The Happy Adventurers by Lydia Miller Middleton (best thriller novels of all time TXT) 📖

“DEAR MOLL,

“This is exactly what happened yesterday. Young Outram says that it is very important for us to keep notes, in case the Thingummy Society should want to know all about it one of these days.

“To begin with I was late for breakfast, so I grabbed your letter and stuck it in my pocket, along with a roll, and bolted. Everything as usual till about 2.30. Bibs was trying to knock some maths into our heads, which I call pretty hard luck on a chap who has crawled to the top of his left wing while shots were dropping round like hail. He looked fairly fed-up. It was tremendously hot and my head ached, and Young Outram had a rag-nail on his first finger which he said was causing him frightful agony, when I suddenly remembered the roll and found your letter. So we ate the roll and read it, I mean we read your letter and ate it—anyway, we were looking at that photograph and thinking that the boy looked a pretty decent sort, and wishing we were him instead of ourselves when suddenly he appeared! He really did, I’m not making this up. At the window just where the parrot was yesterday. And the funny thing is that we don’t usually sit at that desk for maths, but the other room was having something done to it, so we did yesterday. The chap stared at us, and Y. O. said, ‘Hullo!’ and he said, ‘Hullo!’ And Y. O. said, ‘Who are you?’ And he said, ‘I’m a Time-traveller!’ And we said, ‘What the dickens is a Time-traveller?’ And he said ‘Like to come and see?’ And we said, ‘You bet your hat!’ And he said, ‘Hold my fist and shut your eyes!’ So we did, and next thing we knew we were floating on our backs in the sea as calm and cool as cucumbers, and the raft was bobbing about, and you know the rest. At least, we suppose you do. That’s what we want to know. Hugh told us the Time-traveller yarn. It sounds a fairly tall tale, but we’ve heard taller from chaps who were at the front. The point is, how can we go back? London is a rotten hole in this weather.

“Your affec. bro.,

“DICK.”

Mollie read this letter as she ate her morning oatcake. So her spell had worked! The question was, would it work again? For obviously she could not continue sending away photographs without causing remarks to be made and questions asked. She did not see how she could do anything more herself; they must just trust to luck, at any rate till she saw Prudence again.

It was rather odd, when she came to think of it, that she had not questioned Dick yesterday about how they had got over. But the fact was that, after the first surprise of seeing them, she had forgotten. “I forget about Now and only remember Then,” she said to herself. “There is so much to do the time simply flies and comes to an end far too soon.”

When she arrived downstairs that morning she found that her sofa had been carried out of doors. It was a lovely day. Here in the country the leaves still retained their early freshness, and from where she lay she could see the downs, mistily green against the pale morning blue of the sky. The rose-garden, with its smoothly mown grass paths, its pergolas and arches, its standards and dwarfs, was coming into bloom so fast under the June sunshine that Mollie thought she might almost see a bud swell into a full-blown rose if she watched steadily enough. Caroline Testout had already dropped some of her pink blossoms, which lay scattered about the path in rosy patches, reminding Mollie of Grizzel and her shells. She smiled to herself and then sighed, as her eyes wandered from the rose-garden to the long red brick wall beyond, where the sweet cherries grew. The fruit was turning scarlet under an orderly net, which had been put up to protect it from the greedy little birds. Everything was so tidy, she thought. No one would dare to pull off those rose petals for scent-making purposes, nor to gather those cherries merely to play at making jam with. Chauncery was lovely and spacious compared to the house in North Kensington, and the well-kept gardens were a pleasure to look at, but–-

“I don’t think England is big enough to hold children,” she said to Aunt Mary, who sat near, reading the Aeroplane, with some neglected needlework lying in her lap.

Aunt Mary looked up with a surprised expression: “I am sorry you are feeling so crowded up,” she said. “Would you like me to move a little farther away?”

“No, thank you,” Mollie answered, with a laugh, “I have room to breathe even with you there. What I mean is–-” she paused for a moment, wrinkling her brow, and then went on: “London isn’t like this; it’s full of poky holes. Ours is bad enough, but from the train you can see much, much worse places than ours. Sometimes I wonder how people can live in them, and yet Mother says they are not the worst. There is simply no room for children to play, so they play on the streets and sometimes get killed. The Girl Guides are going to help, but it takes a long time “—Mollie shook her head thoughtfully—“and there is so little time too; at home I never have any time to do anything except work or Guiding. I have no time to think in, except after I am in bed, and I go to sleep so horribly soon.” She shook her head again and sighed deeply.

“Well, that’s one good thing to be thankful for,” Aunt Mary said cheerfully, dropping her paper and taking up her sewing, “and there are the holidays for thinking in. I wouldn’t think too much, if I were you. You’ll get plenty of that when you are old,” and Aunt Mary sighed too, as if she did not find her own thoughts very gay affairs always.

“But I want to think of things now that will be useful long before I am old,” Mollie persisted. “There is such a tremendous lot of things to be done, Aunt Mary. And things have to be thoughts long before they are things. I expect the person who invented aeroplanes thought about them for ages and ages before he began to make one.”

“I haven’t the slightest doubt of it,” Aunt Mary agreed, “but you are wandering from your subject, which was the smallness of Great Britain.”

“No, I’m not—at least not exactly, I want to make Great Britain greater, and I can’t think of a way. I should like to have plenty of room and plenty of time.”

“That won’t be an easy problem for you to solve, my lambkin,” Aunt Mary said. “As a matter of fact there is room enough, in the country, but people prefer to live in towns. You will have to hire a pied piper and pipe all the babies into the fields.”

Mollie shook her head, her eyes resting again upon the distant downs. “I don’t know,” she said seriously, “but something will have to be done some day, Aunt Mary, besides play-centres. They are good, but they aren’t enough. Too many children die. Mother goes to a children’s home once a week, and she took me once. You should just see those babies. And they could be such dear little things too. Why—” Mollie hesitated for a moment and then went on, “Why don’t more people go to live in Australia and Canada? The maps are full of empty spaces.”

“Ah, Mollie my dear, that’s not so easy as it sounds,” Aunt Mary said, folding up her work and rising to her feet. “There are all sorts of complications when it comes to shifting camp from the Old World to the New. But perhaps—perhaps if everyone in this old country could be persuaded to think of the children first—! In the meantime I must go and get lunch for my particular child.”

Probably Aunt Mary’s mind was running on those sick babies of the poor as she played to Mollie that afternoon, for her fingers wandered off into the tune of a song she had not heard sung since her childhood:

“‘T is the song, the sigh of the weary: Hard times, hard times, come again no more! Many days you have lingered around our cottage door— Oh, hard times, come again no more!”

Mollie lay listening, the unopened album in her lap. She was drowsy after her morning in the garden, and thought she would rest her eyes by closing them for five minutes. “A little darkness will do them good after all that sunshine,” she murmured to herself.

It was very pleasant lying in the quiet room, on that broad sofa, listening to Aunt Mary’s soft music. Mingling with the sound of the piano was the droning hum of a foolish bee, who had got on the wrong side of the window and was now making vain efforts to fly home again through the glass. A delicious scent came from somewhere—perhaps from the syringa bushes growing just outside the open window. Mollie’s lazy eyelids fell over her eyes—“Just five minutes—”

“Five minutes,” said the clock. “Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Twenty—”

“How soundly the child sleeps,” Aunt Mary whispered, peeping in a little later to look at her niece. “These afternoon naps are the best thing in the world for her overworked little brain. I wish I could fill Chauncery with children, and let them run wild in the garden.” She felt, not for the first time, how duty seemed to pull two ways at once, for there were many things she would fain have done had her duty to her mother not stood in the way.

Someone else came and looked at Mollie.

“Asleep!” Prudence exclaimed, with a smile. “Never mind, I can manage. It is getting very easy.”

*

Mollie did not open her eyes the moment she woke up; she lay still, enjoying the warmth, the sweet scents, and the balmy air, so different from the cold winds of early spring. Presently she yawned, stretched herself like a sleepy kitten, and finally sat up and opened the lazy eyes.

“Good gracious!” she exclaimed, “Prue must have come and found me asleep. I wonder where she is.”

She rose to her