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

and Jerry looked at her commiseratingly. It was rather difficult to reconcile this pale, limping Mollie with the active young Time-traveller of yesterday.

“You’re looking a bit like a mashed potato,” Dick remarked critically. “You’ve been shut up in the house too much. It’s time we came and hauled you out. I’ll tell you what, Aunt Polly-wolly- doodle, we’ll take her out for a drive in the trap this afternoon.”

“We’ll see,” said Aunt Mary. “I am afraid you are too fresh, Dick. You might tumble her out in the exuberance of your spirits. Besides, it is going to rain—it is drizzling already.”

“Pouf!” said Dick lightly. “What’s a little rain! A little soft, wet rain will do her good. And Long John seems to have been eating his fat head off; he played no end of jinks coming along just now. I’ll take him round to the stables—I want to see the puppies. Hop in, Moll. We’ll bring you back in a queen’s chair.”

But Grannie insisted upon some light refreshment first. She was sure the boys must be exhausted after their two hours’ journey from town. “And the best way to fight measles is to feed you up,” she said, leading the way to the dining-room, where strawberries, cherries, biscuits, and a jug of creamy milk stood invitingly upon the table.

The boys consented to the feeding-up process without a murmur. When the plates were all empty they departed on a round of visits to the stable, tennis-court, tool-shed, and other haunts dear to the heart of boy. Aunt Mary firmly refused to allow Mollie to accompany them, even in the queen’s chair they offered.

“You are tired already,” she said to her niece, “and if you want to go for that drive this afternoon you must certainly rest first. Back to your sofa, Miss Mollie—away with you!”

So Mollie rested, with a book in her lap and her thoughts by turns far away and near home.

Later on she was carefully helped into the little governess-cart, with a list of messages to be done in the village, and another list of extravagant promises from the boys of the amazing benefits she was to derive from her outing with them. Long John had got over his first fine raptures, and was now willing to jog along the sweet country lanes at a steady and sober pace, suitable for the invalid he carried behind him.

“How jolly nice it does look after London,” Jerry remarked, as a long branch of honeysuckle swept his cap on to the floor of the trap, where he let it lie unconcernedly. “After all—there’s no place like old England. For looks, anyhow.”

“Each to his choice, and I rejoice The lot has fallen to me In a fair ground—in a fair ground— Yea, Sussex by the sea,”

Mollie quoted, as they came to a standstill at the top of a long incline. In the distance they saw the sea gleaming somewhat greyly under a brief spell of sunshine. All around them the trees and hedges sparkled with raindrops, green and cool and wet.

“They look like green diamonds,” said Dick, letting his cap drop beside Jerry’s and allowing the reins to fall loosely on Long John’s back, as the pony edged to the side of the road and began to nibble the grass. “Rather different from the gold-diggings, isn’t it?”

This remark set the ball rolling. “What do you think it was?” Mollie began.

“Blessed if I know,” Dick answered, with a shake of his head, “blue magic of some sort. Unless we all dreamt it.”

“No, it wasn’t a dream,” said Jerry thoughtfully. “It was simply psychical phenomena. I’ve heard of things just as queer. Awfully funny things happen in India. And look at the ‘phantom armies’ in France.”

“Rot,” said Dick briefly. “I think it was a kink in Mollie’s brain, and she passed it on to me. We do, sometimes. Mother says all twins do. And your silly head was as empty as usual and you psychicked it from me.”

“Rot,” said Jerry, with as much decision as Dick. “I saw the blooming parrot as soon as you did, if not sooner.”

“It wasn’t rot,” Mollie said decidedly; “whatever it was it wasn’t rot. I think—” she paused for a moment to consider her words—“I believe it may have been just what Prue said it was. We travelled back in Time. It sounds impossible, but if you come to think of it lots of things that happen now would have sounded impossible to those children, or at any rate to Papa and Mamma. If Alice in Wonderland could have seen forty years ahead she would have found it quite easy to believe six impossible things before breakfast. There’s submarines for one, and flying, and wireless, especially telephones, and the cinema. If we could have taken the Campbells to a moving picture of a submarine submerging, with aeroplanes flying round, and a lecture wirelessed from America coming out of a gramophone, and the music done with a piano-player, Time-travelling would not have seemed much more wonderful to them.”

Dick shook his head again. “It’s different,” he said. “All those things might have seemed very wonderful and almost impossible, but they weren’t quite impossible. Time-travelling is.”

“But we’ve done it,” said Mollie.

Nobody answered. There did not appear to be an answer to that statement.

“Have you ever heard,” Mollie said at last, speaking slowly and looking at the boys with solemn eyes, “of a thing called Einstein’s Theory of Relatittey—I mean Rela_tiv_ity—Rel-a-_tiv_ity?”

“Old Bibs jawed us about it one day,” Dick answered, “but he said no one could understand it except the chap himself and not always him. So he didn’t expect us to, which was a good job for everybody.”

“That’s what Aunt Mary said; I heard her talking. That’s why I read about it, because I’m fairly good at maths. She has it all pasted in a book. I had to skip most of it, but here and there I found bits. I took some notes,” Mollie drew a penny notebook from her pocket. “One man says that, if the world travelled as fast as light, there would be no Time. All the clocks would stop, and we’d be There as soon as we were Here. Well now, that’s just what we did. We were Here—and we were There. So our time stopped and Now was Then. See?”

“He says If. You couldn’t live without Time. You must have Time to do things in or where would you be? You’d have to swallow all the meals of your life at one mouthful and you’d bust. What comes next?”

“Another man says,” Mollie read impressively, “that any schoolboy— any schoolboy,” she repeated, fixing a stern eye upon her brother, “can see that, if the velocity of light has a given value with reference to the fixed stars, it cannot have the same value with reference to its source when this is moved relatively to the stars.”

“Gee-whiz!” said Dick. “Next, please.”

“A man says that perhaps things measured north and south are different from things measured east and west. We travelled north and south. Perhaps we stretched back in Time all of a sudden, like elastic.”

“Couldn’t be done. Elastic stretches both ways. If you tried to move north and south both at the same time you’d go off like a Christmas cracker. Next.”

“A man says that our ideas of space and time may be all wrong.”

“Aunt Polly will agree with him if we stand here much longer,” said Dick. “Next. Hurry up.”

“You don’t stop to think,” Mollie said impatiently. “Try and think. Your head might just as well be a football. What I think is that if two un-understandable things are discovered about the same time they must belong to each other. Don’t you see that?”

“They might,” Dick said cautiously, “and then again they mightn’t. I don’t think myself that there’s any use trying to understand things like Time-travelling and Relativity. People like us never will.”

“I don’t know that,” said Jerry, who had been listening to the discussion in silence.

“There’s lots of things just as hard to understand, only you take them for granted. Being alive, for instance. Look at Mollie fidgeting about, and Long John chewing and twitching, and the trees waving their branches, and you shaking your head as if it were a dinner-bell, which is about what it is—it’s all life. Just as hard to understand as Relativity, and a jolly sight harder if you ask me. I can’t say I understand Time-travelling, but—” Jerry broke off.

Mollie frowned thoughtfully. “We don’t understand it yet,” she said, “but in another forty years—”

They were all silent. Another forty years!

“We’ll be fifty-three,” Dick said at last. “A jolly funny looking lot we’ll be. All sitting round staring at each other through specs, with white hair and no teeth worth mentioning. I’ll have an ear-trumpet, and Mollie will wear a cap like Grannie’s, and Jerry will be a blithering old idiot saying, ‘Hey!’ like General Dyson-Polks.”

They had to laugh at this picture of themselves, and then Mollie began at the beginning and told the story of Prue’s first visit. The boys were deeply interested. Their own experiences had merely been a repetition of the first—Hugh had appeared and, like the gentleman who dealt in Relativity, they were Here and they were There. “It has taught us something about Australia anyhow,” said Dick; “that is, of course, if we saw the real thing. The next thing is to find out whether we did or if the whole show was just bunkum.”

“What I should like to know,” said Jerry reflectively, “is who the Campbells were, and how they got mixed up with your lot. They must have at some time, or your people wouldn’t have those photographs.”

Mollie smiled. She knew how they and the Campbells had got “mixed up”, but she had never told the boys of her discovery; it was a little secret between her and a certain photograph that smiled down at her from the morning-room mantelpiece. She liked to think how the original would have laughed along with her.

“What I should like to know,” said Dick, “is what that chap O’Rourke was doing in that field. What was his mysterious experiment, and how did Hugh’s stone cut into it? That’s what I want to know, and I don’t suppose I ever will, now. I don’t think we’ll go back, not at present anyway. The show’s over for this time. In fact I don’t want to go; I’m too jolly well pleased to be where I am. Gee-up, you lazy brute,”—this to Long John, who apparently thought he had done enough work for one day and was nosing about the soft grass with contemptuous disregard for his passengers. He moved on unwillingly, and Dick took him briskly downhill.

In the village there were old friends to be greeted, and many inquiries for Mollie’s ankle to be answered. Fresh crusty loaves were brought out by the baker, loosely wrapped in soft paper, and packed away under the seats. A large box, containing a peculiarly delicious make of sponge cake, was set on Mollie’s lap, and a blue paper bag of sifted sugar was entrusted to Jerry’s special care by a misguided grocer. Dick had a golf-club needing attention, which entailed a long and intimate conversation with the local carpenter, who was also a well-known local golfer, and the best hand at repairing clubs, Dick was convinced, in the whole of Great Britain.

It was getting on towards tea-time when Long John’s head was at last turned homewards, and his feet covered the ground with cheerful and approving swiftness. A drizzle of rain fell, “Just enough to save us the trouble of washing for tea,”