The Day Before Yesterday. Richard Middleton

lie like that, and I could not help looking about for the policeman. Soon we came to a little station, and the platform was crowded with people who would not stand still, but walked round and round making noises. When I climbed up on the platform a woman caught hold of me and cried over me. One of her tears fell on my ear and tickled me; but she held me so tightly that I could not put up my hand to rub it. Her breath was hot on my head.

      Then I heard a detested voice say, “Poor little boy, so tired!” and I shuddered back into consciousness of the world that was least interesting of all the worlds I knew. I need not have opened my eyes to be sure that the aunts were at their fell work again, and that the little girl’s snub nose was tilted to a patronising angle. Had I awakened a minute later she, too, would have joined in the auntish chorus of compassion for my weakness. As it was, I looked at her with drowsy pity, finding that she was one of those luckless infants who might as well stay at home for all the fun they get out of travelling. She knew no better than to scream when the train ran into a tunnel; what would she have done if she had seen my roc?

      The train ran on and on, and still I throned it in my corner, awake or dreaming, indisputably master of all the things that counted. The three aunts faded into antimacassars; the little girl endured her uninteresting life and became an aunt and an antimacassar in her turn, and still I swung my legs in my corner seat, a boy-errant in the strange places of the world. I do not remember the name of the station at which the bearded guard ultimately brought me out of my dreams. I do remember standing stiffly on the platform and deciding that I had been travelling night and day for three hundred years. When I communicated this fact to the relatives who met me they were strangely unimpressed; but I knew that when I returned home to my brothers they would display a decent interest in the story of my wanderings. After all, you can’t expect grown-up people to understand everything!

THE MAGIC POOL

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      Being born in a sceptical age, heirs of a world that certainly took its Darwin too seriously, we children did not readily enlarge the circle of our supernatural acquaintances. There was the old witch who lived in the two-storied house beyond the hill, in whom less discriminate eyes recognised only the very respectable widow of an officer in the India Army. There was the ghost of the murdered shepherd-lad that haunted the ruined hut high up on the windy downs; on gusty nights we heard him piping shrilly to his phantom flocks, and sometimes their little bells seemed to greet us from the chorus of the storm. There was a little drowned kitten who mewed to us from the shadows of the rain-water cistern, and a small boy who cried about the garden in the autumn because he could not find his ball among the dead leaves. We had all heard the three last, and most of us had seen them at twilight-time, when ghosts pluck up their poor thin courage and take their walks abroad. As for the witch, we relied on our intuitions and gave her house a wide berth.

      The credentials of these four unquiet spirits having been examined and found satisfactory, schoolroom opinion was against any addition to their number. We would not accept my younger brother’s murderer carrying a sack or my little sister’s procession of special tortoises, though we acknowledged that there was merit in them, regarded merely as artistic conceptions. Perhaps, subconsciously, we realised that to make the supernatural commonplace is also to make it ineffective, and that there is no dignity in a life jostled by spooks. At all events, we relied for our periodical panics on those which had received the official sanction, and on the terrifying monsters our imaginations had drawn from real life—burglars, lunatics, and drunken men.

      It was therefore noteworthy that as soon as we discovered the pool in Hayward’s Wood we were all agreed that it was no ordinary sheet of water, but one of those enchanted pools which draw their waters from magic sources and are capable of throwing spells over mortals who approach them unwarily. And yet, though we felt instinctively that there was something queer about it, the pool in itself was not unattractive. Held, as it were, in a cup in the heart of the wood, it still contrived to win its share of sunshine through the branches above. On its surface the water-boatmen were ferrying cheerfully to and fro, while overhead the dragon-flies drove their gaudy monoplanes in ceaseless competition. All about the woods were gay with wild garlic and the little purple gloves that Nature provides for foxes, and through a natural alley we could see a golden meadow, where cups of cool butter were spread with lavish generosity to quench the parched tongues of bees. The mud that squelched under our feet as we stood on the brink seemed to be good, honest mud, and gave our boots the proper holiday finish. Nevertheless, we stared silently at the waters, half-expecting to see them thicken and part in brown foam, to allow some red-mouthed prehistoric monster to rise oozily from his resting-place in the mud—some such mammoth as we had seen carved in stone on the borders of the lake at the Crystal Palace. But no monster appeared; only a rabbit sprang up suddenly on the far side of the pool, and, seeing we had no gun and no dog, limped off in a leisurely manner to the warren.

      After a while we grew weary of our doubts, and, tacitly agreeing to pretend that it was only an ordinary pond, fell to paddling in the shallows with a good heart. The mud slid warmly through our toes, and the water lay round our calves like a tight string, but we were not changed, as we had half anticipated, into tadpoles or water-lilies. It was apparent that the magic was of a subtler kind than this, and we splashed about cheerfully until the inevitable happened and one of us went in up to his waist. Then we sat on the bank nursing our wet feet, and laughing at the victim as he ruefully wrung out his clothes. We were all of a nautical turn of mind, and we agreed that the pond would serve very well for minor naval engagements, though it was too sheltered to provide enough wind for sailing-ships. Still, here we should at all events be secure from such a disaster as had recently overtaken my troopship Dauntless, which was cruising in calm weather on Pickhurst Pond when all of a sudden “a land breeze shook the shrouds and she was overset,” and four-and-twenty good soldiers sank to the bottom like lead, which they were. Regarded merely as an attractive piece of water, the pool could not fail to be of service in our adventurous lives.

      But all the time we felt in our hearts that it was something more, though we would have found it hard to give reasons for our conviction, for the pool seemed very well able to keep the secret of its enchantment. We did not even know whether it was the instrument of black magic or of white, whether its influence on human beings was amiable or malevolent. We only knew that it was under a spell, that beneath its reticent surface, that showed nothing more than the reflection of our own inquiring faces, lay hidden some part of that especial magic that makes the dreams of young people as real as life, and contradicts the unlovely generalisations of disillusioned adults. All that was necessary was to find the key that would unlock the golden gates.

      The brother who was nearest to me in terms of years found it two days later, and came to me breathlessly with the news. He had been reading a book of fairy stories, and had come upon the description of just such a magic pool as ours, even to the rabbit—who was, it seemed, a kind of advance-agent to the spirit of the pool. The rules were very clear. All you had to do was to go to the pool at midnight and wish aloud, and your wish would be granted. If you were greedy enough to wish more than once, you would be changed into a goldfish. My brother thought it would be rather jolly to be a goldfish, and so for a while did I; but on reflection we decided that if the one wish were carefully expended it might be more amusing to remain a boy.

      It says something for our spirit of adventure that we did not even discuss the advisability of undertaking this lawless expedition. We were more engaged in rejoicing in anticipation over the discomfiture of our elder brothers and settling the difficult problem of what we should wish. My brother was all for seven-league boots and invisible caps and other conjuring tricks of a faëry character; I had set my heart on money, more sovereigns than we could carry, and I finally brought my brother round to my point of view. After all, he could always buy the other things if he had enough money. It was agreed that he should wind up his birthday watch and that we should only pretend to go to bed, as we should have to start at half-past eleven. When planned by daylight the whole thing seemed absurdly easy.

      We had no difficulty in getting out of the house when the time came, simply because this was not the sort of thing that the grown-up people expected us to