Winter Holiday. Arthur Ransome

Bull,” said Dick, hurrying round the corner and crouching over the book beside her. “It isn’t like one a bit. Let’s have a look at the picture . . . It’s a wedge with Aldebaran at the thin end, and then three other small triangles, and the Pleiades away by themselves.”

      He took a last look at the picture and hurried back into the darkness.

      “Got it,” he said. “Just over the top of the hill. Come and see it.”

      Dorothea joined him. He pointed out the bright Aldebaran and the other stars of Taurus, and offered her the telescope.

      “I can see a lot better without,” said Dorothea.

      “How many of the Pleiades can you see?”

      “Six,” said Dorothea.

      “There are lots more than that,” said Dick. “But it’s awfully hard to see them when the telescope won’t keep still. How far away does it say the Pleiades are?”

      Dorothea went back to the fire and found the place in the book.

      “The light from the group known as the Pleiades (referred to by Tennyson in Locksley Hall) . . . ”

      “Oh, hang Tennyson!”

      “The light from the group known as the Pleiades reaches our planet in rather more than three hundred years after it leaves them.”

      “Light goes at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second,” said the voice of the astronomer out in the darkness.

      But Dorothea was also doing some calculations.

      “Shakespeare died 1616.”

      “What?”

      “Well, if the light takes more than three hundred years to get here, it may have started while Shakespeare was alive, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, perhaps. Sir Walter Raleigh may have seen it start . . . ”

      “But of course he didn’t,” said the astronomer indignantly. “The light of the stars he saw had started three hundred years before that . . . ”

      “Battle of Bannockburn, 1314. Bows and arrows.” Dorothea was off again.

      But Dick was no longer listening. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. Sixty times as far as that in a minute. Sixty times sixty times as far as that in an hour. Twenty-four hours in a day. Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Not counting leap years. And then three hundred years of it. Those little stars that seemed to speckle a not too dreadfully distant blue ceiling were farther away than he could make himself think, try as he might. Those little stars must be enormous. The whole earth must be a tiny pebble in comparison. A spinning pebble, and he, on it, the astronomer, looking at flaming gigantic worlds so far away that they seemed no more than sparkling grains of dust. He felt for a moment less than nothing, and then, suddenly, size did not seem to matter. Distant and huge the stars might be, but he, standing here with chattering teeth on the dark hill-side, could see them and name them and even foretell what next they were going to do. “The January Sky.” And there they were, Taurus, Aldebaran, the Pleiades, obedient as slaves . . . He felt an odd wish to shout at them in triumph, but remembered in time that this would not be scientific.

      He had not heard Dorothea come round the corner of the barn.

      For some time she had been looking at the star pictures in the book, and had been quietly busy with the fire. At last, hearing nothing from the astronomer, she had come to see what he was doing. There he was, close by, dark in the darkness. But she saw something else.

      “Dick! Look! The Martians are going to bed.”

      Dick started.

      “What? What? Oh, it’s you, Dot. You did give me a jump.”

      “Well, you ought to hang out a notice when you’re not there. Aren’t we waiting for them to go upstairs? Look! There’s a light in the upstairs window now.”

      Dick was wide awake in a moment. Yes. Where there had been one steady light in the end of the white farm-house there were now two, and one was exactly above the other.

      “We’ll begin signalling at once,” said Dick. “They can’t have been upstairs very long.”

      “But will they be looking out?”

      “Why not? They may be looking out just like us, and wanting to signal to Earth. We always take a last look out before going to bed. Anyway, not knowing makes it more like the real thing. Have you got your torch?’

      “Yes.”

      “We may want it, but we’ll try the lantern. I wonder if they can see any light from the fire. Shouldn’t think so. We’ll go upstairs to signal. Come on, Dot.”

      Dorothea darted back for the lantern that she had put just inside the barn.

      “Don’t go and fall off the steps in the dark,” she called.

      “I’m keeping close to the wall. Come on.”

      She hurried after him. The steps going up outside the barn were broad enough in daylight, but in the dark, even with a lantern, she wished there had been some sort of a railing. Still, if Dick had done it, so could she, and presently they were both standing in the dark upper floor of the barn, looking out of the great square opening at the end of it.

      “Don’t go too near the edge.”

      “I’m not going to,” said Dick.

      “What are you doing?”

      “Finding out where they won’t be able to see the lantern. This corner is all right. Now. Hold the lantern well in the middle of the window. That’ll do. Now shove it into this corner. Now show it again. That’s enough. Into the corner. Three times.”

      Dorothea obediently showed the lantern in the middle of the big opening at the end of the barn, then hid it close against the wall in the corner where no smallest ray of it could be seen from Mars away down there in the valley. Three times she showed it. Three times she hid it. Dick carefully focussed the telescope on the lights of the farm, and watched for a sign that the Martians had noticed that someone on earth was trying to get into touch with them.

      Nothing happened.

      “Do it again.”

      Dorothea did it again. In matters like this, though she was the elder of the two, she always felt that Dick knew best. He could not make up stories about people, but he could think out things like this better than anybody.

      Again nothing happened.

      “You try,” said Dorothea.

      “Well, you take the telescope and watch the planet. The Martians may answer at any minute.”

      But nothing happened.

      “Perhaps it isn’t their room,” said Dorothea. “Perhaps the light in there now has nothing to do with them. It’s the farm woman who’s taken it up to see how much dirt they carried up on their shoes because they came in without using the doormat. So she’s down on her hands and knees scrubbing and very cross indeed with them, and naturally she isn’t looking this way at all.”

      “I say, Dot,” said Dick. “You can’t see all that through the telescope.”

      “Of course I can’t,” said Dorothea. “I never can see anything through the telescope.”

      “I’m going on signalling, anyhow. It may be two or three nights before they notice it.”

      Again and again he held the lantern in the middle of the big empty window. Again and again he hid it. Anybody looking at the old barn high on the hill-side might have thought it was a lighthouse. Flash . . . flash . . . flash . . . and then dark for a long time, and after that another three flashes, and so on.

      “It’s most awfully cold,” said Dorothea at last. “And we’ve got to get back to Mrs Dixon’s.”

      “Once