The Wind on the Moon (24 page)

‘You shouldn't talk about that,' said Dinah with a frown.

‘Why not?'

‘Because it's a secret.'

‘It isn't now,' said Dorinda, and she proceeded to tell Mr. Corvo the story of how they had become kangaroos and lived, for quite a long time, in Sir Lankester's zoo.

Dinah felt very uncomfortable while she listened to all this, for she felt that the story was really their own affair—hers and Dorinda's, the Puma's and the Falcon's—and that in some curious way it would be spoilt by other people knowing of it. A secret was such a splendid thing to have, but as soon as you told the secret, you lost the feeling entirely. Dorinda, so Dinah thought, was spoiling everything.

But was she? For Dinah could not help seeing that Mr. Corvo was very much impressed by the story. To begin with, he was astonished. Then he grew serious, and stared at Dorinda with bright enquiring eyes and a frown on his forehead. And when he heard of the Python's death he clapped his hands and cried ‘Hurrah!' and did a very difficult dancing-step called an
entrechat-dix
.

He was certainly impressed, and Dinah realised that their only chance of persuading him to help them was to impress him very deeply indeed. So Dorinda, it now seemed, had done the right thing in telling him the story of the zoo, and Dinah, admitting to herself that she had been wrong, listened with growing admiration to her sister.

When the story was finished, Mr. Corvo walked up and down the room several times without speaking. Then he stopped and said: ‘When I was a boy, and living in Bombardy, I often used to hear stories of people who could change themselves into birds or animals. It was said in the villages that there were certain very wicked men who, when the moon was full, became wolves and went hunting in the forest. We were told about an old woman who could turn herself into a crow in order to listen to what people were saying in the fields where they were working. And a cousin of mine, who ran away and went to sea, came home and described the great birds that followed his ship when she was far from land, and these birds, he said, were really the souls of dead sailors, and they followed the ship to see if the younger sailors were as good as they had been, and worked as hard, and were as brave when the storm-winds blew.

‘These stories,' said Mr. Corvo, ‘and others like them, I had quite forgotten. But now, when you tell me that you have lately been kangaroos, I remember many things. I feel humble, as I did when I was a child; but also I feel glad and strong, because it may be true, as I thought then it was true, that nothing is impossible.'

And Mr. Corvo, very beautifully and neatly, did another
entrechat-dix
.

‘Then you will help us,' said Dorinda, ‘to go to Bombardy and rescue Father?'

Mr. Corvo began to walk up and down the room again, with his hands behind his back and a deep frown on his forehead.

‘It will be difficult and dangerous,' he said. ‘Oh, so difficult, and ah, so dangerous!'

‘After we got you out of prison,' said Dinah, ‘you said that you were deeply indebted to us.'

Mr. Corvo stood perfectly still in the middle of the room. Then he placed his left hand on his heart—or rather, on that part of his yellow waist-coat which lay nearest his heart—and raising his right hand towards the ceiling, he said in a high ringing voice, ‘Yes, and now I shall discharge my debt! Listen while I tell you how we shall go to Bombardy, and make our entrance even into the Castle of Gliedermannheim, the Castle of the Tyrant of Bombardy, Count Hulagu Bloot!'

Count Hulagu Bloot hated all the countries of the earth except his own, and his own he despised. He despised it for two reasons. When he was young, his fellow-countrymen had never been able to see how clever he was; and after he became the Tyrant of Bombardy—by various cruel, dastardly, ingenious, and horrible means—they never saw how easy it would be to get rid of him, but allowed him to rule them as he liked. And what he liked more than anything else was to make people suffer.

He hated England and France and Germany and Russia and America and Holland and Turkey and Italy and Spain and Austria and Sweden and Portugal and Switzerland and China; but that did not prevent him from buying English bulldogs and French wine and German sausages and Russian caviare and American ice-cream and Dutch tulips and Turkish delight and Italian pictures and Spanish onions and Austrian hats and Swedish matches and Portuguese men-o'-war and Swiss milk chocolate and Chinese puzzles, or anything else, no matter where it came from. For he was very rich.

Quite lately, as it happened, he had decided to refurnish his Castle from top to bottom, except the dungeons, and hearing that the Duke of Starveling, who lived near Midmeddlecum and was very poor, had decided to sell all the furniture and pictures and silver plate and carpets and so forth in
his
castle, Count Hulagu had sent him a telegram offering to buy the lot. The Duke of Starveling at once said yes, and a week later an envoy from the court of Bombardy arrived with a cheque for £85,471:6:9, which was the price of the furniture and pictures and silver plate and carpets and so forth at Starveling Hall, and began to make arrangements to have them packed up and sent to Gliedermannheim.

This man, the envoy, was called Professor Bultek, and when they were both small boys, he and Mr. Corvo had lived next door to each other. He had come to see Mr. Corvo as soon as he arrived in England, to show him the cheque, which was written in gold ink, and to tell him the latest news from Bombardy.

So much Mr. Corvo explained to Dinah and Dorinda. Then he said: ‘And when my friend Bultek goes home, he will take the Duke of Starveling's chairs and tables and beds and pictures and tapestry with him in five enormous furniture vans. Huge and tremendous vans, the biggest that can be found. So big there will be room—do you not think so?—for you and me to hide ourselves among all that furniture, and go to Bombardy with no difficulty, and make our entrance into the Castle of Gliedermannheim. Then, if you are still as clever as you were when you rescued me from prison, and the Golden Puma and the Silver Falcon from the zoo, then you will think of some way to bring your father out of his dungeon. Do not ask me how. That is for you to say. And by and by the furniture vans will be sent back to England with big labels on them saying: E
mpty
. R
eturn to
O
wner
. But they will not all be empty. In one of them, if we are clever and lucky, there will be you and I, and your father too.'

‘It sounds quite easy,' said Dorinda. ‘It sounds the easiest thing we have ever done.'

‘No, no, no!' said Mr. Corvo. ‘Do not deceive yourselves. All I can do to make it easy, I shall do—if my friend Bultek agrees—but like the stone in a plum, the middle part will be hard and difficult and dangerous. We go into Bombardy: good! We go into the Castle: excellent! But to get your father out of the dungeon, and ourselves out of Gliedermannheim, may be as difficult as breaking a plumstone between your thumb and your little finger. Do not be light-hearted about that. Think deeply, make your plans with care.'

‘What sort of a professor is Professor Bultek?' asked Dinah.

‘He looks like a frog,' said Mr. Corvo. ‘and he is a Professor of Palmistry.'

‘He tells fortunes, you mean?'

‘By looking at the lines on your hand,' said Mr. Corvo. ‘It is all great nonsense, I think, but our Tyrant, Count Hulagu, believes in it, and so Bultek has become a favourite of his.'

‘And does Professor Bultek himself believe in the fortunes that he tells?'

‘It would not be kind to ask him that,' said Mr. Corvo. ‘He cries too easily. Ever since he was a little boy, and looked in a glass and saw that he was like a frog, he has cried a great deal. But now you must go and make your plans and preparations, and I shall write a letter to Bultek.'

On the following day Dinah went to see Mrs. Grimble. She went alone. Dorinda had pleaded with her to be allowed to go too, but Dinah, after much thought, had refused to take her. She told Dorinda, as she had told her before, that Mrs. Grimble could be very difficult, and was far more likely to be difficult with strangers than with people she knew. That was perfectly true, but Dinah had two other reasons, about which she said nothing, because she didn't want to. In the first place, she was frightened that Dorinda might laugh at Mrs. Grimble, who had the habit, when talking, of opening the right side of her mouth and closing her left eye; and then, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, she would begin to use the other side of her mouth, and open her left eye and close the right. She did this, she said, because her face got easily tired, and by using only half of it at a time, she could rest the other half. But people who were not used to her appearance often found it upset them.

Dinah's second reason was one that she was very properly ashamed of. She was proud of knowing Mrs. Grimble and wanted to keep her all to herself, as if Mrs. Grimble were a secret. She knew how selfish this was, and therefore wrong, but it was a very pleasant form of selfishness and she could not make up her mind to part with it. Not yet. But she gave her word that if they succeeded in rescuing their father she would take Dorinda to see Mrs. Grimble as soon as they returned.

‘And that,' she said firmly, ‘is a
promise
. And I promise, too, that I shall ask her if she knows about any medicine to make people invisible. But I don't suppose for a moment she does.'

So Dorinda had to find what comfort she could in these two promises, and wait, as patiently as might be, for Dinah's return. She spent most of the time in making a list of the things they would have to take if they went to Gliedermannheim in a furniture van.

Then Dinah came back and her first words were: ‘Mrs. Grimble wasn't even a little bit pleased to see me, and when I asked her if there was any way of becoming invisible she said: “There's only one way I know of, unless you were born with the gift of it like I was, and that's to take off all your skin and put it on again inside out, and I'll tell you the name of a tailor who'll do it for you, if you want to know, but the last man who went to him was hurt so bad that he took to his bed afterwards, and that didn't do him any good either, for not a soul could see him by that time, so there he lay and got no attention at all, and my advice is that you should have nothing to do with such a notion, and my second piece of advice is to go home and leave me in peace, for I had a leg of pork for my dinner that the Puma brought me for a birthday present—I'm ninety-eight to-day—and after eating all that meat I'd rather sleep than listen to you and all your nonsense.“'

‘And did you go away?' asked Dorinda.

‘No,' said Dinah. ‘I let her sleep for an hour, and then I woke her up by tickling my nose with a piece of grass and sneezing three times, very loudly. I told her the whole story of what had happened to Father, and how we meant to go and rescue him, but I don't know whether she was listening or not, she seemed to be half asleep again. Well, after I had finished she didn't say anything for quite a long time, and then she opened one eye and asked, “What do you want me to do?“

‘ “I want you to help us,“ I said. “I want you to suggest some way of getting Father out of the dungeon.“

‘Then she got quite angry and said, “Learn to help yourselves, that's the best help, instead of coming to worry an old woman who's got plenty to worry her already, with all the things she hears about that are going on in the world.“

‘She was quite different from the last time I saw her. I suppose she's getting older,' said Dinah.

‘And did she give you nothing at all?' asked Dorinda.

‘Well, at last she seemed to feel sorry for us, or sorry about Father, because presently she got up and said, “I'm going to give you two things, and one of them is a piece of good advice, and the other is a little bag full of something that smells. And here's the advice to begin with: