Half Magic (16 page)

And their mother and Mr. Smith stood looking at each other and didn't see the shining or hear the singing or sense the fragrance because all they saw was the light of each other's eyes, and all they heard was the beating of each other's heart and all they felt was their love for each other.

By and by the shining and the singing and the fragrance died away.

"I guess that's the last wish, all right," said Mark. "It never rang bells and smelled like a perfume shop before!"

"What did you say?" said their mother.

"I said I guess that's the last wish," said Mark. "The last wish on the charm."

"What charm?" said Mr. Smith.

They had forgotten. Now that they had their heart's desire, they had no need of any other magic. They turned and went out of the office, and the four children followed them.

Jane still held the charm in her hand, but the children were as sure as they had ever been of anything in their short, full lives that with that last wish the magic had gone out of it, and that there would be no more enchanted adventures for them.

"Still," said Mark, as they reached the street, and just as though the others had spoken their thoughts aloud. "Still, we might as well test it and see. Wish something. Any old dumb thing."

"All right, I wish I had four noses," said Jane.

Everyone looked. But the usual slightly snub one remained the only feature in the middle of the face of Jane.

"That settles that," said Mark. "Good-bye, charm." But his voice was quite cheerful.

"I guess it just came to make us happy," said Katharine. "And now we are!"

"Weren't we happy before?" asked Martha.

"Oh, sure, in a kind of way," said Mark. "The way some people are happy and some people are unhappy because they're born that way. But there were a lot of things we wanted changed, and now they're going to be!"

"No more Miss Bick!" said Katharine.

"Summers in the country," said Jane, "and a practically perfect stepfather! You know," she added, feeling suddenly rather wonderful, "it looks as if
we
got our heart's desire, too!"

But all the same, she didn't throw the old, used-up charm away. As they hurried to catch up with their mother and Mr. Smith, she stopped long enough to put it away carefully in her handbag.

She would keep it a while longer, just in case.

And it turned out there was one more wish, after all.

The last wish was Jane's alone, and she never really knew she made it.

That night, as she was getting undressed, she found the charm in her pocket, and sat on the bed looking at it for a long time, and pondering the mystery of how it had come into their hands, and why.

And from that she went on to thinking about their mother's being married, and the changes it would bring into their lives.

She was quite contented about everything. But because she was the only one of the four children who remembered their father, she would have been more contented still if she could have felt sure that he knew about what was going to happen, and approved of it.

It had been a full day, and she was ready for sleep. Already her eyes had begun to close of their own accord. But as she put out the light and tucked the charm absentmindedly under her pillow, her last waking thought was that she wished her father were with her now, so she'd know how he felt about things.

She wasn't worrying about the charm, or working out the right fractions, as she wished it. But because there was still this one small corner in Jane that wasn't completely happy, the charm relented, and thawed out of its icy used-upness, and granted the wish, according to its well-known fashion. Immediately her father was
half
there.

He was there like a thought in her mind, assuring her that everything was all right, and exactly as he would want it, and that he was happy in their happiness.

And a wonderful feeling of peace filled the heart of Jane, and she went to sleep with a smile on her face.

In the morning she'd forgotten all about the wish. She knew only that the sun was yellow and warm, and the sky was blue, and a golden future lay ahead, and all was right with the world.

She found the charm under her pillow when she was making her bed, and put it in the top bureau drawer, reminding herself to consult with the others later about what to do with it.

But the next days were so full, what with plans for the wedding, that Jane never did get around to consulting.

And at last the wedding day came, and happy was the bride the sun shone on, and happy, too, were the four children. And after their mother and Mr. Smith had been pronounced man and wife, Mr. Smith shook hands all round, and their mother kissed them, and then off the two of them went for a week's honeymoon, and Miss Bick came and stayed with the children for the last time, and had her will with them for seven days, and biffed and banged and cleaned and complained until life became a mere burden, but there was always the comforting thought that at the end of the seven days lay freedom.

And the seven days finally were over, and their mother and Mr. Smith returned, and the four children sang "Good-bye forever!" out of the upstairs windows as Miss Bick took her departure for the last time.

And it was then that their mother told them that Mr. Smith had taken a house on a lake for the rest of the summer, where it was real country all around, and yet it was near enough for him to drive in to the bookshop every day.

So from then on all was bustle and squeak, in the words of Katharine, and if the children weren't being taken downtown to buy bathing suits and camera film and badminton birds and beach balls, they were walking to the library and choosing vacation reading or packing their nice shabby old suitcases and the nicer new ones Mr. Smith had bought them.

And it wasn't until the morning of the day before they were to leave that Jane got around to cleaning out her top bureau drawer, and found the charm again.

Immediately she summoned a Council.

"Do you suppose we ought to keep it forever, sort of In Memoriam?" she wondered.

"Put it in the curio cabinet with the other objects of art," said Katharine, giggling.

"Maybe we ought to try it again," said Martha. "Maybe it was just tired before, and now it's had a nice rest!"

"Huh-uh." Mark shook his head. "That last wish was the end. You could tell."

And the others had to agree that you could. But Martha still wasn't pacified.

"What about this, then?" she said. "It's used up for us, but how do we know it wouldn't still be perfectly good for other people?"

This was a thrilling idea.

"Sure," said Mark. "It stands to reason. It's come down through centuries with its magic unscathed—it'd take more than four paltry children to make it bite the dust!"

Jane nodded excitedly. "You mean now we pass it on to somebody else!"

"Anybody we know?" Katharine wondered.

"We could go round being sort of fairy godmothers and granting wishes," said Martha.

Mark shook his head

"That's no good. We'd just get so we wanted to tell everybody what to wish. It'd be sort of like trying to have the charm all over again, secondhand. I think that would be kind of against the rules. It came to us out of the unknown, and I think that's where it ought to go again. I think we ought to let some utter stranger find it, and then put it out of our minds forever."

And the others had to agree that this
did
seem like the kind of noble conduct the charm would expect of them.

So it was with feelings of crusader-like righteousness that, five minutes later, the four children got off a streetcar in a part of town they didn't know at all, and stood looking around them.

Lots of people walked past, but they were all grown-ups.

"And I think it has to be a child," said Mark. "Most grown-ups wouldn't understand, unless they're wonderful ones like Mr. Smith, and you don't find types like him on every street corner."

At last they saw a little girl heading their way. The little girl had a baby with her. The baby was very young and fat, and just learning to walk, and was exceedingly slow about it. As the little girl came nearer, the four children could see that her face, while pleasant, was tired and pale.

"She looks as if she could do with some happiness," said Katharine.

The others nodded.

So Jane dropped the charm on the sidewalk, in a place where it would glint in the sun and attract attention, and she and Mark and Katharine and Martha hid behind a rather scraggly privet hedge nearby, and waited.

"Oh, come along, Baby. Hurry up!" they heard the little girl saying. But Baby wouldn't be hurried. It walked even slower, putting each foot down carefully and then looking at it to be sure that it landed on solid ground. And the third time it looked down it saw the glint of the charm.

Before the horrified gaze of the four children, the baby picked the charm up clumsily, and looked at it. Then the worst happened. It put the charm in its mouth and swallowed.

Behind the hedge everyone gasped.

"Is it lost forever, do you think, or will it come up again?" asked Martha.

"It's a long red lane that has no turning," remarked Katharine.

"Now I suppose the
baby'll
get a wish," said Martha. "What do you suppose it'll be?"

"Probably something horrible," said Jane, "and nobody'll know or be able to help it because it can't talk and tell them!"

"Don't worry," said Mark. "It'll probably just be about Pablum or something."

And it wasn't the baby who got the wish, after all. For now the weary little girl, growing tired of walking so slowly, picked the baby up and began to carry it.

"Oh dear, Baby," she said. "I wish you didn't weigh so much. I wish you didn't weigh anything at all."

And because she was holding the baby who held the charm, right away the magic began to begin again.

Of course if she'd got her wish whole, the baby would have left the earth and gone shooting off into space. As it was, the charm did its usual trick, and immediately the baby weighed half as little as nothing at all, which is still very little. It left the girl's arms, bounced up toward the sky, then floated gently earthward like a piece of thistledown.

The little girl caught it, but it went bouncing up again. The little girl began to cry.

"Shall we tell her?" said Katharine.

"Wait," said Mark.

They waited. And the bouncing did its work. The third time the little girl caught the baby, something shiny flew out of its mouth and landed clinking on the sidewalk. The little girl saw the shine and heard the clink. She put the baby down, and ran to pick up the charm.

She stood looking at it. Then she looked back at the baby, who had ceased to bounce and was sitting on the sidewalk with its thumb in its mouth.

And then, plain as day, the four children could see the little girl beginning to think, and to put two and two together. A look of wild wonder and excitement came over her face, the look of one who is about to make a magic wish.

And it was then that Mark, ever strong-minded, dragged the others away.

"Oughtn't we to tell her the secret?" said Jane. "About saying two times everything?"

"Nobody told us, did they?" said Mark. "I don't think anyone's supposed to."

He wouldn't even let the others look back as they boarded the street car.

"You never know—we might be turned into pillars of salt or something," he said. "I don't think we're supposed to know anything about it. Something tells me."

"At least we know she'll be happy in the end," said Katharine.

But Martha couldn't help wanting to know what was happening right now. When Mark wasn't watching her, she turned and looked.

The little girl and the baby had vanished, on what wild errand of adventure Martha could only guess. But she would never know. She would be left to wonder all the rest of her life.

And she wondered something else, too. After they'd ridden a few blocks, she put it into words.

"Do you suppose we'll ever have any more magic adventures?" she said. "Oh, maybe not big ones like these, but any at all? Just nice little safe ones, maybe?"