“Dot,” said Dick. “I bet that’s the farm-house where those children are staying, the ones Mrs Dixon knew about.”
“Bother them,” said Dorothea. She had been meaning to think of something else. But if Dick remembered them, when his mind was full of stones and stars, how could she possibly forget them?
“Bother them,” she said again. “What about your observatory?”
“You can see any amount of sky from up here,” said Dick. “And we can have a light in the barn for looking at the maps of the stars by.”
“It’ll be pretty cold,” said Dorothea.
But in the angle between the solid stone steps and the wall they found the remains of a fire, charred sticks, and a few stones to keep the fire in place. Someone had felt cold up there before them.
“What about that?” said Dick.
The barn itself was quite empty, and they decided that they could keep their firewood inside it. They climbed the stone steps. Nothing but the rusty hinges was left of the door that had been at the top of them. Gingerly, pressing with each foot before properly stepping on it, they went in. There were holes in the floor and the old planking creaked beneath them. They picked their way towards a big square opening in the end wall, through which, as it came right down to the level of the floor, they supposed bracken or hay had been pitched from a cart standing below.
“What a place to look out from,” said Dick. “And for all the northern stars . . . I say, you can see that farm even better from up here.”
“Perhaps we wouldn’t like them if we knew them,” said Dorothea.
“Let’s go and get wood ready for the evening,” said Dick, “and see if the ice is bearing.”
They went down the steep slope to the tarn. Dick stepped with one foot on the ice at the edge of it. It sank beneath his foot, and water oozed up at the side of it. He threw a stone towards the middle, and it crashed through the ice into the water.
“No good yet,” he said. “But it soon will be.”
They walked round the tarn, gathered two big bundles of fallen sticks in the outskirts of the wood beyond it, carried them up to the barn and spent a long time breaking them up into short handy lengths and piling them neatly just inside.
“Everything’s ready now,” said Dick. “Let’s go down and get tea over.” They were on the point of starting down the track to Dixon’s Farm when they were reminded of those six strangers yet again.
“There’s that boat,” said Dick, taking a last look down at the lake with his telescope. “There, turning into that bay.”
For some minutes they watched, but most of the bay below the white farm-house was hidden by the pine trees on a little rocky headland. Then, suddenly, Dick spoke again. “Coming up the field,” he half whispered. “Just below the house. Waving at something . . . There’s the boat going away out of the bay. Only two in it. Both red caps . . .”
Dorothea put a hand on the telescope for a moment and then remembered that she could never see through it.
“Where are they now?”
“Disappeared behind the house. Let’s go up into the observatory. Just for one minute.”
They ran up the steps and into the loft. Dick crouched on the floor by the big opening at the end of it and steadied his telescope against the wall.
“Dot,” he cried suddenly. “They do come from that house. Look at this end, two windows one above another. Two of them are hanging out of that top window.”
“What’s the good of thinking about them?” said Dorothea. “They might as well be in some different world.”
Dick started so sharply that he almost dropped his telescope.
“Why not? Why not?” he said. “All the better. Just wait till dark and we can try signalling to Mars.”
“To Mars?” said Dorothea.
“Why not?” said Dick. “Of course they may not see it. And even if they do see it they may not understand. A different world. That makes it all the more like signalling to Mars.”
“We’re going to be late for Mrs Dixon’s tea,” said Dorothea, and a moment later they were down those steep stone steps and hurrying home. As she ran down the cart track beside him, Dorothea was thinking. You never knew with Dick. He always seemed to be bothering about birds, or stars, or engines, or fossils and things like that. He never was able to make up stories like those that came so easily to her, and yet, sometimes, in some queer way of his own, he seemed to hit on things that made stories and real life come closer together than usual.
“It’s worth trying,” she panted, just as they were coming to the gate into the main road.
“What is?” said Dick, who was already thinking of quite other stars. What constellations could they look for? He wished he could keep the star map in his head. But anyway, they would take the book with them, and have a lantern to read it by, in case the fire-light was too flickery.
“Signalling to Mars,” said Dorothea.
CHAPTER II
SIGNALLING TO MARS
AN hour later they were climbing the cart track again. Dick had the star-book with him, and the telescope. Dorothea was carrying the lantern.
Mrs Dixon had made no fuss at all about letting them have a lantern when they asked for it, though what they could want with going up to the old barn after sunset was more than she could tell. Stars? Couldn’t they see stars as well and better from the farmyard, or from the scullery window for that, and keep warm into the bargain?
“You must have an observatory on the top of a hill,” Dick had explained, “so as to get a larger horizon.”
“Get along with you, you and your horizons,” Mrs Dixon had laughed, shaking the kitchen table-cloth into the fire. Old Silas had got a spare lantern for them and put a drop of oil in it. And Dick and Dorothea, astronomer and novelist, had hurried out into the winter evening.
They lit the lantern almost at once. It seemed a pity not to carry a lighted lantern when they could and, though there was still a little light in the sky, the lantern made things much darker. The stars were already showing.
“There’s Cassiopeia,” said Dick. “It’s supposed to be her chair, but it’s no good trying to see it like a chair. None of the constellations are like what they’re supposed to be. Even the Plough does just as well for a wagon or a bear.”
But Dorothea did not feel like talking while they were going up the hill at such a pace.
They came to the barn and stood outside it high on the hill-side. Dick was searching the skies while Dorothea peered down into the darkness of the valley.
“What about Mars?” she reminded him at last. “Have they had their tea?”
“Oh, them?” said Dick, and for a moment left the constellations to revolve unwatched. “Look there. Those’ll be the lights of that farm-house. Hide the lantern in the barn and we’ll be able to see better.”
Dorothea put the lantern well inside the doorway and hurried out again into the dark. Dick had already got his telescope trained on those lights away below them.
“It’s all right,” he said. “One of those lights is the downstairs window at this end of the house. I can just see the end wall, all white. There must be some other light quite near it. There you are. There it is. Someone moving about with a lantern.”
“Well, they won’t be going to bed yet. If it’s them. But that youngest one probably goes to bed pretty early.”
It felt very queer to be up there, high above everything, guessing at those strange lives so far away.
“Anyhow,” said Dick, “it’s no good thinking about them till there’s a light upstairs in that room they were putting their heads out of. Let’s look at the real stars. We’ve got to get that fire going. It’ll be all right in that corner round the steps. Then you can stay by the fire and see what the book says, and I can come round this side so as not to be bothered by the light.”
They were not very good at lighting a fire, and instead of doing it in the proper way with a handful of dry grass or the tiniest twigs Dick, after a last regre
tful look by lantern-light at the picture of the rings of Saturn, took the paper wrapper off the star-book and gave it to Dorothea.
“It doesn’t really matter,” he said, “because the same picture is inside the book as well.”
“It’s not like lighting a fire in a proper grate,” said Dorothea. “But the paper’ll make it much easier.”
It did, and in a few minutes they had a fire burning in the corner behind the steps. Smoke poured into their eyes, and reading seemed impossible. But presently the fire burnt clearer, and Dorothea crouched beside it to keep warm, and looked at the star-book in the light of the fire and the lantern.
“Get the chapter on the January sky,” said the astronomer, who was keeping the stone steps between himself and the glare.
Dorothea turned rapidly over the pages. “Got it,” she said.
Dick was staring up into the crowded sky.
“Now then,” he said. “I’ve got the Plough all right. Almost over that farm. And I’ve got the Pole Star, and Cassiopeia on the other side of it, almost opposite the Plough. What are the other ones it tells us to look out for? Skip the poetry.”
“Taurus,” said Dorothea, running her finger along the lines of print, difficult to read with smoke-filled eyes. “The Bull. Major stars: Aldebaran. First magnitude. The eye of the Bull.”
“Bother the 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. “Yo
u 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 more,” said Dick, and then, just as he hid the lantern at the end of the third flash, Dorothea said, “That top light’s gone out. Perhaps it is their room after all. Somebody’s told that youngest one to go to sleep.”
“Oh well,” said Dick. “We’ll try again to-morrow. Hullo! Look! There it is again. Dot! Dot! Something’s happening!”
There was the light in that upper window once more, one spark on the top of another, far away below them. It went out. They watched the patch of darkness where it had been above that other light that went on steadily burning. And as they watched, the upper light shone out again.
“If it goes this time . . .” said Dick, hardly able to speak. “It’s gone. Dot! They’ve answered . . .”
“What are you going to do?” asked Dorothea.
“Give them our signal again. That’ll settle it.”
Quickly the lantern was shown in the middle of the window, hidden, shown, hidden, shown, and then put finally away in the corner. This would settle it. The two watched, hardly daring to believe.
There it was, that answering light, flashing out in the farm far away below them in the valley. It was gone. There it was again. One, two, three flashes, and then darkness.
Winter Holiday Page 2
