The Oracles Read Free Page A

their tails to drive the flies off, and sending up a reassuring cow smell to the children in Tree Town. Even Serafina, who had outgrown most of the tree games, felt a security and confidence up there which she missed in her wary, battling life below. And she was, therefore, a little unwilling to tell anybody about this refuge; Joe, in his innocence, had betrayed their secret to Mrs. Pattison, and invited her to tea in his tree house. There was nothing to be done, save welcome her when she came. Nor had the party gone off badly. She had admired it all very much, thoroughly appreciated the ingenuity of the chair and the ladder, paid a visit to every branch, and brought with her a contribution of lemonade and chocolate biscuits. But she belonged to the dangerous grown-up world, which Serafina distrusted . The people in it were not reasonable. They got themselves into the most mysterious predicaments and then made more hullabaloo about it than any child would dream of making. They seemed to believe that somebody would come and put everything right for them, if they made a great deal of fuss. Even Joe knew better than that. The little Swanns yelled and roared sometimes, if they hurt themselves, but only to relieve their feelings. They did not expect redress. Mrs.Pattison, although she was so nice, did belong to that strange, untrustworthy race, and the tree did not seem so safe after she had been there.
    The back garden was a long one, running uphill to the meadow. Serafina had only got halfway up when she heard Joe’s voice, plaintively hailing her.
    ‘Where are you?’ she called.
    ‘In the miggle of the pond.’
    She ran round a hedge of rambler roses and found them all huddled together in a tank which had once been a lily-pond. To her angry enquiries they replied that they had gone there for safety, until she came home.
    ‘You said—you said yourself,’ said Polly, ‘that they can’t cross water.’
    The worst of raising bogies is the difficulty of dismissing them. Serafina sighed. She ruled by terror, as many another little mother has done. Reassurance was not so easy.
    ‘Silly! They can’t come out in the daytime.’
    Her subjects looked at one another.
    ‘Yes they can,’ whispered Mike at last.
    ‘There’s one now in the meadow,’ said Dinah.
    ‘He’s spoilt our tree,’ said Polly.
    ‘Spoilt our poor tree all quite dead,’ mourned Joe.
    ‘And he’s there still,’ said Mike. ‘We saw him. Hopping after us and shooting at us.’
    Serafina’s spine began to crawl.
    ‘You mean … there’s a person in the meadow?’ she ventured.
    A fluttering sigh of dissent rose from the woebegone group. It was not, they gave her to understand, a person.
    ‘Not … not …’
    Far away a long roll of thunder seemed to answerher. Joe suddenly dashed out of the tank and butted his head into Serafina’s stomach, yelling at the top of his voice:
    ‘An Arfitax!’
    Everybody cried Ssh! It was extremely dangerous to refer to the Enemy by name. Grown-up people might babble lightheartedly about Artefacts, but they did everything differently.
    ‘I don’t believe it,’ quavered Serafina.
    To believe it would bring the skies toppling down.
    The whole mythology of the Artefacts had been, as she knew in her saner moments, her own invention. Of course she was afraid of the things; she always ran past the studio as fast as she could. Even grown-up people were afraid of them. A charwoman, who came sometimes, called them wicked-looking things. And Dr. Browning, when he took the bean out of Mike’s nose, had peered through the studio window and declared that he should not like to meet any of them in a wood on a dark night. They looked very frightening, especially those which had some faint resemblance to human beings. But she knew, perfectly well, that they could not really think, and had no life. They were not real ,as she put it to herself. Her father made them. People sometimes bought them; for what purpose she could not