The mechanico disappeared and summoned a large gang of other
mechanicos. They laid steel tracks about the garden, and down the
walks. ‘This is the life,’ said Raphael, delighted. ‘Come on, Cassie,
let’s run the big engine.’
They spent another two hours playing with the big engine the mechanicos
had brought them. They rode round and round the garden, throwing the
switches, backing for loads of stones they tossed into the dump cars,
and blowing the whistle.
‘Let’s never go back to Uniontown,’ said Raphael as he stopped the
train by the concrete pond. ‘Let’s stay here and play forever.’
‘Raff,’ broke in Cassandra, ‘it’s my turn. Let me drive.’
‘It’s not your turn,’ answered Raphael. ‘Besides, you don’t know how to
run an engine. You’d break it.’
‘Yes I do, too,’ argued Cassandra. ‘You’ve run the train for hours.’
‘Well, it’s mine, isn’t it? I asked for it.’
‘You wouldn’t have thought of it if I hadn’t told you what the Sorcerer
said.’ And Cassandra made a grab for the driving throttle.
‘Let go, Cassie, or I’ll push you off the train,’ said Raphael, angrily
seizing her hand.
Cassandra burst into tears. Raphael suddenly realized that they were
quarreling the first day they were together, fighting when they could
have anything they wanted. He was ashamed.
‘All right, Cassie,’ he said. ‘You can run the old engine.’
Cassandra brightened up. ‘Thank you, Raff,’ she said sweetly.
After lunch the Sorcerer took them to a room Cassie had never seen
before which held an enormous doll’s house. It was a wonderful house.
Each room had its small furnishings. In the bedrooms were bureaus
and beds and rugs and electric lights that turned on and off. In the
dining-room a miniature mechanico plied a vacuum cleaner, in the
kitchen a cook was cooking food on a little electric range, while in
the front parlor sat a mechanical man listening to a radio machine from
which issued strange infinitesimal squeaks and noises. ‘Just like the
radio at home,’ laughed Cassandra joyfully.
When they had grown tired of the doll’s house, they returned to the
garden and ordered two small racing automobiles. They drove these up
and down the asphalt paths, stopping every once in a while to change
the tires for the fun of it.
Toward the end of the afternoon Raphael suddenly thought, ‘I should
like an aeroplane.’ And he clapped his hands.
But this time he was denied. ‘The Master said you were not to have an
aeroplane,’ explained the mechanico. ‘He was afraid you might try to
escape.’
Escape! What nonsense! He was having far too good a time to escape.
‘All right,’ he said petulantly. ‘If I can’t, I suppose that’s all
there is to it.’ Raphael had forgotten Gæa and the animals and Aunt
Mary.
‘Cassie,’ he called, ‘I’ll race you round the garden.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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