THE GARDEN OF THE SORCERER
That night Raphael dropped into a dreamless sleep. When he woke in the
morning, he thought he was in Uniontown at home. There was Cassandra’s
bed, and Cassandra’s black head upon the pillow. But the nursery walls
were different. They were yellow. Then he remembered everything. He
lay half asleep looking across the room at the pictures in silhouette.
Cassandra had told him the whole story of her capture. She had waked
in the Sorcerer’s aeroplane and had been taken to a castle with no
windows. From this she had been carried to a strange boat which also
had no windows. Then they had driven over a long road in a racing
automobile to the tower in the city.
Cassandra was very vague about the details. She had been sleepy. She
had only really waked when he, Raphael, had come. Well, there she was,
Cassandra, his sister.
‘Cassie,’ he called softly to see if she were awake.
‘Yes,’ said Cassandra, opening her eyes.
‘Let’s get up. What time is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
Raphael got out of bed. Running over he pulled the bedclothes off
Cassandra with a jerk, shouting, ‘Ya, ya. Sleepy head. Going to stay
all day in bed.’ Cassandra hit at him with a pillow. Then Raphael
remembered the Sorcerer. As the Emissary of Gæa he should behave with
more dignity. He walked over to the bathroom and slipped on his new
clothes.
When Cassandra and he went down to breakfast, they found the Sorcerer
seated in a chair reading a magazine.
‘Well,’ said he, ‘how did you sleep?’
‘Fine,’ said Raphael. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘My dear boy,’ answered the Sorcerer, ‘I don’t ever sleep. What use is
sleep? It is a waste of valuable time.’
Raphael glanced at the magazine that the Sorcerer had been reading.
It was lying open on the table. As far as Raphael could see it was
made up of advertisements. _Use Flip Flop Arches for Flat Feet. A
Masterpiece of Mechanical Machinery. Is Your Personality Red Hot? The
Mechanico Wearing Our Asbestos Underwear Is Correctly Garbed For All
Occasions._ And there was a picture of a mechanico standing on his
head, underneath which Raphael read, _Do you know better? Make your
manners mechanical._
‘Aren’t there any stories in the magazine?’ Raphael asked.
‘Oh dear no,’ answered Mechanus. ‘This is the Mechanico Journal
Post. It is the last word in magazine-making. We have left out all
unnecessary matter.’ And he showed Raphael the cover on which was
printed the picture of a mechanico with his mouth open. This was done
handsomely in several colors.
After breakfast Raphael and Cassandra went out into the garden to play.
It was a wonderful garden. There were all sorts of flowers growing in
it, flowers much bigger than Raphael had ever seen before. Brick-red
zinnias, crimson dahlias, blue corn flowers, columbine, roses, and
tall sunflowers. There were also many other flowers Raphael could not
name.
‘Why, I didn’t know all these flowers bloomed so early in the spring,’
he said to Cassandra.
‘I guess they don’t, Raff. Anyhow, these are fakes.’
Raphael bent over to pick one. It was true. They were not flowers at
all, but beautifully made imitations.
‘What shall we play?’ asked Raphael.
‘Let’s play trains.’
‘But we haven’t any.’
‘Mechanus said,’ answered Cassandra, ‘that all we had to do was to clap
our hands, and a mechanico would bring us anything we wanted.’
They both clapped their hands, and a mechanico appeared.
‘Please,’ said Cassandra, ‘we want to play trains.’
[Illustration: THE MECHANICO DISAPPEARED AND SUMMONED A LARGE GANG OF
OTHER MECHANICOS]
The mechanico disappeared and returned in a moment bringing a large box
which he carried on his head. When the box was opened, Raphael gave
a cry of delight. Inside it were real trains that ran by steam and
were fired by tiny chips of coal. They had electric lights in all the
carriages. There were also sections of track, and the mechanico brought
switches and drawbridges and stations and a roundhouse with a turntable.
They laid the track through the jungle of the false flowers, and played
happily together for an hour or two. Then Raphael got up and stretched.
‘I wish,’ he said, ‘I had a larger train with an engine that I could
run myself.’
He clapped his hands. ‘Is there a bigger engine about? An engine large
enough for me to ride in?’
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.’
That evening after supper, Mechanus took them to a little theater in
the tower, and showed them moving pictures. Raphael and Cassandra were
very much excited when the lights were shut off and the title, _A Miss
Is As Good As A Mile; A Mechanical Comedy, by the Mechanico Motion
Picture Studio_, flickered on the screen. Aunt Mary seldom took them to
the movies. She said they were vulgar.
First there appeared a tall office building into which a mechanico
hurried, dressed in a silk hat and carrying an oil tankard in one hand.
He was shown falling into the elevator which took him up many flights.
On the way up he stepped in the tankard. When the elevator stopped, he
tripped out and fell through an office door, knocking off his silk hat.
The subtitle read, _Oil Can_.
In the office a second mechanico actor rose from the desk at which he
was working and calmly kicked his visitor through the window, tankard
and all. The first mechanico lit on his head in the street amidst a
splatter of glass with the battered tankard in one hand. He rose and
ran to an automobile standing near and got in. The whole machine fell
apart, the wheels careening off in various directions. The subtitle to
this was, _Only a Motor Car_. There was much more of this kind of fun.
‘Children, don’t you think that is funny?’ asked the Sorcerer when the
reel had come to an end.
‘Not very,’ said Raphael doubtfully. ‘What was it all about?’
‘That was modeled from the very best moving picture comedies,’ answered
the Sorcerer, ‘keeping the funniest features in each.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Raphael politely.
‘Would you like to see a melodrama?’ went on the Sorcerer.
‘No--no, thank you.’
‘Do you want to see one, Cassandra?’
But Cassandra had already fallen asleep.
[Illustration]