“Of course we can talk about the chariot afterward,” Mavis admitted.
“There’ll be lots of time to talk between now and dead of night,” said Kathleen. “Come on, Bear.”
And they went.
There is nothing like a circus for making you forget your anxieties. It is impossible to dwell on your troubles and difficulties when performing dogs are displaying their accomplishments, and wolves dancing their celebrated dance with the flags of all nations, and the engaging lady who jumps through the paper hoops and comes down miraculously on the flat back of the white horse, cannot but drive dull care away, especially from the minds of the young. So that for an hour and a half—it really was a good circus, and I can’t think how it happened to be at Beachfield Fair at all—a solid slab of breathless enjoyment was wedged in between the interview with the Mermaid and the difficult task of procuring for her the chariot she wanted. But when it was all over and they were part of a hot, tightly packed crowd pouring out of the dusty tent into the sunshine, their responsibilities came upon them with renewed force.
“Wasn’t the clown ripping?” said Bernard, as they got free of the crowd.
“I liked the riding-habit lady best, and the horse that went like that, best,” said Kathleen, trying with small pale hands and brown shod legs to give an example of a horse’s conduct during an exhibition of the haute école.
“Didn’t you think the elephant—” Mavis was beginning, when Francis interrupted her.
“About that chariot,” he said, and after that they talked of nothing else. And whatever they said it always came to this in the end, that they hadn’t got a chariot, and couldn’t get a chariot, and that anyhow they didn’t suppose there was a chariot to be got, at any rate in Beachfield.
“It wouldn’t be any good, I suppose,” said Kathleen’s last and most helpful suggestion—“be the slightest good saying ‘Sabrina fair’ to a pumpkin?”
“We haven’t got even a pumpkin,” Bernard reminded her, “let alone the rats and mice and lizards that Cinderella had. No, that’s no good. But I’ll tell you what.” He stopped short. They were near home now—it was late afternoon, in the road where the talkative yellowhammer lived. “What about a wheelbarrow?”