THE

                        EDUCATION OF UNCLE PAUL




[Illustration]


                       MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

                       LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
                               MELBOURNE


                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

                      NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
                        ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO


                   THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
                                TORONTO




                      THE EDUCATION OF UNCLE PAUL


                                   BY

                           ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

                               AUTHOR OF
             ‘JIMBO,’ ‘JOHN SILENCE,’ ‘THE LISTENER,’ ETC.


                       MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
                      ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
                                  1909




Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different
from the man of to-day. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the
waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness,
to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to
whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into
horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each
child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a
nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space; it is

                To see a world in a grain of sand,
                And a heaven in a wild flower,
                Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
                And eternity in an hour;

it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor
petition that it is to be commuted into death.—FRANCIS THOMPSON.




                                   TO

                           ALL THOSE CHILDREN

                  BETWEEN THE AGES OF EIGHT AND EIGHTY

                       WHO LED ME TO ‘THE CRACK’;

              AND HAVE SINCE JOURNEYED WITH ME THROUGH IT

                                  INTO

               THE LAND ‘BETWEEN YESTERDAY AND TO-MORROW’




                               CHAPTER I

                                  ... I stand as mute
              As one with full strong music in his heart
              Whose fingers stray upon a shattered lute.
                                            ALICE MEYNELL.


All night the big liner had been plunging heavily, but towards morning
she entered quieter water, and when the passengers woke, her rising and
falling over the great swells was so easy that even the sea-sick women
admitted the relief.

‘Land in sight, sir! We shall see Liverpool within twenty hours now,
barring fog.’

The friendly bathroom steward passed the open door of Stateroom No. 28,
and the big, brown-bearded man in the blue serge suit who was sitting,
already dressed, on the edge of the port-hole berth, started as though
he had been shot, and ran up on deck without waiting to finish tying the
laces of his india-rubber shoes.

‘By Jove!’ he said, as he thundered along the stuffy passages of the
rolling vessel, and ‘By Gad!’

He emerged on the upper deck in the sunlight, having nearly injured
several persons in his impetuous journey, and, taking a great gulp of
the salt air with keen satisfaction, he crossed to the side in a couple
of strides, the shoe-laces clicking against the deck as he went.

‘Twenty years ago,’ he muttered, ‘when I was barely out of my teens. And
now——!’

The big man was distinctly excited, though ‘moved’ perhaps is the better
word, seeing that the emotion was a little too searching, too tinged
with sadness, to include elation. He plunged both hands into his coat
pockets with a violence that threatened to tear the bottoms out, and
leaned over the railing.

Far away a faint blue line, tinged delicately with green, rose out of
the sea. He saw it instantly, and his throat tightened unexpectedly,
almost like a reflex action. For, about that simple little blue line on
the distant horizon there was something strangely seizing, something
absolutely arresting. The sight of it was a hundred times more poignant
than he had imagined it would be; it touched a thousand springs of
secret life in him, and a mist rose faintly before his eyes.

Paul Rivers had not realised that his emotion would be so intense; but
from that instant everything on the ship, otherwise familiar and rather
boring, looked different. A new sense of locality came to him. The
steamer became strange and new; he ‘recognised’ bits of it as though he
had just come aboard a ship known aforetime. It was no longer the
steamer that was merely crossing the Atlantic; it was the boat that was
bringing him home. And there, trimming the horizon in a thin ribbon of
most arresting beauty, was the coast-line of the first Island.

‘But it seems so much more solid—and so much more real than I expected!’

Though it was barely seven o’clock a few early passengers were already
astir, and he made his way back again to the lower deck and thence
climbed up into the bows. He wished to be alone. Another man, apparently
from the steerage, was there before him, leaning over the rail and
peering fixedly under one hand at the horizon. The saloon passenger took
up his position a few feet farther on and stared hard. He, too, stared
with the eyes of memory, now grown a little dim. The air was fresh and
sweet, fragrant of long sea distances; there was a soft warmth in it
too, for it was late April and the spring made its presence known even
on the great waters where there was nothing to hang its fairy banners
on.

‘So that’s land! That’s the Old Country!’

The words dropped out of their own accord; he could not help himself.
The sky seemed to come down a little closer, with a more familiar and
friendly touch; the very air, he fancied, had a new taste in it,—a whiff
of his boyhood days—a smell of childhood and the things of
childhood—ages ago, it seemed, in another life.

The huge ship rose and fell on the regular, sweeping swells, and
sea-birds from the land already came out to meet her. He easily imagined
that the thrills in the depths of his own being somehow communicated
themselves to the mighty vessel that tore the seas asunder in her great
desire to reach the land.

‘Twenty years,’ he repeated aloud, oblivious of his neighbour, ‘twenty
years since I last saw it!’

‘And it’s gol-darned nearer fifty since _I_ seen it,’ exclaimed a harsh
voice just behind him.

He turned with a start. The steerage passenger beside him, he saw, was
an old man with a rough, grey face, and hair turning white; the hand
that shaded his eyes was thick and worn; there was a heavy gold ring on
the little finger, and the dirty cuff of a dark flannel shirt tumbled,
loosely and unbuttoned, over the very solid wrist. The face, he noticed,
at a second glance, was rugged, beaten, scored, the face of a man who
had tumbled terribly about life, battered from pillar to post; and it
was only the light in the hard blue eyes—eyes still fixed unwaveringly
on the distant line of the land—that redeemed it from a kind of grim
savagery. Beaten and battered, yes! Yet at the same time triumphant. The
atmosphere of the man proclaimed in some vibrant fashion beyond analysis
that he had failed in all he undertook—failed from stupidity rather than
character, and always doggedly beginning over again with the same lack
of intelligence—but yet had never given in, and never would give in.

It was not difficult to reconstruct his history from his appearance; or
to realise his feelings as he saw the Old Country after fifty years—a
returned failure. Although the voice had vibrated with emotion, the face
remained expressionless and unmoved; but down both cheeks large tears
ran slowly, in sudden jerks, to drop with a splash upon the railing. And
Paul Rivers, after his intuitive fashion, grasped the whole drama of the
man with a sudden completeness that touched him with swift sympathy. At
the same time he could not help thinking of rain-drops running down the
face of a statue. He recognised with shame that he was conscious of a
desire to laugh.

‘Fifty years! That’s a long time indeed,’ he said kindly. ‘It’s
half-a-century.’

‘That’s so, Boss,’ returned the other in a dead voice that betrayed
Ireland overlaid with acquired American twang and intonation; ‘and I
guess now I’ll never be able to stick it over here. Jest see it—and then
git back again.’

He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, and never once turned his head
towards the man he was speaking to; only his lips moved; he did not even
lift a finger to brush off the great tears that fell one by one from his
cheeks to the deck. He seemed unconscious of them; as though it was so
long since those hard eyes had melted that they had forgotten how to do
it properly and the skin no longer registered the sensation of the
trickling. The tears continued to fall at intervals; Paul Rivers
actually heard them splash.

‘I went out steerage,’ the man continued to himself, or to the sea, or
to any one else who cared to listen, ‘and I come back steerage. That’s
my trouble. And now’—his eye shifted for a fraction of a second and
watched a huge wave go thundering by—‘I’m grave-huntin’, I guess. And
that’s about the size of it. Jest see it and—git back again!’

The first-class passenger made some kind and appropriate reply—words
with genuine sympathy in them—and then, getting no further answer, found
it difficult to continue the conversation. The man, he realised, had
only wanted a peg to hang his emotion on. It had to be a living peg, but
any other living peg would do equally well, and before long he would
find some one in the steerage who would listen with delight to the flood
that was bound to come. And, presently, he took his departure to his own
quarters where the sailors, with bare feet, were still swabbing the
slippery decks.

A couple of hours later, after breakfast, he leaned over the rail and
again saw the man on the steerage deck, and heard him talking volubly.
The tears were gone, but the smudges were still visible on the cheeks,
where they had traced a zigzag pattern. He was telling the history of
his fifty years’ disappointments and failures to one and all who cared
to listen.

And, apparently, many cared to listen. The man’s emotion was real; it
found vigorous expression. The sight of the old, loved shore, not seen
for half-a-century, but the subject of ten thousand yearnings, had been
too much for him. He told in detail the substance of these ten thousand
dreams—ever one and the same dream, of course—and in the telling of it
he found the relief his soul sought. He got it all out; it did him a
world of good, saving his inner being from a whole army of severe mental
fevers and spiritual pains. The man revelled in a delirium of
self-expression, and in so doing found sanity and health for his
overburdened soul.

And the picture of that hard-faced old man crying accompanied Paul
Rivers to the upper decks, and remained insistently with him for a long
time. It portrayed with such neat emphasis precisely what was so
deplorably lacking in his own character. There, in concrete form, though
not precisely his own case, still near enough to be extremely
illuminating, he had seen a grown-up man finding abundant and natural
expression for his emotion. The man was not ashamed of his tears, and
would doubtless have let them splash on the deck before a hundred
passengers, whereas he, Paul Rivers, was, it seemed, constitutionally
unable to reveal himself, to tell his deep longings, to find expression
through any sensible medium for the ten thousand dreams that choked his
life to the brim. He was unable, perhaps ashamed, to splash on the deck.

It was not that the big, bronzed Englishman wanted to cry, or to wash
his soul in sentiment, but that the sight of this old man’s passion, and
its frank and easy utterance, touched with dramatic intensity the crying
need of his whole temperament. The need of the steerage passenger was
the need of a moment; his own was the need of an existence.

‘Lucky devil!’ he exclaimed, half laughing, half sighing, as he went to
his cabin for the field-glasses; ‘he knows how to get it out—and does
get it out! while I—with my impossible yearnings and my absurd
diffidence in speaking of them to others—I haven’t got a single
safety-valve of any sort or kind. I can’t get it out of me—all this
ocean in my heart and soul—not a drop, not even a blessed tear!’

He laughed again and, stooping to pick up the glasses, he caught a
glimpse of his sunburned, bearded face in the cabin mirror.

‘Even my appearance is against me,’ he went on with mournful humour; ‘I
look like a healthy lumberman more than anything else in God’s world!’

He bent forward and examined himself carefully in detail.

‘What has such a face as that to do with beauty, and the stars, and the
moon sinking over a summer sea, or those night-winds I know rising
faintly from their hiding-places in the dim forests and stealing on soft
tiptoe about the sleeping world until the dawn gives them leave to run
and sing? Yet _I_ know—though I can never tell it to another—what so
many do not know! Who could ever believe that _that_ man’—he pointed to
himself in the glass, laughing—‘wants above all else in life, above
wealth, fame, success, the knowledge of spiritual things, which is
Reality—which is God?’

A flash of light from nowhere ran over his face, making it for one
instant like the face of a boy, shining, wonderful, radiantly young.

‘_I_ know, for instance,’ he went on, the strange flush of enthusiasm
rising into his eyes, ‘that the pine trees hold wind in their arms as
cups hold rare wine, and that when it spills I hear the exquisite
trickling of its music—but I can’t tell any one _that_! And I can’t even
put the wild magic of it into verse or music. Or even into conduct,’ he
concluded with a laugh, ‘conduct that’s sane, that is. For, if I could,
I should find what I’m for ever seeking behind all life and behind all
expressions of beauty—I should find the Reality I seek!’

‘I’ve no safety-valves,’ he added, swinging the glasses round by their
strap to the imminent danger of various articles of furniture, ‘that’s
the long and short of it. Like a giraffe that can’t make any sound at
all although it has the longest throat in all creation. Everything in me
accumulates and accumulates. If only’—and the strange light came back
for a second to his brown eyes—‘I could write, or sing, or pray—live as
the saints did, or do something to—to express adequately the sense of
beauty and wonder and delight that lives, like the presence of a God, in
my soul!’

The lamp in his eyes faded slowly and he sat back on the little cabin
sofa, screwing and unscrewing his glasses till it was surprising that
the thread didn’t wear out. And as he screwed, a hundred fugitive
pictures passed thronging through his mind; moments of yearning and of
pain, of sudden happiness and of equally sudden despondency, vivid moods
of all kinds provoked by the smallest imaginable fancies, as the way
ever was with him. For the moods of the sky were his moods; the swift,
coloured changes of sea and cloud were mirrored in his heart as with all
too impressionable people, and he was for ever trying to seize the
secret of their loveliness and to give it form—in vain. Like many
another mystical soul he saw the invisible foundations of the visible
world—longed to communicate it to others—found he couldn’t—then suffered
all the pain and fever of repression that seeks in vain for adequate
utterance. Too shy to stammer his profound yearnings to ears that would
not hear, and, never having known the blessed relief of a sympathetic
audience, he perforce remained choked and dumb, the only mitigation he
knew being that loss of self which follows prolonged contemplation. In
his contemplation of Nature, for instance, he would gaze upon the
landscape, the sky, a tree or flower, until their essential beauty
passed into his own nature. For the moment he _felt with_ these things.
He _was_ them. He took their qualities literally into himself. He lost
his ordinary personality by changing its centre, merging it into those
remoter phases of consciousness which extended from himself mysteriously
to include the landscape, the sky, the tree, the flower.

For him everywhere in Nature there was psychic energy. And it was
difficult to say which was with him the master passion: to find
Reality—God—through Nature, or to explain Nature through God.


Then the busy faces of America, now left behind after twenty years,
gradually receded, and others, dimly seen through mist, rose above the
horizon of his thoughts. And among them he saw that two stood forth with
more clearness than the rest. One of these was Dick Messenger, the
friend of his boyhood, now dead but a few years; and the other, the face
of his sister, Margaret, whom Dick had left a widow, and whose children
he would now see for the first time at their country home in the South
of England.

The ‘Old Country!’ He repeated the words softly to himself, weaving it
like a coloured thread through all his reverie. He had lived away long
enough to understand the poignant magic that lies in the little phrase,
and to appreciate the seizing and pathetic beauty lying along that faint
blue line of sea and sky.

And presently he took his field-glasses again and went up on deck and
hid himself in the bows alone. Leaning over the bulwarks he took the
scented wind of spring full in the face, and watched with a curious
exhilaration the huge rollers, charging and bellowing like wild bulls of
the sea as the ship drew nearer and nearer to the coast, plunging,
leaping, and thundering as she moved.




                               CHAPTER II

  Justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness
  of man’s imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound
  of mud, there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which
  he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the
  observer, he will have some kind of a bull’s-eye at his belt.—R. L. S.


The case of Paul Rivers after all was very simple, though perhaps in
some respects uncommon. Circumstances—to sum it up roughly—had so
conspired that the most impressionable portion of his character—half of
his mind and most of his soul, that is—had never found utterance. He had
never discovered the medium that could carry forth into the relief of
expression all the inner turmoil and delight of a soul that was very
much alive and singularly in touch with the simple and primitive forces
of the world.

It was not, as with the returned emigrant, grief that he felt, but
something far more troublesome: Joy. For the beauty of the world, of
character as of nature, laid a spell upon him that set his heart in the
glow and fever of an inner furnace, while the play of his imagination
among the ‘common’ things of life which the rest of the world apparently
thought dull set him often upon the borders of an ecstasy whereof he
found himself unable to communicate one single letter to his
fellow-beings. Thus, in later years, and out of due season, he was
afflicted and perplexed by a luxuriant growth that by rights should have
been harvested before he was twenty-five; and a great part of him had
neglected to grow up at all.

This result was due to no fault—no neglect, that is—of his own, but to
circumstances and temperament combined. It explains, however, why, after
twenty years in the backwoods of America, he saw the coast of the Old
Country with a deep emotion that was not all delight, but held something
also of dismay.

Left an orphan, with his younger sister, at an early age, the blundering
of trustees had forced him out into the world before his first term at
Cambridge was over, and after various vicissitudes he had found his way
to America and had been drawn into the lumber trade. Here his knowledge
and love of trees—it was a veritable passion with him—soon resulted in a
transfer from the Minneapolis office to the woods, and after an
interesting apprenticeship, he came to hold an important post in which
he was strangely at home. He was appointed to the post of ‘Wood
Cruiser’—forest-traveller, _commis voyageur_ of the primeval woods. His
duties, well paid too, were to survey, judge, mark, and report upon the
qualities and values of the immense timber limits owned by his Company.
And he loved the work. It was a life of solitude, but a life close to
Nature; borne in his canoe down swift wilderness streams; meeting the
wild animals in their secret haunts; becoming intimate with dawns and
sunsets, great winds, the magic of storms and stars, and being initiated
into the profound mysteries of the clean and haunted regions of the
world.

And the effect of this kind of life upon him—especially at an age when
most men are busy learning more common values in the strife of
cities—was of course significant. For here, in this solitary existence,
the beauty of the world, virgin and glorious, struck the eyes of his
soul and nearly blinded them.

His whole being threw itself inwards upon his thoughts, and outwards
upon what fed his thoughts—the wonder of Nature. Even as a boy he had
been mystically minded, a poet if ever there was one, though a poet
without a lyre; but at school he had chanced to come under the influence
of masters who had sought to curb the exuberance of his imagination, so
that he started into life with the rooted idea that it was something of
a disgrace for a man to be too sensitive to beauty, and to possess a
vivid and coloured imagination was almost a thing to be ashamed of.

This view of his only ‘silver talent,’ moreover, was never permitted by
the nature of his life to alter. His early American experiences
stiffened it into a conviction which he yet despised. The fires ran
hidden, if unchecked. Had he dwelt in cities, they might have suffered
total extinction perhaps, but here, in the heart of the free woods, they
speedily rose to the surface again and flamed. He grew up singularly
unspoilt, the shyness of the original nature utterly uncorrected, the
stores of a poetic imagination accumulating steadily, but always
unuttered.

For his sole companions all these years when he had any at all were the
‘Bosses’ of the lumber camps he inspected, the ‘Cookee’ who looked after
his stew-pot in the ‘home-shack,’ and the half-breed Indian who
accompanied him in the stern-seat of the bark canoe during the
month-long trips about the wilderness: these—with the animals, winds,
stars, and the forms of beauty his imagination for ever conjured out of
them.

For twenty years he lived thus, knowing all the secrets of the woods and
streams. In the summer he never slept under cover at all, so that even
in sleep he understood, through closed eyelids, the motions of the stars
behind the tangled network of branches overhead. In winter his
snow-shoes carried him into the heart of the most dazzling scenes
imaginable—the forest lying under many feet of snow with a cloudless sun
lifting it all into an appearance of magic that took the breath away.
Moreover, the fierce spring, when the streams became impassable floods,
and the autumn, with a flaming glory of gold and scarlet unknown
anywhere else in the world, he knew as intimately as the dryads
themselves.

And all these moods became the intimate companions of his life, taking
the place of men and women. He came to personify Nature as a matter of
course.

Without knowing it, too, the place of children was taken somehow by the
wild animals. He knew them all. He surprised them in their haunts in the
course of his silent journeys into the heart of their playgrounds; and
his headquarters—a one-story shanty on the height of land between his
two chief ‘limits’—was never without a tamed baby bear, a young moose to
draw him on his snow-shoes with the manners of a well-bred pony, and a
dozen other animals reclaimed from savagery and turned by some
mysterious system of his own into real companions and confidants.

And the only books he read in the long winter nights, besides a few
modern American novels that puzzled and vaguely distressed him, were
Blake, his loved Greek plays, and the Bible.

He rarely saw a woman. Sides of his nature that ought to have developed
under the influences of normal life at home lay dormant altogether, or
were filled as best might be by his intercourse with Nature. He wrote
few letters. After Dick Messenger died, the formal correspondence he
kept up at long intervals with his sister—Dick’s widow—hardly deserved
the name of letters. Great slabs of him, so to speak, stopped growing
up, sinking down into the subconscious region to await conditions
favourable for calling them to the surface again, and eventually coming
to life—this was his tragic little secret—at a time when they were long
overdue.

To the end of life he remained shy, shy in the sense that most of his
thoughts and emotions he was afraid to reveal to others; with the
shyness, too, of the utterly modest soul that cannot believe the world
will give it the very things it has most right to claim, yet never dares
to claim. And to the end Nature never lifted the spell laid upon him
during those twenty years of initiation in her solitudes. To see the new
moon tilting her silver horns in the west; to hear the wind rustling in
high trees, like old Indians telling one another secrets of the early
world; and to see the first stars looking down from the height of sky
through spaces of watery blue—these, and a hundred other things that the
majority seemed to ignore, were to him a more moving and terrible
delight than anything he could imagine. For him such things could never
be explained away, but remained living and uncorrected to the end.

Thus when, at forty-five, he inherited the fortune of his aunt (which he
had always known must one day come to him), he returned to England with
the shy, bursting, dream-laden heart of a boy, young as only those are
young whom life has kept clean and sweet in the wilderness; and the
question that sprang to life in his heart when he saw the blue line of
coast was a vague wonder as to what would become of his full-blooded
dreams when tested by the conventional English life that he remembered
as a boy. To whom could he speak of his childlike yearning after God; of
his swift divinations, his passionate intuitions into the very things
that the majority put away with childhood? What modern priest—so he
felt, at least—what befuddled mystic, could possibly enter into the
essential nature of these cravings as he did, or understand, without a
sneer, the unspoilt passions of a man who had never ‘grown up’?

‘I shall be out of touch with it all,’ he thought as he stood there in
the bows and watched the blue line grow nearer, ‘utterly out of touch.
What shall I find to say to the men of my own age—I, who stopped growing
up twenty years ago? How shall I ever link on with them? Children are
the only things I can talk to, and children!’—he shrugged his shoulders
and laughed—‘children will find me out at once and give me away to the
others.’

‘Dick’s children, though, may be different!’ came the sudden reflection.
‘Only—I’ve had nothing to do with children for such ages. Dick had real
imagination. By George,’—and his eyes glowed a moment—‘what if they took
after him!’

And for the fiftieth time, as he pictured the meeting with his stranger
sister, his heart sank, and he found refuge in the knowledge that he had
not altogether burned his boats behind him. For he had been wise in his
generation. He had arranged with his Company, who were only too glad of
the chance of keeping his services, that he should go to England on a
year’s leave, and that if in the end he decided to return he should have
a share in the business, while still continuing the work of
forest-inspection that he loved.

‘I’m nothing but a wood cruiser. I shall go back. In the big world I
might lose all my vision!’

And, having lived so long out of the world, he now came back to it with
this simple, innocent, imaginative heart of a great boy, a boy still
dreaming, for all his five-and-forty years. Fully realising that
something was wrong with him, that he ought to be more sedate, more
cynical, more prosaic and sober, he yet could not quite explain to
himself wherein lay the source of his disability. His thoughts stumbled
and blundered when he tried to lay his finger on it, with the only
result that he felt he would be ‘out of touch’ with his new world, not
knowing exactly how or why.

‘It’s a regular log-jam,’ he said, using the phraseology he was
accustomed to, ‘and I’m sorry for the chap that breaks it.’

It never occurred to him that in this simple thrill that Nature still
gave him he possessed one of the greatest secrets for the preservation
of genuine youth; indeed, had he understood this, it would have meant
that he was already old. For with the majority such dreams die young,
brushed rudely from the soul by the iron hand of experience, whereas in
his case it was their persistent survival that lent such a childlike
quality to his shyness, and made him secretly ashamed of not feeling as
grown up as he realised he ought to feel.

Paul Rivers, in a word, belonged to a comprehensible though perhaps not
over common type, and one not often recognised owing to the elaborate
care with which its ‘specimens’ conceal themselves from the world under
all manner of brave disguises. He was destitute of that nameless quality
that constitutes a human being, not mature necessarily, but grown up.
Sources of inner enthusiasm that most men lose when life brings to them
the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, had kept alive; and though on
the one hand he was secretly ashamed of the very simplicity of his great
delights, on the other hand he longed intensely for some means by which
he could express them and relieve his burdened soul.

He envied the emigrant who could let fall hot tears on the deck without
further ado, while at the same time he dreaded the laughter of the world
into which he was about to move when they learned the cause of the
emotions that produced them. A boy at forty-five! A dreamer of
children’s dreams with fifty in sight—and no practical results!

These were some of the thoughts still tumbling vaguely about his mind
when the tug brought letters aboard at Queenstown, and on the
dining-room table where they were spread out he found one for himself in
a handwriting that he both welcomed and dreaded.




                              CHAPTER III


He welcomed it, because for years it had been the one remaining link
with the life of his old home—these formal epistles that reached him at
long intervals; and he dreaded it, because he knew it would contain a
definite invitation of an embarrassing description.

‘She’s bound to ask me,’ he reflected as he opened it in his cabin; ‘she
can’t help herself. And I am bound to accept, for I can’t help myself
either.’ He was far too honest to think of inventing elaborate excuses.
‘I’ve got to go and spend a month with her right away whether I like it
or not.’

It was not by any means that he disliked his sister, for indeed he
hardly knew her; after all these years he barely remembered what she
looked like, the slim girl of eighteen he had left behind. It was simply
that in his mind she stood for the conventional life, so alien to his
vision, to which he had returned.

He would try to like her, certainly. Very warm impulses stirred in his
heart as he thought of her—his only near relative in the world, and the
widow of his old school and Cambridge friend, Dick Messenger. It was in
her handwriting that he first learned of Dick’s love for her, as it was
in hers that the news of his friend’s death reached him—after his long
tour—two months old. The handwriting was a symbol of the deepest human
emotions he had known. And for that reason, too, he dreaded it.

He never realised quite what kind of woman she had become; in his
thoughts she had always remained simply the girl of eighteen—grown
up—married. Her letters had been very kind and gentle, if in the nature
of the case more and more formal. She became shadowy and vague in his
mind as the years passed, and more and more he had come to think of her
as wholly out of his own world. Reading between the lines it was not
difficult to see that she attached importance to much in life that
seemed to him unreal and trivial, whereas the things that he thought
vital she never referred to at all. It might, of course, be merely
restraint concealing great depths. He could not tell. The letters, after
a few years, had become like formal government reports. He had written
fully, however, to announce his home-coming, and her reply had been full
of genuine pleasure.

‘I don’t think she’ll make very much of me,’ was the thought in his mind
whenever he dwelt upon it. ‘I’m afraid my world must seem foreign—unreal
to her; the things I know rubbish.’

So, in the privacy of his cabin, his heart already strangely astir by
the emotion of that blue line on the horizon, he read his sister’s
invitation and found it charming. There was spontaneous affection in it.

‘We shall fix things up between us so that no one would ever know.’ He
did not explain what it was ‘no one would ever know,’ but went on to
finish the letter. He was to make his home with her in the country, he
read, until he decided what to do with himself. The tone of the letter
made his heart bound. It was a real welcome, and he responded to it
instantly like a boy. Only one thing in it seriously disturbed his
equanimity. Absurd as it may seem, the fact that his sister’s welcome
included also that of the children, had a subtly disquieting effect upon
him.

  ... for they are dying to see you and to find out for themselves what
  the big old uncle they have heard so much about is really like. All
  their animals are being cleaned and swept so as to be ready for your
  arrival, and, in anticipation of your stories of the backwoods, no
  other tales find favour with them any more.

An expression of perplexity puckered his face. ‘I declare, I’m afraid of
those children—Dick’s children!’ he thought, holding the open letter to
his mouth and squinting down the page, while his eyebrows rose and his
forehead broke into lines. ‘They’ll find out what I am. They’ll betray
me. I shall never be able to hold out against them.’ He knew only too
well how searching was the appeal that all growing and immature life
made to him. It touched the very centre of him that had refused to grow
up and that made him young with itself. ‘I can no more resist them than
I could resist the baby bears, or that little lynx that used to eat out
of my hand.’ He shrugged his big shoulders, looking genuinely
distressed. ‘And then every one will know what I am—an overgrown boy—a
dumb poet—a dreamer of dreams that bear no fruit!’

He was not morbidly introspective. He was merely trying to face the
little problem squarely. He got up and staggered across the cabin,
steadying himself against the rolling of the ship in front of the
looking-glass.

‘Big Old Uncle!’

He stuffed the letter into his pocket and surveyed himself critically.
Big he certainly was, but that other adjective brought with it a
sensation of weariness that had never yet troubled him in his wilderness
existence. He was only a little, just a very little, on the shady side
of forty-five, but to the children he might seem really old, _aged_, and
to his sister, who was considerably his junior, as elderly, and perhaps
in need of the comforts of the elderly.

He squared his shoulders and looked more closely into the glass. There,
opposite to him, stood a tall, dignified man in a blue suit, with a
spotless linen collar and a neat tie passing through a gold ring,
instead of the unkempt fellow he was accustomed to in a flannel shirt,
red handkerchief and big sombrero hat pulled over his eyes; a man
weighing the best part of fifteen stones, lean, well-knit, vigorous, and
nearly six feet three in his socks. A pair of brown eyes, kindly brown
eyes he thought, met his own questioningly, and a brown beard—yes, it
was still brown—covered the lower part of the face. He put up a hand to
stroke it, and noticed that it was a strong, muscular hand, sunburnt but
well kept, with neat finger-nails, and a heavy signet ring on one
finger. It brushed across the rather deep lines on the bronzed forehead,
without brushing them away, however, and then travelled higher to the
rough parting in the dark-brown hair, and the hair, he noticed, was
brushed in a particular way evidently, a way he thought no one would
notice but himself and the lumber-camp barber who first taught him, so
as to cover up a few places where the wind made little chilly feelings
in winter-time under his fur cap.

Old? No, not old yet—but “getting on” was a gentler phrase he could not
deny, and there were certainly odd traces where the crows had walked on
his skin while he slept in the forest, and had hopped up even to the
corners of his eyes to see if he were really asleep. There were other
lines, too—lines of exposure, traced by wind and sun, and one or two
queer marks that are said only to come from prolonged hardship and
severest want. For he had known both sides of the wilderness life, and
on his long journeys Nature had not always been kind to him.

He stared for a long time at his reflection in the glass, lost in
reverie. This coming back to England after so many years was like
looking at a picture of himself as he was when he had left; it furnished
him with a ready standard of comparison; the changes of the years stood
out very sharply, as though they had come about in a single night.

Yes, his face and figure had aged a good deal. He admitted it. And when
he frowned he had distinctly an appearance of middle age. This, of
course, was the absurd part of it, for in spirit he had remained as
young as he was at twenty, as enthusiastic, hopeful, spontaneous as
ever, just as much in love with the world, and just as full of boyhood’s
dreams as when he went to Cambridge. And in his eyes still burned the
strange flames that sought to pierce behind the veil of appearances.

‘And those children will find it out and make me look ridiculous before
I’ve been there a week!’ he exclaimed again, sitting down on his bunk
with a crash as the steamer gave a sudden lurch; ‘and then where shall I
be, I’d like to know?’

He lay on his back for an hour thinking out a plan of action. For, of
course, he decided that he must go; only—he must go _disguised_. And he
spent hours inventing the disguise, and more hours perfecting it. For
the first time in his life he would adopt a distinct attitude, and,
having carefully thought out the attitude he intended to adopt by way of
disguise, he buckled it on like armour and fastened it very securely
indeed to his large person.

He would be kind; he would even meet the children half-way, kiss them if
necessary at stated times, in a stated way, and perhaps occasionally
unbend a little as opportunity served and circumstances permitted. But
never must he forget, or allow them to forget, that he was a stiff and
elderly man, a little grim and gruff, sometimes even severe and
short-tempered, and never to be trifled with at any time, or under any
conditions.

Over the tenderer emotions he must keep especial watch; these were a
direct channel to his secrets, and once the old unsatisfied enthusiasms
escaped, there was no saying what might happen. The thought frightened
him, for the pain involved might be very great indeed.

With people of his own age, he realised, the danger would be less.
Silence and reserve cover a multitude of shortcomings. But children, he
knew, had a simple audacity, a merciless penetration, that no mere pose
could ever withstand. And this he felt intuitively, knowing nothing of
children, but being taught by these very qualities in himself. Like
little animals they would soon find the direct channel to his heart
unless well guarded, and come tumbling along it without delay. And
then——!

So Paul Rivers left London the very next day, glad in many ways to think
that he had this haven of refuge to go to from the noisy horror of the
huge strange city; yet with a sinking of his heart lest his true self
should be discovered, and held up to scorn.

Moreover, the strange part of it was that as he sped down through the
smiling green country that spring afternoon, armed from head to foot in
the rigid steel casings of his disguise, he seemed to hear a faint
singing deep within him, a singing that belonged to the youngest part of
him and yet sprang from that which was vastly ancient, but as to the
cause of which he was so puzzled that, in his efforts to analyse it, he
forgot about his journey altogether, and was nearly carried past the
station where he had to get out.




                               CHAPTER IV

  No man worth his spiritual salt can ever become really entangled in
  locality.—A. H. L.


The house, like the description of himself in the letter, was big and
old. It consisted of three rambling wings, each added at a different
period to an original farmhouse, and was thus full of unexpected
staircases, sudden rising passages, and rooms of queer shapes. It
resembled, indeed, the structure of a mind that has grown by chance and
not by system, and was just as difficult for a stranger to find his way
in.

It stood among pine-woods, at the foot of hills that ran on another five
miles to drop their chalk cliffs abruptly into the sea. Where the lawns
stopped on one side and the kitchen-garden on the other began an expanse
of undulating heather-land, dotted with pools of brown water and yellow
with patches of gorse and broom. Here rabbits increased and multiplied;
sea-gulls screamed and flew, using some of the more secluded ponds for
their annual breeding places; foxes lived happily, unhunted and very
bold; and the dainty hoof-marks of deer were sometimes found in the
sandy margins of the freshwater springs.

It was beautiful country, a bit of wild England, out of the world as
very few parts of it now are, and haunted by a loveliness that laid its
spell on the heart of the returned exile the moment he topped the hill
in the dog-cart and saw it spread out before him like a softly coloured
map. The scenery from the train window had somehow disheartened him a
little, producing a curious sense of confinement, almost of
imprisonment, in his mind: the neat meadows holding wooden cattle; the
careful boundaries of ditch and hedge; the five-barred gates, strong to
enclose, the countless notices to warn trespassers, and the universal
network of barbed wire. Accustomed as he was to the vast, unhedged
landscapes of a primitive country, it all looked to him, with its
precise divisions, like a toy garden, combed, washed, swept—exquisitely
cared for, but a little too sweet and perfumed to be quite wholesome.
Only tame things, he felt, could enjoy so gentle a playground, and the
call of his own forests—for this really was what worked in him—sang out
to him with a sterner cry.

But this view from the ridge pleased him more: there were but few hedges
visible; the eye was led to an open horizon and the sea; an impression
of space and freedom rose from the hills and moorlands. Here his
thoughts, accustomed to deal with leagues rather than acres, could at
least find room to turn about in. And although the perfume that rose to
his nostrils was like the perfume of flowers preserved by some
artificial process rather than the great clean smells of a virgin world
such as he was used to, it was nevertheless the smell of his boyhood,
and it moved him powerfully. Odour is the one thing that is impossible
to recall in exile. Sights and sounds the imagination can always
reconstruct after a fashion, but odour is too elusive. It rose now to
his nostrils as something long forgotten, and swept him with a wave of
memory that was extraordinarily keen.

‘That’s a smell to take me back twenty-five years,’ he thought, inhaling
the scent of the heather. He caught his breath sharply, uncertain
whether it was pain or pleasure that predominated. A profound yearning,
too fugitive to be seized, too vague to be definitely labelled, stirred
in the depths of him as his eye roamed over the miles of sunlight and
blue shadow at his feet; again something sang within him as he gazed
over the long ridges of heathland, sprinkled with silvery pools, and
bearing soft purple masses of pine-woods on their sides as they melted
away through haze to the summer sea beyond.

Only when his gaze fell upon the smoke rising from the grey stone roof
of the house nestling far below did the joy of his emotion chill a
little. A vague sense of alarm and nervousness touched him as he
wondered what that grey old building might hold in store for him.

‘It’s silly, I know,’ his thought ran, ‘but I feel like a lost sheep
here. It’s Nature that calls me, not people. I don’t know how I shall
get on in this chess-board sort of a country. They’ll never care for the
things that I care for.’

For a moment a sort of panic came over him. He could almost have turned
and run. Vaguely he felt that he was an unfinished, uncouth article in a
shop of dainty china. He sent the dog-cart on ahead, and walked down the
hillside towards the house, thinking, thinking—wondering almost why he
had ever consented to come, and already conscious of a sense of
imprisonment. He was still impressionable as a boy, with sharp, fleeting
moods like a boy’s.

Then, quite suddenly it seemed, he had walked up the drive and passed
through the house, and a figure moved across a lawn to meet him. The
first sight of his sister he had known for twenty years was a tall woman
in white serge, with a prim, still girlish figure and a quiet, smiling
face, moving graciously through patches of sunshine between flower-beds
of formal outline. There was no spontaneous rush of welcome, no gush, or
flood of questions. He felt relieved. With a flash, too, he realised
that her dominant note was still grief for her lost husband. It was
written all over her.

Instantly, however, shyness descended upon him like a cloud. The scene
he had rehearsed so often in imagination vanished before the reality. He
slipped down inside himself, as his habit sometimes was, and watched the
performance curiously, as though he were a spectator of it instead of an
actor.

He saw himself, hot and rather red in the face, walking awkwardly across
the lawn with both hands out, offering his bearded face clumsily to be
kissed. And it was kissed, first on one cheek, then on the other,
calmly, soberly, delicately. He felt the tingling of it for a long time
afterwards. That kiss confused him ridiculously.

At first he could think of nothing to say except the form of address he
always used to the Bosses of the lumber camps—‘How’s everything up your
way?’—which he felt was not quite the most suitable phrase for the
occasion. Then his sister spoke, and quickly set him more at his ease.

‘But you don’t look one little bit like an American, Paul!’

He gazed at her in admiration, just as he might have gazed at a complete
stranger. The soft intonation of her voice was a keen delight to him.
And her matter-of-fact speech put his shyness to flight.

‘Of course not,’ he replied, leaving out her name after a second’s
hesitation, ‘but my voice, I guess——’

‘Not a bit either,’ she repeated, surveying him very critically. ‘You
look like a sailor home from the sea more than anything else.’

She wore a wide garden hat of Panama straw, charmingly trimmed with
flowers. Her face beneath it, Paul thought, was the most refined and
exquisitely delicate he had ever seen. It was like chiselled porcelain.
He thought of Hank Davis’s woman at Deep Bay Camp—whose face he used to
think wonderful rather—and it suddenly seemed by comparison to have been
chopped with a blunt axe out of wood.

They moved to the long chairs upon the lawn, and her brother realised
for the first time that his boots were enormous, and that his
Minneapolis clothes did not sit upon him quite as they might have done.
He trod on a corner of a geranium bed as they went, crushing an entire
plant with one foot. But his sister appeared not to notice it.

‘It’s an awful long time, M—Margaret,’ he stammered as they went.

They both sat down and turned to stare at each other. It was, of course,
idle to pretend that after so long an absence they could feel any very
profound affection. Dick, he realised quickly with a flash of intuition,
was the truer link. And, on the whole, it was all much easier than he
had expected. His mind began to work very quickly in several directions
at once. The beauty of the English garden in its quiet way touched him
keenly, stirring in him little whirls of inner delight, fugitive but
wonderful. Only a portion of him, after all, went out to his sister.

‘I believe you expected a Red Indian, or a bear,’ he said at length.

She laughed gently, returning his stare of genuine admiration. ‘One
couldn’t help wondering a little, Paul dear,—after so many years—could
one?’ She always said ‘one’ instead of the obvious personal pronoun.
‘You had no beard, for instance, when you left?’

‘And more hair, perhaps!’

‘You look splendid. I _shall_ be proud of you!’

Paul blushed furiously. It was the first compliment ever paid to him by
a woman.

‘Oh, I feel all right,’ he stammered. ‘The healthy life in the woods,
open air, and constant moving keep a fellow “fixed-up” to concert pitch
all the time. I’ve never once—consulted a doctor in my life.’ He was
careful to keep the slang out. He felt he managed it admirably. He said
‘consulted.’

‘And you wrote such nice letters, Paul. It _was_ dear of you.’

‘I was lonely,’ he said bluntly. And after a pause he added, ‘I got all
yours.’

‘I’m so glad.’ And then another pause. In which fashion they talked on
for half an hour, each secretly estimating the other—wondering a little
why they did not feel all kind of poignant emotions they had rather
expected to feel.

It was a perfectly natural scene between a brother and sister who had
grown up entirely apart, who were quite honest, who were utterly
different types, and who yet wished to hold to one another as the
nearest blood ties they possessed. They skimmed pleasantly and, so far
as he was concerned, more and more easily, over the surface of things.
Her talk, like her letters, was sincere, simple, shallow; it concealed
no hidden depths, he felt at once. And by degrees, even in this first
conversation, crept a shadow of other things, so that he realised they
were in reality leagues apart, and could never have anything much in
common below the pleasant surface relations of life.

Yet, even while he sheered off, as oil declines from its very nature to
mingle with water, he felt genuinely drawn to her in another way. She
was his own sister; she was his nearest tie; and she was Dick’s widow.
They would get along together all right; they would be good friends.

‘Twenty years, Margaret.’

‘Twenty years, Paul.’

And then another pause of several minutes during which something that
was too vague to be a real thought passed like a shadow through his
mind. What could his friend Dick have seen in her that was necessary to
his life and happiness—Dick Messenger, who was scholar, poet,
thinker—who sought the everlasting things—God? He instantly suppressed
it as unworthy, something of which he was ashamed, but not before it had
left a definite little trace in his imagination.

‘So at last, Paul, you’ve really come home,’ she resumed; ‘I can hardly
believe it,—and are going to settle down. You are a rich man.’

‘Aunt Alice did her duty,’ he laughed. He ignored the reference to
settling down. It vaguely displeased him. ‘It’s for you as well as me,’
he added, meaning the money. ‘I want to share with you whatever you
need.’

‘Not a penny,’ she said quickly; ‘I have all I need. I live with my
memories, you know. I am only so glad for your sake,—after all your hard
life out there.’

‘The life wasn’t hard; it was rather wonderful,’ he said simply. ‘I
liked it.’

‘For a time perhaps; but you must have had curious experiences and lived
with very rough people in those—lumber camp places you wrote about.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Simple kind of men, but very decent, very
genuine. Few signs of city polish, I admit, but then you know I never
cared for frills, Margaret.’

‘Frills!’ she exclaimed, without any expression on her face. ‘Of course
not. Still, I am very glad you have left it all. The life must often
have been unsuitable and lonely; one always felt that for you. You can’t
have had any of the society that one’s accustomed to.’

‘Not of that kind,’ he put in hurriedly with a short laugh, ‘but of
other kinds. I struck a pretty good crowd of men on the whole.’

She turned her face slightly away from him; her eyes, he divined, had
been fixed for a moment on his hands. For the first time in his life he
realised that they were large and rough and brown. Her own were so pale
and dainty—like china hands, glossy and smooth—and the gold bangle on
her thin wrist looked as though every second it must slip over her
fingers. His own hands disappeared swiftly into the pockets of his coat.

She turned to him with a gentle smile. ‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘it is simply
too delightful to know that you really are here at last. It must seem
strange to you at first, and there are so many things to talk over—such
a lot to tell. I want to hear all your plans. You’ll get used to us
after a bit, and there are lots of nice people in the neighbourhood who
are dying to meet you.’

Her brother felt inclined to explain that he had no wish to interfere
with their ‘dying’; but, instead, he returned her smile. ‘I’m a poor
hand at meeting people, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I’m not as sociable as I
might be.’

‘But you’ll get over that. Of course, living so long in the backwoods
makes one unsociable. But we’ll try and make you happy and comfortable.
You have no idea how very, very glad I am that you’ve come home.’

Paul believed her. He leaned over and patted her hand, and she smiled
frankly and sweetly in his face. She was a very shadowy sort of
personality, he felt. If he blew hard she might blow away altogether, or
disappear like a soap-bubble.

‘I’m glad too, of course,’ he replied. ‘Only at my age, you know, it’s
not easy to tackle new habits.’

‘No one could take you for a day more than thirty-five,’ she said with
truth; ‘so that shall be our own little private secret. You look quite
absurdly young.’

They laughed together easily and naturally. Paul felt more at home and
soothed than he had thought possible. It had not been in the least
formidable after all, and for the first time in his life he knew a
little of that enervating kind of happiness that comes from being made a
fuss of. As there was still a considerable interval before tea, they
left their chairs and strolled through the garden, and as they went, the
talk turned upon the past, and his sister spoke of Dick and of all he
had meant to do in the world, had he lived. Paul heard the details of
his sudden death for the first time. Her voice and manner were evidence
of the melancholy she still felt, but her brother’s heart was deeply
stirred; he asked for all the particulars he had so often wondered
about, and in her quiet, soothing tone, tinged now with tender sadness,
she supplied the information. Clearly she had never arisen from the
blow. She had worshipped Dick without understanding him.

‘Death always frightens me, I think,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘I
try not to think about it.’

She passed on to speak of the children, and told him how difficult she
found it to cope with them—she suffered from frequent headaches and
could not endure noise—and how she hoped when they were a little older
to be more with them. Mademoiselle Fleury, meanwhile, was such an
excellent woman and was teaching them all they should know.

‘Though, of course, I keep a close eye on them so far as I am able,’ she
explained, ‘and only wish I were stronger.’

They sauntered through the rose-garden and down the neat gravel paths
that led to the wilder parts of the grounds where the rhododendron
bushes stood in rounded domes and masses. It was very peaceful, very
beautiful. He trod softly and carefully. The hush of centuries of
cultivation lay over it all. Even the butterflies flew gently, as to the
measure of a leisurely dance that deprecated undue animation. Paul
caught his thoughts wandering to the open spaces of untamed moorland he
had seen from the hill-top. More and more, as his sister’s personality
revealed itself, he got the impression that she lived enclosed like the
wooden cows he had seen from the train, in a little green field, with
precise and neatly trimmed borders. Strong emotions, as all other
symptoms of plain and vigorous life, she shrank from. There were
notice-boards set about her to warn trespassers, stating clearly that
she did not wish to be let out. Yet in her way she was true, loving, and
sweet—only it was such a conventional way, he felt.

Leaving the world of rhododendron bushes behind them, they came to the
beginning of a pine-wood leading to the heather-land beyond. There was a
touch of primitive wildness here. The trees grew straight and tall,
filling the glade, and a stream ran brawling among their roots.

‘This is the Gwyle,’ she said, as they entered the shade, ‘it was Dick’s
favourite part of the whole grounds. I rarely come here; it’s dark even
in summer, and rather damp and draughty, I always think.’

Paul looked about him and drew a long breath. The air was strong with
open-air scents of earth and bark and branches. Far overhead the tufted
pines swayed, murmuring to the sky; the ground ran away downhill,
becoming broken up and uneven; nothing but dark, slender stems rose
everywhere about him, like giant seaweeds, he thought, rising from the
pools of a deep sea. And the soft wind, moving mysteriously between the
shadows and the sunlight, completed the spell. He passed
suddenly—willy-nilly, as his nature would have it—into that mood when
the simplest things about him turned their faces upwards so that he
caught their eyes and their meaning; when the well-known and common
things of the world shone out and revealed the infinite. Something in
this quiet pine-wood that was mighty, and utterly wonderful, entered his
soul, linking him on at a single stroke with the majesty of the great
spirit of the earth. What lay behind it? What was its informing spirit?
How and where could it link on so intimately with his soul? And could it
not be a channel, as he always felt it must be, to the God behind it?
Beauty seized him by the throat and made him tremble.

This sudden rush came over him, sea-like. His moods were ever like the
sea, some strange touch of colour shifting the entire key. Something,
too, made him feel lonely and oppressed. He, who was accustomed to space
in bulk—the space the stars and winds live in—had come to this little,
parcelled-out place. He felt clipped already. He turned to the shadowy
personality beside him, the boyish impulse bursting its way out. After
all, she was his own sister; he could reveal himself to no one if not to
her.

‘By Gosh, Margaret,’ he cried, ‘this is the real thing. This wood must
be alive and haunted just as the James Bay forests are. It’s simply full
of wonder.’

‘It’s the Gwyle wood,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s usually rather damp. But
Dick loved it.’

Her brother hardly heard what she said. ‘Listen,’ he said in a hushed
tone; ‘do you hear the wind up there aloft? The trees are talking. The
wood is full of whispers. There’s no sound in the world like that murmur
of a soft breeze in pine branches. It’s like the old gods sighing, which
only their true worshippers hear! Isn’t it fine and melancholy?
Margaret, d’you know, it goes through me like a fever.’

His sister stopped and stared at him. She wore a little frightened
expression. His sudden enthusiasm puzzled her evidently.

‘It’s the Gwyle wood,’ she repeated mechanically. ‘It’s very pretty, I
think. Dick always thought so too.’

Her brother, surprised at his own rush of ready words, and already
ashamed of the impulse that had prompted him to reveal himself, fell
into silence.

‘Nature excites me sometimes,’ he said presently. ‘I suppose it’s
because I’ve known nothing else.’

‘That’s quite natural, I’m sure, Paul dear,’ she rejoined, turning to
lead the way back to the sunshine of the open garden; ‘it’s very pretty;
I love it too. But it rather alarms me, I think, sometimes.’

‘Perhaps the natural tendency in solitude is to personify nature, and
make it take the place of men and women. It has become a profound need
of my being certainly.’ He spoke more quietly, chilled by her utter
absence of comprehension.

‘In its place I think it is ever so nice. But, Paul, you surprise me. I
had no idea you were clever like that.’ She was perfectly sincere in
what she said.

Her brother blushed like a boy. ‘It’s my foolishness, I suppose,
Margaret,’ he said with a shy laugh. ‘I am certainly not clever.’

‘Anyhow, you can be foolish or clever here to your heart’s content. You
must use the place as though it were your own exactly.’

‘Thank you, Margaret.’

‘Only I don’t think I quite understand all those things,’ she added
vaguely after a pause. ‘Nixie talks rather like that. She has all poor
Dick’s ideas and strange fancies. I really can’t keep up with her at
all.’

Paul stiffened at the reference to the children; he remembered his
attitude. Already he had been guilty of a serious lapse from his good
intentions.

‘She comes down to this wood far too much, and I’m sure it’s not quite
healthy for her. I always forget to speak to Mlle. Fleury.’ Then she
turned to him and smiled. ‘But they are all so excited about your
coming. They will simply devour you.’

‘I’m a poor hand at children, I’m afraid,’ he said, falling back upon
his usual formula, ‘but, of course, I shall be delighted to see them.’

She gathered up her white skirts about her trim ankles and led the way
out of the wood, her brother following and thinking how slim and
graceful she was, and what a charming figure she made among the
rose-trees. He got the impression of her as something unreal and
shadowy, a creature but half alive. It would hardly have surprised him
to see her suddenly flit off into mist and sunshine and disappear from
view, leaving him with the certainty that he had been talking with a
phantasm of a dream. Between himself and her, however, he realised now,
there was a gulf fixed. They looked at one another as it were down the
large end of a telescope, and talked down a long-distance telephone that
changed all their words and made the sense unintelligible and
meaningless. The scale of values between them had no common denominator.
Yet he could love her, and he meant to.

They crossed the lawns and went through the French window into the cool
of the drawing-room, and while he was sipping his first cup of afternoon
English tea, struggling with a dozen complex emotions that stirred
within him, there suddenly darted across the lawn a vision of flying
children, with a string of animals at their heels. They swept out of
some laurel shrubberies into the slanting evening sunlight, and came to
a dead stop on the gravel path in front of the window.

Their eyes met. They had seen him.

There they stood, figures of suddenly arrested motion, staring at him
through the glass. ‘So that’s Uncle Paul!’ was the thought in the mind
of each. He was being inspected, weighed, labelled. The meeting with his
sister was nothing compared to this critical examination, conducted
though it was from a distance.

But it lasted only a moment. With a sudden quietness the children passed
away from the window towards another door round the corner, and so out
of sight.

‘They’ve gone up to get tidy before coming to see you,’ explained his
sister; and Paul used the short respite to the best possible advantage
by collecting his thoughts, remembering his ‘attitude and disguise,’ and
seeing to it that his armour was properly fastened on, leaving no
loopholes for sudden attack. He retired cautiously to the only place in
a room where a shy man feels really safe—the mat before the fireplace.
He almost wished for his gun and hunting-knife. The idea made him laugh.

‘They already love you,’ he heard his sister’s gentle whispering voice,
‘and I know you’ll love them too. You must never let them annoy you, of
course.’

‘They’re your children—and Dick’s,’ he answered quietly. ‘I shall get on
with them famously, I’m sure.’




                               CHAPTER V

            I kiss you and the world begins to fade.
                            _Land of Heart’s Desire._—YEATS.


A few minutes later the door opened softly, and a procession, solemn of
face and silent of foot, marched slowly into the room. The moment had
come at last for his introduction, and, by a single stroke of
unintentional diplomacy, his sister did more to winning her brother’s
shy heart than by anything else she could possibly have devised. She
went out.

‘They will prefer to make your acquaintance by themselves,’ she said in
her gentle way, ‘and without any assistance from me.’

The procession advanced to the middle of the room and then stopped
short. Evidently, for them, the departure of their mother somewhat
complicated matters. They had depended upon her to explain them to their
uncle. There they stood, overcome by shyness, moving from one foot to
another, with flushed and rosy faces, hair brushed, skin shining, and
eyes all prepared to laugh as soon as somebody gave the signal, but not
the least knowing how to begin.

And their uncle faced them in similar plight, as, for the second time
that afternoon, shyness descended upon him like a cloud, and he could
think of nothing to say. His size overwhelmed him; he felt like an
elephant. With a sudden rush all his self-possession deserted him. He
almost wished that his sister might return so that they should be
brought up to him _seriatim_, named just as Adam named the beasts, and
dismissed—which Adam did not do—with a kiss. It was really, of
course—and he knew it to his secret mortification—a meeting on both
sides of children; they all felt the shyness and self-consciousness of
children, he as much as they, and at any moment might take the sudden
plunge into careless intimacy, as the way with children ever is.

Meanwhile, however, he took rapid and careful note of them as they stood
in that silent, fidgety group before him, with solemn, wide-open eyes
fixed upon his face.

The youngest, being in his view little more than a baby, needs no
description beyond the fact that it stared quite unintelligently without
winking an eye. Its eyes, in fact, looked as though they were not made
to close at all. And this is its one and only appearance.

Standing next to the baby, holding its hand, was a boy in a striped suit
of knickerbockers, with a big brown curl like a breaking wave on the top
of his forehead; he was between eight and nine years old, and his
names—for, of course, he had two—were Richard Jonathan, shortened, as
Paul learned later, into Jonah. He balanced himself with the utmost care
in the centre of a particular square of carpet as though half an inch to
either side would send him tumbling into a bottomless abyss. The fingers
not claimed by the baby travelled slowly to and fro along the sticky
line of his lower lip.

Close behind him, treating similarly another square of carpet, stood a
rotund little girl, slightly younger than himself, named Arabella Lucy.
There was a touch of audacity in her eyes, and an expression about the
mouth that indicated the imminent approach of laughter. She had been
distinctly washed and brushed-up for the occasion. Her face shone like a
polished onion skin. She had the same sort of brown hair that Jonah
considered fashionable, and her name for all common daily purposes was
Toby.

The eldest and most formidable of his tormentors, standing a little in
advance of the rest, was Margaret Christina, shortened by her father
(who, indeed, had been responsible for all the nicknames) into Nixie.
And the name fitted her like a skin, for she was the true figure of a
sprite, and looked as if she had just stepped out of the water and her
hair had stolen the yellow of the sand. Her eyes ran about the room like
sunshine from the surface of a stream, and her movements instantly made
Paul think of water gliding over pebbles or ribbed sand with easy and
gentle undulations. Flashlike he saw her in a clearing of his lonely
woods, a creature of the elements. Her big blue eyes, too, were full of
wonder and pensive intelligence, and she stood there in a motherly and
protective manner as though she were quite equal to the occasion and
would presently know how to act with both courage and wisdom.

And Nixie, indeed, it was, after this prolonged and critical pause, who
commenced operations. There was a sudden movement in the group, and the
next minute Paul was aware that she had left it and was walking slowly
towards him. He noticed her graceful, flowing way of moving, and saw a
sunburnt arm and hand extended in his direction. The next second she
kissed him. And that kiss acted like an electric shock. Something in her
that was magical met its kind in his own soul and, flamelike, leaped
towards it. A little tide of hot life poured into him, troubling the
deeps with a momentary sense of delicious bewilderment.

‘How do you do, Uncle Paul,’ she said; ‘we are _very_ glad you have
come—at last.’

The blood ran ridiculously to his head. He found his tongue, and pulled
himself sharply together.

‘So am I, dear. Of course, it’s a long way to come—America.’ He stooped
and bestowed the necessary kisses upon the others, who had followed
their leader and now stood close beside him, staring like little owls in
a row.

‘I know,’ she replied gravely. ‘It takes weeks, doesn’t it? And mother
has told us such a lot about you. We’ve been waiting a very long time, I
think,’ she added as though stating a grievance.

‘I suppose it is rather a long time to wait,’ he said sheepishly. He
stroked his beard and waited.

‘All of us,’ she went on. She included the others in this last
observation by bending her head at them, and into her uncle’s memory
leaped the vision of a slender silver birch tree that grew on the edge
of the Big Beaver Pond near the Canadian border. She moved just as that
silver birch moved when the breeze caught it.

Her manner was very demure, but she looked so piercingly into the very
middle of his eyes that Paul felt as though she had already discovered
everything about him. They all stood quite close to him now, touching
his knees; ready, there and then, to take him wholly into their
confidence.

An impulse that he only just managed to control stirred in him and a
curious pang accompanied it. He remembered his ‘attitude,’ however, and
stiffened slightly.

‘No, it only takes ten days roughly from where I’ve come,’ he said,
leaving the mat and dropping into a deep arm-chair a little farther off.
‘The big steamers go very fast, you know, nowadays.’

Their eyes remained simply glued to his face. They switched round a few
points to follow his movement, but did not leave their squares of
carpet.

‘Madmerzelle said’—it was Toby, _née_ Arabella Lucy, speaking for the
first time—‘you knew lots of stories about deers and wolves and things,
and would look like a Polar bear for us sometimes.’

‘Oh yes, and beavers and Indians in snowstorms, and the roarer
boryalis,’ chimed in Jonah, giving a little hop of excitement that
brought him still closer. ‘And the songs they sing in canoes when there
are rapids,’ he added with intense excitement. ‘Madmizelle sings them
sometimes, but they’re not a bit the real thing, because she hasn’t
enough bass in her voice.’

Paul bit his lip and looked at the carpet. Something in the atmosphere
of the room seemed to have changed in the last few minutes. Jolly
thrills ran through him such as he knew in the woods with his animals
sometimes.

‘I’m afraid I can’t sing much,’ he said, ‘but I can tell you a bear
story sometimes—if you’re good.’ He added the condition as an
afterthought.

‘We _are_ good,’ Jonah said disappointedly, ‘almost always.’

Again that curious pang shot through him. He did not wish to be unkind
to them. He pulled back his coat-sleeve suddenly and showed them a scar
on his arm.

‘That was made by a bear,’ he said, ‘years ago.’

‘Oh, look at the fur!’ cried Toby.

‘Don’t be silly! All proper men have hair on their arms,’ put in Jonah.
‘Does it still hurt, Uncle Paul?’ he asked, examining the place with
intense interest.

‘Not now. We rolled down a hill together head over heels. Such a big
brute, too, he was, and growled like a thunderstorm; it’s a wonder he
didn’t squash me. I’ve got his claws upstairs. I think, really, he was
more frightened than I was.’

They clapped their hands. ‘Tell us, oh, do tell us!’

But Nixie intervened in her stately fashion, leaning over a little and
stroking the scar with fingers that were like the touch of leaves.

‘Uncle Paul’s tired after coming such a long way,’ she said gravely with
sympathy. ‘He hasn’t even unpacked his luggage yet, have you, Uncle?’

Paul admitted that this was the case. He made the least possible motion
to push them off and clear a space round his chair.

‘Are you tired? Oh, I’m _so_ sorry,’ said Jonah.

‘Then he ought to see the animals at once,’ decided Toby, ‘before they
go to bed,’—she seemed to have a vague idea that the whole world must go
to bed earlier than usual if Uncle Paul was tired—‘or they’ll be awfully
disappointed.’ Her face expressed the disappointment of the animals as
well as her own; her uncle’s fatigue had already taken a second place.
‘Oughtn’t he?’ she added, turning to the others.

Paul remembered his intention to remain stiffly grown up.

He made a great effort. Oh, but why did they tug and tear at his heart
so, these little fatherless children? And why did he feel at once that
he was in their own world, comfortably ‘at home’ in it? Did this world
of children, then, link on so easily and naturally with the poet’s
region of imagination and wonder in which he himself still dwelt for all
his many years, bringing him close to his main passion—to know Reality?

‘Of course, I’ll come and say good-night to them before they turn in,’
he decided kindly, letting Nixie and Toby take his hands, while Jonah
followed in the rear to show that he considered this a girl’s affair yet
did not wholly disapprove.

‘Hadn’t we better tell your mother where we’re going?’ he asked as they
started.

‘Oh, mother won’t mind,’ came the answer in chorus. ‘She hardly ever
comes up to the nursery, and, besides, she doesn’t care for the animals,
you see.’

‘They’re rather ’noying for mother,’ Nixie added by way of explanation.
She decapitated many of her long words in this way, and invariably
omitted difficult consonants.

It was a long journey, and the explanations about the animals, their
characteristics, names, and habits, occupied every minute of the way. He
gathered that they were chiefly cats and kittens, to what number he
dared not calculate, and that puppies, at least one parrot, a squirrel,
a multitude of white mice, and various larger beasts of a parental and
aged description, were indiscriminately all mixed up together. Evidently
it was a private menagerie that he was invited to say good-night to, and
the torrent of outlandish names that poured into his ears produced a
feeling of confusion in his mind that made him wonder if he was not
turning into some sort of animal himself, and thus becoming free of
their language.

It was the beginning of a very trying ordeal for him, this being half
pulled, half shoved along the intricate passages of the old house; now
down a couple of unexpected steps that made him stumble; now up another
which made him trip; through narrow doorways, where Jonah had the
audacity to push him from behind lest he should stick half-way; and,
finally, at full speed, the girls tugging at his arms in front, down a
long corridor which proved to be the home-stretch to the nursery.

‘I was afraid we’d lost the trail,’ he gasped. ‘It’s poorly blazed.’

‘Oh, but we haven’t got any tails to lose,’ laughed Toby,
misunderstanding him. ‘And they wouldn’t blaze if we had.’

‘Look out, Nixie! Not so fast! Uncle Paul’s losing his wind as well as
his trail,’ shouted Jonah from the rear. And at that moment they reached
the door of the nursery and came to an abrupt halt, Paul puffing like a
lumberman.

It was impossible for him to remain sedate, but he did the next best
thing—he remained silent.

Then Jonah, pushing past him, turned the handle, and he was ushered,
still panting, into so typical a nursery-schoolroom that the scenes of
his forgotten boyhood rushed back to him with a vividness that seemed to
destroy the passage of time at a single stroke. The past stood
reconstructed. The actual, living mood of his own childhood rose out of
the depths of blurred memories and caused a mist to rise before his
eyes. An emotion he was utterly unable to define shook his heart.

The room was filled with the slanting rays of the setting sun, and the
air from the open windows smelt of garden trees, lawns, and flower-beds.
Sea and heather, too, added their own sharper perfumes. It caught him
away for a moment—oh, that strange power of old perfumes—to the earliest
scenes of his own life, the boyhood in the gardens of Kent before
America had claimed him. And then the details of the room itself became
so insistent that he almost lost his head and turned back without more
ado into a boy of fifteen.

He looked swiftly about him. There was the old-fashioned upright piano
against the wall, the highly coloured pictures hanging crooked on the
wall, the cane chairs, the crowded mantelpiece, the high wire fender
before the empty grate, the general atmosphere of toys, untidiness and
broken articles of every sort and kind—and, above all, the figures of
these excited children all bustling recklessly about him with their
glowing and expectant faces.

There was Toby, her blue sash all awry, running busily about the room;
and Nixie, now in sunshine, now in shadow, with her hair of yellow sand
and her blue dreaming eyes that saw into the Beyond; and little Jonah,
moving about somewhat pompously to prepare the performance that was to
follow. It all combined to produce a sudden shock that swept down upon
him so savagely, that he was within an ace of bolting through the door
and making his escape into safer quarters.

The False Paul, that is, was within an ace of running away with all his
elaborate armour, and leaving the True Paul dancing on the floor, a
child among children, a spirit of impulse, enthusiasm and imagination,
laughing with the sheer happiness of his perpetual youth.

It was a dangerous moment; he was within measurable distance of
revealing himself. For a moment his clothes felt far too large for him;
and only just in time did he remember his ‘attitude,’ and the danger of
being young when he really was old, and the absurdity of being anything
else than a large, sedate man of forty-five. Only he wished that Nixie
would not watch him so appealingly with those starry eyes of hers ...
and look so strangely like the forms that haunted his own wild forests
and streams on the other side of the Atlantic.

He stiffened quickly, drew himself up, and turned to give his elderly
attention to the chorus of explanation and introduction that was already
rising about him with the sound and murmur of the sea.

Something was happening.

For the floor of the room, he now perceived, had become suddenly full of
movement, as though the carpet had turned alive. He felt a rubbing
against his legs and ankles; with a soft thud something leaped upon the
table and covered his hand with smooth, warm fur, uttering little sounds
of pleasure at the same time. On the top of the piano, a thing he had
taken for a heap of toys rose and stretched itself into an odd shape of
straight lines and arching curves. From the window-sill, where the sun
poured in, a round grey substance dropped noiselessly down upon the
carpet and advanced with measured and calculated step towards him;
while, from holes and hiding-places undivined, three or four little
fluffy things, with padded feet and stiff pointing tails, shot out like
shadows and headed straight for a row of saucers that he now noticed for
the first time against the farther wall. The whole room seemed to fill
with soft and graceful movement; and, mingled with the voices of the
children, he caught a fine composite murmur that was soothing as the
sound of flowing wind and water.

It was the sound and the movement of many animals.

‘Here they are,’ said a voice—‘some of them. The others are lost, or out
hunting.’

For the moment Paul did not stop to ask how many ‘others’ there were. He
stood rigidly still for fear that if he moved he might tread on
something living.

There came a scratching sound at the door, and Toby dashed forward to
open it.

‘Silly, naughty babies!’ she cried, nearly tumbling over the fender in
her attempt to seize two round bouncing things that came tearing into
the room like a couple of yellow puddings. ‘Uncle Paul has come to see
you all the way from America! And then you’re late like this! For
shame!’

With a series of thuds and bangs that must have bruised anything not
unusually well padded, the new arrivals, who looked for all the world
like small fat bears, or sable muffs on short brown legs with feet of
black velvet, dashed round the room in a mad chase after nothing at all.
A hissing and spitting issued from dark corners and from beneath various
pieces of furniture, but the two balls confined their attentions almost
at once to the honoured guest. They charged up against his legs as
though determined to upset his balance—this mountain of a man—and then
careered clumsily round the room, knocking over anything small enough
that came in their way, and behaving generally as though they wanted to
clear the whole place in the shortest possible time for their own
particular and immediate benefit.

Next, lifting his eyes for a moment from this impetuous attack, he saw a
brilliantly coloured thing behind bars, standing apparently on its head
and looking upside-down at him with an expression of undisguised and
scornful amusement; while not far from it, in a cage hanging by the
cuckoo clock, some one with a tail as large as his body, shot round and
round on a swinging trapeze that made Paul think of a midget practising
in a miniature gymnasium.

‘These are our animals, you see, Uncle Paul,’ Jonah announced proudly
from his position by the door. There was a trace of condescension in his
tone.

‘We have lots of out-of-door animals as well, though,’ Toby hastened to
explain, lest her uncle should be disappointed.

‘I suppose they’re out of doors?’ said Paul lamely.

‘Of course they are,’ replied Jonah; ‘in the stables and all about.’ He
turned to Nixie, who stood quietly by her uncle’s side in a protective
way, superintending. Nixie nodded corroboration.

‘Now, we’ll introduce you—gradgilly,’ announced Toby, stooping down and
lifting with immense effort the large grey Persian that had been
sleeping on the window-sill when they came in. She held it with great
difficulty in her arms and hands, but in spite of her best efforts only
a portion of it found actual support, the rest straggling away like a
loosely stuffed bolster she could not encompass.

It was evidently accustomed to being dealt with thus in sections, for it
continued to purr sleepily, blinking its large eyes with the usual
cat-smile, and letting its head fall backwards as though it suddenly
desired to examine the ceiling from an entirely fresh point of view.
None of its real attention, of course, was given to the actual
proceeding. It merely suffered the absurd affair—absent-mindedly and
with condescension. Its whiskers moved gently.

‘What’s its name?’ he asked kindly.

‘_Her_ name,’ whispered Nixie.

‘We call her Mrs. Tompkyns, because it’s old now,’ Toby explained,
ignoring genders.

‘After the head-gardener’s gra’mother,’ Nixie explained hastily in his
ear; ‘but we might change it to Uncle Paul in honour of you now,
mightn’t we?’

‘Mrs. Uncle Paul,’ corrected Jonah, looking on with slight disapproval,
and anxious to get to the white mice and the squirrel.

‘It would be a pity to change the name, I think,’ Paul said,
straightening himself up dizzily from the introduction, and watching the
splendid creature fall upon its head from Toby’s weakening grasp, and
then march away with unperturbed dignity to its former throne upon the
window-sill. ‘I feel rather afraid of Mrs. Tompkyns,’ he added; ‘she’s
so very majestic.’

‘Oh, you needn’t be,’ they cried in chorus. ‘It’s all put on, you know,
that sort of grand manner. _We_ knew her when she was a kitten.’

The object-lesson was not lost upon him. Of all creatures in the world,
he reflected as he watched her, cats have the truest dignity. They
absolutely refuse to be laughed at. No cat would ever betray its real
self, yet here was he, a grown-up, intelligent man, vacillating, and on
the verge already of hopeless capitulation.

‘And what’s the name of _these_ persons?’ he asked quickly, turning for
safety to Nixie, who had her arms full of a writhing heap she had been
diligently collecting from the corners of the room.

‘Oh, that’s only Mrs. Tompkyns’ family,’ exclaimed Jonah impatiently;
‘the last family, I mean. She’s had lots of others.’

‘The last family before this was only two,’ Nixie told him. ‘We called
them Ping and Pong. They live in the stables now. But these we call
Pouf, Sambo, Spritey, Zezette, and Dumps——’

‘And the next ones,’ Toby broke in excitedly, ‘we’re going to call with
the names on the engines when we go up to London to see the dentist.’

‘Or the names of the Atlantic steamers wouldn’t be bad,’ said Paul.

‘Not bad,’ Jonah said, with lukewarm approval; ‘only the engines would
be much better.’

‘There may not be any next ones,’ opined Toby, emerging from beneath a
sofa after a frantic, but vain, attempt to catch something alive.

Jonah snorted with contempt. ‘Of course there will. They come in bunches
all the time, just like grapes and chestnuts and things. Madmizelle told
me so. There’s no end to them. Don’t they, Uncle Paul?’

‘I believe so,’ said the authority appealed to, extracting his finger
with difficulty from the teeth and claws of several kittens.

There came a lull in the proceedings, the majority of the animals having
escaped, and successfully concealed themselves among what Toby called
‘the furchinur.’ Paul was still following a prior train of reflection.

‘Yes, cats are really rather wonderful creatures,’ he mused aloud in
spite of himself, turning instinctively in the direction of Nixie. ‘They
possess a mysterious and superior kind of intelligence.’

For a moment it was exactly as if he had tapped his armour and said,
‘Look! It’s all sham!’

The child peered sharply up in his face. There was a sudden light in her
eyes, and her lips were parted. He had not exactly expected her to
answer, but somehow or other he was not surprised when she did. And the
answer she made was just the kind of thing he knew she would say. He was
annoyed with himself for having said so much.

‘And they lead secret little lives somewhere else, and only let us see
what they want us to see. I knew you understood _really_.’ She said it
with an elfin smile that was certainly borrowed from moonlight on a
mountain stream. With one fell swoop it caught him away into a world
where age simply did not exist. His mind wavered deliciously. The
singing in his heart was almost loud enough to be audible.

But he just saved himself. With a sudden movement he leaned forward and
buried his face in the pie of kittens that nestled in her arms, letting
them lose their paws for a moment in his beard. The kittens might
understand, but at least they could not betray him by putting it into
words. It was a narrower escape than he cared for.

‘And these are the Chow puppies,’ cried Jonah, breathless from a long
chase after the sable muffs.

‘We call them China and Japan.’

Paul welcomed the diversion. Their teeth were not nearly so sharp as the
kittens’, and they burrowed with their black noses into his sleeves. So
thick was their fur that they seemed to have no bones at all; their dark
eyes literally dripped laughter.

With an effort he put on a more sedate manner.

‘You _have_ got a lot of beasts,’ he said.

‘Animals,’ Nixie corrected him. ‘Only toads, rats, and hedgehogs are
beasts. And, remember, if you’re rude to an animal, as Mademoiselle
Fleury was once, it only ’spises you—and then——’

‘I beg their pardon,’ he put in hurriedly; ‘I quite understand, of
course.’

‘You see it’s rather important, as they want to like you, and unless you
respect them they can’t, can they?’ she finished earnestly.

‘I do respect them, believe me, Nixie, and I appreciate their affection.
Affection and respect must always go together.’

The children were wholly delighted. Paul had completely won their hearts
from the very beginning. The parrot, the squirrel, and the white mice
were all introduced in turn to him, and he heard sundry mysterious
allusions to ‘the owl in the stables,’ ‘Juliet and her two kids,’ to say
nothing of dogs, ponies, pigeons, and peacocks, that apparently dwelt in
the regions of outer space, and were to be reserved for the morrow.

The performance was coming to an end. Paul was already congratulating
himself upon having passed safely, if not with full credit, through a
severe ordeal, when the door opened and a woman of about twenty-five,
with a pleasant face full of character and intelligence, stood in the
doorway. A torrent of French instantly broke loose on all sides. The
woman started a little when she perceived that the children were not
alone.

‘Oh, Mademoiselle, this is Uncle Paul,’ they cried, each in a different
fashion. ‘This is _our_ Uncle Paul! He’s just been introduced to the
animals, and now he must be introduced to you.’

Paul shook hands with her, and the introduction passed off easily
enough; the woman was charming, he saw at the first glimpse, and
possessed of tact. She at once took his side and pretended to scold her
charges for having plagued and bothered him so long. Evidently she was
something more to them than a mere governess. The lassitude of his
sister, no doubt, gave her rights and responsibilities.

But what impressed Paul when he was alone—for her simple remark that it
was past bedtime was followed by sudden kisses and disappearance—was the
remarkable change that her arrival had brought about in the room. It
came to him with a definite little shock. It was more than significant,
he felt.

And it was this: that the children, though obviously they loved her,
treated her as some one grown up and to be obeyed, whereas himself, he
now realised, they had all along treated as one of themselves to whom
they could be quite open and natural. His ‘attitude’ they had treated
with respect, just as he had treated the attitude of the animals with
respect, but at the same time he had been made to feel one of
themselves, in their world, part and parcel of their own peculiar
region. There had been nothing forced about it whatever. Whether he
liked it or not they accepted him. His ‘attitude’ was not regarded
seriously. It was not regarded at all. And this was grave.

He was so simple that he would never have thought of this but for the
entrance of the governess. Her arrival threw it all into sharp relief.
Clearly the children recognised no barrier between themselves and him;
he had been taken without parley straight into their holy of holies.
Nixie, as leader and judge, had carried him off at once.

And this was a very subtle and powerful compliment that made him think a
great deal. He would either have to drop his armour altogether or make
it very much more effective.

Indeed, it was the immediate problem in his mind as he slowly made his
way downstairs to find his sister on the lawn, and satisfy her rather
vague curiosity by telling her that the children had introduced him to
the animals, and that he had got on famously with them all.




                               CHAPTER VI

         Oh! Fairies, take me out of this dull world
         For I would ride with you upon the wind,
         Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
         And dance upon the mountains like a flame!
                               _Land of Heart’s Desire._—YEATS.


Paul went early to bed that night. It was his first night in an English
country home for many years; strange forces were at work in him. His
introduction to the children, his meeting with Nixie especially, had let
loose powers in his soul that called for sober reflection; and he felt
the need of being alone.

Another thing, too, urged him to seek the solitude of his chamber, for
after dinner he had sat for a couple of hours with his sister, talking
over the events and changes of the long interval since they had met,—the
details that cannot be told in letters, the feelings that no one writes.
And he came upstairs with his first impression of her character slightly
modified. She had more in her than he first divined. Beneath that
shadowy and silken manner he had caught traces of distinct purpose. For
one thing she was determined to keep him in England.

He had told her frankly about his arrangement with the lumber Company,
explaining that he regarded his present visit in the light of a holiday.
‘I suppose that is—er—wise of you,’ she said, but she had not been able
to conceal her disappointment. She asked him presently if he really
wanted to live all his life in such a place, and what it was in English
life, or civilised, conventional life, that he so disliked, and Paul,
feeling distinctly uncomfortable—for he loathed giving pain—had answered
evasively, with more skill than he knew, ‘“Where your treasure is, there
shall your heart be also.” I suppose my treasure—the only kind I know—is
out there in the great woods, Margaret.’

‘Paul, are you married, then?’ she asked with a start; and when he
laughed and assured her most emphatically that he was not, she looked
exceedingly puzzled and a little shocked too. ‘Are you so very fond of
this—er—treasure, then?’ she asked point blank in her softest manner,
‘and is she so—I mean, can’t you bring her home and acknowledge her?’
And after his first surprise when he had gathered her meaning, it took
him a long time to explain that there was no woman concerned at all, and
that it was entirely a matter of his temperament.

‘Everybody makes his own world, remember,’ he laughed, ‘and its size
depends, I suppose, upon the power of the imagination.’

‘Then I fear one’s imagination is a very poor one,’ she said solemnly,
‘or else I have none at all. I cannot pretend to understand your tastes
for trees and woods and things; but you’re exactly like poor Dick in
that way, and I suppose one must be really clever to be like that.’

‘A year is a long time, Margaret,’ he said after a pause, to comfort
her. ‘Much may happen before it’s over.’

‘I hope so,’ she had answered, standing behind his chair and stroking
his head. ‘By that time you may have met some one who will reconcile you
to—to staying here—a little longer.’ She patted his head as though he
were a Newfoundland dog, he thought. It made him laugh.

‘Perhaps,’ he said.

And, now in his room, before the candles were lighted, he was standing
by the open window, thinking it all over. Of women, of course, he knew
little or nothing; to him they were all charming, some of them
wonderful; and he was not conscious that his point of view might be
considered by a man of the world—of the world that is little, sordid,
matter-of-fact—distinctly humorous. At forty-five he believed in women
just as he had believed in them at twenty, only more so, for nothing had
ever entered his experience to trouble an exquisite picture in his mind.
They stood nearer to God than men did, he felt, and the depravity of
really bad women he explained by the fact that when they did fall they
fell farther. The sex-fever, so far as he was concerned, had never
mounted to his brain to obscure his vision.

He only knew—and knew it with a sacred wonder that was akin to
worship—that women, like the angels, were beyond his reach and beyond
his understanding. Comely they all were to him. He looked up to them in
his thoughts, not for their reason or strength, but for the subtlety of
their intuition, their power of sacrifice, and last but not least, for
the beauty and grace of their mere presence in a world that was so often
ugly and unclean.

‘The flame—the lamp—the glory—whatever it may be called—keeps alight in
their faces,’ he loved to say to himself, ‘almost to the end. With men
it is gone at thirty—often at twenty.’

And his sister, for all her light hold on life, and the strain in her
that in his simplicity he regarded as rather ‘worldly,’ was no exception
to the rule. He thought her entirely good and wonderful, and, perhaps,
so far as she went, he was not too egregiously mistaken. He looked for
the best in everybody, and so, of course, found it.

‘Only she will never make much of me, or I of her, I’m afraid,’ he
thought as he leaned out of the window, watching the scented darkness.
‘We shall get along best by leaving each other alone and being
affectionate, so to speak, from a distance.’

And, indeed, so far he had escaped the manifold seductions by which
Nature seeks to attain her great object of perpetuating the race. As a
potential father of many sons he was of course an object of legitimate
prey; but his forest life had obviated all that; his whole forces had
turned inwards for the creation of the poet’s visions, and Nature in
this respect, he believed, had passed him by. So far as he was aware
there was no desire in him to come forth and perform a belated duty to
the world by increasing its population. It was the first time any one
had even suggested to him that he should consider such a matter, and the
mere idea made him smile.

Gradually, however, these thoughts cleared away, and he turned to other
things he deemed more important.

The night was still as imaginable; odours of earth and woods were wafted
into the room with the scent of roses. Overhead, as he leaned on his
elbow and gazed, the stars shone thickly, like points of gold pricked in
a velvet curtain. A lost wind stirred the branches; he could distinguish
their solemn dance against the constellations. Orion, slanting and
immense, tilted across the sky, the two stars at the base resting upon
the shoulder of the hill, and far off, in the deeps of the night, the
murmur of the pines sounded like the breaking of invisible surf.

Something indescribably fresh and wild in the taste of the air carried
him back again across the ocean. The ancient woods he knew so well rose
before the horizon’s rim, swimming with purple shadows and alive with a
continuous great murmur that stretched for a hundred leagues. The
picture of those desolate places, lying in lonely grandeur beneath the
glitter of the Northern Lights, with a thousand lakes echoing the
laughter of the loons, came seductively before his inner eye. The
thought of it all stirred emotions profound and primitive, emotions too
closely married to instincts, perhaps, to be analysed; something in him
that was ancestral, possibly pre-natal. There was nothing in this little
England that could move him so in the same fashion. His thoughts carried
him far, far away....

The faint sound of a church clock striking the hour—a sound utterly
alien to the trend of his thoughts—brought him back again to the
present. He heard it across many fields, fields that had been tilled for
centuries, and there could have been no more vivid or eloquent reminder
that he was no longer in a land where hedges, church bells,
notice-boards, and so forth were not. He came back with a start, and a
sensation almost akin to pain. He felt cramped, caught, caged. The
tinkling church bells annoyed him.

His thoughts turned, with a sudden jerk, as it were, to the undeniable
fact that he had been trying to go about in a disguise, with a clumsy
mask over his face, so that he might appear decently grown up in his new
surroundings.

A pair of owls began to hoot softly in the woods, answering one another
like voices in a dream, and just then the lost wind left the pine
branches and died away into the sky with a swift rush as of many small
wings. In the sudden pool of silence that followed, he fancied he could
hear across the dark miles of heathland the continuous low murmur of the
sea.

The beauty of night, as ever, entered his soul, but with a joy that was
too solemn, too moving, to be felt as pleasure. It touched something in
him beyond the tears of either pain or delight: something that held in
it a mysterious wonder so searching, so poignant, as to be almost
terrible.

He caught his breath and waited.... The great woods of the world,
mountains, the sea, stars, and the crying winds were always for him
symbols of the gateways into a mightier and ideal region, a Beyond-world
where he found rest for his yearnings and a strange peace. They were his
means of losing himself in a temporary heaven.

And to-night it was the beauty of an English scene that carried him
away; and this in spite of his having summoned the wilder vision from
across the seas. Already the forces of his own country were insensibly
at work upon an impressionable mind and temperament. The very air, so
sweetly scented as he drew it in between his lips, was charged with the
subtly-working influences of the ‘Old Country.’ A new web, soft but
mighty, was being woven about his spirit. Even now his heart was
conscious of its gossamer touch, as his dreams yielded imperceptibly to
a new colour.

He followed vaguely, curiously, the leadings of delicate emotions that
had been stirred in him by the events of the day. Symbols,
fast-shifting, protean, passed in suggestive procession before his
mind’s eye, in the way that symbols ever will—in a poet’s heart. He
thought of children, of _the_ children, and of the extraordinarily fresh
appeal they had made to him. Children: how near they, too, stood to the
great things of life, and all the nearer, perhaps, for not being aware
of it. How their farseeing eyes and their simple, unlined souls pointed
the way, like Nature, to the ideal region of which he was always
dreaming: to Reality, to God.

All real children knew and understood; were ready to offer their timid
yet unhesitating guidance, and without question or explanation.

Had, then, Nixie and her troupe already taken him prisoner? And were the
soft chains already twined about his neck?...

Paul hardly acknowledged the question definitely to himself. He was
merely dreaming, and his dreams, rising and falling like the tides of a
sea, bore him to and fro among the shoals and inlands of the day’s
events. The spell of the English June night was very strong upon him, no
doubt, for presently a door opened somewhere behind him, and the very
children he was thinking about danced softly into the room. Nixie came
up close and gazed into his very eyes, and again there began that odd
singing in his heart that he had twice noticed during the day. An
atmosphere of magic, shot with gold and silver, came with the child into
the room.

For the fact was—though he realised it only dimly—the Fates were now
making him a deliberate offer. Had he not been so absorbed, he would
have perceived and appreciated the delicacy of their action. As a rule
they command, whereas now they were only suggesting.

It was really his own heart asking. Here, in this rambling country house
under the hills, was an opportunity of entering the region to which all
that was best and truest in him naturally belonged. The experience might
prove a stepping-stone to a final readjustment of his peculiar being
with the normal busy world of common things. Here was a safety-valve, as
he called it, a channel through which he might express much, if not all,
of his accumulated stores. The guides, now fast asleep in their beds,
had sent out their little dream-bodies to bring the invitation; they
were ready and waiting.

And he, thinking there under the stars his queer, long thoughts, bred in
years of solitude, dallied with the invitation, and—hesitated. The
inevitable pain frightened him—the pain of being young when the world
cries that you are old; the pang of the eternal contrast when the world
would laugh at what seemed to it a foolish fantasy of youth—a pose, a
dream that must bring a bitter awakening! He heard the voices but too
plainly, and shrank quickly from the sound.

But Nixie, standing there beside him with such gentle persistence,
certainly made him waver.... The temptation to yield was strong and
seductive.... Yet, when the faint splendour of the summer moonrise
dimmed the stars near the horizon, and the pines shone tipped with
silver, he found himself borne down by the sense of caution that urged
no revolutionary change, and advised him to keep his armour tightly
buckled on in the disguise he had adopted.

He would wait and see—a little longer, at any rate; and meanwhile he
must be firm and stern and dull; master of himself, and apparently
normal.

He walked to the dressing-table and lit his candles, and, as he did so,
caught a picture of himself in the glass. There was a gleam of subdued
fire in his eyes, he thought, that was not naturally there. Something
about him looked a little wild; it made him laugh.

He laughed to think how utterly absurd it was that a man of his size and
age, and—But the idea refused to frame himself in language—He did not
know exactly why he laughed, for at the same time he felt sad. With him,
as with all other children, tears and laughter are never far apart. It
would have been just as intelligible if he had cried.

But when the candles were out and he was in bed, and the stars were
peeping into the darkened room, the memory of his laughter seemed
unreal, and the sound of it oddly remote.

For, after all, that laughter was rather mysterious. It was not the
Outer Paul laughing at the Inner Paul. It was the Inner Paul laughing
with himself.




                              CHAPTER VII

    The imaginative process may be likened to the state of reverie.
    —ALISON.


The psychology of sleep being apparently beyond all intelligible
explanation, it was not surprising that he woke up next morning as
though he had gone to bed without a single perplexity. He remembered
none of the thoughts that had thronged his brain a few short hours
before; perhaps they had all slipped down into the region of submerged
consciousness, to crop out later in natural, and apparently spontaneous,
action.

At any rate he remembered little enough of his troubles when he woke and
saw the fair English sun streaming in through the open windows. Odours
of woods and dew-drenched lawns came into the room, and the birds were
singing with noise enough to waken all the country-side. It was
impossible to lie in bed. He was up and dressed long before any servant
came to call him.

Downstairs he found the house in darkness; doors barred and windows
heavily shuttered as though the house had expected an attack. Not a soul
was stirring. The air was close and musty. The idea of having to strike
a match in a ‘country’ house at 6 A.M. somehow oppressed him. Not
knowing his way about very well yet, he stumbled across the hall to find
a door, and as he did so something soft came rubbing against his legs.
He put his hand down in the darkness and felt a furry, warm body and a
stiff upright tail that reached almost to his knees. The thing began to
purr.

‘I declare!’ he exclaimed; ‘Mrs. Tompkyns!’ and he struck a match and
followed her to the drawing-room door. A moment later they had
unfastened the shutters of the French window—Mrs. Tompkyns assisting by
standing on her hind legs and tapping the swinging bell—and made their
way out on to the lawn.

The sunshine came slanting between the cedars and lay in shining strips
on the grass. Everything glistened with dew. The air was sweet and fresh
as it only is in the early hours after the dawn. Very faintly, as though
its mind was not yet made up, the air stirred among the bushes.

Paul’s first impulse was to waken the entire household so that they
might share with him this first glory of the morning. ‘Probably they
don’t know how splendid it is!’ The thought of the sleeping family, many
of them perhaps with closed windows, missing all the wonder, was a
positive pain to him. But, fortunately for himself, he decided it might
be better not to begin his visit in this way.

‘I guess you and I, Mrs. Tompkyns, are the only people about,’ he said,
looking down at the beautiful grey creature that sniffed the air calmly
at his feet. ‘Come on, then. Let’s make a raid together on the woods!’

He threw a disdainful glance at the sleeping house; no smoke came from
the chimneys; most of the upper windows were closed. A delicious
fragrance stole out of the woods to meet him as he strolled across the
wet lawn. He felt like a schoolboy doing something out of bounds.

‘You lead and I follow,’ he said, addressing his companion in mischief.

And at once his attention became absorbed in the animal’s characteristic
behaviour. Obviously it was delighted to be with him; yet it did not
wish him to think so, or, if he did think so, to give any sign of the
fact. Nothing could have been plainer. First it crept along by the stone
wall delicately, with its body very close to the ground as though the
weight of the atmosphere oppressed it; and when he spoke, it turned its
head with an affectation of genuine surprise as though it would say,
‘You here! I thought I was alone.’ Then it sat down on the gravel path
and began to wash its face and paws till he had passed, after which—when
he was not looking, of course—it followed him condescendingly, sniffing
at blades of grass _en route_ without actually touching them, and
flicking its tail upwards with sudden, electric jerks.

Paul understood in a general way what was expected of him. He watched it
surreptitiously, pretending to examine the flowers. For this, he knew,
was the great Cat Game of elaborate pretence. And Mrs. Tompkyns, true
adept in the art, played up wonderfully, and incidentally taught him
much about the ways and methods of simple disguise; it advanced
stealthily when he wasn’t looking; it stopped to wash, or gaze into the
air, the moment he turned. It was very shy, and very affected, and very
self-conscious. Inimitable was the way it kept to all the little rules
of the game. It walked daintily down the path after him, shaking the dew
from its paws with a rapid, quivering motion. Then, suddenly arching its
back as though momentarily offended—at nothing—it stared up at him with
an expression that seemed to question his very existence. ‘I guess I
ought to fade away when you look at me like that!’ was his thought.

‘I’m here. I’m coming, Mrs. Tompkyns,’ he felt constrained to remark
aloud before going forward again. ‘The grand morning excites my blood
just as much as it excites your own.’

It seemed necessary to assert his presence. No intelligent person can be
conceited long in the presence of a cat. No living creature can so
sublimely ‘ignore.’ But Paul was not conceited. He continued to watch it
with delight.

One very important rule of the game appeared to be that plenty of bushes
were necessary by way of cover, so that it could pretend it was not
really coming farther than the particular bush where it was hiding at
the moment. Instinctively, he never made the grave mistake of calling it
to follow; and though it never trotted alongside, being always either
behind or in front of him, the presence of the cat in his immediate
neighbourhood provided all sorts of company imaginable. It had also
provided him with an opportunity to play the hero.

Then, suddenly, the calm and peace of the morning was disturbed by a
scene of strange violence. Mrs. Tompkyns, with spread legs, dashed past
him at a surprising speed and flew up the trunk of a big tree as though
all the dogs in the county were at her heels. From this position of
vantage she looked back over her shoulder with hysterical and frightened
eyes. There was a great show of terror, a vast noise of claws upon the
bark. No actress could have created better the atmosphere of immediate
danger and alarm.

Paul had an instinctive _flair_ for this move of the game. He made a
great pretence of running up to save the cat from its awful position,
but of course long before he got there she had dropped laughingly to
earth again, having thus impressed upon him the value of her life.

‘A question of life or death that time, I think, Mrs. Tompkyns,’ he said
soothingly, trying to stroke her back. ‘I wonder if the head-gardener’s
grandmother after whom you were named ever did this sort of thing. I
doubt it!’

But the creature escaped from him easily. For no one is ever caught in
the true Cat Game. It scuttled down the path at full speed in a sort of
canter, but sideways, as though a violent wind blew it and desperate
resistance was necessary to keep on its feet at all. After that its
self-consciousness seemed to disappear a little. It behaved normally. It
stalked birds that showed, however, no fear of its approach. It sniffed
the tips of leaves. It played baby-fashion with various invisible
companions; and finally it vanished in a thick jungle of laurels to hunt
in savage earnest, and left Paul to his own devices. Like all its kind,
it only wished to prove how charming it could be, in order to emphasise
later its utter independence of human sympathy and companionship.


‘If you _must_ go, I suppose you must,’ he laughed, ‘and I shall try to
enjoy myself without you.’

He strolled on alone and lost himself in the pine-wood that flanked the
back lawn, stopping finally by a gate that led to the world of gorse and
heather beyond. The brilliant patches of yellow wafted perfumes to his
nostrils. Far in the distance a blue line hinted where the sea lay; and
over all lay the radiance of the early morning. The old spell was there
that never failed to make his heart leap. And, as he stood still, the
cuckoo flitted, invisible and mischievous, from tree to tree, calling
with its flutelike notes,—

              Sung beyond memory,
              When golden to the winds this world of ours
              Waved wild with boundless flowers;
              Sung in some past where wildernesses were,—

and his thoughts went roaming back to the great woods he had left
behind, woods where the naked streams ran shouting and lawless, where
the trees had not learned self-consciousness, and where no little tame
folk trotted on velvet feet through trim and scented gardens.

And the virgin glory of the morning entered into him with that searching
sweetness which is almost suffering, just as a few hours before the
Night had bewitched him with the mystery of her haunted caverns. For the
beauty of Nature that comes to most softly, with hints, came to him with
an exquisite fierce fever that was pain,—with something of the
full-fledged glory that burst upon Shelley—and to bear it, unrelieved by
expression, was a perpetual torment to him.

But, after long musing that led he scarcely knew where, Paul came back
to himself—and laughed. Laughter was better than sighing, and he was too
much of a child to go long without the sense of happiness coming
uppermost. He lit his pipe—that most delicious of all, the pipe before
breakfast—and wandered out into the sea of yellow gorse, thinking aloud,
laughing, talking to himself.

Something in the performance of Mrs. Tompkyns awakened the train of
thought of the night before. The sublime acting of the animal—he dared
not call it ‘beast’—linked him on to the children’s world. They, too,
had a magnificent condescension for the mere grown-up person. But he—he
was _not_ grown up. It made him sigh and laugh to think of it. He was a
great, overgrown child, playing with gorgeously coloured dreams while
the world of ordinary life passed him by.

The animals and the children linked on again, of course, with the region
of fantasy and make-believe, the world of creation, the world of
eternity, the world where thoughts were alive, and strong belief was a
creative act.

‘That’s where I still belong,’ he said aloud, picking his way among the
waves of yellow sea, ‘and I shall never get out till I die, my visions
unexpressed, my singing dumb.’ He laughed and threw a stone at a bush
that had no blossoms. ‘Oh, if only I knew how to link on with the normal
world of fact _without losing the other_! To turn all these seething
dreams within me to some account. To show them to others!’

He ran and cleared a low gorse-bush with a flying jump.

‘That would be worth living for,’ he continued, panting; ‘to make these
things real to all the people who live in little cages. By Jove, it
would open doors and windows in thousands of cages all over the world,
besides providing me with the outlet I must find some day or—’ he sprang
over a ditch, slipped, and landed head first into prickles—‘or explode!’
he concluded with a shout of laughter that no one heard but the cuckoos
and the yellow-hammers. Then he fell into a reverie, and his thoughts
travelled farther still—into the Beyond.

Quickly recovering himself, and picking up his pipe, he went on towards
the house; and, as he emerged from the pine copse again, the sound of a
gong, ringing faintly in the distance, brought him back to earth with a
shock almost as abrupt as the ditch. Mrs. Tompkyns appeared
simultaneously, wearing an aspect of pristine innocence, admirably
assumed the instant she caught sight of him.

‘Fancy your being out here!’ was the expression of her whole person,
‘and coming, too, in just as the gong sounds!’

‘Breakfast, I suppose!’ he observed. And she trotted behind him like a
dog. For all her affectations of superiority she wanted her milk just as
much as he wanted his coffee.

He walked into the dining-room, through the window, stiffening as he did
so with the resolution of the night before. His armour fitted him
tightly. Little animals, children, the too searching calls of Nature,
occult, symbolic, magical—all these must be sternly resisted and
suppressed in the company of others. The danger of letting his
imagination loose was too alarming. The ridicule would overwhelm him. In
the eyes of the world he now lived in he would seem simply mad. The risk
was impossible.

Like the Christian Scientists, he felt the need of vigorous affirmation:
‘I am Paul Rivers. I am a grown-up man. I am an official in a lumber
Company. I am forty-five. I have a beard. I am important and sedate.’

Thus he fortified himself; and thus, like the persuasive Mrs. Tompkyns
on the lawn, he imagined that he was deceiving both himself—and those
who were _on the watch_!




                              CHAPTER VIII

                 _And a little child shall lead them._


A week passed quickly away and found Paul still in his sister’s house.
The country air agreed with him, and he went for long walks over the
heathery hills and down to the sea. The little private study provided
for him,—remembering Mrs. Tompkyns’ example, he made a brave pretence of
having reports to write to his lumber Company—was admirable for his
work. As a place of retreat when he felt temptation too strong upon him,
or danger was near at hand, he used it constantly. He scented conditions
in advance very often, though no one probably would have suspected it of
him.

Once or twice he lunched out with neighbours, and sometimes people
motored over to tea; companionship and society were at hand if he wanted
them. And books of the kind he loved stood in precious rows upon the
shelves of Dick’s well-stored library. Here he browsed voraciously.

His sister, meanwhile, showed tact hardly to be expected of her. She
tried him tentatively with many things to see if he liked them, but she
made no conspicuous plans for him, and took good care that he was left
entirely to his own devices. A kind of intelligent truce had established
itself between them—these two persons who lived in different worlds and
stared at one another with something like astonishment over the top of a
high wall. Moreover, her languid interest in life made no claims upon
him; there was pleasant companionship, gentle talks, and genuine, if
thinly coloured, affection. He felt absolutely free, yet was conscious
of being looked after with kindness and discretion. She managed him so
well, in fact, that he hardly realised he was being managed at all.

He fell more easily than he had thought possible into the routine of the
uneventful country life. From feeling ‘caged’ he came to feel
‘comfortable.’ June, and the soft forces of the summer, purred about
him, and almost without knowing it he began to purr with them.

For his superabundant energy he found relief in huge walks, early and
late, and in all manner of unnecessary and invented labours of Hercules
about the place. Thus, he dammed up the little stream that trickled
harmlessly through the Gwyle pine-wood, making a series of deep pools in
which he bathed when the spirit moved him; he erected a gigantic and
very dangerous see-saw for the children (and himself) across a fallen
trunk; and, by means of canvas, boards, and steps, he constructed a
series of rooms and staircases in a spreading ilex tree, with rope
railings and bells at each ‘floor’ for visitors, so that even the
gardeners admitted it was the most wonderful thing they had ever set
eyes upon in a tree.

With the children he was, however, careful to play the part he had
decided to play. He was kind and good-natured; he spent a good deal of
time with them daily; he even submitted periodically to be introduced
all over again to the out-of-door animals, but he went through it all
soberly and deliberately, and flattered himself that he was quite
successful in presenting to them the ‘Uncle Paul’ whom it was best for
his safety they should know.

Heart-searchings and temptations he had in plenty, but came through the
ordeal with flying colours, and by the end of the first week he was
satisfied that they accepted him as he wished—sedate, stolid, dull, and
‘grown up.’

Yet, all the time, there was something that puzzled him. Under the
leadership of Nixie the children played up almost too admirably. It was
almost as though he had called them and explained everything in detail.
In spite of himself, they seemed somehow or other to have got into his
confidence, so that he felt his pretence was after all not so effective
as he meant it to be.

Even—nay, especially—the way he was ‘accepted’ by the animals was
suspicious—for nothing can be more eloquent of the true relations
between children and a grown-up than the terms they permit their animals
to have towards him—and this easy acceptance of himself as he pretended
to be constituted the most wearing and subtle kind of attack he could
possibly conceive. He felt as if the steel casings of his armour were
changing into cardboard; soon they would become mere tissue-paper, and
then turn transparent and melt away altogether.

‘They seem to think it’s all put on, this stiffness of mine,’ he thought
more than once. ‘Perhaps they’re playing a sort of game with me. If once
they find out I’m only acting—whew!’ he whistled low—‘the game is up at
once! I must keep an eye peeled!’

Consequently he kept that eye peeled; he made more use of his private
study, and so often gave the excuse of having reports to write that, had
it been true, his lumber Company would have been obliged to double its
staff in order to read them.

Yet, even in the study, he was not absolutely safe.

The children penetrated there too. They knocked elaborately—always; but
with the knock he invariably realised a roguish pair of eyes and a sly
laugh on the other side of the door. It was like knocking on his heart
direct. He always said—in a bored, unnatural tone:

‘Oh, come in, whoever it is!’ knowing quite well who it was. And, then,
in they would come—one or the other of them.

They slipped in softly as shadows, like the coming of dusk, like stray
puffs of wind, fragrant and summery, or like unexpected rays of light as
the sun walked round the house in the afternoon. And when they were
gone—swiftly, like the sun dipping behind a cloud—lo, the room seemed
cold and empty again.

‘Oh, they’re up to something, they’re up to something,’ he said wisely
to himself with a sigh. ‘They’re laying traps for me, bless their little
insolences!’

And the more he thought about it, the more certain he felt that Nixie,
Jonah, and Toby were simply playing the Cat Game—pretending to accept
his attitude because they saw he wished it. Only, less occult and
intelligent than the cat, they sometimes made odd little slips that
betrayed them.

For instance, one evening Jonah penetrated into the study to say
good-night, and brought the Chow puppies, China and Japan, with him.
Their tails curled over their backs like wire brushes; their vigorous
round bodies, for ever on the move, were all he could manage. Having
been duly kissed, the child waited, however, for something else, and at
length, receiving no assistance from his uncle, he lifted each puppy in
turn on to the table.

‘You, Uncle, please hold them; I can’t,’ he explained.

And, rather grimly, Paul tried to keep the two wriggling bodies still,
while Jonah then came up a little closer to his chair.

‘_They_ have reports to write too, to their lumber-kings,’ he said, his
face solemn as a gong—using a phrase culled heaven knows where. ‘So will
you please see that they don’t make blots either.’

‘But how did you know there were such things as lumber-kings?’ Paul
asked, surprised.

‘I didn’t know. They knew,’ with a jerk of his head toward the
struggling puppies, who hated the elevation of the table and the
proximity of Paul’s bearded face. ‘They said you told them.’

There was no trace of a smile in his eyes; nothing but the earnest
expression of the child taking part in the ponderous make-believe of the
grown-up. Paul felt that by this simple expedient his reports and the
safety they represented had been reduced in a single moment to the level
of a paltry pretence.

He blushed. ‘Well, tell them to run after their tails more, and think
less,’ he said.

‘All right, Uncle Paul,’ and the boy was gone, grave as any judge.

And Toby, her small round face still shining like an onion skin, had a
different but equally effective method of showing him that he belonged
to their world in spite of his clumsy pretence. She gave him lessons in
Natural History. One afternoon when a brightly-coloured creature darted
across the page of his book, and he referred to it as a ‘beetle,’ she
very smartly rebuked him.

‘Not beetle, but beetie, _that_ one,’ she corrected him.

He thought at first this was merely a child’s abbreviation, but she went
on to instruct him fully, and he discovered that the ordinary
coleopterist has a great deal yet to learn in the proper classification
of his species.

‘There are beetles, and beedles, and beeties,’ she explained standing by
his chair on the lawn, and twiddling with his watch-chain. ‘Beeties are
all bright-coloured and little and very pretty—like ladybirds.’

‘And beedles?’

‘Oh, b-e-e-e-d-d-dles,’ pronouncing the word heavily and slowly, ‘are
the stupid fat ones in the road that always get run over. They’re always
sleepy, you see, but quite nice, oh, quite nice;’ she hastened to add
lest Paul should dislike them from her description.

‘And all the rest are beetles, I suppose, just ordinary beetles?’ he
asked.

‘Beetles,’ she said, with the calmness of superior knowledge, ‘are fast,
black things that scuttle about kitchens. Horrid and crawly! _Now_ you
know them all!’

She ran off with a burst of laughter upon that face of polished onion
skin, and left her uncle to reflect deeply upon this new world of
beetles.

The lesson was instructive and symbolic, though the choice of subject
was not as poetic as might have been. With this new classification as a
starting-point, the child, no doubt, had erected a vast superstructure
of wonder, fun, beauty, and—why not?—truth! For children, he mused, are
ever the true idealists. In their games of make-believe they create the
world anew—in six minutes. They scorn measurements, and deal directly
with the eternal principles behind things. With a little mud on the end
of a stick they trace the course of the angels, and with the
wooden-blocks of their building-boxes they erect the towering palaces of
a universe that shall never pass away.

Yet what they did, surely he also did! His world of imagination was
identical with theirs of make-believe. Was, then, the difference between
them one of expression merely?...

Toby came thundering up and fell upon him from nowhere.

‘Uncle Paul,’ she said rather breathlessly.

‘Yes, dear,’ he made answer, still thinking upon beedles and beeties.

‘On the path down there by the rosydandrums there’s a beedle now—a big
one with horns—if you’d like to see it.’

‘Oh! By the rhododendrons, you mean?’

‘Yes, by the rosydandrums,’ she repeated. ‘Only we must be quick or
he’ll get home before we come.’

He was far more keen to see that “beedle” than she was. Yet for the
immediate safety of his soul he refused.

Nixie it was, however, who penetrated furthest into the fortress. She
came with a fearless audacity that fairly made him tremble. She had only
to approach for him to become aware how poorly his suit of armour
fitted.

But she was so gentle and polite about it that she was harder to
withstand than all the others put together. She was slim and insinuating
in body, mind and soul. Often, before he realised what she was talking
about, her slender little fingers were between the cracks of his
breast-plate. For instance, after leaving Toby and her “beedle,” he
strolled down to the pine-wood and stood upon the rustic bridge watching
the play of sunlight and shadow, when suddenly, out of the very water it
seemed, up rose a veritable water-sprite—hatless and stockingless—Nixie,
the ubiquitous.

She scrambled lightly along the steep bank to his side, and leaned over
the railing with him, staring at their reflections in the stream.

‘I declare you startled me, child!’ Paul exclaimed.

Her eyes met his in the running reflection beneath them. Of course, it
may have been merely the trick of the glancing water, but to him it
seemed that her expression was elfin and mischievous.

‘Did I—_really_, Uncle Paul?’ she said after a long silence, and without
looking up. But woven through the simple words, as sunlight is woven
through clearing mist, he divined all the other meanings of the child’s
subtle and curious personality. It amounted to this—she at once invited,
nay included, him in her own particular tree and water world: included
him because he belonged there with her, and she simply couldn’t help
herself. There was no favour about it one way or the other.

The compliment—the temptation—was overwhelming. Paul shivered a little,
actually shivered, as he stood beside her in the sunshine. For several
minutes they leaned there in silence, gazing at the flowing water.

‘The woods are _very_ busy—this evening,’ she said at length.

‘I’m sure they are,’ he answered, before he quite realised what he was
saying. Then he pulled himself together with an effort.

‘But does Mlle. Fleury know, and approve—?’ he asked a little stiffly,
glancing down at her bare legs and splashed white frock.

‘Oh, no,’ she laughed wickedly, ‘but then Mlle. only understands what
she sees with her eyes! She is much too mixed up and educated to know
all _this_ kind of thing!’ She made a gesture to include the woods about
them. ‘Her sort of knowledge is so stuffing, you know.’

‘Rather,’ he exclaimed. ‘I would far sooner know the trees themselves
than know their Latin names.’

It slipped out in spite of himself. The next minute he could have bitten
his tongue off. But Nixie took no advantage of him. She let his words
pass as something taken for granted.

‘I mean—it’s better to learn useful things while you can,’ he said
hurriedly, blushing in his confusion like a child.

Nixie peered steadily down into the water for several minutes before she
said anything more.

‘Either she’s found me out and knows everything,’ thought Paul; ‘or she
hasn’t found me out and knows nothing.’ But which it was, for the life
of him, he couldn’t be certain.

‘Oh,’ she cried suddenly, looking up into his face, her eyes, to Paul’s
utter amazement, wet with tears, ‘Oh! how Daddy must have loved you!’

And, before he could think of a word to say, she was gone! Gone into the
woods with a fluttering as of white wings.

‘So apparently I am not too mixed up and educated for their exquisite
little world,’ he reflected, as soon as the emotion caused by her last
words had subsided a little; ‘and the things I know are not of the
“stuffing” kind!’

It all made him think a good deal—this attitude the children adopted
towards _his_ attitude, this unhesitating acceptance of him in spite of
all his pretence. But he still valiantly maintained his studied
aloofness of manner, and never allowed himself to overstep the danger
line. He never forgot himself when he played with them, and the stories
he told were just what they called “ornary” stories, and not tales of
pure imagination and fantasy. The rules of the game, finely balanced,
were observed between them just as between himself and Mrs. Tompkyns.

Yet somehow, by unregistered degrees and secretly, they loosened the
joints of his armour day by day and hour by hour.




                               CHAPTER IX

  All the Powers that vivify nature must be children, for all the
  fairies, and gnomes, the goblins, yes, and the great giants too, are
  only different sizes and shapes and characters of children.—_George
  MacDonald._


It was a week later, and Paul was smoking his evening pipe on the lawn
before dinner. His sister was in London for a couple of days. Mlle.
Fleury had gone to the dentist in the neighbouring town and had not yet
returned. The children, consequently, had been running rather wild.

The sun had barely disappeared, when the full moon, rising huge and
faint in the east, cast a silvery veil over the gardens and the wood.
The night came treading softly down the sky, passing with an almost
visible presence from the hills to the motionless trees in the valley,
and then sinking gently and mysteriously down into the very roots of the
grass and flowers.

During the day there had been rain—warm showers alternating with
dazzling sunshine as in April—and now the earth, before going to sleep,
was sending out great wafts of incense. Paul sniffed it in with keen
enjoyment.

The odour of burning wood floated to him over the tree-tops, hanging a
little heavily in the moist atmosphere; he thought of a hundred fires of
his own making—elsewhere, far away! ‘And grey dawns saw his camp-fires
in the rain,’ he murmured.

He wandered down to the Larch Gate, so called by the children because
the larches stood there about the entrance of the wood like the porch of
some forest temple. He halted, listening to the faint drip-drip of the
trees, and as he listened, he thought; and his thoughts, like stones
falling through a deep sea, sank down into the depths of him where so
little light was that no words came to give them form or substance.

Overhead, the blue lanes of the sky down which the sunlight had poured
all day were slowly softening for the coming of the stars; and in
himself the plastic depths, he felt, were a-stirring, as though some
great change that he could not alter or control were about to take place
in him. He was aware of an unwonted undercurrent of excitement in his
blood. It seemed to him that there was ‘something afoot,’ although he
had no evidence to warrant the suspicion.

‘Something’s up to-night,’ he murmured between the puffs of his pipe.
‘There’s something in the air!’

He blew a long whiff of smoke and watched it melt away over a bed of
mignonette among the blue shadows where the dusk gathered beneath the
ilex trees. There, for a moment, his eye followed it, and just as it
sifted off into transparency he became aware with a start of surprise
that behind the bushes something was moving. He looked closer.

‘It’s stopped,’ he muttered; ‘but only a second ago it was moving—moving
parallel with myself.’

Paul was well accustomed to watching the motions of wild creatures in
the forest; his eye was trained like the eye of an Indian. The gloom at
first was too dense for anything to differentiate itself from their
general mass, but after a short inspection his sight detected little
bits of shadow that were lighter or darker than other little bits. The
moving thing began to assume outline.

‘It’s a person!’ he decided. ‘It’s somebody watching—watching _me_!’

He took a step forward, and the figure likewise advanced, keeping even
pace with him. He went faster, and the figure also went faster; it moved
very silently, very softly, ‘like an Indian,’ he thought with
admiration. Behind the Blue Summer-house, where they sometimes had tea
on wet days, it disappeared.

‘There are no cattle-stealers, or timber-sneaks in this country,’ he
reflected, ‘but there are burglars. Perhaps this is a burglar who knows
Margaret is away and thinks—’

He had not time to finish what the burglar thought, for at that moment,
at the top of the Long Walk, where the moonlight already lay in a patch,
the figure suddenly dashed out at full speed from the cover of the
bushes, and he beheld, not a burglar, but—a little girl in a blue frock
with a broad white collar, and long, black spindle legs.

‘Nixie, my dear child!’ he exclaimed. ‘But aren’t you in bed?’

It was a stupid question of course, and she did not attempt to answer
it, but came up close to him, picking her way neatly between the
flower-beds. The moon gleamed on her shiny black shoes and on her shiny
yellow hair; over her summer dress she wore a red cloak, but it was open
and only held to her by two thin bands about the neck. Under the hood he
saw her elf-like face, the expression grave, but the eyes bright with
excitement, and she moved softly over the grass like a shadow, timidly,
yet without hesitation. A small, warm hand stole into his.

Paul put his pipe, still alight, into his pocket like a naughty boy
caught smoking, and turned to face her.

‘’Pon my soul, Nixie, I believe you really _are_ a sprite!’

She let go his hand and sprang away lightly over the lawn, laughing
silently, her hood dropping off so that her hair flew out in a net to
catch the moonlight, and for an instant he imagined he was looking at
running water, swift and dancing; but the very next second she was back
at his side again, the red hood replaced, the cloak gathered tightly
about her slim person, feeling for his big hand again with both of her
own.

‘At night I _am_ a sprite,’ she whispered laughing, ‘and mind I don’t
bewitch you altogether!’

She drew him gently across the lawn, choosing the direction with evident
purpose, and he, curiously and suddenly bereft of all initiative,
allowed her to do as she would.

‘But, please, Uncle Paul,’ she went on with vast gravity,’ I want you to
be serious now. I’ve something to say to you, and that’s why I’m not in
bed when I ought to be. All the other Sprites are about too, you know,
so be very careful how you answer.’

The big man allowed himself to be led away. He felt his armour dropping
off in great flakes as he went. No light is so magical as in that
mingled hour of sun and moon when the west is still burning and the east
just a-glimmer with the glory that is to come. Paul felt it strongly. He
was half with the sun and half with the moon, and the gates of fantasy
seemed somewhere close at hand. Curtains were being drawn aside, veils
lifting, doors softly opening. He almost heard the rush of the wind
behind, and tasted the keen, sweet excitement of another world.

He turned sharply to look at his companion. But first he put the hood
back, for she seemed more human that way.

‘Well, child!’ he said, as gruffly as he could manage, ‘and what is it
you have stayed up so late to ask me?’

‘It’s something I have to say to you, not to _ask_,’ she replied at once
demurely. There was a delicious severity about her.

After a pause of twenty seconds she tripped round in front of him and
stared full into his face. He felt as though she cried ‘Hands up’ and
held a six-shooter to his head. She pulled the trigger that same moment.

‘Isn’t it time now to stop writing all those Reports, and to take off
your dressing-up things?’ she asked with decision.

Paul stopped abruptly and tried to disengage his hand, but she held him
so tightly that he could not escape without violence.

‘What dressing-up things are you talking about?’ he asked, forcing a
laugh which, he admitted himself, sounded quite absurd.

‘All this pretending that you’re so old, and don’t know about things—I
mean _real_ things—_our_ things.’

He searched as in a fever for the right words—words that should be true
and wise, and safe—but before he could pick them out of the torrent of
sentences that streamed through his mind, she had gone on again. She
spoke calmly, but very gravely.

‘We are _so_ tired of helping to pretend with you; and we’ve been
waiting patiently _so_ long. Even Toby knows it’s only ’sguise you put
on to tease us.’

‘Even Toby?’ he repeated foolishly, avoiding her brilliant eyes.

‘And it really isn’t quite fair, you know. There are so very few that
care—and understand—’

There came a little quaver in her voice. She hardly came up to his
shoulder. He felt as though a whole bathful of happiness had suddenly
been upset inside him, and was running about deliciously through his
whole being—as though he wanted to run and dance and sing. It was like
the reaction after tight boots—collars—or tight armour—and the blood was
beginning to flow again mightily. Nothing could stop it. Some keystone
in the fabric of his being dropped or shifted. His whole inner world
fell into a new pattern. Resistance was no longer possible or desirable.
He had done his best. Now he would give in and enjoy himself at last.

‘But, my dear child—my dear little Nixie—’

‘No, really, Uncle, there’s no good talking like that,’ she interrupted,
her voice under command again, though still aggrieved, ‘because you know
quite well we’re all waiting for you to join us properly—our Society, I
mean—and have our a’ventures with us—’

She called it ‘aventures.’ She left out all consonants when excited. The
word caught him sharply. Nixie had wounded him better than she knew.

‘Er—then do you have adventures?’ he asked.

‘Of course—wonderful.’

‘But not—er—the sort—er—I could join in?’

‘Of course; very wonderfulindeedaventures. That’s what Daddy used to
call them—before he went away.’

It was Dick himself speaking. Paul imagined he could hear the very
voice. Another, and deeper, emotion surged through him, making all the
heartstrings quiver.

He turned and looked about him, still holding the child tightly by the
hand....

Behind him he heard the air moving in the larches, combing out their
long green hair; the pampas grass rustled faintly on the lawn just
beyond; and from the wood, now darkening, came the murmur of the brook.
On his right, the old house looked shadowy and unreal. There stood the
chimneys, like draped figures watching him, with the first stars peeping
over their hunched shoulders. Dew glistened on the slates of the roof;
beyond them he saw the clean outline of the hill, darkly sweeping up
into the pallor of the sunset. There, too, past the wall of the house,
he saw the great distances of heathland moving down through crowds of
shadows to the sea. And the moon was higher.

‘There’s seats in the Blue Summer-house,’ the voice beside him said,
with insinuation as well as command.

He found it impossible to resist; indeed, the very desire to resist had
been spirited away. Slowly they made their way across the silvery
patchwork of the lawn to the door of the Blue Summer-house. This was a
tumble-down structure with a thatched roof; it had once been blue, but
was now no colour at all. Low seats ran round the inside walls, and as
Paul stood at the dark entrance he perceived that these seats were
already occupied; and he hesitated. But Nixie pulled him gently in.

‘This is a regular Meeting,’ she said, as naturally as though she had
been wholly innocent of a part in the plot. ‘They’ve only been waiting
for us. Please come in.’ She even pushed him.

‘It may be regular, but it is most unexpected,’ he said, breathless
rather, and curiously shy as he crossed the threshold and peered round
at the silent faces about him. Eyes, he saw, were big and round and
serious, shining with excitement. Clearly it was a very important
occasion. He wondered what an ‘irregular’ meeting would be like.

‘We waited till mother was away,’ explained a candid voice, speaking
with solemnity from the recesses.

‘And till Madmerzelle had to go to the dentist and stay to tea,’ added
another.

‘So that it would be easier for _you_ to come,’ concluded Nixie, lest he
should think all these excuses were only on their own account.

She led him across the cobbled floor to a wooden arm-chair with crooked
and shattered legs, and persuaded him to sit down. He did so.

‘There was some sense in that, at any rate,’ he remarked irrelevantly,
not quite sure whether he referred to the children, or Mademoiselle, or
the chair, and landing at the same instant with a crash upon the rickety
support which was much lower than he thought it was. The joints and
angles of the wood entered his ribs. He lost all memory of how to be
sedate after that. He began to enjoy himself absurdly.

Silvery laughter was heard, followed immediately by the sound of rushing
little feet as a dozen small shadows shot out into the moonlight and
tore across the lawn at top speed. China and Japan he recognised, and a
cohort of furry creatures in their rear.

‘Now you’ve frightened them _all_ away,’ exclaimed the voice that had
spoken first.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ replied the other, who evidently spoke with authority;
‘Uncle Paul was in before they left. They saw the introduction. That’s
enough. So now,’ it added with decision, ‘if you’re quite ready we’d
better begin.’

Paul grasped by this time that he was the central figure in some secret
ceremony of the children, that it was of vital importance to them, as
well as a profound compliment to himself. The animals formed part of it
so long as they could be persuaded to stay. Their own rituals, however,
were so vastly more wonderful and dignified—especially the Ritual of the
Cats—that they were somewhat contemptuous, and had escaped at the
earliest opportunity. It was, of course, his formal initiation into
their world of make-believe and imagination. He stood before them on the
floor of this tumbled-down Blue Summer-house in the capacity of the
Candidate. Strange chills began to chase one another down his long
spine. A shy happiness swept through him and made him shiver. ‘Can they
possibly guess,’ he wondered, ‘how far more important this is to me than
to them?’

‘Are you ready then?’ Nixie asked again.

‘Quite ready,’ he replied in a deep and tremulous voice.

‘Go ahead then,’ said the voice of decision.

A little bell rang, manipulated by some invisible hand in the darkness,
and Nixie darted forward and drew a curtain that bore a close
resemblance to a carriage rug across the doorway, so that only the
faintest gleam of moonlight filtered through the cracks on either side.
Then the owner of the voice of authority left his throne on the back
wall and stepped solemnly forward in the direction of the candidate.
Paul recognised Jonah with some difficulty. He tripped twice on the way.

The stumbling was comprehensible. On his head he wore a sort of mitre
that on ordinary occasions was evidently used to keep the tea hot on the
schoolroom table; for it was beyond question a tea-cosy. A garment of
variegated colours wrapped his figure down to the heels and trailed away
some distance behind him. It was either a table-cloth or a housemaid’s
Sunday dress, and it invested him with a peculiar air of quaint majesty.
He might have been King of the Gnomes. On his hands were large leathern
gauntlets—very large indeed; and with loose fingers whose movements were
clearly difficult to control, he grasped a stick that once may have been
a hunting crop, but now was certainly a wand of office.

In front of Paul he came to a full stop, gathering his robes about him.

He made a little bow, during which the mitre shifted dangerously to one
side, and then tapped the candidate lightly with the wand on the head,
shoulders, and breast.

‘Please answer now,’ he said in a low tone, and then went backwards to
his seat against the wall. His robe of office so impeded him that he was
obliged to use the wand as a common walking-stick. Once or twice, too,
he hopped.

‘But you’ve forgotten to ask it,’ whispered Nixie from the door where
she was holding up the curtains with both hands. ‘He’s got nothing to
answer.’

Quickly correcting his mistake, Jonah then stood up on his seat and
said, rather shyly, the following lines, evidently learned by heart with
a good deal of trouble:—

               You’ve applied to our Secret Society,
               Which is full of unusual variety,
               And, in spite of your past,
               We admit you at last,
               But—we hope you’ll behave with propriety.

‘Now, stand up and answer, please,’ whispered Nixie. ‘Daddy made all
this up, you know. It’s your turn to answer now.’

Paul rose with difficulty. At first it seemed as if the chair meant to
rise with him, so tightly did it fit; but in the end he stood erect
without it, and bowing to the President, he said in solemn tones—and the
words came genuinely from his heart:

‘I appreciate the honour done to me. I am very grateful indeed.’

‘That’s very good, I think,’ Nixie whispered under her breath to him.

Then Toby advanced, climbing down laboriously from her perch on the
broken bench, and stalked up to the spot just vacated by her brother.
She, too, was suitably dressed for the occasion, but owing to her
diminutive size, and the fact that she did not reach up to the patch of
moonlight, it was not possible to distinguish more than the white cap
pinned on to her hair. It looked like a housekeeper’s cap. She, too,
carried a wand of office. Was it a hunting crop or poker, Paul wondered?

Toby, then, with much more effort than Jonah, repeated the formula of
admission. She got the lines a little mixed, however:—

               You’ve applied to our Secret Society,
               Which is full of unusual propriety,
               And, in spite of your past,
               We admit you at last,
               But we hope you’ll _behave with variety_.

‘I will endeavour to do so,’ said Paul, replying with a low bow.

When he rose again to an upright position, Nixie was standing close in
front of him. One arm still held up the curtains, but the other pointed
directly into his face.

‘Your ’ficial position in the Society,’ she said in her thin, musical
little voice, also repeating words learned by heart, ‘will be that of
Recording Secretary, and your principal duties to keep a record of all
the Aventures and to read them aloud at Regular Meetings. Any Meeting
anywhere is a Regular Meeting. You must further promise on your living
oath not to reveal the existence of the Society, or any detail of its
proceedings, to any person not approved of by the Society as a whole.’

She paused for his reply.

‘I promise,’ he said.

‘He promises,’ repeated three voices together.

There was a general clatter and movement in the summer-house. He was
forced down again into the rickety chair and the three little officials
were clambering upon his knees before he knew where he was. All talked
breathlessly at once.

‘Now you’re in properly—at last!’

‘You needn’t pretend any more——’

‘But we knew all along you were really trying hard to get in?’

‘I really believe I was,’ said he, getting in a chance remark.

They covered him with kisses.

‘We never thought you were as important as you pretended,’ Jonah said;
‘and your being so big made no difference.’

‘Or your beard, Uncle Paul,’ added Toby.

‘And we never think people old till they’re married,’ Jonah explained,
putting the mitre on his uncle’s head.

‘So now we can have our aventures all together,’ exclaimed Nixie,
kissing him swiftly, and leaping off his knee. The other two followed
her example, and suddenly—he never quite understood how it happened so
quickly—the summer-house was empty, and he was alone with the moonlight.
A flash of white petticoats and slender black legs on the lawn, and lo,
they were gone!

On the gravel path outside sounded a quick step. Paul started with
surprise. The very next minute Mlle. Fleury, in her town clothes and
hat, appeared round the corner.

‘’Ow then!’ she exclaimed sharply, ‘the little ones zey are no more
’ere? Mr Rivairs...!’ She shook her finger at him.

Paul tried to look dignified. For the moment, however, he quite forgot
the tea-cosy still balanced on his head.

‘Mademoiselle Fleury,’ he said politely, ‘the children have gone to
bed.’

‘It is ’igh time that they are already in bed, only I hear their voices
now this minute,’ she went on excitedly. ‘They ’ide here, do they not?’

‘I assure you, Mademoiselle, they have gone to bed,’ Paul said. The
woman stared at him with amazement in her eyes. He wondered why. Then,
with a crash, something fell from the skies, hitting his nose on the way
down, and bounding on to the ground.

‘Oh, the mitre!’ he cried with a laugh, ‘I clean forgot it was there.’
He kicked it aside and stared with confusion at his companion. She
looked very neat and trim in her smart town frock. He understood now why
she stared so, and his cheeks flamed crimson, though it was too dark for
them to be seen.

‘Meester Reevairs,’ she said at length, the desire to laugh and the
desire to scold having fought themselves to a standstill, so that her
face betrayed no expression at all, ‘you lead zem astray, I think.’

‘On the contrary, it is they who lead me,’ he said self-consciously. ‘In
fact, they have just deprived me of my very best armour——’

‘Armour!’ she interrupted, ‘_Armoire_! Ah! They ’ide upstairs in the
cupboard,’—and she turned to run.

‘Do not be harsh with them,’ he cried after her, ‘it is all my fault
really. I am to blame, not they.’

‘’Arsh! Oh no!’ she called back to him. ‘Only, you know, if your seester
find them at this hour not in bed——’

Paul lost the end of the sentence as she turned the corner of the house.
He gathered up the remnants of the ceremony and followed slowly in her
footsteps.

‘Now, really,’ he thought, ‘what a simple and charming woman! How her
eyes twinkled! And how awfully nice her voice was!’ He flung down the
rugs and wands and tea-cosy in the hall. ‘Out there,’ with a jerk in the
direction of the Atlantic Ocean, ‘the whole camp would make her a
Queen.’

Altogether the excitement of the last hour had been considerable. He
felt that something must happen to him unless he could calm down a bit.

‘I know,’ he exclaimed aloud, ‘I’ll go and have a hot bath. There’s just
time before dinner. That’ll take it out of me.’ And he went up the front
stairs, singing like a boy.




                               CHAPTER X

    Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.—BLAKE.


For some days after that Paul walked on air. Incredible as it may seem
to normally constituted persons, he was so delighted to have found a
medium in which he could in some measure express himself without fear of
ridicule, that the entire world was made anew for him. He thought about
it a great deal. He even argued in his muddled fashion, but he got no
farther that way. The only thing he really understood was the plain fact
that he had found a region where his companions were about his own age,
with his own tastes, ready to consider things that were _real_, and to
let the trivial and vulgar world go by.

This was the fact that stared him in the face and made him happy. For
the first time in his life he could play with others. Hitherto he had
played alone.

‘It’s a safety-valve at last,’ he exclaimed, using his favourite word.
‘Now I can let myself go a bit. _They_ will never laugh; on the
contrary, they’ll understand and love it. Hooray!’

‘And, remember,’ Nixie had again explained to him, ‘you have to write
down all the aventures. That’s what keeping the records means. And you
must read them out to us at the Meetings.’

And he chuckled as he thought about it, for it meant having real Reports
to write at last, reports that others would read and appreciate.

The aventures, moreover, began very quickly; they came thick and fast;
and he lived in them so intensely that he carried them over into his
other dull world, and sometimes hardly knew which world he was in at
all. His imagination, hungry and untamed, had escaped, and was seeking
all it could devour.

It was a hot afternoon in mid-June, and Paul was lying with his pipe
upon the lawn. His sister was out driving. He was alone with the
children and the smaller portion of the menagerie,—smaller in size, that
is, not in numbers; cats, kittens, and puppies were either asleep, or on
the hunt, all about them. And from an open window a parrot was talking
ridiculously in mixed French and English.

The giant cedars spread their branches; in the limes the bees hummed
drowsily; the world lay a scented garden around him, and a very soft
wind stole to and fro, stirring the bushes with sleepy murmurs and
making the flowers nod.

China and Japan lay panting in the shade behind him, and not far off
reposed the big grey Persian, Mrs. Tompkyns. Regardless of the heat,
Pouf, Zezette, and Dumps flitted here and there as though the whole lawn
was specially made for their games; and Smoke, the black cat, dignified
and mysterious, lay with eyes half-closed just near enough for Paul to
stroke his sleek, hot sides when he felt so disposed. He—Smoke that
is—blinked indifferently at passing butterflies, or twitched his great
tail at the very tip when a bird settled in the branches overhead; but
for the most part he was intent upon other matters—matters of genuine
importance that concerned none but himself.

A few yards off Jonah and Toby were doing something with daisies—what it
was Paul could not see; and on his other side Nixie lay flat upon the
grass and gazed into the sky. The governess was—where all governesses
should be out of lesson-time—elsewhere.

‘Nixie, you’re sleeping. Wake up.’

She rolled over towards him. ‘No, Uncle Paul, I’m not. I was only
thinking.’

‘Thinking of what?’

‘Oh, clouds and things; chiefly clouds, I think.’ She pointed to the
white battlements of summer that were passing very slowly over the
heavens. ‘It’s so funny that you can see them move, yet can’t see the
thing that pushes them along.’

‘Wind, you mean?’

‘H’mmmmm.’

They lay flat on their backs and watched. Nixie made a screen of her
hair and peered through it. Paul did the same with his fingers.

‘You can touch it, and smell it, and hear it,’ she went on, half to
herself, ‘but you can’t _see_ it.’

‘I suspect there are creatures that can see the wind, though,’ he
remarked sleepily.

‘I ’spect so too,’ she said softly. ‘I think I could, if I really tried
hard enough. If I was very, oh very kind and gentle and polite to it, I
think——’

‘Come and tell me quietly,’ Paul said with excitement. ‘I believe you’re
right.’

He scented a delightful aventure. The child turned over on the grass
twice, roller fashion, and landed against him, lying on her face with
her chin in her hands and her heels clicking softly in the air.

She began to explain what she meant. ‘You must listen properly because
it’s rather difficult to explain, you know’; he heard her breathing into
his ear, and then her voice grew softer and fainter as she went on.
Lower and lower it grew, murmuring like a distant mill-wheel, softer and
softer; wonderful sentences and words all running gently into each other
without pause, somewhere below ground. It began to sound far away, and
it melted into the humming of the bees in the lime trees.... Once or
twice it stopped altogether, Paul thought, so that he missed whole
sentences.... Gaps came, gaps filled with no definite words, but only
the inarticulate murmur of summer and summer life....

Then, without warning, he became conscious of a curious sinking
sensation, as though the solid lawn beneath him had begun to undulate.
The turf grew soft like air, and swam up over him in green waves till
his head was covered. His ears became muffled; Nixie’s voice no longer
reached him as something outside himself; it was within—curiously
running, so to speak, with his blood. He sank deeper and deeper into a
delicious, soothing medium that both covered and penetrated him.

The child had him by the hand, that was all he knew, then—a long sliding
motion, and forgetfulness.

‘I’m off,’ he remembered thinking, ‘off at last into a real aventure!’

Down they sank, down, down; through soft darkness, and long, shadowy
places, passing through endless scented caverns, and along dim avenues
that stretched, for ever and ever it seemed, beneath the gloom of mighty
trees. The air was cool and perfumed with earth. They were in some
underworld, strangely muted, soundless, mysterious. It grew very dark.

‘Where are we, Nixie?’ He did not feel alarm; but a sense of wonder,
touched delightfully by awe, had begun to send thrills along his nerves.

Her reply in his ear was like a voice in a tiny trumpet, far away, very
soft. ‘Come along! Follow me!’

‘I’m coming. But it’s so dark.’

‘Hush,’ she whispered. ‘We’re in a dream together. I’m not sure where
exactly. Keep close to me.’

‘I’m coming,’ he repeated, blundering over the roots beside her; ‘but
where are we? I can’t see a bit.’

‘Tread softly. We’re in a lost forest—just before the dawn,’ he heard
her voice answer faintly.

‘A forest underground——? You mean a coal measure?’ he asked in
amazement.

She made no answer. ‘I think we’re going to see the wind,’ she added
presently.

Her words thrilled him inexplicably. It was as if—in that other world of
gross values—some one had said, ‘You’re going to make a million!’ It was
all hushed and soft and subdued. Everything had a coating of plush.

‘We’ve gone backwards somewhere—a great many years. But it’s all right.
There’s no time in dreams.’

‘It’s dreadfully dark,’ he whispered, tripping again.

The persuasion of her little hand led him along over roots and through
places of deep moss. Great spaces, he felt, were about him. Shadows
coated everything with silence. It was like the vast primeval forests of
his country across the seas. The map of the world had somehow shifted,
and here, in little England, he found the freedom of those splendid
scenes of desolation that he craved. Millions of huge trees reared up
about them through the gloom, and he felt their presence, though
invisible.

‘The sun isn’t up yet,’ she added after a bit. He held her hand tightly,
as they stumbled slowly forward together side by side. He began to feel
extraordinarily alive. Exhilaration seized him. He could have shouted
with excitement.

‘Hush!’ whispered his guide, ‘_do_ be careful. You’ll upset us both.’
The trembling of his hand betrayed him. ‘You stumble like an om’ibus!’

‘I’m all right. Go ahead!’ he replied under his breath. ‘I can see
better now!’

‘Now look,’ she said, stopping in front of him and turning round.

The darkness lifted somewhat as he bent down to follow the direction of
her gaze. On every side, dim and thronging, he saw the stems of immense
trees rising upwards into obscurity. There were hundreds upon hundreds
of them. His eyes followed their outline till the endless number
bewildered him. Overhead, the stars were shining faintly through the
tangled network of their branches. Odours of earth and moss and leaves,
cool and delicate, rose about them; vast depths of silence stretched
away in every direction. Great ferns stood motionless, with all the
magic of frosted window-panes, among their roots. All was still and dark
and silent. It was the heart of a great forest before the
dawn—prehistoric, unknown to man.

‘Oh, I wonder—I wonder——’ began Paul, groping about him clumsily with
his hands to feel the way.

‘Oh, please don’t talk so loud,’ Nixie whispered, pinching his arm; ‘we
shall wake up if you do. Only people in dreams come to places like
this.’

‘You know the place?’ he exclaimed with increasing excitement. ‘So do I
almost. I’m sure this has all happened before, only I can’t remember——’

‘We must keep as still as mice.’

‘We are—still as mice.’

‘This is where the winds sleep when they’re not blowing. It’s their
resting-place.’

He looked about him, drawing a deep breath.

‘Look out; you’ll wake them if you breathe like _that_,’ whispered the
child.

‘Are they asleep now?’

‘Of course. Can’t you see?’

‘Not much—yet!’

‘Move like a cat, and speak in whispers. We may see them when they
wake.’

‘How soon?’

‘Dawn. The wind always wakes with the sun. It’s getting closer now.’

It was very wonderful. No words can describe adequately the still
splendour of that vast forest as they stood there, waiting for the
sunrise. Nothing stirred. The trees were carved out of some marvellous
dream-stuff, motionless, yet conveying the impression of life. Paul knew
it and recognised it. All primeval woods possess that quality—trees that
know nothing of men and have never heard the ringing of the axe. The
silence was of death, yet a sense of life that is far beyond death
pulsed through it. Cisterns of quiet, gigantic, primitive life lay
somewhere hidden in these shadowed glades. It seemed the counterpart of
a man’s soul before rude passion and power have stirred it into
activity. Here all slept potentially, as in a human soul. The huge,
sombre pines rose from their beds of golden moss to shake their crests
faintly to the stars, awaiting the coming of the true passion—the great
Sun of life, that should call them to splendour, to reality, and to the
struggle of a bigger life than they yet knew, when they might even try
to shake free from their roots in the hard, confining earth, and fly to
the source of their existence—the sun.

And the sun was coming now. The dawn was at hand. The trees moved gently
together, it seemed. The wood grew lighter. An almost imperceptible
shudder ran through it as through a vast spider’s web.

‘Look!’ cried Nixie. His simple, intuitive little guide was nearer,
after all, to reality than he was, for all his subtle vision. ‘Look,
Uncle Paul!’

His attempt to analyse wonder had prevented his seeing it sooner, but as
she spoke he became aware that something very unusual was going forward
about them. His skin began to tickle, and a strange sense of excitement
took possession of him.

A pale, semi-transparent substance he saw hung everywhere in the air
about them, clinging in spirals and circles to the trunks, and hanging
down from the branches in long slender ribbons that reached almost to
the ground. The colour was a delicate pearl-grey. It covered everything
as with the softest of filtered light, and hung motionless in the air in
painted streamers of thinnest possible vapour.

The silken threads of these gossamer ribbons dropped from the sky in
millions upon millions. They wrapped themselves round the very
star-beams, and lay in sheets upon the ground; they curled themselves
round the stones and crept in among the tiniest crevices of moss and
bark; they clothed the ferns with their fairy gauze. Paul could even
feel them coiling about his hair and beard and eyelashes. They pervaded
the entire scene as light does. The colour was uniform; whether in
sheets or ribbons, it did not vary in shade or in degree of
transparency. The entire atmosphere was pervaded by it, frozen into
absolute stillness.

‘That’s the winds—all that stuff,’ Nixie whispered, her voice trembling
with excitement. ‘They’re asleep still. Aren’t they awful and
wonderful?’

As she spoke a faint vibration ran everywhere through the ribbons.
Involuntarily he tightened his grasp on the child’s hand.

‘That’s their beginning to wake,’ she said, drawing closer to him, ‘like
people moving in sleep.’

The vibration ran through the air again. It quivered as reflections in
the surface of a pool quiver to a ghost of passing wind. They seated
themselves on a fallen trunk and waited. The trees waited too; as
gigantic notes in a set piece, Paul thought, that the coming sun would
presently play upon like a hand upon a vast instrument. Then something
moved a few feet away, and he jumped in spite of himself.

‘Only Jonah,’ explained his guide. ‘He’s asleep like us. Don’t wake him;
he’s having a dream too.’

It was indeed Jonah, wandering vaguely this way and that, disappearing
and reappearing, wholly unaware, it seemed, of their presence. He looked
like a gnome. His feet made no sound as he moved about, and after a few
minutes he lost himself behind a big trunk and they saw him no more. But
almost at once behind him the round figures of China and Japan emerged
into view. They came, moving fast and busily, blundering against the
trees, tumbling down, and butting into everything that came in their
path as though they could not see properly. Paul watched them with
astonishment.

‘They’re only half asleep, and that’s why they see so badly,’ Nixie told
him. ‘Aren’t they silly and happy?’

Before he could answer, something else moved into their limited field of
vision, and he was aware that a silent grey shadow was stalking solemnly
by. All dignity and self-confidence it was; stately, proud, sure of
itself, in a region where it was at home, conscious of its power to see
and move better than any one else. Two wide-open and brilliant eyes,
shining like dropped stars, were turned for a moment towards them where
they sat on the log and watched. Then, silent and beautiful, it passed
on into the darkness beyond, and vanished from their sight.

‘Mrs. Tompkyns!’ whispered Nixie. ‘_She_ saw us all right!’

‘Splendid!’ he exclaimed under his breath, full of admiration.

Nixie pinched his arm. A change had come about in the last few minutes,
and into this dense forest the light of approaching dawn began to steal
most wonderfully. A universal murmuring filled the air.

‘The sun’s coming. They’re going to wake now!’ The child gave a little
shiver of delight. Paul sat up. A general, indefinable motion, he saw,
was beginning everywhere to run to and fro among the hanging streamers.
More light penetrated every minute, and the tree stems began to turn
from black to purple, and then from purple to faint grey. Vistas of
shadowy glades began to open up on all sides; every instant the trees
stood out more distinctly. The myriad threads and ribbons were astir.

‘Look!’ cried the child aloud; ‘they’re uncurling as they wake.’

He looked. The sense of wonder and beauty moved profoundly in his heart.
Where, oh where, in all the dreams of his solitary years had he seen
anything to equal this unearthly vision of the awakening winds?

The winds moved in their sleep, and awoke.

In loops, folds, and spirals of indescribable grace they slowly began to
unwrap themselves from the tree stems with a million little delicate
undulations; like thin mist trembling, and then smoothing out the
ruffled surface of their thousand serpentine eddies, they slid swiftly
upwards from the moss and ferns, disentangled themselves without effort
from roots and stones and bark, and then, reinforced by countless
thousands from the lower branches, they rose up slowly in vast coloured
sheets towards the region of the tree-tops.

And, as they rose, the silence of the forest passed into sound—trembling
and murmuring at first, and then rapidly increasing in volume as the
distant glades sent their voices to swell it, and the note of every
hollow and dell joined in with its contributory note. From all the
shadowy recesses of the wood they heard it come, louder and louder,
leaping to the centre like running great arpeggios, and finally merging
all lesser notes in the wave of a single dominant chord—the song of the
awakened winds to the dawn.

‘They’re singing to the sun,’ Nixie whispered. Her voice caught in her
throat a little and she tightened her grasp on his big hand.

‘They’re changing colour too,’ he answered breathlessly. They stood up
on their log to see.

‘It’s the rate they go does that,’ she tried to explain. She stood on
tiptoe.

He understood what she meant, for he now saw that as the wind rose in
ribbons, streams and spirals, the original pearl-grey changed
chromatically into every shade of colour under the sun.

‘Same as metals getting hot,’ she said. ‘Their colour comes ’cording to
their speed.’

Many of the tints he found it impossible to name, for they were such as
he had never dreamed of. Crimsons, purples, soft yellows, exquisite
greens and pinks ran to and fro in a perfect deluge of colour, as though
a hundred sunsets had been let loose and were hunting wildly for the
West to set in. And there were shades of opal and mother-of-pearl so
delicate that he could only perceive them in his bewildered mind by
translating them into the world of sound, and imagining it was the
colour of their own singing.

Far too rapidly for description they changed their protean dress, moving
faster and faster, glowing fiercely one minute and fading away the next,
passing swiftly into new and dazzling brilliancies as the distant winds
came to join them, and at length rushing upwards in one huge central
draught through the trees, shouting their song with a roar like the sea.

Suddenly they swept up into the sky—sound, colour and all—and silence
once more descended upon the forest. The winds were off and about their
business of the day. The woods were empty. And the sun was at the very
edge of the world.

‘Watch the tops of the trees now,’ cried Nixie, still trembling from the
strange wonder of the scene. ‘The Little Winds will wake the moment the
sun touches them—the little winds in the tops of the trees.’

As she spoke, the sun came up and his first rays touched the pointed
crests above them with gold; and Paul noticed that there were thousands
of tiny, slender ribbons streaming out like elastic threads from the
tips of all the pines, and that these had only just begun to move. As at
a word of command they trooped out to meet the sunshine, undulating like
wee coloured serpents, and uttering their weird and gentle music at the
same time. And Paul, as he listened, understood at last why the wind in
the tree-tops is always more delicately sweet than any other kind, and
why it touches so poignantly the heart of him who hears, and calls
wonder from her deepest lair.

‘The young winds, you see,’ Nixie said, peering up beneath her joined
hands and finding it difficult to keep her balance as she did so. ‘They
sleep longer than the others. And they’re not loose either; they’re
fastened on, and can only go out and come back.’

And, as he watched, he saw these young winds fly out miles into the
brightening sky, making lines of flashing colour, and then tear back
with a whirring rush of music to curl up again round the twigs and pine
needles.

‘Though sometimes they _do_ manage to get loose, and make funny storms
and hurricanes and things that no one expects at all in the sky.’

Paul was on the point of replying to this explanation when something
struck against his legs, and he only just saved himself from falling by
seizing Nixie and risking a flying leap with her from the log.

‘It’s that wicked Japan again,’ she laughed, clambering back on to the
tree.

The puppy was vigorously chasing its own tail, bumping as it did so into
everything within reach. Paul stooped to catch it. At the same instant
it rose up past his very nose, and floated off through the trees and was
lost to view in the sky.

Nixie laughed merrily. ‘It woke in the middle of its silly little
dream,’ she said. ‘It was only half asleep really, and playing. It won’t
come back now.’

‘All puppies are absurd like that——’

But he did not finish his profound observation about puppies, for his
voice at that moment was drowned in a new and terrible noise that seemed
to come from the heart of the wood. It happened just as in a children’s
fairy tale. It bore no resemblance to the roar the winds made; there was
no music in it; it was crude in quality—angry; a sound from another
place.

It came swiftly nearer and nearer, increasing in volume as it came. A
veil seemed to spread suddenly over the scene; the trees grew shadowy
and dim; the glades melted off into mistiness; and ever the mass of
sound came pouring up towards them. Paul realised that the frontiers of
consciousness were shifting again in a most extraordinary fashion, so
that the whole forest slipped off into the background and became a dim
map in his memory, faint and unreal—and, with it, went both Nixie and
himself. The ground rose and fell under their feet. Her hand melted into
something fluid and slippery as he tried to keep his hold upon it. The
child whispered words he could not catch. Then, like the puppy, they
both began to rise.

The roar came out to meet them and enveloped them furiously in mid air.

‘At any rate, we’ve seen the wind!’ he heard the child’s voice murmuring
in his beard. She rose away from him, being lighter, and vanished
through the tops of the trees.

And then the roar drowned him and swept him away in a whirling tempest,
so that he lost all consciousness of self and forgot everything he had
ever known....


The noise resolved itself gradually into the crunching sounds of the
carriage wheels and the clatter of horses’ hoofs coming up the gravel
drive.

Paul looked about him with a sigh that was half a yawn. China and Japan
were still romping on the lawn, Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke were curled up
in hot, soft circles precisely where they had been before, Toby and
Jonah were still busily engaged doing ‘something with daisies’ in the
full blaze of the sunshine, and Nixie lay beside him, all innocence and
peace, still gazing through the tangle of her yellow hair at the
slow-sailing clouds overhead.

And the clouds, he noticed, had hardly altered a line of their shape and
position since he saw them last.

He turned with a jump of excitement.

‘Nixie,’ he exclaimed, ‘I’ve seen the wind!’

She rolled over lazily on her side and fixed her great blue eyes on his
own, between two strands of her hair. From the expression of her brown
face it was possible to surmise that she knew nothing—and everything.

‘Have you?’ she said very quietly. ‘I thought you might.’

‘Yes, but did I dream it, or imagine it, or just think it and make it
up?’ He still felt a little bewildered; the memory of that strangely
beautiful picture-gallery still haunted him. Yonder, before the porch,
the steaming horses and the smart coachman on the box, and his sister
coming across the lawn from the carriage all belonged to another world,
while he himself and Nixie and the other children still stayed with him,
floating in a golden atmosphere where Wind was singing and alive.

‘That doesn’t matter a bit,’ she replied, peering at him gravely before
she pulled her hair over both eyes. ‘The point is that it’s really true!
Now,’ she added, her face completely hidden by the yellow web, ‘all you
have to do is to write it for our next Meeting—write the record of your
Aventure——’

‘And read it out?’ he said, beginning to understand.

The yellow head nodded. He felt utterly and delightfully bewitched.

‘All right,’ he said; ‘I will.’

‘And make it a very-wonderfulindeed Aventure,’ she added, springing to
her feet. ‘Hush! Here’s mother!’

Paul rose dizzily to greet his sister, while the children ran off with
their animals to other things.

‘You’ve had a pleasant afternoon, Paul, dear?’ she asked.

‘Oh, very nice indeed——’ His thoughts were still entangled with the wind
and with the story he meant to write about it for the next Meeting.

She opened her parasol and held it over her head.

‘Now, come indoors,’ he went on, collecting himself with an effort, ‘or
into the shade. This heat is not good for you, Margaret.’ He looked at
her pale, delicate face. ‘You’re tired too.’

‘I enjoyed the drive,’ she replied, letting him take her arm and lead
her towards the house. ‘I met the Burdons in their motor. They’re coming
over to luncheon one day, they said. You’ll like _him_, I think.’

‘That’s very nice,’ he remarked again, ‘very nice. Margaret,’ he
exclaimed suddenly, ashamed of his utter want of interest in all she was
planning for him, ‘I think you ought to have a motor too. I’m going to
give you one.’

‘That is sweet of you, Paul,’ she smiled at him. ‘But really, you know,
one likes horses best. They’re much quieter. Motors do shake one so.’

‘I don’t think that matters; the point is that it’s really true,’ he
muttered to himself, thinking of Nixie’s judgment of his Aventure.

His sister looked at him with her expression of faint amusement.

‘You mustn’t mind me,’ he laughed, planting her in a deck-chair by the
shade of the house; ‘but the truth is, my mind is full just now of some
work I’ve got to do—a report, in fact, I’ve got to write.’

He went off into the house, humming a song. She followed him with her
eyes.

‘He is so strange. I do wish he would see more people and be a little
more normal.’

And in Paul’s mind, as he raced along the passage to his private study
in search of pen and paper, there ran a thought of very different kind
in the shape of a sentence from the favourite of all his books:

‘Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.’




                               CHAPTER XI

  It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most
  stolid. It may be contended, rather, that this (somewhat minor bard)
  in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his
  possessor.—R. L. S.


Now that his first Aventure was an accomplished fact, and that he was
writing it out for the Meeting, Paul carried about with him a kind of
secret joy. At last he had found an audience, and an audience is
unquestionably a very profound need of every human heart. Nixie was
helping him to expression.

‘I’ll write them such an Aventure out of that Wind-Vision,’ he
exclaimed, ‘that they’ll fairly shiver with delight. And if _they_
shiver, why shouldn’t all the children in the world shiver too?’

He no longer made the mistake of thinking it trivial; if he could find
an audience of children all about the world, children known or unknown,
to whom he could show his little gallery of pictures, what could be more
reasonable or delightful? What could be more useful and worth doing than
to show the adventuring mind some meaning in all the beauty that filled
his heart? And the Wind-Vision might be a small—a very small, beginning.
It might be the first of a series of modern fairy tales. The idea
thrilled him with pleasure. ‘A safety-valve at last!’ he cried. ‘An
audience that won’t laugh!’

For, in reality, there was also a queer motherly quality in him which he
had always tried more or less successfully to hide, and of which,
perhaps, he was secretly half ashamed—a feeling that made him long to
give of his strength and sympathy to all that was helpless, weary,
immature.

He went about the house like a new man, for in proportion as he allowed
his imagination to use its wings, life became extraordinarily alive. He
sang, and the world sang with him. Everything turned up little smiling
faces to him, whispering fairy contributions to his tale.

‘The more I give out, the more I get in,’ he laughed. ‘I declare it’s
quite wonderful,’ as though he had really discovered a new truth all for
himself. New forces began to course through his veins like fire. As in a
great cistern tapped for the first time, this new outlet produced other
little cross-currents everywhere throughout his being. Paul began to
find a new confidence. Another stone had shifted in the fabric of his
soul. He moved one stage nearer to the final pattern that it had been
intended from the beginning of time he should assume.

A world within a world began to grow up in the old grey house under the
hill, one consisting of Nixie and her troupe, with Paul trailing heavily
in the rear, very eager; and the other, of the grown-up members of the
household, with Mlle. Fleury belonging to neither, yet in a sense
belonging to both. The cats and animals again were in the former—an
inner division of it, so that it was like a series of Chinese boxes,
each fitting within the next in size.

And this admission of Paul into the innermost circle produced a change
in the household, as well as in himself. After all, the children had not
betrayed him; they had only divined his secret and put him right with
himself. But this was everything; and who is there with a vestige of
youth in his spirit that will not understand the cause of his mysterious
exhilaration?

Outwardly, of course, no definite change was visible in the doings of
the little household. The children said little; they made no direct
reference to his conversion; but the change, though not easily
described, was felt by all. Paul recognised it in every fibre of his
being. Every one, he noticed, understood by some strange freemasonry
that he had been initiated, for every one, he fancied, treated him a
little differently. It was natural that the children should give signs
of increased admiration and affection for their huge new member, but
there was no obvious reason why his sister, and the servants, and the
very animals into the bargain, should regard him with a strain of
something that hesitated between tolerance and tenderness.

If truth were told, they probably did nothing of the sort; it was his
own point of view that had changed. His imagination was responsible for
the rest; yet he felt as though he had been caught into the heart of a
great conspiracy, and the silent, unobtrusive way every one played his,
her, or its part contrived to make him think it was all very real
indeed.

The cats, furry and tender magicians that they are, perhaps interpreted
the change more skilfully and easily than any one else. Without the
least fuss or ceremony they made him instantly free of their world, and
the way their protection and encouragement were extended to him in a
hundred gentle ways gave him an extraordinarily vivid impression that
they, too, had their plans and conferences just as much as the children
had. They made everything seem alive and intelligent, from the bushes
where they hunted to the furniture where they slept. They brought the
whole world, animate and inanimate, into his scheme of existence.
Everything had life, though not the same degree of life. It was all very
subtle and wonderful. He, and the children, and the cats, all had
imagination according to their kind and degree, and all equally used it
to make the world haunted and splendid.

Formerly, for instance, he had often surprised Mrs. Tompkyns going about
in the passages on secret business of her own, perhaps not altogether
good, yet looking up with an _assumption_ of innocence that made it
quite impossible to chide or interfere. (It was, of course, only an
assumption of innocence. A cat’s eyes are too intent and purposeful for
genuine innocence; they are a mask, a concealment of a thousand plans.)
But now, when he met her, she at once stopped and sent her tail aloft by
way of signal, and came to rub against his legs. Her eyes smiled—that
pregnant, significant smile of the feline, shown by mere blinking of the
lids—and she walked slowly by his side with arched back, as an
invitation that he might—nay, that he should—accompany her.

On her great, dark journeys he might not of course yet go, but on the
smaller, less important expeditions he was welcome, and she showed it
plainly every time they met. He was led politely to numerous cupboards,
corners, attics, and cellars, whose existence he had not hitherto
suspected. There were wonderful and terrible places among the
book-shelves and under massive pieces of furniture which she showed to
him when no one was about; and she further taught him how to sit and
stare for long periods until out of vacancy there issued a series of
fascinating figures and scenes of strange loveliness. And he, laughing,
obeyed.

All this, and much else besides, they taught him cleverly.

Some of them, too, came to visit him in his own quarters. They came into
his study, and into his bedroom, and one of them—that black,
thick-haired fellow called Smoke—the one with the ghostly eyes and very
furry trousers—even took to tapping at his door late at night (by
standing on tiptoe he could just reach the knob), and thus established
the right to sleep on the sofa or even to curl up on the foot of the
bed.

And all that the kittens, the puppies, and the out-of-door animals did
to teach him as an equal is better left untold, since this is a story
and not a work on natural history.

Mlle. Fleury, the little French governess, alone seemed curiously out of
the picture. She made difficulties here and there, though not
insuperable ones. The fact was, he saw, that she was not properly in
either of the two worlds. She wanted to be in both at once, but, from
the very nature of her position, succeeded in getting into neither; and
to fall between two worlds is far more perplexing than to fall between
two stools. Paul made allowances for her just as he might have made
allowances for an over-trained animal that had learned too many
human-taught tricks to make its presence quite acceptable to its own
four-footed circle. The charming little person—he, at least, always
thought her voice and her manners and her grace charming after a life
where these were unknown—had to justify herself to the grown-up world
where his sister belonged, as well as to the world of the children whom
she taught. And, consequently, she was often compelled to scold when,
perhaps, her soul cried out that she should bless.

His heart always hammered, if ever so slightly, when he made his way, as
he now did more and more frequently, to the schoolroom or the nursery.
Schoolroom-tea became a pleasure of almost irresistible attractions, and
when it was over and the governess was legitimately out of the way,
Nixie sometimes had a trick of announcing a Regular Meeting to which
Paul was called upon to read out his latest ‘Aventure.’

‘Hulloa! Having tea, are you?’ he exclaimed, looking in at the door one
afternoon shortly after the wind episode. This feigned surprise, which
deceived nobody, he felt was admirable. It was exactly the way Mrs.
Tompkyns did it.

‘Come in, Uncle Paul. _Do_ stay. You _must_ stay,’ came the chorus,
while Mlle. Fleury half smiled, half frowned at him across the table.
‘Here’s just the stodgy kind of cake you like, with jam _and_ honey!’

‘Well,’ he said hesitatingly, as though he scorned such things, while
Mademoiselle poured out a cup, and the children piled up a plate for
him.

He stayed, as it were, by chance, and a minute later was as earnestly
engaged with the cake and tea as if he had come with that special
purpose.

‘It’s all very well done,’ was his secret thought. ‘It’s exactly the way
Mrs. Tompkyns manages all her most important affairs.’

‘Nous avons réunion après,’ Jonah informed the governess presently with
a very grave face. The young woman glanced interrogatively at Paul.

‘Oui, oui,’ he said in his Canadian French, ‘c’est vrai. Réunion
régulaire.’

‘Mais qu’elle idée, donc!’

‘Il est le président,’ said Toby indignantly, pointing with a jam
sandwich.

‘Voilá vous êtes!’ he exclaimed. ‘There you are! Je suis le président!’
and he helped himself to more cake as though by accident.

For five seconds Mlle. Fleury kept her face. Then, in spite of herself,
her lips parted and a row of white teeth appeared.

‘Meester Reevairs, you spoil them,’ she said, ‘and I approve it not.
Mais, voyons donc! Quelles maniéres!’ she added as Sambo and Pouf passed
from Toby’s lap on to the table and began to sniff at the water
cress.... ‘Non, ça c’est _trop_ fort!’ She leaned across to smack them
back into propriety.

‘Abominable,’ Paul cried, ‘abominable tout à fait.’

‘Alwaze when you come such things ’appen.’

‘Pas mon faute,’ he said, helping to catch Pouf.

‘They are deeficult enough without that you make them more,’ she said.

‘Uncle Paul doesn’t know his genders,’ cried Jonah; ‘hooray!’

‘Ma faute,’ he corrected himself, pronouncing it ‘fote.’

Then Toby, struggling with Smoke, whose nose she was trying to force
into a saucer of milk which he did not want, upset the saucer all over
her dress and the table, splashing one and all. Jonah sprang up and
knocked his chair over backwards in the excitement. Mrs. Tompkyns,
wakening from her sleep upon the piano stool, leaped on to the notes of
the open keyboard with a horrible crash. A pandemonium reigned, all
talking, laughing, shouting at once, and the governess scolding. Then
Paul trod on a kitten’s tail under the table and extraordinary shrieks
were heard, whereupon Jonah, stooping to discover their cause, bumped
his head and began to cry. Moving forward to comfort him, Paul’s sleeve
caught in the spout of the tea-pot and it fell with a clatter among the
cups and plates, sending the sugar-tongs spinning into the air, and
knocking the milk-jug sideways so that a white sea flooded the whole
tray and splashed up with white spots on to Paul’s cheeks.

The cumulative effect of these disasters reached a culminating point,
and a sudden hush fell upon the room. The children looked a trifle
scared. Paul, with milk drops trickling down his nose, blushed and
looked solemn. Very guilty and awkward he felt. Mlle. Fleury in fluent,
rattling French explained her view of the situation, at first, however,
without effect. At such moments mere sound and fury are vain; subtle,
latent influences of the personality alone can calm a panic, and these
the little person did not, of course, possess.

To Paul the whole picture appeared in very vivid detail. With the
simplicity of the child and the larger vision of the man he perceived
how closely tears and laughter moved before them; and it really pained
him to see her confused and rather helpless amid all the debris. She was
pretty, slim, and graceful; futile anger did not sit well upon her.

There she stood, little more than a girl herself, staring at him for a
moment speechless, the dainty ruffles of her neat grey dress sticking up
about her pretty throat, he thought, like the bristles of an enraged
kitten. The hair, too, by her ears and neck suddenly seemed to project
untidily and increased the effect. The sunlight from the window behind
her spread through it, making it cloud-like.

‘C’est tout mon—ma faute,’ he said, stretching out both hands
impulsively, ‘tout!’ in his villainous Quebec French. ‘Scold _me_ first,
please.’

There was milk on his left eyebrow, and a crumb of cake in his beard as
well. The governess stared at him, her eyes still blazing ominously. Her
lips quivered. Then, fortunately, she laughed; no one really could have
done otherwise. And that laugh saved the situation. The children, who
had been standing motionless as statues awaiting their doom, sprang
again into life. In a trice the milk had been mopped up, the tongs
replaced, and the tea-pot put to bed under its ornamented cosy.

‘I forgeeve—this time,’ she said. ‘But you are vairy troublesome.’

In future, none the less, she forgave always; her hostility, never quite
sure of itself, vanished from that moment.

‘Blue Summer’ouse,’ whispered Jonah in his ear, ‘and bring your
Wind-Vision to read to us at the Meeting.’

‘But not too much Wind-Vision, please, Meester Reevairs,’ she said,
overhearing the whisper. ‘They think of nothing else.’

Paul stared at her. The thought in his mind was that she ought to come
too, only he knew the children would not approve.

‘Then I must moderate their enthusiasm,’ he said gravely at last.

Mlle. Fleury laughed in his face. ‘_You_ are worst of ze lot, I
know—worst of all. Your Aventures and plays trouble all their
lesson-time.’

‘It is my education,’ he said, as Jonah tugged at his coat from behind
to get him out of the room. ‘You educate _them_; they educate _me_; I
improve slowly. Voilá!’

‘But vairy slowly, n’est-ce pas? And you make up all such _expériences_
like ze Wind-Vision to fill their minds.’

Nixie had told him that all their aventures filtered through to her, and
that she kept a special _cahier_ in her own room, where she wrote them
all out in her own language. ‘Another soul, perhaps, looking about for a
safety-valve,’ he thought swiftly.

‘But, Mademoiselle, why not translate them into French? That’s a good
idea, and excellent practice for them.’

‘Per’aps,’ she laughed, ‘per’aps we do that. C’est une idée au moins.’

She wanted so much, it was clear, to come into their happy little world
of imagination and adventure. He realised suddenly how lonely her life
might be in such a household.

‘You write them, and I will correct them for you,’ he said.

‘Come on, _do_ come on, Uncle,’ cried the voices urgently from the door.
The children were already in the passage. The little governess looked
rather wistfully after them, and on a sudden impulse Paul did a thing he
had never before done in his life. He took her hand and kissed the tips
of her fingers, but so boyishly, and with such simple politeness and
sincerity that there was hardly more in the act than if Jonah had done
the same to Nixie in an aventure of another sort.

‘Au revoir then,’ he said laughingly; ‘chacun a son devoir, don’t they?
And now I go to do mine.’

His sentence was somewhat mixed. He just had time to notice the pretty
blush of confusion that spread over her face, and to hear her laugh ‘You
are weecked children—vairy weecked—and you, Meester Reevairs, the
biggest of all,’ when Nixie and Jonah had him by the hand and they were
off out of the house to their Meeting in the Blue Summer-house.

Thus Mlle. Fleury ceased to be a difficulty in the household so far as
his proceedings with the children were concerned. On the contrary, she
became a helpful force, and often acted as a sort of sentry, or outpost,
between one world and the other. Herself, she never came into their own
private region, but hovered only along the borders of it. For though
little over twenty years of age, she was French, and she understood
exactly how much interest she might allow herself to take in the Society
without endangering her own position,—or theirs—or his. She knew that
she could not enter their world freely and still maintain authority in
the other; but, meanwhile, she managed Paul precisely as though he were
one of her own charges, and saw to it that he did nothing which could
really be injurious to the responsibilities for which she was
answerable.

Thus Paul, thundering along with his belated youth, enjoyed himself more
and more, while he enjoyed, also learned, marked, and read.




                              CHAPTER XII


It haunted him a good deal, this Vision of the Winds. Now he never heard
the stirring of the woods without thinking of those delicately brilliant
streamers flying across the sky.

The satisfaction of spinning a fairy tale out of it for the children’s
Society was only equalled by the pleasure of the original inspiration.
Here, too, was a means of expressing himself he had never dreamed of;
the relief was great. Moreover, it brought him into close touch with the
inexhaustible reservoirs which children draw upon for their endless
world of Make-Believe, and he understood that the child and the poet
live in the same region. His feet were now set upon that secret path
trodden by the feet of children since the world began; and, for all his
burden of years, there was no telling where it might lead him. For the
springs of perennial youth have their sources in that region—the youth
of the spirit, with the constant flow of enthusiasm, the touch of
simple, ever-living beauty, and the whole magic of vision. No one with
imagination can ever become _blasé_, perhaps need ever grow old in the
true sense.

By this means he might at last turn his accumulated stores to some
useful account. The great geysers of imagination that dry up too soon
with the majority might keep bubbling for ever; and provided the pipes
kept open for smaller visions, they might with time become channels for
inspiration of a still higher order. His audience might grow too.

‘I’m getting on,’ he observed to Nixie a few days later; ‘getting on
pretty well for an old man!’

‘I knew you would,’ she replied approvingly. ‘Only you wasted a lot of
time over it. When you came you were so old that Toby thought you were
going to die, you know.’

‘So bad as all that, was it?’

‘H’mmmmm,’ she nodded, her blue eyes faintly troubled; ‘quite!’

Paul took her on his knee and stared at her. The world of elemental
wonder came quite close. There was something of magic about the
atmosphere of this child’s presence that made it possible to believe
anything and everything. She embodied exquisitely so many of his
dreams—those dreams of God and Nature he had lived with all those lonely
years in Canadian solitudes.

‘You know, _I_ think,’ he said slowly as he watched with delight the
look of tender affection upon her face, ‘that, without knowing it,
you’re something of a little magician, Nixie. What do _you_ think?’

But she only laughed and wriggled on his knee.

‘Am I really?’ she said presently. ‘Then what are you, I wonder?’

‘I used to be a Wood Cruiser,’ he replied gravely; ‘but what I am now
it’s rather difficult to say. You ought to know,’ he added, ‘as you’re
the magician who’s changing me.’

‘I’ve not changed you,’ she laughed. ‘I only found you out. The day you
came I saw you were simply full of our things—and that you’d be a sort
of Daddy to us. And we shall want a lot more Aventures, please, as soon
as ever you can write them out——’

She was off his knee and half-way to the house the same second, for the
voice of Mlle. Fleury was heard in the land. He watched her flitting
through the patches of sunshine across the lawn, and caught the
mischievous glance she turned to throw at him as she disappeared through
the open French window—a vision of white dress, black legs, and flying
hair. And only when she was gone did his heavier machinery get to work
with the crop of questions he always thought of too late.

‘A beginning, at any rate!’ he said to himself, thinking of all the
things he was going to write for them. ‘Only I wish we were all in camp
out there among the cedars and hemlocks on Beaver Creek, instead of
boxed up in this toy garden where there are no wild animals, and you
mayn’t cut down trees for a big fire, and there are silly little Notice
Boards all over the place about trespassers being prosecuted....’

The thought touched something in the centre of his being. He travelled;
laughing and sighing as he went. ‘My wig!’ he thought aloud, ‘but it’s
really extraordinary how that child brings those big places over here
for me, and makes them seem alive with all kinds of things _I_ could
never have dreamed of—alone!’

‘Paul, dear, what _are_ you thinking about, here all by yourself—and
without a hat on too, as usual? If the gardeners hear you talking aloud
like this they will think—! Well, I hardly know quite what they _will_
think!’

‘Something Blake said—to be honest,’ he laughed, turning to his sister
who had come silently down the path, dressed, as on the day he had first
seen her, in white serge with a big flower-hat. Languid she looked, but
delicate and wholly charming; she wore brown garden gauntlets over hands
and wrists, and a red parasol she held aloft, shed a becoming pink glow
upon her face.

‘_Maurice_ Blake!’ she exclaimed. ‘Joan’s cousin with the big farm on
the Downs? But you don’t know him!’

‘Not that Blake,’ he laughed again; ‘and Joan, if you mean Joan
Nicholson, Dick’s niece who took up that rescue work, or something, in
London, I have never seen in my life.’

‘Then it’s a book you mean—one of those books you are always poring over
in the library,’ she murmured half reproachfully.

‘One of Dick’s books, yes,’ he replied gently, linking his arm through
hers and leading the way in the direction of the cedars. ‘One of my
“treasures,”’ he added slyly, ‘that you once shamelessly imagined to be
in petticoats.’

She rather liked his teasing. The interests they shared were uncommonly
small, perhaps, and the coinage of available words still smaller. Yet
their differences never took on the slightest ‘edge.’ A genuine
affection smoothed all their little talks.

‘You do read such funny old books, Paul,’ she observed, as though
somewhere in her heart lurked a vague desire to make him more modern.
‘Don’t you ever try books of the day—novels, for instance?’ She had one
under her arm at the moment. He took it to carry for her.

‘I have tried,’ he admitted, a little ashamed of his backwardness, ‘but
I never can make out what they’re driving at—half the time. What they
described has never happened to me, or come into my world. I don’t
recognise it all as true, I mean—’ He stopped abruptly for fear he might
say something to wound her.

‘One can always learn, though, and widen one’s world, can’t one? After
all, we _are_ all in the same world, aren’t we?’

He realised the impossibility of correcting her; the invitation to be
sententious could not catch him; his nature was too profound to contain
the prig.

‘Are we?’ he said gently.

‘Oh, I think so—more or less, Paul. There’s only one _nice_ world, at
least.’ She arranged her hat and parasol to keep the sun off, for she
was afraid of the sun, even the shy sun of England.

He pulled out the deck-chair for her, and opened it.

‘Here,’ she said pointing, ‘if you don’t mind, dear; or perhaps over
_there_ where it looks drier; or just _there_ under that tree, perhaps,
is better still. It’s more sheltered, and there’s less sun, isn’t
there?’

‘I think there is, yes,’ he replied, obeying her. The phrase ‘there’s
less sun’ seemed to him so neatly descriptive of the mental state of
persons without imagination.

‘She’ll come here for her summer holidays soon,’ his sister resumed,
going back to Joan. ‘She works very hard at that “Home” place in town,
and Dick always liked her to use us here as if the place were her own. I
promised that.’ She dropped gracefully into the wicker chair, and Paul
sat down for a moment beside her on the grass. ‘He spent a lot of
capital, you know, in the thing and made her superintendent or
something. She has a sort of passion for this rescuing of slum children,
and, I believe, works herself to death over it, though she has means of
her own. So you will be nice to her when she comes, won’t you, and look
after her a bit? I do what I can, but I always feel I’m rather a
failure. I never know what to talk to her about. She’s so dreadfully in
earnest about everything.’

Paul promised. Joan sounded rather attractive, to tell the truth. He
remembered something, too, of the big organisation his old friend had
founded in London for the rescue and education of waif-boys. A thrill of
pride ran through him, and close at its heels a secret sense of shame,
that he himself did nothing in the great world of action—that his own
life was a mass of selfish dreaming and refined self-seeking, that all
his yearning for God and beauty was after all, perhaps, but a spiritual
egoism. It was not the first time this thought had come to trouble and
perplex. Of late—especially since he had begun to find these
safety-valves of self-expression, and so a measure of relief—his mind
had turned in the direction of some bigger field to work in outside
self, perhaps more than he quite knew or realised.

‘Paul,’ his sister interrupted his reflections, after a prolonged
fidgeting to make herself comfortable so that the parasol should shade
her, the hat not tickle her, and the novel open easily for reading; ‘you
are happy here, aren’t you? You’re not too dull with us, I mean?’

‘It’s quite delightful, Margaret,’ he answered at once. ‘In one sense I
have never been so happy in my life.’ He looked straight at her, the sun
catching his brown beard and face. ‘And I love the children; they’re
just the kind of companions I need.’

‘I’m so glad, so glad,’ she said genuinely. ‘And it’s very kind and
good-natured of you to be with them such a lot. You really almost fill
Dick’s place for them.’ She sighed and half closed her eyes. ‘Some day
you may have children of your own; only you would spoil them quite
atrociously, I’m sure.’

‘Am I spoiling yours?’ he asked solemnly.

‘Dreadfully,’ she laughed; ‘and turning little Mademoiselle’s head into
the bargain.’

It was his turn to burst out laughing. ‘I think that young lady can take
care of herself without difficulty,’ he exclaimed; ‘and as for my
spoiling the children, I think it’s they who are spoiling me!’

And, presently, with some easy excuse, he left her side and went off
into the woods. Margaret watched him charge across the lawn. A perplexed
expression came into her face as she picked up her novel and settled
down into the cushions, balancing the red parasol over her head at a
very careful angle. Admiration was in her glance, too, as she saw him
go. Evidently she was proud of her brother—proud that he was so
different from other people, yet puzzled to the verge of annoyance that
he should be so.

‘What a strange creature he is,’ was her somewhat indefinite reflection;
‘I thought but one Dick could exist in the world! He’s still a boy—not a
day over twenty-five. I wonder if he’s ever been in love, or ever will
be? I think—I hope he won’t; he’s rather nice as he is after all.’

She sighed faintly. Then she dipped again into her novel, wherein the
emotions, from love downwards, were turned on thick and violent as from
so many taps in a factory; got bored with it; looked on to the last
chapter to see what happened to everybody; and, finally—fell asleep.




                              CHAPTER XIII

            To me alone there came a thought of griefs
            A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
                    And I again am strong:

                   ·       ·       ·       ·       ·

            I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,
            The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
                    And all the earth is gay....
                                          _Ode_, W. W.


For the rest of the day Paul was in peculiarly good spirits; he went
about the place full of bedevilment of all kinds, to the astonishment of
the household in general and of his sister in particular. The oppressive
heat seemed to have no effect upon him. There was something in the air
that excited him, and he was very busy getting rid of the excitement.

With bedtime came no desire to sleep. ‘I feel all worked-up, Margaret,’
he said as he lit her candle in the hall. ‘I think it must be an
“aventure” coming,’—though, of course, she had no idea what he meant.

‘There’s thunder about,’ she replied. ‘It’s been so very close all day.’

‘Sleep well,’ Paul said when he left her at the top of the stairs; and
the last thing he heard as he went down the long winding passage to his
bedroom in the west wing was her voice faintly assuring him ‘One always
does here, I’m glad to say.’

Once inside, and the door shut, he gave himself up to his mood. It was a
mood apparently that came from nowhere. A soft and mysterious
excitement, all delicious, stirred in the depths of his being, rising
slowly to the surface. Perhaps it was growing-pains somewhere in the
structure of his personality, engineered subconsciously by his
imagination; perhaps only ‘weather.’ He always followed the barometer
like a strip of dried seaweed.

But on this particular night something more than mere ‘weather’ was
abroad; his nerves sent a succession of swift faint warnings to his
brain. To begin with, the night herself claimed definite attention. Some
nights are just ordinary nights; others touch the soul and whisper ‘I am
the night. Look at me. Listen!’

He obeyed the summons and went to the window, leaning out as his habit
was. The darkness pressed up in a solid wall, charged to the brim with
mysteries waiting to reveal themselves. No trees were visible, no
outline of moor or hill or garden. The sky was pinned down to the
horizon more tightly than usual—keeping back all manner of things. Very
little air crept beneath the edges, so that the atmosphere was
oppressive. The day had been cloudless, but with the sunset whole
continents of vapour had climbed upon the hills of the evening wind,
driven slowly by high currents that had not yet come near enough the
earth to be heard and felt.

He coughed—gently. The least noise, he felt, would shatter some soft and
delicate structure that rose everywhere through the darkness—some
web-like shadow-scaffolding that reared upwards, supporting the night.

‘Something’s going to happen,’ he said low to himself. ‘I can feel it
coming.’

He became very imaginative, enjoying his mood enormously, letting it act
as a mental purge. Aventures that he would discover for the next Meeting
swept through him. The stress and fever of creative fancy, stirred by
the deep travailing of the elements behind that curtain of night, was
upon him. Then, sleep being far away, he went to the writing-table,
where Nixie’s deft hands had everything prepared, lit a second candle,
and began to write.

‘I’ll write “How I climbed the Scaffolding of the Night,”’ he murmured;
‘for I feel it true within me. I feel as if I were part of the
night—part of all this beautiful soft darkness.’

But, before he had written a dozen lines, he stopped and fell to
listening again, staring past the steady candle-flames out into the
open. The stillness was profound. A single ivy-leaf rattled sharply all
by itself on the wall outside his window. He felt as if that leaf tapped
faintly upon his own brain. By a curious process known only to the
poetic temperament, he passed on to _feel with_ everything about him—as
though some portion of himself actually merged in with the silence, with
the perfumes of trees and garden, with the voice of that little tapping
leaf. And, in proportion as he realised this, he transferred the magic
of it to his tale. He found the words that fitted his conception like a
natural skin. He knew in some measure the satisfaction and relief of
expression.

‘A year ago—a month ago,’ he thought with delight, ‘this would have been
impossible to me. Nixie has taught me so much already!’

What he really wanted, of course, were the living, flaming words of
poetry. But this he knew was denied him; perhaps the fire of inspiration
did not burn steadily enough; perhaps the intellectual foundation was
not there. At any rate, he could only do his best and struggle with the
prose, and this he did with intense pleasure.

After a time he laid his pen down and fell to thinking again—the kind of
reverie that dramatises a mood before the inner vision. And another
inspiration came upon him with its sudden little glory; he realised
vividly that _within_ himself a region existed where all that he desired
might find fulfilment; where yearnings, dreams, desires might come true.
There existed this inner place within where he might visualise all he
most wished for into a state of reality. The workshop of the creative
imagination was its vestibule....

Whether or not he could put it into words for others to realise was
merely a question of craft....

He must have sat thinking in this way much longer than he knew, for the
candles had burnt down quite low when at length he bestirred himself
with a mighty yawn and rose to go to bed. But hardly had he begun to
unfasten his crumpled black tie when something made him pause.

Far away, through the hush that covered the world, that ‘something’ was
astir—coming swiftly nearer. He stepped back into the middle of the room
and waited. Smoke, the sleeping black cat on the sofa, sat up and waited
too. Looking about it with brilliant green eyes, wide open, and whiskers
twitching backwards and forwards, it understood even better than he did
that a change in all that world of darkness had come to pass. The animal
stared alternately at the window and the door.

For another minute the stillness held supreme. Then, from the silent
reaches beyond, this new sound came suddenly close, dropping down
through leagues of night. It began with a faint roar in the chimney; a
tree outside uttered a soft, rushing cry; a thousand leaves, instead of
one, rattled on the wall.

A Messenger, running headlong through the darkness, was calling aloud a
warning as it ran, for all to understand who could. And, among the few
who were awake and understood, Paul and his four-footed companion were
certainly the first.

A sudden movement of the vast fabric of darkness came next. That
scaffolding of shadows trembled, as though the same moment it would fall
and let in—Light. In front of the bow window the muslin curtain that so
long had hung motionless, now bellied out slowly into the room. The
movement, mysterious and suggestive, claimed attention significantly.
Paul and Smoke, watching it, exchanged glances. Then, with a long,
sighing sound, it floated back again to its original position. It hung
down straight and still as before.

But in that moment something had entered the room. Borne by this
messenger of the coming storm, this stray Wind had left its warning—and
was gone!

Smoke leapt softly down and padded over to sniff the curtain, and having
done so, blinked up at Paul with eloquent eyes, and sat back to wait
and—wash! No apparatus of speech ever said more plainly ‘Look out!
Something’s coming! Better be prepared as I am!’

And something did come—almost the same minute. The forces that had so
long been trying to upset the tent of darkness, did upset it, and from
one uplifted corner there rushed down upon the world a blue-white sheet
of light that was utterly gorgeous. For one instant trees, moor, hill
leaped into vivid outline. The hands that held the sheet of brilliance
shook it from the four corners, and all the sky shook with it; and,
immediately after, the scaffolding of night fell with a prodigious
crash, as the true storm, following upon its herald, descended with a
hundred thunders and the roar of ten hundred trumpets.

The true wind rushed headlong into the room and extinguished both
candles. Smoke rubbed against Paul’s feet in the darkness, thoroughly
aroused; but Paul himself stood still, as the thrill and splendour of it
all entered his heart and filled him with delight. Thunder, lightning,
wind—all passed mysteriously into his blood till he was almost conscious
of a desire to add the sound of his own voice and shout aloud. The
excitement of the elemental forces swept into himself. He understood now
the signs of preparation that had been going forward in him during the
day.

Splendid sensations, the most splendid he ever knew, raced to and fro in
his being, till it almost seemed as if his consciousness transferred
itself to the tempest. Surely, that great wind tore out of his heart,
that lightning sprang from his brain, that river of rain washed, not
merely out of the sky, but out of himself. The edges of his personality
became fluid and melted off into the very nature of the elements....

‘Now,’ he exclaimed aloud, pacing to and fro while Smoke followed him in
the darkness and tried to play with the bows on his pumps, ‘had I but
the means of expression, what a message I could give to the world, of
beauty, splendour, power!’ He laughed in his excitement. ‘If only the
strings of my poor instrument had been tuned——!’

Sighing a little to himself at the thought, he went to the window. The
first fury of the storm had passed; there was a sudden deep lull broken
only by the rushing drip of rain; he smelt the wet foliage and soaking
grass. Close to the window, it chanced, there was a dead tree, and in
its leafless branches, outlined sharply by the lightning against the
black sky, he traced what seemed the huge letters of some elemental
alphabet; and at that moment, the returning wind passed through them
like a hand on giant strings. It drew forth a wonderful sound in
response, a sound that pierced as a two-edged sword to the centre of his
being. It was a true singing wind—a Wind of Inspiration.

And, as he heard it, the great wave that fought for utterance rose
within him and began to force and tear its way out in spite of
everything. Words came pouring through him—like the stammering of torn
strings upon a fiddle—clipped wings trying to fly—sparks streaming
towards flame yet never achieving it. Similes and metaphors rushed,
mixed and headlong, through his mind. In a moment he had dashed across
the floor; the candles were again alight; and Paul, pencil in hand, was
sitting at the table before a sheet of blank foolscap, the storm
crashing about him, and Smoke watching him calmly with eyes full of
expectant wonder.

And then was enacted a little drama—tragedy if ever there was one—that
must often enough take place in the secret places of the world’s houses,
where the dumb poet seeks to transfer his genuine passion into the
measure of halting and inadequate verse. Poignantly dramatic the
spectacle must be, though never witnessed mercifully by an audience of
more than one. Paul wrote fast, setting the words down almost as they
came. It was that little passionate Wind of Inspiration that was the
cause of all the trouble. Smoke jumped up on the table to watch the
motion of the pencil across the paper. For some reason he hardly thought
it worth while to play with it:

                   The Winds of Inspiration blow,
                     Yet pass me ever by;
                   And songs God taught me long ago,
                     Unuttered burn and—die.

He read the verse over, and with an impatient motion altered ‘burn’ into
‘fade.’ Then he shook his head and continued:

                 From all the far blue hills of heaven
                   The dews of beauty rain;
                 Yet unto me no drops are given
                   To quench the ancient pain.

He scratched out ‘ancient’ and wrote over the top ‘undying.’ Then he
scratched out ‘undying’ and put ‘ancient’ back in its place. This time
Smoke stretched out a long black paw with a velvet end to it and gave
the pencil a deliberate dab. Paul either ignored, or did not notice it;
but Smoke left the paw thrust forward upon the paper so as to be ready
for the next dab.

                   I know the passion of the night,
                     Full of all days unborn,—
                   Full of the yearning of the light
                     For one undying Morn.

Smoke caught the tip of the pencil with a swift and accurate stroke, and
the ‘M’ of ‘Morn’ was provided with an irregular tail Paul had not
intended. Very quickly, however, without further interruption, he wrote
on to the end.

             Above the embers of my heart,
               Waiting the Living Breath;
             The sparks fly listlessly apart—
               Then circle to their death.

             Dead sparks that gathered ne’er to flame,
               Nor felt the kiss of fire!
             Dead thoughts that never found the name
               To spell their deep desire!

             Is then this instrument so poor
               That it may never sound
             Songs that must pass for evermore
               Unuttered and uncrowned?

             O soul that fain would’st steal heaven’s fire,
               Who clipped thy golden wings?
             Who made so passionate a lyre,
               Then never tuned the strings?

             The Winds of Inspiration blow,
               Yet pass me ever by;
             And songs God taught me long ago,
               Lost in the silence—die.


He rose from the table with a gesture of abrupt impatience and read the
entire effusion through from beginning to end. First he laughed, then he
sighed. He wondered for a moment how it was that so little of his
passion had crept into the poor words. He crumpled up the paper and
tossed it into the drawer; and then, blowing out the candles, moved over
to the big arm-chair and dropped down into it. Again, as he sat there,
his thoughts fell to dramatising his mood. He imagined that region
within himself where all might come true, and all yearnings find
adequate expression. The idea got more and more mingled with the storm.
He pictured it to himself with extraordinarily vivid detail.

‘There _is_ such a place, such a state,’ he murmured, ‘and it is, it
must be accessible.’

He heard the clock in the stables—or was it the church—strike the
quarter before midnight.

As he sat in the big chair, Smoke left the table and curled up again on
the mat at his feet.




                              CHAPTER XIV

  Vision or imagination is a representation of what actually exists,
  really and unchangeably. He who does not imagine in stronger and
  better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his
  _perishing_ mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.—W. B.


It was Smoke who first drew his attention to something near the door by
‘padding’ slowly across the carpet and staring up at the handle. Paul’s
eyes, following him, perceived next that the brass knob was silently
turning. Then the door opened quickly and on the threshold stood—Nixie.
The open door made such a draught that the twenty winds tearing about
inside the room almost lifted the mat at his feet. Behind her he saw the
shadowy outline of a second figure, which he recognised as Jonah.

‘Shut the door—quick!’ he said, but they had done so and were already
beside him almost before the words were out of his mouth. In spite of
the darkness a very faint radiance came with them so that he could
distinguish their faces plainly; and his amazement on seeing them at all
at this late hour was instantly doubled when he perceived further that
they were fully dressed for going out. At the same time, however, so
deep had he been in his reverie, and so strongly did the excitement of
it yet linger in his blood, that he hardly realised how wicked they were
to be parading the house at such a time of the night, and that his
obvious duty was to bundle them back to bed. In a strange, queer way
they almost seemed part of his dream, part of his dramatised mood, part
of the region of wonder into which his thoughts had been leading him.
Moreover, he felt in some dim fashion that they had come with a purpose
of great importance.

‘It’s awfully late, you know,’ he exclaimed under his breath, peering
into their faces through the darkness.

‘But not too late, if we start at once,’ Jonah whispered. For a moment
Paul had almost thought that they would melt away and disappear as soon
as he spoke to them, or that they would not answer at all. But now this
settled it; these were no figures in a dream. He felt their hands upon
his arms and neck; the very perfume of Nixie’s hair and breath was about
him. She was dressed, he noticed, in her red cloak with the hood over
her head, and her eyes were popping with excitement. The expression on
her face was earnest, almost grave. He saw the faint gleam of the gold
buckle where the shiny black belt enclosed her little waist.

‘If we start _at once_, I said,’ repeated Jonah in a nervous whisper,
pulling at his hand.

Paul started to his feet and began fumbling with his black tie, feeling
vaguely that either he ought to tie it properly or take it off
altogether, and that it was a sort of indecent tinsel to wear at such a
time. But he only succeeded in pricking his finger with the pin sticking
out of the collar. He felt more than a little bewildered, if the truth
were told.

‘I’ll do that for you,’ Nixie said under her breath; and in a twinkling
her deft fingers had whipped the strip of satin from his neck.

‘You don’t want a tie where we’re going,’ she laughed softly.

‘Or a hat either,’ added Jonah. ‘But I wish you’d hurry, please.’

‘I’d better put on another coat or a dressing-gown, or something,’ he
stammered.

‘Coat’s best,’ Jonah told him, and in a moment he had changed into a
tweed Norfolk jacket that lay upon the chair.

They pulled him towards the door, Nixie holding one hand, Jonah the
other, and Smoke following so closely at his heels that he almost seemed
to be prodding him gently forward with his velvet padded boots. Paul
understood that tremendous forces, elemental in character like the wind
and rain and lightning, somehow added their immense suasion to the
little hands that pulled his own. He made no resistance, but just
allowed himself to go; and he went with a wild and boyish delight
tearing through his mind.

‘Are we going out then?’ he asked, ‘out of doors?’

‘What’s the exact time, the _very_ exact time?’ Nixie asked hurriedly,
ignoring his question; and though Paul had looked a few minutes before
they came in, he had quite forgotten by now. She helped herself to his
watch, burrowing under his coat to find it, and peering closely to read
the position of the hands.

‘Five minutes to twelve!’ she exclaimed, addressing Jonah in excited
whispers. ‘Oh, I say! We must be off at once, or we shall miss the crack
altogether. Come on, Uncle, or your life won’t be safe a minute.’

‘Then what will it be a month, I should like to know?’ he laughed as he
was swept along through the darkness, not knowing what to say or think.

‘The crack! The crack! Quick, or we shall miss it!’ cried the children
in the same sentence, urging him heavily forward.

‘What crack? Where are we going to? What does it all mean?’ he asked
breathlessly, trying to avoid treading on their toes and the toes of
Smoke who flew beside them with tail held swiftly aloft as though to
guide them.

They brought him up with a sudden bump just outside the door, and Nixie
turned up a serious face to explain, while Jonah waited impatiently in
front of them.

‘Quick!’ she whispered, ‘listen and I’ll tell you. We’re going to find
the crack between Yesterday and To-morrow, and then—slip through it.’

His heart leaped with excitement as he heard.

‘Go on,’ he cried. ‘Tell me more!’

‘You see, Yesterday really begins just after Midnight when To-day ends’;
she said, ‘and To-morrow begins there too.’

‘Of course.’

‘After Midnight, To-morrow jumps away again a whole day, and is as far
off as ever. That’s the nearest you can get to To-morrow.’

‘I see.’

‘And Yesterday, which has been a whole day away, suddenly jumps up close
behind again. So that Yesterday and To-morrow,’ she went on, eager with
excitement, ‘meet at Midnight for a single second before flying off to
their new places. Daddy told us that long ago.’

‘Exactly. They must.’

‘But now the world is old and worn. There’s a tiny little crack between
Yesterday and To-morrow. They don’t join as they once did, and, if we’re
_very_ quick, we can find the crack and slip through——’

‘Bless my Timber Limits!’ he exclaimed; ‘what a glorious notion!’

‘And, once inside there, there’s no time, of course,’ she went on, more
and more hurriedly. ‘_Anything_ may happen, and _everything_ come true.’

‘The very region I was thinking about just now!’ thought Paul. ‘The very
place! I’ve found it!’

‘_Do_ hurry up, oh _do_!’ put in Jonah with a loud whisper that echoed
down the corridor, for his patience was at length exhausted by all this
explanation. ‘You _are_ so slow getting started.’

‘Ready!’ cried Paul and Nixie in the same breath.

They were off! Down the dark and silent stairs on tiptoe, through the
empty halls, past the hat-racks and the stuffed deer heads that grinned
down upon them from the walls, along the stone passage to the kitchen
region, where the row of red fire-buckets gleamed upon the shelves, and
so, past the ghostly pantry, to the back door. This they found open, for
Jonah had already run ahead and unlocked it. Another minute and they had
crossed the yard by the stables, where the pump stood watching them like
a figure with an outstretched arm, and soon were well out on to the lawn
at the back of the house. The rain had ceased, but the wind caught them
here with such tremendous blows and shouting that they could hardly hear
themselves speak, and had to keep closely together in a bunch to make
their way at all. It was pitch dark and the stars were hidden. Paul
stumbled and floundered, treading incessantly on the toes of the more
nimble children. Smoke ran like a black shadow, now in front, now
behind.

‘We’re nearly there,’ Nixie cried encouragingly, as he made a false step
and landed with a crash in the middle of some low laurel bushes. ‘But
_do_ be more careful, Uncle, please,’ she added, helping him out again.

‘There’s the clock striking!’ Jonah called, a little in front of them.
‘We’re only just in time!’

Paul recovered himself and pulled up beside them under the shadows of
the big twin cedars that stood like immense sentries at the end of the
lawn. He came rolling in, swaying like a ship in a heavy sea. And, as he
did so, the sound of a church bell striking the hour came to their ears
through the terrific uproar of the elements, blown this way and that by
the wind.

It was midnight striking.

At the same instant he heard a peculiar sharp sound like whistling—the
noise wind makes tearing through a narrow opening.

‘The crack, the crack!’ cried his guides together. ‘That’s the air
rushing. It’s coming. Look out!’ They seized him by the hands.

‘But I shall never get through,’ shouted Paul, thinking of his size for
the first time.

‘Yes you will,’ Nixie screamed back at him above the roar. ‘Between the
sixth and seventh strokes, remember.’

The fifth stroke had already sounded. The wind caught it and went
shrieking into the sky.

Six! boomed the distant bell through the night. They held his hands in a
vice.

There was a sound like an express train tearing through the air. A quick
flash of brilliance followed, and a long slit seemed to open suddenly in
the sky before them, and then flash past like lightning. Nixie tugged at
one hand, and Jonah tugged at the other. Smoke scampered madly past his
feet.

A wild rush of wind swept him along, whistling in his ears; there was a
breathless and giddy sensation of dropping through empty space that
seemed as though it could never end—and then Paul suddenly found himself
sitting on a grassy bank beside a river, Nixie and Jonah on either side
of him, and Smoke washing his face in front of them as though nothing in
the whole world had ever happened to disturb his equanimity. And a
bright, soft light, like the light of the sun, shone warmly over
everything.

‘Only just managed it,’ Nixie observed to Jonah. ‘He _is_ rather wide,
isn’t he?’

‘Everybody’s thin somewhere,’ was the reply.

‘And the crack is very stretchy’—she added,—‘luckily.’

Paul drew a long breath and stretched himself.

‘Well,’ he said, still a little breathless and dizzy, ‘such things were
never done in my day.’

‘But this isn’t your day any more,’ explained Nixie, her blue eyes
popping with laughter and mischief, ‘it’s your night. And, anyhow, as I
told you, there’s no time here at all. There’s no hurry now.’




                               CHAPTER XV

  The imagination is not a state; it is the human existence itself.—W.
  B.


Paul, looking round, felt utterly at peace with himself and the world;
at rest, he felt. That was his first sensation in the mass. He recovered
in a moment from his breathless entrance, and a subtle pleasure began to
steal through his veins. It seemed as if every yearning he had ever
known was being ministered to by competent unseen Presences; and,
obviously, the children and the cats—Mrs. Tompkyns had somehow managed
to join Smoke—felt likewise, for their countenances beamed and blinked
supreme contentment.

‘Ah!’ observed Jonah, sitting contentedly on the grass beside him. ‘This
is the place.’ He heaved a happy little sigh, as though the statement
were incontrovertible.

‘It is,’ echoed Paul. And Nixie’s eyes shone like blue flowers in a
field of spring.

‘The crack’s smaller than it used to be though,’ he heard her murmuring
to herself. ‘Every year it’s harder to get through. I suppose
something’s happening to the world—or to people; some change going on——’

‘Or we’re getting older,’ Jonah put in with profounder wisdom than he
knew.

Paul congratulated himself upon his successful entrance. He felt
something of a dog! The bank on which he lay sloped down towards a river
fledged with reeds and flowers; its waters, blue as the sky, flowed
rippling by, and a soft wind, warm and scented, sighed over it from the
heart of the summer. On the opposite shore, not fifty yards across, a
grove of larches swayed their slender branches lazily in the sun, and a
little farther down the banks he saw a line of willows drooping down to
moisten their tongue-like leaves. The air hummed pleasantly with
insects; birds flashed to and fro, singing as they flew; and, in the
distance, across miles of blue meadowlands, hills rose in shadowy
outline to the sky. He feasted on the beauty of it all, absorbing it
through every sense.

‘But where are we?’ he asked at length, ‘because a moment ago we were in
a storm somewhere?’ He turned to Nixie who still lay talking to herself
contentedly at his side. ‘And what really happens here?’ he added with a
blush. ‘I feel so extraordinarily happy.’

They lay half-buried among the sweet-scented grasses. Jonah burrowed
along the shore at some game of his own close by, and the cats made a
busy pretence of hunting wild game in a dozen places at once, and then
suddenly basking in the sun and washing each other’s necks and backs as
though wild-game hunting were a bore.

‘Nothing ’xactly—_happens_,’ she answered, and her voice sounded
curiously like wind in rushes—‘but everything—_is_.’

It seemed to him as though he listened to some spirit of the ages, very
wise with the wisdom of eternal youth, that spoke to him through the
pretty little mouth of this rosy-faced child.

‘It’s like that river,’ she went on, pointing to the blue streak winding
far away in a ribbon through the landscape, ‘which flows on for ever in
a circle, and never comes to an end. Everything here goes on always, and
then always begins again.’

For the river, as Paul afterwards found out, ran on for miles and miles,
in the curves of an immense circle, of which the sea itself was
apparently nothing but a widening of certain portions.

‘So here,’ continued the child, making a pattern with daisies on his
sleeve as she talked, ‘you can go over anything you like again and
again, and it need never come to an end at all. Only,’ she added,
looking up gravely into his face, ‘you must really, _really_ want it to
start with.’

‘Without getting tired?’ he asked, wonderingly.

‘Of course; because _you_ begin over and over again with it.’

‘Delightful!’ he exclaimed, ‘that means a place of eternal youth, where
emotions continually renew themselves.’

‘It’s the place where you find lost things,’ she explained, with a
little puzzled laugh at his foolish long words, ‘and where things that
came to no proper sort of end—things that didn’t come true, I mean, in
the world, all happen and enjoy themselves——’

He sat up with a jerk, forgetting the carefully arranged daisies on his
coat, and scattering them all over the grass.

‘But this is too splendid!’ he cried. ‘This is what I’ve always been
looking for. It’s what I was thinking about just now when I tried to
write a poem and couldn’t.’

‘_We_ found it long ago,’ said the child, pointing to Jonah and Mrs.
Tompkyns, Smoke having mysteriously disappeared for the moment. ‘We live
here really most of the time. Daddy brought us here first.’

‘Things life promised, but never gave, here come to full fruition,’ Paul
murmured to himself. ‘You mean,’ he added aloud, ‘this is where ideals
that have gone astray among the years may be found again, and actually
realised? A kingdom of heaven within the heart?’ He was very excited,
and forgot for the moment he was speaking to a child.

‘I don’t know about all that,’ she answered, with a puzzled look. ‘But
it is life. We live-happily-ever-after here. That’s what I mean.’

‘It all comes true here?’

‘All, all, all. All broken things and all lost things come here and are
happy again,’ she went on eagerly; ‘and if you look hard enough you can
find ’xactly what you want and ’xactly what you lost. And once you’ve
found it, nothing can break it or lose it again.’

Paul stared, understanding that the voice speaking through her was
greater than she knew.

‘And some things are lost, _we_ think,’ she added, ‘simply because they
were wanted—wanted very much indeed, but never got.’

‘Yet these are certainly the words of a child,’ he reflected, wonder and
delight equally mingled, ‘and of a child tumbling about among great
spiritual things in a simple, intuitive fashion without knowing it.’

‘All the things that ought to happen, but never do happen,’ she went on,
picking up the scattered daisies and making the pattern anew on a
different part of his coat. ‘They all are found here.’

‘Wishes, dreams, ideals?’ he asked, more to see what answer she would
make than because he didn’t understand.

‘I suppose that’s the same thing,’ she replied. ‘But, now _please_,
Uncle Paul, keep still a minute or I can’t possibly finish this crown
the daisies want me to make for them.’

Paul stared into her eyes and saw through them to the blue of the sky
and the blue of the winding river beyond; through to the hills on the
horizon, a deeper blue still; and thence into the softer blue shadows
that lay over the timeless land buried in the distances of his own
heart, where things might indeed come true beyond all reach of
misadventure or decay. For this, of course, was the real land of wonder
and imagination, where everything might happen and nothing need grow
old. The vision of the poet saw ... far—far....

All this he realised through the blue eyes of the child at his side, who
was playing with daisies and talking about the make-believe of children.
His being swam out into the sunshine of great distances, of endless
possibilities, all of which he might be able afterwards to interpret to
others who did not see so far, or so clearly, as himself. He began to
realise that his spirit, like the endless river at his feet, was without
end or beginning. Thrills of new life poured into him from all sides.

‘And when we go back,’ he heard the musical little voice saying beside
him, ‘that church will be striking exactly where we left it—the sixth
stroke, I mean.’

‘Of course; _I_ see!’ cried Paul, beginning to realise the full value of
his discovery, ‘for there’s no time here, is there? Nothing grows old.’

‘That’s it,’ she laughed, clapping her hands, ‘and you can find all the
lost and broken things you want, if you look hard and—really want them.’

‘I want a lot,’ he mused, still staring into the little wells of blue
opposite; ‘the kind that are lost because they’ve never been “got,”’ he
added with a smile, using her own word.

‘For instance,’ Nixie continued, hanging the daisies now in a string
from his beard, ‘all my broken things come here and live happily—if I
broke them by accident; but if I broke them in a temper, they are still
angry and frighten me, and sometimes even chase me out again. Only Jonah
has more of these than I have, and they are all on the other side of the
river, so we’re quite safe here. Now watch,’ she added in a lower voice,
‘Look hard under the trees and you’ll see what I mean perhaps. And wish
hard, too.’

Paul’s eyes followed the direction of her finger across the river, and
almost at once dim shapes began to move to and fro among the larches,
starting into life where the shadows were deepest. At first he could
distinguish no very definite forms, but gradually the outlines grew
clearer as the forms approached the edges of the wood, coming out into
the sunshine.

‘The ghosts! The ghosts of broken things!’ cried Jonah, running up the
bank for protection. ‘Look! They’re coming out. Some one’s thinking
about them, you see!’

Paul, as he gazed, thought he had never seen such an odd collection of
shapes in his life. They stalked about awkwardly like huge insects with
legs of unequal length, and with a lop-sided motion that made it
impossible to tell in which direction they meant to go. They had
brilliant little eyes that flashed this way and that, making a delicate
network of rays all through the wood like the shafts of a hundred
miniature search-lights. Their legs, too, were able to bend both
forwards and backwards and even sideways, so that when they appeared to
be coming towards him they really were going away; and the strange
tumbling motion of their bodies, due to the unequal legs, gave them an
appearance that was weirdly grotesque rather than terrifying.

It was, indeed, a curious and delightful assortment of goblins. There
were dolls without heads, and heads without dolls; milk jugs without
handles, china teapots without spouts, and spouts without china teapots;
clocks without hands, or with cracked and wounded faces; bottles without
necks; broken cups, mugs, plates, and dishes, all with gaping slits and
cracks in their anatomy, with half their faces missing, or without heads
at all; every sort of vase imaginable with every sort of handle
unimaginable; tin soldiers without swords or helmets, china puppies
without tails, broken cages, knives without handles; and a collection of
basins of all sizes that would have been sufficient to equip an entire
fleet of cross-channel steamers: altogether a formidable and pathetic
army of broken creatures.

‘What in the world are they trying to do?’ he asked, after watching
their antics for some minutes with amazement.

‘Looking for the broken parts,’ explained Jonah, who was half amused,
half alarmed. ‘They get out of shape like that because they pick up the
first pieces they find.’

‘And _you_ broke all these things?’

The boy nodded his head proudly. ‘I reckernise most of them,’ he said,
‘but they’re nearly all accidents. I said “sorry” for each one.’

‘That, you see,’ Nixie interrupted, ‘makes all the difference. If you
break a thing on purpose in a temper, you murder it; but the accidents
come down here and feel nothing. They hardly know who broke them. In the
end they all find their pieces. It’s the heaven of broken things, we
call it. But now let’s send them away.’

‘How?’ asked Paul.

‘By forgetting them,’ cried Jonah.

They turned their faces away and began to think of other things, and at
once the figures began to fade and grow dim. The lights went out one by
one. The grotesque shapes melted into the trees, and a minute later
there was nothing to be seen but the slender larch stems and the play of
sunlight and shadow beneath their branches.

‘You see how it works, at any rate,’ Nixie said. ‘Anything you’ve lost
or broken will come back if you think hard enough—nice things as well as
nasty things—but they must be real, real things, and you must want them
in a real, real way.’

It was, indeed, he saw, the region where thoughts come true.

‘Then do broken people come here too?’ Paul asked gravely after a
considerable pause, during which his thoughts went profoundly wandering.

‘Yes; only we don’t happen to know any. But all our dead animals are
here, all the kittens that had to be drowned, and the puppies that died,
and the collie the Burdons’ motor killed, and Birthday, our old horse
that had to be shot. They’re all here, and all happy.’

‘Let’s go and see them then,’ he cried, delighted with this idea of a
heaven of broken animals.

In a moment they were on their feet and away over the springy turf,
singing and laughing in the sunshine, picking flowers, jumping the
little brooks that ran like crystal ribbons among the grass, Nixie and
Jonah dancing by his side as though they had springs in their feet and
wings on their shoulders. More and more the country spread before them
like a great garden run wild, and Paul thought he had never seen such
fields of flowers or smelt such perfumes in the wind.

‘What’s the matter now?’ he exclaimed, as Jonah stopped and began to
stare hard at an acre of lilies of the valley by the way.

‘He’s calling some things of his own,’ Nixie answered. ‘Stare and
think—and they’ll all come. But we needn’t bother about him. Come
along!’ And he only had time to see the lilies open in an avenue to make
way for a variety of furry, four-legged creatures, when the child pulled
him by the hand and they were off again at full speed across the fields.

A sound of neighing made him turn round, and before he could move aside,
a large grey horse with a flowing tail and a face full of gentle
beneficence came trotting over the turf and stopped just behind him,
nuzzling softly into his shoulder.

‘Nice, silly-faced old thing,’ said Nixie, running up to speak to it,
while a brown collie trotted quietly at her heels. A little further off,
peeping up through a tangled growth of pinks and meadow-sweet, he saw
the faces of innumerable kittens, watching him with large and
inquisitive eyes, their ears just topping the flowers like leaves of
fur. Such a family of animals Paul thought he had never even dreamed of.

‘This is the heaven of the lost animals,’ Nixie cried from her seat on
the back of the grey horse, having climbed up by means of a big stone.
On her shoulder perched a small brown owl, blinking in the light like
the instantaneous shutter of a photographic camera. It had fluffy
feathers down to its ankles like trousers, and was very tame. ‘And they
are always happy here and have plenty to eat and drink. They play with
us far better here than outside, and are never frightened. Of course,
too, they get no older.’

Paul climbed up behind her on the horse’s back.

‘Now we’re off!’ he cried; and with Jonah and a dozen animals at their
heels, they raced off across the open country, holding on as best they
could to mane and tail, laughing, shouting, singing, while the wind
whistled in their ears and the hot sun poured down upon their bare
heads.

Then, suddenly, the horse stopped with a jerk that sent them sprawling
forward upon his neck. He turned his head round to look at them with a
comical expression in his big, brown eyes. Paul slid off behind, and
Nixie saved herself by springing sideways into a bed of forget-me-nots.
The owl fluttered away, blinking its eyes more rapidly than ever in a
kind of surprised fury, shaking out its fluffy trousers, and Jonah
arrived panting with his dogs and rabbits and puppies.

‘Come,’ exclaimed Nixie breathlessly, ‘he’s had enough by now. No animal
wants people too long. Let’s get something to eat.’

‘And I’ll cook it,’ cried the boy, busying himself with sticks and twigs
upon the ground. ‘We’ll have stodgy-pudding and cake and jam and
oyster-patties, and then more stodgy-pudding again to finish up with.’

Paul glanced round him and saw that all the animals had disappeared—gone
like thoughts forgotten. In their place he soon saw a column of blue
smoke rising up among the fir trees close behind him, and the children
flitting to and fro through it looking like miniature gypsies. The odour
of the burning wood was incense in his nostrils.

‘But can’t I see something too—something of my own?’ he asked in an
aggrieved tone.

Nixie and Jonah looked up at him with surprise. ‘Of course you can,’
they exclaimed together. ‘Just stare into space as the cats do, and
think, and wish, and wait. Anything you want will come—with practice.
People you’ve lost, or people you’ve wanted to find, or anything that’s
never come true anywhere else.’

They went on busily with their cooking again, and Paul, lying on his
back in the grass some distance away, sent his thoughts roaming,
searching, deeply calling, far into the region of unsatisfied dreams and
desires within his heart....

For what seemed hours and hours they wandered together through the
byways of this vast, enchanted garden, finding everything they wished to
find, forgetting everything they wished to forget, amusing themselves to
their heart’s content; till, at last, they stood together on a big
boulder in the river where the spray rose about them in a cloud and
painted a rainbow above their heads.

‘Get ready! Quick!’ cried Jonah. ‘The Crack’s coming!’

‘It’s coming!’ repeated Nixie, seizing Paul’s hand and urging him to
hold very tight.

He had no time to reply. There was a rushing sound of air tearing
through a narrow opening. The sky grew dark, with a roaring in his ears
and a sense of great things flying past him. Again came the sensation of
dropping giddily through space, and the next minute he found himself
standing with the two children upon the lawn, darkness about them, and
the storm howling and crashing over their heads through the branches of
the twin cedars.

‘There’s the clock still striking,’ Nixie cried. ‘It’s only been a few
seconds altogether.’

He heard the church clock strike the last six strokes of midnight.


For some minutes he realised little more than that he felt rather stiff
and uncomfortable in his bedroom chair, and that he was chilly about the
legs. Outside the wind still roared and whistled, making the windows
rattle, while gusts of rain fell volleying against the panes as though
trying to get in. A roll of distant thunder came faintly to his ear. He
stretched himself and began to undress by the light of a single candle.

On the table lay a sheet of paper headed ‘How I climbed the Scaffolding
of the Night,’ and he read down the page and then took his pen and wrote
the heading of something else on another sheet: ‘Adventure in the Land
between Yesterday and To-morrow.’ With a mighty yawn he then blew out
his candle and tumbled into bed.

And with him, for all the howling of the elements, came a strange sense
of peace and happiness. Out of the depths rose gradually before his
inner eye in a series of delightful pictures the scenes he had just
left, and he understood that the pathway to that country of dreams
fulfilled and emotions that never die, lay buried far within his own
being.

‘Between Yesterday and To-morrow’ was to be the children’s counterpart
of that timeless, deathless region where the spirit may always go when
hunted by the world, fretted by the passion of unsatisfied yearnings,
plagued by the remorseless tribes of sorrow and disaster. There none
could follow him, just as none—none but himself—could bring about its
destruction. For he had found the mystical haven where all lost or
broken things eternally reconstruct themselves.

The ‘Crack,’ of course, may be found by all who have the genuine
yearning to recreate their world more sweetly, provided they possess at
the start enough imagination to repay the trouble of training—also that
_Wanderlust_ of the spirit which seeks ever for a resting-place in the
great beyond that reaches up to God.

Paul as yet had but discovered the entrance, led by little children who
dreamed not how wondrous was the journey; but the rest would follow. For
it is a region mapped gradually out of a thousand impulses, out of ten
thousand dreams, out of the eternal desires of the soul. It is not
discovered in a day, nor do the ways of entrance always remain the same.
A thousand joys contribute to its fashioning, a thousand frustrated
hopes describe its boundaries, and ten thousand griefs bring slowly,
piece by piece, the material for its construction, while every new
experience of the soul, successful or disastrous, adds something to its
uncharted geography. Slowly it gathers into existence, becoming with
every sojourn more real and more satisfying, till at length from the
pain of all possible disillusionment the way opens to the heart of
relief, to the peaceful place of hopes renewed, of purposes made
fruitful and complete.

And from this deathless region, too, flow all the forces of the soul
that make for hope, enthusiasm, courage, and delight. The children might
call it ‘Between Yesterday and To-morrow,’ and find their little broken
dreams brought back to life; but Paul understood that its rewards might
vary immensely according to the courage and the need of the soul that
sought it.




                              CHAPTER XVI

             But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.
                                                     YEATS.


Thus, led delicately by the animals and the children, and guided to a
certain extent, too, by the curious poesy of his own soul, Paul Rivers
came gradually into his own. Once made free of their world, he would
learn next that the process automatically made him free of his own. This
simple expedient of having found an audience did wonders for him, for it
not only loosened his tongue and his pen, but set all the deeper parts
of him running into speech, and the natural love and poetry of the man
began to produce a delightful, if somewhat extraordinary, harvest.

He understood—none better—that fantasy, unless rooted in reality, leads
away from action and tends to weakness and insipidity; but that,
grounded in the common facts of life, and content with idealising the
actual, it might become an important factor for good, lending wings to
the feet and lifting the soul over difficult places. His education
advanced by leaps and bounds.

And in some respects he showed himself possessed of a wisdom that could
only have belonged to him because at heart he was still a child, and the
ordinary ‘knowledge of the world’ had not come to spoil him in his life
of solitude among the trees.

For instance, that ‘Between Yesterday and To-morrow’ bore some curious
relation to reverie and dreams, he dimly discerned, yet, with this
simple and profound wisdom of his, he refused to pry too closely into
the nature of such relationship. He did not seek to reduce the
delightful experience to the little hard pellet of an exact fact. For
that, he felt, would be to lose it. Exact knowledge, he knew, was often
merely a great treachery, and ‘fact’ a dangerous weapon that deceived,
and might even destroy, its owner. If he analysed too carefully, he
might analyse the whole thing out of existence altogether, and such a
contingency was not to be thought of for a single moment.

Moreover, the attitude of the children confirmed his own. They never
referred to their adventures until he had given them form and substance
in his reports as recording secretary of the society. No word passed
their lips until they had heard them read out, and _then_ they talked of
nothing else. During the day they maintained a sublime ignorance of his
‘aventures of the night,’ as though nothing of the kind had ever
happened; and this tended still further to relegate it all to a region
untouched by time, beyond the reach of chance, beyond the destruction of
mere talk, eternal and real in the great sense.

Meanwhile, as this hidden country he had discovered yielded to
exploration, becoming more and more mapped out, and its springs of water
tapped, Paul was conscious that the power from these vital sources began
to modify his character, and to enlarge his outlook upon life.
Imagination, released and singing, provides the greatest of all
magics—belief in one’s self. The rivers of feeling carve their own
channels, which are ever the shortest way to the ocean of fulfilment.
The effects spread gradually to the remotest corner of his being.

One rainy day he found himself alone in the schoolroom with Nixie, for
it was Saturday afternoon, and Mlle. Fleury had carried off Jonah and
Toby in their best clothes, and to their acute dismay, to have tea with
the children—they were dull children—at the vicarage.

Dressed in blue serge, with a broad white collar over her shoulders and
a band of gold about her waist that matched the colour of her hair, she
darted about the room with her usual effect of brightness, so that he
found himself continually thinking the sun had burst through the clouds.
She was busily arranging cats and kittens in various positions in which
they showed no inclination to remain, till the performance had somewhat
the air of the old-fashioned game of ‘general post.’ Paul sat lazily at
the ink-stained table, dividing his attentions between watching the
child’s fascinating movements and pecking idly into the soft wood with
his little gold penknife.

‘Aren’t you _very_ glad we found you out so soon, Uncle Paul?’ she asked
suddenly, looking up at him over a back of glossy and wriggling yellow
fur. ‘Aren’t you very glad _indeed_, I mean?’

He went on picking at the soft ditches between the ridges of dirty brown
without answering for a moment.

‘Yes,’ he said presently, in the slow manner of a man who weighs his
words; ‘very glad indeed. It’s increased my interest in life. It’s made
me happier, and healthier, and wealthier, and all the rest of it—and
wiser too.’ He bent, frowning, over the ditches.

‘It was all your own fault, you know, that we didn’t get you sooner. Oh,
years ago—ever so many.’

‘But I was in the backwoods, Nixie.’

‘That made no difference,’ she answered promptly. ‘If you had written to
us, as mother often asked, we should have noticed at once what you
were.’

‘How could that possibly be?’ he objected, still without looking up.

‘Of course!’ was the overwhelming reply.

‘Oh, come now,’ he said, staring at her solemnly over the table; ‘I
admit your penetration is pretty keen, but I doubt _that_.’

She returned his gaze with an expression of grave, almost contemptuous
surprise, tossing her hair back impatiently with a jerk from her face.
She had finally established the kittens, Zezette and Sambo, in a sleepy
heap just where she wanted them on the top of the squirrel’s cage.

‘But, Uncle,’ she exclaimed, ‘between yesserdayantomorrow you can meet
people even after they’ve gone altogether. So America wouldn’t have been
difficult. How can you think such things?’

Not knowing exactly how it was he could think such things, Paul made no
immediate reply.

‘Anyhow,’ she resumed, ‘it didn’t take long once you were here. We saw
in a second in the drawinroom what you were—the day you arrived.’

‘But I acted so well! I’m sure now I behaved—’

‘You behaved just like Jonah,’ she interrupted him with swift decision,
‘—only bigger!’

Paul laughed to himself. His inquisitor shot across the room to
establish Pouf, another kitten, on the piano top. She moved lightly,
with a dancing motion that flung her hair behind her through the air,
again producing the effect of a sunlight gleam. Paul continued to
destroy the table with his blunt penknife, chuckling inwardly at the
figure he must have cut that summer afternoon in the ‘drawinroom’ before
these mercilessly observant eyes.

‘You stood about shyly just like him and Toby—in lumps,’ she went on
presently, ‘saying things in a sudden, jerky way—’

‘In lumps!’ cried Paul. ‘That’s a nice way to talk to your Uncle!’

Nixie burst out laughing. ‘Oh, I don’t mean that quite,’ she explained;
‘but you stood about as if you found it hard to balance, and were afraid
to move off the mat. Just as Jonah does at a party when he’s shy. I
copied you _exactly_ when I got upstairs.’

‘Did I indeed? Did you indeed, I mean?’ said he, wondering whether he
ought to feel offended or pleased at the picture.

‘Yes, rather,’ declared the child emphatically, darting up with Pouf who
had definitely rejected the top of the piano, and planting it on the
table under his nose, where it immediately sat down, purring loudly and
staring into his face. ‘I should think you did! You see, Pouf says so
too; he’s purring his agreement. Listen to him! That’s fur language.’

He listened as he was bid, gazing first into the green eyes of the
kitten that opened so wide they seemed to have no lids at all, and then
into the mischievous blue eyes of his other tormentor. He decided that
on the whole he felt pleased.

‘Then I wasted a lot of time,’ he observed presently, ‘about joining, I
mean—coming into your world.’

‘H’mmmm, you did.’

‘Only, remember, you were all very young when I was in America, weren’t
you?’ he added by way of excuse.

Nixie nodded her head approvingly.

‘And you, I expect,’ she replied thoughtfully, ‘were too hard then. I
hadn’t thought of that. You might never have squeezed through the Crack,
mightn’t you? You’re much softer now,’ she decided after a second’s
reflection, ‘ever so much softer!’

‘I _have_ improved, I think,’ he admitted, blushing like a pleased
schoolboy. ‘I am decidedly softer!’

He made a violent dig with his penknife, breaking down the hard barrier
between two ditches, whereupon Pouf, thinking the resultant splinter was
a plaything specially contrived for its happiness, opened its eyes wider
than ever, and stretched out a paw that looked huge compared with the
splinter and the penknife. Paul put the weapon away, and Pouf fixed its
eyes intently on the pocket where it had vanished, leaving its paw
absent-mindedly lying on the splinter which it had already wholly
forgotten. It purred louder than ever, trying to give the impression
that it was really a big cat.

Outside the rain fell softly. A blue-bottle buzzed noisily about the
room, banging the ceiling and the walls as though it were exceedingly
angry. Through the open window floated the smell of the English garden
soaked in rain, odours of soused trees and lawns, and wet
air—exquisitely fragrant.

A hush fell over the room; only the purring of the kittens broke it.
Paul thought it was the most soothing sound in the whole world;
something began to purr within himself. His head, and Nixie’s head, and
little Pouf’s head—all lay very close together over that schoolroom
table, each full of its own busy dreams. These queer, gentle talks with
the child were very delightful to him, all his shyness and
self-consciousness gone, and the spirit of true wonder, simple and
profound, awake in his heart.

Together, for a long time, they listened in silence to these sounds of
purring and breathing and the murmur of rain falling outside: deep,
velvety breathing it was, almost inaudible. Everything in life, Paul
caught himself reflecting, tragedy or comedy, goes on against a
background of this deep, hidden, purring sound of life. Breathing is the
first manifestation of life; it is the music of the world, the soft,
continuous hum of existence. His thoughts travelled far....

‘Yes, on the whole,’ he muttered at length inconsequently, ‘I think I
may consider myself softer than before—kinder, gentler, more alive!’

But neither Nixie, nor Pouf, nor, for that matter, Sambo and Zezette
either, paid the smallest attention to his remark; he was soon lost
again in further reflections.

It was the child’s voice that presently recalled him.

‘Uncle Paul,’ she said very softly, her mind still busy with thoughts of
her own, ‘do you know that sometimes I have heard the earth breathing
too—akchilly breathing?’

Paul, coming back from a long journey, turned and gazed at the eager
little face beside him in silence.

‘The earth is alive, I’m sure,’ she went on with an air of great
mystery. ‘It breathes and whispers, and even purrs; sometimes it cries.
It’s a great body, alive—just like you and the other stars——’

‘Nixie!’

‘They are all bodies, though; heavenly bodies, Daddy called them. Only
we, I suppose, are too small to see it that way perhaps.’

Paul listened, stroking Pouf slowly. The child’s voice was low and
somewhat breathless with the excitement of what she was saying. She
believed every word of it intensely. Only a very small part of what she
was thinking found expression in her words. Her ideas beckoned her
beyond; and mere words could not overtake them at her age.

‘The earth,’ she went on, seeing that he did not laugh, ‘is somebody’s
big round body rolling down the sky. It simply must be. Daddy always
said that a fly settling on our bodies didn’t know we were, alive, so we
can’t understand that the earth is alive either. Only _I know it_. Oh!’
she cried out with sudden enthusiasm, ‘how I would love to hear its real
out-loud voice. What a t’riffic roar it must be. I only wish my ears
were further——’

‘Sharper, you mean.’

‘But, all the same, I _have_ heard it breathing,’ she added more
quietly, lifting Pouf suddenly and wrapping its sleeping body round her
neck like a boa, ‘just like this.’ She put her head on one side, so that
her cheek was against the kitten’s lips, and the faint stream of its
breathing tickled her ear. ‘Only the breathing of the earth is much,
ever so much, longer and deeper. It’s whole months long.’

Paul was listening now with his undivided attention. He was being
admitted to the very heart of an imaginative child’s world, and the
knowledge of it charmed him inexpressibly. His eyes were almost as
bright, his cheeks as pink with excitement, as her own. Only he must be
very careful indeed. The least mistake on his part would close the door.

‘Months, Nixie?’

‘Oh, yes, a single breath is months long,’ she whispered, her eyes
growing in size, and darkening with wonder and awe. ‘Pouf lies on me and
breathes twice to my once, but I breathe millions of times—ever so many
millions—as I lie on the earth’s body. And it breathes in and out just
as Pouf and I do. Winter is breathing in, and summer is breathing out,
you see.’

‘So the equinoctial gales are the changes from one breath to the other?’
he put in gravely.

‘I hadn’t thought about the—the gales,’ she said, putting her face
closer and lowering her voice, ‘but I know that in the summer I often
hear the earth breathing out—’specially on still warm nights when
everything lies awake and listens for it.’

‘Then do “Things” really listen as we do?’ he asked gently.

‘Not ’xactly as we do. We only listen in one place—our ears. They listen
all over. But they’re alive just the same, though so much quieter. Oh,
Uncle Paul, everything is alive; everything, I know it!’ She fixed a
searching look on him. ‘You knew _that_, didn’t you?’

There was a trace of real surprise and disappointment in her voice.

‘Well,’ he answered truthfully, ‘I had often and often thought about it,
and wondered sometimes—whether——’

But the child interrupted him almost imperiously. He realised sharply
how the knowledge that the years bring—little, exact, precise
knowledge—may kill the dreams of the naked soul, yet give nothing in
their place but dust and ashes. And, by the same token, he recognised
that his own heart was still untouched, unspoiled. The blood leaped and
ran within him at the thought.

‘The winds, too, are alive,’—she spoke with a solemn excitement that
made her delicate face flush as though a white fire glowed suddenly
beneath the skin and behind the charming eyes—‘they run about, and
sleep, and sing, and are full of voices. The wind has hundreds of
voices—just like insects with such a lot of eyes.’ (Even her strange
simile did not make him smile, so real was the belief and enthusiasm of
her words.) ‘_We_ (with scorn) have only one voice; but the wind can
laugh and cry at the same time!’

‘I’ve heard it,’ he put in, secretly thrilled.

‘I know its angry voice as well as its pretended-angry voice, when it’s
very loud but means nothing in particular. Its baby-voice, when it comes
through the keyhole at night, or down the chimney, or just outside the
window in the early morning, and tells me all its little
very-wonderful-indeed aventures, makes me so happy I want to cry and
laugh at once.’

She paused a moment for breath, dimly conscious, perhaps, that her
description was somewhat confused. Her excitement somehow communicated
itself to Pouf at the same time, for the kitten suddenly rose up with an
arched back and indulged in a yawn that would have cracked the jaws of
any self-respecting creature. After a prolonged stare at Paul, it
proceeded inconsequently to wash itself with an air that plainly said,
‘You won’t catch me napping again. _I_ want to hear this too.’

Paul, meanwhile, stared at the child beside him, thinking that the
gold-dust on her hair must surely come from her tumbling journeys among
the stars, and wondering if she understood how deeply she saw into the
heart of things with those dreamy blue eyes of hers.

‘Listen, Nixie, you fairy-child, and I’ll tell you something,’ he said
gently, ‘something you will like very much’; and, while she waited and
held her breath, he whispered softly in her ear:

               Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
               The soul that rises in us, our life’s star
                   Hath had elsewhere its setting,
                   And cometh from afar:
                   Not in entire forgetfulness,
                   And not in utter nakedness,
               But trailing clouds of glory do we come
                   From God who is our home.




                              CHAPTER XVII

               And snatches of thee everywhere
               Make little heavens throughout a day.
                                           ALICE MEYNELL.


‘That’s very pretty, I think,’ she said politely, staring at him, with a
little smile, half puzzled. The music of the words had touched her, but
she evidently did not grasp why he should have said it. She waited a
minute to see if he had really finished, and then went on again with her
own vein of thought.

‘Then please tell me, Uncle,’ she asked gravely, with deep earnestness,
‘what is it people lose when they grow up?’

And he answered her with equal gravity, speaking seriously as though the
little body at his side were habited by an old, discriminating soul.

‘Simplicity, I think, principally—and vision,’ he said. ‘They get wise
with so many little details called facts that they lose the great view.’

The child watched his face, trying to understand. After a pause she came
back to her own thinking—the sphere where she felt sure of herself.

‘They never see things properly once they’re grown up,’ she said sadly.
‘They all walk into a fog, _I_ believe, that hides all the things _we_
know, and stuffs up their eyes and ears. Daddy called it the cotton-wool
of age, you know. Oh, Uncle, I do hope,’ she cried with the sudden
passion of the child, ‘I _do_ hope I shall never, never get into that
horrid fog. _You_ haven’t, and I won’t, won’t, won’t!’ Her voice rose to
a genuine cry. Then she added with a touch of child-wonder that followed
quite naturally upon the outburst, ‘How did you ever stop yourself, I
wonder!’

‘I lived with the fairies in the backwoods,’ he answered, laughing
softly.

She stared at him with complete admiration in her blue eyes.

‘Then I shall grow up ’xactly like you,’ she said, ‘so that I can always
get out of the cage just as you do, even if my body is big.’

‘Every one’s thin somewhere,’ Paul said, remembering her own
explanation. ‘And the Crack into Yesterday and To-morrow is always close
by when it’s wanted. That’s the real way of escape.’

She clapped her hands and danced, shaking her hair out in a cloud and
laughing with happiness. Paul took her in his arms and kissed her. With
a gesture of exquisite dignity, such as animals show when they resent
human interference, the child tumbled back into her chair by the table,
an expression of polite boredom—though the faintest imaginable—in her
eyes. Many a time had he seen the kittens behave exactly in the same
way.

‘But how do you know all these things, Nixie, and where do all your
ideas come from?’ he asked.

‘They just come to me when I’m thinking of nothing in particular. They
float into my head of their own accord like ships, little fairy ships, I
suppose. And I think,’ she added dreamily after a moment’s pause, ‘some
of them are trees and flowers whispering to me.’ She put her face close
to his own across the table, staring into his very brain with her
shining eyes. ‘Don’t you think so too, Uncle?’

‘I think I do,’ he answered honestly.

‘Though some of the things I hear,’ she went on, ‘I don’t understand
till a long time afterwards.’

‘What kind of things, for instance?’

She hesitated, answering slowly after a pause:

‘Things like streams, and the dripping of rain, and the rustling of wet
leaves, perhaps. At the time I only hear the noise they make, but
afterwards, when I’m alone, doing nothing, it all falls into words and
stories—all sorts of lovely things, but _very_ hard to remember, of
course.’

She broke off and smiled up into his face with a charm that he could
never have put into words.

‘You’ll grow up a poet, Nixie,’ he said.

‘Shall I _really_? But I could never find the rhymes—simply never.’

‘Some never do,’ he answered; ‘and some—the majority, I think—never find
the words even!’

‘Oh, how dreadful!’ she exclaimed, her face clouding with a pain she
could fully understand. ‘Poets who can’t talk at all. I should think
they would burst.’

‘Some of them nearly do,’ he exclaimed, hiding a smile; ‘they get very
queer indeed, these poor poets who cannot express themselves. I have
known one or two.’

‘Have you? Oh, Uncle Paul!’ Her tone expressed all the solemn sympathy
the world could hold.

He nodded his head mysteriously.

The child suddenly sat up very erect. An idea of importance had come
into her head.

‘Then I wonder if Pouf and Smoke, and Zezette and Mrs. Tompkyns are like
that,’ she cried, her face grave as a hanging judge—‘poets who can’t
express themselves, and may burst and get queer! Because they understand
all that sort of thing—scuttling leaves and dew falling, and tickling
grasses and the dreams of beeties, and things we never hear at all.
P’raps that’s why they lie and listen and think for such ages and ages.
I never thought of that before.’

‘It’s quite likely,’ he replied with equal solemnity.

Nixie sprang to her feet and flew round the room from chair to chair,
hugging in turn each kitten, and asking it with a passionate earnestness
that was very disturbing to its immediate comfort in life: ‘Tell me,
Pouf, Smoke, Sambo, this instant! Are you all furry little poets who
can’t tell all your little furry poems? Are you, _are you_, ARE YOU?’

She kissed each one in turn. ‘Are you going to burst and get queer?’ She
shook them all till, mightily offended, they left their thrones and took
cover sedately under tables and sofas well out of reach of this intimate
and public cross-examination. And there they sat, looking straight
before them, as though no one else existed in the entire world.

‘I believe they are, Uncle.’

A silence fell between them. Under the furniture, safe in their dark
corners, the cats began to purr again. Paul got up and strolled to the
open window that looked out across lawns and shrubberies to the fringe
of oaks and elms that marked the distant hayfields. The rain still fell
gently, silently—a fine, scented, melancholy rain; the rain of a minor
key. Tinged with a hundred delicate odours from fields and trees—ghostly
perfumes far more subtle than the perfumes of flowers—the air seemed to
brush the surface of his soul, dropping its fragrance down into his
heart like the close presence of remembered friends.

The evening mode invaded him softly, soothingly; and out of it, in some
way he scarcely understood, crept something that brought a vague
disquiet in its train. A little timid thought stole to the threshold of
his heart and knocked gently upon the door of its very inmost chamber.
And the sound of the knocking, faint and muffled though it was, woke
echoes in this secret chamber that proclaimed in a tone of reproach, if
not almost of warning, that it was still empty and unfurnished. A deep,
infinite yearning, and a yearning that was _new_, stirred within him,
then suddenly rose to the surface of his mind like a voice calling to
him from far away out of mist and darkness.

‘If only I had children of my own...!’ it called; and the echo whispered
afterwards ‘of my very own, made out of my very thoughts...!’

He turned to Nixie who had followed, and now leaned beside him on the
window-sill.

‘So the language of wind and trees and water you translate afterwards
into stories, do you?’ he asked, taking up the conversation where they
had left it. It was hardly a question; he was musing aloud as he gazed
out into the mists that gathered with the dusk. ‘It’s all silent enough
now, at any rate there’s not a breath of air moving. The trees are
dreaming—dreaming perhaps of the Dance of the Winds, or of the
love-making of the snow when their leaves are gone and the flakes settle
softly on the bare twigs; or perhaps dreaming of the humming of the sap
that brings their new clothes with such a rush of glory and wonder in
the spring——’

Again the child looked up into his face with shining eyes. The magic of
her little treasured beliefs had touched the depths of him, and she felt
that they were in the same world together, without pretence and without
the barriers of age. She was radiantly happy, and rather wonderful into
the bargain, a fairy if ever there was one.

‘They’re just thinking,’ she said softly.

‘So trees think too?’

She nodded her head, leaning her chin on her hands as she gazed with him
into the misty air.

‘I wonder what their thoughts are like,’ he said musingly, so that she
could take it for a question or not as she chose.

‘Like ours—in a way,’ she answered, as though speaking of something she
knew beyond all question, ‘only not so small, not so sharp. Our thoughts
prick, I think, but theirs stroke, all running quite smoothly into each
other. Very big and wonderful indeed thoughts—big as wind, I mean, and
wonderful as sky or distance. And the streams—the streams have long,
winding thoughts that run down their whole length under water——’

‘And the trees, you were saying,’ he said, seeing that her thought was
wandering.

‘Yes, the trees,’ she repeated, ‘oh! yes, the trees are different a
little, I think. A wood, you see, may have one big huge thought all at
once——’

‘All at once!’

‘I mean all at the same time, every tree thinking the same thought for
miles. Because, if you lie in a wood, and don’t think yourself, but just
wait and wait and wait, you gradgilly get its great thought and know
what it’s thinking about exactly. You feel it all over instead of—of——’

‘Instead of getting a single little sharp picture in your mind,’ Paul
helped her, grasping the wonder of her mystical idea.

‘I think that’s what I mean,’ she went on. ‘And it’s exactly the same
with everything else—the sea, and the fields, and the sky—oh! and
everything in the whole world.’ She made a sweeping gesture with her arm
to indicate the universe.

‘Oh, Nixie child!’ he cried, with a sudden enthusiasm pouring over him
from the strange region where she had unknowingly led him, ‘if only I
could take you out to the big woods I know across the sea, where the
trees stretch for hundreds of miles, and the moss is everywhere a foot
thick, and the whole forest is such a conspiracy of wonder and beauty
that it catches your heart away and makes you breathless with delight!
Oh, my child, if only you could hear the thoughts and stories of woods
like that—woods untouched since the beginning of the world——!’

‘Take me! Take me! Uncle Paul, oh! take me!’ she cried as though it were
possible to start next day. ‘These woods are such _little_ woods, and I
know all their stories.’ She danced round him with a wild and eager
delight.

‘Such stories, yes, such stories,’ Paul continued, his face shining
almost as much as hers as he thought of his mighty and beloved forests.

‘Please tell me, take me, tell me!’ she cried. ‘All, all, all! Quick!’

‘I can’t. I never understood them properly; only the old Indians know
them now,’ he said sadly, leaning out of the window again with her.
‘They are tales that few people in this part of the world could
understand; in a language old as the wind, too, and nearly forgotten.
You see, the trees are different there. They stand in thousands—pine,
hemlock, spruce, and cedar—mighty, very tall, very straight, very dark,
pouring day and night their great balsam perfumes into the air so that
their stories and their thoughts are sweet as incense and very
mysterious.’

Nixie took the lapels of his coat in her hands and stared up into his
face as though her eyes would pop out. She looked _through_ his eyes.
She saw these very woods he was speaking of standing in dim shadows
behind him.

‘No one ever comes to disturb their lives, and few of them have ever
heard the ringing of the axe. Only giant moose and caribou steal
silently beneath their shade, and Indians, dark and soft-footed as
things of their own world, make camp-fires among their roots. They know
nothing of men and cities and trains, and the wind that sings through
their branches is a wind that has never tasted chimney-pots, and hot
crowds, and pretty, fancy gardens. It is a wind that flies five hundred
miles without taking breath, with nothing to stop its flight but
feathery tree-tops, brushing the heavens, and clean mountain ridges
thrusting great shoulders to the stars. Their thoughts and stories are
difficult to understand, but _you_ might understand them, I think, for
the life of the elements is strong in your veins, you fairy daughter of
wind and water. And some day, when you are stronger in body—not older
though, mind, not older—I shall take you out there so that you may be
able to learn their wonder and interpret it to all the world.’

The words tore through him in such curious, impersonal fashion, that he
hardly realised he was giving utterance to a longing that had once been
his own, and that he was now seeking to realise vicariously in the
person of this little poet-girl beside him. He stroked her hair as she
nestled up to him, breathing hard, her eyes glistening like stars,
speechless with the torrent of wonder with which her big uncle had
enveloped her.

‘Some day,’ she murmured presently, ‘some day, remember. You promise?’

‘I promise.’

‘And—and will you write that all out for me, please?’

‘All what?’

‘About the too-big woods and the too-old language and the winds that fly
without stopping, and the stories——’

‘Oh, oh!’ he laughed; ‘that’s another matter!’

‘Yes, oh you must, Uncle! Make a story of it—an aventure. Write it out
as a verywonerfulindeedaventure, and put you and me in it!’ She forgot
the touch of sadness and clapped her hands with delight. ‘And then read
it out at a Meeting, don’t you see?’

And in the end Paul promised that too, making a great fuss about it, but
in his heart secretly pleased and happy.

‘I’ll try,’ he said, with portentous gravity.

The child stared up at him with the sure knowledge in her eyes that
between them they held the key to all that was really worth knowing.

He stooped to kiss her hair, but before he could do so, with a laugh and
a dancing step he scarcely heard, she was gone from his side and
half-way down the passage, so that he kissed the empty air.

‘Bless her mighty little heart!’ he exclaimed, straightening himself up
again. ‘Was there ever such a teacher in the world before?’

He became aware that the world held powers, gentle yet immense, that
were urging him in directions hitherto undreamed of. With such a fairy
guide he might find—he was already finding—not merely safety-valves of
expression, but an outlet into the bargain for his creative imagination.

‘And a little child shall lead them,’ he murmured in his beard, as he
went slowly down the passage to his room to dress for dinner. Again he
felt like singing.




                             CHAPTER XVIII

   The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others
   only a green thing standing in the way.—W.B.


Thus, gradually, the grey house under the hills changed into a palace;
the garden stretched to include the stars; and Paul, the retired Wood
Cruiser, walked in a world all new and brilliant. For to find the means
of self-expression is to build the foundations of spiritual health, and
an ideal companionship, unvexed by limitations of sense, holds
potentialities that can change earth into heaven. His accumulated stores
of imagination found wings, and he wrote a series of Aventures that
delighted his audience while they healed his own soul.

‘I wish they’d go on for ever and ever,’ observed Toby solemnly to her
brother. ‘Perhaps they do really, only——’

‘Of course they do,’ Jonah said decisively, ‘but Uncle Paul only tells
bits of them to us—bits that _you_ can understand.’

Toby was too much in earnest to notice the masculine scorn.

‘He does know a lot, doesn’t he?’ she said. ‘Do you think he sees up
into heaven? They’re not a bit like made-up aventures.’ She paused,
deeply puzzled; very grave indeed.

‘He’s a man, of course,’ replied Jonah. ‘Men know big things like that.’

‘The Aventures are true,’ Nixie put in gently. ‘That’s why they’re so
big, and go on for ever and ever.’

‘It’s jolly when he puts us in them too, isn’t it?’ said Jonah,
forgetting the masculine pose in his interest. ‘He puts me in most,’ the
boy added proudly.

‘But _I_ do the funniest things,’ declared Toby, slightly aggrieved. ‘It
was me that rode on the moose over the tree-tops to the North Pole, and
understood all it said——’

‘That’s nothing,’ cried her brother, making a huge blot across his
copy-book. ‘He had to get me to turn on the roarer boryalis.’

‘Nixie’s always leader, anyhow,’ replied the child, losing herself for a
moment in the delight of that tremendous blot. She often borrowed Nixie
in this way to obliterate Jonah when her own strength was insufficient.

‘Of course she is,’ was the manly verdict. ‘She knows all those things
almost as well as Uncle Paul. Don’t you, Nixie?’

But Nixie was too busy cleaning up his blot with bits of torn
blotting-paper to reply, and the arrival of Mlle. Fleury put an end to
the discussion for the moment.

And Paul himself, as the big child leading the littler children, or
following their guidance when such guidance was clear, accepted his new
duties with a happy heart. His friendship with them all grew
delightfully, but especially, of course, his friendship with Nixie. This
elemental child slipped into his life everywhere, into his play, as into
his work; she assumed the right to look after him; with charming gravity
she positively mothered him; and Paul, whose life hitherto had known
little enough of such sympathy and care, simply loved it.

If her native poesy won his imagination, her practical interest in his
welfare and comfort equally won his heart. The way she ferreted about in
his room and study, so serious, so thoughtful, attending to so many
little details that no one else ever thought of,—all this came into his
life with a seductive charm as of something entirely new and strange to
him. It was Nixie who always saw to it that his ink-pot was full and his
quill pens trimmed; that flowers had no time to fade upon his table; and
that matches for his pipes never failed in the glass match-stands. He
used up matches, it seemed, almost by the handful.

‘You’re far worse than Daddy used to be,’ she reproved him. ‘I believe
you eat them.’ And when he assured her that he did nothing of the sort,
she only shook her head darkly, and said she couldn’t understand then
what he did with them all.

A hundred services of love and kindness she did for him that no one else
would have thought of. On his mantelpiece she put mysterious little
bottles of medicine.

‘For nettle-stings and scratches,’ she explained. ‘Your poor hands are
always covered with them both when you’ve been out with us.’ And it was
she, too, who bound up his fingers when wounds were more serious, and
saw to it that he had a clean rag each day till the sore was healed. She
put the new red riband on his straw hat after it fell (himself with it)
into the Gull Pond; and one service especially that earned her his
eternal respect was to fasten his evening black tie for dinner. This she
did every night for him. Such tasks were for magical fingers only. He
had never yet compassed it himself. He would run to the nursery to say
good-night, and Nixie, looking almost unreal and changeling in her white
nightgown, with her yellow hair top-knotted quaintly for sleep, would
deftly trim and arrange the strip of satin that he never could manage
properly himself. It was a regular little ritual, Toby watching eagerly
from the bed across the room.

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Uncle Paul,’ she said another
time, holding up a mysterious garment, ‘I never saw such holes—never!’
And then she darned the said socks with results that were picturesque if
not always entirely satisfactory. And once she sewed the toes so tightly
across with her darning that he could not get his foot into them. She
allowed no one else to touch them, however. Little the child guessed
that while she patched his clothes, she wove his life afresh at the same
time.

And with all the children he took Dick’s place more and more. His
existence widened, filled up; he felt in touch with real things as of
old in the woods; the children replaced the trees.

But it was Nixie in particular who crept close to his unsatisfied heart
and tied him to her inner life with the gossamer threads of her
sand-coloured hair. This elfin little being, with her imagination and
tenderness, brought to him something he had never known before, never
dreamed of even; a perfect companionship; a companionship utterly
unclouded.

And the other children understood it; there was no jealousy; it was not
felt by them as favouritism. Natural and right it seemed, and was.

‘You must ask Nixie,’ Jonah would say in reply to any question
concerning his uncle’s welfare or habits. ‘She’s his little mother, you
know.’

For, truth to tell, they were born, these two, in the same corner of the
world of fantasy, bred under the same stars, and fathered by the same
elemental forces. But for the trick of the years and the accident of
blood, they seemed made for one another ideally, eternally.

Things he could speak of to no one else found in her a natural and easy
listener. To grown-ups he had never been able to talk about his mystic
longings; the very way they listened made such things instantly seem
foolish. But Nixie understood in her child-way, not because she was
sympathetic, but because she was _in and of_ them. He was merely talking
the language of her own world. He no longer felt ashamed to ‘think
aloud.’ Most people were in pursuit of such stupid, clumsy things—fame,
money, and other complicated and ugly things—but this child seemed to
understand that he cared about Realities only; for, in her own simple
way, this was what she cared about too.

To talk with her cleared his own mind, too, in a way it had never been
cleared before. He came to understand himself better, and in so doing
swept away a great deal of accumulated rubbish; for he found that when
his thought was too confused to make clear to her, it was usually false,
wrong—not real.

‘I can’t make that out,’ she would say, with a troubled face. ‘I
suppose, I’m not old enough yet.’ And afterwards Paul would realise that
it was himself who was at fault, not the child. Her instinct was
unerring; whereas he, with those years of solitude behind him, sometimes
lost himself in a region where imagination, self-devouring, ran the risk
of becoming untrue, possibly morbid. Her wholesome little judgments
brought sanity and laughter.

For, like other mystical temperaments, what he sought, presumably, was
escape from himself, yet not—and herein he differed healthily from most
of his kidney—so much from his Real Inner Self, as from its outer
pettiness and limitations. True, he sought union with something larger
and more perfect, and in so far was a mystic; but this larger
‘something,’ he dimly understood, was the star of his own soul not yet
emancipated, and in so far he remained a man of action. His was the
true, wholesome mysticism; hysteria was not—as with most—its chief
ingredient. Moreover, this other, eternal part of him touched Eternity.
To be identified with it meant to be identified with God, but never for
one instant to lose his own individuality.

And to express himself through the creative imagination, to lose his own
smallness by interpreting beauty, he had always felt must be a half-way
house to the end in view. His inability, therefore, to find such means
of expression had always meant something incalculably grave, something
that hindered growth. But now this child Nixie, in some extraordinary
yet utterly simple fashion, had come to show him the way. It was
wonderful past finding out. He hardly knew himself how it had come
about. Yet, there she was, ever by his side, pointing to ways that led
him out into expression.

No woman could have done it. His two longings, he came to realise, were
actually one: the desire to express his yearnings grew out of the desire
to find God.

And so it was that the thought of her growing up was horrid to him. He
could not bear to think of her as a ‘young woman’ moving in a modern
world where she would lose all touch with the elemental forces of vision
and simplicity whence she drew half her grace and wonder. Already for
him, in some mystical fashion of spiritual alchemy, she had become the
eternal feminine, exquisitely focused in the little child. With the
advance of years this must inevitably pass from her, as she increased
the distance from her source of inspiration.

‘Nixie, you must promise never to grow up,’ he would say, laughing.

‘Because Aventures stop then, don’t they?’ she asked.

‘Partly that,’ he answered.

‘And I should get tired, like mother; or stupid, like the head
gardener,’ she added. ‘I know. But I don’t think I ever shall, somehow.
I think I am meant to be always like this.’

The serious way she said this last phrase escaped him at the time. He
remembered it afterwards, however.

It was so delightful, too, to read out his stories and aventures to her;
they laughed over them, and her criticisms often improved them vastly.
He even read her his first poem without shyness, and they discussed each
verse and talked about ‘stealing Heaven’s fire,’ and the poor ‘sparks’
that never grew into flames. The ‘kiss of fire’ she thought must be
wonderful. She also asked what a ‘lyre’ was. They made up other verses
together too. But though they laughed and she asked odd questions, on
the whole she grasped the sadness of the poem perfectly.

‘Let’s go and cry a bit somewhere,’ she remarked quietly, her eyes very
wistful. ‘It helps it out awfully, you know.’

He reminded her, however, of a sage remark of Toby’s, to the effect that
when men grew beards they lost the power to cry. Quick as a flash, then,
she turned with one of her exquisite little bits of unconscious poetry.

‘Let’s go to the Gwyle then, and make the stream cry for us instead,’
she said gravely, with a profound sympathy, ‘because everybody’s tears
must get into the water some time—and so to the sea, mustn’t they?’

And on their way, what with jumping ditches and flower-beds, they forgot
all about the crying. On the edge of the woods, however, she raced up
again to his side, her blue eyes full of a new wonder. ‘I know that wind
of inspiration that your poetry said never blew for you,’ she cried. ‘I
know where it blows. Quick! I’ll show you!’ The pace made him pant a
bit; he almost regretted he had mentioned it. ‘I know where it blows,
we’ll catch it, and you shall see. Then you can always, always get it
when you want it.’

And a little farther on, after wading through deep bracken, they
stopped, and Nixie took his hand. ‘Come on tiptoe now,’ she whispered
mysteriously. ‘Don’t crack the twigs with your feet.’ And, smiling at
this counsel of perfection, he obeyed to the best of his ability, while
she pretended not to notice the series of explosions that followed his
tread.

It was a curve in the skirts of the wood where they found themselves; a
small inlet where the tide of daylight flowed against the dark cliffs of
the firs, and then fell back. The thick trees held it at bay so that
only the spray of light penetrated beyond, as from advancing waves.
‘Thus far and no farther,’ very plainly said the pine trees, and the
sunshine lay there collected in the little hollow with the delicious
heat of all the summer. It was a corner hitherto undiscovered by Paul;
he saw it with the pleasure of a discovery.

And there, set brightly against the sombre background, stood the slender
figure of a silver birch tree, all sweet and shining, its branches
sifting the sunshine and the wind; while behind it, standing forth
somewhat from the main body of the wood, a pine, shaggy and formidable,
grew close as though to guard it. The picture, with its striking
contrast, needed no imagination to make it more appealing. It was patent
to any eye.

‘That’s _my_ tree,’ said Nixie softly, with both arms linked about his
elbow and her cheek laid against the sleeve of his coat. ‘My fav’rite
tree. And that’s where your winds of inspiration blow that you said you
couldn’t catch. So now you can always come and hear them, you see.’

Paul entered instantly into the spirit of her dream. The way her child’s
imagination seized upon inanimate objects and incorporated them into the
substance of her own life delighted him, for it was also his own way,
and he understood it.

‘Then that old pine,’ he answered, pointing to the other, ‘is my tree.
See! It’s come out of the wood to protect the little birch.’

The child ran from his side and stood close to them. ‘Yes, and don’t you
see,’ she cried, her eyes popping with excitement, ‘this is me, and
that’s you!’ She patted the two trunks, first the birch and then the
pine. ‘It’s us! I never thought of that before, never! It’s you looking
after me and taking care of me, and me dancing and laughing round you
all the time!’ She ran back to his side and hopped up to plant a kiss in
his beard. He quite forgot to correct her a’venturous grammar.

‘Of course,’ he cried, ‘so it is. Look! The branches touch too. Your
little leaves run up among my old needles!’

Nixie clapped her hands and ran to and fro, laughing and talking, on
errands of further discovery, while Paul sat down to watch the scene and
think his own thoughts. It was just the picture to appeal strongly to
him. At any time the beauty of the tree would have seized him, but with
no one else could he have enjoyed it in the same way, or spoken of his
enjoyment. While Nixie flitted here and there in the sunshine, the
little birch behind her bent down and then released itself with a
graceful rush of branches as the pressure of the wind passed. Against
the blue sky she tossed her leafy hands; then, with a passing shiver,
stood still.

‘I wonder,’ ran his thought, ‘why poets need invent Dryads when such an
incomparable revelation lies plain in one of the commonest of trees like
this?’ And, at the same moment, he saw Nixie dart past between the fir
trees and the birch, as though the very Dryad he was slighting had
slipped out to chide him. Her hair spread in the sunshine like leaves.
In the world of trees here, surely, was the very essence of what is
feminine caught and imprisoned. Whatever of grace and wonder emanate
from the face and figure of a young girl to enchant and bewitch here
found expression in the silver stem and branches, in the running limbs
so slender, in the twigs that bent with their cataracts of flying hair.
Seen against the dark pine-wood, this little birch tree laughed and
danced; over that silver skin ran, positively, smiles; from the facets
of those dainty leaves twinkled mischief and the joys of innocence.
Here, in a word, was Nixie herself in the terms of tree-dom; and, as he
watched, the wind swept out the branches towards him in a cluster of
rustling leaves,—and at the same instant Nixie shot laughing to his
side.

For a second he hardly knew whether it was the child or the silver birch
that nestled down beside him and began to murmur in his ear.

‘This is it, you see,’ she was saying; ‘and there’s your wind of
inspiration blowing now.’

‘We shall have to alter the first verse then,’ he said gravely:

                    ‘The winds of inspiration blow,
                    Yet _never_ pass me by.’

‘Of course, of course,’ she whispered, listening half to her uncle,
half to the rustle in the branches. ‘And now,’ she added presently,
‘you can always come and write your poetry here, and it will be
very-wonderfulindeed poetry, you see. And if you leave a bit of paper
on the tree you’ll find it in the morning covered with all sorts of
things in very fine writing—oh, but _very very_ fine writing, so small
that no one can see it except you and me. One of the Little Winds we
saw, you know, will twine round it and leave marks. And the big pine
is you and the birch is me, isn’t it?’ she ended with sudden
conviction.

The game, of course, was after her own heart. Up she sprang then
suddenly again, picked a spray of leaves from a hanging branch, and
brought it back to him.

‘And here’s a bit of me for a present, so that you can’t ever forget,’
she said with a gravity that held no smile. And she fastened it with
much tugging and arranging in his buttonhole. ‘A bit of my tree, and so
of me.’

‘Then I might leave a bit of paper in the water too,’ he remarked slyly
on their way home, ‘so as to get the thoughts of the stream.’

‘Easily,’ she said, ‘only it must be wrapped up in something. I’ll get
Jonah’s sponge-bag and lend it you. Only you must promise faithfully to
return it in case we go to the seaside in the summer.’

‘And perhaps some of those tears we were talking about will stick on it
and leave their marks before they go on to the sea,’ he suggested.

‘Oh, but they’d be too sad,’ she answered quickly. ‘They’re much better
lost in the sea, aren’t they?’

                  *       *       *       *       *

Thus the poetry in his soul that he could not utter, he lived.

Without any conscious effort of the imagination, the instant Nixie, or
the thought of her, stood beside him—lo, he was in Fairyland. It was so
real that it was positively bewildering.

And the rest of that quiet household, without knowing it, contributed to
its reality. For, to begin with, the place was delightfully ‘out of the
world’; and, after that, the gradations between the two regions seemed
so easy and natural: the shadowy personality of his sister; the dainty
little French governess flitting everywhere with her plaintive voice in
the wake of the elusive children; then the children themselves—Jonah,
the mischievous; Toby with her shining face of onion skin; and, last of
all, the host of tumbling animals, the mysterious cats, the kittens, all
fluff and wonder; and the whole of it set amid the scenery of flowers,
hills, and sea. It was impossible to tell exactly where the actual
threshold lay, this shifting, fluid threshold dividing the two worlds;
but there can be no question that Paul passed it day by day without the
least difficulty, and that it was Nixie who knew all the quickest
short-cuts.

And to all who—since childhood—have lived in Fairyland and tasted of its
sweet innocence and loveliness, comes sooner or later the desire to
transfer something of these qualities to the outer world. Paul felt this
more and more as the days passed. The wish to beautify the lives of
others grew in him with a sudden completeness that proved it to have
been there latent all the time. Through the voices of Nixie, Jonah, and
Toby, as it were, he heard the voices—those myriad, faint, unhappy
voices—of the world’s neglected children a-calling to him: ‘Tell us the
Aventures too!’—‘Take us with you through that Crack!’—‘Show us the
Wind, and let us climb with you the Scaffolding of Night.’

And Paul, listening in his deep heart, began to understand that Nixie’s
education of himself was but a beginning: all unconsciously that elfin
child was surely becoming also his inspiration. This first lesson in
self-expression she had taught him was like the trickle that would lead
to the bursting of the dam. The waters of his enthusiasms would
presently pour out with the rush of genuine power behind them. What he
had to say, do, and live—all forms of self-expression—were to find a
larger field of usefulness than the mere gratification of his personal
sense of beauty.

As yet, however, the thought only played dimly to and fro at the back of
his mind, seeking a way of escape. The greater outlet could not come all
at once. The germ of the desire lay there in secret development, but the
thing he should do had not yet appeared.

So, for the time being, he continued to live in Fairyland and write
Aventures.

It was really incalculable the effect of enchantment this little
yellow-haired girl cast upon him—hard to believe, hard to realise. So
true, so exquisite was it, however, that he almost came to forget her
age, and that she was actually but a child. To him she seemed more and
more an intimate companion of the soul who had existed always, and that
both he and she were ageless. It was their souls that played, talked,
caressed, not merely their minds or bodies. In her flower-like little
figure dwelt assuredly an old and ripened soul; one, too, it seemed to
him sometimes, that hardly belonged to this world at all.

There was that about their relationship which made it eternal—it always
had been somewhere, it always would be—somewhere. No confinings of
flesh, no limitations of mind and sense, no conditions of mere time and
space, could lay their burden upon it for long. It belonged most sweetly
to the real things which are conditionless.

Moreover, one of the chief effects of the world of Faery, experts say,
is that Time is done away with; emotions are inexhaustible and last for
ever, continually renewing themselves; the Fairies dance for years
instead of only for a night; their minds and bodies grow not old; their
desires, and the objects of their desires, pass not away.

‘So, unquestionably,’ said Paul to himself from time to time as he
reflected upon the situation, ‘I am bewitched. I must see what there is
that I can do in the matter to protect myself from further
depredations!’

Yet all he did immediately, so far as can be ascertained among the
sources of this veracious history, was to collect the ‘Aventures’
already written and journey with them one fine day to London, where he
had an interview of some length with a publisher—Dick’s publisher. The
result, at any rate, was—the records prove it—that some time afterwards
he received a letter in which it was plainly stated that ‘the success of
such a book is hard to predict, but it has qualities, both literary and
imaginative, which entitle it to a hearing’; and thus that in due course
the said ‘Adventures of a Prisoner in Fairyland’ appeared upon the
book-stalls. For the publishers, being the foremost in the land, took
the high view that seemed almost independent of mercenary calculations;
and it is interesting to note that the years justified their judgment,
and that the ‘Adventures’ may now be found upon the table of every house
in England where there dwells a true child, be that child seven or
seventy.

And any profits that Paul collected from the sale went, not into his own
pocket, but were put aside, as the sequel shall show, for a secret
purpose that lay hidden at this particular stage of the story among the
very roots of his heart and being.

The summer, meanwhile, passed quickly away, and August melted into
September, finding him still undecided about his return to America.

For the rest, there was no hurry. There was another six months in which
to make up his mind. Meanwhile, also, he made frequent use of the
‘Crack,’ and the changes in his soul went rapidly forward.




                              CHAPTER XIX

             There was a Being whom my spirit oft
             Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,
             In the clear golden prime of my youth’s dawn,
             Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn,
             Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves
             Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves
             Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor
             Paved her light steps;—on an imagined shore
             Under the grey beak of some promontory
             She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,
             That I beheld her not
                                        _Epipsychidion_


One afternoon in late September he made his way alone across the hills.
Clouds blew thinly over a sky of watery blue, driven by an idle wind the
roses had left behind. It seemed a day strayed from out the summer that
now found itself, thrilled and a little confused, in the path of
autumn—and summer had sent forth this soft wind to bring it back to the
fold.

The ‘Crack’ was always near at hand on such a day, and Paul slipped in
without the least difficulty. He found himself in a valley of the Blue
Mountains hitherto unknown, and, so wandering, came presently to a bend
of the river where the sand stretched smooth and inviting.

For a moment he stopped to watch the slanting waves and listen, when to
his sudden amazement he saw upon the shore, half concealed by the reeds
near the bank—a human figure. A second glance showed him that it was the
figure of a young girl, lying there in the sun, her bare feet just
beyond reach of the waves, and her yellow hair strewn about the face so
as to screen it almost entirely from view. A white dress covered her
body; she was slim, he saw, as a child. She was asleep.

Paul stood and stared.

‘Shall I wake her?’ was his first thought. But his second thought was
truer: ‘Can I help waking her?’ And then a third came to him, subtle and
inexplicable, yet scarcely shaping itself in actual language: ‘Is she
after all _a stranger_?’

Flying memories, half-formed, half-caught, ran curiously through his
brain. What was it in the turn of the slender neck, in the lines of the
little mouth, just visible where he stood, that seemed familiar? Did he
not detect upon that graceful figure lying motionless in repose some
indefinable signature that recalled his outer life? Or was it merely
that fancy played tricks, and that he reconstructed a composite picture
from the galleries of memory, with the myriad expression and fugitive
magic of dream or picture—ideal figures he had conjured with in the past
and set alive in some inner frame of his deepest thoughts? He was
conscious of a delicious bewilderment. A singular emotion stirred in his
heart. Yet the face and figure he sought utterly evaded him.

Then, the first sharp instinct to turn aside passed. He accepted the
adventure. Stooping down for a stone, he flung it with a noisy splash
into the river. The girl opened her eyes, threw her hair back in a
cloud, and sat up.

At once a wave of invincible shyness descended upon Paul, rendering
words or action impossible; he felt ridiculously embarrassed, and sought
hurriedly in his mind for ways of escape. But, before any feasible plan
for undoing what was already done suggested itself, he became aware of a
very singular thing—the face of the girl was covered! He could not see
it clearly. Something, veil-like and misty, hung before it so that his
eyes could not focus properly upon the features. The recognition he had
half anticipated, therefore, did not come.

And this helped to restore his composure. It was, in any case, futile to
pretend he did not see her. For one thing, he realised that she was
staring at him just as hard as he was staring at her. The very next
instant she rose and came across the hot sand towards him, her hair
flying loose, and both hands outstretched by way of greeting. Again, the
half-recognition that refused to complete itself swept confusingly over
him.

But this spontaneous and unexpected action had an immediate effect upon
him of another kind. His embarrassment vanished. What she did seemed
altogether right and natural, and the beauty of the girl drove all minor
emotions from his mind. His whole being rose in a wave of unaffected
delight, and almost before he was aware of it, he had stepped forward
and caught both her hands in his own.

This strange golden happiness at first troubled his speech.

‘But surely I know you!’ he cried. ‘If only I could see your face——!’

‘You ought to know me,’ she replied at once with a laugh as of old
acquaintance, ‘for you have called for me often enough, I’m sure!’ Her
voice was soft; curiously familiar accents rang in it; yet, as with the
face, he knew not whose it was.

She looked up at him, and though he could not make out the features, he
discerned the expression they wore—an expression of peace and
confidence. The girl trusted him delightfully.

‘Then what hides you from me?’ he insisted.

She answered him so low that he hardly caught the words. Certainly, at
the moment he did not understand them, for happiness still confused him.
‘The body,’ she murmured; ‘the veil of the body.’

She returned the firm and equal pressure of his hands, and allowed him
to draw her close. Their faces approached, and he looked searchingly
down upon her, trying to pierce the veil in vain. The hot sunshine fell
in a blaze upon their uncovered heads. The next moment the girl raised
her lips to his, and almost before he knew it they had kissed.

Yet that kiss seemed the most natural thing in the world; at a stroke it
killed the last vestige of shyness. Youth ran in his veins like fire.

‘Now, tell me exactly who you are, please,’ he cried, standing back a
little for an inspection, but still holding her hands. They swung out at
arm’s length like children.

‘I think first you should tell me who you are,’ she laughed. ‘I want to
be a mystery a little longer. It’s so much more interesting!’

Leaning backwards with her hair tumbling down her neck, she looked at
him out of eyes that he half imagined, half knew. Laughter and
gentleness played over her like sunlight. Standing there, framed against
the reeds of the river bank, with the blue waters behind and the wind
and sky about her head, Paul thought that never till this moment had he
understood the whole magic of a woman’s beauty. Yet at the same time he
somehow divined that she was as much child as woman, and that something
of eternal youthfulness mingled exquisitely with her suggestion of
maturity.

‘Of course,’ he laughed in return, like a boy in mid-mischief, ‘that’s
your privilege, isn’t it? My name, then, is——’

But there he stuck fast. It seemed so foolish to give the name he owned
in that other tinsel world; it was merely a disguise like a frock-coat
or evening dress, or the absurd uniform he had once assumed to deceive
the children with. He almost felt ashamed of the name he was known by in
that world!

‘Well?’ she asked slyly, ‘and have you forgotten it quite?’

‘I’m the _Man who saw the Wind_, for one thing,’ he said at length;
‘and, after that, well—I suppose I’m the man who’s been looking for you
without knowing it all his life! Now do you know me?’ he concluded
triumphantly.

‘You foolish creature! Of course _I_ know you!’

She came closer; the sunshine and the odour of the flowers seemed to
come with her. ‘It’s _you_ who couldn’t find _me_! I’ve been waiting for
you to claim me ever since—either of us can remember.’

A queer, faint rush of memory rose upon him from the depths—and was
gone. For an instant it seemed that her face half cleared.

‘Then, in the name of beauty,’ he cried, starting forward, ‘why can’t I
see your face and eyes? Why do I only see you partly——?’

She hesitated an instant and drew back; she lowered her eyes—he felt
that—and the voice dropped very low again as she answered:

‘Because, as yet, you only know me—partly.’

‘As through a glass, darkly, you mean?’ he said, half grave, half
laughing.

The girl took both his hands and pressed them silently for a moment.

‘When you know me as I know you,’ she whispered softly, ‘then—we shall
know one another—see one another—face to face. But even now, in these
few minutes, you have come to know me better than you ever did before.
And that is something, isn’t it?’

She moved quite close, passing her hands down his bronzed cheeks and
shaking his head playfully as one might do to a loved child.

‘You take my breath away!’ gasped the delighted man, too bewildered in
his new happiness to let the strangeness of her words perplex him long.
‘But, tell me again,’ he added, slowly releasing himself, ‘how it is
that you know me so well? Tell me again and again!’

She replied demurely, standing before him like a teacher before a
backward pupil. ‘Because I have always watched, studied, and loved
you—from within yourself. It was not my fault that you failed to know me
when I spoke. Perhaps, even now, you would not have found me unless—in
certain ways—through the children—you had begun to come into your own——’

Paul interrupted her, taking her in his arms, while she made no effort
to escape, but only laughed. ‘And I’ll take good care I never lose you
again after this!’ he cried.

‘You know, I wasn’t really asleep just now on the sand,’ she told him a
little later. ‘I heard you coming all the time; only I wanted to see if
you would pass me by as you always did before.’

‘It’s very odd and very wonderful,’ he said, ‘but I never noticed you
till to-day.’

‘And very natural,’ she added under her breath, so low that he did not
hear.

And Paul, moving beside her, murmured in his beard, ‘If she’s not my
Ideal, set mysteriously somehow into the framework of one I already
love—I swear I don’t know who she is!’


They made their way along the sandy shores of the river, the waves
breaking at their feet, the wind singing among the reeds; never had the
sunlight seemed so brilliant, the day so wonderful and kind. All nature
helped them; playing their great game as if it was the only game worth
playing in the whole world—the game loved from one eternity to another.

‘So the children have told you about me, have they?’ he whispered into
the ear that came just level with his lips.

‘And all you love, as well. Your dreams and thoughts more than anything
else—especially your thoughts. You must be very careful with those; they
mould me; they make me what I am. If you didn’t think nicely of
me—verynicelyindeed——’

‘But I shall always think nicely, beautifully, of you,’ he broke in
eagerly, not noticing the familiar touch of language.

‘You have so far, at any rate,’ she replied, ‘for the yearning and
desire of your imagination have created me afresh.’ And he discerned the
smile upon her veiled face as one may see the sun only through troubled
glass, yet know its warmth and brilliance.

‘Then it is because you are part and parcel of my inner self that you
seem so real and intimate and—true?’ he asked passionately.

‘Of course. I am in your very blood; I beat in your heart; I understand
your every passion and emotion, because I am present at their birth. The
most fleeting of your dreams finds its reflection in me; your spirit’s
faintest aspiration runs through me like a trumpet call; and, now that
you have found me, we need never, we _can_ never, separate!’

The passion of her words broke over his heart like a wave. He felt
himself trembling.

‘But it is all so swift and wonderful that it makes me almost
afraid—afraid it cannot last,’ he objected, knowing all the time that
his words were but a common device to make his pleasure the more real.

‘If only, oh, if only I could carry you away with me into that outer
world——!’

She laughed deliciously in his face. ‘It is from that very “outer world”
that you have carried me _in here_,’ she told him softly, ‘for I am
always with you.’ And with the words came that fugitive trick of voice
and gesture that made him certain he knew her—then was gone again. ‘In
the house with your sister and the children,’ she continued; ‘when you
write your Aventures and your verses; in your daily round of duties,
small and great; and when you lie down at night—ah! especially then—I
curl up beside you in your heart, and fly with you through all your
funny dreamland, and wake your dear eyes with a kiss so soft you never
know it. In your early morning rambles, as in your reveries of the dusk,
I never leave you—because I cannot. All day long I am beside you, though
you little realise my presence. I share half your pleasures and all your
pains. And in return you hand over to me half that soul whose unuttered
prayers have thus created me afresh for your salvation.’

‘But it must be my own voice speaking,’ he cried inwardly, satisfied and
happy beyond belief. ‘It is the words of my own thoughts that I hear!’

‘Because I am your own thoughts speaking,’ she replied instantly, as
though he had uttered aloud. ‘I lie, you see, behind your inmost
thoughts!’


They walked through sunny meadows, picking their way among islands of
wild flowers. There was no sound but the murmur of wind and river, and
the singing of birds. Fleecy clouds, here and there in the blue, hung
cool and white, watching them. The whole world, Paul felt, listened
without shyness.

‘And so it is that you love me without shyness,’ she went on,
marvellously linking in with his thought; ‘I am intimate with you as
your own soul, and our relations are pure with the purity that was
before man. There can be no secrets between us, or possibility of
secrets, for your most hidden dreams are also mine. So mingled with your
ultimate being am I, in fact, that sometimes you dare not recognise me
as separate, and all that appears on the surface of your dear mind must
first filter through myself. Why!’ she cried, with a sudden rush of
mischievous laughter, ‘I even know what you are made of; why your queer
heart has never been able to satisfy itself—to “grow up,” as you call
it; and all about this endless desire you have to find God, which is
really nothing but the search to find your true inner Self.’

‘Tell me! tell me!’ he cried.

‘Besides the sun,’ she went on with a strange swiftness of words,
‘there’s the wind and the rain in you; yes, and moon and stars as well.
That’s why the fire and restlessness of the imagination for ever tear
you. No mere form of expression can ever satisfy _that_, but only
increase it; for it means your desire to know reality, to know beauty,
to know your own soul; to know—God! Your blood has kinship with those
tides that flow through all space, even to the gates of the stars; dawns
and sunsets, moonrise and meteors haunt your thoughts with their magic
lights; wild flowers of the fields and hillside nod beside you while you
sleep; and the winds, laughing and sighing, lift your dreams upon vast
wings and flash with them beyond the edges of the universe!’

‘Stop,’ he cried with passion, ‘you are telling all my secrets.’

‘I am telling them only to myself,’ she laughed, ‘and therefore to you.
For I know all the fevers of your soul. The wilderness calls you and the
great woods. You are haunted by the faces of the world’s forgotten
places. Your imagination plays with the lightning about the mountain
tops, and seeks primeval forests and the shores of desolate seas....’

Paul listened spellbound while she put some of the most intangible of
his fancies into the language of poetry. Yet she spoke with the quiet
simplicity of true things. The man felt his soul shake with delight to
hear her. Again and again, while she spoke, the feeling came to him that
in another moment her face must clear and he would know her; yet the
actual second of recognition never appeared. The girl’s true identity
continued to evade him. The enticing uncertainty added enormously to her
charm. It evoked in him even the sense of worship.

‘And this shall be the earnest of our ideal companionship,’ she
whispered, holding up a spray of leaves which she proceeded to fasten
into the buttonhole of his coat; ‘the symbol by which you shall always
know me—the sign of my presence in your heart.’

The top of her head, as she bent over the task, was on a level with his
lips, and when he stooped to kiss it the perfumes of the earth—flowers,
trees, wind, water—rose about her like a cloud. Her hair was hot with
sunshine, all silken with the air of summer. They were one being,
growing out of the earth that he loved—the old, magical, beautiful earth
that fed so great a part of his secret life from perennial springs.

As she drew away again from his caress he glanced down and saw that what
she had pinned into his coat was a little cluster of leaves from the
branch of a silver birch tree.

‘Then I, too, shall give you a sign,’ he said, ‘that shall mean the same
as yours.’ And he picked a twig of pine needles from a tree beside them
and twined it through a coil of her hair. Then, seizing her hands, he
swung her round in a dance till they fell upon the river bank at last,
tired out, and slept the sleep of children.

And after that, for a whole day it seemed, they wandered through this
summer landscape, following the river to its source in the mountains,
and then descending on the farther side to the shores of a blue-rimmed
sea.

‘There are the ships,’ she cried, pointing to the shining expanse of
water; ‘and, see, there is _our_ ship coming for us.’

And as she stood there, laughing with excitement like a child, a barque
with painted figure-head and brown sails yielding to the wind, came
towards them over the waves, the bales of fruit upon her decks scenting
the air, the smell of rope and tar and salty wood enticing them to
distance and adventure. Through the cordage the very sound of the wind
called to them to be off.

‘So at last we start upon our long, long voyage together,’ she said
mysteriously, blushing with pleasure, and leading him down towards the
ship.

‘And where are we to sail to?’ he asked; for the flap of the sails and
the waves beating against the sides made resistance impossible. The
sea-smells were in his nostrils. He glanced down at the veiled face
beside him.

‘First to the Islands of the Night,’ she whispered so low that not even
the wind could carry it away; ‘for there we shall be alone.’

‘And then——?’

‘And then to the Islands of Delight,’ she murmured more softly still;
‘for there we shall find the lost children of the world—_our_ children,
and so be happy with them ever after, like the people in the fairy
tales.’


With something like a shock he realised that some one else was walking
beside him, talking of things that were real in a very different sense.
He had been out walking longer than he knew, and had reached the house
again. The autumnal mist already drew its gauze curtains about the old
building. The smoke rose in straight lines from the chimneys, melting
into dusk. That other place of sunshine and flowers had faded—sea, ship,
islands, had all sunk beneath the depths within him. And this other
person had been saying things for some minutes....

‘I don’t believe you’ve been listening to a single word, Paul. You stand
there with your eyes fixed on vacancy, and only nod your head and
grunt.’

‘I assure you, Margaret, dear,’ he stammered, coming to the surface as
from a long swim under water, ‘I rarely miss anything you say. Only the
Crack came so very suddenly. You were saying that Dick’s niece was
coming to us—Joan—er—Thingumybob, and——’

‘So you heard some of it,’ she laughed quietly, relenting. ‘And I hope
the Crack you speak about is in your head, not in mine.’

‘It’s everywhere,’ he said with his grave humour. ‘That’s the trouble,
you see; one never knows——’ Then, seeing that she was looking anxiously
at the walls of the house and at the roof, he dropped his teasing and
came back to solid earth again. ‘And how soon do you expect her?’ he
asked in his most practical voice. ‘When does she arrive upon the
scene?’

‘Why, Paul, I’ve already told you twice! You really are getting more
absent-minded every day. Joan comes to-morrow, or the day after—she’s to
telegraph which—and stays here for as long as she can manage—a fortnight
or so, I expect. She works herself to death, I believe, in town with
those poor children, and I want her to get a real rest before she goes
back.’

‘Waifs, aren’t they?’ he asked, picking up the thread of the discourse
like a thing heard in a dream, ‘lost children of the slums?’

‘Yes. You’ll see them for yourself probably, as she has some of them
down usually for a day in the country. One can be of use in that way—and
it’s so nice to help. Dick, you know, was absorbed in the scheme. You
will help, won’t you, when the time comes?’

He promised; and they went in together to tea.




                               CHAPTER XX


‘This is him,’ cried Jonah breathlessly, pointing with a hand that wore
ink like a funeral glove. ‘I’ve got him this time. Look!’ And he waved a
half-sheet of paper in his uncle’s face.

‘I’ve made one too—oh, a beauty!’ echoed Toby; ‘and I haven’t made half
such a mess as you.’ Three of her fingers were in mourning. A crape-like
line running from the nose to the corner of the mouth, lent her a
certain distinction. She, too, waved a bit of paper in the air.

‘Mine’s the real Jack-of-the-Inkpot though, isn’t he, Uncle Paul?’
exclaimed the boy, leaving the schoolroom table, and running up to show
it.

‘They’re all real—as real as your awful fingers,’ decreed Paul.

He had been explaining how to make the figure of the Ink Sprite that
leaves blots wherever he goes, blackens penholders and fingers, and
leaves his crawly marks across even the neatest page of writing. Two
blots and a line-then fold the paper. Open it again and the ink has run
into the semblance of an outlandish figure with countless legs and arms,
and a fantastic head; something between a spider, a centipede, and a
sprite.

‘It’s Jack-of-the-Inkpot,’ he told them. ‘Half the time he does his
dirty work invisibly, and if he touches blotting-paper—he vanishes
altogether.’

Jonah skipped about the room, waving his hideous creation in the air.
Toby, in her efforts to make a still better one, almost climbed into the
ink-stand. Nixie sat on the window-sill, dangling her legs and looking
on.

‘Very little ink does it,’ explained Paul, frightened at the results of
his instruction. ‘You needn’t pour it on! He works with the smallest
possible material, remember!’ His own fingers were no longer as spotless
as they might have been.

‘Look!’ shouted Jonah, standing on a chair and ignoring the rebuke.
‘There he goes—just like a black spider flying!’ He let his half-sheet
drop through the air, ink running down its side as it fell, while Toby
watched with the envy of despair.

Paul pounced upon the wriggling figure just in time to prevent further
funeral trappings. He turned it face downwards upon the blotting-paper.

‘Oh, oh!’ cried the children in the same breath; ‘it’s drank him up!’

‘Drunk him up,’ corrected Paul, relieved by the success of his manœuvre.
‘His feet touched the blotting-paper, you see.’

A pause followed.

‘You promised to tell us his song, please,’ observed Nixie from her
perch on the window-sill.

‘This is it, then,’ he answered, looking round at the smudged and solemn
faces, instantly grown still. ‘To judge by appearances you know this
Sprite better than I do!

                      I dance on your paper,
                      I hide in your pen,
                      I make in your ink-stand
                      My black little den;
                      And when you’re not looking
                      I hop on your nose,
                      And leave on your forehead
                      The marks of my toes.

                      When you’re trying to finish
                      Your “i” with a dot,
                      I slip down your finger
                      And make it a blot;
                      And when you’re so busy
                      To cross a big “T,”
                      I make on the paper
                      A little Black Sea.

                      I drink blotting-paper,
                      Eat penwiper-pie,
                      You never can catch me,
                      You never need try!
                      I hop _any_ distance,
                      I use _any_ ink!
                      I’m on to your fingers
                      Before you can wink.’

Paul’s back was to the door. He was in the act of making up a new verse,
and declaiming it, when he was aware that a change had come suddenly
over the room. It was manifest from the faces of the children. Their
attention had wandered; they were looking past him—beyond him.

And when he turned to discover the cause of the distraction he looked
straight into the grey eyes of a woman—grave-faced, with an expression
of strength and sweetness. As he did so the opening words of verse four
slipped out in spite of themselves:—

                     ‘I’m the blackest of goblins,
                     I revel in smears—’

He smothered the accusing statement with a cough that was too late to
disguise it, while the grey eyes looked steadily into his with a twinkle
their owner made no attempt to conceal. The same instant the children
rushed past him to welcome her.

‘It’s Cousin Joan!’ they cried with one voice, and dragged her into the
room.

‘And this is Uncle Paul from America——’ began Nixie.

‘And he’s crammed full of sprites and things, and sees the wind and gets
through our Crack, and—and climbs up the rigging of the Night——’ cried
Jonah, striving to say everything at once before his sisters.

‘And writes the aventures of our Secret S’iety,’ Toby managed to
interpolate by speaking very fast indeed.

‘He’s Recording Secre’ry, you see,’ explained Nixie in a tone of gentle
authority that brought order into the scene. ‘Cousin Joan, you know,’
she added, turning gravely to her uncle, ‘is Visiting I’spector.’

‘Whose visits, however, are somewhat rare, I fear,’ said the new
arrival, with a smile. Her voice was quiet and very pleasant. ‘I hope,
Mr. Rivers, you are able to keep the Society in better order than I ever
could.’

The introduction seemed adequate. They shook hands. Paul somehow forgot
the signs of mourning he wore in common with the rest.

‘Cousin Joan has a _real_ Society in London, of course,’ Nixie explained
gravely, ‘a Society that picks up _real_ lost children.’

‘A-filleted with ours, though,’ cried Jonah proudly.

‘’ffiliated, he means,’ explained Nixie, while everybody laughed, and
the boy looked uncertain whether to be proud, hurt, or puzzled, but in
the end laughing louder than the rest.

When Paul was alone a few minutes later, the children having been
carried off shouting to receive the presents their ‘Cousin’ always
brought them on her rare visits from London, he was conscious first of a
curious sense of disappointment. That strong-faced woman, grave of
expression, with the low voice and the rather sad grey eyes, he divined
was the cause; though, for the moment, he could not trace the feeling to
any definite detail. In his mind he still saw her standing in the
doorway—a woman no longer in her first youth, yet comely with a
delicate, strong beauty that bore the indefinable touch of high living.
It was peculiar to his intuitive temperament to note the spirit before
he became aware of physical details; and this woman had left something
of her personality behind her. She had spoken little, and that little
ordinary; had done nothing in act or gesture that was striking. He did
not even remember how she was dressed, beyond that she looked neat,
soft, effective. Yet, there it was; something was in the room with him
that had not been there before she came.

At first he felt vaguely that his sense of disappointment had to do with
herself. Not that he had expected anything dazzling, or indeed had given
her consciously any thought at all. The male creature, of course,
hearing the name of a girl he is about to meet, instinctively conjures
up a picture to suit her name. He cannot help himself. And Joan
Nicholson, apart from any deliberate process of thought or desire on his
part, hardly suited the picture that had thus spontaneously formed in
his mind. The woman seemed too big for the picture. He had seen her,
perhaps, hitherto, only through his sister’s eyes. It puzzled him. About
her, mysteriously as an invisible garment, was the atmosphere of things
bigger, grander, finer than he had expected; nobler than he quite
understood.

Ah, now, at last, he was getting at it. The vague sense of
disappointment was not with her; it was _with himself_. Tested by some
new standard her mere presence had subtly introduced into the room—into
his intuitive mind—he had become suddenly dissatisfied with himself. His
play with the children, he remembered feeling, had seemed all at once
insignificant, unreal, almost unworthy—compared to another larger order
of things her presence had suggested, if not actually revealed.

Thus, in a flash of vision, the truth came to him. It was with himself
and not with her that he was disappointed. He recalled scraps of the
conversation. It was, after all, nothing Joan Nicholson had said; it was
something Nixie had said. Nixie, his little blue-eyed guide and teacher,
had been up to her wizard tricks again, all unconsciously.

‘Cousin Joan has a _real_ Society in London, you know—_a Society that
picks up real lost children_.’

That was the sentence that had done it. He felt certain. Combined with
the spiritual presentment of the woman, this apparently stray remark had
dropped down into his heart with almost startling effect—like the grain
of powder a chemist adds to his test tube that suddenly changes the
colour and nature of its contents. As yet he could not determine quite
what the change meant; he felt only that it was there—disappointment,
dissatisfaction with himself.

‘Cousin Joan has a _real_ Society.’ She was in earnest.

‘_Real_ lost children’—perhaps potential Nixies, Jonahs, Tobys, all
waiting to be ‘picked up.’

The thoughts ran to and fro in him like some one with a little torch,
lighting up corners and recesses of his soul he had so far never
visited. For thus it sometimes is with the chemistry of growth. The
changes are prepared subconsciously for a long while, and then comes
some trivial little incident—a chance remark, a casual action—and a
match is set to the bonfire. It flames out with a sudden rush. The
character develops with a leap; the soul has become wiser, advanced,
possessed of longer, clearer sight.

Paul was certainly aware of a new standard by which he must judge
himself; and, for all the apparent slightness of its cause, a little
reflection will persuade of its truth. Real, inner crises of a soul are
often produced by causes even more negligible.

The desire, always latent in him, to be of some use in the world, and to
find the things he sought by losing himself in some Cause bigger than
personal ends, had been definitely touched. It now rose to the surface
and claimed deliberate attention.

What in the world did it matter—thus he reflected while dressing for
dinner—whether his own personal sense of beauty found expression or not?
Of what account was it to the world at large, the world, for instance,
that included those ‘lost children’ who needed to be ‘picked up’? To
what use did he put it, except to his own gratification, and the passing
pleasure of the children he played with? Were there no bigger uses,
then, for his imagination, uses nobler and less personal?...

The thoughts chased one another through his mind in some confusion. He
felt more and more dissatisfied with himself. He must set his house in
order. He really must get to work at something _real_!

Other thoughts, too, played with him while he struggled with his studs
and tie. For he noticed suddenly with surprise that he was taking more
trouble with his appearance than usual. That black tie always bothered
him when he could not get the help of Nixie’s fingers, and usually he
appeared at the table with the results of carelessness and despair
plainly visible in its outlandish shape. But to-night he tied and
re-tied, determined to get it right. He meant to look his best.

Yet this process of beautifying himself was instinctive, not deliberate.
It was unconscious; he did not realise what he had been about until he
was half-way downstairs. And then came another of those swift, subtle
flashes by which the soul reveals herself—to herself. This ‘dressing
up,’ what was it for? For whom? Certainly, he did not care a button what
Joan Nicholson thought of his personal appearance. That was positive.
Then, for whom, and for what, was it? Was it for some one else? Had the
arrival of this ‘woman’ upon the scene somehow brought the truth into
sudden relief?...

A delightful, fairy thought sped across his mind with wings of gold,
waving through the dusk of his soul a spray of leaves from a silver
birch tree that he knew, and disappearing into those depths of
consciousness where feelings never clothe themselves in precise
language. A line of poetry swam up and took its place mysteriously—

       My heart has thoughts, which, though thine eyes hold mine,
       Flit to the silent world and other summers,
       With wings that dip beyond the silver seas.

Could it be, then, that he had given his heart so utterly, so
exquisitely, into the keeping of a little child?...

At any rate, before he reached the drawing-room, he understood that what
he had been so busy dressing up was not anything half so trumpery as his
mere external body and appearance. It was his interior person. That
black tie, properly made for once, was an outward and visible sign of an
inward and spiritual grace; only, having forgotten, or possibly never
heard the phrase, he could not make use of it!

‘It’s that little, sandy-haired witch after all!’ he thought to himself.
‘Joan’s coming—a woman’s coming—has made me realise it. I must behave my
best, and look my best. It’s my soul dressing up for Nixie, I do
declare!’




                              CHAPTER XXI


Persons with real force of purpose carry about with them something that
charges unconsciously the atmosphere of others. Paul ‘felt’ this woman.
The first impact of her presence, as has been seen, came almost as a
shock. The ‘shocks,’ however, did not continue—as such. Her influence
worked in him underground, as it were.

She slipped easily and naturally into the quiet routine of the little
household in the Grey House under the hill, till it seemed as if she had
been there always. Margaret had insisted at once that there could be no
‘Missing’ and ‘Mistering’; Dick’s niece must be Joan, and her brother
Paul; and the more familiar terms of address were adopted without effort
on both sides.

The children helped, too. They were all in the same Society, and before
a week had passed she had heard all the ‘aventures,’ and entered into
the discovery of new ones, even contributing some herself with a zest
that delighted Paul, and made him feel wholly at his ease with her. It
was all real to her; she could not otherwise have shown an interest; for
sham had no part in her nature, and her love for these fatherless
children was as great as his own, and similar in kind.

‘You have given their “Society” a new lease of life,’ she told him; ‘you
are an enormous addition to it.’

‘Enormous—yes!’ he laughed.

‘Enormously useful at the same time,’ she laughed in return, ‘because
you not only increase their imagination; you train it, and show them how
to use it.’

‘To say nothing of the indirect benefits I receive myself,’ he added.

And, after a pause, she said: ‘For myself, too, it’s the best kind of
holiday I could possibly have. To come down here into all this, straight
from my waifs in London, is like coming into that Crack-land you have
shown them. I wish—I wish I could introduce it all to my big sad world
of unwashed urchins. They have so few chances.’ A sudden flash of
enthusiasm ran over her face like sunlight. ‘Perhaps, when they come
down here next week for a day’s outing, we might try!—if you will help
me, that is?’ She looked up. Something in the simple words touched him;
her singleness of aim stirred the depths in him.

He promised eagerly.

‘When it’s out,’ she added presently, ‘I’m going to give copies of your
book of aventures to some of them. A good many will understand——’

‘You shall have as many as you can use,’ he put in quickly, with a
thrill of pleasure he hardly understood. ‘I’m only too delighted to
think they could be of any use—any _real_ use, I mean.’

There was something in the simple earnestness of this woman, in the
devotion of her life to an unselfish Cause, that increased daily his
dissatisfaction with himself. She never said a word that suggested
self-sacrifice. A call had come to her, turning her entire life into an
instrument for helping others—others who might never realise enough to
say, ‘Thank you’—and she had accepted it. Now she lived it, that was
all. The Scheme that had provided the call, too, was Dick’s. It was all
conceived originally in that big practical, imaginative heart of the one
intimate friendship he had known. Moreover, it concerned children, lost
children. The appeal to the deepest in himself was thus reinforced in
several ways. More and more, beside this quiet, determined woman, with
her singleness of aim and her practical idealism, his own life seemed
trivial, cheap, selfish. She had found a medium of expression,
self-expression, compared to which his own mind was insignificant.

From the ‘Man who splashed on the Deck’ to Joan Nicholson was a far cry;
as far almost as from the amœba to the dog—yet both the man and the
woman knew the relief of Outlet. And, now, he too was learning in his
own time and place the same truth. Nixie had brought him far. Joan,
perhaps, was to bring him farther still.

Yet there was nothing about her that was very unusual. There are scores
and scores of unmarried women like her sprinkled all along the quiet
ways of life, noble, unselfish, unrecognised, often, no doubt, utterly
unappreciated, turning the whole current of their lives into work for
others—the best they can find. The ordinary man who, for the mother of
his children seeks first of all physical beauty, or perhaps some worldly
standard of attractiveness, passes them by. Their great force, thus
apparently neglected by Nature for her more obvious purposes, runs along
through more hidden channels, achieving great things with but little
glory or reward. To Paul, who knew nothing of modern types, and whose
knowledge of women was abstract rather than concrete, she appeared, of
course, simply normal. For all women he conceived as noble and
unselfish, capable naturally of sacrifice and devotion. To him they were
all saints, more or less, and Joan Nicholson came upon the scene of his
life merely as an ordinarily presentable specimen of the great species
he had always dreamt about.

But it was the first time he had come into close contact with a living
example of the type he had always believed in. Here was a woman whose
interests were all outside herself. The fact thrilled and electrified
him, just as the peculiar nature of her work made a powerful and
intimate appeal to his heart.

As the days passed, and they came to know one another better, she told
him frankly about the small beginnings of her work, and then how Dick’s
idea had caught her up and carried her away to where she now was.

‘There was so much to be done, and so much help needed, that at first,’
she admitted, ‘my own little efforts seemed absurd; and then he showed
me that if everybody talked like that nothing would ever be
accomplished. So I got up and tried. It was something definite and
practical. I let my bigger dreams go——’

‘Well done,’ he interrupted, wondering for a moment what those ‘bigger
dreams’ could have been.

‘——and chose the certainty. And I have never regretted it, though
sometimes, of course, I am still tempted——’

‘That was fine of you,’ he said. He realised vaguely that she would
gladly, perhaps, have spoken to him of those ‘other dreams,’ but it was
not quite clear to him that his sympathy could be of any avail, and he
did not know how to offer it either. To ask direct questions of such a
woman savoured to his delicate mind of impertinence.

‘There was nothing “fine” about it,’ she laughed, after an imperceptible
pause; ‘it was natural, that’s all. I couldn’t help myself really. Human
suffering has always called to me very searchingly. _Au fond_, you see,
it was almost selfishness.’

He suddenly felt unaccountably small with this slip of a woman at his
side, tired, overworked, giving all her best years so gladly away, and
even in her ‘holidays’ thinking of her work more than of herself. He
noticed, too, the passing flames that lit fires in her eyes and
illumined her entire face sometimes when she spoke of her London waifs.
Pity and admiration ran together in his thoughts, the latter easily
predominating.

‘But you must make the most of your holiday,’ he said presently; ‘you
will use up your forces too soon——’

‘Perhaps,’ she laughed, ‘perhaps. Only I get restless with the feeling
that I’m wanted elsewhere. There’s so little time to do anything. The
years pass so quickly—after thirty; and if you always wait till you’re
“quite fit,” you wait for ever, and nothing gets done.’

Paul turned and looked steadily at her for a moment. A sudden beauty,
like a white and shining fire, leaped into her face, flashed about the
eyes and mouth, and was gone. Paul never forgot that look to the end of
his days.

‘By Jove,’ he said, ‘you _are_ in earnest!’

‘Not more than others,’ she said simply; ‘not as much as many, even, I’m
afraid. A good soldier goes on fighting whether he’s “fit” or not,
doesn’t he?’

‘He ought to,’ said Paul—humbly, for some reason he could hardly
explain.

They had many similar talks. She told him a great deal about her rescue
work in London, and he, for his part, became more and more interested.
From a distance, meanwhile, his sister observed them curiously,—though
nothing that was in Margaret’s thoughts ever for a single instant found
its way either into his mind or Joan’s. It was natural, of course, that
Margaret, the reader of modern novels, should have formed certain
conclusions, and perhaps it would have been the obvious and natural
thing for Joan and Paul to have fallen in love and been happy ever
afterwards with children of their own. It would also, no doubt, have
been ‘artistic,’ and the way things are made to happen in novels.

But in real life things are not cut always so neatly to measure, and
whether real life is artistic or not as a whole cannot be judged until
the true, far end is known. For the perspective is wanting; the scale is
on a vaster loom; and of the threads that weave into the pattern and out
again, neither end nor beginning are open to inspection.

The novels Margaret delighted in, with their hotch-potch of duchesses
and valets, Ministers of State and footmen, libertines and snobs, while
doubtless portraying certain phases of modern life with accuracy, could
in no way prepare her for the Pattern that was being woven beneath her
eyes by the few and simple characters in this entirely veracious
history. And it may be assumed, therefore, that Joan had come into the
scenery of Paul’s life with no such commonplace motive—since the high
Gods held the threads and wove them to their own satisfaction—as merely
to marry off the hero.

And if Paul did not fall in love with Joan Nicholson, as he might, or
ought, to have done, he at least did the next best thing to it. He fell
head over ears in love with her work. And since love seeks ever to
imitate and to possess, he cast about in his heart for means by which he
might accomplish these ends. Already he possessed her secret. Now he had
only to imitate her methods.

He was finding his way to a bigger and better means of self-expression
than he had yet dreamed of; while Nixie, the _dea ex machina_, for ever
flitted on ahead and showed the way.

It remained a fairy tale of the most delightful kind. _That_, at least,
he realised clearly.




                              CHAPTER XXII


Among the branches of the ilex tree, whose thick foliage rose like a
giant swarm of bees at the end of the lawn, there were three dark spots
visible that might have puzzled the most expert botanist until he came
close enough to examine them in detail. The fact that the birds avoided
the tree at this particular hour of the evening, when they might
otherwise have loved to perch and sing, hidden among the dense shiny
leaves, would very likely have furnished a clue, and have suggested to
him—if he were a really intelligent man of science—that these dark spots
were of human origin.

In the order in which they rose from the ground towards the top they
were, in fact, Toby, Joan Nicholson, Paul, Nixie and, highest of all,
Jonah. Paul felt safer in the big fork, Joan in the wide seat with the
back. In the upper branches Jonah perched, singing and chattering. Toby
hummed to herself happily nearer the ground, and Nixie, her legs
swinging dizzily over a serpentine branch immediately above Paul’s head,
was really the safest of the lot, though she looked ready to drop at any
moment.

They were all at rest, these wingless human birds, in the tree where
Paul had long ago made seats and staircases and bell-ropes.

‘I wish the wind would come,’ said Nixie. ‘It would make us all swing
about.’

‘And Jonah would lose his balance and bring the lot of us down like ripe
fruit,’ said Paul.

‘On the top of Toby at the bottom,’ added Joan.

‘But my house is well built,’ Paul objected, ‘or it would never have
held such a lot of visitors as it did yesterday.’

‘Look out! I’m slipping!’ cried Jonah suddenly overhead. ‘No! I’m all
right again now,’ he added a second later, having thoroughly alarmed the
lodgers on the lower floors, and sent down a shower of bark and twigs.

‘It’s certainly more solid than your “Scaffolding of Night,”’ Joan
observed mischievously as soon as the shower was past; ‘though, perhaps,
not quite as beautiful.’ And presently she added, ‘I think I never saw
boys enjoy themselves so much in my life. They’ll remember it as long as
they live.’

‘It was your idea,’ he said.

‘But you carried it out for me!’

They were resting after prolonged labours that had been, at the same
time, a prolonged delight. At three o’clock that afternoon, after
twenty-four hours of sunshine among woods and fields, the party of
twenty urchins had been seen safely off the premises into the London
train. Two large brakes had carried them to the station, and the gardens
of the grey house under the hill were dropping back again into their
wonted peace and quiet.

There is nothing unusual—happily—in the sight of poor town-children
enjoying an afternoon in the country; but there was something about this
particular outing that singled it out from the majority of its kind.
Paul had entered heart and soul into it, and the combination of woods,
fields, and running water had made possible certain details that are not
usually feasible.

Margaret had given Paul and her cousin _carte blanche_. They had planned
the whole affair as generals plan a battle. The children had proved able
lieutenants; and the weather had furnished the sun by day and the moon
by night, to show that it thoroughly approved. For it was Paul’s idea
that the entire company of boys should camp out, cook their meals over
wood fires in the open, bathe in the pools he had contrived long ago by
damming up the stream, and that not a single minute of the twenty-four
hours should they be indoors or under cover.

With a big barn close at hand in case of necessity, and with four tents
large enough to hold five apiece, erected at the far end of the Gwyle
woods, where the stream ran wide and full, he had no difficulty in
providing for all contingencies. Each boy had brought a little parcel
with his things for the night; and blankets, bedding of hay and pillows
of selected pine branches—oh, he knew all the tricks for making
comfortable sleeping-quarters in the woods!—were ready and waiting when
the party of urchins came upon the scene.

And every astonished ragamuffin had a number pinned on to his coat the
moment he arrived, and the same number was to be found at the head of
his place in the tent. Each tent, moreover, was under the care of a
particular boy who was responsible for order; while, midway in the camp,
by the ashes of the fire where they had roasted potatoes and told
stories till the moonlight shamed them into sleep, Paul himself lay all
night in his sleeping-bag, the happiest of the lot, sentinel and
guardian of the troop.

The place for the main fire, where meals were cooked, had been carefully
chosen beforehand, and wood collected by the busy hands of Nixie & Co.
The boys sat round it in a large ring; and Paul in the middle, stirring
the stew he had learned to make most deliciously in his backwoods life,
ladled it out into the tin plates of each in turn, while Joan saw to the
bread and cake, and watched the huge kettle of boiling water for tea
that swung slowly from the iron tripod near by.

And that circle of happy urchin faces, seen through the blue smoke
against the background of crowding tree stems, flushed with the hours of
sunshine, the mystery of happiness in all their eyes, remained a picture
in Paul’s memory to the end of his life. The boys, certainly, were not
all good, but they were at least all merry. They forgot for the time the
heat of airless brick lanes and the clatter of noisy traffic. The
perfumes of the wood banished the odour of ill-ventilated rooms. Dark
shadows of the streets gave place to veils of a very different kind, as
the rising moon dropped upon their faces the tracery of pine branches.
And, instead of the roar of a city that for them meant hardship, often
cruelty, they heard the singing of birds, the rustle of trees, and the
murmur of the stream at their very feet.

And Paul, as he paced to and fro softly between the sleeping crew, the
tents all ghostly among the trees, had long, long thoughts that went
with him into his sleeping-bag later and mingled with dreams that were
more inspired than he knew, and destined to bear a great harvest in due
course....

The branches of big forest trees shifted noiselessly forwards from the
scenery that lay ever in the background of his mind, and pressed his
eyelids gently into sleep. With feathery dark fingers they brushed the
surface of his thoughts, leaving the perfume of their own large dreams
about his pillow. The shadowy figures that haunt all ancient woods
peered at him from behind a million stems and, while they peered,
beckoned; whispering to his soul the secrets of the wilderness, and
renewing in him the sources of strength, simplicity, and joy they had
erstwhile taught him.

All that afternoon he had spent with the romping boys, organising their
play, seeing to it that they enjoyed utter freedom, yet did no mischief.
Joan seconded him everywhere, and Nixie flitted constantly between the
camp and the source of supplies in the kitchen. And, to see their play,
came as a revelation to him in many ways. While the majority were
content to shout and tumble headlong with excess of animal spirits let
loose, here and there he watched one or two apart, all aghast at the
beauty they saw at close quarters for the first time; dreaming;
apparently stunned; drinking it all in with eyes and ears and lips;
feeling the moss and branches as others feel jewels and costly lace; and
on some of the little faces an expression of grave wonder, and of joy
too deep for laughter.

‘This ain’t always ’ere, is it, Guv’nor?’ one had asked. And another,
whom Paul watched fingering a common fern for a long time, looked up
presently and inquired if it was real—‘because it isn’t ’arf as pretty
as what _we_ use!’ He was the son of a sceneshifter at an East End
theatre.

And a detail that made peculiarly keen appeal to his heart, a detail not
witnessed by Joan or the children, was the morning ablutions in the
stream, when the occupants of each tent in turn, went into the water
soon after sunrise, their pinched bodies streaked by the shadow and
sunlight of the dawn, their laughter and splashing filling the wood with
unwonted sounds. Soap, towels, and water in plenty! Water perfumed from
the hills! Faces flushed and almost rosy after the sleep in the open,
and the inexhaustible draughts of air to fan them dry again!

And then the eager circle for breakfast, hatless, eyes all fixed upon
the great stew-pot where he mixed the jorum of porridge! And the
noise—for noise, it must be confessed, there was—as they smothered it in
their tin plates with quarts of milk hot from the cow, and busily
swallowed it.

‘You took them straight into the Crack, you know,’ Joan said from her
seat below.

‘Everything came true,’ Nixie’s voice was heard overhead among the
branches.

Jonah clattered down past them and scampered across the lawn with Toby
at his heels, for their bedtime was close at hand. The other three lay
there, half hidden, a little longer, while the shadows crept down from
the hills and gathered underneath. They could no longer see each other
properly. For a time there was silence, stirred only by the faint rustle
of the ilex leaves. Each was thinking long, deep thoughts.

‘Next week,’ said Joan quietly, as though to herself, ‘the other lot
will come. Your sister’s as good as gold about it all.’

Then, after a pause, Nixie’s voice dropped down to them again:

‘And had some of them really never seen a wood before?’ she asked.
‘Fancy that! When I grow up I shall have a big wood made specially for
them—the “Wood for Lost Children” I shall call it. And you’ll see about
the tents and cooking, won’t you, Uncle Paul? Or, perhaps,’ she added,
‘by that time I shall know how to make a real proper stew and porridge,
and be able to tell them stories round the fire as you did. Don’t you
think so?’

‘I think you know most of it already,’ he answered gently. ‘It seems to
me somehow that you have always known all the important things like
that.’

‘Oh, do you really? How splendid if I really did!’ There was a slight
break in her voice—ever so slight. ‘I should so dreadfully like to
help—if I could. It’s so slow getting old enough to do anything.’

Paul turned his head up to her. It was too dim to see her body lying
along the bough, but he could just make out her eyes peering down
between the dark of the leaves, a yellow mist where her hair was, and
all the rest hidden. Very eerie, very suggestive it was, to hear this
little voice amid the dusk of the branches, putting his own thoughts
into words. Were those tears that glistened in the round pools of blue,
or was it the reflection of sunset and the coming stars that filtered
past her through the thinning tree-top? Again he thought of that silver
birch standing under the protection of the shaggy pine.

‘Sing us something, Nixie,’ rose the voice of Joan from below.

‘What shall I sing?’

‘That thing about the two trees Uncle Paul made up.’

‘But he hasn’t given me the tune yet!’

‘The tune’s still lost,’ murmured the deep voice from the shadows of the
big fork. ‘I must go into the Crack and find it. That’s where I found
the words, at least——’ The sound of his voice melted away.

‘Of course,’ Joan was heard to say faintly, ‘all lost things are in
there, aren’t they?’

And then something queer happened that was never explained. Perhaps they
all slipped through the Crack together; or perhaps Nixie’s funny little
singing voice floated down to them through such a filter of listening
leaves that both words and tune were changed on the way into something
sweeter than they actually were in themselves.

                   Who told the Silver Birch tree
                     The stories that we made?
                   And how can she remember
                     The very games we played?

                   Who told her heart of silver
                     That, almost from her birth,
                   The roots of that old Pine tree
                     Had sought hers under earth?

                   For always when the wind blows
                     Her hair about the wood,
                   It blows across my eyes too
                     Her pictured solitude.

                   And then Aventures gather
                     On little hidden feet,
                   And mystery and laughter
                     The magic things repeat.

                   For, O my Silver Birch tree,
                     Full half the ‘things’ we do,
                   We did—or e’er you sweetened
                     The starlight and the dew!

                   They stood there, all in order,
                     Ready and waiting even,
                   Before the sunlight kissed you,
                     Or you, the winds of heaven.

                   Who told you, then, O Birch Tree,
                     The ’Ventures that we play?
                   And how can you remember
                     The wonder—and the Way?




                             CHAPTER XXIII

  PANTHEA. Look, sister, where a troop of spirits gather
           Like flocks of cloud in spring’s delightful weather,
           Thronging in the blue air!

  IONE.    And see! More come.
           Like fountain-vapours when the winds are dumb,
           That climb up the ravines in scattered lines.
           And hark! Is it the music of the pines?
           Is it the lake? Is it the waterfall?

  PANTHEA. ’Tis something sadder, sweeter far than all.
                                                _Prometheus Unbound._


‘It’s all very well for you two to play at being trees,’ the voice of
Joan was heard to object, ‘but I should like to know what part I——’

‘Hush! Hush! I hear them coming,’ Nixie said quickly with a new
excitement.

She had apparently floated up higher into the ilex to the place vacated
by Jonah. Her voice had a ring of the sky in it.

‘Come up to where I am, and we can _all_ see. They’re rising already——’

‘Who—what’s rising?’ called Joan from below; ‘I’m not!’

‘There’s something up, I expect,’ said Paul quickly. ‘I’ll help you.’ He
knew by the child’s voice there was aventure afoot. ‘Give me your hand,
Joan. And put your feet where I tell you. We’re all in the Crack,
remember, so everything’s possible.’

‘Undoubtedly something’s up, but it’s not _me_, I’m afraid,’ she
laughed.

‘Hush! Hush! Hush!’ Nixie’s voice reached them from the higher branches.
‘Talk in whispers, please, or you’ll frighten them. And be quick.
They’re rising everywhere. Any minute now they may be off and you’ll
miss them——’

Joan and Paul obeyed; though in his record of the aventure he never
described the details of their ascent. A few minutes later they were
perched beside the child near the rounded top of the ilex.

‘It’s fearfully rickety,’ Joan said breathlessly.

‘But there’s no danger,’ whispered Nixie, ‘because this is an evergreen
tree, and it doesn’t go with the others.’

‘How—“Go with the others?”’ asked the two in the same breath.

‘Trees,’ answered the child. ‘They’re emigrating. Look! Listen!’

‘Migrating,’ suggested Paul.

‘Of course,’ Nixie said, poking her head higher to see into the sky.
‘Trees go away south in the autumn just like birds—the real trees; their
insides, I mean——’

‘Their spirits,’ Paul explained in his lowest whisper to Joan.

‘That’s why they lose their leaves. And in the spring they come back
with all their new blossoms and things. If they find nicer places in the
south, they stay, that’s all. They—die. Listen—you can hear them going!’

High up in that still autumn sky there ran a sweet and curious sound,
difficult to describe. Joan thought it was like the rustle of countless
leaves falling: the tiny tapping noise made by a dying leaf as it
settles on the ground—multiplied enormously; but to Paul it seemed that
sudden, dream-like whirr of a host of birds when they wheel sharply in
mid-air—heard at a distance. There was no question about the distance at
any rate.

‘Are they just the trees of our woods, then?’ asked Joan in a whisper
that held delight and awe, ‘or——’

The child laughed under her breath. ‘Oh, no,’ was the reply, ‘all the
South of England below a certain line meets here. This is one of the
great starting-places. It’s just like swallows collecting on the wires.
Some big tree, higher than the rest, gives a sign one night—and then all
the other woods flock in by thousands. Uncle Paul knew _that_!’ There
was a touch in her voice of something between scorn and surprise.

‘Did you, Uncle Paul?’ Joan asked.

He fidgeted in his precarious perch. ‘I write the Record of it all, so I
ought to,’ he answered evasively.

And high up in the autumn sky, now darkening, ran on that curious sweet
sound. Across the heavens, silvery in the coming moonlight, they saw
long feathery clouds drawn thinly from north to south, known commonly as
mares’ tails.

‘Those are the tracks they follow,’ whispered Nixie. ‘Look! Now you can
see them—some of them!’

Her voice was so thrilled that it startled them. But for the fact that
they were in the Crack where nothing can be ever ‘lost,’ both Paul and
Joan might have lost their hold and their seats—to say nothing of their
lives—and crashed downwards through the branches of that astonished ilex
tree. Instead, they turned their eyes upwards and stared.

They looked out over the world of tree-tops. On all sides rose Something
in a silent tempest, almost too delicate for words—something that
touched the air with a Presence, swift and wonderful—then was gone. With
it went the faint music as of myriad wheeling birds, too small for
sight. And through the sky ran a vast fluttering of green. They saw the
coming stars, as it were, through immense transparencies of green,
stained here and there with the washed splendours of wet and dying
leaves—the greens, yellows, aye, and the reds too, of autumn. For a few
passing seconds the night was positively robed with the spirit-hues of
the dying year, rising rapidly in the sheets of their dim glory.

‘They’re off!’ murmured Nixie. ‘It’s the first flight. We _are_ lucky!’

Far overhead the pathways of fleecy cloud were tinged with pale yellow
as when the moon looks sometimes mistily upon the earth—tinged, then
suddenly white and silvery as before.

They collect—Paul drew upon the child’s account for his Record—far
over-seas upon some lonely strand or headland, and then swarm inland,
sometimes following their companions, the birds, sometimes leading them.
In countless thousands they go, yet for all their numbers never causing
more than a passing tremble of the air. Their armies add, perhaps, a
shadow to the night, a new tint to the clouds that veil the moon; or, if
owing to stress of autumn weather, they start with the daylight, then
the sunset gains a strange new wonder that puzzles the heart with its
beauty, and makes unimaginative people write foolish letters to the
newspapers. Their speed makes it difficult to catch even the slightest
indication of their flight; the sky is touched with glory, there is a
reflection in the river or the sea—and they are gone! Or, perhaps, from
the evergreens that stay behind, often fringing the coast, the wind
bears a message of farewell, wondrous sweet; or some late birds,
delaying their own departure, wake in the branches and sing in little
bursts of passion the joy of their own approaching escape.

And when they return, each tree in the order of its leaving, and
according to its times and needs, they bring with them all the essential
glory of southern climes, and the magic of spring is due as much to the
tales and memories they have collected to talk about, as to the clear
brilliance of the new dresses with which they come to clothe their old
bodies at home.

The Record of the Aventure, as Paul wrote it faithfully from the child’s
description, makes curious and instructive reading, and the loneliness
of the stalwart evergreens who remain behind to face the winter brought
a pathos into the tale that all lovers of trees will readily appreciate,
and may be read by them in the published account.

Yet to Paul and Joan, to each according to temperament and cast of mind,
the little Aventure brought thoughts of a more practical bearing. To
him, especially, in the escape of the tree-spirits—of their ‘insides,’
as Nixie intuitively phrased it—he divined an allegory of the temporary
escape of the little army of city waifs. Those boys, old in face as they
were cramped in body, had enjoyed, too, a migration that clothed them
for a time, outwardly and inwardly, with some passing beauty which they
could take back to London with them just as the trees come back with the
freshness of the spring.

And this thought led necessarily to others. The little migration of
their bodies from town was important enough; but what of their minds and
souls? What chance of escape was there for these?

The conclusions are obvious enough; they need no elaboration. He had
already learned from Joan of their sufferings. His heart burned within
him. It was all mixed up in his queer poetic mind with the swift vision
of the Tree-Spirits, and with the picture of Joan, Nixie, and the other
children perched like big berries in that astonished ilex tree. In due
season both berries and dreams must ripen. He was beginning to see the
way.

‘They’re gone already,’ Nixie interrupted his long reverie in a whisper;
‘and to-night there’ll be great rains to wash away all the signs.
To-morrow morning, you’ll see, half the trees will be bare.’

And high in the heavens, incredibly high and faint it seemed, ran the
curious sweet sound, driven farther and farther into the reaches of the
night, till at last it died away altogether.

‘Gone,’ murmured Joan, ‘gone!’ The beauty of it touched her voice with
sadness. ‘I wish we could go like that—as beautifully, as quietly, as
easily!’

‘Perhaps we do,’ Paul thought to himself.

‘I think we do,’ Nixie said aloud. ‘Daddy did, I’m sure. I shall, too, I
think—and then come back in the spring, p’rhaps.’




                              CHAPTER XXIV

       See where the child of heaven, with wingéd feet,
       Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn.
                                           _Prometheus Unbound._


Very often in life, when the way seems all prepared for joy, there comes
instead an unexpected time of sadness that makes all the preparation
seem useless and of no purpose. Those coloured threads, whose ends and
beginnings are not seen, weave this unexpected twist in the pattern, and
one knows the bitterness that asks secretly, What can be the use of
efforts thus rendered apparently null and void at a single stroke?
forgetting the roots of faith that are thereby strengthened, and
shutting the eyes to the glory of the whole pattern, which it is always
the endeavour of the imagination to body forth.

And so it seemed to Paul a few weeks later when he returned to England
from America, where he had been to settle up his affairs. For he had
decided to sever his connection with the Lumber Company, and to devote
his life henceforward to battling against the wrongs and sufferings of
childhood. The call had come to him with no uncertain voice. Nixie had
unintentionally sown the seeds; Joan had deliberately watered them; his
own liberated imagination girded its loins to go forth as a labourer to
the harvest.

Then, coming back with the joy of this approaching labour in his heart,
the veil of great sadness descended upon his newly-opening life and set
him in the midst of a dreadful void, a blank of pain and loneliness that
nothing seemed able to fill. Nixie went from him. The Hand that gilds
the stars, and touched her hair with the yellow of the sands, drew her
also away. Just when her gentle companionship had justified itself for
him as something ideally charming that should last always, a breath of
wintry wind passed down upon that grey house under the hill, and, lo,
she was gone—gone like the spirit of her little birch tree from the
cruelties of December.

He was in time to say good-bye—nothing more; in time to see the awful
shadow fall silently upon the wasted little face, and to feel the cold
of eternal winter creep into the thin hand that lay to the last within
his own. Not a single word did he utter as he sat there beside the bed,
choked to the brim with feelings that never yet have known the words to
clothe them. That cold entered his own heart too, and numbed it.

Nixie it was that spoke, though she, too, said little enough. The lips
moved feebly. He lowered his head to catch the last breath.

‘I shall come back,’ he heard faintly, ‘just as the trees do in the
spring!’

The voice was in his ear. It sank down inside him, entering his very
soul. For a moment it sang there—then ceased for ever. With eyes dry and
burning, he buried his head in the tangle of yellow hair upon the
pillow, and when a moment later he raised them again to speak the words
of comfort to his weeping sister, Nixie was no longer there to hear him
or to see.

‘I shall come back in the spring—just as the trees do.’

And so she died, leaving Paul behind in that sea of loneliness whose
waves drown year by year their thousands and tens of thousands—the vast
army that know not Faith. Her blue eyes, so swiftly fading, were on his
to the last. It seemed to him that for a moment he had seen God. And
perhaps he had; for Nixie assuredly was close to divine things, and he
most certainly was pure.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Sad things are best faced squarely, very squarely indeed; dealt with;
and then—deliberately forgotten. In this way their strength, and the
beauty that invariably lies within like a hidden kernel, may be
appropriated and their bitterness destroyed. But such platitudes are
easily said or written, and at first, when Nixie left him, Paul felt as
though the world lay for ever broken at his feet.

What this elfin child had done for him must appear to some exaggerated,
to many, incredible; for the relationship between them had somehow been
touched with the splendour and tenderness of a world unknown to the
majority. The delicate intimacy between their souls, as between souls of
a like age, is difficult to realise outside the region of fantasy. Yet
it had existed: in her with a simple, childlike joy that asked no
questions; in him, with an attempt at analysis that only made it closer
and more dear. What Paul had been to her was a secret she had taken away
with her; what she had been to him, however, was to remain a most
precious memory, and at the same time a source of strength and happiness
that was to prove eternal.

Not, however, in the manner that actually came about—and, at first, not
realised by him in any manner whatsoever.

For, at first, he found himself alone, horribly alone. What her little
mystical heart of poetry had taught him is hard to name. Expression, of
course, in its simpler form, and the joy of a sympathetic audience; but
more than that. In all fine women lies hidden ‘the child’—the simple
vision that pierces—and perhaps in Nixie he had divined, and ideally
reconstructed for himself, the ‘fine woman’! Who can say? A dream so
rich and tender can never be caught in a mere net of words. The truth
lay buried in the depths of his being, to strengthen and to bless; and
some few others may divine its presence there as well as himself
perhaps. The only thing he understood clearly at the moment was that he
had been robbed of an intimate little friend who had crept into every
corner of his heart, and that—he was most terribly alone.




                              CHAPTER XXV

          Donnez vos yeux, donnez vos mains,
          Donnez vos mains magiciennes;
          Pour me guider par les chemins
          Donnez vos yeux, donnez vos mains,
          Vos mains d’Infante dans les miennes.
                                From _Les Unes et les Autres_.


There is nothing to be gained by dwelling upon sadness; the details of
Paul’s suffering may be left to the imagination. It was characteristic
of him that he sought instinctively, and without cant, for the Reality
that lay behind his pain; and Reality—though seas of grief may first be
plunged through to find it—is always Joy. For love is joy, and joy is
strength, and both are aspects of the great central Reality of the life
of the soul. The child was so woven into the strands of his inmost being
that her going seemed, as it were, to draw out with her these very
strands—drew them out away from himself towards—towards what? He hardly
knew how to name it. The word ‘God’ rarely passed his lips: towards
‘Reality,’ then; towards the deep things he had sought all his life.

Part of himself, however, the child had taken away with her. He passed
more and more away from the things of the world, though these had never
yet held him with any security in their mesh. Nixie had gone ahead, that
was all. Before long, as years measure time at least, he would follow
her. She might even come back, ‘like the trees in the spring,’ to tell
him of the way.

His great longing, unexpressed, had always been to know something of the
Beyond—to see into the heart of things; not by the uninspired methods of
an unsavoury spiritualism, or the artificial forcing-house of an
audacious Magic; but by some inner, as yet undetermined, way in his own
heart. For he had always clung to the secret belief that there must be
some interior way of finding ‘Reality,’ some process, simple, piercing,
profound, that would have authority for himself, if not for all the
world. In the heart of all true mystics some such Faith is ingrained.
They are born with it. It is ineradicable—lived, but rarely spoken.

And the root of this belief it was that Nixie had unknowingly watered
and fed. Her going seemed suddenly to have coaxed it almost into flower.
His need of the great, satisfying Companion that knows no shadow of
turning was incalculably quickened thereby. Love and Nature were the
veils that screened the Beyond so thinly that he could almost see
through them; and to both these mysteries the child had led him better
than she knew.

The energy of his mystical yearnings suddenly increased a hundredfold.
Whether these remain within to poison, or go out to bless, depends, of
course, upon the nature of the heart that feels them. Paul, fortunately
for himself, had found ways of expression; he was always provided now
with the safety of an outlet. And, for the immediate moment, the path
was clear enough, and very simple. He was to comfort the mother that
mourned her; himself that mourned her; the puzzled little brother and
sister, and even the army of more or less disconsolate four-footed
friends that missed her presence vaguely, and haunted the door of her
room with the strange instinct that there must still be caresses for
them within, and that for the moment she was merely hiding.

It was Smoke, the furry black fellow, however, always her favourite and
his own, participant in all their old Aventures, who brought him a
strange comfort by secret ways that no man understands. For Smoke asked
no questions. He knew; and though he missed her in all their games, and
meals, and undertakings of every kind, in house or garden, he showed no
obvious symptoms of grief as a dog might have shown. And sometimes he
was positively uncanny: he behaved almost as though he still saw her.

The others, however,——! With most of them out of sight was out of mind.
The kittens, now growing up, purred and played as of old in the
schoolroom, and the Chow puppies, China and Japan, more like yellow
puddings than ever, tore about the house, tumbling and thudding, as
though they had never known their little two-legged elfin playmate. The
household dropped back into the old routine; Margaret, sadder, less
alive than before, pressed down by her new grief into the semblance of a
vision; and the children, hushed and pale, but gradually yielding to the
stress of bursting life which at that age has no long acquaintance with
grief.

It was winter, and the woods and gardens were so altered that the usual
corners of play and mischief were unrecognisable. ‘Out-ov-doors’ was
dead, the sunshine unreal, the darkness hovering close even on the
clearest day. The haunts that Paul and Nixie knew were too much changed,
mercifully for him, who often sought them none the less, to remind him
keenly. The little silver birch tree that danced in summer before the
skirts of the fir wood was bare and shivering in the winds. Behind it,
however, unchanged and shaggy, still stood the dark sheltering pine,
steady among the blasts.

And Paul, meanwhile, beyond the smaller sphere of his immediate duties
in the grey house under the hill, took up with all the enthusiasm he
could spare from sorrow the work among the lost waifs. As has been seen,
he found the complete organisation ready to hand. And, to his great
satisfaction, he found, as he became familiar with the detail, that it
was work suited to the best that was in him. He was the right man in the
right place.

Moreover, it was Dick’s scheme, and to lose himself in it was to get
into touch again delightfully with the great friendship of his youth.
Nixie, too, who had meant when she grew up to provide a Wood for Lost
Children, seemed ever pushing him forward from behind. Thus his zeal
never lessened, and he lost himself in others to some purpose.

The test of time, of course, proved this. At the moment, however, it can
only be known by the trick of ‘looking at the last chapter’—which is
unlawful, as well as logically impossible. And, before he got so far, he
had first learned another profound truth: that only he who carries in
his heart a great sorrow, borne alone, can know the mystery of interior
Vision, inspiring and truly marvellous, which comes from a blessing so
singularly disguised as pain.




                              CHAPTER XXVI

                                      I feel, I see
        Those eyes which burn through smiles that fade in tears,
        Like stars half quenched in mists of silver dew.
                                      _Prometheus Unbound._


The readjustment of self—the renewal—that follows upon great bereavement
having thus been faced courageously, Paul threw himself into his work
with energy. Every Friday night he came down to the house under the
hill, and every Monday morning he returned to London. But the details of
the work, beyond the fact that their fulfilment blessed both himself and
those for whom he laboured, are not essential to the story of what
followed. For the history of Paul’s education is more than anything else
a history of Aventures of the inner life. Outwardly, his existence was
quiet and uneventful.

Almost immediately with the disappearance of his little friend, for
instance, he discovered that the region through the Crack—the land
betweenyesserdayandtomorrow—became more real, more extraordinarily real,
than ever before. The entrances now seemed everywhere and always close;
it was the ways of exit that were difficult to find. He lived in it.
Even in London he moved among those fields of flowers, and the winter
gloom that depressed the majority only enhanced the bright sunshine that
lay about his path. His thoughts were continually following the windings
of the river to the far horizon; and the horizon, too, was wider, more
enticing and mysterious, more suggestive than ever of that blue sea
beyond where he had sailed with that other Companion.

The land became mapped out and known with an intimacy that must seem
little short of marvellous to those who have never even dreamed of the
existence of so fair a country. For, the truth was, his Companion, who
was now his guide and leader, had suddenly revealed herself.

It came about a few days after the funeral—when the emptiness and hush
of sorrow that lay over the house found its exact spiritual
correspondence in the silence and sense of desolation that filled his
own heart. He was in his bedroom, battling with that loneliness in
loneliness which at the first had threatened to overwhelm him. He had
just left his sister’s side, having soothed her with what comfort he
could into the sleep of weariness and exhaustion. By the open window, as
so often before, he stood, staring into the damp winter night. Smoke
moved restlessly to and fro behind him, sometimes sitting down to wash,
sometimes jumping on the bed and sofa as though to search for something
it could never find. Mrs. Tompkyns, who had scratched at the door a few
minutes before, for the first time in her life, and for reasons known to
none but herself and her black companion, lay at last curled up before
the fire.

The room was filled with a soft presence, once silvery and fragrant, but
now draped with the newly woven shadows that rendered it invisible. The
invasion was irresistible. His heart ached. He knew quite well that his
own soul, too, was being measured for its garment of shadow—garment
that, unlike ordinary clothes, fits better and closer with every year.
He was in that dangerous mood when such measurements are made only too
easily, and the lassitude of grief accepts the trying-on with a kind of
soft, almost pleasurable, acquiescence—when, sharply and suddenly, a
sound was audible outside the window that instantly galvanised him into
a state of resistance. The night, hitherto still as the grave, sighed in
response to a rising wind. And through his being at the same moment ran
the answering little Wind of Inspiration some one had taught him to find
always when he sought it.

And the sound brought comfort. It was as though an invisible hand had
reached down inside him and touched the source of joy!

Paul turned quickly. Mrs. Tompkyns was awake on the mat. Smoke rubbed
against his legs. On the table, where he had spread them a few minutes
before, were the black tie, the mended socks, the unused bottle for
nettle stings and scratches, and beside them the faded spray of birch
leaves, now withered and shrivelled. And, as he looked, the wind entered
the room behind him, and he saw that the brown branch turned half over
towards him. It rattled faintly as it moved. He was just in time to
rescue it from Smoke, who saw in the sound and movement an invitation to
play. He pinned it out of reach upon the wall over the mantelpiece.

And it was just as he finished, that this sound of wind sighing through
the dripping and leafless trees outside was followed by another
sound—one that he recognised.... There was a rush and a leap, a swift,
whistling roar—and the next second he found himself among the sunny
fields of flowers that he knew, and heard the water lapping at his
feet ... through the Crack!

‘Everybody’s thin _somewhere_,’ was what he almost expected to hear; but
what he did hear was another sentence, followed by merry and delicious
laughter: ‘Everybody can be happy somewhere!’

And close in front of him, rising, it seemed, out of the reeds and waves
and yellow sands, stood—that veiled Companion whom he knew to be a part
of himself.

She was turned away from him so that he could not see her face, yet he
instantly divined a movement of her whole body towards him. Something
within himself rushed out to meet her half-way. His life stirred
mightily. The thrill of discovery came close. The next second his arms
were about her and she was looking straight into his eyes.

But her own eyes were no longer veiled; her laughing face was clear as
the day; the figure that he held so close was Nixie, child and woman. If
ever it can be possible for two beings to melt into one, it was possible
then. Each possessed the other; each slipped into the other.

‘Face to face at last!’ he heard himself cry. ‘Bless your little fairy
heart! Why in the world didn’t I guess you sooner?’

A flame of happiness sped through him, and grief ran away utterly. The
sense of loss that had numbed his soul vanished. And when she only
answered him by the old mischievous laughter, he asked again: ‘But how
did you disguise yourself so well—your voice, and everything——? Even if
your face _was_ veiled I ought to have recognised you! It’s too
wonderful!’

‘It was you who disguised me!’ she replied, standing up close in front
of him, and playing with his waistcoat buttons as of old. ‘Your thoughts
about me got twisted—sometimes. You thought too much. You should have
_felt_ only.’

‘They never shall again,’ he exclaimed.

‘They never can. We are face to face now.’

Paul turned to look again more closely. He saw her with extraordinary
detail and vividness. It was indeed Nixie, but Nixie exactly as he had
always wanted her, without quite knowing it himself; at least, without
acknowledging it. No gulf of age was there to separate them now. She was
the perfect Companion, for he had made her so. He smoothed her hair as
they turned to walk by the river, and he caught the old childish perfume
of it as it spread untidily over his shoulder, her eyes like dropped
stars shining through it.

‘Isn’t it awfully jolly?’ she whispered: ‘we can have twice as many
aventures now, and you can go on writing them for Jonah and Toby just
the same as before, only faster.’

He felt her hand steal into his; his heart became most strangely merged
with hers. He had known a similar experience in Canadian forests, when
the beauty of Nature had sometimes caught him up till he scarcely felt
himself distinct enough from it to realise that he was separate. He now
knew himself as close to her as that. It was exquisite and yet so simple
that a little child might have felt it—without perplexity. Perhaps it
was precisely what children always _did_ feel towards what they loved,
animate or inanimate.

‘But how is it you can come so close?’ he asked, though he fancied that
he thought, rather than spoke, the question.

‘Because, in the important sense, you are still a child,’ he caught the
answer, ‘and always have been, and always will be.’

The whole world belonged to him. In the midst of the sea of sorrow he
had discovered the little island of happiness.

‘We never can lose each other—_now_!’ he said.

‘As long as you think about me,’ she answered. ‘Please always think
hard, veryhardindeed thoughts. Through the Crack you can find everything
that’s lost——.’

‘And we’re through the Crack now.’

‘Rather!’

                  *       *       *       *       *




                             CHAPTER XXVII

                    ... Straightway I was ’ware,
         So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
         Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
         And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,
         ‘Guess now who holds thee?’—‘Death,’ I said. But there
         The silver answer rang—‘Not Death, but Love.’
                                                      E. B. B.


... It was only when the sky grew dark and the shadow of clouds fell
over that sunny landscape that he realised he was still standing half
dressed beside a dying fire, and that through the open window behind him
the cold night air brought discomfort that made him shiver. He drew the
curtains, lit a candle, spoke a soft word or two to the curled—up forms
of Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke, who were far too busy in their own
Crack-land to trouble about replying, and so finally got into bed.

He felt happier, strangely comforted. The wings of memory and phantasy,
withdrawing softly, left a soothed feeling in his heart. In that region
of creative imagination known as the ‘Crack’ he always found peace and
at least a measure of joy. Until sleep should come to captain his
forces, he deliberately turned the current of his thoughts to the work
he was about to take up in London. Nixie, Joan, Dick—all helped him. His
will erected an iron barrier against the insidious attacks of
sadness—the disease which strikes at the roots of effort. He would dream
his dreams, but also, he would do his work....

The shadows thickened about the house, crowding from the heart of
winter. The fire died down. The room lay still. It was between one and
two o’clock in the morning, when silence in the country is a real
silence, and the darkness weighs. Chasing Smoke and Mrs. Tompkyns down
the winding corridors of dream—Paul slept.


A faint sound in the room a little later made him stir in his sleep and
smile. His lips moved, as though in that land of dreams where he
wandered some one spoke to him and he answered. Then the sound was
repeated, and he woke with a start, sat up in bed, and stared hard into
the darkness.

The fire was quite out; nothing was visible but the dim frame of the
window on his right where he had forgotten to draw the curtains. A
glimmer of light revealed the sash. Thinking it must be the winter dawn,
he was about to lie down again and resume his slumbers, when the sound
that had first wakened him again made itself audible.

A slight shiver ran down his spine, for the sound seemed to bring over
some of the wonder of his dreams into that dark and empty room. Then,
with a tiny revelation of certainty, the knowledge came that he was wide
awake, and that the sound was close in front of him. Moreover, he knew
at once that it was neither Smoke nor Mrs. Tompkyns. It was a sound,
deliberately produced, with conscious intelligence behind it. And it
shot through him with the sweetness of music. It was like a breath of
wind that rustled through a swinging branch—of a birch tree; as though
such a branch waved to and fro softly above his head.

His first idea was that some one was in the room, and had taken down the
spray of withered leaves from the wall; and he strained his eyes in the
direction of the mantelpiece, trying to pierce the darkness. In vain, of
course. All he could distinguish was that something moved gently to and
fro like a spot of light—almost like a fire-fly, yet white—about the
room.

From some deep region of sleep where he had just been, the atmosphere of
dream was still, perhaps, about him. Yet this was no dream. There _was_
somebody in the room with him, somebody alive, somebody who wished to
claim his attention—who had already spoken to him before he woke. He
knew it unmistakably; he even remembered what had been said to him while
yet asleep! ‘How _can_ you go on sleeping when I am here, trying to get
at you?’

It was just as if the words still trembled on the air. Confusedly,
scarcely aware what he did, yet already thrilling with happiness, his
lips formed an answer:

‘Who are you? What is it you want?’

There was a pause of intense silence, during which his heart hammered in
his temples. Then a very faint whisper gathered through the darkness:

‘I promised....’

The point of light wavered a little in the air, then came low and seemed
to settle on the end of the bed. Into the clear and silent spaces of his
lonely soul there swam with it the presence of some one who had never
died, and who could never die.

‘Is that _you_——?’ The name seemed incredible, for this was no Aventure
through the Crack, yet he uttered it after an imperceptible moment of
hesitation——‘_Nixie?_’

Even then he could not believe an answer would be forthcoming. The
light, however, moved slightly, and again came the faint tones of a
voice, a singing voice:

‘Of course it is!’ There was a curious suggestion of huge distance about
it, as though it travelled like an echo across vast spaces. ‘I’m here,
close beside you; closer than ever before.’

He heard the words with what can only be described as a spiritual
sensation—the peace and gratitude that follow the passion of strong
prayer, of prayer that believes it will be heard and answered.

‘You know _now_—don’t you?’ continued the tiny singing voice, ‘because
I’ve told you.’

‘Yes,’ he answered, also very low, ‘I know now.’ For at first he could
think of nothing else to say. A huge excitement moved in him. Those
invisible links of pure aspiration by which the soul knits herself
inwardly to God seemed suddenly tightened in the depths of his being. He
understood that this was a true thing, and possible.

‘You’ve come back—like the trees in the spring,’ he whispered
stammeringly, after another pause, gazing as steadily as he could at the
point of clear light so close in front of him.

‘The real part of me,’ she explained; ‘the real part of me has come
back.’

‘The real part,’ he echoed in his bewilderment. He began to understand.

But even then it all seemed too utterly strange and wonderful to be
true; and a subtle confirmation of the child’s presence that followed
immediately only added at first to his increasing amazement. For both
Smoke and Mrs. Tompkyns, he became aware, had jumped up softly upon the
foot of the bed, and were sitting there, purring loudly with pleasure,
close beneath the fleck of light. And their action made him seek the
further confirmation of his own senses. He leaned forwards, hesitating
in his bewilderment between the desire to find the matches and the
desire to touch the speaker with his hands.

But even in that darkness his intention was divined instantly. The light
slid away like a wee torch carried on wings.

‘No, Uncle Paul,’ whispered the voice farther off, ‘not the matches.
Light makes it more difficult for me.’ He sank back against the pillows,
frightened at the reality of it all. The old familiar name, too, ‘Uncle
Paul,’ was almost more than he could bear.

‘Nixie——!’ he stammered, and then found it impossible to finish the
sentence.

Then she laughed. He heard her silvery laughter in the room, exactly as
he had heard it a hundred times before, spontaneous, mischievous, and
absolutely natural. She was amused at his perplexity, at his want of
faith; at the absurd difficulty he found in believing. He lay quite
still, breathing hard, wondering what would come next; still trying to
persuade himself it was all a dream, yet growing gradually convinced in
spite of himself that it was not.

‘And don’t come too near me,’ he heard her voice across the room. ‘Never
try and touch me, I mean. _Think of me at your centre._ That’s the real
way to get near.’

Very slowly then, after that, he began to accept the Supreme Aventure.
He talked. He asked questions, though never the obvious and detailed
sort of questions it might have been expected he would ask. For it was
now borne in upon him, as she said, that only her _real_ part had come
back, and that only _his_ real part, therefore, was in touch with her.
It was, so to speak, a colloquy of souls in which physical and material
things had no interest. His very first question brought the truth of
this home to him with singular directness. He asked her what the tiny
light was that he saw moving to and fro like a little torch.

‘But I didn’t know there was a light,’ she answered. ‘Where I am it is
all light! I see you perfectly. Only—you look so young, Uncle Paul! Just
like a boy! About my own age, I mean.’

And it is impossible to describe the delight, the mystical rapture that
came to him as he heard her. The words, ‘Where I am it is all light,’
brought with them a sudden sense of reality that was too convincing for
him to doubt any longer. From her simple description he recognised a
place that he knew. But, at the same time, he understood that it was no
_place_ in the ordinary sense of the word, but rather a _state_ and a
_condition_. He himself in his deepest dreams had been there too. That
light had sometimes in brief moments of aspiration shone for him. And
the curious sense of immense distance that came so curiously with her
tiny voice came because there was really no distance at all. She was no
longer conditioned by space or time. Those were limitations of life in
the body, temporary scales of measurement adopted by the soul when
dealing with temporary things. Whereas Nixie was free.

A sense of happiness deep as the sea, of peace, bliss, and perfect rest
that could never know hurry or alarm, surged through him in a tide. He
thought, with a thrill of anticipation, of the time when his own eyes
would be opened, and he should see as clearly as she did. But instantly
the rebuke came.

‘Oh! You must not think about that,’ she said with a laugh; ‘you have a
lot to do first, a lot more aventures to go through!’

As she spoke the light slid nearer again and settled upon the foot of
the bed. His thoughts were evidently the same as spoken words to her.
She knew all that passed in his mind, the very feelings of his heart as
well. This was indeed companionship and intimacy. He remembered how she
had told him all about it in the Crack weeks ago, before he realised who
she was, and before he knew her face to face. And at the same moment he
noticed another curious detail of her presence, namely, that the little
torch—for so he now called it to himself—in passing before the mirror
produced no reflection in the glass. Yet, if his eyes could perceive it,
there ought to have been a refraction from the mirror as well—a
reflection! Did he then only perceive it with his interior vision? Was
his spiritual sight already partially opened?

‘That’s your ’terpretation of me—inside yourself,’ he caught her swift
whisper in reply, for again she _heard_ his thought; and he almost
laughed out aloud with pleasure to notice the long word decapitated as
her habit always was on earth. ‘In your thoughts I’m a sort of light,
you see.’

The explanation was delightful. He understood perfectly. The thought of
Nixie had always come to him, even in earthly life, in the terms of
brightness. And his love marvelled to notice, too, that she still had
the old piercing vision into the heart of things, and the
characteristically graphic way of expressing her meaning.

The purring of the cats made itself audible. They were both ‘kneading’
the bed-clothes by his feet, as happy as though being stroked.

‘No, they don’t see,’ she explained the moment the thought entered his
mind; ‘they only feel that I’m here. Lots of animals are like that. It’s
the way dogs know ’sti’ctively if a person’s good or bad.’

Oh, how the animals after this would knit him to her presence! No wonder
he had already found comfort with them that no human being could
give.... The thought of his sister flashed next into his brain—the
difficulty of helping her——

‘I tried to get at her before I came here to you,’ he heard, ‘but her
room was all dark. It was like trying to get inside a cloud. She’s cold
and shadowy—and ever such a long way off. It’s difficult to explain.’

‘I think I understand,’ he whispered.

‘You can get closer than I can.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Of course. You must.’

It was Nixie’s happiness that seemed so wonderful and splendid to him.
Her voice almost sang; and laughter slipped in between the shortest
sentences even. Brightness, music, and pure joy were about her like an
atmosphere. He was breathing a rarefied air, cool, scented, and
exhilarating. He had already known it when playing with the children and
enjoying their very-wonderful-indeed aventures; only now it was raised
to a still higher power. In its very essence he knew it.

‘Toby and Jonah are with me the moment they sleep,’ she continued, ever
following his least thought. ‘The instant their bodies fold up they
shoot across here to me. Toby comes easiest. She’s a girl, you see. And
Daddy’s here too——’

‘Dick?’ he cried, memory and affection surging through him with a sudden
passion.

‘Of course. You’ve thought about him so much. He says you’ve always been
close to each other——’

The voice broke off suddenly, and the torch of light moved to and fro as
though agitated. Paul heard no sound, and saw no sign, but again, into
the clear and silent spaces of his soul, now opened so marvellously, so
blessedly to receive, there swam the consciousness of another
Presence....

There was a long pause, while memory annihilated all the intervening
years at a single stroke....

His mind was growing slightly confused with it all. His mortal
intelligence wearied and faltered a little with the effort to understand
how time and distance could be thus destroyed. He was not yet free as
these others were free.

‘How is it, then, that you can stay?’ he asked presently, when the light
held steady again. By ‘you’ he meant ‘both of you.’ Yet he did not say
it. This was what seemed so wonderful in their perfect communion; words
really were not necessary. Afterwards, indeed, he sometimes wondered
whether he actually spoke at all.

‘I was going on—at first,’ came the soft answer, ‘when I heard something
calling me, and found I couldn’t. I had something to do here.’

‘What?’ he ventured under his breath.

‘_You!_’ She laughed in his face, so to speak. ‘You, of course. Part of
you is in me, so I couldn’t go on without you. But when you are ready,
and have done your work, we’ll go on together. Daddy is waiting, too.
Oh, it’s simply splendid—a very-splendid-indeed aventure, you see!’
Again she laughed through that darkened room till it seemed filled with
white light, and the light flooded his very soul as he heard her.

‘You _will_ wait, Nixie?’ he asked.

‘I _must_ wait. Both of us must wait. We are all together, you see.’

And, after another long pause, he asked another question:

‘This work, then, that keeps me here——?’

‘Your London boys, of course. There’s no one in the whole world who can
do it so well. You’ve been picked out for it; that’s what really brought
you home from America!’ And she burst out into such a peal of laughter
that Paul laughed with her. He simply couldn’t help himself. He felt
like singing at the same time. It was all so happy and reasonable and
perfect.

‘You’ve got the money and the time and the ’thusiasm,’ she went on; ‘and
over here there are thousands and millions of children all watching you
and clapping their hands and dancing for joy. I’ve told them all the
Aventures you wrote, but they think this is the best of all—the
London-Boys-Aventure!’

He felt his heart swell within him. It seemed that the child’s hair was
again about his eyes, her slender arms clasping his neck, and her blue
eyes peering into his as when she begged him of old in the nursery or
schoolroom for an aventure, a story.

‘So you’ll never give it up, will you, Uncle Paul?’ she sang, in that
tiny soft voice through the darkness.

‘Never,’ he said.

‘Promise?’

‘Promise,’ he replied.

The thought of those ‘thousands and millions’ of children watching his
work from the other side of death was one that would come back to
strengthen him in the future hours of discouragement that he was sure to
know.

And much more she told him besides. They talked, it seemed, for ever—yet
said so little. Into mere moments—such was the swift and concentrated
nature of their intimacy—they compressed hours of earthly conversation;
for his thoughts were heard and answered as soon as born within him, and
a whole train of ideas that the lips ordinarily stammer over in
difficult detail crowded easily into a single expression—a thought, a
desire, a question half uttered, and then a reply that comprehended all.
There was no labour or weariness, no sense of effort.

Moreover, when at length he heard her faint whisper, ‘Now I must go,’ it
conveyed no sense of departure or loss. She did not leave him. It was
more as though he closed a much-loved book and replaced it in his
pocket. The pictures evoked do not leave the mind because the cover is
closed; they remain, on the contrary, to be absorbed by the heart.
Nixie’s silvery presence was _in him_; he would always feel her now,
even when his thoughts seemed busy with outer activities.

The little torch flickered and was gone; but as Paul gazed into the
darkness of the room he knew that the light had merely slipped down deep
into himself to burn as an unfailing beacon at the centre of his soul.
And then it was that he realised other curious details for the first
time. Some of the more ordinary faculties of his mind, it seemed, had
been in suspension during the amazing experience, while others had been
exalted as in trance. For it now came to him that he had actually _seen_
her—with a clearness that he had never known before. That torch lit up
her little form as a lantern lights up a person holding it in darkness.
Just as he had felt all the sweet and essential points of her
personality, so also he had been vividly aware of her figure in the
terms of sight—eyes, hair, sunburned little hands, and twinkling feet.
Her very breath and perfume even!

If the working of his ordinary senses had been in abeyance so that he
hardly knew the hunger for common sight and touch, he now realised that
it was because they had been replaced by these higher senses with their
keener, closer satisfaction. And this intimate knowledge of her was as
superior to the ordinary methods as flying is to crawling—or, better
still, as a draught of water in the throat is to dipping the fingers in
the cup.

For who, indeed, shall define the standard of reality? And who, when the
senses are such sorry reporters, shall declare with authority that one
thing is false and could not happen, and another is true and actually
did happen?

Experiences of the transcendental order are, perhaps, beyond the power
of precise words to describe, for they are not common enough to have
become incorporated into the language of a race. And words are clumsy
and inadequate symbols at best. The deepest thoughts, as the deepest
experiences, ever evade them. It is difficult to convey the sense of
fierce reality the presence of Nixie brought to him. It flooded and
covered him; spread through and over him like light; entered into his
essential being to cherish and to feed, just as the body assimilates
earthly nourishment. He absorbed her. She nourished while she blessed
him.

She had told him the secret: _to think centrally_. He now began to
understand how much nearer he could be to others by thinking strongly of
them than by walking at their side. Physical touch is distant compared
to the subtle intimacy of the desiring mind. The mystical conception of
union with God came home to him as something practically possible.

Yet when he got up a few minutes later to write down the conversation as
he remembered it, the mere lighting of the candle, the noise of the
match, the dipping of his pen in the ink—all contrived somehow to bring
him down to a lower order of things that dimmed most strangely the
memory of what had just passed. Most of what he had heard escaped him.
He could not frame it into words. All he could recapture is what has
been here set down so briefly and baldly.

It then seemed to him—the thought laboured to and fro in his mind as he
got back into bed and sleep came over him—that it was only the Higher
Self in him that had been in communication with the child. The eternal
part of him had talked with the eternal part of her. In the body,
however, this was commonly submerged. Her presence had temporarily
evoked it. It now had returned to its Throne at the core of his being.

All that he remembered of the colloquy was the little portion that, as
it were, had filtered through into his normal self. The rest, the main
part, however, was not lost. He had absorbed it. If he could not recall
the actual words and language, he understood—it was his last thought
before sleep caught him—that its _results_ would remain for ever.

And those who have known similar experiences will understand without
more words. The rest will never understand. Perhaps, after all, the best
and purest form of memory is—_results_.




                             CHAPTER XXVIII

               ... Ne son già morto; e ben ch’ albergo cangi,
           resto in te vivo, ch’ or mi vedi e piangi,
           se l’ un nell’altro amante si trasforma.


And one of the clearest impressions that remained next morning when he
woke was that he had actually _seen_ her. The reality of it increased
with the daylight instead of faded. While he dressed he sang to himself,
until it occurred to him that his signs of joy might be misunderstood by
any of the household who heard; and then he stopped singing and moved
about the room, smiling and contented.

Something of the radiance of that little white torch still seemed in the
air. The heavy gloom of the chill December morning could not smother it.
Something of it remained too about him all day like a halo; looking out
of his eyes; communicable, as it were, from the very surface of his skin
to all with whom he came in contact. His sister, especially, and the
children felt the comfort of his presence. They followed him about from
room to room; they clung close; they were instinctively aware that peace
and strength emanated from him, though little guessing the real source
of his serene and tranquil atmosphere.

For, of course, he told no one of what had happened. During the day,
indeed, it lay in him submerged and unassertive, like the presence of
some great glowing secret, feeding the sources of energy for all his
little outward duties and activities, yet never claiming individual
attention itself. Only with the fall of night, when the doings of the
day were instinctively laid aside like a garment no longer required, did
it again swim up upon him out of the depths, and speak.

‘Now!’ he heard the tiny singing voice, ‘we can be alone. Your body’s
tired. I can get closer to you.’

‘I’ve felt you by me all day, though,’ he said, as though it were the
most natural thing in the world.

‘Of course,’ came the answering whisper, soft as moonlight, ‘because I
never left you for a single moment. I was in everything you did—in your
very words. Once or twice, I even got into mother too, _through you_,
and made her feel better. Wasn’t that splendid?’

Paul longed to give the child one of his old hugs—to feel her little
warm and sunny body pressed against his own. Instead, her laughter
echoed suddenly all about the room.

‘That’s impossible now!’ he heard. ‘I’m ever so much closer this way.
You’ll soon get used to it, you know!’

This spontaneous laughter was the music to which all their talks were
set. He laughed too, and blew the candles out.

‘I tried very hard to say the true things,’ he murmured, referring to
her remark about comforting his sister.

‘I know you did. That’s how I got into her—through you. You must go on
and on trying. In the end we’ll get her all soft and happy again. She’ll
feel me without knowing it.’

Suddenly it struck him that, although the room was dark, he did not see
the light of the little torch as before. He missed it. He was just going
to ask why it was absent when the child caught his thought and replied
of her own accord:

‘Because it’s spread all over now, instead of being just a point. You
are in it, I mean. There’s light everywhere about you now, and I see you
much clearer than last time.’

The explanation described exactly what he felt himself.

‘Let them in, please,’ Nixie suddenly interrupted his thoughts again.
‘They’re both coming up the stairs. It was very naughty of you to forget
them, you know.’

After a moment of puzzled hesitation he understood what she meant, and
was out of bed and across the floor. He did not wait to light a candle,
but opened the door and stood there waiting in the darkness. Almost at
once two soft, furry things brushed past his feet as Smoke, followed by
Mrs. Tompkyns, marched into the room, uttering that curious sharp sound
of pleasure which is something between a purr and a cry. They
disappeared among the shadows beyond the fireplace, and Paul sprang back
into bed again pleased that they were there, yet annoyed with himself
for having forgotten them.

‘But it was my fault _really_,’ she laughed. ‘I’ve been with them out in
the garden, and they’ve only just got in through the pantry window. My
presence excites them awfully. Oh, it’s all right,’ she added quickly,
in reply to his further thought; ‘Barker’s very late to-night doing the
silver. But he’ll shut the window before he goes.’

It was his turn to laugh. She had caught his thought about the window
almost before it reached the surface of his mind. Moreover, he found
that both Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke had very cold wet soles under their
padded little feet.

In this way, most strangely, sweetly, naturally, even the trivial
details of their daily life as they had always known it together,
intermingled with the talk that was often very earnest, mystical, and
pregnant with meanings. It was in every sense a continuation of their
former relationship, touched on her side with a greater knowledge—almost
as though she had suddenly developed to the point she might have reached
in time upon the earth; on his side, with a delicate sense of accepting
guidance from some one with greater privileges than himself, who had
come back on purpose to help and inspire him.

For more and more it seemed to partake of the nature of genuine
inspiration. Speech came direct and swift as thought, without hesitation
or stammering as in the flesh. She told him many things, often quaintly
enough expressed, but that yet seemed to hold the kernel of deep truths.
There had never been the least break in their companionship, it seemed.

‘I knew all this before,’ she said, after a singular exchange of
questions and answers about the nature of communion with invisible
sources of mood and feeling, ‘only I suppose my brain had not got big
enough, or whatever it was, to tell it. Like your poets you used to tell
me about who couldn’t find their rhymes, perhaps.’

And her laughter flowed about him in a rippling flood that instantly
woke his own. They always laughed. They felt so happy. It was a
communion between old souls that surely had bathed deeply in the
experiences of life before they had become imprisoned in the particular
bodies known as Paul Rivers and Margaret Christina Messenger.

He became convinced, too, more and more that she really did not speak at
all—that no actual sound set the waves of air in motion—but that she put
her words into him in the form of thoughts, and that he it was, in order
to grasp them clearly, who clothed them with the symbols of sound and
language. It was essentially of the nature of inspiration. She _blew_
the ideas into his heart and mind.

And many things that he asked her were undoubtedly little more than his
own thoughts, half-formed and vague, lying in the depths of him.

‘Then, over there, where you now are, is it—more real? Are you, as it
were, one stage nearer to the great Reality? What’s it like——?’

‘It’s through the real “Crack,” I think,’ she answered. ‘Everything is
here that I imagined—but _really_ imagined—on earth. And people who
imagined nothing, or wanted only the world, find very little here.’

‘Then is the change very great——?’

‘It doesn’t seem to me like a change at all. I’ve been here before for
visits. Now I’ve come to stay, that’s all!’

‘You yourself have not changed?’

She roared with laughter, till he felt that his question was really
absurd.

‘Of course not! How can I change? I’m always Nixie, wherever I am!’

‘But you feel different——?’ he insisted.

‘I feel better,’ she answered, still laughing. ‘I feel awfully jolly.’

Then after a long pause he asked another question. It was really a
question he was always asking in one form or another, only he had never
yet put it so directly perhaps. He whispered it from a grave and solemn
heart:

‘Are you nearer to—God, do you think?’

It was a word he rarely used. In his conversations with the child on
earth he had never once used it. She waited a long time before replying.
Instinctively, very subtly, it came to him that she did not know exactly
what he meant.

‘I’m _in_ and _with_ Everything there is—Everywhere,’ she said softly.
‘And I couldn’t possibly be nearer to anything than I am.’

More than that she could not explain, and Paul never asked similar
questions again. He understood that they were really unanswerable.

And it was the same with other thoughts, thoughts referring to the
fundamental conditions of temporal existence, that is. Nothing, for
instance, made time and space seem less real than the way she answered
questions involving one or other. Out of curiosity he had gone to the
trouble of reading up other records of spirit communion—the literature
(saving the mark) of Spiritualism brims over with them—and he had asked
her some question with regard to the detailed geography there given.

‘But there’s no _place_ at all where I am,’ the child laughed. ‘I am
just _here_. There was no place really in our Aventures, was there?
Place is only with you on earth!’

And another time, talking of the ‘future’ when he should come to join
herself and Dick at the close of his earthly pilgrimage, she said
between bursts of the merriest laughter he had ever known: ‘But that’s
now! already! You come; you join us; we _are_ all together—always!’

And when he insisted that he could not possibly be in two places at
once, and reminded her that she had already told him she was ‘waiting’
for his arrival, the only reply he could get was this jolly laughter,
and the assurance that he was ‘awfully muddled and c’fused’ and would
‘never understand it _that_ way!’


The main thing these ‘silent’ conversations taught him seemed to be that
Death brings no revolutionary change as regards character; the soul does
not leap into a state much better or much worse than it knew before; the
opportunities for discipline and development continue gradually just as
they did in the body, only under different conditions; and there is no
abrupt change into perfection on the one hand, or into desolation on the
other. He gathered, too, that these ‘conditions’ depended very largely
upon the kind of life—especially the kind of thought—that the
personality had indulged on earth. The things that Nixie ‘imagined’ and
yearned for, she found.

His communion with her became, as time passed, more frequent and more
real, and soon ceased to confine itself only to the quiet night hours.
She was with him all day long, whenever he needed her. She guided him in
a thousand unimportant details of his life, as well as in the bigger
interests of his work in London with his waifs. And in murky London she
was just as close to him as in the perfumed stillness of the Dorsetshire
garden, or in the retirement of his own chamber....

And one singular feature of their alliance was that it continued even in
sleep. For, sometimes, he would wake in the morning after what had been
apparently a dreamless night, yet later in the day there would steal
over him the memory of a long talk he had enjoyed with the child during
the hours of so-called unconsciousness. Dreams, forgotten in the
morning, often, of course, return in this fashion during the day. There
is nothing new or unusual in it. Only with him it became so frequent
that he now rose to the day’s work with a delightful sense of
anticipation: ‘Perhaps later in the day I shall remember! Perhaps we
have been together all night!’

And in this connection he came to notice two things: first, that after
these nights together, at first forgotten, he woke wonderfully
refreshed, blessed, peaceful in mind and body; and secondly, that what
recalled the conversation later was always contact with some object or
other that had been associated with the child. Thus—the
picturesquely-mended socks, the medicine bottle for scratches, or the
spray of birch leaves, now preserved between the pages of his Blake,
never failed in this latter respect.

It was curious, too, how the alliance persisted and fortified itself
during the repose of the body; as though, during sleep, the eternal
portion of himself with which the child communed, enjoyed a greater
measure of freedom. It recalled the closing lines of a sonnet he had
always admired, though his own experience was true in a literal sense
hardly contained, probably, in the heart of the poetess:

        But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,
          When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,
            And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,

        Must doff my will as raiment laid away—
          _With the first dream that comes with the first sleep
            I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart._

He filled a book with these talks as the years passed, though to give
them in more detail could serve little purpose but to satisfy a possible
curiosity. They had value and authority for himself, but for the
majority might seem to contain little sense, or even coherence. They
expressed, of course, his own personal interpretation of life and the
universe. And this was quite possibly poetic, queer, fantastic—for
others. Yet it was his own. He had learned his own values in his own
way, and was now engaged in sorting them out with Nixie’s fairy help to
guide him.

And all souls that find themselves probably do likewise. The strength
and blessing they shed about them as a result is beneficial, but the
close details of the process by which they have ‘arrived’ can only seem
to the world at large unintelligible, possibly even ridiculous; and this
late interior blossoming of Uncle Paul, though it actually happened,
must seem to many a tissue of dreams knit together with a strange
fantastic nonsense.




                              CHAPTER XXIX

                  Donnez vos yeux, donnez vos mains,
                    Donnez vos mains surnaturelles;
                  Pour me conduire aux lendemains
                  Donnez vos yeux, donnez vos mains,
                    Vos mains comme deux roses frêles.


And thus, as the region where he met and held communion with the freed
child seemed to draw deeper and deeper into his interior being, the
reality and value of the experience increased.

That there was some kind of definite external link, however, was equally
true; for the cats, as well as certain other of the animals, most
certainly were aware sometimes of her presence. They showed it in many
and curious ways. But it was distinctly a shock to Paul to learn one day
from his sister that queer stories were afoot concerning himself; that
some of the simple country folk declared they had seen ‘Mr Rivers
walking with a young lady that was jest like Miss Nixie, only taller,’
who disappeared, however, the moment the observer approached. And the
way the household felt her presence was, perhaps, not less remarkable,
for more than one of the servants gave notice because the house had
become ‘haunted,’ and there had been seen a ‘smallish white figure, all
shiny and dancing,’ in his bedroom, or going down the corridor towards
his study.

Perhaps the glamour of his vivid creative thought had cast its effect
upon these untrained imaginations, so that his vision was temporarily
communicated to them too. Or, perhaps, they had actually seen what they
described. But, whatever the explanation may be, the effect upon himself
was to increase, if that were possible, the reality of the whole
occurrence....

And when the spring came round again with its charged memories of
perfume, and sight, and the singing of its happy winds; when the
tree-spirits returned to their garden haunts, all flaming with the
beauty of new dresses gathered over-seas; when the silver birch tree
combed out her glittering hair to the sun and shook her leaves in the
very face of that old pine tree—then Paul felt in himself, too, the
rejuvenation that was going forward in all the world around him. He
tasted in his heart all the regenerative forces that were bursting into
form and energy with the spring, and knew that the pain and desolation
he had felt temporarily in the winter were only spiritual growing-pains
and the passing distress of a soul forging its way outwards through
development to the best possible Expression it could achieve.

For Nixie came back, too, gay and glorious like the rest of the
world—sometimes dressed in blossoms of lilac or laburnum, sometimes with
skirts of daisies and feet resting upon the Little Winds, sometimes with
the soft hood of darkness over her head, the cloak of night about her
shoulders, the stars caught all shivering in her hair, and dusk in the
deeps of her eyes....

His life became ‘inner’ in the best sense—a Life within a Life; not
given over to useless dreaming, but ever drawing from the inner one the
sustenance that provided the driving force for the outer one: the mystic
as man of action!

The Wind of Inspiration blew for him now always, and steadily; but it
was no longer the little wind that stirred the measure of his personal
emotion into stammering verse, but the big, eternal wind that ‘blew the
stars to flame,’ and at the same time impelled him irresistibly along
the path of High A’venture to the loss of Self in work for others....

‘Then why is it we are in the body—and spend so much time there?’ he
asked in one of those intimate and mysterious conversations he held with
the child to the very end of his life. ‘Why need the soul descend to
such clumsy confinings?’

For their talk was very close now about ‘real things,’ and neither found
any difficulty in the words of question or answer.

‘To get experience that can only be got through the pains of
limitation,’ the answer sang within him, as he lay there upon the lawn
beneath the cedars, absorbing the spring beauty. ‘Everything is doing
the same thing everywhere—from Smoke, Mrs. Tompkyns and Madmerzelle,
right up to you, me, Daddy, and the waifs! They all have a bit of
Reality in them working upwards to God. Even stones and plants and trees
are learning experiences they could learn only in those particular
forms—’

‘I know it! Of course, I know it!’ Paul interrupted, with a rush of joy
in his heart he could not restrain; ‘but go on and tell me more, for I
love to hear your little voice say it all.’

‘It’s only, perhaps, that the stones are learning patience and
endurance; the flowers sweetness; the trees strength and comfort; and
the rivers joy. Later they change about, so that in the end each ‘Bit of
Reality’ has gathered all possible experiences in nature before it
passes on into men and women.

‘Think, Uncle Paul, of the joy of a stone, who after centuries of
patience and endurance, cramped and pressed down, knows suddenly the
freedom of wind and sea! Of the restlessness of flame that, after ages
of leaping unsatisfied to the sky, learns the repose of a tree, moved
only by the outside forces of wind and rain! And think of the delight of
all these when they pass still further upwards and reach the stage of
consciousness in animals and men—and in time enter the region of
development where I—where you and I, and all we knew and loved, continue
together, ever climbing, fighting, learning——’

It was curious. Afterwards he could never remember the way she ended the
sentence. For the life of him he could not write it down. Definite
recollection failed him, together with the loss of the actual words.
Only the general sense remained in such a way as to open to his inner
eye a huge vista of spiritual endeavour and advance that left him
breathless and dizzy when he contemplated it, but at the same time
charged most splendidly with courage and with hope.

‘Then the pains of limitation,’ he remembered asking, ‘the anguish of
impossible yearnings that vainly seek expression—these are symptoms of
growth that in the end may produce something higher and nobler?’

‘Must!’ he heard the answer amid a burst of happy laughter, as though
from where she stood it were possible to look back upon earthly pangs
and see them in the terms of joy; ‘just like any other suffering! Like
the stress of heat and pressure that turns common clay into gems——’

He interrupted her swiftly, high hopes crowding through his spirit like
the rush of an army.

‘Then the life in us all—the “Bits of Reality” in you and me—have passed
through all possible forms in their huge upward journey to reach our
present stage——?’ He stammered amid a multitude of golden memories, half
captured.

‘Of course, Uncle Paul, of course!’ he caught deep, deep within him the
silvery faint reply. ‘And your love and sympathy with trees, winds,
hills, with all Nature, even with animals’—again her laughter ran out to
him like a song—‘is because you passed long ago through them all, and
_half remember_. You still _feel with_ them, and your imagination for
ever strives to reconstruct the various beauty known in each stage. You
remember in the depths of you the longings of every particular
degree—even of the time when your soul was less advanced, and groping
upwards as your London waifs grope even now. This is why your sympathy
with them, too, is deep and true. You _half remember_.’

‘And Death,’ he whispered, trembling with the joy of infinite spiritual
desire.

The answer sank down into him with the Little Wind that stirred the
cedars overhead, or else rose singing up from the uttermost depths of
his listening heart—to the end of his days he never could tell which.

‘What you call Death is only slipping through the Crack to a great deal
more memory, and a great deal more power of seeing and telling—towards
the greatest Expression that ever can be known. It is, I promise you
faithfully, Uncle Paul, nothing but a very-wonderfulindeed Aventure,
after all!’


           _Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
      spelling.
 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.