“... in the Other Places,” his voice continued with a droning sound that was like the sea a long way off, or like wind among the branches of a tree.
And something in me leaped automatically to acknowledge the truth I suddenly realised.
“Yes, yes!” I cried, no shyness in me any more, and plunged into myself to seize the flying pictures and arrest their sliding, disappearing motion. “I remember, oh, I remember ... a whole lot of ... dreams ... or things like made-up adventures I once had ages and ages ago ... with ...” I hesitated a second. A rising and inexplicable excitement stopped my words. I was shaking all over. “... with you!” I added boldly, or rather the words seemed to add themselves inevitably. “It was with you, sir?”
He nodded his head slightly and smiled. I think the “sir,” sounding so incongruous, caused the smile.
“Yes,” he said in his soft, low voice, “it was with me. Only they were not dreams. They were real. There’s no good denying what’s real; it only prevents your remembering properly.”
The way he said it held conviction as of sunrise, but anyhow denial in myself seemed equally to have disappeared. Deep within me a sense of reality answered willingly to his own.
“And myself?” he went on gently yet eagerly at the same time, his eyes searching my own. “Don’t you remember—me? Have I, too, gone quite beyond recall?”
But with truth my answer came at once:
“Something ... perhaps ... comes back to me ... a little,” I stammered. For while aware of a keen sensation that I talked with someone I knew as well as I knew my own father, nothing at the moment seemed wholly real to me except his sensitive, pale face with the large and beautiful eyes so keenly peering, and the tangled hair escaping under that ridiculous school cap. The pine trees in the cricket-field rose into the fading sky behind him, and I remember being puzzled to determine where his hair stopped and the feathery branches began.
“... carrying the spears up the long stone steps in the sunshine,” his voice murmured on with a sound like running water, “and the old man in the robe of yellow standing at the top ... and orchards below, all white and pink with blossoms dropping in the wind ... and miles of plain in blue distances far away, the river winding ... and birds fishing in the shallow places ...”