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.