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.