Across the Stream

by E. F. Benson

* * * * *

Archie was allowed, by the end of January, to skate for half an hour before lunch with his Swiss hovering over him like a friendly eagle, to have lunch with Jeannie seated side by side on a toboggan at the edge of the rink, and skate for half an hour again afterwards at the end of which time a second eagle appeared in the person of Blessington or his mother, and carried him off to the sleigh. Right on through half February lasted the golden frosty weather; then came a great snowfall, and with that the frost broke. The snow degenerated into rain, the wind veered again into the slack south, and the roofs dripped and the trees tossed their white burdens from them. But, as the snow melted, wonderful things happened in the earth at the summons of the suns of spring, for gentians pushed their lengthening stems up through the thinning crust, and put forth their star-like flowers, deep as the blue of night and brilliant as the blue of day. The call of the spring, though yet the snow-wreaths lingered, pierced through them, and the listening grasses and bulbs pricked up their little green ears above the soil. Wonderful as last spring had been, the first that Archie had ever consciously noticed, this Alpine Primavera was twice as magical, for winter was caught in her very arms, and warmed to life again. Morning by morning the pine-woods steamed like the hot flank of a horse, and when the mists cleared nature's great colour-box had been busy again with fresh greens, and more vivid reds on the tree-trunks, and weak, pale snowdrops and mountain crocuses shone like silver and gold in the sheltered hollows. A more tender blue took the place of the crystallized skies of winter, and for the barren, brilliant light of the January sun was exchanged a fruitful and caressing luminousness that flooded the world instead of merely looking down upon it. Soon from the lower slopes the snow was quite vanished, and instead of the tinkle of sleigh-bells there came from the pastures the deeper note from the bells of feeding cattle, which all winter long had been penned up in chalets, eating the dry cakes of last year's harvest of grass.

Archie had been lying in his balcony one morning writing an account of these things to Miss Bampton. His mother had gone back to England to take Jeannie home, but would be back at the end of the week, and in the absence of an instructor Archie's task was to write a long letter daily to somebody at home. This he enjoyed doing, for the search for words in which to express himself had begun to interest him, and he had just written: "If you listen very hard, you can almost hear the grass and the flowers fizzing. Is it the sap? It's like fizzing anyhow. That's what I mean."

As he paused at the end of his third page, he felt something in his hand that also reminded him of fizzing. There was that queer thrill and twitching in his fingers, which he recognized at once, and words, not searched for by him, but coming from some other source, began to trace themselves on the blank fourth page. To-day there were no preliminary scrawls, the firm, upright handwriting was coherent from the first.

"Archie, I've got through again," it wrote. "Isn't it fun? If you want a test ("Test?" thought Archie, "what's that?") you'll find a circle cut on the bark of the pine opposite the front-door. Dig in the earth just below it. There's a box and some things in it. I hid them."

A wave of conscious excitement came over the boy, and instantly his hand stopped writing.

"Oh, bother; it's stopped," he said to himself. "I wish I hadn't interrupted it."

But he had interrupted it, and, since he could not get back into that particular quiescence which, he had begun to see, always accompanied these manifestations, he could at least do what the writing suggested, and, slipping off his couch, he tip-toed downstairs in order not to let Blessington hear his exit.

There were two pine-trees, either of which might have been described as opposite the front-door, and he searched in vain round the first of these for any sign of the circle cut on the bark. Then, coming to the other, he at once saw, with a sudden beating of his heart, a rough circle cut in the bark just opposite his eyes. A grey ring of lichen had grown into it, making it so conspicuous that he wondered he had never noticed it before. Next moment he was down on his knees, grubbing up the loose earth directly below it, with the eager, absolute certainty of success. The earth came away very easily, and his hole was not yet a foot deep when he saw something white and shining at the bottom of it, and presently he drew out a small, round tin box, like that which stood on the table in his father's study, and held tobacco. He hastily filled the earth into his excavation again, and, undetected, tip-toed back to his balcony.

For a while the lid resisted his efforts to open it, but soon he got it loose and looked inside. On the top lay a folded piece of paper; below there was a stick of chocolate in lead paper, a pencil, a match-box, and a photograph of a boy about nine years old whom Archie instantly knew to be like himself. Then he opened the piece of folded paper, and saw words written on it in a hand he knew quite well: