“Shall I come in?” he said, his eyes appealingly on Father Time.
“Come,” said Time. He turned to speak to me, “Your room is dark. Turn up the lights. He’s used to light, bright light and plenty of it. The dark has frightened him these three years past.”
I turned up the lights and the bright glare revealed all the more cruelly the tattered figure before us.
Father Christmas advanced a timid step across the floor. Then he paused, as if in sudden fear.
“Is this floor mined?” he said.
“No, no,” said Time soothingly. And to me he added in a murmured whisper, “He’s afraid. He was blown up in a mine in No Man’s Land between the trenches at Christmas-time in 1914. It broke his nerve.”
“May I put my toys on that machine gun?” asked Father Christmas timidly. “It will help to keep them dry.”
“It is not a machine gun,” said Time gently. “See, it is only a pile of books upon the sofa.” And to me he whispered, “They turned a machine gun on him in the streets of Warsaw. He thinks he sees them everywhere since then.”
“It’s all right, Father Christmas,” I said, speaking as cheerily as I could, while I rose and stirred the fire into a blaze. “There are no machine guns here and there are no mines. This is but the house of a poor writer.”
“Ah,” said Father Christmas, lowering his tattered hat still further and attempting something of a humble bow, “a writer? Are you Hans Andersen, perhaps?”