Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE

EDUCATION OF UNCLE PAUL

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA

MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO

ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

THE EDUCATION OF UNCLE PAUL

BY

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

AUTHOR OF

‘JIMBO,’ ‘JOHN SILENCE,’ ‘THE LISTENER,’ ETC.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON

1909

Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of to-day. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space; it is

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour;

it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor petition that it is to be commuted into death.—Francis Thompson.

TO

ALL THOSE CHILDREN

BETWEEN THE AGES OF EIGHT AND EIGHTY

WHO LED ME TO ‘THE CRACK’;

AND HAVE SINCE JOURNEYED WITH ME THROUGH IT

INTO

THE LAND ‘BETWEEN YESTERDAY AND TO-MORROW’

CHAPTER I

... I stand as mute

As one with full strong music in his heart

Whose fingers stray upon a shattered lute.

Alice Meynell.

All night the big liner had been plunging heavily, but towards morning she entered quieter water, and when the passengers woke, her rising and falling over the great swells was so easy that even the sea-sick women admitted the relief.

‘Land in sight, sir! We shall see Liverpool within twenty hours now, barring fog.’

The friendly bathroom steward passed the open door of Stateroom No. 28, and the big, brown-bearded man in the blue serge suit who was sitting, already dressed, on the edge of the port-hole berth, started as though he had been shot, and ran up on deck without waiting to finish tying the laces of his india-rubber shoes.

‘By Jove!’ he said, as he thundered along the stuffy passages of the rolling vessel, and ‘By Gad!’

He emerged on the upper deck in the sunlight, having nearly injured several persons in his impetuous journey, and, taking a great gulp of the salt air with keen satisfaction, he crossed to the side in a couple of strides, the shoe-laces clicking against the deck as he went.

‘Twenty years ago,’ he muttered, ‘when I was barely out of my teens. And now——!’

The big man was distinctly excited, though ‘moved’ perhaps is the better word, seeing that the emotion was a little too searching, too tinged with sadness, to include elation. He plunged both hands into his coat pockets with a violence that threatened to tear the bottoms out, and leaned over the railing.

Far away a faint blue line, tinged delicately with green, rose out of the sea. He saw it instantly, and his throat tightened unexpectedly, almost like a reflex action. For, about that simple little blue line on the distant horizon there was something strangely seizing, something absolutely arresting. The sight of it was a hundred times more poignant than he had imagined it would be; it touched a thousand springs of secret life in him, and a mist rose faintly before his eyes.

Paul Rivers had not realised that his emotion would be so intense; but from that instant everything on the ship, otherwise familiar and rather boring, looked different. A new sense of locality came to him. The steamer became strange and new; he ‘recognised’ bits of it as though he had just come aboard a ship known aforetime. It was no longer the steamer that was merely crossing the Atlantic; it was the boat that was bringing him home. And there, trimming the horizon in a thin ribbon of most arresting beauty, was the coast-line of the first Island.

‘But it seems so much more solid—and so much more real than I expected!’

Though it was barely seven o’clock a few early passengers were already astir, and he made his way back again to the lower deck and thence climbed up into the bows. He wished to be alone. Another man, apparently from the steerage, was there before him, leaning over the rail and peering fixedly under one hand at the horizon. The saloon passenger took up his position a few feet farther on and stared hard. He, too, stared with the eyes of memory, now grown a little dim. The air was fresh and sweet, fragrant of long sea distances; there was a soft warmth in it too, for it was late April and the spring made its presence known even on the great waters where there was nothing to hang its fairy banners on.

‘So that’s land! That’s the Old Country!’

The words dropped out of their own accord; he could not help himself. The sky seemed to come down a little closer, with a more familiar and friendly touch; the very air, he fancied, had a new taste in it,—a whiff of his boyhood days—a smell of childhood and the things of childhood—ages ago, it seemed, in another life.

The huge ship rose and fell on the regular, sweeping swells, and sea-birds from the land already came out to meet her. He easily imagined that the thrills in the depths of his own being somehow communicated themselves to the mighty vessel that tore the seas asunder in her great desire to reach the land.

‘Twenty years,’ he repeated aloud, oblivious of his neighbour, ‘twenty years since I last saw it!’

‘And it’s gol-darned nearer fifty since I seen it,’ exclaimed a harsh voice just behind him.

He turned with a start. The steerage passenger beside him, he saw, was an old man with a rough, grey face, and hair turning white; the hand that shaded his eyes was thick and worn; there was a heavy gold ring on the little finger, and the dirty cuff of a dark flannel shirt tumbled, loosely and unbuttoned, over the very solid wrist. The face, he noticed, at a second glance, was rugged, beaten, scored, the face of a man who had tumbled terribly about life, battered from pillar to post; and it was only the light in the hard blue eyes—eyes still fixed unwaveringly on the distant line of the land—that redeemed it from a kind of grim savagery. Beaten and battered, yes! Yet at the same time triumphant. The atmosphere of the man proclaimed in some vibrant fashion beyond analysis that he had failed in all he undertook—failed from stupidity rather than character, and always doggedly beginning over again with the same lack of intelligence—but yet had never given in, and never would give in.

It was not difficult to reconstruct his history from his appearance; or to realise his feelings as he saw the Old Country after fifty years—a returned failure. Although the voice had vibrated with emotion, the face remained expressionless and unmoved; but down both cheeks large tears ran slowly, in sudden jerks, to drop with a splash upon the railing. And Paul Rivers, after his intuitive fashion, grasped the whole drama of the man with a sudden completeness that touched him with swift sympathy. At the same time he could not help thinking of rain-drops running down the face of a statue. He recognised with shame that he was conscious of a desire to laugh.

‘Fifty years! That’s a long time indeed,’ he said kindly. ‘It’s half-a-century.’

‘That’s so, Boss,’ returned the other in a dead voice that betrayed Ireland overlaid with acquired American twang and intonation; ‘and I guess now I’ll never be able to stick it over here. Jest see it—and then git back again.’

He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, and never once turned his head towards the man he was speaking to; only his lips moved; he did not even lift a finger to brush off the great tears that fell one by one from his cheeks to the deck. He seemed unconscious of them; as though it was so long since those hard eyes had melted that they had forgotten how to do it properly and the skin no longer registered the sensation of the trickling. The tears continued to fall at intervals; Paul Rivers actually heard them splash.

‘I went out steerage,’ the man continued to himself, or to the sea, or to any one else who cared to listen, ‘and I come back steerage. That’s my trouble. And now’—his eye shifted for a fraction of a second and watched a huge wave go thundering by—‘I’m grave-huntin’, I guess. And that’s about the size of it. Jest see it and—git back again!’

The first-class passenger made some kind and appropriate reply—words with genuine sympathy in them—and then, getting no further answer, found it difficult to continue the conversation. The man, he realised, had only wanted a peg to hang his emotion on. It had to be a living peg, but any other living peg would do equally well, and before long he would find some one in the steerage who would listen with delight to the flood that was bound to come. And, presently, he took his departure to his own quarters where the sailors, with bare feet, were still swabbing the slippery decks.

A couple of hours later, after breakfast, he leaned over the rail and again saw the man on the steerage deck, and heard him talking volubly. The tears were gone, but the smudges were still visible on the cheeks, where they had traced a zigzag pattern. He was telling the history of his fifty years’ disappointments and failures to one and all who cared to listen.

And, apparently, many cared to listen. The man’s emotion was real; it found vigorous expression. The sight of the old, loved shore, not seen for half-a-century, but the subject of ten thousand yearnings, had been too much for him. He told in detail the substance of these ten thousand dreams—ever one and the same dream, of course—and in the telling of it he found the relief his soul sought. He got it all out; it did him a world of good, saving his inner being from a whole army of severe mental fevers and spiritual pains. The man revelled in a delirium of self-expression, and in so doing found sanity and health for his overburdened soul.

And the picture of that hard-faced old man crying accompanied Paul Rivers to the upper decks, and remained insistently with him for a long time. It portrayed with such neat emphasis precisely what was so deplorably lacking in his own character. There, in concrete form, though not precisely his own case, still near enough to be extremely illuminating, he had seen a grown-up man finding abundant and natural expression for his emotion. The man was not ashamed of his tears, and would doubtless have let them splash on the deck before a hundred passengers, whereas he, Paul Rivers, was, it seemed, constitutionally unable to reveal himself, to tell his deep longings, to find expression through any sensible medium for the ten thousand dreams that choked his life to the brim. He was unable, perhaps ashamed, to splash on the deck.

It was not that the big, bronzed Englishman wanted to cry, or to wash his soul in sentiment, but that the sight of this old man’s passion, and its frank and easy utterance, touched with dramatic intensity the crying need of his whole temperament. The need of the steerage passenger was the need of a moment; his own was the need of an existence.

‘Lucky devil!’ he exclaimed, half laughing, half sighing, as he went to his cabin for the field-glasses; ‘he knows how to get it out—and does get it out! while I—with my impossible yearnings and my absurd diffidence in speaking of them to others—I haven’t got a single safety-valve of any sort or kind. I can’t get it out of me—all this ocean in my heart and soul—not a drop, not even a blessed tear!’

He laughed again and, stooping to pick up the glasses, he caught a glimpse of his sunburned, bearded face in the cabin mirror.

‘Even my appearance is against me,’ he went on with mournful humour; ‘I look like a healthy lumberman more than anything else in God’s world!’

He bent forward and examined himself carefully in detail.

‘What has such a face as that to do with beauty, and the stars, and the moon sinking over a summer sea, or those night-winds I know rising faintly from their hiding-places in the dim forests and stealing on soft tiptoe about the sleeping world until the dawn gives them leave to run and sing? Yet I know—though I can never tell it to another—what so many do not know! Who could ever believe that that man’—he pointed to himself in the glass, laughing—‘wants above all else in life, above wealth, fame, success, the knowledge of spiritual things, which is Reality—which is God?’

A flash of light from nowhere ran over his face, making it for one instant like the face of a boy, shining, wonderful, radiantly young.

‘I know, for instance,’ he went on, the strange flush of enthusiasm rising into his eyes, ‘that the pine trees hold wind in their arms as cups hold rare wine, and that when it spills I hear the exquisite trickling of its music—but I can’t tell any one that! And I can’t even put the wild magic of it into verse or music. Or even into conduct,’ he concluded with a laugh, ‘conduct that’s sane, that is. For, if I could, I should find what I’m for ever seeking behind all life and behind all expressions of beauty—I should find the Reality I seek!’

‘I’ve no safety-valves,’ he added, swinging the glasses round by their strap to the imminent danger of various articles of furniture, ‘that’s the long and short of it. Like a giraffe that can’t make any sound at all although it has the longest throat in all creation. Everything in me accumulates and accumulates. If only’—and the strange light came back for a second to his brown eyes—‘I could write, or sing, or pray—live as the saints did, or do something to—to express adequately the sense of beauty and wonder and delight that lives, like the presence of a God, in my soul!’

The lamp in his eyes faded slowly and he sat back on the little cabin sofa, screwing and unscrewing his glasses till it was surprising that the thread didn’t wear out. And as he screwed, a hundred fugitive pictures passed thronging through his mind; moments of yearning and of pain, of sudden happiness and of equally sudden despondency, vivid moods of all kinds provoked by the smallest imaginable fancies, as the way ever was with him. For the moods of the sky were his moods; the swift, coloured changes of sea and cloud were mirrored in his heart as with all too impressionable people, and he was for ever trying to seize the secret of their loveliness and to give it form—in vain. Like many another mystical soul he saw the invisible foundations of the visible world—longed to communicate it to others—found he couldn’t—then suffered all the pain and fever of repression that seeks in vain for adequate utterance. Too shy to stammer his profound yearnings to ears that would not hear, and, never having known the blessed relief of a sympathetic audience, he perforce remained choked and dumb, the only mitigation he knew being that loss of self which follows prolonged contemplation. In his contemplation of Nature, for instance, he would gaze upon the landscape, the sky, a tree or flower, until their essential beauty passed into his own nature. For the moment he felt with these things. He was them. He took their qualities literally into himself. He lost his ordinary personality by changing its centre, merging it into those remoter phases of consciousness which extended from himself mysteriously to include the landscape, the sky, the tree, the flower.

For him everywhere in Nature there was psychic energy. And it was difficult to say which was with him the master passion: to find Reality—God—through Nature, or to explain Nature through God.

Then the busy faces of America, now left behind after twenty years, gradually receded, and others, dimly seen through mist, rose above the horizon of his thoughts. And among them he saw that two stood forth with more clearness than the rest. One of these was Dick Messenger, the friend of his boyhood, now dead but a few years; and the other, the face of his sister, Margaret, whom Dick had left a widow, and whose children he would now see for the first time at their country home in the South of England.

The ‘Old Country!’ He repeated the words softly to himself, weaving it like a coloured thread through all his reverie. He had lived away long enough to understand the poignant magic that lies in the little phrase, and to appreciate the seizing and pathetic beauty lying along that faint blue line of sea and sky.

And presently he took his field-glasses again and went up on deck and hid himself in the bows alone. Leaning over the bulwarks he took the scented wind of spring full in the face, and watched with a curious exhilaration the huge rollers, charging and bellowing like wild bulls of the sea as the ship drew nearer and nearer to the coast, plunging, leaping, and thundering as she moved.

CHAPTER II

Justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man’s imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud, there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of a bull’s-eye at his belt.—R. L. S.

The case of Paul Rivers after all was very simple, though perhaps in some respects uncommon. Circumstances—to sum it up roughly—had so conspired that the most impressionable portion of his character—half of his mind and most of his soul, that is—had never found utterance. He had never discovered the medium that could carry forth into the relief of expression all the inner turmoil and delight of a soul that was very much alive and singularly in touch with the simple and primitive forces of the world.

It was not, as with the returned emigrant, grief that he felt, but something far more troublesome: Joy. For the beauty of the world, of character as of nature, laid a spell upon him that set his heart in the glow and fever of an inner furnace, while the play of his imagination among the ‘common’ things of life which the rest of the world apparently thought dull set him often upon the borders of an ecstasy whereof he found himself unable to communicate one single letter to his fellow-beings. Thus, in later years, and out of due season, he was afflicted and perplexed by a luxuriant growth that by rights should have been harvested before he was twenty-five; and a great part of him had neglected to grow up at all.

This result was due to no fault—no neglect, that is—of his own, but to circumstances and temperament combined. It explains, however, why, after twenty years in the backwoods of America, he saw the coast of the Old Country with a deep emotion that was not all delight, but held something also of dismay.

Left an orphan, with his younger sister, at an early age, the blundering of trustees had forced him out into the world before his first term at Cambridge was over, and after various vicissitudes he had found his way to America and had been drawn into the lumber trade. Here his knowledge and love of trees—it was a veritable passion with him—soon resulted in a transfer from the Minneapolis office to the woods, and after an interesting apprenticeship, he came to hold an important post in which he was strangely at home. He was appointed to the post of ‘Wood Cruiser’—forest-traveller, commis voyageur of the primeval woods. His duties, well paid too, were to survey, judge, mark, and report upon the qualities and values of the immense timber limits owned by his Company. And he loved the work. It was a life of solitude, but a life close to Nature; borne in his canoe down swift wilderness streams; meeting the wild animals in their secret haunts; becoming intimate with dawns and sunsets, great winds, the magic of storms and stars, and being initiated into the profound mysteries of the clean and haunted regions of the world.

And the effect of this kind of life upon him—especially at an age when most men are busy learning more common values in the strife of cities—was of course significant. For here, in this solitary existence, the beauty of the world, virgin and glorious, struck the eyes of his soul and nearly blinded them.

His whole being threw itself inwards upon his thoughts, and outwards upon what fed his thoughts—the wonder of Nature. Even as a boy he had been mystically minded, a poet if ever there was one, though a poet without a lyre; but at school he had chanced to come under the influence of masters who had sought to curb the exuberance of his imagination, so that he started into life with the rooted idea that it was something of a disgrace for a man to be too sensitive to beauty, and to possess a vivid and coloured imagination was almost a thing to be ashamed of.

This view of his only ‘silver talent,’ moreover, was never permitted by the nature of his life to alter. His early American experiences stiffened it into a conviction which he yet despised. The fires ran hidden, if unchecked. Had he dwelt in cities, they might have suffered total extinction perhaps, but here, in the heart of the free woods, they speedily rose to the surface again and flamed. He grew up singularly unspoilt, the shyness of the original nature utterly uncorrected, the stores of a poetic imagination accumulating steadily, but always unuttered.

For his sole companions all these years when he had any at all were the ‘Bosses’ of the lumber camps he inspected, the ‘Cookee’ who looked after his stew-pot in the ‘home-shack,’ and the half-breed Indian who accompanied him in the stern-seat of the bark canoe during the month-long trips about the wilderness: these—with the animals, winds, stars, and the forms of beauty his imagination for ever conjured out of them.

For twenty years he lived thus, knowing all the secrets of the woods and streams. In the summer he never slept under cover at all, so that even in sleep he understood, through closed eyelids, the motions of the stars behind the tangled network of branches overhead. In winter his snow-shoes carried him into the heart of the most dazzling scenes imaginable—the forest lying under many feet of snow with a cloudless sun lifting it all into an appearance of magic that took the breath away. Moreover, the fierce spring, when the streams became impassable floods, and the autumn, with a flaming glory of gold and scarlet unknown anywhere else in the world, he knew as intimately as the dryads themselves.

And all these moods became the intimate companions of his life, taking the place of men and women. He came to personify Nature as a matter of course.

Without knowing it, too, the place of children was taken somehow by the wild animals. He knew them all. He surprised them in their haunts in the course of his silent journeys into the heart of their playgrounds; and his headquarters—a one-story shanty on the height of land between his two chief ‘limits’—was never without a tamed baby bear, a young moose to draw him on his snow-shoes with the manners of a well-bred pony, and a dozen other animals reclaimed from savagery and turned by some mysterious system of his own into real companions and confidants.

And the only books he read in the long winter nights, besides a few modern American novels that puzzled and vaguely distressed him, were Blake, his loved Greek plays, and the Bible.

He rarely saw a woman. Sides of his nature that ought to have developed under the influences of normal life at home lay dormant altogether, or were filled as best might be by his intercourse with Nature. He wrote few letters. After Dick Messenger died, the formal correspondence he kept up at long intervals with his sister—Dick’s widow—hardly deserved the name of letters. Great slabs of him, so to speak, stopped growing up, sinking down into the subconscious region to await conditions favourable for calling them to the surface again, and eventually coming to life—this was his tragic little secret—at a time when they were long overdue.

To the end of life he remained shy, shy in the sense that most of his thoughts and emotions he was afraid to reveal to others; with the shyness, too, of the utterly modest soul that cannot believe the world will give it the very things it has most right to claim, yet never dares to claim. And to the end Nature never lifted the spell laid upon him during those twenty years of initiation in her solitudes. To see the new moon tilting her silver horns in the west; to hear the wind rustling in high trees, like old Indians telling one another secrets of the early world; and to see the first stars looking down from the height of sky through spaces of watery blue—these, and a hundred other things that the majority seemed to ignore, were to him a more moving and terrible delight than anything he could imagine. For him such things could never be explained away, but remained living and uncorrected to the end.

Thus when, at forty-five, he inherited the fortune of his aunt (which he had always known must one day come to him), he returned to England with the shy, bursting, dream-laden heart of a boy, young as only those are young whom life has kept clean and sweet in the wilderness; and the question that sprang to life in his heart when he saw the blue line of coast was a vague wonder as to what would become of his full-blooded dreams when tested by the conventional English life that he remembered as a boy. To whom could he speak of his childlike yearning after God; of his swift divinations, his passionate intuitions into the very things that the majority put away with childhood? What modern priest—so he felt, at least—what befuddled mystic, could possibly enter into the essential nature of these cravings as he did, or understand, without a sneer, the unspoilt passions of a man who had never ‘grown up’?

‘I shall be out of touch with it all,’ he thought as he stood there in the bows and watched the blue line grow nearer, ‘utterly out of touch. What shall I find to say to the men of my own age—I, who stopped growing up twenty years ago? How shall I ever link on with them? Children are the only things I can talk to, and children!’—he shrugged his shoulders and laughed—‘children will find me out at once and give me away to the others.’

‘Dick’s children, though, may be different!’ came the sudden reflection. ‘Only—I’ve had nothing to do with children for such ages. Dick had real imagination. By George,’—and his eyes glowed a moment—‘what if they took after him!’

And for the fiftieth time, as he pictured the meeting with his stranger sister, his heart sank, and he found refuge in the knowledge that he had not altogether burned his boats behind him. For he had been wise in his generation. He had arranged with his Company, who were only too glad of the chance of keeping his services, that he should go to England on a year’s leave, and that if in the end he decided to return he should have a share in the business, while still continuing the work of forest-inspection that he loved.

‘I’m nothing but a wood cruiser. I shall go back. In the big world I might lose all my vision!’

And, having lived so long out of the world, he now came back to it with this simple, innocent, imaginative heart of a great boy, a boy still dreaming, for all his five-and-forty years. Fully realising that something was wrong with him, that he ought to be more sedate, more cynical, more prosaic and sober, he yet could not quite explain to himself wherein lay the source of his disability. His thoughts stumbled and blundered when he tried to lay his finger on it, with the only result that he felt he would be ‘out of touch’ with his new world, not knowing exactly how or why.

‘It’s a regular log-jam,’ he said, using the phraseology he was accustomed to, ‘and I’m sorry for the chap that breaks it.’

It never occurred to him that in this simple thrill that Nature still gave him he possessed one of the greatest secrets for the preservation of genuine youth; indeed, had he understood this, it would have meant that he was already old. For with the majority such dreams die young, brushed rudely from the soul by the iron hand of experience, whereas in his case it was their persistent survival that lent such a childlike quality to his shyness, and made him secretly ashamed of not feeling as grown up as he realised he ought to feel.

Paul Rivers, in a word, belonged to a comprehensible though perhaps not over common type, and one not often recognised owing to the elaborate care with which its ‘specimens’ conceal themselves from the world under all manner of brave disguises. He was destitute of that nameless quality that constitutes a human being, not mature necessarily, but grown up. Sources of inner enthusiasm that most men lose when life brings to them the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, had kept alive; and though on the one hand he was secretly ashamed of the very simplicity of his great delights, on the other hand he longed intensely for some means by which he could express them and relieve his burdened soul.

He envied the emigrant who could let fall hot tears on the deck without further ado, while at the same time he dreaded the laughter of the world into which he was about to move when they learned the cause of the emotions that produced them. A boy at forty-five! A dreamer of children’s dreams with fifty in sight—and no practical results!

These were some of the thoughts still tumbling vaguely about his mind when the tug brought letters aboard at Queenstown, and on the dining-room table where they were spread out he found one for himself in a handwriting that he both welcomed and dreaded.

CHAPTER III

He welcomed it, because for years it had been the one remaining link with the life of his old home—these formal epistles that reached him at long intervals; and he dreaded it, because he knew it would contain a definite invitation of an embarrassing description.

‘She’s bound to ask me,’ he reflected as he opened it in his cabin; ‘she can’t help herself. And I am bound to accept, for I can’t help myself either.’ He was far too honest to think of inventing elaborate excuses. ‘I’ve got to go and spend a month with her right away whether I like it or not.’

It was not by any means that he disliked his sister, for indeed he hardly knew her; after all these years he barely remembered what she looked like, the slim girl of eighteen he had left behind. It was simply that in his mind she stood for the conventional life, so alien to his vision, to which he had returned.

He would try to like her, certainly. Very warm impulses stirred in his heart as he thought of her—his only near relative in the world, and the widow of his old school and Cambridge friend, Dick Messenger. It was in her handwriting that he first learned of Dick’s love for her, as it was in hers that the news of his friend’s death reached him—after his long tour—two months old. The handwriting was a symbol of the deepest human emotions he had known. And for that reason, too, he dreaded it.

He never realised quite what kind of woman she had become; in his thoughts she had always remained simply the girl of eighteen—grown up—married. Her letters had been very kind and gentle, if in the nature of the case more and more formal. She became shadowy and vague in his mind as the years passed, and more and more he had come to think of her as wholly out of his own world. Reading between the lines it was not difficult to see that she attached importance to much in life that seemed to him unreal and trivial, whereas the things that he thought vital she never referred to at all. It might, of course, be merely restraint concealing great depths. He could not tell. The letters, after a few years, had become like formal government reports. He had written fully, however, to announce his home-coming, and her reply had been full of genuine pleasure.

‘I don’t think she’ll make very much of me,’ was the thought in his mind whenever he dwelt upon it. ‘I’m afraid my world must seem foreign—unreal to her; the things I know rubbish.’

So, in the privacy of his cabin, his heart already strangely astir by the emotion of that blue line on the horizon, he read his sister’s invitation and found it charming. There was spontaneous affection in it.

‘We shall fix things up between us so that no one would ever know.’ He did not explain what it was ‘no one would ever know,’ but went on to finish the letter. He was to make his home with her in the country, he read, until he decided what to do with himself. The tone of the letter made his heart bound. It was a real welcome, and he responded to it instantly like a boy. Only one thing in it seriously disturbed his equanimity. Absurd as it may seem, the fact that his sister’s welcome included also that of the children, had a subtly disquieting effect upon him.

... for they are dying to see you and to find out for themselves what the big old uncle they have heard so much about is really like. All their animals are being cleaned and swept so as to be ready for your arrival, and, in anticipation of your stories of the backwoods, no other tales find favour with them any more.

An expression of perplexity puckered his face. ‘I declare, I’m afraid of those children—Dick’s children!’ he thought, holding the open letter to his mouth and squinting down the page, while his eyebrows rose and his forehead broke into lines. ‘They’ll find out what I am. They’ll betray me. I shall never be able to hold out against them.’ He knew only too well how searching was the appeal that all growing and immature life made to him. It touched the very centre of him that had refused to grow up and that made him young with itself. ‘I can no more resist them than I could resist the baby bears, or that little lynx that used to eat out of my hand.’ He shrugged his big shoulders, looking genuinely distressed. ‘And then every one will know what I am—an overgrown boy—a dumb poet—a dreamer of dreams that bear no fruit!’

He was not morbidly introspective. He was merely trying to face the little problem squarely. He got up and staggered across the cabin, steadying himself against the rolling of the ship in front of the looking-glass.

‘Big Old Uncle!’

He stuffed the letter into his pocket and surveyed himself critically. Big he certainly was, but that other adjective brought with it a sensation of weariness that had never yet troubled him in his wilderness existence. He was only a little, just a very little, on the shady side of forty-five, but to the children he might seem really old, aged, and to his sister, who was considerably his junior, as elderly, and perhaps in need of the comforts of the elderly.

He squared his shoulders and looked more closely into the glass. There, opposite to him, stood a tall, dignified man in a blue suit, with a spotless linen collar and a neat tie passing through a gold ring, instead of the unkempt fellow he was accustomed to in a flannel shirt, red handkerchief and big sombrero hat pulled over his eyes; a man weighing the best part of fifteen stones, lean, well-knit, vigorous, and nearly six feet three in his socks. A pair of brown eyes, kindly brown eyes he thought, met his own questioningly, and a brown beard—yes, it was still brown—covered the lower part of the face. He put up a hand to stroke it, and noticed that it was a strong, muscular hand, sunburnt but well kept, with neat finger-nails, and a heavy signet ring on one finger. It brushed across the rather deep lines on the bronzed forehead, without brushing them away, however, and then travelled higher to the rough parting in the dark-brown hair, and the hair, he noticed, was brushed in a particular way evidently, a way he thought no one would notice but himself and the lumber-camp barber who first taught him, so as to cover up a few places where the wind made little chilly feelings in winter-time under his fur cap.

Old? No, not old yet—but “getting on” was a gentler phrase he could not deny, and there were certainly odd traces where the crows had walked on his skin while he slept in the forest, and had hopped up even to the corners of his eyes to see if he were really asleep. There were other lines, too—lines of exposure, traced by wind and sun, and one or two queer marks that are said only to come from prolonged hardship and severest want. For he had known both sides of the wilderness life, and on his long journeys Nature had not always been kind to him.

He stared for a long time at his reflection in the glass, lost in reverie. This coming back to England after so many years was like looking at a picture of himself as he was when he had left; it furnished him with a ready standard of comparison; the changes of the years stood out very sharply, as though they had come about in a single night.

Yes, his face and figure had aged a good deal. He admitted it. And when he frowned he had distinctly an appearance of middle age. This, of course, was the absurd part of it, for in spirit he had remained as young as he was at twenty, as enthusiastic, hopeful, spontaneous as ever, just as much in love with the world, and just as full of boyhood’s dreams as when he went to Cambridge. And in his eyes still burned the strange flames that sought to pierce behind the veil of appearances.

‘And those children will find it out and make me look ridiculous before I’ve been there a week!’ he exclaimed again, sitting down on his bunk with a crash as the steamer gave a sudden lurch; ‘and then where shall I be, I’d like to know?’

He lay on his back for an hour thinking out a plan of action. For, of course, he decided that he must go; only—he must go disguised. And he spent hours inventing the disguise, and more hours perfecting it. For the first time in his life he would adopt a distinct attitude, and, having carefully thought out the attitude he intended to adopt by way of disguise, he buckled it on like armour and fastened it very securely indeed to his large person.

He would be kind; he would even meet the children half-way, kiss them if necessary at stated times, in a stated way, and perhaps occasionally unbend a little as opportunity served and circumstances permitted. But never must he forget, or allow them to forget, that he was a stiff and elderly man, a little grim and gruff, sometimes even severe and short-tempered, and never to be trifled with at any time, or under any conditions.

Over the tenderer emotions he must keep especial watch; these were a direct channel to his secrets, and once the old unsatisfied enthusiasms escaped, there was no saying what might happen. The thought frightened him, for the pain involved might be very great indeed.

With people of his own age, he realised, the danger would be less. Silence and reserve cover a multitude of shortcomings. But children, he knew, had a simple audacity, a merciless penetration, that no mere pose could ever withstand. And this he felt intuitively, knowing nothing of children, but being taught by these very qualities in himself. Like little animals they would soon find the direct channel to his heart unless well guarded, and come tumbling along it without delay. And then——!

So Paul Rivers left London the very next day, glad in many ways to think that he had this haven of refuge to go to from the noisy horror of the huge strange city; yet with a sinking of his heart lest his true self should be discovered, and held up to scorn.

Moreover, the strange part of it was that as he sped down through the smiling green country that spring afternoon, armed from head to foot in the rigid steel casings of his disguise, he seemed to hear a faint singing deep within him, a singing that belonged to the youngest part of him and yet sprang from that which was vastly ancient, but as to the cause of which he was so puzzled that, in his efforts to analyse it, he forgot about his journey altogether, and was nearly carried past the station where he had to get out.

CHAPTER IV

No man worth his spiritual salt can ever become really entangled in locality.—A. H. L.

The house, like the description of himself in the letter, was big and old. It consisted of three rambling wings, each added at a different period to an original farmhouse, and was thus full of unexpected staircases, sudden rising passages, and rooms of queer shapes. It resembled, indeed, the structure of a mind that has grown by chance and not by system, and was just as difficult for a stranger to find his way in.

It stood among pine-woods, at the foot of hills that ran on another five miles to drop their chalk cliffs abruptly into the sea. Where the lawns stopped on one side and the kitchen-garden on the other began an expanse of undulating heather-land, dotted with pools of brown water and yellow with patches of gorse and broom. Here rabbits increased and multiplied; sea-gulls screamed and flew, using some of the more secluded ponds for their annual breeding places; foxes lived happily, unhunted and very bold; and the dainty hoof-marks of deer were sometimes found in the sandy margins of the freshwater springs.

It was beautiful country, a bit of wild England, out of the world as very few parts of it now are, and haunted by a loveliness that laid its spell on the heart of the returned exile the moment he topped the hill in the dog-cart and saw it spread out before him like a softly coloured map. The scenery from the train window had somehow disheartened him a little, producing a curious sense of confinement, almost of imprisonment, in his mind: the neat meadows holding wooden cattle; the careful boundaries of ditch and hedge; the five-barred gates, strong to enclose, the countless notices to warn trespassers, and the universal network of barbed wire. Accustomed as he was to the vast, unhedged landscapes of a primitive country, it all looked to him, with its precise divisions, like a toy garden, combed, washed, swept—exquisitely cared for, but a little too sweet and perfumed to be quite wholesome. Only tame things, he felt, could enjoy so gentle a playground, and the call of his own forests—for this really was what worked in him—sang out to him with a sterner cry.

But this view from the ridge pleased him more: there were but few hedges visible; the eye was led to an open horizon and the sea; an impression of space and freedom rose from the hills and moorlands. Here his thoughts, accustomed to deal with leagues rather than acres, could at least find room to turn about in. And although the perfume that rose to his nostrils was like the perfume of flowers preserved by some artificial process rather than the great clean smells of a virgin world such as he was used to, it was nevertheless the smell of his boyhood, and it moved him powerfully. Odour is the one thing that is impossible to recall in exile. Sights and sounds the imagination can always reconstruct after a fashion, but odour is too elusive. It rose now to his nostrils as something long forgotten, and swept him with a wave of memory that was extraordinarily keen.

‘That’s a smell to take me back twenty-five years,’ he thought, inhaling the scent of the heather. He caught his breath sharply, uncertain whether it was pain or pleasure that predominated. A profound yearning, too fugitive to be seized, too vague to be definitely labelled, stirred in the depths of him as his eye roamed over the miles of sunlight and blue shadow at his feet; again something sang within him as he gazed over the long ridges of heathland, sprinkled with silvery pools, and bearing soft purple masses of pine-woods on their sides as they melted away through haze to the summer sea beyond.

Only when his gaze fell upon the smoke rising from the grey stone roof of the house nestling far below did the joy of his emotion chill a little. A vague sense of alarm and nervousness touched him as he wondered what that grey old building might hold in store for him.

‘It’s silly, I know,’ his thought ran, ‘but I feel like a lost sheep here. It’s Nature that calls me, not people. I don’t know how I shall get on in this chess-board sort of a country. They’ll never care for the things that I care for.’

For a moment a sort of panic came over him. He could almost have turned and run. Vaguely he felt that he was an unfinished, uncouth article in a shop of dainty china. He sent the dog-cart on ahead, and walked down the hillside towards the house, thinking, thinking—wondering almost why he had ever consented to come, and already conscious of a sense of imprisonment. He was still impressionable as a boy, with sharp, fleeting moods like a boy’s.

Then, quite suddenly it seemed, he had walked up the drive and passed through the house, and a figure moved across a lawn to meet him. The first sight of his sister he had known for twenty years was a tall woman in white serge, with a prim, still girlish figure and a quiet, smiling face, moving graciously through patches of sunshine between flower-beds of formal outline. There was no spontaneous rush of welcome, no gush, or flood of questions. He felt relieved. With a flash, too, he realised that her dominant note was still grief for her lost husband. It was written all over her.

Instantly, however, shyness descended upon him like a cloud. The scene he had rehearsed so often in imagination vanished before the reality. He slipped down inside himself, as his habit sometimes was, and watched the performance curiously, as though he were a spectator of it instead of an actor.

He saw himself, hot and rather red in the face, walking awkwardly across the lawn with both hands out, offering his bearded face clumsily to be kissed. And it was kissed, first on one cheek, then on the other, calmly, soberly, delicately. He felt the tingling of it for a long time afterwards. That kiss confused him ridiculously.

At first he could think of nothing to say except the form of address he always used to the Bosses of the lumber camps—‘How’s everything up your way?’—which he felt was not quite the most suitable phrase for the occasion. Then his sister spoke, and quickly set him more at his ease.

‘But you don’t look one little bit like an American, Paul!’

He gazed at her in admiration, just as he might have gazed at a complete stranger. The soft intonation of her voice was a keen delight to him. And her matter-of-fact speech put his shyness to flight.

‘Of course not,’ he replied, leaving out her name after a second’s hesitation, ‘but my voice, I guess——’

‘Not a bit either,’ she repeated, surveying him very critically. ‘You look like a sailor home from the sea more than anything else.’

She wore a wide garden hat of Panama straw, charmingly trimmed with flowers. Her face beneath it, Paul thought, was the most refined and exquisitely delicate he had ever seen. It was like chiselled porcelain. He thought of Hank Davis’s woman at Deep Bay Camp—whose face he used to think wonderful rather—and it suddenly seemed by comparison to have been chopped with a blunt axe out of wood.

They moved to the long chairs upon the lawn, and her brother realised for the first time that his boots were enormous, and that his Minneapolis clothes did not sit upon him quite as they might have done. He trod on a corner of a geranium bed as they went, crushing an entire plant with one foot. But his sister appeared not to notice it.

‘It’s an awful long time, M—Margaret,’ he stammered as they went.

They both sat down and turned to stare at each other. It was, of course, idle to pretend that after so long an absence they could feel any very profound affection. Dick, he realised quickly with a flash of intuition, was the truer link. And, on the whole, it was all much easier than he had expected. His mind began to work very quickly in several directions at once. The beauty of the English garden in its quiet way touched him keenly, stirring in him little whirls of inner delight, fugitive but wonderful. Only a portion of him, after all, went out to his sister.

‘I believe you expected a Red Indian, or a bear,’ he said at length.

She laughed gently, returning his stare of genuine admiration. ‘One couldn’t help wondering a little, Paul dear,—after so many years—could one?’ She always said ‘one’ instead of the obvious personal pronoun. ‘You had no beard, for instance, when you left?’

‘And more hair, perhaps!’

‘You look splendid. I shall be proud of you!’

Paul blushed furiously. It was the first compliment ever paid to him by a woman.

‘Oh, I feel all right,’ he stammered. ‘The healthy life in the woods, open air, and constant moving keep a fellow “fixed-up” to concert pitch all the time. I’ve never once—consulted a doctor in my life.’ He was careful to keep the slang out. He felt he managed it admirably. He said ‘consulted.’

‘And you wrote such nice letters, Paul. It was dear of you.’

‘I was lonely,’ he said bluntly. And after a pause he added, ‘I got all yours.’

‘I’m so glad.’ And then another pause. In which fashion they talked on for half an hour, each secretly estimating the other—wondering a little why they did not feel all kind of poignant emotions they had rather expected to feel.

It was a perfectly natural scene between a brother and sister who had grown up entirely apart, who were quite honest, who were utterly different types, and who yet wished to hold to one another as the nearest blood ties they possessed. They skimmed pleasantly and, so far as he was concerned, more and more easily, over the surface of things. Her talk, like her letters, was sincere, simple, shallow; it concealed no hidden depths, he felt at once. And by degrees, even in this first conversation, crept a shadow of other things, so that he realised they were in reality leagues apart, and could never have anything much in common below the pleasant surface relations of life.

Yet, even while he sheered off, as oil declines from its very nature to mingle with water, he felt genuinely drawn to her in another way. She was his own sister; she was his nearest tie; and she was Dick’s widow. They would get along together all right; they would be good friends.

‘Twenty years, Margaret.’

‘Twenty years, Paul.’

And then another pause of several minutes during which something that was too vague to be a real thought passed like a shadow through his mind. What could his friend Dick have seen in her that was necessary to his life and happiness—Dick Messenger, who was scholar, poet, thinker—who sought the everlasting things—God? He instantly suppressed it as unworthy, something of which he was ashamed, but not before it had left a definite little trace in his imagination.

‘So at last, Paul, you’ve really come home,’ she resumed; ‘I can hardly believe it,—and are going to settle down. You are a rich man.’

‘Aunt Alice did her duty,’ he laughed. He ignored the reference to settling down. It vaguely displeased him. ‘It’s for you as well as me,’ he added, meaning the money. ‘I want to share with you whatever you need.’

‘Not a penny,’ she said quickly; ‘I have all I need. I live with my memories, you know. I am only so glad for your sake,—after all your hard life out there.’

‘The life wasn’t hard; it was rather wonderful,’ he said simply. ‘I liked it.’

‘For a time perhaps; but you must have had curious experiences and lived with very rough people in those—lumber camp places you wrote about.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Simple kind of men, but very decent, very genuine. Few signs of city polish, I admit, but then you know I never cared for frills, Margaret.’

‘Frills!’ she exclaimed, without any expression on her face. ‘Of course not. Still, I am very glad you have left it all. The life must often have been unsuitable and lonely; one always felt that for you. You can’t have had any of the society that one’s accustomed to.’

‘Not of that kind,’ he put in hurriedly with a short laugh, ‘but of other kinds. I struck a pretty good crowd of men on the whole.’

She turned her face slightly away from him; her eyes, he divined, had been fixed for a moment on his hands. For the first time in his life he realised that they were large and rough and brown. Her own were so pale and dainty—like china hands, glossy and smooth—and the gold bangle on her thin wrist looked as though every second it must slip over her fingers. His own hands disappeared swiftly into the pockets of his coat.

She turned to him with a gentle smile. ‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘it is simply too delightful to know that you really are here at last. It must seem strange to you at first, and there are so many things to talk over—such a lot to tell. I want to hear all your plans. You’ll get used to us after a bit, and there are lots of nice people in the neighbourhood who are dying to meet you.’

Her brother felt inclined to explain that he had no wish to interfere with their ‘dying’; but, instead, he returned her smile. ‘I’m a poor hand at meeting people, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I’m not as sociable as I might be.’

‘But you’ll get over that. Of course, living so long in the backwoods makes one unsociable. But we’ll try and make you happy and comfortable. You have no idea how very, very glad I am that you’ve come home.’

Paul believed her. He leaned over and patted her hand, and she smiled frankly and sweetly in his face. She was a very shadowy sort of personality, he felt. If he blew hard she might blow away altogether, or disappear like a soap-bubble.

‘I’m glad too, of course,’ he replied. ‘Only at my age, you know, it’s not easy to tackle new habits.’

‘No one could take you for a day more than thirty-five,’ she said with truth; ‘so that shall be our own little private secret. You look quite absurdly young.’

They laughed together easily and naturally. Paul felt more at home and soothed than he had thought possible. It had not been in the least formidable after all, and for the first time in his life he knew a little of that enervating kind of happiness that comes from being made a fuss of. As there was still a considerable interval before tea, they left their chairs and strolled through the garden, and as they went, the talk turned upon the past, and his sister spoke of Dick and of all he had meant to do in the world, had he lived. Paul heard the details of his sudden death for the first time. Her voice and manner were evidence of the melancholy she still felt, but her brother’s heart was deeply stirred; he asked for all the particulars he had so often wondered about, and in her quiet, soothing tone, tinged now with tender sadness, she supplied the information. Clearly she had never arisen from the blow. She had worshipped Dick without understanding him.

‘Death always frightens me, I think,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘I try not to think about it.’

She passed on to speak of the children, and told him how difficult she found it to cope with them—she suffered from frequent headaches and could not endure noise—and how she hoped when they were a little older to be more with them. Mademoiselle Fleury, meanwhile, was such an excellent woman and was teaching them all they should know.

‘Though, of course, I keep a close eye on them so far as I am able,’ she explained, ‘and only wish I were stronger.’

They sauntered through the rose-garden and down the neat gravel paths that led to the wilder parts of the grounds where the rhododendron bushes stood in rounded domes and masses. It was very peaceful, very beautiful. He trod softly and carefully. The hush of centuries of cultivation lay over it all. Even the butterflies flew gently, as to the measure of a leisurely dance that deprecated undue animation. Paul caught his thoughts wandering to the open spaces of untamed moorland he had seen from the hill-top. More and more, as his sister’s personality revealed itself, he got the impression that she lived enclosed like the wooden cows he had seen from the train, in a little green field, with precise and neatly trimmed borders. Strong emotions, as all other symptoms of plain and vigorous life, she shrank from. There were notice-boards set about her to warn trespassers, stating clearly that she did not wish to be let out. Yet in her way she was true, loving, and sweet—only it was such a conventional way, he felt.

Leaving the world of rhododendron bushes behind them, they came to the beginning of a pine-wood leading to the heather-land beyond. There was a touch of primitive wildness here. The trees grew straight and tall, filling the glade, and a stream ran brawling among their roots.

‘This is the Gwyle,’ she said, as they entered the shade, ‘it was Dick’s favourite part of the whole grounds. I rarely come here; it’s dark even in summer, and rather damp and draughty, I always think.’

Paul looked about him and drew a long breath. The air was strong with open-air scents of earth and bark and branches. Far overhead the tufted pines swayed, murmuring to the sky; the ground ran away downhill, becoming broken up and uneven; nothing but dark, slender stems rose everywhere about him, like giant seaweeds, he thought, rising from the pools of a deep sea. And the soft wind, moving mysteriously between the shadows and the sunlight, completed the spell. He passed suddenly—willy-nilly, as his nature would have it—into that mood when the simplest things about him turned their faces upwards so that he caught their eyes and their meaning; when the well-known and common things of the world shone out and revealed the infinite. Something in this quiet pine-wood that was mighty, and utterly wonderful, entered his soul, linking him on at a single stroke with the majesty of the great spirit of the earth. What lay behind it? What was its informing spirit? How and where could it link on so intimately with his soul? And could it not be a channel, as he always felt it must be, to the God behind it? Beauty seized him by the throat and made him tremble.

This sudden rush came over him, sea-like. His moods were ever like the sea, some strange touch of colour shifting the entire key. Something, too, made him feel lonely and oppressed. He, who was accustomed to space in bulk—the space the stars and winds live in—had come to this little, parcelled-out place. He felt clipped already. He turned to the shadowy personality beside him, the boyish impulse bursting its way out. After all, she was his own sister; he could reveal himself to no one if not to her.

‘By Gosh, Margaret,’ he cried, ‘this is the real thing. This wood must be alive and haunted just as the James Bay forests are. It’s simply full of wonder.’

‘It’s the Gwyle wood,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s usually rather damp. But Dick loved it.’

Her brother hardly heard what she said. ‘Listen,’ he said in a hushed tone; ‘do you hear the wind up there aloft? The trees are talking. The wood is full of whispers. There’s no sound in the world like that murmur of a soft breeze in pine branches. It’s like the old gods sighing, which only their true worshippers hear! Isn’t it fine and melancholy? Margaret, d’you know, it goes through me like a fever.’

His sister stopped and stared at him. She wore a little frightened expression. His sudden enthusiasm puzzled her evidently.

‘It’s the Gwyle wood,’ she repeated mechanically. ‘It’s very pretty, I think. Dick always thought so too.’

Her brother, surprised at his own rush of ready words, and already ashamed of the impulse that had prompted him to reveal himself, fell into silence.

‘Nature excites me sometimes,’ he said presently. ‘I suppose it’s because I’ve known nothing else.’

‘That’s quite natural, I’m sure, Paul dear,’ she rejoined, turning to lead the way back to the sunshine of the open garden; ‘it’s very pretty; I love it too. But it rather alarms me, I think, sometimes.’

‘Perhaps the natural tendency in solitude is to personify nature, and make it take the place of men and women. It has become a profound need of my being certainly.’ He spoke more quietly, chilled by her utter absence of comprehension.

‘In its place I think it is ever so nice. But, Paul, you surprise me. I had no idea you were clever like that.’ She was perfectly sincere in what she said.

Her brother blushed like a boy. ‘It’s my foolishness, I suppose, Margaret,’ he said with a shy laugh. ‘I am certainly not clever.’

‘Anyhow, you can be foolish or clever here to your heart’s content. You must use the place as though it were your own exactly.’

‘Thank you, Margaret.’

‘Only I don’t think I quite understand all those things,’ she added vaguely after a pause. ‘Nixie talks rather like that. She has all poor Dick’s ideas and strange fancies. I really can’t keep up with her at all.’

Paul stiffened at the reference to the children; he remembered his attitude. Already he had been guilty of a serious lapse from his good intentions.

‘She comes down to this wood far too much, and I’m sure it’s not quite healthy for her. I always forget to speak to Mlle. Fleury.’ Then she turned to him and smiled. ‘But they are all so excited about your coming. They will simply devour you.’

‘I’m a poor hand at children, I’m afraid,’ he said, falling back upon his usual formula, ‘but, of course, I shall be delighted to see them.’

She gathered up her white skirts about her trim ankles and led the way out of the wood, her brother following and thinking how slim and graceful she was, and what a charming figure she made among the rose-trees. He got the impression of her as something unreal and shadowy, a creature but half alive. It would hardly have surprised him to see her suddenly flit off into mist and sunshine and disappear from view, leaving him with the certainty that he had been talking with a phantasm of a dream. Between himself and her, however, he realised now, there was a gulf fixed. They looked at one another as it were down the large end of a telescope, and talked down a long-distance telephone that changed all their words and made the sense unintelligible and meaningless. The scale of values between them had no common denominator. Yet he could love her, and he meant to.

They crossed the lawns and went through the French window into the cool of the drawing-room, and while he was sipping his first cup of afternoon English tea, struggling with a dozen complex emotions that stirred within him, there suddenly darted across the lawn a vision of flying children, with a string of animals at their heels. They swept out of some laurel shrubberies into the slanting evening sunlight, and came to a dead stop on the gravel path in front of the window.

Their eyes met. They had seen him.

There they stood, figures of suddenly arrested motion, staring at him through the glass. ‘So that’s Uncle Paul!’ was the thought in the mind of each. He was being inspected, weighed, labelled. The meeting with his sister was nothing compared to this critical examination, conducted though it was from a distance.

But it lasted only a moment. With a sudden quietness the children passed away from the window towards another door round the corner, and so out of sight.

‘They’ve gone up to get tidy before coming to see you,’ explained his sister; and Paul used the short respite to the best possible advantage by collecting his thoughts, remembering his ‘attitude and disguise,’ and seeing to it that his armour was properly fastened on, leaving no loopholes for sudden attack. He retired cautiously to the only place in a room where a shy man feels really safe—the mat before the fireplace. He almost wished for his gun and hunting-knife. The idea made him laugh.

‘They already love you,’ he heard his sister’s gentle whispering voice, ‘and I know you’ll love them too. You must never let them annoy you, of course.’

‘They’re your children—and Dick’s,’ he answered quietly. ‘I shall get on with them famously, I’m sure.’

CHAPTER V

I kiss you and the world begins to fade.

Land of Heart’s Desire.—Yeats.

A few minutes later the door opened softly, and a procession, solemn of face and silent of foot, marched slowly into the room. The moment had come at last for his introduction, and, by a single stroke of unintentional diplomacy, his sister did more to winning her brother’s shy heart than by anything else she could possibly have devised. She went out.

‘They will prefer to make your acquaintance by themselves,’ she said in her gentle way, ‘and without any assistance from me.’

The procession advanced to the middle of the room and then stopped short. Evidently, for them, the departure of their mother somewhat complicated matters. They had depended upon her to explain them to their uncle. There they stood, overcome by shyness, moving from one foot to another, with flushed and rosy faces, hair brushed, skin shining, and eyes all prepared to laugh as soon as somebody gave the signal, but not the least knowing how to begin.

And their uncle faced them in similar plight, as, for the second time that afternoon, shyness descended upon him like a cloud, and he could think of nothing to say. His size overwhelmed him; he felt like an elephant. With a sudden rush all his self-possession deserted him. He almost wished that his sister might return so that they should be brought up to him seriatim, named just as Adam named the beasts, and dismissed—which Adam did not do—with a kiss. It was really, of course—and he knew it to his secret mortification—a meeting on both sides of children; they all felt the shyness and self-consciousness of children, he as much as they, and at any moment might take the sudden plunge into careless intimacy, as the way with children ever is.

Meanwhile, however, he took rapid and careful note of them as they stood in that silent, fidgety group before him, with solemn, wide-open eyes fixed upon his face.

The youngest, being in his view little more than a baby, needs no description beyond the fact that it stared quite unintelligently without winking an eye. Its eyes, in fact, looked as though they were not made to close at all. And this is its one and only appearance.

Standing next to the baby, holding its hand, was a boy in a striped suit of knickerbockers, with a big brown curl like a breaking wave on the top of his forehead; he was between eight and nine years old, and his names—for, of course, he had two—were Richard Jonathan, shortened, as Paul learned later, into Jonah. He balanced himself with the utmost care in the centre of a particular square of carpet as though half an inch to either side would send him tumbling into a bottomless abyss. The fingers not claimed by the baby travelled slowly to and fro along the sticky line of his lower lip.

Close behind him, treating similarly another square of carpet, stood a rotund little girl, slightly younger than himself, named Arabella Lucy. There was a touch of audacity in her eyes, and an expression about the mouth that indicated the imminent approach of laughter. She had been distinctly washed and brushed-up for the occasion. Her face shone like a polished onion skin. She had the same sort of brown hair that Jonah considered fashionable, and her name for all common daily purposes was Toby.

The eldest and most formidable of his tormentors, standing a little in advance of the rest, was Margaret Christina, shortened by her father (who, indeed, had been responsible for all the nicknames) into Nixie. And the name fitted her like a skin, for she was the true figure of a sprite, and looked as if she had just stepped out of the water and her hair had stolen the yellow of the sand. Her eyes ran about the room like sunshine from the surface of a stream, and her movements instantly made Paul think of water gliding over pebbles or ribbed sand with easy and gentle undulations. Flashlike he saw her in a clearing of his lonely woods, a creature of the elements. Her big blue eyes, too, were full of wonder and pensive intelligence, and she stood there in a motherly and protective manner as though she were quite equal to the occasion and would presently know how to act with both courage and wisdom.

And Nixie, indeed, it was, after this prolonged and critical pause, who commenced operations. There was a sudden movement in the group, and the next minute Paul was aware that she had left it and was walking slowly towards him. He noticed her graceful, flowing way of moving, and saw a sunburnt arm and hand extended in his direction. The next second she kissed him. And that kiss acted like an electric shock. Something in her that was magical met its kind in his own soul and, flamelike, leaped towards it. A little tide of hot life poured into him, troubling the deeps with a momentary sense of delicious bewilderment.

‘How do you do, Uncle Paul,’ she said; ‘we are very glad you have come—at last.’

The blood ran ridiculously to his head. He found his tongue, and pulled himself sharply together.

‘So am I, dear. Of course, it’s a long way to come—America.’ He stooped and bestowed the necessary kisses upon the others, who had followed their leader and now stood close beside him, staring like little owls in a row.

‘I know,’ she replied gravely. ‘It takes weeks, doesn’t it? And mother has told us such a lot about you. We’ve been waiting a very long time, I think,’ she added as though stating a grievance.

‘I suppose it is rather a long time to wait,’ he said sheepishly. He stroked his beard and waited.

‘All of us,’ she went on. She included the others in this last observation by bending her head at them, and into her uncle’s memory leaped the vision of a slender silver birch tree that grew on the edge of the Big Beaver Pond near the Canadian border. She moved just as that silver birch moved when the breeze caught it.

Her manner was very demure, but she looked so piercingly into the very middle of his eyes that Paul felt as though she had already discovered everything about him. They all stood quite close to him now, touching his knees; ready, there and then, to take him wholly into their confidence.

An impulse that he only just managed to control stirred in him and a curious pang accompanied it. He remembered his ‘attitude,’ however, and stiffened slightly.

‘No, it only takes ten days roughly from where I’ve come,’ he said, leaving the mat and dropping into a deep arm-chair a little farther off. ‘The big steamers go very fast, you know, nowadays.’

Their eyes remained simply glued to his face. They switched round a few points to follow his movement, but did not leave their squares of carpet.

‘Madmerzelle said’—it was Toby, née Arabella Lucy, speaking for the first time—‘you knew lots of stories about deers and wolves and things, and would look like a Polar bear for us sometimes.’

‘Oh yes, and beavers and Indians in snowstorms, and the roarer boryalis,’ chimed in Jonah, giving a little hop of excitement that brought him still closer. ‘And the songs they sing in canoes when there are rapids,’ he added with intense excitement. ‘Madmizelle sings them sometimes, but they’re not a bit the real thing, because she hasn’t enough bass in her voice.’

Paul bit his lip and looked at the carpet. Something in the atmosphere of the room seemed to have changed in the last few minutes. Jolly thrills ran through him such as he knew in the woods with his animals sometimes.

‘I’m afraid I can’t sing much,’ he said, ‘but I can tell you a bear story sometimes—if you’re good.’ He added the condition as an afterthought.

‘We are good,’ Jonah said disappointedly, ‘almost always.’

Again that curious pang shot through him. He did not wish to be unkind to them. He pulled back his coat-sleeve suddenly and showed them a scar on his arm.

‘That was made by a bear,’ he said, ‘years ago.’

‘Oh, look at the fur!’ cried Toby.

‘Don’t be silly! All proper men have hair on their arms,’ put in Jonah. ‘Does it still hurt, Uncle Paul?’ he asked, examining the place with intense interest.

‘Not now. We rolled down a hill together head over heels. Such a big brute, too, he was, and growled like a thunderstorm; it’s a wonder he didn’t squash me. I’ve got his claws upstairs. I think, really, he was more frightened than I was.’

They clapped their hands. ‘Tell us, oh, do tell us!’

But Nixie intervened in her stately fashion, leaning over a little and stroking the scar with fingers that were like the touch of leaves.

‘Uncle Paul’s tired after coming such a long way,’ she said gravely with sympathy. ‘He hasn’t even unpacked his luggage yet, have you, Uncle?’

Paul admitted that this was the case. He made the least possible motion to push them off and clear a space round his chair.

‘Are you tired? Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said Jonah.

‘Then he ought to see the animals at once,’ decided Toby, ‘before they go to bed,’—she seemed to have a vague idea that the whole world must go to bed earlier than usual if Uncle Paul was tired—‘or they’ll be awfully disappointed.’ Her face expressed the disappointment of the animals as well as her own; her uncle’s fatigue had already taken a second place. ‘Oughtn’t he?’ she added, turning to the others.

Paul remembered his intention to remain stiffly grown up.

He made a great effort. Oh, but why did they tug and tear at his heart so, these little fatherless children? And why did he feel at once that he was in their own world, comfortably ‘at home’ in it? Did this world of children, then, link on so easily and naturally with the poet’s region of imagination and wonder in which he himself still dwelt for all his many years, bringing him close to his main passion—to know Reality?

‘Of course, I’ll come and say good-night to them before they turn in,’ he decided kindly, letting Nixie and Toby take his hands, while Jonah followed in the rear to show that he considered this a girl’s affair yet did not wholly disapprove.

‘Hadn’t we better tell your mother where we’re going?’ he asked as they started.

‘Oh, mother won’t mind,’ came the answer in chorus. ‘She hardly ever comes up to the nursery, and, besides, she doesn’t care for the animals, you see.’

‘They’re rather ’noying for mother,’ Nixie added by way of explanation. She decapitated many of her long words in this way, and invariably omitted difficult consonants.

It was a long journey, and the explanations about the animals, their characteristics, names, and habits, occupied every minute of the way. He gathered that they were chiefly cats and kittens, to what number he dared not calculate, and that puppies, at least one parrot, a squirrel, a multitude of white mice, and various larger beasts of a parental and aged description, were indiscriminately all mixed up together. Evidently it was a private menagerie that he was invited to say good-night to, and the torrent of outlandish names that poured into his ears produced a feeling of confusion in his mind that made him wonder if he was not turning into some sort of animal himself, and thus becoming free of their language.

It was the beginning of a very trying ordeal for him, this being half pulled, half shoved along the intricate passages of the old house; now down a couple of unexpected steps that made him stumble; now up another which made him trip; through narrow doorways, where Jonah had the audacity to push him from behind lest he should stick half-way; and, finally, at full speed, the girls tugging at his arms in front, down a long corridor which proved to be the home-stretch to the nursery.

‘I was afraid we’d lost the trail,’ he gasped. ‘It’s poorly blazed.’

‘Oh, but we haven’t got any tails to lose,’ laughed Toby, misunderstanding him. ‘And they wouldn’t blaze if we had.’

‘Look out, Nixie! Not so fast! Uncle Paul’s losing his wind as well as his trail,’ shouted Jonah from the rear. And at that moment they reached the door of the nursery and came to an abrupt halt, Paul puffing like a lumberman.

It was impossible for him to remain sedate, but he did the next best thing—he remained silent.

Then Jonah, pushing past him, turned the handle, and he was ushered, still panting, into so typical a nursery-schoolroom that the scenes of his forgotten boyhood rushed back to him with a vividness that seemed to destroy the passage of time at a single stroke. The past stood reconstructed. The actual, living mood of his own childhood rose out of the depths of blurred memories and caused a mist to rise before his eyes. An emotion he was utterly unable to define shook his heart.

The room was filled with the slanting rays of the setting sun, and the air from the open windows smelt of garden trees, lawns, and flower-beds. Sea and heather, too, added their own sharper perfumes. It caught him away for a moment—oh, that strange power of old perfumes—to the earliest scenes of his own life, the boyhood in the gardens of Kent before America had claimed him. And then the details of the room itself became so insistent that he almost lost his head and turned back without more ado into a boy of fifteen.

He looked swiftly about him. There was the old-fashioned upright piano against the wall, the highly coloured pictures hanging crooked on the wall, the cane chairs, the crowded mantelpiece, the high wire fender before the empty grate, the general atmosphere of toys, untidiness and broken articles of every sort and kind—and, above all, the figures of these excited children all bustling recklessly about him with their glowing and expectant faces.

There was Toby, her blue sash all awry, running busily about the room; and Nixie, now in sunshine, now in shadow, with her hair of yellow sand and her blue dreaming eyes that saw into the Beyond; and little Jonah, moving about somewhat pompously to prepare the performance that was to follow. It all combined to produce a sudden shock that swept down upon him so savagely, that he was within an ace of bolting through the door and making his escape into safer quarters.

The False Paul, that is, was within an ace of running away with all his elaborate armour, and leaving the True Paul dancing on the floor, a child among children, a spirit of impulse, enthusiasm and imagination, laughing with the sheer happiness of his perpetual youth.

It was a dangerous moment; he was within measurable distance of revealing himself. For a moment his clothes felt far too large for him; and only just in time did he remember his ‘attitude,’ and the danger of being young when he really was old, and the absurdity of being anything else than a large, sedate man of forty-five. Only he wished that Nixie would not watch him so appealingly with those starry eyes of hers ... and look so strangely like the forms that haunted his own wild forests and streams on the other side of the Atlantic.

He stiffened quickly, drew himself up, and turned to give his elderly attention to the chorus of explanation and introduction that was already rising about him with the sound and murmur of the sea.

Something was happening.

For the floor of the room, he now perceived, had become suddenly full of movement, as though the carpet had turned alive. He felt a rubbing against his legs and ankles; with a soft thud something leaped upon the table and covered his hand with smooth, warm fur, uttering little sounds of pleasure at the same time. On the top of the piano, a thing he had taken for a heap of toys rose and stretched itself into an odd shape of straight lines and arching curves. From the window-sill, where the sun poured in, a round grey substance dropped noiselessly down upon the carpet and advanced with measured and calculated step towards him; while, from holes and hiding-places undivined, three or four little fluffy things, with padded feet and stiff pointing tails, shot out like shadows and headed straight for a row of saucers that he now noticed for the first time against the farther wall. The whole room seemed to fill with soft and graceful movement; and, mingled with the voices of the children, he caught a fine composite murmur that was soothing as the sound of flowing wind and water.

It was the sound and the movement of many animals.

‘Here they are,’ said a voice—‘some of them. The others are lost, or out hunting.’

For the moment Paul did not stop to ask how many ‘others’ there were. He stood rigidly still for fear that if he moved he might tread on something living.

There came a scratching sound at the door, and Toby dashed forward to open it.

‘Silly, naughty babies!’ she cried, nearly tumbling over the fender in her attempt to seize two round bouncing things that came tearing into the room like a couple of yellow puddings. ‘Uncle Paul has come to see you all the way from America! And then you’re late like this! For shame!’

With a series of thuds and bangs that must have bruised anything not unusually well padded, the new arrivals, who looked for all the world like small fat bears, or sable muffs on short brown legs with feet of black velvet, dashed round the room in a mad chase after nothing at all. A hissing and spitting issued from dark corners and from beneath various pieces of furniture, but the two balls confined their attentions almost at once to the honoured guest. They charged up against his legs as though determined to upset his balance—this mountain of a man—and then careered clumsily round the room, knocking over anything small enough that came in their way, and behaving generally as though they wanted to clear the whole place in the shortest possible time for their own particular and immediate benefit.

Next, lifting his eyes for a moment from this impetuous attack, he saw a brilliantly coloured thing behind bars, standing apparently on its head and looking upside-down at him with an expression of undisguised and scornful amusement; while not far from it, in a cage hanging by the cuckoo clock, some one with a tail as large as his body, shot round and round on a swinging trapeze that made Paul think of a midget practising in a miniature gymnasium.

‘These are our animals, you see, Uncle Paul,’ Jonah announced proudly from his position by the door. There was a trace of condescension in his tone.

‘We have lots of out-of-door animals as well, though,’ Toby hastened to explain, lest her uncle should be disappointed.

‘I suppose they’re out of doors?’ said Paul lamely.

‘Of course they are,’ replied Jonah; ‘in the stables and all about.’ He turned to Nixie, who stood quietly by her uncle’s side in a protective way, superintending. Nixie nodded corroboration.

‘Now, we’ll introduce you—gradgilly,’ announced Toby, stooping down and lifting with immense effort the large grey Persian that had been sleeping on the window-sill when they came in. She held it with great difficulty in her arms and hands, but in spite of her best efforts only a portion of it found actual support, the rest straggling away like a loosely stuffed bolster she could not encompass.

It was evidently accustomed to being dealt with thus in sections, for it continued to purr sleepily, blinking its large eyes with the usual cat-smile, and letting its head fall backwards as though it suddenly desired to examine the ceiling from an entirely fresh point of view. None of its real attention, of course, was given to the actual proceeding. It merely suffered the absurd affair—absent-mindedly and with condescension. Its whiskers moved gently.

‘What’s its name?’ he asked kindly.

‘Her name,’ whispered Nixie.

‘We call her Mrs. Tompkyns, because it’s old now,’ Toby explained, ignoring genders.

‘After the head-gardener’s gra’mother,’ Nixie explained hastily in his ear; ‘but we might change it to Uncle Paul in honour of you now, mightn’t we?’

‘Mrs. Uncle Paul,’ corrected Jonah, looking on with slight disapproval, and anxious to get to the white mice and the squirrel.

‘It would be a pity to change the name, I think,’ Paul said, straightening himself up dizzily from the introduction, and watching the splendid creature fall upon its head from Toby’s weakening grasp, and then march away with unperturbed dignity to its former throne upon the window-sill. ‘I feel rather afraid of Mrs. Tompkyns,’ he added; ‘she’s so very majestic.’

‘Oh, you needn’t be,’ they cried in chorus. ‘It’s all put on, you know, that sort of grand manner. We knew her when she was a kitten.’

The object-lesson was not lost upon him. Of all creatures in the world, he reflected as he watched her, cats have the truest dignity. They absolutely refuse to be laughed at. No cat would ever betray its real self, yet here was he, a grown-up, intelligent man, vacillating, and on the verge already of hopeless capitulation.

‘And what’s the name of these persons?’ he asked quickly, turning for safety to Nixie, who had her arms full of a writhing heap she had been diligently collecting from the corners of the room.

‘Oh, that’s only Mrs. Tompkyns’ family,’ exclaimed Jonah impatiently; ‘the last family, I mean. She’s had lots of others.’

‘The last family before this was only two,’ Nixie told him. ‘We called them Ping and Pong. They live in the stables now. But these we call Pouf, Sambo, Spritey, Zezette, and Dumps——’