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.