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——’
‘And the next ones,’ Toby broke in excitedly, ‘we’re going to call with
the names on the engines when we go up to London to see the dentist.’
‘Or the names of the Atlantic steamers wouldn’t be bad,’ said Paul.
‘Not bad,’ Jonah said, with lukewarm approval; ‘only the engines would
be much better.’
‘There may not be any next ones,’ opined Toby, emerging from beneath a
sofa after a frantic, but vain, attempt to catch something alive.
Jonah snorted with contempt. ‘Of course there will. They come in bunches
all the time, just like grapes and chestnuts and things. Madmizelle told
me so. There’s no end to them. Don’t they, Uncle Paul?’
‘I believe so,’ said the authority appealed to, extracting his finger
with difficulty from the teeth and claws of several kittens.
There came a lull in the proceedings, the majority of the animals having
escaped, and successfully concealed themselves among what Toby called
‘the furchinur.’ Paul was still following a prior train of reflection.
‘Yes, cats are really rather wonderful creatures,’ he mused aloud in
spite of himself, turning instinctively in the direction of Nixie. ‘They
possess a mysterious and superior kind of intelligence.’
For a moment it was exactly as if he had tapped his armour and said,
‘Look! It’s all sham!’
The child peered sharply up in his face. There was a sudden light in her
eyes, and her lips were parted. He had not exactly expected her to
answer, but somehow or other he was not surprised when she did. And the
answer she made was just the kind of thing he knew she would say. He was
annoyed with himself for having said so much.
‘And they lead secret little lives somewhere else, and only let us see
what they want us to see. I knew you understood _really_.’ She said it
with an elfin smile that was certainly borrowed from moonlight on a
mountain stream. With one fell swoop it caught him away into a world
where age simply did not exist. His mind wavered deliciously. The
singing in his heart was almost loud enough to be audible.
But he just saved himself. With a sudden movement he leaned forward and
buried his face in the pie of kittens that nestled in her arms, letting
them lose their paws for a moment in his beard. The kittens might
understand, but at least they could not betray him by putting it into
words. It was a narrower escape than he cared for.
‘And these are the Chow puppies,’ cried Jonah, breathless from a long
chase after the sable muffs.
‘We call them China and Japan.’
Paul welcomed the diversion. Their teeth were not nearly so sharp as the
kittens’, and they burrowed with their black noses into his sleeves. So
thick was their fur that they seemed to have no bones at all; their dark
eyes literally dripped laughter.
With an effort he put on a more sedate manner.
‘You _have_ got a lot of beasts,’ he said.
‘Animals,’ Nixie corrected him. ‘Only toads, rats, and hedgehogs are
beasts. And, remember, if you’re rude to an animal, as Mademoiselle
Fleury was once, it only ’spises you—and then——’
‘I beg their pardon,’ he put in hurriedly; ‘I quite understand, of
course.’
‘You see it’s rather important, as they want to like you, and unless you
respect them they can’t, can they?’ she finished earnestly.
‘I do respect them, believe me, Nixie, and I appreciate their affection.
Affection and respect must always go together.’
The children were wholly delighted. Paul had completely won their hearts
from the very beginning. The parrot, the squirrel, and the white mice
were all introduced in turn to him, and he heard sundry mysterious
allusions to ‘the owl in the stables,’ ‘Juliet and her two kids,’ to say
nothing of dogs, ponies, pigeons, and peacocks, that apparently dwelt in
the regions of outer space, and were to be reserved for the morrow.
The performance was coming to an end. Paul was already congratulating
himself upon having passed safely, if not with full credit, through a
severe ordeal, when the door opened and a woman of about twenty-five,
with a pleasant face full of character and intelligence, stood in the
doorway. A torrent of French instantly broke loose on all sides. The
woman started a little when she perceived that the children were not
alone.
‘Oh, Mademoiselle, this is Uncle Paul,’ they cried, each in a different
fashion. ‘This is _our_ Uncle Paul! He’s just been introduced to the
animals, and now he must be introduced to you.’
Paul shook hands with her, and the introduction passed off easily
enough; the woman was charming, he saw at the first glimpse, and
possessed of tact. She at once took his side and pretended to scold her
charges for having plagued and bothered him so long. Evidently she was
something more to them than a mere governess. The lassitude of his
sister, no doubt, gave her rights and responsibilities.
But what impressed Paul when he was alone—for her simple remark that it
was past bedtime was followed by sudden kisses and disappearance—was the
remarkable change that her arrival had brought about in the room. It
came to him with a definite little shock. It was more than significant,
he felt.
And it was this: that the children, though obviously they loved her,
treated her as some one grown up and to be obeyed, whereas himself, he
now realised, they had all along treated as one of themselves to whom
they could be quite open and natural. His ‘attitude’ they had treated
with respect, just as he had treated the attitude of the animals with
respect, but at the same time he had been made to feel one of
themselves, in their world, part and parcel of their own peculiar
region. There had been nothing forced about it whatever. Whether he
liked it or not they accepted him. His ‘attitude’ was not regarded
seriously. It was not regarded at all. And this was grave.
He was so simple that he would never have thought of this but for the
entrance of the governess. Her arrival threw it all into sharp relief.
Clearly the children recognised no barrier between themselves and him;
he had been taken without parley straight into their holy of holies.
Nixie, as leader and judge, had carried him off at once.
And this was a very subtle and powerful compliment that made him think a
great deal. He would either have to drop his armour altogether or make
it very much more effective.
Indeed, it was the immediate problem in his mind as he slowly made his
way downstairs to find his sister on the lawn, and satisfy her rather
vague curiosity by telling her that the children had introduced him to
the animals, and that he had got on famously with them all.