The imaginative process may be likened to the state of reverie.
—ALISON.
The psychology of sleep being apparently beyond all intelligible
explanation, it was not surprising that he woke up next morning as
though he had gone to bed without a single perplexity. He remembered
none of the thoughts that had thronged his brain a few short hours
before; perhaps they had all slipped down into the region of submerged
consciousness, to crop out later in natural, and apparently spontaneous,
action.
At any rate he remembered little enough of his troubles when he woke and
saw the fair English sun streaming in through the open windows. Odours
of woods and dew-drenched lawns came into the room, and the birds were
singing with noise enough to waken all the country-side. It was
impossible to lie in bed. He was up and dressed long before any servant
came to call him.
Downstairs he found the house in darkness; doors barred and windows
heavily shuttered as though the house had expected an attack. Not a soul
was stirring. The air was close and musty. The idea of having to strike
a match in a ‘country’ house at 6 A.M. somehow oppressed him. Not
knowing his way about very well yet, he stumbled across the hall to find
a door, and as he did so something soft came rubbing against his legs.
He put his hand down in the darkness and felt a furry, warm body and a
stiff upright tail that reached almost to his knees. The thing began to
purr.
‘I declare!’ he exclaimed; ‘Mrs. Tompkyns!’ and he struck a match and
followed her to the drawing-room door. A moment later they had
unfastened the shutters of the French window—Mrs. Tompkyns assisting by
standing on her hind legs and tapping the swinging bell—and made their
way out on to the lawn.
The sunshine came slanting between the cedars and lay in shining strips
on the grass. Everything glistened with dew. The air was sweet and fresh
as it only is in the early hours after the dawn. Very faintly, as though
its mind was not yet made up, the air stirred among the bushes.
Paul’s first impulse was to waken the entire household so that they
might share with him this first glory of the morning. ‘Probably they
don’t know how splendid it is!’ The thought of the sleeping family, many
of them perhaps with closed windows, missing all the wonder, was a
positive pain to him. But, fortunately for himself, he decided it might
be better not to begin his visit in this way.
‘I guess you and I, Mrs. Tompkyns, are the only people about,’ he said,
looking down at the beautiful grey creature that sniffed the air calmly
at his feet. ‘Come on, then. Let’s make a raid together on the woods!’
He threw a disdainful glance at the sleeping house; no smoke came from
the chimneys; most of the upper windows were closed. A delicious
fragrance stole out of the woods to meet him as he strolled across the
wet lawn. He felt like a schoolboy doing something out of bounds.
‘You lead and I follow,’ he said, addressing his companion in mischief.
And at once his attention became absorbed in the animal’s characteristic
behaviour. Obviously it was delighted to be with him; yet it did not
wish him to think so, or, if he did think so, to give any sign of the
fact. Nothing could have been plainer. First it crept along by the stone
wall delicately, with its body very close to the ground as though the
weight of the atmosphere oppressed it; and when he spoke, it turned its
head with an affectation of genuine surprise as though it would say,
‘You here! I thought I was alone.’ Then it sat down on the gravel path
and began to wash its face and paws till he had passed, after which—when
he was not looking, of course—it followed him condescendingly, sniffing
at blades of grass _en route_ without actually touching them, and
flicking its tail upwards with sudden, electric jerks.
Paul understood in a general way what was expected of him. He watched it
surreptitiously, pretending to examine the flowers. For this, he knew,
was the great Cat Game of elaborate pretence. And Mrs. Tompkyns, true
adept in the art, played up wonderfully, and incidentally taught him
much about the ways and methods of simple disguise; it advanced
stealthily when he wasn’t looking; it stopped to wash, or gaze into the
air, the moment he turned. It was very shy, and very affected, and very
self-conscious. Inimitable was the way it kept to all the little rules
of the game. It walked daintily down the path after him, shaking the dew
from its paws with a rapid, quivering motion. Then, suddenly arching its
back as though momentarily offended—at nothing—it stared up at him with
an expression that seemed to question his very existence. ‘I guess I
ought to fade away when you look at me like that!’ was his thought.
‘I’m here. I’m coming, Mrs. Tompkyns,’ he felt constrained to remark
aloud before going forward again. ‘The grand morning excites my blood
just as much as it excites your own.’
It seemed necessary to assert his presence. No intelligent person can be
conceited long in the presence of a cat. No living creature can so
sublimely ‘ignore.’ But Paul was not conceited. He continued to watch it
with delight.
One very important rule of the game appeared to be that plenty of bushes
were necessary by way of cover, so that it could pretend it was not
really coming farther than the particular bush where it was hiding at
the moment. Instinctively, he never made the grave mistake of calling it
to follow; and though it never trotted alongside, being always either
behind or in front of him, the presence of the cat in his immediate
neighbourhood provided all sorts of company imaginable. It had also
provided him with an opportunity to play the hero.
Then, suddenly, the calm and peace of the morning was disturbed by a
scene of strange violence. Mrs. Tompkyns, with spread legs, dashed past
him at a surprising speed and flew up the trunk of a big tree as though
all the dogs in the county were at her heels. From this position of
vantage she looked back over her shoulder with hysterical and frightened
eyes. There was a great show of terror, a vast noise of claws upon the
bark. No actress could have created better the atmosphere of immediate
danger and alarm.
Paul had an instinctive _flair_ for this move of the game. He made a
great pretence of running up to save the cat from its awful position,
but of course long before he got there she had dropped laughingly to
earth again, having thus impressed upon him the value of her life.
‘A question of life or death that time, I think, Mrs. Tompkyns,’ he said
soothingly, trying to stroke her back. ‘I wonder if the head-gardener’s
grandmother after whom you were named ever did this sort of thing. I
doubt it!’
But the creature escaped from him easily. For no one is ever caught in
the true Cat Game. It scuttled down the path at full speed in a sort of
canter, but sideways, as though a violent wind blew it and desperate
resistance was necessary to keep on its feet at all. After that its
self-consciousness seemed to disappear a little. It behaved normally. It
stalked birds that showed, however, no fear of its approach. It sniffed
the tips of leaves. It played baby-fashion with various invisible
companions; and finally it vanished in a thick jungle of laurels to hunt
in savage earnest, and left Paul to his own devices. Like all its kind,
it only wished to prove how charming it could be, in order to emphasise
later its utter independence of human sympathy and companionship.
‘If you _must_ go, I suppose you must,’ he laughed, ‘and I shall try to
enjoy myself without you.’
He strolled on alone and lost himself in the pine-wood that flanked the
back lawn, stopping finally by a gate that led to the world of gorse and
heather beyond. The brilliant patches of yellow wafted perfumes to his
nostrils. Far in the distance a blue line hinted where the sea lay; and
over all lay the radiance of the early morning. The old spell was there
that never failed to make his heart leap. And, as he stood still, the
cuckoo flitted, invisible and mischievous, from tree to tree, calling
with its flutelike notes,—
Sung beyond memory,
When golden to the winds this world of ours
Waved wild with boundless flowers;
Sung in some past where wildernesses were,—
and his thoughts went roaming back to the great woods he had left
behind, woods where the naked streams ran shouting and lawless, where
the trees had not learned self-consciousness, and where no little tame
folk trotted on velvet feet through trim and scented gardens.
And the virgin glory of the morning entered into him with that searching
sweetness which is almost suffering, just as a few hours before the
Night had bewitched him with the mystery of her haunted caverns. For the
beauty of Nature that comes to most softly, with hints, came to him with
an exquisite fierce fever that was pain,—with something of the
full-fledged glory that burst upon Shelley—and to bear it, unrelieved by
expression, was a perpetual torment to him.
But, after long musing that led he scarcely knew where, Paul came back
to himself—and laughed. Laughter was better than sighing, and he was too
much of a child to go long without the sense of happiness coming
uppermost. He lit his pipe—that most delicious of all, the pipe before
breakfast—and wandered out into the sea of yellow gorse, thinking aloud,
laughing, talking to himself.
Something in the performance of Mrs. Tompkyns awakened the train of
thought of the night before. The sublime acting of the animal—he dared
not call it ‘beast’—linked him on to the children’s world. They, too,
had a magnificent condescension for the mere grown-up person. But he—he
was _not_ grown up. It made him sigh and laugh to think of it. He was a
great, overgrown child, playing with gorgeously coloured dreams while
the world of ordinary life passed him by.
The animals and the children linked on again, of course, with the region
of fantasy and make-believe, the world of creation, the world of
eternity, the world where thoughts were alive, and strong belief was a
creative act.
‘That’s where I still belong,’ he said aloud, picking his way among the
waves of yellow sea, ‘and I shall never get out till I die, my visions
unexpressed, my singing dumb.’ He laughed and threw a stone at a bush
that had no blossoms. ‘Oh, if only I knew how to link on with the normal
world of fact _without losing the other_! To turn all these seething
dreams within me to some account. To show them to others!’
He ran and cleared a low gorse-bush with a flying jump.
‘That would be worth living for,’ he continued, panting; ‘to make these
things real to all the people who live in little cages. By Jove, it
would open doors and windows in thousands of cages all over the world,
besides providing me with the outlet I must find some day or—’ he sprang
over a ditch, slipped, and landed head first into prickles—‘or explode!’
he concluded with a shout of laughter that no one heard but the cuckoos
and the yellow-hammers. Then he fell into a reverie, and his thoughts
travelled farther still—into the Beyond.
Quickly recovering himself, and picking up his pipe, he went on towards
the house; and, as he emerged from the pine copse again, the sound of a
gong, ringing faintly in the distance, brought him back to earth with a
shock almost as abrupt as the ditch. Mrs. Tompkyns appeared
simultaneously, wearing an aspect of pristine innocence, admirably
assumed the instant she caught sight of him.
‘Fancy your being out here!’ was the expression of her whole person,
‘and coming, too, in just as the gong sounds!’
‘Breakfast, I suppose!’ he observed. And she trotted behind him like a
dog. For all her affectations of superiority she wanted her milk just as
much as he wanted his coffee.
He walked into the dining-room, through the window, stiffening as he did
so with the resolution of the night before. His armour fitted him
tightly. Little animals, children, the too searching calls of Nature,
occult, symbolic, magical—all these must be sternly resisted and
suppressed in the company of others. The danger of letting his
imagination loose was too alarming. The ridicule would overwhelm him. In
the eyes of the world he now lived in he would seem simply mad. The risk
was impossible.
Like the Christian Scientists, he felt the need of vigorous affirmation:
‘I am Paul Rivers. I am a grown-up man. I am an official in a lumber
Company. I am forty-five. I have a beard. I am important and sedate.’
Thus he fortified himself; and thus, like the persuasive Mrs. Tompkyns
on the lawn, he imagined that he was deceiving both himself—and those
who were _on the watch_!