Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.—BLAKE.
For some days after that Paul walked on air. Incredible as it may seem
to normally constituted persons, he was so delighted to have found a
medium in which he could in some measure express himself without fear of
ridicule, that the entire world was made anew for him. He thought about
it a great deal. He even argued in his muddled fashion, but he got no
farther that way. The only thing he really understood was the plain fact
that he had found a region where his companions were about his own age,
with his own tastes, ready to consider things that were _real_, and to
let the trivial and vulgar world go by.
This was the fact that stared him in the face and made him happy. For
the first time in his life he could play with others. Hitherto he had
played alone.
‘It’s a safety-valve at last,’ he exclaimed, using his favourite word.
‘Now I can let myself go a bit. _They_ will never laugh; on the
contrary, they’ll understand and love it. Hooray!’
‘And, remember,’ Nixie had again explained to him, ‘you have to write
down all the aventures. That’s what keeping the records means. And you
must read them out to us at the Meetings.’
And he chuckled as he thought about it, for it meant having real Reports
to write at last, reports that others would read and appreciate.
The aventures, moreover, began very quickly; they came thick and fast;
and he lived in them so intensely that he carried them over into his
other dull world, and sometimes hardly knew which world he was in at
all. His imagination, hungry and untamed, had escaped, and was seeking
all it could devour.
It was a hot afternoon in mid-June, and Paul was lying with his pipe
upon the lawn. His sister was out driving. He was alone with the
children and the smaller portion of the menagerie,—smaller in size, that
is, not in numbers; cats, kittens, and puppies were either asleep, or on
the hunt, all about them. And from an open window a parrot was talking
ridiculously in mixed French and English.
The giant cedars spread their branches; in the limes the bees hummed
drowsily; the world lay a scented garden around him, and a very soft
wind stole to and fro, stirring the bushes with sleepy murmurs and
making the flowers nod.
China and Japan lay panting in the shade behind him, and not far off
reposed the big grey Persian, Mrs. Tompkyns. Regardless of the heat,
Pouf, Zezette, and Dumps flitted here and there as though the whole lawn
was specially made for their games; and Smoke, the black cat, dignified
and mysterious, lay with eyes half-closed just near enough for Paul to
stroke his sleek, hot sides when he felt so disposed. He—Smoke that
is—blinked indifferently at passing butterflies, or twitched his great
tail at the very tip when a bird settled in the branches overhead; but
for the most part he was intent upon other matters—matters of genuine
importance that concerned none but himself.
A few yards off Jonah and Toby were doing something with daisies—what it
was Paul could not see; and on his other side Nixie lay flat upon the
grass and gazed into the sky. The governess was—where all governesses
should be out of lesson-time—elsewhere.
‘Nixie, you’re sleeping. Wake up.’
She rolled over towards him. ‘No, Uncle Paul, I’m not. I was only
thinking.’
‘Thinking of what?’
‘Oh, clouds and things; chiefly clouds, I think.’ She pointed to the
white battlements of summer that were passing very slowly over the
heavens. ‘It’s so funny that you can see them move, yet can’t see the
thing that pushes them along.’
‘Wind, you mean?’
‘H’mmmmm.’
They lay flat on their backs and watched. Nixie made a screen of her
hair and peered through it. Paul did the same with his fingers.
‘You can touch it, and smell it, and hear it,’ she went on, half to
herself, ‘but you can’t _see_ it.’
‘I suspect there are creatures that can see the wind, though,’ he
remarked sleepily.
‘I ’spect so too,’ she said softly. ‘I think I could, if I really tried
hard enough. If I was very, oh very kind and gentle and polite to it, I
think——’
‘Come and tell me quietly,’ Paul said with excitement. ‘I believe you’re
right.’
He scented a delightful aventure. The child turned over on the grass
twice, roller fashion, and landed against him, lying on her face with
her chin in her hands and her heels clicking softly in the air.
She began to explain what she meant. ‘You must listen properly because
it’s rather difficult to explain, you know’; he heard her breathing into
his ear, and then her voice grew softer and fainter as she went on.
Lower and lower it grew, murmuring like a distant mill-wheel, softer and
softer; wonderful sentences and words all running gently into each other
without pause, somewhere below ground. It began to sound far away, and
it melted into the humming of the bees in the lime trees.... Once or
twice it stopped altogether, Paul thought, so that he missed whole
sentences.... Gaps came, gaps filled with no definite words, but only
the inarticulate murmur of summer and summer life....
Then, without warning, he became conscious of a curious sinking
sensation, as though the solid lawn beneath him had begun to undulate.
The turf grew soft like air, and swam up over him in green waves till
his head was covered. His ears became muffled; Nixie’s voice no longer
reached him as something outside himself; it was within—curiously
running, so to speak, with his blood. He sank deeper and deeper into a
delicious, soothing medium that both covered and penetrated him.
The child had him by the hand, that was all he knew, then—a long sliding
motion, and forgetfulness.
‘I’m off,’ he remembered thinking, ‘off at last into a real aventure!’
Down they sank, down, down; through soft darkness, and long, shadowy
places, passing through endless scented caverns, and along dim avenues
that stretched, for ever and ever it seemed, beneath the gloom of mighty
trees. The air was cool and perfumed with earth. They were in some
underworld, strangely muted, soundless, mysterious. It grew very dark.
‘Where are we, Nixie?’ He did not feel alarm; but a sense of wonder,
touched delightfully by awe, had begun to send thrills along his nerves.
Her reply in his ear was like a voice in a tiny trumpet, far away, very
soft. ‘Come along! Follow me!’
‘I’m coming. But it’s so dark.’
‘Hush,’ she whispered. ‘We’re in a dream together. I’m not sure where
exactly. Keep close to me.’
‘I’m coming,’ he repeated, blundering over the roots beside her; ‘but
where are we? I can’t see a bit.’
‘Tread softly. We’re in a lost forest—just before the dawn,’ he heard
her voice answer faintly.
‘A forest underground——? You mean a coal measure?’ he asked in
amazement.
She made no answer. ‘I think we’re going to see the wind,’ she added
presently.
Her words thrilled him inexplicably. It was as if—in that other world of
gross values—some one had said, ‘You’re going to make a million!’ It was
all hushed and soft and subdued. Everything had a coating of plush.
‘We’ve gone backwards somewhere—a great many years. But it’s all right.
There’s no time in dreams.’
‘It’s dreadfully dark,’ he whispered, tripping again.
The persuasion of her little hand led him along over roots and through
places of deep moss. Great spaces, he felt, were about him. Shadows
coated everything with silence. It was like the vast primeval forests of
his country across the seas. The map of the world had somehow shifted,
and here, in little England, he found the freedom of those splendid
scenes of desolation that he craved. Millions of huge trees reared up
about them through the gloom, and he felt their presence, though
invisible.
‘The sun isn’t up yet,’ she added after a bit. He held her hand tightly,
as they stumbled slowly forward together side by side. He began to feel
extraordinarily alive. Exhilaration seized him. He could have shouted
with excitement.
‘Hush!’ whispered his guide, ‘_do_ be careful. You’ll upset us both.’
The trembling of his hand betrayed him. ‘You stumble like an om’ibus!’
‘I’m all right. Go ahead!’ he replied under his breath. ‘I can see
better now!’
‘Now look,’ she said, stopping in front of him and turning round.
The darkness lifted somewhat as he bent down to follow the direction of
her gaze. On every side, dim and thronging, he saw the stems of immense
trees rising upwards into obscurity. There were hundreds upon hundreds
of them. His eyes followed their outline till the endless number
bewildered him. Overhead, the stars were shining faintly through the
tangled network of their branches. Odours of earth and moss and leaves,
cool and delicate, rose about them; vast depths of silence stretched
away in every direction. Great ferns stood motionless, with all the
magic of frosted window-panes, among their roots. All was still and dark
and silent. It was the heart of a great forest before the
dawn—prehistoric, unknown to man.
‘Oh, I wonder—I wonder——’ began Paul, groping about him clumsily with
his hands to feel the way.
‘Oh, please don’t talk so loud,’ Nixie whispered, pinching his arm; ‘we
shall wake up if you do. Only people in dreams come to places like
this.’
‘You know the place?’ he exclaimed with increasing excitement. ‘So do I
almost. I’m sure this has all happened before, only I can’t remember——’
‘We must keep as still as mice.’
‘We are—still as mice.’
‘This is where the winds sleep when they’re not blowing. It’s their
resting-place.’
He looked about him, drawing a deep breath.
‘Look out; you’ll wake them if you breathe like _that_,’ whispered the
child.
‘Are they asleep now?’
‘Of course. Can’t you see?’
‘Not much—yet!’
‘Move like a cat, and speak in whispers. We may see them when they
wake.’
‘How soon?’
‘Dawn. The wind always wakes with the sun. It’s getting closer now.’
It was very wonderful. No words can describe adequately the still
splendour of that vast forest as they stood there, waiting for the
sunrise. Nothing stirred. The trees were carved out of some marvellous
dream-stuff, motionless, yet conveying the impression of life. Paul knew
it and recognised it. All primeval woods possess that quality—trees that
know nothing of men and have never heard the ringing of the axe. The
silence was of death, yet a sense of life that is far beyond death
pulsed through it. Cisterns of quiet, gigantic, primitive life lay
somewhere hidden in these shadowed glades. It seemed the counterpart of
a man’s soul before rude passion and power have stirred it into
activity. Here all slept potentially, as in a human soul. The huge,
sombre pines rose from their beds of golden moss to shake their crests
faintly to the stars, awaiting the coming of the true passion—the great
Sun of life, that should call them to splendour, to reality, and to the
struggle of a bigger life than they yet knew, when they might even try
to shake free from their roots in the hard, confining earth, and fly to
the source of their existence—the sun.
And the sun was coming now. The dawn was at hand. The trees moved gently
together, it seemed. The wood grew lighter. An almost imperceptible
shudder ran through it as through a vast spider’s web.
‘Look!’ cried Nixie. His simple, intuitive little guide was nearer,
after all, to reality than he was, for all his subtle vision. ‘Look,
Uncle Paul!’
His attempt to analyse wonder had prevented his seeing it sooner, but as
she spoke he became aware that something very unusual was going forward
about them. His skin began to tickle, and a strange sense of excitement
took possession of him.
A pale, semi-transparent substance he saw hung everywhere in the air
about them, clinging in spirals and circles to the trunks, and hanging
down from the branches in long slender ribbons that reached almost to
the ground. The colour was a delicate pearl-grey. It covered everything
as with the softest of filtered light, and hung motionless in the air in
painted streamers of thinnest possible vapour.
The silken threads of these gossamer ribbons dropped from the sky in
millions upon millions. They wrapped themselves round the very
star-beams, and lay in sheets upon the ground; they curled themselves
round the stones and crept in among the tiniest crevices of moss and
bark; they clothed the ferns with their fairy gauze. Paul could even
feel them coiling about his hair and beard and eyelashes. They pervaded
the entire scene as light does. The colour was uniform; whether in
sheets or ribbons, it did not vary in shade or in degree of
transparency. The entire atmosphere was pervaded by it, frozen into
absolute stillness.
‘That’s the winds—all that stuff,’ Nixie whispered, her voice trembling
with excitement. ‘They’re asleep still. Aren’t they awful and
wonderful?’
As she spoke a faint vibration ran everywhere through the ribbons.
Involuntarily he tightened his grasp on the child’s hand.
‘That’s their beginning to wake,’ she said, drawing closer to him, ‘like
people moving in sleep.’
The vibration ran through the air again. It quivered as reflections in
the surface of a pool quiver to a ghost of passing wind. They seated
themselves on a fallen trunk and waited. The trees waited too; as
gigantic notes in a set piece, Paul thought, that the coming sun would
presently play upon like a hand upon a vast instrument. Then something
moved a few feet away, and he jumped in spite of himself.
‘Only Jonah,’ explained his guide. ‘He’s asleep like us. Don’t wake him;
he’s having a dream too.’
It was indeed Jonah, wandering vaguely this way and that, disappearing
and reappearing, wholly unaware, it seemed, of their presence. He looked
like a gnome. His feet made no sound as he moved about, and after a few
minutes he lost himself behind a big trunk and they saw him no more. But
almost at once behind him the round figures of China and Japan emerged
into view. They came, moving fast and busily, blundering against the
trees, tumbling down, and butting into everything that came in their
path as though they could not see properly. Paul watched them with
astonishment.
‘They’re only half asleep, and that’s why they see so badly,’ Nixie told
him. ‘Aren’t they silly and happy?’
Before he could answer, something else moved into their limited field of
vision, and he was aware that a silent grey shadow was stalking solemnly
by. All dignity and self-confidence it was; stately, proud, sure of
itself, in a region where it was at home, conscious of its power to see
and move better than any one else. Two wide-open and brilliant eyes,
shining like dropped stars, were turned for a moment towards them where
they sat on the log and watched. Then, silent and beautiful, it passed
on into the darkness beyond, and vanished from their sight.
‘Mrs. Tompkyns!’ whispered Nixie. ‘_She_ saw us all right!’
‘Splendid!’ he exclaimed under his breath, full of admiration.
Nixie pinched his arm. A change had come about in the last few minutes,
and into this dense forest the light of approaching dawn began to steal
most wonderfully. A universal murmuring filled the air.
‘The sun’s coming. They’re going to wake now!’ The child gave a little
shiver of delight. Paul sat up. A general, indefinable motion, he saw,
was beginning everywhere to run to and fro among the hanging streamers.
More light penetrated every minute, and the tree stems began to turn
from black to purple, and then from purple to faint grey. Vistas of
shadowy glades began to open up on all sides; every instant the trees
stood out more distinctly. The myriad threads and ribbons were astir.
‘Look!’ cried the child aloud; ‘they’re uncurling as they wake.’
He looked. The sense of wonder and beauty moved profoundly in his heart.
Where, oh where, in all the dreams of his solitary years had he seen
anything to equal this unearthly vision of the awakening winds?
The winds moved in their sleep, and awoke.
In loops, folds, and spirals of indescribable grace they slowly began to
unwrap themselves from the tree stems with a million little delicate
undulations; like thin mist trembling, and then smoothing out the
ruffled surface of their thousand serpentine eddies, they slid swiftly
upwards from the moss and ferns, disentangled themselves without effort
from roots and stones and bark, and then, reinforced by countless
thousands from the lower branches, they rose up slowly in vast coloured
sheets towards the region of the tree-tops.
And, as they rose, the silence of the forest passed into sound—trembling
and murmuring at first, and then rapidly increasing in volume as the
distant glades sent their voices to swell it, and the note of every
hollow and dell joined in with its contributory note. From all the
shadowy recesses of the wood they heard it come, louder and louder,
leaping to the centre like running great arpeggios, and finally merging
all lesser notes in the wave of a single dominant chord—the song of the
awakened winds to the dawn.
‘They’re singing to the sun,’ Nixie whispered. Her voice caught in her
throat a little and she tightened her grasp on his big hand.
‘They’re changing colour too,’ he answered breathlessly. They stood up
on their log to see.
‘It’s the rate they go does that,’ she tried to explain. She stood on
tiptoe.
He understood what she meant, for he now saw that as the wind rose in
ribbons, streams and spirals, the original pearl-grey changed
chromatically into every shade of colour under the sun.
‘Same as metals getting hot,’ she said. ‘Their colour comes ’cording to
their speed.’
Many of the tints he found it impossible to name, for they were such as
he had never dreamed of. Crimsons, purples, soft yellows, exquisite
greens and pinks ran to and fro in a perfect deluge of colour, as though
a hundred sunsets had been let loose and were hunting wildly for the
West to set in. And there were shades of opal and mother-of-pearl so
delicate that he could only perceive them in his bewildered mind by
translating them into the world of sound, and imagining it was the
colour of their own singing.
Far too rapidly for description they changed their protean dress, moving
faster and faster, glowing fiercely one minute and fading away the next,
passing swiftly into new and dazzling brilliancies as the distant winds
came to join them, and at length rushing upwards in one huge central
draught through the trees, shouting their song with a roar like the sea.
Suddenly they swept up into the sky—sound, colour and all—and silence
once more descended upon the forest. The winds were off and about their
business of the day. The woods were empty. And the sun was at the very
edge of the world.
‘Watch the tops of the trees now,’ cried Nixie, still trembling from the
strange wonder of the scene. ‘The Little Winds will wake the moment the
sun touches them—the little winds in the tops of the trees.’
As she spoke, the sun came up and his first rays touched the pointed
crests above them with gold; and Paul noticed that there were thousands
of tiny, slender ribbons streaming out like elastic threads from the
tips of all the pines, and that these had only just begun to move. As at
a word of command they trooped out to meet the sunshine, undulating like
wee coloured serpents, and uttering their weird and gentle music at the
same time. And Paul, as he listened, understood at last why the wind in
the tree-tops is always more delicately sweet than any other kind, and
why it touches so poignantly the heart of him who hears, and calls
wonder from her deepest lair.
‘The young winds, you see,’ Nixie said, peering up beneath her joined
hands and finding it difficult to keep her balance as she did so. ‘They
sleep longer than the others. And they’re not loose either; they’re
fastened on, and can only go out and come back.’
And, as he watched, he saw these young winds fly out miles into the
brightening sky, making lines of flashing colour, and then tear back
with a whirring rush of music to curl up again round the twigs and pine
needles.
‘Though sometimes they _do_ manage to get loose, and make funny storms
and hurricanes and things that no one expects at all in the sky.’
Paul was on the point of replying to this explanation when something
struck against his legs, and he only just saved himself from falling by
seizing Nixie and risking a flying leap with her from the log.
‘It’s that wicked Japan again,’ she laughed, clambering back on to the
tree.
The puppy was vigorously chasing its own tail, bumping as it did so into
everything within reach. Paul stooped to catch it. At the same instant
it rose up past his very nose, and floated off through the trees and was
lost to view in the sky.
Nixie laughed merrily. ‘It woke in the middle of its silly little
dream,’ she said. ‘It was only half asleep really, and playing. It won’t
come back now.’
‘All puppies are absurd like that——’
But he did not finish his profound observation about puppies, for his
voice at that moment was drowned in a new and terrible noise that seemed
to come from the heart of the wood. It happened just as in a children’s
fairy tale. It bore no resemblance to the roar the winds made; there was
no music in it; it was crude in quality—angry; a sound from another
place.
It came swiftly nearer and nearer, increasing in volume as it came. A
veil seemed to spread suddenly over the scene; the trees grew shadowy
and dim; the glades melted off into mistiness; and ever the mass of
sound came pouring up towards them. Paul realised that the frontiers of
consciousness were shifting again in a most extraordinary fashion, so
that the whole forest slipped off into the background and became a dim
map in his memory, faint and unreal—and, with it, went both Nixie and
himself. The ground rose and fell under their feet. Her hand melted into
something fluid and slippery as he tried to keep his hold upon it. The
child whispered words he could not catch. Then, like the puppy, they
both began to rise.
The roar came out to meet them and enveloped them furiously in mid air.
‘At any rate, we’ve seen the wind!’ he heard the child’s voice murmuring
in his beard. She rose away from him, being lighter, and vanished
through the tops of the trees.
And then the roar drowned him and swept him away in a whirling tempest,
so that he lost all consciousness of self and forgot everything he had
ever known....
The noise resolved itself gradually into the crunching sounds of the
carriage wheels and the clatter of horses’ hoofs coming up the gravel
drive.
Paul looked about him with a sigh that was half a yawn. China and Japan
were still romping on the lawn, Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke were curled up
in hot, soft circles precisely where they had been before, Toby and
Jonah were still busily engaged doing ‘something with daisies’ in the
full blaze of the sunshine, and Nixie lay beside him, all innocence and
peace, still gazing through the tangle of her yellow hair at the
slow-sailing clouds overhead.
And the clouds, he noticed, had hardly altered a line of their shape and
position since he saw them last.
He turned with a jump of excitement.
‘Nixie,’ he exclaimed, ‘I’ve seen the wind!’
She rolled over lazily on her side and fixed her great blue eyes on his
own, between two strands of her hair. From the expression of her brown
face it was possible to surmise that she knew nothing—and everything.
‘Have you?’ she said very quietly. ‘I thought you might.’
‘Yes, but did I dream it, or imagine it, or just think it and make it
up?’ He still felt a little bewildered; the memory of that strangely
beautiful picture-gallery still haunted him. Yonder, before the porch,
the steaming horses and the smart coachman on the box, and his sister
coming across the lawn from the carriage all belonged to another world,
while he himself and Nixie and the other children still stayed with him,
floating in a golden atmosphere where Wind was singing and alive.
‘That doesn’t matter a bit,’ she replied, peering at him gravely before
she pulled her hair over both eyes. ‘The point is that it’s really true!
Now,’ she added, her face completely hidden by the yellow web, ‘all you
have to do is to write it for our next Meeting—write the record of your
Aventure——’
‘And read it out?’ he said, beginning to understand.
The yellow head nodded. He felt utterly and delightfully bewitched.
‘All right,’ he said; ‘I will.’
‘And make it a very-wonderfulindeed Aventure,’ she added, springing to
her feet. ‘Hush! Here’s mother!’
Paul rose dizzily to greet his sister, while the children ran off with
their animals to other things.
‘You’ve had a pleasant afternoon, Paul, dear?’ she asked.
‘Oh, very nice indeed——’ His thoughts were still entangled with the wind
and with the story he meant to write about it for the next Meeting.
She opened her parasol and held it over her head.
‘Now, come indoors,’ he went on, collecting himself with an effort, ‘or
into the shade. This heat is not good for you, Margaret.’ He looked at
her pale, delicate face. ‘You’re tired too.’
‘I enjoyed the drive,’ she replied, letting him take her arm and lead
her towards the house. ‘I met the Burdons in their motor. They’re coming
over to luncheon one day, they said. You’ll like _him_, I think.’
‘That’s very nice,’ he remarked again, ‘very nice. Margaret,’ he
exclaimed suddenly, ashamed of his utter want of interest in all she was
planning for him, ‘I think you ought to have a motor too. I’m going to
give you one.’
‘That is sweet of you, Paul,’ she smiled at him. ‘But really, you know,
one likes horses best. They’re much quieter. Motors do shake one so.’
‘I don’t think that matters; the point is that it’s really true,’ he
muttered to himself, thinking of Nixie’s judgment of his Aventure.
His sister looked at him with her expression of faint amusement.
‘You mustn’t mind me,’ he laughed, planting her in a deck-chair by the
shade of the house; ‘but the truth is, my mind is full just now of some
work I’ve got to do—a report, in fact, I’ve got to write.’
He went off into the house, humming a song. She followed him with her
eyes.
‘He is so strange. I do wish he would see more people and be a little
more normal.’
And in Paul’s mind, as he raced along the passage to his private study
in search of pen and paper, there ran a thought of very different kind
in the shape of a sentence from the favourite of all his books:
‘Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.’