It haunted him a good deal, this Vision of the Winds. Now he never heard
the stirring of the woods without thinking of those delicately brilliant
streamers flying across the sky.
The satisfaction of spinning a fairy tale out of it for the children’s
Society was only equalled by the pleasure of the original inspiration.
Here, too, was a means of expressing himself he had never dreamed of;
the relief was great. Moreover, it brought him into close touch with the
inexhaustible reservoirs which children draw upon for their endless
world of Make-Believe, and he understood that the child and the poet
live in the same region. His feet were now set upon that secret path
trodden by the feet of children since the world began; and, for all his
burden of years, there was no telling where it might lead him. For the
springs of perennial youth have their sources in that region—the youth
of the spirit, with the constant flow of enthusiasm, the touch of
simple, ever-living beauty, and the whole magic of vision. No one with
imagination can ever become _blasé_, perhaps need ever grow old in the
true sense.
By this means he might at last turn his accumulated stores to some
useful account. The great geysers of imagination that dry up too soon
with the majority might keep bubbling for ever; and provided the pipes
kept open for smaller visions, they might with time become channels for
inspiration of a still higher order. His audience might grow too.
‘I’m getting on,’ he observed to Nixie a few days later; ‘getting on
pretty well for an old man!’
‘I knew you would,’ she replied approvingly. ‘Only you wasted a lot of
time over it. When you came you were so old that Toby thought you were
going to die, you know.’
‘So bad as all that, was it?’
‘H’mmmmm,’ she nodded, her blue eyes faintly troubled; ‘quite!’
Paul took her on his knee and stared at her. The world of elemental
wonder came quite close. There was something of magic about the
atmosphere of this child’s presence that made it possible to believe
anything and everything. She embodied exquisitely so many of his
dreams—those dreams of God and Nature he had lived with all those lonely
years in Canadian solitudes.
‘You know, _I_ think,’ he said slowly as he watched with delight the
look of tender affection upon her face, ‘that, without knowing it,
you’re something of a little magician, Nixie. What do _you_ think?’
But she only laughed and wriggled on his knee.
‘Am I really?’ she said presently. ‘Then what are you, I wonder?’
‘I used to be a Wood Cruiser,’ he replied gravely; ‘but what I am now
it’s rather difficult to say. You ought to know,’ he added, ‘as you’re
the magician who’s changing me.’
‘I’ve not changed you,’ she laughed. ‘I only found you out. The day you
came I saw you were simply full of our things—and that you’d be a sort
of Daddy to us. And we shall want a lot more Aventures, please, as soon
as ever you can write them out——’
She was off his knee and half-way to the house the same second, for the
voice of Mlle. Fleury was heard in the land. He watched her flitting
through the patches of sunshine across the lawn, and caught the
mischievous glance she turned to throw at him as she disappeared through
the open French window—a vision of white dress, black legs, and flying
hair. And only when she was gone did his heavier machinery get to work
with the crop of questions he always thought of too late.
‘A beginning, at any rate!’ he said to himself, thinking of all the
things he was going to write for them. ‘Only I wish we were all in camp
out there among the cedars and hemlocks on Beaver Creek, instead of
boxed up in this toy garden where there are no wild animals, and you
mayn’t cut down trees for a big fire, and there are silly little Notice
Boards all over the place about trespassers being prosecuted....’
The thought touched something in the centre of his being. He travelled;
laughing and sighing as he went. ‘My wig!’ he thought aloud, ‘but it’s
really extraordinary how that child brings those big places over here
for me, and makes them seem alive with all kinds of things _I_ could
never have dreamed of—alone!’
‘Paul, dear, what _are_ you thinking about, here all by yourself—and
without a hat on too, as usual? If the gardeners hear you talking aloud
like this they will think—! Well, I hardly know quite what they _will_
think!’
‘Something Blake said—to be honest,’ he laughed, turning to his sister
who had come silently down the path, dressed, as on the day he had first
seen her, in white serge with a big flower-hat. Languid she looked, but
delicate and wholly charming; she wore brown garden gauntlets over hands
and wrists, and a red parasol she held aloft, shed a becoming pink glow
upon her face.
‘_Maurice_ Blake!’ she exclaimed. ‘Joan’s cousin with the big farm on
the Downs? But you don’t know him!’
‘Not that Blake,’ he laughed again; ‘and Joan, if you mean Joan
Nicholson, Dick’s niece who took up that rescue work, or something, in
London, I have never seen in my life.’
‘Then it’s a book you mean—one of those books you are always poring over
in the library,’ she murmured half reproachfully.
‘One of Dick’s books, yes,’ he replied gently, linking his arm through
hers and leading the way in the direction of the cedars. ‘One of my
“treasures,”’ he added slyly, ‘that you once shamelessly imagined to be
in petticoats.’
She rather liked his teasing. The interests they shared were uncommonly
small, perhaps, and the coinage of available words still smaller. Yet
their differences never took on the slightest ‘edge.’ A genuine
affection smoothed all their little talks.
‘You do read such funny old books, Paul,’ she observed, as though
somewhere in her heart lurked a vague desire to make him more modern.
‘Don’t you ever try books of the day—novels, for instance?’ She had one
under her arm at the moment. He took it to carry for her.
‘I have tried,’ he admitted, a little ashamed of his backwardness, ‘but
I never can make out what they’re driving at—half the time. What they
described has never happened to me, or come into my world. I don’t
recognise it all as true, I mean—’ He stopped abruptly for fear he might
say something to wound her.
‘One can always learn, though, and widen one’s world, can’t one? After
all, we _are_ all in the same world, aren’t we?’
He realised the impossibility of correcting her; the invitation to be
sententious could not catch him; his nature was too profound to contain
the prig.
‘Are we?’ he said gently.
‘Oh, I think so—more or less, Paul. There’s only one _nice_ world, at
least.’ She arranged her hat and parasol to keep the sun off, for she
was afraid of the sun, even the shy sun of England.
He pulled out the deck-chair for her, and opened it.
‘Here,’ she said pointing, ‘if you don’t mind, dear; or perhaps over
_there_ where it looks drier; or just _there_ under that tree, perhaps,
is better still. It’s more sheltered, and there’s less sun, isn’t
there?’
‘I think there is, yes,’ he replied, obeying her. The phrase ‘there’s
less sun’ seemed to him so neatly descriptive of the mental state of
persons without imagination.
‘She’ll come here for her summer holidays soon,’ his sister resumed,
going back to Joan. ‘She works very hard at that “Home” place in town,
and Dick always liked her to use us here as if the place were her own. I
promised that.’ She dropped gracefully into the wicker chair, and Paul
sat down for a moment beside her on the grass. ‘He spent a lot of
capital, you know, in the thing and made her superintendent or
something. She has a sort of passion for this rescuing of slum children,
and, I believe, works herself to death over it, though she has means of
her own. So you will be nice to her when she comes, won’t you, and look
after her a bit? I do what I can, but I always feel I’m rather a
failure. I never know what to talk to her about. She’s so dreadfully in
earnest about everything.’
Paul promised. Joan sounded rather attractive, to tell the truth. He
remembered something, too, of the big organisation his old friend had
founded in London for the rescue and education of waif-boys. A thrill of
pride ran through him, and close at its heels a secret sense of shame,
that he himself did nothing in the great world of action—that his own
life was a mass of selfish dreaming and refined self-seeking, that all
his yearning for God and beauty was after all, perhaps, but a spiritual
egoism. It was not the first time this thought had come to trouble and
perplex. Of late—especially since he had begun to find these
safety-valves of self-expression, and so a measure of relief—his mind
had turned in the direction of some bigger field to work in outside
self, perhaps more than he quite knew or realised.
‘Paul,’ his sister interrupted his reflections, after a prolonged
fidgeting to make herself comfortable so that the parasol should shade
her, the hat not tickle her, and the novel open easily for reading; ‘you
are happy here, aren’t you? You’re not too dull with us, I mean?’
‘It’s quite delightful, Margaret,’ he answered at once. ‘In one sense I
have never been so happy in my life.’ He looked straight at her, the sun
catching his brown beard and face. ‘And I love the children; they’re
just the kind of companions I need.’
‘I’m so glad, so glad,’ she said genuinely. ‘And it’s very kind and
good-natured of you to be with them such a lot. You really almost fill
Dick’s place for them.’ She sighed and half closed her eyes. ‘Some day
you may have children of your own; only you would spoil them quite
atrociously, I’m sure.’
‘Am I spoiling yours?’ he asked solemnly.
‘Dreadfully,’ she laughed; ‘and turning little Mademoiselle’s head into
the bargain.’
It was his turn to burst out laughing. ‘I think that young lady can take
care of herself without difficulty,’ he exclaimed; ‘and as for my
spoiling the children, I think it’s they who are spoiling me!’
And, presently, with some easy excuse, he left her side and went off
into the woods. Margaret watched him charge across the lawn. A perplexed
expression came into her face as she picked up her novel and settled
down into the cushions, balancing the red parasol over her head at a
very careful angle. Admiration was in her glance, too, as she saw him
go. Evidently she was proud of her brother—proud that he was so
different from other people, yet puzzled to the verge of annoyance that
he should be so.
‘What a strange creature he is,’ was her somewhat indefinite reflection;
‘I thought but one Dick could exist in the world! He’s still a boy—not a
day over twenty-five. I wonder if he’s ever been in love, or ever will
be? I think—I hope he won’t; he’s rather nice as he is after all.’
She sighed faintly. Then she dipped again into her novel, wherein the
emotions, from love downwards, were turned on thick and violent as from
so many taps in a factory; got bored with it; looked on to the last
chapter to see what happened to everybody; and, finally—fell asleep.