The imagination is not a state; it is the human existence itself.—W.
B.
Paul, looking round, felt utterly at peace with himself and the world;
at rest, he felt. That was his first sensation in the mass. He recovered
in a moment from his breathless entrance, and a subtle pleasure began to
steal through his veins. It seemed as if every yearning he had ever
known was being ministered to by competent unseen Presences; and,
obviously, the children and the cats—Mrs. Tompkyns had somehow managed
to join Smoke—felt likewise, for their countenances beamed and blinked
supreme contentment.
‘Ah!’ observed Jonah, sitting contentedly on the grass beside him. ‘This
is the place.’ He heaved a happy little sigh, as though the statement
were incontrovertible.
‘It is,’ echoed Paul. And Nixie’s eyes shone like blue flowers in a
field of spring.
‘The crack’s smaller than it used to be though,’ he heard her murmuring
to herself. ‘Every year it’s harder to get through. I suppose
something’s happening to the world—or to people; some change going on——’
‘Or we’re getting older,’ Jonah put in with profounder wisdom than he
knew.
Paul congratulated himself upon his successful entrance. He felt
something of a dog! The bank on which he lay sloped down towards a river
fledged with reeds and flowers; its waters, blue as the sky, flowed
rippling by, and a soft wind, warm and scented, sighed over it from the
heart of the summer. On the opposite shore, not fifty yards across, a
grove of larches swayed their slender branches lazily in the sun, and a
little farther down the banks he saw a line of willows drooping down to
moisten their tongue-like leaves. The air hummed pleasantly with
insects; birds flashed to and fro, singing as they flew; and, in the
distance, across miles of blue meadowlands, hills rose in shadowy
outline to the sky. He feasted on the beauty of it all, absorbing it
through every sense.
‘But where are we?’ he asked at length, ‘because a moment ago we were in
a storm somewhere?’ He turned to Nixie who still lay talking to herself
contentedly at his side. ‘And what really happens here?’ he added with a
blush. ‘I feel so extraordinarily happy.’
They lay half-buried among the sweet-scented grasses. Jonah burrowed
along the shore at some game of his own close by, and the cats made a
busy pretence of hunting wild game in a dozen places at once, and then
suddenly basking in the sun and washing each other’s necks and backs as
though wild-game hunting were a bore.
‘Nothing ’xactly—_happens_,’ she answered, and her voice sounded
curiously like wind in rushes—‘but everything—_is_.’
It seemed to him as though he listened to some spirit of the ages, very
wise with the wisdom of eternal youth, that spoke to him through the
pretty little mouth of this rosy-faced child.
‘It’s like that river,’ she went on, pointing to the blue streak winding
far away in a ribbon through the landscape, ‘which flows on for ever in
a circle, and never comes to an end. Everything here goes on always, and
then always begins again.’
For the river, as Paul afterwards found out, ran on for miles and miles,
in the curves of an immense circle, of which the sea itself was
apparently nothing but a widening of certain portions.
‘So here,’ continued the child, making a pattern with daisies on his
sleeve as she talked, ‘you can go over anything you like again and
again, and it need never come to an end at all. Only,’ she added,
looking up gravely into his face, ‘you must really, _really_ want it to
start with.’
‘Without getting tired?’ he asked, wonderingly.
‘Of course; because _you_ begin over and over again with it.’
‘Delightful!’ he exclaimed, ‘that means a place of eternal youth, where
emotions continually renew themselves.’
‘It’s the place where you find lost things,’ she explained, with a
little puzzled laugh at his foolish long words, ‘and where things that
came to no proper sort of end—things that didn’t come true, I mean, in
the world, all happen and enjoy themselves——’
He sat up with a jerk, forgetting the carefully arranged daisies on his
coat, and scattering them all over the grass.
‘But this is too splendid!’ he cried. ‘This is what I’ve always been
looking for. It’s what I was thinking about just now when I tried to
write a poem and couldn’t.’
‘_We_ found it long ago,’ said the child, pointing to Jonah and Mrs.
Tompkyns, Smoke having mysteriously disappeared for the moment. ‘We live
here really most of the time. Daddy brought us here first.’
‘Things life promised, but never gave, here come to full fruition,’ Paul
murmured to himself. ‘You mean,’ he added aloud, ‘this is where ideals
that have gone astray among the years may be found again, and actually
realised? A kingdom of heaven within the heart?’ He was very excited,
and forgot for the moment he was speaking to a child.
‘I don’t know about all that,’ she answered, with a puzzled look. ‘But
it is life. We live-happily-ever-after here. That’s what I mean.’
‘It all comes true here?’
‘All, all, all. All broken things and all lost things come here and are
happy again,’ she went on eagerly; ‘and if you look hard enough you can
find ’xactly what you want and ’xactly what you lost. And once you’ve
found it, nothing can break it or lose it again.’
Paul stared, understanding that the voice speaking through her was
greater than she knew.
‘And some things are lost, _we_ think,’ she added, ‘simply because they
were wanted—wanted very much indeed, but never got.’
‘Yet these are certainly the words of a child,’ he reflected, wonder and
delight equally mingled, ‘and of a child tumbling about among great
spiritual things in a simple, intuitive fashion without knowing it.’
‘All the things that ought to happen, but never do happen,’ she went on,
picking up the scattered daisies and making the pattern anew on a
different part of his coat. ‘They all are found here.’
‘Wishes, dreams, ideals?’ he asked, more to see what answer she would
make than because he didn’t understand.
‘I suppose that’s the same thing,’ she replied. ‘But, now _please_,
Uncle Paul, keep still a minute or I can’t possibly finish this crown
the daisies want me to make for them.’
Paul stared into her eyes and saw through them to the blue of the sky
and the blue of the winding river beyond; through to the hills on the
horizon, a deeper blue still; and thence into the softer blue shadows
that lay over the timeless land buried in the distances of his own
heart, where things might indeed come true beyond all reach of
misadventure or decay. For this, of course, was the real land of wonder
and imagination, where everything might happen and nothing need grow
old. The vision of the poet saw ... far—far....
All this he realised through the blue eyes of the child at his side, who
was playing with daisies and talking about the make-believe of children.
His being swam out into the sunshine of great distances, of endless
possibilities, all of which he might be able afterwards to interpret to
others who did not see so far, or so clearly, as himself. He began to
realise that his spirit, like the endless river at his feet, was without
end or beginning. Thrills of new life poured into him from all sides.
‘And when we go back,’ he heard the musical little voice saying beside
him, ‘that church will be striking exactly where we left it—the sixth
stroke, I mean.’
‘Of course; _I_ see!’ cried Paul, beginning to realise the full value of
his discovery, ‘for there’s no time here, is there? Nothing grows old.’
‘That’s it,’ she laughed, clapping her hands, ‘and you can find all the
lost and broken things you want, if you look hard and—really want them.’
‘I want a lot,’ he mused, still staring into the little wells of blue
opposite; ‘the kind that are lost because they’ve never been “got,”’ he
added with a smile, using her own word.
‘For instance,’ Nixie continued, hanging the daisies now in a string
from his beard, ‘all my broken things come here and live happily—if I
broke them by accident; but if I broke them in a temper, they are still
angry and frighten me, and sometimes even chase me out again. Only Jonah
has more of these than I have, and they are all on the other side of the
river, so we’re quite safe here. Now watch,’ she added in a lower voice,
‘Look hard under the trees and you’ll see what I mean perhaps. And wish
hard, too.’
Paul’s eyes followed the direction of her finger across the river, and
almost at once dim shapes began to move to and fro among the larches,
starting into life where the shadows were deepest. At first he could
distinguish no very definite forms, but gradually the outlines grew
clearer as the forms approached the edges of the wood, coming out into
the sunshine.
‘The ghosts! The ghosts of broken things!’ cried Jonah, running up the
bank for protection. ‘Look! They’re coming out. Some one’s thinking
about them, you see!’
Paul, as he gazed, thought he had never seen such an odd collection of
shapes in his life. They stalked about awkwardly like huge insects with
legs of unequal length, and with a lop-sided motion that made it
impossible to tell in which direction they meant to go. They had
brilliant little eyes that flashed this way and that, making a delicate
network of rays all through the wood like the shafts of a hundred
miniature search-lights. Their legs, too, were able to bend both
forwards and backwards and even sideways, so that when they appeared to
be coming towards him they really were going away; and the strange
tumbling motion of their bodies, due to the unequal legs, gave them an
appearance that was weirdly grotesque rather than terrifying.
It was, indeed, a curious and delightful assortment of goblins. There
were dolls without heads, and heads without dolls; milk jugs without
handles, china teapots without spouts, and spouts without china teapots;
clocks without hands, or with cracked and wounded faces; bottles without
necks; broken cups, mugs, plates, and dishes, all with gaping slits and
cracks in their anatomy, with half their faces missing, or without heads
at all; every sort of vase imaginable with every sort of handle
unimaginable; tin soldiers without swords or helmets, china puppies
without tails, broken cages, knives without handles; and a collection of
basins of all sizes that would have been sufficient to equip an entire
fleet of cross-channel steamers: altogether a formidable and pathetic
army of broken creatures.
‘What in the world are they trying to do?’ he asked, after watching
their antics for some minutes with amazement.
‘Looking for the broken parts,’ explained Jonah, who was half amused,
half alarmed. ‘They get out of shape like that because they pick up the
first pieces they find.’
‘And _you_ broke all these things?’
The boy nodded his head proudly. ‘I reckernise most of them,’ he said,
‘but they’re nearly all accidents. I said “sorry” for each one.’
‘That, you see,’ Nixie interrupted, ‘makes all the difference. If you
break a thing on purpose in a temper, you murder it; but the accidents
come down here and feel nothing. They hardly know who broke them. In the
end they all find their pieces. It’s the heaven of broken things, we
call it. But now let’s send them away.’
‘How?’ asked Paul.
‘By forgetting them,’ cried Jonah.
They turned their faces away and began to think of other things, and at
once the figures began to fade and grow dim. The lights went out one by
one. The grotesque shapes melted into the trees, and a minute later
there was nothing to be seen but the slender larch stems and the play of
sunlight and shadow beneath their branches.
‘You see how it works, at any rate,’ Nixie said. ‘Anything you’ve lost
or broken will come back if you think hard enough—nice things as well as
nasty things—but they must be real, real things, and you must want them
in a real, real way.’
It was, indeed, he saw, the region where thoughts come true.
‘Then do broken people come here too?’ Paul asked gravely after a
considerable pause, during which his thoughts went profoundly wandering.
‘Yes; only we don’t happen to know any. But all our dead animals are
here, all the kittens that had to be drowned, and the puppies that died,
and the collie the Burdons’ motor killed, and Birthday, our old horse
that had to be shot. They’re all here, and all happy.’
‘Let’s go and see them then,’ he cried, delighted with this idea of a
heaven of broken animals.
In a moment they were on their feet and away over the springy turf,
singing and laughing in the sunshine, picking flowers, jumping the
little brooks that ran like crystal ribbons among the grass, Nixie and
Jonah dancing by his side as though they had springs in their feet and
wings on their shoulders. More and more the country spread before them
like a great garden run wild, and Paul thought he had never seen such
fields of flowers or smelt such perfumes in the wind.
‘What’s the matter now?’ he exclaimed, as Jonah stopped and began to
stare hard at an acre of lilies of the valley by the way.
‘He’s calling some things of his own,’ Nixie answered. ‘Stare and
think—and they’ll all come. But we needn’t bother about him. Come
along!’ And he only had time to see the lilies open in an avenue to make
way for a variety of furry, four-legged creatures, when the child pulled
him by the hand and they were off again at full speed across the fields.
A sound of neighing made him turn round, and before he could move aside,
a large grey horse with a flowing tail and a face full of gentle
beneficence came trotting over the turf and stopped just behind him,
nuzzling softly into his shoulder.
‘Nice, silly-faced old thing,’ said Nixie, running up to speak to it,
while a brown collie trotted quietly at her heels. A little further off,
peeping up through a tangled growth of pinks and meadow-sweet, he saw
the faces of innumerable kittens, watching him with large and
inquisitive eyes, their ears just topping the flowers like leaves of
fur. Such a family of animals Paul thought he had never even dreamed of.
‘This is the heaven of the lost animals,’ Nixie cried from her seat on
the back of the grey horse, having climbed up by means of a big stone.
On her shoulder perched a small brown owl, blinking in the light like
the instantaneous shutter of a photographic camera. It had fluffy
feathers down to its ankles like trousers, and was very tame. ‘And they
are always happy here and have plenty to eat and drink. They play with
us far better here than outside, and are never frightened. Of course,
too, they get no older.’
Paul climbed up behind her on the horse’s back.
‘Now we’re off!’ he cried; and with Jonah and a dozen animals at their
heels, they raced off across the open country, holding on as best they
could to mane and tail, laughing, shouting, singing, while the wind
whistled in their ears and the hot sun poured down upon their bare
heads.
Then, suddenly, the horse stopped with a jerk that sent them sprawling
forward upon his neck. He turned his head round to look at them with a
comical expression in his big, brown eyes. Paul slid off behind, and
Nixie saved herself by springing sideways into a bed of forget-me-nots.
The owl fluttered away, blinking its eyes more rapidly than ever in a
kind of surprised fury, shaking out its fluffy trousers, and Jonah
arrived panting with his dogs and rabbits and puppies.
‘Come,’ exclaimed Nixie breathlessly, ‘he’s had enough by now. No animal
wants people too long. Let’s get something to eat.’
‘And I’ll cook it,’ cried the boy, busying himself with sticks and twigs
upon the ground. ‘We’ll have stodgy-pudding and cake and jam and
oyster-patties, and then more stodgy-pudding again to finish up with.’
Paul glanced round him and saw that all the animals had disappeared—gone
like thoughts forgotten. In their place he soon saw a column of blue
smoke rising up among the fir trees close behind him, and the children
flitting to and fro through it looking like miniature gypsies. The odour
of the burning wood was incense in his nostrils.
‘But can’t I see something too—something of my own?’ he asked in an
aggrieved tone.
Nixie and Jonah looked up at him with surprise. ‘Of course you can,’
they exclaimed together. ‘Just stare into space as the cats do, and
think, and wish, and wait. Anything you want will come—with practice.
People you’ve lost, or people you’ve wanted to find, or anything that’s
never come true anywhere else.’
They went on busily with their cooking again, and Paul, lying on his
back in the grass some distance away, sent his thoughts roaming,
searching, deeply calling, far into the region of unsatisfied dreams and
desires within his heart....
For what seemed hours and hours they wandered together through the
byways of this vast, enchanted garden, finding everything they wished to
find, forgetting everything they wished to forget, amusing themselves to
their heart’s content; till, at last, they stood together on a big
boulder in the river where the spray rose about them in a cloud and
painted a rainbow above their heads.
‘Get ready! Quick!’ cried Jonah. ‘The Crack’s coming!’
‘It’s coming!’ repeated Nixie, seizing Paul’s hand and urging him to
hold very tight.
He had no time to reply. There was a rushing sound of air tearing
through a narrow opening. The sky grew dark, with a roaring in his ears
and a sense of great things flying past him. Again came the sensation of
dropping giddily through space, and the next minute he found himself
standing with the two children upon the lawn, darkness about them, and
the storm howling and crashing over their heads through the branches of
the twin cedars.
‘There’s the clock still striking,’ Nixie cried. ‘It’s only been a few
seconds altogether.’
He heard the church clock strike the last six strokes of midnight.
For some minutes he realised little more than that he felt rather stiff
and uncomfortable in his bedroom chair, and that he was chilly about the
legs. Outside the wind still roared and whistled, making the windows
rattle, while gusts of rain fell volleying against the panes as though
trying to get in. A roll of distant thunder came faintly to his ear. He
stretched himself and began to undress by the light of a single candle.
On the table lay a sheet of paper headed ‘How I climbed the Scaffolding
of the Night,’ and he read down the page and then took his pen and wrote
the heading of something else on another sheet: ‘Adventure in the Land
between Yesterday and To-morrow.’ With a mighty yawn he then blew out
his candle and tumbled into bed.
And with him, for all the howling of the elements, came a strange sense
of peace and happiness. Out of the depths rose gradually before his
inner eye in a series of delightful pictures the scenes he had just
left, and he understood that the pathway to that country of dreams
fulfilled and emotions that never die, lay buried far within his own
being.
‘Between Yesterday and To-morrow’ was to be the children’s counterpart
of that timeless, deathless region where the spirit may always go when
hunted by the world, fretted by the passion of unsatisfied yearnings,
plagued by the remorseless tribes of sorrow and disaster. There none
could follow him, just as none—none but himself—could bring about its
destruction. For he had found the mystical haven where all lost or
broken things eternally reconstruct themselves.
The ‘Crack,’ of course, may be found by all who have the genuine
yearning to recreate their world more sweetly, provided they possess at
the start enough imagination to repay the trouble of training—also that
_Wanderlust_ of the spirit which seeks ever for a resting-place in the
great beyond that reaches up to God.
Paul as yet had but discovered the entrance, led by little children who
dreamed not how wondrous was the journey; but the rest would follow. For
it is a region mapped gradually out of a thousand impulses, out of ten
thousand dreams, out of the eternal desires of the soul. It is not
discovered in a day, nor do the ways of entrance always remain the same.
A thousand joys contribute to its fashioning, a thousand frustrated
hopes describe its boundaries, and ten thousand griefs bring slowly,
piece by piece, the material for its construction, while every new
experience of the soul, successful or disastrous, adds something to its
uncharted geography. Slowly it gathers into existence, becoming with
every sojourn more real and more satisfying, till at length from the
pain of all possible disillusionment the way opens to the heart of
relief, to the peaceful place of hopes renewed, of purposes made
fruitful and complete.
And from this deathless region, too, flow all the forces of the soul
that make for hope, enthusiasm, courage, and delight. The children might
call it ‘Between Yesterday and To-morrow,’ and find their little broken
dreams brought back to life; but Paul understood that its rewards might
vary immensely according to the courage and the need of the soul that
sought it.