And snatches of thee everywhere
Make little heavens throughout a day.
ALICE MEYNELL.
‘That’s very pretty, I think,’ she said politely, staring at him, with a
little smile, half puzzled. The music of the words had touched her, but
she evidently did not grasp why he should have said it. She waited a
minute to see if he had really finished, and then went on again with her
own vein of thought.
‘Then please tell me, Uncle,’ she asked gravely, with deep earnestness,
‘what is it people lose when they grow up?’
And he answered her with equal gravity, speaking seriously as though the
little body at his side were habited by an old, discriminating soul.
‘Simplicity, I think, principally—and vision,’ he said. ‘They get wise
with so many little details called facts that they lose the great view.’
The child watched his face, trying to understand. After a pause she came
back to her own thinking—the sphere where she felt sure of herself.
‘They never see things properly once they’re grown up,’ she said sadly.
‘They all walk into a fog, _I_ believe, that hides all the things _we_
know, and stuffs up their eyes and ears. Daddy called it the cotton-wool
of age, you know. Oh, Uncle, I do hope,’ she cried with the sudden
passion of the child, ‘I _do_ hope I shall never, never get into that
horrid fog. _You_ haven’t, and I won’t, won’t, won’t!’ Her voice rose to
a genuine cry. Then she added with a touch of child-wonder that followed
quite naturally upon the outburst, ‘How did you ever stop yourself, I
wonder!’
‘I lived with the fairies in the backwoods,’ he answered, laughing
softly.
She stared at him with complete admiration in her blue eyes.
‘Then I shall grow up ’xactly like you,’ she said, ‘so that I can always
get out of the cage just as you do, even if my body is big.’
‘Every one’s thin somewhere,’ Paul said, remembering her own
explanation. ‘And the Crack into Yesterday and To-morrow is always close
by when it’s wanted. That’s the real way of escape.’
She clapped her hands and danced, shaking her hair out in a cloud and
laughing with happiness. Paul took her in his arms and kissed her. With
a gesture of exquisite dignity, such as animals show when they resent
human interference, the child tumbled back into her chair by the table,
an expression of polite boredom—though the faintest imaginable—in her
eyes. Many a time had he seen the kittens behave exactly in the same
way.
‘But how do you know all these things, Nixie, and where do all your
ideas come from?’ he asked.
‘They just come to me when I’m thinking of nothing in particular. They
float into my head of their own accord like ships, little fairy ships, I
suppose. And I think,’ she added dreamily after a moment’s pause, ‘some
of them are trees and flowers whispering to me.’ She put her face close
to his own across the table, staring into his very brain with her
shining eyes. ‘Don’t you think so too, Uncle?’
‘I think I do,’ he answered honestly.
‘Though some of the things I hear,’ she went on, ‘I don’t understand
till a long time afterwards.’
‘What kind of things, for instance?’
She hesitated, answering slowly after a pause:
‘Things like streams, and the dripping of rain, and the rustling of wet
leaves, perhaps. At the time I only hear the noise they make, but
afterwards, when I’m alone, doing nothing, it all falls into words and
stories—all sorts of lovely things, but _very_ hard to remember, of
course.’
She broke off and smiled up into his face with a charm that he could
never have put into words.
‘You’ll grow up a poet, Nixie,’ he said.
‘Shall I _really_? But I could never find the rhymes—simply never.’
‘Some never do,’ he answered; ‘and some—the majority, I think—never find
the words even!’
‘Oh, how dreadful!’ she exclaimed, her face clouding with a pain she
could fully understand. ‘Poets who can’t talk at all. I should think
they would burst.’
‘Some of them nearly do,’ he exclaimed, hiding a smile; ‘they get very
queer indeed, these poor poets who cannot express themselves. I have
known one or two.’
‘Have you? Oh, Uncle Paul!’ Her tone expressed all the solemn sympathy
the world could hold.
He nodded his head mysteriously.
The child suddenly sat up very erect. An idea of importance had come
into her head.
‘Then I wonder if Pouf and Smoke, and Zezette and Mrs. Tompkyns are like
that,’ she cried, her face grave as a hanging judge—‘poets who can’t
express themselves, and may burst and get queer! Because they understand
all that sort of thing—scuttling leaves and dew falling, and tickling
grasses and the dreams of beeties, and things we never hear at all.
P’raps that’s why they lie and listen and think for such ages and ages.
I never thought of that before.’
‘It’s quite likely,’ he replied with equal solemnity.
Nixie sprang to her feet and flew round the room from chair to chair,
hugging in turn each kitten, and asking it with a passionate earnestness
that was very disturbing to its immediate comfort in life: ‘Tell me,
Pouf, Smoke, Sambo, this instant! Are you all furry little poets who
can’t tell all your little furry poems? Are you, _are you_, ARE YOU?’
She kissed each one in turn. ‘Are you going to burst and get queer?’ She
shook them all till, mightily offended, they left their thrones and took
cover sedately under tables and sofas well out of reach of this intimate
and public cross-examination. And there they sat, looking straight
before them, as though no one else existed in the entire world.
‘I believe they are, Uncle.’
A silence fell between them. Under the furniture, safe in their dark
corners, the cats began to purr again. Paul got up and strolled to the
open window that looked out across lawns and shrubberies to the fringe
of oaks and elms that marked the distant hayfields. The rain still fell
gently, silently—a fine, scented, melancholy rain; the rain of a minor
key. Tinged with a hundred delicate odours from fields and trees—ghostly
perfumes far more subtle than the perfumes of flowers—the air seemed to
brush the surface of his soul, dropping its fragrance down into his
heart like the close presence of remembered friends.
The evening mode invaded him softly, soothingly; and out of it, in some
way he scarcely understood, crept something that brought a vague
disquiet in its train. A little timid thought stole to the threshold of
his heart and knocked gently upon the door of its very inmost chamber.
And the sound of the knocking, faint and muffled though it was, woke
echoes in this secret chamber that proclaimed in a tone of reproach, if
not almost of warning, that it was still empty and unfurnished. A deep,
infinite yearning, and a yearning that was _new_, stirred within him,
then suddenly rose to the surface of his mind like a voice calling to
him from far away out of mist and darkness.
‘If only I had children of my own...!’ it called; and the echo whispered
afterwards ‘of my very own, made out of my very thoughts...!’
He turned to Nixie who had followed, and now leaned beside him on the
window-sill.
‘So the language of wind and trees and water you translate afterwards
into stories, do you?’ he asked, taking up the conversation where they
had left it. It was hardly a question; he was musing aloud as he gazed
out into the mists that gathered with the dusk. ‘It’s all silent enough
now, at any rate there’s not a breath of air moving. The trees are
dreaming—dreaming perhaps of the Dance of the Winds, or of the
love-making of the snow when their leaves are gone and the flakes settle
softly on the bare twigs; or perhaps dreaming of the humming of the sap
that brings their new clothes with such a rush of glory and wonder in
the spring——’
Again the child looked up into his face with shining eyes. The magic of
her little treasured beliefs had touched the depths of him, and she felt
that they were in the same world together, without pretence and without
the barriers of age. She was radiantly happy, and rather wonderful into
the bargain, a fairy if ever there was one.
‘They’re just thinking,’ she said softly.
‘So trees think too?’
She nodded her head, leaning her chin on her hands as she gazed with him
into the misty air.
‘I wonder what their thoughts are like,’ he said musingly, so that she
could take it for a question or not as she chose.
‘Like ours—in a way,’ she answered, as though speaking of something she
knew beyond all question, ‘only not so small, not so sharp. Our thoughts
prick, I think, but theirs stroke, all running quite smoothly into each
other. Very big and wonderful indeed thoughts—big as wind, I mean, and
wonderful as sky or distance. And the streams—the streams have long,
winding thoughts that run down their whole length under water——’
‘And the trees, you were saying,’ he said, seeing that her thought was
wandering.
‘Yes, the trees,’ she repeated, ‘oh! yes, the trees are different a
little, I think. A wood, you see, may have one big huge thought all at
once——’
‘All at once!’
‘I mean all at the same time, every tree thinking the same thought for
miles. Because, if you lie in a wood, and don’t think yourself, but just
wait and wait and wait, you gradgilly get its great thought and know
what it’s thinking about exactly. You feel it all over instead of—of——’
‘Instead of getting a single little sharp picture in your mind,’ Paul
helped her, grasping the wonder of her mystical idea.
‘I think that’s what I mean,’ she went on. ‘And it’s exactly the same
with everything else—the sea, and the fields, and the sky—oh! and
everything in the whole world.’ She made a sweeping gesture with her arm
to indicate the universe.
‘Oh, Nixie child!’ he cried, with a sudden enthusiasm pouring over him
from the strange region where she had unknowingly led him, ‘if only I
could take you out to the big woods I know across the sea, where the
trees stretch for hundreds of miles, and the moss is everywhere a foot
thick, and the whole forest is such a conspiracy of wonder and beauty
that it catches your heart away and makes you breathless with delight!
Oh, my child, if only you could hear the thoughts and stories of woods
like that—woods untouched since the beginning of the world——!’
‘Take me! Take me! Uncle Paul, oh! take me!’ she cried as though it were
possible to start next day. ‘These woods are such _little_ woods, and I
know all their stories.’ She danced round him with a wild and eager
delight.
‘Such stories, yes, such stories,’ Paul continued, his face shining
almost as much as hers as he thought of his mighty and beloved forests.
‘Please tell me, take me, tell me!’ she cried. ‘All, all, all! Quick!’
‘I can’t. I never understood them properly; only the old Indians know
them now,’ he said sadly, leaning out of the window again with her.
‘They are tales that few people in this part of the world could
understand; in a language old as the wind, too, and nearly forgotten.
You see, the trees are different there. They stand in thousands—pine,
hemlock, spruce, and cedar—mighty, very tall, very straight, very dark,
pouring day and night their great balsam perfumes into the air so that
their stories and their thoughts are sweet as incense and very
mysterious.’
Nixie took the lapels of his coat in her hands and stared up into his
face as though her eyes would pop out. She looked _through_ his eyes.
She saw these very woods he was speaking of standing in dim shadows
behind him.
‘No one ever comes to disturb their lives, and few of them have ever
heard the ringing of the axe. Only giant moose and caribou steal
silently beneath their shade, and Indians, dark and soft-footed as
things of their own world, make camp-fires among their roots. They know
nothing of men and cities and trains, and the wind that sings through
their branches is a wind that has never tasted chimney-pots, and hot
crowds, and pretty, fancy gardens. It is a wind that flies five hundred
miles without taking breath, with nothing to stop its flight but
feathery tree-tops, brushing the heavens, and clean mountain ridges
thrusting great shoulders to the stars. Their thoughts and stories are
difficult to understand, but _you_ might understand them, I think, for
the life of the elements is strong in your veins, you fairy daughter of
wind and water. And some day, when you are stronger in body—not older
though, mind, not older—I shall take you out there so that you may be
able to learn their wonder and interpret it to all the world.’
The words tore through him in such curious, impersonal fashion, that he
hardly realised he was giving utterance to a longing that had once been
his own, and that he was now seeking to realise vicariously in the
person of this little poet-girl beside him. He stroked her hair as she
nestled up to him, breathing hard, her eyes glistening like stars,
speechless with the torrent of wonder with which her big uncle had
enveloped her.
‘Some day,’ she murmured presently, ‘some day, remember. You promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘And—and will you write that all out for me, please?’
‘All what?’
‘About the too-big woods and the too-old language and the winds that fly
without stopping, and the stories——’
‘Oh, oh!’ he laughed; ‘that’s another matter!’
‘Yes, oh you must, Uncle! Make a story of it—an aventure. Write it out
as a verywonerfulindeedaventure, and put you and me in it!’ She forgot
the touch of sadness and clapped her hands with delight. ‘And then read
it out at a Meeting, don’t you see?’
And in the end Paul promised that too, making a great fuss about it, but
in his heart secretly pleased and happy.
‘I’ll try,’ he said, with portentous gravity.
The child stared up at him with the sure knowledge in her eyes that
between them they held the key to all that was really worth knowing.
He stooped to kiss her hair, but before he could do so, with a laugh and
a dancing step he scarcely heard, she was gone from his side and
half-way down the passage, so that he kissed the empty air.
‘Bless her mighty little heart!’ he exclaimed, straightening himself up
again. ‘Was there ever such a teacher in the world before?’
He became aware that the world held powers, gentle yet immense, that
were urging him in directions hitherto undreamed of. With such a fairy
guide he might find—he was already finding—not merely safety-valves of
expression, but an outlet into the bargain for his creative imagination.
‘And a little child shall lead them,’ he murmured in his beard, as he
went slowly down the passage to his room to dress for dinner. Again he
felt like singing.