The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others
only a green thing standing in the way.—W.B.
Thus, gradually, the grey house under the hills changed into a palace;
the garden stretched to include the stars; and Paul, the retired Wood
Cruiser, walked in a world all new and brilliant. For to find the means
of self-expression is to build the foundations of spiritual health, and
an ideal companionship, unvexed by limitations of sense, holds
potentialities that can change earth into heaven. His accumulated stores
of imagination found wings, and he wrote a series of Aventures that
delighted his audience while they healed his own soul.
‘I wish they’d go on for ever and ever,’ observed Toby solemnly to her
brother. ‘Perhaps they do really, only——’
‘Of course they do,’ Jonah said decisively, ‘but Uncle Paul only tells
bits of them to us—bits that _you_ can understand.’
Toby was too much in earnest to notice the masculine scorn.
‘He does know a lot, doesn’t he?’ she said. ‘Do you think he sees up
into heaven? They’re not a bit like made-up aventures.’ She paused,
deeply puzzled; very grave indeed.
‘He’s a man, of course,’ replied Jonah. ‘Men know big things like that.’
‘The Aventures are true,’ Nixie put in gently. ‘That’s why they’re so
big, and go on for ever and ever.’
‘It’s jolly when he puts us in them too, isn’t it?’ said Jonah,
forgetting the masculine pose in his interest. ‘He puts me in most,’ the
boy added proudly.
‘But _I_ do the funniest things,’ declared Toby, slightly aggrieved. ‘It
was me that rode on the moose over the tree-tops to the North Pole, and
understood all it said——’
‘That’s nothing,’ cried her brother, making a huge blot across his
copy-book. ‘He had to get me to turn on the roarer boryalis.’
‘Nixie’s always leader, anyhow,’ replied the child, losing herself for a
moment in the delight of that tremendous blot. She often borrowed Nixie
in this way to obliterate Jonah when her own strength was insufficient.
‘Of course she is,’ was the manly verdict. ‘She knows all those things
almost as well as Uncle Paul. Don’t you, Nixie?’
But Nixie was too busy cleaning up his blot with bits of torn
blotting-paper to reply, and the arrival of Mlle. Fleury put an end to
the discussion for the moment.
And Paul himself, as the big child leading the littler children, or
following their guidance when such guidance was clear, accepted his new
duties with a happy heart. His friendship with them all grew
delightfully, but especially, of course, his friendship with Nixie. This
elemental child slipped into his life everywhere, into his play, as into
his work; she assumed the right to look after him; with charming gravity
she positively mothered him; and Paul, whose life hitherto had known
little enough of such sympathy and care, simply loved it.
If her native poesy won his imagination, her practical interest in his
welfare and comfort equally won his heart. The way she ferreted about in
his room and study, so serious, so thoughtful, attending to so many
little details that no one else ever thought of,—all this came into his
life with a seductive charm as of something entirely new and strange to
him. It was Nixie who always saw to it that his ink-pot was full and his
quill pens trimmed; that flowers had no time to fade upon his table; and
that matches for his pipes never failed in the glass match-stands. He
used up matches, it seemed, almost by the handful.
‘You’re far worse than Daddy used to be,’ she reproved him. ‘I believe
you eat them.’ And when he assured her that he did nothing of the sort,
she only shook her head darkly, and said she couldn’t understand then
what he did with them all.
A hundred services of love and kindness she did for him that no one else
would have thought of. On his mantelpiece she put mysterious little
bottles of medicine.
‘For nettle-stings and scratches,’ she explained. ‘Your poor hands are
always covered with them both when you’ve been out with us.’ And it was
she, too, who bound up his fingers when wounds were more serious, and
saw to it that he had a clean rag each day till the sore was healed. She
put the new red riband on his straw hat after it fell (himself with it)
into the Gull Pond; and one service especially that earned her his
eternal respect was to fasten his evening black tie for dinner. This she
did every night for him. Such tasks were for magical fingers only. He
had never yet compassed it himself. He would run to the nursery to say
good-night, and Nixie, looking almost unreal and changeling in her white
nightgown, with her yellow hair top-knotted quaintly for sleep, would
deftly trim and arrange the strip of satin that he never could manage
properly himself. It was a regular little ritual, Toby watching eagerly
from the bed across the room.
‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Uncle Paul,’ she said another
time, holding up a mysterious garment, ‘I never saw such holes—never!’
And then she darned the said socks with results that were picturesque if
not always entirely satisfactory. And once she sewed the toes so tightly
across with her darning that he could not get his foot into them. She
allowed no one else to touch them, however. Little the child guessed
that while she patched his clothes, she wove his life afresh at the same
time.
And with all the children he took Dick’s place more and more. His
existence widened, filled up; he felt in touch with real things as of
old in the woods; the children replaced the trees.
But it was Nixie in particular who crept close to his unsatisfied heart
and tied him to her inner life with the gossamer threads of her
sand-coloured hair. This elfin little being, with her imagination and
tenderness, brought to him something he had never known before, never
dreamed of even; a perfect companionship; a companionship utterly
unclouded.
And the other children understood it; there was no jealousy; it was not
felt by them as favouritism. Natural and right it seemed, and was.
‘You must ask Nixie,’ Jonah would say in reply to any question
concerning his uncle’s welfare or habits. ‘She’s his little mother, you
know.’
For, truth to tell, they were born, these two, in the same corner of the
world of fantasy, bred under the same stars, and fathered by the same
elemental forces. But for the trick of the years and the accident of
blood, they seemed made for one another ideally, eternally.
Things he could speak of to no one else found in her a natural and easy
listener. To grown-ups he had never been able to talk about his mystic
longings; the very way they listened made such things instantly seem
foolish. But Nixie understood in her child-way, not because she was
sympathetic, but because she was _in and of_ them. He was merely talking
the language of her own world. He no longer felt ashamed to ‘think
aloud.’ Most people were in pursuit of such stupid, clumsy things—fame,
money, and other complicated and ugly things—but this child seemed to
understand that he cared about Realities only; for, in her own simple
way, this was what she cared about too.
To talk with her cleared his own mind, too, in a way it had never been
cleared before. He came to understand himself better, and in so doing
swept away a great deal of accumulated rubbish; for he found that when
his thought was too confused to make clear to her, it was usually false,
wrong—not real.
‘I can’t make that out,’ she would say, with a troubled face. ‘I
suppose, I’m not old enough yet.’ And afterwards Paul would realise that
it was himself who was at fault, not the child. Her instinct was
unerring; whereas he, with those years of solitude behind him, sometimes
lost himself in a region where imagination, self-devouring, ran the risk
of becoming untrue, possibly morbid. Her wholesome little judgments
brought sanity and laughter.
For, like other mystical temperaments, what he sought, presumably, was
escape from himself, yet not—and herein he differed healthily from most
of his kidney—so much from his Real Inner Self, as from its outer
pettiness and limitations. True, he sought union with something larger
and more perfect, and in so far was a mystic; but this larger
‘something,’ he dimly understood, was the star of his own soul not yet
emancipated, and in so far he remained a man of action. His was the
true, wholesome mysticism; hysteria was not—as with most—its chief
ingredient. Moreover, this other, eternal part of him touched Eternity.
To be identified with it meant to be identified with God, but never for
one instant to lose his own individuality.
And to express himself through the creative imagination, to lose his own
smallness by interpreting beauty, he had always felt must be a half-way
house to the end in view. His inability, therefore, to find such means
of expression had always meant something incalculably grave, something
that hindered growth. But now this child Nixie, in some extraordinary
yet utterly simple fashion, had come to show him the way. It was
wonderful past finding out. He hardly knew himself how it had come
about. Yet, there she was, ever by his side, pointing to ways that led
him out into expression.
No woman could have done it. His two longings, he came to realise, were
actually one: the desire to express his yearnings grew out of the desire
to find God.
And so it was that the thought of her growing up was horrid to him. He
could not bear to think of her as a ‘young woman’ moving in a modern
world where she would lose all touch with the elemental forces of vision
and simplicity whence she drew half her grace and wonder. Already for
him, in some mystical fashion of spiritual alchemy, she had become the
eternal feminine, exquisitely focused in the little child. With the
advance of years this must inevitably pass from her, as she increased
the distance from her source of inspiration.
‘Nixie, you must promise never to grow up,’ he would say, laughing.
‘Because Aventures stop then, don’t they?’ she asked.
‘Partly that,’ he answered.
‘And I should get tired, like mother; or stupid, like the head
gardener,’ she added. ‘I know. But I don’t think I ever shall, somehow.
I think I am meant to be always like this.’
The serious way she said this last phrase escaped him at the time. He
remembered it afterwards, however.
It was so delightful, too, to read out his stories and aventures to her;
they laughed over them, and her criticisms often improved them vastly.
He even read her his first poem without shyness, and they discussed each
verse and talked about ‘stealing Heaven’s fire,’ and the poor ‘sparks’
that never grew into flames. The ‘kiss of fire’ she thought must be
wonderful. She also asked what a ‘lyre’ was. They made up other verses
together too. But though they laughed and she asked odd questions, on
the whole she grasped the sadness of the poem perfectly.
‘Let’s go and cry a bit somewhere,’ she remarked quietly, her eyes very
wistful. ‘It helps it out awfully, you know.’
He reminded her, however, of a sage remark of Toby’s, to the effect that
when men grew beards they lost the power to cry. Quick as a flash, then,
she turned with one of her exquisite little bits of unconscious poetry.
‘Let’s go to the Gwyle then, and make the stream cry for us instead,’
she said gravely, with a profound sympathy, ‘because everybody’s tears
must get into the water some time—and so to the sea, mustn’t they?’
And on their way, what with jumping ditches and flower-beds, they forgot
all about the crying. On the edge of the woods, however, she raced up
again to his side, her blue eyes full of a new wonder. ‘I know that wind
of inspiration that your poetry said never blew for you,’ she cried. ‘I
know where it blows. Quick! I’ll show you!’ The pace made him pant a
bit; he almost regretted he had mentioned it. ‘I know where it blows,
we’ll catch it, and you shall see. Then you can always, always get it
when you want it.’
And a little farther on, after wading through deep bracken, they
stopped, and Nixie took his hand. ‘Come on tiptoe now,’ she whispered
mysteriously. ‘Don’t crack the twigs with your feet.’ And, smiling at
this counsel of perfection, he obeyed to the best of his ability, while
she pretended not to notice the series of explosions that followed his
tread.
It was a curve in the skirts of the wood where they found themselves; a
small inlet where the tide of daylight flowed against the dark cliffs of
the firs, and then fell back. The thick trees held it at bay so that
only the spray of light penetrated beyond, as from advancing waves.
‘Thus far and no farther,’ very plainly said the pine trees, and the
sunshine lay there collected in the little hollow with the delicious
heat of all the summer. It was a corner hitherto undiscovered by Paul;
he saw it with the pleasure of a discovery.
And there, set brightly against the sombre background, stood the slender
figure of a silver birch tree, all sweet and shining, its branches
sifting the sunshine and the wind; while behind it, standing forth
somewhat from the main body of the wood, a pine, shaggy and formidable,
grew close as though to guard it. The picture, with its striking
contrast, needed no imagination to make it more appealing. It was patent
to any eye.
‘That’s _my_ tree,’ said Nixie softly, with both arms linked about his
elbow and her cheek laid against the sleeve of his coat. ‘My fav’rite
tree. And that’s where your winds of inspiration blow that you said you
couldn’t catch. So now you can always come and hear them, you see.’
Paul entered instantly into the spirit of her dream. The way her child’s
imagination seized upon inanimate objects and incorporated them into the
substance of her own life delighted him, for it was also his own way,
and he understood it.
‘Then that old pine,’ he answered, pointing to the other, ‘is my tree.
See! It’s come out of the wood to protect the little birch.’
The child ran from his side and stood close to them. ‘Yes, and don’t you
see,’ she cried, her eyes popping with excitement, ‘this is me, and
that’s you!’ She patted the two trunks, first the birch and then the
pine. ‘It’s us! I never thought of that before, never! It’s you looking
after me and taking care of me, and me dancing and laughing round you
all the time!’ She ran back to his side and hopped up to plant a kiss in
his beard. He quite forgot to correct her a’venturous grammar.
‘Of course,’ he cried, ‘so it is. Look! The branches touch too. Your
little leaves run up among my old needles!’
Nixie clapped her hands and ran to and fro, laughing and talking, on
errands of further discovery, while Paul sat down to watch the scene and
think his own thoughts. It was just the picture to appeal strongly to
him. At any time the beauty of the tree would have seized him, but with
no one else could he have enjoyed it in the same way, or spoken of his
enjoyment. While Nixie flitted here and there in the sunshine, the
little birch behind her bent down and then released itself with a
graceful rush of branches as the pressure of the wind passed. Against
the blue sky she tossed her leafy hands; then, with a passing shiver,
stood still.
‘I wonder,’ ran his thought, ‘why poets need invent Dryads when such an
incomparable revelation lies plain in one of the commonest of trees like
this?’ And, at the same moment, he saw Nixie dart past between the fir
trees and the birch, as though the very Dryad he was slighting had
slipped out to chide him. Her hair spread in the sunshine like leaves.
In the world of trees here, surely, was the very essence of what is
feminine caught and imprisoned. Whatever of grace and wonder emanate
from the face and figure of a young girl to enchant and bewitch here
found expression in the silver stem and branches, in the running limbs
so slender, in the twigs that bent with their cataracts of flying hair.
Seen against the dark pine-wood, this little birch tree laughed and
danced; over that silver skin ran, positively, smiles; from the facets
of those dainty leaves twinkled mischief and the joys of innocence.
Here, in a word, was Nixie herself in the terms of tree-dom; and, as he
watched, the wind swept out the branches towards him in a cluster of
rustling leaves,—and at the same instant Nixie shot laughing to his
side.
For a second he hardly knew whether it was the child or the silver birch
that nestled down beside him and began to murmur in his ear.
‘This is it, you see,’ she was saying; ‘and there’s your wind of
inspiration blowing now.’
‘We shall have to alter the first verse then,’ he said gravely:
‘The winds of inspiration blow,
Yet _never_ pass me by.’
‘Of course, of course,’ she whispered, listening half to her uncle,
half to the rustle in the branches. ‘And now,’ she added presently,
‘you can always come and write your poetry here, and it will be
very-wonderfulindeed poetry, you see. And if you leave a bit of paper
on the tree you’ll find it in the morning covered with all sorts of
things in very fine writing—oh, but _very very_ fine writing, so small
that no one can see it except you and me. One of the Little Winds we
saw, you know, will twine round it and leave marks. And the big pine
is you and the birch is me, isn’t it?’ she ended with sudden
conviction.
The game, of course, was after her own heart. Up she sprang then
suddenly again, picked a spray of leaves from a hanging branch, and
brought it back to him.
‘And here’s a bit of me for a present, so that you can’t ever forget,’
she said with a gravity that held no smile. And she fastened it with
much tugging and arranging in his buttonhole. ‘A bit of my tree, and so
of me.’
‘Then I might leave a bit of paper in the water too,’ he remarked slyly
on their way home, ‘so as to get the thoughts of the stream.’
‘Easily,’ she said, ‘only it must be wrapped up in something. I’ll get
Jonah’s sponge-bag and lend it you. Only you must promise faithfully to
return it in case we go to the seaside in the summer.’
‘And perhaps some of those tears we were talking about will stick on it
and leave their marks before they go on to the sea,’ he suggested.
‘Oh, but they’d be too sad,’ she answered quickly. ‘They’re much better
lost in the sea, aren’t they?’
* * * * *
Thus the poetry in his soul that he could not utter, he lived.
Without any conscious effort of the imagination, the instant Nixie, or
the thought of her, stood beside him—lo, he was in Fairyland. It was so
real that it was positively bewildering.
And the rest of that quiet household, without knowing it, contributed to
its reality. For, to begin with, the place was delightfully ‘out of the
world’; and, after that, the gradations between the two regions seemed
so easy and natural: the shadowy personality of his sister; the dainty
little French governess flitting everywhere with her plaintive voice in
the wake of the elusive children; then the children themselves—Jonah,
the mischievous; Toby with her shining face of onion skin; and, last of
all, the host of tumbling animals, the mysterious cats, the kittens, all
fluff and wonder; and the whole of it set amid the scenery of flowers,
hills, and sea. It was impossible to tell exactly where the actual
threshold lay, this shifting, fluid threshold dividing the two worlds;
but there can be no question that Paul passed it day by day without the
least difficulty, and that it was Nixie who knew all the quickest
short-cuts.
And to all who—since childhood—have lived in Fairyland and tasted of its
sweet innocence and loveliness, comes sooner or later the desire to
transfer something of these qualities to the outer world. Paul felt this
more and more as the days passed. The wish to beautify the lives of
others grew in him with a sudden completeness that proved it to have
been there latent all the time. Through the voices of Nixie, Jonah, and
Toby, as it were, he heard the voices—those myriad, faint, unhappy
voices—of the world’s neglected children a-calling to him: ‘Tell us the
Aventures too!’—‘Take us with you through that Crack!’—‘Show us the
Wind, and let us climb with you the Scaffolding of Night.’
And Paul, listening in his deep heart, began to understand that Nixie’s
education of himself was but a beginning: all unconsciously that elfin
child was surely becoming also his inspiration. This first lesson in
self-expression she had taught him was like the trickle that would lead
to the bursting of the dam. The waters of his enthusiasms would
presently pour out with the rush of genuine power behind them. What he
had to say, do, and live—all forms of self-expression—were to find a
larger field of usefulness than the mere gratification of his personal
sense of beauty.
As yet, however, the thought only played dimly to and fro at the back of
his mind, seeking a way of escape. The greater outlet could not come all
at once. The germ of the desire lay there in secret development, but the
thing he should do had not yet appeared.
So, for the time being, he continued to live in Fairyland and write
Aventures.
It was really incalculable the effect of enchantment this little
yellow-haired girl cast upon him—hard to believe, hard to realise. So
true, so exquisite was it, however, that he almost came to forget her
age, and that she was actually but a child. To him she seemed more and
more an intimate companion of the soul who had existed always, and that
both he and she were ageless. It was their souls that played, talked,
caressed, not merely their minds or bodies. In her flower-like little
figure dwelt assuredly an old and ripened soul; one, too, it seemed to
him sometimes, that hardly belonged to this world at all.
There was that about their relationship which made it eternal—it always
had been somewhere, it always would be—somewhere. No confinings of
flesh, no limitations of mind and sense, no conditions of mere time and
space, could lay their burden upon it for long. It belonged most sweetly
to the real things which are conditionless.
Moreover, one of the chief effects of the world of Faery, experts say,
is that Time is done away with; emotions are inexhaustible and last for
ever, continually renewing themselves; the Fairies dance for years
instead of only for a night; their minds and bodies grow not old; their
desires, and the objects of their desires, pass not away.
‘So, unquestionably,’ said Paul to himself from time to time as he
reflected upon the situation, ‘I am bewitched. I must see what there is
that I can do in the matter to protect myself from further
depredations!’
Yet all he did immediately, so far as can be ascertained among the
sources of this veracious history, was to collect the ‘Aventures’
already written and journey with them one fine day to London, where he
had an interview of some length with a publisher—Dick’s publisher. The
result, at any rate, was—the records prove it—that some time afterwards
he received a letter in which it was plainly stated that ‘the success of
such a book is hard to predict, but it has qualities, both literary and
imaginative, which entitle it to a hearing’; and thus that in due course
the said ‘Adventures of a Prisoner in Fairyland’ appeared upon the
book-stalls. For the publishers, being the foremost in the land, took
the high view that seemed almost independent of mercenary calculations;
and it is interesting to note that the years justified their judgment,
and that the ‘Adventures’ may now be found upon the table of every house
in England where there dwells a true child, be that child seven or
seventy.
And any profits that Paul collected from the sale went, not into his own
pocket, but were put aside, as the sequel shall show, for a secret
purpose that lay hidden at this particular stage of the story among the
very roots of his heart and being.
The summer, meanwhile, passed quickly away, and August melted into
September, finding him still undecided about his return to America.
For the rest, there was no hurry. There was another six months in which
to make up his mind. Meanwhile, also, he made frequent use of the
‘Crack,’ and the changes in his soul went rapidly forward.