‘This is him,’ cried Jonah breathlessly, pointing with a hand that wore
ink like a funeral glove. ‘I’ve got him this time. Look!’ And he waved a
half-sheet of paper in his uncle’s face.
‘I’ve made one too—oh, a beauty!’ echoed Toby; ‘and I haven’t made half
such a mess as you.’ Three of her fingers were in mourning. A crape-like
line running from the nose to the corner of the mouth, lent her a
certain distinction. She, too, waved a bit of paper in the air.
‘Mine’s the real Jack-of-the-Inkpot though, isn’t he, Uncle Paul?’
exclaimed the boy, leaving the schoolroom table, and running up to show
it.
‘They’re all real—as real as your awful fingers,’ decreed Paul.
He had been explaining how to make the figure of the Ink Sprite that
leaves blots wherever he goes, blackens penholders and fingers, and
leaves his crawly marks across even the neatest page of writing. Two
blots and a line-then fold the paper. Open it again and the ink has run
into the semblance of an outlandish figure with countless legs and arms,
and a fantastic head; something between a spider, a centipede, and a
sprite.
‘It’s Jack-of-the-Inkpot,’ he told them. ‘Half the time he does his
dirty work invisibly, and if he touches blotting-paper—he vanishes
altogether.’
Jonah skipped about the room, waving his hideous creation in the air.
Toby, in her efforts to make a still better one, almost climbed into the
ink-stand. Nixie sat on the window-sill, dangling her legs and looking
on.
‘Very little ink does it,’ explained Paul, frightened at the results of
his instruction. ‘You needn’t pour it on! He works with the smallest
possible material, remember!’ His own fingers were no longer as spotless
as they might have been.
‘Look!’ shouted Jonah, standing on a chair and ignoring the rebuke.
‘There he goes—just like a black spider flying!’ He let his half-sheet
drop through the air, ink running down its side as it fell, while Toby
watched with the envy of despair.
Paul pounced upon the wriggling figure just in time to prevent further
funeral trappings. He turned it face downwards upon the blotting-paper.
‘Oh, oh!’ cried the children in the same breath; ‘it’s drank him up!’
‘Drunk him up,’ corrected Paul, relieved by the success of his manœuvre.
‘His feet touched the blotting-paper, you see.’
A pause followed.
‘You promised to tell us his song, please,’ observed Nixie from her
perch on the window-sill.
‘This is it, then,’ he answered, looking round at the smudged and solemn
faces, instantly grown still. ‘To judge by appearances you know this
Sprite better than I do!
I dance on your paper,
I hide in your pen,
I make in your ink-stand
My black little den;
And when you’re not looking
I hop on your nose,
And leave on your forehead
The marks of my toes.
When you’re trying to finish
Your “i” with a dot,
I slip down your finger
And make it a blot;
And when you’re so busy
To cross a big “T,”
I make on the paper
A little Black Sea.
I drink blotting-paper,
Eat penwiper-pie,
You never can catch me,
You never need try!
I hop _any_ distance,
I use _any_ ink!
I’m on to your fingers
Before you can wink.’
Paul’s back was to the door. He was in the act of making up a new verse,
and declaiming it, when he was aware that a change had come suddenly
over the room. It was manifest from the faces of the children. Their
attention had wandered; they were looking past him—beyond him.
And when he turned to discover the cause of the distraction he looked
straight into the grey eyes of a woman—grave-faced, with an expression
of strength and sweetness. As he did so the opening words of verse four
slipped out in spite of themselves:—
‘I’m the blackest of goblins,
I revel in smears—’
He smothered the accusing statement with a cough that was too late to
disguise it, while the grey eyes looked steadily into his with a twinkle
their owner made no attempt to conceal. The same instant the children
rushed past him to welcome her.
‘It’s Cousin Joan!’ they cried with one voice, and dragged her into the
room.
‘And this is Uncle Paul from America——’ began Nixie.
‘And he’s crammed full of sprites and things, and sees the wind and gets
through our Crack, and—and climbs up the rigging of the Night——’ cried
Jonah, striving to say everything at once before his sisters.
‘And writes the aventures of our Secret S’iety,’ Toby managed to
interpolate by speaking very fast indeed.
‘He’s Recording Secre’ry, you see,’ explained Nixie in a tone of gentle
authority that brought order into the scene. ‘Cousin Joan, you know,’
she added, turning gravely to her uncle, ‘is Visiting I’spector.’
‘Whose visits, however, are somewhat rare, I fear,’ said the new
arrival, with a smile. Her voice was quiet and very pleasant. ‘I hope,
Mr. Rivers, you are able to keep the Society in better order than I ever
could.’
The introduction seemed adequate. They shook hands. Paul somehow forgot
the signs of mourning he wore in common with the rest.
‘Cousin Joan has a _real_ Society in London, of course,’ Nixie explained
gravely, ‘a Society that picks up _real_ lost children.’
‘A-filleted with ours, though,’ cried Jonah proudly.
‘’ffiliated, he means,’ explained Nixie, while everybody laughed, and
the boy looked uncertain whether to be proud, hurt, or puzzled, but in
the end laughing louder than the rest.
When Paul was alone a few minutes later, the children having been
carried off shouting to receive the presents their ‘Cousin’ always
brought them on her rare visits from London, he was conscious first of a
curious sense of disappointment. That strong-faced woman, grave of
expression, with the low voice and the rather sad grey eyes, he divined
was the cause; though, for the moment, he could not trace the feeling to
any definite detail. In his mind he still saw her standing in the
doorway—a woman no longer in her first youth, yet comely with a
delicate, strong beauty that bore the indefinable touch of high living.
It was peculiar to his intuitive temperament to note the spirit before
he became aware of physical details; and this woman had left something
of her personality behind her. She had spoken little, and that little
ordinary; had done nothing in act or gesture that was striking. He did
not even remember how she was dressed, beyond that she looked neat,
soft, effective. Yet, there it was; something was in the room with him
that had not been there before she came.
At first he felt vaguely that his sense of disappointment had to do with
herself. Not that he had expected anything dazzling, or indeed had given
her consciously any thought at all. The male creature, of course,
hearing the name of a girl he is about to meet, instinctively conjures
up a picture to suit her name. He cannot help himself. And Joan
Nicholson, apart from any deliberate process of thought or desire on his
part, hardly suited the picture that had thus spontaneously formed in
his mind. The woman seemed too big for the picture. He had seen her,
perhaps, hitherto, only through his sister’s eyes. It puzzled him. About
her, mysteriously as an invisible garment, was the atmosphere of things
bigger, grander, finer than he had expected; nobler than he quite
understood.
Ah, now, at last, he was getting at it. The vague sense of
disappointment was not with her; it was _with himself_. Tested by some
new standard her mere presence had subtly introduced into the room—into
his intuitive mind—he had become suddenly dissatisfied with himself. His
play with the children, he remembered feeling, had seemed all at once
insignificant, unreal, almost unworthy—compared to another larger order
of things her presence had suggested, if not actually revealed.
Thus, in a flash of vision, the truth came to him. It was with himself
and not with her that he was disappointed. He recalled scraps of the
conversation. It was, after all, nothing Joan Nicholson had said; it was
something Nixie had said. Nixie, his little blue-eyed guide and teacher,
had been up to her wizard tricks again, all unconsciously.
‘Cousin Joan has a _real_ Society in London, you know—_a Society that
picks up real lost children_.’
That was the sentence that had done it. He felt certain. Combined with
the spiritual presentment of the woman, this apparently stray remark had
dropped down into his heart with almost startling effect—like the grain
of powder a chemist adds to his test tube that suddenly changes the
colour and nature of its contents. As yet he could not determine quite
what the change meant; he felt only that it was there—disappointment,
dissatisfaction with himself.
‘Cousin Joan has a _real_ Society.’ She was in earnest.
‘_Real_ lost children’—perhaps potential Nixies, Jonahs, Tobys, all
waiting to be ‘picked up.’
The thoughts ran to and fro in him like some one with a little torch,
lighting up corners and recesses of his soul he had so far never
visited. For thus it sometimes is with the chemistry of growth. The
changes are prepared subconsciously for a long while, and then comes
some trivial little incident—a chance remark, a casual action—and a
match is set to the bonfire. It flames out with a sudden rush. The
character develops with a leap; the soul has become wiser, advanced,
possessed of longer, clearer sight.
Paul was certainly aware of a new standard by which he must judge
himself; and, for all the apparent slightness of its cause, a little
reflection will persuade of its truth. Real, inner crises of a soul are
often produced by causes even more negligible.
The desire, always latent in him, to be of some use in the world, and to
find the things he sought by losing himself in some Cause bigger than
personal ends, had been definitely touched. It now rose to the surface
and claimed deliberate attention.
What in the world did it matter—thus he reflected while dressing for
dinner—whether his own personal sense of beauty found expression or not?
Of what account was it to the world at large, the world, for instance,
that included those ‘lost children’ who needed to be ‘picked up’? To
what use did he put it, except to his own gratification, and the passing
pleasure of the children he played with? Were there no bigger uses,
then, for his imagination, uses nobler and less personal?...
The thoughts chased one another through his mind in some confusion. He
felt more and more dissatisfied with himself. He must set his house in
order. He really must get to work at something _real_!
Other thoughts, too, played with him while he struggled with his studs
and tie. For he noticed suddenly with surprise that he was taking more
trouble with his appearance than usual. That black tie always bothered
him when he could not get the help of Nixie’s fingers, and usually he
appeared at the table with the results of carelessness and despair
plainly visible in its outlandish shape. But to-night he tied and
re-tied, determined to get it right. He meant to look his best.
Yet this process of beautifying himself was instinctive, not deliberate.
It was unconscious; he did not realise what he had been about until he
was half-way downstairs. And then came another of those swift, subtle
flashes by which the soul reveals herself—to herself. This ‘dressing
up,’ what was it for? For whom? Certainly, he did not care a button what
Joan Nicholson thought of his personal appearance. That was positive.
Then, for whom, and for what, was it? Was it for some one else? Had the
arrival of this ‘woman’ upon the scene somehow brought the truth into
sudden relief?...
A delightful, fairy thought sped across his mind with wings of gold,
waving through the dusk of his soul a spray of leaves from a silver
birch tree that he knew, and disappearing into those depths of
consciousness where feelings never clothe themselves in precise
language. A line of poetry swam up and took its place mysteriously—
My heart has thoughts, which, though thine eyes hold mine,
Flit to the silent world and other summers,
With wings that dip beyond the silver seas.
Could it be, then, that he had given his heart so utterly, so
exquisitely, into the keeping of a little child?...
At any rate, before he reached the drawing-room, he understood that what
he had been so busy dressing up was not anything half so trumpery as his
mere external body and appearance. It was his interior person. That
black tie, properly made for once, was an outward and visible sign of an
inward and spiritual grace; only, having forgotten, or possibly never
heard the phrase, he could not make use of it!
‘It’s that little, sandy-haired witch after all!’ he thought to himself.
‘Joan’s coming—a woman’s coming—has made me realise it. I must behave my
best, and look my best. It’s my soul dressing up for Nixie, I do
declare!’