How easy it would have been to miss all this, if only he had obeyed his
father. But Mr. Crane was so ineffectual....
"Jackie," he had said, "would you please go outside and play, or stay in
some other room. It's very difficult to discuss business while you're
whooping and screaming around, and I have a lot to discuss with Mr.--"
"Yes, Daddy," Jack said before his father mentioned his visitor's name.
But he was not Jack Crane in his game; he was Uncas. The big chairs and
the divan were trees in his imaginative eyes. The huge easy chair in
which Daddy's caller (Jack thought of him only as "Mister") sat was a
fallen log. He, Uncas, meant to hide behind it in ambush.
Mister did not bother him. He had smiled and said in a shrill voice that
he thought Jack was a very nice boy. He wore a light grey-green Palm
Beach suit and carried a big brown leather briefcase that looked too
heavy for his soda straw-thin legs and arms. He was queer-looking
because his waist was so narrow and his back so humped. And when he took
off his tan Panama hat, a white fuzz exploded from his scalp. His face
was pale as the moon in daylight. His broad smile showed teeth that Jack
knew were false.
But the queerest thing about him was his thick spectacles, so heavily
tinted with rose that Jack could not see the eyes behind them. The
afternoon light seemed to bounce off the lenses in such a manner that no
matter what angle you looked at them, you could not pierce them. And
they curved to hide the sides of his eyes completely.
Mister had explained that he was an albino, and he needed the glasses to
dim the glare on his eyes. Jack stopped being Uncas for a minute to
listen. He had never seen an albino before, and, indeed, he did not know
what one was.
"I don't mind the youngster," said Mister. "Let him play here if he
wants to. He's developing his imagination, and he may be finding more
stimuli in this front room than he could in all of outdoors. We should
never cripple the fine gift of imagination in the young. Imagination,
fancy, fantasy--or whatever you call it--is the essence and mainspring
of those scientists, musicians, painters, and poets who amount to
something in later life. They are adults who have remained youths."
Mister addressed Jack, "You're the Last of the Mohicans, and you're
about to sneak up on the French captain and tomahawk him, aren't you?"
Jack blinked. He nodded his head. The opaque rose lenses set in Mister's
face seemed to open a door into his naked grey skull.
The man said, "I want you to listen to me, Jack. You'll forget my name,
which isn't important. But you will always remember me and my visit,
won't you?"
Jack stared at the impenetrable lenses and nodded dumbly.
Mister turned to Jack's father. "Let his fancy grow. It is a necessary
wish-fulfillment play. Like all human young who are good for anything at
all, he is trying to find the lost door to the Garden of Eden. The
history of the great poets and men-of-action is the history of the
attempt to return to the realm that Adam lost, the forgotten Hesperides
of the mind, the Avalon buried in our soul."