Paul's first impulse was to waken the entire household so that they might share with him this first glory of the morning. 'Probably they don't know how splendid it is!' The thought of the sleeping family, many of them perhaps with closed windows, missing all the wonder, was a positive pain to him. But, fortunately for himself, he decided it might be better not to begin, his visit in this way.
'I guess you and I, Mrs. Tompkyns, are the only people about,' he said, looking down at the beautiful grey creature that sniffed the air calmly at his feet. 'Come on, then. Let's make a raid together on the woods!'
He threw a disdainful glance at the sleeping house; no smoke came from the chimneys; most of the upper windows were closed. A delicious fragrance stole out of the woods to meet him as he strolled across the wet lawn. He felt like a schoolboy doing something out of bounds.
'You lead and I follow,' he said, addressing his companion in mischief.
And at once his attention became absorbed in the animal's characteristic behaviour. Obviously it was delighted to be with him; yet it did not wish him to think so, or, if he did think so, to give any sign of the fact. Nothing could have been plainer. First it crept along by the stone wall delicately, with its body very close to the ground as though the weight of the atmosphere oppressed it; and when he spoke, it turned its head with an affectation of genuine surprise as though it would say, 'You here! I thought I was alone.' Then it sat down on the gravel path and began to wash its face and paws till he had passed, after which—when he was not looking, of course—it followed him condescendingly, sniffing at blades of grass en route without actually touching them, and flicking its tail upwards with sudden, electric jerks.
Paul understood in a general way what was expected of him. He watched it surreptitiously, pretending to examine the flowers. For this, he knew, was the great Cat Game of elaborate pretence. And Mrs. Tompkyns, true adept in the art, played up wonderfully, and incidentally taught him much about the ways and methods of simple disguise; it advanced stealthily when he wasn't looking; it stopped to wash, or gaze into the air, the moment he turned. It was very shy, and very affected, and very self-conscious. Inimitable was the way it kept to all the little rules of the game. It walked daintily down the path after him, shaking the dew from its paws with a rapid, quivering motion. Then, suddenly arching its back as though momentarily offended—at nothing—it stared up at him with an expression that seemed to question his very existence. 'I guess I ought to fade away when you look at me like that!' was his thought.
'I'm here. I'm coming, Mrs. Tompkyns,' he felt constrained to remark aloud before going forward again. 'The grand morning excites my blood just as much as it excites your own.'
It seemed necessary to assert his presence. No intelligent person can be conceited long in the presence of a cat. No living creature can so sublimely 'ignore.' But Paul was not conceited. He continued to watch it with delight.
One very important rule of the game appeared to be that plenty of bushes were necessary by way of cover, so that it could pretend it was not really coming farther than the particular bush where it was hiding at the moment. Instinctively, he never made the grave mistake of calling it to follow; and though it never trotted alongside, being always either behind or in front of him, the presence of the cat in his immediate neighbourhood provided all sorts of company imaginable. It had also provided him with an opportunity to play the hero.
Then, suddenly, the calm and peace of the morning was disturbed by a scene of strange violence. Mrs. Tompkyns, with spread legs, dashed past him at a surprising speed and flew up the trunk of a big tree as though all the dogs in the county were at her heels. From this position of vantage she looked back over her shoulder with hysterical and frightened eyes. There was a great show of terror, a vast noise of claws upon the bark. No actress could have created better the atmosphere of immediate danger and alarm.
Paul had an instinctive flair for this move of the game. He made a great pretence of running up to save the cat from its awful position, but of course long before he got there she had dropped laughingly to earth again, having thus impressed upon him the value of her life.
'A question of life or death that time, I think, Mrs. Tompkyns,' he said soothingly, trying to stroke her back. 'I wonder if the head-gardener's grandmother after whom you were named ever did this sort of thing. I doubt it!'
But the creature escaped from him easily. For no one is ever caught in the true Cat Game. It scuttled down the path at full speed in a sort of canter, but sideways, as though a violent wind blew it and desperate resistance was necessary to keep on its feet at all. After that its self-consciousness seemed to disappear a little. It behaved normally. It stalked birds that showed, however, no fear of its approach. It sniffed the tips of leaves. It played baby-fashion with various invisible companions; and finally it vanished in a thick jungle of laurels to hunt in savage earnest, and left Paul to his own devices. Like all its kind, it only wished to prove how charming it could be, in order to emphasise later its utter independence of human sympathy and companionship.
'If you must go, I suppose you must,' he laughed, 'and I shall try to enjoy myself without you.'
He strolled on alone and lost himself in the pine-wood that flanked the back lawn, stopping finally by a gate that led to the world of gorse and heather beyond. The brilliant patches of yellow wafted perfumes to his nostrils. Far in the distance a blue line hinted where the sea lay; and over all lay the radiance of the early morning. The old spell was there that never failed to make his heart leap. And, as he stood still, the cuckoo flitted, invisible and mischievous, from tree to tree, calling with its flute-like notes,—
Sung beyond memory,
When golden to the winds this world of ours
Waved wild with boundless flowers;
Sung in some past where wildernesses were,—
and his thoughts went roaming back to the great woods he had left behind, woods where the naked streams ran shouting and lawless, where the trees had not learned self-consciousness, and where no little tame folk trotted on velvet feet through trim and scented gardens.
And the virgin glory of the morning entered into him with that searching sweetness which is almost suffering, just as a few hours before the Night had bewitched him with the mystery of her haunted caverns. For the beauty of Nature that comes to most softly, with hints, came to him with an exquisite fierce fever that was pain,—with something of the full-fledged glory that burst upon Shelley—and to bear it, unrelieved by expression, was a perpetual torment to him.
But, after long musing that led he scarcely knew where, Paul came back to himself—and laughed. Laughter was better than sighing, and he was too much of a child to go long without the sense of happiness coming uppermost. He lit his pipe—that most delicious of all, the pipe before breakfast—and wandered out into the sea of yellow gorse, thinking aloud, laughing, talking to himself.
Something in the performance of Mrs. Tompkyns awakened the train of thought of the night before. The sublime acting of the animal—he dared not call it 'beast'—linked him on to the children's world. They, too, had a magnificent condescension for the mere grown-up person. But he—he was not grown up. It made him sigh and laugh to think of it. He was a great, over-grown child, playing with gorgeously coloured dreams while the world of ordinary life passed him by.
The animals and the children linked on again, of course, with the region of fantasy and make-believe, the world of creation, the world of eternity, the world where thoughts were alive, and strong belief was a creative act.
'That's where I still belong,' he said aloud, picking his way among the waves of yellow sea, 'and I shall never get out till I die, my visions unexpressed, my singing dumb.' He laughed and threw a stone at a bush that had no blossoms. 'Oh, if only I knew how to link on with the normal world of fact without losing the other! To turn all these seething dreams within me to some account. To show them to others!'
He ran and cleared a low gorse-bush with a flying jump.
'That would be worth living for,' he continued, panting;