Thus Paul, thundering along with his belated youth, enjoyed himself more and more, while he enjoyed, also learned, marked, and read.
CHAPTER XII
It haunted him a good deal, this Vision of the Winds. Now he never heard the stirring of the woods without thinking of those delicately brilliant streamers flying across the sky.
The satisfaction of spinning a fairy tale out of it for the children's Society was only equalled by the pleasure of the original inspiration. Here, too, was a means of expressing himself he had never dreamed of; the relief was great. Moreover, it brought him into close touch with the inexhaustible reservoirs which children draw upon for their endless world of Make-Believe, and he understood that the child and the poet live in the same region. His feet were now set upon that secret path trodden by the feet of children since the world began; and, for all his burden of years, there was no telling where it might lead him. For the springs of perennial youth have their sources in that region—the youth of the spirit, with the constant flow of enthusiasm, the touch of simple, ever-living beauty, and the whole magic of vision. No one with imagination can ever become blasé, perhaps need ever grow old in the true sense.
By this means he might at last turn his accumulated stores to some useful account. The great geysers of imagination that dry up too soon with the majority might keep bubbling for ever; and provided the pipes kept open for smaller visions, they might with time become channels for inspiration of a still higher order. His audience might grow too.
'I'm getting on,' he observed to Nixie a few days later; 'getting on pretty well for an old man!'
'I knew you would,' she replied approvingly. 'Only you wasted a lot of time over it. When you came you were so old that Toby thought you were going to die, you know?
'So bad as all that, was it?'
'H'mmmmm,' she nodded, her blue eyes faintly troubled; 'quite!'
Paul took her on his knee and stared at her. The world of elemental wonder came quite close. There was something of magic about the atmosphere of this child's presence that made it possible to believe anything and everything. She embodied exquisitely so many of his dreams—those dreams of God and Nature he had lived with all those lonely years in Canadian solitudes.
'You know, I think,' he said slowly as he watched with delight the look of tender affection upon her face, 'that, without knowing it, you're something of a little magician, Nixie. What do you, think?'
But she only laughed and wriggled on his knee.
'Am I really?' she said presently. 'Then what are you, I wonder? '
'I used to be a Wood Cruiser,' he replied gravely; 'but what I am now it's rather difficult to say. You ought to know,' he added, 'as you're the magician who's changing me.'
'I've not changed you,' she laughed. 'I only found you out. The day you came I saw you were simply full of our things—and that you'd be a sort of Daddy to us. And we shall want a lot more Aventures, please, as soon as ever you can write them out.'
She was off his knee and half-way to the house the same second, for the voice of Mile. Fleury was heard in the land. He watched her flitting through the patches of sunshine across the lawn, and caught the mischievous glance she turned to throw at him as she disappeared through the open French window—a vision of white dress, black legs, and flying hair. And only when she was gone did his heavier machinery get to work with the crop of questions he always thought of too late.
'A beginning, at any rate!' he said to himself, thinking of all the things he was going to write for them. 'Only I wish we were all in camp out there among the cedars and hemlocks on Beaver Creek, instead of boxed up in this toy garden where there are no wild animals, and you mayn't cut down trees for a big fire, and there are silly little Notice Boards all over the place about trespassers being prosecuted. . .'
The thought touched something in the centre of his being. He travelled; laughing and sighing as he went. 'My wig!' he thought aloud, 'but it's really extraordinary how that child brings those big places over here for me, and makes them seem alive with all kinds of things I could never have dreamed of—alone!'
'Paul, dear, what are you thinking about, here all by yourself—and without a hat on too, as usual? If the gardeners hear you talking aloud like this they will think—! Well, I hardly know quite what they will think!'
'Something Blake said—to be honest,' he laughed, turning to his sister who had come silently down the path, dressed, as on the day he had first seen her, in white serge with a big flower-hat. Languid she looked, but delicate and wholly charming; she wore brown garden gauntlets over hands and wrists, and a red parasol she held aloft, shed a becoming pink glow upon her face.
'Maurice Blake! 'she exclaimed. 'Joan's cousin with the big farm on the Downs? But you don't know him!'
'Not that Blake,' he laughed again; I and Joan, if you mean Joan Nicholson, Dick's niece who took up that rescue work, or something, in London, I have never seen in my life.'
'Then it's a book you mean—one of those books you are always poring over in the library,' she murmured half reproachfully.
'One of Dick's books, yes,' he replied gently, linking his arm through hers and leading the way in the direction of the cedars. 'One of my "treasures,"' he added slyly, 'that you once shamelessly imagined to be in petticoats.'
She rather liked his teasing. The interests they shared were uncommonly small, perhaps, and the coinage of available words still smaller. Yet their differences never took on the slightest 'edge.' A genuine affection smoothed all their little talks.
'You do read such funny old books, Paul,' she observed, as though somewhere in her heart lurked a vague desire to make him more modern. 'Don't you ever try books of the day—novels, for instance?' She had one under her arm at the moment. He took it to carry for her.
'I have tried,' he admitted, a little ashamed of his backwardness, 'but I never can make out what they're driving at—half the time. What they described has never happened to me, or come into my world. I don't recognise it all as true, I mean—' He stopped abruptly for fear he might say something to wound her. 'One can always learn, though, and widen one's world, can't one? After all, we are all in the same world, aren't we?'
He realised the impossibility of correcting her; the invitation to be sententious could not catch him; his nature was too profound to contain the prig.
'Are we?' he said gently.
'Oh, I think so—more or less, Paul. There's only one nice world, at least.' She arranged her hat and parasol to keep the sun off, for she was afraid of the sun, even the shy sun of England.
He pulled out the deck chair for her, and opened it.
'Here,' she said pointing, 'if you don't mind, dear; or perhaps over there where it looks drier; or just there under that tree, perhaps, is better still. It's more sheltered, and there's less sun, isn't there?'
'I think there is, yes,' he replied, obeying her. The phrase 'there's less sun' seemed to him so neatly descriptive of the mental state of persons without imagination.
'She'll come here for her summer holidays