'It's the place where you find lost things,' she explained, with a little puzzled laugh at his foolish long words, 'and where things that came to! no proper sort of end—things that didn't come true, I mean, in the world, all happen and enjoy them—' selves '
He sat up with a jerk, forgetting the carefully arranged daisies on his coat, and scattering them all 'over the grass.
'But this is too splendid!' he cried. 'This is what I've always been looking for. It's what I was thinking about just now when I tried to write a poem and couldn't.'
'We found it long ago,' said the child, pointing to Jonah and Mrs. Tompkyns, Smoke having mysteriously disappeared for the moment. 'We' live here really most of the time. Daddy brought; us here first.'
'Things life promised, but never gave, here come to full fruition,'Paul murmured to himself. 'You: mean,' he added aloud, 'this is where ideals that have gone astray among the years may be found again, and actually realised? A kingdom of heaven within the heart? 'He was very excited, and forgot for the moment he was speaking to a child.
'I don't know about all that,' she answered, with a puzzled look. 'But it is life. We live-happily-ever-after here. That's what I mean.'
'It all comes true here?'
'All, all, all. All broken things and all lost things come here and are happy again,' she went on eagerly; 'and if you look hard enough you can find 'xactly what you want and 'xactly what you lost. And once you've found it, nothing can break it or lose it again.'
Paul stared, understanding that the voice speaking through her was greater than she knew.
'And some things are lost, we think,' she added, 'simply because they were wanted—wanted very much indeed, but never got.'
'Yet these are certainly the words of a child,' he reflected, wonder and delight equally mingled,' and of a child tumbling about among great spiritual things in a simple, intuitive fashion without knowing it.'
'All the things that ought to happen, but never do happen,' she went on, picking up the scattered daisies and making the pattern anew on a different part of his coat. 'They all are found here.'
'Wishes, dreams, ideals?' he asked, more to see what answer she would make than because he didn't understand.
'I suppose that's the same thing,' she replied. 'But, now please Uncle Paul, keep still a minute or I can't possibly finish this crown the daisies want me to make for them.' Paul stared into her eyes and saw through them to the blue of the sky and the blue of the winding river beyond; through to the hills on the horizon, a deeper blue still; and thence into the softer blue shadows that lay over the timeless land buried in the distances of his own heart, where things might indeed come true beyond all reach of misadventure or decay. For this, of course, was the real land of wonder and imagination, where everything might happen and nothing need grow old. The vision of the poet saw . . . far—far . . .
All this he realised through the blue eyes of the child at his side, who was playing with daisies and talking about the make-believe of children. His being swam out into the sunshine of great distances, of endless possibilities, all of which he might be able afterwards to interpret to others who did not see so far, or so clearly, as himself. He began to realise that his spirit, like the endless river at his feet, was without end or beginning. Thrills of new life poured into him from all sides.
'And when we go back,' he heard the musical little voice saying beside him, 'that church will be striking exactly where we left it—the sixth stroke, I mean.'
'Of course; I see!' cried Paul, beginning to realise the full value of his discovery, 'for there's no time here, is there? Nothing grows old.'
'That's it,' she laughed, clapping her hands, 'and you can find all the lost and broken things you want, if you look hard and—really want them.'
'I want a lot,' he mused, still staring into the little wells of blue opposite; 'the kind that are lost because they've never been "got," 'he added with a smile, using her own word.
'For instance,' Nixie continued, hanging the daisies now in a string from his beard, 'all my broken things come here and live happily—if I broke them by accident; but if I broke them in a temper, they are still angry and frighten me, and sometimes even chase me out again. Only Jonah has more of these than I have, and they are all on the other side of the river, so we're quite safe here. Now watch,' she added in a lower voice, 'Look hard under the trees and you'll see what I mean perhaps. And wish hard, too.'
Paul's eyes followed the direction of her finger across the river, and almost at once dim shapes began to move to and fro among the larches, starting into life where the shadows were deepest. At first he could distinguish no very definite forms, but gradually the outlines grew clearer as the forms approached the edges of the wood, coming out into the sunshine.
'The ghosts! The ghosts of broken things!' cried Jonah, running up the bank for protection. 'Look! They're coming out. Some one's thinking about them, you see!'
Paul, as he gazed, thought he had never seen such an odd collection of shapes in his life. They stalked about awkwardly like huge insects with legs of unequal length, and with a lop-sided motion that made it impossible to tell in which direction they meant to go. They had brilliant little eyes that flashed this way and that, making a delicate network of rays all through the wood like the shafts of a hundred miniature search-lights. Their legs, too, were able to bend both forwards and backwards and even sideways, so that when they appeared to be coming towards him they really were going away; and the strange tumbling motion of their bodies, due to the unequal legs, gave them an appearance that was weirdly grotesque rather than terrifying.
It was, indeed, a curious and delightful assortment of goblins. There were dolls without heads, and heads without dolls; milk jugs without handles, china teapots without spouts, and spouts without china teapots; clocks without hands, or with cracked and wounded faces; bottles without necks; broken cups, mugs, plates, and dishes, all with gaping slits and cracks in their anatomy, with half their faces missing, or without heads at all; every sor of vase imaginable with every sort of handle unimaginable; tin soldiers without swords or helmets, china puppies without tails, broken cages, knives without handles; and a collection of basins of all sizes that would have been sufficient to equip an entire fleet of cross-channel steamers: altogether a formidable and pathetic army of broken creatures.
'What in the world are they trying to do?' he asked, after watching their antics for some minutes with amazement.
'Looking for the broken parts,' explained Jonah, who was half amused, half alarmed. 'They get out of shape like that because they pick up the first pieces they find.'
'And you broke all these things?' The boy nodded his head proudly. 'I recker-nise most of them,' he said, 'but they're nearly all accidents. I said "sorry "for each one.'
'That, you see,' Nixie interrupted, 'makes all the difference. If you break a thing on purpose in a temper, you murder it; but the accidents come down here and feel nothing. They hardly know who broke them. In the end they all find their pieces. It's the heaven of broken things, we call it. But now let's send them away.'
'How?' asked Paul.
'By forgetting them,' cried Jonah.
They turned their faces away and began to think of other things, and at once the figures began to fade and grow dim. The lights went out one by one. The grotesque shapes melted into the trees, and a minute later there was nothing to be seen but the slender larch stems and the play of sunlight and shadow beneath their branches. 'You see how it works, at any rate,' Nixie said. 'Anything you've lost or broken will come back if you think hard enough—nice things as well as nasty things—but they must be real, real things, and you must want them in a real, real way.'
It was, indeed, he saw, the region where thoughts come true.
'Then do broken people come here too?' Paul asked gravely after a considerable pause, during which his thoughts went profoundly wandering.
'Yes;