'I have improved, I think,' he admitted, blushing like a pleased schoolboy. 'I am decidedly softer!'
He made a violent dig with his penknife, breaking down the hard barrier between two ditches, where-,upon Pouf, thinking the resultant splinter was a plaything specially contrived for its happiness, opened i its eyes wider than ever, and stretched out a paw that looked huge compared with the splinter and the penknife. Paul put the weapon away, and Pouf fixed its eyes intently on the pocket where it had vanished, leaving its paw absent-mindedly lying on the splinter which it had already wholly forgotten. It purred louder than ever, trying to give the impression that it was really a big cat.
Outside the rain fell softly. A blue-bottle buzzed noisily about the room, banging the ceiling and the walls as though it were exceedingly angry. Through the open window floated the smell of the English garden soaked in rain, odours of soused trees and: lawns, and wet air—exquisitely fragrant.
A hush fell over the room; only the purring of the kittens broke it. Paul thought it was the most soothing sound in the whole world; something-began to purr within himself. His head, and Nixie's head, and little Pouf's head—all lay very close together over that schoolroom table, each full of its own busy dreams. These queer, gentle talks' with the child were very delightful to him, all his. shyness and self-consciousness gone, and the spirit of true wonder, simple and profound, awake in his" heart.
Together, for a long time, they listened in silence to these sounds of purring and breathing and the murmur of rain falling outside: deep, velvety breathing it was, almost inaudible. Everything in life, Paul caught himself reflecting, tragedy or comedy, goes on against a background of this deep, hidden, purring sound of life. Breathing is the first manifestation of life; it is the music of the world, the soft, continuous hum of existence. His thoughts travelled far. . . .
'Yes, on the whole,' he muttered at length in-consequently, 'I think I may consider myself softer than before—kinder, gender, more alive!' But neither Nixie, nor Pouf, nor, for that matter, Sambo and Zezette either, paid the smallest attention to his remark; he was soon lost again in further reflections.
It was the child's voice that presently recalled him.
'Uncle Paul,' she said very softly, her mind still busy with thoughts of her own, 'do you know that sometimes I have heard the earth breathing too—akchilly breathing?'
Paul, coming back from a long journey, turned and gazed at the eager little face beside him in silence.
'The earth is alive, I'm sure,' she went on with an air of great mystery. 'It breathes and whispers,: and even purrs; sometimes it cries. It's a great body, alive—just like you and the other stars.'
'Nixie!'
'They are all bodies, though; heavenly bodies, Daddy called them. Only we, I suppose, are too small to see it that way perhaps.'
Paul listened, stroking Pouf slowly. The child's voice was low and somewhat breathless with the excitement of what she was saying. She believed every word of it intensely. Only a very small part of what she was thinking found expression in her words. Her ideas beckoned her beyond; and mere words could not overtake them at her age.
'The earth,' she went on, seeing that he did not laugh, 'is somebody's big round body rolling down the sky. It simply must be. Daddy always said that a fly settling on our bodies didn't know we were alive, so we can't understand that the earth is alive either. Only I know it. Oh! 'she cried out with sudden enthusiasm, 'how I would love to hear its real out-loud voice. What a t'riffic roar it must be. I only wish my ears were further.'
'Sharper, you mean.'
'But, all the same, I have heard it breathing,' she added more quietly, lifting Pouf suddenly and wrapping its sleeping body round her neck like a boa, 'just like this.' She put her head on one side, so that her cheek was against the kitten's lips, and] the faint stream of its breathing tickled her ear.' Only the breathing of the earth is much, ever sol much, longer and deeper. It's whole months long.'
Paul was listening now with his undivided attention. He was being admitted to the very heart of an imaginative child's world, and the knowledge of it charmed him inexpressibly. His eyes were almost as bright, his cheeks as pink with excitement, as her own. Only he must be very careful indeed. The least mistake on his part would close the door.
'Months, Nixie?'
'Oh, yes, a single breath is months long,' she whispered, her eyes growing in size, and darkening with wonder and awe. 'Pouf lies on me and breathe twice to my once, but I breathe millions of times ever so many millions—as I lie on the earth's body,' And it breathes in and out just as Pouf and I do. Winter is breathing in, and summer is breathing out, you see.'
'So the equinoctial gales are the changes from one breath to the other?' he put in gravely.
'I hadn't thought about the—the gales,' she said, putting her face closer and lowering her voice, 'but I know that in the summer I often hear the earth breathing out—'specially on still warm nights when everything lies awake and listens for it.'
'Then do, 'Things really listen as we do?' he asked gently.
'Not 'xactly as we do. We only listen in one place—our ears. They listen all over. But they're alive just the same, though so much quieter. Oh, Uncle Paul, everything is alive; everything, I know it!' She fixed a searching look on him. 'You knew that, didn't you?'
There was a trace of real surprise and disappointment in her voice.
'Well,' he answered truthfully, 'I had often and often thought about it, and wondered sometimes—whether '
But the child interrupted him almost imperiously. He realised sharply how the knowledge that the years bring—little, exact, precise knowledge—may kill the dreams of the naked soul, yet give nothing in their place but dust and ashes. And, by the same token, he recognised that his own heart was still untouched, unspoiled. The blood leaped and ran within him at the thought.
'The winds, too, are alive,'—she spoke with a solemn excitement that made her delicate face flush as though a white fire glowed suddenly beneath the] skin and behind the charming eyes—' they run about, and sleep, and sing, and are full of voices. The wind has hundreds of voices—just like insects: with such a lot of eyes.' (Even her strange simile, did not make him smile, so real was the belief and enthusiasm of her words.) 'We (with scorn) have only one voice; but the wind can laugh and cry at! the same time!'
'I've heard it,' he put in, secretly thrilled.
'I know its angry voice as well as its pretended-angry voice, when it's very loud but means nothing in particular. Its baby-voice, when it comes through the keyhole at night, or down the chimney, or just outside the window in the early morning, and tells me all its little very-wonderful-indeed aventures, makes me so happy I want to cry and laugh at once.'
She paused a moment for breath, dimly conscious, perhaps, that her description was somewhat confused. Her excitement somehow communicated itself to Pouf at the same time, for the kitten suddenly rose up with an arched back and indulged in a yawn that would have cracked the jaws of any self-respecting creature. After a prolonged stare at Paul, it proceeded inconsequently to wash itself with an air that plainly said, 'You won't catch me napping again. 'want to hear this too.'
Paul, meanwhile, stared at the child beside him, thinking that the gold-dust on her hair must surely come from her tumbling journeys among the stars, and wondering if she understood how deeply she saw into the heart of things with those dreamy blue eyes of hers.
'Listen, Nixie, you fairy-child, and I'll tell you something,' he said gently, 'something you will like very much'; and, while she waited and held her breath, he whispered softly in her ear:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises in us, our life's star
Hath had elsewhere its setting,