He looked swiftly about him. There was the old-fashioned upright piano against the wall, the highly coloured pictures hanging crooked on the wall, the cane chairs, the crowded mantelpiece, the high wire fender before the empty grate, the general atmosphere of toys, untidiness and broken articles of every sort and kind — and, above all, the figures of these excited children all bustling recklessly about him with their glowing and expectant faces.
There was Toby, her blue sash all awry, running busily about the room; and Nixie, now in sunshine, now in shadow, with her hair of yellow sand and her blue dreaming eyes that saw into the Beyond; and little Jonah, moving about somewhat pompously to prepare the performance that was to follow. It all combined to produce a sudden shock that swept down upon him so savagely, that he was within an ace of bolting through the door and making his escape into safer quarters.
The False Paul, that is, was within an ace of running away with all his elaborate armour, and leaving the True Paul dancing on the floor, a child among children, a spirit of impulse, enthusiasm and imagination, laughing with the sheer happiness of his perpetual youth.
It was a dangerous moment; he was within measurable distance of revealing himself. For a moment his clothes felt far too large for him; and only just in time did he remember his ‘attitude,’ and the danger of being young when he really was old, and the absurdity of being anything else than a large, sedate man of forty-five. Only he wished that Nixie would not watch him so appealingly with those starry eyes of hers... and look so strangely like the forms that haunted his own wild forests and streams on the other side of the Atlantic.
He stiffened quickly, drew himself up, and turned to give his elderly attention to the chorus of explanation and introduction that was already rising about him with the sound and murmur of the sea.
Something was happening.
For the floor of the room, he now perceived, had become suddenly full of movement, as though the carpet had turned alive. He felt a rubbing against his legs and ankles; with a soft thud something leaped upon the table and covered his hand with smooth, warm fur, uttering little sounds of pleasure at the same time. On the top of the piano, a thing he had taken for a heap of toys rose and stretched itself into an odd shape of straight lines and arching curves. From the window-sill, where the sun poured in, a round grey substance dropped noiselessly down upon the carpet and advanced with measured and calculated step towards him; while, from holes and hiding-places undivined, three or four little fluffy things, with padded feet and stiff pointing tails, shot out like shadows and headed straight for a row of saucers that he now noticed for the first time against the farther wall. The whole room seemed to fill with soft and graceful movement; and, mingled with the voices of the children, he caught a fine composite murmur that was soothing as the sound of flowing wind and water.
It was the sound and the movement of many animals.
‘Here they are,’ said a voice—’ some of them. The others are lost, or out hunting.’
For the moment Paul did not stop to ask how many ‘others’ there were. He stood rigidly still for fear that if he moved he might tread on something living.
There came a scratching sound at the door, and Toby dashed forward to open it.
‘Silly, naughty babies!’ she cried, nearly tumbling over the fender in her attempt to seize two round bouncing things that came tearing into the room like a couple of yellow puddings. ‘Uncle Paul has come to see you all the way from America! And then you’re late like this! For shame!’
With a series of thuds and bangs that must have bruised anything not unusually well padded, the new arrivals, who looked for all the world like small fat bears, or sable muffs on short brown legs with feet of black velvet, dashed round the room in a mad chase after nothing at all. A hissing and spitting issued from dark corners and from beneath various pieces of furniture, but the two balls confined their attentions almost at once to the honoured guest. They charged up against his legs as though determined to upset his balance — this mountain of a man — and then careered clumsily round the room, knocking over anything small enough that came in their way, and behaving generally as though they wanted to clear the whole place in the shortest possible time for their own particular and immediate benefit.
Next, lifting his eyes for a moment from this impetuous attack, he saw a brilliantly coloured thing behind bars, standing apparently on its head and looking upside-down at him with an expression of undisguised and scornful amusement; while not far from it, in a cage hanging by the cuckoo clock, some one with a tail as large as his body, shot round and round on a swinging trapeze that made Paul think of a midget practising in a miniature gymnasium.
‘These are our animals, you see, Uncle Paul,’ Jonah announced proudly from his position by the door. There was a trace of condescension in his tone.
‘We have lots of out-of-door animals as well, though,’ Toby hastened to explain, lest her uncle should be disappointed.
‘I suppose they’re out of doors?’ said Paul lamely.
‘Of course they are,’ replied Jonah; ‘in the stables and all about.’ He turned to Nixie, who stood quietly by her uncle’s side in a protective way, superintending. Nixie nodded corroboration.
‘Now, we’ll introduce you — gradgilly,’ announced Toby, stooping down and lifting with immense effort the large grey Persian that had been sleeping on the window-sill when they came in. She held it with great difficulty in her arms and hands, but in spite of her best efforts only a portion of it found actual support, the rest straggling away like a loosely stuffed bolster she could not encompass.
It was evidently accustomed to being dealt with thus in sections, for it continued to purr sleepily, blinking its large eyes with the usual cat-smile, and letting its head fall backwards as though it suddenly desired to examine the ceiling from an entirely fresh point of view. None of its real attention, of course, was given to the actual proceeding. It merely suffered the absurd affair — absent-mindedly and with condescension. Its whiskers moved gently.
‘What’s its name?’ he asked kindly.
‘Her name,’ whispered Nixie.
‘We call her Mrs. Tompkyns, because it’s old now,’ Toby explained, ignoring genders.
‘After the head-gardener’s gra’mother,’ Nixie explained hastily in his ear; ‘but we might change it to Uncle Paul in honour of you now, mightn’t we?’
‘Mrs. Uncle Paul,’ corrected Jonah, looking on with slight disapproval, and anxious to get to the white mice and the squirrel.
‘It would be a pity to change the name, I think,’ Paul said, straightening himself up dizzily from the introduction, and watching the splendid creature fall upon its head from Toby’s weakening grasp, and then march away with unperturbed dignity to its former throne upon the window-sill. ‘I feel rather afraid of Mrs. Tompkyns,’ he added; ‘she’s so very majestic.’
‘Oh, you needn’t be,’ they cried in chorus. ‘It’s all put on, you know, that sort of grand manner. We knew her when she was a kitten.’
The object-lesson was not lost upon him. Of all creatures in the world, he reflected as he watched her, cats have the truest dignity. They absolutely refuse to be laughed at. No cat would ever betray its real self, yet here was he, a grown-up, intelligent man, vacillating, and on the verge already of hopeless capitulation.
‘And what’s the name of these persons?’ he asked quickly, turning for safety to Nixie, who had her arms full of a writhing heap she had been diligently collecting from the corners of the room.
‘Oh, that’s only Mrs. Tompkyns’ family,’ exclaimed Jonah impatiently; ‘the last family, I mean. She’s had lots of others.’
‘The last family before this was only two,’
Nixie told him. ‘We called them Ping and Pong. They live in the stables now. But these we call Pouf, Sambo, Spritey, Zezette, and Dumps—’
‘And the next ones,’ Toby broke in excitedly, ‘we’re going to call with the names on the engines when we go up to London to se
e the dentist.’
‘Or the names of the Atlantic steamers wouldn’t be bad,’ said Paul.
‘Not bad,’ Jonah said, with lukewarm approval; ‘only the engines would be much better.’
‘There may not be any next ones,’ opined Toby, emerging from beneath a sofa after a frantic, but vain, attempt to catch something alive.
Jonah snorted with contempt. ‘Of course there will. They come in bunches all the time, just like grapes and chestnuts and things. Madmizelle told me so. There’s no end to them. Don’t they, Uncle Paul?’
‘I believe so,’ said the authority appealed to, extracting his finger with difficulty from the teeth and claws of several kittens.
There came a lull in the proceedings, the majority of the animals having escaped, and successfully concealed themselves among what Toby called ‘the furchinur.’ Paul was still following a prior train of reflection.
‘Yes, cats are really rather wonderful creatures,’ he mused aloud in spite of himself, turning instinctively in the direction of Nixie. ‘They possess a mysterious and superior kind of intelligence.’
For a moment it was exactly as if he had tapped his armour and said, ‘Look! It’s all sham!’
The child peered sharply up in his face. There was a sudden light in her eyes, and her lips were parted. He had not exactly expected her to answer, but somehow or other he was not surprised when she did. And the answer she made was just the kind of thing he knew she would say. He was annoyed with himself for having said so much.
‘And they lead secret little lives somewhere else, and only let us see what they want us to see. I knew you understood really.’ She said it with an elfin smile that was certainly borrowed from moonlight on a mountain stream. With one fell swoop it caught him away into a world where age simply did not exist. His mind wavered deliciously. The singing in his heart was almost loud enough to be audible.
But he just saved himself. With a sudden movement he leaned forward and buried his face in the pie of kittens that nestled in her arms, letting them lose their paws for a moment in his beard. The kittens might understand, but at least they could not betray him by putting it into words. It was a narrower escape than he cared for.
‘And these are the Chow puppies,’ cried Jonah, breathless from a long chase after the sable muffs.
‘We call them China and Japan.’
Paul welcomed the diversion. Their teeth were not nearly so sharp as the kittens’, and they burrowed with their black noses into his sleeves. So thick was their fur that they seemed to have no bones at all; their dark eyes literally dripped laughter.
With an effort he put on a more sedate manner.
‘You have got a lot of beasts,’ he said.
‘Animals,’ Nixie corrected him. ‘Only toads, rats, and hedgehogs are beasts. And, remember, if you’re rude to an animal, as Mademoiselle Fleury was once, it only ‘spises you — and then—’
‘I beg their pardon,’ he put in hurriedly; ‘I quite understand, of course.’
‘You see it’s rather important, as they want to like you, and unless you respect them they can’t, can they?’ she finished earnestly.
‘I do respect them, believe me, Nixie, and I appreciate their affection. Affection and respect must always go together.’
The children were wholly delighted. Paul had completely won their hearts from the very beginning. The parrot, the squirrel, and the white mice were all introduced in turn to him, and he heard sundry mysterious allusions to ‘the owl in the stables,’
‘Juliet and her two kids,’ to say nothing of dogs, ponies, pigeons, and peacocks, that apparently dwelt in the regions of outer space, and were to be reserved for the morrow.
The performance was coming to an end. Paul was already congratulating himself upon having passed safely, if not with full credit, through a severe ordeal, when the door opened and a woman of about twenty-five, with a pleasant face full of character and intelligence, stood in the doorway. A torrent of French instantly broke loose on all sides. The woman started a little when she perceived that the children were not alone.
‘Oh, Mademoiselle, this is Uncle Paul,’ they cried, each in a different fashion. ‘This is our Uncle Paul! He’s just been introduced to the animals, and now he must be introduced to you.’
Paul shook hands with her, and the introduction passed off easily enough; the woman was charming, he saw at the first glimpse, and possessed of tact. She at once took his side and pretended to scold her charges for having plagued and bothered him so long. Evidently she was something more to them than a mere governess. The lassitude of his sister, no doubt, gave her rights and responsibilities.
But what impressed Paul when he was alone — for her simple remark that it was past bedtime was followed by sudden kisses and disappearance — was the remarkable change that her arrival had brought about in the room. It came to him with a definite little shock. It was more than significant, he felt.
And it was this: that the children, though obviously they loved her, treated her as some one grown up and to be obeyed, whereas himself, he now realised, they had all along treated as one of themselves to whom they could be quite open and natural. His ‘attitude’ they had treated with respect, just as he had treated the attitude of the animals with respect, but at the same time he had been made to feel one of themselves, in their world, part and parcel of their own peculiar region. There had been nothing forced about it whatever. Whether he liked it or not they accepted him. His ‘attitude’ was not regarded seriously. It was not regarded at all. And this was grave.
He was so simple that he would never have thought of this but for the entrance of the governess. Her arrival threw it all into sharp relief. Clearly the children recognised no barrier between themselves and him; he had been taken without parley straight into their holy of holies. Nixie, as leader and judge, had carried him off at once.
And this was a very subtle and powerful compliment that made him think a great deal. He would either have to drop his armour altogether or make it very much more effective.
Indeed, it was the immediate problem in his mind as he slowly made his way downstairs to find his sister on the lawn, and satisfy her rather vague curiosity by telling her that the children had introduced him to the animals, and that he had got on famously with them all.
CHAPTER VI
Oh! Fairies, take me out of this dull world
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame!
Land of Heart’s Desire. — Yeats.
Paul went early to bed that night. It was his first night in an English country home for many years; strange forces were at work in him. His introduction to the children, his meeting with Nixie especially, had let loose powers in his soul that called for sober reflection; and he felt the need of being alone.
Another thing, too, urged him to seek the solitude of his chamber, for after dinner he had sat for a couple of hours with his sister, talking over the events and changes of the long interval since they had met, — the details that cannot be told in letters, the feelings that no one writes. And he came upstairs with his first impression of her character slightly modified. She had more in her than he first divined. Beneath that shadowy and silken manner he had caught traces of distinct purpose. For one thing she was determined to keep him in England.
He had told her frankly about his arrangement with the lumber Company, explaining that he regarded his present visit in the light of a holiday. ‘I suppose that is — er — wise of you,’ she said, but she had not been able to conceal her disappointment. She asked him presently if he really wanted to live all his life in such a place, and what it was in English life, or civilised, conventional life, that he so disliked, and Paul, feeling distinctly uncomfortable — for he loathed, giving pain — had answered evasively, with more skill than he knew, ‘“Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.” I suppose my treasure — the on
ly kind I know — is out there in the great woods, Margaret.’
‘Paul, are you married, then?’ she asked with a start; and when he laughed and assured her most emphatically that he was not, she looked exceedingly puzzled and a little shocked too. ‘Are you so very fond of this — er — treasure, then?’ she asked point blank in her softest manner, ‘and is she so — I mean, can’t you bring her home and acknowledge her?’ And after his first surprise when he had gathered her meaning, it took him a long time to explain that there was no woman concerned at all, and that it was entirely a matter of his temperament.
‘Everybody makes his own world, remember,’ he laughed, ‘and its size depends, I suppose, upon the power of the imagination.’
‘Then I fear one’s imagination is a very poor one,’ she said solemnly, ‘or else I have none at all. I cannot pretend to understand your tastes for trees and woods and things; but you’re exactly like poor Dick in that way, and I suppose one must be really clever to be like that.’
‘A year is a long time, Margaret,’ he said after a pause, to comfort her. ‘Much may happen before it’s over.’
‘I hope so,’ she had answered, standing behind his chair and stroking his head. ‘By that time you may have met some one who will reconcile you to — to staying here — a little longer.’ She patted his head as though he were a Newfoundland dog, he thought. It made him laugh.
‘Perhaps,’ he said.
And, now in his room, before the candles were lighted, he was standing by the open window, thinking it all over. Of women, of course, he knew little or nothing; to him they were all charming, some of them wonderful; and he was not conscious that his point of view might be considered by a man of the world — of the world that is little, sordid, matter-of-fact — distinctly humorous. At forty-five he believed in women just as he had believed in them at twenty, only more so, for nothing had ever entered his experience to trouble an exquisite picture in his mind. They stood nearer to God than men did, he felt, and the depravity of really bad women he explained by the fact that when they did fall they fell farther. The sex-fever, so far as he was concerned, had never mounted to his brain to obscure his vision.
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 20