A Prisoner in Fairyland / Blackwood, Algernon, 1869-1951

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Title: A Prisoner in Fairyland

Author: Algernon Blackwood

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[This file was first posted on October 19, 2002]

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A PRISONER IN FAIRYLAND

(THE BOOK THAT 'UNCLE PAUL' WROTE)

BY

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

Author of 'Jimbo,' 'John Silence,'
'The Centaur,' 'Education of Uncle Paul,' Etc.

1913



TO

M. S.-K.

'LITTLE MOUSE THAT, LOST IN WONDER,
FLICKS ITS WHISKERS AT THE THUNDER!'




"Les Pensees!
O leurs essors fougueux, leurs flammes dispersees,
Leur rouge acharnement ou leur accord vermeil!
Comme la-haut les etoiles criblaient la nue,
Elles se constellaient sur la plaine inconnue;
Elles roulaient dans l'espace, telles des feux,
Gravissaient la montagne, illuminaient la fleuve
Et jetaient leur parure universelle et neuve
De mer en mer, sur les pays silencieux."

Le Monde, EMILE VERHAEREN




CHAPTER I


    Man is his own star; and the soul that can
    Render an honest and a perfect man
    Commands all light, all influence, all fate,
    Nothing to him falls early, or too late.
    Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,

    Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
                           BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

Minks--Herbert Montmorency--was now something more than secretary,
even than private secretary: he was confidential-private-secretary,
adviser, friend; and this, more because he was a safe receptacle for
his employer's enthusiasms than because his advice or judgment had any
exceptional value. So many men need an audience. Herbert Minks was a
fine audience, attentive, delicately responsive, sympathetic,
understanding, and above all--silent. He did not leak. Also, his
applause was wise without being noisy. Another rare quality he
possessed was that he was honest as the sun. To prevaricate, even by
gesture, or by saying nothing, which is the commonest form of untruth,
was impossible to his transparent nature. He might hedge, but he could
never lie. And he was 'friend,' so far as this was possible between
employer and employed, because a pleasant relationship of years'
standing had established a bond of mutual respect under conditions of
business intimacy which often tend to destroy it.

Just now he was very important into the bargain, for he had a secret
from his wife that he meant to divulge only at the proper moment. He
had known it himself but a few hours. The leap from being secretary in
one of Henry Rogers's companies to being that prominent gentleman's
confidential private secretary was, of course, a very big one. He
hugged it secretly at first alone. On the journey back from the City
to the suburb where he lived, Minks made a sonnet on it. For his
emotions invariably sought the safety valve of verse. It was a wiser
safety valve for high spirits than horse-racing or betting on the
football results, because he always stood to win, and never to lose.
Occasionally he sold these bits of joy for half a guinea, his wife
pasting the results neatly in a big press album from which he often
read aloud on Sunday nights when the children were in bed. They were
signed 'Montmorency Minks'; and bore evidence of occasional pencil
corrections on the margin with a view to publication later in a
volume. And sometimes there were little lyrical fragments too, in a
wild, original metre, influenced by Shelley and yet entirely his own.
These had special pages to themselves at the end of the big book. But
usually he preferred the sonnet form; it was more sober, more
dignified. And just now the bumping of the Tube train shaped his
emotion into something that began with

   Success that poisons many a baser mind
   With thoughts of self, may lift--

but stopped there because, when he changed into another train, the
jerkier movement altered the rhythm into something more lyrical, and
he got somewhat confused between the two and ended by losing both.

He walked up the hill towards his tiny villa, hugging his secret and
anticipating with endless detail how he would break it to his wife. He
felt very proud and very happy. The half-mile trudge seemed like a few
yards.

He was a slim, rather insignificant figure of a man, neatly dressed,
the City clerk stamped plainly over all his person. He envied his
employer's burly six-foot stature, but comforted himself always with
the thought that he possessed in its place a certain delicacy that was
more becoming to a man of letters whom an adverse fate prevented from
being a regular minor poet. There was that touch of melancholy in his
fastidious appearance that suggested the atmosphere of frustrated
dreams. Only the firmness of his character and judgment decreed
against the luxury of longish hair; and he prided himself upon
remembering that although a poet at heart, he was outwardly a City
clerk and, as a strong man, must permit no foolish compromise.

His face on the whole was pleasing, and rather soft, yet, owing to
this warring of opposing inner forces, it was at the same time
curiously deceptive. Out of that dreamy, vague expression shot, when
least expected, the hard and practical judgment of the City--or vice
versa. But the whole was gentle--admirable quality for an audience,
since it invited confession and assured a gentle hearing. No harshness
lay there. Herbert Minks might have been a fine, successful mother
perhaps. The one drawback to the physiognomy was that the mild blue
eyes were never quite united in their frank gaze. He squinted
pleasantly, though his wife told him it was a fascinating cast rather
than an actual squint. The chin, too, ran away a little from the
mouth, and the lips were usually parted. There was, at any rate, this
air of incompatibility of temperament between the features which, made
all claim to good looks out of the question.

That runaway chin, however, was again deceptive. It did, indeed run
off, but the want of decision it gave to the countenance seemed
contradicted by the prominent forehead and straight eyebrows, heavily
marked. Minks knew his mind. If sometimes evasive rather than
outspoken, he could on occasion be surprisingly firm. He saw life very
clearly. He could certainly claim the good judgment stupid people
sometimes have, due perhaps to their inability to see alternatives--
just as some men's claim to greatness is born of an audacity due to
their total lack of humour.

Minks was one of those rare beings who may be counted on--a quality
better than mere brains, being of the heart. And Henry Rogers
understood him and read him like an open book. Preferring the steady
devotion to the brilliance a high salary may buy, he had watched him
for many years in every sort of circumstance. He had, by degrees, here
and there, shown an interest in his life. He had chosen his private
secretary well. With Herbert Minks at his side he might accomplish
many things his heart was set upon. And while Minks bumped down in his
third-class crowded carriage to Sydenham, hunting his evasive sonnet,
Henry Rogers glided swiftly in a taxi-cab to his rooms in St. James's
Street, hard on the trail of another dream that seemed, equally, to
keep just beyond his actual reach.

It would certainly seem that thought can travel across space between
minds sympathetically in tune, for just as the secretary put his
latch-key into his shiny blue door the idea flashed through him, 'I
wonder what Mr. Rogers will do, now that he's got his leisure, with a
fortune and--me!' And at the same moment Rogers, in his deep arm-chair
before the fire, was saying to himself, 'I'm glad Minks has come to
me; he's just the man I want for my big Scheme!' And then--'Pity he's
such a lugubrious looking fellow, and wears those dreadful fancy
waistcoats. But he's very open to suggestion. We can change all that.
I must look after Minks a bit. He's rather sacrificed his career for
me, I fancy. He's got high aims. Poor little Minks!'

'I'll stand by him whatever happens,' was the thought the slamming of
the blue door interrupted. 'To be secretary to such a man is already
success.' And again he hugged his secret and himself.

As already said, the new-fledged secretary was married and wrote
poetry on the sly. He had four children. He would make an ideal
helpmate, worshipping his employer with that rare quality of being
interested in his ideas and aims beyond the mere earning of a salary;
seeing, too, in that employer more than he, the latter, supposed. For,
while he wrote verses on the sly, 'my chief,' as he now preferred to
call him, lived poetry in his life.

'He's got it, you know, my dear,' he announced to his wife, as he
kissed her and arranged his tie in the gilt mirror over the plush
mantelpiece in the 'parlour'; 'he's got the divine thing in him right
enough; got it, too, as strong as hunger or any other natural
instinct. It's almost functional with him, if I may say so'--which
meant 'if you can understand me'--'only, he's deliberately smothered
it all these years. He thinks it wouldn't go down with other business
men. And he's been in business, you see, from the word go. He meant to
make money, and he couldn't do both exactly. Just like myself---'

Minks wandered on. His wife noticed the new enthusiasm in his manner,
and was puzzled by it. Something was up, she divined.

'Do you think he'll raise your salary again soon?' she asked
practically, helping him draw off the paper cuffs that protected his
shirt from ink stains, and throwing them in the fire. 'That seems to
be the real point.'

But Herbert evaded the immediate issue. It was so delightful to watch
her and keep his secret a little longer.

'And you _do_ deserve success, dear,' she added; 'you've been as
faithful as a horse.' She came closer, and stroked his thick, light
hair a moment.

He turned quickly. Had he betrayed himself already? Had she read it
from his eyes or manner?

'That's nothing,' he answered lightly. 'Duty is duty.'

'Of course, dear,' and she brought him his slippers. He would not let
her put them on for him. It was not gallant to permit menial services
to a woman.

'Success,' he murmured, 'that poisons many a baser mind---' and then
stopped short. 'I've got a new sonnet,' he told her quickly,
determined to prolong his pleasure, 'got it in the train coming home.
Wait a moment, and I'll give you the rest. It's a beauty, with real
passion in it, only I want to keep it cold and splendid if I can.
Don't interrupt a moment.' He put the slippers on the wrong feet and
stared hard into the fire.

Then Mrs. Minks knew for a certainty that something had happened. He
had not even asked after the children.

'Herbert,' she said, with a growing excitement, 'why are you so full
of poetry to-night? And what's this about success and poison all of a
sudden?' She knew he never drank. 'I believe Mr. Rogers has raised
your salary, or done one of those fine things you always say he's
going to do. Tell me, dear, please tell me.' There were new, unpaid
bills in her pocket, and she almost felt tempted to show them. She
poked the fire fussily.

'Albinia,' he answered importantly, with an expression that brought
the chin up closer to the lips, and made the eyebrows almost stern,
'Mr. Rogers will do the right thing always--when the right time comes.
As a matter of fact'--here he reverted to the former train of thought
--'both he and I are misfits in a practical, sordid age. We should
have been born in Greece---'

'I simply love your poems, Herbert,' she interrupted gently, wondering
how she managed to conceal her growing impatience so well, 'but
there's not the money in them that there ought to be, and they don't
pay for coals or for Ronald's flannels---'

'Albinia,' he put in softly, 'they relieve the heart, and so make me a
happier and a better man. But--I should say he would,' he added,
answering her distant question about the salary.

The secret was almost out. It hung on the edge of his lips. A moment
longer he hugged it deliciously. He loved these little conversations
with his wife. Never a shade of asperity entered into them. And this
one in particular afforded him a peculiar delight.

'Both of us are made for higher things than mere money-making,' he
went on, lighting his calabash pipe and puffing the smoke carefully
above her head from one corner of his mouth, 'and that's what first
attracted us to each other, as I have often mentioned to you. But
now'--his bursting heart breaking through all control--'that he has
sold his interests to a company and retired into private life--er--my
own existence should be easier and less exacting. I shall have less
routine, be more my own master, and also, I trust, find time perhaps
for---'

'Then something _has_ happened!' cried Mrs. Minks, springing to her
feet.

'It has, my dear,' he answered with forced calmness, though his voice
was near the trembling point.

She stood in front of him, waiting. But he himself did not rise, nor
show more feeling than he could help. His poems were full of scenes
like this in which the men--strong, silent fellows--were fine and
quiet. Yet his instinct was to act quite otherwise. One eye certainly
betrayed it.

'It has,' he repeated, full of delicious emotion.

'Oh, but Herbert---!'

'And I am no longer that impersonal factor in City life, mere
secretary to the Board of a company---'

'Oh, Bertie, dear!'

'But private secretary to Mr. Henry Rogers--private and confidential
secretary at---'

'Bert, darling---!'

'At 300 pounds a year, paid quarterly, with expenses extra,
and long, regular holidays,' he concluded with admirable dignity and
self-possession.

There was a moment's silence.

'You splendour!' She gave a little gasp of admiration that went
straight to his heart, and set big fires alight there. 'Your reward
has come at last! My hero!'

This was as it should be. The beginning of an epic poem flashed with
tumult through his blood. Yet outwardly he kept his admirable calm.

'My dear, we must take success, like disaster, quietly.' He said it
gently, as when he played with the children. It was mostly put on, of
course, this false grandiloquence of the prig. His eyes already
twinkled more than he could quite disguise.

'Then we can manage the other school, perhaps, for Frank?' she cried,
and was about to open various flood-gates when he stopped her with a
look of proud happiness that broke down all barriers of further
pretended secrecy.

'Mr. Rogers,' was the low reply, 'has offered to do that for us--as a
start.' The words were leisurely spoken between great puffs of smoke.
'That's what I meant just now by saying that he lived poetry in his
life, you see. Another time you will allow judgment to wait on
knowledge---'

'You dear old humbug,' she cried, cutting short the sentence that
neither of them quite understood, 'I believe you've known this for
weeks---'

'Two hours ago exactly,' he corrected her, and would willingly have
prolonged the scene indefinitely had not his practical better half
prevented him. For she came over, dropped upon her knees beside his
chair, and, putting both arms about his neck, she kissed his foolish
sentences away with all the pride and tenderness that filled her to
the brim. And it pleased Minks hugely. It made him feel, for the
moment at any rate, that he was the hero, not Mr. Henry Rogers.

But he did not show his emotion much. He did not even take his pipe
out. It slipped down sideways into another corner of his wandering
lips. And, while he returned the kiss with equal tenderness and
pleasure, one mild blue eye looked down upon her soft brown hair, and
the other glanced sideways, without a trace of meaning in it, at the
oleograph of Napoleon on Elba that hung upon the wall. ...

Soon afterwards the little Sydenham villa was barred and shuttered,
the four children were sound asleep, Herbert and Albinia Minks both
lost in the world of happy dreams that sometimes visit honest, simple
folk whose consciences are clean and whose aims in life are
commonplace but worthy.




CHAPTER II


When the creation was new and all the stars shone in their first
splendour, the gods held their assembly in the sky and sang 'Oh, the
picture of perfection! the joy unalloyed!'

But one cried of a sudden--'It seems that somewhere there is a break
in the chain of light and one of the stars has been lost.'

The golden string of their harp snapped, their song stopped, and they
cried in dismay--'Yes, that lost star was the best, she was the glory
of all heavens!'

From that day the search is unceasing for her, and the cry goes on
from one to the other that in her the world has lost its one joy!

Only in the deepest silence of night the stars smile and whisper among
themselves--'Vain is this seeking! Unbroken perfection is over all!'

RABINDRANATH TAGORE. (Prose translation by Author from his original
Bengali.)

It was April 30th and Henry Rogers sat in his rooms after breakfast,
listening to the rumble of the traffic down St. James's Street, and
found the morning dull. A pile of letters lay unopened upon the table,
waiting the arrival of the discriminating Mr. Minks with his shorthand
note-book and his mild blue eyes. It was half-past nine, and the
secretary was due at ten o'clock.

He smiled as he thought of this excellent fellow's first morning in
the promoted capacity of private secretary. He would come in very
softly, one eye looking more intelligent than the other; the air of
the City clerk discarded, and in its place the bearing that belonged
to new robes of office worn for the first time. He would bow, say
'Good morning, Mr. Rogers,' glance round with one eye on his employer
and another on a possible chair, seat himself with a sigh that meant
'I have written a new poem in the night, and would love to read it to
you if I dared,' then flatten out his oblong note-book and look up,
expectant and receptive. Rogers would say 'Good morning, Mr. Minks.
We've got a busy day before us. Now, let me see---' and would meet his
glance with welcome. He would look quickly from one eye to the other-
to this day he did not know which one was right to meet-and would
wonder for the thousandth time how such an insignificant face could go
with such an honest, capable mind. Then he smiled again as he
remembered Frank, the little boy whose schooling he was paying for,
and realised that Minks would bring a message of gratitude from Mrs.
Minks, perhaps would hand him, with a gesture combining dignity and
humbleness, a little note of thanks in a long narrow envelope of pale
mauve, bearing a flourishing monogram on its back.

And Rogers scowled a little as he thought of the air of gruffness he
would assume while accepting it, saying as pleasantly as he could
manage, 'Oh, Mr. Minks, that's nothing at all; I'm only too delighted
to be of service to the lad.' For he abhorred the expression of
emotion, and his delicate sense of tact would make pretence of helping
the boy himself, rather than the struggling parents.

Au fond he had a genuine admiration for Minks, and there was something
lofty in the queer personality that he both envied and respected. It
made him rely upon his judgment in certain ways he could not quite
define. Minks seemed devoid of personal ambition in a sense that was
not weakness. He was not insensible to the importance of money, nor
neglectful of chances that enabled him to do well by his wife and
family, but--he was after other things as well, if not chiefly. With a
childlike sense of honesty he had once refused a position in a company
that was not all it should have been, and the high pay thus rejected
pointed to a scrupulous nicety of view that the City, of course,
deemed foolishness. And Rogers, aware of this, had taken to him,
seeking as it were to make this loss good to him in legitimate ways.
Also the fellow belonged to leagues and armies and 'things,' quixotic
some of them, that tried to lift humanity. That is, he gave of his
spare time, as also of his spare money, to help. His Saturday
evenings, sometimes a whole bank holiday, he devoted to the welfare of
others, even though the devotion Rogers thought misdirected.

For Minks hung upon the fringe of that very modern, new-fashioned, but
almost freakish army that worships old, old ideals, yet insists upon
new-fangled names for them. Christ, doubtless, was his model, but it
must be a Christ properly and freshly labelled; his Christianity must
somewhere include the prefix 'neo,' and the word 'scientific' must
also be dragged in if possible before he was satisfied. Minks, indeed,
took so long explaining to himself the wonderful title that he was
sometimes in danger of forgetting the brilliant truths it so vulgarly
concealed. Yet never quite concealed. He must be up-to-date, that was
all. His attitude to the world scraped acquaintance with nobility
somewhere. His gift was a rare one. Out of so little, he gave his
mite, and gave it simply, unaware that he was doing anything unusual.

This attitude of mind had made him valuable, even endeared him, to the
successful business man, and in his secret heart Rogers had once or
twice felt ashamed of himself. Minks, as it were, knew actual
achievement because he was, forcedly, content with little, whereas he,
Rogers, dreamed of so much, yet took twenty years to come within reach
of what he dreamed. He was always waiting for the right moment to
begin.

His reflections were interrupted by the sunlight, which, pouring in a
flood across the opposite roof, just then dropped a patch of soft
April glory upon the black and yellow check of his carpet slippers.
Rogers got up and, opening the window wider than before, put out his
head. The sunshine caught him full in the face. He tasted the fresh
morning air. Tinged with the sharp sweetness of the north it had a
fragrance as of fields and gardens. Even St. James's Street could not
smother its vitality and perfume. He drew it with delight into his
lungs, making such a to-do about it that a passer-by looked up to see
what was the matter, and noticing the hanging tassel of a flamboyant
dressing-gown, at once modestly lowered his eyes again.

But Henry Rogers did not see the passer-by in whose delicate mind a
point of taste had thus vanquished curiosity, for his thoughts had
flown far across the pale-blue sky, behind the cannon-ball clouds, up
into that scented space and distance where summer was already winging
her radiant way towards the earth. Visions of June obscured his sight,
and something in the morning splendour brought back his youth and
boyhood. He saw a new world spread about him--a world of sunlight,
butterflies, and flowers, of smooth soft lawns and shaded gravel
paths, and of children playing round a pond where rushes whispered in
a wind of long ago. He saw hayfields, orchards, tea-things spread upon
a bank of flowers underneath a hedge, and a collie dog leaping and
tumbling shoulder high among the standing grass.... It was all
curiously vivid, and with a sense of something about it unfading and
delightfully eternal. It could never pass, for instance, whereas....

'Ain't yer forgotten the nightcap?' sang out a shrill voice from
below, as a boy with a basket on his arm went down the street. He drew
back from the window, realising that he was a sight for all admirers.
Tossing the end of his cigarette in the direction of the cheeky
urchin, he settled himself again in the arm-chair before the glowing
grate-fire.

But the fresh world he had tasted came back with him. For Henry Rogers
stood this fine spring morning upon the edge of a new life. A long
chapter had just closed behind him. He was on the threshold of
another. The time to begin had come. And the thrill of his freedom now
at hand was very stimulating to his imagination. He was forty, and a
rich man. Twenty years of incessant and intelligent labour had brought
him worldly success. He admitted he had been lucky, where so many toil
on and on till the gates of death stand up and block their way,
fortunate if they have earned a competency through years where hope
and disappointment wage their incessant weary battle. But he, for some
reason known only to the silent Fates, had crested the difficult hill
and now stood firm upon the top to see the sunrise, the dreadful gates
not even yet in sight. At yesterday's Board meeting, Minks had handed
him the papers for his signature; the patents had been transferred to
the new company; the cheque had been paid over; and he was now a
gentleman of leisure with a handsome fortune lying in his bank to
await investment. He was a director in the parent, as well as the
subsidiary companies, with fees that in themselves alone were more
than sufficient for his simple needs.

For all his tastes _were_ simple, and he had no expensive hobbies or
desires; he preferred two rooms and a bath to any house that he had
ever seen; pictures he liked best in galleries; horses he could hire
without the trouble of owning; the few books worth reading would go
into a couple of shelves; motors afflicted, even confused him--he was
old-fashioned enough to love country and walk through it slowly on two
vigorous legs; marriage had been put aside with a searing
disappointment years ago, not forgotten, but accepted; and of travel
he had enjoyed enough to realise now that its pleasures could be found
reasonably near home and for very moderate expenditure indeed. And the
very idea of servants was to him an affliction; he loathed their
prying closeness to his intimate life and habits, destroying the
privacy he loved. Confirmed old bachelor his friends might call him if
they chose; he knew what he wanted. Now at last he had it. The
ambition of his life was within reach.

For, from boyhood up, a single big ambition had ever thundered through
his being--the desire to be of use to others. To help his fellow-kind
was to be his profession and career. It had burned and glowed in him
ever since he could remember, and what first revealed it in him was
the sight--common enough, alas--of a boy with one leg hobbling along
on crutches down the village street. Some deep power in his youthful
heart, akin to the wondrous sympathy of women, had been touched. Like
a shock of fire it came home to him. He, too, might lose his dearest
possession thus, and be unable to climb trees, jump ditches, risk his
neck along the edge of the haystack or the roof. '_That might happen
to me too!_' was the terrible thing he realised, and had burst into
tears....

Crutches at twelve! And the family hungry, as he later learned!
Something in the world was wrong; he thought every one had enough to
eat, at least, and only the old used crutches. 'The Poor was a sort of
composite wretch, half criminal, who deserved to be dirty, suffering,
punished; but this boy belonged to a family that worked and did its
best. Something in the world-machinery had surely broken loose and
caused violent disorder. For no one cared particularly. The
''thorities,' he heard, looked after the Poor--''thorities in law,' as
he used to call the mysterious Person he never actually saw, stern,
but kindly in a grave impersonal way; and asked once if some relation-
in-law or other, who was mentioned often but never seen, had,
therefore, anything to do with the poor.

Dropping into his heart from who knows what far, happy star, this
passion had grown instead of faded: to give himself for others, to
help afflicted folk, to make the world go round a little more easily.
And he had never forgotten the deep thrill with which he heard his
father tell him of some wealthy man who during his lifetime had given
away a million pounds--anonymously. ... His own pocket-money just then
was five shillings a week, and his expectations just exactly--nothing.

But before his dreams could know accomplishment, he must have means.
To be of use to anybody at all he must make himself effective. The
process must be reversed, for no man could fight without weapons, and
weapons were only to be had as the result of steady, concentrated
effort--selfish effort. A man must fashion himself before he can be
effective for others. Self-effacement, he learned, was rather a futile
virtue after all.

As the years passed he saw his chances. He cut short a promising
University career and entered business. His talents lay that way, as
his friends declared, and unquestionably he had a certain genius for
invention; for, while scores of futile processes he first discovered
remained mere clever solutions of interesting problems, he at length
devised improvements in the greater industries, and, patenting them
wisely, made his way to practical results.

But the process had been a dangerous one, and during the long business
experience the iron had entered his soul, and he had witnessed at
close quarters the degrading influence of the lust of acquisition. The
self-advertising humbug of most philanthropy had clouded something in
him that he felt could never again grow clear and limpid as before,
and a portion of his original zest had faded. For the City hardly
encouraged it. One bit of gilt after another had been knocked off his
brilliant dream, one jet of flame upon another quenched. The single
eye that fills the body full of light was a thing so rare that its
possession woke suspicion. Even of money generously given, so little
reached its object; gaping pockets and grasping fingers everywhere
lined the way of safe delivery. It sickened him. So few, moreover,
were willing to give without acknowledgment in at least one morning
paper. 'Bring back the receipt' was the first maxim even of the
office-boys; and between the right hand and the left of every one were
special 'private wires' that flashed the news as quickly as possible
about the entire world.

Yet, while inevitable disillusion had dulled his youthful dreams, its
glory was never quite destroyed. It still glowed within. At times,
indeed, it ran into flame, and knew something of its original
splendour. Women, in particular, had helped to keep it alive, fanning
its embers bravely. For many women, he found, dreamed his own dream,
and dreamed it far more sweetly. They were closer to essential
realities than men were. While men bothered with fuss and fury about
empires, tariffs, street-cars, and marvellous engines for destroying
one another, women, keeping close to the sources of life, knew, like
children, more of its sweet, mysterious secrets--the things of value
no one yet has ever put completely into words. He wondered, a little
sadly, to see them battling now to scuffle with the men in managing
the gross machinery, cleaning the pens and regulating ink-pots. Did
they really think that by helping to decide whether rates should rise
or fall, or how many buttons a factory-inspector should wear upon his
uniform, they more nobly helped the world go round? Did they never
pause to reflect who would fill the places they thus vacated? With
something like melancholy he saw them stepping down from their thrones
of high authority, for it seemed to him a prostitution of their sweet
prerogatives that damaged the entire sex.

'Old-fashioned bachelor, no doubt, I am,' he smiled quietly to
himself, coming back to the first reflection whence his thoughts had
travelled so far--the reflection, namely, that now at last he
possessed the freedom he had longed and toiled for.

And then he paused and looked about him, confronted with a difficulty.
To him it seemed unusual, but really it was very common.

For, having it, he knew not at first what use to make of it. This
dawned upon him suddenly when the sunlight splashed his tawdry
slippers with its gold. The movement to the open window was really
instinctive beginning of a search, as though in the free, wonderful
spaces out of doors he would find the thing he sought to do. Now,
settled back in the deep arm-chair, he realised that he had not found
it. The memories of childhood had flashed into him instead. He renewed
the search before the dying fire, waiting for the sound of Minks'
ascending footsteps on the stairs. ...

And this revival of the childhood mood was curious, he felt, almost
significant, for it was symbolical of so much that he had
deliberately, yet with difficulty, suppressed and put aside. During
these years of concentrated toil for money, his strong will had
neglected of set purpose the call of a robust imagination. He had
stifled poetry just as he had stifled play. Yet really that
imagination had merely gone into other channels--scientific invention.
It was a higher form, married at least with action that produced
poetry in steel and stone instead of in verse. Invention has ever
imagination and poetry at its heart.

The acquirement of wealth demanded his entire strength, and all
lighter considerations he had consistently refused to recognise, until
he thought them dead. This sudden flaming mood rushed up and showed
him otherwise. He reflected on it, but clumsily, as with a mind too
long trained in the rigid values of stocks and shares, buying and
selling, hard figures that knew not elasticity. This softer subject
led him to no conclusion, leaving him stranded among misty woods and
fields of flowers that had no outlet. He realised, however, clearly
that this side of him was not atrophied as he thought. Its unused
powers had merely been accumulating--underground.

He got no further than that just now. He poked the fire and lit
another cigarette. Then, glancing idly at the paper, his eye fell upon
the list of births, and by merest chance picked out the name of
Crayfield. Some nonentity had been 'safely delivered of a son' at
Crayfield, the village where he had passed his youth and childhood. He
saw the Manor House where he was born, the bars across the night-
nursery windows, the cedars on the lawn, the haystacks just beyond the
stables, and the fields where the rabbits sometimes fell asleep as
they sat after enormous meals too stuffed to move. He saw the old
gravel-pit that led, the gardener told him, to the centre of the
earth. A whiff of perfume from the laurustinus in the drive came back,
the scent of hay, and with it the sound of the mowing-machine going
over the lawn. He saw the pony in loose flat leather shoes. The bees
were humming in the lime trees. The rooks were cawing. A blackbird
whistled from the shrubberies where he once passed an entire day in
hiding, after emptying an ink-bottle down the German governess's
dress. He heard the old family butler in his wheezy voice calling in
vain for 'Mr. 'Enery' to come in. The tone was respectful, seductive
as the man could make it, yet reproachful. He remembered throwing a
little stone that caught him just where the Newgate fringe met the
black collar of his coat, so that his cry of delight betrayed his
hiding-place. The whacking that followed he remembered too, and how
his brother emerged suddenly from behind the curtain with, 'Father,
may I have it instead of Henry, please?' That spontaneous offer of
sacrifice, of willingness to suffer for another, had remained in his
mind for a long time as a fiery, incomprehensible picture.

More dimly, then, somewhere in mist behind, he saw other figures
moving--the Dustman and the Lamplighter, the Demon Chimneysweep in
black, the Woman of the Haystack--outposts and sentries of a larger
fascinating host that gathered waiting in the shadows just beyond. The
creations of his boy's imagination swarmed up from their temporary
graves, and made him smile and wonder. After twenty years of strenuous
business life, how pale and thin they seemed. Yet at the same time how
extraordinarily alive and active! He saw, too, the huge Net of Stars
he once had made to catch them with from that night-nursery window,
fastened by long golden nails made out of meteors to the tops of the
cedars. ... There had been, too, a train--the Starlight Express. It
almost seemed as if _they_ knew, too, that a new chapter had begun,
and that they called him to come back and play again. ...

Then, with a violent jump, his thoughts flew to other things, and he
considered one by one the various philanthropic schemes he had
cherished against the day when he could realise them. That day had
come. But the schemes seemed one and all wild now, impracticable,
already accomplished by others better than he could hope to accomplish
them, and none of them fulfilling the first essential his practical
mind demanded--knowing his money spent precisely as he wished. Dreams,
long cherished, seemed to collapse one by one before him just when he
at last came up with them. He thought of the woman who was to have
helped him, now married to another who had money without working for
it. He put the thought back firmly in its place. He knew now a greater
love than that--the love for many. ...

He was embarking upon other novel schemes when there was a ring at the
bell, and the charwoman, who passed with him for servant, ushered in
his private secretary, Mr. Minks. Quickly readjusting the machinery of
his mind, Rogers came back to the present,

'Good morning, Mr. Rogers. I trust I am punctual.'

'Good morning, Minks; yes, on the stroke of ten. We've got a busy day.
Let's see now. How are you, by the by?' he added, as an afterthought,
catching first one eye, then the other, and looking finally between
the two.

'Very well, indeed, thank you, Mr. Rogers.' He was dressed in a black
tail-coat, with a green tie neatly knotted into a spotless turn-down
collar. He glanced round him for a chair, one hand already in his
pocket for the note-book.

'Good,' said Rogers, indicating where he might seat himself, and
reaching for the heap of letters.

The other sighed a little and began to look expectant and receptive.

'If I might give you this first, please, Mr. Rogers,' he said,
suddenly pretending to remember something in his breast-pocket and
handing across the table, with a slight flush upon his cheeks, a long,
narrow, mauve envelope with a flourishing address. 'It was a red-
letter day for Mrs. Minks when I told her of your kindness. She wished
to thank you in person, but--I thought a note--I knew,' he stammered,
'you would prefer a letter. It is a tremendous help to both of us, if
I may say so again.'

'Yes, yes, quite so,' said Rogers, quickly; 'and I'm glad to be of
service to the lad. You must let me know from time to time how he's
getting on.'

Minks subsided, flattening out his oblong notebook and examining the
points of his pencil sharpened at both ends as though the fate of
Empires depended on it. They attacked the pile of correspondence
heartily, while the sun, watching them through the open window, danced
gorgeously upon the walls and secretly put the fire out.

In this way several hours passed, for besides letters to be dictated,
there were careful instructions to be given about many things. Minks
was kept very busy. He was now not merely shorthand clerk, and he had
to be initiated into the inner history of various enterprises in which
his chief was interested. All Mr. Rogers's London interests, indeed,
were to be in his charge, and, obviously aware of this, he bore
himself proudly with an air of importance that had no connection with
a common office. To watch him, you would never have dreamed that
Herbert Minks had ever contemplated City life, much less known ten
years of drudgery in its least poetic stages. For him, too, as for his
employer, anew chapter of existence had begun--'commenced' he would
have phrased it--and, as confidential adviser to a man of fortune
whose character he admired almost to the point of worship, he was now
a person whose importance it was right the world should recognise. And
he meant the world to take this attitude without delay. He dressed
accordingly, knowing that of every ten people nine judge value from
clothes, and hat, and boots--especially boots. His patent leather,
buttoned boots were dazzling, with upper parts of soft grey leather.
And his shiny 'topper' wore a band of black. Minks, so far as he knew,
was not actually in mourning, but somebody for whom he ought to be in
mourning might die any day, and meanwhile, he felt, the band conveyed
distinction. It suited a man of letters. It also protected the hat.

'Thank'ee,' said his chief as luncheon time drew near; 'and now, if
you'll get those letters typed, you might leave 'em here for me on
your way home to sign. That's all we have to-day, isn't it?'

'You wanted, I think, to draft your Scheme for Disabled---' began the
secretary, when the other cut him short.

'Yes, yes, but that must wait. I haven't got it clear yet in my own
mind. You might think it out a bit yourself, perhaps, meanwhile, and
give me your ideas, eh? Look up what others have done in the same
line, for instance, and tell me where they failed. What the weakness
of their schemes was, you know--and--er--so forth.'

A faint smile, that held the merest ghost of merriment, passed across
the face of Minks, leaping, unobserved by his chief, from one eye to
the other. There was pity and admiration in it; a hint of pathos
visited those wayward lips. For the suggestion revealed the weakness
the secretary had long ago divined--that the practical root of the
matter did not really lie in him at all, and Henry Rogers forever
dreamed of 'Schemes' he was utterly unable and unsuited to carry out.
Improvements in a silk machine was one thing, but improvements in
humanity was another. Like the poetry in his soul they could never
know fulfilment. He had inspiration, but no constructive talent. For
the thousandth time Minks wondered, glancing at his employer's face,
how such calm and gentle features, such dreamy eyes and a Vandyke
beard so neatly trimmed, could go with ambitions so lofty and so
unusual. This sentence he had heard before, and was destined often to
hear again, while achievement came no nearer.

'I will do so at the first opportunity.' He put the oblong note-book
carefully in his pocket, and stood by the table in an attitude of 'any
further instructions, please?' while one eye wandered to the unopened
letter that was signed 'Albinia Minks, with heartfelt gratitude.'

'And, by the by, Minks,' said his master, turning as though a new idea
had suddenly struck him and he had formed a hasty plan, 'you might
kindly look up an afternoon train to Crayfield. Loop line from Charing
Cross, you know. Somewhere about two o'clock or so. I have to--er--I
think I'll run down that way after luncheon.'

Whereupon, having done this last commission, and written it down upon
a sheet of paper which he placed with care against the clock, beside
the unopened letter, the session closed, and Minks, in his mourning
hat and lavender gloves, walked up St. James's Street apparently
_en route_ for the Ritz, but suddenly, as with careless
unconsciousness, turning into an A.B.C. Depot for luncheon, well
pleased with himself and with the world, but especially with his
considerate employer.

Ten minutes later Mr. Rogers followed him on his way to the club, and
just when Minks was reflecting with pride of the well-turned phrases
he had dictated to his wife for her letter of thanks, it passed across
the mind of its recipient that he had forgotten to read it altogether.
And, truth to tell, he never yet has read it; for, returning late that
evening from his sentimental journey down to Crayfield, it stood no
longer where he had left it beside the clock, and nothing occurred to
remind him of its existence. Apart from its joint composers, no one
can ever know its contents but the charwoman, who, noticing the
feminine writing, took it back to Lambeth and pored over it with a
candle for full half an hour, greatly disappointed. 'Things like
that,' she grumbled to her husband, whose appearance suggested that he
went for bigger game, 'ain't worth the trouble of taking at all,
whichever way you looks at it.' And probably she was right.




CHAPTER III


    And what if All of animated nature
    Be but as Instruments diversely framed
    That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
    One infinite and intellectual Breeze,
    At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
                  _The AEolian Harp_, S. T. COLERIDGE.

In the train, even before St. John's was passed, a touch of inevitable
reaction had set in, and Rogers asked himself why he was going. For a
sentimental journey was hardly in his line, it seemed. But no
satisfactory answer was forthcoming--none, at least, that a Board or a
Shareholders' Meeting would have considered satisfactory.

There was an answer in him somewhere, but he couldn't quite get down
to it. The spring glory had enticed him back to childhood. The journey
was symbolical of escape. That was the truth. But the part of him that
knew it had lain so long in abeyance that only a whisper flitted
across his mind as he sat looking out of the carriage window at the
fields round Lee and Eltham. The landscape seemed hauntingly familiar,
but what surprised him was the number of known faces that rose and
smiled at him. A kind of dream confusion blurred his outer sight;

At Bexley, as he hurried past, he caught dimly a glimpse of an old
nurse whom he remembered trying to break into bits with a hop-pole he
could barely lift; and, most singular thing, on the Sidcup platform, a
group of noisy schoolboys, with smudged faces and ridiculously small
caps stuck on the back of their heads, had scrambled viciously to get
into his compartment. They carried brown canvas satchels full of
crumpled books and papers, and though the names had mostly escaped
him, he remembered every single face. There was Barlow--big, bony chap
who stammered, bringing his words out with a kind of whistling sneeze.
Barlow had given him his first thrashing for copying his stammer.
There was young Watson, who funked at football and sneaked to a master
about a midnight supper. He stole pocket-money, too, and was expelled.
Then he caught a glimpse of another fellow with sly face and laughing
eyes; the name had vanished, but he was the boy who put jalap in the
music-master's coffee, and received a penny from five or six others
who thus escaped a lesson. All waved their hands to him as the train
hurried away, and the last thing he saw was the station lamp where he
had lit the cigar that made three of them, himself included, deadly
sick. Familiar woods and a little blue-eyed stream then hid the vision
... and a moment later he was standing on the platform of his
childhood's station, giving up his first-class ticket (secretly
ashamed that it was not third) to a station-master-ticket-collector
person who simply was not real at all.

For he had no beard. He was small, too, and insignificant. The way he
had dwindled, with the enormous station that used to be a mile or so
in length, was severely disappointing. That STATION-MASTER with the
beard ought to have lived for ever. His niche in the Temple of Fame
was sure. One evening he had called in full uniform at the house and
asked to see Master Henry Rogers, the boy who had got out 'WHILE-THE-
TRAIN-WAS-STILL-IN-MOTION,' and had lectured him gravely with a face
like death. Never again had he left a train 'whilestillinmotion,'
though it was years before he discovered how his father had engineered
that awful, salutary visit.

He asked casually, in a voice that hardly seemed his own, about the
service back to town, and received the answer with a kind of wonder.
It was so respectful. The porters had not found him out yet; but the
moment they did so, he would have to run. He did not run, however. He
walked slowly down the Station Road, swinging the silver-knobbed cane
the office clerks had given him when he left the City. Leisurely,
without a touch of fear, he passed the Water Works, where the huge
iron crank of the shaft rose and fell with ominous thunder against the
sky. It had once been part of that awful hidden Engine which moved the
world. To go near it was instant death, and he always crossed the road
to avoid it; but this afternoon he went down the cinder pathway so
close that he could touch it with his stick. It was incredible that so
terrible a thing could dwindle in a few years to the dimensions of a
motor piston. The crank that moved up and down like a bending,
gigantic knee looked almost flimsy now. ...

Then the village street came into view and he suddenly smelt the
fields and gardens that topped the hill beyond. The world turned gold
and amber, shining beneath a turquoise sky. There was a rush of
flaming sunsets, one upon another, followed by great green moons, and
hosts of stars that came twinkling across barred windows to his very
bedside ... that grand old Net of Stars he made so cunningly. Cornhill
and Lombard Street flashed back upon him for a second, then dived away
and hid their faces for ever, as he passed the low grey wall beside
the church where first he had seen the lame boy hobbling, and had
realised that the whole world suffered.

A moment he stood here, thinking. He heard the wind sighing in the yew
trees beside the dark brown porch. Rooks were cawing among the elms
across the churchyard, and pigeons wheeled and fluttered about the
grey square tower. The wind, the tower, the weather-stained old porch
--these had not changed. This sunshine and this turquoise sky were
still the same.

The village stopped at the churchyard--significant boundary. No single
building ventured farther; the houses ran the other way instead,
pouring down the steep hill in a cataract of bricks and roofs towards
the station. The hill, once topped, and the churchyard left behind, he
entered the world of fields and little copses. It was just like going
through a gateway. It was a Gateway. The road sloped gently down for
half-a-mile towards the pair of big iron gates that barred the drive
up to the square grey house upon whose lawns he once had chased
butterflies, but from whose upper windows he once had netted--stars.

The spell came over him very strongly then as he went slowly down that
road. The altered scale of distance confused him; the road had
telescoped absurdly; the hayfields were so small. At the turn lay the
pond with yellow duckweed and a bent iron railing that divided it to
keep the cows from crossing. Formerly, of course, that railing had
been put to prevent children drowning in its bottomless depths; all
ponds had been bottomless then, and the weeds had spread to entice the
children to a watery death. But now he could have jumped across it,
weed and railing too, without a run, and he looked in vain for the
shores that once had been so seductively far away. They were mere
dirty, muddy edges.

This general shrinkage in space was very curious. But a similar
contraction, he realised, had taken place in time as well, for,
looking back upon his forty years, they seemed such a little thing
compared to the enormous stretch they offered when he had stood beside
this very pond and looked ahead. He wondered vaguely which was the
reality and which the dream. But his effort was not particularly
successful, and he came to no conclusion. Those years of strenuous
business life were like a few weeks, yet their golden results were in
his pockets. Those years of childhood had condensed into a jumble of
sunny hours, yet their golden harvest was equally in his heart. Time
and space were mere bits of elastic that could stretch or shrink as
thought directed, feeling chose. And now both thought and feeling
chose emphatically. He stepped back swiftly. His mind seemed filled
with stars and butterflies and childhood's figures of wonder.
Childhood took him prisoner.

It was curious at first, though, how the acquired nature made a
struggle to assert itself, and the practical side of him, developed in
the busy markets of the world, protested. It was automatic rather, and
at best not very persistent; it soon died away. But, seeing the gravel
everywhere, he wondered if there might not be valuable clay about,
what labour cost, and what the nearest stations were for haulage; and,
seeing the hop-poles, he caught himself speculating what wood they
were made of, and what varnish would best prevent their buried points
from going rotten in this particular soil. There was a surge of
practical considerations, but quickly fading. The last one was stirred
by the dust of a leisurely butcher's cart. He had visions of a paste
for motor-roads, or something to lay dust ... but, before the dust had
settled again through the sunshine about his feet, or the rumble of
the cart died away into distance, the thought vanished like a
nightmare in the dawn. It ran away over the switchback of the years,
uphill to Midsummer, downhill to Christmas, jumping a ditch at Easter,
and a hedge at that terrible thing known as ''Clipse of the Moon.' The
leaves of the elm trees whispered overhead. He was moving through an
avenue that led towards big iron gates beside a little porter's lodge.
He saw the hollies, and smelt the laurustinus. There lay the triangle
of uncut grass at the cross-roads, the long, grey, wooden palings
built upon moss-grown bricks; and against the sky he just caught a
glimpse of the feathery, velvet cedar crests, crests that once held
nails of golden meteors for his Net of Stars.

Determined to enjoy his cake and eat it at the same time as long as
possible, he walked down the road a little distance, eyeing the lawns
and windows of the house through narrow gaps between the boarding of
the fence. He prolonged the pleasures of anticipation thus, and,
besides, he wished to see if the place was occupied or empty. It
looked unkempt rather, the gardens somewhat neglected, and yet there
hung an air of occupancy about it all. He had heard the house had
changed hands several times. But it was difficult to see clearly; the
sunshine dazzled; the lilac and laburnum scattered sheets of colour
through which the shadows wove themselves an obscuring veil, He kept
seeing butterflies and chasing them with his sight.

'Can you tell me if this house is occupied?' he asked abruptly of an
old gentleman who coughed suddenly behind him.

It was an explanation as well as a question, for the passer-by had
surprised him in a remarkable attitude. He was standing on tiptoe upon
the parapet of brick, pulling himself up above the fence by his hands,
and his hat had fallen into the road.

'The shrubberies are so dense I can't see through them,' he added,
landing upon his feet with a jump, a little breathless. He felt rather
foolish. He was glad the stranger was not Minks or one of his fellow
directors. 'The fact is I lived here as a boy. I'm not a burglar.'

But the old gentleman--a clergyman apparently--stood there smiling
without a word as he handed him the fallen hat. He was staring rather
intently into his eyes.

'Ahem!' coughed Mr. Rogers, to fill an awkward gap. 'You're very kind,
sir,' and he took the hat and brushed the dust off. Something brushed
off his sight and memory at the same time.

'Ahem' coughed the other, still staring. 'Please do not mention it---'
adding after a second's pause, to the complete amazement of his
listener, 'Mr. Rogers.'

And then it dawned upon him. Something in the charming, peace-lit face
was strangely familiar.

'I say,' he exclaimed eagerly, 'this is a pleasure,' and then repeated
with even greater emphasis, 'but this is a pleasure, indeed. Who ever
would have thought it?' he added with delicious ambiguity. He seized
the outstretched hand and shook it warmly--the hand of the old vicar
who had once been his tutor too.

'You've come back to your boyhood, then. Is that it? And to see the
old place and--your old friends?' asked the other with his beautiful,
kindly smile that even false quantities had never been able to spoil.
'We've not forgotten you as you've forgotten us, you see,' he added;
'and the place, though empty now for years, has not forgotten you
either, I'll be bound.'

They stood there in the sunshine on the dusty road talking of a
hundred half-forgotten things, as the haze of memory lifted, and
scenes and pictures, names and faces, details of fun and mischief
rained upon him like flowers in a sudden wind of spring. The voice and
face of his old tutor bridged the years like magic. Time had stood
still here in this fair Kentish garden. The little man in black who
came every Saturday morning with his dingy bag had forgotten to wind
the clocks, perhaps. ...

'But you will like to go inside and see it all for yourself--alone,'
the Vicar said at length. 'My housekeeper has the keys. I'll send a
boy with them to the lodge. It won't take five minutes. And then you
must come up to the Vicarage for tea--or dinner if you're kept--and
stay the night. My married daughter-you remember Joan and May, of
course?--is with us just now; she'll be so very glad to see you. You
know the way.'

And he moved off down the country road, still vigorous at seventy,
with his black straw hat and big square-toed boots, his shoulders
hardly more bent than when his mischievous pupil had called every
morning with Vergil and Todhunter underneath one arm, and in his heart
a lust to hurry after sleepy rabbits in the field.

'My married daughter--you remember May?'

The blue-eyed girl of his boyhood passion flitted beside his
disappearing figure. He remembered the last time he saw her--refusing
to help her from a place of danger in the cedar branches--when he put
his love into a single eloquent phrase: 'You silly ass!' then cast her
adrift for ever because she said 'Thanks awfully,' and gave him a
great wet kiss. But he thought a lot of her all the same, and the
thoughts had continued until the uproar in the City drowned them.

Thoughts crowded thick and fast.

How vital thinking was after all! Nothing seemed able to kill its
eternal pictures. The coincidence of meeting his old tutor again was
like a story-book, though in reality likely enough; for his own face
was not so greatly altered by the close brown beard perhaps; and the
Vicar had grown smaller, that was all. Like everything else, he had
shrunk, of course-like road and station-master and water-works. He had
almost said, 'You, too, have shrunk'--but otherwise was the same old
fluffy personality that no doubt still got sadly muddled in his
sermons, gave out wrong hymns, and spent his entire worldly substance
on his scattered parish. His voice was softer too. It rang in his ears
still, as though there had been no break of over two decades. The hum
of bees and scythes was in it just as when it came through the open
study window while he construed the _Georgics_. ... But, most clearly
of all, he heard two sentences--

'You have come back to your boyhood,' and 'The empty place has not
forgotten you, I'll be bound.' Both seemed significant. They hummed
and murmured through his mind. That old net of starlight somehow
caught them in its golden meshes.




CHAPTER IV


     A Spirit gripped him by the hair and carried him far away,
     Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the
        Milky Way:
     Till he heard the roar of the Milky Way die down and drone and
        cease.
                                 Tomlinson, R. KIPLING.

The boy presently came up in a cloud of dust with the key, and ran off
again with a shilling in his pocket, while Henry Rogers, budding
philanthropist and re-awakening dreamer, went down the hill of
memories at high speed that a doctor would have said was dangerous, a
philosopher morbid, and the City decreed unanimously as waste of time.

He went over the house from cellar to ceiling...

And finally he passed through a back door in the scullery and came out
upon the lawn. With a shock he realised that a long time had
intervened. The dusk was falling. The rustle of its wings was already
in the shrubberies. He had missed the tea hour altogether. And, as he
walked there, so softly that he hardly disturbed the thrushes that
busily tapped the dewy grass for supper, he knew suddenly that he was
not alone, but that shadowy figures hid everywhere, watching, waiting,
wondering like himself. They trooped after him, invisible and silent,
as he went about the old familiar garden, finding nothing changed.
They were so real that once he stopped beneath the lime trees, where
afternoon tea was served in summer, and where the Long Walk began its
haunted, shadowy existence--stood still a moment and called to them--

'Is any one there? Come out and show yourselves....!'

And though his voice fell dead among the foliage, winning echoes from
spots whence no echoes possibly could come, and rushing back upon him
like a boomerang, he got the curious impression that it had penetrated
into certain corners of the shrubberies where it had been heard and
understood. Answers did not come. They were no more audible than the
tapping of the thrushes, or the little feet of darkness that ran
towards him from the eastern sky. But they were there. The troop of
Presences drew closer. They had been creeping on all fours. They now
stood up. The entire garden was inhabited and alive.

_'He has come back!'_

It ran in a muted whisper like a hush of wind. The thrill of it passed
across the lawn in the dusk. The dark tunnel of the Long Walk filled
suddenly to the brim. The thrushes raised their heads, peeping
sideways to listen, on their guard. Then the leaves opened a little
and the troop ventured nearer. The doors and windows of the silent,
staring house had also opened. From the high nursery windows
especially, queer shapes of shadow flitted down to join the others.
For the sun was far away behind the cedars now, and that Net of
Starlight dropped downwards through the air. So carefully had he woven
it years ago that hardly a mesh was torn....

_'He has come back again...!'_ the whisper ran a second time, and he
looked about him for a place where he could hide.

But there was no place. Escape from the golden net was now
impossible....

Then suddenly, looming against the field that held the Gravel-Pit and
the sleeping rabbits, he saw the outline of the Third Class Railway
Carriage his father bought as a Christmas present, still standing on
the stone supports that were borrowed from a haystack.

That Railway Carriage had filled whole years with joy and wonder. They
had called it the Starlight Express. It had four doors, real lamps in
the roof, windows that opened and shut, and big round buffers. It
started without warning. It went at full speed in a moment. It was
never really still. The footboards were endless and very dangerous.

He saw the carriage with its four compartments still standing there in
the hay field. It looked mysterious, old, and enormous as ever. There
it still stood as in his boyhood days, but stood neglected and unused.

The memory of the thrilling journeys he had made in this Starlight
Express completed his recapture, for he knew now who the troop of
Presences all about him really were. The passengers, still waiting
after twenty years' delay, thinking perhaps the train would never
start again, were now impatient. They had caught their engine-driver
again at last. Steam was up. Already the blackbirds whistled. And
something utterly wild and reckless in him passionately broke its
bonds with a flood of longings that no amount of years or 'Cities'
could ever subdue again. He stepped out from the dozing lime trees and
held his hat up like a flag.

'Take your seats,' he cried as of old, 'for the Starlight Express.
Take your seats! No luggage allowed! Animals free! Passengers with
special tickets may drive the engine in their turn! First stop the
Milky Way for hot refreshments! Take your seats, or stay at home for
ever!'

It was the old cry, still remembered accurately; and the response was
immediate. The rush of travellers from the Long Walk nearly took him
off his feet. From the house came streams of silent figures, families
from the shrubberies, tourists from the laurels by the scullery
windows, and throngs of breathless oddities from the kitchen-garden.
The lawn was littered with discarded luggage; umbrellas dropped on
flower-beds, where they instantly took root and grew; animals ran
scuttling among them--birds, ponies, dogs, kittens, donkeys, and white
mice in trailing swarms. There was not a minute to spare. One big
Newfoundland brought several Persian kittens on his back, their tails
behind them in the air like signals; a dignified black retriever held
a baby in his mouth; and fat children by the score, with unfastened
clothes and smudged faces, many of them in their nightclothes, poured
along in hurrying, silent crowds, softer than clouds that hide a
crescent moon in summer.

'But this is impossible,' he cried to himself. 'The multiplication
tables have gone wrong. The City has driven me mad. No shareholder
would stand such a thing for a minute!'

While, at the same time, that other voice in him kept shouting, ever
more loudly--

'Take your seats! Take your seats! The Starlight Express is off to
Fairyland! Show your tickets! Show your tickets!'

He laughed with happiness.

The throng and rush were at first so great that he recognised hardly
any of the passengers; but, the first press over, he saw several
bringing up the rear who were as familiar as of yesterday. They nodded
kindly to him as they passed, no sign of reproach for the long delay
in their friendly eyes. He had left his place beside the lime trees,
and now stood at the carriage door, taking careful note of each one as
he showed his ticket to the Guard. And the Guard was the blue-eyed
girl. She did not clip the tickets, but merely looked at them. She
looked, first at the ticket, then into the face of the passenger. The
glance of the blue eyes was the passport. Of course, he remembered
now--both guard and engine-driver were obliged to have blue eyes. Blue
eyes furnished the motor-power and scenery and everything. It was the
spell that managed the whole business--the Spell of the Big Blue eyes
--blue, the colour of youth and distance, of sky and summer flowers,
of
childhood.

He watched these last passengers come up one by one, and as they filed
past him he exchanged a word with each. How pleased they were to see
him! But how ashamed he felt for having been so long away. Not one,
however, reminded him of it, and--what touched him most of all--not
one suspected he had nearly gone for good. All knew he would come
back.

What looked like a rag-and-bone man blundered up first, his face a
perfect tangle of beard and hair, and the eyebrows like bits of tow
stuck on with sealing-wax. It was The Tramp--Traveller of the World,
the Eternal Wanderer, homeless as the wind; his vivid personality had
haunted all the lanes of childhood. And, as Rogers nodded kindly to
him, the figure waited for something more.

'Ain't forgot the rhyme, 'ave yer?' he asked in a husky voice that
seemed to issue from the ground beneath his broken boots. 'The rhyme
we used to sing together in the Noight-Nursery when I put my faice
agin' the bars, after climbin' along 'arf a mile of slippery slaites
to git there.'

And Rogers, smiling, found himself saying it, while the pretty Guard
fixed her blue eyes on his face and waited patiently:--

     I travel far and wide,
     But in my own inside!
     Such places
     And queer races!
     I never go to them, you see,
     _Because they always come to me!_

'Take your seat, please,' cried the Guard. 'No luggage, you know!' She
pushed him in sideways, first making him drop his dirty bundle.

With a quick, light step a very thin man hurried up. He had no
luggage, but carried on his shoulder a long stick with a point of gold
at its tip.

'Light the lamps,' said the Guard impatiently, 'and then sit on the
back buffers and hold your pole out to warn the shooting stars.'

He hopped in, though not before Rogers had passed the time of night
with him first:--

     I stand behind the sky, and light the stars,--
     Except on cloudy nights;
     And then my head
     Remains in bed,
     And takes along the ceiling--easier flights!

Others followed quickly then, too quickly for complete recognition.
Besides, the Guard was getting more and more impatient.

'You've clean forgotten _me_,' said one who had an awful air of
darkness about him; 'and no wonder, because you never saw me properly.
On Sundays, when I was nicely washed up you couldn't 'ardly reckernise
me. Nachural 'nuff, too!'

He shot by like a shadow, then pulled up a window with a rattle,
popped his dirty head out, and called back thickly as if his mouth was
full of smoke or pudding:--

     The darkness suits _me_ best,
     For my old face
     Is out of place,
     Except in chimney stacks!
     Upon my crown
     The soot comes down
     Filling my eyes with blacks.
     Don't light the fire,
     Or I'd--.

'Stop it!' cried the Guard, shutting the window with a snap, so that
Rogers never knew whether the missing word used to be 'expire' or
'perspire'; 'and go on to your proper place on the tender.' Then she
turned quickly to fix her big blue eyes upon the next comer. And how
they did come, to be sure! There was the Gypsy, the Creature of the
Gravel-Pit, the long-legged, long-armed thing from the Long Walk--she
could make her arm stretch the whole length like elastic--the enormous
Woman of the Haystack, who lived beneath the huge tarpaulin cover, the
owner of the Big Cedar, and the owner of the Little Cedar, all
treading fast upon one another's heels.

From the Blue Summer-house came the Laugher. Rogers remembered
pretending once that he was going to faint. He had thrown himself upon
the summer-house floor and kicked, and the blue-eyed girl, instead of
being thrilled as both anticipated, had laughed abominably.

'Painters don't kick!' she had said with scorn, while he had answered,
though without conviction, 'Men-fainters do--kick dreadfully.' And she
had simply laughed till her sides ached, while he lay there kicking
till his muscles were sore, in the vain hope of winning her belief.

He exchanged a glance with her now, as the Laugher slipped in past
them. The eyes of the Guard were very soft. He was found out and
forgiven at the same time.

Then came the very mysterious figure of authority--the Head Gardener,
a composite being who included all the lesser under-gardeners as well.
His sunburned face presented a resume of them all. He was the man who
burned the hills of dead leaves in autumn.

'Give me of your fire, please,' whispered Rogers, something between
joy and sadness in his heart, 'for there are hills of leaves that I
would burn up quickly--' but the man hurried on, tossing his trowel
over the Guard's head, and nearly hitting another passenger who
followed too close. This was the Woman of the Haystack, an enormous,
spreading traveller who utterly refused to be hurried, and only
squeezed through the door because Rogers, the Guard, and several
others pushed behind with all their might, while the Sweep, the Tramp,
and those already in tugged breathlessly at the same time....

Last of all, just as the train was starting, came a hurrying shadowy
thing with dreamy eyes, long hair like waving grass, and open hands
that he spread like wings, as though he were sowing something through
the air. And he was singing softly as he came fumbling along the
byeways of the dusk.

'Oh, but I know _you_ well,' cried Rogers, watching him come with a
thrill of secret wonder, 'and I love you better than all the rest
together.'

The face was hidden as he wafted silently past them. A delicious odour
followed him. And something, fine as star-dust, as he scattered it all
about him, sifted down before the other's sight. The Dustman entered
like a ghost.

'Oh, give me of your dust!' cried Rogers again, 'for there are eyes
that I would blind with it--eyes in the world that I would blind with
it--your dust of dreams and beauty...!'

The man waved a shadowy hand towards him, and his own eyes filled. He
closed the lids a moment; and when he opened them again he saw two
monster meteors in the sky. They crossed in two big lines of glory
above the house, dropping towards the cedars. The Net of Stars was
being fastened. He remembered then his old Star Cave--cave where lost
starlight was stored up by these sprites for future use.

He just had time to seize the little hand the Guard held out, and to
drop into a seat beside her, when the train began to move. It rose
soundlessly with lightning speed. It shot up to a tremendous height,
then paused, hovering in the night.

The Guard turned her big blue eyes upon him.

'Where to?' she whispered. And he suddenly remembered that it was
always he who decided the destination, and that this time he was at a
loss what to say.

'The Star Cave, of course,' he cried, 'the cave where the lost
starlight gathers.'

'Which direction?' she asked, with the yellow whistle to her lips
ready to signal the driver.

'Oh, out there--to the north-west,' he answered, 'to the mountains of
--across the Channel.'

But this was not precise enough. Formerly he had always given very
precise directions.

'Name, please,' she urged, 'but quickly. The Interfering Sun, you
know--there's no time to lose. We shall be meeting the Morning Spiders
soon.'

The Morning Spiders! How it all came back! The Morning Spiders that
fly over the fields in the dawn upon their private threads of gossamer
and fairy cotton.

He remembered that, as children, they had never actually found this
Star Cave, for the Interfering Sun had always come too soon and spoilt
it all.

'Name, please, and do hurry up. We can't hover here all night,' rang
in his ears.

And he made a plunge. He suddenly thought of Bourcelles, the little
village in the Jura mountains, where he and his cousin had spent a
year learning French. The idea flashed into him probably because it
contained mountains, caves, and children. His cousin lived there now
to educate his children and write his books. Only that morning he had
got a letter from him.

'Bourcelles, of course, Bourcelles!' he cried, 'and steer for the
slopes of Boudry where the forests dip towards the precipices of the
Areuse. I'll send word to the children to meet us.'

'Splendid!' cried the Guard, and kissed him with delight. The whistle
shrieked, the train turned swiftly in a tremendous sweeping curve, and
vanished along the intricate star-rails into space, humming and
booming as it went. It flew a mane of stars behind it through the sky.




CHAPTER V


     Oh! thou art fairer than the evening air
     Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
                   Doctor Famtus, CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.

The plop of a water-rat in the pond that occupied the rock-garden in
the middle of the lawn brought him back to earth, and the Vicar's
invitation to tea flashed across his mind.

'Stock Exchange and typewriters!' he exclaimed, 'how rude he'll think
me!' And he rubbed something out of his eyes. He gave one long,
yearning glance at the spangled sky where an inquisitive bat darted
zigzag several times between himself and the Pleiades, that bunch of
star-babies as yet unborn, as the blue-eyed guard used to call them.

'And I shall miss my supper and bed into the bargain!'

He turned reluctantly from his place beside the lime trees, and
crossed the lawn now wet with dew. The whole house seemed to turn its
hooded head and watch him go, staring with amusement in its many
lidless eyes. On the front lawn there was more light, for it faced the
dying sunset. The Big and Little Cedar rose from their pools of
shadow, beautifully poised. Like stately dowagers in voluminous skirts
of velvet they seemed to curtsey to him as he passed. Stars like
clusters of sprinkled blossoms hung upon their dignified old heads.
The whole place seemed aware of him. Glancing a moment at the upper
nursery windows, he could just distinguish the bars through which his
little hands once netted stars, and as he did so a meteor shot across
the sky its flashing light of wonder. Behind the Little Cedar it dived
into the sunset afterglow. And, hardly had it dipped away, when
another, coming crosswise from the south, drove its length of molten,
shining wire straight against the shoulder of the Big Cedar.

The whole performance seemed arranged expressly for his benefit. The
Net was loosed--this Net of Stars and Thoughts--perhaps to go
elsewhere. For this was taking out the golden nails, surely. It would
hardly have surprised him next to see the Starlight Express he had
been dreaming about dart across the heavens overhead. That cool air
stealing towards him from the kitchen-garden might well have been the
wind of its going. He could almost hear the distant rush and murmur of
its flying mass.

'How extraordinarily vivid it all was!' he thought to himself, as he
hurried down the drive. 'What detail! What a sense of reality! How
carefully I must have _thought_ these creatures as a boy! How
thoroughly! And what a good idea to go out and see Jack's children at
Bourcelles. They've never known these English sprites. I'll introduce
'em!'

He thought it out in detail, very vividly indeed. His imagination
lingered over it and gave it singular reality.

Up the road he fairly ran. For Henry Rogers was a punctual man; these
last twenty years he had never once been late for anything. It had
been part of the exact training he had schooled himself with, and the
Vicar's invitation was not one he desired to trifle with. He made his
peace, indeed, easily enough, although the excuses sounded a little
thin. It was something of a shock, too, to find that the married
daughter after all was not the blue-eyed girl of his boyhood's
passion. For it was Joan, not May, who came down the gravel path
between the roses to greet him.

On the way up he had felt puzzled. Yet 'bemused,' perhaps, is the word
that Herbert Minks would have chosen for one of his poems, to describe
a state of mind he, however, had never experienced himself. And he
would have chosen it instinctively--for onomatopoeic reasons--because
it hums and drones and murmurs dreamily. 'Puzzled' was too sharp a
word.

Yet Henry Rogers, who felt it, said 'puzzled' without more ado,
although mind, imagination, memory all hummed and buzzed pleasantly
about his ears even while he did so.

'A dream is a dream,' he reflected as he raced along the familiar
dusty road in the twilight, 'and a reverie is a reverie; but that, I'd
swear, went a bit further than either one or t'other. It puzzles me.
Does vivid thinking, I wonder, make pictures everywhere?... And--can
they last?'

For the detailed reality of the experience had been remarkable, and
the actuality of those childhood's creations scarcely belonged to
dream or reverie. They were certainly quite as real as the sleek
Directors who sat round the long Board Room table, fidgeting with fat
quill pens and pewter ink-pots; more alive even than the Leading
Shareholder who rose so pompously at Annual Meetings to second the
resolution that the 'Report and Balance Sheet be adopted without
criticism.'

And he was conscious that in himself rose, too, a deep, passionate
willingness to accept the whole experience, also 'without criticism.'
Those picturesque passengers in the Starlight Express he knew so
intimately, so affectionately, that he actually missed them. He felt
that he had said good-bye to genuine people. He regretted their
departure, and was keenly sorry he had not gone off with them--such a
merry, wild, adventurous crew! He must find them again, whatever
happened. There was a yearning in him to travel with that blue-eyed
guard among the star-fields. He would go out to Bourcelles and tell
the story to the children. He thought very hard indeed about it all.

And now, in the Vicarage drawing-room after dinner, his bemusement
increased rather than grew less. His mind had already confused a face
and name. The blue-eyed May was not, after all, the girl of his
boyhood's dream. His memory had been accurate enough with the
passengers in the train. There was no confusion there. But this gentle
married woman, who sang to her own accompaniment at her father's
request, was not the mischievous, wilful creature who had teased and
tortured his heart in years gone by, and had helped him construct the
sprites and train and star-trips. It was, surely, the other daughter
who had played that delicious role. Yet, either his memory was at
fault, or the Vicar had mixed the names up. The years had played this
little unimportant trick upon him anyhow. And that was clear.

But if with so-called real people such an error was possible, how
could he be sure of anything? Which after all, he asked himself, was
real? It was the Vicar's mistake, he learned later, for May was now a
teacher in London; but the trivial incident served to point this
confusion in his mind between an outer and an inner world--to the
disadvantage, if anything, of the former.

And over the glass of port together, while they talked pleasantly of
vanished days, Rogers was conscious that a queer, secret amusement
sheltered in his heart, due to some faint, superior knowledge that
this Past they spoke of had not moved away at all, but listened with
fun and laughter just behind his shoulder, watching them. The old
gentleman seemed never tired of remembering his escapades. He told
them one after another, like some affectionate nurse or mother, Rogers
thought, whose children were--to her--unique and wonderful. For he had
really loved this good-for-nothing pupil, loved him the more, as
mothers and nurses do, because of the trouble he had given, and
because of his busy and fertile imagination. It made Rogers feel
ridiculously young again as he listened. He could almost have played a
trick upon him then and there, merely to justify the tales. And once
or twice he actually called him 'Sir.' So that even the conversation
helped to deepen this bemusement that gathered somewhat tenderly about
his mind. He cracked his walnuts and watched the genial, peace-lit
eyes across the table. He chuckled. Both chuckled. They spoke of his
worldly success too--it seemed unimportant somehow now, although he
was conscious that something in him expected, nay demanded tribute--
but the former tutor kept reverting to the earlier days before
achievement.

'You were indeed a boy of mischief, wonder, and mystery,' he said, his
eyes twinkling and his tone almost affectionate; 'you made the whole
place alive with those creatures of your imagination. How Joan helped
you too--or was it May? I used to wonder sometimes--' he glanced up
rather searchingly at his companion a moment--' whether the people who
took the Manor House after your family left did not encounter them
sometimes upon the lawn or among the shrubberies in the dusk--those
sprites of yours. Eh?' He passed a neatly pared walnut across the
table to his guest. 'These ghosts that people nowadays explain
scientifically--what are they but thoughts visualised by vivid
thinking such as yours was--creative thinking? They may be just
pictures created in moments of strong passionate feeling that persist
for centuries and reach other minds direct They're not seen with the
outer eye; that's certain, for no two people ever see them together.
But I'm sure these pictures flame up through the mind sometimes just
as clearly as some folk see Grey Ladies and the rest flit down the
stairs at midnight.'

They munched their walnuts a moment in silence. Rogers listened very
keenly. How curious, he reflected, that the talk should lie this way.
But he said nothing, hoping that the other would go on.

'And if you really believed in your things,' the older man continued
presently, 'as I am sure you did believe, then your old Dustman and
Sweep and Lamplighter, your Woman of the Haystack and your Net of
Stars and Star Train--all these, for instance, must still be living,
where you left them, waiting perhaps for your return to lead their
fresh adventures.'

Rogers stared at him, choking a little over a nut he had swallowed too
hurriedly.

'Yet,' mused on the other, 'it's hardly likely the family that
succeeded you met them. There were no children!'

'Ah,' exclaimed the pupil impulsively, 'that's significant, yes--no
children.' He looked up quickly, questioningly.

'Very, I admit.'

'Besides, the chief Magician had gone away into the City. They
wouldn't answer to anybody's call, you know.'

'True again. But the Magician never forgot them quite, I'll be bound,'
he added. 'They're only in hiding till his return, perhaps!' And his
bright eyes twinkled knowingly.

'But, Vicar, really, you know, that is an extraordinary idea you have
there-a wonderful idea. Do you really think--?'

'I only mean,' the other replied more gravely, 'that what a man
thinks, and makes with thinking, is the real thing. It's in the heart
that sin is first real. The act is the least important end of it--
grave only because it is the inevitable result of the thinking. Action
is merely delayed thinking, after all. Don't think ghosts and bogeys,
I always say to children, or you'll surely see them.'

'Ah, in _that_ sense--!'

'In any sense your mind and intuition can grasp. The thought that
leaves your brain, provided it be a real thought strongly fashioned,
goes all over the world, and may reach any other brain tuned to its
acceptance. _You_ should understand that!' he laughed significantly.

'I do,' said Rogers hastily, as though he felt ashamed of himself or
were acknowledging a fault in his construing of Homer. 'I understand
it perfectly. Only I put all those things--imaginative things--aside
when I went into business. I had to concentrate my energies upon
making money.'

'You did, yes. Ah!' was the rejoinder, as though he would fain have
added, 'And was that wise?'

'And I made it, Vicar; you see, I've made it.' He was not exactly
nettled, but he wanted a word of recognition for his success. 'But you
know why, don't you?' he added, ashamed the same moment. There was a
pause, during which both looked closely at their broken nuts. From one
of the men came a sigh.

'Yes,' resumed the older man presently, 'I remember your great dream
perfectly well, and a noble one it was too. Its fulfilment now, I
suppose, lies well within your reach? You have the means to carry it
out, eh? You have indeed been truly blessed.' He eyed him again with
uncommon keenness, though a smile ran from the eyes and mouth even up
to the forehead and silvery hair. 'The world, I see, has not yet
poisoned you. To carry it out as you once explained it to me would be
indeed success. If I remember rightly,' he added, 'it was a--er--a
Scheme for Disabled--'

Rogers interrupted him quickly. 'And I am full of the same big dream
still,' he repeated almost shyly. 'The money I have made I regard as
lent to me for investment. I wish to use it, to give it away as one
gives flowers. I feel sure--'

He stopped abruptly, caught by the glow of enthusiasm that had leaped
into the other's face with a strangely beautiful expression.

'You never did anything by halves, I remember,' the Vicar said,
looking at him proudly. 'You were always in earnest, even in your
play, and I don't mind telling you that I've often prayed for
something of that zeal of yours--that zeal for others. It's a
remarkable gift. You will never bury it, will you?' He spoke eagerly,
passionately, leaning forward a little across the table. 'Few have it
nowadays; it grows rarer with the luxury and self-seeking of the age.
It struck me so in you as a boy, that even your sprites worked not for
themselves but for others--your Dustman, your Sweep, your absurd
Lamplighter, all were busy doing wonderful things to help their
neighbours, all, too, without reward.'

Rogers flushed like a boy. But he felt the thrill of his dream course
through him like great fires. Wherein was any single thing in the
world worth doing, any object of life worth following, unless as means
to an end, and that end helping some one else. One's own little
personal dreams became exhausted in a few years, endeavours for self
smothered beneath the rain of disappointments; but others, and work
for others, this was endless and inexhaustible.

'I've sometimes thought,' he heard the older man going on, 'that in
the dusk I saw'--his voice lowered and he glanced towards the windows
where the rose trees stood like little figures, cloaked and bonneted
with beauty beneath the stars--'that I saw your Dustman scattering his
golden powder as he came softly up the path, and that some of it
reached my own eyes, too; or that your swift Lamplighter lent me a
moment his gold-tipped rod of office so that I might light fires of
hope in suffering hearts here in this tiny world of my own parish.
Your dreadful Head Gardener, too! And your Song of the Blue-Eyes
Fairy,' he added slyly, almost mischievously, 'you remember that, I
wonder?'

'H'm--a little, yes--something,' replied Rogers confusedly. 'It was a
dreadful doggerel. But I've got a secretary now,' he continued
hurriedly and in rather a louder voice,' a fellow named Minks, a jewel
really of a secretary he is--and he, I believe, can write real--'

'It was charming enough for us all to have remembered it, anyhow,' the
Vicar stopped him, smiling at his blushes,' and for May--or was it
Joan? dear me, how I do forget names!--to have set it to music. She
had a little gift that way, you may remember; and, before she took up
teaching she wrote one or two little things like that.'

'Ah, did she really?' murmured the other. He scarcely knew what he was
saying, for a mist of blue had risen before his eyes, and in it he was
seeing pictures. 'The Spell of Blue, wasn't it, or something like
that?' he said a moment later, 'blue, the colour of beauty in flowers,
sea, sky, distance--the childhood colour par excellence?'

'But chiefly in the eyes of children, yes,' the Vicar helped him,
rising at the same time from the table. 'It was the spell, the
passport, the open sesame to most of your adventures. Come now, if you
won't have another glass of port, and we'll go into the drawing-room,
and Joan, May I mean--no, Joan, of course, shall sing it to you. For
this is a very special occasion for us, you know,' he added as they
passed across the threshold side by side. 'To see you is to go back
with you to Fairyland.'

The piano was being idly strummed as they went in, and the player was
easily persuaded to sing the little song. It floated through the open
windows and across the lawn as the two men in their corners listened.
She knew it by heart, as though she often played it. The candles were
not lit. Dusk caught the sound and muted it enchantingly. And somehow
the simple melody helped to conceal the meagreness of the childish
words. Everywhere, from sky and lawn and solemn trees, the Past came
softly in and listened too.

    There's a Fairy that hides in the beautiful eyes
    Of children who treat her well;
    In the little round hole where the eyeball lies
    She weaves her magical spell.

    Oh, tell it to me,
    Oh, how can it be,
    This Spell of the Blue-Eyes Fairy.

    Well,--the eyes must be blue,
    And the heart must be true,
    And the child must be _better_ than gold;
    And then, if you'll let her,
    The quicker the better,
    She'll make you forget that you're old,
    That you're heavy and stupid, and--old!

    So, if such a child you should chance to see,
    Or with such a child to play,
    No matter how weary and dull you be,
    Nor how many tons you weigh;
    You will suddenly find that you're young again,
    And your movements are light and airy,
    And you'll try to be solemn and stiff in vain--
    It's the Spell of the Blue-Eyes Fairy!

    Now I've told it to you,
    And you _know_ it is true--
    It's the Spell of the Blue-Eyes Fairy!

'And it's the same spell,' said the old man in his corner as the last
notes died away, and they sat on some minutes longer in the fragrant
darkness, 'that you cast about us as a boy, Henry Rogers, when you
made that wonderful Net of Stars and fastened it with your comets'
nails to the big and little cedars. The one catches your heart, you
see, while the other gets your feet and head and arms till you're a
hopeless prisoner--a prisoner in Fairyland.'

'Only the world to-day no longer believes in Fairyland,' was the
reply, 'and even the children have become scientific. Perhaps it's
only buried though. The two ought to run in harness really--opposite
interpretations of the universe. One might revive it--here and there
perhaps. Without it, all the tenderness seems leaking out of life--'

Joan presently said good-night, but the other two waited on a little
longer; and before going to bed they took a turn outside among the
flower-beds and fruit-trees that formed the tangled Vicarage garden at
the back. It was uncommonly warm for a night in early spring. The
lilacs were in bud, and the air most exquisitely scented.

Rogers felt himself swept back wonderfully among his early years. It
seemed almost naughty to be out at such an hour instead of asleep in
bed. It was quite ridiculous--but he loved the feeling and let himself
go with happy willingness. The story of 'Vice Versa,' where a man
really became a boy again, passed through his mind and made him laugh.

And the old Vicar kept on feeding the semi-serious mood with what
seemed almost intentional sly digs. Yet the digs were not intentional,
really; it was merely that his listener, already prepared by his
experience with the Starlight Express, read into them these searching
meanings of his own. Something in him was deeply moved.

'You might make a great teacher, you know,' suggested his companion,
stooping to sniff a lilac branch as they paused a moment. 'I thought
so years ago; I think so still. You've kept yourself so simple.'

'How not to do most things,' laughed the other, glad of the darkness.

'How to do the big and simple things,' was the rejoinder; 'and do them
well, without applause. You have Belief.'

'Too much, perhaps. I simply can't get rid of it.'

'Don't try to. It's belief that moves the world; people want teachers
--that's my experience in the pulpit and the parish; a world in
miniature, after all--but they won't listen to a teacher who hasn't
got it. There are no great poets to-day, only great discoverers. The
poets, the interpreters of discovery, are gone--starved out of life by
ridicule, and by questions to which exact answers are impossible. With
your imagination and belief you might help a world far larger than
this parish of mine at any rate. I envy you.'

Goodness! how the kind eyes searched his own in this darkness. Though
little susceptible to flattery, he was aware of something huge the
words stirred in the depths of him, something far bigger than he yet
had dreamed of even in his boyhood, something that made his cherished
Scheme seem a little pale and faded.

'Take the whole world with you into fairyland,' he heard the low voice
come murmuring in his ear across the lilacs. And there was starlight
in it--that gentle, steady brilliance that steals into people while
they sleep and dream, tracing patterns of glory they may recognise
when they wake, yet marvelling whence it came. 'The world wants its
fairyland back again, and won't be happy till it gets it.'

A bird listening to them in the stillness sang a little burst of song,
then paused again to listen.

'Once give them of your magic, and each may shape his fairyland as he
chooses...' the musical voice ran on.

The flowers seemed alive and walking. This was a voice of beauty. Some
lilac bud was singing in its sleep. Sirius had dropped a ray across
its lips of blue and coaxed it out to dance. There was a murmur and a
stir among the fruit-trees too. The apple blossoms painted the
darkness with their tiny fluttering dresses, while old Aldebaran
trimmed them silently with gold, and partners from the Milky Way swept
rustling down to lead the violets out. Oh, there was revelry to-night,
and the fairy spell of the blue-eyed Spring was irresistible....

'But the world will never dance,' he whispered sadly, half to himself
perhaps; 'it's far too weary.'

'It will follow a leader,' came the soft reply, 'who dances well and
pipes the true old music so that it can hear. Belief inspires it
always. And that Belief you have.' There was a curious vibration in
his voice; he spoke from his heart, and his heart was evidently moved.

'I wonder when it came to me, then, and how?'

The Vicar turned and faced him where they stood beneath the lime
trees. Their scent was pouring out as from phials uncorked by the
stars.

'It came,' he caught the answer that thrilled with earnestness, 'when
you saw the lame boy on the village hill and cried. As long ago as
that it came.'

His mind, as he listened, became a plot of fresh-turned earth the Head
Gardener filled with flowers. A mass of covering stuff the years had
laid ever thicker and thicker was being shovelled away. The flowers he
saw being planted there were very tiny ones. But they would grow. A
leaf from some far-off rocky mount of olive trees dropped fluttering
through the air and marvellously took root and grew. He felt for a
moment the breath of night air that has been tamed by an eastern sun.
He saw a group of men, bare-headed, standing on the slopes, and in
front of them a figure of glory teaching little, simple things they
found it hard to understand....

'You have the big and simple things alive in you,' the voice carried
on his pictured thought among the flowers. 'In your heart they lie all
waiting to be used. Nothing can smother them. Only-you must give them
out.'

'If only I knew how--!'

'Keep close to the children,' sifted the strange answer through the
fruit-trees; 'the world is a big child. And catch it when it lies
asleep--not thinking of itself,' he whispered.

'The time is so short--'

'At forty you stand upon the threshold of life, with values learned
and rubbish cleared away. So many by that time are already dead--in
heart. I envy your opportunities ahead. You have learned already one
foundation truth--the grandeur of toil and the insignificance of
acquisition. The other foundation thing is even simpler--you have a
neighbour. Now, with your money to give as flowers, and your Belief to
steer you straight, you have the world before you. And--keep close to
the children.'

'Before there are none left,' added Rogers under his breath. But the
other heard the words and instantly corrected him--

'Children of any age, and wherever you may find them.'

And they turned slowly and made their way in silence across the
soaking lawn, entering the house by the drawing-room window.

'Good-night,' the old man said, as he lit his candle and led him to
his room; 'and pleasant, happy, inspiring dreams.'

He seemed to say it with some curious, heartfelt meaning in the common
words. He disappeared slowly down the passage, shading the candle with
one hand to pick his way, and Rogers watched him out of sight, then
turned and entered his own room, closing the door as softly as
possible behind him.

It had been an astonishing conversation. All his old enthusiasm was
stirred. Embers leaped to flame. No woman ever had done as much. This
old fellow, once merely respected tutor, had given him back his first
original fire and zeal, yet somehow cleansed and purified. And it
humbled him at the same time. Dead leaves, dropped year by year in his
City life, were cleared away as though a mighty wind had swept him.
The Gardener was burning up dead leaves; the Sweep was cleaning out
the flues; the Lamplighter waving his golden signal in the sky--far
ahead, it is true, but gleaming like a torch and beacon. The Starlight
Express was travelling at top speed among the constellations. He stood
at the beginning of the important part of life....

And now, as he lay in bed and heard the owls hooting in the woods, and
smelt the flowers through the open window, his thoughts followed
strongly after that old Star Train that he used to drive about the
sky. He was both engine-driver and passenger. He fell asleep to dream
of it.

And all the vital and enchanting thoughts of his boyhood flowed back
upon him with a rush, as though they had never been laid aside. He
remembered particularly one singular thing about them--that they had
never seemed quite his own, but that he had either read or heard them
somewhere else. As a child the feeling was always strong that these
'jolly thoughts,' as he called them, were put into him by some one
else--some one who whispered to him--some one who lived close behind
his ears. He had to listen very hard to catch them. It was _not_
dreams, yet all night long, especially when he slept tightly, as he
phrased it, this fairy whispering continued, and in the daytime he
remembered what he could and made up his stories accordingly. He stole
these ideas about a Star Net and a Starlight Express. One day he would
be caught and punished for it. It was trespassing upon the preserves
of some one else.

Yet he could never discover who this some one else was, except that it
was a 'she' and lived among the stars, only coming out at night. He
imagined she hid behind that little dusty constellation called the
Pleiades, and that was why the Pleiades wore a veil and were so dim--
lest he should find her out. And once, behind the blue gaze of the
guard-girl, who was out of his heart by this time, he had known a
moment of thrilling wonder that was close to awe. He saw another pair
of eyes gazing out at him They were ambery eyes, as he called them--
just what was to be expected from a star. And, so great was the shock,
that at first he stood dead still and gasped, then dashed up suddenly
close to her and stared into her face, frightening her so much that
she fell backwards, and the amber eyes vanished instantly. It was the
'some one else' who whispered fairy stories to him and lived behind
his ear. For a second she had been marvellously close. And he had lost
her!

From that moment, however, his belief in her increased enormously, and
he never saw a pair of brown-ambery eyes without feeling sure that she
was somewhere close about him. The lame boy, for instance, had the
same delicate tint in his sad, long, questioning gaze. His own collie
had it too! For years it was an obsession with him, haunting and
wonderful--the knowledge that some one who watched close beside him,
filling his mind with fairy thoughts, might any moment gaze into his
face through a pair of ordinary familiar eyes. And he was certain that
all his star-imagination about the Net, the Starlight Express, and the
Cave of Lost Starlight came first into him from this hidden 'some one
else' who brought the Milky Way down into his boy's world of fantasy.

'If ever I meet her in real life,' he used to say, 'I'm done for. She
is my Star Princess!'

And now, as he fell asleep, the old atmosphere of that Kentish garden
drew thickly over him, shaking out clusters of stars about his bed.
Dreams usually are determined by something more remote than the talk
that has just preceded going to bed, but to-night it was otherwise.
And two things the old Vicar had let fall--two things sufficiently
singular, it seemed, when he came to think about them--influenced his
night adventures. 'Catch the world when it's asleep,' and 'Keep close
to the children'--these somehow indicated the route his dream should
follow. For he headed the great engine straight for the village in the
Jura pine woods where his cousin's children lived. He did not know
these children, and had seen his cousin but rarely in recent years;
yet, it seemed, they came to meet the train up among the mountain
forests somewhere. For in this village, where he had gone to study
French, the moods of his own childhood had somehow known continuation
and development. The place had once been very dear to him, and he had
known delightful adventures there, many of them with this cousin. Now
he took all his own childhood's sprites out in this Starlight Express
and introduced them to these transplanted children who had never made
acquaintance with the English breed. They had surprising, wild
adventures all together, yet in the morning he could remember very
little of it all. The interfering sun melted them all down in dew. The
adventures had some object, however; that was clear; though what the
object was, except that it did good somewhere to. some one, was gone,
lost in the deeps of sleep behind him. They scurried about the world.
The sprites were very active indeed--quite fussily energetic. And his
Scheme for Disabled Something-or other was not anywhere discoverable
in these escapades. That seemed forgotten rather, as though they found
bigger, more important things to do, and nearer home too. Perhaps the
Vicar's hint about the 'Neighbour' was responsible for that. Anyhow,
the dream was very vivid, even though the morning sun melted it away
so quickly and completely. It seemed continuous too. It filled the
entire night.

Yet the thing that Rogers took off with him to town next morning was,
more than any other detail, the memory of what the old tutor had said
about the living reality and persistence of figures that passionate
thinking has created--that, and the value of Belief.




CHAPTER VI


     Be thou my star, and thou in me be seen
     To show what source divine is, and prevails.
     I mark thee planting joy in constant fire.
                   _To Sirius_, G. MEREDITH.

And he rather astonished the imperturbable Minks next day by the
announcement that he was thinking of going abroad for a little
holiday. 'When I return, it will be time enough to take up the Scheme
in earnest,' he said. For Minks had brought a sheaf of notes embodying
the results of many hours' labour, showing what others had already
done in that particular line of philanthropy.

'Very good indeed, Minks, very good. I'll take 'em with me and make a
careful study of the lot. I shall be only gone a week or so,' he
added, noticing the other's disappointment. For the secretary had
hoped to expound these notes himself at length. 'Take a week's holiday
yourself,' he added. 'Mrs. Minks might like to get to the sea,
perhaps. There'll only be my letters to forward. I'll give you a
little cheque.' And he explained briefly that he was going out to
Bourcelles to enjoy a few days' rest before they attacked great
problems together. After so many years of application to business he
had earned it. Crayfield, it seemed, had given him a taste for
sentimental journeys. But the fact was, too, the Tramp, the Dustman,
the Lamplighter, and the Starlight Express were all in his thoughts
still.

And it was spring. He felt this sudden desire to see his cousin again,
and make the acquaintance of his cousin's children. He remembered how
the two of them had tramped the Jura forests as boys. They had met in
London at intervals since. He dictated a letter to him then and there
--Minks taking it down like lightning--and added a postscript in his
own handwriting:--

'I feel a longing,' he wrote, 'to come out and see the little haven of
rest you have chosen, and to know your children. Our ways have gone
very far apart--too far--since the old days when we climbed out of the
windows of _la cure_ with a sheet, and tramped the mountains all night
long. Do you remember? I've had my nose on the grindstone ever since,
and you've worked hard too, judging by your name in publishers' lists.
I hope your books are a great success. I'm ashamed I've never any time
to read now. But I'm "retired" from business at last and hope to do
great things. I'll tell you about a great Scheme I have in hand when
we meet. I should like your advice too.

'Any room will do--sunny aspect if possible. And please give my love
to your children in advance. Tell them I shall come out in the
Starlight Express. Let me have a line to say if it's all right.'

In due course the line--a warm-hearted one--arrived. Minks came to
Charing Cross to see him off, the gleam of the sea already in his
pale-blue eyes.

'The Weather Report says "calm," Mr. Rogers,' he kept repeating.
'You'll have a good crossing, I hope and trust. I'm taking Mrs. Minks
myself---'

'Yes, yes, that's good,' was the quick reply. 'Capital. And--let me
see-I've got your notes with me, haven't I? I'll draft out a general
plan and send it to you as soon as I get a moment. You think over it
too, will you, while I'm away. And enjoy yourself at the same time.
Put your children in the sea--nothing like the sea for children--sea
and sun and sand and all that sort of thing.'

'Thank you very much, Mr. Rogers, and I trust---'

Somebody bumped against him, cutting short a carefully balanced
sentence that was intended to be one-third good wishes, one-third
weather remark, and the last third Mrs. Minks. Her letter of thanks
had never been referred to. It rankled, though very slightly.

'What an absurd-looking person!' exclaimed the secretary to himself,
following the aggressor with one eye, and trying to recapture the lost
sentence at the same time. 'They really should not allow such people
in a railway terminus,' he added aloud. The man was ragged and unkempt
to the last degree--a sort of tramp; and as he bought a ticket at the
third-class wicket, just beyond, he kept looking up slyly at Minks and
his companion. 'The way he knocked against me almost seemed
intentional,' Minks thought. The idea of pickpockets and cleverly
disguised detectives ran confusedly in his mind. He felt a little
flustered for some reason.

'I beg your pardon,' Mr. Rogers was saying to a man who tried to push
in front of him. 'But we _must_ each take our turn, you know.' The
throng of people was considerable. This man looked like a dustman.
He, too, was eagerly buying a ticket, but had evidently mistaken the
window. 'Third-class is lower down I think,' Mr. Rogers suggested with
a touch of authority.

'What a lot of foreigners there are about,' remarked Minks. 'These
stations are full of suspicious characters.' The notice about
loitering flashed across him.

He took the ticket Mr. Rogers handed to him, and went off to register
the luggage, and when later he joined his chief at the carriage door
he saw him talking to a couple of strangers who seemed anxious to get
in.

'I took _this_ corner seat for you, Mr. Rogers,' he explained, both to
prove his careful forethought and to let the strangers know that his
master was a person of some importance. They were such an
extraordinary couple too! Had there been hop-pickers about he could
have understood it. They were almost figures of masquerade; for while
one resembled more than anything else a chimney-sweep who had
forgotten to wash his face below the level of the eyes, the other
carried a dirty sack across his shoulders, which apparently he had
just been trying to squeeze into the rack.

They moved off when they saw Minks, but the man with the sack made a
gesture with one hand, as though he scattered something into the
carriage through the open door.

The secretary threw a reproachful look at a passing guard, but there
was nothing he could do. People with tickets had a right to travel.
Still, he resented these crowding, pushing folk. 'I'm sorry, Mr.
Rogers,' he said, as though he had chosen a poor train for his
honoured chief; 'there must be an excursion somewhere. There's a big
fete of Vegetarians, I know, at Surbiton to-day, but I can hardly
think these people---'

'Don't wait, Minks,' said the other, who had taken his seat. 'I'll let
you hear from me, you know, about the Scheme and--other things. Don't
wait.' He seemed curiously unobservant of these strange folk, almost
absent-minded.

The guard was whistling. Minks shut the door and gave the travelling-
rug a last tuck-in about his feet. He felt as though he were packing
off a child. The mother in him became active. Mr. Rogers needed
looking after. Another minute and he would have patted him and told
him what to eat and wear. But instead he raised his hat and smiled.
The train moved slowly out, making a deep purring sound like flowing
water. The platform had magically thinned. Officials stood lonely
among the scattered wavers of hats and handkerchiefs. As he stepped
backwards to keep the carriage window in sight until the last possible
moment, Minks was nearly knocked over by a man who hurried along the
platform as if he still had hopes of catching the train.

'Really, sir!' gasped the secretary, stooping to pick up his newspaper
and lavender glove--he wore one glove and carried the other--the
collision had sent flying. But the man was already far beyond the
reach of his voice. 'He must be an escaped lamplighter, or something,'
he laughed good-naturedly, as he saw the long legs vanish down the
platform. He leaped on to the line. Evidently he was a railway
employe. He seemed to be vainly trying to catch the departing buffers.
An absurd and reckless fellow, thought Minks.

But what caught the secretary's attention last, and made him wonder a
little if anything unusual was happening to the world, was the curious
fact that, as the last carriage glided smoothly past, he recognised
four figures seated comfortably inside. Their feet were on the
cushions--disgracefully. They were talking together, heads forward,
laughing, even--singing. And he could have sworn that they were the
two men who had watched himself and Mr. Rogers at the ticket window,
and the strangers who had tried to force their way into Mr. Rogers's
carriage when he came up just in time to interfere.

'They got in somehow after all, then,' he said to himself. 'Of course,
I had forgotten. The Company runs third-class carriages on the
continental trains now. Odd!' He mentally rubbed his eyes.

The train swept round the corner out of sight, leaving a streaming
cloud of smoke and sparks behind it. It went out with a kind of rush
of delight, glad to be off, and conscious of its passengers' pleasure.

'Odd.' This was the word that filled his mind as he walked home.
'Perhaps--our minds are in such intimate sympathy together--perhaps he
was thinking of--of that kind of thing--er--and some of his thoughts
got into my own imagination. Odd, though, very, _very_ odd.'

He had once read somewhere in one of his new-fangled books that
'thoughts are things.' It had made a great impression on him. He had
read about Marconi too. Later he made a more thorough study of this
'thinking business.'

And soon afterwards, having put his chief's papers in order at the
flat, he went home to Mrs. Minks and the children with this other
thought--that he had possibly been overworking himself, and that it
was a good thing he was going to have a holiday by the sea.

He liked to picture himself as an original thinker, not afraid of new
ideas, but in reality he preferred his world sober, ordinary, logical.
It was merely big-sounding names he liked. And this little incident
was somewhere out of joint. It was--odd.

     Success that poisons many a baser mind
     May lift---

But the sonnet had never known completion. In the space it had
occupied in his mind another one abruptly sprouted. The first subject
after all was banal. A better one had come to him--

     Strong thoughts that rise in a creative mind
     May flash about the world, and carry joy---

Then it stuck. He changed 'may' to 'shall,' but a moment later decided
that 'do' was better, truer than either. After that inspiration failed
him. He retired gracefully upon prose again.

'Odd,' he thought, 'very odd!'

And he relieved his mind by writing a letter to a newspaper. He did
not send it in the end, for his better judgment prevented, but he had
to do something by way of protest, and the only alternative was to
tell his wife about it, when she would look half puzzled, half pained,
and probably reply with some remark about the general cost of living.
So he wrote the letter instead.

For Herbert Minks regarded himself as a man with the larger view of
citizenship, a critic of public affairs, and, in a measure, therefore,
an item of that public opinion which moulded governments. Hence he had
a finger, though but a little finger, in the destiny of nations and in
the polity--a grand word that!--of national councils. He wrote
frequent letters, thus, to the lesser weekly journals; these letters
were sometimes printed; occasionally--oh, joy!--they were answered by
others like himself, who referred to him as 'your esteemed
correspondent.' As yet, however, his following letter had never got
into print, nor had he experienced the importance of that editorial
decision, appended between square brackets: 'This correspondence must
now cease'--so vital, that is, that the editor and the entire office
staff might change their opinions unless it _did_ cease.

Having drafted his letter, therefore, and carried it about with him
for several hours in his breast pocket, he finally decided not to send
it after all, for the explanation of his 'odd' experience, he well
knew, was hardly one that a newspaper office could supply, or that
public correspondence could illuminate. His better judgment always won
the day in the end. Thinking _was_ creative, after all.




CHAPTER VII


              ... The sun,
     Closing his benediction,
     Sinks, and the darkening air
     Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night-
     Night with her train of stars
     And her great gift of sleep.
                     W. E. HENLEY.

In a southern-facing room on the first floor of La Citadelle the
English family sat after tea. The father, a spare, mild-eyed man, his
thatch of brown hair well sprinkled with grey above the temples, was
lighting his pipe for the tenth time-the tenth match, but the same
pipeful of tobacco; and his wife, an ample, motherly woman, slightly
younger than himself, was knitting on the other side of the open
fireplace, in which still glowed a mass of peat ashes. From time to
time she stirred them with a rickety pair of tongs, or with her foot
kicked into the grate the matches he invariably threw short upon the
floor. But these were adventures ill-suited to her. Knitting was her
natural talent. She was always knitting.

By the open window stood two children, a boy and a girl of ten and
twelve respectively, gazing out into the sunshine. It was the end of
April, and though the sun was already hot, there was a sharpness in
the air that told of snow still lying on the mountain heights behind
the village. Across vineyard slopes and patches of agricultural land,
the Lake of Neuchatel lay blue as a southern sea, while beyond it, in
a line of white that the sunset soon would turn to pink and gold,
stretched the whole range of Alps, from Mont Blanc to where the Eiger
and the Weisshorn signalled in the east. They filled the entire
horizon, already cloud-like in the haze of coming summer.

The door into the corridor opened, and a taller child came in. A mass
of dark hair, caught by a big red bow, tumbled untidily down her back.
She was sixteen and very earnest, but her eyes, brown like her
father's, held a curious puzzled look, as though life still confused
her so much that while she did her duties bravely she did not quite
understand why it should be so.

'Excuse me, Mother, shall I wash up?' she said at once. She always did
wash up. And 'excuse me' usually prefaced her questions.

'Please, Jane Anne,' said Mother. The entire family called her Jane
Anne, although her baptismal names were rather fine. Sometimes she
answered, too, to Jinny, but when it was a question of household
duties it was Jane Anne, or even 'Ria.'

She set about her duties promptly, though not with any special
deftness. And first she stooped and picked up the last match her
father had dropped upon the strip of carpet that covered the linoleum.

'Daddy,' she said reprovingly, 'you do make such a mess.' She brushed
tobacco ashes from his coat. Mother, without looking up, went on
talking to him about the bills-washing, school-books, boots, blouses,
oil, and peat. And as she did so a puzzled expression was visible in
his eyes akin to the expression in Jane Anne's. Both enjoyed a similar
mental confusion sometimes as to words and meanings and the import of
practical life generally.

'We shan't want any more now, thank goodness,' he said vaguely,
referring to the peat, though Mother was already far ahead, wading
among boots and shirts and blouses.

'But if we get a load in now, you see, it's _cheaper_,' she said with
emphasis on every alternate word, slowing up the pace to suit him.

'Mother, where _did_ you put the washing-up rag?' came the voice of
Jinny in plaintive accents from the tiny kitchen that lay beyond the
adjoining bedroom. 'I can't find it anywhere,' she added, poking her
head round the door suddenly.

'Pet lamb,' was Mother's answer, still bending over her knitting-she
was prodigal of terms like this and applied them indiscriminately, for
Jane Anne resembled the animal in question even less than did her
father--'I saw it last on the geranium shelf--you know, where the
fuchsias and the-' She hesitated, she was not sure herself. 'I'll get
it, my duckie, for you,' she added, and began to rise. She was a
voluminous, very stately woman. The operation took time.

'Let me,' said Daddy, drawing his mind with difficulty from the peat,
and rising too. They rose together.

'It's all right, I've got it,' cried the child, who had disappeared
again. 'It was in the sink. That's Jimbo; he washed up yesterday.'

'Pas vrai!' piped a little voice beside the open window, overhearing
his name, 'because I only dried. It was Monkey who washed up.' They
talked French and English all mixed up together.

But Monkey was too busy looking at the Alps through an old pair of
opera-glasses, relic of her father's London days that served for
telescope, to think reply worth while. Her baptismal names were also
rather wonderful, though neither of her parents could have supplied
them without a moment's reflection first. There was commotion by that
window for a moment but it soon subsided again, for things that Jinny
said never provoked dissension, and Jimbo and Monkey just then were
busy with a Magic Horse who had wings of snow, and was making fearful
leaps from the peaks of the Dent du Midi across the Blumlisalp to the
Jungfrau.

'Will you please carry the samovar for me?' exclaimed Jane Anne,
addressing both her parents, as though uncertain which of them would
help her. 'You filled it so awfully full to-day, I can't lift it. I
advertise for help.'

Her father slowly rose. 'I'll do it, child,' he said kindly, but with
a patience, almost resignation, in his tone suggesting that it was
absurd to expect such a thing of him. 'Then do exactly as you think
best,' he let fall to his wife as he went, referring to the chaos of
expenses she had been discussing with him. 'That'll be all right.' For
his mind had not yet sorted the jumble of peat, oil, boots, school-
books, and the rest. 'We can manage THAT at any rate; you see it's
francs, not shillings,' he added, as Jane Anne pulled him by the
sleeve towards the steaming samovar. He held the strings of an ever
empty purse.

'Daddy, but you've _always_ got a crumb in your beard,' she was
saying, 'and if it isn't a crumb, it's ashes on your coat or a match
on the floor.' She brushed the crumb away. He gave her a kiss. And
between them they nearly upset the old nickel-plated samovar that was
a present from a Tiflis Armenian to whom the mother once taught
English. They looked round anxiously as though afraid of a scolding;
but Mother had not noticed. And she was accustomed to the noise and
laughter. The scene then finished, as it usually did, by the mother
washing up, Jane Anne drying, and Daddy hovering to and fro in the
background making remarks in his beard about the geraniums, the China
tea, the indigestible new bread, the outrageous cost of the
necessaries of life, or the book he was at work on at the moment. He
often enough gave his uncertain assistance in the little menial duties
connected with the preparation or removal of the tea-things, and had
even been known to dry. Only washing-up he never did. Somehow his
vocation rendered him immune from that. He might bring the peat in,
fill the lamps, arrange and dust the scanty furniture, but washing-up
was not a possibility even. As an author it was considered beneath his
dignity altogether, almost improper--it would have shocked the
children. Mother could do anything; it was right and natural that she
should---poor soul I But Daddy's profession set him in an enclosure
apart, and there were certain things in this servantless menage he
could not have done without disgracing the entire family. Washing-up
was one; carrying back the empty basket of tea-things to the Pension
was another. Daddy wrote books. As Jane Anne put it forcibly and
finally once, 'Shakespeare never washed up or carried a tea-basket in
the street!'--which the others accepted as a conclusive statement of
authority.

And, meantime, the two younger children, who knew how to amuse each
other for hours together unaided, had left the Magic Horse in its
stables for the night--an enormous snow-drift--and were sitting side
by side upon the sofa conning a number of _Punch_ some English aunt
had sent them. The girl read out the jokes, and her brother pointed
with a very dirty finger to the pictures. None of the jokes were
seized by either, but Jimbo announced each one with, 'Oh! I say!' and
their faces were grave and sometimes awed; and when Jimbo asked, 'But
what does THAT mean?' his sister would answer, 'Don't you see, I
suppose the cabman meant--' finishing with some explanation very far
from truth, whereupon Jimbo, accepting it doubtfully, said nothing,
and they turned another page with keen anti