looking like miniature gypsies. The odour of the burning wood was incense in his nostrils.
'But can't I see something too—something of my own?' he asked in an aggrieved tone.
Nixie and Jonah looked up at him with surprise. 'Of course you can,' they exclaimed together. 'Just stare into space as the cats do, and think, and wish, and wait. Anything you want will come—with practice. People you've lost, or people you've wanted to find, or anything that's never come true anywhere else.'
They went on busily with their cooking again, and Paul, lying on his back in the grass some distance away, sent his thoughts roaming, searching, deeply calling, far into the region of unsatisfied dreams and desires within his heart. . . .
For what seemed hours and hours they wandered together through the byways of this vast, enchanted garden, finding everything they wished to find, forgetting everything they wished to forget, amusing themselves to their heart's content; till, at last, they stood together on a big boulder in the river where the spray rose about them in a cloud and painted a rainbow above their heads.
'Get ready! Quick,' cried Jonah. 'The Crack's coming!'
'It's coming!' repeated Nixie, seizing Paul's hand and urging him to hold very tight.
He had no time to reply. There was a rushing sound of air tearing through a narrow opening. The sky grew dark, with a roaring in his ears and a sense of great things flying past him. Again came the sensation of dropping giddily through space, and the next minute he found himself standing with the two children upon the lawn, darkness about them, and the storm howling and crashing over their heads through the branches of the twin cedars.
'There's the clock still striking,' Nixie cried. 'It's only been a few seconds altogether.'
He heard the church clock strike the last six strokes of midnight.
For some minutes he realised little more than that he felt rather stiff and uncomfortable in his bedroom chair, and that he was chilly about the legs. Outside the wind still roared and whistled, making the windows rattle, while gusts of rain fell volleying against the panes as though trying to get in. A roll of distant thunder came faintly to his ear. He stretched himself and began to undress by the light of a single candle. On the table lay a sheet of paper headed 'How I climbed the Scaffolding of the Night,' and he read down the page and then took his pen and wrote the heading of something else on another sheet: 'Adventure in the Land between Yesterday and To-morrow.' With a mighty yawn he then blew out his candle and tumbled into bed.
And with him, for all the howling of the elements, came a strange sense of peace and happiness. Out of the depths rose gradually before his inner eye in a series of delightful pictures the scenes he had just left, and he understood that the pathway to that country of dreams fulfilled and emotions that never die, lay buried far within his own being.
'Between Yesterday and To-morrow' was to be the children's counterpart of that timeless, deathless region where the spirit may always go when hunted by the world, fretted by the passion of unsatisfied yearnings, plagued by the remorseless tribes of sorrow and disaster. There none could follow him, just as none—none but himself—could bring about its destruction. For he had found the mystical haven where all lost or broken things eternally reconstruct themselves.
The 'Crack,' of course, may be found by all who have the genuine yearning to recreate their world more sweetly, provided they possess at the start enough imagination to repay the trouble of training—also that Wanderlust of the spirit which seeks ever for a resting-place in the great beyond that reaches up to God.
Paul as yet had but discovered the entrance, led by little children who dreamed not how wondrous was the journey; but the rest would follow. For it is a region mapped gradually out of a thousand impulses, out of ten thousand dreams, out of the eternal desires of the soul. It is not discovered in a day, nor do the ways of entrance always remain the same. A thousand joys contribute to its fashioning, a thousand frustrated hopes describe its boundaries, and ten thousand griefs bring slowly, piece by piece, the material for its construction, while every new experience of the soul, successful or disastrous, adds something to its uncharted geography. Slowly it gathers into existence, becoming with every sojourn more real and more satisfying, till at length from the pain of all possible disillusionment the way opens to the heart of relief, to the peaceful place of hopes renewed, of purposes made fruitful and complete.
And from this deathless region, too, flow all the forces of the soul that make for hope, enthusiasm, courage, and delight. The children might call it 'Between Yesterday and To-morrow,' and find their little broken dreams brought back to life; but Paul understood that its rewards might vary immensely according to the courage and the need of the soul that sought it.
CHAPTER XVI
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.
YEATS.
Thus, led delicately by the animals and the children, and guided to a certain extent, too, by the curious poesy of his own soul, Paul Rivers came gradually into his own. Once made free of their world, he would learn next that the process automatically lade him free of his own. This simple expedient of having found an audience did wonders for him, for it not only loosened his tongue and his pen, but it all the deeper parts of him running into speech, id the natural love and poetry of the man began to produce a delightful, if somewhat extraordinary, harvest.
He understood—none better—that fantasy, unless rooted in reality, leads away from action and tends to weakness and insipidity; but that, grounded in the common facts of life, and content with idealising the actual, it might become an important factor for good, lending wings to the feet and lifting the soul over difficult places. His education advanced by leaps and bounds. And in some respects he showed himself possessed of a wisdom that could only have belonged to him because at heart he was still a child, and the ordinary 'knowledge of the world' had not come to spoil him in his life of solitude among the trees.
For instance, that 'Between Yesterday and Tomorrow' bore some curious relation to reverie and dreams, he dimly discerned, yet, with this simple and profound wisdom of his, he refused to pry too closely into the nature of such relationship. He did not seek to reduce the delightful experience to the little hard pellet of an exact fact. For that, he felt, would be to lose it. Exact knowledge, he knew, was often merely a great treachery, and 'fact' a dangerous weapon that deceived, and might even destroy, its owner. If he analysed too carefully, he might analyse the whole thing out of existence altogether, and such a contingency was not to be thought of for a single moment.
Moreover, the attitude of the children confirmed his own. They never referred to their adventures until he had given them form and substance in his reports as recording secretary of the society. No word passed their lips until they had heard them read out, and then they talked of nothing else. During the day they maintained a sublime ignorance of his 'aventures of the night,' as though nothing of the kind had ever happened; and this tended still further to relegate it all to a region untouched by time, beyond the reach of chance, beyond the destruction of mere talk, eternal and real in the great sense.
Meanwhile, as this hidden country he had discovered yielded to exploration, becoming more and more mapped out, and its springs of water tapped, Paul was conscious that the power from these vital sources began to modify his character, and to enlarge his outlook upon life. Imagination, released and singing, provides the greatest of all magics—belief in one's self. The rivers of feeling carve their own channels, which are ever the shortest way to the ocean of fulfilment. The effects
