'No, it only takes ten days roughly from where I've come,' he said, leaving the mat and dropping into a deep arm-chair a little farther off. 'The big steamers go very fast, you know, nowadays.'
Their eyes remained simply glued to his face. They switched round a. few points to follow his movement, but did not leave their squares of carpet.
'Madmerzelle said'—it was Toby, née Arabella Lucy, speaking for the first time—' you knew lots of stories about deers and wolves and things, and would look like a Polar bear for us sometimes.'
'Oh yes, and beavers and Indians in snowstorms, and the roarer boryalis,' chimed in Jonah, giving a little hop of excitement that brought him still closer. 'And the songs they sing in canoes when there are rapids,' he added with intense excitement. 'Madmizelle sings them sometimes, but they're not a bit the real thing, because she hasn't enough bass in her voice.'
Paul bit his lip and looked at the carpet. Something in the atmosphere of the room seemed to have changed in the last few minutes. Jolly thrills ran through him such as he knew in the woods with his animals sometimes.
'I'm afraid I can't sing much,' he said, 'but I can tell you a bear story sometimes—if you're good.' He added the condition as an afterthought.
'We are good,' Jonah said disappointedly,' almost always.'
Again that curious pang shot through him. He did not wish to be unkind to them. He pulled back his coat-sleeve suddenly and showed them a scar on his arm.
'That was made by a bear,' he said, 'years ago.'
'Oh, look at the fur!' cried Toby.
'Don't be silly! All proper men have hair on their arms,' put in Jonah. 'Does it still hurt, Uncle Paul?' he asked, examining the place with intense interest.
'Not now. We rolled down a hill together head over heels. Such a big brute, too, he was, and growled like a thunderstorm; it's a wonder he didn't squash me. I've got his claws upstairs. I think, really, he was more frightened than I was.'
They clapped their hands. 'Tell us, oh, do tell us!'
But Nixie intervened in her stately fashion, leaning over a little and stroking the scar with fingers that were like the touch of leaves.
'Uncle Paul's tired after coming such a long way,' she said gravely with sympathy. 'He hasn't even unpacked his luggage yet, have you, Uncle?'
Paul admitted that this was the case. He made the least possible motion to push them off and clear a space round his chair.
'Are you tired? Oh, I'm so sorry,' said Jonah.
'Then he ought to see the animals at once,' decided Toby, 'before they go to bed,'—she seemed to have a vague idea that the whole world must go to bed earlier than usual if Uncle Paul was tired— 'or they'll be awfully disappointed.' Her face expressed the disappointment of the animals as well as her own; her uncle's fatigue had already taken a second place. 'Oughtn't he?' she added, turning to the others.
Paul remembered his intention to remain stiffly grown up.
He made a great effort. Oh, but why did they tug and tear at his heart so, these little fatherless children? And why did he feel at once that he was in their own world, comfortably 'at home' in it? Did this world of children, then, link on so easily and naturally with the poet's region of imagination and wonder in which he himself still dwelt for all his many years, bringing him close to his main passion—to know Reality?
'Of course, I'll come and say good-night to them before they turn in,' he decided kindly, letting Nixie and Toby take his hands, while Jonah followed in the rear to show that he considered this a girl's affair yet did not wholly disapprove.
'Hadn't we better tell your mother where we're going?' he asked as they started.
'Oh, mother won't mind,' came the answer in chorus. 'She hardly ever comes up to the nursery, and, besides, she doesn't care for the animals, you see.'
'They're rather 'noying for mother,' Nixie added by way of explanation. She decapitated many of her long words in this way, and invariably omitted difficult consonants.
It was a long journey, and the explanations about the animals, their characteristics, names, and habits, occupied every minute of the way. He gathered that they were chiefly cats and kittens, to what number he dared not calculate, and that puppies, at least one parrot, a squirrel, a multitude of white mice, and various larger beasts of a parental and aged description, were indiscriminately all mixed up together. Evidently it was a private menagerie that he was invited to say good-night to, and the torrent of outlandish names that poured into his ears produced a feeling of confusion in his mind that made him wonder if he was not turning into some sort of animal himself, and thus becoming free of their language.
It was the beginning of a very trying ordeal for him, this being half pulled, half shoved along the intricate passages of the old house; now down a couple of unexpected steps that made him stumble; now up another which made him trip; through narrow doorways, where Jonah had the audacity to push him from behind lest he should stick half-way; and, finally, at full speed, the girls tugging at his arms in front, down a long corridor which proved to be the home-stretch to the nursery.
'I was afraid we'd lost the trail,' he gasped. 'It's poorly blazed.' 'Oh, but we haven't got any tails to lose,' laughed Toby, misunderstanding him. 'And they wouldn't blaze if we had.'
'Look out, Nixie! Not so fast! Uncle Paul's losing his wind as well as his trail,' shouted Jonah from the rear. And at that moment they reached the door of the nursery and came to an abrupt halt, Paul puffing like a lumberman.
It was impossible for him to remain sedate, but he did the next best thing—he remained silent.
Then Jonah, pushing past him, turned the handle, and he was ushered, still panting, into so typical a nursery-schoolroom that the scenes of his forgotten boyhood rushed back to him with a vividness that seemed to destroy the passage of time at a single stroke. The past stood reconstructed. The actual, living mood of his own childhood rose out of the depths of blurred memories and caused a mist to rise before his eyes. An emotion he was utterly unable to define shook his heart.
The room was filled with the slanting rays of the setting sun, and the air from the open windows smelt of garden trees, lawns, and flower-beds. Sea and heather, too, added their own sharper perfumes. It caught him away for a moment—oh, that strange power of old perfumes—to the earliest scenes of his own life, the boyhood in the gardens of Kent before America had claimed him. And then the details of the room itself became so insistent that he almost lost his head and turned back without more ado into a boy of fifteen.
He looked swiftly about him. There was the old-fashioned upright piano against the wall, the highly coloured pictures hanging crooked on the wall, the cane chairs, the crowded mantelpiece, the high wire fender before the empty grate, the general atmosphere of toys, untidiness and broken articles of every sort and kind—and, above all, the figures of these excited children all bustling recklessly about him with their glowing and expectant faces.
There was Toby, her blue sash all awry, running busily about the room; and Nixie, now in sunshine, now in shadow, with her hair of yellow sand and her blue dreaming eyes that saw into the Beyond; and little Jonah, moving about somewhat pompously to prepare the performance that was to follow. It all combined to produce a sudden shock that swept down upon him so savagely, that he was within an ace of bolting through the door and making
