treading incessantly on the toes of the more nimble children. Smoke ran like a black shadow, now in front, now behind.
'We're nearly there,' Nixie cried encouragingly, as he made a false step and landed with a crash in the middle of some low laurel bushes. 'But do be more careful, Uncle, please,' she added, helping him out again.
'There's the clock striking!' Jonah called, a little in front of them. 'We're only just in time!'
Paul recovered himself and pulled up beside them under the shadows of the big twin cedars that stood like immense sentries at the end of the lawn. He came rolling in, swaying like a ship in a heavy sea. And, as he did so, the sound of a church bell striking the hour came to their ears through the terrific uproar of the elements, blown this way and that by the wind.
It was midnight striking.
At the same instant he heard a peculiar sharp sound like whistling—the noise wind makes tearing through a narrow opening.
'The crack, the crack!' cried his guides together. 'That's the air rushing. It's coming. Look out!' They seized him by the hands.
'But I shall never get through,' shouted Paul, thinking of his size for the first time.
'Yes you will,' Nixie screamed back at him above the roar. 'Between the sixth and seventh strokes, remember.' The fifth stroke had already sounded. The wind caught it and went shrieking into the sky.
Six! boomed the distant bell through the night. They held his hands in a vice.
There was a sound like an express train tearing through the air. A quick flash of brilliance followed, and a long slit seemed to open suddenly in the sky before them, and then flash past like lightning. Nixie tugged at one hand, and Jonah tugged at the other. Smoke scampered madly past his feet.
A wild rush of wind swept him along, whistling in his ears; there was a breathless and giddy sensation of dropping through empty space that seemed as though it could never end—and then Paul suddenly found himself sitting on a grassy bank beside a river, Nixie and Jonah on either side of him, and Smoke washing his face in front of them as though nothing in the whole world had ever happened to disturb his equanimity. And a bright, soft light, like the light of the sun, shone warmly over everything.
'Only just managed it,' Nixie observed to Jonah. 'He is rather wide, isn't he? '
'Everybody's thin somewhere,' was the reply.
'And the crack is very stretchy'—she added,— luckily.'
Paul drew a long breath and stretched himself.
'Well,' he said, still a little breathless and dizzy, 'such things were never done in my day.' 'But this isn't your day any more,' explained Nixie, her blue eyes popping with laughter and mischief, 'it's your night. And, anyhow, as I told you, there's no time here at all. There's no hurry now.'
CHAPTER XV
The imagination is not a state; it is the human existence itself.
—W. B.
Paul, looking round, felt utterly at peace with himself and the world; at rest, he felt. That was his first sensation in the mass. He recovered in a moment from his breathless entrance, and a subtle pleasure began to steal through his veins. It seemed as if every yearning he had ever known was being ministered to by competent unseen Presences; and, obviously, the children and the cats—Mrs. Tompkyns had somehow managed to join Smoke—felt likewise, for their countenances beamed and blinked supreme contentment.
'Ah!' observed Jonah, sitting contentedly on the grass beside him. 'This is the place.' He heaved a happy little sigh, as though the statement were incontrovertible.
'It is,' echoed Paul. And Nixie's eyes shone like blue flowers in a field of spring.
'The crack's smaller than it used to be though,' he heard her murmuring to herself. 'Every year it's harder to get through. I suppose something's happening to the world—or to people; some change going on'
'Or we're getting older,' Jonah put in with pro-founder wisdom than he knew.
Paul congratulated himself upon his successful entrance. He felt something of a dog! The bank on which he lay sloped down towards a river fledged with reeds and flowers; its waters, blue as the sky, flowed rippling by, and a soft wind, warm and] scented, sighed over it from the heart of the summer. On the opposite shore, not fifty yards across, a grove of larches swayed their slender branches lazily in the sun, and a little farther down the banks he saw a line of willows drooping down to moisten their tongue-like leaves. The air hummed pleasantly with insects; birds flashed to and fro, singing as they flew; and, in the distance, across miles of blue meadowlands, hills rose in shadowy outline to the sky. He feasted on the beauty of it all, absorbing it through every sense.
'But where are we?' he asked at length, 'because a moment ago we were in a storm somewhere?' He turned to Nixie who still Jay talking to herself contentedly at his side. 'And what really happens here? 'he added with a blush. 'I feel so extraordinarily happy.'
They lay half-buried among the sweet-scented grasses. Jonah burrowed along the shore at some game of his own close by, and the cats made a busy pretence of hunting wild game in a dozen places at once, and then suddenly basking in the sun and washing each other's necks and backs as though wild-game hunting were a bore.
'Nothing 'xactly—happens, she answered, and her voice sounded curiously like wind in rushes—'but everything—is. 1
It seemed to him as though he listened to some spirit of the ages, very wise with the wisdom of eternal youth, that spoke to him through the pretty little mouth of this rosy-faced child.
'It's like that river,' she went on, pointing to the blue streak winding far away in a ribbon through the landscape, 'which flows on for ever in a circle, and never comes to an end. Everything here goes on always, and then always begins again.'
For the river, as Paul afterwards found out, ran on for miles and miles, in the curves of an immense circle, of which the sea itself was apparently nothing but a widening of certain portions.
'So here,' continued the child, making a pattern with daisies on his sleeve as she talked, 'you can go over anything you like again and again, and it need never come to an end at all. Only,' she added, looking up gravely into his face, 'you must really, really want it to start with.'
'Without getting tired?' he asked, wonderingly.
'Of course; because you begin over and over again with it.' 'Delightful!' he exclaimed, 'that means a place of eternal youth, where emotions continually renew themselves.'
'It's the place where you find lost things,' she explained, with a little puzzled laugh at his foolish long words, 'and where things that came to! no proper sort of end—things that didn't come true, I mean, in the world, all happen and enjoy them—' selves '
He sat up with a jerk, forgetting the carefully arranged daisies on his coat, and scattering them all 'over the grass.
'But this is too splendid!' he cried. 'This is what I've always been looking for. It's what I was thinking about just now when I tried to write a poem and couldn't.'
'We found it long ago,' said the child, pointing to Jonah and Mrs. Tompkyns, Smoke having mysteriously disappeared for the moment. 'We' live here really most of the time. Daddy brought; us here first.'
'Things life promised, but never gave, here come to full fruition,'Paul murmured to himself. 'You: mean,' he added aloud, 'this is where ideals that have gone astray among the years may be found again, and actually realised? A kingdom of heaven within the heart? 'He was very excited, and forgot for the moment he was speaking to a child.
'I don't know about all that,' she answered, with a puzzled look. 'But it is life. We live-happily-ever-after here. That's what I mean.'
'It all comes true here?'