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 his escape into safer quarters.
The False Paul, that is, was within an ace of running away with all his elaborate armour, and leaving the True Paul dancing on the floor, a child among children, a spirit of impulse, enthusiasm and imagination, laughing with the sheer happiness of his perpetual youth.
It was a dangerous moment; he was within measurable distance of revealing himself. For a moment his clothes felt far too large for him; and only just in time did he remember his 'attitude,' and the danger of being young when he really was old, and the absurdity of being anything else than a large, sedate man of forty-five. Only he wished that Nixie would not watch him so appealingly with those starry eyes of hers . . . and look so strangely like the forms that haunted his own wild forests and streams on the other side of the Atlantic.
He stiffened quickly, drew himself up, and turned to give his elderly attention to the chorus of explanation and introduction that was already rising about him with the sound and murmur of the sea.
Something was happening.
For the floor of the room, he now perceived, had become suddenly full of movement, as though the carpet had turned alive. He felt a rubbing against his legs and ankles; with a soft thud something leaped upon the table and covered his hand with smooth, warm fur, uttering little sounds of pleasure at the same time. On the top of the piano, a thing he had taken for a heap of toys rose and stretched itself into an odd shape of straight lines and arching curves. From the window-sill, where the sun poured in, a round grey substance dropped noiselessly down upon the carpet and advanced with measured and calculated step towards him; while, from holes and hiding-places undivined, three or four little fluffy things, with padded feet and stiff pointing tails, shot out like shadows and headed straight for a row of saucers that he now noticed for the first time against the farther wall. The whole room seemed to fill with soft and graceful movement; and, mingled with the voices of the children, he caught a fine composite murmur that was soothing as the sound of flowing wind and water.
It was the sound and the movement of many animals.
'Here they are,' said a voice—'some of them. The others are lost, or out hunting.'
For the moment Paul did not stop to ask how many 'others' there were. He stood rigidly still for fear that if he moved he might tread on something living.
There came a scratching sound at the door, and Toby dashed forward to open it.
'Silly, naughty babies!' she cried, nearly tumbling over the fender in her attempt to seize two round bouncing things that came tearing into the room like a couple of yellow puddings. 'Uncle Paul has come to see you all the way from America! And then you're late like this! For shame!'
With a series of thuds and bangs that must have bruised anything not unusually well padded, the new arrivals, who looked for all the world like small fat bears, or sable muffs on short brown legs with feet of black velvet, dashed round the room in a mad chase after nothing at all. A hissing and spitting issued from dark corners and from beneath various pieces of furniture, but the two balls confined their attentions almost at once to the honoured guest. They charged up against his legs as though determined to upset his balance—this mountain of a man—and then careered clumsily round the room, knocking over anything small enough that came in their way, and behaving generally as though they wanted to clear the whole place in the shortest possible time for their own particular and immediate benefit.
Next, lifting his eyes for a moment from this impetuous attack, he saw a brilliantly coloured thing behind bars, standing apparently on its head and looking upside-down at him with an expression of undisguised and scornful amusement; while not far from it, in a cage hanging by the cuckoo clock, some one with a tail as large as his body, shot round and round on a swinging trapeze that made Paul think of a midget practising in a miniature gymnasium.
'These are our animals, you see, Uncle Paul,' Jonah announced proudly from his position by the door. There was a trace of condescension in his tone.
'We have lots of out-of-door animals as well, though,' Toby hastened to explain, lest her uncle should be disappointed.
'I suppose they're out of