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THE EDUCATION OF UNCLE PAUL

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

TORONTO

THE EDUCATION OF UNCLE PAUL

AUTHOR OF ' JIMBO,' 'JOHN SILENCE,' 'THE LISTENER,' ETC.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1909

Know you what it is to be a child ? It is to be something very different from the man of to-day. It is to have a spirit )et streaming from the waters of baptism j it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief ; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear ; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul ; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space ; it is

To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour 5

it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor petition that it is to be commuted into death. — FRANCIS THOMPSON.

p/R

6oo3 E

TO

ALL THOSE CHILDREN BETWEEN THE AGES OF EIGHT AND EIGHTY

WHO LED ME TO CTHE CRACK ' J LND HAVE SINCE JOURNEYED WITH ME THROUGH IT

INTO THE LAND 'BETWEEN YESTERDAY AND TO-MORROW '

CHAPTER I

... I stand as mute

As one with full strong music in his heart Whose fingers stray upon a shattered lute.

ALICE MEYNKLL.

ALL night the big liner had been plunging heavily, but towards morning she entered quieter water, and when the passengers woke, her rising and falling over the great swells was so easy that even the sea-sick women admitted the relief.

* Land in sight, sir ! We shall see Liverpool within twenty hours now, barring fog.'

The friendly bathroom steward passed the open door of Stateroom No. 28, and the big, brown- bearded man in the blue serge suit who was sitting, already dressed, on the edge of the port-hole berth, started as though he had been shot, and ran up on deck without waiting to finish tying the laces of his india-rubber shoes.

' By Jove ! ' he said, as he thundered along the stuffy passages of the rolling vessel, and * By Gad ! '

He emerged on the upper deck in the sunlight, having nearly injured several persons in his impetuous

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2 THE EDUCATION OF CHAP.

journey, and, taking a great gulp of the salt air with keen satisfaction, he crossed to the side in a couple of strides, the shoe-laces clicking against the deck as he went.

* Twenty years ago,' he muttered, * when I was barely out of my teens. And now ! '

The big man was distinctly excited, though * moved ' perhaps is the better word, seeing that the emotion was a little too searching, too tinged with sadness, to include elation. He plunged both hands into his coat pockets with a violence that threatened to tear the bottoms out, and leaned over the railing.

Far away a faint blue line, tinged delicately with green, rose out of the sea. He saw it instantly, and his throat tightened unexpectedly, almost like a reflex action. For, about that simple little blue line on the distant horizon there was something strangely seizing, .something absolutely arresting. The sight of it was a hundred times more poignant than he had imagined it would be ; it touched a thousand springs of secret life in him, and a mist rose faintly before his eyes. -„

Paul Rivers had not realised that his emotion would be so intense ; but from that instant every- thing on the ship, otherwise familiar and rather boring, looked different. A new sense of locality came to him. The steamer became strange and new ; he * recognised ' bits of it as though he had just -come aboard a ship known aforetime. It was

i UNCLE PAUL 3

no longer the steamer that was merely crossing the Atlantic ; it was the boat that was bringing him home. And there, trimming the horizon in a thin ribbon of most arresting beauty, was the coast-line of the first Island.

' But it seems so much more solid — and so much more real than I expected ! '

Though it was barely seven o'clock a few early passengers were already astir, and he made his way back again to the lower deck and thence climbed up into the bows. He wished to be alone. Another man, apparently from the steerage, was there before him, leaning over the rail and peering fixedly under one hand at the horizon. The saloon passenger took up his position a few feet farther on and stared hard. He, too, stared with the eyes of memory, now grown a little dim. The air was fresh and sweet, fragrant of long sea distances ; there was a soft warmth in it too, for it was late April and the spring made its presence known even on the great waters where there was nothing to hang its fairy banners on.

' So that's land ! That's the Old Country ! '

The words dropped out of their own accord ; he could not help himself. The sky seemed to come down a little closer, with a more familiar and friendly touch ; the very air, he fancied, had a new taste in it, — a whiff of his boyhood days — a smell of child- hood and the things of childhood — ages ago, it seemed, in another life.

4 THE EDUCATION OF CHAP.

The huge ship rose and fell on the regular, sweep- ing swells, and sea-birds from the land already came out to meet her. He easily imagined that the thrills in the depths of his own being somehow communicated themselves to the mighty vessel that tore the seas asunder in her great desire to reach the land.

* Twenty years,' he repeated aloud, oblivious of his neighbour, * twenty years since I last saw it ! '

* And it's gol-darned nearer fifty since / seen it,' exclaimed a harsh voice just behind him.

He turned with a start. The steerage passenger beside him, he saw, was an old man with a rough, grey face, and hair turning white ; the hand that shaded his eyes was thick and worn ; there was a heavy gold ring on the little finger, and the dirty cuff of a dark flannel shirt tumbled, loosely and un- buttoned, over the very solid wrist. The face, he noticed, at a second glance, was rugged, beaten, scored, the face of a man who had tumbled terribly about life, battered from pillar to post ; and it was only the light in the hard blue eyes — eyes still fixed unwaveringly on the distant line of the land — that redeemed it from a kind of grim savagery. Beaten and battered, yes ! Yet at the same time triumphant. The atmosphere of the man proclaimed in some vibrant fashion beyond analysis that he had failed in all he undertook — failed from stupidity rather than character, and always doggedly beginning over again

i UNCLE PAUL 5

with the same lack of intelligence — but yet had never given in, and never would give in.

It was not difficult to reconstruct his history from his appearance ; or to realise his feelings as he saw the Old Country after fifty years — a returned failure. Although the voice had vibrated with emotion, the face remained expressionless and unmoved ; but down both cheeks large tears ran slowly, in sudden jerks, to drop with a splash upon the railing. And Paul Rivers, after his intuitive fashion, grasped the whole drama of the man with a sudden complete- ness that touched him with swift sympathy. At the same time he could not help thinking of rain-drops running down the face of a statue. He recognised with shame that he was conscious of a desire to laugh.

* Fifty years ! That's a long time indeed,' he said kindly. * It's half-a-century.'

* That's so, Boss,' returned the other in a dead voice that betrayed Ireland overlaid with acquired American twang and intonation ; * and I guess now I'll never be able to stick it over here. Jest see it — and then git back again.'

He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, and never once turned his head towards the man he was speak- ing to ; only his lips moved ; he did not even lift a finger to brush ofF the great tears that fell one by one from his cheeks to the deck. He seemed un- conscious of them ; as though it was so long since

6 THE EDUCATION OF CHAP.

those hard eyes had melted that they had forgotten how to do it properly and the skin no longer registered the sensation of the trickling. The tears continued to fall at intervals ; Paul Rivers actually heard them splash.

* I went out steerage,' the man continued to him- self, or to the sea, or to any one else who cared to listen, 'and I come back steerage. That's my trouble. And now ' — his eye shifted for a fraction of a second and watched a huge wave go thundering by — ' I'm grave-huntin', I guess. And that's about the size of it. Jest see it and — git back again ! '

The first-class passenger made some kind and appropriate reply — words with genuine sympathy in them — and then, getting no further answer, found it difficult to continue the conversation. The man, he realised, had only wanted a peg to hang his emotion on. It had to be a living peg, but any other living peg would do equally well, and before long he would find some one in the steerage who would listen with delight to the flood that was bound to come. And, presently, he took his departure to his own quarters where the sailors, with bare feet, were still swabbing the slippery decks.

A couple of hours later, after breakfast, he leaned over the rail and again saw the man on the steerage deck, and heard him talking volubly. The tears were gone, but the smudges were still visible on the cheeks, where they had traced a zigzag pattern. He

, UNCLE PAUL 7

was telling the history of his fifty years' disappoint- ments and failures to one and all who cared to listen.

And, apparently, many cared to listen. The man's emotion was real ; it found vigorous expres- sion. The sight of the old, loved shore, not seen for half-a-century, but the subject of ten thousand yearnings, had been too much for him. He told in detail the substance of these ten thousand dreams — ever one and the same dream, of course — and in the telling of it he found the relief his soul sought. He got it all out ; it did him a world of good, saving his inner being from a whole army of severe mental fevers and spiritual pains. The man revelled in a delirium of self-expression, and in so doing found sanity and health for his overburdened soul.

And the picture of that hard-faced old man crying accompanied Paul Rivers to the upper decks, and remained insistently with him for a long time. It portrayed with such neat emphasis precisely what was so deplorably lacking in his own character. There, in concrete form, though not precisely his own case, still near enough to be extremely illuminat- ing, he had seen a grown-up man finding abundant and natural expression for his emotion. The man was not ashamed of his tears, and would doubtless have let them splash on the deck before a hundred passengers, whereas he, Paul Rivers, was, it seemed, constitutionally unable to reveal himself, to tell his

8 THE EDUCATION OF CHAP.

deep longings, to find expression through any sensible medium for the ten thousand dreams that choked his life to the brim. He was unable, perhaps ashamed, to splash on the deck.

It was not that the big, bronzed Englishman wanted to cry, or to wash his soul in sentiment, but that the sight of this old man's passion, and its frank and easy utterance, touched with dramatic intensity the crying need of his. whole temperament. The need of the steerage passenger was the need of a moment ; his own was the need of an existence.

' Lucky devil ! ' he exclaimed, half laughing, half sighing, as he went to his cabin for the field-glasses ; ' he knows how to get it out — and does get it out ! while I — with my impossible yearnings and my absurd diffidence in speaking of them to others — I haven't got a single safety-valve of any sort or kind. I can't get it out of me — all this ocean in my heart and soul — not a drop, not even a blessed tear ! '

He laughed again and, stooping to pick up the glasses, he caught a glimpse of his sunburned, bearded face in the cabin mirror.

* Even my appearance is against me,' he went on with mournful humour ; c I look like a healthy lumberman more than anything else in God's world ! '

He bent forward and examined himself carefully in detail.

'What has such a face as that to do with beauty, and the stars, and the moon sinking over

i UNCLE PAUL 9

a summer sea, or those night-winds I know rising faintly from their hiding-places in the dim forests and stealing on soft tiptoe about the sleeping world until the dawn gives them leave to run and sing ? Yet / know — though I can never tell it to another- — what so many do not know ! Who could ever believe that that man ' — he pointed to himself in the glass, laughing — ' wants above all else in life, above wealth, fame, success, the knowledge of spiritual things, which is Reality — which is God ? '

A flash of light from nowhere ran over his face, making it for one instant like the face of a boy, shining, wonderful, radiantly young.

' / know, for instance,' he went on, the strange flush of enthusiasm rising into his eyes, 'that the pine-trees hold wind in their arms as cups hold rare wine, and that when it spills I hear the exquisite trickling of its music — but I can't tell any one that\ And I can't even put the wild magic of it into verse or music. Or even into conduct,' he concluded with a laugh, ' conduct that's sane, that is. For, if I could, I should find what I'm for ever seeking behind all life and behind all expressions of beauty — I should find the Reality I seek ! '

' I've no safety-valves,' he added, swinging the glasses round by their strap to the imminent danger of various articles of furniture, ' that's the long and short of it. Like a giraffe that can't make any sound at all although it has the longest throat

io THE EDUCATION OF CHAP.

in all creation. Everything in me accumulates and accumulates. If only ' — and the strange light came back for a second to his brown eyes — * I could write, or sing, or pray — live as the saints did, or do some- thing to — to express adequately the sense of beauty and wonder and delight that lives, like the presence of a God, in my soul ! '

The lamp in his eyes faded slowly and he sat back on the little cabin sofa, screwing and unscrew- ing his glasses till it was surprising that the thread didn't wear out. And as he screwed, a hundred fugitive pictures passed thronging through his mind ; moments of yearning and of pain, of sudden happi- ness and of equally sudden despondency, vivid moods of all kinds provoked by the smallest imaginable fancies, as the way ever was with him. For the moods of the sky were his moods ; the swift, coloured changes of sea and cloud were mirrored in his heart as with all too impressionable people, and he was for ever trying to seize the secret of their loveliness and to give it form — in vain. Like many another mystical soul he saw the invisible foundations of the visible world — longed to communicate it to others — found he couldn't — then suffered all the pain and fever of repression that seeks in vain for adequate utterance. Too shy to stammer his pro- found yearnings to ears that would not hear, and, never having known the blessed relief of a sympathetic audience, he perforce remained choked and dumb,

UNCLE PAUL ii

the only mitigation he knew being that loss of self which follows prolonged contemplation. In his con- templation of Nature, for instance, he would gaze upon the landscape, the sky, a tree or flower, until their essential beauty passed into his own nature. For the moment he felt with these things. He was them. He took their qualities literally into himself, He lost his ordinary personality by changing its centre, merging it into those remoter phases of con- sciousness which extended from himself mysteriously to include the landscape, the sky, the tree, the flower. For him everywhere in Nature there was psychic energy. And it was difficult to say which was with him the master passion : to find Reality — God — through Nature, or to explain Nature through God.

Then the busy faces of America, now left behind after twenty years, gradually receded, and others, dimly seen through mist, rose above the horizon of his thoughts. And among them he saw that two stood forth with more clearness than the rest. One of these was Dick Messenger, the friend of his boy- hood, now dead but a few years ; and the other, the face of his sister, Margaret, whom Dick had left a widow, and whose children he would now see for the first time at their country home in the South ot England.

The ' Old Country ! ' He repeated the words softly to himself, weaving it like a coloured thread

12 UNCLE PAUL

CHAP,

through all his reverie. He had lived away long long enough to understand the poignant magic that lies in the little phrase, and to appreciate the seizing and pathetic beauty lying along that faint blue line of sea and sky.

And presently he took his field-glasses again and went up on deck and hid himself in the bows alone. Leaning over the bulwarks he took the scented wind of spring full in the face, and watched with a curious exhilaration the huge rollers, charging and bellowing like wild bulls of the sea as the ship drew nearer and nearer to the coast, plunging, leaping, and thunder- ing as she moved.

CHAPTER II

Justice ii not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud, there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted ; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of a bull's-eye at his belt. — R. L. S.

THE case of Paul Rivers after all was very simple, though perhaps in some respects uncommon. Circumstances — to sum it up roughly — had so conspired that the most impressionable portion of his character — half of his mind and most of his soul, that is — had never found utterance. He had never discovered the medium that could carry forth into the relief of expression all the inner turmoil and delight of a soul that was very much alive and singularly in touch with the simple and primitive forces of the world.

It was not, as with the returned emigrant, grief that he felt, but something far more troublesome : Joy. For the beauty of the world, of character as of nature, laid a spell upon him that set his heart in the glow and fever of an inner furnace, while the play of his imagination among the ' common '

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i4 THE EDUCATION OF CHAP. \

things of life which the rest of the world apparently thought dull set him often upon the borders of an ] ecstasy whereof he found himself unable to com- municate one single letter to his fellow - beings. Thus, in later years, and out of due season, he was afflicted and perplexed by a luxuriant growth that by rights should have been harvested before he was twenty-five ; and a great part of him had neglected to grow up at all.

This result was due to no fault — no neglect, that is — of his own, but to circumstances and tempera- ment combined. It explains, however, why, after twenty years in the backwoods of America, he saw the coast of the Old Country with a deep emotion that was not all delight, but held something also of j dismay.

Left an orphan, with his younger sister, at an : early age, the blundering of trustees had forced him out into the world before his first term at Cambridge was over, and after various vicissitudes he had found his way to America and had been drawn into the lumber trade. Here his knowledge and love of trees — it was a veritable passion with him — soon resulted in a transfer from the Minneapolis office to the woods, and after an interesting apprenticeship, he came to hold an important post in which he was strangely at home. He was appointed to the post of ' Wood Cruiser ' — forest-traveller, commis voyageur of the primeval woods. His duties, well

ii UNCLE PAUL 15

paid too, were to survey, judge, mark, and report upon the qualities and values of the immense timber limits owned by his Company. And he loved the work. It was a life of solitude, but a life close to Nature ; borne in his canoe down swift wilderness streams ; meeting the wild animals in their secret haunts ; becoming intimate with dawns and sunsets, great winds, the magic of storms and stars, and being initiated into the profound mysteries of the clean and haunted regions of the world.

And the effect of this kind of life upon him — especially at an age when most men are busy learning more common values in the strife of cities — was of course significant. For here, in this soli- tary existence, the beauty of the world, virgin and glorious, struck the eyes of his soul and nearly blinded them.

His whole being threw itself inwards upon his thoughts, and outwards upon what fed his thoughts —the wonder of Nature. Even as a boy he had been mystically minded, a poet if ever there was one, though a poet without a lyre ; but at school he had chanced to come under the influence of masters who had sought to curb the exuberance of his imagination, so that he started into life with the rooted idea that it was something of a disgrace for a man to be too sensitive to beauty, and to possess a vivid and coloured imagination was almost a thing to be ashamed of.

1 6 THE EDUCATION OF CHAP.

This view ot his only * silver talent,' moreover, was never permitted by the nature of his life to alter.- His early American experiences stiffened it into a conviction which he yet despised. The fires ran hidden, if unchecked. Had he dwelt in cities, they might have suffered total extinction perhaps, but! here, in the heart of the free woods, they speedily rose to the surface again and flamed. He grew up singularly unspoilt, the shyness of the original nature utterly unconnected, the stores of a poetic imagina- tion accumulating steadily, but always unuttered.

For his sole companions all these years when he had any at all were the ' Bosses ' of the lumber camps he inspected, the ' Cookee ' who looked after his stew-pot in the 'home-shack,' and the half-breed Indian who accompanied him in the stern-seat of the bark canoe during the month-long trips about the wilderness : these — with the animals, winds, stars, and the forms of beauty his imagination for ever conjured out of them.

For twenty years he lived thus, knowing all the secrets of the woods and streams. In the summer he never slept under cover at all, so that even in sleep he understood, through closed eyelids, the motions of the stars behind the tangled network of branches overhead. In winter his snow-shoes carried him into the heart of the most dazzling scenes imaginable — the forest lying under many feet of snow with a cloudless sun lifting it all into an

n UNCLE PAUL 17

appearance of magic that took the breath away. Moreover, the fierce spring, when the streams became impassable floods, and the autumn, with a flaming glory of gold and scarlet unknown anywhere else in the world, he knew as intimately as the dryads themselves.

And all these moods became the intimate com- panions of his life, taking the place of men and women. He came to personify Nature as a matter of course.

Without knowing it, too, the place of children was taken somehow by the wild animals. He knew them all. He surprised them in their haunts in the course of his silent journeys into the heart of their playgrounds ; and his headquarters — a one- story shanty on the height of land between his two chief ' limits ' — was never without a tamed baby bear, a young moose to draw him on his snow-shoes with the manners of a well-bred pony, and a dozen other animals reclaimed from savagery and turned by some mysterious system of his own into real companions and confidants.

And the only books he read in the long winter nights, besides a few modern American novels that puzzled and vaguely distressed him, were Blake, his loved Greek plays, and the Bible.

He rarely saw a woman. Sides of his nature that ought to have developed under the influences of normal life at home lay dormant altogether, or were

1 8 THE EDUCATION OF CHAP.

filled as best might be by his intercourse with Nature. He wrote few letters. After Dick Messenger died, the formal correspondence he kept up at long intervals with his sister — Dick's widow — hardly de- served the name of letters. Great slabs of him, so ' to speak, stopped growing up, sinking down into the subconscious region to await conditions favourable for calling them to the surface again, and eventually coming to life — this was his tragic little secret — at a time when they were long overdue.

To the end of life he remained shy, shy in the sense that most of his thoughts and emotions he was afraid to reveal to others ; with the shyness, too, of the< utterly modest soul that cannot believe the world will give it the very things it has most right to claim, yet never dares to claim. And to the end Nature never lifted the spell laid upon him during those twenty years of initiation in her solitudes. To see the new moon tilting her silver horns in the west ; to hear the wind rustling in high trees, like old Indians telling one another secrets of the early world ; and to see the first stars looking down from the height of sky through spaces of watery blue — these, and a hundred other things that the majority seemed to ignore, were to him a more moving and terrible delight than anything he could imagine. For him such things could never be explained away, but remained living and uncorrected to the end.

Thus when, at forty-five, he inherited the fortune

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of his aunt (which he had always known must one day come to him), he returned to England with the shy, bursting, dream-laden heart of a boy, young as only those are young whom life has kept clean and sweet in the wilderness ; and the question that sprang to life in his heart when he saw the blue line of coast was a vague wonder as to what would be- come of his full-blooded dreams when tested by the conventional English life that he remembered as a boy. To whom could he speak of his child-like yearning after God ; of his swift divinations, his passionate intuitions into the very things that the majority put away with childhood ? What modern priest — so he felt, at least — what befuddled mystic, could possibly enter into the essential nature of these cravings as he did, or understand, without a sneer, the unspoilt passions of a man who had never ' grown up ' ?

* I shall be out of touch with it all,' he thought as he stood there in the bows and watched the blue line grow nearer, ' utterly out of touch. What shall I find to say to the men of my own age — I, who stopped growing up twenty years ago ? How shall I ever link on with them ? Children are the only things I can talk to, and children ! ' — he shrugged his shoulders and laughed — ' children will find me out at once and give me away to the others.'

' Dick's children, though, may be different ! ' came the sudden reflection. ' Only — I've had nothing to

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do with children for such ages. Dick had real imagination. By George,' — and his eyes glowed a moment — ' what if they took after him ! "

And for the fiftieth time, as he pictured the meeting with his stranger sister, his heart sank, andf he found refuge in the knowledge that he had not altogether burned his boats behind him. For he had been wise in his generation. He had arranged with his Company, who were only too glad of the chance of keeping his services, that he should go to England on a year's leave, and that if in the end he decided to return he should have a share in the| business, while still continuing the work of forest-*- inspection that he loved.

' I'm nothing but a wood-cruiser. I shall go back. In the big world I might lose all my vision ! '

And, having lived so long out of the world, he now came back to it with this simple, innocent, imaginative heart of a great boy, a boy still dream- ing, for all his five-and-forty years. Fully realising that something was wrong with him, that he ought to be more sedate, more cynical, more prosaic and sober, he yet could not quite explain to himself wherein lay the source of his disability. His thoughts stumbled and blundered when he tried to lay his finger on it, with the only result that he felt he would be * out of touch ' with his new work not knowing exactly how or why.

* It's a regular log-jam,' he said, using the phras

,i UNCLE PAUL 21

ology he was accustomed to, ' and I'm sorry for the chap that breaks it.'

It never occurred to him that in this simple thrill that Nature still gave him he possessed one of the greatest secrets for the preservation of genuine youth ; indeed, had he understood this, it would have meant that he was already old. For with the majority such dreams die young, brushed rudely from the soul by the iron hand of experience, whereas in his case it was their persistent survival that lent such a childlike quality to his shyness, and made him secretly ashamed of not feeling as grown-up as he realised he ought to feel.

Paul Rivers, in a word, belonged to a com- prehensible though perhaps not over common type, and one not often recognised owing to the elaborate care with which its ' specimens ' conceal themselves from the world under all manner of brave disguises. He was destitute of that nameless quality that con- stitutes a human being, not mature necessarily, but grown up. Sources of inner enthusiasm that most men lose when life brings to them the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, had kept alive ; and though on the one hand he was secretly ashamed of the very simplicity of his great delights, on the other hand he longed intensely for some means by which he could express them and relieve his burdened soul.

He envied the emigrant who could let fall hot tears on the deck without further ado, while at the

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CHAP. II

same time he dreaded the laughter of the world into which he was about to move when they learned the cause of the emotions that produced them. A boy at forty-five ! A dreamer of children's dreams with fifty in sight — and no practical results !

These were some of the thoughts still tumbling vaguely about his mind when the tug brought letters aboard at Queenstown, and on the dining-room table where they were spread out he found one for himself in a handwriting that he both welcomed and dreaded.

CHAPTER III

HE welcomed it, because for years it had been the one remaining link with the life of his old home — these formal epistles that reached him at long intervals ; and he dreaded it, because he knew it would contain a definite invitation of an embarrass- ing description.

' She's bound to ask me,' he reflected as he opened it in his cabin ; * she can't help herself. And I am bound to accept, for I can't help myself either.' He was far too honest to think of in- venting elaborate excuses. * I've got to go and spend a month with her right away whether I like it or not.'

It was not by any means that he disliked his sister, for indeed he hardly knew her ; after all these years he barely remembered what she looked like, the slim girl of eighteen he had left behind. It was simply that in his mind she stood for the conventional life, so alien to his vision, to which he had returned.

He would try to like her, certainly. Very warm impulses stirred in his heart as he thought of her —

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his only near relative in the world, and the widow of his old school and Cambridge friend, Dick Messenger. It was in her handwriting that he first learned of Dick's love for her, as it was in hers that the news of his friend's death reached him — after his long tour — two months old. The handwriting was a symbol of the deepest human emotions he had known. And for that reason, too, he dreaded it.

He never realised quite what kind of woman she had become ; in his thoughts she had always remained simply the girl of eighteen — grown up — married. Her letters had been very kind and gentle, if in the nature of the case more and more formal. She became shadowy and vague in his mind as the years passed, and more and more he had come to think of her as wholly out of his own world. Reading between the lines it was not diffi- cult to see that she attached importance to much in life that seemed to him unreal and trivial, whereas the things that he thought vital she never referred to at all. It might, of course, be merely restraint concealing great depths. He could not tell. The letters, after a few years, had become like formal government reports. He had written fully, how- ever, to announce his home-coming, and her reply had been full of genuine pleasure.

'I don't think she'll make very much of me,' was the thought in his mind whenever he dwelt

Ill

UNCLE PAUL 25

upon it. ' I'm afraid my world must seem foreign — unreal to her ; the things I know rubbish.'

So, in the privacy of his cabin, his heart already strangely astir by the emotion of that blue line on the horizon, he read his sister's invitation and found it charming. There was spontaneous affection in it.

* We shall fix things up between us so that no one would ever know.' He did not explain what it was ' no one would ever know,' but went on to finish the letter. He was to make his home with her in the country, he read, until he decided what to do with himself. The tone of the letter made his heart bound. It was a real welcome, and he responded to it instantly like a boy. Only one thing in it seriously disturbed his equanimity. Absurd as it may seem, the fact that his sister's welcome included also that of the children, had a subtly disquieting effect upon him.

... for they are dying to see you and to find out for themselves what the big old uncle they have heard so much about is really like. All their animals are being cleaned and swept so as to be ready for your arrival, and, in anticipa- tion of your stories of the backwoods, no other tales find favour with them any more.

An expression of perplexity puckered his face. * I declare, I'm afraid of those children — Dick's children ! ' he thought, holding the open letter to his mouth and squinting down the page, while his

26 THE EDUCATION OF CHAP.

eyebrows rose and his forehead broke into lines. 1 They'll find out what I am. They'll betray me. I shall never be able to hold out against them.* He knew only too well how searching was the appeal that all growing and immature life made to him. It touched the very centre of him that had refused to grow up and that made him young with itself. * I can no more resist them than I could resist the baby bears, or that little lynx that used to eat out ' of my hand.' He shrugged his big shoulders, look- ing genuinely distressed. ' And then every one will know what I am — an overgrown boy — a dumb poet — a dreamer of dreams that bear no fruit ! *

He was not morbidly introspective. He was merely trying to face the little problem squarely. He got up and staggered across the cabin, steadying himself against the rolling of the ship in front of the looking-glass.

« Big Old Uncle ! '

He stuffed the letter into his pocket and surveyed himself critically. Big he certainly was, but that other adjective brought with it a sensation of weariness that had never yet troubled him in his wilderness existence. He was only a little, just a very little, on the shady side of forty-five, but to the children he might seem really old, aged^ and to his sister, who was considerably his junior, as elderly, "and perhaps in need of the comforts of the elderly.

in UNCLE PAUL 27

He squared his shoulders and looked more closely into the glass. There, opposite to him, stood a tall, dignified man in a blue suit, with a spotless linen collar and a neat tie passing through a gold ring, in- stead of the unkempt fellow he was accustomed to in a flannel shirt, red handkerchief and big sombrero hat pulled over his eyes ; a man weighing the best part of fifteen stones, lean, well-knit, vigorous, and nearly six feet three in his socks. A pair of brown eyes, kindly brown eyes he thought, met his own question- ingly, and a brown beard — yes, it was still brown — covered the lower part of the face. He put up a hand to stroke it, and noticed that it was a strong, muscular hand, sunburnt but well kept, with neat finger-nails, and a heavy signet ring on one finger. It brushed across the rather deep lines on the bronzed forehead, without brushing them away, however, and then travelled higher to the rough parting in the dark-brown hair, and the hair, he noticed, was brushed in a particular way evidently, a way he thought no one would notice but himself and the lumber-camp barber who first taught him, so as to cover up a few places where the wind made little chilly feelings in winter-time under his fur cap.

Old ? No, not old yet — but " getting on " was a gentler phrase he could not deny, and there were certainly odd traces where the crows had walked on his skin while he slept in the forest, and had

28 THE EDUCATION OF CH,

hopped up even to the corners of his eyes to see if he were really asleep. There were other lines, too — lines of exposure, traced by wind and sun, and one or two queer marks that are said only to come from prolonged hardship and severest want. For he had known both sides of the wilderness life, and on his long journeys Nature had not always been kind to him.

He stared for a long time at his reflection in the glass, lost in reverie. This coming back to England after so many years was like looking at a picture of himself as he was when he had left ; it furnished him with a ready standard of com- parison ; the changes of the years stood out very sharply, as though they had come about in a single night.

Yes, his face and figure had aged a good deal. He admitted it. And when he frowned he had distinctly an appearance of middle age. This, of course, was the absurd part of it, for in spirit he had