Solution Manual for Statistics for Business and Economics 13th Edition

McClave Benson Sincich 0134506596 9780134506593

Full link download
Test Bank:

https://testbankpack.com/p/test-bank-for-statistics-for-business-and-
economics-13th-edition-mcclave-benson-sincich-0134506596-
9780134506593/
Solution Manual:

https://testbankpack.com/p/solution-manual-for-statistics-for-business-
and-economics-13th-edition-mcclave-benson-sincich-0134506596-
9780134506593/

Chapter 2
Methods for Describing Sets of Data
2.1 First, we find the frequency of the grade A. The sum of the frequencies for all five grades must be 200.
Therefore, subtract the sum of the frequencies of the other four grades from 200. The frequency for grade
A is:
200 − (36 + 90 + 30 + 28) = 200 − 184 = 16

To find the relative frequency for each grade, divide the frequency by the total sample size, 200. The
relative frequency for the grade B is 36/200 = .18. The rest of the relative frequencies are found in a
similar manner and appear in the table:

Grade on Statistics Exam Frequency Relative Frequency

A: 90 −100 16 .08
B: 80 − 89 36 .18
C: 65 − 79 90 .45
D: 50 − 64 30 .15
F: Below 50 28 .14
Total 200 1.00

2.2 a. To find the frequency for each class, count the number of times each letter occurs. The frequencies
for the three classes are:

Class Frequency
X 8
Y 9
Z 3
Total 20
b. The relative frequency for each class is found by dividing the frequency by the total sample size. The
relative frequency for the class X is 8/20 = .40. The relative frequency for the class Y is 9/20 = .45.
The relative frequency for the class Z is 3/20 = .15.

Class Frequency Relative Frequency

X 8 .40
Y 9 .45
Z 3 .15
Total 20 1.00

10
Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Inc.
3 Chapter 2 Methods for Describing Sets of Data 11

c. The frequency bar chart is:

6
Frequency

0
X Y Z
C la s s

d. The pie chart for the frequency distribution is:

Pie Chart of Class

Category
X
Z
Y
15.0%
Z

X
40.0%

Y
45.0%

107
2.3 a. p = = .615
U
174

57
b. pS = = .328
174

10
c. pR = = .057
174

d. .615 ( 360 ) = 221.4 , .328 ( 360 ) = 118.1 , .057 ( 360 ) = 20.5

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Inc.

4 Chapter 2 Methods for Describing Sets of Data 11

e. Using MINITAB, the pie chart is:

Pie Chart of Location

Category
Rural Urban
5.7%
Suburban
Rural

Suburban
32.8%

Urban
61.5%

f. 61.5% of the STEM participants are from urban areas, 32.8% are from suburban areas, and 5.7% are
from rural areas.

g. Using MINITAB, the bar chart is:

70

60

50

40
Percen

30
t

20

10
0
Urban Suburban Rural
Loc

Percent is calculated within all data.

Both charts give the same information.

2.4 a. According to the pie chart, .760 of the sample currently have.a cable/satellite TV subscription at
home. The total number of adults sampled who have a cable/satellite TV subscription at home is
1, 521
1,521 + 180 + 300 = 2,001 . The proportion is = .760 .
2,001

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Inc.

13 Chapter 2 Methods for Describing Sets of Data 13

b. Using MINITAB, the pie chart is:

Pie Chart of Subscribe
Category
Cable TV
Cord cutter Cord cutter
16.5%

Cable TV
83.5%

2.5 a. The type of graph is a bar graph.

b. The variable measured for each of the robots is type of robotic limbs.

c. From the graph, the design used the most is the “legs only” design.

d. The relative frequencies are computed by dividing the frequencies by the total sample size. The total
sample size is n = 106. The relative frequencies for each of the categories are:

Type of Limbs Frequency Relative Frequency

None 15 15/106 = .142
Both 8 8 / 106 = .075
Legs ONLY 63 63/106 = .594
Wheels ONLY 20 20/106 = .189
Total 106 1.000

e. Using MINITAB, the Pareto diagram is:

.60

.50

.40
Frequency

.30
Relative

.20

.10
0
Legs Wheels None Both
Type

Percent within all data.

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Inc.

Another document from Scribd.com that is
random and unrelated content:
 ‘I was lonely,’ he said bluntly. And after a pause he added, ‘I got
all yours.’
‘I’m so glad.’ And then another pause. In which fashion they
talked on for half an hour, each secretly estimating the other—
wondering a little why they did not feel all kind of poignant
emotions they had rather expected to feel.
It was a perfectly natural scene between a brother and sister
who had grown up entirely apart, who were quite honest, who
were utterly different types, and who yet wished to hold to one
another as the nearest blood ties they possessed. They skimmed
pleasantly and, so far as he was concerned, more and more easily,
over the surface of things. Her talk, like her letters, was sincere,
simple, shallow; it concealed no hidden depths, he felt at once.
And by degrees, even in this first conversation, crept a shadow of
other things, so that he realised they were in reality leagues apart,
and could never have anything much in common below the
pleasant surface relations of life.
Yet, even while he sheered off, as oil declines from its very
nature to mingle with water, he felt genuinely drawn to her in
another way. She was his own sister; she was his nearest tie; and
she was Dick’s widow. They would get along together all right;
they would be good friends.
‘Twenty years, Margaret.’
‘Twenty years, Paul.’
And then another pause of several minutes during which
something that was too vague to be a real thought passed like a
shadow through his mind. What could his friend Dick have seen in
her that was necessary to his life and happiness—Dick Messenger,
who was scholar, poet, thinker—who sought the everlasting things
—God? He instantly suppressed it as unworthy, something of
which he was ashamed, but not before it had left a definite little
trace in his imagination.
‘So at last, Paul, you’ve really come home,’ she resumed; ‘I can
hardly believe it,—and are going to settle down. You are a rich
man.’
‘Aunt Alice did her duty,’ he laughed. He ignored the reference
to settling down. It vaguely displeased him. ‘It’s for you as well as
me,’ he added, meaning the money. ‘I want to share with you
whatever you need.’
 ‘Not a penny,’ she said quickly; ‘I have all I need. I live with my
memories, you know. I am only so glad for your sake,—after all
your hard life out there.’
‘The life wasn’t hard; it was rather wonderful,’ he said simply. ‘I
liked it.’
‘For a time perhaps; but you must have had curious experiences
and lived with very rough people in those—lumber camp places
you wrote about.’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Simple kind of men, but very
decent, very genuine. Few signs of city polish, I admit, but then
you know I never cared for frills, Margaret.’
‘Frills!’ she exclaimed, without any expression on her face. ‘Of
course not. Still, I am very glad you have left it all. The life must
often have been unsuitable and lonely; one always felt that for you.
You can’t have had any of the society that one’s accustomed to.’
‘Not of that kind,’ he put in hurriedly with a short laugh, ‘but of
other kinds. I struck a pretty good crowd of men on the whole.’
She turned her face slightly away from him; her eyes, he
divined, had been fixed for a moment on his hands. For the first
time in his life he realised that they were large and rough and
brown. Her own were so pale and dainty—like china hands, glossy
and smooth—and the gold bangle on her thin wrist looked as
though every second it must slip over her fingers. His own hands
disappeared swiftly into the pockets of his coat.
She turned to him with a gentle smile. ‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘it is
simply too delightful to know that you really are here at last. It
must seem strange to you at first, and there are so many things to
talk over—such a lot to tell. I want to hear all your plans. You’ll get
used to us after a bit, and there are lots of nice people in the
neighbourhood who are dying to meet you.’
Her brother felt inclined to explain that he had no wish to
interfere with their ‘dying’; but, instead, he returned her smile.
‘I’m a poor hand at meeting people, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I’m not as
sociable as I might be.’
‘But you’ll get over that. Of course, living so long in the
backwoods makes one unsociable. But we’ll try and make you
happy and comfortable. You have no idea how very, very glad I am
that you’ve come home.’
Paul believed her. He leaned over and patted her hand, and she
smiled frankly and sweetly in his face. She was a very shadowy
sort of personality, he felt. If he blew hard she might blow away
altogether, or disappear like a soap-bubble.
‘I’m glad too, of course,’ he replied. ‘Only at my age, you know,
it’s not easy to tackle new habits.’
‘No one could take you for a day more than thirty-five,’ she said
with truth; ‘so that shall be our own little private secret. You look
quite absurdly young.’
They laughed together easily and naturally. Paul felt more at
home and soothed than he had thought possible. It had not been
in the least formidable after all, and for the first time in his life he
knew a little of that enervating kind of happiness that comes from
being made a fuss of. As there was still a considerable interval
before tea, they left their chairs and strolled through the garden,
and as they went, the talk turned upon the past, and his sister
spoke of Dick and of all he had meant to do in the world, had he
lived. Paul heard the details of his sudden death for the first time.
Her voice and manner were evidence of the melancholy she still
felt, but her brother’s heart was deeply stirred; he asked for all the
particulars he had so often wondered about, and in her quiet,
soothing tone, tinged now with tender sadness, she supplied the
information. Clearly she had never arisen from the blow. She had
worshipped Dick without understanding him.
‘Death always frightens me, I think,’ she said with a faint smile.
‘I try not to think about it.’
She passed on to speak of the children, and told him how
difficult she found it to cope with them—she suffered from
frequent headaches and could not endure noise—and how she
hoped when they were a little older to be more with them.
Mademoiselle Fleury, meanwhile, was such an excellent woman
and was teaching them all they should know.
‘Though, of course, I keep a close eye on them so far as I am
able,’ she explained, ‘and only wish I were stronger.’
They sauntered through the rose-garden and down the neat
gravel paths that led to the wilder parts of the grounds where the
rhododendron bushes stood in rounded domes and masses. It was
very peaceful, very beautiful. He trod softly and carefully. The
hush of centuries of cultivation lay over it all. Even the butterflies
flew gently, as to the measure of a leisurely dance that deprecated
undue animation. Paul caught his thoughts wandering to the open
spaces of untamed moorland he had seen from the hill-top. More
and more, as his sister’s personality revealed itself, he got the
impression that she lived enclosed like the wooden cows he had
seen from the train, in a little green field, with precise and neatly
trimmed borders. Strong emotions, as all other symptoms of plain
and vigorous life, she shrank from. There were notice-boards set
about her to warn trespassers, stating clearly that she did not wish
to be let out. Yet in her way she was true, loving, and sweet—only
it was such a conventional way, he felt.
Leaving the world of rhododendron bushes behind them, they
came to the beginning of a pine-wood leading to the heather-land
beyond. There was a touch of primitive wildness here. The trees
grew straight and tall, filling the glade, and a stream ran brawling
among their roots.
‘This is the Gwyle,’ she said, as they entered the shade, ‘it was
Dick’s favourite part of the whole grounds. I rarely come here; it’s
dark even in summer, and rather damp and draughty, I always
think.’
Paul looked about him and drew a long breath. The air was
strong with open-air scents of earth and bark and branches. Far
overhead the tufted pines swayed, murmuring to the sky; the
ground ran away downhill, becoming broken up and uneven;
nothing but dark, slender stems rose everywhere about him, like
giant seaweeds, he thought, rising from the pools of a deep sea.
And the soft wind, moving mysteriously between the shadows and
the sunlight, completed the spell. He passed suddenly—willy-nilly,
as his nature would have it—into that mood when the simplest
things about him turned their faces upwards so that he caught
their eyes and their meaning; when the well-known and common
things of the world shone out and revealed the infinite. Something
in this quiet pine-wood that was mighty, and utterly wonderful,
entered his soul, linking him on at a single stroke with the majesty
of the great spirit of the earth. What lay behind it? What was its
informing spirit? How and where could it link on so intimately
with his soul? And could it not be a channel, as he always felt it
must be, to the God behind it? Beauty seized him by the throat
and made him tremble.
This sudden rush came over him, sea-like. His moods were ever
like the sea, some strange touch of colour shifting the entire key.
Something, too, made him feel lonely and oppressed. He, who was
accustomed to space in bulk—the space the stars and winds live in
—had come to this little, parcelled-out place. He felt clipped
already. He turned to the shadowy personality beside him, the
boyish impulse bursting its way out. After all, she was his own
sister; he could reveal himself to no one if not to her.
‘By Gosh, Margaret,’ he cried, ‘this is the real thing. This wood
must be alive and haunted just as the James Bay forests are. It’s
simply full of wonder.’
‘It’s the Gwyle wood,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s usually rather damp.
But Dick loved it.’
Her brother hardly heard what she said. ‘Listen,’ he said in a
hushed tone; ‘do you hear the wind up there aloft? The trees are
talking. The wood is full of whispers. There’s no sound in the
world like that murmur of a soft breeze in pine branches. It’s like
the old gods sighing, which only their true worshippers hear! Isn’t
it fine and melancholy? Margaret, d’you know, it goes through me
like a fever.’
His sister stopped and stared at him. She wore a little frightened
expression. His sudden enthusiasm puzzled her evidently.
‘It’s the Gwyle wood,’ she repeated mechanically. ‘It’s very
pretty, I think. Dick always thought so too.’
Her brother, surprised at his own rush of ready words, and
already ashamed of the impulse that had prompted him to reveal
himself, fell into silence.
‘Nature excites me sometimes,’ he said presently. ‘I suppose it’s
because I’ve known nothing else.’
‘That’s quite natural, I’m sure, Paul dear,’ she rejoined, turning
to lead the way back to the sunshine of the open garden; ‘it’s very
pretty; I love it too. But it rather alarms me, I think, sometimes.’
‘Perhaps the natural tendency in solitude is to personify nature,
and make it take the place of men and women. It has become a
profound need of my being certainly.’ He spoke more quietly,
chilled by her utter absence of comprehension.
‘In its place I think it is ever so nice. But, Paul, you surprise me.
I had no idea you were clever like that.’ She was perfectly sincere
in what she said.
Her brother blushed like a boy. ‘It’s my foolishness, I suppose,
Margaret,’ he said with a shy laugh. ‘I am certainly not clever.’
‘Anyhow, you can be foolish or clever here to your heart’s
content. You must use the place as though it were your own
exactly.’
 ‘Thank you, Margaret.’
‘Only I don’t think I quite understand all those things,’ she
added vaguely after a pause. ‘Nixie talks rather like that. She has
all poor Dick’s ideas and strange fancies. I really can’t keep up
with her at all.’
Paul stiffened at the reference to the children; he remembered
his attitude. Already he had been guilty of a serious lapse from his
good intentions.
‘She comes down to this wood far too much, and I’m sure it’s
not quite healthy for her. I always forget to speak to Mlle. Fleury.’
Then she turned to him and smiled. ‘But they are all so excited
about your coming. They will simply devour you.’
‘I’m a poor hand at children, I’m afraid,’ he said, falling back
upon his usual formula, ‘but, of course, I shall be delighted to see
them.’
She gathered up her white skirts about her trim ankles and led
the way out of the wood, her brother following and thinking how
slim and graceful she was, and what a charming figure she made
among the rose-trees. He got the impression of her as something
unreal and shadowy, a creature but half alive. It would hardly have
surprised him to see her suddenly flit off into mist and sunshine
and disappear from view, leaving him with the certainty that he
had been talking with a phantasm of a dream. Between himself
and her, however, he realised now, there was a gulf fixed. They
looked at one another as it were down the large end of a telescope,
and talked down a long-distance telephone that changed all their
words and made the sense unintelligible and meaningless. The
scale of values between them had no common denominator. Yet
he could love her, and he meant to.
They crossed the lawns and went through the French window
into the cool of the drawing-room, and while he was sipping his
first cup of afternoon English tea, struggling with a dozen complex
emotions that stirred within him, there suddenly darted across the
lawn a vision of flying children, with a string of animals at their
heels. They swept out of some laurel shrubberies into the slanting
evening sunlight, and came to a dead stop on the gravel path in
front of the window.
Their eyes met. They had seen him.
There they stood, figures of suddenly arrested motion, staring at
him through the glass. ‘So that’s Uncle Paul!’ was the thought in
the mind of each. He was being inspected, weighed, labelled. The
meeting with his sister was nothing compared to this critical
examination, conducted though it was from a distance.
But it lasted only a moment. With a sudden quietness the
children passed away from the window towards another door
round the corner, and so out of sight.
‘They’ve gone up to get tidy before coming to see you,’ explained
his sister; and Paul used the short respite to the best possible
advantage by collecting his thoughts, remembering his ‘attitude
and disguise,’ and seeing to it that his armour was properly
fastened on, leaving no loopholes for sudden attack. He retired
cautiously to the only place in a room where a shy man feels really
safe—the mat before the fireplace. He almost wished for his gun
and hunting-knife. The idea made him laugh.
‘They already love you,’ he heard his sister’s gentle whispering
voice, ‘and I know you’ll love them too. You must never let them
annoy you, of course.’
‘They’re your children—and Dick’s,’ he answered quietly. ‘I shall
get on with them famously, I’m sure.’
 CHAPTER V
I kiss you and the world begins to fade.
Land of Heart’s Desire.—Y .

A few minutes later the door opened softly, and a procession,

solemn of face and silent of foot, marched slowly into the room.
The moment had come at last for his introduction, and, by a single
stroke of unintentional diplomacy, his sister did more to winning
her brother’s shy heart than by anything else she could possibly
have devised. She went out.
‘They will prefer to make your acquaintance by themselves,’ she
said in her gentle way, ‘and without any assistance from me.’
The procession advanced to the middle of the room and then
stopped short. Evidently, for them, the departure of their mother
somewhat complicated matters. They had depended upon her to
explain them to their uncle. There they stood, overcome by
shyness, moving from one foot to another, with flushed and rosy
faces, hair brushed, skin shining, and eyes all prepared to laugh as
soon as somebody gave the signal, but not the least knowing how
to begin.
And their uncle faced them in similar plight, as, for the second
time that afternoon, shyness descended upon him like a cloud, and
he could think of nothing to say. His size overwhelmed him; he felt
like an elephant. With a sudden rush all his self-possession
deserted him. He almost wished that his sister might return so
that they should be brought up to him seriatim, named just as
Adam named the beasts, and dismissed—which Adam did not do—
with a kiss. It was really, of course—and he knew it to his secret
mortification—a meeting on both sides of children; they all felt the
shyness and self-consciousness of children, he as much as they,
and at any moment might take the sudden plunge into careless
intimacy, as the way with children ever is.
 Meanwhile, however, he took rapid and careful note of them as
they stood in that silent, fidgety group before him, with solemn,
wide-open eyes fixed upon his face.
The youngest, being in his view little more than a baby, needs
no description beyond the fact that it stared quite unintelligently
without winking an eye. Its eyes, in fact, looked as though they
were not made to close at all. And this is its one and only
appearance.
Standing next to the baby, holding its hand, was a boy in a
striped suit of knickerbockers, with a big brown curl like a
breaking wave on the top of his forehead; he was between eight
and nine years old, and his names—for, of course, he had two—
were Richard Jonathan, shortened, as Paul learned later, into
Jonah. He balanced himself with the utmost care in the centre of a
particular square of carpet as though half an inch to either side
would send him tumbling into a bottomless abyss. The fingers not
claimed by the baby travelled slowly to and fro along the sticky
line of his lower lip.
Close behind him, treating similarly another square of carpet,
stood a rotund little girl, slightly younger than himself, named
Arabella Lucy. There was a touch of audacity in her eyes, and an
expression about the mouth that indicated the imminent approach
of laughter. She had been distinctly washed and brushed-up for
the occasion. Her face shone like a polished onion skin. She had
the same sort of brown hair that Jonah considered fashionable,
and her name for all common daily purposes was Toby.
The eldest and most formidable of his tormentors, standing a
little in advance of the rest, was Margaret Christina, shortened by
her father (who, indeed, had been responsible for all the
nicknames) into Nixie. And the name fitted her like a skin, for she
was the true figure of a sprite, and looked as if she had just
stepped out of the water and her hair had stolen the yellow of the
sand. Her eyes ran about the room like sunshine from the surface
of a stream, and her movements instantly made Paul think of
water gliding over pebbles or ribbed sand with easy and gentle
undulations. Flashlike he saw her in a clearing of his lonely woods,
a creature of the elements. Her big blue eyes, too, were full of
wonder and pensive intelligence, and she stood there in a
motherly and protective manner as though she were quite equal to
the occasion and would presently know how to act with both
courage and wisdom.
 And Nixie, indeed, it was, after this prolonged and critical
pause, who commenced operations. There was a sudden
movement in the group, and the next minute Paul was aware that
she had left it and was walking slowly towards him. He noticed her
graceful, flowing way of moving, and saw a sunburnt arm and
hand extended in his direction. The next second she kissed him.
And that kiss acted like an electric shock. Something in her that
was magical met its kind in his own soul and, flamelike, leaped
towards it. A little tide of hot life poured into him, troubling the
deeps with a momentary sense of delicious bewilderment.
‘How do you do, Uncle Paul,’ she said; ‘we are very glad you
have come—at last.’
The blood ran ridiculously to his head. He found his tongue, and
pulled himself sharply together.
‘So am I, dear. Of course, it’s a long way to come—America.’ He
stooped and bestowed the necessary kisses upon the others, who
had followed their leader and now stood close beside him, staring
like little owls in a row.
‘I know,’ she replied gravely. ‘It takes weeks, doesn’t it? And
mother has told us such a lot about you. We’ve been waiting a very
long time, I think,’ she added as though stating a grievance.
‘I suppose it is rather a long time to wait,’ he said sheepishly. He
stroked his beard and waited.
‘All of us,’ she went on. She included the others in this last
observation by bending her head at them, and into her uncle’s
memory leaped the vision of a slender silver birch tree that grew
on the edge of the Big Beaver Pond near the Canadian border. She
moved just as that silver birch moved when the breeze caught it.
Her manner was very demure, but she looked so piercingly into
the very middle of his eyes that Paul felt as though she had already
discovered everything about him. They all stood quite close to him
now, touching his knees; ready, there and then, to take him wholly
into their confidence.
An impulse that he only just managed to control stirred in him
and a curious pang accompanied it. He remembered his ‘attitude,’
however, and stiffened slightly.
‘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 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 doors?’ said Paul lamely.
‘Of course they are,’ replied Jonah; ‘in the stables and all about.’
He turned to Nixie, who stood quietly by her uncle’s side in a
protective way, superintending. Nixie nodded corroboration.
‘Now, we’ll introduce you—gradgilly,’ announced Toby, stooping
down and lifting with immense effort the large grey Persian that
had been sleeping on the window-sill when they came in. She held
it with great difficulty in her arms and hands, but in spite of her
best efforts only a portion of it found actual support, the rest
straggling away like a loosely stuffed bolster she could not
encompass.
It was evidently accustomed to being dealt with thus in sections,
for it continued to purr sleepily, blinking its large eyes with the
usual cat-smile, and letting its head fall backwards as though it
suddenly desired to examine the ceiling from an entirely fresh
point of view. None of its real attention, of course, was given to the
actual proceeding. It merely suffered the absurd affair—absent-
mindedly and with condescension. Its whiskers moved gently.
‘What’s its name?’ he asked kindly.
‘Her name,’ whispered Nixie.
‘We call her Mrs. Tompkyns, because it’s old now,’ Toby
explained, ignoring genders.
‘After the head-gardener’s gra’mother,’ Nixie explained hastily
in his ear; ‘but we might change it to Uncle Paul in honour of you
now, mightn’t we?’
‘Mrs. Uncle Paul,’ corrected Jonah, looking on with slight
disapproval, and anxious to get to the white mice and the squirrel.
‘It would be a pity to change the name, I think,’ Paul said,
straightening himself up dizzily from the introduction, and
watching the splendid creature fall upon its head from Toby’s
weakening grasp, and then march away with unperturbed dignity
to its former throne upon the window-sill. ‘I feel rather afraid of
Mrs. Tompkyns,’ he added; ‘she’s so very majestic.’
‘Oh, you needn’t be,’ they cried in chorus. ‘It’s all put on, you
know, that sort of grand manner. We knew her when she was a
kitten.’
The object-lesson was not lost upon him. Of all creatures in the
world, he reflected as he watched her, cats have the truest dignity.
They absolutely refuse to be laughed at. No cat would ever betray
its real self, yet here was he, a grown-up, intelligent man,
vacillating, and on the verge already of hopeless capitulation.
‘And what’s the name of these persons?’ he asked quickly,
turning for safety to Nixie, who had her arms full of a writhing
heap she had been diligently collecting from the corners of the
room.
‘Oh, that’s only Mrs. Tompkyns’ family,’ exclaimed Jonah
impatiently; ‘the last family, I mean. She’s had lots of others.’
‘The last family before this was only two,’ Nixie told him. ‘We
called them Ping and Pong. They live in the stables now. But these
we call Pouf, Sambo, Spritey, Zezette, and Dumps——’
‘And the next ones,’ Toby broke in excitedly, ‘we’re going to call
with the names on the engines when we go up to London to see the
dentist.’
‘Or the names of the Atlantic steamers wouldn’t be bad,’ said
Paul.
‘Not bad,’ Jonah said, with lukewarm approval; ‘only the
engines would be much better.’
‘There may not be any next ones,’ opined Toby, emerging from
beneath a sofa after a frantic, but vain, attempt to catch something
alive.
Jonah snorted with contempt. ‘Of course there will. They come
in bunches all the time, just like grapes and chestnuts and things.
Madmizelle told me so. There’s no end to them. Don’t they, Uncle
Paul?’
‘I believe so,’ said the authority appealed to, extracting his finger
with difficulty from the teeth and claws of several kittens.
There came a lull in the proceedings, the majority of the animals
having escaped, and successfully concealed themselves among
what Toby called ‘the furchinur.’ Paul was still following a prior
train of reflection.
 ‘Yes, cats are really rather wonderful creatures,’ he mused aloud
in spite of himself, turning instinctively in the direction of Nixie.
‘They possess a mysterious and superior kind of intelligence.’
For a moment it was exactly as if he had tapped his armour and
said, ‘Look! It’s all sham!’
The child peered sharply up in his face. There was a sudden
light in her eyes, and her lips were parted. He had not exactly
expected her to answer, but somehow or other he was not
surprised when she did. And the answer she made was just the
kind of thing he knew she would say. He was annoyed with himself
for having said so much.
‘And they lead secret little lives somewhere else, and only let us
see what they want us to see. I knew you understood really.’ She
said it with an elfin smile that was certainly borrowed from
moonlight on a mountain stream. With one fell swoop it caught
him away into a world where age simply did not exist. His mind
wavered deliciously. The singing in his heart was almost loud
enough to be audible.
But he just saved himself. With a sudden movement he leaned
forward and buried his face in the pie of kittens that nestled in her
arms, letting them lose their paws for a moment in his beard. The
kittens might understand, but at least they could not betray him
by putting it into words. It was a narrower escape than he cared
for.
‘And these are the Chow puppies,’ cried Jonah, breathless from
a long chase after the sable muffs.
‘We call them China and Japan.’
Paul welcomed the diversion. Their teeth were not nearly so
sharp as the kittens’, and they burrowed with their black noses
into his sleeves. So thick was their fur that they seemed to have no
bones at all; their dark eyes literally dripped laughter.
With an effort he put on a more sedate manner.
‘You have got a lot of beasts,’ he said.
‘Animals,’ Nixie corrected him. ‘Only toads, rats, and hedgehogs
are beasts. And, remember, if you’re rude to an animal, as
Mademoiselle Fleury was once, it only ’spises you—and then——’
‘I beg their pardon,’ he put in hurriedly; ‘I quite understand, of
course.’
 ‘You see it’s rather important, as they want to like you, and
unless you respect them they can’t, can they?’ she finished
earnestly.
‘I do respect them, believe me, Nixie, and I appreciate their
affection. Affection and respect must always go together.’
The children were wholly delighted. Paul had completely won
their hearts from the very beginning. The parrot, the squirrel, and
the white mice were all introduced in turn to him, and he heard
sundry mysterious allusions to ‘the owl in the stables,’ ‘Juliet and
her two kids,’ to say nothing of dogs, ponies, pigeons, and
peacocks, that apparently dwelt in the regions of outer space, and
were to be reserved for the morrow.
The performance was coming to an end. Paul was already
congratulating himself upon having passed safely, if not with full
credit, through a severe ordeal, when the door opened and a
woman of about twenty-five, with a pleasant face full of character
and intelligence, stood in the doorway. A torrent of French
instantly broke loose on all sides. The woman started a little when
she perceived that the children were not alone.
‘Oh, Mademoiselle, this is Uncle Paul,’ they cried, each in a
different fashion. ‘This is our Uncle Paul! He’s just been
introduced to the animals, and now he must be introduced to you.’
Paul shook hands with her, and the introduction passed off
easily enough; the woman was charming, he saw at the first
glimpse, and possessed of tact. She at once took his side and
pretended to scold her charges for having plagued and bothered
him so long. Evidently she was something more to them than a
mere governess. The lassitude of his sister, no doubt, gave her
rights and responsibilities.
But what impressed Paul when he was alone—for her simple
remark that it was past bedtime was followed by sudden kisses
and disappearance—was the remarkable change that her arrival
had brought about in the room. It came to him with a definite little
shock. It was more than significant, he felt.
And it was this: that the children, though obviously they loved
her, treated her as some one grown up and to be obeyed, whereas
himself, he now realised, they had all along treated as one of
themselves to whom they could be quite open and natural. His
‘attitude’ they had treated with respect, just as he had treated the
attitude of the animals with respect, but at the same time he had
been made to feel one of themselves, in their world, part and
parcel of their own peculiar region. There had been nothing forced
about it whatever. Whether he liked it or not they accepted him.
His ‘attitude’ was not regarded seriously. It was not regarded at
all. And this was grave.
He was so simple that he would never have thought of this but
for the entrance of the governess. Her arrival threw it all into
sharp relief. Clearly the children recognised no barrier between
themselves and him; he had been taken without parley straight
into their holy of holies. Nixie, as leader and judge, had carried
him off at once.
And this was a very subtle and powerful compliment that made
him think a great deal. He would either have to drop his armour
altogether or make it very much more effective.
Indeed, it was the immediate problem in his mind as he slowly
made his way downstairs to find his sister on the lawn, and satisfy
her rather vague curiosity by telling her that the children had
introduced him to the animals, and that he had got on famously
with them all.
 CHAPTER VI
Oh! Fairies, take me out of this dull world
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame!
Land of Heart’s Desire.—Y .

Paul went early to bed that night. It was his first night in an
English country home for many years; strange forces were at work
in him. His introduction to the children, his meeting with Nixie
especially, had let loose powers in his soul that called for sober
reflection; and he felt the need of being alone.
Another thing, too, urged him to seek the solitude of his
chamber, for after dinner he had sat for a couple of hours with his
sister, talking over the events and changes of the long interval
since they had met,—the details that cannot be told in letters, the
feelings that no one writes. And he came upstairs with his first
impression of her character slightly modified. She had more in her
than he first divined. Beneath that shadowy and silken manner he
had caught traces of distinct purpose. For one thing she was
determined to keep him in England.
He had told her frankly about his arrangement with the lumber
Company, explaining that he regarded his present visit in the light
of a holiday. ‘I suppose that is—er—wise of you,’ she said, but she
had not been able to conceal her disappointment. She asked him
presently if he really wanted to live all his life in such a place, and
what it was in English life, or civilised, conventional life, that he so
disliked, and Paul, feeling distinctly uncomfortable—for he
loathed giving pain—had answered evasively, with more skill than
he knew, ‘“Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.”
I suppose my treasure—the only kind I know—is out there in the
great woods, Margaret.’
 ‘Paul, are you married, then?’ she asked with a start; and when
he laughed and assured her most emphatically that he was not,
she looked exceedingly puzzled and a little shocked too. ‘Are you
so very fond of this—er—treasure, then?’ she asked point blank in
her softest manner, ‘and is she so—I mean, can’t you bring her
home and acknowledge her?’ And after his first surprise when he
had gathered her meaning, it took him a long time to explain that
there was no woman concerned at all, and that it was entirely a
matter of his temperament.
‘Everybody makes his own world, remember,’ he laughed, ‘and
its size depends, I suppose, upon the power of the imagination.’
‘Then I fear one’s imagination is a very poor one,’ she said
solemnly, ‘or else I have none at all. I cannot pretend to
understand your tastes for trees and woods and things; but you’re
exactly like poor Dick in that way, and I suppose one must be
really clever to be like that.’
‘A year is a long time, Margaret,’ he said after a pause, to
comfort her. ‘Much may happen before it’s over.’
‘I hope so,’ she had answered, standing behind his chair and
stroking his head. ‘By that time you may have met some one who
will reconcile you to—to staying here—a little longer.’ She patted
his head as though he were a Newfoundland dog, he thought. It
made him laugh.
‘Perhaps,’ he said.
And, now in his room, before the candles were lighted, he was
standing by the open window, thinking it all over. Of women, of
course, he knew little or nothing; to him they were all charming,
some of them wonderful; and he was not conscious that his point
of view might be considered by a man of the world—of the world
that is little, sordid, matter-of-fact—distinctly humorous. At forty-
five he believed in women just as he had believed in them at
twenty, only more so, for nothing had ever entered his experience
to trouble an exquisite picture in his mind. They stood nearer to
God than men did, he felt, and the depravity of really bad women
he explained by the fact that when they did fall they fell farther.
The sex-fever, so far as he was concerned, had never mounted to
his brain to obscure his vision.
He only knew—and knew it with a sacred wonder that was akin
to worship—that women, like the angels, were beyond his reach
and beyond his understanding. Comely they all were to him. He
looked up to them in his thoughts, not for their reason or strength,
but for the subtlety of their intuition, their power of sacrifice, and
last but not least, for the beauty and grace of their mere presence
in a world that was so often ugly and unclean.
‘The flame—the lamp—the glory—whatever it may be called—
keeps alight in their faces,’ he loved to say to himself, ‘almost to
the end. With men it is gone at thirty—often at twenty.’
And his sister, for all her light hold on life, and the strain in her
that in his simplicity he regarded as rather ‘worldly,’ was no
exception to the rule. He thought her entirely good and wonderful,
and, perhaps, so far as she went, he was not too egregiously
mistaken. He looked for the best in everybody, and so, of course,
found it.
‘Only she will never make much of me, or I of her, I’m afraid,’ he
thought as he leaned out of the window, watching the scented
darkness. ‘We shall get along best by leaving each other alone and
being affectionate, so to speak, from a distance.’
And, indeed, so far he had escaped the manifold seductions by
which Nature seeks to attain her great object of perpetuating the
race. As a potential father of many sons he was of course an object
of legitimate prey; but his forest life had obviated all that; his
whole forces had turned inwards for the creation of the poet’s
visions, and Nature in this respect, he believed, had passed him
by. So far as he was aware there was no desire in him to come
forth and perform a belated duty to the world by increasing its
population. It was the first time any one had even suggested to
him that he should consider such a matter, and the mere idea
made him smile.
Gradually, however, these thoughts cleared away, and he turned
to other things he deemed more important.
The night was still as imaginable; odours of earth and woods
were wafted into the room with the scent of roses. Overhead, as he
leaned on his elbow and gazed, the stars shone thickly, like points
of gold pricked in a velvet curtain. A lost wind stirred the
branches; he could distinguish their solemn dance against the
constellations. Orion, slanting and immense, tilted across the sky,
the two stars at the base resting upon the shoulder of the hill, and
far off, in the deeps of the night, the murmur of the pines sounded
like the breaking of invisible surf.
 Something indescribably fresh and wild in the taste of the air
carried him back again across the ocean. The ancient woods he
knew so well rose before the horizon’s rim, swimming with purple
shadows and alive with a continuous great murmur that stretched
for a hundred leagues. The picture of those desolate places, lying
in lonely grandeur beneath the glitter of the Northern Lights, with
a thousand lakes echoing the laughter of the loons, came
seductively before his inner eye. The thought of it all stirred
emotions profound and primitive, emotions too closely married to
instincts, perhaps, to be analysed; something in him that was
ancestral, possibly pre-natal. There was nothing in this little
England that could move him so in the same fashion. His thoughts
carried him far, far away....
The faint sound of a church clock striking the hour—a sound
utterly alien to the trend of his thoughts—brought him back again
to the present. He heard it across many fields, fields that had been
tilled for centuries, and there could have been no more vivid or
eloquent reminder that he was no longer in a land where hedges,
church bells, notice-boards, and so forth were not. He came back
with a start, and a sensation almost akin to pain. He felt cramped,
caught, caged. The tinkling church bells annoyed him.
His thoughts turned, with a sudden jerk, as it were, to the
undeniable fact that he had been trying to go about in a disguise,
with a clumsy mask over his face, so that he might appear decently
grown up in his new surroundings.
A pair of owls began to hoot softly in the woods, answering one
another like voices in a dream, and just then the lost wind left the
pine branches and died away into the sky with a swift rush as of
many small wings. In the sudden pool of silence that followed, he
fancied he could hear across the dark miles of heathland the
continuous low murmur of the sea.
The beauty of night, as ever, entered his soul, but with a joy that
was too solemn, too moving, to be felt as pleasure. It touched
something in him beyond the tears of either pain or delight:
something that held in it a mysterious wonder so searching, so
poignant, as to be almost terrible.
He caught his breath and waited.... The great woods of the
world, mountains, the sea, stars, and the crying winds were always
for him symbols of the gateways into a mightier and ideal region, a
Beyond-world where he found rest for his yearnings and a strange
peace. They were his means of losing himself in a temporary
heaven.
And to-night it was the beauty of an English scene that carried
him away; and this in spite of his having summoned the wilder
vision from across the seas. Already the forces of his own country
were insensibly at work upon an impressionable mind and
temperament. The very air, so sweetly scented as he drew it in
between his lips, was charged with the subtly-working influences
of the ‘Old Country.’ A new web, soft but mighty, was being woven
about his spirit. Even now his heart was conscious of its gossamer
touch, as his dreams yielded imperceptibly to a new colour.
He followed vaguely, curiously, the leadings of delicate
emotions that had been stirred in him by the events of the day.
Symbols, fast-shifting, protean, passed in suggestive procession
before his mind’s eye, in the way that symbols ever will—in a
poet’s heart. He thought of children, of the children, and of the
extraordinarily fresh appeal they had made to him. Children: how
near they, too, stood to the great things of life, and all the nearer,
perhaps, for not being aware of it. How their farseeing eyes and
their simple, unlined souls pointed the way, like Nature, to the
ideal region of which he was always dreaming: to Reality, to God.
All real children knew and understood; were ready to offer their
timid yet unhesitating guidance, and without question or
explanation.
Had, then, Nixie and her troupe already taken him prisoner?
And were the soft chains already twined about his neck?...
Paul hardly acknowledged the question definitely to himself. He
was merely dreaming, and his dreams, rising and falling like the
tides of a sea, bore him to and fro among the shoals and inlands of
the day’s events. The spell of the English June night was very
strong upon him, no doubt, for presently a door opened
somewhere behind him, and the very children he was thinking
about danced softly into the room. Nixie came up close and gazed
into his very eyes, and again there began that odd singing in his
heart that he had twice noticed during the day. An atmosphere of
magic, shot with gold and silver, came with the child into the
room.
For the fact was—though he realised it only dimly—the Fates
were now making him a deliberate offer. Had he not been so
absorbed, he would have perceived and appreciated the delicacy of
their action. As a rule they command, whereas now they were only
suggesting.
It was really his own heart asking. Here, in this rambling
country house under the hills, was an opportunity of entering the
region to which all that was best and truest in him naturally
belonged. The experience might prove a stepping-stone to a final
readjustment of his peculiar being with the normal busy world of
common things. Here was a safety-valve, as he called it, a channel
through which he might express much, if not all, of his
accumulated stores. The guides, now fast asleep in their beds, had
sent out their little dream-bodies to bring the invitation; they were
ready and waiting.
And he, thinking there under the stars his queer, long thoughts,
bred in years of solitude, dallied with the invitation, and—
hesitated. The inevitable pain frightened him—the pain of being
young when the world cries that you are old; the pang of the
eternal contrast when the world would laugh at what seemed to it
a foolish fantasy of youth—a pose, a dream that must bring a bitter
awakening! He heard the voices but too plainly, and shrank
quickly from the sound.
But Nixie, standing there beside him with such gentle
persistence, certainly made him waver.... The temptation to yield
was strong and seductive.... Yet, when the faint splendour of the
summer moonrise dimmed the stars near the horizon, and the
pines shone tipped with silver, he found himself borne down by
the sense of caution that urged no revolutionary change, and
advised him to keep his armour tightly buckled on in the disguise
he had adopted.
He would wait and see—a little longer, at any rate; and
meanwhile he must be firm and stern and dull; master of himself,
and apparently normal.
He walked to the dressing-table and lit his candles, and, as he
did so, caught a picture of himself in the glass. There was a gleam
of subdued fire in his eyes, he thought, that was not naturally
there. Something about him looked a little wild; it made him
laugh.
He laughed to think how utterly absurd it was that a man of his
size and age, and—But the idea refused to frame himself in
language—He did not know exactly why he laughed, for at the
same time he felt sad. With him, as with all other children, tears
and laughter are never far apart. It would have been just as
intelligible if he had cried.
But when the candles were out and he was in bed, and the stars
were peeping into the darkened room, the memory of his laughter
seemed unreal, and the sound of it oddly remote.
For, after all, that laughter was rather mysterious. It was not the
Outer Paul laughing at the Inner Paul. It was the Inner Paul
laughing with himself.
 CHAPTER VII
The imaginative process may be likened to the state of reverie.
—A .

The psychology of sleep being apparently beyond all intelligible

explanation, it was not surprising that he woke up next morning
as though he had gone to bed without a single perplexity. He
remembered none of the thoughts that had thronged his brain a
few short hours before; perhaps they had all slipped down into the
region of submerged consciousness, to crop out later in natural,
and apparently spontaneous, action.
At any rate he remembered little enough of his troubles when he
woke and saw the fair English sun streaming in through the open
windows. Odours of woods and dew-drenched lawns came into the
room, and the birds were singing with noise enough to waken all
the country-side. It was impossible to lie in bed. He was up and
dressed long before any servant came to call him.
Downstairs he found the house in darkness; doors barred and
windows heavily shuttered as though the house had expected an
attack. Not a soul was stirring. The air was close and musty. The
idea of having to strike a match in a ‘country’ house at 6 A.M.
somehow oppressed him. Not knowing his way about very well
yet, he stumbled across the hall to find a door, and as he did so
something soft came rubbing against his legs. He put his hand
down in the darkness and felt a furry, warm body and a stiff
upright tail that reached almost to his knees. The thing began to
purr.
‘I declare!’ he exclaimed; ‘Mrs. Tompkyns!’ and he struck a
match and followed her to the drawing-room door. A moment
later they had unfastened the shutters of the French window—
Mrs. Tompkyns assisting by standing on her hind legs and tapping
the swinging bell—and made their way out on to the lawn.
 The sunshine came slanting between the cedars and lay in
shining strips on the grass. Everything glistened with dew. The air
was sweet and fresh as it only is in the early hours after the dawn.
Very faintly, as though its mind was not yet made up, the air
stirred among the bushes.
Paul’s first impulse was to waken the entire household so that
they might share with him this first glory of the morning.
‘Probably they don’t know how splendid it is!’ The thought of the
sleeping family, many of them perhaps with closed windows,
missing all the wonder, was a positive pain to him. But,
fortunately for himself, he decided it might be better not to begin
his visit in this way.
‘I guess you and I, Mrs. Tompkyns, are the only people about,’
he said, looking down at the beautiful grey creature that sniffed
the air calmly at his feet. ‘Come on, then. Let’s make a raid
together on the woods!’
He threw a disdainful glance at the sleeping house; no smoke
came from the chimneys; most of the upper windows were closed.
A delicious fragrance stole out of the woods to meet him as he
strolled across the wet lawn. He felt like a schoolboy doing
something out of bounds.
‘You lead and I follow,’ he said, addressing his companion in
mischief.
And at once his attention became absorbed in the animal’s
characteristic behaviour. Obviously it was delighted to be with
him; yet it did not wish him to think so, or, if he did think so, to
give any sign of the fact. Nothing could have been plainer. First it
crept along by the stone wall delicately, with its body very close to
the ground as though the weight of the atmosphere oppressed it;
and when he spoke, it turned its head with an affectation of
genuine surprise as though it would say, ‘You here! I thought I was
alone.’ Then it sat down on the gravel path and began to wash its
face and paws till he had passed, after which—when he was not
looking, of course—it followed him condescendingly, sniffing at
blades of grass en route without actually touching them, and
flicking its tail upwards with sudden, electric jerks.
Paul understood in a general way what was expected of him. He
watched it surreptitiously, pretending to examine the flowers. For
this, he knew, was the great Cat Game of elaborate pretence. And
Mrs. Tompkyns, true adept in the art, played up wonderfully, and
incidentally taught him much about the ways and methods of
simple disguise; it advanced stealthily when he wasn’t looking; it
stopped to wash, or gaze into the air, the moment he turned. It
was very shy, and very affected, and very self-conscious.
Inimitable was the way it kept to all the little rules of the game. It
walked daintily down the path after him, shaking the dew from its
paws with a rapid, quivering motion. Then, suddenly arching its
back as though momentarily offended—at nothing—it stared up at
him with an expression that seemed to question his very existence.
‘I guess I ought to fade away when you look at me like that!’ was
his thought.
‘I’m here. I’m coming, Mrs. Tompkyns,’ he felt constrained to
remark aloud before going forward again. ‘The grand morning
excites my blood just as much as it excites your own.’
It seemed necessary to assert his presence. No intelligent person
can be conceited long in the presence of a cat. No living creature
can so sublimely ‘ignore.’ But Paul was not conceited. He
continued to watch it with delight.
One very important rule of the game appeared to be that plenty
of bushes were necessary by way of cover, so that it could pretend
it was not really coming farther than the particular bush where it
was hiding at the moment. Instinctively, he never made the grave
mistake of calling it to follow; and though it never trotted
alongside, being always either behind or in front of him, the
presence of the cat in his immediate neighbourhood provided all
sorts of company imaginable. It had also provided him with an
opportunity to play the hero.
Then, suddenly, the calm and peace of the morning was
disturbed by a scene of strange violence. Mrs. Tompkyns, with
spread legs, dashed past him at a surprising speed and flew up the
trunk of a big tree as though all the dogs in the county were at her
heels. From this position of vantage she looked back over her
shoulder with hysterical and frightened eyes. There was a great
show of terror, a vast noise of claws upon the bark. No actress
could have created better the atmosphere of immediate danger
and alarm.
Paul had an instinctive flair for this move of the game. He made
a great pretence of running up to save the cat from its awful
position, but of course long before he got there she had dropped
laughingly to earth again, having thus impressed upon him the
value of her life.