Chapter VIII

Yet, perhaps, after all, the chief change she introduced was this vital resurrection of his sense of play. For Play is eternal, older than the stars, older even than dreams. She taught him afresh things he had already known, but long forgotten or laid aside. And all she knew came first direct from Nature, large and undiluted.

He learned, for instance, the secret of that deep quiet she possessed even in her wildest moments; and how it came from a practice in her mother’s house, where all was rush and clamour about worldly ‘horrid things’--her practice of lying out at night to watch the stars. But not merely to watch them for a minute. She would watch for hours, following the constellations from the moment they loomed above the horizon till they set again at dawn. She saw them move slowly across the entire sky. For ‘mother hurried and fussed’ her so, and by doing this she instinctively drew into her curious wild heart the deep delight of feeling that ‘there was lots of room really, and no particular hurry about anything.’ Her inspiration was profound, from ancient sources, natural.

And her ‘play,’ for the same reason, was never foolish. It was creative play. It was the faculty by which the poets and dreamers re-create the world, and thus rejuvenate it. Adam knew it when he named the beasts, and Job, when he made rhymes about taking Leviathan with a hook, and sang his little heart-sweet songs about the conies and the hopping hills. In the wise it never dies, for it is most subtly allied to wisdom, and only the dreamless can divorce it quite. It is the natural, untaught poetry of the soul which laughs and weeps with Nature, knowing itself akin, seeing itself in everything and everything in itself. Mánya in some amazing fashion, not yet educated out of her, knew Nature in herself.

She did naughty things too, as he learned from Mrs. Coove, when he felt obliged to lecture her, but they were invariably typical and explanatory of her close-to-Nature little being. And he understood what she felt so well that his lectures ended in laughter, with her grave defence ‘Uncle, you’d have done the same yourself.’ Once in particular, after a fortnight of parching drought, when the gush of warm rain came with its welcome, drenching soak, and the child ran out upon the balcony in her nightgown to feel it on her body too--how could he prove her wrong, having felt the same delight himself? ‘I was thirsty and dry all over. I _had_ to do it,’ she explained, puzzled, adding that of course she had changed afterwards and used the rough Turkey towel ‘just as you do.’

But other things he did not understand so well; and one of these was her singular habit of imitating the sounds of Nature, with an accuracy, too, that often deceived even himself. The true sounds of Nature are only two--water and wind, with their many variations. And Mánya, by some trick of tone and breath, could reproduce them marvellously.

‘It’s the way to get close,’ she told him when he asked her why, ‘the way to get inside. If you get the sound exact, you feel the same as they do, and know their things.’ And the cryptic, yet deeply suggestive explanation contained a significant truth that yet just evaded his comprehension. They often played it together in the woods, though he never approached her own astonishing excellence. This, again, stirred something like awe in him; it was a little eerie, almost uncanny, to hear her ‘doing trees,’ or ‘playing wind and water.’

But the strangest of all her odd, original tricks was one that he at length dissuaded her from practising because he felt it stimulated her imagination unwisely, and with too great conviction. It is not easy to describe, and to convey the complete success of the achievement is impossible without seeing the actual results. For she drew invisible things. Her designs, so clumsily done with a butt of pencil, or even the point of her stick in the sand, managed to suggest a meaning that somehow just escaped grasping by the mind. They made him think of puzzle-pictures that intentionally conceal a face or figure. Vague, fluid shapes that never quite achieved an actual form ran through these scattered tracings. She used points in the scenery to indicate an outline of something other than themselves, yet something they contained and clothed. His eye vainly tried to force into view the picture that he felt lay there hiding within these points.

On a large sheet of paper she would draw roughly details of the landscape--tops of trees, the Mill roof, a boulder or a stretch of the stream, for instance--and persuade these points to gather the blank space of paper between them into the semblance, the suggestion rather, of some vague figure, always vast and always very much alive. They marked, within their boundaries, an outline of some form that remained continually elusive. Yet the outline thus framed, whichever way you looked at it, even holding the paper upside down, still remained a figure; a figure, moreover, that moved. For the child had a way of turning the paper round so that the figure had an appearance of moving independently upon itself. The reality of the whole business was more than striking; and it was when she came to giving these figures names that she decided to put a stop to it.

* * * * *

One day another curious thing had happened. He had often thought about it since, and wondered whether its explanation lay in mere child’s mischief, or in some power of discerning these invisible Presences that she drew.

They were returning together from a scramble in the gravel-pit which they pretended was a secret entrance to the centre of the world; and they were tired. Mánya walked a little in front, as her habit was, so that she could turn and see him ‘opposite’ at a moment’s notice when he said an interesting thing. Her red tam-o’-shanter, with the top-knot off, she carried in her hand, swinging it to and fro. From time to time she flicked it out sideways, as though to keep flies away. But there were no flies, for it was chilly and growing dark. The pines were thickly planted here, with sudden open spaces. Their footsteps fell soft and dead upon the needles. And sometimes she flung her arm out with an imperious, sudden gesture of defiance that made him feel suspicious and look over his shoulder. For it was like signing to some one who came close, some one he could not see, but whose presence was very real to her. The unwelcome conviction grew upon him. Some one, in the world she knew apart from him, accompanied them. A few minutes before she had been wild and romping, playing at ‘mushrooms’ with laughter and excitement. She loved doing this--whirling round on her toes till her skirts were horizontal, then sinking with them ballooning round her to the ground, the tam-o’-shanter pulled down over her entire face so that she looked like a giant toadstool with a crimson top. But now she had turned suddenly grave and silent.

‘Uncle!’ she exclaimed abruptly, turning sharply to face him, and using the hushed tone that was always prelude to some startling question, ‘tell me _one_ thing, please. What would _you_ do if----’

She broke off suddenly and sprang swiftly to one side.

‘Mánya! if what?’ He did not like the movement; it was so obviously done to avoid something that stood in her way--between them--very close. He almost jumped too. ‘I can’t tell you anything while you’re darting about like a deer-fly. What d’you want to know?’ he added with involuntary sharpness.

She stood facing him with her legs astride the path. She stared straight into his eyes. The dusk played tricks with her height, always delusive. It magnified her. She seemed to stand over him, towering up.

‘If some one kept walking close beside you under an umbrella,’ she whispered earnestly, ‘so that the face was hidden and you could never see it--what would _you_ do?’

‘Child! But what a question!’ The carelessness in his tone was not quite natural. A shiver ran down his back.

She moved closer, so that he felt her breath and saw the gleam of her big, wide-opened eyes.

‘Would you knock up the umbrella with a bang,’ she whispered, as though afraid she might be overheard, ‘or just suddenly stoop and look beneath--catching it that way?’

He stepped aside to pass her, but the child stepped with him, barring his movement of escape. She meant to have her answer.

‘Take it by surprise like that, I mean. _Would_ you, Uncle?’

He stared blankly at her; the conviction in her voice and manner was disquieting.

‘Depends what kind or thing,’ he said, seeing his mistake. He tried to banter, and yet at the same time seem serious. But to joke with Mánya in this mood was never very successful. She resented it. And above all he did not want to lose her confidence.

‘Depends,’ he said slowly, ‘whether I felt it friendly or unfriendly; but I _think_--er--I should prefer to knock the brolly up.’

For a moment she appeared to weigh the wisdom of his judgment, then instantly rejecting it.

‘_I_ shouldn’t!’ she answered like a flash. ‘I should suddenly run up and stoop to see. I should catch it that way!’

And, before he could add a word or make a movement to go on, she darted from beside him with a leap like a deer, flew forwards several yards among the trees, stooped suddenly down, then turned her head and face up sideways as though to peer beneath something that spread close to the ground. Her skirts ballooned about her like the mushroom, one hand supporting her on the earth, while the other, holding the tam-o’-shanter, shaded her eyes.

‘Oh! oh!’ she cried the next instant, standing bolt upright again, ‘it’s a whole lot! And they’ve all gone like lightning--gone off there!’ She pointed all about her--into the sky, towards the moors, back to the forest, even down into the earth--a curious sweeping gesture; then hid her face behind both hands and came slowly to his side again.

‘It wasn’t one, Uncle. It was a lot!’ she whispered through her fingers. Then she dropped her hands as a new explanation flashed into her. ‘But p’raps, after all, it was only one! Oh, Uncle, I do believe it _was_ only one. Just fancy--how awfully splendid! I wonder!’

Neither the hour nor the place seemed to him suitable for such a discussion. He put his arm round her and hurried out of the wood. He put the woods behind them, like a protective barrier; for his sake as well as hers; that much he clearly realised. He somehow made a shield of them.

In the garden, with the stars peeping through thin clouds, and the lights of the windows beckoning in front, he turned and said laughing, quickening his pace at the same time:

‘Rabbits, Mánya, rabbits! All the rabbits here use brollies, and the bunnies too.’ It was the best thing he could think of at the moment. Rather neat he thought it. But her instant answer took the wind out of his sham sails.

‘That’s just the name for them!’ she cried, clapping her hands softly with delight. ‘Now they needn’t hide like that any more. We’ll just pretend they’re bunnies, and they’ll feel disguised enough.’

They went into the house, and it was comforting to see the figure of Mother Coove filling the entire hall. At least there was no disguising her. But on the steps Mánya halted a moment and gazed up in his face. She stood in front of him, deaf to Mrs. Coove’s statements from the rear about wet boots. Her eyes, though shining with excitement, held a puzzled, wild expression.

‘Uncle,’ she whispered, with sly laughter, standing on tiptoe to kiss him, ‘I wonder----!’ then flew upstairs to change before he could find a suitable reply.

But he wondered too, wondered what it was the child had seen. For certainly she had seen something.

Yet the thought that finally stayed with him--as after all the other queer adventures they had together--was this unpleasant one, that his so willing acceptance of the little intruder involved the disapproval, even the resentment, of--another. It haunted him. He never could get quite free of it. Another watched, another listened, another--waited. And Mánya knew.