Being born in a sceptical age, heirs of a world that certainly took its Darwin too seriously, we children did not readily enlarge the circle of our supernatural acquaintances. There was the old witch who lived in the two-storied house beyond the hill, in whom less discriminate eyes recognised only the very respectable widow of an officer in the India Army. There was the ghost of the murdered shepherd-lad that haunted the ruined hut high up on the windy downs; on gusty nights we heard him piping shrilly to his phantom flocks, and sometimes their little bells seemed to greet us from the chorus of the storm. There was a little drowned kitten who mewed to us from the shadows of the rain-water cistern, and a small boy who cried about the garden in the autumn because he could not find his ball among the dead The credentials of these four unquiet spirits having been examined and found satisfactory, schoolroom opinion was against any addition to their number. We would not accept my younger brother’s murderer carrying a sack or my little sister’s procession of special tortoises, though we acknowledged that there was merit in them, regarded merely as artistic conceptions. Perhaps, subconsciously, we realised that to make the supernatural commonplace is also to make it ineffective, and that there is no dignity in a life jostled by spooks. At all events, we relied for our periodical panics on those which had received the official sanction, and on the terrifying monsters our imaginations had drawn from real life—burglars, lunatics, and drunken men. It was therefore noteworthy that as soon as we discovered the pool in Hayward’s After a while we grew weary of our doubts, and, tacitly agreeing to pretend that it was only an ordinary pond, fell to paddling in the shallows with a good heart. The mud slid warmly through our toes, and the water lay round our calves like a tight string, but we were not changed, as we had half anticipated, into tadpoles or water-lilies. It was apparent that the magic was of a subtler kind than this, and we splashed about cheerfully until the inevitable happened and one of us went in up to his waist. Then we sat on the bank nursing our wet feet, and laughing at the victim as he ruefully wrung out his clothes. We were all of a nautical turn of mind, and we agreed that the pond would But all the time we felt in our hearts that it was something more, though we would have found it hard to give reasons for our conviction, for the pool seemed very well able to keep the secret of its enchantment. We did not even know whether it was the instrument of black magic or of white, whether its influence on human beings was amiable or malevolent. We only knew that it was under a spell, that beneath its reticent surface, that showed nothing more than the reflection of our own inquiring faces, lay hidden some part of that especial The brother who was nearest to me in terms of years found it two days later, and came to me breathlessly with the news. He had been reading a book of fairy stories, and had come upon the description of just such a magic pool as ours, even to the rabbit—who was, it seemed, a kind of advance-agent to the spirit of the pool. The rules were very clear. All you had to do was to go to the pool at midnight and wish aloud, and your wish would be granted. If you were greedy enough to wish more than once, you would be changed into a goldfish. My brother thought it would be rather jolly to be a goldfish, and so for a while did I; but on reflection we decided that if the one wish were carefully expended it might be more amusing to remain a boy. It says something for our spirit of adventure that we did not even discuss the advisability of undertaking this lawless We had no difficulty in getting out of the house when the time came, simply because this was not the sort of thing that the grown-up people expected us to do, but we found the world strangely altered. The familiar lanes had become rivers of changing shadows, the hedgerows were ambuscades of robbers, the tall trees were affronted giants. Fortunately, we were on very good Somehow we reached the pool at last, and stayed our steps on the bank expectantly. At first we could see nothing but shadows, but, after a while, we discovered that it was full of drowned stars, a little pale as though And then, as we waited breathlessly, we heard a noise among the undergrowth on the other side of the pool—a noise, it seemed, of footsteps, that grew louder and louder in our excited ears, till it was as if all the armies of the world were tramping through the wood. And then . . . and then . . . When we stopped to get our breath halfway home we first discovered that neither of us had had presence of mind enough to wish. But we knew that there was no going back. We had had our chance, and missed it. But, even now, I do not doubt that it was a magic pool. |