Читать книгу The Complete Works of Algernon Blackwood. Novels, Short Stories, Horror Classics, Occult & Supernatural Tales, Plays онлайн

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This was the fact that stared him in the face and made him happy. For the first time in his life he could play with others. Hitherto he had played alone.

'It's a safety-valve at last,' he exclaimed, using his favourite word. 'Now I can let myself go a bit.

They will never laugh; on the contrary, they'll understand and love it. Hooray!'

'And, remember,' Nixie had again explained to him, 'you have to write down all the aventures. That's what keeping the records means. And you must read them out to us at the Meetings.'

And he chuckled as he thought about it, for it meant having real Reports to write at last, reports that others would read and appreciate.

The aventures, moreover, began very quickly; they came thick and fast; and he lived in them so intensely that he carried them over into his other dull world, and sometimes hardly knew which world he was in at all. His imagination, hungry and untamed, had escaped, and was seeking all it could devour.

It was a hot afternoon in mid-June, and Paul was lying with his pipe upon the lawn. His sister was out driving. He was alone with the children and the smaller portion of the menagerie,—smaller in size, that is, not in numbers; cats, kittens, and puppies were either asleep, or on the hunt, all about them. And from an open window a parrot was talking ridiculously in mixed French and English.