Boys -- Fiction; Dreams -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Governesses -- Fiction; Imagination -- Fiction
He struggled frantically with his wings. But between him and the
governess there was still the power of Fright to be overcome--the very
Power she had long ago invoked. It was following him still, preventing
his turning back, and driving him ever forward to his death.
Again the voice sounded in the night; and this time it was closer. He
could not quite distinguish the words. They buzzed oddly in his ears ...
other voices mingled with them ... the hideous children began to shriek
somewhere underneath him ... wings with eyes among their burning
feathers flashed past him.
His own wings folded close over his little body, drooping like dead
things. His eyes closed, and he turned on his side. A huge face that was
one-half the governess and the other half the head gardener at home,
thrust itself close against his own, and blew upon his eyelids till he
opened them. Already he was falling, sinking, tumbling headlong through
a space that offered no resistance.
"Jimbo!" shrieked a voice that instantly died away into a wail behind
him.
He opened his eyes once more--for it was that loved voice again--but
the glare from the moon so dazzled him that he could only fancy he saw
the figure of the governess, not a hundred feet away, struggling and
floundering in the clutch of a black creature that beat the air with
enormous wings all round her. He saw her hair streaming out into the
night, and one wing seemed to hang broken and useless at her side.
He was turning over and over, like a piece of wood in the waves of the
sea, and the governess, caught by Fright, the monster of her own
creation, drifted away from his consciousness as a dream melts away in
the light of the morning.... From the gleaming mountains and treeless
plains below Jimbo thought there rose a hollow roar like the mocking
laughter of an immense multitude of people, shaking with mirth. The Moon
had got him at last, and her laughter ran through the heavens like a
wave. Revolving upon his own little axis so swiftly that he neither saw
nor heard anything more, he dropped straight down upon the great
satellite.
The light of the moon flamed up into his eyes and dazzled him.
But what in the world was this?
How could the moon dwindle so suddenly to the size of a mere lamp
flame?
How could the whole expanse of the heavens shrink in an instant to the
limits of a little, cramped room?
In a single second, before he had time to realise that he felt surprise,
the entire memory of his recent experiences vanished from his mind. The
past became an utter blank. Like a wreath of smoke everything melted
away as if it had never been at all. The functions of the brain resumed
their normal course. The delirium of the past few hours was over.
Jimbo was lying at home on his bed in the night-nursery, and his mother
was bending over him. At the foot of the bed stood the doctor in black.
The nurse held a lamp, only half shaded by her hand, as she approached
the bedside.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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