Once Upon a Wardrobe(29)

A dwarf?

A gnome or elf?

Or Balder or Thor?

Jack stopped flat in his tracks, the sun weak through winter’s low clouds, and his eyes scanned the familiar garden. He shook his head.

It hadn’t been real.

Or had it?

That feeling of joy arrived again, and it felt like a desire even greater than the very thing he desired. He felt as if pure Northernness washed over him, took him over completely. He imagined open spaces, twilight, solitude . . . a place far away; a place he could not yet find.

*

The days passed as they do. Months later summer arrived, and with it, freedom. The trees opened sleepy branches with green and greener foliage, the sun warmed the waving heather grasses and the tops of the brothers’ shoulders, the waves of Belfast Lough sparkled like they were lit from within.

Father had sent Jack and Warnie, now fourteen and sixteen years old, off with their bags to visit their aunt, Helen, who lived in the countryside of Dundrum. Near the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland, her home was nestled on acres of land as wild as the stories they loved. She wasn’t strict; Helen allowed the boys to wander without supervision, to read to their hearts’ content, and to be free of the constraints of school. With family enough to satisfy and freedom enough for the imagination, Jack and Warnie loved Helen and loved Dundrum.

One fuzzy afternoon the rain crashed against the windows of Aunt Helen’s library. Jack stared through the glass, bemoaning the lack of an afternoon spent in the countryside. He turned his attention back to the room—and there it was!

Again!

Right there on the wooden table Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods waited for him. And this time it wasn’t just words in a magazine. No! This was a book with illustrations by an artist named Arthur Rackham, who had brought the Norse story to life in a way Jack’s brilliant imagination hadn’t even done.

“Warnie!” Jack called for his brother, who came running.

“Look,” Jack said as Warnie entered the library. “I thought I’d never see it again. And this time with illustrations so glorious . . . they . . .” He lost his words.

Warnie stared at his brother. In this, they had nothing in common. What did Warnie care for the printed version of an opera about Norse mythology? And yet Warnie loved his brother.

“I must have one of my own,” Jack said. “I must own this book.”

“You’ve never even heard the music of it,” Warnie said. “Only seen the words.” He glanced down. “And the pictures.”

“You must help me. We’ll save our money and . . .”

Warnie sank into a chair and picked up the book, flipped through its pages. It was quite magnificent with its drawings of nymphs and dryads, of fierce gods, the sketches both wild and energized as if the creatures might burst from the pages. But Warnie had loads of other ideas about how to spend his schillings.

It took months, but Jack saved up his money, and Warnie, out of love, chipped in. Jack bought the book for fifteen schillings.

Now possessing the art of the very story that awoke the Northernness within him, Jack sat alone for hours with that illustrated book, a pure pleasure. He slowly flipped through the pages, the story of Siegfried rushing over him like a waterfall, drenching him in the beauty.

In Twilight of the Gods, Ragnar?k was a thrilling nonstop series of events that finished with the death of each god, and yet there were those gods who died and rose again. Jack met the wolf Fenrir, the son of a god, who devoured the sun. There were journeys to the end of the world with creatures who dwelled in marshes and forests, in caves and on mountains. And somehow Jack felt as if he already knew the stories, as if they’d been buried deeply in his soul.

Finally, inspired to try his own hand at something so beautiful, Jack set ink to paper and began composing his first long poem. Writing the first three stanzas, he felt the poetry come alive beneath his pen, words so real and true that he ached. But by the time he reached the final lines, he felt his words and ideas falter. He sensed the dread of trying to write exactly what he meant and raise his work to a higher realm, a Wagnerian realm.

Jack wanted to do as Wagner had done, and yet . . .

He abandoned the poem, ripping it to shreds and feeling, for the first time, he knew what writing actually meant. It wasn’t just words, one after the other. Composing a poem required more than lining up sentences one right after the other. And yet he knew he’d write again. One day he would try again.

In the meantime, dwarfs and dryads, wolves and witches, mountains and gods, and endless winters, all found their way into Jack Lewis’s life.

*

George and I sit by the dwindling fire. Mum and Dad are taking longer in the village than I’d expected, and I wonder if they’ve gone to visit Uncle Brian. I pull George close and wind the well-worn knitted blanket around us, tucking the edges around his legs.

“Where were you when he told you about the Norse stories?” George asked.

“Outside,” I tell him, “walking around that lake behind his house, our feet mashing the snow, winding among the trees that look like they are trying to grab the clouds. I walked behind him and put my boots into his footprints when”—I try to sound mysterious and bend closer to George—“all of a sudden, Mr. Lewis stopped at a tree that looked as if it could bend over and whisper to us, an old man’s face almost whirling in the bark. I could see, I did see, how he would have looked for that Wagner opera in nature. I was doing the same just at that moment, wondering if his woods were full of fauns and a white witch and talking beavers.”