Hans Frost

No one perhaps in the United Kingdom was quite so frightened as was
Nathalie Swan on the third day of November, 1924, sitting in a
third-class carriage about quarter to five of a cold, windy,
darkening afternoon. Her train was drawing her into Paddington
Station, and how she wished that she were dead!

She sat in a corner on the hard, dusty seat, her hands clenched,
her heart beating with hot, thick, hammering throbs. She wished
that she were dead. She was an orphan. No one in the world needed
her. The Proudies whom she was abandoning had been very, very good
to her, but certainly did not need her. The famous Mrs. Frost to
whom she was going would almost surely not be good to her--and as
to needing her . . .

Open upon her lap was a number of that shiny geographically
illustrated paper the London News, and among other portraits was
one of Hans Frost, and under it was written:


Mr. Hans Frost, whose Seventieth Birthday occurs on November 3.
His friends and admirers are marking the occasion with a suitable
presentation.


Kind Samuel Proudie had not known that the photograph was there,
when at Polchester Station he had bought illustrated papers and
flung them onto her lap. She herself had, of course, not known it,
and it had been with a kind of shock that she had recognized the
well-known features, the square rugged face with the deep,
penetrating eyes, the round head with its short, thick, black hair,
the face austere like a priest's, the shoulders broad, the body
rather squat, the short sturdy legs, standing there in the
beautiful book-lined library--no man of seventy here surely. Not
even a man of letters. Rather priest plus prize-fighter plus (in
some implied kindly geniality) Father Christmas without the beard.

And then at the last something enigmatic. . . . Or did one imagine
that because one knew how great he was?

Nathalie was nineteen years and no fool. She had had this face in
front of her, framed in a neat black frame for the last six years,
had carried it with her everywhere, had had it always in her
bedroom wherever she might be. For was he not her uncle, her
famous, marvellous uncle whom she had never seen but had made her
hero, her conception of God, indeed, ever since she could remember?

How tiny, but how defiant, she had been on that first morning at
the Polchester High School, when, hemmed in by tormentors, she had
boasted: "You can do what you like, but I've got a grander uncle
than you have!"

The name, Hans Frost, had meant nothing to them until they had
enquired of fathers and mothers at home, but then, after those
enquiries, she had received her coveted glory.

"Mother says he's the most wonderful writer. What's he like? Does
he take you to theatres when you're in London?"

And then must come the sad confession that she had never seen him,
that he had perhaps never heard of her, that he was her uncle only
because he had married her aunt.

And yet some glory lingered. The time had come at last when she
read his books. Always surreptitiously. They were forbidden.
Mrs. Proudie thought them shocking. All except the fairy stories,
and they might also be shocking, did one understand what they
meant. . . .

Nathalie read some of the fairy stories first: The Crystal Bell,
The Duchess of Paradis, The Palace of Ice. She did not at the time
bother about inner meanings. She took the pictures for what they
were. The Prince in The Crystal Bell crossing the Lake of Fire,
the Duchess of Paradis opening the casket of jade, the Dwarfs in
Green Parrots tying the tails of the monkeys together while they
slept. Then (she was seventeen now) she came to the novels. She
saved up her money and bought The Praddons, The Silver Tree, Joy
Has Three Faces, and The Chinese Miracle.