Fortunately these remarks were not audible in the ordinary sense of the word. Old Mathers was eyeing me.
'What is your colour?' he asked.
'My colour?'
'Surely you know you have a colour?'
'People often remark on my red face.'
'I do not mean that at all.'
Follow this closely, this is bound to be extremely interesting. Very edifying also.
I saw it was necessary to question old Mathers carefully.
'Do you refuse to explain this question about the colours?'
'No,' he said. He slapped more tea in his cup.
'No doubt you are aware that the winds have colours,' he said. I thought he settled himself more restfully in his chair and changed his face till it looked a little bit benign.
'I never noticed it.'
'A record of this belief will be found in the literature of all ancient peoples. There are four winds and eight sub-winds, each with its own colour. The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a fine shining silver. The north wind is a hard black and the west is amber. People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend a day sitting quietly on a hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their fall and rise and changing hues, the magic of neighbouring winds when they are inter-weaved like ribbons at a wedding. It was a better occupation than gazing at newspapers. The sub-winds had colours of indescribable delicacy, a reddish-yellow half-way between silver and purple, a greyish-green which was related equally to black and brown. What could be more exquisite than a countryside swept lightly by cool rain reddened by the south-west breeze!'
'Can you see these colours?' I asked.
'No.'
'You were asking me what my colour was. How do people get their colours?'
'A person's colour,' he answered slowly, 'is the colour of the wind prevailing at his birth.'
'What is your own colour?'
'Light yellow.'
'And what is the point of knowing your colour or having a colour at all?'
'For one thing you can tell the length of your life from it. Yellow means a long life and the lighter the better.'
This is very edifying, every sentence a sermon in itself. Ask him to explain.
'Please explain.'
'It is a question of making little gowns,' he said informatively. 'Little gowns?'
'Yes. When I was born there was a certain policeman present who had the gift of wind-watching. The gift is getting very rare these days. Just after I was born he went outside and examined the colour of the wind that was blowing across the hill. He had a secret bag with him full of certain materials and bottles and he had tailor's instruments also. He was outside for about ten minutes. When he came in again he had a little gown in his hand and he made my mother put it on me.'
'Where did he get this gown?' I asked in surprise.
'He made it himself secretly in the backyard, very likely in the cowhouse. It was very thin and slight like the very finest of spider's muslin. You would not see it at all if you held it against the sky but at certain angles of the light you might at times accidentally notice the edge of it. It was the purest and most perfect manifestation of the outside skin of light yellow. This yellow was the colour of my birth-wind.'
'I see,' I said.
A very beautiful conception.
'Every time my birthday came,' old Mathers said, 'I was presented with another little gown of the same identical quality except that it was put on over the other one and not in place of it. You may appreciate the extreme delicacy and fineness of the material when I tell you that even at five years old with five of these gowns together on me, I still appeared to be naked. It was, however, an unusual yellowish sort of nakedness. Of course there was no objection to wearing other clothes over the gown. I usually wore an overcoat. But every year I got a new gown.'
'Where did you get them?' I asked.
'From the police. They were brought to my own home until I was big enough to call to the barracks for them.'
'And how does all this enable you to predict your span of life?'
'I will tell you. No matter what your colour is, it will be represented faithfully in your birth-gown. With each year and each gown, the colour will get deeper and more pronounced. In my own case I had attained a bright full-blown yellow at fifteen although the colour was so light at birth as to be imperceptible. I am now nearing seventy and the colour is a light brown. As my gowns come to me through the years ahead, the colour will deepen to dark brown, then a dull mahogany and from that ultimately to that very dark sort of brownness one associates usually with stout.'
'Yes?'
'In a word the colour gradually deepens gown by gown and year by year until it appears to be black. Finally a day will come when the addition of one further gown will actually achieve real and full blackness. On that day I will die.'