Algernon Blackwood (14 page)

'They've seen us!' she whispered in alarm. '
He's
seen us.' An
inexplicable thrill ran over her.

'They saw us long ago,' her brother added contemptuously. His voice
quavered.

Jimbo turned to face them, getting in front of his sister for
protection, although she towered above him by a head at least. The
Guard, who led the way, they saw now, was a girl—a girl not much
older than Monkey, with big blue eyes. 'There they are,' the Guard
said loudly, pointing; and the big man, looking about him as though he
did not see very clearly, stretched out his hands towards him. 'But
you must be very quick,' she added, 'the Interfering Sun—'

'I'm glad you came to meet us. I hoped you might. Jane Anne's gone in
ages ago. Now we'll all go in together,' he said in a deep voice, 'and
gather star-dust for our dreams...' He groped to find them. His hands
grew shadowy. He felt the empty air.

His voice died away even as he said it, and the difficulty he had in
seeing seemed to affect their own eyes as well. A mist rose. It turned
to darkness. The river of starlight faded. The net had suddenly big
holes in it. They were slipping through. Wind whispered in the trees.
There was a sharp, odd sound like the plop of a water-rat in a
pond....

'We must be quick,' his voice came faintly from far away. They just
had time to see his smile, and noticed the gleam of two gold teeth....
Then the darkness rushed up and covered them. The stream of tangled,
pouring beams became a narrow line, so far away it was almost like the
streak of a meteor in the sky.... Night hid the world and everything
in it....

Two radiant little forms slipped past Riquette and slid feet first
into the sleeping bodies on the beds.

There came soon after a curious sound from the outer room, as Mother
turned upon her sofa-bed and woke. The sun was high above the
Blumlisalp, spreading a sheet of gold and silver on the lake. Birds
were singing in the plane trees. The roof below the open windows shone
with dew, and draughts of morning air, sweet and fresh, poured into
the room. With it came the scent of flowers and forests, of fields and
peaty smoke from cottage chimneys....

But there was another perfume too. Far down the sky swept some fleet
and sparkling thing that made the world look different. It was
delicate and many-tinted, soft as a swallow's wing, and full of
butterflies and tiny winds.

For, with the last stroke of midnight from the old church tower, May
had waked April; and April had run off into the mountains with the
dawn. Her final shower of tears still shone upon the ground. Already
May was busy drying them.

That afternoon, when school was over, Monkey and Jimbo found
themselves in the attics underneath the roof together. They had
abstracted their father's opera-glasses from the case that hung upon
the door, and were using them as a telescope.

'What can you see?' asked Jimbo, waiting for his turn, as they looked
towards the hazy mountains behind the village.

'Nothing.'

'That must be the opening, then,' he suggested, 'just air.'

His sister lowered the glasses and stared at him. 'But it can't be a
real place?' she said, the doubt in her tone making her words a
question. 'Daddy's never been there himself, I'm sure—from the way he
told it. You only dreamed it.' 'Well, anyhow,' was the reply with
conviction, 'it's there, so there must be
somebody
who believes in
it.' And he was evidently going to add that he had been there, when
Mother's voice was heard calling from the yard below, 'Come down from
that draughty place. It's dirty, and there are dead rats in it. Come
out and play in the sunshine. Try and be sensible like Jinny.'

They smuggled the glasses into their case again, and went off to the
woods to play. Though their union seemed based on disagreements
chiefly they were always quite happy together like this, living in a
world entirely their own. Jinny went her own way apart always—ever
busy with pots and pans and sewing. She was far too practical and
domestic for their tastes to amalgamate; yet, though they looked down
upon her a little, no one in their presence could say a word against
her. For they recognised the child's unusual selflessness, and rather
stood in awe of it.

And this afternoon in the woods they kept coming across places that
seemed oddly familiar, although they had never visited them before.
They had one of their curious conversations about the matter—queer
talks they indulged in sometimes when quite alone. Mother would have
squelched such talk, and Daddy muddled them with long words, while
Jane Anne would have looked puzzled to the point of tears.

'I'm
sure
I've been here before,' said Monkey, looking across the
trees to a place where the limestone cliffs dropped in fantastic
shapes of pointed rock. 'Have you got that feeling too?'

Jimbo, with his hands in the pockets of his blue reefer overcoat and
his feet stuck wide apart, stared hard at her a moment. His little
mind was searching too.

'It's natural enough, I suppose,' he answered, too honest to pretend,
too proud, though, to admit he had not got it.

They were rather breathless with their climb, and sat down on a
boulder in the shade.

'I know all this awfully well,' Monkey presently resumed, looking
about her. 'But certainly we've never come as far as this. I think my
underneath escapes and comes to places by itself. I feel like that.
Does yours?'

He looked up from a bundle of moss he was fingering. This was rather
beyond him.

'Oh, I feel all right,' he said, 'just ordinary.' He would have given
his ten francs in the savings bank, the collection of a year, to have
answered otherwise. 'You're always getting tummy-aches and things,' he
added kindly. 'Girls do.' It was pride that made the sharp addition.
But Monkey was not hurt; she did not even notice what he said. The
insult thus ignored might seem almost a compliment Jimbo thought with
quick penitence.

'Then, perhaps,' she continued, more than a little thrilled by her own
audacity, 'it's somebody else's thinking. Thinking skips about the
world like anything, you know. I read it once in one of Daddy's
books.'

'Oh, yes—like that—'

'Thinking hard
does
make things true, of course,' she insisted.

'But you can't exactly see them,' he put in, to explain his own
inexperience. He felt jealous of these privileges she claimed. 'They
can't last, I mean.' 'But they can't be wiped out either,' she said
decidedly. 'I'm sure of that.'

Presently they scrambled higher and found among the rocks an opening
to a new cave. The Jura mountains are riddled with caves which the
stalactites turn into palaces and castles. The entrance was rather
small, and they made no attempt to crawl in, for they knew that coming
out again was often very difficult. But there was great excitement
about it, and while Monkey kept repeating that she knew it already, or
else had seen a picture of it somewhere, Jimbo went so far as to admit
that they had certainly found it
very
easily, while suggesting that
the rare good fortune was due rather to his own leadership and skill.

But when they came home to tea, full of the glory of their discovery,
they found that a new excitement made the announcement fall a little
flat. For in the Den, Daddy read a telegram he had just received from
England to say that Cousin Henry was coming out to visit them for a
bit. His room had already been engaged at the carpenter's house. He
would arrive at the end of the week.

It was the first of May!

One of the great facts of the world I hold to be the registration in
the Universe of every past scene and thought.

F. W. M.

No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least
inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the
walls of memory.

This little village, that Henry Rogers was thus to revisit after so
long an interval, can boast no particular outstanding beauty to lure
the common traveller. Its single street winds below the pine forest;
its tiny church gathers close a few brown-roofed houses; orchards
guard it round about; the music of many fountains tinkle summer and
winter through its cobbled yards; and its feet are washed by a
tumbling stream that paints the fields with the radiance of countless
wild-flowers in the spring. But tourists never come to see them. There
is no hotel, for one thing, and ticket agents, even at the railway
stations, look puzzled a moment before they realise where this place
with the twinkling name can hide.... Some consult books. Yet, once you
get there, it is not easy to get away again. Something catches the
feet and ears and eyes. People have been known to go with all their
luggage on Gygi's handcart to the station—then turn aside at the last
moment, caught back by the purple woods.

A traveller, glancing up at the little three-storey house with 'Poste
et Telegraphe' above the door, could never guess how busy the world
that came and went beneath its red-tiled roof. In spring the wistaria
tree (whence the Pension borrowed its brave name, Les Glycines) hangs
its blossoms between 'Poste' and 'Telegraphe,' and the perfume of
invisible lilacs drenches the street from the garden at the back.
Beyond, the road dips past the bee-hives of
la cure
; and Boudry
towers with his five thousand feet of blue pine woods over the
horizon. The tinkling of several big stone fountains fills the street.

But the traveller would not linger, unless he chanced to pass at
twelve o'clock and caught the stream of people going into their mid-
day dinner at the Pension. And even then he probably would not see the
presiding genius, Madame Jequier, for as often as not she would be in
her garden, busy with eternal bulbs, and so strangely garbed that if
she showed herself at all, it would be with a shrill, plaintive
explanation—'Mais il ne faut pas me regarder. Je suis invisible!'
Whereupon, consistently, she would not speak again, but flit in
silence to and fro, as though she were one of those spirits she so
firmly believed in, and sometimes talked to by means of an old
Planchette.

And on this particular morning the Widow Jequier was 'invisible' in
her garden clothes as Gygi, the gendarme, came down the street to ring
the
midi
bell. Her mind was black with anxiety. She was not thinking
of the troop that came to
dejeuner
, their principal meal of the day,
paying a franc for it, but rather of the violent scenes with unpaid
tradesmen that had filled the morning-tradesmen who were friends as
well (which made it doubly awkward) and often dropped in socially for
an evening's music and conversation. Her pain darkened the sunshine,
and she found relief in the garden which was her passion. For in three
weeks the interest on the mortgages was due, and she had nothing saved
to meet it. The official notice had come that morning from the Bank.
Her mind was black with confused pictures of bulbs, departed
pensionnaires
, hostile bankers, and—the ghastly
charite de la
Commune
which awaited her. Yet her husband, before he went into the
wine-business so disastrously, had been pasteur here. He had preached
from this very church whose bells now rang out the mid-day hour. The
spirit of her daughter, she firmly believed, still haunted the garden,
the narrow passages, and the dilapidated little salon where the ivy
trailed along the ceiling.

Twelve o'clock, striking from the church-tower clock, and the voice of
her sister from the kitchen window, then brought the Widow Jequier
down the garden in a flying rush. The table was laid and the soup was
almost ready. The people were coming in. She was late as usual; there
was no time to change. She flung her garden hat aside and scrambled
into more presentable garments, while footsteps already sounded on the
wooden stairs that led up from the village street.

One by one the retired governesses entered, hung their cloaks upon the
pegs in the small, dark hallway, and took their places at the table.
They began talking among themselves, exchanging the little gossip of
the village, speaking of their books and clothes and sewing, of the
rooms in which they lived, scattered down the street, of the heating,
of barking dogs that disturbed their sleep, the behaviour of the
postman, the fine spring weather, and the views from their respective
windows across the lake and distant Alps. Each extolled her own
position: one had a garden; another a balcony; a third was on the top
floor and so had no noisy tenant overhead; a fourth was on the ground,
and had no stairs to climb. Each had her secret romance, and her
secret method of cheap feeding at home. There were five or six of
them, and this was their principal meal in the day; they meant to make
the most of it; they always did; they went home to light suppers of
tea and coffee, made in their own
appartements
. Invitations were
issued and accepted. There were some who would not speak to each
other. Cliques, divisions,
societes a part
, existed in the little
band. And they talked many languages, learned in many lands—Russian,
German, Italian, even Armenian—for all had laboured far from their
country, spending the best of their years teaching children of foreign
families, many of them in important houses. They lived upon their
savings. Two, at least, had less than thirty pounds a year between
them and starvation, and all were of necessity careful of every
centime. They wore the same dresses from one year's end to another.
They had come home to die.

The Postmaster entered with the cash-box underneath one arm. He bowed
gravely to the assembled ladies, and silently took his seat at the
table. He never spoke; at meals his sole remarks were statements: 'Je
n'ai pas de pain,' 'Il me manque une serviette,' and the like, while
his black eyes glared resentfully at every one as though they had done
him an injury. But his fierceness was only in the eyes. He was a meek
and solemn fellow really. Nature had dressed him in black, and he
respected her taste by repeating it in his clothes. Even his
expression was funereal, though his black eyes twinkled.