Algernon Blackwood (17 page)

'What jolly stars you've got here,' he said, pointing. 'They're like
diamonds. Look, it's a perfect network far above the Alps. By gum—
what beauties!'

And as he said it he smiled. Monkey gave her brother a nudge that
nearly made him cry out. He wondered what she meant, but all the same
he returned the nudge significantly. For Cousin Henry, when he smiled,
had plainly shown—two teeth of gold.

The children had never seen gold-capped teeth.

'I'd like one for my collection,' thought Jimbo, meaning a drawer that
included all his loose possessions of small size. But another thing
stirred in him too, vague, indefinite, far away, something he had, as
it were, forgotten.

O star benignant and serene,
I take the good to-morrow,
That fills from verge to verge my dream,
With all its joy and sorrow!
The old sweet spell is unforgot
That turns to June December;
And, though the world remember not,
Love, we would remember.

Life and Death
, W. E. HENLEY.

And Rogers went over to unpack. It was soon done. He sat at his window
in the carpenter's house and enjoyed the peace. The spell of evening
stole down from the woods. London and all his strenuous life seemed
very far away. Bourcelles drew up beside him, opened her robe, let
down her forest hair, and whispered to him with her voice of many
fountains....

She lies just now within the fringe of an enormous shadow, for the sun
has dipped behind the blue-domed mountains that keep back France.
Small hands of scattered mist creep from the forest, fingering the
vineyards that troop down towards the lake. A dog barks. Gygi, the
gendarme, leaves the fields and goes home to take his uniform from its
peg. Pere Langel walks among his beehives. There is a distant tinkling
of cow-bells from the heights, where isolated pastures gleam like a
patchwork quilt between the spread of forest; and farther down a train
from Paris or Geneva, booming softly, leaves a trail of smoke against
the background of the Alps where still the sunshine lingers.

But trains, somehow, do not touch the village; they merely pass it.
Busy with vines, washed by its hill-fed stream, swept by the mountain
winds, it lies unchallenged by the noisy world, remote, un-noticed,
half forgotten. And on its outskirts stands the giant poplar that
guards it—
la sentinelle
the peasants call it, because its lofty
crest, rising to every wind, sends down the street first warning of
any coming change. They see it bend or hear the rattle of its leaves.
The
coup de Joran
, most sudden and devastating of mountain winds, is
on the way from the precipice of the Creux du Van. It comes howling
like artillery down the deep Gorges de l'Areuse. They run to fasten
windows, collect the washing from roof and garden, drive the cattle
into shelter, and close the big doors of the barns. The children clap
their hands and cry to Gygi, 'Plus vite! Plus vite!' The lake turns
dark. Ten minutes later it is raging with an army of white horses like
the sea.

Darkness drapes the village. It comes from the whole long line of
Jura, riding its troop of purple shadows—slowly curtaining out the
world. For the carpenter's house stands by itself, apart. Perched upon
a knoll beside his little patch of vineyard, it commands perspective.
From his upper window Rogers saw and remembered....

High up against the fading sky ridges of limestone cliff shine out
here and there, and upon the vast slopes of Boudry—
l'immense geant
de Boudry
—lies a flung cloak of forest that knows no single seam.
The smoke from
bucheron
fires, joining the scarves of mist, weaves
across its shoulder a veil of lace-like pattern, and at its feet, like
some great fastening button, hides the village of the same name, where
Marat passed his brooding youth. Its evening lights are already
twinkling. They signal across the vines to the towers of Colombier,
rising with its columns of smoke and its poplars against the sheet of
darkening water—Colombier, in whose castle
milord marechal Keith
had his headquarters as Governor of the Principality of Neuchatel
under the King of Prussia. And, higher up, upon the flank of wooded
mountains, is just visible still the great red-roofed farm of
Cotendard, built by his friend Lord Wemyss, another Jacobite refugee,
who had strange parties there and entertained Jean Jacques Rousseau in
his exile. La Citadelle in the village was the wing of another castle
he began to build, but left unfinished.

White in the gathering dusk, Rogers saw the strip of roadway where
passed the gorgeous coach—
cette fameuse diligence du milord marshal
Keith
—or more recent, but grimmer memory, where General Bourbaki's
division of the French army, 80,000 strong, trailed in unspeakable
anguish, hurrying from the Prussians. At Les Verrieres, upon the
frontier, they laid down their arms, and for three consecutive days
and nights the pitiful destitute procession passed down that strip of
mountain road in the terrible winter of 1870-71.

Some among the peasants still hear that awful tramping in their sleep:
the kindly old
vigneron
who stood in front of his chalet from dawn
to sunset, giving each man bread and wine; and the woman who nursed
three soldiers through black small-pox, while neighbours left food
upon the wall before the house.... Memories of his boyhood crowded
thick and fast. The spell of the place deepened about him with the
darkness. He recalled the village postman—fragment of another
romance, though a tattered and discredited one. For this postman was
the descendant of that audacious pale-frenier who married Lord Wemyss'
daughter, to live the life of peasants with her in a yet tinier hamlet
higher up the slopes. If you asked him, he would proudly tell you,
with his bullet-shaped, close-cropped head cocked impertinently on one
side, how his brother, now assistant in a Paris shop, still owned the
title of baron by means of which his reconciliated lordship sought
eventually to cover up the unfortunate escapade. He would hand you
English letters—and Scotch ones too!—with an air of covert insolence
that was the joy of half the village. And on Sundays he was to be
seen, garbed in knickerbockers, gaudy stockings, and sometimes high,
yellowish spats, walking with his peasant girl along the very road his
more spirited forbear covered in his runaway match....

The night stepped down more quickly every minute from the heights.
Deep-noted bells floated upwards to him from Colombier, bringing upon
the evening wind some fragrance of these faded boyhood memories. The
stars began to peep above the peaks and ridges, and the mountains of
the Past moved nearer. A veil of gossamer rose above the tree-tops,
hiding more and more of the landscape; he just could see the slim new
moon dip down to drink from her own silver cup within the darkening
lake. Workmen, in twos and threes, came past the little house from
their toil among the vines, and fragments of the Dalcroze songs rose
to his ear—songs that the children loved, and that he had not heard
for nearly a quarter of a century. Their haunting refrains completed
then the spell, for all genuine spells are set to some peculiar music
of their own. These Dalcroze melodies were exactly right.... The
figures melted away into the single shadow of the village street. The
houses swallowed them, voices, footsteps, and all.

And his eye, wandering down among the lights that twinkled against the
wall of mountains, picked out the little ancient house, nestling so
close beside the church that they shared a wall in common. Twenty-five
years had passed since first he bowed his head beneath the wistaria
that still crowned the Pension doorway. He remembered bounding up the
creaking stairs. He felt he could still bound as swiftly and with as
sure a step, only—he would expect less at the top now. More truly
put, perhaps, he would expect less for himself. That ambition of his
life was over and done with. It was for others now that his desires
flowed so strongly. Mere personal aims lay behind him in a faded heap,
their seductiveness exhausted.... He was a man with a Big Scheme now—
a Scheme to help the world....

The village seemed a dull enough place in those days, for the big Alps
beckoned beyond, and day and night he longed to climb them instead of
reading dull French grammar. But now all was different. It dislocated
his sense of time to find the place so curiously unchanged. The years
had played some trick upon him. While he himself had altered,
developed, and the rest, this village had remained identically the
same, till it seemed as if no progress of the outer world need ever
change it. The very people were so little altered—hair grown a little
whiter, shoulders more rounded, steps here and there a trifle slower,
but one and all following the old routine he knew so well as a boy.

Tante Jeanne, in particular, but for wrinkles that looked as though a
night of good sound sleep would smooth them all away, was the same
brave woman, still 'running' that Wistaria Pension against the burden
of inherited debts and mortgages. 'We're still alive,' she had said to
him, after greetings delayed a quarter of a century, 'and if we
haven't got ahead much, at least we haven't gone back!' There was no
more hint of complaint than this. It stirred in him a very poignant
sense of admiration for the high courage that drove the ageing fighter
forward still with hope and faith. No doubt she still turned the
kitchen saucer that did duty for planchette, unconsciously pushing its
blunted pencil towards the letters that should spell out coming help.
No doubt she still wore that marvellous tea-gown garment that did duty
for so many different toilettes, even wearing it when she went with
goloshes and umbrella to practise Sunday's hymns every Saturday night
on the wheezy church harmonium. And most likely she still made
underskirts from the silk of discarded umbrellas because she loved the
sound of frou-frou thus obtained, while the shape of the silk exactly
adapted itself to the garment mentioned. And doubtless, too, she still
gave away a whole week's profits at the slightest call of sickness in
the village, and then wondered how it was the Pension did not pay...!

A voice from below interrupted his long reverie.

'Ready for supper, Henry?' cried his cousin up the stairs. 'It's past
seven. The children have already left the Citadelle.'

And as the two middle-aged dreamers made their way along the winding
street of darkness through the vines, one of them noticed that the
stars drew down their grand old network, fastening it to the heights
of Boudry and La Tourne. He did not mention it to his companion, who
was wumbling away in his beard about some difficult details of his
book, but the thought slipped through his mind like the trail of a
flying comet: 'I'd like to stay a long time in this village and get
the people straight a bit,'—which, had he known it, was another
thought carefully paraphrased so that he should not notice it and feel
alarm: 'It will be difficult to get away from here. My feet are in
that net of stars. It's catching about my heart.'

Low in the sky a pale, witched moon of yellow watched them go....

'The Starlight Express is making this way, I do believe,' he thought.
But perhaps he spoke the words aloud instead of thinking them.

'Eh! What's that you said, Henry?' asked the other, taking it for a
comment of value upon the plot of a story he had referred to.

'Oh, nothing particular,' was the reply. 'But just look at those stars
above La Tourne. They shine like beacons burning on the trees.' Minks
would have called them 'braziers.'

'They are rather bright, yes,' said the other, disappointed. 'The air
here is so very clear.' And they went up the creaking wooden stairs to
supper in the Wistaria Pension as naturally as though the years had
lifted them behind the mountains of the past in a single bound—
twenty-five years ago.

Near where yonder evening star
Makes a glory in the air,
Lies a land dream—found and far
Where it is light always.
There those lovely ghosts repair
Who in sleep's enchantment are,
In Cockayne dwell all things fair—
(But it is far away).

Cockayne Country, Agnes Duclaux.

The first stage in Cousinenry's introduction took place, as has been
seen, at a railway station; but further stages were accomplished
later. For real introductions are not completed by merely repeating
names and shaking hands, still less by a hurried kiss. The ceremony
had many branches too—departments, as it were. It spread itself, with
various degrees, over many days as opportunity offered, and included
Gygi, the gendarme, as well as the little troop of retired governesses
who came to the Pension for their mid-day dinner. Before two days were
passed he could not go down the village street without lifting his cap
at least a dozen times. Bourcelles was so very friendly; no room for
strangers there; a new-comer might remain a mystery, but he could not
be unknown. Rogers found his halting French becoming rapidly fluent
again. And every one knew so much about him—more almost than he knew
himself.

At the Den next day, on the occasion of their first tea together, he
realised fully that introduction—to the children at any rate—
involved a kind of initiation.

It seemed to him that the room was full of children, crowds of them,
an intricate and ever shifting maze. For years he had known no
dealings with the breed, and their movements now were so light and
rapid that it rather bewildered him. They were in and out between the
kitchen, corridor, and bedroom like bits of a fluid puzzle. One moment
a child was beside him, and the next, just as he had a suitable
sentence ready to discharge at it, the place was vacant. A minute
later 'it' appeared through another door, carrying the samovar, or was
on the roof outside struggling with Riquette.