Algernon Blackwood (19 page)

'No starlight, either,' added Monkey quickly, giving her cousin a
little nudge. 'It's all upwumbled, or whatever Daddy calls it.'

The look he gave her might well have suppressed a grown-up person—
'grande personne,' as Jimbo termed it, translating literally—but on
Monkey it had only slight effect. Her irrepressible little spirit
concealed springs few could regulate. Even avoir-dupois increased
their resiliency the moment it was removed. But Jimbo checked her
better than most. She did look a trifle ashamed—for a second.

'Can't you wait?' he whispered. 'Daddy'll spoil it if you begin it
here. How you do fidget!'

They passed all together out into the yard, the men in front, the two
children just behind, walking warily.

Then came the separation, yet none could say exactly how it was
accomplished. For separations are curious things at the best of times,
the forces that effect them as mysterious as wind that blows a pair of
butterflies across a field. Something equally delicate was at work.
One minute all four stood together by the fountain, and the next Daddy
was walking downhill towards the carpenter's house alone, while the
other three were already twenty metres up the street that led to the
belt of forest.

Jimbo, perhaps, was responsible for the deft manoeuvring. At any rate,
he walked beside his big cousin with the air of a successful aide-de-
camp. But Monkey, too, seemed flushed with victory, rolling along—her
rotundity ever suggested rolling rather than the taking of actual
steps—as if she led a prisoner.

'Don't bother your cousin, children,' their father's voice was heard
again faintly in the distance. Then the big shoulder of La Citadelle
hid him from view and hearing.

And so the sight was seen of these three, arm in arm, passing along
the village street in the twilight. Gygi saw them go and raised his
blue, peaked cap; and so did Henri Favre, standing in the doorway of
his little shop, as he weighed the possible value of the new customer
for matches, chocolate, and string—the articles English chiefly
bought; and likewise Alfred Sandoz, looking a moment through the
window of his cabaret, the Guillaume Tell, saw them go past like
shadows towards the woods, and observed to his carter friend across
the table, 'They choose queer times for expeditions, these English,
ouah!
'

'It's their climate makes them like that,' put in his wife, a touch of
pity in her voice. Her daughter swept the Den and lit the
fourneau
for
la famille anglaise
in the mornings, and the mother,
knowing a little English, spelt out the weather reports in the
Daily
Surprise
she sometimes brought.

Meanwhile the three travellers had crossed the railway line, where
Jimbo detained them for a moment's general explanation, and passed the
shadow of the sentinel poplar. The cluster of spring leaves rustled
faintly on its crest. The village lay behind them now. They turned a
moment to look back upon the stretch of vines and fields that spread
towards the lake. From the pool of shadow where the houses nestled
rose the spire of the church, a strong dark line against the fading
sunset. Thin columns of smoke tried to draw it after them. Lights
already twinkled on the farther shore, five miles across, and beyond
these rose dim white forms of the tremendous ghostly Alps. Dusk slowly
brought on darkness.

Jimbo began to hum the song of the village he had learned in school—

P'tit Bourcelles sur sa colline
De partout a gentille mine;
On y pratique avec success
L'exploitation du francais,

and the moment it was over, his sister burst out with the question
that had been buzzing inside her head the whole time—

'How long are you going to stay?' she said, as they climbed higher
along the dusty road.

'Oh, about a week,' he told her, giving the answer already used a
dozen times. 'I've just come out for a holiday—first holiday I've had
for twenty years. Fancy that! Pretty long time, eh?'

They simply didn't believe that; they let it pass—politely.

'London's stuffy, you know, just now,' he added, aware that he was
convicted of exaggeration. 'Besides, it's spring.'

'There are millions of flowers here,' Jimbo covered his mistake
kindly, 'millions and millions. Aren't there, Monkey?'

'Oh, billions.'

'Of course,' he agreed.

'And more than anywhere else in the whole world.'

'It looks like that,' said Cousin Henry, as proudly as they said it
themselves. And they told him how they picked clothes-baskets full of
the wild lily of the valley that grew upon the Boudry slopes,
hepaticas, periwinkles, jonquils, blue and white violets, as well as
countless anemones, and later, the big yellow marguerites.

'Then how long are you going to stay—
really
?' inquired Monkey once
again, as though the polite interlude were over. It was a delicate way
of suggesting that he had told an untruth. She looked up straight into
his face. And, meeting her big brown eyes, he wondered a little—for
the first time—how he should reply.

'Daddy came here meaning to stay only six months—first.'

'When I was littler,' Jimbo put in.

'—and stayed here all this time—four years.'

'I hope to stay a week or so—just a little holiday, you know,' he
said at length, giving the answer purposely. But he said it without
conviction, haltingly. He felt that they divined the doubt in him.
They guessed his thought along the hands upon his arm, as a horse
finds out its rider from the touch upon the reins. On either side big
eyes watched and judged him; but the brown ones put a positive
enchantment in his blood. They shone so wonderfully in the dusk.

'Longer than that, I think,' she told him, her own mind quite made up.
'It's not so easy to get away from.'

'You mean it?' he asked seriously. 'It makes one quite nervous.'

'There's such a lot to do here,' she said, still keeping her eyes
fixed upon his face till he felt the wonder in him become a little
unmanageable. 'You'll never get finished in a week.'

'My secretary,' he stammered, 'will help me,' and Jimbo nodded,
fastening both hands upon his arm, while Monkey indulged in a little
gust of curious laughter, as who should say 'He who laughs last,
laughs best.'

They entered the edge of the forest. Hepaticas watched them with their
eyes of blue. Violets marked their tread. The frontiers of the
daylight softly closed behind them. A thousand trees opened a way to
let them pass, and moss twelve inches thick took their footsteps
silently as birds. They came presently to a little clearing where the
pines stood in a circle and let in a space of sky. Looking up, all
three saw the first small stars in it. A wild faint scent of coming
rain was in the air—those warm spring rains that wash the way for
summer. And a signal flashed unseen from the blue eyes to the brown.

'This way,' said Jimbo firmly. 'There's an armchair rock where you can
rest and get your wind a bit,' and, though Rogers had not lost his
wind, he let himself be led, and took the great grey boulder for his
chair. Instantly, before he had arranged his weight among the points
and angles, both his knees were occupied.

'By Jove,' flashed through his mind. 'They've brought me here on
purpose. I'm caught!'

A tiny pause followed.

'Now, look here, you little Schemers, I want to know what—'

But the sentence was never finished. The hand of Monkey was already
pointing upwards to the space of sky. He saw the fringe of pine tops
fencing it about with their feathery, crested ring, and in the centre
shone faint, scattered stars. Over the fence of mystery that surrounds
common objects wonder peeped with one eye like a star.

'Cousinenry,' he heard close to his ear, so soft it almost might have
been those tree-tops whispering to the night, 'do you know anything
about a Star Cave—a place where the starlight goes when there are no
eyes or puddles about to catch it?'

A Star Cave! How odd! His own boyhood's idea. He must have mentioned
it to his cousin perhaps, and
he
had told the children. And all that
was in him of nonsense, poetry, love rose at a bound as he heard it.
He felt them settle themselves more comfortably upon his knees. He
forgot to think about the points and angles. Here surely a gateway was
opening before his very feet, a gateway into that world of fairyland
the old clergyman had spoken about. A great wave of tenderness swept
him—a flood strong and deep, as he had felt it long ago upon the hill
of that Kentish village. The golden boyhood's mood rushed over him
once more with all its original splendour. It took a slightly
different form, however. He knew better how to direct it for one
thing. He pressed the children closer to his side.

'A what?' he asked, speaking low as they did. 'Do I know a what?'

'A cave where lost starlight collects,' Monkey repeated, 'a Star
Cave.'

And Jimbo said aloud the verses he had already learned by heart. While
his small voice gave the words, more than a little mixed, a bird high
up among the boughs woke from its beauty sleep and sang. The two
sounds mingled. But the singing of the bird brought back the scenery
of the Vicarage garden, and with it the strange, passionate things the
old clergyman had said. The two scenes met in his mind, passed in and
out of one another like rings of smoke, interchanged, and finally
formed a new picture all their own, where flowers danced upon a carpet
of star-dust that glittered in mid-air.

He knew some sudden, deep enchantment of the spirit. The Fairyland the
world had lost spread all about him, and—he had the children close.
The imaginative faculty that for years had invented ingenious patents,
woke in force, and ran headlong down far sweeter channels—channels
that fastened mind, heart, and soul together in a single intricate
network of soft belief. He remembered the dusk upon the Crayfield
lawns.

'Of course I know a Star Cave,' he said at length, when Jimbo had
finished his recitation, and Monkey had added the details their father
had told them. 'I know the very one your Daddy spoke about. It's not
far from where we're sitting. It's over there.' He pointed up to the
mountain heights behind them, but Jimbo guided his hand in the right
direction—towards the Boudry slopes where the forests dip upon the
precipices of the Areuse.

'Yes, that's it—exactly,' he said, accepting the correction
instantly; 'only
I
go to the top of the mountains first so as to
slide down with the river of starlight.'

'We go straight,' they told him in one breath.

'Because you've got more star-stuff in your eyes than I have, and find
the way better,' he explained.

That touched their sense of pity. 'But you can have ours,' they cried,
'we'll share it.'

'No,' he answered softly, 'better keep your own. I can get plenty now.
Indeed, to tell the truth—though it's a secret between ourselves,
remember—that's the real reason I've come out here. I want to get a
fresh supply to take back to London with me. One needs a fearful lot
in London—'

'But there's no sun in London to melt it,' objected Monkey instantly.

'There's fog though, and it gets lost in fog like ink in blotting-
paper. There's never enough to go round. I've got to collect an awful
lot before I go back.'

'That'll take more than a week,' she said triumphantly.

They fastened themselves closer against him, like limpets on a rock.

'I told you there was lots to do here,' whispered Monkey again.
'You'll never get it done in a week.'

'And how will you take it back?' asked Jimbo in the same breath. The
answer went straight to the boy's heart.

'In a train, of course. I've got an express train here on purpose—'

'The "Rapide"?' he interrupted, his blue eyes starting like flowers
from the earth.

'Quicker far than that. I've got—'

They stared so hard and so expectantly, it was almost like an
interruption. The bird paused in its rushing song to listen too.

'—a Starlight Express,' he finished, caught now in the full tide of
fairyland. 'It came here several nights ago. It's being loaded up as
full as ever it can carry. I'm to drive it back again when once it's
ready.'

'Where is it now?'

'Who's loading it?'

'How fast does it go? Are there accidents and collisions?'

'How do you find the way?'

'May I drive it with you?'

'Tell us exactly everything in the world about it—at once!'

Questions poured in a flood about him, and his imagination leaped to
their answering. Above them the curtain of the Night shook out her
million stars while they lay there talking with bated breath together.
On every single point he satisfied them, and himself as well. He told
them all—his visit to the Manor House, the sprites he found there
still alive and waiting as he had made them in his boyhood, their
songs and characters, the Dustman, Sweep, and Lamplighter, the
Laugher, and the Woman of the Haystack, the blue-eyed Guard—

'But now her eyes are brown, aren't they?' Monkey asked, peering very
close into his face. At the same moment she took his heart and hid it
deep away among her tumbling hair.

'I was coming to that. They're brown now, of course, because in this
different atmosphere brown eyes see better than blue in the dark. The
colours of signals vary in different countries.

'And I'm the
mecanicien
,' cried Jimbo. 'I drive the engine.'

'And I'm your stoker,' he agreed, 'because here we burn wood instead
of coal, and I'm director in a wood-paving company and so know all
about it.'

They did not pause to dissect his logic—but just tore about full
speed with busy plans and questionings. He began to wonder how in the
world he would satisfy them—and satisfy himself as well!—when the
time should come to introduce them to Express and Cave and Passengers.
For if he failed in that, the reality of the entire business must fall
to the ground. Yet the direct question did not come. He wondered more
and more. Neither child luckily insisted on immediate tangible
acquaintance. They did not even hint about it. So far the whole thing
had gone splendidly and easily, like floating a new company with the
rosiest prospectus in the world; but the moment must arrive when
profits and dividends would have to justify mere talk. Concrete
results would be demanded. If not forthcoming, where would his
position be?