Algernon Blackwood (33 page)

How she divined his thought, and snatched it from his mind always,
this nimble-witted child! His germ developed with a bound at once.

'More a palace than a cathedral,' he whispered. 'Night is a palace,
and has to be built afresh each time. Twilight rears the scaffolding
first, then hangs the Night upon it. Otherwise the darkness would
simply fall in lumps, and lie about in pools and blocks, unfinished—a
ruin instead of a building. Everything must have a scaffolding first.
Look how beautifully it's coming now,' he added, pointing, 'each
shadow in its place, and all the lines of grey and black fitting
exaccurately together like a skeleton. Have you never noticed it
before?'

Jimbo, of course,
had
noticed it, his manner gave them to
understand, but had not thought it worth while mentioning until his
leader drew attention to it.

'Just as trains must have rails to run on,' he explained across
Cousinenry's intervening body to Monkey, 'or else there'd be accidents
and things all the time.'

'And night would be a horrid darkness like a plague in Egypt,' she
supposed, adroitly defending herself and helping her cousin at the
same time. 'Wouldn't it?' she added, as the shadows drew magically
nearer from the forest and made the fire gradually grow brighter. The
children snuggled closer to their cousin's comforting bulk, shivering
a little. The woods went whispering together. Night shook her velvet
skirts out.

'Yes, everything has its pattern,' he answered, 'from the skeleton of
a child or a universe to the outline of a thought. Even a dream must
have its scaffolding,' he added, feeling their shudder and leading it
towards fun and beauty. 'Insects, birds, and animals all make little
scaffoldings with their wee emotions, especially kittens and
butterflies. Engine-drivers too,' for he felt Jimbo's hand steal into
his own and go to sleep there, 'but particularly little beasties that
live in holes under stones and in fields.

When a little mouse in wonder
Flicks its whiskers at the thunder,

it makes a tiny scaffolding behind which it hides in safety,
shuddering. Same with Daddy's stories. Thinking and feeling does the
trick. Then imagination comes and builds it up solidly with bricks and
wall-papers....'

He told them a great deal more, but it cannot be certain that they
heard it all, for there were other Excitements about besides their
cousin—the fire, the time, the place, and above all, this marvellous
coming of the darkness. They caught words here and there, but Thought
went its own independent way with each little eager mind. He had
started the machinery going, that was all. Interpretation varied;
facts remained the same. And meanwhile twilight brought the
Scaffolding of Night before their eyes.

'You can see the lines already,' he murmured sleepily, 'like veins
against the sunset.... Look!'

All saw the shadowy slim rafters slip across the paling sky, mapping
its emptiness with intricate design. Like an enormous spider's web of
fine dark silk it bulged before the wind. The trellis-work, slung from
the sky, hung loose. It moved slowly, steadily, from east to west,
trailing grey sheets of dusk that hung from every filament. The maze
of lines bewildered sight. In all directions shot the threads of
coming darkness, spun from the huge body of Night that still hid
invisible below the horizon.

'They're fastening on to everything ... look!' whispered Cousin Henry,
kicking up a shower of sparks with his foot. 'The Pattern's being made
before your eyes! Don't you see the guy ropes?'

And they saw it actually happen. From the summits of the distant Alps
ran filmy lines of ebony that knotted themselves on to the crests of
the pines beside them. There were so many no eye could follow them.
They flew and darted everywhere, dropping like needles from the sky
itself, sewing the tent of darkness on to the main supports, and
threading the starlight as they came. Night slowly brought her beauty
and her mystery upon the world. The filmy pattern opened. There was a
tautness in the lines that made one feel they would twang with
delicate music if the wind swept its hand more rapidly across them.
And now and again all vibrated, each line making an ellipse between
its fastened ends, then gradually settling back to its thin, almost
invisible bed. Cables of thick, elastic darkness steadied them.

How much of it all the children realised themselves, or how much
flashed into them from their cousin's mind, is of course a thing not
even a bat can tell.

'Is that why bats fly in such a muddle? Like a puzzle?'

'Of course,' he said. The bats were at last explained.

They built their little pictures for themselves. No living being can
lie on the edge of a big pine forest when twilight brings the darkness
without the feeling that everything becomes too wonderful for words.
The children as ever fed his fantasy, while he thought he did it all
himself. Dusk wore a shroud to entangle the too eager stars, and make
them stay.

'I never noticed it before,' murmured Monkey against his coat sleeve.
'Does it happen every night like this?'

'You only see it if you look very closely,' was the low reply. 'You
must think hard, very hard. The more you think, the more you'll see.'

'But really,' asked Jimbo, 'it's only—
crepuscule, comme ca,
isn't
it?' And his fingers tightened on his leader's hand.

'Dusk, yes,' answered Cousin Henry softly, 'only dusk. But people
everywhere are watching it like ourselves, and thinking feather
thoughts. You can see the froth of stars flung up over the crest of
Night. People are watching it from windows and fields and country
roads everywhere, wondering what makes it so beautiful. It brings
yearnings and long, long desires. Only a few like ourselves can see
the lines of scaffolding, but everybody who thinks about it, and loves
it, makes it more real for others to see, too. Daddy's probably
watching it too from his window.'

'I wonder if Jinny ever sees it,' Monkey asked herself.

But Jimbo knew. 'She's in it,' he decided. 'She's always in places
like that; that's where she lives.'

The children went on talking to each other under their breath, and
while they did so Cousin Henry entered their little wondering minds.
Or, perhaps, they entered his. It is difficult to say. Not even an
owl, who is awfully wise about everything to do with night and
darkness, could have told for certain. But, anyhow, they all three saw
more or less the same thing. The way they talked about it afterwards
proves that. Their minds apparently merged, or else there was one big
mirror and two minor side-reflections of it. It was their cousin's
interpretation, at any rate, that they remembered later. They brought
the material for his fashioning.

'Look!' cried Monkey, sitting up, 'there are millions and millions
now—lines everywhere—pillars and squares and towers. It's like a
city. I can see lamps in every street—'

'That's stars,' interrupted Jimbo. The stars indeed were peeping here
and there already. 'I feel up there,' he added, 'my inside, I mean—up
among the stars and lines and sky-things.'

'That's the mind wandering,' explained the eldest child of the three.
'Always follow a wandering mind. It's quite safe. Mine's going
presently too. We'll all go off together.'

Several little winds, released by darkness, passed them just then on
their way out of the forest. They gathered half a dozen sparks from
the fire to light them on their way, and brought cool odours with them
from the deepest recesses of the trees—perfumes no sunlight ever
finds. And just behind them came a big white moth, booming and
whirring softly. It darted to and fro to find the trail, then
vanished, so swiftly that no one saw it go.

'He's pushing it along,' said Jimbo.

'Or fastening the lines,' his sister thought, 'you see he hovers in
one place, then darts over to another.'

'That's fastening the knots,' added Jimbo.

'No; he's either an Inspector or a Pathfinder,' whispered Cousin
Henry, 'I don't know exactly which. They show the way the scaffolding
goes. Moths, bats, and owls divide the work between them somehow.' He
sat up suddenly to listen, and the children sat up with him. 'Hark!'
he added, 'do you hear that?'

Sighings and flutterings rose everywhere about them, and overhead the
fluffy spires of the tree-tops all bent one way as the winds went
foraging across the night. Majestically the scaffolding reared up and
towered through the air, while sheets of darkness hung from every
line, and trailed across the earth like gigantic sails from some
invisible vessel. Loose and enormous they gradually unfolded, then
suddenly swung free and dropped with a silent dip and rush. Night
swooped down upon the leagues of Jura forest. She spread her tent
across the entire range.

The threads were fastened everywhere now, and the uprights all in
place. Moths were busy in all directions, showing the way, while bats
by the dozen darted like black lightning from corner to corner, making
sure that every spar and beam was fixed and steady. So exquisitely
woven was the structure that it moved past them overhead without the
faintest sound, yet so frail and so elastic that the whirring of the
moths sent ripples of quivering movement through the entire framework.

'Hush!' murmured Rogers, 'we're properly inside it now. Don't think of
anything in particular. Just follow your wandering minds and wait.'
The children lay very close against him. He felt their warmth and the
breathing of their little bosoms. All three moved sympathetically
within the rhythm of the dusk. The 'inside' of each went floating up
into the darkening sky.

The general plan of the scaffolding they clearly made out as they
passed among its myriad, mile-long rafters, but the completed temple,
of course, they never saw. Black darkness hides that ever. Night's
secret mystery lies veiled finally in its innermost chamber, whence it
steals forth to enchant the mind of men with its strange bewilderment.
But the Twilight Scaffolding they saw clearly enough to make a map of
it. For Daddy afterwards drew it from their description, and gave it
an entire page in the Wumble Book, Monkey ladling on the colour with
her camel's-hair brush as well as she could remember.

It was a page to take the breath away, the big conception blundering
clumsily behind the crude reconstruction. Great winds formed the base,
winds of brown and blue and purple, piled mountainously upon each
other in motionless coils, and so soft that the upright columns of the
structure plunged easily and deeply into them. Thus the framework
could bend and curve and sway, moving with steady glide across the
landscape, yet never collapsing nor losing its exquisite proportions.
The forests shored it up, its stays and bastions were the Jura
precipices; it rested on the shoulders of the hills. From vineyard,
field, and lake vast droves of thick grey shadows trooped in to
curtain the lower halls of the colossal edifice, as chamber after
chamber disappeared from view and Night clothed the structure from the
ground-floors upwards. And far overhead a million tiny scarves, half
sunset and half dusk, wove into little ropes that lashed the topmost
spars together, dovetailing them neatly, and fastening them at last
with whole clusters of bright thin stars.

'Ohhhhh!' breathed Jimbo with a delicious shudder of giddiness. 'Let's
climb to the very tip and see all the trains and railway stations in
the world!'

'Wait till the moon comes up and puts the silver rivets in,' the
leader whispered. 'It'll be safer then. My weight, you know—'

'There she is!' interrupted Monkey with a start, 'and there's no such
thing as weight—'

For the moon that instant came up, it seemed with a rush, and the line
of distant Alps moved forward, blocked vividly against the silvery
curtain that she brought. Her sight ran instantly about the world.
Between the trees shot balls of yellowish white, unfolding like ribbon
as they rolled. They splashed the rocks and put shining pools in the
hollows among the moss. Spangles shone on Monkey's hair and eyes;
skins and faces all turned faintly radiant. The lake, like a huge
reflector, flashed its light up into the heavens. The moon laid a
coating of her ancient and transfiguring paint upon the enormous
structure, festooning the entire sky. 'She's put the silver rivets
in,' said Jimbo.

'Now we can go,' whispered Rogers, 'only, remember, it's a giddy
business, rather.'

All three went fluttering after it, floating, rising, falling, like
fish that explore a sunken vessel in their own transparent medium. The
elastic structure bore them easily as it swung along. Its enormous
rhythm lulled their senses with a deep and drowsy peace, and as they
climbed from storey to storey it is doubtful if the children caught
their leader's words at all. There were no echoes—the spaces were too
vast for that—and they swung away from spar to spar, and from rafter
to rafter, as easily as acrobats on huge trapezes. Jimbo and Monkey
shot upwards into space.

'I shall explore the lower storeys first,' he called after them, his
words fluttering in feathers of sound far up the vault. 'Keep the fire
in sight to guide you home again ...' and he moved slowly towards the
vast ground-floor chambers of the Night. Each went his independent way
along the paths of reverie and dream. He found himself alone.

For he could not soar and float as they did; he kept closer to the
earth, wandering through the under chambers of the travelling building
that swung its way over vineyards, woods, and village roofs. He kept
more in touch with earth than they did. The upper sections where the
children climbed went faster than those lower halls and galleries, so
that the entire framework bent over, breaking ever into a crest of
foaming stars. But in these under halls where he stood and watched
there was far less movement. From century to century these remained
the same. Between the bases of the mighty columns he watched the wave
of darkness drown the world, leading it with a rush of silence towards
sleep. For the children Night meant play and mischief; for himself it
meant graver reverie....