Algernon Blackwood (35 page)

'I
did,
indulge in that sort of thing as a boy, yes,' was the half-
guilty reply; 'but that was years and years ago, wasn't it?'

'They have survived, then,' said Daddy with decision. 'The sweetness
of this place has stimulated them afresh. The children'—he glanced
suspiciously at his wife for a moment—'have appropriated them too.
It's a powerful combination. After a pause he added, 'I might develop
that idea in my story—that you've brought back the sweet creations of
childhood with you and captured us all—a sort of starry army.'

'Why not?' interpolated Mother, as who should say there was no harm in
that
. 'They certainly have been full of mischief lately.'

'Creation
is
mischievous,' murmured her husband. 'But since you have
come,' he continued aloud,—'how can I express it exactly?—the days
have seemed larger, fuller, deeper, the forest richer and more
mysterious, the sky much closer, and the stars more soft and intimate.
I dream of them, and they all bring me messages that help my story. Do
you know what I mean? There were days formerly, when life seemed
empty, thin, peaked, impoverished, its scale of values horribly
reduced, whereas now—since you've been up to your nonsense with the
children—some tide stands at the full, and things are always
happening.'

'Well, really, Daddy!' said the expression on Mother's face and hands
and knitting-needles, 'you
are
splendid to-day'; but aloud she only
repeated her little hold-all phrase, 'Why not?'

Yet somehow he recognised that she understood him better than usual.
Her language had not changed—things in Mother worked slowly, from
within outwards as became her solid personality—but it held new
meaning. He felt for the first time that he could make her understand,
and more—that she was ready to understand. That is, he felt new
sympathy with her. It was very delightful, stimulating; he instantly
loved her more, and felt himself increased at the same time.

'I believe a story like that might even sell,' he observed, with a
hint of reckless optimism. 'People might recognise a touch of their
own childhood in it, eh?'

He longed for her to encourage him and pat him on the back.

'True,' said Mother, smiling at him, 'for every one likes to keep in
touch with their childhood—if they can. It makes one feel young and
hopeful—jolly; doesn't it? Why not?'

Their eyes met. Something, long put aside and buried under a burden of
exaggerated care, flashed deliciously between them. Rogers caught it
flying and felt happy. Bridges were being repaired, if not newly
built.

'Nature, you see, is always young really,' he said; 'it's full of
children. The very meaning of the word, eh, John?' turning to his
cousin as who should say, 'We knew our grammar once.'

'
Natura
, yes—something about to produce.' They laughed in their
superior knowledge of a Latin word, but Mother, stirred deeply though
she hardly knew why, was not to be left out. Would the bridge bear
her, was perhaps her thought.

'And of the feminine gender,' she added slyly, with a touch of pride.
The bridge creaked, but did not give way. She said it very quickly.
She had suddenly an air of bouncing on her sofa.

'Bravo, Mother,' said her husband, looking at her, and there was a
fondness in his voice that warmed and blessed and melted down into
her. She had missed it so long that it almost startled her. 'There's
the eternal old magic, Mother; you're right. And if I had more of you
in me—more of the creative feminine—I should do better work, I'm
sure. You must give it to me.'

She kept her eyes upon her needles. The others, being unobservant
'mere men,' did not notice that the stitches she made must have
produced queer kind of stockings if continued. 'We'll be
collaborators,' Daddy added, in the tone of a boy building on the
sands at Margate.

'I will,' she said in a low voice, 'if only I know how.'

'Well,' he answered enthusiastically, looking from one to the other,
delighted to find an audience to whom he could talk of his new dream,
'you see, this is really a great jolly fairy-tale I'm trying to write.
I'm blessed if I know where the ideas come from, or how they pour into
me like this, but—anyhow it's a new experience, and I want to make
the most of it. I've never done imaginative work before, and—though
it is a bit fantastical, mean to keep in touch with reality and show
great truths that emerge from the commonest facts of life. The
critics, of course, will blame me for not giving 'em the banal thing
they expect from me, but what of that?' He was dreadfully reckless.

'I see,' said Mother, gazing open-mindedly into his face; 'but where
does
my
help come in, please?'

She leaned back, half-sighing, half-smiling. 'Here's my life'—she
held up her needles—'and that's the soul of prosaic dulness, isn't
it?'

'On the contrary,' he answered eagerly, 'it's reality. It's courage,
patience, heroism. You're a spring-board for my fairy-tale, though I'd
never realised it before. I shall put you in, just as you are. You'll
be one of the earlier chapters.'

'Every one'll skip me, then, I'm afraid.'

'Not a bit,' he laughed gaily; 'they'll feel you all through the book.
Their minds will rest on you. You'll be a foundation. "Mother's
there," they'll say, "so it's all right. This isn't nonsense. We'll
read on." And they will read on.'

'I'm all through it, then?'

'Like the binding that mothers the whole book, you see,' put in
Rogers, delighted to see them getting on so well, yet amazed to hear
his cousin talk so openly with her of his idea.

Daddy continued, unabashed and radiant. Hitherto, he knew, his wife's
attitude, though never spoken, had been very different. She almost
resented his intense preoccupation with stories that brought in so
little cash. It would have been better if he taught English or gave
lessons in literature for a small but regular income. He gave too much
attention to these unremunerative studies of types she never met in
actual life. She was proud of the reviews, and pasted them neatly in a
big book, but his help and advice on the practical details of the
children's clothing and education were so scanty. Hers seemed ever the
main burden.

Now, for the first time, though she distrusted fantasy and deemed it
destructive of action, she felt something real. She listened with a
kind of believing sympathy. She noticed, moreover, with keen pleasure,
that her attitude fed him. He talked so freely, happily about it all.
Already her sympathy, crudely enough expressed, brought fuel to his
fires. Some one had put starlight into her.

'He's been hungry for this all along,' she reflected; 'I never
realised it. I've thought only of myself without knowing it.'

'Yes, I'll put you in, old Mother,' he went on, 'and Rogers and the
children too. In fact, you're in it already,' he chuckled, 'if you
want to know. Each of you plays his part all day long without knowing
it.' He changed his seat, going over to the window-sill, and staring
down upon them as he talked on eagerly. 'Don't you feel,' he said,
enthusiasm growing and streaming from him, 'how all this village life
is a kind of dream we act out against the background of the sunshine,
while our truer, deeper life is hidden somewhere far below in half
unconsciousness? Our daily doings are but the little bits that emerge,
tips of acts and speech that poke up and out, masquerading as
complete? In that vaster sea of life we lead below the surface lies my
big story, my fairy-tale—when we sleep.' He paused and looked down
questioningly upon them. 'When we sleep,' he repeated impressively,
struggling with his own thought. 'You, Mother, while you knit and sew,
slip down into that enormous under-sea and get a glimpse of the
coloured pictures that pass eternally behind the veil. I do the same
when I watch the twilight from my window in reverie. Sunshine
obliterates them, but they go just the same.
You
call it day-
dreaming. Our waking hours are the clothes we dress the spirit in
after its nightly journeys and activities. Imagination does not create
so much as remember. Then, by transforming, it reveals.'

Mother sat staring blankly before her, utterly lost, while her husband
flung these lumps of the raw material of his story at her—of its
atmosphere, rather. Even Rogers felt puzzled, and hardly followed what
he heard. The intricacies of an artistic mind were indeed bewildering.
How in the world would these wild fragments weave together into any
intelligible pattern?

'You mean that we travel when we sleep,' he ventured, remembering a
phrase that Minks had somewhere used, 'and that our real life is out
of the body?' His cousin was taking his thought—or was it originally
Minks's?—wholesale.

Mother looked up gratefully. 'I often dream I'm flying,' she put in
solemnly. 'Lately, in particular, I've dreamed of stars and funny
things like that a lot.'

Daddy beamed his pleasure. 'In my fairy-tale we shall all see stars,'
he laughed, 'and we shall all get "out." For our thoughts will
determine the kind of experience and adventure we have when the spirit
is free and unhampered. And contrariwise, the kind of things we do at
night—in sleep, in dream—will determine our behaviour during the
day. There's the importance of thinking rightly, you see. Out of the
body is eternal, and thinking is more than doing—it's more complete.
The waking days are brief intervals of test that betray the character
of our hidden deeper life. We are judged in sleep. We last for ever
and ever. In the day, awake, we stand before the easel on which our
adventures of the night have painted those patterns which are the very
structure of our outer life's behaviour. When we sleep again we re-
enter the main stream of our spirit's activity. In the day we forget,
of course—as a rule, and most of us—but we follow the pattern just
the same, unwittingly, because we can't help it. It's the mould we've
made.'

'Then your story,' Rogers interrupted, 'will show the effect in the
daytime of what we do at night? Is that it?' It amazed him to hear his
cousin borrowing thus the entire content of his own mind, sucking it
out whole like a ripe plum from its skin.

'Of course,' he answered; 'and won't it be a lark? We'll all get out
in sleep and go about the village together in a bunch, helping,
soothing, cleaning up, and putting everybody straight, so that when
they wake up they'll wonder why in the world they feel so hopeful,
strong, and happy all of a sudden. We'll put thoughts of beauty into
them—beauty, you remember, which "is a promise of happiness."'

'Ah!' said Mother, seizing at his comprehensible scrap with energy.
'That
is
a story.'

'If I don't get it wumbled in the writing down,' her husband
continued, fairly bubbling over. 'You must keep me straight, remember,
with your needles—your practical aspirations, that is. I'll read it
out to you bit by bit, and you'll tell me where I've dropped a stitch
or used the wrong wool, eh?'

'Mood?' she asked.

'No, wool,' he said, louder.

There was a pause.

'But you see my main idea, don't you—that the sources of our life lie
hid with beauty very very far away, and that our real, big, continuous
life is spiritual—out of the body, as I shall call it. The waking-day
life uses what it can bring over from this enormous under-running sea
of universal consciousness where we're all together, splendid, free,
untamed, and where thinking is creation and we feel and know each
other face to face? See? Sympathy the great solvent? All linked
together by thought as stars are by their rays. Ah! You get my idea—
the great Network?'

He looked straight into his wife's eyes. They were opened very wide.
Her mouth had opened a little, too. She understood vaguely that he was
using a kind of shorthand really. These cryptic sentences expressed in
emotional stenography mere odds and ends that later would drop into
their proper places, translated into the sequence of acts that are the
scaffolding of a definite story. This she firmly grasped—but no more.

'It's grand-a wonderful job,' she answered, sitting back upon the sofa
with a sigh of relief, and again bouncing a little in the process, so
that Rogers had a horrible temptation to giggle. The tension of
listening had been considerable. 'People, you mean, will realise how
important thinking is, and that sympathy—er—' and she hesitated,
floundering.

'Is the great way to grow,' Rogers quickly helped her, 'because by
feeling with another person you add his mind to yours and so get
bigger. And '—turning to his cousin—' you're taking starlight as the
symbol of sympathy? You told me that the other day, I remember.' But
the author did not hear or did not answer; his thought was far away in
his dream again.

The situation was saved. All the bridges had borne well. Daddy, having
relieved his overcharged mind, seemed to have come to a full stop. The
Den was full of sunlight. A delightful feeling of intimacy wove the
three humans together. Mother caught herself thinking of the far-off
courtship days when their love ran strong and clear. She felt at one
with her husband, and remembered him as lover. She felt in touch with
him all over. And Rogers was such a comfortable sort of person. Tact
was indeed well named—sympathy so delicately adjusted that it
involved feeling-with to the point of actual touch.

Daddy came down from his perch upon the window-sill, stretched his
arms, and drew a great happy sigh.

'Mother,' he added, rising to go out, 'you shall help me, dearie.
We'll write this great fairy-tale of mine together, eh?' He stooped
and kissed her, feeling love and tenderness and sympathy in his heart.

'You brave old Mother!' he laughed; 'we'll send Eddie to Oxford yet,
see if we don't. A book like that might earn 100 pounds or even 200
pounds.'