Algernon Blackwood (36 page)

Another time she would have answered, though not bitterly, 'Meanwhile
I'll go on knitting stockings,' or 'Why not? we shall see what we
shall see'—something, at any rate, corrective and rather sober,
quenching. But this time she said nothing. She returned the kiss
instead, without looking up from her needles, and a great big thing
like an unborn child moved near her heart. He had not called her
'dearie' for so long a time, it took her back to their earliest days
together at a single, disconcerting bound. She merely stroked his
shoulder as he straightened up and left the room. Her eyes then
followed him out, and he turned at the door and waved his hand.
Rogers, to her relief, saw him to the end of the passage, and her
handkerchief was out of sight again before he returned. As he came in
she realised even more clearly than before that he somehow was the
cause of the changing relationship. He it was who brought this
something that bridged the years—made old bridges safe to use again.
And her love went out to him. He was a man she could open her heart to
even.

Patterns of starry beauty had found their way in and were working out
in all of them. But Mother, of course, knew nothing of this. There was
a tenderness in him that won her confidence. That was all she felt.
'Oh, dear,' she thought in her odd way, 'what a grand thing a man is
to be sure, when he's got that!' It was like one of Jane Anne's
remarks.

As he came in she had laid the stocking aside and was threading a
needle for darning and buttons, and the like.

'"Threading the eye of a yellow star," eh?' he laughed, 'and always at
it. You've stirred old Daddy up this time. He's gone off to his story,
simply crammed full. What a help and stimulus you must be to him!'

'I,' she said, quite flabbergasted; 'I only wish it were true—again.'
The last word slipped out by accident; she had not meant it.

But Rogers ignored it, even if he noticed it.

'I never can help him in his work. I don't understand it enough. I
don't understand it at all.' She was ashamed to hedge with this man.
She looked him straight in the eye.

'But he feels your sympathy,' was his reply. 'It's not always
necessary to understand. That might only muddle him. You help by
wishing, feeling, sympathising—believing.'

'You really think so?' she asked simply. 'What wonderful thoughts you
have I One has read, of course, of wives who inspired their husbands'
work; but it seemed to belong to books rather than to actual life.'

Rogers looked at her thoughtful, passionate face a moment before he
answered. He realised that his words would count with her. They
approached delicate ground. She had an absurd idea of his importance
in their lives; she exaggerated his influence; if he said a wrong
thing its effect upon her would be difficult to correct.

'Well,' he said, feeling mischief in him, 'I don't mind telling
you
that I should never have understood that confused idea of his story
but for one thing.'

'What was that?' she asked, relieved to feel more solid ground at
last.

'That I saw the thing from his own point of view,' he replied;
'because I have had similar thoughts all my life. I mean that he's
bagged it all unconsciously out of my own mind; though, of course,' he
hastened to add, 'I could never, never have made use of it as he will.
I could never give it shape and form.'

Mother began to laugh too. He caught the twinkle in her eyes. She
bounced again a little on the springy sofa as she turned towards him,
confession on her lips at last.

'And I do believe you've felt it too, haven't you?' he asked quickly,
before she could change her mind.

'I've felt something—yes,' she assented; 'odd, unsettled; new things
rushing everywhere about us; the children mysterious and up to all
sorts of games and wickedness; and bright light over everything, like-
like a scene in a theatre, somehow. It's exhilarating, but I can't
quite make it out. It can't be right to feel so frivolous and jumpy-
about at my age, can it?'

'You feel lighter, eh?

She burst out laughing. Mother was a prosaic person; that is, she had
strong common-sense; yet through her sober personality there ran like
a streak of light some hint of fairy lightness, derived probably from
her Celtic origin. Now, as Rogers watched her, he caught a flash of
that raciness and swift mobility, that fluid, protean elasticity of
temperament which belonged to the fairy kingdom. The humour and pathos
in her had been smothered by too much care. She accepted old age
before her time. He saw her, under other conditions, dancing, singing,
full of Ariel tricks and mischief—instead of eternally mending
stockings and saving centimes for peat and oil and washerwomen. He
even saw her feeding fantasy—poetry—to Daddy like a baby with a
spoon. The contrast made him laugh out loud.

'You've lived here five years,' he went on, 'but lived too heavily.
Care has swamped imagination. I did the same-in the City-for twenty
years. It's all wrong. One has to learn to live carelessly as well as
carefully. When I came here I felt all astray at first, but now I see
more clearly. The peace and beauty have soaked into me.' He hesitated
an instant, then continued. Even if she didn't grasp his meaning now
with her brains, it would sink down into her and come through later.

'The important things of life are very few really. They stand out
vividly here. You've both vegetated, fossilised, atrophied a bit. I
discovered it in my own case when I went back to Crayfield and—'

He told her about his sentimental journey, and how he found all the
creations of his childhood's imagination still so alive and kicking in
a forgotten backwater of his mind that they all hopped out and took
objective form—the sprites, the starlight express, the boundless
world of laughter, fun and beauty.

'And, without exactly knowing it, I suppose I've brought them all out
here,' he continued, seeing that she drank it in thirstily, 'and—
somehow or other—you all have felt it and responded. It's not my
doing, of course,' he added; 'it's simply that I'm the channel as it
were, and Daddy, with his somewhat starved artist's hunger of mind,
was the first to fill up. It's pouring through him now in a story,
don't you see; but we're all in it—'

'In a way, yes, that's what I've felt,' Mother interrupted. 'It's all
a kind of dream here, and I've just waked up. The unchanging village,
the forests, the Pension with its queer people, the Magic Box—'

'Like a play in a theatre,' he interrupted, 'isn't it?'

'Exactly,' she laughed, yet half-seriously.

'While your husband is the dramatist that writes it down in acts and
scenes. You see, his idea is, perhaps, that life as we know it is
never a genuine story, complete and leading to a climax. It's all in
disconnected fragments apparently. It goes backwards and forwards, up
and down, in and out in a wumbled muddle, just anyhow, as it were. The
fragments seem out of their proper place, the first ones often last,
and
vice versa
. It seems inconsequential, because we only see the
scraps that break through from below, from the true inner, deeper life
that flows on steadily and dramatically out of sight. That's what he
means by "out of the body" and "sleep" and "dreaming." The great
pattern is too big and hidden for us to see it whole, just as when you
knit I only see the stitches as you make them, although the entire
pattern is in your mind complete. Our daily, external acts are the
stitches we show to others and that everybody sees. A spiritual person
sees the whole.'

'Ah!' Mother interrupted, 'I understand now. To know the whole pattern
in my mind you'd have to get in sympathy with my thought below. Is
that it?'

'Sometimes we look over the fence of mystery, yes, and see inside—see
the entire stage as it were.'

'It
is
like a great play, isn't it?' she repeated, grasping again at
the analogy with relief. 'We give one another cues, and so on—'

'While each must know the whole play complete in order to act his part
properly—be in sympathy, that is, with all the others. The tiniest
details so important, too,' he added, glancing significantly at the
needles on her lap. 'To act your own part faithfully you must carry
all the others in your mind, or else—er—get your own part out of
proportion.'

'It will be a wonderful story, won't it?' she said, after a pause in
which her eyes travelled across the sunshine towards the carpenter's
house where her husband, seen now in a high new light, laboured
steadily.

There was a clatter in the corridor before he could reply, and Jimbo
and Monkey flew in with a rush of wings and voices from school. They
were upon him in an instant, smelling of childhood, copy-books, ink,
and rampagious with hunger. Their skins and hair were warm with
sunlight. 'After tea we'll go out,' they cried, 'and show you
something in the forest—oh, an enormous and wonderful thing that
nobody knows of but me and Jimbo, and comes over every night from
France and hides inside a cave, and goes back just before sunrise with
a sack full of thinkings—'

'Thoughts,' corrected Jimbo.

'—that haven't reached the people they were meant for, and then—'

'Go into the next room, wash yourselves and tidy up,' said Mother
sternly, 'and then lay the table for tea. Jinny isn't in yet. Put the
charcoal in the samovar. I'll come and light it in a moment.'

They disappeared obediently, though once behind the door there were
sounds that resembled a pillow-fight rather than tidying-up; and when
Mother presently went after them to superintend, Rogers sat by the
window and stared across the vineyards and blue expanse of lake at the
distant Alps. It was curious. This vague, disconnected, rambling talk
with Mother had helped to clear his own mind as well. In trying to
explain to her something he hardly understood himself, his own
thinking had clarified. All these trivial scenes were little bits of
rehearsal. The Company was still waiting for the arrival of the Star
Player who should announce the beginning of the real performance. It
was a woman's role, yet Mother certainly could not play it. To get the
family really straight was equally beyond his powers. 'I really must
have more common-sense,' he reflected uneasily; 'I am getting out of
touch with reality somewhere. I'll write to Minks again.'

Minks, at the moment, was the only definite, positive object in the
outer world he could recall. 'I'll write to him about—' His thought
went wumbling. He quite forgot what it was he had to say to him—'Oh,
about lots of things,' he concluded, 'his wife and children and—and
his own future and so on.'

The Scheme had melted into air, it seemed. People lost in Fairyland,
they say, always forget the outer world of unimportant happenings.
They live too close to the source of things to recognise their
clownish reflections in the distorted mirrors of the week-day level.

Yes, it was curious, very curious. Did Thought, then, issue primarily
from some single source and pass thence along the channels of men's
minds, each receiving and interpreting according to his needs and
powers? Was the Message—the Prophet's Vision—merely the more
receipt of it than most? Had, perhaps, this whole wonderful story his
cousin wrote originated, not in his, Rogers's mind, nor in that of
Minks, but in another's altogether—the mind of her who was destined
for the principal role? Thrills of absurd, electric anticipation
rushed through him—very boyish, wildly impossible, yet utterly
delicious.

Two doors opened suddenly—one from the kitchen, admitting Monkey with
a tray of cups and saucers, steam from the hissing samovar wrapping
her in a cloud, the other from the corridor, letting in
Jane Anne, her arms full of packages. She had been shopping for the
family in Neuchatel, and was arrayed in garments from the latest Magic
Box. She was eager and excited.

'Cousinenry,' she cried, dropping half the parcels in her fluster,
'I've had a letter!' It was in her hand, whereas the parcels had been
merely under her arms. 'The postman gave it me himself as I came up
the steps. I'm a great correspondencer, you know.' And she darted
through the steam to tell her mother. Jimbo passed her, carrying the
tea-pot, the sugar-basin dangerously balanced upon spoons and knives
and butter-dish. He said nothing, but glanced at his younger sister
significantly. Rogers saw the entire picture through the cloud of
steam, shot through with sunlight from the window. It was like a
picture in the clouds. But he intercepted that glance and knew then
the writer of the letter.

'But did you get the mauve ribbon, child?' asked Mother.

Instead of answer, the letter was torn noisily open. Jinny never had
letters. It was far more important than ribbons.

'And how much change have you left out of the five francs? Daddy will
want to know.'

Jimbo and Monkey were listening carefully, while pretending to lay the
table. Mother's silence betrayed that she was reading the letter with
interest and curiosity equal to those of its recipient. 'Who wrote it?
Who's it from? I must answer it at once,' Jinny was saying with great
importance. 'What time does the post go, I wonder? I mustn't miss it.'

'The post-mark,' announced Mother, 'is Bourcelles. It's very
mysterious.' She tapped the letter with one hand, like the villain in
the theatre. Rogers heard her and easily imagined the accompanying
stage gesture. 'The handwriting on the envelope is like Tante Anna,'
he heard, 'but the letter itself is different. It's all capitals, and
wrongly spelt.' Mlle. Lemaire was certainly not the writer.

Jimbo and Monkey were busy hanging the towel out of the window, signal
to Daddy that tea was ready. But as Daddy was already coming down the
street at a great pace, apparently excited too, they waved it instead.
Rogers suddenly remembered that Jimbo that morning had asked him for a
two-centime stamp. He made no remark, however, merely wondering what
was in the letter itself.