Algernon Blackwood (37 page)

'It's a joke, of course,' Mother was heard to say in an odd voice.

'Oh no, Mother, for how could anybody know? It's what I've been
dreaming about for nights and nights. It's so aromantic, isn't it?'

The louder hissing of the samovar buried the next words, and at that
moment Daddy came into the room. He was smiling and his eyes were
bright. He glanced at the table and sat down by his cousin on the
sofa.

'I've done a lot of work since you saw me,' he said happily, patting
him on the knee, 'although in so short a time. And I want my cup of
tea. It came so easily and fluently for a wonder; I don't believe I
shall have to change a word—though usually I distrust this sort of
rapid composition.'

'Where are you at now?' asked Rogers. 'We're all "out,"' was the
reply, 'and the Starlight Express is just about to start and—Mother,
let me carry that for you,' he exclaimed, turning round as his wife
appeared in the doorway with more tea-things. He got up quickly, but
before he could reach her side Jinny flew into his arms and kissed
him.

'Did you get my tobacco, Jinny?' he asked. She thrust the letter under
his nose. What was tobacco, indeed, compared to an important letter!
'You can keep the change for yourself.'

He read it slowly with a puzzled expression, while Mother and the
children watched him. Riquette jumped down from her chair and rubbed
herself against his leg while he scratched himself with his boot,
thinking it was the rough stocking that tickled him.

'Eh? This is very queer,' he muttered, slapping the open sheet just as
his wife had done, and reading it again at arm's-length. 'Somebody'—
he looked suspiciously round the room—'has been reading my notes or
picking out my thoughts while I'm asleep, eh?'

'But it's a real letter,' objected Jinny; 'it's correspondence, isn't
it, Daddy?'

'It is certainly a correspondence,' he comforted her, and then,
reading it aloud, he proceeded to pin it on the wall above the
mantelpiece:—

'The Starlight Xpress starts to-night, Be reddy and punctuel. Sleep
titely and get out.'

That was all. But everybody exchanged glances.

'Odd,' thought Mother, again remembering her dreams.

Jimbo upset the milk-jug. Usually there would have been a rumpus over
this. To-day it seemed like something happening far away—something
that had not really happened at all.

'We must all be ready then,' said Rogers, noticing vaguely that
Mother's sleeve had smeared the butter as she mopped up the mess.

Daddy was making a note on his shirt sleeve:—

The Sweep, the Laugher and the Tramp,
The running man who lights the lamp,
The Woman of the Haystack, too,
The Gardener and Man of Dust
Are passengers because they must
Follow the Guard with eyes of blue.
Over the forests and into the Cave
That is the way we must all behave—

'Please, Daddy, will you move? It's dripping on to your boot.'

They all looked down; the milk had splashed from the cloth and fallen
upon the toe of his big mountain boots. It made a pretty, white star.
Riquette was daintily lapping it up with her long pink Tongue. Ray by
ray the star set in her mysterious interior.

'Riquette must come too,' said Rogers gravely. 'She's full of white
starlight now.'

And Jimbo left his chair and went seriously over to the book-shelf
above Mother's sofa-bed to arrange the signals. For between the
tightly-wedged books he had inserted all the available paper-knives
and book-markers he could find to represent railway-signals. They
stuck out at different angles. He altered several, putting some up,
some down, and some at right angles.

'The line's all clear for to-night,' he announced to Daddy with a
covert significance he hardly grasped himself, then coming back to
home-made jam and crusty village bread.

Jane Anne caught her father's answering glance-mysterious, full of
unguessed meanings. 'Oh, excuse me, Mother,' she said, feeling the
same thing in herself and a little frightened; 'but I do believe
they're conspiring, aren't they?'

And Mother gave a sudden start, whose cause she equally failed to
analyse. 'Hush, dear,' she said. 'Don't criticise your elders, and
when you do, don't use long words you cannot possibly understand.'

And everybody understood something none of them understood-while tea
went on as usual to the chatter of daily details of external life.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.

Abt Vogler
, R. BROWNING.

Some hours later, as Rogers undressed for bed in his room beneath the
roof, he realised abruptly that the time had come for him to leave.
The weeks had flown; Minks and the Scheme required him; other matters
needed attention too. What brought him to the sudden decision was the
fact that he had done for the moment all he could find to do,
beginning with the Pension mortgages and ending with little Edouard
Tissot, the
vigneron's
boy who had curvature of the spine and could
not afford proper treatment. It was a long list. He was far from
satisfied with results, yet he had done his best, in spite of many
clumsy mistakes. In the autumn he might return and have a further try.
Finances were getting muddled, too, and he realised how small his
capital actually was when the needs of others made claims upon it.
Neighbours were as plentiful as insects.

He had made all manner of schemes for his cousin's family as well, yet
seemed to have accomplished little. Their muddled life defied
disentanglement, their difficulties were inextricable. With one son at
a costly tutor, another girl in a Geneva school, the younger children
just outgrowing the local education, the family's mode of living so
scattered, meals in one place, rooms in several others,—it was all
too unmethodical and dispersed to be covered by their small uncertain
income. Concentration was badly needed. The endless talks and
confabulations, which have not been reported here because their
confusion was interminable and unreportable, landed every one in a
mass of complicated jumbles. The solution lay beyond his power, as
equally beyond the powers of the obfuscated parents. He would return
to England, settle his own affairs, concoct some practical scheme with
the aid of Minks, and return later to discuss its working out. The
time had come for him to leave.

And, oddly enough, what made him see it were things the children had
said that very evening when he kissed them all good-night. England had
been mentioned.

'You're here for always now,' whispered Monkey, 'because you love me
and can't get away. I've tied you with my hair, you know.'

'You'll have no sekrity in London,' said Jimbo. 'Who'll stick your
stamps on?'

'The place will seem quite empty if you go,' Jane Anne contributed,
not wishing to make her contribution too personal, lest she should
appear immodest. 'You've made a memorandum of agreement.' This meant
he had promised rashly once to stay for ever. The phrase lent an
official tone besides.

He fell asleep, devising wonderful plans, as usual, for the entire
world, not merely a tiny section of it. The saviour spirit was ever in
his heart. It failed to realise itself because the mind was unequal to
the strain of wise construction; but it was there, as the old vicar
had divined. He had that indestructible pity to which no living thing
is outcast.

But to-night he fell asleep so slowly, gradually, that he almost
watched the dissolving of consciousness in himself. He hovered a long
time about the strange, soft frontiers. He saw the barriers lower
themselves into the great dim plains. Inch by inch the outer world
became remote, obscure, lit dubiously by some forgotten sun, and inch
by inch the profound recesses of nightly adventure coaxed him down. He
realised that he swung in space between the two. The room and house
were a speck in the universe above him, his brain the mere outlet of a
tunnel up which he climbed every morning to put his horns out like a
snail, and sniff the outer world. Here, in the depths, was the
workroom where his life was fashioned. Here glowed the mighty, hidden
furnaces that shaped his tools. Drifting, glimmering figures streamed
up round him from the vast under-world of sleep, called unconscious.
'I
am
a spirit,' he heard, not said or thought, 'and no spirit can
be unconscious for eight hours out of every twenty-four...!'

Slowly the sea of dreamless sleep, so-called, flowed in upon him,
down, round, and over; it submerged the senses one by one, beginning
with hearing and ending with sight. But, as each physical sense was
closed, its spiritual counterpart—the power that exists apart from
its limited organ-opened into clear, divine activity, free as life
itself....

How ceaseless was this movement of Dreams, never still, always
changing and on the dance, incessantly renewing itself in
kaleidoscopic patterns. There was perpetual metamorphosis and rich
transformation; many became one, one many; the universe was a single
thing, charged with stimulating emotional shocks as each scrap of
interpretation passed in and across the mind....

He was falling into deeper and deeper sleep, into that eternal region
where he no longer thought, but knew... Immense processions of
shifting imagery absorbed him into themselves, spontaneous,
unfamiliar, self-multiplying, and as exquisitely baffling as God and
all His angels....

The subsidence of the external world seemed suddenly complete.

So deeply was he sunk that he reached that common pool of fluid
essence upon which all minds draw according to their needs and powers.
Relations were established, wires everywhere connected. The central
switchboard clicked all round him; brains linked with brains, asleep
or not asleep. He was so deep within himself that, as the children and
the Story phrased it, he was 'out.' The air grew light and radiant.

'Hooray! I'm out!' and he instantly thought of his cousin.

'So am I!' That wumbled author shot immediately into connection with
him. 'And so is Mother—for the first time. Come on: we'll all go
together.'

It was unnecessary to specify where, for that same second they found
themselves in the room of Mlle. Lemaire. At this hour of the night it
was usually dark, except for the glimmer of the low-turned lamp the
sufferer never quite extinguished.

From dusk till dawn her windows in La Citadelle shone faintly for all
to see who chanced to pass along the village street. 'There she lies,
poor aching soul, as she has lain for twenty years, thinking good of
some one, or maybe praying!' For the glimmer was visible from very
far, and familiar as a lighthouse to wandering ships at sea. But, had
they known her inner happiness, they would not have said 'poor soul!'
They would have marvelled. In a Catholic canton, perhaps, they would
have crossed themselves and prayed. Just now they certainly would have
known a singular, exalted joy. Caught in fairyland, they would have
wondered and felt happy.

For the room was crowded to the doors. Walls, windows, ceiling, had
melted into transparency to let in the light of stars; and, caught
like gold-fish in the great network of the rays, shone familiar
outlines everywhere—Jimbo, Monkey, Jinny, the Sweep, the Tramp, the
Gypsy, the Laugher up against the cupboard, the Gardener by the window
where the flower-pots stood, the Woman of the Haystack in the
corridor, too extensive to slip across the threshold, and, in the
middle of the room, motionless with pleasure-Mother!

'Like gorgeous southern butterflies in a net, I do declare!' gasped
Daddy, as he swept in silently with his companion, their colours
mingling harmoniously at once with the rest.

And Mother turned.

'You're out, old girl, at last!' he cried.

'God bless my soul, I am!' she answered. Their sentences came both
together, and their blues and yellows swam into each other and made a
lovely green. 'It's what I've been trying to do all these years
without knowing it. What a glory! I understand now—understand myself
and you. I see life clearly as a whole. Hooray, hooray!' She glided
nearer to him, her face was beaming.

'Mother's going to explode,' said Monkey in a whisper. But, of course,
everybody 'heard' it; for the faintest whisper of thought sent a
ripple through that sea of delicate colour. The Laugher bent behind
the cupboard to hide her face, and the Gardener by the window stooped
to examine his flower-pots. The Woman of the Haystack drew back a
little into the corridor again, preparatory to another effort to
squeeze through. But Mother, regardless of them all, swam on towards
her husband, wrapped in joy and light as in a garment. Hitherto, in
her body, the nearest she had come to coruscating was once when she
had taken a course of sulphur baths. This was a very different matter.
She fairly glittered.

'We'll never go apart again,' Daddy was telling her. 'This inner
sympathy will last, you know.
He
did it. It's him we have to thank,'
and he pointed at his cousin. 'It's starlight, of course, he has
brought down into us.'

But Rogers missed the compliment, being busy in a corner with Monkey
and Jimbo, playing at mixing colours with startling results. Mother
swam across to her old friend, Mile. Lemaire. For a quarter of a
century these two had understood one another, though never consciously
been 'out' together. She moved like a frigate still, gliding and
stately, but a frigate that has snapped its hawsers and meant to sail
the skies.