Algernon Blackwood (41 page)

'Look sharp!' cried a voice that fell from the sky above them.

'Here come the Morning Spiders,
On their gossamer outriders!'

This time it was the Lamplighter flashing to and fro as he put the
stars out one by one. He was in a frantic hurry; he extinguished whole
groups of them at once. The Pleiades were the last to fade.

Rogers heard him and came back into himself. For his ecstasy had
carried him even beyond the region of the freest 'thinking.' He could
give no account or explanation of it at all. Monkey, Jimbo, Mother,
and he raced in a line together for home and safety. Above the fields
they met the spiders everywhere, the spiders that bring the dawn and
ride off into the Star Cave on lost rays and stray thoughts that
careless minds have left scattered about the world.

And the children, as they raced and told their mother to 'please move
a little more easily and slipperily,' sang together in chorus:—

'We shall meet the Morning Spiders,
The fairy-cotton riders,
Each mounted on a star's rejected ray;
With their tiny nets of feather

They collect our thoughts together,
And on strips of windy weather
Bring the Day. ...'

'That's stolen from you or Daddy,' Mother began to say to Rogers—but
was unable to complete the flash. The thought lay loose behind her in
the air.

A spider instantly mounted it and rode it off.

Something brushed her cheek. Riquette stood rover her, fingering her
face with a soft extended paw.

'But it surely can't be time yet to get up!' she murmured. 'I've only
just fallen asleep, it seems.' She glanced at her watch upon the chair
beside the bed, saw that it was only four o'clock, and then turned
over, making a space for the cat behind her shoulder. A tremendous
host of dreams caught at her sliding mind. She tried to follow them.
They vanished. 'Oh dear!' she sighed, and promptly fell asleep again.
But this time she slept lightly. No more adventures came. She did not
dream. And later, when Riquette woke her a second time because it was
half-past six, she remembered as little of having been 'out' as though
such a thing had never taken place at all.

She lit the fire and put the porridge saucepan on the stove. It was a
glorious July morning. She felt glad to be alive, and full of happy,
singing thoughts. 'I wish I could always sleep like that!' she said.
'But what a pity one has to wake up in the end!'

And then, as she turned her mind toward the coming duties of the day,
another thought came to her. It was a very ordinary, almost a daily
thought, but there seemed more behind it than usual. Her whole heart
was in it this time—

'As soon as the children are off to school I'll pop over to mother,
and see if I can't cheer her up a bit and make her feel more happy. Oh
dear!' she added, 'life is a bag of duties, whichever way one looks at
it!' But she felt a great power in her that she could face them easily
and turn each one into joy. She could take life more bigly,
carelessly, more as a whole somehow. She was aware of some huge
directing power in her 'underneath.' Moreover, the 'underneath' of a
woman like Mother was not a trifle that could be easily ignored. That
great Under Self, resting in the abysses of being, rose and led. The
pettier Upper Self withdrew ashamed, passing over the reins of conduct
into those mighty, shadowy hands.

Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades,
Or loose the bands of Orion?

Book of Job
.

The feeling that something was going to happen—that odd sense of
anticipation—which all had experienced the evening before at tea-time
had entirely vanished, of course, next morning. It was a mood, and it
had passed away. Every one had slept it off. They little realised how
it had justified itself. Jane Anne, tidying the Den soon after seven
o'clock, noticed the slip of paper above the mantelpiece, read it
over—'The Starlight Express will start to-night. Be reddy!'—and tore
it down. 'How could that. have amused us!' she said aloud, as she
tossed it into the waste-paper basket. Yet, even while she did so,
some stray sensation of delight clutched at her funny little heart, a
touch of emotion she could not understand that was wild and very
sweet. She went singing about her work. She felt important and grown-
up, extraordinarily light-hearted too. The things she sang made up
their own words—such odd snatches that came she knew not whence. An
insect clung to her duster, and she shook it out of the window with
the crumbs and bits of cotton gathered from the table-cloth.

'Get out, you Morning Spider,
You fairy-cotton rider!'

she sang, and at the same minute Mother opened the bedroom door and
peeped in, astonished at the unaccustomed music. In her voluminous
dressing-gown, her hair caught untidily in a loose net, her face
flushed from stooping over the porridge saucepan, she looked, thought
Jinny, 'like a haystack somehow.' Of course she did not say it. The
draught, flapping at her ample skirts, added the idea of a covering
tarpaulin to the child's mental picture. She went on dusting with a
half-offended air, as though Mother had no right to interrupt her with
a superintending glance like this.

'You won't forget the sweeping too, Jinny?' said Mother, retiring
again majestically with that gliding motion her abundant proportions
achieved so gracefully.

'Of course I won't, Mother,' and the instant the door was closed she
fell into another snatch of song, the words of which flowed
unconsciously into her mind, it seemed—

'For I'm a tremendously busy Sweep,
Dusting the room while you're all asleep,
And shoving you all in the rubbish heap,
Over the edge of the tiles'

—a little wumbled, it is true, but its source unmistakable.

And all day long, with every one, it was similar, this curious
intrusion of the night into the day, the sub-conscious into the
conscious—a kind of subtle trespassing. The flower of forgotten
dreams rose so softly to the surface of consciousness that they had an
air of sneaking in, anxious to be regarded as an integral part of
normal waking life. Like bubbles in water they rose, discharged their
puff of fragrant air, and disappeared again. Jane Anne, in particular,
was simply radiant all day long, and more than usually clear-headed.
Once or twice she wumbled, but there was big sense in her even then.
It was only the expression that evaded her. Her little brain was a
poor transmitter somehow.

'I feel all endowed to-day,' she informed Rogers, when he
congratulated her later in the day on some cunning act of attention
she bestowed upon him. It was in the courtyard where they all sat
sunning themselves after
dejeuner
, and before the younger children
returned to afternoon school.

'I feel emaciated, you know,' she added, uncertain whether emancipated
was the word she really sought.

'You'll be quite grown-up,' he told her, 'by the time I come back to
little Bourcelles in the autumn.' Little Bourcelles! It sounded, the
caressing way he said it, as if it lay in the palm of his big brown
hand.

'But you'll never come back, because you'll never go,' Monkey chimed
in. 'My hair, remember—'

'
My
trains won't take you,' said Jimbo gravely.

'Oh, a train may
take
you,' continued Monkey, 'but you can't leave.
Going away by train isn't leaving.'

'It's only like going to sleep,' explained her brother. You'll come
back every night in a Starlight Express—'

'Because a Starlight Express takes passengers—whether they like it or
not. You take an ordinary train, but a starlight train takes you!'
added Monkey.

Mother heard the words and looked up sharply from her knitting.
Something, it seemed, had caught her attention vividly, though until
now her thoughts had been busy with practical things of quite another
order. She glanced keenly round at the faces, where all sat grouped
upon the stone steps of La Citadelle. Then she smiled curiously, half
to herself. What she said was clearly not what she had first meant to
say.

'Children, you're not sitting on the cold stone, are you?' she
inquired, but a little absent-mindedly.

'We're quite warm; we've got our thick under-neathies on,' was the
reply. They realised that only part of her mind was in the, question,
and that any ordinary answer would satisfy her.

Mother resumed her knitting, apparently satisfied.

But Jinny, meanwhile, had been following her own train of thought,
started by her cousin's description of her as 'grown-up.' The picture
grew big and gracious in her mind.

'I wonder what I shall do when my hair goes up?' she observed,
apparently
a propos de bottes
. It was the day, of course, eagerly,
almost feverishly, looked forward to.

'Hide your head in a bag probably,' laughed her sister. Jinny flushed;
her hair was not abundant. Yet she seemed puzzled rather than
offended.

'Never mind,' Rogers soothed her. 'The day a girl puts up her hair, a
thousand young men are aware of it,—and one among them trembles.' The
idea of romance seemed somehow in the air.

'Oh, Cousinenry!' She was delighted, comforted, impressed; but
perplexity was uppermost. Something in his tone of voice prevented
impudent comment from the others.

'And all the stars grow a little brighter,' he added. 'The entire
universe is glad.'

'I shall be a regular company promoter!' she exclaimed, nearer to wit
than she knew, yet with only the vaguest inkling of what he really
meant.

'And draw up a Memorandum of Agreement with the Milky Way,' he added,
gravely smiling.

He had just been going to say 'with the Pleiades,' when something
checked him. A wave of strange emotion swept him. It rose from the
depths within, then died away as mysteriously as it came. Like
exquisite music heard from very far away, it left its thrill of beauty
and of wonder, then hid behind the breath of wind that brought it.
'The whole world, you see, will know,' he added under his breath to
the delighted child. He looked into her queer, flushed face. The blue
eyes for a moment had, he thought, an amber tinge. It was a mere
effect of light, of course; the sun had passed behind a cloud.
Something that he ought to have known, ought to have remembered,
flashed mockingly before him and was gone. 'One among them trembles,'
he repeated in his mind. He himself was trembling.

'The Morning Spiders,' said some one quietly and softly, 'are standing
at their stable doors, making faces at the hidden sun.'

But he never knew who said it, or if it was not his own voice speaking
below his breath. He glanced at Jimbo. The small grave face wore an
air of man-like preoccupation, as was always the case when he felt a
little out of his depth in general conversation. He assumed it in
self-protection. He never exposed himself by asking questions. The
music of that under-voice ran on:—

'Sweet thoughts, like fine weather,
Bind closely together
God's stars with the heart of a boy.'

But he said it aloud apparently this time, for the others looked up
with surprise. Monkey inquired what in the world he was talking about,
only, not quite knowing himself, he could not answer her. Jimbo then,
silent and preoccupied, found his thoughts still running on marriage.
The talk about his sister's hair going up no doubt had caused it.
He remembered the young schoolmistress who had her meals at the
Pension, and the Armenian student who had fallen in love with, and
eventually married, her. It was the only courtship he had ever
witnessed. Marriage and courtship seemed everywhere this morning.

'I saw it all with Mlle. Perette,' he informed the party. 'It began
already by his pouring out water for her and passing the salt and
things. It
always
begins like that. He got shawls even when she was
hot.'

He looked so wise and grave that nobody laughed, and his sisters even
seemed impressed rather. Jinny waited anxiously for more. If Mother
did make an odd grimace, it was not noticed, and anyhow was cleverly
converted into the swallowing of a yawn. There was a moment's silence.
Jimbo, proudly conscious that more was expected of him, provided it in
his solemn little voice.

'But it must be horrid,' he announced, 'to be married—always sticked
to the same woman, like that.' No sentence was complete without the
inevitable 'already' or 'like that,' translated from the language he
was more at home in. He thought in French. 'I shall never marry myself
(
me marier
) he decided, seeing his older sister's eyes upon him
wonderingly. Then, uncertain whether he had said an awfully wise or an
awfully foolish thing, he added no more. Anyhow, it was the way a man
should talk—with decision.

'It's bad enough to be a wife,' put in Monkey, 'but it must be worse
still to have one!'

But Jane Anne seemed shocked. A man, Jimbo reflected, can never be
sure how his wisdom may affect the other sex; women are not meant to
know everything. She rose with dignity and went upstairs towards the
door, and Monkey, rippling with laughter, smacked her as she went.
This only shocked her more.

'That was a slight mistake behind,' she said reprovingly, looking
back; 'you should have more reserve, I think,' then firmly shut the
door.

All of which meant—so far as Jane Anne was concerned—that an
important standard of conduct—grown-up, dignified, stately in a
spiritual sense—was being transferred to her present behaviour, but
transferred ineffectively. Elsewhere Jane Anne lived it,
was
it. She
knew it, but could not get at the part of her that knew it. The
transmitting machinery was imperfect. Connecting links and switches
were somehow missing. Yearning was strong in her, that yearning which
is common to all the world, though so variously translated. Once out
of the others' sight, she made a curious face. She went into her room
between the kitchen and the Den, flung herself on the bed, and burst
into tears. And the fears brought relief. They oiled the machinery
perhaps. At any rate, she soon felt better.