Algernon Blackwood (42 page)

'I felt so enormous and unsettled,' she informed Mother later, when
the redness of her eyes was noticed and she received breathlessly a
great comforting hug. I never get anything right.'

'But you
are
right, darling,' Mother soothed her, little guessing
that she told the perfect truth. 'You are all right, only you don't
know it. Everybody's wumbled somewhere.' And she advised her—ah,
Mother was profoundly wise instinctively—not to think so much, but
just go ahead as usual and do her work.

For Mother herself felt a little queer that day, as though something
very big and splendid lay hiding just beyond her reach. It surged up,
vanished, then surged up again, and it came closest when she was not
thinking of it. The least effort of the mind to capture it merely
plunged her into an empty gulf where she could not touch bottom. The
glorious thing ran instantly underground. She never ceased to be aware
of it, but any attempt to focus resulted in confusion. Analysis was
beyond her powers, yet the matter was very simple really, for only
when thought is blank, and when the mind has forgotten to think, can
inspiration come through into the heart. The intellect interprets
afterwards, sets in order, regulates, examines the wonder and beauty
the heart distils alchemically out of the eternal stream in which life
everywhere dips its feet. If Reason interferes too soon, or during
transmission, it only muddles and destroys. And Mother, hitherto, had
always been so proud of being practical, prosaic, reasonable. She had
deliberately suppressed the other. She could not change in a single
day just because she had been 'out' and made discoveries last night.
Oh, how simple it all was really, and yet how utterly most folk
convert the wonder of it into wumbling!

Like Jane Anne, her miniature, she felt splendid all day long, but
puzzled too. It was almost like those religious attacks she had
experienced in early youth. She had no definite creed by which she
could explain it. Though nominally Christian, like her husband, she
could not ascribe her joy to a 'Holy Spirit,' or to a 'God' working in
her. But she was reminded of her early 'religious attacks' because she
now experienced that large sensation of glorious peace and certainty
which usually accompanies the phenomenon in the heart called
'conversion.' She saw life whole. She rested upon some unfailing
central Joy. Come what might, she felt secure and 'saved.' Something
everlasting lay within call, an ever-ready help in trouble; and all
day she was vaguely conscious that her life lay hid with—with what?
She never found the word exactly, for 'Joy' was but one aspect of it.
She fell back upon the teachings of the big religions which are the
police regulations of the world. Yet all creeds shared these, and her
feeling was far deeper than mere moral teachings. And then she gave up
thinking about it. Besides, she had much knitting to do.

'It's come to stay anyhow; I feel in sympathy with everybody,' she
said, and so dismissed vain introspection, keeping the simple
happiness and peace. That was her strength, as it was also Jinny's. A
re-formation had begun.

Jimbo, too, felt something in his microcosmic way, only he said little
and asked no single question. It betrayed itself, however, to his
Mother's widened vision. He was all stirred up. He came back again
from school at three o'clock—for it was Thursday and he did not take
the singing lesson from three to four—put down his books with a very
business-like air, forgot to kiss his Mother—and went out.

'Where are you off to, Jimbo?' She scented mischief. He was so
affaire
.

He turned obediently at once, the face grave and puckered.

'Going over to the carpenter's house, Mummy.'

'What for, dear? Why don't you stay and play here?' She had the
feeling that her husband was absorbed in his work and would not like
to be disturbed.

The boy's reply was evasive too. 'I want to have a long discuss with
Daddy,' he said.

'Can't you have your long discuss with me instead?' she asked.

He shook his head. 'You see,' he answered solemnly, 'it's about
things.'

'But Daddy's working just now; he'll be over to tea at four. Can't it
wait till then?'

She understood too well to inquire what 'things' might be. The boy
wished to speak with one of his own sex—as one man to another man.

'When a man's at work,' she added, 'he doesn't like to be disturbed.'

'All right,' was the reply. 'We can wait a little,' and he settled
down to other things in a corner by himself. His mind, clearly, was
occupied with grave considerations he could not discuss with anybody,
least of all with women and children. But, of course, busy men must
not be interrupted. For a whole hour in his corner he made no sound,
and hardly any movement.

But Daddy did not come at four o'clock. He was evidently deep in work.
And Mother did not send for him. The carpenter's wife, she knew, would
provide a cup of tea.

He came late to supper, too, at the Pension, nodded to Mother with an
expression which plainly said, 'I've finished the story at last';
winked to his cousin, meaning, 'It came out all right, I'm satisfied,'
and took his seat between Jinny and Mlle. Vuillemot, the governess who
had earned her meal by giving a music lesson that afternoon to a
pensionnaire
. Jinny looked sideways at him in a spirit of
examination, and picked the inevitable crumb deftly from his beard.

'Reminiscences!' she observed slyly. 'You did have some tea, then.'
Her long word was well chosen for once; her mind unusually logical,
too.

But Daddy made no reply; he went on eating whatever was set before him
with an air of complete detachment; he devoured cold ham and salad
automatically; and the children, accustomed to this absorption,
ignored his presence. He was still in the atmosphere of his work,
abstracted, lost to the outer world. They knew they would only, get
wumbled answers to their questions and remarks, and they did not dare
to tease him. From time to time he lifted his eyes—very bright they
were—and glanced round the table, dimly aware that he was in the
midst of a stream of noisy chatter, but unable to enter it
successfully at any point. Mother, watching him, thought, 'He's
sitting on air, he's wrapped in light, he's very happy'; and ate an
enormous supper, as though an insatiable hunger was in her.

The governess, Mlle. Vuillemot, who stood in awe of the 'author' in
him, seized her opportunity. She loved to exchange a
mot
with a real
writer, reading all kinds of unintended subtlety into his brief
replies in dreadful French. To-night she asked him the meaning of a
word, title of a Tauchnitz novel she had been reading—Juggernaut;
but, being on his deaf side, he caught 'Huguenot' instead, and gave
her a laboured explanation, strangled by appalling grammar.

The historical allusions dazed her; the explanation ended on a date.
She was sorry she had ventured, for it made her feel so ignorant.

'Shuggairnort,' she repeated bravely. She had a vague idea he had not
properly heard before.

But this time he caught 'Argonaut,' and swamped her then with
classical exposition, during which she never took her eyes off him,
and decided that he was far more wonderful than she had ever dreamed.
He was; but not for the reasons she supposed.

'Thank you,' she said with meek gratitude at the end, 'I thank you.'

'Il n'y a pas de quar,' replied Daddy, bowing; and the adventure came
to an end. The others luckily had not heard it in full swing; they
only caught the final phrase with which he said adieu. But it served
its unwitting purpose admirably. It brought him back to the world
about him. The spell was broken. All turned upon him instantly.

'Snay pas un morsow de bong.' Monkey copied his accent, using a
sentence from a schoolboy's letter in
Punch
. 'It's not a bit of
good.' Mother squelched her with a look, but Daddy, even if he noticed
it, was not offended. Nothing could offend him to-night. Impertinence
turned silvery owing to the way he took it. There was a marvellous
light and sweetness about him. 'He
is
on air,' decided Mother
finally. 'He's written his great Story—our story. It's finished!'

'I don't know,' he said casually to the others, as they stood talking
a few minutes in the salon before going over to the Den, 'if you'd
like to hear it; but I've got a new creature for the Wumble Book. It
came to me while I was thinking of something else—'

'Thinking of one thing while you were thinking of another!' cried
Monkey. It described exaccurately his state of mind sometimes.

'—and I jotted down the lines on my cuff. So it's not very perfect
yet.'

Mother had him by the arm quickly. Mlle. Vuillemot was hovering in his
neighbourhood, for one thing. It seemed to her they floated over,
almost flew.

'It's a Haystack Woman,' he explained, once they were safely in the
Den grouped about him. 'A Woman of the Haystack who is loved by the
Wind. That is to say, the big Wind loves her, but she prefers the
younger, handsomer little Winds, and—'

He was not allowed to finish. The children laid his cuff back in a
twinkling, drawing up the coat sleeve.

'But surely I know that,' Mother was saying. 'I've heard of her before
somewhere. I wonder where?' Others were saying the same thing. 'It's
not new.'

'Impossible,' said Daddy, 'for the idea only came to me this morning
while I was—'

'Thinking of something else,' Monkey again finished the sentence for
him.

Mother felt that things were rushing about her from another world. She
was vaguely conscious—deliciously, bewilderingly—of having heard
this all before. Imaginative folk have built the certainty of a
previous existence upon evidence as slight; for actual scenery came
with it, and she saw dim forest trees, and figures hovering in the
background, and bright atmosphere, and fields of brilliant stars. She
felt happy and shining, light as a feather, too. It all was just
beyond her reach, though; she could not recover it properly. 'It must
have been a dream
she
told me,' was her conclusion, referring to
Mlle. Lemaire. Her old friend was in it somewhere or other. She felt
sure of that.

She hardly heard, indeed, the silly lines her husband read aloud to
the children. She liked the sound of his voice, though; it suggested
music she had known far away—in her childhood.

'It's high spirits really,' whispered Rogers, sitting beside her in
the window. 'It's a sort of overflow from his story. He can't do that
kind of rhyme a bit, but it's an indication—'

'You think he's got a fine big story this time?' she asked under her
breath; and Cousin Henry's eyes twinkled keenly as he gave a
significant nod and answered: 'Rather! Can't you feel the splendour
all about him, the strength, the harmony!'

She leaped at the word. Harmony exactly described this huge new thing
that had come into the family, into the village, into the world. The
feeling that they all were separate items, struggling for existence
one against the other, had gone for ever. Life seemed now a single
whole, an enormous pattern. Every one fitted in. There was effort—
wholesome jolly effort, but no longer the struggle or fighting that
were ugly. To 'live carelessly' was possible and right because the
pattern was seen entire. It was to live in the whole.

'Harmony,' she repeated to herself, with a great swelling happiness in
her heart, 'that's the nunculus of the matter.'

'The what?' he asked, overhearing her.

'The nunculus,' she repeated bravely, seeing the word in her mind, yet
unable to get it quite. Rogers did not correct her.

'Rather,' was all he said. 'Of course it is.' What did the
pronunciation of a word matter at such a time? Her version even
sounded better than the original. Mother saw things bigger! Already
she was becoming creative!

'And you're the one who brought it,' she continued, but this time so
low that he did not catch the words. 'It's you, your personality, your
thinking, your atmosphere somehow that have brought this gigantic
sense of peace and calm security which are
au fond
nothing but the
consciousness of harmony and the power of seeing ugly details in their
proper place—in a single
coup d'oeil
—and understanding them as
parts of a perfect whole.'

It was her thought really running on; she never could have found the
words like that. She thought in French, too, for one thing. And, in
any case, Rogers could not have heard her, for he was listening now to
the uproar of the children as they criticised Daddy's ridiculous
effusion. A haystack, courted in vain by zephyrs, but finally taken
captive by an equinoctial gale, strained nonsense too finely for their
sense of what was right and funny. It was the pictures he now drew in
the book that woke their laughter. He gave the stack a physiognomy
that they recognised.

'But, Mother, he's making it look like you!' cried Monkey—only Mother
was too far away in her magnificent reverie to reply intelligently.

I know her; she's my friend,' she answered vaguely. 'So it's all
right.'

'Majestic Haystack'—it was the voice of the wind addressing her:—

'Majestic Haystack, Empress of my life,
Your ample waist
Just fits the gown I fancy for my wife,
And suits my taste;
Yet there you stand, flat-footed, square and deep,
An unresponsive, elephantine heap,
Coquetting with the stars while I'm asleep,
O cruel Stack!

Coy, silent Monster, Matron of the fields,
I sing to you;
And all the fondest love that summer yields
I bring to you;
Yet there you squat, immense in your disdain,
Heedless of all the tears of streaming rain
My eyes drip over you—your breathless swain;
O stony Stack!

Stupendous Maiden, sweetest when oblong,
Does inner flame
Now smoulder in thy soul to hear my song
Repeat thy name?
Or does thy huge and ponderous heart object
The advances of my passion, and reject
My love because it's airy and elect?
O wily Stack!