Algernon Blackwood (45 page)

'We thought you would probably stay in there. We're going over now.
It's very late,' Rogers added. They said good-night again.

She closed and locked the great door of the Citadelle behind them,
hearing their steps upon the cobbles in the yard, and for some time
afterwards upon the road. But their going away seemed the same as
coming nearer. She felt so close to everything that lived. Everything
did live. Her heart included all that existed, that ever had existed,
that ever could exist. Mother was alive all over. 'I have just been
created,' she laughed, and went back into the Den to drink her cup of
tepid chocolate.

See, the busy Pleiades,
Sisters to the Hyades,
Seven by seven
Across the heaven,
Light desire
With their fire,
Working cunningly together in a soft and tireless band,

Sweetly linking
All our thinking
In the Net of Sympathy that brings back Fairyland.

A Voice
.

The prophecy of the children that Bourcelles was a difficult place to
get away from found its justification next morning, for Rogers slept
so heavily that he nearly missed his train. It was six o'clock when he
tumbled downstairs, too late for a real breakfast, and only just in
time to get his luggage upon the little char that did duty for all
transport in this unsophisticated village. The carpenter pulled it for
him to the station.

'If I've forgotten anything, my cousin will send it after me,' he told
Mme. Michaud, as he gulped down hot coffee on the steps.

'Or we can keep it for you,' was the answer. 'You'll be coming back
soon.' She knew, like the others, that one always came back to
Bourcelles. She shook hands with him as if he were going away for a
night or two. 'Your room will always be ready,' she added. 'Ayez la
bonte seulement de m'envoyer une petite ligne d'avance.'

'There's only fifteen minutes,' interrupted her husband, 'and it's
uphill all the way.'

They trundled off along the dusty road, already hot in the early July
sun. There was no breath of wind; swallows darted in the blue air; the
perfume of the forests was everywhere; the mountains rose soft and
clear into the cloudless sky. They passed the Citadelle, where the
awning was already being lowered over the balcony for Mlle. Lemaire's
bed to be wheeled out a little later. Rogers waved his handkerchief,
and saw the answering flutter inside the window. Riquette, on her way
in, watched him from the tiles. The orchards then hid the lower
floors; he passed the tinkling fountain; to the left he saw the church
and the old Pension, the wistaria blossoms falling down its walls in a
cascade of beauty.

The Postmaster put his head out and waved his Trilby hat with a solemn
smile. 'Le barometre est tres haut...' floated down the village
street, instead of the sentence of good-bye. Even the Postmaster took
it for granted that he was not leaving. Gygi, standing in the door of
his barn, raised his peaked hat and smiled. 'Fait beau, ce matin,' he
said, 'plus tard il fera rudement chaud.' He spoke as if Rogers were
off for a walk or climb. It was the same everywhere. The entire
village saw him go, yet behaved as if he was not really leaving. How
fresh and sweet the morning air was, keen mountain fragrance in it,
and all the delicious, delicate sharpness of wet moss and dewy fields.

As he passed the courtyard near the Guillaume Tell, and glanced up at
the closed windows of Mother Plume's apartment, a pattering step
startled him behind, and Jimbo came scurrying up. Rogers kissed him
and lifted him bodily upon the top of his portmanteau, then helped the
carpenter to drag it up the hill. 'The barriers at the level crossing
are down, the warning gongs are ringing. It's signalled from
Auvernier.' They were only just in time. The luggage was registered
and the train panting up the steep incline, when Monkey, sleep still
thick in her eyes, appeared rolling along the white road. She was too
breathless to speak; she stood and stared like a stuffed creature in a
Museum. Jimbo was beside the engine, having a word with the
mecanicien
.

'Send a telegram, you know—like that,' he shouted, as the carriage
slid past him, 'and we'll bring the
char
.' He knew his leader would
come back. He took his cap off politely, as a man does to a lady—the
Bourcelles custom. He did not wave his handkerchief or make
undignified signs. He stood there, watching his cousin to the last,
and trying to see the working of the engine at the same time. He had
already told him the times and stopping places, and where he had to
change; there was nothing more for a man to say.

Monkey, her breath recovered now, shouted something impudent from the
road. 'The train will break down with you in it before it gets to
Pontarlier, and you'll be back for tea—worse luck!' He heard it
faintly, above the grinding of the wheels. She blew him a kiss; her
hair flew out in a cloud of brown the sunshine turned half golden. He
almost saw the shining of her eyes. And then the belt of the forest
hid her from view, hid Jimbo and the village too. The last thing he
saw of Bourcelles was the top of the church spire and the red roof of
the towering Citadelle. The crest of the sentinel poplar topped them
both for a minute longer, waved a slight and stately farewell, then
lowered itself into the forest and vanished in its turn.

And Rogers came back with a start and a bump to what is called real
life.

He closed his eyes and leaned back in his corner, feeling he had
suddenly left his childhood behind him for the second time, not
gradually as it ought to happen, but all in one dreadful moment. A
great ache lay in his heart. The perfect book of fairy-tales he had
been reading was closed and finished. Weeks had passed in the
delicious reading, but now the last page was turned; he came back to
duty—duty in London—great, noisy, overwhelming London, with its
disturbing bustle, its feverish activities, its complex, artificial,
unsatisfying amusements, and its hosts of frantic people. He grew
older in a moment; he was forty again now; an instant ago, just on the
further side of those blue woods, he had been fifteen. Life shrank and
dwindled in him to a little, ugly, unattractive thing. He was
returning to a flat in the dolorous edifice of civilisation. A great
practical Scheme, rising in sombre bricks and mortar through a
disfiguring fog, blocked all the avenues of the future.

The picture seemed sordid somewhere, the contrast was so striking. In
a great city was no softness; hard, sharp angles everywhere, or at
best an artificial smoothness that veiled ugliness and squalor very
thinly. Human relationship worked like parts of a machine, cramped
into definite orbits, each wheel, each pulley, the smallest deviation
deemed erratic. In Bourcelles, the mountain village, there was more
latitude, room for expansion, space. The heart leaped up spontaneously
like a spring released. In the city this spring was held down rigidly
in place, pressed under as by a weight; and the weight, surely, was
that one for ever felt compelled to think of self—self in a rather
petty, shameful way—personal safety. In the streets, in the houses,
in public buildings, shops, and railway stations, even where people
met to eat and drink in order to keep alive, were Notice Boards of
caution and warning against their fellow kind. Instead of the kindly
and unnecessary, even ridiculous little Gygi, there were big, grave
policemen by the score, a whole army of them; and everywhere grinned
the Notice Boards, like automatic, dummy policemen, mocking joy with
their insulting warnings. The heart was oppressed with this constant
reminder that safety could only be secured by great care and trouble—
safety for the little personal self; protection from all kinds of
robbery, depredation, and attack; beware of pickpockets, the
proprietor is not responsible for overcoats and umbrellas even! And
burglar alarms and doors of steel and iron everywhere—an organised
defence from morning till night—against one's own kind.

He had lived among these terrible conditions all his life, proud of
the personal security that civilisation provided, but he had never
before viewed it from outside, as now he suddenly did. A spiritual
being, a man, lives in a city as in a state of siege among his own
kind. It was deplorable, it was incredible. In little Bourcelles, a
mountain village most would describe pityingly as half civilised and
out of the world, there was safety and joy and freedom as of the
universe.... His heart contracted as he thus abruptly realised the
distressing contrast. Although a city is a unit, all classes neatly
linked together by laws and by-laws, by County Councils, Parliaments,
and the like, the spirit of brotherhood was a mockery and a sham.
There is organised charity, but there is not—Charity. In a London
Square he could not ring the bell and ask for a glass of milk.... In
Bourcelles he would walk into any house, since there were no bells,
and sit down to an entire meal!

He laughed as the absurd comparison darted across his mind, for he
recognised the foolish exaggeration in it; but behind the laughter
flamed the astonishing truth. In Bourcelles, in a few weeks, he had
found a bigger, richer life than all London had supplied to him in
twenty years; he had found wings, inspiration, love, and happiness; he
had found the universe. The truth of his cousin's story blazed upon
him like an inner sun. In this new perspective he saw that it was a
grander fairy-tale than he had guessed even when close to it. What was
a Scheme for Disabled Thingumabobs compared to the endless, far-
reaching schemes that life in Bourcelles suggested to him! There was
the true centre of life; cities were accretions of disease upon the
surface merely! He was leaving Fairyland behind him.

In sudden moments like this, with their synthetic bird's-eye view, the
mind sometimes sees more clearly than in hours of careful reflection
and analysis. And the first thing he saw now was Minks, his friendly,
ridiculous little confidential secretary. From all the crowds of men
and women he knew, respected, and enjoyed in London, as from the vast
deluge of human mediocrity which for him
was
London, he picked out
suddenly—little Minks—Herbert Montmorency Minks. His mind, that is,
darting forward in swift, comprehensive survey, and searching
automatically for some means whereby it might continue the happiness
and sweetness recently enjoyed, selected Minks. Minks was a clue.
Minks possessed—no matter how absurd the proportions of their mixing
—three things just left behind: Vision, Belief, Simplicity, all
products of a spiritual imagination.

And at first this was the single thought sent forward into the future.
Rogers saw the fact, flash-like and true-then let it go, yielding to
the greater pull that drew reflection back into the past.

And he found it rather dislocating, this abrupt stepping out of his
delightful forest Fairyland.... Equilibrium was not recovered for a
long time, as the train went thundering over the Jura Mountains into
France, Only on the other side of Pontarlier, when the country grew
unfamiliar and different, did harmony return. Among the deep blue
forests he was still in Fairyland, but at Mouchard the scenery was
already changing, and by the time Dole was reached it had completely
changed. The train ran on among the plains and vineyards of the
Burgundy country towards Laroche and Dijon. The abrupt alteration,
however, was pain. His thoughts streamed all backwards now to
counteract it. He roamed again among the star fields above the
Bourcelles woods. It was true—he had not really left Bourcelles. His
body was bumping into Dijon, but the important part of him—thought,
emotion, love—lingered with the children, hovered above the
Citadelle, floated through the dusky, scented forests.

And the haunting picture was ever set in its framework of old burning
stars. He could not get the Pleiades in particular out of his mind.
The pictures swarmed past him as upon a boy returning to school after
the holidays, and each one had a background of sky with stars behind
it; the faces that he knew so well had starry eyes; Jimbo flung
handfuls of stars loose across the air, and Monkey caught them,
fastening them like golden pins into her hair. Glancing down, he saw a
long brown hair upon his sleeve. He picked it off and held his finger
and thumb outside the window till the wind took it away. Some Morning
Spider would ride it home—perhaps past his cousin's window while he
copied out that wonderful, great tale. But, instead—how in the world
could it happen in clear daylight?—a little hand shot down from above
and gathered it in towards the Pleiades.

The Pleiades—the Seven Sisters—that most exquisite cluster of the
eastern sky, soft, tender, lovely, clinging close together always like
a group of timid children, who hide a little dimly for fear of being
surprised by bolder stars upon their enormous journey—they now shone
down upon all he thought and remembered. They seemed always above the
horizon of his mind. They never set. In them lay souls of unborn
children, children waiting to be born. He could not imagine why this
particular constellation clung with such a haunting touch of beauty
about his mind, or why some passion of yearning unconfessed and
throbbing hid behind the musical name. Stars and unborn children had
got strangely mixed!

He tried to recall the origin of the name—he had learned it once in
the old Vicar's study. The Pleiades were attendants upon Artemis, the
huntress moon, he recalled vaguely, and, being pursued by Orion, were
set for safety among the stars. He even remembered the names of some
of them; there was Maia, Tagete, Alcyone, but the other four lay in
his mental lumber room, whence they could not be evoked, although
Merope, he felt sure, was one of them. Of Maia, however, he felt
positive.... How beautiful the names were!