Algernon Blackwood (5 page)

'The shrubberies are so dense I can't see through them,' he added,
landing upon his feet with a jump, a little breathless. He felt rather
foolish. He was glad the stranger was not Minks or one of his fellow
directors. 'The fact is I lived here as a boy. I'm not a burglar.'

But the old gentleman—a clergyman apparently—stood there smiling
without a word as he handed him the fallen hat. He was staring rather
intently into his eyes.

'Ahem!' coughed Mr. Rogers, to fill an awkward gap. 'You're very kind,
sir,' and he took the hat and brushed the dust off. Something brushed
off his sight and memory at the same time.

'Ahem' coughed the other, still staring. 'Please do not mention it—'
adding after a second's pause, to the complete amazement of his
listener, 'Mr. Rogers.'

And then it dawned upon him. Something in the charming, peace-lit face
was strangely familiar.

'I say,' he exclaimed eagerly, 'this is a pleasure,' and then repeated
with even greater emphasis, 'but this is a pleasure, indeed. Who ever
would have thought it?' he added with delicious ambiguity. He seized
the outstretched hand and shook it warmly—the hand of the old vicar
who had once been his tutor too.

'You've come back to your boyhood, then. Is that it? And to see the
old place and—your old friends?' asked the other with his beautiful,
kindly smile that even false quantities had never been able to spoil.
'We've not forgotten you as you've forgotten us, you see,' he added;
'and the place, though empty now for years, has not forgotten you
either, I'll be bound.'

They stood there in the sunshine on the dusty road talking of a
hundred half-forgotten things, as the haze of memory lifted, and
scenes and pictures, names and faces, details of fun and mischief
rained upon him like flowers in a sudden wind of spring. The voice and
face of his old tutor bridged the years like magic. Time had stood
still here in this fair Kentish garden. The little man in black who
came every Saturday morning with his dingy bag had forgotten to wind
the clocks, perhaps. ...

'But you will like to go inside and see it all for yourself—alone,'
the Vicar said at length. 'My housekeeper has the keys. I'll send a
boy with them to the lodge. It won't take five minutes. And then you
must come up to the Vicarage for tea—or dinner if you're kept—and
stay the night. My married daughter-you remember Joan and May, of
course?—is with us just now; she'll be so very glad to see you. You
know the way.'

And he moved off down the country road, still vigorous at seventy,
with his black straw hat and big square-toed boots, his shoulders
hardly more bent than when his mischievous pupil had called every
morning with Vergil and Todhunter underneath one arm, and in his heart
a lust to hurry after sleepy rabbits in the field.

'My married daughter—you remember May?'

The blue-eyed girl of his boyhood passion flitted beside his
disappearing figure. He remembered the last time he saw her—refusing
to help her from a place of danger in the cedar branches—when he put
his love into a single eloquent phrase: 'You silly ass!' then cast her
adrift for ever because she said 'Thanks awfully,' and gave him a
great wet kiss. But he thought a lot of her all the same, and the
thoughts had continued until the uproar in the City drowned them.

Thoughts crowded thick and fast.

How vital thinking was after all! Nothing seemed able to kill its
eternal pictures. The coincidence of meeting his old tutor again was
like a story-book, though in reality likely enough; for his own face
was not so greatly altered by the close brown beard perhaps; and the
Vicar had grown smaller, that was all. Like everything else, he had
shrunk, of course-like road and station-master and water-works. He had
almost said, 'You, too, have shrunk'—but otherwise was the same old
fluffy personality that no doubt still got sadly muddled in his
sermons, gave out wrong hymns, and spent his entire worldly substance
on his scattered parish. His voice was softer too. It rang in his ears
still, as though there had been no break of over two decades. The hum
of bees and scythes was in it just as when it came through the open
study window while he construed the
Georgics
. ... But, most clearly
of all, he heard two sentences—

'You have come back to your boyhood,' and 'The empty place has not
forgotten you, I'll be bound.' Both seemed significant. They hummed
and murmured through his mind. That old net of starlight somehow
caught them in its golden meshes.

A Spirit gripped him by the hair and carried him far away,
Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the
Milky Way:
Till he heard the roar of the Milky Way die down and drone and
cease.

Tomlinson, R. KIPLING.

The boy presently came up in a cloud of dust with the key, and ran off
again with a shilling in his pocket, while Henry Rogers, budding
philanthropist and re-awakening dreamer, went down the hill of
memories at high speed that a doctor would have said was dangerous, a
philosopher morbid, and the City decreed unanimously as waste of time.

He went over the house from cellar to ceiling...

And finally he passed through a back door in the scullery and came out
upon the lawn. With a shock he realised that a long time had
intervened. The dusk was falling. The rustle of its wings was already
in the shrubberies. He had missed the tea hour altogether. And, as he
walked there, so softly that he hardly disturbed the thrushes that
busily tapped the dewy grass for supper, he knew suddenly that he was
not alone, but that shadowy figures hid everywhere, watching, waiting,
wondering like himself. They trooped after him, invisible and silent,
as he went about the old familiar garden, finding nothing changed.
They were so real that once he stopped beneath the lime trees, where
afternoon tea was served in summer, and where the Long Walk began its
haunted, shadowy existence—stood still a moment and called to them—

'Is any one there? Come out and show yourselves....!'

And though his voice fell dead among the foliage, winning echoes from
spots whence no echoes possibly could come, and rushing back upon him
like a boomerang, he got the curious impression that it had penetrated
into certain corners of the shrubberies where it had been heard and
understood. Answers did not come. They were no more audible than the
tapping of the thrushes, or the little feet of darkness that ran
towards him from the eastern sky. But they were there. The troop of
Presences drew closer. They had been creeping on all fours. They now
stood up. The entire garden was inhabited and alive.

'He has come back!'

It ran in a muted whisper like a hush of wind. The thrill of it passed
across the lawn in the dusk. The dark tunnel of the Long Walk filled
suddenly to the brim. The thrushes raised their heads, peeping
sideways to listen, on their guard. Then the leaves opened a little
and the troop ventured nearer. The doors and windows of the silent,
staring house had also opened. From the high nursery windows
especially, queer shapes of shadow flitted down to join the others.
For the sun was far away behind the cedars now, and that Net of
Starlight dropped downwards through the air. So carefully had he woven
it years ago that hardly a mesh was torn....

'He has come back again...!'
the whisper ran a second time, and he
looked about him for a place where he could hide.

But there was no place. Escape from the golden net was now
impossible....

Then suddenly, looming against the field that held the Gravel-Pit and
the sleeping rabbits, he saw the outline of the Third Class Railway
Carriage his father bought as a Christmas present, still standing on
the stone supports that were borrowed from a haystack.

That Railway Carriage had filled whole years with joy and wonder. They
had called it the Starlight Express. It had four doors, real lamps in
the roof, windows that opened and shut, and big round buffers. It
started without warning. It went at full speed in a moment. It was
never really still. The footboards were endless and very dangerous.

He saw the carriage with its four compartments still standing there in
the hay field. It looked mysterious, old, and enormous as ever. There
it still stood as in his boyhood days, but stood neglected and unused.

The memory of the thrilling journeys he had made in this Starlight
Express completed his recapture, for he knew now who the troop of
Presences all about him really were. The passengers, still waiting
after twenty years' delay, thinking perhaps the train would never
start again, were now impatient. They had caught their engine-driver
again at last. Steam was up. Already the blackbirds whistled. And
something utterly wild and reckless in him passionately broke its
bonds with a flood of longings that no amount of years or 'Cities'
could ever subdue again. He stepped out from the dozing lime trees and
held his hat up like a flag.

'Take your seats,' he cried as of old, 'for the Starlight Express.
Take your seats! No luggage allowed! Animals free! Passengers with
special tickets may drive the engine in their turn! First stop the
Milky Way for hot refreshments! Take your seats, or stay at home for
ever!'

It was the old cry, still remembered accurately; and the response was
immediate. The rush of travellers from the Long Walk nearly took him
off his feet. From the house came streams of silent figures, families
from the shrubberies, tourists from the laurels by the scullery
windows, and throngs of breathless oddities from the kitchen-garden.
The lawn was littered with discarded luggage; umbrellas dropped on
flower-beds, where they instantly took root and grew; animals ran
scuttling among them—birds, ponies, dogs, kittens, donkeys, and white
mice in trailing swarms. There was not a minute to spare. One big
Newfoundland brought several Persian kittens on his back, their tails
behind them in the air like signals; a dignified black retriever held
a baby in his mouth; and fat children by the score, with unfastened
clothes and smudged faces, many of them in their nightclothes, poured
along in hurrying, silent crowds, softer than clouds that hide a
crescent moon in summer.

'But this is impossible,' he cried to himself. 'The multiplication
tables have gone wrong. The City has driven me mad. No shareholder
would stand such a thing for a minute!'

While, at the same time, that other voice in him kept shouting, ever
more loudly—

'Take your seats! Take your seats! The Starlight Express is off to
Fairyland! Show your tickets! Show your tickets!'

He laughed with happiness.

The throng and rush were at first so great that he recognised hardly
any of the passengers; but, the first press over, he saw several
bringing up the rear who were as familiar as of yesterday. They nodded
kindly to him as they passed, no sign of reproach for the long delay
in their friendly eyes. He had left his place beside the lime trees,
and now stood at the carriage door, taking careful note of each one as
he showed his ticket to the Guard. And the Guard was the blue-eyed
girl. She did not clip the tickets, but merely looked at them. She
looked, first at the ticket, then into the face of the passenger. The
glance of the blue eyes was the passport. Of course, he remembered
now—both guard and engine-driver were obliged to have blue eyes. Blue
eyes furnished the motor-power and scenery and everything. It was the
spell that managed the whole business—the Spell of the Big Blue eyes
—blue, the colour of youth and distance, of sky and summer flowers,
of
childhood.

He watched these last passengers come up one by one, and as they filed
past him he exchanged a word with each. How pleased they were to see
him! But how ashamed he felt for having been so long away. Not one,
however, reminded him of it, and—what touched him most of all—not
one suspected he had nearly gone for good. All knew he would come
back.

What looked like a rag-and-bone man blundered up first, his face a
perfect tangle of beard and hair, and the eyebrows like bits of tow
stuck on with sealing-wax. It was The Tramp—Traveller of the World,
the Eternal Wanderer, homeless as the wind; his vivid personality had
haunted all the lanes of childhood. And, as Rogers nodded kindly to
him, the figure waited for something more.

'Ain't forgot the rhyme, 'ave yer?' he asked in a husky voice that
seemed to issue from the ground beneath his broken boots. 'The rhyme
we used to sing together in the Noight-Nursery when I put my faice
agin' the bars, after climbin' along 'arf a mile of slippery slaites
to git there.'

And Rogers, smiling, found himself saying it, while the pretty Guard
fixed her blue eyes on his face and waited patiently:—

I travel far and wide,
But in my own inside!
Such places
And queer races!
I never go to them, you see,
Because they always come to me!

'Take your seat, please,' cried the Guard. 'No luggage, you know!' She
pushed him in sideways, first making him drop his dirty bundle.

With a quick, light step a very thin man hurried up. He had no
luggage, but carried on his shoulder a long stick with a point of gold
at its tip.

'Light the lamps,' said the Guard impatiently, 'and then sit on the
back buffers and hold your pole out to warn the shooting stars.'

He hopped in, though not before Rogers had passed the time of night
with him first:—

I stand behind the sky, and light the stars,—
Except on cloudy nights;
And then my head
Remains in bed,
And takes along the ceiling—easier flights!

Others followed quickly then, too quickly for complete recognition.
Besides, the Guard was getting more and more impatient.

'You've clean forgotten
me
,' said one who had an awful air of
darkness about him; 'and no wonder, because you never saw me properly.
On Sundays, when I was nicely washed up you couldn't 'ardly reckernise
me. Nachural 'nuff, too!'