Algernon Blackwood (56 page)

This idea of flux grew everywhere about him. There was fluid movement
in this world within a world. All life was a flowing past of ceaseless
beauty, wonder, splendour; it was doubt and question that dammed the
rush, causing that stoppage which is ugly, petty, rigid. His being
flowed out to mingle with her own. It was all inevitable, and he never
really doubted once. Only before long he would be compelled to act—to
speak—to tell her what he felt, and hear her dear, dear answer....
The excitement in him became more and more difficult to control.
Already there was strain and tension below his apparent outer
calmness. Life in him burst forward to a yet greater life than he had
ever known....

The others—it was his cousin's voice this time—were speaking of the
Story, and of his proposed treatment of it in its larger version as a
book. Daddy was saying, apparently, that it must fail because he saw
no climax for it. The public demanded a cumulative interest that
worked up to some kind of thrilling denouement that they called a
climax, whereas his tale was but a stretch of life, and of very
ordinary life. And Life, for the majority, knew no such climax. How
could he manage one without inventing something artificial?

'But the climax of life comes every day and every minute,' he heard
her answer—and how her little voice rang out above the others like a
bell!—'when you deny yourself for another, and that other does not
even know it. A day is lost that does not pin at least one sweet
thought against each passing hour.'

And his inner construction took a further prodigious leap, as the
sentence showed him the grand and simple motive of her being. It had
been his own as well, though he had stupidly bungled it in his search
to find something big enough to seem worth doing. She, he divined,
found neighbours everywhere, losing no time. He had known a few rare,
exquisite souls who lived for others, but here, close beside him at
last, was one of those still rarer souls who seem born to—die for
others.... They give so unsparingly of their best.... To his
imaginative interpretation of her he gave full rein.... And it was
instantaneous as creation....

The voices of Minks and Mother renewed the stream of sound that swept
by him then, though he caught no words that were comparable in value
to these little singing phrases that she used from time to time.
Jimbo, bored by the grown-up talk that took the place of expected
stories, had fallen asleep upon his shoulder; Monkey's hair, as usual,
was in his eyes; he sat there listening and waiting with a heart that
beat so loudly he thought the children must feel it and ask him what
was the matter. Jinny stirred the peat from time to time. The room was
full of shadows. But, for him, the air grew brighter every minute, and
in this steady brilliance he saw the little figure rise and grow in
grandeur till she filled all space.

'You called it "getting out" while the body is asleep,' came floating
through the air through the sound of Jimbo's breathing, 'whereas
I
called it getting away from self while personal desire is asleep.
But the idea is the same....'

His cousin's words that called forth this criticism he had not heard.
It was only her sentence that seemed to reach him.

From the river of words and actions men call life she detained, it
seemed to him, certain that were vital and important in some
symbolical sense; she italicised them, made them her own—then let
them go to join the main stream again. This selection was a kind of
genius. The river did not overwhelm her as it overwhelms most, because
the part of it she did not need for present action she ignored, while
yet she swam in the whole of it, shirking nothing.

This was the way he saw her—immediately. And, whether it was his own
invention, or whether it was the divination of a man in the ecstasy of
sudden love, it was vital because he felt it, and it was real because
he believed it. Then why seek to explain the amazing sense of
intimacy, the certainty that he had known her always? The thing was
there
; explanation could bring it no nearer. He let the explanations
go their way; they floated everywhere within reach; he had only to
pocket them and take them home for study at his leisure afterwards—
with her.

'But, we
shall
come to it in time,' he caught another flying
sentence that reached him through the brown tangle of Monkey's hair.
It was spoken with eager emphasis. 'Does not every letter you write
begin with
dear
?....'

All that she said added something to life, it seemed, like poetry
which, he remembered, 'enriches the blood of the world.' The
selections were not idle, due to chance, but belonged to some great
Scheme, some fairy edifice she built out of the very stuff of her own
life. Oh, how utterly he understood and knew her. The poison of
intellectuality, thank heaven, was not in her, yet she created
somehow; for all she touched, with word or thought or gesture, turned
suddenly alive in a way he had never known before. The world turned
beautiful and simple at her touch....

Even the commonest things! It was miraculous, at least in its effect
upon himself. Her simplicity escaped all signs of wumbling. She had no
favourite and particular Scheme for doing good, but did merely what
was next her at the moment to be done. She
was
good. In her little
person glowed a great enthusiasm for life. She created neighbours.
And, as the grandeur of her insignificance rose before him, his own
great Scheme for Disabled Thingumabobs that once had filled the
heavens, shrank down into the size of a mere mouse-trap that would go
into his pocket. In its place loomed up another that held the beauty
of the Stars. How little, when announcing it to Minks weeks and weeks
ago, had he dreamed the form it was to take!

And so, wrapped in this glory of the stars, he dreamed on in his
corner, fashioning this marvellous interpretation of a woman he had
never seen before, and never spoken with. It was all so different to
ordinary falling in love at sight, that the phrase never once occurred
to him. It was consummated in a moment—out there, beside the fountain
when he saw her first, shadowy, with brilliant, peering eyes. It
seemed perfect instantly, a recovery of something he had always known.
And who shall challenge the accuracy of his vision, or call its sudden
maturity impossible? For where one sees the surface only, another sees
the potentialities below. To believe in these is to summon them into
activity, just as to think the best of a person ever brings out that
best. Are we not all potential splendours?

Swiftly, in a second, he reviewed the shining sentences that revealed
her to him: The 'autumn flowers'—she lived, then, in the Present,
without that waste of energy which is regret! In 'a little shell' lay
the pattern of all life,—she saw the universe in herself and lived,
thus, in the Whole! To be 'out' meant forgetting self; and life's
climax is at every minute of the day—she understood, that is, the
growth of the soul, due to acceptance of what every minute brings,
however practical, dull, uninteresting. By recreating the commonest
things, she found a star in each. And her world was made up of
neighbours—for 'every letter that one writes begins with
dear
!'

The Pattern matured marvellously before his eyes; and its delicate
embroideries, far out of sight, seemed the arabesques that yearnings,
hitherto unfulfilled, had traced long long ago with the brush of
tender thinking. Together, though at opposite ends of the world, these
two had woven the great Net of sympathy, thought, and longing in which
at last they both were prisoners ... and with them all the earth.

The figure of Jane Anne loomed before him like an ogress suddenly.

'Cousinenry,
will
you answer or will you
not
? Daddy's already
asked you twenty times at least!' Then, below her breath, as she bent
over him, 'The Little Countess will think you awf'ly rude if you go to
sleep and snore like this.'

He looked up. He felt a trifle dazed. For a moment he had forgotten
where he was. How dark the room had grown! Only—he was sure he had
not snored.

'I beg your pardon,' he stammered, 'but I was only thinking—how
wonderful you—how wonderful it all is, isn't it? I was listening. I
heard perfectly.'

'You were dozing,' whispered Monkey. 'Daddy wants the Countess to tell
you how she knew the story long ago, or something.
Ecoute un peu, man
vieux
!'

'I should love to hear it,' he said, louder, sitting up so abruptly in
his chair that Jimbo tilted at a dangerous angle, though still without
waking. 'Please, please go on.'

And he listened then to the quiet, silvery language in which the
little visitor described the scenery of her childhood, when, without
brothers or sisters, she was forced to play alone, and had amused
herself by imagining a Net of Constellations which she nailed by
shooting stars to four enormous pine trees that grew across the
torrent. She described the great mountains that enclosed her father's
estate, her loneliness in this giant garden, due to his morose
severity of character, her yearnings to escape and see the big world
beyond the ridges. All her thought and longing went to the fashioning
of this Net, and every night she flung it far across the peaks and
valleys to catch companions with whom she might play. The characters
in her fairy books came out of the pages to help her, and sometimes
when they drew it in, it was so heavy with the people entangled in its
meshes that they could scarcely move it. But the moment all were out,
the giant Net, relieved of their weight, flew back into the sky. The
Pleiades were its centre, because she loved the Pleiades best of all,
and Orion pursued its bright shape with passion, yet could never quite
come up with it.

'And these people whom you caught,' whispered Rogers from his corner,
listening to a tale he knew as well as she did, 'you kept them
prisoners?'

'I first put into them all the things I longed to do myself in the big
world, and then flung them back again into their homes and towns and
villages—'

'Excepting one,' he murmured.

'Who was so big and clumsy that he broke the meshes and so never got
away.' She laughed, while the children stared at their cousin,
wondering how he knew as much as she did. 'He stayed with me, and
showed me how to make our prisoners useful afterwards by painting them
all over with starlight which we collected in a cave. Then they went
back and dazzled others everywhere by their strange, alluring
brilliance. We made the whole world over in this way—'

'Until you lost him.'

'One cloudy night he disappeared, yes, and I never found him again.
There was a big gap between the Pleiades and Orion where he had
tumbled through. I named him Orion after that; and I would stand at
night beneath the four great pine trees and call and call, but in
vain. "You must come up to me! You must come up to me!" I called, but
got no answer—'

'Though you knew quite well where he had fallen to, and that he was
only hiding—'

'Excuse me, but
how
did she know?' inquired Jinny abruptly.

The Little Countess laughed. 'I suppose—because the threads of the
Net were so sensitive that they went on quivering long after he
tumbled out, and so betrayed the direction—'

'And afterwards, when you got older, Grafin,' interrupted Daddy, who
wished his cousin to hear the details of the extraordinary
coincidence, 'you elaborated your idea—'

'Yes, that thought and yearning always fulfil themselves somewhere,
somehow, sooner or later,' she continued. 'But I kept the imagery of
my Star Net in which all the world lies caught, and I used starlight
as the symbol of that sympathy which binds every heart to every other
heart. At my father's death, you see, I inherited his property. I
escaped from the garden which had been so long my prison, and I tried
to carry out in practical life what I had dreamed there as a child. I
got people together, where I could, and formed Thinkers' Guilds—
people, that is, who agreed to think beauty, love, and tolerance at
given hours in the day, until the habit, once formed, would run
through all their lives, and they should go about as centres of light,
sweetening the world. Few have riches, fewer still have talent, but
all can think. At least, one would
think
so, wouldn't one?'—with a
smile and a fling of her little hands.

She paused a moment, and then went on to describe her failure. She
told it to them with laughter between her sentences, but among her
listeners was one at least who caught the undertone of sadness in the
voice.

'For, you see, that was where I made my mistake. People would do
anything in the world rather than think. They would work, give money,
build schools and hospitals, make all manner of sacrifices—only—they
would not think; because, they said, there was no visible result.' She
burst out laughing, and the children all laughed too.

'I should think not indeed,' ventured Monkey, but so low that no one
heard her.

'And so you went on thinking it all alone,' said Rogers in a low
voice.

'I tried to write it first as a story,' she answered softly, 'but
found that was beyond me; so I went on thinking it all alone, as you
say—'

'Until the Pattern of your thought floated across the world to me,'
said Daddy proudly. 'I imagined I was inspired; instead I was a
common, unoriginal plagiarist!'

'Like all the rest of us,' she laughed.

'Mummie, what
is
a plagiarist?' asked Jinny instantly; and as
Rogers, her husband, and even Minks came hurriedly to her aid, the
spell of the strange recital was broken, and out of the turmoil of
voices the only thing distinctly heard was Mother exclaiming with
shocked surprise:—