Algernon Blackwood (9 page)

'Don't wait, Minks,' said the other, who had taken his seat. 'I'll let
you hear from me, you know, about the Scheme and—other things. Don't
wait.' He seemed curiously unobservant of these strange folk, almost
absent-minded.

The guard was whistling. Minks shut the door and gave the travelling-
rug a last tuck-in about his feet. He felt as though he were packing
off a child. The mother in him became active. Mr. Rogers needed
looking after. Another minute and he would have patted him and told
him what to eat and wear. But instead he raised his hat and smiled.
The train moved slowly out, making a deep purring sound like flowing
water. The platform had magically thinned. Officials stood lonely
among the scattered wavers of hats and handkerchiefs. As he stepped
backwards to keep the carriage window in sight until the last possible
moment, Minks was nearly knocked over by a man who hurried along the
platform as if he still had hopes of catching the train.

'Really, sir!' gasped the secretary, stooping to pick up his newspaper
and lavender glove—he wore one glove and carried the other—the
collision had sent flying. But the man was already far beyond the
reach of his voice. 'He must be an escaped lamplighter, or something,'
he laughed good-naturedly, as he saw the long legs vanish down the
platform. He leaped on to the line. Evidently he was a railway
employe. He seemed to be vainly trying to catch the departing buffers.
An absurd and reckless fellow, thought Minks.

But what caught the secretary's attention last, and made him wonder a
little if anything unusual was happening to the world, was the curious
fact that, as the last carriage glided smoothly past, he recognised
four figures seated comfortably inside. Their feet were on the
cushions—disgracefully. They were talking together, heads forward,
laughing, even—singing. And he could have sworn that they were the
two men who had watched himself and Mr. Rogers at the ticket window,
and the strangers who had tried to force their way into Mr. Rogers's
carriage when he came up just in time to interfere.

'They got in somehow after all, then,' he said to himself. 'Of course,
I had forgotten. The Company runs third-class carriages on the
continental trains now. Odd!' He mentally rubbed his eyes.

The train swept round the corner out of sight, leaving a streaming
cloud of smoke and sparks behind it. It went out with a kind of rush
of delight, glad to be off, and conscious of its passengers' pleasure.

'Odd.' This was the word that filled his mind as he walked home.
'Perhaps—our minds are in such intimate sympathy together—perhaps he
was thinking of—of that kind of thing—er—and some of his thoughts
got into my own imagination. Odd, though, very,
very
odd.'

He had once read somewhere in one of his new-fangled books that
'thoughts are things.' It had made a great impression on him. He had
read about Marconi too. Later he made a more thorough study of this
'thinking business.'

And soon afterwards, having put his chief's papers in order at the
flat, he went home to Mrs. Minks and the children with this other
thought—that he had possibly been overworking himself, and that it
was a good thing he was going to have a holiday by the sea.

He liked to picture himself as an original thinker, not afraid of new
ideas, but in reality he preferred his world sober, ordinary, logical.
It was merely big-sounding names he liked. And this little incident
was somewhere out of joint. It was—odd.

Success that poisons many a baser mind
May lift—

But the sonnet had never known completion. In the space it had
occupied in his mind another one abruptly sprouted. The first subject
after all was banal. A better one had come to him—

Strong thoughts that rise in a creative mind
May flash about the world, and carry joy—

Then it stuck. He changed 'may' to 'shall,' but a moment later decided
that 'do' was better, truer than either. After that inspiration failed
him. He retired gracefully upon prose again.

'Odd,' he thought, 'very odd!'

And he relieved his mind by writing a letter to a newspaper. He did
not send it in the end, for his better judgment prevented, but he had
to do something by way of protest, and the only alternative was to
tell his wife about it, when she would look half puzzled, half pained,
and probably reply with some remark about the general cost of living.
So he wrote the letter instead.

For Herbert Minks regarded himself as a man with the larger view of
citizenship, a critic of public affairs, and, in a measure, therefore,
an item of that public opinion which moulded governments. Hence he had
a finger, though but a little finger, in the destiny of nations and in
the polity—a grand word that!—of national councils. He wrote
frequent letters, thus, to the lesser weekly journals; these letters
were sometimes printed; occasionally—oh, joy!—they were answered by
others like himself, who referred to him as 'your esteemed
correspondent.' As yet, however, his following letter had never got
into print, nor had he experienced the importance of that editorial
decision, appended between square brackets: 'This correspondence must
now cease'—so vital, that is, that the editor and the entire office
staff might change their opinions unless it
did
cease.

Having drafted his letter, therefore, and carried it about with him
for several hours in his breast pocket, he finally decided not to send
it after all, for the explanation of his 'odd' experience, he well
knew, was hardly one that a newspaper office could supply, or that
public correspondence could illuminate. His better judgment always won
the day in the end. Thinking
was
creative, after all.

... The sun,
Closing his benediction,
Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night-
Night with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep.

W. E. HENLEY.

In a southern-facing room on the first floor of La Citadelle the
English family sat after tea. The father, a spare, mild-eyed man, his
thatch of brown hair well sprinkled with grey above the temples, was
lighting his pipe for the tenth time-the tenth match, but the same
pipeful of tobacco; and his wife, an ample, motherly woman, slightly
younger than himself, was knitting on the other side of the open
fireplace, in which still glowed a mass of peat ashes. From time to
time she stirred them with a rickety pair of tongs, or with her foot
kicked into the grate the matches he invariably threw short upon the
floor. But these were adventures ill-suited to her. Knitting was her
natural talent. She was always knitting.

By the open window stood two children, a boy and a girl of ten and
twelve respectively, gazing out into the sunshine. It was the end of
April, and though the sun was already hot, there was a sharpness in
the air that told of snow still lying on the mountain heights behind
the village. Across vineyard slopes and patches of agricultural land,
the Lake of Neuchatel lay blue as a southern sea, while beyond it, in
a line of white that the sunset soon would turn to pink and gold,
stretched the whole range of Alps, from Mont Blanc to where the Eiger
and the Weisshorn signalled in the east. They filled the entire
horizon, already cloud-like in the haze of coming summer.

The door into the corridor opened, and a taller child came in. A mass
of dark hair, caught by a big red bow, tumbled untidily down her back.
She was sixteen and very earnest, but her eyes, brown like her
father's, held a curious puzzled look, as though life still confused
her so much that while she did her duties bravely she did not quite
understand why it should be so.

'Excuse me, Mother, shall I wash up?' she said at once. She always did
wash up. And 'excuse me' usually prefaced her questions.

'Please, Jane Anne,' said Mother. The entire family called her Jane
Anne, although her baptismal names were rather fine. Sometimes she
answered, too, to Jinny, but when it was a question of household
duties it was Jane Anne, or even 'Ria.'

She set about her duties promptly, though not with any special
deftness. And first she stooped and picked up the last match her
father had dropped upon the strip of carpet that covered the linoleum.

'Daddy,' she said reprovingly, 'you do make such a mess.' She brushed
tobacco ashes from his coat. Mother, without looking up, went on
talking to him about the bills-washing, school-books, boots, blouses,
oil, and peat. And as she did so a puzzled expression was visible in
his eyes akin to the expression in Jane Anne's. Both enjoyed a similar
mental confusion sometimes as to words and meanings and the import of
practical life generally.

'We shan't want any more now, thank goodness,' he said vaguely,
referring to the peat, though Mother was already far ahead, wading
among boots and shirts and blouses.

'But if we get a load in now, you see, it's
cheaper
,' she said with
emphasis on every alternate word, slowing up the pace to suit him.

'Mother, where
did
you put the washing-up rag?' came the voice of
Jinny in plaintive accents from the tiny kitchen that lay beyond the
adjoining bedroom. 'I can't find it anywhere,' she added, poking her
head round the door suddenly.

'Pet lamb,' was Mother's answer, still bending over her knitting-she
was prodigal of terms like this and applied them indiscriminately, for
Jane Anne resembled the animal in question even less than did her
father—'I saw it last on the geranium shelf—you know, where the
fuchsias and the-' She hesitated, she was not sure herself. 'I'll get
it, my duckie, for you,' she added, and began to rise. She was a
voluminous, very stately woman. The operation took time.

'Let me,' said Daddy, drawing his mind with difficulty from the peat,
and rising too. They rose together.

'It's all right, I've got it,' cried the child, who had disappeared
again. 'It was in the sink. That's Jimbo; he washed up yesterday.'

'Pas vrai!' piped a little voice beside the open window, overhearing
his name, 'because I only dried. It was Monkey who washed up.' They
talked French and English all mixed up together.

But Monkey was too busy looking at the Alps through an old pair of
opera-glasses, relic of her father's London days that served for
telescope, to think reply worth while. Her baptismal names were also
rather wonderful, though neither of her parents could have supplied
them without a moment's reflection first. There was commotion by that
window for a moment but it soon subsided again, for things that Jinny
said never provoked dissension, and Jimbo and Monkey just then were
busy with a Magic Horse who had wings of snow, and was making fearful
leaps from the peaks of the Dent du Midi across the Blumlisalp to the
Jungfrau.

'Will you please carry the samovar for me?' exclaimed Jane Anne,
addressing both her parents, as though uncertain which of them would
help her. 'You filled it so awfully full to-day, I can't lift it. I
advertise for help.'

Her father slowly rose. 'I'll do it, child,' he said kindly, but with
a patience, almost resignation, in his tone suggesting that it was
absurd to expect such a thing of him. 'Then do exactly as you think
best,' he let fall to his wife as he went, referring to the chaos of
expenses she had been discussing with him. 'That'll be all right.' For
his mind had not yet sorted the jumble of peat, oil, boots, school-
books, and the rest. 'We can manage THAT at any rate; you see it's
francs, not shillings,' he added, as Jane Anne pulled him by the
sleeve towards the steaming samovar. He held the strings of an ever
empty purse.

'Daddy, but you've
always
got a crumb in your beard,' she was
saying, 'and if it isn't a crumb, it's ashes on your coat or a match
on the floor.' She brushed the crumb away. He gave her a kiss. And
between them they nearly upset the old nickel-plated samovar that was
a present from a Tiflis Armenian to whom the mother once taught
English. They looked round anxiously as though afraid of a scolding;
but Mother had not noticed. And she was accustomed to the noise and
laughter. The scene then finished, as it usually did, by the mother
washing up, Jane Anne drying, and Daddy hovering to and fro in the
background making remarks in his beard about the geraniums, the China
tea, the indigestible new bread, the outrageous cost of the
necessaries of life, or the book he was at work on at the moment. He
often enough gave his uncertain assistance in the little menial duties
connected with the preparation or removal of the tea-things, and had
even been known to dry. Only washing-up he never did. Somehow his
vocation rendered him immune from that. He might bring the peat in,
fill the lamps, arrange and dust the scanty furniture, but washing-up
was not a possibility even. As an author it was considered beneath his
dignity altogether, almost improper—it would have shocked the
children. Mother could do anything; it was right and natural that she
should—poor soul I But Daddy's profession set him in an enclosure
apart, and there were certain things in this servantless menage he
could not have done without disgracing the entire family. Washing-up
was one; carrying back the empty basket of tea-things to the Pension
was another. Daddy wrote books. As Jane Anne put it forcibly and
finally once, 'Shakespeare never washed up or carried a tea-basket in
the street!'—which the others accepted as a conclusive statement of
authority.

And, meantime, the two younger children, who knew how to amuse each
other for hours together unaided, had left the Magic Horse in its
stables for the night—an enormous snow-drift—and were sitting side
by side upon the sofa conning a number of
Punch
some English aunt
had sent them. The girl read out the jokes, and her brother pointed
with a very dirty finger to the pictures. None of the jokes were
seized by either, but Jimbo announced each one with, 'Oh! I say!' and
their faces were grave and sometimes awed; and when Jimbo asked, 'But
what does THAT mean?' his sister would answer, 'Don't you see, I
suppose the cabman meant—' finishing with some explanation very far
from truth, whereupon Jimbo, accepting it doubtfully, said nothing,
and they turned another page with keen anticipation. They never
appealed for outside aid, but enjoyed it in their own dark, mysterious
way. And, presently, when the washing-up was finished, and the dusk
began to dim the landscape and conceal the ghostly-looking Alps, they
retired to the inner bedroom—for this was Saturday and there were no
school tasks to be prepared—and there, seated on the big bed in the
corner, they opened a book of
cantiques
used in school, and sang one
hymn and song after another, interrupting one another with jokes and
laughter and French and English sentences oddly mixed together. Jimbo
sang the tune, and Monkey the alto. It was by no means unpleasant to
listen to. And, upon the whole, it was a very grave business
altogether, graver even than their attitude to "Punch." Jane Anne
considered it a foolish waste of time, but she never actually said so.
She smiled her grave smile and went her own puzzled way alone.