Voices, too, now began to be heard more frequently. They dropped upon him out of the reaches of this endless void; and with them sometimes came forms that shot past him with amazing swiftness, racing into the empty Beyond as though sucked into a vast vacuum. The very stars seemed to move. He became part of some much larger movement in which he was engulfed and merged. He could no longer think of himself as Jimbo. When he uttered his own name he saw merely a mass of wind and colour through which the great pulses of space and the planets beat tumultuously, lapping him round with the currents of a terrific motion that seemed to swallow up his own little personality entirely, while giving him something infinitely greater....
But surely these small voices, shrill and trumpet-like, did not come from the stars! these deep whispers that ran round the immense vault overhead and sounded almost familiarly in his ears —
“Give it him the moment he wakes.”
“Bring the ice-bag ... quick!”
“Put the hot bottle to his feet IMMEDIATELY!”
The voices shrieked all round him, turning suddenly into soft whispers that died away somewhere among his feathers. The soles of his feet began to glow, and he felt a gigantic hand laid upon his throat and head. Almost it seemed as if he were lying somewhere on his back, and people were bending over him, shouting and whispering.
“Why hangs the moon so red?” cried a voice that was instantly drowned in a chorus of unintelligible whispering.
“The black cow must be killed,” whispered some one deep within the sky.
“Why drips the rain so cold?” yelled one of the hideous children close behind him. And a third called with a distant laughter from behind a star —
“Why sings the wind so shrill?”
“Quiet!” roared an appalling voice below, as if all the rivers of the world had suddenly turned loose into the sky. “Quiet!”
Instantly a star, that had been hovering for some time on the edge of a fantastic dance, dropped down close in front of his face. It had a glaring disc, with mouth and eyes. An icy hand seemed laid on his head, and the star rushed back into its place in the sky, leaving a trail of red flame behind it. A little voice seemed to go with it, growing fainter and fainter in the distance —
“We dance with phantoms and with shadows play.”
But, regardless of everything, Jimbo flew onwards and upwards, terrified and helpless though he was. His thoughts turned without ceasing to the governess, and he felt sure that she would yet turn up in time to save him from being caught by the Fright that pursued, or lost among the fearful spaces that lay beyond the stars.
For a long time, however, his wings had been growing more and more tired, and the prospect of being destroyed from sheer exhaustion now presented itself to the boy vaguely as a possible alternative — vaguely only, because he was no longer able to think, properly speaking, and things came to him more by way of dull feeling than anything else.
It was all the more with something of a positive shock, therefore, that he realised the change. For a change had come. He was now sudden by conscious of an influx of new power — greater than anything he had ever known before in any of his flights. His wings now suddenly worked as if by magic. Never had the motion been so easy, and it became every minute easier and easier. He simply flashed along without apparent effort. An immense driving power had entered into him. He realised that he could fly for ever without getting tired. His pace increased tenfold — increased alarmingly. The possibility of exhaustion vanished utterly. Jimbo knew now that something was wrong. This new driving power was something wholly outside himself. His wings were working far too easily. Then, suddenly, he understood: His wings were not working at all!
He was not being driven forward from behind; he was being drawn forward from in front.
He saw it all in a flash: Miss Lake’s warning long ago about the danger of flying too high; the last song of the Frightened Children, “Dare you fly out alone through the shadows that wave, when the course is unknown and there’s no one to save?” the strange words sung to him about the “relentless misty moon,” and the object of the dreadful Pursuer in steadily forcing him upwards and away from the earth. It all flashed across his poor little dazed mind. He understood at last.
He had soared too high and had entered the sphere of the moon’s attraction.
“The moon is too strong, and there’s death in the stars!” a voice bellowed below him like the roar of a falling mountain, shaking the sky.
The child flew screaming on. There was nothing else he could do. But hardly had the roar died away when another voice was heard, a tender voice, a whispering, sympathetic voice, though from what part of the sky it came he could not tell —
“Arrange the pillows for his little head.”
But below him the wings of the Pursuer were mounting closer and closer. He could almost feel the mighty wind from their feathers, and hear the rush of the great body between them. It was impossible to slacken his speed even had he wished; no strength on earth could have resisted that terrible power drawing upwards towards the moon. Instinctively, however, he realised that he would rather have gone forwards than backwards. He never could have faced capture by that dreadful creature behind. All the efforts of the past weeks to escape from Fright, the owner of the Empty House, now acted upon him with a cumulative effect, and added to the suction of the moon-life. He shot forward at a pace that increased with every second.
At the back of his mind, too, lay some kind of faint perception that the governess would, after all, be there to help him. She had always turned up before when he was in danger, and she would not fail him now. But this was a mere ghost of a thought that brought little comfort, and merely added its quota of force to the speed that whipped him on, ever faster, into the huge white moon-world in front.
For this, then, he had escaped from the horror of the Empty House! To be sucked up into the moon, the “relentless, misty moon” — to be drawn into its cruel, silver web, and destroyed. The Song to the Misty Moon outside the window came back in snatches and added to his terror; only it seemed now weeks ago since he had heard it. Something of its real meaning, too, filtered down into his heart, and he trembled anew to think that the moon could be a great, vast, moving Being, alive and with a purpose....
But why, oh, why did they keep shouting these horrid snatches of the song through the sky? Trapped! Trapped! The word haunted him through the night:
Thy songs are nightly driven, From sky to sky, Eternally, O’er the old, grey hills of heaven!
Caught! Caught at last! The moon’s prisoner, a captive in her airless caves; alone on her dead white plains; searching for ever in vain for the governess; wandering alone and terrified.
By the awful grace Of thy weird white face.
The thought crazed him, and he struggled like a bird caught in a net. But he might as well have struggled to push the worlds out of their courses. The power against him was the power of the universe in which he was nothing but a little, lost, whirling atom. It was all of no avail, and the moon did not even smile at his feeble efforts. He was too light to revolve round her, too impalpable to create his own orbit; he had not even the consistency of a comet; he had reached the point of stagnation, as it were — the dead level — the neutral zone where the attractions of the earth and moon meet and counterbalance one another — where bodies have no weight and existence no meaning.
Now the moon was close upon him; he could see nothing else. There lay the vast, shining sea of light in front of him. Behind, the roar of the following creature grew fainter and fainter, as he outdistanced it in the awful swiftness of the huge drop down upon the moon mountains.
Already he was close enough to its surface to hear nothing of its great singing but a deep, confused murmur. And, as the distance increased, he realised that the change in his own condition increased. He felt as if he were flying off into a million tiny particles — breaking up under the effects of the deadly speed and the action of the new moon-forces. Immense, i
nvisible arms, half-silver and half-shadow, grew out of the white disc and drew him downwards upon her surface. He was being merged into the life of the moon.
There was a pause. For a moment his wings stopped dead. Their vain fluttering was all but over....
Hark! Was that a voice borne on the wings of some lost wind? Why should his heart beat so tumultuously all at once?
He turned and stared into the ocean of black air overhead till it turned him dizzy. A violent trembling ran through his tired being from head to foot. He had heard a voice — a voice that he knew and loved — a voice of help and deliverance. It rang in shrill syllables up the empty spaces, and it reached new centres of force within him that touched his last store of courage and strength.
“Jimbo, hold on!” it cried, like a faint, thin, pricking current of sound almost unable to reach him through the seas of distance. “I’m coming; hold on a little longer!”
It was the governess. She was true to the end. Jimbo felt his heart swell within him. She was mounting, mounting behind him with incredible swiftness. The sound of his own name in these terrible regions recalled to him some degree of concentration, and he strove hard to fight against the drawing power that was seeking his destruction.
He struggled frantically with his wings. But between him and the governess there was still the power of Fright to be overcome — the very Power she had long ago invoked. It was following him still, preventing his turning back, and driving him ever forward to his death.
Again the voice sounded in the night; and this time it was closer. He could not quite distinguish the words. They buzzed oddly in his ears ... other voices mingled with them ... the hideous children began to shriek somewhere underneath him ... wings with eyes among their burning feathers flashed past him.
His own wings folded close over his little body, drooping like dead things. His eyes closed, and he turned on his side. A huge face that was one-half the governess and the other half the head gardener at home, thrust itself close against his own, and blew upon his eyelids till he opened them. Already he was falling, sinking, tumbling headlong through a space that offered no resistance.
“Jimbo!” shrieked a voice that instantly died away into a wail behind him.
He opened his eyes once more — for it was that loved voice again — but the glare from the moon so dazzled him that he could only fancy he saw the figure of the governess, not a hundred feet away, struggling and floundering in the clutch of a black creature that beat the air with enormous wings all round her. He saw her hair streaming out into the night, and one wing seemed to hang broken and useless at her side.
He was turning over and over, like a piece of wood in the waves of the sea, and the governess, caught by Fright, the monster of her own creation, drifted away from his consciousness as a dream melts away in the light of the morning.... From the gleaming mountains and treeless plains below Jimbo thought there rose a hollow roar like the mocking laughter of an immense multitude of people, shaking with mirth. The Moon had got him at last, and her laughter ran through the heavens like a wave. Revolving upon his own little axis so swiftly that he neither saw nor heard anything more, he dropped straight down upon the great satellite.
The light of the moon flamed up into his eyes and dazzled him.
But what in the world was this?
How could the moon dwindle so suddenly to the size of a mere lamp flame?
How could the whole expanse of the heavens shrink in an instant to the limits of a little, cramped room?
In a single second, before he had time to realise that he felt surprise, the entire memory of his recent experiences vanished from his mind. The past became an utter blank. Like a wreath of smoke everything melted away as if it had never been at all. The functions of the brain resumed their normal course. The delirium of the past few hours was over.
Jimbo was lying at home on his bed in the night-nursery, and his mother was bending over him. At the foot of the bed stood the doctor in black. The nurse held a lamp, only half shaded by her hand, as she approached the bedside.
This lamp was the moon of his delirium — only he had quite forgotten now that there had ever been any moon at all.
The little thermometer, thrust into his teeth among the stars, was still in his mouth. A hot-water bottle made his feet glow and burn. And from the walls of the sick-room came as it were the echoes of recently-uttered sentences: “Take his temperature! Give him the medicine the moment he wakes! Put the hot bottle to his feet.... Fetch the ice-bag.... Quick!”
“Where am I, mother?” he asked in a whisper.
“You’re in bed, darling, and must keep quite quiet. You’ll soon be all right again. It was the old black cow that tossed you. The gardener found you by the swinging gate and carried you in.... You’ve been unconscious!”
“How long have I been uncon —— ?” Jimbo could not manage the whole word.
“About three hours, darling.”
Then he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, and when he woke long after it was early morning, and there was no one in the room but the old family nurse, who sat watching beside the bed. Something — some dim memory — that had stirred his brain in sleep, immediately rushed to his lips in the form of an inconsequent question. But before he could even frame the sentence, the thought that prompted it had slipped back into the deeper consciousness he had just left behind with the trance of deep sleep.
But the old nurse, watching every movement, waiting upon the child’s very breath, had caught the question, and she answered soothingly in a whisper —
“Oh, Miss Lake died a few days after she left here,” she said in a very low voice. “But don’t think about her any more, dearie! She’ll never frighten children again with her silly stories.”
“DIED!”
Jimbo sat up in bed and stared into the shadows behind her, as though his eyes saw something she could not see. But his voice seemed almost to belong to some one else.
“She was really dead all the time, then,” he said below his breath.
Then the child fell back without another word, and dropped off into the sleep which was the first step to final recovery.
THE END
THE EDUCATION OF UNCLE PAUL
The Education of Uncle Paul ponders the different attitudes to the world entertained by adults and children. The title character returns home to England after a long stay in the American wilderness in order to manage his sister’s affairs, upon the death of her husband. Having spent so long in isolation, Paul feels he is still a child, and that his return to civilised society has forced him into a maturity he does not really feel. His nephew and nieces help him find a sense of contentment between the practical outlook of the adult world and the more innocent wonderment of the child’s perspective. The supernatural element of the novel comes in the form of Paul’s vivid imagination, which allows him to give visible forms to invisible natural forces such as the wind. But are these forms really the product of Paul’s imagination?
In 1913, Blackwood published a sequel, A Prisoner in Fairyland. In 1920, he revisited the novel again when he adapted it into the play Through the Crack, which he co-authored with Violet Pearn. The play blended the narrative of this novel with that of his later work, The Extra Day (1915).
Title page of the first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
THE EDUCATION OF UNCLE PAUL
Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of to-day. It is to have a spirit jet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space; it is
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour;
It is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor petition chat it is to be commuted into death. — Francis Thompson.
TO
ALL THOSE CHILDREN
BETWEEN THE AGES OF EIGHT AND EIGHTY
WHO LED ME TO ‘THE CRACK’;
AND HAVE SINCE JOURNEYED WITH ME THROUGH IT
INTO
THE LAND ‘BETWEEN YESTERDAY AND TO-MORROW’
CHAPTER I
... I stand as mute
As one with full strong music in his heart
Whose fingers stray upon a shattered lute.
ALICE MEYNELL.
ALL night the big liner had been plunging heavily, but towards morning she entered quieter water, and when the passengers woke, her rising and falling over the great swells was so easy that even the sea-sick women admitted the relief.
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 15