Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  And the virgin glory of the morning entered into him with that searching sweetness which is almost suffering, just as a few hours before the Night had bewitched him with the mystery of her haunted caverns. For the beauty of Nature that comes to most softly, with hints, came to him with an exquisite fierce fever that was pain, — with something of the full-fledged glory that burst upon Shelley — and to bear it, unrelieved by expression, was a perpetual torment to him.

  But, after long musing that led he scarcely knew where, Paul came back to himself — and laughed. Laughter was better than sighing, and he was too much of a child to go long without the sense of happiness coming uppermost. He lit his pipe — that most delicious of all, the pipe before breakfast — and wandered out into the sea of yellow gorse, thinking aloud, laughing, talking to himself.

  Something in the performance of Mrs. Tompkyns awakened the train of thought of the night before. The sublime acting of the animal — he dared not call it ‘beast’ — linked him on to the children’s world. They, too, had a magnificent condescension for the mere grown-up person. But he — he was not grown up. It made him sigh and laugh to think of it. He was a great, over-grown child, playing with gorgeously coloured dreams while the world of ordinary life passed him by.

  The animals and the children linked on again, of course, with the region of fantasy and make-believe, the world of creation, the world of eternity, the world where thoughts were alive, and strong belief was a creative act.

  ‘That’s where I still belong,’ he said aloud, picking his way among the waves of yellow sea, ‘and I shall never get out till I die, my visions unexpressed, my singing dumb.’ He laughed and threw a stone at a bush that had no blossoms. ‘Oh, if only I knew how to link on with the normal world of fact without losing the other! To turn all these seething dreams within me to some account. To show them to others!’

  He ran and cleared a low gorse-bush with a flying jump.

  ‘That would be worth living for,’ he continued, panting; ‘to make these things real to all the people who live in little cages. By Jove, it would open doors and windows in thousands of cages all over the world, besides providing me with the outlet I must find some day or—’ he sprang over a ditch, slipped, and landed head first into prickles—’ or explode!’ he concluded with a shout of laughter that no one heard but the cuckoos and the yellow-hammers. Then he fell into a reverie, and his thoughts travelled farther still — into the Beyond.

  Quickly recovering himself, and picking up his pipe, he went on towards the house; and, as he emerged from the pine copse again, the sound of a gong, ringing faintly in the distance, brought him back to earth with a shock almost as abrupt as the ditch. Mrs. Tompkyns appeared simultaneously, wearing an aspect of pristine innocence, admirably assumed the instant she caught sight of him.

  ‘Fancy your being out here!’ was the expression of her whole person, ‘and coming, too, in just as the gong sounds!’

  ‘Breakfast, I suppose!’ he observed. And she trotted behind him like a dog. For all her affectations of superiority she wanted her milk just as much as he wanted his coffee.

  He walked into the dining-room, through the window, stiffening as he did so with the resolution of the night before. His armour fitted him tightly. Little animals, children, the too searching calls of Nature, occult, symbolic, magical — all these must be sternly resisted and suppressed in the company of others. The danger of letting his imagination loose was too alarming. The ridicule would overwhelm him. In the eyes of the world he now lived in he would seem simply mad. The risk was impossible.

  Like the Christian Scientists, he felt the need of vigorous affirmation: ‘I am Paul Rivers. I am a grown-up man. I am an official in a lumber Company. I am forty-five. I have a beard. I am important and sedate.’

  Thus he fortified himself; and thus, like the persuasive Mrs. Tompkyns on the lawn, he imagined that he was deceiving both himself — and those who were on the watch!

  CHAPTER VIII

  And a little child shall lead them.

  A week passed quickly away and found Paul still in his sister’s house. The country air agreed with him, and he went for long walks over the heathery hills and down to the sea. The little private study provided for him, — remembering Mrs. Tompkyns’ example, he made a brave pretence of having reports to write to his lumber Company — was admirable for his work. As a place of retreat when he felt temptation too strong upon him, or danger was near at hand, he used it constantly. He scented conditions in advance very often, though no one probably would have suspected it of him.

  Once or twice he lunched out with neighbours, and sometimes people motored over to tea; companionship and society were at hand if he wanted them. And books of the kind he loved stood in precious rows upon the shelves of Dick’s well-stored library. Here he browsed voraciously.

  His sister, meanwhile, showed tact hardly to be expected of her. She tried him tentatively with many things to see if he liked them, but she made no conspicuous plans for him, and took good care that he was left entirely to his own devices. A kind of intelligent truce had established itself between them — these two persons who lived in different worlds and stared at one another with something like astonishment over the top of a high wall. Moreover, her languid interest in life made no claims upon him; there was pleasant companionship, gentle talks, and genuine, if thinly coloured, affection. He felt absolutely free, yet was conscious of being looked after with kindness and discretion. She managed him so well, in fact, that he hardly realised he was being managed at all.

  He fell more easily than he had thought possible into the routine of the uneventful country life. From feeling ‘caged’ he came to feel ‘comfortable.’ June, and the soft forces of the summer, purred about him, and almost without knowing it he began to purr with them.

  For his superabundant energy he found relief in huge walks, early and late, and in all manner of unnecessary and invented labours of Hercules about the place. Thus, he dammed up the little stream that trickled harmlessly through the Gwyle pine-wood, making a series of deep pools in which he bathed when the spirit moved him; he erected a gigantic and very dangerous see-saw for the children (and himself) across a fallen trunk; and, by means of canvas, boards, and steps, he constructed a series of rooms and staircases in a spreading ilex-tree, with rope railings and bells at each ‘floor’ for visitors, so that even the gardeners admitted it was ‘ the most wonderful thing they had ever set eyes upon in a tree.

  With the children he was, however, careful to play the part he had decided to play. He was kind and good-natured; he spent a good deal of time with them daily; he even submitted periodically to be introduced all over again to the out-of-door animals, but he went through it all soberly and deliberately, and flattered himself that he was quite successful in presenting to them the ‘Uncle Paul’ whom it was best for his safety they should know.

  Heart-searchings and temptations he had in plenty, but came through the ordeal with flying colours, and by the end of the first week he was satisfied that they accepted him as he wished — sedate, stolid, dull, and ‘grown up.’

  Yet, all the time, there was something that puzzled him. Under the leadership of Nixie the children played up almost too admirably. It was almost as though he had called them and explained everything in detail. In spite of himself, they seemed somehow or other to have got into his confidence, so that he felt his pretence was after all not so effective as he meant it to be.

  Even — nay, especially — the way he was ‘accepted’ by the animals was suspicious — for nothing can be more eloquent of the true relations between children and a grown-up than the terms they permit their animals to have towards him — and this easy acceptance of himself as he pretended to be constituted the most wearing and subtle kind of attack he could possibly conceive. He felt as if the steel casings of his armour were changing into cardboard; soon they would become mere tissue-paper, and then turn transparent and melt away altogether.

  ‘They seem to think i
t’s all put on, this stiffness of mine,’ he thought more than once. ‘Perhaps they’re playing a sort of game with me. If once they find out I’m only acting — whew!’ he whistled low—’ the: game is up at once! I must keep an eye peeled!’ Consequently he kept that eye peeled; he made more use of his private study, and so often gave the excuse of having reports to write that, had it been true, his lumber Company would have been obliged to double its staff in order to read them.

  Yet, even in the study, he was not absolutely safe. The children penetrated there too. They knocked elaborately — always; but with the knock he invariably realised a roguish pair of eyes and a sly laugh on the other side of the door. It was like knocking on his heart direct. He always said — in a bored, unnatural tone:

  ‘Oh, come in, whoever it is!’ knowing quite well who it was. And, then, in they would come — one or the other of them.

  They slipped in softly as shadows, like the coming of dusk, like stray puffs of wind, fragrant and summery, or like unexpected rays of light as the sun walked round the house in the afternoon. And when they were gone — swiftly, like the sun dipping behind a cloud — lo, the room seemed cold and empty again.

  ‘Oh, they’re up to something, they’re up to something,’ he said wisely to himself with a sigh.

  ‘They’re laying traps for me, bless their little insolences!’

  And the more he thought about it, the more certain he felt that Nixie, Jonah, and Toby were simply playing the Cat Game — pretending to accept his attitude because they saw he wished it. Only, less occult and intelligent than the cat, they sometimes made odd little slips that betrayed them.

  For instance, one evening Jonah penetrated into the study to say good-night, and brought the Chow puppies, China and Japan, with him. Their tails curled over their backs like wire brushes; their vigorous round bodies, for ever on the move, were all he could manage. Having been duly kissed, the child waited, however, for something else, and at length, receiving no assistance from his uncle, he lifted each puppy in turn on to the table.

  ‘You, Uncle, please hold them; I can’t,’ he explained.

  And, rather grimly, Paul tried to keep the two wriggling bodies still, while Jonah then came up a little closer to his chair.

  ‘They have reports to write too, to their lumber-kings,’ he said, his face solemn as a gong — using a phrase culled heaven knows where. ‘So will you please see that they don’t make blots either.’

  ‘But how did you know there were such things as lumber-kings?’ Paul asked, surprised.

  ‘I didn’t know. They knew,’ with a jerk of his head toward the struggling puppies, who hated the elevation of the table and the proximity of Paul’s bearded face. ‘They said you told them.’

  There was no trace of a smile in his eyes; nothing but the earnest expression of the child taking part in the ponderous make-believe of the grown-up. Paul felt that by this simple expedient his reports and the safety they represented had been reduced in a single moment to the level of a paltry pretence.

  He blushed. ‘Well, tell them to run after their tails more, and think less,’ he said.

  ‘All right, Uncle Paul,’ and the boy was gone, grave as any judge.

  And Toby, her small round face still shining like an onion skin, had a different but equally effective method of showing him that he belonged to their world in spite of his clumsy pretence. She gave him lessons in Natural History. One afternoon when a brightly-coloured creature darted across the page of his book, and he referred to it as a ‘beetle,’ she very smartly rebuked him.

  ‘Not beetle, but beetle, that one,’ she corrected him.

  He thought at first this was merely a child’s abbreviation, but she went on to instruct him fully, and he discovered that the ordinary coleopterist has a great deal yet to learn in the proper classification of his species.

  ‘There are beetles, and beedles, and beeties,’ she explained standing by his chair on the lawn, and twiddling with his watch-chain. ‘Beeties are all bright-coloured and little and very pretty — like ladybirds.’

  ‘And beedles?’

  ‘Oh, b-e-e-e-d-d-dles,’ pronouncing the word heavily and slowly, ‘are the stupid fat ones in the road that always get run over. They’re always sleepy, you see, but quite nice, oh, quite nice;’ she hastened to add lest Paul should dislike them from her description.

  ‘And all the rest are beetles, I suppose, just ordinary beetles?’ he asked.

  ‘Beetles,’ she said, with the calmness of superior knowledge, ‘are fast, black things that scuttle about kitchens. Horrid and crawly! Now you know them all!’

  She ran off with a burst of laughter upon that face of polished onion skin, and left her uncle to reflect deeply upon this new world of beetles.

  The lesson was instructive and symbolic, though the choice of subject was not as poetic as might have been. With this new classification as a starting-point, the child, no doubt, had erected a vast superstructure of wonder, fun, beauty, and — why not? — truth! For children, he mused, are ever the true idealists. In their games of make-believe they create the world anew — in six minutes. They scorn measurements, and deal directly with the eternal principles behind things. With a little mud on the end of a stick they trace the course of the angels, and with the wooden-blocks of their building-boxes they erect the towering palaces of a universe that shall never pass away.

  Yet what they did, surely he also did! His world of imagination was identical with theirs of make-believe. Was, then, the difference between them one of expression merely?...

  Toby came thundering up and fell upon him from nowhere.

  ‘Uncle Paul,’ she said rather breathlessly.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ he made answer, still thinking upon beedles and beeties.

  ‘On the path down there by the rosydandrums there’s a beedle now — a big one with horns — if you’d like to see it.’

  ‘Oh! By the rhododendrons, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, by the rosydandrums,’ she repeated. ‘Only we must be quick or he’ll get home before we come.’

  He was far more keen to see that “beedle” than she was. Yet for the immediate safety of his soul he refused.

  Nixie it was, however, who penetrated furthest into the fortress. She came with a fearless audacity that fairly made him tremble. She had only to approach for him to become aware how poorly his suit of armour fitted.

  But she was so gentle and polite about it that she was harder to withstand than all the others put together. She was slim and insinuating in body, mind and soul. Often, before he realised what she was talking about, her slender little fingers were between the cracks of his breast-plate. For instance, after leaving Toby and her “beedle,” he strolled down to the pinewood and stood upon the rustic bridge watching the play of sunlight and shadow, when suddenly, out of the very water it seemed, up rose a veritable water-sprite — hatless and stockingless — Nixie, the ubiquitous.

  She scrambled lightly along the steep bank to his side, and leaned over the railing with him, staring at their reflections in the stream.

  ‘I declare you startled me, child!’ Paul exclaimed.

  Her eyes met his in the running reflection beneath them. Of course, it may have been merely the trick of the glancing water, but to him it seemed that her expression was elfin and mischievous.

  ‘Did I — really, Uncle Paul?’ she said after a long silence, and without looking up. But woven through the simple words, as sunlight is woven through clearing mist, he divined all the other meanings of the child’s subtle and curious personality. It amounted to this — she at once invited, nay included, him in her own particular tree and water world: included him because he belonged there with her, and she simply couldn’t help herself. There was no favour about it one way or the other.

  The compliment — the temptation — was overwhelming. Paul shivered a little, actually shivered, as he stood beside her in the sunshine. For several minutes they leaned there in silence, gazing at the flowing water.
r />   ‘The woods are very busy — this evening,’ she said at length.

  ‘I’m sure they are,’ he answered, before he quite realised what he was saying. Then he pulled himself together with an effort.

  ‘But does Mile. Fleury know, and approve — ?’ he asked a little stiffly, glancing down at her bare legs and splashed white frock.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she laughed wickedly, ‘but then Mile, only understands what she sees with her eyes! She is much too mixed-up and educated to know all this kind of thing!’ She made a gesture to include the woods about them. ‘Her sort of knowledge is so stuffing, you know.’

  ‘Rather,’ he exclaimed. ‘I would far sooner know the trees themselves than know their Latin names.’

  It slipped out in spite of himself. The next minute he could have bitten his tongue off. But Nixie took no advantage of him. She let his words pass as something taken for granted.

  ‘I mean — it’s better to learn useful things while you can,’ he said hurriedly, blushing in his confusion like a child.

  Nixie peered steadily down into the water for several minutes before she said anything more.

  ‘Either she’s found me out and knows everything,’ thought Paul; ‘or she hasn’t found me out and knows nothing.’ But which it was, for the life of him, he couldn’t be certain.

  ‘Oh,’ she cried suddenly, looking up into his face, her eyes, to Paul’s utter amazement, wet with tears, ‘Oh! how Daddy must have loved you!’

  And, before he could think of a word to say, she was gone! Gone into the woods with a fluttering as of white wings.

  ‘So apparently I am not too mixed-up and educated for their exquisite little world,’ he reflected, as soon as the emotion caused by her last words had subsided a little; ‘and the things I know are not of the “stuffing” kind!’

  It all made him think a good deal — this attitude the children adopted towards his attitude, this unhesitating acceptance of him in spite of all his pretence. But he still valiantly maintained his studied aloofness of manner, and never allowed himself to overstep the danger line. He never forgot himself when he played with them, and the stories he told were just what they called “ornary” stories, and not tales of pure imagination and fantasy. The rules of the game, finely balanced, were observed between them just as between himself and Mrs. Tompkyns.