Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘They’re only half asleep, and that’s why they see so badly,’ Nixie told him. ‘Aren’t they silly and happy?’

  Before he could answer, something else moved into their limited field of vision, and he was aware that a silent grey shadow was stalking solemnly by. All dignity and self - confidence it was; stately, proud, sure of itself, in a region where it was at home, conscious of its power to see and move better than any one else. Two wide-open and brilliant eyes, shining like dropped stars, were turned for a moment towards them where they sat on the log and watched. Then, silent and beautiful, it passed on into the darkness beyond, and vanished from their sight.

  ‘Mrs. Tompkyns!’ whispered Nixie. ‘She saw us all right!’

  ‘Splendid!’ he exclaimed under his breath, full of admiration.

  Nixie pinched his arm. A change had come about in the last few minutes, and into this dense forest the light of approaching dawn began to steal most wonderfully. A universal murmuring filled the air.

  ‘The sun’s coming. They’re going to wake now!’ The child gave a little shiver of delight. Paul sat up. A general, indefinable motion, he saw, was beginning everywhere to run to and fro among the hanging streamers. More light penetrated every minute, and the tree stems began to turn from black to purple, and then from purple to faint grey. Vistas of shadowy glades began to open up on all sides; every instant the trees stood out more distinctly. The myriad threads and ribbons were astir.

  ‘Look!’ cried the child aloud; ‘they’re uncurling as they wake.’

  He looked. The sense of wonder and beauty moved profoundly in his heart. Where, oh where, in all the dreams of his solitary years had he seen anything to equal this unearthly vision of the awakening winds?

  The winds moved in their sleep, and awoke.

  In loops, folds, and spirals of indescribable grace they slowly began to unwrap themselves from the tree stems with a million little delicate undulations; like thin mist trembling, and then smoothing out the ruffled surface of their thousand serpentine eddies, they slid swiftly upwards from the moss and ferns, disentangled themselves without effort from roots and stones and bark, and then, reinforced by countless thousands from the lower branches, they rose up slowly in vast coloured sheets towards the region of the tree tops.

  And, as they rose, the silence of the forest passed into sound — trembling and murmuring at first, and then rapidly increasing in volume as the distant glades sent their voices to swell it, and the note of every hollow and dell joined in with its contributory note. From all the shadowy recesses of the wood they heard it come, louder and louder, leaping to the centre like running great arpeggios, and finally merging all lesser notes in the wave of a single dominant chord — the song of the awakened winds to the dawn.

  ‘They’re singing to the sun,’ Nixie whispered. Her voice caught in her throat a little and she tightened her grasp on his big hand.

  ‘They’re changing colour too,’ he answered breathlessly. They stood up on their log to see.

  ‘It’s the rate they go does that,’ she tried to explain. She stood on tiptoe.

  He understood what she meant, for he now saw that as the wind rose in ribbons, streams and spirals, the original pearl-grey changed chromatically into every shade of colour under the sun.

  ‘Same as metals getting hot,’ she said. ‘Their colour comes ‘cording to their speed.’

  Many of the tints he found it impossible to name, for they were such as he had never dreamed of. Crimsons, purples, soft yellows, exquisite greens and pinks ran to and fro in a perfect deluge of colour, as though a hundred sunsets had been let loose and were hunting wildly for the West to set in. And there were shades of opal and mother-of-pearl so delicate that he could only perceive them in his bewildered mind by translating them into the world of sound, and imagining it was the colour of their own singing.

  Far too rapidly for description they changed their protean dress, moving faster and faster, glowing fiercely one minute and fading away the next, passing swiftly into new and dazzling brilliancies as the distant winds came to join them, and at length rushing upwards in one huge central draught through the trees, shouting their song with a roar like the sea.

  Suddenly they swept up into the sky — sound, colour and all — and silence once more descended upon the forest. The winds were off and about their business of the day. The woods were empty. And the sun was at the very edge of the world.

  ‘Watch the tops of the trees now,’ cried Nixie, still trembling from the strange wonder of the scene. ‘The Little Winds will wake the moment the sun touches them — the little winds in the tops of the trees.’

  As she spoke, the sun came up and his first rays touched the pointed crests above them with gold; and Paul noticed that there were thousands of tiny, slender ribbons streaming out like elastic threads from the tips of all the pines, and that these had only just begun to move. As at a word of command they trooped out to meet the sunshine, undulating like wee coloured serpents, and uttering their weird and gentle music at the same time. And Paul, as he listened, understood at last why the wind in the tree-tops is always more delicately sweet than any other kind, and why it touches so poignantly the heart of him who hears, and calls wonder from her deepest lair.

  ‘The young winds, you see,’ Nixie said, peering up beneath her joined hands and finding it difficult to keep her balance as she did so. ‘They sleep longer than the others. And they’re not loose either; they’re fastened on, and can only go out and come back.’

  And, as he watched, he saw these young winds fly out miles into the brightening sky, making lines of flashing colour, and then tear back with a whirring rush of music to curl up again round the twigs and pine needles.

  ‘Though sometimes they do manage to get loose, and make funny storms and hurricanes and things that no one expects at all in the sky.’

  Paul was on the point of replying to this explanation when something struck against his legs, and he only just saved himself from falling by seizing Nixie and risking a flying leap with her from the log.

  ‘It’s that wicked Japan again,’ she laughed, clambering back on to the tree.

  The puppy was vigorously chasing its own tail, bumping as it did so into everything within reach. Paul stooped to catch it. At the same instant it rose up past his very nose, and floated off through the trees and was lost to view in the sky.

  Nixie laughed merrily. ‘It woke in the middle of its silly little dream,’ she said. ‘It was only half-asleep really, and playing. It won’t come back now.’

  ‘All puppies are absurd like that—’

  But he did not finish his profound observation about puppies, for his voice at that moment was drowned in a new and terrible noise that seemed to come from the heart of the wood. It happened just as in a children’s fairy tale. It bore no resemblance to the roar the winds made; there was no music in it; it was crude in quality — angry; a sound from another place.

  It came swiftly nearer and nearer, increasing in volume as it came. A veil seemed to spread suddenly over the scene; the trees grew shadowy and dim; the glades melted off into mistiness; and ever the mass of sound came pouring up towards them. Paul realised that the frontiers of consciousness were shifting again in a most extraordinary fashion, so that the whole forest slipped off into the background and became a dim map in his memory, faint and unreal — and, with it, went both Nixie and himself. The ground rose and fell under their feet. Her hand melted into something fluid and slippery as he tried to keep his hold upon it. The child whispered words he could not catch. Then, like the puppy, they both began to rise.

  The roar came out to meet them and enveloped them furiously in mid air.

  ‘At any rate, we’ve seen the wind!’ he heard the child’s voice murmuring in his beard. She rose away from him, being lighter, and vanished through the tops of the trees.

  And then the roar drowned him and swept him away in a whirling tempest, so that he lost all consciousness of self and forgot everything he h
ad ever known....

  The noise resolved itself gradually into the crunching sounds of the carriage wheels and the clatter of horses’ hoofs coming up the gravel drive.

  Paul looked about him with a sigh that was half a yawn. China and Japan were still romping on the lawn, Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke were curled up in hot, soft circles precisely where they had been before, Toby and Jonah were still busily engaged doing ‘something with daisies’ in the full blaze of the sunshine, and Nixie lay beside him, all innocence and peace, still gazing through the tangle of her yellow hair at the slow-sailing clouds overhead.

  And the clouds, he noticed, had hardly altered a line of their shape and position since he saw them last.

  He turned with a jump of excitement.

  ‘Nixie,’ he exclaimed, ‘I’ve seen the wind!’

  She rolled over lazily on her side and fixed her great blue eyes on his own, between two strands of her hair. From the expression of her brown face it was possible to surmise that she knew nothing — and everything.

  ‘Have you?’ she said very quietly. ‘I thought you might.’

  ‘Yes, but did I dream it, or imagine it, or just think it and make it up?’ He still felt a little bewildered; the memory of that strangely beautiful picture-gallery still haunted him. Yonder, before the porch, the steaming horses and the smart coachman on the box, and his sister coming across the lawn from the carriage all belonged to another world, while he himself and Nixie and the other children still stayed with him, floating in a golden atmosphere where Wind was singing and alive.

  ‘That doesn’t matter a bit,’ she replied, peering at him gravely before she pulled her hair over both eyes. ‘The point is that it’s really true! Now,’ she added, her face completely hidden by the yellow web, ‘all you have to do is to write it for our next Meeting — write the record of your Adventure—’

  ‘And read it out?’ he said, beginning to understand.

  The yellow head nodded. He felt utterly and delightfully bewitched.

  ‘All right,’ he said; ‘I will.’

  ‘And make it a verywonderfulindeed Adventure,’ she added, springing to her feet. ‘Hush! Here’s mother!’

  Paul rose dizzily to greet his sister, while the children ran off with their animals to other things.

  ‘You’ve had a pleasant afternoon, Paul, dear?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, very nice indeed—’ His thoughts were still entangled with the wind and with the story he meant to write about it for the next Meeting.

  She opened her parasol and held it over her head. ‘Now, come indoors,’ he went on, collecting himself with an effort, ‘or into the shade. This heat is not good for you, Margaret.’ He looked at her pale, delicate face. ‘You’re tired too.’

  ‘I enjoyed the drive,’ she replied, letting him take her arm and lead her towards the house. ‘I met the Burdons in their motor. They’re coming over to luncheon one day, they said. You’ll like him, I think.’

  ‘That’s very nice,’ he remarked again, ‘very nice. Margaret,’ he exclaimed suddenly, ashamed of his utter want of interest in all she was planning for him, ‘I think you ought to have a motor too. I’m going to give you one.’

  ‘That is sweet of you, Paul,’ she smiled at him.

  ‘But really, you know, one likes horses best. They’re much quieter. Motors do shake one so.’

  ‘I don’t think that matters; the point is that it’s really true,’ he muttered to himself, thinking of Nixie’s judgment of his Adventure.

  His sister looked at him with her expression of faint amusement.

  ‘You mustn’t mind me,’ he laughed, planting her in a deck-chair by the shade of the house; ‘but the truth is, my mind is full just now of some work I’ve got to do — a report, in fact, I’ve got to write.’ He went off into the house, humming a song. She followed him with her eyes.

  ‘He is so strange. I do wish he would see more people and be a little more normal.’

  And in Paul’s mind, as he raced along the passage to his private study in search of pen and paper, there ran a thought of very different kind in the shape of a sentence from the favourite of all his books:

  ‘Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.’

  CHAPTER XI

  It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended, rather, that this (somewhat minor bard) in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. — R. L. S.

  Now that his first Adventure was an accomplished fact, and that he was writing it out for the Meeting, Paul carried about with him a kind of secret joy. At last he had found an audience, and an audience is unquestionably a very profound need of every human heart. Nixie was helping him to expression.

  ‘I’ll write them such an Adventure out of that Wind - Vision,’ he exclaimed, ‘that they’ll fairly shiver with delight. And if they shiver, why shouldn’t all the children in the world shiver too?’

  He no longer made the mistake of thinking it trivial; if he could find an audience of children all about the world, children known or unknown, to whom he could show his little gallery of pictures, what could be more reasonable or delightful? What could be more useful and worth doing than to show the adventuring mind some meaning in all the beauty that filled his heart? And the Wind-Vision might be a small — a very small, beginning. It might be the first of a series of modern fairy tales. The idea thrilled him with pleasure. ‘A safety-valve at last!’ he cried. ‘An audience that won’t laugh!’ For, in reality, there was also a queer motherly quality in him which he had always tried more or less successfully to hide, and of which, perhaps, he was secretly half ashamed — a feeling that made him long to give of his strength and sympathy to all that was helpless, weary, immature.

  He went about the house like a new man, for in proportion as he allowed his imagination to use its wings, life became extraordinarily alive. He sang, and the world sang with him. Everything turned up little smiling faces to him, whispering fairy contributions to his tale.

  ‘The more I give out, the more I get in,’ he laughed. ‘I declare it’s quite wonderful,’ as though he had really discovered a new truth all for himself. New forces began to course through his veins like fire. As in a great cistern tapped for the first time, this new outlet produced other little cross-currents everywhere throughout his being. Paul began to find a new confidence. Another stone had shifted in the fabric of his soul. He moved one stage nearer to the final pattern that it had been intended from the beginning of time he should assume.

  A world within a world began to grow up in the old grey house under the hill, one consisting of Nixie and her troupe, with Paul trailing heavily in the rear, very eager; and the other, of the grownup members of the household, with Mlle. Fleury belonging to neither, yet in a sense belonging to both. The cats and animals again were in the former — an inner division of it, so that it was like a series of Chinese boxes, each fitting within the next in size.

  And this admission of Paul into the innermost circle produced a change in the household, as well as in himself. After all, the children had not betrayed him; they had only divined his secret and put him right with himself. But this was everything; and who is there with a vestige of youth in his spirit that will not understand the cause of his mysterious exhilaration?

  Outwardly, of course, no definite change was visible in the doings of the little household. The children said little; they made no direct reference to his conversion; but the change, though not easily described, was felt by all. Paul recognised it in every fibre of his being. Every one, he noticed, understood by some strange freemasonry that he had been initiated, for every one, he fancied, treated him a little differently. It was natural that the children should give signs of increased admiration and affection for their huge new member, but there was no obvious reason why his sister, and the servants, and the very animals into the bargain, should regard him with a strain of something that hesitated between tolerance and tenderness.

>   If truth were told, they probably did nothing of the sort; it was his own point of view that had changed. His imagination was responsible for the rest; yet he felt as though he had been caught into the heart of a great conspiracy, and the silent, unobtrusive way every one played his, her, or its part contrived to make him think it was all very real indeed.

  The cats, furry and tender magicians that they are, perhaps interpreted the change more skilfully and easily than any one else. Without the least fuss or ceremony they made him instantly free of their world, and the way their protection and encouragement were extended to him in a hundred gentle ways gave him an extraordinarily vivid impression that they, too, had their plans and conferences just as much as the children had. They made everything seem alive and intelligent, from the bushes where they hunted to the furniture where they slept. They brought the whole world, animate and inanimate, into his scheme of existence. Everything had life, though not the same degree of life. It was all very subtle and wonderful. He, and the children, and the cats, all had imagination according to their kind and degree, and all equally used it to make the world haunted and splendid.

  Formerly, for instance, he had often surprised Mrs. Tompkyns going about in the passages on secret business of her own, perhaps not altogether good, yet looking up with an assumption of innocence that made it quite impossible to chide or interfere. (It was, of course, only an assumption of innocence. A cat’s eyes are too intent and purposeful for genuine innocence; they are a mask, a concealment of a thousand plans.) But now, when he met her, she at once stopped and sent her tail aloft by way of signal, and came to rub against his legs. Her eyes smiled — that pregnant, significant smile of the feline, shown by mere blinking of the lids — and she walked slowly by his side with arched back, as an invitation that he might — nay, that he should — accompany her.