Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  On her great, dark journeys he might not of course yet go, but on the smaller, less important expeditions he was welcome, and she showed it plainly every time they met. He was led politely to numerous cupboards, corners, attics, and cellars, whose existence he had not hitherto suspected. There were wonderful and terrible places among the book - shelves and under massive pieces of furniture which she showed to him when no one was about; and she further taught him how to sit and stare for long periods until out of vacancy there issued a series of fascinating figures and scenes of strange loveliness. And he, laughing, obeyed.

  All this, and much else besides, they taught him cleverly.

  Some of them, too, came to visit him in his own quarters. They came into his study, and into his bedroom, and one of them — that black, thick-haired fellow called Smoke — the one with the ghostly eyes and very furry trousers — even took to tapping at his door late at night (by standing on tip-toe he could just reach the knob), and thus established the right to sleep on the sofa or even to curl up on the foot of the bed.

  And all that the kittens, the puppies, and the out-of-door animals did to teach him as an equal is better left untold, since this is a story and not a work on natural history.

  Mlle. Fleury, the little French governess, alone seemed curiously out of the picture. She made difficulties here and there, though not insuperable ones. The fact was, he saw, that she was not properly in either of the two worlds. She wanted to be in both at once, but, from the very nature of her position, succeeded in getting into neither; and to fall between two worlds is far more perplexing than to fall between two stools. Paul made allowances for her just as he might have made allowances for an over-trained animal that had learned too many human-taught tricks to make its presence quite acceptable to its own four-footed circle. The charming little person — he, at least, always thought her voice and her manners and her grace charming after a life where these were unknown — had to justify herself to the grown-up world where his sister belonged, as well as to the world of the children whom she taught. And, consequently, she was often compelled to scold when, perhaps, her soul cried out that she should bless.

  His heart always hammered, if ever so slightly, when he made his way, as he now did more and more frequently, to the schoolroom or the nursery. Schoolroom-tea became a pleasure of almost irresistible attractions, and when it was over and the governess was legitimately out of the way, Nixie sometimes had a trick of announcing a Regular Meeting to which Paul was called upon to read out his latest ‘Adventure.’

  ‘Hulloa! Having tea, are you?’ he exclaimed, looking in at the door one afternoon shortly after the wind episode. This feigned surprise, which deceived nobody, he felt was admirable. It was exactly the way Mrs. Tompkyns did it.

  ‘Come in, Uncle Paul. Do stay. You must stay,’ came the chorus, while Mlle. Fleury half smiled, half frowned at him across the table.; ‘Here’s just the stodgy kind of cake you like, with jam and honey!’

  ‘Well,’ he said hesitatingly, as though he scorned such things, while Mademoiselle poured out a cup, and the children piled up a plate for him.

  He stayed, as it were, by chance, and a minute later was as earnestly engaged with the cake and tea as if he had come with that special purpose.

  ‘It’s all very well done,’ was his secret thought. ‘It’s exactly the way Mrs. Tompkyns manages all her most important affairs.’

  ‘Nous avons réunion après,’ Jonah informed the governess presently with a very grave face. The young woman glanced interrogatively at Paul.

  ‘Oui, oui,’ he said in his Canadian French, ‘c’est vrai. Réunion régulaire.’

  ‘Mais qu’elle idée, donc!’

  ‘Il est le président,’ said Toby indignantly, pointing with a jam sandwich.

  ‘Voilà vous êtes!’ he exclaimed. ‘There you are! Je suis le président!’ and he helped himself to more cake as though by accident.

  For five seconds Mlle. Fleury kept her face. Then, in spite of herself, her lips parted and a row of white teeth appeared.

  ‘Meester Reevairs, you spoil them,’ she said, ‘and I approve it not. Mais, voyons donc! Quelles manières!’ she added as Sambo and Pouf passed from Toby’s lap on to the table and began to sniff at the water cress.... ‘Non, ça c’est trop fort!’ She leaned across to smack them back into propriety. ‘Abominable,’ Paul cried, ‘abominable tout à fait.’

  ‘Alwaze when you come such things ‘appen.’

  ‘Pas mon faute,’ he said, helping to catch Pouf.

  ‘They are deeficult enough without that you make them more,’ she said.

  ‘Uncle Paul doesn’t know his genders,’ cried Jonah; ‘hooray!’

  ‘Ma faute,’ he corrected himself, pronouncing it ‘fote.’

  Then Toby, struggling with Smoke, whose nose she was trying to force into a saucer of milk which he did not want, upset the saucer all over her dress and the table, splashing one and all. Jonah sprang up and knocked his chair over backwards in the excitement. Mrs. Tompkyns, wakening from her sleep upon the piano stool, leaped on to the notes of the open keyboard with a horrible crash. A pandemonium reigned, all talking, laughing, shouting at once, and the governess scolding. Then Paul trod on a kitten’s tail under the table and extraordinary shrieks were heard, whereupon Jonah, stooping to discover their cause, bumped his head and began to cry. Moving forward to comfort him, Paul’s sleeve caught in the spout of the teapot and it fell with a clatter among the cups and plates, sending the sugar-tongs spinning into the air, and knocking the milk-jug sideways so that a white sea flooded the whole tray and splashed up with white spots on to Paul’s cheeks.

  The cumulative effect of these disasters reached a culminating point, and a sudden hush fell upon the room. The children looked a trifle scared. Paul, with milk drops trickling down his nose, blushed and looked solemn. Very guilty and awkward he felt. Mlle. Fleury in fluent, rattling French explained her view of the situation, at first, however, without effect. At such moments mere sound and fury are vain; subtle, latent influences of the personality alone can calm a panic, and these the little person did not, of course, possess.

  To Paul the whole picture appeared in very vivid detail. With the simplicity of the child and the larger vision of the man he perceived how closely tears and laughter moved before them; and it really pained him to see her confused and rather helpless amid all the debris. She was pretty, slim, and graceful; futile anger did not sit well upon her.

  There she stood, little more than a girl herself, staring at him for a moment speechless, the dainty ruffles of her neat grey dress sticking up about her pretty throat, he thought, like the bristles of an enraged kitten. The hair, too, by her ears and neck suddenly seemed to project untidily and increased the effect. The sunlight from the window behind her spread through it, making it cloud-like.

  ‘C’est tout mon — ma fote,’ he said, stretching out both hands impulsively, ‘tout!’ in his villainous Quebec French. ‘Scold me first, please.’

  There was milk on his left eyebrow, and a crumb of cake in his beard as well. The governess stared at him, her eyes still blazing ominously. Her lips quivered. Then, fortunately, she laughed; no one really could have done otherwise. And that laugh saved the situation. The children, who had been standing motionless as statues awaiting their doom, sprang again into life. In a trice the milk had been moped up, the tongs replaced, and the tea-pot put to bed under its ornamented cosy.

  ‘I forgeeve — this time,’ she said. ‘But you are vairy troublesome.’

  In future, none the less, she forgave always; her hostility, never quite sure of itself, vanished from that moment.

  ‘Blue Summer’ouse,’ whispered Jonah in his ear, ‘and bring your Wind-Vision to read to us at the Meeting.’

  ‘But not too much Wind-Vision, please, Meester Reevairs,’ she said, overhearing the whisper. ‘They think of nothing else.’

  Paul stared at her. The thought in his mind was that she ought to come too, only he knew the
children would not approve.

  ‘Then I must moderate their enthusiasm,’ he said gravely at last.

  Mlle. Fleury laughed in his face. ‘You are worst of ze lot, I know — worst of all. Your Aventures and plays trouble all their lesson time.’

  ‘It is my education,’ he said, as Jonah tugged at his coat from behind to get him out of the room.

  ‘You educate them; they educate me; I improve slowly. Voilà!’

  ‘But vairy slowly, n’est-ce pas? And you make up all such expériences like ze Wind-Vision to fill their minds.’

  Nixie had told him that all their aventures filtered through to her, and that she kept a special cahier in her own room, where she wrote them all out in her own language. ‘Another soul, perhaps, looking about for a safety-valve,’ he thought swiftly.

  ‘But, Mademoiselle, why not translate them into French? That’s a good idea, and excellent practice for them.’

  ‘Per’aps,’ she laughed, ‘per’aps we do that. C’est une idée au moins.’

  She wanted so much, it was clear, to come into their happy little world of imagination and adventure. He realised suddenly how lonely her life might be in such a household.

  ‘You write them, and I will correct them for you,’ he said.

  ‘Come on, do come on, Uncle,’ cried the voices urgently from the door. The children were already in the passage. The little governess looked rather wistfully after them, and on a sudden impulse Paul did a thing he had never before done in his life. He took her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers, but so boyishly, and with such simple politeness and sincerity that there was hardly more in the act than if Jonah had done the same to Nixie in an adventure of another sort.

  ‘Au revoir then,’ he said laughingly; ‘chacun a son devoir, don’t they? And now I go to do mine.’

  His sentence was somewhat mixed. He just had time to notice the pretty blush of confusion that spread over her face, and to hear her laugh ‘You are weecked children — vairy weecked — and you, Meester Reevairs, the biggest of all,’ when Nixie and Jonah had him by the hand and they were off out of the house to their Meeting in the Blue Summer-house.

  Thus Mlle. Fleury ceased to be a difficulty in the household so far as his proceedings with the children were concerned. On the contrary, she became a helpful force, and often acted as a sort of sentry, or outpost, between one world and the other. Herself, she never came into their own private region, but hovered only along the borders of it. For though little over twenty years of age, she was French, and she understood exactly how much interest she might allow herself to take in the Society without endangering her own position, — or theirs — or his. She knew that she could not enter their world freely and still maintain authority in the other; but, meanwhile, she managed Paul precisely as though he were one of her own charges, and saw to it that he did nothing which could really be injurious to the responsibilities for which she was answerable.

  Thus Paul, thundering along with his belated youth, enjoyed himself more and more, while he enjoyed, also learned, marked, and read.

  CHAPTER XII

  It haunted him a good deal, this Vision of the Winds. Now he never heard the stirring of the woods without thinking of those delicately brilliant streamers flying across the sky.

  The satisfaction of spinning a fairy tale out of it for the children’s Society was only equalled by the pleasure of the original inspiration. Here, too, was a means of expressing himself he had never dreamed of; the relief was great. Moreover, it brought him into close touch with the inexhaustible reservoirs which children draw upon for their endless world of Make-Believe, and he understood that the child and the poet live in the same region. His feet were now set upon that secret path trodden by the feet of children since the world began; and, for all his burden of years, there was no telling where it might lead him. For the springs of perennial youth have their sources in that region — the youth of the spirit, with the constant flow of enthusiasm, the touch of simple, ever-living beauty, and the whole magic of vision. No one with imagination can ever become blasé, perhaps need ever grow old in the true sense.

  By this means he might at last turn his accumulated stores to some useful account. The great geysers of imagination that dry up too soon with the majority might keep bubbling for ever; and provided the pipes kept open for smaller visions, they might with time become channels for inspiration of a still higher order. His audience might grow too.

  ‘I’m getting on,’ he observed to Nixie a few days later; ‘getting on pretty well for an old man!’

  ‘I knew you would,’ she replied approvingly. ‘Only you wasted a lot of time over it. When you came you were so old that Toby thought you were going to die, you know.’

  ‘So bad as all that, was it?’

  ‘H’mmmmm,’ she nodded, her blue eyes faintly troubled; ‘quite!’

  Paul took her on his knee and stared at her. The world of elemental wonder came quite close. There was something of magic about the atmosphere of this child’s presence that made it possible to believe anything and everything. She embodied exquisitely so many of his dreams — those dreams of God and Nature he had lived with all those lonely years in Canadian solitudes.

  ‘You know, I think,’ he said slowly as he watched with delight the look of tender affection upon her face, ‘that, without knowing it, you’re something of a little magician, Nixie. What do you think?’

  But she only laughed and wriggled on his knee.

  ‘Am I really?’ she said presently. ‘Then what are you, I wonder?’

  ‘I used to be a Wood Cruiser,’ he replied gravely; ‘but what I am now it’s rather difficult to say. You ought to know,’ he added, ‘as you’re the magician who’s changing me.’

  ‘I’ve not changed you,’ she laughed. ‘I only found you out. The day you came I saw you were simply full of our things — and that you’d be a sort of Daddy to us. And we shall want a lot more Aventures, please, as soon as ever you can write them out—’

  She was off his knee and half-way to the house the same second, for the voice of Mlle. Fleury was heard in the land. He watched her flitting through the patches of sunshine across the lawn, and caught the mischievous glance she turned to throw at him as she disappeared through the open French window — a vision of white dress, black legs, and flying hair. And only when she was gone did his heavier machinery get to work with the crop of questions he always thought of too late.

  ‘A beginning, at any rate!’ he said to himself, thinking of all the things he was going to write for them. ‘Only I wish we were all in camp out there among the cedars and hemlocks on Beaver Creek, instead of boxed up in this toy garden where there are no wild animals, and you mayn’t cut down trees for a big fire, and there are silly little Notice Boards all over the place about trespassers being prosecuted...’

  The thought touched something in the centre of his being. He travelled; laughing and sighing as he went. ‘My wig!’ he thought aloud, ‘but it’s really extraordinary how that child brings those big places over here for me, and makes them seem alive with all kinds of things I could never have dreamed of — alone!’

  ‘Paul, dear, what are you thinking about, here all by yourself — and without a hat on too, as usual? If the gardeners hear you talking aloud like this they will think — ! Well, I hardly know quite what they will think!’

  ‘Something Blake said — to be honest,’ he laughed, turning to his sister who had come silently down the path, dressed, as on the day he had first seen her, in white serge with a big flower-hat. Languid she looked, but delicate and wholly charming; she wore brown garden gauntlets over hands and wrists, and a red parasol she held aloft, shed a becoming pink glow upon her face.

  ‘Maurice Blake!’ she exclaimed. ‘Joan’s cousin with the big farm on the Downs? But you don’t know him!’

  ‘Not that Blake,’ he laughed again; ‘and Joan, if you mean Joan Nicholson, Dick’s niece who took up that rescue work, or something, in London, I have never seen
in my life.’

  ‘Then it’s a book you mean — one of those books you are always poring over in the library,’ she murmured half reproachfully.

  ‘One of Dick’s books, yes,’ he replied gently, linking his arm through hers and leading the way in the direction of the cedars. ‘One of my “treasures,”’ he added slyly, ‘that you once shamelessly imagined to be in petticoats.’

  She rather liked his teasing. The interests they shared were uncommonly small, perhaps, and the coinage of available words still smaller. Yet their differences never took on the slightest ‘edge.’ A genuine affection smoothed all their little talks.

  ‘You do read such funny old books, Paul,’ she observed, as though somewhere in her heart lurked a vague desire to make him more modern. ‘Don’t you ever try books of the day — novels, for instance?’ She had one under her arm at the moment. He took it to carry for her.

  ‘I have tried,’ he admitted, a little ashamed of his backwardness, ‘but I never can make out what they’re driving at — half the time. What they described has never happened to me, or come into my world. I don’t recognise it all as true, I mean—’ He stopped abruptly for fear he might say something to wound her.

  ‘One can always learn, though, and widen one’s world, can’t one? After all, we are all in the same world, aren’t we?’

  He realised the impossibility of correcting her; the invitation to be sententious could not catch him; his nature was too profound to contain the prig.

  ‘Are we?’ he said gently.

  ‘Oh, I think so — more or less, Paul. There’s only one nice world, at least.’ She arranged her hat and parasol to keep the sun off, for she was afraid of the sun, even the shy sun of England.

  He pulled out the deck chair for her, and opened it.

  ‘Here,’ she said pointing, ‘if you don’t mind, dear; or perhaps over there where it looks drier; or just there under that tree, perhaps, is better still. It’s more sheltered, and there’s less sun, isn’t there?’