Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  She returned his gaze with an expression of grave, almost contemptuous surprise, tossing her hair back impatiently with a jerk from her face. She had finally established the kittens, Zezette and Sambo, in a sleepy heap just where she wanted them on the top of the squirrel’s cage.

  ‘But, Uncle,’ she exclaimed, ‘between yesserdayantomorrow you can meet people even after they’ve gone altogether. So America wouldn’t have been difficult. How can you think such things?’

  Not knowing exactly how it was he could think such things, Paul made no immediate reply.

  ‘Anyhow,’ she resumed, ‘it didn’t take long once you were here. We saw in a second in the drawingroom what you were — the day you arrived.’

  ‘But I acted so well! I’m sure now I behaved—’

  ‘You behaved just like Jonah,’ she interrupted him with swift decision, ‘ — only bigger!’

  Paul laughed to himself. His inquisitor shot across the room to establish Pouf, another kitten, on the piano top. She moved lightly, with a dancing motion that flung her hair behind her through the air, again producing the effect of a sunlight gleam. Paul continued to destroy the table with his blunt penknife, chuckling inwardly at the figure he must have cut that summer afternoon in the ‘drawinroom’ I before these mercilessly observant eyes.

  ‘You stood about shyly just like him and Toby — in lumps,’ she went on presently, ‘saying things in a sudden, jerky way—’

  ‘In lumps!’ cried Paul. ‘That’s a nice way to talk to your Uncle!’

  Nixie burst out laughing. ‘Oh, I don’t mean that quite,’ she explained; ‘but you stood about as if you found it hard to balance, and were afraid to move off the mat. Just as Jonah does at a party when he’s shy. I copied you exactly when I got upstairs.’

  ‘Did I indeed? Did you indeed, I mean?’ said he, wondering whether he ought to feel offended or pleased at the picture.

  ‘Yes, rather,’ declared the child emphatically, darting up with Pouf who had definitely rejected the top of the piano, and planting it on the table under his nose, where it immediately sat down, purring loudly and staring into his face. ‘I should think you did! You see, Pouf says so too; he’s purring his agreement. Listen to him! That’s fur language.’

  He listened as he was bid, gazing first into the green eyes of the kitten that opened so wide they seemed to have no lids at all, and then into the mischievous blue eyes of his other tormentor. He decided that on the whole he felt pleased.

  ‘Then I wasted a lot of time,’ he observed presently, ‘about joining, I mean — coming into your world.’

  ‘H’mmmrn, you did.’

  ‘Only, remember, you were all very young when I was in America, weren’t you?’ he added by way of excuse.

  Nixie nodded her head approvingly.

  ‘And you, I expect,’ she replied thoughtfully, ‘were too hard then. I hadn’t thought of that. You might never have squeezed through the Crack, mightn’t you? You’re much softer now,’ she decided after a second’s reflection, ‘ever so much softer!’

  ‘I have improved, I think,’ he admitted, blushing like a pleased schoolboy. ‘I am decidedly softer!’

  He made a violent dig with his penknife, breaking down the hard barrier between two ditches, whereupon Pouf, thinking the resultant splinter was a plaything specially contrived for its happiness, opened its eyes wider than ever, and stretched out a paw that looked huge compared with the splinter and the penknife. Paul put the weapon away, and Pouf fixed its eyes intently on the pocket where it had vanished, leaving its paw absent-mindedly lying on the splinter which it had already wholly forgotten. It purred louder than ever, trying to give the impression that it was really a big cat.

  Outside the rain fell softly. A blue-bottle buzzed noisily about the room, banging the ceiling and the walls as though it were exceedingly angry. Through the open window floated the smell of the English garden soaked in rain, odours of soused trees and lawns, and wet air — exquisitely fragrant.

  A hush fell over the room; only the purring of the kittens broke it. Paul thought it was the most soothing sound in the whole world; something began to purr within himself. His head, and Nixie’s head, and little Pouf’s head — all lay very close together over that schoolroom table, each full of its own busy dreams. These queer, gentle talks with the child were very delightful to him, all his shyness and self-consciousness gone, and the spirit of true wonder, simple and profound, awake in his heart.

  Together, for a long time, they listened in silence to these sounds of purring and breathing and the murmur of rain falling outside: deep, velvety breathing it was, almost inaudible. Everything in, life, Paul caught himself reflecting, tragedy or comedy, goes on against a background of this deep, hidden, purring sound of life. Breathing is the first manifestation of life; it is the music of the world, the soft, continuous hum of existence. His thoughts travelled far....

  ‘Yes, on the whole,’ he muttered at length inconsequently, ‘I think I may consider myself softer than before — kinder, gentler, more alive!’

  But neither Nixie, nor Pouf, nor, for that matter, Sambo and Zezette either, paid the smallest attention to his remark; he was soon lost again in further reflections.

  It was the child’s voice that presently recalled him.

  ‘Uncle Paul,’ she said very softly, her mind still busy with thoughts of her own, ‘do you know that sometimes I have heard the earth breathing too — akchilly breathing?’

  Paul, coming back from a long journey, turned and gazed at the eager little face beside him in silence.

  ‘The earth is alive, I’m sure,’ she went on with an air of great mystery. ‘It breathes and whispers, and even purrs; sometimes it cries. It’s a great body, alive — just like you and the other stars—’

  ‘Nixie!’

  ‘They are all bodies, though; heavenly bodies, Daddy called them. Only we, I suppose, are too small to see it that way perhaps.’

  Paul listened, stroking Pouf slowly. The child’s voice was low and somewhat breathless with the excitement of what she was saying. She believed every word of it intensely. Only a very small part of what she was thinking found expression in her words. Her ideas beckoned her beyond; and mere words could not overtake them at her age.

  ‘The earth,’ she went on, seeing that he did not laugh, ‘is somebody’s big round body rolling down the sky. It simply must be. Daddy always said that a fly settling on our bodies didn’t know we were alive, so we can’t understand that the earth is alive either. Only I know it. Oh!’ she cried out with sudden enthusiasm, ‘how I would love to hear its real out-loud voice. What a t’riffic roar it must be.

  I only wish my ears were further—’

  ‘Sharper, you mean.’ — .

  ‘But, all the same, I have heard it breathing,’ she added more quietly, lifting Pouf suddenly and wrapping its sleeping body round her neck like a boa, ‘just like this.’ She put her head on one side, so that her cheek was against the kitten’s lips, and the faint stream of its breathing tickled her ear. ‘Only the breathing of the earth is much, ever so much, longer and deeper. It’s whole months long.’ Paul was listening now with his undivided attention. He was being admitted to the very heart of an imaginative child’s world, and the knowledge of it charmed him inexpressibly. His eyes were almost as bright, his cheeks as pink with excitement, as her own. Only he must be very careful indeed. The least mistake on his part would close the door.

  ‘Months, Nixie?’

  ‘Oh, yes, a single breath is months long,’ she whispered, her eyes growing in size, and darkening with wonder and awe. ‘Pouf lies on me and breathes twice to my once, but I breathe millions of times — ever so many millions — as I lie on the earth’s body.

  And it breathes in and out just as Pouf and I do. Winter is breathing in, and summer is breathing out, you see.’

  ‘So the equinoctial gales are the changes from one breath to the other?’ he put in gravely.

  ‘I hadn’t thought about the —
the gales,’ she said, putting her face closer and lowering her voice, ‘but I know that in the summer I often hear the earth breathing out— ‘specially on still warm nights when everything lies awake and listens for it.’

  ‘Then do “Things” really listen as we do?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Not ‘xactly as we do. We only listen in one place — our ears. They listen all over. But they’re alive just the same, though so much quieter. Oh, Uncle Paul, everything is alive; everything, I know it!’ She fixed a searching look on him. ‘You knew that, didn’t you?’

  There was a trace of real surprise and disappointment in her voice.

  ‘Well,’ he answered truthfully, ‘I had often and often thought about it, and wondered sometimes — whether—’

  But the child interrupted him almost imperiously. He realised sharply how the knowledge that the years bring — little, exact, precise knowledge — may kill the dreams of the naked soul, yet give nothing in their place but dust and ashes. And, by the same token, he recognised that his own heart was still untouched, unspoiled. The blood leaped and ran within him at the thought.

  ‘The winds, too, are alive,’ — she spoke with a solemn excitement that made her delicate face flush as though a white fire glowed suddenly beneath the skin and behind the charming eyes—’ they run about, and sleep, and sing, and are full of voices. The wind has hundreds of voices — just like insects with such a lot of eyes.’ (Even her strange simile did not make him smile, so real was the belief and enthusiasm of her words.) ‘We (with scorn) have only one voice; but the wind can laugh and cry at the same time!’

  ‘I’ve heard it,’ he put in, secretly thrilled.

  ‘I know its angry voice as well as its pretended-angry voice, when it’s very loud but means nothing in particular. Its baby-voice, when it comes through the keyhole at night, or down the chimney, or just outside the window in the early morning, and tells me all its little very-wonderful-indeed aventures, makes me so happy I want to cry and laugh at once.’

  She paused a moment for breath, dimly conscious, perhaps, that her description was somewhat confused. Her excitement somehow communicated itself to Pouf at the same time, for the kitten suddenly rose up with an arched back and indulged in a yawn that would have cracked the jaws of any self-respecting creature. After a prolonged stare at Paul, it proceeded inconsequently to wash itself with an air that plainly said, ‘You won’t catch me napping again. I want to hear this too.’

  Paul, meanwhile, stared at the child beside him, thinking that the gold-dust on her hair must surely come from her tumbling journeys among the stars, and wondering if she understood how deeply she saw into the heart of things with those dreamy blue eyes of hers.

  ‘Listen, Nixie, you fairy-child, and I’ll tell you something,’ he said gently, ‘something you will like very much’; and, while she waited and held her breath, he whispered softly in her ear:

  Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

  The soul that rises in us, our life’s star

  Hath had elsewhere its setting,

  And cometh from afar:

  Not in entire forgetfulness,

  And not in utter nakedness,

  But trailing clouds of glory do we come

  From God who is our home:

  CHAPTER XVII

  And snatches of thee everywhere

  Make little heavens throughout a day.

  ALICE METNELL.

  ‘That’s very pretty, I think,’ she said politely, staring at him, with a little smile, half puzzled. The music of the words had touched her, but she evidently did not grasp why he should have said it. She waited a minute to see if he had really finished, and then went on again with her own vein of thought.

  ‘Then please tell me, Uncle,’ she asked gravely, with deep earnestness, ‘what is it people lose when they grow up?’

  And he answered her with equal gravity, speaking seriously as though the little body at his side were habited by an old, discriminating soul.

  ‘Simplicity, I think, principally — and vision,’ he said. ‘They get wise with so many little details called facts that they lose the great view.’

  The child watched his face, trying to understand. After a pause she came back to her own thinking — the sphere where she felt sure of herself.

  ‘They never see things properly once they’re grown up,’ she said sadly. ‘They all walk into a fog, I believe, that hides all the things we know, and stuffs up their eyes and ears. Daddy called it the cotton-wool of age, you know. Oh, Uncle, I do hope,’ she cried with the sudden passion of the child, ‘I do hope I shall never, never get into that horrid fog. You haven’t, and I won’t, won’t, won’t!’ Her voice rose to a genuine cry. Then she added with a touch of child-wonder that followed quite naturally upon the outburst, ‘How did you ever stop yourself, I wonder!’

  ‘I lived with the fairies in the backwoods,’ he answered, laughing softly.

  She stared at him with complete admiration in her blue eyes.

  ‘Then I shall grow up ‘xactly like you,’ she said, ‘so that I can always get out of the cage just as you do, even if my body is big.’

  ‘Every one’s thin somewhere,’ Paul said, remembering her own explanation. ‘And the Crack into Yesterday and To-morrow is always close by when it’s wanted. That’s the real way of escape.’ She clapped her hands and danced, shaking her hair out in a cloud and laughing with happiness. Paul took her in his arms and kissed her. With a gesture of exquisite dignity, such as animals show when they resent human interference, the child tumbled back into her chair by the table, an expression of polite boredom — though the faintest imaginable — in her eyes. Many a time had he seen the kittens behave exactly in the same way.

  ‘But how do you know all these things, Nixie, and where do all your ideas come from?’ he asked.

  ‘They just come to me when I’m thinking of nothing in particular. They float into my head of their own accord like ships, little fairy ships, I suppose. And I think,’ she added dreamily after a moment’s pause, ‘some of them are trees and flowers whispering to me.’ She put her face close to his own across the table, staring, into his very brain with her shining eyes. ‘Don’t you think so too, Uncle?’

  ‘I think I do,’ he answered honestly.

  ‘Though some of the things I hear,’ she went on, ‘I don’t understand till a long time afterwards.’

  ‘What kind of things, for instance?’

  She hesitated, answering slowly after a pause: ‘Things like streams, and the dripping of rain, and the rustling of wet leaves, perhaps. At the time I only hear the noise they make, but afterwards, when I’m alone, doing nothing, it all falls into words and stories — all sorts of lovely things, but very hard to remember, of course.’

  She broke off and smiled up into his face with a charm that he could never have put into words.

  ‘You’ll grow up a poet, Nixie,’ he said.

  ‘Shall I really? But I could never find the rhymes — simply never.’

  ‘Some never do,’ he answered; ‘and some — the majority, I think — never find the words even!’

  ‘Oh, how dreadful!’ she exclaimed, her face clouding with a pain she could fully understand. ‘Poets who can’t talk at all. I should think they would burst.’

  ‘Some of them nearly do,’ he exclaimed, hiding a smile; ‘they get very queer indeed, these poor poets who cannot express themselves. I have known one or two.’

  ‘Have you? Oh, Uncle Paul!’ Her tone expressed all the solemn sympathy the world could hold.

  He nodded his head mysteriously.

  The child suddenly sat up very erect. An idea of importance had come into her head.

  ‘Then I wonder if Pouf and Smoke, and Zezette and Mrs. Tompkyns are like that,’ she cried, her face grave as a hanging judge—’ poets who can’t express themselves, and may burst and get queer! Because they understand all that sort of thing — scuttling leaves and dew falling, and tickling grasses and the dreams of beetie
s, and things we never hear at all. P’raps that’s why they lie and listen and think for such ages and ages. I never thought of that before.’

  ‘It’s quite likely,’ he replied with equal solemnity.

  Nixie sprang to her feet and flew round the room from chair to chair, hugging in turn each kitten, and asking it with a passionate earnestness that was very disturbing to its immediate comfort in life: ‘Tell me, Pouf, Smoke, Sambo, this instant! Are you all furry little poets who can’t tell all your little furry poems? Are you, are you, ARE YOU?’

  She kissed each one in turn. ‘Are you going to burst and get queer?’ She shook them all till, mightily offended, they left their thrones and took cover sedately under tables and sofas well out of reach of this intimate and public cross-examination. And there they sat, looking straight before them, as though no one else existed in the entire world.

  ‘I believe they are, Uncle.’

  A silence fell between them. Under the furniture, safe in their dark corners, the cats began to purr again. Paul got up and strolled to the open window that looked out across lawns and shrubberies to the fringe of oaks and elms that marked the distant hayfields. The rain still fell gently, silently — a fine, scented, melancholy rain; the rain of a minor key. Tinged with a hundred delicate odours from fields and trees — ghostly perfumes far more subtle than the perfumes of flowers — the air seemed to brush the surface of his soul, dropping its fragrance down into his heart like the close presence of remembered friends.

  The evening mode invaded him softly, soothingly; and out of it, in some way he scarcely understood, crept something that brought a vague disquiet in its train. A little timid thought stole to the threshold of his heart and knocked gently upon the door of its very inmost chamber. And the sound of the knocking, faint and muffled though it was, woke echoes in this secret chamber that proclaimed in a tone of reproach, if not almost of warning, that it was still empty and unfurnished. A deep, infinite yearning, and a yearning that was new, stirred within him, then suddenly rose to the surface of his mind like a voice calling to him from far away out of mist and darkness.