The land became mapped out and known with an intimacy that must seem little short of marvellous to those who have never even dreamed of the existence of so fair a country. For, the truth was, his Companion, who was now his guide and leader, had suddenly revealed herself.
It came about a few days after the funeral — when the emptiness and hush of sorrow that lay over the house found its exact spiritual correspondence in the silence and sense of desolation that filled his own heart. He was in his bedroom, battling with that loneliness in loneliness which at the first had threatened to overwhelm him. He had just left his sister’s side, having soothed her with what comfort he could into the sleep of weariness and exhaustion. By the open window, as so often before, he stood, staring into the damp winter night. Smoke moved restlessly to and fro behind him, sometimes sitting down to wash, sometimes jumping on the bed and sofa as though to search for something it could never find. Mrs. Tompkyns, who had scratched at the door a few minutes before, for the first time in her life, and for reasons known to none but herself and her black companion, lay at last curled up before the fire.
The room was filled with a soft presence, once silvery and fragrant, but now draped with the newly woven shadows that rendered it invisible. The invasion was irresistible. His heart ached. He knew quite well that his own soul, too, was being measured for its garment of shadow — garment that, unlike ordinary clothes, fits better and closer with every year. He was in that dangerous mood when such measurements are made only too easily, and the lassitude of grief accepts the trying-on with a kind of soft, almost pleasurable, acquiescence — when, sharply and suddenly, a sound was audible outside the window that instantly galvanised him into a state of resistance. The night, hitherto still as the grave, sighed in response to a rising wind. And through his being at the same moment ran the answering little Wind of Inspiration some one had taught him to find always when he sought it.
And the sound brought comfort. It was as though an invisible hand had reached down inside him and touched the source of joy!
Paul turned quickly. Mrs. Tompkyns was awake on the mat. Smoke rubbed against his legs. On the table, where he had spread them a few minutes before, were the black tie, the mended socks, the unused bottle for nettle stings and scratches, and beside them the faded spray of birch leaves, now withered and shrivelled. And, as he looked, the wind entered the room behind him, and he saw that the brown branch turned half over towards him. It rattled faintly as it moved. He was just in time to rescue it from Smoke, who saw in the sound and movement an invitation to play. He pinned it out of reach upon the wall over the mantelpiece.
And it was just as he finished, that this sound of wind sighing through the dripping and leafless trees outside was followed by another sound — one that he recognised.... There was a rush and a leap, a swift, whistling roar — and the next second he found himself among the sunny fields of flowers that he knew, and heard the water lapping at his feet... through the Crack!
‘Everybody’s thin somewhere,’ was what he almost expected to hear; but what he did hear was another sentence, followed by merry and delicious laughter:
‘Everybody can be happy somewhere!’
And close in front of him, rising, it seemed, out of the reeds and waves and yellow sands, stood — that veiled Companion whom he knew to be a part of himself.
She was turned away from him so that he could not see her face, yet he instantly divined a movement of her whole body towards him. Something within himself rushed out to meet her halfway. His life stirred mightily. The thrill of discovery came close. The next second his arms were about her and she was looking straight into his eyes.
But her own eyes were no longer veiled; her laughing face was clear as the day; the figure that he held so close was Nixie, child and woman. If ever it can be possible for two beings to melt into one, it was possible then. Each possessed the other; each slipped into the other.
‘Face to face at last!’ he heard himself cry. ‘Bless your little fairy heart! Why in the world didn’t I guess you sooner?’
A flame of happiness sped through him, and grief ran away utterly. The sense of loss that had numbed his soul vanished. And when she only answered him by the old mischievous laughter, he asked again: ‘But how did you disguise yourself so well — your voice, and everything — ?
Even if your face was veiled I ought to have recognised you! It’s too wonderful!’
‘It was you who disguised me!’ she replied, standing up close in front of him, and playing with his waistcoat buttons as of old. ‘Your thoughts about me got twisted — sometimes. You thought too much. You should have felt only.’
‘They never shall again,’ he exclaimed.
‘They never can. We are face to face now.’
Paul turned to look again more closely. He saw her with extraordinary detail and vividness. It was indeed Nixie, but Nixie exactly as he had always wanted her, without quite knowing it himself; at least, without acknowledging it. No gulf of age was there to separate them now. She was the perfect Companion, for he had made her so. He smoothed her hair as they turned to walk by the river, and he caught the old childish perfume of it as it spread untidily over his shoulder, her eyes like dropped stars shining through it.
‘Isn’t it awfully jolly?’ she whispered: ‘we can have twice as many aventures now, and you can go on writing them for Jonah and Toby just the same as before, only faster.’
He felt her hand steal into his; his heart became most strangely merged with hers. He had known a similar experience in Canadian forests, when the beauty of Nature had sometimes caught him up till he scarcely felt himself distinct enough from it to realise that he was separate. He now knew himself as close to her as that. It was exquisite and yet so simple that a little child might have felt it — without perplexity. Perhaps it was precisely what children always did feel towards what they loved, animate or inanimate.
‘But how is it you can come so close?’ he asked, though he fancied that he thought, rather than spoke, the question.
‘Because, in the important sense, you are still a child,’ he caught the answer, ‘and always have been, and always will be.’
The whole world belonged to him. In the midst of the sea of sorrow he had discovered the little island of happiness.
‘We never can lose each other — now!’ he said.
‘As long as you think about me,’ she answered. ‘Please always think hard, veryhardindeed thoughts. Through the Crack you can find everything that’s lost — .’
‘ And we’re through the Crack now.’
‘Rather!’
CHAPTER XXVII
.... Straightway I was ‘ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,
‘Guess now who holds thee?’— ‘Death,’ I said.
But there The silver answer rang— ‘Not Death, but Love.’
E. B. B.
.... It was only when the sky grew dark and the shadow of clouds fell over that sunny landscape that he realised he was still standing half dressed beside a dying fire, and that through the open window behind him the cold night air brought discomfort that made him shiver. He drew the curtains, lit a candle, spoke a soft word or two to the curled-up forms of Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke, who were far too busy in their own Crack-land to trouble about replying, and so finally got into bed.
He felt happier, strangely comforted. The wings of memory and phantasy, withdrawing softly, left a soothed feeling in his heart. In that region of creative imagination known as the ‘Crack’ he always found peace and at least a measure of joy. Until sleep should come to captain his forces, he deliberately turned the current of his thoughts to the work he was about to take up in London. Nixie, Joan, Dick — all helped him. His will erected an iron barrier against the insidious attacks of sadness — the disease which strikes at the roots of effort. He would dream his dreams, but also, he woul
d do his work....
The shadows thickened about the house, crowding from the heart of winter. The fire died down. The room lay still. It was between one and two o’clock in the morning, when silence in the country is a real silence, and the darkness weighs. Chasing Smoke and Mrs. Tompkyns down the winding corridors of dream — Paul slept.
A faint sound in the room a little later made him stir in his sleep and smile. His lips moved, as though in that land of dreams where he wandered some one spoke to him and he answered. Then the sound was repeated, and he woke with a start, sat up in bed, and stared hard into the darkness.
The fire was quite out; nothing was visible but the dim frame of the window on his right where he had forgotten to draw the curtains. A glimmer of light revealed the sash. Thinking it must be the winter dawn, he was about to lie down again and resume his slumbers, when the sound that had first wakened him again made itself audible.
A slight shiver ran down his spine, for the sound seemed to bring over some of the wonder of his dreams into that dark and empty room. Then, with a tiny revelation of certainty, the knowledge came that he was wide awake, and that the sound was close in front of him. Moreover, he knew at once that it was neither Smoke nor Mrs. Tompkyns. It was a sound, deliberately produced, with conscious intelligence behind it. And it shot through him with the sweetness of music. It was like a breath of wind that rustled through a swinging branch — of a birch tree; as though such a branch waved to and fro softly above his head.
His first idea was that some one was in the room, and had taken down the spray of withered leaves from the wall; and he strained his eyes in the direction of the mantelpiece, trying to pierce the darkness. In vain, of course. All he could distinguish was that something moved gently to and fro like a spot of light — almost like a fire-fly, yet white — about the room.
From some deep region of sleep where he had just been, the atmosphere of dream was still, perhaps, about him. Yet this was no dream. There was somebody in the room with him, somebody alive, somebody who wished to claim his attention — who had already spoken to him before he woke. He knew it unmistakably; he even remembered what had been said to him while yet asleep! ‘How can you go on sleeping when I am here, trying to get at you?’
It was just as if the words still trembled on the air. Confusedly, scarcely aware what he did, yet already thrilling with happiness, his lips formed an answer:
‘Who are you? What is it you want?’
There was a pause of intense silence, during which his heart hammered in his temples. Then a very faint whisper gathered through the darkness:
‘I promised....’
The point of light wavered a little in the air, then came low and seemed to settle on the end of the bed. Into the clear and silent spaces of his lonely soul there swam with it the presence of some one who had never died, and who could never die.
‘Is that you — ?’ The name seemed incredible, for this was no Adventure through the Crack, yet he uttered it after an imperceptible moment of hesitation— ‘Nixie?’
Even then he could not believe an answer would be forthcoming. The light, however, moved slightly, and again came the faint tones of a voice, a singing voice:
‘Of course it is!’ There was a curious suggestion of huge distance about it, as though it travelled like an echo across vast spaces. ‘I’m here, close beside you; closer than ever before.’
He heard the words with what can only be described as a spiritual sensation — the peace and gratitude that follow the passion of strong prayer, of prayer that believes it will be heard and answered.
‘You know now — don’t you?’ continued the tiny singing voice, ‘because I’ve told you.’
‘Yes,’ he answered, also very low, ‘I know now.’ For at first he could think of nothing else to say. A huge excitement moved in him. Those invisible links of pure aspiration by which the soul knits herself inwardly to God seemed suddenly tightened in the depths of his being. He understood that this was a true thing, and possible.
‘You’ve come back — like the trees in the spring,’ he whispered stammeringly, after another pause, gazing as steadily as he could at the point of clear light so close in front of him.
‘The real part of me,’ she explained; ‘the real part of me has come back.’
‘The real part,’ he echoed in his bewilderment. He began to understand.
But even then it all seemed too utterly strange and wonderful to be true; and a subtle confirmation of the child’s presence that followed immediately only added at first to his increasing amazement. For both Smoke and Mrs. Tompkyns, he became aware, had jumped up softly upon the foot of the bed, and were sitting there, purring loudly with pleasure, close beneath the fleck of light. And their action made him seek the further confirmation of his own senses. He leaned forwards, hesitating in his bewilderment between the desire to find the matches and the desire to touch the speaker with his hands.
But even in that darkness his intention was divined instantly. The light slid away like a wee torch carried on wings.
‘No, Uncle Paul,’ whispered the voice farther off, ‘not the matches. Light makes it more difficult for me.’ He sank back against the pillows, frightened at the reality of it all. The old familiar name, too, ‘Uncle Paul,’ was almost more than he could bear.
‘Nixie — !’ he stammered, and then found it impossible to finish the sentence.
Then she laughed. He heard her silvery laughter in the room, exactly as he had heard it a hundred times before, spontaneous, mischievous, and absolutely natural. She was amused at his perplexity, at his want of faith; at the absurd difficulty he found in believing. He lay quite still, breathing hard, wondering what would come next; still trying to persuade himself it was all a dream, yet growing gradually convinced in spite of himself that it was not.
‘And don’t come too near me,’ he heard her voice across the room. ‘Never try and touch me, I mean. Think of me at your centre. That’s the real way to get near.’
Very slowly then, after that, he began to accept the Supreme Adventure. He talked. He asked questions, though never the obvious and detailed sort of questions it might have been expected he would ask. For it was now borne in upon him, as she said, that only her real part had come back, and that only his real part, therefore, was in touch with her. It was, so to speak, a colloquy of souls in which physical and material things had no interest. His very first question brought the truth of this home to him with singular directness. He asked her what the tiny light was that he saw moving to and fro like a little torch.
‘But I didn’t know there was a light,’ she answered. ‘Where I am it is all light! I see you perfectly. Only — you look so young, Uncle Paul! Just like a boy! About my own age, I mean.’
And it is impossible to describe the delight, the mystical rapture that came to him as he heard her. The words, ‘Where I am it is all light,’ brought with them a sudden sense of reality that was too convincing for him to doubt any longer. From her simple description he recognised a place that he knew. But, at the same time, he understood that it was no place in the ordinary sense of the word, but rather a state and a condition. He himself in his deepest dreams had been there too. That light had sometimes in brief moments of aspiration shone for him. And the curious sense of immense distance that came so curiously with her tiny voice came because there was really no distance at all. She was no longer conditioned by space or time. Those were limitations of life in the body, temporary scales of measurement adopted by the soul when dealing with temporary things. Whereas Nixie was free.
A sense of happiness deep as the sea, of peace, bliss, and perfect rest that could never know hurry or alarm, surged through him in a tide. He thought, with a thrill of anticipation, of the time when his own eyes would be opened, and he should see as clearly as she did. But instantly the rebuke came.
‘Oh! You must not think about that/ she said with a laugh; ‘you have a lot to do first, a lot more aventures to go through!’
; As she spoke the light slid nearer again and settled upon the foot of the bed. His thoughts were evidently the same as spoken words to her. She knew all that passed in his mind, the very feelings of his heart as well. This was indeed companionship and intimacy. He remembered how she had told him all about it in the Crack weeks ago, before he realised who she was, and before he knew her face to face. And at the same moment he noticed another curious detail of her presence, namely, that the little torch — for so he now called it to himself — in passing before the mirror produced no reflection in the glass. Yet, if his eyes could perceive it, there ought to have been a refraction from the mirror as well — a reflection! Did he then only perceive it with his interior vision? Was his spiritual sight already partially opened?
‘That’s your ‘terpretation of me — inside yourself,’ he caught her swift whisper in reply, for again she heard his thought; and he almost laughed out aloud with pleasure to notice the long word decapitated as her habit always was on earth. ‘In your thoughts I’m a sort of light, you see.’
The explanation was delightful. He understood perfectly. The thought of Nixie had always come to him, even in earthly life, in the terms of brightness. And his love marvelled to notice, too, that she still had the old piercing vision into the heart of things, and the characteristically graphic way of expressing her meaning.
The purring of the cats made itself audible. They were both ‘kneading’ the bed-clothes by his feet, as happy as though being stroked.
‘No, they don’t see,’ she explained the moment the thought entered his mind; ‘they only feel that I’m here. Lots of animals are like that. It’s the way dogs know ‘sti’ctively if a person’s good or bad.’ Oh, how the animals after this would knit him to her presence! No wonder he had already found comfort with them that no human being could give.... The thought of his sister flashed next into his brain — the difficulty of helping her —
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 37