Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘I tried to get at her before I came here to you,’ he heard, ‘but her room was all dark. It was like trying to get inside a cloud. She’s cold and shadowy — and ever such a long way off. It’s diff’cult to explain.’

  ‘I think I understand,’ he whispered.

  ‘You can get closer than I can.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Of course. You must.’

  It was Nixie’s happiness that seemed so wonderful and splendid to him. Her voice almost sang; and laughter slipped in between the shortest sentences even. Brightness, music, and pure joy were about her like an atmosphere. He was breathing a rarefied air, cool, scented, and exhilarating. He had already known it when playing with the children and enjoying their very-wonderful-indeed aventures; only now it was raised to a still higher power. In its very essence he knew it.

  ‘Toby and Jonah are with me the moment they sleep,’ she continued, ever following his least thought. ‘The instant their bodies fold up they shoot across here to me. Toby comes easiest. She’s a girl, you see. And Daddy’s here too—’

  ‘Dick?’ he cried, memory and affection surging through him with a sudden passion.

  ‘Of course. You’ve thought about him so much.

  He says you’ve always been close to each other—’

  The voice broke off suddenly, and the torch of light moved to and fro as though agitated. Paul heard no sound, and saw no sign, but again, into the clear and silent spaces of his soul, now opened so marvellously, so blessedly to receive, there swam the consciousness of another Presence...

  There was a long pause, while memory annihilated all the intervening years at a single stroke....

  His mind was growing slightly confused with it all. His mortal intelligence wearied and faltered a little with the effort to understand how time and distance could be thus destroyed. He was not yet free as these others were free.

  ‘How is it, then, that you can stay?’ he asked presently, when the light held steady again. By ‘you’ he meant ‘both of you.’ Yet he did not say it. This was what seemed so wonderful in their perfect communion; words really were not necessary. Afterwards, indeed, he sometimes wondered whether he actually spoke at all.

  ‘I was going on — at first,’ came the soft answer, ‘when I heard something calling me, and found I couldn’t. I had something to do here.’

  ‘What?’ he ventured under his breath.

  ‘You!’ She laughed in his face, so to speak. ‘You, of course. Part of you is in me, so I couldn’t go on without you. But when you are ready, and have done your work, we’ll go on together. Daddy is waiting, too. Oh, it’s simply splendid — a very-splendid-indeed adventure, you see!’ Again she laughed through that darkened room till it seemed filled with white light, and the light flooded his very soul as he heard her.

  ‘You will wait, Nixie?’ he asked.

  ‘I must wait. Both of us must wait. We are all together, you see.’

  And, after another long pause, he asked another question:

  ‘This work, then, that keeps me here — ?’

  ‘Your London boys, of course. There’s no one in the whole world who can do it so well. You’ve been picked out for it; that’s what really brought you home from America!’ And she burst out into such a peal of laughter that Paul laughed with her. He simply couldn’t help himself. He felt like singing at the same time. It was all so happy and reasonable and perfect.

  ‘You’ve got the money and the time and the ‘thusiasm,’ she went on; ‘and over here there are thousands and millions of children all watching you and clapping their hands and dancing for joy. I’ve told them all the Aventures you wrote, but they think this is the best of all — the London-Boys-Adventure!”

  He felt his heart swell within him. It seemed that the child’s hair was again about his eyes, her slender arms clasping his neck, and her blue eyes peering into his as when she begged him of old in the nursery or schoolroom for an adventure, a story.

  ‘So you’ll never give it up, will you, Uncle Paul?’ she sang, in that tiny soft voice through the darkness.

  ‘Never,’ he said.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise,’ he replied.

  The thought of those ‘thousands and millions’ of children watching his work from the other side of death was one that would come back to strengthen him in the future hours of discouragement that he was sure to know.

  And much more she told him besides. They talked, it seemed, for ever — yet said so little. Into mere moments — such was the swift and concentrated nature of their intimacy — they compressed hours of earthly conversation; for his thoughts were heard and answered as soon as born within him, and a whole train of ideas that the lips ordinarily stammer over in difficult detail crowded easily into a single expression — a thought, a desire, a question half uttered, and then a reply that comprehended all. There was no labour or weariness, no sense of effort.

  Moreover, when at length he heard her faint whisper, ‘Now I must go,’ it conveyed no sense of departure or loss. She did not leave him. It was more as though he closed a much-loved book and replaced it in his pocket. The pictures evoked do not leave the mind because the cover is closed; they remain, on the contrary, to be absorbed by the heart Nixie’s silvery presence was in him; he would always feel her now, even when his thoughts seemed busy with outer activities.

  The little torch flickered and was gone; but as Paul gazed into the darkness of the room he knew that the light had merely slipped down deep into himself to burn as an unfailing beacon at the centre of his soul. And then it was that he realised other curious details for the first time. Some of the more ordinary faculties of his mind, it seemed, had been in suspension during the amazing experience, while others had been exalted as in trance. For it now came to him that he had actually seen her — with a clearness that he had never known before. That torch lit up her little form as a lantern lights up a person holding it in darkness. Just as he had felt all the sweet and essential points of her personality, so also he had been vividly aware of her figure in the terms of sight — eyes, hair, sunburned little hands, and twinkling feet. Her very breath and perfume even!

  If the working of his ordinary senses had been in abeyance so that he hardly knew the hunger for common sight and touch, he now realised that it was because they had been replaced by these higher senses with their keener, closer satisfaction. And this intimate knowledge of her was as superior to the ordinary methods as flying is to crawling — or, better still, as a draught of water in the throat is to dipping the fingers in the cup.

  For who, indeed, shall define the standard of reality? And who, when the senses are such sorry reporters, shall declare with authority that one thing is false and could not happen, and another is true and actually did happen?

  Experiences of the transcendental order are, perhaps, beyond the power of precise words to describe, for they are not common enough to have become incorporated into the language of a race. And words are clumsy and inadequate symbols at best. The deepest thoughts, as the deepest experiences, ever evade them. It is difficult to convey the sense of fierce reality the presence of Nixie brought to him. It flooded and covered him; spread through and over him like light; entered into his essential being to cherish and to feed, just as the body assimilates earthly nourishment. He absorbed her. She nourished while she blessed him.

  She had told him the secret: to think centrally. He now began to understand how much nearer he could be to others by thinking strongly of them than by walking at their side. Physical touch is distant compared to the subtle intimacy of the desiring mind. The mystical conception of union with God came home to him as something practically possible.

  Yet when he got up a few minutes later to write down the conversation as he remembered it, the mere lighting of the candle, the noise of the match, the dipping of his pen in the ink — all contrived somehow to bring him down to a lower order of things that dimmed most strangely the memory of what had just passed. Most of w
hat he had heard escaped him. He could not frame it into words. All he could recapture is what has been here set down so briefly and baldly.

  It then seemed to him — the thought laboured to and fro in his mind as he got back into bed and sleep came over him — that it was only the Higher Self in him that had been in communication with the child. The eternal part of him had talked with the eternal part of her. In the body, however, this was commonly submerged. Her presence had temporarily evoked it. It now had returned to its Throne at the core of his being.

  All that he remembered of the colloquy was the little portion that, as it were, had filtered through into his normal self. The rest, the main part, however, was not lost. He had absorbed it. If he could not recall the actual words and language, he understood — it was his last thought before sleep caught him — that its results would remain for ever.

  And those who have known similar experiences will understand without more words. The rest will never understand. Perhaps, after all, the best and purest form of memory is — results.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  .... Ne son già morto; e ben ch’albergo cangi, resto in te vivo, ch’ or mi ved i e piangi, se l’un neir altro amante si trasforma.

  AND one of the clearest impressions that remained next morning when he woke was that he had actually seen her. The reality of it increased with the daylight instead of faded. While he dressed he sang to himself, until it occurred to him that his signs of joy might be misunderstood by any of the household who heard; and then he stopped singing and moved about the room, smiling and contented.

  Something of the radiance of that little white torch still seemed in the air. The heavy gloom of the chill December morning could not smother it. Something of it remained too about him all day like a halo; looking out of his eyes; communicable, as it were, from the very surface of his skin to all with whom he came in contact. His sister, especially, and the children felt the comfort of his presence. They followed him about from room to room; they clung close; they were instinctively aware that peace and strength emanated from him, though little guessing the real source of his serene and tranquil atmosphere.

  For, of course, he told no one of what had happened. During the day, indeed, it lay in him submerged and unassertive, like the presence of some great glowing secret, feeding the sources of energy for all his little outward duties and activities, yet never claiming individual attention itself. Only with the fall of night, when the doings of the day were instinctively laid aside like a garment no longer required, did it again swim up upon him out of the depths, and speak.

  ‘Now!’ he heard the tiny singing voice, ‘we can be alone. Your body’s tired. I can get closer to you.’

  ‘I’ve felt you by me all day, though,’ he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘Of course,’ came the answering whisper, soft as moonlight, ‘because I never left you for a single moment. I was in everything you did — in your very words. Once or twice, I even got into mother too, through you, and made her feel better. Wasn’t that splendid?’

  Paul longed to give the child one of his old hugs — to feel her little warm and sunny body pressed against his own. Instead, her laughter echoed suddenly all about the room.

  ‘That’s impossible now!’ he heard. ‘I’m ever so much closer this way. You’ll soon get used to it, you know!’

  This spontaneous laughter was the music to which all their talks were set. He laughed too, and blew the candles out.

  ‘I tried very hard to say the true things,’ he murmured, referring to her remark about comforting his sister.

  ‘I know you did. That’s how I got into her — through you. You must go on and on trying. In the end we’ll get her all soft and happy again. She’ll feel me without knowing it.’

  Suddenly it struck him that, although the room was dark, he did not see the light of the little torch as before. He missed it. He was just going to ask why it was absent when the child caught his thought and replied of her own accord:

  ‘Because it’s spread all over now, instead of being just a point. You are in it, I mean. There’s light everywhere about you now, and I see you much clearer than last time.’

  The explanation described exactly what he felt himself.

  ‘Let them in, please,’ Nixie suddenly interrupted his thoughts again. ‘They’re both coming up the stairs. It was very naughty of you to forget them, you know.’

  After a moment of puzzled hesitation he understood what she meant, and was out of bed and across the floor. He did not wait to light a candle, but opened the door and stood there waiting in the darkness. Almost at once two soft, furry things brushed past his feet as Smoke, followed by Mrs. Tompkyns, marched into the room, uttering that curious sharp sound of pleasure which is something between a purr and a cry. They disappeared among the shadows beyond the fireplace, and Paul sprang back into bed again pleased that they were there, yet annoyed with himself for having forgotten them.

  ‘But it was my fault really,’ she laughed. ‘I’ve been with them out in the garden, and they’ve only just got in through the pantry window. My presence excites them awfully. Oh, it’s all right,’ she added quickly, in reply to his further thought; ‘Barker’s very late to-night doing the silver. But he’ll shut the window before he goes.’

  It was his turn to laugh. She had caught his thought about the window almost before it reached the surface of his mind. Moreover, he found that both Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke had very cold wet soles under their padded little feet.

  In this way, most strangely, sweetly, naturally, even the trivial details of their daily life as they had always known it together, intermingled with the talk that was often very earnest, mystical, and pregnant with meanings. It was in every sense a continuation of their former relationship, touched on her side with a greater knowledge — almost as though she had suddenly developed to the point she might have reached in time upon the earth; on his side, with a delicate sense of accepting guidance from some one with greater privileges than himself, who had come back on purpose to help and inspire him.

  For more and more it seemed to partake of the nature of genuine inspiration. Speech came direct and swift as thought, without hesitation or stammering as in the flesh. She told him many things, often quaintly enough expressed, but that yet seemed to hold the kernel of deep truths. There had never been the least break in their companionship, it seemed.

  ‘I knew all this before,’ she said, after a singular exchange of questions and answers about the nature of communion with invisible sources of mood and feeling, ‘only I suppose my brain had not got big enough, or whatever it was, to tell it. Like your poets you used to tell me about who couldn’t find their rhymes, perhaps.’

  And her laughter flowed about him in a rippling flood that instantly woke his own. They always laughed. They felt so happy. It was a communion between old souls that surely had bathed deeply in the experiences of life before they had become imprisoned in the particular bodies known as Paul Rivers and Margaret Christina Messenger.

  He became convinced, too, more and more that she really did not speak at all — that no actual sound set the waves of air in motion — but that she put her words into him in the form of thoughts, and that he it was, in order to grasp them clearly, who clothed them with the symbols of sound and language. It was essentially of the nature of inspiration. She blew the ideas into his heart and mind.

  And many things that he asked her were undoubtedly little more than his own thoughts, halfformed and vague, lying in the depths of him.

  ‘Then, over there, where you now are, is it — more real? Are you, as it were, one stage nearer to the great Reality? What’s it like — ?’

  ‘It’s through the real “Crack,” I think,’ she answered. ‘Everything is here that I imagined — but really imagined — on earth. And people who imagined nothing, or wanted only the world, find very little here.’

  ‘Then is the change very great — ?’

  ‘It doesn’t
seem to me like a change at all. I’ve been here before for visits. Now I’ve come to stay, that’s all!’

  ‘You yourself have not changed?’

  She roared with laughter, till he felt that his question was really absurd.

  ‘Of course not! How can I change? I’m always Nixie, wherever I am!’

  ‘But you feel different — ?’ he insisted.

  ‘I feel better,’ she answered, still laughing. ‘I feel awfully jolly.’

  Then after a long pause he asked another question. It was really a question he was always asking in one form or another, only he had never yet put it so directly perhaps. He whispered it from a grave and solemn heart:

  ‘Are you nearer to — God, do you think?’

  It was a word he rarely used. In his conversations with the child on earth he had never once used it. She waited a long time before replying. Instinctively, very subtly, it came to him that she did not know exactly what he meant.

  ‘I’m in and with Everything there is — Everywhere,’ she said softly. ‘And I couldn’t possibly be nearer to anything than I am.’

  More than that she could not explain, and Paul never asked similar questions again. He understood that they were really unanswerable.

  And it was the same with other thoughts, thoughts referring to the fundamental conditions of temporal existence, that is. Nothing, for instance, made time and space seem less real than the way she answered questions involving one or other. Out of curiosity he had gone to the trouble of reading up other records of spirit communion — the literature (saving the mark) of Spiritualism brims over with them — and he had asked her some question with regard to the detailed geography there given.

  ‘But there’s no place at all where I am,’ the child laughed. ‘I am just here. There was no place really in our Aventures, was there? Place is only with you on earth!’