‘I shall explore the lower storeys first,’ he called after them, his words fluttering in feathers of sound far up the vault. ‘Keep the fire in sight to guide you home again …’ and he moved slowly towards the vast ground-floor chambers of the Night. Each went his independent way along the paths of reverie and dream. He found himself alone.
For he could not soar and float as they did; he kept closer to the earth, wandering through the under chambers of the travelling building that swung its way over vineyards, woods, and village roofs. He kept more in touch with earth than they did. The upper sections where the children climbed went faster than those lower halls and galleries, so that the entire framework bent over, breaking ever into a crest of foaming stars. But in these under halls where he stood and watched there was far less movement. From century to century these remained the same. Between the bases of the mighty columns he watched the wave of darkness drown the world, leading it with a rush of silence towards sleep. For the children Night meant play and mischief; for himself it meant graver reverie….
These were the chambers, clearly, of ancestral sleep and dream: they seemed so familiar and well known. Behind him blinked the little friendly fire in the forest, link with the outer world he must not lose. He would find the children there when he went back, lively from their scamper among the stars; and, meanwhile, he was quite content to wander down these corridors in the floor of Night and taste their deep repose. For years he had not visited or known them. The children had led him back, although he did not realise it. He believed, on the contrary, that it was he who led and they who followed. For true leadership is ever inspired, making each follower feel that he goes first and of his own free will….
‘Jimbo, you flickery sprite, where are you now?’ he called, suddenly noticing how faint the little fire had grown with distance.
A lonely wind flew down upon him with a tiny shout:
‘Up here, at the very top, with Daddy. He’s making notes in a tower- room all by himself!’
Rogers could not believe his ears. Daddy indeed!
‘Is Monkey with you? And is she safe?’
‘She’s helping Daddy balance. The walls aren’t finished, and he’s on a fearful ledge. He’s after something or other for his story, he says.’
It seemed impossible. Daddy skylarking on the roof of Night, and making notes! Yet with a moment’s reflection the impossibility vanished; surprise went after it; it became natural, right, and true. Daddy, of course, sitting by his window in the carpenter’s house, had seen the Twilight Scaffolding sweep past and had climbed into it. Its beauty had rapt him out and away. In the darkness his mind wandered, too, gathering notes subconsciously for his wonderful new story.
‘Come down here to me,’ he cried, as a man cries in his sleep, making no audible sound. ‘There’s less risk among the foundations.’ And down came Daddy with an immediate rush. He arrived in a bundle, then straightened up. The two men stood side by side in these subterraneans of the night.
‘You!’ whispered Rogers, trying to seize his hand, while the other evaded him, hiding behind a shadow.
‘Don’t touch me,’ he murmured breathlessly. ‘You’ll scatter my train of thought. Think of something else at once, please….’ He moved into thicker shadows, half disappearing. ‘I’m after something that suddenly occurred to me for my story.’
‘What is it? I’ll think it with you,’ his cousin called after him.
‘You’ll see it better if I do. Tell me.’
‘A train that carries Thought, as this darkness carries stars — a starlight express,’ was the quick reply, ‘and a cavern where lost starlight gathers till it’s wanted-sort of terminus of the railway. They belong to the story somewhere if only I can find them and fit them in. Starlight binds all together as thought and sympathy bind minds….’
Rogers thought hard about them. Instantly his cousin vanished.
‘Thank you,’ ran a faint whisper among the pillars; ‘I’m on their trail again now. I must go up again. I can see better from the top,’ and the voice grew fainter and higher and further off with each word till it died away completely into silence. Daddy went chasing his inspiration through the scaffolding of reverie and dream.
‘We did something for him the other night after all, then,’ thought
Rogers with delight.
‘Of course,’ dropped down a wee, faint answer from above, as the author heard him thinking; ‘you did a lot. I’m partly out at last. This is where all the Patterns hide. Awake, I only get their dim reflections, broken and distorted. This is reality, not that. Ha, ha! If only I can get it through, my lovely, beautiful pattern—’
‘You will, you will,’ cried the other, as the voice went fluttering through space. ‘Ask the children. Jimbo and Monkey are up there somewhere. They’re the safest guides.’
Rogers gave a gulp and found that he was coughing. His feet were cold. A shudder ran across the feathery structure, making it tremble from the foundations to the forest of spires overhead. Jimbo came sliding down a pole of gleaming ebony. In a hammock of beams and rafters, swinging like a network of trapezes, Monkey swooped down after him, head first as usual. For the moon that moment passed behind a cloud, and the silver rivets started from their shadowy sockets. Clusters of star nails followed suit. The palace bent and tottered like a falling wave. Its pillars turned into trunks of pine trees; its corridors were spaces through the clouds; its chambers were great dips between the mountain summits.
‘It’s going too fast for sight,’ thought Rogers; ‘I can’t keep up with it. Even the children have toppled off.’ But he still heard Daddy’s laughter echoing down the lanes of darkness as he chased his pattern with yearning and enthusiasm.
The huge structure with its towers and walls and platforms slid softly out of sight. The moonlight sponged its outlines from the sky. The scaffolding melted into darkness, moving further westwards as night advanced. Already it was over France and Italy, sweeping grandly across the sea, bewildering the vessels in its net of glamour, and filling with wonder the eyes of the look-out men at the mast heads.
‘The fire’s going out,’ a voice was saying. Rogers heard it through a moment’s wild confusion as he fell swiftly among a forest of rafters, beams, and shifting uprights.
‘I’ll get more wood.’
The words seemed underground. A mountain wind rose up and brought the solid world about him. He felt chilly, shivered, and opened his eyes. There stood the solemn pine trees, thick and close; moonlight flooded the spaces between them and lit their crests with silver.
‘This is the Wind Wood,’ he remarked aloud to reassure himself.
Jimbo was bending over the fire, heaping on wood. Flame leaped up with a shower of sparks. He saw Monkey rubbing her eyes beside him.
‘I’ve had a dream of falling,’ she was saying, as she snuggled down closer into his side.
‘I didn’t,’ Jimbo said. ‘I dreamed of a railway accident, and everybody was killed except one passenger, who was Daddy. It fell off a high bridge. We found Daddy in the fourgon with the baggages, writing a story and laughing — making an awful row.’
‘What did you dream, Cousinenry?’ asked Monkey, peering into his eyes in the firelight.
‘That my feet were cold, because the fire had gone out,’ he answered, trying in vain to remember whether he had dreamed anything at all. ‘And — that it’s time to go home. I hear the curfew ringing.’
Some one whistled softly. They ought to have been in bed an hour ago.
It was ten o’clock, and Gygi was sounding the couvre feu from the old church tower. They put the fire out and walked home arm in arm, separating with hushed good-nights in the courtyard of the Citadelle. But Rogers did not hear the scolding Mother gave them when they appeared at the Den door, for he went on at once to his own room in the carpenter’s house, with the feeling that he had lived always in Bourcelles, and would never leave it again. His Scheme had moved bodily from London to the forest.
And on
the way upstairs he peeped a moment into his cousin’s room, seeing a light beneath the door. The author was sitting beside the open window with the lamp behind him and a note-book on his knees. Moonlight fell upon his face. He was sound asleep.
‘I won’t wake him,’ thought his cousin, going out softly again. ‘He’s dreaming — dreaming of his wonderful new story probably.’
CHAPTER XXII
Even as a luminous haze links star to star,
I would supply all chasms with music, breathing
Mysterious motions of the soul, no way
To be defined save in strange melodies.
Paracelsus, R. BROWNING.
Daddy’s story, meanwhile, continued to develop itself with wonder and enthusiasm. It was unlike anything he had ever written. His other studies had the brilliance of dead precious stones, perhaps, but this thing moved along with a rushing life of its own. It grew, fed by sources he was not aware of. It developed of itself — changed and lived and flashed. Some creative fairy hand had touched him while he slept perhaps. The starry sympathy poured through him, and he thought with his feelings as well as with his mind.
At first he was half ashamed of it; the process was so new and strange; he even attempted to conceal his method, because he could not explain or understand it. ‘This is emotional, not intellectual,’ he sighed to himself; ‘it must be second childhood. I’m old. They’ll call it decadent!’ Presently, however, he resigned himself to the delicious flow of inspiration, and let it pour out till it flowed over into his daily life as well. Through his heart it welled up and bubbled forth, a thing of children, starlight, woods, and fairies.
Yet he was shy about it. He would talk about the story, but would not read it out. ‘It’s a new genre for me,’ he explained shyly, ‘an attempt merely. We’ll see what comes of it. My original idea, you see, has grown out of hand rather. I wake every morning with something fresh, as though’ — he hesitated a moment, glancing towards his wife— ‘as if it came to me in sleep,’ he concluded. He felt her common sense might rather despise him for it.
‘Perhaps it does,’ said Rogers.
‘Why not?’ said Mother, knitting on the sofa that was her bed at night.
She had put her needles down and was staring at her husband; he stared at Rogers; all three stared at each other. Something each wished to conceal moved towards utterance and revelation. Yet no one of them wished to be the first to mention it. A great change had come of late upon Bourcelles. It no longer seemed isolated from the big world outside as before; something had linked it up with the whole surrounding universe, and bigger, deeper currents of life flowed through it. And with the individual life of each it was the same. All dreamed the same enormous, splendid dream, yet dared not tell it — yet.
Both parents realised vaguely that it was something their visitor had brought, but what could it be exactly? It was in his atmosphere, he himself least of all aware of it; it was in his thought, his attitude to life, yet he himself so utterly unconscious of it. It brought out all the best in everybody, made them feel hopeful, brighter, more courageous. Yes, certainly, he, brought it. He believed in them, in the best of them — they lived up to it or tried to. Was that it? Was it belief and vision that he brought into their lives, though unconsciously, because these qualities lay so strongly in himself? Belief is constructive. It is what people are rather than what they preach that affects others. Two strangers meet and bow and separate without a word, yet each has changed; neither leaves the other quite as he was before. In the society of children, moreover, one believes everything in the world — for the moment. Belief is constructive and creative; it is doubt and cynicism that destroy. In the presence of a child these latter are impossible. Was this the explanation of the effect he produced upon their little circle — the belief and wonder and joy of Fairyland?
For a moment something of this flashed through Daddy’s mind. Mother, in her way, was aware of something similar. But neither of them spoke it. The triangular staring was its only evidence. Mother resumed her knitting. She was not given to impulsive utterance. Her husband once described her as a solid piece of furniture. She was.
‘You see,’ said Daddy bravely, as the moment’s tension passed, ‘my original idea was simply to treat Bourcelles as an epitome, a miniature, so to speak, of the big world, while showing how Nature sweetened and kept it pure as by a kind of alchemy. But that idea has grown. I have the feeling now that the Bourcelles we know is a mere shadowy projection cast by a more real Bourcelles behind. It is only the dream village we know in our waking life. The real one — er — we know only in sleep.’ There! — it was partly out!
Mother turned with a little start. ‘You mean when we sleep?’ she asked. She knitted vigorously again at once, as though ashamed of this sudden betrayal into fantasy. ‘Why not?’ she added, falling back upon her customary non-committal phrase. Yet this was not the superior attitude he had dreaded; she was interested. There was something she wanted to confess, if she only dared. Mother, too, had grown softer in some corner of her being. Something shone through her with a tiny golden radiance.
‘But this idea is not my own,’ continued Daddy, dangerously near to wumbling. ‘It comes through me only. It develops, apparently, when I’m asleep,’ he repeated. He sat up and leaned forward. ‘And, I believe,’ he added, as on sudden reckless impulse, ‘it comes from you, Henry. Your mind, I feel, has brought this cargo of new suggestion and discharged it into me — into every one — into the whole blessed village. Man, I think you’ve bewitched us all!’
Mother dropped a stitch, so keenly was she listening. A moment later she dropped a needle too, and the two men picked it up, and handed it back together as though it weighed several pounds.
‘Well,’ said Rogers slowly, ‘I suppose all minds pour into one another somewhere — in and out of one another, rather — and that there’s a common stock or pool all draw upon according to their needs and power to assimilate. But I’m not conscious, old man, of driving anything deliberately into you—’
‘Only you think and feel these things vividly enough for me to get them too,’ said Daddy. Luckily ‘thought transference’ was not actually mentioned, or Mother might have left the room, or at least have betrayed an uneasiness that must have chilled them.
‘As a boy I imagined pretty strongly,’ in a tone of apology, ‘but never since. I was in the City, remember, twenty years—’
‘It’s the childhood things, then,’ Daddy interrupted eagerly. ‘You’ve brought the great childhood imagination with you — the sort of gorgeous, huge, and endless power that goes on fashioning of its own accord just as dreams do—’
‘I did, indulge in that sort of thing as a boy, yes,’ was the half- guilty reply; ‘but that was years and years ago, wasn’t it?’
‘They have survived, then,’ said Daddy with decision. ‘The sweetness of this place has stimulated them afresh. The children’ — he glanced suspiciously at his wife for a moment— ‘have appropriated them too. It’s a powerful combination. After a pause he added, ‘I might develop that idea in my story — that you’ve brought back the sweet creations of childhood with you and captured us all — a sort of starry army.’
‘Why not?’ interpolated Mother, as who should say there was no harm in that. ‘They certainly have been full of mischief lately.’
‘Creation is mischievous,’ murmured her husband. ‘But since you have come,’ he continued aloud,— ‘how can I express it exactly? — the days have seemed larger, fuller, deeper, the forest richer and more mysterious, the sky much closer, and the stars more soft and intimate. I dream of them, and they all bring me messages that help my story. Do you know what I mean? There were days formerly, when life seemed empty, thin, peaked, impoverished, its scale of values horribly reduced, whereas now — since you’ve been up to your nonsense with the children — some tide stands at the full, and things are always happening.’
‘Well, really, Daddy!’ said the expression on Mother’s face and h
ands and knitting-needles, ‘you are splendid to-day’; but aloud she only repeated her little hold-all phrase, ‘Why not?’
Yet somehow he recognised that she understood him better than usual. Her language had not changed — things in Mother worked slowly, from within outwards as became her solid personality — but it held new meaning. He felt for the first time that he could make her understand, and more — that she was ready to understand. That is, he felt new sympathy with her. It was very delightful, stimulating; he instantly loved her more, and felt himself increased at the same time.
‘I believe a story like that might even sell,’ he observed, with a hint of reckless optimism. ‘People might recognise a touch of their own childhood in it, eh?’
He longed for her to encourage him and pat him on the back.
‘True,’ said Mother, smiling at him, ‘for every one likes to keep in touch with their childhood — if they can. It makes one feel young and hopeful — jolly; doesn’t it? Why not?’
Their eyes met. Something, long put aside and buried under a burden of exaggerated care, flashed deliciously between them. Rogers caught it flying and felt happy. Bridges were being repaired, if not newly built.
‘Nature, you see, is always young really,’ he said; ‘it’s full of children. The very meaning of the word, eh, John?’ turning to his cousin as who should say, ‘We knew our grammar once.’
‘Natura, yes — something about to produce.’ They laughed in their superior knowledge of a Latin word, but Mother, stirred deeply though she hardly knew why, was not to be left out. Would the bridge bear her, was perhaps her thought.
‘And of the feminine gender,’ she added slyly, with a touch of pride.
The bridge creaked, but did not give way. She said it very quickly.
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 111