Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘Mine crystallised long ago, I fear.’

  ‘Care and anxiety did that. You neglected it a little. But your husband’s cousin has cleaned the channels out. He does it unconsciously, but he does it. He has belief and vision like a child, and therefore turns instinctively to children because they keep it alive in him, though he hardly knows why he seeks them. The world, too, is a great big child that is crying for its Fairyland….’

  ‘But the practical—’ objected Mother, true to her type of mind-an echo rather than an effort.

  ‘ — is important, yes, only it has been exaggerated out of all sane proportion in most people’s lives. So little is needed, though that little of fine quality, and ever fed by starlight. Obeyed exclusively, it destroys life. It bricks you up alive. But now tell me,’ she added, ‘where would you like to go first? Whom will you help? There is time enough to cover .the world if you want to, before the interfering sun gets up.’

  ‘You!’ cried Mother, impulsively, then realised instantly that her friend was already developed far beyond any help that she could give. It was the light streaming from the older, suffering woman that was stimulating her own sympathies so vehemently. For years the process had gone on. It was at last effective.

  ‘There are others, perhaps, who need it more than I,’ flashed forth a lovely ray.

  ‘But I would repay,’ Mother cried eagerly, ‘I would repay.’ Gratitude for life rushed through her, and her friend must share it.

  ‘Pass it on to others,’ was the shining answer. ‘That’s the best repayment after all.’ The stars themselves turned brighter as the thought flashed from her.

  Then Ireland vanished utterly, for it had been mixed, Mother now perceived, with personal longings that were at bottom selfish. There were indeed many there, in the scenes of her home and childhood, whose lives she might ease and glorify by letting in the starlight while they slept; but her motive, she discerned, was not wholly pure. There was a trace in it, almost a little stain, of personal gratification — she could not analyse it quite — that dimmed the picture in her thought. The brilliance of her companion made it stand out clearly. Nearer home was a less heroic object, a more difficult case, some one less likely to reward her efforts with results. And she turned instead to this.

  ‘You’re right,’ smiled the other, following her thought; ‘and you couldn’t begin with a better bit of work than that. Your old mother has cut herself off so long from giving sympathy to her kind that now she cannot accept it from others without feeling suspicion and distrust. Ease and soften her outlook if you can. Pour through her gloom the sympathy of stars. And remember,’ she added, as Mother rose softly out of the trees and hovered a moment overhead, ‘that if you need the Sweep or the Lamplighter, or the Gardener to burn away her dead leaves, you have only to summon them. Think hard, and they’ll be instantly beside you.’

  Upon an eddy of glowing wind Mother drifted across the fields to the corner of the village where her mother occupied a large single room in solitude upon the top floor, a solitude self-imposed and rigorously enforced.

  ‘Use the finest quality,’ she heard her friend thinking far behind her, ‘for you have plenty of it. The Dustman gave it to you when you were not looking, gathered from the entire Zodiac… and from the careless meteor’s track….’

  The words died off into the forest.

  That he keeps only

  For the old and lonely,

  (And is very strict about it)

  Who sleep so little that they need the best—’

  The words came floating behind her. She felt herself brimful — charged with loving sympathy of the sweetest and most understanding quality. She looked down a moment upon her mother’s roof. Then she descended.

  CHAPTER XXV

  And also there’s a little star —

  So white, a virgin’s it must be; —

  Perhaps the lamp my love in heaven

  Hangs out to light the way for me.

  Song, THEOPHILE MARZIALS.

  In this corner of Bourcelles the houses lie huddled together with an air of something shamefaced; they dare not look straight at the mountains or at the lake; they turn their eyes away even from the orchards at the back. They wear a mysterious and secret look, and their shoulders have a sly turn, as though they hid their heads in the daytime and stirred about their business only after dark.

  They lie grouped about a cobbled courtyard that has no fountain in it. The fair white road goes quickly by outside, afraid to look in frankly; and the entrance to the yard is narrow. Nor does a single tree grow in it. If Bourcelles could have a slum, this would be it.

  Why the old lady had left her cosy quarters in Les Glycines and settled down in this unpleasant corner of the village was a puzzle to everybody. With a shrug of the shoulders the problem was generally left unsolved. Madame Jequier discussed it volubly a year ago when the move took place, then dismissed it as one of those mysteries of old people no one can understand. To the son-in-law and the daughter, who got nearer the truth, it was a source of pain and sadness beyond their means of relief. Mrs. ‘Plume’ — it was a play in French upon her real name, — had been four years in the Pension, induced to come from a lonely existence in Ireland by her daughter and throw in her lot with the family, and at first had settled down comfortably enough. She was over seventy, and possessed 80 pounds a year — a dainty, witty, amusing Irish lady, with twinkling eyes and a pernicketty strong will, and a brogue she transferred deliciously into her broken French. She loved the children, yet did not win their love in return, because they stood in awe of her sarcastic criticisms. Life had gone hardly with her; she had lost her fortune and her children, all but this daughter, with whose marriage she was keenly disappointed. An aristocrat to the finger-tips, she could not accept the change of circumstances; distress had soured her; the transplanting hastened her decline; there was no sweetness left in her. She turned her heart steadily against the world.

  The ostensible cause of this hiding herself away with her sorrow and disappointment was the presence of Miss Waghorn, with whom she disagreed, and even quarrelled, from morning till night. They formed a storm-centre that moved from salon to dining-room, and they squabbled acutely about everything — the weather, the heating, the opening or shutting of windows, the details of the food, the arrangement of the furniture, even the character of the cat. Miss Waghorn loved. The bickerings were incessant. They only had to meet for hot disagreement to break out. Mrs. Plume, already bent with age, would strike the floor with the ebony stick she always carried, and glare at the erect, defiant spinster— ‘That horrud, dirrty cat; its always in the room!’ Then Miss Waghorn: ‘It’s a very nice cat, Madame’ — she always called her Madame— ‘and when I was a young girl I was taught to be kind to animals.’— ‘The drawing-room is not the place for animals,’ came the pricking answer. And then the scuffle began in earnest.

  Miss Waghorn, owing to her want of memory, forgot the squabble five minutes afterwards, and even forgot that she knew her antagonist at all. She would ask to be introduced, or even come up sweetly and introduce herself within half an hour of the battle. But Madame Plume forgot nothing; her memory was keen and accurate. She did not believe in the other’s failing. ‘That common old woman!’ she exclaimed with angry scorn to her daughter.

  ‘It’s deliberate offensiveness, that’s all it is at all!’ And she left the Pension.

  But her attitude to the harmless old Quaker lady was really in small her attitude to humanity at large. She drew away in disgust from a world that had treated her so badly. Into herself she drew, growing smaller every day, more sour, more suspicious, and more averse to her own kind. Within the restricted orbit of her own bitter thoughts she revolved towards the vanishing point of life which is the total loss of sympathy. She felt with no one but herself. She belonged to that, alas, numerous type which, with large expectations unrealised, cannot accept disillusionment with the gentle laughter it deserves. She resented the universe. Sympathy was dead
.

  And she had chosen this unsavoury corner to dwell in because ‘the poor’ of the village lived there, and she wished to count herself among them. It emphasised the spite, the grudge, she felt against humanity. At first she came into dejeuner and souper, but afterwards her meals were sent over twice a day from the Pension. She discovered so many reasons for not making the little journey of a hundred yards. On Sunday the ‘common people’ were in the streets; on Saturday it was cleaning-day and the Pension smelt of turpentine; Monday was for letter-writing, and other days were too hot or too cold, too windy or too wet. In the end she accomplished her heart’s desire. Madame Cornu, who kept the grocer’s shop, and lived on the floor below with her husband, prepared the two principal meals and brought them up to her on a tray. She ate them alone. Her breakfast cup of tea she made herself, Mme. Cornu putting the jug of milk outside the door. She nursed her bitter grievance against life in utter solitude. Acidity ate its ugly pattern into her heart.

  The children, as in duty bound, made dolorous pilgrimages to that upper floor from time to time, returning frightened, and Mother went regularly twice a week, coming home saddened and distressed. Her husband rarely went at all now, since the time when she told him to his face he came to taunt her. She spent her time, heaven only knows how, for she never left the building. According to Mother she was exceedingly busy doing nothing. She packed, unpacked, and then repacked all her few belongings. In summer she chased bees in her room with a wet towel; but with venom, not with humour. The Morning Post came daily from London. ‘I read my paper, write a letter, and the morning’s gone,’ she told her daughter, by way of complaint that time was so scanty. Mme. Cornu often heard her walking up and down the floor, tapping her ebony stick and talking softly to herself. Yet she was as sane as any old body living in solitude with evil thinking well can be. She starved-because she neither gave nor asked.

  As Mother thought of her, thus finding the way in instantly, the church clock sounded midnight. She entered a room that was black as coal and unsweetened as an airless cellar. The fair rays that had been pouring out of her returned with a little shock upon themselves — repulsed. She felt herself reduced, and the sensation was so unpleasant at first that she almost gasped. It was like suffocation. She felt enclosed with Death. That her own radiance dimmed a moment was undeniable, but it was for a moment only, for, thinking instantly of her friend, she drew upon that woman’s inexhaustible abundance, and found her own stores replenished.

  Slowly, as a wintry sun pierces the mist in some damp hollow of the woods, her supply of starlight lit up little pathways all about her, and she saw the familiar figure standing by the window. The figure was also black; it stood like an ebony statue in an atmosphere that was thick with gloom, turgid, sinister, and wholly rayless. It was like a lantern in a London fog. A few dim lines of sombre grey issued heavily from it, but got no farther than its outer surface, then doubled back and plunged in again. They coiled and twisted into ugly knots. Her mother’s atmosphere was opaque, and as dismal as a November fog. There was a speck of light in the room, however, and it came, the visitor then perceived, from a single candle that stood beside the bed. The old lady had been reading; she rarely slept before two o’clock in the morning.

  And at first, so disheartening, so hopeless seemed the task, that Mother wavered in her mission; a choking, suffocating sensation blocked all her channels of delivery. The very flowers on the window- sill, she noted, drooped in a languishing decline; they had a lifeless air as of flowers that struggle for existence in deep shadow and have never known the kiss of sunshine. Through the inch of opened window stole a soft breath of the night air, but it turned black and sluggish the moment it came in. And just then, as Mother hovered there in hesitating doubt, the figure turned and moved across to the bed, supporting herself with the ebony cane she always used. Stiffly she sank upon her knees. The habit was as strong as putting her shoes outside the door at night to be cleaned,-those shoes that never knew the stain of roadway dust-and equally devoid of spiritual significance. Yet, for a moment, as the embittered mind gabbled through the string of words that long habit had crystallised into an empty formula, Mother noticed that the lines of grey grew slightly clearer; the coil and tangle ceased; they even made an effort to emerge and leave the muddy cloud that obscured their knotted, intricate disorder.

  The formula Mother recognised; it had hardly changed, indeed, since she herself had learned it at those very knees when days were brighter; it began with wholesale and audacious requests for self, then towards the end passed into vague generalities for the welfare of others. And just here it was that the lines of grey turned brighter and tried to struggle out of the murky atmosphere. The sight was pathetic, yet deeply significant. Mother understood its meaning. There was hope. Behind the prayer for others still shone at least an echo of past meaning.

  ‘I believe in you, old, broken, disappointed heart,’ flashed through her own bright atmosphere, ‘and, believing, I can help you!’

  Her skill, however, was slight, owing to lack of practice and experience. She moved over to the bed, trying first to force her own darting rays into the opaque, dull cloud surrounding the other; then seeking a better way-for this had no results — she slipped somehow inside the mist, getting behind it, down at the very source. From here she forced her own light through, mixing her beams of coloured radiance with the thick grey lines themselves. She tried to feel and think as her mother felt and thought, moving beside her mind’s initial working, changing the gloom into something brighter as she moved along. This was the proper way, she felt-to clean the source itself, rather than merely untie knots at the outer surface. It was a stifling business, but she persisted. Tiny channels cleared and opened. A little light shone through. She felt-with her mother, instead of arguing, as it were…

  The old lady presently blew the candle out and composed herself to sleep. Mother laboured on….

  ‘Oh dear,’ she sighed, ‘oh dear!’ as she emerged from the gloom a moment to survey her patient and note results. To her amazement she saw that there was a change indeed, though a very curious one. The entire outer surface of the cloud seemed in commotion, with here and there a glimmering lustre as if a tiny lamp was at last alight within. She felt herself swell with happiness. Instantly, then, the grey lines shot out, fastening with wee loops and curves among her own. Some links evidently had been established. She had imparted something.

  ‘She’s dreaming! I do believe I’ve sown some dream of beauty in her!’ she beamed to herself.

  Some golden, unaccustomed sleep had fallen over the old lady. Stray shreds of darkness loosened from the general mass and floated off, yet did not melt entirely from sight. She was shedding some of her evil thoughts.

  ‘The Sweep!’ thought Mother, and turning, found him beside her in the room. Her husband, to her astonishment, was also there.

  ‘But I didn’t think of you!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Not a definite thought,’ he answered, ‘but you needed me. I felt it. We’re so close together now that we’re practically one, you see.’ He trailed his Pattern behind him, clothed now with all manner of rich new colouring, ‘I’ve collected such heaps of new ideas,’ he went on, ‘and now I want her too. She’s in the Story. I’ll transfigure her as well.’ He was bright as paint, and happy as a sand-boy. ‘Well done, old Mother,’ he added, ‘you’ve done a lot already. See, she’s dreaming small, soft, tender things of beauty that your efforts have let through.’

  He glided across and poured from his own store of sympathy into that dry, atrophied soul upon the bed. ‘It’s a question how much she will be able to transmit, though,’ he said doubtfully. ‘The spiritual machinery is so stiff and out of gear from long disuse. In Miss Waghorn’s case it’s only physical — I’ve just been there — but this is spiritual blackness. We shall see to-morrow. Something will get through at any rate, and we must do this every night, you know.’

  ‘Rather!’ echoed Mother.

  ‘Her actual
self, you see, has dwindled so that one can hardly find it. It’s smaller than a flea, and as hard and black.’ They smiled a little sadly.

  The Sweep, rushing out of the window with his heavy sack loaded to the brim, interrupted their low laughter. He was no talker, but a man of action. Busily all this time he had been gathering up the loose, stray fragments that floated off from the cloud, and stuffing them into the sack. He now flew, singing, into the night, and they barely caught the last words of his eternal song: —

  ’… a tremendously busy Sweep,

  Tossing the blacks in the Rubbish Heap

  Over the edge of the world.’

  ‘Come,’ whispered Daddy. ‘It’s getting late. The interfering sun is on the way, and you’ve been hours here already. All the trains are back, and every one is waiting for us.’ Yet it had seemed so short a time really.

  Wrapped together in the beauty of his Pattern, they left the old lady peacefully asleep, and sped across the roofs towards the forest.

  But neither of them noticed, it seemed, the lovely little shining figure that hovered far in the air above and watched them go. It followed them all the way, catching even at the skirts of the flying Pattern as they went. Was it the Spirit of some unknown Star they had attracted from beyond the Milky Way? Or was it, perhaps, a Thought from some fair, exquisite heart that had been wakened by the rushing of the Expresses, and had flashed in to take a place in the wonderful story Daddy wove?

  It had little twinkling feet, and its eyes were of brown flame and amber.

  ‘No, they did not notice the starry, fluttering figure. It overtook them none the less, and with a flying leap was into the Pattern of his story — in the very centre, too! — as quickly as lightning passes through the foliage of the tree it strikes. Only the lightning stayed. The figure remained caught. The entire Pattern shivered to its outer fringes, then began to glow and shine all over. As the high harmonic crowns the end of a long cadenza on a violin, fulfilling bars of difficult effort, this point of exquisite beauty flashed life into the Pattern of the story, consummating the labour of construction with the true, inevitable climax. There was something of fairy insolence, both cheeky and delicious, in the proprietary way it chose the principal place, yet the only place still unoccupied, and sang ‘I’m here. I’ve come!’ It calmly fashioned itself a nest, as it were, curled up and made itself at home. It was at home. The audacity was justified. The Pattern seemed at last complete. Beauty and Truth shone at its centre. And the tiny voice continued singing, though no one seemed to know exactly whence the sound proceeded: —