Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  Minks glowed. He was being listened to, and understood by his honoured chief, too!

  ‘Simply that some one, perhaps far away — some sweet woman probably — has been thinking love,’ he replied with enthusiasm, yet in a low and measured voice, ‘and that the burning thoughts have rushed into the emptiness of a heart that needs them. Like water, thought finds its level. The sudden gush — all feel it more or less at times, surely! — may rise first from her mind as she walks lonely upon the shore, pacing the decks at sea, or in her hillside rambles, thinking, dreaming, hoping, yearning — to pour out and find the heart that needs these very things, perhaps far across the world. Who knows? Heart thrills in response to heart secretly in every corner of the globe, and when these tides flood unexplained into your soul—’

  ‘Into my soul — !’ exclaimed his chief.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ Minks hurried to explain; ‘I mean to any lonely soul that happens to crave such comfort with real longing — it implies, to my mind at least, that these two are destined to give and take from one another, and that, should they happen to meet in actual life, they will rush together instantly like a pair of flames—’

  ‘And if they never — meet?’ asked Rogers slowly, turning to the mantel- piece for the matches.

  ‘They will continue to feed each other in this delicious spiritual way from a distance, sir. Only — the chances are — that they will meet, for their thought already connects them vitally, though as yet unrealised.’

  There was a considerable pause. Rogers lit his pipe. Minks, feeling he ought to stand while his master did so, also rose from his chair. The older man turned; they faced each other for a moment, Rogers putting smoke violently into the air between them.

  ‘Minks, my dear fellow,’ he observed, ‘you are, as I have always thought, a poet. You have ideas, and, whether true or not, they are rather lovely. Write them out for others to read. Use your spare time writing them out. I’ll see to it that you have more leisure.’

  With a laugh the big man moved abruptly past his chair and knocked his pipe on the edge of the ash-bowl. His eye, as he did so, fell upon the pile of letters and papers arranged so neatly on the table. He remembered the lateness of the hour — and other things besides.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said vaguely with a sigh; ‘so here we are again back at work in London.’

  Minks had turned, too, realising that the surprising conversation was over. A great excitement was in him. He did not feel in the least tired. An unusual sense of anticipation was in the air. He could not make it out at all. Reviewing a dozen possibilities at once, he finally rejected the romantic one he had first suspected, and decided that the right moment had at last come to say something of the Scheme. He had worked so hard to collect data. All was in perfect order. His chief could not feel otherwise than pleased.

  ‘Then I’ll be saying good-night, Mr. Rogers,’ he began, ‘for you must be very tired, and I trust you will enjoy a long night’s rest. Perhaps you would like me to come a little later in the morning than usual.’

  He stood looking affectionately at the formidable pile of correspondence, and, as his chief made no immediate reply, he went on, with more decision in his voice:

  ‘Here,’ he said, touching the papers he had carefully set on one side, ‘are all the facts you wanted referring to your great Scheme—’

  He jumped. His master’s fist had come down with a bang upon the table.

  He stepped back a pace. They stared at one another.

  ‘Damn the Scheme!’ cried Rogers. ‘have done and finished with it. Tear up the papers. Cancel any arrangements already made. And never mention the thing again in my hearing. It’s all unreal and wrong and unnecessary!’

  Minks gasped. The man was so in earnest. What could it mean?

  ‘Wrong — unnecessary — done with!’ he faltered. Then, noticing the flashing eyes that yet betrayed a hint of merriment in their fire, he added quickly, ‘Quite so, Mr. Rogers; I understand. You’ve got an improvement, you mean?’

  It was not his place to ask questions, but he could not contain himself. Curiosity and disappointment rushed over him.

  ‘A bigger and a better one altogether, Minks,’ was the vehement reply. He pushed the heap of papers towards the secretary. Minks took them gingerly, reluctantly.

  ‘Burn ’em up,’ Rogers went on, ‘and never speak to me again about the blessed thing. I’ve got a far bigger Scheme than that.’

  Minks slowly gathered the papers together and put them in his biggest pocket. He knew not what to think. The suddenness of the affair dazed him. Thought-transference failed this time; he was too perturbed, indeed, to be in a receptive state at all. It seemed a catastrophe, a most undesirable and unexpected climax. The romantic solution revived in him — but only for a passing moment. He rejected it. Some big discovery was in the air. He felt that extraordinary sense of anticipation once again.

  ‘Look here, my dear fellow, Minks,’ said Rogers, who had been watching his discomfiture with amusement, ‘you may be surprised, but you need not be alarmed. The fact is, this has been coming for a long time; it’s not an impulsive decision. You must have felt it — from my letters. That Scheme was all right enough, only I am not the right man for it. See? And our work,’ he added laughingly, ‘won’t go for nothing either, because our thought will drop into another mind somewhere that will accomplish the thing far better than I could have accomplished it.’

  Minks made an odd gesture, as who should say this might not be true. He did not venture upon speech, however. This new plan must be very wonderful, was all he thought just then. His faith in his employer’s genius was complete.

  ‘And in due time you shall hear all about it. Have a little patience. Perhaps you’ll get it out of my thoughts before I tell it to you,’ he smiled, ‘but perhaps you won’t. I can only tell you just now that it has beauty in it — a beauty of the stars.’

  Yet what his bigger Scheme was he really had no clear idea. He felt it coming-that was all!

  And with that Minks had to be content. This was dismissal. Good-nights were said, and the secretary went out into the street.

  ‘Go to a comfortable hotel,’ was the last thing he heard, ‘and put it down to me, of course. Sleep well, sleep well. To-morrow at two o’clock will do.’

  Minks strolled home, walking upon air. The sky was brilliant with its gorgeous constellations — the beauty of the stars. Poems blazed upon him. But he was too excited to compose. Even first lines evaded capture. ‘Stars,’ besides, was a dreadful word to rhyme with, for all its charm and loveliness. He knew of old that the only word was ‘wars,’ most difficult to bring in naturally and spontaneously, and with the wrong sound in any case.

  ‘He must have been writing poetry out there,’ he reflected finally, ‘or else living it. Living it, probably. He’s a grand fellow anyhow, grand as a king.’ Stars, wars, kings, thrones-=the words flew in and out among a maze of unaccomplished lines.

  But the last thing in his mind as he curled up to sleep in the strange bed was that he had delivered his wife’s message, but that he could not tell her about this sudden collapse of the great, long-talked-of Scheme. Albinia would hardly understand. She might think less of his chief. He would wait until the new one dawned upon the horizon with its beauty of the stars. Then he would simply overwhelm her with it, as his temperament loved to do.

  CHAPTER XXX

  Lo, every yearning thought that holds a tear,

  Yet finds no mission

  And lies untold,

  Waits, guarded in that labyrinth of gold, —

  To reappear

  Upon some perfect night,

  Deathless — not old —

  But sweet with time and distance,

  And clothed as in a vision

  Of starry brilliance

  For the world’s delight.

  JOHN HENRY CAMPDEN.

  Then, as the days passed, practical life again caught Henry Rogers in its wholesome grip. Fairyland
did not fade exactly, but it dipped a little below the horizon. Like hell and heaven, it was a state of mind, open potentially to all, but not to be enjoyed merely for the asking. Like other desirable things, it was to be ‘attained.’ Its remoteness and difficulty of access lent to it a haunting charm; for though its glory dimmed a little, there was a soft afterglow that shed its radiance even down Piccadilly and St. James’s Street. He was always conscious of this land beyond the sunset; the stars shone brightly, though clouds or sunlight interfered to blur their message.

  London life, however, by the sheer weight of its grinding daily machinery, worked its slow effect upon him. He became less sensitive to impressions. These duller periods were interrupted sometimes by states of brilliant receptiveness, as at Bourcelles; but there was a fence between the two — a rather prickly frontier, and the secret of combining them lay just beyond his reach. For his London mind, guided by reason, acted in a logical plane of two dimensions, while imagination, captained by childhood’s fairy longings, cantered loose in all directions at once — impossibly. The first was the world; the second was the universe. As yet, he was unable to co-ordinate them. Minks, he was certain, could — and did, sailing therefore upon an even keel. There was this big harmony in little Minks that he envied. Minks had an outlet. Sydenham, and even the City, for him were fairyland; a motor-bus fed his inspiration as surely as a starlit sky; moon always rhymed with June, and forget with regret. But the inner world of Henry Rogers was not yet properly connected with the outer. Passage from one to the other was due to chance, it seemed, not to be effected at will. Moods determined the sudden journey. He rocked. But for his talks with little Minks, he might have wrecked.

  And the talks with Minks were about — well, he hardly knew what, but they all played round this map of fairyland he sought to reduce to the scale of everyday life. They discussed thought, dreams, the possibility of leaving the body in sleep, the artist temperament, the source of inspiration as well as the process of the imaginative faculty that created. They talked even of astronomy. Minks held that the life of practical, daily work was the bed-rock of all sane production, yet while preaching this he bubbled over with all the wild, entrancing theories that were in the air to-day. They were comical, but never dangerous — did not upset him. They were almost a form of play.

  And his master, listening, found these conversations an outlet somehow for emotions in himself he could not manage — a scaffolding that provided outlines for his awakening dreams to build upon. He found relief. For Minks, with his delightful tact, asked no awkward questions. He referred neither to the defunct Scheme, nor mentioned the new one that held ‘a beauty of the stars.’ He waited. Rogers also waited.

  And, while he waited, he grew conscious more and more of an enormous thing that passed, driving behind, below, his daily external life. He could never quite get at it. In there, down out of sight somewhere, he knew everything. His waking existence was fed invisibly from below. In the daytime he now frequently caught himself attempting to recover the memory of things that went on elsewhere, things he was personally involved in, vital things. This daylight effort to recover them was as irksome as the attempt to draw a loose hair that has wound about the tongue. He spoke at length to Minks about it.

  ‘Some part of you,’ replied the imperturbable secretary, after listening carefully to his master’s vague description of the symptoms, ‘is being engaged elsewhere — very actively engaged—’

  ‘Eh?’ asked Rogers, puzzled.

  ‘Probably at night, sir, while your brain and body sleep,’ Minks elaborated, ‘your energetic spirit is out — on the plane of causes—’

  The other gasped slightly, ‘While my body lies unconscious?’

  ‘Your spirit may be busy at all kinds of things. That can never be unconscious,’ was the respectful answer. ‘They say—’

  ‘Yes, what do they say?’ He recognised a fairy theory, and jumped at it.

  ‘That in sleep,’ continued the other, encouraged, ‘the spirit knows a far more concentrated life — dips down into the deep sea of being — our waking life merely the froth upon the shore.’

  Rogers stared at him. ‘Yes, yes,’ he answered slowly, ‘that’s very pretty, very charming; it’s quite delightful. What ideas you have, my dear Minks! What jolly, helpful ideas!’

  Minks beamed with pleasure.

  ‘Not my own, Mr. Rogers, not my own,’ he said, with as much pride as if they were his own, ‘but some of the oldest in the world, just coming into fashion again with the turn of the tide, it seems. Our daily life — even the most ordinary — is immensely haunted, girdled about with a wonder of incredible things. There are hints everywhere to-day, though few can read the enormous script complete. Here and there one reads a letter or a word, that’s all. Yet the best minds refuse to know the language, not even the ABC of it; they read another language altogether—’

  ‘The best minds!’ repeated Rogers. ‘What d’you mean by that!’ It sounded, as Minks said it, so absurdly like best families.

  ‘The scientific and philosophical minds, sir. They think it’s not worth learning, this language. That’s the pity of it — ah, the great pity of it!’ And he looked both eager and resentful — his expression almost pathetic. He turned half beseechingly to his employer, as though he might alter the sad state of things. ‘As with an iceberg, Mr. Rogers,’ he added, ‘the greater part of everything — of ourselves especially — is invisible; we merely know the detail banked against an important grand Unseen.’

  The long sentence had been suffered to its close because the audience was busy with thoughts of his own instead of listening carefully. Behind the wild language stirred some hint of meaning that, he felt, held truth. For a moment, it seemed, his daylight searching was explained — almost.

  ‘Well and good, my dear fellow, and very picturesque,’ he said presently, gazing with admiration at his secretary’s neat blue tie and immaculate linen; ‘but thinking, you know, is not possible without matter.’ This in a tone of ‘Do talk a little sense.’ ‘Even if the spirit does go out, it couldn’t think apart from the brain, could it now, eh?’

  Minks took a deep breath and relieved himself of the following:

  ‘Ah, Mr. Rogers’ — as much as to say ‘Fancy you believing that!’— ‘but it can experience and know direct, since it passes into the region whence the material that feeds thought issues in the first instance — causes, Mr. Rogers, causes.’

  ‘Oho!’ said his master, ‘oho!’

  ‘There is no true memory afterwards,’ continued the little dreamer, ‘because memory depends upon how much the spirit can bring back into the brain, you see. We have vague feelings, rather than actual recollection — feelings such as you were kind enough to confess to me you had been haunted by yourself—’

  ‘All-overish feelings,’ Rogers helped him, seeing that he was losing confidence a little, ‘vague sensations of joy and wonder and — well — in a word, strength.’

  ‘Faith,’ said Minks, with a decision of renewed conviction, ‘which is really nothing but unconscious knowledge — knowledge unremembered. And it’s the half-memory of what you do at night that causes this sense of anticipation you now experience; for what is anticipation, after all, but memory thrown forward?’

  There was a pause then, during which Rogers lit a cigarette, while

  Minks straightened his tie several times in succession.

  ‘You are a greater reader than I, of course,’ resumed his employer presently; ‘still, I have come across one or two stories which deal with this kind of thing. Only, in the books, the people always remember what they’ve done at night, out of the body, in the spirit, or whatever you like to call it. Now, I remember nothing whatever. How d’you account for that, pray?’

  Minks smiled a little sadly. ‘The books,’ he answered very softly, ‘are wrong there — mere inventions — not written from personal experience. There can be no detailed memory unless the brain has been ‘out’ too — which it hasn’t. Th
at’s where inaccuracy and looseness of thought come in. If only the best minds would take the matter up, you see, we might—’

  Rogers interrupted him. ‘We shall miss the post, Minks, if we go on dreaming and talking like this,’ he exclaimed, looking at his watch and then at the pile of letters waiting to be finished. ‘It is very delightful indeed, very — but we mustn’t forget to be practical, too.’

  And the secretary, not sorry perhaps to be rescued in time from the depths he had floundered in, switched his mind in concentration upon the work in hand again. The conversation had arisen from a chance coincidence in this very correspondence — two letters that had crossed after weeks of silence.

  Work was instantly resumed. It went on as though it had never been interrupted. Pride and admiration stirred the heart of Minks as he noticed how keenly and accurately his master’s brain took up the lost threads again. ‘A grand fellow!’ he thought to himself, ‘a splendid man! He lives in both worlds at once, yet never gets confused, nor lets one usurp his powers to the detriment of the other. If only I were equally balanced and effective. Oh dear!’ And he sighed.

  And there were many similar conversations of this kind. London seemed different, almost transfigured sometimes. Was this the beginning of that glory which should prove it a suburb of Bourcelles?

  Rogers found his thoughts were much in that cosy mountain village: the children capered by his side all day; he smelt the woods and flowers; he heard the leaves rustle on the poplar’s crest; and had merely to think of a certain room in the tumble-down old Citadelle for a wave of courage and high anticipation to sweep over him like a sea. A new feeling of harmony was taking him in hand. It was very delightful; and though he felt explanation beyond his reach still, his talks with Minks provided peep-holes through which he peered at the enormous thing that brushed him day and night.

  A great settling was taking place inside him. Thoughts certainly began to settle. He realised, for one thing, that he had left the theatre where the marvellous Play had been enacted. He stood outside now, able to review and form a judgment. His mind loved order. Undue introspection he disliked, as a form of undesirable familiarity; a balanced man must not be too familiar with himself; it endangered self-respect.