Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘The writer quarrels with him,’ he observed, ‘for not giving what is expected of him. What he has thought he must go on thinking, or be condemned. He must repeat himself or be uncomprehended.

  Hitherto’ — Minks prided himself upon the knowledge— ‘he has written studies of uncommon temperaments. Therefore to indulge in fantasy now is wrong.’

  ‘Ah, you take it that way, do you?’

  ‘Experience justifies me, Mr. Rogers,’ the secretary continued. ‘A friend of mine, or rather of Mrs. Minks’s, once wrote a volume of ghost stories that, of course, were meant to thrill. His subsequent book, with no such intention, was judged by the object of the first — as a failure. It must make the flesh creep. Everything he wrote must make the flesh creep. One of the papers, the best — a real thunderer, in fact — said “Once or twice the desired thrill comes close, but never, alas, quite comes off.”’

  ‘How wumbled,’ exclaimed his listener.

  ‘It is indeed,’ said Minks, ‘in fact, one of the thorns in the path of literature. The ordinary clever mind is indeed a desolate phenomenon. And how often behind the “Oxford manner” lurks the cultured prig, if I may put it so.’

  ‘Indeed you may,’ was the other’s rejoinder, ‘for you put it admirably.’

  They laughed a little and went on with their reading in their respective corners. The journey to Paris was enlivened by many similar discussions, Minks dividing his attentions between his master, his volume of philosophy, and the needs of various old ladies, to whom such men attach themselves as by a kind of generous, manly instinct. Minks was always popular and inoffensive. He had such tact.

  ‘Ah! and that reminds me, Minks,’ said Rogers, as they paced the banks of the Seine that evening, looking at the starry sky over Paris. ‘What do you know about the Pleiades? Anything — eh?’

  Minks drew with pride upon his classical reading.

  ‘The seven daughters of Atlas, Mr. Rogers, if I remember correctly, called therefore the Atlantides. They were the virgin companions of Artemis. Orion, the great hunter, pursued them in Boeotia, and they called upon the gods for help.’

  ‘And the gods turned ’em into stars, wasn’t it?’

  ‘First into doves, sir — Peleiades means doves — and then set them among the Constellations, where big Orion still pursues, yet never overtakes them.’

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it? What a memory you’ve got, Minks. And isn’t one of ’em lost or something?’

  ‘Merope, yes,’ the delighted Minks went on. He knew it because he had looked it up recently for his lyric about ‘the Doves of Thought.’ ‘She married a mortal, Sisyphus, the son of Aeolus, and so shines more dimly than the rest. For her sisters married gods. But there is one who is more luminous than the others—’

  ‘Ah! and which was that?’ interrupted Rogers.

  ‘Maia,’ Minks told him pat. ‘She is the most beautiful of the seven. She was the Mother, too, of Mercury, the Messenger of the gods. She gave birth to him in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. Zeus was the father—’

  ‘Take care; you’ll get run over,’ and Rogers pulled him from the path of an advancing taxi-cab, whose driver swore furiously at the pair of them. ‘Charming, all that, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is lovely, sir. It haunts the mind. I suppose,’ he added, ‘that’s why your cousin, Mr. Campden, made the Pleiades the centre of his Star Net in the story — a cluster of beautiful thoughts as it were.’

  ‘No doubt, no doubt,’ his tone so brusque suddenly that Minks decided after all not to mention his poem where the Pleiades made their appearance as the ‘doves of thought.’

  ‘What a strange coincidence,’ Rogers said as they turned towards the hotel again.

  ‘Subconscious knowledge, probably, sir,’ suggested the secretary, scarcely following his meaning, if meaning indeed there was.

  ‘Possibly! One never knows, does one?’

  ‘Never, Mr. Rogers. It’s all very wonderful.’

  And so, towards six o’clock in the evening of the following day, having passed the time pleasantly in Paris, the train bore them swiftly beyond Pontarlier and down the steep gradient of the Gorges de l’Areuse towards Neuchatel. The Val de Travers, through which the railway slips across the wooded Jura into Switzerland, is like a winding corridor cleft deep between savage and precipitous walls. There are dizzy glimpses into the gulf below. With steam shut off and brakes partly on, the train curves sharply, hiding its eyes in many tunnels lest the passengers turn giddy. Strips of bright green meadow- land, where the Areuse flows calmly, alternate with places where the ravine plunges into bottomless depths that have been chiselled out as by a giant ploughshare. Rogers pointed out the chosen views, while his secretary ran from window to window, excited as a happy child. Such scenery he had never known. It changed the entire content of his mind. Poetry he renounced finally before the first ten minutes were past. The descriptions that flooded his brain could be rendered only by the most dignified and stately prose, and he floundered among a welter of sonorous openings that later Albinia would read in Sydenham and retail judiciously to the elder children from ‘Father’s foreign letters.’

  ‘We shall pass Bourcelles in a moment now! Look out! Be ready with your handkerchief!’ Rogers warned him, as the train emerged from the final tunnel and scampered between thick pine woods, emblazoned here and there with golden beeches. The air was crystal, sparkling. They could smell the forests.

  They took their places side by side at the windows. The heights of Boudry and La Tourne, that stand like guardian sentries on either side of the mountain gateway, were already cantering by. The precipices flew past. Beyond lay the smiling slopes of vineyard, field, and orchard, sprinkled with farms and villages, of which Bourcelles came first. The Areuse flowed peacefully towards the lake. The panorama of the snowy Alps rolled into view along the farther horizon, and the slanting autumn sunshine bathed the entire scene with a soft and ruddy light. They entered the Fairyland of Daddy’s story.

  ‘Voila la sentinelle deja!’ exclaimed Rogers, putting his head out to see the village poplar. ‘We run through the field that borders the garden of the Pension. They’ll come out to wave to us. Be ready.’

  ‘Ah, oui,’ said Minks, who had been studying phrase books, ‘je vwa.’ But in reality he saw with difficulty, for a spark had got into his eye, and its companion optic, wandering as usual, was suffused with water too.

  The news of their arrival had, of course, preceded them, and the row of waving figures in the field gave them a welcome that went straight to Minks’s heart. He felt proud for his grand employer. Here was a human touch that would modify the majesty of the impersonal mountain scenery in his description. He waved his handkerchief frantically as the train shot past, and he hardly knew which attracted him most — the expression of happiness on Mr. Rogers’s face, or the line of nondescript humanity that gesticulated in the field as though they wished to stop the Paris ‘Rapide.’

  For it was a very human touch; and either Barnum’s Circus or the byeways and hedges of Fairyland had sent their picked representatives with a dance seen usually only in shy moonlit glades. His master named them as the carriage rattled by. The Paris Express, of course, did not stop at little Bourcelles. Minks recognised each one easily from the descriptions in the story.

  The Widow Jequier, with garden skirts tucked high, and wearing big gauntlet gloves, waved above her head a Union Jack that knocked her bonnet sideways at every stroke, and even enveloped the black triangle of a Trilby hat that her brother-in-law held motionless aloft as though to test the wind for his daily report upon the condition of le barometre. The Postmaster never waved. He looked steadily before him at the passing train, his small, black figure more than usually dwarfed by a stately outline that rose above the landscape by his side, and was undoubtedly the Woman of the Haystack. Telling lines from the story’s rhymes flashed through Minks’s memory as, chuckling with pleasure, he watched the magnificent, ample gestures of Mother’s waving arms. She see
med to brush aside the winds who came a-courting, although wide strokes of swimming really described her movements best. A little farther back, in the middle distance, he recognised by his peaked cap the gendarme, Gygi, as he paused in his digging and looked up to watch the fun; and beyond him again, solid in figure as she was unchanging in her affections, he saw Mrs. Postmaster, struggling with a bed sheet the pensionnaires des Glycines helped her shake in the evening breeze. It was too close upon the hour of souper for her to travel farther from the kitchen. And beside her stood Miss Waghorn, waving an umbrella. She was hatless. Her tall, thin figure, dressed in black, against the washing hung out to dry, looked like a note of exclamation, or, when she held the umbrella up at right angles, like a capital L the fairies had set in the ground upon its head.

  And the fairies themselves, the sprites, the children! They were everywhere and anywhere. Jimbo flickered, went out, reappeared, then flickered again; he held a towel in one hand and a table napkin in the other. Monkey seemed more in the air than on the solid earth, for one minute she was obviously a ball, and the next, with a motion like a somersault, her hair shot loose across the sunlight as though she flew. Both had their mouths wide open, shouting, though the wind carried their words all away unheard. And Jane Anne stood apart. Her welcome, if the gesture is capable of being described at all, was a bow. She moved at the same time sedately across the field, as though she intended to be seen separately from the rest. She wore hat and gloves. She was evidently in earnest with her welcome. But Mr. John Henry Campden, the author and discoverer of them all, Minks did not see.

  ‘But I don’t see the writer himself!’ he cried. ‘I don’t see Mr.

  Campden.’

  ‘You can’t,’ explained Rogers, ‘he’s standing behind his wife.’

  And the little detail pleased the secretary hugely. The true artist, he reflected, is never seen in his work.

  It all was past and over — in thirty seconds. The spire of the church, rising against a crimson sky, with fruit trees in the foreground and a line of distant summits across the shining lake, replaced the row of wonderful dancing figures. Rogers sank back in his corner, laughing, and Minks, saying nothing, went across to his own at the other end of the compartment. It all had been so swift and momentary that it seemed like the flash of a remembered dream, a strip of memory’s pictures, a vivid picture of some dazzling cinematograph. Minks felt as if he had just read the entire story again from one end to the other — in thirty seconds. He felt different, though wherein exactly the difference lay was beyond him to discover. ‘It must be the spell of Bourcelles,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Mr. Rogers warned me about it. It is a Fairyland that thought has created out of common things. It is quite wonderful!’ He felt a glow all over him. His mind ran on for a moment to another picture his master had painted for him, and he imagined Albinia and the family out here, living in a little house on the borders of the forest, a strip of vineyards, sunlight, mountains, happy scented winds, and himself with a writing-table before a window overlooking the lake… writing down Beauty.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  We never meet; yet we meet day by day

  Upon those hills of life, dim and immense:

  The good we love, and sleep-our innocence.

  O hills of life, high hills! And higher than they,

  Our guardian spirits meet at prayer and play.

  Beyond pain, joy, and hope, and long suspense,

  Above the summits of our souls, far hence,

  An angel meets an angel on the way.

  Beyond all good I ever believed of thee

  Or thou of me, these always love and live.

  And though I fail of thy ideal of me,

  My angel falls not short. They greet each other.

  Who knows, they may exchange the kiss we give,

  Thou to thy crucifix, I to my mother.

  ALICE MCYNELL.

  The arrival at the station interrupted the reverie in which the secretary and his chief both were plunged.

  ‘How odd,’ exclaimed Minks, ever observant, as he leaped from the carriage, ‘there are no platforms. Everything in Switzerland seems on one level, even the people — everything, that is, except the mountains.’

  ‘Switzerland is the mountains,’ laughed his chief.

  Minks laughed too. ‘What delicious air!’ he added, filling his lungs audibly. He felt half intoxicated with it.

  After some delay they discovered a taxi-cab, piled the luggage on to it, and were whirled away towards a little cluster of lights that twinkled beneath the shadows of La Tourne and Boudry. Bourcelles lay five miles out.

  ‘Remember, you’re not my secretary here,’ said Rogers presently, as the forests sped by them. ‘You’re just a travelling companion.’

  ‘I understand,’ he replied after a moment’s perplexity. ‘You have a secretary here already.’

  ‘His name is Jimbo.’

  The motor grunted its way up the steep hill above Colombier. Below them spread the vines towards the lake, sprinkled with lights of farms and villages. As the keen evening air stole down from forest and mountain to greet them, the vehicle turned into the quiet village street. Minks saw the big humped shoulders of La Citadelle, the tapering church spire, the trees in the orchard of the Pension. Cudrefin, smoking a cigar at the door of his grocery shop, recognised them and waved his hand. A moment later Gygi lifted his peaked hat and called ‘bon soir, bonne nuit,’ just as though Rogers had never gone away at all. Michaud, the carpenter, shouted his welcome as he strolled towards the Post Office farther down to post a letter, and then the motor stopped with a jerk outside the courtyard where the fountain sang and gurgled in its big stone basin. Minks saw the plane tree. He glanced up at the ridged backbone of the building. What a portentous looking erection it was. It seemed to have no windows. He wondered where the famous Den was. The roof overlapped like a giant hood, casting a deep shadow upon the cobbled yard. Overhead the stars shone faintly.

  Instantly a troop of figures shot from the shadow and surrounded them. There was a babel of laughter, exclamations, questions. Minks thought the stars had fallen. Children and constellations were mingled all together, it seemed. Both were too numerous to count. All were rushing with the sun towards Hercules at a dizzy speed.

  ‘And this is my friend, Mr. Minks,’ he heard repeated from time to time, feeling his hand seized and shaken before he knew what he was about. Mother loomed up and gave him a stately welcome too.

  ‘He wears gloves in Bourcelles!’ some one observed audibly to some one else.

  ‘Excuse me! This is Riquette!’ announced a big girl, hatless like the rest, with shining eyes. ‘It’s a she.’

  ‘And this is my secretary, Mr. Jimbo,’ said Rogers, breathlessly, emerging from a struggling mass. Minks and Jimbo shook hands with dignity.

  ‘Your room is over at the Michauds, as before.’

  ‘And Mr. Mix is at the Pension — there was no other room to be had—’

  ‘Supper’s at seven—’

  ‘Tante Jeanne’s been grand-cieling all day with excitement. She’ll burst when she sees you!’

  ‘She’s read the story, too. Elle dit que c’est le bouquet!’

  ‘There’s new furniture in the salon, and they’ve cleaned the sink while you’ve been away!…’

  The author moved forward out of the crowd. At the same moment another figure, slight and shadowy, revealed itself, outlined against the white of the gleaming street. It had been hidden in the tangle of the stars. It kept so quiet.

  ‘Countess, may I introduce him to you,’ he said, seizing the momentary pause. There was little ceremony in Bourcelles. ‘This is my cousin I told you about — Mr. Henry Rogers. You must know one another at once. He’s Orion in the story.’

  He dragged up his big friend, who seemed suddenly awkward, difficult to move. The children ran in and out between them like playing puppies, tumbling against each in turn.

  ‘They don’t know which is which,’ observed Jinny, w
atching the introduction. Her voice ran past him like the whir of a shooting star through space — far, far away. ‘Excuse me!’ she cried, as she cannoned off Monkey against Cousinenry. ‘I’m not a terminus! This is a regular shipwreck!’

  The three elder ones drew aside a little from the confusion.

  ‘The Countess,’ resumed Daddy, as soon as they were safe from immediate destruction, ‘has come all the way from Austria to see us. She is staying with us for a few days. Isn’t it delightful? We call her the little Grafin.’ His voice wumbled a trifle thickly in his beard. ‘She was good enough to like the story — our story, you know — and wrote to me—’

  ‘My story,’ said a silvery, laughing voice.

  And Rogers bowed politely, and with a moment’s dizziness, at two bright smiling eyes that watched him out of the little shadow standing between him and the children. He was aware of grandeur.

  He stood there, first startled, then dazed. She was so small. But something about her was so enormous. His inner universe turned over and showed its under side. The hidden thing that so long had brushed his daily life came up utterly close and took him in its gigantic arms. He stared like an unmannered child.

  Something had lit the world….

  ‘This is delicious air,’ he heard Minks saying to his cousin in the distance — to his deaf side judging by the answer:

  ‘Delicious here — yes, isn’t it?’

  Something had lit the stars.…

  Minks and his cousin continued idly talking. Their voices twittered like birds in empty space. The children had scattered like marbles from a spinning-top. Their voices and footsteps sounded in the cobbled yard of La Citadelle, as they scampered up to prepare for supper. Mother sailed solemnly after them, more like a frigate than ever. The world, on fire, turned like a monstrous Catherine wheel within his brain.