Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  A low, pleasant laugh was audible behind her.

  “You had nearly forgotten me altogether,” said a deep, quiet voice that startled her so much that for a moment the terror of the window left her as she turned sharply round. An old man stood beside her, gazing steadily into her face over the top of big, dark spectacles that balanced on his long, hooked nose. He wore a grey beard with yellow stains that she somehow felt certain were made by iodine, and there was a whiff of oil or medicine that was familiar to her, fragrant yet not entirely pleasant, as of a chemist’s shop. There was a suggestion of scented soap too, though not of soap that he used on his own person. “I have been expecting your advent,” he went on, “expecting it for ever and ever, yet with the unfailing belief that it must happen.” Pushing his spectacles up on to his wrinkled forehead, he looked her up and down with a respectful, wondering expression. His eyes were watery, but searching, searching, and very fine. “And now that you are really here among us,” he concluded solemnly, “it troubles me in a way I had not foreseen. It is almost more than I can bear.”

  “Mr. Apothecary!” cried Maria. “You’re my Apothecary!”

  The old body bent so low that she thought the spectacles must slip off his nose, and on the top of his lowered head a tiny black skull-cap became visible.

  I am as you made me,” his low, pleasant voice replied, and added, “and I am ready to believe you did your best.”

  But the faint Tick tock! and the noise at the window still sounded behind her, and she hardly took in what the old man was saying. She was only vaguely aware of an intense respect he emanated, and of something else about him beyond her comprehension.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you, Apothecary,” she answered hurriedly, “but — don’t you see? — he’s getting in!” She pointed frantically to the window. “He’s coming to catch me! My Five Minutes may be up! Oh, can’t you help somehow?” And the hurry-scurry feeling rushed over her like a flood. “I’ve tried Knife, Knife, but it hasn’t had much effect!

  She was facing the window now, still pointing, and the Apothecary, having straightened up, turned his eyes to look. He was very leisurely about it, as though hurry was evidently a thing he did not know.

  “The devil!” he murmured in his beard, as a smile of quiet amusement crept up from his lips and settled between the cheeks and eyes. There was not a vestige of alarm in him as he moved slowly past her to the window and peered through the glass. “Ah, yes,” he went on, smiling to himself, “we do see him from time to time — flashing past, you know,” as he turned back to her. “He peeps in at windows, knocks at doors. He’s one of your inventions, we always imagined, for he only appears when you’re playing with us.” He said “playing” as though the word hurt him rather.

  It hurt her, too, a little. The thought that she had merely played with these delightful Fruit Stoners was painful now.

  “You have brought him with you, no doubt,” the old man added, giving her a slightly reproachful glance. “He has never stayed so long before.”

  The Clock Man’s figure against the glass held motionless, but the Tick tock! went on faintly, the unpleasant grinding sound as well.

  “I didn’t bring him,” explained Maria, breathlessly, “for he brought me. And I didn’t ask to come. I’m just put here. I’m here to look for something frightfully important and he’s allowed me five minutes to find it, and I can’t remember what it is, and oh, ‘Pothecary” — she left out the A in her excitement—” he’s come to take me back, so my time must be up — and that grinding means—”

  The Apothecary stopped her flow of rushing words by calmly holding up his ancient hand.

  “There is no hurry here,” he observed quietly, “as you, of all persons, must be aware. You need not recognize him unless you wish to.” And he smiled so powerfully that she already felt the wild scurry in her dying down. How soothing, how protective his voice and manner were. The feeling came to her that he knew everything — everything in the world. “Your five minutes, as you call them,” he added, “are your own, to be used, no doubt, where and when you will.”

  “But that grinding — ?”

  “Let him grind,” was the reply, “provided he does not strike.”

  Maria started, feeling still more comforted. She was safe, apparently, unless she heard a strike.

  “Look again,” the other was saying, turning to the window, “and do not forget this time that we are on the first floor now high above the ground,” and then his lips murmured something too low for her to catch. Four syllables, it seemed.

  She was already looking, and the rest of the sentence did not reach her mind, for she saw the Clock Man suddenly streaking away past the window as though he had been shot out of a cannon, his black coat-tails flying behind him like cloudy wings. He went so fast that it seemed as if he had never been there at all. The grinding sound went with him, the Tick tock! ceased, the window-pane showed nothing but the summer sky. And the shock of it stung something bitterly, pungently, in her memory at the same instant.

  “Jack Robinson! Jack Robinson!” flew from her mouth as a swallow might dart flashing from its nest.

  She stood stock still, then clutched her breast with both arms. It was as though she had said something stupendous. Her breath caught. Her heart stopped. Her mouth was dry. The Apothecary, she saw, also stood motionless, with bent head and folded hands.

  “Of course,” she heard him murmur. He swallowed hard. He, too, felt emotion evidently. “ Of course,” he repeated, the beard waggling as he half-whispered it. “I knew you would remember sooner or later. He never fails. He cannot, for he is your masterpiece. Always in the nick of time, as you see—”

  “Was that a nick?” asked Maria.

  He nodded. “Naturally,” he replied, gravely still. “He only comes in nicks.”

  “But I didn’t see anything!” she objected. “Did you?”

  “No one can see what is everywhere at once,” he told her. “To remember in the nick of time is the only way. It was all right anyhow, wasn’t it?” he inquired, smiling again a little. “There was no strike.”

  The word reverberated strangely somewhere at the back of her head. Strike, strike, she repeated to herself.

  “Strike!” she exclaimed aloud. “You mean strike you dead?”

  The old man eyed her with the utmost curiosity and interest. He shook his head.

  “So you have heard the old legends too?” he brought out at length.

  “Legends — ?”

  He watched her eagerly before he went on presently. “We, too,” he observed, but rather to himself than to her, “have heard that there are people, beings of a sort, it seems, who — who come to an end — sometimes.” He laughed indulgently a little. Maria stared at him and he stared back.

  “In any case,” he went on finally, “it is better if no strike comes in your presence, for if that happened — if you heard the striking — you would go away — probably — with him — taking it with you—”

  He stopped, though his beard continued to waggle a good deal.

  “Forgive me,” he added after a moment, “if I seem muddled and confused, but these thoughts are so deep and difficult, and though your being here inspires me, it also bewilders and amazes a little. We are not in your time, you see, but outside it, and so—”

  But the only words Maria understood were “taking it with you.” She clutched at them.

  “It!” she cried. “The thing I’ve come to find?”

  He bowed his head. A rather mournful look replaced the smile.

  “Now that you have remembered him,” he remarked with a touch of resignation almost, “you will probably soon remember it. I imagine,” he went on thoughtfully, “the Man who Winds the Clocks, as you call him” — he grinned a little— “knows what it is you want to find, but Jack Robinson” — lowering his voice as he pronounced the name—” knows where it is. So you may have to ask the one, and then tell the other. The first is just your invention, the second” —
he whispered it—” is your masterpiece.”

  Maria sighed. She only partly grasped his meaning. It seemed to her a heavy programme. “Oh, dear!” she heaved out.

  “Oh, dear me,” the old fellow added, sighing too. “You know everything, I suppose,” she said. “You’re a philosopher!”

  “I merely analyse,” he corrected her. “You made me a chemist.”

  She again felt suddenly a little guilty as she heard it. It was dreadful really, the thoughtless way she had made all these people, and played with them, and muddled up their time, and dressed them all anyhow, and not even allowed them enough living places without doubling up, and even let Judas knock them off the rim of the plate, and — Was that a sound she caught faintly ticking? Was it a knocking at a door? Her whirling thoughts stopped abruptly, or, rather, they flew in another direction all at once. Her interest in the Fruit Stoners’ world had once again made her forget what she was here for.

  She listened intently. There was nothing but the sound of her own irregular breathing. The sound, whether it was again the Tick tock! or a knocking at a door, was so faint and distant that it did not seem to matter much. The feeling came to her that, if she did not actually carry it about with her, inside her even, it was always there. Whether she heard it or not, it never really stopped.

  “Oh, my Apothecary,” she interrupted her own whirling thoughts, “I believe you know everything.

  You will help me, won’t you? To find my thing, I mean? And to remember?”

  He gazed at her with a curious expression on his very crinkly face. “All of us will help,” he murmured, “if worship is help. For we all adore and love you naturally.” He was now looking, not at her, but at a sort of glass retort he had pulled out of a deep pocket in the long robe of pale yellow that flapped about him. It contained a transparent liquid tinged with blue, and as she watched him a strange wondering stirred in her, a faint, half familiar picture rising in her mind of a large window somewhere with great jars of coloured glass reflecting sunlight. It vanished again instantly. The Apothecary was mumbling something in his yellow beard. It prevented her following up her thought.

  “I had better finish this,” he explained. “I am analysing it, always analysing it, ever since I was made, of course. I may withdraw, if you permit it.” It was a question. Oddly enough, it came just when she, too, felt she wanted to be alone a little, so that she could think things out. The old fellow stirred such profound reflections in her.

  “Good-bye,” she said gently, “and thank you most awfully for — for everything,” she added lamely.

  Already he seemed a little more shadowy, a little more distant too, and at the same time smaller surely. His beard was waggling as he went. If the words did not reach her audibly, she knew exactly what the wise old fellow was saying.

  “Jack Robinson! Jack Robinson! Jack Robinson, remember..” And his outline merged into the shadows beyond the pool of sunlight from the window. He was no longer there, though Maria knew that in another way he was really always there.

  “Bless him!” ran across her mind. “I must have made him with the very deepest in me, I suppose...”

  Her thoughts, which had been calmer in his presence, began to whirl again. “That’s one, at any rate, I needn’t marry,” darted through her, “though I could live with him always. I’d like him always near. He knows everything. What wonderful things he said!”

  But what were the wonderful things? She tried to go over them again, to recall them, only to find that every word he uttered, even that powerful name, had completely left her memory. Like the Fruit Stoners, her thoughts whirled in a turning, jumbled ring, throwing off occasional flying ideas as a whizzing Catherine wheel throws off sparks that flash and die. Marriage! Marriage was one of these flying sparks that hung in her mind an instant before it was extinguished. She was to marry one of these eight Fruit Stoners, of course. The Gentleman obviously. He was rather old, but she could make him younger, couldn’t she? Of course she could. She could change their conditions all round and make them happier. Well — but could she really? Did the Sailor, for instance, really want to dress in silk and live in a big house? And if she married him, could she settle down and spend her life on a ship, always making long voyages? He was so adorable that living with him anywhere would be bliss. Yet the same applied to the beloved Tinker and the frightfully brave Soldier, though she remembered that with the Tailor she would have endless new dresses, and the Ploughboy’s life with lambs and great horses and sweet-smelling cows and fields of daisies and buttercups was perhaps what she would really like better than anything.... Oh, life was very full and marvellous!

  A long sigh escaped her, a sigh of complete confusion. Passing a hand across her forehead, she touched her hair and idly stroked it. The missing ribbon! Ah! The Thief! With a shock again his face and figure sprang into her mind, as a little shiver ran over her, leaving a queer, quick smile on her lips, a shining in her eyes as though a tiny fire burned in her somewhere deep below.

  That dreadful man! She had made him too? With a part of herself, he said. But the marriage idea now darted away and faded, replaced by another — the idea that without the ribbon her hair must be untidy and she was not looking her best. There was no looking-glass in the corridor, of course, and the window-pane reflected badly. Marriage, anyhow, would come later, much later.... There was something else she had to do before she could settle down, something of such tremendous, such awful importance that it must be seen to instantly. Instantly, or she would be too late, too late for ever. It had entirely left her mind again, and it came back now with a shock that turned her rigid. She drew a deep breath and made a violent effort. She remembered. A search, something she must find, a pearl of great price, five minutes only, the Man who Wound the Clocks ever at her heels, frantic hurry, endless leisure, a mighty name.... Oh! How wonderful and crowded with interest life was...! But how terrible...!

  Confusion overwhelmed her, and the rigidity of her body turned to water as though her bones had withdrawn. It was like a dream-world, but for the fact that nothing so bitingly real could possibly be a dream. It was too packed with enchantment, this glorious life...! A feeling of utter tiredness overmastered her. She must sit down; she must rest and think. She turned, her legs weary and unsteady, but no chair, no sofa, no divan was to be seen, nothing but a door that faced her. Her eyes settled on the brass handle.

  Faint, far away, but unmistakable, yet almost as if within herself somewhere, rose the ticking that was like the ticking of a tiny watch, close, close against her heart.

  “It never, never stops,” she whispered to herself. “It’s always, always there, even when I’m not listening.” And she turned the door knob recklessly, and walked unhesitatingly into the room beyond.

  CHAPTER VIII

  IN the first second, as she walked in, she recognized it. The room was familiar; she had been there before, she remembered it.

  A phrase, though a phrase from nowhere, passed across her mind: “Queen Elizabeth’s Room.”

  She caught her breath with a gulp. The same instant the sense of familiarity was gone. It disappeared, and remembrance went with it. All that remained was this vague, fugitive feeling that she had somehow been here before, had already lived through this scene once. And this, though it came and went like faint glimpses of a forgotten dream, persisted. It hung about her. This feeling of recurrence haunted her. This had all happened before.

  The room was large and lofty, but dimly lit because the blinds were down, and it held a musty smell as though it had been long unused. An enormous cupboard stood against the wall, a sofa and several big arm-chairs wore dust-sheets, and a great four-poster bed outlined itself in the centre of the floor. The room, she saw at once, was empty, and she closed the door behind her, then looked about her for a resting-place. The chairs in dustsheets were not inviting; the great bed, she noticed, was covered with a heavy counterpane affair she imagined was brocade. She felt tired, worn out, with little aches and twinges in h
er body, odd little aches and twinges that puzzled her. “Growing pains” shot into her mind, then vanished as meaningless as “Queen Elizabeth’s Room.” Where did they come from, these absurd darting phrases? There was something in her that kept inventing them. Growing pains indeed! As though she were a kitten! She smiled to herself; there was no sense of hurry, but the feeling of weariness was very strong, her mind and body ached, demanding rest.

  She had been through so much; the scenes and talk, the whirling confusion and bewilderment, the alternate sense of wild hurry and endless leisure, the dreadful gaps of remembering and forgetting, the efforts, the fears, the happiness, the excitement — all these had exhausted her. They enticed, made promises, but did not satisfy.... She must lie down and rest now, try to collect her thoughts, to get things straight.

  “Growing pains indeed! As though I were a kitten.” She repeated the queer phrases with another smile as her eyes turned to the wide, inviting bed while she began to calculate the effort she must make to drag that huge brocade away — and saw for the first time a small dark object lying in its very centre. She gave a start. She examined it. It was motionless. And it was black as night.

  “Judas!” she cried out. “Judas, my black darling beauty!” And the same instant, with a flying leap, she landed on the bouncing mattress beside her beloved cat, and the pair of them danced up and down together like fallen acrobats on a loose-swung net. “Judas! My dark angel!” she went on, plunging her face and fingers into the soft warm pool of blackness that he made. “If I hadn’t nearly forgotten you altogether! Think of that, will you? And all the time you were just quietly waiting for me in here, knowing that of course I would come and find you, and just sleeping as soundly and tightly as a drum! Oh, Judas, my best beloved, now tell me all about it, all about everything at once, you tight, fat drum!

  She continued her endearments, though the drum made no response beyond opening a very narrow eye, making itself more comfortable with the slightest possible readjustment of the back paws against the nose, and emitting a faint, rumbling purr that was not, indeed, unlike the roll of very muffled drums. But Maria asked no more: she had found her friend, she was resting comfortably on her back, she could now think things over in peace and quietness, and utter her thoughts aloud, if she wanted, to an understanding friend who would help and advise, yet not interrupt or criticize.