Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  She looked into those eyes as they came nearer across the lawn, and all the confusion in her, the jumbled incoherence of everything, the puzzling nightmare turmoil, turned simple. Almost — she knew what she had come to find, knew at least positively that it was in the Pig Stye; almost — almost — even remembered the syllables of that mighty name.... Oh, this rich and tender moment, could she but hold it....

  “You are the one I’m going to marry,” and her voice came out like singing. “And then everything will be happy for ever afterwards!”

  Whether he heard her or not she did not know. He was much nearer now, and as she watched him she noticed again his well-shaped hands, his long slender fingers, the marvellously light and delicate way he moved. His feet, it seemed to her, scarcely pressed the daisies down. “I believe he could steal even with his toes!” she thought, feeling the delicious flooding tide of blood rise up to her very eyes. He looked so young too, exactly as she had always seen him in her mind, of course. “My husband...!” she breathed too low for anyone to hear.

  But he heard it.

  “Maria,” he said, “you chose me, and here I am.” He held out her hair-ribbon, her necklace, her coloured shell, her belt. “And I’ve brought these back.”

  Maria examined them. “Thank you,” she replied, a trifle stiffly, for she knew it was a mistake to let a man take one too easily. “But you stole them from me first, you know.”

  “If I hadn’t,” he agreed, “I couldn’t bring them back.”

  “And you said you would take everything — even my Pearl of Great Price if you found it. That’s what you are — a real thief.”

  He smiled, while his great eyes looked her through and through.

  “I have already taken everything,” he said in an enchantingly low, mysterious voice, “even your heart,” he added, coming right up to her and putting his arms miraculously about her.

  “I gave you that,” she whispered, “the first moment I saw you.”

  “Then I’m not a perfect thief after all.”

  “Oh, yes, you are,” she told him, her lips against his cheek, “because,” she added softly, “you stole that too. I made you with my very best—”

  His kisses stopped her words. It was most lovely. He lifted her off her feet and kissed her in the air, he set her down again and kissed her on the lawn; he was very strong and very gentle. Radiant and glorious it all was. It was the very acme of reality. All the rest of her life and adventures was a dream, but this at last was real. Here was the explanation of the shock his eyes had given her in the Barn. Here was the message they had flashed. This surely, at last, was being more awake, more fully conscious! The other Fruit Stoners, even the Sailor, Gentleman, Apothecary, were but unreal shadows compared to this. Even the menace of the Tick tock!, the sharp odour, died away, the sense of panic hurry faded, the Pearl of Great Price itself in the Pig Stye could wait a little.... The nightmare horror all withdrew.

  “I’ll weave the ribbon in your hair,” he said, and she liked the determined way he said it. He did not ask. His touch was marvellous as he caught the tresses and fastened the little ribbon in.

  “Your belt must go on too,” he told her, and though his clever hands had clasped it in a second round her waist, their faces came together again while he did so, and the perfume of the lilac that had first concealed him lay deliciously in his breath.

  “And the shell goes against our ears,” he murmured like sweet music, “so that we shall both hear the singing of the sea at the same moment....” They were a long, long time listening to the singing of the sea in that curly coloured shell he held between their ears, face against face, cheek against cheek, and the singing of the sea held rapture.

  Long, long, long in that lovely garden, they listened to the old, old tales, the old, old songs. The sunshine lay warm upon them; the perfume of the flowers breathed over them; they listened and they listened.... She gave him everything she had to give, and he took everything. For she loved him, yes, she loved her Thief, with body, mind and soul; she held nothing back, she gave and gave until there was nothing more to give, for there was nothing left.... At last, at long last, she told herself, she had found something that was beyond all question real....

  Oh, the happy comfort of it, the security, the peace that wrapped her round with her Thief’s arms about her, the untold bliss. Here, in this starry ecstasy, lay her ultimate reality at last. She was in her prime. It was the absolute and perfect nick....

  “Everything I’ve given you, my Thief,” she murmured in his ear against her lips, for it never even occurred to her to ask what he gave. “All I am and all I have. Everything.”

  His answer puzzled her. “I’ve taken everything, Maria, for you made me a perfect Thief.”

  She drew her face back a little and looked up into his big shining eyes, and what she saw perturbed her, for though the fire in the eyes burned as intently as before, a change she did not like had come into the face. The skin was darker, though it lay in the full blaze of the sunshine, and the darkness seemed spreading even as she looked. There were lines, too, she had not noticed before, lines that deepened visibly. There was this wrinkly, loosened skin. She gave an involuntary start, disentangling herself slowly from his arms, and the face, as she now gazed at it from a little distance, turned distinctly crinkly. His arms at the same moment weakened about her, then dropped down by his side. The scent of the lilac that was so sweet in her nostrils no longer drowned that other unwelcome odour she had till now utterly forgotten. She noticed its sharp, acrid tang again.

  “You have nothing left,” she heard, “for I have taken all.”

  Already he stood a little away from her.

  “Nothing,” she whispered, terror stealing back upon her, for she knew that what he said was true. Her heart sank dreadfully, and the glory she had experienced, it seemed, for ages, left the world, and the garden died, the lovely garden where she had tasted a bliss she had called real. “Nothing,” she repeated, “for you have stolen it all away and left me empty.” But she said it to herself and not to him, the words fluttering soundlessly in her heart alone. “Nothing... everything...”

  She looked despairingly about her.

  “The garden’s — dead,” ran through her, and as the sad words went clanking like broken bells across her thought, she heard that other sound she dreaded.

  Tick tock! Tick tock!...

  It was certainly a padding tread, a footstep.

  She had forgotten it, though she knew it never ceased. She had neglected and despised it, postponing the warning it repeated endlessly. Automatically, she sniffed the air. The queer, acrid tang came to her nostrils. The flowers — pinks, lilac, wallflowers — all were dead.

  “Thief, my Thief...!” she called faintly, her heart breaking and panic catching her.

  He was still visible, but in the distance now. He had left her side. He looked smaller, insignificant somehow. The face, even across the lawn, was dark and lined and crinkled. He waved a hand, that slender, beautiful hand that had caressed her youth.

  “Are you going — are you leaving me?”

  His voice came shivering on the wind: “I have taken all you have to give. Why stay?”

  Maria knew herself utterly bereft, drained empty, all she had ever had taken from her. What was there left now? The Thief was as unreal as the others. What, then, was real?

  Very small he looked, over there against the door in the wall of the ivied house. Her heart went out to him, then came back as with a hollow crash into her ribs.

  “Where — are the others?” she called faintly. “Are you leaving me to join them?” Her youth too, she knew, he had taken her youth away....

  Halting an instant by the door he had now opened, he raised his hand and called, but the only word that reached her across the lawn was “Listen...” and the door banged behind him.

  The song, muffled by the thick grey walls, came indistinctly, so that she barely caught the words. Male voices chanted it.

&nbs
p; “Time is a tiger... stalking every man... streaked like the lightning... taking all he can....” And as she heard it, feeling its odd rhythm in her blood, the full awful nightmare power swept back upon her out of the very sky.

  CHAPTER XVI

  With a gigantic effort Maria held her ground. She made no sound, no movement. Her sense of loneliness seemed utterly intolerable, yet she faced it. Her heart, though it seemed to stop an instant, went on beating again.

  Tick tock! Tick tock!

  The beating sound rang on, sounding everywhere about her, in the very air, while behind the dying fragrance of the flowers hung ever that strange acrid tang. Her eyes roved nervously over the whole scene inch by inch. No figure now was visible. All, all had failed her.

  Tick tock! Tick tock!

  Her distraught mind whirled with questions that flew off unanswered, while the padding tread came closer. It was made by something that never, never stopped, that never left her in peace, by something for ever passing, racing, rushing past.

  Time, she thought, as the sound beat stealthily in rhythm with the hammering of her own pulses. Invulnerable, she remembered the Gentleman’s comment on her pistol shot. The Man who Winds the Clocks came back to her. Five Minutes followed.

  Then rushed upon her, as that ominous chorus rang through her mind again... Tiger — Tiger — one of the most awful words she knew. Tiger... streaked like the lightning... stalking every man... Why was this pitiless monster associated with the sound?

  Tick tock! Tick tock! Like the beating of some giant heart, some relentless, immortal heart that never hurried because its end was sure.

  She turned with a start suddenly and looked behind her, as though she expected to catch something in the act of moving. Something had stirred, making a faint rustling. She sniffed, she stared, she listened. There was nothing to be seen, yet there was a change. The lawn and house and garden now abruptly wore a different look, showing themselves less clearly, less brilliant, less defined. Though the sun still shone in a cloudless sky, its radiance had dimmed a little, as on those summer days when the air thickens almost imperceptibly before a storm. There was less light — yes, that was it, less light. The light was fading. Daylight was leaving the world. It was as though the wick of some great lamp was being turned down. A beginning of twilight dusk was spreading. It was a frightening, nightmare change.

  It was then the shadow fell. From above her in the sky it fell; it fell across the lawn and flower-beds and garden, upon the shrubberies, upon the cedars farther off, upon the old grey house. It draped the world, as though a veil had passed before the sun, and something, she then realized, was indeed actually passing above her through the air, and it was this shadow that took the light away.

  Something was passing overhead. It cast its shadow.

  She gazed with horror, for the shape was quite distinct, and she saw its outline clearly racing across the lawn at her feet. As the shadow of a cloud sweeps over bare hills, the general form was unmistakable, recognizable too, the body drawn out to its full length behind the tremendous neck, the mighty limbs stretched forward, as the great animal swept past in the full cry of the eternal hunt.

  For a second its dark pattern lay clearly outlined on the lawn.

  “A feline! A monstrous feline!” rose in icy terror to her mind. “A Tiger — Time the Tiger!

  The awful padding steps roared over her like a wind: Tick tock! Tick tock!, with the deep, hoarse, grinding sound that came before the strike, the growl of relentless pursuit. If only the strike would come! Dreadful though the thought was, it was better than this heart-breaking suspense. Her time, she knew, was almost up; on the very edge of the last minute she balanced dizzily. She sought frantically for a name, a mighty name that could help and save her, but could not find it, for it had been too long forgotten. Pig Stye was all she found. Pig Stye, and something she must look for, a pearl of great price that lay hidden there.

  If she could only find this, the nightmare would end; it would be explained, a meaning would come into all this incoherent, purposeless jumbled terror that was her life. Once she found it, she would become real, wake up out of this thick, horrible phantasmagoria where nothing was real, not even the Thief’s intoxicating love. She would become more conscious, awaken a second time.

  “The Pig Stye! The Pig Stye!” she shrieked in that nightmare voice that made no sound, though the effort behind it was tremendous.

  “The night cometh when...” but this, too, was soundless.

  She turned quickly, her legs shot forward, she rushed, but the darkness made it impossible to choose her direction. It seemed to her that she moved in a circle as the Fruit Stoners did, moving violently yet not advancing. Round and round like a squirrel in a cage, round and round, automatically, mechanically, caged, a prisoner, whirling round the rim of a plate.

  “The Pig Stye! Which is the way to the Pig Stye?”

  And as she rushed headlong through the darkness, or perhaps only round and round, a thought rose with alarming conviction before her — the sudden certainty that she must meet the owner of the footsteps face to face, must challenge it even before her precious object could be found. Whether Tiger or the Man who Winds the Clocks, she must somehow snatch her pearl from beneath his very eyes before she could — escape.

  “The Pig Stye! The Pig Stye!

  Frantically she rushed headlong through the increasing darkness, knowing that she must soon meet the owner of the footsteps face to face. It was the true nightmare rush. She made no progress despite the most terrific efforts. Her heart, it seemed, must burst. This darkness, she knew now, was a final darkness. Light at some distant end was problematical. Her time was up, her five minutes, her — life.

  “The valley of the shadow of death” crashed through her with an awful resonance. And she knew she was old, old, old. Childhood, youth, maturity, her prime, her nicks, her ecstatic and her ghastly moments, all were but aspects of some hideous automatic mechanism to which she was enslaved — because she was not awake enough, not conscious and aware enough, to realize their absurdity. Only one thing, after all, was worth while, only one thing was real — her search. Without it, all this adventure, amusement, emotion, experience, was just a meaningless jumble, an incoherent picture of glitteringly attractive rubbish. None of it was real. It was no better than a silly dream, yet with horror, dreadful horror, at the heart of it, the horror of ultimate nightmare. The Fruit Stoners were but a fragment of her own ghastly dream...!

  “I’m old, old,” she kept saying to herself as she rushed headlong in the nightmare circle, balancing dizzily on a rim like a fruit stone on the edge of a slippery plate. “I’m old, or I could not think like this!”

  Think! The word exploded with a shock in her frenzied brain. The blank futility of thought struck like a blow into her heart. Thinking was utterly useless. What counted alone was action, action backed by feeling. Here lay a direct way to finding something real. And it lay for her now — through a Pig Stye.

  These thoughts, she knew, were old, old thoughts belonging to the Valley of the Shadow whose darkness now beat against her eyes. She had lost everything. The Thief had left her empty and bereft; his love, her final effort, was unreal like all the rest. It had given her a few mechanical baubles only — a glass necklace, a shell, a pretty belt, a blue hair-ribbon.

  “When I’ve taken everything... you will be happy..” The words came floating from a great distance, a distance both of time and space.

  He had taken everything.

  It was this vivid, flashing conviction of her final and utter emptiness that somehow made her whirling circle stop. There came an abrupt jerk and she stood still, facing her final emptiness.

  “The Pig Stye! The thing I came to look for! The one thing that I simply must find!” she whispered to herself with an intense conviction that burnt like fire. “It’s all I’ve got left... my search...!”

  And in the sudden singleness of her heart she remembered that there was one who alone could guide a
nd help her. There was one who could stop, or who at least could change, perhaps even arrest, this remorseless, pitiless swift rush of time that must destroy her. There was a mighty name, a name of fire and thunder and gorgeous magic. It could make time and clocks ridiculous.

  “Jack...!” burst from her tightened throat, that then instantly restricted in a dreadful gulp, for the rest of the marvellous name escaped her memory. Her breath choked as she made frantic efforts to recover it. There was an “is,” and “on,” a “rob” as well, but the proper sequence of the syllables were lost.

  “Jack... Bonsinor...!” She shrieked aloud in her panic. She knew it was somewhere wrong. It was as though she told a lie. Yet part of it was right. Jack certainly was right.

  “Jack... Jack...!” she yelled again in her helplessness, leaving out the rest. And perhaps it was this honest refusal to humbug herself that lent her courage and direction.

  “Jack! The Pig Stye!” she cried at the top of her voice, and took the plunge.

  “Here goes!” she added, like a child of ten years old.

  And even half the wondrous name, apparently, worked magic.

  CHAPTER XVII

  FOR she went — straight across the lawn, darkness or no darkness. It seemed easier now. It was absurd to spin round in an aimless circle when you wanted to reach a point in front of you. She went straight in front of her towards the old ivied house. That a Pig Stye should exist inside a country house did not bother her an atom. She was as full of confidence as though some mighty and all-powerful being held her by the hand. That Judas should be scampering in his idiotic fashion beside her, tail in the air and whiskers spraying, caused her no surprise at all. She knew where she was going and what she wanted, and Judas, naturally, knew too.

  On reaching the back door, she opened it and stalked in, and was not in the least perturbed to see that her spindly little legs were stained with mud, or that her short serge skirt had hay and dandelions sticking to it. She brushed them off and walked down the passage towards the kitchen.