Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  He had been rooting about in the heather by the edge of the sand-pits. And he thrust his joined hands beneath the other’s nose. Something the size of a hen’s egg, something that shone a dirty white, lay in them against the thick gold rings. ‘Didn’t I tell you the place was a gol-darned gold mine? But what’s the use o’ talking? Will you look at this, now?’ He repeated it with the air of a man who has suddenly discovered the secret of the world. The voice was quiet with intense excitement kept hard under.

  And Eliot obeyed and looked. He saw his visitor, his Bond Street trousers turned up high enough to show the great muscles of his calves, the Homburg hat tilted across one eye, coat-sleeves pulled up and smeared with a whitish mud. There was perspiration on his forehead. It only needed the sombrero and the pistols to complete the picture of twenty years ago when Cass Murdoch, after weeks of heavy labour, found the first gold-dust in his pan. For John C. had found gold. It lay, a dirty lump of white earth, in his large spread hands. Those hands were the pan. The breeze that murmured through the pine trees came, sweet and keen, from leagues of open plain and virgin mountains far away.

  ... Eliot smelt the wood-fire smoke of camp... heard the crack of the rifle as some one killed the dinner....

  ‘Well, John C.,’ he gasped, as he dropped back likewise into the vanished pocket of the years, ‘what’s your luck? Out with it, man, out with it!’

  ‘A fortune,’ replied his visitor. ‘Put yer finger on it right now, an’ don’t tell mother or burst out crying unless yer forced to!’ High pleasure was in his voice.

  He stepped closer, transferring the lump of dirt into the hand his host unconsciously stretched open to receive it. It lay there a moment, looking even dirtier than before against the more delicate skin. Eliot felt it with finger and thumb. It was soft and sticky and a little moist. It stained the flesh.

  Then he looked up and stared into his companion’s eyes — blankly. A horrible excitement worked underground in him. But he did not even yet understand.

  ‘You’ve got it,’ observed John C., with dry finality.

  ‘Got what?’ asked Eliot.

  ‘Got it right there in yer westkit pocket,’ said the other, with an air of supreme satisfaction. His cigar had gone out. He lit it again in leisurely fashion, spat accurately at a distant frond of bracken, eyed the lump of dirt again with inimitable pride, and added, ‘Got it without asking; the working soft and easy too; water-power on the spot, and the sea all close and handy for shipping it away.’ He made a gesture to indicate the tumbling stream and the sea-coast a few miles beyond.

  Then, seeing that his host still stared with blank incomprehension, holding the little lump at arm’s length as though it might bite or burn him, he deigned to explain, but with a note of condescending pity in his voice, as of a man explaining to a stupid child.

  ‘Clay,’ he said calmly, ‘and good stuff at that.’

  ‘Clay,’ repeated Eliot, still a little dazed, though light was breaking on him. ‘Bricks...?’ he asked, with a dull sinking of the heart.

  ‘Bricks, nothing!’ snapped the other with impatient scorn, as though his friend were still a tenderfoot in Arizona. ‘Good, white pottery clay, and soft as a baby’s tongue. The best God ever laid down for man. Worth twice its weight in dust. And all to be had for the trouble of shovelling it out. Old pard, you’ve struck it good and hot this time; and here’s my blessing on yer both.’

  Eliot dropped the lump his fingers held so long and took half-heartedly the giant hand that squeezed his own. Across his brain ran visions of slender vases, exquisite white cups and bowls and pitchers, plates and sweet-rimmed basins, all fashioned in delicate-toned shades of glaze — beautifully finished pottery—’ worth twice their weight in dust.’

  X

  AND half an hour later, when John Casanova Murdoch had boomed away in his luxurious motorcar like a departing thunderstorm, Eliot, coming back by the pinewood that led from the high road, heard a step behind him, and turned to find Mànya’s face looking over his very shoulder.

  ‘Uncle, who was that?’ There was a touch of indignation in her voice that was almost contempt.

  ‘Man I knew in America — years ago,’ he said shortly. He still felt dazed, bewildered. But shame and uneasiness came creeping up as well.

  ‘He won’t come again, will he?’

  ‘Not again, Mànya.’

  The child took his arm, apparently only half relieved.

  ‘He was like a bit of the dirty country,’ she said, and when he interrupted with ‘Not quite so bad as that, Mànya,’ she asked abruptly with her usual intuition, ‘Did he want to buy, or build, or something horrid like that?’

  ‘We haven’t met for twenty years,’ he said evasively. ‘Used to hunt and camp together in America. He went to the goldfields with me.’ He was debating all the while whether he should tell her all. He hardly knew what he thought. Like a powerful undertow there drove through the storm of strange emotions the tide of a decision he had already come to. It swept him from all his moorings, though as yet he would not acknowledge it even to himself.

  ‘Uncle,’ she cried suddenly, stepping across the path, and looking anxiously into his face, ‘tell me one thing: will anything be different?’

  And the simple question, or perhaps the eager, wistful expression in her voice and eyes, showed him the truth that there was no evading. He must tell her sometime. Why not now?

  He decided to make a clean sweep of it.

  ‘Mànya,’ he began gently, ‘this Place one day — when I am gone, you know — will be your own. But there’ll be no money with it. You’ll have very little to live on.’

  She said nothing, just listening with a little air of boredom, as though she knew this already, yet felt no special interest in it. It belonged to the world of things she could not realise much. She nodded. They still stood there, face to face.

  ‘I’ve been anxious, child, for a long time about your future,’ he went on, meeting her dark eyes with a distinct effort, for they seemed to read the shame he felt rising in his heart; ‘and wondering what I could do to make you safe—’

  ‘I’m safe enough,’ she interrupted, tossing her hair back and raising her chin a little.

  ‘But when I’m gone,’ he said gravely, ‘and Mrs. Coove has gone, and there’s no one to look after you. Money’s your only friend then.’

  She seemed to reflect. She moved aside, and they walked on slowly towards the house.

  ‘That’s a long way off, Uncle. I’m not afraid.’

  ‘But it’s my duty to provide for you as well as possible,’ he said firmly.

  And then he told her bluntly and in as few words as possible of the discovery of the clay.

  The excitement at first in the child was so great that nothing would satisfy her but that they should at once turn back and see the place together. They did so, while he explained how ‘Mr. Murdoch,’ who was learned in strata, their depth and dip and outcrop, had declared that this deposit of fine white clay was very large. Its spread below the heather-roots might be tremendous. ‘My aunt,’ he said, ‘your great-aunt Julia, lived all her life upon a gold mine here without knowing it, poor as a church mouse.’

  This particularly thrilled her. ‘How funny that she never felt it!’ was her curious verdict. ‘Was she very deaf?’

  ‘Stone deaf, yes,’ he replied, laughing, ‘and short-sighted too.’

  ‘Ah!’ said the child, as though things were thus explained. ‘But she might have digged!’

  She ran among the heather when he showed her the place, found lumps of clay, played ball with them and was wildly delighted. She treated the great discovery as a game; then as a splendid secret ‘just between us two.’ Mr. Murdoch wouldn’t tell, would he? That seemed the only danger that she saw — at first.

  But her uncle knew quite well that this excitement was all false; and far from reassuring him, it merely delayed the deeper verdict that was bound to come with full comprehension. All the discovery involved had n
ot reached her brain. As yet she realised only the novelty, the mystery, the wonder. The spot, moreover, where the great deposit showed its lip was beside the loveliest part of all the wood, and just where the child most loved to play.

  At last, then, as her body grew tired and the excitement brought the natural physical reaction, he saw the change begin. She paused and looked about her half suspiciously, like an animal that suspects a trap. Her glance ran questioningly to where her uncle leaned, watching her, against a tree. She eyed him. He thought she suddenly looked different, though wherein the difference lay escaped him. He felt as if he were watching a wild animal, only half tamed, that distrusts its owner, and would next deny his mastership and wait its opportunity to spring. The simile, he knew, was exaggerated, but the picture rose within him none the less. Misgiving and uneasiness grew apace.

  Abruptly Mànya stopped her wild playing and with the movement of a little panther ran towards him. She took up a position, as usual, directly opposite. With the strange air of dignity that sometimes clothed her, the figure of the child stood there among the darkening trees and asked him questions, keen, searching questions. He was grateful for the shadows, though he felt they did not screen his face from her piercing sight; but it was her imperious manner above all that made his defence seem so clumsily insincere, and the questions a veritable inquisition.

  Before the flood of them, as before their pitiless scrutiny, he certainly quailed. Their keen directness convicted him almost of treachery, and he was hard put to it to persuade her and himself that it really was a sense of duty he obeyed in this decision to work the clay. ‘I’m doing it all for her,’ he repeated again and again to himself, and loathed, with a dash of terror, that curious sudden drive, as of a blow from outside, that sent his tongue into his cheek. But the terror, he dimly divined, was due to another feeling as well, equally vague yet equally persistent. For it seemed that while she listened to his explanations, another listened in the darkness too. Her resentment and distress he realised vividly; but he felt also the resentment and distress — of another. And more than once, during this strange dialogue in the darkening wood, he knew the horrible sensation that this ‘other’ had come very close, so close as to slip between himself and the child. Almost — that the child was being used as the instrument to express the vehement protest...!

  But he faced the music, to use the lingo of John C., and spared himself nothing. He told Mànya, though briefly, that workmen must swarm all through her secret playground, that machinery must grind and boom across the haunted valleys, that the water of her little stream must yield the power to turn great ugly wheels, and that perhaps even a little railway might be built to convey the loads of precious clay down to the sea where steamers would call for them. Acres of trees, too, would be swept away, and heather-land marred and scarred with pits and ditches and quarries. But the benefits in time would all be hers. He put it purposely at its worst, while emphasising as best he could the interest and excitement that must accompany the developments. The dream of many years was nevertheless shattered into bits in half an hour.

  The child listened and understood. He was relieved, if puzzled at the same time, that she betrayed no emotion of disappointment or indignation. What she felt she dealt with in her own way — inside. At the stream, however, on her way home, she paused a moment, watching it slip through the darkness underneath the old mill-wheel.

  ‘It won’t run any more — for itself,’ she said in a low, trembling little voice, that was infinitely pathetic.

  ‘No; but it will run for you, Mànya,’ he answered, though the words had not been addressed really to him; ‘working away busily for your future.’

  And then she burst into tears and hid her face against his coat. He found no further thing to say. He walked beside her, feeling like a criminal found out.

  But at the end, as they neared the house side by side, she suddenly turned and asked another question that caused him a thrill of vivid surprise and discomfort — so vivid, in fact, that it was fear.

  They were standing just beneath her bedroom window then. Memory rushed back upon him with overwhelming force, and he glanced up instinctively at the empty panes of glass. It was almost as though he expected to see a face looking reproachfully down upon him. Through him like spears of ice, as he heard the words, there shot again the atrocious sensation that it was not Mànya, the child, who asked the question, but that Other who had recently moved so close. For behind the tone, with no great effort to conceal it either, trailed a new accent that Mànya never used. Greater than resentment, it was anger, and within the anger lay the touch of a yet stronger note — the note of judgment.

  ‘But, tell me one thing, Uncle,’ she asked in a whispering voice: ‘will the Place let you?’

  XI

  MOTIVE, especially in complex natures, is often beyond reach of accurate discovery, and a mixed motive may prove quite impossible of complete disentanglement. But for the sense of shame that Eliot felt, he might never have discerned that with his genuine desire to provide for Mànya’s future there was also involved a secret satisfaction that he himself would profit too. The sight of gold demolishes pretence and artifice; and deep within he felt the old lust of possession and acquisition assert itself. All these years it had been buried, not destroyed. His love of the Place, his worship of Memory, his guardianship of the little dream-estate, compared to the prize of worldly treasure, were on the surface. They were artificial.

  This little thing had proved it. The child’s tears, her significant question above all, had shown him to himself. If not, whence came this sense of ignominy before her own purer passion, the loss of confidence, this inner quailing before Another who gazed reprovingly, resentfully, upon him from the shadows of the past? That note of menace in Mànya’s suggestive question was surely not her own. It haunted him. Day and night he heard it ringing in his brain. This new distrust of himself that he recognised read into it something almost vindictive and revengeful.

  But Eliot, for all that, was not the man to give in easily. He resolutely dismissed this birth of morbid fancy. Clinging to the thought that his duty to his niece came first, he resisted the suggestion that imputed a grosser selfishness. Cass Murdoch, too, unwittingly helped; for the side of his character John C.’s visit had revived — the love of fight and energetic action — came valiantly to the rescue. To a great extent he persuaded himself that his motive was — almost entirely — a pure one. Preparations for developing the clay went forward steadily.

  Mànya too appeared to help him. She said no more distressing things; she showed keen interest in the coming and going of surveyors, architects, soil experts, and the like. And Murdoch’s discovery was no false alarm; the bed of clay was deep and extensive as he prophesied, its quality very fine. Men came with pick and shovel; sample pits were dug; the stuff was tested and judged excellent; and the verdict of the manufacturers, to whom ‘lots’ were forwarded on approval, pronounced it admirable for a large and ready market. There was money in it, and the supply would last for years. The papers heralded the fortunate discoverer, and a moderate fortune undeniably was in sight.

  The preparations, however, took time, and the finding of the initial capital, which Murdoch readily supplied, also took time, and spring meanwhile slipped into summer before the enterprise was fairly on its feet. Soft winds sighed lazily among the larches, and the scent of flowers pervaded every valley the pine-trees basked in the sunshine, the pearly water laughed and sang; and at night the moon shot every glade with magic that was like the wings of moths whose flitting scattered everywhere the fine dust of a thousand silvery dreams. The beauty of the little haunted estate leaped into a rich maturity that was utterly enchanting, like wild flowers that are sweetest just before they die.

  And over Mànya, too, there passed slowly a mysterious change, for it seemed as if for a time she had been standing still, and now with a sudden leap of beauty passed into the glory of young womanhood. With her short skirts and tumbled hair, her
grave and wistful face, swinging idly that red tam-o’-shanter from which she was inseparable, he saw her one evening on the lawn outside his study window, and the change flashed into him across the moonlight with a positive shock. The child had suddenly grown up. A barrier stood between them.

  But the barrier was not so sudden as it seemed, for, on looking back, he realised the daily, almost imperceptible manner of its growth. Its complete erection he realised now, but he had been aware of it for a long time — ever since his decision to work the clay, in fact. Here was the proof her deceptive silence had concealed. She had felt it too deeply for words, for arguing, for disappointment volubly expressed; but it had struck into the roots of her little being and had changed her from within outwards. It had aged her. Reality had broken in upon her world of play and dream. He had destroyed her childhood at a single blow. She questioned, doubted, and grew old.

  But though every one grows older in identically this way, by sudden leaps, as it were, due to the forcing impulse of some strong emotion, with Mànya it brought no radical alteration. She deepened rather than definitely changed. The sense of wonder did not fade, but ripened. The crude facts of life could never satisfy a nature such as hers, and though she realised them now for the first time, they could not enter to destroy. They drove her more deeply into herself. That is, she dealt with them.

  And the change, though he devoted hours of pondering reflection over it, may be summed up briefly enough in so far as it affected himself. There was a difference in their relationship. He stood away from her; while she, on her side, drew nearer to something else that was not himself. With this elusive and mysterious Thing she lived daily. She took sides with it and with the Place, against himself. It went on largely, he felt, behind his back. She grew more and more identified with some active influence that had always been at work in all the wild gardened loveliness of the property, but was now more active than before. Stirred up and roused it was; he could almost imagine it — aggressive. And Mànya, always knowing it at closer quarters than himself, was now in definite league with it. There was opposition in it, though an opposition as yet inactive.