The words were kindly spoken, but the voice and manner rather deliberate. Jimbo began to look a little troubled, as his father watched him.
“Come now, little man,” he said more gently, “what’s the matter, eh?” He drew the boy close to him. “Tell me all about it, and what it is you’re always thinking about so much.”
Jimbo brought back his mind with a tremendous effort, and said, “I don’t like the winter. It’s so dark and full of horrid things. It’s all ice and shadows, so—so I go away and think of what I like, and other places——”
“Nonsense!” interrupted his father briskly; “winter’s a capital time for boys. What in the world d’ye mean, I wonder?”
He lifted the child on to his knee and stroked his hair, as though he were patting the flank of a horse. Jimbo took no notice of the interruption or of the caress, but went on saying what he had to say, though with eyes a little more clouded.
“Winter’s like going into a long black tunnel, you see. It’s downhill to Christmas, of course, and then uphill all the way to the summer holidays. But the uphill part’s so slow that——”
“Tut, tut!” laughed the Colonel in spite of himself; “you mustn’t have such thoughts. Those are a baby’s notions. They’re silly, silly, silly.”
“Do you really think so, father?” continued the boy, as if politeness demanded some recognition of his father’s remarks, but otherwise anxious only to say what was in his mind. “You wouldn’t think them silly if you really knew. But, of course, there’s no one to tell you in the stable, so you can’t know. You’ve never seen the funny big people rushing past you and laughing through their long hair when the wind blows so loud. I know several of them almost to speak to, but you hear only wind. And the other things with tiny legs that skate up and down the slippery moonbeams, without ever tumbling off—they aren’t silly a bit, only they don’t like dogs and noise. And I’ve seen the furniture"—he pronounced it furchinur—"dancing about in the day-nursery when it thought it was alone, and I’ve heard it talking at night. I know the big cupboard’s voice quite well. It’s just like a drum, only rougher....”
The Colonel shook his head and frowned severely, staring hard at his son. But though their eyes met, the boy hardly saw him. Far away at the other end of the dark Tunnel of the Months he saw the white summer sunshine lying over gardens full of nodding flowers. Butterflies were flitting across meadows yellow with buttercups, and he saw the fascinating rings upon the lawn where the Fairy People held their dances in the moonlight; he heard the wind call to him as it ran on along by the hedgerows, and saw the gentle pressure of its swift feet upon the standing hay; streams were murmuring under shady trees; birds were singing; and there were echoes of sweeter music still that he could not understand, but loved all the more perhaps on that account....
“Yes,” announced the Colonel later that evening to his wife, spreading his hands out as he spoke. “Yes, my dear, I have made a discovery, and an alarming one. You know, I’m rarely at fault where the children are concerned—and I’ve noted all the symptoms with unusual care. James, my dear, is an imaginative boy.”
He paused to note the effect of his words, but seeing none, continued:
“I regret to be obliged to say it, but it’s a fact beyond dispute. His head is simply full of things, and he talked to me this evening about tunnels and slippery moonlight till I very nearly lost my temper altogether. Now, the boy will never make a man unless we take him in hand properly at once. We must get him a governess, or something, without delay. Just fancy, if he grew up into a poet or one of these—these——”
In his distress the soldier could only think of horse-terms, which did not seem quite the right language. He stuck altogether, and kept repeating the favourite gesture with his open hand, staring at his wife over his glasses as he did so.
But the mother never argued.
“He’s very young still,” she observed quietly, “and, as you have always said, he’s not a bit like other boys, remember.”
“Exactly what I say. Now that your eyes are opened to the actual state of affairs, I’m satisfied.”
“We’ll get a sensible nursery-governess at once,” added the mother.
“A practical one?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Hard-headed?”
“Yes.”
“And well educated?”
“Yes.”
“And—er—firm with children. She’ll do for the lot, then.”
“If possible.”
“And a young woman who doesn’t go in for poetry, and dreaming, and all that kind of flummery.”
“Of course, dear.”
“Capital. I felt sure you would agree with me,” he went on. “It’d be no end of a pity if Jimbo grew up an ass. At present he hardly knows the difference between a roadster and a racer. He’s going into the army, too,” he added by way of climax, “and you know, my dear, the army would never stand that!”
“Never,” said the mother quietly, and the conversation came to an end.
Meanwhile, the subject of these remarks was lying wide awake upstairs in the bed with the yellow iron railing round it. His elder brother was asleep in the opposite corner of the room, snoring peacefully. He could just see the brass knobs of the bedstead as the dying firelight quivered and shone on them. The walls and ceiling were draped in shadows that altered their shapes from time to time as the coals dropped softly into the grate. Gradually the fire sank, and the room darkened. A feeling of delight and awe stole into his heart.
Jimbo loved these early hours of the night before sleep came. He felt no fear of the dark; its mystery thrilled his soul; but he liked the summer dark, with its soft, warm silences better than the chill winter shadows. Presently the firelight sprang up into a brief flame and then died away altogether with an odd little gulp. He knew the sound well; he often watched the fire out, and now, as he lay in bed waiting for he knew not what, the moonlight filtered in through the baize curtains and gradually gave to the room a wholly new character.
Jimbo sat up in bed and listened. The house was very still. He slipped into his red dressing-gown and crept noiselessly over to the window. For a moment he paused by his brother’s bed to make sure that he really was asleep; then, evidently satisfied, he drew aside a corner of the curtain and peered out.
“Oh!” he said, drawing in his breath with delight, and again “oh!”
It was difficult to understand why the sea of white moonlight that covered the lawn should fill him with such joy, and at the same time bring a lump into his throat. It made him feel as if he were swelling out into something very much greater than the actual limits of his little person. And the sensation was one of mingled pain and delight, too intense for him to feel for very long. The unhappiness passed gradually away, he always noticed, and the happiness merged after a while into a sort of dreamy ecstasy in which he neither thought nor wished much, but was conscious only of one single unmanageable yearning.
The huge cedars on the lawn reared themselves up like giants in silver cloaks, and the horse-chestnut—the Umbrella Tree, as the children called it—loomed with motionless branches that were frosted and shining. Beyond it, in a blue mist of moonlight and distance, lay the kitchen-garden; he could just make out the line of the high wall where the fruit-trees grew. Immediately below him the gravel of the carriage drive sparkled with frost.
The bars of the windows were cold to his hands, yet he stood there for a long time with his nose flattened against the pane and his bare feet on the cane chair. He felt both happy and sad; his heart longed dreadfully for something he had not got, something that seemed out of his reach because he could not name it. No one seemed to believe all the things he knew in quite the same way as he did. His brothers and sisters played up to a certain point, and then put the things aside as if they had only been assumed for the time and were not real. To him they were always real. His father’s words, too, that evening had sorely puzzled him when he came to think over them
afterwards: “They’re a baby’s notions.... They’re silly, silly, silly.” Were these things real or were they not? And, as he pondered, yearning dumbly, as only these little souls can yearn, the wistfulness in his heart went out to meet the moonlight in the air. Together they wove a spell that seemed to summon before him a fairy of the night, who whispered an answer into his heart: “We are real so long as you believe in us. It is your imagination that makes us real and gives us life. Please, never, never stop believing.”
Jimbo was not quite sure that he understood the message, but he liked it all the same, and felt comforted. So long as they believed in one another, the rest did not matter very much after all. And when at last, shivering with cold, he crept back to bed, it was only to find through the Gates of Sleep a more direct way to the things he had been thinking about, and to wander for the rest of the night, unwatched and free, through the wonders of an Enchanted Land.
Jimbo, as his father had said, was an imaginative child. Most children are—more or less; and he was “more,” at least, “more” than his brothers and sisters. The Colonel thought he had made a penetrating discovery, but his wife had known it always. His head, indeed, was “full of things,"—things that, unless trained into a channel where they could be controlled and properly schooled, would certainly interfere with his success in a practical world, and be a source of mingled pain and joy to him all through life. To have trained these forces, ever bursting out towards creation, in his little soul,—to have explained, interpreted, and dealt fairly by them, would perhaps have been the best and wisest way; to have suppressed them altogether, cleaned them out by the process of substitution, this might have succeeded too in less measure; but to turn them into a veritable rout of horror by the common method of “frightening the nonsense out of the boy,” this was surely the very worst way of dealing with such a case, and the most cruel. Yet, this was the method adopted by the Colonel in the robust good-nature of his heart, and the utter ignorance of his soul.
So it came about that three months later, when May was melting into June, Miss Ethel Lake arrived upon the scene as a result of the Colonel’s blundering good intentions. She brought with her a kind disposition, a supreme ignorance of unordinary children, a large store of self-confidence—and a corded yellow tin box.
CHAPTER II: MISS LAKE COMES—AND GOES
..................
THE CONVERSATION TOOK PLACE SUDDENLY one afternoon, and no one knew anything about it except the two who took part in it: the Colonel asked the governess to try and knock the nonsense out of Jimbo’s head, and the governess promised eagerly to do her very best. It was her first “place”; and by “nonsense” they both understood imagination. True enough, Jimbo’s mother had given her rather different instructions as to the treatment of the boy, but she mistook the soldier’s bluster for authority, and deemed it best to obey him. This was her first mistake.
In reality she was not devoid of imaginative insight; it was simply that her anxiety to prove a success permitted her better judgment to be overborne by the Colonel’s boisterous manner.
The wisdom of the mother was greater than that of her husband. For the safe development of that tender and imaginative little boy of hers, she had been at great pains to engage a girl—a clergyman’s daughter—who possessed sufficient sympathy with the poetic and dreamy nature to be of real help to him; for true help, she knew, can only come from true understanding. And Miss Lake was a good girl. She was entirely well-meaning—which is the beginning of well-doing, and her principal weakness lay in her judgment, which led her to obey the Colonel too literally.
“She seems most sensible,” he declared to his wife.
“Yes, dear.”
“And practical.”
“I think so.”
“And firm and—er—wise with children.”
“I hope so.”
“Just the sort for young Jimbo,” added the Colonel with decision.
“I trust so; she’s a little young, perhaps.”
“Possibly, but one can’t get everything,” said her husband, in his horse-and-dog voice. “A year with her should clean out that fanciful brain of his, and prepare him for school with other boys. He’ll be all right once he gets to school. My dear,” he added, spreading out his right hand, fingers extended, “you’ve made a most wise selection. I congratulate you. I’m delighted.”
“I’m so glad.”
“Capital, I repeat, capital. You’re a clever little woman. I knew you’d find the right party, once I showed you how the land lay.”
* * *
The Empty House, that stood in its neglected garden not far from the Park gates, was built on a point of land that entered wedgewise into the Colonel’s estate. Though something of an eyesore, therefore, he could do nothing with it.
To the children it had always been an object of peculiar, though not unwholesome, mystery. None of them cared to pass it on a stormy day—the wind made such odd noises in its empty corridors and rooms—and they refused point-blank to go within hailing distance of it after dark. But in Jimbo’s imagination it was especially haunted, and if he had ceased to reveal to the others what he knew went on under its roof, it was only because they were unable to follow him, and were inclined to greet his extravagant recitals with “Now, Jimbo, you know perfectly well you’re only making up.”
The House had been empty for many years; but, to the children, it had been empty since the beginning of the world, since what they called the “very beginning.” They believed—well, each child believed according to his own mind and powers, but there was at least one belief they all held in common: for it was generally accepted as an article of faith that the Indians, encamped among the shrubberies on the back lawn, secretly buried their dead behind the crumbling walls of its weedy garden—the “dead” provided by the children’s battles, be it understood. Wakeful ears in the night-nursery had heard strange sounds coming from that direction when the windows were open on hot summer nights; and the gardener, supreme authority on all that happened in the night (since they believed that he sat up to watch the vegetables and fruit-trees ripen, and never went to bed at all), was evidently of the same persuasion.
When appealed to for an explanation of the mournful wind-voices, he knew what was expected of him, and rose manfully to the occasion.
“It’s either them Redskins aburyin’ wot you killed of ‘em yesterday,” he declared, pointing towards the Empty House with a bit of broken flower-pot, “or else it’s the ones you killed last week, and who was always astealin’ of my strorbriz.” He looked very wise as he said this, and his wand of office—a dirty trowel—which he held in his hand, gave him tremendous dignity.
“That’s just what we thought, and of course if you say so too, that settles it,” said Nixie.
“It’s more’n likely, missie, leastways from wot you describes, which it is a hempty house all the same, though I can’t say as I’ve heard no sounds, not very distinct that is, myself.”
The gardener may have been anxious to hedge a bit, for fear of a scolding from headquarters, but his cryptic remarks pleased the children greatly, because it showed, they thought, that they knew more than the gardener did.
Thus the Empty House remained an object of somewhat dreadful delight, lending a touch of wonderland to that part of the lane where it stood, and forming the background for many an enchanting story over the nursery fire in winter-time. It appealed vividly to their imaginations, especially to Jimbo’s. Its dark windows, without blinds, were sometimes full of faces that retreated the moment they were looked at. That tangled ivy did not grow over the roof so thickly for nothing; and those high elms on the western side had not been planted years ago in a semicircle without a reason. Thus, at least, the children argued, not knowing exactly what they meant, nor caring much, so long as they proved to their own satisfaction that the place was properly haunted, and therefore worthy of their attention.
It was natural they should lead Miss Lake in that direction on one of t
heir first walks together, and it was natural, too, that she should at once discover from their manner that the place was of some importance to them.
“What a queer-looking old house,” she remarked, when they turned the corner of the lane and it came into view. “Almost a ruin, isn’t it?”
The children exchanged glances. A “ruin” did not seem the right sort of word at all; and, besides, was a little disrespectful. Also, they were not sure whether the new governess ought to be told everything so soon. She had not really won their confidence yet. After a slight pause—and a children’s pause is the most eloquent imaginable—Nixie, being the eldest, said in a stiff little voice: “It’s the Empty House, Miss Lake. We know it very well indeed.”
“It looks empty,” observed Miss Lake briskly.
“But it’s not a ruin, of course,” added the child, with the cold dignity of chosen spokesman.
“Oh!” said the governess, quite missing the point. She was talking lightly on the surface of things, wholly ignorant of the depths beneath her feet, intuition with her having always been sternly repressed.
“It’s a gamekeeper’s cottage, or something like that, I suppose,” she said.
“Oh, no; it isn’t a bit.”
“Doesn’t it belong to your father, then?”
“No. It’s somebody else’s, you see.”
“Then you can’t have it pulled down?”
“Rather not! Of course not!” exclaimed several indignant voices at once.
Miss Lake perceived for the first time that it held more than ordinary importance in their mind.
“Tell me about it,” she said. “What is its history, and who used to live in it?”
There came another pause. The children looked into each others’ faces. They gazed at the blue sky overhead; then they stared at the dusty road at their feet. But no one volunteered an answer. Miss Lake, they felt, was approaching the subject in an offensive manner.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 30