‘But did you get the mauve ribbon, child?’ asked Mother.
Instead of answer, the letter was torn noisily open. Jinny never had letters. It was far more important than ribbons.
‘And how much change have you left out of the five francs? Daddy will want to know.’
Jimbo and Monkey were listening carefully, while pretending to lay the table. Mother’s silence betrayed that she was reading the letter with interest and curiosity equal to those of its recipient. ‘Who wrote it? Who’s it from? I must answer it at once,’ Jinny was saying with great importance. ‘What time does the post go, I wonder? I mustn’t miss it.’
‘The post-mark,’ announced Mother, ‘is Bourcelles. It’s very mysterious.’ She tapped the letter with one hand, like the villain in the theatre. Rogers heard her and easily imagined the accompanying stage gesture. ‘The handwriting on the envelope is like Tante Anna,’ he heard, ‘but the letter itself is different. It’s all capitals, and wrongly spelt.’ Mlle. Lemaire was certainly not the writer.
Jimbo and Monkey were busy hanging the towel out of the window, signal to Daddy that tea was ready. But as Daddy was already coming down the street at a great pace, apparently excited too, they waved it instead. Rogers suddenly remembered that Jimbo that morning had asked him for a two-centime stamp. He made no remark, however, merely wondering what was in the letter itself.
‘It’s a joke, of course,’ Mother was heard to say in an odd voice.
‘Oh no, Mother, for how could anybody know? It’s what I’ve been dreaming about for nights and nights. It’s so aromantic, isn’t it?’
The louder hissing of the samovar buried the next words, and at that moment Daddy came into the room. He was smiling and his eyes were bright. He glanced at the table and sat down by his cousin on the sofa.
‘I’ve done a lot of work since you saw me,’ he said happily, patting him on the knee, ‘although in so short a time. And I want my cup of tea. It came so easily and fluently for a wonder; I don’t believe I shall have to change a word—though usually I distrust this sort of rapid composition.’
‘Where are you at now?’ asked Rogers. ‘We’re all “out,"‘ was the reply, ‘and the Starlight Express is just about to start and—Mother, let me carry that for you,’ he exclaimed, turning round as his wife appeared in the doorway with more tea-things. He got up quickly, but before he could reach her side Jinny flew into his arms and kissed him.
‘Did you get my tobacco, Jinny?’ he asked. She thrust the letter under his nose. What was tobacco, indeed, compared to an important letter! ‘You can keep the change for yourself.’
He read it slowly with a puzzled expression, while Mother and the children watched him. Riquette jumped down from her chair and rubbed herself against his leg while he scratched himself with his boot, thinking it was the rough stocking that tickled him.
‘Eh? This is very queer,’ he muttered, slapping the open sheet just as his wife had done, and reading it again at arm’s-length. ‘Somebody’— he looked suspiciously round the room—’has been reading my notes or picking out my thoughts while I’m asleep, eh?’
‘But it’s a real letter,’ objected Jinny; ‘it’s correspondence, isn’t it, Daddy?’
‘It is certainly a correspondence,’ he comforted her, and then, reading it aloud, he proceeded to pin it on the wall above the mantelpiece:—
‘The Starlight Xpress starts to-night, Be reddy and punctuel. Sleep titely and get out.’
That was all. But everybody exchanged glances.
‘Odd,’ thought Mother, again remembering her dreams.
Jimbo upset the milk-jug. Usually there would have been a rumpus over this. To-day it seemed like something happening far away—something that had not really happened at all.
‘We must all be ready then,’ said Rogers, noticing vaguely that
Mother’s sleeve had smeared the butter as she mopped up the mess.
Daddy was making a note on his shirt sleeve:—
The Sweep, the Laugher and the Tramp,
The running man who lights the lamp,
The Woman of the Haystack, too,
The Gardener and Man of Dust
Are passengers because they must
Follow the Guard with eyes of blue.
Over the forests and into the Cave
That is the way we must all behave—-
‘Please, Daddy, will you move? It’s dripping on to your boot.’
They all looked down; the milk had splashed from the cloth and fallen upon the toe of his big mountain boots. It made a pretty, white star. Riquette was daintily lapping it up with her long pink Tongue. Ray by ray the star set in her mysterious interior.
‘Riquette must come too,’ said Rogers gravely. ‘She’s full of white starlight now.’
And Jimbo left his chair and went seriously over to the book-shelf above Mother’s sofa-bed to arrange the signals. For between the tightly-wedged books he had inserted all the available paper-knives and book-markers he could find to represent railway-signals. They stuck out at different angles. He altered several, putting some up, some down, and some at right angles.
‘The line’s all clear for to-night,’ he announced to Daddy with a covert significance he hardly grasped himself, then coming back to home-made jam and crusty village bread.
Jane Anne caught her father’s answering glance-mysterious, full of unguessed meanings. ‘Oh, excuse me, Mother,’ she said, feeling the same thing in herself and a little frightened; ‘but I do believe they’re conspiring, aren’t they?’
And Mother gave a sudden start, whose cause she equally failed to analyse. ‘Hush, dear,’ she said. ‘Don’t criticise your elders, and when you do, don’t use long words you cannot possibly understand.’
And everybody understood something none of them understood-while tea went on as usual to the chatter of daily details of external life.
CHAPTER XXIV
..................
All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.
Abt Vogler, R. BROWNING.
Some hours later, as Rogers undressed for bed in his room beneath the roof, he realised abruptly that the time had come for him to leave. The weeks had flown; Minks and the Scheme required him; other matters needed attention too. What brought him to the sudden decision was the fact that he had done for the moment all he could find to do, beginning with the Pension mortgages and ending with little Edouard Tissot, the vigneron’s boy who had curvature of the spine and could not afford proper treatment. It was a long list. He was far from satisfied with results, yet he had done his best, in spite of many clumsy mistakes. In the autumn he might return and have a further try. Finances were getting muddled, too, and he realised how small his capital actually was when the needs of others made claims upon it. Neighbours were as plentiful as insects.
He had made all manner of schemes for his cousin’s family as well, yet seemed to have accomplished little. Their muddled life defied disentanglement, their difficulties were inextricable. With one son at a costly tutor, another girl in a Geneva school, the younger children just outgrowing the local education, the family’s mode of living so scattered, meals in one place, rooms in several others,—it was all too unmethodical and dispersed to be covered by their small uncertain income. Concentration was badly needed. The endless talks and confabulations, which have not been reported here because their confusion was interminable and unreportable, landed every one in a mass of complicated jumbles. The solution lay beyond his power, as equally
beyond the powers of the obfuscated parents. He would return to England, settle his own affairs, concoct some practical scheme with the aid of Minks, and return later to discuss its working out. The time had come for him to leave.
And, oddly enough, what made him see it were things the children had said that very evening when he kissed them all good-night. England had been mentioned.
‘You’re here for always now,’ whispered Monkey, ‘because you love me and can’t get away. I’ve tied you with my hair, you know.’
‘You’ll have no sekrity in London,’ said Jimbo. ‘Who’ll stick your stamps on?’
‘The place will seem quite empty if you go,’ Jane Anne contributed, not wishing to make her contribution too personal, lest she should appear immodest. ‘You’ve made a memorandum of agreement.’ This meant he had promised rashly once to stay for ever. The phrase lent an official tone besides.
He fell asleep, devising wonderful plans, as usual, for the entire world, not merely a tiny section of it. The saviour spirit was ever in his heart. It failed to realise itself because the mind was unequal to the strain of wise construction; but it was there, as the old vicar had divined. He had that indestructible pity to which no living thing is outcast.
But to-night he fell asleep so slowly, gradually, that he almost watched the dissolving of consciousness in himself. He hovered a long time about the strange, soft frontiers. He saw the barriers lower themselves into the great dim plains. Inch by inch the outer world became remote, obscure, lit dubiously by some forgotten sun, and inch by inch the profound recesses of nightly adventure coaxed him down. He realised that he swung in space between the two. The room and house were a speck in the universe above him, his brain the mere outlet of a tunnel up which he climbed every morning to put his horns out like a snail, and sniff the outer world. Here, in the depths, was the workroom where his life was fashioned. Here glowed the mighty, hidden furnaces that shaped his tools. Drifting, glimmering figures streamed up round him from the vast under-world of sleep, called unconscious. ‘I am a spirit,’ he heard, not said or thought, ‘and no spirit can be unconscious for eight hours out of every twenty-four…!’
Slowly the sea of dreamless sleep, so-called, flowed in upon him, down, round, and over; it submerged the senses one by one, beginning with hearing and ending with sight. But, as each physical sense was closed, its spiritual counterpart—the power that exists apart from its limited organ-opened into clear, divine activity, free as life itself….
How ceaseless was this movement of Dreams, never still, always changing and on the dance, incessantly renewing itself in kaleidoscopic patterns. There was perpetual metamorphosis and rich transformation; many became one, one many; the universe was a single thing, charged with stimulating emotional shocks as each scrap of interpretation passed in and across the mind….
He was falling into deeper and deeper sleep, into that eternal region where he no longer thought, but knew… Immense processions of shifting imagery absorbed him into themselves, spontaneous, unfamiliar, self-multiplying, and as exquisitely baffling as God and all His angels….
The subsidence of the external world seemed suddenly complete.
So deeply was he sunk that he reached that common pool of fluid essence upon which all minds draw according to their needs and powers. Relations were established, wires everywhere connected. The central switchboard clicked all round him; brains linked with brains, asleep or not asleep. He was so deep within himself that, as the children and the Story phrased it, he was ‘out.’ The air grew light and radiant.
‘Hooray! I’m out!’ and he instantly thought of his cousin.
‘So am I!’ That wumbled author shot immediately into connection with him. ‘And so is Mother—for the first time. Come on: we’ll all go together.’
It was unnecessary to specify where, for that same second they found themselves in the room of Mlle. Lemaire. At this hour of the night it was usually dark, except for the glimmer of the low-turned lamp the sufferer never quite extinguished.
From dusk till dawn her windows in La Citadelle shone faintly for all to see who chanced to pass along the village street. ‘There she lies, poor aching soul, as she has lain for twenty years, thinking good of some one, or maybe praying!’ For the glimmer was visible from very far, and familiar as a lighthouse to wandering ships at sea. But, had they known her inner happiness, they would not have said ‘poor soul!’ They would have marvelled. In a Catholic canton, perhaps, they would have crossed themselves and prayed. Just now they certainly would have known a singular, exalted joy. Caught in fairyland, they would have wondered and felt happy.
For the room was crowded to the doors. Walls, windows, ceiling, had melted into transparency to let in the light of stars; and, caught like gold-fish in the great network of the rays, shone familiar outlines everywhere—Jimbo, Monkey, Jinny, the Sweep, the Tramp, the Gypsy, the Laugher up against the cupboard, the Gardener by the window where the flower-pots stood, the Woman of the Haystack in the corridor, too extensive to slip across the threshold, and, in the middle of the room, motionless with pleasure-Mother!
‘Like gorgeous southern butterflies in a net, I do declare!’ gasped Daddy, as he swept in silently with his companion, their colours mingling harmoniously at once with the rest.
And Mother turned.
‘You’re out, old girl, at last!’ he cried.
‘God bless my soul, I am!’ she answered. Their sentences came both together, and their blues and yellows swam into each other and made a lovely green. ‘It’s what I’ve been trying to do all these years without knowing it. What a glory! I understand now—understand myself and you. I see life clearly as a whole. Hooray, hooray!’ She glided nearer to him, her face was beaming.
‘Mother’s going to explode,’ said Monkey in a whisper. But, of course, everybody ‘heard’ it; for the faintest whisper of thought sent a ripple through that sea of delicate colour. The Laugher bent behind the cupboard to hide her face, and the Gardener by the window stooped to examine his flower-pots. The Woman of the Haystack drew back a little into the corridor again, preparatory to another effort to squeeze through. But Mother, regardless of them all, swam on towards her husband, wrapped in joy and light as in a garment. Hitherto, in her body, the nearest she had come to coruscating was once when she had taken a course of sulphur baths. This was a very different matter. She fairly glittered.
‘We’ll never go apart again,’ Daddy was telling her. ‘This inner sympathy will last, you know. He did it. It’s him we have to thank,’ and he pointed at his cousin. ‘It’s starlight, of course, he has brought down into us.’
But Rogers missed the compliment, being busy in a corner with Monkey and Jimbo, playing at mixing colours with startling results. Mother swam across to her old friend, Mile. Lemaire. For a quarter of a century these two had understood one another, though never consciously been ‘out’ together. She moved like a frigate still, gliding and stately, but a frigate that has snapped its hawsers and meant to sail the skies.
‘Our poor, stupid, sleeping old bodies,’ she smiled.
But the radiant form of the other turned to her motionless cage upon the bed behind her. ‘Don’t despise them,’ she replied, looking down upon the worn-out prison-house, while a little dazzle of brilliance flashed through her atmosphere. ‘They are our means of spreading this starlight about the world and giving it to others. Our brains transmit it cunningly; it flashes from our eyes, and the touch of our fingers passes it on. We gather it here, when we are “out,” but we can communicate it best to others when we are “in."‘
There was sound of confusion and uproar in the room behind as some one came tumbling in with a rush, scattering the figures in all directions as when a gust of wind descends upon a bed of flowers.
‘In at last!’ cried a muffled voice that sounded as though a tarpaulin smothered it, and the Woman of the Haystack swept into the room with a kind of clumsy majesty. The Tramp and Gypsy, whose efforts had at length dislodged her awkward bulk
, came rolling after. They had been pushing steadily from behind all this time, though no one had noticed them slip out.
‘We can do more than the smaller folk,’ she said proudly, sailing up to Mother. ‘We can’t be overlooked, for one thing’; and arm-in-arm, like a pair of frigates then, they sailed about the room, magnificent as whales that swim in a phosphorescent sea. The Laugher straightened up to watch them, the Gardener turned his head, and Rogers and the children paused a moment in their artificial mixing, to stare with wonder.
‘I’m in!’ said the Woman.
‘I’m out!’ said Mother.
And the children felt a trifle envious. Instantly their brilliance dimmed a little. The entire room was aware of it.
‘Think always of the world in gold and silver,’ shot from Mile.
Lemaire. The dimness passed as she said it.
‘It was my doing,’ laughed Monkey, turning round to acknowledge her wickedness lest some one else should do it for her and thus increase her shame.
‘Sweep! Sweep!’ cried Rogers.
But this thought-created sprite was there before the message flashed. With his sack wide open, he stood by Monkey, full of importance. A moment he examined her. Then, his long black fingers darting like a shuttle, he discovered the false colouring that envy had caused, picked it neatly out—a thread of dirty grey—and, winding it into a tiny ball, tossed it with contempt into his sack.
‘Over the edge of the world you go,
With the mud and the leaves and the dirty snow!’
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 89