‘Quick!’ he tried to cry; ‘be quick! I am changing. I am drowsy with your voice and beauty. Your eyes have touched me, and I am—falling asleep!’ His voice grew weaker as he said it.
Her answer sounded faint, and far above him:
‘Give me… your… hand. Touch me. Come away with me… to… my … garden … in the mountains…. We may wake together … You are waking now…!’
He made an effort to find her little palm. But the wind swept coldly between his opened fingers.
‘Waking!—what is it?’ he cried thinly. He thought swiftly of something vague and muddy—something dull, disordered, incomplete. Here it was all glass-clear. ‘Where are you? I can’t find you. I can’t see!’
A dreadful, searching pain shot through him. He was losing her, just when he had found her. He struggled, clung, fought frantically to hold her. But his fingers seized the air.
‘Oh, I shall find you—even when you wake,’ he heard far away among the stars. ‘Try and remember me—when I come. Try and remember….’
It dipped into the distance. He had lost her. He caught a glimpse of the Pleiades as he fell at a fearful speed. Some one behind them picked up stars and tossed them after him. They dimmed as they shot by—from gold to white, from white to something very pale. Behind them rose a wave of light that hurt his eyes.
‘Look out! The Interfering Sun!’ came a disappearing voice that was followed by a peal of laughter. ‘I hope you found her, and I hope you caught it well. You deserved to….’
There was a scent of hair that he loved, a vision of mischievous brown eyes, an idea that somebody was turning a somersault beside him—and then he landed upon the solid earth with a noise like thunder.
The room was dark. At first he did not recognise it. Through the open window came the clatter of lumbering traffic that passed heavily down St. James’s Street. He rose stiffly from his chair, vexed with himself for having dozed. It was more than a doze, though; he had slept some thirty minutes by his watch. No memory of any dreams was in him— nothing but a feeling of great refreshing lightness and peace….
It was wonderful, he reflected, as he changed into country clothes for his walk in Richmond Park, how even the shortest nap revives the brain and body. There was a sense that an immense interval had elapsed, and that something very big had happened or was going to happen to him very soon….
And an hour later he passed through the Richmond Gate and found the open spaces of the Park deserted, as they always were. The oaks and bracken rustled in a gentle breeze. The swishing of his boots through the wet grass was the only sound he heard, for the boom and purr of distant London reached him more as touch than as something audible. Seated on a fallen tree, he watched the stars and listened to the wind. That hum and boom of the city seemed underground, the flare it tossed into the sky rose from vast furnaces below the world. The stars danced lightly far beyond its reach, secure and unafraid. He thought of children dancing with twinkling feet upon the mountains….
And in himself there was hum and light as well. Too deep, too far below the horizon for full discovery, he caught the echo, the faint, dim flashings of reflection that are called by men a Mood. These, rising to the surface, swept over him with the queer joy of intoxicating wonder that only children know. Some great Secret he had to tell himself, only he had kept it so long and so well that he could not find it quite. He felt the thrill, yet had forgotten what it was.
Something was going to happen. A new footfall was coming across the world towards him. He could almost hear its delicate, swift tread. Life was about to offer him this delicious, thrilling secret—very soon. Looking up he saw the Pleiades, and the single footfall became many. He remembered that former curious obsession of the Pleiades… and as Thought and Yearning went roaming into space, they met Anticipation, who took them by the hand. It seemed, then, that children came flocking down upon him from the sky, led by a little figure with starry eyes of clearest amber, a pair of tiny twinkling feet, and a voice quite absurdly soft and tender.
‘Your time is coming,’ he heard behind the rustling of the oak leaves overhead, ‘for the children are calling to you—children of your own. And this is the bravest Scheme in all the world. There is no bigger. How can there be? For all the world is a child that goes past your windows crying for its lost Fairyland…!’
It was after midnight when at length he slipped through the Robin Hood Gate, passed up Priory Lane, and walked rapidly by the shuttered houses of Roehampton. And, looking a moment over Putney Bridge; he saw the reflections of the stars in the muddy, dawdling Thames. Nothing anywhere was thick enough to hide them. The Net of Stars, being in his heart, was everywhere. No prisoner could be more securely caught than he was.
CHAPTER XXXII
..................
Asia. The point of one white star is quivering still
Deep in the orange light of widening morn
Beyond the purple mountains: through a chasm
Of wind-divided mist the darker lake
Reflects it: now it wanes: it gleams again
As the waves fade, and as the burning threads
Of woven cloud unravel in the pale air:
‘Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloud-like snow
The roseate sunlight quivers: hear I not
The AEolian music of her sea-green plumes
Winnowing the crimson dawn?
Prometheus Unbound, SHELLEY.
August had blazed its path into September, and September had already trimmed her successor’s gown with gold and russet before Henry Rogers found himself free again to think of holidays. London had kept its grip upon him all these weeks while the rest of the world was gay and irresponsible. He was so absurdly conscientious. One of his Companies had got into difficulties, and he was the only man who could save the shareholders’ money. The Patent Coal Dust Fuel Company, Ltd., had bought his invention for blowing fine coal dust into a furnace whereby an intense heat was obtainable in a few minutes. The saving in material, time, and labour was revolutionary. Rogers had received a large sum in cash, though merely a nominal number of the common shares. It meant little to him if the Company collapsed, and an ordinary Director would have been content with sending counsel through the post in the intervals of fishing and shooting. But Henry Rogers was of a different calibre. The invention was his child, born by hard labour out of loving thought. The several thousand shareholders believed in him: they were his neighbours. Incompetence and extravagance threatened failure. He took a room in the village near the Essex factories, and gave his personal energy and attention to restoring economical working of every detail. He wore overalls. He put intelligence into hired men and foremen; he spent his summer holiday turning a system of waste into the basis of a lucrative industry. The shareholders would never know whose faithfulness had saved them loss, and at the most his thanks would be a formal paragraph in the Report at the end of the year. Yet he was satisfied, and worked as though his own income depended on success. For he knew—of late this certainty had established itself in him, influencing all he did—that faithful labour, backed by steady thinking, must reach ten thousand wavering characters, merge with awakening tendencies in them, and slip thence into definite daily action. Action was thought materialised. He helped the world. A copybook maxim thus became a weapon of tempered steel. His Scheme was bigger than any hospital for disabled bodies. It would still be cumulative when bodies and bricks were dust upon the wind. It must increase by geometrical progression through all time.
It was largely to little Minks that he owed this positive conviction and belief, to that ridiculous, high-souled Montmorency Minks, who, while his master worked in overalls, took the air himself on Clapham Common, or pored with a wet towel round his brow beneath the oleograph of Napoleon in the attempt to squeeze his exuberant emotion into tripping verse. For Minks admired intensely from a distance. He attended to the correspondence in the flat, and made occasional visits down to Essex, but otherwise enjoyed a kind of
extra holiday of his own. For Minks was not learned in coal dust. The combustion was in his eager brain. He produced an amazing series of lyrics and sonnets, though too high-flown, alas, to win a place in print. Love and unselfishness, as usual, were his theme, with a steady sprinkling of ‘the ministry of Thought,’ ‘true success, unrecognised by men, yet noted by the Angels,’ and so forth. His master’s labour seemed to him a ‘brilliant form of purity,’ and ‘the soul’s security’ came in admirably to close the crowded, tortuous line. ‘Beauty’ and ‘Duty’ were also thickly present, both with capitals, but the verse that pleased him most, and even thrilled Albinia to a word of praise, was one that ended—’Those active powers which are the Doves of Thought.’ It followed ‘neither can be sold or bought,’ and Mrs. Minks approved, because, as she put it, ‘there, now, is something you can sell; it’s striking and original; no editor could fail to think so.’ The necessities of Frank and Ronald were ever her standard of praise or blame.
Thus, it was the first week in October before Rogers found himself free to leave London behind him and think of a change of scene. No planning was necessary…. Bourcelles was too constantly in his mind all these weary weeks to admit of alternatives. Only a few days ago a letter had come from Jinny, saying she was going to a Pension in Geneva after Christmas, and that unless he appeared soon he would not see her again as she ‘was,’ a qualification explained by the postscript, ‘My hair will be up by that time. Mother says I can put it up on Xmas Day. So please hurry up, Mr. Henry Rogers, if you want to see me as I am.’
But another thing that decided him was that the great story was at last in print. It was published in the October number of the Review, and the press had already paid considerable attention to it. Indeed, there was a notice at the railway bookstall on the day he left, to the effect that the first edition was exhausted, and that a large second edition would be available almost immediately. ‘Place your orders at once’ was added in bold red letters. Rogers bought one of these placards for his cousin.
‘It just shows,’ observed Minks, whom he was taking out with him.
‘Shows what?’ inquired his master.
‘How many more thoughtful people there are about, sir, than one had any idea of,’ was the reply. ‘The public mind is looking for something of that kind, expecting it even, though it hardly knows what it really wants. That’s a story, Mr. Rogers, that must change the point of view of all who read it—with understanding. It makes the commonest man feel he is a hero.’
‘You’ve put our things into a non-smoker, Minks,’ the other interrupted him. ‘What in the world are you thinking about?’
‘I beg your pardon, I’m sure, sir; so I have,’ said Minks, blushing, and bundling the bags along the platform to another empty carriage, ‘but that story has got into my head. I sat up reading it aloud to Mrs. Minks all night. For it says the very things I have always longed to say. Sympathy and the transference of thought—to say nothing of the soul’s activity when the body is asleep—have always seemed to me—-’
He wandered on while his companion made himself comfortable in a corner with his pipe and newspaper. But the first thing Rogers read, as the train went scurrying through Kent, was a summary of the contents of this very Review. Two-thirds of the article was devoted to the ‘Star Story’ of John Henry Campden, whose name ‘entitled his work to a high standard of criticism.’ The notice was well written by some one evidently of intelligence and knowledge; sound judgment was expressed on style and form and general execution, but when it came to the matter itself the criticism was deplorably misunderstanding. The writer had entirely missed the meaning. While praising the ‘cleverness’ he asked plainly between the lines of his notice ‘What does it mean?’ This unconscious exposure of his own ignorance amused his reader while it also piqued him. The critic, expert in dealing with a political article, was lamentably at sea over an imaginative story.
‘Inadequate receiving instrument,’ thought Rogers, smiling audibly.
Minks, deep in a mysterious looking tome in the opposite corner, looked up over his cigarette and wondered why his employer laughed. He read the article the other handed to him, thinking how much better he could have done it himself. Encouraged by the expression in Mr. Rogers’s eyes, he then imparted what the papers call ‘a genuine contribution to the thought upon the subject.’
‘The writer quarrels with him,’ he observed, ‘for not giving what is expected of him. What he has thought he must go on thinking, or be condemned. He must repeat himself or be uncomprehended.
Hitherto’—Minks prided himself upon the knowledge—’he has written studies of uncommon temperaments. Therefore to indulge in fantasy now is wrong.’
‘Ah, you take it that way, do you?’
‘Experience justifies me, Mr. Rogers,’ the secretary continued. ‘A friend of mine, or rather of Mrs. Minks’s, once wrote a volume of ghost stories that, of course, were meant to thrill. His subsequent book, with no such intention, was judged by the object of the first— as a failure. It must make the flesh creep. Everything he wrote must make the flesh creep. One of the papers, the best—a real thunderer, in fact—said “Once or twice the desired thrill comes close, but never, alas, quite comes off."‘
‘How wumbled,’ exclaimed his listener.
‘It is indeed,’ said Minks, ‘in fact, one of the thorns in the path of literature. The ordinary clever mind is indeed a desolate phenomenon. And how often behind the “Oxford manner” lurks the cultured prig, if I may put it so.’
‘Indeed you may,’ was the other’s rejoinder, ‘for you put it admirably.’
They laughed a little and went on with their reading in their respective corners. The journey to Paris was enlivened by many similar discussions, Minks dividing his attentions between his master, his volume of philosophy, and the needs of various old ladies, to whom such men attach themselves as by a kind of generous, manly instinct. Minks was always popular and inoffensive. He had such tact.
‘Ah! and that reminds me, Minks,’ said Rogers, as they paced the banks of the Seine that evening, looking at the starry sky over Paris. ‘What do you know about the Pleiades? Anything—eh?’
Minks drew with pride upon his classical reading.
‘The seven daughters of Atlas, Mr. Rogers, if I remember correctly, called therefore the Atlantides. They were the virgin companions of Artemis. Orion, the great hunter, pursued them in Boeotia, and they called upon the gods for help.’
‘And the gods turned ‘em into stars, wasn’t it?’
‘First into doves, sir—Peleiades means doves—and then set them among the Constellations, where big Orion still pursues, yet never overtakes them.’
‘Beautiful, isn’t it? What a memory you’ve got, Minks. And isn’t one of ‘em lost or something?’
‘Merope, yes,’ the delighted Minks went on. He knew it because he had looked it up recently for his lyric about ‘the Doves of Thought.’ ‘She married a mortal, Sisyphus, the son of Aeolus, and so shines more dimly than the rest. For her sisters married gods. But there is one who is more luminous than the others—-’
‘Ah! and which was that?’ interrupted Rogers.
‘Maia,’ Minks told him pat. ‘She is the most beautiful of the seven. She was the Mother, too, of Mercury, the Messenger of the gods. She gave birth to him in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. Zeus was the father—-’
‘Take care; you’ll get run over,’ and Rogers pulled him from the path of an advancing taxi-cab, whose driver swore furiously at the pair of them. ‘Charming, all that, isn’t it?’
‘It is lovely, sir. It haunts the mind. I suppose,’ he added, ‘that’s why your cousin, Mr. Campden, made the Pleiades the centre of his Star Net in the story—a cluster of beautiful thoughts as it were.’
‘No doubt, no doubt,’ his tone so brusque suddenly that Minks decided after all not to mention his poem where the Pleiades made their appearance as the ‘doves of thought.’
‘What a strange coincidence,’ R
ogers said as they turned towards the hotel again.
‘Subconscious knowledge, probably, sir,’ suggested the secretary, scarcely following his meaning, if meaning indeed there was.
‘Possibly! One never knows, does one?’
‘Never, Mr. Rogers. It’s all very wonderful.’
And so, towards six o’clock in the evening of the following day, having passed the time pleasantly in Paris, the train bore them swiftly beyond Pontarlier and down the steep gradient of the Gorges de l’Areuse towards Neuchatel. The Val de Travers, through which the railway slips across the wooded Jura into Switzerland, is like a winding corridor cleft deep between savage and precipitous walls. There are dizzy glimpses into the gulf below. With steam shut off and brakes partly on, the train curves sharply, hiding its eyes in many tunnels lest the passengers turn giddy. Strips of bright green meadow- land, where the Areuse flows calmly, alternate with places where the ravine plunges into bottomless depths that have been chiselled out as by a giant ploughshare. Rogers pointed out the chosen views, while his secretary ran from window to window, excited as a happy child. Such scenery he had never known. It changed the entire content of his mind. Poetry he renounced finally before the first ten minutes were past. The descriptions that flooded his brain could be rendered only by the most dignified and stately prose, and he floundered among a welter of sonorous openings that later Albinia would read in Sydenham and retail judiciously to the elder children from ‘Father’s foreign letters.’
‘We shall pass Bourcelles in a moment now! Look out! Be ready with your handkerchief!’ Rogers warned him, as the train emerged from the final tunnel and scampered between thick pine woods, emblazoned here and there with golden beeches. The air was crystal, sparkling. They could smell the forests.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 100