The Algernon Blackwood Collection

by Algernon Blackwood

  They took their places side by side at the windows. The heights of Boudry and La Tourne, that stand like guardian sentries on either side of the mountain gateway, were already cantering by. The precipices flew past. Beyond lay the smiling slopes of vineyard, field, and orchard, sprinkled with farms and villages, of which Bourcelles came first. The Areuse flowed peacefully towards the lake. The panorama of the snowy Alps rolled into view along the farther horizon, and the slanting autumn sunshine bathed the entire scene with a soft and ruddy light. They entered the Fairyland of Daddy’s story.

  ‘Voila la sentinelle deja!’ exclaimed Rogers, putting his head out to see the village poplar. ‘We run through the field that borders the garden of the Pension. They’ll come out to wave to us. Be ready.’

  ‘Ah, oui,’ said Minks, who had been studying phrase books, ‘je vwa.’ But in reality he saw with difficulty, for a spark had got into his eye, and its companion optic, wandering as usual, was suffused with water too.

  The news of their arrival had, of course, preceded them, and the row of waving figures in the field gave them a welcome that went straight to Minks’s heart. He felt proud for his grand employer. Here was a human touch that would modify the majesty of the impersonal mountain scenery in his description. He waved his handkerchief frantically as the train shot past, and he hardly knew which attracted him most—the expression of happiness on Mr. Rogers’s face, or the line of nondescript humanity that gesticulated in the field as though they wished to stop the Paris ‘Rapide.’

  For it was a very human touch; and either Barnum’s Circus or the byeways and hedges of Fairyland had sent their picked representatives with a dance seen usually only in shy moonlit glades. His master named them as the carriage rattled by. The Paris Express, of course, did not stop at little Bourcelles. Minks recognised each one easily from the descriptions in the story.

  The Widow Jequier, with garden skirts tucked high, and wearing big gauntlet gloves, waved above her head a Union Jack that knocked her bonnet sideways at every stroke, and even enveloped the black triangle of a Trilby hat that her brother-in-law held motionless aloft as though to test the wind for his daily report upon the condition of le barometre. The Postmaster never waved. He looked steadily before him at the passing train, his small, black figure more than usually dwarfed by a stately outline that rose above the landscape by his side, and was undoubtedly the Woman of the Haystack. Telling lines from the story’s rhymes flashed through Minks’s memory as, chuckling with pleasure, he watched the magnificent, ample gestures of Mother’s waving arms. She seemed to brush aside the winds who came a-courting, although wide strokes of swimming really described her movements best. A little farther back, in the middle distance, he recognised by his peaked cap the gendarme, Gygi, as he paused in his digging and looked up to watch the fun; and beyond him again, solid in figure as she was unchanging in her affections, he saw Mrs. Postmaster, struggling with a bed sheet the pensionnaires des Glycines helped her shake in the evening breeze. It was too close upon the hour of souper for her to travel farther from the kitchen. And beside her stood Miss Waghorn, waving an umbrella. She was hatless. Her tall, thin figure, dressed in black, against the washing hung out to dry, looked like a note of exclamation, or, when she held the umbrella up at right angles, like a capital L the fairies had set in the ground upon its head.

  And the fairies themselves, the sprites, the children! They were everywhere and anywhere. Jimbo flickered, went out, reappeared, then flickered again; he held a towel in one hand and a table napkin in the other. Monkey seemed more in the air than on the solid earth, for one minute she was obviously a ball, and the next, with a motion like a somersault, her hair shot loose across the sunlight as though she flew. Both had their mouths wide open, shouting, though the wind carried their words all away unheard. And Jane Anne stood apart. Her welcome, if the gesture is capable of being described at all, was a bow. She moved at the same time sedately across the field, as though she intended to be seen separately from the rest. She wore hat and gloves. She was evidently in earnest with her welcome. But Mr. John Henry Campden, the author and discoverer of them all, Minks did not see.

  ‘But I don’t see the writer himself!’ he cried. ‘I don’t see Mr.

  Campden.’

  ‘You can’t,’ explained Rogers, ‘he’s standing behind his wife.’

  And the little detail pleased the secretary hugely. The true artist, he reflected, is never seen in his work.

  It all was past and over—in thirty seconds. The spire of the church, rising against a crimson sky, with fruit trees in the foreground and a line of distant summits across the shining lake, replaced the row of wonderful dancing figures. Rogers sank back in his corner, laughing, and Minks, saying nothing, went across to his own at the other end of the compartment. It all had been so swift and momentary that it seemed like the flash of a remembered dream, a strip of memory’s pictures, a vivid picture of some dazzling cinematograph. Minks felt as if he had just read the entire story again from one end to the other—in thirty seconds. He felt different, though wherein exactly the difference lay was beyond him to discover. ‘It must be the spell of Bourcelles,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Mr. Rogers warned me about it. It is a Fairyland that thought has created out of common things. It is quite wonderful!’ He felt a glow all over him. His mind ran on for a moment to another picture his master had painted for him, and he imagined Albinia and the family out here, living in a little house on the borders of the forest, a strip of vineyards, sunlight, mountains, happy scented winds, and himself with a writing-table before a window overlooking the lake… writing down Beauty.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  ..................

  We never meet; yet we meet day by day

  Upon those hills of life, dim and immense:

  The good we love, and sleep-our innocence.

  O hills of life, high hills! And higher than they,

  Our guardian spirits meet at prayer and play.

  Beyond pain, joy, and hope, and long suspense,

  Above the summits of our souls, far hence,

  An angel meets an angel on the way.

  Beyond all good I ever believed of thee

  Or thou of me, these always love and live.

  And though I fail of thy ideal of me,

  My angel falls not short. They greet each other.

  Who knows, they may exchange the kiss we give,

  Thou to thy crucifix, I to my mother.

  ALICE MCYNELL.

  The arrival at the station interrupted the reverie in which the secretary and his chief both were plunged.

  ‘How odd,’ exclaimed Minks, ever observant, as he leaped from the carriage, ‘there are no platforms. Everything in Switzerland seems on one level, even the people—everything, that is, except the mountains.’

  ‘Switzerland is the mountains,’ laughed his chief.

  Minks laughed too. ‘What delicious air!’ he added, filling his lungs audibly. He felt half intoxicated with it.

  After some delay they discovered a taxi-cab, piled the luggage on to it, and were whirled away towards a little cluster of lights that twinkled beneath the shadows of La Tourne and Boudry. Bourcelles lay five miles out.

  ‘Remember, you’re not my secretary here,’ said Rogers presently, as the forests sped by them. ‘You’re just a travelling companion.’

  ‘I understand,’ he replied after a moment’s perplexity. ‘You have a secretary here already.’

  ‘His name is Jimbo.’

  The motor grunted its way up the steep hill above Colombier. Below them spread the vines towards the lake, sprinkled with lights of farms and villages. As the keen evening air stole down from forest and mountain to greet them, the vehicle turned into the quiet village street. Minks saw the big humped shoulders of La Citadelle, the tapering church spire, the trees in the orchard of the Pension. Cudrefin, smoking a cigar at the door of his grocery shop, recognised them and waved his hand. A moment later Gygi lifted his peaked hat and called
‘bon soir, bonne nuit,’ just as though Rogers had never gone away at all. Michaud, the carpenter, shouted his welcome as he strolled towards the Post Office farther down to post a letter, and then the motor stopped with a jerk outside the courtyard where the fountain sang and gurgled in its big stone basin. Minks saw the plane tree. He glanced up at the ridged backbone of the building. What a portentous looking erection it was. It seemed to have no windows. He wondered where the famous Den was. The roof overlapped like a giant hood, casting a deep shadow upon the cobbled yard. Overhead the stars shone faintly.

  Instantly a troop of figures shot from the shadow and surrounded them. There was a babel of laughter, exclamations, questions. Minks thought the stars had fallen. Children and constellations were mingled all together, it seemed. Both were too numerous to count. All were rushing with the sun towards Hercules at a dizzy speed.

  ‘And this is my friend, Mr. Minks,’ he heard repeated from time to time, feeling his hand seized and shaken before he knew what he was about. Mother loomed up and gave him a stately welcome too.

  ‘He wears gloves in Bourcelles!’ some one observed audibly to some one else.

  ‘Excuse me! This is Riquette!’ announced a big girl, hatless like the rest, with shining eyes. ‘It’s a she.’

  ‘And this is my secretary, Mr. Jimbo,’ said Rogers, breathlessly, emerging from a struggling mass. Minks and Jimbo shook hands with dignity.

  ‘Your room is over at the Michauds, as before.’

  ‘And Mr. Mix is at the Pension—there was no other room to be had—-’

  ‘Supper’s at seven—-’

  ‘Tante Jeanne’s been grand-cieling all day with excitement. She’ll burst when she sees you!’

  ‘She’s read the story, too. Elle dit que c’est le bouquet!’

  ‘There’s new furniture in the salon, and they’ve cleaned the sink while you’ve been away!…’

  The author moved forward out of the crowd. At the same moment another figure, slight and shadowy, revealed itself, outlined against the white of the gleaming street. It had been hidden in the tangle of the stars. It kept so quiet.

  ‘Countess, may I introduce him to you,’ he said, seizing the momentary pause. There was little ceremony in Bourcelles. ‘This is my cousin I told you about—Mr. Henry Rogers. You must know one another at once. He’s Orion in the story.’

  He dragged up his big friend, who seemed suddenly awkward, difficult to move. The children ran in and out between them like playing puppies, tumbling against each in turn.

  ‘They don’t know which is which,’ observed Jinny, watching the introduction. Her voice ran past him like the whir of a shooting star through space—far, far away. ‘Excuse me!’ she cried, as she cannoned off Monkey against Cousinenry. ‘I’m not a terminus! This is a regular shipwreck!’

  The three elder ones drew aside a little from the confusion.

  ‘The Countess,’ resumed Daddy, as soon as they were safe from immediate destruction, ‘has come all the way from Austria to see us. She is staying with us for a few days. Isn’t it delightful? We call her the little Grafin.’ His voice wumbled a trifle thickly in his beard. ‘She was good enough to like the story—our story, you know— and wrote to me—-’

  ‘My story,’ said a silvery, laughing voice.

  And Rogers bowed politely, and with a moment’s dizziness, at two bright smiling eyes that watched him out of the little shadow standing between him and the children. He was aware of grandeur.

  He stood there, first startled, then dazed. She was so small. But something about her was so enormous. His inner universe turned over and showed its under side. The hidden thing that so long had brushed his daily life came up utterly close and took him in its gigantic arms. He stared like an unmannered child.

  Something had lit the world….

  ‘This is delicious air,’ he heard Minks saying to his cousin in the distance—to his deaf side judging by the answer:

  ‘Delicious here—yes, isn’t it?’

  Something had lit the stars.…

  Minks and his cousin continued idly talking. Their voices twittered like birds in empty space. The children had scattered like marbles from a spinning-top. Their voices and footsteps sounded in the cobbled yard of La Citadelle, as they scampered up to prepare for supper. Mother sailed solemnly after them, more like a frigate than ever. The world, on fire, turned like a monstrous Catherine wheel within his brain.

  Something had lit the universe.…

  He stood there in the dusk beneath the peeping stars, facing the slender little shadow. It was all he saw at first—this tiny figure. Demure and soft, it remained motionless before him, a hint of childhood’s wonder in its graceful attitude. He was aware of something mischievous as well—that laughed at him…. He realised then that she waited for him to speak. Yet, for the life of him, he could find no words, because the eyes, beneath the big-brimmed hat with its fluttering veil, looked out at him as though some formidable wild creature watched him from the opening of its cave. There was a glint of amber in them. The heart in him went thumping. He caught his breath. Out, jerked, then, certain words that he tried hard to make ordinary—-

  ‘But surely—we have met before—I think I know you—-’

  He just said it, swallowing his breath with a gulp upon the unfinished sentence. But he said it—somewhere else, and not here in the twilight street of little Bourcelles. For his sight swam somehow far away, and he was giddy with the height. The roofs of the houses lay in a sea of shadow below him, and the street wound through them like a ribbon of thin lace. The tree-tops waved very softly in a wind that purred and sighed beneath his feet, and this wind was a violet little wind, that bent them all one way and set the lines and threads of gold a-quiver to their fastenings. For the fastenings were not secure; any minute he might fall. And the threads, he saw, all issued like rays from two central shining points of delicate, transparent amber, radiating forth into an exquisite design that caught the stars. Yet the stars were not reflected in them. It was they who lit the stars….

  He was dizzy. He tried speech again.

  ‘I told you I should—’ But it was not said aloud apparently.

  Two little twinkling feet were folded. Two hands, he saw, stretched down to draw him close. These very stars ran loose about him in a cloud of fiery sand. Their pattern danced in flame. He picked out Sirius, Aldebaran—the Pleiades! There was tumult in his blood, a wild and exquisite confusion. What in the world had happened to him that he should behave in this ridiculous fashion? Yet he was doing nothing. It was only that, for a passing instant, the enormous thing his life had been dimly conscious of so long, rose at last from its subterranean hiding-place and overwhelmed him. This picture that came with it was like some far-off dream he suddenly recovered. A glorious excitement caught him. He felt utterly bewildered.

  ‘Have we?’ he heard close in front of him. ‘I do not think I have had the pleasure’—it was with a slightly foreign accent—’but it is so dim here, and one cannot see very well, perhaps.’

  And a ripple of laughter passed round some gigantic whispering gallery in the sky. It set the trellis-work of golden threads all trembling. He felt himself perched dizzily in this shaking web that swung through space. And with him was some one whom he knew…. He heard the words of a song:

  ‘Light desire With their fire.’

  Something had lit his heart.…

  He lost himself again, disgracefully. A mist obscured his sight, though with the eyes of his mind he still saw crystal-clear. Across this mist fled droves and droves of stars. They carried him out of himself—out, out, out!… His upper mind then made a vehement effort to recover equilibrium. An idea was in him that some one would presently turn a somersault and disappear. The effort had a result, it seemed, for the enormous thing passed slowly away again into the caverns of his under-self, … and he realised that he was conducting himself in a foolish and irresponsible manner, which Minks, in particular, would disapprove. He was staring rudely�
��at a shadow, or rather, at two eyes in a shadow. With another effort—oh, how it hurt!—he focused sight again upon surface things. It seemed his turn to say something.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ he stammered, ‘but I thought—it seemed to me for a moment—that I—remembered.’

  The face came close as he said it. He saw it clear a moment. The figure grew defined against the big stone fountain—the little hands in summer cotton gloves, the eyes beneath the big brimmed hat, the streaming veil. Then he went lost again—more gloriously than before. Instead of the human outline in the dusky street of Bourcelles, he stared at the host of stars, at the shimmering design of gold, at the Pleiades, whose fingers of spun lustre swung the Net loose across the world….

  ‘Flung from huge Orion’s hand…’

  he caught in a golden whisper,

  ‘Sweetly linking

  All our thinking….’

  His cousin and Minks, he was aware vaguely, had left him. He was alone with her. A little way down the hill they turned and called to him. He made a frantic effort—there seemed just time—to plunge away into space and seize the cluster of lovely stars with both his hands. Headlong, he dived off recklessly… driving at a fearful speed, … when—the whole thing vanished into a gulf of empty blue, and he found himself running, not through the sky to clutch the Pleiades, but heavily downhill towards his cousin and Minks.

  It was a most abrupt departure. There was a curious choking in his throat. His heart ran all over his body. Something white and sparkling danced madly through his brain. What must she think of him?

  ‘We’ve just time to wash ourselves and hurry over to supper,’ his cousin said, as he overtook them, flustered and very breathless. Minks looked at him—regarded him, rather—astonishment, almost disapproval, in one eye, and in the other, apparently observing the vineyards, a mild rebuke.