The Algernon Blackwood Collection

by Algernon Blackwood

  “That’s better,” said the Tramp approvingly. “Smell, then follow,” and he moved forward again with his dancing, happy step. “All the wild, natural things do it,” he cried, looking back over his shoulder at the three who were on their knees with faces pressed down against the yellow carpet. “It’s the way to keep on the trail. Smell—then follow.”

  Something flashed through the clearing mind of the older man, though where it came from he had less idea than the dandelions: a mood of forgotten beauty rushed upon him—

  “O, follow, follow!

  Through the caverns hollow,

  As the song floats thou pursue,

  Where the wild bee never flew—”

  and he ran dancing forward after the great Tramp, singing the words as though they were his own.

  Yet the flowers spread so thickly that the trail soon lost itself; it seemed like a paper-chase where the hare had scattered coloured petals instead of torn white copy-books. Each searcher followed the sign of his or her own favourite flower; like a Jack-in-the-Box each one bobbed up and down, smelling, panting, darting hither and thither as in the mazes of some gnat—or animal-dance, till knees and hands were stained with sweet brown earth, and lips and noses gleamed with the dust of orange-tinted pollen.

  “Anyhow, I’d rather look than find,” cried Tim, turning a somersault over a sandy rabbit-mound.

  The swallows flashed towards Judy, a twittering song sprinkling itself like liquid silver behind them as they swooped away again.

  “I expect,” the girl confessed breathlessly, “that when we do find him—we shall just die—!”

  “Of happiness, and wonder,” ventured Uncle Felix, watching a common Meadow Brown that perched, opening and closing its wings, upon his sleeve. And the Tramp, almost invisible among high standing grass and thistles, laughed and called in his curious, singing voice, “There is no hurry! Life has just begun!”

  “Then we might as well sit down,” suggested Uncle Felix, and suiting the action to the word, chose a nice soft spot upon the mossy bank and made himself comfortable as though he meant to stay; the Tramp did likewise, gathering the children close about his tangled figure. For one thing a big ditch faced them, its opposite bank overgrown with bramble bushes, and for another the sloping moss offered itself invitingly, like a cushioned sofa. So they lay side by side, watching the empty ditch, listening to the faint trickle of water tinkling down it. Slender reeds and tall straight grasses fringed the nearer edge, and, as the wind passed through them with a hush and whisper, they bent over in a wave of flowing green.

  “He’s certainly gone that way,” Judy whispered, following with her eyes the direction of the bending reeds. She was getting expert now.

  “Along the ditch, I do believe,” agreed Tim. There were no flowers in it, and few, perhaps, would have found beauty there, yet the pointing of the reeds was unmistakable. “It’s chock full of stuff,” he added, “but a rat could get along, so I suppose—”

  “The signs are very slight sometimes,” murmured the Tramp, his head half buried in the moss, “and sometimes difficult as well. You’d be surprised.” He flung out his arms and legs and continued laughingly. “When things are contrary you may be sure you’re getting somewhere—getting warm, that is.”

  The children heard this outburst, but they did not listen. They were absorbed in something else already, for the movements of the reeds were fascinating. They began to imitate them, swaying their heads and bodies to and fro in time, and crooning to themselves in an attempt to copy the sound made by the wind among the crowded stalks.

  “Don’t,” objected Uncle Felix, half in fun, “it makes me dizzy.” He was tempted to copy them, however, and made an effort, but the movement caught him in the ribs a little. His body, like his mind, was not as supple as theirs. An oak tree or an elm, perhaps, was more his model.

  “Do,” the Tramp corrected him, swaying as he said it. “Swing with a thing if you want to understand it. Copy it, and you catch its meaning. That’s rhythm!” He made an astonishing mouthful of the word. The children overheard it.

  “How do you spell it?” Judy asked.

  “I don’t,” he replied; “I do it. Once you get into the"—he took a great breath—"rhythm of a thing, you begin to like it. See?”

  And he went on swaying his big shoulders in imitation of the rustling reeds. All four swayed together then, holding their feathers before them like little flying banners. More than ever, they seemed things growing out of the earth, out of the very ditch. The movement brought a delicious, soothing sense of peace and safety over them; earth, air, and sunshine all belonged to them, plenty for everybody, no need to get there first and snatch at the best places. There was no hurry, life had just begun. They seemed to have dug a hole in space and curled up cosily inside it. They whispered curious natural things to one another. “A wren is settling on my hair,” said Judy: “a butterfly on my neck,” said Uncle Felix: “a mouse,” Tim mentioned, “is making its nest in my trousers pocket.” And the Tramp kept murmuring in his voice of wind and water, “I’m full of air and sunlight, floating in them, floating away… my secret’s in the wind and open sky… there is no longer any Time—to lose….”

  A bright green lizard darted up the sun-baked bank, vanishing down a crack without a sound; it left a streak of fire in the air. A golden fly hovered about the tallest reed, then darted into another world, invisibly. A second followed it, a third, a fourth—points of gold that pinned the day fast against the moving wall of green. A wren shot at full speed along the bed of the ditch, threading its winding length together as upon a woven pattern. All were busy and intent upon some purpose common to the whole of them, and to everything else as well; even the things that did not move were doing something.

  “I say,” cried Tim suddenly, “they’re covering him up. They’re hiding him better so that we shan’t find him. We’ve got too warm.”

  How long they had been in that ditch when the boy exclaimed no one could tell; perhaps a lifetime, or perhaps an age only. It was long enough, at any rate, for the Tramp to have changed visibly in appearance—he looked younger, thinner, sprightlier, more shining. He seemed to have shed a number of outward things that made him bulky—bits of beard and clothing, several extra waistcoats, and every scrap of straw and stuff from the hedges that he wore at first. More and more he looked as Judy had seen him, ages and ages ago, emerging from the tarpaulin on the rubbish-heap at the End of the World.

  He sprang alertly to his feet at the sound of Tim’s exclamation. The sunlit morning seemed to spring up with him.

  “We have been very warm indeed,” he sang, “but we shall get warmer still before we find him. Besides, those things aren’t hiding him—they’re looking. Everything and everybody in the whole wide world is looking, but the signs are different for everybody, don’t you see? Each knows and follows their own particular sign. Come on!” he cried, “come on and look! We shall find him in the end.”

  COME-BACK STUMPER’S SIGN

  ..................

  VI

  THE STEEP BANK WAS EASILY managed. They were up it in a twinkling, a line of dancing figures, all holding hands.

  First went the Tramp, shining and glowing like a mirror in the sunshine—fire surely in him; next Judy, almost flying with the joy and lightness in her—as of air; Tim barely able to keep tight hold of her hand, so busily did his feet love the roots and rabbit-holes of—earth; and finally, Uncle Felix, rolling to and fro, now sideways, now toppling headlong, roaring as he followed like a heavy wave. Fire, air, earth, and water—they summarised existence; owned and possessed the endless day; lived it, were one with it. Their leader, who apparently had swallowed the sun, fused and unified them in this amazing way with—fire.

  And hardly had they passed the line of shy forget-me-nots on the top of the bank, than they ran against a curious looking object that at first appeared to be an animated bundle of some kind, but on closer inspection proved to be a human figure stooping. It
was somebody very busy about the edges of a great clump of bramble bushes. At the sound of their impetuous approach it straightened up. It had the face of a man—yellowish, patched with red, breathless and very hot. It was Come-back Stumper.

  He glared at them, furious at being disturbed, yet with an uneasy air, half comical, half ashamed, as of being—caught. He took on a truculent, aggressive attitude, as though he knew he would have to explain himself and did not want to do so. He turned and faced them.

  “Mornin’,” he grunted fiercely. “It’s a lovely day.”

  But they all agreed so promptly with him that he dropped the offensive at once. His face was very hot. It dripped.

  “Energetic as usual,” observed Uncle Felix, while Tim poked among the bushes to see what he had been after, and Judy offered him a very dirty handkerchief to mop his forehead with. His bald head shone and glistened. Wisps of dark hair lay here and there upon it like the feathers of a crow’s torn wing.

  “Thanks, dear,” he said stiffly, using the few inches of ragged cambric and then tucking the article absent-mindedly into a pocket of his shooting coat. “I’ve been up very early—since dawn. Since dawn,” he repeated in a much louder voice, “got up, in fact, with the sun.” He meant to justify his extreme and violent activity. He glanced at the Tramp with a curious air of respect. Tim thought he saluted him, but Judy declared afterwards he was only wiping “the hot stuff off the side of his dear old head.”

  “Wonderful moment,—dawn, ain’t it, General?” said the Tramp. “Best in the whole day when you come to think of it.”

  “It is, sir,” replied Stumper, as proud as though a Field-Marshal had addressed him, “and the first.” He looked more closely at the Tramp; he rubbed his eyes, and then produced the scrap of cambric and rubbed them again more carefully than before. Perhaps he, too, had been hoping for a leader! Something very proud and happy stole upon his perspiring face of ochre. He moved a step nearer. “Did you notice it this morning?” he asked in a whisper, “the dawn, I mean? Never saw anything like it in me life before. Thought I was in the Himalayas or the Caucasus again. Astonishin’, upon me word—the beauty of it! And the birds! Did you hear ‘em? Expect you usually do, though,” he added with a touch of unmistakable envy and admiration in his tone.

  “Uncommon,” agreed the Tramp, “and no mistake about it. They knew, you see.” They no longer called each other “Sir” and “General”; they had come to an understanding apparently.

  “Umph!” said Stumper, and looked round shyly at the others.

  Stumper was evidently under the stress of some divine emotion he was half ashamed of. An unwonted passion stirred him. He seemed a prey to an unusual and irrepressible curiosity. Only the obvious fact that his listeners shared the same feelings with him loosened his sticky tongue and stole self-consciousness away. He had expected to be laughed at. Instead the group admired him. The Tramp—his manner proved it—thought of him very highly indeed.

  “Never knew such a day in all me life before,” Stumper admitted frankly. “Couldn’t—simply couldn’t stay indoors.”

  He still retained a trace of challenge in his tone. But no one challenged. Judy took his arm. “So you came out?” she said softly.

  “Like us,” said Uncle Felix.

  “Of course,” Tim added. But it was the Tramp who supplied the significant words they had all been waiting for, Stumper himself more eagerly than any one else. “To look,” he remarked quite naturally.

  Stumper might have just won a great world-victory, judging by the expression that danced upon his face. He dropped all pretence at further concealment. He put his other arm round Tim’s shoulder, partly to balance himself better against Judy’s pushing, and partly because he realised the companionship of both children as very dear just then. He had a great deal to say, and wanted to say it all at once, but words never came to him too easily; he had missed many an opportunity in life for the want of fluent and spontaneous address. He stammered and halted somewhat in his delivery. A new language with but a single word in it would have suited him admirably.

  “Yes,” he growled, “I came out—to look. But when I got out—I clean forgot what it was—who, I mean—no, what,” he corrected himself again, “I’d come out to look for. Can’t make it out at all.” He broke off in a troubled way.

  “No?” agreed Judy sympathetically, as though she knew.

  “But you want to find it awfully,” Tim stated as a fact.

  “Awfully,” admitted Stumper with a kind of fierceness.

  “Only you can’t remember what it looks like quite?” put in Uncle Felix.

  Stumper hesitated a moment. “Too wonderful to remember properly,” he said more quietly; something like that. “But the odd thing is,” he went on in a lower tone, “I’ve seen it. I know I’ve seen it. Saw it this mornin’—very early—when the pigeon woke me up—at dawn.”

  “Pigeon!” exclaimed Tim and Judy simultaneously. “Dawn!”

  “Carrier-pigeon—flew in at my open window—woke me,” continued the soldier in his gruff old voice. “I’ve used ‘em—carrier-pigeons, you know. Sent messages—years ago. I understand the birds a bit. Extraordinary thing, I thought. Got up and looked at it.” He blocked again.

  “Ah!” said some one, by way of encouragement.

  “And it looked back at me.” By the way he said it, it was clear he hardly expected to be believed.

  “Of course,” said Uncle Felix.

  “Naturally,” added Tim.

  “And what d’you think?” Stumper went on, a note of yearning and even passion in his voice. “What d’you think?” he whispered: “I felt it had a message for me—brought me a message—something to tell me—”

  “Round its neck or foot?” asked Tim.

  Stumper drew the boy closer and looked down into his face. “Eyes,” he mumbled, “in its small bright eyes. There was a flash, I saw it plainly—something strange and marvellous, something I’ve been looking for all my life.”

  No one said a single word, but the old soldier felt the understanding sympathy rising like steam from all of them.

  “Then, suddenly, it was gone—out into the open sky—bang into the sunrise. And I saw the dawn all over everything. I dressed—rushed out—and—”

  “Had it laid an egg?” Tim asked, remembering another kind of hunting somewhere, long ago.

  “How could it?” Judy corrected him quickly. “There was—no time—” then stopped abruptly. She turned towards Come-Back Stumper; she gave him a hurried and affectionate hug. “And then,” she asked, “what happened next?”

  Stumper returned the hug, including Tim in it too. “I found this—fluttering in my hand,” he said, and held up a small grey feather for them to admire. “It’s the only clue I’ve got. The pigeon left it.”

  While they admired the feather and exhibited their own, Tim crying, “We’ve got five now, nearly a whole wing!” Stumper was heard to murmur above their heads, “And since I—came out to look—I’ve felt—quite different.”

  “Your secret’s in the wind and open sky!” cried Judy, dancing round him with excitement. Her voice came flying from the air.

  “You’re awfully warm—you’re hot—you’re burning!” shouted Tim, clapping his hands. His voice seemed to rise out of the earth.

  “We’ve all seen it, all had a glimpse,” roared Uncle Felix with a sound of falling water, rolling up nearer as he spoke. “It’s too wonderful to see for long, too wonderful to remember quite. But we shall find it in the end. We’re all looking!” He began a sort of dancing step. “And when we find it—” he went on.

  “We’ll change the world,” shouted Stumper, as though he uttered a final word of command.

  “It’s a he, remember,” interrupted Tim. “Come along!”

  And then the Tramp, who had been standing quietly by, smiling to himself but saying nothing, came nearer, opened his great arms and drew the four of them together. His voice, his shining presence, the warm brilliance that glowe
d about him, seemed to envelop them like a flame of fire and a fire of—love.

  “We’re thinking and arguing too much,” he drawled in his leisurely, big voice, “we lose the trail that way, we lose the rhythm. Just love and look and wonder—then we’ll find him. There is no hurry, life has just begun. But keep on looking all the time.” He turned to Stumper with a chuckle. “You said you had a flash,” he reminded him. “What’s become of it? You can’t have lost it—with that pigeon’s feather in your hand!”

  “It’s waggling,” announced Tim, holding up his own, while the others followed suit. The little feathers all bent one way—towards the bramble clump. Their tiny, singing music was just audible in the pause.

  “Yes,” replied Come-Back Stumper at length. “I’ve had a flash—flashes, in fact! What’s more,” he added proudly, “I was after a couple of them—just when you arrived.”

  Everybody talked at once then. Uncle Felix and the children fell to explaining the signs and traces they had already discovered, each affirming vehemently that their own particular sign was the loveliest—the dragon-fly, the flowers, the wind, the bending reeds, even the lizard and the bumble-bee. The chorus of sound was like the chattering of rooks among the tree-tops; in fact, though the quality of tone of course was different, the resemblance to a concert of birds, all singing together in a summer garden, was quite striking. Out of the hubbub single words emerged occasionally—a “robin,” “swallows,” an “up-and-under bird"—yet, strange to say, so far as Stumper was concerned, only one thing was said; all said the same one thing; he heard this one thing only—as though the words and sentences they used were but different ways of pronouncing it, of spelling it, of uttering it. Moreover, the wind in the feather said it too, for the sound and intonation were similar. It was the thing that wind and running water said, that flame roared in the fireplace, that rain-drops pattered on the leaves, even house-flies, buzzing across the window-panes—everything everywhere, the whole earth, said it.