The Algernon Blackwood Collection

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘I am Joseph Wimble, not a gentleman quite, not of much account anywhere perhaps, but a true workman, earning £250 a year, knowing all about the outside, and something about the inside of books; thirty-seven years old, with a boy at the Grammar School, a girl of sixteen in the house, and married to—to——’ He paused, turned from the mirror, and sat down. It cost him an effort to remember—’to Joan Lumley, daughter of a corn-chandler in Norfolk, who might die any moment and leave us enough to live on,’ he went on, ‘in a more comfortable position,’ passing his hand over his forehead; ‘and my life is insured, and I’ve put a bit by, and Tom’s to be a solicitor’s clerk, and everything’s going smoothly except that taxes——’

  The sound of an opening door disturbed him. He felt confused in his mind. He heard Mrs. Marks saying loudly, ‘And please say good-bye for me to your husband,’ the aspirate so emphasised that it was obviously an insecurity. She intended he should hear and understand she bore him no ill-will for his bad manners, yet despised him. The steps went downstairs, and the two questions came back upon him like pistol-shots:

  ‘Who was she? Who am I?

  He realised he had been wandering from the point.

  ‘I’m a centre of life, independent and unafraid,’ thought flashed an answer. ‘I’m what I make myself, what I think myself. I’m not seeing things upside down; I’m beginning to think for myself, and that’s what it is. No one, nor nothing, nor anything anywhere in the world,’ he went on, mixed in speech, but clear in mind, ‘can prevent me from being anything I feel myself, will myself, say I am. I’ve never read nor thought nor bothered my head about things before. By heavens! I’ll begin! I have begun——’

  ‘What’s the matter, Joe? Have you got a headache, or is it the books bothering you, dear?’ His wife had come in upon him.

  She put her hand upon his forehead, and he got up from his chair and faced her.

  ‘I’ve made a discovery,’ he said, with exhilaration in his manner, ‘a great discovery.’ He looked triumphantly at her. ‘I am.’

  ‘What are you?’ she asked, thinking he was joking, and his sentence left unfinished on purpose.

  ‘I am,’ he repeated with emphasis. ‘I have discovered that I am, that I exist. Your question to that woman made me suddenly see it.’

  His wife looked flustered, and said vaguely, ‘What?’ Wimble continued:

  ‘As yet, I don’t know exactly what I am, but I mean to find out. Up till now I’ve been automatic, just doing things because other people do ‘em. But I’ve discovered that’s not necessary. I’m going to do things in future because I want to. But first I must find out why I am what I am. Then the explanation’ll come—of everything. Do you see what I mean? It’s a case of “Enquire within upon everything."‘ And he smiled. His heart fluttered. He felt wings in it—again.

  ‘Do you mean you’re going to start in the writing or publishing line, Joe?’ It had always been her secret ambition.

  ‘That may come later,’ he told her, ‘when I’ve something to say. For it’s really big, this discovery of mine. Most people never find it out at all. She’—indicating with his thumb the direction Mrs. Marks had taken— ‘hasn’t, for instance. She simply isn’t aware that she exists. She isn’t.’

  ‘Isn’t what, dear?’

  ‘She is not, I mean, because she doesn’t know she is,’ he said loudly.

  ‘Oh, that way. I see.’ Mrs. Wimble looked a wee bit frightened. He had seen an animal, a rabbit for instance, look like that before it decided to plunge back into its hole for safety.

  ‘There are strange, big things about these days, I know,’ she said after a pause, thinking of the books with queer titles his employers published. ‘You have been reading too much, dear, thinking and——’

  ‘Mother,’ he interrupted, instinctively omitting her name, and in a tone that convinced her his head was momentarily turned, ‘that’s the whole trouble. I’ve never thought in my life.’

  ‘But why should you, dear?’ she soothed him, wondering if people who lost their memory and wandered off exhibited such symptoms first. ‘You always do your work splendidly. Don’t think too much, is what I say. It always leads to worrying——’

  ‘Hardly ever—till this moment,’ he was saying in the grave, emphatic way that so alarmed her. ‘Not even when I asked you to marry me, when Tom was born, or Joan, or when we took this flat, or anything.’

  ‘You’ve made quite a success of your life without it anyhow, Joe dear. And no woman could ask more than that. D’you feel poorly? Joan can fetch Dr. Monson in a moment.’ It was a variant of ‘What?’

  ‘I feel better and bigger and stronger,’ he replied, ‘more real than ever in my life before. I have never been really alive till this moment. I am—and for the first time I know it. I’m experiencing.’ He stopped short, as Joan went down the passage singing, pausing a moment to look in, then tactfully going on her way again. The fluttering in his heart became more marked. Something was trying to escape. There was a whirr of wings again. ‘Mother,’ he said to his wife, as their heads turned back from the door together, ‘do you know what “experiencing” is? D’you realise what the word means?’

  She sat down, resting her arms upon the table. She looked quietly into his eyes, as at one who is about to speak out of greater knowledge.

  ‘Joe dear, I have had experiences—experiences of my very own, you know.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know, I know. But what I mean is—do you get the meaning, the real meaning of the word?’

  She sighed audibly. ‘Not your meaning, perhaps,’ she meant. But she did not say it.

  ‘It means,’ he said, delighted with her exquisite silence, ‘it means— er——’ He thought hard a moment. ‘Experience,’ he went on, ‘is that “something” which changes potatoes into nourishment, and so into emotion. That’s it. Until you eat potatoes, you don’t exist. Until you have experiences, you don’t exist. When you have experiences and know that you have them, you—persist.’

  She gasped aloud. She took his hand—very quietly.

  ‘Joe dear,’ she said, softly as in their courtship days, ‘such ideas don’t come into your head from nowhere. Has some one been talking to you? Have you been reading these books?’

  His pulse was very quiet.

  ‘Have you been reading the firm’s books, dear?’ she repeated.

  She asked it gently, forgivingly, as a mother might ask her boy, ‘Have you been tasting father’s whisky?’ The books were meant to sell to booksellers, to the public, to people who needed that particular kind of excitement. Her husband was to be trusted. He was not supposed to know what they contained. His ‘line’ of trade was chiefly medical, psychological, religious, philosophical. Fiction was another ‘line’—for the apprentice. Joe was an ‘expert’ traveller. He was expected to talk about his wares, but not as one who read them. Merely their selling value was his strong point.

  By the expression of his face she knew the answer.

  He leaned back in his chair, just as he did sometimes when he asked what there was for dinner—the same real interest in his eyes—and he answered very calmly:

  ‘My dear, I have—a bit. Cogito ergo sum. For the first time I understood, in theory, that I existed. My reading taught me that. But I never knew it in practice until just now, when I heard you ask that question about the future Mrs. Fox: “Who was she?” And then I knew also that you——’

  ‘You what?’ enquired Mrs. Wimble, bridling.

  ‘Were unaware that you existed,’ he replied point blank.

  ‘Aren’t you a little beside yourself, Joe—sort of excited, or something? ‘she gasped, proud of her tact and self-control. ‘What else could I have said? How could I have put it different?’

  ‘Joan,’ he answered gently, ‘you should have said, “What is she?” For that would have meant you thought for yourself. It would have meant that you knew you were, and that you knew she was.’

  ‘Original?’ said Mrs. Wimble slowly, catchin
g her husband’s meaning vaguely, but more than a little disturbed in her mind.

  ‘No,’ he answered, ‘true. Just as when, years ago—the sunshine lovely and the fields full of buttercups—you wore a yellow scarf, and a wagtail beside a willow pond came so near that——’

  ‘Joe,’ she said with a slight flush that was half displeasure yet half flattered vanity,’ you needn’t bring up that again. We were a bit above ourselves, dear, when that happened. We lost our heads——’

  ‘Above ourselves! Free and real and happy,’ he interrupted her, ‘that’s what we were then. We had wings. We’ve lost ‘em. We were in the air, I tell you.’ His voice grew louder. ‘And what’s more, we knew it.’

  He heard his daughter pass down the narrow passage again, singing. He got up and seemed to shake himself. There was again a fluttering in him.

  ‘We certainly were in the air,’ murmured his astonished wife.

  ‘You were a glorious yellow wagtail,’ he went on, so that she didn’t know whether his laughter was in earnest or in play, ‘and we were rising—into flight. We’ve come down to earth since. We live in a hole, as it were. I’m going to get out!’

  Joan’s little song went past the door and died away towards the kitchen:

  Flow, fly, flow,

  Wherever I am, I go.

  ‘We’ve lost our wings. We crawl about. We never dance now, or sing, or——’ He broke off abruptly. He felt the other portion of himself, so long hidden, coming to the surface; and he was aware that it went after his daughter. He was a little afraid of it—felt giddy. Her voice in the distance sounded like a lark’s, the lilt of her curious little song had an echo of the open air in it, her tread brought back the tripping of the wagtail along the river’s bank. ‘We never get out now,’ he finished the sentence, ‘we never get out. Earth smothers us. We want air!’

  Mrs. Wimble watched him a moment with frightened eyes. He was standing on tiptoe, holding the tails of his coat in his hands as though he was about to do something very unusual—something foolish and ridiculous, she thought. He seemed about to dance, to rise, almost to fly up to the ceiling. She felt uneasy, hot—a little ashamed.

  ‘We can go out more, dear, if you think it wise,’ she said cautiously, moving a little further away. ‘It’s the expense—I always thought——’

  Her husband stared at her a moment dumbly. He seemed to be listening. In his heart a little, forgotten song crept back, answering the singing of the girl. Then, dropping upon his heels again, he said patiently in a soothing tone:

  ‘There, there, Mother! Forgive me if I frightened you. I was only pretending we were young again. That old bird thing—bird-magic—came over me for a moment. The girl’s singing did it, I suppose. Something ageless in me got the upper hand . . .’

  He took her hand and comforted her. ‘Steady, Joe,’ she said, horribly puzzled, ‘she is a bit flighty, I know.’

  ‘But we will go out more,’ he went on more normally again, adopting her meaning perfectly. ‘Bother the expense! We’ll go out this very night and take the child with us. We’ll dine out, my dear. I’ll take you to a West End restaurant!’

  CHAPTER IV.

  ..................

  FOR JOAN CERTAINLY WAS NO ordinary girl; some called her backward, some considered her deficient, but all agreed that she was singular. Yet all liked her. Tall, slim and fair, with plenty of golden hair and eyes of merry brightness, she was out of the common in an attractive sort of way. Tom, her brother, with the mind of a solicitor’s clerk, looked down upon her; her mother, fond, conventional, socially ambitious, despaired of her; her father alone held the opinion, ‘There’s something in that girl. She’s always herself. But town-life over-weights and hides her; and in the end will suffocate. It’ll snuff her out. She’s meant for country.’ He was aware of something unusually real in her. They were great friends. ‘I want more air,’ she had said once. ‘In a field or garden I’d grow enormous like a bean plant. In these streets I’m just a stone squashed down by crowds. I’m in a hole and can’t breathe. I prefer a fewity.’ Even her words were her own like this. ‘I’d like room to dance in. Life is a dance. I’d learn it in a field. I’d be a bird girl.’ Space was her need, for mind as well as body.

  It was her father’s secret ambition too: a cottage, a garden with things that grew silently into beauty, flowers, vegetables, plants; sweet laughing winds; the rush of living rain at midnight; water to drink from a deep, cool spring instead of from metal pipes; a large, inviting horizon in which a man might lose himself; and above all—birds.

  ‘After a month in real private country—loose country, talking, dancing, running country——’ She paused.

  ‘Liquid, fluid, as it were,’ he put in, delighted.

  ‘Yes, deep and clear as a river,’ she went on, ‘in country like that, do you know what’d happen to me, father, after a few months of waiting?’

  ‘I know, but I can’t quite say,’ he answered. ‘Tell me, child, for I’d love to hear your own description.’

  ‘I’d fly,’ was her answer. ‘Everything in me would fly about like a bird, picking up things, and all over the place at once without a plan—a fixed, heavy plan like a street or square in London here—and yet getting on all the time—getting further.’

  ‘And how would you learn, dear?’

  ‘Birds,’ she laughed. ‘There’s bird-teaching, I’m sure.’ She flitted across to another chair as she said it. She came closer to her father, who was listening with both ears, watching, drinking in something he had known long ago and then forgotten. ‘You know all about it, Daddy. You needn’t pretend.’

  ‘You’re rather like one, d’you know,’ he smiled. ‘Like a bird, I mean.’ He thought of a dabchick that hides so cleverly no one can put it up— then, suddenly, is there, close at hand.

  She was perched on his knee before he knew it. Her small voice twittered on into his ear. Something about her sparkled, flashed and vanished, and it reminded him of sunshine on swift-fluttering wings through the speckled shade of an orchard. She darted, whirred, and came to rest. He stroked her.

  ‘Father, you know everything before I say it,’ she went on, her face shining with happiness that made her almost beautiful. ‘If I could only live like a bird, I could live. Here it’s all a big, stuffy cage.’ She flitted to the window, pointing to roofs and walls and chimney-pots, black with grime. The same instant she was back again upon his knees. ‘To live like a bird is to be alive all over, I’m sure, I’m sure. I know it. It’s all routing here.’

  Whether she meant rotten, routine, or living in a rut, he did not ask. He felt her meaning.

  ‘There’s a nest in a garden waiting for us somewhere,’ he said, living the dream with her in his heart. ‘And it’s got an orchard, high deep grass, wild flowers, hills in the distance, with a tremendous sky where the winds go tearing about like the flight of birds. And a stream that ripples and sings and shines. All alive, I mean, and always moving. They say the country’s stagnation. It isn’t. It’s a perfect rush——’

  ‘Of course,’ she put in. ‘Oh, father, think hard about that place, and we’ll attract it nearer and nearer, till in the end we drop into it and grow like——’

  ‘Beans,’ he laughed.

  ‘Birds,’ she rippled, and hopped from his knee across the room, and was down the passage and out of sight before he could draw another breath.

  There was something alert as lightning in the girl. She woke a similar thing in him, too. It had nothing to do with brain as intellect, or with reason, or with knowledge in the ordinary sense the world gives to these words. But it had to do, he dimly felt, with another bigger thing that was everywhere and in everything. Joan shared it, brought it nearer; it was universal. What that bigger thing might be perplexed him. He was aware that it drove past, alertness in so huge a thing conveying the impression of vast power. There was grandeur in it somewhere, poise, dignity, beauty; yet this subtle alertness too, and this swift protean sparkle. It was towe
ring as a night of stars, alluring as a peeping wildflower, but prodigious also as though all the oceans flowed suddenly between narrow banks in a flood of clearest water, very rapid, terrifyingly deep. For a robe it wore the lustrous colouring of untold age. His imagery, when he tried to visualise it, grew mixed. He called it Experience. But sometimes he told himself he knew its Christian name— its familiar, little, intimate nickname—and that was Wisdom.

  And so he was rather glad that Joan, like himself, was but half educated; that she was backward, and that he knew, relatively, only the outsides of books. For facts, he vaguely felt, might come between them and this august yet precious thing they knew together. Birds could teach it, but Ornithology hid it.

  Lately, however, as his wife divined, he had been dipping in between the covers of the goods he travelled in. Caught by the bait of several drugging titles, he had nibbled—in the train, in waiting-rooms, in the ‘parlours’ of commercial hotels where he put up for the night. He had found names and descriptions of various things, but they were the names and descriptions given by others to their own sensations. The ordered classification merely developed snapshots. He recognised photographs of dead things that he knew must be somewhere—alive. The names made stationary what ought to dance along with incessant movement. Only he did not realise this until he saw the photographs. The alleged accuracy of a photograph was an insolent falsehood, pretending that what was alive was dead, that what rushed was stationary. Dogs and savages cannot recognise the photographs of their masters. The resemblance has to be taught. Everything flows, his shilling Heraclitus told him. He had always known it. Birds taught it. Joan lived it. To classify was to photograph—a prevarication. To publish a snapshot of a jumping horse was to teach what is not true. Definitions were trivial and absurd, for what was true to-day was false to-morrow. The sole value of names, of classification, of photographing lay in stopping life for an instant so that its flow might be realised—as a momentary stage in an incessant process. And he looked at a group of acquaintances his wife had ‘Kodaked’ ten days ago, and realised with delight how they all had rushed away, torn on ahead, lived, since she had told that insignificant lie in black and white about them.