Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  Jimbo was still conscious of the drawing power of the sea, but he felt that his companion was too strong for it. After fifteen minutes of fierce flight he heard the sounds of earth again, and knew that they were safe.

  Then the governess loosened her hold, and they flew along side by side in the direction of home.

  “I won’t scold you, Jimbo,” she said presently, “for you’ve suffered enough already.” She was the first to break the silence, and her voice trembled a little. “But remember, the sea draws you down, just as surely as the moon draws you up. Nothing would please Him better than to see you destroyed by one or the other.”

  Jimbo said nothing. But, when once they were safe inside the room again, he went up and cried his eyes out on her arm, while she folded him in to her heart as if he were the only thing in the whole world she had to love.

  CHAPTER XV. THE CALL OF THE BODY

  One night, towards the end of the practice flights, a strange thing happened, which showed that the time for the final flight of escape was drawing near.

  They had been out for several hours flying through a rainstorm, the thousand little drops of which stung their faces like tiny gun-shot. About two in the morning the wind shifted and drove the clouds away as by magic; the stars came out, at first like the eyes of children still dim with crying, but later with a clear brilliance that filled Jimbo and the governess with keen pleasure. The air was washed and perfumed; the night luminous, alive, singing. All its tenderness and passion entered their hearts and filled them with the wonder of its glory.

  “Come down, Jimbo,” said the governess, “and we’ll lie in the trees and smell the air after the rain.”

  “Yes,” added the boy, whose Older Self had been whispering mysterious things to him, “and watch the stars and hear them singing.”

  He led the way to some beech trees that lined a secluded lane, and settled himself comfortably in the top branches of the largest, while the governess soon found a resting-place beside him. It was a deserted spot, far from human habitation. Here and there through the foliage they could see little pools of rain-water reflecting the sky. The group of trees swung in the wind, dreaming great woodland dreams, and overhead the stars looked like a thousand orchards in the sky, filling the air with the radiance of their blossoms.

  “How brilliant they are to-night,” said the governess, after watching the boy attentively for some minutes as they lay side by side in the great forked branch. “I never saw the constellations so clear.”

  “But they have so little shape,” he answered dreamily; “if we wore lights when we flew about we should make much better constellations than they do.”

  “The Big and Little Child instead of the Big and Little Bear,” she laughed, still watching him.

  “I’m slipping away — —” he began, and then stopped suddenly. He saw the expression of his companion’s eyes, which were looking him through and through with the most poignant love and yearning mingled in their gaze, and something clutched at his heart that he could not understand.

  “ —— not slipping out of the tree,” he went on vaguely, “but slipping into some new place or condition. I don’t understand it. Am I — going off somewhere — where you can’t follow? I thought suddenly — I was losing you.”

  The governess smiled at him sadly and said nothing. She stroked his wings and then raised them to her lips and kissed them. Jimbo watched her, and folded his other wing across into her hands; he felt unhappy, and his heart began to swell within him; but he didn’t know what to say, and the Older Self began slowly to fade away again.

  “But the stars,” he went on, “have they got things they send out too — forces, I mean, like the trees? Do they send out something that makes us feel sad, or happy, or strong, or weak?”

  She did not answer for some time; she lay watching his face and fondling his smooth red wings; and, presently, when she did begin to explain, Jimbo found that the child in him was then paramount again, and he could not quite follow what she said.

  He tried to answer properly and seem interested, but her words were very long and hard to understand, and after a time he thought she was talking to herself more than to him, and he gave up all serious effort to follow. Then he became aware that her voice had changed. The words seemed to drop down upon him from a great height. He imagined she was standing on one of those far stars he had been asking about, and was shouting at him through an immense tube of sky and darkness. The words pricked his ears like needle-points, only he no longer heard them as words, but as tiny explosions of sound, meaningless and distant. Swift flashes of light began to dance before his eyes, and suddenly from underneath the tree, a wind rose up and rushed, laughing, across his face. Darkness in a mass dropped over his eyes, and he sank backwards somewhere into another corner of space altogether.

  The governess, meanwhile, lay quite still, watching the limp form in the branches beside her and still holding the tips of his red wings. Presently tears stole into her eyes, and began to run down her cheeks. One deep sigh after another escaped from her lips; but the little boy, or the old soul, who was the cause of all her emotion, apparently was far away and knew nothing of it. For a long time she lay in silence, and then leaned a little nearer to him, so as to see his full face. The eyes were wide open and staring, but they were looking at nothing she could see, for the consciousness cannot be in two places at the same time, and Jimbo just then was off on a little journey of his own, a journey that was but preliminary to the great final one of all.

  “Jimbo,” whispered the girl between her tears and sighs, “Jimbo! Where have you gone to? Tell me, are they getting ready for you at last, and am I to lose you after all? Is this the only way I can save you — by losing you?”

  There was no answer, no sign of movement; and the governess hid her face in her hands and cried quietly to herself, while her tears dropped down through the branches of the tree and fell into the rain-pools beneath.

  For Jimbo’s state of oblivion in the tree was in reality a momentary return to consciousness in his body on the bed, and the repaired mechanism of the brain and muscles had summoned him back on a sort of trial visit. He remembered nothing of it afterwards, any more than one remembers the experiences of deep sleep; but the fact was that, with the descent of the darkness upon him in the branches, he had opened his eyes once again on the scene in the night-nursery bedroom where his body lay.

  He saw figures standing round the bed and about the room; his mother with the same white face as before, was still bending over the bed asking him if he knew her; a tall man in a long black coat moved noiselessly to and fro; and he saw a shaded lamp on a table a little to the right of the bed. Nothing seemed to have changed very much, though there had probably been time enough since he last opened his eyes for the black-coated doctor to have gone and come again for a second visit. He held an instrument in his hands that shone brightly in the lamplight. Jimbo saw this plainly and wondered what it was. He felt as if he were just waking out of a nice, deep sleep — dreamless and undisturbed. The Empty House, the Governess, Fright and the Children had all vanished from his memory, and he knew no more about wings and feathers than he did about the science of meteorology.

  But the bedroom scene was a mere glimpse after all; his eyes were already beginning to close again. First they shut out the figure of the doctor; then the bed-curtains; and then the nurse moved her arm, making the whole scene quiver for an instant, like some huge jelly-shape, before it dipped into profound darkness and disappeared altogether. His mother’s voice ran off into a thin trickle of sound, miles and miles away, and the light from the lamp followed him with its glare for less than half a second. All had vanished.

  “Jimbo, dear, where have you been? Can you remember anything?” asked the soft voice beside him, as he looked first at the stars overhead, and then from the tracery of branches and leaves beneath him to the great sea of tree-tops and open country all round.

  But he could tell her nothing; he seemed dreamy an
d absent-minded, lying and staring at her as if he hardly knew who she was or what she was saying. His mind was still hovering near the border-line of the two states of consciousness, like the region between sleeping and waking, where both worlds seem unreal and wholly wonderful.

  He could not answer her questions, but he evidently caught some reflex of her emotions, for he leaned towards her across the branches, and said he was happy and never wanted to leave her. Then he crawled to the end of the big bough and sprang out into the air with a shout of delight. He was the child again — the flying child, wild with the excitement of tearing through the night air at fifty miles an hour.

  The governess soon followed him and they flew home together, taking a long turn by the sea and past the great chalk cliffs, where the sea sang loud beneath them.

  These lapses became with time more frequent, as well as of longer duration; and with them the boy noticed that the longing to escape became once again intense. He wanted to get home, wherever home was; he experienced a sort of nostalgia for the body, though he could not remember where that body lay. But when he asked the governess what this feeling meant, she only mystified him by her answers, saying that every one, in the body or out of it, felt a deep longing for their final home, though they might not have the least idea where it lay, or even to be able to recognise, much less to label, their longing.

  His normal feelings, too, were slowly returning to him. The Older Self became more and more submerged. As he approached the state of ordinary, superficial consciousness, the characteristics of that state reflected themselves more and more in his thoughts and feelings. His memory still remained a complete blank; but he somehow felt that the things, places, and people he wanted to remember, had moved much nearer to him than before. Every day brought them more within his reach.

  “All these forgotten things will come back to me soon, I know,” he said one day to the governess, “and then I’ll tell you all about them.”

  “Perhaps you’ll remember me too then,” she answered, a shadow passing across her face.

  Jimbo clapped his hands with delight.

  “Oh,” he cried, “I should like to remember you, because that would make you a sort of two-people governess, and I should love you twice as much.”

  But with the gradual return to former conditions the feelings of age and experience grew dim and indefinite, his knowledge lessened, becoming obscure and confused, showing itself only in vague impressions and impulses, until at last it became quite the exception for the child-consciousness to be broken through by flashes of intuition and inspiration from the more deeply hidden memories.

  For one thing, the deep horror of the Empty House and its owner now returned to him with full force. Fear settled down again over the room, and lurked in the shadows over the yard. A vivid dread seized him of the other door in the room — the door through which the Frightened Children had disappeared, but which had never opened since. It gradually became for him a personality in the room, a staring, silent, listening thing, always watching, always waiting. One day it would open and he would be caught! In a dozen ways like this the horror of the house entered his heart and made him long for escape with all the force of his being.

  But the governess, too, seemed changing; she was becoming more vague and more mysterious. Her face was always sad now, and her eyes wistful; her manner became restless and uneasy, and in many little ways the child could not fail to notice that her mind was intent upon other things. He begged her to name the day for the final flight, but she always seemed to have some good excuse for putting it off.

  “I feel frightened when you don’t tell me what’s going on,” he said to her.

  “It’s the preparations for the last flight,” she answered, “the flight of escape. He’ll try to prevent us going together so that you should get lost. But it’s better you shouldn’t know too much,” she added. “Trust me and have patience.”

  “Oh, that’s what you’re so afraid of,” he said, “separation!” He was very proud indeed of the long word, and said it over several times to himself.

  And the governess, looking out of the window at the fading sunlight, repeated to herself more than to him the word he was so proud of.

  “Yes, that’s what I’m so afraid of — separation; but if it means your salvation — —” and her sentence remained unfinished as her eyes wandered far above the tops of the trees into the shadows of the sky.

  And Jimbo, drawn by the sadness of her voice, turned towards the window and noticed to his utter amazement that he could see right through her. He could see the branches of the trees beyond her body.

  But the next instant she turned and was no longer transparent, and before the boy could say a word, she crossed the floor and disappeared from the room.

  CHAPTER XVI. PREPARATION

  Now that he was preparing to leave it, Jimbo began to realise more fully how things in this world of delirium — so the governess sometimes called it — were all terribly out of order and confused. So long as he was wholly in it and of it, everything had seemed all right; but, as he approached his normal condition again, the disorder became more and more apparent.

  And the next few hours brought it home with startling clearness, and increased to fever heat the desire for final escape.

  It was not so much a nonsense-world — it was too alarming for that — as a world of nightmare, wherein everything was distorted. Events in it were all out of proportion; effects no longer sprang from adequate causes; things happened in a dislocated sort of way, and there was no sequence in the order of their happening. Tiny occurrences filled him with disproportionate, inconceivable horror; and great events, on the other hand, passed him scathless. The spirit of disorder — monstrous, uncouth, terrifying — reigned supreme; and Jimbo’s whole desire, though inarticulate, was to escape back into order and harmony again.

  In contrast to all this dreadful uncertainty, the conduct of the governess stood out alone as the one thing he could count upon: she was sure and unfailing; he felt absolute confidence in her plans for his safety, and when he thought of her his mind was at rest. Come what might, she would always be there in time to help. The adventure over the sea had proved that; but, childlike, he thought chiefly of his own safety, and had ceased to care very much whether she escaped with him or not. It was the older Jimbo that preferred captivity to escape without her, whereas every minute now he was sinking deeper into the normal child state in which the intuitive flashes from the buried soul became more and more rare.

  Meanwhile, there was preparation going on, secret and mysterious. He could feel it. Some one else besides the governess was making plans, and the boy began to dread the moment of escape almost as much as he desired it. The alternative appalled him — to live for ever in the horror of this house, bounded by the narrow yard, watched by Fright listening ever at his elbow, and visited by the horrible Frightened Children. Even the governess herself began to inspire him with something akin to fear, as her personality grew more and more mysterious. He thought of her as she stood by the window, with the branches of the tree visible through her body, and the thought filled him with a dreadful and haunting distress.

  But this was only when she was absent; the moment she came into the room, and he looked into her kind eyes, the old feeling of security returned, and he felt safe and happy.

  Once, during the day, she came up to see him, and this time with final instructions. Jimbo listened with rapt attention.

  “To-night, or to-morrow night we start,” she said in a quiet voice. “You must wait till you hear me calling — —”

  “But sha’n’t we start together?” he interrupted.

  “Not exactly,” she replied. “I’m doing everything possible to put him off the scent, but it’s not easy, for once Fright knows you he’s always on the watch. Even if he can’t prevent your escape, he’ll try to send you home to your body with such a shock that you’ll be only ‘half there’ for the rest of your life.”

  Jimbo did not qu
ite understand what she meant by this, and returned at once to the main point.

  “Then the moment you call I’m to start?”

  “Yes. I shall be outside somewhere. It depends on the wind and weather a little, but probably I shall be hovering above the trees. You must dash out of the window and join me the moment you hear me call. Clear the wall without sinking into the yard, and mind he doesn’t tear your wings off as you fly by.”

  “What will happen, though, if I don’t find you?” he asked.

  “You might get lost. If he succeeds in getting me out of the way first, you’re sure to get lost — —”

  “But I’ve had long flights without getting lost,” he objected.

  “Nothing to this one,” she replied. “It will be tremendous. You see, Jimbo, it’s not only distance; it’s change of condition as well.”

  “I don’t mind what it is so long as we escape together,” he said, puzzled by her words.

  He kept his eyes fixed on her face. It seemed to him she was changing even as he looked at her. A sort of veil lifted from her features. He fancied he could see the shape of the door through her body.

  “Oh, please, Miss Lake — —” he began in a frightened voice, taking a step towards her. “What is the matter? You look so different!”

  “Nothing, dearest boy, is the matter,” she replied faintly. “I feel sad at the thought of your — of our going, that’s all. But that’s nothing,” she added more briskly, “and remember, I’ve told you exactly what to do; so you can’t make any mistake. Now good-bye for the present.”

  There was a smile on her face that he had never seen there before, and an expression of tenderness and love that he could not fail to understand. But even as he looked she seemed to fade away into a delicate, thin shadow as she moved slowly towards the trap-door. Jimbo stretched out his arms to touch her, for the moment of dread had passed, and he wanted to kiss her.