Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘By Gosh, Margaret,’ he cried, ‘this is the real thing. This wood must be alive and haunted just as the James Bay forests are. It’s simply full of wonder.’

  ‘It’s the Gwyle wood,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s usually rather damp. But Dick loved it.’

  Her brother hardly heard what she said. ‘Listen,’ he said in a hushed tone; ‘do you hear the wind up there aloft? The trees are talking. The wood is full of whispers. There’s no sound in the world like that murmur of a soft breeze in pine branches. It’s like the old gods sighing, which only their true worshippers hear! Isn’t it fine and melancholy? Margaret, d’you know, it goes through me like a fever.’

  His sister stopped and stared at him. She wore a little frightened expression. His sudden enthusiasm puzzled her evidently.

  ‘It’s the Gwyle wood,’ she repeated mechanically. ‘It’s very pretty, I think. Dick always thought so too.’

  Her brother, surprised at his own rush of ready words, and already ashamed of the impulse that had prompted him to reveal himself, fell into silence.

  ‘Nature excites me sometimes,’ he said presently. ‘I suppose it’s because I’ve known nothing else.’

  ‘That’s quite natural, I’m sure, Paul dear,’ she rejoined, turning to lead the way back to the sunshine of the open garden; ‘it’s very pretty; I love it too. But it rather alarms me, I think, sometimes.’

  ‘Perhaps the natural tendency in solitude is to personify nature, and make it take the place of men and women. It has become a profound need of my being certainly.’ He spoke more quietly, chilled by her utter absence of comprehension.

  ‘In its place I think it is ever so nice. But, Paul, you surprise me. I had no idea you were clever like that.’ She was perfectly sincere in what she said.

  Her brother blushed like a boy. ‘It’s my foolishness, I suppose, Margaret,’ he said with a shy laugh. ‘I am certainly not clever.’

  ‘Anyhow, you can be foolish or clever here to your heart’s content. You must use the place as though it were your own exactly.’

  ‘Thank you, Margaret.’

  ‘Only I don’t think I quite understand all those things,’ she added vaguely after a pause. ‘Nixie talks rather like that. She has all poor Dick’s ideas and strange fancies. I really can’t keep up with her at all.’

  Paul stiffened at the reference to the children; he remembered his attitude. Already he had been guilty of a serious lapse from his good intentions.

  ‘She comes down to this wood far too much, and I’m sure it’s not quite healthy for her. I always forget to speak to Mlle. Fleury.’ Then she turned to him and smiled. ‘But they are all so excited about your coming. They will simply devour you.’

  ‘I’m a poor hand at children, I’m afraid,’ he said, falling back upon his usual formula, ‘but, of course, I shall be delighted to see them.’

  She gathered up her white skirts about her trim ankles and led the way out of the wood, her brother following and thinking how slim and graceful she was, and what a charming figure she made among the rose-trees. He got the impression of her as something unreal and shadowy, a creature but half alive. It would hardly have surprised him to see her suddenly flit off into mist and sunshine and disappear from view, leaving him with the certainty that he had been talking with a phantasm of a dream. Between himself and her, however, he realised now, there was a gulf fixed. They looked at one another as it were down the large end of a telescope, and talked down a long-distance telephone that changed all their words and made the sense unintelligible and meaningless. The scale of values between them had no common denominator. Yet he could love her, and he meant to.

  They crossed the lawns and went through the French window into the cool of the drawing-room, and while he was sipping his first cup of afternoon English tea, struggling with a dozen complex emotions that stirred within him, there suddenly darted across the lawn a vision of flying children, with a string of animals at their heels. They swept out of some laurel shrubberies into the slanting evening sunlight, and came to a dead stop on the gravel path in front of the window.

  Their eyes met. They had seen him.

  There they stood, figures of suddenly arrested motion, staring at him through the glass. ‘So that’s Uncle Paul!’ was the thought in the mind of each. He was being inspected, weighed, labelled. The meeting with his sister was nothing compared to this critical examination, conducted though it was from a distance.

  But it lasted only a moment. With a sudden quietness the children passed away from the window towards another door round the corner, and so out of sight.

  ‘They’ve gone up to get tidy before coming to see you,’ explained his sister; and Paul used the short respite to the best possible advantage by collecting his thoughts, remembering his ‘attitude and disguise,’ and seeing to it that his armour was properly fastened on, leaving no loopholes for sudden attack. He retired cautiously to the only place in a room where a shy man feels really safe — the mat before the fireplace. He almost wished for his gun and hunting-knife. The idea made him laugh.

  ‘They already love you,’ he heard his sister’s gentle whispering voice, ‘and I know you’ll love them too. You must never let them annoy you, of course.’

  ‘They’re your children — and Dick’s,’ he answered quietly. ‘I shall get on with them famously, I’m sure.’

  CHAPTER V

  I kiss you and the world begins to fade.

  Land of Heart’s Desire. — Yeats.

  A FEW minutes later the door opened softly, and a procession, solemn of face and silent of foot, marched slowly into the room. The moment had come at last for his introduction, and, by a single stroke of unintentional diplomacy, his sister did more to winning her brother’s shy heart than by anything else she could possibly have devised. She went out.

  ‘They will prefer to make your acquaintance by themselves,’ she said in her gentle way, ‘and without any assistance from me.’

  The procession advanced to the middle of the room and then stopped short. Evidently, for them, the departure of their mother somewhat complicated matters. They had depended upon her to explain them to their uncle. There they stood, overcome by shyness, moving from one foot to another, with flushed and rosy faces, hair brushed, skin shining, and eyes all prepared to laugh as soon as somebody gave the signal, but not the least knowing how to begin.

  And their uncle faced them in similar plight, as, for the second time that afternoon, shyness descended upon him like a cloud, and he could think of nothing to say. His size overwhelmed him; he felt like an elephant. With a sudden rush all his self-possession deserted him. He almost wished that his sister might return so that they should be brought up to him seriatim, named just as Adam named the beasts, and dismissed — which Adam did not do — with a kiss. It was really, of course — and he knew it to his secret mortification — a meeting on both sides of children; they all felt the shyness and self-consciousness of children, he as much as they, and at any moment might take the sudden plunge into careless intimacy, as the way with children ever is.

  Meanwhile, however, he took rapid and careful note of them as they stood in that silent, fidgety group before him, with solemn, wide-open eyes fixed upon his face.

  The youngest, being in his view little more than a baby, needs no description beyond the fact that it stared quite unintelligently without winking an eye. Its eyes, in fact, looked as though they were not made to close at all. And this is its one and only appearance.

  Standing next to the baby, holding its hand, was a boy in a striped suit of knickerbockers, with a big brown curl like a breaking wave on the top of his forehead; he was between eight and nine years old, and his names — for, of course, he had two — were Richard Jonathan, shortened, as Paul learned later, into Jonah. He balanced himself with the utmost care in the centre of a particular square of carpet as though half an inch to either side would send him tumbling into a bottomless abyss. The fingers not claimed by the baby travelled slowly to and fro
along the sticky line of his lower lip.

  Close behind him, treating similarly another square of carpet, stood a rotund little girl, slightly younger than himself, named Arabella Lucy. There was a touch of audacity in her eyes, and an expression about the mouth that indicated the imminent approach of laughter. She had been distinctly washed and brushed-up for the occasion. Her face shone like a polished onion skin. She had the same sort of brown hair that Jonah considered fashionable, and her name for all common daily purposes was Toby.

  The eldest and most formidable of his tormentors, standing a little in advance of the rest, was Margaret Christina, shortened by her father (who, indeed, had been responsible for all the nicknames) into Nixie. And the name fitted her like a skin, for she was the true figure of a sprite, and looked as if she had just stepped out of the water and her hair had stolen the yellow of the sand. Her eyes ran about the room like sunshine from the surface of a stream, and her movements instantly made Paul think of water gliding over pebbles or ribbed sand with easy and gentle undulations. Flashlike he saw her in a clearing of his lonely woods, a creature of the elements. Her big blue eyes, too, were full of wonder and pensive intelligence, and she stood there in a motherly and protective manner as though she were quite equal to the occasion and would presently know how to act with both courage and wisdom.

  And Nixie, indeed, it was, after this prolonged and critical pause, who commenced operations. There was a sudden movement in the group, and the next minute Paul was aware that she had left it and was walking slowly towards him. He noticed her graceful, flowing way of moving, and saw a sunburnt arm and hand extended in his direction. The next second she kissed him. And that kiss acted like an electric shock. Something in her that was magical met its kind in his own soul and, flamelike, leaped towards it. A little tide of hot life poured into him, troubling the deeps with a momentary sense of delicious bewilderment.

  ‘How do you do, Uncle Paul,’ she said; ‘we are very glad you have come — at last.’

  The blood ran ridiculously to his head. He found his tongue, and pulled himself sharply together.

  ‘So am I, dear. Of course, it’s a long way to come — America.’ He stooped and bestowed the necessary kisses upon the others, who had followed their leader and now stood close beside him, staring like little owls in a row.

  ‘I know,’ she replied gravely. ‘It takes weeks, doesn’t it? And mother has told us such a lot about you. We’ve been waiting a very long time, I think,’ she added as though stating a grievance.

  ‘I suppose it is rather a long time to wait,’ he said sheepishly. He stroked his beard and waited.

  ‘All of us,’ she went on. She included the others in this last observation by bending her head at them, and into her uncle’s memory leaped the vision of a slender silver birch-tree that grew on the edge of the Big Beaver Pond near the Canadian border. She moved just as that silver birch moved when the breeze caught it.

  Her manner was very demure, but she looked so piercingly into the very middle of his eyes that Paul felt as though she had already discovered everything about him. They all stood quite close to him now, touching his knees; ready, there and then, to take him wholly into their confidence.

  An impulse that he only just managed to control stirred in him and a curious pang accompanied it. He remembered his ‘attitude,’ however, and stiffened slightly.

  ‘No, it only takes ten days roughly from where I’ve come,’ he said, leaving the mat and dropping into a deep arm-chair a little farther off. ‘The big steamers go very fast, you know, nowadays.’

  Their eyes remained simply glued to his face. They switched round a few points to follow his movement, but did not leave their squares of carpet..

  ‘Madmerzelle said’ — it was Toby, née Arabella Lucy, speaking for the first time—’ you knew lots of stories about deers and wolves and things, and would look like a Polar bear for us sometimes.’

  ‘Oh yes, and beavers and Indians in snowstorms, and the roarer boryalis,’ chimed in Jonah, giving a little hop of excitement that brought him still closer. ‘And the songs they sing in canoes when there are rapids,’ he added with intense excitement.

  ‘Madmizelle sings them sometimes, but they’re not a bit the real thing, because she hasn’t enough bass in her voice.’

  Paul bit his lip and looked at the carpet. Something in the atmosphere of the room seemed to have changed in the last few minutes. Jolly thrills ran through him such as he knew in the woods with his animals sometimes.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t sing much,’ he said, ‘but I can tell you a bear story sometimes — if you’re good.’ He added the condition as an afterthought.

  ‘We are good,’ Jonah said disappointedly, ‘almost always.’

  Again that curious pang shot through him. He did not wish to be unkind to them. He pulled back his coat-sleeve suddenly and showed them a scar on his arm.

  ‘That was made by a bear,’ he said, ‘years ago.’

  ‘Oh, look at the fur!’ cried Toby.

  ‘Don’t be silly! All proper men have hair on their arms,’ put in Jonah. ‘Does it still hurt, Uncle Paul?’ he asked, examining the place with intense interest.

  ‘Not now. We rolled down a hill together head over heels. Such a big brute, too, he was, and growled like a thunderstorm; it’s a wonder he didn’t squash me. I’ve got his claws upstairs. I think, really, he was more frightened than I was.’

  They clapped their hands. ‘Tell us, oh, do tell us!’

  But Nixie intervened in her stately fashion, leaning over a little and stroking the scar with fingers that were like the touch of leaves.

  ‘Uncle Paul’s tired after coming such a long way,’ she said gravely with sympathy. ‘He hasn’t even unpacked his luggage yet, have you, Uncle?’

  Paul admitted that this was the case. He made the least possible motion to push them off and clear a space round his chair.

  ‘Are you tired? Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said Jonah.

  ‘Then he ought to see the animals at once,’ decided Toby, ‘before they go to bed,’ — she seemed to have a vague idea that the whole world must go to bed earlier than usual if Uncle Paul was tired —

  ‘or they’ll be awfully disappointed.’ Her face expressed the disappointment of the animals as well as her own; her uncle’s fatigue had already taken a second place. ‘Oughtn’t he?’ she added, turning to the others.

  Paul remembered his intention to remain stiffly grown up.

  He made a great effort. Oh, but why did they tug and tear at his heart so, these little fatherless children? And why did he feel at once that he was in their own world, comfortably ‘at home’ in it? Did this world of children, then, link on so easily and naturally with the poet’s region of imagination and wonder in which he himself still dwelt for all his many years, bringing him close to his main passion — to know Reality?

  ‘Of course, I’ll come and say good-night to them before they turn in,’ he decided kindly, letting Nixie and Toby take his hands, while Jonah followed in the rear to show that he considered this a girl’s affair yet did not wholly disapprove.

  ‘Hadn’t we better tell your mother where we’re going?’ he asked as they started.

  ‘Oh, mother won’t mind,’ came the answer in chorus. ‘She hardly ever comes up to the nursery, and, besides, she doesn’t care for the animals, you see.’

  ‘They’re rather ‘noying for mother,’ Nixie added by way of explanation. She decapitated many of her long words in this way, and invariably omitted difficult consonants.

  It was a long journey, and the explanations about the animals, their characteristics, names, and habits, occupied every minute of the way. He gathered that they were chiefly cats and kittens, to what number he dared not calculate, and that puppies, at least one parrot, a squirrel, a multitude of white mice, and various larger beasts of a parental and aged description, were indiscriminately all mixed up together. Evidently it was a private menagerie that he was invited to say good-night to, and the
torrent of outlandish names that poured into his ears produced a feeling of confusion in his mind that made him wonder if he was not turning into some sort of animal himself, and thus becoming free of their language.

  It was the beginning of a very trying ordeal for him, this being half pulled, half shoved along the intricate passages of the old house; now down a couple of unexpected steps that made him stumble; now up another which made him trip; through narrow doorways, where Jonah had the audacity to push him from behind lest he should stick half-way; and, finally, at full speed, the girls tugging at his arms in front, down a long corridor which proved to be the home-stretch to the nursery.

  ‘I was afraid we’d lost the trail,’ he gasped. ‘It’s poorly blazed.’

  ‘Oh, but we haven’t got any tails to lose,’ laughed Toby, misunderstanding him. ‘And they wouldn’t blaze if we had.’

  ‘Look out, Nixie! Not so fast! Uncle Paul’s losing his wind as well as his trail,’ shouted Jonah from the rear. And at that moment they reached the door of the nursery and came to an abrupt halt, Paul puffing like a lumberman.

  It was impossible for him to remain sedate, but he did the next best thing — he remained silent.

  Then Jonah, pushing past him, turned the handle, and he was ushered, still panting, into so typical a nursery-schoolroom that the scenes of his forgotten boyhood rushed back to him with a vividness that seemed to destroy the passage of time at a single stroke. The past stood reconstructed. The actual, living mood of his own childhood rose out of the depths of blurred memories and caused a mist to rise before his eyes. An emotion he was utterly unable to define shook his heart.

  The room was filled with the slanting rays of the setting sun, and the air from the open windows smelt of garden trees, lawns, and flower-beds. Sea and heather, too, added their own sharper perfumes. It caught him away for a moment — oh, that strange power of old perfumes — to the earliest scenes of his own life, the boyhood in the gardens of Kent before America had claimed him. And then the details of the room itself became so insistent that he almost lost his head and turned back without more ado into a boy of fifteen.