Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

He heard the clock in the stables — or was it the church — strike the quarter before midnight.

  As he sat in the big chair, Smoke left the table and curled up again on the mat at his feet.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Vision or imagination is a representation of what actually exists, really and unchangeably. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all. — W. B.

  It was Smoke who first drew his attention to something near the door by ‘padding’ slowly across the carpet and staring up at the handle. Paul’s eyes, following him, perceived next that the brass knob! was silently turning. Then the door opened quickly I and on the threshold stood — Nixie. The open door made such a draught that the twenty winds tearing about inside the room almost lifted the mat at his feet. Behind her he saw the shadowy outline of a second figure, which he recognised as Jonah.

  ‘Shut the door — quick!’ he said, but they had j done so and were already beside him almost before the words were out of his mouth. In spite of the darkness a very faint radiance came with them so that he could distinguish their faces plainly; and his amazement on seeing them at all at this late hour was instantly doubled when he perceived further that t they were fully dressed for going out. At the same time, however, so deep had he been in his reverie, and so strongly did the excitement of it yet linger in his blood, that he hardly realised how wicked they were to be parading the house at such a time of the night, and that his obvious duty was to bundle them back to bed. In a strange, queer way they almost seemed part of his dream, part of his dramatised mood, part of the region of wonder into which his thoughts had been leading him. Moreover, he felt in some dim fashion that they had come with a purpose of great importance.

  ‘It’s awfully late, you know,’ he exclaimed under his breath, peering into their faces through the darkness.

  ‘But not too late, if we start at once,’ Jonah whispered. For a moment Paul had almost thought that they would melt away and disappear as soon as he spoke to them, or that they would not answer at all. But now this settled it; these were no figures in a dream. He felt their hands upon his arms and neck; the very perfume of Nixie’s hair and breath was about him. She was dressed, he noticed, in her red cloak with the hood over her head, and her eyes were popping with excitement. The expression on her face was earnest, almost grave. He saw the faint gleam of the gold buckle where the shiny black belt enclosed her little waist.

  ‘If we start at once, I said,’ repeated Jonah in a nervous whisper, pulling at his hand.

  Paul started to his feet and began fumbling with his black tie, feeling vaguely that either he ought to tie it properly or take it off altogether, and that it was a sort of indecent tinsel to wear at such a time. But he only succeeded in pricking his finger with the pin sticking out of the collar. He felt more than a little bewildered, if the truth were told.

  ‘I’ll do that for you,’ Nixie said under her breath; and in a twinkling her deft fingers had whipped the strip of satin from his neck.

  ‘You don’t want a tie where we’re going,” she laughed softly.

  ‘Or a hat either,’ added Jonah. ‘But I wish you’d hurry, please.’

  ‘I’d better put on another coat or a dressing-gown, or something,’ he stammered.

  ‘Coat’s best,’ Jonah told him, and in a moment he had changed into a tweed Norfolk jacket that lay upon the chair.

  They pulled him towards the door, Nixie holding one hand, Jonah the other, and Smoke following so closely at his heels that he almost seemed to be prodding him gently forward with his velvet padded boots. Paul understood that tremendous forces, elemental in character like the wind and rain and lightning, somehow added their immense suasion to the little hands that pulled his own. He made no resistance, but just allowed himself to go; and he went with a wild and boyish delight tearing through his mind.

  ‘Are we going out then?’ he asked, ‘out of doors?’

  ‘What’s the exact time, the very exact time?’ Nixie asked hurriedly, ignoring his question; and though Paul had looked a few minutes before they came in, he had quite forgotten by now. She helped herself to his watch, burrowing under his coat to find it, and peering closely to read the position of the hands.

  ‘Five minutes to twelve!’ she exclaimed, addressing Jonah in excited whispers. ‘Oh, I say! We must be off at once, or we shall miss the crack altogether. Come on, Uncle, or your life won’t be safe a minute.’

  ‘Then what will it be a month, I should like to know?’ he laughed as he was swept along through the darkness, not knowing what to say or think.

  ‘The crack! The crack! Quick, or we shall miss it!’ cried the children in the same sentence, urging him heavily forward.

  ‘What crack? Where are we going to? What does it all mean?’ he asked breathlessly, trying to avoid treading on their toes and the toes of Smoke who flew beside them with tail held swiftly aloft as though to guide them.

  They brought him up with a sudden bump just outside the door, and Nixie turned up a serious face to explain, while Jonah waited impatiently in front of them.

  ‘Quick!’ she whispered, ‘listen and I’ll tell you. We’re going to find the crack between Yesterday and To-morrow, and then — slip through it.’

  His heart leaped with excitement as he heard.

  ‘Go on,’ he cried. ‘Tell me more!’

  ‘You see, Yesterday really begins just after Midnight when To-day ends’; she said, ‘and Tomorrow begins there too.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘After Midnight, To-morrow jumps away again a whole day, and is as far off as ever. That’s the nearest you can get to To-morrow.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And Yesterday, which has been a whole day away, suddenly jumps up close behind again. So that Yesterday and To-morrow,’ she went on, eager with excitement, ‘meet at Midnight for a single second before flying off to their new places. Daddy told us that long ago.’

  ‘Exactly. They must.’

  : But now the world is old and worn. There’s a tiny little crack between Yesterday and To-morrow. They don’t join as they once did, and, if we’re very quick, we can find the crack and slip through—’

  ‘Bless my Timber Limits!’ he exclaimed; ‘what a glorious notion!’

  ‘And, once inside there, there’s no time, of course,’ she went on, more and more hurriedly. ‘Anything may happen, and everything come true.’

  ‘The very region I was thinking about just now!’ thought Paul. ‘The very place! I’ve found it!’

  ‘Do hurry up, oh do!’ put in Jonah with a loud whisper that echoed down the corridor, for his patience was at length exhausted by all this explanation. ‘You are so slow getting started.’

  ‘Ready!’ cried Paul and Nixie in the same breath.

  They were off! Down the dark and silent stairs on tiptoe, through the empty halls, past the hat-racks and the stuffed deer heads that grinned down upon them from the walls, along the stone passage to the kitchen region, where the row of red fire-buckets gleamed upon the shelves, and so, past the ghostly pantry, to the back door. This they found open, for Jonah had already run ahead and unlocked it. Another minute and they had crossed the yard by the stables, where the pump stood watching them like a figure with an outstretched arm, and soon were well out on to the lawn at the back of the house. The rain had ceased, but the wind caught them here with such tremendous blows and shouting that they could hardly hear themselves speak, and had to keep closely together in a bunch to make their way at all. It was pitch dark and the stars were hidden. Paul stumbled and floundered, treading incessantly on the toes of the more nimble children. Smoke ran like a black shadow, now in front, now behind.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ Nixie cried encouragingly, as he made a false step and landed with a crash in the middle of some low laurel bushes. ‘But do be more careful, Uncle, please,’ she added, helping him out again.

  ‘There’s the
clock striking!’ Jonah called, a little in front of them. ‘We’re only just in time!’

  Paul recovered himself and pulled up beside them under the shadows of the big twin cedars that stood like immense sentries at the end of the lawn. He came rolling in, swaying like a ship in a heavy sea. And, as he did so, the sound of a church bell striking the hour came to their ears through the terrific uproar of the elements, blown this way and that by the wind.

  . It was midnight striking.

  At the same instant he heard a peculiar sharp sound like whistling — the noise wind makes tearing through a narrow opening.

  ‘The crack, the crack!’ cried his guides together. ‘That’s the air rushing. It’s coming. Look out!’ They seized him by the hands.

  ‘But I shall never get through,’ shouted Paul, thinking of his size for the first time.

  ‘Yes you will,’ Nixie screamed back at him above the roar. ‘Between the sixth and seventh strokes, remember.’

  The fifth stroke had already sounded. The wind caught it and went shrieking into the sky.

  Six! boomed the distant bell through the night. They held his hands in a vice.

  There was a sound like an express train tearing through the air. A quick flash of brilliance followed, and a long slit seemed to open suddenly in the sky before them, and then flash past like lightning. Nixie tugged at one hand, and Jonah tugged at the other. Smoke scampered madly past his feet.

  A wild rush of wind swept him along, whistling in his ears; there was a breathless and giddy sensation of dropping through empty space that seemed as though it could never end — and then Paul suddenly found himself sitting on a grassy bank beside a river, Nixie and Jonah on either side of him, and Smoke washing his face in front of them as though nothing in the whole world had ever happened to disturb his equanimity. And a bright, soft light, like the light of the sun, shone warmly over everything.

  ‘Only just managed it,’ Nixie observed to Jonah. ‘He is rather wide, isn’t he?’

  ‘Everybody’s thin somewhere,’ was the reply.

  ‘And the crack is very stretchy’ — she added,—’ luckily.’

  Paul drew a long breath and stretched himself.

  ‘Well,’ he said, still a little breathless and dizzy, ‘such things were never done in my day.’

  ‘But this isn’t your day any more,’ explained Nixie, her blue eyes popping with laughter and mischief, ‘it’s your night. And, anyhow, as I told you, there’s no time here at all. There’s no hurry now.’

  CHAPTER XV

  The imagination is not a state; it is the human existence itself. — W B.

  PAUL, looking round, felt utterly at peace with himself and the world; at rest, he felt. That was his first sensation in the mass. He recovered in a moment from his breathless entrance, and a subtle pleasure began to steal through his veins. It seemed as if every yearning he had ever known was being ministered to by competent unseen Presences; and, obviously, the children and the cats — Mrs. Tompkyns had somehow managed to join Smoke — felt likewise, for their countenances beamed and blinked supreme contentment.

  ‘Ah!’ observed Jonah, sitting contentedly on the grass beside him. ‘This is the place.’ He heaved a happy little sigh, as though the statement were incontrovertible.

  ‘It is,’ echoed Paul. And Nixie’s eyes shone like blue flowers in a field of spring.

  ‘The crack’s smaller than it used to be though,’ he heard her murmuring to herself. ‘Every year it’s harder to get through. I suppose something’s happening to the world — or to people; some change going on—’

  ‘Or we’re getting older,’ Jonah put in with profounder wisdom than he knew.

  Paul congratulated himself upon his successful entrance. He felt something of a dog! The bank on which he lay sloped down towards a river fledged with reeds and flowers; its waters, blue as the sky, flowed rippling by, and a soft wind, warm and scented, sighed over it from the heart of the summer. On the opposite shore, not fifty yards across, a grove of larches swayed their slender branches lazily in the sun, and a little farther down the banks he saw a line of willows drooping down to moisten their tongue-like leaves. The air hummed pleasantly with insects; birds flashed to and fro, singing as they flew; and, in the distance, across miles of blue meadowlands, hills rose in shadowy outline to the sky. He feasted on the beauty of it all, absorbing it through every sense.

  ‘But where are we?’ he asked at length, ‘because a moment ago we were in a storm somewhere?’ He turned to Nixie who still lay talking to herself contentedly at his side. ‘And what really happens here?’ he added with a blush. ‘I feel so extraordinarily happy.’

  They lay half-buried among the sweet-scented grasses. Jonah burrowed along the shore at some game of his own close by, and the cats made a busy pretence of hunting wild game in a dozen places at once, and then suddenly basking in the sun and washing each other’s necks and backs as though wild-game hunting were a bore.

  ‘Nothing ‘xactly — happens, she answered, and ‘her voice sounded curiously like wind in rushes—’ but everything — is.’

  It seemed to him as though he listened to some spirit of the ages, very wise with the wisdom of eternal youth, that spoke to him through the pretty little mouth of this rosy-faced child.

  ‘It’s like that river,’ she went on, pointing to the blue streak winding far away in a ribbon through the landscape, ‘which flows on for ever in a circle, and never comes to an end. Everything here goes on always, and then always begins again.’

  For the river, as Paul afterwards found, out, ran on for miles and miles, in the curves of an immense circle, of which the sea itself was apparently nothing but a widening of certain portions.

  ‘So here,’ continued the child, making a pattern with daisies on his sleeve as she talked, ‘you can go over anything you like again and again, and it need never come to an end at all. Only,’ she added, looking up gravely into his face, ‘you must really, really want it to start with.’

  ‘Without getting tired?’ he asked, wonderingly. ‘Of course; because you begin over and over again with it.’

  ‘Delightful!’ he exclaimed, ‘that means a place of eternal youth, where emotions continually renew themselves.’

  ‘It’s the place where you find lost things,’ she explained, with a little puzzled laugh at his foolish long words, ‘and where things that came to no proper sort of end — things that didn’t come true, I mean, in the world, all happen and enjoy themselves—’

  He sat up with a jerk, forgetting the carefully arranged daisies on his coat, and scattering them all over the grass.

  ‘But this is too splendid!’ he cried. ‘This is what I’ve always been looking for. It’s what I was thinking about just now when I tried to write a poem and couldn’t.’

  ‘We found it long ago,’ said the child, pointing to Jonah and Mrs. Tompkyns, Smoke having mysteriously disappeared for the moment. ‘We live here really most of the time. Daddy brought us here first.’

  ‘Things life promised, but never gave, here come to full fruition,’ Paul murmured to himself. ‘You mean,’ he added aloud, ‘this is where ideals that have gone astray among the years may be found again, and actually realised? A kingdom of heaven within the heart?’ He was very excited, and forgot for the moment he was speaking to a child.

  ‘I don’t know about all that,’ she answered, with a puzzled look. ‘But it is life. W e live-happily-ever-after here. That’s what I mean.’

  ‘It all comes true here?’

  ‘All, all, all. All broken things and all lost things come here and are happy again,’ she went on eagerly; ‘and if you look hard enough you can find ‘xactly what you want and ‘xactly what you lost. And once you’ve found it, nothing can break it or lose it again.’

  Paul stared, understanding that the voice speaking through her was greater than she knew.

  ‘And some things are lost, we think,’ she added, ‘simply because they were wanted — wanted very much indeed, but neve
r got.’

  ‘Yet these are certainly the words of a child,’ he reflected, wonder and delight equally mingled, ‘and of a child tumbling about among great spiritual things in a simple, intuitive fashion without knowing it.’

  ‘All the things that ought to happen, but never do happen,’ she went on, picking up the scattered daisies and making the pattern anew on a different part of his coat. ‘They all are found here.’

  ‘Wishes, dreams, ideals?’ he asked, more to see what answer she would make than because he didn’t understand.

  ‘I suppose that’s the same thing,’ she replied. ‘But, now please, Uncle Paul, keep still a minute or I can’t possibly finish this crown the daisies want me to make for them.’

  Paul stared into her eyes and saw through them to the blue of the sky and the blue of the winding river beyond; through to the hills on the horizon, a deeper blue still; and thence into the softer blue shadows that lay over the timeless land buried in the distances of his own heart, where things might indeed come true beyond all reach of misadventure or decay. For this, of course, was the real land of wonder and imagination, where everything might happen and nothing need grow old. The vision of the poet saw... far — far...

  All this he realised through the blue eyes of the child at his side, who was playing with daisies and talking about the make-believe of children. His being swam out into the sunshine of great distances, of endless possibilities, all of which he might be able afterwards to interpret to others who did not see so far, or so clearly, as himself. He began to realise that his spirit, like the endless river at his feet, was without end or beginning. Thrills of new life poured into him from all sides.

  ‘And when we go back,’ he heard the musical little voice saying beside him, ‘that church will be striking exactly where we left it — the sixth stroke, I mean.’

  ‘Of course; I see!’ cried Paul, beginning to realise the full value of his discovery, ‘for there’s no time here, is there? Nothing grows old.’