Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘That’s it,’ she laughed, clapping her hands, ‘and you can find all the lost and broken things you want, if you look hard and — really want them.’

  ‘I want a lot,’ he mused, still staring into the little wells of blue opposite; ‘the kind that are lost because they’ve never been “got,”’ he added with a smile, using her own word.

  ‘For instance,’ Nixie continued, hanging the daisies now in a string from his beard, ‘all my broken things come here and live happily — if I broke them by accident; but if I broke them in a temper, they are still angry and frighten me, and sometimes even chase me out again. Only Jonah has more of these than I have, and they are all on the other side of the river, so we’re quite safe here. Now watch,’ she added in a lower voice, ‘Look hard under the trees and you’ll see what I mean perhaps. And wish hard, too.’

  Paul’s eyes followed the direction of her finger across the river, and almost at once dim shapes began to move to and fro among the larches, starting into life where the shadows were deepest. At first he could distinguish no very definite forms, but gradually the outlines grew clearer as the forms approached the edges of the wood, coming out into the sunshine.

  ‘The ghosts! The ghosts of broken things!’ cried Jonah, running up the bank for protection. ‘Look! They’re coming out. Some one’s thinking about them, you see!’

  Paul, as he gazed, thought he had never seen such an odd collection of shapes in his life. They stalked about awkwardly like huge insects with legs of unequal length, and with a lop-sided motion that made it impossible to tell in which direction they meant to go. They had brilliant little eyes that flashed this way and that, making a delicate network of rays all through the wood like the shafts of a hundred miniature search-lights. Their legs, too, were able to bend both forwards and backwards and even sideways, so that when they appeared to be coming towards him they really were going away; and the strange tumbling motion of their bodies, due to the unequal legs, gave them an appearance that was weirdly grotesque rather than terrifying.

  It was, indeed, a curious and delightful assortment of goblins. There were dolls without heads, and heads without dolls; milk jugs without handles, china teapots without spouts, and spouts without china teapots; clocks without hands, or with cracked and wounded faces; bottles without necks; broken cups, mugs, plates, and dishes, all with gaping slits and cracks in their anatomy, with half their faces missing, or without heads at all; every sort of vase imaginable with every sort of handle unimaginable; tin soldiers without swords or helmets, china puppies without tails, broken cages, knives without handles; and a collection of basins of all sizes that would have been sufficient to equip an entire fleet of cross-channel steamers: altogether a formidable and pathetic army of broken creatures.

  ‘What in the world are they trying to do?’ he asked, after watching their antics for some minutes with amazement.

  ‘Looking for the broken parts,’ explained Jonah, who was half amused, half alarmed. ‘They get out of shape like that because they pick up the first pieces they find.’

  ‘And you broke all these things?’

  The boy nodded his head proudly. ‘I reckernise most of them,’ he said, ‘but they’re nearly all accidents. I said “sorry” for each one.’

  ‘That, you see,’ Nixie interrupted, ‘makes all the difference. If you break a thing on purpose in a temper, you murder it; but the accidents come down here and feel nothing. They hardly know who broke them. In the end they all find their pieces. It’s the heaven of broken things, we call it. But now let’s send them away.’

  ‘How?’ asked Paul.

  ‘By forgetting them,’ cried Jonah.

  They turned their faces away and began to think of other things, and at once the figures began to fade and grow dim. The lights went out one by one. The grotesque shapes melted into the trees, and a minute later there was nothing to be seen but the slender larch stems and the play of sunlight and shadow beneath their branches.

  ‘You see how it works, at any rate,’ Nixie said. ‘Anything you’ve lost or broken will come back if you think hard enough — nice things as well as nasty things — but they must be real, real things, and you must want them in a real, real way.’

  It was, indeed, he saw, the region where thoughts come true.

  ‘Then do broken people come here too?’ Paul asked gravely after a considerable pause, during which his thoughts went profoundly wandering.

  ‘Yes; only we don’t happen to know any. But all our dead animals are here, all the kittens that had to be drowned, and the puppies that died, and the collie the Burdons’ motor killed, and Birthday, our old horse that had to be shot. They’re all here, and all happy.’

  ‘Let’s go and see them then,’ he cried, delighted with this idea of a heaven of broken animals.

  In a moment they were on their feet and away over the springy turf, singing and laughing in the sunshine, picking flowers, jumping the little brooks that ran like crystal ribbons among the grass, Nixie and Jonah dancing by his side as though they had springs in their feet and wings on their shoulders. More and more the country spread before them like a great garden run wild, and Paul thought he had never seen such fields of flowers or smelt such perfumes in the wind.

  ‘What’s the matter now?’ he exclaimed, as Jonah stopped and began to stare hard at an acre of lilies of the valley by the way.

  ‘He’s calling some things of his own,’ Nixie answered. ‘Stare and think — and they’ll all come. But we needn’t bother about him. Come along!’ And he only had time to see the lilies open in an avenue to make way for a variety of furry, four-legged creatures, when the child pulled him by the hand and they were off again at full speed across the fields.

  A sound of neighing made him turn round, and before he could move aside, a large grey horse with a flowing tail and a face full of gentle beneficence came trotting over the turf and stopped just behind him, nuzzling softly into his shoulder.

  ‘Nice, silly-faced old thing,’ said Nixie, running up to speak to it, while a brown collie trotted quietly at her heels. A little further off, peeping up through a tangled growth of pinks and meadow-sweet, he saw the faces of innumerable kittens, watching him with large and inquisitive eyes, their ears just topping the flowers like leaves of fur. Such a family of animals Paul thought he had never even dreamed of.

  ‘This is the heaven of the lost animals,’ Nixie cried from her seat on the back of the grey horse, having climbed up by means of a big stone. On her shoulder perched a small brown owl, blinking in the light like the instantaneous shutter of a photographic camera. It had fluffy feathers down to its ankles like trousers, and was very tame, ‘And they are always happy here and have plenty to eat and drink. They play with us far better here than outside, and are never frightened. Of course, too, they get no older.’

  Paul climbed up behind her on the horse’s back.

  ‘Now we’re off!’ he cried; and with Jonah and a dozen animals at their heels, they raced off across the open country, holding on as best they could to mane and tail, laughing, shouting, singing, while the wind whistled in their ears and the hot sun poured down upon their bare heads.

  Then, suddenly, the horse stopped with a jerk that sent them sprawling forward upon his neck. He turned his head round to look at them with a comical expression in his big, brown eyes. Paul slid off behind, and Nixie saved herself by springing sideways into a bed of forget-me-nots. The owl fluttered away, blinking its eyes more rapidly than ever in a kind of surprised fury, shaking out its fluffy trousers, and Jonah arrived panting with his dogs and rabbits and puppies.

  ‘Come,’ exclaimed Nixie breathlessly, ‘he’s had enough by now. No animal wants people too long. Let’s get something to eat.’

  ‘And I’ll cook it,’ cried the boy, busying himself with sticks and twigs upon the ground. ‘We’ll have stodgy-pudding and cake and jam and oyster-patties, and then more stodgy-pudding again to finish up with.’

  Paul glanced round him and saw tha
t all the animals had disappeared — gone like thoughts forgotten. In their place he soon saw a column of blue smoke rising up among the fir trees close behind him, and the children flitting to and fro through it looking like miniature gypsies. The odour of the burning wood was incense in his nostrils.

  ‘But can’t I see something too — something of my own?’ he asked in an aggrieved tone.

  Nixie and Jonah looked up at him with surprise.

  ‘Of course you can,’ they exclaimed together. ‘Just stare into space as the cats do, and think, and wish, and wait. Anything you want will come — with practice. People you’ve lost, or people you’ve wanted to find, or anything that’s never come true anywhere else.’

  They went on busily with their cooking again, and Paul, lying on his back in the grass some distance away, sent his thoughts roaming, searching, deeply calling, far into the region of unsatisfied dreams and desires within his heart....

  For what seemed hours and hours they wandered together through the byways of this vast, enchanted garden, finding everything they wished to find, forgetting everything they wished to forget, amusing themselves to their heart’s content; till, at last, they stood together on a big boulder in the river where the spray rose about them in a cloud and painted a rainbow above their heads.

  ‘Get ready! Quick!’ cried Jonah. ‘The Crack’s coming!’

  ‘It’s coming!’ repeated Nixie, seizing Paul’s hand and urging him to hold very tight.

  He had no time to reply. There was a rushing sound of air tearing through a narrow opening. The sky grew dark, with a roaring in his ears and a sense of great things flying past him. Again came the sensation of dropping giddily through space, and the next minute he found himself standing with the two children upon the lawn, darkness about them, and the storm howling and crashing over their heads through the branches of the twin cedars.

  ‘There’s the clock still striking,’ Nixie cried. ‘It’s only been a few seconds altogether.’

  He heard the church clock strike the last six strokes of midnight.

  For some minutes he realised little more than that he felt rather stiff and uncomfortable in his bedroom chair, and that he was chilly about the legs. Outside the wind still roared and whistled, making the windows rattle, while gusts of rain fell volleying against the panes as though trying to get in. A roll of distant thunder came faintly to his ear. He stretched himself and began to undress by the light of a single candle.

  On the table lay a sheet of paper headed ‘How I climbed the Scaffolding of the Night,’ and he read down the page and then took his pen and wrote the heading of something else on another sheet: ‘Adventure in the Land between Yesterday and To-morrow.’ With a mighty yawn he then blew out his candle and tumbled into bed.

  And with him, for all the howling of the elements, came a strange sense of peace and happiness. Out of the depths rose gradually before his inner eye in a series of delightful pictures the scenes he had just left, and he understood that the pathway to that country of dreams fulfilled and emotions that never die, lay buried far within his own being.

  ‘Between Yesterday and To-morrow’ was to be the children’s counterpart of that timeless, deathless region where the spirit may always go when hunted by the world, fretted by the passion of unsatisfied yearnings, plagued by the remorseless tribes of sorrow and disaster. There none could follow him, just as none — none but himself — could bring about its destruction. For he had found the mystical haven where all lost or broken things eternally reconstruct themselves.

  The ‘Crack,’ of course, may be found by all who have the genuine yearning to recreate their world more sweetly, provided they possess at the start enough imagination to repay the trouble of training — also that Wanderlust of the spirit which seeks ever for a resting-place in the great beyond that reaches up to God.

  Paul as yet had but discovered the entrance, led by little children who dreamed not how wondrous was the journey; but the rest would follow. For it is a region mapped gradually out of a thousand impulses, out of ten thousand dreams, out of the eternal desires of the soul. It is not discovered in a day, nor do the ways of entrance always remain the same. A thousand joys contribute to its fashioning, a thousand frustrated hopes describe its boundaries, and ten thousand griefs bring slowly, piece by piece, the material for its construction, while every new experience of the soul, successful or disastrous, adds something to its uncharted geography. Slowly it gathers into existence, becoming with every sojourn more real and more satisfying, till at length from the pain of all possible disillusionment the way opens to the heart of relief, to the peaceful place of hopes renewed, of purposes made fruitful and complete.

  And from this deathless region, too, flow all the forces of the soul that make for hope, enthusiasm, courage, and delight. The children might call it ‘Between Yesterday and To-morrow,’ and find their little broken dreams brought back to life; but Paul understood that its rewards might vary immensely according to the courage and the need of the soul that sought it.

  CHAPTER XVI

  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you. YEATS.

  THUS, led delicately by the animals and the children, and guided to a certain extent, too, by the curious poesy of his own soul, Paul Rivers came gradually into his own. Once made free of their world, he would learn next that the process automatically made him free of his own. This simple expedient of having found an audience did wonders for him, for it not only loosened his tongue and his pen, but set all the deeper parts of him running into speech, and the natural love and poetry of the man began to produce a delightful, if somewhat extraordinary, harvest.

  He understood — none better — that fantasy, unless rooted in reality, leads away from action and tends to weakness and insipidity; but that, grounded in the common facts of life, and content with idealising the actual, it might become an important factor for good, lending wings to the feet and lifting the soul over difficult places. His education advanced by leaps and bounds.

  And in some respects he showed himself possessed of a wisdom that could only have belonged to him because at heart he was still a child, and the ordinary ‘knowledge of the world’ had not come to spoil him in his life of solitude among the trees.

  For instance, that Between Yesterday and Tomorrow’ bore some curious relation to reverie and dreams, he dimly discerned, yet, with this simple and profound wisdom of his, he refused to pry too closely into the nature of such relationship. He did not seek to reduce the delightful experience to the little hard pellet of an exact fact. For that, he felt, would be to lose it. Exact knowledge, he knew, was often merely a great treachery, and ‘fact’ a dangerous weapon that deceived, and might even destroy, its owner. If he analysed too carefully, he might analyse the whole thing out of existence altogether, and such a contingency was not to be thought of for a single moment.

  Moreover, the attitude of the children confirmed his own. They never referred to their adventures until he had given them form and substance in his reports as recording secretary of the society. No word passed their lips until they had heard them read out, and then they talked of nothing else. During the day they maintained a sublime ignorance of his aventures of the night,’ as though nothing of the kind had ever happened; and this tended still further to relegate it all to a region untouched by time, beyond the reach of chance, beyond the destruction of mere talk, eternal and real in the great sense.

  Meanwhile, as this hidden country he had discovered yielded to exploration, becoming more and more mapped out, and its springs of water tapped, Paul was conscious that the power from these vital sources began to modify his character, and to enlarge his outlook upon life. Imagination, released and singing, provides the greatest of all magics — belief in one’s self. The rivers of feeling carve their own channels, which are ever the shortest way to the ocean of fulfilment. The effects spread gradually to the remotest corner of his being.

  One rainy day he found himself alone in the schoolroom with Nixie, for it was S
aturday afternoon, and Mlle. Fleury had carried off Jonah and Toby in their best clothes, and to their acute dismay, to have tea with the children — they were dull children — at the vicarage.

  Dressed in blue serge, with a broad white collar over her shoulders and a band of gold about her waist that matched the colour of her hair, she darted about the room with her usual effect of brightness, so that he found himself continually thinking the sun had burst through the clouds. She was busily arranging cats and kittens in various positions in which they showed no inclination to remain, till the performance had somewhat the air of the old-fashioned game of ‘general post.’ Paul sat lazily at the ink-stained table, dividing his attentions between watching the child’s fascinating movements and pecking idly into the soft wood with his little gold penknife.

  ‘Aren’t you very glad we found you out so soon, Uncle Paul?’ she asked suddenly, looking up at him over a back of glossy and wriggling yellow fur. ‘Aren’t you very glad indeed, I mean?’

  He went on picking at the soft ditches between the ridges of dirty brown without answering for a moment.

  ‘Yes,’ he said presently, in the slow manner of a man who weighs his words; ‘very glad indeed. It’s increased my interest in life. It’s made me happier, and healthier, and wealthier, and all the rest of it — and wiser too.’ He bent, frowning, over the ditches.

  ‘It was all your own fault, you know, that we didn’t get you sooner. Oh, years ago — ever so many.’

  ‘But I was in the backwoods, Nixie.’

  ‘That made no difference,’ she answered promptly. ‘If you had written to us, as mother often asked, we should have noticed at once what you were.’

  ‘How could that possibly be?’ he objected, still without looking up.

  ‘Of course!’ was the overwhelming reply.

  ‘Oh, come now,’ he said, staring at her solemnly over the table; ‘I admit your penetration is pretty keen, but I doubt that.’