Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘If only I had children of my own...!’ it called; and the echo whispered afterwards ‘of my very own, made out of my very thoughts....!’

  He turned to Nixie who had followed, and now leaned beside him on the window-sill.

  ‘So the language of wind and trees and water you translate afterwards into stories, do you?’ he asked, taking up the conversation where they had left it. It was hardly a question; he was musing aloud as he gazed out into the mists that gathered with the dusk. ‘It’s all silent enough now, at any rate there’s not a breath of air moving. The trees are dreaming — dreaming perhaps of the Dance of the Winds, or of the love-making of the snow when their leaves are gone and the flakes settle softly on the bare twigs; or perhaps dreaming of the humming of the sap that brings their new clothes with such ‘a rush of glory and wonder in the spring—’

  Again the child looked up into his face with shining eyes. The magic of her little treasured beliefs had touched the depths of him, and she felt that they were in the same world together, without pretence and without the barriers of age. She was radiantly happy, and rather wonderful into the bargain, a fairy if ever there was one.

  ‘They’re just thinking,’ she said softly.

  ‘So trees think too?’

  She nodded her head, leaning her chin on her hands as she gazed with him into the misty air.

  ‘I wonder what their thoughts are like,’ he said musingly, so that she could take it for a question or not as she chose.

  ‘Like ours — in a way,’ she answered, as though speaking of something she knew beyond all question, ‘only not so small, not so sharp. Our thoughts prick, I think, but theirs stroke, all running quite smoothly into each other. Very big and wonderful-indeed thoughts — big as wind, I mean, and wonderful as sky or distance. And the streams — the streams have long, winding thoughts that run down their whole length under water—’

  ‘And the trees, you were saying,’ he said, seeing that her thought was wandering.

  ‘Yes, the trees,’ she repeated, ‘oh! yes, the trees are different a little, I think. A wood, you see, may have one big huge thought all at once—’

  ‘All at once!’

  ‘I mean all at the same time, every tree thinking the same thought for miles. Because, if you lie in a wood, and don’t think yourself, but just wait and wait and wait, you gradgilly get its great thought and know what it’s thinking about exactly. You feel it all over instead of — of—’

  ‘Instead of getting a single little sharp picture in your mind,’ Paul helped her, grasping the wonder of her mystical idea.

  ‘I think that’s what I mean,’ she went on. ‘And j it’s exactly the same with everything else — the sea, and the fields, and the sky — oh! and everything in I the whole world.’ She made a sweeping gesture with her arm to indicate the universe.

  ‘Oh, Nixie child!’ he cried, with a sudden enthusiasm pouring over him from the strange region where she had unknowingly led him, ‘if only I could take you out to the big woods I know across the sea, where the trees stretch for hundreds of miles, and the moss is everywhere a foot thick, and the whole forest is such a conspiracy of wonder and beauty that it catches your heart away and makes you breathless with delight! Oh, my child, if only you could hear the thoughts and stories of woods like that — woods untouched since the beginning of the world — !’

  ‘Take me! Take me! Uncle Paul, oh! take me!’ she cried as though it were possible to start next day. ‘These woods are such little woods, and I know all their stories.’ She danced round him with a wild and eager delight.

  ‘Such stories, yes, such stories,’ Paul continued, his face shining almost as much as hers as he thought of his mighty and beloved forests.

  ‘Please tell me, take me, tell me!’ she cried. ‘All, all, all! Quick!’

  ‘I can’t. I never understood them properly; only the old Indians know them now,’ he said sadly, leaning out of the window again with her. ‘They are tales that few people in this part of the world could understand; in a language old as the wind, too, and nearly forgotten. You see, the trees are different there. They stand in thousands — pine, hemlock, spruce, and cedar — mighty, very tall, very straight, very dark, pouring day and night their great balsam perfumes into the air so that their stories and their thoughts are sweet as incense and very mysterious.’ Nixie took the lapels of his coat in her hands and stared up into his face as though her eyes would pop out. She looked through his eyes. She saw these very woods he was speaking of standing in dim shadows behind him.

  ‘No one ever comes to disturb their lives, and few of them have ever heard the ringing of the axe. Only giant moose and caribou steal silently beneath their shade, and Indians, dark and soft-footed as things of their own world, make camp-fires among their roots. They know nothing of men and cities and trains, and the wind that sings through their branches is a wind that has never tasted chimney-pots, and hot crowds, and pretty, fancy gardens. It is a wind that flies five hundred miles without taking breath, with nothing to stop its flight but feathery tree-tops, brushing the heavens, and clean mountain ridges thrusting great shoulders to the stars. Their thoughts and stories are difficult to understand, but you might understand them, I think, for the life of the elements is strong in your veins, you fairy daughter of wind and water. And some day, when you are stronger in body — not older though, mind, not older — I shall take you out there so that you may be able to learn their wonder and interpret it to all the world.’

  The words tore through him in such curious, impersonal fashion, that he hardly realised he was giving utterance to a longing that had once been his own, and that he was now seeking to realise vicariously in the person of this little poet-girl beside him. He stroked her hair as she nestled up to him, breathing hard, her eyes glistening like stars, speechless with the torrent of wonder with which her big uncle had enveloped her.

  ‘Some day,’ she murmured presently, ‘some day, remember. You promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘And — and will you write that all out for me, please?’

  ‘All what?’

  ‘About the too-big woods and the too-old language and the winds that fly without stopping, and the stories—’

  ‘Oh, oh!’ he laughed; ‘that’s another matter!’

  ‘Yes, oh you must, Uncle! Make a story of it — an adventure. Write it out as a verywonerfulindeedaventure, and put you and me in it!’ She forgot the touch of sadness and clapped her hands with delight. ‘And then read it out at a Meeting, don’t you see?’

  And in the end Paul promised that too, making I a great fuss about it, but in his heart secretly pleased! and happy.

  ‘I’ll try,’ he said, with portentous gravity.

  The child stared up at him with the sure knowledge in her eyes that between them they held the key to all that was really worth knowing.

  He stooped to kiss her hair, but before he could do so, with a laugh and a dancing step he scarcely heard, she was gone from his side and half-way down the passage, so that he kissed the empty air.

  ‘Bless her mighty little heart!’ he exclaimed, straightening himself up again. ‘Was there ever such a teacher in the world before?’

  He became aware that the world held powers, gentle yet immense, that were urging him in directions hitherto undreamed of. With such a fairy guide, he might find — he was already finding — not merely safety-valves of expression, but an outlet into the bargain for his creative imagination.

  ‘And a little child shall lead them,’ he murmured in his beard, as he went slowly down the passage to his room to dress for dinner. Again he felt like singing.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing standing in the way. — W. B.

  THUS, gradually, the grey house under the hills changed into a palace; the garden stretched to include the stars; and Paul, the retired Wood Cruiser, walked in a world all new and brilliant. For to find the means of
self-expression is to build the foundations of spiritual health, and an ideal companionship, unvexed by limitations of sense, holds potentialities that can change earth into heaven. His accumulated stores of imagination found wings, and he wrote a series of Aventures that delighted his audience while they healed his own soul.

  ‘I wish they’d go on for ever and ever,’ observed Toby solemnly to her brother. ‘Perhaps they do really, only—’

  ‘Of course they do,’ Jonah said decisively, ‘but Uncle Paul only tells bits of them to us — bits that you can understand.’

  Toby was too much in earnest to notice the masculine scorn.

  ‘He does know a lot, doesn’t he?’ she said. ‘Do you think he sees up into heaven? They’re not a bit like made-up aventures.’ She paused, deeply puzzled; very grave indeed.

  ‘He’s a man, of course,’ replied Jonah. ‘Men know big things like that.’

  ‘The Aventures are true,’ Nixie put in gently. ‘That’s why they’re so big, and go on for ever and ever.

  ‘It’s jolly when he puts us in them too, isn’t it?’ said Jonah, forgetting the masculine pose in his interest. ‘He puts me in most,’ the boy added proudly.

  ‘But I do the funniest things,’ declared Toby, slightly aggrieved. ‘It was me that rode on the moose over the tree-tops to the North Pole, and understood all it said—’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ cried her brother, making a huge blot across his copy-book. ‘He had to get me to turn on the roarer boryalis.’

  ‘Nixie’s always leader, anyhow,’ replied the child, losing herself for a moment in the delight of that tremendous blot. She often borrowed Nixie in this way to obliterate Jonah when her own strength was insufficient.

  ‘Of course she is,’ was the manly verdict. ‘She knows all those things almost as well as Uncle Paul. Don’t you, Nixie?’

  But Nixie was too busy cleaning up his blot with bits of torn blotting-paper to reply, and the arrival of Mlle. Fleury put an end to the discussion for the moment.

  And Paul himself, as the big child leading the littler children, or following their guidance when such guidance was clear, accepted his new duties with a happy heart. His friendship with them all grew delightfully, but especially, of course, his friendship with Nixie. This elemental child slipped into his life everywhere, into his play, as into his work; she assumed the right to look after him; with charming gravity she positively mothered him; and Paul, whose life hitherto had known little enough of such sympathy and care, simply loved it.

  If her native poesy won his imagination, her practical interest in his welfare and comfort equally won his heart. The way she ferreted about in his room and study, so serious, so thoughtful, attending to so many little details that no one else ever thought of, — all this came into his life with a seductive charm as of something entirely new and strange to him. It was Nixie who always saw to it that his ink-pot was full and his quill pens trimmed; that flowers had no time to fade upon his table; and that matches for his pipes never failed in the glass match-stands. He used up matches, it seemed, almost by the handful.

  ‘You’re far worse than Daddy used to be,’ she reproved him. ‘I believe you eat them.’ And when he assured her that he did nothing of the sort, she only shook her head darkly, and said she couldn’t understand then what he did with them all.

  A hundred services of love and kindness she did for him that no one else would have thought of. On his mantelpiece she put mysterious little bottles of medicine.

  ‘For nettle-stings and scratches,’ she explained. ‘Your poor hands are always covered with them both when you’ve been out with us.’ And it was she, too, who bound up his fingers when wounds were more serious, and saw to it that he had a clean rag each day till the sore was healed. She put the new red riband on his straw hat after it fell (himself with it) into the Gull Pond; and one service especially that earned her his eternal respect was to fasten his evening black tie for dinner. This she did every night for him. Such tasks were for magical fingers only. He had never yet compassed it himself. He would run to the nursery to say good-night, and Nixie, looking almost unreal and changeling in her white nightgown, with her yellow hair top-knotted quaintly for sleep, would deftly trim and arrange the strip of satin that he never could manage properly himself. It was a regular little ritual, Toby watching eagerly from the bed across the room.

  ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Uncle Paul,’ she said another time, holding up a mysterious garment, ‘I never saw such holes — never!’

  And then she darned the said socks with results that were picturesque if not always entirely satisfactory. And once she sewed the toes so tightly across with her darning that he could not get his foot into them. She allowed no one else to touch them, however. Little the child guessed that while she patched his clothes, she wove his life afresh at the same time.

  And with all the children he took Dick’s place more and more. His existence widened, filled up; he felt in touch with real things as of old in the woods; the children replaced the trees.

  But it was Nixie in particular who crept close to his unsatisfied heart and tied him to her inner life with the gossamer threads of her sand-coloured hair. This elfin little being, with her imagination and tenderness, brought to him something he had never known before, never dreamed of even; a perfect companionship; a companionship utterly unclouded.

  And the other children understood it; there was no jealousy; it was not felt by them as favouritism. Natural and right it seemed, and was.

  ‘You must ask Nixie,’ Jonah would say in reply to any question concerning his uncle’s welfare or habits. ‘She’s his little mother, you know.’

  For, truth to tell, they were born, these two, in the same corner of the world of fantasy, bred under the same stars, and fathered by the same elemental forces. But for the trick of the years and the accident of blood, they seemed made for one another ideally, eternally.

  Things he could speak of to no one else found in her a natural and easy listener. To grown-ups he had never been able to talk about his mystic longings; the very way they listened made such things instantly seem foolish. But Nixie understood in her child-way, not because she was sympathetic, but because she was in and of them. He was merely talking the language of her own world. He no longer felt ashamed to ‘think aloud.’ Most people were in pursuit of such stupid, clumsy things — fame, money, and other complicated and ugly things — but this child seemed to understand that he cared about Realities only; for, in her own simple way, this was what she cared about too.

  To talk with her cleared his own mind, too, in a way it had never been cleared before. He came to understand himself better, and in so doing swept away a great deal of accumulated rubbish; for he found that when his thought was too confused to make clear to her, it was usually false, wrong — not real.

  ‘I can’t make that out,’ she would say, with a troubled face. ‘I suppose, I’m not old enough yet.’ And afterwards Paul would realise that it was himself who was at fault, not the child. Her instinct was unerring; whereas he, with those years of solitude behind him, sometimes lost himself in a region where imagination, self-devouring, ran the risk of becoming untrue, possibly morbid. Her wholesome little judgments brought sanity and laughter.

  For, like other mystical temperaments, what he sought, presumably, was escape from himself, yet not — and herein he differed healthily from most of his kidney — so much from his Real Inner Self, as from its outer pettiness and limitations. True, he sought union with something larger and more perfect, and in so far was a mystic; but this larger ‘something,’ he dimly understood, was the star of his own soul not yet emancipated, and in so far he remained a man of action. His was the true, wholesome mysticism; hysteria was not — as with most — its chief ingredient. Moreover, this other, eternal part of him touched Eternity. To be identified with it meant to be identified with God, but never for one instant to lose his own individuality.

  And to express himself through the creative ima
gination, to lose his own smallness by interpreting beauty, he had always felt must be a halfway house to the end in view. His inability, therefore, to find such means of expression had always meant something incalculably grave, something that hindered growth. But now this child Nixie, in some extraordinary yet utterly simple fashion, had come to show him the way. It was wonderful past finding out. He hardly knew himself how it had come about. Yet, there she was, ever by his side, pointing to ways that led him out into expression.

  No woman could have done it. His two longings, he came to realise, were actually one: the desire to express his yearnings grew out of the desire to find God.

  And so it was that the thought of her growing up was horrid to him. He could not bear to think of her as a ‘young woman’ moving in a modern world where she would lose all touch with the elemental forces of vision and simplicity whence she drew half her grace and wonder. Already for him, in some mystical fashion of spiritual alchemy, she had become the eternal feminine, exquisitely focussed in the little child. With the advance of years this must inevitably pass from her, as she increased the distance from her source of inspiration.

  ‘Nixie, you must promise never to grow up,’ he would say, laughing.

  ‘Because Aventures stop then, don’t they?’ she asked.

  ‘Partly that,’ he answered.

  ‘And I should get tired, like mother; or stupid, like the head gardener,’ she added. ‘I know. But I don’t think I ever shall, somehow. I think I am meant to be always like this.’

  The serious way she said this last phrase escaped him at the time. He remembered it afterwards, however.

  It was so delightful, too, to read out his stories and aventures to her; they laughed over them, and her criticisms often improved them vastly. He even read her his first poem without shyness, and they discussed each verse and talked about ‘stealing Heaven’s fire,’ and the poor ‘sparks’ that never grew into flames. The ‘kiss of fire’ she thought must be wonderful. She also asked what a ‘lyre’ was. They made up other verses together too. But though they laughed and she asked odd questions, on the whole she grasped the sadness of the poem perfectly.