Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  I dance on your paper,

  I hide in your pen,

  I make in your ink-stand

  My black little den;

  And when you’re not looking

  I hop on your nose,

  And leave on your forehead

  The marks of my toes.

  When you’re trying to finish

  Your “i” with a dot,

  I slip down your finger

  And make it a blot;

  And when you’re so busy

  To cross a big “T,”

  I make on the paper

  A little Black Sea.

  I drink blotting-paper,

  Eat penwiper-pie,

  You never can catch me,

  You never need try!

  I hop any distance,

  I use any ink!

  I’m on to your fingers

  Before you can wink.’

  Paul’s back was to the door. He was in the act of making up a new verse, and declaiming it, when he was aware that a change had come suddenly over the room. It was manifest from the faces of the children. Their attention had wandered; they were looking past him — beyond him.

  And when he turned to discover the cause of the distraction he looked straight into the grey eyes of a woman — grave-faced, with an expression of strength and sweetness. As he did so the opening words of verse four slipped out in spite of themselves: —

  ‘I’m the blackest of goblins,

  I revel in smears—’

  He smothered the accusing statement with a cough that was too late to disguise it, while the grey eyes looked steadily into his with a twinkle their owner made no attempt to conceal. The same ( instant the children rushed past him to welcome [ her.

  ‘It’s Cousin Joan!’ they cried with one voice, and dragged her into the room.

  ‘And this is Uncle Paul from America—’ began Nixie.

  ‘And he’s crammed full of sprites and things, and sees the wind and gets through our Crack, and — and climbs up the rigging of the Night—’ cried Jonah, striving to say everything at once before his sisters.

  ‘And writes the aventures of our Secret S’iety,’ Toby managed to interpolate by speaking very fast indeed.

  ‘He’s Recording Secre’ry, you see,’ explained Nixie in a tone of gentle authority that brought order into the scene. ‘Cousin Joan, you know,’ she added, turning gravely to her uncle, ‘is Visiting I’spector.’

  ‘Whose visits, however, are somewhat rare, I fear,’ said the new arrival, with a smile. Her voice was quiet and very pleasant. ‘I hope, Mr. Rivers, you are able to keep the Society in better order than I ever could.’

  The introduction seemed adequate. They shook hands. Paul somehow forgot the signs of mourning he wore in common with the rest.

  ‘Cousin Joan has a real Society in London, of course,’ Nixie explained gravely, ‘a Society that picks up real lost children.’

  ‘A-filleted with ours, though,’ cried Jonah proudly.

  ‘‘ffiliated, he means,’ explained Nixie, while everybody laughed, and the boy looked uncertain whether to be proud, hurt, or puzzled, but in the end laughing louder than the rest.

  When Paul was alone a few minutes later, the children having been carried off shouting to receive the presents their ‘Cousin’ always brought them on her rare visits from London, he was conscious first of a curious sense of disappointment. That strong-faced woman, grave of expression, with the low voice and the rather sad grey eyes, he divined was the cause; though, for the moment, he could not trace the feeling to any definite detail. In his mind he still saw her standing in the doorway — a woman no longer in her first youth, yet comely with a delicate, strong beauty that bore the indefinable touch of high living. It was peculiar to his intuitive temperament to note the spirit before he became aware of physical details; and this woman had left something of her personality behind her. She had spoken little, and that little ordinary; had done nothing in act or gesture that was striking. He did not even remember how she was dressed, beyond that she looked neat, soft, effective. Yet, there it was; something was in the room with him that had not been there before she came.

  At first he felt vaguely that his sense of disappointment had to do with herself. Not that he had expected anything dazzling, or indeed had given her consciously any thought at all. The male creature, of course, hearing the name of a girl he is about to meet, instinctively conjures up a picture to suit her name. He cannot help himself. And Joan Nicholson, apart from any deliberate process of thought or desire on his part, hardly suited the picture that had thus spontaneously formed in his mind. The woman seemed too big for the picture. He had seen her, perhaps, hitherto, only through his sister’s eyes. It puzzled him. About her, mysteriously as an invisible garment, was the atmosphere of things bigger, grander, finer than he had expected; nobler than he quite understood.

  Ah, now, at last, he was getting at it. The vague sense of disappointment was not with her; it was with himself. Tested by some new standard her mere presence had subtly introduced into the room — into his intuitive mind — he had become suddenly dissatisfied with himself. His play with the children, he remembered feeling, had seemed all at once insignificant, unreal, almost unworthy — compared to another larger order of things her presence had suggested, if not actually revealed. Thus, in a flash of vision, the truth came to him.

  It was with himself and not with her that he was disappointed. He recalled scraps of the conversation. It was, after all, nothing Joan Nicholson had said; it was something Nixie had said. Nixie, his little blue-eyed guide and teacher, had been up to her wizard tricks again, all unconsciously.

  ‘Cousin Joan has a real Society in London, you know — a Society that picks up real lost children’

  That was the sentence that had done it. He felt certain. Combined with the spiritual presentment of the woman, this apparently stray remark had dropped down into his heart with almost startling effect — like the grain of powder a chemist adds to his test tube that suddenly changes the colour and nature of its contents. As yet he could not determine quite what the change meant; he felt only that it was there — disappointment, dissatisfaction with himself.

  ‘Cousin Joan has a real Society.’ She was in earnest.

  ‘Real lost children’ — perhaps potential Nixies, Jonahs, Tobys, all waiting to be ‘picked up.’

  The thoughts ran to and fro in him like some one with a little torch, lighting up corners and recesses of his soul he had so far never visited. For thus it sometimes is with the chemistry of growth. The changes are prepared subconsciously for a long while, and then comes some trivial little incident — a chance remark, a casual action — and a match is set to the bonfire. It flames out with a sudden rush. The character develops with a leap; the soul has become wiser, advanced, possessed of longer, clearer sight.

  Paul was certainly aware of a new standard by which he must judge himself; and, for all the apparent slightness of its cause, a little reflection will persuade of its truth. Real, inner crises of a soul are often produced by causes even more negligible.

  The desire, always latent in him, to be of some use in the world, and to find the things he sought by losing himself in some Cause bigger than personal ends, had been definitely touched. It now rose to the surface and claimed deliberate attention.

  What in the world did it matter — thus he reflected while dressing for dinner — whether his own personal sense of beauty found expression or not? Of what account was it to the world at large, the world, for instance, that included those ‘lost children’ who needed to be ‘picked up’? To what use did he put it, except to his own gratification, and the passing pleasure of the children he played with? Were there no bigger uses, then, for his imagination, uses nobler and less personal?...

  The thoughts chased one another through his mind in some confusion. He felt more and more dissatisfied with himself. He must set his house in order. He really must get to work at something real!

  Other thoughts,
too, played with him while he struggled with his studs and tie. For he noticed suddenly with surprise that he was taking more trouble with his appearance than usual. That black tie always bothered him when he could not get the help of Nixie’s fingers, and usually he appeared at the table with the results of carelessness and despair plainly visible in its outlandish shape. But to-night he tied and re-tied, determined to get it right. He meant to look his best.

  Yet this process of beautifying himself was instinctive, not deliberate. It was unconscious; he did not realise what he had been about until he was half-way downstairs. And then came another of those swift, subtle flashes by which the soul reveals herself — to herself. This ‘dressing-up,’ what was it for? For whom? Certainly, he did not care a button what Joan Nicholson thought of his personal appearance. That was positive. Then, for whom, and for what, was it? Was it for some one else? Had the arrival of this ‘woman’ upon the scene somehow brought the truth into sudden relief?...

  A delightful, fairy thought sped across his mind with wings of gold, waving through the dusk of his soul a spray of leaves from a silver birch-tree that he knew, and disappearing into those depths of consciousness where feelings never clothe themselves in precise language. A line of poetry swam up and took its place mysteriously —

  My heart has thoughts, which, though thine eyes hold mine,

  Flit to the silent world and other summers,

  With wings that dip beyond the silver seas.

  Could it be, then, that he had given his heart so utterly, so exquisitely, into the keeping of a little child?...

  At any rate, before he reached the drawing-room, he understood that what he had been so busy dressing up was not anything half so trumpery as his mere external body and appearance. It was his interior person. That black tie, properly made for once, was an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace; only, having forgotten, or possibly never heard the phrase, he could not make use of it!

  ‘It’s that little, sandy-haired witch after all!’ he thought to himself. ‘Joan’s coming — a woman’s coming — has made me realise it. I must behave my best, and look my best. It’s my soul dressing up for Nixie, I do declare!’

  CHAPTER XXI

  PERSONS with real force of purpose carry about with them something that charges unconsciously the atmosphere of others. Paul ‘felt’ this woman. The first impact of her presence, as has been seen, came almost as a shock. The ‘shocks,’ however, did not continue — as such. Her influence worked in him underground, as it were.

  She slipped easily and naturally into the quiet routine of the little household in the Grey House under the hill, till it seemed as if she had been there always. Margaret had insisted at once that there could be no ‘Missing’ and ‘Mistering’; Dick’s niece must be Joan, and her brother Paul; and the more familiar terms of address were adopted without effort on both sides.

  The children helped, too. They were all in the same Society, and before a week had passed she had heard all the ‘aventures,’ and entered into the discovery of new ones, even contributing some herself with a zest that delighted. Paul, and made him feel wholly at his ease with her. It was all real to her; she could not otherwise have shown an interest; for sham had no part in her nature, and her love for these fatherless children was as great as his own, and similar in kind.

  ‘You have given their “Society” a new lease of life,’ she told him; ‘you are an enormous addition to it.’

  ‘Enormous — yes!’ he laughed.

  ‘Enormously useful at the same time,’ she laughed in return, ‘because you not only increase their imagination; you train it, and show them how to Use it.’

  ‘To say nothing of the indirect benefits I receive myself,’ he added.

  And, after a pause, she said: ‘For myself, too, it’s the best kind of holiday I could possibly have. To come down here into all this, straight from my waifs in London, is like coming into that Crackland you have shown them. I wish — I wish I could introduce it all to my big sad world of unwashed urchins. They have so few chances.’ A sudden flash of enthusiasm ran over her face like sunlight. ‘Perhaps, when they come down here next week for a day’s outing, we might try! — if you will help me, that is?’ She looked up. Something in the simple words touched him; her singleness of aim stirred the depths in him.

  He promised eagerly.

  ‘When it’s out,’ she added presently, ‘I’m going to give copies of your book of aventures to some of them. A good many will understand—’

  ‘You shall have as many as you can use,’ he put in quickly, with a thrill of pleasure he hardly understood. ‘I’m only too delighted to think they could be of any use — any real use, I mean.’

  There was something in the simple earnestness of this woman, in the devotion of her life to an unselfish Cause, that increased daily his dissatisfaction with himself. She never said a word that suggested selfsacrifice. A call had come to her, turning her entire life into an instrument for helping others — others who might never realise enough to say, ‘Thank you’ — and she had accepted it. Now she lived it, that was all. The Scheme that had provided the call, too, was Dick’s. It was all conceived originally in that big practical, imaginative heart of the one intimate friendship he had known. Moreover, it concerned children, lost children. The appeal to the deepest in himself was thus reinforced in several ways. More and more, beside this quiet, determined woman, with her singleness of aim and her practical idealism, his own life seemed trivial, cheap, selfish. She had found a medium of expression, selfexpression, compared to which his own mind was insignificant.

  From the ‘Man who splashed on the Deck’ to Joan Nicholson was a far cry; as far almost as from the amoeba to the dog — yet both the man and the woman knew the relief of Outlet. And, now, he too was learning in his own time and place the same truth. Nixie had brought him far. Joan, perhaps, was to bring him farther still.

  Yet there was nothing about her that was very unusual. There are scores and scores of unmarried women like her sprinkled all along the quiet ways of life, noble, unselfish, unrecognised, often, no doubt, utterly unappreciated, turning the whole current of their lives into work for others — the best they can find. The ordinary man who, for the mother of his children seeks first of all physical beauty, or perhaps some worldly standard of attractiveness, passes them by. Their great force, thus apparently neglected by Nature for her more obvious purposes, runs along through more hidden channels, achieving great things with but little glory or reward. To Paul, who knew nothing of modern types, and whose knowledge of women was abstract rather than concrete, she appeared, of course, simply normal. For all women he conceived as noble and unselfish, capable naturally of sacrifice and devotion. To him they were all saints, more or less, and Joan Nicholson came upon the scene of his life merely as an ordinarily presentable specimen of the great species he had always dreamt about.

  But it was the first time he had come into close contact with a living example of the type he had always believed in. Here was a woman whose interests were all outside herself. The fact thrilled and electrified him, just as the peculiar nature of her work made a powerful and intimate appeal to his heart.

  As the days passed, and they came to know one another better, she told him frankly about the small beginnings of her work, and then how Dick’s idea had caught her up and carried her away to where she now was.

  ‘There was so much to be done, and so much help needed, that at first,’ she admitted, ‘my own little efforts seemed absurd; and then he showed me that if everybody talked like that nothing would ever be accomplished. So I got up and tried. It was something definite and practical. I let my bigger dreams go—’

  ‘Well done,’ he interrupted, wondering for a moment what those ‘bigger dreams’ could have been.

  ‘ — and chose the certainty. And I have never regretted it, though sometimes, of course, I am still tempted’

  ‘That was fine of you,’ he said. He realised vaguely that she would gl
adly, perhaps, have spoken to him of those ‘other dreams,’ but it was not quite clear to him that his sympathy could be of any avail, and he did not know how to offer it either. To ask direct questions of such a woman savoured to his delicate mind of impertinence.

  ‘There was nothing “fine” about it,’ she laughed, after an imperceptible pause; ‘it was natural, that’s all. I couldn’t help myself really. Human suffering has always called to me very searchingly. Au fond, you see, it was almost selfishness.’

  He suddenly felt unaccountably small with this slip of a woman at his side, tired, overworked, giving all her best years so gladly away, and even in her ‘holidays’ thinking of her work more than of herself. He noticed, too, the passing flames that lit fires in her eyes and illumined her entire face sometimes when she spoke of her London waifs. Pity and admiration ran together in his thoughts, the latter easily predominating.

  ‘But you must make the most of your holiday,’ he said presently; ‘you will use up your forces too soon—’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she laughed, ‘perhaps. Only I get restless with the feeling that I’m wanted elsewhere. There’s so little time to do anything. The years pass so quickly — after thirty; and if you always wait till you’re “quite fit,” you wait for ever, and nothing gets done.’

  Paul turned and looked steadily at her for a moment. A sudden beauty, like a white and shining fire, leaped into her face, flashed about the eyes and mouth, and was gone. Paul never forgot that look to the end of his days.

  ‘By Jove,’ he said, ‘you are in earnest!’

  ‘Not more than others,’ she said simply; ‘not as much as many, even, I’m afraid. A good soldier goes on fighting whether he’s “fit” or not, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He ought to,’ said Paul — humbly, for some reason he could hardly explain.

  They had many similar talks. She told him a great deal about her rescue work in London, and he, for his part, became more and more interested. From a distance, meanwhile, his sister observed them curiously, — though nothing that was in Margaret’s thoughts ever for a single instant found its way either into his mind or Joan’s. It was natural, of course, that Margaret, the reader of modern novels, should have formed certain conclusions, and perhaps it would have been the obvious and natural thing for Joan and Paul to have fallen in love and been happy ever afterwards with children of their own. It would also, no doubt, have been ‘artistic,’ and the way things are made to happen in novels.