Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘Did you, Uncle Paul?’ Joan asked.

  He fidgeted in his precarious perch. ‘I write the Record of it all, so I ought to,’ he answered evasively.

  And high up in the autumn sky, now darkening, ran on that curious sweet sound. Across the heavens, silvery in the coming moonlight, they saw long feathery clouds drawn thinly from north to south, known commonly as mares’ tails.

  ‘Those are the tracks they follow,’ whispered Nixie. ‘Look! Now you can see them — some of them!’

  Her voice was so thrilled that it startled them. But for the fact that they were in the Crack where nothing can be ever ‘lost,’ both Paul and Joan might have lost their hold and their seats — to say nothing of their lives — and crashed downwards through the branches of that astonished ilex tree. Instead, they turned their eyes upwards and stared.

  They looked out over the world of tree-tops. On all sides rose Something in a silent tempest, almost too delicate for words — something that touched the air with a Presence, swift and wonderful — then was gone. With it went the faint music as of myriad wheeling birds, too small for sight. And through the sky ran a vast fluttering of green. They saw the coming stars, as it were, through immense transparencies of green, stained here and there with the washed splendours of wet and dying leaves — the greens, yellows, aye, and the reds too, of autumn.

  For a few passing seconds the night was positively robed with the spirit-hues of the dying year, rising rapidly in the sheets of their dim glory.

  ‘They’re off!’ murmured Nixie. ‘It’s the first flight. We are lucky!’

  Far overhead the pathways of fleecy cloud were tinged with pale yellow as when the moon looks sometimes mistily upon the earth — tinged, then suddenly white and silvery as before.

  They collect — Paul drew upon the child’s account for his Record — far over-seas upon some lonely strand or headland, and then swarm inland, sometimes following their companions, the birds, sometimes leading them. In countless thousands they go, yet for all their numbers never causing more than a passing tremble of the air. Their armies add, perhaps, a shadow to the night, a new tint to the clouds that veil the moon; or, if owing to stress of autumn weather, they start with the daylight, then the sunset gains a strange new wonder that puzzles the heart with its beauty, and makes unimaginative people write foolish letters to the newspapers. Their speed makes it difficult to catch even the slightest indication of their flight; the sky is touched with glory, there is a reflection in the river or the sea — and they are gone! Or, perhaps, from the evergreens that stay behind, often fringing the coast, the wind bears a message of farewell, wondrous sweet; or some late birds, delaying their own departure, wake in the branches and sing in little bursts of passion the joy of their own approaching escape.

  And when they return, each tree in the order of its leaving, and according to its times and needs, they bring with them all the essential glory of southern climes, and the magic of spring is due as much to the tales and memories they have collected to talk about, as to the clear brilliance of the new dresses with which they come to clothe their old bodies at home.

  The Record of the Adventure, as Paul wrote it faithfully from the child’s description, makes curious and instructive reading, and the loneliness of the stalwart evergreens who remain behind to face the winter brought a pathos into the tale that all lovers of trees will readily appreciate, and may be read by them in the published account.

  Yet to Paul and Joan, to each according to temperament and cast of mind, the little Adventure brought thoughts of a more practical bearing. To him, especially, in the escape of the tree-spirits — of their ‘insides,’ as Nixie intuitively phrased it — he divined an allegory of the temporary escape of the little army of city waifs. Those boys, old in face as they were cramped in body, had enjoyed, too, a migration that clothed them for a time, outwardly and inwardly, with some passing beauty which they could take back to London with them just as the trees come back with the freshness of the spring.

  And this thought led necessarily to others. The little migration of their bodies from town was important enough; but what of their minds and souls? What chance of escape was there for these?

  The conclusions are obvious enough; they need no elaboration. He had already learned from Joan of their sufferings. His heart burned within him. It was all mixed up in his queer poetic mind with the swift vision of the Tree Spirits, and with the picture of Joan, Nixie, and the other children perched like big berries in that astonished ilex tree. In due season both berries and dreams must ripen. He was beginning to see the way.

  ‘They’re gone already,’ Nixie interrupted his long reverie in a whisper; ‘and to-night there’ll be great rains to wash away all the signs. To-morrow morning, you’ll see, half the trees will be bare.’

  And high in the heavens, incredibly high and faint it seemed, ran the curious sweet sound, driven farther and farther into the reaches of the night, till at last it died away altogether.

  ‘Gone,’ murmured Joan, ‘gone!’ The beauty of it touched her voice with sadness. ‘I wish we could go like that — as beautifully, as quietly, as easily!’

  ‘Perhaps we do,’ Paul thought to himself.

  ‘I think we do,’ Nixie said aloud. ‘Daddy did, I’m sure. I shall, too, I think — and then come back in the spring, p’rhaps.’

  CHAPTER XXIV

  See where the child of heaven, with wingéd feet,

  Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn.

  Prometheus Unbound.

  VERY often in life, when the way seems all prepared for joy, there comes instead an unexpected time of sadness that makes all the preparation seem useless and of no purpose. Those coloured threads, whose ends and beginnings are not seen, weave this unexpected twist in the pattern, and one knows the bitterness that asks secretly, What can be the use of efforts thus rendered apparently null and void at a single stroke? forgetting the roots of faith that are thereby strengthened, and shutting the eyes to the glory of the whole pattern, which it is always the endeavour of the imagination to body forth.

  And so it seemed to Paul a few weeks later when he returned to England from America, where he had been to settle up his affairs. For he had decided to sever his connection with the Lumber Company, and to devote his life henceforward to battling against the wrongs and sufferings of childhood. The call had come to him with no uncertain voice. Nixie had unintentionally sown the seeds; Joan had deliberately watered them; his own liberated imagination girded its loins to go forth as a labourer to the harvest.

  Then, coming back with the joy of this approaching labour in his heart, the veil of great sadness descended upon his newly-opening life and set him in the midst of a dreadful void, a blank of pain and loneliness that nothing seemed able to fill. Nixie went from him. The Hand that gilds the stars, and touched her hair with the yellow of the sands, drew her also away. Just when her gentle companionship had justified itself for him as something ideally charming that should last always, a breath of wintry wind passed down upon that grey house under the hill, and, lo, she was gone — gone like the spirit of her little birch tree from the cruelties of December.

  He was in time to say good-bye — nothing more; in time to see the awful shadow fall silently upon the wasted little face, and to feel the cold of eternal winter creep into the thin hand that lay to the last within his own. Not a single word did he utter as he sat there beside the bed, choked to the brim with feelings that never yet have known the words to clothe them. That cold entered his own heart too, and numbed it.

  Nixie it was that spoke, though she, too, said little enough. The lips moved feebly. He lowered his head to catch the last breath.

  ‘I shall come back,’ he heard faintly, ‘just as the trees do in the spring!’

  The voice was in his ear. It sank down inside him, entering his very soul. For a moment it sang there — then ceased for ever. With eyes dry and burning, he buried his head in the tangle of yellow hair upon the pillow, and when a m
oment later he raised them again to speak the words of comfort to his weeping sister, Nixie was no longer there to hear him or to see.

  ‘I shall come back in the spring — just as the trees do.’

  And so she died, leaving Paul behind in that sea of loneliness whose waves drown year by year their thousands and tens of thousands — the vast army that know not Faith. Her blue eyes, so swiftly fading, were on his to the last. It seemed to him that for a moment he had seen God. And perhaps he had; for Nixie assuredly was close to divine things, and he most certainly was pure.

  * * * *

  Sad things are best faced squarely, very squarely indeed; dealt with; and then — deliberately forgotten. In this way their strength, and the beauty that invariably lies within like a hidden kernel, may be appropriated and their bitterness destroyed. But such platitudes are easily said or written, and at first, when Nixie left him, Paul felt as though the world lay for ever broken at his feet.

  What this elfin child had done for him must appear to some exaggerated, to many, incredible; for the relationship between them had somehow been touched with the splendour and tenderness of a world unknown to the majority. The delicate intimacy between their souls, as between souls of a like age, is difficult to realise outside the region of fantasy. Yet it had existed: in her with a simple, childlike joy that asked no questions; in him, with an attempt at analysis that only made it closer and more dear. What Paul had been to her was a secret she had taken away with her; what she had been to him, however, was to remain a most precious memory, and at the same time a source of strength and happiness that was to prove eternal.

  Not, however, in the manner that actually came about — and, at first, not realised by him in any manner whatsoever.

  For, at first, he found himself alone, horribly alone. What her little mystical heart of poetry had taught him is hard to name. Expression, of course, in its simpler form, and the joy of a sympathetic audience; but more than that. In all fine women lies hidden ‘the child’ — the simple vision that pierces — and perhaps in Nixie he had divined, and ideally reconstructed for himself, the ‘fine woman’! Who can say? A dream so rich and tender can never be caught in a mere net of words. The truth lay buried in the depths of his being, to strengthen and to bless; and some few others may divine its presence there as well as himself perhaps. The only thing he understood clearly at the moment was that he had been robbed of an intimate little friend who had crept into every corner of his heart, and that — he was most terribly alone.

  CHAPTER XXV

  Donnez vos yeux, donnez vos mains,

  Donnez vos mains magiciennes;

  Pour me guider par ‘es chemins

  Donnez vos yeux, donnez vos mains,

  Vos mains d’infante dans les miennes.

  From Les Unes et les Autres.

  THERE is nothing to be gained by dwelling upon sadness; the details of Paul’s suffering may be left to the imagination. It was characteristic of him that he sought instinctively, and without cant, for the Reality that lay behind his pain; and Reality — though seas of grief may first be plunged through to find it — is always Joy. For love is joy, and joy is strength, and both are aspects of the great central Reality of the life of the soul. The child was so woven into the strands of his inmost being that her going seemed, as it were, to draw out with her these very strands — drew them out away from himself towards — towards what? He hardly knew how to name it. The word ‘God’ rarely passed his lips: towards ‘Reality,’ then; towards the deep things he had sought all his life.

  Part of himself, however, the child had taken away with her. He passed more and more away from the things of the world, though these had never yet held him with any security in their mesh. Nixie had gone ahead, that was all. Before long, as years measure time at least, he would follow her. She might even come back, ‘like the trees in the spring,’ to tell him of the way.

  His great longing, unexpressed, had always been to know something of the Beyond — to see into the heart of things; not by the uninspired methods of an unsavoury spiritualism, or the artificial forcing-house of an audacious Magic; but by some inner, as yet undetermined, way in his own heart. For he had always clung to the secret belief that there must be some interior way of finding ‘Reality,’ some process, simple, piercing, profound, that would have authority for himself, if not for all the world. In the heart of all true mystics some such Faith is ingrained. They are born with it. It is ineradicable — lived, but rarely spoken.

  And the root of this belief it was that Nixie had unknowingly watered and fed. Her going seemed suddenly to have coaxed it almost into flower. His need of the great, satisfying Companion that knows no shadow of turning was incalculably quickened thereby. Love and Nature were the veils that screened the Beyond so thinly that he could almost see through them; and to both these mysteries the child had led him better than she knew.

  The energy of his mystical yearnings suddenly increased a hundredfold. Whether these remain within to poison, or go out to bless, depends, of course, upon the nature of the heart that feels them. Paul, fortunately for himself, had found ways of expression; he was always provided now with the safety of an outlet. And, for the immediate moment, the path was clear enough, and very simple. He was to comfort the mother that mourned her; himself that mourned her; the puzzled little brother and sister, and even the army of more or less disconsolate fourfooted friends that missed her presence vaguely, and haunted the door of her room with the strange instinct that there must still be caresses for them within, and that for the moment she was merely hiding.

  It was Smoke, the furry black fellow, however, always her favourite and his own, participant in all their old Aventures, who brought him a strange comfort by secret ways that no man understands. For Smoke asked no questions. He knew; and though he missed her in all their games, and meals, and undertakings of every kind, in house or garden, he showed no obvious symptoms of grief as a dog might have shown. And sometimes he was positively uncanny: he behaved almost as though he still saw her.

  The others, however, — ! With most of them out of sight was out of mind. The kittens, now growing up, purred and played as of old in the schoolroom, and the Chow puppies, China and Japan, more like yellow puddings than ever, tore about the house, tumbling and thudding, as though they had never known their little two-legged elfin playmate. The household dropped back into the old routine; Margaret, sadder, less alive than before, pressed down by her new grief into the semblance of a vision; and the children, hushed and pale, but gradually yielding to the stress of bursting life which at that age has no long acquaintance with grief.

  It was winter, and the woods and gardens were so altered that the usual corners of play and mischief were unrecognisable. ‘Out-ov-doors’ was dead, the sunshine unreal, the darkness hovering close even on the clearest day. The haunts that Paul and Nixie knew were too much changed, mercifully for him, who often sought them none the less, to remind him keenly. The little silver birch tree that danced in summer before the skirts of the fir wood was bare and shivering in the winds. Behind it, however, unchanged and shaggy, still stood the dark sheltering pine, steady among the blasts.

  And Paul, meanwhile, beyond the smaller sphere of his immediate duties in the grey house under the hill, took up with all the enthusiasm he could spare from sorrow the work among the lost waifs. As has been seen, he found the complete organisation ready to hand. And, to his great satisfaction, he found, as he became familiar with the detail, that it was work suited to the best that was in him. He was the right man in the right place.

  Moreover, it was Dick’s scheme, and to lose himself in it was to get into touch again delightfully with the great friendship of his youth. Nixie, too, who had meant when she grew up to provide a Wood for Lost Children, seemed ever pushing him forward from behind. Thus his zeal never lessened, and he lost himself in others to some purpose.

  The test of time, of course, proved this. At the moment, however, it can only be known by the trick of �
�looking at the last chapter’ — which is unlawful, as well as logically impossible. And, before he got so far, he had first learned another profound truth: that only he who carries in his heart a great sorrow, borne alone, can know the mystery of interior Vision, inspiring and truly marvellous, which comes from a blessing so singularly disguised as pain.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  I feel, I see

  Those eyes which burn through smiles that fade in tears,

  Like stars half quenched in mists of silver dew.

  Prometheus Unbound.

  THE readjustment of self — the renewal — that follows upon great bereavement having thus been faced courageously, Paul threw himself into his work with energy. Every Friday night he came down to the house under the hill, and every Monday morning he returned to London. But the details of the work, beyond the fact that their fulfilment blessed both himself and those for whom he laboured, are not essential to the story of what followed. For the history of Paul’s education is more than anything else a history of Aventures of the inner life. Outwardly, his existence was quiet and uneventful.

  Almost immediately with the disappearance of his little friend, for instance, he discovered that the region through the Crack — the land betweenyesserdayandtomorrow — became more real, more extraordinarily real, than ever before. The entrances now seemed everywhere and always close; it was the ways of exit that were difficult to find. He lived in it. Even in London he moved among those fields of flowers, and the winter gloom that depressed the majority only enhanced the bright sunshine that lay about his path. His thoughts were continually following the windings of the river to the far horizon; and the horizon, too, was wider, more enticing and mysterious, more suggestive than ever of that blue sea beyond where he had sailed with that other Companion.