Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  Cousin Henry was easily leader now. While Daddy remained absorbed with his marvellous new story, enthusiastic and invisible, they ran about the world at the heels of this ‘busy engineer,’ as Jane Ann entitled him. He had long ago told them, with infinite and exaccurate detail, of his journey to the garden and his rediscovery of the sprites, forgotten during his twenty years of business life. And these sprites were as familiar to them now as those of their own childhood. They little knew that at night they met and talked with them. Daddy had put them all into the Wumble Book, achieving mediocre success with the rhymes, but amply atoning with the illustrations. The Woman of the Haystack was evidently a monster pure and simple, till Jinny announced that she merely had ‘elephantitis,’ and thus explained her satisfactorily. The Lamplighter, with shining feet, taking enormous strides from Neuchatel to a London slum, putting fire into eyes and hearts en route, thrilled them by his radiant speed and ubiquitous activity, while his doggerel left them coldly questioning. For the rhymes did not commend themselves to their sense of what was proper in the use of words. His natural history left them unconvinced, though the anatomy of the drawing fascinated them.

  He walked upon his toes

  As softly as a saying does,

  For so the saying goes.

  That he ‘walked upon his toes’ was all right, but that he ‘walked softly as a saying’ meant nothing, even when explained that ‘thus the saying goes.’

  ‘Poor old Daddy,’ was Jinny’s judgment; ‘he’s got to write something.

  You see, he is an author. Some day he’ll get his testimonial.’

  It was Cousin Henry who led them with a surer, truer touch. He always had an adventure up his sleeve — something their imaginations could accept and recreate. Each in their own way, they supplied interpretations as they were able.

  Every walk they took together furnished the germ of an adventure.

  ‘But I’m not exciting to-day,’ he would object thirsting for a convincing compliment that should persuade him to take them out. Only the compliment never came quite as he hoped.

  ‘Everybody’s exciting somewhere,’ said Monkey, leading the way and knowing he would follow. ‘We’ll go to the Wind Wood.’

  Jimbo took his hand then, and they went. Corners of the forest had names now, born of stories and adventures he had placed there — the Wind Wood, the Cuckoo Wood, where Daddy could not sleep because ‘the beastly cuckoo made such a noise’; the Wood where Mother Fell, and so on. No walk was wholly unproductive.

  And so, one evening after supper, they escaped by the garden, crossed the field where the standing hay came to their waists, and climbed by forest paths towards the Wind Wood. It was a spot where giant pines stood thinly, allowing a view across the lake towards the Alps. The moss was thick and deep. Great boulders, covered with lichen, lay about, and there were fallen trees to rest the back against. Here he had told them once his vision of seeing the wind, and the name had stuck; for the story had been very vivid, and every time they felt the wind or heard it stirring in the tree-tops, they expected to see it too. There were blue winds, black winds, and winds — violent these — of purple and flaming scarlet.

  They lay down, and Cousinenry made a fire. The smoke went up in thin straight lines of blue, melting into the sky. The sun had set half an hour before, and the flush of gold and pink was fading into twilight. The glamour of Bourcelles dropped down upon all three. They ought to have been in bed — hence the particular enjoyment.

  ‘Are you getting excited now?’ asked Monkey, nestling in against him.

  ‘Hush!’ he said, ‘can’t you hear it coming?’

  ‘The excitement?’ she inquired under her breath.

  ‘No, the Night. Keep soft and silent — if you can.’

  ‘Tell us, please, at once,’ both children begged him instantly, for the beauty of the place and hour demanded explanation, and explanation, of course, must be in story or adventure form. The fire crackled faintly; the smell crept out like incense; the lines of smoke coiled upwards, and seemed to draw the tree-stems with them. Indeed they formed a pattern together, big thick trunks marking the uprights at the corners, and wavy smoke lines weaving a delicate structure in between them. It was a kind of growing, moving scaffolding. Saying nothing, Cousin Henry pointed to it with his finger. He traced its general pattern for them in the air.

  ‘That’s the Scaffolding of the Night beginning,’ he whispered presently, feeling adventure press upon him.

  ‘Oh, I say,’ said Jimbo, sitting up, and pretending as usual more comprehension than he actually possessed. But his sister instantly asked, ‘What is it — the Scaffolding of the Night? A sort of cathedral, you mean?’

  How she divined his thought, and snatched it from his mind always, this nimble-witted child! His germ developed with a bound at once.

  ‘More a palace than a cathedral,’ he whispered. ‘Night is a palace, and has to be built afresh each time. Twilight rears the scaffolding first, then hangs the Night upon it. Otherwise the darkness would simply fall in lumps, and lie about in pools and blocks, unfinished — a ruin instead of a building. Everything must have a scaffolding first. Look how beautifully it’s coming now,’ he added, pointing, ‘each shadow in its place, and all the lines of grey and black fitting exaccurately together like a skeleton. Have you never noticed it before?’

  Jimbo, of course, had noticed it, his manner gave them to understand, but had not thought it worth while mentioning until his leader drew attention to it.

  ‘Just as trains must have rails to run on,’ he explained across Cousinenry’s intervening body to Monkey, ‘or else there’d be accidents and things all the time.’

  ‘And night would be a horrid darkness like a plague in Egypt,’ she supposed, adroitly defending herself and helping her cousin at the same time. ‘Wouldn’t it?’ she added, as the shadows drew magically nearer from the forest and made the fire gradually grow brighter. The children snuggled closer to their cousin’s comforting bulk, shivering a little. The woods went whispering together. Night shook her velvet skirts out.

  ‘Yes, everything has its pattern,’ he answered, ‘from the skeleton of a child or a universe to the outline of a thought. Even a dream must have its scaffolding,’ he added, feeling their shudder and leading it towards fun and beauty. ‘Insects, birds, and animals all make little scaffoldings with their wee emotions, especially kittens and butterflies. Engine-drivers too,’ for he felt Jimbo’s hand steal into his own and go to sleep there, ‘but particularly little beasties that live in holes under stones and in fields.

  When a little mouse in wonder

  Flicks its whiskers at the thunder,

  it makes a tiny scaffolding behind which it hides in safety, shuddering. Same with Daddy’s stories. Thinking and feeling does the trick. Then imagination comes and builds it up solidly with bricks and wall-papers….’

  He told them a great deal more, but it cannot be certain that they heard it all, for there were other Excitements about besides their cousin — the fire, the time, the place, and above all, this marvellous coming of the darkness. They caught words here and there, but Thought went its own independent way with each little eager mind. He had started the machinery going, that was all. Interpretation varied; facts remained the same. And meanwhile twilight brought the Scaffolding of Night before their eyes.

  ‘You can see the lines already,’ he murmured sleepily, ‘like veins against the sunset…. Look!’

  All saw the shadowy slim rafters slip across the paling sky, mapping its emptiness with intricate design. Like an enormous spider’s web of fine dark silk it bulged before the wind. The trellis-work, slung from the sky, hung loose. It moved slowly, steadily, from east to west, trailing grey sheets of dusk that hung from every filament. The maze of lines bewildered sight. In all directions shot the threads of coming darkness, spun from the huge body of Night that still hid invisible below the horizon.

  ‘They’re fastening on to everything … look!’ whispered Cousin Hen
ry, kicking up a shower of sparks with his foot. ‘The Pattern’s being made before your eyes! Don’t you see the guy ropes?’

  And they saw it actually happen. From the summits of the distant Alps ran filmy lines of ebony that knotted themselves on to the crests of the pines beside them. There were so many no eye could follow them. They flew and darted everywhere, dropping like needles from the sky itself, sewing the tent of darkness on to the main supports, and threading the starlight as they came. Night slowly brought her beauty and her mystery upon the world. The filmy pattern opened. There was a tautness in the lines that made one feel they would twang with delicate music if the wind swept its hand more rapidly across them. And now and again all vibrated, each line making an ellipse between its fastened ends, then gradually settling back to its thin, almost invisible bed. Cables of thick, elastic darkness steadied them.

  How much of it all the children realised themselves, or how much flashed into them from their cousin’s mind, is of course a thing not even a bat can tell.

  ‘Is that why bats fly in such a muddle? Like a puzzle?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. The bats were at last explained.

  They built their little pictures for themselves. No living being can lie on the edge of a big pine forest when twilight brings the darkness without the feeling that everything becomes too wonderful for words. The children as ever fed his fantasy, while he thought he did it all himself. Dusk wore a shroud to entangle the too eager stars, and make them stay.

  ‘I never noticed it before,’ murmured Monkey against his coat sleeve.

  ‘Does it happen every night like this?’

  ‘You only see it if you look very closely,’ was the low reply. ‘You must think hard, very hard. The more you think, the more you’ll see.’

  ‘But really,’ asked Jimbo, ‘it’s only — crepuscule, comme ca, isn’t it?’ And his fingers tightened on his leader’s hand.

  ‘Dusk, yes,’ answered Cousin Henry softly, ‘only dusk. But people everywhere are watching it like ourselves, and thinking feather thoughts. You can see the froth of stars flung up over the crest of Night. People are watching it from windows and fields and country roads everywhere, wondering what makes it so beautiful. It brings yearnings and long, long desires. Only a few like ourselves can see the lines of scaffolding, but everybody who thinks about it, and loves it, makes it more real for others to see, too. Daddy’s probably watching it too from his window.’

  ‘I wonder if Jinny ever sees it,’ Monkey asked herself.

  But Jimbo knew. ‘She’s in it,’ he decided. ‘She’s always in places like that; that’s where she lives.’

  The children went on talking to each other under their breath, and while they did so Cousin Henry entered their little wondering minds. Or, perhaps, they entered his. It is difficult to say. Not even an owl, who is awfully wise about everything to do with night and darkness, could have told for certain. But, anyhow, they all three saw more or less the same thing. The way they talked about it afterwards proves that. Their minds apparently merged, or else there was one big mirror and two minor side-reflections of it. It was their cousin’s interpretation, at any rate, that they remembered later. They brought the material for his fashioning.

  ‘Look!’ cried Monkey, sitting up, ‘there are millions and millions now — lines everywhere — pillars and squares and towers. It’s like a city. I can see lamps in every street — —’

  ‘That’s stars,’ interrupted Jimbo. The stars indeed were peeping here and there already. ‘I feel up there,’ he added, ‘my inside, I mean — up among the stars and lines and sky-things.’

  ‘That’s the mind wandering,’ explained the eldest child of the three. ‘Always follow a wandering mind. It’s quite safe. Mine’s going presently too. We’ll all go off together.’

  Several little winds, released by darkness, passed them just then on their way out of the forest. They gathered half a dozen sparks from the fire to light them on their way, and brought cool odours with them from the deepest recesses of the trees — perfumes no sunlight ever finds. And just behind them came a big white moth, booming and whirring softly. It darted to and fro to find the trail, then vanished, so swiftly that no one saw it go.

  ‘He’s pushing it along,’ said Jimbo.

  ‘Or fastening the lines,’ his sister thought, ‘you see he hovers in one place, then darts over to another.’

  ‘That’s fastening the knots,’ added Jimbo.

  ‘No; he’s either an Inspector or a Pathfinder,’ whispered Cousin Henry, ‘I don’t know exactly which. They show the way the scaffolding goes. Moths, bats, and owls divide the work between them somehow.’ He sat up suddenly to listen, and the children sat up with him. ‘Hark!’ he added, ‘do you hear that?’

  Sighings and flutterings rose everywhere about them, and overhead the fluffy spires of the tree-tops all bent one way as the winds went foraging across the night. Majestically the scaffolding reared up and towered through the air, while sheets of darkness hung from every line, and trailed across the earth like gigantic sails from some invisible vessel. Loose and enormous they gradually unfolded, then suddenly swung free and dropped with a silent dip and rush. Night swooped down upon the leagues of Jura forest. She spread her tent across the entire range.

  The threads were fastened everywhere now, and the uprights all in place. Moths were busy in all directions, showing the way, while bats by the dozen darted like black lightning from corner to corner, making sure that every spar and beam was fixed and steady. So exquisitely woven was the structure that it moved past them overhead without the faintest sound, yet so frail and so elastic that the whirring of the moths sent ripples of quivering movement through the entire framework.

  ‘Hush!’ murmured Rogers, ‘we’re properly inside it now. Don’t think of anything in particular. Just follow your wandering minds and wait.’ The children lay very close against him. He felt their warmth and the breathing of their little bosoms. All three moved sympathetically within the rhythm of the dusk. The ‘inside’ of each went floating up into the darkening sky.

  The general plan of the scaffolding they clearly made out as they passed among its myriad, mile-long rafters, but the completed temple, of course, they never saw. Black darkness hides that ever. Night’s secret mystery lies veiled finally in its innermost chamber, whence it steals forth to enchant the mind of men with its strange bewilderment. But the Twilight Scaffolding they saw clearly enough to make a map of it. For Daddy afterwards drew it from their description, and gave it an entire page in the Wumble Book, Monkey ladling on the colour with her camel’s-hair brush as well as she could remember.

  It was a page to take the breath away, the big conception blundering clumsily behind the crude reconstruction. Great winds formed the base, winds of brown and blue and purple, piled mountainously upon each other in motionless coils, and so soft that the upright columns of the structure plunged easily and deeply into them. Thus the framework could bend and curve and sway, moving with steady glide across the landscape, yet never collapsing nor losing its exquisite proportions. The forests shored it up, its stays and bastions were the Jura precipices; it rested on the shoulders of the hills. From vineyard, field, and lake vast droves of thick grey shadows trooped in to curtain the lower halls of the colossal edifice, as chamber after chamber disappeared from view and Night clothed the structure from the ground-floors upwards. And far overhead a million tiny scarves, half sunset and half dusk, wove into little ropes that lashed the topmost spars together, dovetailing them neatly, and fastening them at last with whole clusters of bright thin stars.

  ‘Ohhhhh!’ breathed Jimbo with a delicious shudder of giddiness. ‘Let’s climb to the very tip and see all the trains and railway stations in the world!’

  ‘Wait till the moon comes up and puts the silver rivets in,’ the leader whispered. ‘It’ll be safer then. My weight, you know—’

  ‘There she is!’ interrupted Monkey with a start, ‘and there’s no such thing as weight—’


  For the moon that instant came up, it seemed with a rush, and the line of distant Alps moved forward, blocked vividly against the silvery curtain that she brought. Her sight ran instantly about the world. Between the trees shot balls of yellowish white, unfolding like ribbon as they rolled. They splashed the rocks and put shining pools in the hollows among the moss. Spangles shone on Monkey’s hair and eyes; skins and faces all turned faintly radiant. The lake, like a huge reflector, flashed its light up into the heavens. The moon laid a coating of her ancient and transfiguring paint upon the enormous structure, festooning the entire sky. ‘She’s put the silver rivets in,’ said Jimbo.

  ‘Now we can go,’ whispered Rogers, ‘only, remember, it’s a giddy business, rather.’

  All three went fluttering after it, floating, rising, falling, like fish that explore a sunken vessel in their own transparent medium. The elastic structure bore them easily as it swung along. Its enormous rhythm lulled their senses with a deep and drowsy peace, and as they climbed from storey to storey it is doubtful if the children caught their leader’s words at all. There were no echoes — the spaces were too vast for that — and they swung away from spar to spar, and from rafter to rafter, as easily as acrobats on huge trapezes. Jimbo and Monkey shot upwards into space.