Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  She had suddenly an air of bouncing on her sofa.

  ‘Bravo, Mother,’ said her husband, looking at her, and there was a fondness in his voice that warmed and blessed and melted down into her. She had missed it so long that it almost startled her. ‘There’s the eternal old magic, Mother; you’re right. And if I had more of you in me — more of the creative feminine — I should do better work, I’m sure. You must give it to me.’

  She kept her eyes upon her needles. The others, being unobservant ‘mere men,’ did not notice that the stitches she made must have produced queer kind of stockings if continued. ‘We’ll be collaborators,’ Daddy added, in the tone of a boy building on the sands at Margate.

  ‘I will,’ she said in a low voice, ‘if only I know how.’

  ‘Well,’ he answered enthusiastically, looking from one to the other, delighted to find an audience to whom he could talk of his new dream, ‘you see, this is really a great jolly fairy-tale I’m trying to write. I’m blessed if I know where the ideas come from, or how they pour into me like this, but — anyhow it’s a new experience, and I want to make the most of it. I’ve never done imaginative work before, and — though it is a bit fantastical, mean to keep in touch with reality and show great truths that emerge from the commonest facts of life. The critics, of course, will blame me for not giving ’em the banal thing they expect from me, but what of that?’ He was dreadfully reckless.

  ‘I see,’ said Mother, gazing open-mindedly into his face; ‘but where does my help come in, please?’

  She leaned back, half-sighing, half-smiling. ‘Here’s my life’ — she held up her needles— ‘and that’s the soul of prosaic dulness, isn’t it?’

  ‘On the contrary,’ he answered eagerly, ‘it’s reality. It’s courage, patience, heroism. You’re a spring-board for my fairy-tale, though I’d never realised it before. I shall put you in, just as you are. You’ll be one of the earlier chapters.’

  ‘Every one’ll skip me, then, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Not a bit,’ he laughed gaily; ‘they’ll feel you all through the book. Their minds will rest on you. You’ll be a foundation. “Mother’s there,” they’ll say, “so it’s all right. This isn’t nonsense. We’ll read on.” And they will read on.’

  ‘I’m all through it, then?’

  ‘Like the binding that mothers the whole book, you see,’ put in Rogers, delighted to see them getting on so well, yet amazed to hear his cousin talk so openly with her of his idea.

  Daddy continued, unabashed and radiant. Hitherto, he knew, his wife’s attitude, though never spoken, had been very different. She almost resented his intense preoccupation with stories that brought in so little cash. It would have been better if he taught English or gave lessons in literature for a small but regular income. He gave too much attention to these unremunerative studies of types she never met in actual life. She was proud of the reviews, and pasted them neatly in a big book, but his help and advice on the practical details of the children’s clothing and education were so scanty. Hers seemed ever the main burden.

  Now, for the first time, though she distrusted fantasy and deemed it destructive of action, she felt something real. She listened with a kind of believing sympathy. She noticed, moreover, with keen pleasure, that her attitude fed him. He talked so freely, happily about it all. Already her sympathy, crudely enough expressed, brought fuel to his fires. Some one had put starlight into her.

  ‘He’s been hungry for this all along,’ she reflected; ‘I never realised it. I’ve thought only of myself without knowing it.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll put you in, old Mother,’ he went on, ‘and Rogers and the children too. In fact, you’re in it already,’ he chuckled, ‘if you want to know. Each of you plays his part all day long without knowing it.’ He changed his seat, going over to the window-sill, and staring down upon them as he talked on eagerly. ‘Don’t you feel,’ he said, enthusiasm growing and streaming from him, ‘how all this village life is a kind of dream we act out against the background of the sunshine, while our truer, deeper life is hidden somewhere far below in half unconsciousness? Our daily doings are but the little bits that emerge, tips of acts and speech that poke up and out, masquerading as complete? In that vaster sea of life we lead below the surface lies my big story, my fairy-tale — when we sleep.’ He paused and looked down questioningly upon them. ‘When we sleep,’ he repeated impressively, struggling with his own thought. ‘You, Mother, while you knit and sew, slip down into that enormous under-sea and get a glimpse of the coloured pictures that pass eternally behind the veil. I do the same when I watch the twilight from my window in reverie. Sunshine obliterates them, but they go just the same. You call it day- dreaming. Our waking hours are the clothes we dress the spirit in after its nightly journeys and activities. Imagination does not create so much as remember. Then, by transforming, it reveals.’

  Mother sat staring blankly before her, utterly lost, while her husband flung these lumps of the raw material of his story at her — of its atmosphere, rather. Even Rogers felt puzzled, and hardly followed what he heard. The intricacies of an artistic mind were indeed bewildering. How in the world would these wild fragments weave together into any intelligible pattern?

  ‘You mean that we travel when we sleep,’ he ventured, remembering a phrase that Minks had somewhere used, ‘and that our real life is out of the body?’ His cousin was taking his thought — or was it originally Minks’s? — wholesale.

  Mother looked up gratefully. ‘I often dream I’m flying,’ she put in solemnly. ‘Lately, in particular, I’ve dreamed of stars and funny things like that a lot.’

  Daddy beamed his pleasure. ‘In my fairy-tale we shall all see stars,’ he laughed, ‘and we shall all get “out.” For our thoughts will determine the kind of experience and adventure we have when the spirit is free and unhampered. And contrariwise, the kind of things we do at night — in sleep, in dream — will determine our behaviour during the day. There’s the importance of thinking rightly, you see. Out of the body is eternal, and thinking is more than doing — it’s more complete. The waking days are brief intervals of test that betray the character of our hidden deeper life. We are judged in sleep. We last for ever and ever. In the day, awake, we stand before the easel on which our adventures of the night have painted those patterns which are the very structure of our outer life’s behaviour. When we sleep again we re- enter the main stream of our spirit’s activity. In the day we forget, of course — as a rule, and most of us — but we follow the pattern just the same, unwittingly, because we can’t help it. It’s the mould we’ve made.’

  ‘Then your story,’ Rogers interrupted, ‘will show the effect in the daytime of what we do at night? Is that it?’ It amazed him to hear his cousin borrowing thus the entire content of his own mind, sucking it out whole like a ripe plum from its skin.

  ‘Of course,’ he answered; ‘and won’t it be a lark? We’ll all get out in sleep and go about the village together in a bunch, helping, soothing, cleaning up, and putting everybody straight, so that when they wake up they’ll wonder why in the world they feel so hopeful, strong, and happy all of a sudden. We’ll put thoughts of beauty into them — beauty, you remember, which “is a promise of happiness.”’

  ‘Ah!’ said Mother, seizing at his comprehensible scrap with energy.

  ‘That is a story.’

  ‘If I don’t get it wumbled in the writing down,’ her husband continued, fairly bubbling over. ‘You must keep me straight, remember, with your needles — your practical aspirations, that is. I’ll read it out to you bit by bit, and you’ll tell me where I’ve dropped a stitch or used the wrong wool, eh?’

  ‘Mood?’ she asked.

  ‘No, wool,’ he said, louder.

  There was a pause.

  ‘But you see my main idea, don’t you — that the sources of our life lie hid with beauty very very far away, and that our real, big, continuous life is spiritual — out of the body, as I shall call it. The waking-day life uses what
it can bring over from this enormous under-running sea of universal consciousness where we’re all together, splendid, free, untamed, and where thinking is creation and we feel and know each other face to face? See? Sympathy the great solvent? All linked together by thought as stars are by their rays. Ah! You get my idea — the great Network?’

  He looked straight into his wife’s eyes. They were opened very wide. Her mouth had opened a little, too. She understood vaguely that he was using a kind of shorthand really. These cryptic sentences expressed in emotional stenography mere odds and ends that later would drop into their proper places, translated into the sequence of acts that are the scaffolding of a definite story. This she firmly grasped — but no more.

  ‘It’s grand-a wonderful job,’ she answered, sitting back upon the sofa with a sigh of relief, and again bouncing a little in the process, so that Rogers had a horrible temptation to giggle. The tension of listening had been considerable. ‘People, you mean, will realise how important thinking is, and that sympathy — er—’ and she hesitated, floundering.

  ‘Is the great way to grow,’ Rogers quickly helped her, ‘because by feeling with another person you add his mind to yours and so get bigger. And ‘ — turning to his cousin—’ you’re taking starlight as the symbol of sympathy? You told me that the other day, I remember.’ But the author did not hear or did not answer; his thought was far away in his dream again.

  The situation was saved. All the bridges had borne well. Daddy, having relieved his overcharged mind, seemed to have come to a full stop. The Den was full of sunlight. A delightful feeling of intimacy wove the three humans together. Mother caught herself thinking of the far-off courtship days when their love ran strong and clear. She felt at one with her husband, and remembered him as lover. She felt in touch with him all over. And Rogers was such a comfortable sort of person. Tact was indeed well named — sympathy so delicately adjusted that it involved feeling-with to the point of actual touch.

  Daddy came down from his perch upon the window-sill, stretched his arms, and drew a great happy sigh.

  ‘Mother,’ he added, rising to go out, ‘you shall help me, dearie. We’ll write this great fairy-tale of mine together, eh?’ He stooped and kissed her, feeling love and tenderness and sympathy in his heart.

  ‘You brave old Mother!’ he laughed; ‘we’ll send Eddie to Oxford yet, see if we don’t. A book like that might earn 100 pounds or even 200 pounds.’

  Another time she would have answered, though not bitterly, ‘Meanwhile I’ll go on knitting stockings,’ or ‘Why not? we shall see what we shall see’ — something, at any rate, corrective and rather sober, quenching. But this time she said nothing. She returned the kiss instead, without looking up from her needles, and a great big thing like an unborn child moved near her heart. He had not called her ‘dearie’ for so long a time, it took her back to their earliest days together at a single, disconcerting bound. She merely stroked his shoulder as he straightened up and left the room. Her eyes then followed him out, and he turned at the door and waved his hand. Rogers, to her relief, saw him to the end of the passage, and her handkerchief was out of sight again before he returned. As he came in she realised even more clearly than before that he somehow was the cause of the changing relationship. He it was who brought this something that bridged the years — made old bridges safe to use again. And her love went out to him. He was a man she could open her heart to even.

  Patterns of starry beauty had found their way in and were working out in all of them. But Mother, of course, knew nothing of this. There was a tenderness in him that won her confidence. That was all she felt. ‘Oh, dear,’ she thought in her odd way, ‘what a grand thing a man is to be sure, when he’s got that!’ It was like one of Jane Anne’s remarks.

  As he came in she had laid the stocking aside and was threading a needle for darning and buttons, and the like.

  ‘“Threading the eye of a yellow star,” eh?’ he laughed, ‘and always at it. You’ve stirred old Daddy up this time. He’s gone off to his story, simply crammed full. What a help and stimulus you must be to him!’

  ‘I,’ she said, quite flabbergasted; ‘I only wish it were true — again.’

  The last word slipped out by accident; she had not meant it.

  But Rogers ignored it, even if he noticed it.

  ‘I never can help him in his work. I don’t understand it enough. I don’t understand it at all.’ She was ashamed to hedge with this man. She looked him straight in the eye.

  ‘But he feels your sympathy,’ was his reply. ‘It’s not always necessary to understand. That might only muddle him. You help by wishing, feeling, sympathising — believing.’

  ‘You really think so?’ she asked simply. ‘What wonderful thoughts you have I One has read, of course, of wives who inspired their husbands’ work; but it seemed to belong to books rather than to actual life.’

  Rogers looked at her thoughtful, passionate face a moment before he answered. He realised that his words would count with her. They approached delicate ground. She had an absurd idea of his importance in their lives; she exaggerated his influence; if he said a wrong thing its effect upon her would be difficult to correct.

  ‘Well,’ he said, feeling mischief in him, ‘I don’t mind telling you that I should never have understood that confused idea of his story but for one thing.’

  ‘What was that?’ she asked, relieved to feel more solid ground at last.

  ‘That I saw the thing from his own point of view,’ he replied; ‘because I have had similar thoughts all my life. I mean that he’s bagged it all unconsciously out of my own mind; though, of course,’ he hastened to add, ‘I could never, never have made use of it as he will. I could never give it shape and form.’

  Mother began to laugh too. He caught the twinkle in her eyes. She bounced again a little on the springy sofa as she turned towards him, confession on her lips at last.

  ‘And I do believe you’ve felt it too, haven’t you?’ he asked quickly, before she could change her mind.

  ‘I’ve felt something — yes,’ she assented; ‘odd, unsettled; new things rushing everywhere about us; the children mysterious and up to all sorts of games and wickedness; and bright light over everything, like- like a scene in a theatre, somehow. It’s exhilarating, but I can’t quite make it out. It can’t be right to feel so frivolous and jumpy- about at my age, can it?’

  ‘You feel lighter, eh?

  She burst out laughing. Mother was a prosaic person; that is, she had strong common-sense; yet through her sober personality there ran like a streak of light some hint of fairy lightness, derived probably from her Celtic origin. Now, as Rogers watched her, he caught a flash of that raciness and swift mobility, that fluid, protean elasticity of temperament which belonged to the fairy kingdom. The humour and pathos in her had been smothered by too much care. She accepted old age before her time. He saw her, under other conditions, dancing, singing, full of Ariel tricks and mischief — instead of eternally mending stockings and saving centimes for peat and oil and washerwomen. He even saw her feeding fantasy — poetry — to Daddy like a baby with a spoon. The contrast made him laugh out loud.

  ‘You’ve lived here five years,’ he went on, ‘but lived too heavily. Care has swamped imagination. I did the same-in the City-for twenty years. It’s all wrong. One has to learn to live carelessly as well as carefully. When I came here I felt all astray at first, but now I see more clearly. The peace and beauty have soaked into me.’ He hesitated an instant, then continued. Even if she didn’t grasp his meaning now with her brains, it would sink down into her and come through later.

  ‘The important things of life are very few really. They stand out vividly here. You’ve both vegetated, fossilised, atrophied a bit. I discovered it in my own case when I went back to Crayfield and—’

  He told her about his sentimental journey, and how he found all the creations of his childhood’s imagination still so alive and kicking in a forgotten backwater of his mind that they a
ll hopped out and took objective form — the sprites, the starlight express, the boundless world of laughter, fun and beauty.

  ‘And, without exactly knowing it, I suppose I’ve brought them all out here,’ he continued, seeing that she drank it in thirstily, ‘and — somehow or other — you all have felt it and responded. It’s not my doing, of course,’ he added; ‘it’s simply that I’m the channel as it were, and Daddy, with his somewhat starved artist’s hunger of mind, was the first to fill up. It’s pouring through him now in a story, don’t you see; but we’re all in it—’

  ‘In a way, yes, that’s what I’ve felt,’ Mother interrupted. ‘It’s all a kind of dream here, and I’ve just waked up. The unchanging village, the forests, the Pension with its queer people, the Magic Box—’

  ‘Like a play in a theatre,’ he interrupted, ‘isn’t it?’

  ‘Exactly,’ she laughed, yet half-seriously.

  ‘While your husband is the dramatist that writes it down in acts and scenes. You see, his idea is, perhaps, that life as we know it is never a genuine story, complete and leading to a climax. It’s all in disconnected fragments apparently. It goes backwards and forwards, up and down, in and out in a wumbled muddle, just anyhow, as it were. The fragments seem out of their proper place, the first ones often last, and vice versa. It seems inconsequential, because we only see the scraps that break through from below, from the true inner, deeper life that flows on steadily and dramatically out of sight. That’s what he means by “out of the body” and “sleep” and “dreaming.” The great pattern is too big and hidden for us to see it whole, just as when you knit I only see the stitches as you make them, although the entire pattern is in your mind complete. Our daily, external acts are the stitches we show to others and that everybody sees. A spiritual person sees the whole.’

  ‘Ah!’ Mother interrupted, ‘I understand now. To know the whole pattern in my mind you’d have to get in sympathy with my thought below. Is that it?’