Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  ’While the busy Pleiades,

  Sisters to the Hyades,

  Seven by seven,

  Across the heaven,

  Light desire

  With their fire,

  Flung from huge Orion’s hand,

  Sweetly linking

  All our thinking

  In the Net of Sympathy that brings back Fairyland!’

  No — neither Mother nor Daddy were aware of what had happened thus in the twinkling of an eye. Certainly neither guessed that another heart, far distant as the crow flies, had felt the stream of his vital, creative thinking, and had thus delicately responded and sent out a sympathetic message of belief. But neither did Adams and Leverrier, measuring the heavens, and calculating through years of labour the delicate interstellar forces, know that each had simultaneously caught Neptune in their net of stars — three thousand million miles away. Had they been ‘out,’ these two big, patient astronomers, they might have realised that they really worked in concert every night. But history does not relate that they slept well or ill; their biographies make no mention of what their ‘Underneaths’ were up to while their brains lay resting on the pillow; and private confession, if such exists, has never seen the light of print as yet. In that region, however, where Thinking runs and plays, thought dancing hand in hand with thought that is akin to it, the fact must surely have been known and recognised. They, too, travelled in the Starlight Express.

  Mother and Daddy realised it just then as little as children are aware of the loving thoughts of the parent that hovers protectingly about them all day long. They merely acknowledged that a prodigious thrill of happiness pulsed through both of them at once, feeling proud as the group in the tree-tops praised their increased brightness and admired the marvellous shining of the completed Pattern they trailed above their heads. But more than that they did not grasp. Nor have they ever grasped it perhaps. That the result came through later is proved, however, by the published story, and by the strange, sweet beauty its readers felt all over the world. But this belongs to the private working of inspiration which can never be explained, not even by the artist it has set on fire. He, indeed, probably understands it least of all.

  ‘Where are the trains, the Starlight Expresses?’ asked Mother.

  ‘Gone!’ answered Jimbo. ‘Gone to Australia where they’re wanted. It’s evening now down there.’

  He pointed down, then up. ‘Don’t you see? We must hurry.’ She looked across the lake where the monstrous wall of Alps was dimly visible. The sky was brightening behind them. Long strata of thin cloud glimmered with faintest pink. The stars were rapidly fading. ‘What ages you’ve been!’ he added.

  ‘And where’s Tante Anna?’ she inquired quickly, looking for her brilliant friend.

  ‘She’s come and gone a dozen times while you’ve been skylarking somewhere else,’ explained Monkey with her usual exaggeration. ‘She’s gone for good now. She sleeps so badly. She’s always waking up, you know.’ Mother understood. Only too well she knew that her friend snatched sleep in briefest intervals, incessantly disturbed by racking pain.

  A stream of light flashed past her, dashing like a meteor towards the village and disappearing before she could see the figure.

  ‘There goes Jinny,’ cried some one, ‘always working to the very last.

  The interfering sun’ll catch her if she doesn’t look out!’

  There was movement and hurry everywhere. Already the world ran loose and soft in colour. Birds, just awake, were singing in the trees below. Several passed swiftly overhead, raking the sky with a whirring rush of wings. Everybody was asking questions, urging return, yet lingering as long as possible, each according to his courage. To be caught ‘out’ by the sun meant waking with a sudden start that made getting out of bed very difficult and might even cause a headache.

  Rogers alone seemed unperturbed, unhurried, for he was absorbed in a discovery that made him tremble. Noting the sudden perfection of his cousin’s Pattern, he had gone closer to examine it, and had — seen the starry figure. Instantly he forgot everything else in the world. It seemed to him that he had suddenly found all he had ever sought. He gazed into those gentle eyes of amber and felt that he gazed into the eyes of the Universe that had taken shape in front of him. Floating up as near as he could, he spoke —

  ‘Where do you come from — from what star?’ he asked softly in an ecstasy of wonder.

  The tiny face looked straight at him and smiled.

  ‘From the Pleiades, of course, — that little group of star-babies as yet unborn.’

  ‘I’ve been looking for you for ever,’ he answered.

  ‘You’ve found me,’ sang the tiny voice. ‘This is our introduction. Now, don’t forget. There was a lost Pleiad, you know. Try to remember me when you wake.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’ He meant in the Pattern.

  The star-face rippled with laughter.

  ‘It’s yours — your Scheme. He’s given it perfect shape for you, that’s all. Don’t you recognise it? But it’s my Story as well. …’

  A ray with crimson in it shot out just then across the shoulder of the Blumlisalp, and, falling full upon the tiny face, it faded out; the Pattern faded with it; Daddy vanished too. On the little azure winds of dawn they flashed away. Jimbo, Monkey, and certain of the Sprites alone held on, but the tree-tops to which they clung were growing more and more slippery every minute. Mother, loth to return, balanced bravely on the waving spires of a larch. Her sleep that night had been so deep and splendid, she struggled to prolong it. She hated waking up too early.

  ‘The Morning Spiders! Look out!’ cried a Sprite, as a tiny spider on its thread of gossamer floated by. It was the Dustman’s voice. Catching the Gypsy with one arm and the Tramp with the other, all three instantly disappeared.

  ‘But where’s my Haystack friend?’ called Mother faintly, almost losing her balance in the attempt to turn round quickly.

  ‘Oh, she’s all right,’ the Head Gardener answered from a little distance where he was burning something. ‘She just “stays put” and flirts with every wind that comes near her. She loves the winds. They know her little ways.’ He went on busily burning up dead leaves he had been collecting all night long — dead, useless thoughts he had found clogging a hundred hearts and stopping outlets.

  ‘Look sharp!’ cried a voice that fell from the sky above them.

  ’Here come the Morning Spiders,

  On their gossamer outriders!’

  This time it was the Lamplighter flashing to and fro as he put the stars out one by one. He was in a frantic hurry; he extinguished whole groups of them at once. The Pleiades were the last to fade.

  Rogers heard him and came back into himself. For his ecstasy had carried him even beyond the region of the freest ‘thinking.’ He could give no account or explanation of it at all. Monkey, Jimbo, Mother, and he raced in a line together for home and safety. Above the fields they met the spiders everywhere, the spiders that bring the dawn and ride off into the Star Cave on lost rays and stray thoughts that careless minds have left scattered about the world.

  And the children, as they raced and told their mother to ‘please move a little more easily and slipperily,’ sang together in chorus: —

  ’We shall meet the Morning Spiders,

  The fairy-cotton riders,

  Each mounted on a star’s rejected ray;

  With their tiny nets of feather

  They collect our thoughts together,

  And on strips of windy weather

  Bring the Day. …’

  ‘That’s stolen from you or Daddy,’ Mother began to say to Rogers — but was unable to complete the flash. The thought lay loose behind her in the air.

  A spider instantly mounted it and rode it off.

  Something brushed her cheek. Riquette stood rover her, fingering her face with a soft extended paw.

  ‘But it surely can’t be time yet to get up!’ she murmured. ‘I’ve only just fallen asleep, it seems.
’ She glanced at her watch upon the chair beside the bed, saw that it was only four o’clock, and then turned over, making a space for the cat behind her shoulder. A tremendous host of dreams caught at her sliding mind. She tried to follow them. They vanished. ‘Oh dear!’ she sighed, and promptly fell asleep again. But this time she slept lightly. No more adventures came. She did not dream. And later, when Riquette woke her a second time because it was half-past six, she remembered as little of having been ‘out’ as though such a thing had never taken place at all.

  She lit the fire and put the porridge saucepan on the stove. It was a glorious July morning. She felt glad to be alive, and full of happy, singing thoughts. ‘I wish I could always sleep like that!’ she said. ‘But what a pity one has to wake up in the end!’

  And then, as she turned her mind toward the coming duties of the day, another thought came to her. It was a very ordinary, almost a daily thought, but there seemed more behind it than usual. Her whole heart was in it this time —

  ‘As soon as the children are off to school I’ll pop over to mother, and see if I can’t cheer her up a bit and make her feel more happy. Oh dear!’ she added, ‘life is a bag of duties, whichever way one looks at it!’ But she felt a great power in her that she could face them easily and turn each one into joy. She could take life more bigly, carelessly, more as a whole somehow. She was aware of some huge directing power in her ‘underneath.’ Moreover, the ‘underneath’ of a woman like Mother was not a trifle that could be easily ignored. That great Under Self, resting in the abysses of being, rose and led. The pettier Upper Self withdrew ashamed, passing over the reins of conduct into those mighty, shadowy hands.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades,

  Or loose the bands of Orion?

  Book of Job.

  The feeling that something was going to happen — that odd sense of anticipation — which all had experienced the evening before at tea-time had entirely vanished, of course, next morning. It was a mood, and it had passed away. Every one had slept it off. They little realised how it had justified itself. Jane Anne, tidying the Den soon after seven o’clock, noticed the slip of paper above the mantelpiece, read it over— ‘The Starlight Express will start to-night. Be reddy!’ — and tore it down. ‘How could that. have amused us!’ she said aloud, as she tossed it into the waste-paper basket. Yet, even while she did so, some stray sensation of delight clutched at her funny little heart, a touch of emotion she could not understand that was wild and very sweet. She went singing about her work. She felt important and grown- up, extraordinarily light-hearted too. The things she sang made up their own words — such odd snatches that came she knew not whence. An insect clung to her duster, and she shook it out of the window with the crumbs and bits of cotton gathered from the table-cloth.

  ’Get out, you Morning Spider,

  You fairy-cotton rider!’

  she sang, and at the same minute Mother opened the bedroom door and peeped in, astonished at the unaccustomed music. In her voluminous dressing-gown, her hair caught untidily in a loose net, her face flushed from stooping over the porridge saucepan, she looked, thought Jinny, ‘like a haystack somehow.’ Of course she did not say it. The draught, flapping at her ample skirts, added the idea of a covering tarpaulin to the child’s mental picture. She went on dusting with a half-offended air, as though Mother had no right to interrupt her with a superintending glance like this.

  ‘You won’t forget the sweeping too, Jinny?’ said Mother, retiring again majestically with that gliding motion her abundant proportions achieved so gracefully.

  ‘Of course I won’t, Mother,’ and the instant the door was closed she fell into another snatch of song, the words of which flowed unconsciously into her mind, it seemed —

  ’For I’m a tremendously busy Sweep,

  Dusting the room while you’re all asleep,

  And shoving you all in the rubbish heap,

  Over the edge of the tiles’

  — a little wumbled, it is true, but its source unmistakable.

  And all day long, with every one, it was similar, this curious intrusion of the night into the day, the sub-conscious into the conscious — a kind of subtle trespassing. The flower of forgotten dreams rose so softly to the surface of consciousness that they had an air of sneaking in, anxious to be regarded as an integral part of normal waking life. Like bubbles in water they rose, discharged their puff of fragrant air, and disappeared again. Jane Anne, in particular, was simply radiant all day long, and more than usually clear-headed. Once or twice she wumbled, but there was big sense in her even then. It was only the expression that evaded her. Her little brain was a poor transmitter somehow.

  ‘I feel all endowed to-day,’ she informed Rogers, when he congratulated her later in the day on some cunning act of attention she bestowed upon him. It was in the courtyard where they all sat sunning themselves after dejeuner, and before the younger children returned to afternoon school.

  ‘I feel emaciated, you know,’ she added, uncertain whether emancipated was the word she really sought.

  ‘You’ll be quite grown-up,’ he told her, ‘by the time I come back to little Bourcelles in the autumn.’ Little Bourcelles! It sounded, the caressing way he said it, as if it lay in the palm of his big brown hand.

  ‘But you’ll never come back, because you’ll never go,’ Monkey chimed in. ‘My hair, remember—’

  ‘My trains won’t take you,’ said Jimbo gravely.

  ‘Oh, a train may take you,’ continued Monkey, ‘but you can’t leave.

  Going away by train isn’t leaving.’

  ‘It’s only like going to sleep,’ explained her brother. You’ll come back every night in a Starlight Express—’

  ‘Because a Starlight Express takes passengers — whether they like it or not. You take an ordinary train, but a starlight train takes you!’ added Monkey.

  Mother heard the words and looked up sharply from her knitting. Something, it seemed, had caught her attention vividly, though until now her thoughts had been busy with practical things of quite another order. She glanced keenly round at the faces, where all sat grouped upon the stone steps of La Citadelle. Then she smiled curiously, half to herself. What she said was clearly not what she had first meant to say.

  ‘Children, you’re not sitting on the cold stone, are you?’ she inquired, but a little absent-mindedly.

  ‘We’re quite warm; we’ve got our thick under-neathies on,’ was the reply. They realised that only part of her mind was in the, question, and that any ordinary answer would satisfy her.

  Mother resumed her knitting, apparently satisfied.

  But Jinny, meanwhile, had been following her own train of thought, started by her cousin’s description of her as ‘grown-up.’ The picture grew big and gracious in her mind.

  ‘I wonder what I shall do when my hair goes up?’ she observed, apparently a propos de bottes. It was the day, of course, eagerly, almost feverishly, looked forward to.

  ‘Hide your head in a bag probably,’ laughed her sister. Jinny flushed; her hair was not abundant. Yet she seemed puzzled rather than offended.

  ‘Never mind,’ Rogers soothed her. ‘The day a girl puts up her hair, a thousand young men are aware of it, — and one among them trembles.’ The idea of romance seemed somehow in the air.

  ‘Oh, Cousinenry!’ She was delighted, comforted, impressed; but perplexity was uppermost. Something in his tone of voice prevented impudent comment from the others.

  ‘And all the stars grow a little brighter,’ he added. ‘The entire universe is glad.’

  ‘I shall be a regular company promoter!’ she exclaimed, nearer to wit than she knew, yet with only the vaguest inkling of what he really meant.

  ‘And draw up a Memorandum of Agreement with the Milky Way,’ he added, gravely smiling.

  He had just been going to say ‘with the Pleiades,’ when something checked him. A wave of strange emotion swept him. It rose from the de
pths within, then died away as mysteriously as it came. Like exquisite music heard from very far away, it left its thrill of beauty and of wonder, then hid behind the breath of wind that brought it. ‘The whole world, you see, will know,’ he added under his breath to the delighted child. He looked into her queer, flushed face. The blue eyes for a moment had, he thought, an amber tinge. It was a mere effect of light, of course; the sun had passed behind a cloud. Something that he ought to have known, ought to have remembered, flashed mockingly before him and was gone. ‘One among them trembles,’ he repeated in his mind. He himself was trembling.

  ‘The Morning Spiders,’ said some one quietly and softly, ‘are standing at their stable doors, making faces at the hidden sun.’

  But he never knew who said it, or if it was not his own voice speaking below his breath. He glanced at Jimbo. The small grave face wore an air of man-like preoccupation, as was always the case when he felt a little out of his depth in general conversation. He assumed it in self-protection. He never exposed himself by asking questions. The music of that under-voice ran on: —

  ’Sweet thoughts, like fine weather,

  Bind closely together

  God’s stars with the heart of a boy.’