Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  But he said it aloud apparently this time, for the others looked up with surprise. Monkey inquired what in the world he was talking about, only, not quite knowing himself, he could not answer her. Jimbo then, silent and preoccupied, found his thoughts still running on marriage. The talk about his sister’s hair going up no doubt had caused it. He remembered the young schoolmistress who had her meals at the Pension, and the Armenian student who had fallen in love with, and eventually married, her. It was the only courtship he had ever witnessed. Marriage and courtship seemed everywhere this morning.

  ‘I saw it all with Mlle. Perette,’ he informed the party. ‘It began already by his pouring out water for her and passing the salt and things. It always begins like that. He got shawls even when she was hot.’

  He looked so wise and grave that nobody laughed, and his sisters even seemed impressed rather. Jinny waited anxiously for more. If Mother did make an odd grimace, it was not noticed, and anyhow was cleverly converted into the swallowing of a yawn. There was a moment’s silence. Jimbo, proudly conscious that more was expected of him, provided it in his solemn little voice.

  ‘But it must be horrid,’ he announced, ‘to be married — always sticked to the same woman, like that.’ No sentence was complete without the inevitable ‘already’ or ‘like that,’ translated from the language he was more at home in. He thought in French. ‘I shall never marry myself (me marier) he decided, seeing his older sister’s eyes upon him wonderingly. Then, uncertain whether he had said an awfully wise or an awfully foolish thing, he added no more. Anyhow, it was the way a man should talk — with decision.

  ‘It’s bad enough to be a wife,’ put in Monkey, ‘but it must be worse still to have one!’

  But Jane Anne seemed shocked. A man, Jimbo reflected, can never be sure how his wisdom may affect the other sex; women are not meant to know everything. She rose with dignity and went upstairs towards the door, and Monkey, rippling with laughter, smacked her as she went. This only shocked her more.

  ‘That was a slight mistake behind,’ she said reprovingly, looking back; ‘you should have more reserve, I think,’ then firmly shut the door.

  All of which meant — so far as Jane Anne was concerned — that an important standard of conduct — grown-up, dignified, stately in a spiritual sense — was being transferred to her present behaviour, but transferred ineffectively. Elsewhere Jane Anne lived it, was it. She knew it, but could not get at the part of her that knew it. The transmitting machinery was imperfect. Connecting links and switches were somehow missing. Yearning was strong in her, that yearning which is common to all the world, though so variously translated. Once out of the others’ sight, she made a curious face. She went into her room between the kitchen and the Den, flung herself on the bed, and burst into tears. And the fears brought relief. They oiled the machinery perhaps. At any rate, she soon felt better.

  ‘I felt so enormous and unsettled,’ she informed Mother later, when the redness of her eyes was noticed and she received breathlessly a great comforting hug. I never get anything right.’

  ‘But you are right, darling,’ Mother soothed her, little guessing that she told the perfect truth. ‘You are all right, only you don’t know it. Everybody’s wumbled somewhere.’ And she advised her — ah, Mother was profoundly wise instinctively — not to think so much, but just go ahead as usual and do her work.

  For Mother herself felt a little queer that day, as though something very big and splendid lay hiding just beyond her reach. It surged up, vanished, then surged up again, and it came closest when she was not thinking of it. The least effort of the mind to capture it merely plunged her into an empty gulf where she could not touch bottom. The glorious thing ran instantly underground. She never ceased to be aware of it, but any attempt to focus resulted in confusion. Analysis was beyond her powers, yet the matter was very simple really, for only when thought is blank, and when the mind has forgotten to think, can inspiration come through into the heart. The intellect interprets afterwards, sets in order, regulates, examines the wonder and beauty the heart distils alchemically out of the eternal stream in which life everywhere dips its feet. If Reason interferes too soon, or during transmission, it only muddles and destroys. And Mother, hitherto, had always been so proud of being practical, prosaic, reasonable. She had deliberately suppressed the other. She could not change in a single day just because she had been ‘out’ and made discoveries last night. Oh, how simple it all was really, and yet how utterly most folk convert the wonder of it into wumbling!

  Like Jane Anne, her miniature, she felt splendid all day long, but puzzled too. It was almost like those religious attacks she had experienced in early youth. She had no definite creed by which she could explain it. Though nominally Christian, like her husband, she could not ascribe her joy to a ‘Holy Spirit,’ or to a ‘God’ working in her. But she was reminded of her early ‘religious attacks’ because she now experienced that large sensation of glorious peace and certainty which usually accompanies the phenomenon in the heart called ‘conversion.’ She saw life whole. She rested upon some unfailing central Joy. Come what might, she felt secure and ‘saved.’ Something everlasting lay within call, an ever-ready help in trouble; and all day she was vaguely conscious that her life lay hid with — with what? She never found the word exactly, for ‘Joy’ was but one aspect of it. She fell back upon the teachings of the big religions which are the police regulations of the world. Yet all creeds shared these, and her feeling was far deeper than mere moral teachings. And then she gave up thinking about it. Besides, she had much knitting to do.

  ‘It’s come to stay anyhow; I feel in sympathy with everybody,’ she said, and so dismissed vain introspection, keeping the simple happiness and peace. That was her strength, as it was also Jinny’s. A re-formation had begun.

  Jimbo, too, felt something in his microcosmic way, only he said little and asked no single question. It betrayed itself, however, to his Mother’s widened vision. He was all stirred up. He came back again from school at three o’clock — for it was Thursday and he did not take the singing lesson from three to four — put down his books with a very business-like air, forgot to kiss his Mother — and went out.

  ‘Where are you off to, Jimbo?’ She scented mischief. He was so affaire.

  He turned obediently at once, the face grave and puckered.

  ‘Going over to the carpenter’s house, Mummy.’

  ‘What for, dear? Why don’t you stay and play here?’ She had the feeling that her husband was absorbed in his work and would not like to be disturbed.

  The boy’s reply was evasive too. ‘I want to have a long discuss with

  Daddy,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t you have your long discuss with me instead?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘You see,’ he answered solemnly, ‘it’s about things.’

  ‘But Daddy’s working just now; he’ll be over to tea at four. Can’t it wait till then?’

  She understood too well to inquire what ‘things’ might be. The boy wished to speak with one of his own sex — as one man to another man.

  ‘When a man’s at work,’ she added, ‘he doesn’t like to be disturbed.’

  ‘All right,’ was the reply. ‘We can wait a little,’ and he settled down to other things in a corner by himself. His mind, clearly, was occupied with grave considerations he could not discuss with anybody, least of all with women and children. But, of course, busy men must not be interrupted. For a whole hour in his corner he made no sound, and hardly any movement.

  But Daddy did not come at four o’clock. He was evidently deep in work. And Mother did not send for him. The carpenter’s wife, she knew, would provide a cup of tea.

  He came late to supper, too, at the Pension, nodded to Mother with an expression which plainly said, ‘I’ve finished the story at last’; winked to his cousin, meaning, ‘It came out all right, I’m satisfied,’ and took his seat between Jinny and Mlle. Vuillemot, the governess who had earned her meal by givi
ng a music lesson that afternoon to a pensionnaire. Jinny looked sideways at him in a spirit of examination, and picked the inevitable crumb deftly from his beard.

  ‘Reminiscences!’ she observed slyly. ‘You did have some tea, then.’ Her long word was well chosen for once; her mind unusually logical, too.

  But Daddy made no reply; he went on eating whatever was set before him with an air of complete detachment; he devoured cold ham and salad automatically; and the children, accustomed to this absorption, ignored his presence. He was still in the atmosphere of his work, abstracted, lost to the outer world. They knew they would only, get wumbled answers to their questions and remarks, and they did not dare to tease him. From time to time he lifted his eyes — very bright they were — and glanced round the table, dimly aware that he was in the midst of a stream of noisy chatter, but unable to enter it successfully at any point. Mother, watching him, thought, ‘He’s sitting on air, he’s wrapped in light, he’s very happy’; and ate an enormous supper, as though an insatiable hunger was in her.

  The governess, Mlle. Vuillemot, who stood in awe of the ‘author’ in him, seized her opportunity. She loved to exchange a mot with a real writer, reading all kinds of unintended subtlety into his brief replies in dreadful French. To-night she asked him the meaning of a word, title of a Tauchnitz novel she had been reading — Juggernaut; but, being on his deaf side, he caught ‘Huguenot’ instead, and gave her a laboured explanation, strangled by appalling grammar.

  The historical allusions dazed her; the explanation ended on a date.

  She was sorry she had ventured, for it made her feel so ignorant.

  ‘Shuggairnort,’ she repeated bravely. She had a vague idea he had not properly heard before.

  But this time he caught ‘Argonaut,’ and swamped her then with classical exposition, during which she never took her eyes off him, and decided that he was far more wonderful than she had ever dreamed. He was; but not for the reasons she supposed.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said with meek gratitude at the end, ‘I thank you.’

  ‘Il n’y a pas de quar,’ replied Daddy, bowing; and the adventure came to an end. The others luckily had not heard it in full swing; they only caught the final phrase with which he said adieu. But it served its unwitting purpose admirably. It brought him back to the world about him. The spell was broken. All turned upon him instantly.

  ‘Snay pas un morsow de bong.’ Monkey copied his accent, using a sentence from a schoolboy’s letter in Punch. ‘It’s not a bit of good.’ Mother squelched her with a look, but Daddy, even if he noticed it, was not offended. Nothing could offend him to-night. Impertinence turned silvery owing to the way he took it. There was a marvellous light and sweetness about him. ‘He is on air,’ decided Mother finally. ‘He’s written his great Story — our story. It’s finished!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said casually to the others, as they stood talking a few minutes in the salon before going over to the Den, ‘if you’d like to hear it; but I’ve got a new creature for the Wumble Book. It came to me while I was thinking of something else—’

  ‘Thinking of one thing while you were thinking of another!’ cried

  Monkey. It described exaccurately his state of mind sometimes.

  ‘ — and I jotted down the lines on my cuff. So it’s not very perfect yet.’

  Mother had him by the arm quickly. Mlle. Vuillemot was hovering in his neighbourhood, for one thing. It seemed to her they floated over, almost flew.

  ‘It’s a Haystack Woman,’ he explained, once they were safely in the

  Den grouped about him. ‘A Woman of the Haystack who is loved by the

  Wind. That is to say, the big Wind loves her, but she prefers the

  younger, handsomer little Winds, and—’

  He was not allowed to finish. The children laid his cuff back in a twinkling, drawing up the coat sleeve.

  ‘But surely I know that,’ Mother was saying. ‘I’ve heard of her before somewhere. I wonder where?’ Others were saying the same thing. ‘It’s not new.’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Daddy, ‘for the idea only came to me this morning while I was—’

  ‘Thinking of something else,’ Monkey again finished the sentence for him.

  Mother felt that things were rushing about her from another world. She was vaguely conscious — deliciously, bewilderingly — of having heard this all before. Imaginative folk have built the certainty of a previous existence upon evidence as slight; for actual scenery came with it, and she saw dim forest trees, and figures hovering in the background, and bright atmosphere, and fields of brilliant stars. She felt happy and shining, light as a feather, too. It all was just beyond her reach, though; she could not recover it properly. ‘It must have been a dream she told me,’ was her conclusion, referring to Mlle. Lemaire. Her old friend was in it somewhere or other. She felt sure of that.

  She hardly heard, indeed, the silly lines her husband read aloud to the children. She liked the sound of his voice, though; it suggested music she had known far away — in her childhood.

  ‘It’s high spirits really,’ whispered Rogers, sitting beside her in the window. ‘It’s a sort of overflow from his story. He can’t do that kind of rhyme a bit, but it’s an indication—’

  ‘You think he’s got a fine big story this time?’ she asked under her breath; and Cousin Henry’s eyes twinkled keenly as he gave a significant nod and answered: ‘Rather! Can’t you feel the splendour all about him, the strength, the harmony!’

  She leaped at the word. Harmony exactly described this huge new thing that had come into the family, into the village, into the world. The feeling that they all were separate items, struggling for existence one against the other, had gone for ever. Life seemed now a single whole, an enormous pattern. Every one fitted in. There was effort — wholesome jolly effort, but no longer the struggle or fighting that were ugly. To ‘live carelessly’ was possible and right because the pattern was seen entire. It was to live in the whole.

  ‘Harmony,’ she repeated to herself, with a great swelling happiness in her heart, ‘that’s the nunculus of the matter.’

  ‘The what?’ he asked, overhearing her.

  ‘The nunculus,’ she repeated bravely, seeing the word in her mind, yet unable to get it quite. Rogers did not correct her.

  ‘Rather,’ was all he said. ‘Of course it is.’ What did the pronunciation of a word matter at such a time? Her version even sounded better than the original. Mother saw things bigger! Already she was becoming creative!

  ‘And you’re the one who brought it,’ she continued, but this time so low that he did not catch the words. ‘It’s you, your personality, your thinking, your atmosphere somehow that have brought this gigantic sense of peace and calm security which are au fond nothing but the consciousness of harmony and the power of seeing ugly details in their proper place — in a single coup d’oeil — and understanding them as parts of a perfect whole.’

  It was her thought really running on; she never could have found the words like that. She thought in French, too, for one thing. And, in any case, Rogers could not have heard her, for he was listening now to the uproar of the children as they criticised Daddy’s ridiculous effusion. A haystack, courted in vain by zephyrs, but finally taken captive by an equinoctial gale, strained nonsense too finely for their sense of what was right and funny. It was the pictures he now drew in the book that woke their laughter. He gave the stack a physiognomy that they recognised.

  ‘But, Mother, he’s making it look like you!’ cried Monkey — only Mother was too far away in her magnificent reverie to reply intelligently.

  I know her; she’s my friend,’ she answered vaguely. ‘So it’s all right.’

  ‘Majestic Haystack’ — it was the voice of the wind addressing her: —

  ’Majestic Haystack, Empress of my life,

  Your ample waist

  Just fits the gown I fancy for my wife,

  And suits my taste;

  Yet there you
stand, flat-footed, square and deep,

  An unresponsive, elephantine heap,

  Coquetting with the stars while I’m asleep,

  O cruel Stack!

  Coy, silent Monster, Matron of the fields,

  I sing to you;

  And all the fondest love that summer yields

  I bring to you;

  Yet there you squat, immense in your disdain,

  Heedless of all the tears of streaming rain

  My eyes drip over you — your breathless swain;

  O stony Stack!

  Stupendous Maiden, sweetest when oblong,

  Does inner flame

  Now smoulder in thy soul to hear my song

  Repeat thy name?

  Or does thy huge and ponderous heart object

  The advances of my passion, and reject

  My love because it’s airy and elect?

  O wily Stack!

  O crested goddess, thatched and top-knotted,

  O reckless Stack!

  Of wives that to the Wind have been allotted

  There is no lack;

  You’ve spurned my love as though I were a worm;

  But next September when I see thy form,

  I’ll woo thee with an equinoctial storm!

  I have that knack!’

  ‘Far less wumbled than usual,’ thought Rogers, as the children danced about the room, making up new ridiculous rhymes, of which ‘I’ll give you a whack’ seemed the most popular. Only Jane Anne was quiet. A courtship even so remote and improbable as between the Wind and a Haystack sent her thoughts inevitably in the dominant direction.

  ‘It must be nice when one is two,’ she whispered ambiguously to Mother with a very anxious face, ‘but I’m sure that if a woman can’t cook, love flies out of the window. It’s a positive calamity, you know.’

  But it was Cousin Henry’s last night in Bourcelles, and the spirit of pandemonium was abroad. Neither parent could say no to anything, and mere conversation in corners was out of the question. The door was opened into the corridor, and while Mother played her only waltz, Jimbo and Monkey danced on the splintery boards as though it were a parquet floor, and Rogers pirouetted somewhat solemnly with Jane Anne. She enjoyed it immensely, yet rested her hand very gingerly upon his shoulder. ‘Please don’t hold me quite so tight,’ she ventured. ‘I’ve never danced with a strange man before, you see’; and he no more laughed at her than he had laughed at Mother’s ‘nunculus.’ Even Jane Anne, he knew, would settle down comfortably before long into the great big pattern where a particular nook awaited — aye, needed — her bizarre, odd brilliance. The most angular fragments would nest softly, neatly in. A little filing, a little polishing, and all would fit together. To force would only be to break. Hurry was of the devil. And later, while Daddy played an ancient tune that was written originally as a mazurka yet did duty now for a two-step, he danced with Mother too, and the children paused to watch out of sheer admiration.