Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  For this was Sunday morning, yet Sunday had not — happened.

  HIDE-AND-SEEK

  III

  The garden clung close and soft about the Old Mill House as a mood clings about the emotion that has summoned it. Uncle Felix, Tim, and Judy were as much a part of it as the lilac, hyacinths, and tulips. Any minute, it seemed, the butterflies and bees and birds might settle on them too.

  For a bloom of exquisite, fresh wonder lay upon the earth, lay softly and secure as though it need never pass away. No fading of daylight could dim the glory of all the promises of joy the day contained, no hint of waning anywhere. “There is no hurry,” seemed written on the very leaves and blades of grass. “We’re all alive together! Come and — look!” The garden, lying there so gently in its beauty, hid a secret.

  Yet, though all was so calm and peaceful, there was nowhere the dulness of stagnation. Life brimmed the old-world garden with incessant movement that flashed dancing and rhythm even into things called stationary. The joy of existence ran riot everywhere without check or hindrance; there was no time — to pause and die. For the sunlight did not merely lie upon the air — it poured; wind did not blow — it breathed, ambushed one minute among the rose-trees just above the ground, and cantering next through the crests of the busy limes. The elms and horse-chestnuts that ordinarily grew now leaped — leaped upwards to the sun; while all flying things — birds, insects, bees, and butterflies — passed in and out like darting threads of colour, pinning the beauty into a patterned tapestry for all to see. The entire day was charged with the natural delight of endless, sheer existence. It was visible.

  Each detail, moreover, claimed attention, as though never seen properly before; no longer dulled by familiarity, but shaking off its “ordinary” appearance, proud to be looked at, naked and alive. The rivulet ran on, but did not run away; the gravel paths, soft as rolled brown sugar, led somewhere, but led in both directions, each of them inviting; the blue of the sky did not stay “up there and far away,” but dropped down close in myriad flakes, lifting the green carpet of the lawn to meet it. The day seemed like a turning circle that changed every moment to show another aspect of its gorgeous pattern, yet, while changing, only turned, unable to grow older or to pass away. There was something real at last, something that could be known, enjoyed — something of eternity about it. It was real.

  “Wherever has he got to?” exclaimed Judy, trying to pierce the distances of earth and sky with distended eyes. “He can’t be very far away, because — I kissed him.”

  Tim, sitting beside her on the grass, felt the exquisite mystery of it too. It was marvellous that any one could vanish in such a way. But he hesitated too. He felt uncertain about something. His thoughts flew off to that strange wood he loved to play in. He remembered the warning: “Beware the centre, if you enter; For once you’re there, you disappear!” But this explanation did not appeal to him as likely now. He stared at Judy and his uncle. Some one had touched him, making him warm and happy. He remembered that distinctly. He had caught a glimpse — though a glimpse too marvellous to be seen for long, even to be remembered properly. “But there’s no good looking unless we know where to look,” he remarked. “Is there?”

  “He’s just gone out like a candle,” whispered Judy.

  “Extror’nary,” declared her brother, hugging the excitement that thrilled his heart. “But he can’t be really lost. I’m sure of that!”

  And a great hush fell upon them all. Some one, it seemed, was listening; some one was watching; some one was waiting for them to move.

  “Uncle?” they said in the same breath together, then hung upon his answer.

  This authority hesitated a moment, looking about him expectantly as though for help.

  “I think,” he stated shyly, “I think — he’s — hiding.”

  Nothing more wonderful ever fell from grown-up lips. They had heard it said before — but only said. Now they realised it.

  “Hiding!” They stood up; they could see further that way. But they waited for more detail before showing their last approval.

  “Out here,” he added.

  They were not quite sure. They expected a disclosure more out of the ordinary. It might be true, but —

  “Hide-and-seek?” they repeated doubtfully. “But that’s just a game.”

  They were unsettled in their minds.

  “Not that kind,” he replied significantly. “I mean the kind the rain plays with the wind and leaves, the stream with the stones and roots along its bank, the rivers with the sea. That’s the kind of hide-and-seek I mean!”

  He chose instinctively watery symbols. And his tone conveyed something so splendid and mysterious that it was impossible to doubt or hesitate a moment longer.

  “Oh,” they exclaimed. “It never ends, you mean?”

  “Goes on for ever and ever,” he murmured. “The moment the river finds the sea it disappears and the sea begins to look. The wind never really finds the clouds, and the sun and the stars—”

  “We know!” they shouted, cutting his explanations short.

  “Come on then!” he cried. “We’ve got the hunt of our lives before us.” And he began to run about in a circle like an animal trying to catch its tail.

  “But are we to look for him, or he for us?” inquired the boy, after a preliminary canter over the flower-beds.

  “We for him.” They sprang to attention and clapped their hands.

  “It’s an enormous hide,” said Tim. “We may get lost ourselves. Better look out!”

  And then they waited for instructions. But the odd thing was that their uncle waited too. There was this moment’s hesitation. They looked to him. The old fixed habit asserted itself: a grown-up must surely know more than they did. How could it be otherwise? In this case, however, the grown-up seemed in doubt. He looked at them. It was otherwise.

  “It’s so long since I played this kind of hide-and-seek,” he murmured.

  “I’ve rather forgotten—”

  He stopped short. There certainly was a difficulty. Nobody knew in what direction to begin.

  “It’s a snopportunity,” exclaimed Judy. “I’m sure of that!”

  “We just look — everywhere!” cried Tim.

  A light broke over their uncle’s face as if a ray of sunshine touched it. His mind cleared. Some old, forgotten joy, wonderful as the dawn, burst into his heart, rose to fire in his eyes, flooded his whole being. A glory long eclipsed, a dream interrupted years ago, an uncompleted game of earliest youth — all these rose from their hiding-place and recaptured him, soul and body. He glanced at the children. These things he had recaptured, they, of course, had never lost; this state and attitude of wonder was their natural prerogative; he had recovered the ownership of the world, but they had possessed it always. They knew the whole business from beginning to end — only they liked to hear it stated. That was obviously his duty as a grown-up: to stick the label on.

  “Of course,” he whispered, deliciously enchanted. “You’ve got it. It’s the snopportunity! The great thing is to — look.”

  And, as if to prove him right, a flock of birds passed sweeping through the air above their heads, paused in mid-flight, wheeled, fluttered noisily a second, then scattered in all directions like leaves whirled by an eddy of loose, autumn wind.

  “Come on,” cried Tim, remembering perhaps the “dodgy” butterfly and trying to imitate it with his arms and legs. “I know where to go first. Just follow me!”

  “And there’ll be signs, remember,” Uncle Felix shouted as he followed.

  “Whoever finds a sign must let the others know at once.”

  They began with the feeling that they would discover the Stranger in a moment, sure of the places where he had tried cleverly to conceal himself, but soon began to realise that this was no ordinary game, and that he certainly knew of mysterious spots and corners they had never dreamed about. It was as Tim declared, “an enormous hide.” Come-Back Stumper’s cunning dive into bed was noth
ing compared to the skill with which this hider eluded their keen searching. There was another difference too. In Stumper’s case their interest had waned, they felt they had been cheated somehow, they knew themselves defeated and had given up the search. But here the interest was unfailing; it increased rather than diminished; they were ever on the very edge of finding him, and more than once they shrieked with joy, “I’ve got him!” — only to find they had been “very hot” but not quite hot enough. It was, like everything else upon this happy morning, endless.

  It continued and continued, as naturally as the rivulet that ran for ever downhill to find the sea, that nothing, it seemed, could put a stop to, much less an end. The feeling that time was passing utterly disappeared; weeks, months, and years lay waiting somewhere near, but could be left or taken, used or not used, as they pleased. To take a week and use it was like picking a flower that looked much prettier growing sweetly in the sunny earth. Why pick it? It came to an end that way! The minutes, the hours and days, morning, noon and night as well, the very seasons too, offered themselves, and — vanished. They did not come and go, they were just “there”; and to steal into one or other of them at will was like stealing into one mood after another as the heart decreed. They were mere counters in the gorgeous and unending game. They helped to hide the mysterious Stranger who was evidently in the centre round which all life lay grouped so marvellously. They hid and covered him as moods hide and cover the heart that wears them — temporarily. Uncle Felix and the children used them somewhat in this way, it seems, for while they looked and hunted in and out among them, any minute, day or season was recoverable at will. They did not pass away. It was the seekers who passed through them. To Uncle Felix, at any rate, it seemed a fact — this joyous sensation of immense duration, yet of nothing passing away: the bliss of utter freedom. He gasped to realise it. But the children did not gasp. They had always known that nothing ever really came to an end. “The weather’s still here,” he heard Judy calling across the lawn to Tim — as though she had just been looking among December snowdrifts and had popped back again into the fragrance of midsummer hayfields. “The Equator’s made of golden butterflies, all shining,” the boy called back, having evidently just been round the world and seen its gleaming waist….

  But none of them had found what they were looking for….

  They had looked in all the difficult places where a clever player would be most likely to conceal himself, yet in vain; there was no definite sign of him, no footprints on the flower-beds or along the edge of the shrubberies. The garden proper had been searched from end to end without result. The children had been to the particular hiding-places each knew best, Tim to the dirty nook between the ilex and the larder window, and Judy to the scooped-out trunk of the rotten elm, and both together to the somewhat smelly channel between the yew trees and a disused outhouse — all equally untenanted.

  In the latter gloomy place, in fact, they met. No sunlight pierced the dense canopy of branches; it was barely light enough to see. Judy and Tim advanced towards each other on tiptoe, confident of discovery at last. They only realised their mistake at five yards’ distance.

  “You!” exclaimed Tim, in a disappointed whisper. “I thought it was going to be a sign.” “I felt positive he’d be in here somewhere,” said Judy.

  “Perhaps we’re both signs,” they declared together, then paused, and held a secret discussion about it all.

  “He’s got a splendid hide,” was the boy’s opinion. “D’you think Uncle

  Felix knows anything? You heard what he said about signs…!”

  They decided without argument that he didn’t. He just went “thumping about” in the usual places. He’d never find him. They agreed it was very wonderful. Tim advanced his pet idea — it had been growing on him: “I think he knows some special place we’d never look in — a hole or something.” But Judy met the suggestion with superior knowledge: “He moves about,” she announced. “He doesn’t stop in a hole. He flies at an awful rate — from place to place. That’s — signs, I expect.”

  “Wings?” suggested Tim.

  Judy hesitated. “You remember — at breakfast, wasn’t it? — ages and ages ago — all had wings — those things—”

  She broke off and pointed significantly at the figure of Uncle Felix who was standing with his head cocked up at an awkward angle, staring into the sky. Shading his eyes with one hand, he was apparently examining the topmost branches of the tall horse-chestnuts.

  “He couldn’t have got up a tree, could he, or into a bird’s nest?” said the girl. She offered the suggestion timidly, yet her brother did not laugh at her. There was this strange feeling that the hider might be anywhere — simply anywhere. This was no ordinary game.

  “There’s such a lot,” Tim answered vaguely.

  She looked at him with intense admiration. The wonder of this marvellous game was in their hearts. The moment when they would find him was simply too extraordinary to think about.

  Judy moved a step closer in the darkness. “Can he get small, then — like that?” she whispered.

  But the question was too much for Tim.

  “Anyhow he gets about, doesn’t he?” was the reply, the vagueness of uncertain knowledge covering the disappointment. “There are simply millions of trees and nests and — and rabbit-holes all over the place.”

  They were silent for a moment. Then Judy asked, still more timidly:

  “I say, Tim?”

  “Well.”

  “What does he really look like? I can’t remember quite. I mean — shall we recognise him?”

  Tim stared at her. “My dear!” he gasped, as though the question almost shocked him. “Why, he touched me — on the head! I felt it!”

  Judy laughed softly; it was only that she wanted to remind herself of something too precious to be forgotten.

  “I kissed him!” she whispered, a hint of triumph in her voice and eyes.

  They stood staring at one another for a little while, weighing the proofs thus given; then Tim broke the silence with a question of his own. It was the result of this interval of reflection. It was an unexpected sort of question:

  “Do you know what it is we want?” he asked. “I do,” he added hurriedly, lest she should answer first.

  “What?” she said, seeing from his tone and manner that it was important.

  “We shall never, never find him this way,” he said decisively.

  “What?” she repeated with impatience.

  Tim lowered his voice. “What we want,” he said with the emphasis of true conviction, “is — a Leader.”

  Judy repeated the word after him immediately; it was obvious; why hadn’t she thought of it herself? “Of course,” she agreed. “That’s it exactly.”

  “We’re looking wrong somewhere,” her brother added, and they both turned their heads in the direction of Uncle Felix who was still standing on the lawn in a state of bewilderment, examining the treetops. He expected something from the air, it seemed. Perhaps he was looking for rain — he loved water so. But evidently he was not a proper leader; he was even more bewildered than themselves; he, too, was looking wrong somewhere, somehow. They needed some one to show them how and where to look. Instinctively they felt their uncle was no better at this mighty game than they were. If only somebody who knew and understood — a leader — would turn up!

  And it was just then that Judy clutched her brother by the arm and said in a startled whisper, “Hark!”

  They harked. Through the hum of leaves and insects that filled the air this sweet June morning they heard another sound — a voice that reached them even here beneath the dense roof of shrubbery. They heard words distinctly, though from far away, rising, falling, floating across the lawn as though some one as yet invisible were singing to himself.

  For it was the voice of a man, and it certainly was a song. Moreover, without being able to explain it exactly, they felt that it was just the kind of singing that belonged to the kind of day: it was
right and natural, a fresh and windy sound in the careless notes, almost as though it was a bird that sang. So exquisite was it, indeed, that they listened spellbound without moving, standing hand in hand beneath the dark bushes. And Uncle Felix evidently heard it too, for he turned his head; instead of examining the tree-tops he peered into the rose trees just behind him, both hands held to his ears to catch the happy song. There was both joy and laughter in the very sound of it:

  My secret’s in the wind and open sky;

  There is no longer any Time — to lose;

  The world is young with laughter; we can fly

  Among the imprisoned hours as we choose.

  The rushing minutes pause; an unused day

  Breaks into dawn and cheats the tired sun.

  The birds are singing. Hark! Come out and play!

  There is no hurry; life has just begun.

  The voice died away among the rose trees, and the birds burst into a chorus of singing everywhere, as if they carried on the song among themselves. Then, in its turn, their chorus also died away. Tim looked at his sister. He seemed about to burst — if not into song, then into a thousand pieces.

  “A leader!” he exclaimed, scarcely able to get the word out in his excitement. “Did you hear it?”

  “Tim!” she gasped — and they flew out, hand in hand still, to join their uncle in the sunshine.

  “Found anything?” he greeted them before they could say a word. “I heard some one singing — a man, or something — over there among the rose trees—”

  “And the birds,” interrupted Judy. “Did you hear them?”

  “Uncle,” cried Tim with intense conviction, “it’s a sign. I do believe it’s a sign—”

  “That’s exactly what it is,” a deep voice broke in behind them “ — a sign; and no mistake about it either.”

  All three turned with a start. The utterance was curiously slow; there was a little dragging pause between each word. The rose trees parted, and they found themselves face to face with some one whom they had seen twice before in their lives, and who now made his appearance for the third time therefore — the man from the End of the World: the Tramp.