Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  But when I talked with my cousin after dinner, and consoled her with the assurance that Aileen was gifted with an unusually vivid imagination which time and ourselves must train to some more practical end — while I said all this, and more besides, two sentences the child had made use of kept ringing in my head. One — when she told me with merciless perception that I was only “making-up” stories; and the other, when she had informed me with that quiet rush of certainty and conviction that “Philip” was — myself.

  III

  A big-game expedition of some months put an end temporarily to my avuncular responsibilities; at least so far as action was concerned, for there were certain memories that held curiously vivid among all the absorbing turmoil of our camp life. Often, lying awake in my tent at night, or even following the tracks of our prey through the jungle, these pictures would jump out upon me and claim attention. Aileen’s little face of suffering would come between me and the sight of my rifle; or her assurance that I was the “Philip” of her imagination would attack me with an accent of reality that seemed queer enough until I analyzed it away. And more than once I found myself thinking of her dark and serious countenance when she told how “Philip” had loved her to the end, and would have saved her if they had not cut off his hands. My own Imagination, it seemed, was weaving the details of her child’s invention into a story, for I never could think of this latter detail without positively experiencing a sensation of smarting pain in my wrists...! When I returned to England in the spring they had moved, I found, into a house by the sea, a tumbled-down old rookery of a building my cousin s father had rarely occupied during his lifetime, nor she been able to let since it had passed into her possession. An urgent letter summoned me thither, and I traveled down the very day after my arrival to the bleak Norfolk coast with a sense of foreboding in my heart that increased almost to a presentiment when the cab entered the long drive and I recognized the grey and gloomy walls of the old mansion. The sea air swept the gardens with its salt wash, and the moan of the surf was audible even up to the windows.

  “I wonder what possessed her to come here?” was the first thought in my mind. “Surely the last place in the world to bring a morbid or too-sensitive child to!” My further dread that something had happened to the little child I loved so tenderly was partly dispelled, however, when my cousin met me at the door with open arms and smiling face, though the welcome I soon found, was chiefly due to the relief she gained from my presence. Something had happened to little Aileen, though not the final disaster that I dreaded. She had suffered from nervous attacks of so serious a character during my absence that the doctor had insisted upon sea air, and my cousin, not with the best judgment, had seized upon the idea of making the old house serve the purpose. She had made a wing habitable for a few weeks; she hoped the entire change of scene would fill the little girl’s mind with new and happier ideas. Instead — the result had been exactly the reverse. The child had wept copiously and hysterically the moment she set eyes on the old walls and smelt the odor of the sea.

  But before we had been talking ten minutes there was a cry and a sound of rushing footsteps, and a scampering figure, with dark, flying hair, had dived headlong into my arms, and Aileen was sobbing —

  “Oh, you’ve come, you’ve come at last! I am so awfully glad. I thought it would be the same as before, and you’d get caught.” She ran from me next and kissed her mother, laughing with pleasure through her tears, and was gone from the room as quickly as she had come.

  I caught my cousin’s glance of frightened amazement.

  “Now isn’t that odd?” she exclaimed in a hushed voice. “Isn’t that odd? Those are the tears of happiness, — the first time I’ve seen her smile since we came here last week.”

  But it rather nettled me, I think. “Why odd?” I asked. “Aileen loves me, it’s delightful to—”

  “Not that, not that!” she said quickly. “It’s odd, I meant, she should have found you out so soon. She didn’t even know you were back in England, and I’d sent her off to play on the sands with Kempster and the dogs so as to be sure of an opportunity of telling you everything before you saw her.”

  Our eyes met squarely, yet not with complete sympathy or comprehension.

  “You see, she knew perfectly well you were here — the instant you came.”

  “But there’s nothing in that,” I asserted. “Children know things just as animals do. She scented her favorite uncle from the shore like a dog!” And I laughed in her face.

  That laugh perhaps was a mistake on my part. Its well-meant cheerfulness was possibly overdone. Even to myself it did not ring quite true.

  “I do believe you are in league with her — against me,” was the remark that greeted it, accompanied by an increase of that expression of fear in the eyes I had divined the moment we met upon the doorstep. Finding nothing genuine to say in reply, I kissed the top of her head.

  In due course, after the tea things had been removed, I learned the exact state of affairs, and even making due allowance for my cousin’s excited exaggerations, there were things that seemed to me inexplicable enough on any ground of normal explanation. Slight as the details may seem when set down seriatim, their cumulative effect upon my own mind touched an impressive and disagreeable climax that I did my best to conceal from outward betrayal. As I sat in the great shadowy room, listening to my cousin’s jerky description of “childish” things, it was borne in upon me that they might well have the profoundest possible significance. I watched her eager, frightened face, lit only by the flickering flames the sharp spring evening made necessary, and thought of the subject of our conversation flitting about the dreary halls and corridors of the huge old building, a little figure of tragedy, laughing, crying and dreaming in a world entirely her own — and there stirred in me an unwelcome recognition of those mutinous and disheveled forces that lie but thinly screened behind the commonplace details of life and that now seemed ready to burst forth and play their mysterious rôle before our very eyes.

  “Tell me exactly what has happened,” I urged, with decision but sympathy.

  “There’s so little, when it’s put into words, George; but — well, the thing that first upset me was that she — knew the whole place, though she’s never been here before. She knew every passage and staircase, many of them that I did not know myself; she showed us an underground passage to the sea, that father himself didn’t know; and she actually drew a scrawl of the house as it used to be three hundred years ago when the other wing was standing where the copper beeches grow now. It’s accurate, too.”

  It seemed impossible to explain to a person of my cousin’s temperament the theories of prenatal memory and the like, or the possibility of her own knowledge being communicated telepathically to the brain of her own daughter. I said therefore very little, but listened with an uneasiness that grew horribly.

  “She found her way about the gardens instantly, as if she had played in them all her life; and she keeps drawing figures of people — men and women — in old costumes, the sort of thing our ancestors wore, you know—”

  “Well, well, well!” I interrupted impatiently; “what can be more natural? She is old enough to have seen pictures she can remember enough to copy — ?”

  “Of course,” she resumed calmly, but with a calmness due to the terror that ate her very soul and swallowed up all minor emotions; “of course, but one of the faces she gets is — a portrait.”

  She rose suddenly and came closer to me across the big stone hearth, lowering her voice to a whisper, “George,” she whispered, “it’s the very image of that awful — de Lorne!

  The announcement, I admit, gave me a thrill, for that particular ancestor on my father’s side had largely influenced my boyhood imagination by the accounts of his cruelty wickedness in days gone by. But I think now the shiver that ran down my back was due to the thought of my little Aileen practicing her memory and pencil upon so vile an object. That, and my cousin’s pale visage of alarm, combined
to shake me. I said, however, what seemed wise and reasonable at the moment.

  “You’ll be claiming next, Theresa, that the house is haunted,” I suggested.

  She shrugged her shoulders with an indifference that was very eloquent of the strength of this other more substantial terror.

  “That would be so easy to deal with,” she said, without even looking up. “A ghost stays in one place. Aileen could hardly take it about with her.”

  I think we both enjoyed the pause that followed. It gave me time to collect my forces for what I knew was coming. It gave her time to get her further facts into some pretence of coherence.

  “I told you about the belt?” she asked at length, weakly, and as though unutterable things she longed to disown forced the question to her unwilling lips.

  The sentence shot into me like the thrust of a naked sword.... I shook my head.

  “Well, even a year or two ago she had that strange dislike of wearing a belt with her frocks. We thought it was a whim, and did not humor her. Belts are necessary, you know, George,” she tried to smile feebly. “But now it has come to such a point that I’ve had to give in.”

  “She dislikes a belt round her waist, you mean?” I asked, fighting a sudden inexplicable spasm in my heart.

  “It makes her scream. The moment anything encloses her waist she sets up such a hubbub, and struggles so, and hides away, and I’ve been obliged to yield.”

  “But really, Theresa — !”

  “She declares it fastens her in, and she will never get free again, and all kinds of other things. Oh, her fear is dreadful, poor child. Her face gets that sort of awful grey, don’t you know? Even Kempster, who if anything is too firm, had to give in.”

  “And what else, pray?” I disliked hearing these details intensely. It made me ache with a kind of anger that I could not at once relieve the child’s pain.

  “The way she spoke to me after Dr. Hale had left — you know how awfully kind and gentle he is, and how Aileen likes him and even plays with him and sits on his knee? Well, he was talking about her diet, regulating it and so forth, teasing her that she mustn’t eat this and that, and the rest of it, when she turned that horrid grey again and jumped oft his knee with her scream - that thin wailing scream she has that goes through me like a knife, George — and flew to the nursery and locked herself in with — what do you think? — with all the bread, apples, cold meat and other eatables she could find!”

  “Eatables!” I exclaimed, aware of another spasm of vivid pain. “When I coaxed her out, hours later, she was trembling like a leaf and fell into my arms utterly exhausted, and all I could get her to tell me was this — which she repeated again and again with a sort of beseeching, appealing tone that made my heart bleed—”

  She hesitated an instant.

  “Tell me at once.”

  ‘“I shall starve again, I shall starve again,’ were the words she used. She kept repeating it over and over between her sobs. ‘I shall be without anything to eat. I shall starve!’ And, would you believe it, while she hid in that nursery cupboard she had crammed so much cake and stuff into her little self that she was violently sick for a couple of days. Moreover, she now hates the sight of Dr. Hale so much, poor man, that it’s useless for him to see her. It does more harm than good.”

  I had risen and begun to walk up and down the hall while she told me this. I said very little. In my mind strange thoughts tore and raced, standing erect before me out of unbelievably immense depths of shadow. There was nothing very pregnant I found to say, however, for theories and speculations are of small avail as practical help — unless two minds see eye to eye in them.

  “And the rest?” I asked gently, coming behind the chair and resting both hands upon her shoulders. She got up at once and faced me. I was afraid to show too much sympathy lest the tears should come.

  “Oh, George,” she exclaimed, “I am relieved you have come. You are really strong and comforting. To feel your great hands on my shoulders gives me courage. But, you know, truly and honestly I am frightened out of my very wits by the child—”

  “You won’t stay here, of course?”

  “We leave at the end of this week,” she replied. ‘You will not desert me till then, I know. And Aileen will be all right as long as you are here, for you have the most extraordinary effect on her for good.”

  “Bless her little suffering imagination,” I said. “You can count on me. I’ll send to town tonight for my things.”

  And then she told me about the room. It was simple enough, but it conveyed a more horrible certainty of something true than all the other details put together. For there was a room on the ground floor, intended to be used on wet days when the nursery was too far for muddy boots —— and into this room Aileen could not go. Why? No one could tell. The facts were that the first moment the child ran in, her mother close behind, she stopped, swayed, and nearly fell. Then, with shrieks that were even heard outside by the gardeners sweeping the gravel path, she flung herself headlong against the wall, against a particular corner of it that is to say, and beat it with her little fists until the skin broke and left stains upon the paper. It all happened in less than a minute. The words she cried so frantically her mother was too shocked and flabbergasted to remember, or even to hear properly. Aileen nearly upset her in her bewildered efforts next to find the door and escape. And the first thing she did when escape was accomplished, was to drop in a dead faint upon the stone floor of the passage outside.

  “Now, is that all make-believe?” whispered Theresa, unable to keep the shudder from her lips. “Is that all merely part of a story she has make up and plays a part in?”

  We looked one another straight in the eyes for a space of some seconds. The dread in the mother’s heart leaped out to swell a terror in my own — a terror of another kind, but greater.

  “It is too late tonight,” I said at length, “for it would only excite her unnecessarily; but tomorrow I will talk with Aileen. And — if it seems wise — I might — I might be able to help in other ways too,” I added. So I did talk to her — next day.

  IV

  I always had her confidence, this little dark-eyed maid, and there was an intimacy between us that made play and talk very delightful. Yet as a rule, without giving myself a satisfactory reason, I preferred talking with her in the sunlight. She was not eerie, bless her little heart of queerness and mystery, but she had a way of suggesting other ways of life and existence shouldering about us that made me look round in the dark and wonder what the shadows concealed or what waited round the next corner.

  We were on the lawn, where the bushy yews drop thick shade, the soft air making tea possible out of doors, my cousin out driving to distant calls; and Aileen had invited herself and was messing about with my manuscripts in a way that vexed me, for I had been reading my fairy tales to her and she kept asking me questions that shamed my limited powers. I remember, too, that I was glad the collie ran to and fro past us, scampering and barking after the swallows on the lawn.

  “Only some of your stories are true, aren’t they?” she asked abruptly.

  “How do you know that, young critic?” I had been waiting for an opening supplied by herself. Anything forced on my part she would have suspected.

  “Oh, I can tell.”

  Then she came up and whispered without any hint of invitation on my part, “Uncle, it is true, isn’t it, that I’ve been in other places with you? And isn’t it only the things we did there that make the true stories?”

  The opening was delivered all perfect and complete into my hands. I cannot conceive how it was I availed myself of it so queerly — I mean, how it was that the words and the name slipped out of their own accord as though I was saying something in a dream.

  “Of course, my little Lady Aileen, because in imagination, you see, we—”

  But before I had time to finish the sentence with which I hoped to coax out the true inwardness of her own distress, she was upon me in a heap.

  �
�Oh,” she cried, with a sudden passionate outburst, “then you do know my name? You know all the story — our story!

  She was very excited, face flushed, eyes dancing, all the emotions of a life charged to the brim with experience playing through her little person.

  “Of course, Miss Inventor, I know your name,” I said quickly, puzzled, and with a sudden dismay that was hideous, clutching at my throat.

  “And all that we did in this place?” she went on, pointing with increased excitement to the thick, ivy-grown walls of the old house.

  My own emotion grew extraordinarily, a swift, rushing uneasiness upsetting all my calculations. For it suddenly came back to me that in calling her “Lady Aileen” I had not pronounced the name quite as usual. My tongue had played a trick with the consonants and vowels, though at the moment of utterance I had somehow failed to notice the change. “Aileen” and “Helen” are almost interchangeable sounds....! And it was “Lady Helen” that I had actually said.

  The discovery took my breath away for an instant — and the way she had leaped upon the name to claim it.

  “No one else, you see, knows me as ‘Lady Helen,”’ she continued whispering, “because that’s only in our story, isn’t it? And now I’m just Aileen Langton. But as long as you know, it’s all right. Oh, I am so awf’ly glad you knew, most awf’ly, awf’ly glad.”

  I was momentarily at a loss for words. Keenly desirous to guide the child’s “pain-stories” into wiser channels, and thus help her to relief, I hesitated a moment for the right clue. I murmured something soothing about “our story,” while in my mind I searched vigorously for the best way of leading her on to explain all her terror of the belt, the fear of starvation, the room that made her scream, and all the rest. All that I was most anxious to get out of her little tortured mind and then replace it by some brighter dream.