Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  Rarely he went to London and pored over musty volumes in the British Museum Reading-room, but after a day or two would hear the murmur of the mill-wheel singing round that portentous, dreary dome, and back he would come again, post-haste. And perhaps he chose his line of study, rather than more imaginative work, because it reasonably absorbed him, while yet it stole no single emotion from his past with her, nor trespassed upon the walking of one dear faint ghost.

  III

  AND it was upon this gentle, solitary household that suddenly Mànya Petrovski descended with her presence of wonder and of magic. Out of a clear blue sky she dropped upon him and made herself deliciously at home. Only daughter of his widowed sister, married to a Russian, she was fourteen at the time of her mother’s death; and the duty seemed forced upon him with a conviction that admitted of no denial. He had never seen the child in his life, for she was born in the year that he returned to England, family relations simply non-existent; but he had heard of her, partly from Mrs. Coove, his housekeeper, and partly from tentative letters his sister wrote from time to time, aiming at reconciliation. He only knew that she was backward to the verge of being stupid, that she ‘loved Nature and life out of doors,’ and that she shared with her strange father a certain sulking moodiness that seemed to have been so strong in his own half civilised Slav temperament. He also remembered that her mother, a curious mixture of Puritanism and weakly dread of living, had brought her up strictly in the manufacturing city of the midlands where they dwelt ‘wealthily,’ surrounded by an atmosphere of artificiality that he deemed almost criminal. For his sister, fostering old-fashioned religious tendencies, believed that a visible Satan haunted the frontiers of her narrow orthodoxy, and would devour Mànya as soon as look at her once she strayed outside. She too had claimed, he remembered, to love Nature, though her love of it consisted solely in looking cleverly out of windows at passing scenery she need never bother herself to reach. Her husband’s violent tempers she had likewise ascribed to his possession by a devil, if not by the — her own personal — devil himself. And when this letter, written on her death-bed, came begging him, as the only possible relative, to take charge of the child, he accepted it, as his character was, unflinchingly, yet with the greatest possible reluctance. Significant, too, of his character was the detail that, out of many others surely far more important, first haunted him: ‘She’ll love Nature (by which he meant the Place) in the way her mother did — artificially. We shan’t get on a bit!’ — thus, instinctively, betraying what lay nearest to his heart.

  None the less, he accepted the position without hesitation. There was no money; his sister’s property was found to be mortgaged several times above its realisable value, and the child would come to him without a penny. He went headlong at the problem, as at so many other duties that had faced him — puzzling, awkward duties — with a kind of blundering delicacy native to his blood. ‘Got to be done, no good dreaming about it,’ he said to himself within a few hours of receiving the letter; and when a little later the telegram came announcing his sister’s death, he added shortly with a grim expression, ‘Here goes, then!’ In this plucky, yet not really impulsive decisiveness, the layer of character acquired in Arizona asserted itself. Action ousted dreaming.

  And in due course the preparations for the girl’s reception were concluded. She would make the journey south alone, and Mrs. Coove would meet her. Moreover, evidence to himself at least of true welcome, Mànya should have the bedroom which had been for years unoccupied — his wife’s.

  For all that, he dreaded her arrival unspeakably. ‘She’ll be bored here. She’ll dislike the Place — perhaps hate it. And I shall dislike her too.’

  IV

  ELIOT ruled his little household well, because he ruled himself. No one, from the tri-weekly gardener to the rough half-breed Westerner who managed the modest stable, felt the least desire to trifle with him. Even Mrs. Coove, in the brief morning visits to his study, did not care about asking him to repeat some sentence that she had not quite caught or understood. Yet, in a sense, as with all such men, it was the woman who really managed him. ‘Mrs.’ Coove, big, motherly, spinster, divined the child beneath the grim exterior, and simply played with him. She it was who really ‘ran’ the household, relieving him of all domestic worries, and she it was, had he fallen ill — which, even for a day, he never did — who would have nursed him into health again with such tactfully concealed devotion that, while loving the nursing, he would never have guessed the devotion.

  So it was largely upon Mrs. Coove that he secretly relied to welcome, manage, and look after his little orphaned niece, while, of course, pretending that he did it all himself.

  ‘She’ll want a companion, sir, of sorts — if I may make so bold — some one to play with,’ she told him when he had mentioned that later, of course, he would provide a ‘governess or something’ when he had first ‘sized up’ the child.

  He looked hard at her for a moment. He realised her meaning, that the hostile neighbourhood could be relied on to supply nothing of that kind.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, as though he had thought of it himself.

  ‘She’ll love the pony, sir, if she ain’t one of the booky sort, which I seem to remember she ain’t,’ added Mrs. Coove, looking as usual as though just about to burst into tears. For her motherly face wore a lachrymose expression that was utterly deceptive. Her contempt for books, too, and writing folk was never quite successfully concealed.

  In silence he watched the old woman wipe her moist hands upon a black apron, and the perplexities of his new duties grew visibly before his eyes. She had little notion that secretly her master stood a little in awe of her superior domestic knowledge.

  ‘The pony and the woods,’ he suggested briefly.

  ‘A puppy or a kitten, sir, would help a bit — for indoors, if I may make so bold,’ the housekeeper ventured, with a passing gulp at her own audacity; ‘and out of doors, sir, as you say, maybe she’ll be ‘appy enough. Her pore mother taught—’

  The long breath she had taken for this sentence she meant to use to the last gasp if possible. But her master cut her short.

  ‘Miss Mànya arrives at six,’ he said, turning to his books and papers. ‘The dog-cart, with you in it, to meet her — please.’ The ‘please’ was added because he knew her vivid dislike of being too high from the ground, while judging correctly that the pleasure would more than compensate her for this risk of elevation. It was also intended to convey that he appreciated her help, but deplored her wordiness. Laconic even to surliness himself, he disliked long phrases. It was a perpetual wonder to him why even lazy people who detested effort would always use a dozen words where two were more effective.

  So Mrs. Coove, accustomed to his ways, departed, with a curtsey that more than anything else resembled a sudden collapse of the knees beneath more than they could carry comfortably.

  ‘Thank you, sir; I’ll see to it all right,’ she said, obedient to his glance, beginning the sentence in the room but finishing it in the passage. She looked as though she would weep hopelessly once outside, whereas really she felt beaming pleasure. The compliment of being sent to meet Miss Mànya made her forget her dread of the elevated, swaying dog-cart, as also of the silent half-breed groom who drove it. Full of importance she went off to make preparations.

  And later, when Mrs. Coove was on her way to the station five miles off, dangerously perched, as it seemed to her, in mid-air, he made his way out slowly into the woods, a vague feeling in him that there was something he must say good-bye to. The Place henceforth, with Mànya in it, would be — not quite the same. What change would come he could not say, but something of the secrecy, the long-loved tender privacy and wonder would depart. Another would share it with him, a trespasser, in a sense an outsider. And, as he roamed the little pine-grown vales, the mossy coverts, and the knee-high bracken, there stole into him this queer sensation that it all was part of a living Something that constituted almost a distinct entity. His wi
fe inspired it, but, also, the Place had a personality of its own, apart from the qualities he had read into it. He realised, for the first time, that it too might take an attitude towards the new arrival. Everywhere, it seemed, there was an air of expectant readiness. It was aware.... It might possibly resent it.

  And, for moments here and there, as he wandered, rose other ideas in him as well, brought for the first time into existence by the thought of the new arrival. This element, like a sudden shaft of sunlight on a landscape, discovered to him a new aspect of the mental picture. It was vague; yet perplexed him not a little. And it was this: that the thing he loved in all this little property, thinking it always as his own, was in reality what she had loved in it, the thing that she had made him see through the lens of her own more wild, poetic vision. What he was now saying good-bye to, the thing that the expected intruder might change, or even oust, was after all but a phantom memory — the aspect she had built into it. This curious, painful doubt assailed him for the first time. Was his love and worship of the Place really an individual possession of his own, or had it been all these years but her interpretation of it that he enjoyed vicariously? The thought of Mànya’s presence here etched this possibility in sharp relief. Unwelcome, and instantly dismissed, the thought yet obtruded itself — that his feelings had not been quite genuine, quite sincere, and that it was her memory, her so vital vision of the Place he loved rather than the Place itself at first hand.

  For the idea that another was on the way to share it stirred the unconscious query: What precisely was it she would share?

  And behind it came a still more subtle questioning that he put away almost before it was clearly born: Was he really quite content with this unambitious guardianship of the dream-estate, and was the grievance of his exile so completely dead that he would, under all possible conditions, keep its loveliness inviolate and free from spoliation?

  The coming of the child, with the new duties involved, and the probable later claims upon his meagre purse, introduced a worldly element that for so long had slept in him. He wondered. The ghosts all walked. But beside them walked other ghosts as well. And this new, strange pain of uncertainty came with them — sinister though exceedingly faint suggestion that he had been worshipping a phantom fastened into his heart by a mind more vigorous than his own.

  Ambition, action, practical achievement stirred a little in their sleep.

  And on his way back he picked some bits of heather and bracken, a few larch twigs with little cones upon them, and several sprays of pine. These he carried into the house and up into the child’s bedroom, where he stuck them about in pots and vases. The flowers Mrs. Coove had arranged he tossed away. For flowers in a room, or in a house at all, he never liked; they looked unnatural, artificial. Flowers and food together on a table seemed to him as dreadful as the sickly smelling wreaths people loved to put on coffins. But leaves were different; and earth was best of all. In his own room he had two wide, deep boxes of plain earth, watered daily, renewed from time to time, and more sweetly scented than any flowers in the world.

  Opening the windows to let in all the sun and air there was, he glanced round him with critical approval. To most the room must have seemed bare enough, yet he had put extra chairs and tables in it, a sofa too, because he thought the child would like them. Personally, he preferred space about him; his own quarters looked positively unfurnished; rooms were cramped enough as it was, and useless upholstery gave him a feeling of oppression. He still clung to essentials; and an empty room, like earth and sky, was fine and dignified.

  But Mànya, he well knew, might feel differently, and he sought to anticipate her wishes as best he might. For Mànya came from a big house where the idea was to conceal every inch of empty space with something valuable and useless; and her playground had been gardens smothered among formal flowerbeds — triangles, crescents, circles, anything that parodied Nature — paths cut cleanly to neat patterns, and plants that acknowledged their shame by growing all exactly alike without a trace of individuality.

  He moved to the open window, gazing out across the stretch of hill and heathery valley, thick with stately pines. The wind sighed softly past his ears. He heard the murmur of the droning mill-wheel, the drum and tinkle of falling water mingling with it. And the years that had passed since last he stood and looked forth from this window came up close and peered across his shoulder. The Past rose silently beside him and looked out too.... He saw it all through other eyes that once had so large a share in fashioning it.

  Again came this singular impression — that, while he waited, the whole Place waited too. It knew that she was coming. Another pair of feet would run upon its face and surface, another voice wake all its little echoes, another mind seek to read its secret and share the mystery of its being.

  ‘If Mànya doesn’t like it — !’ struck with real pain across his heart. But the thought did not complete itself. Only, into the strong face came a momentary expression of helplessness that sat strangely there. Whether the child would like himself or not seemed a consideration of quite minor importance.

  A sound of wheels upon the gravel at the front of the house disturbed his deep reflections, and, shutting the door carefully behind him, he gave one last look round to see that all was right, and then went downstairs to meet her. The sigh that floated through his mind was not allowed to reach the lips; but another expression came up into his face. His lips became compressed, and resolution passed into his eyes. It was the look — and how he would have laughed, perhaps, could he have divined it! — the look of set determination that years ago he wore when in some lonely encampment among the Bad Lands something of danger was reported near.

  With a sinking heart he went downstairs to meet his duty.

  But in the hall, scattering his formal phrases to the winds, a boyish figure, yet with loose flying hair, ran up against him, then stepped sharply back. There was a moment’s pitiless examination.

  ‘Uncle Dick!’ he heard, cried softly. ‘Is that what you’re like? But how wonderful!’ And he was aware that a pair of penetrating eyes, set wide apart in a grave but eager face, were mercilessly taking him in. It was he who, was being ‘sized up.’ No redskin ever made a more rapid and thorough examination, nor, probably, a more accurate one.

  ‘Oh! I never thought you would look so kind and splendid!’

  ‘Me!’ he gasped, forgetting every single thing he had planned to say in front of this swift-moving creature who attacked him.

  She came close up to him, her voice breathless still but if possible softer, eyes shining like two little lamps.

  ‘I expected — from what Mother said — you’d be — just Uncle Richard! And instead it’s only Uncle — Uncle Dick!’

  Here was unaffected sincerity indeed. He had dreaded — he hardly knew why — some simpering sentence of formality, or even tears at being lonely in a strange house. And, in place of either came this sort of cowboy verdict, straight as a blow from the shoulder. It took his breath away. In his heart something turned very soft and yearning. And yet he — winced.

  ‘Nice drive?’ he heard his gruff voice asking. For the life of him he could think of nothing else to say. And the answer came with a little peal of breathless laughter, increasing his amazement and confusion.

  ‘I drove all the way. I made the blackie let me. And the motherly person held on behind like a bolster. It was glorious.’

  At the same moment two strong, quick arms, thin as a lariat, were round his neck. And he was being kissed — once only, though it felt all over his face. She stood on tiptoe to reach him, pulling his head down towards her lips.

  ‘How are you, Uncle, please?’

  ‘Thanks, Mànya,’, he said shortly, straightening up in an effort to keep his balance, ‘all right. Glad you are, too. Mrs. Coove, your “motherly person who held on like a bolster,” will take you upstairs and wash you. Then food — soon as you like.’

  He had not indulged in such a long sentence for years. It increased
his bewilderment to hear it. Something ill-regulated had broken loose.

  Mrs. Coove, who had watched the scene from the background and doubtless heard the flattering description of herself, moved forward with a mountainous air of possession. Her face as usual seemed to threaten tears, but there was a gleam in her eyes which could only come from the joy of absolute approval. With a movement of her arm that seemed to gather the child in, she went laboriously upstairs. The back of her alone proved to any seeing eye that she had already passed willingly into the state of abject slavery that all instinctive mothers love.

  ‘We shan’t be barely five minutes, sir,’ she called respectfully when half-way up; and the way she glanced down upon her grim master, who stood still with feet wide apart watching them, spoke further her opinion — and her joy at it — that he too was caught within her toils. ‘She’ll manage you, sir, if I may make so bold,’ was certainly the thought her words did not express.

  They vanished round the corner — the heavy tread and the light, pattering step. And he still stood on there, waiting in the hall. A mist rose just before his eyes; he did not see quite clearly. In his heart a surge of strong, deep feeling struggled upwards, but was instantly suppressed. Mànya had said another thing that moved him far more than her childish appreciation of himself, something that stirred him to the depths most strangely.

  For, when he asked her how she enjoyed the drive, the girl had replied with undeniable sincerity, looking straight into his eyes: