Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  In due course he supplied a governess, Fräulein Bühlke. She came from the neighbouring town, with her broad, flat German face, framed in flaxen hair that was glossy but not oiled, and smoothed down close to the skull across a shining parting. Mechanically devout, rather fussy, literal in mind, exceedingly worthy and conscientious, her formula was, ‘You think that would be wise? Then I try it.’ And the ‘trying,’ which the tone suggested would be delicate, was applied with a blundering directness that defeated its own end. Her method was thumping rather than insinuating, and her notion of delicacy was to state her meaning heavily, add to it, ‘Try to believe that I know best, dear child,’ and then conscientiously enforce it. Mànya she understood as little as an okapi, but she was kind, affectionate, and patient; and though Eliot always meant to change her, he never did, for the getting of a suitable governess was more than he and Mrs. Coove could really manage. ‘Der liebe Gott weisst alles,’ was the phrase with which she ended all their interviews. And if Mànya’s obedience showed a slight contempt, it was a contempt he did not think it wise entirely to check.

  For he himself could never scold her. It was impossible. It felt as though he stepped upon a baby. Their relations were those of equals almost, each looking up to the other with respect and wonder. Her schoolroom life became a thing apart. So did the hours in his study. Her walks with the governess and his journeys to the British Museum were mere extensions of the schoolroom and the study. It was when they went out together, roaming about the Place at will, exploring, playing, building fires, and the rest, that their true enjoyment came — enjoyment all the keener because each stuck valiantly to duty first.

  Her face, though not exactly pretty, had the charm of some wild intelligence he had never seen before. The nose, slightly tilted, wore a tiny platform at its tip. The mouth was firm, lips exquisitely cut, but it was in the dark, shining eyes that the expression of the soul ran into focus; though at times she knew long periods of silence that seemed almost sullen, when her eyes turned dead and coaly, and she seemed almost gone away from behind them. One day she was old as himself, another a mere baby; something was always escaping the leash and slipping off, then coming back with a rush of some astonishing sentence it had gone to fetch. Her physical appearance sometimes was elusive too, now tall, now short, her little body protean as her little soul.

  Like running water she was all over the house, not laughing much, not exactly gay or cheerful either, but somehow charged to the brim with a mysterious spirit of play — grave, earnest play, yet airy with a consummate mischief sometimes that was the despair of Fräulein Bühlke, who wore an expression then as though, after all, there were things God did not know. Yes, like running water through the rooms and corridors, and tumbling down the stairs behind the kitten or round the skirts of ‘bulgey’ Mother Coove. Swift and gentle always, yet with force enough to hurt you if you got in her way; almost to sting or slap. Soft, and very girlish to look at, she was really hard as a boy, flexible too as a willow branch, and with a rod of steel laced somewhere invisibly through her tenderness, unsuspected till occasion — rarely — betrayed its presence. It shifted its position too; one never knew where that firmness which is character would crop out and refuse to bend. For then the childishness would vanish. She became imperious as a little natural queen. The half-breed groom had a taste of this latter quality more than once, and afterwards worshipped the ground she walked on. To see them together, she in her dark-grey riding-habit, holding a little whip, and he with his sinister, wild face and half malignant manners, called up some picture of a child and a savage animal she had tamed.

  But the thing Mànya chiefly brought into his garden, and so also into the garden of his thoughts, was this new element of Play. She brought with her, not only the child’s make-believe, but the child’s conviction, earnestness, and sense of reality.

  ‘Tell me one thing,’ she had a way of saying, sure preface to something of significant import that she had to ask, accompanied always by a darker expression in the eyes, puzzled or searching and not on any account to be evaded or lightly answered; ‘Tell me one thing, Uncle: do these outside things come after us into the house as well?’

  ‘Only when we allow them, or invite them in,’ he replied, taking up her mood as seriously as herself, yet knowing her question to be a feint. She knew the true answer better than himself. She wished to see what he would say. Her sly laughter of approval told him that. ‘They’re already there, though, aren’t they?’ she whispered, and when he nodded agreement, she added, ‘Of course; they’re everywhere really all the time. They don’t move about as we do.’

  But she had often this singular way of seeing things, and saying them, from the original point of view whence she regarded them — from beneath, as it were, topsy-turvy some might call it, almost a little mad, judged by the sheep-like vision of the majority, yet for herself entirely true, consistent, not imagined merely.

  Her literal use of words, too, was sometimes vividly illuminating — as though she saw language directly, and robbed of the cloak with which familiar use has smothered it. She undressed phrases, making them shine out alone.

  ‘Moping, child?’ he asked once, when one of her silent fits had been somewhat prolonged. ‘Unhappy?’

  ‘No, Uncle. And I’m not moping.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘Fräulein told me I was selfish, rather.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said to comfort her. ‘Be yourself — self-ish — or you’re nothing.’

  She followed her own thought, perhaps not understanding him quite.

  ‘She said I must put my Self out more — for others. Mother used to say it too.’

  He turned and stared at her. The little face was very grave.

  ‘Eh?’ he asked. ‘Put your Self out?’

  Mànya nodded, fixing her eyes, half dreamy, upon his own. She had been far away. Now she was coming back.

  ‘So I’m learning,’ she said, her voice coming as from a distance. ‘It’s so funny. But it’s not really difficult — a bit. I could teach you, I think, if you’d promise faithfully to practise regularly.’

  There was a pause before he asked the next question.

  ‘How d’you do it, child?’ came a little gruffly, for he felt queer emotion rising in him.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t tell you like that. I could only show you.’

  There was a touch of weirdness about the child. It stole into him — a faint sense of eeriness, as though she were letting him see through peepholes into that other world she knew so well.

  ‘Well,’ he asked, more gently, ‘what happens when you have put your Self — er — out? Other things come in, eh?’

  ‘How can I tell?’ she answered like a flash. ‘I’m out.’

  He stared at her, waiting for more. But nothing followed, and a minute later she was as usual, laughing, her brilliant eyes flashing with mischief, and presently went upstairs to get tidy for their evening meal that was something between an early dinner and high tea. Only at the door she paused a second to fling him another of her characteristic phrases:

  ‘I wonder, Uncle. Don’t you?’ For she certainly knew some natural way, born in her, of moving her Self aside and letting the tide of ‘bigger things’ sweep in and use her. It was her incommunicable secret.

  And he did wonder a good deal. Wonder with him had never faded as with most men. It had often puzzled him why this divine curiosity about everything should disappear with the majority after twenty-five, instead, rather, of steadily increasing the more one knows. Familiarity with those few scattered details the world calls knowledge had never dulled its golden edge for him. Only Mànya, and the things she asked and said, gave it a violent new impetus that was like youth returned. And her notion of putting one’s Self out in order to let other things come in filled him with about as much wonder as he could comfortably hold just then. He dozed over the fire, thinking deeply, wishing that for a single moment he cou
ld stand where this child stood, see things from her point of view, learn the geography of the world she lived in. The source of her inspiration was Nature of course. Yet he too stood close to Nature and was full of sympathetic understanding for her mystery and beauty. Did Mànya then stand nearer than himself? Did she, perhaps, dwell inside it, while he examined from the outside only, a mere onlooker, though an appreciative and loving onlooker?

  It came to him that things yielded up to her their essential meaning because she saw them from another side, and he recalled an illuminating line of Alice Meynell about a daisy, and how wonderful it must be to see from ‘God’s side,’ even of such a simple thing.

  Mànya, moreover, saw everything in some amazing fashion as One. The facts of common knowledge men studied so laboriously in isolated groups were but the jewelled facets that hung glittering upon the enormous flanks of this One. The thought flashed through his mind. He remembered another thing she said, and then another; they began to crowd his brain. ‘I never dream because I know it all awake,’ she told him once; and only that afternoon, when he asked her why she always stopped and stood straight before him — a habit she had — when he spoke seriously with her, she answered, ‘Because I want to see you properly. I must be opposite for that! No one can see their own face, or what’s next to them, can they?’

  Truth, and a philosophical truth! Of no particular importance, maybe, yet strange for a child to have discovered.

  Even her ideas of space were singularly original, direct, unhampered by the terms that smother meaning. ‘Up’ and ‘down’ perplexed her; ‘left’ and ‘right’ perpetually deceived her; even ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ when she tried to express them, landed her in a chaos of confusion that to most could have seemed only sheer stupidity. She stood, as it were, in some attitude of naked knowledge behind thought, perception unfettered, untaught, in which she knew that space was only a way of talking about something that no one ever really understands. She saw space, felt it rather, in some absolute sense, not yet ‘educated’ to treat it relatively. She saw everything ‘round,’ as though her spatial perceptions were all circles. And circles are infinite, eternal.

  With Time, too, it was somewhat similar. ‘It’ll come round again,’ she said once, when he chided her for having left something undone earlier in the day; or, ‘when I get back to it, Uncle,’ in reply to his reminding her of a duty for the following day. To the end she was ‘stupid’ about telling the time, and until he cured her of it her invariable answer to his question, ‘what o’clock it was,’ would be the literal truth that it was ‘just now, Uncle,’ or simply ‘now,’ as though she saw things from an absolute, and not a relative point of view. She was always saying things to prove it in this curious manner. And, while it made him sometimes feel uncomfortable in a way he could not quite define, it also increased his attitude of respect towards the secret, mysterious thing she hid so well, though without intending to hide it. She seemed in touch with eternal things — more than other children — not merely with a transient expression of them filtered down for normal human comprehension. Some giant thing she certainly knew. She lived it. Death, for instance, was a conception her mind failed to grasp. She could not realise it. People had ‘left’ or ‘gone away,’ perhaps, but somehow for her were always ‘there.’

  Thus started, his thoughts often travelled far, but always came up with a shock against that big black barrier — the army of the dead. The dead, of course, were always somewhere — if there was survival. But, though he had encountered strange phases of the spiritualistic movement in America, he had known nothing to justify the theory of interference from the other side of that black barrier. The deliverances of the mediums brought no conviction. He sometimes wondered, that was all. And in particular he wondered about that member of the great army who had been for years his close and dear companion. This was natural enough. Could it be that his thought, prolonged and concentrated, formed a prison-house from which escape was difficult? And had his own passionate thinking that ever associated her memory with the Place, detained one soul from farther flight elsewhere? Was this an explanation of that hint Mànya so often brought him — that her presence helped to disentangle, liberate, unravel...? Was the Place haunted in this literal sense?...

  VIII

  YET, perhaps, after all, the chief change she introduced was this vital resurrection of his sense of play. For Play is eternal, older than the stars, older even than dreams. She taught him afresh things he had already known, but long forgotten or laid aside. And all she knew came first direct from Nature, large and undiluted.

  He learned, for instance, the secret of that deep quiet she possessed even in her wildest moments; and how it came from a practice in her mother’s house, where all was rush and clamour about worldly ‘horrid things’ — her practice of lying out at night to watch the stars. But not merely to watch them for a minute. She would watch for hours, following the constellations from the moment they loomed above the horizon till they set again at dawn. She saw them move slowly across the entire sky. For ‘mother hurried and fussed’ her so, and by doing this she instinctively drew into her curious wild heart the deep delight of feeling that c there was lots of room really, and no particular hurry about anything.’ Her inspiration was profound, from ancient sources, natural.

  And her ‘play,’ for the same reason, was never foolish. It was creative play. It was the faculty by which the poets and dreamers re-create the world, and thus rejuvenate it. Adam knew it when he named the beasts, and Job, when he made rhymes about taking Leviathan with a hook, and sang his little heart-sweet songs about the conies and the hopping hills. In the wise it never dies, for it is most subtly allied to wisdom, and only the dreamless can divorce it quite. It is the natural, untaught poetry of the soul which laughs and weeps with Nature, knowing itself akin, seeing itself in everything and everything in itself. Mànya in some amazing fashion, not yet educated out of her, knew Nature in herself.

  She did naughty things too, as he learned from Mrs. Coove, when he felt obliged to lecture her, but they were invariably typical and explanatory of her close-to-Nature little being. And he understood what she felt so well that his lectures ended in laughter, with her grave defence ‘Uncle, you’d have done the same yourself.’ Once in particular, after a fortnight of parching drought, when the gush of warm rain came with its welcome, drenching soak, and the child ran out upon the balcony in her nightgown to feel it on her body too — how could he prove her wrong, having felt the same delight himself? ‘I was thirsty and dry all over. I had to do it,’ she explained, puzzled, adding that of course she had changed afterwards and used the rough Turkey towel ‘just as you do.’

  But other things he did not understand so well; and one of these was her singular habit of imitating the sounds of Nature, with an accuracy, too, that often deceived even himself. The true sounds of Nature are only two — water and wind, with their many variations. And Mànya, by some trick of tone and breath, could reproduce them marvellously.

  ‘It’s the way to get close,’ she told him when he asked her why, ‘the way to get inside. If you get the sound exact, you feel the same as they do, and know their things.’ And the cryptic, yet deeply suggestive explanation contained a significant truth that yet just evaded his comprehension. They often played it together in the woods, though he never approached her own astonishing excellence. This, again, stirred something like awe in him; it was a little eerie, almost uncanny, to hear her ‘doing trees,’ or ‘playing wind and water.’

  But the strangest of all her odd, original tricks was one that he at length dissuaded her from practising because he felt it stimulated her imagination unwisely, and with too great conviction. It is not easy to describe, and to convey the complete success of the achievement is impossible without seeing the actual results. For she drew invisible things. Her designs, so clumsily done with a butt of pencil, or even the point of her stick in the sand, managed to suggest a meaning that somehow just escaped grasping by the mind.
They made him think of puzzle-pictures that intentionally conceal a face or figure. Vague, fluid shapes that never quite achieved an actual form ran through these scattered tracings. She used points in the scenery to indicate an outline of something other than themselves, yet something they contained and clothed. His eye vainly tried to force into view the picture that he felt lay there hiding within these points.

  On a large sheet of paper she would draw roughly details of the landscape — tops of trees, the Mill roof, a boulder or a stretch of the stream, for instance — and persuade these points to gather the blank space of paper between them into the semblance, the suggestion rather, of some vague figure, always vast and always very much alive. They marked, within their boundaries, an outline of some form that remained continually elusive. Yet the outline thus framed, whichever way you looked at it, even holding the paper upside down, still remained a figure; a figure, moreover, that moved. For the child had a way of turning the paper round so that the figure had an appearance of moving independently upon itself. The reality of the whole business was more than striking; and it was when she came to giving these figures names that she decided to put a stop to it.

  One day another curious thing had happened. He had often thought about it since, and wondered whether its explanation lay in mere child’s mischief, or in some power of discerning these invisible Presences that she drew.