The Second Algernon Blackwood Megapack

by Algernon Blackwood

  A cool salt air smote their faces, and Parnacute heard the soft crashing of waves as they crossed the Channel, and swept on over the fields and forests of France, glimmering below like the squares of a mighty chess-hoard. Like toys, village after village shot by, smelling of peatsmoke, cattle, and the faint windiness of coming spring.

  Sometimes they passed below the clouds and lost the stars, sometimes above them and lost the world; sometimes over forests roaring like the sea, sometimes above vast plains still and silent as the grave; but always Parnacute saw the constellations of Orion and Pleiades shining on the coatcollar of the soaring policeman, their little patterns picked out as with tiny electric lamps.

  Below them lay the huge map of the earth, raised, scarred, darkly coloured, and breathing—a map alive.

  Then came the Jura, soft and purple, carpeted with forests, rolling below them like a dream, and they looked down into slumbering valleys and heard far below the tumbling of water and the singing of countless streams.

  “Glory, glory!” cried the Professor. “And do the birds know this?”

  “Not the imprisoned ones,” was the reply. And presently they whipped across large gleaming bodies of water as the lakes of Switzerland approached. Then, entering the zones of icy atmosphere, they looked down and saw white towers and pinnacles of silver, and the forms of scarred and mighty glaciers that rose and fell among the fields of eternal snow, folding upon the mountains in vast procession.

  “I think—I’m frightened!” gasped Parnacute, clutching at his companion, but seizing only the frigid air.

  The policeman shouted with laughter.

  “This is nothing—compared to Mars or the moon,” he cried, soaring till the Alps looked like a patch of snowdrops shining in a Surrey garden. “You’ll soon get accustomed to it.” The Professor of Political Economy rose after him. But presently they sank again in an immense curving sweep and touched the tops of the highest mountains with their toes. This sent them instantly aloft again, bounding with the impetus of rockets, and so they careered on through the perfumed, pathless night till they came to Italy and left the Alps behind them like the shadowy wall of another world that had silently moved up close to them through space.

  “Mother of Mountains!” shouted the delighted man of colleges. “And did the thrush know this too?”

  “It has you to thank, if so,” the policeman answered.

  “And I have you to thank.”

  “No—yourself,” replied his flying guide.

  And then the desert! They had crossed the scented Mediterranean and reached the zones of sand. It rose in clouds and sheets as a mighty wind stirred across the leagues of loneliness that stretched below them into blue distance. It whirled about them and stung their faces, “Thin ropes of sand which crumble ere they bind!” cried the Professor with a peal of laughter, not knowing what he said in the delirium of his pleasure.

  The hot smell of the sand excited him; the knowledge that for hundreds of miles he could not see a house or a human being thrilled him dizzily with the incalculable delight of freedom. The splendour of the night, mystical and incommunicable, overcame him. He rose, laughing wildly, shaking the sand from his hair, and taking gigantic curves into the starry space about him. He remembered vividly the sight of those bedraggled wings in the little cramped cage—and then looked down and realized that here the winds sank exhausted from the very weariness of too much space. Oh, that he could tear away the bars of every cage the world had ever known—set free all captive creatures—restore to all wild, winged life the liberty of open spaces that is theirs by right!

  He cried again to the stars and winds and deserts, but his words found no intelligible expression, for their passion was too great to be confined in any known medium. The World-Policeman alone understood, perhaps, for he flew down in circles round the little Professor and laughed and laughed and laughed.

  And it seemed as if tremendous figures formed themselves out of the sky to listen, and bent down to lift him with a single sweep of their immense arms from the earth to the heavens. Such was the torrential power and delight of escape in him, that he almost felt as if he could skim the icy abysses of Death itself—without being ever caught.…

  The colossal shapes of Egypt, terrible and monstrous, passed far below in huge and shadowy procession, and the desolate Lybian Mountains drew him hovering over their wastes of stone.…

  And this was only a beginning! Asia, India, and the Southern Seas all lay within reach! All could be visited in turn. The interstellar spaces, the far planets, and the white moon were yet to know! “We must be thinking of turning soon,” he heard the voice of his companion, and then remembered how his own body, hot and feverish, lay in that stuffy little room at the other end of Europe. It was indeed caged—the withered body in the room, and himself in the withered body—doubly caged. He laughed and shuddered. The wind swept through him, licking him clean. He rose again in the ecstasy of free flight, following the lead of the policeman on the homeward journey, and the mountains below became a purple line on the map. In a series of great sweeps they rested on the top of the Pyramid, and then upon the forehead of the Sphinx, and so onwards, touching the earth at intervals, till they heard once more the waves upon the coast-line, and soared aloft again across the sea, racing through Spain and over the Pyrenees. The thin blue outline of the policeman kept ever at his side.

  From all the far blue hills of heaven these winds of freedom blow!” he shouted into space, following it with a peal of laughter that made his guide circle round and round him, chuckling as he flew. A curious, silvery chuckle it was—yet it sounded as though it came to him through a much greater distance than before. It came, as it were, through barriers.

  The picture of the bird-fancier’s shop came again vividly before him. He saw the beseeching and frightened little eyes; heard the ceaseless pattering of the imprisoned feet, wings beating against the bars, and soft furry bodies pushing vainly to get out. He saw the red face of Theodore Spinks, the proprietor, gloating over the scene of captive life that gave him the means to live—the means to enjoy his own little measure of freedom. He saw the sea-gull drooping in its corner, and the owl, its eyes filled with the dust of the street, its feathered ears twitching;—and then he thought again of the caged human beings of the world—men, women and children, and a pain, like the pain of a whole universe, burned in his soul and set his heart aflame with yearning…to set them all instantly free.

  And, unable to find words to give expression to what he felt, he found relief again in his strange, impetuous singing.

  Simon Parnacute, Professor of Political Economy, sang in mid-heaven! But this was the last vivid memory he knew. It all began to fade a little after that. It changed swiftly like a dream when the body nears the point of waking. He tried to seize and hold it, to delay the moment when it must end; but the power was beyond him. He felt heavy and tired, and flew closer to the ground; the intervals between the curves of flight grew smaller and smaller, the impetus weaker and weaker as he became every moment more dense and stupid. His progress across the fields of the south of England, as he made his way almost laboriously homewards, became rather a series of long, low leaps than actual flight. More and more often he found himself obliged to touch the earth to acquire the necessary momentum. The big policeman seemed suddenly to have quite melted away into the blue of night.

  Then he heard a door open in the sky over his head. A star came down rather too close and half blinded his eyes. Instinctively he called for help to his friend, the world-policeman.

  “It’s time, for your soup now,” was the only answer he got. And it did not seem the right answer, or the right voice either. A terror of being permanently lost came over him, and he cried out again louder than before.

  “And the medicine first,” dropped the thin, shrill voice out of endless space.

  It was not the policeman’s voice at all. He knew now, and understood. A sensation of weariness, of sickening disgust and boredom came over hi
m. He looked up. The sky had turned white; he saw curtains and walls and a bright lamp with a red shade. This was the star that had nearly blinded him—a lamp merely, in a sick-room! And, standing at the farther end of the room, he saw the figure of the nurse in cap and apron.

  Below him lay his body in the bed. His sensation of disgust and boredom became a positive horror. But he sank down exhausted into it—into his cage.

  “Take this soup, sir, after the medicine, and then perhaps you’ll get another bit of sleep,” the nurse was saying with gentle authority, bending over him.

  IV

  The progress of Professor Parnacute towards recovery was slow and tedious, for the illness had been severe and it left him with a dangerously weak heart. And at night he still had the delights of the flying dreams. Only, by this time, he had learned to fly alone. His phantom friend, the big World-Policeman, no longer accompanied him.

  And his chief occupation during these weary hours of convalescence was curious and, the nurse considered, not very suitable for an invalid: for he spent the time with endless calculations, poring over the list of his few investments, and adding up times without number the total of his savings of nearly forty years. The bed was strewn with papers and documents; pencils were always getting lost among the clothes; and each time the nurse collected the paraphernalia and put them aside, he would wait till she was out of the room, and then crawl over to the table and carry them all back into bed with him.

  Then, finally, she gave up fighting with him, and acquiesced, for his restlessness increased and he could not sleep unless his beloved half-sheets and pencils lay strewn upon the counterpane within instant reach.

  Even to the least observant it was clear that the Professor was hatching the preliminary details of a profound plot.

  And his very first visitor, as soon as he was permitted to see anybody, was a gentleman with parchment skin and hard, dry, peeping eyes who came by special request—a solicitor, from the firm of Messrs. Costa & Delay.

  “I will ascertain the price of the shop and stock-intrade and inform you of the result at the earliest opportunity, Professor Parnacute,” said the man of law in his gritty, professional voice, as he at length took his departure and left the sick-room with the expressionless face of one to whom the eccentricities of human nature could never be new or surprising.

  “Thank you; I shall be most anxious to hear,” replied the other, turning in his long easy-chair to save his papers, and at the same time to defend himself against the chiding of the good-natured nurse.

  “I knew I should have to pay for it,” he murmured, thinking of his original sin; “but I hope,”—here he again consulted his pencilled figures—“I think I can manage it—just. Though with Consols so low—” He fell to musing again. “Still, I can always sublet the shop, of course, as they suggest,” he concluded with a sigh, turning to appeal to the bewildered nurse and finding for the first time that she had gone out of the room.

  He fell to pondering deeply. Presently the “list enclosed” by the solicitors caught his eye among the pillows, and he began listlessly to examine it. It was type-written and covered several sheets of foolscap. It was split up into divisions headed as “Lot 1, Lot 2, Lot 3,” and so on. He began to read slowly half aloud to himself; then with increasing excitement—

  “50 Linnets, guaranteed not straight from the fields; allcaged.”

  “10 fierce singing Linnets.”

  “10 grand cock Throstles, just on song.”

  “5 Pear-Tree Goldfinches, with deep, square blazes, wellbuttoned and mooned.”

  “4 Devonshire Woodlarks, guaranteed full song; caged three months.”

  The Professor sat up and gripped the paper tightly. His face wore a pained, intent expression. A convulsive movement of his fingers, automatic perhaps, crumpled the sheet and nearly tore it across. He went on reading, shedding rugs and pillows as though they oppressed him. His breath came a little faster.

  “5 cock Blackbirds, full plumage, lovely songsters.”

  “1 Song-Thrush, show-cage and hamper; splendid whistler, picked bird.”

  “1 beautiful, large upstanding singing Skylark; sings all day; been caged positively five months.”

  Simon Parnacute uttered a curious little cry. It was deep down in his throat. He was conscious of a burning desire to be rich—a millionaire; powerful—an autocratic monarch. After a pause he brought back his attention with an effort to the type-written page and the consideration of further “Lots”—

  “3 cock Skylarks; can hear them 200 yards off when singing.”

  “Two hundred yards off when singing,” muttered the Professor into his one remaining pillow.

  He read on, kicking his feet, somewhat viciously for a sick man, against the wicker rest at the end of the lounge chair.

  “1 special, select, singing cock Skylark; guaranteed caged three months; sings his wild note.”

  He suddenly dashed the list aside. The whole chair creaked and groaned with the violence of his movement. He kicked three times running at the wicker foot-rest, and evidently rejoiced that it was still stiff enough to make it worth while to kick again—harder.

  “Oh, that I had all the money in the world!” he cried to himself, letting his eyes wander to the window and the clear blue spaces between the clouds; “all the money in the world!” he repeated with growing excitement. He saw one of London’s sea-gulls circling high, high up. He watched it for some minutes, till it sailed against a dazzling bit of white cloud and was lost to view.

  “‘Sings his wild note’—‘guaranteed caged three months’—‘can be heard two hundred yards oft.’”

  The phrases burned in his brain like consuming flames.

  And so the list went on. He was glancing over the last page when his eye fell suddenly upon an item that described a lot of—

  “8 Linnets caged four months; raving with song.”

  He dropped the list, rose with difficulty from his chair and paced the room, muttering to himself “raving with song, raving with song, raving with song.” His hollow cheeks were flushed, his eyes aglow.

  “Caged, caged, caged,” he repeated under his breath, while his thoughts travelled to that racing flight across Europe, over seas and mountains.

  “Sings his wild note!” He heard again the whistling wind about his ears as he flew through the zones of heated air above the desert sands.

  “Raving with song!” He remembered the passion of his own cry—that strange lyrical outburst of his heart when the magic of freedom caught him, and he had soared at will through the unchartered regions of the night.

  And then he saw once more the blinking owl, its eyes blinded by the dust of the London street, its feathery ears twitching as it heard the wind sighing past the open doorway of the dingy shop.

  And again the thrush looked into his face and poured out the rapture of its spring song.

  And half-an-hour later he was so exhausted by the unwonted emotion and exercise that the nurse herself was obliged to write at his dictation the letter he sent in reply to the solicitors, Messrs. Costa & Delay in Southampton Row.

  But the letter was posted that night and the Professor, still mumbling to himself about “having to pay for it,” went to bed with the first hour of the darkness, and plunged straight into another of his delightful flying dreams almost the very moment his eyes had closed.

  V

  “…Thus, all the animals have been disposed of according to your instructions,” ran the final letter from the solicitors, “and we beg to append list of items so allotted, together with country addresses to which they have been sent. We think you may feel assured that they are now in homes where they will be well cared for.

  “We still retain the following animals against your further instructions—

  2 Zonure Lizards

  1 Angulated Tortoise

  2 Mealy Rosellas

  2 Scaly-breasted Lorikeets.

  “With regard to these we should advise.…

  “The
caged birds, meanwhile, which you intend the children shall release, are being cared for satisfactorily; and the premises will be ready for taking over as from June 1.…”

  And, with the assistance of the nurse, he then began to issue a steady stream of letters to the parents of children he knew in the country, carefully noting and tabulating the replies, and making out little white labels inscribed in plain lettering with the words “Lot 1,” “Lot 2,” and so on, precisely as though he were in the animal business himself, and were getting ready for a sale.

  But the sale which took place a fortnight later on June 1 was no ordinary sale.

  It was a brilliant hot day when Simon Parnacute, still worn and shaky from his recent illness, made his way towards the shop of the “retired” bird-fancier. The sale of the premises and stock-in-trade, and the high price obtained, had made quite a stir in the “Fancy,” but of that the Professor was sublimely ignorant as he crossed the street in front of a truculent motor-omnibus and stood before the dingy three-storey red-brick house.

  He produced the key sent to him by Messrs. Costa & Delay, and opened the door. It was cool after the glare of the burning street, and delightfully silent. He remembered the chorus of crying birds that had greeted his last appearance. The silence now was eloquent.

  “Good, good,” he said to himself, with a quiet smile, as he noticed the temporary counter built across the front room for cloaks and parcels, “very good indeed.” Then he went upstairs, climbing painfully, for he was still easily exhausted. There was hardly a stick of furniture in the house, nor an inch of carpet on the floor and stairs, but the rooms had been swept and scrubbed; everything was fresh and scrupulously clean, and the tenant to whom he was to sub-let could have no fault to find on that score.

  In the first-floor rooms he saw with pleasure the flowers arranged about the boards as he had directed. The air was sweet and perfumed. The windows at the back—the sills deep with jars of roses—opened upon a small bit of green garden, and Parnacute looked out and saw the blue sky and the clouds floating lazily across it.