Algernon Blackwood (34 page)

These were the chambers, clearly, of ancestral sleep and dream: they
seemed so familiar and well known. Behind him blinked the little
friendly fire in the forest, link with the outer world he must not
lose. He would find the children there when he went back, lively from
their scamper among the stars; and, meanwhile, he was quite content to
wander down these corridors in the floor of Night and taste their deep
repose. For years he had not visited or known them. The children had
led him back, although he did not realise it. He believed, on the
contrary, that it was he who led and they who followed. For true
leadership is ever inspired, making each follower feel that he goes
first and of his own free will....

'Jimbo, you flickery sprite, where are you now?' he called, suddenly
noticing how faint the little fire had grown with distance.

A lonely wind flew down upon him with a tiny shout:

'Up here, at the very top, with Daddy. He's making notes in a tower-
room all by himself!'

Rogers could not believe his ears. Daddy indeed!

'Is Monkey with you? And is she safe?'

'She's helping Daddy balance. The walls aren't finished, and he's on a
fearful ledge. He's after something or other for his story, he says.'

It seemed impossible. Daddy skylarking on the roof of Night, and
making notes! Yet with a moment's reflection the impossibility
vanished; surprise went after it; it became natural, right, and true.
Daddy, of course, sitting by his window in the carpenter's house, had
seen the Twilight Scaffolding sweep past and had climbed into it. Its
beauty had rapt him out and away. In the darkness his mind wandered,
too, gathering notes subconsciously for his wonderful new story.

'Come down here to me,' he cried, as a man cries in his sleep, making
no audible sound. 'There's less risk among the foundations.' And down
came Daddy with an immediate rush. He arrived in a bundle, then
straightened up. The two men stood side by side in these subterraneans
of the night.

'You!' whispered Rogers, trying to seize his hand, while the other
evaded him, hiding behind a shadow.

'Don't touch me,' he murmured breathlessly. 'You'll scatter my train
of thought. Think of something else at once, please....' He moved into
thicker shadows, half disappearing. 'I'm after something that suddenly
occurred to me for my story.'

'What is it? I'll think it with you,' his cousin called after him.
'You'll see it better if I do. Tell me.'

'A train that carries Thought, as this darkness carries stars—a
starlight express,' was the quick reply, 'and a cavern where lost
starlight gathers till it's wanted-sort of terminus of the railway.
They belong to the story somewhere if only I can find them and fit
them in. Starlight binds all together as thought and sympathy bind
minds....'

Rogers thought hard about them. Instantly his cousin vanished.

'Thank you,' ran a faint whisper among the pillars; 'I'm on their
trail again now. I must go up again. I can see better from the top,'
and the voice grew fainter and higher and further off with each word
till it died away completely into silence. Daddy went chasing his
inspiration through the scaffolding of reverie and dream.

'We did something for him the other night after all, then,' thought
Rogers with delight.

'Of course,' dropped down a wee, faint answer from above, as the
author heard him thinking; 'you did a lot. I'm partly out at last.
This is where all the Patterns hide. Awake, I only get their dim
reflections, broken and distorted. This is reality, not that. Ha, ha!
If only I can get it through, my lovely, beautiful pattern—'

'You will, you will,' cried the other, as the voice went fluttering
through space. 'Ask the children. Jimbo and Monkey are up there
somewhere. They're the safest guides.'

Rogers gave a gulp and found that he was coughing. His feet were cold.
A shudder ran across the feathery structure, making it tremble from
the foundations to the forest of spires overhead. Jimbo came sliding
down a pole of gleaming ebony. In a hammock of beams and rafters,
swinging like a network of trapezes, Monkey swooped down after him,
head first as usual. For the moon that moment passed behind a cloud,
and the silver rivets started from their shadowy sockets. Clusters of
star nails followed suit. The palace bent and tottered like a falling
wave. Its pillars turned into trunks of pine trees; its corridors were
spaces through the clouds; its chambers were great dips between the
mountain summits.

'It's going too fast for sight,' thought Rogers; 'I can't keep up with
it. Even the children have toppled off.' But he still heard Daddy's
laughter echoing down the lanes of darkness as he chased his pattern
with yearning and enthusiasm.

The huge structure with its towers and walls and platforms slid softly
out of sight. The moonlight sponged its outlines from the sky. The
scaffolding melted into darkness, moving further westwards as night
advanced. Already it was over France and Italy, sweeping grandly
across the sea, bewildering the vessels in its net of glamour, and
filling with wonder the eyes of the look-out men at the mast heads.

'The fire's going out,' a voice was saying. Rogers heard it through a
moment's wild confusion as he fell swiftly among a forest of rafters,
beams, and shifting uprights.

'I'll get more wood.'

The words seemed underground. A mountain wind rose up and brought the
solid world about him. He felt chilly, shivered, and opened his eyes.
There stood the solemn pine trees, thick and close; moonlight flooded
the spaces between them and lit their crests with silver.

'This is the Wind Wood,' he remarked aloud to reassure himself.

Jimbo was bending over the fire, heaping on wood. Flame leaped up with
a shower of sparks. He saw Monkey rubbing her eyes beside him.

'I've had a dream of falling,' she was saying, as she snuggled down
closer into his side.

'
I
didn't,' Jimbo said. 'I dreamed of a railway accident, and
everybody was killed except one passenger, who was Daddy. It fell off
a high bridge. We found Daddy in the
fourgon
with the baggages,
writing a story and laughing—making an awful row.'

'What did
you
dream, Cousinenry?' asked Monkey, peering into his
eyes in the firelight.

'That my feet were cold, because the fire had gone out,' he answered,
trying in vain to remember whether he had dreamed anything at all.
'And—that it's time to go home. I hear the curfew ringing.'

Some one whistled softly. They ought to have been in bed an hour ago.

It was ten o'clock, and Gygi was sounding the
couvre feu
from the
old church tower. They put the fire out and walked home arm in arm,
separating with hushed good-nights in the courtyard of the Citadelle.
But Rogers did not hear the scolding Mother gave them when they
appeared at the Den door, for he went on at once to his own room in
the carpenter's house, with the feeling that he had lived always in
Bourcelles, and would never leave it again. His Scheme had moved
bodily from London to the forest.

And on the way upstairs he peeped a moment into his cousin's room,
seeing a light beneath the door. The author was sitting beside the
open window with the lamp behind him and a note-book on his knees.
Moonlight fell upon his face. He was sound asleep.

'I won't wake him,' thought his cousin, going out softly again. 'He's
dreaming—dreaming of his wonderful new story probably.'

Even as a luminous haze links star to star,
I would supply all chasms with music, breathing
Mysterious motions of the soul, no way
To be defined save in strange melodies.

Paracelsus
, R. BROWNING.

Daddy's story, meanwhile, continued to develop itself with wonder and
enthusiasm. It was unlike anything he had ever written. His other
studies had the brilliance of dead precious stones, perhaps, but this
thing moved along with a rushing life of its own. It grew, fed by
sources he was not aware of. It developed of itself—changed and lived
and flashed. Some creative fairy hand had touched him while he slept
perhaps. The starry sympathy poured through him, and he thought with
his feelings as well as with his mind.

At first he was half ashamed of it; the process was so new and
strange; he even attempted to conceal his method, because he could not
explain or understand it. 'This is emotional, not intellectual,' he
sighed to himself; 'it must be second childhood. I'm old. They'll call
it decadent!' Presently, however, he resigned himself to the delicious
flow of inspiration, and let it pour out till it flowed over into his
daily life as well. Through his heart it welled up and bubbled forth,
a thing of children, starlight, woods, and fairies.

Yet he was shy about it. He would talk about the story, but would not
read it out. 'It's a new
genre
for me,' he explained shyly, 'an
attempt merely. We'll see what comes of it. My original idea, you see,
has grown out of hand rather. I wake every morning with something
fresh, as though'—he hesitated a moment, glancing towards his wife—
'as if it came to me in sleep,' he concluded. He felt her common sense
might rather despise him for it.

'Perhaps it does,' said Rogers.

'Why not?' said Mother, knitting on the sofa that was her bed at
night.

She had put her needles down and was staring at her husband; he stared
at Rogers; all three stared at each other. Something each wished to
conceal moved towards utterance and revelation. Yet no one of them
wished to be the first to mention it. A great change had come of late
upon Bourcelles. It no longer seemed isolated from the big world
outside as before; something had linked it up with the whole
surrounding universe, and bigger, deeper currents of life flowed
through it. And with the individual life of each it was the same. All
dreamed the same enormous, splendid dream, yet dared not tell it—yet.

Both parents realised vaguely that it was something their visitor had
brought, but what could it be exactly? It was in his atmosphere, he
himself least of all aware of it; it was in his thought, his attitude
to life, yet he himself so utterly unconscious of it. It brought out
all the best in everybody, made them feel hopeful, brighter, more
courageous. Yes, certainly,
he,
brought it. He believed in them, in
the best of them—they lived up to it or tried to. Was that it? Was it
belief and vision that he brought into their lives, though
unconsciously, because these qualities lay so strongly in himself?
Belief is constructive. It is what people
are
rather than what they
preach that affects others. Two strangers meet and bow and separate
without a word, yet each has changed; neither leaves the other quite
as he was before. In the society of children, moreover, one believes
everything in the world—for the moment. Belief is constructive and
creative; it is doubt and cynicism that destroy. In the presence of a
child these latter are impossible. Was this the explanation of the
effect he produced upon their little circle—the belief and wonder and
joy of Fairyland?

For a moment something of this flashed through Daddy's mind. Mother,
in her way, was aware of something similar. But neither of them spoke
it. The triangular staring was its only evidence. Mother resumed her
knitting. She was not given to impulsive utterance. Her husband once
described her as a solid piece of furniture. She was.

'You see,' said Daddy bravely, as the moment's tension passed, 'my
original idea was simply to treat Bourcelles as an epitome, a
miniature, so to speak, of the big world, while showing how Nature
sweetened and kept it pure as by a kind of alchemy. But that idea has
grown. I have the feeling now that the Bourcelles we know is a mere
shadowy projection cast by a more real Bourcelles behind. It is only
the dream village we know in our waking life. The real one—er—we
know only in sleep.' There!—it was partly out!

Mother turned with a little start. 'You mean when we sleep?' she
asked. She knitted vigorously again at once, as though ashamed of this
sudden betrayal into fantasy. 'Why not?' she added, falling back upon
her customary non-committal phrase. Yet this was not the superior
attitude he had dreaded; she was interested. There was something she
wanted to confess, if she only dared. Mother, too, had grown softer in
some corner of her being. Something shone through her with a tiny
golden radiance.

'But this idea is not my own,' continued Daddy, dangerously near to
wumbling. 'It comes
through
me only. It develops, apparently, when
I'm asleep,' he repeated. He sat up and leaned forward. 'And, I
believe,' he added, as on sudden reckless impulse, 'it comes from you,
Henry. Your mind, I feel, has brought this cargo of new suggestion and
discharged it into me—into every one—into the whole blessed village.
Man, I think you've bewitched us all!'

Mother dropped a stitch, so keenly was she listening. A moment later
she dropped a needle too, and the two men picked it up, and handed it
back together as though it weighed several pounds.

'Well,' said Rogers slowly, 'I suppose all minds pour into one another
somewhere—in and out of one another, rather—and that there's a
common stock or pool all draw upon according to their needs and power
to assimilate. But I'm not conscious, old man, of driving anything
deliberately into you—'

'Only you think and feel these things vividly enough for me to get
them too,' said Daddy. Luckily 'thought transference' was not actually
mentioned, or Mother might have left the room, or at least have
betrayed an uneasiness that must have chilled them.

'As a boy I imagined pretty strongly,' in a tone of apology, 'but
never since. I was in the City, remember, twenty years—'

'It's the childhood things, then,' Daddy interrupted eagerly. 'You've
brought the great childhood imagination with you—the sort of
gorgeous, huge, and endless power that goes on fashioning of its own
accord just as dreams do—'