Algernon Blackwood (38 page)

'Our poor, stupid, sleeping old bodies,' she smiled.

But the radiant form of the other turned to her motionless cage upon
the bed behind her. 'Don't despise them,' she replied, looking down
upon the worn-out prison-house, while a little dazzle of brilliance
flashed through her atmosphere. 'They are our means of spreading this
starlight about the world and giving it to others. Our brains transmit
it cunningly; it flashes from our eyes, and the touch of our fingers
passes it on. We gather it here, when we are "out," but we can
communicate it best to others when we are "in."'

There was sound of confusion and uproar in the room behind as some one
came tumbling in with a rush, scattering the figures in all directions
as when a gust of wind descends upon a bed of flowers.

'In at last!' cried a muffled voice that sounded as though a tarpaulin
smothered it, and the Woman of the Haystack swept into the room with a
kind of clumsy majesty. The Tramp and Gypsy, whose efforts had at
length dislodged her awkward bulk, came rolling after. They had been
pushing steadily from behind all this time, though no one had noticed
them slip out.

'
We
can do more than the smaller folk,' she said proudly, sailing up
to Mother. 'We can't be overlooked, for one thing'; and arm-in-arm,
like a pair of frigates then, they sailed about the room, magnificent
as whales that swim in a phosphorescent sea. The Laugher straightened
up to watch them, the Gardener turned his head, and Rogers and the
children paused a moment in their artificial mixing, to stare with
wonder.

'I'm in!' said the Woman.

'I'm out!' said Mother.

And the children felt a trifle envious. Instantly their brilliance
dimmed a little. The entire room was aware of it.

'Think always of the world in gold and silver,' shot from Mile.
Lemaire. The dimness passed as she said it.

'It was my doing,' laughed Monkey, turning round to acknowledge her
wickedness lest some one else should do it for her and thus increase
her shame.

'Sweep! Sweep!' cried Rogers.

But this thought-created sprite was there before the message flashed.
With his sack wide open, he stood by Monkey, full of importance. A
moment he examined her. Then, his long black fingers darting like a
shuttle, he discovered the false colouring that envy had caused,
picked it neatly out—a thread of dirty grey—and, winding it into a
tiny ball, tossed it with contempt into his sack.

'Over the edge of the world you go,
With the mud and the leaves and the dirty snow!'

he sang, skipping off towards the door. The child's star-body glowed
and shone again, pulsing all over with a shimmering, dancing light
that was like moonshine upon running water.

'Isn't it time to start now?' inquired Jinny; and as she said it all
turned instinctively towards the corner of the room where they were
assembled. They gathered round Mlle. Lemaire. It was quite clear who
was leader now. The crystal brilliance of her whiteness shone like a
little oval sun. So sparkling was her atmosphere, that its purity
scarcely knew a hint of colour even. Her stream of thought seemed
undiluted, emitting rays in all directions till it resembled a wheel
of sheer white fire. The others fluttered round her as lustrous moths
about an electric light.

'Start where?' asked Mother, new to this great adventure.

Her old friend looked at her, so that she caught a darting ray full in
the face, and instantly understood.

'First to the Cave to load up,' flashed the answer; 'and then over the
sleeping world to mix the light with everybody's dreams. Then back
again before the morning spiders are abroad with the interfering sun.'

She floated out into the corridor, and all the others fell into line
as she went. The draught of her going drew Mother into place
immediately behind her. Daddy followed close, their respective colours
making it inevitable, and Jinny swept in after him, bright and eager
as a little angel. She tripped on the edge of something he held
tightly in one hand, a woven maze of tiny glittering lines,
exquisitely inter-threaded—a skeleton of beauty, waiting to be filled
in and clothed, yet already alive with spontaneous fire of its own. It
was the Pattern of his story he had been busy with in the corner.

'I won't step on it, Daddy,' she said gravely.

'It doesn't matter if you do. You're in it,' he answered, yet lifted
it higher so that it flew behind him like a banner in the night.

The procession was formed now. Rogers and the younger children came
after their sister at a little distance, and then, flitting to and fro
in darker shades, like a fringe of rich embroidery that framed the
moving picture, came the figures of the sprites, born by Imagination
out of Love in an old Kentish garden years and years ago. They rose
from the tangle of the ancient building. Climbing the shoulder of a
big, blue wind, they were off and away!

It was a jolly night, a windy night, a night without clouds, when all
the lanes of the sky were smooth and swept, and the interstellar
spaces seemed close down upon the earth.

'Kind thoughts, like fine weather,
Link sweetly together God's stars
With the heart of a boy,'

sang Rogers, following swiftly with Jimbo and his sister. For all
moved along as easily as light across the surfaces of polished glass.
And the sound of Rogers's voice seemed to bring singing from every
side, as the gay procession swept onwards. Every one contributed lines
of their own, it seemed, though there was a tiny little distant voice,
soft and silvery, that intruded from time to time and made all wonder
where it came from. No one could see the singer. At first very far
away, it came nearer and nearer.

DADDY. 'The Interfering Sun has set!
GARDENER. Now Sirius flings down the Net!
LAMPLIGHTER. See, the meshes flash and quiver,
As the golden, silent river

SWEEP. Clears the dark world's troubled dream.
DUSTMAN. Takes it sleeping,
Gilds its weeping
With a star's mysterious beam.
Tiny, distant Voice. Oh, think Beauty!
It's your duty!
In the Cave you work for others,
All the stars are little brothers;

ROGERS. Think their splendour,
Strong and tender;
DADDY. Think their glory
In the Story
MOTHER. Of each day your nights redeem?
Voice (nearer). Every loving, gentle thought
Of this fairy brilliance wrought,
JANE ANNE. Every wish that you surrender,
MONKEY. Every little impulse tender,
JIMBO. Every service that you render
TANTE ANNA. Brings its tributary stream!
TRAMP AND GYFSY. In the fretwork
Of the network
Hearts lie patterned and a-gleam!

WOMAN OF THE Think with passion
HAYSTACK. That shall fashion
Life's entire design well-planned;
Voice (still nearer). While the busy Pleiades,
ROGERS. Sisters to the Hyades,
Voice (quite close). Seven by seven,
Across the heaven,
ROGERS. Light desire
With their fire!
Voice (in his ear). Working cunningly together in a soft and
tireless band,
Sweetly linking
All our thinking,
In the Net of Sympathy that brings back
Fairyland!'

Mother kept close to her husband; she felt a little bewildered, and
uncertain in her movements; it was her first conscious experience of
being out. She wanted to go in every direction at once; for she knew
everybody in the village, knew all their troubles and perplexities,
and felt the call from every house.

'Steady,' he told her; 'one thing at a time, you know.' Her thoughts,
he saw, had turned across the sea to Ireland where her strongest ties
were. Ireland seemed close, and quite as accessible as the village.
Her friend of the Haystack, on the other hand, seemed a long way off
by comparison.

'That's because Henry never realised her personality very clearly,'
said Daddy, seeing by her colour that she needed explanation. 'When
creating all these Garden Sprites, he didn't
think
her sharply,
vividly enough to make her effective. He just felt that a haystack
suggested the elderly spread of a bulky and untidy old woman whose
frame had settled beneath too many clothes, till she had collapsed
into a field and stuck there. But he left her where he found her. He
assigned no duties to her. She's only half alive. As a rule, she
merely sits—just "stays put"—until some one moves her.'

Mother turned and saw her far in the rear, settling down comfortably
upon a flat roof near the church. She rather envied her amiable
disposition. It seemed so safe. Every one else was alive with such
dangerous activity.

'Are we going
much
further—?' she began, when Monkey rushed by,
caught up the sentence, and discharged herself with impudence into
Daddy.

'Which is right, "further" or "farther"?' she asked with a flash of
light.

'Further, of course,' said unsuspecting Mother.

'But "further" sounds "farther," she cried, with a burst of laughter
that died away with her passage of meteoric brilliance—into the body
of the woods beyond.

'But the other Sprites, you see, are real and active,' continued
Daddy, ignoring the interruption as though accustomed to it, because
he thought out clearly every detail. 'They're alive enough to haunt a
house or garden till sensitive people become aware of them and declare
they've seen a ghost.'

'And
we
?' she asked. 'Who thought us out so wonderfully?'

'That's more than I can tell,' he answered after a little pause. 'God
knows that, for He thought out the entire universe to which we belong.
I only know that we're real, and all part of the same huge, single
thing.' He shone with increased brightness as he said it. 'There's no
question about
our
personalities and duties and the rest. Don't you
feel it too?'

He looked at her as he spoke. Her outline had grown more definite. As
she began to understand, and her bewilderment lessened, he noted that
her flashing lines burned more steadily, falling into a more regular,
harmonious pattern. They combined, moreover, with his own, and with
the starlight too, in some exquisite fashion he could not describe.
She put a hand out, catching at the flying banner of his Story that he
trailed behind him in the air. They formed a single design, all three.
His happiness became enormous.

'I feel joined on to everything,' she replied, half singing it in her
joy. 'I feel tucked into the universe everywhere, and into you, dear.
These rays of starlight have sewn us together.' She began to tremble,
but it was the trembling of pure joy and not of alarm....

'Yes,' he said, 'I'm learning it too. The moment thought gets away
from self it lets in starlight and makes room for happiness. To think
with sympathy of others is to grow: you take in their experience and
add it to your own—development; the heart gets soft and deep and wide
till you feel the entire universe buttoning its jacket round you. To
think of self means friction and hence reduction.'

'And your Story,' she added, glancing up proudly at the banner that
they trailed. 'I have helped a little, haven't I?'

'It's nearly finished,' he flashed back; 'you've been its inspiration
and its climax. All these years, when we thought ourselves apart,
you've been helping really underground—that's true collaboration.'

'Our little separation was but a
reculer pour mieux sauter
. See how
we've rushed together again!'

A strange soft singing, like the wind in firs, or like shallow water
flowing over pebbles, interrupted them. The sweetness of it turned the
night alive.

'Come on, old Mother. Our Leader is calling to us. We must work.'

They slid from the blue wind into a current of paler air that happened
to slip swiftly past them, and went towards the forest where Mlle.
Lemaire waited for them. Mother waved her hand to her friend, settled
comfortably upon the flat roof in the village in their rear. 'We'll
come back to lean upon you when we're tired,' she signalled. But she
felt no envy now. In future she would certainly never 'stay put.' Work
beckoned to her—and such endless, glorious work: the whole Universe.

'What life! What a rush of splendour!' she exclaimed as they reached
the great woods and heard them shouting below in the winds. 'I see now
why the forest always comforted me. There's strength here I can take
back into my body with me when I go.'

'The trees, yes, express visibly only a portion of their life,' he
told her. 'There is an overflow we can appropriate.'

Yet their conversation was never audibly uttered. It flashed
instantaneously from one to the other. All they had exchanged since
leaving La Citadelle had taken place at once, it seemed. They were
awake in the region of naked thought and feeling. The dictum of the
materialists that thought and feeling cannot exist apart from matter
did not trouble them. Matter, they saw, was everywhere, though too
tenuous for any measuring instrument man's brain had yet invented.

'Come on!' he repeated; 'the Starlight Express is waiting. It will
take you anywhere you please—Ireland if you like!'

They found the others waiting on the smooth layer of soft purple air
that spread just below the level of the tree-tops. The crests
themselves tossed wildly in the wind, but at a depth of a few feet
there was peace and stillness, and upon this platform the band was
grouped. 'The stars are caught in the branches to-night,' a sensitive
walker on the ground might have exclaimed. The spires rose about them
like little garden trees of a few years' growth, and between them ran
lanes and intricate, winding thoroughfares Mother saw long, dark
things like thick bodies of snakes converging down these passage-ways,
filling them, all running towards the centre where the group had
established itself. There were lines of dotted lights along them. They
did not move with the waving of the tree-tops. They looked uncommonly
familiar.