Algernon Blackwood (55 page)

'You've eaten so much supper you can't speak,' said Monkey, whose hand
was in his coat-pocket for loose chicken-feed, as she called centimes.
'The Little Countess will
regler ton affaire
all right. Just wait
till she gets at you.'

'You love her?' he asked gently, feeling little disposed to play.

The child's reply was cryptic, yet uncommonly revealing:—

'She's just like a relation. It's so funny she didn't know us long,
long ago—find us out, I mean.'

'Mother likes her awfully,' added Jimbo, as though that established
the matter of her charm for ever. 'It's a pity she's not a man'—just
to show that Cousinenry's position was not endangered.

They chattered on. Rogers hardly remembers how he climbed the long
stone steps. He found himself in the Den. It came about with a sudden
jump as in dreams.
She
was among them before the courtyard was
crossed; she had gone up the steps immediately in front of him....
Jinny was bringing in the lamp, while Daddy struggled with a load of
peat for the fire, getting in everybody's way. Riquette stood
silhouetted against the sky upon the window sill. Jimbo used the
bellows. A glow spread softly through the room. He caught sight of
Minks standing rather helplessly beside the sofa talking to Jane Anne,
and picking at his ear as he always did when nervous or slightly ill
at ease. He wondered vaguely what she was saying to him. He looked
everywhere but at the one person for whose comfort the others were so
energetic.

His eyes did not once turn in her direction, yet he knew exactly how
she was dressed, what movements she made, where she stood, the very
words, indeed, she used, and in particular the expression of her face
to each in turn. For he was guilty of a searching inner scrutiny he
could not control. And, above all, he was aware, with a divine,
tumultuous thrill, that she, for her part, also neither looked at him
nor uttered one sentence that he could take as intended for himself.

Because, of course, all she said and did and looked
were
meant for
him, and her scrutiny was even closer and more searching than his own.

In the Den that evening there was one world within another, though
only these two, and probably the intuitive and diabolically observant
Minks, perceived it. The deep furnaces of this man's inner being,
banked now so long that mere little flames had forgotten their way
out, lay open at last to that mighty draught before whose fusing power
the molten, fluid state becomes inevitable.

'You must come up to me' rang on in his head like a chime of bells. 'O
think Beauty: it's your duty....'

The chairs were already round the open fireplace, when Monkey pushed
him into the big one with the broken springs he always used, and
established herself upon his knee. Jimbo was on the other in a
twinkling. Jane Anne plumped down upon the floor against him. Her hair
was up, and grown-ups might sit as they pleased. Minks in a hard,
straight-backed chair, firmly assured everybody that he was
exceedingly comfortable and really preferred stiff chairs. He found
safety next to Mother who, pleased and contented, filled one corner of
the sofa and looked as though she occupied a pedestal. Beyond her
perched Daddy, on the music stool, leaning his back against the
unlighted fourneau. The Wumble Book was balanced on his knees, and
beside him sat the little figure of the visitor who, though at the
end, was yet somehow the true centre of the circle. Rogers saw her
slip into her unimportant place. She took her seat, he thought, as
softly as a mouse. For no one seemed to notice her. She was so
perfectly at home among them. In her little folded hands the Den and
all its occupants seemed cared for beyond the need of words or
definite action. And, although her place was the furthest possible
remove from his own, he felt her closer to him than the very children
who nestled upon his knees.

Riquette then finally, when all were settled, stole in to complete the
circle. She planted herself in the middle of the hearth before them
all, looked up into their faces, decided that all was well, and began
placidly to wash her face and back. A leg shot up, from the middle of
her back apparently, as a signal that they might talk. A moment later
she composed herself into that attitude of dignified security possible
only to the feline species. She made the fourth that inhabited this
world within a world. Rogers, glancing up suddenly from observing her,
caught—for the merest fraction of an instant—a flash of starfire in
the air. It darted across to him from the opposite end of the horse-
shoe. Behind it flickered the tiniest smile a human countenance could
possibly produce.

'Little mouse who, lost in wonder,
Flicks its whiskers at the thunder.'

It was Jane Anne repeating the rhyme for Minks's benefit. How
appropriately it came in, he thought. And voices were set instantly in
motion; it seemed that every one began to speak at once.

Who finally led the conversation, or what was actually said at first,
he has no more recollection than the man in the moon, for he only
heard the silvery music of a single voice. And that came rarely. He
felt washed in glory from head to foot. In a dream of happy starlight
he swam and floated. He hid his face behind the chair of Monkey, and
his eyes were screened below the welcome shelter of Jimbo's shoulder.

The talk meanwhile flowed round the horse-shoe like a river that
curves downhill. Life ran past him, while he stood on the banks and
watched. He reconstructed all that happened, all that was said and
done, each little movement, every little glance of the eye. These
common things he recreated. For, while his body sat in the Den before
a fire of peat, with children, a cat, a private secretary, three very
ordinary people and a little foreign visitor, his spirit floated high
above the world among the immensities of suns and starfields. He was
in the Den, but the Den was in the universe, and to the scale of the
universe he set the little homely, commonplace picture. Life, he
realised,
is
thought and feeling; and just then he thought and felt
like a god. He was Orion, and Orion had at last overtaken the
Pleiades. The fairest of the cluster lay caught within his giant arms.
The Enormous Thing that so long had haunted him with hints of its
approach, rose up from his under-self, and possessed him utterly. And,
oh, the glory of it, the splendour, the intoxication!

In the dim corner where
she
sat, the firelight scarcely showed her
face, yet every shade of expression that flitted across her features
he saw unobscured. The sparkling, silvery sentences she spoke from
time to time were volumes that interpreted life anew. For years he had
pored over these thick tomes, but heavily and without understanding.
The little things she said now supplied the key. Mind and brain played
no part in this. It was simply that he heard—and knew. He re-
discovered her from their fragments, piece by piece....

The general talk flowed past him in a stream of sound, cut up into
lengths by interrupting consonants, and half ruined by this arbitrary
division; but what
she
said always seemed the living idea that lay
behind the sound. He could not explain it otherwise. With herself,
and with Riquette, and possibly with little, dreaming Minks, he sat
firmly at the centre of this inner world. The others, even the
children, hovered about its edges, trying to get in. That tiny smile
had flashed its secret, ineffable explanation into him. Starlight was
in his blood....

Mother, for instance, he vaguely knew, was speaking of the years they
all had lived in Bourcelles, of the exquisite springs, of the fairy,
gorgeous summers. It was the most ordinary talk imaginable, though it
came sincerely from her heart.

'If only you had come here earlier,' she said, 'when the forest was so
thick with flowers.' She enumerated them one by one. 'Now, in the
autumn, there are so few!'

The little sparkling answer lit the forest glades afresh with colour,
perfume, wonder:—

'But the autumn flowers, I think, are the sweetest; for they have the
beauty of all the summer in them.'

A slight pause followed, and then all fell to explaining the shining
little sentence until its lustre dimmed and disappeared beneath the
smother of their words. In himself, however, who heard them not, a new
constellation swam above the horizon of his inner world. Riquette
looked slyly up and blinked. She purred more deeply, but she made no
stupid sign....

And Daddy mentioned then the forest spell that captured the entire
village with its peace and softness—'all so rough and big and
tumbled, and yet every detail so exquisitely finished and thought out,
you know.'

Out slipped the softest little fairy phrase imaginable from her dim
corner then:—

'Yes, like hand-made things—you can almost see the hand that made
them.'

And Rogers started so perceptibly that Jimbo shifted his weight a
little, thinking he must be uncomfortable. He had surely used that
very phrase himself! It was familiar. Even when using it he remembered
wondering whence its sweetness had dropped into his clumsier mind.
Minks uncrossed his legs, glanced up at him a moment, then crossed
them again. He made this sign, but, like Riquette, he said nothing....

The stream flowed on and on. Some one told a story. There was hushed
attentive listening, followed suddenly by bursts of laughter and
delight. Who told it, or what it was about, Rogers had no notion.
Monkey dug him in the ribs once because apparently he grunted at the
wrong moment, and Jimbo chided her beneath his breath—'Let him have a
nap if he wants to; a man's always tired after a long journey like
that...!' Some one followed with another story—Minks, was it, this
time?—for Rogers caught his face, as through a mist, turning
constantly to Mother for approval. It had to do with a vision of great
things that had come to a little insignificant woman on a bed of
sickness. He recognised the teller because he knew the tale of old.
The woman, he remembered, was Albinia's grandmother, and Minks was
very proud of it.

'That's a
very
nice story,' rippled from the dim corner when it was
over. 'For I like everything so tiny that you can find it inside a
shell. That's the way to understand big things and to do them.'

And again the phrase was as familiar to him as though he had said it
himself—heard it, read it, dreamed it, even. Whatever its fairy
source, he knew it. His bewilderment increased absurdly. The things
she said were so ordinary, yet so illuminating, though never quite
betraying their secret source. Where had he heard them? Where had he
met this little foreign visitor? Whence came the singular certainty
that she shared this knowledge with him, and might presently explain
it, all clear as daylight and as simple? He had the odd impression
that she played with him, delayed purposely the moment of revelation,
even expected that
he
would be the first to make it known. The
disclosure was to come from himself! She provided him with
opportunities—these little sparkling sentences! But he hid in his
corner, silent and magically excited, afraid to take the lead. These
sentences were addressed to him. There was conversation thus between
the two of them; but his replies remained inaudible. Thought makes no
sound; its complete delivery is ever wordless.... He felt very big,
and absurdly shy.

It was gesture, however, that infallible shorthand of the mind, which
seemed the surest medium of this mute delightful intercourse. For each
little gesture that she made—unconsciously, of course—expressed more
than the swiftest language could have compassed in an hour. And he
noted every one: the occasional flourish of the little hands, the
bending of the graceful neck, the shadowy head turned sideways, the
lift of one shoulder, almost imperceptible, and sometimes the attitude
of the entire body. To him they were, one and all, eloquently
revealing. Behind each little gesture loomed a yet larger one, the
scale increasing strangely, till his thoughts climbed up them as up a
ladder into the region where her ideas lay naked before casual
interpretation clothed them. Those, he reflected, who are rich in
ideas, but find words difficult, may reveal themselves prodigally in
gesture. Expression of one kind or another there must be; yet lavish
action, the language of big souls, seems a man's expression rather
than a woman's.... He built up swiftly, surely, solidly his
interpretation of this little foreign visitor who came to him thus
suddenly from the stars, whispering to his inmost thought, 'You must
come up to me.' The whole experience dazed him. He sat in utter
dumbness, shyer than a boy, but happier than a singing star!... The
Joy in his heart was marvellous.

Yet how could he know all this?

In the intervals that came to him like breathing spaces he asked
himself this childish question. How could he tell that this little
soft being with the quiet unobtrusive manners had noble and great
beauty of action in her anywhere? A few pretty phrases, a few
significant gestures, these were surely a slight foundation to build
so much upon! Was there, then, some absolute communion of thought
between the two of them such as his cousin's story tried to show? And
had their intercourse been running on for years, neither of them aware
of it in the daytime? Was this intimate knowledge due to long
acquaintance? Had her thought been feeding him perhaps since childhood
even?

In the pause of his temporary lunacy he asked himself a dozen similar
questions, but before the sign of any answer came he was off again,
sweeping on outstretched wings among the stars. He drank her in. He
knew. What was the good of questions? A thirsty man does not stop
midway in his draught to ask when his thirst began, its cause, or why
the rush of liquid down his throat is satisfying. He knows, and
drinks. It seemed to Henry Rogers, ordinary man of business and
practical affairs, that some deep river which so long had flowed deep
out of sight, hidden below his daily existence, rose now grandly at
the flood. He had heard its subterranean murmurs often. Here, in the
Den, it had reached his lips at last. And he quenched his thirst....
His thought played round her without ceasing, like flowing water....