Algernon Blackwood

“ Leaning backwards with her hair tumbling down her neck, she looked at him out of eyes that he half imagined, half knew. Laughter and gentleness played over her like sunlight. Standing there, framed against the reeds of the river bank, with the blue waters behind and the wind and sky about her head, Paul thought that never till this moment had he understood the whole magic of a woman’s beauty. Yet at the same time he somehow divined that she was as much child as woman, and that something of eternal youthfulness mingled exquisitely with her suggestion of maturity. ”

“ The big man allowed himself to be led away. He felt his armour dropping off in great flakes as he went. No light is so magical as in that mingled hour of sun and moon when the west is still burning and the east just a-glimmer with the glory that is to come. Paul felt it strongly. He was half with the sun and half with the moon, and the gates of fantasy seemed somewhere close at hand. Curtains were being drawn aside, veils lifting, doors softly opening. He almost heard the rush of the wind behind, and tasted the keen, sweet excitement of another world. ”

“ And Paul, moving beside her, murmured in his beard, ‘If she’s not my Ideal, set mysteriously somehow into the framework of one I already love—I swear I don’t know who she is!’
They made their way along the sandy shores of the river, the waves breaking at their feet, the wind singing among the reeds; never had the sunlight seemed so brilliant, the day so wonderful and kind. All nature helped them; playing their great game as if it was the only game worth playing in the whole world—the game loved from one eternity to another. ”

“ Paul looked about him with a sigh that was half a yawn. China and Japan were still romping on the lawn, Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke were curled up in hot, soft circles precisely where they had been before, Toby and Jonah were still busily engaged doing ‘something with daisies’ in the full blaze of the sunshine, and Nixie lay beside him, all innocence and peace, still gazing through the tangle of her yellow hair at the slow-sailing clouds overhead. ”

“ Children: how near they, too, stood to the great things of life, and all the nearer, perhaps, for not being aware of it. How their farseeing eyes and their simple, unlined souls pointed the way, like Nature, to the ideal region of which he was always dreaming: to Reality, to God.
All real children knew and understood; were ready to offer their timid yet unhesitating guidance, and without question or explanation.
Had, then, Nixie and her troupe already taken him prisoner? And were the soft chains already twined about his neck?...
Paul hardly acknowledged the question definitely to himself. ”

“ Imagination, released and singing, provides the greatest of all magics—belief in one’s self. The rivers of feeling carve their own channels, which are ever the shortest way to the ocean of fulfilment. The effects spread gradually to the remotest corner of his being.
One rainy day he found himself alone in the schoolroom with Nixie, for it was Saturday afternoon, and Mlle. Fleury had carried off Jonah and Toby in their best clothes, and to their acute dismay, to have tea with the children—they were dull children—at the vicarage. ”

“ In a moment they were on their feet and away over the springy turf, singing and laughing in the sunshine, picking flowers, jumping the little brooks that ran like crystal ribbons among the grass, Nixie and Jonah dancing by his side as though they had springs in their feet and wings on their shoulders. More and more the country spread before them like a great garden run wild, and Paul thought he had never seen such fields of flowers or smelt such perfumes in the wind. ”

“ And with all the children he took Dick’s place more and more. His existence widened, filled up; he felt in touch with real things as of old in the woods; the children replaced the trees.
But it was Nixie in particular who crept close to his unsatisfied heart and tied him to her inner life with the gossamer threads of her sand-coloured hair. This elfin little being, with her imagination and tenderness, brought to him something he had never known before, never dreamed of even; a perfect companionship; a companionship utterly unclouded. ”

“ The wind always wakes with the sun. It’s getting closer now.’
It was very wonderful. No words can describe adequately the still splendour of that vast forest as they stood there, waiting for the sunrise. Nothing stirred. The trees were carved out of some marvellous dream-stuff, motionless, yet conveying the impression of life. Paul knew it and recognised it. All primeval woods possess that quality—trees that know nothing of men and have never heard the ringing of the axe. The silence was of death, yet a sense of life that is far beyond death pulsed through it. ”

“ Sights and sounds the imagination can always reconstruct after a fashion, but odour is too elusive. It rose now to his nostrils as something long forgotten, and swept him with a wave of memory that was extraordinarily keen.
‘That’s a smell to take me back twenty-five years,’ he thought, inhaling the scent of the heather. He caught his breath sharply, uncertain whether it was pain or pleasure that predominated. A profound yearning, too fugitive to be seized, too vague to be definitely labelled, stirred in the depths of him as his eye roamed over the miles of sunlight and blue shadow at his feet ”

“ There were notice-boards set about her to warn trespassers, stating clearly that she did not wish to be let out. Yet in her way she was true, loving, and sweet—only it was such a conventional way, he felt.
Leaving the world of rhododendron bushes behind them, they came to the beginning of a pine-wood leading to the heather-land beyond. There was a touch of primitive wildness here. The trees grew straight and tall, filling the glade, and a stream ran brawling among their roots.
‘This is the Gwyle,’ she said, as they entered the shade, ‘it was Dick’s favourite part of the whole grounds. ”

“ Great slabs of him, so to speak, stopped growing up, sinking down into the subconscious region to await conditions favourable for calling them to the surface again, and eventually coming to life—this was his tragic little secret—at a time when they were long overdue.
To the end of life he remained shy, shy in the sense that most of his thoughts and emotions he was afraid to reveal to others; with the shyness, too, of the utterly modest soul that cannot believe the world will give it the very things it has most right to claim, yet never dares to claim. ”

“ A wild rush of wind swept him along, whistling in his ears; there was a breathless and giddy sensation of dropping through empty space that seemed as though it could never end—and then Paul suddenly found himself sitting on a grassy bank beside a river, Nixie and Jonah on either side of him, and Smoke washing his face in front of them as though nothing in the whole world had ever happened to disturb his equanimity. And a bright, soft light, like the light of the sun, shone warmly over everything. ”

“ His whole being threw itself inwards upon his thoughts, and outwards upon what fed his thoughts—the wonder of Nature. Even as a boy he had been mystically minded, a poet if ever there was one, though a poet without a lyre; but at school he had chanced to come under the influence of masters who had sought to curb the exuberance of his imagination, so that he started into life with the rooted idea that it was something of a disgrace for a man to be too sensitive to beauty, and to possess a vivid and coloured imagination was almost a thing to be ashamed of. ”

“ Paul promised. Joan sounded rather attractive, to tell the truth. He remembered something, too, of the big organisation his old friend had founded in London for the rescue and education of waif-boys. A thrill of pride ran through him, and close at its heels a secret sense of shame, that he himself did nothing in the great world of action—that his own life was a mass of selfish dreaming and refined self-seeking, that all his yearning for God and beauty was after all, perhaps, but a spiritual egoism. ”

“ The vision of the poet saw ... far—far....
All this he realised through the blue eyes of the child at his side, who was playing with daisies and talking about the make-believe of children. His being swam out into the sunshine of great distances, of endless possibilities, all of which he might be able afterwards to interpret to others who did not see so far, or so clearly, as himself. He began to realise that his spirit, like the endless river at his feet, was without end or beginning. Thrills of new life poured into him from all sides. ”

“ The huge, sombre pines rose from their beds of golden moss to shake their crests faintly to the stars, awaiting the coming of the true passion—the great Sun of life, that should call them to splendour, to reality, and to the struggle of a bigger life than they yet knew, when they might even try to shake free from their roots in the hard, confining earth, and fly to the source of their existence—the sun. ”

“ It is to be something very different from the man of to-day. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space ”

“ It evoked in him even the sense of worship.
‘And this shall be the earnest of our ideal companionship,’ she whispered, holding up a spray of 259leaves which she proceeded to fasten into the buttonhole of his coat; ‘the symbol by which you shall always know me—the sign of my presence in your heart.’
The top of her head, as she bent over the task, was on a level with his lips, and when he stooped to kiss it the perfumes of the earth—flowers, trees, wind, water—rose about her like a cloud. Her hair was hot with sunshine, all silken with the air of summer. ”

“ Oh, Uncle Paul!’ Her tone expressed all the solemn sympathy the world could hold.
He nodded his head mysteriously.
The child suddenly sat up very erect. An idea of importance had come into her head.
‘Then I wonder if Pouf and Smoke, and Zezette and Mrs. Tompkyns are like that,’ she cried, her face grave as a hanging judge—‘poets who can’t express themselves, and may burst and get queer! Because they understand all that sort of thing—scuttling leaves and dew falling, and tickling grasses and the dreams of beeties, and things we never hear at all. ”

“ The actual, living mood of his own childhood rose out of the depths of blurred memories and caused a mist to rise before his eyes. An emotion he was utterly unable to define shook his heart.
The room was filled with the slanting rays of the setting sun, and the air from the open windows smelt of garden trees, lawns, and flower-beds. Sea and heather, too, added their own sharper perfumes. It caught him away for a moment—oh, that strange power of old perfumes—to the earliest scenes of his own life, the boyhood in the gardens of Kent before America had claimed him. ”

“ His size overwhelmed him; he felt like an elephant. With a sudden rush all his self-possession deserted him. He almost wished that his sister might return so that they should be brought up to him seriatim, named just as Adam named the beasts, and dismissed—which Adam did not do—with a kiss. It was really, of course—and he knew it to his secret mortification—a meeting on both sides of children; they all felt the shyness and self-consciousness of children, he as much as they, and at any moment might take the sudden plunge into careless intimacy, as the way with children ever is. ”

“ The conclusions are obvious enough; they need no elaboration. He had already learned from Joan of their sufferings. His heart burned within him. It was all mixed up in his queer poetic mind with the swift vision of the Tree-Spirits, and with the picture of Joan, Nixie, and the other children perched like big berries in that astonished ilex tree. In due season both berries and dreams must ripen. He was beginning to see the way.
‘They’re gone already,’ Nixie interrupted his long reverie in a whisper; ‘and to-night there’ll be great rains to wash away all the signs. ”

“ It was the child’s voice that presently recalled him.
‘Uncle Paul,’ she said very softly, her mind still busy with thoughts of her own, ‘do you know that sometimes I have heard the earth breathing too—akchilly breathing?’
Paul, coming back from a long journey, turned and gazed at the eager little face beside him in silence.
‘The earth is alive, I’m sure,’ she went on with an air of great mystery. ‘It breathes and whispers, and even purrs; sometimes it cries. It’s a great body, alive—just like you and the other stars——’
‘Nixie!’
‘They are all bodies, though; heavenly bodies, Daddy called them. ”