The Collected Novels of Algernon Blackwood (11 Titles in One Edition). Algernon Blackwood
His friendship with them all grew delightfully, but especially, of course, his friendship with Nixie. This elemental child slipped into his life everywhere, into his play, as into his work; she assumed the right to look after him; with charming gravity she positively mothered him; and Paul, whose life hitherto had known little enough of such sympathy and care, simply loved it.
If her native poesy won his imagination, her practical interest in his welfare and comfort equally won his heart. The way she ferreted about in his room and study, so serious, so thoughtful, attending to so many little details that no one else ever thought of,—all this came into his life with a seductive charm as of something entirely new and strange to him. It was Nixie who always saw to it that his ink-pot was full and his quill pens trimmed; that flowers had no time to fade upon his table; and that matches for his pipes never failed in the glass match-stands. He used up matches, it seemed, almost by the handful.
'You're far worse than Daddy used to be,' she reproved him. 'I believe you eat them.' And when he assured her that he did nothing of the sort, she only shook her head darkly, and said she couldn't understand then what he did with them all.
A hundred services of love and kindness she did for him that no one else would have thought of. On his mantelpiece she put mysterious little bottles of medicine.
'For nettle-stings and scratches,' she explained. 'Your poor hands are always covered with them both when you've been out with us. 'And it was she, too, who bound up his fingers when wounds were more serious, and saw to it that he had a clean rag each day till the sore was healed. She put the new red riband on his straw hat after it fell (himself with it) into the Gull Pond; and one service especially that earned her his eternal respect was to fasten his evening black tie for dinner. This she did every night for him. Such tasks were for magical fingers only. He had never yet compassed it himself. He would run to the nursery to say good-night, and Nixie, looking almost unreal and changeling in her white nightgown, with her yellow hair top-knotted quaintly for sleep, would deftly trim and arrange the strip of satin that he never could manage properly himself. It was a regular little ritual, Toby watching eagerly from the bed across the room.
c You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Uncle Paul,' she said another time, holding up a mysterious garment, 'I never saw such holes—never!' And then she darned the said socks with result that were picturesque if not always entirely satisfactory. And once she sewed the toes so tightly 'across with her darning that he could not get his foot into them. She allowed no one else to touch; them, however. Little the child guessed that while she patched his clothes, she wove his life afresh at the same time.
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.
And the other children understood it; there was no jealousy; it was not felt by them as favouritism. Natural and right it seemed, and was.
'You must ask Nixie,' Jonah would say in reply to any question concerning his uncle's welfare or habits. 'She's his little mother, you know.'
For, truth to tell, they were born, these two, in the same corner of the world of fantasy, bred under the same stars, and fathered by the same elemental forces. But for the trick of the years and the accident of blood, they seemed made for one another ideally, eternally.
Things he could speak of to no one else found in her a natural and easy listener. To grown-ups he had never been able to talk about his mystic longings; the very way they listened made such things instantly seem foolish. But Nixie understood in her child-way, not because she was sympathetic, but because she was in and of them. He was merely talking the language of her own world. He no longer felt ashamed to 'think aloud.' Most people were in pursuit of such stupid, clumsy things—fame, money, and other complicated and ugly things—but this child seemed to understand that he cared about Realities only; for, in her own simple way, this was what she cared about too.
To talk with her cleared his own mind, too, in a way it had never been cleared before. He came to understand himself better, and in so doing swept away a great deal of accumulated rubbish; for he found that when his thought was too confused to make clear to her, it was usually false, wrong—not real.
'I can't make that out,' she would say, with a troubled face. 'I suppose, I'm not old enough yet.' And afterwards Paul would realise that it was himself who was at fault, not the child. Her instinct was unerring; whereas he, with those years of solitude behind him, sometimes lost himself in a region where imagination, self-devouring, ran the risk of becoming untrue, possibly morbid. Her wholesome little judgments brought sanity and laughter.
For, like other mystical temperaments, what he sought, presumably, was escape from himself, yet not—and herein he differed healthily from most of his kidney—so much from his Real Inner Self, as from its outer pettiness and limitations. True, he sought union with something larger and more perfect, and in so far was a mystic; but this larger 'something,' he dimly understood, was the star of his own soul not yet emancipated, and in so far he remained a man of action. His was the true, wholesome mysticism; hysteria was not—as with most—its chief ingredient. Moreover, this other, eternal part of him touched Eternity. To be identified with it meant to be identified with God, but never for one instant to lose his own individuality.
And to express himself through the creative imagination, to lose his own smallness by interpreting beauty, he had always felt must be a halfway house to the end in view. His inability, therefore, to find such means of expression had always meant something incalculably grave, something that hindered growth. But now this child Nixie, in some extraordinary yet utterly simple fashion, had come to show him the way. It was wonderful past finding out. He hardly knew himself how it had come about. Yet, there she was, ever by his side, pointing to ways that led him out into expression.
No woman could have done it. His two longings, he came to realise, were actually one: the desire to express his yearnings grew out of the desire to find God.
And so it was that the thought of her growing up was horrid to him. He could not bear to think of her as a young woman moving in a modern world where she would lose all touch with the elemental forces of vision and simplicity whence she drew half her grace and wonder. Already for him, in some mystical fashion of spiritual alchemy, she had become the eternal feminine, exquisitely focussed in the little child. With the advance of years this must inevitably pass from her, as she increased the distance from her source of inspiration.
'Nixie, you must promise never to grow up,' he would say, laughing.
'Because Aventures stop then, don't they?' she asked.
'Partly that,' he answered.
'And I should get tired, like mother; or stupid, like the head gardener,' she added. 'I know. But I don't think I ever shall, somehow. I think I am meant to be always like this.'
The serious way she said this last phrase escaped him at the time. He remembered it afterwards, however.
It was so delightful, too, to read out his stories and aventures to her; they laughed over there and her criticisms often improved them vastly. He even read her his first poem without shyness, and they discussed each verse and talked about 'stealing Heaven's fire,' and the poor 'sparks' that never grew into flames. The 'kiss of fire' she thought' must be wonderful. She also asked what a 'lyre was. They made up other verses together too. But though they laughed and she asked odd questions, on the whole she grasped the sadness of the poem perfectly.
'Let's go and cry a bit somewhere,' she remarked quietly, her eyes very wistful. 'It helps it out! awfully, you know.'
He reminded her, however, of a sage remark of Toby's, to the effect that when men grew beards they lost the power to cry. Quick as a flash, then, she turned with one of her exquisite little bits of unconscious poetry.
'Let's go to the Gwyle