The Collected Novels of Algernon Blackwood (11 Titles in One Edition). Algernon Blackwood
wake your dear eyes with a kiss so soft you never know it. In your early morning rambles, as in your reveries of the dusk, '. never leave you—because I cannot. All day long I am beside you, though you little realise my presence. I share half your pleasures and all your pains. And in return you hand over to me half that soul whose unuttered prayers have thus created me afresh for your salvation.'
'But it must be my own voice speaking,' he cried inwardly, satisfied and happy beyond belief. 'It is the words of my own thoughts that I hear!'
'Because I am your own thoughts speaking,' sh« replied instantly, as though he had uttered aloud. 'I lie, you see, behind your inmost thoughts!'
They walked through sunny meadows, picking their way among islands of wild flowers. There was no sound but the murmur of wind and river, and the singing of birds. Fleecy clouds, here and there in the blue, hung cool and white, watching them. The whole world, Paul felt, listened without shyness.
'And so it is that you love me without shyness,' she went on, marvellously linking in with his thought; 'I am intimate with you as your own soul, and our relations are pure with the purity that was before man. There can be no secrets between us, or possibility of secrets, for your most hidden dreams are also mine. So mingled with your ultimate being am I, in fact, that sometimes you dare not recognise me as separate, and all that appears on the surface of your dear mind must first filter through myself. Why!' she cried, with a sudden rush of mischievous laughter, 'I even know what you are made of; why your queer heart has never been able to satisfy itself—to "grow-up," as you call it; and all about this endless desire you have to find God, which is really nothing but the search to find your true inner Self.'
'Tell me! tell me!' he cried.
'Besides the sun,' she went on with a strange swiftness of words, 'there's the wind and the rain in you; yes, and moon and stars as well. That's why the fire and restlessness of the imagination for ever tear you. No mere form of expression can ever satisfy that, but only increase it; for it means your desire to know reality, to know beauty, to know your own soul; to know—God! Your blood has kinship with those tides that flow through all space, even to the gates of the stars; dawns and; sunsets, moonrise and meteors haunt your thoughts with their magic lights; wild flowers of the fields? and hillside nod beside you while you sleep; and the winds, laughing and sighing, lift your dreams? upon vast wings and flash with them beyond the edges of the universe!'
'Stop,' he cried with passion, 'you are telling all my secrets.'
'I am telling them only to myself,' she laughed, 'and therefore to you. For I know all the fevers of your soul. The wilderness calls you and the great woods. You are haunted by the faces of the world's forgotten places. Your imagination plays with the| lightning about the mountain tops, and seeks primeval forests and the shores of desolate seas. . . .'
Paul listened spellbound while she put some of the most intangible of his fancies into the language of poetry. Yet she spoke with the quiet simplicity of true things. The man felt his soul shake with delight to hear her. Again and again, while she spoke, the feeling came to him that in another moment her face must clear and he would know her; yet the actual second of recognition never appeared. The girl's true identity continued to evade him. The enticing uncertainty added enormously to her charm. 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 leaves 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. They were one being, growing out of the earth that he loved—the old, magical, beautiful earth that fed so great a part of his secret life from perennial springs.
As she drew away again from his caress he glanced down and saw that what she had pinned into his coat was a little cluster of leaves from the branch of a silver birch tree.
'Then I, too, shall give you a sign,' he said, 'that shall mean the same as yours.' And he picked a twig of pine needles from a tree beside them and twined it through a coil of her hair. Then, seizing her hands, he swung her round in a dance till they fell upon the river bank at last, tired out, and slept the sleep of children.
And after that, for a whole day it seemed, they wandered through this summer landscape, following the river to its source in the mountains, and then descending on the farther side to the shores of a blue-rimmed sea.
'There are the ships,' she cried, pointing to the shining expanse of water; 'and, see, there is our ship coming for us.'
And as she stood there, laughing with excitement like a child, a barque with painted figure-head and I brown sails yielding to the wind, came towards them! over the waves, the bales of fruit upon her decks 'scenting the air, the smell of rope and tar and salty f wood enticing them to distance and adventure, Through the cordage the very sound of the wind I called to them to be off.
'So at last we start upon our long, long voyage together,' she said mysteriously, blushing with pleasure, and leading him down towards the ship.
'And where are we to sail to?' he asked; for the flap of the sails and the waves beating against the sides made resistance impossible. The sea-smells were in his nostrils. He glanced down at the veiled face beside him.
'First to the Islands of the Night,' she whispered so low that not even the wind could carry it away; 'for there we shall be alone.'
'And then?'
'And then to the Islands of Delight,' she murmured more softly still; 'for there we shall find the lost children of the world—our children, and so be happy with them ever after, like the people in the fairy tales.'
With something like a shock he realised that some one else was walking beside him, talking of things that were real in a very different sense. He had been out walking longer than he knew, and had reached the house again. The autumnal mist already drew its gauze curtains about the old building. The smoke rose in straight lines from the chimneys, melting into dusk. That other place of sunshine and flowers had faded—sea, ship, islands, had all sunk beneath the depths within him. And this other person had been saying things for some minutes. . . .
'I don't believe you've been listening to a single word, Paul. You stand there with your eyes fixed on vacancy, and only nod your head and grunt.'
'I assure you, Margaret, dear,' he stammered, coming to the surface as from a long swim under water, 'I rarely miss anything you say. Only the Crack came so very suddenly. You were saying that Dick's niece was coming to us—Joan—er—Thingumybob, and—'
'So you heard some of it,' she laughed quietly, relenting. 'And I hope the Crack you speak about is in your head, not in mine.'
'It's everywhere,' he said with his grave humour.
'That's the trouble, you see; one never knows—'
Then, seeing that she was looking anxiously at the walls of the house and at the roof, he dropped his teasing and came back to solid earth again. 'And how soon do you expect her?' he asked in his most practical voice. 'When does she arrive upon the scene?'
'Why, Paul, I've already told you twice! You really are getting more absent-minded every day. Joan comes to-morrow, or the day after—she's to telegraph which—and stays here for as long as she can manage—a fortnight or so, I expect. She works herself to death, I believe, in town with those poor children, and I want her to get a real rest before she goes back.'
'Waifs, aren't they?' he asked, picking up the thread of the discourse like a thing heard in a dream, 'lost children of the slums?'
'Yes. You'll see them for yourself probably, as she has some of them down usually for a day in the country. One can be of use in that way—and it's so nice to help. Dick, you know, was absorbed in the scheme. You will help, won't you, when the time comes?'
He promised; and they went in together to tea.