Читать книгу The Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood (10 Novels & 80+ Short Stories in One Edition) - Algernon Blackwood - Страница 42

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'THIS is him,' cried Jonah breathlessly, pointing with a hand that wore ink like a funeral glove. 'I've got him this time. Look!' And he waved a half-sheet of paper in his uncle's face.

'I've made one too—oh, a beauty!' echoed Toby; 'and I haven't made half such a mess as you.' Three of her fingers were in mourning. A crape-like line running from the nose to the corner of the mouth, lent her a certain distinction. She, too, waved a bit of paper in the air.

'Mine's the real Jack-of-the-Inkpot though, isn't he, Uncle Paul?' exclaimed the boy, leaving the schoolroom table, and running up to show it.

'They're all real—as real as your awful fingers,' decreed Paul.

He had been explaining how to make the figure of the Ink Sprite that leaves blots wherever he goes, blackens penholders and fingers, and leaves his crawly marks across even the neatest page of writing. Two blots and a line—then fold the paper. Open it again and the ink has run into the semblance of an outlandish figure with countless legs and arms, and a fantastic head; something between a spider, a centipede, and a sprite.

'It's Jack-of-the-Inkpot,' he told them. 'Half the time he does his dirty work invisibly, and if he touches blotting paper—he vanishes altogether.'

Jonah skipped about the room, waving his hideous creation in the air. Toby, in her efforts to make a still better one, almost climbed into the inkstand. Nixie sat on the window-sill, dangling her legs and looking on.

'Very little ink does it,' explained Paul, frightened at the results of his instruction. 'You needn't pour it on! He works with the smallest possible material, remember!' His own ringers were no longer as spotless as they might have been.

'Look!' shouted Jonah, standing on a chair and ignoring the rebuke. 'There he goes—just like a black spider flying!' He let his half-sheet drop through the air, ink running down its side as it fell, while Toby watched with the envy of despair.

Paul pounced upon the wriggling figure just in time to prevent further funeral trappings. He turned it face downwards upon the blotting paper.

'Oh, oh!' cried the children in the same breath; 'it's drank him up!'

'Drunk him up,' corrected Paul, relieved by the success of his manoeuvre. 'His feet touched the blotting-paper, you see.'

A pause followed. 'You promised to tell us his song, please,' observed Nixie from her perch on the window-sill.

'This is it, then,' he answered, looking round at the smudged and solemn faces, instantly grown still. 'To judge by appearances you know this Sprite better than I do!

I dance on your paper,

I hide in your pen,

I make in your ink-stand

My black little den;

And when you're not looking

I hop on your nose,

And leave on your forehead

The marks of my toes.

When you're trying to finish

Your "i "with a dot,

I slip down your finger

And make it a blot;

And when you're so busy

To cross a big "T,"

I make on the paper

A little Black Sea.

I drink blotting-paper,

Eat penwiper-pie,

You never can catch me,

You never need try!

I hop any distance,

I use any ink!

I'm on to your fingers

Before you can wink.'

Paul's back was to the door. He was in the act of making up a new verse, and declaiming it, when he was aware that a change had come suddenly over the room. It was manifest from the faces of the children. Their attention had wandered; they were looking past him—beyond him.

And when he turned to discover the cause of the distraction he looked straight into the grey eyes of a woman—grave-faced, with an expression of strength^ and sweetness. As he did so the opening words of verse four slipped out in spite of themselves:—

'I'm the blackest of goblins,

I revel in smears—'

He smothered the accusing statement with a cough that was too late to disguise it, while the grey eyes looked steadily into his with a twinkle their' owner made no attempt to conceal. The same instant the children rushed past him to welcome her.

'It's Cousin Joan! 'they cried with one voice, and dragged her into the room.

'And this is Uncle Paul from America began Nixie.

'And he's crammed full of sprites and things, and sees the wind and gets through our Crack, and —and climbs up the rigging of the Night' cried Jonah, striving to say everything at once before his sisters.

'And writes the aventures of our Secret S'iety,' Toby managed to interpolate by speaking very fast indeed.

'He's Recording Secre'ry, you see,' explained Nixie in a tone of gentle authority that brought order into the scene. 'Cousin Joan, you know,' she added, turning gravely to her uncle, 'is Visiting I'spector.'

'Whose visits, however, are somewhat rare, I fear,' said the new arrival, with a smile. Her voice was quiet and very pleasant. 'I hope, Mr. Rivers, you are able to keep the Society in better order than I ever could.'

The introduction seemed adequate. They shook hands. Paul somehow forgot the signs of mourning he wore in common with the rest.

'Cousin Joan has a real Society in London, of course,' Nixie explained gravely, 'a Society that picks up real lost children.'

'A-filleted with ours, though,' cried Jonah proudly.

''ffiliated, he means,' explained Nixie, while everybody laughed, and the boy looked uncertain whether to be proud, hurt, or puzzled, but in the end laughing louder than the rest.

When Paul was alone a few minutes later, the children having been carried off shouting to receive the presents their 'Cousin' always brought them on her rare visits from London, he was conscious first of a curious sense of disappointment. That strong-faced woman, grave of expression, with the low voice and the rather sad grey eyes, he divined was the cause; though, for the moment, he could not trace the feeling to any definite detail. In his mind he still saw her standing in the doorway—a woman no longer in her first youth, yet comely with a delicate, strong beauty that bore the indefinable touch of high living. It was peculiar to his intuitive temperament to note the spirit before he ! became aware of physical details; and this woman had left something of her personality behind her. She had spoken little, and that little ordinary; had done nothing in act or gesture that was striking. He did not even remember how she was dressed, beyond that she looked neat, soft, effective. Yet, there it was; something was in the room with him that had not been there before she came.

At first he felt vaguely that his sense of disappointment had to do with herself. Not that he had expected anything dazzling, or indeed had given her consciously any thought at all. The male creature, of course, hearing the name of a girl he is about to meet, instinctively conjures up a picture to suit her name. He cannot help himself. And Joan Nicholson, apart from any deliberate process of thought or desire on his part, hardly suited the picture that had thus spontaneously formed in his mind. The woman seemed too big for the picture. He had seen her, perhaps, hitherto, only through his sister's eyes. It puzzled him. About her, mysteriously as an invisible garment, was the atmosphere of things bigger, grander, finer than he had expected; nobler than he quite understood.

Ah, now, at last, he was getting at it. The vague sense of disappointment was not with her; it was with himself. Tested by some new standard her mere presence had subtly introduced into the room—into his intuitive mind—he had become suddenly dissatisfied with himself. His play with the children, he remembered feeling, had seemed all at once insignificant, unreal, almost unworthy—compared to another larger order of things her presence had suggested, if not actually revealed.

Thus, in a flash of vision, the truth came to him. It was with himself and not with her that he was disappointed. He recalled scraps of the conversation. It was, after all, nothing Joan Nicholson had said; it was something Nixie had said. Nixie, his little blue-eyed guide and teacher, had been up to her wizard tricks again, all unconsciously.

'Cousin Joan has a real Society in London, you know—a Society that picks up real lost children?

That was the sentence that had done it. He felt certain. Combined with the spiritual presentment of the woman, this apparently stray remark had dropped down into his heart with almost startling effect—like the grain of powder a chemist adds to his test tube that suddenly changes the colour and nature of its contents. As yet he could not determine quite what the change meant; he felt only that it was there—disappointment, dissatisfaction with himself.

'Cousin Joan has a real Society.' She was in earnest.

'Real lost children'—perhaps potential Nixies, Jonahs, Tobys, all waiting to be 'picked up.'

The thoughts ran to and fro in him like some one with a little torch, lighting up corners and recesses of his soul he had so far never visited. For thus it sometimes is with the chemistry of growth. The changes are prepared subconsciously for a long while, and then comes some trivial little incident—a chance remark, a casual action—and a match is set to the bonfire. It flames out with a sudden rush. The character develops with a leap; the soul has become wiser, advanced, possessed of longer, clearer sight.

Paul was certainly aware of a new standard by which he must judge himself; and, for all the' apparent slightness of its cause, a little reflection will persuade of its truth. Real, inner crises of a soul are often produced by causes even more negligible.

The desire, always latent in him, to be of some use in the world, and to find the things he sought by losing himself in some Cause bigger than personal ends, had been definitely touched. It now rose to the surface and claimed deliberate attention.

What in the world did it matter—thus he reflected while dressing for dinner—whether his own personal sense of beauty found expression or not? Of what account was it to the world at large, the world, for instance, that included those 'lost children 'who needed to be 'picked up '? To what use did I he put it, except to his own gratification, and the passing pleasure of the children he played with? Were there no bigger uses, then, for his imagination, uses nobler and less personal? . . .

The thoughts chased one another through his mind in some confusion. He felt more and more dissatisfied with himself. He must set his house in order. He really must get to work at something real!

Other thoughts, too, played with him while he struggled with his studs and tie. For he noticed suddenly with surprise that he was taking more trouble with his appearance than usual. That black tie always bothered him when he could not get the help of Nixie's fingers, and usually he appeared at the table with the results of carelessness and despair plainly visible in its outlandish shape. But to-night he tied and re-tied, determined to get it right. He meant to look his best.

Yet this process of beautifying himself was instinctive, not deliberate. It was unconscious; he did not realise what he had been about until he was half-way downstairs. And then came another of those swift, subtle flashes by which the soul reveals herself—to herself. This 'dressing-up,' what was it for? For whom? Certainly, he did not care a button what Joan Nicholson thought of his persona appearance. That was positive. Then, for whom and for what, was it? Was it for some one else Had the arrival of this 'woman' upon the scene somehow brought the truth into sudden relief?

A delightful, fairy thought sped across his mine with wings of gold, waving through the dusk of hi soul a spray of leaves from a silver birch-tree that he I knew, and disappearing into those depths of consciousness where feelings never clothe themselves in precise language. A line of poetry swam up an«j took its place mysteriously—

My heart has thoughts, which, though thine eyes hold mine,

Flit to the silent world and other summers,

With wings that dip beyond the silver seas.

Could it be, then, that he had given his heart so utterly, so exquisitely, into the keeping of a little child? . . .

At any rate, before he reached the drawing-room, he understood that what he had been so busy dressing up was not anything half so trumpery as his mere external body and appearance. It was his interior person. That black tie, properly made for once, was an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace; only, having forgotten, or possibly never heard the phrase, he could not make use of it! 'It's that little, sandy-haired witch after all!' he thought to himself. 'Joan's coming—a woman's coming—has made me realise it. I must behave my best, and look my best. It's my soul dressing up for Nixie, I do declare!'