THE
EDUCATION OF UNCLE PAUL
[Illustration]
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
THE EDUCATION OF UNCLE PAUL
BY
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
AUTHOR OF
‘JIMBO,’ ‘JOHN SILENCE,’ ‘THE LISTENER,’ ETC.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1909
Know you what it is to be a child? 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 is
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour;
it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor
petition that it is to be commuted into death.—FRANCIS THOMPSON.
TO
ALL THOSE CHILDREN
BETWEEN THE AGES OF EIGHT AND EIGHTY
WHO LED ME TO ‘THE CRACK’;
AND HAVE SINCE JOURNEYED WITH ME THROUGH IT
INTO
THE LAND ‘BETWEEN YESTERDAY AND TO-MORROW’
CHAPTER I
... I stand as mute
As one with full strong music in his heart
Whose fingers stray upon a shattered lute.
ALICE MEYNELL.
All night the big liner had been plunging heavily, but towards morning
she entered quieter water, and when the passengers woke, her rising and
falling over the great swells was so easy that even the sea-sick women
admitted the relief.
‘Land in sight, sir! We shall see Liverpool within twenty hours now,
barring fog.’
The friendly bathroom steward passed the open door of Stateroom No. 28,
and the big, brown-bearded man in the blue serge suit who was sitting,
already dressed, on the edge of the port-hole berth, started as though
he had been shot, and ran up on deck without waiting to finish tying the
laces of his india-rubber shoes.
‘By Jove!’ he said, as he thundered along the stuffy passages of the
rolling vessel, and ‘By Gad!’
He emerged on the upper deck in the sunlight, having nearly injured
several persons in his impetuous journey, and, taking a great gulp of
the salt air with keen satisfaction, he crossed to the side in a couple
of strides, the shoe-laces clicking against the deck as he went.
‘Twenty years ago,’ he muttered, ‘when I was barely out of my teens. And
now——!’
The big man was distinctly excited, though ‘moved’ perhaps is the better
word, seeing that the emotion was a little too searching, too tinged
with sadness, to include elation. He plunged both hands into his coat
pockets with a violence that threatened to tear the bottoms out, and
leaned over the railing.
Far away a faint blue line, tinged delicately with green, rose out of
the sea. He saw it instantly, and his throat tightened unexpectedly,
almost like a reflex action. For, about that simple little blue line on
the distant horizon there was something strangely seizing, something
absolutely arresting. The sight of it was a hundred times more poignant
than he had imagined it would be; it touched a thousand springs of
secret life in him, and a mist rose faintly before his eyes.
Paul Rivers had not realised that his emotion would be so intense; but
from that instant everything on the ship, otherwise familiar and rather
boring, looked different. A new sense of locality came to him. The
steamer became strange and new; he ‘recognised’ bits of it as though he
had just come aboard a ship known aforetime. It was no longer the
steamer that was merely crossing the Atlantic; it was the boat that was
bringing him home. And there, trimming the horizon in a thin ribbon of
most arresting beauty, was the coast-line of the first Island.
‘But it seems so much more solid—and so much more real than I expected!’
Though it was barely seven o’clock a few early passengers were already
astir, and he made his way back again to the lower deck and thence
climbed up into the bows. He wished to be alone. Another man, apparently
from the steerage, was there before him, leaning over the rail and
peering fixedly under one hand at the horizon. The saloon passenger took
up his position a few feet farther on and stared hard. He, too, stared
with the eyes of memory, now grown a little dim. The air was fresh and
sweet, fragrant of long sea distances; there was a soft warmth in it
too, for it was late April and the spring made its presence known even
on the great waters where there was nothing to hang its fairy banners
on.
‘So that’s land! That’s the Old Country!’
The words dropped out of their own accord; he could not help himself.
The sky seemed to come down a little closer, with a more familiar and
friendly touch; the very air, he fancied, had a new taste in it,—a whiff
of his boyhood days—a smell of childhood and the things of
childhood—ages ago, it seemed, in another life.
The huge ship rose and fell on the regular, sweeping swells, and
sea-birds from the land already came out to meet her. He easily imagined
that the thrills in the depths of his own being somehow communicated
themselves to the mighty vessel that tore the seas asunder in her great
desire to reach the land.
‘Twenty years,’ he repeated aloud, oblivious of his neighbour, ‘twenty
years since I last saw it!’
‘And it’s gol-darned nearer fifty since _I_ seen it,’ exclaimed a harsh
voice just behind him.
He turned with a start. The steerage passenger beside him, he saw, was
an old man with a rough, grey face, and hair turning white; the hand
that shaded his eyes was thick and worn; there was a heavy gold ring on
the little finger, and the dirty cuff of a dark flannel shirt tumbled,
loosely and unbuttoned, over the very solid wrist. The face, he noticed,
at a second glance, was rugged, beaten, scored, the face of a man who
had tumbled terribly about life, battered from pillar to post; and it
was only the light in the hard blue eyes—eyes still fixed unwaveringly
on the distant line of the land—that redeemed it from a kind of grim
savagery. Beaten and battered, yes! Yet at the same time triumphant. The
atmosphere of the man proclaimed in some vibrant fashion beyond analysis
that he had failed in all he undertook—failed from stupidity rather than
character, and always doggedly beginning over again with the same lack
of intelligence—but yet had never given in, and never would give in.
It was not difficult to reconstruct his history from his appearance; or
to realise his feelings as he saw the Old Country after fifty years—a
returned failure. Although the voice had vibrated with emotion, the face
remained expressionless and unmoved; but down both cheeks large tears
ran slowly, in sudden jerks, to drop with a splash upon the railing. And
Paul Rivers, after his intuitive fashion, grasped the whole drama of the
man with a sudden completeness that touched him with swift sympathy. At
the same time he could not help thinking of rain-drops running down the
face of a statue. He recognised with shame that he was conscious of a
desire to laugh.
‘Fifty years! That’s a long time indeed,’ he said kindly. ‘It’s
half-a-century.’
‘That’s so, Boss,’ returned the other in a dead voice that betrayed
Ireland overlaid with acquired American twang and intonation; ‘and I
guess now I’ll never be able to stick it over here. Jest see it—and then
git back again.’
He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, and never once turned his head
towards the man he was speaking to; only his lips moved; he did not even
lift a finger to brush off the great tears that fell one by one from his
cheeks to the deck. He seemed unconscious of them; as though it was so
long since those hard eyes had melted that they had forgotten how to do
it properly and the skin no longer registered the sensation of the
trickling. The tears continued to fall at intervals; Paul Rivers
actually heard them splash.
‘I went out steerage,’ the man continued to himself, or to the sea, or
to any one else who cared to listen, ‘and I come back steerage. That’s
my trouble. And now’—his eye shifted for a fraction of a second and
watched a huge wave go thundering by—‘I’m grave-huntin’, I guess. And
that’s about the size of it. Jest see it and—git back again!’
The first-class passenger made some kind and appropriate reply—words
with genuine sympathy in them—and then, getting no further answer, found
it difficult to continue the conversation. The man, he realised, had
only wanted a peg to hang his emotion on. It had to be a living peg, but
any other living peg would do equally well, and before long he would
find some one in the steerage who would listen with delight to the flood
that was bound to come. And, presently, he took his departure to his own
quarters where the sailors, with bare feet, were still swabbing the
slippery decks.
A couple of hours later, after breakfast, he leaned over the rail and
again saw the man on the steerage deck, and heard him talking volubly.
The tears were gone, but the smudges were still visible on the cheeks,
where they had traced a zigzag pattern. He was telling the history of
his fifty years’ disappointments and failures to one and all who cared
to listen.
And, apparently, many cared to listen. The man’s emotion was real; it
found vigorous expression. The sight of the old, loved shore, not seen
for half-a-century, but the subject of ten thousand yearnings, had been
too much for him. He told in detail the substance of these ten thousand
dreams—ever one and the same dream, of course—and in the telling of it
he found the relief his soul sought. He got it all out; it did him a
world of good, saving his inner being from a whole army of severe mental
fevers and spiritual pains. The man revelled in a delirium of
self-expression, and in so doing found sanity and health for his
overburdened soul.
And the picture of that hard-faced old man crying accompanied Paul
Rivers to the upper decks, and remained insistently with him for a long
time. It portrayed with such neat emphasis precisely what was so
deplorably lacking in his own character. There, in concrete form, though
not precisely his own case, still near enough to be extremely
illuminating, he had seen a grown-up man finding abundant and natural
expression for his emotion. The man was not ashamed of his tears, and
would doubtless have let them splash on the deck before a hundred
passengers, whereas he, Paul Rivers, was, it seemed, constitutionally
unable to reveal himself, to tell his deep longings, to find expression
through any sensible medium for the ten thousand dreams that choked his
life to the brim. He was unable, perhaps ashamed, to splash on the deck.
It was not that the big, bronzed Englishman wanted to cry, or to wash
his soul in sentiment, but that the sight of this old man’s passion, and
its frank and easy utterance, touched with dramatic intensity the crying
need of his whole temperament. The need of the steerage passenger was
the need of a moment; his own was the need of an existence.
‘Lucky devil!’ he exclaimed, half laughing, half sighing, as he went to
his cabin for the field-glasses; ‘he knows how to get it out—and does
get it out! while I—with my impossible yearnings and my absurd
diffidence in speaking of them to others—I haven’t got a single
safety-valve of any sort or kind. I can’t get it out of me—all this
ocean in my heart and soul—not a drop, not even a blessed tear!’
He laughed again and, stooping to pick up the glasses, he caught a
glimpse of his sunburned, bearded face in the cabin mirror.
‘Even my appearance is against me,’ he went on with mournful humour; ‘I
look like a healthy lumberman more than anything else in God’s world!’
He bent forward and examined himself carefully in detail.
‘What has such a face as that to do with beauty, and the stars, and the
moon sinking over a summer sea, or those night-winds I know rising
faintly from their hiding-places in the dim forests and stealing on soft
tiptoe about the sleeping world until the dawn gives them leave to run
and sing? Yet _I_ know—though I can never tell it to another—what so
many do not know! Who could ever believe that _that_ man’—he pointed to
himself in the glass, laughing—‘wants above all else in life, above
wealth, fame, success, the knowledge of spiritual things, which is
Reality—which is God?’
A flash of light from nowhere ran over his face, making it for one
instant like the face of a boy, shining, wonderful, radiantly young.
‘_I_ know, for instance,’ he went on, the strange flush of enthusiasm
rising into his eyes, ‘that the pine trees hold wind in their arms as
cups hold rare wine, and that when it spills I hear the exquisite
trickling of its music—but I can’t tell any one _that_! And I can’t even
put the wild magic of it into verse or music. Or even into conduct,’ he
concluded with a laugh, ‘conduct that’s sane, that is. For, if I could,
I should find what I’m for ever seeking behind all life and behind all
expressions of beauty—I should find the Reality I seek!’
‘I’ve no safety-valves,’ he added, swinging the glasses round by their
strap to the imminent danger of various articles of furniture, ‘that’s
the long and short of it. Like a giraffe that can’t make any sound at
all although it has the longest throat in all creation. Everything in me
accumulates and accumulates. If only’—and the strange light came back
for a second to his brown eyes—‘I could write, or sing, or pray—live as
the saints did, or do something to—to express adequately the sense of
beauty and wonder and delight that lives, like the presence of a God, in
my soul!’
The lamp in his eyes faded slowly and he sat back on the little cabin
sofa, screwing and unscrewing his glasses till it was surprising that
the thread didn’t wear out. And as he screwed, a hundred fugitive
pictures passed thronging through his mind; moments of yearning and of
pain, of sudden happiness and of equally sudden despondency, vivid moods
of all kinds provoked by the smallest imaginable fancies, as the way
ever was with him. For the moods of the sky were his moods; the swift,
coloured changes of sea and cloud were mirrored in his heart as with all
too impressionable people, and he was for ever trying to seize the
secret of their loveliness and to give it form—in vain. Like many
another mystical soul he saw the invisible foundations of the visible
world—longed to communicate it to others—found he couldn’t—then suffered
all the pain and fever of repression that seeks in vain for adequate
utterance. Too shy to stammer his profound yearnings to ears that would
not hear, and, never having known the blessed relief of a sympathetic
audience, he perforce remained choked and dumb, the only mitigation he
knew being that loss of self which follows prolonged contemplation. In
his contemplation of Nature, for instance, he would gaze upon the
landscape, the sky, a tree or flower, until their essential beauty
passed into his own nature. For the moment he _felt with_ these things.
He _was_ them. He took their qualities literally into himself. He lost
his ordinary personality by changing its centre, merging it into those
remoter phases of consciousness which extended from himself mysteriously
to include the landscape, the sky, the tree, the flower.
For him everywhere in Nature there was psychic energy. And it was
difficult to say which was with him the master passion: to find
Reality—God—through Nature, or to explain Nature through God.
Then the busy faces of America, now left behind after twenty years,
gradually receded, and others, dimly seen through mist, rose above the
horizon of his thoughts. And among them he saw that two stood forth with
more clearness than the rest. One of these was Dick Messenger, the
friend of his boyhood, now dead but a few years; and the other, the face
of his sister, Margaret, whom Dick had left a widow, and whose children
he would now see for the first time at their country home in the South
of England.
The ‘Old Country!’ He repeated the words softly to himself, weaving it
like a coloured thread through all his reverie. He had lived away long
enough to understand the poignant magic that lies in the little phrase,
and to appreciate the seizing and pathetic beauty lying along that faint
blue line of sea and sky.
And presently he took his field-glasses again and went up on deck and
hid himself in the bows alone. Leaning over the bulwarks he took the
scented wind of spring full in the face, and watched with a curious
exhilaration the huge rollers, charging and bellowing like wild bulls of
the sea as the ship drew nearer and nearer to the coast, plunging,
leaping, and thundering as she moved.