Aus den Himmelsaugen droben
Fallen zitternd goldne Funken
Durch die Nacht, und meine Seele
Dehnt sich liebeweit und weiter.
O ihr Himmelsaugen droben,
Weint euch aus in meine Seele,
Dass von lichten Sternentranen
Uberfliesset meine Seele!
Heine.
They rose, fluttered a moment above the lilac bushes, and then shot
forward like the curve of a rainbow into the sleeping house. The next
second they stood beside the bed of the Widow Jequier.
She lay there, so like a bundle of untidy sticks that, but for the
sadness upon the weary face, they could have burst out laughing. The
perfume of the wistaria outside the open window came in sweetly, yet
could not lighten the air of heavy gloom that clothed her like a
garment. Her atmosphere was dull, all streaked with greys and black,
for her mind, steeped in anxiety even while she slept, gave forth
cloudy vapours of depression and disquietude that made impossible the
approach of--light. Starlight, certainly, could not force an entrance,
and even sunlight would spill half its radiance before it reached her
heart. The help she needed she thus deliberately shut out. Before
going to bed her mood had been one of anxious care and searching
worry. It continued, of course, in sleep.
'Now,' thought their leader briskly, 'we must deal with this at once';
and the children, understanding his unspoken message, approached
closer to the bed. How brilliant their little figures were--Jimbo, a
soft, pure blue, and Monkey tinged faintly here and there with
delicate clear orange. Thus do the little clouds of sunset gather
round to see the sun get into bed. And in utter silence; all their
intercourse was silent--thought, felt, but never spoken.
For a moment there was hesitation. Cousinenry was uncertain exactly
how to begin. Tante Jeanne's atmosphere was so very thick he hardly
knew the best way to penetrate it. Her mood had been so utterly black
and rayless. But his hesitation operated like a call for help that
flew instantly about the world and was communicated to the golden
threads that patterned the outside sky. They quivered, flashed the
message automatically; the enormous network repeated it as far as
England, and the answer came. For thought is instantaneous, and desire
is prayer. Quick as lightning came the telegram. Beside them stood a
burly figure of gleaming gold.
'I'll do it,' said the earthy voice. 'I'll show you 'ow. For she loves
'er garden. Her sympathy with trees and flowers lets me in. Always
send for _me_ when she's in a mess, or needs a bit of trimmin' and
cleanin' up.'
The Head Gardener pushed past them with his odour of soil and burning
leaves, his great sunburned face and his browned, stained hands. These
muscular, big hands he spread above her troubled face; he touched her
heart; he blew his windy breath of flowers upon her untidy hair; he
called the names of lilac, wistaria, roses, and laburnum....
The room filled with the little rushing music of wind in leaves; and,
as he said 'laburnum,' there came at last a sudden opening channel
through the fog that covered her so thickly. Starlight, that was like
a rivulet of laburnum blossoms melted into running dew, flowed down
it. The Widow Jequier stirred in her sleep and smiled. Other channels
opened. Light trickled down these, too, drawn in and absorbed from the
store the Gardener carried. Then, with a rush of scattering fire, he
was gone again. Out into the enormous sky he flew, trailing golden
flame behind him. They heard him singing as he dived into the Network
--singing of buttercups and cowslips, of primroses and marigolds and
dandelions, all yellow flowers that have stored up starlight.
And the atmosphere of Tante Jeanne first glowed, then shone; it
changed slowly from gloom to glory. Golden channels opened everywhere,
making a miniature network of their own. Light flashed and corruscated
through it, passing from the children and their leader along the tiny
pipes of sympathy the Gardener had cleared of rubbish and decay. Along
the very lines of her face ran tiny shining rivers; flooding across
her weary eyelids, gilding her untidy hair, and pouring down into her
heavy heart. She ceased fidgeting; she smiled in her sleep; peace
settled on her face; her fingers on the coverlet lost their touch of
strain. Finally she turned over, stretched her old fighting body into
a more comfortable position, sighed a moment, then settled down into a
deep and restful slumber. Her atmosphere was everywhere 'soft-shiny'
when they left her to shoot next into the attic chamber above, where
Miss Waghorn lay among her fragments of broken memory, and the litter
of disordered images that passed with her for 'thinking.'
And here, again, although their task was easier, they needed help to
show the right way to begin. Before they reached the room Jimbo had
wondered how they would 'get at' her. That wonder summoned help. The
tall, thin figure was already operating beside the bed as they
entered. His length seemed everywhere at once, and his slender pole, a
star hanging from the end, was busy touching articles on walls and
floor and furniture. The disorder everywhere was the expression of her
dishevelled mind, and though he could not build the ruins up again, at
least he could trace the outlines of an ordered plan that she might
use when she left her body finally and escaped from the rebellious
instrument in death. And now that escape was not so very far away.
Obviously she was already loose. She was breaking up, as the world
expresses it.
And the children, watching with happy delight, soon understood his
method. Each object that he touched emitted a tiny light. In her mind
he touched the jumble of wandering images as well. On waking she would
find both one and the other better assorted. Some of the lost things
her memory ever groped for she would find more readily. She would see
the starlight on them.
'See,' said their leader softly, as the long thin figure of the
Lamplighter shot away into the night, 'she sleeps so lightly because
she is so old--fastened so delicately to the brain and heart. The
fastenings are worn and loose now. Already she is partly out!'
'That's why she's so muddled in the daytime,' explained Jimbo, for his
sister's benefit.
'Exaccurately, I knew it already!' was the reply, turning a somersault
like a wheel of twirling meteors close to the old lady's nose.
'Carefully, now!' said their leader. 'And hurry up! There's not much
we can do here, and there's heaps to do elsewhere. We must remember
Mother and Daddy--before the Interfering Sun is up, you know.'
They flashed about the attic chamber, tipping everything with light,
from the bundle of clothes that strewed the floor to the confused
interior of the black basket-trunk where she kept her money and
papers. There were no shelves in this attic chamber; no room for
cupboards either; it was the cheapest room in the house. And the old
woman in the bed sometimes opened her eyes and peered curiously,
expectantly, about her. Even in her sleep she looked for things.
Almost, they felt, she seemed aware of their presence near her, she
knew that they were there; she smiled.
A moment later they were in mid-air on their way to the Citadelle,
singing as they went:--
He keeps that only
For the old and lonely,
Who sleep so little that they need the best.
The rest--
The common stuff--
Is good enough
For Fraulein, or for baby, or for mother,
Or any other
Who likes a bit of dust,
And yet can do without it--
If they must...
Already something of the Dawn's faint magic painting lay upon the
world. Roofs shone with dew. The woods were singing, and the flowers
were awake. Birds piped and whistled shrilly from the orchards. They
heard the Mer Dasson murmuring along her rocky bed. The rampart of the
Alps stood out more clearly against the sky.
'We must be _very_ quick,' Cousin Henry flashed across to them,
'quicker than an express train.'
'That's impossible,' cried Jimbo, who already felt the call of waking
into his daily world. 'Hark! There's whistling already....'
The next second, in a twinkling, he was gone. He had left them. His
body had been waked up by the birds that sang and whistled so loudly
in the plane tree outside his window. Monkey and her guide raced on
alone into the very room where he now sat up and rubbed his eyes in
the Citadelle. He was telling his mother that he had just been
'dreaming extraordinary.' But Mother, sleeping like a fossil monster
in the Tertiary strata, heard him not.
'He often goes like that,' whispered Monkey in a tone of proud
superiority. 'He's only a little boy really, you see.'
But the sight they then witnessed was not what they expected.
For Mademoiselle Lemaire herself was working over Mother like an
engine, and Mother was still sleeping like the dead. The radiance that
emanated from the night-body of this suffering woman, compared to
their own, was as sunlight is to candle-light. Its soft glory was
indescribable, its purity quite unearthly, and the patterns that it
wove lovely beyond all telling. Here they surprised her in the act,
busy with her ceaseless activities for others, working for the world
by _thinking_ beauty. While her pain-racked body lay asleep in the bed
it had not left for thirty years, nor would ever leave again this side
of death, she found her real life in loving sympathy for the pain of
others everywhere. For thought is prayer, and prayer is the only true
effective action that leaves no detail incomplete. She _thought_ light
and glory into others. Was it any wonder that she drew a special,
brilliant supply from the Starlight Cavern, when she had so much to
give? For giving-out involved drawing-in to fill the emptied spaces.
Her pure and endless sources of supply were all explained.
'I've been working on her for years,' she said gently, looking round
at their approach, 'for her life is so thickly overlaid with care, and
the care she never quite knows how to interpret. We were friends, you
see, in childhood.... You'd better hurry on to the carpenter's house.
You'll find Jinny there doing something for her father.' She did not
cease her working while she said it, this practical mind so familiar
with the methods of useful thinking, this loving heart so versed in
prayer while her broken body, deemed useless by the world, lay in the
bed that was its earthly prison-house. '_He_ can give me all the help
I need,' she added.
She pointed, and they saw the figure of the Sweep standing in the
corner of the room among a pile of brimming sacks. His dirty face was
beaming. They heard him singing quietly to himself under his breath,
while his feet and sooty hands marked time with a gesture of quaintest
dancing:--
_Such_ a tremendously busy Sweep,
Catching the world when it's all asleep,
And tossing the blacks on the Rubbish Heap
Over the edge of the world!
'Come,' whispered Cousin Henry, catching at Monkey's hair, 'we can do
something, but we can't do _that_. She needs no help from us!'
They sped across to the carpenter's house among the vineyards.
'What a splendour!' gasped the child as they went. 'My starlight seems
quite dim beside hers.'
'She's an old hand at the game,' he replied, noticing the tinge of
disappointment in her thought. 'With practice, you know----'
'And Mummy must be pretty tough,' she interrupted with a laugh, her
elastic nature recovering instantly.
'----with practice, I was going to say, your atmosphere will get
whiter too until it simply shines. That's why the saints have halos.'
But Monkey did not hear this last remark, she was already in her
father's bedroom, helping Jinny.
Here there were no complications, no need for assistance from a Sweep,
or Gardener, or Lamplighter. It was a case for pulling, pure and
simple. Daddy was wumbled, nothing more. Body, mind, and heart were
all up-jumbled. In making up the verse about the starlight he had
merely told the truth--about himself. The poem was instinctive and
inspirational confession. His atmosphere, as he lay there, gently
snoring in his beauty sleep, was clear and sweet and bright, no
darkness in it of grey or ugliness; but its pattern was a muddle, or
rather there were several patterns that scrambled among each other for
supremacy. Lovely patterns hovered just outside him, but none of them
got really in. And the result was chaos. Daddy was not clear-headed;
there was no concentration. Something of the perplexed confusion that
afflicted his elder daughter in the daytime mixed up the patterns
inextricably. There was no main pathway through his inner world.
And the picture proved it. It explained why Jinny pulled in vain. His
night-body came out easily as far as the head, then stuck hopelessly.
He looked like a knotted skein of coloured wools. Upon the paper where
he had been making notes before going to sleep--for personal
atmosphere is communicated to all its owner touches--lay the same
confusion. Scraps of muddle, odds and ends of different patterns,
hovered in thick blots of colour over the paragraphs and sentences.
His own uncertainty was thus imparted to what he wrote, and his
stories brought no conviction to his readers. He was too much the
Dreamer, or too much the Thinker, which of the two was not quite
clear. Harmony was lacking.
'That's probably what I'M like, too,' thought his friend, but so
softly that the children did not hear it. That Scheme of his passed
vaguely through his mind.
Then he cried louder--a definite thought:--
'There's no good tugging like that, my dears. Let him slip in again.
You'll only make him restless, and give him distorted dreams.'
'I've tugged like this every night for months,' said Jinny, 'but the
moment I let go he flies back like elastic.'
'Of course. We must first untie the knots and weave the patterns into
one. Let go!'
Daddy's night-body flashed back like a sword into its sheath. They
stood and watched him. He turned a little in his sleep, while above
him the lines twined and wriggled like phosphorus on moving water, yet
never shaped themselves into anything complete. They saw suggestions
of pure beauty in them here and there that yet never joined together
into a single outline; it was like watching the foam against a
steamer's sides in moonlight--just failing of coherent form.
'They want combing out,' declared Jane Anne with a brilliant touch of
truth. 'A rake would be best.'
'Assorting, sifting, separating,' added Cousinenry, 'but it's not
easy.' He thought deeply for a moment. 'Suppose you two attend to the
other things,' he said presently, 'while I take charge of the combing-
out.'
They knew at once his meaning; it was begun as soon as thought, only
they could never have thought of it alone; none but a leader with real
sympathy in his heart could have discovered the way.
Like Fairies, lit internally with shining lanterns, they flew about
their business. Monkey picked up his pencils and dipped their points
into her store of starlight, while Jinny drew the cork out of his ink-
pot and blew in soft-shiny radiance of her own. They soaked his books
in it, and smoothed his paper out with their fingers of clean gold.
His note-books, chair, and slippers, his smoking-coat and pipes and
tobacco-tins, his sponge, his tooth-brush and his soap--everything
from dressing-gown to dictionary, they spread thickly with their
starlight, and continued until the various objects had drunk in enough
to make them shine alone.
Then they attacked the walls and floor and ceiling, sheets and bed-
clothes. They filled the tin-bath full to the very brim, painted as
well the windows, door-handles, and the wicker chair in which they
knew he dozed after dejeuner. But with the pencils, pens, and ink-pots
they took most trouble, doing them very thoroughly indeed. And his
enormous mountain-boots received generous treatment too, for in these
he went for his long lonely walks when he thought out his stories
among the woods and valleys, coming home with joy upon his face--'I
got a splendid idea to-day--a magnificent story--if only I can get it
on to paper before it's gone...!' They understood his difficulty now:
the 'idea' was wumbled before he could fashion it. He could not get
the pattern through complete.
And his older friend, working among the disjointed patterns, saw his
trouble clearly too. It was not that he lacked this sympathy that
starlight brings, but that he applied it without discernment. The
receiving instrument was out of order, some parts moving faster than
others. Reason and imagination were not exaccurately adjusted. He
gathered plenty in, but no clear stream issued forth again; there was
confusion in delivery. The rays were twisted, the golden lines caught
into knots and tangles. Yet, ever just outside him, waiting to be
taken in, hovered these patterns of loveliness that might bring joy to
thousands. They floated in beauty round the edges of his atmosphere,
but the moment they sank in to reach his mind, there began the
distortion that tore their exquisite proportions and made designs mere
disarrangement. Inspiration, without steady thought to fashion it, was
of no value.
He worked with infinite pains to disentangle the mass of complicated
lines, and one knot after another yielded and slipped off into
rivulets of gold, all pouring inwards to reach heart and brain. It was
exhilarating, yet disappointing labour. New knots formed themselves so
easily, yet in the end much surely had been accomplished. Channels had
been cleared; repetition would at length establish habit.
But the line of light along the eastern horizon had been swiftly
growing broader meanwhile. It was brightening into delicate crimson.
Already the room was clearer, and the radiance of their bodies fading
into a paler glory. Jane Anne grew clumsier, tumbling over things, and
butting against her more agile sister. Her thoughts became more
muddled. She said things from time to time that showed it--hints that
waking was not far away.
'Daddy's a wumbled Laplander, you know, after all. Hurry up!' The
foolish daylight speech came closer.
'Give his ink-pot one more blow,' cried Monkey. Her body always slept
at least an hour longer than the others. She had more time for work.
Jane Anne bumped into the washhand-stand. She no longer saw quite
clearly.
'I'm a plenipotentiary, that's what I am. I'm afraid of nothing. But
the porridge has to be made. I must get back....'
She vanished like a flash, just as her brother had vanished half an
hour before.
'We'll go on with it to-morrow night,' signalled Cousin Henry to his
last remaining helper. 'Meet me here, remember, when...the moon...is
high enough to...cast...a...shadow....'
The opening and shutting of a door sounded through his sleep. He
turned over heavily. Surely it was not time to get up yet. That could
not be hot water coming! He had only just fallen asleep. He plunged
back again into slumber.
But Monkey had disappeared.
'What a spanking dream I've had...!' Her eyes opened, and she saw her
school-books on the chair beside the bed. Mother was gently shaking
her out of sleep. 'Six o'clock, darling. The bath is ready, and
Jinny's nearly got the porridge done. It's a lovely morning!'
'Oh, Mummy, I----'
But Mummy lifted her bodily out of bed, kissed her sleepy eyes awake,
and half carried her over to the bath. 'You can tell me all about that
later,' she said with practical decision; 'when the cold water's
cleared your head. You're always fuzzy when you wake.'
Another day had begun. The sun was blazing high above the Blumlisalp.
The birds sang in chorus. Dew shone still on the fields, but the men
were already busy in the vineyards.
And presently Cousin Henry woke too and stared lazily about his room.
He looked at his watch.
'By Jove,' he murmured. 'How one does sleep in this place! And what a
dream to be sure--I who never dream!'
He remembered nothing more. From the moment he closed his eyes, eight
hours before, until this second, all was a delicious blank. He felt
refreshed and wondrously light-hearted, at peace with all the world.
There was music in his head. He began to whistle as he lay among the
blankets for half an hour longer. And later, while he breakfasted
alone downstairs, he remembered that he ought to write to Minks. He
owed Minks a letter. And before going out into the woods he wrote it.
'I'm staying on a bit,' he mentioned at the end. 'I find so much to do
here, and it's such a rest. Meanwhile I can leave everything safely in
your hands. But as soon as I get a leisure moment I'll send you the
promised draft of my Scheme for Disabled, etc., etc.'
But the Scheme got no further somehow. New objections, for one thing,
kept cropping up in his mind. It would take so long to build the
place, and find the site, satisfy County Councils, and all the rest.
The Disabled, moreover, were everywhere; it was invidious to select
one group and leave the others out. Help the world, yes--but what was
'the world'? There were so many worlds. He touched a new one every day
and every hour. Which needed his help most? Bourcelles was quite as
important, quite as big and hungry as any of the others. 'That old
Vicar knew a thing or two,' he reflected later in the forest, while he
gathered a bunch of hepaticas and anemones to take to Mlle. Lemaire.
'There are "neighbours" everywhere, the world's simply chock full of
'em. But what a pity that we die just when we're getting fit and ready
to begin. Perhaps we go on afterwards, though. I wonder...!'