And the talks with Minks were about--well, he hardly knew what, but

they all played round this map of fairyland he sought to reduce to the

scale of everyday life. They discussed thought, dreams, the

possibility of leaving the body in sleep, the artist temperament, the

source of inspiration as well as the process of the imaginative

faculty that created. They talked even of astronomy. Minks held that

the life of practical, daily work was the bed-rock of all sane

production, yet while preaching this he bubbled over with all the

wild, entrancing theories that were in the air to-day. They were

comical, but never dangerous--did not upset him. They were almost a

form of play.

And his master, listening, found these conversations an outlet somehow

for emotions in himself he could not manage--a scaffolding that

provided outlines for his awakening dreams to build upon. He found

relief. For Minks, with his delightful tact, asked no awkward

questions. He referred neither to the defunct Scheme, nor mentioned

the new one that held 'a beauty of the stars.' He waited. Rogers also

waited.

And, while he waited, he grew conscious more and more of an enormous

thing that passed, driving behind, _below_, his daily external life.

He could never quite get at it. In there, down out of sight somewhere,

he knew everything. His waking existence was fed invisibly from below.

In the daytime he now frequently caught himself attempting to recover

the memory of things that went on elsewhere, things he was personally

involved in, vital things. This daylight effort to recover them was as

irksome as the attempt to draw a loose hair that has wound about the

tongue. He spoke at length to Minks about it.

'Some part of you,' replied the imperturbable secretary, after

listening carefully to his master's vague description of the symptoms,

'is being engaged elsewhere--very actively engaged---'

'Eh?' asked Rogers, puzzled.

'Probably at night, sir, while your brain and body sleep,' Minks

elaborated, 'your energetic spirit is out--on the plane of causes---'

The other gasped slightly, 'While my body lies unconscious?'

'Your spirit may be busy at all kinds of things. _That_ can never be

unconscious,' was the respectful answer. 'They say---'

'Yes, what do they say?' He recognised a fairy theory, and jumped at

it.

'That in sleep,' continued the other, encouraged, 'the spirit knows a

far more concentrated life--dips down into the deep sea of being--our

waking life merely the froth upon the shore.'

Rogers stared at him. 'Yes, yes,' he answered slowly, 'that's very

pretty, very charming; it's quite delightful. What ideas you have, my

dear Minks! What jolly, helpful ideas!'

Minks beamed with pleasure.

'Not my own, Mr. Rogers, not my own,' he said, with as much pride as

if they _were_ his own, 'but some of the oldest in the world, just

coming into fashion again with the turn of the tide, it seems. Our

daily life--even the most ordinary--is immensely haunted, girdled

about with a wonder of incredible things. There are hints everywhere

to-day, though few can read the enormous script complete. Here and

there one reads a letter or a word, that's all. Yet the best minds

refuse to know the language, not even the ABC of it; they read another

language altogether---'

'The best minds!' repeated Rogers. 'What d'you mean by that!' It

sounded, as Minks said it, so absurdly like best families.

'The scientific and philosophical minds, sir. They think it's not

worth learning, this language. That's the pity of it--ah, the great

pity of it!' And he looked both eager and resentful--his expression

almost pathetic. He turned half beseechingly to his employer, as

though _he_ might alter the sad state of things. 'As with an iceberg,

Mr. Rogers,' he added, 'the greater part of everything--of ourselves

especially--is invisible; we merely know the detail banked against an

important grand Unseen.'

The long sentence had been suffered to its close because the audience

was busy with thoughts of his own instead of listening carefully.

Behind the wild language stirred some hint of meaning that, he felt,

held truth. For a moment, it seemed, his daylight searching was

explained--almost.

'Well and good, my dear fellow, and very picturesque,' he said

presently, gazing with admiration at his secretary's neat blue tie and

immaculate linen; 'but thinking, you know, is not possible without

matter.' This in a tone of '_Do_ talk a little sense.' 'Even if the

spirit does go out, it couldn't think apart from the brain, could it

now, eh?'

Minks took a deep breath and relieved himself of the following:

'Ah, Mr. Rogers'--as much as to say 'Fancy _you_ believing that!'--

'but it can experience and know _direct_, since it passes into the

region whence the material that feeds thought issues in the first

instance--causes, Mr. Rogers, causes.'

'Oho!' said his master, 'oho!'

'There is no true memory afterwards,' continued the little dreamer,

'because memory depends upon how much the spirit can bring back into

the brain, you see. We have vague feelings, rather than actual

recollection--feelings such as you were kind enough to confess to me

you had been haunted by yourself---'

'All-overish feelings,' Rogers helped him, seeing that he was losing

confidence a little, 'vague sensations of joy and wonder and--well--in

a word, strength.'

'Faith,' said Minks, with a decision of renewed conviction, 'which is

really nothing but unconscious knowledge--knowledge unremembered. And

it's the half-memory of what you do at night that causes

this sense of anticipation you now experience; for what is

anticipation, after all, but memory thrown forward?'

There was a pause then, during which Rogers lit a cigarette, while

Minks straightened his tie several times in succession.

'You are a greater reader than I, of course,' resumed his employer

presently; 'still, I have come across one or two stories which deal

with this kind of thing. Only, in the books, the people always

remember what they've done at night, out of the body, in the spirit,

or whatever you like to call it. Now, _I_ remember nothing whatever.

How d'you account for that, pray?'

Minks smiled a little sadly. 'The books,' he answered very softly,

'are wrong there--mere inventions--not written from personal

experience. There can be no detailed memory unless the brain has been

'out' too--which it hasn't. That's where inaccuracy and looseness of

thought come in. If only the best minds would take the matter up, you

see, we might---'

Rogers interrupted him. 'We shall miss the post, Minks, if we go on

dreaming and talking like this,' he exclaimed, looking at his watch

and then at the pile of letters waiting to be finished. 'It is very

delightful indeed, very--but we mustn't forget to be practical, too.'

And the secretary, not sorry perhaps to be rescued in time from the

depths he had floundered in, switched his mind in concentration upon

the work in hand again. The conversation had arisen from a chance

coincidence in this very correspondence--two letters that had crossed

after weeks of silence.

Work was instantly resumed. It went on as though it had never been

interrupted. Pride and admiration stirred the heart of Minks as he

noticed how keenly and accurately his master's brain took up the lost

threads again. 'A grand fellow!' he thought to himself, 'a splendid

man! He lives in both worlds at once, yet never gets confused, nor

lets one usurp his powers to the detriment of the other. If only I

were equally balanced and effective. Oh dear!' And he sighed.

And there were many similar conversations of this kind. London seemed

different, almost transfigured sometimes. Was this the beginning of

that glory which should prove it a suburb of Bourcelles?

Rogers found his thoughts were much in that cosy mountain village: the

children capered by his side all day; he smelt the woods and flowers;

he heard the leaves rustle on the poplar's crest; and had merely to

think of a certain room in the tumble-down old Citadelle for a wave of

courage and high anticipation to sweep over him like a sea. A new

feeling of harmony was taking him in hand. It was very delightful; and

though he felt explanation beyond his reach still, his talks with

Minks provided peep-holes through which he peered at the enormous

thing that brushed him day and night.

A great settling was taking place inside him. Thoughts certainly began

to settle. He realised, for one thing, that he had left the theatre

where the marvellous Play had been enacted. He stood outside now, able

to review and form a judgment. His mind loved order. Undue

introspection he disliked, as a form of undesirable familiarity; a

balanced man must not be too familiar with himself; it endangered

self-respect.

He had been floundering rather. After years of methodical labour the

freedom of too long a holiday was disorganising. He tried to steady

himself. And the Plan of Life, answering to control, grew smaller

instantly, reduced to proportions he could examine reasonably. This

was the beginning of success. The bewildering light of fairyland still

glimmered, but no longer so diffused. It focused into little definite

kernels he could hold steady while he scrutinised them.

And these kernels he examined carefully as might be: in the quiet,

starry evenings usually, while walking alone in St. James's Park after

his day of board meetings, practical work with Minks, and the like.

Gradually then, out of the close survey, emerged certain things that

seemed linked together in an intelligible sequence of cause and

effect. There was still mystery, for subconscious investigation ever

involves this background of shadow. Question and Wonder watched him.

But the facts emerged.

He jotted them down on paper as best he could. The result looked like

a Report drawn up by Minks, only less concise and--he was bound to

admit it--less intelligible. He smiled as he read them over....

'My thoughts and longings, awakened that night in the little Crayfield

garden,' he summed it up to himself, having read the Report so far,

'went forth upon their journey of realisation. I projected them--

according to Minks--vividly enough for that! I thought Beauty--and

this glorious result materialised! More--my deepest, oldest craving of

all has come to life again--the cry of loneliness that yearns to--that

seeks--er---'

At this point, however, his analysis grew wumbled; the transference of

thought and emotion seemed comprehensible enough; though magical, it

was not more so than wireless telegraphy, or that a jet of steam

should drive an express for a hundred miles. It was conceivable that

Daddy had drawn thence the inspiration for his wonderful story. What

baffled him was the curious feeling that another was mixed up in the

whole, delightful business, and that neither he nor his cousin were

the true sponsors of the fairy fabric. He never forgot the description

his cousin read aloud that night in the Den--how the Pattern of his

Story reached its climax and completeness when a little starry figure

with twinkling feet and amber eyes had leaped into the centre and made

itself at home there. From the Pleiades it came. The lost Pleiad was

found. The network of thought and sympathy that contained the universe

had trembled to its uttermost fastenings. The principal role was

filled at last.

It was here came in the perplexing thing that baffled him. His mind

sat down and stared at an enormous, shadowy possibility that he was

unable to grasp. It brushed past him overhead, beneath, on all sides.

He peered up at it and marvelled, unconvinced, yet knowing himself a

prisoner. Something he could not understand was coming, was already

close, was watching him, waiting the moment to pounce out, like an

invisible cat upon a bewildered mouse. The question he flung out

brought no response, and he recalled with a smile the verse that

described his absurd position:--

Like a mouse who, lost in wonder,

Flicks its whiskers at the thunder!

For, while sprites and yearning were decidedly his own, the

interpretation of them, if not their actual origin, seemed another's.

This other, like some dear ideal on the way to realisation, had taken

him prisoner. The queer sense of anticipation Bourcelles had fostered

was now actual expectation, as though some Morning Spider had borne

his master-longing, exquisitely fashioned by the Story, across the

Universe, and the summons had been answered-from the Pleiades. The

indestructible threads of thought and feeling tightened. The more he

thought about his cousin's interpretation the more he found in it a

loveliness and purity, a crystal spiritual quality, that he could

credit neither to the author's mind nor to his own. This soft and

starry brilliance was another's. Up to a point the interpretation came

through Daddy's brain, just as the raw material came through his own;

but there-after this other had appropriated both, as their original

creator and proprietor. Some shining, delicate hand reached down from

its starry home and gathered in this exquisite form built up from the

medley of fairy thought and beauty that were first its own. The owner

of that little hand would presently appear to claim it.

'We were but channels after all then--both of us,' was the idea that

lay so insistently in him. 'The sea of thought sends waves in all

directions. They roll into different harbours. I caught the feeling,

he supplied the form, but this other lit the original fire!'

And further than this wumbled conclusion he could not get. He went

about his daily work. however, with a secret happiness tugging at his

mind all day, and a sense of expectant wonder glancing brightly over

everything he thought or did. He was a prisoner in fairyland, and what

he called his outer and his inner world were, after all, but different

ways of looking at one and the same thing. Life everywhere was one.

CHAPTER XXXI

Es stehen unbeweglich

Die Sterne in der Hoh'

Viel tausend Jahr', und schauen

Sich an mit Liebesweh.

Sie sprechen eine Sprache,

Die ist so reich, so schon;

Doch keiner der Philologen

Kann diese Sprache verstehen.

Ich aber hab' sie gelernet,

Und ich vergesse sie nicht;

Mir diente als Grammatik

Der Herzallerliebsten Gesicht.

HEINE.

One evening in particular the sense of expectation in him felt very

close upon delivery. All day he had been aware of it, and a letter

received that morning from his cousin seemed the cause. The story, in

its shorter version, had been accepted. Its reality, therefore, had

already spread; one other mind, at least, had judged it with

understanding. Two months from now, when it appeared in print,

hundreds more would read it. Its beauty would run loose in many

hearts. And Rogers went about his work that day as though the pleasure

was his own. The world felt very sweet. He saw the good in every one

with whom he came in contact. And the inner excitement due to

something going to happen was continuous and cumulative.

Yet London just then--it was August--was dull and empty, dusty, and

badly frayed at the edges. It needed a great cleaning; he would have

liked to pour sea water over all its streets and houses, bathed its

panting parks in the crystal fountains of Bourcelles. All day long his

thoughts, indeed, left London for holidays in little Bourcelles. He

was profoundly conscious that the Anticipation he first recognised in

that forest village was close upon accomplishment now. On the journey

back to England he recalled how urgent it had been. In London, ever

since, it had never really left him. But to-day it now suddenly became

more than expectation--he felt it in him as a certainty that

approached fulfilment. It was strange, it was bewildering; it seemed

to him as though something from that under-self he could never

properly reach within him, pushed upwards with a kind of aggressive

violence towards the surface. It was both sweet and vital. Behind the

'something' was the 'some one' who led it into action.

At half-past six he strolled down a deserted St. James's Street,

passed the door of his club with no temptation to go in, and climbed

the stairs slowly to his rooms. His body was languid though his mind

alert. He sank into an arm-chair beside the open window. 'I must

_do_ something to-night,' he thought eagerly; 'mere reading at the

club is out of the question. I'll go to a theatre or--or--.' He

considered various alternatives, deciding finally upon Richmond Park.

He loved long walks at night when his mind was restless thus; the air

in Richmond Park was peculiarly fresh and scented after dark. He knew

the little gate that was never closed. He would dine lightly, and go

for a ten-mile stretch among the oaks, surprise the deer asleep,

listen to the hum of distant London, and watch the fairy battle

between the lurid reflection of its million lights and the little

stars.... There were places in the bracken where....

The rumbling clatter of a railway van disturbed the picture. His mind

followed the noise instead. Thought flashed along the street to a

station. He saw trains...

'Come at once! You're wanted here--some one calls you!' sounded a

breathless merry voice beside him. 'Come quickly; aussi schnell que

moglich!'

There was a great gulp of happiness in him; his spirit plunged in joy.

He turned and looked about him swiftly. That singing voice, with its

impudent mingling of languages was unmistakable.

'From the Pleiades. Look sharp! You've been further off than ever

lately, and further is further than farther--much! Over the forests

and into the cave, that is the way we must all behave---!'

He opened an eye.

Between him and a great gold sunset ran the wind. It was a slender

violet wind. The sunset, however, was in the act of disappearing for

the Scaffolding of Dusk was passing through the air--he saw the slung

trellis-work about him, the tracery of a million lines, the guy-ropes,

uprights, and the feathery threads of ebony that trailed the Night

behind them like a mighty cloth. There was a fluttering as of

innumerable wings.

'You needn't tug like that,' he gasped. 'I'm coming all right. I'm

out!'

'But you're so slow and sticky,' she insisted. 'You've been sticky

like this for weeks now!'

He saw the bright brown eyes and felt the hair all over his face like

a bath of perfume. They rushed together. His heart beat faster....

'Who wants me in such a hurry?' he cried, the moment he was

disentangled. Laughter ran past him on every side from the world of

trees.

'As if you didn't know! What _is_ the good of pretending any longer!

You're both together in the Network, and you know it just as well as

she does!'

Pretending! Just as well as _she_ does!

As though he had eyes all over his body he saw the Net of Stars above

him. Below were forests, vineyards, meadows, and the tiny lights of

houses. In the distance shimmered the waters of a familiar lake. Great

purple mountains rolled against the sky line. But immediately over his

head, close yet also distant, filling the entire heavens, there hung a

glittering Pattern that he knew, grown now so vast that at first he

scarcely recognised its dazzling loveliness. From the painted western

horizon it stretched to other fastenings that dipped below the world,

where the East laid its gulfs of darkness to surprise the sun. It

swung proudly down, as though hung from the Pole Star towards the

north, and while the Great Bear 'pointers' tossed its embroidery

across Cassiopeia, the Pleiades, just rising, flung its further

fringes down to Orion, waiting in wonder to receive them far below the

horizon. Old Sirius wore one breadth of it across his stupendous

shoulder, and Aldebaran, with fingers of bronze and fire, drew it

delicately as with golden leashes over the sleeping world.

When first he saw it, there was this gentle fluttering as of wings

through all its intricate parts, but the same moment four shooting

stars pierced its outlying edges with flying nails of gold. It

steadied and grew taut.

'There she is!' cried Monkey, flashing away like a comet towards the

Cave. 'You'll catch it now--and you deserve to!' She turned a

brilliant somersault and vanished.

Then, somehow, the vast Pattern settled into a smaller scale, so that

he saw it closer, clearer, and without confusion. Beauty and wonder

focused for his sight. The perfected design of Daddy's fairy story

floated down into his heart without a hint of wumbling. Never had he

seen it so luminous and simple. For others, of course, meanwhile had

known and understood it. Others believed. Its reality was more

intense, thus, than before.

He rose from the maze of tree-tops where he floated, and stretched his

arms out, no fear or hesitation in him anywhere. Perched in the very

centre of the Pattern, seated like a new-born star upon its throne, he

saw that tiny figure who had thrilled him months ago when he caught it

in a passing instant, fluttering in the web of Daddy's story,--both

its climax and its inspiration. The twinkling feet were folded now. He

saw the soft little eyes that shone like starlight through clear

amber. The hands, palms upwards, were stretched to meet his own.

'You, of course, must come up--to me,' he heard.

And climbing the lace-like tracery of the golden web, he knelt before

her. But, almost before both knees were bent, her hands had caught

him--the touch ran like a sheath of fire through every nerve--and he

was seated beside her in that shining centre.

'But why did it suddenly grow small?' he asked at once. He felt

absolutely at home. It was like speaking to a child who loved him

utterly, and whom he, in his turn, knew intimately inside out.

'Because you suddenly understood,' was the silvery, tiny answer. 'When

you understand, you bring everything into yourself, small as a toy. It

is size that bewilders. Men make size. Fairy things, like stars and

tenderness, are always small.'

'Of course,' he said; 'as if I didn't know it already!'

'Besides,' she laughed, half closing her brilliant eyes and peering at

him mischievously, 'I like everything so tiny that you can find it

inside a shell. That makes it possible to do big things.'

'Am _I_ too big---?' he exclaimed, aware of clumsiness before this

exquisite daintiness.

'A little confused, that's all,' her laughter rippled. 'You want

smoothing down. I'll see to that.'

He had the feeling, as she said it, that his being included the entire

Pattern, even to its most distant edges where it fastened on to the

rim of the universe. From this huge sensation, he came back swiftly to

its tiny correspondence again. His eyes turned to study her. But she

seemed transparent somehow, so that he saw the sky behind her, and in

it, strangely enough--just behind her face--the distant Pleiades,

shining faintly with their tender lustre. They reached down into her

little being, it seemed, as though she emanated from them. Big

Aldebaran guided strongly from behind. For an instant he lost sight of

the actual figure, seeing in its place a radiant efflorescence,

purified as by some spiritual fire--the Spirit of a Star.

'I'm here, quite close beside you,' whispered the tiny voice. 'Don't

let your sight get troublesome like your size. Inside-sight, remember,

is the thing!'

He turned, or rather he focused sight again to find her. He was

startled a little. For a moment it seemed like his own voice speaking

deep down within himself.

'Make yourself at home,' it continued, 'you belong here--almost as

much as I do.' And at the sound of her voice all the perplexities of

his life lay down. It brushed him smooth, like a wind that sets rough

feathers all one way,

He remembered again where he was, and what was going on.

'I do,' he answered, happy as a boy. 'I am at home. It is perfect.'

'Do you, indeed! You speak as though this story were your own!'

And her laugh was like the tinkle of hare-bells in the wind.

'It is,' he said; 'at least I had--I _have_, rather, a considerable

hand in the making of it.'

'Possibly,' she answered, 'but the story belongs to the person who

first started it. And that person is myself. The story is mine

really!'

'Yours!' he gasped.

'Because--I am the story!'

He stared hard to find the face that said this thing. Thought stopped

dead a moment, blocked by a marvel that was impossible, yet true.

'You mean---?' he stammered.

'You heard perfectly what I said; you understood it, too. There's no

good pretending,' impatience as well as laughter in the little voice.

'I am the story,--the story that you love.'

A sudden joy burst over him in a flood. Struggle and search folded

their wings and slept. An immense happiness wrapped him into the very

woof of the pattern wherein they sat. A thousand loose and ineffective

moods of his life found coherence, as a thousand rambling strands were

gathered home and fastened into place.

And the Pattern quivered and grew brighter.

'I am the story because I thought of it first. You, as a version of

its beauty--a channel for its delivery--belong utterly to me. You can

no more resist me than a puddle can resist the stars' reflection. You

increase me. We increase each other.'

'You say you thought it first,' he cried, feeling the light he

radiated flow in and mingle with her own. 'But who are you? Where do

you come from?'

'Over there somewhere, I think,' she laughed, while a ray like fire

flashed out in the direction of the Pleiades that climbed the sky

towards the East. 'You ought to know. You've been hunting for me long

enough!'

'But who _are_ you?' he insisted again, 'for I feel it's you that have

been looking for me--I've so often heard you calling!'

She laughed again till the whole web quivered. Through her eyes the

softness of all the seven Pleiades poured deliciously into him.

'It's absurd that such a big thing as you could hide so easily,' she

said. 'But you'll never hide again. I've got you fast now. And you've

got me! It's like being reflected together in the same puddle, you

see!'

The dazzling radiance passed as she said it into a clearer glow, and

across the fire of it he caught her eyes steadily a moment, though he

could not see the face complete. Two brilliant points of amber shone

up at him, as stars that peep from the mirror of a forest pool. That

mental daylight-searching seemed all explained, only he could not

remember now that there was any such thing at all as either searching

or daylight. When 'out' like this, waking was the dream---the sunlight

world forgotten.

'This Pattern has always been my own,' she continued with infinite

softness, yet so clearly that his whole body seemed a single ear

against her lips, 'for I've thought it ever since I can remember. I've

lived it. This Network of Stars I made ages ago in a garden among far

bigger mountains than these hills, a garden I knew vividly, yet could

not always find--almost as though I dreamed it. The Net included the--

oh, included everything there is, and I fastened it to four big pines

that grew on the further side of the torrent in that mountain garden

of my dream--fastened it with nails of falling stars. And I made the

Pleiades its centre because I loved them best of all. Oh! Orion,

Orion, how big and comforting your arms are! Please hold me tight for

ever and ever!'

'But I know it, too, that lovely dream,' he cried. 'It all comes back

to me. I, too, have dreamed it with you then somewhere--somewhere---!'

His voice choked. He had never known that life could hold such

sweetness, wonder, joy. The universe lay within his arms.

'All the people I wanted to help I used to catch in my Net of Stars,'

she went on. 'There was a train that brought them up to its edges, and

once I got the passengers into the web, and hung them loose in it till

they were soaked with starlight, I could send them back happier and

braver than they came. It's been my story ever since I can remember

anything--my adventure, my dream, my life. And when the great Net

faded a little and wanted brightening, we knew an enormous cavern in

the mountains where lost starlight collected, and we used to gather

this in thousands of sacks, and wash and paint the entire web afresh.

That made it sticky, so that the passengers hung in it longer. Don't

you remember?

They came back with starlight in their hair and eyes and voices--and

in their hearts.'

'And the way you--_we_ got them into the Net,' he interrupted

excitedly, 'was by understanding them--by feeling with them---'

'Sympathy,' she laughed, 'of course! Only there were so many I could

not reach and could not understand, and so could never get in. In

particular there was some one who ought to have been there to help me.

If I could find that some one I could do twice as much. I searched and

searched. I hunted through every corner of the garden, through forest,

cavern, sky, but never with success. Orion never overtook me! My

longing cried every where, but in vain. Oh, Orion, my lost Orion, I

have found you now at last!... The Net flashed messages in all

directions, but without response. This some one who could make my work

complete existed--that I _knew_--only he was hidden somewhere out of

sight--concealed in some corner or other, veiled by a darkness that he

wove about himself--as though by some funny kind of wrong thinking

that obscured the light I searched for and made it too dim to reach me

properly. His life or mind--his thought and feeling, that is--were

wumbled---'

'_Wumbled!_' he cried, as the certainty burst upon him with the

password. He stood close to her, opening his arms.

Instantly she placed her golden palm upon his mouth, with fingers that

were like soft star-rays. Her words, as she continued, were sweeter

than the footfalls of the Pleiades when they rise above the sea.

'Yet there were times when we were so close that we could feel each

other, and each wondered why the other did not actually appear. I have

been trying,' she whispered, oh so dearly, 'to find you always. And

you knew it, too, for I've felt you searching too....'

The outlying skirts of the Pattern closed in a little, till the edges

gathered over them like a tent of stars. Alone in the heart of the

universe they told their secret very softly....

'There are twin-stars, you know,' she whispered, when he released her,

'that circle so close about each other that they look like one. I

wonder, oh, I wonder, do they ever touch!'

'They are apart in order to see one another better,' he murmured.

'They watch one another more sweetly so. They play at separation for

the joy of coming together again.'

And once more the golden Pattern hid them for a moment from the other

stars.... The shafts of night-fire played round and above their secret

tent in space.... Most marvellously their beings found each other in

the great whispering galleries of the world where Thought and Yearning

know that first fulfilment which is the source of action later....

'So, now that I have found you,' her voice presently

went on, 'our Network shall catch everybody everywhere. For the

Pattern of my story, woven so long ago, has passed through you as

through a channel--to another who can give it forth. It will spread

across every sky. All, all will see it and climb up.'

'My scheme---' he cried, with eager delight, yet not quite certain

what he meant, nor whence the phrase proceeded.

'Was my thought first,' she laughed, 'when you were a little boy and I

was a little girl--somewhere in a garden very long ago. A ray from its

pattern touched you into beauty. Though I could do nothing with it

myself, one little ray shot into the mirror of your mind and instantly

increased itself. But then, you hid yourself; the channel closed---'

'It never died, though,' he interrupted; 'the ray, I mean.'

'It waited,' she went on, 'until you found children somewhere, and the

channel cleared instantly. Through you, opened up and cleaned by them,

my pattern rushed headlong into another who can use it. It could never

die, of course. And the long repression--I never ceased to live it--

made its power irresistible.'

'Your story!' he cried. 'It _is_ indeed your story.'

The eyes were so close against his own that he made a movement that

was like diving into a deep and shining sea to reach them.... The

Pleiades rushed instantly past his face.... Soft filaments of golden

texture stroked his very cheeks. That slender violet wind rose into

his hair. He saw other larger winds behind it, deeply coloured....

Something made him tremble all over like a leaf in a storm. He saw,

then, the crest of the sentinel poplar tossing between him and the

earth far, far below. A mist of confusion caught him, so that he knew

not where he was.... He made an effort to remember... a violent

effort.... Some strange sense of heaviness oppressed him.... He was

leaving her.

'Quick!' he tried to cry; 'be quick! I am changing. I am drowsy with

your voice and beauty. Your eyes have touched me, and I am--falling

asleep!' His voice grew weaker as he said it.

Her answer sounded faint, and far above him:

'Give me... your... hand. Touch me. Come away with me... to... my ...

garden ... in the mountains.... We may wake together ... You are

waking now...!'

He made an effort to find her little palm. But the wind swept coldly

between his opened fingers.

'Waking!--what is it?' he cried thinly. He thought swiftly of

something vague and muddy--something dull, disordered, incomplete.

Here it was all glass-clear. 'Where are you? I can't find you. I can't

see!'

A dreadful, searching pain shot through him. He was losing her, just

when he had found her. He struggled, clung, fought frantically to hold

her. But his fingers seized the air.

'Oh, I shall find you--even when you wake,' he heard far away among

the stars. 'Try and remember me--when I come. _Try and remember_....'

It dipped into the distance. He had lost her. He caught a glimpse of

the Pleiades as he fell at a fearful speed. Some one behind them

picked up stars and tossed them after him. They dimmed as they shot

by--from gold to white, from white to something very pale. Behind them

rose a wave of light that hurt his eyes.

'Look out! The Interfering Sun!' came a disappearing voice that was

followed by a peal of laughter. 'I hope you found her, and I hope you

caught it well. You deserved to....'

There was a scent of hair that he loved, a vision of mischievous brown

eyes, an idea that somebody was turning a somersault beside him--and

then he landed upon the solid earth with a noise like thunder.

The room was dark. At first he did not recognise it. Through the open

window came the clatter of lumbering traffic that passed heavily down

St. James's Street. He rose stiffly from his chair, vexed with himself

for having dozed. It was more than a doze, though; he had slept some

thirty minutes by his watch. No memory of any dreams was in him--

nothing but a feeling of great refreshing lightness and peace....

It was wonderful, he reflected, as he changed into country clothes for

his walk in Richmond Park, how even the shortest nap revives the brain

and body. There was a sense that an immense interval had elapsed, and

that something very big had happened or was going to happen to him

very soon....

And an hour later he passed through the Richmond Gate and found the

open spaces of the Park deserted, as they always were. The oaks and

bracken rustled in a gentle breeze. The swishing of his boots through

the wet grass was the only sound he heard, for the boom and purr of

distant London reached him more as touch than as something audible.

Seated on a fallen tree, he watched the stars and listened to the

wind. That hum and boom of the city seemed underground, the flare it

tossed into the sky rose from vast furnaces below the world. The stars

danced lightly far beyond its reach, secure and unafraid. He thought

of children dancing with twinkling feet upon the mountains....

And in himself there was hum and light as well. Too deep, too far

below the horizon for full discovery, he caught the echo, the faint,

dim flashings of reflection that are called by men a Mood. These,

rising to the surface, swept over him with the queer joy of

intoxicating wonder that only children know. Some great Secret he had

to tell himself, only he had kept it so long and so well that he could

not find it quite. He felt the thrill, yet had forgotten what it was.

Something was going to happen. A new footfall was coming across the

world towards him. He could almost hear its delicate, swift tread.

Life was about to offer him this delicious, thrilling secret--very

soon. Looking up he saw the Pleiades, and the single footfall became

many. He remembered that former curious obsession of the Pleiades...

and as Thought and Yearning went roaming into space, they met

Anticipation, who took them by the hand. It seemed, then, that

children came flocking down upon him from the sky, led by a little

figure with starry eyes of clearest amber, a pair of tiny twinkling

feet, and a voice quite absurdly soft and tender.

'Your time is coming,' he heard behind the rustling of the oak leaves

overhead, 'for the children are calling to you--children of your own.

And this is the bravest Scheme in all the world. There is no bigger.

How can there be? For all the world is a child that goes past your

windows crying for its lost Fairyland...!'

It was after midnight when at length he slipped through the Robin Hood

Gate, passed up Priory Lane, and walked rapidly by the shuttered

houses of Roehampton. And, looking a moment over Putney Bridge; he saw

the reflections of the stars in the muddy, dawdling Thames. Nothing

anywhere was thick enough to hide them. The Net of Stars, being in his

heart, was everywhere. No prisoner could be more securely caught than

he was.

CHAPTER XXXII

_Asia_. The point of one white star is quivering still

Deep in the orange light of widening morn

Beyond the purple mountains: through a chasm

Of wind-divided mist the darker lake

Reflects it: now it wanes: it gleams again

As the waves fade, and as the burning threads

Of woven cloud unravel in the pale air:

'Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloud-like snow

The roseate sunlight quivers: hear I not

The AEolian music of her sea-green plumes

Winnowing the crimson dawn?

_Prometheus Unbound_, SHELLEY.

August had blazed its path into September, and September had already

trimmed her successor's gown with gold and russet before Henry Rogers

found himself free again to think of holidays. London had kept its

grip upon him all these weeks while the rest of the world was gay and

irresponsible. He was so absurdly conscientious. One of his Companies

had got into difficulties, and he was the only man who could save the

shareholders' money. The Patent Coal Dust Fuel Company, Ltd., had

bought his invention for blowing fine coal dust into a furnace whereby

an intense heat was obtainable in a few minutes. The saving in

material, time, and labour was revolutionary. Rogers had received a

large sum in cash, though merely a nominal number of the common

shares. It meant little to him if the Company collapsed, and an

ordinary Director would have been content with sending counsel through

the post in the intervals of fishing and shooting. But Henry Rogers

was of a different calibre. The invention was his child, born by hard

labour out of loving thought. The several thousand shareholders

believed in him: they were his neighbours. Incompetence and

extravagance threatened failure. He took a room in the village near

the Essex factories, and gave his personal energy and attention to

restoring economical working of every detail. He wore overalls. He put

intelligence into hired men and foremen; he spent his summer holiday

turning a system of waste into the basis of a lucrative industry. The

shareholders would never know whose faithfulness had saved them loss,

and at the most his thanks would be a formal paragraph in the Report

at the end of the year. Yet he was satisfied, and worked as though his

own income depended on success. For he knew--of late this certainty

had established itself in him, influencing all he did--that faithful

labour, backed by steady thinking, must reach ten thousand wavering

characters, merge with awakening tendencies in them, and slip thence

into definite daily action. Action was thought materialised. He helped

the world. A copybook maxim thus became a weapon of tempered steel.

His Scheme was bigger than any hospital for disabled bodies. It would

still be cumulative when bodies and bricks were dust upon the wind. It

must increase by geometrical progression through all time.

It was largely to little Minks that he owed this positive conviction

and belief, to that ridiculous, high-souled Montmorency Minks, who,

while his master worked in overalls, took the air himself on Clapham

Common, or pored with a wet towel round his brow beneath the oleograph

of Napoleon in the attempt to squeeze his exuberant emotion into

tripping verse. For Minks admired intensely from a distance. He

attended to the correspondence in the flat, and made occasional visits

down to Essex, but otherwise enjoyed a kind of extra holiday of his

own. For Minks was not learned in coal dust. The combustion was in his

eager brain. He produced an amazing series of lyrics and sonnets,

though too high-flown, alas, to win a place in print. Love and

unselfishness, as usual, were his theme, with a steady sprinkling of

'the ministry of Thought,' 'true success, unrecognised by men, yet

noted by the Angels,' and so forth. His master's labour seemed to him

a 'brilliant form of purity,' and 'the soul's security' came in

admirably to close the crowded, tortuous line. 'Beauty' and 'Duty'

were also thickly present, both with capitals, but the verse that

pleased him most, and even thrilled Albinia to a word of praise, was

one that ended--'Those active powers which are the Doves of Thought.'

It followed 'neither can be sold or bought,' and Mrs. Minks approved,

because, as she put it, 'there, now, is something you can _sell_; it's

striking and original; no editor could fail to think so.' The

necessities of Frank and Ronald were ever her standard of praise or

blame.

Thus, it was the first week in October before Rogers found himself

free to leave London behind him and think of a change of scene. No

planning was necessary.... Bourcelles was too constantly in his mind

all these weary weeks to admit of alternatives. Only a few days ago a

letter had come from Jinny, saying she was going to a Pension in

Geneva after Christmas, and that unless he appeared soon he would not

see her again as she 'was,' a qualification explained by the

postscript, 'My hair will be up by that time. Mother says I can put it

up on Xmas Day. So please hurry up, Mr. Henry Rogers, if you want to

see me as I am.'

But another thing that decided him was that the great story was at

last in print. It was published in the October number of the Review,

and the press had already paid considerable attention to it. Indeed,

there was a notice at the railway bookstall on the day he left, to the

effect that the first edition was exhausted, and that a large second

edition would be available almost immediately. 'Place your orders at

once' was added in bold red letters. Rogers bought one of these

placards for his cousin.

'It just shows,' observed Minks, whom he was taking out with him.

'Shows what?' inquired his master.

'How many more thoughtful people there are about, sir, than one had

any idea of,' was the reply. 'The public mind is looking for something

of that kind, expecting it even, though it hardly knows what it really

wants. That's a story, Mr. Rogers, that must change the point of view

of all who read it--with understanding. It makes the commonest man

feel he is a hero.'

'You've put our things into a non-smoker, Minks,' the other

interrupted him. 'What in the world are you thinking about?'

'I beg your pardon, I'm sure, sir; so I have,' said Minks, blushing,

and bundling the bags along the platform to another empty carriage,

'but that story has got into my head. I sat up reading it aloud to

Mrs. Minks all night. For it says the very things I have always longed

to say. Sympathy and the transference of thought--to say nothing of

the soul's activity when the body is asleep--have always seemed to

me---'

He wandered on while his companion made himself comfortable in a

corner with his pipe and newspaper. But the first thing Rogers read,

as the train went scurrying through Kent, was a summary of the

contents of this very Review. Two-thirds of the article was devoted to

the 'Star Story' of John Henry Campden, whose name 'entitled his work

to a high standard of criticism.' The notice was well written by some

one evidently of intelligence and knowledge; sound judgment was

expressed on style and form and general execution, but when it came to

the matter itself the criticism was deplorably misunderstanding. The

writer had entirely missed the meaning. While praising the

'cleverness' he asked plainly between the lines of his notice 'What

does it mean?' This unconscious exposure of his own ignorance amused

his reader while it also piqued him. The critic, expert in dealing

with a political article, was lamentably at sea over an imaginative

story.

'Inadequate receiving instrument,' thought Rogers, smiling audibly.

Minks, deep in a mysterious looking tome in the opposite corner,

looked up over his cigarette and wondered why his employer laughed. He

read the article the other handed to him, thinking how much better he

could have done it himself. Encouraged by the expression in Mr.

Rogers's eyes, he then imparted what the papers call 'a genuine

contribution to the thought upon the subject.'

'The writer quarrels with him,' he observed, 'for not giving what is

expected of him. What he has thought he must go on thinking, or be

condemned. He must repeat himself or be uncomprehended.

Hitherto'--Minks prided himself upon the knowledge--'he has written

studies of uncommon temperaments. Therefore to indulge in fantasy now

is wrong.'

'Ah, you take it that way, do you?'

'Experience justifies me, Mr. Rogers,' the secretary continued. 'A

friend of mine, or rather of Mrs. Minks's, once wrote a volume of

ghost stories that, of course, were meant to thrill. His subsequent

book, with no such intention, was judged by the object of the first--

as a failure. It must make the flesh creep. Everything he wrote must

make the flesh creep. One of the papers, the best--a real thunderer,

in fact--said "Once or twice the desired thrill comes close, but

never, alas, quite comes off."'

'How wumbled,' exclaimed his listener.

'It is indeed,' said Minks, 'in fact, one of the thorns in the path of

literature. The ordinary clever mind is indeed a desolate phenomenon.

And how often behind the "Oxford manner" lurks the cultured prig, if I

may put it so.'

'Indeed you may,' was the other's rejoinder, 'for you put it

admirably.'

They laughed a little and went on with their reading in their

respective corners. The journey to Paris was enlivened by many similar

discussions, Minks dividing his attentions between his master, his

volume of philosophy, and the needs of various old ladies, to whom

such men attach themselves as by a kind of generous, manly instinct.

Minks was always popular and inoffensive. He had such tact.

'Ah! and that reminds me, Minks,' said Rogers, as they paced the banks

of the Seine that evening, looking at the starry sky over Paris. 'What

do you know about the Pleiades? Anything--eh?'

Minks drew with pride upon his classical reading.

'The seven daughters of Atlas, Mr. Rogers, if I remember correctly,

called therefore the Atlantides. They were the virgin companions of

Artemis. Orion, the great hunter, pursued them in Boeotia, and they

called upon the gods for help.'

'And the gods turned 'em into stars, wasn't it?'

'First into doves, sir--Peleiades means doves--and then set them among

the Constellations, where big Orion still pursues, yet never overtakes

them.'

'Beautiful, isn't it? What a memory you've got, Minks. And isn't one

of 'em lost or something?'

'Merope, yes,' the delighted Minks went on. He knew it because he had

looked it up recently for his lyric about 'the Doves of Thought.' 'She

married a mortal, Sisyphus, the son of Aeolus, and so shines more

dimly than the rest. For her sisters married gods. But there is one

who is more luminous than the others---'

'Ah! and which was that?' interrupted Rogers.

'Maia,' Minks told him pat. 'She is the most beautiful of the seven.

She was the Mother, too, of Mercury, the Messenger of the gods. She

gave birth to him in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. Zeus was the

father---'

'Take care; you'll get run over,' and Rogers pulled him from the path

of an advancing taxi-cab, whose driver swore furiously at the pair of

them. 'Charming, all that, isn't it?'

'It is lovely, sir. It haunts the mind. I suppose,' he added, 'that's

why your cousin, Mr. Campden, made the Pleiades the centre of his Star

Net in the story--a cluster of beautiful thoughts as it were.'

'No doubt, no doubt,' his tone so brusque suddenly that Minks decided

after all not to mention his poem where the Pleiades made their

appearance as the 'doves of thought.'

'What a strange coincidence,' Rogers said as they turned towards the

hotel again.

'Subconscious knowledge, probably, sir,' suggested the secretary,

scarcely following his meaning, if meaning indeed there was.

'Possibly! One never knows, does one?'

'Never, Mr. Rogers. It's all very wonderful.'

And so, towards six o'clock in the evening of the following day,

having passed the time pleasantly in Paris, the train bore them

swiftly beyond Pontarlier and down the steep gradient of the Gorges de

l'Areuse towards Neuchatel. The Val de Travers, through which the

railway slips across the wooded Jura into Switzerland, is like a

winding corridor cleft deep between savage and precipitous walls.

There are dizzy glimpses into the gulf below. With steam shut off and

brakes partly on, the train curves sharply, hiding its eyes in many

tunnels lest the passengers turn giddy. Strips of bright green meadow-

land, where the Areuse flows calmly, alternate with places where the

ravine plunges into bottomless depths that have been chiselled out as

by a giant ploughshare. Rogers pointed out the chosen views, while his

secretary ran from window to window, excited as a happy child. Such

scenery he had never known. It changed the entire content of his mind.

Poetry he renounced finally before the first ten minutes were past.

The descriptions that flooded his brain could be rendered only

by the most dignified and stately prose, and he floundered among a

welter of sonorous openings that later Albinia would read in Sydenham

and retail judiciously to the elder children from 'Father's foreign

letters.'

'We shall pass Bourcelles in a moment now! Look out! Be ready with

your handkerchief!' Rogers warned him, as the train emerged from the

final tunnel and scampered between thick pine woods, emblazoned here

and there with golden beeches. The air was crystal, sparkling. They

could smell the forests.

They took their places side by side at the windows. The heights of

Boudry and La Tourne, that stand like guardian sentries on either side

of the mountain gateway, were already cantering by. The precipices

flew past. Beyond lay the smiling slopes of vineyard, field, and

orchard, sprinkled with farms and villages, of which Bourcelles came

first. The Areuse flowed peacefully towards the lake. The panorama of

the snowy Alps rolled into view along the farther horizon, and the

slanting autumn sunshine bathed the entire scene with a soft and ruddy

light. They entered the Fairyland of Daddy's story.

'Voila la sentinelle deja!' exclaimed Rogers, putting his head out to

see the village poplar. 'We run through the field that borders the

garden of the Pension. They'll come out to wave to us. Be ready.'

'Ah, oui,' said Minks, who had been studying phrase books, 'je vwa.'

But in reality he saw with difficulty, for a spark had got into his

eye, and its companion optic, wandering as usual, was suffused with

water too.

The news of their arrival had, of course, preceded them, and the row

of waving figures in the field gave them a welcome that went straight

to Minks's heart. He felt proud for his grand employer. Here was a

human touch that would modify the majesty of the impersonal mountain

scenery in his description. He waved his handkerchief frantically as

the train shot past, and he hardly knew which attracted him most--the

expression of happiness on Mr. Rogers's face, or the line of

nondescript humanity that gesticulated in the field as though they

wished to stop the Paris 'Rapide.'

For it was a _very_ human touch; and either Barnum's Circus or the

byeways and hedges of Fairyland had sent their picked representatives

with a dance seen usually only in shy moonlit glades. His master named

them as the carriage rattled by. The Paris Express, of course, did not

stop at little Bourcelles. Minks recognised each one easily from the

descriptions in the story.

The Widow Jequier, with garden skirts tucked high, and wearing big

gauntlet gloves, waved above her head a Union Jack that knocked her

bonnet sideways at every stroke, and even enveloped the black triangle

of a Trilby hat that her brother-in-law held motionless aloft as

though to test the wind for his daily report upon the condition of le

barometre. The Postmaster never waved. He looked steadily before him

at the passing train, his small, black figure more than usually

dwarfed by a stately outline that rose above the landscape by his

side, and was undoubtedly the Woman of the Haystack. Telling lines

from the story's rhymes flashed through Minks's memory as, chuckling

with pleasure, he watched the magnificent, ample gestures of Mother's

waving arms. She seemed to brush aside the winds who came a-courting,

although wide strokes of swimming really described her movements best.

A little farther back, in the middle distance, he recognised by his

peaked cap the gendarme, Gygi, as he paused in his digging and looked

up to watch the fun; and beyond him again, solid in figure as she was

unchanging in her affections, he saw Mrs. Postmaster, struggling with

a bed sheet the _pensionnaires des Glycines_ helped her shake in the

evening breeze. It was too close upon the hour of _souper_ for her to

travel farther from the kitchen. And beside her stood Miss Waghorn,

waving an umbrella. She was hatless. Her tall, thin figure, dressed in

black, against the washing hung out to dry, looked like a note of

exclamation, or, when she held the umbrella up at right angles, like a

capital L the fairies had set in the ground upon its head.

And the fairies themselves, the sprites, the children! They were

everywhere and anywhere. Jimbo flickered, went out, reappeared, then

flickered again; he held a towel in one hand and a table napkin in the

other. Monkey seemed more in the air than on the solid earth, for one

minute she was obviously a ball, and the next, with a motion like a

somersault, her hair shot loose across the sunlight as though she

flew. Both had their mouths wide open, shouting, though the wind

carried their words all away unheard. And Jane Anne stood apart. Her

welcome, if the gesture is capable of being described at all, was a

bow. She moved at the same time sedately across the field, as though

she intended to be seen separately from the rest. She wore hat and

gloves. She was evidently in earnest with her welcome. But Mr. John

Henry Campden, the author and discoverer of them all, Minks did not

see.

'But I don't see the writer himself!' he cried. 'I don't see Mr.

Campden.'

'You can't,' explained Rogers, 'he's standing behind his wife.'

And the little detail pleased the secretary hugely. The true artist,

he reflected, is never seen in his work.

It all was past and over--in thirty seconds. The spire of the church,

rising against a crimson sky, with fruit trees in the foreground and a

line of distant summits across the shining lake, replaced the row of

wonderful dancing figures. Rogers sank back in his corner, laughing,

and Minks, saying nothing, went across to his own at the other end of

the compartment. It all had been so swift and momentary that it seemed

like the flash of a remembered dream, a strip of memory's pictures, a

vivid picture of some dazzling cinematograph. Minks felt as if he had

just read the entire story again from one end to the other--in thirty

seconds. He felt different, though wherein exactly the difference lay

was beyond him to discover. 'It must be the spell of Bourcelles,' he

murmured to himself. 'Mr. Rogers warned me about it. It is a Fairyland

that thought has created out of common things. It is quite wonderful!'

He felt a glow all over him. His mind ran on for a moment to another

picture his master had painted for him, and he imagined Albinia and

the family out here, living in a little house on the borders of the

forest, a strip of vineyards, sunlight, mountains, happy scented

winds, and himself with a writing-table before a window overlooking

the lake... writing down Beauty.

CHAPTER XXXIII

We never meet; yet we meet day by day

Upon those hills of life, dim and immense:

The good we love, and sleep-our innocence.

O hills of life, high hills! And higher than they,

Our guardian spirits meet at prayer and play.

Beyond pain, joy, and hope, and long suspense,

Above the summits of our souls, far hence,

An angel meets an angel on the way.

Beyond all good I ever believed of thee

Or thou of me, these always love and live.

And though I fail of thy ideal of me,

My angel falls not short. They greet each other.

Who knows, they may exchange the kiss we give,

Thou to thy crucifix, I to my mother.

ALICE MCYNELL.

The arrival at the station interrupted the reverie in which the

secretary and his chief both were plunged.

'How odd,' exclaimed Minks, ever observant, as he leaped from the

carriage, 'there are no platforms. Everything in Switzerland seems on

one level, even the people--everything, that is, except the

mountains.'

'Switzerland _is_ the mountains,' laughed his chief.

Minks laughed too. 'What delicious air!' he added, filling his lungs

audibly. He felt half intoxicated with it.

After some delay they discovered a taxi-cab, piled the luggage on to

it, and were whirled away towards a little cluster of lights that

twinkled beneath the shadows of La Tourne and Boudry. Bourcelles lay

five miles out.

'Remember, you're not my secretary here,' said Rogers presently, as

the forests sped by them. 'You're just a travelling companion.'

'I understand,' he replied after a moment's perplexity. 'You have a

secretary here already.'

'His name is Jimbo.'

The motor grunted its way up the steep hill above Colombier. Below

them spread the vines towards the lake, sprinkled with lights of farms

and villages. As the keen evening air stole down from forest and

mountain to greet them, the vehicle turned into the quiet village

street. Minks saw the big humped shoulders of La Citadelle, the

tapering church spire, the trees in the orchard of the Pension.

Cudrefin, smoking a cigar at the door of his grocery shop, recognised

them and waved his hand. A moment later Gygi lifted his peaked hat and

called 'bon soir, bonne nuit,' just as though Rogers had never gone

away at all. Michaud, the carpenter, shouted his welcome as he

strolled towards the Post Office farther down to post a letter, and

then the motor stopped with a jerk outside the courtyard where the

fountain sang and gurgled in its big stone basin. Minks saw the plane

tree. He glanced up at the ridged backbone of the building. What a

portentous looking erection it was. It seemed to have no windows. He

wondered where the famous Den was. The roof overlapped like a giant

hood, casting a deep shadow upon the cobbled yard. Overhead the stars

shone faintly.

Instantly a troop of figures shot from the shadow and surrounded them.

There was a babel of laughter, exclamations, questions. Minks thought

the stars had fallen. Children and constellations were mingled all

together, it seemed. Both were too numerous to count. All were rushing

with the sun towards Hercules at a dizzy speed.

'And this is my friend, Mr. Minks,' he heard repeated from time to

time, feeling his hand seized and shaken before he knew what he was

about. Mother loomed up and gave him a stately welcome too.

'He wears gloves in Bourcelles!' some one observed audibly to some one

else.

'Excuse me! This is Riquette!' announced a big girl, hatless like the

rest, with shining eyes. 'It's a she.'

'And this is my secretary, Mr. Jimbo,' said Rogers, breathlessly,

emerging from a struggling mass. Minks and Jimbo shook hands with

dignity.

'Your room is over at the Michauds, as before.'

'And Mr. Mix is at the Pension--there was no other room to be had---'

'Supper's at seven---'

'Tante Jeanne's been _grand-cieling_ all day with excitement. She'll

burst when she sees you!'

'She's read the story, too. Elle dit que c'est le bouquet!'

'There's new furniture in the salon, and they've cleaned the sink

while you've been away!...'

The author moved forward out of the crowd. At the same moment another

figure, slight and shadowy, revealed itself, outlined against the

white of the gleaming street. It had been hidden in the tangle of the

stars. It kept so quiet.

'Countess, may I introduce him to you,' he said, seizing the momentary

pause. There was little ceremony in Bourcelles. 'This is my cousin I

told you about--Mr. Henry Rogers. You must know one another at once.

He's Orion in the story.'

He dragged up his big friend, who seemed suddenly awkward, difficult

to move. The children ran in and out between them like playing

puppies, tumbling against each in turn.

'They don't know which is which,' observed Jinny, watching the

introduction. Her voice ran past him like the whir of a shooting star

through space--far, far away. 'Excuse me!' she cried, as she cannoned

off Monkey against Cousinenry. 'I'm not a terminus! This is a regular

shipwreck!'

The three elder ones drew aside a little from the confusion.

'The Countess,' resumed Daddy, as soon as they were safe from

immediate destruction, 'has come all the way from Austria to see us.

She is staying with us for a few days. Isn't it delightful? We call

her the little Grafin.' His voice wumbled a trifle thickly in his

beard. 'She was good enough to like the story--our story, you know--

and wrote to me---'

'My story,' said a silvery, laughing voice.

And Rogers bowed politely, and with a moment's dizziness, at two

bright smiling eyes that watched him out of the little shadow standing

between him and the children. He was aware of grandeur.

He stood there, first startled, then dazed. She was so small. But

something about her was so enormous. His inner universe turned over

and showed its under side. The hidden thing that so long had brushed

his daily life came up utterly close and took him in its gigantic

arms. He stared like an unmannered child.

_Something had lit the world_....

'This _is_ delicious air,' he heard Minks saying to his cousin in the

distance--to his deaf side judging by the answer:

'Delicious here--yes, isn't it?'

_Something had lit the stars._...

Minks and his cousin continued idly talking. Their voices twittered

like birds in empty space. The children had scattered like marbles

from a spinning-top. Their voices and footsteps sounded in the cobbled

yard of La Citadelle, as they scampered up to prepare for supper.

Mother sailed solemnly after them, more like a frigate than ever. The

world, on fire, turned like a monstrous Catherine wheel within his

brain.

_Something had lit the universe._...

He stood there in the dusk beneath the peeping stars, facing the

slender little shadow. It was all he saw at first--this tiny figure.

Demure and soft, it remained motionless before him, a hint of

childhood's wonder in its graceful attitude. He was aware of something

mischievous as well--that laughed at him.... He realised then that she

waited for him to speak. Yet, for the life of him, he could find no

words, because the eyes, beneath the big-brimmed hat with its

fluttering veil, looked out at him as though some formidable wild

creature watched him from the opening of its cave. There was a glint

of amber in them. The heart in him went thumping. He caught his

breath. Out, jerked, then, certain words that he tried hard to make

ordinary---

'But surely--we have met before--I think I know you---'

He just said it, swallowing his breath with a gulp upon the unfinished

sentence. But he said it--somewhere else, and not here in the twilight

street of little Bourcelles. For his sight swam somehow far away, and

he was giddy with the height. The roofs of the houses lay in a sea of

shadow below him, and the street wound through them like a ribbon of

thin lace. The tree-tops waved very softly in a wind that purred and

sighed beneath his feet, and this wind was a violet little wind, that

bent them all one way and set the lines and threads of gold a-quiver

to their fastenings. For the fastenings were not secure; any minute he

might fall. And the threads, he saw, all issued like rays from two

central shining points of delicate, transparent amber, radiating forth

into an exquisite design that caught the stars. Yet the stars were not

reflected in them. It was they who lit the stars....

He _was_ dizzy. He tried speech again.

'I told you I _should_--' But it was not said aloud apparently.

Two little twinkling feet were folded. Two hands, he saw, stretched

down to draw him close. These very stars ran loose about him in a

cloud of fiery sand. Their pattern danced in flame. He picked out

Sirius, Aldebaran--the Pleiades! There was tumult in his blood, a wild

and exquisite confusion. What in the world had happened to him that he

should behave in this ridiculous fashion? Yet he was doing nothing. It

was only that, for a passing instant, the enormous thing his life had

been dimly conscious of so long, rose at last from its subterranean

hiding-place and overwhelmed him. This picture that came with it was

like some far-off dream he suddenly recovered. A glorious excitement

caught him. He felt utterly bewildered.

'Have we?' he heard close in front of him. 'I do not think I have had

the pleasure'--it was with a slightly foreign accent--'but it is so

dim here, and one cannot see very well, perhaps.'

And a ripple of laughter passed round some gigantic whispering gallery

in the sky. It set the trellis-work of golden threads all trembling.

He felt himself perched dizzily in this shaking web that swung through

space. And with him was some one whom he knew.... He heard the words

of a song:

'Light desire With their fire.'

_Something had lit his heart._...

He lost himself again, disgracefully. A mist obscured his sight,

though with the eyes of his mind he still saw crystal-clear. Across

this mist fled droves and droves of stars. They carried him out of

himself--out, out, out!... His upper mind then made a vehement effort

to recover equilibrium. An idea was in him that some one would

presently turn a somersault and disappear. The effort had a result, it

seemed, for the enormous thing passed slowly away again into the

caverns of his under-self, ... and he realised that he was conducting

himself in a foolish and irresponsible manner, which Minks, in

particular, would disapprove. He was staring rudely--at a shadow, or

rather, at two eyes in a shadow. With another effort--oh, how it

hurt!--he focused sight again upon surface things. It seemed his turn

to say something.

'I beg your pardon,' he stammered, 'but I thought--it seemed to me for

a moment--that I--remembered.'

The face came close as he said it. He saw it clear a moment. The

figure grew defined against the big stone fountain--the little hands

in summer cotton gloves, the eyes beneath the big brimmed hat, the

streaming veil. Then he went lost again--more gloriously than before.

Instead of the human outline in the dusky street of Bourcelles, he

stared at the host of stars, at the shimmering design of gold, at the

Pleiades, whose fingers of spun lustre swung the Net loose across the

world....

'Flung from huge Orion's hand...'

he caught in a golden whisper,

'Sweetly linking

All our thinking....'

His cousin and Minks, he was aware vaguely, had left him. He was alone

with her. A little way down the hill they turned and called to him. He

made a frantic effort--there seemed just time--to plunge away into

space and seize the cluster of lovely stars with both his hands.

Headlong, he dived off recklessly... driving at a fearful speed, ...

when--the whole thing vanished into a gulf of empty blue, and he found

himself running, not through the sky to clutch the Pleiades, but

heavily downhill towards his cousin and Minks.

It was a most abrupt departure. There was a curious choking in his

throat. His heart ran all over his body. Something white and sparkling

danced madly through his brain. What must she think of him?

'We've just time to wash ourselves and hurry over to supper,' his

cousin said, as he overtook them, flustered and very breathless. Minks

looked at him--regarded him, rather--astonishment, almost disapproval,

in one eye, and in the other, apparently observing the vineyards, a

mild rebuke.

He walked beside them in a dream. The sound of Colombier's bells

across Planeyse, men's voices singing fragments of a Dalcroze song

floated to him, and with them all the dear familiar smells:--

Le coeur de ma mie

Est petit, tout petit petit,

J'en ai l'ame ravie....

It was Minks, drawing the keen air noisily into his lungs in great

draughts, who recalled him to himself.

'I could find my way here without a guide, Mr. Campden,' he was saying

diffidently, burning to tell how the Story had moved him. 'It's all so

vivid, I can almost see the Net. I feel in it,' and he waved one hand

towards the sky.

The other thanked him modestly. 'That's your power of visualising

then,' he added. 'My idea was, of course, that every mind in the world

is related with every other mind, and that there's no escape--we are

all prisoners. The responsibility is vast.'

'Perfectly. I've always believed it. Ah! if only one could _live_ it!'

Rogers heard this clearly. But it seemed that another heard it with

him. Some one very close beside him shared the hearing. He had

recovered from his temporary shock. Only the wonder remained. Life was

sheer dazzling glory. The talk continued as they hurried along the

road together. Rogers became aware then that his cousin was giving

information--meant for himself.

'... A most charming little lady, indeed. She comes from over there,'

and he pointed to where the Pleiades were climbing the sky towards the

East, 'in Austria somewhere. She owns a big estate among the

mountains. She wrote to me--I've had _such_ encouraging letters, you

know, from all sorts of folk--and when I replied, she telegraphed to

ask if she might come and see me. She seems fond of telegraphing,

rather.' And he laughed as though he were speaking of an ordinary

acquaintance.

'Charming little lady!' The phrase was like the flick of a lash.

Rogers had known it applied to such commonplace women.

'A most intelligent face,' he heard Minks saying, 'quite beautiful,

_I_ thought--the beauty of mind and soul.'

'... Mother and the children took to her at once,' his cousin's voice

went on. 'She and her maid have got rooms over at the Beguins. And, do

you know, a most singular coincidence,' he added with some excitement,

'she tells me that ever since childhood she's had an idea like this--

like the story, I mean--an idea of her own she always wanted to write

but couldn't-----'

'Of course, of course,' interrupted Rogers impatiently; and then he

added quickly, 'but how _very_ extraordinary!'

'The idea that Thought makes a network everywhere about the world in

which we all are caught, and that it's a positive duty, therefore, to

think beauty--as much a duty as washing one's face and hands, because

what you think _touches_ others all day long, and all night long too--

in sleep.'

'Only she couldn't write it?' asked Rogers. His tongue was like a

thick wedge of unmanageable wood in his mouth. He felt like a man who

hears another spoil an old, old beautiful story that he knows himself

with intimate accuracy.

'She can telegraph, she says, but she can't write!'

'An expensive talent,' thought the practical Minks.

'Oh, she's very rich, apparently. But isn't it odd? You see, she

thought it vividly, played it, lived it. Why, she tells me she even

had a Cave in her mountains where lost thoughts and lost starlight

collected, and that she made a kind of Pattern with them to represent

the Net. She showed me a drawing of it, for though she can't write,

she paints quite well. But the odd thing is that she claims to have

thought out the main idea of my own story years and years ago with the

feeling that some day her idea was bound to reach some one who

_would_ write it---'

'Almost a case of transference,' put in Minks.

'A fairy tale, yes, isn't it!'

'Married?' asked Rogers, with a gulp, as they reached the door. But

apparently he had not said it out loud, for there was no reply.

He tried again less abruptly. It required almost a physical effort to

drive his tongue and frame the tremendous question.

'What a fairy story for her children! How _they_ must love it!' This

time he spoke so loud that Minks started and looked up at him.

'Ah, but she has no children,' his cousin said.

They went upstairs, and the introductions to Monsieur and Madame

Michaud began, with talk about rooms and luggage. The mist was over

him once more. He heard Minks saying:--

'Oui, je comprongs un poo,' and the clatter of heavy boots up and down

the stairs, ... and then found himself washing his hands in stinging

hot water in his cousin's room.

'The children simply adore her already,' he heard, 'and she won

Mother's confidence at the very start. They can't manage her long

name. They just call her the Little Countess--die kleine Grafin. She's

doing a most astonishing work in Austria, it seems, with children...

the Montessori method, and all that....'

'By George, now; is it possible? Bourcelles accepted her at once

then?'

'She accepted Bourcelles rather--took it bodily into herself--our

poverty, our magic boxes, our democratic intimacy, and all the rest;

it was just as though she had lived here with us always. And she kept

asking who Orion was--that's you, of course--and why you weren't

here---'

'And the Den too?' asked Rogers, with a sudden trembling in his heart,

yet knowing well the answer.

'Simply appropriated it--came in naturally without being asked; Jimbo

opened the door and Monkey pushed her in. She said it was her Star

Cave. Oh, she's a remarkable being, you know, rather,' he went on more

gravely, 'with unusual powers of sympathy. She seems to feel at once

what you are feeling. Takes everything for granted as though she knew.

I think she _does_ know, if you ask me---'

'Lives the story in fact,' the other interrupted, hiding his face

rather in the towel, 'lives her belief instead of dreaming it, eh?'

'And, fancy this!' His voice had a glow and softness in it as he said

it, coming closer, and almost whispering, 'she wants to take Jinny and

Monkey for a bit and educate them.' He stood away to watch the effect

of the announcement. 'She even talks of sending Edward to Oxford,

too!' He cut a kind of wumbled caper in his pleasure and excitement.

'She loves children then, evidently?' asked the other, with a coolness

that was calculated to hide other feelings. He rubbed his face in the

rough towel as though the skin must come off. Then, suddenly dropping

the towel, he looked into his cousin's eyes a moment to ensure a

proper answer.

'Longs for children of her own, I think,' replied the author; 'one

sees it, feels it in all she says and does. Rather sad, you know,

that! An unmarried mother---'

'In fact,' put in Rogers lightly, 'the very character you needed to

play the principal role in your story. When you write the longer

version in book form you'll have to put her in.'

'And find her a husband too--which is a bore. I never write love

stories, you see. She's finer as she is at present--mothering the

world.'

Rogers's face, as he brushed his hair carefully before the twisted

mirror, was not visible.

There came a timid knock at the door.

'I'm ready, gentlemen, when you are,' answered the voice of Minks

outside.

They went downstairs together, and walked quickly over to the Pension

for supper. Rogers moved sedately enough so far as the others saw, yet

inwardly he pranced like a fiery colt in harness. There were golden

reins about his neck. Two tiny hands directed him from the Pleiades.

In this leash of sidereal fire he felt as though he flew. Swift

thought, flashing like a fairy whip, cut through the air from an

immense distance, and urged him forwards. Some one expected him and he

was late--years and years late. Goodness, how his companions crawled

and dawdled!

'... she doesn't come over for her meals,' he heard, 'but she'll join

us afterwards at the Den. You'll come too, won't you, Mr. Minks?'

'Thank you, I shall be most happy--if I'm not intruding,' was the

reply as they passed the fountain near the courtyard of the Citadelle.

The musical gurgle of its splashing water sounded to Rogers like a

voice that sang over and over again, 'Come up, come up, come up! You

must come up to me!'

'How brilliant your stars are out here, Mr. Campden,' Minks was saying

when they reached the door of La Poste. He stood aside to let the

others pass before him. He held the door open politely. 'No wonder you

chose them as the symbol for thought and sympathy in your story.' And

they climbed the narrow, creaking stairs and entered the little hall

where the entire population of the Pension des Glycines awaited them

with impatience.

The meal dragged out interminably. Everybody had so much to say.

Minks, placed between Mother and Miss Waghorn, talked volubly to the

latter and listened sweetly to all her stories. The excitement of the

Big Story, however, was in the air, and when she mentioned that she

looked forward to reading it, he had no idea, of course, that she had

already done so at least three times. The Review had replaced her

customary Novel. She went about with it beneath her arm. Minks,

feeling friendly and confidential, informed her that he, too,

sometimes wrote, and when she noted the fact with a deferential phrase

about 'you men of letters,' he rose abruptly to the seventh heaven of

contentment. Mother meanwhile, on the other side, took him bodily into

her great wumbled heart. 'Poor little chap,' her attitude said

plainly, 'I don't believe his wife half looks after him.' Before the

end of supper she knew all about Frank and Ronald, the laburnum tree

in the front garden, what tea they bought, and Albinia's plan for

making coal last longer by mixing it with coke.

Tante Jeanne talked furiously and incessantly, her sister-in-law told

her latest dream, and the Postmaster occasionally cracked a solemn

joke, laughing uproariously long before the point appeared. It was a

merry, noisy meal, and Henry Rogers sat through it upon a throne that

was slung with golden ropes from the stars. He was in Fairyland again.

Outside, the Pleiades were rising in the sky, and somewhere in

Bourcelles--in the rooms above Beguin's shop, to be exact--some one

was waiting, ready to come over to the Den. His thoughts flew wildly.

Passionate longing drove behind them. 'You must come up to me,' he

heard. They all were Kings and Queens.

He played his part, however; no one seemed to notice his

preoccupation. The voices sounded now far, now near, as though some

wind made sport with them; the faces round him vanished and

reappeared; but he contrived cleverly, so that none remarked upon his

absent-mindedness. Constellations do not stare at one another much.

'Does your Mother know you're "out"?' asked Monkey once beside him--it

was the great joke now, since the Story had been read--and as soon as

she was temporarily disposed of, Jimbo had serious information to

impart from the other side. 'She's a real Countess,' he said, speaking

as man to man. 'I suppose if she went to London she'd know the King--

visit him, like that?'

Bless his little heart! Jimbo always knew the important things to talk

about.

There were bursts of laughter sometimes, due usually to statements

made abruptly by Jane Anne--as when Mother, discussing the garden with

Minks, reviled the mischievous birds:--

'They want thinning badly,' she said.

'Why don't they take more exercise, then?' inquired Jinny gravely.

And in these gusts of laughter Rogers joined heartily, as though he

knew exactly what the fun was all about. In this way he deceived

everybody and protected himself from discovery. And yet it seemed to

him that he shouted his secret aloud, not with his lips indeed, but

with his entire person. Surely everybody knew it...! He was self-

conscious as a schoolgirl.

'You must come up--to me,' rang continuously through his head like

bells. 'You must come up to me.'

CHAPTER XXXIV

How many times do I love thee, dear?

Tell me how many thoughts there be

In the atmosphere

Of a new fall'n year,

Whose white and sable hours appear

The latest flake of Eternity:--

So many times do I love thee, dear.

How many times do I love again?

Tell me how many beads there are

In a silver chain

Of evening rain,

Unravelled from the tumbling main,

And threading the eye of a yellow star:--

So many times do I love again.

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES.

A curious deep shyness settled upon Henry Rogers as they all trooped

over to the Den. The others gabbled noisily, but to him words came

with difficulty. He felt like a boy going up for some great test,

examination, almost for judgment. There was an idea in him that he

must run and hide somewhere. He saw the huge outline of Orion tilting

up above the Alps, slanting with the speed of his eternal hunt to

seize the Pleiades who sailed ever calmly just beyond his giant arms.

Yet what that old Hunter sought was at last within his reach. He knew

it, and felt the awe of capture rise upon him.

'You've eaten so much supper you can't speak,' said Monkey, whose hand

was in his coat-pocket for loose chicken-feed, as she called centimes.

'The Little Countess will _regler ton affaire_ all right. Just wait

till she gets at you.'

'You love her?' he asked gently, feeling little disposed to play.

The child's reply was cryptic, yet uncommonly revealing:--

'She's just like a relation. It's so funny she didn't know us long,

long ago--find us out, I mean.'

'Mother likes her awfully,' added Jimbo, as though that established

the matter of her charm for ever. 'It's a pity she's not a man'--just

to show that Cousinenry's position was not endangered.

They chattered on. Rogers hardly remembers how he climbed the long

stone steps. He found himself in the Den. It came about with a sudden

jump as in dreams. _She_ was among them before the courtyard was

crossed; she had gone up the steps immediately in front of him....

Jinny was bringing in the lamp, while Daddy struggled with a load of

peat for the fire, getting in everybody's way. Riquette stood

silhouetted against the sky upon the window sill. Jimbo used the

bellows. A glow spread softly through the room. He caught sight of

Minks standing rather helplessly beside the sofa talking to Jane Anne,

and picking at his ear as he always did when nervous or slightly ill

at ease. He wondered vaguely what she was saying to him. He looked

everywhere but at the one person for whose comfort the others were so

energetic.

His eyes did not once turn in her direction, yet he knew exactly how

she was dressed, what movements she made, where she stood, the very

words, indeed, she used, and in particular the expression of her face

to each in turn. For he was guilty of a searching inner scrutiny he

could not control. And, above all, he was aware, with a divine,

tumultuous thrill, that she, for her part, also neither looked at him

nor uttered one sentence that he could take as intended for himself.

Because, of course, all she said and did and looked _were_ meant for

him, and her scrutiny was even closer and more searching than his own.

In the Den that evening there was one world within another, though

only these two, and probably the intuitive and diabolically observant

Minks, perceived it. The deep furnaces of this man's inner being,

banked now so long that mere little flames had forgotten their way

out, lay open at last to that mighty draught before whose fusing power

the molten, fluid state becomes inevitable.

'You must come up to me' rang on in his head like a chime of bells. 'O

think Beauty: it's your duty....'

The chairs were already round the open fireplace, when Monkey pushed

him into the big one with the broken springs he always used, and

established herself upon his knee. Jimbo was on the other in a

twinkling. Jane Anne plumped down upon the floor against him. Her hair

was up, and grown-ups might sit as they pleased. Minks in a hard,

straight-backed chair, firmly assured everybody that he was

exceedingly comfortable and really preferred stiff chairs. He found

safety next to Mother who, pleased and contented, filled one corner of

the sofa and looked as though she occupied a pedestal. Beyond her

perched Daddy, on the music stool, leaning his back against the

unlighted fourneau. The Wumble Book was balanced on his knees, and

beside him sat the little figure of the visitor who, though at the

end, was yet somehow the true centre of the circle. Rogers saw her

slip into her unimportant place. She took her seat, he thought, as

softly as a mouse. For no one seemed to notice her. She was so

perfectly at home among them. In her little folded hands the Den and

all its occupants seemed cared for beyond the need of words or

definite action. And, although her place was the furthest possible

remove from his own, he felt her closer to him than the very children

who nestled upon his knees.

Riquette then finally, when all were settled, stole in to complete the

circle. She planted herself in the middle of the hearth before them

all, looked up into their faces, decided that all was well, and began

placidly to wash her face and back. A leg shot up, from the middle of

her back apparently, as a signal that they might talk. A moment later

she composed herself into that attitude of dignified security possible

only to the feline species. She made the fourth that inhabited this

world within a world. Rogers, glancing up suddenly from observing her,

caught---for the merest fraction of an instant--a flash of starfire in

the air. It darted across to him from the opposite end of the horse-

shoe. Behind it flickered the tiniest smile a human countenance could

possibly produce.

'Little mouse who, lost in wonder,

Flicks its whiskers at the thunder.'

It was Jane Anne repeating the rhyme for Minks's benefit. How

appropriately it came in, he thought. And voices were set instantly in

motion; it seemed that every one began to speak at once.

Who finally led the conversation, or what was actually said at first,

he has no more recollection than the man in the moon, for he only

heard the silvery music of a single voice. And that came rarely. He

felt washed in glory from head to foot. In a dream of happy starlight

he swam and floated. He hid his face behind the chair of Monkey, and

his eyes were screened below the welcome shelter of Jimbo's shoulder.

The talk meanwhile flowed round the horse-shoe like a river that

curves downhill. Life ran past him, while he stood on the banks and

watched. He reconstructed all that happened, all that was said and

done, each little movement, every little glance of the eye. These

common things he recreated. For, while his body sat in the Den before

a fire of peat, with children, a cat, a private secretary, three very

ordinary people and a little foreign visitor, his spirit floated high

above the world among the immensities of suns and starfields. He was

in the Den, but the Den was in the universe, and to the scale of the

universe he set the little homely, commonplace picture. Life, he

realised, _is_ thought and feeling; and just then he thought and felt

like a god. He was Orion, and Orion had at last overtaken the

Pleiades. The fairest of the cluster lay caught within his giant arms.

The Enormous Thing that so long had haunted him with hints of its

approach, rose up from his under-self, and possessed him utterly. And,

oh, the glory of it, the splendour, the intoxication!

In the dim corner where _she_ sat, the firelight scarcely showed her

face, yet every shade of expression that flitted across her features

he saw unobscured. The sparkling, silvery sentences she spoke from

time to time were volumes that interpreted life anew. For years he had

pored over these thick tomes, but heavily and without understanding.

The little things she said now supplied the key. Mind and brain played

no part in this. It was simply that he heard--and knew. He re-

discovered her from their fragments, piece by piece....

The general talk flowed past him in a stream of sound, cut up into

lengths by interrupting consonants, and half ruined by this arbitrary

division; but what _she_ said always seemed the living idea that lay

behind the sound. He could not explain it otherwise. With herself,

and with Riquette, and possibly with little, dreaming Minks, he sat

firmly at the centre of this inner world. The others, even the

children, hovered about its edges, trying to get in. That tiny smile

had flashed its secret, ineffable explanation into him. Starlight was

in his blood....

Mother, for instance, he vaguely knew, was speaking of the years they

all had lived in Bourcelles, of the exquisite springs, of the fairy,

gorgeous summers. It was the most ordinary talk imaginable, though it

came sincerely from her heart.

'If only you had come here earlier,' she said, 'when the forest was so

thick with flowers.' She enumerated them one by one. 'Now, in the

autumn, there are so few!'

The little sparkling answer lit the forest glades afresh with colour,

perfume, wonder:--

'But the autumn flowers, I think, are the sweetest; for they have the

beauty of all the summer in them.'

A slight pause followed, and then all fell to explaining the shining

little sentence until its lustre dimmed and disappeared beneath the

smother of their words. In himself, however, who heard them not, a new

constellation swam above the horizon of his inner world. Riquette

looked slyly up and blinked. She purred more deeply, but she made no

stupid sign....

And Daddy mentioned then the forest spell that captured the entire

village with its peace and softness--'all so rough and big and

tumbled, and yet every detail so exquisitely finished and thought out,

you know.'

Out slipped the softest little fairy phrase imaginable from her dim

corner then:--

'Yes, like hand-made things--you can almost see the hand that made

them.'

And Rogers started so perceptibly that Jimbo shifted his weight a

little, thinking he must be uncomfortable. He had surely used that

very phrase himself! It was familiar. Even when using it he remembered

wondering whence its sweetness had dropped into his clumsier mind.

Minks uncrossed his legs, glanced up at him a moment, then crossed

them again. He made this sign, but, like Riquette, he said nothing....

The stream flowed on and on. Some one told a story. There was hushed

attentive listening, followed suddenly by bursts of laughter and

delight. Who told it, or what it was about, Rogers had no notion.

Monkey dug him in the ribs once because apparently he grunted at the

wrong moment, and Jimbo chided her beneath his breath--'Let him have a

nap if he wants to; a man's always tired after a long journey like

that...!' Some one followed with another story--Minks, was it, this

time?--for Rogers caught his face, as through a mist, turning

constantly to Mother for approval. It had to do with a vision of great

things that had come to a little insignificant woman on a bed of

sickness. He recognised the teller because he knew the tale of old.

The woman, he remembered, was Albinia's grandmother, and Minks was

very proud of it.

'That's a _very_ nice story,' rippled from the dim corner when it was

over. 'For I like everything so tiny that you can find it inside a

shell. That's the way to understand big things and to do them.'

And again the phrase was as familiar to him as though he had said it

himself--heard it, read it, dreamed it, even. Whatever its fairy

source, he knew it. His bewilderment increased absurdly. The things

she said were so ordinary, yet so illuminating, though never quite

betraying their secret source. Where had he heard them? Where had he

met this little foreign visitor? Whence came the singular certainty

that she shared this knowledge with him, and might presently explain

it, all clear as daylight and as simple? He had the odd impression

that she played with him, delayed purposely the moment of revelation,

even expected that _he_ would be the first to make it known. The

disclosure was to come from himself! She provided him with

opportunities--these little sparkling sentences! But he hid in his

corner, silent and magically excited, afraid to take the lead. These

sentences were addressed to him. There was conversation thus between

the two of them; but his replies remained inaudible. Thought makes no

sound; its complete delivery is ever wordless.... He felt very big,

and absurdly shy.

It was gesture, however, that infallible shorthand of the mind, which

seemed the surest medium of this mute delightful intercourse. For each

little gesture that she made--unconsciously, of course--expressed more

than the swiftest language could have compassed in an hour. And he

noted every one: the occasional flourish of the little hands, the

bending of the graceful neck, the shadowy head turned sideways, the

lift of one shoulder, almost imperceptible, and sometimes the attitude

of the entire body. To him they were, one and all, eloquently

revealing. Behind each little gesture loomed a yet larger one, the

scale increasing strangely, till his thoughts climbed up them as up a

ladder into the region where her ideas lay naked before casual

interpretation clothed them. Those, he reflected, who are rich in

ideas, but find words difficult, may reveal themselves prodigally in

gesture. Expression of one kind or another there must be; yet lavish

action, the language of big souls, seems a man's expression rather

than a woman's.... He built up swiftly, surely, solidly his

interpretation of this little foreign visitor who came to him thus

suddenly from the stars, whispering to his inmost thought, 'You must

come up to me.' The whole experience dazed him. He sat in utter

dumbness, shyer than a boy, but happier than a singing star!... The

Joy in his heart was marvellous.

Yet how could he know all this?

In the intervals that came to him like breathing spaces he asked

himself this childish question. How could he tell that this little

soft being with the quiet unobtrusive manners had noble and great

beauty of action in her anywhere? A few pretty phrases, a few

significant gestures, these were surely a slight foundation to build

so much upon! Was there, then, some absolute communion of thought

between the two of them such as his cousin's story tried to show? And

had their intercourse been running on for years, neither of them aware

of it in the daytime? Was this intimate knowledge due to long

acquaintance? Had her thought been feeding him perhaps since childhood

even?

In the pause of his temporary lunacy he asked himself a dozen similar

questions, but before the sign of any answer came he was off again,

sweeping on outstretched wings among the stars. He drank her in. He

knew. What was the good of questions? A thirsty man does not stop

midway in his draught to ask when his thirst began, its cause, or why

the rush of liquid down his throat is satisfying. He knows, and

drinks. It seemed to Henry Rogers, ordinary man of business and

practical affairs, that some deep river which so long had flowed deep

out of sight, hidden below his daily existence, rose now grandly at

the flood. He had heard its subterranean murmurs often. Here, in the

Den, it had reached his lips at last. And he quenched his thirst....

His thought played round her without ceasing, like flowing water....

This idea of flux grew everywhere about him. There was fluid movement

in this world within a world. All life was a flowing past of ceaseless

beauty, wonder, splendour; it was doubt and question that dammed the

rush, causing that stoppage which is ugly, petty, rigid. His being

flowed out to mingle with her own. It was all inevitable, and he never

really doubted once. Only before long he would be compelled to act--to

speak--to tell her what he felt, and hear her dear, dear answer....

The excitement in him became more and more difficult to control.

Already there was strain and tension below his apparent outer

calmness. Life in him burst forward to a yet greater life than he had

ever known....

The others--it was his cousin's voice this time--were speaking of the

Story, and of his proposed treatment of it in its larger version as a

book. Daddy was saying, apparently, that it must fail because he saw

no climax for it. The public demanded a cumulative interest that

worked up to some kind of thrilling denouement that they called a

climax, whereas his tale was but a stretch of life, and of very

ordinary life. And Life, for the majority, knew no such climax. How

could he manage one without inventing something artificial?

'But the climax of life comes every day and every minute,' he heard

her answer--and how her little voice rang out above the others like a

bell!--'when you deny yourself for another, and that other does not

even know it. A day is lost that does not pin at least one sweet

thought against each passing hour.'

And his inner construction took a further prodigious leap, as the

sentence showed him the grand and simple motive of her being. It had

been his own as well, though he had stupidly bungled it in his search

to find something big enough to seem worth doing. She, he divined,

found neighbours everywhere, losing no time. He had known a few rare,

exquisite souls who lived for others, but here, close beside him at

last, was one of those still rarer souls who seem born to--die for

others.... They give so unsparingly of their best.... To his

imaginative interpretation of her he gave full rein.... And it was

instantaneous as creation....

The voices of Minks and Mother renewed the stream of sound that swept

by him then, though he caught no words that were comparable in value

to these little singing phrases that she used from time to time.

Jimbo, bored by the grown-up talk that took the place of expected

stories, had fallen asleep upon his shoulder; Monkey's hair, as usual,

was in his eyes; he sat there listening and waiting with a heart that

beat so loudly he thought the children must feel it and ask him what

was the matter. Jinny stirred the peat from time to time. The room was

full of shadows. But, for him, the air grew brighter every minute, and

in this steady brilliance he saw the little figure rise and grow in

grandeur till she filled all space.

'You called it "getting out" while the body is asleep,' came floating

through the air through the sound of Jimbo's breathing, 'whereas

_I_ called it getting away from self while personal desire is asleep.

But the idea is the same....'

His cousin's words that called forth this criticism he had not heard.

It was only her sentence that seemed to reach him.

From the river of words and actions men call life she detained, it

seemed to him, certain that were vital and important in some

symbolical sense; she italicised them, made them her own--then let

them go to join the main stream again. This selection was a kind of

genius. The river did not overwhelm her as it overwhelms most, because

the part of it she did not need for present action she ignored, while

yet she swam in the whole of it, shirking nothing.

This was the way he saw her--immediately. And, whether it was his own

invention, or whether it was the divination of a man in the ecstasy of

sudden love, it was vital because he felt it, and it was real because

he believed it. Then why seek to explain the amazing sense of

intimacy, the certainty that he had known her always? The thing was

_there_; explanation could bring it no nearer. He let the explanations

go their way; they floated everywhere within reach; he had only to

pocket them and take them home for study at his leisure afterwards--

with her.

'But, we _shall_ come to it in time,' he caught another flying

sentence that reached him through the brown tangle of Monkey's hair.

It was spoken with eager emphasis. 'Does not every letter you write

begin with _dear_?....'

All that she said added something to life, it seemed, like poetry

which, he remembered, 'enriches the blood of the world.' The

selections were not idle, due to chance, but belonged to some great

Scheme, some fairy edifice she built out of the very stuff of her own

life. Oh, how utterly he understood and knew her. The poison of

intellectuality, thank heaven, was not in her, yet she created

somehow; for all she touched, with word or thought or gesture, turned

suddenly alive in a way he had never known before. The world turned

beautiful and simple at her touch....

Even the commonest things! It was miraculous, at least in its effect

upon himself. Her simplicity escaped all signs of wumbling. She had no

favourite and particular Scheme for doing good, but did merely what

was next her at the moment to be done. She _was_ good. In her little

person glowed a great enthusiasm for life. She created neighbours.

And, as the grandeur of her insignificance rose before him, his own

great Scheme for Disabled Thingumabobs that once had filled the

heavens, shrank down into the size of a mere mouse-trap that would go

into his pocket. In its place loomed up another that held the beauty

of the Stars. How little, when announcing it to Minks weeks and weeks

ago, had he dreamed the form it was to take!

And so, wrapped in this glory of the stars, he dreamed on in his

corner, fashioning this marvellous interpretation of a woman he had

never seen before, and never spoken with. It was all so different to

ordinary falling in love at sight, that the phrase never once occurred

to him. It was consummated in a moment--out there, beside the fountain

when he saw her first, shadowy, with brilliant, peering eyes. It

seemed perfect instantly, a recovery of something he had always known.

And who shall challenge the accuracy of his vision, or call its sudden

maturity impossible? For where one sees the surface only, another sees

the potentialities below. To believe in these is to summon them into

activity, just as to think the best of a person ever brings out that

best. Are we not all potential splendours?

Swiftly, in a second, he reviewed the shining sentences that revealed

her to him: The 'autumn flowers'--she lived, then, in the Present,

without that waste of energy which is regret! In 'a little shell' lay

the pattern of all life,--she saw the universe in herself and lived,

thus, in the Whole! To be 'out' meant forgetting self; and life's

climax is at every minute of the day--she understood, that is, the

growth of the soul, due to acceptance of what every minute brings,

however practical, dull, uninteresting. By recreating the commonest

things, she found a star in each. And her world was made up of

neighbours--for 'every letter that one writes begins with

_dear_!'

The Pattern matured marvellously before his eyes; and its delicate

embroideries, far out of sight, seemed the arabesques that yearnings,

hitherto unfulfilled, had traced long long ago with the brush of

tender thinking. Together, though at opposite ends of the world, these

two had woven the great Net of sympathy, thought, and longing in which

at last they both were prisoners ... and with them all the earth.

The figure of Jane Anne loomed before him like an ogress suddenly.

'Cousinenry, _will_ you answer or will you _not_? Daddy's already

asked you twenty times at least!' Then, below her breath, as she bent

over him, 'The Little Countess will think you awf'ly rude if you go to

sleep and snore like this.'

He looked up. He felt a trifle dazed. For a moment he had forgotten

where he was. How dark the room had grown! Only--he was sure he had

not snored.

'I beg your pardon,' he stammered, 'but I was only thinking--how

wonderful you--how wonderful it all is, isn't it? I was listening. I

heard perfectly.'

'You were dozing,' whispered Monkey. 'Daddy wants the Countess to tell

you how she knew the story long ago, or something. _Ecoute un peu, man

vieux_!'

'I should love to hear it,' he said, louder, sitting up so abruptly in

his chair that Jimbo tilted at a dangerous angle, though still without

waking. 'Please, please go on.'

And he listened then to the quiet, silvery language in which the

little visitor described the scenery of her childhood, when, without

brothers or sisters, she was forced to play alone, and had amused

herself by imagining a Net of Constellations which she nailed by

shooting stars to four enormous pine trees that grew across the

torrent. She described the great mountains that enclosed her father's

estate, her loneliness in this giant garden, due to his morose

severity of character, her yearnings to escape and see the big world

beyond the ridges. All her thought and longing went to the fashioning

of this Net, and every night she flung it far across the peaks and

valleys to catch companions with whom she might play. The characters

in her fairy books came out of the pages to help her, and sometimes

when they drew it in, it was so heavy with the people entangled in its

meshes that they could scarcely move it. But the moment all were out,

the giant Net, relieved of their weight, flew back into the sky. The

Pleiades were its centre, because she loved the Pleiades best of all,

and Orion pursued its bright shape with passion, yet could never quite

come up with it.

'And these people whom you caught,' whispered Rogers from his corner,

listening to a tale he knew as well as she did, 'you kept them

prisoners?'

'I first put into them all the things I longed to do myself in the big

world, and then flung them back again into their homes and towns and

villages---'

'Excepting one,' he murmured.

'Who was so big and clumsy that he broke the meshes and so never got

away.' She laughed, while the children stared at their cousin,

wondering how he knew as much as she did. 'He stayed with me, and

showed me how to make our prisoners useful afterwards by painting them

all over with starlight which we collected in a cave. Then they went

back and dazzled others everywhere by their strange, alluring

brilliance. We made the whole world over in this way---'

'Until you lost him.'

'One cloudy night he disappeared, yes, and I never found him again.

There was a big gap between the Pleiades and Orion where he had

tumbled through. I named him Orion after that; and I would stand at

night beneath the four great pine trees and call and call, but in

vain. "You must come up to me! You must come up to me!" I called, but

got no answer---'

'Though you knew quite well where he had fallen to, and that he was

only hiding---'

'Excuse me, but _how_ did she know?' inquired Jinny abruptly.

The Little Countess laughed. 'I suppose--because the threads of the

Net were so sensitive that they went on quivering long after he

tumbled out, and so betrayed the direction---'

'And afterwards, when you got older, Grafin,' interrupted Daddy, who

wished his cousin to hear the details of the extraordinary

coincidence, 'you elaborated your idea---'

'Yes, that thought and yearning always fulfil themselves somewhere,

somehow, sooner or later,' she continued. 'But I kept the imagery of

my Star Net in which all the world lies caught, and I used starlight

as the symbol of that sympathy which binds every heart to every other

heart. At my father's death, you see, I inherited his property. I

escaped from the garden which had been so long my prison, and I tried

to carry out in practical life what I had dreamed there as a child. I

got people together, where I could, and formed Thinkers' Guilds--

people, that is, who agreed to think beauty, love, and tolerance at

given hours in the day, until the habit, once formed, would run

through all their lives, and they should go about as centres of light,

sweetening the world. Few have riches, fewer still have talent, but

all can think. At least, one would _think_ so, wouldn't one?'--with a

smile and a fling of her little hands.

She paused a moment, and then went on to describe her failure. She

told it to them with laughter between her sentences, but among her

listeners was one at least who caught the undertone of sadness in the

voice.

'For, you see, that was where I made my mistake. People would do

anything in the world rather than think. They would work, give money,

build schools and hospitals, make all manner of sacrifices--only--they

would not think; because, they said, there was no visible result.' She

burst out laughing, and the children all laughed too.

'I should think not indeed,' ventured Monkey, but so low that no one

heard her.

'And so you went on thinking it all alone,' said Rogers in a low

voice.

'I tried to write it first as a story,' she answered softly, 'but

found that was beyond me; so I went on thinking it all alone, as you

say---'

'Until the Pattern of your thought floated across the world to me,'

said Daddy proudly. 'I imagined I was inspired; instead I was a

common, unoriginal plagiarist!'

'Like all the rest of us,' she laughed.

'Mummie, what _is_ a plagiarist?' asked Jinny instantly; and as

Rogers, her husband, and even Minks came hurriedly to her aid, the

spell of the strange recital was broken, and out of the turmoil of

voices the only thing distinctly heard was Mother exclaiming with

shocked surprise:--

'Why, it's ten o'clock! Jimbo, Monkey, please plagiarise off to bed at

once!'--in a tone that admitted of no rejoinder or excuses.

'A most singular thing, isn't it, Henry?' remarked the author, coming

across to his side when the lamp was lit and the children had said

their good-nights.

'I really think we ought to report it to the Psychical Society as a

genuine case of thought-transference. You see, what people never

properly realise is---'

But Henry Rogers lost the remainder of the sentence even if he heard

the beginning, for his world was in a state of indescribable turmoil,

one emotion tumbling wildly upon the heels of another. He was elated

to intoxication. The room spun round him. The next second his heart

sank down into his boots. He only caught the end of the words she was

saying to Mother across the room:--

'... but I must positively go to-morrow, I've already stayed too long.

So many things are waiting at home for me to do. I must send a

telegram and....'

His cousin's wumbling drowned the rest. He was quite aware that Rogers

was not listening to him.

'... your great kindness in writing to him, and then coming yourself,'

Mother was saying. 'It's such an encouragement. I can't tell you how

much he--we---'

'And you'll let me write to you about the children,' she interrupted,

'the plans we discussed, you know....'

Rogers broke away from his cousin with a leap. It felt at least like a

leap. But he knew not where to go or what to say. He saw Minks

standing with Jane Anne again by the fourneau, picking at his ear. By

the open window with Mother stood the little visitor. She was leaving

to-morrow. A torturing pain like twisting knives went through him. The

universe was going out!... He saw the starry sky behind her. Daddy

went up and joined them, and he was aware that the three of them

talked all at once for what seemed an interminable time, though all he

heard was his cousin's voice repeating at intervals, 'But you _can't_

send a telegram before eight o'clock to-morrow morning in any case;

the post is closed....'

And then, suddenly, the puzzle reeled and danced before his eyes. It

dissolved into a new and startling shape that brought him to his

senses with a shock. There had been a swift shuffling of the figures.

Minks and his cousin were helping her into her cloak. She _was_ going.

One of them--he knew not which--was offering politely to escort her

through the village.

It sounded like his own sentence of exile, almost of death. Was he

forty years of age, or only fifteen? He felt awkward, tongue-tied,

terrified.

They were already in the passage. Mother had opened the door into the

yard.

'But your way home lies down the hill,' he heard the silver voice,

'and to go with me you must come up. I can easily---'

Above the leaves of the plane tree he saw the stars. He saw Orion and

the Pleiades. The Fairy Net flung in and caught him. He found his

voice.

In a single stride he was beside her. Minks started at his sudden

vehemence and stepped aside.

'_I_ will take you home, Countess, if I may,' and his tone was so

unnecessarily loud and commanding that Mother turned and stared. 'Our

direction lies together. I will come up--with you.'

She did not even look at him. He saw that tiny smile that was like the

flicker of a star--no more. But he heard her answer. It seemed to fill

the sky.

'Thank you. I might lose my way alone.'

And, before he realised how she managed it, they had crossed the

cobbled yard, Daddy was swinging away downhill towards the

carpenter's, and Minks behind them, at the top of the stone steps, was

saying his last good-night to Mother. With the little visitor beside

him, he passed the singing fountain and led her down the deserted

village street beneath the autumn stars.

Three minutes later they were out of sight... when Minks came down the

steps and picked his way among the shadows after Daddy, who had the

latch-key of the carpenter's house. He ran to overtake him.

And he ran upon his toes

As softly as a saying does,

For so the saying goes!

His thoughts were very active, but as clear as day. He was thinking

whether German was a difficult language to acquire, and wondering

whether a best man at a wedding ought to wear white gloves or not. He

decided to ask Albinia. He wrote the letter that very night before he

went to sleep.

And, while he slept, Orion pursued the Pleiades across the sky, and

numerous shooting stars fastened the great Net of thought and sympathy

close over little Bourcelles.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's A Prisoner in Fairyland, by Algernon Blackwood