The darkness suits _me_ best, For my old face Is out of place, Except in chimney stacks!
Upon my crown The soot comes down Filling my eyes with blacks.
Don"t light the fire, Or I"d--.
"Stop it!" cried the Guard, shutting the window with a snap, so that Rogers never knew whether the missing word used to be "expire" or "perspire"; "and go on to your proper place on the tender." Then she turned quickly to fix her big blue eyes upon the next comer. And how they did come, to be sure! There was the Gypsy, the Creature of the Gravel-Pit, the long-legged, long-armed thing from the Long Walk--she could make her arm stretch the whole length like elastic--the enormous Woman of the Haystack, who lived beneath the huge tarpaulin cover, the owner of the Big Cedar, and the owner of the Little Cedar, all treading fast upon one another"s heels.
From the Blue Summer-house came the Laugher. Rogers remembered pretending once that he was going to faint. He had thrown himself upon the summer-house floor and kicked, and the blue-eyed girl, instead of being thrilled as both antic.i.p.ated, had laughed abominably.
"Painters don"t kick!" she had said with scorn, while he had answered, though without conviction, "Men-fainters do--kick dreadfully." And she had simply laughed till her sides ached, while he lay there kicking till his muscles were sore, in the vain hope of winning her belief.
He exchanged a glance with her now, as the Laugher slipped in past them. The eyes of the Guard were very soft. He was found out and forgiven at the same time.
Then came the very mysterious figure of authority--the Head Gardener, a composite being who included all the lesser under-gardeners as well.
His sunburned face presented a resume of them all. He was the man who burned the hills of dead leaves in autumn.
"Give me of your fire, please," whispered Rogers, something between joy and sadness in his heart, "for there are hills of leaves that I would burn up quickly--" but the man hurried on, tossing his trowel over the Guard"s head, and nearly hitting another pa.s.senger who followed too close. This was the Woman of the Haystack, an enormous, spreading traveller who utterly refused to be hurried, and only squeezed through the door because Rogers, the Guard, and several others pushed behind with all their might, while the Sweep, the Tramp, and those already in tugged breathlessly at the same time....
Last of all, just as the train was starting, came a hurrying shadowy thing with dreamy eyes, long hair like waving gra.s.s, and open hands that he spread like wings, as though he were sowing something through the air. And he was singing softly as he came fumbling along the byeways of the dusk.
"Oh, but I know _you_ well," cried Rogers, watching him come with a thrill of secret wonder, "and I love you better than all the rest together."
The face was hidden as he wafted silently past them. A delicious odour followed him. And something, fine as star-dust, as he scattered it all about him, sifted down before the other"s sight. The Dustman entered like a ghost.
"Oh, give me of your dust!" cried Rogers again, "for there are eyes that I would blind with it--eyes in the world that I would blind with it--your dust of dreams and beauty...!"
The man waved a shadowy hand towards him, and his own eyes filled. He closed the lids a moment; and when he opened them again he saw two monster meteors in the sky. They crossed in two big lines of glory above the house, dropping towards the cedars. The Net of Stars was being fastened. He remembered then his old Star Cave--cave where lost starlight was stored up by these sprites for future use.
He just had time to seize the little hand the Guard held out, and to drop into a seat beside her, when the train began to move. It rose soundlessly with lightning speed. It shot up to a tremendous height, then paused, hovering in the night.
The Guard turned her big blue eyes upon him.
"Where to?" she whispered. And he suddenly remembered that it was always he who decided the destination, and that this time he was at a loss what to say.
"The Star Cave, of course," he cried, "the cave where the lost starlight gathers."
"Which direction?" she asked, with the yellow whistle to her lips ready to signal the driver.
"Oh, out there--to the north-west," he answered, "to the mountains of --across the Channel."
But this was not precise enough. Formerly he had always given very precise directions.
"Name, please," she urged, "but quickly. The Interfering Sun, you know--there"s no time to lose. We shall be meeting the Morning Spiders soon."
The Morning Spiders! How it all came back! The Morning Spiders that fly over the fields in the dawn upon their private threads of gossamer and fairy cotton.
He remembered that, as children, they had never actually found this Star Cave, for the Interfering Sun had always come too soon and spoilt it all.
"Name, please, and do hurry up. We can"t hover here all night," rang in his ears.
And he made a plunge. He suddenly thought of Bourcelles, the little village in the Jura mountains, where he and his cousin had spent a year learning French. The idea flashed into him probably because it contained mountains, caves, and children. His cousin lived there now to educate his children and write his books. Only that morning he had got a letter from him.
"Bourcelles, of course, Bourcelles!" he cried, "and steer for the slopes of Boudry where the forests dip towards the precipices of the Areuse. I"ll send word to the children to meet us."
"Splendid!" cried the Guard, and kissed him with delight. The whistle shrieked, the train turned swiftly in a tremendous sweeping curve, and vanished along the intricate star-rails into s.p.a.ce, humming and booming as it went. It flew a mane of stars behind it through the sky.
CHAPTER V
Oh! thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
Doctor Famtus, CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.
The plop of a water-rat in the pond that occupied the rock-garden in the middle of the lawn brought him back to earth, and the Vicar"s invitation to tea flashed across his mind.
"Stock Exchange and typewriters!" he exclaimed, "how rude he"ll think me!" And he rubbed something out of his eyes. He gave one long, yearning glance at the spangled sky where an inquisitive bat darted zigzag several times between himself and the Pleiades, that bunch of star-babies as yet unborn, as the blue-eyed guard used to call them.
"And I shall miss my supper and bed into the bargain!"
He turned reluctantly from his place beside the lime trees, and crossed the lawn now wet with dew. The whole house seemed to turn its hooded head and watch him go, staring with amus.e.m.e.nt in its many lidless eyes. On the front lawn there was more light, for it faced the dying sunset. The Big and Little Cedar rose from their pools of shadow, beautifully poised. Like stately dowagers in voluminous skirts of velvet they seemed to curtsey to him as he pa.s.sed. Stars like cl.u.s.ters of sprinkled blossoms hung upon their dignified old heads.
The whole place seemed aware of him. Glancing a moment at the upper nursery windows, he could just distinguish the bars through which his little hands once netted stars, and as he did so a meteor shot across the sky its flashing light of wonder. Behind the Little Cedar it dived into the sunset afterglow. And, hardly had it dipped away, when another, coming crosswise from the south, drove its length of molten, shining wire straight against the shoulder of the Big Cedar.
The whole performance seemed arranged expressly for his benefit. The Net was loosed--this Net of Stars and Thoughts--perhaps to go elsewhere. For this was taking out the golden nails, surely. It would hardly have surprised him next to see the Starlight Express he had been dreaming about dart across the heavens overhead. That cool air stealing towards him from the kitchen-garden might well have been the wind of its going. He could almost hear the distant rush and murmur of its flying ma.s.s.
"How extraordinarily vivid it all was!" he thought to himself, as he hurried down the drive. "What detail! What a sense of reality! How carefully I must have _thought_ these creatures as a boy! How thoroughly! And what a good idea to go out and see Jack"s children at Bourcelles. They"ve never known these English sprites. I"ll introduce "em!"
He thought it out in detail, very vividly indeed. His imagination lingered over it and gave it singular reality.
Up the road he fairly ran. For Henry Rogers was a punctual man; these last twenty years he had never once been late for anything. It had been part of the exact training he had schooled himself with, and the Vicar"s invitation was not one he desired to trifle with. He made his peace, indeed, easily enough, although the excuses sounded a little thin. It was something of a shock, too, to find that the married daughter after all was not the blue-eyed girl of his boyhood"s pa.s.sion. For it was Joan, not May, who came down the gravel path between the roses to greet him.
On the way up he had felt puzzled. Yet "bemused," perhaps, is the word that Herbert Minks would have chosen for one of his poems, to describe a state of mind he, however, had never experienced himself. And he would have chosen it instinctively--for onomatopoeic reasons--because it hums and drones and murmurs dreamily. "Puzzled" was too sharp a word.
Yet Henry Rogers, who felt it, said "puzzled" without more ado, although mind, imagination, memory all hummed and buzzed pleasantly about his ears even while he did so.
"A dream is a dream," he reflected as he raced along the familiar dusty road in the twilight, "and a reverie is a reverie; but that, I"d swear, went a bit further than either one or t"other. It puzzles me.
Does vivid thinking, I wonder, make pictures everywhere?... And--can they last?"
For the detailed reality of the experience had been remarkable, and the actuality of those childhood"s creations scarcely belonged to dream or reverie. They were certainly quite as real as the sleek Directors who sat round the long Board Room table, fidgeting with fat quill pens and pewter ink-pots; more alive even than the Leading Shareholder who rose so pompously at Annual Meetings to second the resolution that the "Report and Balance Sheet be adopted without criticism."
And he was conscious that in himself rose, too, a deep, pa.s.sionate willingness to accept the whole experience, also "without criticism."
Those picturesque pa.s.sengers in the Starlight Express he knew so intimately, so affectionately, that he actually missed them. He felt that he had said good-bye to genuine people. He regretted their departure, and was keenly sorry he had not gone off with them--such a merry, wild, adventurous crew! He must find them again, whatever happened. There was a yearning in him to travel with that blue-eyed guard among the star-fields. He would go out to Bourcelles and tell the story to the children. He thought very hard indeed about it all.
And now, in the Vicarage drawing-room after dinner, his bemus.e.m.e.nt increased rather than grew less. His mind had already confused a face and name. The blue-eyed May was not, after all, the girl of his boyhood"s dream. His memory had been accurate enough with the pa.s.sengers in the train. There was no confusion there. But this gentle married woman, who sang to her own accompaniment at her father"s request, was not the mischievous, wilful creature who had teased and tortured his heart in years gone by, and had helped him construct the sprites and train and star-trips. It was, surely, the other daughter who had played that delicious role. Yet, either his memory was at fault, or the Vicar had mixed the names up. The years had played this little unimportant trick upon him anyhow. And that was clear.
But if with so-called real people such an error was possible, how could he be sure of anything? Which after all, he asked himself, was real? It was the Vicar"s mistake, he learned later, for May was now a teacher in London; but the trivial incident served to point this confusion in his mind between an outer and an inner world--to the disadvantage, if anything, of the former.
And over the gla.s.s of port together, while they talked pleasantly of vanished days, Rogers was conscious that a queer, secret amus.e.m.e.nt sheltered in his heart, due to some faint, superior knowledge that this Past they spoke of had not moved away at all, but listened with fun and laughter just behind his shoulder, watching them. The old gentleman seemed never tired of remembering his escapades. He told them one after another, like some affectionate nurse or mother, Rogers thought, whose children were--to her--unique and wonderful. For he had really loved this good-for-nothing pupil, loved him the more, as mothers and nurses do, because of the trouble he had given, and because of his busy and fertile imagination. It made Rogers feel ridiculously young again as he listened. He could almost have played a trick upon him then and there, merely to justify the tales. And once or twice he actually called him "Sir." So that even the conversation helped to deepen this bemus.e.m.e.nt that gathered somewhat tenderly about his mind. He cracked his walnuts and watched the genial, peace-lit eyes across the table. He chuckled. Both chuckled. They spoke of his worldly success too--it seemed unimportant somehow now, although he was conscious that something in him expected, nay demanded tribute-- but the former tutor kept reverting to the earlier days before achievement.
"You were indeed a boy of mischief, wonder, and mystery," he said, his eyes twinkling and his tone almost affectionate; "you made the whole place alive with those creatures of your imagination. How Joan helped you too--or was it May? I used to wonder sometimes--" he glanced up rather searchingly at his companion a moment--" whether the people who took the Manor House after your family left did not encounter them sometimes upon the lawn or among the shrubberies in the dusk--those sprites of yours. Eh?" He pa.s.sed a neatly pared walnut across the table to his guest. "These ghosts that people nowadays explain scientifically--what are they but thoughts visualised by vivid thinking such as yours was--creative thinking? They may be just pictures created in moments of strong pa.s.sionate feeling that persist for centuries and reach other minds direct They"re not seen with the outer eye; that"s certain, for no two people ever see them together.