Algernon Blackwood (10 page)

Usually at this hour the Den presented a very different appearance,
the children, with slates and
cahiers
, working laboriously round the
table, Jane Anne and mother knitting or mending furiously, Mere
Riquette, the old cat, asleep before the fire, and a general
schoolroom air pervading the place. The father, too, tea once
finished, would depart for the little room he slept in and used as
work-place over at the carpenter's house among the vineyards. He kept
his books there, his rows of pipes and towering little heap of half-
filled match-boxes, and there he wrote his clever studies that yet
were unproductive of much gold and brought him little more than
pleasant notices and occasional letters from enthusiastic strangers.
It seemed very unremunerative labour indeed, and the family had done
well to migrate from Essex into Switzerland, where, besides the
excellent schools which cost barely two pounds annually per head, the
children learned the language and enjoyed the air of forest and
mountain into the bargain. Life, for all that, was a severe problem to
them, and the difficulty of making both ends come in sight of each
other, let alone meeting, was an ever-present one. That they jogged
along so well was due more than the others realised to the untiring
and selfless zeal of the Irish mother, a plucky, practical woman, and
a noble one if ever such existed on this earth. The way she contrived
would fill a book; her economies, so clever they hardly betrayed
themselves, would supply a comic annual with material for years,
though their comedy involved a pathos of self-denial and sleepless
nights that only those similarly placed could have divined. Herself a
silent, even inarticulate, woman, she never spoke of them, least of
all to her husband, whose mind it was her brave desire to keep free
from unnecessary worries for his work. His studies she did not
understand, but his stories she read aloud with patient resignation to
the children. She marked the place when the reading was interrupted
with a crimson paper-knife, and often Jimbo would move it several
pages farther on without any of them discovering the gap. Jane Anne,
however, who made no pretence of listening to 'Daddy's muddle-
stories,' was beginning to realise what went on in Mother's mind
underground. She hardly seized the pathos, but she saw and understood
enough to help. And she was in many ways a little second edition—a
phrase the muddle-stories never knew, alas!—of her mother, with the
same unselfishness that held a touch of grandeur, the same clever
domestic instinct for contrivance, and the same careful ways that yet
sat ill upon a boundless generosity of heart beneath. She loved to be
thought older than she was, and she used the longest, biggest,
grandest words she could possibly invent or find.

And the village life suited them all in all respects, for, while there
was no degrading poverty anywhere, all the inhabitants, from the
pasteur to the carpenter, knew the exact value of a centime; there was
no question of keeping up impossible appearances, but a general
frankness with regard to the fundamental values of clothing, food, and
education that all shared alike and made no pretence about. Any
faintest sign of snobbery, for instance, would have been drummed out
of the little mountain hamlet at once by Gygi, the gendarme, who spent
more time in his fields and vineyards than in his uniform. And, while
every one knew that a title and large estates were a not impossible
future for the famille anglaise, it made no slightest difference in
the treatment of them, and indeed hardly lent them the flavour of a
faintest cachet. They were the English family in La Citadelle, and
that was all there was about it.

The peasants, however, rather pitied the hard-working author who 'had
to write all those books,' than paid him honourable tribute for his
work. It seemed so unnecessary. Vineyards produced wine a man could
drink and pay for, but books—! Well, results spoke for themselves,
and no one who lived in La Citadelle was millionaire.

Yet the reputation of John Frederic Campden stood high enough, for all
his meagre earnings, and he was an ineffective author chiefly,
perhaps, because he missed his audience. Somewhere, somehow, he fell
between two stools. And his chagrin was undeniable; for though the
poet's heart in him kept all its splendid fires alight, his failure
chilled a little the intellect that should fashion them along
effective moulds. Now, with advancing years, the increasing cost of
the children's growing-up, and the failing of his wife's health a
little, the burdens of life were heavier than he cared to think about.

But this evening, as the group sat round the wide peat fire, cheerful
and jolly in the lamplight, there was certainly no sign of sadness.
They were like a party of children in which the grave humour of the
ever-knitting mother kept the balance true between fun and
foolishness.

'Please, Daddy, a story at once,' Jane Anne demanded, 'but a told one,
not a read-aloud one. I like a romantic effort best.'

He fumbled in his pocket for a light, and Jimbo gravely produced a box
he had secretly filled with matches already used, collected
laboriously from the floor during the week. Then Monkey, full of
mischief, came over from the window where she had been watching them
with gasps of astonishment no one had heeded through the small end of
the opera-glasses. There was a dancing brilliance in her movements,
and her eyes, brown like her mother's, sparkled with fun and
wickedness. Taking the knee Jimbo left unoccupied, and waiting till
the diversion caused by the match-box had subsided, she solemnly
placed a bread-crumb in his rather tangled beard.

'Now you're full-dress,' she said, falling instantly so close against
him that he could not tickle her, while Mother glanced up a second
uncertain whether to criticise the impertinence or let it pass. She
let it pass. None of the children had the faintest idea what it meant
to be afraid of their father.

'People who waste bread,' he began, 'end by getting so thin themselves
that they double up like paper and disappear.'

'But
how
thin, Daddy?' asked Jane Anne, ever literal to the death.
'And is it romantic or just silly?'

He was puzzled for a moment what to reply.

'He doesn't know. He's making up,' piped Jimbo.

'I
do
know,' came the belated explanation, as he put the crumb into
the bowl of his extinguished pipe with a solemnity that delighted
them, but puzzled Jane Anne, who suggested it would taste 'like toast
smelt.' 'People who take bread that doesn't belong to them end by
having no dinner—'

'But that isn't anything about thinness,' interrupted Jinny, still
uncomforted. Some one wasted by love was in her mind perhaps.

'It is, child, because they get so frightfully thin,' he went on,
'that they end by getting thinner than the thin end of a wedge.'

The eyes of Mother twinkled, but the children still stared, waiting.
They had never heard of this phrase about the wedge. Indeed Jane Anne
shared with Jimbo total ignorance of the word at all. Like the
audience who read his books, or rather ought to have read them, they
expected something different, yet still hoped.

'It's a rhyme, and not a story though,' he added, anticipating perhaps
their possible disappointment. For the recent talk about expenses had
chilled his imagination too much for an instantaneous story, whereas
rhymes came ever to him easily.

'All right! Let's have it anyhow,' came the verdict in sentences of
French and English. And in the breathless pause that followed, even
Mother looking up expectantly from her busy fingers, was heard this
strange fate of the Thin Child who stole another's bread-crumb:—

He then grew thinner than the thin,
The thin end of the wedge;
He grew so pitifully thin
It set his teeth on edge;
But the edge it set his teeth upon
Was worse than getting thinner,
For it was the edge of appetite,
And his teeth were in no dinner!

There was a deep silence. Mother looked as though she expected more,—
the good part yet to come. The rhyme fell flat as a pancake, for of
course the children did not understand it. Its nonsense, clever
enough, escaped them. True nonsense is for grown-ups only. Jane Anne
stared steadily at him with a puzzled frown. Her face wore an
expression like a moth.

'Thank you, Daddy,
very
much,' she said, certain as ever that the
fault if any was her own, since all that Daddy said and did was simply
splendid. Whereupon the others fairly screamed with delight, turning
attention thereby from the dismal failure.

'She doesn't understand it, but she's always so polite!' cried Monkey.

Her mother quickly intervened. 'Never mind, Jane Anne,' she soothed
her, lest her feelings should be ruffled; 'you shall never want a
dinner, lovey; and when all Monkey's teeth are gone you'll still be
able to munch away at something.'

But Jinny's feelings were never ruffled exactly, only confused and
puzzled. She was puzzled now. Her confidence in her father's splendour
was unshakable.

'And, anyhow, Mother, you'll never be a thin wedge,' she answered,
meaning to show her gratitude by a compliment. She joined herself as
loudly as anybody in the roar that followed this sally. Obviously, she
had said a clever and amusing thing, though it was not clear to her
why it was so. Her flushed face was very happy; it even wore a touch
of proud superiority. Her talents were domestic rather than
intellectual.

'Excuse me, Daddy,' she said gravely, in a pause that followed
presently. 'But what is a wedge, exactly? And I think I'd like to copy
that poetry in my book, please.' For she kept a book in which his
efforts were neatly inscribed in a round copy-book handwriting, and
called by Monkey 'The Muddle Book.' There his unappreciated doggerels
found fame, though misunderstood most of all by the affectionate child
who copied them so proudly.

The book was brought at once. Her father wrote out the nonsense verse
on his knee and made a funny little illustration in the margin. 'Oh, I
say!' said Jimbo, watching him, while Monkey, lapsing into French,
contributed with her usual impudence, 'Pas tant mal!' They all loved
the illustrations.

The general interest, then, as the way is with children, puppies, and
other young Inconsistencies, centred upon the contents of the book.
They eagerly turned the pages, as though they did not know its
contents by heart already. They praised for the hundredth time the
drawing of the Muddle Animal who

Hung its hopes upon a nail
Or laid them on the shelf;
Then pricked its conscience with its tail,
And sat upon itself.

They looked also with considerable approval upon the drawings and
descriptions of the Muddle Man whose manners towards the rest of the
world were cool; because

He saw things with his naked eye,
That's why his glance was chilly.

But the explanation of the disasters he caused everywhere by his
disagreeable sharpness of speech and behaviour did
not
amuse them.
They observed as usual that it was 'too impossible'; the drawings,
moreover, did not quite convince:—

So cutting was his speaking tone
Each phrase snipped off a button,
So sharp his words, they have been known
To carve a leg of mutton;
He shaved himself with sentences,
And when he went to dances,
He made—Oh shocking tendencies!-
Deep holes with piercing glances.

But on the last page the Muddle Man behaved so badly, was so
positively indecent in his conduct, that he was persuaded to disappear
altogether; and his manner of extinguishing himself in the
illustration delighted the children far more than the verse whose fun
again escaped them:—

They observed he was indecent,
But he said it wasn't true,
For
he
pronounced it 'in descent'—
Then disappeared from view!

Mother's alleged 'second sight' was also attributed to the fact that
she 'looked twice before she leaped'—and the drawing of that leap
never failed to produce high spirits. For her calm and steady way of
walking—sailing—had earned her the name of the frigate—and this was
also illustrated, with various winds, all coloured, driving her along.

The time passed happily; some one turned the lamp out, and Daddy,
regardless of expense—he had been grumbling about it ten minutes
before—heaped on the bricks of peat. Riquette, a bit of movable
furniture without which the room seemed incomplete, deftly slipped in
between the circle of legs and feet, and curled up upon Jinny's lap.
Her snoring, a wheezy noise that made Jimbo wonder 'why it didn't
scrape her,' was as familiar as the ticking of the clock. Old Mere
Riquette knew her rights. And she exacted them. Jinny's lap was one of
these. She had a face like an old peasant woman, with a curious snub
nose and irregular whiskers that betrayed recklessly the advance of
age. Her snores and gentle purring filled the room now. A hush came
over the whole party. At seven o'clock they must all troop over to the
Pension des Glycines for supper, but there was still an hour left. And
it was a magic hour. Sighs were audible here and there, as the
exhausted children settled deeper into their chairs.

A change came over the atmosphere. Would nothing exciting ever happen?

'The stars are out,' said Jimbo in his soft, gentle little voice,
turning his head towards the windows. The others looked too—all
except Mother, whose attitude suggested suspiciously that she slept,
and Riquette, who most certainly did sleep. Above the rampart of the
darkened Alps swung up the army of the stars. The brighter ones were
reflected in the lake. The sky was crowded. Tiny, golden pathways slid
down the purple walls of the night. 'Some one in heaven is letting
down the star-ladders...' he whispered.

Jimbo's sentence had marked the change of key. Enchantment was abroad
—the Saturday evening spell was in the room.