Algernon Blackwood (2 page)

'Albinia,' he answered importantly, with an expression that brought
the chin up closer to the lips, and made the eyebrows almost stern,
'Mr. Rogers will do the right thing always—when the right time comes.
As a matter of fact'—here he reverted to the former train of thought
—'both he and I are misfits in a practical, sordid age. We should
have been born in Greece—'

'I simply love your poems, Herbert,' she interrupted gently, wondering
how she managed to conceal her growing impatience so well, 'but
there's not the money in them that there ought to be, and they don't
pay for coals or for Ronald's flannels—'

'Albinia,' he put in softly, 'they relieve the heart, and so make me a
happier and a better man. But—I should say he would,' he added,
answering her distant question about the salary.

The secret was almost out. It hung on the edge of his lips. A moment
longer he hugged it deliciously. He loved these little conversations
with his wife. Never a shade of asperity entered into them. And this
one in particular afforded him a peculiar delight.

'Both of us are made for higher things than mere money-making,' he
went on, lighting his calabash pipe and puffing the smoke carefully
above her head from one corner of his mouth, 'and that's what first
attracted us to each other, as I have often mentioned to you. But
now'—his bursting heart breaking through all control—'that he has
sold his interests to a company and retired into private life—er—my
own existence should be easier and less exacting. I shall have less
routine, be more my own master, and also, I trust, find time perhaps
for—'

'Then something
has
happened!' cried Mrs. Minks, springing to her
feet.

'It has, my dear,' he answered with forced calmness, though his voice
was near the trembling point.

She stood in front of him, waiting. But he himself did not rise, nor
show more feeling than he could help. His poems were full of scenes
like this in which the men—strong, silent fellows—were fine and
quiet. Yet his instinct was to act quite otherwise. One eye certainly
betrayed it.

'It has,' he repeated, full of delicious emotion.

'Oh, but Herbert—!'

'And I am no longer that impersonal factor in City life, mere
secretary to the Board of a company—'

'Oh, Bertie, dear!'

'But private secretary to Mr. Henry Rogers—private and confidential
secretary at—'

'Bert, darling—!'

'At 300 pounds a year, paid quarterly, with expenses extra,
and long, regular holidays,' he concluded with admirable dignity and
self-possession.

There was a moment's silence.

'You splendour!' She gave a little gasp of admiration that went
straight to his heart, and set big fires alight there. 'Your reward
has come at last! My hero!'

This was as it should be. The beginning of an epic poem flashed with
tumult through his blood. Yet outwardly he kept his admirable calm.

'My dear, we must take success, like disaster, quietly.' He said it
gently, as when he played with the children. It was mostly put on, of
course, this false grandiloquence of the prig. His eyes already
twinkled more than he could quite disguise.

'Then we can manage the other school, perhaps, for Frank?' she cried,
and was about to open various flood-gates when he stopped her with a
look of proud happiness that broke down all barriers of further
pretended secrecy.

'Mr. Rogers,' was the low reply, 'has offered to do that for us—as a
start.' The words were leisurely spoken between great puffs of smoke.
'That's what I meant just now by saying that he lived poetry in his
life, you see. Another time you will allow judgment to wait on
knowledge—'

'You dear old humbug,' she cried, cutting short the sentence that
neither of them quite understood, 'I believe you've known this for
weeks—'

'Two hours ago exactly,' he corrected her, and would willingly have
prolonged the scene indefinitely had not his practical better half
prevented him. For she came over, dropped upon her knees beside his
chair, and, putting both arms about his neck, she kissed his foolish
sentences away with all the pride and tenderness that filled her to
the brim. And it pleased Minks hugely. It made him feel, for the
moment at any rate, that he was the hero, not Mr. Henry Rogers.

But he did not show his emotion much. He did not even take his pipe
out. It slipped down sideways into another corner of his wandering
lips. And, while he returned the kiss with equal tenderness and
pleasure, one mild blue eye looked down upon her soft brown hair, and
the other glanced sideways, without a trace of meaning in it, at the
oleograph of Napoleon on Elba that hung upon the wall. ...

Soon afterwards the little Sydenham villa was barred and shuttered,
the four children were sound asleep, Herbert and Albinia Minks both
lost in the world of happy dreams that sometimes visit honest, simple
folk whose consciences are clean and whose aims in life are
commonplace but worthy.

When the creation was new and all the stars shone in their first
splendour, the gods held their assembly in the sky and sang 'Oh, the
picture of perfection! the joy unalloyed!'

But one cried of a sudden—'It seems that somewhere there is a break
in the chain of light and one of the stars has been lost.'

The golden string of their harp snapped, their song stopped, and they
cried in dismay—'Yes, that lost star was the best, she was the glory
of all heavens!'

From that day the search is unceasing for her, and the cry goes on
from one to the other that in her the world has lost its one joy!

Only in the deepest silence of night the stars smile and whisper among
themselves—'Vain is this seeking! Unbroken perfection is over all!'

RABINDRANATH TAGORE. (Prose translation by Author from his original
Bengali.)

It was April 30th and Henry Rogers sat in his rooms after breakfast,
listening to the rumble of the traffic down St. James's Street, and
found the morning dull. A pile of letters lay unopened upon the table,
waiting the arrival of the discriminating Mr. Minks with his shorthand
note-book and his mild blue eyes. It was half-past nine, and the
secretary was due at ten o'clock.

He smiled as he thought of this excellent fellow's first morning in
the promoted capacity of private secretary. He would come in very
softly, one eye looking more intelligent than the other; the air of
the City clerk discarded, and in its place the bearing that belonged
to new robes of office worn for the first time. He would bow, say
'Good morning, Mr. Rogers,' glance round with one eye on his employer
and another on a possible chair, seat himself with a sigh that meant
'I have written a new poem in the night, and would love to read it to
you if I dared,' then flatten out his oblong note-book and look up,
expectant and receptive. Rogers would say 'Good morning, Mr. Minks.
We've got a busy day before us. Now, let me see—' and would meet his
glance with welcome. He would look quickly from one eye to the other-
to this day he did not know which one was right to meet-and would
wonder for the thousandth time how such an insignificant face could go
with such an honest, capable mind. Then he smiled again as he
remembered Frank, the little boy whose schooling he was paying for,
and realised that Minks would bring a message of gratitude from Mrs.
Minks, perhaps would hand him, with a gesture combining dignity and
humbleness, a little note of thanks in a long narrow envelope of pale
mauve, bearing a flourishing monogram on its back.

And Rogers scowled a little as he thought of the air of gruffness he
would assume while accepting it, saying as pleasantly as he could
manage, 'Oh, Mr. Minks, that's nothing at all; I'm only too delighted
to be of service to the lad.' For he abhorred the expression of
emotion, and his delicate sense of tact would make pretence of helping
the boy himself, rather than the struggling parents.

Au fond he had a genuine admiration for Minks, and there was something
lofty in the queer personality that he both envied and respected. It
made him rely upon his judgment in certain ways he could not quite
define. Minks seemed devoid of personal ambition in a sense that was
not weakness. He was not insensible to the importance of money, nor
neglectful of chances that enabled him to do well by his wife and
family, but—he was after other things as well, if not chiefly. With a
childlike sense of honesty he had once refused a position in a company
that was not all it should have been, and the high pay thus rejected
pointed to a scrupulous nicety of view that the City, of course,
deemed foolishness. And Rogers, aware of this, had taken to him,
seeking as it were to make this loss good to him in legitimate ways.
Also the fellow belonged to leagues and armies and 'things,' quixotic
some of them, that tried to lift humanity. That is, he gave of his
spare time, as also of his spare money, to help. His Saturday
evenings, sometimes a whole bank holiday, he devoted to the welfare of
others, even though the devotion Rogers thought misdirected.

For Minks hung upon the fringe of that very modern, new-fashioned, but
almost freakish army that worships old, old ideals, yet insists upon
new-fangled names for them. Christ, doubtless, was his model, but it
must be a Christ properly and freshly labelled; his Christianity must
somewhere include the prefix 'neo,' and the word 'scientific' must
also be dragged in if possible before he was satisfied. Minks, indeed,
took so long explaining to himself the wonderful title that he was
sometimes in danger of forgetting the brilliant truths it so vulgarly
concealed. Yet never quite concealed. He must be up-to-date, that was
all. His attitude to the world scraped acquaintance with nobility
somewhere. His gift was a rare one. Out of so little, he gave his
mite, and gave it simply, unaware that he was doing anything unusual.

This attitude of mind had made him valuable, even endeared him, to the
successful business man, and in his secret heart Rogers had once or
twice felt ashamed of himself. Minks, as it were, knew actual
achievement because he was, forcedly, content with little, whereas he,
Rogers, dreamed of so much, yet took twenty years to come within reach
of what he dreamed. He was always waiting for the right moment to
begin.

His reflections were interrupted by the sunlight, which, pouring in a
flood across the opposite roof, just then dropped a patch of soft
April glory upon the black and yellow check of his carpet slippers.
Rogers got up and, opening the window wider than before, put out his
head. The sunshine caught him full in the face. He tasted the fresh
morning air. Tinged with the sharp sweetness of the north it had a
fragrance as of fields and gardens. Even St. James's Street could not
smother its vitality and perfume. He drew it with delight into his
lungs, making such a to-do about it that a passer-by looked up to see
what was the matter, and noticing the hanging tassel of a flamboyant
dressing-gown, at once modestly lowered his eyes again.

But Henry Rogers did not see the passer-by in whose delicate mind a
point of taste had thus vanquished curiosity, for his thoughts had
flown far across the pale-blue sky, behind the cannon-ball clouds, up
into that scented space and distance where summer was already winging
her radiant way towards the earth. Visions of June obscured his sight,
and something in the morning splendour brought back his youth and
boyhood. He saw a new world spread about him—a world of sunlight,
butterflies, and flowers, of smooth soft lawns and shaded gravel
paths, and of children playing round a pond where rushes whispered in
a wind of long ago. He saw hayfields, orchards, tea-things spread upon
a bank of flowers underneath a hedge, and a collie dog leaping and
tumbling shoulder high among the standing grass.... It was all
curiously vivid, and with a sense of something about it unfading and
delightfully eternal. It could never pass, for instance, whereas....

'Ain't yer forgotten the nightcap?' sang out a shrill voice from
below, as a boy with a basket on his arm went down the street. He drew
back from the window, realising that he was a sight for all admirers.
Tossing the end of his cigarette in the direction of the cheeky
urchin, he settled himself again in the arm-chair before the glowing
grate-fire.

But the fresh world he had tasted came back with him. For Henry Rogers
stood this fine spring morning upon the edge of a new life. A long
chapter had just closed behind him. He was on the threshold of
another. The time to begin had come. And the thrill of his freedom now
at hand was very stimulating to his imagination. He was forty, and a
rich man. Twenty years of incessant and intelligent labour had brought
him worldly success. He admitted he had been lucky, where so many toil
on and on till the gates of death stand up and block their way,
fortunate if they have earned a competency through years where hope
and disappointment wage their incessant weary battle. But he, for some
reason known only to the silent Fates, had crested the difficult hill
and now stood firm upon the top to see the sunrise, the dreadful gates
not even yet in sight. At yesterday's Board meeting, Minks had handed
him the papers for his signature; the patents had been transferred to
the new company; the cheque had been paid over; and he was now a
gentleman of leisure with a handsome fortune lying in his bank to
await investment. He was a director in the parent, as well as the
subsidiary companies, with fees that in themselves alone were more
than sufficient for his simple needs.

For all his tastes
were
simple, and he had no expensive hobbies or
desires; he preferred two rooms and a bath to any house that he had
ever seen; pictures he liked best in galleries; horses he could hire
without the trouble of owning; the few books worth reading would go
into a couple of shelves; motors afflicted, even confused him—he was
old-fashioned enough to love country and walk through it slowly on two
vigorous legs; marriage had been put aside with a searing
disappointment years ago, not forgotten, but accepted; and of travel
he had enjoyed enough to realise now that its pleasures could be found
reasonably near home and for very moderate expenditure indeed. And the
very idea of servants was to him an affliction; he loathed their
prying closeness to his intimate life and habits, destroying the
privacy he loved. Confirmed old bachelor his friends might call him if
they chose; he knew what he wanted. Now at last he had it. The
ambition of his life was within reach.