_ See, the busy Pleiades,
Sisters to the Hyades,
Seven by seven
Across the heaven,
Light desire
With their fire,
Working cunningly together in a soft and tireless band,
Sweetly linking
All our thinking
In the Net of Sympathy that brings back Fairyland.
_A Voice_.
The prophecy of the children that Bourcelles was a difficult place to
get away from found its justification next morning, for Rogers slept
so heavily that he nearly missed his train. It was six o'clock when he
tumbled downstairs, too late for a real breakfast, and only just in
time to get his luggage upon the little char that did duty for all
transport in this unsophisticated village. The carpenter pulled it for
him to the station.
'If I've forgotten anything, my cousin will send it after me,' he told
Mme. Michaud, as he gulped down hot coffee on the steps.
'Or we can keep it for you,' was the answer. 'You'll be coming back
soon.' She knew, like the others, that one always came back to
Bourcelles. She shook hands with him as if he were going away for a
night or two. 'Your room will always be ready,' she added. 'Ayez la
bonte seulement de m'envoyer une petite ligne d'avance.'
'There's only fifteen minutes,' interrupted her husband, 'and it's
uphill all the way.'
They trundled off along the dusty road, already hot in the early July
sun. There was no breath of wind; swallows darted in the blue air; the
perfume of the forests was everywhere; the mountains rose soft and
clear into the cloudless sky. They passed the Citadelle, where the
awning was already being lowered over the balcony for Mlle. Lemaire's
bed to be wheeled out a little later. Rogers waved his handkerchief,
and saw the answering flutter inside the window. Riquette, on her way
in, watched him from the tiles. The orchards then hid the lower
floors; he passed the tinkling fountain; to the left he saw the church
and the old Pension, the wistaria blossoms falling down its walls in a
cascade of beauty.
The Postmaster put his head out and waved his Trilby hat with a solemn
smile. 'Le barometre est tres haut...' floated down the village
street, instead of the sentence of good-bye. Even the Postmaster took
it for granted that he was not leaving. Gygi, standing in the door of
his barn, raised his peaked hat and smiled. 'Fait beau, ce matin,' he
said, 'plus tard il fera rudement chaud.' He spoke as if Rogers were
off for a walk or climb. It was the same everywhere. The entire
village saw him go, yet behaved as if he was not really leaving. How
fresh and sweet the morning air was, keen mountain fragrance in it,
and all the delicious, delicate sharpness of wet moss and dewy fields.
As he passed the courtyard near the Guillaume Tell, and glanced up at
the closed windows of Mother Plume's apartment, a pattering step
startled him behind, and Jimbo came scurrying up. Rogers kissed him
and lifted him bodily upon the top of his portmanteau, then helped the
carpenter to drag it up the hill. 'The barriers at the level crossing
are down, the warning gongs are ringing. It's signalled from
Auvernier.' They were only just in time. The luggage was registered
and the train panting up the steep incline, when Monkey, sleep still
thick in her eyes, appeared rolling along the white road. She was too
breathless to speak; she stood and stared like a stuffed creature in a
Museum. Jimbo was beside the engine, having a word with the
_mecanicien_.
'Send a telegram, you know--like that,' he shouted, as the carriage
slid past him, 'and we'll bring the _char_.' He knew his leader would
come back. He took his cap off politely, as a man does to a lady--the
Bourcelles custom. He did not wave his handkerchief or make
undignified signs. He stood there, watching his cousin to the last,
and trying to see the working of the engine at the same time. He had
already told him the times and stopping places, and where he had to
change; there was nothing more for a man to say.
Monkey, her breath recovered now, shouted something impudent from the
road. 'The train will break down with you in it before it gets to
Pontarlier, and you'll be back for tea--worse luck!' He heard it
faintly, above the grinding of the wheels. She blew him a kiss; her
hair flew out in a cloud of brown the sunshine turned half golden. He
almost saw the shining of her eyes. And then the belt of the forest
hid her from view, hid Jimbo and the village too. The last thing he
saw of Bourcelles was the top of the church spire and the red roof of
the towering Citadelle. The crest of the sentinel poplar topped them
both for a minute longer, waved a slight and stately farewell, then
lowered itself into the forest and vanished in its turn.
And Rogers came back with a start and a bump to what is called real
life.
He closed his eyes and leaned back in his corner, feeling he had
suddenly left his childhood behind him for the second time, not
gradually as it ought to happen, but all in one dreadful moment. A
great ache lay in his heart. The perfect book of fairy-tales he had
been reading was closed and finished. Weeks had passed in the
delicious reading, but now the last page was turned; he came back to
duty--duty in London--great, noisy, overwhelming London, with its
disturbing bustle, its feverish activities, its complex, artificial,
unsatisfying amusements, and its hosts of frantic people. He grew
older in a moment; he was forty again now; an instant ago, just on the
further side of those blue woods, he had been fifteen. Life shrank and
dwindled in him to a little, ugly, unattractive thing. He was
returning to a flat in the dolorous edifice of civilisation. A great
practical Scheme, rising in sombre bricks and mortar through a
disfiguring fog, blocked all the avenues of the future.
The picture seemed sordid somewhere, the contrast was so striking. In
a great city was no softness; hard, sharp angles everywhere, or at
best an artificial smoothness that veiled ugliness and squalor very
thinly. Human relationship worked like parts of a machine, cramped
into definite orbits, each wheel, each pulley, the smallest deviation
deemed erratic. In Bourcelles, the mountain village, there was more
latitude, room for expansion, space. The heart leaped up spontaneously
like a spring released. In the city this spring was held down rigidly
in place, pressed under as by a weight; and the weight, surely, was
that one for ever felt compelled to think of self--self in a rather
petty, shameful way--personal safety. In the streets, in the houses,
in public buildings, shops, and railway stations, even where people
met to eat and drink in order to keep alive, were Notice Boards of
caution and warning against their fellow kind. Instead of the kindly
and unnecessary, even ridiculous little Gygi, there were big, grave
policemen by the score, a whole army of them; and everywhere grinned
the Notice Boards, like automatic, dummy policemen, mocking joy with
their insulting warnings. The heart was oppressed with this constant
reminder that safety could only be secured by great care and trouble--
safety for the little personal self; protection from all kinds of
robbery, depredation, and attack; beware of pickpockets, the
proprietor is not responsible for overcoats and umbrellas even! And
burglar alarms and doors of steel and iron everywhere--an organised
defence from morning till night--against one's own kind.
He had lived among these terrible conditions all his life, proud of
the personal security that civilisation provided, but he had never
before viewed it from outside, as now he suddenly did. A spiritual
being, a man, lives in a city as in a state of siege among his own
kind. It was deplorable, it was incredible. In little Bourcelles, a
mountain village most would describe pityingly as half civilised and
out of the world, there was safety and joy and freedom as of the
universe.... His heart contracted as he thus abruptly realised the
distressing contrast. Although a city is a unit, all classes neatly
linked together by laws and by-laws, by County Councils, Parliaments,
and the like, the spirit of brotherhood was a mockery and a sham.
There is organised charity, but there is not--Charity. In a London
Square he could not ring the bell and ask for a glass of milk.... In
Bourcelles he would walk into any house, since there were no bells,
and sit down to an entire meal!
He laughed as the absurd comparison darted across his mind, for he
recognised the foolish exaggeration in it; but behind the laughter
flamed the astonishing truth. In Bourcelles, in a few weeks, he had
found a bigger, richer life than all London had supplied to him in
twenty years; he had found wings, inspiration, love, and happiness; he
had found the universe. The truth of his cousin's story blazed upon
him like an inner sun. In this new perspective he saw that it was a
grander fairy-tale than he had guessed even when close to it. What was
a Scheme for Disabled Thingumabobs compared to the endless, far-
reaching schemes that life in Bourcelles suggested to him! There was
the true centre of life; cities were accretions of disease upon the
surface merely! He was leaving Fairyland behind him.
In sudden moments like this, with their synthetic bird's-eye view, the
mind sometimes sees more clearly than in hours of careful reflection
and analysis. And the first thing he saw now was Minks, his friendly,
ridiculous little confidential secretary. From all the crowds of men
and women he knew, respected, and enjoyed in London, as from the vast
deluge of human mediocrity which for him _was_ London, he picked out
suddenly--little Minks--Herbert Montmorency Minks. His mind, that is,
darting forward in swift, comprehensive survey, and searching
automatically for some means whereby it might continue the happiness
and sweetness recently enjoyed, selected Minks. Minks was a clue.
Minks possessed--no matter how absurd the proportions of their mixing
--three things just left behind: Vision, Belief, Simplicity, all
products of a spiritual imagination.
And at first this was the single thought sent forward into the future.
Rogers saw the fact, flash-like and true-then let it go, yielding to
the greater pull that drew reflection back into the past.
And he found it rather dislocating, this abrupt stepping out of his
delightful forest Fairyland.... Equilibrium was not recovered for a
long time, as the train went thundering over the Jura Mountains into
France, Only on the other side of Pontarlier, when the country grew
unfamiliar and different, did harmony return. Among the deep blue
forests he was still in Fairyland, but at Mouchard the scenery was
already changing, and by the time Dole was reached it had completely
changed. The train ran on among the plains and vineyards of the
Burgundy country towards Laroche and Dijon. The abrupt alteration,
however, was pain. His thoughts streamed all backwards now to
counteract it. He roamed again among the star fields above the
Bourcelles woods. It was true--he had not really left Bourcelles. His
body was bumping into Dijon, but the important part of him--thought,
emotion, love--lingered with the children, hovered above the
Citadelle, floated through the dusky, scented forests.
And the haunting picture was ever set in its framework of old burning
stars. He could not get the Pleiades in particular out of his mind.
The pictures swarmed past him as upon a boy returning to school after
the holidays, and each one had a background of sky with stars behind
it; the faces that he knew so well had starry eyes; Jimbo flung
handfuls of stars loose across the air, and Monkey caught them,
fastening them like golden pins into her hair. Glancing down, he saw a
long brown hair upon his sleeve. He picked it off and held his finger
and thumb outside the window till the wind took it away. Some Morning
Spider would ride it home--perhaps past his cousin's window while he
copied out that wonderful, great tale. But, instead--how in the world
could it happen in clear daylight?--a little hand shot down from above
and gathered it in towards the Pleiades.
The Pleiades--the Seven Sisters--that most exquisite cluster of the
eastern sky, soft, tender, lovely, clinging close together always like
a group of timid children, who hide a little dimly for fear of being
surprised by bolder stars upon their enormous journey--they now shone
down upon all he thought and remembered. They seemed always above the
horizon of his mind. They never set. In them lay souls of unborn
children, children waiting to be born. He could not imagine why this
particular constellation clung with such a haunting touch of beauty
about his mind, or why some passion of yearning unconfessed and
throbbing hid behind the musical name. Stars and unborn children had
got strangely mixed!
He tried to recall the origin of the name--he had learned it once in
the old Vicar's study. The Pleiades were attendants upon Artemis, the
huntress moon, he recalled vaguely, and, being pursued by Orion, were
set for safety among the stars. He even remembered the names of some
of them; there was Maia, Tagete, Alcyone, but the other four lay in
his mental lumber room, whence they could not be evoked, although
Merope, he felt sure, was one of them. Of Maia, however, he felt
positive.... How beautiful the names were!
Then, midway, in thinking about them, he found himself, as Monkey
said, thinking of something else: of his weeks at Bourcelles again and
what a long holiday it had been, and whether it was wasted time or
well-used time-a kind of general stock-taking, as it were, but chiefly
of how little he had accomplished after all, set down in black and
white. He had enjoyed himself and let himself go, rather foolishly
perhaps, but how much after all had he actually accomplished? He
remembered pleasant conversations with Mother that possibly cheered
and helped her--or possibly were forgotten as soon as ended. He
remembered his cousin's passing words of gratitude--that he had helped
him somehow with his great new story: and he remembered--this least of
all-that his money had done something to relieve a case or two of
suffering. And this was all! The net result so insignificant! He felt
dissatisfied, eager already to make new plans, something definite and
thorough that should retrieve the wasted opportunities. With a little
thought and trouble, how easily he might have straightened out the
tangle of his cousin's family, helped with the education of the
growing children, set them all upon a more substantial footing
generally. It was possible still, of course, but such things are done
best on the spot, the personal touch and presence of value; arranged
by correspondence it becomes another thing at once and loses
spontaneity. The accent lies on the wrong details. Sympathy is watered
by the post.... Importance lodges in angles not intended for it.
Master of his time, with certain means at his disposal, a modicum of
ability as well, he was free to work hard on the side of the angels
wherever opportunity might offer; yet he had wasted all these weeks
upon an unnecessary holiday, frittering the time away in enjoyment
with the children. He felt ashamed and mortified as the meagre record
stared him in the face.
Yet, curiously enough, when Reason had set down the figures
accurately, as he fancied, and totted up the trifling totals, there
flitted before him something more that refused to be set down upon the
paper. The Ledger had no lines for it. What was it? Why was it
pleasant, even flattering? Why did it mitigate his discontent and
lessen the dissatisfied feeling? It passed hovering in and about his
thoughts, though uncaught by actual words; and as his mind played with
it, he felt more hopeful. He searched in vain for a definition, but,
though fruitless, the search brought comfort somehow. Something _had_
been accomplished and it was due to himself, because without his
presence it would never have been done. This hint slipped into desire,
yearning, hope--that, after all, a result _had_ perhaps been achieved,
a result he himself was not properly aware of--a result of that
incalculable spiritual kind that escapes the chains of definite
description. For he recalled--yet mortified a little the memory should
flatter--that his cousin had netted Beauty in his story, and that
Mother had spoken of living with greater carelessness and peace, and
that each had thanked him as though he were the cause.
And these memories, half thought, half feeling, were comforting and
delicious, so that he revelled in them lingeringly, and wished that
they were really true. For, if true, they were immensely significant.
Any one with a purse could build a hospital or pay an education fee,
but to be helpful because of being oneself was a vast, incalculable
power, something direct from God... and his thoughts, wandering on
thus between fact and fantasy, led him back with a deep inexplicable
thrill again to--the Pleiades, whose beauty, without their being aware
of it, shines nightly for all who can accept it. Here was the old, old
truth once more-that the left hand must not know what the right is
doing, and that to be is of greater importance than to do. Here was
Fairyland once more, the Fairyland he had just left. To think beauty
and love is to become them, to shed them forth without realising it. A
Fairy blesses because she is a Fairy, not because she turns a pumpkin
into a coach and four.... The Pleiades do not realise how their
loveliness may....
Rogers started. For the thought had borrowed a tune from the rhythm of
the wheels and sleepers, and he had uttered the words aloud in his
corner. Luckily he had the carriage to himself. He flushed. Again a
tender and very exquisite thing had touched him somewhere.... It was
in that involuntary connection his dreaming had found between a Fairy
and the Pleiades. Wings of gauzy gold shone fluttering a moment before
his inner sight, then vanished. He was aware of some one very dear and
wild and tender, with amber eyes and little twinkling feet--some one
whom the Great Tale brought almost within his reach.... He literally
had seen stars for an instant--_a_ star! Its beauty brimmed him up. He
laughed in his corner. This thing, whatever it was, had been coming
nearer for some time. These hints of sudden joy that breathe upon a
sensitive nature, how mysterious, how wildly beautiful, how
stimulating they are! But whence, in the name of all the stars, do
they come? A great happiness passed flaming through his heart, an
extraordinary sense of anticipation in it--as though he were going to
meet some one who--who--well, what?--who was a necessity and a delight
to him, the complement needed to make his life effective--some one he
loved abundantly--who would love him abundantly in return. He recalled
those foolish lines he had written on sudden impulse once, then thrown
away....
Thought fluttered and went out. He could not seize the elusive cause
of this delicious joy. It was connected with the Pleiades, but how,
where, why? Above the horizon of his life a new star was swimming into
glory. It was rising. The inexplicable emotion thrilled tumultuously,
then dived back again whence it came... It had to do with children and
with a woman, it seemed, for the next thing he knew was that he was
thinking of children, children of his own, and of the deep yearning
Bourcelles had stirred again in him to find their Mother... and, next,
of his cousin's story and that wonderful detail in it that the
principal role was filled at last, the role in the great Children's
Play he himself had felt was vacant. It was to be filled by that
childless Mother the writer's imagination had discovered or created.
And again the Pleiades lit up his inner world and beckoned to him with
their little fingers of spun gold; their eyes of clouded amber smiled
into his own. It was most extraordinary and delightful. There was
something--come much closer this time, almost within reach of
discovery--something he ought to remember about them, something he had
promised to remember, then stupidly forgotten. The lost, hidden joy
was a torture. Yet, try as he would, no revelation came to clear the
matter up. Had he read it somewhere perhaps? Or was it part of the
Story his cousin had wumbled into his ear when he only partly
listened?
'I believe I dreamed it,' he smiled to himself at last in despair. 'I
do believe it was a dream--a fragment of some jolly dream I had in my
Fairyland of little Bourcelles!'
Children, stars, Fairyland, dreams--these brought it somehow. His
cousin's story also had to do with it, chiefly perhaps after all--this
great story.
'I shall have to go back there to get hold of it completely,' he added
with conviction. He almost felt as if some one were thinking hard
about him--one of the characters in the story, it seemed. The mind of
some one far away, as yet unknown, was searching for him in thought,
sending forth strong definite yearnings which came to rest of their
own accord in his own being, a garden naturally suited to their
growth. The creations of his boyhood's imagination had survived, the
Sweep, the Dustman, and the Lamplighter, then why not the far more
powerful creations in the story...? Thought was never lost!
'But no man in his senses can believe such a thing!' he exclaimed, as
the train ran booming through the tunnel.
'That's the point,' whispered a voice beside him. 'You are _out_ of
your senses. Otherwise you could not feel it!'
He turned sharply. The carriage was empty; there was no one there. It
was, of course, another part of himself that supplied the answer; yet
it startled him. The blurred reflection of the lamp, he noticed, cast
a picture against the black tunnel wall that was like a constellation.
The Pleiades again! It almost seemed as if the voice had issued from
that false reflection in the shaking window-pane....
The train emerged from the tunnel. He rushed out into the blaze of the
Interfering Sun. The lovely cluster vanished like a dream, and with it
the hint of explanation melted down in dew. Fields sped past with a
group of haystacks whose tarpaulin skirts spread and lifted in the
gust of wind the train made. He thought abruptly of Mother....
Perhaps, after all, he had taught her something, shown her Existence
as a big, streaming, endless thing in which months and years, possibly
even life itself, were merely little sections, each unintelligible
unless viewed as portions of the Whole, and not as separate,
difficult, puzzling items set apart. Possibly he had drawn her map to
bigger scale, increased her faith, given her more sense of repose and
peace, more courage therefore. She thought formerly of a day, but not
of its relation to all days before and behind. She stuck her husband's
'reviews' in the big book, afflicted by the poor financial results
they represented, but was unable to think of his work as a stage in a
long series of development and progress, no effort lost, no single
hope mislaid. And that was something--_if_ he had accomplished it.
Only, he feared he had not. There was the trouble. There lay the
secret of a certain ineffectiveness in his character. For he did not
realise that fear is simply suppressed desire, vivid signs of life,
and that desire is the ultimate causative agent everywhere and always.
'Behind Will stands Desire,' and Desire is Action.
And if he _had_ accomplished this, how was it done? Not by preaching,
certainly. Was it, then, simply by being, thinking, feeling it? A
glorious thought, if true! For assuredly he had this faculty of seeing
life whole, and even in boyhood he had looked ahead over its entire
map. He had, indeed, this way of relating all its people, and all its
parts together, instead of seeing them separate, unintelligible
because the context was left out. He lived intensely in the present,
yet looked backwards and forwards too at the same time. This large
sympathy, this big comforting vision was his gift. Consequently he
believed in Life. Had he also, then, the gift of making others feel
and believe it too...?
There he was again, thinking in a circle, as Laroche flew past with
its empty platforms, and warned him that Paris was getting close. He
bumped out of Fairyland, yet tumbled back once more for a final
reverie before the long ugly arms of the city snatched him finally
out. 'To see life whole,' he reflected, 'is to see it glorious. To
think one's self part of humanity at large is to bring the universe
down into the heart. But to see life whole, a whole heart is
necessary.... He's done it in that splendid story, and he bagged the
raw idea somehow from me. That's something at any rate. ... So few
think Beaaty.... But will others see it? That's the point!'
'No, it isn't,' answered the voice beside him. 'The point is that he
has thought it, and the universe is richer. Even if others do not read
or understand, what he has thought _is there now_, for ever and ever.'
'True,' he reflected, 'for that Beauty may float down and settle in
other minds when they least are looking for it, and ignoring utterly
whence comes the fairy touch. Divine! Delicious! Heavenly!'
'The Beauty he has written came through you, yet was not yours,' the
voice continued very faintly. 'A far more beautiful mind first
projected it into that network which binds all minds together. 'Twas
thence you caught it flying, and, knowing not how to give it shape,
transferred it to another--who could use it--for others.... Thought is
Life, and Sympathy is living....'
The voice died away; he could not hear the remainder clearly; the
passing scenery caught his attention again; during his reverie it had
been unnoticed utterly. 'Thought is Life, but Sympathy is living---'
it rolled and poured through him as he repeated it. Snatches of
another sentence then came rising into him from an immense distance,
falling upon him from immeasurable heights--barely audible:-
'... from a mind that so loved the Pleiades she made their loveliness
and joy her own... Alcyone, Merope, Maia...' It dipped away into
silence like a flower closing for the night, and the train, he
realised, was slackening speed as it drew into the hideous Gare de
Lyon.
'I'll talk to Minks about it, perhaps,' he thought, as he stood
telling the Customs official that he had no brandy, cigarettes, or
lace. 'He knows about things like that. At any rate, he'll
sympathise.'
He went across Paris to the Gare du Nord, and caught the afternoon
boat train to London. The sunshine glared up from the baking streets,
but he never forgot that overhead, though invisible, the stars were
shining all the time--Starlight, the most tender and least suspected
light in all the world, shining bravely even when obscured by the
Interfering Sun, and the Pleiades, softest, sweetest little group
among them all.
And when at eleven o'clock he entered his St. James's flat, he took a
store of it shining in his heart, and therefore in his eyes. Only that
was no difficult matter, for all the lamps far up the heights were lit
and gleaming, and caught old mighty London in their gorgeous net. _