Algernon Blackwood Read Online Free Page A

figures that knew not elasticity. This softer subject
led him to no conclusion, leaving him stranded among misty woods and
fields of flowers that had no outlet. He realised, however, clearly
that this side of him was not atrophied as he thought. Its unused
powers had merely been accumulating—underground.
    He got no further than that just now. He poked the fire and lit
another cigarette. Then, glancing idly at the paper, his eye fell upon
the list of births, and by merest chance picked out the name of
Crayfield. Some nonentity had been 'safely delivered of a son' at
Crayfield, the village where he had passed his youth and childhood. He
saw the Manor House where he was born, the bars across the night-
nursery windows, the cedars on the lawn, the haystacks just beyond the
stables, and the fields where the rabbits sometimes fell asleep as
they sat after enormous meals too stuffed to move. He saw the old
gravel-pit that led, the gardener told him, to the centre of the
earth. A whiff of perfume from the laurustinus in the drive came back,
the scent of hay, and with it the sound of the mowing-machine going
over the lawn. He saw the pony in loose flat leather shoes. The bees
were humming in the lime trees. The rooks were cawing. A blackbird
whistled from the shrubberies where he once passed an entire day in
hiding, after emptying an ink-bottle down the German governess's
dress. He heard the old family butler in his wheezy voice calling in
vain for 'Mr. 'Enery' to come in. The tone was respectful, seductive
as the man could make it, yet reproachful. He remembered throwing a
little stone that caught him just where the Newgate fringe met the
black collar of his coat, so that his cry of delight betrayed his
hiding-place. The whacking that followed he remembered too, and how
his brother emerged suddenly from behind the curtain with, 'Father,
may I have it instead of Henry, please?' That spontaneous offer of
sacrifice, of willingness to suffer for another, had remained in his
mind for a long time as a fiery, incomprehensible picture.
    More dimly, then, somewhere in mist behind, he saw other figures
moving—the Dustman and the Lamplighter, the Demon Chimneysweep in
black, the Woman of the Haystack—outposts and sentries of a larger
fascinating host that gathered waiting in the shadows just beyond. The
creations of his boy's imagination swarmed up from their temporary
graves, and made him smile and wonder. After twenty years of strenuous
business life, how pale and thin they seemed. Yet at the same time how
extraordinarily alive and active! He saw, too, the huge Net of Stars
he once had made to catch them with from that night-nursery window,
fastened by long golden nails made out of meteors to the tops of the
cedars. ... There had been, too, a train—the Starlight Express. It
almost seemed as if
they
knew, too, that a new chapter had begun,
and that they called him to come back and play again. ...
    Then, with a violent jump, his thoughts flew to other things, and he
considered one by one the various philanthropic schemes he had
cherished against the day when he could realise them. That day had
come. But the schemes seemed one and all wild now, impracticable,
already accomplished by others better than he could hope to accomplish
them, and none of them fulfilling the first essential his practical
mind demanded—knowing his money spent precisely as he wished. Dreams,
long cherished, seemed to collapse one by one before him just when he
at last came up with them. He thought of the woman who was to have
helped him, now married to another who had money without working for
it. He put the thought back firmly in its place. He knew now a greater
love than that—the love for many. ...
    He was embarking upon other novel schemes when there was a ring at the
bell, and the charwoman, who passed with him for servant, ushered in
his private secretary, Mr. Minks. Quickly readjusting the machinery of
his mind, Rogers came back to the present,
    'Good