A Prisoner in Fairyland Part 41

Rogers alone seemed unperturbed, unhurried, for he was absorbed in a discovery that made him tremble. Noting the sudden perfection of his cousin's Pattern, he had gone closer to examine it, and had--seen the starry figure. Instantly he forgot everything else in the world. It seemed to him that he had suddenly found all he had ever sought. He gazed into those gentle eyes of amber and felt that he gazed into the eyes of the Universe that had taken shape in front of him. Floating up as near as he could, he spoke--

'Where do you come from--from what star?' he asked softly in an ecstasy of wonder.

The tiny face looked straight at him and smiled.

'From the Pleiades, of course,--that little group of star-babies as yet unborn.'

'I've been looking for you for ever,' he answered.

'You've found me,' sang the tiny voice. 'This is our introduction.

Now, don't forget. There was a lost Pleiad, you know. Try to remember me when you wake.'

'Then why are you here?' He meant in the Pattern.

The star-face rippled with laughter.

'It's yours--your Scheme. He's given it perfect shape for you, that's all. Don't you recognise it? But it's my Story as well. ...'

A ray with crimson in it shot out just then across the shoulder of the Blumlisalp, and, falling full upon the tiny face, it faded out; the Pattern faded with it; Daddy vanished too. On the little azure winds of dawn they flashed away. Jimbo, Monkey, and certain of the Sprites alone held on, but the tree-tops to which they clung were growing more and more slippery every minute. Mother, loth to return, balanced bravely on the waving spires of a larch. Her sleep that night had been so deep and splendid, she struggled to prolong it. She hated waking up too early.

'The Morning Spiders! Look out!' cried a Sprite, as a tiny spider on its thread of gossamer floated by. It was the Dustman's voice.

Catching the Gypsy with one arm and the Tramp with the other, all three instantly disappeared.

'But where's my Haystack friend?' called Mother faintly, almost losing her balance in the attempt to turn round quickly.

'Oh, she's all right,' the Head Gardener answered from a little distance where he was burning something. 'She just "stays put" and flirts with every wind that comes near her. She loves the winds. They know her little ways.' He went on busily burning up dead leaves he had been collecting all night long--dead, useless thoughts he had found clogging a hundred hearts and stopping outlets.

'Look sharp!' cried a voice that fell from the sky above them.

'Here come the Morning Spiders, On their gossamer outriders!'

This time it was the Lamplighter flas.h.i.+ng to and fro as he put the stars out one by one. He was in a frantic hurry; he extinguished whole groups of them at once. The Pleiades were the last to fade.

Rogers heard him and came back into himself. For his ecstasy had carried him even beyond the region of the freest 'thinking.' He could give no account or explanation of it at all. Monkey, Jimbo, Mother, and he raced in a line together for home and safety. Above the fields they met the spiders everywhere, the spiders that bring the dawn and ride off into the Star Cave on lost rays and stray thoughts that careless minds have left scattered about the world.

And the children, as they raced and told their mother to 'please move a little more easily and slipperily,' sang together in chorus:--

'We shall meet the Morning Spiders, The fairy-cotton riders, Each mounted on a star's rejected ray; With their tiny nets of feather

They collect our thoughts together, And on strips of windy weather Bring the Day. ...'

'That's stolen from you or Daddy,' Mother began to say to Rogers--but was unable to complete the flash. The thought lay loose behind her in the air.

A spider instantly mounted it and rode it off.

Something brushed her cheek. Riquette stood rover her, fingering her face with a soft extended paw.

'But it surely can't be time yet to get up!' she murmured. 'I've only just fallen asleep, it seems.' She glanced at her watch upon the chair beside the bed, saw that it was only four o'clock, and then turned over, making a s.p.a.ce for the cat behind her shoulder. A tremendous host of dreams caught at her sliding mind. She tried to follow them.

They vanished. 'Oh dear!' she sighed, and promptly fell asleep again.

But this time she slept lightly. No more adventures came. She did not dream. And later, when Riquette woke her a second time because it was half-past six, she remembered as little of having been 'out' as though such a thing had never taken place at all.

She lit the fire and put the porridge saucepan on the stove. It was a glorious July morning. She felt glad to be alive, and full of happy, singing thoughts. 'I wish I could always sleep like that!' she said.

'But what a pity one has to wake up in the end!'

And then, as she turned her mind toward the coming duties of the day, another thought came to her. It was a very ordinary, almost a daily thought, but there seemed more behind it than usual. Her whole heart was in it this time--

'As soon as the children are off to school I'll pop over to mother, and see if I can't cheer her up a bit and make her feel more happy. Oh dear!' she added, 'life is a bag of duties, whichever way one looks at it!' But she felt a great power in her that she could face them easily and turn each one into joy. She could take life more bigly, carelessly, more as a whole somehow. She was aware of some huge directing power in her 'underneath.' Moreover, the 'underneath' of a woman like Mother was not a trifle that could be easily ignored. That great Under Self, resting in the abysses of being, rose and led. The pettier Upper Self withdrew ashamed, pa.s.sing over the reins of conduct into those mighty, shadowy hands.

CHAPTER XXVI

Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, Or loose the bands of Orion?

_Book of Job_.

The feeling that something was going to happen--that odd sense of antic.i.p.ation--which all had experienced the evening before at tea-time had entirely vanished, of course, next morning. It was a mood, and it had pa.s.sed away. Every one had slept it off. They little realised how it had justified itself. Jane Anne, tidying the Den soon after seven o'clock, noticed the slip of paper above the mantelpiece, read it over--'The Starlight Express will start to-night. Be reddy!'--and tore it down. 'How could that. have amused us!' she said aloud, as she tossed it into the waste-paper basket. Yet, even while she did so, some stray sensation of delight clutched at her funny little heart, a touch of emotion she could not understand that was wild and very sweet. She went singing about her work. She felt important and grown- up, extraordinarily light-hearted too. The things she sang made up their own words--such odd s.n.a.t.c.hes that came she knew not whence. An insect clung to her duster, and she shook it out of the window with the crumbs and bits of cotton gathered from the table-cloth.

'Get out, you Morning Spider, You fairy-cotton rider!'

she sang, and at the same minute Mother opened the bedroom door and peeped in, astonished at the unaccustomed music. In her voluminous dressing-gown, her hair caught untidily in a loose net, her face flushed from stooping over the porridge saucepan, she looked, thought Jinny, 'like a haystack somehow.' Of course she did not say it. The draught, flapping at her ample skirts, added the idea of a covering tarpaulin to the child's mental picture. She went on dusting with a half-offended air, as though Mother had no right to interrupt her with a superintending glance like this.

'You won't forget the sweeping too, Jinny?' said Mother, retiring again majestically with that gliding motion her abundant proportions achieved so gracefully.

'Of course I won't, Mother,' and the instant the door was closed she fell into another s.n.a.t.c.h of song, the words of which flowed unconsciously into her mind, it seemed--

'For I'm a tremendously busy Sweep, Dusting the room while you're all asleep, And shoving you all in the rubbish heap, Over the edge of the tiles'

--a little wumbled, it is true, but its source unmistakable.

And all day long, with every one, it was similar, this curious intrusion of the night into the day, the sub-conscious into the conscious--a kind of subtle trespa.s.sing. The flower of forgotten dreams rose so softly to the surface of consciousness that they had an air of sneaking in, anxious to be regarded as an integral part of normal waking life. Like bubbles in water they rose, discharged their puff of fragrant air, and disappeared again. Jane Anne, in particular, was simply radiant all day long, and more than usually clear-headed.

Once or twice she wumbled, but there was big sense in her even then.

It was only the expression that evaded her. Her little brain was a poor transmitter somehow.

'I feel all endowed to-day,' she informed Rogers, when he congratulated her later in the day on some cunning act of attention she bestowed upon him. It was in the courtyard where they all sat sunning themselves after _dejeuner_, and before the younger children returned to afternoon school.

'I feel emaciated, you know,' she added, uncertain whether emanc.i.p.ated was the word she really sought.

'You'll be quite grown-up,' he told her, 'by the time I come back to little Bourcelles in the autumn.' Little Bourcelles! It sounded, the caressing way he said it, as if it lay in the palm of his big brown hand.

'But you'll never come back, because you'll never go,' Monkey chimed in. 'My hair, remember---'

'_My_ trains won't take you,' said Jimbo gravely.

'Oh, a train may _take_ you,' continued Monkey, 'but you can't leave.

Going away by train isn't leaving.'