A Prisoner in Fairyland Part 53

'How wumbled,' exclaimed his listener.

'It is indeed,' said Minks, 'in fact, one of the thorns in the path of literature. The ordinary clever mind is indeed a desolate phenomenon.

And how often behind the "Oxford manner" lurks the cultured prig, if I may put it so.'

'Indeed you may,' was the other's rejoinder, 'for you put it admirably.'

They laughed a little and went on with their reading in their respective corners. The journey to Paris was enlivened by many similar discussions, Minks dividing his attentions between his master, his volume of philosophy, and the needs of various old ladies, to whom such men attach themselves as by a kind of generous, manly instinct.

Minks was always popular and inoffensive. He had such tact.

'Ah! and that reminds me, Minks,' said Rogers, as they paced the banks of the Seine that evening, looking at the starry sky over Paris. 'What do you know about the Pleiades? Anything--eh?'

Minks drew with pride upon his cla.s.sical reading.

'The seven daughters of Atlas, Mr. Rogers, if I remember correctly, called therefore the Atlantides. They were the virgin companions of Artemis. Orion, the great hunter, pursued them in Boeotia, and they called upon the G.o.ds for help.'

'And the G.o.ds turned 'em into stars, wasn't it?'

'First into doves, sir--Peleiades means doves--and then set them among the Constellations, where big Orion still pursues, yet never overtakes them.'

'Beautiful, isn't it? What a memory you've got, Minks. And isn't one of 'em lost or something?'

'Merope, yes,' the delighted Minks went on. He knew it because he had looked it up recently for his lyric about 'the Doves of Thought.' 'She married a mortal, Sisyphus, the son of Aeolus, and so shines more dimly than the rest. For her sisters married G.o.ds. But there is one who is more luminous than the others---'

'Ah! and which was that?' interrupted Rogers.

'Maia,' Minks told him pat. 'She is the most beautiful of the seven.

She was the Mother, too, of Mercury, the Messenger of the G.o.ds. She gave birth to him in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. Zeus was the father---'

'Take care; you'll get run over,' and Rogers pulled him from the path of an advancing taxi-cab, whose driver swore furiously at the pair of them. 'Charming, all that, isn't it?'

'It is lovely, sir. It haunts the mind. I suppose,' he added, 'that's why your cousin, Mr. Campden, made the Pleiades the centre of his Star Net in the story--a cl.u.s.ter of beautiful thoughts as it were.'

'No doubt, no doubt,' his tone so brusque suddenly that Minks decided after all not to mention his poem where the Pleiades made their appearance as the 'doves of thought.'

'What a strange coincidence,' Rogers said as they turned towards the hotel again.

'Subconscious knowledge, probably, sir,' suggested the secretary, scarcely following his meaning, if meaning indeed there was.

'Possibly! One never knows, does one?'

'Never, Mr. Rogers. It's all very wonderful.'

And so, towards six o'clock in the evening of the following day, having pa.s.sed the time pleasantly in Paris, the train bore them swiftly beyond Pontarlier and down the steep gradient of the Gorges de l'Areuse towards Neuchatel. The Val de Travers, through which the railway slips across the wooded Jura into Switzerland, is like a winding corridor cleft deep between savage and precipitous walls.

There are dizzy glimpses into the gulf below. With steam shut off and brakes partly on, the train curves sharply, hiding its eyes in many tunnels lest the pa.s.sengers turn giddy. Strips of bright green meadow- land, where the Areuse flows calmly, alternate with places where the ravine plunges into bottomless depths that have been chiselled out as by a giant ploughshare. Rogers pointed out the chosen views, while his secretary ran from window to window, excited as a happy child. Such scenery he had never known. It changed the entire content of his mind.

Poetry he renounced finally before the first ten minutes were past.

The descriptions that flooded his brain could be rendered only by the most dignified and stately prose, and he floundered among a welter of sonorous openings that later Albinia would read in Sydenham and retail judiciously to the elder children from 'Father's foreign letters.'

'We shall pa.s.s Bourcelles in a moment now! Look out! Be ready with your handkerchief!' Rogers warned him, as the train emerged from the final tunnel and scampered between thick pine woods, emblazoned here and there with golden beeches. The air was crystal, sparkling. They could smell the forests.

They took their places side by side at the windows. The heights of Boudry and La Tourne, that stand like guardian sentries on either side of the mountain gateway, were already cantering by. The precipices flew past. Beyond lay the smiling slopes of vineyard, field, and orchard, sprinkled with farms and villages, of which Bourcelles came first. The Areuse flowed peacefully towards the lake. The panorama of the snowy Alps rolled into view along the farther horizon, and the slanting autumn sunshine bathed the entire scene with a soft and ruddy light. They entered the Fairyland of Daddy's story.

'Voila la sentinelle deja!' exclaimed Rogers, putting his head out to see the village poplar. 'We run through the field that borders the garden of the Pension. They'll come out to wave to us. Be ready.'

'Ah, oui,' said Minks, who had been studying phrase books, 'je vwa.'

But in reality he saw with difficulty, for a spark had got into his eye, and its companion optic, wandering as usual, was suffused with water too.

The news of their arrival had, of course, preceded them, and the row of waving figures in the field gave them a welcome that went straight to Minks's heart. He felt proud for his grand employer. Here was a human touch that would modify the majesty of the impersonal mountain scenery in his description. He waved his handkerchief frantically as the train shot past, and he hardly knew which attracted him most--the expression of happiness on Mr. Rogers's face, or the line of nondescript humanity that gesticulated in the field as though they wished to stop the Paris 'Rapide.'

For it was a _very_ human touch; and either Barnum's Circus or the byeways and hedges of Fairyland had sent their picked representatives with a dance seen usually only in shy moonlit glades. His master named them as the carriage rattled by. The Paris Express, of course, did not stop at little Bourcelles. Minks recognised each one easily from the descriptions in the story.

The Widow Jequier, with garden skirts tucked high, and wearing big gauntlet gloves, waved above her head a Union Jack that knocked her bonnet sideways at every stroke, and even enveloped the black triangle of a Trilby hat that her brother-in-law held motionless aloft as though to test the wind for his daily report upon the condition of le barometre. The Postmaster never waved. He looked steadily before him at the pa.s.sing train, his small, black figure more than usually dwarfed by a stately outline that rose above the landscape by his side, and was undoubtedly the Woman of the Haystack. Telling lines from the story's rhymes flashed through Minks's memory as, chuckling with pleasure, he watched the magnificent, ample gestures of Mother's waving arms. She seemed to brush aside the winds who came a-courting, although wide strokes of swimming really described her movements best.

A little farther back, in the middle distance, he recognised by his peaked cap the gendarme, Gygi, as he paused in his digging and looked up to watch the fun; and beyond him again, solid in figure as she was unchanging in her affections, he saw Mrs. Postmaster, struggling with a bed sheet the _pensionnaires des Glycines_ helped her shake in the evening breeze. It was too close upon the hour of _souper_ for her to travel farther from the kitchen. And beside her stood Miss Waghorn, waving an umbrella. She was hatless. Her tall, thin figure, dressed in black, against the washing hung out to dry, looked like a note of exclamation, or, when she held the umbrella up at right angles, like a capital L the fairies had set in the ground upon its head.

And the fairies themselves, the sprites, the children! They were everywhere and anywhere. Jimbo flickered, went out, reappeared, then flickered again; he held a towel in one hand and a table napkin in the other. Monkey seemed more in the air than on the solid earth, for one minute she was obviously a ball, and the next, with a motion like a somersault, her hair shot loose across the sunlight as though she flew. Both had their mouths wide open, shouting, though the wind carried their words all away unheard. And Jane Anne stood apart. Her welcome, if the gesture is capable of being described at all, was a bow. She moved at the same time sedately across the field, as though she intended to be seen separately from the rest. She wore hat and gloves. She was evidently in earnest with her welcome. But Mr. John Henry Campden, the author and discoverer of them all, Minks did not see.

'But I don't see the writer himself!' he cried. 'I don't see Mr.

Campden.'

'You can't,' explained Rogers, 'he's standing behind his wife.'

And the little detail pleased the secretary hugely. The true artist, he reflected, is never seen in his work.

It all was past and over--in thirty seconds. The spire of the church, rising against a crimson sky, with fruit trees in the foreground and a line of distant summits across the shining lake, replaced the row of wonderful dancing figures. Rogers sank back in his corner, laughing, and Minks, saying nothing, went across to his own at the other end of the compartment. It all had been so swift and momentary that it seemed like the flash of a remembered dream, a strip of memory's pictures, a vivid picture of some dazzling cinematograph. Minks felt as if he had just read the entire story again from one end to the other--in thirty seconds. He felt different, though wherein exactly the difference lay was beyond him to discover. 'It must be the spell of Bourcelles,' he murmured to himself. 'Mr. Rogers warned me about it. It is a Fairyland that thought has created out of common things. It is quite wonderful!'

He felt a glow all over him. His mind ran on for a moment to another picture his master had painted for him, and he imagined Albinia and the family out here, living in a little house on the borders of the forest, a strip of vineyards, sunlight, mountains, happy scented winds, and himself with a writing-table before a window overlooking the lake... writing down Beauty.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

We never meet; yet we meet day by day Upon those hills of life, dim and immense: The good we love, and sleep-our innocence.

O hills of life, high hills! And higher than they,

Our guardian spirits meet at prayer and play.

Beyond pain, joy, and hope, and long suspense, Above the summits of our souls, far hence, An angel meets an angel on the way.

Beyond all good I ever believed of thee Or thou of me, these always love and live.

And though I fail of thy ideal of me,

My angel falls not short. They greet each other.

Who knows, they may exchange the kiss we give, Thou to thy crucifix, I to my mother.

ALICE MCYNELL.

The arrival at the station interrupted the reverie in which the secretary and his chief both were plunged.

'How odd,' exclaimed Minks, ever observant, as he leaped from the carriage, 'there are no platforms. Everything in Switzerland seems on one level, even the people--everything, that is, except the mountains.'

'Switzerland _is_ the mountains,' laughed his chief.