Free Algernon Blackwood by A Prisoner in Fairyland

wonder that was close to awe. He saw another pair
of eyes gazing out at him They were ambery eyes, as he called them—
just what was to be expected from a star. And, so great was the shock,
that at first he stood dead still and gasped, then dashed up suddenly
close to her and stared into her face, frightening her so much that
she fell backwards, and the amber eyes vanished instantly. It was the
'some one else' who whispered fairy stories to him and lived behind
his ear. For a second she had been marvellously close. And he had lost
her!
    From that moment, however, his belief in her increased enormously, and
he never saw a pair of brown-ambery eyes without feeling sure that she
was somewhere close about him. The lame boy, for instance, had the
same delicate tint in his sad, long, questioning gaze. His own collie
had it too! For years it was an obsession with him, haunting and
wonderful—the knowledge that some one who watched close beside him,
filling his mind with fairy thoughts, might any moment gaze into his
face through a pair of ordinary familiar eyes. And he was certain that
all his star-imagination about the Net, the Starlight Express, and the
Cave of Lost Starlight came first into him from this hidden 'some one
else' who brought the Milky Way down into his boy's world of fantasy.
    'If ever I meet her in real life,' he used to say, 'I'm done for. She
is my Star Princess!'
    And now, as he fell asleep, the old atmosphere of that Kentish garden
drew thickly over him, shaking out clusters of stars about his bed.
Dreams usually are determined by something more remote than the talk
that has just preceded going to bed, but to-night it was otherwise.
And two things the old Vicar had let fall—two things sufficiently
singular, it seemed, when he came to think about them—influenced his
night adventures. 'Catch the world when it's asleep,' and 'Keep close
to the children'—these somehow indicated the route his dream should
follow. For he headed the great engine straight for the village in the
Jura pine woods where his cousin's children lived. He did not know
these children, and had seen his cousin but rarely in recent years;
yet, it seemed, they came to meet the train up among the mountain
forests somewhere. For in this village, where he had gone to study
French, the moods of his own childhood had somehow known continuation
and development. The place had once been very dear to him, and he had
known delightful adventures there, many of them with this cousin. Now
he took all his own childhood's sprites out in this Starlight Express
and introduced them to these transplanted children who had never made
acquaintance with the English breed. They had surprising, wild
adventures all together, yet in the morning he could remember very
little of it all. The interfering sun melted them all down in dew. The
adventures had some object, however; that was clear; though what the
object was, except that it did good somewhere to. some one, was gone,
lost in the deeps of sleep behind him. They scurried about the world.
The sprites were very active indeed—quite fussily energetic. And his
Scheme for Disabled Something-or other was not anywhere discoverable
in these escapades. That seemed forgotten rather, as though they found
bigger, more important things to do, and nearer home too. Perhaps the
Vicar's hint about the 'Neighbour' was responsible for that. Anyhow,
the dream was very vivid, even though the morning sun melted it away
so quickly and completely. It seemed continuous too. It filled the
entire night.
    Yet the thing that Rogers took off with him to town next morning was,
more than any other detail, the memory of what the old tutor had said
about the living reality and persistence of figures that passionate
thinking has created—that, and the value of Belief.

Chapter VI
*
    Be thou my star, and thou in me be seen
To show what source divine is, and prevails.
I mark thee planting joy in constant fire.
    To Sirius
, G. MEREDITH.
    And he