'But "further" sounds "farther," she cried, with a burst of laughter that died away with her pa.s.sage of meteoric brilliance--into the body of the woods beyond.

'But the other Sprites, you see, are real and active,' continued Daddy, ignoring the interruption as though accustomed to it, because he thought out clearly every detail. 'They're alive enough to haunt a house or garden till sensitive people become aware of them and declare they've seen a ghost.'

'And _we_?' she asked. 'Who thought us out so wonderfully?'

'That's more than I can tell,' he answered after a little pause. 'G.o.d knows that, for He thought out the entire universe to which we belong.

I only know that we're real, and all part of the same huge, single thing.' He shone with increased brightness as he said it. 'There's no question about _our_ personalities and duties and the rest. Don't you feel it too?'

He looked at her as he spoke. Her outline had grown more definite. As she began to understand, and her bewilderment lessened, he noted that her flashing lines burned more steadily, falling into a more regular, harmonious pattern. They combined, moreover, with his own, and with the starlight too, in some exquisite fashion he could not describe.

She put a hand out, catching at the flying banner of his Story that he trailed behind him in the air. They formed a single design, all three.

His happiness became enormous.

'I feel joined on to everything,' she replied, half singing it in her joy. 'I feel tucked into the universe everywhere, and into you, dear.

These rays of starlight have sewn us together.' She began to tremble, but it was the trembling of pure joy and not of alarm....

'Yes,' he said, 'I'm learning it too. The moment thought gets away from self it lets in starlight and makes room for happiness. To think with sympathy of others is to grow: you take in their experience and add it to your own--development; the heart gets soft and deep and wide till you feel the entire universe b.u.t.toning its jacket round you. To think of self means friction and hence reduction.'

'And your Story,' she added, glancing up proudly at the banner that they trailed. 'I have helped a little, haven't I?'

'It's nearly finished,' he flashed back; 'you've been its inspiration and its climax. All these years, when we thought ourselves apart, you've been helping really underground--that's true collaboration.'

'Our little separation was but a _reculer pour mieux sauter_. See how we've rushed together again!'

A strange soft singing, like the wind in firs, or like shallow water flowing over pebbles, interrupted them. The sweetness of it turned the night alive.

'Come on, old Mother. Our Leader is calling to us. We must work.'

They slid from the blue wind into a current of paler air that happened to slip swiftly past them, and went towards the forest where Mlle.

Lemaire waited for them. Mother waved her hand to her friend, settled comfortably upon the flat roof in the village in their rear. 'We'll come back to lean upon you when we're tired,' she signalled. But she felt no envy now. In future she would certainly never 'stay put.' Work beckoned to her--and such endless, glorious work: the whole Universe.

'What life! What a rush of splendour!' she exclaimed as they reached the great woods and heard them shouting below in the winds. 'I see now why the forest always comforted me. There's strength here I can take back into my body with me when I go.'

'The trees, yes, express visibly only a portion of their life,' he told her. 'There is an overflow we can appropriate.'

Yet their conversation was never audibly uttered. It flashed instantaneously from one to the other. All they had exchanged since leaving La Citadelle had taken place at once, it seemed. They were awake in the region of naked thought and feeling. The dictum of the materialists that thought and feeling cannot exist apart from matter did not trouble them. Matter, they saw, was everywhere, though too tenuous for any measuring instrument man's brain had yet invented.

'Come on!' he repeated; 'the Starlight Express is waiting. It will take you anywhere you please--Ireland if you like!'

They found the others waiting on the smooth layer of soft purple air that spread just below the level of the tree-tops. The crests themselves tossed wildly in the wind, but at a depth of a few feet there was peace and stillness, and upon this platform the band was grouped. 'The stars are caught in the branches to-night,' a sensitive walker on the ground might have exclaimed. The spires rose about them like little garden trees of a few years' growth, and between them ran lanes and intricate, winding thoroughfares Mother saw long, dark things like thick bodies of snakes converging down these pa.s.sage-ways, filling them, all running towards the centre where the group had established itself. There were lines of dotted lights along them. They did not move with the waving of the tree-tops. They looked uncommonly familiar.

'The trains,' Jimbo was crying. He darted to and fro, superintending the embarking of the pa.s.sengers.

All the sidings of the sky were full of Starlight Expresses.

The loading-up was so quickly accomplished that Mother hardly realised what was happening. Everybody carried sacks overflowing with dripping gold and bursting at the seams. As each train filled, it shot away across the starry heavens; for everyone had been to the Cave and gathered their material even before she reached the scene of action.

And with every train went a _mecanicien_ and a _conducteur_ created by Jimbo's vivid and believing thought; a Sweep, a Lamplighter, and a Head Gardener went, too, for the children's thinking multiplied these, too, according to their needs. They realised the meaning of these Sprites so clearly now--their duties, appearance, laws of behaviour, and the rest-that their awakened imaginations thought them instantly into existence, as many as were necessary. Train after train, each with its full complement of pa.s.sengers, flashed forth across that summer sky, till the people in the Observatories must have thought they had miscalculated strangely and the Earth was pa.s.sing amid the showering Leonids before her appointed time.

'Where would you like to go first?' Mother heard her friend ask softly. 'It's not possible to follow all the trains at once, you know.'

'So I see,' she gasped. 'I'll just sit still a moment, and think.'

The size and freedom of existence, as she now saw it, suddenly overwhelmed her. Accustomed too long to narrow channels, she found s.p.a.ce without railings and notice-boards bewildering. She had never dreamed before that thinking can open the gates to heaven and bring the Milky Way down into the heart. She had merely knitted stockings.

She had been practical. At last the key to her husband's being was in her hand. That key at the same time opened a door through him, into her own. Hitherto she had merely criticised. Oh dear! Criticism, when she might have created!

She turned to seek him. But only her old friend was there, floating beside her in a brilliant mist of gold and white that turned the tree- tops into rows of Burning Bushes.

'Where is he?' she asked quickly.

'Hush!' was the instant reply; 'don't disturb him. Don't think, or you'll bring him back. He's filling his sack in the Star Cave. Men have to gather it,--the little store they possess is soon crystallised into hardness by Reason,--but women have enough in themselves usually to last a lifetime. They are born with it.'

'Mine crystallised long ago, I fear.'

'Care and anxiety did that. You neglected it a little. But your husband's cousin has cleaned the channels out. He does it unconsciously, but he does it. He has belief and vision like a child, and therefore turns instinctively to children because they keep it alive in him, though he hardly knows why he seeks them. The world, too, is a great big child that is crying for its Fairyland....'

'But the practical--' objected Mother, true to her type of mind-an echo rather than an effort.

'--is important, yes, only it has been exaggerated out of all sane proportion in most people's lives. So little is needed, though that little of fine quality, and ever fed by starlight. Obeyed exclusively, it destroys life. It bricks you up alive. But now tell me,' she added, 'where would you like to go first? Whom will you help? There is time enough to cover .the world if you want to, before the interfering sun gets up.'

'_You_!' cried Mother, impulsively, then realised instantly that her friend was already developed far beyond any help that she could give.

It was the light streaming from the older, suffering woman that was stimulating her own sympathies so vehemently. For years the process had gone on. It was at last effective.

'There are others, perhaps, who need it more than I,' flashed forth a lovely ray.

'But I would repay,' Mother cried eagerly, 'I would repay.' Grat.i.tude for life rushed through her, and her friend must share it.

'Pa.s.s it on to others,' was the shining answer. 'That's the best repayment after all.' The stars themselves turned brighter as the thought flashed from her.

Then Ireland vanished utterly, for it had been mixed, Mother now perceived, with personal longings that were at bottom selfish. There were indeed many there, in the scenes of her home and childhood, whose lives she might ease and glorify by letting in the starlight while they slept; but her motive, she discerned, was not wholly pure. There was a trace in it, almost a little stain, of personal gratification-- she could not a.n.a.lyse it quite--that dimmed the picture in her thought. The brilliance of her companion made it stand out clearly.

Nearer home was a less heroic object, a more difficult case, some one less likely to reward her efforts with results. And she turned instead to this.

'You're right,' smiled the other, following her thought; 'and you couldn't begin with a better bit of work than that. Your old mother has cut herself off so long from giving sympathy to her kind that now she cannot accept it from others without feeling suspicion and distrust. Ease and soften her outlook if you can. Pour through her gloom the sympathy of stars. And remember,' she added, as Mother rose softly out of the trees and hovered a moment overhead, 'that if you need the Sweep or the Lamplighter, or the Gardener to burn away her dead leaves, you have only to summon them. Think hard, and they'll be instantly beside you.'

Upon an eddy of glowing wind Mother drifted across the fields to the corner of the village where her mother occupied a large single room in solitude upon the top floor, a solitude self-imposed and rigorously enforced.

'Use the finest quality,' she heard her friend thinking far behind her, 'for you have plenty of it. The Dustman gave it to you when you were not looking, gathered from the entire Zodiac... and from the careless meteor's track....'

The words died off into the forest.

_That_ he keeps only For the old and lonely, (And is very strict about it) Who sleep so little that they need the best--'

The words came floating behind her. She felt herself brimful--charged with loving sympathy of the sweetest and most understanding quality.

She looked down a moment upon her mother's roof. Then she descended.

CHAPTER XXV