Algernon Blackwood

A Prisoner in Fairyland

Algernon Blackwood

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  • CHAPTER I
  • CHAPTER II
  • CHAPTER III
  • CHAPTER IV
  • CHAPTER V
  • CHAPTER VI
  • CHAPTER VII
  • CHAPTER VIII
  • CHAPTER IX
  • CHAPTER X
  • CHAPTER XI
  • CHAPTER XII
  • CHAPTER XIII
  • CHAPTER XIV
  • CHAPTER XV
  • CHAPTER XVI
  • CHAPTER XVII
  • CHAPTER XVIII
  • CHAPTER XIX
  • CHAPTER XX
  • CHAPTER XXI
  • CHAPTER XXII
  • CHAPTER XXII
  • CHAPTER XXIV
  • CHAPTER XXV
  • CHAPTER XXVI
  • CHAPTER XXVII
  • CHAPTER XXVIII
  • CHAPTER XXIX
  • CHAPTER XXX
  • CHAPTER XXXI
  • CHAPTER XXXII
  • CHAPTER XXXIII
  • CHAPTER XXXIV
    • Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. (sniff, me too!) A PRISONER IN FAIRYLAND (THE BOOK THAT 'UNCLE PAUL' WROTE)

     

    TO



    M. S.-K.



    ‘LITTLE MOUSE THAT, LOST IN WONDER,


    FLICKS ITS WHISKERS AT THE THUNDER!’


    “Les Pensees!


    O leurs essors fougueux, leurs flammes dispersees,


    Leur rouge acharnement ou leur accord vermeil!


    Comme la-haut les etoiles criblaient la nue,


    Elles se constellaient sur la plaine inconnue;


    Elles roulaient dans l’espace, telles des feux,


    Gravissaient la montagne, illuminaient la fleuve


    Et jetaient leur parure universelle et neuve


    De mer en mer, sur les pays silencieux.”



    Le Monde, EMILE VERHAEREN


    CHAPTER I

    Man is his own star; and the soul that can


    Render an honest and a perfect man


    Commands all light, all influence, all fate,


    Nothing to him falls early, or too late.


    Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,

    Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.


    BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

    Minks—Herbert Montmorency—was now something more than secretary,

    even than private secretary: he was confidential-private-secretary,

    adviser, friend; and this, more because he was a safe receptacle for

    his employer’s enthusiasms than because his advice or judgment had any

    exceptional value. So many men need an audience. Herbert Minks was a

    fine audience, attentive, delicately responsive, sympathetic,

    understanding, and above all—silent. He did not leak. Also, his

    applause was wise without being noisy. Another rare quality he

    possessed was that he was honest as the sun. To prevaricate, even by

    gesture, or by saying nothing, which is the commonest form of untruth,

    was impossible to his transparent nature. He might hedge, but he could

    never lie. And he was ‘friend,’ so far as this was possible between

    employer and employed, because a pleasant relationship of years’

    standing had established a bond of mutual respect under conditions of

    business intimacy which often tend to destroy it.

    Just now he was very important into the bargain, for he had a

    secret from his wife that he meant to divulge only at the proper

    moment. He had known it himself but a few hours. The leap from being

    secretary in one of Henry Rogers’s companies to being that prominent

    gentleman’s confidential private secretary was, of course, a very big

    one. He hugged it secretly at first alone. On the journey back from

    the City to the suburb where he lived, Minks made a sonnet on it. For

    his emotions invariably sought the safety valve of verse. It was a

    wiser safety valve for high spirits than horse-racing or betting on

    the football results, because he always stood to win, and never to

    lose. Occasionally he sold these bits of joy for half a guinea, his

    wife pasting the results neatly in a big press album from which he

    often read aloud on Sunday nights when the children were in bed. They

    were signed ‘Montmorency Minks’; and bore evidence of occasional

    pencil corrections on the margin with a view to publication later in a

    volume. And sometimes there were little lyrical fragments too, in a

    wild, original metre, influenced by Shelley and yet entirely his own.

    These had special pages to themselves at the end of the big book. But

    usually he preferred the sonnet form; it was more sober, more

    dignified. And just now the bumping of the Tube train shaped his

    emotion into something that began with

    Success that poisons many a baser mind


    With thoughts of self, may lift—

    but stopped there because, when he changed into another train, the

    jerkier movement altered the rhythm into something more lyrical, and

    he got somewhat confused between the two and ended by losing both.

    He walked up the hill towards his tiny villa, hugging his secret

    and anticipating with endless detail how he would break it to his

    wife. He felt very proud and very happy. The half-mile trudge seemed

    like a few yards.

    He was a slim, rather insignificant figure of a man, neatly

    dressed, the City clerk stamped plainly over all his person. He envied

    his employer’s burly six-foot stature, but comforted himself always

    with the thought that he possessed in its place a certain delicacy

    that was more becoming to a man of letters whom an adverse fate

    prevented from being a regular minor poet.