A Prisoner in Fairyland (The Book That 'Uncle Paul' Wrote)Blackwood, Algernon
Science
A Prisoner in Fairyland (The Book That 'Uncle Paul' Wrote)
Blackwood, Algernon
Magic -- Fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
'Yes, it's quite all right like that,' added Jimbo. And without more
ado they took his arms and pulled him out of the forest.
And Henry Rogers heard something deep, deep down within himself echo
the verdict.
'I think it is all right.'
On the way home there were no puddles, but there were three pairs of
eyes--and the stars were uncommonly thick overhead. The children asked
him almost as many questions as there were clusters of them between
the summits of Boudry and La Tourne. All three went floundering in
that giant Net. It was so different, too, from anything they had been
accustomed to. Their father's stories, answers, explanations, and the
like, were ineffective because they always felt he did not quite
believe them himself even while he gave them. He did not think he
believed them, that is. But Cousin Henry talked of stars and star-
stuff as though he had some in his pocket at the moment. And, of
course, he had. For otherwise they would not have listened. He could
not have held their attention.
They especially liked the huge, ridiculous words he used, because such
words concealed great mysteries that pulsed with wonder and
exquisitely wound them up. Daddy made things too clear. The bones of
impossibility were visible. They saw thin nakedness behind the
explanations, till the sense of wonder faded. They were not babies to
be fed with a string of one-syllable words!
Jimbo kept silence mostly, his instinct ever being to conceal his
ignorance; but Monkey talked fifteen to the dozen, filling the pauses
with long 'ohs' and bursts of laughter and impudent observations. Yet
her cheeky insolence never crossed the frontier where it could be
resented. Her audacity stopped short of impertinence.
'There's a point beyond which--' her cousin would say gravely, when
she grew more daring than usual; and, while answering 'It'll stick
into you, then, not into me,' she yet withdrew from the borders of
impertinence at once.
'What is star-stuff really then?' she asked.
'The primordial substance of the universe,' he answered solemnly, no
whit ashamed of his inaccuracy.
'Ah yes!' piped Jimbo, quietly. _Ecole primaire_ he understood. This
must be something similar.
'But what does it do, I mean, and why is it good for people to have it
in them--on them--whatever it is?' she inquired.
'It gives sympathy and insight; it's so awfully subtle and delicate,'
he answered. 'A little of it travels down on every ray and soaks down
into you. It makes you feel inclined to stick to other people and
understand them. That's sympathy.'
'_Sympathie_,' said Jimbo for his sister's benefit apparently, but in
reality because he himself was barely treading water.
'But sympathy,' the other went on, 'is no good without insight--which
means seeing things as others see them--from inside. That's insight---
'
'Inside sight,' she corrected him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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