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
Here there were no complications, no need for assistance from a Sweep,
or Gardener, or Lamplighter. It was a case for pulling, pure and
simple. Daddy was wumbled, nothing more. Body, mind, and heart were
all up-jumbled. In making up the verse about the starlight he had
merely told the truth--about himself. The poem was instinctive and
inspirational confession. His atmosphere, as he lay there, gently
snoring in his beauty sleep, was clear and sweet and bright, no
darkness in it of grey or ugliness; but its pattern was a muddle, or
rather there were several patterns that scrambled among each other for
supremacy. Lovely patterns hovered just outside him, but none of them
got really in. And the result was chaos. Daddy was not clear-headed;
there was no concentration. Something of the perplexed confusion that
afflicted his elder daughter in the daytime mixed up the patterns
inextricably. There was no main pathway through his inner world.
And the picture proved it. It explained why Jinny pulled in vain. His
night-body came out easily as far as the head, then stuck hopelessly.
He looked like a knotted skein of coloured wools. Upon the paper where
he had been making notes before going to sleep--for personal
atmosphere is communicated to all its owner touches--lay the same
confusion. Scraps of muddle, odds and ends of different patterns,
hovered in thick blots of colour over the paragraphs and sentences.
His own uncertainty was thus imparted to what he wrote, and his
stories brought no conviction to his readers. He was too much the
Dreamer, or too much the Thinker, which of the two was not quite
clear. Harmony was lacking.
'That's probably what I'M like, too,' thought his friend, but so
softly that the children did not hear it. That Scheme of his passed
vaguely through his mind.
Then he cried louder--a definite thought:--
'There's no good tugging like that, my dears. Let him slip in again.
You'll only make him restless, and give him distorted dreams.'
'I've tugged like this every night for months,' said Jinny, 'but the
moment I let go he flies back like elastic.'
'Of course. We must first untie the knots and weave the patterns into
one. Let go!'
Daddy's night-body flashed back like a sword into its sheath. They
stood and watched him. He turned a little in his sleep, while above
him the lines twined and wriggled like phosphorus on moving water, yet
never shaped themselves into anything complete. They saw suggestions
of pure beauty in them here and there that yet never joined together
into a single outline; it was like watching the foam against a
steamer's sides in moonlight--just failing of coherent form.
'They want combing out,' declared Jane Anne with a brilliant touch of
truth. 'A rake would be best.'
'Assorting, sifting, separating,' added Cousinenry, 'but it's not
easy.' He thought deeply for a moment. 'Suppose you two attend to the
other things,' he said presently, 'while I take charge of the combing-
out.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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