



Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer





THE BLUE FLOWER

By Henry Van <DW18>




     The desire of the moth for the star,
     Of the night for the morrow,
     The devotion for something afar
     From the sphere of our sorrow.
     --SHELLEY.




             To
      THE DEAR MEMORY OF
      BERNARD VAN <DW18>
          1887-1897
      AND THE LOVE THAT LIVES
       BEYOND THE YEARS




PREFACE

Sometimes short stories are brought together like parcels in a basket.
Sometimes they grow together like blossoms on a bush. Then, of course,
they really belong to one another, because they have the same life in
them.

The stories in this book have been growing together for a long time. It
is at least ten years since the first of them, the story of The Other
Wise Man, came to me; and all the others I knew quite well by heart a
good while before I could find the time, in a hard-worked life, to write
them down and try to make them clear and true to others. It has been a
slow task, because the right word has not always been easy to find, and
I wanted to keep free from conventionality in the thought and close to
nature in the picture. It is enough to cause a man no little shame to
see how small is the fruit of so long labour.

And yet, after all, when one wishes to write about life, especially
about that part of it which is inward, the inwrought experience of
living may be of value. And that is a thing which one cannot get in
haste, neither can it be made to order. Patient waiting belongs to it;
and rainy days belong to it; and the best of it sometimes comes in the
doing of tasks that seem not to amount to much. So in the long run, I
suppose, while delay and failure and interruption may keep a piece of
work very small, yet in the end they enter into the quality of it and
bring it a little nearer to the real thing, which is always more or less
of a secret.

But the strangest part of it all is the way in which a single thought,
an idea, will live with a man while he works, and take new forms from
year to year, and light up the things that he sees and hears, and lead
his imagination by the hand into many wonderful and diverse regions. It
seems to me that there am two ways in which you may give unity to a book
of stories. You may stay in one place and write about different themes,
preserving always the colour of the same locality. Or you may go into
different places and use as many of the colours and shapes of life as
you can really see in the light of the same thought.

There is such a thought in this book. It is the idea of the search for
inward happiness, which all men who are really alive are following,
along what various paths, and with what different fortunes! Glimpses of
this idea, traces of this search, I thought that I could see in certain
tales that were in my mind,--tales of times old and new, of lands near
and far away. So I tried to tell them, as best as I could, hoping that
other men, being also seekers, might find some meaning in them.

There are only little, broken chapters from the long story of life.
None of them is taken from other books. Only one of them--the story of
Winifried and the Thunder-Oak--has the slightest wisp of a foundation in
fact or legend. Yet I think they are all true.

But how to find a name for such a book,--a name that will tell enough to
show the thought and yet not too much to leave it free? I have borrowed
a symbol from the old German poet and philosopher, Novalis, to stand
instead of a name. The Blue Flower which he used in his romance of
Heinrich von Ofterdingen to symbolise Poetry, the object of his young
hero's quest, I have used here to signify happiness, the satisfaction of
the heart.

Reader, will you take the book and see if it belongs to you? Whether
it does or not, my wish is that the Blue Flower may grow in the garden
where you work.

AVALON, December 1, 1902.




CONTENTS

     I.     The Blue Flower
     II.    The Source
     III.   The Mill
     IV.    Spy Rock
     V.     Wood-Magic
     VI.    The Other Wise Man
     VII.   I Handful of Clay
     VIII.  The Lost Word
     IX.    The First Christmas-Tree




THE BLUE FLOWER

The parents were abed and sleeping. The clock on the wall ticked loudly
and lazily, as if it had time to spare. Outside the rattling windows
there was a restless, whispering wind. The room grew light, and dark,
and wondrous light again, as the moon played hide-and-seek through the
clouds. The boy, wide-awake and quiet in his bed, was thinking of the
Stranger and his stories.

"It was not what he told me about the treasures," he said to himself,
"that was not the thing which filled me with so strange a longing. I
am not greedy for riches. But the Blue Flower is what I long for. I can
think of nothing else. Never have I felt so before. It seems as if I
had been dreaming until now--or as if I had just slept over into a new
world.

"Who cared for flowers in the old world where I used to live? I never
heard of anyone whose whole heart was set upon finding a flower. But
now I cannot even tell all that I feel--sometimes as happy as if I were
enchanted. But when the flower fades from me, when I cannot see it in my
mind, then it is like being very thirsty and all alone. That is what the
other people could not understand.

"Once upon a time, they say, the animals and the trees and the flowers
used to talk to people. It seems to me, every minute, as if they were
just going to begin again. When I look at them I can see what they want
to say. There must be a great many words that I do not know; if I knew
more of them perhaps I could understand things better. I used to love to
dance, but now I like better to think after the music."

Gradually the boy lost himself in sweet fancies, and suddenly he
found himself again, in the charmed land of sleep. He wandered in far
countries, rich and strange; he traversed wild waters with incredible
swiftness; marvellous creatures appeared and vanished; he lived with
all sorts of men, in battles, in whirling crowds, in lonely huts. He was
cast into prison. He fell into dire distress and want. All experiences
seemed to be sharpened to an edge. He felt them keenly, yet they did
not harm him. He died and came alive again; he loved to the height of
passion, and then was parted forever from his beloved. At last, toward
morning, as the dawn was stealing near, his soul grew calm, and the
pictures showed more clear and firm.

It seemed as if he were walking alone through the deep woods. Seldom the
daylight shimmered through the green veil. Soon he came to a rocky gorge
in the mountains. Under the mossy stones in the bed of the stream, he
heard the water secretly tinkling downward, ever downward, as he climbed
upward.

The forest grew thinner and lighter. He came to a fair meadow on the
<DW72> of the mountain. Beyond the meadow was a high cliff, and in the
face of the cliff an opening like the entrance to a path. Dark was the
way, but smooth, and he followed easily on till he came near to a vast
cavern from which a flood of radiance streamed to meet him.

As he entered he beheld a mighty beam of light which sprang from the
ground, shattering itself against the roof in countless sparks, falling
and flowing all together into a great pool in the rock. Brighter was the
light-beam than molten gold, but silent in its rise, and silent in its
fall. The sacred stillness of a shrine, a never-broken hush of joy and
wonder, filled the cavern. Cool was the dripping radiance that softly
trickled down the walls, and the light that rippled from them was pale
blue.

But the pool, as the boy drew near and watched it, quivered and glanced
with the ever-changing colours of a liquid opal. He dipped his hands in
it and wet his lips. It seemed as if a lively breeze passed through his
heart.

He felt an irresistible desire to bathe in the pool. Slipping off his
clothes he plunged in. It was as if he bathed in a cloud of sunset. A
celestial rapture flowed through him. The waves of the stream were like
a bevy of nymphs taking shape around him, clinging to him with tender
breasts, as he floated onward, lost in delight, yet keenly sensitive to
every impression. Swiftly the current bore him out of the pool, into a
hollow in the cliff. Here a dimness of slumber shadowed his eyes, while
he felt the pressure of the loveliest dreams.

When he awoke again, he was aware of a new fulness of light, purer and
steadier than the first radiance. He found himself lying on the green
turf, in the open air, beside a little fountain, which sparkled up and
melted away in silver spray. Dark-blue were the rocks that rose at a
little distance, veined with white as if strange words were written upon
them. Dark-blue was the sky, and cloudless.

All passion had dissolved away from him; every sound was music; every
breath was peace; the rocks were like sentinels protecting him; the sky
was like a cup of blessing full of tranquil light.

But what charmed him most, and drew him with resistless power, was a
tall, clear-blue flower, growing beside the spring, and almost touching
him with its broad, glistening leaves. Round about were many other
flowers, of all hues. Their odours mingled in a perfect chord of
fragrance. He saw nothing but the Blue Flower.

Long and tenderly he gazed at it, with unspeakable love. At last he felt
that he must go a little nearer to it, when suddenly it began to move
and change. The leaves glistened more brightly, and drew themselves up
closely around the swiftly growing stalk. The flower bent itself toward
him, and the petals showed a blue, spreading necklace of sapphires,
out of which the lovely face of a girl smiled softly into his eyes. His
sweet astonishment grew with the wondrous transformation.

All at once he heard his mother's voice calling him, and awoke in his
parents' room, already flooded with the gold of the morning sun.

From the German of Novalis.




THE SOURCE

I

In the middle of the land that is called by its inhabitants Koorma, and
by strangers the Land of the Half-forgotten, I was toiling all day long
through heavy sand and grass as hard as wire. Suddenly, toward evening,
I came upon a place where a gate opened in the wall of mountains, and
the plain ran in through the gate, making a little bay of level country
among the hills.

Now this bay was not brown and hard and dry, like the mountains above
me, neither was it covered with tawny billows of sand like the desert
along the edge of which I had wearily coasted. But the surface of it was
smooth and green; and as the winds of twilight breathed across it they
were followed by soft waves of verdure, with silvery turnings of the
under sides of many leaves, like ripples on a quiet harbour. There were
fields of corn, filled with silken rustling, and vineyards with long
rows of trimmed maple-trees standing each one like an emerald goblet
wreathed with vines, and flower-gardens as bright as if the earth
had been embroidered with threads of blue and scarlet and gold, and
olive-orchards frosted over with delicate and fragrant blossoms.
Red-roofed cottages were scattered everywhere through the sea of
greenery, and in the centre, like a white ship surrounded by a flock of
little boats, rested a small, fair, shining city.

I wondered greatly how this beauty had come into being on the border of
the desert. Passing through the fields and gardens and orchards, I found
that they were all encircled and lined with channels full of running
water. I followed up one of the smaller channels until it came to a
