Читать книгу The Complete Works of Algernon Blackwood. Novels, Short Stories, Horror Classics, Occult & Supernatural Tales, Plays онлайн

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'Riquette would like a bit,' cried Jimbo, almost balancing on his head in his efforts to get it all at once, while Monkey's shining fingers stuffed her blouse and skirts with sheaves of golden gossamer that later she meant to spread in a sheet upon the pillow of Mademoiselle Lemaire.

'She sleeps so little that she needs the best,' she sang, realising for once that her own amusement was not the end of life. 'I'll make her nights all wonder.'

Cousinenry, meanwhile, worked steadily like a man who knows his time is short. He piled the stuff in heaps and pyramids, and then compressed it into what seemed solid blocks that made his pockets bulge like small balloons. Already a load was on his back that bent him double.

'Such a tiny bit is useful,' he explained, 'if you know exactly how and where to put it. This compression is my own patent.'

'Of course,' they echoed, trying in vain to pack it up as cleverly as he did.

Nor were these three the only gatherers. The place was full of movement. Jane Anne was always coming back for more, deigning no explanations. She never told where she had spent her former loads. She gathered an apron full, sped off to spend and scatter it in places she knew of, and then came bustling in again for more. And they always knew her whereabouts because of the whiter glory that she radiated into the dim yellow world about them.