The Bright Messenger

by Algernon Blackwood

  CHAPTER II

  The subsequent twenty years or so may be summarized.

  Alone in the world, of a loving, passionate nature, he deliberately setall thought of marriage on one side as an impossibility, and directedhis entire energy into the acquirement of knowledge; reading, studying,experimenting far outside the circle of the ordinary medical man. Theattitude of detachment he had adopted became a habit. He believed itwas now his nature.

  The more he learned of human frailty and human faculties, the greaterbecame the charity he felt towards his fellow-kind. In his own being,it seemed, lay something big, sweet, simple, a generosity that longedto share with others, a tolerance more ready to acquit than to condemn,above all, a great gift of understanding sympathy that, doubtless, wasthe explanation of his singular insight. Rarely he found it in him toblame; forgiveness, based upon the increasing extent of his experience,seemed his natural view of human mistakes and human infirmities. Hisone desire, his one hope, was to serve the Race.

  Yet he himself remained aloof. He watched the Play but took no part init. This forgiveness, too, began at home. His grievance had not souredor dejected him, his father's error presenting itself as a problem tobe pondered over, rather than a sin to blame. Some day, he promisedhimself, he would go and see with his own eyes the Khaketian tribewhence his blood was partially derived, whence his un-English yearningsfor a wilder scale of personal freedom amid an unstained, majesticNature were first stolen. The inherited picture of a Caucasian vale ofloveliness and liberty lay, indeed, very deep in his nature, emergingalways like a symbol when he was profoundly moved. At any crisis in hislife it rose beckoning, seductive, haunting beyond words.... Curious,ill-defined emotions with it, that drove him towards another standard,another state, to something, at any rate, he could neither name norvisualize, yet that seemed to dwarf the only life he knew. About itwas a touch of strange unearthly radiance that dimmed existence as heknew it. The shine went out of it. There was involved in this symbolic"Valley" something wholly new both in colour, sound and outline, yetthat remained obstinately outside definition.

  First, however, he must work, develop himself, and broaden, deepen,extend in every possible way the knowledge of his kind that seemed hisonly love.

  He began in a very practical way, setting up his plate in a meanquarter of the great metropolis, healing, helping, learning with hisheart as well as with his brain, observing life at closest quartersfrom its beginning to its close, his sympathies becoming enriched themore he saw, and his mind groping its way towards clearer insight themore he read, thought, studied. His wealth made him independent; histastes were simple; his wants few. He observed the great Play from thePit and Gallery, from the Wings, from Behind the Scenes as well.

  Moving then, into the Stalls, into a wealthier neighbourhood, thatis, he repeated the experience among another class, finding, however,little difference except in the greater artificiality of his types,the larger proportion of mental and nervous ailments, of hysteria,delusion, imaginary troubles, and the like. The infirmities due toidleness, enflamed vanity and luxury offered a new field, though to hima less attractive one. The farther from simplicity, from the raw factsof living, the more complicated, yet the more trivial, the resultingdisabilities. These, however, were quite as real as those, and harder,indeed, to cure. Idle imagination, fostered by opportunity and means,yet forced by conventionality to wear infinite disguises, brought astrange, if far from a noble, crop of disorders into his ken. Yet heaccepted them for serious treatment, whatever his private opinion mayhave been, while his patience, tact and sympathy, backed by his insightand great knowledge, brought him quick success. He was soon in a fairway to become a fashionable doctor.

  But the field, he found, was restricted somewhat. His quest wasknowledge, not fame or money. He chose his cases where he could,though actually refusing nothing. He specialized more and more withafflictions of a mental kind. He was immensely successful in restoringproportion out of disorder. He revealed people to themselves. Hetaught them to recover lost hope and confidence. He used littlemedicine, but stimulated the will towards a revival of fading vitality.Auto-suggestion, rather than suggestion or hypnotism, was his method.He healed. He began to be talked about.

  Then, suddenly, his house was sold, his plate was taken down, hevanished.

  Human beings object to sudden changes whose secret they have not beentold and cannot easily guess; his abrupt disappearance caused talk andrumours, led, of course, by those, chiefly disappointed women, whohad most reason to be grateful for past services. But, if the wordscharlatan and quack were whispered, he did not hear them; he had takenthe post of assistant in a lunatic asylum in a northern town, becausethe work promised him increase of knowledge and experience in his ownparticular field. The talk he left behind him mattered as little as thesmall pay attached to the humble duties he had accepted.

  London forgot him, but he did not forget what London had taught him.

  A new field opened, and in less than two years, opportunity, combinedwith his undoubted qualifications, saw him Head of an establishmentwhere he could observe at first hand the facts and phenomena thatinterested him most. Humane treatment, backed by profound insight intothe derangements of the poor human creatures under his charge, broughtthe place into a fame it had never known before. He spent five yearsthere in profound study and experiment; he achieved new results andpublished them. His _Experimental Psychology_ caused a sensation. Hisname was known. He was an Authority.

  At this time he was well past thirty, a tall, dark,distinguished-looking man, of appearance grave and even sombre;imposing, too, with his quiet, piercing eyes, but sombre only until thesmile lit up his somewhat rugged face. It was a face that nobody couldlie to, but to that smile the suffering heart might tell its inmostsecrets with confidence, hope, trust, and without reserve.

  There followed several years abroad, in Paris, Rome, St. Petersburg,Moscow; Vienna and Zurich he also visited to test there certain linesof research and to meet personally their originators.

  This period was partly a holiday, partly an opportunity to know atfirst hand the leaders in mental therapeutics, psychology and therest, and also that he might find time to digest and arrange hisown accumulation of knowledge with a view, later, to undertakingthe life-work to which his previous experience was but preliminary.Fame had come to him unsought; his published works alone ensured hisgoing down to posterity as a careful but daring and original judgeof the human species and its possibilities. It was the supernormalrather than the merely abnormal powers that attracted him. In thesubconscious, as, equally, in the superconscious, his deep experiencetaught him, lay amazing powers of both moral and physical healing,powers as yet but little understood, powers as limitless as they seemedincredible, as mysterious in their operation as they were simple intheir accessibility. And auto-suggestion was the means of using them.The great men whom he visited welcomed him with open arms, added tohis data, widened yet further his mental outlook. Sought by high andlow in many countries and in strangest cases, his experience grew andmultiplied, his assortment of unusual knowledge was far-reaching; tillhe stood finally in wonder and amazement before the human being and itsunrealized powers, and his optimism concerning the future progress ofthe race became more justified with every added fact.

  Yet, perhaps, his greatest achievement was the study of himself; it wasprobably to this deep, intimate and honest research into his own beingthat his success in helping others was primarily due. For in himself,though mastered and co-ordinated by his steady will, rendered harmlessby his saving sense of humour and (as he believed) by the absence ofany harboured grievance against others--in his very own being lay allthose potential elements of disorder, those loose unravelled threadsof alien impulse and suppressed desire, which can make for dangerousdisintegration, and thus produce the disturbing results classedgenerally under alienation and neurosis.

  The incongruous elements in him were the gift of nature; [Greek: gnothiseauton] was the saving attitude he brought to tha
t gift, redeemingit. This phrase, borrowed, he remembered with a smile, for the portalof the ancient Mysteries, remained his watchword. He was able tothank the fierce illicit love that furnished his body and his mentalmake-up for a richer field of first-hand study than years of practiceamong others could have supplied. He belonged by temperament to theunstable. But--he was aware of it. He realized the two beings in him:the reasoning, scientific man, and the speculative dreamer, visionary,poet. The latter wondered, dreamed among a totally different set ofvalues far below and out of sight. This deeper portion of himself wasforever beating up for recognition, clamouring to be used, yet withthe strange shyness that reminded him of a loving woman who cannot becertain her passion is returned. It hinted, threatened, wept and evensulked. It rose like a flame, bringing its own light and wind, blessedhis whole being with some divine assurance, and then, because notinstantly accepted, it retired, leaving him empty, his mind colouredwith unearthly yearnings, with poignant regrets, yet perfumed as thoughthe fairness of Spring herself had lit upon his heart and kissed itinto blossom on her passage north. It presented its amazing pictures,and withdrew. Elusive, as the half memory of some radiant dream, whosewonder and sweetness have been intense to the point of almost pain, ithovered, floating just out of reach. It lay waiting for that sincerebelief which would convince that its passion was returned. And afleeting picture of a wild Caucasian valley, steeped in sunshine andflowers, was always the first sign of its awakening.

  Though not afraid of reason, it seemed somehow independent of thelatter's processes. It was his reason, however, he well knew thatdimmed the light in its grand, terrible eyes, causing it to withdrawthe instant he began to question. Precise, formal thinking shut theengines off and damped the furnaces. His love, his passion, none theless, were there, hiding with belief, until some bright messenger,bringing glad tidings, should reveal the method of harmonious unionbetween reason and vision, between man's trivial normal faculties andhis astounding supernormal possibilities.

  "This element of feeling in our outlook on Nature is a satisfaction initself, but our plea for allowing it to operate in our interpretationof Nature is that we get closer to some things through feeling thanwe do through science. The tendency of feeling is always to seethings whole. We cannot, for our life's sake, and for the sake of ourphilosophical reconstruction, afford to lose in scientific analysiswhat the poets and artists and the lovers of Nature all see. It isintuitively felt, rather than intellectually perceived, the vision ofthings as totalities, root and all, all in all; neither fancifully, normystically, but sympathetically in their wholeness."

  To these words of Professor T. Arthur Thomson's, he heartilysubscribed, applying their principle to his own particular field.