Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  This view of his only ‘silver talent,’ moreover, was never permitted by the nature of his life to alter. His early American experiences stiffened it into a conviction which he yet despised. The fires ran hidden, if unchecked. Had he dwelt in cities, they might have suffered total extinction perhaps, but here, in the heart of the free woods, they speedily rose to the surface again and flamed. He grew up singularly unspoilt, the shyness of the original nature utterly uncorrected, the stores of a poetic imagination accumulating steadily, but always unuttered.

  For his sole companions all these years when he had any at all were the ‘Bosses’ of the lumber camps he inspected, the ‘Cookee’ who looked after his stew-pot in the ‘home-shack,’ and the half-breed Indian who accompanied him in the stern-seat of the bark canoe during the month-long trips about the wilderness: these — with the animals, winds, stars, and the forms of beauty his imagination for ever conjured out of them.

  For twenty years he lived thus, knowing all the secrets of the woods and streams. In the summer he never slept under cover at all, so that even in sleep he understood, through closed eyelids, the motions of the stars behind the tangled network of branches overhead. In winter his snow-shoes carried him into the heart of the most dazzling scenes imaginable — the forest lying under many feet of snow with a cloudless sun lifting it all into an appearance of magic that took the breath away. Moreover, the fierce spring, when the streams became impassable floods, and the autumn, with a flaming glory of gold and scarlet unknown anywhere else in the world, he knew as intimately as the dryads themselves.

  And all these moods became the intimate companions of his life, taking the place of men and women. He came to personify Nature as a matter of course.

  Without knowing it, too, the place of children was taken somehow by the wild animals. He knew them all. He surprised them in their haunts in the course of his silent journeys into the heart of their playgrounds; and his headquarters — a one-story shanty on the height of land between his two chief ‘limits’ — was never without a tamed baby bear, a young moose to draw him on his snow-shoes with the manners of a well-bred pony, and a dozen other animals reclaimed from savagery and turned by some mysterious system of his own into real companions and confidants.

  And the only books he read in the long winter nights, besides a few modern American novels that puzzled and vaguely distressed him, were Blake, his loved Greek plays, and the Bible.

  He rarely saw a woman. Sides of his nature that ought to have developed under the influences of normal life at home lay dormant altogether, or were filled as best might be by his intercourse with Nature. He wrote few letters. After Dick Messenger died, the formal correspondence he kept up at long intervals with his sister — Dick’s widow — hardly deserved the name of letters. Great slabs of him, so to speak, stopped growing up, sinking down into the subconscious region to await conditions favourable for calling them to the surface again, and eventually coming to life — this was his tragic little secret — at a time when they were long overdue.

  To the end of life he remained shy, shy in the sense that most of his thoughts and emotions he was afraid to reveal to others; with the shyness, too, of the utterly modest soul that cannot believe the world will give it the very things it has most right to claim, yet never dares to claim. And to the end Nature never lifted the spell laid upon him during those twenty years of initiation in her solitudes. To see the new moon tilting her silver horns in the west; to hear the wind rustling in high trees, like old Indians telling one another secrets of the early world; and to see the first stars looking down from the height of sky through spaces of watery blue — these, and a hundred other things that the majority seemed to ignore, were to him a more moving and terrible delight than anything he could imagine. For him such things could never be explained away, but remained living and uncorrected to the end.

  Thus when, at forty-five, he inherited the fortune of his aunt (which he had always known must one day come to him), he returned to England with the shy, bursting, dream-laden heart of a boy, young as only those are young whom life has kept clean and sweet in the wilderness; and the question that sprang to life in his heart when he saw the blue line of coast was a vague wonder as to what would become of his full-blooded dreams when tested by the conventional English life that he remembered as a boy. To whom could he speak of his child-like yearning after God; of his swift divinations, his passionate intuitions into the very things that the majority put away with childhood? What modern priest — so he felt, at least — what befuddled mystic, could possibly enter into the essential nature of these cravings as he did, or understand, without a sneer, the unspoilt passions of a man who had never ‘grown up’?

  ‘I shall be out of touch with it all,’ he thought as he stood there in the bows and watched the blue line grow nearer, ‘utterly out of touch. What shall I find to say to the men of my own age — I, who stopped growing up twenty years ago? How shall I ever link on with them? Children are the only things I can talk to, and children!’ — he shrugged his shoulders and laughed—’ children will find me out at once and give me away to the others.’

  ‘Dick’s children, though, may be different!’ came the sudden reflection. ‘Only — I’ve had nothing to do with children for such ages. Dick had real imagination. By George,’ — and his eyes glowed a moment—’ what if they took after him!”

  And for the fiftieth time, as he pictured the meeting with his stranger sister, his heart sank, and he found refuge in the knowledge that he had not altogether burned his boats behind him. For he had been wise in his generation. He had arranged with his Company, who were only too glad of the chance of keeping his services, that he should go to England on a year’s leave, and that if in the end he decided to return he should have a share in the business, while still continuing the work of forest-inspection that he loved.

  ‘I’m nothing but a wood-cruiser. I shall go back. In the big world I might lose all my vision!’

  And, having lived so long out of the world, he now came back to it with this simple, innocent, imaginative heart of a great boy, a boy still dreaming, for all his five-and-forty years. Fully realising that something was wrong with him, that he ought to be more sedate, more cynical, more prosaic and sober, he yet could not quite explain to himself wherein lay the source of his disability. His thoughts stumbled and blundered when he tried to lay his finger on it, with the only result that he felt he would be ‘out of touch’ with his new world, not knowing exactly how or why.

  ‘It’s a regular log-jam,’ he said, using the phraseology he was accustomed to, ‘and I’m sorry for the chap that breaks it.’

  It never occurred to him that in this simple thrill that Nature still gave him he possessed one of the greatest secrets for the preservation of genuine youth; indeed, had he understood this, it would have meant that he was already old. For with the majority such dreams die young, brushed rudely from the soul by the iron hand of experience, whereas in his case it was their persistent survival that lent such a childlike quality to his shyness, and made him secretly ashamed of not feeling as grown-up as he realised he ought to feel.

  Paul Rivers, in a word, belonged to a comprehensible though perhaps not over common type, and one not often recognised owing to the elaborate care with which its ‘specimens’ conceal themselves from the world under all manner of brave disguises.

  He was destitute of that nameless quality that constitutes a human being, not mature necessarily, but grown up. Sources of inner enthusiasm that most men lose when life brings to them the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, had kept alive; and though on the one hand he was secretly ashamed of the very simplicity of his great delights, on the other hand he longed intensely for some means by which he could express them and relieve his burdened soul.

  He envied the emigrant who could let fall hot tears on the deck without further ado, while at the same time he dreaded the laughter of the world into which he was about to move when they learned the cause of the emotions that
produced them. A boy at forty-five! A dreamer of children’s dreams with fifty in sight — and no practical results!

  These were some of the thoughts still tumbling vaguely about his mind when the tug brought letters aboard at Queenstown, and on the dining-room table where they were spread out he found one for himself in a handwriting that he both welcomed and dreaded.

  CHAPTER III

  HE welcomed it, because for years it had been the one remaining link with the life of his old home — these formal epistles that reached him at long intervals; and he dreaded it, because he knew it would contain a definite invitation of an embarrassing description.

  ‘She’s bound to ask me,’ he reflected as he opened it in his cabin; ‘she can’t help herself. And I am bound to accept, for I can’t help myself either.’ He was far too honest to think of inventing elaborate excuses. ‘I’ve got to go and spend a month with her right away whether I like it or not.’

  It was not by any means that he disliked his sister, for indeed he hardly knew her; after all these years he barely remembered what she looked like, the slim girl of eighteen he had left behind. It was simply that in his mind she stood for the conventional life, so alien to his vision, to which he had returned.

  He would try to like her, certainly. Very warm impulses stirred in his heart as he thought of her — his only near relative in the world, and the widow of his old school and Cambridge friend, Dick Messenger. It was in her handwriting that he first learned of Dick’s love for her, as it was in hers that the news of his friend’s death reached him — after his long tour — two months old. The handwriting was a symbol of the deepest human emotions he had known. And for that reason, too, he dreaded it.

  He never realised quite what kind of woman she had become; in his thoughts she had always remained simply the girl of eighteen — grown up — married. Her letters had been very kind and gentle, if in the nature of the case more and more formal. She became shadowy and vague in his mind as the years passed, and more and more he had come to think of her as wholly out of his own world. Reading between the lines it was not difficult to see that she attached importance to much in life that seemed to him unreal and trivial, whereas the things that he thought vital she never referred to at all. It might, of course, be merely restraint concealing great depths. He could not tell. The letters, after a few years, had become like formal government reports. He had written fully, however, to announce his home-coming, and her reply had been full of genuine pleasure.

  ‘I don’t think she’ll make very much of me,’ was the thought in his mind whenever he dwelt upon it. ‘I’m afraid my world must seem foreign: — unreal to her; the things I know rubbish.’

  So, in the privacy of his cabin, his heart already strangely astir by the emotion of that blue line on the horizon, he read his sister’s invitation and found it charming. There was spontaneous affection in it.

  ‘We shall fix things up between us so that no one would ever know.’ He did not explain what it was ‘no one would ever know,’ but went on to finish the letter. He was to make his home with her in the country, he read, until he decided what to do with himself. The tone of the letter made his heart bound. It was a real welcome, and he responded to it instantly like a boy. Only one thing in it seriously disturbed his equanimity. Absurd as it may seem, the fact that his sister’s welcome included also that of the children, had a subtly disquieting effect upon him.

  ... for they are dying to see you and to find out for themselves what the big old uncle they have heard so much about is really like. All their animals are being cleaned and swept so as to be ready for your arrival, and, in anticipation of your stories of the backwoods, no other tales find favour with them any more.

  An expression of perplexity puckered his face.

  ‘I declare, I’m afraid of those children — Dick’s children!’ he thought, holding the open letter to his mouth and squinting down the page, while his eyebrows rose and his forehead broke into lines ‘They’ll find out what I am. They’ll betray me.

  I shall never be able to hold out against them.’ He knew only too well how searching was the appeal that all growing and immature life made to him. It touched the very centre of him that had refused to grow up and that made him young with itself.

  ‘I can no more resist them than I could resist the baby bears, or that little lynx that used to eat out of my hand.’ He shrugged his big shoulders, looking genuinely distressed. ‘And then every one will know what I am — an overgrown boy — a dumb poet — a dreamer of dreams that bear no fruit!’

  He was not morbidly introspective. He was merely trying to face the little problem squarely. He got up and staggered across the cabin, steadying himself against the rolling of the ship in front of the looking-glass.

  ‘Big Old Uncle!’

  He stuffed the letter into his pocket and surveyed himself critically. Big he certainly was, but that other adjective brought with it a sensation of weariness that had never yet troubled him in his wilderness existence. He was only a little, just a very little, on the shady side of forty-five, but to the children he might seem really old, aged, and to his sister, who was considerably his junior, as elderly,’ and perhaps in need of the comforts of the elderly.

  He squared his shoulders and looked more closely into the glass. There, opposite to him, stood a tall, dignified man in a blue suit, with a spotless linen collar and a neat tie passing through a gold ring, instead of the unkempt fellow he was accustomed to in a flannel shirt, red handkerchief and big sombrero hat pulled over his eyes; a man weighing the best part of fifteen stones, lean, well-knit, vigorous, and nearly six feet three in his socks. A pair of brown eyes, kindly brown eyes he thought, met his own questioningly, and a brown beard — yes, it was still brown — covered the lower part of the face. He put up a hand to stroke it, and noticed that it was a strong, muscular hand, sunburnt but well kept, with neat finger-nails, and a heavy signet ring on one finger. It brushed across the rather deep lines on the bronzed forehead, without brushing them away, however, and then travelled higher to the rough parting in the dark-brown hair, and the hair, he noticed, was brushed in a particular way evidently, a way he thought no one would notice but himself and the lumber-camp barber who first taught him, so as to cover up a few places where the wind made little chilly feelings in winter-time under his fur cap.

  Old? No, not old yet — but “getting on” was a gentler phrase he could not deny, and there were certainly odd traces where the crows had walked on his skin while he slept in the forest, and had hopped up even to the corners of his eyes to see if he were really asleep. There were other lines, too — lines of exposure, traced by wind and sun, and one or two queer marks that are said only to come from prolonged hardship and severest want. For he had known both sides of the wilderness life, and on his long journeys Nature had not always been kind to him.

  He stared for a long time at his reflection in the glass, lost in reverie. This coming back to England after so many years was like looking at a picture of himself as he was when he had left; it furnished him with a ready standard of comparison; the changes of the years stood out very sharply, as though they had come about in a single night.

  Yes, his face and figure had aged a good deal. He admitted it. And when he frowned he had distinctly an appearance of middle age. This, of course, was the absurd part of it, for in spirit he had remained as young as he was at twenty, as enthusiastic, hopeful, spontaneous as ever, just as much in love with the world, and just as full of boyhood’s dreams as when he went to Cambridge. And in his eyes still burned the strange flames that sought to pierce behind the veil of appearances.

  ‘And those children will find it out and make me look ridiculous before I’ve been there a week!’ he exclaimed again, sitting down on his bunk with a crash as the steamer gave a sudden lurch; ‘and then where shall I be, I’d like to know?’

  He lay on his back for an hour thinking out a plan of action. For, of course, he decided that he must go; only — he must go disguised.
And he spent hours inventing the disguise, and more hours perfecting it. For the first time in his life he would adopt a distinct attitude, and, having carefully thought out the attitude he intended to adopt by way of disguise, he buckled it on like armour and fastened it very securely indeed to his large person.

  He would be kind; he would even meet the children half-way, kiss them if necessary at stated times, in a stated way, and perhaps occasionally unbend a little as opportunity served and circumstances permitted. But never must he forget, or allow them to forget, that he was a stiff and elderly man, a little grim and gruff, sometimes even severe and short-tempered, and never to be trifled with at any time, or under any conditions.

  Over the tenderer emotions he must keep especial watch; these were a direct channel to his secrets, and once the old unsatisfied enthusiasms escaped, there was no saying what might happen. The thought frightened him, for the pain involved might be very great indeed.

  With people of his own age, he realised, the danger would be less. Silence and reserve cover a multitude of shortcomings. But children, he knew, had a simple audacity, a merciless penetration, that no mere pose could ever withstand. And this he felt intuitively, knowing nothing of children, but being taught by these very qualities in himself. Like little animals they would soon find the direct channel to his heart unless well guarded, and come tumbling along it without delay. And then — !

  So Paul Rivers left London the very next day, glad in many ways to think that he had this haven of refuge to go to from the noisy horror of the huge strange city; yet with a sinking of his heart lest his true self should be discovered, and held up to scorn.

  Moreover, the strange part of it was that as he sped down through the smiling green country that spring afternoon, armed from head to foot in the rigid steel casings of his disguise, he seemed to hear a faint singing deep within him, a singing that belonged to the youngest part of him and yet sprang from that which was vastly ancient, but as to the cause of which he was so puzzled that, in his efforts to analyse it, he forgot about his journey altogether, and was nearly carried past the station where he had to get out.