Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  “He is not a human being at all,” he continued with a queer thin whisper that conveyed a gravity of conviction singularly impressive, “in the sense in which you and I are accustomed to use the term. His inner being is not shaped, as his outer body, upon quite — human lines. He is a Cosmic Being — a direct expression of cosmic life. A little bit, a fragment, of the Soul of the World, and in that sense a survival — a survival of her youth.”

  The Irishman, as he listened to these utterly unexpected words, felt something rise within him that threatened to tear him asunder. Whether it was joy or terror, or compounded strangely of the two, he could not tell. It seemed as if he stood upon the edge of hearing something — spoken by a man who was no mere dreamer like himself — that would explain the world, himself, and all his wildest cravings. He both longed and feared to hear it. In his hidden and most secret thoughts, those thoughts he never uttered to another, this deep belief in the Earth as a conscious, sentient, living Being had persisted in spite of all the forces education and modern life had turned against it. It seemed in him an undying instinct, an unmovable conviction, though he hardly dared acknowledge it even to himself.

  He had always “dreamed” the Earth alive, a mothering organism to humanity; and himself, via his love of Nature, in some sweet close relation to her that other men had forgotten or ignored. Now, therefore, to hear Stahl talk of Cosmic Beings, fragments of the Soul of the World, and “survivals of her early life” was like hearing a great shout of command to his soul to come forth and share it in complete acknowledgment.

  He bit his lips, pinched himself, stared. Then he took the black cigar he was aware was being handed to him, lit it with fingers that trembled absurdly, and smoked as hard as though his sanity depended on his finishing it in a prescribed time. Great clouds rose before his face. But his soul within him came up with a flaming rush of speed, shouting, singing….

  There was enough ash to knock off into the bronze tray beside him before either said a word. He watched the little operation as closely as though he were aiming a rifle. The ash, he saw, broke firmly. “This must be a really good cigar,” he thought to himself, for as yet he had not been conscious of tasting it. The ash-tray, he also saw, was a kind of nymph, her spread drapery forming the receptacle. “I must get one of those,” he thought. “I wonder what they cost.” Then he puffed violently again. The doctor had risen and was pacing the cabin floor slowly over by the red curtain that concealed the bunk. O’Malley absent-mindedly watched him, and as he did so the words he had heard kept on roaring at the back of his mind.

  And then, while silence still held the room, — swift, too, as a second although it takes time to write — flashed through him a memory of Fechner, the German philosopher who held that the Universe was everywhere consciously alive, and that the Earth was the body of a living Entity, and that the World-Soul or Cosmic Consciousness is something more than a picturesque dream of the ancients….

  The doctor came to anchor again on the sofa opposite. To his great relief he was the first to break the silence, for O’Malley simply did not know how or where to begin.

  “We know today — you certainly know for I’ve read it accurately described in your books — that the human personality can extend itself under certain conditions called abnormal. It can project portions of itself, show itself even at a distance, operate away from the central covering body. In exactly similar fashion may the Being of the Earth have projected portions of herself in the past. Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival … a survival of a hugely remote period when her Consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity … forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds….”

  And then, suddenly, as though he had been deliberately giving his imagination rein yet now regretted it, his voice altered, his manner assumed a shade of something colder. He shifted the key, as though to another aspect of his belief. The man was talking swiftly of his experiences in the big and private hospitals. He was describing the very belief to which he had first found himself driven — the belief that had opened the door to so much more. So far as O’Malley could follow it in his curiously excited condition of mind, it was little more or less than a belief he himself had often played lovingly with — the theory that a man has a fluid or etheric counterpart of himself which is obedient to strong desire and can, under certain conditions, be detached — projected in a shape dictated by that desire.

  He only realized this fully later perhaps, for the doctor used a phraseology of his own. Stahl was telling calmly how he had been driven to some such belief by the facts that had come under his notice both in the asylums and in his private practice.

  “…That in the amazingly complex personality of a human being,” he went on, “there does exist some vital constituent, a part of consciousness, that can leave the body for a short time without involving death; that it is something occasionally visible to others; something malleable by thought and desire — especially by intense and prolonged yearning; and that it can even bring relief to its owner by satisfying in some subjective fashion the very yearnings that drew it forth.”

  “Doctor! You mean the ‘astral’?”

  “There is no name I know of. I can give it none. I mean in other words that it can create the conditions for such satisfaction — dream-like, perhaps, yet intense and seemingly very real at the time. Great emotion, for instance, drives it forth, explaining thus appearances at a distance, and a hundred other phenomena that my investigations of abnormal personality have forced me to recognize as true. And nostalgia often is the means of egress, the channel along which all the inner forces and desires of the heart stream elsewhere toward their fulfillment in some person, place, or dream.”

  Stahl was giving himself his head, talking freely of beliefs that rarely found utterance. Clearly it was a relief to him to do so — to let himself be carried away. There was, after all, the poet in him side by side with the observer and analyst, and the fundamental contradiction in his character stood most interestingly revealed. O’Malley listened, half in a dream, wondering what this had to do with the Cosmic Life just mentioned.

  “Moreover, the appearance, the aspect of this etheric Double, molded thus by thought, longing, and desire, corresponds to such thought, longing, and desire. Its shape, when visible shape is assumed, may be various — very various. The form might conceivably be felt, discerned clairvoyantly as an emanation rather than actually seen,” he continued.

  Then he added, looking closely at his companion, “and in your own case this Double — it has always seemed to me — may be peculiarly easy of detachment from the rest of you.”

  “I certainly create my own world and slip into it — to some extent,” murmured the Irishman, absorbingly interested; “ — reverie and so forth; partially, at any rate.”

  “‘Partially,’ yes, in your reveries of waking consciousness,” Stahl took him up, “but in sleep — in the trance consciousness — completely! And therein lies your danger,” he added gravely; “for to pass out completely in waking consciousness, is the next step — an easy one; and it constitutes, not so much a disorder of your being, as a readjustment, but a readjustment difficult of sane control.” He paused again. “You pass out while fully awake — a waking delusion. It is usually labeled — though in my opinion wrongly so — insanity.”

  “I’m not afraid of that,” O’Malley laughed, almost nettled. “I can manage myself all right — have done so far, at any rate.”

  It was curious how the rôles had shifted. O’Malley it was now who checked and criticized.

  “I suggest caution,” was the reply, made earnestly. “I suggest caution.”

  “I should keep your warnings for mediums, clairvoyants, and the like,” said the other tartly. He was half amazed, half alarmed even while he said it. It was the personal application that annoyed h
im. “They are rather apt to go off their heads, I believe.”

  Dr. Stahl rose and stood before him as though the words had given him a cue he wanted. “From that very medium-class,” he said, “my most suggestive ‘cases’ have come, though not for one moment do I think of including you with them. Yet these very ‘cases’ have been due one and all to the same cause — the singular disorder I have just mentioned.”

  They stared at one another a moment in silence. Stahl, whether O’Malley liked it or no, was impressive. He gazed at the little figure in front of him, the ragged untidy beard, the light shining on the bald skull, wondering what was coming next and what all this bewildering confession of unorthodox belief was leading up to. He longed to hear more about that hinted Cosmic Life … and how yearning might lead to its realization.

  “For any phenomena of the séance-room that may be genuine,” he heard him saying, “are produced by this fluid, detachable portion of the personality, the very thing we have been speaking about. They are projections of the personality — automatic projections of the consciousness.”

  And then, like a clap of thunder upon his bewildered mind, came this man’s amazing ultimatum, linking together all the points touched upon and bringing them to a head. He repeated it emphatically.

  “And in similar fashion,” concluded the calm, dispassionate voice beside him, “there have been projections of the Earth’s great consciousness — direct expressions of her cosmic life — Cosmic Beings. And of these distant and primitive manifestations, it is conceivable that one or two may still — here and there in places humanity has never stained — actually survive. This man is one of them.”

  He turned on the two electric lights behind him with an admirable air of finality. The extraordinary talk was at an end. He moved about the cabin, putting chairs straight and toying with the papers on his desk. Occasionally he threw a swift and searching glance at his companion, like a man who wished to note the effect of an attack.

  For, indeed, this was the impression that his listener retained above all else. This flood of wild, unorthodox, speculative ideas had been poured upon him helter-skelter with a purpose. And the abruptness of the climax was cleverly planned to induce impulsive, hot confession.

  But O’Malley found no words. He sat there in his armchair, passing his fingers through his tumbled hair. His inner turmoil was too much for speech or questions … and presently, when the gong for dinner rang noisily outside the cabin door, he rose abruptly and went out without a single word. Stahl turned to see him go. He merely nodded with a little smile.

  But he did not go to his stateroom. He walked the deck alone for a time, and when he reached the dining room, Stahl, he saw, had already come and gone. Halfway down the table, diagonally across, the face of the big Russian looked up occasionally at him and smiled, and every time he did so the Irishman felt a sense of mingled alarm and wonder greater than anything he had ever known in his life before. One of the great doors of life again had opened. The barriers of his heart broke away. He was no longer caged and manacled within the prison of a puny individuality. The world that so distressed him faded. The people in it were dolls. The fur-merchant, the Armenian priest, the tourists and the rest were mere automatic puppets, all made to scale — petty scale, amazingly dull, all exactly alike — tiny, unreal, half alive.

  The ship, meanwhile, he reflected with a joy that was passion, was being borne over the blue sea, and this sea lay spread upon the curved breast of the round and spinning earth. He, too, and the big Russian lay upon her breast, held close by gravity so-called, caught closer still, though, by something else besides. And his longings increased with his understanding. Stahl, wittingly or unwittingly, had given them an immense push forwards.

  CHAPTER XI

  “In scientific terms one can say: Consciousness is everywhere; it is awake when and wherever the bodily energy underlying the spiritual exceeds that degree of strength which we call the threshold. According to this, consciousness can be localized in time and space.” — FECHNER, Buchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode

  The offer of the cabin, meanwhile, remained open. In the solitude that O’Malley found necessary that evening he toyed with it, though knowing that he would never really accept.

  Like a true Celt his imagination took the main body of Stahl’s words and ensouled them with his own vivid temperament. There stirred in him this nameless and disquieting joy that wrought for itself a Body from material just beyond his thoughts — that region of enormous experience that ever fringes the consciousness of imaginative men. He took the picture at its face value, took it inside with his own thoughts, delighted in it, raised it, of course, very soon to a still higher scale. If he criticized at all it was with phrases like “The man’s a poet after all! Why, he’s got creative imagination!” To find his own intuitions endorsed, even half explained, by a mind of opposite type was a new experience. It emphasized amazingly the reality of that inner world he lived in.

  This explanation of the big Russian’s effect upon himself was terrific, and that a “doctor” should have conceived it, glorious. That some portion of a man’s spirit might assume the shape of his thoughts and project itself visibly seemed likely enough. Indeed, to him, it seemed already a “fact,” and his temperament did not linger over it. But that other suggestion fairly savaged him with its strange grandeur. He played lovingly with it.

  That the Earth was a living being was a conception divine in size as in simplicity, and that the Gods and mythological figures had been projections of her consciousness — this thought ran with a magnificent new thunder about his mind. It was overwhelming, beautiful as Heaven and as gracious. He saw the ancient shapes of myth and legend still alive in some gorgeous garden of the primal world, a corner too remote for humanity to have yet stained it with their trail of uglier life. He understood in quite a new way, at last, those deep primitive longings that hitherto had vainly craved their full acknowledgment. It meant that he lay so close to the Earth that he felt her pulses as his own. The idea stormed his belief.

  It was the Soul of the Earth herself that all these years had been calling to him.

  And while he let his imagination play with the soaring beauty of the idea, he remembered certain odd little facts. He marshaled them before him in a row and questioned them: The picture he had seen with the Captain’s glasses — those speeding shapes of beauty; the new aspect of a living Nature that the Russian’s presence stirred in him; the man’s broken words as they had leaned above the sea in the dusk; the curious passion that leaped to his eyes when certain chance words had touched him at the dinner-table. And, lastly, the singular impression of giant bulk he produced sometimes upon the mind, almost as though a portion of him — this detachable portion molded by the quality of his spirit as he felt himself to be — emerged visibly to cause it.

  Vaguely, in this way, O’Malley divined how inevitable was the apparent isolation of these two, and why others instinctively avoided them. They seemed by themselves in an enclosure where the parent lumberingly, and the boy defiantly, disported themselves with a kind of lonely majesty that forbade approach.

  And it was later that same night, as the steamer approached the Lipari Islands, that the drive forward he had received from the doctor’s words was increased by a succession of singular occurrences. At the same time, Stahl’s deliberate and as he deemed it unjustifiable interference, helped him to make up his mind decisively on certain other points.

  The first “occurrence” was of the same order as the “bigness” — extraordinarily difficult, that is, to confirm by actual measurement.

  It was ten o’clock, Stahl still apparently in his cabin by himself, and most of the passengers below at an impromptu concert, when the Irishman, coming down from his long solitude, caught sight of the Russian and his boy moving about the dark after-deck with a speed and vigor that instantly arrested his attention. The suggestion of size, and of rapidity of movement, had never been more marked. It was as though a cloud of the summer da
rkness moved beside them.

  Then, going cautiously nearer, he saw that they were neither walking quickly, nor running, as he had first supposed, but — to his amazement — were standing side by side upon the deck — stock still. The appearance of motion, however, was not entirely a delusion, for he next saw that, while standing there steady as the mast and life-boats behind them, something emanated shadow-like from both their persons and seemed to hover and play about them — something that was only approximately of their own outer shapes, and very considerably larger. Now it veiled them, now left them clear. He thought of smoke-clouds moving to and fro about dark statues.

  So far as he could focus his sight upon them, these “shadows,” without any light to cast them, moved in distorted guise there on the deck with a motion that was somehow rhythmical — a great movement as of dance or gambol.

  As with the appearance of “bigness,” he perceived it first out of the corner of his eye. When he looked again he saw only two dark figures, motionless.

  He experienced the sensation a man sometimes knows on entering a deserted chamber in the nighttime, and is aware that the things in it have just that instant — stopped. His arrival puts abrupt end to some busy activity they were engaged in, which begins again the moment he goes. Chairs, tables, cupboards, the very spots and patterns of the wall have just flown back to their usual places whence they watch impatiently for his departure — with the candle.

  This time, on a deck instead of in a room, O’Malley with his candle had surprised them in the act: people, moreover, not furniture. And this shadowy gambol, this silent Dance of the Emanations, immense yet graceful, made him think of Winds flying, visible and uncloaked, somewhere across long hills, or of Clouds passing to a stately, elemental measure over the blue dancing-halls of an open sky. His imagery was confused and gigantic, yet very splendid. Again he recalled the pictured shapes seen with his mind’s eye through the Captain’s glasses. And as he watched, he felt in himself what he called “the wild, tearing instinct to run and join them,” more even — that by rights he ought to have been there from the beginning — dancing with them — indulging a natural and instinctive and rhythmical movement that he had somehow forgotten.