Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  “Another glass?” suggested Stahl. “A drink to the gods of the Future, and till we meet again, on your return journey, eh?”

  “I’ll walk with you to the steamer,” was the reply. “I never care for much wine. And the gods of the Future will prefer my usual offering, I think — imaginative faith.”

  The doctor did not ask him to explain. They walked down the middle of the narrow streets. No one was about, nor were there lights in many windows. Once or twice from an upper story came the faint twanging of a balalaika against the drone of voices, and occasionally they passed a little garden where figures outlined themselves among the trees, with the clink of glasses, laughter of men and girls, and the glowing tips of cigarettes.

  They turned down toward the harbor where the spars and funnels of the big steamers were just visible against the sky, and opposite the unshuttered window of a shop — one of those modern shops that oddly mar the town with assorted German tinware, Paris hats, and oleographs indiscriminately mingled — Stahl stopped a moment and pointed. They moved up idly and looked in. From the shadows of the other side, well hidden, an armed patrol eyed them suspiciously, though they were not aware of it.

  “It was before a window like this,” remarked Stahl, apparently casually, “that I once in Tiflis overheard two mountain Georgians talking together as they examined a reproduction of a modern picture — Böcklin’s ‘Centaur.’ They spoke in half whispers, but I caught the trend of what they said. You know the picture, perhaps?”

  “I’ve seen it somewhere, yes,” was the short reply. “But what were they saying?” He strove to keep his voice commonplace and casual like his companion’s.

  “Oh, just discussing it together, but with a curious stretched interest,” Stahl went on. “One asked, ‘What does it say?’ and pointed to the inscription underneath. They could not read. For a long time they stared in silence, their faces grave and half afraid. ‘What is it?’ repeated the first one, and the other, a much older man, heavily bearded and of giant build, replied low, ‘It’s what I told you about’; there was awe in his tone and manner; ‘they still live in the big valley of the rhododendrons beyond—’ mentioning some lonely uninhabited region toward Daghestan; ‘they come in the spring, and are very swift and roaring….You must always hide. To see them is to die. But they cannot die; they are of the mountains. They are older, older than the stones. And the dogs will warn you, or the horses, or sometimes a great sudden wind, though you must never shoot.’ They stood gazing in solemn wonder for minutes…till at last, realizing that their silence was final, I moved away. There were manifestations of life in the mountains, you see, that they had seen and knew about — old forms akin to that picture apparently.”

  The patrol came out of his shadows, and Stahl quickly drew his companion along the pavement.

  “You have your passport with you?” he asked, noticing the man behind them.

  “It went to the police this afternoon. I haven’t got it back yet.” O’Malley spoke thickly, in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. How much he welcomed that casual interruption of the practical world he could never explain or tell. For the moment he had felt like wax in the other’s hands. He had dreaded searching questions, and felt unspeakably relieved. A minute more and he would have burst into confession.

  “You should never be without it,” the doctor added. “The police here are perfect fiends, and can cause you endless inconvenience.”

  O’Malley knew it all, but gladly seized the talk and spun it out, asking innocent questions while scarcely listening to the answers. They distanced the patrol and neared the quays and shipping. In the darkness of the sky a great line showed where the spurs of the Lesser Caucasus gloomed huge and solemn to the East and West. At the gangway of the steamer they said good-bye. Stahl held the Irishman’s hand a moment in his own.

  “Remember, when you know temptation strong,” he said gravely, though a smile was in the eyes, “the passwords that I now give you: Humanity and Civilization.”

  “I’ll try.”

  They shook hands warmly enough.

  “Come home by this steamer if you can,” he called down from the deck. “And keep to the middle of the road on your way back to the hotel. It’s safer in a town like this.” O’Malley divined the twinkle in his eyes as he said it. “Forgive my many sins,” he heard finally, “and when we meet again, tell me your own….” The darkness took the sentence. But the word the Irishman took home with him to the little hotel was the single one — Civilization: and this, owing to the peculiar significance of intonation and accent with which this bewildering and self-contradictory being had uttered it.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  He walked along the middle of the street as Stahl had advised. He would have done so in any case, unconsciously, for he knew these towns quite as well as the German did. Yet he did not walk alone. The entire Earth walked with him, and personal danger was an impossibility. A dozen ruffians might attack him, but none could “take” his life.

  How simple it all seemed, yet how utterly beyond the reach of intelligible description to those who have never felt it — this sudden surge upwards, downwards, all around and about of the vaster consciousness amid which the sense of normal individuality seemed but a tiny focused point. That loss of personality he first dreaded as an “inner catastrophe” appeared to him now for what it actually was — merely an extinction of some phantasmal illusion of self into the only true life. Here, upon the fringe of this wonder-region of the Caucasus, the spirit of the Earth still manifested as of old, reached out lovingly to those of her children who were simple enough to respond, ready to fold them in and heal them of the modern, racking fevers which must otherwise destroy them…. The entire sky of soft darkness became a hand that covered him, and stroked him into peace; the perfume that wafted down that narrow street beside him was the single, enveloping fragrance of the whole wide Earth herself; he caught the very murmur of her splendid journey through the stars. The certitude of some state of boundless being flamed, roaring and immense, about his soul….

  And when he reached his room, a little cell that shut out light and air, he met that sinister denial of the simple life which, for him at least, was the true Dweller on the Threshold. Crashing in to it he choked, as it were, and could have cried aloud. It gripped and caught him by the throat — the word that Stahl — Stahl who understood even while he warned and mocked and hesitated himself — had flung so tauntingly upon him from the decks — Civilization.

  Upon his table lay by chance — the Armenian hotel-keeper had evidently unearthed it for his benefit — a copy of a London halfpenny paper, a paper that feeds the public with the ugliest details of all the least important facts of life by the yard, inventing others when the supply is poor. He read it over vaguely, with a sense of cold distress that was half pain, half nausea. Somehow it stirred his sense of humor; he returned slowly to his normal, littler state. But it was not the contrast which made him smile; rather was it the chance juxtaposition of certain of the contents; for on the page facing the accounts of railway accidents, of people burned alive, explosions, giant strikes, crumpled air-men and other countless horrors which modern inventions offered upon the altar of feverish Progress, he read a complacently boastful leader that extolled the conquest of Nature men had learned by speed. The ability to pass from one point to another across the skin of the globe in the least possible time was sign of the development of the human soul.

  The pompous flatulence of the language touched bathos. He thought of the thousands who had read both columns and preened themselves upon that leader. He thought how they would pride themselves upon the latest contrivance for speeding their inert bodies from one point to another “annihilating distance”; upon being able to get from suburbia to the huge shops that created artificial wants, then filled them; from the pokey villas with their wee sham gardens to the dingy offices; from dark airless East End rooms to countless factories that pour out semifraudulent, unnecessary wares upon the world, explosiv
es and weapons to destroy another nation, or cheapjack goods to poison their own — all in a few minutes less than they could do it the week before.

  And then he thought of the leisure of the country folk and of those who knew how to be content without external possessions, to watch the sunset and the dawn with hearts that sought realities; sharing the noble slowness of the seasons, the gradual growth of flowers, trees, and crops, the unhurried dignity of Nature’s grand procession, the repose-in-progress of the Mother-Earth.

  The calmness of the unhastening Earth once more possessed his soul in peace. He hid the paper, watching the quiet way the night beyond his window buried it from sight…

  And through that open window came the perfume and the mighty hand of darkness slowly. It seemed to this imaginative Irishman that he caught a sound of awful laughter from the mountains and the sea, a laughter that brought, too, a wave of sighing — of deep and old-world sighing.

  And before he went to sleep he took an antidote in the form of a page from that book that accompanied all his travels, a book which was written wholly in the open air because its message refused to come to the heart of the inspired writer within doors, try as he would, the “sky especially containing for me the key, the inspiration—”

  And the fragment that he read expressed a little bit of his own thought and feeling. The seer who wrote it looked ahead, naming it “After Civilization,” whereas he looked back. But they saw the same vision; the confusion of time was nothing: —

  In the first soft winds of spring, while snow yet lay on the ground —

  Forth from the city into the great woods wandering,

  Into the great silent white woods where they waited in their beauty and

  majesty

  For man their companion to come:

  There, in vision, out of the wreck of cities and civilizations,

  Slowly out of the ruins of the past

  Out of the litter and muck of a decaying world,

  Lo! even so

  I saw a new life arise.

  O sound of waters, jubilant, pouring, pouring — O hidden song in the

  hollows!

  Secret of the Earth, swelling, sobbing to divulge itself!

  Slowly, building, lifting itself up atom by atom,

  Gathering itself round a new center — or rather round the worldold

  center once more revealed —

  I saw a new life, a new society, arise.

  Man I saw arising once more to dwell with Nature;

  (The old old story — the prodigal son returning, so loved,

  The long estrangement, the long entanglement in vain things) —

  The child returning to its home — companion of the winter woods once

  more —

  Companion of the stars and waters — hearing their words at first-hand

  (more than all science ever taught) —

  The near contact, the dear dear mother so close — the twilight sky

  and the young tree-tops against it;

  The few needs, the exhilarated radiant life — the food and population

  question giving no more trouble;

  No hurry more, no striving one to over-ride the other:

  … man the companion of Nature.

  Civilization behind him now — the wonderful stretch of the past;

  Continents, empires, religions, wars, migrations — all gathered up in him;

  The immense knowledge, the vast winged powers — to use or not to use — …

  And as he fell asleep at length it seemed there came a sound of hushed huge trampling underneath his window, and that when he rose to listen, his big friend from the steamer led him forth into the darkness, that those shapes of Cloud and Wind he now so often saw, companioned them across the heights of the night toward some place in the distant mountains where light and flowers were, and all his dream of years most exquisitely fulfilled….

  He slept. And through his sleep there dropped the words of that old tribesman from the wilderness: “They come in the spring… and are very swift and roaring. They are older, older than the stones. They cannot die… they are of the mountains, and you must hide.”

  But the dream-consciousness knows no hiding; and though memory failed to report with detail in the morning, O’Malley woke refreshed and blessed, knowing that companionship awaited him, and that once he found the courage to escape completely, the Simple Life of Earth would claim him in full consciousness.

  Stahl with his little modern “Intellect” was no longer there to hinder and prevent.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  “Far, very far, steer by my star,

  Leaving the loud world’s hurry and clamor,

  In the mid-sea waits you, maybe,

  The Isles of Glamour, where Beauty reigns.

  From coasts of commerce and myriad-marted

  Towns of traffic by wide seas parted,

  Past shoals unmapped and by reefs uncharted,

  The single-hearted my isle attains.

  “Each soul may find faith to her mind,

  Seek you the peace of the groves Elysian,

  Or the ivy twine and the wands of vine,

  The Dionysian, Orphic rite?

  To share the joy of the Maenad’s leaping

  In frenzied train thro’ the dusk glen sweeping,

  The dew-drench’d dance and the star-watch’d sleeping,

  Or temple keeping in vestal white?

  “Ye who regret suns that have set,

  Lo, each god of the ages golden,

  Here is enshrined, ageless and kind,

  Unbeholden the dark years through.

  Their faithful oracles yet bestowing,

  By laurels whisper and clear streams flowing,

  Or the leafy stir of the Gods’ own going,

  In oak trees blowing, may answer you!” — From PEREGRINA’S SONG

  For the next month Terence O’Malley possessed his soul in patience; he worked, and the work saved him. That is to say it enabled him to keep what men call “balanced.” Stahl had — whether intentionally or not he was never quite certain — raised a tempest in him. More accurately, perhaps, he had called it to the top, for it had been raging deep down ever since he could remember, or had begun to think.

  That the earth might be a living, sentient organism, though too vast to be envisaged as such by normal human consciousness, had always been a tenet of his imagination’s creed. Now he knew it true, as a dinner-gong is true. That deep yearnings, impossible of satisfaction in the external conditions of ordinary life, could know subjective fulfillment in the mind, had always been for him poetically true, as for any other poet: now he realized that it was literally true for some outlying tract of consciousness usually inactive, termed by some transliminal. Spiritual nostalgia provided the channel, and the transfer of consciousness to this outlying tract, involving, of course, a trance condition of the usual self, indicated the way — that was all.

  Again, his mystical temperament had always seen objects as forces which from some invisible center push outwards into visible shape — as bodies: bodies of trees, stones, flowers, men, women, animals; and others but partially pushed outwards, still invisible to limited physical sight at least, either too huge, too small, or too attenuated for vision. Whereas now, as a result of Stahl and Fechner combined, it flamed into him that this was positively true; more — that there was a point in his transliminal consciousness where he might “contact” these forces before they reached their cruder external expression as bodies. Nature, in this sense, had always been for him alive, though he had allowed himself the term by a long stretch of poetic sympathy; but now he knew that it was actually true, because objects, landscapes, humans, and the rest, were verily aspects of the collective consciousness of the Earth, moods of her spirit, phases of her being, expressions of her deep, pure, passionate “heart” — projections of herself.

  He pondered lingeringly over this. Common words revealed their open faces to him. He saw the ideas behind l
anguage, saw them naked. Repetition had robbed them of so much that now became vital, like Bible phrases that too great familiarity in childhood kills for all subsequent life as meaningless. His eyes were opened perhaps. He took a flower into his mind and thought about it; really thought; meditated lovingly. A flower was literally projected by the earth so far as its form was concerned. Its roots gathered soil and earth-matter, changing them into leaves and blossoms; its leaves again, took of the atmosphere, also a part of the earth. It was projected by the earth, born of her, fed by her, and at “death” returned into her. But this was its outward and visible form only. The flower, for his imaginative mind, was a force made visible as literally as a house was a force the mind of the architect made visible. In the mind, or consciousness of the Earth this flower first lay latent as a dream. Perhaps, in her consciousness, it nested as that which in us corresponds to a little thought…. And from this he leaped, as the way ever was with him, to bigger “projections” — trees, atmosphere, clouds, winds, some visible, some invisible, and so to a deeper yet simpler comprehension of Fechner’s thundering conception of human beings as projections. Was he, then, literally, a child of the Earth, mothered by the whole magnificent planet…? All the world akin — that seeking for an eternal home in every human heart explained…? And were there — had there been rather — these other, vaster projections Stahl had adumbrated with his sudden borrowed stretch of vision — forces, thoughts, moods of her hidden life invisible to sight, yet able to be felt and known interiorly?

  That “the gods” were definitely knowable Powers, accessible to any genuine worshipper, had ever haunted his mind, thinly separated only from definite belief: now he understood that this also had been true, though only partially divined before. For now he saw them as the rare expressions of the Earth’s in the morning of her life. That he might ever come to know them close made him tremble with a fearful joy, the idea flaming across his being with a dazzling brilliance that brought him close to that state of consciousness termed ecstasy. And that in certain unique beings, outwardly human like his friend, there might still survive some primitive expression of the Earth-Soul, lesser than the gods, and intermediate as it were, became for him now a fact — wondrous, awe-inspiring, even holy, but still a fact that he could grasp.