Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  Their stature was conveyed to him, chiefly, at first, by the fact that these flowers, though rising to his own waist, did not cover the feet of them, yet that the flowers in the immediate line of their advance still swayed and nodded, as though no weight had lain upon their brilliance. The footsteps were of wind, the figures light as air; they shone; their radiant presences lit the acres. Their own atmosphere, too, came with them, as though the landscape moved and travelled with and in their being, as though the flowers, the natural beauty, emanated from them. The landscape was their atmosphere. They created, brought it with them. It seemed that they “expressed” the landscape and “were” the scenery, with all its multitudinous forms.

  They approached with a great and easy speed that was not measurable. Over the crest of the living, sunlit hill they poured, with their bulk, their speed, their majesty, their sweet brimming joy. Fillery stood motionless watching them, his own joy touched with awed confusion, till wonder and worship mastered the final trace of fear.

  Though he perceived these figures first as they topped the skyline, he was aware that great space also stretched behind them, and that this immense perspective was in some way appropriate to their appearance. Born of a greater space than his “mind” could understand, they flowed towards him across that windy crest and at the same time from infinitely far beyond it. Above the continuous humming sound, he heard their music too, faint but mighty, filling the air with deep vibrations that seemed the natural expression of their joyful beings. Each figure was a chord, yet all combining in a single harmony that had volume without loudness. It seemed to him that their sound and colour and movement wove a new pattern upon space, a new outline, form or growth, perhaps a flower, a tree, perhaps a planet.... They were creative. They expressed themselves naturally in a million forms.

  He heard, he saw. He knew no other words to use. But the “hearing” was, rather, some kind of intimate possession so that his whole being filled and overbrimmed; and the “sight” was greater than the customary little irritation of the optic nerve — it involved another term of space. He could describe the sight more readily than the hearing. The apparent contradiction of distance and proximity, of vast size yet intimacy, made him tremble in his hiding-place.

  His “sight,” at any rate, perceived the approaching figures all round, all over, all at once, as they poured like a wave across the hill from far beyond its visible crest. For into this space below the horizon he saw as well, though, normally speaking, it was out of sight. Nor did he see one side only; he saw the backs of the towering forms as easily as the portion facing him; he saw behind them. It was not as with ordinary objects refracting light, the back and underneath and further edges invisible. All sides were visible at once. The space beyond, moreover, whence the mighty outlines issued, was of such immensity that he could think only of interstellar regions. Not to the little planet, then, did these magnificent shapes belong. They were of the Universe. The symbol of his valley, he knew suddenly, belonged here too.

  Silent with wonder, motionless with worship, he watched the singing flood of what he felt to be immense, non-human nature-life pour past him. The procession lasted for hours, yet was over in a minute’s flash. All categories his mind knew hitherto were useless. The faces, in their power, their majesty, the splendour even of their extent, were both appalling, yet infinitely tender. They were filled with stars, blue distance, flowers, spirals of fire, space and air, interwoven too, with shining geometrical designs whose intricate patterns merged in a central harmony. They brought their own winds with them.

  Yet of features precisely, he was not aware. Each face was, rather, an immense expression, but an expression that was permanent and could not change. These were immutable, eternal faces. He borrowed from human terms the only words that offered, while aware that he falsely introduced the personal into that which was essentially impersonal.

  There stole over him a strange certainty that what he worshipped was the grandeur of joyful service working through unalterable law — the great compassion of some untiring service that was deathless.... He stood within the Universe, face to face with its elemental builders, guardians, its constructive artizans, the impersonal angelic powers ... the region, the state, he now felt convinced, to which “N. H.” belonged, and whence, by some inexplicable chance, he had come to occupy a human body.... And the sounds — the flash came to him with lightning conviction — were those essential rhythms which are the kernels of all visible, manifested forms....

  He was not aware that he was moving, that he had left the spot where he had stood — so long, yet for a single second only — and had now reached the corner of a street again. The flowers were gone, and the trees and groves gone with them; no waters rippled past; there was no shining hill. The moon, the stars, the breaking dawn remained, but he saw windows, walls and villas once again, while his feet echoed on dead stone pavements....

  Yet the figures had not wholly gone. Before a house, where he now paused a moment, the towering, flowing outlines were still faintly visible. Their singing still audible, their shapes still gently luminous, they stood grouped about an open window of the second story. In the front garden a big plane tree stirred its leafless branches; the tree and figures interpenetrated. Slowly then, the outlines grew dim and shadowy, indistinguishable almost from the objects in the twilight near them. Chimneys, walls and roofs stole in upon the great shapes with foreign, grosser details that obscured their harmony, confused their proportion, as with two sets of values. The eye refused to focus both at once. A roof, a chimney obtruded, while sight struggled, fluttered, then ended in confusion. The figures faded and melted out. They merged with the tree, the reddening sky, the murky air close to the house which a street lamp made visible. Suddenly they were lost — they were no longer there.

  But the rhythmical sound, though fainter, still continued — and Fillery looked up.

  It was a sound, he realized in a flash, evocative and summoning. Type called to type, brother to brother, across the universe. The house before him was his own, and the open window through which the music issued was the bedroom of “N. H.”

  He stood transfixed. Both sides of his complex nature operated simultaneously. His mind worked more clearly — the entire history of the “case” in that upstairs room passed through it: he was a doctor. But his speculative, emotional aspect, the dreamer in him, so greatly daring, all that poetic, transcendental, half-mystical part which classed him, he well knew, with the unstable; all this, long and dangerously repressed, worked with opposite, if equal pressure. From the subconscious rose violent hands as of wind and fire, lovely, fashioning, divine, tearing away the lid of the reasoning surface-consciousness that confined, confused them.

  To disentangle, to define these separate functions, were a difficult problem even for the most competent psychiatrist. Creative imaginative powers, hitherto merely fumbling, half denied as well, now stretched their wings and soared. With them came a blinding clarity of sight that enabled him to focus a vast field of detail with extraordinary rapidity. Horizons had lifted, perspective deepened and lit up. In a few brief seconds, before his front door opened, a hundred details flashed towards a focus and shone concentrated:

  The Vision, of course — the Figures had now melted into the night — had no objective reality. Suppressed passion had created them, forbidden yearnings had passed the Censor and dramatized a dream, set aside yet never explained, that heredity was responsible for. Both were born of his lost radiant valley. His Note Books held a thousand similar cases....

  But the speculative dreamer flashed coloured lights against this common white. The prism blazed. From the inter-stellar spaces came these radiant figures, from Sirius, immense and splendid sun, from Aldebaran among the happy Hyades, from awful Betelgeuse, whose volume fills a Martian orbit. Their dazzling, giant grandeur was of stellar origin. Yet, equally, they came from the dreadful back gardens of those sordid houses. Nature was Nature everywhere, in the nebulæ as in the stifled plane tree
of a city court. That he saw them as “figures” was but his own private, personal interpretation of a prophecy the whole Universe announced. They were not figures necessarily; they were Powers. And “N. H.” was of their kind.

  He suddenly remembered the small, troubled earth whereon he lived — a neglected corner of the universe that was in distress and cried frantically for help.... Alcyone caught it in her golden arms perhaps; Sirius thundered against its little ears....

  He found his latchkey and fumblingly inserted it, but, even while he did so, the state of the planet at the moment poured into his mind with swift, concentrated detail; he remembered the wireless excitement of the instant — and smiled. Not that way would it come. The new order was of a spiritual kind. It would steal into men’s hearts, not splutter along the waves of ether, as the “dead” are said to splutter to the “living.” The great impulse, the mighty invitation Nature sent out to return to simple, natural life, would come, without “phenomena” from within.... He remembered Relativity — that space is local, space and time not separate entities. He understood. He had just experienced it. Another, a fourth dimension! Space as a whole was annihilated! He smiled.

  His latchkey turned.

  The transmutation of metals flashed past him — all substance one. His latchkey was upside down. He turned it round and reinserted it, and the results of advanced psychology rushed at him, as though the sun rushed over the horizon of some Eastern clime, covering all with the light of a new, fair dawn.

  In a few seconds this accumulation of recent knowledge and discovery flooded his state of singular receptiveness — as thinker and as poet. The Age was crumbling, civilization passing like its predecessors. The little planet lay certainly in distress. No true help lay within it; its reservoirs were empty. No adequate constructive men or powers were anywhere in sight. It was exhausted, dying. Unless new help, powers from a new, an inexhaustible source, came quickly ... a new vehicle for their expression....

  And wonder took him by the throat ... as the key turned in the lock with its familiar grating sound, and the door, without actual pressure on his part, swung open.

  Paul Devonham, a look of bright terror in his eyes, stood on the threshold.

  The expression, not only of the face but of the whole person, he had seen once only in another human countenance — a climber, who had slipped by his very side and dropped backward into empty space. The look of helpless bewilderment as hands and feet lost final touch with solidity, the air of terrible yet childlike amazement with which he began his descent of a thousand feet through a gulf of air — the shock marked the face in a single second with what he now saw in his colleague’s eyes. Only, with Devonham — Fillery felt sure of his diagnosis — the lost hold was mental.

  His outward control, however, was admirable. Devonham’s voice, apart from a certain tenseness in it, was quiet enough: “I’ve been telephoning everywhere.... There’s been a — a crisis — —”

  “Violence?”

  But the other shook his head. “It’s all beyond me quite,” he said, with a wry smile. “The first outbreak was nothing — nothing compared to this.” The continuous sound of humming which filled the hall, making the air vibrate oddly, grew louder. Devonham seized his friend’s arm.

  “Listen!” he whispered. “You hear that?”

  “I heard it outside in the street,” Fillery said. “What is it?”

  Devonham glared at him. “God knows,” he said, “I don’t. He’s been doing it, on and off, for a couple of hours. It began the moment you left, it seems. They’re all about him — these vibrations, I mean. He does it with his whole body somehow. And” — he hesitated— “there’s meaning in it of some kind. Results, I mean,” he jerked out with an effort.

  “Visible?” came the gentle question.

  Devonham started. “How did you know?” There was a thrust of intense curiosity in the eyes.

  “I’ve had a similar experience myself, Paul. You opened the front door in the middle of it. The figures — —”

  “You saw figures?” Devonham looked thunderstruck. In his heart was obviously a touch of panic.

  As the two men stood gazing into each other’s eyes a moment silently, the sound about them increased again, rising and falling, its great separate rhythmical waves almost distinguishable. In Fillery’s mind rose patterns, outlines, forms of flowers, spirals, circles....

  “He knows you’re in the house,” said Devonham in a curious voice, relieved apparently no answer came to his question. “Better come upstairs at once and see him.” But he did not turn to lead the way. “That’s not auditory hallucination, Edward, whatever else it is!” He was still clinging to the rock, but the rock was crumbling beneath his desperate touch. Space yawned below him.

  “Visual,” suggested Fillery, as though he held out a feeble hand to the man whose whole weight already hung unsupported before the plunge. His friend spoke no word; but his expression made words unnecessary: “We must face the facts,” it said plainly, “wherever these may lead. No shirking, no prejudice of mine or yours must interfere. There must be no faltering now.”

  So plainly was his passion for truth and knowledge legible in the expression of the shocked but honest mind, that Fillery felt compassion overpower the first attitude of privacy he had meant to take. This time he must share. The honesty of the other won his confidence too fully for him to hold back anything. There was no doubt in his mind that he read his colleague’s state aright.

  “A moment, Paul,” he said in a low voice, “before we go upstairs,” and he put his hand out, oddly enough meeting Devonham’s hand already stretched to meet it. He drew him aside into a corner of the hall, while the waves of sound surged round and over them like a sea. “Let me first tell you,” he went on, his voice trembling slightly, “my own experience.” It seemed to him that any moment he must see the birth of a new form, an outline, a “body” dance across before his very eyes.

  “Neither auditory nor visual,” murmured Devonham, burning to hear what was coming, yet at the same time shrinking from it by the laws of his personality. “Hallucination of any kind, there is absolutely none. There’s nothing transferred from your mind to his. This thing is real — original.”

  Fillery tightened his grip a second on the hand he held.

  “Paul,” he said gravely, yet unable to hide the joy of recent ecstasy in his eyes, “it is also — new!”

  The low syllables seemed borne away and lifted beyond their reach by an immense vibration that swept softly past them. And so actual was this invisible wave that behind it lay the trough, the ebb, that awaits, as in the sea, the next advancing crest. Into this ebb, as it were, both men dropped simultaneously the same significant syllables: their lips uttered together:

  “N. H.” The wave of sound seemed to take their voices and increase them. It was the older man who added: “Coming into full possession.”

  The two stood waiting, listening, their heads turned sideways, their bodies motionless, while the soft rhythmical uproar rose and fell about them. No sign escaped them for some minutes; no words, it seemed, occurred to either of them.

  Through the transom over the front door stole the grey light of the late autumn dawn; the hall furniture was visible, chairs, hat-rack, wooden chests that held the motor rugs. A china bowl filled with visiting cards gleamed white beside it. Soon the milkman, uttering his comic earthly cry, would clatter down the area staircase, and the servants would be up. As yet, however, but for the big soft sound, the house was perfectly still. This part of it, almost a separate wing, was completely cut off from the main building. No one had been disturbed.

  Fillery moved his head and looked at his companion. The expression of both face and figure arrested him. He had taken off his dinner jacket, and the old loose golfing coat he wore hung askew; he had one hand in a pocket of it, the other thrust deep into his trousers. His glasses hung down across his crumpled shirt-front, his black tie made an untidy cross. He looked, thought Fillery, whose sense
of the ludicrous became always specially alert in his gravest moments, like an unhappy curate who had presided over some strenuous and worrying social gathering in the local town hall. Only one detail denied this picture — the expression of something mysterious and awed in the sheet-white face. He was listening with sharp dislike yet eager interest. His repugnance betrayed itself in the tightened lips, the set of the angular shoulders; the panic was written in the glistening eyes. There were things in his face he could never, never tell. The struggle in him was natural to his type of mind: he had experienced something himself, and a personal experience opens new vistas in sympathy and understanding. But — the experience ran contrary to every tenet of theory and practice he had ever known. The moment of new birth was painful. This was his colleague’s diagnosis.

  Fillery then suddenly realized that the gulf between them was without a bridge. To tell his own experience became at once utterly impossible. He saw this clearly. He could not speak of it to his assistant. It was, after all, incommunicable. The bridge of terms, language, feeling, did not exist between them. And, again, up flashed for a second his sense of the comic, this time in an odd touch of memory — Povey’s favourite sentence: “Never argue with the once-born!” Only to older souls was expression possible.

  For the first time then his diagnosis wavered oddly. Why, for instance, did Paul persist in that curious, watchful stare...?

  Devonham, conscious of his chief’s eyes and mind upon him, looked up. Somewhere in his expression was a glare, but nothing revealed his state of mind better than the fact that he stupidly contradicted himself:

  “You’re putting all this into him, Edward,” a touch of anger, perhaps of fear, in the intense whispering voice. “The hysteria of the studio upset him, of course. If you’d left him alone, as you promised, he’d have always stayed LeVallon. He’d be cured by now.” Then, as Fillery made no reply or comment, he added, but this time only the anxiety of the doctor in his tone: “Hadn’t you better go up to him at once? He’s your patient, not mine, remember!”