Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  He looked at the girl sharply with unconcealed admiration. “It does not frighten you?” he asked, and in reply she said the very thing he felt sure she would say, hoping for it even while he shrank:

  “Escape,” he heard in a low, clear voice, half a question, half an exclamation, and saw the blood leave her face.

  The instinctive “Hush!” that rose to his lips he did not utter. The sense of loss, of searching pain, the word implied he did not show. Instead, he spoke in his natural, everyday tone again:

  “The body irks him, of course, and he may try to rid himself of it. Its limitations to him are a prison, for his true consciousness he finds outside it. The explanation,” he added to himself, “of many a case of suicidal mania probably. I’ve often wondered — —”

  He took her hand, aware by the pallor of her face what her feelings were. “Death, you see, Nayan, has no meaning for him, as it has for us who think consciousness out of the body impossible, and he is puzzled by our dread of it. ‘We,’ he said once, ‘have nothing that decays. We may be stationary, or advance, or retreat, but we can never end.’ He derives — oh, I’m convinced of it — from another order. Here — amongst us — he is inarticulate, unable to express himself, hopeless, helpless, in prison. Oh, if only — —”

  “He loves you,” she said quickly, releasing her hand. “I suppose he realizes the eternal part of you and identifies himself with that. In you, Edward, lies something very close to what he is, akin — he needs it terribly, just as you — —” She became confused.

  “Love, as we understand it,” he interrupted, his voice shaking a little, “he does not, cannot know, for he serves another law, another order of being.”

  “That’s how I feel it too.”

  She shivered slightly, but she did not turn away, and her eyes kept all their frankness.

  “Our humanity,” she murmured, “writes upon his heart in ink that quickly fades — —”

  “And leaves no trace,” he caught her up hurriedly. “His one idea is to help, to render service. It is as natural to him as for water to run down hill. He seeks instinctively to become one with the person he seeks to aid. As with us an embrace is an attempt at union, so he seeks, by some law of his own being, to become identified with those whom he would help. And he helps by intensifying their consciousness — somewhat as heat and air increase ordinary physical vitality. Only, first there must be something for him to work on. Energy, even bad, vicious, wrongly used, he can work on. Mere emptiness prevents him. You remember Lady Gleeson — —”

  “We — most of us — are too empty,” she put in with quiet resignation. “Our sense of that divine beauty is too faint — —”

  “Rather,” came the quick correction, “he stands too close to us. His effect is too concentrated. The power at such close quarters disturbs and overbalances.”

  “That’s why, then, I always feel it strongest when he’s left.”

  He glanced at her keenly.

  “In his presence,” she explained, “it’s always as though I saw only a part of him, even of his physical appearance, out of the corner of my eye, as it were, and sometimes — —” She hesitated. He did not help her this time. “As if those others, many others, similar to himself, but invisible, crowding space about us, were intensely active.” Her voice hushed again. “He brings them with him — as now. I feel it, Edward, now. I feel them close.” She looked round the empty room, peering through the window into the quiet evening sky. Dr. Fillery also turned away. He sighed again. “Have you noticed, too,” he went on presently, yet half as if following his own thoughts, and a trifle incongruously, “the speed and lightness his very movements convey, and how he goes down the street with that curious air of drawing things after him, along with him, as trains and motors draw the loose leaves and dust — —”

  “Whirling,” her quick whisper startled him a little, as she turned abruptly from the window and gazed straight at him. He smiled, instantly recovering himself. “A good word, yes — whirling — but in the plural. As though there were vortices about him.”

  It was her turn to smile. “That might one day carry him away,” she exclaimed. They smiled together then, they even laughed, but somewhere in their laughter, like the lengthening shadows of the spring day outside, lay an incommunicable sadness neither of them could wholly understand.

  “Yet the craving for beauty,” she said suddenly, “that he leaves behind in me” — her voice wavered— “an intolerable yearning that nothing can satisfy — nothing — here. An infinite desire, it seems, for — for — —”

  Dr. Fillery took her hand again gently, looking down steadily into the clear eyes that sought his own, and the light glistening in their moisture was similar, he fancied for a moment, to the fire in another pair of shining eyes that never failed to stir the unearthly dreams in him.

  “It lies beyond any words of ours,” he said softly. “Don’t struggle to express it, Iraida. To the flower, the star, we are wise to leave their own expression in their own particular field, for we cannot better it.”

  A sound of rising wind, distant yet ominous, went past the window, as for a moment then the girl came closer till she was almost in his arms, and though he did not accept her, equally he did not shrink from the idea of acceptance — for the first time since they had known one another. There was a smell of flowers; almost in that wailing wind he was aware of music.

  “Together,” he heard her whisper, while a faint shiver — was it of joy or terror? — ran through her nerves. “All of us — when the time comes — together.” She made an abrupt movement. “Just as we are together now! Listen!” she exclaimed.

  “We call it wind,” she whispered. “But of course — really — it’s behind — beyond — inside — isn’t it?”

  Dr. Fillery, holding her closely, made no answer. Then he laughed, let go her hands, and said in his natural tone again, breaking an undesirable spell intentionally, though with a strong effort: “We are in space and time, remember. Iraida. Let us obey them happily until another certain and practical thing is shown us.”

  The faint sound that had been rising about them in the air died down again.

  They looked into each other’s eyes, then drew apart, though with a movement so slight it was scarcely perceptible. It was Nayan and Dr. Fillery once more, but not before the former had apparently picked out the very thought that had lain, though unexpressed, in the latter’s deepest mind — its sudden rising the cause of his deliberate change of attitude. For she had phrased it, given expression to it, though from an angle very different to his own. And her own word, “escape,” used earlier in the conversation, had deliberately linked on with it, as of intentional purpose.

  “He must go back. The time is coming when he must go back. We are not ready for him here — not yet.”

  Somewhat in this fashion, though without any actual words, had the idea appeared in letters of fire that leaped and flickered through a mist of anguish, of loss, of loneliness, rising out of the depths within him. He knew whence they came, he divined their origin at once, and the sound, though faint and distant at first, confirmed him. Swiftly behind them, moreover, born of no discoverable antecedents, it seemed, rose simultaneously the phrase that Father Collins loved: “A Being in his own place is the ruler of his fate.” Father Collins, for all his faults and strangeness, was a personality, a consciousness, that might prove of value. His extraordinarily swift receptiveness, his undoubted telepathic powers, his fluid, sensitive, protean comprehension of possibilities outside the human walls, above the earthly ceiling, so to speak.... Value suddenly attached itself to Father Collins, as though the name had been dropped purposely into his mind by someone. He was surprised to find this thought in him. It was not for the first time, however, Dr. Fillery remembered.

  In Nayan’s father, again, an artist, though not a particularly subtle one perhaps, lay a deep admiration, almost a love, he could not explain. “There’s something about him in a sense immeasurable, something n
ot only untamed but untamable,” he phrased it. “His gentleness conceals it as a summer’s day conceals a thunderstorm. To me it’s almost like an incarnation of the primal forces at work in the hearts of my own people” — he grew sad— “and as dangerous probably.” He was speaking to his daughter, who repeated the words later to Dr. Fillery. The study of Fire in the elemental group had failed. “He’s too big, too vast, too formless, to get into any shape or outline my tools can manage, even by suggestion. He dominates the others — Earth, Air, Water — and dwarfs them.”

  “But fire ought to,” she put in. “It’s the most powerful and splendid, the most terrific of them all. Isn’t it? It regenerates. It purifies. I love fire — —”

  Her father smiled in his beard, noticing the softness in her manner, rather than in her voice. The awakening in her he had long since understood sympathetically, if more profoundly than she knew, and welcomed.

  “He won’t hurt you, child. He won’t harm Nayushka any more than a summer’s day can hurt her. I see him thus sometimes,” he mumbled on half to himself, though she heard and stored the words in her memory; “as an entire day, a landscape even, I often see him. A stretch of being rather than a point; a rushing stream rather than a single isolated wave harnessed and confined in definite form — as we understand being here,” he added curiously. “No, he’ll neither harm nor help you,” he went on; “nor any of us for that matter. A dozen nations, a planet, a star he might help or harm” — he laughed aloud suddenly in a startled way at his own language— “but an individual never!” And he abruptly took her in his arms and kissed her, drying her tears with his own rough handkerchief. “Not even a fire-worshipper,” he added with gruff tenderness, “like you!”

  “There’s more of divinity in fire than in any other earthly thing we know,” she replied as he held her, “for it takes into itself the sweetest essence of all it touches.” She looked up at him with a smile. “That’s why you can’t get it into your marble perhaps.” To which her father made the significant rejoinder: “And because none of us has the least conception what ‘divine’ and ‘divinity’ really mean, though we’re always using the words! It’s odd, anyhow,” he finished reflectively, “that I can model the fellow better from memory than when he’s standing there before my eyes. At close quarters he confuses me with too many terrific unanswerable questions.”

  To multiply the verdicts and impressions Fillery jotted down is unnecessary. In his own way he collected; in his own way he wrote them down. About “N. H.,” all agreed in their various ways of expressing it, was that vital suggestion of agelessness, of deathlessness, of what men call eternal youth: the vigorous grace of limbs and movements, the deep simple joy of confidence and power. None could picture him tired, or even wearing out, yet ever with a faint hint of painful conflict due to immense potentialities— “a day compressed into a single minute,” as Khilkoff phrased it — straining, but vainly, to express themselves through a limited form that was inadequate to their use. A storm of passionate hope and wonder seemed ever ready to tear forth from behind the calm of the great quiet eyes, those green-blue changing eyes, which none could imagine lightless or unlamping; and about his whole presentment a surplus of easy, overflowing energy from an inexhaustible source pressing its gifts down into him spontaneously, fire and wind its messengers; yet that the human machinery using these — mind, body, nerves — was ill adapted to their full expression. To every individual having to do with him was given a push, a drive, an impetus that stimulated that individual’s chief characteristic, intensifying it.

  This to imaginative and discerning sight. But even upon ordinary folk, aware only of the surface things that deliberately hit them, was left a startling impression as of someone waving a strange, unaccustomed banner that made them halt and stare before passing on — uncomfortably. He had that nameless quality, apart from looks or voice or manner, which arrested attention and drew the eyes of the soul, wonderingly, perhaps uneasily, upon itself. He left a mark. Something defined him from all others, leaving him silhouetted in the mind, and those who had looked into his eyes could not forget that they had done so. Up rose at once the great unanswerable questions that, lying ever at the back of daily life, the majority find it most comfortable to leave undisturbed — but rose in red ink or italics. He started into an awareness of greater life. And the effect remained, was greatest even, after he had passed on.

  It was, of course, Father Collins, a frequent caller now at the Home, betraying his vehement interest in long talks with Dr. Fillery and in what interviews with “N. H.” the latter permitted him — it was this protean being whose mind, amid wildest speculations, formed the most positive conclusions. The Prometheans, he believed, were not far wrong in their instinctive collective judgment. “N. H.” was not a human being; the occupant of that magnificent body was not a human spirit like the rest of us.

  “Nor is he the only one walking the streets to-day,” he affirmed mysteriously. “In shops and theatres, trains and buses, tucked in among the best families,” he laughed, although in earnest, “and even in suburbia I have come across other human bodies similarly inhabited. What they are and where they come from exactly, we cannot know, but their presence among us is indubitable.”

  “You mean you recognize them?” inquired Dr. Fillery calmly.

  “One unmistakable sign they possess in common — they are invariably inarticulate, helpless, lost. The brain, the five senses, the human organs — all they have to work through — are useless to express the knowledge and powers natural to them. Electricity might as well try to manifest itself through a gas-pipe, or music through a stone. One and all, too, possess strange glimmerings of another state where they are happy and at home, something of the glory à la Wordsworth, a Golden Age idea almost, a state compared to which humanity seems a tin-pot business, yet a state of which no single descriptive terms occur to them.”

  “Of which, however, they can tell us nothing?”

  “Memory, of course, is lost. Their present brain can have no records, can it? Only those of us who have perhaps at some time, in some earlier existence possibly, shared such a state can have any idea of what they’re driving at.”

  He glanced at Fillery with a significant raising of his bushy eyebrows.

  “There have been no phenomena, I’m glad to say,” put in the doctor, aware some comment was due from him, “no physical phenomena, I mean.”

  “Nor could there be,” pursued the other, delighted. “He has not got the apparatus. With all such beings, their power, rather than perceived, is felt. Sex, as with us, they also cannot know, for they are neither male nor female.” He paused, as the other did not help him. “Enigmas they must always be to us. We may borrow from the East and call them devas, or class them among nature spirits of legend and the rest, but we can, at any rate, welcome them, and perhaps even learn from them.”

  “Learn from them?” echoed Fillery sharply.

  “They are essentially natural, you see, whereas we are artificial, and becoming more so with every century, though we call it civilization. If we lived closer to nature we might get better results, I mean. Primitive man, I’m convinced, did get certain results, but he was a poor instrument. Modern man, in some ways, is a better, finer instrument to work through, only he is blind to the existence of any beings but himself. A bridge, however, might be built, I feel. ‘N. H.’ seems to me in close touch with these curious beings, if” — he lowered his voice— “he is not actually one of them. The wind and fire he talks about are, of course, not what we mean. It is heat and rhythm, in some more essential form, he refers to. If ‘N. H.’ is some sort of nature spirit, or nature-being, he is of a humble type, concerned with humble duties in the universe — —”

  “There are, you think, then, higher, bigger kinds?” inquired the listener, his face and manner showing neither approval nor disapproval.

  Father Collins raised his hands and face and shoulders, even his eyebrows. His spirits rose as well.

 
“If they exist at all — and the assumption explains plausibly the amazing intelligence behind all natural phenomena — they include every grade, of course, from the insignificant fairies, so called, builders of simple forms, to the immense planetary spirits and vast Intelligences who guide and guard the welfare of the greater happenings.” His eyes shone, his tone matched in enthusiasm his gestures. “A stupendous and magnificent hierarchy,” he cried, “but all, all under God, of course, who maketh his angels spirits and his ministers a flaming fire. Ah, think of it,” he went on, becoming lyrical almost as wonder fired him, “think of it now especially in the spring! The vast abundance and insurgence of life pouring up on all sides into forms and bodies, and all led, directed, fashioned by this host of invisible, yet not unknowable, Intelligences! Think of the prolific architecture, the delicacy, the grandeur, the inspiring beauty that are involved...!”

  “You said just now a bridge might be built,” Dr. Fillery interrupted, while the other paused a second for breath.

  Father Collins, nailed down to a positive statement, hesitated and looked about him. But the hesitation passed at once.

  “It is the question merely,” he went on more composedly, “of providing the apparatus, the means of manifestation, the instrument, the — body. Isn’t it? Our evolution and theirs are two separate — different things.”

  “I suppose so. No force can express itself without a proper apparatus.”

  “Certain of these Intelligences are so immense that only a series of events, long centuries, a period of history, as we call it, can provide the means, the body indeed, through which they can express themselves. An entire civilization may be the ‘body’ used by an archetypal power. Others, again — like ‘N. H.’ probably — since I notice that it is usually the artist, the artistic temperament he affects most — require beauty for their expression — beauty of form and outline, of sound, of colour.”