Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  And so it was that the entrance of the familiar, friendly creature brought this thing both itself and ‘mother’ knew, but whereof I as yet was ignorant. I held the door wide. The draught rushed through behind her, and sent a shower of sparks about the fireplace. The lamp flickered and gave a little gulp. And Riquette marched slowly past, with all the impressive dignity of her kind, towards the other door that stood ajar. Turning the corner like a shadow, she disappeared into the room where the two children slept. We heard the soft thud with which she leaped upon the bed. Then, in a lull of the wind, she came back again and sat on the oilcloth, staring into mother’s’ face. She mewed and put a paw out, drawing the black dress softly with half-opened claws. And it was all so horribly suggestive and pathetic, it revived such poignant memories, that I got up impulsively — I think I had actually said the words, ‘We’d better put her out, mother, after all’ — when my companion rose to her feet and forestalled me. She said another thing instead. It took my breath away to hear it. ‘She wants us to go with her. Pan, will you come too?’ The surprise on my face must have asked the question, for I do not remember saying anything. ‘To the attic,’ she said quietly.

  She stood there by the table, a tall, grave figure dressed in black, and her face above the lamp-shade caught the full glare of light. Its expression positively stiffened me. She seemed so secure in her singular purpose. And her familiar appearance had so oddly given place to something wholly strange to me. She looked like another person — almost with the unwelcome transformation of the sleep-walker about her. Cold came over me as I watched her, for I remembered suddenly her Irish second-sight, her story years ago of meeting a figure on the attic stairs, the figure of Petavel. And the idea of this motherly, sedate, and wholesome woman, absorbed day and night in prosaic domestic duties, and yet ‘seeing’ things, touched the incongruous almost to the point of alarm. It was so distressingly convincing.

  Yet she knew quite well that I would come. Indeed, following the excited animal, she was already by the door, and a moment later, still without answering or protesting, I was with them in the draughty corridor. There was something inevitable in her manner that made it impossible to refuse. She took the lamp from its nail on the wall, and following our four-footed guide, who ran with obvious pleasure just in front, she opened the door into the courtyard. The wind nearly put the lamp out, but a minute later we were safe inside the passage that led up flights of creaky wooden stairs towards the world of tenantless attics overhead.

  And I shall never forget the way the excited Riquette first stood up and put her paws upon the various doors, trotted ahead, turned back to watch us coming, and then finally sat down and waited on the threshold of the empty, raftered space that occupied the entire length of the building underneath the roof. For her manner was more that of an intelligent dog than of a cat, and sometimes more like that of a human mind than either.

  We had come up without a single word. The howling of the wind as we rose higher was like the roar of artillery. There were many broken stairs, and the narrow way was full of twists and turnings. It was a dreadful journey. I felt eyes watching us from all the yawning spaces of the darkness, and the noise of the storm smothered footsteps everywhere. Troops of shadows kept us company. But it was on the thresh¬old of this big, chief attic, when ‘mother’ stopped abruptly to put down the lamp, that real feat took hold of me. For Riquette marched steadily forward into the middle of the dusty flooring, picking her way among the fallen tiles and mortar, as though she went towards — some one. She purred loudly and uttered little cries of excited pleasure. Her tail went up into the air, and she lowered her head with the unmistakable intention of being stroked. Her lips opened and shut. Her green eyes smiled. She was being stroked.

  It was an unforgettable performance. I would rather have witnessed an execution or a murder than watch that mysterious creature twist and turn about in the way she did. Her magnified shadow was as large as a pony on the floor and rafters. I wanted to hide the whole thing by extinguishing the lamp. For, even before the mysterious action began, I experienced the sudden rush of conviction that others besides ourselves were in this attic — and standing very close to us indeed. And, although there was ice in my blood, there was also a strange swelling of the heart that only love and tenderness could bring.

  But, whatever it was, my human companion, still silent, knew and understood. She saw. And her soft whisper that ran with the wind among the rafters, ‘Il a prié pour Petavel et le bon Dieu l’a entendu,’ did not amaze me one quarter as much as the expression I then caught upon her radiant face. Tears ran down the cheeks, but they were tears of happi¬ness. Her whole figure seemed lit up. She opened her arms — picture of great Motherhood, proud, blessed, and tender beyond words. I thought she was going to fall, for she took quick steps forward; but when I moved to catch her, she drew me aside instead with a sudden gesture that brought fear back in the place of wonder.

  ‘Let them pass,’ she whispered grandly. ‘Pan, don’t you see.... He’s leading him into peace and safety ... by the hand I’ And her joy seemed to kill the shadows and fill the entire attic with white light. Then, almost simultaneously with her words, she swayed. I was in time to catch her, but as I did so, across the very spot where we had just been stand¬ing — two figures, I swear, went past us like a flood of light.

  There was a moment next of such confusion that I did not see what happened to Riquette, for the sight of my companion kneeling on the dusty boards and praying with a curious sort of passionate happiness, while tears pressed between her covering fingers — the strange wonder of this made me utterly oblivious to minor details. ...

  We were sitting round the peat fire again, and ‘mother’ was saying to me in the gentlest, tenderest whisper I ever heard from human lips— ‘Pan, I think perhaps that’s why God took him....’

  And when a little later we went in to make Riquette cosy in the empty bed, ever since kept sacred to her use, the mourn¬fulness had lifted; and in the place of resignation was proud peace and joy that knew no longer sad or selfish questionings.

  THE HEATH FIRE

  The men at luncheon in Rennie’s Surrey cottage that September day were discussing, of course, the heat. All agreed it had been exceptional. But nothing unusual was said until O’Hara spoke of the heath fires. They had been rather terrific, several in a single day, devouring trees and bushes, endangering human life, and spreading with remarkable rapidity. The flames, too, had been extraordinarily high and vehement for heath fires. And O’Hara’s tone had introduced into the com¬monplace talk something new — the element of mystery; it was nothing definite he said, but manner, eyes, hushed voice and the rest conveyed it. And it was genuine. What he felt reached the others rather than what he said. The atmosphere in the little room, with the honeysuckle trailing sweetly across the open windows, changed; the talk became of a sudden less casual, frank, familiar; and the men glanced at one another across the table, laughing still, yet with an odd touch of con¬straint marking little awkward, unfilled pauses. Being a group of normal Englishmen, they disliked mystery; it made them feel uncomfortable; for the things O’Hara hinted at had touched that kind of elemental terror that lurks secretly in all human beings. Guarded by ‘culture’, but never wholly concealed, the unwelcome thing made its presence known — the hint of primitive dread that, for instance, great thunder-storms, tidal waves, or violent conflagrations rouse.

  And instinctively they fell at once to discussing the obvious causes of the fires. The stockbroker, scenting imagination, edged mentally away, sniffing. But the journalist was full of brisk information, ‘simply given’.

  ‘The sun starts them in Canada, using a dewdrop as a lens,’ he said, ‘and an engine’s spark, remember, carries an immense distance without losing its heat.’

  ‘But hardly miles,’ said another, who had not been really listening.

  ‘It’s my belief,’ put in the critic keenly, ‘that a lot were done on purpose. Bits of live coal wrapped in cl
oth were found, you know.’ He was a little, weasel-faced iconoclast, dropping the acid of doubt and disbelief wherever he went, but offering nothing in the place of what he destroyed. His head was turret-shaped, lips tight and thin, nose and chin running to points like gimlets, with which he bored into the unremunerative days of life.

  ‘The general unrest, yes,’ the journalist supported him, and tried to draw the conversation on to labour questions. But their host preferred the fire talk. ‘I must say,’ he put in gravely, ‘that some of the blazes hereabouts were uncommonly — er —— queer. They started, I mean, so oddly. You remember, O’Hara, only last week that suspicious one over Kettlebury way — ?’

  It seemed he wished to draw the artist out, and that the artist, feeling the general opposition, declined.

  ‘Why seek an unusual explanation at all?’ the critic said at length, impatiently. ‘It’s all natural enough, if you ask me.’

  ‘Natural! Oh yes!’ broke in O’Hara, with a sudden vehemence that betrayed feeling none had as yet suspected; ‘provided you don’t limit the word to mean only what we understand. There’s nothing anywhere — unnatural.’

  A laugh cut short the threatened tirade, and the journalist expressed the general feeling with ‘Oh you, Jim! You’d see a devil in a dust-storm, or a fairy in the tea-leaves of your cup!’

  ‘And why not, pray? Devils and fairies are every bit as true as formulae.’

  Some one tactfully guided them away from a profitless discussion, and they talked glibly of the damage done, the hideousness of the destroyed moors, the gaunt, black, ugly slopes, fifty-foot flames, roaring noises, and the splendour of the enormous smoke-clouds that had filled the skies. And Rennie, still hoping to coax O’Hara, repeated tales the beaters had brought in that crying, as though living things were caught, had been heard in places, and that some had seen tall shapes of fire passing headlong through the choking smoke. For the note O’Hara had struck refused to be ignored. It went on sounding underneath the commonest remark; and the atmosphere to the end retained that curious tinge that he had given to it — of the strange, the ominous, the mysterious and unexplained. Until, at last, the artist, having added nothing further to the talk, got up with some abruptness and left the room. He complained briefly that the fever he had suffered from still bothered him and he would go and lie down a bit. The heat, he said, oppressed him.

  A silence followed his departure. The broker drew a sigh as though the market had gone up. But Rennie, old, compre¬hending friend, looked anxious. ‘Excitement,’ he said, ‘not oppression, is the word he meant. He’s always a bit strung up when that Black Sea fever gets him. He brought it with him from Batoum.’ And another brief silence followed.

  ‘Been with you most of the summer, hasn’t he?’ enquired the journalist, on the trail of a ‘par’, ‘painting those wild things of his that no one understands.’ And their host, weighing a moment how much he might in fairness tell, replied — among friends it was— ‘Yes; and this summer they have been more — er — wild and wonderful than usual — an extraordinary rush of colour splendid schemes, “conceptions”, I believe you critics call ‘em, of fire, as though, in a way, the unusual heat had possessed him for interpretation.’

  The group expressed its desultory interest by uninspired interjections.

  ‘That was what he meant just now when he said the fires had been mysterious, required explanation, or something — the way they started, rather,’ concluded Rennie.

  Then he hesitated. He laughed a moment, and it was an uneasy, apologetic little laugh. How to continue he hardly knew. Also, he wished to protect his friend from the cheap jeering of miscomprehension. ‘He is very imaginative, you know,’ he went on, quietly, as no one spoke. ‘You remember that glorious mad thing he did of the Fallen Lucifer — driving a star across the heavens till the heat of the descent set a light to half the planets, scorched the old moon to the white cinder that she now is, and passed close enough to earth to send our oceans up in a single jet of steam? Well, this time — he’s been at something every bit as wild, only truer — finer. And what is it? Briefly, then, he’s got the idea, it seems, that the unusual heat from the sun this year has penetrated deep enough — in places-especially on these unprotected heaths that retain their heat so cleverly — to reach another kindred expression — to waken a response — in sympathy, you see — from the central fires of the earth.’

  He paused again a moment awkwardly, conscious how clum¬sily he expressed it. ‘The parent getting into touch again with its lost child, eh? See the idea? Return of the Fire Prodigal, as it were?’

  His listeners stared in silence, the broker looking his obvious relief that O’Hara was not on ’Change, the critic’s eyes glancing sharply down that pointed, boring nose of his.

  ‘And the central fires have felt it and risen in response,’ continued Rennie in a lower voice. ‘You see the idea? It’s big, to say the least. The volcanoes have answered too — there’s old Etna, the giant of ’em all, breaking out in fifty new mouths of flame. Heat is latent in everything, only waiting to be called out. That match you’re striking, this coffee-pot, the warmth in our bodies, and so on — their heat comes first from the sun, and is therefore an actual part of the sun, the origin of all heat and life. And so O’Hara, you know, who sees the universe as a single homogeneous One and — and — well, I give it up. Can’t explain it, you see. You must get him to do that. But somehow this year — cloudless — the protecting armour of water all gone too — the sun’s rays manag¬ed to sink in and reach their kind buried deep below. Perhaps, later, we may get him to show us the studies that he’s made — whew! — the most — er — amazing things you ever saw!’

  The ‘superiority’ of unimaginative minds was inevitable, making Rennie regret that he had told so much. It was almost as if he had been untrue to his friend. But at length the group broke up for the afternoon. They left messages for O’Hara. Two motored, and the journalist took the train. The critic followed his sharp nose to London, where he might ferret out the failures that his mind delighted in. And when they were gone the host slipped quickly upstairs to find his friend. The heat was unbearable to suffocation, the little bedroom like an oven. But Jim O’Hara was not in it.

  For, instead of lying down as he had said, a fierce revolt, stirred by the talk of those unvisioned minds below, had wakened, and the deep, sensitive, poet’s soul in him had leaped suddenly to the acceptance of an impossible thing. He had escaped, driven forth by the secret call of wonder. He made full speed for the destroyed moors. Fever or no fever, he must see for himself. Did no one understand? Was he the only one?... Walking quickly, he passed the Frensham Ponds, came through that spot of loneliness and beauty, the Lion’s Mouth, noting that even there the pool of water had dried up and the rushes waved in the hot air over a bed of hard, caked mud, and so reached within the hour the wide ex¬panse of Thursley Common. On every side the world stretched dark and burnt, a cemetery of cinders. Great thrills rushed through his heart; and with the power of a tide that yet came at flashing speed the truth rose up in him... Half running now, he plunged forward another mile or two, and found himself, the only living thing, amid the great waste of heather-land. The blazing sunlight drenched it. It lay, a sheet of weird dark beauty, spreading like a black, enormous garden as far as the eye could reach.

  Then, breathless, he paused and looked about him. Within his heart something, long smouldering, ran into sudden flame. Light blazed upon his inner world. For as the scorch of vehe¬ment passion may quicken tracts of human consciousness that lie ordinarily inert and unproductive, so here the surface of the earth had turned alive. He knew; he saw; he under¬stood.

  Here, in these open sun-traps that gathered and retained the heat, the fire of the Universe had dropped and lain, increasing week by week. These parched, dry months, the soil, free from rejecting and protective moisture, had let it all accumulate till at length it had sunk downwards, inwards, and the sister fires below, responding to the touch of their
ancient parent source, too long unfelt, had answered with a swift uprising roar. They had come up with answering joy, and here and there had actually reached the surface, and had leaped out with dancing cry, wild to escape from an age-long prison back to their huge, eternal origin.

  This sunshine, ah! what was it? These farthing dips of heat men complained about in their tiny, cage-like houses! It scorch¬ed the grass and fields, yes; but the surface never held it long enough to let it sink to union with its kindred of the darker fires beneath! These cried for it, but union was ever denied and stifled by the weight of cooled and cooling rock. And the ages of separation had almost cooled remembrance too — fire — the kiss and strength of fire — the flaming embrace and burning lips of the father sun himself.... He could have cried with the fierce delight of it all, and the picture he would paint rose there before him, burnt gloriously into the canvas of the entire heavens. Was not his own heat and life also from the sun?...

  He stared about him in the deep silence of the afternoon. The world was still. It basked in the windless heat. No living thing stirred, for the common forms of life had fled away. Earth waited. He, too, waited. And then some touch of intuition, blown to white heat, supplied the link the pedestrian intellect missed, and he knew that what he waited for was on the way. For he would see. The message he should paint would come before his outer eye as well, though not, as he had first stupidly expected, on some grand, enormous scale. Rather would it be the equivalent of that still, small voice that once had inspired an entire nation....