The First Algernon Blackwood Megapack: 36 Classic Tales of the Supernatural

by Algernon Blackwood

  Being myself of the “opposite type of mind,” I naturally did not argue, but suffered myself to accept his half-truth for the whole—temporarily. I checked him from time to time merely lest he should go too fast for me to follow what seemed a very wonderful tale of faerie.

  “So this wild thing in me the world today has beggared and denied,” he went on, swept by his Celtic enthusiasm, “woke in its full strength. Calling to me like some flying spirit in a storm, it claimed me. the man’s being summoned me back to the earth and Nature, as it were, automatically. I understood that look on his face, that sign in his eyes. the ‘Isles of Greece’ furnished some faint clue, but as yet I knew no more—only that he and I were in the same region and that I meant to go with him and that he accepted me with delight that was joy. It drew me as empty space draws a giddy man to the precipice’s edge. Thoughts from another’s mind,” he added by way of explanation, turning round, “come far more completely to me when I stand in a man’s atmosphere, silent and receptive, than when by speech he tries to place them there. Ah! And that helps me to get at what I mean, perhaps. the man, you see, hardly thought; he felt.”

  “As an animal, you mean? Instinctively—?”

  “In a sense, yes,” he replied after a momentary hesitation. “Like some very early, very primitive form of life.”

  “With the best will in the world, Terence, I don’t quite follow you—”

  “I don’t quite follow myself,” he cried, “because I’m trying to lead and follow at the same time. You know that idea—I came across it somewhere—that in ancient peoples the senses were much less specialized than they are now; that perception came to them in general, massive sensations rather than divided up neatly into five channels:—that they felt all over so to speak, and that all the senses, as in an overdose of hashish, become one single sense? the centralizing of perception in the brain is a recent thing, and it might equally well have occurred in any other nervous headquarters of the body, say, the solar plexus; or, perhaps, never have been localized at all! In hysteria patients have been known to read with the finger-tips and smell with the heel. Touch is still all over; it’s only the other four that have got fixed in definite organs. There are systems of thought today that still would make the solar plexus the main center, and not the brain. the word ‘brain,’ you know, never once occurs in the ancient Scriptures of the world. You will not find it in the Bible—the reins, the heart, and so forth were what men felt with then. They felt all over—well,” he concluded abruptly, “I think this fellow was like that. D’ye see now?”

  I stared at him, greatly wondering. A nursemaid passed close, balancing a child in a spring-perambulator, saying in a foolish voice, “Wupsey up, wupsey down! Wupsey there!” O’Malley, in the full stream of his mood, waited impatiently till she had gone by. Then, rolling over on his side, he came closer, talking in a lowered tone. I think I never saw him so deeply stirred, nor understood, perhaps, so little of the extreme passion working in him. Yet it was incredible that he could have caught so much from mere interviews with a semi-articulate stranger, unless what he said was strictly true, and this Russian had positively touched latent fires in his soul by a kind of sympathetic magic.

  “You know,” he went on almost under his breath, “every man who thinks for himself and feels vividly finds he lives in a world of his own, apart, and believes that one day he’ll come across, either in a book or in a person, the Priest who shall make it clear to him. Well—I’d found mine, that’s all. I can’t prove it to you with a pair of scales or a butcher’s meat-axe, but it’s true.”

  “And you mean his mere presence conveyed all this without speech almost?”

  “Because there was no speech possible,” he replied, dropping his voice to a whisper and thrusting his face yet closer into mine. “We were solitary survivors of a world whose language was either uncreated or”—he italicized the word—“forgotten….”

  “An elaborate and detailed thought-transference, then?”

  “Why not?” he murmured. “It’s one of the commonest facts of daily life.”

  “And you had never fully realized it before, this loneliness and its possible explanation—that there might exist, I mean, a way of satisfying it—till you met this stranger?”

  He answered with deep earnestness. “Always, old man, always, but suffered under it atrociously because I’d never understood it. I had been afraid to face it. This man, a far bigger and less diluted example of it than myself, made it all clear and right and natural. We belonged to the same forgotten place and time. Under his lead and guidance I could find my own—return….”

  I whistled a long soft whistle, looking up into the sky. Then, sitting upright like himself, we stared hard at one another, straight in the eye. He was too grave, too serious to trifle with. It would have been unfair too. Besides, I loved to hear him. the way he reared such fabulous superstructures upon slight incidents, interpreting thus his complex being to himself, was uncommonly interesting. It was observing the creative imagination actually at work, and the process in a sense seemed sacred. Only the truth and actuality with which he clothed it all made me a little uncomfortable sometimes.

  “I’ll put it to you quite simply,” he cried suddenly.

  “Yes, and ‘quite simply’ it was—?”

  “That he knew the awful spiritual loneliness of living in a world whose tastes and interests were not his own, a world to which he was essentially foreign, and at whose hands he suffered continual rebuff and rejection. Advances from either side were mutually and necessarily repelled because oil and water cannot mix. Rejected, moreover, not merely by a family, tribe, or nation, but by a race and time—by the whole World of Today; an outcast and an alien, a desolate survival.”

  “An appalling picture!”

  “I understood it,” he went on, holding up both hands by way of emphasis, “because in miniature I had suffered the same: he was a supreme case of what lay so deeply in myself. He was a survival of other life the modern mind has long since agreed to exile and deny. Humanity stared at him over a barrier, never dreaming of asking him in. Even had it done so he could not by the law of his being have accepted. Outcast myself in some small way, I understood his terrible loneliness, a soul without a country, visible and external country that is. A passion of tenderness and sympathy for him, and so also for myself, awoke. I saw him as chieftain of all the lonely, exiled souls of life.”

  Breathless a moment, he lay on his back staring at the summer clouds—those thoughts of wind that change and pass before their meanings can be quite seized. Similarly protean was the thought his phrases tried to clothe. the terror, pathos, sadness of this big idea he strove to express touched me deeply, yet never quite with the clarity of his own conviction.

  “There are such souls, dépaysées and in exile,” he said suddenly again, turning over on the grass. “They do exist. They walk the earth today here and there in the bodies of ordinary men…and their loneliness is a loneliness that must be whispered.”

  “You formed any idea what kind of—of survival?” I asked gently, for the notion grew in me that after all these two would prove to be mere revolutionaries in escape, political refugees, or something quite ordinary.

  O’Malley buried his face in his hands for a moment without replying. Presently he looked up. I remember that a streak of London black ran from the corner of his mouth across the cheek. He pushed the hair back from his forehead, answering in a manner grown abruptly calm and dispassionate.

  “Don’t ye see what a foolish question that is,” he said quietly, “and how impossible to satisfy, inviting that leap of invention which can be only an imaginative lie…? I can only tell you,” and the breeze brought to us the voices of children from the Round Pond where they sailed their ships of equally wonderful adventure, “that my own longing became this: to go with him, to know what he knew, to live where he lived—forever.”

  “And the alarm you said you felt?”

  He hesitated.

&n
bsp; “That,” he added, “was a kind of mistake. To go involved, I felt, an inner catastrophe that might be Death—that it would be out of the body, I mean, or a going backwards. In reality, it was a going forwards and a way to Life.”

  VII

  And it was just before the steamer made Naples that the jolly Captain unwittingly helped matters forward a good deal. For it was his ambition to include in the safe-conduct of his vessel the happy-conduct also of his passengers. He liked to see them contented and of one accord, a big family, and he noted—or had word brought to him perhaps—that there were one or two whom the attitude of the majority left out in the cold.

  It may have been—O’Malley wondered without actually asking—that the man who shared the cabin with the strangers made some appeal for re-arrangement, but in any case Captain Burgenfelder approached the Irishman that afternoon on the bridge and asked if he would object to having them in his stateroom for the balance of the voyage.

  “Your present gompanion geds off at Naples,” he said. “Berhaps you would not object. I think—they seem lonely. You are friendly with them. They go alzo to Batoum?”

  This proposal for close quarters gave him pause. He knew a moment or two of grave hesitation, yet without time to analyze it. Then, driven by a sudden decision of the heart that knew no revision of reason, he agreed.

  “I had better, perhaps, suggest it to see if they are willing,” he said the next minute, hedging.

  “I already ask him dat.”

  “Oh, you have! And he would like it—not object, I mean?” he added, aware of a subtle sense of half-frightened pleasure.

  “Pleased and flattered on the contrary,” was the reply, as he handed him the glasses to look at Ischia rising blue from the sea.

  O’Malley felt as though his decision was somehow an act of self-committal, almost grave. It meant that impulsively he accepted a friendship which concealed in its immense attraction—danger. He had taken the plunge.

  The rush of it broke over him like a wave, setting free a tumult of very deep emotion. He raised the glasses automatically to his eyes, but looking through them he saw not Ischia nor the opening the Captain explained the ship would make, heading that evening for Sicily. He saw quite another picture that drew itself up out of himself—was thrown up, rather, somewhat with violence, as upon a landscape of dream-scenery. the lens of passionate yearning in himself, ever unsatisfied, focused it against a background far, far away, in some faint distance that was neither of space nor time, and might equally have been past as future. Large figures he saw, shadowy yet splendid, that ran free-moving as clouds over mighty hills, vital with the abundant strong life of a younger world…. Yet never quite saw them, never quite overtook them, for their speed and the manner of their motion bewildered the sight….

  Moreover, though they evaded him in terms of physical definition he knew a sense of curious, half-remembered familiarity. Some portion of his hidden self, uncaught, unharnessed by anything in modern life, rose with a passionate rush of joy and made after them—something in him untamed as wind. His mind stood up, as it were, and shouted “I am coming.” For he saw himself not far behind, as a man, racing with great leaps to join them…yet never overtaking, never drawing close enough to see quite clearly. the roar of their tramping shook the very blood in his ears….

  His decision to accept the strangers had set free in his being something that thus for the first time in his life—escaped…. Symbolically in his mind this Escape had taken picture form….

  The Captain’s voice was asking for the glasses; with a wrench that caused almost actual physical pain he tore himself away, letting this herd of Flying Thoughts sink back into the shadows and disappear. With sharp regret he saw them go—a regret for long, long, far-off things….

  Turning, he placed the field-glasses carefully in that fat open hand stretched out to receive them, and noted as he did so the thick, pink fingers that closed about the strap, the heavy ring of gold, the band of gilt about the sleeve. That wrought gold, those fleshy fingers, the genial gutteral voice saying “T’anks” were symbols of an existence tamed and artificial that caged him in again….

  Then he went below and found that the lazy “drummer” who talked harvest-machines to puzzled peasants had landed, and in his place an assortment of indiscriminate clothing belonging to the big Russian and his son lay scattered over the upper berth and upon the sofa-bed beneath the port-hole.

  VIII

  “For my own part I find in some of these abnormal or supernormal facts the strongest suggestions in favor of a superior consciousness being possible. I doubt whether we shall ever understand some of them without using the very letter of Fechner’s conception of a great reservoir in which the memories of earth’s inhabitants are pooled and preserved, and from which, when the threshold lowers or the valve opens, information ordinarily shut out leaks into the mind of exceptional individuals among us.”

  —WILLIAM JAMES, A Pluralistic Universe

  And it was some hours later, while the ship made for the open sea, that he told Dr. Stahl casually of the new arrangement and saw the change come so suddenly across his face. Stahl stood back from the compass-box whereon they leaned, and putting a hand upon his companion’s shoulder, looked a moment into his eyes. With surprise O’Malley noted that the pose of cynical disbelief was gone; in its place was sympathy, interest, kindness. the words he spoke came from his heart.

  “Is that true?” he asked, as though the news disturbed him.

  “Of course. Why not? Is there anything wrong?” He felt uneasy. the doctor’s manner confirmed the sense that he had done a rash thing. Instantly the barrier between the two crumbled and he lost the first feeling of resentment that his friends should be analyzed. the men thus came together in unhindered sincerity.

  “Only,” said the doctor thoughtfully, half gravely, “that—I may have done you a wrong, placed you, that is, in a position of—” he hesitated an instant,—“of difficulty. It was I who suggested the change.”

  O’Malley stared at him.

  “I don’t understand you quite.”

  “It is this,” continued the other, still holding him with his eyes. He said it deliberately. “I have known you for some time, formed-er—an opinion of your type of mind and being—a very rare and curious one, interesting me deeply—”

  “I wasn’t aware you’d had me under the microscope,” O’Malley laughed, but restlessly.

  “Though you felt it and resented it—justly, I may say—to the point of sometimes avoiding me—”

  “As doctor, scientist,” put in O’Malley, while the other, ignoring the interruption, continued in German:—

  “I always had the secret hope, as ‘doctor and scientist,’ let us put it then, that I might one day see you in circumstances that should bring out certain latent characteristics I thought I divined in you. I wished to observe you—your psychical being—under the stress of certain temptations, favorable to these characteristics. Our brief voyages together, though they have so kindly ripened our acquaintance into friendship”—he put his hand again on the other’s shoulder smiling, while O’Malley replied with a little nod of agreement—“have, of course, never provided the opportunity I refer to—”

  “Ah—!”

  “Until now!” the doctor added. “Until now.”

  Puzzled and interested the Irishman waited for him to go on, but the man of science, who was now a ship’s doctor, hesitated. He found it difficult, apparently, to say what was in his thoughts.

  “You refer, of course, though I hardly follow you quite—to our big friends?” O’Malley helped him.

  The adjective slipped out before he was aware of it. His companion’s expression admitted the accuracy of the remark. “You also see them—big, then?” he said, quickly taking him up. He was not cross-questioning; out of keen sympathetic interest he asked it.

  “Sometimes, yes,” the Irishman answered, more astonished. “Sometimes only—”

  “Exactly. Bigger t
han they really are; as though at times they gave out—emanated—something that extended their appearance. Is that it?”

  O’Malley, his confidence wholly won, more surprised, too, than he quite understood, seized Stahl by the arm and drew him toward the rails. They leaned over, watching the sea. A passenger, pacing the decks before dinner, passed close behind them.

  “But, doctor,” he said in a hushed tone as soon as the steps had died away, “you are saying things that I thought were half in my imagination only, not true in the ordinary sense quite—your sense, I mean?”

  For some moments the doctor made no reply. In his eyes a curious steady gaze replaced the usual twinkle. When at length he spoke it was evidently following a train of thought of his own, playing round a subject he seemed half ashamed of and yet desired to state with direct language.

  “A being akin to yourself,” he said in low tones, “only developed, enormously developed; a Master in your own peculiar region, and a man whose influence acting upon you at close quarters could not fail to arouse the latent mind-storms”—he chose the word hesitatingly, as though seeking for a better he could not find on the moment,—“always brewing in you just below the horizon.”

  He turned and watched his companion’s face keenly. O’Malley was too impressed to feel annoyance.

  “Well—?” he asked, feeling the adventure closing round him with quite a new sense of reality. “Well?” he repeated louder. “Please go on. I’m not offended, only uncommonly interested. You leave me in a fog, so far. I think you owe me more than hints.”

  “I do,” said the other simply. “About that man is a singular quality too rare for language to have yet coined its precise description: something that is essentially”—they had lapsed into German now, and he used the German word—“unheimlich.”