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

by Algernon Blackwood

  “Of disease, of pain, of separateness,” put in the other.

  The German shrugged his shoulders. “It’s the stage they’re at,” he said. “You, if you have success, will merely make a few uncomfortable. the majority will hardly turn their heads. To one in a million you may bring peace and happiness.”

  “It’s worth it,” cried the Irishman, “even for that one!”

  Stahl answered very gently, smiling with his new expression of tenderness and sympathy. “Dream your great dream if you will, but dream it, my friend, alone—in peace and silence. That ‘one’ I speak of is yourself.”

  The doctor pressed his hand and turned toward his cabin. O’Malley stood a little longer to share the sunrise. Neither spoke another word. He heard the door shut softly behind him. the unspoken answer in his mind was in two words—two common little adjectives: “Coward and selfish!”

  But Stahl, once in the privacy of his cabin, judging by the glance visible on his face ere he closed the door, may probably have known a very different thought. And possibly he uttered it below his breath. A sigh most certainly escaped his lips, a sigh half sadness, half relief. For O’Malley remembered it afterwards.

  “Beautiful, foolish dreamer among men! But, thank God, harmless—to others and—himself.”

  And soon afterwards O’Malley also went to his cabin. Before sleep took him he lay deep in a mood of sadness—almost as though he had heard his friend’s unspoken thought. He realized the insuperable difficulties that lay before him. the world would think him “mad but harmless.”

  Then, with full sleep, he slipped across that sunrise and found the old-world Garden. He held the eternal password.

  “I can but try…!”

  XLV

  And here the crowded, muddled notebooks come to an end. the rest was action—and inevitable disaster.

  The brief history of O’Malley’s mad campaign may be imagined. To a writer who found interest in the study of forlorn hopes and their leaders, a detailed record of this particular one might seem worth while. For me personally it is too sad and too pathetic. I cannot bring myself to tell, much less to analyze the story of a broken heart, when that heart and story are those of a close and deeply admired intimate, a man who gave me genuine love and held my own.

  Besides, although a curious chapter in uncommon human nature, it is not by any means a new one. It is the true story of many a poet and dreamer since the world began, though perhaps not often told nor even guessed. And only the poets themselves, especially the little poets who cannot utter half the fire that consumes them, may know the searing pain and passion and the true inwardness of it all.

  Most of those months it chanced I was away, and only fragments of the foolish enterprise could reach me. But nothing, I think, could have stopped him, nor any worldly selfish wisdom made him even pause. the thing possessed him utterly; it had to flame its way out as best it could. To high and low, he preached by every means in his power the Simple Life; he preached the mystical life as well—that the true knowledge and the true progress are within, that they both pertain to the inner being and have no chief concern with external things. He preached it wildly, lopsidedly, in or out of season, knowing no half measures. His enthusiasm obscured his sense of proportion and the extravagance hid the germ of truth that undeniably lay in his message.

  To put the movement on its feet at first he realized every possession that he had. It left him penniless, if he was not almost so already, and in the end it left him smothered beneath the glory of his blinding and unutterable Dream. He never understood that suggestion is more effective than a sledge-hammer. His faith was no mere little seed of mustard, but a full-fledged forest singing its message in a wind of thunder. He shouted it aloud to the world.

  I think the acid disappointment that lies beneath that trite old phrase “a broken heart” was never really his; for indeed it seemed that his cruel, ludicrous failure merely served to strengthen hope and purpose by making him seek for a better method of imparting what he had to say. In the end he learned the bitter lesson to the full. But faith never trailed a single feather. Those jeering audiences in the Park; those empty benches in many a public hall, those brief, ignoring paragraphs in the few newspapers that filled a vacant corner by labeling him crank and long-haired prophet; even the silence that greeted his pamphlets, his letters to the Press, and all the rest, hurt him for others rather than for himself. His pain was altruistic, never personal. His dream and motive, his huge, unwieldy compassion, his genuine love for humanity, all were big enough for that.

  And so, I think, he missed the personal mortification that disappointment so deep might bring to dreamers with an aim less unadulteratedly pure. His eye was single to the end. He attributed only the highest motives to all who offered help. the very quacks and fools who flocked to his banner, eager to exploit their smaller fads by joining them to his own, he welcomed, only regretting that, as Stahl had warned him, he could not attract a better class of mind. He did not even see through the manoeuvres of the occasional women of wealth and title who sought to conceal their own mediocrity by advertising in their drawing-rooms the eccentricities of men like himself. And to the end he had the courage of his glorious convictions.

  The change of method that he learned at last, moreover, was characteristic of this faith and courage.

  “I’ve begun at the wrong end,” he said; “I shall never reach men through their intellects. Their brains today are occupied by the machine-made gods of civilization. I cannot change the direction of their thoughts and lusts from outside; the momentum is too great to stop that way. I must get at them from within. To reach their hearts, the new ideas must rise up from within. I see the truer way. I must do it from the other side. It must come to them—in Beauty.”

  For he was to the last convinced that death would merge him in the being of the Earth’s Collective Consciousness, and that, lost in her deep eternal beauty, he thus might reach the hearts of men in some stray glimpse of nature’s loveliness, and register his flaming message. He loved to quote from Adonais:

  “He is made one with Nature: there is heard

  His voice in all her music, from the moan

  Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;

  He is a presence to be felt and known

  In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,

  Spreading itself where’er that Power may move

  Which has withdrawn his being to its own.

  He is a portion of the loveliness

  Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear

  His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress

  Sweeps through the dull dense world…”

  And this thought, phrased in a dozen different ways, was always on his lips. To dream was right and useful, even to dream alone, because the beauty of the dream must add to the beauty of the Whole of which it is a part and an interpretation. It was not really lost or vain. All must come back in time to feed the world. He had known gracious thoughts of Earth too big to utter, almost too big to hold. Such thoughts could not ever be really told; they were incommunicable. For the mystical revelation is incommunicable. It has authority only for him who feels it. A corporate revelation is impossible. Only those among men could know, in whose hearts it rose intuitively and made its presence felt as innate ideas. Inspiration brings it, and beauty is the vehicle. Their hearts must change before their minds could be reached.

  “I can work it better from the other side—from that old, old Garden which is the Mother’s heart. In this way I can help at any rate…!”

  XLVI

  It was at the close of a wet and foggy autumn that we met again, winter in the air, all London desolate; and his wasted, forlorn appearance told me the truth at once. Only the passionate eagerness of voice and manner were there to prove that the spirit had not weakened. There glowed within a fire that showed itself in the translucent shining of the eyes and face.

  “I’ve made one great discovery, old man,” he
exclaimed with old, familiar, high enthusiasm, “one great discovery at least.”

  “You’ve made so many,” I answered cheerfully, while my real thoughts were busy with his bodily state of health. For his appearance shocked me. He stood among a litter of papers, books, neckties, nailed boots, knapsacks, maps and what-not, that rolled upon the floor from the mouth of the Willesden canvas sack. His old grey flannel suit hung literally upon a bag of bones; all the life there was seemed concentrated in his face and eyes—those far-seeing, light blue eyes. They were darker than usual now, eyes like the sea, I thought. His hair, long and disordered, tumbled over his forehead. He was pale, and at the same time flushed. It was almost a disembodied spirit that I saw.

  “You’ve made so many. I love to hear them. Is this one finer than the others?”

  He looked a moment at me through and through, almost uncannily. He looked in reality beyond me. It was something else he saw, and in the dusk I turned involuntarily.

  “Simpler,” he said quickly, “much simpler.”

  He moved up close beside me, whispering. Was it all imagination that a breath of flowers came with him? There was certainly a curious fragrance in the air, wild and sweet like orchards in the spring.

  “And it is—?”

  “That the Garden’s everywhere! You needn’t go to the distant Caucasus to find it. It’s all about this old London town, and in these foggy streets and dingy pavements. It’s even in this cramped, undusted room. Now at this moment, while that lamp flickers and the thousands go to sleep. the gates of horn and ivory are here,” he tapped his breast. “And here the flowers, the long, clean open hills, the giant herd, the nymphs, the sunshine and the gods!”

  So attached was he now to that little room in Paddington where his books and papers lay, that when the curious illness that had caught him grew so much worse, and the attacks of the nameless fever that afflicted him turned serious, I hired a bedroom for him in the same house. And it was in that poky, cage-like den he breathed his last.

  His illness I called curious, his fever nameless, because they really were so and puzzled every one. He simply faded out of life, it seemed; there was no pain, no sleeplessness, no suffering of any physical kind. He uttered no complaint, nor were there symptoms of any known disorder.

  “Your friend is sound organically,” the doctor told me when I pressed him for the truth there on the stairs, “sound as a bell. He wants the open air and plenty of wholesome food, that’s all. His body is ill-nourished. His trouble is mental—some deep and heavy disappointment doubtless. If you can change the current of his thoughts, awaken interest in common things, and give him change of scene, perhaps—” He shrugged his shoulders and looked very grave.

  “You think he’s dying?”

  “I think, yes, he is dying.”

  “From—?”

  “From lack of living pure and simple,” was the answer. “He has lost all hold on life.”

  “He has abundant vitality still.”

  “Full of it. But it all goes—elsewhere. the physical organism gets none of it.”

  “Yet mentally,” I asked, “there’s nothing actually wrong?”

  “Not in the ordinary sense. the mind is clear and active. So far as I can test it, the process of thought is healthy and undamaged. It seems to me—”

  He hesitated a moment on the doorstep while the driver wound the motor handle. I waited with a sinking heart for the rest of the sentence.

  “…like certain cases of nostalgia I have known—very rare and very difficult to deal with. Acute and vehement nostalgia, yes, sometimes called a broken heart,” he added, pausing another instant at the carriage door, “in which the entire stream of a man’s inner life flows to some distant place, or person, or—or to some imagined yearning that he craves to satisfy.”

  “To a dream?”

  “It might be even that,” he answered slowly, stepping in. “It might be spiritual. the religious and poetic temperament are most open to it, and the most difficult to deal with when afflicted.” He emphasized the little word as though the doubt he felt was far less strong than the conviction he only half concealed. “If you would save him, try to change the direction of his thoughts. There is nothing—in all honesty I must say it—nothing that I can do to help.”

  And then, pulling at the grey tuft on his chin and looking keenly at me a moment over his glasses,—“Those flowers,” he said hesitatingly, “you might move those flowers from the room, perhaps. Their perfume is a trifle strong… It might be better.” Again he looked sharply at me. There was an odd expression in his eyes. And in my heart there was an odd sensation too, so odd that I found myself bereft a moment of any speech at all, and when my tongue became untied, the carriage was already disappearing down the street. For in that dingy sick-room there were no flowers at all, yet the perfume of woods and fields and open spaces had reached the doctor too, and obviously perplexed him.

  “Change the direction of his thoughts!” I went indoors, wondering how any honest and even half-unselfish friend, knowing what I knew, could follow such advice. With what but the lowest motive, of keeping him alive for my own happiness, could I seek to change his thoughts of some imagined joy and peace to the pain and sordid facts of an earthly existence that he loathed?

  But when I turned I saw the tousled yellow-headed landlady standing in the breach. Mrs. Heath stopped me in the hall to inquire whether I could say “anythink abart the rent per’aps?” Her manner was defiant. I found three months were owing.

  “It’s no good arsking ’im,” she said, though not unkindly on the whole. “I’m sick an’ tired of always being put off. He talks about the gawds and a Mr. Pan, or some such gentleman who he says will look after it all. But I never sees ’im—not this Mr. Pan. And his stuff up there,” jerking her head toward the little room, “ain’t worth a Sankey-moody ’ymn-book, take the lot of it at cost!”

  I reassured her. It was impossible to help smiling. For some minds, I reflected, a Sankey hymn-book might hold dreams that were every bit as potent as his own, and far less troublesome. But that “Mr. Pan, or some such gentleman” should serve as a “reference” between lodger and landlady was an unwitting comment on the modern point of view that made me want to cry rather than to laugh. O’Malley and Mrs. Heath between them had made a profounder criticism than they knew.

  * * * *

  And so by slow degrees he went, leaving the outer fury for the inner peace. the center of consciousness gradually shifted from the transient form which is the true ghost, to the deeper, permanent state which is the eternal reality. For this was how he phrased it to me in one of our last, strange talks. He watched his own withdrawal.

  In bed he would lie for hours with fixed and happy eyes, staring apparently at nothing, the expression on his face quite radiant. the pulse sank often dangerously low; he scarcely seemed to breathe; yet it was never complete unconsciousness or trance. My voice, when I found the heart to try and coax his own for speech, would win him back. the eyes would then grow dimmer, losing their happier light, as he turned to the outer world to look at me.

  “The pull is so tremendous now,” he whispered; “I was far, so far away, in the deep life of Earth. Why do you bring me back to all these little pains? I can do nothing here; there I am of use…”

  He spoke so low I had to bend my head to catch the words. It was very late at night and for hours I had been watching by his side. Outside an ugly yellow fog oppressed the town, but about him like an atmosphere I caught again that fragrance as of trees and flowers. It was too faint for any name—that fugitive, mild perfume one meets upon bare hills and round the skirts of forests. It was somehow, I fancied, in the very breath.

  “Each time the effort to return is greater. In there I am complete and full of power. I can work and send my message back so splendidly. Here,” he glanced down at his wasted body with a curious smile, “I am only on the fringe—it’s pain and failure. All so ineffective.”

  That other look came back
into the eyes, more swiftly than before.

  “I thought you might like to speak, to tell me—something,” I said, keeping the tears with difficulty from my voice. “Is there no one you would like to see?”

  He shook his head slowly, and gave the peculiar answer:

  “They’re all in there.”

  “But Stahl, perhaps—if I could get him here?”

  An expression of gentle disapproval crossed his face, then melted softly into a wistful tenderness as of a child.

  “He’s not there—yet,” he whispered, “but he will come too in the end. In sleep, I think, he goes there even now.”

  “Where are you really then?” I ventured, “And where is it you go to?”

  The answer came unhesitatingly; there was no doubt or searching.

  “Into myself, my real and deeper self, and so beyond it into her—the Earth. Where all the others are—all, all, all.”

  And then he frightened me by sitting up in bed abruptly. His eyes stared past me—out beyond the close confining walls. the movement was so startling with its suddenness and vigor that I shrank back a moment. the head was sideways. He was intently listening.

  “Hark!” he whispered. “They are calling me! Do you hear…?”

  The look of joy that broke over the face like sunshine made me hold my breath. Something in his low voice thrilled me beyond all I have ever known. I listened too. Only the rumble of the traffic down the distant main street broke the silence, the rattle of a nearer cart, and the footsteps of a few pedestrians. No other noises came across the night. There was no wind. Thick yellow fog muffled everything.

  “I hear nothing,” I answered softly. “What is it that you hear?”

  And, making no reply, he presently lay down again among the pillows, that look of joy and glory still upon his face. It lay there to the end like sunrise.

  The fog came in so thickly through the window that I rose to close it. He never closed that window, and I hoped he would not notice. For a sound of wretched street-music was coming nearer—some beggar playing dismally upon a penny whistle—and I feared it would disturb him. But in a flash he was up again.