The First Algernon Blackwood Megapack

by Algernon Blackwood

  “You have studied him closely then—had him, too, under the microscope? In this short time?”

  This time the answer did not surprise him, however.

  “My friend,” he heard, while the other turned from him and gazed out over the misty sea, “I have not been a ship’s doctor—always. I am one now only because the leisure and quiet give me the opportunity to finish certain work, recording work. For years I was in the H—”—he mentioned the German equivalent for the Salpêtrière—“years of research and investigation into the astonishing vagaries of the human mind and spirit—with certain results, followed later privately, that it is now my work to record. And among many cases that might well seem—er—beyond either credence or explanation,”—he hesitated again slightly—“I came across one, one in a million, let us admit, that an entire section of my work deals with under the generic term of Urmenschen.”

  “Primitive men,” O’Malley snapped him up, translating. Through his growing bewilderment ran also a growing uneasiness shot strangely with delight. Intuitively he divined what was coming.

  “Beings,” the doctor corrected him, “not men. the prefix Ur-, moreover, I use in a deeper sense than is usually attached to it as in Urwald, Urwelt, and the like. An Urmensch in the world today must suggest a survival of an almost incredible kind—a kind, too, utterly inadmissible and inexplicable to the materialist perhaps—”

  “Paganistic?” interrupted the other sharply, joy and fright rising over him.

  “Older, older by far,” was the rejoinder, given with a curious hush and a lowering of the voice.

  The suggestion rushed into full possession of O’Malley’s mind. There rose in him something that claimed for his companions the sea, the wind, the stars—tumultuous and terrific. But he said nothing. the conception, blown into him thus for the first time at full strength, took all his life into its keeping. No energy was left over for mere words. the doctor, he was aware, was looking at him, the passion of discovery and belief in his eyes. His manner kindled. It was the hidden Stahl emerging.

  “…a type, let me put it,” he went on in a voice whose very steadiness thrilled his listener afresh, “that in its strongest development would experience in the world today the loneliness of a complete and absolute exile. A return to humanity, you see, of some unexpended power of mythological values….”

  “Doctor…!”

  The shudder passed through him and away almost as soon as it came. Again the sea grew splendid, the thunder of the waves held voices calling, and the foam framed shapes and faces, wildly seductive, though fugitive as dreams. the words he had heard moved him profoundly. He remembered how the presence of the stranger had turned the world alive.

  He knew what was coming, too, and gave the lead direct, while yet half afraid to ask the question.

  “So my friend—this big ‘Russian’—?”

  “I have known before, yes, and carefully studied.”

  IX

  “Is it not just possible that there is a mode of being as much transcending Intelligence and Will as these transcend mechanical motion?”

  —HERBERT SPENCER, First Principles

  The two men left the rail and walked arm in arm along the deserted deck, speaking in lowered voices.

  “He came first to us, brought by the keeper of an obscure hotel where he was staying, as a case of lapse of memory—loss of memory, I should say, for it was complete. He was unable to say who he was, whence he came, or to whom he belonged. of his land or people we could learn nothing. His antecedents were an utter blank. Speech he had practically none of his own—nothing but the merest smattering of many tongues, a word here, a word there. Utterance, indeed, of any kind was exceedingly difficult to him. For years, evidently, he had wandered over the world, companionless among men, seeking his own, finding no place where to lay his head. People, it seemed, both men and women, kept him at arm’s-length, feeling afraid; the keeper of the little hotel was clearly terrified. This quality he had that I mentioned just now, repelled human beings—even in the Hospital it was noticeable—and placed him in the midst of humanity thus absolutely alone. It is a quality more rare than”—hesitating, searching for a word—“purity, one almost extinct today, one that I have never before or since come across in any other being—hardly ever, that is to say,” he qualified the sentence, glancing significantly at his companion.

  “And the boy?” O’Malley asked quickly, anxious to avoid any discussion of himself.

  “There was no boy then. He has found him since. He may find others too—possibly!” the Irishman drew his arm out, edging away imperceptibly. That shiver of joy reached him from the air and sea, perhaps.

  “And two years ago,” continued Dr. Stahl, as if nothing had happened, “he was discharged, harmless”—he lingered a moment on the word, “if not cured. He was to report to us every six months. He has never done so.”

  “You think he remembers you?”

  “No. It is quite clear that he has lapsed back completely again into the—er—state whence he came to us, that unknown world where he passed his youth with others of his kind, but of which he has been able to reveal no single detail to us, nor we to trace the slightest clue.”

  They stopped beneath the covered portion of the deck, for the mist had now turned to rain. They leaned against the smoking-room outer wall. In O’Malley’s mind the thoughts and feelings plunged and reared. Only with difficulty did he control himself.

  “And this man, you think,” he asked with outward calmness, “is of—of my kind?”

  “‘Akin,’ I said. I suggest—” But O’Malley cut him short.

  “So that you engineered our sharing a cabin with a view to putting him again—putting us both—under the microscope?”

  “My scientific interest was very strong,” Dr. Stahl replied carefully. “But it is not too late to change. I offer you a bed in my own roomy cabin on the promenade deck. Also, I ask your forgiveness.”

  The Irishman, large though his imaginative creed was, felt oddly checked, baffled, stupefied by what he had heard. He knew perfectly well what Stahl was driving at, and that revelations of another kind were yet to follow. What bereft him of very definite speech was this new fact slowly awakening in his consciousness which hypnotized him, as it were, with its grandeur. It seemed to portend that his own primitive yearnings, so-called, grew out of far deeper foundations than he had yet dreamed of even. Stahl, should he choose to listen, meant to give him explanation, quasi-scientific explanation. This talk about a survival of “unexpended mythological values” carried him off his feet. He knew it was true. Veiled behind that carefully chosen phrase was something more—a truth brilliantly discovered. He knew, too, that it bit at the platform-boards upon which his personality, his sanity, his very life, perhaps, rested—his modern life.

  “I forgive you, Dr. Stahl,” he heard himself saying with a deceptive calmness of voice as they stood shoulder to shoulder in that dark corner, “for there is really nothing to forgive. the characteristics of these Urmenschen you describe attract me very greatly. Your words merely give my imagination a letter of introduction to my reason. They burrow among the foundations of my life and being. At least—you have done me no wrong….” He knew the words were wild, impulsive, yet he could find no better. Above all things he wished to conceal his rising, grand delight.

  “I thank you,” Stahl said simply, yet with a certain confusion. “I—felt I owed you this explanation—er—this confession.”

  “You wished to warn me?”

  “I wished to say ‘Be careful’ rather. I say it now—Be careful! I give you this invitation to share my cabin for the remainder of the voyage, and I urge you to accept it.” the offer was from the heart, while the scientific interest in the man obviously half hoped for a refusal.

  “You think harm might come to me?”

  “Not physically. the man is gentle and safe in every way.”

  “But there is danger—in your opinion?” insisted the other.
/>   “There is danger—”

  “That his influence may make me as himself—an Urmensch?”

  “That he may—get you,” was the curious answer, given steadily after a moment’s pause.

  Again the words thrilled O’Malley to the core of his delighted, half-frightened soul. “You really mean that?” he asked again; “as ‘doctor and scientist,’ you mean it?”

  Stahl replied with a solemn anxiety in eyes and voice. “I mean that you have in yourself that ‘quality’ which makes the proximity of this ‘being’ dangerous: in a word that he may take you—er—with him.”

  “Conversion?”

  “Appropriation.”

  They moved further up the deck together for some minutes in silence, but the Irishman’s feelings, irritated by the man’s prolonged evasion, reached a degree of impatience that was almost anger. “Let us be more definite,” he exclaimed at length a trifle hotly. “You mean that I might go insane?”

  “Not in the ordinary sense,” came the answer without a sign of annoyance or hesitation; “but that something might happen to you—something that science could not recognize and medical science could not treat—”

  Then O’Malley interrupted him with the vital question that rushed out before he could consider its wisdom or legitimacy.

  “Then what really is he—this man, this ‘being’ whom you call a ‘survival,’ and who makes you fear for my safety. Tell me exactly what he is?”

  They found themselves just then by the doctor’s cabin, and Stahl, pushing the door open, led him in. Taking the sofa for himself, he pointed to an armchair opposite.

  X

  “Superstition is outside reason; so is revelation.”

  —OLD SAYING

  And O’Malley understood that he had pressed the doctor to the verge of confessing some belief that he was ashamed to utter or to hold, something forced upon him by his out-of-the-way experience of life to which his scientific training said peremptorily “No.” Further, that he watched him keenly all the time, noting the effect his words produced.

  “He is not a human being at all,” he continued with a queer thin whisper that conveyed a gravity of conviction singularly impressive, “in the sense in which you and I are accustomed to use the term. His inner being is not shaped, as his outer body, upon quite—human lines. He is a Cosmic Being—a direct expression of cosmic life. A little bit, a fragment, of the Soul of the World, and in that sense a survival—a survival of her youth.”

  The Irishman, as he listened to these utterly unexpected words, felt something rise within him that threatened to tear him asunder. Whether it was joy or terror, or compounded strangely of the two, he could not tell. It seemed as if he stood upon the edge of hearing something—spoken by a man who was no mere dreamer like himself—that would explain the world, himself, and all his wildest cravings. He both longed and feared to hear it. In his hidden and most secret thoughts, those thoughts he never uttered to another, this deep belief in the Earth as a conscious, sentient, living Being had persisted in spite of all the forces education and modern life had turned against it. It seemed in him an undying instinct, an unmovable conviction, though he hardly dared acknowledge it even to himself.

  He had always “dreamed” the Earth alive, a mothering organism to humanity; and himself, via his love of Nature, in some sweet close relation to her that other men had forgotten or ignored. Now, therefore, to hear Stahl talk of Cosmic Beings, fragments of the Soul of the World, and “survivals of her early life” was like hearing a great shout of command to his soul to come forth and share it in complete acknowledgment.

  He bit his lips, pinched himself, stared. Then he took the black cigar he was aware was being handed to him, lit it with fingers that trembled absurdly, and smoked as hard as though his sanity depended on his finishing it in a prescribed time. Great clouds rose before his face. But his soul within him came up with a flaming rush of speed, shouting, singing….

  There was enough ash to knock off into the bronze tray beside him before either said a word. He watched the little operation as closely as though he were aiming a rifle. the ash, he saw, broke firmly. “This must be a really good cigar,” he thought to himself, for as yet he had not been conscious of tasting it. the ash-tray, he also saw, was a kind of nymph, her spread drapery forming the receptacle. “I must get one of those,” he thought. “I wonder what they cost.” Then he puffed violently again. the doctor had risen and was pacing the cabin floor slowly over by the red curtain that concealed the bunk. O’Malley absent-mindedly watched him, and as he did so the words he had heard kept on roaring at the back of his mind.

  And then, while silence still held the room,—swift, too, as a second although it takes time to write—flashed through him a memory of Fechner, the German philosopher who held that the Universe was everywhere consciously alive, and that the Earth was the body of a living Entity, and that the World-Soul or Cosmic Consciousness is something more than a picturesque dream of the ancients….

  The doctor came to anchor again on the sofa opposite. To his great relief he was the first to break the silence, for O’Malley simply did not know how or where to begin.

  “We know today—you certainly know for I’ve read it accurately described in your books—that the human personality can extend itself under certain conditions called abnormal. It can project portions of itself, show itself even at a distance, operate away from the central covering body. In exactly similar fashion may the Being of the Earth have projected portions of herself in the past. of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival…a survival of a hugely remote period when her Consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity…forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds….”

  And then, suddenly, as though he had been deliberately giving his imagination rein yet now regretted it, his voice altered, his manner assumed a shade of something colder. He shifted the key, as though to another aspect of his belief. the man was talking swiftly of his experiences in the big and private hospitals. He was describing the very belief to which he had first found himself driven—the belief that had opened the door to so much more. So far as O’Malley could follow it in his curiously excited condition of mind, it was little more or less than a belief he himself had often played lovingly with—the theory that a man has a fluid or etheric counterpart of himself which is obedient to strong desire and can, under certain conditions, be detached—projected in a shape dictated by that desire.

  He only realized this fully later perhaps, for the doctor used a phraseology of his own. Stahl was telling calmly how he had been driven to some such belief by the facts that had come under his notice both in the asylums and in his private practice.

  “…That in the amazingly complex personality of a human being,” he went on, “there does exist some vital constituent, a part of consciousness, that can leave the body for a short time without involving death; that it is something occasionally visible to others; something malleable by thought and desire—especially by intense and prolonged yearning; and that it can even bring relief to its owner by satisfying in some subjective fashion the very yearnings that drew it forth.”

  “Doctor! You mean the ‘astral’?”

  “There is no name I know of. I can give it none. I mean in other words that it can create the conditions for such satisfaction—dream-like, perhaps, yet intense and seemingly very real at the time. Great emotion, for instance, drives it forth, explaining thus appearances at a distance, and a hundred other phenomena that my investigations of abnormal personality have forced me to recognize as true. And nostalgia often is the means of egress, the channel along which all the inner forces and desires of the heart stream elsewhere toward their fulfillment in some person, place, or dream.”

  Stahl was giving himself his head, talking freely of beliefs that rarely found utterance. Clearly it wa
s a relief to him to do so—to let himself be carried away. There was, after all, the poet in him side by side with the observer and analyst, and the fundamental contradiction in his character stood most interestingly revealed. O’Malley listened, half in a dream, wondering what this had to do with the Cosmic Life just mentioned.

  “Moreover, the appearance, the aspect of this etheric Double, molded thus by thought, longing, and desire, corresponds to such thought, longing, and desire. Its shape, when visible shape is assumed, may be various—very various. the form might conceivably be felt, discerned clairvoyantly as an emanation rather than actually seen,” he continued.

  Then he added, looking closely at his companion, “and in your own case this Double—it has always seemed to me—may be peculiarly easy of detachment from the rest of you.”

  “I certainly create my own world and slip into it—to some extent,” murmured the Irishman, absorbingly interested; “—reverie and so forth; partially, at any rate.”

  “‘Partially,’ yes, in your reveries of waking consciousness,” Stahl took him up, “but in sleep—in the trance consciousness—completely! And therein lies your danger,” he added gravely; “for to pass out completely in waking consciousness, is the next step—an easy one; and it constitutes, not so much a disorder of your being, as a readjustment, but a readjustment difficult of sane control.” He paused again. “You pass out while fully awake—a waking delusion. It is usually labeled—though in my opinion wrongly so—insanity.”

  “I’m not afraid of that,” O’Malley laughed, almost nettled. “I can manage myself all right—have done so far, at any rate.”

  It was curious how the rôles had shifted. O’Malley it was now who checked and criticized.

  “I suggest caution,” was the reply, made earnestly. “I suggest caution.”

  “I should keep your warnings for mediums, clairvoyants, and the like,” said the other tartly. He was half amazed, half alarmed even while he said it. It was the personal application that annoyed him. “They are rather apt to go off their heads, I believe.”