Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘Land in sight, sir! We shall see Liverpool within twenty hours now, barring fog.’

  The friendly bathroom steward passed the open door of Stateroom No. 28, and the big, brown-bearded man in the blue serge suit who was sitting, already dressed, on the edge of the port-hole berth, started as though he had been shot, and ran up on deck without waiting to finish tying the laces of his india-rubber shoes.

  ‘By Jove!’ he said, as he thundered along the stuffy passages of the rolling vessel, and ‘By Gad!’ He emerged on the upper deck in the sunlight, having nearly injured several persons in his impetuous journey, and, taking a great gulp of the salt air with keen satisfaction, he crossed to the side in a couple of strides, the shoe-laces clicking against the deck as he went.

  ‘Twenty years ago,’ he muttered, ‘when I was barely out of my teens. And now — !’

  The big man was distinctly excited, though ‘moved’ perhaps is the better word, seeing that the emotion was a little too searching, too tinged with sadness, to include elation. He plunged both hands into his coat pockets with a violence that threatened to tear the bottoms out, and leaned over the railing.

  Far away a faint blue line, tinged delicately with green, rose out of the sea. He saw it instantly, and his throat tightened unexpectedly, almost like a reflex action. For, about that simple little blue line on the distant horizon there was something strangely seizing something absolutely arresting. The sight of it was a hundred times more poignant than he had imagined it would be; it touched a thousand springs of secret life in him, and a mist rose faintly before his eyes.

  Paul Rivers had not realised that his emotion would be so intense; but from that instant everything on the ship, otherwise familiar and rather boring, looked different. A new sense of locality came to him. The steamer became strange and new; he ‘recognised’ bits of it as though he had just come aboard a ship known aforetime. It was no longer the steamer that was merely crossing the Atlantic; it was the boat that was bringing him home. And there, trimming the horizon in a thin ribbon of most arresting beauty, was the coast-line of the first Island.

  ‘But it seems so much more solid — and so much more real than I expected!’

  Though it was barely seven o’clock a few early passengers were already astir, and he made his way back again to the lower deck and thence climbed up into the bows. He wished to be alone. Another man, apparently from the steerage, was there before him, leaning over the rail and peering fixedly under one hand at the horizon. The saloon passenger took up his position a few feet farther on and stared hard. He, too, stared with the eyes of memory, now grown a little dim. The air was fresh and sweet, fragrant of long sea distances; there was a soft warmth in it too, for it was late April and the spring made its presence known even on the great waters where there was nothing to hang its fairy banners on.

  ‘So that’s land! That’s the Old Country!’

  The words dropped out of their own accord; he could not help himself. The sky seemed to come down a little closer, with a more familiar and friendly touch; the very air, he fancied, had a new taste in it, — a whiff of his boyhood days — a smell of childhood and the things of childhood — ages ago, it seemed, in another life.

  The huge ship rose and fell on the regular, sweeping swells, and sea-birds from the land already came out to meet her. He easily imagined that the thrills in the depths of his own being somehow communicated themselves to the mighty vessel that tore the seas asunder in her great desire to reach the land.

  ‘Twenty years,’ he repeated aloud, oblivious of his neighbour, ‘twenty years since I last saw it!’

  ‘And it’s gol-darned nearer fifty since I seen it,’ exclaimed a harsh voice just behind him.

  He turned with a start. The steerage passenger beside him, he saw, was an old man with a rough, grey face, and hair turning white; the hand that shaded his eyes was thick and worn; there was a heavy gold ring on the little finger, and the dirty cuff of a dark flannel shirt tumbled, loosely and unbuttoned, over the very solid wrist. The face, he noticed, at a second glance, was rugged, beaten, scored, the face of a man who had tumbled terribly about life, battered from pillar to post; and it was only the light in the hard blue eyes — eyes still fixed unwaveringly on the distant line of the land — that redeemed it from a kind of grim savagery. Beaten and battered, yes! Yet at the same time triumphant. The atmosphere of the man proclaimed in some vibrant fashion beyond analysis that he had failed in all he undertook — failed from stupidity rather than character, and always doggedly beginning over again with the same lack of intelligence — but yet had never given in, and never would give in.

  It was not difficult to reconstruct his history from his appearance; or to realise his feelings as he saw the Old Country after fifty years — a returned failure. Although the voice had vibrated with emotion, the face remained expressionless and unmoved; but down both cheeks large tears ran slowly, in sudden jerks, to drop with a splash upon the railing. And Paul Rivers, after his intuitive fashion, grasped the whole drama of the man with a sudden completeness that touched him with swift sympathy. At the same time he could not help thinking of rain-drops running down the face of a statue. He recognised with shame that he was conscious of a desire to laugh.

  ‘Fifty years! That’s a long time indeed,’ he said kindly. ‘It’s half-a-century.’

  ‘That’s so, Boss,’ returned the other in a dead voice that betrayed Ireland overlaid with acquired American twang and intonation; ‘and I guess now I’ll never be able to stick it over here. Jest see it — and then git back again.’

  He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, and never once turned his head towards the man he was speaking to; only his lips moved; he did not even lift a finger to brush off the great tears that fell one by one from his checks to the deck. He seemed unconscious of them; as though it was so long since those hard eyes had melted that they had forgotten how to do it properly and the skin no longer registered the sensation of the trickling. The tears continued to fall at intervals; Paul Rivers actually heard them splash.

  ‘I went out steerage,’ the man continued to himself, or to the sea, or to any one else who cared to listen, ‘and I come back steerage. That’s my trouble. And now’ — his eye shifted for a fraction of a second and watched a huge wave go thundering by—’ I’m grave-huntin’, I guess. And that’s about the size of it. Jest see it and — git back again!’

  The first-class passenger made some kind and appropriate reply — words with genuine sympathy in them — and then, getting no further answer, found it difficult to continue the conversation. The man, he realised, had only wanted a peg to hang his emotion on. It had to be a living peg, but any other living peg would do equally well, and before long he would find some one in the steerage who would listen with delight to the flood that was bound to come. And, presently, he took his departure to his own quarters where the sailors, with bare feet, were still swabbing the slippery decks.

  A couple of hours later, after breakfast, he leaned over the rail and again saw the man on the steerage deck, and heard him talking volubly. The tears were gone, but the smudges were still visible on the cheeks, where they had traced a zigzag pattern. He was telling the history of his fifty years’ disappointments and failures to one and all who cared to listen.

  And, apparently, many cared to listen. The man’s emotion was real; it found vigorous expression. The sight of the old, loved shore, not seen for half-a-century, but the subject of ten thousand yearnings, had been too much for him. He told in detail the substance of these ten thousand dreams — ever one and the same dream, of course — and in the telling of it he found the relief his soul sought. He got it all out; it did him a world of good, saving his inner being from a whole army of severe mental fevers and spiritual pains. The man revelled in a delirium of self-expression, and in so doing found sanity and health for his overburdened soul.

  And the picture of that hard-faced old man crying accompanied Paul Rivers to the upper decks, and remained insistent
ly with him for a long time. It portrayed with such neat emphasis precisely what was so deplorably lacking in his own character. There, in concrete form, though not precisely his own case, still near enough to be extremely illuminating, he had seen a grown-up man finding abundant and natural expression for his emotion. The man was not ashamed of his tears, and would doubtless have let them splash on the deck before a hundred passengers, whereas he, Paul Rivers, was, it seemed, constitutionally unable to reveal himself, to tell his deep longings, to find expression through any sensible medium for the ten thousand dreams that choked his life to the brim. He was unable, perhaps ashamed, to splash on the deck.

  It was not that the big, bronzed Englishman wanted to cry, or to wash his soul in sentiment, but that the sight of this old man’s passion, and its frank and easy utterance, touched with dramatic intensity the crying need of his whole temperament. The need of the steerage passenger was the need of a moment; his own was the need of an existence.

  ‘Lucky devil!’ he exclaimed, half laughing, half sighing, as he went to his cabin for the field-glasses; ‘he knows how to get it out — and does get it out! while I — with my impossible yearnings and my absurd diffidence in speaking of them to others — I haven’t got a single safety-valve of any sort or kind. I can’t get it out of me — all this ocean in my heart and soul — not a drop, not even a blessed tear!’

  He laughed again and, stooping to pick up the glasses, he caught a glimpse of his sunburned, bearded face in the cabin mirror.

  ‘Even my appearance is against me,’ he went on with mournful humour; ‘I look like a healthy lumberman more than anything else in God’s world!’ He bent forward and examined himself carefully in detail.

  ‘What has such a face as that to do with beauty, and the stars, and the moon sinking over a summer sea, or those night-winds I know rising faintly from their hiding-places in the dim forests and stealing on soft tiptoe about the sleeping world until the dawn gives them leave to run and sing? Yet I know — though I can never tell it to another — what so many do not know! Who could ever believe that that man’ — he pointed to himself in the glass, laughing—’ wants above all else in life, above wealth, fame, success, the knowledge of spiritual things, which is Reality — which is God?’

  A flash of light from nowhere ran over his face, making it for one instant like the face of a boy, shining, wonderful, radiantly young.

  ‘I know, for instance,’ he went on, the strange flush of enthusiasm rising into his eyes, ‘that the pine-trees hold wind in their arms as cups hold rare wine, and that when it spills I hear the exquisite trickling of its music — but I can’t tell any one that! And I can’t even put the wild magic of it into verse or music. Or even into conduct,’ he concluded with a laugh, ‘conduct that’s sane, that is. For, if I could, I should find what I’m for ever seeking behind all life and behind all expressions of beauty — I should find the Reality I seek!’

  ‘I’ve no safety-valves,’ he added, swinging the glasses round by their strap to the imminent danger of various articles of furniture, ‘that’s the long and short of it. Like a giraffe that can’t make any sound at all although it has the longest throat in all creation. Everything in me accumulates and accumulates. If only’ — and the strange light came back for a second to his brown eyes—’ I could write, or sing, or pray — live as the saints did, or do something to — to express adequately the sense of beauty and wonder and delight that lives, like the presence of a God, in my soul!’

  The lamp in his eyes faded slowly and he sat back on the little cabin sofa, screwing and unscrewing his glasses till it was surprising that the thread didn’t wear out. And as he screwed, a hundred fugitive pictures passed thronging through his mind; moments of yearning and of pain, of sudden happiness and of equally sudden despondency, vivid moods of all kinds provoked by the smallest imaginable fancies, as the way ever was with him. For the moods of the sky were his moods; the swift, coloured changes of sea and cloud were mirrored in his heart as with all too impressionable people, and he was for ever trying to seize the secret of their loveliness and to give it form — in vain. Like many another mystical soul he saw the invisible foundations of the visible world — longed to communicate it to others — found he couldn’t — then suffered all the pain and fever of repression that seeks in vain for adequate utterance. Too shy to stammer his profound yearnings to ears that would not hear, and, never having known the blessed relief of a sympathetic audience, he perforce remained choked and dumb, the only mitigation he knew being that loss of self which follows prolonged contemplation. In his contemplation of Nature, for instance, he would gaze upon the landscape, the sky, a tree or flower, until their essential beauty passed into his own nature. For the moment he felt with these things. He was them. He took their qualities literally into himself. He lost his ordinary personality by changing its centre, merging it into those remoter phases of consciousness which extended from himself mysteriously to include the landscape, the sky, the tree, the flower.

  For him everywhere in Nature there was psychic energy. And it was difficult to say which was with him the master passion: to find Reality — God — through Nature, or to explain Nature through God.

  Then the busy faces of America, now left behind after twenty years, gradually receded, and others, dimly seen through mist, rose above the horizon of his thoughts. And among them he saw that two stood forth with more clearness than the rest. One of these was Dick Messenger, the friend of his boyhood, now dead but a few years; and the other, the face of his sister, Margaret, whom Dick had left a widow, and whose children he would now see for the first time at their country home in the South of England.

  The ‘Old Country!’ He repeated the words softly to himself, weaving it like a coloured thread through all his reverie. He had lived away long long enough to understand the poignant magic that lies in the little phrase, and to appreciate the seizing and pathetic beauty lying along that faint blue line of sea and sky.

  And presently he took his field-glasses again and went up on deck and hid himself in the bows alone. Leaning over the bulwarks he took the scented wind of spring full in the face, and watched with a curious exhilaration the huge rollers, charging and bellowing like wild bulls of the sea as the ship drew nearer and nearer to the coast, plunging, leaping, and thundering as she moved.

  CHAPTER II

  Justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man’s imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud, there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of a bull’s-eye at his belt. — R. L. S.

  THE case of Paul Rivers after all was very simple, though perhaps in some respects uncommon. Circumstances — to sum it up roughly — had so conspired that the most impressionable portion of his character — half of his mind and most of his soul, that is — had never found utterance. He had never discovered the medium that could carry forth into the relief of expression all the inner turmoil and delight of a soul that was very much alive and singularly in touch with the simple and primitive forces of the world.

  It was not, as with the returned emigrant, grief that he felt, but something far more troublesome: Joy. For the beauty of the world, of character as of nature, laid a spell upon him that set his heart in the glow and fever of an inner furnace, while the play of his imagination among the ‘common’ things of life which the rest of the world apparently thought dull set him often upon the borders of an ecstasy whereof he found himself unable to communicate one single letter to his fellow - beings. Thus, in later years, and out of due season, he was afflicted and perplexed by a luxuriant growth that by rights should have been harvested before he was twenty-five; and a great part of him had neglected to grow up at all.

  This result was due to no fault — no neglect, that is — of his own, but to circumstances and temperament combined. It explains, however, why, after twenty years in the backwoods
of America, he saw the coast of the Old Country with a deep emotion that was not all delight, but held something also of dismay.

  Left an orphan, with his younger sister, at an early age, the blundering of trustees had forced him out into the world before his first term at Cambridge was over, and after various vicissitudes he had found his way to America and had been drawn into the lumber trade. Here his knowledge and love of trees — it was a veritable passion with him — soon resulted in a transfer from the Minneapolis office to the woods, and after an interesting apprenticeship, he came to hold an important post in which he was strangely at home. He was appointed to the post of ‘Wood Cruiser’ — forest-traveller, commis voyageur of the primeval woods. His duties, well paid too, were to survey, judge, mark, and report upon the qualities and values of the immense timber limits owned by his Company. And he loved the work. It was a life of solitude, but a life close to Nature; borne in his canoe down swift wilderness streams; meeting the wild animals in their secret haunts; becoming intimate with dawns and sunsets, great winds, the magic of storms and stars, and being initiated into the profound mysteries of the clean and haunted regions of the world.

  And the effect of this kind of life upon him — especially at an age when most men are busy learning more common values in the strife of cities — was of course significant. For here, in this solitary existence, the beauty of the world, virgin and glorious, struck the eyes of his soul and nearly blinded them.

  His whole being threw itself inwards upon his thoughts, and outwards upon what fed his thoughts — the wonder of Nature. Even as a boy he had been mystically minded, a poet if ever there was one, though a poet without a lyre; but at school he had chanced to come under the influence of masters who had sought to curb the exuberance of his imagination, so that he started into life with the rooted idea that it was something of a disgrace for a man to be too sensitive to beauty, and to possess a vivid and coloured imagination was almost a thing to be ashamed of.