“Take me to him,” she said gently. “I want to say good-bye.”
I led her up those creaking wooden stairs and left her with her dead.
Her strength was wonderful. I can never forget the quiet self-control she showed through all the wretched details that the situation then entailed. She asked no questions, shed no tears, moving brave and calm through all the ghastly duties. Something in her that lay deeper than death understood, and with the resignation of a truly great heart, accepted. Far stronger than myself she was; and, indeed, it seemed that my pain for her — at the time anyhow — absorbed the suffering that made my own heart ache with a sense of loss that has ever since left me empty and bereaved. Only in her eyes was there betrayal of sorrow that was itself, perhaps, another half revival of yet dimmer memories... “eyes in which desire of some strange thing unutterably burned, unquenchable... For the first time I understood the truth of another’s words — so like a statue was her appearance, so set in stone, her words so sparing and her voice so dead:
“I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls as countries lieth silent-bare....”
Her soul lay silent-bare; her grief was hopeless.... To my shame it must be confessed that I longed to escape from all the strain and nightmare of what had passed. The few days had been charged with material for a lifetime. I knew the sharp desire to find myself in touch once more with common, wholesome things — with London noise and bustle, trains, telephones and daily newspapers, with stupid students who could not even remember what they had learned the previous week, and with all the great majority who never even dreamed of a consciousness less restricted than their own. I saw the matter through, however, to the bitter end, and did not lose sight of Mrs. Le Vallon until I left her safely in Lausanne, and helped her find a woman who should be both maid and companion, at least for the immediate future. It cannot be of interest or value to relate here. She did not cross my path again; while, on the other hand, it has never been possible for me to forget her. To this day I hear her voice and accent, I feel the touch of that hand that drew me softly into such depths of inexplicable vision; above all, I see her luminous, strange eyes and her movements of strange grace across the chalet floor.... And sometimes, even now, I half... remember.
Yet never, till after this long interval of years, could I bring myself to set down any record of what had happened. Perhaps — most probably, I think — I feared that dwelling upon the haunting details that writing would involve might revive too obsessingly the memory of an experience so curiously overwhelming.
Now time has brought the necessity, as it were, of this confession; and I have done my best with material that really resists the mould of language, at least as I can use it. Later reading — for I devoured the best authorities and ransacked even the most extravagant records in my quest — has come to throw a little curious light upon some parts of it; and the results of this subsequent study no doubt appear in this report. At the time, however, I was ignorant of all such things, and the effect upon me of what I witnessed thus for the first time may be judged accordingly. It was dislocating.
Two facts alone remain to mention. And the first seems to me perhaps the most singular of the entire experience. For the pages I had covered with writing showed suddenly an abrupt and extraordinary change of script. Although the earlier sheets were in my own handwriting, roughly jotting down question and reply as they fell from the lips of Julius or his wife, there came midway in them this inexplicable change that altered them into the illegible scribble of a language that I could not read, yet recognised. It changed into that curious kind of ideograph that Julius used at school, that he showed me many a time in the sand at the end of the football field where we used to lie and talk, and that he claimed then was the ancient sacerdotal cipher we had used together in our remotest “Temple Days.” I cannot read a word of it, nor can any to whom I have shown it decipher a single outline. The change began, it seems, at the point where “Mrs. Le Vallon” went “deeper” at his word of command, and entered the layer of memories that dealt with that most ancient “section.” This accounts, too, for the confusion and incompleteness of my record as written. A page of this script is framed upon my walls to-day; my eye rests on it as I write these words upon a modern typewriter — in Streatham.
The other fact I have to mention might well be the starting point for study and observation of an interesting kind. Yet, though it sorely tempted me, I resisted the temptation, and now, after twenty years, it is too late, and I, too old. This record, if published, may fall beneath the eye of someone to whom the chance and the desire may possibly combine to bring the opportunity.
For some weeks after the events that have been here described, Mrs. Le Vallon gave birth to a boy, surviving him, alas! by but a single day.
This I heard long afterwards by the merest chance. But my strenuous efforts to trace the child proved unavailing, and I only learned that he was adopted by a French family whose name even was not given to me. If alive he would be now about twenty years of age.
THE END
THE WAVE
AN EGYPTIAN AFTERMATH
This novel was first published in 1916. Another story of reincarnation, its protagonist is Thomas Kelverdon, whose life is haunted by a premonition of his own death by drowning under the eponymous wave. As the story progresses, it transpires that the origin of this recurring dream lies in a tragic love triangle, which Kelverdon was involved in during a previous existence in ancient Egypt – a love triangle which seems set to be played out again in the present day…
The first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Title page of the first U.S. edition
CHAPTER I.
Since childhood days he had been haunted by a Wave.
It appeared with the very dawn of thought, and was his earliest recollection of any vividness. It was also his first experience of nightmare: a wave of an odd, dun colour, almost tawny, that rose behind him, advanced, curled over in the act of toppling, and then stood still. It threatened, but it did not fall. It paused, hovering in a position contrary to nature; it waited.
Something prevented; it was not meant to fall; the right moment had not yet arrived.
If only it would fall! It swept across the skyline in a huge, long curve far overhead, hanging dreadfully suspended. Beneath his feet he felt the roots of it withdrawing; he shuffled furiously and made violent efforts; but the suction undermined him where he stood. The ground yielded and dropped away. He only sank in deeper. His entire weight became that of a feather against the gigantic tension of the mass that any moment, it seemed, must lift him in its rising curve, bend, break, and twist him, then fling him crashing forward to his smothering fate.
Yet the moment never came. The Wave hung balanced between him and the sky, poised in mid-air. It d
id not fall. And the torture of that infinite pause contained the essence of the nightmare.
The Wave invariably came up behind him, stealthily, from what seemed interminable distance. He never met it. It overtook him from the rear. The horizon hid it till it rose.
There were stages in its history, moreover, and in the effect it produced upon his early mind. Usually he woke up the moment he realised it was there. For it invariably announced its presence. He heard no sound, but knew that it was coming — there was a feeling in the atmosphere not unlike the heavy brooding that precedes a thunderstorm, only so different from anything he had yet known in life that his heart sank into his boots. He looked up. There, above his head was the huge, curved monster, hanging in mid-air. The mood had justified itself. He called it the ‘wavy feeling.’ He was never wrong about it.
The second stage was reached when, instead of trying to escape shorewards, where there were tufts of coarse grass upon a sandy bank, he turned and faced the thing. He looked straight into the main under-body of the poised billow. He saw the opaque mass out of which this line rose up and curved. He stared against the dull, dun-coloured parent body whence it came — the sea. Terrified yet fascinated, he examined it in detail, as a man about to be executed might examine the grain of the wooden block close against his eyes. A little higher, some dozen feet above the level of his head, it became transparent; sunlight shot through the glassy curve. He saw what appeared to be streaks and bubbles and transverse lines of foam that yet did not shine quite as water shines. It moved suddenly; it curled a little towards the crest; it was about to topple over, to break — yet did not break.
About this time he noticed another thing: there was a curious faint sweetness in the air beneath the bend of it, a delicate and indescribable odour that was almost perfume. It was sweet; it choked him. He called it, in his boyish way, a whiff. The ‘whiff’ and the ‘wavy feeling’ impressed themselves so vividly upon his mind that if ever he met them in his ordinary life — out of dream, that is — he was sure that he would know them. In another sense he felt he knew them already. They were familiar.
But another stage went further than all the others put together. It amounted to a discovery. He was perhaps ten years old at this time, for he was still addressed as ‘Tommy,’ and it was not till the age of fifteen that his solid type of character made ‘Tom’ seem more appropriate. He had just told the dream to his mother for the hundredth time, and she, after listening with sympathy, had made her ever-green suggestion— ‘If you dream of water, Tommy, it means you’re thirsty in your sleep,’ — when he turned and stared straight into her eyes with such intentness that she gave an involuntary start.
‘But, mother, it isn’t water!’
‘Well, darling, if it isn’t water, what is it, then?’ She asked the question quietly enough, but she felt, apparently, something of the queer dismay that her boy felt too. It seemed the mother-sense was touched. The instinct to protect her offspring stirred uneasily in her heart. She repeated the question, interested in the old, familiar dream for the first time since she heard it several years before: ‘If it isn’t water, Tommy, what is it? What can it be?’ His eyes, his voice, his manner — something she could not properly name — had startled her.
But Tommy noticed her slight perturbation, and knowing that a boy of his age did not frighten his mother without reason, or even with it, turned his eyes aside and answered:
‘I couldn’t tell. There wasn’t time. You see, I woke up then.’
‘How curious, Tommy,’ she rejoined. ‘A wave is a wave, isn’t it?’
And he answered thoughtfully: ‘Yes, mother; but there are lots of things besides water, aren’t there?’
She assented with a nod, and a searching look at him which he purposely avoided. The subject dropped; no more was said; yet somehow from that moment his mother knew that this idea of a wave, whether it was nightmare or only dream, had to do with her boy’s life in a way that touched the protective thing in her, almost to the point of positive defence. She could not explain it; she did not like it; instinct warned her — that was all she knew. And Tommy said no more. The truth was, indeed, that he did not know himself of what the Wave was composed. He could not have told his mother even had he considered it permissible. He would have loved to speculate and talk about it with her, but, having divined her nervousness, he knew he must not feed it. No boy should do such a thing.
Moreover, the interest he felt in the Wave was of such a deep, enormous character — the adjectives were his own — that he could not talk about it lightly. Unless to some one who showed genuine interest, he could not even mention it. To his brothers and sister, both older and younger than himself, he never spoke of it at all. It had to do with something so fundamental in him that it was sacred. The realisation of it, moreover, came and went, and often remained buried for weeks together; months passed without a hint of it; the nightmare disappeared. Then, suddenly, the feeling would surge over him, perhaps just as he was getting into bed, or saying his prayers, or thinking of quite other things. In the middle of a discussion with his brother about their air-guns and the water-rat they hadn’t hit — up would steal the ‘wavy’ feeling with its dim, familiar menace. It stole in across his brother’s excited words about the size and speed of the rat; interest in sport entirely vanished; he stared at Tim, not hearing a word he said; he dived into bed; he had to be alone with the great mood of wonder and terror that was rising. The approach was unmistakable; he cuddled beneath the sheets, fighting-angry if Tim tried to win him back to the original interest. The dream was coming; and, sure enough, a little later in his sleep, it came.
For even at this stage of his development he recognised instinctively this special quality about it — that it could not, was not meant to be avoided. It was inevitable and right. It hurt, yet he must face it. It was as necessary to his well-being as having a tooth out. Nor did he ever seek to dodge it. His character was not the kind that flinched. The one thing he did ask was — to understand. Some day, he felt, this full understanding would come.
There arrived then a new and startling development in this curious obsession, the very night, Tommy claims, that there had been the fuss about the gun and water-rat, on the day before the conversation with his mother. His brother had plagued him to come out from beneath the sheets and go on with the discussion, and Tommy, furious at being disturbed in the ‘wavy’ mood he both loved and dreaded, had felt himself roused uncommonly. He silenced Tim easily enough with a smashing blow from a pillow, then, with a more determined effort than usual, buried himself to face the advent of the Wave. He fell asleep in the attempt, but the attempt bore fruit. He felt the great thing coming up behind him; he turned; he saw it with greater distinctness than ever before; almost he discovered of what it was composed.
That it was not water established itself finally in his mind; but more — he got very close to deciding its exact composition. He stared hard into the threatening mass of it; there was a certain transparency about the substance, yet this transparency was not clear enough for water: there were particles, and these particles went drifting by the thousand, by the million, through the mass of it. They rose and fell, they swept along, they were very minute indeed, they whirled. They glistened, shimmered, flashed. He made a guess; he was just on the point of guessing right, in fact, when he saw another thing that for the moment obliterated all his faculties. There was both cold and heat in the sensation, fear and delight. It transfixed him. He saw eyes.
Steady, behind the millions of minute particles that whirled and drifted, he distinctly saw a pair of eyes of light-blue colour, and hardly had he registered this new discovery, when another pair, but of quite different kind, became visible beyond the first pair — dark, with a fringe of long, thick lashes. They were — he decided afterwards — what is called Eastern eyes, and they smiled into his own through half-closed lids. He thinks he made out a face that was dimly sketched behind them, but the whirling particles glinted and shimmered in such a
confusing way that he could not swear to this. Of one thing only, or rather of two, did he feel quite positive: that the dark eyes were those of a woman, and that they were kind and beautiful and true: but that the pale-blue eyes were false, unkind, and treacherous, and that the face to which they belonged, although he could not see it, was a man’s. Dimly his boyish heart was aware of happiness and suffering. The heat and cold he felt, the joy and terror, were half explained. He stared. The whirling particles drifted past and hid them. He woke.
That day, however, the ‘wavy’ feeling hovered over him more or less continuously. The impression of the night held sway over all he did and thought. There was a kind of guidance in it somewhere. He obeyed this guidance as by an instinct he could not, dared not disregard, and towards dusk it led him into the quiet room overlooking the small Gardens at the back of the house, his father’s study. The room was empty; he approached the big mahogany cupboard; he opened one of the deep drawers where he knew his father kept gold and private things, and birthday or Christmas presents. But there was no dishonourable intention in him anywhere; indeed, he hardly knew exactly why he did this thing. The drawer, though moving easily, was heavy; he pulled hard; it slid out with a rush; and at that moment a stern voice sounded in the room behind him: ‘What are you doing at my Eastern drawer?’
Tommy, one hand still on the knob, turned as if he had been struck. He gazed at his father, but without a trace of guilt upon his face.
‘I wanted to see, Daddy.’
‘I’ll show you,’ said the stern-faced man, yet with kindness and humour in the tone. ‘It’s full of wonderful things. I’ve nothing secret from you; but another time you’d better ask first — Tommy.’
‘I wanted to see,’ faltered the boy. ‘I don’t know why I did it. I just had a feeling. It’s the first time — really.’
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 161