Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  The man watched him searchingly a moment, but without appearing to do so. A look of interest and understanding, wholly missed by the culprit, stole into his fine grey eyes. He smiled, then drew Tommy towards him, and gave him a kiss on the top of his curly head. He also smacked him playfully. ‘Curiosity,’ he said with pretended disapproval, ‘is divine, and at your age it is right that you should feel curiosity about everything in the world. But another time just ask me — and I’ll show you all I possess.’ He lifted his son in his arms, so that for the first time the boy could overlook the contents of the opened drawer. ‘So you just had a feeling, eh —— ?’ he continued, when Tommy wriggled in his arms, uttered a curious exclamation, and half collapsed. He seemed upon the verge of tears. An ordinary father must have held him guilty there and then. The boy cried out excitedly:

  ‘The whiff! Oh, Daddy, it’s my whiff!’

  The tears, no longer to be denied, came freely then; after them came confession too, and confused though it was, the man made something approaching sense out of the jumbled utterance. It was not mere patient kindness on his part, for an older person would have seen that genuine interest lay behind the half-playful, half-serious cross-examination. He watched the boy’s eager, excited face out of the corner of his eyes; he put discerning questions to him, he assisted his faltering replies, and he obtained in the end the entire story of the dream — the eyes, the wavy feeling, and the whiff. How much coherent meaning he discovered in it all is hard to say, or whether the story he managed to disentangle held together. There was this strange deep feeling in the boy, this strong emotion, this odd conviction amounting to an obsession; and so far as could be discovered, it was not traceable to any definite cause that Tommy could name — a fright, a shock, a vivid impression of one kind or another upon a sensitive young imagination. It lay so deeply in his being that its roots were utterly concealed; but it was real.

  Dr. Kelverdon established the existence in his second boy of an unalterable premonition, and, being a famous nerve specialist, and a disciple of Freud into the bargain, he believed that a premonition has a cause, however primitive, however carefully concealed that cause may be. He put the boy to bed himself and tucked him up, told Tim that if he teased his brother too much he would smack him with his best Burmese slipper which had tiny nails in it, and then whispered into Tommy’s ear as he cuddled down, happy and comforted, among the blankets: ‘Don’t make a special effort to dream, my boy; but if you do dream, try to remember it next morning, and tell me exactly what you see and feel.’ He used the Freudian method.

  Then, going down to his study again, he looked at the open drawer and sniffed the faint perfume of things — chiefly from Egypt — that lay inside it. But there was nothing of special interest in the drawer; indeed, it was one he had not touched for years.

  He went over one by one a few of the articles, collected from various points of travel long ago. There were bead necklaces from Memphis, some trash from a mummy of doubtful authenticity, including several amulets and a crumbling fragment of old papyrus, and, among all this, a tiny packet of incense mixed from a recipe said to have been found in a Theban tomb. All these, jumbled together in pieces of tissue-paper, had lain undisturbed since the day he wrapped them up some dozen years before — indeed he heard the dry rattle of the falling sand as he undid the tissue-paper. But a strong perfume rose from the parcel to his nostrils. ‘That’s what Tommy means by his whiff,’ he said to himself. ‘That’s Tommy’s whiff beyond all question. I wonder how he got it first?’

  He remembered, then, that he had made a note of the story connected with the incense, and after some rummaging he found the envelope and read the account jotted down at the time. He had meant to hand it over to a literary friend — the tale was so poignantly human — then had forgotten all about it. The papyrus, dating over 3000 B.C., had many gaps. The Egyptologist had admittedly filled in considerable blanks in the afflicting story: —

  A victorious Theban General, Prince of the blood, brought back a Syrian youth from one of his foreign conquests and presented him to his young wife who, first mothering him for his beauty, then made him her personal slave, and ended by caring deeply for him. The slave, in return, loved her with passionate adoration he was unable to conceal. As a Lady of the Court, her quasi-adoption of the youth caused comment. Her husband ordered his dismissal. But she still made his welfare her especial object, finding frequent reasons for their meeting. One day, however, her husband caught them together, though their meeting was in innocence. He half strangled the youth, till the blood poured down upon his own hands, then had him flogged and sent away to On, the City of the Sun.

  The Syrian found his way back again, vengeance in his fiery blood. The clandestine yet innocent meetings were renewed. Rank was forgotten. They met among the sand-dunes in the desert behind the city where a pleasure tent among a grove of palms provided shelter, and the slave losing his head, urged the Princess to fly with him. Yet the wife, true to her profligate and brutal husband, refused his plea, saying she could only give a mother’s love, a mother’s care. This he rejected bitterly, accusing her of trifling with him. He grew bolder and more insistent. To divert her husband’s violent suspicions she became purposely cruel, even ordering him punishments. But the slave misinterpreted. Finally, warning him that if caught he would be killed, she devised a plan to convince him of her sincerity. Hiding him behind the curtains of her tent, she pleaded with her husband for the youth’s recall, swearing that she meant no wrong. But the soldier, in his fury, abused and struck her, and the slave, unable to contain himself, rushed out of his hiding-place and stabbed him, though not mortally. He was condemned to death by torture. She was to be chief witness against him.

  Meanwhile, having extracted a promise from her husband that the torture should not be carried to the point of death, she conveyed word to the victim that he should endure bravely, knowing that he would not die. She now realised that she loved. She promised to fly with him.

  The sentence was duly carried out, the slave only half believing in her truth. It was a public holiday in Thebes. She was compelled to see the punishment inflicted before the crowd. There were a thousand drums. A sand-storm hid the sun.

  Seated beside her husband on a terrace above the Nile, she watched the torture — then knew she had been tricked. But the Syrian did not know; he believed her false. As he expired, casting his last glance of anguish and reproach at her, she rose, leaped the parapet, flung herself into the river, and was drowned. The husband had their bodies thrown into the sea, unburied. The same wave took them both. Later, however, they were recovered by influential friends; they were embalmed, and secretly laid to rest in his ancestral Tomb in the Valley of the Kings among the Theban Hills. In due course the husband, unwittingly, was buried with them.

  Nearly five thousand years later all three mummies were discovered lying side by side, their story inscribed upon a papyrus inside the great sarcophagus.

  Dr. Kelverdon glanced through the story he had forgotten, then tore it into little pieces and threw them into the fireplace. For a moment longer, however, he stood beside the open drawer reflectingly. Had he ever told the tale to Tommy? No; it was hardly likely; indeed it was impossible. The boy was not born even when first he heard it. To his wife, then? Less likely still. He could not remember, anyhow. The faint suggestion in his mind — a story communicated pre-natally — was not worth following up. He dismissed the matter from his thoughts. He closed the drawer and turned away. The little packet of incense, however, taken from the Tomb, he did not destroy. ‘I’ll give it to Tommy,’ he decided. ‘Its whiff may possibly stimulate him into explanation!’

  CHAPTER II.

  As a result of having told everything to his father, Tommy’s nightmare, however, largely ceased to trouble him. He had found the relief of expression, which is confession, and had laid upon the older mind the burden of his terror. Once a month, once a week, or even daily if he wanted to, he could repeat the expression as the need
for it accumulated, and the load which decency forbade being laid upon his mother, the stern-faced man could carry easily for him.

  The comfortable sensation that forgiveness is the completion of confession invaded his awakening mind, and had he been older this thin end of a religious wedge might have persuaded him to join what his mother called that ‘vast conspiracy.’ But even at this early stage there was something stalwart and self-reliant in his cast of character that resisted the cunning sophistry; vicarious relief woke resentment in him; he meant to face his troubles alone. So far as he knew, he had not sinned, yet the Wave, the Whiff, the Eyes were symptoms of some fate that threatened him, a premonition of something coming that he must meet with his own strength, something that he could only deal with effectively alone, since it was deserved and just. One day the Wave would fall; his father could not help him then. This instinct in him remained unassailable. He even began to look forward to the time when it should come — to have done with it and get it over, conquering or conquered.

  The premonition, that is, while remaining an obsession as before, transferred itself from his inner to his outer life. The nightmare, therefore, ceased. The menacing interest, however, held unchanged. Though the name had not hitherto occurred to him, he became a fatalist. ‘It’s got to come; I’ve got to meet it. I will.’

  ‘Well, Tommy,’ his father would ask from time to time, ‘been dreaming anything lately?’

  ‘Nothing, Daddy. It’s all stopped.’

  ‘Wave, eyes, and whiff all forgotten, eh?’

  Tommy shook his head. ‘They’re still there,’ he answered slowly, ‘but — —’ He seemed unable to complete the sentence. His father helped him at a venture.

  ‘But they can’t catch you — is that it?’

  The boy looked up with a dogged expression in his big grey eyes. ‘I’m ready for them,’ he replied. And his father laughed and said, ‘Of course. That’s half the battle.’

  He gave him a present then — one of the packets of tissue-paper — and Tommy took it in triumph to his room. He opened it in private, but the contents seemed to him without especial interest. Only the Whiff was, somehow, sweet and precious; and he kept the packet in a drawer apart where the fossils and catapult and air-gun ammunition could not interfere with it, hiding the key so that Tim and the servants could not find it. And on rare occasions, when the rest of the household was asleep, he performed a little ritual of his own that, for a boy of his years, was distinctly singular.

  When the room was dark, lit in winter by the dying fire, or in summer by the stars, he would creep out of bed, make quite sure that Tim was asleep, stand on a chair to reach the key from the top of the big cupboard, and carefully unlock the drawer. He had oiled the wood with butter, so that it was silent. The tissue-paper gleamed dimly pink; the Whiff came out to meet him. He lifted the packet, soft and crackling, and set it on the window-sill; he did not open it; its contents had no interest for him, it was the perfume he was after. And the moment the perfume reached his nostrils there came a trembling over him that he could not understand. He both loved and dreaded it. This manly, wholesome-minded, plucky little boy, the basis of whose steady character was common sense, became the prey of a strange, unreasonable fantasy. A faintness stole upon him; he lost the sense of kneeling on a solid chair; something immense and irresistible came piling up behind him; there was nothing firm he could push against to save himself; he began shuffling with his bare feet, struggling to escape from something that was coming, something that would probably overwhelm him yet must positively be faced and battled with. The Wave was rising. It was the wavy feeling.

  He did not turn to look, because he knew quite well there was nothing in the room but beds, a fender, furniture, vague shadows and his brother Tim. That kind of childish fear had no place in what he felt. But the Wave was piled and curving over none the less; it hung between him and the shadowed ceiling, above the roof of the house; it came from beyond the world, far overhead against the crowding stars. It would not break, for the time had not yet come. But it was there. It waited. He knelt beneath its mighty shadow of advance; it was still arrested, poised above his eager life, competent to engulf him when the time arrived. The sweep of its curved mass was mountainous. He knelt inside this curve, small, helpless, but not too afraid to fight. The perfume stole about him. The Whiff was in his nostrils. There was a strange, rich pain — oddly remote, yet oddly poignant.…

  And it was with this perfume that the ritual chiefly had to do. He loved the extraordinary sensations that came with it, and tried to probe their meaning in his boyish way. Meaning there was, but it escaped him. The sweetness clouded something in his brain, and made his muscles weak; it robbed him of that resistance which is fighting strength. It was this battle that he loved, this sense of shoving against something that might so easily crush and finish him. There was a way to beat it, a way to win — could he but discover it. As yet he could not. Victory, he felt, lay more in yielding and going-with than in violent resistance.

  And, meanwhile, in an ecstasy of this half yielding, half resisting, he lent himself fully to the overmastering tide. He was conscious of attraction and repulsion, something that enticed, yet thrust him backwards. Some final test of manhood, character, value, lay in the way he faced it. The strange, rich pain stole marvellously into his blood and nerves. His heart beat faster. There was this exquisite seduction that contained delicious danger. It rose upon him out of some inner depth he could not possibly get at. He trembled with mingled terror and delight. And it invariably ended with a kind of inexpressible yearning that choked him, crumpled him inwardly, as he described it, brought the moisture, hot and smarting, into his burning eyes, and — each time to his bitter shame — left his cheeks wet with scalding tears.

  He cried silently; there was no heaving, gulping, audible sobbing, just a relieving gush of heartfelt tears that took away the strange, rich pain and brought the singular ritual to a finish. He replaced the tissue-paper, blotted with his tears; locked the drawer carefully; hid the key on the top of the cupboard again, and tumbled back into bed.

  Downstairs, meanwhile, a conversation was in progress concerning the welfare of the growing hero.

  ‘I’m glad that dream has left him anyhow. It used to frighten me rather. I did not like it,’ observed his mother.

  ‘He doesn’t speak to you about it any more?’ the father asked.

  For months, she told him, Tommy had not mentioned it. They went on to discuss his future together. The other children presented fewer problems, but Tommy, apparently, felt no particular call to any profession.

  ‘It will come with a jump,’ the doctor inclined to think. ‘He’s been on the level for some time now. Suddenly he’ll grow up and declare his mighty mind.’

  Father liked humour in the gravest talk; indeed the weightier the subject, the more he valued a humorous light upon it. The best judgment, he held, was shaped by humour, sense of proportion lost without it. His wife, however, thought ‘it a pity.’ Grave things she liked grave.

  ‘There’s something very deep in Tommy,’ she observed, as though he were developing a hidden malady.

  ‘Hum,’ agreed her husband. ‘His subconscious content is unusual, both in kind and quantity.’ His eyes twinkled. ‘It’s possible he may turn out an artist, or a preacher. If the former, I’ll bet his output will be original; and, as for the latter,’ — he paused a second— ‘he’s too logical and too fearless to be orthodox. Already he thinks things out for himself.’

  ‘I should like to see him in the Church, though,’ said Mother. ‘He would do a lot of good. But he is uncompromising, rather.’

  ‘His honesty certainly is against him,’ sighed his father. ‘What do you think he asked me the other day?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know, John.’ The answer completed itself with the unspoken ‘He never asks me anything now.’

  ‘He came straight up to me and said, ‘Father, is it good to feel pain? To let it come, I mean, or try to dodg
e it?’’

  ‘Had he hurt himself?’ the woman asked quickly. It seemed she winced.

  ‘Not physically. He had been feeling something inside. He wanted to know how ‘a man’ should meet the case.’

  ‘And what did you tell him, dear?’

  ‘That pain was usually a sign of growth, to be understood, accepted, faced. That most pain was cured in that way — —’

  ‘He didn’t tell you what had hurt him?’ she interrupted.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t ask him. He’d have shut up like a clam. Tommy likes to deal with things alone in his own way. He just wanted to know if his way was — well, my way.’

  There fell a pause between them; then Mother, without looking up, enquired: ‘Have you noticed Lettice lately? She’s here a good deal now.’

  But her husband only smiled, making no direct reply. ‘Tommy will have a hard time of it when he falls in love,’ he remarked presently. ‘He’ll know the real thing and won’t stand any nonsense — just as I did.’ Whereupon his wife informed him that if he was not careful he would simply ruin the boy — and the brief conversation died away of its own accord. As she was leaving the room a little later, unsatisfied but unaggressive, he asked her: ‘Have you left the picture books, my dear?’ and she pointed to an ominous heap upon the table in the window, with the remark that Jane had ‘unearthed every book that Tommy had set eyes upon since he was three. You’ll find everything that’s ever interested him,’ she added as she went out, ‘every picture, that is — and I suppose it is the pictures that you want.’

  For an hour and a half the great specialist turned pages without ceasing — well-thumbed pages; torn, crumpled, blotted, painted pages. It was easy to discover the boy’s favourite pictures; and all were commonplace enough, the sort that any normal, adventure-loving boy would find delightful. But nothing of special significance resulted from the search; nothing that might account for the recurrent nightmare, nothing in the way of eyes or wave. He had already questioned Jane as to what stories she told him, and which among them he liked best. ‘Hunting or travel or collecting,’ Jane had answered, and it was about ‘collecting that he asks most questions. What kind of collecting, sir? Oh, treasure or rare beetles mostly, and sometimes — just bones.’