Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘Bones! What kind of bones?’

  ‘The villin’s, sir,’ explained the frightened Jane. ‘He always likes the villin to get lost, and for the jackals to pick his bones in the desert — —’

  ‘Any particular desert?’

  ‘No, sir; just desert.’

  ‘Ah — just desert! Any old desert, eh?’

  ‘I think so, sir — as long as it is desert.’

  Dr. Kelverdon put the woman at her ease with the humorous smile that made all the household love — and respect — him; then asked another question, as if casually: Had she ever told him a story in which a wave or a pair of eyes were in any way conspicuous?

  ‘No, never, sir,’ replied the honest Jane, after careful reflection. ‘Nor I wouldn’t,’ she added, ‘because my father he was drowned in a tidal wave; and as for eyes, I know that’s wrong for children, and I wouldn’t tell Master Tommy such a thing for all the world — —’

  ‘Because?’ enquired the doctor kindly, seeing her hesitation.

  ‘I’d be frightening myself, sir, and he’d make such fun of me,’ she finally confessed.

  No, it was clear that the nurse was not responsible for the vivid impression in Tommy’s mind which bore fruit in so strange a complex of emotions. Nor were other lines of enquiry more successful. There was a cause, of course, but it would remain unascertainable unless some clue offered itself by chance. Both the doctor and the father in him were pledged to a persistent search that was prolonged over several months, but without result. The most perplexing element in the problem seemed to him the whiff. The association of terror with a wave needed little explanation; the introduction of the eyes, however, was puzzling, unless some story of a drowning man was possibly the clue; but the addition of a definite odour, an Eastern odour, moreover, with which the boy could hardly have become yet acquainted, — this combination of the three accounted for the peculiar interest in the doctor’s mind.

  Of one thing alone did he feel reasonably certain: the impression had been printed upon the deepest part of Tommy’s being, the very deepest; it arose from those unplumbed profundities — though a scientist, he considered them unfathomable — of character and temperament whence emerge the most primitive of instincts, — the generative and creative instinct, choice of a mate, natural likes and dislikes, — the bed-rock of the nature. A girl was in it somewhere, somehow.…

  Midnight had sounded from the stable clock in the mews when he stole up into the boys’ room and cautiously approached the yellow iron bed where Tommy lay. The reflection of a street electric light just edged his face. He was sound asleep — with tear-stains marked clearly on the cheek not pressed into the pillow. Dr. Kelverdon paused a moment, looked round the room, shading the candle with one hand. He saw no photograph, no pictures anywhere. Then he sniffed. There was a faint and delicate perfume in the air. He recognised it. He stood there, thinking deeply.

  ‘Lettice Aylmer,’ he said to himself presently as he went softly out again to seek his own bed; ‘I’ll try Lettice. It’s just possible.… Next time I see her I’ll have a little talk.’ For he suddenly remembered that Lettice Aylmer, his daughter’s friend and playmate, had very large and beautiful dark eyes.

  CHAPTER III.

  Lettice Aylmer, daughter of the Irish Member of Parliament, did not provide the little talk that he anticipated, however, because she went back to her Finishing School abroad. Dr. Kelverdon was sorry when he heard it. So was Tommy. She was to be away a year at least. ‘I must remember to have a word with her when she comes back,’ thought the father, and made a note of it in his diary twelve months ahead. ‘Three hundred and sixty-five days,’ thought Tommy, and made a private calendar of his own.

  It seemed an endless, zodiacal kind of period; he counted the days, a sheet of foolscap paper for each month, and at the bottom of each sheet two columns showing the balance of days gone and days to come. Tuesday, when he had first seen her, was underlined, and each Tuesday had a number attached to it, giving the total number of weeks since that wonderful occasion. But Saturdays were printed. On Saturday Lettice had spoken to him; she had smiled, and the words were, ‘Don’t forget me, Tommy!’ And Tommy, looking straight into her great dark eyes, that seemed to him more tender even than his mother’s, had stammered a reply that he meant with literal honesty: ‘I won’t — never…’; and she was gone… to France… across the sea.

  She took his soul away with her, leaving him behind to pore over his father’s big atlas and learn French sentences by heart. It seemed the only way. Life had begun, and he must be prepared. Also, his career was chosen. For Lettice had said another thing — one other thing. When Mary, his sister, introduced him, ‘This is Tommy,’ Lettice looked down and asked: ‘Are you going to be an engineer?’ adding proudly, ‘My brother is.’ Before he could answer she was scampering away with Mary, the dark hair flying in a cloud, the bright bow upon it twinkling like a star in heaven — and Tommy, hating his ridiculous boyish name with an intense hatred, stood there trembling, but aware that the die was cast — he was going to be an engineer.

  Trembling, yes; for he felt dazed and helpless, caught in a mist of fire and gold, the furniture whirling round him, and something singing wildly in his heart. Two things, each containing in them the essence of genuine shock, had fallen upon him: shock, because there was impetus in them as of a blow. They had been coming; they had reached him. There was no doubt or question possible. He staggered from the impact. Joy and terror touched him; at one and the same moment he felt the enticement and the shrinking of his dream.… He longed to seize her and prevent her ever going away, yet also he wanted to push her from him as though she somehow caused him pain.

  For, on the two occasions when speech had taken place between himself and Lettice, the dream had transferred itself boldly into his objective life — yet not entirely. Two characteristics only had been thus transferred. When his sister first came into the hall with ‘This is Tommy,’ the wavy feeling had already preceded her by a definite interval that was perhaps a second by the watch. He was aware of it behind him, curved and risen — not curving, rising — from the open fireplace, but also from the woods behind the house, from the whole of the country right back to the coast, from across the world, it seemed, towering overhead against the wintry sky. And when Lettice smiled and asked that question of childish admiration about being an engineer, he was already shuffling furiously with his feet upon the Indian rug. She was gone again, luckily, he hoped, before the ridiculous pantomime was noticeable.

  He saw her once or twice. He was invariably speechless when she came into his presence, and his silence and awkwardness made him appear at great disadvantage. He seemed intentionally rude. Nervous self-consciousness caused him to bridle over nothing. Even to answer her was a torture. He dreaded a snub appallingly, and bridled in anticipation. Furious with himself for his inability to use each precious opportunity, he pretended he didn’t care. The consequence was that when she once spoke to him sweetly, he was too overpowered to respond as he might have done. That she had not even noticed his anguished attitude never occurred to him.

  ‘We’re always friends, aren’t we, Tommy?’

  ‘Rather,’ he blurted, before he could regain his composure for a longer sentence.

  ‘And always will be, won’t we?’

  ‘Rather,’ he repeated, cursing himself later for thinking of nothing better to say. Then, just as she flew off in that dancing way of hers, he found his tongue. Out of the jumbled mass of phrases in his head three words got loose and offered themselves: ‘We’ll always be!’ he flung at her retreating figure of intolerable beauty. And she turned her head over her shoulder, waved her hand without stopping her career, and shouted ‘Rather!’

  That was the Tuesday in his calendar. But on Saturday, the printed Saturday following it, the second characteristic of his dream announced itself: he recognised the Eyes. Why he had not recognised them on the Tuesday lay beyond explanation; he only knew it was so. And afterwards,
when he tried to think it over, it struck him that she had scampered out of the hall with peculiar speed and hurry; had made her escape without the extra word or two the occasion naturally demanded — almost as though she, too, felt something that uneasily surprised her.

  Tommy wondered about it till his head spun round. She, too, had received an impact that was shock. He was as thorough about it as an instinctive scientist. He also registered this further fact — that the dream-details had not entirely reproduced themselves in the affair. There was no trace of the Whiff or of the other pair of Eyes. Some day the three would come together; but then.…

  The main thing, however, undoubtedly was this: Lettice felt something too: she was aware of feelings similar to his own. He was too honest to assume that she felt exactly what he felt; he only knew that her eyes betrayed familiar intimacy when she said ‘Don’t forget me, Tommy,’ and that when she rushed out of the hall with that unnecessary abruptness it was because — well, he could only transfer to her some degree of the ‘wavy’ feeling in himself.

  And he fell in love with abandonment and a delicious, infinite yearning. From that moment he thought of himself as Tom instead of Tommy.

  It was an entire, sweeping love that left no atom or corner of his being untouched. Lettice was real; she hid below the horizon of distant France, yet could not, did not, hide from him. She also waited.

  He knew the difference between real and unreal people. The latter wavered about his life and were uncertain; sometimes he liked them, sometimes he did not; but the former — remained fixed quantities: he could not alter towards them. Even at this stage he knew when a person came into his life to stay, or merely to pass out again. Lettice, though seen but twice, belonged to this first category. His feeling for her had the Wave in it; it gathered weight and mass, it was irresistible. From the dim, invisible foundations of his life it came, out of the foundations of the world, out of that inexhaustible sea-foundation that lay below everything. It was real; it was not to be avoided. He knew. He persuaded himself that she knew too.

  And it was then, realising for the first time the searching pain of being separated from something that seemed part of his being by natural right, he spoke to his father and asked if pain should be avoided. This conversation has been already sufficiently recorded; but he asked other things as well. From being so long on the level he had made a sudden jump that his father had foretold; he grew up; his mind began to think; he had peered into certain books; he analysed. Out of the nonsense of his speculative reflections the doctor pounced on certain points that puzzled him completely. Probing for the repressed elements in the boy’s psychic life that caused the triple complex of Wave and Eyes and Whiff, he only saw the cause receding further and further from his grasp until it finally lost itself in ultimate obscurity. The disciple of Freud was baffled hopelessly.…

  Tom, meanwhile, bathed in a sea of new sensations. Distance held meaning for him, separation was a kind of keen starvation. He made discoveries — watched the moon rise, heard the wind, and knew the stars shone over the meadows below the house, things that before had been merely commonplace. He pictured these details as they might occur in France, and once when he saw a Swallow Tail butterfly, knowing that the few English specimens were said to have crossed the Channel, he had a touch of ecstasy, as though the proud insect brought him a message from the fields below the Finishing School. Also he read French books and found the language difficult but exquisite. All sweet and lovely things came from France, and at school he attempted violent friendships with three French boys and the Foreign Language masters, friendships that were not appreciated because they were not understood. But he made progress with the language, and it stood him in good stead in his examinations. He was aiming now at an Engineering College. He passed in — eventually — brilliantly enough.

  Before that satisfactory moment, however, he knew difficult times. His inner life was in a splendid tumult. From the books he purloined he read a good many facts concerning waves and wave-formation. He learned, among other things, that all sensory impressions reached the nerves by impact of force in various wave-lengths; heat, light and sound broke upon the skin and eyes and ears in vibrations of æther or air that advanced in steady series of wavy formations which, though not quite similar to his dream-wave, were akin to it. Sensation, which is life, was thus linked on to his deepest, earliest memory.

  A wave, however, instantly rejoined the parent stock and formed again. And perhaps it was the repetition of the wave — its forming again and breaking again — that impressed him most. For he imagined his impulses, emotions, tendencies all taking this wave-form, sweeping his moods up to a certain point, then dropping back into his centre — the Sea, he called it — which held steady below all temporary fluctuations — only to form once more and happen all over again.

  With his moral and spiritual life it was similar: a wind came, wind of desire, wind of yearning, wind of hope, and he felt his strength accumulating, rising, bending with power upon the object that he had in view. To take that object exactly at the top of the wave was to achieve success; to miss that moment was to act with a receding and diminishing power, to dissipate himself in foam and spray before he could retire for a second rise. He saw existence as a wave. Life itself was a wave that rose, swept, curved, and finally — must break.

  He merely visualised these feelings into pictures; he did not think them out, nor get them into words. The wave became symbolic to him of all life’s energies. It was the way in which all sensation expressed itself. Lettice was the high-water mark on shore he longed to reach and sweep back into his own tumultuous being. In that great underneath, the Sea, they belonged eternally together.…

  One thing, however, troubled him exceedingly: he read that a wave was a segment of a circle, the perfect form, yet that it never completed itself. The ground on which it broke prevented the achievement of the circle. That, he felt, was a pity, and might be serious; there was always that sinister retirement for another effort that yet never did, and never could, result in complete achievement. He watched the waves a good deal on the shore, when occasion offered in the holidays — they came from France! — and made a discovery on his own account that was not mentioned in any of the books. And it was this: that the top of the wave, owing to its curve, was reflected in the under part. Its end, that is, was foretold in its beginning.

  There was a want of scientific accuracy here, a confusion of time and space, perhaps, yet he noticed the idea and registered the thrill. At the moment when the wave was poised to fall its crest shone reflected in the base from which it rose.

  But the more he watched the waves on the shore, the more puzzled he became. They seemed merely a movement of the sea itself. They endlessly repeated themselves. They had no true, separate existence until they — broke. Nor could he determine whether the crest or the base was the beginning, for the two ran along together, and what was above one minute was below the minute after. Which part started first he never could decide. The head kept chasing the tail in an effort to join up. Only when a wave broke and fell was it really — a wave. It had to ‘happen’ to earn its name.

  There were ripples too. These indicated the direction of the parent wave upon whose side they happened, but not its purpose. Moods were ripples: they varied the surface of life but did not influence its general direction.

  His own life followed a similar behaviour; he was full of ripples that were for ever trying to complete themselves by happening in acts. But the main Wave was the thing — end and beginning sweeping along together, both at the same time somehow. That is, he knew the end and could foretell it. It rose from the great ‘beneath’ which was the sea in him. It must topple over in the end and complete itself. He knew it would; he knew it would hurt; he knew also that he would not shirk it when it came. For it was a repetition somehow.

  ‘I jolly well mean to enjoy the smash,’ he felt. ‘I know one pair of Eyes already; there’s only the Whiff and the other Eyes to come. The moment I find
them, I’ll go bang into it.’ He experienced a delicious shiver at the prospect.

  One thing, however, remained uncertain: the stuff the Wave was made of. Once he discovered that, he would discover also — where the smash would come.

  CHAPTER IV.

  ‘Can a chap feel things coming?’ he asked his father. He was perhaps fifteen or sixteen then. ‘I mean, when you feel them coming, does that mean they must come?’

  His father listened warily. There had been many similar questions lately.

  ‘You can feel ordinary things coming,’ he replied; ‘things due to association of ideas.’

  Tom looked up. ‘Association?’ he queried uncertainly.

  ‘If you feel hungry,’ explained the doctor, ‘you know that dinner’s coming; you associate the hunger with the idea of eating. You recognise them because you’ve felt them both together before.’

  ‘They ought to come, then?’

  ‘Dinner does come — ordinarily speaking. You’ve learned to expect it from the hunger. You could, of course, prevent it coming,’ he added dryly, ‘only that would be bad for you. You need it.’

  Tom reflected a moment with a puckered face. His father waited for him to ask more, hoping he would. The boy felt the sympathy and invitation.

  ‘Before,’ he repeated, picking out the word with sudden emphasis, his mind evidently breaking against a problem. ‘But if I felt hungry for something I hadn’t had before —— ?’

  ‘In that case you wouldn’t call it hunger. You wouldn’t know what to call it. You’d feel a longing of some kind and would wonder what it meant.’