Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  And the moment of clear vision left its visible traces in him even after it had passed. If he felt contempt for his cousin, he felt for Lettice a deep and searching pity — she was divided against herself, she was playing a part she had to play. The usual human emotions were used, of course, to convey the situation, yet in some way he was unable to explain she was — being driven. In spite of herself she must inflict this pain.… It was a mystery he could not solve.…

  His exaltation, naturally, was of brief duration. The inevitable reaction followed it. He saw the situation again as an ordinary man of the world must see it.… The fires of jealousy were alight and spreading. Already they were eating away the foundations of every generous feeling he had ever known.… It was not, he argued, that he did not trust her. He did. But he feared the insidious power of infatuation, he feared the burning glamour of this land of passionate mirages, he feared the deluding forces of sex which his cousin had deliberately awakened in her blood — and other nameless things he feared as well, though he knew not exactly what they were. For it seemed to him that they were old as dreams, old as the river and the menace of these solemn hills.… From childhood up, his own trust in her truth and loyalty had remained unalterably fixed, ingrained in the very essence of his being. It was more than his relations with a woman he loved that were in danger: it was his belief and trust in Woman, focussed in her self symbolically, that were threatened.… It was his belief in Life.

  With Lettice, however, he felt himself in some way powerless to deal; he could watch her, but he could not judge… least of all, did he dare prevent.… Her attitude he could not know nor understand.…

  There was a pink glow upon the desert before he realised that a reply to Tony’s letter was necessary; and that pink was a burning gold when he knew his answer must be of such a kind that Tony felt free to pursue his course unchecked. Tom held to his strange belief to ‘Let it all come,’ he would not try to prevent; he would neither shirk nor dodge. He doubted whether it lay in his power now to hinder anything, but in any case he would not seek to do so. Rather than block coming events, he must encourage their swift development. It was the best, the only way; it was the right way too. He belonged to his destination. He went into his own background.…

  The sky was alight from zenith to horizon, the Nile aflame with sunrise, by the time the letter was written. He read it over, then hurriedly undressed and plunged into bed. A long, dreamless sleep took instant charge of him, for he was exhausted to a state of utter depletion.

  Dear Tony — I have read your letter with the greatest sympathy — it was forwarded from Assouan. It cost you a good deal, I know, to say what you did, and I’m sure you mean it for the best. I feel it like that too — for the best.

  But it is easier for you to write than for me to answer. Her position, of course, is an awfully delicate one; and I feel — no doubt you feel too — that her standard of conduct is higher than that of ordinary women, and that any issue between us — if there is an issue at all! — should be left to her to decide.

  Nothing can touch my friendship with her; you needn’t worry about that. But if you can bring any added happiness into her life, it can only be welcomed by all three of us. So go ahead, Tony, and make her as happy as you can. The important things are not in our hands to decide in any case; and, whatever happens, we both agree on one thing — that her happiness is the important thing. — Yours ever, Tom.

  CHAPTER XXIII.

  He was wakened by the white-robed Arab housemaid with his breakfast. He felt hungry, but still tired; sleep had not rested him. On the tray an envelope caught his eye — sent by hand evidently, since it bore no stamp. The familiar writing made the blood race in his veins, and the instant the man was gone he tore it open. There was burning in his eyes as he read the pencilled words. He devoured it whole with a kind of visual gulp — a flash; the entire meaning first, then lines, then separate words.

  Come for lunch, or earlier. My cousin is invited out, and Tony has suddenly left for Cairo with his friends. I shall be lonely. How beautiful and precious you were last night. I long for you to comfort me. But don’t efface yourself again — it gave me a horrid, strange presentiment — as if I were losing you — almost as if you no longer trusted me. And don’t forget that I love you with all my heart and soul. I had such queer, long dreams last night — terrible rather. I must tell you. Do come. — Yours, L.

  P.S. Telephone if you can’t.

  Sweetness and pain rose in him, then numbness. For his mind flung itself with violence upon two sentences: he was ‘beautiful and precious’; she longed for him to ‘comfort’ her. Why, he asked himself, was his conduct beautiful and precious? And why did she need his comfort? The words were like vitriol in the eyes.

  Long before reason found the answer, instinct — swift, merciless interpreter — told him plainly. While the brain fumbled, the heart already understood. He was stabbed before he knew what stabbed him.

  And hope sank extinguished. The last faint doubt was taken from him. It was not possible to deceive himself an instant longer, for the naked truth lay staring into his eyes.

  He swallowed his breakfast without appetite… and went downstairs. He sighed, but something wept inaudibly. A wall blocked every step he took. The devastating commonplace was upon him — it was so ordinary. Other men… oh, how often he had heard the familiar tale! He tried to grip himself. ‘Others… of course… but me!’ It seemed impossible.

  In a dream he crossed the crowded hall, avoiding various acquaintances with unconscious cunning. He found the letter-box and — posted his letter to Tony. ‘That’s gone, at any rate!’ he realised. He told the porter to telephone that he would come to lunch. ‘That’s settled too!’ Then, hardly knowing what blind instinct prompted, he ordered a carriage… and presently found himself driving down the hot, familiar road to — Karnak. For some faultless impulse guided him. He turned to the gigantic temple, with its towering, immense proportions — as though its grandeur might somehow protect and mother him.

  In those dim aisles and mighty halls brooded a Presence that he knew could soothe and comfort. The immensities hung still about the fabulous ruin. He would lose his tortured self in something bigger — that beauty and majesty which are Karnak. Before he faced Lettice, he must forget a moment — forget his fears, his hopes, his ceaseless torment of belief and doubt. It was, in the last resort, religious — a cry for help, a prayer. But also it was an inarticulate yearning to find that state of safety where he and she dwelt secure from separation — in the ‘sea.’ For Karnak is a spiritual experience, or it is nothing. There, amid the deep silence of the listening centuries, he would find peace; forgetting himself a moment, he might find — strength.

  Then reason parsed the sentences that instinct already understood complete. For Lettice — the tender woman of his first acquaintance — had obviously experienced a moment of reaction. She realised he was wounded at her hands. She felt shame and pity. She craved comfort and forgiveness — his comfort, his forgiveness. Conscience whispered. As against the pain she inflicted, he had been generous, long-suffering — therefore his conduct was ‘beautiful and precious.’ Tony, moreover, had hidden himself until his letter should be answered — and she was ‘lonely.’

  With difficulty Tom suppressed the rising bitterness of contempt and anger in him. His cousin’s obliquity was a sordid touch. He forgot a moment the loftier point of view; but for a short time only. The contempt merged again in something infinitely greater. The anger disappeared. Her attitude occupied him exclusively. The two phrases rang on with insistent meaning in his heart, as with the clang of a fateful sentence of exile, execution — death:

  ‘How beautiful you were last night, and precious… I long for you to comfort me.…’

  While the carriage crawled along the sun-baked sand, he watched the Arab children with their blue-black hair, who ran beside it, screaming for bakshish. The little faces shone like polished bronze; they held their hands out, their bare feet patte
red in the sand. He tossed small coins among them. And their cries and movements fell into the rhythm of the song, whose haunting refrain pulsed ever in his blood: ‘We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise.…’

  They were soon out-distanced, the palm-trees fell away, the soaring temple loomed against the blazing sky. He left the arabyieh at the western entrance and went on foot down the avenue of headless rams. The huge Khonsu gateway dropped its shadow over him. Passing through the Court with its graceful colonnades, and the Chapel, flanked by cool, dark chambers, where the Sacred Boat floated on its tideless sea beyond the world, he moved on across the sandy waste of broken stone again, and reached in a few minutes the towering grey and reddish sandstone that was Amon’s Temple.

  This was the goal of his little pilgrimage. Sublimity closed round him. The gigantic pylon, its shoulders breaking the sky four-square far overhead, seemed the prodigious portal of another world. Slowly he passed within, crossed the Great Court where the figures of ancient Theban deities peered at him between the forest of broken monoliths and lovely Osiris pillars, then, moving softly beneath the second enormous pylon, found himself on the threshold of the Great Hypostyle Hall itself.

  He caught his breath, he paused, then stepped within on tiptoe, and the hush of four thousand years closed after him. Awe stole upon him; he felt himself included in the great ideal of this older day. The stupendous aisles lent him their vast shelter; the fierce sunlight could not burn his flesh; the air was cool and sweet in these dim recesses of unremembered time. He passed his hand with reverence over the drum-shaped blocks that built up the majestic columns, as they reared towards the massive, threatening roof. The countless inscriptions and reliefs showered upon his sight bewilderingly.

  And he forgot his lesser self in this crowded atmosphere of ancient divinities and old-world splendour. He was aware of kings and queens, of princes and princesses, of stately priests, of hosts and conquests; forgotten gods and goddesses trooped past his listening soul; his heart remembered olden wars, and the royalty of golden days came back to him. He steeped himself in the long, long silence in which an earlier day lay listening with ears of stone. There was colour; there was spendthrift grandeur, half savage, half divine. His imagination, wakened by Egypt, plunged backwards with a sense of strange familiarity. Tom easily found the mightier scale his aching heart so hungrily desired. It soothed his personal anguish with a sense of individual insignificance which was comfort.…

  The peace was marvellous, an unearthly peace; the strength unwearied, inexhaustible. The power that was Amon lingered still behind the tossed and fabulous ruin. Those soaring columns held up the very sky, and their foundations made the earth itself swing true. The silence, profound, unalterable, was the silence in the soul that lies behind all passion and distress. And these steadfast qualities Tom absorbed unconsciously through his very skin.… The Wave might fall indeed, but it would fall into the mothering sea where levels must be restored again, secure upon unshakable foundations.… And as he paced these solemn aisles, his soul drank in their peace and stillness, their strength of calm resistance. Though built upon the sand, they still endured, and would continue to endure. They pointed to the stars.

  And the effect produced upon him, though the adjective was not his, seemed spiritual. There was a power in the mighty ruin that lifted him to an unaccustomed level from which he looked down upon the inner drama being played. He reached a height; the bird’s-eye view was his; he saw and realised, yet he did not judge. The vast structure, by its harmony, its power, its overmastering beauty, made him feel ashamed and mortified. A sense of humiliation crept into him, melting certain stubborn elements of self that, grown out of proportion, blocked his soul’s clear vision. That he must stand aside had never occurred to him before with such stern authority; it occurred to him now. The idea of sacrifice stole over him with a sweetness that was deep and marvellous. It seemed that Isis touched him. He looked into the eyes of great Osiris,… and that part of him that ever watched — the great Onlooker — smiled.

  His being, as a whole, remained inarticulate as usual; no words came to his assistance. It was rather that he attained — as once before, in another moment of deeper insight — that attitude towards himself which is best described as impersonal. Who was he, indeed, that he should claim the right to thwart another’s happiness, hinder another’s best self-realisation? By what right, in virtue of what exceptional personal value, could he, Tom Kelverdon, lay down the law to this other, and say, ‘Me only shall you love… because I happen to love you…?’

  And, as though to test what of strength and honesty might lie in this sudden exaltation of resolve, he recognised just then the very pylon against whose vast bulk they had rested together that moonlit night a few short weeks before… when he saw two rise up like one person… as he left them and stole away into the shadows.

  ‘So I knew it even then — subconsciously,’ he realised. ‘The truth was in me even then, a few days after my arrival.… And they knew it too. She was already going from me, if not already gone…!’

  He leaned against that same stone column, thinking, searching in his mind, feeling acutely. Reactions caught at him in quick succession. Doubt, suspicion, anger clouded vision; pain routed the impersonal conception. Loneliness came over him with the cool wind that stirred the sand between the columns; the patches of glaring sunshine took on a ghastly whiteness; he shivered.… But it was not that he lost belief in his moment of clear vision, nor that the impersonal attitude became untrue. It was another thing he realised: that the power of attainment was not yet in him… quite. He could renounce, but not with complete acceptance.…

  As he drove back along the sandy lanes of blazing heat a little later, it seemed to him that he had been through some strenuous battle that had taxed his final source of strength. If his position was somewhat vague, this was due to his inability to analyse such deep interior turmoil. He was sure, at least, of one thing — that, before he could know this final joy awaiting him, he must first find in himself the strength for what seemed just then an impossible, an ultimate sacrifice. He must forget himself — if such forgetfulness involved the happiness of another. He must slip out. The strength to do it would come presently. And his heart was full of this indeterminate, half-formed resolve as he entered the shady garden and saw Lettice lying in her deck-chair beneath the trees, awaiting him.

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  Events, however slight, which involve the soul are drama; for once the soul takes a hand in them their effects are permanent and reproductive. Not alone the relationship between individuals are determined this way or that, but the relationships of these individuals towards the universe are changed upon a scale of geometrical progression. The results are of the eternal order. Since that which persists — the soul — is radically affected, they are of ultimate importance.

  Had the strange tie between Tom and Lettice been due to physical causes only, to mental affinity, or to mere sympathetic admiration of each other’s outward strength and beauty, a rupture between them could have been of a passing character merely. A pang, a bitterness that lasted for a day or for a year — and the gap would be filled again by some one else. They had idealised; they would get over it; they were not indispensable to one another; there were other fish in the sea, and so forth.

  But with Tom, at any rate, there was something transcendental in their intimate union. Loss, where she was concerned, involved a permanent and irremediable bereavement — no substitute was conceivable. With him, this relationship seemed foreordained, almost prenatal — it had come to him at the very dawn of life; it had lasted through years of lonely waiting; no other woman had ever threatened its fixed security, and the sudden meeting in Switzerland had seemed to him reunion rather than discovery. Moreover, he had transferred his own sense of security to her; had always credited her with similar feelings; and the suspicion now that he had deceived himself in this made life tremble to the foundations. It was a terrible thought that robbed
him of every atom of self-confidence. It affected his attitude to the entire universe.

  The intensity of this drama, however, being interior, caused little outward disturbance that casual onlookers need have noticed. He waved his hat as he walked towards the corner where she lay, greeting her with a smile and careless word, as though no shadow stood between them. A barrier, nevertheless, was there he knew. He felt it almost sensibly. Also — it had grown higher. And at once he was aware that the Lettice who returned his smile with a colourless ‘Good morning, Tom, I’m so glad you could come,’ was not the Lettice who had known a moment’s reaction a little while before. He told by her very attitude that now there was lassitude, even weariness in her. Her eyes betrayed none of the excitement and delight that another could wake in her. His own presence certainly no longer brought the thrill, the interest that once it did. She was both bored and lonely.

  And, while an exquisite pain ran through him, he made a prodigious effort to draw upon the strength he had felt in Karnak a short half-hour ago. He struggled bravely to forget himself. ‘So Tony’s gone!’ he said lightly, ‘run off and left us without so much as a word of warning or good-bye. A rascally proceeding, I call it! Rather sudden, too, wasn’t it?’

  He sat down beside her and began to smoke. She need not answer unless she wanted to. She did answer, however, and at once. She did not look at him; her eyes were on the golden distance. It had to be said; she said it. ‘He’s only gone for two or three days. His friends suddenly changed their minds, and he couldn’t get out of it. He said he didn’t want to go — a bit.’