Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  He checked himself again, as the rich, ancient notion flitted across his stirring memory.

  “Delightful, picturesque conceptions of the planet’s young, fair ignorance!” he reminded himself, smiling as before.

  Whereupon rose, bursting through his momentary dream, with full-fledged power, the great hope of his own reasoned, scientific Dream — that man is greater than he knows, and that the progress of the Race was demonstrable.

  For, to the subliminal powers of an awakened Race these Nature Beings with their special faculties, must lie open and accessible. The human and the non-human could unite! Nature must come back into the hearts of men and win them again to simple, natural life with love, with joy, with naked beauty. Death and disease must vanish, hope and purity return. The Race must develop, grow, become in the true sense universal. It could know God!

  The vision flashed upon him with extraordinary conviction, so that he forgot for the moment how securely he belonged to the unstable. The smile of happiness spread, as it were, over his entire being. He glowed and pulsed with its delicious inward fire. Light filled his being for an instant — an instant of intoxicating belief and certainty and vision. The instant inspiration of a dream went lost and vanished. He had drawn upon childhood and legendary reading for the substance of a moment’s happiness. He shook himself, so to speak. He remembered his patients and his duties, his colleague too....

  Nothing, meanwhile, occurred to arouse interest or attention. LeVallon was quite docile, ordinary; he needed no watching; he slept well, ate well, spent his leisure with his books and in the garden. He complained often of the lack of sunlight, and sometimes he might be seen taking some deep breaths of air into his lungs by the open window or on the balcony. The phases of the moon, too, interested him, and he asked once when the full moon would come and then, when Devonham told him, he corrected the date the latter gave, proving him two hours wrong. But, on the whole, there seemed little to differentiate him from the usual young man whose physique had developed in advance of his mental faculties; his knowledge in some respects certainly was backward, as in the case of arrested development. He seemed an intelligent countryman, but an unusually intelligent countryman, though all the time another under-intelligence shone brightly, betraying itself in remarks and judgments oddly phrased.

  Dr. Fillery took him, during the following day or two, to concerts, theatres, cinemas. He enjoyed them all. Yet in the theatres he was inclined to let his attention wander. The degree of alertness varied oddly. His critical standard, moreover, was curiously exacting; he demanded the real creative interpretation of a part, and was quick to detect a lack of inspiration, of fine technique, of true conception in a player. Reasons he failed to give, and argument seemed impossible to him, but if voice or gesture or imaginative touch failed anywhere, he lost interest in the performer from that moment.

  “He has poor breath,” he remarked. “He only imitates. He is outside.” Or, “She pretends. She does not feel and know. Feeling — the feeling that comes of fire — she has not felt.”

  “She does not understand her part, you mean?” suggested Fillery.

  “She does not burn with it,” was the reply.

  At concerts he behaved individually too. They bored as well as puzzled him; the music hardly stirred him. He showed signs of distress at anything classical, though Wagner, Debussy, the Russians, moved him and produced excitement.

  “He,” was his remark, with emphasis, “has heard. He gives me freedom. I could fly and go away. He sets me free ...” and then he would say no more, not even in reply to questions. He could not define the freedom he referred to, nor could he say where he could go away to. But his face lit up, he smiled his delightful smile, he looked happy. “Stars,” he added once in a tone of interest, in reply to repeated questions, “stars, wind, fire, away from this!” — he tapped his head and breast— “I feel more alive and real.”

  “It’s real and true, that music? That’s what you feel?”

  “It’s beyond this,” he replied, again tapping his body. “They have heard.”

  The cinema interested him more. Yet its limits seemed to perplex him more than its wonder thrilled him. He accepted it as a simple, natural, universal thing.

  “They stay always on the sheet,” he observed with evident surprise. “And I hear nothing. They do not even sing. Sound and movement go together!”

  “The speaking will come,” explained Fillery. “Those are pictures merely.”

  “I understand. Yet sound is natural, isn’t it? They ought to be heard.”

  “Speech,” agreed his companion, “is natural, but singing isn’t.”

  “Are they not alive enough to sing?” was the reply, spoken to himself rather than to his neighbour, who was so attentive to his least response. “Do they only sing when” — Fillery heard it and felt something leap within him— “when they are paid or have an audience?” he finished the sentence quickly.

  “No one sings naturally of their own accord — not in cities, at any rate,” was the reply.

  LeVallon laughed, as though he understood at once.

  “There is no sun and wind,” he murmured. “Of course. They cannot.”

  It was the cinemas that provided most material for observation, Fillery found. There was in a cinema performance something that excited his companion, but excited him more than the doctor felt he was justified in encouraging. Obviously the other side of him, the “N. H.” aspect, came up to breathe under the stimulus of the rapid, world-embracing, space-and-time destroying pictures on the screen. Concerts did not stimulate him, it seemed, but rather puzzled him. He remained wholly the commonplace LeVallon — with one exception: he drew involved patterns on the edge of his programmes, patterns of a very complicated yet accurate kind, as though he almost saw the sounds that poured into his ears. And these ornamented programmes Dr. Fillery preserved. Sound — music — seemed to belong to his interpretation of movement. About the cinema, however, there seemed something almost familiar, something he already knew and understood, the sound belonging to movement only lacking.

  Apart from these small incidents, LeVallon showed nothing unusual, nothing that a yokel untaught yet of natural intelligence might not have shown. His language, perhaps, was singular, but, having been educated by one mind only, and in a region of lonely forests and mountains, remote from civilized life, there was nothing inexplicable in the odd words he chose, nor in the peculiar — if subtle and penetrating — phrases that he used. Invariably he recognized the spontaneous, creative power as distinguished from the derivative that merely imitated.

  He found ways of expressing himself almost immediately, both in speech and writing, however, and with a perfection far beyond the reach of a half-educated country lad; and this swift aptitude was puzzling until its explanation suddenly was laid bare. He absorbed, his companion realized at last, as by telepathy, the content of his own, of Fillery’s mind, acquiring the latter’s mood, language, ideas, as though the two formed one being.

  The discovery startled the doctor. Yet what startled him still more was the further discovery, made a little later, that he himself could, on occasions, become so identified with his patient that the slightest shade of thought or feeling rose spontaneously in his own mind too.

  He remained, otherwise, almost entirely “LeVallon”; and, after a full report made to Devonham, and the detailed discussion thereon that followed, Dr. Fillery had no evidence to contradict the latter’s opinion: “LeVallon is the real true self. The other personality— ‘N. H.’ as we call it — is a mere digest and accumulation of material supplied by his parents and by Mason.”

  “Let us wait and see what happens when ‘N. H.’ appears and does something,” Fillery was content to reply.

  “If,” answered Devonham, with sceptical emphasis, “it ever does appear.”

  “You think it won’t?” asked Fillery.

  “With proper treatment,” said Devonham decisively, “I see no reason why ‘N. H.’ should not
become happily merged in the parent self — in LeVallon, and a permanent cure result.”

  He put his glasses straight and stared at his chief, as much as to say “You promised.”

  “Perhaps,” said Fillery. “But, in my judgment, ‘LeVallon’ is too slight to count at all. I believe the whole, real, parent Self is ‘N. H.,’ and the only life LeVallon has at all is that which peeps up through him — from ‘N. H.’”

  Fillery returned his serious look.

  “If ‘N. H.’ is the real self, and I am right,” he added slowly, “you, Paul, will have to revise your whole position.”

  “I shall,” returned Devonham. “But — you will allow this — it is a lot to expect. I see no reason to believe in anything more than a subconscious mind of unusual content, and possibly of unusual powers and extent,” he added with reluctance.

  “It is,” said Fillery significantly, “a lot to expect — as you said just now. I grant you that. Yet I feel it possible that — —” he hesitated.

  Devonham looked uncomfortable. He fidgeted. He did not like the pause. A sense of exasperation rose in him, as though he knew something of what was coming.

  “Paul,” went on his chief abruptly in a tone that dropped instinctively to a lower key — almost a touch of awe lay behind it— “you admit no deity, I know, but you admit purpose, design, intelligence.”

  “Well,” replied the other patiently, long experience having taught him iron restraint, “it’s a blundering, imperfect system, inadequately organized — if you care to call that intelligence. It’s of an extremely intricate complexity. I admit that. Deity I consider an unnecessary assumption.”

  “The love and hate of atoms alone bowls you over,” was the unexpected comment. “The word ‘Laws’ explains nothing. A machine obeys the laws, but intelligence conceived that machine — and a man repairs and keeps it going. Who — what — keeps the daisy going, the crystal, the creative thought in the imagination? An egg becomes a leaf-eating caterpillar, which in turn becomes a honey-eating butterfly with wings. A yolk turns into feathers. Is that accomplished without intelligence?”

  “Ask our new patient,” interrupted Devonham, wiping his glasses with unnecessary thoroughness.

  “Which?”

  Devonham startled, looked up without his glasses. It seemed the question made him uneasy. Putting the glasses on suddenly, he stared at his chief.

  “I see what you mean, Edward,” he said earnestly, his interest deeply captured. “Be careful. We know nothing, remember, nothing of life. Don’t jump ahead like this or take your dreams for reality. We have our duty — in a case like this.”

  Fillery smiled, as though to convey that he remembered his promise.

  “Humanity,” he replied, “is a very small section of the universe. Compared to the minuter forms of life, which may be quite as important, if not more so, the human section is even negligible; while, compared to the possibility of greater forms — —” He broke off abruptly. “As you say, Paul, we know nothing of life after all, do we? Nothing, less than nothing! We observe and classify a few results, that’s all. We must beware of narrow prejudice, at any rate — you and I.”

  His eyes lost their light, his speech dried up, his ideas, dreams, speculations returned to him unrewarded, unexpressed. With natures in whom the subconscious never stirred, natures through whom its magical fires cast no faintest upward gleam, intercourse was ever sterile, unproductive. Such natures had no background. Even a fact, with them, was detached from its true big life, its full significance, its divine potentialities!...

  “We must beware of prejudice,” he repeated quietly. “We seek truth only.”

  “We must beware,” replied Devonham, as he shrugged his shoulders, “of suggestion — of auto-suggestion above all. We must remember how repressed desires dramatize themselves — especially,” he added significantly, “when aided by imagination. We seek only facts.” On his face appeared swiftly, before it vanished again, an expression of keen anxiety, almost of affliction, yet tempered, as it were, by surprise and wonder, by pity possibly, and certainly by affection.

  CHAPTER VIII

  TO Devonham, meanwhile, LeVallon’s behaviour was polite and kind and distant; he did not show distrust of any sort, but he betrayed a certain diffidence, reserve and caution. Trust he felt; sympathy he did not feel. To the amusement of Fillery, he suggested almost a kind of mild contempt when dealing with him, and this amusement was increased by the fact that it obviously annoyed Devonham, while it gratified his chief. For towards Fillery, LeVallon behaved with an intimate and understanding sympathy that proved his instantaneous affection based upon mutual comprehension. It seemed that LeVallon and Fillery had known one another always.

  It was doubtless, due to this innate sympathy between them that Edward Fillery’s rare gift of absorbing the content of another’s mind, even to the point of taking on that other’s conditions, physical and emotional at the same time, was so successful. By means of a highly developed power of auto-suggestion, he had learned so to identify his own mind, thought, feeling with those of a patient, that there resulted a kind of merging by which he literally became that patient. He felt with him. As a subject sees the pictures in the hypnotiser’s mind, perceives his thoughts, divines his slightest will, so Fillery, reversing the process, could realize for the moment exactly what his patient was thinking, feeling, desiring. It was of great use to him in his strange practice.

  This gift, naturally, varied in degree, and was not invariably successful. In some cases he only felt, the emotion alone being thus transferred; in others he only saw what the patient saw, or thought he saw, the accompanying emotion being omitted; in others again, as in cases of vision at a distance, either of time or space, he had been able to follow the “travelling sight” of his patient, whose consciousness in trance was operating far away, and thus to check for subsequent verification exactly what that patient saw. He had shared strange experiences with others — with a man, for instance, in whom sight was transferred to the tip of his index finger, so that he could read a book by passing that finger along the printed line; with a woman, again, in whom “exteriorized consciousness” manifested itself, so that, if the air several inches from her face was pinched or struck, the impact was received and an actual bruise produced upon her skin.

  This extension of consciousness, its seeds already in his nature, he had trained and developed to a point where he could almost rely upon auto-suggestion bringing about quickly the desired conditions. Its success, however, as mentioned, was variable. With “N. H.,” especially now, this variableness was marked; sometimes it was so easily accomplished as to seem natural and without a conscious effort, while at other times it failed completely. Since it was in no sense an attempt to transfer anything from his own mind to that of the patient, Fillery felt that his promise to his colleague was not involved.

  The following scene describes the first time in which the process took place with his new patient. Fillery himself wrote down the words, supplied the detailed description, filled in the emotion and psychology, but exactly as these occurred and as he felt them, both when these took place, respectively, in his own consciousness and in that of his patient. Part of the time he was present, part of it he was not visibly so, being screened from observation, yet so placed that he could note everything that happened. It is clear, however, that his mind was so intimately en rapport with the thoughts and feelings of “N. H.,” that he experienced in his own being all that “N. H.” experienced. The description was written immediately after the occurrence, though some of it, the spoken language in particular, was jotted down in his hiding place at the actual moment.

  The interlacing of the two minds, their interpenetration, as it were, one occasionally dominating the other, is curious to trace and far from difficult to disentangle. Similarly the interweaving of LeVallon and “N. H.” is noticeable. The description given by Devonham of the portion of the occurrence he witnessed personally, or heard about from Nurse Robbin
s and the attendants — this description reduces the whole thing to the commonplace level of “a slight seizure accompanied by signs of violence and moments of delirium due to excitement and fatigue, and soon cured by sleep.”

  The occurrence took place precisely at the period when the moon was at the full.

  CHAPTER IX

  THE body I’m in and using is 22, as they call it, and from a man named Mason, a geologist, I receive sums of money, regularly paid, with which I live. They call it “live.” A roof and walls protect me, who do not need protection; my body, which it irks, is covered with wool and cloth and stuff, fitting me as bark fits a tree and yet not part of me; my feet, which love the touch of earth and yearn for it, are cased in dead dried skin called leather; even my head and hair, which crave the sun and wind, are covered with another piece of dead dried skin, shaped like a shell, but an ugly shell, in which, were it shaped otherwise, the wind and rustling leaves might sing with flowers.

  Before 22 I remember nothing — nothing definite, that is. I opened my eyes in a soft, but not refreshing case standing on four iron legs, and well off the ground, and covered with coarse white coverings piled thickly on my body. It was a bed. Slabs of transparent stuff kept out the living sunshine for which I hungered; thick solid walls shut off the wind; no stars or moon showed overhead, because an enormous lid hid every bit of sky. No dew, therefore, lay upon the sheets. I smelt no earth, no leaves, no flowers. No single natural sound entered except the chattering of dirty sparrows which had lost its freshness. I was in a hospital.