Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  A gust of memory flashed by me as I heard. Those small but perfect, exquisite, lovely rhythms!

  “Who called me here? Whose voice reached after me, bringing me into this undesirable consciousness?” I cried aloud, as the memory went tearing by, then vanished before I could recover it. At the same time Fillery let go my hand, and the little bridge was snapped. I felt what he called pain. It passed at once. I found his hand again, but the bridge was not rebuilt. How white his skin had grown, I noticed, as I looked up at his face. But the eyes shone grandly. “I shall find the way,” I said. “We shall go back together to our eternal home.”

  He went on reading as though I had not interrupted, but I found it less easy to listen now.

  I realized then that he was gone. He had left the room, though I had not seen him go. I had been away.

  It was some days ago that this occurred. It was to-day, a few hours ago, that I seized the Comely One and tried to comfort her, poor hungry member of this little Race.

  But both occurrences help us — help dear Fillery and myself — to understand how difficult it is to answer his questions and tell him exactly what he wants to know.

  “How long, O Lord, how long!” I hear his yearning cry. “Yet other beings cannot help us; they can only tell us what their own part is.”

  After the door had clicked I knew release for a bit — release from a state I partially understood and so found irksome, into another where I felt at home and so found pleasurable. In the big rhythms my nature expressed itself apparently. I rose, seeking my lost companions. They — the Devonham and his busy little figures — called it sleep. It may be “sleep.” But I find there what I seek yet have forgotten, and that with me were dear Fillery and another — a Comely One whom he brings — as though we belong together and have a common origin. But this other Comely One — who is it?

  CHAPTER X

  ABOUT a week after the arrival of LeVallon in London, Dr. Fillery came out of the Home one morning early, upon some uninteresting private business. He had left “LeVallon” happy with his books and garden, Devonham was with him to answer questions or direct his energies; the other “cases” in the establishment were moving nicely towards a cure.

  The November air was clear and almost bright; no personal worries troubled him. His mind felt free and light.

  It was one of those mornings when Nature slips, very close and sweet, into the heart, so close and sweet that the mind wonders why people quarrel and disagree, when it is so easy to forgive, and the planet seems but a big, lovely, happy garden, evil an impossible nightmare, and personal needs few and simple.

  He walked by cross roads towards Primrose Hill, entering Regent’s Park near the Zoo. An early white frost was rapidly melting in the sun. The sky showed a faint tinge of blue. He saw floating sea-gulls. These, and a faint breeze that stirred the yellowing last leaves of autumn, gave his heart a sudden lift.

  And this lift was in the direction of a forbidden corner. He was aware of some exquisite dawn-wind far away stirring a million flowers, dew sparkled, streams splashed and murmured. A valley gleamed and vanished, yet left across his mind its shining trail.... For this lift of his heart made him soar into a region where it was only too easy to override temptation. Fillery, however, though his invisible being soared, kept both visible feet firmly on the ground. The surface was slippery, being melted by the sun, but frost kept the earth hard and frozen underneath. His balance never was in danger. He remained detached and a spectator.

  She walked beside him nevertheless, a figure of purity and radiance, perfumed, soft, delicious. She was so ignorant of life. That was her wonder partly; for beauty was her accident and, while admirable, was not a determining factor. Life, in its cruder sense, she did not know, though moving through the thick of it. It neither touched nor soiled her; she brushed its dirt and dust aside as though a non-conducting atmosphere surrounded her. Her emotions, deep and searching, had remained untorn. A quality of pristine innocence belonged to her, as though, in the noisy clamour of ambitious civilized life, she remained still aware of Eden. Her grace, her loveliness, her simplicity moved by his side as naturally, it seemed to him, as air or perfume.

  “Iraida,” he murmured to himself, with a smile of joy. “Nayan Khilkoff. All the men worship and adore you, yet respect you too. They cannot touch you. You remain aloof, unstained.” And, remembering LeVallon’s remarks in cinema and theatre, he could have sung at this mere thought of her.

  “Untouched by coarseness, something unearthly about your loveliness of soul, a baby, a saint, and to all the men in Khilkoff’s Studio, a mother. Where do you really come from? Whence do you derive? Your lovely soul can have no dealings with our common flesh. How many young fellows have you saved already, how many floundering characters redeemed! They crave your earthly, physical love. Instead you surprise and disappoint and shock them into safety again — by giving to them Love...!”

  And, as he half repeated his vivid thoughts aloud, he suddenly saw her coming towards him from the ornamental water, and instantly, wondering what he should say to her, his mind contracted. The thing in him that sang went backward into silence. He put a brake upon himself. But he watched her coming nearer, wondering what brought her so luckily into Regent’s Park, and all the way from Chelsea, at such an hour. She moved so lightly, sweetly; she was so intangible and lovely. He feared her eyes, her voice.

  They drew nearer. From looking to right and left, he raised his head. She was close, quite close, a hundred yards away. That walk, that swing, that poise of head and neck he could not mistake anywhere. His whole being glowed, thrilled, and yet contracted as in pain.

  A sentence about the weather, about her own, her father’s, health, about his calling to see them shortly, rose to his lips. He turned his eyes away, then again looked up. They were now not twenty yards apart; in another moment he would have raised his hat, when, with a sensation of cold disappointment in him, she went past in totally irresponsive silence. It was a stranger — a shop girl, a charwoman, a bus-conductor’s wife — anybody but she whom he had thought.

  How could he have been so utterly mistaken? It amazed him. It was, indeed, months since they had met, yet his knowledge of her appearance was so accurate and detailed that such an error seemed incredible. He had experienced, besides, the actual thrill.

  The phenomenon, however, was not new to him. Often had he experienced it, much as others have. He knew, from this, that she was somewhere near, coming deliciously, deliberately towards him, moving every minute firmly nearer, from a point in great London town which she had left just at the precise moment which would time her crossing his own path later. They would meet presently, if not now. Fate had arranged all details, and something in him was aware of it before it happened.

  The phenomenon, as a matter of fact, was repeated twice again in the next half-hour: he saw her — on both occasions beyond the possibility of question — coming towards him, yet each time it was a complete stranger masquerading in her guise.

  It meant, he knew, that their two minds — hearts, too, he wondered, with a sense of secret happiness, enjoyed intensely then instantly suppressed — were wirelessing to one another across the vast city, and that both transmitter and receiver, their physical bodies, would meet shortly round the corner, or along the crowded street. Strong currents of desiring thought, he knew, he hoped, he wondered, were trying to shape the crude world nearer to the heart’s desire, causing the various intervening passers-by to assume the desirable form and outline in advance.

  He reflected, following the habit of his eager mind; this wireless discovery, after all, was the discovery of a universal principle in Nature. It was common to all forms of life, a faint beginning of that advance towards marvellous intercommunicating, semi-telepathic brotherhood he had always hoped for, believed in.... Even plants, he remembered, according to Bose....

  Then, suddenly, half-way down Baker Street he found her close beside him.

  She was dressed so becomingly, so natur
ally, that no particular detail caught his eye, although she wore more colour than was usual in the dull climate known to English people. There was a touch of fur and there were flowers, but these were part of her appearance as a whole, and the hat was so exactly right, though it was here that Englishwomen generally went wrong, that he could not remember afterwards what it was like. It was as suitable as natural hair. It looked as if she had grown it. The shining eyes were what he chiefly noticed. They seemed to increase the pale sunlight in the dingy street.

  She was so close that he caught her perfume almost before he recognized her, and a sense of happiness invaded his whole being instantly, as he took the slender hand emerging from a muff and held it for a moment. The casual sentences he had half prepared fled like a flock of birds surprised. Their eyes met.... And instantly the sun rose over a far Khaketian valley; he was aware of joy, of peace, of deep contentment, London obliterated, the entire world elsewhere. He knew the thrill, the ecstasy of some long-forgotten dawn....

  But in that brief second while he held her hand and gazed into her eyes, there flashed before him a sudden apparition. With lightning rapidity this picture darted past between them, paused for the tiniest fraction of a second, and was gone again. So swiftly the figure shot across that the very glance he gave her was intercepted, its angle changed, its meaning altered. He started involuntarily, for he knew that vision, the bright rushing messenger, someone who brought glad tidings. And this time he recognized it — it was the figure of “N. H.”

  The outward start, the slight wavering of the eyelids, both were noticed, though not understood, much less interpreted by the young woman facing him.

  “You are as much surprised as I am,” he heard the pleasant, low-pitched voice before his face. “I thought you were abroad. Father and I came back from Sark only yesterday.”

  “I haven’t left town,” he replied. “It was Devonham went to Switzerland.”

  He was thinking of her pleasant voice, and wondering how a mere voice could soothe and bless and comfort in this way. The picture of the flashing figure, too, preoccupied him. His various mind was ever busy with several trains of thought at once, though all correlated. Why, he was wondering, should that picture of “N. H.” leave a sense of chill upon his heart? Why had the first radiance of this meeting thus already dimmed a little? Her nearness, too, confused him as of old, making his manner a trifle brusque and not quite natural, until he found his centre of control again. He looked quickly up and down the street, moved aside to let some people pass, then turned to the girl again. “Your holiday has done you good, Iraida,” he said quietly; “I hope your father enjoyed it too.”

  “We both enjoyed ourselves,” she answered, watching him, something of a protective air about her. “I wish you had been with us, for that would have made it perfect. I was thinking that only this morning — as I walked across Hyde Park.”

  “How nice of you! I believe I, too, was thinking of you both, as I walked through Regent’s Park.” He smiled for the first time.

  “It’s very odd,” she went on, “though you can explain it probably,” she added, with a smile that met his own, increasing it, “or, at any rate, Dr. Devonham could — but I’ve seen you several times this morning already — in the last half-hour. I’ve seen you in other people in the street, I mean. Yet I wasn’t thinking of you at the actual moment, it’s two months since we’ve met, and I imagined you were abroad.”

  “Odd, yes,” he said, half shyly, half curtly. “It’s an experience many have, I believe.”

  She gazed up at him. “It’s very natural, I think, when people like each other, Edward, and are in sympathy.”

  “Yet it happens with people who don’t like each other too,” he objected, and at the same moment was vexed that he had used the words.

  Iraida Khilkoff laughed. He had the feeling that she read his thoughts as easily as if they were printed in red letters on his grey felt hat.

  “There must be some bond between them, though,” she remarked, “an emotion, I mean, whatever it may be — even hatred.”

  “Probably, Nayan,” he agreed. “It’s you now, not Devonham, that wants to explain things. I think I must take you into the Firm, you could take charge of the female patients with great success.”

  Whereupon she looked up at him with such a grave mothering expression that he was aware of her secret power, her central source of strength in dealing with men. Her innocence and truth were an atmosphere about her, protecting her as naturally and neatly as the clothes upon her body. She believed in men. He felt like a child beside her.

  “I’m in the Firm already,” she said, “for you made me a partner years ago when I was so high,” and her small gloved hand indicated the stature of a little girl. “You taught me first.”

  He remembered the bleak northern town where fifteen years ago he had known her father as a patient for some minor ailment, and the friendship that grew out of the relationship. He remembered the child of nine or ten who sat on his knee and repeated to him the Russian fairy tales her mother told her; he recalled the charm, the wonder, the extraordinary power of belief. Her words brought back again that flowered Caucasian valley in the sunlight and this, again, flashed upon the screen the strange bright figure that had already once intercepted their glance, as though it somehow came between them....

  “You have one advantage over me,” he rejoined presently, “for in my Clinique the people know that they need treatment, whereas in the Studio you catch your patients unawares. They do not know they’re ill. You heal them without their being aware that they need healing.”

  “Yet some of our habitués have found their way later to your consulting-room,” she reminded him.

  “Merely to finish what you had first begun — a sort of convalescence. You work in the big, raw world, I in a mere specialized corner of it.”

  He turned away, lest the power in her eyes overcome him. The traffic thundered past, the people crowded, jostling them. He could have stood there talking to her all day long, the London street forgotten or full of flowers and Eden’s trees and rippling summer streams. The pale sunlight caught her face beside him and made it shine....

  He longed to take her in his arms and fly through the dawn for ever, for his clean mind saw her without clothing, her hair loose in the wind, her white shape fleeing from him, yet beckoning across a gleaming shoulder that he must overtake and capture her....

  “I’m on my way to St. Dunstan’s,” he heard the musical voice. “A friend of father’s.... Come with me, will you?” And with her muff she touched his arm, trying to make him turn her way. But just as he felt the touch he saw the bright figure again. Swifter than himself and far more powerful, it leaped dancing past and carried her away before his very eyes. She waved her hand, her eyes faded like stars into the distance of some unearthly spring — and she was gone. A pang of peculiar anguish seized him, as the mental picture flashed with the speed of light and vanished. For the figure seemed of elemental power, taking its own with perfect ease....

  He shook his head. “I’ll come to see you to-morrow instead,” he told her. “I’ll come to the Studio in the afternoon, if you’ll both be in. I’d like to bring a friend with me, if I may.”

  “Good-bye then.” She took his hand and kept it. “I shall expect you to tell me all about this — friend. I knew you had something on your mind, for your thoughts have been elsewhere all the time.”

  “Julian LeVallon,” he replied quickly. “He’s staying with me indefinitely.” His face grew stern a moment about the mouth. “I think he may need you,” he added with abrupt significance.

  “Julian LeVallon,” she repeated, the name sounding very musical the way her slightly foreign accent touched it “And what nationality may that be?”

  Dr. Fillery hesitated. “His parents, Nayan, I believe, were English,” he said. “He has lived all his life in the Jura Mountains, alone with an old scholar, poet and geologist, who brought him up. Of our modern life he knows little. I t
hink you may — —” He broke off. “His mother died when he was born,” he concluded.

  “And of women he knows nothing,” she replied, understandingly, “so that he will probably fall in love with the first he sees — with Nayan.”

  “I hope so, Nayan, and he will be safe with you.”

  She watched her companion’s face for a minute or two with her clear searching eyes. She smiled. But his own face wore a mask now; no figure this time flashed between their deep understanding gaze.

  “A woman, you think, can teach and help him more than a man,” she said, without lowering her eyes.

  “Probably — perhaps, at any rate. The material, I must warn you at once, is new and strange. I want him to meet you.”

  “Then I am in the Firm,” was all she answered, “and you can’t do without me.” She let go the hand she had held all this time, and turned from him, looking once across her shoulder as he, too, went upon his way.

  “About three o’clock we shall expect you — and Mr. Julian LeVallon,” she added. “The Prometheans are coming too, as of course you know, but that won’t matter. Father has let the Studio to them.”

  “The more the merrier,” he answered, raised his hat, and went on at a rapid pace up Baker Street.

  But with him up the London street went a flock of thoughts, hopes, fears and memories that were hard to disentangle. Lost, forgotten dreams went with him too. He had known that one day he must be “executed,” yet with his own hands he had just slipped the noose about his neck. Detachment from life, he realized, keeping aloof from the emotions that touch one’s fellow beings, can only be, after all, a pose. In his case it was evidently a pose assumed for safety and self-protection, an artificial attitude he wore to keep his heart from error. His love, born of some far unearthly valley, undoubtedly consumed him, while yet he said it nay....

  He had himself suggested bringing together the girl and “N. H.” There had been no need to do this. Yet he had deliberately offered it, and she had instantly accepted. Even while he said the words there was a volcano of emotion in him, several motives fighting to combine. The fear for himself, being selfish, he had set aside at once; there was also the fear for her — the odd certainty in him that at last her woman’s nature would be waked; lastly, the fear for “N. H.” himself. And here he clashed with his promise to Devonham. Behind the simple proposal lay these various threads of motive, emotion and qualification.