Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  Realized though dimly, this troubled her clear mind, as she took the chair he offered, the conviction that she must tend and care for, even love this strange youth, as though he were in exile and none but herself could understand him. She heard the deep resonant voice in the air in front of her:

  “I am not lost now,” he said, with his radiant smile, and as if he perceived her thought from the expression in her face. “I wished to take you away — to take you back. I wish it still.”

  He stood gazing down at her. The deep tones, the shining eyes, the towering stature with its quiet strength — these, added to the directness of the language, confused her for a moment. The words were so entirely unexpected. Fillery had led her to suppose otherwise. Yet before the blazing innocence in his face and manner, her composure at once returned. She found no words at first. She smiled up into his eyes, then pointed to a chair. Seated he would be more manageable, she felt. His upright stature was so overpowering.

  “You had forgotten — —” he went on, obeying her wish and sitting down, “but I could not know that you had forgotten. I apologize” — the word sounded oddly on his lips, as though learned recently— “for making you suffer.”

  “Forgotten!”

  A swift intuition, due to some as yet undecipherable kinship, told her that the word bore no reference to the Studio scene. Some larger meaning, scaled to an immenser map, came with it. An unrealized emotion stirred faintly in her as she heard. Her first sight of him as a figure of light returned.

  “But that is all forgiven now,” she replied calmly in her firm, gentle voice. “We need not speak of it. You understand now” — she ended lamely— “that it is not possible — —”

  He listened intently, gravely, as though with a certain effort, his head bent forward to catch every syllable. And as he bent, peering, listening, he might have been some other-worldly being staring down through a window in the sky into the small confusions of earth’s affairs.

  “Yes,” he said, the moment she stopped speaking, “I understand now. I shall never make you suffer again. Only — I could not know that you had forgotten — so completely.”

  “Forgotten?” she again repeated in spite of herself, for the way he uttered the word again stirred that nameless, deep emotion in her. Their attitudes respectively were changing. She no longer felt that she could “mother” this great figure before her.

  “Where we belong,” he answered in his great quiet voice. “There,” he added, in a way that made it the counterpart of her own spontaneous and intuitive “here.” “It is so easy. I had forgotten too. But Fillery, dear Fillery, helps me to remember, and the stars and flowers and wind, these help me too. And then you — when I saw you I suddenly remembered more. I was so happy. I remembered what I had left to come among men and women. I knew that Fillery and you belonged ‘there’ with me. You, both, had come down for a little time, come down ‘here,’ but had remained too long. You had become almost as men and women are. I remembered everything when I saw your eyes. I was so happy in a moment, as I looked at you, that I felt I must go back, go home. The central fire called me, called us all three. I wanted to escape and take you with me. I knew by your eyes that you were ready. You called to Fillery. We were off.”

  He paused a moment, while she listened in breathless silence.

  “Then, suddenly, you refused. You resisted. Something prevented. The Messengers were there when suddenly” — an expression of yearning pain clouded his great eyes a moment— “you forgot again. I forgot too, forgot everything. The darkness came. It was cold. My enemy, the water, caught me.”

  He stopped, and passed his hands across his forehead, sighing, his eyes fixed upon vacancy as with an intense effort to recover something. “And I still forget,” he went on, the yearning now transferred from the eyes to the lowered voice. “I can remember nothing again. All, all is gone from me.” The light in his face actually grew dimmer as he slowly uttered the words. He leaned back in his big arm-chair. Again, it occurred to her, it was as if he drew back from that window in the sky.

  A curious hollow, empty of life, seemed to drop into the room between them as his voice ceased.

  While he had been speaking, the girl watched and listened with intense interest and curiosity. She remembered he was a “patient,” yet no touch of uneasiness or nervousness was in her. His strange words, meaningless as they might seem, woke deep echoes of some dim buried recognition in her. It amazed and troubled her. This young man, this sinner against the conventions whom she had come to comfort and forgive, held the reins already. What had happened, what was happening, and how did he contrive it? She was aware of a clear, divining knowledge in him, a power, a directness she could not fathom. He seemed to read her inside out. It was more than uncanny; it was spiritual. It mastered her.

  During his speech he remained very still, without gesture, without change of expression in his face; he made no movement; only his voice deepened and grew rhythmical. And a power emanated from him she hardly dared resist, much less deny. His voice, his words, reached depths in her she scarcely knew herself. He was so strong, so humble, so simple, yet so strangely peaceful. And — suddenly she realized it — so far beyond her, yet akin. She became aware that the figure seated in the chair, watching her, talking, was but a fraction of his whole self. He was — the word occurred to her — immense. Was she, too, immense?

  More than troubled, she was profoundly stimulated. The mothering instinct in her for the first time seemed to fail a little. The woman in her trembled, not quite sure of itself. But, besides these two, there was another part of her that listened and felt joy — a white, radiant joy which, if she allowed, must become ecstasy. Whence came this hint of unearthly rapture? Again there rose before her the two significant words: “There” and “Here.”

  “I do not quite understand,” she replied, after a moment’s pause, looking into his eyes steadily, her voice firm, her young face very sweet; “I do not fully understand, perhaps. But I sympathize.” Then she added suddenly, with a little smile: “But, at any rate, I did not come to make you apologize — Julian. Please be sure of that. I came to see if I might be of any use — if there was anything I might do to make — —”

  His quick interruption transfixed her.

  “You came,” he said in a distinct, low tone, “because you love me and wish me to love you. But we do love already, you, dear Fillery, and I — only our love is in that great Service where we all three belong. It is not of this — it is not here — —” making an impatient gesture with his hand to indicate his general surroundings.

  He broke off instantly, noticing the expression in her face.

  She had realized suddenly, as he spoke, the blind fury of reproduction that sweeps helpless men and women everywhere into union, then flings them aside exhausted, useless, its purpose accomplished. Though herself never yet caught by it, the vivid realization made her turn from life with pity and revulsion. Yet — were these thoughts her own? Whence did they come, if not? And what was this new blind thing straining in her mind for utterance, bursting upwards like a flame, threatening to split it asunder even in its efforts to escape? “What are these words we use?” darted across her. “What do they mean? What is it we’re talking about really? I don’t know quite. Yet it’s real, yes, real and true. Only it’s beyond our words. It’s something I know, but have forgotten....” That was his word again: “Forgotten”! While they used words together, something in her went stumbling, groping, thrusting towards a great shining revelation for which no words existed. And a strange, deep anguish seized her suddenly.

  “Oh!” he cried, “I make you suffer again. The fire leaves you. You are white. I — I will apologize” — he slipped on to his knees before her— “but you do not understand. It was not your sacredness I spoke of.” Already on his knees before her, but level with her face owing to his great stature, gazing into her eyes with an expression of deep tenderness, humility, almost suffering, he added: “It was our other love, I meant
, our great happy service, the thing we have forgotten. You came, I thought, to help me to remember that. The way home — I saw you knew.” The light streamed back into his face and eyes.

  The tumult and confusion in the girl were natural enough. Her resourcefulness, however, did not fail her at this curious and awkward moment. His words, his conduct were more than she could fathom, yet behind both she divined a source of remote inspiration she had never known before in any “man.” The beauty and innocence on the face arrested her faculties for a second. That nameless emotion stirred again. A glimmer of some faint, distant light, whose origin she could not guess, passed flickering across her inner tumult. Some faculty she could not name, at any rate, blew suddenly to white heat in her. This youth on his knees before her had spoken truth. Without knowing it even herself, she had given him her love, a virgin love, a woman’s love hitherto unawakened in her by any other man, but a love not of this earth quite — because of him who summoned it into sudden flower.

  Yet at the same time he denied the need of it! He spoke of some marvellous great shining Service that was different from the love of man and woman.

  This too, as some forgotten, lost ideal, she knew was also true.

  Her mind, her heart, her experience, her deepest womanly nature, these, she realized in a glowing instant of extraordinary divination, were at variance in her. She trembled; she knew not what to do or say or think. And again, it came to her, that the visible shape before her was but the insignificant fraction of a being whose true life spread actively and unconfined through infinite space.

  She then did something that was prompted, though she did not know it thus, by her singleness of heart, her purity of soul and body, her unique and natural instinct to be of use, of service, to others — the accumulated practice and effort of her entire life provided the action along a natural line of least resistance: she bent down and put her arm and hand round his great shoulder. She lowered her face. She kissed him most tenderly, with a mother’s love, a woman’s secret passion perhaps, but yet with something else as well she could not name — an unearthly yearning for a greater Ideal than anything she had yet known on earth among humanity.... It was the invisible she kissed.

  And LeVallon, she realized with immense relief, justified her action, for he did not return the kiss. At the same time she had known quite well it would be thus. That kiss trembled, echoed, in her own greater unrealized self as well.

  “What is it,” she whispered, a mysterious passion surging up in her as she raised him to his feet, “that you remember and wish to recover — for us all? Can you tell me? What is this great, happy, deathless service that we have forgotten?” Her voice trembled a little. An immense sense of joy, of liberty, shook out its sunlit wings.

  His expression, as he rose, was something between that of a child and a faithful yearning animal, but of a “divine animal,” though she did not know the phrase. Its purity, its sweetness, its power — it was the power she noticed chiefly — were superb.

  “I cannot tell, I cannot remember,” his voice said softly, for all its resonant, virile depth. “It is some state we all have come from — into this. We are strangers here. This brain and intellect, this coarse, thick feeling, this selfishness, this want of harmony and working together — all this is new and strange to us. It is of blind and clumsy children. This love of one single person for one other single person — it is so pitiful. We three have come into this for a time, a little time. It is pain and misery. It is prison. Each one works only for himself. There is no joy. They know nothing of our great Service. We cannot show them. Let us go back — —”

  Another pause fell between them, another of those singular hollows she had felt before. But this time the hollow was not empty. It was brimmed with surging life. The gulf between her earthly state and another that was nameless, a gulf usually unbridgeable, the fixed gulf, as an old book has it, which may not be crossed without danger to the Race, for whose protection it exists — this childhood simile occurred to her. And a sense of awe stirred in her being. It was the realization that this gulf or hollow now brimmed with life, that it could be crossed, that she might step over into another place — the sense of awe rose thence, yet came certainly neither from the woman nor the mother in her.

  “I am of another place,” LeVallon went on, plucking the thought naked from her inmost being. “For I am come here recently, and the purpose of my coming is hidden from me, and memory is dark. But it is not entirely dark. Sometimes I half remember. Stars, flowers, fire, wind, women — here and there — bring light into the darkness. Oh,” he cried suddenly, “how wonderful they are — how wonderful you are — on that account to me!”

  The voice held a strange, evoking power perhaps. A thousand yearnings she had all her life suppressed because they interfered with her duty — as she conceived it — here and now, fluttered like rising flames within her as she listened. His voice now increased in volume and rhythm, though still quiet and low-pitched; it was as if a great wind poured behind it with tremendous vibrations, through it, lifting her out of a limited, cramped, everyday self. A delicious warmth of happy comfort, of acceptance, of enthusiasm glowed in her. And LeVallon’s face, she saw, had become radiant, almost as though it emanated light. This light entered her being and brought joy again.

  “Joy!” he said, reading her thought and feeling. “Joy!”

  “Joy! Another place!” she heard herself repeating, her eyes now fixed upon his own.

  She felt lighter, caught up and away a little, lifted above the solid earth; as if it was heat that lightened, and wind that bore her upwards. Everything in her became intensified.

  “Another state, another place” — her voice seemed to borrow something of the rhythm in his own, though she did not notice it— “but not away from earth, this beautiful earth?” With a happy smile she added, “I love the dear kind earth, I love it.”

  The light on his face increased:

  “The earth we love and serve,” he said, “is beautiful, but here” — he looked about him round the room, at the trees waving through the window, at the misty sky above draping the pale light of the sun— “here I am on the surface only. There is confusion and struggle. Everything quarrels against everything else. It is discord and disorder. There is no harmony. Here, on the surface, everything is separate. There is no working together. It is all pain, each little part fighting for itself. Here — I am outside — there is no joy.”

  It was the phrase “I am outside” that flashed something more of his meaning into her. His full meaning lay beyond actual words perhaps; but this phrase fell like a shock into that inmost self which she had deliberately put away.

  “You are from inside, yes,” she exclaimed, marvelling afterwards that she had said it; “within — nearer to the centre —— !”

  And he took the abrupt interruption as though they both understood and spoke of the same one thing together, having found a language born of similar great yearnings and of forgotten knowledge, times, states, conditions, places.

  “I come,” he said, his voice, his bright smile alive with the pressure of untold desire, “from another place that is — yes — inside, nearer to the centre. I have forgotten almost everything. I remember only that there was harmony, love, work and happiness all combined in the perfect liberty of our great service. We served the earth. We helped the life upon it. There was no end, no broken fragments, no failure.” The voice touched chanting. “There was no death.”

  He rose suddenly and came over to her side, and instinctively the girl stood up. What she felt and thought as she heard the strange language he used, she hardly knew herself. She only knew in that moment an immense desire to help her kind, an intensification of that great ideal of impersonal service which had always been the keynote of her life. This became vividly stimulated in her. It rose like a dominating, overmastering passion. The sense of ineffectual impotence, of inability to accomplish anything of value against the stolid odds life set against her, the uselessnes
s of her efforts with the majority, in a word, seemed brushed away, as though greater powers of limitless extent were now at last within her reach. This blazed in her like fire. It shone in her big dark eyes that looked straight into his as they stood facing one another.

  “And that service,” he went on in his deep vibrating, half-singing tone, “I see in dear Fillery and in you. I know my own kind. We three, at least, belong. I know my own.” The voice seemed to shake her like a wind.

  At the last two words her soul leaped within her. It seemed quite natural that his great arm should take her breast and shoulder and that his lips should touch her cheek and hair. For there was worship in both gestures.

  “Our greater service,” she whispered, trembling, “tell me of that. What is it?” His touch against her was like the breath of fire.

  Her womanly instincts, so-called, her maternal love, her feminine impulses deserted her. She was aware solely at that moment of the proximity of a being who called her to a higher, to, at any rate, a different state, to something beyond the impoverished conditions of humanity as she had hitherto experienced it, to something she had ever yearned and longed for without knowing what it was. An extraordinary sense of enormous liberty swept over her again.

  His voice broke and the rhythm failed.

  “I cannot tell you,” he replied mournfully, the light fading a little from his eyes and face. “I have forgotten. That other place is hidden from me. I am in exile,” he added slowly, “but with you and — Fillery.” His blue eyes filled with moisture; the expression of troubled loneliness was one she had never seen before on any human face. “I suffer,” he added gently. “We all suffer.”

  And, at the sight of it, the yearning to help, to comfort, to fulfil her rôle as mother, returned confusingly, and rose in her like a tide. He was so big and strong and splendid. He was so helpless. It was, perhaps, the innocence in the great blue eyes that conquered her — for the first time in her life.