It was only much later she realized that the figure who had then overtaken her, supported, comforted with kind ordinary words she hardly understood at the moment and yet vaguely welcomed, finally leaving her at the door of her father’s house in Chelsea, was the figure of Edward Fillery.
CHAPTER XXIV
AS upon a former occasion some twenty-four hours before, “N. H.” seemed hardly aware that his visitor had left, though this time there was the vital difference — that what was of value had not gone at all. The essence of the girl, it seemed, was still with him. It remained. The physical presence was to him apparently the least of all.
He returned to his place at the open window of the darkening room, while night, with her cooler airs, passed over the world on tiptoe. He drew deep breaths, opened his arms, and seemed to shake himself, as though glad to be free of recent little awkward and unnatural gestures that had irked him. There was happiness in his face. “She is a builder, though she has forgotten,” ran his thought with pleasure, “and I can work with her. Like Fillery, she builds up, constructs; we are all three in the same service, and the gods are glad. I love her ... yes ... but she” — his thoughts grew troubled and confused— “she speaks of another love that is a tight and binding little thing ... that catches and confines. It is for one person only ... one person for one other.... For two ... only for two persons!... What is its meaning then?”
Of her words and acts he had understood evidently a small part only; much that she had said and done he had not comprehended, although in it somewhere there had certainly lain a sweet, faint, troubling pleasure that was new to him.
His thought wavered, flickered out and vanished. For a long time he leaned against the window with his images, thinking with his heart, for when alone and not stirred by the thinking of others close to him, he became of a curious childlike innocence, knowing nothing. His “thinking” with others present seemed but a reflection of their thinking. The way he caught up the racial thinking, appearing swiftly intelligent at the time (as with Fillery’s mind), passed the instant he was alone. He became open, then, to bigger rhythms that the little busy thinkers checked and interrupted. But this greater flow of images, of rhythms, this thinking with the heart — what was it, and with what things did it deal? He did not know. He had forgotten. To his present brain it was alien. He grasped only that it was concerned with the rhythms of fire and wind apparently, though hardly, perhaps, of that crude form in which men know them, but of an inner, subtler, more vital heat and air which lie in and behind all forms and help to shape them — and of Intelligences which use these as their vehicles, their instruments, their bodies.
In his “images” he was aware of these Intelligences, perceived them with his entire being, shared their activities and nature: behind all so-called forms and shapes, whether of people, flowers, minerals, of insects or of stars, of a bird, a butterfly or a nebula, but also of those mental shapes which are born of thought and mood and heart — this host of Intelligences, great and small, all delving together, building, constructing, involved in a vast impersonal service which was deathless. This seemed the mighty call that thundered through him, fire and wind merely the agencies with which he, in particular, knew instinctively his duties lay.
For his work, these images taught him, was to increase life by making the “body” it used as perfect as he could. The more perfect the form, the instrument, the greater the power manifesting through it. A poor, imperfect form stopped the flow of this manifesting life, as though a current were held up and delayed. For instance, his own form, his present body, now irked, delayed and hampered him, although he knew not how or why or whence he had come to be using it at this moment on the earth. The instinctive desire to escape from it lay in him, and also the instinctive recognition that two others, similarly caught and imprisoned, must escape with him....
The images, the rhythms, poured through him in a mighty flood, as he leaned by the open window, his great figure, his whole nature too, merging in the space, the wind, the darkness of the soft-moving night beyond.... Yet darkness troubled him too; it always seemed unfamiliar, new, something he had never been accustomed to. In darkness he became quiet, very gentle, feeling his way, as it were, uneasily.
He was aware, however, that Fillery was near, though not, perhaps, that he was actually in the room, seated somewhere among the shadows, watching him. He felt him close in the same way he felt the girl still close, whether distance between them in space was actually great or small. The essential in all three was similar, their yearnings, hopes, intentions, purposes were akin; their longing for some service, immense, satisfying, it seemed, connected them. The voice, however, did not startle when it sounded behind him from an apparently empty room:
“The love she spoke of you do not understand, of course. Perhaps you do not need it....”
The voice, as well as the feeling that lay behind, hardly disturbed the images and rhythms in their wondrous flow. Rather, they seemed a part of them. “N. H.” turned. He saw Dr. Fillery distinctly, sitting motionless among the shadows by the wall.
“It is, for you, a new relationship, and seems small, cramping and unnecessary — —”
“What is it?” “N. H.” asked. “What is this love she seeks to hold me with, saying that I need it? Dear Fillery,” he added, moving nearer, “will you tell me what it is? I found it sweet and pleasant, yet I fear it.”
“It is,” was the reply, “in its best form, the highest quality we know — —”
“Ah! I felt the fire in it,” interrupted “N. H.” smiling. “I smelt the flowers.” His smile seemed faintly luminous across the gloom.
“Because it was the best,” replied the other gently. “In its best form it means, sometimes, the complete sacrifice of one being for the welfare of another. There is no self in it at all.” He felt the eyes of his companion fixed upon him in the darkness of the quiet room; he felt likewise that he was bewildered and perplexed. “As, for instance, the mother for her child,” he went on. “That is the purest form of it we know.”
“One being feels it for one other only,” “N. H.” repeated apparently ignoring the reference to maternal love. “Each wants the other for himself alone! Each lives for the other only, the rest excluded! It is always two and two. Is that what she means?”
“She would not like it if you had the same feeling for another — woman,” Fillery explained. “She would feel jealousy — which means she would grudge sharing you with another. She would resent it, afraid of losing you.”
“Two and two, and two and two,” the words floated through the shadows. The ideal seemed to shock and hurt him; he could not understand it. “She asks for the whole of me — all to herself. It is lower than insects, flowers even. It is against Nature. So small, so separate — —”
“But Nature,” interrupted Dr. Fillery, after an interval of silence between them, “is not concerned with what we call love. She is indifferent to it. Her purpose is merely the continuance of the Race, and she accomplishes this by making men and women attractive to one another. This, too,” he explained, “we call love, though it is love in its weakest, least enduring form.”
“That,” replied “N. H.,” “I know and understand. She builds the best form she can.”
“And once the form is built,” agreed the other, “and Nature’s aim fulfilled, this kind of love usually fades out and dies. It is a physical thing entirely, like the two atoms we read about together a few days ago which rush together automatically to produce a third thing.” He lowered his voice suddenly. “There was a great teacher once,” he went on, “who told us that we should love everybody, everybody, and that in the real life there was no marriage, as we call it, nor giving in marriage.”
It seemed that, as he said the words, the darkness lifted, and a faint perfume of flowers floated through the air.
“N. H.” made no comment or reply. He sat still, listening.
“I love her,” he whispered suddenly. “I love her in that w
ay — because I want everybody else to love her too — as I do, and as you do. But I do not want her for myself alone. Do you? You do not, of course. I feel you are as I am. You are happy that I love her.”
“There is morality,” said Fillery presently in a low voice, glad at that moment of the darkness. “There is what we call morality.”
“Tell me, dear Fillery, what that is. Is it bigger than your ‘love’?”
Dr. Fillery explained briefly, while his companion listened intently, making no comment. It was evidently as strange and new to him as human love. “We have invented it,” he added at the end, “to protect ourselves, our mothers, our families, our children. It is, you see, a set of rules devised for the welfare of the Race. For though a few among us do not need such rules, the majority do. It is, in a word, the acknowledgment of the rights of others.”
“It had to be invented!” exclaimed “N. H.,” with a sigh that seemed to trouble the darkness as with the sadness of something he could scarcely believe. “And these rules are needed still! Is the Race at that stage only? It does not move, then?”
Into the atmosphere, as the low-spoken words were audible, stole again that mysterious sense of the insignificance of earth and all its manifold activities, human and otherwise, and with it, too, a remarkable breath of some larger reality, starry-bright, that lay shining just beyond all known horizons. Fillery shivered in spite of himself. It seemed to him for an instant that the great figure looming opposite through the darkness extended, spread, gathering into its increased proportions the sky, the trees, the darkened space outside; that it no longer sat there quite alone. He recalled his colleague’s startling admission — the touch of panic terror.
“Slowly, if at all,” he said louder, though wondering why he raised his voice. “Yet there is some progress.”
He had the feeling it would be better to turn on the light, as though this conversation and the strange sensations it produced in him would be impossible in a full blaze. He made a movement, indeed, to find the switch. It was the sound of his companion’s voice that made him pause, for the words came at him as though a wave of heat moved through the air. He knew intuitively that the other’s intense inner activity had increased. He let his hand drop. He listened. Their thoughts, he was convinced, had mingled and been mutually shared again. There was a faint sound like music behind it.
“We have worked such a little time as yet,” fell the words into the silence. “If only — oh! if only I could remember more!”
“A little time!” thought Fillery to himself, knowing that the other meant the millions of years Nature had used to evoke her myriad forms. “Try to remember,” he added in a whisper.
“What I do remember, I cannot even tell,” was the reply, the voice strangely deepening. “No words come to me.” He paused a moment, then went on: “I am of the first, the oldest. I know that. The earth was hot and burning — burning, burning still. It was soft with heat when I was summoned from — from other work just completed. With a vast host I came. Our Service summoned us. We began at the beginning. I am of the oldest. The earth was still hot — burning, burning — —”
The voice failed suddenly.
“I cannot remember. Dear Fillery, I cannot remember. It hurts me. My head pains. Our work — our service — yes, there is progress. The ages, as you call them — but it is such a little time as yet — —” The voice trailed off, the figure lost its suggestion of sudden vastness, the darkness emptied. “I am of the oldest — that I remember only....” It ceased as though it drifted out upon the passing wind outside.
“Then you have been working,” said Fillery, his voice still almost a whisper, “you and your great host, for thousands of years — in the service of this planet — —” He broke off, unable to find his words, it seemed.
“Since the beginning,” came the steady answer. “Years I do not know. Since the beginning. Yet we have only just begun — oh!” he cried, “I cannot remember! It is impossible! It all goes lost among my words, and in this darkness I am confused and entangled with your own little thinking. I suffer with it.” Then suddenly: “My eyes are hot and wet, dear Fillery. What happens to them?” He stood up, putting both hands to his face. Fillery stood up too. He trembled.
“Don’t try,” he said soothingly; “do not try to remember any more. It will come back to you soon, but it won’t come back by any deliberate effort.”
He comforted him as best he could, realizing that the curious dialogue had lasted long enough. But he did not produce a disconcerting blaze by turning the light on suddenly; he led his companion gently to the door, so that the darkness might pass more gradually. The lights in the corridor were shaded and inoffensive. It was only in the bedroom that he noticed the bright tears, as “N. H.,” examining them with curious interest in the mirror, exclaimed more to himself than to Fillery: “She had them too. I saw them in her eyes when she spoke to me of love, the love she will teach me because she said I needed it.”
“Tears,” said Fillery, his voice shaking. “They come from feeling pain.”
“It is a little thing,” returned “N. H.,” smiling at himself, then turning to his friend, his great blue eyes shining wonderfully through their moisture. “Then she felt what I felt — we felt together. When she comes to-morrow I will show her these tears and she will be glad I love. And she will bring tears of her own, and you will have some too, and we shall all love together. It is not difficult, is it?”
“Not very,” agreed Fillery, smiling in his turn; “it is not very difficult.” He was again trembling.
“She will be happy that we all love.”
“I — hope so.”
It was curious how easily tears came to the eyes of this strange being, and for causes so different that they were not easy to explain. He did not cry; it was merely that the hot tears welled up.
Even with Devonham once it happened too. The lesson in natural history was over. Devonham had just sketched the outline of the various kingdoms, with the animal kingdom and man’s position in it, according to present evolutionary knowledge, and had then said something about the earth’s place in the solar system, and the probable relation of this system to the universe at large — an admirable bird’s-eye view, as it were, without a hint of speculative imagination in it anywhere — when “N. H.,” after intent listening in irresponsive silence, asked abruptly:
“What does it believe?” Then, as Devonham stared at him, a little puzzled at first, he repeated: “That is what the Race knows. But what does it believe?”
“Believe,” said Devonham, “believe. Ah! you mean what is its religion, its faith, its speculations!” — and proceeded to give the briefest possible answer he felt consistent with his duty. The less his pupil’s mind was troubled with such matters, the better, in his opinion.
“And their God?” the young man inquired abruptly, as soon as the recital was over. He had listened closely, as he always did, but without a sign of interest, merely waiting for the end, much as a child who is bored by a poor fairy tale, yet wishes to know exactly how it is all going to finish. “They know Him?” He leaned forward.
Devonham, not quite liking the form of the question, nor the more eager manner accompanying it, hesitated a moment, thinking perhaps what he ought to say. He did not want this mind, now opening, to be filled with ideas that could be of no use to it, nor help in its formation; least of all did he desire it to be choked and troubled with the dead theology of man-made notions concerning a tumbling personal Deity. Creeds, moreover, were a matter of faith, of auto-suggestion as he called it, being obviously divorced from any process of reason. He had, nevertheless, a question to answer and a duty to perform. His hesitation passed in compromise. He was, as has been seen, too sincere, too honest, to possess much sense of humour.
“The Race,” he said, “or rather that portion of it into which you have been born, believes — on paper” — he emphasized the qualification— “in a paternal god; but its real god, the god it worships, is
Knowledge. Not a Knowledge that exists for its own sake,” he went on blandly, “but that brings possessions, power, comfort and a million needless accessories into life. That god it worships, as you see, with energy and zeal. Knowledge and work that shall result in acquisition, in pleasure, that is the god of the Race on this side of the planet where you find yourself.”
“And the God on paper?” asked “N. H.,” making no comment, though he had listened attentively and had understood. “The God that is written about on paper, and believed in on paper?”
“The printed account of this god,” replied Devonham, “describes an omnipotent and perfect Being who has existed always. He created the planet and everything upon it, but created it so imperfectly that he had to send later a smaller god to show how much better he might have created us. In doing this, he offered us an extremely difficult and laborious method of improvement, a method of escaping from his own mistake, but a method so painful and unrealizable that it is contrary to our very natures — as he made them first.” He almost smacked his lips as he said it.
“The big God, the first one,” asked “N. H.” at once. “Have they seen and known Him? Have they complained?”
“No,” said Devonham, “they have not. Those who believe in him accept things as he made them.”
“And the smaller lesser God — how did He arrive?” came the odd question.
“He was born like you and me, but without a father. No male had his mother ever known.”
“He was recognized as a god?” The pupil showed interest, but no emotion, much less excitement.
“By a few. The rest, afraid because he told them their possessions were worthless, killed him quickly.”
“And the few?”
“They obeyed his teaching, or tried to, and believed that they would live afterwards for ever and ever in happiness — —”
“And the others? The many?”
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 253