Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  With his uncle he never discussed the matter in detail, for the barrier between the two types of mind made it difficult. Only once, years later, something led them to the frontier of the subject — of a single detail of the subject, rather:

  “Can’t you even tell me what — they were like?” he asked; and the reply, though conceived in wisdom, was not encouraging. “It is far better you should try not to know, or to find out.”

  “Well — that odor — ?” persisted the nephew. “What do you make of that?”

  Dr. Cathcart looked at him and raised his eyebrows.

  “Odors,” he replied, “are not so easy as sounds and sights of telepathic communication. I make as much, or as little, probably, as you do yourself.”

  He was not quite so glib as usual with his explanations. That was all.

  At the fall of day, cold, exhausted, famished, the party came to the end of the long portage and dragged themselves into a camp that at first glimpse seemed empty. Fire there was none, and no Punk came forward to welcome them. The emotional capacity of all three was too overspent to recognize either surprise or annoyance; but the cry of spontaneous affection that burst from the lips of Hank, as he rushed ahead of them towards the fireplace, came probably as a warning that the end of the amazing affair was not quite yet. And both Cathcart and his nephew confessed afterwards that when they saw him kneel down in his excitement and embrace something that reclined, gently moving, beside the extinguished ashes, they felt in their very bones that this “something” would prove to be Défago — the true Défago returned.

  And so, indeed, it was.

  It is soon told. Exhausted to the point of emaciation, the French Canadian — what was left of him, that is — fumbled among the ashes, trying to make a fire. His body crouched there, the weak fingers obeying feebly the instinctive habit of a lifetime with twigs and matches. But there was no longer any mind to direct the simple operation. The mind had fled beyond recall. And with it, too, had fled memory. Not only recent events, but all previous life was a blank.

  This time it was the real man, though incredibly and horribly shrunken. On his face was no expression of any kind whatever — fear, welcome, or recognition. He did not seem to know who it was that embraced him, or who it was that fed, warmed and spoke to him the words of comfort and relief. Forlorn and broken beyond all reach of human aid, the little man did meekly as he was bidden. The “something” that had constituted him “individual” had vanished forever.

  In some ways it was more terribly moving than anything they had yet seen — that idiot smile as he drew wads of coarse moss from his swollen cheeks and told them that he was “a damned moss eater”; the continued vomiting of even the simplest food; and, worst of all, the piteous and childish voice of complaint in which he told them that his feet pained him— “burn like fire” — which was natural enough when Dr. Cathcart examined them and found that both were dreadfully frozen. Beneath the eyes there were faint indications of recent bleeding.

  The details of how he survived the prolonged exposure, of where he had been, or of how he covered the great distance from one camp to the other, including an immense détour of the lake on foot since he had no canoe — all this remains unknown. His memory had vanished completely. And before the end of the winter whose beginning witnessed this strange occurrence, Défago, bereft of mind, memory and soul, had gone with it. He lingered only a few weeks.

  And what Punk was able to contribute to the story throws no further light upon it. He was cleaning fish by the lake shore about five o’clock in the evening — an hour, that is, before the search party returned — when he saw this shadow of the guide picking its way weakly into camp. In advance of him, he declares, came the faint whiff of a certain singular odor.

  That same instant old Punk started for home. He covered the entire journey of three days as only Indian blood could have covered it. The terror of a whole race drove him. He knew what it all meant. Défago had “seen the Wendigo.”

  Old Clothes

  I

  Imaginative children with their odd questionings of life and their delicate nervous systems must be often a source of greater anxiety than delight to their parents, and Aileen, the child of my widowed cousin, impressed me from the beginning as being a strangely vivid specimen of her class. Moreover, the way she took to me from the first placed quasi-avuncular responsibilities upon my shoulders (in her mother’s eyes), that I had no right, even as I had no inclination, to shirk. Indeed, I loved the queer, wayward, mysterious little being. Only it was not always easy to advise; and her somewhat marked peculiarities certainly called for advice of a skilled and special order.

  It was not merely that her make-believe was unusually sincere and haunting, and that she would talk by the hour with invisible playmates (touching them, putting up her lips to be kissed, opening doors for them to pass in and out, and setting chairs, footstools and even flowers for them), for many children in my experience have done as much and done it with a vast sincerity, but that she also accepted what they told her with so steady a degree of conviction that their words influenced her life and, accordingly, her health.

  They told her stories, apparently, in which she herself played a central part, stories, moreover, that were neither comforting nor wise. She would sit in a corner of the room, as both her mother and myself can vouch, face to face with some make-believe Occupant of the chair so carefully arranged; the footstool had been placed with precision, and sometimes she would move it a little this way or that; the table whereon rested the invisible elbows was beside her with a jar of flowers that changed according to the particular visitor. And there she would wait motionless, perhaps an hour at a time, staring up into the viewless features of the person who was talking with her — who was telling her a story in which she played an exceedingly poignant part. Her face altered with the run of emotions, her eyes grew large and moist, and sometimes frightened; rarely she laughed, and rarely asked a whispered question, but more often sat there, tense and eager, uncannily absorbed in the inaudible tale falling from invisible lips — the tale of her own adventures.

  But it was the terror inspired by these singular recitals that affected her delicate health as early as the age of eight, and when, owing to her mother’s well-meant but ill-advised ridicule, she indulged them with more secrecy, the effect upon her nerves and character became so acute that I was summoned down upon a special advisory visit I scarcely appreciated.

  “Now, George, what do you think I had better do? Dr. Hale insists upon more exercise and more companionship, sea air and all the rest of it, but none of these things seem to do any good.”

  “Have you taken her into your confidence, or rather has she taken you into hers?” I ventured mildly.

  The question seemed to give offence a little.

  “Of course,” was the emphatic answer. “The child has no secrets from her mother. She is perfectly devoted to me.”

  “But you have tried to laugh her out of it, haven’t you now?”

  “Yes. But with such success that she holds these conversations far less than she used to—”

  “Or more secretly?” was my comment, that was met with a superior shrug of the shoulders.

  Then, after a further pause, in which my cousins distress and my own affectionate interest in the whimsical imagination of my little niece combined to move me, I tried again —

  “Make-believe,” I observed, “is always a bit puzzling to us older folk, because, though we indulge in it all our lives, We no longer believe in it; whereas children like Aileen—”

  She interrupted me quickly —

  “You know what I feel anxious about,” she said, lowering her voice. “I think there may be cause for serious alarm.” Then she added frankly, looking up with grave eyes into my face, “George, I want your help — your best help, please. You’ve always been a true friend.”

  I gave it to her in calculated words.

  “Theresa,” I said with grave emphasis, “there is no tr
ace of insanity on either side of the family, and my own opinion is that Aileen is perfectly well-balanced in spite of this too highly developed imagination. But, above all things, you must not drive it inwards by making fun of it. Lead it out. E — ducate it. Guide it by intelligent sympathy. Get her to tell you all about it, and so on. I think Aileen wants careful observing, perhaps — but nothing more.”

  For some minutes she watched my face in silence, her eyes intent, her features slightly twitching. I knew at once from her manner what she was driving at. She approached the subject with awkwardness and circumlocution, for it was something she dreaded, not feeling sure whether it was of heaven or of hell.

  “You are very wonderful, George,” she said at length, “and you have theories about almost everything—”

  “Speculations,” I admitted.

  “And your hypnotic power is helpful, you know. Now — if — if you thought it safe, and that Providence would not be offended—”

  “Theresa,” I stopped her firmly before she had committed herself to the point where she would feel hurt by a refusal, “let me say at once that I do not consider a child a fit subject for hypnotic experiment, and I feel quite sure that an intelligent person like yourself will agree with me that it’s unpermissible.”

  “I was only thinking of a little ‘suggestion,’” she murmured.

  “Which would come far better from the mother.”

  “If the mother had not already lost her power by using ridicule,” she confessed meekly.

  “Yes, you never should have laughed. Why did you, I wonder?”

  An expression came into her eyes that I knew to be invariably with hysterical temperaments the precursor of tears. She looked round to make sure no one was listening.

  “George,” she whispered, and into the dusk of that September evening passed some shadow between us that left behind an atmosphere of sudden and inexplicable chill, “George, I wish — I wish it was quite clear to me that it really is all make-believe, I mean—”

  “What do you mean?” I said, with a severity that was assumed to hide my own uneasiness. But the tears came the same instant in a flood that made any intelligent explanation out of the question.

  The terror of the mother for her own blood burst forth.

  “I’m frightened — horribly frightened,” she said between the sobs. “I’ll go up and see the child myself,” I said comfortingly at length when the storm had subsided. “I’ll run up to the nursery. You mustn’t be alarmed. Aileen’s all right. I think I can help you in the matter a good deal.”

  II

  In the nursery as usual Aileen was alone. I found her sitting by the open window, an empty chair opposite to her. She was staring at it — into it, but it is not easy to describe the certainty she managed to convey that there was someone sitting in that chair, talking with her. It was her manner that did it. She rose quickly, with a start as I came in, and made a half gesture in the direction of the empty chair as though to shake hands, then corrected herself quickly, and gave a friendly little nod of farewell or dismissal — then turned towards me. Incredible as it must sound, that chair looked at once slightly otherwise. It was empty. “Aileen, what in the world are you up to?”

  ‘You know, uncle,” she replied, without hesitation.

  “Oh, rather! I know! “I said, trying to get into her mood so as later to get her out of it, “because I do the same thing with the people in my own stories. I talk to them too—”

  She came up to my side, as though it were a matter of life and death. “But do they answer?”

  I realized the overwhelming sincerity, even the seriousness, of the question to her mind. The shadow evoked downstairs by my cousin had followed me up here. It touched me on the shoulder.

  “Unless they answer,” I told her, “they are not really alive, and the story hangs fire when people read it.”

  She watched me very closely a moment as we leaned out of the open window where the rich perfume of the Portuguese laurels came up from the lawns below. The proximity of the child brought a distinct atmosphere of its own, an atmosphere charged with suggestions, almost with faint pictures, as of things I had once known. I had often felt this before, and did not altogether welcome it, for the pictures seemed framed in some emotional setting that invariably escaped my analysis. I understood in a vague way what it was about the child that made her mother afraid. There flashed across me a fugitive sensation, utterly elusive yet painfully real, that she knew moments of suffering by rights she ought not to have known. Bizarre and unreasonable as the conception was, it was convincing. And it touched a profound sympathy in me.

  Aileen undoubtedly was aware of this sympathy.

  “It’s Philip that talks to me most of the time,” she volunteered, “and he’s always, always explaining — but never quite finishes.”

  “Explaining what, dear little Child of the Moon?” I urged gently, giving her a name she used to love when she was smaller.

  “Why he couldn’t come in time to save me, of course,” she said. “You see, they cut off both his hands.”

  I shall never forget the sensation these words of a child’s mental adventure caused me, nor the kind of bitter reality they forced into me that they were true, and not merely a detail of some attempted rescue of a “Princess in a Tower.” A vivid rush of thought seemed to focus my consciousness upon my own two wrists, as though I felt the pain of the operation she mentioned, and with a swift instinct that slipped into action before I could control it, I had hidden both hands from her sight in my coat pockets.

  “And what else does ‘Philip’ tell you?” I asked gently.

  Her face flushed. Tears came into her eyes, then fled away again lest they should fall from their softly-colored nests.

  “That he loved me so awfully,” she replied; “and that he loved me to the very end, and that all his life after I was gone, and after they cut his hands off, he did nothing but pray for me — from the end of the world where he went to hide—”

  I shook myself free with an effort from the enveloping atmosphere of tragedy, realizing that her imagination must be driven along brighter channels and that my duty must precede my interest.

  “But you must get Philip to tell you all his funny and jolly adventures, too,” I said, “the ones he had, you know, when his hands grew again—” The expression that came into her face literally froze my blood. “That’s only making-up stories,” she said icily. “They never did grow again. There were no happy or funny adventures.”

  I cast about in my mind for an inspiration how to help her mind into more wholesome ways of invention. I realized more than ever before the profundity of my affection for this strange, fatherless child, and how I would give my whole soul if I could help her and teach her joy. It was a real love that swept me, rooted in things deeper than I realized.

  But, before the right word was given me to speak, I felt her nestle up against my side, and heard her utter the very phrase that for some time I had been dreading in the secret places of my soul she would utter. The sentence seemed to shake me within. I knew a hurried, passing moment of unspeakable pain that is utterly beyond me to reason about.

  ‘You know,” was what she said, “because it’s you who are Philip!” And the way she said it — so quietly, the words touched somehow with a gentle though compassionate scorn, yet made golden by a burning love that filled her little person to the brim — robbed me momentarily of all power of speech. I could only bend down and put my arm about her and kiss her head that came up barely to the level of my chin. I swear I loved that child as I never loved any other human being.

  “Then Philip is going to teach you all sorts of jolly adventures with his new hands,” I remember saying, with blundering good intention, “because he’s no longer sad, and is full of fun, and loves you twice as much as ever!”

  And I caught her up and carried her down the long stairs of the house out into the garden, where we joined the dogs and romped together until the face of the motherly K
empster at an upper window shouted down something stupid about bedtime, supper, or the rest of it, and Aileen, flushed yet with brighter eyes, ran into the house and, turning at the door, showed me her odd little face wreathed in smiles and laughter.

  For a long time I paced to and fro with a cigar between the box hedges of the old-time garden, thinking of the child and her queer imaginings, and of the profoundly moving and disquieting sensations she stirred in me at the same time. Her face flitted by my side through the shadows. She was not pretty, properly speaking, but her appearance possessed an original charm that appealed to me strongly. Her head was big and in some way old-fashioned; her eyes, dark but not large, were placed close together, and she had a wide mouth that was certainly not beautiful. But the look of distressed and yearning passion that sometimes swept over these features, not otherwise prepossessing, changed her look into sudden beauty, a beauty of the soul, a soul that knew suffering and was acquainted with grief. This, at least, is the way my own mind saw the child, and therefore the only way I can hope to make others see her. Were I a painter I might put her upon canvas in some imaginary portrait and call it, perhaps, “Reincarnation” — for I have never seen anything in child-life that impressed me so vividly with that odd idea of an old soul come back to the world in a new young body — a new Suit of Clothes.