Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  “And, in front of me, upon the conductor’s desk, lay the score of my own music in clearest manuscript, no longer crossed out and corrected as it lay in my rooms after all the first passion of beauty had been ground out of it, but lovely and perfect as the original inspiration had rushed flamelike into my soul months before.

  “The whole performance from that moment— ‘rehearsal’ seems no adequate word to describe it — went with the smoothness of a dream from beginning to end. Just as the music was my own music made perfect, so the words and songs were the mature expression of the original conception before my blundering efforts had confined them, stammering and incomplete, in broken form. Moreover — more wonderful still — I noticed the very places in my score where I had floundered, and where, in the laborious process of composition, the first inspiration had failed me and I had filled in with what was mediocre and banal. It was as if a master pointed out to me with the simplicity of true power the passages where the commonplace might pass — could —— did pass — by deft, inspired touches into what was fine, moving, noble.

  The lesson was a sublime one; at the time, however, it all seemed so ridiculously simple and easy that I felt I could never again write anything that was not great and splendid.

  “Moreover, the acting, speaking and dancing provided the perfect medium for my ideas; and the whole performance was the consummate representation of my first conception; even the scenery shifted swiftly and noiselessly, and the intervals between the acts were hardly noticeable.

  “And the end came with a curious abruptness, bringing me to myself —— my limited, stammering, caged little self, as, it seemed, after these moments of intoxicating expression — with a sharp sense of pain that all was over; and I became aware that, without hurry, without noise, the entire audience that filled the huge building had risen to their feet like one man, and that thousands of hands were clapping silently the measure of their intense appreciation. From floor to ceiling, and from wall to wall, flew a great wave of emotion that swept their praise into me, gathered and focused into a single mighty draft of applause. It was, I remember thinking, all their thoughts of joy, their feelings of gratitude, beating in upon my soul in that form of praise which is the artist’s only adequate reward; and it reminded me of nothing so much as the whirring of innumerable soft wings all rising through the air at the same moment. Pictorially, in this fashion, it came before my mind.

  “Violin in hand, I rose too, and turned to face the auditorium, for I realized that they were calling for the author — for him who had ministered so adequately to their pleasure — and that I must be prepared to say something in reply. I had, indeed, made my first bow, and was already casting about in my mind for suitable words, when, for the first time during the whole adventure — something in me hesitated. Either it was that the sea of glimmering faces frightened me, or that I was obeying instinctively some faint warning that it was not myself, but some other, who was the true author of the play, and that it was for him these thousands before me clamored and called.

  “But when, still hesitating in confusion, I turned again towards the stage, I saw that the great fire curtain had meanwhile descended and that a footstep, regular and unhurried, was at that very moment coming forward towards the footlights. I heard the tread. I knew at once who it was. The stranger from the shadows behind me who had directed the entire performance was now moving to the front. It was he for whom the audience clamored; it was he who was the true author of the play!

  “And instantly I clamored with them, forgetting my own small pain in a kind of delightful exultation that I, too, owed this man everything, and that I should at last see him face to face and join my thanks and gratitude to theirs.

  “Almost that same instant he appeared and stood before the center of the curtains, the glare of the footlights casting upwards into his face. And he looked, not at the great throng behind and beyond me, but down into my own face, into my own eyes, smiling, approving, his expression radiant with a glory I have never seen before or since upon any human countenance.

  “And the stranger, I then realized — was myself “What happened next is so difficult to describe — though I scarcely know why it should be so — that I cannot hope to convey the reality of it properly, or paint the instantaneous manner in which he vanished and was gone. He neither faded nor moved. But in a second that seemed to have no perceptible duration he was beside me — with me — in me; and this swift way he became suddenly merged into myself has always seemed to me the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed. The wave of delight and exultation swept into me anew. I felt for one brief moment that I was as a god — with a god’s power of perfect expression.

  “But for one second only; for, at once, a new sound, terrible and overwhelming, rose in a flood and tore me away from all that I had ever known. And the sound was ugly and distressing... and darkness followed it....

  “It was real clapping this time, the clapping of human hands... and an indifferent orchestra was playing a noisy march just below me with a great blare of brass out of tune. The lights were up all over the theater; the audience, busy with wraps and overcoats and applause, were hurrying out. I saw the actors and actresses of the play bowing and scraping before the curtain; and the sight of the perspiration trickling down over the grease-paint of the leading man directly beneath my box struck me like a blow in the face. Then came the frantic whistling for broughams and taxicabs and the hoarse shouting from the street where men cried the evening papers in the roar of the outer world. I picked up my opera-hat, which had rolled into the middle of the floor while I had slept upon the sofa, scrambled into my overcoat, rushed out into the street, and told the driver of the first taxicab I found to drive for his life at double rates....

  “And all that night, before the memory of the wonder and the glory faded, I worked upon my score of words and music, striving to get down on the paper something at least of what had been shown to me. How much, or how little I succeeded it is now impossible to say. As I have already explained in this report, the memory faded with distressing swiftness. But I did my best. I hope — I believe — I am told, at least — that there is something in the work that people like....

  The Man Who Played upon the Leaf

  Where the Jura pine-woods push the fringe of their purple cloak down the slopes till the vineyards stop them lest they should troop into the lake of Neuchâtel, you may find the village where lived the Man Who Played upon the Leaf.

  My first sight of him was genuinely prophetic — that spring evening in the garden café of the little mountain auberge. But before I saw him I heard him, and ever afterwards the sound and the sight have remained inseparable in my mind.

  Jean Grospierre and Louis Favre were giving me confused instructions —— the vin rouge of Neuchâtel is heady, you know — as to the best route up the Tête-de-Rang, when a thin, wailing music, that at first I took to be rising wind, made itself heard suddenly among the apple trees at the end of the garden, and riveted my attention with a thrill of I know not what.

  Favre’s description of the bridle path over Mont Racine died away; then Grospierre’s eyes wandered as he, too, stopped to listen; and at the same moment a mongrel dog of indescribably forlorn appearance came whining about our table under the walnut tree.

  “It’s Perret ‘Comment-va,’ the man who plays on the leaf,” said Favre.

  “And his cursed dog,” added Grospierre, with a shrug of disgust. And, after a pause, they fell again to quarreling about my complicated path up the Tête-de-Rang.

  I turned from them in the direction of the sound.

  The dusk was falling. Through the trees I saw the vineyards sloping down a mile or two to the dark blue lake with its distant-shadowed shore and the white line of misty Alps in the sky beyond. Behind us the forests rose in folded purple ridges to the heights of Boudry and La Tourne, soft and thick like carpets of cloud. There was no one about in the cabaret. I heard a horse’s hoofs in the village street, a rattle of pans from
the kitchen, and the soft roar of a train climbing the mountain railway through gathering darkness towards France — and, singing through it all, like a thread of silver through a dream, this sweet and windy music.

  But at first there was nothing to be seen. The Man Who Played on the Leaf was not visible, though I stared hard at the place whence the sound apparently proceeded. The effect, for a moment, was almost ghostly.

  Then, down there among the shadows of fruit trees and small pines, something moved, and I became aware with a start that the little sapin I had been looking at all the time was really not a tree, but a man — hatless, with dark face, loose hair, and wearing a pèlerine over his shoulders. How he had produced this singularly vivid impression and taken upon himself the outline and image of a tree is utterly beyond me to describe. It was, doubtless, some swift suggestion in my own imagination that deceived me.... Yet he was thin, small, straight, and his flying hair and spreading pèlerine somehow pictured themselves in the network of dusk and background into the semblance, I suppose, of branches.

  I merely record my impression with the truest available words — also my instant persuasion that this first view of the man was, after all, significant and prophetic: his dominant characteristics presented themselves to me symbolically. I saw the man first as a tree; I heard his music first as wind.

  Then, as he came slowly towards us, it was clear that he produced the sound by blowing upon a leaf held to his lips between tightly closed hands. And at his heel followed the mongrel dog.

  “The inseparables!” sneered Grospierre, who did not appreciate the interruption. He glanced contemptuously at the man and the dog, his face and manner, it seemed to me, conveying a merest trace, however, of superstitious fear. “The tune your father taught you, hein?” he added, with a cruel allusion I did not at the moment understand.

  “Hush!” Favre said; “he plays thunderingly well all the same!” His glass had not been emptied quite so often, and in his eyes as he listened there was a touch of something that was between respect and wonder.

  “The music of the devil,” Grospierre muttered as he turned with the gesture of surly impatience to the wine and the rye bread. “It makes me dream at night. Ooua!”

  The man, paying no attention to the gibes, came closer, continuing his leaf-music, and as I watched and listened the thrill that had first stirred in me grew curiously. To look at, he was perhaps forty, perhaps fifty; worn, thin, broken; and something seizingly pathetic in his appearance told its little wordless story into the air. The stamp of the outcast was mercilessly upon him. But the eyes were dark and fine. They proclaimed the possession of something that was neither worn nor broken, something that was proud to be outcast, and welcomed it.

  “He’s cracky, you know,” explained Favre, “and half blind. He lives in that hut on the edge of the forest” — pointing with his thumb toward Côtendard— “and plays on the leaf for what he can earn.”

  We listened for five minutes perhaps while this singular being stood there in the dusk and piped his weird tunes; and if imagination had influenced my first sight of him it certainly had nothing to do with what I now heard. For it was unmistakable; the man played, not mere tunes and melodies, but the clean, strong, elemental sounds of Nature —— especially the crying voices of wind. It was the raw material, if you like, of what the masters have used here and there — Wagner, and so forth — but by him heard closely and wonderfully, and produced with marvelous accuracy. It was now the notes of birds or the tinkle and rustle of sounds heard in groves and copses, and now the murmur of those airs that lose their way on summer noons among the tree tops; and then, quite incredibly, just as the man came closer and the volume increased, it grew to the crying of bigger winds and the whispering rush of rain among tossed branches....

  How he produced it passed my comprehension, but I think he somehow mingled his own voice with the actual notes of the vibrating edge of the leaf; perhaps, too, that the strange passion shaking behind it all in the depths of the bewildered spirit poured out and reached my mind by ways unknown and incalculable.

  I must have momentarily lost myself in the soft magic of it, for I remember coming back with a start to notice that the man had stopped, and that his melancholy face was turned to me with a smile of comprehension and sympathy that passed again almost before I had time to recognize it, and certainly before I had time to reply. And this time I am ready to admit that it was my own imagination, singularly stirred, that translated his smile into the words that no one else heard —

  “I was playing for you — because you understand.”

  Favre was standing up and I saw him give the man the half loaf of coarse bread that was on the table, offering also his own partly-emptied wine-glass. “I haven’t the sou today,” he was saying, “but if you re hungry, mon brave—” And the man, refusing the wine, took the bread with an air of dignity that precluded all suggestion of patronage or favor, and ought to have made Favre feel proud that he had offered it.

  “And that for his son!” laughed the stupid Grospierre, tossing a cheese-rind to the dog, “or for his forest god!”

  The music was about me like a net that still held my words and thoughts in a delicate bondage — which is my only explanation for not silencing the coarse guide in the way he deserved; but a few minutes later, when the men had gone into the inn, I crossed to the end of the garden, and there, where the perfumes of orchard and forest deliciously mingled, I came upon the man sitting on the grass beneath an apple tree. The dog, wagging its tail, was at his feet, as he fed it with the best and largest portions of the bread. For himself, it seemed, he kept nothing but the crust, and — what I could hardly believe, had I not actually witnessed it — the cur, though clearly hungry, had to be coaxed with smiles and kind words to eat what it realized in some dear dog-fashion was needed even more by its master. A pair of outcasts they looked indeed, sharing dry bread in the back garden of the village inn; but in the soft, discerning eyes of that mangy creature there was an expression that raised it, for me at least, far beyond the ranks of common curdom; and in the eyes of the man, half-witted and pariah as he undoubtedly was, a look that set him somewhere in a lonely place where he heard the still, small voices of the world and moved with the elemental tides of life that are never outcast and that include the farthest suns.

  He took the franc I offered; and, closer, I perceived that his eyes, for all their moments of fugitive brilliance, were indeed half sightless, and that perhaps he saw only well enough to know men as trees walking. In the village some said he saw better than most, that he saw in the dark, possibly even into the peopled regions beyond this world, and there were reasons — uncanny reasons — to explain the belief. I only know, at any rate, that from this first moment of our meeting he never failed to recognize me at a considerable distance, and to be aware of my whereabouts even in the woods at night; and the best explanation I ever heard, though of course unscientific, was Louis Favre’s whispered communication that “he sees with the whole surface of his skin!”

  He took the franc with the same air of grandeur that he took the bread, as though he conferred a favor, yet was grateful. The beauty of that gesture has often come back to me since with a sense of wonder for the sweet nobility that I afterwards understood inspired it. At the time, however, he merely looked up at me with the remark, “C’est pom le Dieu —— merci!

  He did not say “le bon Dieu,” as everyone else did.

  And though I had meant to get into conversation with him, I found no words quickly enough, for he at once stood up and began to play again on his leaf; and while he played his thanks and gratitude, or the thanks and gratitude of his God, that shaggy mongrel dog stopped eating and sat up beside him to listen.

  Both fixed their eyes upon me as the sounds of wind and birds and forest poured softly and wonderfully about my ears... so that, when it was over and I went down the quiet street to my pension, I was aware that some tiny sense of bewilderment had crept into the profounder regions of my
consciousness and faintly disturbed my normal conviction that I belonged to the common world of men as of old. Some aspect of the village, especially of the human occupants in it, had secretly changed for me.

  Those pearly spaces of sky, where the bats flew over the red roofs, seemed more alive, more exquisite than before; the smells of the open stables where the cows stood munching, more fragrant than usual of sweet animal life that included myself delightfully, keenly; the last chatterings of the sparrows under the eaves of my own pension more intimate and personal....

  Almost as if those strands of elemental music the man played on his leaf had for the moment made me free of the life of the earth, as distinct from the life of men....

  I can only suggest this, and leave the rest to the care of the imaginative reader; for it is impossible to say along what inner byways of fancy I reached the conclusion that when the man spoke of “the God,” and not “the good God,” he intended to convey his sense of some great woodland personality — some Spirit of the Forests whom he knew and loved and worshipped, and whom, he was intuitively aware, I also knew and loved and worshipped.

  I during the next few weeks I came to learn more about this poor, half-witted man. In the village he was known as Perret “Comment-va,” the Man Who Plays on the Leaf; but when the people wished to be more explicit they described him as the man “without parents and without God.” The origin of “Comment-va” I never discovered, but the other titles were easily explained — he was illegitimate and outcast. The mother had been a wandering Italian girl and the father a loose-living bûcheron, who was, it seems, a standing disgrace to the community. I think the villagers were not conscious of their severity; the older generation of farmers and vignerons had pity, but the younger ones and those of his own age were certainly guilty, if not of deliberate cruelty, at least of a harsh neglect and the utter withholding of sympathy. It was like the thoughtless cruelty of children, due to small unwisdom, and to that absence of charity which is based on ignorance. They could not in the least understand this crazy, picturesque being who wandered day and night in the forests and spoke openly, though never quite intelligibly, of worshipping another God than their own anthropomorphic deity.