Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  The knock at the door and the arrival of his dinner broke the appalling train of thought, but rather than be seen in his present diminutive appearance — later, of course, he would surely grow again — he ran into the bedroom. And when he came out again after the waiter’s departure he found that his dinner shared the same abominable change. The food upon the dishes was reduced to the minutest proportions — the toast like children’s, the soup an egg-cupful, the tenderloin a little slice the size of a visiting-card, and the bird not much larger than a black-beetle. And yet more than he could eat; more than sufficient! He sat in the big chair positively lost, his feet dangling. Then, mortified, frightened, and angry beyond expression, he undressed and concealed himself beneath the sheets and blankets of his bed.

  “Of course I’m going mad — that’s what it all means,” he exclaimed. “I’m no longer of any account in the world. I could never go into my Club, for instance, like this!” — and he surveyed the small outline that made a little lump beneath the surface of the bed-clothes— “or read the lessons having to stand upon a chair to reach the lectern.” And tears of bleeding vanity and futile wrath mingled upon his pillow.... The humiliation was agonising.

  In the middle of which the door opened and in came the hotel valet, bearing before him upon a silver salver what at first appeared to be small, striped sandwiches, darkish in hue, but upon closer inspection were seen to be several wee suits of clothes, neatly pressed and folded for wearing. Glancing round the room and perceiving no one, the man proceeded to put them away in the chest of drawers, soliloquising from time to time as he did so.

  “So the old buffer did go out after all!” he reflected, as he smoothed the tiny trousers in the drawer. “‘E’s nothing but a gas-bag, anyway! Close with the coin, too — always was that!” He whistled, spat in the grate, hunted about for a cigarette, and again found relief in speech. My little dawg’s worth two of im all the time, and lots to spare. Tim’s real...!” And other things, too, he said in similar vein. He was utterly oblivious of Sir Timothy’s presence — serenely unconscious that the thin, fading line beneath the sheets was the very individual he was talking about. “Even hides his cigarettes, does he? He’s right, though. Take away what he’s got and there wouldn’t be enough left over to stand upright at a poultry show!” And he guffawed merrily to himself. But what brought the final horror into that vanishing Personality on the bed was the singular fact that the valet made no remark about the absurd and horrible size of those tiny clothes. This, then, was how others — even a hotel valet — saw him!

  All night long, it seemed, he lay in atrocious pain, the darkness mercifully hiding him, though never from himself, and only towards daylight did he pass off into a condition of unconsciousness. He must have slept very late indeed, too, for he woke to find sunlight in the room, and the housemaid — that tall, dignified girl who had tried to be kind — dusting and sweeping energetically. He screamed to her, but his voice was too feeble to make itself heard above the sweeping. The high-pitched squeak was scarcely audible even to himself. Presently she approached the bed and flung the sheets back. “That’s funny,” she observed, “could’ve sworn I saw something move!” She gave a hurried look, then went on sweeping. But in the process she had tossed his person, now no larger than a starved mouse, out on to the carpet. He cried aloud in his anguish, but the squeak was too faint to be audible. “Ugh!” exclaimed the girl, jumping to one side, “there’s that ‘orrid mouse again! Dead, too, I do declare!” And then, without being aware of the fact, she swept him up with the dust and bits of paper into her pan.

  Whereupon Sir Timothy awoke with a bad start, and perceived that his train was running somewhat uneasily into King’s Cross, and that he had slept nearly the whole way.

  THE SECRET

  I saw him walking down the floor of the A.B.C. shop where I was lunch’ ing. He was gazing about for a vacant seat with that vague stare of puzzled distress he always wore when engaged in practical affairs. Then he saw me and nodded. I pointed to the seat opposite; he sat down. There was a crumb in his brown beard, I noticed. There had been one a year ago, when I saw him last.

  “What a long time since we met,” I said, genuinely glad to see him. He was a most lovable fellow, though his vagueness was often perplexing to his friends.

  “Yes — er — h’mmm — let me see—”

  “Just about a year,” I said.

  He looked at me with an expression as though he did not see me. He was delving in his mind for dates and proofs. His fierce eyebrows looked exactly as though they were false — stuck on with paste — and I imagined how puzzled he would be if one of them suddenly dropped off into his soup. The eyes beneath, however, were soft and beaming; the whole face was tender, kind, gentle, and when he smiled he looked thirty instead of fifty.

  “A year, is it?” he remarked, and then turned from me to the girl who was waiting to take his order. This ordering was a terrible affair. I marvelled at the patience of that never-to-be tipped waitress in the dirty black dress. He looked with confusion from me to her, from her to the complicated bill of fare, and from this last to me again.

  “Oh, have a cup of coffee and a bit of that lunch cake,” I said with desperation. He stared at me for a second, one eyebrow moving, the other still as the grave. I felt an irresistible desire to laugh.

  “All right,” he murmured to the girl, “coffee and a bit of that lunch-cake.” She went off wearily. “And a pat of butter,” he whispered after her, but look’ ing at the wrong waitress. “And a portion of that strawberry jam,” he added, looking at another waitress.

  Then he turned to talk with me.

  “Oh no,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the crowd of girls by the counter; “not the jam. I forgot I’d ordered that lunch-cake.”

  Again he switched round in his chair — he always perched on the edge like a bird — and made a great show of plunging into a long deferred chat with me. I knew what would come. He was always writing books and sending them out among publishers and forgetting where they were at the moment.

  “And how are you?” he asked. I told him.

  “Writing anything these days?” I ventured boldly.

  The eyebrows danced. “Well, the fact is, I’ve only just finished a book.”

  “Sent it anywhere?”

  “It’s gone off, yes. Let me see — it’s gone to — er—” The coffee and lunch cake arrived without the pat of butter, but with two lots of strawberry jam. “I won’t have jam, thank you. And will you bring a pat of butter?” he muttered to the girl. Then, turning to me again— “Oh, I really forget for the moment. It’s a good story, I think.” His novels were, as a fact, extraordinarily good, which was the strange part of it all.

  “It’s about a woman, you see, who—” He proceeded to tell me the story in outline. Once he got beyond the confused openings of talk the man became interesting, but it took so long, and was so difficult to follow, that I remembered former experiences and cut him short with a lucky inspiration.

  “Don’t spoil it for me by telling it. I shan’t enjoy it when it comes out.”

  He laughed, and both eyebrows dropped and hid his eyes. He busied him’ self with the cake and butter. A second crumb went to join the first. I thought of balls in golf bunkers, and laughed outright. For a time the conversation flagged. I became aware of a certain air of mystery about him. He was full of something besides the novel — something he wanted to talk about but had probably forgotten “for the moment.” I got the impression he was casting about in the upper confusion of his mind for the cue.

  “You’re writing something else now?” I ventured.

  The question hit the bull’ s-eye. Both eyebrows shot up, as though they would vanish the next minute on wires and fly up into the wings. The cake in his hand would follow; and last of all he himself would go. The children’s pantomime came vividly before me. Surely he was a made-up figure on his way to rehearsal.

  “I am,” he said; “but it’s a great
secret. I’ve got a magnificent idea!”

  “I promise not to tell. I’m safe as the grave. Tell me.”

  He fixed his kindly, beaming eyes on my face and smiled charmingly.

  “It’s a play,” he murmured, and then paused for effect, hunting about on his plate for cake, where cake there was none.

  “Another piece of that lunch-cake, please,” he said in a sudden loud voice, addressed to the waitresses at large. “It came to me the other day in the London Library — er — very fine idea—”

  “Something really original?”

  “Well, I think so, perhaps.” The cake came with a clatter of plates, but he pushed it aside as though he had forgotten about it, and leaned forward across the table. “I’ll tell you. Of course you won’t say anything. I don’t want the idea to get about. There’s money in a good play — and people do steal so, don’t they?”

  I made a gesture, as much as to say, “Do I look like a man who would repeat?” and he plunged into it with enthusiasm.

  Oh! The story of that play! And those dancing eyebrows! And the bits of the plot he forgot and went back for! And the awful, wild confusion of names and scenes and curtains! And the way his voice rose and fell like a sound carried to and fro by a gusty wind! And the feeling that something was coining which would make it all clear — but which never came!

  “The woman, you see,” — all his stories began that way— “is one of those modern women who... and when she dies she tells on her death-bed how she knew all the time that Anna—”

  “That’s the heroine, I think?” I asked keenly, after ten minutes’ exposition, hoping to Heaven my guess was right.

  “No, no, she’s the widow, don’t you remember, of the clergyman who went over to the Church of Rome to avoid marrying her sister — in the first act — or didn’t mention that?”

  “You mentioned it, I think, but the explanation—”

  “Oh, well, you see, the Anglican clergyman — he’s Anglican in the first act — always suspected that Miriam had not died by her own hand, but had been poisoned. In fact, he finds the incriminating letter in the gas-pipe, and recognises the handwriting—”

  “Oh, he finds the letter?”

  “Rather. He finds the letter, don’t you see? and compares it with the others, and makes up his mind who wrote it, and goes straight to Colonel Middleton with his discovery.”

  “So Middleton, of course, refuses to believe—”

  “Refuses to believe that the second wife — oh, I forgot to mention that the clergyman had married again in his own Church; married a woman who turns out to be Anna’s — no, I mean Miriam’s — half-sister, who had been educated abroad in a convent — refuses to believe, you see, that his wife had anything to do with it. Then Middleton has a splendid scene. He and the clergyman have the stage to themselves. Wyndham’s the man for Middleton, of course. Well, he declares that he has the proof — proof that must convince everybody, and just as he waves it in the air in comes Miriam, who is walking in her sleep, from her sick-bed. They listen. She is talking in her sleep. By Jove, man, don’t you see it? She is talking about the crime! She practically confesses it before their very eyes.”

  “Splendid!”

  “And she never wakes up — I mean, not in that scene. She goes back to bed and has no idea next day what she has said and done.”

  “And the clergyman’s honour is saved?” I hazarded, amazed at my rashness. “No. Anna is saved. You see, I forgot to tell you that in the second act Miriam’s brother, Sir John, had—”

  The waitress brought the little paper checks.

  “Let’s go outside and finish. It’s getting frightfully stuffy here,” I suggested desperately, picking up the bills.

  We walked out together, he still talking against time with the most terrible confusion of names and acts and scenes imaginable. He bumped into everybody who came in his way. His beard was full of crumbs. His eyebrows danced with excitement — I knew then positively they were false — and his voice ran up and down the scale like a buzz-saw at work on a tough board.

  “By Jove, old man, that is a play!”

  He turned to me with absolute happiness in his face.

  “But for Heaven’s sake, don’t let out a word of it. I must have a copyright performance first before it’s really safe.”

  “Not a word, I promise.”

  “It’s a dead secret — till I’ve finished it, I mean — then I’ll come and tell you the dénouement. The last curtain is simply magnificent. You see, Middleton never hears—”

  “I won’t tell a living soul,” I cried, running to catch a bus. “It’s a secret — yours and mine!”

  And the omnibus carried me away Westwards.

  Meanwhile the play remains to this day a “dead secret,” known only to the man who thinks he told it, and to the other man who knows he heard it told.

  THE LEASE

  The other day I came across my vague friend again. Last time it was in an A.B.C. shop; this time it was in a bus. We always meet in humble places.

  He was vaguer than ever, fuddled and distrait; but delightfully engaging. He had evidently not yet lunched, for he wore no crumb; but I had a shrewd suspicion that beneath his green Alpine hat there lurked a straw or two in his untidy hair. It would hardly have surprised me to see him turn with his child like smile and say, “Would you mind very much taking them out for me? You know they do tickle so” — half mumbled, half shouted.

  Instead, he tried to shake hands, and his black eyebrows danced. He looked as loosely put together as a careless parcel. I imagined large bits of him tumbling out.

  “You re off somewhere or other, I suppose?” he said; and the question was so characteristic it was impossible not to laugh.

  I mentioned the City.

  “I’m going that way too,” he said cheerfully. He had come to the conclusion that he could not shake hands with safety; there were too many odds and ends about him — gloves, newspapers, half-open umbrella, parcels. Evidently he had left the house uncertain as to where he was going, and had brought all these things in case, like the White Knight, he might find a use for them on the way. His overcoat was wrongly buttoned, too, so that on one side the collar reached almost to his ear. From the pockets protruded large envelopes, white and blue. I marvelled again how he ever concentrated his mind enough to write plays and novels; for in both the action was quick and dramatic; the dialogue crisp, forcible, often witty.

  “Going to the City!” I exclaimed. “You?” Museums, libraries, second-hand book-shops were his usual haunts — places where he could be vague and absent-minded without danger to anyone. I felt genuinely curious. “Copy of some kind? Local colour for something, eh?” I laughed, hoping to draw him out.

  A considerable pause followed, during which he rearranged several of his parcels, and his eyebrows shot up and down like two black-beetles dancing a hornpipe.

  “I’m helping a chap with his lease,” he replied suddenly, in such a very loud voice that everybody in the bus heard and became interested.

  He had this way of alternately mumbling and talking very loud — absurdly loud; picking out unimportant words with terrific emphasis. He also had this way of helping others. Indeed, it was difficult to meet him without suspecting an errand of kindness — rarely mentioned, however.

  “Chap with his lease,” he repeated in a kind of roar, as though he feared someone had not heard him — the driver, possibly!

  We were in a white Putney bus, going East. The policeman just then held it up at Wellington Street.

  “It’s jolly stopping like this,” he cried; “one can chat a bit without having to shout.”

  My curiosity about the lease, or rather about his part in it, prevented an immediate reply. How he could possibly help in such a complicated matter puzzled me exceedingly.

  “Horrible things, leases!” I said at length. “Confusing, I mean, with their endless repetitions and absence of commas. Legal language seems so needlessly—”

 
; “Oh, but this one is right enough,” he interrupted. “You see, my pal hasn’t signed it yet. He’s in rather a muddle about it, to tell the truth, and I’m going to get it straightened out by my solicitor.”

  The bus started on with a lurch, and he rolled against me.

  “It’s a three-year lease,” he roared, “with an option to renew, you know — oh no, I’m wrong there, by the bye,” and he tapped my knee and dropped a glove, and, when it was picked up and handed to him, tried to stuff it up his sleeve as though it was a handkerchief— “I’m wrong there — that’s the house he’s in at present, and his wife wants to break that lease because she doesn’t like it, and they’ve got more children than they expected (these words whispered), and there’s no bathroom, and the kitchen stairs are absurdly narrow —

  “But the lease — you were just saying — ?”

  “Quite so; I was,” and both eyebrows dropped so that the eyes were almost completely hidden, “but that lease is all right. It’s the other one I was talking about just then —

  “The house he’s in now, you mean, or — ?” My head already swam. The attention of the people opposite had begun to wander.

  My friend pulled himself together and clutched several parcels.

  “No, no, no,” he explained, smiling gently; “he likes this one. It’s the other I meant — the one his wife doesn’t approve of — the one with the narrow bathroom stairs and no kitchen — I mean the narrow kitchen stairs and no bathroom. It has so few cupboards, too, and the nursery chimneys smoke every time the wind’s in the east. (Poor man! How devotedly he must have listened while it was being drummed into his good-natured ears!) So you see, Henry, my pal, thought of giving it up when the lease fell in and taking this other house — the one I was just talking about — and putting in a bathroom at his own expense, provided the landlord—”