Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  Indeed, all the interpretations, all the ‘layers,’ to use my sister’s phrase, slipped in by turns and lodged there for a time. They came day and night, and though my reason denied them entrance they held their own as by a kind of squatters’ right. They stirred moods already in me, that is, and did not introduce entirely new ones; for every mind conceals ancestral deposits that have been cultivated in turn along the whole line of its descent. Any day a chance shower may cause this one or that to blossom. Thus it came to me, at any rate. After darkness the Inquisition paced the empty corridors and set up ghastly apparatus in the dismal halls; and once, in the library, there swept over me that easy and delicious conviction that by confessing my wickedness I could resume it later, since Confession is expression, and expression brings relief and leaves one ready to accumulate again. And in such mood I felt bitter and unforgiving towards all others who thought differently. Another time it was a Pagan thing that assaulted me — so trivial yet oh, so significant at the time — when I dreamed that a herd of centaurs rolled up with a great stamping of hoofs round the house to destroy it, and then woke to hear the horses tramping across the field below the lawns; they neighed ominously and their noisy panting was audible as if it were just outside my windows.

  But the tree episode, I think, was the most curious of all — except, perhaps, the incident with the children which I shall mention in a moment — for its closeness to reality was so unforgettable. Outside the east window of my room stood a giant wellingtonia on the lawn, its head rising level with the upper sash. It grew some twenty feet away, planted on the highest terrace, and I often saw it when closing my curtains for the night, noticing how it drew its heavy skirts about it, and how the light from other windows threw glimmering streaks and patches that turned it into the semblance of a towering, solemn image. It stood there then so strikingly, somehow like a great old-world idol, that it claimed attention. Its appearance was curiously formidable. Its branches rustled without visibly moving and it had a certain portentous, forbidding air, so grand and dark and monstrous in the night that I was always glad when my curtains shut it out. Yet, once in bed, I had never thought about it one way or the other, and by day had certainly never sought it out.

  One night, then, as I went to bed and closed this window against a cutting easterly wind, I saw — that there were two of these trees. A brother wellingtonia rose mysteriously beside it, equally huge, equally towering, equally monstrous. The menacing pair of them faced me there upon the lawn. But in this new arrival lay a strange suggestion that frightened me before I could argue it away. Exact counterpart of its giant companion, it revealed also that gross, odious quality that all my sister’s paintings held. I got the odd impression that the rest of these trees, stretching away dimly in a troop over the farther lawns, were similar, and that, led by this enormous pair, they had all moved boldly closer to my windows. At the same moment a blind was drawn down over an upper room; the second tree disappeared into the surrounding darkness. It was, of course, this chance light that had brought it into the field of vision, but when the black shutter dropped over it, hiding it from view, the manner of its vanishing produced the queer effect that it had slipped into its companion — almost that it had been an emanation of the one I so disliked, and not really a tree at all! In this way the garden turned vehicle for expressing what lay behind it all!...

  The behaviour of the doors, the little, ordinary doors, seems scarcely worth mention at all, their queer way of opening and shutting of their own accord; for this was accountable in a hundred natural ways, and to tell the truth, I never caught one in the act of moving. Indeed, only after frequent repetitions did the detail force itself upon me, when, having noticed one, I noticed all. It produced, however, the unpleasant impression of a continual coming and going in the house, as though, screened cleverly and purposely from actual sight, some one in the building held constant invisible intercourse with — others.

  Upon detailed descriptions of these uncertain incidents I do not venture, individually so trivial, but taken all together so impressive and so insolent. But the episode of the children, mentioned above, was different. And I give it because it showed how vividly the intuitive child-mind received the impression — one impression, at any rate — of what was in the air. It may be told in a very few words. I believe they were the coachman’s children, and that the man had been in Mr. Franklyn’s service; but of neither point am I quite positive. I heard screaming in the rose-garden that runs along the stable walls — it was one afternoon not far from the tea-hour — and on hurrying up I found a little girl of nine or ten fastened with ropes to a rustic seat, and two other children — boys, one about twelve and one much younger — gathering sticks beneath the climbing rose-trees. The girl was white and frightened, but the others were laughing and talking among themselves so busily while they picked that they did not notice my abrupt arrival. Some game, I understood, was in progress, but a game that had become too serious for the happiness of the prisoner, for there was a fear in the girl’s eyes that was a very genuine fear indeed. I unfastened her at once; the ropes were so loosely and clumsily knotted that they had not hurt her skin; it was not that which made her pale. She collapsed a moment upon the bench, then picked up her tiny skirts and dived away at full speed into the safety of the stable-yard. There was no response to my brief comforting, but she ran as though for her life, and I divined that some horrid boys’ cruelty had been afoot. It was probably mere thoughtlessness, as cruelty with children usually is, but something in me decided to discover exactly what it was.

  And the boys, not one whit alarmed at my intervention, merely laughed shyly when I explained that their prisoner had escaped, and told me frankly what their ‘gime’ had been. There was no vestige of shame in them, nor any idea, of course, that they aped a monstrous reality. That it was mere pretence was neither here nor there. To them, though make-believe, it was a make-believe of something that was right and natural and in no sense cruel. Grown-ups did it too. It was necessary for her good.

  ‘We was going to burn her up, sir,’ the older one informed me, answering my ‘Why?’ with the explanation, ‘Because she wouldn’t believe what we wanted ‘er to believe.’

  And, game though it was, the feeling of reality about the little episode was so arresting, so terrific in some way, that only with difficulty did I confine my admonitions on this occasion to mere words. The boys slunk off, frightened in their turn, yet not, I felt, convinced that they had erred in principle. It was their inheritance. They had breathed it in with the atmosphere of their bringing-up. They would renew the salutary torture when they could — till she ‘believed’ as they did.

  I went back into the house, afflicted with a passion of mingled pity and distress impossible to describe, yet on my short way across the garden was attacked by other moods in turn, each more real and bitter than its predecessor. I received the whole series, as it were, at once. I felt like a diver rising to the surface through layers of water at different temperatures, though here the natural order was reversed, and the cooler strata were uppermost, the heated ones below. Thus, I was caught by the goblin touch of the willows that fringed the field; by the sensuous curving of the twisted ash that formed a gateway to the little grove of sapling oaks where fauns and satyrs lurked to play in the moonlight before Pagan altars; and by the cloaking darkness, next, of the copse of stunted pines, close gathered each to each, where hooded figures stalked behind an awful cross. The episode with the children seemed to have opened me like a knife. The whole Place rushed at me.

  I suspect this synthesis of many moods produced in me that climax of loathing and disgust which made me feel the limit of bearable emotion had been reached, so that I made straight to find Frances in order to convince her that at any rate I must leave. For, although this was our last day in the house, and we had arranged to go next day, the dread was in me that she would still find some persuasive reason for staying on. And an unexpected incident then made my dread unnecessary. The front d
oor was open and a cab stood in the drive; a tall, elderly man was gravely talking in the hall with the parlour-maid we called the Grenadier. He held a piece of paper in his hand. ‘I have called to see the house,’ I heard him say, as I ran up the stairs to Frances, who was peering like an inquisitive child over the banisters....

  ‘Yes,’ she told me with a sigh, I know not whether of resignation or relief, ‘the house is to be let or sold. Mabel has decided. Some Society or other, I believe — —’

  I was overjoyed: this made our leaving right and possible. ‘You never told me, Frances!’

  ‘Mabel only heard of it a few days ago. She told me herself this morning. It is a chance, she says. Alone she cannot get it “straight.”’

  ‘Defeat?’ I asked, watching her closely.

  ‘She thinks she has found a way out. It’s not a family, you see, it’s a Society, a sort of Community — they go in for thought — —’

  ‘A Community!’ I gasped. ‘You mean religious?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not exactly,’ she said smiling, ‘but some kind of association of men and women who want a headquarters in the country — a place where they can write and meditate — think — mature their plans and all the rest — I don’t know exactly what.’

  ‘Utopian dreamers?’ I asked, yet feeling an immense relief come over me as I heard. But I asked in ignorance, not cynically. Frances would know. She knew all this kind of thing.

  ‘No, not that exactly,’ she smiled. ‘Their teachings are grand and simple — old as the world too, really — the basis of every religion before men’s mind perverted them with their manufactured creeds — —’

  Footsteps on the stairs, and the sound of voices, interrupted our odd impromptu conversation, as the Grenadier came up, followed by the tall, grave gentleman who was being shown over the house. My sister drew me along the corridor towards her room, where she went in and closed the door behind me, yet not before I had stolen a good look at the caller — long enough, at least, for his face and general appearance to have made a definite impression on me. For something strong and peaceful emanated from his presence; he moved with such quiet dignity; the glance of his eyes was so steady and reassuring, that my mind labelled him instantly as a type of man one would turn to in an emergency and not be disappointed. I had seen him but for a passing moment, but I had seen him twice, and the way he walked down the passage, looking competently about him, conveyed the same impression as when I saw him standing at the door — fearless, tolerant, wise. ‘A sincere and kindly character,’ I judged instantly, ‘a man whom some big kind of love has trained in sweetness towards the world; no hate in him anywhere.’ A great deal, no doubt, to read in so brief a glance! Yet his voice confirmed my intuition, a deep and very gentle voice, great firmness in it too.

  ‘Have I become suddenly sensitive to people’s atmospheres in this extraordinary fashion?’ I asked myself, smiling, as I stood in the room and heard the door close behind me. ‘Have I developed some clairvoyant faculty here?’ At any other time I should have mocked.

  And I sat down and faced my sister, feeling strangely comforted and at peace for the first time since I had stepped beneath The Towers’ roof a month ago. Frances, I then saw, was smiling a little as she watched me.

  ‘You know him?’ I asked.

  ‘You felt it too?’ was her question in reply. ‘No,’ she added, ‘I don’t know him — beyond the fact that he is a leader in the Movement and has devoted years and money to its objects. Mabel felt the same thing in him that you have felt — and jumped at it.’

  ‘But you’ve seen him before?’ I urged, for the certainty was in me that he was no stranger to her.

  She shook her head. ‘He called one day early this week, when you were out. Mabel saw him. I believe — —’ she hesitated a moment, as though expecting me to stop her with my usual impatience of such subjects— ‘I believe he has explained everything to her — the beliefs he embodies, she declares, are her salvation — might be, rather, if she could adopt them.’

  ‘Conversion again!’ For I remembered her riches, and how gladly a Society would gobble them.

  ‘The layers I told you about,’ she continued calmly, shrugging her shoulders slightly— ‘the deposits that are left behind by strong thinking and real belief — but especially by ugly, hateful belief, because, you see — there’s more vital passion in that sort — —’

  ‘Frances, I don’t understand a bit,’ I said out loud, but said it a little humbly, for the impression the man had left was still strong upon me and I was grateful for the steady sense of peace and comfort he had somehow introduced. The horrors had been so dreadful. My nerves, doubtless, were more than a little overstrained. Absurd as it must sound, I classed him in my mind with the robins, the happy, confiding robins who believed in everybody and thought no evil! I laughed a moment at my ridiculous idea, and my sister, encouraged by this sign of patience in me, continued more fluently.

  ‘Of course you don’t understand, Bill? Why should you? You’ve never thought about such things. Needing no creed yourself, you think all creeds are rubbish.’

  ‘I’m open to conviction — I’m tolerant,’ I interrupted.

  ‘You’re as narrow as Sam Franklyn, and as crammed with prejudice,’ she answered, knowing that she had me at her mercy.

  ‘Then, pray, what may be his, or his Society’s beliefs?’ I asked, feeling no desire to argue, ‘and how are they going to prove your Mabel’s salvation? Can they bring beauty into all this aggressive hate and ugliness?’

  ‘Certain hope and peace,’ she said, ‘that peace which is understanding, and that understanding which explains all creeds and therefore tolerates them.’

  ‘Toleration! The one word a religious man loathes above all others! His pet word is damnation — —’

  ‘Tolerates them,’ she repeated patiently, unperturbed by my explosion, ‘because it includes them all.’

  ‘Fine, if true,’ I admitted, ‘very fine. But how, pray, does it include them all?’

  ‘Because the key-word, the motto, of their Society is, “There is no religion higher than Truth,” and it has no single dogma of any kind. Above all,’ she went on, ‘because it claims that no individual can be “lost.” It teaches universal salvation. To damn outsiders is uncivilised, childish, impure. Some take longer than others — it’s according to the way they think and live — but all find peace, through development, in the end. What the creeds call a hopeless soul, it regards as a soul having further to go. There is no damnation — —’

  ‘Well, well,’ I exclaimed, feeling that she rode her hobby-horse too wildly, too roughly over me, ‘but what is the bearing of all this upon this dreadful place, and upon Mabel? I’ll admit that there is this atmosphere — this — er — inexplicable horror in the house and grounds, and that if not of damnation exactly, it is certainly damnable. I’m not too prejudiced to deny that, for I’ve felt it myself.’

  To my relief she was brief. She made her statement, leaving me to take it or reject it as I would.

  ‘The thought and belief its former occupants — have left behind. For there has been coincidence here, a coincidence that must be rare. The site on which this modern house now stands was Roman, before that Early Britain, with burial mounds, before that again, Druid — the Druid stones still lie in that copse below the field, the Tumuli among the ilexes behind the drive. The older building Sam Franklyn altered and practically pulled down was a monastery; he changed the chapel into a meeting hall, which is now the music room; but, before he came here, the house was occupied by Manetti, a violent Catholic without tolerance or vision; and in the interval between these two, Julius Weinbaum had it, Hebrew of most rigid orthodox type imaginable — so they all have left their — —’

  ‘Even so,’ I repeated, yet interested to hear the rest, ‘what of it?’

  ‘Simply this,’ said Frances with conviction, ‘that each in turn has left his layer of concentrated thinking and belief behind him; because each believ
ed intensely, absolutely, beyond the least weakening of any doubt — the kind of strong belief and thinking that is rare anywhere to-day, the kind that wills, impregnates objects, saturates the atmosphere, haunts, in a word. And each, believing he was utterly and finally right, damned with equally positive conviction the rest of the world. One and all preached that implicitly if not explicitly. It’s the root of every creed. Last of the bigoted, grim series came Samuel Franklyn.’

  I listened in amazement that increased as she went on. Up to this point her explanation was so admirable. It was, indeed, a pretty study in psychology if it were true.

  ‘Then why does nothing ever happen?’ I enquired mildly. ‘A place so thickly haunted ought to produce a crop of no ordinary results!’

  ‘There lies the proof,’ she went on in a lowered voice, ‘the proof of the horror and the ugly reality. The thought and belief of each occupant in turn kept all the others under. They gave no sign of life at the time. But the results of thinking never die. They crop out again the moment there’s an opening. And, with the return of Mabel in her negative state, believing nothing positive herself, the place for the first time found itself free to reproduce its buried stores. Damnation, hell-fire, and the rest — the most permanent and vital thought of all those creeds, since it was applied to the majority of the world — broke loose again, for there was no restraint to hold it back. Each sought to obtain its former supremacy. None conquered. There results a pandemonium of hate and fear, of striving to escape, of agonised, bitter warring to find safety, peace — salvation. The place is saturated by that appalling stream of thinking — the terror of the damned. It concentrated upon Mabel, whose negative attitude furnished the channel of deliverance. You and I, according to our sympathy with her, were similarly involved. Nothing happened, because no one layer could ever gain the supremacy.’