Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  For perhaps five minutes he stood there beside the table without stirring a muscle. He might have been carved out of stone. His eyes were shut, and only the heaving of the chest betrayed the fact that he was a living being. Then, with a strange quietness, he lit a match and applied it to the sheet of paper he held in his hand. The ashes fell slowly about him, piece by piece, and he blew them from the window-sill into the air, his eyes following them as they floated away on the summer wind that breathed so warmly over the world.

  He turned back slowly into the room. Although his actions and movements were absolutely steady and controlled, it was clear that he was on the edge of violent action. A hurricane might burst upon the still room any moment. His muscles were tense and rigid. Then, suddenly, he whitened, collapsed, and sank backwards into a chair, like a tumbled bundle of inert matter. He had fainted.

  In less than half an hour he recovered consciousness and sat up. As before, he made no sound. Not a syllable passed his lips. He rose quietly and looked about the room.

  Then he did a curious thing.

  Taking a heavy stick from the rack in the corner he approached the mantlepiece, and with a heavy shattering blow he smashed the clock to pieces. The glass fell in shivering atoms.

  “Cease your lying voice for ever,” he said, in a curiously still, even tone. “There is no such thing as time!”

  He took the watch from his pocket, swung it round several times by the long gold chain, smashed it into smithereens against the wall with a single blow, and then walked into his laboratory next door, and hung its broken body on the bones of the skeleton in the corner of the room.

  “Let one damned mockery hang upon another,” he said smiling oddly. “Delusions, both of you, and cruel as false!”

  He slowly moved back to the front room. He stopped opposite the bookcase where stood in a row the “Scriptures of the World,” choicely bound and exquisitely printed, the late professor’s most treasured possession, and next to them several books signed “Pilgrim.”

  One by one he took them from the shelf and hurled them through the open window.

  “A devil’s dreams! A devil’s foolish dreams!” he cried, with a vicious laugh.

  Presently he stopped from sheer exhaustion. He turned his eyes slowly to the wall opposite, where hung a weird array of Eastern swords and daggers, scimitars and spears, the collections of many journeys. He crossed the room and ran his finger along the edge. His mind seemed to waver.

  “No,” he muttered presently; “not that way. There are easier and better ways than that.”

  He took his hat and passed downstairs into the street.

  5

  It was five o’clock, and the June sun lay hot upon the pavement. He felt the metal door-knob burn the palm of his hand.

  “Ah, Laidlaw, this is well met,” cried a voice at his elbow; “I was in the act of coming to see you. I’ve a case that will interest you, and besides, I remembered that you flavoured your tea with orange leaves! — and I admit — —”

  It was Alexis Stephen, the great hypnotic doctor.

  “I’ve had no tea to-day,” Laidlaw said, in a dazed manner, after staring for a moment as though the other had struck him in the face. A new idea had entered his mind.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Dr. Stephen quickly. “Something’s wrong with you. It’s this sudden heat, or overwork. Come, man, let’s go inside.”

  A sudden light broke upon the face of the younger man, the light of a heaven-sent inspiration. He looked into his friend’s face, and told a direct lie.

  “Odd,” he said, “I myself was just coming to see you. I have something of great importance to test your confidence with. But in your house, please,” as Stephen urged him towards his own door— “in your house. It’s only round the corner, and I — I cannot go back there — to my rooms — till I have told you.”

  “I’m your patient — for the moment,” he added stammeringly as soon as they were seated in the privacy of the hypnotist’s sanctum, “and I want — er — —”

  “My dear Laidlaw,” interrupted the other, in that soothing voice of command which had suggested to many a suffering soul that the cure for its pain lay in the powers of its own reawakened will, “I am always at your service, as you know. You have only to tell me what I can do for you, and I will do it.” He showed every desire to help him out. His manner was indescribably tactful and direct.

  Dr. Laidlaw looked up into his face.

  “I surrender my will to you,” he said, already calmed by the other’s healing presence, “and I want you to treat me hypnotically — and at once. I want you to suggest to me” — his voice became very tense— “that I shall forget — forget till I die — everything that has occurred to me during the last two hours; till I die, mind,” he added, with solemn emphasis, “till I die.”

  He floundered and stammered like a frightened boy. Alexis Stephen looked at him fixedly without speaking.

  “And further,” Laidlaw continued, “I want you to ask me no questions. I wish to forget for ever something I have recently discovered — something so terrible and yet so obvious that I can hardly understand why it is not patent to every mind in the world — for I have had a moment of absolute clear vision — of merciless clairvoyance. But I want no one else in the whole world to know what it is — least of all, old friend, yourself.”

  He talked in utter confusion, and hardly knew what he was saying. But the pain on his face and the anguish in his voice were an instant passport to the other’s heart.

  “Nothing is easier,” replied Dr. Stephen, after a hesitation so slight that the other probably did not even notice it. “Come into my other room where we shall not be disturbed. I can heal you. Your memory of the last two hours shall be wiped out as though it had never been. You can trust me absolutely.”

  “I know I can,” Laidlaw said simply, as he followed him in.

  6

  An hour later they passed back into the front room again. The sun was already behind the houses opposite, and the shadows began to gather.

  “I went off easily?” Laidlaw asked.

  “You were a little obstinate at first. But though you came in like a lion, you went out like a lamb. I let you sleep a bit afterwards.”

  Dr. Stephen kept his eyes rather steadily upon his friend’s face.

  “What were you doing by the fire before you came here?” he asked, pausing, in a casual tone, as he lit a cigarette and handed the case to his patient.

  “I? Let me see. Oh, I know; I was worrying my way through poor old Ebor’s papers and things. I’m his executor, you know. Then I got weary and came out for a whiff of air.” He spoke lightly and with perfect naturalness. Obviously he was telling the truth. “I prefer specimens to papers,” he laughed cheerily.

  “I know, I know,” said Dr. Stephen, holding a lighted match for the cigarette. His face wore an expression of content. The experiment had been a complete success. The memory of the last two hours was wiped out utterly. Laidlaw was already chatting gaily and easily about a dozen other things that interested him. Together they went out into the street, and at his door Dr. Stephen left him with a joke and a wry face that made his friend laugh heartily.

  “Don’t dine on the professor’s old papers by mistake,” he cried, as he vanished down the street.

  Dr. Laidlaw went up to his study at the top of the house. Half way down he met his housekeeper, Mrs. Fewings. She was flustered and excited, and her face was very red and perspiring.

  “There’ve been burglars here,” she cried excitedly, “or something funny! All your things is just anyhow, sir. I found everything all about everywhere!” She was very confused. In this orderly and very precise establishment it was unusual to find a thing out of place.

  “Oh, my specimens!” cried the doctor, dashing up the rest of the stairs at top speed. “Have they been touched or — —”

  He flew to the door of the laboratory. Mrs. Fewings panted up heavily behind him.

  “The
labatry ain’t been touched,” she explained, breathlessly, “but they smashed the libry clock and they’ve ‘ung your gold watch, sir, on the skelinton’s hands. And the books that weren’t no value they flung out er the window just like so much rubbish. They must have been wild drunk, Dr. Laidlaw, sir!”

  The young scientist made a hurried examination of the rooms. Nothing of value was missing. He began to wonder what kind of burglars they were. He looked up sharply at Mrs. Fewings standing in the doorway. For a moment he seemed to cast about in his mind for something.

  “Odd,” he said at length. “I only left here an hour ago and everything was all right then.”

  “Was it, sir? Yes, sir.” She glanced sharply at him. Her room looked out upon the courtyard, and she must have seen the books come crashing down, and also have heard her master leave the house a few minutes later.

  “And what’s this rubbish the brutes have left?” he cried, taking up two slabs of worn gray stone, on the writing-table. “Bath brick, or something, I do declare.”

  He looked very sharply again at the confused and troubled housekeeper.

  “Throw them on the dust heap, Mrs. Fewings, and — and let me know if anything is missing in the house, and I will notify the police this evening.”

  When she left the room he went into the laboratory and took his watch off the skeleton’s fingers. His face wore a troubled expression, but after a moment’s thought it cleared again. His memory was a complete blank.

  “I suppose I left it on the writing-table when I went out to take the air,” he said. And there was no one present to contradict him.

  He crossed to the window and blew carelessly some ashes of burned paper from the sill, and stood watching them as they floated away lazily over the tops of the trees.

  * * *

  XI

  THE EMPTY SLEEVE

  1

  The Gilmer brothers were a couple of fussy and pernickety old bachelors of a rather retiring, not to say timid, disposition. There was grey in the pointed beard of John, the elder, and if any hair had remained to William it would also certainly have been of the same shade. They had private means. Their main interest in life was the collection of violins, for which they had the instinctive flair of true connoisseurs. Neither John nor William, however, could play a single note. They could only pluck the open strings. The production of tone, so necessary before purchase, was done vicariously for them by another.

  The only objection they had to the big building in which they occupied the roomy top floor was that Morgan, liftman and caretaker, insisted on wearing a billycock with his uniform after six o’clock in the evening, with a result disastrous to the beauty of the universe. For “Mr. Morgan,” as they called him between themselves, had a round and pasty face on the top of a round and conical body. In view, however, of the man’s other rare qualities — including his devotion to themselves — this objection was not serious.

  He had another peculiarity that amused them. On being found fault with, he explained nothing, but merely repeated the words of the complaint.

  “Water in the bath wasn’t really hot this morning, Morgan!”

  “Water in the bath not reely ‘ot, wasn’t it, sir?”

  Or, from William, who was something of a faddist:

  “My jar of sour milk came up late yesterday, Morgan.”

  “Your jar sour milk come up late, sir, yesterday?”

  Since, however, the statement of a complaint invariably resulted in its remedy, the brothers had learned to look for no further explanation. Next morning the bath was hot, the sour milk was “brortup” punctually. The uniform and billycock hat, though, remained an eyesore and source of oppression.

  On this particular night John Gilmer, the elder, returning from a Masonic rehearsal, stepped into the lift and found Mr. Morgan with his hand ready on the iron rope.

  “Fog’s very thick outside,” said Mr. John pleasantly; and the lift was a third of the way up before Morgan had completed his customary repetition: “Fog very thick outside, yes, sir.” And Gilmer then asked casually if his brother were alone, and received the reply that Mr. Hyman had called and had not yet gone away.

  Now this Mr. Hyman was a Hebrew, and, like themselves, a connoisseur in violins, but, unlike themselves, who only kept their specimens to look at, he was a skilful and exquisite player. He was the only person they ever permitted to handle their pedigree instruments, to take them from the glass cases where they reposed in silent splendour, and to draw the sound out of their wondrous painted hearts of golden varnish. The brothers loathed to see his fingers touch them, yet loved to hear their singing voices in the room, for the latter confirmed their sound judgment as collectors, and made them certain their money had been well spent. Hyman, however, made no attempt to conceal his contempt and hatred for the mere collector. The atmosphere of the room fairly pulsed with these opposing forces of silent emotion when Hyman played and the Gilmers, alternately writhing and admiring, listened. The occasions, however, were not frequent. The Hebrew only came by invitation, and both brothers made a point of being in. It was a very formal proceeding — something of a sacred rite almost.

  John Gilmer, therefore, was considerably surprised by the information Morgan had supplied. For one thing, Hyman, he had understood, was away on the Continent.

  “Still in there, you say?” he repeated, after a moment’s reflection.

  “Still in there, Mr. John, sir.” Then, concealing his surprise from the liftman, he fell back upon his usual mild habit of complaining about the billycock hat and the uniform.

  “You really should try and remember, Morgan,” he said, though kindly. “That hat does not go well with that uniform!”

  Morgan’s pasty countenance betrayed no vestige of expression. “‘At don’t go well with the yewniform, sir,” he repeated, hanging up the disreputable bowler and replacing it with a gold-braided cap from the peg. “No, sir, it don’t, do it?” he added cryptically, smiling at the transformation thus effected.

  And the lift then halted with an abrupt jerk at the top floor. By somebody’s carelessness the landing was in darkness, and, to make things worse, Morgan, clumsily pulling the iron rope, happened to knock the billycock from its peg so that his sleeve, as he stooped to catch it, struck the switch and plunged the scene in a moment’s complete obscurity.

  And it was then, in the act of stepping out before the light was turned on again, that John Gilmer stumbled against something that shot along the landing past the open door. First he thought it must be a child, then a man, then — an animal. Its movement was rapid yet stealthy. Starting backwards instinctively to allow it room to pass, Gilmer collided in the darkness with Morgan, and Morgan incontinently screamed. There was a moment of stupid confusion. The heavy framework of the lift shook a little, as though something had stepped into it and then as quickly jumped out again. A rushing sound followed that resembled footsteps, yet at the same time was more like gliding — someone in soft slippers or stockinged feet, greatly hurrying. Then came silence again. Morgan sprang to the landing and turned up the electric light. Mr. Gilmer, at the same moment, did likewise to the switch in the lift. Light flooded the scene. Nothing was visible.

  “Dog or cat, or something, I suppose, wasn’t it?” exclaimed Gilmer, following the man out and looking round with bewildered amazement upon a deserted landing. He knew quite well, even while he spoke, that the words were foolish.

  “Dog or cat, yes, sir, or — something,” echoed Morgan, his eyes narrowed to pin-points, then growing large, but his face stolid.

  “The light should have been on.” Mr. Gilmer spoke with a touch of severity. The little occurrence had curiously disturbed his equanimity. He felt annoyed, upset, uneasy.

  For a perceptible pause the liftman made no reply, and his employer, looking up, saw that, besides being flustered, he was white about the jaws. His voice, when he spoke, was without its normal assurance. This time he did not merely repeat. He explained.

  “The light was o
n, sir, when last I come up!” he said, with emphasis, obviously speaking the truth. “Only a moment ago,” he added.

  Mr. Gilmer, for some reason, felt disinclined to press for explanations. He decided to ignore the matter.

  Then the lift plunged down again into the depths like a diving-bell into water; and John Gilmer, pausing a moment first to reflect, let himself in softly with his latch-key, and, after hanging up hat and coat in the hall, entered the big sitting-room he and his brother shared in common.

  The December fog that covered London like a dirty blanket had penetrated, he saw, into the room. The objects in it were half shrouded in the familiar yellowish haze.

  2

  In dressing-gown and slippers, William Gilmer, almost invisible in his armchair by the gas-stove across the room, spoke at once. Through the thick atmosphere his face gleamed, showing an extinguished pipe hanging from his lips. His tone of voice conveyed emotion, an emotion he sought to suppress, of a quality, however, not easy to define.

  “Hyman’s been here,” he announced abruptly. “You must have met him. He’s this very instant gone out.”

  It was quite easy to see that something had happened, for “scenes” leave disturbance behind them in the atmosphere. But John made no immediate reference to this. He replied that he had seen no one — which was strictly true — and his brother thereupon, sitting bolt upright in the chair, turned quickly and faced him. His skin, in the foggy air, seemed paler than before.

  “That’s odd,” he said nervously.

  “What’s odd?” asked John.

  “That you didn’t see — anything. You ought to have run into one another on the doorstep.” His eyes went peering about the room. He was distinctly ill at ease. “You’re positive you saw no one? Did Morgan take him down before you came? Did Morgan see him?” He asked several questions at once.