The names then flashed upon him—Lady Statham—Richard Vance.
Vance! With a horrid drop from splendour into something mean and sordid, Henriot felt the pain of it. The motive of the man was so insignificant, his purpose so atrocious. More and more, with the name, came back—his first repugnance, fear, suspicion. And human terror caught him. He shrieked. But, as in nightmare, no sound escaped his lips. He tried to move; a wild desire to interfere, to protect, to prevent, flung him forward—close to the dizzy edge of the gulf below. But his muscles refused obedience to the will. The paralysis of common fear rooted him to the rocks.
But the sudden change of focus instantly destroyed the picture; and so vehement was the fall from glory into meanness, that it dislocated the machinery of clairvoyant vision. The inner perception clouded and grew dark. Outer and inner mingled in violent, inextricable confusion. The wrench seemed almost physical. It happened all at once, retreat and continuation for a moment somehow combined. And, if he did not definitely see the awful thing, at least he was aware that it had come to pass. He knew it as positively as though his eye were glued against a magnifying lens in the stillness of some laboratory. He witnessed it.
The supreme moment of evocation was close. Life, through that awful sandy vortex, whirled and raged. Loose particles showered and pelted, caught by the draught of vehement life that moulded the substance of the Desert into imperial outline—when, suddenly, shot the little evil thing across that marred and blasted it.
Into the whirlpool flew forward a particle of material that was a human being. And the Group-Soul caught and used it.
The actual accomplishment Henriot did not claim to see. He was a witness, but a witness who could give no evidence. Whether the woman was pushed of set intention, or whether some detail of sound and pattern was falsely used to effect the terrible result, he was helpless to determine. He pretends no itemised account. She went. In one second, with appalling swiftness, she disappeared, swallowed out of space and time within that awful maw—one little corpuscle among a million through which the Life, now stalking the Desert wastes, moulded itself a troop-like Body. Sand took her.
There followed emptiness—a hush of unutterable silence, stillness, peace. Movement and sound instantly retired whence they came. The avenues of Memory closed; the Splendours all went down into their sandy tombs. . . .
The moon had sunk into the Libyan wilderness; the eastern sky was red. The dawn drew out that wondrous sweetness of the Desert, which is as sister to the sweetness that the moonlight brings. The Desert settled back to sleep, huge, unfathomable, charged to the brim with life that watches, waits, and yet conceals itself behind the ruins of apparent desolation. And the Wadi, empty at his feet, filled slowly with the gentle little winds that bring the sunrise.
Then, across the pale glimmering of sand, Henriot saw a figure moving. It came quickly towards him, yet unsteadily, and with a hurry that was ugly. Vance was on the way to fetch him. And the horror of the man’s approach struck him like a hammer in the face. He closed his eyes, sinking back to hide.
But, before he swooned, there reached him the clatter of the murderer’s tread as he began to climb over the splintered rocks, and the faint echo of his voice, calling him by name—falsely and in pretence—for help.
EXPLANATORY NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
AB = Algernon Blackwood
C = The Centaur (1911; reprint, Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1939)
DNS = Day and Night Stories (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1917)
EBT = Episodes Before Thirty (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1923)
EH = The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1906)
IE = Incredible Adventures (New York: Macmillan, 1914)
JS = John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908; reprint, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920)
L = The Listener and Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907)
LV = The Lost Valley and Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910)
PG = Pan’s Garden (London: Macmillan, 1912)
TMS = Ten Minute Stories (London: John Murray, 1914)
INTRODUCTION
1 For a list of abbreviations used in the Introduction and Notes, see above.
2 “Author’s Note to the 1942 Edition” of John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (London: Richards Press, 1942), p. [vi].
3 See n. 1 to “The Insanity of Jones.”
4 The Education of Uncle Paul (London: Macmillan, 1909), pp. 52-53.
5 The Bright Messenger (London: Cassell, 1921), p. 166.
6 Mike Ashley, Algernon Blackwood: A Bio-bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. 28-29.
7 Ibid., p. 31.
8 “Dreams and Fairies,” Bookman (London) no. 459 (December 1929): 175.
SMITH: AN EPISODE IN A LODGING-HOUSE
This story was first published in EH; no prior periodical publication has been located. The very first sentence makes it clear that the story was inspired by AB’s one year (1888-89) at Edinburgh University, where, although he was enrolled in the agriculture department, he preferred to spend time taking courses at the medical school. It is possible that the character of Smith was inspired by a Hindu medical student with whom AB became close friends; AB cryptically states that “We made curious and interesting experiments together” (EBT 61). It was at this time that AB was experimenting with hypnotism, spiritualism, theosophy, and the like. The reference in the story to “ancient Hebrew mysticism” points to AB’s absorption of the Kabbalah as part of his indoctrination into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; AB became a member of this order in 1900, but may have known something of it as early as his Edinburgh days. See Mike Ashley, “Algernon Blackwood and the Golden Dawn,” Fantasy Commentator 5, no. 2 (winter 1984): 77-91.
1 AB was fluent in English, French, and German, but did not know much Hebrew or any of the other ancient languages. He was, however, obliged to learn a little Hebrew in connection with his activities with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
2 Cf. the “young doctor” who lived in AB’s boardinghouse in Toronto from 1891 to 1892: “He was about twenty-six years old and very poor; the exact antithesis of myself, being clear-minded, practical, cynical and a thorough sceptic on the existence of a soul and God and immortality. ... He argued me out of my boots every time, and towards the end of our talks grew impatient and almost angry with my vague mind and ‘transcendental tommyrot,’ as he called it” (EBT 66-67). See also the materialistic Dr. Cathcart in “The Wendigo” (p. 176).
3 Compare “The Golden Fly” (in Pan’s Garden), in which a man heedlessly kills a golden fly but comes to realize that, given the psychic in terrelatedness of all entity, his action is far from insignificant: “To the whole of Existence, that included himself, a golden fly, the sun, and all the stars, he must somehow answer for his crime” (PG 379).
4 This suggests the traditional paraphernalia of the Black Mass, with its mystical use of a pentacle enclosed within a circle. AB admitted that he, Johann Kay Pauw, and his French friend Louis would engage in harmless re-creations of the Black Mass in their New York boardinghouse: “He [Louis] particularly enjoyed singing what he called la messe noire with astonishing variations in his high falsetto. This ‘mass’ was performed by all three of us to a plaster-cast faun an artist had given me in Toronto. . . . The darkened room, the three figures passing to and fro and chanting, the strange weird face of the faun, lit by the flickering flame from below, startled [the landlady] so that she stood stock still on the threshold without a word. The next second she was gone” (EBT 246-47).
5 The “occult manipulation of sound” is at the heart of AB’s novel The Human Chord (1910), in which four individuals gather to sing a “human chord” that might loosen the fabric of the universe. The concept was derived directly from AB’s involvement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
THE WILLOWS
Far and away Blackwood’s most celebrated story, “The Willows” first appear
ed in L; no prior periodical publication has been located. The tale was manifestly based upon AB’s two trips down the Danube, from June to August 1900 and from June to August 1901, the first in the company of his friend Wilfrid Wilson. This trip was chronicled in a two-part essay, “Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe,” Macmillan’s Magazine no. 503 (September 1901): 350-58; no. 504 (October 1901): 418-29 (abbreviated in the notes as “Danube”), and it becomes evident that many features in “The Willows” are imaginative elaborations of various incidents in this journey. The narrator’s friend, described only as a Swede, is said to be “devoid of imagination,” but Wilson could hardly be so described: his various experiences with AB supplied the plots for most of the tales in The Wolves of God and Other Fey Stories (1921), a volume to which AB affixed Wilson’s name as coauthor. But the Swede’s unimaginativeness is a necessary device to convey the genuine weirdness of the events as they unfurl. H. P. Lovecraft considered “The Willows” the single finest weird tale in literature. It has appeared in nearly every selection of AB’s best tales and has been frequently anthologized, most notably in Dorothy Scarborough’s Famous Modern Ghost Stories (1921), Philip Van Doren Stern’s The Midnight Reader (1942), and Bennett Cerf’s Famous Ghost Stories (1944).
1 Cf. AB’s description of the region below the town of Pressburg (in Hungarian, Poszony): “The main river is a couple of miles wide and full of islands, separated by rapids and falls. An officer assured us that we should get lost for days together unless we carefully kept to the main channel. The country is utterly deserted, save for the little black landing-stages of the steamers that appear every twenty miles or so, the villages lying far back and protected by high earthen banks. The loneliness and desolation of these vast reaches of turbulent river and low willow-clad islands were impressive; in flood-time it must be grand” (“Danube,” p. 426).
2 Cf. AB’s camp on an island a few miles above Passau: “... we ... were visited by an inquisitive peasant, who saw our fire and came over from the mainland in a punt. ‘Are we trespassing?’ I asked. ‘No; the island’s usually under water’ ” (“Danube,” p. 421).
3 A gipsy tent is a long, envelope-shaped tent. “We pegged the tent inside and out. All night the wind tore at it, howling; but a gipsy-tent never comes down” (“Danube,” p. 420).
4 “We passed signs of Roman days and Turkish occupancy strangely mingled: Carnuntum, where Marcus Aurelius is said to have written much of his philosophy” (“Danube,” p. 425). Carnuntum was an important Roman military base in the province of Pannonia Superior. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (emperor of Rome, C.E. 161-180) wrote the second book of his Meditations there, c. C.E. 171-73.
5 “The river communicated something of its hurry to ourselves, and in my mind the journey now presents itself something in the form of a series of brilliant cinematographs” (“Danube,” p. 419). Bioscope is an early term for a motion picture.
6 “At first our progress was slow. Patches of white weeds everywhere choked the river and often brought us to a complete standstill, and in less then ten minutes we were aground in a shallow. We had to tuck up our trousers and wade” (“Danube,” pp. 350-51).
7 “Donaueschingen is an old-fashioned little town on the southern end of the Schwarzwald plateau. . . . It breathes a spirit of remoteness and tranquillity born of the forests that encircle it, and that fill the air with pleasant odours and gentle murmurings” (“Danube,” p. 350).
8 “To-day [June 19, 1900], for the first time, we heard the famous song of the Danube. . . . It is a hissing, seething sound which rises everywhere from the river. You think steam must be escaping somewhere, or soda-water fizzing out from an immense syphon among the woods on the banks. It is said to be the friction of the pebbles along the bed of the river, caused by the terrific speed of so great a body of water” (“Danube,” pp. 418-19).
9 This is an exact description of the river Iller as it empties into the Danube: “It had come in at an acute angle after running almost parallel with us for a little distance. It tumbled in at headlong speed, with an icy, turbulent flood of muddy water, and it gave the sedate Danube an impetus that it did not lose for another hundred miles below Ulm. For a space the two rivers declined to mingle. The noisy, dirty Iller, fresh from the Alps, kept to the right bank, going twice as fast as the more dignified companion to the left. A distinct line (as though drawn by a rope) divided them, in colour, speed, and height,—the Iller remaining for a long time at least half an inch above the level of the Danube” (“Danube,” p. 358).
10 “Half a mile below, the Inn poured in from the Tyrolese Alps and carried us into the finest gorge we had so far seen. The new comer brought cold air with it, and we swept into the gloomy ravine between high mountains with something like a genuine shudder” (“Danube,” pp. 421-22).
11 A reference to the short novel Undine (1811) by Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de La Motte-Fouqué, recounting the legend of Undine, the daughter of a water-prince, who marries a mortal but later kills him.
12 “. . . when we landed for camp the place was so lonely that, on climbing the bank, I looked straight into the eyes of a great stag with branching antlers” (“Danube,” p. 425).
13 See n. 1 for a close approximation to this speech by an “officer” in Pressburg.
14 AB’s attraction to Nature produced, as a corollary, a sense of human insignificance: “So intense, so flooding, was the elation of joy Nature brought, that after such moments even the gravest worldly matters, as well as the people concerned in these, seemed trivial and insignificant. Nature introduced a vaster scale of perspective against which a truer proportion appeared” (EBT 40).
15 “That evening, after crossing and re-crossing the river, we found a sheltered camp on a sandy island where pollards and willows roared in the wind. As if to show the loneliness of the spot an otter, rolling over and over among the eddies, swam past us as we landed. About sunset the clouds broke up momentarily and let out a flood of crimson light all over the wild country. Against the gorgeous red sky a stream of dark clouds, in all shapes and kinds, hurried over the Carpathian mountains, and when we went to bed a full moon cast the queerest shadows through the tossing branches” (“Danube,” p. 426).
16 AB was fascinated by the concept of elementals, or entities symbolizing or embodying one of the four elements of medieval cosmology (earth, air, fire, and water) or more loosely representing other terrestrial phenomena. “The Nemesis of Fire” (in JS) is about a fire elemental; “The Wendigo” (see notes below, p. 362) is about an elemental that might possibly represent air or fire, but more generally symbolizes the call of the wilderness; “The Glamour of the Snow” (see notes below, p. 365) is about an ice elemental; “May Day Eve” (in L) involves a man encountering a succession of elementals.
17 AB and Wilfrid Wilson had difficulty procuring and preserving meat (aside from bacon) during their voyage on the Danube, so that their meals tended to be largely vegetarian: “New potatoes, dried prunes, and onions in the stew-pot were points of light in a gusty and otherwise dismal meal” (“Danube,” p. 420).
18 In a somewhat less bizarre incident early in their journey, AB and Wilson, inadvertently camping on private property near Ulm, were told by the owner: “Then you may sleep here if you go on again to-morrow; but don’t go into the woods after game” (“Danube,” p. 357).
19 On several occasions during AB’s Danube trip, his nights or early mornings were disturbed by prowlers, both human and animal: “During the night someone prowled about the tent. We heard twigs snapping and the footsteps among the bushes; but neither of us troubled ourselves to get up” (“Danube,” p. 357); “One morning . . . about six o’clock we heard someone rummaging among our pans. Then something stumbled heavily against the tent, and there was a sound of many feet and an old familiar smell. We rushed out, to find ourselves in the centre of a herd of about fifty cows” (“Danube,” p. 423).
20 Shortly after leaving Vienna, AB and Wilson’s canoe did in fact suffer damage when it wa
s swept into the current: “The bows of the canoe . . . were completely smashed in” (“Danube,” p. 425). But a carpenter repaired the boat and in three hours they resumed their journey.
21 In New York AB befriended Dr. Otto Huebner, who introduced AB to the concept of the fourth dimension: “His exposition of a fourth dimension always delighted me. That the universe, indeed, was really four-dimensional, and that all we perceived of it was that sectional aspect, a portion as it were, that is projected into our three-dimensional world, was a theme that positively made him red in the face” (EBT 145).
22 “At Komorn, rising with its fortress just above the dead level of the plain, we laid in provisions. . . . In the afternoon we came to Gran. The dome of its huge Italian basilica dominates for miles the plain we had just traversed, but looks like a round gleaming pebble beside the mountains that rise behind it. The charms of this quaint little town made us realise that time is after all but a form of thought; in other words, we stayed too long” (“Danube,” pp. 427-28).
23 “I have often felt—wondered, rather . . . whether there might be other systems of evolution besides humanity.” The Human Chord (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 52.
THE INSANITY OF JONES
This story was first published in L; no prior periodical publication has been located. It is the first of many tales and novels by AB to deal with the theme of reincarnation; the first may have been “The House of the Past” (1904; reprinted in TMS), whose basic plot AB has reworked here. AB believed that he himself was the reincarnation of an American Indian medicine man (see EBT 60). See his essay “On Reincarnation,” Aryan Path 1, no. 1 (March 1930): 155-58. The title of this tale is of course ironic, for Jones’s (and AB’s) belief in reincarnation is meant to be accepted implicitly by the reader, and the events of the tale are designed to confirm it; hence Jones’s “insanity” is, for AB, really a higher kind of sanity. The blandness of Jones’s name suggests the ubiquity of reincarnation: we are all reincarnated souls, whether we are aware of it or not. AB’s most exhaustive, but perhaps not most effective, treatment of the reincarnation theme occurs in the novel The Wave (1916), which similarly displays a group of three reincarnated souls who re-create a scenario from the distant past.
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