The Algernon Blackwood Collection

by Algernon Blackwood

  And the incoherence of the latter part had almost bored him. For it was, he easily divined, a studied incoherence. It was meant to touch a similar weakness in himself—if there. But it was not there. He saw through the whole manoeuvre. Stahl wished to warn and save him by showing that the experience they had partly shared was nothing but a strange mental disorder. He wished to force in this subtle way his own interpretation of it upon his friend. Yet at the same time the intuitive Irishman discerned that other tendency in the man which would so gladly perhaps have welcomed a different explanation, and even in some fashion did actually accept it.

  O’Malley smiled inwardly as he watched him prepare the coffee as of old. And patiently he waited for the rest that was to come. In a certain sense it all was useful. It would be helpful later. This was an attitude he would often have to face when he returned to civilized life and tried to tell his Message to the thinking, educated men of today—the men he must win over somehow to his dream—the men, without whose backing, no Movement could hope to meet with even a measure of success.

  “So, like myself,” said Stahl, as he carefully tended the flame of the spirit-lamp between them, “you have escaped by the skin of your teeth, as it were. And I congratulate you—heartily.”

  “I thank you,” said the other dryly.

  “You write your version now, and I’ll write mine—indeed it is already almost finished—then we’ll compare notes. Perhaps we might even publish them together.”

  He poured out the fragrant coffee. They faced each other across the little table. But O’Malley did not take the bait. He wished to hear the balance his companion still might tell.

  And presently he asked for it.

  “With the discharge of your patient the trouble ceased at once, then?”

  “Comparatively soon. It gradually subsided, yes.”

  “And as regards yourself?”

  “I came back to my senses. I recovered my control. The insubordinate impulses I had known retired.” He smiled as he sipped his coffee. “You see me now,” he added, looking his companion steadily in the eyes, “a sane and commonplace ship’s doctor.”

  “I congratulate you—”

  “Vielen Dank.“ He bowed.

  “On what you missed, yet almost accomplished,” the other finished. “You might have known, like me, the cosmic consciousness! You might have met the gods!”

  “In a strait-waistcoat,” the doctor added with a snap.

  They laughed at one another across their coffee cups as once before they had laughed across their glasses of Kakhetian wine—two eternally antagonistic types that will exist as long as life itself.

  But, contrary to his expectations, the German had little more to tell. He mentioned how the experience had led his mind into strange and novel reading in his desire to know what other minds might have to offer by way of explanation, even the most fanciful and far-fetched. He told, though very briefly, how he had picked up Fechner among others, and carefully studied his “poetic theories,” and read besides the best accounts of “spiritistic” phenomena, as also of the rarer states of hysteria, double-consciousness, multiple personality, and even those looser theories which suggest that a portion of the human constitution called “astral” or “etheric” may escape from the parent center and, carrying with it the subtler forces of desire and yearning, construct a vivid subjective state of mind which is practically its Heaven of hope and longing all fulfilled.

  He did not, however, betray the results upon himself of all this curious reading and study, nor mention what he found of truth or probability in it all. He merely quoted books and authors, in at least three languages, that stretched in a singular and catholic array from Plato and the Neo-Platonists across the ages to Myers, Du Prel, Flournoy, Lodge, and Morton Prince.

  Out of the lot, perhaps,—O’Malley gathered it by inference rather than from actual statement, from fragments of their talks upon the outward voyage more than from anything let fall just then—Fechner had proved the most persuasive to this man’s contradictory and original mind. It certainly seemed, at least, as if he knew some secret sympathetic leaning toward the idea that consciousness and matter were inseparable, and that a Cosmic Consciousness “of sorts” might pertain to the Earth as, equally, to all the other stars and planets. The Urwelt idea he so often referred to had seized a part of his imagination—that, at least, was clear.

  The Irishman drank it all in, but he was too exhausted now to argue, and too full besides to ask questions. His natural volubility forsook him. He let the doctor have his say without interruptions. He took the warnings with the rest of it. Nothing the other said had changed him.

  It was not the first sunrise they had watched together, and as they took the morning air on deck once more, Corsica rising like a dream the night had left behind her on the sea, he listened with fainter interest to the German’s concluding sentences.

  “At any rate you now understand why on that other voyage I was so eager to watch you with your friend, so keen to separate you, to prevent your sleeping with him, and at the same time so desirous to see his influence upon you at close quarters; and also—why I always understood so well what was going on both outwardly and within.”

  O’Malley quietly reiterated the belief he still held in the power of his own dream.

  “I shall go home and give my message to the world,” was what he said quietly. “I think it’s true.”

  “It’s better to keep silent,” was the answer, “for, even if true, the world is not ready yet to listen. It will evaporate, you’ll find, in the telling. You’ll find there’s nothing to tell. Besides, a dream like yours must dawn on all at once, and not on merely one. No one will understand you.”

  “I can but try.”

  “You will reach no men of action; and few of intellect. You will merely stuff the dreamers who are already stuffed enough. What is the use, I ask you? What is the use?”

  “It will set the world on fire for simplicity,” the other murmured, knowing the great sweet passion flame within him as he watched the sun come slowly out of the rosy sea. “All the use in the world.”

  “None,” was the laconic answer.

  “They might know the gods!” cried O’Malley, using the phrase that symbolized for him the entire Vision.

  Stahl looked at him for some time before he spoke. Again that expression of wistful, almost longing admiration shone in the brown eyes.

  “My friend,” he answered gravely, “men do not want to know the gods. They prefer their delights less subtle. They crave the cruder physical sensations that bang them toward excitement—”

  “Of disease, of pain, of separateness,” put in the other.

  The German shrugged his shoulders. “It’s the stage they’re at,” he said. “You, if you have success, will merely make a few uncomfortable. The majority will hardly turn their heads. To one in a million you may bring peace and happiness.”

  “It’s worth it,” cried the Irishman, “even for that one!”

  Stahl answered very gently, smiling with his new expression of tenderness and sympathy. “Dream your great dream if you will, but dream it, my friend, alone—in peace and silence. That ‘one’ I speak of is yourself.”

  The doctor pressed his hand and turned toward his cabin. O’Malley stood a little longer to share the sunrise. Neither spoke another word. He heard the door shut softly behind him. The unspoken answer in his mind was in two words—two common little adjectives: “Coward and selfish!”

  But Stahl, once in the privacy of his cabin, judging by the glance visible on his face ere he closed the door, may probably have known a very different thought. And possibly he uttered it below his breath. A sigh most certainly escaped his lips, a sigh half sadness, half relief. For O’Malley remembered it afterwards.

  “Beautiful, foolish dreamer among men! But, thank God, harmless—to others and—himself.”

  And soon afterwards O’Malley also went to his cabin. Before sleep took him he lay deep in a mood o
f sadness—almost as though he had heard his friend’s unspoken thought. He realized the insuperable difficulties that lay before him. The world would think him “mad but harmless.”

  Then, with full sleep, he slipped across that sunrise and found the old-world Garden. He held the eternal password.

  “I can but try…!”

  XLV

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  AND HERE THE CROWDED, MUDDLED notebooks come to an end. The rest was action—and inevitable disaster.

  The brief history of O’Malley’s mad campaign may be imagined. To a writer who found interest in the study of forlorn hopes and their leaders, a detailed record of this particular one might seem worth while. For me personally it is too sad and too pathetic. I cannot bring myself to tell, much less to analyze the story of a broken heart, when that heart and story are those of a close and deeply admired intimate, a man who gave me genuine love and held my own.

  Besides, although a curious chapter in uncommon human nature, it is not by any means a new one. It is the true story of many a poet and dreamer since the world began, though perhaps not often told nor even guessed. And only the poets themselves, especially the little poets who cannot utter half the fire that consumes them, may know the searing pain and passion and the true inwardness of it all.

  Most of those months it chanced I was away, and only fragments of the foolish enterprise could reach me. But nothing, I think, could have stopped him, nor any worldly selfish wisdom made him even pause. The thing possessed him utterly; it had to flame its way out as best it could. To high and low, he preached by every means in his power the Simple Life; he preached the mystical life as well—that the true knowledge and the true progress are within, that they both pertain to the inner being and have no chief concern with external things. He preached it wildly, lopsidedly, in or out of season, knowing no half measures. His enthusiasm obscured his sense of proportion and the extravagance hid the germ of truth that undeniably lay in his message.

  To put the movement on its feet at first he realized every possession that he had. It left him penniless, if he was not almost so already, and in the end it left him smothered beneath the glory of his blinding and unutterable Dream. He never understood that suggestion is more effective than a sledge-hammer. His faith was no mere little seed of mustard, but a full-fledged forest singing its message in a wind of thunder. He shouted it aloud to the world.

  I think the acid disappointment that lies beneath that trite old phrase “a broken heart” was never really his; for indeed it seemed that his cruel, ludicrous failure merely served to strengthen hope and purpose by making him seek for a better method of imparting what he had to say. In the end he learned the bitter lesson to the full. But faith never trailed a single feather. Those jeering audiences in the Park; those empty benches in many a public hall, those brief, ignoring paragraphs in the few newspapers that filled a vacant corner by labeling him crank and long-haired prophet; even the silence that greeted his pamphlets, his letters to the Press, and all the rest, hurt him for others rather than for himself. His pain was altruistic, never personal. His dream and motive, his huge, unwieldy compassion, his genuine love for humanity, all were big enough for that.

  And so, I think, he missed the personal mortification that disappointment so deep might bring to dreamers with an aim less unadulteratedly pure. His eye was single to the end. He attributed only the highest motives to all who offered help. The very quacks and fools who flocked to his banner, eager to exploit their smaller fads by joining them to his own, he welcomed, only regretting that, as Stahl had warned him, he could not attract a better class of mind. He did not even see through the manoeuvres of the occasional women of wealth and title who sought to conceal their own mediocrity by advertising in their drawing-rooms the eccentricities of men like himself. And to the end he had the courage of his glorious convictions.

  The change of method that he learned at last, moreover, was characteristic of this faith and courage.

  “I’ve begun at the wrong end,” he said; “I shall never reach men through their intellects. Their brains today are occupied by the machine-made gods of civilization. I cannot change the direction of their thoughts and lusts from outside; the momentum is too great to stop that way. I must get at them from within. To reach their hearts, the new ideas must rise up from within. I see the truer way. I must do it from the other side. It must come to them—in Beauty.”

  For he was to the last convinced that death would merge him in the being of the Earth’s Collective Consciousness, and that, lost in her deep eternal beauty, he thus might reach the hearts of men in some stray glimpse of nature’s loveliness, and register his flaming message. He loved to quote from Adonais:

  “He is made one with Nature: there is heard

  His voice in all her music, from the moan

  Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;

  He is a presence to be felt and known

  In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,

  Spreading itself where’er that Power may move

  Which has withdrawn his being to its own.

  He is a portion of the loveliness

  Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear

  His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress

  Sweeps through the dull dense world…”

  And this thought, phrased in a dozen different ways, was always on his lips. To dream was right and useful, even to dream alone, because the beauty of the dream must add to the beauty of the Whole of which it is a part and an interpretation. It was not really lost or vain. All must come back in time to feed the world. He had known gracious thoughts of Earth too big to utter, almost too big to hold. Such thoughts could not ever be really told; they were incommunicable. For the mystical revelation is incommunicable. It has authority only for him who feels it. A corporate revelation is impossible. Only those among men could know, in whose hearts it rose intuitively and made its presence felt as innate ideas. Inspiration brings it, and beauty is the vehicle. Their hearts must change before their minds could be reached.

  “I can work it better from the other side—from that old, old Garden which is the Mother’s heart. In this way I can help at any rate…!”

  XLVI

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  IT WAS AT THE CLOSE of a wet and foggy autumn that we met again, winter in the air, all London desolate; and his wasted, forlorn appearance told me the truth at once. Only the passionate eagerness of voice and manner were there to prove that the spirit had not weakened. There glowed within a fire that showed itself in the translucent shining of the eyes and face.

  “I’ve made one great discovery, old man,” he exclaimed with old, familiar, high enthusiasm, “one great discovery at least.”

  “You’ve made so many,” I answered cheerfully, while my real thoughts were busy with his bodily state of health. For his appearance shocked me. He stood among a litter of papers, books, neckties, nailed boots, knapsacks, maps and what-not, that rolled upon the floor from the mouth of the Willesden canvas sack. His old grey flannel suit hung literally upon a bag of bones; all the life there was seemed concentrated in his face and eyes—those far-seeing, light blue eyes. They were darker than usual now, eyes like the sea, I thought. His hair, long and disordered, tumbled over his forehead. He was pale, and at the same time flushed. It was almost a disembodied spirit that I saw.

  “You’ve made so many. I love to hear them. Is this one finer than the others?”

  He looked a moment at me through and through, almost uncannily. He looked in reality beyond me. It was something else he saw, and in the dusk I turned involuntarily.

  “Simpler,” he said quickly, “much simpler.”

  He moved up close beside me, whispering. Was it all imagination that a breath of flowers came with him? There was certainly a curious fragrance in the air, wild and sweet like orchards in the spring.

  “And it is—?”

  “That the Garden’s everywhere! You needn’t go to
the distant Caucasus to find it. It’s all about this old London town, and in these foggy streets and dingy pavements. It’s even in this cramped, undusted room. Now at this moment, while that lamp flickers and the thousands go to sleep. The gates of horn and ivory are here,” he tapped his breast. “And here the flowers, the long, clean open hills, the giant herd, the nymphs, the sunshine and the gods!”

  So attached was he now to that little room in Paddington where his books and papers lay, that when the curious illness that had caught him grew so much worse, and the attacks of the nameless fever that afflicted him turned serious, I hired a bedroom for him in the same house. And it was in that poky, cage-like den he breathed his last.

  His illness I called curious, his fever nameless, because they really were so and puzzled every one. He simply faded out of life, it seemed; there was no pain, no sleeplessness, no suffering of any physical kind. He uttered no complaint, nor were there symptoms of any known disorder.

  “Your friend is sound organically,” the doctor told me when I pressed him for the truth there on the stairs, “sound as a bell. He wants the open air and plenty of wholesome food, that’s all. His body is ill-nourished. His trouble is mental—some deep and heavy disappointment doubtless. If you can change the current of his thoughts, awaken interest in common things, and give him change of scene, perhaps—” He shrugged his shoulders and looked very grave.

  “You think he’s dying?”

  “I think, yes, he is dying.”

  “From—?”

  “From lack of living pure and simple,” was the answer. “He has lost all hold on life.”

  “He has abundant vitality still.”

  “Full of it. But it all goes—elsewhere. The physical organism gets none of it.”

  “Yet mentally,” I asked, “there’s nothing actually wrong?”

  “Not in the ordinary sense. The mind is clear and active. So far as I can test it, the process of thought is healthy and undamaged. It seems to me—”