The Algernon Blackwood Collection

by Algernon Blackwood

  He hesitated a moment on the doorstep while the driver wound the motor handle. I waited with a sinking heart for the rest of the sentence.

  “…like certain cases of nostalgia I have known—very rare and very difficult to deal with. Acute and vehement nostalgia, yes, sometimes called a broken heart,” he added, pausing another instant at the carriage door, “in which the entire stream of a man’s inner life flows to some distant place, or person, or—or to some imagined yearning that he craves to satisfy.”

  “To a dream?”

  “It might be even that,” he answered slowly, stepping in. “It might be spiritual. The religious and poetic temperament are most open to it, and the most difficult to deal with when afflicted.” He emphasized the little word as though the doubt he felt was far less strong than the conviction he only half concealed. “If you would save him, try to change the direction of his thoughts. There is nothing—in all honesty I must say it—nothing that I can do to help.”

  And then, pulling at the grey tuft on his chin and looking keenly at me a moment over his glasses,—"Those flowers,” he said hesitatingly, “you might move those flowers from the room, perhaps. Their perfume is a trifle strong … It might be better.” Again he looked sharply at me. There was an odd expression in his eyes. And in my heart there was an odd sensation too, so odd that I found myself bereft a moment of any speech at all, and when my tongue became untied, the carriage was already disappearing down the street. For in that dingy sick-room there were no flowers at all, yet the perfume of woods and fields and open spaces had reached the doctor too, and obviously perplexed him.

  “Change the direction of his thoughts!” I went indoors, wondering how any honest and even half-unselfish friend, knowing what I knew, could follow such advice. With what but the lowest motive, of keeping him alive for my own happiness, could I seek to change his thoughts of some imagined joy and peace to the pain and sordid facts of an earthly existence that he loathed?

  But when I turned I saw the tousled yellow-headed landlady standing in the breach. Mrs. Heath stopped me in the hall to inquire whether I could say “anythink abart the rent per’aps?” Her manner was defiant. I found three months were owing.

  “It’s no good arsking ‘im,” she said, though not unkindly on the whole. “I’m sick an’ tired of always being put off. He talks about the gawds and a Mr. Pan, or some such gentleman who he says will look after it all. But I never sees ‘im—not this Mr. Pan. And his stuff up there,” jerking her head toward the little room, “ain’t worth a Sankey-moody ‘ymn-book, take the lot of it at cost!”

  I reassured her. It was impossible to help smiling. For some minds, I reflected, a Sankey hymn-book might hold dreams that were every bit as potent as his own, and far less troublesome. But that “Mr. Pan, or some such gentleman” should serve as a “reference” between lodger and landlady was an unwitting comment on the modern point of view that made me want to cry rather than to laugh. O’Malley and Mrs. Heath between them had made a profounder criticism than they knew.

  * * * * *

  And so by slow degrees he went, leaving the outer fury for the inner peace. The center of consciousness gradually shifted from the transient form which is the true ghost, to the deeper, permanent state which is the eternal reality. For this was how he phrased it to me in one of our last, strange talks. He watched his own withdrawal.

  In bed he would lie for hours with fixed and happy eyes, staring apparently at nothing, the expression on his face quite radiant. The pulse sank often dangerously low; he scarcely seemed to breathe; yet it was never complete unconsciousness or trance. My voice, when I found the heart to try and coax his own for speech, would win him back. The eyes would then grow dimmer, losing their happier light, as he turned to the outer world to look at me.

  “The pull is so tremendous now,” he whispered; “I was far, so far away, in the deep life of Earth. Why do you bring me back to all these little pains? I can do nothing here; there I am of use…”

  He spoke so low I had to bend my head to catch the words. It was very late at night and for hours I had been watching by his side. Outside an ugly yellow fog oppressed the town, but about him like an atmosphere I caught again that fragrance as of trees and flowers. It was too faint for any name—that fugitive, mild perfume one meets upon bare hills and round the skirts of forests. It was somehow, I fancied, in the very breath.

  “Each time the effort to return is greater. In there I am complete and full of power. I can work and send my message back so splendidly. Here,” he glanced down at his wasted body with a curious smile, “I am only on the fringe—it’s pain and failure. All so ineffective.”

  That other look came back into the eyes, more swiftly than before.

  “I thought you might like to speak, to tell me—something,” I said, keeping the tears with difficulty from my voice. “Is there no one you would like to see?”

  He shook his head slowly, and gave the peculiar answer:

  “They’re all in there.”

  “But Stahl, perhaps—if I could get him here?”

  An expression of gentle disapproval crossed his face, then melted softly into a wistful tenderness as of a child.

  “He’s not there—yet,” he whispered, “but he will come too in the end. In sleep, I think, he goes there even now.”

  “Where are you really then?” I ventured, “And where is it you go to?”

  The answer came unhesitatingly; there was no doubt or searching.

  “Into myself, my real and deeper self, and so beyond it into her—the

  Earth. Where all the others are—all, all, all.”

  And then he frightened me by sitting up in bed abruptly. His eyes stared past me—out beyond the close confining walls. The movement was so startling with its suddenness and vigor that I shrank back a moment. The head was sideways. He was intently listening.

  “Hark!” he whispered. “They are calling me! Do you hear…?”

  The look of joy that broke over the face like sunshine made me hold my breath. Something in his low voice thrilled me beyond all I have ever known. I listened too. Only the rumble of the traffic down the distant main street broke the silence, the rattle of a nearer cart, and the footsteps of a few pedestrians. No other noises came across the night. There was no wind. Thick yellow fog muffled everything.

  “I hear nothing,” I answered softly. “What is it that you hear?”

  And, making no reply, he presently lay down again among the pillows, that look of joy and glory still upon his face. It lay there to the end like sunrise.

  The fog came in so thickly through the window that I rose to close it. He never closed that window, and I hoped he would not notice. For a sound of wretched street-music was coming nearer—some beggar playing dismally upon a penny whistle—and I feared it would disturb him. But in a flash he was up again.

  “No, no!” he cried, raising his voice for the first time that night. “Do not shut it. I shan’t be able to hear then. Let all the air come in. Open it wider… wider! I love that sound!”

  “The fog—”

  “There is no fog. It’s only sun and flowers and music. Let them in. Don’t you hear it now?” he added. And, more to bring him peace than anything else, I bowed my head to signify agreement. For the last confusion of the mind, I saw, was upon him, and he made the outer world confirm some imagined detail of his inner dream. I drew the sash down lower, covering his body closely with the blankets. He flung them off impatiently at once. The damp and freezing night rushed in upon us like a presence. It made me shudder, but O’Malley only raised himself upon one elbow to taste it better, and—to listen.

  Then, waiting patiently for the return of the quiet, trance-like state when I might cover him again, I moved toward the window and looked out. The street was empty, save for that beggar playing vilely on his penny whistle. The wretch came to a standstill immediately before the house. The lamplight fell from the room upon his tattered, broken figure. I could not see his face. He groped
and felt his way.

  Outside that homeless wanderer played his penny pipe in the night of cold and darkness.

  Inside the Dreamer listened, dreaming of his gods and garden, his great Earth Mother, his visioned life of peace and simple things with a living Nature…

  And I felt somehow that player watched us. I made an angry sign to him to go. But it was the sudden touch upon my arm that made me turn round with such a sudden start that I almost cried aloud. O’Malley in his night-clothes stood close against me on the floor, slight as a spirit, eyes a-shine, lips moving faintly into speech through the most wonderful smile a human face has ever shown me.

  “Do not send him away,” he whispered, joy breaking from him like a light, “but tell him that I love it. Go out and thank him. Tell him I hear and understand, and say that I am coming. Will you…?”

  Something within me whirled. It seemed that I was lifted from my feet a moment. Some tide of power rushed from his person to my own. The room was filled with blinding light. But in my heart there rose a great emotion that combined tears and joy and laughter all at once.

  “The moment you are back in bed,” I heard my voice like one speaking from a distance, “I’ll go—”

  The momentary, wild confusion passed as suddenly as it came. I remember he obeyed at once. As I bent down to tuck the clothes about him, that fragrance as of flowers and open spaces rose about my bending face like incense—bewilderingly sweet.

  And the next second I was standing in the street. The man who played upon the pipe, I saw, was blind. His hand and fingers were curiously large.

  I was already close, ready to press all that my pockets held into his hand—ay, and far more than merely pockets held because O’Malley said he loved the music—when something made me turn my head away. I cannot say precisely what it was, for first it seemed a tapping at the window of his room behind me, and then a little noise within the room itself, and next—more curious than either,—a feeling that something came out rushing past me through the air. It whirled and shouted as it went…

  I only remember clearly that in the very act of turning, and while my look still held that beggar’s face within the field of vision, I saw the sightless eyes turn bright a moment as though he opened them and saw. He did most certainly smile; to that I swear.

  But when I turned again the street immediately about me was empty.

  The beggar-man was gone.

  And down the pavement, moving swiftly through the curtain of fog,

  I saw his vanishing figure. It was large and spreading. In the fringe of

  light the lamp-post gave, its upper edges seemed far above the ground.

  Someone else was with him. There were two figures.

  I heard that sound of piping far away. It sounded faint and almost flute-like in the air. And in the mud at my feet the money lay—spurned utterly. I heard the last coins ring upon the pavement as they settled. But in the room, when I got back, the body of Terence O’Malley had ceased to breathe.

  JIMBO: A FANTASY

  ..................

  CHAPTER I: “RABBITS”

  ..................

  JIMBO’S GOVERNESS OUGHT TO HAVE known better—but she didn’t. If she had, Jimbo would never have met with the adventures that subsequently came to him. Thus, in a roundabout sort of way, the child ought to have been thankful to the governess; and perhaps, in a roundabout sort of way, he was. But that comes at the far end of the story, and is doubtful at best; and in the meanwhile the child had gone through his suffering, and the governess had in some measure expiated her fault; so that at this stage it is only necessary to note that the whole business began because the Empty House happened to be really an Empty House—not the one Jimbo’s family lived in, but another of which more will be known in due course.

  Jimbo’s father was a retired Colonel, who had married late in life, and now lived all the year round in the country; and Jimbo was the youngest child but one. The Colonel, lean in body as he was sincere in mind, an excellent soldier but a poor diplomatist, loved dogs, horses, guns and riding-whips. He also really understood them. His neighbours, had they been asked, would have called him hard-headed, and so far as a soft-hearted man may deserve the title, he probably was. He rode two horses a day to hounds with the best of them, and the stiffer the country the better he liked it. Besides his guns, dogs and horses, he was also very fond of his children. It was his hobby that he understood them far better than his wife did, or than any one else did, for that matter. The proper evolution of their differing temperaments had no difficulties for him. The delicate problems of child-nature, which defy solution by nine parents out of ten, ceased to exist the moment he spread out his muscular hand in a favourite omnipotent gesture and uttered some extraordinarily foolish generality in that thunderous, good-natured voice of his. The difficulty for himself vanished when he ended up with the words, “Leave that to me, my dear; believe me, I know best!” But for all else concerned, and especially for the child under discussion, this was when the difficulty really began.

  Since, however, the Colonel, after this chapter, mounts his best hunter and disappears over a high hedge into space so far as our story is concerned, any further delineation of his wholesome but very ordinary type is unnecessary.

  One winter’s evening, not very long after Christmas, the Colonel made a discovery. It alarmed him a little; for it suggested to his cocksure mind that he did not understand all his children as comprehensively as he imagined.

  Between five o’clock tea and dinner—that magic hour when lessons were over and the big house was full of shadows and mystery—there came a timid knock at the study door.

  “Come in,” growled the soldier in his deepest voice, and a little girl’s face, wreathed in tumbling brown hair, poked itself hesitatingly through the opening.

  The Colonel did not like being disturbed at this hour, and everybody in the house knew it; but the spell of Christmas holidays was still somehow in the air, and the customary order was not yet fully re-established. Moreover, when he saw who the intruder was, his growl modified itself into a sort of common sternness that yet was not cleverly enough simulated to deceive the really intuitive little person who now stood inside the room.

  “Well, Nixie, child, what do you want now?”

  “Please, father, will you—we wondered if——”

  A chorus of whispers issued from the other side of the door:

  “Go on, silly!”

  “Out with it!”

  “You promised you would, Nixie.”

  “... if you would come and play Rabbits with us?” came the words in a desperate rush, with laughter not far behind.

  The big man with the fierce white moustaches glared over the top of his glasses at the intruders as if amazed beyond belief at the audacity of the request.

  “Rabbits!” he exclaimed, as though the mere word ought to have caused an instant explosion. “Rabbits!”

  “Oh, please do.”

  “Rabbits at this time of night!” he repeated. “I never heard of such a thing. Why, all good rabbits are asleep in their holes by now. And you ought to be in yours too by rights, I’m sure.”

  “We don’t sleep in holes, father,” said the owner of the brown hair, who was acting as leader.

  “And there’s still a nour before bedtime, really,” added a voice in the rear.

  The big man slowly put his glasses down and looked at his watch. He looked very savage, but of course it was all pretence, and the children knew it. “If he was really cross he’d pretend to be nice,” they whispered to each other, with merciless perception.

  “Well—” he began. But he who hesitates, with children, is lost. The door flung open wide, and the troop poured into the room in a medley of long black legs, flying hair and outstretched hands. They surrounded the table, swarmed upon his big knees, shut his stupid old book, tried on his glasses, kissed him, and fell to discussing the game breathlessly all at once, as though it had already begun.

 
; This, of course, ended the battle, and the big man had to play the part of the Monster Rabbit in a wonderful game of his own invention. But when, at length, it was all over, and they were gathered panting round the fire of blazing logs in the hall, the Monster Rabbit—the only one with any breath at his command—looked up and spoke.

  “Where’s Jimbo?” he asked.

  “Upstairs.”

  “Why didn’t he come and play too?”

  “He didn’t want to.”

  “Why? What’s he doing?”

  Several answers were forthcoming.

  “Nothing in p’tickler.”

  “Talking to the furniture when I last saw him.”

  “Just thinking, as usual, or staring in the fire.”

  None of the answers seemed to satisfy the Monster Rabbit, for when he kissed them a little later and said good-night, he gave orders, with a graver face, for Jimbo to be sent down to the study before he went to bed. Moreover, he called him “James,” which was a sure sign of parental displeasure.

  “James, why didn’t you come and play with your brothers and sisters just now?” asked the Colonel, as a dreamy-eyed boy of about eight, with a mop of dark hair and a wistful expression, came slowly forward into the room.

  “I was in the middle of making pictures.”

  “Where—what—making pictures?”

  “In the fire.”

  “James,” said the Colonel in a serious tone, “don’t you know that you are getting too old now for that sort of thing? If you dream so much, you’ll fall asleep altogether some fine day, and never wake up again. Just think what that means!”

  The child smiled faintly and moved up confidingly between his father’s knees, staring into his eyes without the least sign of fear. But he said nothing in reply. His thoughts were far away, and it seemed as if the effort to bring them back into the study and to a consideration of his father’s words was almost beyond his power.

  “You must run about more,” pursued the soldier, rubbing his big hands together briskly, “and join your brothers and sisters in their games. Lie about in the summer and dream a bit if you like, but now it’s winter, you must be more active, and make your blood circulate healthily,—er—and all that sort of thing.”