This imaginative picture grew upon me, as though in some way I was let into the inner being of that life which prompts all natural movements and hides, securely veiled, in every stock and stone. A new interpretative centre was awake in me. In the movement of wind I was aware of — life. Then, while this subtle perception that an intelligent, directing power lay behind the very air I breathed, a similar report reached me from another, equally elemental, quarter, though it is less easy to describe.
From the sun? Originally, yes — since primarily from the sun emerges all the heat the earth contains. It first stirred definite sensation in me when my eye caught the final gleam upon the turreted walls of vapour where still the sunset stood emblazoned. From that coloured sea of light, and therefore of heat, something flashed in power through me; a vision of running fire broke floodingly above the threshold of my mind, ran into every corner of my being, left its inspiring trail, became part of my very nerves and blood. Consciousness was deepened and intensified.
Yet it was neither common heat I felt nor common flame I pictured, but rather a touch of that primordial and ethereal fire which dwells at the heart of all manifested life — latent heat. For it was neither yellow, red, nor white with any aspect of common flame, but what I can only dare to describe as a fierce, dark splendour, black and shining, yet of intense, incandescent brilliance. The contradictory adjectives catch a ghost of it. Moreover, I was aware of no discomfort, for while it threatened to overwhelm me, the chief effect was to leave a glow, a radiance, an enthusiasm of strengthened will and confidence, combined with a sense of lightning’s power. It was spiritual heat, of which fire is but a physical vehicle. The central fire of the universe burned in my heart.
I realised, in a word, that both elements were vehicles of intelligent and living Agencies. Of their own accord they became active, and natural laws were but their method of activity. They were alert; the valley was alive, combining, cooperating with myself — and taking action.
This was their first exquisite approach. But presently, when I moved away from the window, the sunset clouds grown dark and colourless again, I realised lesser manifestations of this new emotion which may seem more intelligible when I set them down in words. The candle flame, for instance, and the flaring match with which I lit my cigarette seemed not so much to produce fire by a chemical device, as to puncture holes through a curtain into that sea of latent fire that lies in all material things. The breath of air, moreover, that extinguished the flame did not annihilate it, but merged it into the essential being of its own self. The two acted in sympathy together. Both Wind and Fire drew attention to themselves of set intention, insisting upon notice, as if inviting cooperation.
And something leviathan leaped up in me to welcome them. The standing miracle of fire lit up the darkened valley. Pure flame revealed itself suddenly as the soul in me, the eternal part that remembered and grew wise, the deathless part that survived all successive bodies.
And I realised with a shock of comprehension the danger that Julius ran in the evocation that his “experiment” involved: Fire, once kindled, and aided naturally by air, must seek to destroy the prison that confines it....
I remained for some time in my room. My will, my power of choice, seemed taken from me. My life moved with these vaster influences. I argued vehemently with some part of me that still offered a vague resistance. It was the merest child’s play. I figured myself in my London lecture room, explaining to my students the course and growth of the delusion that had captured me. The result was futile; I convinced neither my students nor myself. It was the thinking mind in me that opposed, but it was another thing in me that knew, and this other thing was enormously stronger than the reasoning mind, and overwhelmed it. No amount of arguing could stand against the power of knowledge that had become established in me by feeling-with. I felt-with Nature, especially with her twin elemental powers of wind and fire. And this wisdom of feeling-with dominated my entire being. Denial and argument were merely false.
All that evening this sense of the companionship of
Wind and Fire remained vividly assertive. Everywhere they moved about me. They acted in concert, each assisting the other. I was for ever aware of them; their physical manifestations were as great dumb gestures of two living and intelligent Immensities in Nature. Yet it was only in part, perhaps, I knew them. Their full, amazing power never came to me completely. The absolute realisation that came to Julius in full consciousness was not mine. I shared at most, it seems, a reflected knowledge, seeing what happened as through some lens of half — recovered memory.
Moreover, supper, when I came downstairs to find Julius and his wife already waiting for me, was the most ordinary and commonplace meal imaginable. We talked of the weather! Mrs. LeVallon was light-hearted, almost gay, though I felt it was repressed excitement that drove outwards this trivial aspect of her. But for the fact that all she did now seemed individual and distinguished, her talk and gestures might have scraped acquaintance with mere foolishness. Indeed, our light talk and her irresponsibility added to the sense of reality I have mentioned. It was a mask, and the mask dropped occasionally with incongruous abruptness that was startling.
Such insignificant details revealed the immediate range of the Powers that watched and waited close beside our chairs. That sudden, fixed expression in her eyes, for instance, when the Man brought in certain private papers, handed them to Julius who, after reading them, endorsed them with a modern fountain pen, then passed them on to me! That fountain pen and her accompanying remark — how incongruous and insignificant they were! Both seemed symbolical items in some dwindled, trivial scale of being!
“It isn’t everybody that’s got a professor for a secretary, Julius, is it?”
She said it with her mouth full, her elbows on the table, and only that other look in the watchful eyes seemed to contradict the awkward, untaught body. There was a flash of tenderness and passion in them, a pathetic questioning and wonder, as though she saw in her husband’s act an acknowledgment of dim forebodings in her own deep heart. She appealed, it seemed, to me. Was it that she divined he was already slipping from her, farewells all unsaid, yet that she was — inarticulate?... The entire little scene, the words, the laughter and the look, were but evidence of an attempt to lift the mask. Her choice of words, their accent and pronunciation, that fountain pen, the endorsement, the stupid remark about myself — were all these lifted by those yearning eyes into the tragedy of a fateful goodbye message?...
More significant still, though even less direct, was another moment — when the Man stretched his arm across the table to turn the lamp up. For in this unnecessary act she saw — the intuition came sharply to me — an effect of the approaching Powers upon his untutored soul. The wick was already high enough when, with an abrupt, impulsive movement, he stooped to turn it higher; and instantly Mrs. LeVallon was on her feet, her face first pale, then hotly flushed. She rose as though to strike him, then changed the gesture as if to ward a blow — almost to protect. It was an impetuous, revealing act.
Out of some similar impulse, too, only half understood, I sprang to her assistance.
“There’s light enough,” I exclaimed.
“And heat,” she added quickly. “Good Lord! the room’s that hot, it’s like a furnace!”
She flashed a look of gratitude at me. What exactly was in her mind I cannot know, but in my own was the strange feeling that the less visible fire in the air the better. An expression of perplexed alarm showed itself in the face of the faithful but inarticulate serving man. Unwittingly he had blundered. His distress was acute.
I almost thought he would drop to his knees and ask his mistress’s hand for forgiveness.
Whether Julius perceived all this is hard to say. He looked up calmly, watching us; but the glance he gave, and the fact that he spoke no word, made me think he realised what the energy of her tone and gesture veiled. The desire to assist the increase of heat, of fire — cooperation — had acted upon the phys
ical medium least able to resist — the most primitive system present. The approach of the two Activities affected us, one and all.
There were other incidents of a similar kind before the meal was over, quite ordinary in themselves, yet equally revealing; my interpretation of them due to this enhanced condition of acute perception that pertained to awakening memory. Air and fire accumulated, flake by flake. A kind of radiant heat informed all common objects. It was in our hearts as well. And wind was waiting to blow it into flame.
CHAPTER XXIX
..................
“Not yet are fixed the prison bars;
The hidden light the spirit owns
If blown to Aame would dim the stars
And they who rule them from their thrones:
And the proud sceptred spirits thence
Would bow to pay us reverence.”
— A. E.
It was out of this accumulation of unusual emotion that a slight but significant act of Julius recalled me to the outer world. I was lighting my pipe — from the chimney of the lamp rather than by striking a match — when I overheard him telling the Man that, instead of sitting up as usual, he might go to bed at once. He went off obediently, but with some latent objection, half resentment, half opposition, in his manner. There was a sulkiness as of disappointment in his face. He knew that something unusual was on foot, and he felt that he should by rights be in it — he might be of use, he might be needed. There was this dumb emotion in him, as in a faithful dog who, scenting danger, is not called upon to fight, and so retires growling to his kennel.
He went slowly, casting backward glances, and at the door he turned and caught my eye. I had only to beckon, to raise my hand a moment, to say a word — he would have come running back with a bound into the room. But the gaze of his master was upon him, and he went; and though he may have lain down in his room beyond the kitchen, I felt perfectly sure he did not sleep. His body lay down, but not his excited instincts.
For this dismissal of the Man was, of course, a signal. The three of us were then in that dim-lit peasant’s room — alone; and for a long time in a silence broken only by the sparks escaping from the burning logs upon the hearth, and by the low wind that now went occasionally sighing past the open window. We sat there waiting, not looking at each other, yet each aware of the slightest physical or mental movement. It was an intense and active silence in which deep things were being accomplished; for, if Mrs. LeVallon and myself were negative, I was alert to immense and very positive actions that were going forward in the being of our companion. Julius, sitting quietly with folded hands, his face just beyond the lamp’s first circle of light, was preparing, and with a stress of extreme internal effort that made the silence seem a field of crashing battle. The entire strength of this strange being’s soul, cooperating with Nature, and by methods of very ancient acquirement known fully to himself alone, sought an achievement that should make us act as one. Through two natural elemental powers, fire and wind — both vitally part of us since the body’s birth — we could claim the incalculable support of the entire universe. It was a cosmic act. Ourselves were but the channel. ‘ Later this channel would define itself still more.
Beneath those smoke-stained rafters, as surely as beneath the vaulted roof of some great temple, stepped worship and solemnity. The change came gradually. From the sky above the star-lit valley this grave, tremendous attitude swung down into our hearts. Not alone the isolated chalet, but the world itself contained us, a temple wherein we, insignificant worshippers, knelt before the Universe. For the powers we invoked were not merely earthly powers, but those cosmic energies that drove and regulated even the flocks of stars.
Mrs. LeVallon and I both knew it dimly, as we waited with beating hearts in that great silence. She scarcely moved. Somehow divining the part she had to play, she sat there motionless as a figure in stone, offering no resistance. Her reawakened memory must presently guide us; she knew the importance of her role, and the composure with which she accepted it touched grandeur. Yet each one of us was necessary. If Julius took the leader’s part, her contribution, as my own, were equally essential to success. If the greater risk was his, our own risk was yet not negligible. The elemental Powers would take what channel seemed best available. It was not a personal consideration for us. We were most strangely one.
My own measure of interpretation I have already attempted to describe. Hers I guess intuitively. For we shared each other’s feelings as only love and sympathy know how to share. These feelings now grew steadily in power; and, obeying them, our bodies moved to new positions. We changed our attitudes.
For I remember that while Julius rose and stood beside the table, his wife went quietly from my side and seated herself before the open window, her face turned towards the valley and the night. Instinctively we formed a living triangle, Mrs. LeVallon at the apex. And, though at the time I understood the precise significance of these changes, reading clearly the language they acted out in motion, that discernment is now no longer in me, so that I cannot give the perfect expression of meaning they revealed. Upon Julius, however, some appearance, definite as a robe upon the head and shoulders, proclaimed him a figure of command and somehow, too, of tragedy. It set him in the centre. Close beside me, within the circle of the lamplight, I watched him — so still, so grave, the face of marble pallor, the dark hair tumbling as of old about the temples whereon the effort of intensest concentration made the pulsing veins stand out as thick as cords. Calm as an image he stood there for a period of time I cannot state. Beyond him, in the shadows by the window, his wife’s figure was just visible as she leaned, half reclining, across the wooden sill into the night. There was no sound from the ‘outer valley, there was no sound in the room. Then, suddenly of itself, a change approached. The silence broke.
“Julius...!” came faintly from the window, as Mrs. LeVallon with a sudden gesture drew the curtain to shut out the darkness. She turned towards us. “Julius!” And her voice, using the tone I had heard before when she fled past me up that meadow slope, sounded as from some space beyond the walls. I looked up, my nerves on the alert, for it came to me that she was at the limit of endurance and that something now must break in her.
Julius moved over to her side, while she put her hands out first to welcome him, then half to keep him off. He spoke no word. He took her outstretched hands in both of his, leading her back a little nearer towards the centre of the room.
“Julius,” she whispered, “what frightens me tonight? I’m all a-shiver. There’s something coming? — but what is it? And why do I seem to know, yet not to know?”
He answered her quietly, the voice deep with tenderness:
“We three are here together” — I saw the shining smile I knew of old — “and there is no cause to feel afraid. You are tired with your long, long waiting.” And he meant, I knew, the long fatigue of ages that she apprehended, but did not grasp fully yet. She was Mrs. LeVallon still.
“I’m both hot and cold together, and all oppressed,” she went on; “like a fever it is — icy and yet on fire. I can’t get at myself, to keep it still. Julius... what is it?” The whisper held somehow for me the potentiality of scream. Then, taking his two hands closer, she raised her voice with startling suddenness. “Julius,” she cried, “I know what frightens me — it’s you! What are you tonight?” She looked searchingly a moment into his face. “And what is this thing that’s going to happen to you? I hear it coming nearer — outside” — she moved further from the curtained window with small, rushing steps, looking back across her shoulder — “all down the valley from the mountains, those awful mountains. Oh, Julius, it’s coming — for you — my husband! And for him,” she added, laying her eyes upon me like a flame.
I thought the tears must come, but she held them back, looking appealingly at me, and clutching Julius as though he would slip from her. Then, with a quick movement and a little gust of curious laughter, she clapped her hand upon her mouth to stop the words. Some
thing she meant to say to me was left unspoken, she was ashamed of the momentary weakness. “Mrs. LeVallon” was still uppermost.
“Julius,” she added more softly, “there’s something about tonight I haven’t known since childhood. There’s such heat and — oh, hark!” — she stopped a moment, holding up her finger — “there’s a sound — like riggin’ in the wind. But it ain’t wind. What is it, Julius? And why is that wonderful?”
Yet no sound issued from the quiet valley;, it was as still as death. Even the sighing of the breeze had ceased about the walls.
“If only I understood,” she went on, looking from his face to mine, “if only I knew exactly. It was something,” she added almost to herself, “that used to come to me when I was little — on the farm — and I put it away because it made me” — she whispered the last two words below her breath — “feel crazy ”
“Crazy?” repeated Julius, smiling down at her.
“Like a queen,” she finished proudly, yet still timid. “I couldn’t feel that way and do my work.” And her long lashes lifted, so that the eyes flashed at me across the table. “It made everything seem too easy.”
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 162