“To give you the truth,” resumed his assistant, “and all question of who is right or who is wrong aside, I tell you frankly I am not sure. I confess myself up against it.
It er gives me the creeps a little “ He laughed awkwardly. That swift watchful look, as of a man who plays a part, flashed and vanished.
“Your feeling, anyhow?” insisted his friend. “Your general feeling?”
“A general judgment based on general feeling,” said the other in a quiet tone, “has little value. It is based, necessarily, as you know, upon intuition, which I temperamentally dislike. It has no facts to go upon. I distrust generalizations.” He took a deep breath, inhaled a lot of smoke, exhaled it with relief, and made an effort. It went against the grain in him to be caught without an explanation.
“‘N.H.’ in my opinion, and so far as my limited observation of him —”
Fillery allowed himself a laugh of amused impatience. “Leave out the personal extras for once, and burn your bridges. Tell me finally what you think about ‘N.H.’ We’re not scoring points now.”
Thus faced with an alternative, Devonham found his sense of humour again and forgot himself. It cost him an effort, but he obeyed the bigger and less personal mind.
“I really don’t know exactly what he is,” he confessed again. “He puzzles me completely. It may be” he shrugged his shoulders, compelled by his temperament to hedge “that he represents, as I first thought, the content of his parents’ minds, the subsequent addition of Mason’s mind included.”
“That’s possible, usual and comprehensible enough,” put in the doctor, watching him with amused concentration, but with an inner excitement scarcely concealed.
“Or” resumed Devonham, “it may be that through these —”
“Through his mental inheritance from his parents and from Mason, yes —”
“he taps the most primitive stores and layers of racial memory we know. The world-memory, if I dare put it so, full proof being lacking, is open to him —”
“Through his subconscious powers, of course?”
“That is your usual theory, isn’t it? We have there, at any rate, a working hypothesis, with a great mass of evidence generally speaking behind it.”
“Don’t be cynical, Paul. Is this ‘N.H.’ merely a Secondary Personality, or is it the real central self? That’s the whole point.”
“You jump ahead, as usual,” replied Devonham, really smiling for the first lime, though his face instantly grew serious again. “Edward,” he went on, “I do not know, I cannot say, I dare not
“Ah!”
“Of suggestion, let us put it.”
“Of suggestion, yes. Get on with it, there’s a good fellow. I felt myself an extraordinary vitality about him. I noticed it at once at Charing Cross.”
“I saw you did” Devonham looked hard at him. “You were humming to yourself, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” was the surprised reply, “but I can well believe it. I felt a curious pleasure and exhilaration.”
Devonham, shrugging his shoulders slightly, resumed: “During the ‘LeVallon’ periods he is ordinary, though unusually observant, critical and intelligent; during the ‘X. H.’ periods he becomes er super-normal. If you felt this felt anything in the station, it was because something in you called up the ‘N.H.’ aspect”
“It’s quick of you to guess that,” said Fillery, with quick appreciation. “You noticed a change in me, well but the other? He divined my ‘foreign’ blood, you think?”
“It is enough that you responded and felt kinship. Put it that way. ‘N.H.’ seems to me” he took a deeper breath and gave a sort of gasp “in some ways a unique being as I said before.”
“Tell me, if you can,” said Fillery, lighting his own pipe and settling back into his chair, “tell me a little about your first meeting with him in the Jura Mountains, what happened and so forth. I remember, of course, your Notes. After your telegram, I read ’em carefully.” He glanced round at his companion. “They were very honest, Paul, I thought. Eh?” He was unable to refuse himself the pleasure of the little dig. “Honest you always are,” he added. “We couldn’t work together otherwise, could we?”
Devonham, deep in his own thoughts, did not accept the challenge. He turned in his chair, puffing at his pipe,
“I can give you briefly what happened and how things went,” he said. “The place, then, first: an ordinary peasant chalet in a remote Jura valley, difficult of access, situated among what they call the upper pastures. I reached it by diligence and mule late in the afternoon. A peasant in a lower valley directed me, adding that ‘le monsieur anglais’ was dead and buried two days before —”
“Mason, that is?”
The other nodded. “And adding that ‘le fou’”
“LeVallon, of course?”
“would eat me alive at sight. He spoke with respect, however, even awe. He hoped I had come to take him away. The countryside was afraid of him.
“The valley struck me as intolerably lonely, but of unusual beauty. Big forests, great rocks, and tumbling streams among cliffs and pastures made it exceptional. The chalet was simple, clean and comfortable. It was really an ideal spot for a thinker or a student. The first thing I noticed was a fire burning on a pile of rock in front of the building. The sun was setting, and its last rays lit the entire little glen a mere gully between precipices and forest slopes but especially lit up the pile of rocks where the fire burned, so that I saw the smoke, blue, red and yellow, and the figure kneeling before it. This figure was a man, half naked, and of magnificent proportions. When I shouted —”
“You would shout, of course,” Yet he did not say it critically.
“the figure rose and turned and came to meet me.
It was LeVallon.”
Devonham paused a moment. Fillery’s eyes were fixed upon him.
“I admit,” Devonham went on, conscious of the other’s inquiring and intent expression, “I was surprised a bit.” He smiled his faint, unwilling smile. “The figure made me start. I was aware of an emotion I am not subject to what I called just now the creeps. I thought, at last, I had really seen a a vision. He looked so huge, so wonderful, so radiant. It was, of course, the effect of coloured smoke and magnifying sunset, added to his semi-nakedness. To the waist he was stripped. But, at first, his size, his splendour, a kind of radiance borrowed from the sunlight and the fire, seemed to enlarge him beyond human. He seemed to dominate, even to fill the little valley.
“I stood still, uncertain of my feelings. There was, I think, a trace of fear in me. I waited for him to come up to me. He did so. He stretched out a hand. I took it. And what do you think he said?”
Fillery, the inner excitement and delight increasing in him as he listened, stared in silence. There was no lightness in him now.
“‘Are you Fillery?’ That’s what he said, and the first words he uttered. ‘Are you Fillery?’ But spoken in a way I find difficult to reproduce. He made the name sound like a rush of wind. ‘F,’ of course, involves a draught of breath between the teeth, I know. But he made the name sound exactly like a gush of wind through branches that’s the nearest I can get to it,”
“Well and then?”
“Don’t be impatient, Edward. I try to be accurate. But really what happened next is a bit beyond any experience that we I have yet come across. And, as to what I felt well, I was tired, hungry, thirsty. I wanted, normally, rest and food and drink. Yet all these were utterly forgotten. For a moment or two I admit it I felt as if I had come face to face with something not of this earth quite.” He grinned. “A touch of gooseflesh came to me for the first time in my life. The fellow’s size and radiance in the sunlight, the fact that he stood there wor
shipping fire always, to me, the most wonderful of natural phenomena his grandeur and nakedness the way he pronounced your name even all this er upset my judgment for the moment.” He paused again. He hesitated. “A visual hallucination, due to fatigue, can be, of course, very detailed sometimes,” he added, a note of challenge in his tone.
Fillery watched his friend narrowly, as he stumbled among the details of what he evidently found a difficult, almost an impossible description.
“Natural enough,” he put in. “You’d hardly be human yourself if you felt nothing at such a sight.”
“The loneliness, too, increased the effect,” went on the other, “for there was no one nearer than the peasants who had directed me a thousand feet below, nor was there another building of any sort in sight. Anyhow, it seemed, I managed my strange emotions all right, for the young man took to me at once. He left the fire, if reluctantly, singing to himself a sort of low chanting melody, with perhaps five or six notes at most in it, and far from unmusical —”
“He explained the fire? Was he actually worshipping, I mean?”
“It was certainly worship, judging by the expression of his face and his gestures of reverence and happiness. But I asked no questions. I thought it best just to accept, or appear to accept, the whole thing as natural. He said something about the Equinox, but I did not catch it properly and did not ask. This had evidently been taught him. It was, however, the 22nd of September, oddly enough, though the gales had not yet come.”
“So you got into the chalet next?” asked the other, noticing the gaps, the incoherence.
“He put his coat on, sat down with me to a meal of bread and milk and cheese meat there seemed none in the building anywhere. This meal was, if you understand me, obeying a mere habit automatically. He did just what it had been his habit to do with Mason all these years. He got the stuff himself quickly, effectively, no fumbling anywhere and, from that moment, hardly spoke again until we left two days later. I mean that literally. All he said, when I tried to make him talk, was, ‘You are not Fillery,’ or ‘Take me to Fillery. I need him.’
“I almost felt that I was living with some marvellously trained animal, of extraordinary intelligence, gentle, docile, friendly, but unhappy because it had lost its accustomed master. But on the other hand I admit it I was conscious of a certain power in his personality beyond me to explain. That, really, is the best description I can give you.”
“You mentioned the name of Mason?” asked Fillery, avoiding a dozen more obvious and natural questions.
“Several times. But his only reply was a smile, while he repeated the name himself, adding your own after it: ‘Mason Fillery, Mason Fillery,’ he would say, smiling with quiet happiness. ‘I like Fillery!’”
“The nights?”
“Briefly I was glad to see the dawn. We had separate rooms, my own being the one probably where Mason had died a few days before. But it was not that I minded in the least. It was the feeling the knowledge in fact that my companion was up and about all night in the building or out of doors. I heard him moving, singing quietly to himself, the wooden veranda creaked beneath his tread. He was active all through the darkness and cannot have slept at all. When I came down soon after dawn he was running over the slopes a mile away, running towards the chalet, too, with the speed and lightness of a deer. He had been to some height, I think, to see the sun rise and probably to worship it —”
“And your journey? You got him away easily?”
“He was only too ready to leave, for it meant coming to you. I arranged with the peasants below to have the chalet closed up, took my charge to Neuchatel, and thence to Berne, where I bought him an outfit, and arrived in due course, as you know, at Charing Cross.”
“His first sight of cities, people, trains, steamers and the rest, I take it. Any reactions?”
“The troubles I anticipated did not materialize. He came like a lamb, the most helpless and pathetic lamb I ever saw. He stared but asked no questions. I think he was half dazed, even stupefied with it all.”
“Stupefied?”
“An odd word to use, I know. I should have said perhaps ‘automatic’ rather. He was so open to my suggestions, doing what my mind expected him to do, but nothing more ah! with one exception.”
Fillery meant to hear an account of that exception, though the other would willingly have foregone its telling evidently. It was related, Fillery felt sure, to the unusual powers Devonham had mentioned.
“Oh, you shall hear it,” said the latter quickly, “for what it’s worth. There’s no need to exaggerate, of course.” He told it rapidly, accurately, no doubt, because his mind was honest, yet without comment or expression in his voice and face. He supplied no atmosphere.
“I had got him like a lamb, as I told you, to Paris, and it was during the Customs examination the er little thing occurred. The man, searching through his trunk, pulled out a packet of flat papers and opened it. He looked them over with puzzled interest, turning them upside down to examine them from every possible angle. Then he asked a trifle unpleasantly what they were. I hadn’t the smallest idea myself, I had never seen them before; they were very carefully wrapped up. LeVallon, whose sudden excitement increased the official’s interest, told him that they were star-and-weather maps. It doubtless was the truth; he had made them with Mason; but they were queer-looking papers to have at such a time, hidden away, too, at the bottom of the trunk; and LeVallon’s manner and expression did not help to disarm the man’s evident suspicion. He asked a number of pointed questions in a very disagreeable way who made them, for what purpose, how they were used, and whether they were connected with aviation. I translated, of course. I explained their innocence —”
“LeVallon’s excitement?” asked Fillery. “What form did it take? Rudeness, anger, violence of any sort?” He was aware his friend would have liked to shirk these details.
“Nothing of the kind.” He hesitated briefly, then went on. “He behaved, rather, as though well, as a devout Catholic might have behaved if his crucifix or some holy relic were being mauled. The maps were sacred. Symbols possibly. Heaven knows what! He tried to take them back. The official, as a natural result, became still more suspicious and, of course, offensive too. My explanations and expostulations were quite useless, for he didn’t even listen to them.”
Devonham was now approaching the part of the story he least wished to describe. He played for time. He gave details of the ensuing altercation.
“What happened in the end?” Fillery at length interrupted. “What did LeVallon do? There were no arrests, I take it?” he added with a smile.
Paul coughed and fidgeted. He told the literal truth, however.
“LeVallon, after listening for a long time to the conversation he could not understand, suddenly took his fingers off the papers. The man’s dirty hand still held them tightly on the grimy counter. LeVallon began or he suddenly began to breathe well heavily rather.”
“Rhythmically?”
“Heavily,” insisted the other. “In a curious way, anyhow,” he added, determined to keep strictly to the truth, “not unlike Heathcote when he put himself automatically into trance and then told us what was going on at the other end of England. You remember the case.” He paused a moment again, as if to recall exactly what had occurred. “It’s not easy to describe, Edward,” he continued, looking up. “You remember that huge draughty hall where they examine luggage at the Lyons Station. I can’t explain it. But that breathing somehow caught the draughts, used them possibly, in any case increased them. A wind came through the great hall. I can’t explain it,” he repeated, “I can only tell you what happened. That wind most certainly came pouring steadily through, for I felt it myself, and saw it blow upon the fluttering papers. The heat in the salle at the same moment seemed to grow intense. Not an oppressive heat, though. Radiant heat, rather. It felt, I mean, like a fierce sunlight. I looked up, almost expecting to see a great light from which it came. It was then at this very moment the French
man turned as if someone touched him.”
“You felt anything, Paul?”
“Yes,” admitted the other slowly.
Fillery waited.
“A what I must call a thrill.” His voice was lower now.
“Of?” his Chief persisted.
Devonham waited a full ten seconds before reply. He again shrugged his shoulders a little. Apparently he sought his words with honest care that included also intense reluctance and disapproval:
“Loveliness, romance, enchantment; but, above all, I think power.” He ground out the confession slowly. “By power I mean a sort of confidence and happiness.”
“Increase of vitality, call it. Intensification of your consciousness.”
“Possibly. A bigger perspective suddenly, a bigger scale of life; something er a bit wild, but certainly er uncommonly stimulating. The best word, I think, is liberty, perhaps. An immense and careless sense of liberty.” And Fillery, knowing the value of superlatives in Devonham’s cautious mind, felt satisfied. He asked quietly what the official did next.
“Stood stock still at first. Then his face changed; he smiled; he looked up understandingly, sympathetically, at LeVallon. He spoke: ‘My father, too,’ he said with admiration, ‘had a big telescope. Monsieur is an astronomer.’
“‘One of the greatest,’ I added quickly; ‘these charts are of infinite value to France.’ No sense of comedy touched me anywhere, the ludicrous was absent. The man bowed, as carefully, respect in every gesture, he replaced the maps, marked the trunk with his piece of chalk, and let us go, helping in every way he could.”
Devonham drew a long breath, glad that he had relieved himself of his unwelcome duty. He had told the literal truth.
“Of course, of course,” Fillery said, half to himself perhaps, “A breath of bigger consciousness, his imagination touched, the subconscious wakened, and intelligence the natural result.” He turned to his colleague. “Interesting, Paul, very,” he added in a louder tone, “and not easy to explain, I grant. The official we do not know, but you, at any rate, are not a good subject for hypnotic suggestion!”
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 171