The Algernon Blackwood Collection

by Algernon Blackwood

  Meanwhile, Povey, anxious to resume his lecture, made an effort to recover his command of the group-atmosphere which Toogood had disturbed. The latter had a “personal magnetism” which made the women like him in spite of their distrust.

  “I was just saying,” he resumed, patting the elbow of the psychometrist, “that this strange event we’ve been discussing you weren’t present, I believe, at the time, but, of course, you’ve heard about it has features which seem to point to something radically new, or at least of very rare occurrence. As Lattimer mentioned, a human body has never yet, so far as we know, been occupied, obsessed, by a non-human entity, but that, after all, is no reason why it should not ever happen. What is a body, anyhow? What is an entity, too?” Povey’s thought was wandering, evidently; the thread of his first discourse was broken; he floundered. “Man, anyway, is more than a mere chemical machine,” he went on, “a crystallization of the primitive nebulae, though the instrument he uses, the body he works through, is undoubtedly thus describable. Now, we know there are all kinds of non-human intelligences busy on our planet, in the Universe itself as well. Why, then, I ask, should not one of these?”

  He paused, unable to find himself, his confusion obvious. He was as glad of the interruption that was then provided by the arrival of Imson as his audience was. Toogood certainly was not sorry; he need find no immediate answer. He sipped his drink and made mental notes.

  Imson arrived in a rough brown ulster with the collar turned up about his ears, a low flannel shirt, not strictly clean, lying loosely round his neck. His colourless face was of somewhat flabby texture, due probably to his diet, but its simple, honest expression was attractive, the smile engaging. The touch of foolishness might have been child-like innocence, even saintliness some thought, and though he was well over forty, the unlined skin made him look more like thirty. He enjoyed a physiognomy not unlike that of a horse or sheep. His big, brown eyes stared wide open at the world, expecting wonder and finding it. His hobby was inspirational poems. One lay in his breast pocket now. He burned to read it aloud.

  Pat Imson’s ideal was an odd one detachment; the desire to avoid all ties that must bring him back to future incarnations on the earth, to eschew making fresh Karma, in a word. He considered himself an “old soul,” and was rather weary of it all of existence and development, that is. To take no part in life meant to escape from those tangles for whose unravelling the law of rebirth dragged the soul back again and again. To sow no Causes was to have no harvest of Effects to reap with toil and perspiration. Action, of course, there must be, but “indifference to results of action” was the secret. Imson, none the less, was always entangled with wives and children. Having divorced one wife, and been divorced by another, he had recently married a third; a flock of children streamed behind him; he was a good father, if a strange husband.

  “It’s old Karma I have to work off,” he would explain, referring to the wives. “If I avoid the experience I shall only have to come back again. There’s no good shirking old Karma.” He gave this explanation to the wives themselves, not only to his friends. “Face it and it’s done with, worked off, you see.” That is, it had to be done nicely, kindly, generously.

  An entire absence of the sense of humour was, of course, his natural gift, yet a certain quaint wisdom helped to fill the dangerous vacuum. He was known usually as “Pat.”

  “Come on, Pat,” said Povey, making room for him at his side. “How’s Karma? We’re just talking about Le–Vallon and the Studio business. What do you make of it? You were there, weren’t you?” The others listened, attentively, for Imson had a reputation for “seeing true.”

  “I saw it, yes,” replied Imson, ordering his dinner with indifference soup, fried potatoes, salad, cheese and coffee but declining the offered wine. The group waited for his next remark, but none was forthcoming. He sat crumbling his bread into the soup and stirring the mixture with his spoon.

  “Did you see the light about him, Mr. Imson?” asked Miss Lance. “The brilliant aura of golden yellow that he wore? I thought it sounds exaggerated, I know but to me it seemed even brighter than the lightning. Did you notice it?”

  “Well,” said Imson slowly, putting his spoon down. “I’m not often clairvoyant, you know. I did notice, however, a sort of radiance about him. But with hair like that, it’s difficult to be certain —”

  “Full of lovely patterns,” said Mrs. Towzer. “Geometrical patterns.”

  “Like astrological designs,” mentioned Miss Milligan. “He’s Leo, of course fire.”

  “Almost as though he brought or caused the lightning as if it actually emanated out of his atmosphere somehow,” claimed Miss Lance, for it was her conversation after all.

  “I saw nothing of that,” replied Imson quietly. “No, I can’t say I saw anything exactly like that.” He added honestly, with his engaging smile that had earned for him in some quarters the nickname of “The Sheep”: “I was looking at Nayan, you see, most of the time.”

  A smile flickered round the table, for rumour had it that the girl had once seemed to him as possible “Karma.”

  “So was I,” put in Kempster with kindly intention, though his sympathy was evidently not needed. Imson was too simple even to feel embarrassment. “She came to life suddenly for the first time since I’ve known her. It was amazing.” To which Imson, busy over his salad-dressing, made no reply.

  Povey, lighting his pipe and puffing out thick clouds of smoke, was cleverer. “LeVallon’s effect upon her, whatever it was, seemed instantaneous,” he informed the table. “I never saw a clearer case of two souls coming together in a flash.”

  “As I said just now,” Kempster quickly mentioned.

  “They are similar,” said Imson, looking up, while the group waited expectantly.

  “Similar,” repeated Kempster. “Ah!”

  “It was the surprise in her face that struck me most,” observed Povey quickly, making an internal note of Imson’s adjective, but knowing that indirect methods would draw him out better than point-blank questions. “LeVallon showed it too. It was an unexpected recognition on both sides. They are ‘similar,’ as you say; both at the same stage of development, whatever that stage may be. The expression on both faces —”

  “Escape,” exclaimed Imson, giving at last the kernel of what he had to say. And the effect upon the group was electrical. A visible thrill ran round the Soho table.

  “The very word,” exclaimed Povey and Miss Lance together. “Escape!” But neither of them knew exactly what they meant, nor what Imson himself meant.

  “LeVallon has, of course, already escaped,” the latter went on quietly. “He is no longer caught by causes and effects as we are here. He’s got out of it all long ago if he was ever in it at all.”

  “If he ever was in it at all,” said Povey quickly. “You noticed that too. You’re very discerning, Pat.”

  “Clairvoyant,” mentioned Miss Lance.

  “I’ve seen them in dreams like that,” returned Imson calmly. “I often see them, of course.” He referred to his qualification for membership. “The great figures I see in dream have just that unearthly expression.”

  “Unearthly,” said Mrs. Towzer with excitement.

  “Non-human,” mentioned Kempster suggestively.

  “Not of this world, anyhow,” suggested Miss Lance mysteriously.

  “Divine?” inquired Miss Milligan below her breath.

  “Really,” murmured Toogood, “I must get a bit of his hair and psychometrize it at once.” He was sipping a second glass of whisky.

  Imson looked round at each face in turn, apparently seeing nothing that need increase his attachment to the planet by way of fresh Karma.

  “The Deva world,” he said briefly, after a pause. “Probably he’s come to take Nayan off with him. She I always said so has a strong strain of the elemental kingdom in her. She may be his Devi. LeVallon, I’m sure, is here for the first time. He’s one of the non-human evolution. He’s slipped in. A Deva hi
mself probably.” It was as though he said that the waiter was Swiss or French, or that the proprietor’s daughter had Italian blood in her.

  Povey looked round him with an air of triumph.

  “Ah!” he announced, as who should say, “You all thought my version a bit wild, but here’s confirmation from an unbiased witness.”

  “Oh, well, I can’t be certain,” Imson reminded the group. If he deceived them enough to change their lives in any respect, it involved fresh Karma for himself. Care was indicated. “I can’t be positive, can I?” he hedged. “Only I must say the great deva-figures I’ve seen in dream have exactly that look and expression.”

  “That’s interesting, Pat,” Povey put in, “because, before you came, I was suggesting a similar explanation for his air of immense potential power. The elemental atmosphere he brought we all noticed it, of course.”

  “Elemental is the only word,” Miss Lance inserted. “A great Nature Being.” She was thinking of her magazine.

  “He struck me as being so close to Nature that he seemed literally part of it.”

  “That would explain the lightning and the strange cry he gave about ‘messengers,’” replied Imson, wiping the oil from his chin and sprinkling his petit suisse with powdered sugar. “It’s quite likely enough.”

  “I wish you’d jot down what you think a little report of what you saw and felt,” the Secretary mentioned. “It would be of great value. I thought of making a collection of the different versions and accounts.”

  “They might be published some day,” thought Miss Lance. “Let’s all,” she added aloud with emphasis.

  Imson nodded agreement, making no audible reply, while the conversation ran on, gathering impetus as it went, growing wilder possibly, but also more picturesque. A man in the street, listening behind a curtain, must have deemed the talkers suffering from delusion, mad; a good psychologist, on the other hand, similarly screened, and knowing the antecedent facts, the Studio scene, at any rate, must have been struck by one outstanding detail the effect, namely, upon one and all of the person they discussed. They had seen him for an hour or so among a crowd, a young man whose name they hardly knew; only a few had spoken to him; there had been, it seemed, neither time nor opportunity for him to produce upon one and all the impression he undoubtedly had produced. For in every mind, upon every heart, LeVallon’s mere presence had evidently graven an unforgettable image, scored an undecipherable hieroglyph. Each felt, it seemed, the hint of a personality their knowledge could not explain, nor any earthly explanation satisfy. The consciousness in each one, perhaps, had been quickened. Hence, possibly, the extravagance of their conversation. Yet, since all reported differently, collective hysteria seemed discounted.

  Meanwhile, as the talk continued, and the wings of imaginative speculation fanned the thick tobacco smoke, others had dropped in, both male and female members, and the group now filled the little room to the walls. The same magnet drew them all, in each heart burned the same huge question mark: Who what is this LeVallon? What was the meaning of the scene in Khilkoffs Studio?

  Here, too, was a curious and significant fact about the gathering the amount of knowledge, true or otherwise, they had managed to collect about LeVallon. One way or another, no one could say exactly how, the Society had picked up an astonishing array of detail they now shared together. It was known where he had spent his youth, also how, and with whom, as well as something of the different views about him held by Dr. Devonham and Edward Fillery. To such temperaments as theirs the strange, the unusual, came automatically perhaps, percolating into their minds as though a collective power of thought-reading operated. Garbled, fanciful, askew, their information may have been, but a great deal of it was not far wrong.

  Imson, for instance, provided an account of LeVallon’s birth, to which all listened spellbound. He evaded all questions as to how he knew of it. “His parents,” he assured the room, “practised the old forgotten magic; his father, ‘at any rate, was an expert, if not an initiate, with all the rites and formulae of ancient times in his memory. Le–Vallon was born as the result of an experiment, its origins dating back so far that they concerned life upon another planet, I believe, a planet nearer to the sun. The tremendous winds and heat were vehicles of deity, you see there!’

  “The parents, you mean, had former lives upon another planet?” asked someone in a hushed tone. “Or he himself?”

  “The parents and Mason. Mason was involved in the experiment that resulted in the birth of LeVallon here today.”

  “The experiment what was it exactly?” inquired Lattimer, while Toogood surreptitiously made notes on his rather dirty cuff.

  Imson shrugged his shoulders very slightly.

  “Some of it came to me in sleep,” he mentioned, producing a paper from his pocket and beginning to read it aloud before anyone could stop him.

  “When the sun was younger, and moon and stars

  Were thrilled with my human birth, And the winds fled shouting the wondrous news As they circled the sea and the earth,

  “From the fight for money and worldly fame

  I drew one magical soul Who came to me over the star-lit sea As the needle turns to the Pole.

  “Conceived in the hour the stars foretold,

  This son of the winds I bore, And I taught him the secrets of —”

  “Yes,” interrupted Povey audaciously, “but the experiment you were telling us about?”

  A murmur of approving voices helped him.

  “Oh, the experiment, yes, well all I know is,” he went on with conviction, calmly replacing the poem in his pocket, “that it concerned an old rite, involving the evocation of some elemental being or nature-spirit the three of them had already evoked millions of years before, but had not banished again. The experiment they made today was to restore it to its proper sphere. In order to do so, they had to evoke it again, and, of course” he glanced round, as though all present were familiar with the formula of magical practices “it could come only through the channel of a human system.”

  “Of course, yes,” murmured a dozen voices, while eyes grew bigger and a pin dropping must have been audible.

  “Well” Imson spoke very slowly now, each word clear as a bell “the father, who was officiating, failed. He could not stand the strain. His heart stopped beating. He died just when it was there, he dropped dead.”

  “What happened to iff” asked Povey, too interested to care that he no longer led the room. “You said it could only use a human system as channel —”

  “It did so,” explained Imson.

  The information produced a pause of several seconds. Some of the members, like Toogood, though openly, were making pencil notes upon cuffs or backs of envelopes.

  “But the channel was neither Mason nor the woman.” The effect of this negative information was as nothing compared to the startling interest produced by the speaker’s next words: “It took the easiest channel, the line of least resistance the unborn body of the child.”

  Povey, seizing his opportunity, leaped into the silence:

  “Whose body, now full grown, and named LeVallon, came to the Studio!” he exclaimed, looking round at the group, as though he had himself given the explanation all had just listened to. “A human body tenanted by a nature-spirit, one of the form-builders a Deva,...”

  CHAPTER 18

  ..................

  FOR ALL THE WILDNESS OF the talk, this group of the Unstable was a coherent and consistent entity, using a language each item in it understood. They knew what they were after. Alcohol, coffee, tobacco, underfeeding, these helped or hindered, respectively, the expression of an ideal that, nevertheless, was common to them all; and if the minds represented were unbalanced, or merely speculative, poetic, one genuine quest and sympathy bound all together into a coherent, and who shall say unintelligent or valueless, unit. The unstable enjoyed an extreme sensitiveness to varied experience, with flexible adaptability to all possible new conditions, whereas the stable, wit
h their rigid mental organizations, remained uninformed, stagnant, even fossilized.

  In other rooms about the great lamp-lit city sat, doubtless, other similar groups at the very same moment, discussing the shibboleths of other faiths, of other dreams, of other ideas, systems, notions, philosophies, all interpretative of the earth in which little humanity dwells, cut off and isolated, apparently, from the rest of the stupendous universe. A listener, screened from view, a listener not in sympathy with the particular group he observed, and puzzled, therefore, by the language used, must have deemed he listened to harmless, if boring, madness. For each group uses its own language, and the lowest common denominator, though plainly printed in the world’s old scriptures, has not yet become adopted by the world at large.

  Into this particular group, a little later in the evening, and when the wings of imagination had increased their sweep a trifle dangerously perhaps into the room, like the arrival of a policeman rather, dropped Father Collins. He came rarely to the Prometheans’ restaurant. There was a general sense of drawing breath as he appeared. A pause followed. Something of the cold street air came with him. He wore his big black felt hat, his shabby opera cloak, and clutched firmly he had no gloves on the heavy gnarled stick he had cut for his collection in a Cingalese forest years ago, when he was studying with a Buddhist priest. The folds of his voluminous cloak, as he took it off, sent the hanging smoke-clouds in a whirl. His personality stirred the mental atmosphere as well. The women looked up and stared, respectful welcome in their eyes; several of the men rose to shake hands; there was a general shuffling of chairs.

  “Bring another moulin a vent and a clean glass,” Povey said at once to the hovering waiter.

  “It’s raw and bitter in the street and a fog coming down thickly,” mentioned Father Collins. He exhaled noisily and with comfortable relief, as he squeezed himself towards the chair Povey placed for him and looked round genially, nodding and shaking hands with those he knew. “But you’re warm and cosy enough in here” he sat down with unexpected heaviness, and smiled at everybody “and well fed, too, I’ll be bound.”