The authority in his manner became abruptly clear as day. Devonham watched over him; also he watched him. For days, for weeks, this had been his attitude. For the first time, in this instant, as he saw him lead away LeVallon into his own room and close the door, Fillery now perceived this. He experienced a violent revulsion of mind. In a flash a hundred details of the recent past occurred to him, chief among them the fact that, more and more, the control of the Home and its occupants had been taken over, Fillery himself only too willing, by his assistant. A moment of appalling doubt rose like a black cloud....
He heard Paul telling LeVallon to begin his breakfast, just as the door closed, and he noted the authoritative tone of voice. The next minute he and his colleague were alone together.
“Paul,” said the chief quickly, but with a calm assurance that anticipated a favourable answer, “they, at any rate, are all right?”
Devonham nodded his head. “No harm done,” he replied briefly. “In fact, as you know, he rather stimulates them than otherwise.”
“I know.”
He felt, for the first time in their years of close relationship, a breath of suspicion enter him. There was a look upon his colleague’s face he could not quite define. It baffled him.
“Of course, I know — He stopped, for the undecipherable look had strengthened suddenly. He thought of a gaoler.
“Paul,” he said quickly, “what’s the matter? What’s wrong with you?”
He drew back a pace or two and watched him.
“With me nothing, Edward. Nothing at all.” The tone was grave with anxiety, yet had this new authority in it.
A feeling of intolerable insecurity came upon him, a sensation as though he balanced on air, yet its cause, its origin, easily explained: the support of his colleague’s mind was taken from him. Paul’s attitude was clear as day to him. He was a gaoler.... He recalled again the recent detail, brightly significant that Nurse Robbins had turned to Paul, rather than to himself.
“With me, then you think?” His voice hardly sounded like his own. He looked about him for support, found an armchair, sat down in it. “You’re strange, Paul, very strange,” he whispered. “What do you mean by ‘there’s something wrong with me’?”
Devonham’s expression cleared slightly and a kindly, sympathetic smile appeared, then vanished. The grave look that Fillery disliked reappeared.
“What d’you mean, Paul Devonham?” came the repetition, in a louder, more challenging voice. “You’re watching me as though I were” he laughed without a trace of mirth “a patient.” He leaned forward. “Paul, you’ve been watching me for a long time. Out with it, now. What is it?”
Devonham, who had kept silent, drew some papers from his pocket, a bundle of rolled sheets.
“Of course,” he said gently, “I always watch you. For that’s how I learn. I learn from you, Edward, more than from anybody I know.”
But Dr. Fillery, his eyes fixed upon the sheaf of papers, had recognized them. His own writing was visible along the uneven edges. They were the description he had set down of his adventure on Flower Hill, of the scenes between “N.H.” and Lady Gleeson, between “N.H.” and Nayan, the autobiographical description with “N.H.” and Nurse Robbins soon after his arrival, when Fillery had so amazingly found his own mind as he believed identified with his patient’s.
Devonham snapped off the elastic band that held the sheaf together. “Edward, I’ve read them. We have no secrets, of course. I’ve read them carefully. Every word my dear fellow.”
“Yes, yes,” replied the other, while something in him wavered horribly. “I’m glad. They were meant for you to read, for of course we have no secrets. I I do not expect you to agree. We have never quite seen eye to eye have we?” His voice shook. “You terrible iconoclast,” he added, betraying thus the nature of the fear that changed his voice, then recognizing with vexation that he had done so. “You believe nothing. You never will believe anything. You cannot understand. With joy you would destroy what I and others believe wouldn’t you, Paul?”
The deep sadness, the gravity on the face in front of him stopped the tirade.
“I would save you, Edward,” came the earnest, gentle words, “from yourself. The powers of auto-suggestion, as we know in our practice don’t we? are limitless. If you call that destroying —”
From the adjoining room the clatter of knives and forks was audible. Dr. Fillery listened a moment with a smile.
“Paul,” he asked, his voice firm and sure again, “is your chief patient in that room,” indicating the door with his head, “or in this?”
“In this,” was the reply. “A wise man is always his own patient and ‘Physician, heal thyself his motto.” He sat down beside his chief. His manner changed; there was affection, deep solicitude, something of passionate entreaty even in voice and eyes and gestures. “There are features here,” he said in lowered tones, “Edward, we have not understood, perhaps even we can never understand; but we have not, I think, sufficiently guarded against one thing auto-suggestion. The role it plays in life is immense, incalculable; it is in everything we do and think, above all in everything we believe. It is peculiarly powerful and active in er unusual things —”
“The sound the sounds you’ve heard them yourself,” broke in his companion.
Devonham shrugged his thin shoulders. “He sings in a peculiar way.” As an aside, he said it, returning to his main sermon instantly. “Let us leave details out,” he cried; “it is the principle that concerns us. Edward, your complex against humanity lies hard and rigid in you still. It has never found that full recognition by yourself which can resolve it. Your work, your noble work, is but a partial expression. The kernel of this old complex in you remains unrelieved, undischarged because still unrecognized. And, further, you are continually adding to the repression which” even Devonham paused a second before using such a word to such a man “is poisoning you, Edward, poisoning you, I repeat.”
“You saw you saw the rebuilding of the daisy” an odd whisper of insecurity ran through the quiet words, a statement rather than a question “you realize, at any rate, that chance has brought us into contact with Powers, creative Powers, of a new order —”
“Let us omit all details just now,” interrupted the other, a troubled, indecipherable look on his face. “The undoubted telepathy between your mind and mine nullifies any such —”
“powers of which we all have some faint counter-part, at any rate, in our subliminal selves.” Fillery had not heard the interruption. “Powers by means of which we may build for the Race new forms, new mental bodies, new vehicles for life, for God, to manifest through more perfect, more receptive —”
Devonham had suddenly seized both his hands and was leaning closer to him. Something compelling, authoritative, peculiarly convincing for a moment had its undeniable effect, again stopping the flow of hurried, passionate, eager words.
“There is one new form, new body,” and the intensity in voice and eyes drove the meaning deep, deep into his listener’s mind and heart. “I wish to see you build. One, and one only physical, mental, spiritual. But you cannot build it, Edward alone!”
“Paul!” The other held up a warning hand; the expression in his eyes was warning too. Their effect upon Devonham, however, was nil. He was talking with a purpose nothing could alter.
“She is still waiting for you,” he went on with determination, “and already you have kept her waiting overlong.” In the tone, in the hard clear eyes as well, lay a suggestion almost of tears.
He opened the door into the breakfast-room, but Fillery caught his arm and stopped him. They could hear Nurse Robbins speaking, as she attended as usual to her patient’s wants. Coffee was being poured out. There was a sound of knives and plates and cups.
“One minute, Paul, one minute before we go in.” He drew him aside. “And what, Doctor Devonham, may I ask, would you prescribe?” There was a curious mixture of gentle sarcasm, of pity, of patient tolerance, yet at the same time
of sincere, even anxious, interest in the question. The face and manner betrayed that he waited for the answer with something more than curiosity.
There was no hesitancy in Devonham. He judged the moment ripe, perhaps; he was aware that his words would be listened to, appreciated, understood certainly, and possibly, obeyed.
“Expression,” he said convincingly, but in a lowered voice. “The fullest expression, everywhere and always. Let it all come. Accept the lot, believe the lot, welcome the lot, and thus” he could not conceal the note of passionate entreaty, of deep affection “avoid every atom of repression. In the end in the long run your own best judgment must prevail.”
They smiled into each other’s eyes for a moment in silence, while, instinctively and automatically, their hands joined in a steady clasp.
“Bless you, old fellow,” murmured the chief. “As if I didn’t know! It’s the treatment you’ve been trying on me for weeks and months. As if I hadn’t noticed!”
As they entered the breakfast-room, Nurse Robbins, with flushed face and sparkling eyes, was pouring out the coffee, leaning close over her patient’s shoulder as she did so. Fresh roses were in her cheeks as well as on the table.
“This is its touch upon the blossomed maid,” whispered Fillery, with the quick hint of humour that belongs only to the sane. At the same time the light remark was produced, he well knew, by a part of himself that sought to remain veiled from recognition. Any other triviality would have done as well to cloak the sharp pain that swept him, and to lead his listener astray. For in that instant, as they entered, he saw at the table not “N.H.,” but LeVallon the backward, ignorant, commonplace LeVallon, an empty, untaught personality, yet so receptive that anything anything could be transferred to him by a strong, vivid mind, a mind, for instance, like his own....
The sight, for a swift instant, was intolerable and devastating. He balanced again on air that gave him no support. He wavered, almost swayed. “N.H.,” in that horrible and painful second, did not exist, and never had existed. The unstable mind, he comforted himself, experiences dislocating extremes of attitude... for, at the same time as he saw himself shaking and wavering without solid support, he saw the figure of Paul Devonham, big, important, authoritative, dominating the uncertainties of life with calm, steady power.
In a fraction of a second all this came and went. He sat down beside LeVallon, his eyes still twinkling with his trivial little joke.
“‘N.H.,’” he whispered to Devonham quickly, “has escaped at last.”
“LeVallon,” came the whispered reply as quickly, “is cured at last.” And, to conceal an intolerable rush of pain, of loss, of loneliness that threatened tears, he pointed to the dropped eyes and blushing cheeks of the pretty nurse across the table.
CHAPTER 27
..................
TO EDWARD FILLERY, THE DEEP pain of frustration baffling all his mental processes, the end had come with a strange, bewildering swiftness. He knew there had been a prolonged dislocation of his being, possibly, even a partial loss of memory with regard to much that went on about him, but he could not, did not, admit that no value or reality had attached to his experiences. The central self in him had projected a limb, an arm, that, feeling its way across the confining wall of the prison house, groping towards an unbelievably wonderful revelation of new possibilities, had abruptly now withdrawn again. The dissociation in his personality was over. He was, in other words, no longer aware of “N.H.” Like Devonham, he now did not “perceive” “N.H.,” but only LeVallon. But, unlike Devonham, he had perceived him....
He had met half-way a mighty and magnificent Vision. Its truth and beauty remained for him enduring. The revelation had come and gone. That its close was sudden, simple, undramatic, above all untheatrical, satisfied him. “N.H.” had “escaped,” leaving the commonplace LeVallon. in his place. But, at least, he had known “N.H.”
His whole being, an odd, sweet, happy pain in him, yearned ever to the glorious memory of it all. The melancholy, the peculiar shyness he felt, were not without an indefinite pleasure. His nature still vibrated to those haunting and inspiring rhythms, but his normal, earthly faculties, he flattered himself, were in no sense permanently disorganized. Professionally, he still cared for LeVallon, disenchanted dust though he might be, compared to “N.H.”... He approved of Devonham’s proposal to take him for a few days to the sea. He also approved of Paul’s advice that he should accept Father Collins’ invitation to spend a day or two at his country cottage. The Khilkoffs would be there, father and daughter. The Home, in charge of an assistant, could be reached in a few hours in case of need. The magic of Devonham’s wise, controlling touch lay in every detail, it seemed....
He saw the trio for Nurse Robbins was of the party off to Seaford. “The final touches to his cure,” Paul mentioned slyly, with a smile, as the guard whistled. But of whose cure he did not explain. “He’ll bathe in the sea,” he added, the reference obvious this time. “And when we return I shall be best man. I’ve already promised!” There was a triumph of skilled wisdom in both sentences.
“The time isn’t ripe yet, Edward, for too magnificent ideas. And your ideas have been a shade too magnificent, perhaps.” He talked on lightly, even carelessly. And, as usual, there was purpose, meaning, “treatment” his friend easily discerned it now in every detail of his attitude.
Fillery laughed. Through his mind ran Povey’s sentence, “Never argue with the once-born!” but aloud he said, “At any rate, I’ve no idea that I’m Emperor of Japan or or the Archangel Gabriel!” And the other, pleased and satisfied that a touch of humour showed itself, shook hands firmly, affectionately, through the window as the train moved off. LeVallon raised his hat to his chief and smiled an ordinary smile....
With the speed and incongruity of a dream these few days slipped by, their happenings vivid enough, yet all set to a curiously small scale, a cramped perspective, blurred a little as by a fading light. Only one thing retained its brilliance, its intense reality, its place in the bigger scale, its vast perspective remaining unchanged. The same immense sweet rhythm swept Iraida and himself inevitably together. Some deep obsession that hitherto prevented had been withdrawn.
She had called that very morning Paul’s touch visible here again, he believed, though he had not asked. He looked on and smiled. After the ordeal of breakfast with Devonham and LeVallon her visit was announced. It was Paul, after a little talk downstairs, who showed her in. With the radiance of a spring wildflower opening to the early sunshine, her unexpected visit to his study seemed clothed. Unexpected, yes, but surely inevitable as well. With the sweet morning wind through the open window, it seemed, she came to him, the letter of invitation from Father Collins in her hand. His own lay among his correspondence, still untouched. Her perfume rose about him as she explained something he hardly heard or followed.
“You’ll come, Edward, won’t you? You’ll come too.”
“Of course,” he answered. But it was a song he heard, and no dull spoken words. She ran dancing towards him through a million flowers; her hair flew loose along the scented winds; her white limbs glowed with fire. He danced to meet her. It was in the Valley that he caught her hands and met her eyes. “It’s happened,” he heard himself saying. “It’s happened at last just as you said it must. Escape! He has escaped!”
“But we shall follow after when the time comes, Edward.”
“Where the wild bee never flew!”...
“When the time comes,” she repeated.
Her voice, her smile, her eyes brought him back sharply into the little room. The furniture showed up again. The Valley faded. He noticed suddenly that for the first time she wore no flowers in her dress as usual.
“Iraida!” he exclaimed. “Then you knew!”
She bent her head, smiling divinely. She took both his hands in hers. At her touch every obstacle between them melted. His own private, personal inhibition he saw as the trivial barriers a little child might raise. His complex against h
umanity, as Paul called it, had disappeared. Their minds, their beings, their natures became most strangely one, he felt, and yet quite naturally. There was nothing they did not share.
“With the first dawn,” he heard her say in a low voice. “Never never again,” he seemed to hear, “shall we destroy his their work of ages.”
“A flower,” he whispered, “has no need to wear a flower!” He was convinced that she too had shared an experience similar to his own, perhaps had even seen the bright, marvellous Deva faces peering, shining.... He did not ask. She said no more. Life flowed between them in an untroubled stream....
Like the flow of a stream, indeed, things went past him, yet with incidents and bits of conversation thus picked out with vivid sharpness. The dissociation of his being was still noticeable here and there, he supposed. The swell after the storm took time to settle down. Slowly, however, the waves that had been projected, leaping to heaven, returned to the safe, quiet dead level of the normal calm.... The depths lay still once more. And his melancholy passed a little, lifted. He knew, at any rate, those depths were now accessible.
“I’ve seen over the wall a moment,” he said to himself. “Paul is both right and wrong. What I’ve seen lies too far ahead of the Race to be intelligible or of use. I should be cast out, crucified, my other, simpler work destroyed. To control rhythms so powerful, so different to anything we now know, is not yet possible. They would shatter, rather than construct.” He smiled sadly, yet with resignation. There was pain and humour in his eyes. “I should be regarded as a Promethean merely, an extremist Promethean, and probably be locked up for contravening some County Council bye-law or offending Church and State. That’s where he, perhaps, is right Paul!” He thought of him with affection and pity, with understanding love. “How wise and faithful, how patient and how skilled within his limits. The stable are the useful; the stable are the leaders; the stable rule the world. People with steady if unvisioned eyes like Paul, with money like Lady Gleeson.... But, oh!” he sighed “how slow, ye gods! how slow!”...
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 202