The Algernon Blackwood Collection

by Algernon Blackwood

  The veil was down again, and he was talking with Madame Jaretzka, the Lettice Aylmer of his boyhood days. Such moments of the déjà-vu leave bewilderment behind them, like the effect of sudden change of focus in the eye; and with the bewilderment a sense of insecurity as well.

  ‘Yes,’ he said half dreamily, ‘and you’ve rescued a lot already, haven’t you?’ as though he still followed in speech the direction of the vanished emotion.

  ‘You know that, Tom?’ she enquired, raising her eyelids, thus finally restoring the normal.

  He stammered rather: ‘I have the feeling—that you’re always doing good to some one somewhere. There’s something,’—he searched for a word— ‘impersonal about you—almost.’ And he knew the word was nearly right, though found by chance. It included ‘un-physical,’ the word he did not like to use. He did not want an angel’s love; the spiritual, to him, rose from the physical, and was not apart from it. He was not in heaven yet, and had no wish to be. He was on earth; and everything of value—love, above all—must spring from earth, or else remain incomplete, insecure, ineffective even.

  And again a tiny dart of pain shot through him. Yet he was glad he said it, for it was true. He liked to face what hurt him. To face it was to get it over.…

  But she was laughing again gently to herself, though certainly not at him. ‘What were you thinking about so long?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been silent for several minutes and your thoughts were far away.’ And as he did not reply immediately, she went on: ‘If you go to Assouan you mustn’t fall into reveries like that or you’ll leave holes in the dam, or whatever your engineering work is—Tom!’

  She spoke the name with a sudden emphasis that startled him. It was a call.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, looking up at her. He was emerging from a dream.

  ‘Come back to me. I don’t like your going away in that strange way— forgetting me.’

  ‘Ah, I like that. Say it again,’ he returned, a deeper note in his voice.

  ‘You were away—weren’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said slowly. ‘I can’t say quite. I was thinking of you, wherever I was.’ He went on, holding her eyes with a steady gaze: ‘A curious feeling came over me like—like heat and light. You seemed so familiar to me all of a sudden that I felt I had known you ages and ages. I was trying to make out where—it was——’

  She dropped her eyelids again and peered at him, but no longer smiling. There was a sterner expression in her face. The lips curved a moment in a new strange way. The air seemed to waver an instant between them. She peered down at him as through a mist.…

  ‘There—like that!’ he exclaimed passionately. ‘Only I wish you wouldn’t. There’s something I don’t like about it. It hurts,’—and the same minute felt ashamed, as though he had said a foolish thing. It had come out in spite of himself.

  ‘Then I won’t, Tom—if you’ll promise not to go away again. I was thinking of Egypt for a second—I don’t know why.’

  But he did not laugh with her; his face kept the graver expression still.

  ‘It changes you—rather oddly,’ he said quietly, ‘that lowering of the eyelids. I can’t say why exactly, but it makes you look——Eastern.’ Again he had said a foolish thing. A kind of spell seemed over him.

  ‘Irish eyes!’ he heard her saying. ‘They sometimes look like that, I’m told. But you promise, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I promise,’ he answered bluntly enough, because he meant it. ‘I can never go away from you because,’—he turned and looked very hard at her a moment—’because there’s something in you I need in my very soul,’ he went on earnestly, ‘yet that always escapes me. I can’t get hold of— all of you.’

  And though she refused his very earnest mood, she answered with obvious sincerity at once. ‘That’s as it should be, Tom. A man tires of a woman the moment he gets to the end of her.’ She gave her little laugh and touched his hand. ‘Perhaps that’s what I’m meant to teach you. When you know all of me——’

  ‘I shall never know all of you,’ said Tom.

  ‘You never will,’ she replied with meaning, ‘for I don’t even know it all myself.’ And as she said it, he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful in all the world before, for the breeze caught her long gauzy veil of blue and tossed it across her face so that the eyes seemed gazing at him from a distance, but a distance that had height in it. He felt her above him, beyond him, on this height, a height he must climb before he could know complete possession.

  ‘By Jove!’ he thought, ‘isn’t it rising just!’ For the Wave was under them tremendously.

  April meanwhile had slipped into May, and their daily companionship had become the most natural thing in the world, when the telegram arrived that threatened to interrupt the delightful intercourse. But it was not the telegram Tom expected. Neither Greece nor Egypt claimed his talents yet, for the contracts both at Assouan and Salonica were postponed until the autumn, and the routine of a senior partner’s life in London was to be his immediate fate. He brought her the news at once: they discussed it together in all its details and as intimately as though it affected their joint lives similarly. His first thought was to run and talk it over with her; hers, how the change might influence their intercourse, their present and their future. Their relationship was now established in this solid, natural way. He told her everything as a son might tell his mother: she asked questions, counselled, made suggestions as a woman whose loving care considered his welfare and his happiness before all else.

  However, it brought no threatened interruption after all—involved, indeed, less of separation than if he had been called away as they expected: for though he must go to London that same week, she would shortly follow him. ‘And if you go to Egypt in the autumn, Tom,’—she smiled at the way they influenced the future nearer to the heart’s desire—’I may go with you. I could make my arrangements accordingly— take my holiday out there earlier instead of here as usual in the spring.’

  The days passed quickly. Her first duty was to return to Warsaw; she would then follow him to London and help him with his flat. No man could choose furniture and carpets and curtains properly. They discussed the details with the enthusiasm of children: she would come up several times a week from her bungalow in Kent and make sure that his wall-papers did not clash with the general scheme. Brown was his colour, he told her, and always had been. It was the dominant shade of her eyes as well. He made her promise to stand in the rooms with her eyes opened very wide so that there could be no mistake, and they laughed over the picture happily.

  She came to the train, and although he declared vehemently that he disliked ‘being seen off,’ he was secretly delighted. ‘One says such silly things merely because one feels one must say something. And those silly things remain in the memory out of all proportion to their value.’ But she insisted. ‘Good-byes are always serious to me, Tom. One never knows. I want to see you to the very last minute.’ She had this way of making him feel little things significant with Fate. But another little thing also was in store for him. As the train moved slowly out he noticed some letters in her hand; and one of them was addressed to Warsaw. The name leaped up and stung him—Jaretzka. A spasm of pain shot through him. She was leaving in the morning, he knew.…

  ‘Write to me from Warsaw,’ he said. ‘Take care! We’re moving!’

  ‘I’ll write every day, my dearest Tom, my boy. You won’t forget me. I shall see you in a fortnight.’

  He let go the little hand he held till the last possible minute. The bells drowned her final words. She stood there waving her hand with the unposted letters in them, till the station pillars intervened and hid her from him.

  And this time no ‘silly last things’ had been said that could ‘stay in the memory out of all proportion to their value.’ It was something he had noticed on the envelope that stayed—not the husband’s name, but a word in the address, a peculiar Polish word he happened to know:—’Tworki’—the name of the principal
maison de santé that stood just outside the city of Warsaw.…

  Half an hour, perhaps an hour, he sat smoking in his narrow sleeping compartment, thinking with a kind of intense confusion out of which no order came.… At Pontarlier he had to get out for the Customs formalities. It was midnight. The stars were bright. The keen spring air from the wooded Jura Mountains had a curious effect, for he returned to his carriage feeling sleepy, the throng of pictures drowned into calmness by one master-thought that reduced their confusion into order. He looked back over the past weeks and realised their intensity. He had lived. There was a change in him, the change of growth, development. He loved. There was now a woman who was his entire world, essential to him. He was essential to her too. And the importance of this ousted all lesser things, even the senior partnership. This was the master-thought—that he now lived for her. He was ‘real’ even as she was ‘real,’ each to the other real. The Wave had lifted him to a level never reached before. And it was rising still.…

  He fell asleep on this, to dream of a mighty stream that swept them together irresistibly towards some climax that he never could quite see. She floated near to save him. She floated down. Her little hands were stretched. It was a gorgeous and stupendous dream—a dream of rising life itself—rising till it would curve and break and fall, and the inevitable thing would happen that would bring her finally into his hungry arms, complete, mother and woman, a spiritual love securely founded on the sweet and wholesome earth.…

  CHAPTER XI.

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  DURING THE BRIEF SEPARATION OF a fortnight Tom was too busy in London to allow himself much reflection. Absence, once the first keen sense of loss is over, is apt to bring reaction. The self makes an automatic effort to regain the normal life it led before the new emotion dislocated the long-accustomed routine. It tries to run back again along the line of least resistance that habit has made smooth and easy. If the reaction continues to assert its claim, the new emotion is proved thereby a delusion. The test lies there.

  In Tom’s case, however, the reaction was a feeble reminder merely that he had once lived—without her. It took the form of regret for all the best years of his life he had endured—how, he could not think—without this tender, loving woman at his side. That is, he recognised that his love was real and had changed his outlook fundamentally. He could never do without her from this moment onwards. She equally needed him. He would never leave her.… Further than that, for the present, he did not allow himself to think. Having divined something of her tragedy, he accepted the definite limitations. Speculations concerning another he looked on as beside the point. As far as possible he denied himself the indulgence in them. But another thing he felt as well—the right to claim her, whether he exercised that right or not.

  Concerning his relationship with her, however, he did not deny speculation, though somehow this time the perspective was too vast for him to manage quite. There was a strange distance in it: he lost himself in remoteness. In either direction it ran into mists that were interminable, as though veils and curtains lifted endlessly, melting into shadowy reaches beyond that baffled all enquiry. The horizons of his life had grown so huge. This woman had introduced him to a scale of living that he could only gaze at with wondering amazement and delight, too large as yet to conform to the order that his nature sought. He could not properly find himself.

  ‘It feels almost as if I’ve loved her before like this—yet somehow not enough. That’s what I’ve got to learn,’ was the kind of thought that came to him, at odd moments only. The situation seemed so curiously familiar, yet only half familiar. They were certainly made for one another, and the tie between them had this deep touch of the inevitable about it that refused to go. That notion of the soul’s advance in a spiral cropped up in his mind again. He saw her both coming nearer and retreating—as a moving figure against high light leaves the spectator uncertain whether it is advancing or retiring. He would have liked to talk to Tony all about it, for Tony would be sympathetic. He wanted a confidant and turned instinctively to his cousin.… She already understood more than he did, though perhaps not consciously, and therein lay the secret of her odd elusiveness. Yet, in another sense, his possession was incomplete because a part of her still lay unawakened. ‘I must love her more and more and more,’ he told himself. But, at the same time, he took it for granted that he was indispensable to her, as she was to him.

  These flashes of perception, deeper than anything he had experienced in life hitherto, came occasionally while he waited in London for her return; and though puzzled—his straightforward nature disliked all mystery—he noted them with uncommon interest. Nothing, however, could prevent the rise upwards of the Wave that bore the situation on its breast. The affair swept him onwards; it was not to be checked or hindered. He resigned direction to its elemental tide.

  The faint uneasiness, also, recurred from time to time, especially now that he was alone again. He attributed it to the unsatisfied desire in his heart, the knowledge that as yet he had no exclusive possession, and did not really own her; the sense of insecurity unsettled him, the feeling that she was open to capture by any one—’who understands and appreciates her better than I do,’ was the way he phrased it sometimes. He was troubled and uneasy because so much of her lay unresponsive to his touch— not needing him. While he was climbing up to reach her, another, with a stronger claim, might step in—step back—and seize her.

  It made him smile a little even while he thought of it, for her truth and constancy were beyond all question. And then, suddenly, he traced the uneasiness to its source. There was ‘another’ who had first claim upon her—who had it once, at any rate. Though at present some cloud obscured and negatived that claim, the cloud might lift, the situation change, the claim become paramount again, as once it surely had been paramount. And, disquieting though the possibility was, Tom was pleased with himself—he was so naïve and simple towards life—for having discerned it clearly. He recognised the risk and thus felt half prepared in advance.… In another way it satisfied him too. With this dream-like suggestion that it all had happened before, he had always felt that a further detail was lacking to complete the scene he half remembered. Something, as yet, was wanting. And this item needed to make the strange repetition of the scene fulfil itself seemed, precisely, the presence of ‘another.’

  Their intercourse, meanwhile, proved beyond words delightful during the following weeks, when, after her return from Warsaw, she kept her word and helped him in the prosaic business of furnishing his flat and settling down, as in a hundred other details of his daily life as well. All that they did and said together confirmed their dear relationship and established it beyond reproach. There was no question of anything false, illicit, requiring concealment: nothing to hide and no one to evade. In their own minds their innocence was so sure, indeed, that it was not once alluded to between them. It was impossible to look at her and doubt: nor could the most cynical suspect Tom Kelverdon of an undesirable intrigue with the wife of another man. His acquaintance, moreover, were not of the kind that harboured the usual ‘worldly’ thoughts; he went little into society, whereas the comparatively few Londoners she knew were almost entirely—he discovered it by degrees—people whose welfare in one way or another she had earnestly at heart. It was a marvel to him, indeed, how she never wearied of helping ungrateful folk, for the wish to be of service seemed ingrained in her. Her first thought on making new acquaintances was always what she could do for them, not with money necessarily, but by ‘seeing’ them in their proper milieu and planning to bring about the conditions they needed in order to realise themselves fully. Failure, discontent, unhappiness were due to wrong conditions more than to radical fault in the people themselves; once they ‘found themselves,’ the rest would follow. It amounted to a genius in her.

  It seemed the artist instinct that sought this unselfish end rather than any religious tendency. She felt it ugly to see people at issue with their surroundings. Her religion
was humanity, and had no dogmas. Even Tony Winslowe, now in England again, came in for his share of this sweet fashioning energy in her; much to his own bewilderment and to Tom’s amusement.…

  The summer passed towards early autumn and London emptied, but it made no difference to them. Tom had urgent work to do and was absorbed in it, never forgetting for a moment that he was now a Partner in the Firm. He spent frequent week-ends at Madame Jaretzka’s Kentish bungalow, where she had for companion at the moment an Irish cousin who, as Tom easily guessed, was also a dependant. This cousin had been invited with her child, Molly, for the summer holidays, and these summer holidays had run on into three months at least.

  A tall, thin, angular woman, of uncertain manners and capricious temperament, Mrs. Haughstone had perhaps lived so long upon another’s bounty that she had come to take her good fortune for granted, and permitted herself freely two cardinal indulgences—grumbling and jealousy. Having married unwisely, in order to better herself rather than because she loved, her shiftless husband had disgraced himself with an adventuress governess, leaving her with three children and something below £150 a year. Madame Jaretzka had stepped in to bring them together again: she provided schooling abroad, holidays, doctors, clothes, and all she could devise by way of helping them ‘find themselves’ again, and so turning their broken lives to good account. With the husband, sly, lazy, devoid of both pride and honesty, she could do little, and she was quite aware that he and his wife put their heads together to increase the flow of ‘necessaries’ she generously supplied.

  It was a sordid, commonplace story, sordidly treated by the soured and vindictive wife, whose eventual aims upon her saviour’s purse were too obvious to be mistaken. Even Tom perceived the fact without delay. He also perceived, behind the flattering tongue, an acid and suspicious jealousy that regarded new friends with ill-disguised alarm. Mrs. Haughstone thought of herself and her children before all else. She mistook the impersonal attitude of her benefactress for credulous weakness. A new friend was hostile to her shameless ambitions and disliked accordingly.… Tom scented an enemy the first time he met her. To him she expressed her disapproval of Tony, and vice versa, while to her hostess she professed she liked them both—’but’: the ‘but’ implying that men were selfish and ambitious creatures who thought only of their own advantage.