The Algernon Blackwood Collection

by Algernon Blackwood

  The rush of the wonderful cinema then began, and he forgot himself.

  They experienced the sense such a performance leaves behind of having been—as Mother put it—all over the place. Sitting in the dark the individual at first is conscious only of himself, neighbours ignored if not forgotten. The screen then flashes into light, and with the picture, consciousness flashes across the world. The lie of the stationary photograph is corrected, time is denied, partially at least, and space is unable to boast and swagger as it loves to do. The cinema frees and extends the consciousness, restores the past, and sets distance close beneath the eyes. Only the watching self remains—pregnant symbol!—in the darkness.

  It was one of the best performances in London; within an hour or two the audience danced from the dingy streets of the metropolis into the sunlight of India, Africa, and of islands among far southern seas. The kaleidoscope of other lands and other ways of thinking, acting, living carried them away with understanding sympathy. From savage wild life drinking at water-holes in the sun-drenched Tropics, they darted across half-charted oceans and watched the penguin and the polar bear amid arctic ice. Over mountains, down craters, flying above cities and peering deep under water, the various experiences of strange distant life came into their ken. They flew about the planet. The leaders of the world gazed at them, so close and real that their emotions were legible on their magnified features. They smiled or frowned, then flashed away, and yet still were there, living, thinking, willing this and that. Widely separated portions of the vast human family presented themselves vigorously, registered a tie of kinship, and were gone again about their business, now become in some sense the business of the audience too. Fighting, toiling, loving, hating, meeting death and adventure by sea and land, creating and destroying, differing much in colour, custom, clothing, and the rest, yet human as Wimble and his family were human, possessed with the same griefs, hopes, and joys, the same passion to live, the same fear of death—one great family.

  Joan slipped her arm into that of her father; they nestled closely, very much in sympathy as the world rushed past their eyes upon the screen.

  ‘We’re flying,’ she whispered, with a squeeze, as the penguins on the polar ice gave place to a scene of negroes sweating in the sun and munching sugarcane while they lazily picked the fluffy cotton. ‘We’re everywhere all-at-once, don’t you see?’ A moment later, as though to point her words, they looked down upon a mapped-out county from an aeroplane. The unimportance of earth was visible in the distance.

  ‘You can’t fly under water anyhow,’ mumbled Wimble, as they left the air and flashed with a submarine upon sponges, coral, and inquisitive, perfectly poised fish. A black man was trying to knife a shark.

  ‘I can see what they feel though,’ was the whispered answer. ‘Inside their watery minds, I mean.’

  ‘Wherever I am I go,’ he thought, but didn’t say it, because by the time he had reflected how foolish it was to remain stuck only upon the minute point of his own tiny personal experience, they were climbing with a scientific Italian of eminence down a crater full of smoke and steam, and could almost hear the thunder of the explosions. But while they went down, everything else went up. Smoke, steam, masses of rock all trying to rise. ‘Gravity is the devil,’ he remembered; ‘it keeps us from flying into the sun.’

  The idea made him chuckle, and Joan pinched his arm, giggling too audibly in her excitement.

  ‘Hush!’ said Mother. They watched in silence then; a bird’s-eye view of the planet was what they watched. With each picture they took part. Every corner of the globe, with its different activities, touched their hearts and minds with interest—busy, rushing life in various forms, and all going on simultaneously, at this very moment—now. Life obviously was one. The strange unity was convincing. Nothing they saw was alien to themselves, for they took part in it. In each picture they ‘wondered what it felt like.’ They took for an instant, longer or shorter, the point of view of a new aspect of life, of something as yet they had not actually experienced. They longed—or dreaded—to stand within that huge cavern of blue lonely ice and hear the waves of the Polar Sea lick up the snow; to taste that sugary cane with animal-white teeth, and feel the fluffy cotton between thick, lumpy fingers; to swim under water and look up instead of down; to crawl fearfully a little nearer to the molten centre of the planet through smoke and fire and awful thundering explosions. They longed or dreaded. Mentally, that is, they experienced a new relationship in each separate case, a relationship that stretched a suburban consciousness beyond its normal ken.

  ‘It’s very tiring,’ mentioned Mother, during a brief interval of glaring light, ‘and hurts my eyes. And I can’t see why they want to show us those half-naked natives. I’m glad I’m English. Disgusting people, I call them.’

  ‘They’ll improve it, you know,’ observed Tom; ‘the flickering, I mean. It’s a great invention. Somebody made a bit of cash there all right.’

  One couple, at any rate, in the four-shilling seats felt the tie and knew their consciousness extended to include them all. They were engaged with all these various folk and multifarious activities. Humanity was one. The cinema shouted it aloud. The sense of collective consciousness was stirred.

  ‘Well,’ gasped Mother, blinking her eyes in the sudden light at the end, ‘that was a show, wasn’t it?’ She seemed tired rather than exhilarated.

  ‘Not half,’ declared Tom, feeling for his cigarettes. He kept the programmes, putting both into his pocket.

  ‘I’m glad I’m English anyhow,’ repeated Mother, stationary at the mouth of her hole in the ground; but whether she despised the Hottentots, the Eskimo, or the penguins, she did not specify. It was her final verdict merely. The statement said simply that she was satisfied to be her little self, balanced safely on a clod of earth, in a spot of the universe called England. Extension of consciousness gave her no joy at all. She felt unsafe.

  They left the theatre slowly, their minds shrinking back with a touch of disappointment, almost of pain, within the prescribed limits of normal, practical life again. Wimble felt he had been flying, and had just come back; he settled with difficulty. In the brief space between the vestibule and the door his thoughts continued flying. There was excitement and anticipation in him. ‘The next stage,’ he said to himself, ‘will be hearing. We shall hear the people talk. After that—not so very far away either—we shall see ‘em now, and no interval of time at all. Machinery won’t be used. Our minds will do the trick. We’ll see everywhere with our thoughts!’ He remembered his Telepathy Primer, giving individual instances, as authentic and well proven as any reasonable person could desire. He felt sure this vast, general development must follow—some faculty of air, swift and flashing as light—the bird’s-eye view.

  The murky street, with its damp and chilly air, struck him in the face as he stood with his family a moment, then walked down the steps. There was still a luminous glow in the western sky above the roofs. Mother took his arm to steady herself; Tom was behind, his eyes roving hungrily; Joan flitted just in front.

  ‘Our ‘bus is over there,’ said Mother, pointing with a black-gloved hand.

  ‘We’ll take a taxi, my dear,’ was his reply. He hailed one, bundled his astonished family inside, wished the driver ‘Good-evening’ with a smile, and slammed the door upon his own coat-tails.

  ‘But you haven’t told him the address,’ said Mother.

  ‘He ought to know,’ exclaimed Wimble, ‘but he’s not a bird yet, so I’d better tell him.’

  ‘It might be safer,’ added his wife sarcastically, holding on to his coat-tails as he leaned out of the window to do so.

  He watched the crowd as they whirled away; he felt happy, happy, happy. With the damp London air he felt as though a part of him still sweltered in the golden sunshine, diving under blue clear water where the sponges and the corals grew. Soft breezes touched his cheek one minute, the next he laid his hand on glittering ice. He heard the surf crashing upon a palm-clad reef.
. . . These thronging people, policemen, costers, shop-folk, pale-faced workers, and over-dressed men and women of the big houses, all had some link with himself, that had been drawn closer; but so had the swarthy half-naked folk at the Antipodes who had just claimed his consciousness. They were all one really. Each nation seemed a mood. The sense of oneness leaped upon his heart and seized him.

  ‘It all happened without our even moving,’ as Joan had said on the way home. ‘I suppose everything’s in us then, really. We’re everywhere.’ And while Tom’s superior ‘Oh, cut it out’ seemed more than usually ignorant and silly, Wimble’s heart flamed within him. For it came to him, like a promise of wind-borne freedom, that there existed in his own being an immense and mighty under-side that was only waiting to be organised into fuller, even into all-embracing, consciousness. Man, he felt sure again, was a cosmic, not only a planetary, being. He could know the stars. The real self was of air. . . .

  CHAPTER XIV.

  ..................

  ‘LOOK HERE, FATHER,’ SAID JOAN next day, ‘why is it——’ then paused, unable apparently to express herself.

  ‘Eh, child?’ He gasped, thinking her question consisted of those three words alone, and wondering how in the world he was going to satisfy her.

  ‘Why is it,’ she went on the next moment, ‘that wherever we are we want to be somewhere else, and whatever we know we want to know something else— more at any rate? And we never want it alone. We want to tell everything to some one else, I mean.’

  Father almost preferred the first question—it left openings for vaguer answers. This definiteness increased his difficulty rather. He scratched his head and passed his fingers through his hair, which looked just then as if it would neither stay on nor down. He smoothed it deliberately, thinking as hard and quickly as he could. He knew what the girl meant, of course, more or less.

  ‘The instinct to share what we like is, I suppose, a proof that we——’ he was going to say.

  Before he could utter the words, however, she answered for him: ‘Because we ought to be everywhere at once and know everything at once—like in that cinema. Isn’t that it?’

  Mother, it so chanced, just then went past the open door along the corridor; she went steadily, not to say heavily; she was obviously in one place at a time, doing one thing at a time, a worthy, practical, useful human being, and what the world considers a valuable unit of humanity— yet surely, oh, surely, wrong and a wing-less entity clogged with earth and the limits that earth-ignorance involved. She was on her way to scold the servant, to order dinner, or to fetch socks to mend. Good. But it was the way she went about her job—the un-birdy way—that proved the badger in her. Air and the careless joy of air was nowhere in her, not even in her most helpful actions. ‘One should take life as a bird takes the air,’ he was thinking again. It had become a motto.

  And a flood of shadowy thoughts swept down upon his mind. Joan, when he turned to find her, had already gone from the room. He was alone. The half-read newspaper lay upon his knee; Tom had long since gone to the office; the sun shone in across the sea of roofs and chimney-pots; he saw a white, soft, fluffy cloud bedded in the blue. A swift shot gloriously across the narrow strip of sky. And this flood of shadow thoughts poured in and out of his mind like a hundred thousand swifts.

  They would have filled an entire Primer if written out and printed; but in his mind, together with their host of suggestive correlations, they flashed and vanished with the speed and ease of the swift, a bird that seemed only wings, without body, legs, or head—powerful, graceful flight personified. The laborious absurdity of words made him feel helpless and rather stupid. He felt lonely, too, exiled from a finer, easier state of being to which something in him properly and rightfully belonged. The wings of the spirit stirred and fluttered in him. He sighed. Joan’s sentence vibrated in him like a song, for nothing so much as music sets free the bird in human beings, enabling the soul to soar beyond all possible categories of time and space, beyond all confinements and limitations, even beyond death.

  It was his daughter’s remark that led in this rushing shower of thoughts that followed: ‘Why is it that, wherever we are, we want to be elsewhere?’

  People as a whole were always afflicted with this desire to be somewhere else. It was true. In London he longed for windy lanes, but in the windy lanes he thought how nice it would be to see the shops and people in the streets; at a party he would think with longing of the cosy room at home, the book and chair beside the fire-corner with his pipe, yet in that corner with pipe and book he would suddenly lay them down and remember with envy the gaiety of company, the talk, the laughter, and the bright companionship he was missing. It was often, if not always, so: the desire to be elsewhere and otherwise seemed inherent in human beings; they were never content or satisfied with the place they were in at a given moment.

  ‘It’s the restlessness of the race,’ he decided, ‘for whom movement is so laborious, slow, and costly. If they moved as a bird moves, swiftly, instantly, and without trouble or cost, this restlessness would not be felt.’

  Then he paused. ‘But it’s not merely that,’ flashed through him, ‘far, far more. It’s the expression of a strange and deep belief: the belief that we ought to be, and should be, can be everywhere at once. This power lies in us somewhere, only as yet we haven’t discovered how to use it. . . . But it’s coming, and air and flight, wings and speed are already its beckoning symbols. We’re being mysteriously quickened. We ought to be able to know everything, and to be everywhere, at once, in touch with all the universe, able to draw on all its powers. We have the right. This longing so to know and be, this uneasy yearning in us, what is it but an affirmation, a conviction that we can so be? Our wings go fluttering in our tiny cages. Wherever I am I go—and I am wherever my thought and desire are.’

  He sat back and thought about it. It seemed to him a great discovery. He felt sure that somewhere in himself lay the power to be everywhere at once, one with everybody and everything. To be aware of everybody everywhere was the first step at any rate, and the cinema had dropped a hint that it was coming.

  ‘Well—but the practical meaning of it—what? The use that people like Mother should make of it—what? Bodies will never actually fly. Certainly not, but thought flies already, and it only remains for consciousness to accompany it. Bodies, of course, are earth; yet they will, they must, grow lighter, more responsive, both as receiving and transmitting instruments, consciousness no longer focussed only where the body is. We shall be human cinemas,’ he thought, ‘going where we will, instantaneously and easily as a bird, seeing all and knowing all. Universal consciousness, of course, is a spiritual condition; it is an Air quality, space and time denied. The Kingdom of Air is within us. We shall experience air with its collective instantaneity. . . .’

  He folded his newspaper and went down the narrow corridor to his little private den. ‘Oh, that I had the wings of a dove,’ occurred to him and made him smile. ‘A cry of the soul, of course,’ he realised, as he took his twenty limited steps between the rigid walls. He stubbed his toe against the desk, and sat down in his revolving chair.

  The ideas set in motion by Joan’s remark continued flowing, flying through him. He seized what he could catch.

  ‘Our bodies, responding to a swifter, happier, more careless attitude of mind, will gradually grow lighter, more sensitive; become less dense and earthy; until at last we shall feel with everybody everywhere. No longer separate and cut off from others, divided as earth is divided, we shall win this immense increase of sympathy and be everywhere we want to be, every-at-once, as Joan put it. We shall move with our thought—air! We shall have instantaneity—air again! Our bodies may not fly, but our consciousness will fly to one another, as light flies across the universe unerringly from sun to sun—bodies of light. Like the birds in England, we shall know when the Siberian ice has broken. We shall be off!’

  The thrill of some mighty wisdom came very near.

  He bec
ame strangely aware—it was like the lifting of great wings within his soul—that this collective, airy consciousness was already gathering the world into a flock; and it was the cinema, explained by Joan’s brief sentence, that flashed the amazing and uplifting thought upon him.

  Whirling round and round in his revolving chair, reason tried to grapple with the rush of ideas. The contents of a hundred Primers rose higgledy-piggledy, to congest his mind and memory. But his soul, rising like a lark, outdistanced everything he had ever read. The one clear dazzling certainty was this: ‘We shall no longer be cut off and separate from others.’ A variant, surely, of loving, and therefore knowing, all neighbours as ourselves. A thousand years as one day! To be everywhere at once and to know everybody was, after all, but to slip the cables of the tiny, separate self, and experience the Whole. Hence the desire to be always elsewhere and otherwise. Hence, too, the innate yearning to share experiences of all kinds with others. ‘Nirvana’ dropped from a forgotten Primer into him, and for the first time pages of laborious explanation utterly ignored, he grasped its gracious meaning fully. ‘To meet the Lord in the air and be for ever with him,’ came another cliché. They poured and rained upon him in their naked meanings, undisguised by words.

  ‘Ah! To live in the Whole was not, then, to lose individuality, but to extend and share it!’ He spun round and round happily in his chair. ‘Grand bird idea, and air ideal!’ He saw in his heart the nations taking wing at last, leaving earth below them, free of space and free of time, sharing this new and undivided consciousness. It was spiritual, of course; yet not an inaccessible nor a different state; it was a state growing naturally and truly out of the physical. Spontaneous living and the bird’s-eye point of view were the first faint signs of its approach. . . .

  The chair stopped turning, while he filled and lit his pipe, watching the clouds of blue smoke float here and there in wreaths and eddies. Joan’s eyes peered across it at him like a phantom’s. . . . ‘It’s immense, but very simple,’ he was thinking, ‘her funny little song puts it all in a nutshell . . . and the way she tries to live . . .’ when a heavy tread disturbed him and something came into the room.