The Algernon Blackwood Collection

by Algernon Blackwood

  “She makes notes about them in a book and then destroys them,” was the reply from the end of the room. I heard a sigh of relief. “I’m glad you’ve seen them, Bill. I wanted you to—but was afraid to show them. You understand?”

  “I understand,” was my reply, though it was not a question intended to be answered. All I understood really was that Mabel’s mind was as sweet and pure as my sister’s, and that she had some good reason for what she did. She destroyed the sketches, but first made notes! It was an interpretation of the place she sought. Brother-like, I felt resentment, though, that Frances should waste her time and talent, when she might be doing work that she could sell. Naturally, I felt other things as well….

  “Mabel pays me five guineas for each one,” I heard. “Absolutely insists.”

  I stared at her stupidly a moment, bereft of speech or wit. “I must

  either accept, or go away,” she went on calmly, but a little white.

  “I’ve tried everything. There was a scene the third day I was here—when

  I showed her my first result. I wanted to write to you, but hesitated—”

  “It’s unintentional, then, on your part—forgive my asking it, Frances, dear?” I blundered, hardly knowing what to think or say. “Between the lines” of her letter came back to me. “I mean, you make the sketches in your ordinary way and—the result comes out of itself, so to speak?”

  She nodded, throwing her hands out like a Frenchman. “We needn’t keep the money for ourselves, Bill. We can give it away, but—I must either accept or leave,” and she repeated the shrugging gesture. She sat down on the chair facing me, staring helplessly at the carpet.

  “You say there was a scene?” I went on presently, “She insisted?”

  “She begged me to continue,” my sister replied very quietly. “She thinks—that is, she has an idea or theory that there’s something about the place—something she can’t get at quite.” Frances stammered badly. She knew I did not encourage her wild theories.

  “Something she feels—yes,” I helped her, more than curious.

  “Oh, you know what I mean, Bill,” she said desperately. “That the place is saturated with some influence that she is herself too positive or too stupid to interpret. She’s trying to make herself negative and receptive, as she calls it, but can’t, of course, succeed. Haven’t you noticed how dull and impersonal and insipid she seems, as though she had no personality? She thinks impressions will come to her that way. But they don’t—”

  “Naturally.”

  “So she’s trying me—us—what she calls the sensitive and impressionable artistic temperament. She says that until she is sure exactly what this influence is, she can’t fight it, turn it out, ‘get the house straight’, as she phrases it.”

  Remembering my own singular impressions, I felt more lenient than I might otherwise have done. I tried to keep impatience out of my voice.

  “And this influence, what—whose is it?”

  We used the pronoun that followed in the same breath, for I answered my own question at the same moment as she did:

  “His.” Our heads nodded involuntarily towards the floor, the dining room being directly underneath.

  And my heart sank, my curiosity died away on the instant; I felt bored. A commonplace haunted house was the last thing in the world to amuse or interest me. The mere thought exasperated, with its suggestions of imagination, overwrought nerves, hysteria, and the rest.

  Mingled with my other feelings was certainly disappointment. To see a figure or feel a “presence,” and report from day to day strange incidents to each other would be a form of weariness I could never tolerate.

  “But really, Frances,” I said firmly, after a moment’s pause, “it’s too far-fetched, this explanation. A curse, you know, belongs to the ghost stories of early Victorian days.” And only my positive conviction that there was something after all worth discovering, and that it most certainly was not this, prevented my suggesting that we terminate our visit forthwith, or as soon as we decently could. “This is not a haunted house, whatever it is,” I concluded somewhat vehemently, bringing my hand down upon her odious portfolio.

  My sister’s reply revived my curiosity sharply.

  “I was waiting for you to say that. Mabel says exactly the same. He is in it—but it’s something more than that alone, something far bigger and more complicated.” Her sentence seemed to indicate the sketches, and though I caught the inference I did not take it up, having no desire to discuss them with her just them indeed, if ever.

  I merely stared at her and listened. Questions, I felt sure, would be of little use. It was better she should say her thought in her own way.

  “He is one influence, the most recent,” she went on slowly, and always very calmly, “but there are others—deeper layers, as it were— underneath. If his were the only one, something would happen. But nothing ever does happen. The others hinder and prevent—as though each were struggling to predominate.”

  I had felt it already myself. The idea was rather horrible. I shivered.

  “That’s what is so ugly about it—that nothing ever happens,” she said. “There is this endless anticipation—always on the dry edge of a result that never materializes. It is torture. Mabel is at her wits’ end, you see. And when she begged me—what I felt about my sketches—I mean—”

  She stammered badly as before.

  I stopped her. I had judged too hastily. That queer symbolism in her paintings, pagan and yet not innocent, was, I understood, the result of mixture. I did not pretend to understand, but at least I could be patient. I consequently held my peace. We did talk on a little longer, but it was more general talk that avoided successfully our hostess, the paintings, wild theories, and him—until at length the emotion Frances had hitherto so successfully kept under burst vehemently forth again.

  It had hidden between her calm sentences, as it had hidden between the lines of her letter. It swept her now from head to foot, packed tight in the thing she then said.

  “Then, Bill, if it is not an ordinary haunted house,” she asked, “what is it?”

  The words were commonplace enough. The emotion was in the tone of her voice that trembled; in the gesture she made, leaning forward and clasping both hands upon her knees, and in the slight blanching of her cheeks as her brave eyes asked the question and searched my own with anxiety that bordered upon panic. In that moment she put herself under my protection. I winced.

  “And why,” she added, lowering her voice to a still and furtive whisper, “does nothing ever happen? If only,"—this with great emphasis— “something would happen—break this awful tension—bring relief. It’s the waiting I cannot stand.” And she shivered all over as she said it, a touch of wildness in her eyes.

  I would have given much to have made a true and satisfactory answer. My mind searched frantically for a moment, but in vain. There lay no sufficient answer in me. I felt what she felt, though with differences. No conclusive explanation lay within reach. Nothing happened. Eager as I was to shoot the entire business into the rubbish heap where ignorance and superstition discharge their poisonous weeds, I could not honestly accomplish this. To treat Frances as a child, and merely “explain away” would be to strain her confidence in my protection, so affectionately claimed. It would further be dishonest to myself—weak, besides—to deny that I had also felt the strain and tension even as she did. While my mind continued searching, I returned her stare in silence; and Frances then, with more honesty and insight than my own, gave suddenly the answer herself—an answer whose truth and adequacy, so far as they went, I could not readily gainsay:

  “I think, Bill, because it is too big to happen here—to happen anywhere, indeed, all at once—and too awful!”

  To have tossed the sentence aside as nonsense, argued it away, proved that it was really meaningless, would have been easy—at any other time or in any other place; and, had the past week brought me none of the vivid impressions it had brought me, this
is doubtless what I should have done. My narrowness again was proved. We understand in others only what we have in ourselves. But her explanation, in a measure, I knew was true. It hinted at the strife and struggle that my notion of a Shadow had seemed to cover thinly.

  “Perhaps,” I murmured lamely, waiting in vain for her to say more. “But you said just now that you felt the thing was ‘in layers’, as it were. Do you mean each one—each influence—fighting for the upper hand?”

  I used her phraseology to conceal my own poverty. Terminology, after all, was nothing, provided we could reach the idea itself.

  Her eyes said yes. She had her clear conception, arrived at independently, as was her way.

  And, unlike her sex, she kept it clear, unsmothered by too many words.

  “One set of influences gets at me, another gets at you. It’s according to our temperaments, I think.” She glanced significantly at the vile portfolio. “Sometimes they are mixed—and therefore false. There has always been in me, more than in you, the pagan thing, perhaps, though never, thank God, like that.”

  The frank confession of course invited my own, as it was meant to do.

  Yet it was difficult to find the words.

  “What I have felt in this place, Frances, I honestly can hardly tell you, because—er—my impressions have not arranged themselves in any definite form I can describe. The strife, the agony of vainly-sought escape, and the unrest—a sort of prison atmosphere—this I have felt at different times and with varying degrees of strength. But I find, as yet, no final label to attach. I couldn’t say pagan, Christian, or anything like that, I mean, as you do. As with the blind and deaf, you may have an intensification of certain senses denied to me, or even another sense altogether in embryo—”

  “Perhaps,” she stopped me, anxious to keep to the point, “you feel it as

  Mabel does. She feels the whole thing complete.”

  “That also is possible,” I said very slowly. I was thinking behind my words. Her odd remark that it was “big and awful” came back upon me as true. A vast sensation of distress and discomfort swept me suddenly. Pity was in it, and a fierce contempt, a savage, bitter anger as well. Fury against some sham authority was part of it.

  “Frances,” I said, caught unawares, and dropping all pretence, “what in the world can it be?” I looked hard at her. For some minutes neither of us spoke.

  “Have you felt no desire to interpret it?” she asked presently, “Mabel did suggest my writing something about the house,” was my reply, “but I’ve felt nothing imperative. That sort of writing is not my line, you know. My only feeling,” I added, noticing that she waited for more, “is the impulse to explain, discover, get it out of me somehow, and so get rid of it. Not by writing, though—as yet.” And again I repeated my former question:

  “What in the world do you think it is?” My voice had become involuntarily hushed. There was awe in it. Her answer, given with slow emphasis, brought back all my reserve: the phraseology provoked me rather:—"Whatever it is, Bill, it is not of God.”

  I got up to go downstairs. I believe I shrugged my shoulders. “Would you like to leave, Frances? Shall we go back to town?” I suggested this at the door, and hearing no immediate reply, I turned back to look. Frances was sitting with her head bowed over and buried in her hands. The attitude horribly suggested tears. No woman, I realized, can keep back the pressure of strong emotion as long as Frances had done, without ending in a fluid collapse. I waited a moment uneasily, longing to comfort, yet afraid to act—and in this way discovered the existence of the appalling emotion in myself, hitherto but half guessed. At all costs a scene must be prevented: it would involve such exaggeration and overstatement. Brutally, such is the weakness of the ordinary man, I turned the handle to go out, but my sister then raised her head. The sunlight caught her face, framed untidily in its auburn hair, and I saw her wonderful expression with a start. Pity, tenderness, and sympathy shone in it like a flame. It was undeniable. There shone through all her features the imperishable love and yearning to sacrifice self for others which I have seen in only one type of human being. It was the great mother look.

  “We must stay by Mabel and help her get it straight,” she whispered, making the decision for us both.

  I murmured agreement. Abashed and half ashamed, I stole softly from the room and went out into the grounds. And the first thing clearly realized when alone was this: that the long scene between us was without definite result. The exchange of confidence was really nothing but hints and vague suggestion. We had decided to stay, but it was a negative decision not to leave rather than a positive action. All our words and questions, our guesses, inferences, explanations, our most subtle allusions and insinuations, even the odious paintings themselves, were without definite result. Nothing had happened.

  CHAPTER VI

  ..................

  AND INSTINCTIVELY, ONCE ALONE, I made for the places where she had painted her extraordinary pictures; I tried to see what she had seen. Perhaps, now that she had opened my mind to another view, I should be sensitive to some similar interpretation—and possibly by way of literary expression. If I were to write about the place, I asked myself, how should I treat it? I deliberately invited an interpretation in the way that came easiest to me—writing.

  But in this case there came no such revelation. Looking closely at the trees and flowers, the bits of lawn and terrace, the rose-garden and corner of the house where the flaming creeper hung so thickly, I discovered nothing of the odious, unpure thing her color and grouping had unconsciously revealed. At first, that is, I discovered nothing. The reality stood there, commonplace and ugly, side by side with her distorted version of it that lay in my mind. It seemed incredible. I tried to force it, but in vain. My imagination, ploughed less deeply than hers, or to another pattern, grew different seed. Where I saw the gross soul of an overgrown suburban garden, inspired by the spirit of a vulgar, rich revivalist who loved to preach damnation, she saw this rush of pagan liberty and joy, this strange license of primitive flesh which, tainted by the other, produced the adulterated, vile result.

  Certain things, however, gradually then became apparent, forcing themselves upon me, willy-nilly. They came slowly, but overwhelmingly. Not that facts had changed, or natural details altered in the grounds— this was impossible—but that I noticed for the first time various aspects I had not noticed before—trivial enough, yet for me, just then, significant. Some I remembered from previous days; others I saw now as I wandered to and fro, uneasy, uncomfortable,—almost, it seemed, watched by some one who took note of my impressions. The details were so foolish, the total result so formidable. I was half aware that others tried hard to make me see. It was deliberate.

  My sister’s phrase, “one layer got at me, another gets at you,” flashed, undesired, upon me.

  For I saw, as with the eyes of a child, what I can only call a goblin garden—house, grounds, trees, and flowers belonged to a goblin world that children enter through the pages of their fairy tales. And what made me first aware of it was the whisper of the wind behind me, so that I turned with a sudden start, feeling that something had moved closer. An old ash tree, ugly and ungainly, had been artificially trained to form an arbor at one end of the terrace that was a tennis lawn, and the leaves of it now went rustling together, swishing as they rose and fell. I looked at the ash tree, and felt as though I had passed that moment between doors into this goblin garden that crouched behind the real one. Below, at a deeper layer perhaps, lay hidden the one my sister had entered.

  To deal with my own, however, I call it goblin, because an odd aspect of the quaint in it yet never quite achieved the picturesque. Grotesque, probably, is the truer word, for everywhere I noticed, and for the first time, this slight alteration of the natural due either to the exaggeration of some detail, or to its suppression, generally, I think, to the latter. Life everywhere appeared to me as blocked from the full delivery of its sweet and lovely message. Some counter influence
stopped it—suppression; or sent it awry—exaggeration. The house itself, mere expression, of course, of a narrow, limited mind, was sheer ugliness; it required no further explanation. With the grounds and garden, so far as shape and general plan were concerned, this was also true; but that trees and flowers and other natural details should share the same deficiency perplexed my logical soul, and even dismayed it. I stood and stared, then moved about, and stood and stared again. Everywhere was this mockery of a sinister, unfinished aspect. I sought in vain to recover my normal point of view. My mind had found this goblin garden and wandered to and fro in it, unable to escape.

  The change was in myself, of course, and so trivial were the details which illustrated it, that they sound absurd, thus mentioned one by one. For me, they proved it, is all I can affirm. The goblin touch lay plainly everywhere: in the forms of the trees, planted at neat intervals along the lawns; in this twisted ash that rustled just behind me; in the shadow of the gloomy wellingtonias, whose sweeping skirts obscured the grass; but especially, I noticed, in the tops and crests of them. For here, the delicate, graceful curves of last year’s growth seemed to shrink back into themselves. None of them pointed upwards. Their life had failed and turned aside just when it should have become triumphant. The character of a tree reveals itself chiefly at the extremities, and it was precisely here that they all drooped and achieved this hint of goblin distortion—in the growth, that is, of the last few years. What ought to have been fairy, joyful, natural, was instead uncomely to the verge of the grotesque. Spontaneous expression was arrested. My mind perceived a goblin garden, and was caught in it. The place grimaced at me.

  With the flowers it was similar, though far more difficult to detect in detail for description. I saw the smaller vegetable growth as impish, half-malicious. Even the terraces sloped ill, as though their ends had sagged since they had been so lavishly constructed; their varying angles gave a queerly bewildering aspect to their sequence that was unpleasant to the eye. One might wander among their deceptive lengths and get lost —lost among open terraces!—with the house quite close at hand. Unhomely seemed the entire garden, unable to give repose, restlessness in it everywhere, almost strife, and discord certainly.