The First Algernon Blackwood Megapack: 36 Classic Tales of the Supernatural

by Algernon Blackwood

  “I definitely understood at last that my mind was affected—and proved it too, for the instant effort I made at recovery resulted in my seeing him normal again. the size and shape retreated the moment I denied them.”

  O’Malley noticed how the speaker’s voice lingered over the phrase. Again he knew the intention of the pause that followed. He held his peace, however, and waited.

  “Nor was sight the only sense affected,” Stahl continued, “for smell and hearing also brought their testimony. Through all but touch, indeed, the hallucination attacked me. For sometimes at night while I sat up watching in the little room, there rose outside the open window in the yards and gardens a sound of tramping, a distant roaring as of voices in a rising wind, a rushing, hollow murmur, confused and deep like that of forests, or the swift passage of a host of big birds across the sky. I heard it, both in the air and on the ground—this tramping on the lawns, this curious shaking of the atmosphere. And with it at the same time a sharp and mingled perfume that made me think of earth and leaves, of flowers after rain, of plains and open spaces, most singular of all—of animals and horses.

  “Before the firm denial of my mind, they vanished, just as the change of form had vanished. But both left me weaker than they found me, more tender to attack. Moreover, I understood most plainly, that they emanated all from him. These ‘emanations’ came, too, chiefly, as I mentioned, whilst he slept. In sleep, it seemed, he set them free. the slumber of the body disengaged them. And then the instinct came to warn me—presenting itself with the authority of an unanswerable intuition—the realization, namely, that if, for a single moment in his presence, I slept, the changes would leap forward in my own being, and I should join him.”

  “Escape! Know freedom in a larger consciousness!” cried the other.

  “And for a man of my point of view and training to have permitted such a conviction at all,” he went on, the interruption utterly ignored again, “proves how far along the road I had already traveled without knowing it. Only at the time I was not aware of this. It was the shock of full discovery later that brought me to my senses, when, seeking to withdraw,—I found I could not.”

  “And so you ran away.” It came out bluntly enough, with a touch of scorn but ill concealed.

  “We discharged him. But before that came there was more I have to tell you—if you still care to hear it.”

  “I’m not tired, if that’s what you mean. I could listen all night, as far as that goes.”

  He rose to stretch his legs a moment, and Stahl rose too—instantly. Together they leaned over the bulwarks. the German’s hat was off and the air made by the steamer’s passage drew his beard out. the warm soft wind brought odors of sea and shore. It caressed their faces, then passed on across those sleeping peasants on the lower deck. the masts and rigging swung steadily against the host of stars.

  “Before I thus knew myself half caught,” continued the doctor, standing now close enough beside him for actual contact, “and found it difficult to get away, other things had happened, things that confirmed the change so singularly begun in me. They happened everywhere; confirmation came from many quarters; though slight enough, they filled in all the gaps and crevices, strengthened the joints, and built the huge illusion round me all complete until it held me like a prison.

  “And they are difficult to tell. Only, indeed, to yourself who underwent a similar experience up there in the mountains, could they bring much meaning. You had the same temptation and you—weathered the same storm.” He caught O’Malley’s arm a moment and held it. “You escaped this madness just as I did, and you will realize what I mean when I say that the sensation of losing my sense of personal identity became so dangerously, so seductively strong. the feeling of extended consciousness became delicious—too delicious to resist. A kind of pagan joy and exultation known to some in early youth, but put away with the things of youth, possessed me. In the presence of this other’s soul, so strangely powerful in its silence and simplicity, I felt as though I touched new sources of life. I tapped them. They poured down and flooded me—with dreams—dreams that could really haunt—with unsettling thoughts of glory and delight beyond the body. I got clean away into Nature. I felt as though some portion of me just awakening reached out across him into rain and sunshine, far up into the sweet and starry sky—as a tree growing out of a thicket that chokes its lower part finds light and freedom at the top.”

  “It caught you badly, doctor,” O’Malley murmured. “The gods came close!”

  “So badly that I loathed the prisoned darkness that held me so thickly in the body. I longed to know my being all dispersed through Nature, scattered with dew and wind, shining with the star-light and the sun. And the manner of escape I hinted to you a little while ago came to seem right and necessary. Lawful it seemed, and obvious. the mania literally obsessed me, though still I tried to hide it even from myself…and struggled in resistance.”

  “You spoke just now of other things that came to confirm it,” the Irishman said while the other paused to take breath. All this he knew. He grew weary of Stahl’s clever laboring the point that it was madness. A little knowledge is ever dangerous, and he saw so clearly why the hesitation of the merely intellectual man had led him into error. “Did you mean that others acknowledged this influence as well as yourself?”

  “You shall read that for yourself tomorrow,” came the answer, “in the detailed report I drew up afterwards; it is far too long to tell you now. But, I may mention something of it. That breaking out of patients was a curious thing, their trying to escape, their dreams and singing, their efforts sometimes to approach his room, their longing for the open and the gardens; the deep, prolonged entrancing of a few; the sounds of rushing, tramping that they, too, heard, the violence of some, the silent ecstasy of others. the thing may find its parallel, perhaps, in the collective mania that sometimes afflicts religious communities, in monasteries or convents. Only here there was no preacher and eloquent leader to induce hysteria—nothing but that silent dynamo of power, gentle and winning as a little child, a being who could not put a phrase together, exerting his potent spell unconsciously, and chiefly while he slept.

  “For the phenomena almost without exception came in the night, and often at their fullest strength, as afterwards reported to me, while I dozed in his room and watched beside his motionless and slumbering form. Oh, and there was more as well, much more, as you shall read. the stories my assistants brought me, the tales of frightened nurse and warder, the amazing yarns the porter stammered out, of strangers who had rung the bell at dawn, trying to push past him through the door, saying they were messengers and had been summoned, sent for, had to come,—large, curious, windy figures, or, as he sometimes called them with unconscious humor, ‘like creatures out of fairy books or circuses’ that always vanished as suddenly as they came. Making every allowance for excitement and exaggeration, the tales were strange enough, I can assure you, and the way many of the patients knew their visions intensified, their illusions doubly strengthened, their efforts even to destroy themselves in many cases almost more than the staff could deal with—all this brought the matter to a climax and made my duty very plain at last.”

  “And the effect upon yourself—at its worst?” asked his listener quietly.

  Stahl sighed wearily a little as he answered with a new-found sadness in his tone.

  “I’ve told you briefly that,” he said; “repetition cannot strengthen it. the worthlessness of the majority of human aims today expresses it Best—what you have called yourself the ‘horror of civilization.’ the vanity of all life’s modern, so-called up-to-date tendencies for outer, mechanical developments. A wild, mad beauty streaming from that man’s personality overran the whole place and caught the lot of us, myself especially, with a lust for simple, natural things, and with a passion for spiritual beauty to accompany them. Fame, wealth, position seemed the shadows then, and something else it’s hard to name announced itself as the substance…. I wanted to c
lear out and live with Nature, to know simplicity, unselfish purposes, a golden state of childlike existence close to dawns and dew and running water, cared for by woods and blessed by all the winds….” He paused again for breath, then added:—

  “And that’s just where the mania caught at me so cunningly—till I saw it and called a halt.”

  “Ah!”

  “For the thing I sought, the thing he knew, and perhaps remembered, was not possible in the body. It was a spiritual state—”

  “Or to be known subjectively!” O’Malley checked him.

  “I am no lotus-eater by nature,” he went on with energy, “and so I fought and conquered it. But first, I tell you, it came upon me like a tempest—a hurricane of wonder and delight. I’ve always held, like yourself perhaps, that civilization brings its own army of diseases, and that the few illnesses known to ruder savage races can be cured by simple means the earth herself supplies. And along this line of thought the thing swept into me—the line of my own head-learning. This was natural enough; natural enough, too, that it thus at first deceived me.

  “For the quack cures of history come to this—herb simples and the rest; only we know them now as sun-cure, water-cure, open-air cure, old Kneipp, sea-water, and a hundred others. Doctors have never swarmed before as they do now, and these artificial diseases civilization brings in such quantity seemed all at once to mean the abeyance of some central life or power men ought to share with—Nature…. You shall read it all in my written report. I merely wish to show you now how the insidious thing got at me along the line of my special knowledge. I saw the truth that priests and doctors are the only possible and necessary ‘professions’ in the world, and—that they should be really but a single profession….”

  XLIV

  He drew suddenly back with a kind of jerk. It was as though he realized abruptly that he had said too much—had overdone it. He took his companion by the arm and led him down the decks.

  As they passed the bridge the Captain called out a word of welcome to them; and his jolly, boisterous laugh ran down the wind. the American engineer came from behind a dark corner, almost running into them; his face was flushed. “It’s like a furnace below,” he said in his nasal familiar manner; “too hot to sleep. I’ve run up for a gulp of air.” He made as though he would join them.

  “The wind’s behind us, yes,” replied the doctor in a different tone, “and there’s no draught.” With a gesture, half bow, half dismissal, he made even this thick-skinned member of “the greatest civilization on earth” understand he was not wanted. And they turned at the cabin door, O’Malley a moment wondering at the admirable dignity with which the “little” man had managed the polite dismissal.

  Himself, perhaps, he would not have minded the diversion. He was a little weary of the German’s long recital. the confession had not been complete, he felt. Much had been held back. It was not altogether straightforward. the dishonesty which hides in compromise peeped through it everywhere.

  And the incoherence of the latter part had almost bored him. For it was, he easily divined, a studied incoherence. It was meant to touch a similar weakness in himself—if there. But it was not there. He saw through the whole manoeuvre. Stahl wished to warn and save him by showing that the experience they had partly shared was nothing but a strange mental disorder. He wished to force in this subtle way his own interpretation of it upon his friend. Yet at the same time the intuitive Irishman discerned that other tendency in the man which would so gladly perhaps have welcomed a different explanation, and even in some fashion did actually accept it.

  O’Malley smiled inwardly as he watched him prepare the coffee as of old. And patiently he waited for the rest that was to come. In a certain sense it all was useful. It would be helpful later. This was an attitude he would often have to face when he returned to civilized life and tried to tell his Message to the thinking, educated men of today—the men he must win over somehow to his dream—the men, without whose backing, no Movement could hope to meet with even a measure of success.

  “So, like myself,” said Stahl, as he carefully tended the flame of the spirit-lamp between them, “you have escaped by the skin of your teeth, as it were. And I congratulate you—heartily.”

  “I thank you,” said the other dryly.

  “You write your version now, and I’ll write mine—indeed it is already almost finished—then we’ll compare notes. Perhaps we might even publish them together.”

  He poured out the fragrant coffee. They faced each other across the little table. But O’Malley did not take the bait. He wished to hear the balance his companion still might tell.

  And presently he asked for it.

  “With the discharge of your patient the trouble ceased at once, then?”

  “Comparatively soon. It gradually subsided, yes.”

  “And as regards yourself?”

  “I came back to my senses. I recovered my control. the insubordinate impulses I had known retired.” He smiled as he sipped his coffee. “You see me now,” he added, looking his companion steadily in the eyes, “a sane and commonplace ship’s doctor.”

  “I congratulate you—”

  “Vielen Dank.” He bowed.

  “On what you missed, yet almost accomplished,” the other finished. “You might have known, like me, the cosmic consciousness! You might have met the gods!”

  “In a strait-waistcoat,” the doctor added with a snap.

  They laughed at one another across their coffee cups as once before they had laughed across their glasses of Kakhetian wine—two eternally antagonistic types that will exist as long as life itself.

  But, contrary to his expectations, the German had little more to tell. He mentioned how the experience had led his mind into strange and novel reading in his desire to know what other minds might have to offer by way of explanation, even the most fanciful and far-fetched. He told, though very briefly, how he had picked up Fechner among others, and carefully studied his “poetic theories,” and read besides the best accounts of “spiritistic” phenomena, as also of the rarer states of hysteria, double-consciousness, multiple personality, and even those looser theories which suggest that a portion of the human constitution called “astral” or “etheric” may escape from the parent center and, carrying with it the subtler forces of desire and yearning, construct a vivid subjective state of mind which is practically its Heaven of hope and longing all fulfilled.

  He did not, however, betray the results upon himself of all this curious reading and study, nor mention what he found of truth or probability in it all. He merely quoted books and authors, in at least three languages, that stretched in a singular and catholic array from Plato and the Neo-Platonists across the ages to Myers, Du Prel, Flournoy, Lodge, and Morton Prince.

  Out of the lot, perhaps,—O’Malley gathered it by inference rather than from actual statement, from fragments of their talks upon the outward voyage more than from anything let fall just then—Fechner had proved the most persuasive to this man’s contradictory and original mind. It certainly seemed, at least, as if he knew some secret sympathetic leaning toward the idea that consciousness and matter were inseparable, and that a Cosmic Consciousness “of sorts” might pertain to the Earth as, equally, to all the other stars and planets. the Urwelt idea he so often referred to had seized a part of his imagination—that, at least, was clear.

  The Irishman drank it all in, but he was too exhausted now to argue, and too full besides to ask questions. His natural volubility forsook him. He let the doctor have his say without interruptions. He took the warnings with the rest of it. Nothing the other said had changed him.

  It was not the first sunrise they had watched together, and as they took the morning air on deck once more, Corsica rising like a dream the night had left behind her on the sea, he listened with fainter interest to the German’s concluding sentences.

  “At any rate you now understand why on that other voyage I was so eager to watch you with your friend, so keen to separ
ate you, to prevent your sleeping with him, and at the same time so desirous to see his influence upon you at close quarters; and also—why I always understood so well what was going on both outwardly and within.”

  O’Malley quietly reiterated the belief he still held in the power of his own dream.

  “I shall go home and give my message to the world,” was what he said quietly. “I think it’s true.”

  “It’s better to keep silent,” was the answer, “for, even if true, the world is not ready yet to listen. It will evaporate, you’ll find, in the telling. You’ll find there’s nothing to tell. Besides, a dream like yours must dawn on all at once, and not on merely one. No one will understand you.”

  “I can but try.”

  “You will reach no men of action; and few of intellect. You will merely stuff the dreamers who are already stuffed enough. What is the use, I ask you? What is the use?”

  “It will set the world on fire for simplicity,” the other murmured, knowing the great sweet passion flame within him as he watched the sun come slowly out of the rosy sea. “All the use in the world.”

  “None,” was the laconic answer.

  “They might know the gods!” cried O’Malley, using the phrase that symbolized for him the entire Vision.

  Stahl looked at him for some time before he spoke. Again that expression of wistful, almost longing admiration shone in the brown eyes.

  “My friend,” he answered gravely, “men do not want to know the gods. They prefer their delights less subtle. They crave the cruder physical sensations that bang them toward excitement—”