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

by Algernon Blackwood

  “Frances, I don’t understand a bit,” I said out loud, but said it a little humbly, for the impression the man had left was still strong upon me and I was grateful for the steady sense of peace and comfort he had somehow introduced. the horrors had been so dreadful. My nerves, doubtless, were more than a little overstrained. Absurd as it must sound, I classed him in my mind with the robins, the happy, confiding robins who believed in everybody and thought no evil! I laughed a moment at my ridiculous idea, and my sister, encouraged by this sign of patience in me, continued more fluently.

  “Of course you don’t understand, Bill? Why should you? You’ve never thought about such things. Needing no creed yourself, you think all creeds are rubbish.”

  “I’m open to conviction—I’m tolerant,” I interrupted.

  “You’re as narrow as Sam Franklyn, and as crammed with prejudice,” she answered, knowing that she had me at her mercy.

  “Then, pray, what may be his, or his Society’s beliefs?” I asked, feeling no desire to argue, “and how are they going to prove your Mabel’s salvation? Can they bring beauty into all this aggressive hate and ugliness?”

  “Certain hope and peace,” she said, “that peace which is understanding, and that understanding which explains all creeds and therefore tolerates them.”

  “Toleration! the one word a religious man loathes above all others! His pet word is damnation—”

  “Tolerates them,” she repeated patiently, unperturbed by my explosion, “because it includes them all.”

  “Fine, if true” I admitted, “very fine. But how, pray, does it include them all?”

  “Because the key-word, the motto, of their Society is, ‘There is no religion higher than Truth,’ and it has no single dogma of any kind. Above all,” she went on, “because it claims that no individual can be ‘lost.’ It teaches universal salvation. To damn outsiders is uncivilized, childish, impure. Some take longer than others—it’s according to the way they think and live—but all find peace, through development, in the end. What the creeds call a hopeless soul, it regards as a soul having further to go. There is no damnation—”

  “Well, well,” I exclaimed, feeling that she rode her hobby horse too wildly, too roughly over me, “but what is the bearing of all this upon this dreadful place, and upon Mabel? I’ll admit that there is this atmosphere—this—er—inexplicable horror in the house and grounds, and that if not of damnation exactly, it is certainly damnable. I’m not too prejudiced to deny that, for I’ve felt it myself.”

  To my relief she was brief. She made her statement, leaving me to take it or reject it as I would.

  “The thought and belief its former occupants—have left behind. For there has been coincidence here, a coincidence that must be rare. the site on which this modern house now stands was Roman, before that Early Britain, with burial mounds, before that again, Druid—the Druid stones still lie in that copse below the field, the Tumuli among the ilexes behind the drive. the older building Sam Franklyn altered and practically pulled down was a monastery; he changed the chapel into a meeting hall, which is now the music room; but, before he came here, the house was occupied by Manetti, a violent Catholic without tolerance or vision; and in the interval between these two, Julius Weinbaum had it, Hebrew of most rigid orthodox type imaginable—so they all have left their—”

  “Even so,” I repeated, yet interested to hear the rest, “what of it?”

  “Simply this,” said Frances with conviction, “that each in turn has left his layer of concentrated thinking and belief behind him; because each believed intensely, absolutely, beyond the least weakening of any doubt—the kind of strong belief and thinking that is rare anywhere today, the kind that wills, impregnates objects, saturates the atmosphere, haunts, in a word. And each, believing he was utterly and finally right, damned with equally positive conviction the rest of the world. One and all preached that implicitly if not explicitly. It’s the root of every creed. Last of the bigoted, grim series came Samuel Franklyn.”

  I listened in amazement that increased as she went on. Up to this point her explanation was so admirable. It was, indeed, a pretty study in psychology if it were true.

  “Then why does nothing ever happen?” I enquired mildly. “A place so thickly haunted ought to produce a crop of no ordinary results!”

  “There lies the proof,” she went on in a lowered voice, “the proof of the horror and the ugly reality. the thought and belief of each occupant in turn kept all the others under. They gave no sign of life at the time. But the results of thinking never die. They crop out again the moment there’s an opening. And, with the return of Mabel in her negative state, believing nothing positive herself the place for the first time found itself free to reproduce its buried stores.

  “Damnation, hell-fire, and the rest—the most permanent and vital thought of all those creeds, since it was applied to the majority of the world—broke loose again, for there was no restraint to hold it back. Each sought to obtain its former supremacy. None conquered. There results a pandemonium of hate and fear, of striving to escape, of agonized, bitter warring to find safety, peace—salvation. the place is saturated by that appalling stream of thinking—the terror of the damned. It concentrated upon Mabel, whose negative attitude furnished the channel of deliverance. You and I, according to our sympathy with her, were similarly involved. Nothing happened, because no one layer could ever gain the supremacy.”

  I was so interested—I dare not say amused—that I stared in silence while she paused a moment, afraid that she would draw rein and end the fairy tale too soon.

  “The beliefs of this man, of his Society rather, vigorously thought and therefore vigorously given out here, will put the whole place straight. It will act as a solvent. These vitriolic layers actively denied, will fuse and disappear in the stream of gentle, tolerant sympathy which is love. For each member, worthy of the name, loves the world, and all creeds go into the melting-pot; Mabel, too, if she joins them out of real conviction, will find salvation—”

  “Thinking, I know, is of the first importance,” I objected, “but don’t you, perhaps, exaggerate the power of feeling and emotion which in religion are au fond always hysterical?”

  “What is the world,” she told me, “but thinking and feeling? An individual’s world is entirely what that individual thinks and believes—interpretation. There is no other. And unless he really thinks and really believes, he has no permanent world at all. I grant that few people think, and still fewer believe, and that most take ready-made suits and make them do. Only the strong make their own things; the lesser fry, Mabel among them, are merely swept up into what has been manufactured for them. They get along somehow. You and I have made for ourselves, Mabel has not. She is a nonentity, and when her belief is taken from her, she goes with it.”

  It was not in me just then to criticize the evasion, or pick out the sophistry from the truth. I merely waited for her to continue.

  “None of us have Truth, my dear Frances,” I ventured presently, seeing that she kept silent.

  “Precisely,” she answered, “but most of us have beliefs. And what one believes and thinks affects the world at large. Consider the legacy of hatred and cruelty involved in the doctrines men have built into their creeds where the sine qua non of salvation is absolute acceptance of one particular set of views or else perishing everlastingly—for only by repudiating history can they disavow it—”

  “You’re not quite accurate,” I put in. “Not all the creeds teach damnation, do they? Franklyn did, of course, but the others are a bit modernized now surely?”

  “Trying to get out of it,” she admitted, “perhaps they are, but damnation of unbelievers—of most of the world, that is—is their rather favorite idea if you talk with them.”

  “I never have.”

  She smiled. “But I have,” she said significantly, “so, if you consider what the various occupants of this house have so strongly held and thought and believed, you need not be surprised t
hat the influence they have left behind them should be a dark and dreadful legacy. For thought, you know, does leave—”

  The opening of the door, to my great relief, interrupted her, as the Grenadier led in the visitor to see the room. He bowed to both of us with a brief word of apology, looked round him, and withdrew, and with his departure the conversation between us came naturally to an end. I followed him out. Neither of us in any case, I think, cared to argue further.

  And, so far as I am aware, the curious history of the Towers ends here too. There was no climax in the story sense. Nothing ever really happened. We left next morning for London. I only know that the Society in question took the house and have since occupied it to their entire satisfaction, and that Mabel, who became a member shortly afterwards, now stays there frequently when in need of repose from the arduous and unselfish labors she took upon herself under its aegis. She dined with us only the other night, here in our tiny Chelsea flat, and a jollier, saner, more interesting and happy guest I could hardly wish for. She was vital—in the best sense; the lay figure had come to life. I found it difficult to believe she was the same woman whose fearful effigy had floated down those dreary corridors and almost disappeared in the depths of that atrocious Shadow.

  What her beliefs were now I was wise enough to leave unquestioned, and Frances, to my great relief, kept the conversation well away from such inappropriate topics. It was clear, however, that the woman had in herself some secret source of joy, that she was now an aggressive, positive force, sure of herself, and apparently afraid of nothing in heaven or hell. She radiated something very like hope and courage about her, and talked as though the world were a glorious place and everybody in it kind and beautiful. Her optimism was certainly infectious.

  The Towers were mentioned only in passing. the name of Marsh came up—not the Marsh, it so happened, but a name in some book that was being discussed—and I was unable to restrain myself. Curiosity was too strong. I threw out a casual enquiry Mabel could leave unanswered if she wished. But there was no desire to avoid it. Her reply was frank and smiling.

  “Would you believe it? She married,” Mabel told me, though obviously surprised that I remembered the housekeeper at all; “and is happy as the day is long. She’s found her right niche in life. A sergeant—”

  “The army!” I ejaculated.

  “Salvation Army,” she explained merrily.

  Frances exchanged a glance with me. I laughed too, for the information took me by surprise. I cannot say why exactly, but I expected at least to hear that the woman had met some dreadful end, not impossibly by burning.

  “And the Towers, now called the Rest House,” Mabel chattered on, “seems to me the most peaceful and delightful spot in England—”

  “Really,” I said politely.

  “When I lived there in the old days—while you were there, perhaps, though I won’t be sure.”

  Mabel went on, “the story got abroad that it was haunted. Wasn’t it odd? A less likely place for a ghost I’ve never seen. Why, it had no atmosphere at all.” She said this to Frances, glancing up at me with a smile that apparently had no hidden meaning. “Did you notice anything queer about it when you were there?”

  This was plainly addressed to me.

  “I found it—er—difficult to settle down to anything,” I said, after an instant’s hesitation. “I couldn’t work there—”

  “But I thought you wrote that wonderful book on the Deaf and Blind while you stayed with me,” she asked innocently.

  I stammered a little. “Oh no, not then. I only made a few notes—er—at the Towers. My mind, oddly enough, refused to produce at all down there. But—why do you ask? Did anything—was anything supposed to happen there?”

  She looked searchingly into my eyes a moment before she answered:

  “Not that I know of,” she said simply.

  THE WOLVES OF GOD

  1

  As the little steamer entered the bay of Kettletoft in the Orkneys the beach at Sanday appeared so low that the houses almost seemed to be standing in the water; and to the big, dark man leaning over the rail of the upper deck the sight of them came with a pang of mingled pain and pleasure. the scene, to his eyes, had not changed. the houses, the low shore, the flat treeless country beyond, the vast open sky, all looked exactly the same as when he left the island thirty years ago to work for the Hudson Bay Company in distant N. W. Canada. A lad of eighteen then, he was now a man of forty-eight, old for his years, and this was the home-coming he had so often dreamed about in the lonely wilderness of trees where he had spent his life. Yet his grim face wore an anxious rather than a tender expression. the return was perhaps not quite as he had pictured it.

  Jim Peace had not done too badly, however, in the Company’s service. For an islander, he would be a rich man now; he had not married, he had saved the greater part of his salary, and even in the far-away Post where he had spent so many years there had been occasional opportunities of the kind common to new, wild countries where life and law are in the making. He had not hesitated to take them. None of the big Company Posts, it was true, had come his way, nor had he risen very high in the service; in another two years his turn would have come, yet he had left of his own accord before those two years were up. His decision, judging by the strength in the features, was not due to impulse; the move had been deliberately weighed and calculated; he had renounced his opportunity after full reflection. A man with those steady eyes, with that square jaw and determined mouth, certainly did not act without good reason.

  A curious expression now flickered over his weather-hardened face as he saw again his childhood’s home, and the return, so often dreamed about, actually took place at last. An uneasy light flashed for a moment in the deep-set grey eyes, but was quickly gone again, and the tanned visage recovered its accustomed look of stern composure. His keen sight took in a dark knot of figures on the landing-pier—his brother, he knew, among them. A wave of home-sickness swept over him. He longed to see his brother again, the old farm, the sweep of open country, the sand-dunes, and the breaking seas. the smell of long-forgotten days came to his nostrils with its sweet, painful pang of youthful memories.

  How fine, he thought, to be back there in the old familiar fields of childhood, with sea and sand about him instead of the smother of endless woods that ran a thousand miles without a break. He was glad in particular that no trees were visible, and that rabbits scampering among the dunes were the only wild animals he need ever meet.…

  Those thirty years in the woods, it seemed, oppressed his mind; the forests, the countless multitudes of trees, had wearied him. His nerves, perhaps, had suffered finally. Snow, frost and sun, stars, and the wind had been his companions during the long days and endless nights in his lonely Post, but chiefly—trees. Trees, trees, trees! On the whole, he had preferred them in stormy weather, though, in another way, their rigid hosts, ’mid the deep silence of still days, had been equally oppressive. In the clear sunlight of a windless day they assumed a waiting, listening, watching aspect that had something spectral in it, but when in motion—well, he preferred a moving animal to one that stood stock-still and stared. Wind, moreover, in a million trees, even the lightest breeze, drowned all other sounds—the howling of the wolves, for instance, in winter, or the ceaseless harsh barking of the husky dogs he so disliked.

  Even on this warm September afternoon a slight shiver ran over him as the background of dead years loomed up behind the present scene. He thrust the picture back, deep down inside himself. the self-control, the strong, even violent will that the face betrayed, came into operation instantly. the background was background; it belonged to what was past, and the past was over and done with. It was dead. Jim meant it to stay dead.

  The figure waving to him from the pier was his brother. He knew Tom instantly; the years had dealt easily with him in this quiet island; there was no startling, no unkindly change, and a deep emotion, though unexpressed, rose in his heart. It was good to be home again, he
realized, as he sat presently in the cart, Tom holding the reins, driving slowly back to the farm at the north end of the island. Everything he found familiar, yet at the same time strange. They passed the school where he used to go as a little bare-legged boy; other boys were now learning their lessons exactly as he used to do. Through the open window he could hear the droning voice of the schoolmaster, who, though invisible, wore the face of Mr. Lovibond, his own teacher.

  “Lovibond?” said Tom, in reply to his question. “Oh, he’s been dead these twenty years. He went south, you know—Glasgow, I think it was, or Edinburgh. He got typhoid.”

  Stands of golden plover were to be seen as of old in the fields, or flashing overhead in swift flight with a whir of wings, wheeling and turning together like one huge bird. Down on the empty shore a curlew cried. Its piercing note rose clear above the noisy clamor of the gulls. the sun played softly on the quiet sea, the air was keen but pleasant, the tang of salt mixed sweetly with the clean smells of open country that he knew so well. Nothing of essentials had changed, even the low clouds beyond the heaving uplands were the clouds of childhood.

  They came presently to the sand-dunes, where rabbits sat at their burrow-mouths, or ran helter-skelter across the road in front of the slow cart.

  “They’re safe till the colder weather comes and trapping begins,” he mentioned. It all came back to him in detail.

  “And they know it, too—the canny little beggars,” replied Tom. “Any rabbits out where you’ve been?” he asked casually.

  “Not to hurt you,” returned his brother shortly.

  Nothing seemed changed, although everything seemed different. He looked upon the old, familiar things, but with other eyes. There were, of course, changes, alterations, yet so slight, in a way so odd and curious, that they evaded him; not being of the physical order, they reported to his soul, not to his mind. But his soul, being troubled, sought to deny the changes; to admit them meant to admit a change in himself he had determined to conceal even if he could not entirely deny it.