The First Algernon Blackwood Megapack

by Algernon Blackwood

  We moved back to our rugs. For a long time neither of us found anything to say. Soon I led the way down the creaking ladder indoors again, and we entered the stuffy little sitting-room of the tiny flat he temporarily occupied. I turned up an electric light, but O’Malley begged me to lower it. I only had time to see that his eyes were still aglow. We sat by the open window. He drew a worn notebook from his still more worn coat; but it was too dark for him to read. He knew it all by heart.

  XVII

  Some of Fechner’s reasons for thinking the Earth a being superior in the scale to ourselves, he gave, but it was another passage that lingered chiefly in my heart, the description of the daring German’s joy in dwelling upon her perfections—later, too, of his first simple vision. Though myself wholly of the earth, earthy in the ordinary sense, the beauty of the thoughts live in my spirit to this day, transfiguring even that dingy Insurance Office, streaming through all my dullest, hardest daily tasks with the inspiration of a simple delight that helps me over many a difficult weary time of work and duty.

  “‘To carry her precious freight through the hours and seasons what form could be more excellent than hers—being as it is horse, wheels, and wagon all in one. Think of her beauty—a shining ball, sky-blue and sunlit over one half, the other bathed in starry night, reflecting the heavens from all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of her mountains and windings of her valleys she would be a spectacle of rainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her from her own mountain tops. Every quality of landscape that has a name would then be visible in her all at once—all that is delicate or graceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, or cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh. That landscape is her face—a peopled landscape, too, for men’s eyes would appear in it like diamonds among the dew-drops. Green would be the dominant color, but the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is shrouded in her veil—a veil the vapory, transparent folds of which the earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying and folding about herself anew.’

  “She needs, as a sentient organism,” he continued, pointing into the curtain of blue night beyond the window, “no heart or brain or lungs as we do, for she is—different. ‘Their functions she performs through us! She has no proper muscles or limbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the other stars. To these her whole mass reacts by the most exquisite alterations in its total gait and by the still more exquisite vibratory responses in its substance. Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the clouds and snowfields combine them into white, the woods and flowers disperse them into colors…. Men have always made fables about angels, dwelling in the light, needing no earthly food or drink, messengers between ourselves and God. Here are actually existent beings, dwelling in the light and moving through the sky, needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries between God and us, obeying His commands. So, if the heavens really are the home of angels, the heavenly bodies must be those very angels, for other creatures there are none. Yes! the Earth is our great common guardian angel, who watches over all our interests combined.’

  “And then,” whispered the Irishman, seeing that I still eagerly listened, “give your ear to one of his moments of direct vision. Note its simplicity, and the authority of its conviction:

  “‘On a certain spring morning I went out to walk. the fields were green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all things. It was only a little bit of the earth; it was only a moment of her existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more it seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear a fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh and flower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so at one with herself, turning her whole living face to Heaven, and carrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky,—only to find them nowhere.’”

  Fire-engines, clanging as with a hurrying anger through the night, broke in upon his impassioned sentences; the shouts of the men drowned his last words….

  Life became very wonderful inside those tight, confining walls, for the spell and grandeur of the whole conception lifted the heart. Even if belief failed, in the sense of believing—a shilling, it succeeded in the sense of believing—a symphony. the invading beauty swept about us both. Here was a glory that was also a driving power upon which any but a man half dead could draw for practical use. For the big conceptions fan the will. the little pains of life, they make one feel, need not kill true joy, nor deaden effort.

  “Come,” said O’Malley softly, interrupting my dream of hope and splendor, “let us walk together through the Park to your place. It is late, and you, I know, have to be up early in the morning…earlier than I.”

  And presently we passed the statue of Achilles and got our feet upon the turf beyond—a little bit of living planet in the middle of the heavy smothering London town. About us, over us, within us, stirred the awe of that immense idea. Upon that bit of living, growing turf we passed toward the Marble Arch, treading, as it were, the skin of a huge Body—the physical expression of a grand angelic Being, alive, sentient, conscious. Conscious, moreover, of our little separate individual selves who walked…a Being who cared; who felt us; who knew, understood, and—loved us as a mother her own offspring…. “To whom men could pray as they pray to their saints.”

  The conception, even thus dimly and confusedly adumbrated, brought a new sense of life—terrific and eternal. All living things upon the earth’s surface were emanations of her mighty central soul; all—from the gods and fairies of olden time who knew it, to the men and women of Today who have forgotten it.

  The gods—!

  Were these then projections of her personality—aspects and facets of her divided self—emanations now withdrawn? Latent in her did they still exist as moods or Powers—true, alive, everlasting, but unmanifest? Still knowable to simple men and to Children of Nature?

  Was this the giant truth that Stahl had built on Fechner?

  Everything about us seemed to draw together into an immense and towering configuration that included trees and air and the sweep of open park—the looming and overwhelming beauty of one of these very gods survived—Pan, the eternal and the splendid…a mood of the Earth-life, a projection clothed with the light of stars, the cloudy air, the passion of the night, the thrill of an august, extended Mood.

  And the others were not so very far behind—those other little parcels of Earth’s Consciousness the Greeks and early races, the simple, primitive, childlike peoples of the dawn, divined the existence of, and labeled “gods”…and worshipped…so as to draw their powers into themselves by ecstasy and vision…

  Could, then, worship now still recall them? Was the attitude of even one true worshipper’s heart the force necessary to touch that particular aspect of the mighty total Consciousness of Earth, and call forth those ancient forms of beauty? Could it be that this idea—the idea of “the gods”—was thus forever true and vital…? And might they be known and felt in the heart if not actually in some suggested form?

  I only know that as we walked home past the doors of that dingy Paddington house where Terence O’Malley kept his dusty books and papers and so to my own quarters, these things he talked about dropped into my mind with a bewildering splendor to stay forever. His words I have forgotten, or how he made such speculations worth listening to at all. Yet, I hear them singing in my blood as though of yesterday; and often when that conflict comes ’twixt duty and desire that makes life sometimes so vain and bitter, the memory comes to lift with strength far greater than my own. the Earth can heal and bless.

  XVIII

  Slowly, taking life easily, th
e little steamer puffed its way across the Ionian Sea. the pyramid of Etna, bluer even than the sky, dominated the western horizon long after the heel of Italy had faded, then melted in its turn into the haze of cloud and distance. No other sails were visible.

  With the passing of Calabria spring had leaped into the softness of full summer, and the breezes were gentle as those that long ago fanned the cheeks and hair of Io, beloved of Zeus, as she flew southwards toward the Nile. the passengers, less lovely than that fair daughter of Argos, and with the unrest of thinner adventure in their blood, basked lazily in the sun; but the sea was not less haunted for those among them whose hearts could travel. the Irishman at any rate slipped beyond the confines of the body, viewing that ancient scene as she had done, from above. His widening consciousness expanded to include it.

  Cachalots spouted; dolphins danced, as though still to those wild flutes of Dionysus; porpoises rolled beneath the surface of the transparent waves, diving below the vessel’s sides but just in time to save their shiny noses; and all day long, ignoring the chart upon the stairway walls, the tourists turned their glasses eastwards, searching for a first sight of Greece.

  O’Malley, meanwhile, trod the decks of a new ship. For him now sea and sky were doubly peopled. the wind brought messages of some divine deliverance approaching slowly, the heat of that pearly, shining sun warmed centers of his being that hitherto the world kept chill. the land toward which the busy steamer moved he knew, of course, was but the shell from which the inner spirit of beauty once vivifying it had long since passed away. Yet it remained a clue. That ancient loveliness, as a mood of the earth’s early consciousness, was buried, not destroyed. Eternally it still flamed somewhere. And, long before the days of Greece, he knew, it had existed in yet fuller and more complete manifestation: that earliest, vastly splendid Mood of the earth’s soul, too mighty for any existence that the history of humanity can recall, and too remote for any but the most daringly imaginative minds even to conceive. the Urwelt Mood, as Stahl himself admitted, even while it called to him, was a reconstruction that to men today could only seem—dangerous.

  And his own little Self, guided by the inarticulate stranger, was being led at last toward its complete recapture.

  Yet, while he crawled slowly with the steamer over a tiny portion of the spinning globe, feeling that at the same time he crawled toward a spot upon it where access would be somehow possible to this huge expression of her first Life—what was it, phrased timidly as men phrase big thoughts today, that he really believed? Even in our London talks, intimate as they were, interpreted too by gesture, facial expression, and—silence, his full meaning evaded precise definition. “There are no words, there are no words,” he kept saying, shrugging his shoulders and stroking his untidy hair. “In me, deep down, it all lies clear and plain and strong; but language cannot seize a mode of life that throve before language existed. If you cannot catch the picture from my thoughts, I give up the whole dream in despair.” And in his written account, owing to its strange formlessness, the result was not a little bewildering.

  Briefly stated, however—that remnant, at least, which I discover in my own mind when attempting to tell the story to others—what he felt, believed, lived, at any rate while the adventure lasted, was this:—

  That the Earth, as a living, conscious Being, had known visible projections of her consciousness similar to those projections of our own personality which the advanced psychologists of today now envisage as possible; that the simple savagery of his own nature, and the poignant yearnings derived from it, were in reality due to his intimate closeness to the life of the Earth; that, whereas in the body the fulfillment of these longings was impossible, in the spirit he might yet know contact with the soul of the planet, and thus experience their complete satisfaction. Further, that the portion of his personality which could thus enter this heaven of its own subjective construction, was that detachable portion Stahl had spoken of as being “malleable by desire and longing,” leaving the body partially and temporarily sometimes in sleep, and, at death, completely. More,—that the state thus entered would mean a quasi-merging back into the life of the Earth herself, of which he was a partial expression.

  This closeness to Nature was today so rare as to be almost unrecognized as possible. Its possession constituted its owner what the doctor called a “Cosmic Being”—a being scarcely differentiated from the life of the Earth Spirit herself—a direct expression of her life, a survival of a time before such expressions had separated away from her and become individualized as human creatures. Moreover, certain of these earliest manifestations or projections of her consciousness, knowing in their huge shapes of fearful yet simple beauty a glory of her own being, still also survived. the generic term of “gods” might describe their status as interpreted to the little human power called Imagination.

  This call to the simple life of primal innocence and wonder that had ever brimmed the heart of the Irishman, acknowledged while not understood, might have slumbered itself away with the years among modern conditions into atrophy and denial, had he not chanced to encounter a more direct and vital instance of it even than himself. the powerfully-charged being of this Russian stranger had summoned it forth. the mere presence of this man quickened and evoked this faintly-stirring center in his psychic being that opened the channel of return. Speech, as any other explanation, was unnecessary. To resist was still within his power. To accept and go was also open to him. the “inner catastrophe” he feared need not perhaps be insuperable or permanent.

  “Remember,” the doctor had said to him at the end of that last significant conversation, “this berth in my stateroom is freely at your disposal till Batoum.” And O’Malley, thanking him, had shaken off that restraining hand upon his arm, knowing that he would never make use of it again.

  For the Russian stranger and his son had somehow made him free.

  Between that cabin and the decks he spent his day. Occasionally he would go below to report progress, as it were, by little sentences which he divined would be acceptable, and at the same time gave expression to his own growing delight. the boy, meanwhile, was everywhere, playing alone like a wild thing; one minute in the bows, hat off, gazing across the sea beneath a shading hand, and the next leaning over the stern-rails to watch the churning foam that drove them forwards. At regular intervals he, too, rushed to the cabin and brought communications to his parent.

  “Tomorrow at dawn,” observed the Irishman, “we shall see Cape Mattapan rising from the sea. After that, Athens for a few hours; then coasting through the Cyclades, close to the mainland often.” And glancing over to the berth, while pretending to be busy with his steamer-trunk, he saw the great smile of happiness break over the other’s face like a sunrise….

  For it was clear to him that with the approach to Greece, a change began to come over his companions. It was noticeable chiefly in the father. the joy that filled the man, too fine and large to be named excitement, passed from him in radiations that positively seemed to carry with them a physical extension. This, of course, was purely a clairvoyant effect upon the mind—O’Malley’s divining faculty visualized the spiritual traits of the man’s dilating Self. But, nevertheless, the truth remained that—somehow he increased. He grew; became interiorly more active, alive, potent; and of this singular waxing of the inner spirit something passed outwards and stood with rare dignity about his very figure.

  And this manifestation of themselves was due to that expansion of the inner life caused by happiness. the little point of their personalities they showed normally to the world was but a single facet, a tip as it were of their whole selves. More lay within, beyond. As with the rest of the world, a great emotion stimulated and summoned it forth into activity nearer the surface. Clearly, for these two Greece symbolized a point of departure of a great hidden passion. Something they expected lay waiting for them there. Guidance would come thence.

  And, by reflection perhaps as much as by direct stimulation, the same change ma
de itself felt in himself. Joy caught him—the joy of a home-coming, long deferred….

  At the same time, the warning of Dr. Stahl worked in him, if subconsciously only. He showed this by mixing more with the other passengers. He chatted with the Captain, who was as pleased with his big family as though he had personally provided the weather that made them happy; with the Armenian priest, who was eager to show that he had read “a much of T’ackeray and Keeplin”; and especially with the boasting Moscow merchant, who by this time “owned” the smoking-room and imposed his verbose commonplaces upon one and all with authoritative self-confidence in six languages—a provincial mind in full display. the latter in particular held him to a normal humanity; his atmosphere breathed the wholesome thickness of the majority of humankind—ordinary, egoistic, with the simplicity of the uninspiring sort. the merchant acted upon him as a sedative, and that day the Irishman took him in large doses, allopathically, for his talk formed an admirable antidote to the stress of that other burning excitement that, according to Stahl, threatened to disintegrate his personality.

  Though hardly in the sense he intended, the fur-merchant was entirely delightful—engaging as a child; for, among other marked qualities, he possessed the unerring instinct of the snob which made him select for his friends those whose names or position might glorify his banal insignificance—and his stories were vivid pictorial illustrations of this useful worldly faculty. O’Malley listened with secret delight, keeping a grave face and dropping in occasional innocent questions to heighten the color or increase the output. Others in the circle responded in kind, feeling the same chord vibrating in themselves. Even the priest, like a repeating-gun, continually discharged his little secret pride that Byron had occupied a room in that Venetian monastery where he lived; and at last O’Malley himself was conscious of an inclination to report his own immense and recently discovered kinship with a greater soul and consciousness than his own. After all, he reflected with a deep thrill while he listened, the desire of the snob was but a crude and simple form of the desire of the mystic:—to lose one’s little self in a Self which is greater!