“Come on, man,” he cried at the top of his voice. “That’s the joran! I know it of old! It’s terrific. Run!” And he caught the lad, still lingering, by the arm.
But Lord Ernie shook himself free with an excitement almost violent.
“I’ve been up there with those great fires,” he shouted. “I know the whole blessed thing. But where was it? Where?” His face was white, eyes shining, manner strangely agitated. “Big, naked fellows who dance like wind, and rushing women of fire, and—”
Two things happened then, interrupting the boy’s wild language. Thejoran reached the village and struck it; the houses shook, the trees bent double, and the cloud of limestone dust, painting the darkness white, swept on between Hendricks and the boy with extraordinary force, even separating them. There was a clatter of falling tiles, of banging doors and windows, and then a burst of icy rain that fell like iron shot on everything, raising actual spray. the air was in an instant thick. Everything drove past, roared, trembled. And, secondly—just in that brief instant when man and boy were separated—there shot between them with shadowy swiftness the figure of a man, hatless, with flying hair, who vanished with running strides into the darkness of the village street beyond—all so rapidly that sight could focus the manner neither of his coming nor of his going. Hendricks caught a glimpse of a swarthy, elemental type of face, the swing of great shoulders, the leap of big loose limbs—something rushing and elastic in the whole appearance—but nothing he could claim for definite detail. the figure swept through the dust and wind like an animal—and was gone. It was, indeed, only the contrast of Lord Ernie’s whitened skin, of his graceful, half-elegant outline, that enabled him to recall the details that he did. the weather-beaten visage seemed to storm away. Bindy’s delicate aristocratic face shone so pale and eager. But that a real man had passed was indubitable, for the boy made a flurried movement as though to follow. Hendricks caught his arm with a determined grip and pulled him back.
“Who was that? Who was it?” Lord Ernie cried breathlessly, resisting with all his strength, but vainly.
“Some mountain fellow, of course. Nothing to do with us.” And he dragged the boy after him down the road. For a second both seemed to have lost their heads. Hendricks certainly felt a gust of something strike him into momentary consternation that was half alarm.
“From up there, where the fires are?” asked the boy, shouting above the wind and rain.
“Yes, yes, I suppose so. Come along. We shall be soused. Are you mad?” For Bindy still held back with all his weight, trying to turn round and see. Hendricks used more force. There was almost a scuffle in the road.
“All right, I’m coming. I only wanted to look a second. You needn’t drag my arm out.” He ceased resistance, and they lurched forward together. “But what a chap he was! He went like the wind. Did you see the light streaming out of him—like fire?”
“Like what?” shouted Hendricks, as they dashed now through the driving tempest.
“Fire!” bawled the boy. “It lit me up as he passed—fire that lights but does not burn, and wind that blows the world along—”
“Button your coat and run!” interrupted the other, hurrying his pace, and pulling the lad forcibly after him.
“Don’t twist! You’re hurting! I can run as well as you!” came back, with an energy Bindy had never shown before in his life. He was breathless, panting, charged with excitement still. “It touched me as he passed—fire that lights but doesn’t burn, and wind that blows the heart to flame—let me go, will you? Let go my hand.”
He dashed free and away. the torrential rain came down in sheets now from a windless sky, for the joran was already miles beyond them, tearing across the angry lake. They reached the carpenter’s house, where their lodging was, soaked to the skin. They dried themselves, and ate the light supper of soup and omelette prepared for them—ate it in their dressing-gowns. Lord Ernie went to bed with a hot-water bottle of rough stone. He declared with decision that he felt no chill. His excitement had somewhat passed.
“But, I say, Mr. Hendricks,” he remarked, as he settled down with his novel and a cigarette, calmed and normal again, “this is a place and a half, isn’t it? It stirs me all up. I suppose it’s the storm. What doyou think?”
“Electrical state of the air, yes,” replied the tutor briefly.
Soon afterwards he closed the shutters on the weather side, said good-night, and went into his own room to unpack. the singular phrase Bindy had used kept singing through his head: “Fire that lights but doesn’t burn, and wind that blows the heart to flame”—the first time he had said “blows the world along.” Where on earth had the boy got hold of such queer words? He still saw the figure of that wild mountain fellow who had passed between them with the dust and wind and rain. There was confusion in the picture, or rather in his memory of it, perhaps. But it seemed to him, looking back now, that the man in passing had paused a second—the briefest second merely—and had spoken, or, at any rate, had stared closely a moment into Bindy’s face, and that some communication had been between them in that moment of elemental violence.
III
Pasteur Leysin Hendricks remembered very well. Even now in his old age he was a vigorous personality, but in his youth he had been almost revolutionary; wild enough, too, it was rumoured, until he had turned to God of his own accord as offering a larger field for his strenuous vitality. the little man was possessed of tireless life, a born leader of forlorn hopes, attack his métier, and heavy odds the conditions that he loved. Before settling down in this isolated spot—pasteur de l’église indépendente in a protestant Canton—he had been a missionary in remote pagan lands. His horizon was a big one, he had seen strange things. An uncouth being, with a large head upon a thin and wiry body supported by steely bowed legs, he had that courage which makes itself known in advance of any proof. Hendricks slipped over to la cureabout nine o’clock and found him in his study. Lord Ernie was asleep; at least his light was out, no sound or movement audible from his room. the joran had swept the heavens of clouds. Stars shone brilliantly. the fires still blazed faintly upon the heights.
The visit was not unexpected, for Hendricks had already sent a message to announce himself, and the moment he sat down, met the Pasteur’s eye, heard his voice, and observed his slight imperious gestures, he passed under the influence of a personality stronger than his own. Something in Leysin’s atmosphere stretched him, lifting his horizon. He had come chiefly—he now realised it—to borrow help and explanation with regard to Lord Ernie; the events of two hours before had impressed him more than he quite cared to own, and he wished to talk about it. But, somehow, he found it difficult to state his case; no opening presented itself; or, rather, the Pasteur’s mind, intent upon something of his own, was too preoccupied. In reply to a question presently, the tutor gave a brief outline of his present duties, but omitted the scene of excitement in the village street, for as he watched the furrowed face in the light of the study lamp, he realised both anxiety and spiritual high pressure at work below the surface there. He hesitated to intrude his own affairs at first. They discussed, nevertheless, the psychology of the boy, and the unfavorable chances of regeneration, while the old man’s face lit up and flashed from time to time, until at length the truth came out, and Hendricks understood his friend’s preoccupation.
“What you’re attempting with an individual,” Leysin exclaimed with ardor, “is precisely what I’m attempting with a crowd. And it’s difficult. For poor sinners make poor saints, and the lukewarm I will spue out of my mouth.” He made an abrupt, resentful gesture to signify his disgust and weariness, perhaps his contempt as well. “Cut it down! Why cumbereth it the ground?”
“A hard, uncharitable doctrine,” began the tutor, realising that he must discuss the Parish before he could introduce Bindy’s case effectively. “You mean, of course, that there’s no material to work on?”
“No energy to direct,” was the emphatic reply. “My sheep here are—real she
ep; mere negative, drink-sodden loafers without desire. Hospital cases! I could work with tigers and wild beasts, but who ever trained a slug?”
“Your proper place is on the heights,” suggested Hendricks, interrupting at a venture. “There’s scope enough up there, or used to be. Have they died out, those wild men of the mountains?” And hit by chance the target in the bull’s-eye.
The old man’s face turned younger as he answered quickly.
“Men like that,” he exclaimed, “do not die off. They breed and multiply.” He leaned forward across the table, his manner eager, fervent, almost impetuous with suppressed desire for action. “There’s evil thinking up there,” he said suggestively, “but, by heaven, it’s alive; it’s positive, ambitious, constructive. With violent feeling and strong desire to work on, there’s hope of some result. Upon vehement impulses like that, pagan or anything else, a man can work with a will. Those are the tigers; down here I have the slugs!”
He shrugged his shoulders and leaned back into his chair. Hendricks watched him, thinking of the stories told about his missionary days among savage and barbarian tribes.
“Born of the vital landscape, I suppose?” he asked. “Wind and frost and blazing sun. Their wild energy, I mean, is due to—”
A gesture from the old man stopped him. “You know who started them upon their wild performances,” he said gravely in a lower voice; “you know how that ambitious renegade priest from the Valais chose them for his nucleus, then died before he could lead them out, trained and competent, upon his strange campaign? You heard the story when you were with me as a boy—?”
“I remember Marston,” put in the other, uncommonly interested, “Marston—the boy who—” He stopped because he hardly knew how to continue. There was a minute’s silence. But it was not an empty silence, though no word broke it. Leysin’s face was a study.
“Ah, Marston, yes,” he said slowly, without looking up; “you remember him. But that is at my door, too, I suppose. His father was ignorant and obstinate; I might have saved him otherwise.” He seemed talking to himself rather than to his listener. Pain showed in the lines about the rugged mouth. “There was no one, you see, who knew how to direct the great life that woke in the lad. He took it back with him, and turned it loose into all manner of useless enterprises, and the doctors mistook his abrupt and fierce ambitions for—for the hysteria which they called the vestibule of lunacy.… Yet small characters may have big ideas.… They didn’t understand, of course.… It was sad, sad, sad.” He hid his face in his hands a moment.
“Marston went wrong, then, in the end?” for the other’s manner suggested disaster of some kind. Hendricks asked it in a whisper. Leysin uncovered his face, looped his neck with one finger, and pointed to the ceiling.
“Hanged himself!” murmured Hendricks, shocked.
The Pasteur nodded, but there was impatience, half anger in his tone.
“They checked it, kept it in. of course, it tore him!”
The two men looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, and something in the younger of them shrank. This was all beyond his ken a little. An odd hint of bleak and cruel reality was in the air, making him shiver along nerves that were normally inactive. the uneasiness he felt about Lord Ernie became alarm. His conscience pricked him.
“More than he could assimilate,” continued Leysin. “It broke him. Yet, had outlets been provided, had he been taught how to use it, this elemental energy drawn direct from Nature—” He broke off abruptly, struck perhaps by the expression in his listener’s eyes. “It seems incredible, doesn’t it, in the twentieth century? I know.”
“Evil?” asked Hendricks, stammering rather.
“Why evil?” was the impatient reply. “How can any force be evil? That’s merely a question of direction.”
“And the priest who discovered these forces and taught their use, then—?”
“Was genuinely spiritual and followed the truth in his own way. He was not necessarily evil.” the little Pasteur spoke with vehemence. “You talk like the religion-primers in the kindergarten,” he went on. “Listen. This man, sick and weary of his lukewarm flock, sought vital, stalwart systems who might be clean enough to use the elemental powers he had discovered how to attract. Only the bias of the users could make it @evil@ by wrong use. His idea was big and even holy—to train a corps that might regenerate the world. And he chose unreasoning, unintellectual types with a purpose—primitive, giant men who could assimilate the force without risk of being shattered. Under his direction he intended they should prove as effective as the twelve disciples of old who were fisher-folk. And, had he gone on—”
“He, too, failed then?” asked the other, whose tangled thoughts struggled with incredulity and belief as he heard this strange new thing. “He died, you mean?”
“Maison de santé,” was the laconic reply, “strait-waistcoats, padded cells, and the rest; but still alive, I’m told. It was more than he could manage.”
It was a startling story, even in this brief outline, deep suggestion in it. the tutor’s sense of being out of his depth increased. After nine months with a lifeless, devitalised human being, this was—well, he seemed to have fallen in his sleep from a comfortable bed into a raging mountain torrent. Strong currents rushed through and over him. the lonely, peaceful village outside, sleeping beneath the stars, heightened the contrast.
“Suppressed or misdirected energy again, I suppose,” he said in a low tone, respecting his companion’s emotion. “And these mountain men,” he asked abruptly, “do they still keep up their—practices?”
“Their ceremonies, yes,” corrected the other, master of himself again. “Turbulent moments of nature, storms and the like, stir them to clumsy rehearsals of once vital rituals—not entirely ineffective, even in their incompleteness, but dangerous for that very reason. This joran, for instance, invariably communicates something of its atmospherical energy to themselves. They light their fires as of old. They blunder through what they remember of his ceremonies. With the glasses you may see them in their dozens, men and women, leaping and dancing. It’s an amazing sight, great beauty in it, impossible to witness even from a distance without feeling the desire to take part in it. Even my people feel it—the only time they ever get alive,”—he jerked his big head contemptuously towards the street—“or feel desire to act. And someone from the heights—a messenger perhaps—will be down later, this very evening probably, on the hunt—”
“On the hunt?” Hendricks asked it half below his breath. He felt a touch of awe as he heard this experienced, genuinely religious man speak with conviction of such curious things. “On the hunt?” he repeated more eagerly.
“Messengers do come down,” was the reply. “A living belief always seeks to increase, to grow, to add to itself. Where there’s conviction there’s always propaganda.”
“Ah, converts—?”
Leysin shrugged his big black shoulders. “Desire to add to their number—desire to save,” he said. “The energy they absorb overflows, that’s all.”
The Englishman debated several questions vaguely in his mind; only his mind, being disturbed, could not hold the balance exactly true. Leysin’s influence, as of old, was upon him. A possibility, remote, seductive, dangerous, began to beckon to him, but from somewhere just outside his reasoning mind.
“And they always know when one of their kind is near,” the voice slipped in between his tumbling thoughts, “as though they get it instinctively from these universal elements they worship. They select their recruits with marvellous judgment and precision. No messenger ever goes back alone; nor has a recruit ever been known to return to the lazy squalor of the conditions whence he escaped.”
The younger man sat upright in his chair, suddenly alert, and the gesture that he made unconsciously might have been read by a keen psychiatrist as evidence of mental self-defence. He felt the forbidden impulse in him gathering force, and tried to call a halt. At any rate, he called upon the other man to be explicit. He en
quired point-blank what this religion of the heights might be. What were these elements these people worshipped? In what did their wild ceremonies consist?
And Leysin, breaking bounds, let his speech burst forth in a stream of explanation, learned of actual knowledge, as he claimed, and uttered with a vehement conviction that produced an undeniable effect upon his astonished listener. Told by no dreamer, but by a righteous man who lived, not merely preached his certain faith, Hendricks, before the half was heard, forgot what age and land he dwelt in. Whole blocks of conventional belief crumbled and fell away. Brick walls erected by routine to mark narrow paths of proper conduct—safe, moral, advisable conduct—thawed and vanished. Through the ruins, scrambling at him from huge horizons never recognised before, came all manner of marvellous possibilities. the little confinement of modern thought appalled him suddenly. Leysin spoke slowly, said little, was not even speculative. It was no mere magic of words that made the dim-lit study swim these deep waters beyond the ripple of pert creeds, but rather the overwhelming sense of sure conviction driving behind the statements. the little man had witnessed curious things, yes, in his missionary days, and that he had found truth in them in place of ignorant nonsense was remarkable enough. That silly superstitions prevalent among older nations could be signs really of their former greatness, linked mightily close to natural forces, was a startling notion, but it paved the way in Hendricks’ receptive mind just then for the belief that certain so-called elements might be worshipped—known intimately, that is—to the uplifting advantage of the worshippers. And what elements more suitable for adoring imitation than wind and fire? For in a human body the first signs of what men term life are heat which is combustion, and breath which is a measure of wind. Life means fire, drawn first from the sun, and breathing, borrowed from the omnipresent air; there might credibly be ways of assaulting these elements and taking heaven by storm; of seizing from their inexhaustible stores an abnormal measure, of straining this huge raw supply into effective energy for human use—vitality. Living with fire and wind in their most active moments; closely imitating their movements, following in their footsteps, understanding their “laws of being,” going identicallywith them—there lay a hint of the method. It was once, when men were primitively close to Nature, instinctual knowledge. the ceremony was the teaching. the Powers of fire, the Principalities of air, existed; and humanity could know their qualities by the ritual of imitation, could actually absorb the fierce enthusiasm of flame and the tireless energy of wind. Such transference was conceivable.
The First Algernon Blackwood Megapack Page 124