by Anthology
I stayed where I had lain myself, and whether my eyes were open or closed I no longer knew. The miseries of this place had abated. No, that does not express it, for this was no longer a place. This place had disappeared, or it had been merged in the new dimension which I call Nowhere.
It is immeasurably great; it is unimaginably small: for as there is no time so there is no space: there is only being, and its modes: and in that region my misery continued itself far from the knowledge of this brain and beyond the let or hindrance of this body.
And yet somewhere, somehow, I knew something that I can only think of as nothing. An awful, a deadly business was proceeding, with me as the subject. It can only be expressed negatively. Thus I may phrase it, I had gone in the spirit into that aperture from which I had fled. I was in contact with the unmanifest, and that, in its own sphere, is as competent and enduring as are its extensions with which we are familiar. But of that I cannot speak; for as it was out of range of these senses so it was out of range of this mind whose sole preoccupation is these senses.
I had been in terror, but in what was I now? How little to me was the human absence of light, the normal absence of sound that had frightened me.
I was nowhere, and it was real. I was nothing and I was enduring. I would have returned to my blank, dumb prison as one flies to a paradise, but I could not, for something had happened to me. I was translated; and until that experience was fulfilled I could not regain myself nor evade in any way my happenings.
Therefore, I do not know how long I remained crouched in that stony den. Nor how I lay; nor aught that happened to me. But at a point I did return to normal consciousness, and that as swiftly as though one had taken me by the shoulders and clicked me to another direction.
All that monstrous Something-Nothing ceased; and I was listening with these ears, and staring through known darkness with these eyes that see you.
There were footsteps outside the door, and in an instant the door grinced and screeched and swung.
It was those two. But I did not move from where I lay, and when I did so it was because he lifted me. Those giant arms could lift me as one plucks up a cat; and in a moment I was walking, and the arm that was yet around my waist was pressing me lovingly to his side.
“We were only playing with you,” he said.
And she at my other side cooed, as she fondled my hand.
“It was only a game.”
I looked wordlessly from one to the other and laughed gently.
It was strange that I did not wish to speak. It was strange still that I would not speak; and to everything that they said I returned my gentle laugh. That, it seemed to me, must be sufficient communion even for them; and who in the world could wish to speak when he might laugh?
We walked on, slowly at first, and then hastily, and sentences came from one to the other across me; sometimes explanations, at times assertions and assents.
“It took us ten minutes to get out,” he said, “and we thought—”
“For you are so much cleverer than we are,” she interposed.
“That you would have been home almost as quickly as we were.”
“It took us ten long minutes to imagine that although the door was closed it might not be fastened,” he went on, “but when I pulled on it it opened at once.
“I was glad to see the moonlight,” he continued in a tone of reverie.
“Glad!” she exclaimed.
“Those ten minutes were unpleasant,” he assented.
“They were wicked,” she exclaimed energetically. “They . . .” she paused and took my arm again: “They are forgotten and forgiven. Our thoughts of each other now can be all frankness and trust.”
I must have been imprisoned for some hours, for when I went in there had been a bright moon in a bare sky, where now there was no moon and the heavens were deeply shadowed. Our faces were visible to each other as dull shapes, and the spaces about us were bathed in that diaphanous darkness through which one looks without seeing, and against which things loom rather than show.
A wonderful feeling of well-being flowed through me, warming and bracing me. A feeling of astonishing rest for myself, and of endless affection for my companions.
And with it all there was a sense, confused and yet strong, that I knew something which they did not know. That I had a secret which would astonish them when they discovered it.
I knew they should discover it, for I would reveal it to them myself, as soon as I became aware of what it really was. And my mind was filled with joy at the thought of how I would surprise them, and of how they should be surprised.
That strange knowledge lay like a warmth at my heart. It lit the dull night for me, so that through the gloom and mirk I walked as on air and in radiance. All that I had gone through vanished from my memory. It was as though it had never been. Nothing was any more but this new-found rest and contentment.
Happiness! I had found it at last; and it was more worth finding than anything I had yet experienced.
But the end of our walk was nigh. At a distance was the gleam of lights, and black silhouettes about them. We increased our pace, I, willingly enough, for I wished to tell them a secret; and in a short time we came to the great steps and mounted them. Men were there with torches, and we walked gaily from darkness into light.
Reaching the top, on the wide platform before the door, she turned to me with a smile, and she stopped dead. I saw the smile frozen on her face. I saw her face blanch to the whiteness of snow, and her eyes widen and fix and stare. She clasped her bosom with both hands and stood so, staring.
Then something, a self of me, detached itself from me, and stood forward and looked also.
I saw myself. My mouth was twisted sidewards in a jolly grin. My eyes were turned inwards in a comical squint, and my chin was all a sop of my own saliva.
I looked at myself so for a mortal moment, and I awakened.
EVERYWHERE ELSE AND OTHERWISE
Algernon Blackwood
1
Among the genuinely strange stories of the world, the strangest are those concerned with total disappearance. Apart from murders and destruction, where bodies are variously done away with, these “total disappearances” stand by themselves. Hi presto! and the fellow is gone, leaving not a wrack behind. The class, naturally, is small. Sydney Mantravers certainly belonged to it.
His case is interesting because, after a total disappearance of four years or so, he re-appeared. Not only did he re-appear, but he tried hard to tell me where he had been and what he had been doing during his long absence. He failed. Such experiences apparently seem uncommunicable in any language at the disposal of humanity, since they transcend anything humanity has undergone. The necessary words have not yet been coined. Before he could satisfy the thousand questions I burned to ask him, questions, too, he might in time have partly answered, he was gone again, this time, as we say, for good.
I saw him go, I also saw him return: that is, I saw him disappear and re-appear. This was my unsought, unwelcomed privilege. I was with him when he went, I was there when he came back. That final going in death robbed him, I firmly believe, of a burden of intense and marvellous confession, while it robbed me, but in particular robbed Dr. Vronski, his fellow student, of a rich harvest that was almost within my grasp—a revelation possibly that might have extended the present knowledge of the race.
Sydney Mantravers remains for me an extraordinary, even terrible, problem. The mere mention of his name brings back the haunting radiance of his skin and eyes, the breath of some unearthly atmosphere which stimulates, while yet it cools, the blood. Eyes, skin and those thousand unanswered questions will haunt me till I, too, enter that silent darkness which makes reappearance apparently impossible.
His story is not really complicated. It is only that the sequence of its details covers a considerable time, a somewhat extensive field as well. It is best to tell it precisely as it happened. It began, then, in a London club, of which we were both members,
and the occasion was August 4th, the night of the Ultimatum. War had been declared. England was at war with Germany. It was a night, as all remember, of intense excitement, of strange exaltation. Emotion was deep and real. It was not personal emotion. All of us, old and young, thought first of the country.
Mantravers, a distant cousin, was over sixty; I was a young officer of twenty-five. He had always been kind to me, I knew him fairly well, he had given me good tips in days gone by, we were friends of a kind, and his knowledge of life, as a rich, travelled, experienced bachelor, had often stood me in good stead. I respected, if rather dreaded, him, dreaded, that is, his strange high-brow theories, his attainments in higher physics, his amazing ideas about space and time and what not. Occasionally, he would pour something of all this into me, leaving me breathless, uneasy, perhaps a little scared. My main interests being horses, women, money and personal advancement, the dread of his intellectual attainments was understandable, but he declared he liked to talk to me because, if ignorant, I was what he called “open-minded and intelligent,” while I think he twigged some secret curiosity in me at the same time. I used to think of those occasional talks as “trying it on the dog,” but when once I mentioned this he shook his head. “No, no,” he said, “it’s not that. You happen to have an unusual mind, an original make-up. If you were trained a bit I could tell you more. You could do things. Your ignorance is to the good, for you would have nothing to un-learn.”
His greatest friend was a certain Dr. Vronski, whom I knew slightly too, another “advanced intellectual” whose experiments with islands, hypnotism, yoga, and other adventures into difficult fields brought him more than once into conflict with the Law. Vronski I saw rarely, he never favoured me with special talks, but he treated me with a certain courtesy, almost a touch of deference in his manner somewhere, as though I interested him as a specimen, or as someone with possibilities that must be watched, at any rate, not damaged, this attitude due, I felt sure, to things my cousin had said about me. I was, naturally, in the confidence of neither. I mention I his strange Dr. Vronski because of the role he inevitably played. Another odd thing I must mention too at this point—the astonishing fact that Mantravers, already over sixty, looked even younger than Vronski, who was forty perhaps. My cousin’s youthful air, indeed, was a standing joke almost. Not looked merely—he was young. He had not aged for years; for a quarter of a century, the story ran, he had not changed. Yet, when I caught up with the tale and its undeniable evidence, I had the convinced intuition that this amazing preservation had its mysterious roots, not in any experiment with glands, but in some secret adventure or discovery that had been undertaken by this amazing pair, had failed in Vronski’s case, yet succeeded with my cousin. Sydney Mantravers, to put it ridiculously, had arrested decay, I hat gradual decay which we call growing older, for something like a score of years.
This was uppermost in my mind, even a rather dreadful barrier between us, each time we met and talked. Owing to my age, much of the evidence, of course, was hearsay. Yet his curious youthfulness a I sixty never failed to rise in my mind, often to strike me in the face with its uncanniness. He had somehow escaped a good twenty-five years of life. It was present in my mind when the Ultimatum came.
In the club, then, that night of strain and tension, I chanced to be sitting with him when the news we had all been waiting for came m—that war had been declared. We were all “worked up” and above ourselves. Mantravers, too, was all worked up—but, as I suddenly discovered with a shock, not about the declaration of war. He was stirred and excited about quite another matter, a wholly personal matter.
It was this difference of key that isolated him oddly from what all were feeling at the moment. While my mind was occupied entirely with questions about England, the Empire, our army and navy, with my own immediate prospects as a soldier as well, he kept asking me questions about some trivial personal matter. It got on my nerves a bit. Too excited to be puzzled, I felt first exasperated, then angry. He kept asking me if I remembered someone called Defrayne. But the name conveyed nothing to me. I had never heard it, and in any case what could it matter at such a time—unless, perhaps, this Defrayne had something to do with the war.
“He was in the 9th, you know,” said Mantravers, as though Defrayne did, after all, have something to say to the war. I hardly listened, I was barely polite, my interest was so entirely elsewhere. The only point I noticed as curious, and had been aware of, indeed, even before—though the excitement had prevented my paying special attention to it—was the colour of my cousin’s face. His skin was dead white of rather a ghastly kind. “Try and remember,” he urged. “Look back a bit. He was in your regiment. You must have heard of him.” But I listened through a chorus of other voices, for we were all talking at once . . .
It was well after midnight, “God Save the King” already sung, when, to my surprise, Mantravers begged me to walk home with him, since it was on my own way, and when we reached his door asked, even insisted, that I should come in. He wished to tell me something. Once in his room, a drink before us, I remember that a sensation of discomfort, almost of alarm, came over me, and that I began to watch him more closely. My own preoccupation was still entirely with the war, of course. Literally, I could think of nothing else. Yet his first question, since I had naturally expected something about Germany at least, returned to his own personal affair: “You tell me,” he began in a low and rather tense voice, “that you don’t recall Defrayne?” I did not, and I told him so again bluntly enough, exasperation and impatience showing plainly. I had hoped for something very different.
“Then—if you don’t mind—I’ll tell you something,” he said, and there was a nervous hesitation, almost a demand for sympathy, in his manner that made me wonder. Tire pallor in his face again struck me sharply. “I must tell someone,” he went on, “and you’re the sort of listener I want. You’re ignorant and simple, but you’re open-minded.” He paused for a second or two. “It’s about Defrayne and myself,” he added, almost in a whisper, and for some reason I felt a sudden shiver run down my back. It was due, this shiver, I verily believe, to an abrupt realisation that he looked twenty-five years younger than he was. I knew this in a general way, had wondered a I it often enough. I now realised it. I felt at any rate this passing shiver.
2
Let me say at once that this announcement both bored and half infuriated me, so that at first I listened perfunctorily—for what possible interest could Defrayne, whoever he was, have now?—but I hat later, if considerably later, my interest was so deeply caught that I lie war, with all it meant, slipped into the background.
Strange, how many different things the mind can think of at the same time, how many different, even opposing, emotions it can hold simultaneously: the nearest approach to four-dimensional time and space we know, perhaps. The thing he had to tell was so literally beyond belief that had he told it a week, even twenty-four hours, before, it must have seemed wholly beyond belief, and I should have thought him mad. Yet now, as I stared and listened, one ear cocked for the street where shouting, tumult and the National Anthem were still audible, I discovered that I did not entirely disbelieve. Nor did I, as must have been the case even the night before, regard my cousin as the victim of an elaborate hallucination, his mind deranged. On the contrary, I found myself listening to something that I felt was not necessarily impossible. And the idea dawned upon me, then, that this shock of the war, which in my case was profound and real, had worked in me some swift curious change. I felt in some way older, more developed. Tire shock had matured me abruptly, as it were with a jump. A new understanding of Mantravers was born in me. I understood, for instance, his reputation for giving “easy advice,” for saying what the other fellow wanted to hear, rather than what he thought himself. His immense knowledge of life had always brought people in trouble to him, young people especially. “Go and ask Mantravers, he’ll tell you what to do,” was a commonplace, though it would have been more correct to say “he’ll t
ell you what you want to hear.” I now realised suddenly that this was no false friendliness in him, nor lack of principle exactly, but was due rather to his deep understanding sympathy. He put himself so completely in the other fellow’s shoes that he thought the other fellow’s thoughts instead of his own. It was his own power of imaginative sympathy that sent him wrong.
As my preoccupation with the war now slipped further and further into the background it flashed upon me, too, that after all I did perhaps remember having heard of Defrayne. I did not know even how the name was spelled, when suddenly there leaped into my mind the word “de Frasne,” and I dimly recalled that a young officer in my regiment, of that name pronounced Defrayne, had committed suicide a good many years ago. It was well before my time, but I had heard the case spoken of. In trouble about money, a woman, questions of personal honour involved, the young subaltern had put a bullet through his temple. But he had gone to see Mantravers first. As I listened to the tense, low-pitched voice in the chair opposite to mine, details filled in the story by degrees.
A good many years before, it appeared, young de Frasne had come to ask his advice. The young fellow had involved himself in a terrible mess, yet without having done anything wrong actually. Appearances were hopelessly against him. In a tragic mood, the youngster expected, wanted, tragic advice, and Mantravers took up his case with his usual intense sympathy. He felt, that is, exactly what young de Frasne felt. “Some chaps,” he had suggested, “placed as you are, might, of course, rank honour higher than life . . .” Young de Frasne went, white. “You mean . . .?” he asked grimly. “There’s always the emergency exit, isn’t there?” Mantravers mentioned, lending himself fully to the other’s theatrical state of mind. It never occurred to him, he swore, that the stricken youngster would take his advice seriously. “I really thought,” he now told me in his flat, “that he’d go home feeling himself a stage hero—then think out another way. He would come back in the morning. But he did not come back next morning, nor any other morning.”