The First Algernon Blackwood MEGAPACK ®. Algernon Blackwood
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the mere joy of tumultuous pagan instincts. It was, in the kind of simple life he craved, the first step toward the recovery of noble, dignified, enfranchised living. In the denial of all this external flummery he hated, it would leave the soul disengaged and free, able to turn her activities within for spiritual development. Civilization now suffocated, smothered, killed the soul. Being in the hopeless minority, he felt he must be somewhere wrong, at fault, deceived. For all men, from a statesman to an engine-driver, agreed that the accumulation of external possessions had value, and that the importance of material gain was real…. Yet, for himself, he always turned for comfort to the Earth. the wise and wonderful Earth opened her mind and her deep heart to him in a way few other men seemed to know. Through Nature he could move blind-folded along, yet find his way to strength and sympathy. A noble, gracious life stirred in him then which the pettier human world denied. He often would compare the thin help or fellowship he gained from ordinary social intercourse, or from what had seemed at the time quite a successful gathering of his kind, with the power he gained from a visit to the woods or mountains. the former, as a rule, evaporated in a single day; the other stayed, with ever growing power, to bless whole weeks and months.
And hence it was, whether owing to the truth or ignorance of his attitude, that a sense of bleak loneliness spread through all his life, and more and more he turned from men to Nature.
Moreover, foolish as it must sound, I was sometimes aware that deep down in him hid some nameless, indefinable quality that proclaimed him fitted to live in conditions that had never known the restraints of modern conventions—a very different thing to doing without them once known. A kind of childlike, transcendental innocence he certainly possessed, naïf, most engaging, and—utterly impossible. It showed itself indirectly, I think, in this distress under modern conditions. the multifarious apparatus of the spirit of Today oppressed him; its rush and luxury and artificiality harassed him beyond belief. the terror of cities ran in his very blood.
When I describe him as something of an outcast, therefore, it will be seen that he was such both voluntarily and involuntarily.
“What the world has gained by brains is simply nothing to what it has lost by them—”
“A dream, my dear fellow, a mere dream,” I stopped him, yet with sympathy because I knew he found relief this way. “Your constructive imagination is too active.”
“By Gad,” he replied warmly, “but there is a place somewhere, or a state of mind—the same thing—where it’s more than a dream. And, what’s more, bless your stodgy old heart, some day I’ll get there.”
“Not in England, at any rate,” I suggested.
He stared at me a moment, his eyes suddenly charged with dreams. Then, characteristically, he snorted. He flung his hand out with a gesture that should push the present further from him.
“I’ve always liked the Eastern theory—old theory anyhow if not Eastern—that intense yearnings end by creating a place where they are fulfilled—”
“Subjectively—”
“Of course; objectively means incompletely. I mean a Heaven built up by desire and intense longing all your life. Your own thought makes it. Living idea, that!”
“Another dream, Terence O’Malley,” I laughed, “but beautiful and seductive.”
To argue bored him. He loved to state his matter, fill it with detail, blow the heated breath of life into it, and then leave it. Argument belittled without clarifying; criticism destroyed, sealing up the sources of life. Any fool could argue; the small, denying minds were always critics.
“A dream, but a damned foine one, let me tell you,” he exclaimed, recovering his brogue in his enthusiasm. He glared at me a second, then burst out laughing. “Tis better to have dhreamed and waked,” he added, “than never to have dhreamed at all.”
And then he poured out O’Shaughnessy’s passionate ode to the Dreamers of the world:
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory;
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
For this passion for some simple old-world innocence and beauty lay in his soul like a lust—self-feeding and voracious.
III
“Lonely! Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?”
—THOREAU
March had passed shouting away, and April was whispering deliciously among her scented showers when O’Malley went on board the coasting steamer at Marseilles for the Levant and the Black Sea. the mistral made the land unbearable, but herds of white horses ran galloping over the bay beneath a sky of childhood’s blue. the ship started punctually—he came on board as usual with a bare minute’s margin—and from his rapid survey of the thronged upper deck, it seems, he singled out on the instant this man and boy, wondering first vaguely at their uncommon air of bulk, secondly at the absence of detail which should confirm it. They appeared so much bigger than they actually were. the laughter, rising in his heart, however, did not get as far as his lips.
For this appearance of massive bulk, and of shoulders comely yet almost humped, was not borne out by a direct inspection. It was a mental impression. the man, though broad and well-proportioned, with heavy back and neck and uncommonly sturdy torso, was in no sense monstrous. It was upon the corner of the eye that the bulk and hugeness dawned, a false report that melted under direct vision. O’Malley took him in with attention merging in respect, searching in vain for the detail of back and limbs and neck that suggested so curiously the sense of the gigantic. the boy beside him, obviously son, possessed the same elusive attributes—felt yet never positively seen.
Passing down to his cabin, wondering vaguely to what nationality they might belong, he was immediately behind them, elbowing French and German tourists, when the father abruptly turned and faced him. Their gaze met. O’Malley started.
“Whew…!” ran some silent expression like fire through his brain.
Out of a massive visage, placid for all its ruggedness, shone eyes large and timid as those of an animal or child bewildered among so many people. There was an expression in them not so much cowed or dismayed as “un-refuged”—the eyes of the hunted creature. That, at least, was the first thing they betrayed; for the same second the quick-blooded Celt caught another look: the look of a hunted creature that at last knows shelter and has found it. the first expression had emerged, then withdrawn again swiftly like an animal into its hole where safety lay. Before disappearing, it had flashed a wireless message of warning, of welcome, of explanation—he knew not what term to use—to another of its own kind, to himself.
O’Malley,