Incredible Adventures. Algernon Blackwood
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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 unfavourable 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 ardour, ‘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 sheep; 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