The First Algernon Blackwood MEGAPACK ®. Algernon Blackwood

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СКАЧАТЬ saying in a foolish voice, “Wupsey up, wupsey down! Wupsey there!” O’Malley, in the full stream of his mood, waited impatiently till she had gone by. Then, rolling over on his side, he came closer, talking in a lowered tone. I think I never saw him so deeply stirred, nor understood, perhaps, so little of the extreme passion working in him. Yet it was incredible that he could have caught so much from mere interviews with a semi-articulate stranger, unless what he said was strictly true, and this Russian had positively touched latent fires in his soul by a kind of sympathetic magic.

      “You know,” he went on almost under his breath, “every man who thinks for himself and feels vividly finds he lives in a world of his own, apart, and believes that one day he’ll come across, either in a book or in a person, the Priest who shall make it clear to him. Well—I’d found mine, that’s all. I can’t prove it to you with a pair of scales or a butcher’s meat-axe, but it’s true.”

      “And you mean his mere presence conveyed all this without speech almost?”

      “Because there was no speech possible,” he replied, dropping his voice to a whisper and thrusting his face yet closer into mine. “We were solitary survivors of a world whose language was either uncreated or”—he italicized the word—“forgotten….”

      “An elaborate and detailed thought-transference, then?”

      “Why not?” he murmured. “It’s one of the commonest facts of daily life.”

      “And you had never fully realized it before, this loneliness and its possible explanation—that there might exist, I mean, a way of satisfying it—till you met this stranger?”

      He answered with deep earnestness. “Always, old man, always, but suffered under it atrociously because I’d never understood it. I had been afraid to face it. This man, a far bigger and less diluted example of it than myself, made it all clear and right and natural. We belonged to the same forgotten place and time. Under his lead and guidance I could find my own—return….”

      I whistled a long soft whistle, looking up into the sky. Then, sitting upright like himself, we stared hard at one another, straight in the eye. He was too grave, too serious to trifle with. It would have been unfair too. Besides, I loved to hear him. the way he reared such fabulous superstructures upon slight incidents, interpreting thus his complex being to himself, was uncommonly interesting. It was observing the creative imagination actually at work, and the process in a sense seemed sacred. Only the truth and actuality with which he clothed it all made me a little uncomfortable sometimes.

      “I’ll put it to you quite simply,” he cried suddenly.

      “Yes, and ‘quite simply’ it was—?”

      “That he knew the awful spiritual loneliness of living in a world whose tastes and interests were not his own, a world to which he was essentially foreign, and at whose hands he suffered continual rebuff and rejection. Advances from either side were mutually and necessarily repelled because oil and water cannot mix. Rejected, moreover, not merely by a family, tribe, or nation, but by a race and time—by the whole World of Today; an outcast and an alien, a desolate survival.”

      “An appalling picture!”

      “I understood it,” he went on, holding up both hands by way of emphasis, “because in miniature I had suffered the same: he was a supreme case of what lay so deeply in myself. He was a survival of other life the modern mind has long since agreed to exile and deny. Humanity stared at him over a barrier, never dreaming of asking him in. Even had it done so he could not by the law of his being have accepted. Outcast myself in some small way, I understood his terrible loneliness, a soul without a country, visible and external country that is. A passion of tenderness and sympathy for him, and so also for myself, awoke. I saw him as chieftain of all the lonely, exiled souls of life.”

      Breathless a moment, he lay on his back staring at the summer clouds—those thoughts of wind that change and pass before their meanings can be quite seized. Similarly protean was the thought his phrases tried to clothe. the terror, pathos, sadness of this big idea he strove to express touched me deeply, yet never quite with the clarity of his own conviction.

      “There are such souls, dépaysées and in exile,” he said suddenly again, turning over on the grass. “They do exist. They walk the earth today here and there in the bodies of ordinary men…and their loneliness is a loneliness that must be whispered.”

      “You formed any idea what kind of—of survival?” I asked gently, for the notion grew in me that after all these two would prove to be mere revolutionaries in escape, political refugees, or something quite ordinary.

      O’Malley buried his face in his hands for a moment without replying. Presently he looked up. I remember that a streak of London black ran from the corner of his mouth across the cheek. He pushed the hair back from his forehead, answering in a manner grown abruptly calm and dispassionate.

      “Don’t ye see what a foolish question that is,” he said quietly, “and how impossible to satisfy, inviting that leap of invention which can be only an imaginative lie…? I can only tell you,” and the breeze brought to us the voices of children from the Round Pond where they sailed their ships of equally wonderful adventure, “that my own longing became this: to go with him, to know what he knew, to live where he lived—forever.”

      “And the alarm you said you felt?”

      He hesitated.

      “That,” he added, “was a kind of mistake. To go involved, I felt, an inner catastrophe that might be Death—that it would be out of the body, I mean, or a going backwards. In reality, it was a going forwards and a way to Life.”

      VII

      And it was just before the steamer made Naples that the jolly Captain unwittingly helped matters forward a good deal. For it was his ambition to include in the safe-conduct of his vessel the happy-conduct also of his passengers. He liked to see them contented and of one accord, a big family, and he noted—or had word brought to him perhaps—that there were one or two whom the attitude of the majority left out in the cold.

      It may have been—O’Malley wondered without actually asking—that the man who shared the cabin with the strangers made some appeal for re-arrangement, but in any case Captain Burgenfelder approached the Irishman that afternoon on the bridge and asked if he would object to having them in his stateroom for the balance of the voyage.

      “Your present gompanion geds off at Naples,” he said. “Berhaps you would not object. I think—they seem lonely. You are friendly with them. They go alzo to Batoum?”

      This proposal for close quarters gave him pause. He knew a moment or two of grave hesitation, yet without time to analyze it. Then, driven by a sudden decision of the heart that knew no revision of reason, he agreed.

      “I had better, perhaps, suggest it to see if they are willing,” he said the next minute, hedging.

      “I already ask him dat.”

      “Oh, you have! And he would like it—not object, I mean?” he added, aware of a subtle sense of half-frightened pleasure.

      “Pleased and flattered on the contrary,” was the reply, as he handed him the glasses to look at Ischia rising blue from the sea.

      O’Malley felt as though his decision was somehow an act of self-committal, almost grave. It meant that impulsively he accepted a friendship which concealed in its immense attraction—danger. He СКАЧАТЬ