The First Algernon Blackwood MEGAPACK ®. Algernon Blackwood

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      “‘Though it is true that we know no other,’” he heard Stahl repeating slowly as he looked down into his cup and stirred the dregs.

      Then, suddenly, the doctor rose and came over to his side. His eyes twinkled, and he rubbed his hands vigorously together as he spoke. He laughed.

      “For instance, I have no longer now the consciousness of that coffee I have just swallowed,” he exclaimed, “yet, if it disagreed with me, my consciousness of it would return.”

      “The abnormal states you mean are a symptom of disorder then?” the Irishman asked, following the analogy.

      “At present, yes,” was the reply, “and will remain so until their correlation with the smaller conscious Self is better understood. These belligerent Powers of the larger Consciousness are apt to overwhelm as yet. That time, perhaps, is coming. Already a few here and there have guessed that the states we call hysteria and insanity, conditions of trance, hypnotism, and the like, are not too satisfactorily explained.” He peered down at his companion. “If I could study your Self at close quarters for a few years,” he added significantly, “and under various conditions, I might teach the world!”

      “Thank you!” cried the Irishman, now wholly returned into his ordinary self. He could think of nothing else to say, yet he meant the words and gave them vital meaning. He moved across to another chair. Lighting a cigarette, he puffed out clouds of smoke. He did not desire to be caught again beneath this man’s microscope. And in his mind he had a sudden picture of the speculative and experimenting doctor being “requested to sever his connection” with the great Hospital for the sake of the latter’s reputation. But Stahl, in no way offended, was following his own thoughts aloud, half speaking to himself.

      “… For a being organized as you are, more active in the outlying tracts of consciousness than in the centers lying nearer home,—a being like yourself, I say, might become aware of Other Life and other personalities even more advanced and highly organized than that of the Earth.”

      A strange excitement came upon him, making his eyes shine. He walked to and fro, O’Malley watching him, a touch of alarm mingled with his interest.

      “And to think of the great majority that denies because they are—dead!” he cried. “Smothered! Undivining! Living in that uninspired fragment which they deem the whole! Ah, my friend,”—and he came abruptly nearer—“the pathos, the comedy, the pert self-sufficiency of their dull pride, the crass stupidity and littleness of their denials, in the eyes of those like ourselves who have actually known the passion of the larger experience—! For all this modern talk about a Subliminal Self is woven round a profoundly significant truth, a truth newly discovered and only just beginning to be understood. We are much greater than we know, and there is a vast subconscious part of us. But, what is more important still, there is a super-consciousness as well. the former represents what the race has discarded; it is past; but the latter stands for what it reaches out to in the future. the perfect man you dream of perhaps is he who shall eventually combine the two, for there is, I think, a vast amount the race has discarded unwisely and prematurely. It is of value and will have to be recovered. In the subconsciousness it lies secure and waiting. But it is the super-consciousness that you should aim for, not the other, for there lie those greater powers which so mysteriously wait upon the call of genius, inspiration, hypnotism, and the rest.”

      “One leads, though, to the other,” interrupted O’Malley quickly. “It is merely a question of the swing of the pendulum?”

      “Possibly,” was the laconic reply.

      “They join hands, I mean, behind my back, as it were.”

      “Possibly.”

      “This stranger, then, may really lead me forward and not back?”

      “Possibly,” again was all the answer that he got.

      For Stahl had stopped short, as though suddenly aware that he had said too much, betraying himself in the sudden rush of interest and excitement. the face for a moment had seemed quite young, but now the flush faded, and the light died out from his eyes. O’Malley never understood how the change came about so quickly, for in a moment, it seemed, the doctor was calm again, quietly lighting one of his black cigars over by the desk, peering at him half quizzingly, half mockingly through the smoke.

      “So I urge you again,” he was saying, as though the rest had been some interlude that the Irishman had half imagined, “to proceed with the caution of this sane majority, the caution that makes for safety. Your friend, as I have already suggested to you, is a direct expression of the cosmic life of the earth. Perhaps, you have guessed by now, the particular type and form. Do not submit your inner life too completely to his guidance. Contain your Self—and resist—while it is yet possible.”

      And while he sat on there, sipping hot coffee, half listening to the words that warned of danger while at the same time they cunningly urged him forwards, it seemed that the dreams of childhood revived in him with a power that obliterated this present day—the childhood, however, not of his mere body, but of his spirit, when the world herself was young…. He, too, had dwelt in Arcady, known the free life of splendor and simplicity in some Saturnian Reign; for now this dream, but half remembered, half believed, though eternally yearned for—dream of a Golden Age untouched by Time, still there, still accessible, still inhabited, was actually coming true.

      It surely was that old Garden of innocence and joy where the soul, while all unvexed by a sham and superficial civilization of the mind, might yet know growth—a realm half divined by saints and poets, but to the gross majority forgotten or denied.

      The Simple Life! This new interpretation of it at first overwhelmed. the eyes of his soul turned wild with glory; the passion that o’er-runs the world in desolate places was his; his, too, the strength of rushing rivers that coursed their parent’s being. He shared the terror of the mountains and the singing of the sweet Spring rains. the spread wonder of the woods of the world lay imprisoned and explained in the daily hurry of his very blood. He understood, because he felt, the power of the ocean tides; and, flitting to and fro through the tenderer regions of his extended Self, danced the fragrance of all the wild flowers that ever blew. That strange allegory of man, the microcosm, and earth, the macrocosm, became a sudden blazing reality. the feverish distress, unrest, and vanity of modern life was due to the distance men had traveled from the soul of the world, away from large simplicity into the pettier state they deemed so proudly progress.

      Out of the transliminal depths of this newly awakened Consciousness rose the pelt and thunder of these magical and enormous cosmic sensations—the pulse and throb of the planetary life where his little Self had fringed her own. Those untamed profundities in himself that walked alone, companionless among modern men, suffering an eternal nostalgia, at last knew the approach to satisfaction. For when the “inner catastrophe” completed itself and escape should come—that transfer of the conscious center across the threshold into this vaster region stimulated by the Earth—all his longings would be housed at last like homing birds, nested in the gentle places his yearnings all these years had lovingly built for them—in a living Nature! the fever of modern life, the torture and unrest of a false, external civilization that trained the brain while it still left wars and baseness in the heart, would drop from him like the symptoms of some fierce disease. the god of speed and mechanism that ruled the world today, urging men at ninety miles an hour to enter a Heaven where material gain was only a little sublimated and not utterly denied, would pass for the nightmare that it really was. In its place the cosmic life of undifferentiated simplicity, clean and sweet and big, would hold СКАЧАТЬ