The Best Psychic Stories Part 3

The flat was roomy, high up on the top floor, yet in a busy part of town, so that the roar of traffic mounted round it like a sea. Through the open windows came the fresh night air of June. He had never noticed before how sweet the London night air could be, and that not all the smoke and dust could smother a certain touch of wild fragrance that tinctured it with perfume--yes, almost perfume--as of the country. He swallowed a draught of it as he stood there, staring out across the tangled world of roofs and chimney-pots. He saw the procession of the clouds; he saw the stars; he saw the moonlight falling in a shower of silver spears upon the slates and wires and steeples. And something in him quickened--something that had never stirred before.

He turned with a horrid start, for the uneasiness had of a sudden leaped within him like an animal. There was some one in the flat.

Instantly, with action--even this slight action--the fancy vanished; but, all the same, he switched on the electric lights and made a search.

For it seemed to him that some one had crept up close behind him while he stood there watching the night--some one, whose silent presence fingered with unerring touch both this new thing that had quickened in his heart and that sense of original deep uneasiness. He was amazed at himself--angry--indignant that he could be thus foolishly upset over nothing, yet at the same time profoundly distressed at this vehement growth of a new thing in his well-ordered personality. Growth? He dismissed the word the moment it occurred to him--but it had occurred to him. It stayed. While he searched the empty flat, the long pa.s.sages, the gloomy bedroom at the end, the little hall where he kept his overcoats and golf sticks, it stayed. Growth! It was oddly disquieting. Growth to him involved, though he neither acknowledged nor recognized the truth perhaps, some kind of undesirable changeableness, instability, unbalance.

Yet singular as it all was, he realized that the uneasiness and the sudden appreciation of beauty that was so new to him had both entered by the same door into his being. When he came back to the front room he noticed that he was perspiring. There were little drops of moisture on his forehead. And down his spine ran chills, little, faint quivers of cold. He was s.h.i.+vering.

He lit his big meerschaum pipe, and left the lights all burning. The feeling that there was something he had overlooked, forgotten, left undone, had vanished. Whatever the original cause of this absurd uneasiness might be--he called it absurd on purpose because he now realized in the depths of him that it was really more vital than he cared about--it was much nearer to discovery than before. It dodged about just below the threshold of discovery. It was as close as that.

Any moment he would know what it was; he would remember. Yes, he would _remember_. Meanwhile, he was in the right place. No desire to go elsewhere afflicted him, as in the theater. Here was the place, here in the flat.

And then it was with a kind of sudden burst and rush--it seemed to him the only way to phrase it--memory gave up her dead.

At first he only caught her peeping round the corner at him, drawing aside a corner of an enormous curtain, as it were; striving for more complete entrance as though the ma.s.s of it were difficult to move. But he understood, he knew, he recognized. It was enough for that. As an entrance into his being--heart, mind, soul--was being attempted and the entrance because of his stolid temperament was difficult of accomplishment, there was effort, strain. Something in him had first to be opened up, widened, made soft and ready as by an operation, before full entrance could be effected. This much he grasped though for the life of him he could not have put it into words. Also he knew who it was that sought an entrance. Deliberately from himself he withheld the name.

But he knew as surely as though Straughan stood in the room and faced him with a knife saying, "Let me in, let me in. I wish you to know I'm here. I'm clearing a way! You recall our promise?"

He rose from his chair and went to the open window again, the strange fear slowly pa.s.sing. The cool air fanned his cheeks. Beauty till now had scarcely ever brushed the surface of his soul. He had never troubled his head about it. It pa.s.sed him by indifferent; and he had ever loathed the mouthy prating of it on others' lips. He was practical; beauty was for dreamers, for women, for men who had means and leisure. He had not exactly scorned it; rather it had never touched his life, to sweeten, to cheer, to uplift. Artists for him were like monks--another s.e.x almost--useless beings who never helped the world go round. He was for action always, work, activity, achievement as he saw them. He remembered Straughan vaguely--Straughan, the ever impecunious friend of his youth, always talking of color and sound--mysterious, ineffectual things. He even forgot what they had quarreled about, if they had quarreled at all even; or why they had gone apart all these years ago. And certainly he had forgotten any promise. Memory as yet only peeped at him round the corner of that huge curtain tentatively, suggestively, yet--he was obliged to admit it--somewhat winningly. He was conscious of this gentle, sweet seductiveness that now replaced his fear.

And as he stood now at the open window peering over huge London, beauty came close and smote him between the eyes. She came blindingly, with her train of stars and clouds and perfumes. Night, mysterious, myriad-eyed, and flaming across her sea of haunted shadows invaded his heart and shook him with her immemorial wonder and delight. He found no words of course to clothe the new unwonted sensations. He only knew that all his former dread, uneasiness, distress, and with them this idea of growth that had seemed so repugnant to him were merged, swept up, and gathered magnificently home into a wave of beauty that enveloped him. "See it, and understand," ran a secret inner whisper across his mind. He saw. He understood....

He went back and turned the lights out. Then he took his place again at that open window, drinking in the night. He saw a new world; a species of intoxication held him. He sighed, as his thoughts blundered for expression among words and sentences that knew him not. But the delight was there, the wonder, the mystery. He watched with heart alternately tightening and expanding the transfiguring play of moon and shadow over the sea of buildings. He saw the dance of the hurrying clouds, the open patches into outer s.p.a.ce, the veiling and unveiling of that ancient silvery face; and he caught strange whispers of the hierophantic, sacerdotal power that has echoed down the world since Time began and dropped strange magic phrases into every poet's heart, since first "G.o.d dawned on Chaos"--the Beauty of the Night.

A long time pa.s.sed--it may have been one hour, it may have been three--when at length he turned away and went slowly to his bedroom. A deep peace lay over him. Something quite new and blessed had crept into his life and thought. He could not quite understand it all. He only knew that it uplifted. There was no longer the least sign of affliction or distress. Even the inevitable reaction that set in could not destroy that.

And then as he lay in bed nearing the borderland of sleep, suddenly and without any obvious suggestion to bring it, he remembered another thing.

He remembered the promise. Memory got past the big curtain for an instant and showed her face. She looked into his eyes. It must have been a dozen years ago when Straughan and he had made that foolish solemn promise, that whoever died first should show himself if possible to the other.

He had utterly forgotten it--till now. But Straughan had not forgotten it. The letter came three weeks later from India. That very evening Straughan had died--at nine o'clock. And he had come back--in the Beauty that he loved.

THE SECOND GENERATION[3]

BY ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

[Footnote 3: _From Ten-Minute Stories_, published by E. P. Dutton & Co.]

Sometimes, in a moment of sharp experience, comes that vivid flash of insight that makes a plat.i.tude suddenly seem a revelation--its full content is abruptly realized. "Ten years _is_ a long time, yes," he thought, as he walked up the drive to the great Kensington house where she still lived.

Ten years--long enough, at any rate, for her to have married and for her husband to have died. More than that he had not heard, in the outlandish places where life had cast him in the interval. He wondered whether there had been any children. All manner of thoughts and questions, confused a little, pa.s.sed across his mind. He was well-to-do now, though probably his entire capital did not amount to her income for a single year. He glanced at the huge, forbidding mansion. Yet that pride was false which had made of poverty an insuperable obstacle. He saw it now.

He had learned values in his long exile.

But he was still ridiculously timid. This confusion of thought, of mental images rather, was due to a kind of fear, since wors.h.i.+p ever is akin to awe. He was as nervous as a boy going up for a _viva voce_; and with the excitement was also that unconquerable sinking--that horrid shrinking sensation that excessive shyness brings. Why in the world had he come? Why had he telegraphed the very day after his arrival in England? Why had he not sent a tentative, tactful letter, feeling his way a little?

Very slowly he walked up the drive, feeling that if a reasonable chance of escape presented itself he would almost take it. But all the windows stared so hard at him that retreat was really impossible now and though no faces were visible behind the curtains, all had seen him, possibly she herself--his heart beat absurdly at the extravagant suggestion. Yet it was odd--he felt so certain of being seen, and that someone watched him. He reached the wide stone steps that were clean as marble, and shrank from the mark his boots must make upon their spotlessness. In desperation, then, before he could change his mind, he touched the bell.

But he did not hear it ring--mercifully; that irrevocable sound must have paralyzed him altogether. If no one came to answer, he might still leave a card in the letter-box and slip away. Oh, how utterly he despised himself for such a thought! A man of thirty with such a chicken heart was not fit to protect a child, much less a woman. And he recalled with a little stab of pain that the man she married had been noted for his courage, his determined action, his inflexible firmness in various public situations, head and shoulders above lesser men. What presumption on his own part ever to dream!... He remembered, too, with no apparent reason in particular, that this man had a grown-up son already, by a former marriage.

And still no one came to open that huge, contemptuous door with its so menacing, so hostile air. His back was to it, as he carelessly twirled his umbrella, but he felt its sneering expression behind him while it looked him up and down. It seemed to push him away. The entire mansion focused its message through that stern portal: Little timid men are not welcomed here.

How well he remembered the house! How often in years gone by had he not stood and waited just like this, trembling with delight and antic.i.p.ation, yet terrified lest the bell should be answered and the great door actually swung wide! Then, as now, he would have run, had he dared. He was still afraid--his wors.h.i.+p was so deep. But in all these years of exile in wild places, farming, mining, working for the position he had at last attained, her face and the memory of her gracious presence had been his comfort and support, his only consolation, though never his actual joy. There was so little foundation for it all, yet her smile and the words she had spoken to him from time to time in friendly conversation had clung, inspired, kept him going--for he knew them all by heart. And more than once in foolish optimistic moods, he had imagined, greatly daring, that she possibly had meant more....

He touched the bell a second time--with the point of his umbrella. He meant to go in, carelessly as it were, saying as lightly as might be, "Oh, I'm back in England again--if you haven't _quite_ forgotten my existence--I could not forego the pleasure of saying 'How-do-you-do?'

and hearing that you are well ...," and the rest; then presently bow himself easily out--into the old loneliness again. But he would at least have seen her; he would have heard her voice, and looked into her gentle, amber eyes; he would have touched her hand. She might even ask him to come in another day and see her! He had rehea.r.s.ed it all a hundred times, as certain feeble temperaments do rehea.r.s.e such scenes.

And he came rather well out of that rehearsal, though always with an aching heart, the old great yearnings unfulfilled. All the way across the Atlantic he had thought about it, though with lessening confidence as the time drew near. The very night of his arrival in London he wrote, then, tearing up the letter (after sleeping over it), he had telegraphed next morning, asking if she would be in. He signed his surname--such a very common name, alas! but surely she would know--and her reply, "Please call 4:30," struck him as rather oddly worded. Yet here he was.

There was a rattle of the big door k.n.o.b, that aggressive, hostile k.n.o.b that thrust out at him insolently like a fist of bronze. He started, angry with himself for doing so. But the door did not open. He became suddenly conscious of the wilds he had lived in for so long; his clothes were hardly fas.h.i.+onable; his voice probably had a tw.a.n.g in it, and he used tricks of speech that must betray the rough life so recently left.

What would she think of him, now? He looked much older, too. And how brusque it was to have telegraphed like that! He felt awkward, gauche, tongue-tied, hot and cold by turns. The sentences, so carefully rehea.r.s.ed, fled beyond recovery.

Good heavens--the door was open! It had been open for some minutes. It moved noiselessly on big hinges. He acted automatically; he heard himself asking if her ladys.h.i.+p was at home, though his voice was nearly inaudible. The next moment he was standing in the great, dim hall, so poignantly familiar, and the remembered perfume almost made him sway. He did not hear the door close, but he knew. He was caught. The butler betrayed an instant's surprise--or was it over-wrought imagination again?--when he gave his name. It seemed to him--though only later did he grasp the significance of that curious intuition--that the man had expected another caller instead. The man took his card respectfully and disappeared. These flunkeys were so marvellously trained. He was too long accustomed to straight question and straight answer, but here, in the Old Country, privacy was jealously guarded with such careful ritual.

And almost immediately the butler returned, still expressionless, and showed him into the large drawing-room on the ground floor that he knew so well. Tea was on the table--tea for one. He felt puzzled. "If you will have tea first, sir, her ladys.h.i.+p will see you afterwards," was what he heard. And though his breath came thickly, he asked the question that forced itself out. Before he knew what he was saying he asked it, "Is she ill?" "Oh, no, her ladys.h.i.+p is quite well, thank you, sir. If you will have tea first, sir, her ladys.h.i.+p will see you afterwards." The horrid formula was repeated, word for word. He sank into an armchair and mechanically poured out his own tea. What he felt he did not exactly know. It seemed so unusual, so utterly unexpected, so unnecessary, too.

Was it a special attention, or was it merely casual? That it could mean anything else did not occur to him. How was she busy, occupied--not here to give him tea? He could not understand it. It seemed such a farce having tea alone like this--it was like waiting for an audience, it was like a doctor's or a dentist's room. He felt bewildered, ill at ease, cheap.... But after ten years in primitive lands perhaps London usages had changed in some extraordinary manner. He recalled his first amazement at the motor-omnibuses, taxicabs, and electric tubes. All were new. London was otherwise than when he left it. Piccadilly and the Marble Arch themselves had altered. And, with his reflection, a shade more confidence stole in. She knew that he was there and presently she would come in and speak with him, explaining everything by the mere fact of her delicious presence. He was ready for the ordeal, he would see her--and drop out again. It was worth all manner of pain, even of mortification. He was in her house, drinking her tea, sitting in a chair she used herself perhaps. Only he would never dare to say a word or make a sign that might betray his changeless secret. He still felt the boyish wors.h.i.+pper, wors.h.i.+pping in dumbness from a distance, one of a group of many others like himself. Their dreams had faded, his had continued, that was the difference. Memories tore and raced and poured upon him.

How sweet and gentle she had always been to him! He used to wonder sometimes.... Once, he remembered, he had rehea.r.s.ed a declaration, but while rehearsing the big man had come in and captured her, though he had only read the definite news long after by chance in an Arizona paper.

He gulped his tea down. His heart alternately leaped and stood still. A sort of numbness held him most of that dreadful interval, and no clear thought came at all. Every ten seconds his head turned towards the door that rattled, seemed to move, yet never opened. But any moment now it _must_ open, and he would be in her very presence, breathing the same air with her. He would see her, charge himself with her beauty once more to the brim, and then go out again into the wilderness--the wilderness of life--without her, and not for a mere ten years but for always. She was so utterly beyond his reach. He felt like a backwoodsman, he was a backwoodsman.

For one thing only was he duly prepared, though he thought about it little enough--she would, of course, have changed. The photograph he owned, cut from an ill.u.s.trated paper, was not true now. It might even be a little shock perhaps. He must remember that. Ten years cannot pa.s.s over a woman without--

Before he knew it the door was open, and she was advancing quietly towards him across the thick carpet that deadened sound. With both hands outstretched she came, and with the sweetest welcoming smile upon her parted lips he had seen in any human face. Her eyes were soft with joy.

His whole heart leaped within him; for the instant he saw her it all flashed clear as sunlight--that she knew and understood. She had always known, had always understood. Speech came easily to him in a flood, had he needed it, but he did not need it. It was all so adorably easy, simple, natural, and true. He just took her hands--those welcoming, outstretched hands--in both of his own, and led her to the nearest sofa.

He was not even surprised at himself. Inevitably, out of depths of truth, this meeting came about. And he uttered a little foolish commonplace, because he feared the huge revulsion that his sudden glory brought, and loved to taste it slowly:

"So you live here still?"

"Here, and here," she answered softly, touching his heart, and then her own. "I am attached to this house, too, because _you_ used to come and see me here, and because it was here I waited so long for you, and still wait. I shall never leave it--unless you change. You see, we live together here."

He said nothing. He leaned forward to take and hold her. The abrupt knowledge of it all somehow did not seem abrupt--it was as though he had known it always; and the complete disclosure did not seem disclosure either--rather as though she told him something he had inexplicably left unrealized, yet not forgotten. He felt absolutely master of himself, yet, in a curious sense, outside of himself at the same time. His arms were already open--when she gently held her hands up to prevent. He heard a faint sound outside the door.

"But you are free," he cried, his great pa.s.sion breaking out and flooding him, yet most oddly well controlled, "and I--"

She interrupted him in the softest, quietest whisper he had ever heard:

"You are not free, as I am free--not yet."

The sound outside came suddenly closer. It was a step. There was a faint click on the handle of the door. In a flash, then, came the dreadful shock that overwhelmed him--the abrupt realization of the truth that was somehow horrible--that Time, all these years, had left no mark upon her and that _she had not changed_. Her face was as young as when he saw her last.

With it there came cold and darkness into the great room. He s.h.i.+vered with cold, but an alien, unaccountable cold. Some great shadow dropped upon the entire earth, and though but a second could have pa.s.sed before the handle actually turned, and the other person entered, it seemed to him like several minutes. He heard her saying this amazing thing that was question, answer, and forgiveness all in one--this, at least, he divined before the ghastly interruption came--"But, George--if you had only spoken--!"

With ice in his blood he heard the butler saying that her ladys.h.i.+p would be "pleased" to see him if he had finished his tea and would be "so good as to bring the papers and doc.u.ments upstairs with him." He had just sufficient control of certain muscles to stand upright and murmur that he would come. He rose from a sofa that held no one but himself. All at once he staggered. He really did not know exactly what happened, or how he managed to stammer out the medley of excuses and semi-explanations that battered their way through his brain and issued somehow in definite words from his lips. Somehow or other he accomplished it. The sudden attack, the faintness, the collapse!... He vaguely remembered afterwards--with amazement too--the suavity of the butler as he suggested telephoning for a doctor, and that he just managed to forbid it, refusing the offered gla.s.s of brandy as well, remembered contriving to stumble into the taxicab and give his hotel address with a final explanation that he would call another day and "bring the papers." It was quite clear that his telegram had been attributed to someone else, someone "with papers"--perhaps a solicitor or architect. His name was such an ordinary one, there were so many Smiths. It was also clear that she whom he had come to see and _had_ seen, no longer lived here in the flesh....

And just as he left the hall he had the vision--mere fleeting glimpse it was--of a tall, slim, girlish figure on the stairs asking if anything was wrong, and realized vaguely through his atrocious pain that she was, of course, the wife of the son who had inherited....

JOSEPH: A STORY