Algernon Blackwood

“ Delane then realised two things sharply, both of them fleeting impressions, but acutely vivid: First, that the outside darkness seemed to have entered and established itself between him and the new arrival; and, secondly, that the stranger’s face was difficult to focus for clear sight, although the covering hat was now removed. There was a blur upon it somewhere. And this the Englishman ascribed partly to the flickering effect of firelight, and partly to the lightning glare of the man’s masterful and terrific eyes, which made his own sight waver in some curious fashion as he gazed upon him. ”

“ And the Englishman stared then into a countenance grown mighty with woe and loneliness. There stood darkly in it this incommunicable magnificence of pain that mingled awe with the pity he had felt. The kingly eyes looked clear into his own, completing his subjugation out of time. “I would follow you,” ran his thought upon its knees, “follow you with obedience forever and ever, even into a last damnation. For you are sublime. You shall come again into your Kingdom, if my own small worship⁠—”
Then blackness sponged the reckless thought away. ”

“ Again, deep love and searching pity seared the Englishman’s heart as he replied in the gentlest accents he could find to master:
“And I claim you,” he said, “by my understanding sympathy, and by my sorrow for your Godforsaken loneliness, and by my love. For no Kingdom built on hate can stand against the love you would deny⁠—”
Words failed him then, as he saw the majesty fade slowly from the face, grown small and shadowy. ”

“ I prefer the hidden gorges of these mountains, and the shadows of the covering forests. My days”⁠—his voice drew the loneliness of uttermost space into its piteous accents⁠—“are passed in darkness. I can never climb again.”
He spoke this time, indeed, as a man whose nerve was gone forever. It was pitiable almost to tears. And Delane, unable to explain the amazing contradictions, felt recklessly, furiously drawn to this trapped wanderer with the mien of a king yet the air and speech sometimes of a woman and sometimes of an outcast child. ”

“ He stooped a little as he uttered the next words with a crying pathos that an outcast woman might have used. “I am,” he said, “engulfed in intolerable loneliness. I can never climb again.”
With a shiver impossible to control, half of terror, half of pity, Delane moved a step nearer to the marvellous stranger. The spirit of Ludwig, exiled and distraught, had gripped his soul with a weakening terror; but now sheer beauty lifted him above all personal shrinking. ”

“ The black hurricane of night, the terror of frozen peaks, the yawning horror of the great abyss outside⁠—all three crowded into the Englishman’s mind with a slashing impact that blocked delivery of any word or action. It was not that he refused, it was not that he withdrew, but that Life stood paralysed and rigid. The flow stopped dead for the first time since he had left his mother’s womb. The God in him was turned to stone and rendered ineffective. ”

“ But you must seek them where they still survive; in the churches, and in isolated lands where thought lies unawakened. For they are the children’s blocks of make-believe whose palaces, like your once tremendous kingdom, have no true existence for the thinking mind.”
And he stretched his hands towards him with the gesture of one who sought to help and save, then paused as he realised that his arms enclosed sheer blackness, with the emptiness of wind and driving rain.
For the door of the hut stood open, and Delane balanced on the threshold, facing the sheet of night above the abyss. ”

“ Delane gave up the search, aware that something unalterably splendid stood before him. Solemnity and beauty swept him too. His was never the grotesque assumption that man must be the highest being in the universe, nor that a thing is a miracle merely because it has never happened before. ”

“ The forest flapped and tossed its myriad branches. Cold draughts swept down from spectral fields of melting snow above; and the blackness turned momentarily into the semblance of towers and bastions of thick beaten gloom. ”

“ But, unlike yourself, I am no climber.”
“The heights have no attraction for you?” asked Delane, as he mingled steaming milk and coffee in the wooden bowl, marvelling what brought him then so high above the valleys. “It is their difficulty and danger that fascinate me always. I find the loneliness of the summits intoxicating in a sense.” ”

“ Some crashing, as of a ruined world, passed splintering through his little timid heart. He did not yield, but he understood⁠—with an understanding which seemed the delicate first sign of yielding⁠—the seductiveness of evil, the sweet delight of surrendering the Will with utter recklessness to those swelling forces which disintegrate the heroic soul in man. He remembered. It was true. In the reaction from excess he had definitely called upon his childhood’s teaching with a passing moment of genuine belief. ”

“ Delane moved slowly after him, opening his arms. Tenderness and big compassion flung wide the gates of love within him. He found strange language, too, although actual, spoken words did not produce them further than his entrails where they had their birth.
“Toys in the world are plentiful, Sire, and you may have them for your masterpiece of play. ”

“ Before him, drinking his little soul out merely by his Presence, stood one whose habit of mind, not alone his external accidents, was imperial with black prerogative before the first man drew the breath of life. ”

“ His senses, while reporting accurately, insisted upon this arresting and uncommon touch: there was, about this late wanderer of the night, some evasive, lofty strangeness that set him utterly apart from ordinary men. ”