Algernon Blackwood

“ Our great ancestor and Arthur were one being, and that one being was vaster than a million people. Yet it was Malahide I saw.⁠ ⁠...
“They laid me in the earth I loved,” he said in a strange, thrilling voice like running wind and water, “and I found eternal life. I live now forever in Their divine existence. I share the life that changes yet can never pass away.”
I felt myself rising like a cloud as he said it. A roaring beauty captured me completely. ”

“ Now what came over me in that bit of dark pine forest is more than I can quite explain, but I think it must have been due to the height⁠—the village was 4,000 feet above sea-level⁠—and the effect of the rarefied air upon my circulation. The nearest thing to it in my experience is rye whisky, the queer touch of wildness, of self-confidence, a kind of whooping rapture and the reckless sensation of being a tin god of sorts that comes from a lot of alcohol⁠—a memory, please understand, of years before, when I thought it a grand thing to own the earth and paint the old town red. ”

“ Eternally young and glorious⁠—young, I mean, in the sense of a field of flowers in the Spring looks young; and glorious in the sense the sky looks glorious at dawn or sunset. Something big shone through him like a storm, something that would go on forever just as the Earth goes on, always renewing itself, something of gigantic life that in the human sense could never age at all⁠—something the old gods had. ”

“ All this kind of thing is Dutch to me, a form of poetry or superstition, for I am interested chiefly in the buying and selling of exchange, with an office in New York City, just off Wall Street, and only come to Europe now occasionally for a holiday. I like to see the dear old musty cities, and go to the Opera, and take a motor run through Shakespeare’s country or round the Lakes, get in touch again with London and Paris at the Ritz Hotels⁠—and then back again to the greatest city on earth, where for years now I’ve been making a good thing out of it. ”

“ Death!
The answer came in his normal voice: “Keep close to me. I know the way.⁠ ⁠...”
The scenery dwindled suddenly; the trees came back. I was walking in the forest beside my nephew, and the moonlight lay in patches and little shafts of silver. The crests of the pines just murmured in a wind that scarcely stirred, and through an opening on our right I saw the deep valley clasped about the twinkling village lights. Towering in splendour the spectral snowfields hung upon the sky, huge summits guarding them. And Arthur took my arm⁠—oh, solidly enough this time. ”

“ The atmosphere of dream came round me, but a dream of something just hovering outside the world I knew⁠—a dream wrought in gold and silver, with shining eyes, with graceful beckoning hands, and with voices that rang like bells of music.⁠ ⁠... And the pools of light grew larger, merging one into another, until a delicate soft light shone equably throughout the entire forest. ”

“ What do I mean? My mind grew to the dimensions of a planet. We were among the roots of life⁠—whence issues that one thing in infinite guise that seeks so many temporary names from the protean minds of men.
“You shall pluck asphodel in the meadows this side of Erebus,” Arthur was chanting. “Hermes himself, the Psychopomp, shall lead, and Malahide shall welcome us.”
Malahide⁠ ⁠... !
To hear him use that name, the name of our scholar-ancestor, now dead and buried close upon a century⁠—the way he half chanted it⁠—gave me the gooseflesh. I stopped against a tree-stem, thinking of escape. ”

“ Again there came another voice that caught up my own and turned it into common syntax. Some heady beauty of the Earth rose about me like a cloud.
“Hark! Night comes, with the dusk upon her eyelids. She brings those dreams that every dewdrop holds at dawn. Daughter of Thanatos and Hypnos⁠ ⁠... !”
But again⁠—who said the words? It surely was not Arthur, my nephew Arthur, of Today, learning French in a Swiss mountain village! I felt⁠—well, what did I feel? In the name of the Stock Exchange and Wall Street, what was the cash surrender of amazing feelings? ”

“ Oh, yes, I began to think it over a bit as we raced down the mountainside that glorious night. I’ve read some in my day; my brain’s all right; I’ve heard of dual personality and subliminal uprush and conversion⁠—no new line of goods, all that. But somehow these stunts of the psychologists and philosophers didn’t cut any ice with me just then, because I’d experienced what they merely explained. And explanation was just a bargain sale. The best things can’t be explained at all. There’s no real value in a bargain sale.
Arthur had trouble to keep up with me. ”

“ They are an open channel; and in a pine wood where no human life has ever been you shall often find gateways where Hecate is kind to such as us.”
He took my hand⁠—he must have felt mine trembling, but his own was cool and strong and felt like silver⁠—and led me forward into the depths of a wood that seemed to me quite endless. It felt endless, that is to say. I don’t know what came over me. Fear slipped away, and elation took its place.⁠ ⁠... As we advanced over ground that seemed level, or slightly undulating, I saw bright pools of sunshine here and there upon the forest floor. ”

“ Under one arm I carried a whole forest breathing in the wind, and beneath the other a hundred meadows full of singing streams with golden marigolds and blue forget-me-nots along their banks. Upon my back and shoulders lay the clouded hills with dew and moonlight in their brimmed, capacious hollows. Thick in my hair hung the unaging powers that are stars and sunlight ”

“ I gasped. “How’s that?”
“You’ve come,” he continued quietly, “to the only valley in this artificial country that has atmosphere. This valley is alive⁠—especially this end of it. There’s superstition here, thank God! Even the peasants know things.”
I stared at him. “See here, Arthur,” I objected. “I’m not a Cath. And I don’t know a thing⁠—at least it’s all dead in me and forgotten⁠—about poetry or classics or your gods and pan⁠—pantheism⁠—in spite of grandfather⁠—”
His face turned like a dream face. ”

“ I asked.
“Why, for one,” he replied with emotion and enthusiasm in his voice, “that living and dying ain’t either of them of much account. That if you know Beauty, I mean, and Beauty is in your life, you live on in it and with it for others⁠—even when you’re dead.” ”

“ From one year’s end to another no human foot went up or down it; the hay was never cut; no cattle grazed along the splendid pastures; no chalet had even been built within a mile of the wood we slowly made for. “They’re superstitious,” he told me. “It was just the same a hundred years ago when he discovered it⁠—there was a little natural cave on the edge of the forest where he used to sleep sometimes⁠—I’ll show it to you presently⁠—but for generations this entire mountainside has been undisturbed. You’ll never meet a living soul in any part of it.” ”

“ I have a clear recollection of my nephew then. He struck me as having grit and character, but as being wrongly placed. He had his grandfather’s tastes. He ought to have been, like him, a great scholar, a poet, an editor of marvellous old writings in new editions. I couldn’t get much out of the boy, except that he “liked the chemical business fairly,” and meant to please his father by “knowing it thoroughly” so as to qualify later for his directorship. ”

“ The Earth, the whole bustling universe, was nothing after all but a visible production of eternal, living Powers⁠—spiritual powers, mind you⁠—that just happened to include the particular little type of strutting creature we called mankind. And these Powers, as seen in Nature, were the gods. ”

“ Arthur’s a director now in his father’s wholesale chemical business, and I⁠—well, I’m doing better than ever in the buying and selling of exchange between banks in New York City as before.
But when I said I was still drawing dividends on my Swiss investment, I meant it. And it’s not “scenery.” Everybody gets a thrill from “scenery.” It’s a darned sight more than that. It’s those little wayward patches of blue on a cloudy day ”

“ But usually it’s something nearer, bigger, simpler than all or any of these. It’s just the certainty that, when I hurry along the hard stone pavements from bank to bank, I’m walking on the⁠—Earth. It’s just that⁠—the Earth! ”