Algernon Blackwood

“ The trees closed up behind us like a tide.
“It’s all right,” said Arthur; “just keep an open mind and a heart alive with love. It has a shattering effect at first, but that will pass.” He saw I was afraid, for I shrank visibly enough. He stood beside me in his grey flannel suit, with his brilliant eyes and his great shock of hair, looking more like a column of light than a human being. “It’s all quite right and natural,” he repeated; “we have passed the gateway, and Hecate, who presides over gateways, will let us out again. Do not make discord by feeling fear. ”

“ Each tree I passed turned of its own accord and flung after me until the entire forest followed. But I got out. I reached the open. Upon the sloping field in the full, clear light of the moon I collapsed in a panting heap. The Earth drew back with a great shuddering sigh behind me. There was this strange, tumultuous sound upon the night. I lay beneath the open heavens that were full of moonlight. I was myself⁠—but there were tears in me. Beauty too high for understanding had slipped between my fingers. I had lost Malahide. I had lost the gods of Earth⁠ ⁠... ”

“ Eternally young and glorious⁠—young, I mean, in the sense 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.”
The conversation that followed is too long to give here, but it led to his telling me the experience in his own life that had opened his eyes to the truth of what he said. “Beauty is imperishable,” he declared, “and if you live with it, why, you’re imperishable too!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He turned and gazed down on me, his big eyes glowing, and not a sign of perspiration on his skin.
“That’s nothing,” he exclaimed in his musical, deep voice “You know it, or you’d never have felt things in this wood last night; and you wouldn’t have wanted to come out with me now!”
“How?” 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 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. ”

“ First National is selling!”
Great-faced Hephæstus, how ridiculous! It was like saying, “I’ll take your scalp unless you give me meat.” It was barbaric, savage, centuries ago. 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is a pine-wood, and pines are the oldest, simplest trees; they are true primitives. 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. ”

“ It’s natural you should feel the place. You and I belong to it. We’ve both got him in us. You’re just as proud of him as I am, only in a different way.” And then he added, with a touch of disappointment: “I thought you’d like it. You weren’t afraid last night. You felt the beauty then.”
Flattery is a darned subtle thing at any time. ”

“ His reply staggered me a bit. “It was just that,” he said. —“the Earth!”
And then, just when things were getting interesting and promising a dividend, he shut up like a clam. He wouldn’t say another word. He asked after my family and business, my health, what kind of crossing I’d had, and all the rest of the common stock. ”

“ I suppose in America we get pretty free and easy, and don’t quite understand reserve. But this young man of half my age kept me in my place as easily as I might have kept a nervous customer quiet in my own office. He just refused to take me on. He was polite and cool and distant as you please, and when I got pressing sometimes he simply pretended he didn’t understand. I could no more get him back again to the subject of the wood than a customer could have gotten me to tell him about the prospects of exchange being cheap or dear⁠—when I didn’t know myself but wouldn’t let him see I didn’t know. ”

“ I remembered that this ancestor of ours lived for years in the isolation of some Swiss forest where he claimed⁠—he used that setting for his writing⁠—he had found the exiled gods, their ghosts, their beauty, their eternal essences⁠—or something astonishing of that sort. ”