THE BRIGHT MESSENGER
OTHER WORKS BY
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
JULIUS LeVALLON
THE WAVE: An Egyptian Aftermath
TEN MINUTE STORIES
DAY AND NIGHT STORIES
THE PROMISE OF AIR
THE GARDEN OF SURVIVAL
THE LISTENER and Other Stories
THE EMPTY HOUSE and Other Stories
THE LOST VALLEY and Other Stories
JOHN SILENCE: Physician Extraordinary
_With Violet Pearn_
KARMA: A Reincarnation Play
_With Wilfred Wilson_
THE WOLVES OF GOD and other Fey Stories
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
THE BRIGHT MESSENGER
BY
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
AUTHOR OF
"JULIUS LeVALLON," "THE WOLVES OF GOD," ETC.
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
Copyright 1922, by
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
To the Unstable
THE BRIGHT MESSENGER
CHAPTER I
Edward Fillery, so far as may be possible to a man of normal passions
and emotions, took a detached view of life and human nature. At the age
of thirty-eight he still remained a spectator, a searching, critical,
analytical, yet chiefly, perhaps, a sympathetic spectator, before the
great performance whose stage is the planet and whose performers and
auditorium are humanity.
Knowing himself outcast, an unwelcome deadhead at the play, he had yet
felt no bitterness against the parents whose fierce illicit passion had
deprived him of an honourable seat. The first shock of resentment over,
he had faced the situation with a tolerance which showed an unusual
charity, an exceptional understanding, in one so young.
He was twenty when he learned the truth about himself. And it was his
wondering analysis as to why two loving humans could be so careless of
their offspring's welfare, when the rest of Nature took such pains in
the matter, that first betrayed, perhaps, his natural aptitude. He had
the innate gift of seeing things as they were, undisturbed by personal
emotion, while yet asking himself with scientific accuracy why and how
they came to be so. These were invaluable qualities in the line of
knowledge and research he chose for himself as psychologist and doctor.
The terms are somewhat loose. His longing was to probe the motives of
conduct in the first place, and, in the second, to correct the results
of wrong conduct by removing faulty motives. Psychiatrist and healer,
therefore, were his more accurate titles; psychiatrist and healer, in
due course, he became.
His father, an engineer of ability and enterprise, prospecting in the
remoter parts of the Caucasus for copper, and making a comfortable
fortune in so doing, was carried off his feet suddenly by the beauty of
a Khaketian peasant girl, daughter of a shepherd in these lonely and
majestic mountains, whose intolerable grandeur may well intoxicate a
man to madness. A dangerous and disgraceful episode it seems to have
been between John Fillery, hitherto of steady moral fibre, and this
strange, lovely pagan girl, whose savage father hunted the pair of them
high and low for weeks before they finally eluded him in the azalea
valleys beyond Artvine.
Great passion, possibly great love, born of this enchanted land whose
peaks touch heaven, while their lower turfy slopes are carpeted with
lilies, azaleas, rhododendrons, contributed to the birth of Edward,
who first saw the light in a secret chamber of a dirty Tiflis house,
above the Koura torrent. That same night, when the sun dipped beneath
the Black Sea waters two hundred miles to the westward, his mother had
looked for the last time upon her northern lover and her wild Caucasian
mountains.
Edward, however, persisted, visible emblem of a few weeks' primal
passion in a primal land. Intense desire, born in this remote
wilderness of amazing loveliness, lent him, perhaps, a strain of
illicit, almost unearthly yearning, a secret nostalgia for some lost
vale of beauty that held fiercer sunshine, mightier winds and fairer
flowers than those he knew in this world.
At the age of four he was brought to England; his Russian memories
faded, though not the birthright of his primitive blood. Settling in
London, his father increased his fortune as consulting engineer, but
did not marry. To the short vehement episode he had given of his very
best; he remained true to his gorgeous memory and his sin; the cream
of his life, its essence and its perfume, had been spent in those wild
wind-swept azalea valleys beyond Artvine. The azalea honey was in his
blood, the scent of the lilies in his brain; he still heard the Koura
and Rion foaming down towards ancient Colchis. Edward embodied for him
the spirit of these sweet, passionate memories. He loved the boy, he
cherished and he spoilt him.
But Edward had stuff in him that rendered spoiling harmless. A
vigorous, independent youngster, he showed firmness and character
as a lad. To the delight of his father he knew his own mind early,
reading and studying on his own account, possessed at the same time
by a vehement love of nature and outdoor life that was far more than
the average English boy's inclination to open air and sport. There lay
some primal quality in his blood that was of ancient origin and leaned
towards wildness. There seemed almost, at the same time, a faunish
strain that turned away from life.
As a tiny little fellow he had that strange touch of creative
imagination other children have also known--an invisible playmate. It
had no name, as it, apparently, had no sex. The boy's father could
trace it directly to no fairy tale read or heard; its origin in the
child's mind remained a mystery. But its characteristics were unusual,
even for such fanciful imaginings: too full-fledged to have been
created gradually by the boy's loneliness, it seemed half goblin and
half Nature-spirit; it replaced, at any rate, the little brothers and
sisters who were not there, and the father, led by his conscience,
possibly, to divine or half divine its origin, met the pretence with
sympathetic encouragement.
It came usually with the wind, moreover, and went with the wind, and
wind accordingly excited the child. "Listen! Father!" he would exclaim
when no air was moving anywhere and the day was still as death. Then:
"Plop! So there you are!" as though it had dropped through empty space
and landed at his feet. "It came from a tremenjus height," the child
explained. "The wind's up _there_, you see, to-day." Which struck the
parent's mind as odd, because it proved later true. An upper wind, far
in the higher strata of air, came down an hour or so afterwards and
blew into a storm.
Fire and flowers, too, were connected with this invisible playmate.
"_He'll_ make it burn, father," the child said convincingly, when the
chimney smoked and the coals refused to catch, and then became very
busy with his friend in the grate and about the hearth, just as though
he helped and superintended what was being invisibly accomplished.
"It's burning better, anyhow," agreed the father, astonished in spite
of himself as the coals began to glow and spurt their gassy flames.
"Well done; I am very much obliged to you and your little friend."
"But it's the only thing he can do. He likes it. It's his work really,
don't you see--keeping up the heat in things."
"Oh, it's his natural job, is it? I see, yes. But my thanks to him, all
the same."
"Thank you very much," said grave Edward, aged five, addressing his
tiny friend among the fire-irons. "I'm much mobliged to you."
Edward was a bit older when the flower incident took place--with the
geranium that no amount of care and coaxing seemed able to keep alive.
It had been dying slowly for some days, when Edward announced that he
saw its "inside" flitting about the plant, but unable to get back into
it. "It's got out, you see, and can't get back into its body again, so
it's dying."
"Well, what in the world are we to do about it?" asked his father.
"I'll ask," was the solemn reply. "Now I know!" he cried, delighted,
after asking his question of the empty air and listening for the
answer. "Of course. Now I see. Look, father, there it is--its spirit!"
He stood beside the flower and pointed to the earth in the pot.
"Dear me, yes! Where d'you see it? I--don't see it quite."
"He says I can pick it up and put it back and then the flower will
live." The child put out a hand as though picking up something that
moved quickly about the stem.
"What's it look like?" asked his father quickly.
"Oh, sort of trinangles and things with lines and corners," was the
reply, making a gesture as though he caught it and popped it back
into the red drooping blossoms. "There you are! Now you're alive
again. Thank you very much, please"--this last remark to the invisible
playmate who was superintending.
"A sort of geometrical figure, was it?" inquired the father next day,
when, to his surprise, he found the geranium blooming in full health
and beauty once again. "That's what you saw, eh?"
"It was its spirit, and it was shiny red, like fire," the child
replied. "It's heat. Without these things there'd be no flowers at all."
"Who makes everything grow?" he asked suddenly, a moment later.
"You mean _what_ makes them grow."
"Who," he repeated with emphasis. "Who builds the bodies up and looks
after them?"
"Ah! the structure, you mean, the form?"
Edward nodded. His father had the feeling he was not being asked for
information, but was being cross-examined. A faint pressure, as of
uneasiness, touched him.
"They develop automatically--that means naturally, under the laws of
nature," he replied.
"And the laws--who keeps them working properly?"
The father, with a mental gulp, replied that God did.
"A beetle's body, for instance, or a daisy's or an elephant's?"
persisted the child undeceived by the theological evasion. "Or mine, or
a mountain's----?"
John Fillery racked his brain for an answer, while Edward continued his
list to include sea-anemones, frost-patterns, fire, wind, moon, sun
and stars. All these forms to him were bodies apparently.
"I know!" he exclaimed suddenly with intense conviction, clapping his
hands together and standing on his toes.
"Do you, indeed! Then you know more than the rest of us."
"_They do_, of course," came the positive announcement. "The other
kind! It's their work. Yours, for instance"--he turned to his playmate,
but so naturally and convincingly that a chill ran down his father's
spine as he watched--"is fire, isn't it? You showed me once. And water
stops you, but wind helps you ..." and he continued long after his
father had left the room.
With advancing years, however, Edward either forgot his playmate or
kept its activities to himself. He no longer referred to it, at any
rate. His energies demanded a bigger field; he roamed the fields and
woods, climbed the hills, stayed out all night to see the sunrise, made
fires even when fires were not exactly needed, and hunted with Red
Indians and with what he called "Windy-Fire people" everywhere. He was
never in the house. He ran wild. Great open spaces, trees and flowers
were what he liked. The sea, on the other hand, alarmed him. Only wind
and fire comforted him and made him happy and full of life. He was a
playmate of wind and fire. Water, in large quantities at any rate, was
inimical.
With concealed approval, masking a deep love fulfilled yet incomplete,
his father watched the growth of this fiercer strain that mere covert
shooting could not satisfy, nor ordinary sporting holidays appease.
"England's too small for you, Edward, isn't it?" he asked once
tentatively, when the boy was about fifteen.
"The English people, you mean, father?"
"You find them dull, don't you? And the island a bit cramped--eh?"
Edward waited without replying. He did not quite understand what his
indulgent father intended, or was leading up to.
"You'd like to travel and see things and people for yourself, I mean?"
He watched the boy without, as he thought, the latter noticing. The
answer pleased but puzzled him.
"We're all much the same, aren't we?" said Edward.
"Well--with differences--yes, we are. But still----"
"It's only the same over and over again, isn't it?" Then, while his
father was thinking of this reply, and of what he should say to it, the
boy asked suddenly with arresting intensity:
"Are we the only people--the only sort of beings, I mean? Just men
and women like us all over the world? No others of any sort--bigger,
for instance, or--more wild and wonderful?" Then he added, a thrust
of strange yearning in his face and eyes: "More beautiful?" He almost
whispered the last words.
His father winced. He divined the origin of that strange inquiry.
Upon those immense and lonely mountains, distant in space and time
for him, imagination, rich and pagan, ran, he well knew, to vast and
mighty beings, superior to human, benignant and maleficent, akin to
the stimulating and exhilarating conception of the gods, and certainly
non-human.
"Nothing, Edward, that we know of. Why should there be?"
"Oh, I don't know, dad. I just wondered--sometimes. But, as you say,
we've not a scrap of evidence, of course."
"Not a scrap," agreed his father. "Poetic legends ain't evidence."
The mind ruled the heart in Edward; he had his father's brains, at any
rate; and all his powers and longings focused in a single line that
indicated plainly what his career should be. The Public Schools could
help him little; he went to Edinburgh to study medicine; he passed
eventually with all possible honours; and the day he brought home the
news his father, dying, told him the secret of his illegitimate birth.