sweeping cuff that sent the brute, its ribs caved in and its back
broken, hurtling twenty feet. Then the human brute went mad. A foaming
rage flecked the lips that parted with a wild inarticulate cry, as it
sprang in, swung the club mightily in both hands, and brought it down
full on the head of the uprearing grizzly. Not even the skull of a
grizzly could withstand the crushing force of such a blow, and the
animal went down to meet the worrying of the hounds. And through their
scurrying leaped the man, squarely upon the body, where, in the white
electric light, resting on his club, he chanted a triumph in an unknown
tongue--a song so ancient that Professor Wertz would have given ten
years of his life for it.
His guests rushed to possess him and acclaim him, but James Ward,
suddenly looking out of the eyes of the early Teuton, saw the fair frail
Twentieth Century girl he loved, and felt something snap in his brain.
He staggered weakly toward her, dropped the club, and nearly fell.
Something had gone wrong with him. Inside his brain was an intolerable
agony. It seemed as if the soul of him were flying asunder. Following
the excited gaze of the others, he glanced back and saw the carcass of
the bear. The sight filled him with fear. He uttered a cry and would
have fled, had they not restrained him and led him into the bungalow.
* * * * *
James J. Ward is still at the head of the firm of Ward, Knowles & Co.
But he no longer lives in the country; nor does he run of nights after
the coyotes under the moon. The early Teuton in him died the night of
the Mill Valley fight with the bear. James J. Ward is now wholly James
J. Ward, and he shares no part of his being with any vagabond
anachronism from the younger world. And so wholly is James J. Ward
modern, that he knows in all its bitter fullness the curse of civilized
fear. He is now afraid of the dark, and night in the forest is to him a
thing of abysmal terror. His city house is of the spick and span order,
and he evinces a great interest in burglar-proof devices. His home is a
tangle of electric wires, and after bed-time a guest can scarcely
breathe without setting off an alarm. Also, he has invented a
combination keyless door-lock that travelers may carry in their vest
pockets and apply immediately and successfully under all circumstances.
But his wife does not deem him a coward. She knows better. And, like any
hero, he is content to rest on his laurels. His bravery is never
questioned by those of his friends who are aware of the Mill Valley
episode.
THE RETURN[2]
BY ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
[Footnote 2: From _Pan's Garden_, by Algernon Blackwood--Permission of
the Macmillan Company.]
It was curious--that sense of dull uneasiness that came over him so
suddenly, so stealthily at first he scarcely noticed it, but with such
marked increase after a time that he presently got up and left the
theater. His seat was on the gangway of the dress circle, and he slipped
out awkwardly in the middle of what seemed to be the best and jolliest
song of the piece. The full house was shaking with laughter; so
infectious was the gaiety that even strangers turned to one another as
much as to say, "Now, isn't that funny?"
It was curious, too, the way the feeling first got into him at all, and
in the full swing of laughter, music, light-heartedness; for it came as
a vague suggestion, "I've forgotten something--something I meant to
do--something of importance. What in the world was it, now?" And he
thought hard, searching vainly through his mind; then dismissed it as
the dancing caught his attention. It came back a little later again,
during a passage of long-winded talk that bored him and set his
attention free once more, but came more strongly this time, insisting on
an answer. What could it have been that he had overlooked, left undone,
omitted to see to? It went on nibbling at the subconscious part of him.
Several times this happened, this dismissal and return, till at last the
thing declared itself more plainly--and he felt bothered, troubled,
distinctly uneasy.
He was wanted somewhere. There was somewhere else he ought to be. That
describes it best, perhaps. Some engagement of moment had entirely
slipped his memory--an engagement that involved another person, too. But
where, what, with whom? And, at length, this vague uneasiness amounted
to positive discomfort, so that he felt unable to enjoy the piece, and
left abruptly. Like a man to whom comes suddenly the horrible idea that
the match he lit his cigarette with and flung into the waste-paper
basket on leaving was not really out--a sort of panic distress--he
jumped into a taxicab and hurried to his flat to find everything in
order, of course; no smoke, no fire, no smell of burning.
But his evening was spoiled. He sat smoking in his armchair at home,
this business man of forty, practical in mind, of character some called
stolid, cursing himself for an imaginative fool. It was now too late to
go back to the theater; the club bored him; he spent an hour with the
evening papers, dipping into books, sipping a long cool drink, doing
odds and ends about the flat. "I'll go to bed early for a change," he
laughed, but really all the time fighting--yes, deliberately
fighting--this strange attack of uneasiness that so insidiously grew
upwards, outwards from the buried depths of him that sought so
strenuously to deny it. It never occurred to him that he was ill. He was
not ill. His health was thunderingly good. He was as robust as a
coal-heaver.
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 passages, 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 shivering.
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 mass 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 passing. 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 passed 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 sex
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 space, 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 "God
dawned on Chaos"--the Beauty of the Night.
A long time passed--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 platitude 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, passed 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 worship 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
anticipation, 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 worship 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 rehearsed it all a
hundred times, as certain feeble temperaments do rehearse 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 knob, that aggressive, hostile knob
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 fashionable; his voice probably had a twang 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
rehearsed, 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 ladyship 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 ladyship 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 ladyship is quite well, thank you, sir. If
you will have tea first, sir, her ladyship 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
worshipper, worshipping 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 rehearsed 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 illustrated paper, was not true now. It might even be
a little shock perhaps. He must remember that. Ten years cannot pass
over a woman without--