Three More John Silence Stories - Algernon Blackwood
Three More John Silence Stories
BY ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
To M.L.W. The Original of John Silence
and
My Companion in Many Adventures
Contents
Case I: Secret Worship
Case II: The Camp of the Dog
Case III: A Victim of Higher Space
CASE I: SECRET WORSHIP
Harris, the silk merchant, was in South Germany on his way home from a
business trip when the idea came to him suddenly that he would take the
mountain railway from Strassbourg and run down to revisit his old school
after an interval of something more than thirty years. And it was to
this chance impulse of the junior partner in Harris Brothers of St.
Paul's Churchyard that John Silence owed one of the most curious cases
of his whole experience, for at that very moment he happened to be
tramping these same mountains with a holiday knapsack, and from
different points of the compass the two men were actually converging
towards the same inn.
Now, deep down in the heart that for thirty years had been concerned
chiefly with the profitable buying and selling of silk, this school had
left the imprint of its peculiar influence, and, though perhaps unknown
to Harris, had strongly coloured the whole of his subsequent existence.
It belonged to the deeply religious life of a small Protestant community
(which it is unnecessary to specify), and his father had sent him there
at the age of fifteen, partly because he would learn the German
requisite for the conduct of the silk business, and partly because the
discipline was strict, and discipline was what his soul and body needed
just then more than anything else.
The life, indeed, had proved exceedingly severe, and young Harris
benefited accordingly; for though corporal punishment was unknown, there
was a system of mental and spiritual correction which somehow made the
soul stand proudly erect to receive it, while it struck at the very root
of the fault and taught the boy that his character was being cleaned and
strengthened, and that he was not merely being tortured in a kind of
personal revenge.
That was over thirty years ago, when he was a dreamy and impressionable
youth of fifteen; and now, as the train climbed slowly up the winding
mountain gorges, his mind travelled back somewhat lovingly over the
intervening period, and forgotten details rose vividly again before him
out of the shadows. The life there had been very wonderful, it seemed to
him, in that remote mountain village, protected from the tumults of the
world by the love and worship of the devout Brotherhood that ministered
to the needs of some hundred boys from every country in Europe. Sharply
the scenes came back to him. He smelt again the long stone corridors,
the hot pinewood rooms, where the sultry hours of summer study were
passed with bees droning through open windows in the sunshine, and
German characters struggling in the mind with dreams of English
lawns--and then the sudden awful cry of the master in German--
"Harris, stand up! You sleep!"
And he recalled the dreadful standing motionless for an hour, book in
hand, while the knees felt like wax and the head grew heavier than a
cannon-ball.
The very smell of the cooking came back to him--the daily _Sauerkraut_,
the watery chocolate on Sundays, the flavour of the stringy meat served
twice a week at _Mittagessen_; and he smiled to think again of the
half-rations that was the punishment for speaking English. The very
odour of the milk-bowls,--the hot sweet aroma that rose from the soaking
peasant-bread at the six-o'clock breakfast,--came back to him pungently,
and he saw the huge _Speisesaal_ with the hundred boys in their school
uniform, all eating sleepily in silence, gulping down the coarse bread
and scalding milk in terror of the bell that would presently cut them
short--and, at the far end where the masters sat, he saw the narrow slit
windows with the vistas of enticing field and forest beyond.
And this, in turn, made him think of the great barnlike room on the top
floor where all slept together in wooden cots, and he heard in memory
the clamour of the cruel bell that woke them on winter mornings at five
o'clock and summoned them to the stone-flagged _Waschkammer_, where boys
and masters alike, after scanty and icy washing, dressed in complete
silence.
From this his mind passed swiftly, with vivid picture-thoughts, to other
things, and with a passing shiver he remembered how the loneliness of
never being alone had eaten into him, and how everything--work, meals,
sleep, walks, leisure--was done with his "division" of twenty other boys
and under the eyes of at least two masters. The only solitude possible
was by asking for half an hour's practice in the cell-like music rooms,
and Harris smiled to himself as he recalled the zeal of his violin
studies.
Then, as the train puffed laboriously through the great pine forests
that cover these mountains with a giant carpet of velvet, he found the
pleasanter layers of memory giving up their dead, and he recalled with
admiration the kindness of the masters, whom all addressed as Brother,
and marvelled afresh at their devotion in burying themselves for years
in such a place, only to leave it, in most cases, for the still rougher
life of missionaries in the wild places of the world.
He thought once more of the still, religious atmosphere that hung over
the little forest community like a veil, barring the distressful world;
of the picturesque ceremonies at Easter, Christmas, and New Year; of the
numerous feast-days and charming little festivals. The _Beschehr-Fest_,
in particular, came back to him,--the feast of gifts at Christmas,--when
the entire community paired off and gave presents, many of which had
taken weeks to make or the savings of many days to purchase. And then he
saw the midnight ceremony in the church at New Year, with the shining
face of the _Prediger_ in the pulpit,--the village preacher who, on the
last night of the old year, saw in the empty gallery beyond the organ
loft the faces of all who were to die in the ensuing twelve months, and
who at last recognised himself among them, and, in the very middle of
his sermon, passed into a state of rapt ecstasy and burst into a torrent
of praise.
Thickly the memories crowded upon him. The picture of the small village
dreaming its unselfish life on the mountain-tops, clean, wholesome,
simple, searching vigorously for its God, and training hundreds of boys
in the grand way, rose up in his mind with all the power of an
obsession. He felt once more the old mystical enthusiasm, deeper than
the sea and more wonderful than the stars; he heard again the winds
sighing from leagues of forest over the red roofs in the moonlight; he
heard the Brothers' voices talking of the things beyond this life as
though they had actually experienced them in the body; and, as he sat in
the jolting train, a spirit of unutterable longing passed over his
seared and tired soul, stirring in the depths of him a sea of emotions
that he thought had long since frozen into immobility.
And the contrast pained him,--the idealistic dreamer then, the man of
business now,--so that a spirit of unworldly peace and beauty known only
to the soul in meditation laid its feathered finger upon his heart,
moving strangely the surface of the waters.
Harris shivered a little and looked out of the window of his empty
carriage. The train had long passed Hornberg, and far below the streams
tumbled in white foam down the limestone rocks. In front of him, dome
upon dome of wooded mountain stood against the sky. It was October, and
the air was cool and sharp, woodsmoke and damp moss exquisitely mingled
in it with the subtle odours of the pines. Overhead, between the tips of
the highest firs, he saw the first stars peeping, and the sky was a
clean, pale amethyst that seemed exactly the colour all these memories
clothed themselves with in his mind.
He leaned back in his corner and sighed. He was a heavy man, and he had
not known sentiment for years; he was a big man, and it took much to
move him, literally and figuratively; he was a man in whom the dreams of
God that haunt the soul in youth, though overlaid by the scum that
gathers in the fight for money, had not, as with the majority, utterly
died the death.
He came back into this little neglected pocket of the years, where so
much fine gold had collected and lain undisturbed, with all his
semispiritual emotions aquiver; and, as he watched the mountain-tops
come nearer, and smelt the forgotten odours of his boyhood, something
melted on the surface of his soul and left him sensitive to a degree he
had not known since, thirty years before, he had lived here with his
dreams, his conflicts, and his youthful suffering.
A thrill ran through him as the train stopped with a jolt at a tiny
station and he saw the name in large black lettering on the grey stone
building, and below it, the number of metres it stood above the level of
the sea.
"The highest point on the line!" he exclaimed. "How well I remember
it--Sommerau--Summer Meadow. The very next station is mine!"
And, as the train ran downhill with brakes on and steam shut off, he put
his head out of the window and one by one saw the old familiar landmarks
in the dusk. They stared at him like dead faces in a dream. Queer, sharp
feelings, half poignant, half sweet, stirred in his heart.
"There's the hot, white road we walked along so often with the two
Brueder always at our heels," he thought; "and there, by Jove, is the
turn through the forest to '_Die Galgen_,' the stone gallows where they
hanged the witches in olden days!"
He smiled a little as the train slid past.
"And there's the copse where the Lilies of the Valley powdered the
ground in spring; and, I swear,"--he put his head out with a sudden
impulse--"if that's not the very clearing where Calame, the French boy,
chased the swallow-tail with me, and Bruder Pagel gave us half-rations
for leaving the road without permission, and for shouting in our mother
tongues!" And he laughed again as the memories came back with a rush,
flooding his mind with vivid detail.
The train stopped, and he stood on the grey gravel platform like a man
in a dream. It seemed half a century since he last waited there with
corded wooden boxes, and got into the train for Strassbourg and home
after the two years' exile. Time dropped from him like an old garment
and he felt a boy again. Only, things looked so much smaller than his
memory of them; shrunk and dwindled they looked, and the distances
seemed on a curiously smaller scale.
He made his way across the road to the little Gasthaus, and, as he went,
faces and figures of former schoolfellows,--German, Swiss, Italian,
French, Russian,--slipped out of the shadowy woods and silently
accompanied him. They flitted by his side, raising their eyes
questioningly, sadly, to his. But their names he had forgotten. Some of
the Brothers, too, came with them, and most of these he remembered by
name--Bruder Roest, Bruder Pagel, Bruder Schliemann, and the bearded face
of the old preacher who had seen himself in the haunted gallery of those
about to die--Bruder Gysin. The dark forest lay all about him like a sea
that any moment might rush with velvet waves upon the scene and sweep
all the faces away. The air was cool and wonderfully fragrant, but with
every perfumed breath came also a pallid memory....
Yet, in spite of the underlying sadness inseparable from such an
experience, it was all very interesting, and held a pleasure peculiarly
its own, so that Harris engaged his room and ordered supper feeling well
pleased with himself, and intending to walk up to the old school that
very evening. It stood in the centre of the community's village, some
four miles distant through the forest, and he now recollected for the
first time that this little Protestant settlement dwelt isolated in a
section of the country that was otherwise Catholic. Crucifixes and
shrines surrounded the clearing like the sentries of a beleaguering
army. Once beyond the square of the village, with its few acres of field
and orchard, the forest crowded up in solid phalanxes, and beyond the
rim of trees began the country that was ruled by the priests of another
faith. He vaguely remembered, too, that the Catholics had showed
sometimes a certain hostility towards the little Protestant oasis that
flourished so quietly and benignly in their midst. He had quite
forgotten this. How trumpery it all seemed now with his wide experience
of life and his knowledge of other countries and the great outside
world. It was like stepping back, not thirty years, but three hundred.
There were only two others besides himself at supper. One of them, a
bearded, middle-aged man in tweeds, sat by himself at the far end, and
Harris kept out of his way because he was English. He feared he might be
in business, possibly even in the silk business, and that he would
perhaps talk on the subject. The other traveller, however, was a
Catholic priest. He was a little man who ate his salad with a knife, yet
so gently that it was almost inoffensive, and it was the sight of "the
cloth" that recalled his memory of the old antagonism. Harris mentioned
by way of conversation the object of his sentimental journey, and the
priest looked up sharply at him with raised eyebrows and an expression
of surprise and suspicion that somehow piqued him. He ascribed it to his
difference of belief.
"Yes," went on the silk merchant, pleased to talk of what his mind was
so full, "and it was a curious experience for an English boy to be
dropped down into a school of a hundred foreigners. I well remember the
loneliness and intolerable Heimweh of it at first." His German was very
fluent.
The priest opposite looked up from his cold veal and potato salad and
smiled. It was a nice face. He explained quietly that he did not belong
here, but was making a tour of the parishes of Wurttemberg and Baden.
"It was a strict life," added Harris. "We English, I remember, used to
call it _Gefaengnisleben_--prison life!"
The face of the other, for some unaccountable reason, darkened. After a
slight pause, and more by way of politeness than because he wished to
continue the subject, he said quietly--
"It was a flourishing school in those days, of course. Afterwards, I
have heard--" He shrugged his shoulders slightly, and the odd look--it
almost seemed a look of alarm--came back into his eyes. The sentence
remained unfinished.
Something in the tone of the man seemed to his listener uncalled for--in
a sense reproachful, singular. Harris bridled in spite of himself.
"It has changed?" he asked. "I can hardly believe--"
"You have not heard, then?" observed the priest gently, making a gesture
as though to cross himself, yet not actually completing it. "You have
not heard what happened there before it was abandoned--?"
It was very childish, of course, and perhaps he was overtired and
overwrought in some way, but the words and manner of the little priest
seemed to him so offensive--so disproportionately offensive--that he
hardly noticed the concluding sentence. He recalled the old bitterness
and the old antagonism, and for a moment he almost lost his temper.
"Nonsense," he interrupted with a forced laugh, "_Unsinn_! You must
forgive me, sir, for contradicting you. But I was a pupil there myself.
I was at school there. There was no place like it. I cannot believe that
anything serious could have happened to--to take away its character. The
devotion of the Brothers would be difficult to equal anywhere--"
He broke off suddenly, realising that his voice had been raised unduly
and that the man at the far end of the table might understand German;
and at the same moment he looked up and saw that this individual's eyes
were fixed upon his face intently. They were peculiarly bright. Also
they were rather wonderful eyes, and the way they met his own served in
some way he could not understand to convey both a reproach and a
warning. The whole face of the stranger, indeed, made a vivid impression
upon him, for it was a face, he now noticed for the first time, in whose
presence one would not willingly have said or done anything unworthy.
Harris could not explain to himself how it was he had not become
conscious sooner of its presence.
But he could have bitten off his tongue for having so far forgotten
himself. The little priest lapsed into silence. Only once he said,
looking up and speaking in a low voice that was not intended to be
overheard, but that evidently _was_ overheard, "You will find it
different." Presently he rose and left the table with a polite bow that
included both the others.
And, after him, from the far end rose also the figure in the tweed suit,
leaving Harris by himself.
He sat on for a bit in the darkening room, sipping his coffee and
smoking his fifteen-pfennig cigar, till the girl came in to light the
oil lamps. He felt vexed with himself for his lapse from good manners,
yet hardly able to account for it. Most likely, he reflected, he had
been annoyed because the priest had unintentionally changed the pleasant
character of his dream by introducing a jarring note. Later he must seek
an opportunity to make amends. At present, however, he was too impatient
for his walk to the school, and he took his stick and hat and passed out
into the open air.
And, as he crossed before the Gasthaus, he noticed that the priest and
the man in the tweed suit were engaged already in such deep conversation
that they hardly noticed him as he passed and raised his hat.
He started off briskly, well remembering the way, and hoping to reach
the village in time to have a word with one of the Brueder. They might
even ask him in for a cup of coffee. He felt sure of his welcome, and
the old memories were in full possession once more. The hour of return
was a matter of no consequence whatever.
It was then just after seven o'clock, and the October evening was
drawing in with chill airs from the recesses of the forest. The road
plunged straight from the railway clearing into its depths, and in a
very few minutes the trees engulfed him and the clack of his boots fell
dead and echoless against the serried stems of a million firs. It was
very black; one trunk was hardly distinguishable from another. He walked
smartly, swinging his holly stick. Once or twice he passed a peasant on
his way to bed, and the guttural "Gruss Got," unheard for so long,
emphasised the passage of time, while yet making it seem as nothing. A
fresh group of pictures crowded his mind. Again the figures of former
schoolfellows flitted out of the forest and kept pace by his side,
whispering of the doings of long ago. One reverie stepped hard upon the
heels of another. Every turn in the road, every clearing of the forest,
he knew, and each in turn brought forgotten associations to life. He
enjoyed himself thoroughly.
He marched on and on. There was powdered gold in the sky till the moon
rose, and then a wind of faint silver spread silently between the earth
and stars. He saw the tips of the fir trees shimmer, and heard them
whisper as the breeze turned their needles towards the light. The
mountain air was indescribably sweet. The road shone like the foam of a
river through the gloom. White moths flitted here and there like silent
thoughts across his path, and a hundred smells greeted him from the
forest caverns across the years.
Then, when he least expected it, the trees fell away abruptly on both
sides, and he stood on the edge of the village clearing.
He walked faster. There lay the familiar outlines of the houses, sheeted
with silver; there stood the trees in the little central square with the
fountain and small green lawns; there loomed the shape of the church
next to the Gasthof der Bruedergemeinde; and just beyond, dimly rising
into the sky, he saw with a sudden thrill the mass of the huge school
building, blocked castlelike with deep shadows in the moonlight,
standing square and formidable to face him after the silences of more
than a quarter of a century.
He passed quickly down the deserted village street and stopped close
beneath its shadow, staring up at the walls that had once held him
prisoner for two years--two unbroken years of discipline and
homesickness. Memories and emotions surged through his mind; for the
most vivid sensations of his youth had focused about this spot, and it
was here he had first begun to live and learn values. Not a single
footstep broke the silence, though lights glimmered here and there
through cottage windows; but when he looked up at the high walls of the
school, draped now in shadow, he easily imagined that well-known faces
crowded to the windows to greet him--closed windows that really
reflected only moonlight and the gleam of stars.
This, then, was the old school building, standing foursquare to the
world, with its shuttered windows, its lofty, tiled roof, and the spiked
lightning-conductors pointing like black and taloned fingers from the
corners. For a long time he stood and stared. Then, presently, he came
to himself again, and realised to his joy that a light still shone in
the windows of the Bruderstube.
He turned from the road and passed through the iron railings; then
climbed the twelve stone steps and stood facing the black wooden door
with the heavy bars of iron, a door he had once loathed and dreaded with
the hatred and passion of an imprisoned soul, but now looked upon
tenderly with a sort of boyish delight.
Almost timorously he pulled the rope and listened with a tremor of
excitement to the clanging of the bell deep within the building. And the
long-forgotten sound brought the past before him with such a vivid sense
of reality that he positively shivered. It was like the magic bell in
the fairy-tale that rolls back the curtain of Time and summons the
figures from the shadows of the dead. He had never felt so sentimental
in his life. It was like being young again. And, at the same time, he
began to bulk rather large in his own eyes with a certain spurious
importance. He was a big man from the world of strife and action. In
this little place of peaceful dreams would he, perhaps, not cut
something of a figure?
"I'll try once more," he thought after a long pause, seizing the iron
bell-rope, and was just about to pull it when a step sounded on the
stone passage within, and the huge door slowly swung open.
A tall man with a rather severe cast of countenance stood facing him in
silence.
"I must apologise--it is somewhat late," he began a trifle pompously,
"but the fact is I am an old pupil. I have only just arrived and really
could not restrain myself." His German seemed not quite so fluent as
usual. "My interest is so great. I was here in '70."
The other opened the door wider and at once bowed him in with a smile of
genuine welcome.
"I am Bruder Kalkmann," he said quietly in a deep voice. "I myself was a
master here about that time. It is a great pleasure always to welcome a
former pupil." He looked at him very keenly for a few seconds, and then
added, "I think, too, it is splendid of you to come--very splendid."
"It is a very great pleasure," Harris replied, delighted with his
reception.
The dimly lighted corridor with its flooring of grey stone, and the
familiar sound of a German voice echoing through it,--with the peculiar
intonation the Brothers always used in speaking,--all combined to lift
him bodily, as it were, into the dream-atmosphere of long-forgotten
days. He stepped gladly into the building and the door shut with the
familiar thunder that completed the reconstruction of the past. He
almost felt the old sense of imprisonment, of aching nostalgia, of
having lost his liberty.
Harris sighed involuntarily and turned towards his host, who returned
his smile faintly and then led the way down the corridor.
"The boys have retired," he explained, "and, as you remember, we keep
early hours here. But, at least, you will join us for a little while in
the _Bruderstube_ and enjoy a cup of coffee." This was precisely what
the silk merchant had hoped, and he accepted with an alacrity that he
intended to be tempered by graciousness. "And to-morrow," continued the
Bruder, "you must come and spend a whole day with us. You may even find
acquaintances, for several pupils of your day have come back here as
masters."
For one brief second there passed into the man's eyes a look that made
the visitor start. But it vanished as quickly as it came. It was
impossible to define. Harris convinced himself it was the effect of a
shadow cast by the lamp they had just passed on the wall. He dismissed
it from his mind.
"You are very kind, I'm sure," he said politely. "It is perhaps a
greater pleasure to me than you can imagine to see the place again.
Ah,"--he stopped short opposite a door with the upper half of glass and
peered in--"surely there is one of the music rooms where I used to
practise the violin. How it comes back to me after all these years!"
Bruder Kalkmann stopped indulgently, smiling, to allow his guest a
moment's inspection.