Algernon Blackwood - Four Weird Tales

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FOUR WEIRD TALES

BY

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

INCLUDING:

"The Insanity of Jones"
"The Man Who Found Out"
"The Glamour of the Snow" and
"Sand"

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

These stories first appeared in Blackwood's story collections:
"The Insanity of Jones" in _The Listener and Other Stories_ (1907);
"The Man Who Found Out" in _The Wolves of God and Other Fey Stories_
(1921);
"The Glamour of the Snow," and "Sand" in _Pan's Garden_ (1912).

* * * * *

_The Insanity of Jones_

(A Study in Reincarnation)

Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the
way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for
them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar,
thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the
great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them
and the world of causes behind.

For only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance
by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament
bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome,
that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that any moment a
chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the
shifting frontier.

Some, however, are born with this awful certainty in their hearts, and
are called to no apprenticeship, and to this select company Jones
undoubtedly belonged.

All his life he had realised that his senses brought to him merely a
more or less interesting set of sham appearances; that space, as men
measure it, was utterly misleading; that time, as the clock ticked it
in a succession of minutes, was arbitrary nonsense; and, in fact, that
all his sensory perceptions were but a clumsy representation of _real_
things behind the curtain--things he was for ever trying to get at, and
that sometimes he actually did get at.

He had always been tremblingly aware that he stood on the borderland
of another region, a region where time and space were merely forms of
thought, where ancient memories lay open to the sight, and where the
forces behind each human life stood plainly revealed and he could see
the hidden springs at the very heart of the world. Moreover, the fact
that he was a clerk in a fire insurance office, and did his work with
strict attention, never allowed him to forget for one moment that, just
beyond the dingy brick walls where the hundred men scribbled with
pointed pens beneath the electric lamps, there existed this glorious
region where the important part of himself dwelt and moved and had its
being. For in this region he pictured himself playing the part of a
spectator to his ordinary workaday life, watching, like a king, the
stream of events, but untouched in his own soul by the dirt, the noise,
and the vulgar commotion of the outer world.

And this was no poetic dream merely. Jones was not playing prettily with
idealism to amuse himself. It was a living, working belief. So convinced
was he that the external world was the result of a vast deception
practised upon him by the gross senses, that when he stared at a great
building like St. Paul's he felt it would not very much surprise him to
see it suddenly quiver like a shape of jelly and then melt utterly away,
while in its place stood all at once revealed the mass of colour, or the
great intricate vibrations, or the splendid sound--the spiritual
idea--which it represented in stone.

For something in this way it was that his mind worked.

Yet, to all appearances, and in the satisfaction of all business claims,
Jones was normal and unenterprising. He felt nothing but contempt for
the wave of modern psychism. He hardly knew the meaning of such words as
"clairvoyance" and "clairaudience." He had never felt the least desire
to join the Theosophical Society and to speculate in theories of
astral-plane life, or elementals. He attended no meetings of the
Psychical Research Society, and knew no anxiety as to whether his "aura"
was black or blue; nor was he conscious of the slightest wish to mix in
with the revival of cheap occultism which proves so attractive to weak
minds of mystical tendencies and unleashed imaginations.

There were certain things he _knew_, but none he cared to argue about;
and he shrank instinctively from attempting to put names to the contents
of this other region, knowing well that such names could only limit and
define things that, according to any standards in use in the ordinary
world, were simply undefinable and illusive.

So that, although this was the way his mind worked, there was clearly a
very strong leaven of common sense in Jones. In a word, the man the
world and the office knew as Jones _was_ Jones. The name summed him up
and labelled him correctly--John Enderby Jones.

Among the things that he _knew_, and therefore never cared to speak or
speculate about, one was that he plainly saw himself as the inheritor
of a long series of past lives, the net result of painful evolution,
always as himself, of course, but in numerous different bodies each
determined by the behaviour of the preceding one. The present John Jones
was the last result to date of all the previous thinking, feeling,
and doing of John Jones in earlier bodies and in other centuries. He
pretended to no details, nor claimed distinguished ancestry, for he
realised his past must have been utterly commonplace and insignificant
to have produced his present; but he was just as sure he had been at
this weary game for ages as that he breathed, and it never occurred to
him to argue, to doubt, or to ask questions. And one result of this
belief was that his thoughts dwelt upon the past rather than upon the
future; that he read much history, and felt specially drawn to certain
periods whose spirit he understood instinctively as though he had lived
in them; and that he found all religions uninteresting because, almost
without exception, they start from the present and speculate ahead as to
what men shall become, instead of looking back and speculating why men
have got here as they are.

In the insurance office he did his work exceedingly well, but without
much personal ambition. Men and women he regarded as the impersonal
instruments for inflicting upon him the pain or pleasure he had earned
by his past workings, for chance had no place in his scheme of things at
all; and while he recognised that the practical world could not get
along unless every man did his work thoroughly and conscientiously, he
took no interest in the accumulation of fame or money for himself, and
simply, therefore, did his plain duty, with indifference as to results.

In common with others who lead a strictly impersonal life, he possessed
the quality of utter bravery, and was always ready to face any
combination of circumstances, no matter how terrible, because he saw in
them the just working-out of past causes he had himself set in motion
which could not be dodged or modified. And whereas the majority of
people had little meaning for him, either by way of attraction or
repulsion, the moment he met some one with whom he felt his past had
been _vitally_ interwoven his whole inner being leapt up instantly and
shouted the fact in his face, and he regulated his life with the utmost
skill and caution, like a sentry on watch for an enemy whose feet could
already be heard approaching.

Thus, while the great majority of men and women left him
uninfluenced--since he regarded them as so many souls merely passing
with him along the great stream of evolution--there were, here and
there, individuals with whom he recognised that his smallest intercourse
was of the gravest importance. These were persons with whom he knew
in every fibre of his being he had accounts to settle, pleasant or
otherwise, arising out of dealings in past lives; and into his relations
with these few, therefore, he concentrated as it were the efforts that
most people spread over their intercourse with a far greater number. By
what means he picked out these few individuals only those conversant
with the startling processes of the subconscious memory may say, but the
point was that Jones believed the main purpose, if not quite the entire
purpose, of his present incarnation lay in his faithful and thorough
settling of these accounts, and that if he sought to evade the least
detail of such settling, no matter how unpleasant, he would have lived
in vain, and would return to his next incarnation with this added duty
to perform. For according to his beliefs there was no Chance, and could
be no ultimate shirking, and to avoid a problem was merely to waste time
and lose opportunities for development.

And there was one individual with whom Jones had long understood clearly
he had a very large account to settle, and towards the accomplishment
of which all the main currents of his being seemed to bear him with
unswerving purpose. For, when he first entered the insurance office as a
junior clerk ten years before, and through a glass door had caught sight
of this man seated in an inner room, one of his sudden overwhelming
flashes of intuitive memory had burst up into him from the depths, and
he had seen, as in a flame of blinding light, a symbolical picture of
the future rising out of a dreadful past, and he had, without any act of
definite volition, marked down this man for a real account to be
settled.

"With _that_ man I shall have much to do," he said to himself, as he
noted the big face look up and meet his eye through the glass. "There is
something I cannot shirk--a vital relation out of the past of both of
us."

And he went to his desk trembling a little, and with shaking knees, as
though the memory of some terrible pain had suddenly laid its icy hand
upon his heart and touched the scar of a great horror. It was a moment
of genuine terror when their eyes had met through the glass door, and
he was conscious of an inward shrinking and loathing that seized upon
him with great violence and convinced him in a single second that the
settling of this account would be almost, perhaps, more than he could
manage.

The vision passed as swiftly as it came, dropping back again into the
submerged region of his consciousness; but he never forgot it, and
the whole of his life thereafter became a sort of natural though
undeliberate preparation for the fulfilment of the great duty when the
time should be ripe.

In those days--ten years ago--this man was the Assistant Manager,
but had since been promoted as Manager to one of the company's local
branches; and soon afterwards Jones had likewise found himself
transferred to this same branch. A little later, again, the branch
at Liverpool, one of the most important, had been in peril owing to
mismanagement and defalcation, and the man had gone to take charge of
it, and again, by mere chance apparently, Jones had been promoted to the
same place. And this pursuit of the Assistant Manager had continued for
several years, often, too, in the most curious fashion; and though Jones
had never exchanged a single word with him, or been so much as noticed
indeed by the great man, the clerk understood perfectly well that these
moves in the game were all part of a definite purpose. Never for one
moment did he doubt that the Invisibles behind the veil were slowly and
surely arranging the details of it all so as to lead up suitably to the
climax demanded by justice, a climax in which himself and the Manager
would play the leading _roles_.

"It is inevitable," he said to himself, "and I feel it may be terrible;
but when the moment comes I shall be ready, and I pray God that I may
face it properly and act like a man."

Moreover, as the years passed, and nothing happened, he felt the horror
closing in upon him with steady increase, for the fact was Jones hated
and loathed the Manager with an intensity of feeling he had never before
experienced towards any human being. He shrank from his presence, and
from the glance of his eyes, as though he remembered to have suffered
nameless cruelties at his hands; and he slowly began to realise,
moreover, that the matter to be settled between them was one of very
ancient standing, and that the nature of the settlement was a discharge
of accumulated punishment which would probably be very dreadful in the
manner of its fulfilment.

When, therefore, the chief cashier one day informed him that the man
was to be in London again--this time as General Manager of the head
office--and said that he was charged to find a private secretary for him
from among the best clerks, and further intimated that the selection
had fallen upon himself, Jones accepted the promotion quietly,
fatalistically, yet with a degree of inward loathing hardly to be
described. For he saw in this merely another move in the evolution of
the inevitable Nemesis which he simply dared not seek to frustrate by
any personal consideration; and at the same time he was conscious of a
certain feeling of relief that the suspense of waiting might soon be
mitigated. A secret sense of satisfaction, therefore, accompanied the
unpleasant change, and Jones was able to hold himself perfectly well in
hand when it was carried into effect and he was formally introduced as
private secretary to the General Manager.

Now the Manager was a large, fat man, with a very red face and bags
beneath his eyes. Being short-sighted, he wore glasses that seemed to
magnify his eyes, which were always a little bloodshot. In hot weather a
sort of thin slime covered his cheeks, for he perspired easily. His head
was almost entirely bald, and over his turn-down collar his great neck
folded in two distinct reddish collops of flesh. His hands were big and
his fingers almost massive in thickness.

He was an excellent business man, of sane judgment and firm will,
without enough imagination to confuse his course of action by showing
him possible alternatives; and his integrity and ability caused him to
be held in universal respect by the world of business and finance. In
the important regions of a man's character, however, and at heart, he
was coarse, brutal almost to savagery, without consideration for others,
and as a result often cruelly unjust to his helpless subordinates.

In moments of temper, which were not infrequent, his face turned a dull
purple, while the top of his bald head shone by contrast like white
marble, and the bags under his eyes swelled till it seemed they would
presently explode with a pop. And at these times he presented a
distinctly repulsive appearance.

But to a private secretary like Jones, who did his duty regardless of
whether his employer was beast or angel, and whose mainspring was
principle and not emotion, this made little difference. Within the
narrow limits in which any one _could_ satisfy such a man, he pleased
the General Manager; and more than once his piercing intuitive faculty,
amounting almost to clairvoyance, assisted the chief in a fashion that
served to bring the two closer together than might otherwise have
been the case, and caused the man to respect in his assistant a power
of which he possessed not even the germ himself. It was a curious
relationship that grew up between the two, and the cashier, who enjoyed
the credit of having made the selection, profited by it indirectly as
much as any one else.

So for some time the work of the office continued normally and very
prosperously. John Enderby Jones received a good salary, and in the
outward appearance of the two chief characters in this history there
was little change noticeable, except that the Manager grew fatter and
redder, and the secretary observed that his own hair was beginning to
show rather greyish at the temples.

There were, however, two changes in progress, and they both had to do
with Jones, and are important to mention.

One was that he began to dream evilly. In the region of deep sleep,
where the possibility of significant dreaming first develops itself, he
was tormented more and more with vivid scenes and pictures in which a
tall thin man, dark and sinister of countenance, and with bad eyes, was
closely associated with himself. Only the setting was that of a past
age, with costumes of centuries gone by, and the scenes had to do with
dreadful cruelties that could not belong to modern life as he knew it.

The other change was also significant, but is not so easy to describe,
for he had in fact become aware that some new portion of himself,
hitherto unawakened, had stirred slowly into life out of the very depths
of his consciousness. This new part of himself amounted almost to
another personality, and he never observed its least manifestation
without a strange thrill at his heart.

For he understood that it had begun to _watch_ the Manager!

II

It was the habit of Jones, since he was compelled to work among
conditions that were utterly distasteful, to withdraw his mind wholly
from business once the day was over. During office hours he kept the
strictest possible watch upon himself, and turned the key on all inner
dreams, lest any sudden uprush from the deeps should interfere with his
duty. But, once the working day was over, the gates flew open, and he
began to enjoy himself.

He read no modern books on the subjects that interested him, and, as
already said, he followed no course of training, nor belonged to any
society that dabbled with half-told mysteries; but, once released from
the office desk in the Manager's room, he simply and naturally entered
the other region, because he was an old inhabitant, a rightful denizen,
and because he belonged there. It was, in fact, really a case of
dual personality; and a carefully drawn agreement existed between
Jones-of-the-fire-insurance-office and Jones-of-the-mysteries, by the
terms of which, under heavy penalties, neither region claimed him out of
hours.

For the moment he reached his rooms under the roof in Bloomsbury, and
had changed his city coat to another, the iron doors of the office
clanged far behind him, and in front, before his very eyes, rolled up
the beautiful gates of ivory, and he entered into the places of flowers
and singing and wonderful veiled forms. Sometimes he quite lost touch
with the outer world, forgetting to eat his dinner or go to bed, and lay
in a state of trance, his consciousness working far out of the body. And
on other occasions he walked the streets on air, half-way between the
two regions, unable to distinguish between incarnate and discarnate
forms, and not very far, probably, beyond the strata where poets,
saints, and the greatest artists have moved and thought and found their
inspiration. But this was only when some insistent bodily claim
prevented his full release, and more often than not he was entirely
independent of his physical portion and free of the real region, without
let or hindrance.

One evening he reached home utterly exhausted after the burden of the
day's work. The Manager had been more than usually brutal, unjust,
ill-tempered, and Jones had been almost persuaded out of his settled
policy of contempt into answering back. Everything seemed to have gone
amiss, and the man's coarse, underbred nature had been in the ascendant
all day long: he had thumped the desk with his great fists, abused,
found fault unreasonably, uttered outrageous things, and behaved
generally as he actually was--beneath the thin veneer of acquired
business varnish. He had done and said everything to wound all that was
woundable in an ordinary secretary, and though Jones fortunately dwelt
in a region from which he looked down upon such a man as he might look
down on the blundering of a savage animal, the strain had nevertheless
told severely upon him, and he reached home wondering for the first time
in his life whether there was perhaps a point beyond which he would be
unable to restrain himself any longer.

For something out of the usual had happened. At the close of a passage
of great stress between the two, every nerve in the secretary's body
tingling from undeserved abuse, the Manager had suddenly turned full
upon him, in the corner of the private room where the safes stood, in
such a way that the glare of his red eyes, magnified by the glasses,
looked straight into his own. And at this very second that other
personality in Jones--the one that was ever _watching_--rose up swiftly
from the deeps within and held a mirror to his face.

A moment of flame and vision rushed over him, and for one single
second--one merciless second of clear sight--he saw the Manager as the
tall dark man of his evil dreams, and the knowledge that he had suffered
at his hands some awful injury in the past crashed through his mind like
the report of a cannon.

It all flashed upon him and was gone, changing him from fire to ice,
and then back again to fire; and he left the office with the certain
conviction in his heart that the time for his final settlement with the
man, the time for the inevitable retribution, was at last drawing very
near.

According to his invariable custom, however, he succeeded in putting
the memory of all this unpleasantness out of his mind with the changing
of his office coat, and after dozing a little in his leather chair
before the fire, he started out as usual for dinner in the Soho French
restaurant, and began to dream himself away into the region of flowers
and singing, and to commune with the Invisibles that were the very
sources of his real life and being.

For it was in this way that his mind worked, and the habits of years had
crystallised into rigid lines along which it was now necessary and
inevitable for him to act.

At the door of the little restaurant he stopped short, a half-remembered
appointment in his mind. He had made an engagement with some one, but
where, or with whom, had entirely slipped his memory. He thought it was
for dinner, or else to meet just after dinner, and for a second it came
back to him that it had something to do with the office, but, whatever
it was, he was quite unable to recall it, and a reference to his pocket
engagement book showed only a blank page. Evidently he had even omitted
to enter it; and after standing a moment vainly trying to recall either
the time, place, or person, he went in and sat down.

But though the details had escaped him, his subconscious memory seemed
to know all about it, for he experienced a sudden sinking of the heart,
accompanied by a sense of foreboding anticipation, and felt that
beneath his exhaustion there lay a centre of tremendous excitement. The
emotion caused by the engagement was at work, and would presently cause
the actual details of the appointment to reappear.

Inside the restaurant the feeling increased, instead of passing: some
one was waiting for him somewhere--some one whom he had definitely
arranged to meet. He was expected by a person that very night and just
about that very time. But by whom? Where? A curious inner trembling came
over him, and he made a strong effort to hold himself in hand and to be
ready for anything that might come.

And then suddenly came the knowledge that the place of appointment was
this very restaurant, and, further, that the person he had promised to
meet was already here, waiting somewhere quite close beside him.

He looked up nervously and began to examine the faces round him. The
majority of the diners were Frenchmen, chattering loudly with much
gesticulation and laughter; and there was a fair sprinkling of clerks
like himself who came because the prices were low and the food good, but
there was no single face that he recognised until his glance fell upon
the occupant of the corner seat opposite, generally filled by himself.

"There's the man who's waiting for me!" thought Jones instantly.

He knew it at once. The man, he saw, was sitting well back into the
corner, with a thick overcoat buttoned tightly up to the chin. His skin
was very white, and a heavy black beard grew far up over his cheeks. At
first the secretary took him for a stranger, but when he looked up and
their eyes met, a sense of familiarity flashed across him, and for a
second or two Jones imagined he was staring at a man he had known years
before. For, barring the beard, it was the face of an elderly clerk who
had occupied the next desk to his own when he first entered the service
of the insurance company, and had shown him the most painstaking
kindness and sympathy in the early difficulties of his work. But a
moment later the illusion passed, for he remembered that Thorpe had been
dead at least five years. The similarity of the eyes was obviously a
mere suggestive trick of memory.

The two men stared at one another for several seconds, and then Jones
began to act _instinctively_, and because he had to. He crossed over and
took the vacant seat at the other's table, facing him; for he felt it
was somehow imperative to explain why he was late, and how it was he had
almost forgotten the engagement altogether.

No honest excuse, however, came to his assistance, though his mind had
begun to work furiously.

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