Algernon Blackwood

ANCIENT SORCERIES

Algernon Blackwood

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I

There are, it would appear, certain wholly

unremarkable persons, with none of the characteristics that invite

adventure, who yet once or twice in the course of their smooth lives

undergo an experience so strange that the world catches its breath—and

looks the other way! And it was cases of this kind, perhaps, more than

any other, that fell into the widespread net of John Silence, the

psychic doctor, and, appealing to his deep humanity, to his patience,

and to his great qualities of spiritual sympathy, led often to the

revelation of problems of the strangest complexity, and of the

profoundest possible human interest.

Matters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic

for belief he loved to trace to their hidden sources. To unravel a

tangle in the very soul of things—and to release a suffering human

soul in the process— was with him a veritable passion. And the knots

he untied were, indeed, after passing strange.

The world, of course, asks for some plausible basis

to which it can attach credence—something it can, at least, pretend to

explain. The adventurous type it can understand: such people carry

about with them an adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and

their characters obviously drive them into the circumstances which

produce the adventures. It expects nothing else from them, and is

satisfied. But dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way

experiences, and the world having been led to expect otherwise, is

disappointed with them, not to say shocked. Its complacent judgment has

been rudely disturbed.

“Such a thing happened to that man!” it

cries—”a commonplace person like that! It is too absurd! There must be

something wrong!”

Yet there could be no question that something did

actually happen to little Arthur Vezin, something of the purious nature

he described to Dr. Silence. Outwardly or inwardly, it happened beyond

a doubt, and in spite of the jeers of his few friends who heard the

tale, and observed wisely that “such a thing might perhaps have come to

Iszard, that crack-brained Iszard, or to that odd fish Minski, but it

could never have happened to commonplace little Vezin, who was

fore-ordained to live and die according to scale.”

But, whatever his method of death was, Vezin certainly did not “live

according to scale” so far as this particular event in his otherwise

uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch

his pale delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer and

more hushed as he proceeded, was to know the conviction that his

halting words perhaps failed sometimes to convey. He lived the thing

over again each time he told it. His whole personality became muffled

in the recital. It subdued him more than ever, so that the tale became

a lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated. He appeared to

excuse himself and ask your pardon for having dared to take part in so

fantastic an episode. For little Vezin was a timid, gentle, sensitive

soul, rarely able to assert himself, tender to man and beast, and

almost constitutionally unable to say No, or to claim many things that

should rightly have been his. His whole scheme of life seemed utterly

remote from anything more exciting than missing a train or losing an

umbrella on an omnibus. And when this curious event came upon him he

was already more years beyond forty than his friends suspected or he

cared to admit.

John Silence, who heard him speak of his experience

more than once, said that he sometimes left out certain details and put

in others; yet they were all obviously true. The whole scene was

unforgettably cinematographed on to his mind. None of the details were

imagined or invented. And when he told the story with them all

complete, the effect was undeniable. His appealing brown eyes shone,

and much of the charming personality, usually so carefully repressed,

came forward and revealed itself. His modesty was always there, of

course, but in the telling he forgot the present and allowed himself to

appear almost vividly as he lived again in the past of his adventure.

He was on the way home when it happened, crossing

northern France from some mountain trip or other where he buried

himself solitary-wise every summer. He had nothing but an unregistered

bag in the rack, and the train was jammed to suffocation, most of the

passengers being unredeemed holiday English. He disliked them, not

because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy

and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all

the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled

him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody. These

English clashed about him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely

that he ought to be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he

did not claim insistently enough all kinds of things that he didn’t

want and that were really valueless, such as corner seats, windows up

or down, and so forth.

So that he felt uncomfortable in the train, and

wished the journey were over and he was back again living with his

unmarried sister in Surbiton.

And when the train stopped for ten panting minutes

at the little station in northern France, and he got out to stretch his

legs on the platform, and saw to his dismay a further batch of the

British Isles debouching from another train, it suddenly seemed

impossible to him to continue the journey. Even his flabby soul

revolted, and the idea of staying a night in the little town and going

on next day by a slower, emptier train, flashed into his mind. The

guard was already shouting “en voiture” and the corridor of his

compartment was already packed when the thought came to him. And, for

once, he acted with decision and rushed to snatch his bag.

Finding the corridor and steps impassable, he tapped

at the window (for he had a corner seat) and begged the Frenchman who

sat opposite to hand his luggage out to him, explaining in his wretched

French that he intended to break the journey there. And this elderly

Frenchman, he declared, gave him a look, half of warning, half of

reproach, that to his dying day he could never forget; handed the bag

through the window of the moving train; and at the same time poured

into his ears a long sentence, spoken rapidly and low, of which he was

able to comprehend only the last few words: “a cause du sommeil et a

cause des chats.”

In reply to Dr. Silence, whose singular psychic

acuteness at once seized upon this Frenchman as a vital point in the

adventure, Vezin admitted that the man had impressed him favourably

from the beginning, though without being able to explain why. They had

sat facing one another during the four hours of the journey, and though

no conversation had passed between them—Vezin was timid about his

stuttering French—he confessed that his eyes were being continually

drawn to his face, almost, he felt, to rudeness, and that each, by a

dozen nameless little politenesses and attentions, had evinced the

desire to be kind.