Algernon Blackwood

Four Weird Tales

Algernon Blackwood

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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.