Weird and Witty Tales of Mystery (2 page)

And, the more I puzzled over it, the more I began to realise that its
genesis dated from those few minutes of reverie lying under the
gorse-bush (reverie, a thing I had never before in all my life indulged
in!), or, now that I came to reflect more accurately, from my brief
interview with that wild-eyed, swift-moving, shadowy man of whom I had
first inquired the way.

I recalled my singular fancy that veils were lifting off the surface of
the hills and fields, and a tremor of excitement accompanied the
memory. Such a thing had never before been possible to my practical
intelligence, and it made me feel suspicious—suspicious about myself.
I stood still a moment—I looked about me into the gathering mist,
above me to the vanishing stars, below me to the hidden valley, and
then sent an urgent summons to my individuality, as I had always known
it, to arrest and chase these undesirable fancies.

But I called in vain. No answer came. Anxiously, hurriedly, confusedly,
too, I searched for my normal self, but could not find it; and this
failure to respond induced in me a sense of uneasiness that touched
very nearly upon the borders of alarm.

I pushed on faster and faster along the turfy track among the
gorse-bushes with a dread that I might lose the way altogether, and a
sudden desire to reach home as soon as might be. Then, without warning,
I emerged unexpectedly into clear air again, and the vapour swept past
me in a rushing wall and rose into the sky. Anew I saw the lights of
the village behind me in the depths, here and there a line of smoke
rising against the pale yellow sky, and stars overhead peering down
through thin wispy clouds that stretched their wind-signs across the
night.

After all, it had been nothing but a stray bit of sea-fog driving up
from the coast, for the other side of the hills, I remembered, dipped
their chalk cliffs straight into the sea, and strange lost winds must
often come a-wandering this way with the sharp changes of temperature
about sunset. None the less, it was disconcerting to know that mist and
storm lay hiding within possible reach, and I walked on smartly for a
sight of Tom Bassett's cottage and the lights of the Manor House in the
valley a short mile beyond.

The clearing of the air, however, lasted but a very brief while, and
vapour was soon rising about me as before, hiding the path and making
bushes and stone walls look like running shadows. It came, driven
apparently, by little independent winds up the many side gullies, and
it was very cold, touching my skin like a wet sheet. Curious great
shapes, too, it assumed as the wind worked to and fro through it: forms
of men and animals; grotesque, giant outlines; ever shifting and
running along the ground with silent feet, or leaping into the air with
sharp cries as the gusts twisted them inwardly and lent them voice.
More and more I pushed my pace, and more and more darkness and vapour
obliterated the landscape. The going was not otherwise difficult, and
here and there cowslips glimmered in patches of dancing yellow, while
the springy turf made it easy to keep up speed; yet in the gloom I
frequently tripped and plunged into prickly gorse near the ground, so
that from shin to knee was soon a-tingle with sharp pain. Odd puffs and
spits of rain stung my face, and the periods of utter stillness were
always followed by little shouting gusts of wind, each time from a new
direction. Troubled is perhaps too strong a word, but flustered I
certainly was; and though I recognised that it was due to my being in
an environment so remote from the town life I was accustomed to, I
found it impossible to stifle altogether the feeling of malaise that
had crept into my heart, and I looked about with increasing eagerness
for the lighted windows of Bassett's cottage.

More and more, little pin-pricks of distress and confusion accumulated,
adding to my realisation of being away from streets and shop-windows,
and things I could classify and deal with. The mist, too, distorted as
well as concealed, played tricks with sounds as well as with sights.
And, once or twice, when I stumbled upon some crouching sheep, they got
up without the customary alarm and hurry of sheep, and moved off slowly
into the darkness, but in such a singular way that I could almost have
sworn they were not sheep at all, but human beings crawling on
all-fours, looking back and grimacing at me over their shoulders as
they went. On these occasions—for there were more than one—I never
could get close enough to feel their woolly wet backs, as I should have
liked to do; and the sound of their tinkling bells came faintly through
the mist, sometimes from one direction, sometimes from another,
sometimes all round me as though a whole flock surrounded me; and I
found it impossible to analyse or explain the idea I received that they
were
not
sheep-bells at all, but something quite different.

But mist and darkness, and a certain confusion of the senses caused by
the excitement of an utterly strange environment, can account for a
great deal. I pushed on quickly. The conviction that I had strayed from
the route grew, nevertheless, for occasionally there was a great
commotion of seagulls about me, as though I had disturbed them in their
sleeping-places. The air filled with their plaintive cries, and I heard
the rushing of multitudinous wings, sometimes very close to my head,
but always invisible owing to the mist. And once, above the swishing of
the wet wind through the gorse-bushes, I was sure I caught the faint
thunder of the sea and the distant crashing of waves rolling up some
steep-throated gully in the cliffs. I went cautiously after this, and
altered my course a little away from the direction of the sound.

Yet, increasingly all the time, it came to me how the cries of the
sea-birds sounded like laughter, and how the everlasting wind blew and
drove about me with a purpose, and how the low bushes persistently took
the shape of stooping people, moving stealthily past me, and how the
mist more and more resembled huge protean figures escorting me across
the desolate hills, silently, with immense footsteps. For the inanimate
world now touched my awakened poetic sense in a manner hitherto
unguided, and became fraught with the pregnant messages of a dimly
concealed life. I readily understood, for the first time, how easily a
superstitious peasantry might people their world, and how even an
educated mind might favour an atmosphere of legend. I stumbled along,
looking anxiously for the lights of the cottage.

Suddenly, as a shape of writhing mist whirled past, I received so
direct a stroke of wind that it was palpably a blow in the face.
Something swept by with a shrill cry into the darkness. It was
impossible to prevent jumping to one side and raising an arm by way of
protection, and I was only just quick enough to catch a glimpse of the
sea-gull as it raced past, with suddenly altered flight, beating its
powerful wings over my head. Its white body looked enormous as the mist
swallowed it. At the same moment a gust tore my hat from my head and
flung the flap of my coat across my eyes. But I was well-trained by
this time, and made a quick dash after the retreating black object,
only to find on overtaking it that I held a prickly branch of gorse.
The wind combed my hair viciously. Then, out of a corner of my eye, I
saw my hat still rolling, and grabbed swiftly at it; but just as I
closed on it, the real hat passed in front of me, turning over in the
wind like a ball, and I instantly released my first capture to chase
it. Before it was within reach, another one shot between my feet so
that I stepped on it. The grass seemed covered with moving hats, yet
each one, when I seized it, turned into a piece of wood, or a tiny
gorse-bush, or a black rabbit hole, till my hands were scored with
prickles and running blood. In the darkness, I reflected, all objects
looked alike, as though by general conspiracy. I straightened up and
took a long breath, mopping the blood with my handkerchief. Then
something tapped at my feet, and on looking down, there was the hat
within easy reach, and I stooped down and put it on my head again. Of
course, there were a dozen ways of explaining my confusion and
stupidity, and I walked along wondering which to select. My eyesight,
for one thing—and under such conditions why seek further? It was
nothing, after all, and the dizziness was a momentary effect caused by
the effort and stooping.

But for all that, I shouted aloud, on the chance that a wandering
shepherd might hear me; and of course no answer came, for it was like
calling in a padded room, and the mist suffocated my voice and killed
its resonance.

It was really very discouraging: I was cold and wet and hungry; my legs
and clothes torn by the gorse, my hands scratched and bleeding; the
wind brought water to my eyes by its constant buffeting, and my skin
was numb from contact with the chill mist. Fortunately I had matches,
and after some difficulty, by crouching under a wall, I caught a swift
glimpse of my watch, and saw that it was but little after eight
o'clock. Supper I knew was at nine, and I was surely over half-way by
this time. But here again was another instance of the way everything
seemed in a conspiracy against me to appear otherwise than ordinary,
for in the gleam of the match my watch-glass showed as the face of a
little old gray man, uncommonly like the folk-lorist himself, peering
up at me with an expression of whimsical laughter. My own reflection it
could not possibly have been, for I am clean-shaven, and this face
looked up at me through a running tangle of gray hair. Yet a second and
third match revealed only the white surface with the thin black hands
moving across it.

And it was at this point, I well remember, that I reached what was for
me the true heart of the adventure, the little fragment of real
experience I learned from it and took back with me to my doctor's life
in London, and that has remained with me ever since, and helped me to a
new sympathetic insight into the intricacies of certain curious mental
cases I had never before really understood.

For it was sufficiently obvious by now that a curious change had been
going forward in me for some time, dating, so far as I could focus my
thoughts sufficiently to analyse, from the moment of my speech with
that hurrying man of shadow on the hillside. And the first deliberate
manifestation of the change, now that I looked back, was surely the
awakening in my prosaic being of the "poetic thrill"; my sudden amazing
appreciation of the world around me as something alive. From that
moment the change in me had worked ahead subtly, swiftly. Yet, so
natural had been the beginning of it, that although it was a radically
new departure for my temperament, I was hardly aware at first of what
had actually come about; and it was only now, after so many encounters,
that I was forced at length to acknowledge it.

It came the more forcibly too, because my very commonplace ideas of
beauty had hitherto always been associated with sunshine and crude
effects; yet here this new revelation leaped to me out of wind and mist
and desolation on a lonely hillside, out of night, darkness, and
discomfort. New values rushed upon me from all sides. Everything had
changed, and the very simplicity with which the new values presented
themselves proved to me how profound the change, the readjustment, had
been. In such trivial things the evidence had come that I was not aware
of it until repetition forced my attention: the veils rising from
valley and hill; the mountain tops as personalities that shout or
murmur in the darkness; the crying of the sea birds and of the living,
purposeful wind; above all, the feeling that Nature about me was
instinct with a life differing from my own in degree rather than in
kind; everything, from the conspiracy of the gorse-bushes to the
disappearing hat, showed that a fundamental attitude of mind in me had
changed—and changed, too, without my knowledge or consent.

Moreover, at the same time the deep sadness of beauty had entered my
heart like a stroke; for all this mystery and loveliness, I realized
poignantly was utterly independent and careless of
me
, as me; and
that while I must pass, decay, grow old, these manifestations would
remain for ever young and unalterably potent. And thus gradually had I
become permeated with the recognition of a region hitherto unknown to
me, and that I had always depreciated in others and especially, it now
occurred to me, in my friend the old folk-lorist.

Here surely, I thought, was the beginning of conditions which, carried
a little further, must become pathogenic. That the change was real and
pregnant I had no doubt whatever. My consciousness was expanding and I
had caught it in the very act. I had of course read much concerning the
changes of personality, swift, kaleidoscopic—had come across something
of it in my practice—and had listened to the folk-lorist holding forth
like a man inspired upon ways and means of reaching concealed regions
of the human consciousness, and opening it to the knowledge of things
called magical, so that one became free of a larger universe. But it
was only now for the first time, on these bare hills, in touch with the
wind and the rain, that I realized in how simple a fashion the
frontiers of consciousness could shift this way and that, or with what
touch of genuine awe the certainty might come that one stood on the
borderland of new, untried, perhaps dangerous, experiences.

At any rate, it did now come to me that my consciousness had shifted
its frontiers very considerably, and that whatever might happen must
seem not abnormal, but quite simple and inevitable, and of course
utterly true. This very simplicity, however, doing no violence to my
being, brought with it none the less a sense of dread and discomfort;
and my dim awareness that unknown possibilities were about me in the
night puzzled and distressed me perhaps more than I cared to admit.