The Heath Fire
By Algernon Blackwood

The men at luncheon in Rennie’s Surrey cottage that September day were discussing, of course, the heat. All agreed it had been exceptional. But nothing unusual was said until O’Hara spoke of the heath fires. They had been rather terrific, several in a single day, devouring trees and bushes, endangering human life, and spreading with remarkable rapidity. The flames, too, had been extraordinarily high and vehement for heath fires. And O’Hara’s tone had introduced into the com­monplace talk something new—the element of mystery; it was nothing definite he said, but manner, eyes, hushed voice and the rest conveyed it. And it was genuine. What he felt reached the others rather than what he said. The atmosphere in the little room, with the honeysuckle trailing sweetly across the open windows, changed; the talk became of a sudden less casual, frank, familiar; and the men glanced at one another across the table, laughing still, yet with an odd touch of con­straint marking little awkward, unfilled pauses. Being a group of normal Englishmen, they disliked mystery; it made them feel uncomfortable; for the things O’Hara hinted at had touched that kind of elemental terror that lurks secretly in all human beings. Guarded by ‘culture’, but never wholly concealed, the unwelcome thing made its presence known—the hint of primitive dread that, for instance, great thunder-storms, tidal waves, or violent conflagrations rouse.

    And instinctively they fell at once to discussing the obvious causes of the fires. The stockbroker, scenting imagination, edged mentally away, sniffing. But the journalist was full of brisk information, ‘simply given’.

    ‘The sun starts them in Canada, using a dewdrop as a lens,’ he said, ‘and an engine’s spark, remember, carries an immense distance without losing its heat.’

    ‘But hardly miles,’ said another, who had not been really listening.

    ‘It’s my belief,’ put in the critic keenly, ‘that a lot were done on purpose. Bits of live coal wrapped in cloth were found, you know.’ He was a little, weasel-faced iconoclast, dropping the acid of doubt and disbelief wherever he went, but offering nothing in the place of what he destroyed. His head was turret-shaped, lips tight and thin, nose and chin running to points like gimlets, with which he bored into the unremunerative days of life.

    ‘The general unrest, yes,’ the journalist supported him, and tried to draw the conversation on to labour questions. But their host preferred the fire talk. ‘I must say,’ he put in gravely, ‘that some of the blazes hereabouts were uncommonly—er——queer. They started, I mean, so oddly. You remember, O’Hara, only last week that suspicious one over Kettlebury way—?’

    It seemed he wished to draw the artist out, and that the artist, feeling the general opposition, declined.

    ‘Why seek an unusual explanation at all?’ the critic said at length, impatiently. ‘It’s all natural enough, if you ask me.’

    ‘Natural! Oh yes!’ broke in O’Hara, with a sudden vehemence that betrayed feeling none had as yet suspected; ‘provided you don’t limit the word to mean only what we understand. There’s nothing anywhere—unnatural.’

    A laugh cut short the threatened tirade, and the journalist expressed the general feeling with ‘Oh you, Jim! You’d see a devil in a dust-storm, or a fairy in the tea-leaves of your cup!’

    ‘And why not, pray? Devils and fairies are every bit as true as formulae.’

    Some one tactfully guided them away from a profitless discussion, and they talked glibly of the damage done, the hideousness of the destroyed moors, the gaunt, black, ugly slopes, fifty-foot flames, roaring noises, and the splendour of the enormous smoke-clouds that had filled the skies. And Rennie, still hoping to coax O’Hara, repeated tales the beaters had brought in that crying, as though living things were caught, had been heard in places, and that some had seen tall shapes of fire passing headlong through the choking smoke. For the note O’Hara had struck refused to be ignored. It went on sounding underneath the commonest remark; and the atmosphere to the end retained that curious tinge that he had given to it—of the strange, the ominous, the mysterious and unexplained. Until, at last, the artist, having added nothing further to the talk, got up with some abruptness and left the room. He complained briefly that the fever he had suffered from still bothered him and he would go and lie down a bit. The heat, he said, oppressed him.

    A silence followed his departure. The broker drew a sigh as though the market had gone up. But Rennie, old, compre­hending friend, looked anxious. ‘Excitement,’ he said, ‘not oppression, is the word he meant. He’s always a bit strung up when that Black Sea fever gets him. He brought it with him from Batoum.’ And another brief silence followed.

    ‘Been with you most of the summer, hasn’t he?’ enquired the journalist, on the trail of a ‘par’, ‘painting those wild things of his that no one understands.’ And their host, weighing a moment how much he might in fairness tell, replied—among friends it was—‘Yes; and this summer they have been more—er—wild and wonderful than usual—an extraordinary rush of colour splendid schemes, “conceptions”, I believe you critics call ’em, of fire, as though, in a way, the unusual heat had possessed him for interpretation.’

    The group expressed its desultory interest by uninspired interjections.

    ‘That was what he meant just now when he said the fires had been mysterious, required explanation, or something—the way they started, rather,’ concluded Rennie.

    Then he hesitated. He laughed a moment, and it was an uneasy, apologetic little laugh. How to continue he hardly knew. Also, he wished to protect his friend from the cheap jeering of miscomprehension. ‘He is very imaginative, you know,’ he went on, quietly, as no one spoke. ‘You remember that glorious mad thing he did of the Fallen Lucifer—driving a star across the heavens till the heat of the descent set a light to half the planets, scorched the old moon to the white cinder that she now is, and passed close enough to earth to send our oceans up in a single jet of steam? Well, this time—he’s been at something every bit as wild, only truer—finer. And what is it? Briefly, then, he’s got the idea, it seems, that the unusual heat from the sun this year has penetrated deep enough— in places-especially on these unprotected heaths that retain their heat so cleverly—to reach another kindred expression— to waken a response—in sympathy, you see—from the central fires of the earth.’

    He paused again a moment awkwardly, conscious how clum­sily he expressed it. ‘The parent getting into touch again with its lost child, eh? See the idea? Return of the Fire Prodigal, as it were?’

    His listeners stared in silence, the broker looking his obvious relief that O’Hara was not on ‘Change, the critic’s eyes glancing sharply down that pointed, boring nose of his.

    ‘And the central fires have felt it and risen in response,’ continued Rennie in a lower voice. ‘You see the idea? It’s big, to say the least. The volcanoes have answered too— there’s old Etna, the giant of ’em all, breaking out in fifty new mouths of flame. Heat is latent in everything, only waiting to be called out. That match you’re striking, this coffee-pot, the warmth in our bodies, and so on—their heat comes first from the sun, and is therefore an actual part of the sun, the origin of all heat and life. And so O’Hara, you know, who sees the universe as a single homogeneous One and—and— well, I give it up. Can’t explain it, you see. You must get him to do that. But somehow this year—cloudless—the protecting armour of water all gone too—the sun’s rays manag­ed to sink in and reach their kind buried deep below. Perhaps, later, we may get him to show us the studies that he’s made—whew!—the most—er—amazing things you ever saw!’

    The ‘superiority’ of unimaginative minds was inevitable, making Rennie regret that he had told so much. It was almost as if he had been untrue to his friend. But at length the group broke up for the afternoon. They left messages for O’Hara. Two motored, and the journalist took the train. The critic followed his sharp nose to London, where he might ferret out the failures that his mind delighted in. And when they were gone the host slipped quickly upstairs to find his friend. The heat was unbearable to suffocation, the little bedroom like an oven. But Jim O’Hara was not in it.

    For, instead of lying down as he had said, a fierce revolt, stirred by the talk of those unvisioned minds below, had wakened, and the deep, sensitive, poet’s soul in him had leaped suddenly to the acceptance of an impossible thing. He had escaped, driven forth by the secret call of wonder. He made full speed for the destroyed moors. Fever or no fever, he must see for himself. Did no one understand? Was he the only one?... Walking quickly, he passed the Frensham Ponds, came through that spot of loneliness and beauty, the Lion’s Mouth, noting that even there the pool of water had dried up and the rushes waved in the hot air over a bed of hard, caked mud, and so reached within the hour the wide ex­panse of Thursley Common. On every side the world stretched dark and burnt, a cemetery of cinders. Great thrills rushed through his heart; and with the power of a tide that yet came at flashing speed the truth rose up in him... Half running now, he plunged forward another mile or two, and found himself, the only living thing, amid the great waste of heather-land. The blazing sunlight drenched it. It lay, a sheet of weird dark beauty, spreading like a black, enormous garden as far as the eye could reach.

    Then, breathless, he paused and looked about him. Within his heart something, long smouldering, ran into sudden flame. Light blazed upon his inner world. For as the scorch of vehe­ment passion may quicken tracts of human consciousness that lie ordinarily inert and unproductive, so here the surface of the earth had turned alive. He knew; he saw; he under­stood.

    Here, in these open sun-traps that gathered and retained the heat, the fire of the Universe had dropped and lain, increasing week by week. These parched, dry months, the soil, free from rejecting and protective moisture, had let it all accumulate till at length it had sunk downwards, inwards, and the sister fires below, responding to the touch of their ancient parent source, too long unfelt, had answered with a swift uprising roar. They had come up with answering joy, and here and there had actually reached the surface, and had leaped out with dancing cry, wild to escape from an age-long prison back to their huge, eternal origin.

    This sunshine, ah! what was it? These farthing dips of heat men complained about in their tiny, cage-like houses! It scorch­ed the grass and fields, yes; but the surface never held it long enough to let it sink to union with its kindred of the darker fires beneath! These cried for it, but union was ever denied and stifled by the weight of cooled and cooling rock. And the ages of separation had almost cooled remembrance too—fire—the kiss and strength of fire—the flaming embrace and burning lips of the father sun himself.... He could have cried with the fierce delight of it all, and the picture he would paint rose there before him, burnt gloriously into the canvas of the entire heavens. Was not his own heat and life also from the sun?...

    He stared about him in the deep silence of the afternoon. The world was still. It basked in the windless heat. No living thing stirred, for the common forms of life had fled away. Earth waited. He, too, waited. And then some touch of intuition, blown to white heat, supplied the link the pedestrian intellect missed, and he knew that what he waited for was on the way. For he would see. The message he should paint would come before his outer eye as well, though not, as he had first stupidly expected, on some grand, enormous scale. Rather would it be the equivalent of that still, small voice that once had inspired an entire nation....

    The wind passed very softly across the unburnt patch of heather where he lay; he heard it rustling in the skeletons of scorched birch trees, and in the gorse and furze bushes that the flame had left so ghostly pale. Farther off it sang in the isolated pines, dying away like surf upon some far-off reef. He smelt the bitter perfume of burnt soil, the pungent, acrid odour of beaten ashes. The purple-black of the moors yawned like openings in the side of the earth. In all directions for miles stretched the deep emptiness of the heather-lands, an immense, dark, magic garden, still black with the feet of wonder that had flown across it and left it so beautifuily scarred. The shadow of the terrible embrace still trailed and lingered as through Midnight had screened a time of passion with this curtain of her softest plumes.

    And they had called it ugly, had spoken of its marred beauty, its hideousness! He laughed exultantly as he drank it in, for the weird and savage splendour everywhere broke loose and spread, passing from the earth into the receptive substance of his own mind. Even the roots of gorse and heather, like petrified, shadow-eating snakes, charged with the mystery of that eternal underworld whence they had risen, lay waiting for the return of the night of sleep whence Fire had wakened them. Lost ghosts of a salamander army that the flame had swept above the ground, they lay anguished and frightened in the glare of the unaccustomed sun....

    And waiting, he stared about him in the deep silence of the afternoon. Hazy with distance he saw the peak of Crooksbury, dim in its sheet of pines, waving a blue-plumed crest into the sky for signal; and close about him rose the more sombre glory of the lesser knolls and boulders, still cloaked in the swarthy magic of the smoke. Amid pools of ashes in the nearer hollows he saw the blue beauty of the fire-weed that rushes instantly into life behind all conflagrations. It was blowing softly in the wind. And here and there, set like emeralds bpon some dusky bosom, lay the brilliant spires of young bracken that rose to clap a thousand tiny hands in the heart of exquisite desolation. In a cloud of green they rustled in the wind above the sea of black.... And so within himself O’Hara realised the huge excitement of the flame this fragment of the earth had felt. For Fire, mysterious symbol of universal life, spirit that prodigally gives itself without itself diminishing, had passed in power across this ancient heather-land, leaving the soul of it all naked and unashamed. The sun had loved it. The fires below had risen up and answered. They had known that union with their source which some call death....

    And the fires were rising still. The poet’s heart in him became suddenly and awfully aware. Ye stars of fire! This patch of unburnt heather where he lay had been untouched as yet, but now the flame in his soul had brought the little needed link and he would see. The thing of wonder that the Universe should teach him how to paint was already on the way. Called by the sun, tremendous, splendid parent, the central fires were still rising.

    And he turned, weakness and exultation racing for possession of him. The wind passed softly over his face, and with it came a faint, dry sound. It was distant and yet dose beside him. At the stir of it there rose also in himself a strange vast thing that was bigger than the bulk of the moon and wide as the extension of swept forests, yet small and gentle as a blade of grass that pricks the lawn in spring. And he realised then that ‘within’ and ‘without’ had turned one, and that over the entire moorland arrived this thing that was happening too in a whitehot point of his own heart. He was linked with the sun and the farthest star, and in his little finger glowed the heat and fire of the universe itself. In sympathy his own fires were rising too.

    The sound was born—a faint, light noise of crackling in the heather at his feet. He bent his head and searched, and among the obscure and tiny underways of the roots he saw a tip of curling smoke rise slowly upwards. It moved in a thin, blue spiral past his face. Then terror took him that was like a terror of the mountains, yet with it at the same time a realisa­tion of beauty that made the heart leap within him into dazzling radiance. For the incense of this fairy column of thin smoke drew his soul with it—upwards towards its source. He rose to his feet, trembling....

    He watched the line rise slowly to the sky and vanish into blue. The whole expanse of blackened heather-land watched too. Wind sank away; the sunshine dropped to meet it. A sense of deep expectancy, profound and reverent, lay over all that sun-baked moor; and the entire sweep of burnt world about him knew with joy that what was taking place in that wee, isolated patch of Surrey heather was the thing the Hebrew mystic knew when the Soul of the Universe became manifest in the bush that burned, yet never was consumed. In that faint sound of crackling, as he stood aside to listen and to watch, O’Hara knew a form of the eternal Voice of Ages. There was no flame, but it seemed to him that all his inner being passed in fiery heat outwards towards its source.... He saw the little patch of dried-up heather sink to the level of the black surface all about it—a sifted pile of delicate, pale-blue ashes. The tiny spiral vanished; he watched it disappear, winding upwards out of sight in a little ghostly trail of beauty. So small and soft and simple was this wonder of the world. It was gone. And something in himself had broken, dropped in ashes, and passed also outwards like a tiny mounting flame.

    But the picture O’Hara had thought himself designed to paint was never done. It was not even begun. The great canvas of ‘The Fire Worshipper’ stood empty on the easel, for the artist had not strength to lift a brush. Within two days the final breath passed slowly from his lips. The strange fever that so perplexed the doctor by its rapid development and its fury took him so easily. His temperature was extra­ordinary. The heat, as of an internal fire, fairly devoured him, and the smile upon his face at the last—so Rennie declared— was the most perplexingly wonderful thing he had ever seen. ‘It was like a great, white flame,’ he said.