Meiklejohn the curate,
was walking through the Jura when this thing happened to him. There is
only his word to vouch for it, for the inn and its proprietor are now
both of the past, and the local record of the occurrence has long since
assumed the proportions of a picturesque but inaccurate legend. As a
true story, however, it stands out from those of its kidney by the fact
that there seems to have been a deliberate intention in it. It saved a
life—a life the world had need of. And this singular rescue of a man
of value to the best order of things makes one feel that there was some
sense, even logic, in the affair.
Moreover, Meiklejohn asserts that it was the only
psychic experience he ever knew. Things of the sort were not a
‘habit’ with him. His rescue, thus was not one of those meaningless
interventions that puzzle the man in the Street while they exhilarate
the psychologist. It was a deliberate and very determined affair.
Meiklejohn found himself that hot August night in
one of the valleys that slip like blue shadows hidden among pine-woods
between the Swiss frontier and France. He had passed Ste. Croix earlier
in the day; Les Rasses had been left behind about four o’clock;
Buttes, and the Val de Travers, where the cement of many a London street
comes from, was his goal. But the light failed long before he reached
it, and he stopped at an inn that appeared unexpectedly round a corner
of the dusty road, built literally against the great cliffs that formed
one wall of the valley. He was so footsore, and his knapsack so heavy,
that he turned in without more ado.
Le Guillaume Tell was the name of the inn—dirty
white walls, with thin, almost mangy vines scrambling over the door, and
the stream brawling beneath shuttered windows with green and white
stripes all patched by sun and rain. His room was sevenpence, his dinner
of soup, omelette, fruit, cheese, and coffee, a franc. The prices suited
his pocket and made him feel comfortable and at home. Immediately behind
the hotel—the only house visible, except the sawmill across the road,
rose the ever-crumbling ridges and precipices that formed the flanks of
Chasseront and ran on past La Sagne towards the grey Aiguilles de
Baulmes. He was in the Jura fastnesses where tourists rarely penetrate.
Through the low doorway of the inn he carried with
him the strong atmosphere of thoughts that had accompanied him all
day—dreams of how he intended to spend his life, plans of sacrifice
and effort. For his hopes of great achievement, even then at
twenty-five, were a veritable passion in him, and his desire to spend
himself for humanity a devouring flame. So occupied, indeed, was his
mind with the emotions belonging to this line of thinking, that he
hardly noticed the singular, though exceedingly faint, sense of alarm
that stirred somewhere in the depths of his being as he passed within
that doorway where the dropping vine-leaves clutched at his hat. He remembered
it a little later. The sense of danger had been touched in him. He felt
at the moment only a hint of discomfort, too vague to claim definite
recognition. Yet it was there—the instant he stepped within the
threshold—and afterwards he distinctly recalled its sudden and
unaccountable advent.
His bedroom, though stuffy, as from windows long
unopened, was clean; carpetless, of course, and primitive, with white
pine floor and walls, and the short bed, smothered under its duvet, very
creaky. And very short! For Meiklejohn was well over six feet.
‘I shall have to curl up, as usual, in a knot,’
was his reflection as he measured the bed with his eye; ‘though
to-night I think— after my twenty miles in this air—’
The thought refused to complete itself. He was
going to add that he was tired enough to have slept on a stone floor,
but for some undefined reason the same sense of alarm that had tapped
him on the shoulder as he entered the inn returned now when he
contemplated the bed. A sharp repugnance for that bed, as sudden and
unaccountable as it was curious, swept into him—and was gone again
before he had time to seize it wholly. It was in reality so slight that
he dismissed it immediately as the merest fancy; yet, at the same
time, he was aware that he would rather have slept on another bed, had
there been one in the room—and then the queer feeling that, after all,
perhaps, he would not sleep
there in the end at all. How this idea came to him he never knew. He
records it, however, as part of the occurrence.
After eight o’clock a few peasants, and workmen
from the sawmill, came in to drink their demi-litre
of red wine in the common room downstairs, to stare at the
unexpected guest, and to smoke their vile tobacco. They were neither
picturesque nor amusing—simply dirty and slightly malodorous. At nine
o’clock Meiklejohn knocked the ashes from his briar pipe upon the
limestone window-ledge, and went upstairs, overpowered with sleep. The
sense of alarm had utterly disappeared; his mind was busy once more with
his great dreams of the future—dreams that materialised themselves, as
all the world knows, in the famous Meiklejohn Institutes....
Berthoud, the proprietor, short and sturdy, with
his faded brown coat and no collar, slightly confused with red wine and
a ‘tourist’ guest, showed him the way up. For, of course, there was
no femme de chambre.
‘You have
the corridor all to yourself,’ the man said; showed him the best
corner of the landing to shout from in case he wanted anything—there
being no bell—eyed his boots, knapsack, and flask with considerable
curiosity, wished him good-night, and was gone. He went downstairs with
a noise like a horse, thought the curate, as he locked the door after
him.
The windows had been open now for a couple of
hours, and the room smelt sweet with the odours of sawn wood and
shavings, the resinous perfume of the surrounding hosts of pines, and
the sharp, delicate touch of a lonely mountain valley where civilisation
has not yet tainted the air. Whiffs of coarse tobacco, pungent without
being offensive, came invisibly through the cracks of the floor.
Primitive and simple it all was—a—sort of vigorous ‘backwoods’
atmosphere. Yet, once again, as he turned to examine the room after
Berthoud’s steps had blundered down below into the passage, something
rose faintly within him to set his nerves mysteriously a-quiver.
Out of these perfectly simple conditions, without
the least apparent cause, the odd feeling again came over him that he
was—in danger.
The curate was not much given to analysis. He was a
man of action pure and simple, as a rule. But to-night, in spite of
himself, his thoughts went plunging, searching, asking. For this
singular message of dread that emanated as it were from the room, or
from some article of furniture in the room perhaps—that bed still
touched his mind with a peculiar repugnance-demanded somewhat
insistently for an explanation. And the only explanation that
suggested itself to his unimaginative mind was that the forces of nature
hereabouts were—overpowering; that, after the slum streets and factory
chimneys of the last twelve months, these towering cliffs and smothering
pine-forests communicated to his soul a word of grandeur that amounted
to awe. Inadequate and far-fetched as the explanation seems, it was the
only one that occurred to him; and its value in this remarkable
adventure lies in the fact that he connected his sense of danger partly
with the bed and partly with the mountains.
‘I felt once or twice,’ he said afterwards,
‘as though some powerful agency of a spiritual kind were all the time
trying to beat into my stupid brain a message of warning.’ And this
way of expressing it is more true and graphic than many paragraphs of
attempted analysis.
Meiklejohn hung his clothes by the open window to
air, washed, read his Bible, looked several times over his shoulder
without apparent cause, and then knelt down to pray. He was a simple and
devout soul; his Self lost in the yearning, young but sincere, to live
for humanity. He prayed, as usual, with intense earnestness that his
life might be preserved for use in the world, when in the middle of his
prayer—there came a knocking at the door.
Hastily rising from his knees, he opened. The sound
of rushing water filled the corridor. He heard the voices of the workmen
below in the drinking-room. But only darkness stood in the passages,
filling the house to the very brim. No one was there. He returned to his
interrupted devotions.
‘I imagined it,’ he said to himself. He
continued his prayers, however, longer than usual. At the back of his
thoughts, dim, vague, half-defined only, lay this lurking sense of
uneasiness— that he was in danger. He prayed earnestly and simply, as
a child might pray, for the preservation of his life....
Again, just as he prepared to get into bed,
struggling to make the heaped-up duvet spread all over, came that
knocking at the bedroom door. It was soft, wonderfully soft, and
something within him thrilled curiously in response. He crossed the
floor to open—then hesitated. Suddenly he understood that that
knocking at the door was connected with the sense of danger in his
heart. In the region of subtle intuitions the two were linked. With this
realisation there came over him, he declares, a singular mood in which,
as in a revelation, he knew that Nature held forces that might somehow
communicate directly and positively with—human beings. This thought
rushed upon him out of the night, as it were. It arrested his movements.
He stood there upon the bare pine boards, hesitating to open the door.
The delay thus described lasted actually only a few
seconds, but in those few seconds these thoughts tore rapidly and like
fire through his mind. The beauty of this lost and mysterious valley was
certainly in his veins. He felt the strange presence of the encircling
forests, soft and splendid, their million branches sighing in the night
airs. The crying of the falling water touched him. He longed to transfer
their peace and power to the hearts of suffering thousands of men and
women and children. The towering precipices that literally dropped their
pale walls over the roof of the inn lifted his thoughts to their own
windswept heights; he longed to convey their message of inflexible
strength to the weak-kneed folk in the slums where he worked. He was
peculiarly conscious of the presence of these forces of Nature—the
irresistible powers that regenerate as easily as they destroy.
All this, and far more, swept his soul like a huge
wind as he stood there, waiting to open the door in answer to that mysterious
soft knocking.
And there, when at length he opened, stood the
figure of a man—staring at him and smiling.
Disappointment seized him instantly. He had
expected, almost believed, that he would see something un-ordinary; and
instead, there stood a man who had merely mistaken the door of his room,
and was now bowing his apology for the interruption. Then, to his
amazement, he saw that the man beckoned: the figure was some one who
sought to draw him out.
‘Come with me,’ it seemed to say.
But Meiklejohn only realised this afterwards, he
says, when it was too late and he had already shut the door in the
stranger’s face. For the man had withdrawn into the darkness a little,
and the curate had taken the movement for a mere acknowledgment of his
mistake instead of—as he afterwards felt—a sign that he should
follow.
‘And the moment the door was shut,’ he says,
‘I felt that it would have been better for me to have gone out into
the passage to see what he wanted. It came over me that the man had
something important to say to me. I had missed it.’
For some seconds, it seemed, he resisted the
inclination to go after him. He argued with himself; then turned to his
bed, pulled back the sheets and heavy duvet, and was met sharply again
with the sense of repugnance, almost of fear, as before. It leaped out
upon him—as though the drawing back of the blankets had set free some
cold blast of wind that struck him across the face and made him shiver.
At the same moment a shadow fell from behind his
shoulder and dropped across the pillow and upper half of the bed. It
may, of course, have been the magnified shadow of the moth that buzzed
about the pale-yellow electric light in the ceiling. He does not pretend
to know. It passed swiftly, however, and was gone; and Meiklejohn,
feeling less sure of himself than ever before in his life, crossed the
floor quickly, almost running, and opened the door to go after the man
who had knocked—twice. For in reality less than half a minute had
passed since the shutting of the door and its reopening.
But the corridor was empty. He marched down the
pine-board floor for some considerable distance. Below he saw the
glimmer of the hall, and heard the voices of the peasants and workmen
from the sawmill as they still talked and drank their red wine in the
public room. That sound of falling water, as before, filled the air.
Darkness reigned. But the person—the messenger—who had twice
knocked at his door was gone utterly.... Presently a door opened
downstairs, and the peasants clattered out noisily. He turned and went
back to bed. The electric light was switched off below. Silence fell.
Conquering his strange repugnance, Meiklejohn, with a prayer on his
lips, got into bed, and in less than ten minutes was sound asleep.
‘I admit,’ he says, in telling the story,
‘that what happened afterwards came so swiftly and so confusingly, yet
with such a storm of overwhelming conviction of its reality, that its
sequence may be somewhat blurred in my memory, while, at the same time,
I see it after all these years as though it was a thing of yesterday.
But in my sleep, first of all, I again heard that soft, mysterious
tapping—not in the course of a dream of any sort, but sudden and alone
out of the dark blank of forgetfulness. I tried to wake. At first,
however, the bonds of unconsciousness held me tight. I had to struggle
in order to return to the waking world. There was a distinct effort
before I opened my eyes; and in that slight interval I became aware that
the person who had knocked at the door had meanwhile opened it and
passed into the room. I had left the lock unturned. The person was close
beside me in the darkness— not in utter darkness, however, for a
rising three-quarter moon shed its faint silver upon the floor in
patches, and as I sprang swiftly from the bed, I noticed something alive
moving towards me across the carpetless boards. Upon the edges of a
patch of moonlight, where the fringe of silver and shadow mingled, it
stopped. Three feet away from it I, too, stopped, shaking in every
muscle. It lay there crouching at my very feet, staring up at me. But
was it man or was it animal? For at first I took it certainly for a
human being on all fours; but the next moment, with a spasm of genuine
terror that half stopped my breath, it was borne in upon me that the
creature was—nothing human. Only in this way can I describe it. It was
identical with the human figure who had knocked before and beckoned to
me to follow, but it was another presentation of that figure.
‘And it held (or brought, if you will) some
tremendous message for me—some message of tremendous importance, I
mean. The first time I had argued, resisted, refused to listen. Now it
had returned in a form that ensured obedience. Some quite terrific power
emanated from it—a power that I understood instinctively belonged to
the mountains and the forests and the untamed elemental forces of
Nature. Amazing as it may sound in cold blood, I can only say that I
felt as though the towering precipices outside had sent me a direct
warning— that my life was in immediate danger.
‘For a space that seemed minutes, but was
probably less than a few seconds, I stood there trembling on the bare
boards, my eyes riveted upon the dark, uncouth shape that covered all
the floor beyond. I saw no limbs or features, no suggestion of outline
that I could connect with any living form I know, animate or inanimate.
Yet it moved and stirred all the time— whirled
within itself, describes it best; and into my mind sprang a picture
of an immense dark wheel, turning, spinning, whizzing so rapidly that
it appears motionless, and uttering that low and ominous thunder that
fills a great machinery-room of a factory. Then I thought of Ezekiel’s
vision of the Living Wheels.........
‘And it must have been at this instant, I think,
that the muttering and deep note that issued from it formed itself into
words within me. At any rate, I heard a voice that spoke with
unmistakable intelligence:
‘“Come!” it said. “Come out—at once!”
And the sense of power that accompanied the Voice was so splendid that
my fear vanished and I obeyed instantly without thinking more. I
followed; it led. It altered in shape. The door was
open. It ran silently in a form that was more like a stream of deep
black water than anything else I can think of—out of the room, down
the stairs, across the hail, and up to the deep shadows that lay against
the door leading into the road. There I lost sight of it.’
Meiklejohn’s only desire, he says, then was to
rush after it—to escape. This he did. He understood that somehow it
had passed through the door into the open air. Ten seconds later,
perhaps even less, he, too, was in the open air. He acted almost
automatically; reason, reflection, logic all swept away. Nowhere,
however, in the soft moonlight about him was any sign of the
extraordinary apparition that had succeeded in drawing him out of the
inn, out of his bedroom, out of his—bed. He stared in a dazed way at
everything—just beginning to get control of his faculties a
bit—wondering what in the world it all meant. That huge spinning form,
he felt convinced, lay hidden somewhere close beside him, waiting for
the end. The danger it had enabled him to avoid was close at hand.... He
knew that, he says....
There lay the meadows, touched here and there with
wisps of floating mist; the stream roared and tumbled down its rocky bed
to his left; across the road the sawmill lifted its skeleton-like
outline, moonlight shining on the dew-covered shingles of the roof, its
lower part hidden in shadow. The cold air of the valley was exquisitely
scented.
To the right, where his eye next wandered, he saw
the thick black woods rising round the base of the precipices that
soared into the sky, sheeted with silvery moonlight. His gaze ran up
them to the far ridges that seemed to push the very stars farther into
the heavens. Then, as he saw those stars crowding the night, he
staggered suddenly backwards, seizing the wall of the road for support,
and catching his breath. For the top of the cliff, he fancied, moved. A
group of stars was for a fraction of a second—hidden. The
earth—the scenery of the valley, at least—turned about him.
Something prodigious was happening to the solid structure of the world.
The precipices seemed to bend over upon the valley. The far, uppermost
ridge of those beetling cliffs shifted downwards. Meiklejohn declares
that the way its movement hid momentarily a group of stars was the most
startling—for some reason horrible—thing he had ever witnessed.
Then came the roar and crash and thunder as the
mass toppled, slid, and finally—took the frightful plunge. How long
the forces of rain and frost had been chiselling out the slow detachment
of the giant slabs that fell, or whence came the particular extra little
push that drove the entire mass out from the parent rock, no one can
know. Only one thing is certain: that it was due to no chance, but to
the nicely and exactly calculated results of balanced cause and effect.
From the beginning of time it had been known—it might have been
accurately calculated, rather—that this particular thousand tons of
rock would break away from the crumbling tops of the precipices and
crash downwards with the roar of many tempests into the lost and
mysterious mountain valley where Meiklejohn the curate spent such and
such a night of such and such a holiday. It was just as sure as the
return of Halley’s comet.
‘I watched it,’ he says, ‘because I
couldn’t do anything else. I would far rather have run—I was so
frightfully close to it all—but I couldn’t move a muscle. And in a
few seconds it was over. A terrific wind knocked me backwards against
the stone wall; there was a vast clattering of smaller stones, set
rolling down the neighbouring couloirs; a steady roll of echoes ran
thundering up and down the valley; and then all was still again exactly
as it had been before. And the curious thing was—ascertained a little
later, as you may imagine, and not at once—that the inn, being so
closely built up against the cliffs, had almost entirely escaped. The
great mass of rock and trees had taken a leap farther out, and filled
the meadows, blocked the road, crushed the sawmill like a matchbox, and
dammed up the stream; but the inn itself was almost untouched.
‘Almost—for
a single block of limestone, about the size of a grand piano, had
dropped straight upon one corner of the roof and smashed its way through
my bedroom, carrying everything it contained down to the level of the
cellar, so terrific was the momentum of its crushing journey. Not a
stick of the furniture was afterwards discoverable—as such. The bed
seems to have been caught by the very middle of the fallen mass.’
The confusion in Meiklejohn’s mind may be
imagined—the rush of feeling and emotion that swept over him.
Berthoud and the peasants mustered in less than a dozen minutes,
talking, crying, praying. Then the stream, dammed up by the accumulation
of rock, carried off the debris of the broken roof and walls in less
than half an hour. The rock, however, that swept the room and the empty
bed of Meiklejohn the curate into dust, still lies in the valley
where it fell.
‘The only other thing that I remember,’ he
says, in telling the story, ‘is that, as I stood there, shaking with
excitement and the painful terror of it all, before Berthoud and the
peasants had come to count over their number and learn that no one was
missing—while I stood there, leaning against the wall of the road,
something rose out of the white dust at my feet, and, with a noise like
the whirring of some immense projectile, passed swiftly and invisibly
away up into space—so far as I could judge, towards the distant ridges
that reared their motionless outline in moonlight beneath the stars.’
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From Your Dark Side
