



Produced by David Moynihan. HTML version by Al Haines. The Garden of Survival


by

Algernon Blackwood




I

IT will surprise and at the same time possibly amuse you to know that
I had the instinct to tell what follows to a Priest, and might have
done so had not the Man of the World in me whispered that from
professional Believers I should get little sympathy, and probably
less credence still. For to have my experience disbelieved, or
attributed to hallucination, would be intolerable to me. Psychical
investigators, I am told, prefer a Medium who takes no cash
recompense for his performance, a Healer who gives of his strange
powers without reward. There are, however, natural-born priests who
yet wear no uniform other than upon their face and heart, but since I
know of none I fall back upon yourself, my other half, for in writing
this adventure to you I almost feel that I am writing it to myself. The desire for confession is upon me: this thing must out. It is a
story, though an unfinished one. I mention this at once lest,
frightened by the thickness of the many pages, you lay them aside
against another time, and so perhaps neglect them altogether. A
story, however, will invite your interest, and when I add that it is
true, I feel that you will bring sympathy to that interest: these
together, I hope, may win your attention, and hold it, until you
shall have read the final word. That I should use this form in telling it will offend your literary
taste--you who have made your name both as critic and creative
writer--for you said once, I remember, that to tell a story in
epistolary form is a subterfuge, an attempt to evade the difficult
matters of construction and delineation of character. My story,
however, is so slight, so subtle, so delicately intimate too, that a
letter to some one in closest sympathy with myself seems the only
form that offers. It is, as I said, a confession, but a very dear confession: I burn to
tell it honestly, yet know not how. To withhold it from you would be
to admit a secretiveness that our relationship has never known--out
it must, and to you. I may, perhaps, borrow--who can limit the
sharing powers of twin brothers like ourselves?--some of the skill
your own work spills so prodigally, crumbs from your writing-table,
so to speak; and you will forgive the robbery, if successful, as you
will accept lie love behind the confession as your due. Now, listen, please! For this is the point: that, although my wife is
dead these dozen years and more--I have found reunion and I love. Explanation of this must follow as best it may. So, please mark tie
point which for the sake of emphasis I venture to repeat: that I know
reunion and I love. With the jealous prerogative of the twin, you objected to that
marriage, though I knew that it deprived you of no jot of my
affection, owing to the fact that it was prompted by pity only,
leaving the soul in me wholly disengaged. Marion, by her steady
refusal to accept my honest friendship, by her persistent admiration
of me, as also by her loveliness, her youth, her singing, persuaded
me somehow finally that I needed her. The cry of the flesh, which
her beauty stimulated and her singing increased most strangely,
seemed raised into a burning desire that I mistook at the moment for
the true desire of the soul. Yet, actually, the soul in me remained
aloof, a spectator, and one, moreover, of a distinctly lukewarm kind. It was very curious. On looking back, I can hardly understand it even
now; there seemed some special power, some special undiscovered tie
between us that led me on and yet deceived me. It was especially
evident in her singing, this deep power. She sang, you remember, to
her own accompaniment on the harp, and her method, though so simple
it seemed almost childish, was at the same time charged with a great
melancholy that always moved me most profoundly. The sound of her
small, plaintive voice, the sight of her slender fingers that plucked
the strings in some delicate fashion native to herself, the tiny foot
that pressed the pedal--all these, with her dark searching eyes fixed
penetratingly upon my own while she sang of love and love's
endearments, combined in a single stroke of very puissant and
seductive kind. Passions in me awoke, so deep, so ardent, so
imperious, that I conceived them as born of the need of one soul for
another. I attributed their power to genuine love. The following
reactions, when my soul held up a finger and bade me listen to her
still, small warnings, grew less positive and of ever less duration. The frontier between physical and spiritual passion is perilously
narrow, perhaps. My judgment, at any rate, became insecure, then
floundered hopelessly. The sound of the harp-strings and of Marion's
voice could overwhelm its balance instantly. Mistaking, perhaps, my lukewarm-ness for restraint, she led me at last
to the altar you described as one of sacrifice. And your instinct,
more piercing than my own, proved only too correct: that which I held
for love declared itself as pity only, the soft, affectionate pity of
a weakish man in whom the flesh cried loudly, the pity of a man who
would be untrue to himself rather than pain so sweet a girl by
rejecting the one great offering life placed within her gift. She
persuaded me so cunningly that I persuaded myself, yet was not aware
I did so until afterwards. I married her because in some manner I
felt, but never could explain, that she had need of me. And, at the wedding, I remember two things vividly: the expression of
wondering resignation on your face, and upon hers--chiefly in the
eyes and in the odd lines about the mouth--the air of subtle triumph
that she wore: that she had captured me for her very own at last, and
yet--for there was this singular hint in her attitude and
behaviour--that she had taken me, because she had this curious deep
need of me. This sharply moving touch was graven into me, increasing the
tenderness of my pity, subsequently, a thousandfold. The necessity
lay in her very soul. She gave to me all she had to give, and in so
doing she tried to satisfy some hunger of her being that lay beyond
my comprehension or interpretation. For, note this--she gave herself
into my keeping, I remember, with a sigh. It seems as of yesterday the actual moment when, urged by my vehement
desires, I made her consent to be my wife; I remember, too, the
doubt, the shame, the hesitation that made themselves felt in me
before the climax when her beauty overpowered me, sweeping reflection
utterly away. I can hear to-day the sigh, half of satisfaction, yet
half, it seemed, of pain, with which she sank into my arms at last,
as though her victory brought intense relief, yet was not wholly
gamed in the way that she had wanted. Her physical beauty, perhaps,
was the last weapon she had wished to use for my enslavement; she
knew quite surely that the appeal to what was highest in me had not
succeeded...