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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.