



Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive/American
Libraries.) JOHN SILENCE
  Physician Extraordinary

  BY
  ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

  AUTHOR OF
  “THE LISTENER” “THE EMPTY HOUSE” ETC. BOSTON
  JOHN W. LUCE & COMPANY
  1909




  TO
  M. L. W.
  THE ORIGINAL OF JOHN SILENCE
  AND
  MY COMPANION IN MANY ADVENTURES




CONTENTS


  CASE I
                         PAGE
  A PSYCHICAL INVASION      1

  CASE II
  ANCIENT SORCERIES        75

  CASE III
  THE NEMESIS OF FIRE     143

  CASE IV
  SECRET WORSHIP          245

  CASE V
  THE CAMP OF THE DOG     295




JOHN SILENCE

CASE I

A PSYCHICAL INVASION


“And what is it makes you think I could be of use in this particular
case?” asked Dr. John Silence, looking across somewhat sceptically at
the Swedish lady in the chair facing him. “Your sympathetic heart and your knowledge of occultism----”

“Oh, please--that dreadful word!” he interrupted, holding up a finger
with a gesture of impatience. “Well, then,” she laughed, “your wonderful clairvoyant gift and your
trained psychic knowledge of the processes by which a personality may
be disintegrated and destroyed--these strange studies you’ve been
experimenting with all these years----”

“If it’s only a case of multiple personality I must really cry off,”
interrupted the doctor again hastily, a bored expression in his eyes. “It’s not that; now, please, be serious, for I want your help,” she
said; “and if I choose my words poorly you must be patient with my
ignorance. The case I know will interest you, and no one else could
deal with it so well. In fact, no ordinary professional man could deal
with it at all, for I know of no treatment or medicine that can restore
a lost sense of humour!”

“You begin to interest me with your ‘case,’” he replied, and made
himself comfortable to listen. Mrs. Sivendson drew a sigh of contentment as she watched him go to the
tube and heard him tell the servant he was not to be disturbed. “I believe you have read my thoughts already,” she said; “your
intuitive knowledge of what goes on in other people’s minds is
positively uncanny.”

Her friend shook his head and smiled as he drew his chair up to a
convenient position and prepared to listen attentively to what she had
to say. He closed his eyes, as he always did when he wished to absorb
the real meaning of a recital that might be inadequately expressed,
for by this method he found it easier to set himself in tune with the
living thoughts that lay behind the broken words. By his friends John Silence was regarded as an eccentric, because
he was rich by accident, and by choice--a doctor. That a man of
independent means should devote his time to doctoring, chiefly
doctoring folk who could not pay, passed their comprehension entirely. The native nobility of a soul whose first desire was to help those who
could not help themselves, puzzled them. After that, it irritated them,
and, greatly to his own satisfaction, they left him to his own devices. Dr. Silence was a free-lance, though, among doctors, having neither
consulting-room, bookkeeper, nor professional manner. He took no
fees, being at heart a genuine philanthropist, yet at the same time
did no harm to his fellow-practitioners, because he only accepted
unremunerative cases, and cases that interested him for some very
special reason. He argued that the rich could pay, and the very poor
could avail themselves of organised charity, but that a very large
class of ill-paid, self-respecting workers, often followers of the
arts, could not afford the price of a week’s comforts merely to be told
to travel. And it was these he desired to help: cases often requiring
special and patient study--things no doctor can give for a guinea, and
that no one would dream of expecting him to give. But there was another side to his personality and practice, and one
with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that
especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that
intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical
afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to
approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or
less generally as the “Psychic Doctor.”

In order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted
himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and
spiritual. What precisely this training had been, or where undergone,
no one seemed to know,--for he never spoke of it, as, indeed, he
betrayed no single other characteristic of the charlatan,--but the fact
that it had involved a total disappearance from the world for five
years, and that after he returned and began his singular practice no
one ever dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of
quack, spoke much for the seriousness of his strange quest and also for
the genuineness of his attainments. For the modern psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the
“man who knows.” There was a trace of pity in his voice--contempt he
never showed--when he spoke of their methods. “This classification of results is uninspired work at best,” he said
once to me, when I had been his confidential assistant for some years. “It leads nowhere, and after a hundred years will lead nowhere. It is
playing with the wrong end of a rather dangerous toy. Far better, it
would be, to examine the causes, and then the results would so easily
slip into place and explain themselves. For the sources are accessible,
and open to all who have the courage to lead the life that alone makes
practical investigation safe and possible.”

And towards the question of clairvoyance, too, his attitude was
significantly sane, for he knew how extremely rare the genuine power
was, and that what is commonly called clairvoyance is nothing more than
a keen power of visualising. “It connotes a slightly increased sensibility, nothing more,” he would
say. “The true clairvoyant deplores his power, recognising that it adds
a new horror to life, and is in the nature of an affliction. And you
will find this always to be the real test.”

Thus it was that John Silence, this singularly developed doctor, was
able to select his cases with a clear knowledge of the difference
between mere hysterical delusion and the kind of psychical affliction
that claimed his special powers. It was never necessary for him to
resort to the cheap mysteries of divination; for, as I have heard him
observe, after the solution of some peculiarly intricate problem--

“Systems of divination, from geomancy down to reading by tea-leaves,
are merely so many methods of obscuring the outer vision, in order
that the inner vision may become open.