John Silence, Physician Extraordinary · Algernon Blackwood
I at once saw that there was something about her appearance that was singular and unusual, but it was only when we had moved quite close that I recognised what caused it. For while the lips wore a smile that lit the whole face with a happiness I had never seen there before, the eyes themselves were fixed in a steady, sightless stare as though they were lifeless and made of glass.
I made an impulsive forward movement, but Dr. Silence instantly dragged me back.
“No,” he cried, “don’t wake her!”
“What do you mean?” I replied aloud, struggling in his grasp.
“She’s asleep. It’s somnambulistic. The shock might injure her permanently.”
I turned and peered closely into his face. He was absolutely calm. I began to understand a little more, catching, I suppose, something of his strong thinking.
“Walking in her sleep, you mean?”
He nodded. “She’s on her way to meet him. From the very beginning he must have drawn her—irresistibly.”
“But the torn tent and the wounded flesh?”
“When she did not sleep deep enough to enter the somnambulistic trance he missed her—he went instinctively and in all innocence to seek her out—with the result, of course, that she woke and was terrified——”
“Then in their heart of hearts they love?” I asked finally.
John Silence smiled his inscrutable smile: “Profoundly,” he answered, “and as simply as only primitive souls can love. If only they both come to realise it in their normal waking states his Double will cease these nocturnal excursions. He will be cured, and at rest.”
The words had hardly left his lips when there was a sound of rustling branches on our left, and the very next instant the dense brushwood parted where it was darkest and out rushed the swift form of an animal at full gallop. The noise of feet was scarcely audible, but in that utter stillness I heard the heavy panting breath and caught the swish of the low bushes against its sides. It went straight towards Joan—and as it went the girl lifted her head and turned to meet it. And the same instant a canoe that had been creeping silently and unobserved round the inner shore of the lagoon, emerged from the shadows and defined itself upon the water with a figure at the middle thwart. It was Maloney.
It was only afterwards I realised that we were invisible to him where we stood against the dark background of trees; the figures of Joan and the animal he saw plainly, but not Dr. Silence and myself standing just beyond them. He stood up in the canoe and pointed with his right arm. I saw something gleam in his hand.
“Stand aside, Joan girl, or you’ll get hit,” he shouted, his voice ringing horribly through the deep stillness, and the same instant a pistol-shot cracked out with a burst of flame and smoke, and the figure of the animal, with one tremendous leap into the air, fell back in the shadows and disappeared like a shape of night and fog. Instantly, then, Joan opened her eyes, looked in a dazed fashion about her, and pressing both hands against her heart, fell with a sharp cry into my arms that were just in time to catch her.
And an answering cry sounded across the lagoon—thin, wailing, piteous. It came from Sangree’s tent.
“Fool!” cried Dr. Silence, “you’ve wounded him!” and before we could move or realise quite what it meant, he was in the canoe and half-way across the lagoon.
Some kind of similar abuse came in a torrent from my lips too—though I cannot remember the actual words—as I cursed the man for his disobedience and tried to make the girl comfortable on the ground. But the clergyman was more practical. He was spreading his coat over her and dashing water on her face.
“It’s not Joan I’ve killed at any rate,” I heard him mutter as she turned and opened her eyes and smiled faintly up in his face. “I swear the bullet went straight.”
Joan stared at him; she was still dazed and bewildered, and still imagined herself with the companion of her trance. The strange lucidity of the somnambulist still hung over her brain and mind, though outwardly she appeared troubled and confused.
“Where has he gone to? He disappeared so suddenly, crying that he was hurt,” she asked, looking at her father as though she did not recognise him. “And if they’ve done anything to him—they have done it to me too—for he is more to me than——”
Her words grew vaguer and vaguer as she returned slowly to her normal waking state, and now she stopped altogether, as though suddenly aware that she had been surprised into telling secrets. But all the way back, as we carried her carefully through the trees, the girl smiled and murmured Sangree’s name and asked if he was injured, until it finally became clear to me that the wild soul of the one had called to the wild soul of the other and in the secret depths of their beings the call had been heard and understood. John Silence was right. In the abyss of her heart, too deep at first for recognition, the girl loved him, and had loved him from the very beginning. Once her normal waking consciousness recognised the fact they would leap together like twin flames, and his affliction would be at an end; his intense desire would be satisfied; he would be cured.
And in Sangree’s tent Dr. Silence and I sat up for the remainder of the night—this wonderful and haunted night that had shown us such strange glimpses of a new heaven and a new hell—for the Canadian tossed upon his balsam boughs with high fever in his blood, and upon each cheek a dark and curious contusion showed, throbbing with severe pain although the skin was not broken and there was no outward and visible sign of blood.
“Maloney shot straight, you see,” whispered Dr. Silence to me after the clergyman had gone to his tent, and had put Joan to sleep beside her mother, who, by the way, had never once awakened. “The bullet must have passed clean through the face, for both cheeks are stained. He’ll wear these marks all his life—smaller, but always there. They’re the most curious scars in the world, these scars transferred by repercussion from an injured Double. They’ll remain visible until just before his death, and then with the withdrawal of the subtle body they will disappear finally.”
His words mingled in my dazed mind with the sighs of the troubled sleeper and the crying of the wind about the tent. Nothing seemed to paralyse my powers of realisation so much as these twin stains of mysterious significance upon the face before me.
It was odd, too, how speedily and easily the Camp resigned itself again to sleep and quietness, as though a stage curtain had suddenly dropped down upon the action and concealed it; and nothing contributed so vividly to the feeling that I had been a spectator of some kind of visionary drama as the dramatic nature of the change in the girl’s attitude.
Yet, as a matter of fact, the change had not been so sudden and revolutionary as appeared. Underneath, in those remoter regions of consciousness where the emotions, unknown to their owners, do secretly mature, and owe thence their abrupt revelation to some abrupt psychological climax, there can be no doubt that Joan’s love for the Canadian had been growing steadily and irresistibly all the time. It had now rushed to the surface so that she recognised it; that was all.
And it has always seemed to me that the presence of John Silence, so potent, so quietly efficacious, produced an effect, if one may say so, of a psychic forcing-house, and hastened incalculably the bringing together of these two “wild” lovers. In that sudden awakening had occurred the very psychological climax required to reveal the passionate emotion accumulated below. The deeper knowledge had leaped across and transferred itself to her ordinary consciousness, and in that shock the collision of the personalities had shaken them to the depths and shown her the truth beyond all possibility of doubt.
“He’s sleeping quietly now,” the doctor said, interrupting my reflections. “If you will watch alone for a bit I’ll go to Maloney’s tent and help him to arrange his thoughts.” He smiled in anticipation of that “arrangement.” “He’ll never quite understand how a wound on the Double can transfer itself to the physical body, but at least I can persuade him that the less he talks and ‘explains’ tomorrow, the sooner the forces will run their natural course now to peace and quietness.”
He went away softly, and with the removal of his presence Sangree, sleeping heavily, turned over and groaned with the pain of his broken head.
And it was in the still hour just before the dawn, when all the islands were hushed, the wind and sea still dreaming, and the stars visible through clearing mists, that a figure crept silently over the ridge and reached the door of the tent where I dozed beside the sufferer, before I was aware of its presence. The flap was cautiously lifted a few inches and in looked—Joan.
That same instant Sangree woke and sat up on his bed of branches. He recognised her before I could say a word, and uttered a low cry. It was pain and joy mingled, and this time all human. And the girl too was no longer walking in her sleep, but fully aware of what she was doing. I was only just able to prevent him springing from his blankets.
“Joan, Joan!” he cried, and in a flash she answered him, “I’m here—I’m with you always now,” and had pushed past me into the tent and flung herself upon his breast.
“I knew you would come to me in the end,” I heard him whisper.
“It was all too big for me to understand at first,” she murmured, “and for a long time I was frightened——”
“But not now!” he cried louder; “you don’t feel afraid now of—of anything that’s in me——”
“I fear nothing,” she cried, “nothing, nothing!”
I led her outside again. She looked steadily into my face with eyes shining and her whole being transformed. In some intuitive way, surviving probably from the somnambulism, she knew or guessed as much as I knew.
“You must talk tomorrow with John Silence,” I said gently, leading her towards her own tent. “He understands everything.”
I left her at the door, and as I went back softly to take up my place of sentry again with the Canadian, I saw the first streaks of dawn lighting up the far rim of the sea behind the distant islands.
And, as though to emphasise the eternal closeness of comedy to tragedy, two small details rose out of the scene and impressed me so vividly that I remember them to this very day. For in the tent where I had just left Joan, all aquiver with her new happiness, there rose plainly to my ears the grotesque sounds of the Bo’sun’s Mate heavily snoring, oblivious of all things in heaven or hell; and from Maloney’s tent, so still was the night, where I looked across and saw the lantern’s glow, there came to me, through the trees, the monotonous rising and falling of a human voice that was beyond question the sound of a man praying to his God.
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