The English Review/Full Circle

by Algernon Blackwood

It was at the age of 36 that Jorden, stockbroker, first saw the little chap, and he establishes the date because it was also the first time he had realised he was getting older. Between knowing and realising the gap is wide; all know, for instance, that one day they must die; few realise it. A certain emotion, a small yet definite shock, moreover, invariably accompanies the realisation. On this particular occasion it was a commonplace detail that made Jorden aware that he was no longer twenty-five, a fast forward in the football field⁠—it was loss of breath.

Climbing the steep, sunlit slopes above Igls in the Tyrol, that brilliant August afternoon, his wind failed him momentarily; he paused for breath; his age, as he stood panting, occurred to him; the little shock, the consequent emotion, were also present. It was in this instant that he caught sight of the youngster, chasing a swallowtail butterfly⁠—uphill.

Jorden stood still for some seconds to watch the pursuit. The radiant face and eager eyes, the mouth half open, the zest and energy in the flying limbs, one arm poising the net to strike⁠—these held his attention vividly.

“Uphill!” he exclaimed to himself, envy and admiration in him; and he was on the point of shouting encouragement to the youngster, when⁠—yet with a movement as though he hid deliberately⁠—the boy was gone. A turn in the path, a dip in the flowered slope, apparently concealed him. At any rate, he vanished. “He’ll tire before I do,” ran consolingly through the other’s mind, as he waited in vain some minutes for the reappearance, then presently continued his steep climb uphill. “Endurance, at any rate, is mine” he comforted himself, “if not that happy zest⁠ ⁠… !”

The incident, for some reason not unconnected with the transient emotion, lingered in his thought: a little English schoolboy, evidently, out with his parents for the holidays. There was another thing that made the picture linger, something he found himself unable to define precisely, presenting itself vaguely to him as a curious sense of intimacy. A further detail flashed back that night, too, just before sleep came: that the boy, namely, midway in the excitement of the chase, had thrown him an understanding and affectionate glance, “as though,” reflected Jorden, “I had been his father, or uncle, or something like that!” Adventure, mischief were in it too. The family luggage, no doubt, was already on the diligence, the distraught parents hunting everywhere for “Master Jack” with frantic phrases in German and English.⁠ ⁠… This picture edged Jorden’s sleep that night, because, perhaps, he remembered having been similarly naughty in his own childhood years⁠—ah, nearly thirty years⁠—ago. His own reaction to this look that haunted him, he found it difficult to describe, because “yearning” was not the kind of word that would have occurred to Jorden, the stockbroker, at any time, nor one that he would have used without very considerable effort to avoid it. It was, nevertheless, the true and accurate word.

This, then, was the first time that he saw the boy; and it was, he vaguely fancied, the emotion due to his sudden realisation of growing older that made the memory cling.

It was at the age of forty that he saw him next. The interval, meanwhile, had not dimmed the original picture. Often and often he caught himself wondering who the little fellow was; whether he had been smacked for his escapade; whether he had eventually caught the gorgeous butterfly, had got lost in those big wild mountains, had stumbled, hurt himself perhaps⁠ ⁠… until the atmosphere of affectionate interest he had first felt became permanently associated with the youngster and his uncertain fate. This intimate and sympathetic relationship was established in his mind; his heart acknowledged something that was half friendship and half guardianship.

At the age of forty, then, he saw him suddenly again, but in very different surroundings.

Now, at the age of forty, a man knows his first youth is done with, though he is slow yet to admit that he is middle-aged. It comforts him, none the less, to shift his standard of measurement a trifle. He reads with pleasure, for instance, that a public man of that age is referred to by the newspapers as “a young man still.” Forty, his women friends assure him, is nothing, while forty remains forty for all that. In various minor ways he begins, probably, to humbug himself. He knows, but he does not realise, until something happens to force realisation on him. And when Jorden again ran across the little fellow of a few years before, it so happened that he was in the bitter throes of a disappointing love affair, the disappointment due precisely to the fact that he was just forty, whereas a certain other man was only just twenty-nine.

Here, again, it was an unusual emotion of the moment that made the incident stick in his memory⁠—at a place of public entertainment, Maskelyne and Devant’s, the home of childhood’s conjuring tricks and mystery, the place, above all, where people⁠—vanished.

The similarity, at any rate, was overwhelmingly convincing: the same laughing, affectionate expression, the air of mischief, the old quick glance of sympathy, yes, of recognition even. It was the same boy beyond a doubt, although there was now a certain remoteness about him, a certain distance as it were, that puzzled the older man, bringing a hint of chagrin with it. It never occurred to him that the boy looked no older than when he had first seen him. This never entered his head. What did enter his head, curiously enough, was a childhood’s memory of his own, when he had infuriated a deaf aunt who was “treating” him in this very place⁠—it was Maskelyne and Cook’s in those days, the Egyptian Hall of Mystery, in Piccadilly⁠—by striking a match in the middle of the performance. He had been promptly sent home to bed, with bread and water for his supper. And again his heart yearned towards this little ragamuffin in a sailor-suit⁠—he himself, he remembered, wore a sailor-suit when he lit that match⁠—halfway round the sweep of the dress-circle to the left.

This was during the entr’acte. The lights then went down, the curtain rose, faces about him grew dim and indistinct again. The gnawing pain of his unhappy love affair returned to plague him, but with it, now, this strange yearning, this affectionate and intimate tenderness towards his rediscovered youngster that, for the life of him, he could not explain. There was between them, he felt positive an undecipherable familiarity, a deep understanding sympathy.

Truth to tell, there was a good deal of emotion in the stolid Jorden at that moment, emotion of various kinds. He realised another thing as well⁠—that the performance bored him. He was too old now for these tricks. The conjuring wearied him. He had come to see a particular disappearing trick, much advertised, yet when he saw it its climax found his thoughts elsewhere. He had not followed the business on the stage at all. His head, in the semidarkness, kept turning towards the sweep of the dress-circle to his left. That jolly little ruffian! He wished he were his own.⁠ ⁠… He would have a good look when the curtain fell. Yet when, presently, it got light again, he experienced a sharp pang of regret and disappointment: the seat was empty, the boy was gone.

“Young monkey,” he reflected, with an understanding grin. “Been sent home in disgrace, of course! Did something wicked probably⁠—just as I did⁠—and got packed off to bed.” And while he rather hugged the idea, chuckling over it, his heart ached a little because of that empty seat and the lost opportunity of somehow making the acquaintance of its recent occupant.

These two appearances rather haunted him thenceforward, so that, coupling them together, he often thought about them, wonderingly, longingly, yes, yearningly. He wished the boy were his own. The sympathy in him deepened. He flattered himself that he “understood the little rascal,” that he could have made him happy, have given him the life, the training, the education his character and temperament best called for. The boy’s nature seemed an open book to him. In some inner kingdom of the heart he built it all up with tenderness. Only the sense of remoteness troubled him a little, the sense of distance, widening, it seemed, with the years; this brought a touch of pain with it, hinting that his loss perhaps was final. He countered it, comforting himself thereby, with the reflection that it was spatial merely, due to the fact that they had never actually met and spoken together.⁠ ⁠…

Meanwhile the years passed, age came upon him, fate took him to the East where health suffered, and then, suddenly, a new card was dealt. A relative died, and Jorden came unexpectedly into great possessions. Also, he came home. With his faded vitality, his uncertain health, his loneliness, he entered into the management, what most call the enjoyment, of a large estate, an historic house, soaked in tradition and half fossilised into something a long line of ancestors, fading back towards 1400, had deposited through the centuries. He recalled visiting the place once as a little boy, when his cousin had it. It was a Sunday. The occasion, indeed, remained sharp in his memory, since he had been punished for birds’-nesting in his go-to-meeting clothes.

It was an atmosphere he was too feeble now to resist. Without energy to become constructive, much less creative, he became that easier thing, a dreamer. The ghosts, the attractive melancholy, swamped him rather; thought ran backwards more and more⁠ ⁠… And then it was, walking one crisp autumn morning with the headkeeper through the ancient woods, that he saw a figure suddenly that made him stand stock still: climbing over a stile from the park meadows where the deer were, was the youngster! A school cap perched on the back of his head, the mop of hair was untidy, the Eton suit was torn and muddy, one bootlace was undone. On the face was a guilty, caught-in-the-act expression, yet with the same air of mischief and adventure as before. There was no trace of fear. The laughing eyes, the affectionate trusting look of recognition betrayed no anxiety. And the understanding sympathy, the sense of peculiar intimacy, rose in Jorden like a flood, while with it came the queer assurance that the former remoteness he had known had become distinctly less. He felt nearer to the boy, yet in some subtle fashion as though this greater closeness lay in himself, that he had drawn nearer while the boy had never changed. Two incongruous details, however, failed to strike him: that there were no nests in autumn, and that the boy had not grown older.

The man stood for a moment spellbound. “Birds’-nesting! And in his Sunday clothes! How dare he!” Jorden made this observation aloud, interrupting something solemn the keeper was saying about foxes and the decrease in pheasants’ eggs. “How well I remember doing it myself⁠—just like that⁠—years and years ago! I tore my Sunday trousers, too.⁠ ⁠… Eh, Thompson? You were saying⁠ ⁠… ?”

But the keeper had touched his cap, murmured a few unintelligible words, and taken a side-path across the woods away from him. The man’s face wore almost an uncomfortable look, though, as usual, respectful and attentive. He seemed a trifle scared.

“Now for it!” added Jorden to himself, but still aloud. He felt full of things he wanted to say. The desire to play was in him. This time he would not let his opportunity slip; this time, by heaven, he would speak.

He advanced towards the boy, moving quickly, yet at the same time cautiously, for an odd fear lay in him that, unless he were very prompt, the youngster would be gone, evading him for the third time. With mind and will, therefore, Jorden gripped him steadily in his thought, his eyes fixed hard, his whole being concentrated in the determination to speak.⁠ ⁠… And the face, as he drew nearer, watched him eagerly, expectantly, the eyes half mischievous in their laughter, the expression inviting and charged with interest, almost as if the welcome words: “Come, play with me!” must be audible any moment. Jorden, in fact, while noting every detail with the utmost sharpness, even that the dirtied Sunday clothes were just what he himself had worn in that escapade of his own childhood in these very woods, felt also the positive conviction that he knew the boy as he knew his own soul.

“Why I know him as I know myself⁠ ⁠… it’s positively absurd!” The yearning in his heart became, of a sudden, indescribable.

It was at this second that two things happened: first⁠—that the dance of light and shadow from the branches wavered curiously in outline, as in an attempt to resolve the figure into a mere effect of woodland magic. At thirty yards, indeed, the boy might easily have disappeared, have suddenly⁠—not been there. But at ten yards this was difficult. No mere effect of light and shade, moreover, could possibly trick his steady gaze, his concentrated mind. Jorden still held the figure with determined grip. He was now within easy speaking distance. Already, indeed, the boy was moving from the stile towards him, smiling, convincingly substantial, and the man, aware that his heart was thumping, opened his lips to speak. At which moment happened the second thing, namely, that he found no words.

Nothing occurred to him to say; he did not know what words to use. He could find no possible language, no phraseology, the boy would comprehend. The realisation came with a shock of pain. His inarticulateness brought a sense of tears. The understanding, the yearning love he felt, the deep desire to enter into the spirit of the little chap’s adventure, the longing to play with him, all this was blocked, desire and hope turned sterile instantly, by the sheer inability to address him in any words that he would understand. This unbridgeable gulf yawned inpassably between the two⁠—a gulf of unshared experience that made language common to them both extremely diffcult. An amazing shyness dropped over him.

The pair stood within actual touching distance, when this bitter realisation fell upon Jorden like a blow. His hand was out, his lips were certainly open, and in this attitude of distressing paralysis he remained, for one second, like a frozen statue, dumb and motionless. His mind refused all action, though the eyes held true, fixing the face and figure indubitably clear before him.

In the eyes, then, came the final proof that the gulf between the two was no fancy merely; the sense of remoteness had, indeed, grown less, yet this lack of suitable words remained insuperable. From the expectant, happy face the smile now faded; the sadness in the man’s heart was reflected, as by a mirror, in the young features opposite. The gulf was recognised. A strange, an instantaneous, withdrawal took place. It was established that the “remoteness” was assuredly not spatial merely, but was of time and condition, determined, it seemed, as by a great body of unshared experience.⁠ ⁠…

Jorden’s outstretched hand completed its gesture, yet not the gesture originally planned: hurriedly, it now covered his own eyes instead. His mind and will, his concentration and assurance, wavered. There was this moment of confused reflection, swift but disturbing, a shadow of some dim, lost memory flickering through it, with twinkling feet, with ghostly skirts. A second later, when he uncovered his eyes again, the stile was empty, the figure gone. The dance of light and shade shifted through the crisp autumn air, the branches swayed, the breeze passed gently in the wood. Coming slowly up the narrow glade, the keeper reappeared, and Jorden, an intense melancholy and regret in his heart, moved heavily to meet him, his mind searching for phrases about the pheasants and the foxes⁠ ⁠…

Being a stolid type of man, inarticulate, rather, even to himself, and characteristically shy of the unusual, Jorden thenceforward detected, at the heart of his deep yearning, a note of dread. Desire was still dominant, but this note of dread⁠—it was the merest hint⁠—had become an ingredient of it. “I may see him again any moment, any day,” changed into “I’m afraid I may see him any moment, any day.” The reason for this was too subtle for him; he “had a feeling,” and no more than that. He connected any reappearance now with something in himself; a big fundamental change, as it were; with something, anyhow, his deepest being did not desire. Subsequent meetings⁠—and he knew they were bound to come⁠—would be significant in an unwelcome, almost an unpleasant, kind of way. Shrinking, instinctive and unexplained, accompanied the longing.

The loneliness of his life, meanwhile, of his somewhat unmanageable fate, increased. Not that he cut himself off sourly from his kind⁠—the sweetness in his dumb nature remained⁠—but that his inner life lay silent, uncompanied, inarticulate. Memories, more and more, assailed him, ghostly desires and regrets catching at their skirts. Thought ran increasingly backwards, rather than ahead. Last month was dim, while sixty years ago was vivid. He became old, old, old.⁠ ⁠…

Subsequent “meetings,” as expected, did occur, though not yet that particular one he dreaded as significant, even final, a word, however, he did not once permit himself. True to his type, he belonged to those who, after a certain stage, live chiefly in the past, yet without bitterness. His was a sweet and healthy mind; merely it pleased, refreshed and satisfied him to dwell upon far distant years, living over again, as with careless zest, adventures of his early boyhood.

These subsequent “meetings,” as he admitted with a smile of amusement, became, indeed, “curiouser and curiouser”: one at a board meeting, the other at a funeral. A kind of board meeting, that is to say. It was a difficult period for folk with large estates, and Jorden had decided to sell off considerable portions of his land to a building company, himself a director by the terms of sale. The very woods where he had seen the little fellow on the stile, where he himself had gone birds’-nesting in his Sunday clothes, these woods were now to be cut down for building.

It was at the meeting when final details of the scheme were to be decided⁠—Jorden sentimentally attempting to save the plot, the other directors staring at him blankly⁠—it was in the middle of this blundering attempt, since he had no reasons to offer, that the boy suddenly came smiling at him from behind the Chairman’s throne.

Jorden, John Henry Jorden, sprang up. The figure was not there. Jorden, John Henry Jorden, sat down⁠ ⁠… He saved the woods, yielding in their place another piece of land at great personal loss instead.

At the funeral, again, the funeral of an unvalued relative, as he stood hatless in a bitter wind beside the grave, there⁠—yes, unmistakably⁠—the little figure emerged. On the outskirts of the dreary and perfunctory mourners, he saw it flit and shift, brighter than before, nearer too, nearer to his own being, that is, with laughter this time, not smiles, upon the face, and the hands stretched out towards himself. The welcome in the eyes, the gesture of invitation, of recognition, the whole attitude as though words “Soon we shall be together, shan’t we?” were almost audible⁠—this staggered Jorden as he stared. He turned his head a moment; the others must surely see what he saw too. When he glanced back again only the wearied mourners, shivering as they counted the shovels of falling earth, were visible.

Exposed overlong to the biting air, very old and feeble, his point of last resistance on this occasion was attacked and beaten down.⁠ ⁠… As he lay in the darkened room, winter gripping the world outside but powerless to grip his heart, he became sharply, suddenly, aware that spring, with its flowers, its sparkling radiance, slipped past the shuttered windows. The nurse was there, reading by a shaded lamp across the room, but the doctor had gone. And Jorden knew quite well, knew the meaning of the deep stillness about him, knew why the doctor would not come back, knew also why lambent spring had thus abruptly routed winter. It entered leaping, with the perfume of fresh earth, the music of running streams, the singing of birds, the carelessness of happy youth.

He felt no shyness now; he was no longer inarticulate. He knew what words to use. He realised, yet without a shock, that he faced the final meeting he had dreaded, and, further, for the first time, that the boy had not grown older⁠—and why this was so. Time behind him had telescoped, dwindled, vanished. Life had performed full circle here. Entering it at a point, from invisibility, he had now reached that point again⁠—back into invisibility. The years collapsed, revealing amazingly their pretence, their sham duration. Their accumulated wisdom, their grave experience, their earnest effort, growth, development, their search and question⁠—all these disappeared as though they never had been, while in their place surged up one fundamental bright desire in unadulterated power, invincible as spring; the desire to live, to play, to be. Unquenchable youth rose in his heart, defying the worn-out instrument that should, yet could not now, express it here.

The little fellow entered unannounced, yet the nurse did not even turn her head. The merry, laughing eyes, the torn best suit, the rumpled hair, the undying mischief and adventure, came up dancing close beside the dim-lit bed.

“You have come back at last,” sang the careless, happy voice he recognised. “We shall be together always now.” The senile body made a movement, so that the nurse glanced up quickly from her book a moment, then went on reading as before. “We have always been together⁠ ⁠… I never really lost you,” came the faint answer as though a breath of air sighed through the room. He laughed, stretching out his feeble hands. The nurse, holding a mirror briefly to the smiling lips, drew up the sheet across the face, entered a pencil note upon the chart, then quietly resumed her reading. The gulf was bridged at last. Old age and recovered youth went off dancing to the stars. Life, at the point called death, had performed full circle.