The Face of the Earth

by Algernon Blackwood

Finkelstein, like many another German, resembled a weak edition of Bismarck. A little way off the appearance was remarkable. Closer, of course, one saw the softness of eye and indecision of jaw that destroyed the illusion.

“I want you to fearful be⁠—of nozzing,” be said, looking the young man up and down.

“I am afraid of nothing,” said Arthur Spinrobin, believing that the secretaryship was already his.

“Goot,” said the old professor, “I take you on!”

And thus Arthur Spinrobin, orphan, penniless, the money provided for his Cambridge education just completed, began the high adventure of his life by a three months’ engagement to Professor Adolf Finkelstein. The only qualification was that he should know German, have some knowledge of surveying, and be “afraid of nothing.” Finkelstein, for reasons best known to himself, lived at the time in a little farmhouse of grey stone among the folds of the Dorsetshire hills; and thither Spinrobin, small, round and active, with cheerful face and sanguine heart, betook himself, as agreed, on 1st September,

“It may lead to something,” he said to himself at the end of the first week; “but it’s all jolly queer. I wonder if the old boy is a spy⁠—or merely a lunatic.” He remembered that he was expected to be afraid of nothing. Arrest, high treason, and other ominous words occurred to him; but in the end he rejected them all. “He’s one of these Teutonic dreamers⁠—transcendentalist and all that⁠—gone a little bit cracky.” Only the map-making puzzled him⁠—uneasily.

For the life they led was not quite ordinary. They had a big sitting room and a bedroom each in the farmhouse that was glad enough to take a couple of boarders. The mornings they spent translating various German passages, beginning with authors like Novalis and Schlegel, and ending with more modern writers that Spinrobin had never heard of. While Finkelstein translated into French, Spinrobin did likewise into English⁠—apparently with a view to simultaneous publication in both languages of some big Essay the German professor was at work on. This Essay was to include these passages, but Finkelstein did not take the secretary into his confidence concerning it. There was an air of mystery about the whole thing.

And the translated passages always had to do with the one subject, viz., that the Earth was the body of a great Being⁠—living, conscious; that it had organs and a physiognomy; that the beauty of nature was merely a revelation of its personality; and that human beings could no more realise this than a fly on an elephant could realise that it walked upon a living body differing from its own merely in size and habits.

“Some faces are too big to be seen as faces,” Finkelstein said one morning to him. Then leaning forward through the tobacco smoke above their work table he suddenly touched Spinrobin’s little turn-up nose with his thick finger. “The ten million microbes there dwelling,” he said with an earnestness that made the secretary start, “do not know they are on a human face, was?” For he talked German and English indiscriminately.

The afternoons they walked together upon the hills, Spinrobin in normal shooting costume, and Finkelstein in baggy grey knickerbockers, elastic-side boots with nails, a loose jacket of Austrian Loden cloth, and a Tyrolese hat. A camera was swung round his shoulder, for he took frequent photographs, which he developed himself.

“Look,” he said, pointing, to the smooth, rounded hilltops about him, treeless, with sheep and cattle feeding in groups. “The cheeks of a great face⁠—see, I photograph it now, and later show you somezing your own little sight cannot take in. Ach! the camera is fine for that. Wer weisst? Wer weisst?”⁠ ⁠…

But the chalk pits drew him most, and he was forever taking photographs or making sketches of them, and asking his secretary to draw accurate plans showing the exact relation they bore to one another; and poring over the results on paper at home till the smoke got too thick to see, and he would put them away, with a sigh and discuss plans for the morrow. In particular there were two pits about a mile apart that interested him, with a third some hundreds of feet below them, very deep, with, a ragged edge whose gorse and furze bushes grew in a fringe along the lips.

“There, we have it, I think,” he used to say in German, after wandering for hours from one to the other, and studying endless photographs and plans of them at home. “There, we have it. Wait and see if I am not right.” All of which bewildered the secretary hopelessly, until one day, in his chief’s absence, he peeped into his bedroom, and saw on the walls his own series of maps, distorted out of all truth or accuracy, with the pits marked in red and the whole presenting different aspects of a mighty and very dreadful countenance. The two smaller pits were eyes, and the lower deep one with the bushes fringing it like hair, was a mouth⁠—a huge, open, gaping mouth. The sight produced in him an unpleasant sense of alarm and disgust he was at a loss to account for.⁠ ⁠…

“Ach, not here! Do not stumble here!” the German, cried one day when Spinrobin slipped near the edge of the bigger pit, and his face was so white that for a moment it seemed almost as if the depths of chalk below had shot up some curious message of reflected light upon his skin. And for some reason he never could explain quite to himself, the secretary always avoided that particular pit afterwards. A certain sense of personality pervaded it: and when the Professor told him the stories (corroborated in some measure, too, by the farmer) about the number of sheep and cattle it devoured yearly, the sense of dread⁠—though he laughed at it⁠—increased. One evening, too, coming home alone, he heard the wind whistling and booming round its white sides, polishing them to smoothness, and the sudden fancy leaped into his brain of a great purring throat. “Absurd!” he laughed, turning with a run in a safer direction; “this old Finkelstein with his crazy anthropomorphism has got into my imagination.”

And that very night they translated long passages from Fechner⁠—told with a bold power and originality that made it all unpleasantly real to the ordinarily cheerful, healthy-minded little secretary. “Like your own visionary, ze great Blake,” exclaimed Finkelstein in the middle, curiously excited (and using a vigorous English phrase utterly incongruous to the professional type, and picked up heaven knows where!) “zis Fechner has a great imagination that bangs straight through into Reality!”

Thus there gradually grew up about the Innocent Spinrobin a queer sense that the world was no longer quite the same as he had hitherto seen it. This Fechner, whom the Professor studied, laid a new spell upon him. The water for fish, the air for birds; the ether⁠—well, the ether, too, in turn had its own denizens: worlds! The stars were alive: the planets great spiritual Beings; the earth on which he lived was the physical body of some vast Intelligence that boomed its mighty way through space just as he himself pattered with quick little footsteps across a field. Moreover, Finkelstein elaborated the theory of his fellow countryman with singular conviction.

“Ze worlds are ze true angels,” he said, “and not imachination is ze music of the spheres. Ach! I vill proof it to everypody when I gif out zis great book I write.” Then, puffing his pipe voluminously into his secretary’s face, he would become enthusiastic and more confidential. The worlds, he declared, were some kind of Beings superior to men and animals, but alive and conscious in the same sense. He dwelt upon the analogy till water came into bin soft eyes, and his gesticulations threatened the crockery as well as Spinrobin’s own astonished features. Arms and legs, he said, after all are only crutches to enable ill-constructed creatures to get about⁠—whereas the worlds have no need for them, being round. Eyes are equally unnecessary, for they find their way through the ether without them infallibly. For lungs⁠—their whole surface is in continual commerce with the winds; and for circulation, the rivers, springs and rains arc unceasing. Also all the worlds are in most delicate touch with one another, keenly sensitive to the least variation; and where they grow cold⁠—they die.

“Ach! Donnerwelter! they starve!” he would cry, with something between anger and laughter, as though his uncouth imagination were really true.

And Spinrobin, hearing all this from morning till night, and having practical explanations given to him during their walks among the hills, reached a point before long where he became exceedingly uncomfortable. Those maps and tortured photographs haunted his dreams with their suggestions of Faces that it is not good for a man to look upon.⁠ ⁠…

He kept incessant watch upon Finkelstein. It came to him somehow or other that the work, and the walks, and all the rest of it were a labored pretence. The German dreamer had some very practical, matter of fact purpose behind all his imaginative writing and talking. It made him uneasy. Once or twice on the hills, he caught Finkelstein looking at him with a singular expression in his eyes an expression that made him inclined to run, or to cry for help, or do something to draw attention to themselves and on more than one occasion he was certain he heard someone treading softly in the night about the door of his bedroom. And Spinrobin, though not a coward, was decidedly of the timid order. He did not like it! It bewildered his respectable and commonplace soul.

“There,” exclaimed Finkelstein, in his native tongue, one November evening, when a first spray of snow had whitened the hills, “there you see it well. The snow helps to bring out the great whitened face with glorious features! Ach! Ach! In these desolate places where men have done little to obliterate or disturb, you can see more plainly.” He indicated the curious configuration of the hills about them. From the high point on which they stood Spinrobin’s awakened imagination easily permitted him to trace the “great whitened face,” the enthusiastic German referred to. The pits marked the two eyes, now closed by the shadows of the dusk; and he saw the large, deep, capacious mouth, gaping wide open beneath its fringe of hair-like trees and bushes. It certainly bore a curious resemblance to a vast Face thrust up from below, the features outlined by the powdered snow.

The man came close to his side, and began to talk very rapidly. The secretary’s knowledge of German was good, but the other talked so quickly, using such strange phrases and clipping his words with such guttural gymnastics, that he found it difficult to follow.

The only thing he gathered generally was that Finkelstein was indulging his imagination, aided by a grotesque humor, in describing the Death of the Earth. The snow and cold made him forecast the time when the body of the earth would be finally dead; and the cause, he declared here came in the grotesque humor⁠—was that she could no longer feed her internal fires. Mouths, channels, monstrous funnels to act as feeding pipes should be constructed, and the old earth should be kept alive forever. Or she might even be fed through smaller holes like these very pits⁠—he pointed to them, catching Spinrobin suddenly by the arm⁠—just as human beings might be fed through the pores of the skin!

Spinrobin jumped away from his side in the middle of the strange outburst. They had approached nearer to the edge of the big pit than he cared about.

“My imachination runs me away!” cried the Professor. “Come, let us get home to supper. For it is our duty to feed our own bodies before we feed the earth;” and he laughed aloud as he followed his startled secretary down the stony hill path back to the farm.

During the next few days he made frequent reference, however, to this bizarre notion of feeding the dying earth through holes in her surface⁠—pores in her skin. Spinrobin watched him more carefully than even before.

Apparently he was not the only person who watched him, for one afternoon that same week the farmer came abruptly into the secretary’s bedroom, and asked for a private word with him. Finkelstein was out. Briefly the man came with a warning. “You seem innocent like,” explained he, “but you ain’t the first secretary he’s had down here, now the first that’s disappeared.”

“But I’ve not disappeared!” gasped Spinrobin.

“You may do though⁠—in the cold weather.”

The old man was cryptic and mysterious. He received a big price for his rooms, he explained, but⁠—well, he could not help giving a warning to such a nice young fellow as Spinrobin.

The secretary felt his flesh begin to crawl, and a sudden light dawned upon him. The step of the German already sounded in the hall below, and he turned with a quick question to the friendly farmer. It was guesswork, hut apparently it hit the bull’s-eye.

“The sheep and cattle, then, that disappear⁠—?”

“Oh! but he pays me big prices for them⁠—” The approaching steps of Finkelstein sent the farmer about his business, but Spinrobin went into his room and locked the door. He began to understand things better. His first quarter was up that week. He came to an abrupt decision. Finkelstein could get a new secretary!⁠ ⁠… and next day when he chose a discreet opportunity to announce his decision with plausible excuses, the Professor merely fixed his watery eyes on his face with the remark in German⁠—“I regret it. You have been a patient and admirable secretary⁠—just the material I want for my, great⁠—my great purpose.” But the phrase “just the material” was ominous and stuck in Spinrobin’s mind. Somehow he had come to loathe the man⁠—his voice, eyes, and gestures. His speculations no longer interested him as before. They touched the secret springs of abhorrence and alarm in the depths of him. The figure with Tyrolese hat, baggy knickerbockers and shapeless legs ending in the ridiculous elastic-side boots became cloaked with suggestions of a strange horror he could not in the least explain to himself.

And it was a week later⁠—his last day, in fact⁠—when a sound woke him at two in the morning, and he peeped out of his window, and saw Finkelstein in the moonlight standing with the loden cloak about his shoulders and throwing up small stones to attract his attention. The moon was reflected in his big spectacles. He carried a long stick. Grotesquely forbidding he looked.

“Come out,” he whispered gutturally, holding up a finger to enjoin silence, “come out and see. It is too wonderful! Ach! it is too wonderful!” He was greatly excited, it seemed.

“What?” stammered little Spinrobin, half frightened. It was like a figure in a nightmare, he felt, a figure he was compelled to obey, for his unlined young soul was very, sensitive to suggestion, and this German undoubtedly: exercised, unconscious hypnotic influence over him.

“The pits are working!” continued the thick German voice. “Only once in a lifetime you see such a thing, perhaps. Ach, but quick, come quick. It is the feedingtime. I show you! Was? The feedingtime.⁠ ⁠… !”

A crowd of conflicting emotions in the breast, of the shivering Spinrobin⁠—curiosity, fear, wonder and a rash courage or youth urged him to see this extraordinary adventure to its end⁠—found their resultant expression (to this day he cannot quite explain how!) and brought him in a few minutes to the side, of the German outside. They moved rapidly up the hill.

Moonlight lay over the whole tossed landscape of mountain and valley, and a gusty S.W. wind from the sea boomed and echoed! in the hollows. He heard it swish, through the patches of long grass about their feet, and past his ears. The German, wrapped in his cloak, and holding his long stick partly concealed, led the way. His calves, thought Spinrobin, looked just like, sausages. At any other time he could have laughed.⁠ ⁠… Instead, he pattered behind, shivering.

“Hark!” whispered Finkelstein, stopping a moment for breath, after a mile of silent climbing. “Now, you hear it.” And the secretary heard in the distance that booming sound of the wind as it rushed like mighty breathing about the mouth of the big pit.

The same intense curiosity that had brought him out on this mad expedition overcame the instinct to turn and run⁠—for his life. Finkelstein, he saw, was making sudden awkward movements under cover of his cloak⁠ ⁠… They were standing some fifty yards, from the edge now. The great opening gaped there in the moonlight down the steep slope in front.

“It is the great cold,” the German was crying, half to himself, “the cold that means death! She cries for food! Listen.” He was very excited. “Ach! The great service you shall perhaps render!”

The wind rose with a wild roar about them, freezingly cold; it shouted horribly in the depths of the capacious opening in the hillside. It cried with shrill, swishing rounds as it rushed through the fringe of bushes grew along the dizzy edge.

“She cries for you, for you, for you! Ach! You are so privileged as that!” called out Finkelstein, the “crise” of his mania full upon him, and fairly dancing with excitement. “It is only young food she wants. She refuses me again.⁠ ⁠…” And a lot more that Spinrobin did not understand.

The whole thing, and the ghastly dementia of this crazy German was very clear to him now!

He was an active, nimble-footed little fellow, but somehow or other he stumbled at the first step. The German’s arm shot out, and the rope at the end of the long stick whistled dreadfully in the air as it flew towards him, and entangled itself about his legs. It flashed in the moonlight⁠—death in its coils.

Spinrobin yelled and struggled. Finkelstein, breathing hard, came up along the shortening rope hand over hand towards him, pulling him nearer and nearer, to the edge. They rolled and bumped down the precipitous slope, the German just managing to keep out of reach, and the mingled shouting of the two voices rose in wild clamor through the night.

“But why struggle?” cried the lunatic. “There will be no pain, no pain. And you are worth fifty sheep or cattle⁠ ⁠… !” The spectacled eyes shone like little lamps of silver.

“You shall come too, you brute!” shrieked Spinrobin, at last catching him by an elastic boot and dragging him down upon the ground with a crash.

They rolled a bit. Close to the brink, caught by the fringe of gorse bushes which tore and scratched him (though he only knew it afterwards when he saw the scars!) they stopped. The rope was hopelessly entangled about their feet. For a second the struggle ensued. Spinrobin heard a loosened stone drop past him, and land with a distant clatter far below. He made a tremendous effort. But the German wriggled free, and stood over him.

Spinrobin dizzy and exhausted, closed his eyes. The wind rose with a booming roar, and to his terrified imagination it seemed, like great arms that spread out a net to catch him as he fell.

“You feed her! You feed her! Ach, it is fine⁠ ⁠… !” The wind tore away with his words.

A moment later he would have toppled over to his death, when one of the gorse bushes, to his utter amazement, stood upright, struck the figure of the German a resounding blow in the chest that sent him spinning backwards to the ground, and at the same instant clutched Spinrobin’s feet, and dragged him up into comparative safety.

It was the farmer, who had been disturbed by their leaving the house, and had followed them np the hill. But Spinrobin never knew quite how it happened. He fairly spun⁠—mind and body.

How they managed between them to truss the maniac with the rope and stick, and carry him back, was not without humor; but the full meaning of the “Secretaryship” (for which Spinrobin never received his salary) was only apparent some weeks later, when the advertisement caused by the adventure drew out the whole facts.

For Finkelstein, it appeared, with his singular form of homicidal mania, was proved by the joint investigations of the English and German police to have been the author of at least three mysterious “disappearances” of young men who had acted as his secretaries; and his remarkable lunacy that imagined the Earth to be a living Being who required human sustenance to keep her alive (he, Finkelstein, being High Priest at the Ceremony), is now minutely recorded for all who care to read in the Proceedings of the Psychological Societies of both countries.