Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes | Page 6

the folk-lorist himself, peering up
at me with an expression of whimsical laughter. My own reflection it
could not possibly have been, for I am clean-shaven, and this face
looked up at me through a running tangle of gray hair. Yet a second and
third match revealed only the white surface with the thin black hands
moving across it.
II
And it was at this point, I well remember, that I reached what was for
me the true heart of the adventure, the little fragment of real experience
I learned from it and took back with me to my doctor's life in London,
and that has remained with me ever since, and helped me to a new
sympathetic insight into the intricacies of certain curious mental cases I
had never before really understood.
For it was sufficiently obvious by now that a curious change had been
going forward in me for some time, dating, so far as I could focus my
thoughts sufficiently to analyse, from the moment of my speech with
that hurrying man of shadow on the hillside. And the first deliberate
manifestation of the change, now that I looked back, was surely the
awakening in my prosaic being of the "poetic thrill"; my sudden
amazing appreciation of the world around me as something alive. From
that moment the change in me had worked ahead subtly, swiftly. Yet,
so natural had been the beginning of it, that although it was a radically
new departure for my temperament, I was hardly aware at first of what
had actually come about; and it was only now, after so many
encounters, that I was forced at length to acknowledge it.
It came the more forcibly too, because my very commonplace ideas of
beauty had hitherto always been associated with sunshine and crude
effects; yet here this new revelation leaped to me out of wind and mist
and desolation on a lonely hillside, out of night, darkness, and
discomfort. New values rushed upon me from all sides. Everything had
changed, and the very simplicity with which the new values presented
themselves proved to me how profound the change, the readjustment,

had been. In such trivial things the evidence had come that I was not
aware of it until repetition forced my attention: the veils rising from
valley and hill; the mountain tops as personalities that shout or murmur
in the darkness; the crying of the sea birds and of the living, purposeful
wind; above all, the feeling that Nature about me was instinct with a
life differing from my own in degree rather than in kind; everything,
from the conspiracy of the gorse-bushes to the disappearing hat,
showed that a fundamental attitude of mind in me had changed--and
changed, too, without my knowledge or consent.
Moreover, at the same time the deep sadness of beauty had entered my
heart like a stroke; for all this mystery and loveliness, I realized
poignantly was utterly independent and careless of me, as me; and that
while I must pass, decay, grow old, these manifestations would remain
for ever young and unalterably potent. And thus gradually had I
become permeated with the recognition of a region hitherto unknown to
me, and that I had always depreciated in others and especially, it now
occurred to me, in my friend the old folk-lorist.
Here surely, I thought, was the beginning of conditions which, carried a
little further, must become pathogenic. That the change was real and
pregnant I had no doubt whatever. My consciousness was expanding
and I had caught it in the very act. I had of course read much
concerning the changes of personality, swift, kaleidoscopic--had come
across something of it in my practice--and had listened to the folk-lorist
holding forth like a man inspired upon ways and means of reaching
concealed regions of the human consciousness, and opening it to the
knowledge of things called magical, so that one became free of a larger
universe. But it was only now for the first time, on these bare hills, in
touch with the wind and the rain, that I realized in how simple a fashion
the frontiers of consciousness could shift this way and that, or with
what touch of genuine awe the certainty might come that one stood on
the borderland of new, untried, perhaps dangerous, experiences.
At any rate, it did now come to me that my consciousness had shifted
its frontiers very considerably, and that whatever might happen must
seem not abnormal, but quite simple and inevitable, and of course

utterly true. This very simplicity, however, doing no violence to my
being, brought with it none the less a sense of dread and discomfort;
and my dim awareness that unknown possibilities were about me in the
night puzzled and distressed me perhaps more than I