Four Weird Tales

Four Weird Tales

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Title: Four Weird Tales
Author: Algernon Blackwood
Release Date: September 20, 2005 [EBook #16726]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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FOUR WEIRD TALES
BY
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
INCLUDING:
"The Insanity of Jones" "The Man Who Found Out" "The Glamour of the Snow" and
"Sand"

A NOTE ON THE TEXT
These stories first appeared in Blackwood's story collections: "The Insanity of Jones" in
The Listener and Other Stories (1907); "The Man Who Found Out" in The Wolves of God
and Other Fey Stories (1921); "The Glamour of the Snow," and "Sand" in Pan's Garden

(1912).
* * * * *

The Insanity of Jones
(A Study in Reincarnation)
Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who,
with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go
past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings
of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the
world of causes behind.
For only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance by some strange
suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament bequeathed from a remote past,
comes the knowledge, not too welcome, that this greater world lies ever at their elbow,
and that any moment a chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross
the shifting frontier.
Some, however, are born with this awful certainty in their hearts, and are called to no
apprenticeship, and to this select company Jones undoubtedly belonged.
All his life he had realised that his senses brought to him merely a more or less
interesting set of sham appearances; that space, as men measure it, was utterly misleading;
that time, as the clock ticked it in a succession of minutes, was arbitrary nonsense; and, in
fact, that all his sensory perceptions were but a clumsy representation of real things
behind the curtain--things he was for ever trying to get at, and that sometimes he actually
did get at.
He had always been tremblingly aware that he stood on the borderland of another region,
a region where time and space were merely forms of thought, where ancient memories
lay open to the sight, and where the forces behind each human life stood plainly revealed
and he could see the hidden springs at the very heart of the world. Moreover, the fact that
he was a clerk in a fire insurance office, and did his work with strict attention, never
allowed him to forget for one moment that, just beyond the dingy brick walls where the
hundred men scribbled with pointed pens beneath the electric lamps, there existed this
glorious region where the important part of himself dwelt and moved and had its being.
For in this region he pictured himself playing the part of a spectator to his ordinary
workaday life, watching, like a king, the stream of events, but untouched in his own soul
by the dirt, the noise, and the vulgar commotion of the outer world.
And this was no poetic dream merely. Jones was not playing prettily with idealism to
amuse himself. It was a living, working belief. So convinced was he that the external
world was the result of a vast deception practised upon him by the gross senses, that
when he stared at a great building like St. Paul's he felt it would not very much surprise

him to see it suddenly quiver like a shape of jelly and then melt utterly away, while in its
place stood all at once revealed the mass of colour, or the great intricate vibrations, or the
splendid sound--the spiritual idea--which it represented in stone.
For something in this way it was that his mind worked.
Yet, to all appearances, and in the satisfaction of all business claims, Jones was normal
and unenterprising. He felt nothing but contempt for the wave of modern psychism. He
hardly knew the meaning of such words as "clairvoyance" and "clairaudience." He had
never felt the least desire to join the Theosophical Society and to speculate in theories of
astral-plane life, or elementals. He attended no meetings of the Psychical Research
Society, and knew no anxiety as to whether his "aura" was black or