Читать книгу The Complete Works of Algernon Blackwood. Novels, Short Stories, Horror Classics, Occult & Supernatural Tales, Plays онлайн

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"Don't ye see what a foolish question that is," he said quietly, "and how impossible to satisfy, inviting that leap of invention which can be only an imaginative lie…? I can only tell you," and the breeze brought to us the voices of children from the Round Pond where they sailed their ships of equally wonderful adventure, "that my own longing became this: to go with him, to know what he knew, to live where he lived—forever."

"And the alarm you said you felt?"

He hesitated.

"That," he added, "was a kind of mistake. To go involved, I felt, an inner catastrophe that might be Death—that it would be out of the body, I mean, or a going backwards. In reality, it was a going forwards and a way to Life."

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And it was just before the steamer made Naples that the jolly Captain unwittingly helped matters forward a good deal. For it was his ambition to include in the safe-conduct of his vessel the happy-conduct also of his passengers. He liked to see them contented and of one accord, a big family, and he noted—or had word brought to him perhaps—that there were one or two whom the attitude of the majority left out in the cold.