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).
Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysteriousthings fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination,are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past thedoors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice thefaint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearancesbetween 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 naturaltemperament 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 andforces 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 companyJones undoubtedly belonged.
All his life he had realised that his senses brought to him merelya more or less interesting set of sham appearances; that space, asmen measure it, was utterly misleading; that time, as the clockticked it in a succession of minutes, was arbitrary nonsense; and, infact, that all his sensory perceptions were but a clumsy representationof real things behind the curtain—things he was for ever tryingto get at, and that sometimes he actually did get at.
He had always been tremblingly aware that he stood on the borderlandof another region, a region where time and space were merelyforms of thought, where ancient memories lay open to the sight,and where the forces behind each human life stood plainly revealedand 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, anddid his work with strict attention, never allowed him to forget forone moment that, just beyond the dingy brick walls where the hundredmen scribbled with pointed pens beneath the electric lamps,there existed this glorious region where the important part of himselfdwelt and moved and had its being. For in this region hepictured himself playing the part of a spectator to his ordinaryworkaday life, watching, like a king, the stream of events, but untouchedin his own soul by the dirt, the noise, and the vulgar commotionof the outer world.
And this was no poetic dream merely. Jones was not playingprettily with idealism to amuse himself. It was a living, working belief.So convinced was he that the external world was the result of avast deception practised upon him by the gross senses, that when hestared at a great building like St. Paul's he felt it would not verymuch surprise him to see it suddenly quiver like a shape of jelly andthen melt utterly away, while in its place stood all at once revealedthe mass of colour, or the great intricate vibrations, or the splendidsound—the spiritual idea—which it represented in stone.
For something in this way it was that his mind worked.