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The Centaur

by Algernon Blackwood · English · Gutenberg #9964 · 546,904 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Centaur

Author: Algernon Blackwood


        
Release date: February 1, 2006 [eBook #9964]
                Most recently updated: May 15, 2025

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CENTAUR ***




                              THE CENTAUR

                           ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

                                  1911




I

"We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing
the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the
meaning of it all."

--WILLIAM JAMES, _A Pluralistic Universe_

"... A man's vision is the great fact about him. Who cares for Carlyle's
reasons, or Schopenhauer's, or Spencer's? A philosophy is the expression
of a man's intimate character, and all definitions of the Universe are
but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it."

--Ibid


"There are certain persons who, independently of sex or comeliness,
arouse an instant curiosity concerning themselves. The tribe is small,
but its members unmistakable. They may possess neither fortune, good
looks, nor that adroitness of advance-vision which the stupid name good
luck; yet there is about them this inciting quality which proclaims that
they have overtaken Fate, set a harness about its neck of violence, and
hold bit and bridle in steady hands.

"Most of us, arrested a moment by their presence to snatch the definition
their peculiarity exacts, are aware that on the heels of curiosity
follows--envy. They know the very things that we forever seek in vain.
And this diagnosis, achieved as it were _en passant_, comes near to the
truth, for the hallmark of such persons is that they have found, and
come into, their own. There is a sign upon the face and in the eyes.
Having somehow discovered the 'piece' that makes them free of the whole
amazing puzzle, they know where they belong and, therefore, whither they
are bound: more, they are definitely _en route_. The littlenesses of
existence that plague the majority pass them by.

"For this reason, if for no other," continued O'Malley, "I count my
experience with that man as memorable beyond ordinary. 'If for no other,'
because from the very beginning there was another. Indeed, it was
probably his air of unusual bigness, massiveness rather,--head, face,
eyes, shoulders, especially back and shoulders,--that struck me first
when I caught sight of him lounging there hugely upon my steamer deck at
Marseilles, winning my instant attention before he turned and the
expression on his great face woke more--woke curiosity, interest, envy.
He wore this very look of certainty that knows, yet with a tinge of mild
surprise as though he had only recently known. It was less than
perplexity. A faint astonishment as of a happy child--almost of an
animal--shone in the large brown eyes--"

"You mean that the physical quality caught you first, then the
psychical?" I asked, keeping him to the point, for his Irish imagination
was ever apt to race away at a tangent.

He laughed good-naturedly, acknowledging the check. "I believe that to be
the truth," he replied, his face instantly grave again. "It was the
impression of uncommon bulk that heated my intuition--blessed if I know
how--leading me to the other. The size of his body did not smother, as so
often is the case with big people: rather, it revealed. At the moment I
could conceive no possible connection, of course. Only this overwhelming
attraction of the man's personality caught me and I longed to make
friends. That's the way with me, as you know," he added, tossing the hair
back from his forehead impatiently,"--pretty often. First impressions.
Old man, I tell you, it was like a possession."

"I believe you," I said. For Terence O'Malley all his life had never
understood half measures.




II

"The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for
civilization, or is he past it, and mastering it?"

--WHITMAN

"We find ourselves today in the midst of a somewhat peculiar state of
society, which we call Civilization, but which even to the most
optimistic among us does not seem altogether desirable. Some of us,
indeed, are inclined to think that it is a kind of disease which the
various races of man have to pass through....

"While History tells us of many nations that have been attacked by it, of
many that have succumbed to it, and of some that are still in the throes
of it, we know of no single case in which a nation has fairly recovered
from and passed through it to a more normal and healthy condition. In
other words, the development of human society has never yet (that we know
of) passed beyond a certain definite and apparently final stage in the
process we call Civilization; at that stage it has always succumbed or
been arrested."

--EDWARD CARPENTER, _Civilization: Its Cause and Cure_


O'Malley himself is an individuality that invites consideration from the
ruck of commonplace men. Of mingled Irish, Scotch, and English blood, the
first predominated, and the Celtic element in him was strong. A man of
vigorous health, careless of gain, a wanderer, and by his own choice
something of an outcast, he led to the end the existence of a rolling
stone. He lived from hand to mouth, never quite growing up. It seemed,
indeed, that he never could grow up in the accepted sense of the term,
for his motto was the reverse of _nil admirari_, and he found himself in
a state of perpetual astonishment at the mystery of things. He was
forever deciphering the huge horoscope of Life, yet getting no further
than the House of Wonder, on whose cusp surely he had been born.
Civilization, he loved to say, had blinded the eyes of men, filling them
with dust instead of vision.

An ardent lover of wild outdoor life, he knew at times a high, passionate
searching for things of the spirit, when the outer world fell away like
dross and he seemed to pass into a state resembling ecstasy. Never in
cities or among his fellow men, struggling and herded, did these times
come to him, but when he was abroad with the winds and stars in desolate
places. Then, sometimes, he would be rapt away, caught up to see the
tail-end of the great procession of the gods that had come near. He
surprised Eternity in a running Moment.

For the moods of Nature flamed through him--_in_ him--like presences,
potently evocative as the presences of persons, and with meanings equally
various: the woods with love and tenderness; the sea with reverence and
magic; plains and wide horizons with the melancholy peace and silence as
of wise and old companions; and mountains with a splendid terror due to
some want of comprehension in himself, caused probably by a spiritual
remoteness from their mood.

The Cosmos, in a word, for him was psychical, and Nature's moods were
transcendental cosmic activities that induced in him these singular
states of exaltation and expansion. She pushed wide the gateways of his
deeper life. She entered, took possession, dipped his smaller self into
her own enormous and enveloping personality.

He possessed a full experience, and at times a keen judgment, of modern
life; while underneath, all the time, lay the moving sea of curiously
wild primitive instincts. An insatiable longing for the wilderness was in
his blood, a craving vehement, unappeasable. Yet for something far
greater than the wilderness alone--the wilderness was merely a symbol, a
first step, indication of a way of escape. The hurry and invention of
modern life were to him a fever and a torment. He loathed the million
tricks of civilization. At the same time, being a man of some
discrimination at least, he rarely let himself go completely. Of these
wilder, simpler instincts he was afraid. They might flood all else. If he
yielded entirely, something he dreaded, without being able to define,
would happen; the structure of his being would suffer a nameless
violence, so that he would have to break with the world. These cravings
stood for that loot of the soul which he must deny himself. Complete
surrender would involve somehow a disintegration, a dissociation of
his personality that carried with it the loss of personal identity.

When the feeling of revolt became sometimes so urgent in him that it
threatened to become unmanageable, he would go out into solitude, calling
it to heel; but this attempt to restore order, while easing his nature,
was never radical; the accumulation merely increased on the rebound; the
yearnings grew and multiplied, and the point of saturation was often
dangerously near. "Some day," his friends would say, "there'll be a
bursting of the dam." And, though their meaning might be variously
interpreted, they spoke the truth. O'Malley knew it, too.

A man he was, in a word, of deep and ever-shifting moods, and with more
difficulty than most in recognizing the underlying self of which these
outer aspects were projections masquerading as complete personalities.

The underlying ego that unified these projections was of the type
touched with so sure a hand in the opening pages of an inspired little
book: _The Plea of Pan_. O'Malley was useless as a citizen and knew it.
Sometimes--he was ashamed of it as well.

Occasionally, and at the time of this particular "memorable adventure,"
aged thirty, he acted as foreign correspondent; but even as such he was
the kind of newspaper man that not merely collects news, but discovers,
reveals, creates it. Wise in their generation, the editors who
commissioned him remembered when his copy came in that they were editors.
A roving commission among the tribes of the Caucasus was his assignment
at the moment, and a better man for the purpose would have been hard to
find, since he knew beauty, had a keen eye for human nature, divined what
was vital and picturesque, and had, further, the power to set it down in
brief terms born directly of his vivid emotions.

When first I knew him he lived--nowhere, being always on the move. He
kept, however, a dingy little room near Paddington where his books and
papers accumulated, undusted but safe, and where the manuscripts of his
adventures were found when his death made me the executor of his few
belongings. The key was in his pocket, carefully ticketed with a bone
label. And this, the only evidence of practical forethought I ever
discovered in him, was proof that something in that room was deemed by
him of value--to others. It certainly was not the heterogeneous
collection of second-hand books, nor the hundreds of unlabeled
photographs and sketches. Can it have been the MSS. of stories, notes,
and episodes I found, almost carefully piled and tabulated with titles,
in a dirty kitbag of green Willesden canvas?

Some of these he had told me (with a greater vividness than he could
command by pen); others were new; many unfinished. All were unusual,
to say the least. All, too, had obviously happened to himself at some
period of his roving career, though here and there he had disguised his
own part in them by Hoffmann's device of throwing the action into the
third person. Those told to me by word of mouth I could only feel were
true, true for himself at least. In no sense were they mere inventions,
but arose in moments of vision upon a structure of solid events. Ten
men will describe in as many different ways a snake crossing their path;
but, besides these, there exists an eleventh man who sees more than the
snake, the path, the movement. O'Malley was some such eleventh man. He
saw the thing whole, from some kind of inner bird's-eye view, while the
ten saw only limited aspects of it from various angles. He was accused
of adding details, therefore, because he had divined their presence while
still below the horizon. Before they emerged the others had already left.

By which I mean that he saw in commonplace events the movement of greater
tides than others saw. At one remove of time or distance--a minute or a
mile--he perceived _all_. While the ten chattered volubly about the name
of the snake, he was caught beyond by the beauty of the path, the glory
of the running glide, the nature of the forces that drove, hindered,
modified.

The others reasoned where the snake was going, its length in inches and
its speed per second, while he, ignoring such superficial details,
plunged as it were into the very nature of the creature's being. And in
this idiosyncrasy, which he shared with all persons of mystical
temperament, is exemplified a certain curious contempt for Reason that he
had. For him mere intellectuality, by which the modern world sets such
store, was a valley of dry bones. Its worship was a worship of the form.
It missed the essential inner truth because such inner truth could be
known only by being it, feeling it. The intellectual attitude of mind, in
a word, was critical, not creative, and to be unimaginative seemed to
him, therefore, the worst form of unintelligence.

"The arid, sterile minds!" he would cry in a burst of his Celtic
enthusiasm. "Where, I ask ye, did the philosophies and sciences of the
world assist the progress of any single soul a blessed inch?"

Any little Dreamer in his top-floor back, spinning by rushlight his
web of beauty, was greater than the finest critical intelligence that
ever lived. The one, for all his poor technique, was stammering over
something God had whispered to him, the other merely destroying thoughts
invented by the brain of man.

And this attitude of mind, because of its interpretative effect upon
what follows, justifies mention. For to O'Malley, in some way difficult
to explain, Reason and Intellect, as such, had come to be worshipped
by men today out of all proportion to their real value. Consciousness,
focused too exclusively upon them, had exalted them out of due proportion
in the spiritual economy. To make a god of them was to make an empty and
inadequate god. Reason should be the guardian of the soul's advance, but
not the object. Its function was that of a great sandpaper which should
clear the way of excrescences, but its worship was to allow a detail to
assume a disproportionate importance.

Not that he was fool enough to despise Reason in what he called its
proper place, but that he was "wise" enough--not that he was
"intellectual" enough!--to recognize its futility in measuring the things
of the soul. For him there existed a more fundamental understanding than
Reason, and it was, apparently, an inner and natural understanding.

"The greatest Teacher we ever had," I once heard him say, "ignored the
intellect, and who, will ye tell me, can by searching find out God? And
yet what else is worth finding out...? Isn't it only by becoming as a
little child--a child that feels and never reasons things--that any
one shall enter the kingdom...? Where will the giant intellects be before
the Great White Throne when a simple man with the heart of a child will
top the lot of 'em?"

"Nature, I'm convinced," he said another time, though he said it with
puzzled eyes and a mind obviously groping, "is our next step. Reason
has done its best for centuries, and gets no further. It _can_ get no
further, for it can do nothing for the inner life which is the sole
reality. We must return to Nature and a purified intuition, to a greater
reliance upon what is now subconscious, back to that sweet, grave
guidance of the Universe which we've discarded with the primitive
state--a spiritual intelligence, really, divorced from mere
intellectuality."

And by Nature he did not mean a return to savagery. There was no idea
of going backwards in his wild words. Rather he looked forwards, in some
way hard to understand, to a state when Man, with the best results of
Reason in his pocket, might return to the instinctive life--to feeling
_with_--to the sinking down of the modern, exaggerated intellectual
personality into its rightful place as guide instead of leader. He called
it a Return to Nature, but what he meant, I always felt, was back to a
sense of kinship with the Universe which men, through worshipping the
intellect alone, had lost. Men today prided themselves upon their
superiority to Nature as beings separate and apart. O'Malley sought, on
the contrary, a development, if not a revival, of some faultless
instinct, due to kinship with her, which--to take extremes--shall direct
alike the animal and the inspired man, guiding the wild bee and the
homing pigeon, and--the soul toward its God.

This clue, as he called it, crystallized so neatly and so conclusively
his own mental struggles, that he had called a halt, as it were, to his
own intellectual development.... The name and family of the snake, hence,
meant to him the least important things about it. He caught, wildly yet
consistently, at the psychic links that bound the snake and Nature and
himself together with all creation. Troops of adventurous thoughts had
all his life "gone west" to colonize this land of speculative dream. True
to his idea, he "thought" with his emotions as much as with his brain,
and in the broken record of the adventure that this book relates, this
strange passion of his temperament remains the vital clue. For it
happened _in_, as well as to, himself. His Being could include the Earth
by feeling with her, whereas his intellect could merely criticize, and so
belittle, the details of such inclusion.

Many a time, while he stretched credulity to a point, I have heard him
apologize in some such way for his method. It was the splendor of his
belief that made the thing so convincing in the telling, for later when
I found the same tale written down it seemed somehow to have failed
of an equal achievement. The truth was that no one language would
convey the extraordinary freight that was carried so easily by his
instinctive choice of gestures, tone, and glance. With him these were
consummately interpretative.

       *       *       *       *       *

Before the age of thirty he had written and published a volume or two of
curious tales, all dealing with extensions of the personality, a subject
that interested him deeply, and one he understood because he drew the
material largely from himself. Psychology he simply devoured, even in its
most fantastic and speculative forms; and though perhaps his vision was
incalculably greater than his power of technique, these strange books had
a certain value and formed a genuine contribution to the thought on that
particular subject. In England naturally they fell dead, but their
translation into German brought him a wider and more intelligent circle.
The common public unfamiliar with Sally Beauchamp No. 4, with Hélène
Smith, or with Dr. Hanna, found in these studies of divided personality,
and these singular extensions of the human consciousness, only
extravagance and imagination run to wildness. Yet, none the less, the
substratum of truth upon which O'Malley had built them, lay actually
within his own personal experience. The books had brought him here and
there acquaintances of value; and among these latter was a German doctor,
Heinrich Stahl. With Dr. Stahl the Irishman crossed swords through months
of somewhat irregular correspondence, until at length the two had met on
board a steamer where the German held the position of ship's doctor. The
acquaintanceship had grown into something approaching friendship,
although the two men stood apparently at the opposite poles of thought.
From time to time they still met.

In appearance there was nothing unusual about O'Malley, unless it was the
contrast of the light blue eyes with the dark hair. Never, I think, did I
see him in anything but that old grey flannel suit, with the low collar
and shabby glistening tie. He was of medium height, delicately built, his
hands more like a girl's than a man's. In towns he shaved and looked
fairly presentable, but once upon his travels he grew beard and moustache
and would forget for weeks to have his hair cut, so that it fell in a
tangle over forehead and eyes.

His manner changed with the abruptness of his moods. Sometimes active and
alert, at others for days together he would become absent, dreamy,
absorbed, half oblivious of the outer world, his movements and actions
dictated by subconscious instinct rather than regulated by volition.
And one cause of that loneliness of spirit which was undoubtedly a chief
pain in life to him, was the fact that ordinary folk were puzzled how to
take him, or to know which of these many extreme moods was the man
himself. Uncomfortable, unsatisfactory, elusive, not to be counted upon,
they deemed him: and from their point of view they were undoubtedly
right. The sympathy and above all the companionship he needed, genuinely
craved too, were thus denied to him by the faults of his own temperament.
With women his intercourse was of the slightest; in a sense he did not
know the need of them much. For one thing, the feminine element in his
own nature was too strong, and he was not conscious, as most men are, of
the great gap of incompleteness women may so exquisitely fill; and, for
another, its obvious corollary perhaps, when they did come into his life,
they gave him more than he could comfortably deal with. They offered him
more than he needed.

In this way, while he perhaps had never fallen in love, as the saying has
it, he had certainly known that high splendor of devotion which means the
losing of oneself in others, that exalted love which seeks not any reward
of possession because it is itself so utterly possessed. He was pure,
too; in the sense that it never occurred to him to be otherwise.

Chief cause of his loneliness--so far as I could judge his complex
personality at all--seemed that he never found a sympathetic, truly
understanding ear for those deeply primitive longings that fairly ravaged
his heart. And this very isolation made him often afraid; it proved that
the rest of the world, the sane majority at any rate, said No to them. I,
who loved him and listened, yet never quite apprehended his full meaning.
Far more than the common Call of the Wild, it was. He yearned, not so
much for a world savage, uncivilized, as for a perfectly natural one that
had never known, perhaps never needed civilization--a state of freedom in
a life unstained.

He never wholly understood, I think, the reason why he found himself in
such stern protest against the modern state of things, why people
produced in him a state of death so that he turned from men to Nature--to
find life. The things the nations exclusively troubled themselves about
all seemed to him so obviously vain and worthless, and, though he never
even in his highest moments felt the claims of sainthood, it puzzled and
perplexed him deeply that the conquest over Nature in all its
multifarious forms today should seem to them so infinitely more important
than the conquest over self. What the world with common consent called
Reality, seemed ever to him the most crude and obvious, the most
transient, the most blatant un-Reality. His love of Nature was more than
the mere joy of tumultuous pagan instincts. It was, in the kind of simple
life he craved, the first step toward the recovery of noble, dignified,
enfranchised living. In the denial of all this external flummery he
hated, it would leave the soul disengaged and free, able to turn her
activities within for spiritual development. Civilization now suffocated,
smothered, killed the soul. Being in the hopeless minority, he felt he
must be somewhere wrong, at fault, deceived. For all men, from a
statesman to an engine-driver, agreed that the accumulation of external
possessions had value, and that the importance of material gain was
real.... Yet, for himself, he always turned for comfort to the Earth.
The wise and wonderful Earth opened her mind and her deep heart to him
in a way few other men seemed to know. Through Nature he could move
blind-folded along, yet find his way to strength and sympathy. A noble,
gracious life stirred in him then which the pettier human world denied.
He often would compare the thin help or fellowship he gained from
ordinary social intercourse, or from what had seemed at the time quite a
successful gathering of his kind, with the power he gained from a visit
to the woods or mountains. The former, as a rule, evaporated in a single
day; the other stayed, with ever growing power, to bless whole weeks and
months.

And hence it was, whether owing to the truth or ignorance of his
attitude, that a sense of bleak loneliness spread through all his life,
and more and more he turned from men to Nature.

Moreover, foolish as it must sound, I was sometimes aware that deep down
in him hid some nameless, indefinable quality that proclaimed him fitted
to live in conditions that had never known the restraints of modern
conventions--a very different thing to doing without them once known. A
kind of childlike, transcendental innocence he certainly possessed,
_naïf_, most engaging, and--utterly impossible. It showed itself
indirectly, I think, in this distress under modern conditions. The
multifarious apparatus of the spirit of Today oppressed him; its rush and
luxury and artificiality harassed him beyond belief. The terror of cities
ran in his very blood.

When I describe him as something of an outcast, therefore, it will be
seen that he was such both voluntarily and involuntarily.

"What the world has gained by brains is simply nothing to what it has
lost by them--"

"A dream, my dear fellow, a mere dream," I stopped him, yet with
sympathy because I knew he found relief this way. "Your constructive
imagination is too active."

"By Gad," he replied warmly, "but there is a place somewhere, or a state
of mind--the same thing--where it's more than a dream. And, what's more,
bless your stodgy old heart, some day I'll get there."

"Not in England, at any rate," I suggested.

He stared at me a moment, his eyes suddenly charged with dreams. Then,
characteristically, he snorted. He flung his hand out with a gesture that
should push the present further from him.

"I've always liked the Eastern theory--old theory anyhow if not
Eastern--that intense yearnings end by creating a place where they are
fulfilled--"

"Subjectively--"

"Of course; objectively means incompletely. I mean a Heaven built up by
desire and intense longing all your life. Your own thought makes it.
Living idea, that!"

"Another dream, Terence O'Malley," I laughed, "but beautiful and
seductive."

To argue bored him. He loved to state his matter, fill it with detail,
blow the heated breath of life into it, and then leave it. Argument
belittled without clarifying; criticism destroyed, sealing up the sources
of life. Any fool could argue; the small, denying minds were always
critics.

"A dream, but a damned foine one, let me tell you," he exclaimed,
recovering his brogue in his enthusiasm. He glared at me a second, then
burst out laughing. "Tis better to have dhreamed and waked," he added,
"than never to have dhreamed at all."

And then he poured out O'Shaughnessy's passionate ode to the Dreamers of
the world:

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory;
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

For this passion for some simple old-world innocence and beauty lay in
his soul like a lust--self-feeding and voracious.




III

"Lonely! Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?"

--THOREAU


March had passed shouting away, and April was whispering deliciously
among her scented showers when O'Malley went on board the coasting
steamer at Marseilles for the Levant and the Black Sea. The _mistral_
made the land unbearable, but herds of white horses ran galloping
over the bay beneath a sky of childhood's blue. The ship started
punctually--he came on board as usual with a bare minute's margin--and
from his rapid survey of the thronged upper deck, it seems, he singled
out on the instant this man and boy, wondering first vaguely at their
uncommon air of bulk, secondly at the absence of detail which should
confirm it. They appeared so much bigger than they actually were. The
laughter, rising in his heart, however, did not get as far as his lips.

For this appearance of massive bulk, and of shoulders comely yet almost
humped, was not borne out by a direct inspection. It was a mental
impression. The man, though broad and well-proportioned, with heavy
back and neck and uncommonly sturdy torso, was in no sense monstrous.
It was upon the corner of the eye that the bulk and hugeness dawned, a
false report that melted under direct vision. O'Malley took him in with
attention merging in respect, searching in vain for the detail of back
and limbs and neck that suggested so curiously the sense of the
gigantic. The boy beside him, obviously son, possessed the same elusive
attributes--felt yet never positively seen.

Passing down to his cabin, wondering vaguely to what nationality they
might belong, he was immediately behind them, elbowing French and German
tourists, when the father abruptly turned and faced him. Their gaze met.
O'Malley started.

"Whew...!" ran some silent expression like fire through his brain.

Out of a massive visage, placid for all its ruggedness, shone eyes
large and timid as those of an animal or child bewildered among so many
people. There was an expression in them not so much cowed or dismayed as
"un-refuged"--the eyes of the hunted creature. That, at least, was the
first thing they betrayed; for the same second the quick-blooded Celt
caught another look: the look of a hunted creature that at last knows
shelter and has found it. The first expression had emerged, then
withdrawn again swiftly like an animal into its hole where safety lay.
Before disappearing, it had flashed a wireless message of warning, of
welcome, of explanation--he knew not what term to use--to another of its
own kind, to _himself_.

O'Malley, utterly arrested, stood and stared. He would have spoken, for
the invitation seemed obvious enough, but there came an odd catch in his
breath, and words failed altogether. The boy, peering at him sideways,
clung to his great parent's side. For perhaps ten seconds there was this
interchange of staring, intimate staring, between the three of them ...
and then the Irishman, confused, more than a little agitated, ended the
silent introduction with an imperceptible bow and passed on slowly,
knocking absent-mindedly through the crowd, down to his cabin on the
lower deck.

In his heart, deep down, stirred an indescribable sympathy with something
he divined in these two that was akin to himself, but that as yet he
could not name. On the surface he felt an emotion he knew not whether to
call uneasiness or surprise, but crowding past it, half smothering it,
rose this other more profound emotion. Something enormously winning in
the atmosphere of father and son called to him in the silence: it was
significant, oddly buried; not yet had it emerged enough to be confessed
and labeled. But each had recognized it in the other. Each knew. Each
waited. And it was extraordinarily disturbing.

Before unpacking, he sat for a long time on his berth, thinking....trying
in vain to catch through a thunder of surprising emotions the word that
might bring explanation. That strange impression of giant bulk,
unsupported by actual measurements; that look of startled security
seeking shelter; that other look of being sure, of knowing where to go
and being actually _en route_,--all these, he felt, grew from the same
hidden cause whereof they were symptoms. It was this hidden thing in the
man that had reached out invisibly and fired his own consciousness as
their gaze met in that brief instant. And it had disturbed him so
profoundly because the very same lost thing lay buried in himself. The
man knew, whereas he anticipated merely--as yet. What was it? Why came
there with it both happiness and fear?

The word that kept chasing itself in a circle like a kitten after its own
tail, yet bringing no explanation, was Loneliness--a loneliness that must
be whispered. For it was loneliness on the verge of finding relief. And
if proclaimed too loud, there might come those who would interfere and
prevent relief. The man, and the boy too for that matter, were escaping.
They had found the way back, were ready and eager, moreover, to show it
to other prisoners.

And this was as near as O'Malley could come to explanation. He began to
understand dimly--and with an extraordinary excitement of happiness.

"Well--and the bigness?" I asked, seizing on a practical point after
listening to his dreaming, "what do you make of that? It must have had
some definite cause surely?"

He turned and fixed his light blue eyes on mine as we paced beside the
Serpentine that summer afternoon when I first heard the story told.
He was half grave, half laughing.

"The size, the bulk, the bigness," he replied, "must have been in
reality the expression of some mental quality that reached me
psychically, producing its effect directly on my mind and not upon the
eyes at all." In telling the story he used a simile omitted in the
writing of it, because his sense of humor perceived that no possible turn
of phrase could save it from grotesqueness when actually it was far from
grotesque--extraordinarily pathetic rather: "As though," he said, "the
great back and shoulders carried beneath the loose black cape--humps,
projections at least; but projections not ugly in themselves, comely even
in some perfectly natural way, that lent to his person this idea of giant
size. His body, though large, was normal so far as its proportions were
concerned. In his spirit, though, there hid another shape. An aspect of
that other shape somehow reached my mind."

Then, seeing that I found nothing at the moment to reply, he added:

"As an angry man you may picture to yourself as red, or a jealous
man as green!" He laughed aloud. "D'ye see, now? It was not really a
physical business at all!"




IV

"We think with only a small part of the past, but it is with our
entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire,
will, and act."

--HENRI BERGSON


The balance of his fellow-passengers were not distinguished. There was a
company of French tourists gong to Naples, and another lot of Germans
bound for Athens, some business folk for Smyrna and Constantinople, and a
sprinkling of Russians going home via Odessa, Batoum, or Novorossisk.

In his own stateroom, occupying the upper berth, was a little
round-bodied, red-faced Canadian drummer, "traveling" in
harvest-machines. The name of the machine, its price, and the terms of
purchase were his universe; he knew them in several languages; beyond
them, nothing. He was good-natured, conceding anything to save trouble.
"D'ye mind the light for a bit while I read in bed?" asked O'Malley.
"Don't mind anything much," was the cheery reply. "I'm not particular;
I'm easy-going and you needn't bother." He turned over to sleep. "Old
traveler," he added, his voice muffled by sheets and blankets, "and take
things as they come." And the only objection O'Malley found in him was
that he took things as they came to the point of not taking baths at all,
and not even taking all his garments off when he went to bed.

The Captain, whom he knew from previous voyages, a genial, rough-voiced
sailor from Sassnitz, chided him for so nearly missing the boat--"as
usual."

"You're too late for a seat at my taple," he said with his laughing
growl; "it's a pidy. You should have led me know py telegram, and I then
kepd your place. Now you find room at the doctor's taple howefer
berhaps...!"

"Steamer's very crowded this time," O'Malley replied, shrugging his
shoulders; "but you'll let me come up sometimes for a smoke with you
on the bridge?"

"Of course, of course."

"Anybody interesting on board?" he asked after a moment's pause.

The jolly Captain laughed. "'Pout the zame as usual, you know. Nothing to
stop ze ship! Ask ze doctor; he knows zooner than me. But, anyway, the
nice ones, they get zeazick always and dizappear. Going Trebizond this
time?" he added.

"No; Batoum."

"Ach! Oil?"

"Caucasus generally--up in the mountains a bit."

"God blenty veapons then, I hope. They shoot you for two pfennig up
there!" And he was off with his hearty deep laugh and rather ponderous
briskness toward the bridge.

Thus O'Malley found himself placed for meals at the right hand of
Dr. Stahl; opposite him, on the doctor's left, a talkative Moscow
fur-merchant who, having come to definite conclusions of his own about
things n general, was persuaded the rest of the world must share them,
and who delivered verbose commonplaces with a kind of pontifical
utterance sometimes amusing, but usually boring; on his right a
gentle-eyed, brown-bearded Armenian priest from the Venice monastery that
had sheltered Byron, a man who ate everything except soup with his knife,
yet with a daintiness that made one marvel, and with hands so graceful
they might almost have replaced the knife without off offence. Beyond the
priest sat the rotund Canadian drummer. He kept silence, watched the
dishes carefully lest anything should escape him, and--ate. Lower down on
the opposite side, one or two nondescripts between, sat the big, blond,
bearded stranger with his son. Diagonally across from himself and the
doctor, they were in full view.

O'Malley talked to all and sundry whom his voice could reach, being
easily forthcoming to people whom he was not likely to see again. But
he was particularly pleased to find himself next to the ship's doctor,
Dr. Heinrich Stahl, for the man both attracted and antagonized him, and
they had crossed swords pleasantly on more voyages than one. There
was a fundamental contradiction in his character due--O'Malley
divined--to the fact that his experiences did not tally as he wished them
to do with his beliefs, or vice versa. Affecting to believe in nothing,
he occasionally dropped remarks that betrayed a belief in all kinds of
things, unorthodox things. Then, having led the Irishman into confessions
of his own fairy faith, he would abruptly rule the whole subject out of
order with some cynical phrase that closed discussion. In this sarcastic
attitude O'Malley detected a pose assumed for his own protection. "No man
of sense can possibly accept such a thing; it is incredible and foolish."
Yet, the biting way he said the words betrayed him; the very thing his
reason rejected, his soul believed....

These vivid impressions the Irishman had of people, one wonders how
accurate they were! In this case, perhaps, he was not far from the
truth. That a man with Dr. Stahl's knowledge and ability could be
content to hide his light under the bushel of a mere _Schiffsarzt_
required explanation. His own explanation was that he wanted leisure for
thinking and writing. Bald-headed, slovenly, prematurely old, his beard
stained with tobacco and snuff, under-sized, scientific in the
imaginative sense that made him speculative beyond mere formulae, his was
an individuality that inspired a respect one could never quite account
for. He had keen dark eyes that twinkled, sometimes mockingly, sometimes,
if the word may be allowed, bitterly, yet often too with a good-humored
amusement which sympathy with human weaknesses could alone have
caused. A warm heart he certainly had, as more than one forlorn
passenger could testify.

Conversation at their table was slow at first. It began at the lower end
where the French tourists chattered briskly over the soup, then crept
upwards like a slow fire o'erleaping various individuals who would not
catch. For instance, it passed the harvest-machine man; it passed the
nondescripts; it also passed the big light-haired stranger and his son.

At the table behind, there was a steady roar and buzz of voices; the
Captain was easy and genial, prophesying to the ladies on either side
Of him a calm voyage. In the shelter of his big voice even the shy found
it easy to make remarks to their neighbors. Listening to fragments of
the talk O'Malley found that his own eyes kept wandering down the
table--diagonally across--to the two strangers. Once or twice he
intercepted the doctor's glance traveling in the same direction, and on
these occasions it was on the tip of his tongue to make a remark about
them, or to ask a question. Yet the words did not come. Dr. Stahl, he
felt, knew a similar hesitation. Each, wanting to speak, yet kept
silence, waiting for the other to break the ice.

"This _mistral_ is tiresome," observed the doctor, as the tide of talk
flowed up to his end and made a remark necessary. "It tries the nerves
of some." He glanced at O'Malley, but it was the fur-merchant who
replied, spreading a be-ringed hand over his plate to feel the warmth.

"I know it well," he said pompously in a tone of finality; "it lasts
three, six, or nine days. But once across the Golfe de Lyons we shall be
free of it."

"You think so? Ah, I am glad," ventured the priest with a timid smile
while he adroitly balanced meat and bullet-like green peas upon his
knife-blade. Tone, smile, and gesture were so gentle that the use of
steel in any form seemed incongruous.

The voice of the fur-merchant came in domineeringly.

"Of course. I have made this trip so often, I _know_. St. Petersburg to
Paris, a few weeks on the Riviera, then back by Constantinople and the
Crimea. It is nothing. I remember last year--" He pushed a large pearl
pin more deeply into his speckled tie and began a story that proved
chiefly how luxuriously he traveled. His eyes tried to draw the whole
end of the table into his circle, but while the Armenian listened
politely, with smiles and bows, Dr. Stahl turned to the Irishman again.
It Vas the year of Halley's comet and he began talking interestingly
about it.

"... Three o'clock in the morning--any morning, yes--is the best time,"
the doctor concluded, "and I'll have you called. You must see it through
my telescope. End of this week, say, after we leave Catania and turn
eastwards..."

And at this instant, following a roar of laughter from the Captain's
table, came one of those abrupt pauses that sometimes catch an entire
room at once. All voices hushed. Even the merchant, setting down his
champagne glass, fell silent. One heard only the beating of the steamer's
screw, the rush of water below the port-holes, the soft scuffle of the
stewards' feet. The conclusion of the doctor's inconsiderable sentence
was sharply audible all over the room--

"... crossing the Ionian Sea toward the Isles of Greece."

It rang across the pause, and at the same moment O'Malley caught the eyes
of the big stranger lifted suddenly and fixed upon the speaker's face as
though the words had summoned him.

They shifted the same instant to his own, then dropped again to his
plate. Again the clatter of conversation drowned the room as before; the
merchant resumed his self-description in terms of gold; the doctor
discussed the gases of the comet's tail. But the swift-blooded Irishman
felt himself caught away strangely and suddenly into another world.
Out of the abyss of the subconscious there rose a gesture prophetic and
immense. The trivial phrase and that intercepted look opened a great
door of wonder in his heart. In a second he grew "absent-minded." Or,
rather, something touched a button and the whole machinery of his
personality shifted round noiselessly and instantaneously, presenting an
immediate new facet to the world. His normal, puny self-consciousness
slipped a moment into the majestic calm of some far larger state that
the stranger also knew. The Universe lies in every human heart, and he
plunged into that archetypal world that stands so close behind all
sensible appearances. He could neither explain nor attempt to explain,
but he sailed away into some giant swimming mood of beauty wherein
steamer, passengers, talk, faded utterly, the stranger and his son
remaining alone real and vital. He had seen; he could never forget.
Chance prepared the setting, but immense powers had rushed in and availed
themselves of it. Something deeply buried had flamed from the stranger's
eyes and beckoned to him. The fire ran from the big man to himself and
was gone.

"The Isles of Greece--" The words were simple enough, yet it seemed to
O'Malley that the look they summoned to the stranger's eyes ensouled
them, transfiguring them with the significance of vital clues. They
touched the fringe of a mystery, magnificent and remote--some
transcendent psychical drama in the 'life of this man whose "bigness"
and whose "loneliness that must be whispered" were also in their way
other vital clues. Moreover, remembering his first sight of these two
upon the upper deck a few hours before, he understood that his own
spirit, by virtue of its peculiar and primitive yearnings, was involved
in the same mystery and included in the same hidden passion.

The little incident illustrates admirably O'Malley's idiosyncrasy of
"seeing whole." In a lightning flash his inner sense had associated the
words and the glance, divining that the one had caused the other. That
pause provided the opportunity.... If Imagination, then it was creative
imagination; if true, it was assuredly spiritual insight of a rare
quality.

He became aware that the twinkling eyes of his neighbor were observing
him keenly. For some moments evidently he had been absent-mindedly
staring down the table. He turned quickly and looked at the doctor
with frankness. This time it was impossible to avoid speech of some
kind.

"Following those lights that do mislead the morn?" asked Dr. Stahl
slyly. "Your thoughts have been traveling. You've heard none of my last
remarks!"

Under the clamor of the merchant's voice O'Malley replied in a lowered
tone:

"I was watching those two half-way down the table opposite. They interest
you as well, I see." It was not a challenge exactly; if the tone was
aggressive, it was merely that he felt the subject was one on which they
would differ, and he scented an approaching discussion. The doctor's
reply, indicating agreement, surprised him a good deal.

"They do; they interest me greatly." There was no trace of fight in the
voice. "That should cause _you_ no surprise."

"Me--they simply fascinate," said O'Malley, always easily drawn. "What is
it? What do you see about them that is unusual? Do you, too, see them
'big'?" The doctor did not answer at once, and O'Malley added, "The
father's a tremendous fellow, but it's not that--"

"Partly, though," said the other, "partly, I think."

"What else, then?" The fur-merchant, still talking, prevented their
being overheard. "What is it marks them off so from the rest?"

"Of all people _you_ should see," smiled the doctor quietly. "If a man
of your imagination sees nothing, what shall a poor exact mind like
myself see?" He eyed him keenly a moment. "You really mean that you
detect nothing?"

"A certain distinction, yes; a certain aloofness from others. Isolated,
they seem in a way; rather a splendid isolation I should call it--"

And then he stopped abruptly. It was most curious, but he was aware
that unwittingly in this way he had stumbled upon the truth, aware at
the same time that he resented discussing it with his companion--because
it meant at the same time discussing himself or something in himself he
wished to hide. His entire mood shifted again with completeness and
rapidity. He could not help it. It seemed suddenly as though he had been
telling the doctor secrets about himself, secrets moreover he would not
treat sympathetically. The doctor had been "at him," so to speak,
searching the depths of him with a probing acuteness the casual language
had disguised.

"What are they, do you suppose: Finns, Russians, Norwegians, or what?"
the doctor asked. And the other replied briefly that he guessed they
might be Russians perhaps, South Russians. His tone was different. He
wished to avoid further discussion. At the first opportunity he neatly
changed the conversation.

It was curious, the way proof came to him. Something in himself, wild as
the desert, something to do with that love of primitive life he discussed
only with the few who were intimately sympathetic toward it, this
something in his soul was so akin to a similar passion in these
strangers that to talk of it was to betray himself as well as them.

Further, he resented Dr. Stahl's interest in them, because he felt it was
critical and scientific. Not far behind hid the analysis that would lay
them bare, leading to their destruction. A profound instinctive sense of
self-preservation had been stirred within him.

Already, mysteriously guided by secret affinities, he had ranged himself
on the side of the strangers.




V

"Mythology contains the history of the archetypal world. It comprehends
Past, Present, and Future."

--NOVALIS, _Flower Pollen, Translated by U.C.B.


In this way there came between these two the slight barrier of a
forbidden subject that grew because neither destroyed it. O'Malley had
erected it; Dr. Stahl respected it. Neither referred again for a time to
the big Russian and his son.

In his written account O'Malley, who was certainly no constructive
literary craftsman, left out apparently countless little confirmatory
details. By word of mouth he made me feel at once that this mystery
existed, however; and to weld the two together is a difficult task. There
nevertheless was this something about the Russian and his boy that
excited deep curiosity, accompanied by an aversion on the part of the
other passengers that isolated them; also, there was this competition on
the part of the two friends to solve it, from opposing motives.

Had either of the strangers fallen seasick, the advantage would have
been easily with Dr. Stahl--professionally, but since they remained well,
and the doctor was in constant demand by the other passengers, it was
the Irishman who won the first move and came to close quarters by making
a personal acquaintance. His strong desire helped matters of course; for
he noticed with indignation that these two, quiet and inoffensive as they
were and with no salient cause of offence, were yet rejected by the main
body of passengers. They seemed to possess a quality that somehow
insulated them from approach, sending them effectually "to Coventry," and
in a small steamer where the travelers settle down into a kind of big
family life, this isolation was unpleasantly noticeable.

It stood out in numerous little details that only a keen observer closely
watching could have taken into account. Small advances, travelers'
courtesies, and the like that ordinarily should have led to conversation,
in their case led to nothing. The other passengers invariably moved away
after a few moments, politely excusing themselves, as it were, from
further intercourse. And although at first the sight of this stirred in
him an instinct of revolt that was almost anger, he soon felt that the
couple not merely failed to invite, but even emanated some definite
atmosphere that repelled. And each time he witnessed these little scenes,
there grew more strongly in him the original picture he had formed of
them as beings rejected and alone, hunted by humanity as a whole, seeking
escape from loneliness into a place of refuge that they knew of,
definitely at last _en route_.

Only an imaginative mind, thus concentrated upon them, could have
divined all this; yet to O'Malley it seemed plain as the day. With the
certitude, moreover, came the feeling, ever stronger, that the refuge
they sought would prove to be also the refuge he himself sought, the
difference being that whereas they knew, he still hesitated.

Yet, in spite of this secret sympathy, imagined or discovered, he found
it no easy matter to approach the big man for speech. For a day and a
half he merely watched; attraction so strong excited caution; he paused,
waiting. His attention, however, was so keen that he seemed always to
know where they were and what they were doing. By instinct he was
aware in what part of the ship they would be found--for the most part
leaning over the rail alone in the bows, staring down at the churned
water together by the screws, pacing the after-deck in the dusk or early
morning when no one was about, or hidden away in some corner of the
upper deck, side by side, gazing at sea and sky. Their method of walking,
too, made it easy to single them out from the rest--a free, swaying
movement of the limbs, a swing of the shoulders, a gait that was
lumbering, almost clumsy, half defiant, yet at the same time graceful,
and curiously rapid. The body moved along swiftly for all its air of
blundering--a motion which was a counterpart of that elusive appearance
of great bulk, and equally difficult of exact determination. An air
went with them of being ridiculously confined by the narrow little decks.

Thus it was that Genoa had been made and the ship was already half
way on to Naples before the opportunity for closer acquaintance presented
itself. Rather, O'Malley, unable longer to resist, forced it. It
seemed, too, inevitable as sunrise.

Rain had followed the _mistral_ and the sea was rough. A rich land-taste
came about the ship like the smell of wet oaks when wind sweeps their
leaves after a sousing shower. In the hour before dinner, the decks
slippery with moisture, only one or two wrapped-up passengers in
deck-chairs below the awning, O'Malley, following a sure inner lead,
came out of the stuffy smoking-room into the air. It was already dark
and the drive of mist-like rain somewhat obscured his vision after the
glare. Only for a moment though--for almost the first thing he saw
was the Russian and his boy moving in front of him toward the aft
compasses. Like a single figure, huge and shadowy, they passed into the
darkness beyond with a speed that seemed as usual out of proportion
to their actual stride. They lumbered rapidly away. O'Malley caught that
final swing of the man's great shoulders as they disappeared, and,
leaving the covered deck, he made straight after them. And though neither
gave any sign that they had seen him, he felt that they were aware of his
coming--and even invited him.

As he drew close a roll of the vessel brought them almost into each
other's arms, and the boy, half hidden beneath his parent's flowing
cloak, looked up at once and smiled. The saloon light fell dimly upon
his face. The Irishman saw that friendly smile of welcome, and lurched
forward with the roll of the deck. They brought up against the bulwarks,
and the big man put out an arm to steady him. They all three laughed
together. At close quarters, as usual again, the impression of bulk had
disappeared.

And then, at first, utterly unlike real life, they said--nothing. The
boy moved round and stood close to his side so that he found himself
placed between them, all three leaning forward over the rails watching
the phosphorescence of the foam-streaked Mediterranean.

Dusk lay over the sea; the shores of Italy not near enough to be visible;
the mist, the hour, the loneliness of the deserted decks, and something
else that was nameless, shut them in, these three, in a little world of
their own. A sentence or two rose in O'Malley's mind, but without finding
utterance, for he felt that no spoken words were necessary. He was
accepted without more ado. A deep natural sympathy existed between
them, recognized intuitively from that moment of first mutual inspection
at Marseilles. It was instinctive, almost as with animals. The action
of the boy in coming round to his side, unhindered by the father, was
the symbol of utter confidence and welcome.

There came, then, one of those splendid and significant moments that
occasionally, for some, burst into life, flooding all barriers, breaking
down as with a flaming light the thousand erections of shadow that close
one in. Something imprisoned in himself swept outwards, rising like a
wave, bringing an expansion of life that "explained." It vanished, of
course, instantly again, but not before he had caught a flying remnant
that lit the broken puzzles of his heart and left things clearer. Before
thought, and therefore words, could overtake, it was gone; but there
remained at least this glimpse. The fire had flashed a light down
subterranean passages of his being and made visible for a passing second
some clue to his buried primitive yearnings. He partly understood.

Standing there between these two this thing came over him with a
degree of intelligibility scarcely captured by his words. The man's
qualities--his quietness, peace, slowness, silence--betrayed somehow that
his inner life dwelt in a region vast and simple, shaping even his
exterior presentment with its own huge characteristics, a region wherein
the distress of the modern world's vulgar, futile strife could not
exist--more, could never _have_ existed. The Irishman, who had never
realized exactly why the life of Today to him was dreadful, now
understood it in the presence of this simple being with his atmosphere of
stately power. He was like a child, but a child of some pre-existence
utterly primitive and utterly forgotten; of no particular age, but of
some state that antedates all ages; simple in some noble, concentrated
sense that was prodigious, almost terrific. To stand thus beside him was
to stand beside a mighty silent fire, steadily glowing, a fire that fed
all lesser flames, because itself close to the central source of fire. He
felt warmed, lighted, vivified--made whole. The presence of this stranger
took him at a single gulp, as it were, straight into Nature--a Nature
that was alive. The man was part of her. Never before had he stood so
close and intimate. Cities and civilization fled away like transient
dreams, ashamed. The sun and moon and stars moved up and touched him.

This word of lightning explanation, at least, came to him as he breathed
the other's atmosphere and presence. The region where this man's spirit
fed was at the center, whereas today men were active with a scattered,
superficial cleverness, at the periphery. He even understood that his
giant gait and movements were small outer evidences of this inner fact,
wholly in keeping. That blundering stupidity, half glorious, half
pathetic, with which he moved among his fellows was a physical
expression of this psychic fact that his spirit had never learned the
skilful tricks taught by civilization to lesser men. It was, in a way,
awe-inspiring, for he was now at last driving back full speed for his own
region and--escape.

O'Malley knew himself caught, swept off his feet, momentarily driving
with him....

The singular deep satisfaction of it, standing there with these two in
the first moment, he describes as an entirely new sensation in his
life--an awareness that he was "complete." The boy touched his side and
he let an arm steal round to shelter him. The huge, bearded parent rose
in his massiveness against his other shoulder, hemming him in. For a
second he knew a swift and curious alarm, passing however almost at
once into the thrill of a rare happiness. In that moment, it was not the
passengers or the temper of Today who rejected them; it was they who
rejected the world: because they knew another and superior one--more,
they were in it.

Then, without turning, the big man spoke, the words in heavy accented
English coming out laboriously and with slow, exceeding difficulty as
though utterance was a supreme effort.

"You ... come ... with ... us?" It was like stammering almost. Still
more was it like essential inarticulateness struggling into an utterance
foreign to it--unsuited. The voice was a deep and windy bass, merging
with the noise of the sea below.

"I'm going to the Caucasus," O'Malley replied; "up into the old, old
mountains, to--see things--to look about--to search--" He really wanted
to say much more, but the words lay dead or beyond reach.

The big man nodded slowly. The boy listened.

"And yourself--?" asked the Irishman, hardly knowing why he faltered and
trembled.

The other smiled; a beauty that was beyond all language passed with that
smile across the great face in the dusk.

"Some of us ... of ours ..." he spoke very slowly, very brokenly,
quarrying out the words with real labor, "... still survive... out
there.... We ... now go back. So very ... few ... remain.... And
you--come with us ..."




VI

"In the spiritual Nature-Kingdom, man must everywhere seek his peculiar
territory and climate, his best occupation, his particular neighborhood,
in order to cultivate a Paradise in idea; this is the right system....
Paradise is scattered over the whole earth, and that is why it has become
so unrecognizable."

--NOVALIS, Translated by U.C.B.

"Man began in instinct and will end in instinct. Instinct is genius in
Paradise, before the period of self-abstraction (self-knowledge)."

--Ibid


"Look here, old man," he said to me, "I'll just tell you what it was,
because I know you won't laugh."

We were lying under the big trees behind the Round Pond when he reached
this point, and his direct speech was so much more graphic than the
written account that I use it. He was in one of his rare moments of
confidence, excited, hat off, his shabby tie escaping from the shabbier
grey waistcoat. One sock lay untidily over his boot, showing bare leg.

Children's voices floated to us from the waterside as though from very
far away, the nursemaids and perambulators seemed tinged with unreality,
the London towers were clouds, its roar the roar of waves. I saw only the
ship's deck, the grey and misty sea, the uncouth figures of the two who
leaned with him over the bulwarks.

"Go on," I said encouragingly; "out with it!"

"It must seem incredible to most men, but, by Gad, I swear to you, it
lifted me off my feet, and I've never known anything like it. The mind
of that great fellow got hold of me, included me. He made the inanimate
world--sea, stars, wind, woods, and mountains--seem all alive. The entire
blessed universe was conscious--and he came straight out of it to get me.
I understood things about myself I've never understood before--and always
funked rather;--especially that feeling of being out of touch with my
kind, of finding no one in the world today who speaks my language
quite--that, and the utter, God-forsaken loneliness it makes me suffer--"

"You always have been a lonely beggar really," I said, noting the
hesitation that thus on the very threshold checked his enthusiasm,
quenching the fire in those light-blue eyes. "Tell me. I shall understand
right enough--or try to."

"God bless you," he answered, leaping to the sympathy, "I believe you
will. There's always been this primitive, savage thing in me that keeps
others away--puts them off, and so on. I've tried to smother it a bit
sometimes--"

"Have you?" I laughed.

"'Tried to,' I said, because I've always been afraid of its getting out
too much and bustin' my life all to pieces:--something lonely and untamed
and sort of outcast from cities and money and all the thick suffocating
civilization of today; and I've only saved myself by getting off into
wildernesses and free places where I could give it a breathin' chance
without running the risk of being locked up as a crazy man." He laughed
as he said it, but his heart was in the words. "You know all that;
haven't I told you often enough? It's not a morbid egoism, or what their
precious academic books so stupidly call 'degenerate,' for in me it's
damned vital and terrific, and moves always to action. It's made me an
alien and--and--"

"Something far stronger than the Call of the Wild, isn't it?"

He fairly snorted. "Sure as we're both alive here sittin' on this sooty
London grass," he cried. "This Call of the Wild they prate about is
just the call a fellow hears to go on 'the bust' when he's had too much
town and's got bored--a call to a little bit of license and excess to
safety-valve him down. What I feel," his voice turned grave and quiet
again, "is quite a different affair. It's the call of real hunger--the
call of food. They want to let off steam, but I want to take in stuff to
prevent--starvation." He whispered the word, putting his lips close to my
face.

A pause fell between us, which I was the first to break.

"This is not your century! That's what you really mean," I suggested
patiently.

"Not my century!" he caught me up, flinging handfuls of faded grass in
the air between us and watching it fall; "why, it's not even my world!
And I loathe, loathe the spirit of today with its cheap-jack inventions,
and smother of sham universal culture, its murderous superfluities and
sordid vulgarity, without enough real sense of beauty left to see that a
daisy is nearer heaven than an airship--"

"Especially when the airship falls," I laughed. "Steady, steady, old boy;
don't spoil your righteous case by overstatement."

"Well, well, you know what I mean," he laughed with me, though his face
at once turned earnest again, "and all that, and all that, and all
that.... And so this savagery that has burned in me all these years
unexplained, these Russian strangers made clear. I can't tell you how
because I don't know myself. The father did it--his proximity, his
silence stuffed with sympathy, his great vital personality unclipped by
contact with these little folk who left him alone. His presence alone
made me long for the earth and Nature. He seemed a living part of it
all. He was magnificent and enormous, but the devil take me if I know
how."

"He said nothing--that referred to it directly?"

"Nothing but what I've told you,--blundering awkwardly with those few
modern words. But he had it in him a thousand to my one. He made me feel
I was right and natural, untrue to myself to suppress it and a coward to
fear it. The speech-center in the brain, you know, is anyhow a
comparatively recent thing in evolution. They say that--"

"It wasn't his century either," I checked him again.

"No, and he didn't pretend it was, as I've tried to," he cried, sitting
bolt upright beside me. "The fellow was genuine, never dreamed of
compromise. D'ye see what I mean? Only somehow he'd found out where his
world and century were, and was off to take possession. And that's what
caught me. I felt it by some instinct in me stronger than all else; only
we couldn't talk about it definitely because--because--I hardly know how
to put it--for the same reason," he added suddenly, "that I can't talk
about it to you _now!_ There are no words.... What we both sought was a
state that passed away before words came into use, and is therefore
beyond intelligible description. No one spoke to them on the ship for
the same reason, I felt sure, that no one spoke to them in the whole
world--because no one could manage even the alphabet of their language.

"And this was so strange and beautiful," he went on, "that standing
there beside him, in his splendid atmosphere, the currents of wind and
sea reached _me through him first_, filtered by his spirit so that I
assimilated them and they fed me, because he somehow stood in such close
and direct relation to Nature. I slipped into my own region, made happy
and alive, knowing at last what I wanted, though still unable to phrase
it. This modern world I've so long tried to adjust myself to became a
thing of pale remembrance and a dream...."

"All in your mind and imagination, of course, this," I ventured,
seeing that his poetry was luring him beyond where I could follow.

"Of course," he answered without impatience, grown suddenly thoughtful,
less excited again, "and that's why it was true. No chance of clumsy
senses deceiving one. It was direct vision. What is Reality, in the last
resort," he asked, "but the thing a man's vision brings to him--to
believe? There's no other criterion. The criticism of opposite types
of mind is merely a confession of their own limitations."

Being myself of the "opposite type of mind," I naturally did not argue,
but suffered myself to accept his half-truth for the whole--temporarily.
I checked him from time to time merely lest he should go too fast for me
to follow what seemed a very wonderful tale of faerie.

"So this wild thing in me the world today has beggared and denied," he
went on, swept by his Celtic enthusiasm, "woke in its full strength.
Calling to me like some flying spirit in a storm, it claimed me. The
man's being summoned me back to the earth and Nature, as it were,
automatically. I understood that look on his face, that sign in his eyes.
The 'Isles of Greece' furnished some faint clue, but as yet I knew no
more--only that he and I were in the same region and that I meant to
go with him and that he accepted me with delight that was joy. It drew
me as empty space draws a giddy man to the precipice's edge. Thoughts
from another's mind," he added by way of explanation, turning round,
"come far more completely to me when I stand in a man's atmosphere,
silent and receptive, than when by speech he tries to place them there.
Ah! And that helps me to get at what I mean, perhaps. The man, you
see, hardly thought; he _felt_."

"As an animal, you mean? Instinctively--?"

"In a sense, yes," he replied after a momentary hesitation. "Like some
very early, very primitive form of life."

"With the best will in the world, Terence, I don't quite follow you--"

"I don't quite follow myself," he cried, "because I'm trying to lead
and follow at the same time. You know that idea--I came across it
somewhere--that in ancient peoples the senses were much less specialized
than they are now; that perception came to them in general, massive
sensations rather than divided up neatly into five channels:--that they
felt all over so to speak, and that all the senses, as in an overdose of
hashish, become one single sense? The centralizing of perception in the
brain is a recent thing, and it might equally well have occurred in any
other nervous headquarters of the body, say, the solar plexus; or,
perhaps, never have been localized at all! In hysteria patients have been
known to read with the finger-tips and smell with the heel. Touch is
still all over; it's only the other four that have got fixed in definite
organs. There are systems of thought today that still would make the
solar plexus the main center, and not the brain. The word 'brain,' you
know, never once occurs in the ancient Scriptures of the world. You will
not find it in the Bible--the reins, the heart, and so forth were what
men felt with then. They felt all over--well," he concluded abruptly, "I
think this fellow was like that. D'ye see now?"

I stared at him, greatly wondering. A nursemaid passed close, balancing a
child in a spring-perambulator, saying in a foolish voice, "Wupsey up,
wupsey down! Wupsey there!" O'Malley, in the full stream of his mood,
waited impatiently till she had gone by. Then, rolling over on his side,
he came closer, talking in a lowered tone. I think I never saw him so
deeply stirred, nor understood, perhaps, so little of the extreme
passion working in him. Yet it was incredible that he could have caught
so much from mere interviews with a semi-articulate stranger, unless
what he said was strictly true, and this Russian had positively touched
latent fires in his soul by a kind of sympathetic magic.

"You know," he went on almost under his breath, "every man who thinks for
himself and feels vividly finds he lives in a world of his own, apart,
and believes that one day he'll come across, either in a book or in a
person, the Priest who shall make it clear to him. Well--I'd found mine,
that's all. I can't prove it to you with a pair of scales or a butcher's
meat-axe, but it's true."

"And you mean his mere presence conveyed all this without speech almost?"

"Because there _was_ no speech possible," he replied, dropping his voice
to a whisper and thrusting his face yet closer into mine. "We were
solitary survivors of a world whose language was either uncreated or"--he
italicized the word--"_forgotten_...."

"An elaborate and detailed thought-transference, then?"

"Why not?" he murmured. "It's one of the commonest facts of daily life."

"And you had never fully realized it before, this loneliness and its
possible explanation--that there might exist, I mean, a way of satisfying
it--till you met this stranger?"

He answered with deep earnestness. "Always, old man, always, but suffered
under it atrociously because I'd never understood it. I had been afraid
to face it. This man, a far bigger and less diluted example of it than
myself, made it all clear and right and natural. We belonged to the same
forgotten place and time. Under his lead and guidance I could find my
own--return...."

I whistled a long soft whistle, looking up into the sky. Then, sitting
upright like himself, we stared hard at one another, straight in the eye.
He was too grave, too serious to trifle with. It would have been unfair
too. Besides, I loved to hear him. The way he reared such fabulous
superstructures upon slight incidents, interpreting thus his complex
being to himself, was uncommonly interesting. It was observing the
creative imagination actually at work, and the process in a sense seemed
sacred. Only the truth and actuality with which he clothed it all made
me a little uncomfortable sometimes.

"I'll put it to you quite simply," he cried suddenly.

"Yes, and 'quite simply' it was--?"

"That he knew the awful spiritual loneliness of living in a world whose
tastes and interests were not his own, a world to which he was
essentially foreign, and at whose hands he suffered continual rebuff and
rejection. Advances from either side were mutually and necessarily
repelled because oil and water cannot mix. Rejected, moreover, not
merely by a family, tribe, or nation, but by a race and time--by the
whole World of Today; an outcast and an alien, a desolate survival."

"An appalling picture!"

"I understood it," he went on, holding up both hands by way of emphasis,
"because in miniature I had suffered the same: he was a supreme case of
what lay so deeply in myself. He was a survival of other life the modern
mind has long since agreed to exile and deny. Humanity stared at him over
a barrier, never dreaming of asking him in. Even had it done so he could
not by the law of his being have accepted. Outcast myself in some small
way, I understood his terrible loneliness, a soul without a country,
visible and external country that is. A passion of tenderness and
sympathy for him, and so also for myself, awoke. I saw him as chieftain
of all the lonely, exiled souls of life."

Breathless a moment, he lay on his back staring at the summer
clouds--those thoughts of wind that change and pass before their meanings
can be quite seized. Similarly protean was the thought his phrases tried
to clothe. The terror, pathos, sadness of this big idea he strove to
express touched me deeply, yet never quite with the clarity of his own
conviction.

"There _are_ such souls, _dépaysées_ and in exile," he said suddenly
again, turning over on the grass. "They _do_ exist. They walk the earth
today here and there in the bodies of ordinary men ... and their
loneliness is a loneliness that must be whispered."

"You formed any idea what kind of--of survival?" I asked gently, for
the notion grew in me that after all these two would prove to be mere
revolutionaries in escape, political refugees, or something quite
ordinary.

O'Malley buried his face in his hands for a moment without replying.
Presently he looked up. I remember that a streak of London black ran
from the corner of his mouth across the cheek. He pushed the hair back
from his forehead, answering in a manner grown abruptly calm and
dispassionate.

"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."




VII


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.

It may have been--O'Malley wondered without actually asking--that
the man who shared the cabin with the strangers made some appeal for
re-arrangement, but in any case Captain Burgenfelder approached the
Irishman that afternoon on the bridge and asked if he would object
to having them in his stateroom for the balance of the voyage.

"Your present gompanion geds off at Naples," he said. "Berhaps you would
not object. I think--they seem lonely. You are friendly with them. They
go alzo to Batoum?"

This proposal for close quarters gave him pause. He knew a moment or two
of grave hesitation, yet without time to analyze it. Then, driven by a
sudden decision of the heart that knew no revision of reason, he agreed.

"I had better, perhaps, suggest it to see if they are willing," he said
the next minute, hedging.

"I already ask him dat."

"Oh, you have! And he would like it--not object, I mean?" he added, aware
of a subtle sense of half-frightened pleasure.

"Pleased and flattered on the contrary," was the reply, as he handed him
the glasses to look at Ischia rising blue from the sea.

O'Malley felt as though his decision was somehow an act of
self-committal, almost grave. It meant that impulsively he accepted a
friendship which concealed in its immense attraction--danger. He had
taken the plunge.

The rush of it broke over him like a wave, setting free a tumult of very
deep emotion. He raised the glasses automatically to his eyes, but
looking through them he saw not Ischia nor the opening the Captain
explained the ship would make, heading that evening for Sicily. He saw
quite another picture that drew itself up out of himself--was thrown
up, rather, somewhat with violence, as upon a landscape of dream-scenery.
The lens of passionate yearning in himself, ever unsatisfied, focused
it against a background far, far away, in some faint distance that was
neither of space nor time, and might equally have been past as future.
Large figures he saw, shadowy yet splendid, that ran free-moving as
clouds over mighty hills, vital with the abundant strong life of a
younger world.... Yet never quite saw them, never quite overtook them,
for their speed and the manner of their motion bewildered the sight....

Moreover, though they evaded him in terms of physical definition he knew
a sense of curious, half-remembered familiarity. Some portion of his
hidden self, uncaught, unharnessed by anything in modern life, rose with
a passionate rush of joy and made after them--something in him untamed as
wind. His mind stood up, as it were, and shouted "I am coming." For he
saw himself not far behind, as a man, racing with great leaps to join
them ... yet never overtaking, never drawing close enough to see quite
clearly. The roar of their tramping shook the very blood in his ears....

His decision to accept the strangers had set free in his being something
that thus for the first time in his life--escaped.... Symbolically
in his mind this Escape had taken picture form....

The Captain's voice was asking for the glasses; with a wrench that
caused almost actual physical pain he tore himself away, letting this
herd of Flying Thoughts sink back into the shadows and disappear. With
sharp regret he saw them go--a regret for long, long, far-off things....

Turning, he placed the field-glasses carefully in that fat open hand
stretched out to receive them, and noted as he did so the thick, pink
fingers that closed about the strap, the heavy ring of gold, the band of
gilt about the sleeve. That wrought gold, those fleshy fingers, the
genial gutteral voice saying "T'anks" were symbols of an existence tamed
and artificial that caged him in again....

Then he went below and found that the lazy "drummer" who talked
harvest-machines to puzzled peasants had landed, and in his place an
assortment of indiscriminate clothing belonging to the big Russian and
his son lay scattered over the upper berth and upon the sofa-bed beneath
the port-hole.




VIII

"For my own part I find in some of these abnormal or supernormal facts
the strongest suggestions in favor of a superior consciousness being
possible. I doubt whether we shall ever understand some of them without
using the very letter of Fechner's conception of a great reservoir in
which the memories of earth's inhabitants are pooled and preserved, and
from which, when the threshold lowers or the valve opens, information
ordinarily shut out leaks into the mind of exceptional individuals among
us."

--WILLIAM JAMES, _A Pluralistic Universe_


And it was some hours later, while the ship made for the open sea, that
he told Dr. Stahl casually of the new arrangement and saw the change come
so suddenly across his face. Stahl stood back from the compass-box
whereon they leaned, and putting a hand upon his companion's shoulder,
looked a moment into his eyes. With surprise O'Malley noted that the pose
of cynical disbelief was gone; in its place was sympathy, interest,
kindness. The words he spoke came from his heart.

"Is that true?" he asked, as though the news disturbed him.

"Of course. Why not? Is there anything wrong?" He felt uneasy. The
doctor's manner confirmed the sense that he had done a rash thing.
Instantly the barrier between the two crumbled and he lost the first
feeling of resentment that his friends should be analyzed. The men thus
came together in unhindered sincerity.

"Only," said the doctor thoughtfully, half gravely, "that--I may have
done you a wrong, placed you, that is, in a position of--" he hesitated
an instant,--"of difficulty. It was I who suggested the change."

O'Malley stared at him.

"I don't understand you quite."

"It is this," continued the other, still holding him with his eyes. He
said it deliberately. "I have known you for some time, formed-er--an
opinion of your type of mind and being--a very rare and curious one,
interesting me deeply--"

"I wasn't aware you'd had me under the microscope," O'Malley laughed, but
restlessly.

"Though you felt it and resented it--justly, I may say--to the point of
sometimes avoiding me--"

"As doctor, scientist," put in O'Malley, while the other, ignoring the
interruption, continued in German:--

"I always had the secret hope, as 'doctor and scientist,' let us put it
then, that I might one day see you in circumstances that should bring
out certain latent characteristics I thought I divined in you. I wished
to observe you--your psychical being--under the stress of certain
temptations, favorable to these characteristics. Our brief voyages
together, though they have so kindly ripened our acquaintance into
friendship"--he put his hand again on the other's shoulder smiling,
while O'Malley replied with a little nod of agreement--"have, of course,
never provided the opportunity I refer to--"

"Ah--!"

"Until now!" the doctor added. "Until now."

Puzzled and interested the Irishman waited for him to go on, but the
man of science, who was now a ship's doctor, hesitated. He found it
difficult, apparently, to say what was in his thoughts.

"You refer, of course, though I hardly follow you quite--to our big
friends?" O'Malley helped him.

The adjective slipped out before he was aware of it. His companion's
expression admitted the accuracy of the remark. "You also see them--big,
then?" he said, quickly taking him up. He was not cross-questioning;
out of keen sympathetic interest he asked it.

"Sometimes, yes," the Irishman answered, more astonished. "Sometimes
only--"

"Exactly. Bigger than they really are; as though at times they gave
out--emanated--something that extended their appearance. Is that it?"

O'Malley, his confidence wholly won, more surprised, too, than he quite
understood, seized Stahl by the arm and drew him toward the rails. They
leaned over, watching the sea. A passenger, pacing the decks before
dinner, passed close behind them.

"But, doctor," he said in a hushed tone as soon as the steps had died
away, "you are saying things that I thought were half in my imagination
only, not true in the ordinary sense quite--your sense, I mean?"

For some moments the doctor made no reply. In his eyes a curious
steady gaze replaced the usual twinkle. When at length he spoke it was
evidently following a train of thought of his own, playing round a
subject he seemed half ashamed of and yet desired to state with direct
language.

"A being akin to yourself," he said in low tones, "only developed,
enormously developed; a Master in your own peculiar region, and a man
whose influence acting upon you at close quarters could not fail to
arouse the latent mind-storms"--he chose the word hesitatingly, as
though seeking for a better he could not find on the moment,--"always
brewing in you just below the horizon."

He turned and watched his companion's face keenly. O'Malley was too
impressed to feel annoyance.

"Well--?" he asked, feeling the adventure closing round him with quite a
new sense of reality. "Well?" he repeated louder. "Please go on. I'm not
offended, only uncommonly interested. You leave me in a fog, so far. I
think you owe me more than hints."

"I do," said the other simply. "About that man is a singular quality
too rare for language to have yet coined its precise description:
something that is essentially"--they had lapsed into German now, and he
used the German word--"_unheimlich_."

The Irishman started. He recognized this for truth. At the same time
the old resentment stirred a little in him, creeping into his reply.

"You have studied him closely then--had him, too, under the microscope?
In this short time?"

This time the answer did not surprise him, however.

"My friend," he heard, while the other turned from him and gazed out over
the misty sea, "I have not been a ship's doctor--always. I am one now
only because the leisure and quiet give me the opportunity to finish
certain work, recording work. For years I was in the H----"--he mentioned
the German equivalent for the Salpêtrière--"years of research and
investigation into the astonishing vagaries of the human mind and
spirit--with certain results, followed later privately, that it is now my
work to record. And among many cases that might well seem--er--beyond
either credence or explanation,"--he hesitated again slightly--"I came
across one, one in a million, let us admit, that an entire section of my
work deals with under the generic term of _Urmenschen_."

"Primitive men," O'Malley snapped him up, translating. Through his
growing bewilderment ran also a growing uneasiness shot strangely
with delight. Intuitively he divined what was coming.

"Beings," the doctor corrected him, "not men. The prefix _Ur-_, moreover,
I use in a deeper sense than is usually attached to it as in _Urwald_,
_Urwelt_, and the like. An _Urmensch_ in the world today must suggest a
survival of an almost incredible kind--a kind, too, utterly inadmissible
and inexplicable to the materialist perhaps--"

"Paganistic?" interrupted the other sharply, joy and fright rising over
him.

"Older, older by far," was the rejoinder, given with a curious hush and a
lowering of the voice.

The suggestion rushed into full possession of O'Malley's mind. There rose
in him something that claimed for his companions the sea, the wind, the
stars--tumultuous and terrific. But he said nothing. The conception,
blown into him thus for the first time at full strength, took all his
life into its keeping. No energy was left over for mere words. The
doctor, he was aware, was looking at him, the passion of discovery and
belief in his eyes. His manner kindled. It was the hidden Stahl emerging.

"... a type, let me put it," he went on in a voice whose very steadiness
thrilled his listener afresh, "that in its strongest development would
experience in the world today the loneliness of a complete and absolute
exile. A return to humanity, you see, of some unexpended power of
mythological values...."

"Doctor...!"

The shudder passed through him and away almost as soon as it came. Again
the sea grew splendid, the thunder of the waves held voices calling, and
the foam framed shapes and faces, wildly seductive, though fugitive as
dreams. The words he had heard moved him profoundly. He remembered how
the presence of the stranger had turned the world alive.

He knew what was coming, too, and gave the lead direct, while yet
half afraid to ask the question.

"So my friend--this big 'Russian'--?"

"I have known before, yes, and carefully studied."




IX

"Is it not just possible that there is a mode of being as much
transcending Intelligence and Will as these transcend mechanical
motion?"

--HERBERT SPENCER, _First Principles_


The two men left the rail and walked arm in arm along the deserted deck,
speaking in lowered voices.

"He came first to us, brought by the keeper of an obscure hotel where he
was staying, as a case of lapse of memory--loss of memory, I should say,
for it was complete. He was unable to say who he was, whence he came, or
to whom he belonged. Of his land or people we could learn nothing. His
antecedents were an utter blank. Speech he had practically none of his
own--nothing but the merest smattering of many tongues, a word here, a
word there. Utterance, indeed, of any kind was exceedingly difficult to
him. For years, evidently, he had wandered over the world, companionless
among men, seeking his own, finding no place where to lay his head.
People, it seemed, both men and women, kept him at arm's-length, feeling
afraid; the keeper of the little hotel was clearly terrified. This
quality he had that I mentioned just now, repelled human beings--even in
the Hospital it was noticeable--and placed him in the midst of humanity
thus absolutely alone. It is a quality more rare than"--hesitating,
searching for a word--"purity, one almost extinct today, one that I have
never before or since come across in any other being--hardly ever, that
is to say," he qualified the sentence, glancing significantly at his
companion.

"And the boy?" O'Malley asked quickly, anxious to avoid any discussion
of himself.

"There was no boy then. He has found him since. He may find others
too--possibly!" The Irishman drew his arm out, edging away imperceptibly.
That shiver of joy reached him from the air and sea, perhaps.

"And two years ago," continued Dr. Stahl, as if nothing had happened,
"he was discharged, harmless"--he lingered a moment on the word, "if not
cured. He was to report to us every six months. He has never done so."

"You think he remembers you?"

"No. It is quite clear that he has lapsed back completely again into
the--er--state whence he came to us, that unknown world where he
passed his youth with others of his kind, but of which he has been able
to reveal no single detail to us, nor we to trace the slightest clue."

They stopped beneath the covered portion of the deck, for the mist
had now turned to rain. They leaned against the smoking-room outer
wall. In O'Malley's mind the thoughts and feelings plunged and reared.
Only with difficulty did he control himself.

"And this man, you think," he asked with outward calmness, "is of--of
my kind?"

"'Akin,' I said. I suggest--" But O'Malley cut him short.

"So that you engineered our sharing a cabin with a view to putting
him again--putting us both--under the microscope?"

"My scientific interest was very strong," Dr. Stahl replied carefully.
"But it is not too late to change. I offer you a bed in my own roomy
cabin on the promenade deck. Also, I ask your forgiveness."

The Irishman, large though his imaginative creed was, felt oddly checked,
baffled, stupefied by what he had heard. He knew perfectly well what
Stahl was driving at, and that revelations of another kind were yet
to follow. What bereft him of very definite speech was this new fact
slowly awakening in his consciousness which hypnotized him, as it were,
with its grandeur. It seemed to portend that his own primitive yearnings,
so-called, grew out of far deeper foundations than he had yet dreamed
of even. Stahl, should he choose to listen, meant to give him
explanation, quasi-scientific explanation. This talk about a survival of
"unexpended mythological values" carried him off his feet. He knew it was
true. Veiled behind that carefully chosen phrase was something more--a
truth brilliantly discovered. He knew, too, that it bit at the
platform-boards upon which his personality, his sanity, his very life,
perhaps, rested--his modern life.

"I forgive you, Dr. Stahl," he heard himself saying with a deceptive
calmness of voice as they stood shoulder to shoulder in that dark corner,
"for there is really nothing to forgive. The characteristics of these
_Urmenschen_ you describe attract me very greatly. Your words merely give
my imagination a letter of introduction to my reason. They burrow
among the foundations of my life and being. At least--you have done
me no wrong...." He knew the words were wild, impulsive, yet he could
find no better. Above all things he wished to conceal his rising, grand
delight.

"I thank you," Stahl said simply, yet with a certain confusion. "I--felt
I owed you this explanation--er--this confession."

"You wished to warn me?"

"I wished to say 'Be careful' rather. I say it now--Be careful! I give
you this invitation to share my cabin for the remainder of the voyage,
and I urge you to accept it." The offer was from the heart, while the
scientific interest in the man obviously half hoped for a refusal.

"You think harm might come to me?"

"Not physically. The man is gentle and safe in every way."

"But there _is_ danger--in your opinion?" insisted the other.

"There _is_ danger--"

"That his influence may make me as himself--an _Urmensch_?"

"That he may--get you," was the curious answer, given steadily after
a moment's pause.

Again the words thrilled O'Malley to the core of his delighted,
half-frightened soul. "You really mean that?" he asked again; "as 'doctor
and scientist,' you mean it?"

Stahl replied with a solemn anxiety in eyes and voice. "I mean that you
have in yourself that 'quality' which makes the proximity of this 'being'
dangerous: in a word that he may take you--er--with him."

"Conversion?"

"Appropriation."

They moved further up the deck together for some minutes in silence, but
the Irishman's feelings, irritated by the man's prolonged evasion,
reached a degree of impatience that was almost anger. "Let us be more
definite," he exclaimed at length a trifle hotly. "You mean that I might
go insane?"

"Not in the ordinary sense," came the answer without a sign of annoyance
or hesitation; "but that something might happen to you--something that
science could not recognize and medical science could not treat--"

Then O'Malley interrupted him with the vital question that rushed
out before he could consider its wisdom or legitimacy.

"Then what really is he--this man, this 'being' whom you call a
'survival,' and who makes you fear for my safety. Tell me _exactly_ what
he is?"

They found themselves just then by the doctor's cabin, and Stahl,
pushing the door open, led him in. Taking the sofa for himself, he
pointed to an armchair opposite.




X

"Superstition is outside reason; so is revelation."

--OLD SAYING


And O'Malley understood that he had pressed the doctor to the verge of
confessing some belief that he was ashamed to utter or to hold, something
forced upon him by his out-of-the-way experience of life to which his
scientific training said peremptorily "No." Further, that he watched him
keenly all the time, noting the effect his words produced.

"He is not a human being at all," he continued with a queer thin whisper
that conveyed a gravity of conviction singularly impressive, "in the
sense in which you and I are accustomed to use the term. His inner being
is not shaped, as his outer body, upon quite--human lines. He is a Cosmic
Being--a direct expression of cosmic life. A little bit, a fragment, of
the Soul of the World, and in that sense a survival--a survival of her
youth."

The Irishman, as he listened to these utterly unexpected words, felt
something rise within him that threatened to tear him asunder. Whether
it was joy or terror, or compounded strangely of the two, he could not
tell. It seemed as if he stood upon the edge of hearing something--spoken
by a man who was no mere dreamer like himself--that would explain the
world, himself, and all his wildest cravings. He both longed and feared
to hear it. In his hidden and most secret thoughts, those thoughts he
never uttered to another, this deep belief in the Earth as a conscious,
sentient, living Being had persisted in spite of all the forces education
and modern life had turned against it. It seemed in him an undying
instinct, an unmovable conviction, though he hardly dared acknowledge it
even to himself.

He had always "dreamed" the Earth alive, a mothering organism to
humanity; and himself, _via_ his love of Nature, in some sweet close
relation to her that other men had forgotten or ignored. Now, therefore,
to hear Stahl talk of Cosmic Beings, fragments of the Soul of the World,
and "survivals of her early life" was like hearing a great shout of
command to his soul to come forth and share it in complete
acknowledgment.

He bit his lips, pinched himself, stared. Then he took the black cigar he
was aware was being handed to him, lit it with fingers that trembled
absurdly, and smoked as hard as though his sanity depended on his
finishing it in a prescribed time. Great clouds rose before his face. But
his soul within him came up with a flaming rush of speed, shouting,
singing....

There was enough ash to knock off into the bronze tray beside him before
either said a word. He watched the little operation as closely as though
he were aiming a rifle. The ash, he saw, broke firmly. "This must be a
really good cigar," he thought to himself, for as yet he had not been
conscious of tasting it. The ash-tray, he also saw, was a kind of nymph,
her spread drapery forming the receptacle. "I must get one of those," he
thought. "I wonder what they cost." Then he puffed violently again. The
doctor had risen and was pacing the cabin floor slowly over by the red
curtain that concealed the bunk. O'Malley absent-mindedly watched
him, and as he did so the words he had heard kept on roaring at the
back of his mind.

And then, while silence still held the room,--swift, too, as a second
although it takes time to write--flashed through him a memory of Fechner,
the German philosopher who held that the Universe was everywhere
consciously alive, and that the Earth was the body of a living Entity,
and that the World-Soul or Cosmic Consciousness is something more than a
picturesque dream of the ancients....

The doctor came to anchor again on the sofa opposite. To his great relief
he was the first to break the silence, for O'Malley simply did not know
how or where to begin.

"We know today--_you_ certainly know for I've read it accurately
described in your books--that the human personality can extend itself
under certain conditions called abnormal. It can project portions of
itself, show itself even at a distance, operate away from the central
covering body. In exactly similar fashion may the Being of the Earth
have projected portions of herself in the past. Of such great powers or
beings there may be conceivably a survival ... a survival of a hugely
remote period when her Consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in
shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing
humanity ... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a
flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all
sorts and kinds...."

And then, suddenly, as though he had been deliberately giving his
imagination rein yet now regretted it, his voice altered, his manner
assumed a shade of something colder. He shifted the key, as though to
another aspect of his belief. The man was talking swiftly of his
experiences in the big and private hospitals. He was describing _the_
very belief to which he had first found himself driven--the belief that
had opened the door to so much more. So far as O'Malley could follow it
in his curiously excited condition of mind, it was little more or less
than a belief he himself had often played lovingly with--the theory that
a man has a fluid or etheric counterpart of himself which is obedient to
strong desire and can, under certain conditions, be detached--projected
in a shape dictated by that desire.

He only realized this fully later perhaps, for the doctor used a
phraseology of his own. Stahl was telling calmly how he had been driven
to some such belief by the facts that had come under his notice both
in the asylums and in his private practice.

"...That in the amazingly complex personality of a human being," he went
on, "there does exist some vital constituent, a part of consciousness,
that can leave the body for a short time without involving death; that it
is something occasionally visible to others; something malleable by
thought and desire--especially by intense and prolonged yearning; and
that it can even bring relief to its owner by satisfying in some
subjective fashion the very yearnings that drew it forth."

"Doctor! You mean the 'astral'?"

"There is no name I know of. I can give it none. I mean in other words
that it can create the conditions for such satisfaction--dream-like,
perhaps, yet intense and seemingly very real at the time. Great emotion,
for instance, drives it forth, explaining thus appearances at a distance,
and a hundred other phenomena that my investigations of abnormal
personality have forced me to recognize as true. And nostalgia often is
the means of egress, the channel along which all the inner forces and
desires of the heart stream elsewhere toward their fulfillment in some
person, place, or _dream_."

Stahl was giving himself his head, talking freely of beliefs that rarely
found utterance. Clearly it was a relief to him to do so--to let himself
be carried away. There was, after all, the poet in him side by side with
the observer and analyst, and the fundamental contradiction in his
character stood most interestingly revealed. O'Malley listened, half in a
dream, wondering what this had to do with the Cosmic Life just mentioned.

"Moreover, the appearance, the aspect of this etheric Double, molded
thus by thought, longing, and desire, corresponds to such thought,
longing, and desire. Its shape, when visible shape is assumed, may be
various--very various. The form might conceivably be _felt_, discerned
clairvoyantly as an emanation rather than actually seen," he continued.

Then he added, looking closely at his companion, "and in your own case
this Double--it has always seemed to me--may be peculiarly easy of
detachment from the rest of you."

"I certainly create my own world and slip into it--to some extent,"
murmured the Irishman, absorbingly interested; "--reverie and so forth;
partially, at any rate."

"'Partially,' yes, in your reveries of waking consciousness," Stahl took
him up, "but in sleep--in the trance consciousness--completely! And
therein lies your danger," he added gravely; "for to pass out completely
in _waking_ consciousness, is the next step--an easy one; and it
constitutes, not so much a disorder of your being, as a readjustment, but
a readjustment difficult of sane control." He paused again. "You pass out
while fully awake--a waking delusion. It is usually labeled--though in my
opinion wrongly so--insanity."

"I'm not afraid of that," O'Malley laughed, almost nettled. "I can manage
myself all right--have done so far, at any rate."

It was curious how the rôles had shifted. O'Malley it was now who checked
and criticized.

"I suggest caution," was the reply, made earnestly. "I suggest caution."

"I should keep your warnings for mediums, clairvoyants, and the like,"
said the other tartly. He was half amazed, half alarmed even while he
said it. It was the personal application that annoyed him. "They are
rather apt to go off their heads, I believe."

Dr. Stahl rose and stood before him as though the words had given
him a cue he wanted. "From that very medium-class," he said, "my most
suggestive 'cases' have come, though not for one moment do I think of
including you with them. Yet these very 'cases' have been due one and
all to the same cause--the singular disorder I have just mentioned."

They stared at one another a moment in silence. Stahl, whether O'Malley
liked it or no, was impressive. He gazed at the little figure in front of
him, the ragged untidy beard, the light shining on the bald skull,
wondering what was coming next and what all this bewildering confession
of unorthodox belief was leading up to. He longed to hear more about that
hinted Cosmic Life ... and how yearning might lead to its realization.

"For any phenomena of the séance-room that may be genuine," he heard him
saying, "are produced by this fluid, detachable portion of the
personality, the very thing we have been speaking about. They are
projections of the personality--automatic projections of the
consciousness."

And then, like a clap of thunder upon his bewildered mind, came this
man's amazing ultimatum, linking together all the points touched upon and
bringing them to a head. He repeated it emphatically.

"And in similar fashion," concluded the calm, dispassionate voice
beside him, "there have been projections of the Earth's great
consciousness--direct expressions of her cosmic life--Cosmic Beings. And
of these distant and primitive manifestations, it is conceivable that
one or two may still--here and there in places humanity has never
stained--actually survive. This man is one of them."

He turned on the two electric lights behind him with an admirable air of
finality. The extraordinary talk was at an end. He moved about the cabin,
putting chairs straight and toying with the papers on his desk.
Occasionally he threw a swift and searching glance at his companion,
like a man who wished to note the effect of an attack.

For, indeed, this was the impression that his listener retained above
all else. This flood of wild, unorthodox, speculative ideas had been
poured upon him helter-skelter with a purpose. And the abruptness of
the climax was cleverly planned to induce impulsive, hot confession.

But O'Malley found no words. He sat there in his armchair, passing
his fingers through his tumbled hair. His inner turmoil was too much
for speech or questions ... and presently, when the gong for dinner
rang noisily outside the cabin door, he rose abruptly and went out
without a single word. Stahl turned to see him go. He merely nodded
with a little smile.

But he did not go to his stateroom. He walked the deck alone for a
time, and when he reached the dining room, Stahl, he saw, had already
come and gone. Halfway down the table, diagonally across, the face of
the big Russian looked up occasionally at him and smiled, and every
time he did so the Irishman felt a sense of mingled alarm and wonder
greater than anything he had ever known in his life before. One of the
great doors of life again had opened. The barriers of his heart broke
away. He was no longer caged and manacled within the prison of a puny
individuality. The world that so distressed him faded. The people in it
were dolls. The fur-merchant, the Armenian priest, the tourists and the
rest were mere automatic puppets, all made to scale--petty scale,
amazingly dull, all exactly alike--tiny, unreal, half alive.

The ship, meanwhile, he reflected with a joy that was passion, was
being borne over the blue sea, and this sea lay spread upon the curved
breast of the round and spinning earth. He, too, and the big Russian
lay upon her breast, held close by gravity so-called, caught closer
still, though, by something else besides. And his longings increased with
his understanding. Stahl, wittingly or unwittingly, had given them an
immense push forwards.




XI

"In scientific terms one can say: Consciousness is everywhere; it is
awake when and wherever the bodily energy underlying the spiritual
exceeds that degree of strength which we call the threshold. According to
this, consciousness can be localized in time and space."

--FECHNER, _Buchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode_


The offer of the cabin, meanwhile, remained open. In the solitude that
O'Malley found necessary that evening he toyed with it, though knowing
that he would never really accept.

Like a true Celt his imagination took the main body of Stahl's words and
ensouled them with his own vivid temperament. There stirred in him this
nameless and disquieting joy that wrought for itself a Body from material
just beyond his thoughts--that region of enormous experience that ever
fringes the consciousness of imaginative men. He took the picture at its
face value, took it inside with his own thoughts, delighted in it, raised
it, of course, very soon to a still higher scale. If he criticized at all
it was with phrases like "The man's a poet after all! Why, he's got
creative imagination!" To find his own intuitions endorsed, even half
explained, by a mind of opposite type was a new experience. It emphasized
amazingly the reality of that inner world he lived in.

This explanation of the big Russian's effect upon himself was terrific,
and that a "doctor" should have conceived it, glorious. That some
portion of a man's spirit might assume the shape of his thoughts and
project itself visibly seemed likely enough. Indeed, to him, it seemed
already a "fact," and his temperament did not linger over it. But that
other suggestion fairly savaged him with its strange grandeur. He played
lovingly with it.

That the Earth was a living being was a conception divine in size as in
simplicity, and that the Gods and mythological figures had been
projections of her consciousness--this thought ran with a magnificent
new thunder about his mind. It was overwhelming, beautiful as Heaven
and as gracious. He saw the ancient shapes of myth and legend still alive
in some gorgeous garden of the primal world, a corner too remote for
humanity to have yet stained it with their trail of uglier life. He
understood in quite a new way, at last, those deep primitive longings
that hitherto had vainly craved their full acknowledgment. It meant that
he lay so close to the Earth that he felt her pulses as his own. The idea
stormed his belief.

It was the Soul of the Earth herself that all these years had been
calling to him.

And while he let his imagination play with the soaring beauty of the
idea, he remembered certain odd little facts. He marshaled them before
him in a row and questioned them: The picture he had seen with the
Captain's glasses--those speeding shapes of beauty; the new aspect of
a living Nature that the Russian's presence stirred in him; the man's
broken words as they had leaned above the sea in the dusk; the curious
passion that leaped to his eyes when certain chance words had touched
him at the dinner-table. And, lastly, the singular impression of giant
bulk he produced sometimes upon the mind, almost as though a portion of
him--this detachable portion molded by the quality of his spirit as he
felt himself to be--emerged visibly to cause it.

Vaguely, in this way, O'Malley divined how inevitable was the apparent
isolation of these two, and why others instinctively avoided them. They
seemed by themselves in an enclosure where the parent lumberingly, and
the boy defiantly, disported themselves with a kind of lonely majesty
that forbade approach.

And it was later that same night, as the steamer approached the Lipari
Islands, that the drive forward he had received from the doctor's words
was increased by a succession of singular occurrences. At the same time,
Stahl's deliberate and as he deemed it unjustifiable interference, helped
him to make up his mind decisively on certain other points.

The first "occurrence" was of the same order as the "bigness"--
extraordinarily difficult, that is, to confirm by actual measurement.

It was ten o'clock, Stahl still apparently in his cabin by himself, and
most of the passengers below at an impromptu concert, when the Irishman,
coming down from his long solitude, caught sight of the Russian and his
boy moving about the dark after-deck with a speed and vigor that
instantly arrested his attention. The suggestion of size, and of rapidity
of movement, had never been more marked. It was as though a cloud of the
summer darkness moved beside them.

Then, going cautiously nearer, he saw that they were neither walking
quickly, nor running, as he had first supposed, but--to his
amazement--were standing side by side upon the deck--stock still. The
appearance of motion, however, was not entirely a delusion, for he next
saw that, while standing there steady as the mast and life-boats behind
them, something emanated shadow-like from both their persons and seemed
to hover and play about them--something that was only approximately
of their own outer shapes, and very considerably larger. Now it veiled
them, now left them clear. He thought of smoke-clouds moving to and
fro about dark statues.

So far as he could focus his sight upon them, these "shadows," without
any light to cast them, moved in distorted guise there on the deck with a
motion that was somehow rhythmical--a great movement as of dance or
gambol.

As with the appearance of "bigness," he perceived it first out of the
corner of his eye. When he looked again he saw only two dark figures,
motionless.

He experienced the sensation a man sometimes knows on entering a deserted
chamber in the nighttime, and is aware that the things in it have just
that instant--stopped. His arrival puts abrupt end to some busy activity
they were engaged in, which begins again the moment he goes. Chairs,
tables, cupboards, the very spots and patterns of the wall have just
flown back to their usual places whence they watch impatiently for his
departure--with the candle.

This time, on a deck instead of in a room, O'Malley with his candle had
surprised them in the act: people, moreover, not furniture. And this
shadowy gambol, this silent Dance of the Emanations, immense yet
graceful, made him think of Winds flying, visible and uncloaked,
somewhere across long hills, or of Clouds passing to a stately, elemental
measure over the blue dancing-halls of an open sky. His imagery was
confused and gigantic, yet very splendid. Again he recalled the pictured
shapes seen with his mind's eye through the Captain's glasses. And as
he watched, he felt in himself what he called "the wild, tearing instinct
to run and join them," more even--that by rights he ought to have
been there from the beginning--dancing with them--indulging a natural and
instinctive and rhythmical movement that he had somehow forgotten.

The passion in him was very strong, very urgent, it seems, for he took
a step forward, a call of some kind rose in his throat, and in another
second he would have been similarly cavorting upon the deck, when he
felt his arm clutched suddenly with vigor from behind. Some one seized
him and held him back. A German voice spoke with a guttural whisper
in his ear.

Dr. Stahl, crouching and visibly excited, drew him forward a little.
"Hold up!" he heard whispered--for their India rubber soles slithered
on the wet decks. "We shall see from here, eh? See something at last?"
He still whispered. O'Malley's sudden anger died down. He could not
give vent to it without making noise, for one thing, and above all else
he wished to--see. He merely felt a vague wonder how long Stahl had
been watching.

They crouched behind the lee of a boat. The outline of the ship rose,
distinctly visible against the starry sky, masts, spars, and cordage. A
faint gleam came through the glass below the compass-box. The wheel and
the heaps of coiled rope beyond rose and fell with the motion of the
vessel, now against the stars, now black against the phosphorescent foam
that trailed along the sea like shining lace. But the human figures, he
next saw, were now doing nothing, not even pacing the deck; they were
no longer of unusual size either. Quietly leaning over the rail, father
and son side by side, they were guiltless of anything more uncommon
than gazing into the sea. Like the furniture, they had just--stopped!

Dr. Stahl and his companion waited motionless for several minutes in
silence. There was no sound but the dull thunder of the screws, and
a faint windy whistle the ship's speed made in the rigging. The
passengers were all below. Then, suddenly, a burst of music came up as
some one opened a saloon port-hole and as quickly closed it again--a
tenor voice singing to the piano some trivial modern song with a trashy
sentimental lilt. It was--in this setting of sea and sky--painful;
O'Malley caught himself thinking of a barrel-organ in a Greek temple.

The same instant father and son, as though startled, moved slowly away
down the deck into the further darkness, and Dr. Stahl tightened his grip
of the Irishman's arm with a force that almost made him cry out. A gleam
of light from the opened port-hole had fallen about them before they
moved. Quite clearly it revealed them bending busily over, heads close
together, necks and shoulders thrust forward and down a little.

"Look, by God!" whispered Stahl hoarsely as they moved off. "There's
a third!"

He pointed. Where the two had been standing something, indeed, still
remained. Concealed hitherto by their bulk, this other figure had been
left. They saw its large, dim outline. It moved. Apparently it began
to climb over the rails, or to move in some way just outside them,
hanging half above the sea. There was a free, swaying movement about
it, not ungainly so much as big--very big.

"Now, quick!" whispered the doctor excited, in English; "this time I find
out, sure!"

He made a violent movement forward, a pocket electric lamp in his hand,
then turned angrily, furiously, to find that O'Malley held him fast.
There was a most unseemly struggle--for a minute, and it was caused by
the younger man's sudden passionate instinct to protect his own from
discovery, if not from actual capture and destruction.

Stahl fought in vain, being easily overmatched; he swore vehement German
oaths under his breath; and the pocket-lamp, of course unlighted, fell
and rattled over the deck, sliding with the gentle roll of the steamer to
leeward. But O'Malley's eyes, even while he struggled, never for one
instant left the spot where the figure and the "movement" had been; and
it seemed to him that when the bulwarks dipped against the dark of the
sea, the moving thing completed its efforts and passed into the waves
with a swift leap. When the vessel righted herself again the outline of
the rail was clear.

Dr. Stahl, he then saw, had picked up the lamp and was bending over
some mark upon the deck, examining a wide splash of wet upon which
he directed the electric flash. The sense of revived antagonism between
the men for the moment was strong, too strong for speech. O'Malley
feeling half ashamed, yet realized that his action had been instinctive,
and that another time he would do just the same. He would fight to the
death any too close inspection, since such inspection included also
now--himself.

The doctor presently looked up. His eyes shone keenly in the gleam
of the lamp, but he was no longer agitated.

"There is too much water," he said calmly, as though diagnosing a case;
"too much to permit of definite traces." He glanced round, flashing the
beam about the decks. The other two had disappeared. They were alone. "It
was outside the rail all the time, you see," he added, "and never quite
reached the decks." He stooped down and examined the splash once more. It
looked as though a wave had topped the scuppers and left a running line
of foam and water. "Nothing to indicate its exact nature," he said in a
whisper that conveyed something between uneasiness and awe, again turning
the light sharply in every direction and peering about him. "It came to
them--er--from the sea, though; it came from the sea right enough. That,
at least, is positive." And in his manner was perhaps just a touch to
indicate relief.

"And it returned into the sea," exclaimed O'Malley triumphantly. It
was as though he related his own escape.

The two men were now standing upright, facing one another. Dr. Stahl,
betraying no sign of resentment, looked him steadily in the eye. He put
the lamp back into his pocket. When he spoke at length in the darkness,
the words were not precisely what the Irishman had expected. Under them
his own vexation and excitement faded instantly. He felt almost sheepish
when he remembered his violence.

"I forgive your behavior, of course," Stahl said, "for it is
consistent--splendidly consistent--with my theory of you; and of value,
therefore. I only now urge you again"--he moved closer, speaking almost
solemnly--"to accept the offer of a berth in my cabin. Take it, my
friend, take it--tonight."

"Because you wish to watch me at close quarters."

"No," was the reply, and there was sympathy in the voice, "but because
you are in danger--especially in sleep."

There was a moment's pause before O'Malley said anything.

"It is kind of you, Dr. Stahl, very kind," he answered slowly, and this
time with grave politeness; "but I am not afraid, and I see no reason to
make the change. And as it's now late," he added somewhat abruptly,
almost as though he feared he might be persuaded to alter his mind, "I
will say good-night and turn in--if you will forgive me--at once."

Dr. Stahl said no further word. He watched him, the other was aware, as
he moved down the deck toward the saloon staircase, and then turned once
more with his lamp to stoop over the splashed portion of the boards. He
examined the place apparently for a long time.

But O'Malley, as he went slowly down the hot and stuffy stairs, realized
with a wild and rushing tumult of joy that the "third" he had seen was of
a splendor surpassing the little figures of men, and that something deep
within his own soul was most gloriously akin with it. A link with the
Universe had been subconsciously established, tightened up, adjusted.
From all this living Nature breathing about him in the night, a message
had reached the strangers and himself--a message shaped in beauty and in
power. Nature had become at last aware of his presence close against her
ancient face. Henceforth would every sight of Beauty take him direct to
the place where Beauty comes from. No middleman, no Art was necessary.
The gates were opening. Already he had caught a glimpse.




XII

In the stateroom he found, without surprise somehow, that his new
companions had already retired for the night. The curtain of the upper
berth was drawn, and on the sofa-bed below the opened port-hole the
boy already slept. Standing a moment in the little room with these two
close, he felt that he had come into a new existence almost. Deep within
him this sense of new life thrilled and glowed. He was shaking a little
all over, not with the mere tremor of excitement, however, but with the
tide of a vast and rising exultation he could scarce contain. For his
normal self was too small to hold it. It demanded expansion, and the
expansion it claimed had already begun. The boundaries of his personality
were enormously extending.

In words this change escaped him wholly. He only knew that something
in him of an old unrest lay down at length and slept. Less acute grew
those pangs of starvation his life had ever felt--the ache of that
inappeasable hunger for the beauty and innocence of some primal state
before thick human crowds had stained the world with all their strife
and clamor. The glory of it burned white within him.

And the way he described it to himself was significant of its true
nature. For it vans the analogy of childhood. The passion of a boy's
longing swept over him. He knew again the feelings of those early days
when--

A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,

--when all the world smells sweet and golden as a summer's day, and a
village street is endless as the sky....

This it was, raised to its highest power, that dropped a hint of
explanation into that queer heart of his wherein had ever burned the
strange desire for primitive existence. It was the Call, though, not of
his own youth alone, but of the youth of the world. A mood of the Earth's
consciousness--some giant expression of her cosmic emotion--caught
him. And it was the big Russian who acted as channel and interpreter.

Before getting into bed, he drew aside the little red curtain that
screened his companion, and peered cautiously through the narrow slit.
The big occupant of the bunk also slept, his mane-like hair spread about
him over the pillow, and on his great, placid face a look of peace that
seemed to deepen with every day the steamer neared her destination.
O'Malley gazed for a full minute and more. Then the sleeper felt the
gaze, for suddenly the eyelids quivered, moved, and lifted. The large
brown eyes peered straight into his own. The Irishman, unable to turn
away in time, stood fixed and staring in return. The gentleness and power
of the look passed straight down into his heart, filled him to the brim
with things their owner knew, and confirmed that appeasement of his
own hunger, already begun.

"I tried--to prevent the--interference," he stammered in a low voice.
"I held him back. You saw me?"

A huge hand stretched forth from the bunk to stop him. Impulsively he
seized it with both his own. At the first contact he started--a little
frightened. It felt so wonderful, so mighty. Thus might a gust of wind
or a billow of the sea have thrust against him.

"A messenger--came," said the man with that laborious slow utterance, and
deep as thunder, "from--the--sea."

"From--the--sea, yes," repeated O'Malley beneath his breath, yet
conscious rather that he wanted to shout and sing it. He saw the big
man smile. His own small hands were crushed in the grasp of power.
"I--understand," he added in a whisper. He found himself speaking with
a similar clogged utterance. Somehow, it seemed, the language they
ought to have used was either forgotten or unborn. Yet whereas his friend
was inarticulate perhaps, he himself was--dumb. These little modern
words were all wrong and inadequate. Modern speech could only deal
with modern smaller things.

The giant half rose in his bed, as though at first to leap forward and
away from it. He tightened an instant the grasp upon his companion's
hands, then suddenly released them and pointed across the cabin. That
smile of happiness spread upon his face. O'Malley turned. There the
boy lay, deeply slumbering, the clothes flung back so that the air from
the port-hole played over the bare neck and chest; upon his face, too,
shone the look of peace and rest his father wore, the hunted expression
all gone, as though the spirit had escaped in sleep. The parent pointed,
first to the boy, then to himself, then to this new friend standing
beside his bed. The gesture including the three of them was of singular
authority--invitation, welcome, and command lay in it. More--in some
incomprehensible way it was majestic. O'Malley's thought flashed upon
him the limb of some great oak tree, swaying in the wind.

Next, placing a finger on his lips, his eyes once more swept O'Malley
and the boy, and he turned again into the little bunk that so difficultly
held him, and lay back. The hair flowed down and mingled with the beard,
over pillow and neck, almost to the shoulders. And something that was
enormous and magnificent lay back with him, carrying with it again that
sudden atmosphere of greater bulk. With a deep sound in his throat that
was certainly no actual word and yet more expressive than any speech, he
turned hugely over among the little, scanty sheets, drew the curtain
again before his face, and returned into the world of--sleep.




XIII

"It may happen that the earthly body falls asleep in one direction deeply
enough to allow it in others to awaken far beyond its usual limits, and
yet not so deeply and completely as to awaken no more. Or, to the
subjective vision there comes a flash so unusually vivid as to bring to
the earthly sense an impression rising above the threshold from an
otherwise inaccessible distance. Here begin the wonders of clairvoyance,
of presentiments, and premonitions in dreams;--pure fables, if the future
body and the future life are fables; otherwise signs of the one and
predictions of the other; but what has signs exists, and what has
prophecies will come."

--FECHNER, _Buchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode_


But O'Malley rolled into his own berth below without undressing, sleep
far from his eyes. He had heard the Gates of ivory and horn swing softly
upon their opening hinges, and the glimpse he caught of the garden beyond
made any question of slumber impossible. Again he saw those shapes of
cloud and wind flying over the long hills, while the name that should
describe them ran, hauntingly splendid, along the mysterious passages of
his being, though never coming quite to the surface for capture.

Perhaps, too, he was glad that the revelation was only partial. The
size of the vision thus invoked awed him a little, so that he lay there
half wondering at the complete surrender he had made to this guidance
of another soul.

Stahl's warnings ran far away and laughed. The idea even came to him that
Stahl was playing with him: that his portentous words had been carefully
chosen for their heightening effect upon his own imagination so that the
doctor might study an uncommon and extreme "case." The notion passed
through him merely, without lingering.

In any event it was idle to put the brakes on now. He was internally
committed and must go wherever it might lead. And the thought rejoiced
him. He had climbed upon a pendulum that swung into an immense past; but
its return swing would bring him safely back. It was rushing now into
that nameless place of freedom that the primitive portion of his being
had hitherto sought in vain, and a fundamental, starved craving of his
life would know satisfaction at last. Already life had grown all glorious
without. It was not steel engines but a speeding sense of beauty that
drove the ship over the sea with feet of winged blue darkness. The stars
fled with them across the sky, dropping golden leashes to draw him faster
and faster forwards--yet within--to the dim days when this old world yet
was young. He took his fire of youth and spread it, as it were, all over
life till it covered the entire world, far, far away. Then he stepped
back into it, and the world herself, he found, stepped with him.

He lay listening to the noises of the ship, the thump and bumble of
the engines, the distant droning of the screws under water. From time
to time stewards moved down the corridor outside, and the footsteps
of some late passenger still paced the decks overhead. He heard voices,
too, and occasionally the clattering of doors. Once or twice he fancied
some one moved stealthily to the cabin door and lingered there, but the
matter never drew him to investigate, for the sound each time resolved
itself naturally into the music of the ship's noises.

And everything, meanwhile, heard or thought, fed the central concern
upon which his mind was busy. These superficial sounds, for instance,
had nothing to do with the real business of the ship; _that_ lay below
with the buried engines and the invisible screws that worked like demons
to bring her into port. And with himself and his slumbering companions
the case was similar. Their respective power-stations, working in the
subconscious, had urged them toward one another inevitably. How long, he
wondered, had the spirit of that lonely, alien "being" flashed messages
into the void that reached no receiving-station tuned to their
acceptance? Their accumulated power was great, the currents they
generated immense. He knew. For had they not charged full into himself
the instant he came on board, bringing an intimacy that was immediate
and full-fledged?

The untamed longings that always tore him when he felt the great winds,
moved through forests, or found himself in desolate places, were at last
on the high road to satisfaction--to some "state" where all that they
represented would be explained and fulfilled. And whether such "state"
should prove to be upon the solid surface of the earth, objective; or in
the fluid regions of his inner being, subjective--was of no account
whatever. It would be true. The great figure that filled the berth above
him, now deeply slumbering, had in him subterraneans that gave access
not only to Greece, but far beyond that haunted land, to a state of
existence symbolized in the legends of the early world by Eden and the
Golden Age....

"You are in danger," that wise old speculative doctor had whispered,
"and especially in sleep!" But he did not sleep. He lay there thinking,
thinking, thinking, a rising exaltation of desire paving busily the path
along which eventually he might escape.

As the night advanced and the lesser noises retired, leaving only the
deep sound of the steamer talking to the sea, he became aware, too, that
a change, at first imperceptibly, then swiftly, was stealing over the
cabin. It came with a riot of silent Beauty. At a loss to describe it
with precision, he nevertheless divined that it proceeded from the
sleeping figure overhead and in a lesser pleasure, too, from the boy upon
the sofa opposite. It emanated from these two, he felt, in proportion as
their bodies passed into deeper and deeper slumber, as though what
occurred sometimes upon the decks by an act of direct volition, took
place now automatically and with a fuller measure of release. Their
spirits, free of that other world in sleep, were alert and potently
discharging. Unconsciously, their vital, underlying essence escaped into
activity.

Growing about his own person, next, it softly folded him in, casing
his inner being with glory and this crowding sense of beauty. This
increased manifestation of psychic activity reached down into the very
core of himself, like invisible fingers playing upon an instrument.
Notes--powers--in his soul, hitherto silent because none had known how
to sound them, rose singing to the surface. For it seemed at length that
forms of some intenser life, busily operating, moved to and fro within
the painted white walls of that little cabin, working subtly to bring
about a transformation of himself. A singular change was fast and
cleverly at work in his own being. It was, he puts it, a silent and
irresistible Evocation.

No one of his senses was directly affected; certainly he neither saw,
felt, nor heard anything in the usual acceptance of the terms; but any
instant surely, it seemed that all his senses must awake and report to
the mind things that were splendid beyond the common order. In the
crudest aspect of it, he felt as though he extended and grew large--that
he dreaded to see himself in the mirror lest he might witness an external
appearance of bigness which corresponded to this interior expansion.

For a long time he lay unresisting, letting the currents of this
subjective tempest play through and round him. Entrancing sensations of
beauty and rapture came with it. The outer world seemed remote and
trivial, the passengers unreal--the priest, the voluble merchant, the
jovial Captain, all spun like dead things at the periphery of life;
whereas he was moving toward the Center. Stahl--! the thought of Dr.
Stahl, alone intruded with a certain unwelcome air of hindrance, almost
as though he sought to end it, or call a halt. But Stahl, too, himself
presently spun off like a leaf before the rising wind...

And then it was that an external sense was tapped, and he did hear
something. From the berth overhead came a faint sound that made his
heart stand still, though not with common fear. He listened intently.
The blood tearing through his ears at first concealed its actual nature.
It was far, far away; then came closer, as a waft of wind brings near and
carries off again a sound of bells in mountains. It fled over vales and
hills, to return a moment after with suddenness--a little louder, a
little nearer. And with it came an increase of this sense of beauty that
stretched his heart, as it were, to some deep ancient scale of joy once
known, but long forgotten...

Across the cabin, the boy moved uneasily in his sleep.

"Oh, that I could be with him where he now is!" he cried, "in that
place of eternal youth and eternal companionship!" The cry was
instinctive utterly; his whole being, condensed in the single yearning,
pressed through it--drove behind it. The place, the companionship, the
youth--all, he knew, would prove in some strange way enormous, vast,
ultimately satisfying forever and ever, far out of this little modern
world that imprisoned him...

Again, most unwelcome and unexplained, the face of Stahl flashed
suddenly before him to hinder and interrupt. He banished it with
an effort, for it brought a smaller comprehension that somehow
involved--fear.

"Curse the man!" flamed in anger across his world of beauty, and the
violence of the contrast broke something in his mind like a globe of
colored glass that had focused the exquisiteness of the vision.... The
sound continued as before, but its power of evocation lessened. The
thought of Stahl--Stahl in his denying aspect--dimmed it.

Glancing up at the frosted electric light, O'Malley felt vaguely that
if he turned it out he would somehow yet see better, hear better,
understand more; and it was this practical consideration, introduced
indirectly by the thought of Stahl, that made him realize now for the
first time that he actually and definitely was--afraid. For, to leave his
bunk with its comparative, protective dark, and step into the middle of
a cabin he knew to be alive with a seethe of invisible charging forces,
made him realize that distinct effort was necessary--effort of will. If
he yielded he would be caught up and away, swept from his known moorings,
borne through high space out of himself. And Stahl with his cowardly
warnings and belittlements set fear, thus, in the place of free
acceptance. Otherwise he might even have come to these long blue hills
where danced and raced the giant shapes of cloud, singing while....

"Singing!" Ah! There was the clue! The sound he heard was singing--faint,
low singing; close beside him too. It was the big man, singing softly in
his sleep.

This ordinary explanation of the "wonder-sound" brought him down to
earth, and so to a more normal feeling of security again. He stepped
cautiously from the bed, careful not to let the rings rattle on the rod
of brass, and slowly raised himself upright. And then, through a slit of
the curtain, he--saw. The lips of the big sleeper moved gently, the beard
rising and falling very slightly with them, and this murmur that he had
thought so far away, came out and sang deliriously and faint before his
very face. It most curiously--flowed. Easily, naturally, almost
automatically, it poured softly forth, and the Irishman at once
understood why he had first mistaken it for an echo of wind from distant
hills. The imagery was entirely accurate. For it was precisely the
singing cry that wind makes in a keyhole, in a chimney, or passing idly
over the sweep of grassy hills. Exactly thus had he often listened to it
swishing through the crannies of high rocks, tuneless yet searching. In
it, too, there lay some accent of a secret, dim sublimity, deeper far
than any other human sound could touch. The terror of a great freedom
caught him, a freedom most awfully remote from the smaller personal
existence he knew Today ... for it suggested, with awe and wonder, the
kind of primitive utterance that was before speech or the development of
language; when emotions were still too vague and mighty to be caught by
little words, but when beings, close to the heart of their great Mother,
expressed the feelings, enormous and uncomplex, of the greater life they
shared as portions of her--projections of the Earth herself.

With a crash in his brain, O'Malley stopped. These thoughts, he suddenly
realized, were not his own. An attack of unwonted sensations stung and
scattered his mind with a rush of giant splendor that threatened to
overwhelm him. He was in the very act of being carried away; his sense of
personal identity menaced; surrender well-nigh already complete.

Another moment, especially if those eyes opened and caught him, and he
would be beyond recall in the region of these other two. The narrow space
of that little cabin was charged already to the brim, filled with some
overpowering loveliness of wild and simple things, the beauty of stars
and winds and flowers, the terror of seas and mountains; strange radiant
forms of gods and heroes, nymphs, fauns and satyrs; the fierce sunshine
of some Golden Age unspoiled, of a stainless region now long forgotten
and denied--that world of splendor his heart had ever craved in vain, and
beside which the life of Today faded to a wretched dream.

It was the _Urwelt_ calling....

With a violent internal effort, he tore his gaze from those eyelids that
fortunately opened not. At the same moment, though he did not hear them,
steps came close in the corridor, and there was a rattling of the knob.
Behind him, a movement from the berth below the port-hole warned him that
he was but just in time. The Vision he was afraid as yet to acknowledge
drew with such awful speed toward the climax.

Quickly he turned away, lifted the hook of the cabin door, and passed
into the passage, strangely faint. A great commotion followed him out:
father and son both, it seemed, suddenly upon their feet. And at the
same time the sound of "singing" rolled into the body of a great hushed
chorus, as it were of galloping winds that filled big valleys far away
with a gust of splendor, faintly roaring in some incredible distance
where no cities were, nor habitations of men; with a freedom, too, that
was majestic and sublime. Oh! the terrific gait of that life in an open
world!--Golden to the winds!--uncrowded!--The cosmic life--!

O'Malley shivered as he heard. For an instant, the true grain of his
inner life, picked out in flame and silver, flashed clear. Almost--he
knew himself caught back.

And there, in the dimly-lighted corridor, against the paneling of the
cabin wall, crouched Dr. Stahl--listening. The pain of the contrast was
vivid beyond words. It seemed as if he had passed from the thunder of
organs to hear the rattling of tin cans. Instantly he understood the
force that all along had held him back: the positive, denying aspect of
this man's mind--afraid.

"_You!_" he exclaimed in a high whisper. "What are _you_ doing here?"
He hardly remembers what he said. The doctor straightened up and came on
tiptoe to his side. He moved hurriedly.

"Come away," he said vehemently under his breath. "Come with me to my
cabin--to the decks--anywhere away from this--before it's too late."

And the Irishman then realized that his face was white and that his
voice shook. The hand that gripped him by the arm shook too.

They went quickly along the deserted corridor and up the stairs,
O'Malley making no resistance, moving in a kind of dream. He has a
fleeting recollection of an odor, sweet and slightly pungent as of
horses, in his nostrils. The wind of the open decks revived him, and he
saw to his amazement that the East was brightening. In that cabin, then,
hours had been compressed into minutes.

The steamer had already slipped by the Straits of Messina. To the right
he saw the cones of Etna, shadowy in the sky, calling across the dawn to
Stromboli their smoking brother of the Lipari. To the left over the blue
Ionian Sea the lights of a cloudless sunrise rose softly above the world.

And the hour of enchantment seized and shook him anew. Somewhere, across
those faint blue waves, lay the things that he so passionately sought. It
was the very essence of their loveliness and wonder that had charged down
between the walls of that stuffy cabin below. For every morning still, at
dawn, the tired world knows again the splendors of her youth; and the
Irishman, shuddering a little in his sacred joy, felt that he must burst
his bonds and fly to join the sunrise and the sea. The yearning, he was
aware, had now increased a thousandfold: its fulfillment was merely
delayed.

He passed along the decks all slippery with dew into Dr. Stahl's cabin,
and flung himself on the broad sofa to sleep. Sleep, too, came at once;
he was profoundly exhausted; and, while he slept, Stahl watched over him,
covering his body with a thick blanket.




XIV

"It is a lovely imagination responding to the deepest desires, instincts,
cravings of spiritual man, that spiritual rapture should find an echo in
the material world; that in mental communion with God we should find
sensible communion with nature; and that, when the faithful rejoice
together, bird and beast, hill and forest, should be not felt only, but
seen to rejoice along with them. It is not the truth; between us and our
environment, whatever links there are, this link is wanting. But the
yearning for it, the passion which made Wordsworth cry out for something,
even were it the imagination of a pagan which would make him 'less
forlorn,' is natural to man; and simplicity leaps at the lovely fiction
of a response. Just here is the opportunity for such alliances between
spiritualism and superstition as are the daily despair of seekers
after truth."

--Dr. VERRALL


And though he slept for hours the doctor never once left his side, but
sat there with pencil and notebook, striving to catch, yet in vain, some
accurate record of the strange fragmentary words that fell from his lips
at intervals. His own face was aflame with an interest that amounted to
excitement. The very hand that held the pencil trembled. One would have
said that thus somewhat a man might behave who found himself faced with
confirmation of some vast, speculative theory his mind had played with
hitherto from a distance only.

Toward noon the Irishman awoke. The steamer, still loading oranges and
sacks of sulfur in the Catania harbor, was dusty and noisy. Most of the
passengers were ashore, hurrying with guidebooks and field-glasses to see
the statue of the dead Bellini or watch the lava flow. A blazing,
suffocating heat lay over the oily sea, and the summit of the volcano,
with its tiny, ever-changing puff of smoke, soared through blue haze.

To Stahl's remark, "You've slept eight hours," he replied, "But I feel as
though I'd slept eight centuries away." He took the coffee and rolls
provided, and then smoked. The doctor lit a cigar. The red curtains over
the port-holes shut out the fierce sun, leaving the cabin cool and dim.
The shouting of the lightermen and officers mingled with the roar and
scuttle of the donkey-engine. And O'Malley knew perfectly well that while
the other moved about carelessly, playing with books and papers on his
desk, he was all the time keeping him under close observation.

"Yes," he continued, half to himself, "I feel as if I'd fallen asleep in
one world and awakened into another where life is trivial and
insignificant, where men work like devils for things of no value in order
to accumulate them in great ugly houses; always collecting and
collecting, like mad children, possessions that they never really
possess--things external to themselves, valueless and unreal--"

Dr. Stahl came up quietly and sat down beside him. He spoke gently,
his manner kind and grave rather. He put a hand upon his shoulder.

"But, my dear boy," he said, the critical mood all melted away, "do
not let yourself go too completely. That is vicious thinking, believe me.
All details are important--here and now--spiritually important, if you
prefer the term. The symbols change with the ages, that is all." Then, as
the other did not reply, he added: "Keep yourself well in hand. Your
experience is of extraordinary interest--may even be of value, to
yourself as well as to--er--others. And what happened to you last night
is worthy of record--if you can use it without surrendering your soul to
it altogether. Perhaps, later, you will feel able to speak of it--to tell
me in detail a little--?"

His keen desire to know more evidently fought with his desire to protect,
to heal, possibly even to prevent.

"If I felt sure that your control were sufficient, I could tell you in
return some results of my own study of--certain cases in the hospitals,
you see, that might throw light upon--upon your own curious experience."

O'Malley turned with such abruptness that the cigar ash fell down
over his clothes. The bait was strong, but the man's sympathy was not
sufficiently of a piece, he felt, to win his entire confidence.

"I cannot discuss beliefs," he said shortly, "in the speculative way you
do. They are too real. A man doesn't argue about his love, does he?" He
spoke passionately. "Today everybody argues, discusses, speculates: no
one believes. If you had your way, you'd take away my beliefs and put in
their place some wretched little formula of science that the next
generation will prove all wrong again. It's like the N rays one of you
discovered: they never really existed at all." He laughed. Then his
flushed face turned grave again. "Beliefs are deeper than discoveries.
They are eternal."

Stahl looked at him a moment with admiration. He moved across the cabin
toward his desk.

"I am more with you than perhaps you understand," he said quietly, yet
without too obviously humoring him. "I am more--divided, that's all."

"Modern!" exclaimed the other, noticing the ashes on his coat for
the first time and brushing them off impatiently. "Everything in you
expresses itself in terms of matter, forgetting that matter being in
continual state of flux is the least real of all things--"

"Our training has been different," observed Stahl simply, interrupting
him. "I use another phraseology. Fundamentally, we are not so far
apart as you think. Our conversation of yesterday proves it, if you have
not forgotten. It is people like yourself who supply the material that
teaches people like me--helps me to advance--to speculate, though
you dislike the term."

The Irishman was mollified, though for some time he continued in the same
strain. And the doctor let him talk, realizing that his emotion needed
the relief of this safety-valve. He used words loosely, but Stahl did not
check him; it was merely that the effort to express himself--this self
that could believe so much--found difficulty in doing so coherently in
modern language. He went very far. For the fact that while Stahl
criticized and denied, he yet understood, was a strong incentive
to talk. O'Malley plunged repeatedly over his depth, and each time the
doctor helped him in to shore.

"Perhaps," said Stahl at length in a pause, "the greatest difference
between us is merely that whereas you jump headlong, ignoring details
by the way, I climb slowly, counting the steps and making them secure.
I deny at first because if the steps survive such denial, I know that
they are permanent. I build scaffolding. You fly."

"Flight is quicker," put in the Irishman.

"It is for the few," was the reply; "scaffolding is for all."

"You spoke a few days ago of strange things," O'Malley said presently
with abruptness, "and spoke seriously too. Tell me more about that, if
you will." He sought to lead the talk away from himself, since he did
not intend to be fully drawn. "You said something about the theory that
the Earth is alive, a living being, and that the early legendary forms of
life may have been emanations--projections of herself--detached portions
of her consciousness--or something of the sort. Tell me about that
theory. Can there be really men who are thus children of the earth,
fruit of pure passion--Cosmic Beings as you hinted? It interests me
deeply."

Dr. Stahl appeared to hesitate.

"It is not new to me, of course," pursued the other, "but I should like
to know more."

Stahl still seemed irresolute. "It is true," he replied at length slowly,
"that in an unguarded moment I let drop certain observations. It is
better you should consider them unsaid perhaps: forget them."

"And why, pray?"

The answer was well calculated to whet his appetite.

"Because," answered the doctor, bending over to him as he crossed over to
his side, "they are dangerous thoughts to play with, dangerous to the
interests of humanity in its present state today, unsettling to the soul,
shaking the foundations of sane consciousness." He looked hard at him.
"Your own mind," he added softly, "appears to me to be already on their
track. Whether you are aware of it or not, you have in you that kind of
very passionate desire--of yearning--which might reconstruct them and
make them come true--for yourself--if you get out."

O'Malley, his eyes shining, looked up into his face.

"'Reconstruct--make them come true--if I get out'!" he repeated
stammeringly, fearful that if he appeared too eager the other would stop.
"You mean, of course, that this Double in me would escape and build
its own heaven?"

Stahl nodded darkly. "Driven forth by your intense desire." After a
pause he added, "The process already begun in you would complete
itself."

Ah! So obviously what the doctor wanted was a description of his
sensations in that haunted cabin.

"Temporarily?" asked the Irishman under his breath.

The other did not answer for a moment. O'Malley repeated the question.

"Temporarily," said Stahl, turning away again toward his desk,
"unless--the yearning were too strong."

"In which case--?"

"Permanently. For it would draw the entire personality with it...."

"The soul?"

Stahl was bending over his books and papers. The answer was barely
audible.

"Death," was the whispered word that floated across the heavy air of
that little sun-baked cabin.

The word if spoken at all was so softly spoken that the Irishman
scarcely knew whether he actually heard it, or whether it was uttered by
his own thought. He only realized--catching some vivid current from
the other man's mind--that this separation of a vital portion of himself
that Stahl hinted at might involve a kind of nameless inner catastrophe
which should mean the loss of his personality as it existed today--an
idea, however, that held no terror for him if it meant at the same time
the recovery of what he so passionately sought.

And another intuition flashed upon its heels--namely, that this
extraordinary doctor spoke of something he knew as a certainty; that
his amazing belief, though paraded as theory, was to him more than
theory. Had he himself undergone some experience that he dared not
speak of, and were his words based upon a personal experience instead
of, as he pretended, merely upon the observation of others? Was this a
result of his study of the big man two years ago? Was this the true
explanation of his being no longer an assistant at the H--hospital,
but only a ship's doctor? Had this "modern" man, after all, a flaming
volcano of ancient and splendid belief in him, akin to what was in
himself, yet ever fighting it?

Thoughts raced and thundered through his mind as he watched him across
the cigar smoke. The rattling of that donkey-engine, the shouts of the
lightermen, the thuds of the sulfur-sacks--how ridiculous they all
sounded, the clatter of a futile, meaningless existence where men
gathered--rubbish, for mere bodies that lived amid dust a few years,
then returned to dust forever.

He sprang from his sofa and crossed over to the doctor's side. Stahl
was still bending over a littered desk.

"You, too," he cried, and though trying to say it loud, his voice could
only whisper, "you, too, must have the _Urmensch_ in your heart and
blood, for how else, by my soul, could you _know_ it all? Tell me,
doctor, tell me!" And he was on the very verge of adding, "Join us! Come
and join us!" when the little German turned his bald head slowly round
and fixed upon the excited Irishman such a cool and quenching stare that
instantly he felt himself convicted of foolishness, almost of
impertinence.

He dropped backwards into an armchair, and the doctor at the same moment
let himself down upon the revolving stool that was nailed to the floor in
front of the desk. His hands smoothed out papers. Then he leaned forward,
still holding his companion's eyes with that steady stare which forbade
familiarity.

"My friend," he said quietly in German, "you asked me just now to tell
you of the theory--Fechner's theory--that the Earth is a living,
conscious Being. If you care to listen, I will do so. We have time." He
glanced round at the shady cabin, took down a book from the shelf
before him, puffed his black cigar and began to read.

"It is from one of your own people--William James; what you call a
'Hibbert Lecture' at Manchester College. It gives you an idea, at least,
of what Fechner saw. It is better than my own words."

So Stahl, in his turn, refused to be "drawn." O'Malley, as soon as he
recovered from the abruptness of the change from that other conversation,
gave all his attention. The uneasy feeling that he was being played
with, coaxed as a specimen to the best possible point for the microscope,
passed away as the splendor of the vast and beautiful conception dawned
upon him, and shaped those nameless yearnings of his life in glowing
language.




XV


The shadows of the September afternoon were lengthening toward us from
the Round Pond by the time O'Malley reached this stage of his curious and
fascinating story. It was chilly under the trees, and the "wupsey-up,
wupsey-down" babies, as he termed them, had long since gone in to their
teas, or whatever it is that London babies take at six o'clock.

We strolled home together, and he welcomed the idea of sharing a dinner
we should cook ourselves in the tiny Knightsbridge flat. "Stewpot
evenings," he called these occasions. They reminded us of camping trips
together, although it must be confessed that in the cage-like room the
"stew" never tasted quite as it did beside running water on the skirts of
the forest when the dews were gathering on the little gleaming tent, and
the wood-smoke mingled with the scents of earth and leaves.

Passing that grotesque erection opposite the Albert Hall, gaudy in the
last touch of sunset, I saw him shudder. The spell of the ship and sea
and the blazing Sicilian sunshine lay still upon us, Etna's cones
towering beyond those gilded spikes of the tawdry Memorial. I stole a
glance at my companion. His light blue eyes shone, but with the
reflection of another sunset--the sunset of forgotten, ancient, far-off
scenes when the world was young.

His personality held something of magic in that silent stroll homewards,
for no word fell from either one of us to break its charm. The untidy
hair escaped from beneath the broad-brimmed old hat, and his faded coat
of grey flannel seemed touched with the shadows that the dusk brings
beneath wild-olive trees. I noticed the set of his ears, and how the
upper points of them ran so sharply into the hair. His walk was springy,
light, very quiet, suggesting that he moved on open turf where a sudden
running jump would land him, not into a motor-bus, but into a mossy
covert where ferns grew. There was a certain fling of the shoulders that
had an air of rejecting streets and houses. Some fancy, wild and sweet,
caught me of a faun passing down through underbrush of woodland glades to
drink at a forest pool; and, chance giving back to me a little verse of
Alice Corbin's, I turned and murmured it while watching him:

What dim Arcadian pastures
  Have I known,
That suddenly, out of nothing,
  A wind is blown,
Lifting a veil and a darkness,
  Showing a purple sea--
And under your hair, the faun's eyes
  Look out on me?

It was, of course, that whereas his body marched along Hill Street and
through Montpelier Square, his thoughts and spirit flitted through the
haunted, old-time garden he forever craved. I thought of the morrow--of
my desk in the Life Insurance Office, of the clerks with oiled hair
brushed back from the forehead, all exactly alike, trousers neatly turned
up to show fancy colored socks from bargain sales, their pockets full of
cheap cigarettes, their minds busy with painted actresses and the names
of horses! A Life Insurance Office! All London paying yearly sums to
protect themselves against--against the most interesting moment of
life. Premiums upon escape and freedom!

Again, it was the spell of my companion's personality that turned all
this paraphernalia of the busy, modern existence into the counters in
some grotesque and rather sordid game. Tomorrow, of course, it would
all turn real and earnest again, O'Malley's story a mere poetic fancy.
But for the moment I lived it with him, and found it magnificent.

And the talk we had that evening when the stew-pot was empty and we were
smoking on the narrow-ledged roof of the prison-house--for he always
begged for open air, and with cushions we often sat beneath the stars and
against the grimy chimney-pots--that talk I shall never forget. Life
became constructed all anew. The power of the greatest fairy tale this
world can ever know lay about me, raised to its highest expression. I
caught at least some touch of reality--of awful reality--in the idea that
this splendid globe whereon we perched like insects peeping timidly from
tiny cells, might be the body of a glorious Being--the mighty frame to
which some immense Collective Consciousness, vaster than that of men, and
wholly different in kind, might be attached.

In the story, as I found it later in the dusty little Paddington room,
O'Malley reported, somewhat heavily, it seemed to me, the excerpts
chosen by Dr. Stahl. As an imaginative essay, they were interesting, of
course, and vitally suggestive, but in a tale of adventure such as this
they overweight the barque of fancy. Yet, in order to appreciate what
followed, it seems necessary for the mind to steep itself in something of
his ideas. The reader who dreads to think, and likes his imagination to
soar unsupported, may perhaps dispense with the balance of this section;
but to be faithful to the scaffolding whereon this Irishman built his
amazing dream, I must attempt as best I can some précis of that
conversation.




XVI

"Every fragment of visible Nature might, as far as is known, serve as
part in some organism unlike our bodies.... As to that which can, and
that which cannot, play the part of an organism, we know very little. A
sameness greater or less with our own bodies is the basis from which we
conclude to other bodies and souls.... A certain likeness of outward
form, and again some amount of similarity in action, are what we stand on
when we argue to psychical life. But our failure, on the other side, to
discover these symptoms is no sufficient warrant for positive denial. It
is natural in this connection to refer to Fechner's vigorous advocacy."

--F.H. BRADLEY, _Appearance and Reality_


It was with an innate resistance--at least a stubborn prejudice--that
I heard him begin. The earth, of course, was but a bubble of dried fire,
a huge round clod, dead as mutton. How could it be, in any permissible
sense of the word--alive?

Then, gradually, as he talked there among the chimney-pots of old smoky
London, there stole over me this new and disquieting sense of reality--a
strange, vast splendor, too mighty to lie in the mind with comfort.
Laughter fled away, ashamed. A new beauty, as of some amazing dawn,
flashed and broke upon the world. The autumn sky overhead, thick-sown
with its myriad stars, came down close, sifting gold and fire about my
life's dull ways. That desk in the Insurance Office of Cornhill gleamed
beyond as an altar or a possible throne.

The glory of Fechner's immense speculation flamed about us both, majestic
yet divinely simple. Only a dim suggestion of it, of course, lay caught
in the words the Irishman used--words, as I found later, that were a
mixture of Professor James and Dr. Stahl, flavored strongly with Terence
O'Malley--but a suggestion potent enough to have haunted me ever since
and to have instilled meanings of stupendous divinity into all the
commonest things of daily existence. Mountains, seas, wide landscapes,
forests,--all I see now with emotions of wonder, delight, and awe unknown
to me before. Flowers, rain, wind, even a London fog, have come to hold
new meanings.

I never realized before that the mere _size_ of our old planet could
have hindered the perception of so fair a vision, or her mere
quantitative bulk have killed automatically in the mind the possible idea
of her being in some sense living. A microbe, endowed with our powers of
consciousness, might similarly deny life to the body of the elephant on
which it rode; or some wee arguing atom, endowed with mind and senses,
persuade itself that the monster upon whose flesh it dwelt were similarly
a "heavenly body" of dead, inert matter; the bulk of the "world" that
carried them obstructing their perception of its Life.

And Fechner, as it seems, was no mere dreamer, playing with a huge
poetical conception. Professor of Physics in Leipsic University, he found
time amid voluminous labors in chemistry to study electrical science
with the result that his measurements in galvanism are classic to this
day. His philosophical work was more than considerable. "A book on the
atomic theory, classic also; four elaborate mathematical and experimental
volumes on what he called psychophysics (many persons consider Fechner to
have practically founded scientific psychology in the first of these
books); a volume on organic evolution, and two works on experimental
æsthetics, in which again Fechner is thought by some judges to have laid
the foundations of a new science," are among his other performances....
"All Leipsic mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the
ideal German scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was
homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious slave to truth and
learning.... His mind was indeed one of those multitudinously organized
crossroads of truth which are occupied only at rare intervals by children
of men, and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen
in due perspective. Patientest observation, exactest mathematics,
shrewdest discrimination, humanest feeling, flourished in him on the
largest scale, with no apparent detriment to one another. He was in fact
a philosopher in the 'great' sense."

"Yes," said O'Malley softly in my ear as we leaned against the chimneys
and watched the tobacco curl up to the stars, "and it was this man's
imagination that had evidently caught old Stahl and bowled him over.
I never fathomed the doctor quite. His critical and imaginative apparatus
got a bit mixed up, I suspect, for one moment he cursed me for asking
'suspicious questions,' and the next sneered sarcastically at me for
boiling over with a sudden inspirational fancy of my own. He never
gave himself away completely, and left me to guess that he made that
Hospital place too hot to hold him. He was a wonderful bird. But every
time I aimed at him I shot wide and hit a cloud. Meantime he peppered
me all over--one minute urging me into closer intimacy with my
Russian--his cosmic being, his _Urmensch_ type--so that he might study
my destruction, and half an hour later doing his utmost apparently to
protect me from him and keep me sane and balanced." His laugh rang
out over the roofs.

"The net result," he added, his face tilted toward the stars as though
he said it to the open sky rather than to me, "was that he pushed me
forwards into the greatest adventure life has ever brought to me. I
believe, I verily believe that sometimes, there were moments of
unconsciousness--semi-consciousness perhaps--when I really did leave my
body--caught away as Moses, or was it Job or Paul?--into a Third Heaven,
where I touched a bit of Reality that fairly made me reel with happiness
and wonder."

"Well, but Fechner--and his great idea?" I brought him back.

He tossed his cigarette down into the back-garden that fringed the
Park, leaning over to watch its zigzag flight of flame.

"Is simply this," he replied, "--'that not alone the earth but the
whole Universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, is everywhere
alive and conscious.' He regards the spiritual as the rule in Nature, not
the exception. The professorial philosophers have no vision. Fechner
towers above them as a man of vision. He dared to imagine. He made
discoveries--whew!!" he whistled, "and such discoveries!"

"To which the scholars and professors of today," I suggested, "would
think reply not even called for?"

"Ah," he laughed, "the solemn-faced Intellectuals with their narrow
outlook, their atrophied vision, and their long words! Perhaps! But in
Fechner's universe there is room for every grade of spiritual being
between man and God. The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders
of body. He believes passionately in the Earth Soul, he treats her as our
special guardian angel; we can pray to the Earth as men pray to their
saints. The Earth has a Collective Consciousness. We rise upon the Earth
as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of her soil as leaves grow
from a tree. Sometimes we find our bigger life and realize that we are
parts of her bigger collective consciousness, but as a rule we are aware
only of our separateness, as individuals. These moments of cosmic
consciousness are rare. They come with love, sometimes with pain, music
may bring them too, but above all--landscape and the beauty of Nature!
Men are too petty, conceited, egoistic to welcome them, clinging for dear
life to their precious individualities."

He drew breath and then went on: "'Fechner likens our individual
persons on the earth to so many sense-organs of her soul, adding to
her perceptive life so long as our own life lasts. She absorbs our
perceptions, just as they occur, into her larger sphere of knowledge.
When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world were closed, for
all perceptive contributions from that particular quarter cease.'"

"Go on," I exclaimed, realizing that he was obviously quoting verbatim
fragments from James that he had since pondered over till they had
become his own, "Tell me more. It is delightful and very splendid."

"Yes," he said, "I'll go on quick enough, provided you promise me one
thing: and that is--to understand that Fechner does not regard the
Earth as a sort of big human being. If a being at all, she is a being
utterly different from us in kind, as of course we know she is in
structure. Planetary beings, as a class, would be totally different from
any other beings that we know. He merely protests at the presumption of
our insignificant human knowledge in denying some kind of life and
consciousness to a form so beautifully and marvelously organized as
that of the earth! The heavenly bodies, he holds, are beings superior to
men in the scale of life--a vaster order of intelligence altogether. A
little two-legged man with his cocksure reason strutting on its tiny
brain as the apex of attainment he ridicules. D'ye see, now?"

I gasped, I lit a big pipe--and listened. He went on. This time it was
clearly a page from that Hibbert Lecture Stahl had mentioned--the one
in which Professor James tries to give some idea of Fechner's aim and
scope, while admitting that he "inevitably does him miserable injustice
by summarizing and abridging him."

"Ages ago the earth was called an animal," I ventured. "We all know
that."

"But Fechner," he replied, "insists that a planet is a higher class of
being than either man or animal--'a being whose enormous size requires an
altogether different plan of life.'"

"An inhabitant of the ether--?"

"You've hit it," he replied eagerly. "Every element has its own living
denizens. Ether, then, also has hers--the globes. 'The ocean of ether,
whose waves are light, has also her denizens--higher by as much as
their element is higher, swimming without fins, flying without wings,
moving, immense and tranquil, as by a half-spiritual force through the
half-spiritual sea which they inhabit,' sensitive to the slightest pull
of one another's attraction: beings in every way superior to us. Any
imagination, you know," he added, "can play with the idea. It is old as
the hills. But this chap showed how and why it could be actually true."

"This superiority, though?" I queried. "I should have guessed their
stage of development lower than ours, rather than higher."

"Different," he answered, "different. That's the point."

"Ah!" I watched a shooting star dive across our thick, wet atmosphere,
and caught myself wondering whether the flash and heat of that hurrying
little visitor produced any reaction in this Collective Consciousness
of the huge Body whereon we perched and chattered, and upon which
later it would fall in finest dust.

"It is by insisting on the differences as well as on the resemblances,"
rushed on the excited O'Malley, "that he makes the picture of the earth's
life so concrete. Think a moment. For instance, our animal organization
comes from our inferiority. Our need of moving to and fro, of stretching
our limbs and bending our bodies, shows only our defect."

"Defect!" I cried. "But we're so proud of it!"

'"What are our legs,'" he laughed, "'but crutches, by means of which,
with restless efforts, we go hunting after the things we have not inside
ourselves? The Earth is no such cripple; why should she who already
possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue, have limbs
analogous to ours? What need has she of arms, with nothing to reach
for? Of a neck with no head to carry? Of eyes or nose, when she finds
her way through space without either, and has the millions of eyes of
all her animals to guide their movements on her surface, and all their
noses to smell the flowers she grows?'"

"We are literally a part of her, then--projections of her immense life,
as it were--one of the projections, at least?"

"Exactly. And just as we are ourselves a part of the earth," he
continued, taking up my thought at once, "so are our organs her organs.
'She is, as it were, eye and ear over her whole extent--all that we see
and hear in separation she sees and hears at once.'" He stood up beside
me and spread his hands out to the stars and over the trees and paths
of the Park at our feet, where the throngs of men and women walked
and talked together in the cool of the evening. His enthusiasm grew as
the idea of this German's towering imagination possessed him.

"'She brings forth living beings of countless kinds upon her surface,
and their multitudinous conscious relations with each other she takes
up into her higher and more general conscious life.'"

He leaned over the parapet and drew me to his side. I stared with him
at the reflection of London town in the sky, thinking of the glow and
heat and restless stir of the great city and of the frantic strivings of
its millions for success--money, power, fame, a few, here and there, for
spiritual success. The roar of its huge trafficking beat across the night
in ugly thunder to our ears. I thought of the other cities of the world;
of its villages; of shepherds among the lonely hills; of its myriad wild
creatures in forest, plain, and mountain...

"All this she takes up into her great heart as part of herself!" I
murmured.

"All this," he replied softly, as the sound of the Band beyond the
Serpentine floated over to us on our roof; "--the separate little
consciousnesses of all the cities, all the tribes, all the nations of
men, animals, flowers, insects--everything." He again opened his arms to
the sky. He drew in deep breaths of the night air. The dew glistened on
the slates behind us. Far across the towers of Westminster a yellow moon
rose slowly, dimming the stars. Big Ben, deeply booming, trembled on
the air nine of her stupendous vibrations. Automatically, I counted
them--subconsciously.

"And all our subconscious sensations are also hers," he added, catching
my thought again; "our dreams but half divined, our aspirations half
confessed, our tears, our yearnings, and our--prayers."

At the moment it almost seemed to me as if our two minds joined, each
knowing the currents of the other's thought, and both caught up, gathered
ill, folded comfortably away into the stream of a Consciousness far
bigger than either. It was like a momentary, specific proof of what
he urged--a faint pulse-beat we heard of the soul of the earth; and it
was amazingly uplifting.

"Every form of life, then, is of importance," I heard myself thinking,
or saying, for I hardly knew which. "The tiniest efforts of value--even
the unrecognized ones, and those that seem futile."

"Even the failures," he whispered, "--the moments when we do not trust
her."

We stood for some moments in silence. Presently, with a hand upon my
shoulder, he drew me down again among our rugs against the chimney-stack.

"And there are some of us," he said gently, yet with a voice that held
the trembling of an immense joy, "who know a more intimate relationship
with their great Mother than the rest, perhaps. By the so-called Love
of Nature, or by some artless simplicity of soul, wholly unmodern of
course, perhaps felt by children or poets mostly, they lie caught close
to her own deep life, knowing the immense sweet guidance of her mighty
soul, divinely mothered, strangers to all the strife for material
gain--to that 'unrest which men miscall delight,'--primitive children of
her potent youth ... offspring of pure passion ... each individual
conscious of her weight and drive behind him--" His words faded away into
a whisper that became unintelligible, then inaudible; but his thought
somehow continued itself in my own mind.

"The simple life," I said in a low tone; "the Call of the Wild, raised
to its highest power?"

But he changed my sentence a little.

"The call," he answered, without turning to look at me, speaking it
into the night about us, "the call to childhood, the true, pure, vital
childhood of the Earth--the Golden Age--before men tasted of the Tree and
knew themselves separate; when the lion and the lamb lay down together
and a little child could lead them. A time and state, that is, of which
such phrases can be symbolical."

"And of which there may be here and there some fearful exquisite
survival?" I suggested, remembering Stahl's words.

His eyes shone with the fire of his passion. "Of which on that little
tourist steamer I found one!"

The wind that fanned our faces came perhaps across the arid wastes
of Bayswater and the North-West. It also came from the mountains and
gardens of this lost Arcadia, vanished for most beyond recovery....

"The Hebrew poets called it Before the Fall," he went on, "and later
poets the Golden Age; today it shines through phrases like the Land of
Heart's Desire, the Promised Land, Paradise, and what not; while the
minds of saint and mystic have ever dreamed of it as union with their
deity. For it is possible and open to all, to every heart, that is, not
blinded by the cloaking horror of materialism which blocks the doorways
of escape and prisons self behind the drab illusion that the outer form
is the reality and riot the inner thought...."

The hoarse shouting of a couple of drunken men floated to us from the
pavements, and crossing over, we peered down toward the opening of Sloane
Street, watching a moment the stream of broughams, motors, and
pedestrians. The two men with the rage of an artificial stimulant in
their brains reeled out of sight. A big policeman followed slowly. The
night-life of the great glaring city poured on unceasingly--the stream
of souls all hurrying by divers routes and means toward a state where
they sought to lose themselves--to forget the pressure of the bars that
held them--to escape the fret and worry of their harassing personalities,
and touch some fringe of happiness! All so sure they knew the way--yet
hurrying really in the wrong direction--outwards instead of inwards;
afraid to be--simple....

We moved back to our rugs. For a long time neither of us found
anything to say. Soon I led the way down the creaking ladder indoors
again, and we entered the stuffy little sitting-room of the tiny flat he
temporarily occupied. I turned up an electric light, but O'Malley begged
me to lower it. I only had time to see that his eyes were still aglow. We
sat by the open window. He drew a worn notebook from his still more
worn coat; but it was too dark for him to read. He knew it all by heart.




XVII


Some of Fechner's reasons for thinking the Earth a being superior in the
scale to ourselves, he gave, but it was another passage that lingered
chiefly in my heart, the description of the daring German's joy in
dwelling upon her perfections--later, too, of his first simple vision.
Though myself wholly of the earth, earthy in the ordinary sense, the
beauty of the thoughts live in my spirit to this day, transfiguring even
that dingy Insurance Office, streaming through all my dullest, hardest
daily tasks with the inspiration of a simple delight that helps me over
many a difficult weary time of work and duty.

"'To carry her precious freight through the hours and seasons what form
could be more excellent than hers--being as it is horse, wheels, and
wagon all in one. Think of her beauty--a shining ball, sky-blue and
sunlit over one half, the other bathed in starry night, reflecting the
heavens from all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds
of her mountains and windings of her valleys she would be a spectacle
of rainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of
her from her own mountain tops. Every quality of landscape that has
a name would then be visible in her all at once--all that is delicate or
graceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, or
cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh. _That landscape is her face_--a peopled
landscape, too, for men's eyes would appear in it like diamonds among the
dew-drops. Green would be the dominant color, but the blue atmosphere
and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is shrouded in her veil--a
veil the vapory, transparent folds of which the earth, through her
ministers the winds, never tires of laying and folding about herself
anew.'

"She needs, as a sentient organism," he continued, pointing into the
curtain of blue night beyond the window, "no heart or brain or lungs
as we do, for she is--different. 'Their functions she performs _through
us_! She has no proper muscles or limbs of her own, and the only objects
external to her are the other stars. To these her whole mass reacts by
the most exquisite alterations in its total gait and by the still more
exquisite vibratory responses in its substance. Her ocean reflects the
lights of heaven as in a mighty mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like
a monstrous lens, the clouds and snowfields combine them into white,
the woods and flowers disperse them into colors.... Men have always
made fables about angels, dwelling in the light, needing no earthly food
or drink, messengers between ourselves and God. Here are actually
existent beings, dwelling in the light and moving through the sky,
needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries between God and us,
obeying His commands. So, if the heavens really are the home of angels,
the heavenly bodies must be those very angels, for other creatures there
are none. Yes! the Earth is our great common guardian angel, who
watches over all our interests combined.'

"And then," whispered the Irishman, seeing that I still eagerly listened,
"give your ear to one of his moments of direct vision. Note its
simplicity, and the authority of its conviction:

"'On a certain spring morning I went out to walk. The fields were green,
the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here and there a
man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all things. It was
only a little bit of the earth; it was only a moment of her existence;
and yet as my look embraced her more and more it seemed to me not
only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear a fact, that she is an
angel, an angel so rich and fresh and flower-like, and yet going her
round in the skies so firmly and so at one with herself, turning her
whole living face to Heaven, and carrying me along with her into that
Heaven, that I asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so
spun themselves away from life as to deem the earth only a dry clod,
and to seek for angels above it or about it in the emptiness of the
sky,--only to find them nowhere.'"

Fire-engines, clanging as with a hurrying anger through the night,
broke in upon his impassioned sentences; the shouts of the men drowned
his last words....

Life became very wonderful inside those tight, confining walls, for
the spell and grandeur of the whole conception lifted the heart. Even
if belief failed, in the sense of believing--a shilling, it succeeded in
the sense of believing--a symphony. The invading beauty swept about us
both. Here was a glory that was also a driving power upon which any
but a man half dead could draw for practical use. For the big conceptions
fan the will. The little pains of life, they make one feel, need not kill
true joy, nor deaden effort.

"Come," said O'Malley softly, interrupting my dream of hope and
splendor, "let us walk together through the Park to your place. It is
late, and you, I know, have to be up early in the morning ... earlier
than I."

And presently we passed the statue of Achilles and got our feet upon
the turf beyond--a little bit of living planet in the middle of the
heavy smothering London town. About us, over us, within us, stirred the
awe of that immense idea. Upon that bit of living, growing turf we
passed toward the Marble Arch, treading, as it were, the skin of a huge
Body--the physical expression of a grand angelic Being, alive, sentient,
conscious. Conscious, moreover, of our little separate individual selves
who walked ... a Being who cared; who felt us; who knew, understood,
and--loved us as a mother her own offspring.... "To whom men could
pray as they pray to their saints."

The conception, even thus dimly and confusedly adumbrated, brought a new
sense of life--terrific and eternal. All living things upon the earth's
surface were emanations of her mighty central soul; all--from the gods
and fairies of olden time who knew it, to the men and women of Today who
have forgotten it.

The gods--!

Were these then projections of her personality--aspects and facets
of her divided self--emanations now withdrawn? Latent in her did they
still exist as moods or Powers--true, alive, everlasting, but unmanifest?
Still knowable to simple men and to Children of Nature?

Was this the giant truth that Stahl had built on Fechner?

Everything about us seemed to draw together into an immense and
towering configuration that included trees and air and the sweep of
open park--the looming and overwhelming beauty of one of these very
gods survived--Pan, the eternal and the splendid ... a mood of the
Earth-life, a projection clothed with the light of stars, the cloudy air,
the passion of the night, the thrill of an august, extended Mood.

And the others were not so very far behind--those other little parcels
of Earth's Consciousness the Greeks and early races, the simple,
primitive, childlike peoples of the dawn, divined the existence of, and
labeled "gods" ... and worshipped ... so as to draw their powers into
themselves by ecstasy and vision ...

Could, then, worship now still recall them? Was the attitude of even
one true worshipper's heart the force necessary to touch that particular
aspect of the mighty total Consciousness of Earth, and call forth those
ancient forms of beauty? Could it be that this idea--the idea of "the
gods"--was thus forever true and vital...? And might they be known
and felt in the heart if not actually in some suggested form?

I only know that as we walked home past the doors of that dingy
Paddington house where Terence O'Malley kept his dusty books and
papers and so to my own quarters, these things he talked about dropped
into my mind with a bewildering splendor to stay forever. His words I
have forgotten, or how he made such speculations worth listening to at
all. Yet, I hear them singing in my blood as though of yesterday; and
often when that conflict comes 'twixt duty and desire that makes life
sometimes so vain and bitter, the memory comes to lift with strength
far greater than my own. The Earth can heal and bless.




XVIII


Slowly, taking life easily, the little steamer puffed its way across the
Ionian Sea. The pyramid of Etna, bluer even than the sky, dominated
the western horizon long after the heel of Italy had faded, then melted
in its turn into the haze of cloud and distance. No other sails were
visible.

With the passing of Calabria spring had leaped into the softness of
full summer, and the breezes were gentle as those that long ago fanned
the cheeks and hair of Io, beloved of Zeus, as she flew southwards toward
the Nile. The passengers, less lovely than that fair daughter of Argos,
and with the unrest of thinner adventure in their blood, basked lazily
in the sun; but the sea was not less haunted for those among them whose
hearts could travel. The Irishman at any rate slipped beyond the confines
of the body, viewing that ancient scene as she had done, from above.
His widening consciousness expanded to include it.

Cachalots spouted; dolphins danced, as though still to those wild
flutes of Dionysus; porpoises rolled beneath the surface of the
transparent waves, diving below the vessel's sides but just in time to
save their shiny noses; and all day long, ignoring the chart upon the
stairway walls, the tourists turned their glasses eastwards, searching
for a first sight of Greece.

O'Malley, meanwhile, trod the decks of a new ship. For him now sea
and sky were doubly peopled. The wind brought messages of some divine
deliverance approaching slowly, the heat of that pearly, shining sun
warmed centers of his being that hitherto the world kept chill. The land
toward which the busy steamer moved he knew, of course, was but the
shell from which the inner spirit of beauty once vivifying it had long
since passed away. Yet it remained a clue. That ancient loveliness, as a
mood of the earth's early consciousness, was buried, not destroyed.
Eternally it still flamed somewhere. And, long before the days of Greece,
he knew, it had existed in yet fuller and more complete manifestation:
that earliest, vastly splendid Mood of the earth's soul, too mighty for
any existence that the history of humanity can recall, and too remote
for any but the most daringly imaginative minds even to conceive. The
_Urwelt_ Mood, as Stahl himself admitted, even while it called to him,
was a reconstruction that to men today could only seem--dangerous.

And his own little Self, guided by the inarticulate stranger, was being
led at last toward its complete recapture.

Yet, while he crawled slowly with the steamer over a tiny portion of
the spinning globe, feeling that at the same time he crawled toward a
spot upon it where access would be somehow possible to this huge
expression of her first Life--what was it, phrased timidly as men phrase
big thoughts today, that he really believed? Even in our London talks,
intimate as they were, interpreted too by gesture, facial expression,
and--silence, his full meaning evaded precise definition. "There are no
words, there are no words," he kept saying, shrugging his shoulders and
stroking his untidy hair. "In me, deep down, it all lies clear and plain
and strong; but language cannot seize a mode of life that throve before
language existed. If you cannot catch the picture from my thoughts, I
give up the whole dream in despair." And in his written account, owing
to its strange formlessness, the result was not a little bewildering.

Briefly stated, however--that remnant, at least, which I discover in
my own mind when attempting to tell the story to others--what he
felt, believed, _lived_, at any rate while the adventure lasted, was
this:--

That the Earth, as a living, conscious Being, had known visible
projections of her consciousness similar to those projections of our own
personality which the advanced psychologists of today now envisage as
possible; that the simple savagery of his own nature, and the poignant
yearnings derived from it, were in reality due to his intimate closeness
to the life of the Earth; that, whereas in the body the fulfillment of
these longings was impossible, in the spirit he might yet know contact
with the soul of the planet, and thus experience their complete
satisfaction. Further, that the portion of his personality which could
thus enter this heaven of its own subjective construction, was that
detachable portion Stahl had spoken of as being "malleable by desire and
longing," leaving the body partially and temporarily sometimes in sleep,
and, at death, completely. More,--that the state thus entered would mean
a quasi-merging back into the life of the Earth herself, of which he was
a partial expression.

This closeness to Nature was today so rare as to be almost unrecognized
as possible. Its possession constituted its owner what the doctor
called a "Cosmic Being"--a being scarcely differentiated from the life
of the Earth Spirit herself--a direct expression of her life, a survival
of a time before such expressions had separated away from her and become
individualized as human creatures. Moreover, certain of these earliest
manifestations or projections of her consciousness, knowing in their
huge shapes of fearful yet simple beauty a glory of her own being, still
also survived. The generic term of "gods" might describe their status as
interpreted to the little human power called Imagination.

This call to the simple life of primal innocence and wonder that had ever
brimmed the heart of the Irishman, acknowledged while not understood,
might have slumbered itself away with the years among modern conditions
into atrophy and denial, had he not chanced to encounter a more direct
and vital instance of it even than himself. The powerfully-charged being
of this Russian stranger had summoned it forth. The mere presence of this
man quickened and evoked this faintly-stirring center in his psychic
being that opened the channel of return. Speech, as any other
explanation, was unnecessary. To resist was still within his power. To
accept and go was also open to him. The "inner catastrophe" he feared
need not perhaps be insuperable or permanent.

"Remember," the doctor had said to him at the end of that last
significant conversation, "this berth in my stateroom is freely at your
disposal till Batoum." And O'Malley, thanking him, had shaken off
that restraining hand upon his arm, knowing that he would never make
use of it again.

For the Russian stranger and his son had somehow made him free.

Between that cabin and the decks he spent his day. Occasionally he
would go below to report progress, as it were, by little sentences which
he divined would be acceptable, and at the same time gave expression
to his own growing delight. The boy, meanwhile, was everywhere, playing
alone like a wild thing; one minute in the bows, hat off, gazing
across the sea beneath a shading hand, and the next leaning over the
stern-rails to watch the churning foam that drove them forwards. At
regular intervals he, too, rushed to the cabin and brought communications
to his parent.

"Tomorrow at dawn," observed the Irishman, "we shall see Cape Mattapan
rising from the sea. After that, Athens for a few hours; then coasting
through the Cyclades, close to the mainland often." And glancing over to
the berth, while pretending to be busy with his steamer-trunk, he saw the
great smile of happiness break over the other's face like a sunrise....

For it was clear to him that with the approach to Greece, a change
began to come over his companions. It was noticeable chiefly in the
father. The joy that filled the man, too fine and large to be named
excitement, passed from him in radiations that positively seemed to
carry with them a physical extension. This, of course, was purely a
clairvoyant effect upon the mind--O'Malley's divining faculty
visualized the spiritual traits of the man's dilating Self. But,
nevertheless, the truth remained that--somehow he increased. He grew;
became interiorly more active, alive, potent; and of this singular waxing
of the inner spirit something passed outwards and stood with rare dignity
about his very figure.

And this manifestation of themselves was due to that expansion of
the inner life caused by happiness. The little point of their
personalities they showed normally to the world was but a single facet, a
tip as it were of their whole selves. More lay within, beyond. As with
the rest of the world, a great emotion stimulated and summoned it forth
into activity nearer the surface. Clearly, for these two Greece
symbolized a point of departure of a great hidden passion. Something they
expected lay waiting for them there. Guidance would come thence.

And, by reflection perhaps as much as by direct stimulation, the same
change made itself felt in himself. Joy caught him--the joy of a
home-coming, long deferred....

At the same time, the warning of Dr. Stahl worked in him, if
subconsciously only. He showed this by mixing more with the other
passengers. He chatted with the Captain, who was as pleased with his
big family as though he had personally provided the weather that made
them happy; with the Armenian priest, who was eager to show that he
had read "a much of T'ackeray and Keeplin"; and especially with the
boasting Moscow merchant, who by this time "owned" the smoking-room and
imposed his verb

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