Читать книгу The First Algernon Blackwood MEGAPACK ® - Algernon Blackwood - Страница 13

THE CENTAUR (PART 1)

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. Someone 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 someone 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 someone 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 verbose commonplaces upon one and all with authoritative self-confidence in six languages—a provincial mind in full display. the latter in particular held him to a normal humanity; his atmosphere breathed the wholesome thickness of the majority of humankind—ordinary, egoistic, with the simplicity of the uninspiring sort. the merchant acted upon him as a sedative, and that day the Irishman took him in large doses, allopathically, for his talk formed an admirable antidote to the stress of that other burning excitement that, according to Stahl, threatened to disintegrate his personality.

Though hardly in the sense he intended, the fur-merchant was entirely delightful—engaging as a child; for, among other marked qualities, he possessed the unerring instinct of the snob which made him select for his friends those whose names or position might glorify his banal insignificance—and his stories were vivid pictorial illustrations of this useful worldly faculty. O’Malley listened with secret delight, keeping a grave face and dropping in occasional innocent questions to heighten the color or increase the output. Others in the circle responded in kind, feeling the same chord vibrating in themselves. Even the priest, like a repeating-gun, continually discharged his little secret pride that Byron had occupied a room in that Venetian monastery where he lived; and at last O’Malley himself was conscious of an inclination to report his own immense and recently discovered kinship with a greater soul and consciousness than his own. After all, he reflected with a deep thrill while he listened, the desire of the snob was but a crude and simple form of the desire of the mystic:—to lose one’s little self in a Self which is greater!

Then, weary of them all and their minute personal interests, he left the smoking-room and joined the boy again, running absurd races with him from stern to bow, playing hide-and-seek among the decks, even playing shuffle-board together. They sweated in the blazing sun and watched the dance of the sea; caught the wind in their faces with a shout of joy, or with pointing fingers followed the changing outlines of the rare, soft clouds that sailed the world of blue above them. There was no speech between them, and both felt that other things, invisible, swift, and spirit-footed, whose home is just beyond the edge of life as the senses report life, played wildly with them. the smoking-room then, with its occupants so greedy for the things that money connotes—the furs, champagne, cigars, and heavy possessions that were symbols of the personal aggrandizement they sought and valued—seemed to the Irishman like a charnel-house where those about to die sat making inventories in blind pride of the things they must leave behind.

It was, indeed, a contrast of Death and Life. For beside him, with that playing, silent boy, coursed the power of transforming loveliness which had breathed over the world before her surface knew this swarming race of men. the life of the Earth knew no need of outward acquisition, possessing all things so completely in herself. And he—he was her child—O glory! Joy passing belief!

“Oh!” he cried once with passion, turning to the fair-haired figure of youth who stood with him in the bows, meeting the soft wind,—“Oh, to have heard the trees whispering together in the youth of the world, and felt one of the earliest winds that ever blew across the cooling seas!”

And the boy, not understanding the words, but responding with a perfect naturalness to the emotion that drove them forth, seized his hand and with an extraordinarily free motion as of flying, raced with him down the decks, happy, laughing, hair loose over his face, and with a singular action of the shoulders as though he somehow—cantered. O’Malley remembered his vision of the Flying Shapes….

Toward the evening, however, the boy disappeared, keeping close to his father’s side, and after dinner both retired early to their cabin.

And the ship, meanwhile, drew ever nearer to the haunted land.

XIX

“Privacy is ignorance.”

—JOSIAH ROYCE

Somewhat after the manner of things suffered in vivid dreams, where surprise is numbed and wonder becomes the perfect password, the Irishman remembers the sequence of little events that filled the following day.

Yet his excitement held nothing of the vicious fling of fever; it was spread over the entire being rather than located hotly in the brain and blood alone; and it “derived,” as it were, from tracts of his personality usually unstirred, atrophied indeed in most men, that connected him as by a delicate network of feelers with Nature and the Earth. He came gradually to feel them, as a man in certain abnormal conditions becomes conscious of the bodily processes that customarily go on in himself without definite recognition.

Stahl could have told him, had he cared to seek the information, that this fringe of wider consciousness, stretching to the stars and winds and earth, was the very part that had caused his long unrest and yearning—the part that knew the Earth as mother and sought the sweet and savage freedom of what he called with the poverty of modern terms—primitive. the channels leading toward a state of Cosmic Consciousness, one with the Earth Life, were being now flushed and sluiced by the forces emanating from the persons of his new companions.

And as this new state slowly usurped command, the readjustment of his spiritual economy thus involved, caused other portions of himself to sink into temporary abeyance. While it alarmed him, it was too delicious to resist. He made no real attempt to resist. Yet he knew full well that the portion sinking thus out of sight was what folk with such high pride call Reason, Judgment, Common Sense!

In common with animal, bird, and insect life, all intimately close to Nature, he began to feel as realities those subtle currents of the Earth’s personality by which the seals know direction in the depths of a thousand-mile sea, by which the homing pigeons blaze trails through space, birds fly south, the wild bees know their pathways, and all simple life, from the Red Indian to the Red Ant, acknowledges the viewless guidance of the mother’s enveloping heart. the cosmic life ran through his being, lighting signals, offering service, more—claiming leadership.

With it, however, came no loss of individuality, but rather a powerful increase of life by means of which for the first time he dreamed of a fuller existence which should eventually harmonize and combine the ancient simplicity of soul that claimed the Earth, with the modern complexity which, indulged alone, rendered the world so ugly and insignificant…! He experienced an immense, driving push upon what Bergson has called the élan vital of his being.

The opening charge of his new discovery, however, was more than disconcerting, and it is not surprising that he lost his balance. Its attack and rush were overwhelming. Thus, it was a kind of exalted speculative wonder lying behind his inner joy that caused his mistakes. He had imagined, for instance, that the first sight of Greece would bring some climax of revelation, making clear to what particular type of early life the spirits of his companions conformed; more, that they would then betray themselves to one and all for what they were in some effort to escape, in some act of unrestraint, something, in a word, that would explain themselves to the world of passengers, and focus them upon the doctor’s microscope forever.

Yet when Greece showed her first fair rim of outline, his companions still slept peacefully in their bunks. the anticipated dénouement did not appear. Nothing happened. It was not the mere sight of so much land lying upon the sea’s cool cheek that could prove vital in an adventure of such a kind. For the adventure remained spiritual. O’Malley had merely confused two planes of consciousness. As usual, he saw the thing “whole” in that extraordinary way to which his imagination alone held the key; and hence his error.

Yet the moment has ever remained for him one of vital, stirring splendor, significant as life or death. He remembers that he was early on deck and saw the dawn blow up softly from behind the islands with a fresh, salt wind that blew at the same time like music into his very heart. Golden clear it rose; and just below, like the petals of some vast, archetypal flower that gave it birth, the low blue hills of coast and island opened magically into blossom. the rocky cliffs of Mattapan slipped past; the smooth, bare slopes of the ancient shore-line followed; treeless peaks and shoulders, abrupt precipices, summits and ridges all exquisitely rosy and alive. He had seen Greece before, yet never thus, and the emotion that invaded every corner of his larger consciousness lay infinitely deeper than any mere pseudo-classical thrill he had known in previous years. He saw it, felt it, knew it from within, instead of as a spectator from without. This dawn-mood of the Earth was also his own; and upon his spirit, as upon her blue-crowned hills, lay the tide of high light with its delicate swift blush. He saw it with her—through one of her opened eyes.

The hot hours the steamer lay in the Piraeus Harbor were wearisome, the noise of loading and unloading cargo worse even than at Catania. While the tourist passengers hurried fussily ashore, carrying guidebooks and cameras, to chatter among the ruined temples, he walked the decks alone, dreaming his great dream, conscious that he spun through leagues of space with the great Being who more and more possessed him. Beyond the shipping and the masts collected there from all the ports of the Mediterranean and the Levant, he watched the train puffing slowly to the station that lay in the shadow of Theseus’ Temple, but his eyes at the same tune strained across the haze toward Eleusis Bay, and while his ears caught the tramping feet of the long Torchlight Procession, some power of his remoter consciousness divined the forms of hovering gods, expressions of his vast Mother’s personality with which, in worship, this ancient people had believed it possible to merge themselves. the significant truths that lay behind the higher Mysteries, degraded since because forgotten and misinterpreted, trooped powerfully down into his mind. For the supreme act of this profound cult, denied by a grosser age that seeks to telephone to heaven, deeming itself thereby “advanced,” lay in the union of the disciple with his god, the god he worshipped all his life, and into whose Person he slipped finally at death by a kind of marriage rite.

“The gods!” ran again through his mind with passion and delight, as the letter of his early studies returned upon him, accompanied now for the first time by the in-living spirit that interpreted them. “The gods!—Moods of her giant life, manifestations of her spreading Consciousness pushed outwards, Powers of life and truth and beauty…!”

* * * *

And, meanwhile, Dr. Stahl, sometimes from a distance, sometimes coming close, kept over him a kind of half-paternal, half-professional attendance, the Irishman accepting his ministrations without resentment, almost with indifference.

“I shall be on deck between two and three in the morning to see the comet,” the German observed to him casually toward evening as they met on the bridge. “We may meet perhaps—”

“All right, doctor; it’s more than possible,” replied O’Malley, realizing how closely he was being watched.

In his mind at the moment another sentence ran, the thought growing stronger and stronger within him as the day declined:

“It will come tonight—come as an inner catastrophe not unlike that of death! I shall hear the call—to escape….”

For he knew, as well as if it had been told to him in so many words, that the sleep of his two companions all day was in the nature of a preparation. the fluid projections of themselves were all the time active elsewhere. Their bodies heavily slumbered; their spirits were out and alert. Summoned forth by those strange and radiant evocative forces that even in the dullest minds “Greece” stirs into life, they had temporarily escaped. Again he saw those shapes of cloud and wind moving with swift freedom over the long, bare hills. Again and again the image returned. With the night a similar separation of the personality might come to himself too. Stahl’s warning passed in letters of fire across his inner sight. With a relief that yet contained uneasiness he watched his shambling figure disappear down the stairway. He was alone.

XX

“To everything that a man does he must give his undivided attention or his Ego. When he has done this, thoughts soon arise in him, or else a new method of apprehension miraculously appears….

“Very remarkable it is that through this play of his personality man first becomes aware of his specific freedom, and that it seems to him as though he awaked out of a deep sleep as though he were only now at home in the world, and as if the light of day were breaking now over his interior life for the first time…. the substance of these impressions which affect us we call Nature, and thus Nature stands in an immediate relationship to those functions of our bodies which we call senses. Unknown and mysterious relations of our body allow us to surmise unknown and mysterious correlations with Nature, and therefore Nature is that wondrous fellowship into which our bodies introduce us, and which we learn to know through the mode of its constitutions and abilities.”

—NOVALIS, Disciples at Saïs. Translated by U.C.B.

And so, at last, the darkness came, a starry darkness of soft blue shadows and phosphorescent sea out of which the hills of the Cyclades rose faint as pictures of floating smoke a wind might waft away like flowers to the sky.

The plains of Marathon lay far astern, blushing faintly with their scarlet tamarisk blossoms. the strange purple glow of sunset upon Hymettus had long since faded. A hush grew over the sea, now a marvelous cobalt blue. the earth, gently sleeping, manifested dreamily. Into the subconscious state passed one half of her huge, gentle life.

The Irishman, responding to the eternal spell of her dream-state, experienced in quite a new way the magic of her Night-Mood. He found it more difficult than ever to realize as separate entities the little things that moved about through the upper surface of her darkness. Wings of silver, powerfully whirring, swept his soul onwards to another place—toward Home.

And the two worlds intermingled oddly. These little separate “outer things” going to and fro so busily became as symbols more or less vital, more or less transparent. They varied according to their simplicity. Some of them were channels that led directly where he was going; others, again, had lost all connection with their vital source and center of existence. To the former belonged the sailors, children, the tired birds that rested on the ship as they journeyed northwards, swallows, doves, and little travelers with breasts of spotted yellow that nested in the rigging; even, in a measure, the gentle, brown-eyed priest; but to the latter, the noisy, vulgar, beer-drinking tourists, and, especially, the fur-merchant…. Stahl, interpreter and intermediary, hovered between—incarnate compromise.

Escaping from everybody, at length, he made his way into the bows; there, covered by the stars, he waited. And the thing he waited for—he felt it coming over him with a kind of massive sensation as little local as heat or cold—was that disentanglement of a part of his personality from the rest against which Stahl had warned him. That portion of his complex personality in which resided desire and longing, matured during these many years of poignant nostalgia, was now slowly and deliberately loosening out from the parent center. It was the vehicle of his Urwelt yearnings; and the Urwelt was about to draw it forth. the Call was on its way.

Hereabouts, then, near the Isles of Greece, lay a channel to the Earth’s far youth, a channel for some reason still unclosed. His companions knew it; he, too, had half divined it. the increased psychic activity of all three as they approached Greece seemed explained. the sign—would it be through hearing, sight, or touch?—would shortly come that should convince.

That very afternoon Stahl had said—“Greece will betray them,” and he had asked: “Their true form and type?” And for answer the old man did an expressive thing, far more convincing than words: he bent forwards and downwards. He made as though to move a moment on all fours.

O’Malley remembered the brief and vital scene now. the word, however, persistently refused to come into his mind. Because the word was really inadequate, describing but partially a form and outline symbolical of far more,—a measure of Nature and Deity alike.

And so, as a man dreading the entrance to a great adventure that he yet desires, the Irishman waited there alone beneath the cloud of night…. Soft threads of star-gold, trailing the sea, wove with the darkness a veil that hid from his eyes the world of crude effects. All memory of the casual realities of modern life that so distressed his soul, fled far away. the archetypal world, soul of the Earth, swam close about him, enormous and utterly simple. He seemed alone in some hollow of the night which Time had overlooked, and where the powers of sea and air held him in the stretch of their gigantic, changeless hands. In this hollow lay the entrance to the channel down which he presently might flash back to that primal Garden of the Earth’s first beauty—her Golden Age…down which, at any rate, the authoritative Call he awaited was to come…. “Oh! what a power has white simplicity!”

Wings from the past, serene and tranquil, bore him toward this ancient peace where echoes of life’s brazen clash today could never enter. Ages before Greece, of course, it had flourished, yet Greece had caught some flying remnant ere it left the world of men, and for a period had striven to renew its life, though by poetry but half believed. Over the vales and hills of Hellas this mood had lingered bravely for a while, then passed away forever…and those who dreamed of its remembrance remain homeless and lonely, seeking it ever again in vain, lost citizens, rejected by the cycles of vainer life and action that succeeded.

The Spirit of the Earth, yes, whispered in his ears as he waited covered by the night and stars. She called him, as though across all the forests on her breast the long sweet winds went whispering his name. Lying there upon the coils of thick and tarry rope, the Urwelt caught him back with her splendid passion. Currents of Earth life, quasi-deific, gentle as the hands of little children, tugged softly at this loosening portion of his Self, urging his very lips, as it were, once more to the mighty Mother’s breasts. Again he saw those cloud-like shapes careering over long, bare hills…and almost knew himself among them as they raced with streaming winds…free, ancient comrades among whom he was no longer alien and outcast, including his two companions of the steamer. the early memory of the Earth became his own; as a part of her, he shared it too.

The Urwelt closed magnificently about him. Vast shapes of power and beauty, other than human, once his comrades thus, but since withdrawn because denied by a pettier age, moved up, huge and dim, across the sham barriers of time and space, singing the great Earth-Song of welcome in his ears. the whisper grew awfully…. the Spirit of the Earth flew close and called upon him with a shout…!

Then, out of this amazing reverie, he woke abruptly to the consciousness that someone was approaching him stealthily, yet with speed, through the darkness. With a start he sat up, peering about him. There was dew on his clothes and hair. the stars, he saw, had shifted their positions.

He heard the surge of the water from the vessel’s bows below. the line of the shore lay close on either side. Overhead he saw the black threads of rigging, quivering with the movement of the ship; the swaying mast-head light; the dim, round funnels; the confused shadows where the boats swung—and nearer, moving between the ropes and windlasses, this hurrying figure whose approach had disturbed him in his gorgeous dream.

And O’Malley divined at once that, though in one sense a portion of his dream, it belonged outwardly to the same world as this long dark steamer that trailed after him across the sea. A piece of his vision, as it were, had broken off and remained in the cruder world wherein his body lay upon these tarry ropes. the boy came up and stood a moment by his side in silence, then, stooping to the level of his head, he spoke:—

“Come,” he said in low tones of joy; “come! We wait long for you already!”

The words, like music, floated over the sea, as O’Malley took the outstretched hand and suffered himself to be led quickly toward the lower deck. He walked at first as in a dream continued after waking; more than once it seemed as though they stepped together from the boards and moved through space toward the line of peaked hills that fringed the steamer’s course so close. For through the salt night air ran a perfume that suggested flowers, earth, and woods, and there seemed no break in the platforms of darkness that knit sea and shore to the very substance of the vessel.

XXI

The lights in the saloon were out, the smoking-room empty, the passengers in bed. the ship seemed entirely deserted. Only, on the bridge, the shadow of the first officer paced quietly to and fro. Then, suddenly, as they approached the stern, O’Malley discerned anther figure, huge and motionless, against the background of phosphorescent foam; and at the first glance it was exactly as though he had detached from the background of his mind one of those Flying Outlines upon the hills—and caught it there, arrested visibly at last.

He moved along, fairly sure of himself, yet with a tumult of confused sensations, as if consciousness were transferring itself now more rapidly to that portion of him which sought to escape.

Leaning forward, in a stooping posture over the bulwarks, wrapped in the flowing cape he sometimes wore, the man’s back and shoulders married so intimately with the night that it was hard to determine the dividing line between the two. So much more of the deck behind him, and of the sky immediately beyond his neck, was obliterated than by any possible human outline. Whether owing to obliquity of disturbed vision, tricks of shadow, or movement of the vessel between the stars and foam, the Irishman saw these singular emanations spread about him into space. He saw them this time directly. And more than ever before they seemed in some way right and comely—true. They were in no sense monstrous; they reported beauty, though a beauty cloaked in power.

And, watching him, O’Malley felt that this loosening portion of himself, as once before in the little cabin, likewise began to grow and spread. Within some ancient fold of the Earth’s dream-consciousness they both lay caught. In some mighty Dream of her planetary Spirit, dim, immense, slow-moving, they played their parts of wonder. Already they lay close enough to share the currents of her subconscious activities. And the dream, as she turned in her vast, spatial sleep, was a dream of a time long gone.

Here, amid the loneliness of deserted deck and night, this illusion of bulk was more than ever before outwardly impressive, and as he yielded to the persuasion of the boy’s hand, he was conscious of a sudden wild inclination to use his own arms and legs in a way he had never before known or dreamed of, yet that seemed curiously familiar. the balance and adjustment of his physical frame sought to shift and alter; neck and shoulders, as it were, urged forward; there came a singular pricking in the loins, a rising of the back, a thrusting up and outwards of the chest. He felt that something grew behind him with a power that sought to impel or drive him in advance and out across the world at a terrific gait; and the hearing of his ears became of a sudden intensely acute. While his body moved ordinarily, he knew that a part of him that was not body moved—otherwise, that he neither walked, ran, nor stepped upon two feet, but—galloped. the motion proclaimed him kin with the flying shapes upon the hills. At the heart of this portion which sought to detach itself from his central personality—which, indeed, seemed already half escaped—he cantered.

The experience lasted but a second—this swift, free motion of the escaping Double—then passed away like those flashes of memory that rise and vanish again before they can be seized for examination. He shook himself free of the unaccountable obsession, and with the effort of returning to the actual present, the passing-outwards was temporarily checked. And it was then, just as he held himself in hand again, that glancing sideways, he became aware that the boy beside him had, like his parent, also changed—grown large and shadowy with a similar suggestion of another splendid outline. the extension already half accomplished in himself and fully accomplished in the father, was in process of accomplishment in the smaller figure of the son. Clothed in the emerged true shape of their inner being they slowly revealed themselves. It was as bewildering as watching death, and as stern and beautiful.

For the boy, still holding his hand, loped along beside him as though the projection that emanated from him, grown almost physical, were somehow difficult to manage.

In the moment of nearer, smaller consciousness that yet remained to him, O’Malley recalled the significant pantomime of Dr. Stahl two days before in the cabin. It came with a rush of fire. the warning operated; his caution instantly worked. He dropped the hand, let the clinging fingers slip from his own, overcome by something that appalled. For this, surely, was the inner catastrophe that he dreaded, the radical internal dislocation of his personality that involved—death. the thing that had happened, or was happening to these other two, was on the edge of fulfillment in himself—before he was either ready or had decided to accept it.

At any rate he hesitated; and the hesitation, shifting his center of consciousness back into his brain, checked and saved him. A confused sense of forces settling back within himself followed; a kind of rush and scuttle of moods and powers: and he remained temporarily master of his being, recovering balance and command. Twice already—in that cabin-scene, as also on the deck when Stahl had seized him—the moment had come close. Now, again, had he kept hold of the boy’s grasp, that inner transformation, which should later become externalized, must have completed itself.

“No, no!” he tried to cry aloud, “for I’m not yet ready!” But his voice rose scarcely above a whisper. the decision of his will, however, had produced the desired result. the “illusion,” so strangely born, had passed, at any rate for the time. He knew once more the glory of the steadfast stars, realized that he walked normally upon a steamer’s deck, heard with welcome the surge of the sea below, and felt the peace of this calm southern night as they coasted with two hundred sleeping tourists between the islands and the Grecian mainland…. He remembered the fur-merchant, the Armenian priest, the Canadian drummer….

It seemed his feet half tripped, or at least that he put out a hand to steady himself against the ship’s long roll, for the pair of them moved up to the big man’s side with a curious, rushing motion that brought them all together with a mild collision. And the boy laughed merrily, his laughter like singing half completed. O’Malley remembers the little detail, because it serves to show that he was yet still in a state of intensified consciousness, far above the normal level. It was still “like walking in my sleep or acting out some splendid dream,” as he put it in his written version. “Half out of my body, if you like, though in no sense of the words at all half out of my mind!”

XXII

What followed he relates with passion, half confused. Without speaking the big Russian turned his head by way of welcome, and O’Malley saw that the proportions of it were magnificent like a fragment of the night and sky. Though too dark to read the actual expression in the eyes, he detected their gleam of joy and splendor. the whole presentment of the man was impressive beyond any words that he could find. Massive, yet charged with swift and alert vitality, he reared there through the night, his inner self now toweringly manifested. At any other time, and without the preparation already undergone, the sight might almost have terrified; now it only uplifted. For in similar fashion, though lesser in degree, because the mold was smaller, and hesitation checked it, this very transformation had been going forward within himself.

The three of them leaned there upon the rails, rails oddly dwindled now to the size of a toy steamer, while thus the spirit of the dreaming Earth swam round and through them, awful in power, yet at the same time gentle, winning, seductive as wild flowers in the spring. And it was this delicate, hair-like touch of delight, magical with a supreme and utterly simple innocence, that made the grandeur of the whole experience still easily manageable, and terror in it all unknown.

The Irishman stood on the outside, toward the vessel’s stern, next him the father, beyond, the boy. They touched. A current like a river in flood swept through all three.

He, too, was caught within those visible extensions of their personalities; all again, caught within the consciousness of the Earth. Across the sea they gazed together in silence—waiting.

It was the Oro passage, where the mainland hills on the west and the Isle of Tenos on the east draw close together, and the steamer passes for several miles so near to Greece that the boom of surf upon the shore is audible. That night, however, the sea lay too still for surf; it whispered softly in its sleep; and in its sleep, too, listened. They heard its multitudinous rush of voices as the surge below raced by—a giant frieze in which the phosphorescence painted dancing forms and palely luminous faces. Unsubstantial shapes of foam held hands in continuous array below the waves, lit by soft-sea-lanterns strung together along the steamer’s sides.

Yet it was not these glimmering shapes the three of them watched, thus intently silent. the lens of yearning focused not in sight. Down the great channel at whose opening they stood, leading straight to the Earth’s old central heart, the message of communion would not be a visual one. the sensitive fringe of their stretched personalities, contacting thus actually the consciousness of the planet-soul, would quiver to a reaction of another kind. This point of union, already affected, would presently report itself, unmistakably, yet not to the eyes. the increased acuteness of the Irishman’s hearing—a kind of interior hearing—quickly supplied the key. It was that all three—listened.

Some primitive sound of Earth would presently vibrate through their extended beings with an authoritative sweet thunder not to be denied. By a Voice, a Call, the Earth would tell them that she heard; that lovingly she was aware of their presence in her heart. She would call them, with the voice of one of their own kind.

How strange it all was! Enormous in conception, enormous in distance, scope, stretch! Yet so tiny, intimate, sweet! And this vast splendor was to report itself by one of the insignificant little channels by which men, locked in cramped physical bodies, interpret the giant universe—a trivial sense-impression! That so terrible a communication could reach the soul via the quivering of a wee material nerve was on a par with that other grave splendor—that God can exist in the heart of a child.

Thus, dimly, yet with an authority that shakes the soul, may little human hearts divine the Immensities that travel with a thunder of great glory close about their daily life. Through regions of their subliminal consciousness, which transcends the restricted physical expression of it called personality as the moisture of the world transcends a drop of water, deific presences pass grandly to and fro.

For here, to this wild-hearted Irishman with the forbidden strain of the Urmensch in his blood, came the sharp and instant revelation that the Consciousness is not contained skin-tight around the body. It spread enormously about him, remote, extended; and in some distant tract of it this strange occurrence took place. the idea of distance and extension, of course, were merely intellectual concepts, like that of Time. For what happened, happened near and close, beside, within his actual physical person. That physical person, with its brain, however, he realized, was but a fragment of his total Self. A broken piece of the occurrence filtered through from beyond and fell upon the deck at his feet. the rest he divined, seeing it whole. Only the little bit, however, has he found the language to describe.

And that for which all three listened was already on the way. Forever it had been “happening,” yet only reached them now because they were ready and open to it. Events upon the physical plane, he grasped, represented the last feeble expression of things that had happened interiorly with a vaster power long ago—and are ever happening still. This Sound they listened for, coming from the Spirit of the Earth, lay ever close to men’s ears, divinely sweet and splendid. It seemed born somewhere in the heart of the blue gloom that draped the hills of Greece. Thence, across the peaked mountains, stretched the immense pipe of starry darkness that carried it toward them as along a channel. Made possible of approach by the ancient passion of beauty that Greece once knew, it ran down upon the world into their hearts, direct from the Being of the Earth.

With a sudden rush, it grew nearer, swelling with a draught of sound that sucked whole spaces of sky and sea and stars with it. It emerged. They heard, all three.

Above the pulse and tremble of the steamer’s engines, above the surge and gurgle of the sea, a cry swept toward them from the shore. Long-drawn, sweetly-penetrating, yet with some strident accent of power and command, this voice of Earth rushed upon them over the quiet water—then died away again among the mountains and the night. Its passage through the sky was torrential. the whole pouring flood of it dipped back with abrupt swiftness into silence. the Irishman understood that but an echo of its main volume had come through.

A deep, convulsive movement ran over the great body at his side, and at once communicated itself to the boy beyond. Father and son straightened up abruptly as though the same force lifted both; then stretched down and forwards over the bulwarks. They seemed to shake themselves free of something. Neither spoke. Something utterly overwhelming lay in that moment. For the cry was at once of enchanting sweetness, yet with a deep and dreadful authority that overpowered. It invited the very soul.

A moment of silence followed, and the cry was then repeated, thinner, fainter, already further away. It seemed withdrawn, sunk more deeply into the night, higher up, too, floating away northwards into remoter vales and glens that lay beyond the shore-line. Though still a single cry, there were distinct breaks of utterance in it this time, as of words. It was, of a kind—speech: a Message, a Summons, a Command that somehow held entreaty at its heart.

And this time the appeal in it was irresistible. Father and son started forwards as though deliberately pulled; while from himself shot outwards that loosening portion of his being that all the evening had sought release. the vehicle of his yearnings, passionately summoned, leaped to the ancient call of the Earth’s eternally young life. This vital essence of his personality, volatile as air and fierce as lightning, flashed outwards from its hidden prison where it lay choked and smothered by the weights and measures of modern life. For the beauty and splendor of that far voice wrung his very heart and set it free. He knew a quasi-physical wrench of detachment. A wild and tameless glory fused the fastenings of ages.

Only the motionless solidity of the great figure beside him prevented somehow the complete escape, and made him understand that the Call just then was not for all three of them, especially not for himself. the parent rose beside him, massive and stable, secure as the hills which were his true home, and the boy broke suddenly into happy speech which was wild and singing.

He looked up swiftly into his parent’s steady visage.

“Father!” he cried in tones that merged half with the wind, half with the sea, “it is his voice! Chiron calls—!” His eyes shone like stars, his young face was alight with joy and passion.—“Go, father, you, or—”

He stopped an instant, catching the Irishman’s eyes upon his own across the form between them.

“—or you!” he added with a laughter of delight; “you go!”

The big figure straightened up, standing back a pace from the rails. A low sound rolled from him that was like an echo of thunder among hills. With slow, laborious distinctness it broke off into fragments that were words, with great difficulty uttered, but with a final authority that rendered them command.

“No,” O’Malley heard, “you—first. And—carry word—that we—are—on the way.” Staring out across the sea and sky he boomed it deeply. “You—first. We—follow—!” And the speech seemed to flow from the entire surface of his body rather than from the lips alone. the sea and air mothered the syllables. Thus might the Night herself have spoken.

Chiron! the word, with its clue of explanation, flamed about him with a roar. Was this, then, the type of cosmic life to which his companions, and himself with them, inwardly approximated…?

The same instant, before O’Malley could move a muscle to prevent it, the boy climbed the rails with an easy, vaulting motion that was swift yet oddly spread, and dropped straight down into the sea. He fell; and as he fell it was as if the passage through the air drew out a part of him again like smoke. Whether it was due to the flying cloak, or to some dim wizardry of the shadows, there grew over him an instantaneous transformation of outline that was far more marked than anything before. For as the steamer drew onwards, and the body thus passed in its downward flight close beneath O’Malley’s eyes, he saw that the boy was making the first preparatory motions of swimming,—movements, however, that were not the horizontal sweep of a pair of human arms, but rather the vertical strokes of a swimming animal. He pawed the air.

The surprise of the whole unexpected thing came upon him with a crash that brought him back effectually again into himself. That part of him, already half emerged in similar escape, now flashed back sheath-like within him. the inner catastrophe he dreaded while desiring it, had not yet completed itself.

He heard no splash, for the ship was high out of the water, and the place where the body met the sea already lay far astern; but when the momentary arrest of his faculties had passed and he found his voice to cry for help, the father turned upon him like a lion and clapped a great, encompassing hand upon his mouth.

“Quiet!” his deep voice boomed. “It is well—and he—is—safe.”

And across the huge and simple visage ran an expression of such supreme happiness, while in his act and gesture lay such convincing power, that the Irishman felt himself overborne and forced to acknowledge another standard of authority that somehow made the whole thing right. To cry “man overboard,” to stop the ship, throw life-buoys and the rest, was not only unnecessary, but foolish. the boy was safe; it was well with him; he was not “lost”…

“See,” said the parent’s deep voice, breaking in upon his thoughts as he drew him to one side with a certain vehemence, “See!”

He pointed downwards. And there, between them, half in the scuppers, against their very feet, lay the huddled body upon the deck, the arms outstretched, the face turned upwards to the stars.

* * * *

The bewilderment that followed was like the confusion which exists between two states of consciousness when the mind passes from sleep to waking, or vice versa. O’Malley lost that power of attention which enables a man to concentrate on details sufficiently to recall their exact sequence afterwards with certainty.

Two things, however, stood out and he tells them briefly enough: first, that the joy upon the father’s face rendered an offer of sympathy ludicrous; secondly, that Dr. Stahl was again upon the scene with a promptness which proved him to have been close at hand all the time.

It was between two and three in the morning, the rest of the passengers asleep still, but Captain Burgenfelder and the first officer appeared soon after and an orderly record of the affair was drawn up formally. the depositions of the father and of himself were duly taken down in writing, witnessed, and all the rest.

The scene in the doctor’s cabin remains vividly in his mind: the huge Russian standing by the door—for he refused a seat—incongruously smiling in contrast to the general gravity, his mind obviously brought by an effort of concentration to each question; the others seated round the desk some distance away, leaving him in a space by himself; the scratching of the doctor’s pointed pen; the still, young outline underneath the canvas all through the long pantomime, lying upon a couch at the back where the shadows gathered thickly. And then the gust of fresh wind that came in with a little song as they opened the door at the end, and saw the crimson dawn reflected in the dewy, shining boards of the deck. the father, throwing the Irishman a significant and curious glance, was out to join it on the instant.

Syncope, produced by excitement, cause unknown, was the scientific verdict, and an immediate burial at sea the parent’s wish. As the sun rose over the highlands of Asia Minor it was carried into effect.

But the father’s eyes followed not the drop. They gazed with rapt, intent expression in another direction where the shafts of sunrise sped across the sea toward the glens and dales of distant Pelion. At the sound of the plunge he did not even turn his eyes. He pointed, gathering O’Malley somehow into the gesture, across the Ægean Sea to where the shores of north-western Arcadia lay below the horizon, raised his arms with a huge sweep of welcome to the brightening sky, then turned and went below without a single word.

For a few minutes, puzzled and perhaps a little awed, the group of sailors and ship’s officers remained standing with bared heads, then disappeared silently in their turn, leaving the decks to the sunrise and the wind.

XXIII

But O’Malley did not immediately return to his own cabin; he yielded to Dr. Stahl’s persuasion and dropped into the armchair he had already occupied more than once, watching his companion’s preparations with the lamp and coffeepot.

With his eyes, that is, he watched, staring, as men say, absent-mindedly; for the fact was, only a little bit of him hovered there about his weary physical frame. the rest of him was off somewhere else across the threshold—subliminal: below, with the Russian, beyond with the traveling spirit of the boy; but the major portion, out deep in space, reclaimed by the Earth.

So, at least, it felt; for the circulation of blood in his brain ran low and physical sensation there was almost none. the driving impulse upon the outlying tracts of consciousness usually submerged had been tremendous.

“That time,” he heard Stahl saying in an oddly distant voice from across the cabin, “you were nearly—out—”

“You heard? You saw it all?” he murmured as in half-sleep. For it was an effort to focus his mind even upon simple words.

The reply he hardly caught, though he felt the significant stare of the man’s eye upon him and divined the shaking of his head. His life still pulsed and throbbed far away outside his normal self. Complete return was difficult. He felt all over: with the wind and hills and sea, all his little personal sensations tucked away and absorbed into Nature. In the Earth he lay, pervading her whole surface, still sharing her vaster life. With her he moved, as with a greater, higher, and more harmonious creation than himself. In large measure the cosmic instincts still swept these quickened fringes of his deep subconscious personality.

“You know them now for what they are,” he heard the doctor saying at the end of much else he had entirely missed. “The father will be the next to go, and then—yourself. I warn you before it is too late. Beware! And—resist!”

His thoughts, and with them those subtle energies of the soul that are the vehicles of thought, followed where the boy had gone. Deep streams of longing swept him. the journey of that spirit, so singularly released, drew half his forces after it. Thither the bereaved parent and himself were also bound; and the lonely incompleteness of his life lay wholly now explained. That cry within the dawn, though actually it had been calling always, had at last reached him; hitherto he had caught only misinterpreted echoes of it. From the narrow body it had called him forth. Another moment and he would have known complete emancipation; and never could he forget that glorious sensation as the vital essence tasted half release. Next time the process should complete itself, and he would—go!

“Drink this,” he heard abruptly in Stahl’s grating voice, and saw him cross the cabin with a cup of steaming coffee. “Concentrate your mind now upon the things about you here. Return to the present. And tell me, too, if you can bring yourself to do so,” he added, stooping over him with the cup, “a little of what you experienced. the return, I know, is pain. But try—try—”

“Like a little bit of death, yes,” murmured the Irishman. “I feel caught again and caged—small.” He could have wept. This ugly little life!

“Because you’ve tasted a moment of genuine cosmic consciousness and now you feel the limitations of normal personality,” Stahl added, more soothingly. He sat down beside him and sipped his own coffee.

“Dispersed about the whole earth I felt, deliciously extended and alive,” O’Malley whispered with a faint shiver as he glanced about the little cabin, noticing the small windows and shut door. “Upholstery” oppressed him. “Now I’m back in prison again.”

There was silence for a moment. Then presently the doctor spoke, as though he thought aloud, expecting no reply.

“All great emotions,” he said in lowered tones, “tap the extensions of the personality we now call subconscious, and a man in anger, in love, in ecstasy of any kind is greater than he knows. But to you has come, perhaps, the greatest form of all—a definite and instant merging with the being of the Earth herself. You reached the point where you felt the spirit of the planet’s life. You almost crossed the threshold—your extension edged into her own. She bruised you, and you knew—”

“‘Bruised’?” he asked, startled at the singular expression into closer hearing.

“We are not ‘aware’ of our interior,” he answered, smiling a little, “until something goes wrong and the attention is focused. A keen sensation—pain—and you become aware. Subconscious processes then become consciously recognized. I bruise your lung for instance; you become conscious of that lung for the first time, and feel it. You gather it up from the general subconscious background into acute personal consciousness. Similarly, a word or mood may sting and stimulate some phase of your consciousness usually too remote to be recognized. Last night—regions of your extended Self, too distant for most men to realize their existence at all, contacted the consciousness of the Earth herself. She bruised you, and via that bruise caught you up into her greater Self. You experienced a genuine cosmic reaction.”

O’Malley listened, though hardly to the actual words. Behind the speech, which was in difficult German for one thing, his mind heard the rushing past of this man’s ideas. They moved together along the same stream of thought, and the Irishman knew that what he thus heard was true, at any rate, for himself. And at the same time he recognized with admiration the skill with which this scientific mystic of a Schiffsarzt sought to lead him back into the safer regions of his normal state. Stahl did not now oppose or deny. Catching the wave of the Celt’s experience, he let his thought run sympathetically with it, alongside, as it were, guiding gently and insinuatingly down to earth again.

And the result justified this cunning wisdom; O’Malley returned to the common world by degrees. For it was enchanting to find his amazing adventure explained even in this partial, speculative way. Who else among his acquaintances would have listened at all, much less admitted its possibility?

“But, why in particular me?” he asked. “Can’t everybody know these cosmic reactions you speak of?” It was his intellect that asked the foolish question. His whole Self knew the answer beforehand.

“Because,” replied the doctor, tapping his saucer to emphasize each word, “in some way you have retained an almost unbelievable simplicity of heart—an innocence singularly undefiled—a sort of primal, spontaneous innocence that has kept you clean and open. I venture even to suggest that shame, as most men know it, has never come to you at all.”

The words sank down into him. Passing the intellect that would have criticized, they nested deep within where the intuition knew them true. Behind the clumsy language that is, he caught the thought.

“As if I were a saint!” he laughed faintly.

Stahl shook his head. “Rather, because you live detached,” he replied, “and have never identified your Self with the rubbish of life. the channels in you are still open to these tides of larger existence. I wish I had your courage.”

“While others—?”

The German hesitated a moment. “Most men,” he said, choosing his words with evident care, “are too grossly organized to be aware that these reactions of a wider consciousness can be possible at all. Their minute normal Self they mistake for the whole, hence denying even the experiences of others. ‘Our actual personality may be something considerably unlike that conception of it which is based on our present terrestrial consciousness—a form of consciousness suited to, and developed by, our temporary existence here, but not necessarily more than a fraction of our total self. It is quite credible that our entire personality is never terrestrially manifest.’” Obviously he quoted. the Irishman had read the words somewhere. He came back more and more into the world—correlated, that is, the subconscious with the conscious.

“Yet consciousness apart from the brain is inconceivable,” he interposed, more to hear the reply than to express a conviction.

Whether Stahl divined his intention or not, he gave no sign.

“‘We cannot say with any security that the stuff called brain is the only conceivable machinery which mind and consciousness are able to utilize: though it is true that we know no other.’” the last phrase he repeated: “‘though it is true that we know no other.’”

O’Malley sank deeper into his chair, making no reply. His mind clutched at the words “too grossly organized,” and his thoughts ran back for a moment to his daily life in London. He pictured his friends and acquaintances there; the men at his club, at dinner parties, in the parks, at theaters; he heard their talk—shooting—destruction of exquisite life; horses, politics, women, and the rest; yet good, honest, lovable fellows all. But how did they breathe in so small a world at all? Practical-minded specimens of the greatest civilization ever known! He recalled the heavy, dazed expression on the faces of one or two to whom he had sometimes dared to speak of those wider realms that were so familiar to himself….

“‘Though it is true that we know no other,’” he heard Stahl repeating slowly as he looked down into his cup and stirred the dregs.

Then, suddenly, the doctor rose and came over to his side. His eyes twinkled, and he rubbed his hands vigorously together as he spoke. He laughed.

“For instance, I have no longer now the consciousness of that coffee I have just swallowed,” he exclaimed, “yet, if it disagreed with me, my consciousness of it would return.”

“The abnormal states you mean are a symptom of disorder then?” the Irishman asked, following the analogy.

“At present, yes,” was the reply, “and will remain so until their correlation with the smaller conscious Self is better understood. These belligerent Powers of the larger Consciousness are apt to overwhelm as yet. That time, perhaps, is coming. Already a few here and there have guessed that the states we call hysteria and insanity, conditions of trance, hypnotism, and the like, are not too satisfactorily explained.” He peered down at his companion. “If I could study your Self at close quarters for a few years,” he added significantly, “and under various conditions, I might teach the world!”

“Thank you!” cried the Irishman, now wholly returned into his ordinary self. He could think of nothing else to say, yet he meant the words and gave them vital meaning. He moved across to another chair. Lighting a cigarette, he puffed out clouds of smoke. He did not desire to be caught again beneath this man’s microscope. And in his mind he had a sudden picture of the speculative and experimenting doctor being “requested to sever his connection” with the great Hospital for the sake of the latter’s reputation. But Stahl, in no way offended, was following his own thoughts aloud, half speaking to himself.

“… For a being organized as you are, more active in the outlying tracts of consciousness than in the centers lying nearer home,—a being like yourself, I say, might become aware of Other Life and other personalities even more advanced and highly organized than that of the Earth.”

A strange excitement came upon him, making his eyes shine. He walked to and fro, O’Malley watching him, a touch of alarm mingled with his interest.

“And to think of the great majority that denies because they are—dead!” he cried. “Smothered! Undivining! Living in that uninspired fragment which they deem the whole! Ah, my friend,”—and he came abruptly nearer—“the pathos, the comedy, the pert self-sufficiency of their dull pride, the crass stupidity and littleness of their denials, in the eyes of those like ourselves who have actually known the passion of the larger experience—! For all this modern talk about a Subliminal Self is woven round a profoundly significant truth, a truth newly discovered and only just beginning to be understood. We are much greater than we know, and there is a vast subconscious part of us. But, what is more important still, there is a super-consciousness as well. the former represents what the race has discarded; it is past; but the latter stands for what it reaches out to in the future. the perfect man you dream of perhaps is he who shall eventually combine the two, for there is, I think, a vast amount the race has discarded unwisely and prematurely. It is of value and will have to be recovered. In the subconsciousness it lies secure and waiting. But it is the super-consciousness that you should aim for, not the other, for there lie those greater powers which so mysteriously wait upon the call of genius, inspiration, hypnotism, and the rest.”

“One leads, though, to the other,” interrupted O’Malley quickly. “It is merely a question of the swing of the pendulum?”

“Possibly,” was the laconic reply.

“They join hands, I mean, behind my back, as it were.”

“Possibly.”

“This stranger, then, may really lead me forward and not back?”

“Possibly,” again was all the answer that he got.

For Stahl had stopped short, as though suddenly aware that he had said too much, betraying himself in the sudden rush of interest and excitement. the face for a moment had seemed quite young, but now the flush faded, and the light died out from his eyes. O’Malley never understood how the change came about so quickly, for in a moment, it seemed, the doctor was calm again, quietly lighting one of his black cigars over by the desk, peering at him half quizzingly, half mockingly through the smoke.

“So I urge you again,” he was saying, as though the rest had been some interlude that the Irishman had half imagined, “to proceed with the caution of this sane majority, the caution that makes for safety. Your friend, as I have already suggested to you, is a direct expression of the cosmic life of the earth. Perhaps, you have guessed by now, the particular type and form. Do not submit your inner life too completely to his guidance. Contain your Self—and resist—while it is yet possible.”

And while he sat on there, sipping hot coffee, half listening to the words that warned of danger while at the same time they cunningly urged him forwards, it seemed that the dreams of childhood revived in him with a power that obliterated this present day—the childhood, however, not of his mere body, but of his spirit, when the world herself was young…. He, too, had dwelt in Arcady, known the free life of splendor and simplicity in some Saturnian Reign; for now this dream, but half remembered, half believed, though eternally yearned for—dream of a Golden Age untouched by Time, still there, still accessible, still inhabited, was actually coming true.

It surely was that old Garden of innocence and joy where the soul, while all unvexed by a sham and superficial civilization of the mind, might yet know growth—a realm half divined by saints and poets, but to the gross majority forgotten or denied.

The Simple Life! This new interpretation of it at first overwhelmed. the eyes of his soul turned wild with glory; the passion that o’er-runs the world in desolate places was his; his, too, the strength of rushing rivers that coursed their parent’s being. He shared the terror of the mountains and the singing of the sweet Spring rains. the spread wonder of the woods of the world lay imprisoned and explained in the daily hurry of his very blood. He understood, because he felt, the power of the ocean tides; and, flitting to and fro through the tenderer regions of his extended Self, danced the fragrance of all the wild flowers that ever blew. That strange allegory of man, the microcosm, and earth, the macrocosm, became a sudden blazing reality. the feverish distress, unrest, and vanity of modern life was due to the distance men had traveled from the soul of the world, away from large simplicity into the pettier state they deemed so proudly progress.

Out of the transliminal depths of this newly awakened Consciousness rose the pelt and thunder of these magical and enormous cosmic sensations—the pulse and throb of the planetary life where his little Self had fringed her own. Those untamed profundities in himself that walked alone, companionless among modern men, suffering an eternal nostalgia, at last knew the approach to satisfaction. For when the “inner catastrophe” completed itself and escape should come—that transfer of the conscious center across the threshold into this vaster region stimulated by the Earth—all his longings would be housed at last like homing birds, nested in the gentle places his yearnings all these years had lovingly built for them—in a living Nature! the fever of modern life, the torture and unrest of a false, external civilization that trained the brain while it still left wars and baseness in the heart, would drop from him like the symptoms of some fierce disease. the god of speed and mechanism that ruled the world today, urging men at ninety miles an hour to enter a Heaven where material gain was only a little sublimated and not utterly denied, would pass for the nightmare that it really was. In its place the cosmic life of undifferentiated simplicity, clean and sweet and big, would hold his soul in the truly everlasting arms.

And that little German doctor, sitting yonder, enlightened yet afraid, seeking an impossible compromise—Stahl could no more stop his going than a fly could stop the rising of the Atlantic tides.

Out of all this tumult of confused thought and feeling there rose then the silver face of some forgotten and passionate loveliness. Apparently it reached his lips, for he heard his own voice murmuring outside him somewhere across the cabin:—

“The gods of Greece—and of the world—”

Yet the instant words clothed it, the flashing glory went. the idea plunged back out of sight—untranslatable in language. Thrilled and sad, he lay back in his chair, watching the doctor and trying to focus his mind upon what he was saying. But the lost idea still dived and reared within him like a shining form, yet never showing more than this radiant point above the surface. the passion and beauty of it…! He tried no more to tie a label of modern words about its neck. He let it swim and dive and leap within him uncaught. Only he understood better why, close to Greece, his friends had betrayed their inner selves, and why for the lesser of the two, whose bodily cage was not yet fully clamped and barred by physical maturity, escape, or return rather, had been possible, nay, had been inevitable.