CHAPTER 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!"
CHAPTER 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.
CHAPTER 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 theatres; 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.
