CHAPTER XXVI
He walked along the middle of the street as Stahl
had advised. He would have done so in any case, unconsciously, for he knew
these towns quite as well as the German did. Yet he did not walk alone. The
entire Earth walked with him, and personal danger was an impossibility. A dozen
ruffians might attack him, but none could "take" his life.
How simple it all seemed, yet how utterly beyond
the reach of intelligible description to those who have never felt it--this
sudden surge upwards, downwards, all around and about of the vaster
consciousness amid which the sense of normal individuality seemed but a tiny
focused point. That loss of personality he first dreaded as an "inner
catastrophe" appeared to him now for what it actually was--merely an
extinction of some phantasmal illusion of self into the only true life. Here,
upon the fringe of this wonder-region of the Caucasus, the spirit of the Earth still
manifested as of old, reached out lovingly to those of her children who were
simple enough to respond, ready to fold them in and heal them of the modern,
racking fevers which must otherwise destroy them.... The entire sky of soft
darkness became a hand that covered him, and stroked him into peace; the
perfume that wafted down that narrow street beside him was the single,
enveloping fragrance of the whole wide Earth herself; he caught the very murmur
of her splendid journey through the stars. The certitude of some state of
boundless being flamed, roaring and immense, about his soul....
And when he reached his room, a little cell that
shut out light and air, he met that sinister denial of the simple life which,
for him at least, was the true Dweller on the Threshold. Crashing in to it he
choked, as it were, and could have cried aloud. It gripped and caught him by
the throat--the word that Stahl--Stahl who understood even while he warned and
mocked and hesitated himself--had flung so tauntingly upon him from the decks--Civilization.
Upon his table lay by chance--the Armenian
hotel-keeper had evidently unearthed it for his benefit--a copy of a London
halfpenny paper, a paper that feeds the public with the ugliest details of all
the least important facts of life by the yard, inventing others when the supply
is poor. He read it over vaguely, with a sense of cold distress that was half
pain, half nausea. Somehow it stirred his sense of humor; he returned slowly to
his normal, littler state. But it was not the contrast which made him smile;
rather was it the chance juxtaposition of certain of the contents; for on the
page facing the accounts of railway accidents, of people burned alive,
explosions, giant strikes, crumpled air-men and other countless horrors which
modern inventions offered upon the altar of feverish Progress, he read a
complacently boastful leader that extolled the conquest of Nature men had
learned by speed. The ability to pass from one point to another across the skin
of the globe in the least possible time was sign of the development of the
human soul.
The pompous flatulence of the language touched
bathos. He thought of the thousands who had read both columns and preened
themselves upon that leader. He thought how they would pride themselves upon
the latest contrivance for speeding their inert bodies from one point to
another "annihilating distance"; upon being able to get from suburbia
to the huge shops that created artificial wants, then filled them; from the
pokey villas with their wee sham gardens to the dingy offices; from dark
airless East End rooms to countless factories that pour out semifraudulent,
unnecessary wares upon the world, explosives and weapons to destroy another
nation, or cheapjack goods to poison their own--all in a few minutes less than
they could do it the week before.
And then he thought of the leisure of the country
folk and of those who knew how to be content without external possessions, to
watch the sunset and the dawn with hearts that sought realities; sharing the
noble slowness of the seasons, the gradual growth of flowers, trees, and crops,
the unhurried dignity of Nature's grand procession, the repose-in-progress of
the Mother-Earth.
The calmness of the unhastening Earth once more
possessed his soul in peace. He hid the paper, watching the quiet way the night
beyond his window buried it from sight...
And through that open window came the perfume and
the mighty hand of darkness slowly. It seemed to this imaginative Irishman that
he caught a sound of awful laughter from the mountains and the sea, a laughter
that brought, too, a wave of sighing--of deep and old-world sighing.
And before he went to sleep he took an antidote in
the form of a page from that book that accompanied all his travels, a book
which was written wholly in the open air because its message refused to come to
the heart of the inspired writer within doors, try as he would, the "sky
especially containing for me the key, the inspiration--"
And the fragment that he read expressed a little
bit of his own thought and feeling. The seer who wrote it looked ahead, naming
it "After Civilization," whereas he looked back. But they saw the
same vision; the confusion of time was nothing:--
In the first soft winds of spring, while snow yet
lay on the ground--:
Forth from the city into the great woods
wandering,
Into the great silent white woods where they
waited in their beauty and majesty
For man their companion to come:
There, in vision, out of the wreck of cities and
civilizations,
Slowly out of the ruins of the past
Out of the litter and muck of a decaying world,
Lo! even so
I saw a new life arise.
O sound of waters, jubilant, pouring, pouring--O
hidden song in the hollows!
Secret of the Earth, swelling, sobbing to divulge
itself!
Slowly, building, lifting itself up atom by atom,
Gathering itself round a new center--or rather
round the world—old center once more revealed--
I saw a new life, a new society, arise.
Man I saw arising once more to dwell with Nature;
(The old old story--the prodigal son returning, so
loved,
The long estrangement, the long entanglement in
vain things)--
The child returning to its home--companion of the
winter woods once more--
Companion of the stars and waters--hearing their
words at first-hand (more than all science ever taught)--
The near contact, the dear dear mother so
close--the twilight sky and the young tree-tops against it;
The few needs, the exhilarated radiant life--the
food and population question giving no more trouble;
No hurry more, no striving one to over-ride the
other: ... man the companion of Nature.
Civilization behind him now--the wonderful stretch
of the past;
Continents, empires, religions, wars,
migrations--all gathered up in him;
The immense knowledge, the vast winged powers--to
use or not to use--...
And as he fell asleep at length it seemed there
came a sound of hushed huge trampling underneath his window, and that when he
rose to listen, his big friend from the steamer led him forth into the
darkness, that those shapes of Cloud and Wind he now so often saw, companioned
them across the heights of the night toward some place in the distant mountains
where light and flowers were, and all his dream of years most exquisitely
fulfilled....
He slept. And through his sleep there dropped the
words of that old tribesman from the wilderness: "They come in the
spring... and are very swift and roaring. They are older, older than the
stones. They cannot die... they are of the mountains, and you must hide."
But the dream-consciousness knows no hiding; and
though memory failed to report with detail in the morning, O'Malley woke
refreshed and blessed, knowing that companionship awaited him, and that once he
found the courage to escape completely, the Simple Life of Earth would claim
him in full consciousness.
Stahl with his little modern "Intellect"
was no longer there to hinder and prevent.
CHAPTER XXVII
"Far,
very far, steer by my star, Leaving the loud world's hurry and clamor, In the
mid-sea waits you, maybe, The Isles of Glamour, where Beauty reigns. From
coasts of commerce and myriad-marted Towns of traffic by wide seas parted, Past
shoals unmapped and by reefs uncharted, The single-hearted my isle attains.
"Each
soul may find faith to her mind, Seek you the peace of the groves Elysian, Or
the ivy twine and the wands of vine, The Dionysian, Orphic rite? To share the
joy of the Maenad's leaping In frenzied train thro' the dusk glen sweeping, The
dew-drench'd dance and the star-watch'd sleeping, Or temple keeping in vestal
white?
"Ye
who regret suns that have set, Lo, each god of the ages golden, Here is
enshrined, ageless and kind, Unbeholden the dark years through. Their faithful
oracles yet bestowing, By laurels whisper and clear streams flowing, Or the
leafy stir of the Gods' own going, In oak trees blowing, may answer you!"
--From
PEREGRINA'S SONG
For the next month Terence O'Malley possessed his soul
in patience; he worked, and the work saved him. That is to say it enabled him
to keep what men call "balanced." Stahl had--whether intentionally or
not he was never quite certain--raised a tempest in him. More accurately,
perhaps, he had called it to the top, for it had been raging deep down ever
since he could remember, or had begun to think.
That the earth might be a living, sentient
organism, though too vast to be envisaged as such by normal human
consciousness, had always been a tenet of his imagination's creed. Now he knew
it true, as a dinner-gong is true. That deep yearnings, impossible of
satisfaction in the external conditions of ordinary life, could know subjective
fulfillment in the mind, had always been for him poetically true, as for any other
poet: now he realized that it was literally true for some outlying tract of
consciousness usually inactive, termed by some transliminal. Spiritual
nostalgia provided the channel, and the transfer of consciousness to this
outlying tract, involving, of course, a trance condition of the usual self,
indicated the way--that was all.
Again, his mystical temperament had always seen
objects as forces which from some invisible center push outwards into visible
shape--as bodies: bodies of trees, stones, flowers, men, women, animals; and
others but partially pushed outwards, still invisible to limited physical sight
at least, either too huge, too small, or too attenuated for vision. Whereas
now, as a result of Stahl and Fechner combined, it flamed into him that this
was positively true; more--that there was a point in his transliminal consciousness
where he might "contact" these forces before they reached their
cruder external expression as bodies. Nature, in this sense, had always been
for him alive, though he had allowed himself the term by a long stretch of
poetic sympathy; but now he knew that it was actually true, because objects,
landscapes, humans, and the rest, were verily aspects of the collective
consciousness of the Earth, moods of her spirit, phases of her being,
expressions of her deep, pure, passionate "heart"--projections of herself.
He pondered lingeringly over this. Common words
revealed their open faces to him. He saw the ideas behind language, saw them
naked. Repetition had robbed them of so much that now became vital, like Bible
phrases that too great familiarity in childhood kills for all subsequent life
as meaningless. His eyes were opened perhaps. He took a flower into his mind
and thought about it; really thought; meditated lovingly. A flower was
literally projected by the earth so far as its form was concerned. Its roots
gathered soil and earth-matter, changing them into leaves and blossoms; its
leaves again, took of the atmosphere, also a part of the earth. It was
projected by the earth, born of her, fed by her, and at "death"
returned into her. But this was its outward and visible form only. The flower,
for his imaginative mind, was a force made visible as literally as a house was
a force the mind of the architect made visible. In the mind, or consciousness
of the Earth this flower first lay latent as a dream. Perhaps, in her
consciousness, it nested as that which in us corresponds to a little
thought.... And from this he leaped, as the way ever was with him, to bigger
"projections"--trees, atmosphere, clouds, winds, some visible, some
invisible, and so to a deeper yet simpler comprehension of Fechner's thundering
conception of human beings as projections. Was he, then, literally, a child of
the Earth, mothered by the whole magnificent planet...? All the world
akin--that seeking for an eternal home in every human heart explained...? And
were there--had there been rather--these other, vaster projections Stahl had
adumbrated with his sudden borrowed stretch of vision--forces, thoughts, moods
of her hidden life invisible to sight, yet able to be felt and known
interiorly?
That "the gods" were definitely knowable
Powers, accessible to any genuine worshipper, had ever haunted his mind, thinly
separated only from definite belief: now he understood that this also had been
true, though only partially divined before. For now he saw them as the rare
expressions of the Earth's in the morning of her life. That he might ever come
to know them close made him tremble with a fearful joy, the idea flaming across
his being with a dazzling brilliance that brought him close to that state of consciousness
termed ecstasy. And that in certain unique beings, outwardly human like his
friend, there might still survive some primitive expression of the Earth-Soul,
lesser than the gods, and intermediate as it were, became for him now a
fact--wondrous, awe-inspiring, even holy, but still a fact that he could grasp.
He had found one such; and Stahl, by warnings that
fought with urging invitation at the same time, had confirmed it.
It was singular, he reflected, how worship had
ever turned for him a landscape or a scene enchantingly alive. Worship, he now
understood, of course invited "the gods," and was the channel through
which their manifestation became possible to the soul. All the gods, then, were
accessible in this interior way, but Pan especially--in desolate places and
secret corners of a wood.... He remembered dimly the Greek idea of worship in
the Mysteries: that the worshipper knew actual temporary union with his deity
in ecstasy, and at death went permanently into his sphere of being. He understood
that worship was au fond a desire for loss of personal life--hence its subtle
joy; and a fear lest it be actually accomplished--whence its awe and wonder.
Some glorious, winged thing moved now beside him;
it held him by the hand. The Earth possessed him; and the whole adventure, so
far as he can make it plain, was an authoritative summons to the natural,
Simple Life.
For the next month, therefore, O'Malley,
unhurrying, blessed with a deeper sense of happiness than he had ever known
before, dismissed the "tempest" from his surface consciousness, and
set to work to gather the picturesque impressions of strange places and strange
peoples that the public liked to read about in occasional letters of travel.
And by the time May had passed into June he had moved up and down the Caucasus,
observing, learning, expanding, and gathering in the process through every
sense--through the very pores of his skin almost--draughts of a new and
abundant life that is to be had there merely for the asking.
That modification of the personality which comes
even in cities to all but the utterly hidebound--so that a man in Rome finds
himself not quite the same as he was in London or in Paris a few days
before--went forward in him on a profounder scale than anything he had known hitherto.
Nature fed, stimulated and called him with a passionate intimacy that destroyed
all sense of loneliness, and with a vehement directness of attack that simply
charged him to the brim with a new joy of living. His vitality, powers, even
his physical health, stood at their best and highest. The country laid its
spell upon him, in a word; and if he expresses it thus with some intensity it
was because life came to him so. His record is the measure of his vision. Those
who find exaggeration in it merely confess thereby their own smaller capacity
of living.
Here, as he wandered to and fro among these proud,
immense, secluded valleys, through remote and untamed forests, and by the banks
of wild rivers that shook their flying foam across untrodden banks, he wandered
at the same time deeper and ever deeper into himself, toward a point where he
lost touch with all that constituted him "modern," or held him
captive in the spirit of today. Nearer and ever nearer he moved into some
tremendous freedom, some state of innocence and simplicity that, while
gloriously unrestrained, yet knew no touch of license. Dreams had whispered of
it; childhood had fringed its frontiers; longings had even mapped it faintly to
his mind. But now he breathed its very air and knew it face to face. The Earth
surged wonderfully about him.
With his sleeping-bag upon a small Caucasian
horse, a sack to hold his cooking things, a pistol in his belt, he wandered
thus for days, sleeping beneath the stars, seeing the sunset and the dawn,
drenched in new strength and wonder all the time. Here he touched deeper
reaches of the Earth that spoke of old, old things, that yet were still young
because they knew not change. He walked in the morning of the world, through
her primal fire and dew, when all was a first and giant garden.
The advertised splendors of other lands, even of
India, Egypt, and the East, seemed almost vulgar beside this country that had
somehow held itself aloof, unstained and clean. The civilization of its little
towns seemed but a coated varnish that an hour's sun would melt away; the
railway, crawling along the flanks of the great range, but a ribbon of old iron
pinned on that, with the first shiver of those giant sides, would split and
vanish.
Here, where the Argonauts once landed, the Golden
Fleece still shone o' nights in the depths of the rustling beech woods; along
the shores of that old Phasis their figures might still be seen, tall Jason in
the lead, erect and silvery, passing o'er the shining, flowered fields upon
their quest of ancient beauty. Further north from this sunny Colchian strand
rose the peak of Kasbek, gaunt and desolate pyramid of iron, "sloping
through five great zones of climate," whence the ghost of Prometheus still
gazed down from his "vast frozen precipice" upon a world his courage
would redeem. For somewhere here was the cradle of the human race, fair garden
of some Edened life before the "Fall," when the Earth sang for joy in
her first, golden youth, and her soul expressed itself in mighty forms that
remain for lesser days but a faded hierarchy of visioned gods.
A living Earth went with him everywhere, with love
that never breathed alarm. It seemed he felt her very thoughts within
himself--thoughts, however, that now no longer married with a visible expression
as shapes.
Among these old-world tribes and peoples with
their babble of difficult tongues, wonder and beauty, terror and worship, still
lay too deeply buried to have as yet externalized themselves in mental forms as
legend, myth, and story. In the blood ran all their richness undiluted. Life
was simple, full charged with an immense delight. At home little cocksure
writers in little cocksure journals, pertly modern and enlightened, might
dictate how far imaginative vision and belief could go before they overstepped
the limits of an artificial schedule; but here "everything possible to be
believed was still an image of truth," and the stream of life flowed
deeper than all mere intellectual denials.
A little out of sight, but thinly veiled, the
powers that in this haunted corner of the earth, too strangely neglected,
pushed outwards into men and trees, into mountains, flowers, and the rest, were
unenslaved and intensely vital. In his blood O'Malley knew the primal pulses of
the world.
It was irresistibly seductive. Whether he slept
with the Aryan Ossetians upon the high ridges of the central range, or shared
the stone huts of the mountain Jews, unchanged since Bible days, beyond the
Suram heights, there came to all his senses the message of that Golden Age his
longings ever sought--the rush and murmur of the Urwelt calling.
And so it was, about the first week in June that
lean, bronzed, and in perfect physical condition, this wandering Irishman found
himself in a little Swanetian hamlet beyond Alighir, preparing with a Georgian
peasant-guide to penetrate yet deeper into the mountain recesses and feed his
heart with what he found of loneliness and beauty.
This region of Imerethia, bordering on Mingrelia,
is smothered beneath an exuberance of vegetation almost tropical, blue and
golden with enormous flowers, tangled with wild vines, rich with towering soft
beech woods, and finally, in the upper sections, ablaze with leagues of huge
rhododendron trees in blossom that give whole mountain-sides the aspect of a
giant garden, flowering amid peaks that even dwarf the Alps. For here the
original garden of the world survives, run wild with pristine loveliness. The
prodigality of Nature is bewildering, almost troubling. There are valleys,
rarely entered by the foot of man, where monstrous lilies, topping a man on
foot and even reaching to his shoulder on horseback, have suggested to
botanists in their lavish luxuriance a survival of the original flora of the
world. A thousand flowers he found whose names he had never heard of, their
hues and forms as strangely lovely as those of another planet. The grasses
alone in scale and mass were magnificent. While, in and out of all this
splendor, less dense and voluminous only than the rhododendron forests, ran
scattered lines of blazing yellow--the crowding clusters of azalea bushes that
scented the winds beyond belief.
Beyond this region of extravagance in size and
color, there ran immense bare open slopes of smooth turf that led to the foot
of the eternal snowfields, with, far below, valleys of prodigious scale and
steepness that touched somehow with disdain all memory of other mountain ranges
he had ever known.
And here it was this warm June evening--June 15th
it was--while packing his sack with cheese and maize-flour in the dirty yard of
a so-called "post-house," more hindered than helped by his Georgian
guide, that he realized the approach of a familiar, bearded figure. The figure
emerged. There was a sudden clutch and lift of the heart ... then a rush of wild
delight. There stood his Russian steamer-friend, part of the scale and
splendor, as though grown out of the very soil. He occupied in a flash the
middle of the picture. He gave it meaning. He was part of it, exactly as a tree
or big grey boulder were part of it.
