CHAPTER XLIII
And then at length there came a change of voice
across the cabin. The Irishman had finished. He sank back in the deep leather
chair, exhausted physically, but with the exultation of his mighty hope still
pouring at full strength through his heart. For he had ventured further than
ever before and had spoken of a possible crusade--a crusade that should preach
peace and happiness to every living creature.
And Dr. Stahl, in a voice that showed how deeply
he was moved, asked quietly:--
"By leading the nations back to Nature you
think they shall advance to Truth at last?"
"With time," was the reply. "The
first step lies there:--in changing the direction of the world's activities,
changing it from the transient Outer to the eternal Inner. In the simple life,
external possessions unnecessary and recognized as vain, the soul would turn
within and seek Reality. Only a tiny section of humanity has time to do it now.
There is no leisure. Civilization means acquirement for the body: it ought to
mean development for the soul. Once sweep aside the trash and rubbish men seek
outside themselves today, and the wings of their smothered souls would stir
again. Consciousness would expand. Nature would draw them first. They would
come to feel the Earth as I did. Self would disappear, and with it this false
sense of separateness. The greater consciousness would waken in them. The peace
and joy and blessedness of inner growth would fill their lives. But, first,
this childish battling to the death for external things must cease, and
Civilization stand revealed for the bleak and empty desolate thing it really
is. It leads away from God and from the things that are eternal."
The German made no answer; O'Malley ceased to
speak; a long silence fell between them. Then, presently, Stahl relighted his
cigar, and lapsing into his native tongue--always a sign with him of deepest
seriousness--he began to talk.
"You've honored me," he said, "with
a great confidence; and I am deeply, deeply grateful. You have told your inmost
dream--the thing men find it hardest of all to speak about." He felt in
the darkness for his companion's hand and held it tightly for a moment. He made
no other comment upon what he had heard. "And in return--in some small way
of return," he continued, "I may ask you to listen to something of my
own, something of possible interest. No one has ever known it from my lips.
Only, in our earlier conversations on the outward voyage, I hinted at it once
or twice. I sometimes warned you--"
"I remember. You said he'd 'get' me, 'win' me
over--'appropriation' was the word you used."
"I suggested caution, yes; urged you not to
let yourself go too completely; told you he represented danger to yourself, and
to humanity as it is organized today--"
"And all the rest," put in O'Malley a
shade impatiently. "I remember perfectly."
"Because I knew what I was talking
about." The doctor's voice came across the darkness somewhat ominously.
And then he added in a louder tone, evidently sitting forward as he said it:
"For the thing that has happened to yourself as I foresaw it would, had
already almost happened to me too!"
"To you, doctor, too?" exclaimed the
Irishman in the moment's pause that followed.
"I saved myself just in time--by getting rid
of the cause."
"You discharged him from the hospital,
because you were afraid!" He said it sharply as though are instant of the
old resentment had flashed up.
By way of answer Stahl rose from his chair and
abruptly turned up the electric lamp upon the desk that faced them across the
cabin. Evidently he preferred the light. O'Malley saw that his face was white
and very grave. He grasped for the first time that the man was speaking
professionally. The truth came driving next behind it--that Stahl regarded him
as a patient.
"Please go on, doctor," he said, keenly
on the watch. "I'm deeply interested." The wings of his great dream
still bore him too far aloft for him to feel more than the merest passing
annoyance at his discovery. Resentment had gone too. Sadness and disappointment
for an instant touched him perhaps, but momentarily. In the end he felt sure
that Stahl would stand at his side, completely won over and convinced.
"You had a similar experience to my own, you
say," he urged him. "I am all eagerness and sympathy to hear."
"We'll talk in the open air," the doctor
answered, and ringing the bell for the steward to clear away, he drew his
companion out to the deserted decks. They moved toward the bows, past the
sleeping peasants. The stars were mirrored in a glassy sea and toward the north
the hills of Corsica stood faintly outlined in the sky. It was already long
after midnight.
"Yes, a similar thing nearly happened to
me," he resumed as they settled themselves against a coil of rope where
only the murmur of the washing sea could reach them, "and might have
happened to others too. Inmates of that big Krankenhaus were variously
affected. My action, tardy I must admit, saved myself and them."
And the German then told his story as a man might
tell of his escape from some grave disaster. In the emphatic sentences of his
native language he told it, congratulating himself all through. The Russian had
almost won him over, gained possession of his heart and mind, persuaded him,
but in the end had failed--because the other ran away. It was like hearing a
man describe an attempt to draw him into Heaven, then boast of his escape. His
caution and his judgment, as he put it, saved him, but to the listening Celt it
rather seemed that his compromise it was that damned him. The Kingdom of Heaven
is hard to enter, for Stahl had possessions not of the wood and metal order,
but possessions of the brain and reason he was too proud to forego completely.
They kept him out.
With increasing sadness, too, he heard it; for
here he realized was the mental attitude of an educated, highly civilized man
today--a representative type regarded by the world as highest. It was this he
had to face. Moreover Stahl was more than merely educated, he was
understandingly sympathetic, meeting the great dream halfway; seeing in it
possibilities; admitting its high beauty, and even sometimes speaking of it
with hope and a touch of enthusiasm. Its originator none the less he regarded
as a reactionary dreamer, an unsettling and disordered influence, a patient, if
not even something worse!
Stahl's voice and manner were singular while he
told it all, revealing one moment the critical mind that analyzed and judged,
and the next an enthusiasm almost of the mystic. Alternately, like the man and
woman of those quaint old weather-glasses, each peered out and showed a face,
the reins of compromise yet ever seeking to hold them well in leash and drive
them together.
Hardly, it seems, had the strange Russian been
under his care a week before he passed beneath the sway of his curious
personality and experienced the attack of singular emotions upon his heart and
mind.
He described at first the man's arrival, telling
it with the calm and balanced phrases a doctor uses when speaking merely of a
patient who had stirred his interest. He first detailed the method of
suggestion he had used to revive the lapsed memory--and its utter failure. Then
he passed on to speak of him more generally: but briefly and condensed.
"The man," he said, "was so
engaging, so docile, his personality altogether so attractive and mysterious,
that I took the case myself instead of delegating it to my assistants. All
efforts to trace his past collapsed. It was as if he had drifted into that
little hotel out of the night of time. Of madness there was no evidence
whatever. The association of ideas in his mind, though limited, was logical and
rigid. His health was perfect, barring strange, sudden fever; his vitality
tremendous; yet he ate most sparingly and the only food he touched was fruit
and milk and vegetables. Meat made him sick, the huge frame shuddered when he
saw it. And from all the human beings in the place with whom he came in contact
he shrank with a kind of puzzled dismay. With animals, most oddly it seemed, he
sought companionship; he would run to the window if a dog barked, or to hear a
horse's hoofs; a Persian cat belonging to one of the nurses never left his
side, and I have seen the trees in the yard outside his window thick with
birds, and even found them in the room and on the sill, flitting about his very
person, unafraid and singing.
"With me, as with the attendants, his speech
was almost nil--laconic words in various languages, clipped phrases that
sometimes combined Russian, French, or German, other tongues as well.
"But, strangest of all, with animal life he
seemed to hold this kind of communication that was Intelligible both to himself
and them. Animals certainly were 'aware' of him. It was not speech. It ran in a
deep, continuous murmur like a droning, humming sound of wind. I took the hint
thus faintly offered. I gave him his freedom in the yards and gardens. The open
air and intercourse with natural life was what he craved. The sadness and the
air of puzzled fretting then left his face, his eyes grew bright, his whole
presentment happier; he ran and laughed and even sang. The fever that had
troubled him all vanished. Often myself I took the place of nurse or orderly to
watch him, for the man's presence more than interested me: it gave me a renewed
sense of life that was exhilarating, invigorating, delightful. And in his
appearance, meanwhile, something that was not size or physical measurement,
turned--tremendous.
"A part of me that was not mind--a sort of
forgotten instinct blindly groping--came of its own accord to regard him as some
loose fragment of a natural, cosmic life that had somehow blundered down into a
human organism it sought to use....
"And then it was for the first time I
recognized the spell he had cast upon me; for, when the Committee decided there
was no reason to keep him longer, I urged that he should stay. Making a special
plea, I took him as a private patient of my own. I kept him under closer
personal observation than ever before. I needed him. Something deep within me,
something undivined hitherto, called out into life by his presence, could not
do without him. This new craving, breakingly wild and sweet, awoke in my blood
and cried for him. His presence nourished it in me. Most insidiously it
attacked me. It stirred deep down among the roots of my being. It 'threatened
my personality' seems the best way I can put it; for, turning a critical
analysis upon it, I discovered that it was an undermining and revolutionary
change going steadily forward in my character. Its growth had hitherto been
secret. When I first recognized its presence, the thing was already strong. For
a long time, it had been building.
"And the change in a word--you will grasp my
meaning from the shortest description of essentials--was this: that ambition
left me, ordinary desire crumbled, the outer world men value so began to
fade."
"And in their place?" cried O'Malley
breathlessly, interrupting for the first time.
"Came a rushing, passionate desire to escape
from cities and live for beauty and simplicity 'in the wilderness'; to taste
the life he seemed to know; to go out blindly with him into woods and desolate
places, and be mixed and blended with the loveliness of Earth and Nature. This
was the first thing I knew. It was like an expansion of my normal world--almost
an extension of consciousness. It somehow threatened my sense of personal
identity. And--it made me hesitate."
O'Malley caught the tremor in his voice. Even in
the telling of it the passion plucked at him, for here, as ever, he stood on
the border-line of compromise, his heart tempting him toward salvation, his
brain and reason tugging at the brakes.
"The sham and emptiness or modern life, its
drab vulgarity, the unworthiness of its very ideals stood appallingly revealed
before some inner eye just opening. I felt shaken to the core of what had
seemed hitherto my very solid and estimable self. How the man thus so
powerfully affected me lies beyond all intelligible explanation. To use the
obvious catchword 'hypnotism' is to use a toy and stop a leak with paper. For
his influence was unconsciously exerted. He cast no net of clever, persuasive
words about my thought. Out of that deep, strange silence of the man it somehow
came. His actions and his simple happiness of face and manner--both in some
sense the raw material of speech perhaps--may have operated as potently
suggestive agents; but no adequate causes to justify the result, apart from the
fantastic theories I have mentioned, have ever yet come within the range of my
understanding. I can only give you the undeniable effects."
"Your sense of extended consciousness,"
asked his listener, "was this continuous, once it had begun?"
"It came in patches," Stahl continued.
"My normal, everyday self was thus able to check it. While it derided,
commiserated this everyday self, the latter stood in dread of it and even awe.
My training, you see, regarded it as symptom of disorder, a beginning of
unbalance that might end in insanity, the thin wedge of a dissociation of the
personality Morton Prince and others have described."
His speech grew more and more jerky, even
incoherent; evidently the material had not even now been fully reduced to order
in his mind.
"Among other curious symptoms I soon
established that this subtle spreading of my consciousness grew upon me
especially during sleep. The business of the day distracted, scattered it. On
waking in the morning, as with the physical fatigue that comes toward the
closing of the day, it was strongest.
"And so, in order to examine it closely when
in fullest manifestation, I came to spend the nights with him. I would creep in
while he slept and stay till morning, alternately sleeping and waking myself. I
watched the two of us together. I also watched the 'two' in me. And thus it was
I made the further strange discovery that the influence he exerted on me was
strongest while he slept. It is best described by saying that in his sleep I
was conscious that he sought to draw me with him--away somewhere into his own
wonderful world--the state or region, that is, where he manifested completely
instead of partially as I knew him here. His personality was a channel
somewhere out into a living, conscious Nature...."
"Only," interrupted O'Malley, "you
felt that to yield and go involved some nameless inner catastrophe, and so
resisted?" He chose his phrase with purpose.
"Because I discovered," was the pregnant
answer, given steadily while he watched his listener closely through the
darkness, "that this desire for escape the man had wakened in me was
nothing more or less than the desire to leave the world, to leave the conditions
that prevented--in fact to leave the body. My discontent with modern life had
gone as far as that. It was the birth of the suicidal mania."
The pause that followed the words, on the part of
Dr. Stahl at any rate, was intentional. O'Malley held his peace. The men
shifted their places oil the coil of rope, for both were cramped and stiff with
the lengthy session. For a minute or two they leaned over the bulwarks and
watched the phosphorescent foam in silence. The blue mountainous shores slipped
past in shadowy line against the stars. But when they sat down again their
relative positions were not what they had been before. Dr. Stahl had placed
himself between his listener and the sea. And O'Malley did not let the
manoeuvre escape him. Smiling to himself he noticed it. Just as surely he
noticed, too, that the whole recital was being told him with a purpose.
"You really need not be afraid," he
could not resist saying. "The idea of escape that way has never even come
to me at all. And, anyhow, I've far too much on hand first in telling the world
my message." He laughed in the silence that took his words, for Stahl said
nothing and made as though he had not heard. But the Irishman understood that
it was in the spirit of feeble compromise that danger lay--if danger there was
at all, and he himself was far beyond such weakness. His eye was single and his
body full of light, and the faith that plays with mountains had made him whole.
Return to Nature for him involved no denial of human life, nor depreciation of human
interests, but only a revolutionary shifting of values.
"And it was one night while he slept and I
watched him in the little room," resumed the German as though there had
been no interruption, "I noticed first so decisively this growing of a
singular size about him I have already mentioned, and grasped its meaning. For
the bulk of the man while growing--emerging, rather, I should say--assumed
another shape than his own. It was not my eyes that saw it. I saw him as he
felt himself to be. The creature's personality, his essential inner being, was
acting directly upon my own. His influence was at me from another point or
angle. First the emotions, then the senses you see. It was a finely organized
attack.
"I definitely understood at last that my mind
was affected--and proved it too, for the instant effort I made at recovery
resulted in my seeing him normal again. The size and shape retreated the moment
I denied them."
O'Malley noticed how the speaker's voice lingered
over the phrase. Again he knew the intention of the pause that followed. He
held his peace, however, and waited.
"Nor was sight the only sense affected,"
Stahl continued, "for smell and hearing also brought their testimony.
Through all but touch, indeed, the hallucination attacked me. For sometimes at
night while I sat up watching in the little room, there rose outside the open
window in the yards and gardens a sound of tramping, a distant roaring as of
voices in a rising wind, a rushing, hollow murmur, confused and deep like that
of forests, or the swift passage of a host of big birds across the sky. I heard
it, both in the air and on the ground--this tramping on the lawns, this curious
shaking of the atmosphere. And with it at the same time a sharp and mingled
perfume that made me think of earth and leaves, of flowers after rain, of
plains and open spaces, most singular of all--of animals and horses.
"Before the firm denial of my mind, they
vanished, just as the change of form had vanished. But both left me weaker than
they found me, more tender to attack. Moreover, I understood most plainly, that
they emanated all from him. These 'emanations' came, too, chiefly, as I
mentioned, whilst he slept. In sleep, it seemed, he set them free. The slumber
of the body disengaged them. And then the instinct came to warn me--presenting
itself with the authority of an unanswerable intuition--the realization,
namely, that if, for a single moment in his presence, I slept, the changes
would leap forward in my own being, and I should join him."
"Escape! Know freedom in a larger
consciousness!" cried the other.
"And for a man of my point of view and
training to have permitted such a conviction at all," he went on, the
interruption utterly ignored again, "proves how far along the road I had
already traveled without knowing it. Only at the time I was not aware of this.
It was the shock of full discovery later that brought me to my senses, when,
seeking to withdraw,--I found I could not."
"And so you ran away." It came out
bluntly enough, with a touch of scorn but ill concealed.
"We discharged him. But before that came
there was more I have to tell you--if you still care to hear it."
"I'm not tired, if that's what you mean. I
could listen all night, as far as that goes."
He rose to stretch his legs a moment, and Stahl
rose too--instantly. Together they leaned over the bulwarks. The German's hat
was off and the air made by the steamer's passage drew his beard out. The warm
soft wind brought odors of sea and shore. It caressed their faces, then passed
on across those sleeping peasants on the lower deck. The masts and rigging
swung steadily against the host of stars.
"Before I thus knew myself half caught,"
continued the doctor, standing now close enough beside him for actual contact,
"and found it difficult to get away, other things had happened, things
that confirmed the change so singularly begun in me. They happened everywhere;
confirmation came from many quarters; though slight enough, they filled in all
the gaps and crevices, strengthened the joints, and built the huge illusion
round me all complete until it held me like a prison.
"And they are difficult to tell. Only,
indeed, to yourself who underwent a similar experience up there in the
mountains, could they bring much meaning. You had the same temptation and
you--weathered the same storm." He caught O'Malley's arm a moment and held
it. "You escaped this madness just as I did, and you will realize what I
mean when I say that the sensation of losing my sense of personal identity
became so dangerously, so seductively strong. The feeling of extended
consciousness became delicious--too delicious to resist. A kind of pagan joy
and exultation known to some in early youth, but put away with the things of
youth, possessed me. In the presence of this other's soul, so strangely powerful
in its silence and simplicity, I felt as though I touched new sources of life.
I tapped them. They poured down and flooded me--with dreams--dreams that could
really haunt--with unsettling thoughts of glory and delight beyond the body. I
got clean away into Nature. I felt as though some portion of me just awakening
reached out across him into rain and sunshine, far up into the sweet and starry
sky--as a tree growing out of a thicket that chokes its lower part finds light
and freedom at the top."
"It caught you badly, doctor," O'Malley
murmured. "The gods came close!"
"So badly that I loathed the prisoned
darkness that held me so thickly in the body. I longed to know my being all
dispersed through Nature, scattered with dew and wind, shining with the star-light
and the sun. And the manner of escape I hinted to you a little while ago came
to seem right and necessary. Lawful it seemed, and obvious. The mania literally
obsessed me, though still I tried to hide it even from myself ... and struggled
in resistance."
"You spoke just now of other things that came
to confirm it," the Irishman said while the other paused to take breath.
All this he knew. He grew weary of Stahl's clever laboring the point that it
was madness. A little knowledge is ever dangerous, and he saw so clearly why
the hesitation of the merely intellectual man had led him into error. "Did
you mean that others acknowledged this influence as well as yourself?"
"You shall read that for yourself
tomorrow," came the answer, "in the detailed report I drew up
afterwards; it is far too long to tell you now. But, I may mention something of
it. That breaking out of patients was a curious thing, their trying to escape,
their dreams and singing, their efforts sometimes to approach his room, their
longing for the open and the gardens; the deep, prolonged entrancing of a few;
the sounds of rushing, tramping that they, too, heard, the violence of some,
the silent ecstasy of others. The thing may find its parallel, perhaps, in the
collective mania that sometimes afflicts religious communities, in monasteries
or convents. Only here there was no preacher and eloquent leader to induce
hysteria--nothing but that silent dynamo of power, gentle and winning as a
little child, a being who could not put a phrase together, exerting his potent
spell unconsciously, and chiefly while he slept.
"For the phenomena almost without exception
came in the night, and often at their fullest strength, as afterwards reported
to me, while I dozed in his room and watched beside his motionless and
slumbering form. Oh, and there was more as well, much more, as you shall read.
The stories my assistants brought me, the tales of frightened nurse and warder,
the amazing yarns the porter stammered out, of strangers who had rung the bell
at dawn, trying to push past him through the door, saying they were messengers
and had been summoned, sent for, had to come,--large, curious, windy figures,
or, as he sometimes called them with unconscious humor, 'like creatures out of
fairy books or circuses' that always vanished as suddenly as they came. Making
every allowance for excitement and exaggeration, the tales were strange enough,
I can assure you, and the way many of the patients knew their visions
intensified, their illusions doubly strengthened, their efforts even to destroy
themselves in many cases almost more than the staff could deal with--all this
brought the matter to a climax and made my duty very plain at last."
"And the effect upon yourself--at its
worst?" asked his listener quietly.
Stahl sighed wearily a little as he answered with
a new-found sadness in his tone.
"I've told you briefly that," he said;
"repetition cannot strengthen it. The worthlessness of the majority of
human aims today expresses it Best--what you have called yourself the 'horror of
civilization.' The vanity of all life's modern, so-called up-to-date tendencies
for outer, mechanical developments. A wild, mad beauty streaming from that
man's personality overran the whole place and caught the lot of us, myself
especially, with a lust for simple, natural things, and with a passion for
spiritual beauty to accompany them. Fame, wealth, position seemed the shadows
then, and something else it's hard to name announced itself as the
substance.... I wanted to clear out and live with Nature, to know simplicity,
unselfish purposes, a golden state of childlike existence close to dawns and
dew and running water, cared for by woods and blessed by all the
winds...." He paused again for breath, then added:--
"And that's just where the mania caught at me
so cunningly--till I saw it and called a halt."
"Ah!"
"For the thing I sought, the thing he knew,
and perhaps remembered, was not possible in the body. It was a spiritual
state--"
"Or to be known subjectively!" O'Malley
checked him.
"I am no lotus-eater by nature," he went
on with energy, "and so I fought and conquered it. But first, I tell you,
it came upon me like a tempest--a hurricane of wonder and delight. I've always
held, like yourself perhaps, that civilization brings its own army of diseases,
and that the few illnesses known to ruder savage races can be cured by simple
means the earth herself supplies. And along this line of thought the thing
swept into me--the line of my own head-learning. This was natural enough;
natural enough, too, that it thus at first deceived me.
"For the quack cures of history come to
this--herb simples and the rest; only we know them now as sun-cure, water-cure,
open-air cure, old Kneipp, sea-water, and a hundred others. Doctors have never
swarmed before as they do now, and these artificial diseases civilization
brings in such quantity seemed all at once to mean the abeyance of some central
life or power men ought to share with--Nature.... You shall read it all in my
written report. I merely wish to show you now how the insidious thing got at me
along the line of my special knowledge. I saw the truth that priests and
doctors are the only possible and necessary 'professions' in the world,
and--that they should be really but a single profession...."
CHAPTER XLIV
He drew suddenly back with a kind of jerk. It was
as though he realized abruptly that he had said too much--had overdone it. He
took his companion by the arm and led him down the decks.
As they passed the bridge the Captain called out a
word of welcome to them; and his jolly, boisterous laugh ran down the wind. The
American engineer came from behind a dark corner, almost running into them; his
face was flushed. "It's like a furnace below," he said in his nasal
familiar manner; "too hot to sleep. I've run up for a gulp of air."
He made as though he would join them.
"The wind's behind us, yes," replied the
doctor in a different tone, "and there's no draught." With a gesture,
half bow, half dismissal, he made even this thick-skinned member of "the
greatest civilization on earth" understand he was not wanted. And they
turned at the cabin door, O'Malley a moment wondering at the admirable dignity
with which the "little" man had managed the polite dismissal.
Himself, perhaps, he would not have minded the
diversion. He was a little weary of the German's long recital. The confession
had not been complete, he felt. Much had been held back. It was not altogether
straightforward. The dishonesty which hides in compromise peeped through it
everywhere.
And the incoherence of the latter part had almost
bored him. For it was, he easily divined, a studied incoherence. It was meant
to touch a similar weakness in himself--if there. But it was not there. He saw
through the whole manoeuvre. Stahl wished to warn and save him by showing that
the experience they had partly shared was nothing but a strange mental
disorder. He wished to force in this subtle way his own interpretation of it
upon his friend. Yet at the same time the intuitive Irishman discerned that
other tendency in the man which would so gladly perhaps have welcomed a
different explanation, and even in some fashion did actually accept it.
O'Malley smiled inwardly as he watched him prepare
the coffee as of old. And patiently he waited for the rest that was to come. In
a certain sense it all was useful. It would be helpful later. This was an
attitude he would often have to face when he returned to civilized life and
tried to tell his Message to the thinking, educated men of today--the men he
must win over somehow to his dream--the men, without whose backing, no Movement
could hope to meet with even a measure of success.
"So, like myself," said Stahl, as he
carefully tended the flame of the spirit-lamp between them, "you have
escaped by the skin of your teeth, as it were. And I congratulate
you--heartily."
"I thank you," said the other dryly.
"You write your version now, and I'll write
mine--indeed it is already almost finished--then we'll compare notes. Perhaps
we might even publish them together."
He poured out the fragrant coffee. They faced each
other across the little table. But O'Malley did not take the bait. He wished to
hear the balance his companion still might tell.
And presently he asked for it.
"With the discharge of your patient the
trouble ceased at once, then?"
"Comparatively soon. It gradually subsided,
yes."
"And as regards yourself?"
"I came back to my senses. I recovered my
control. The insubordinate impulses I had known retired." He smiled as he
sipped his coffee. "You see me now," he added, looking his companion
steadily in the eyes, "a sane and commonplace ship's doctor."
"I congratulate you--"
"Vielen Dank." He bowed.
"On what you missed, yet almost
accomplished," the other finished. "You might have known, like me,
the cosmic consciousness! You might have met the gods!"
"In a strait-waistcoat," the doctor
added with a snap.
They laughed at one another across their coffee
cups as once before they had laughed across their glasses of Kakhetian
wine--two eternally antagonistic types that will exist as long as life itself.
But, contrary to his expectations, the German had
little more to tell. He mentioned how the experience had led his mind into
strange and novel reading in his desire to know what other minds might have to
offer by way of explanation, even the most fanciful and far-fetched. He told,
though very briefly, how he had picked up Fechner among others, and carefully
studied his "poetic theories," and read besides the best accounts of
"spiritistic" phenomena, as also of the rarer states of hysteria,
double-consciousness, multiple personality, and even those looser theories
which suggest that a portion of the human constitution called
"astral" or "etheric" may escape from the parent center
and, carrying with it the subtler forces of desire and yearning, construct a
vivid subjective state of mind which is practically its Heaven of hope and
longing all fulfilled.
He did not, however, betray the results upon
himself of all this curious reading and study, nor mention what he found of
truth or probability in it all. He merely quoted books and authors, in at least
three languages, that stretched in a singular and catholic array from Plato and
the Neo-Platonists across the ages to Myers, Du Prel, Flournoy, Lodge, and
Morton Prince.
Out of the lot, perhaps,--O'Malley gathered it by
inference rather than from actual statement, from fragments of their talks upon
the outward voyage more than from anything let fall just then--Fechner had
proved the most persuasive to this man's contradictory and original mind. It
certainly seemed, at least, as if he knew some secret sympathetic leaning
toward the idea that consciousness and matter were inseparable, and that a
Cosmic Consciousness "of sorts" might pertain to the Earth as,
equally, to all the other stars and planets. The Urwelt idea he so often
referred to had seized a part of his imagination--that, at least, was clear.
The Irishman drank it all in, but he was too
exhausted now to argue, and too full besides to ask questions. His natural
volubility forsook him. He let the doctor have his say without interruptions.
He took the warnings with the rest of it. Nothing the other said had changed
him.
It was not the first sunrise they had watched
together, and as they took the morning air on deck once more, Corsica rising
like a dream the night had left behind her on the sea, he listened with fainter
interest to the German's concluding sentences.
"At any rate you now understand why on that
other voyage I was so eager to watch you with your friend, so keen to separate
you, to prevent your sleeping with him, and at the same time so desirous to see
his influence upon you at close quarters; and also--why I always understood so
well what was going on both outwardly and within."
O'Malley quietly reiterated the belief he still
held in the power of his own dream.
"I shall go home and give my message to the
world," was what he said quietly. "I think it's true."
"It's better to keep silent," was the
answer, "for, even if true, the world is not ready yet to listen. It will
evaporate, you'll find, in the telling. You'll find there's nothing to tell.
Besides, a dream like yours must dawn on all at once, and not on merely one. No
one will understand you."
"I can but try."
"You will reach no men of action; and few of
intellect. You will merely stuff the dreamers who are already stuffed enough.
What is the use, I ask you? What is the use?"
"It will set the world on fire for
simplicity," the other murmured, knowing the great sweet passion flame
within him as he watched the sun come slowly out of the rosy sea. "All the
use in the world."
"None," was the laconic answer.
"They might know the gods!" cried
O'Malley, using the phrase that symbolized for him the entire Vision.
Stahl looked at him for some time before he spoke.
Again that expression of wistful, almost longing admiration shone in the brown
eyes.
"My friend," he answered gravely,
"men do not want to know the gods. They prefer their delights less subtle.
They crave the cruder physical sensations that bang them toward
excitement--"
"Of disease, of pain, of separateness,"
put in the other.
The German shrugged his shoulders. "It's the
stage they're at," he said. "You, if you have success, will merely
make a few uncomfortable. The majority will hardly turn their heads. To one in
a million you may bring peace and happiness."
"It's worth it," cried the Irishman,
"even for that one!"
Stahl answered very gently, smiling with his new
expression of tenderness and sympathy. "Dream your great dream if you
will, but dream it, my friend, alone--in peace and silence. That 'one' I speak
of is yourself."
The doctor pressed his hand and turned toward his
cabin. O'Malley stood a little longer to share the sunrise. Neither spoke
another word. He heard the door shut softly behind him. The unspoken answer in
his mind was in two words--two common little adjectives: "Coward and
selfish!"
But Stahl, once in the privacy of his cabin,
judging by the glance visible on his face ere he closed the door, may probably
have known a very different thought. And possibly he uttered it below his
breath. A sigh most certainly escaped his lips, a sigh half sadness, half
relief. For O'Malley remembered it afterwards.
"Beautiful, foolish dreamer among men! But,
thank God, harmless--to others and--himself."
And soon afterwards O'Malley also went to his
cabin. Before sleep took him he lay deep in a mood of sadness--almost as though
he had heard his friend's unspoken thought. He realized the insuperable
difficulties that lay before him. The world would think him "mad but harmless."
Then, with full sleep, he slipped across that
sunrise and found the old-world Garden. He held the eternal password.
"I can but try...!"
