Monday's Illustrated Word: "Big Top Nightmare" by unknown writer (in English)

art by Lin Streeter - The Beyond #5 - Ace Magazines, July 1951.

Michael Matt's Open Letter to Leo XIV (in English).

 You can read ther original text here.

HOLY FATHER: My name is Michael Matt. I stand before you tonight a lifelong Traditional Catholic and father to seven children who is grateful to you and to God for the many hopeful signs here in the first weeks of your pontificate.

As an accredited journalist, I covered the conclave and I was standing right across from you on the colonnade when from the loggia you first blessed us in Latin, prayed the traditional Confiteor, and later led the entire world singing honor to the Queen of Heaven, the Regina Caeli.

And though I am filled with Catholic hope that Your Holiness will lead us to greener pastures,  I also come to you with a heavy heart. As you know, over the past twelve years faithful Catholics have endured scandals in the Church such as the world has never seen. In the wake of Fiducia Supplicans, entire conferences of Catholic bishops were obliged in conscience to resist Peter to his face, something no faithful Catholic ever expected to see.

Confusion, lack of clarity, and even mass defections became the hallmarks of the day over the course of the past decade.

When Your Holiness blessed the world from the loggia, I recalled how my father as a young American soldier had received that same traditional blessing from the same loggia when Papa Pacelli had blessed the troops back in 1944. After the war, my father returned home to found The Remnant, the oldest traditional Catholic newspaper in the United States.

I pray that you, Holy Father, will hear my voice as that of a sheep crying in the night. I am a traditional Catholic, but I will never allow scandal or any other malady to drive me out of my suffering Church. Again, I am a traditionalist who never left the Church. After Pope John Paul II granted the first Indult in 1984, my father obtained permission from our local ordinary to have the first Latin Mass in the United States. Consequently, my children received the Sacraments in the Traditional Rite, attend a diocesan Latin Mass every Sunday, and are all practicing Catholics.

I come not in defiance, then, but in supplication, living in a Church I hardly recognize anymore. I am no saint, but I know what our Church has taught infallibly for two thousand years. I come from a long line of Catholic publishers who spent their lives defending tradition and the infallible teachings of the Catholic Church.

One hundred and sixty years ago, my great-grandfather founded the oldest Catholic weekly newspaper in America today.

For his part, my grandfather, Joseph Matt, was a German immigrant who came to America when he was just 17 years old. Three decades later, he was made a Knight of St. Gregory by Pope Pius XI at a ceremony held here in the Vatican. After fifty years in loyal service to the Church, he was named Editor Emeritus of the Catholic press in America.

When Your Holiness blessed the world from the loggia, I recalled how my father as a young American soldier had received that same traditional blessing from the same loggia when Papa Pacelli had blessed the troops back in 1944. After the war, my father returned home to found the oldest traditional Catholic newspaper in the United States.

For 160 years, my fathers have stood on the wall in defense of the great social teaching of your predecessors. They held up the defense of Catholic Tradition as our sacred duty before God. I stand before you tonight, Holy Father, praying that you will do the same.

I trust that you understand the nature and extent of the scandal we all feel in our hearts. I trust that you know what it is like for a father to have explain to his son that so much corruption in the Church does not mean that she is not the Church founded by Jesus Christ.

The first time I had the honor of meeting you was in a Vatican press conference in 2023 during the Synod on Synodality. I was struck by your manifest sensus Catholicus. I remember your clarity in teaching when you told a secular press that it was not possible for the Church to abandon two thousand years of Tradition by ordaining women.

Your words on that occasion gave me hope. And now that you are the 267th Successor of Saint Peter, I pray that that same faith and courage will be your guide. I trust that you understand the nature and extent of the scandal we all feel in our hearts. I trust that you know what it is like for a father to have explain to his son that so much corruption in the Church does not mean that she is not the Church founded by Jesus Christ.

Surely you know that like Rachel weeping for her children, our wives and mothers weep for their children, so many of whom have been lost in the desert of Modernism and a Godless new world order.

For forty years in that desert, your predecessors have provided manna in the form of the Latin Mass for families like mine. I trust you understand that the Latin Mass is all our children have ever known. And since it has kept so many families united in the Catholic Faith, surely Pope Leo XIV – the missionary pope—would not take that away from us.

I am not sure how much more scandal our children can endure. They have overheard the things of which St. Paul tells us we should not even speak – the sexual abuse of children, the homosexual abuse of seminarians, blasphemy against God, and now Traditionis Custodes – that the Traditional  Roman Rite – the only mass Roman Catholics have known for a thousand years – that the most beautiful thing this side of heaven is, according to a pope, divisive and must be canceled.

If Synodality continues down this path, Holiness, how will history not describe it as the hospice nurse who was summoned to provide palliative care for a dying Catholic Church?

What does Synodality mean? Thus far, we are told that it means the Church will accommodate the world’s demands that she bow to sodomy and bend a knee to heterodoxy. I feel certain that this is not what Your Holiness means by Synodality. But please understand that this is how Synodality has been presented to our scandalized children at the rainbow masses and the diocesan encounter sessions where all are welcome, but no one is encouraged to “repent and sin no more.” Your predecessor told the whole world that he wants to bless sinners living in sodmitical unions and that he wants unrepentant public adulterers to receive the Sacraments.

If Synodality continues down this path, Holiness, how will history not describe it as the hospice nurse who was summoned to provide palliative care for a dying Catholic Church?

Holy Father, you are committed to listening to the sheep. So, please, Holiness, listen to this from a lifelong Catholic journalist: The world does not need a Pope of the Synodal Church. The world needs a pope of the Catholic Church. And as a Traditional Catholic, I can assure you that Mother Church never abandoned us. She has been accompanying us since before we can remember. We never had to walk alone on pathways she didn’t walk first, out ahead of us, leading us, encouraging us to come and follow Him Who is the hope of the world.

When we came into this world, she was there, ready to receive us in the living waters of her baptismal font. From that moment on, she accompanied us every moment of every day of our lives.

When we were children, her nuns taught us how to listen to the voice of Mother Church. Her Sacraments were our rites of passage along the journey of life. The celebrations of her great feasts are our most cherished childhood memories. Her priests listened to us in the darkness of the confessional every morning.

Pope Pius wrote that “the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries nor innovators, but traditionalists.” I would add to that: The true friends of the POPE are neither revolutionaries nor innovators, but traditionalists.

The Church was with us when our children came into the world, and she stood faithful guard at the deathbeds of our mothers and fathers. There she was in black cassock, purple stole, holy viaticum in hand, “Ego te absolvo” on the lips of her holy priests – accompanying us past the gatekeeper and on into eternal life.

We lived out our lives as our fathers had for a thousand years – in the shadows of her steeples, in joy and sadness, sickness and health, birth and death, she was always there. Every day of our lives – her Angelus bells woke us in the morning, called us for the midday meal, reminded us of when it was time to pray and prepare to sleep. She was our ever-constant companion, with her catechisms and virtues, lessons and precepts, her saints and angels, seasons, and sacraments, fasting and feasting, laughter and tears.

She is why we are.

Holy Father, lead us back to her. God has chosen you to lead His Church into greener pastures. So, lead on, Leo. And when you look out of your window, remember this: there are traditionalists all over the world who are not your enemies but who are your most loyal sons, watching and praying that Peter’s faith will not fail him. If it does, they will be left with no choice but to resist him to his face. If it does not, however, Peter will have no greater defenders in the world today than the traditionalists.

Pope Pius wrote that “the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries nor innovators, but traditionalists.” I would add to that: The true friends of the POPE are neither revolutionaries nor innovators, but traditionalists. We stand with you, and we beg you, Holy Father, return to Tradition, liberate Mother Church from her chains, and save us, save our children, save our souls. If you carry the light of Christ out into the darkness of a world at war with God, we will follow you to the ends of the earth and, please God, to the gates of the kingdom of heaven.

 

https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/7795-open-letter-to-pope-leo

Friday's Sung Word: "Perfume de Mulher Bonita" by Georges Moran and Osvaldo Santiago (in Portuguese)

  

Não existe, não
Um aroma assim, tão doce
Nem, que num jardim
Procurá-lo, enfim
Eu fosse
É um olor sutil
Que de flores mil
Se exala
Filtro de ilusão
Que de uma paixão
Nos fala

Perfume de mulher bonita
Tu me vens recordar um amor
Em ti meu coração palpita
Num sonho risonho
Perfume de mulher bonita
Já gozei, certa vez, teu frescor
Se um dia ela voltar
De novo hás de vibrar
Nas minhas noites de luar.

 

You can listen "Perfume de Mulher Bonita" sung by Carlos Galhardo with Orquestra Victor Brasileira here.

Thursday's Serial: “The Centaur” by Algernon Blackwood (in English) - IX

 

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.