The Centaur Part 19

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 companions.h.i.+p 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.

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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ds' 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, pa.s.sionate "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. Repet.i.tion 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 G.o.ds" were definitely knowable Powers, accessible to any genuine wors.h.i.+pper, 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 G.o.ds, 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 wors.h.i.+p had ever turned for him a landscape or a scene enchantingly alive. Wors.h.i.+p, he now understood, of course invited "the G.o.ds," and was the channel through which their manifestation became possible to the soul. All the G.o.ds, 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 wors.h.i.+p in the Mysteries: that the wors.h.i.+pper knew actual temporary union with his deity in ecstasy, and at death went permanently into his sphere of being. He understood that wors.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sionate 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 const.i.tuted 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 sh.o.r.es of that old Phasis their figures might still be seen, tall Jason in the lead, erect and silvery, pa.s.sing o'er the s.h.i.+ning, 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 G.o.ds.

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 wors.h.i.+p, 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 c.o.c.ksure writers in little c.o.c.ksure 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 gra.s.ses alone in scale and ma.s.s 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 cl.u.s.ters 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.

XXVIII

"Seasons and times; Life and Fate--all are remarkably rhythmic, metric, regular throughout. In all crafts and arts, in all machines, in organic bodies, in our daily occupations everywhere there is rhythm, meter, accent, melody. All that we do with a certain skill unnoticed, we do rhythmically. There is rhythm everywhere; it insinuates itself everywhere. All mechanism is metric, rhythmic. There must be more in it than this. Is it merely the influence of inertia?"

--NOVALIS, Translated by U.C.B.

Notwithstanding the extent and loneliness of this wild country, coincidence seemed in no way stretched by the abrupt appearance; for in a sense it was not wholly unexpected. There had been certain indications that the meeting again of these two was imminent. The Irishman had never doubted they would meet. But something more than mere hints or warnings, it seemed, had prepared him.

The nature of these warnings, however, O'Malley never fully disclosed.

Two of them he told to me by word of mouth, but there were others he could not bring himself to speak about at all. Even the two he mentioned do not appear in his written account. His hesitation is not easy to explain, unless it be that language collapsed in the attempt to describe occurrences so remote from common experience. This may be so, although he grappled not unsuccessfully with the rest of the amazing adventure. At any rate I could never coax from him more than the confession that there _were_ other things that had brought him hints. Then came a laugh, a shrug of the shoulders, an expression of confused bewilderment in eyes and manner and--silence.

The two he spoke of I report as best I can. On the roof of that London apartment-house where so many of our talks took place beneath the stars and to the tune of bustling modern traffic, he told them to me.

Both were consistent with his theory that he was becoming daily more active in some outlying portion of his personality--knowing experiences in a region of extended consciousness stimulated so powerfully by his strange new friend.

Both, moreover, brought him one and the same conviction that he was no longer--alone. For some days past he had realized this. More than his peasant guide accompanied him. He was both companioned and--observed.

"A dozen times," he said, "I thought I saw him, and a dozen times I was mistaken. But my mind looked for him. I knew that he was somewhere close." He compared the feeling to that common experience of the streets when a friend, not known to be near, or even expected, comes abruptly into the thoughts, so that numberless individuals may trick the sight with his appearance before he himself comes suddenly down the pavement. His approach has reached the mind before his mere body turns the corner. "Something in me was aware of his approach,"

he added, "as though his being were sending out feelers in advance to find me. They reached me first, I think"--he hesitated briefly, hunting for a more accurate term he could not find--"in dream."

"You dreamed that he was coming, then?"

"It came first in dream," he answered; "only when I woke the dream did not fade; it pa.s.sed over into waking consciousness, so that I could hardly tell where the threshold lay between the two. And, meanwhile, I was always expecting to see him at every turn of the trail almost; a little higher up the mountain, behind a rock, or standing beside a tree, just as in the end I actually did see him. Long before he emerged in this way, he had been close about me, guiding, waiting, watching."

He told it as a true thing he did not quite expect me to believe. Yet, in a sense, _his_ sense, I could and did believe it. It was so wholly consistent with the tenor of his adventure and the condition of abnormal receptivity of mind. For his stretched consciousness was in a state of white sensitiveness whereon the tenderest mental force of another's thought might well record its signature. Acutely impressionable he was all over. Physical distance was of as little, or even of less, account to such forces as it is to electricity.