The Centaur Part 27

At first, too, in those days while waiting for the steamer in Batoum, he kept strangely silent. Even in his own thoughts was silence. He could not speak of what he knew. Even paper refused it. But all the time this glorious winged thing, that yet was simple as the sunlight or the rain, went by his side, while his soul knew the relief of some divine, proud utterance that, he felt, could never know complete confession in speech or writing. Later he stammered over it--to his notebooks and to me, and partially also to Dr. Stahl. But at first it dwelt alone and hidden, contained in this deep silence.

The days of waiting he filled with walks about the streets, watching the world with new eyes. He took the Russian steamer to Poti, and tramped with a knapsack up the Tchourokh gorge beyond Bourtchka, regardless of the Turkish gypsies and encampments of wild peoples on the banks. The sense of personal danger was impossible; he felt the whole world kin. That sense protected him. Pistol and cartridges lay in his bag, forgotten at the hotel.

Delight and pain lay oddly mingled in him. The pain he recognized of old, but this great radiant happiness was new. The nightmare of modern cheap-jack life was all explained; unjustified, of course, as he had always dimly felt, symptom of deep disorder; all due, this feverish, external business, to an odd misunderstanding with the Earth. Humanity had somehow quarreled with her, claiming an independence that could not really last. For her the centuries of this estrangement were but a little thing perhaps--a moment or two in that huge life which counted a million years to lay a narrow bed of chalk. They would come back in time.

Meanwhile she ever called. A few, perhaps, already dreamed of return.

Movements, he had heard, were afoot--a tentative endeavor here and there.

They heard, these few, the splendid whisper that, sweetly calling, ever pa.s.sed about the world.

For her voice in the last resort was more potent than all others--an enchantment that never wholly faded; men had but temporarily left her mighty sides and gone astray, eating of trees of knowledge that brought them deceptive illusions of a mad self-intoxication; fallen away into the pains of separateness and death. Loss of direction and central control was the result; the Babel of many tongues so clumsily invented, by which all turned one against another. Insubordinate, artificial centers had a.s.sumed disastrous command. Each struggled for himself against his neighbors. Even religions fought to the blood. A single sect could d.a.m.n the rest of humanity, yet in the same breath sing complaisantly of its own Heaven.

Meanwhile She smiled in love and patience, letting them learn their lesson; meanwhile She watched and waited while, like foolish children, they toiled and sweated after futile transient things that brought no single letter of content. She let them coin their millions from her fairest thoughts, the gold and silver in her veins; and let them turn it into engines of destruction, knowing that each "life lost," returned into her arms and heart, crying with the pain of its wayward foolishness, the lesson learned; She watched their tears and struggling just outside the open nursery door, knowing they must at length return for food; and while thus waiting, watching, She heard all prayers that reached her; She answered them with love and forgiveness ever ready; and to the few who realized their folly--naughtiness, perhaps, at worst it was--this side of "death," She brought full measure of peace and joy and beauty.

Not permanently could they hurt themselves, for evil was but distance from her side, the ignorance of those who had wandered furthest into the little dark labyrinth of a separated self. The "intellect" they were so proud of had misled them.

And sometimes, here and there across the ages, with a glory that refused utterly to be denied, She thundered forth her old sweet message of deliverance. Through poet, priest, or child she called her children home. The summons rang like magic across the wastes of this dreary separated existence. Some heard and listened, some turned back, some wondered and were strangely thrilled; some, thinking it too simple to be true, were puzzled by the yearning and the tears and went back to seek for a more difficult way; while most, denying the secret glory in their hearts, sought to persuade themselves they loved the strife and hurrying fever best.

At other times, again, she chose quite different ways, and sent the amazing message in a flower, a breath of evening air, a sh.e.l.l upon the sh.o.r.e; though oftenest, perhaps, it hid in a strain of music, a patch of color on the sea or hills, a rustle of branches in a little twilight wind, a whisper in the dusk or in the dawn. He remembered his own first visions of it....

Only never could the summons come to her children through the intellect, for this it was that led them first away. Her message enters ever by the heart.

The simple life! He smiled as he thought of the bald Utopias here and there devised by men, for he had seen a truth whose brilliance smote his eyes too dazzlingly to permit of the smallest corner of darkness.

Remote, no doubt, in time that day when the lion shall lie down with the lamb and men shall live together in peace and gentleness; when the inner life shall be admitted as the Reality, strife, gain, and loss unknown because possessions undesired, and petty selfhood merged in the larger life--remote, of course, yet surely not impossible. He had seen the Face of Nature, heard her Call, tasted her joy and peace; and the rest of the tired world might do the same. It only waited to be shown the way. The truth he now saw so dazzling was that all who heard the call might know it for themselves at once, cuira.s.sed with s.h.i.+ning love that makes the whole world kin, the Earth a mother literally divine. Each soul might thus provide a channel along which the summons home should pa.s.s across the world. To live with Nature and share her greater consciousness, _en route_ for states yet greater, nearer to the eternal home--this was the beginning of the truth, the life, the way.

He saw "religion" all explained: and those hard sayings that make men turn away:--the imagined dread of losing life to find it; the counsel of perfection that the neighbor shall be loved as self; the fancied injury and outrage that made it hard for rich men to enter the kingdom.

Of these, as of a hundred other sayings, he saw the necessary truth. It all seemed easy now. The world would see it with him; it must; it could not help itself. Simplicity as of a little child, and selflessness as of the mystic--these were the splendid clues.

Death and the grave, indeed, had lost their victory. For in the stages of wider consciousness beyond this transient physical phase he saw all loved ones joined and safe, as separate words upgathered each to each in the parent sentence that explains them, the sentence in the paragraph, the paragraph in the whole grand story all achieved--and so at length into the eternal library of G.o.d that consummates the whole.

He saw the glorious series, timeless and serene, advancing to the climax, and somehow understood that individuality at each stage was never lost but rather extended and magnified. Love of the Earth, life close to Nature, and denial of so-called civilization was the first step upwards.

In the Simple Life, in this return to Nature, lay the opening of the little path that climbed to the stars and heaven.

XL

At the end of the week the little steamer dropped her anchor in the harbor and the Irishman booked his pa.s.sage home. He was standing on the wharf to watch the unloading when a hand tapped him on the shoulder and he heard a well-known voice. His heart leaped with pleasure. There were no preliminaries between these two.

"I am glad to see you safe. You did not find your friend, then?"

O'Malley looked at the bronzed face beside him, noted the ragged tobacco-stained beard, and saw the look of genuine welcome in the twinkling brown eyes. He watched him lift his cap and mop that familiar dome of bald head.

"I'm safe," was all he answered, "because I found him."

For a moment Dr. Stahl looked puzzled. He dropped the hand he held so tightly and led him down the wharf.

"We'll get out of this devilish sun," he said, leading the way among the tangle of merchandise and bales, "it's enough to boil our brains."

They pa.s.sed through the crowd of swarthy, dripping Turks, Georgians, Persians, and Armenians who labored half naked in the heat, and moved toward the town. A Russian gunboat lay in the Bay, side by side with freight and pa.s.senger vessels. An oil-tank steamer took on cargo. The scene was drenched in suns.h.i.+ne. The Black Sea gleamed like molten metal. Beyond, the wooded spurs of the Caucasus climbed through haze into cloudless blue.

"It's beautiful," remarked the German, pointing to the distant coastline, "but hardly with the beauty of those Grecian Isles we pa.s.sed together.

Eh?" He watched him closely. "You're coming back on our steamer?" he asked in the same breath.

"It's beautiful," O'Malley answered ignoring the question, "because it lives. But there is dust upon its outer loveliness, dust that has gathered through long ages of neglect, dust that I would sweep away--I've learnt how to do it. He taught me."

Stahl did not even look at him, though the words were wild enough. He walked at his side in silence. Perhaps he partly understood. For this first link with the outer world of appearances was difficult for him to pick up. The person of Stahl, thick-coated with the civilization whence he came, had brought it, and out of the ocean of glorious vision in his soul, O'Malley took at random the first phrases he could find.

"Yes, I've booked a pa.s.sage on your steamer," he added presently, remembering the question. It did not seem strange to him that his companion ignored both clues he offered. He knew the man too well for that. It was only that he waited for more before he spoke.

They went to the little table outside the hotel pavement where several weeks ago they had drunk Kakhetian wine together and talked of deeper things. The German called for a bottle, mineral water, ice, and cigarettes. And while they sipped the cooling golden liquid, hats off and coats on the backs of their chairs, Stahl gave him the news of the world of men and events that had transpired meanwhile. O'Malley listened vaguely as he smoked. It seemed remote, unreal, almost fantastic, this long string of ugly, frantic happenings, all symptoms of some disordered state that was like illness. The scream of politics, the roar and rattle of flying-machines, financial crashes, furious labor upheavals, rumors of war, the death of kings and magnates, awful accidents and strange turmoil in enormous cities. Details of some sad prison life, it almost seemed, pain and distress and strife the note that bound them all together. Men were mastered by these things instead of mastering them. These unimportant things they thought would make them free only imprisoned them.

They lunched there at the little table in the shade, and in turn the Irishman gave an outline of his travels. Stahl had asked for it and listened attentively. The pictures interested him.

"You've done your letters for the papers," he questioned him, "and now, perhaps, you'll write a book as well?"

"Something may force its way out--come blundering, thundering out in fragments, yes."

"You mean you'd rather not--?"

"I mean it's all too big and overwhelming. He showed me such blinding splendors. I might tell it, but as to writing--!" He shrugged his shoulders.

And this time Dr. Stahl ignored no longer. He took him up. But not with any expected words or questions. He merely said, "My friend, there's something that I have to tell you--or, rather, I should say, to show you." He looked most keenly at him, and in the old familiar way he placed a hand upon his shoulder. His voice grew soft. "It may upset you; it may unsettle--prove a shock perhaps. But if you are prepared, we'll go--"

"What kind of shock?" O'Malley asked, startled a moment by the gravity of manner.

"The shock of death," was the answer, gently spoken.

The Irishman only knew a swift rush of joy and wonder as he heard it.

"But there is no such thing!" he cried, almost with laughter. "He taught me that above all else. There is no death!"

"There is 'going away,' though," came the rejoinder, spoken low; "there is earth to earth and dust to dust--"

"That's of the body--!"

"That's of the body, yes," the older man repeated darkly.

"There is only 'going home,' escape and freedom. I tell you there's only that. It's nothing but joy and splendor when you really understand."

But Dr. Stahl made no immediate answer, nor any comment. He paid the bill and led him down the street. They took the shady side. Pa.s.sing beyond the skirts of the town they walked in silence. The barracks where the soldiers sang, the railway line to Tiflis and Baku, the dome and minarets of the church, were left behind in turn, and presently they reached the hot, straight dusty road that fringed the sea. They heard the cras.h.i.+ng of the little waves and saw the foam creamily white against the dark grey pebbles of the beach.

And when they reached a small enclosure where thin trees were planted among spa.r.s.e gra.s.s all brown and withered by the sun, they paused, and Stahl pointed to a mound, marked at either end by rough stone boulder. A date was on it, but no name. O'Malley calculated the difference between the Russian Calendar and the one he was accustomed to. Stahl checked him.

"The fifteenth of June," the German said.

"The fifteenth of June, yes," said O'Malley very slowly, but with wonder and excitement in his heart. "That was the day that Rostom tried to run away--the day I saw him come to me from the trees--the day we started off together ... to the Garden...."

He turned to his companion questioningly. For a moment the rush of memory was quite bewildering.