Stahl, he remembers, had been talking for a long time. The general sense of what he said reached him, perhaps, but certainly not many of the words. The doctor, it was clear, wished to coax from him the most intimate description possible of his experience. He put things crudely in order to challenge criticism, and thus to make his companion's reason sit in judgment on his heart. If this visionary Celt would let his intellect pass soberly and dissectingly upon these flaming states of wider consciousness he had touched, the doctor would have data of real value for his own purposes.
But this discriminating analysis was precisely what the Irishman found impossible. His soul was too "dispersed" to concentrate upon modern terms and phrases. These in any case dealt only with the fragments of Self that manifested through brain and body. The rest could be felt only, never truly described. Since the beginning of the world such transcendental experiences had never been translatable in the language of "common" sense; and today, even, when a few daring minds sought a laborious classification, straining the resources of psychology, the results were little better than a rather enticing and suggestive confusion.
In his written account, indeed, he gives no proper report of what Stahl tried to say. A gaping hiatus appears in the manuscript, with only asterisks and numbers that referred to pages of his tumbled notebooks. Following these indications I came across the skeletons of ideas which perhaps were the raw material, so to say, of these crude and speculative statements that the German poured out at him across that cabin—blocks of exaggeration he flung at him, in the hope of winning some critical and intelligible response. Like the structure of some giant fairy-tale they read—some toppling scaffolding that needed reduction in scale before it could be focused for normal human sight.
"Nature" was really alive for those who believed—and worshipped; for worship was that state of consciousness which opens the sense and provides the channel for this singular interior realization. In very desolate and lonely places, unsmothered and unstained by men as they exist today, such expressions of the Earth's stupendous, central vitality were still possible…. The "Russian" himself was some such fragment, some such cosmic being, strayed down among men in a form outwardly human, and the Irishman had in his own wild, untamed heart those same very tender and primitive possibilities which enabled him to know and feel it.
In the body, however, he was fenced off—without. Only by the disentanglement of his primitive self from the modern development which caged it, could he recover this strange lost Eden and taste in its fullness the mother-life of the planetary consciousness which called him back. This dissociation might be experienced temporarily as a subliminal adventure; or permanently—in death.
Here, it seemed, was a version of the profound mystical idea that a man must lose his life to find it, and that the personal self must be merged in a larger one to know peace—the incessant, burning nostalgia that dwells in the heart of every religion known to men: escape from the endless pain of futile personal ambitions and desires for external things that are unquenchable because never possible of satisfaction. It had never occurred to him before in so literal and simple a form. It explained his sense of kinship with the earth and nature rather than with men….
There followed, then, another note which the Irishman had also omitted from his complete story as I found it—in this MS. that lay among the dust and dinginess of the Paddington back-room like some flaming gem in a refuse heap. It was brief but pregnant—the block of another idea, Fechner's apparently, hurled at him by the little doctor.
That, just as the body takes up the fact of the bruised lung into its own general consciousness, lifting it thereby from the submerged, unrealized state; and just as our human consciousness can be caught up again as a part of the earth's; so, in turn, the Planet's own vast personality is included in the collective consciousness of the entire Universe—all steps and stages of advance to that final and august Consciousnss of which they are fragments, projections, manifestations in Time—GOD.
And the immense conception, at any rate, gave him a curious, flashing clue to that passionate inclusion which a higher form of consciousness may feel for the countless lesser manifestations below it; and so to that love for humanity as a whole that saviors feel….
Yet, out of all this deep flood of ideas and suggestions that somehow poured about him from the mind of this self-contradictory German, alternately scientist and mystic, O'Malley emerged with his own smaller and vivid personal delight that he would presently himself—escape: escape under the guidance of the big Russian into some remote corner of his own extended Being, where he would enjoy a quasi-merging with the Earth-life, and know subjectively at least the fruition of all his yearnings.
The doctor had phrased it once that a part of him fluid, etheric or astral, malleable by desire, would escape and attain to this result. But, after all, the separation of one portion of himself from the main personality could only mean being conscious it: another part of it—in a division usually submerged.
As Stahl so crudely put it, the Earth had bruised him. He would know in some little measure the tides of her own huge life, his longings, loneliness, and nostalgia explained and satisfied. He would find that fair old Garden. He might even know the lesser gods.
* * * * *
That afternoon at Smyrna the matter was officially reported, and so officially done with. It caused little enough comment on the steamer. The majority of the passengers had hardly noticed the boy at all, much less his disappearance; and while many of them landed there for Ephesus, still more left the ship next day at Constantinople.
The big Russian, though he kept mostly to his own cabin, was closely watched by the ship's officers, and O'Malley, too, realized that he was under observation. But nothing happened; the emptied steamer pursued her quiet way, and the Earth, unrealized by her teeming freight so busy with their tiny personal aims, rushed forwards upon her glorious journey through space.
O'Malley alone realized her presence, aware that he rushed with her amid a living universe. But he kept his new sensations to himself. The remainder of the voyage, indeed, across the Black SeaviaSamsoun and Trebizond, is hazy in his mind so far as practical details are concerned, for he found himself in a dreamy state of deep peace and would sometimes sit for hours in reverie, only reminded of the present by certain pricks of annoyance from the outer world. He had returned, of course, to his own stateroom, yet felt in such close sympathy with his companion that no outward expression by way of confidence or explanation was necessary. In their Subconsciousness they were together and at one.
The pricks of annoyance came, as may be expected, chiefly from Dr. Stahl, and took the form of variations of "I told you so." The man was in a state of almost anger, caused half by disappointment, half by unsatisfied curiosity. His cargo of oil and water would not mix, yet he knew not which to throw overboard; here was another instance where facts refused to tally with the beliefs dictated by sane reason; where the dazzling speculations he played with threatened to win the day and destroy the compromise his soul loved.
The Irishman, however, did not resent his curiosity, though he made no attempt to satisfy it. He allowed him to become authoritative and professional, to treat him somewhat as a patient. What could it matter to him, who in a few hours would land at Batoum and go off with his guide and comrade to some place where—? The thought he could never see completed in words, for he only knew that the fulfillment of the adventure would take place—somewhere, somehow, somewhen—in that space within the soul of which external space is but an image and a figure. What takes place in the mind and heart are alone the true events; their outward expression in the shifting and impermanent shapes of matter is the least real thing in all the world. For him the experience would be true, real, authoritative—fact in the deepest sense of the word. Already he saw it "whole."
Faith asks no travelers' questions—exact height of mountains, length of rivers, distance from the sea, precise spelling of names, and so forth. He felt—the quaint and striking simile is in the written account—like a man hunting for a pillar-box in a strange city—absurdly difficult to find, as though purposely concealed by the authorities amid details of street and houses to which the eye is unaccustomed, yet really close at hand all the time….
But at Trebizond, a few hours before Batoum, Dr. Stahl in his zealous attentions went too far; for that evening he gave his "patient" a sleeping-draught in his coffee that caused him to lie for twelve hours on the cabin sofa, and when at length he woke toward noon, the Customs officers had been aboard since nine o'clock, and most of the passengers had already landed.
Among them, leaving no message, the big Russian had also gone ashore. And, though Stahl may have been actuated by the wisest and kindest motives, he was not quite prepared for the novel experience with which it provided him—namely, of hearing an angry Irishman saying rapidly what he thought of him in a stream of eloquent language that lasted nearly a quarter of an hour without a break!
Although Batoum is a small place, and the trains that leave it during the day are few enough, O'Malley knew that to search for his friend by the methods of the ordinary detective was useless. It would have been also wrong. The man had gone deliberately, without attempting to say good-bye—because, having come together in the real and inner sense, real separation was not possible. The vital portion of their beings, thought, feeling, and desire, were close and always would be. Their bodies, busy at different points of the map among the casual realities of external life, could make no change in that. And at the right moment they would assuredly meet again to begin the promised journey.
Thus, at least, in some fashion peculiarly his own, was the way the Irishman felt; and this was why, after the first anger with his German friend, he resigned himself patiently to the practical business he had in hand.
The little incident was characteristically revealing, and shows how firmly rooted in his imaginative temperament was the belief, the unalterable conviction rather, that his life operated upon an outer and an inner plane simultaneously, the one ever reacting upon the other. It was as if he were aware of two separate sets of faculties, subtly linked, one carrying on the affairs of the physical man in the "practical" world, the other dealing with the spiritual economy in the subconscious. To attend to the latter alone was to be a useless dreamer among men, unpractical, unbalanced; to neglect it wholly for the former was to be crassly limited, but half alive; to combine the two in effective co-operation was to achieve that high level of a successful personality, which some perhaps term genius, some prophet, and others, saint. It meant, at any rate, to have sources of inspiration within oneself.
Thus he spent the day completing what was necessary for his simple outfit, and put up for the night at one of the little hotels that spread their tables invitingly upon the pavement, so that dinner may be enjoyed in full view of one of the most picturesque streams of traffic it is possible to see.
The sultry, enervating heat of the day had passed and a cool breeze came shorewards over the Black Sea. With a box of thin Russian cigarettes before him he lingered over the golden Kakhetian wine and watched the crowded street. Knowing enough of the language to bargain smartly for his room, his pillows, sheets, and samovar, he yet could scarcely compass conversation with the strangers about him. Of Russian proper, besides, he heard little; there was a Babel of many tongues, Armenian, Turkish, Georgian, explosive phrases of Swanetian, soft gliding Persian words, and the sharp or guttural exclamations of the big-voiced, giant fellows, all heavily armed, who belonged to the bewildering tribes that dwelt among the mountains beyond. Occasionally came a broken bit of French or German; but they strayed in, lost and bizarre, as fragments from some distant or forgotten world.
Down the pavement, jostling his elbows, strode the constant, gorgeous procession of curious, wild, barbaric faces, bearded, with hooked noses, flashing eyes, burkas flowing; cartridge-belts of silver and ivory gleaming across chests in the glare of the electric light; bashliks of white, black, and yellow wool upon the head, increasing the stature; evil-looking Black Sea knives stuck in most belts, rifles swung across great supple shoulders, long swords trailing; Turkish gypsies, dark and furtive-eyed, walking softly in leather slippers—of endless and fascinating variety, many colored and splendid, it all was. From time to time a droschky with two horses, or a private carriage with three, rattled noisily over the cobbles at a reckless pace, stopping with the abruptness of a practiced skater; and officers with narrow belted waists like those of women, their full-skirted cloaks reaching half-way down high boots of shining leather, sprang out to pay the driver and take a vacant table at his side; and once or twice a body of soldiers, several hundred strong, singing the national songs with a full-throated vigor, hoarse, wild, somehow half terrible, passed at a swinging gait away into the darkness at the end of the street, the roar of their barbaric singing dying away in the distance by the sea where the boom of waves just caught it.
And O'Malley loved it all, and "thrilled" as he watched and listened. From his hidden self within something passed out and joined it. He felt the wild pulse of energetic life that drove along with the tumult of it. The savage, untamed soul in him leaped as he saw; the blood ran faster. Sitting thus upon the bank of the hurrying stream, he knew himself akin to the main body of the invisible current further out; it drew him with it, and he experienced a quickening of all his impulses toward some wild freedom that was mighty—clean—simple.
Civilian dress was rare, and noticeable when it came. The shipping agents wore black alpaca coats, white trousers, and modern hats of straw. A few ship's officers in blue, with official caps gold-braided, passed in and out like men without a wedding garment, as distressingly out of the picture as tourists in check knickerbockers and nailed boots moving through some dim cathedral aisle. O'Malley recognized one or two from his own steamer, and turned his head the other way. It hurt. He caught himself thinking, as he saw them, of Stock Exchanges, two-penny-tubes, Belgravia dinner parties, private views, "small and earlies," musical comedy, and all the rest of the dismal and meager program. These harmless little modern uniforms were worse than ludicrous, for they formed links with the glare and noise of the civilization he had left behind, the smeared vulgarity of the big cities where men and women live in their possessions, wasting life in that worship of external detail they call "progress"…
A well-known German voice crashed through his dream.
"Already at the wine! These Caucasian vintages are good; they really taste of grapes and earth and flowers. Yes, thanks, I'll join you for a moment if I may. We only lie three days in port and are glad to get ashore."
O'Malley called for a second glass, and passed the cigarettes.
"I prefer my black cigars, thank you," was the reply, lighting one. "You push on tomorrow, I suppose? Kars, Tiflis, Erzerum, or somewhere a little wilder in the mountains, eh?"
"Toward the mountains, yes," the Irishman said. Dr. Stahl was the only person he could possibly have allowed to sit next him at such a time. He had quite forgiven him now, and though at first he felt no positive welcome, the strange link between the two men quickly asserted itself and welded them together in that odd harmony they knew in spite of all differences. They could be silent together, too, without distress or awkwardness, sure test that at least some portion of their personalities fused.
And for a long time they remained silent, watching the surge and movement of the old, old types about them. They sipped the yellow wine and smoked. The stars came out; the carriages grew less; from far away floated a deep sonorous echo now and then of the soldiers singing by their barracks. Sometimes a steamer hooted. Cossacks swung by. Often some wild cry rang out from a side street. There were heavy, unfamiliar perfumes in the air. Presently Stahl began talking about the Revolution of a few years before and the scenes of violence he had witnessed in these little streets, the shooting, barricades, bombs thrown into passing carriages, Cossacks charging down the pavements with swords drawn, shouting and howling. O'Malley listened with a part of his mind at any rate. The rest of him was much further away…. He was up among the mountain fastnesses. Already, it seemed, he knew the secret places of the mist, the lair of every running wind….
Two tall mountain tribesmen swaggered past close to their table; the thick grey burkas almost swept their glasses. They walked magnificently with easy, flowing stride, straight from the hips.
"The earth here," said O'Malley, taking advantage of a pause in the other's chatter, "produces some splendid types. Look at those two; they make one think of trees walking—blown along bodily before a wind." He watched them with admiration as they swung off and disappeared among the crowd.
Dr. Stahl, glancing keenly at him, laughed a little.
"Yes," he said; "brave, generous fellows too as a rule, who will shoot you for a pistol that excites their envy, yet give their life to save one of their savage dogs. They're still—natural," he added after a moment's hesitation; "still unspoiled. They live close to Nature with a vengeance. Up among the Ossetians on the high saddles you'll find true Pagans who worship trees, sacrifice blood, and offer bread and salt to the nature-deities."
"Still?" asked O'Malley, sipping his wine.
"Still," replied Stahl, following his example.
Over the glasses' rims their eyes met. Both smiled, though neither quite knew why. The Irishman, perhaps, was thinking of the little city clerks he knew at home, pigeon-breasted, pale-faced, under-sized. One of these big men, so full of rushing, vigorous life, would eat a dozen at a sitting.
"There's something here the rest of the world has lost," he murmured to himself. But the doctor heard him.
"You feel it?" he asked quickly, his eyes brightening. "The awful, primitive beauty—?"
"I feel—something, certainly," was the cautious answer. He could not possibly have said more just then; yet it seemed as though he heard far echoes of that voice that had been first borne to his ears across the blue Ægean. In the gorges of these terrible mountains it surely sounded still. These men must know it too.
"The spell of this strange land will never leave you once you've felt it," pursued the other quietly, his voice deepening. "Even in the towns here—Tiflis, Kutais—I have felt it. Hereabouts is the cradle of the human race, they say, and the people have not changed for thousands of years. Some of them you'll find"—he hunted for a word, then said with a curious, shrugging gesture, "terrific."
"Ah—" said the Irishman, lighting a fresh cigarette from the dying stump so clumsily that the trembling of the hand was noticeable.
"And akin most likely," said Stahl, thrusting his face across the table with a whispering tone, "to that—man—who—tempted you."
O'Malley did not answer. He drank the liquid golden sunshine in his glass; his eyes lifted to the stars that watched above the sea; between the surge of human figures came a little wind from the grim, mysterious Caucasus beyond. He turned all tender as a child, receiving as with a shock of sudden strength and sweetness a thousand intimate messages from the splendid mood of old Mother-Earth who here expressed herself in such a potent breed of men and mountains.
He heard the doctor's voice still speaking, as from a distance though:—
"For here they all grow with her. They do not fight her and resist. She pours freely through them; there is no opposition. The channels still lie open; … and they share her life and power."
"That beauty which the modern world has lost," repeated the other to himself, lingering over the words, and wondering why they expressed so little of what he really meant.
"But which will never—cannever come again," Stahl completed the sentence. There was a wistful, genuine sadness in his voice and eyes, and the sympathy touched the inflammable Celt with fire. It was ever thus with him. The little man opposite, with the ragged beard, and the bald, domed head gleaming in the electric light, had laid a card upon the table, showing a bit of his burning heart. The generous Irishman responded like a child, laying himself bare. So hungry was he for comprehension.
"Men have everywhere else clothed her fair body with their smothering, ugly clothing and their herded cities," he burst out, so loud that the Armenian waiter sidled up, thinking he called for wine. "But here she lies naked and unashamed, sweet in divinity made simple. By Jove! I tell you, doctor, it burns and sweeps me with a kind of splendid passion that drowns my little shame-faced personality of the twentieth century. I could run out and worship—fall down and kiss the grass and soil and sea—!"
He drew back suddenly like a wounded animal; his face turned scarlet, as though he knew himself convicted of an hysterical outburst. Stahl's eyes had changed even as he spoke the flaming words that struggled so awkwardly to seize his mood of rapture—a thought the Earth poured through him for a moment. The bitter, half-mocking smile lay in them, and on the lips the cold and critical expression of the other Stahl, skeptic and science-man. A revulsion of feeling caught them both. But to O'Malley came the thought that once again he had been drawn—was being coaxed for examination beneath the microscope.
"The material here," Stahl said presently, with the calm tones of a dispassionate diagnosis, "is magnificent as you say, uncivilized without being merely savage, untamed, yet far from crude barbarism. When the progress of the age gets into this land the transformation will be grand. When Russia lets in culture, when modern improvements have developed her resources and trained the wild human forces into useful channels…."
He went on calmly by the yard, till it was all the Irishman could do not to dash the wine-glass in his face.
"Remember my words when you are up in the lonely mountains," he concluded at length, smiling his queer sardonic smile, "and keep yourself in hand. Put on the brakes when possible. Your experience will thus have far more value."
"And you," replied O'Malley bluntly, so bluntly it was almost rudeness, "go back to Fechner, and try to save your compromising soul before it is too late—"
"Still following those lights that do mislead the morn," Stahl added gently, breaking into English for a phrase he apparently loved. They laughed and raised their glasses.
A long pause came which neither cared to break. The streets were growing empty, the personality of the mysterious little Black Sea port folding away into the darkness. The wilder element had withdrawn behind the shuttered windows. There came a murmur of the waves, but the soldiers no longer sang. The droschkys ceased to rattle past. The night flowed down more thickly from the mountains, and the air, moist with that malarial miasma which makes the climate of this reclaimed marsh whereon Batoum is built so unhealthy, closed unpleasantly about them. The stars died in it.
"Another glass?" suggested Stahl. "A drink to the gods of the Future, and till we meet again, on your return journey, eh?"
"I'll walk with you to the steamer," was the reply. "I never care for much wine. And the gods of the Future will prefer my usual offering, I think—imaginative faith."
The doctor did not ask him to explain. They walked down the middle of the narrow streets. No one was about, nor were there lights in many windows. Once or twice from an upper story came the faint twanging of a balalaika against the drone of voices, and occasionally they passed a little garden where figures outlined themselves among the trees, with the clink of glasses, laughter of men and girls, and the glowing tips of cigarettes.
They turned down toward the harbor where the spars and funnels of the big steamers were just visible against the sky, and opposite the unshuttered window of a shop—one of those modern shops that oddly mar the town with assorted German tinware, Paris hats, and oleographs indiscriminately mingled—Stahl stopped a moment and pointed. They moved up idly and looked in. From the shadows of the other side, well hidden, an armed patrol eyed them suspiciously, though they were not aware of it.
"It was before a window like this," remarked Stahl, apparently casually, "that I once in Tiflis overheard two mountain Georgians talking together as they examined a reproduction of a modern picture—Böcklin's 'Centaur.' They spoke in half whispers, but I caught the trend of what they said. You know the picture, perhaps?"
"I've seen it somewhere, yes," was the short reply. "But what were they saying?" He strove to keep his voice commonplace and casual like his companion's.
"Oh, just discussing it together, but with a curious stretched interest," Stahl went on. "One asked, 'What does it say?' and pointed to the inscription underneath. They could not read. For a long time they stared in silence, their faces grave and half afraid. 'What is it?' repeated the first one, and the other, a much older man, heavily bearded and of giant build, replied low, 'It's what I told you about'; there was awe in his tone and manner; 'they still live in the big valley of the rhododendrons beyond—' mentioning some lonely uninhabited region toward Daghestan; 'they come in the spring, and are very swift and roaring….You must always hide. To see them is to die. But they cannot die; they are of the mountains. They are older, older than the stones. And the dogs will warn you, or the horses, or sometimes a great sudden wind, though you must never shoot.' They stood gazing in solemn wonder for minutes…till at last, realizing that their silence was final, I moved away. There were manifestations of life in the mountains, you see, that they had seen and knew about—old forms akin to that picture apparently."
The patrol came out of his shadows, and Stahl quickly drew his companion along the pavement.
"You have your passport with you?" he asked, noticing the man behind them.
"It went to the police this afternoon. I haven't got it back yet." O'Malley spoke thickly, in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. How much he welcomed that casual interruption of the practical world he could never explain or tell. For the moment he had felt like wax in the other's hands. He had dreaded searching questions, and felt unspeakably relieved. A minute more and he would have burst into confession.
"You should never be without it," the doctor added. "The police here are perfect fiends, and can cause you endless inconvenience."
O'Malley knew it all, but gladly seized the talk and spun it out, asking innocent questions while scarcely listening to the answers. They distanced the patrol and neared the quays and shipping. In the darkness of the sky a great line showed where the spurs of the Lesser Caucasus gloomed huge and solemn to the East and West. At the gangway of the steamer they said good-bye. Stahl held the Irishman's hand a moment in his own.
"Remember, when you know temptation strong," he said gravely, though a smile was in the eyes, "the passwords that I now give you: Humanity and Civilization."
"I'll try."
They shook hands warmly enough.
"Come home by this steamer if you can," he called down from the deck. "And keep to the middle of the road on your way back to the hotel. It's safer in a town like this." O'Malley divined the twinkle in his eyes as he said it. "Forgive my many sins," he heard finally, "and when we meet again, tell me your own…." The darkness took the sentence. But the word the Irishman took home with him to the little hotel was the single one—Civilization: and this, owing to the peculiar significance of intonation and accent with which this bewildering and self-contradictory being had uttered it.
He walked along the middle of the street as Stahl had advised. He would have done so in any case, unconsciously, for he knew these towns quite as well as the German did. Yet he did not walk alone. The entire Earth walked with him, and personal danger was an impossibility. A dozen ruffians might attack him, but none could "take" his life.
How simple it all seemed, yet how utterly beyond the reach of intelligible description to those who have never felt it—this sudden surge upwards, downwards, all around and about of the vaster consciousness amid which the sense of normal individuality seemed but a tiny focused point. That loss of personality he first dreaded as an "inner catastrophe" appeared to him now for what it actually was—merely an extinction of some phantasmal illusion of self into the only true life. Here, upon the fringe of this wonder-region of the Caucasus, the spirit of the Earth still manifested as of old, reached out lovingly to those of her children who were simple enough to respond, ready to fold them in and heal them of the modern, racking fevers which must otherwise destroy them…. The entire sky of soft darkness became a hand that covered him, and stroked him into peace; the perfume that wafted down that narrow street beside him was the single, enveloping fragrance of the whole wide Earth herself; he caught the very murmur of her splendid journey through the stars. The certitude of some state of boundless being flamed, roaring and immense, about his soul….
And when he reached his room, a little cell that shut out light and air, he met that sinister denial of the simple life which, for him at least, was the true Dweller on the Threshold. Crashing in to it he choked, as it were, and could have cried aloud. It gripped and caught him by the throat—the word that Stahl—Stahl who understood even while he warned and mocked and hesitated himself—had flung so tauntingly upon him from the decks—Civilization.
Upon his table lay by chance—the Armenian hotel-keeper had evidently unearthed it for his benefit—a copy of a London halfpenny paper, a paper that feeds the public with the ugliest details of all the least important facts of life by the yard, inventing others when the supply is poor. He read it over vaguely, with a sense of cold distress that was half pain, half nausea. Somehow it stirred his sense of humor; he returned slowly to his normal, littler state. But it was not the contrast which made him smile; rather was it the chance juxtaposition of certain of the contents; for on the page facing the accounts of railway accidents, of people burned alive, explosions, giant strikes, crumpled air-men and other countless horrors which modern inventions offered upon the altar of feverish Progress, he read a complacently boastful leader that extolled the conquest of Nature men had learnedby speed. The ability to pass from one point to another across the skin of the globe in the least possible time was sign of the development of the human soul.
The pompous flatulence of the language touched bathos. He thought of the thousands who had read both columns and preened themselves upon that leader. He thought how they would pride themselves upon the latest contrivance for speeding their inert bodies from one point to another "annihilating distance"; upon being able to get from suburbia to the huge shops that created artificial wants, then filled them; from the pokey villas with their wee sham gardens to the dingy offices; from dark airless East End rooms to countless factories that pour out semifraudulent, unnecessary wares upon the world, explosives and weapons to destroy another nation, or cheapjack goods to poison their own—all in a few minutes less than they could do it the week before.
And then he thought of the leisure of the country folk and of those who knew how to be content without external possessions, to watch the sunset and the dawn with hearts that sought realities; sharing the noble slowness of the seasons, the gradual growth of flowers, trees, and crops, the unhurried dignity of Nature's grand procession, the repose-in-progress of the Mother-Earth.
The calmness of the unhastening Earth once more possessed his soul in peace. He hid the paper, watching the quiet way the night beyond his window buried it from sight…
And through that open window came the perfume and the mighty hand of darkness slowly. It seemed to this imaginative Irishman that he caught a sound of awful laughter from the mountains and the sea, a laughter that brought, too, a wave of sighing—of deep and old-world sighing.
And before he went to sleep he took an antidote in the form of a page from that book that accompanied all his travels, a book which was written wholly in the open air because its message refused to come to the heart of the inspired writer within doors, try as he would, the "sky especially containing for me the key, the inspiration—"
And the fragment that he read expressed a little bit of his own thought and feeling. The seer who wrote it looked ahead, naming it "After Civilization," whereas he looked back. But they saw the same vision; the confusion of time was nothing:—
In the first soft winds of spring, while snow yet lay on the ground—Forth from the city into the great woods wandering,Into the great silent white woods where they waited in their beauty andmajestyFor man their companion to come:There, in vision, out of the wreck of cities and civilizations,Slowly out of the ruins of the past
Out of the litter and muck of a decaying world,Lo! even soI saw a new life arise.O sound of waters, jubilant, pouring, pouring—O hidden song in thehollows!Secret of the Earth, swelling, sobbing to divulge itself!Slowly, building, lifting itself up atom by atom,Gathering itself round a new center—or rather round the worldoldcenter once more revealed—I saw a new life, a new society, arise.Man I saw arising once more to dwell with Nature;(The old old story—the prodigal son returning, so loved,The long estrangement, the long entanglement in vain things)—The child returning to its home—companion of the winter woods oncemore—Companion of the stars and waters—hearing their words at first-hand(more than all science ever taught)—The near contact, the dear dear mother so close—the twilight skyand the young tree-tops against it;The few needs, the exhilarated radiant life—the food and populationquestion giving no more trouble;No hurry more, no striving one to over-ride the other:… man the companion of Nature.Civilization behind him now—the wonderful stretch of the past;Continents, empires, religions, wars, migrations—all gathered up in him;The immense knowledge, the vast winged powers—to use or not to use—…
And as he fell asleep at length it seemed there came a sound of hushed huge trampling underneath his window, and that when he rose to listen, his big friend from the steamer led him forth into the darkness, that those shapes of Cloud and Wind he now so often saw, companioned them across the heights of the night toward some place in the distant mountains where light and flowers were, and all his dream of years most exquisitely fulfilled….
He slept. And through his sleep there dropped the words of that old tribesman from the wilderness: "They come in the spring… and are very swift and roaring. They are older, older than the stones. They cannot die… they are of the mountains, and you must hide."
But the dream-consciousness knows no hiding; and though memory failed to report with detail in the morning, O'Malley woke refreshed and blessed, knowing that companionship awaited him, and that once he found the courage to escape completely, the Simple Life of Earth would claim him in full consciousness.
Stahl with his little modern "Intellect" was no longer there to hinder and prevent.
"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-martedTowns 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 leapingIn frenzied train thro' the dusk glen sweeping,The dew-drench'd dance and the star-watch'd sleeping,Or temple keeping in vestal white?
"Ye who regret suns that have set,Lo, each god of the ages golden,Here is enshrined, ageless and kind,Unbeholden the dark years through.Their faithful oracles yet bestowing,By laurels whisper and clear streams flowing,Or the leafy stir of the Gods' own going,In oak trees blowing, may answer you!"
—From PEREGRINA'S SONG
For the next month Terence O'Malley possessed his soul in patience; he worked, and the work saved him. That is to say it enabled him to keep what men call "balanced." Stahl had—whether intentionally or not he was never quite certain—raised a tempest in him. More accurately, perhaps, he had called it to the top, for it had been raging deep down ever since he could remember, or had begun to think.
That the earth might be a living, sentient organism, though too vast to be envisaged as such by normal human consciousness, had always been a tenet of his imagination's creed. Now he knew it true, as a dinner-gong is true. That deep yearnings, impossible of satisfaction in the external conditions of ordinary life, could know subjective fulfillment in the mind, had always been for him poetically true, as for any other poet: now he realized that it was literally true for some outlying tract of consciousness usually inactive, termed by some transliminal. Spiritual nostalgia provided the channel, and the transfer of consciousness to this outlying tract, involving, of course, a trance condition of the usual self, indicated the way—that was all.
Again, his mystical temperament had always seen objects as forces which from some invisible center push outwards into visible shape—as bodies: bodies of trees, stones, flowers, men, women, animals; and others but partially pushed outwards, still invisible to limited physical sight at least, either too huge, too small, or too attenuated for vision. Whereas now, as a result of Stahl and Fechner combined, it flamed into him that this was positively true; more—that there was a point in his transliminal consciousness where he might "contact" these forces before they reached their cruder external expression as bodies. Nature, in this sense, had always been for him alive, though he had allowed himself the term by a long stretch of poetic sympathy; but now he knew that it was actually true, because objects, landscapes, humans, and the rest, were verily aspects of the collective consciousness of the Earth, moods of her spirit, phases of her being, expressions of her deep, pure, passionate "heart"—projections of herself.
He pondered lingeringly over this. Common words revealed their open faces to him. He saw the ideas behind language, saw them naked. Repetition had robbed them of so much that now became vital, like Bible phrases that too great familiarity in childhood kills for all subsequent life as meaningless. His eyes were opened perhaps. He took a flower into his mind and thought about it; really thought; meditated lovingly. A flower was literally projected by the earth so far as its form was concerned. Its roots gathered soil and earth-matter, changing them into leaves and blossoms; its leaves again, took of the atmosphere, also a part of the earth. It was projected by the earth, born of her, fed by her, and at "death" returned into her. But this was its outward and visible form only. The flower, for his imaginative mind, was a force made visible as literally as a house was a force the mind of the architect made visible. In the mind, or consciousness of the Earth this flower first lay latent as a dream. Perhaps, in her consciousness, it nested as that which in us corresponds to a little thought…. And from this he leaped, as the way ever was with him, to bigger "projections"—trees, atmosphere, clouds, winds, some visible, some invisible, and so to a deeper yet simpler comprehension of Fechner's thundering conception of human beings as projections. Was he, then, literally, a child of the Earth, mothered by the whole magnificent planet…? All the world akin—that seeking for an eternal home in every human heart explained…? And were there—had there been rather—these other, vaster projections Stahl had adumbrated with his sudden borrowed stretch of vision—forces, thoughts, moods of her hidden life invisible to sight, yet able to be felt and known interiorly?
That "the gods" were definitely knowable Powers, accessible to any genuine worshipper, had ever haunted his mind, thinly separated only from definite belief: now he understood that this also had been true, though only partially divined before. For now he saw them as the rare expressions of the Earth's in the morning of her life. That he might ever come to know them close made him tremble with a fearful joy, the idea flaming across his being with a dazzling brilliance that brought him close to that state of consciousness termed ecstasy. And that in certain unique beings, outwardly human like his friend, there might still survive some primitive expression of the Earth-Soul, lesser than the gods, and intermediate as it were, became for him now a fact—wondrous, awe-inspiring, even holy, but still a fact that he could grasp.
He had found one such; and Stahl, by warnings that fought with urging invitation at the same time, had confirmed it.
It was singular, he reflected, how worship had ever turned for him a landscape or a scene enchantingly alive. Worship, he now understood, of course invited "the gods," and was the channel through which their manifestation became possible to the soul. All the gods, then, were accessible in this interior way, but Pan especially—in desolate places and secret corners of a wood…. He remembered dimly the Greek idea of worship in the Mysteries: that the worshipper knew actual temporary union with his deity in ecstasy, and at death went permanently into his sphere of being. He understood that worship was au fond a desire for loss of personal life—hence its subtle joy; and a fear lest it be actually accomplished—whence its awe and wonder.
Some glorious, winged thing moved now beside him; it held him by the hand. The Earth possessed him; and the whole adventure, so far as he can make it plain, was an authoritative summons to the natural, Simple Life.
For the next month, therefore, O'Malley, unhurrying, blessed with a deeper sense of happiness than he had ever known before, dismissed the "tempest" from his surface consciousness, and set to work to gather the picturesque impressions of strange places and strange peoples that the public liked to read about in occasional letters of travel. And by the time May had passed into June he had moved up and down the Caucasus, observing, learning, expanding, and gathering in the process through every sense—through the very pores of his skin almost—draughts of a new and abundant life that is to be had there merely for the asking.
That modification of the personality which comes even in cities to all but the utterly hidebound—so that a man in Rome finds himself not quite the same as he was in London or in Paris a few days before—went forward in him on a profounder scale than anything he had known hitherto. Nature fed, stimulated and called him with a passionate intimacy that destroyed all sense of loneliness, and with a vehement directness of attack that simply charged him to the brim with a new joy of living. His vitality, powers, even his physical health, stood at their best and highest. The country laid its spell upon him, in a word; and if he expresses it thus with some intensity it was because life came to him so. His record is the measure of his vision. Those who find exaggeration in it merely confess thereby their own smaller capacity of living.
Here, as he wandered to and fro among these proud, immense, secluded valleys, through remote and untamed forests, and by the banks of wild rivers that shook their flying foam across untrodden banks, he wandered at the same time deeper and ever deeper into himself, toward a point where he lost touch with all that constituted him "modern," or held him captive in the spirit of today. Nearer and ever nearer he moved into some tremendous freedom, some state of innocence and simplicity that, while gloriously unrestrained, yet knew no touch of license. Dreams had whispered of it; childhood had fringed its frontiers; longings had even mapped it faintly to his mind. But now he breathed its very air and knew it face to face. The Earth surged wonderfully about him.
With his sleeping-bag upon a small Caucasian horse, a sack to hold his cooking things, a pistol in his belt, he wandered thus for days, sleeping beneath the stars, seeing the sunset and the dawn, drenched in new strength and wonder all the time. Here he touched deeper reaches of the Earth that spoke of old, old things, that yet were still young because they knew not change. He walked in the morning of the world, through her primal fire and dew, when all was a first and giant garden.
The advertised splendors of other lands, even of India, Egypt, and the East, seemed almost vulgar beside this country that had somehow held itself aloof, unstained and clean. The civilization of its little towns seemed but a coated varnish that an hour's sun would melt away; the railway, crawling along the flanks of the great range, but a ribbon of old iron pinned on that, with the first shiver of those giant sides, would split and vanish.
Here, where the Argonauts once landed, the Golden Fleece still shone o' nights in the depths of the rustling beech woods; along the shores of that old Phasis their figures might still be seen, tall Jason in the lead, erect and silvery, passing o'er the shining, flowered fields upon their quest of ancient beauty. Further north from this sunny Colchian strand rose the peak of Kasbek, gaunt and desolate pyramid of iron, "sloping through five great zones of climate," whence the ghost of Prometheus still gazed down from his "vast frozen precipice" upon a world his courage would redeem. For somewhere here was the cradle of the human race, fair garden of some Edened life before the "Fall," when the Earth sang for joy in her first, golden youth, and her soul expressed itself in mighty forms that remain for lesser days but a faded hierarchy of visioned gods.
A living Earth went with him everywhere, with love that never breathed alarm. It seemed he felt her very thoughts within himself—thoughts, however, that now no longer married with a visible expression as shapes.
Among these old-world tribes and peoples with their babble of difficult tongues, wonder and beauty, terror and worship, still lay too deeply buried to have as yet externalized themselves in mental forms as legend, myth, and story. In the blood ran all their richness undiluted. Life was simple, full charged with an immense delight. At home little cocksure writers in little cocksure journals, pertly modern and enlightened, might dictate how far imaginative vision and belief could go before they overstepped the limits of an artificial schedule; but here "everything possible to be believed was still an image of truth," and the stream of life flowed deeper than all mere intellectual denials.
A little out of sight, but thinly veiled, the powers that in this haunted corner of the earth, too strangely neglected, pushed outwards into men and trees, into mountains, flowers, and the rest, were unenslaved and intensely vital. In his blood O'Malley knew the primal pulses of the world.
It was irresistibly seductive. Whether he slept with the Aryan Ossetians upon the high ridges of the central range, or shared the stone huts of the mountain Jews, unchanged since Bible days, beyond the Suram heights, there came to all his senses the message of that Golden Age his longings ever sought—the rush and murmur of theUrweltcalling.
And so it was, about the first week in June that lean, bronzed, and in perfect physical condition, this wandering Irishman found himself in a little Swanetian hamlet beyond Alighir, preparing with a Georgian peasant-guide to penetrate yet deeper into the mountain recesses and feed his heart with what he found of loneliness and beauty.
This region of Imerethia, bordering on Mingrelia, is smothered beneath an exuberance of vegetation almost tropical, blue and golden with enormous flowers, tangled with wild vines, rich with towering soft beech woods, and finally, in the upper sections, ablaze with leagues of huge rhododendron trees in blossom that give whole mountain-sides the aspect of a giant garden, flowering amid peaks that even dwarf the Alps. For here the original garden of the world survives, run wild with pristine loveliness. The prodigality of Nature is bewildering, almost troubling. There are valleys, rarely entered by the foot of man, where monstrous lilies, topping a man on foot and even reaching to his shoulder on horseback, have suggested to botanists in their lavish luxuriance a survival of the original flora of the world. A thousand flowers he found whose names he had never heard of, their hues and forms as strangely lovely as those of another planet. The grasses alone in scale and mass were magnificent. While, in and out of all this splendor, less dense and voluminous only than the rhododendron forests, ran scattered lines of blazing yellow—the crowding clusters of azalea bushes that scented the winds beyond belief.
Beyond this region of extravagance in size and color, there ran immense bare open slopes of smooth turf that led to the foot of the eternal snowfields, with, far below, valleys of prodigious scale and steepness that touched somehow with disdain all memory of other mountain ranges he had ever known.
And here it was this warm June evening—June 15th it was—while packing his sack with cheese and maize-flour in the dirty yard of a so-called "post-house," more hindered than helped by his Georgian guide, that he realized the approach of a familiar, bearded figure. The figure emerged. There was a sudden clutch and lift of the heart … then a rush of wild delight. There stood his Russian steamer-friend, part of the scale and splendor, as though grown out of the very soil. He occupied in a flash the middle of the picture. He gave it meaning. He was part of it, exactly as a tree or big grey boulder were part of it.
"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 therewereother 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 passed 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,hissense, 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.
"But it was more than the Russian who was close," he added quietly with one of those sentences that startled me into keen attention. "He was there—with others—of his kind."
And then, hardly pausing to take breath, he plunged, as his manner was, full tilt into the details of this first experience that thrilled my hedging soul with an astonishing power of conviction. As always when his heart was in the words, the scenery about us faded and I lived the adventure with him. The cowled and hooded chimneys turned to trees, the stretch of dim star-lit London Park became a deep Caucasian vale, the thunder of the traffic was the roaring of the snow-fed torrents. The very perfume of strange flowers floated in the air.
They had been in their blankets, he and his peasant guide, for hours, and a moon approaching the full still concealed all signs of dawn, when he woke out of deep sleep with the odd sensation that it was only a part of him that woke. One portion of him was in the body, while another portion was elsewhere, manifesting with ease and freedom in some state or region whither he had traveled in his sleep—where, moreover, he had not been alone.
And close about him in the trees was—movement. Yes! Through and between the scattered trunks he saw it still.
With eyes a little dazed, the active portion of his brain perceived this processing movement passing to and fro across the glades of moonlight beneath the steady trees. For there was no wind. The shadows of the branches did not stir. He saw swift running shapes, vigorous yet silent, hurrying across the network of splashed silver and pools of black in some kind of organized movement that was circular and seemed not due to chance. Arranged it seemed and ordered; like the regulated revolutions of a set and whirling measure.
Perhaps twenty feet from where he lay was the outer fringe of what he discerned to be this fragment of some grand gamboling dance or frolic; yet discerned but dimly, for the darkness combined with his uncertain vision to obscure it.
And the shapes, as they sped across the silvery patchwork of the moon, seemed curiously familiar. Beyond question he recognized and knew them. For they were akin to those shadowy emanations seen weeks ago upon the steamer's after-deck, to that "messenger" who climbed from out the sea and sky, and to that form the spirit of the boy assumed, set free in death. They were the flying outlines of Wind and Cloud he had so often glimpsed in vision, racing over the long, bare, open hills—at last come near.
In the moment of first waking, when he saw them clearest, he declares with emphasis that heknewthe father and the boy were among them. Not so much that he saw them actually for recognition, but rather that he felt their rushing presences; for the first sensation on opening his eyes was the conviction that both had passed him close, had almost touched and called him. Afterwards he searched in vain among the flying forms that swept in the swift succession of their leaping dance across the silvery pathways. While varying in size all were so similar.
His description of them is confused a little, for he admits that he could never properly focus them in steady sight. They slipped with a melting swiftness under the eye; the moment one seemed caught in vision it passed on further and the next was in its place. It was like following a running wave-form on the sea. He says, moreover, that while erect and splendid, their backs and shoulders seemed prolonged in hugeness as though they often crouched to spring; they seemed to paw the air; and that a faint delicious sound to which they kept obedient time and rhythm, held that same sweetness which had issued from the hills of Greece, blown down now among the trees from very far away. And when he says "blown down among the trees," he qualifies this phrase as well, because at the same time it came to him that the sound also rose up from underneath the earth, as if the very surface of the ground ran shaking with a soft vibration of its own. Some marvelous dream it might have been in which the forms, the movement, and the sound were all thrown up and outwards from the quivering surface of the Earth itself.
Yet, almost simultaneously with the first instant of waking, the body issued its call of warning. For, while he gazed, and before time for the least reflection came, the Irishman experienced this dislocating conviction that he himself was taking part in the whirling gambol even while he lay and watched it, and that in this way the sense of division in his personality was explained. The fragment of himself within the brain watched some other more vital fragment—some projection of his consciousness detached and separate—playing yonder with its kind beneath the moon.
This sense of a divided self was not new to him, but never before had he known it so distinct and overwhelming. The definiteness of the division, as well as the importance and vitality of the separated portion, were arrestingly novel. It felt as though he were completely out, or to such a degree, at least, that the fraction left behind with the brain was at first only just sufficient for him to recognize his body at all.
Yonder with these others he felt the wind of movement pass along his back, he saw the trees slip by, and knew the very contact of the ground between the leaps. His movements were natural and easy, light as air and fast as wind; they seemed automatic, impelled by something mighty that directed and contained them. He knew, too, the sensation that others pressed behind him and passed before, slipped in and out, and that through the whole wild urgency of it he yet could never make an error. More—he knew that these shifting forms had been close and dancing about him for a time not measurable merely by the hours of a single night, that in a sense they were always there though he had but just discovered them. His earlier glimpses had been a very partial divination of a truth, immense and beautiful, that now dawned quite gorgeously upon him all complete.
The whole world danced. The Universe was rhythmical as well as metrical.
For this amazing splendor showed itself in a flash-like revelation to the freed portion of his consciousness, and he knew it irresistibly because he himself shared it. Here was an infinite joy, naked and unashamed, born of the mighty Mother's heart and life, a joy which, in its feebler, lesser manifestations, trickles down into human conditions, though still spontaneously even then, so pure its primal urgency, as—dancing.
The entire experience, the entire revelation, he thinks, can have occupied but a fraction of a second, but it seemed to smite the whole of his being at once with the conviction of a supreme authority. And close behind it came, too, that other sister expression of a spontaneous and natural expression, equally rhythmical—the impulse to sing. He could have sung aloud. For this puissant and mysterious rhythm to which all moved was greater than any little measure of their own. Surging through them, it came from outside and beyond, infinitely greater than themselves, springing from something of which they were, nevertheless, a living portion. From the body of the Earth it came direct—it was in fact a manifestation of her own vibrating life. The currents of the Earth pulsed through them.
"And then," he says, "I caught this flaming thought of wonder, though so much of it faded instantly upon my full awakening that I can only give you the merest suggestion of what it was."
He stood up beside me as he said it, spreading his arms, as so often when he was excited, to the sky. I caught the glow of his eyes, and in his voice was passion. He spoke unquestionably of something he had intimately known, not as men speak of even the vividest dreams, but of realities that have burned the heart and left their trails of glory.
"Science has guessed some inkling of the truth," he cried, "when it declares that the ultimate molecules of matter are in constant vibratory movement one about another, even upon the point of a needle. But I saw—knew, rather, as if I had always known it, sweet as summer rain, and close in me as love—that the whole Earth with all her myriad expressions of life moved to this primal rhythm as of some divine dancing."
"Dancing?" I asked, puzzled.
"Rhythmical movement call it then," he replied. "To share the life of the Earth is to dance and sing in a huge abundant joy! And the nearer to her great heart, the more natural and spontaneous the impulse—the instinctive dancing of primitive races, of savages and children, still artless and untamed; the gamboling of animals, of rabbits in the meadows and of deer unwatched in forest clearings—you know naturalists have sometimes seen it; of birds in the air—rooks, gulls, and swallows; of the life within the sea; even of gnats in the haze of summer afternoons. All life simple enough to touch and share the enormous happiness of her deep, streaming, personal Being, dances instinctively for very joy—obedient to a greater measure than they know…. The natural movement of the great Earth-Soul is rhythmical. The very winds, the swaying of trees and flowers and grasses, the movement of the sea, of water running through the fields with silver feet, of the clouds and edges of the mist, even the trembling of the earthquakes,—all, all respond in sympathetic motions to this huge vibratory movement of her great central pulse. Ay, and the mountains too, though so vastly scaled their measure that perhaps we only know the pauses in between, and think them motionless…. The mountains rise and fall and change; our very breathing, first sign of stirring life, even the circulation of our blood, bring testimony; our speech as well—inspired words are ever rhythmical, language that pours into the poet's mind from something greater than himself. And not unwisely, but in obedience to a deep instinctive knowledge was dancing once—in earlier, simpler days—a form of worship. You know, at least, how rhythm in music and ceremonial uplifts and cleans and simplifies the heart toward the greater life…. You know, perhaps, the Dance of Jesus…."
The words poured from him with passion, yet always uttered gently with a smile of joy upon the face. I saw his figure standing over me, outlined against the starry sky; and, deeply stirred, I listened with delight and wonder. Rhythm surely lies behind all expression of life. He was on the heels of some simple, dazzling verity though he phrased it wildly. But not a tenth part of all he said could I recapture afterwards for writing down. The steady, gentle swaying of his body I remember clearly, and that somewhere or other in the stream of language, he made apt reference to the rhythmical swaying of those who speak in trance, or know some strange, possessing gust of inspiration.
The first and natural expression of the Earth's vitality lies in a dancing movement of purest joy and happiness—that for me is the gist of what remains. Those near enough to Nature feel it. I myself remembered days in spring … my thoughts, borne upon some sweet emotion, traveled far….
"And not of the Earth alone," he interrupted my dreaming in a voice like singing, "but of the entire Universe. The spheres and constellations weave across the fields of ether the immense old rhythm of their divine, eternal dance…!"
Then, with a disconcerting abruptness, and a strange little wayward laugh as of apology for having let himself so freely go, he sat down beside me with his back against the chimney-stack. He resumed more quietly the account of this particular adventure that lay 'twixt dream and waking:
All that he described had happened in a few seconds. It flashed, complete, authoritative and vivid, then passed away. He knew again the call and warning of his body—to return. For this consciousness of being in two places at once, divided as it were against himself, brought with it the necessity for decision. With which portion should he identify himself? By an act of will, it seemed, a choice was possible.
And with it, then, came the knowledge that to remain "out" was easier than to return. This time, to come back into himself would be difficult.
The very possibility seemed to provide the shock of energy necessary for overcoming it; the experience alarmed him; it was like holding an option upon living—like a foretaste of death. Automatically, as it were, these loosened forces in him answered to the body's summons. The result was immediate and singular; one of these Dancing outlines separated itself from the main herd, approached with a sudden silent rush, enveloped him for a second of darkness and confusion, losing its shape completely on the way, and then merged into his being as smoke slips in and merges with the structure of a tree.
The projected portion of his personality had returned. The sense of division was gone. There remained behind only the little terror of the weak flesh whose summons had thus brought it back.
The same instant he was fully awake—the night about him empty of all but the silver dreaming of the moon among the shadows. Beside him lay the sleeping figure of his companion, the bashlik of lamb's wool drawn closely down about the ears and neck, and the voluminous black burka shrouding him from feet to shoulders. A little distance away the horse stood, munching grass. Again he noted that there was no wind, and the shadows of the trees lay motionless upon the ground. The air smelt sweet of forest, soil, and dew.
The experience—it seemed now—belonged to dreaming rather than to waking consciousness, for there was nothing about him to confirm it outwardly. Only the memory remained—that, and a vast, deep-coursing, subtle happiness. The smaller terror that he felt was of the flesh alone, for the flesh ever instinctively fought against such separation. The happiness, though, contained and overwhelmed the fear.
Yes, only the memory remained, and even that fast fading. But the substance of what had been, passed into his inmost being: the splendor of that would remain forever, incorporated with his life. He had shared in this brief moment of extended consciousness some measure of the Mother's cosmic being, simple as sunshine, unrestrained as wind, complete and satisfying. Its natural expression was rhythmical, a deep, pure joy that drove outwards even into little human conditions as dancing and singing. He had known it, too, with companions of his kind…
Moreover, though no longer visible or audible, it still continued somewhere close. He was blessedly companioned all the time—and watched.Theyknew him one of themselves—these brother expressions of her cosmic life—theseUrweltbeings that Today had no external, bodily forms. They waited, knowing well that he would come. Fulfillment beckoned surely just beyond…