The Centaur Part 21

Though unusual enough in so unfrequented a region, this was not necessarily alarming, and the first proof O'Malley had that the man experienced no ordinary physical fear was the fact that he had left both knife and rifle in his blankets. Hitherto, at the least sign of danger, he changed into a perfect a.r.s.enal; he invariably slept "in his weapons"; but now, even in the darkness, the other noted that he was unarmed, and therefore it was no attempt at horse-stealing or of a.s.sault upon themselves he feared.

"Who is it? What is it?" he asked, stumbling over the tangle of string-like roots that netted the ground. "Natives, travelers like ourselves, or--something else?" He spoke very low, as though aware that what had waked him still hovered close enough to overhear. "Why do you fear?"

And Rostom looked up a moment from stooping over the rope. He stepped a little nearer, avoiding the animal's hoofs. In a confused whisper of French and Russian, making at the same time the protective signs of his religion, he muttered a sentence of which the other caught little more than the una.s.suring word that something was about them close--something "_mechant_." This curious, significant word he used.

The whispered utterance, the manner that went with it, surely the dark and lonely setting of the little scene as well, served to convey the full suggestion of the adjective with a force the man himself could scarcely have intended. Something had pa.s.sed by, not so much evil, wicked, or malign as strange and alien--uncanny. Rostom, a man utterly careless of physical danger, rising to it, rather, with delight, was frightened--in his soul.

"What do you mean?" O'Malley asked louder, with an air of impatience a.s.sumed. The man was on his knees, but whether praying, or merely struggling with the rope, was hard to see. "What is it you're talking about so foolishly?" He spoke with a confidence he hardly felt himself.

And the involved reply, spoken with lips against the earth, the head but slightly turned as he knelt, again smothered the words. Only the curious phrase came to him--"_de l'ancien monde_--_quelque-chose_--"

The Irishman took him by the shoulders. Not meaning actually to shake him, he yet must have used some violence, for the fact was that he did not like the answers and sought to deny some strong emotion in himself.

The man stood up abruptly with a kind of sudden spring. The expression of his face was not easily divined in the darkness, but a gleam of the eyes was clearly visible. It may have been anger, it may have been terror; vivid excitement it certainly was.

"Something--old as the stones, old as the stones," he whispered, thrusting his dark bearded face unpleasantly close. "Such things are in these mountains.... _Mais oui! C'est moi qui vous le dis!_ Old as the stones, I tell you. And sometimes they come out close--with sudden wind.

_We_ know!"

He stepped back again sharply and dropped upon his knees, bowing to the ground with flattened palms. He made a repelling gesture as though it was O'Malley's presence that brought the experience.

"And to see them is--to die!" he heard, muttered against the ground thickly. "To see them is to die!"

The Irishman went back to his sleeping-bag. Some strange pa.s.sion of the man was deeply stirred; he did not wish to offend his violent beliefs and turn it against himself in a stupid, scrambling fight. He lay and waited. He heard the muttering of the deep voice behind him in the darkness. Presently it ceased. Rostom came softly back to bed.

"_He_ knows; _he_ warned me!" he whispered, jerking one hand toward the horse significantly, as they at length lay again side by side in their blankets and the stars shone down upon them from a deep black sky.

"But, for the moment, they have pa.s.sed, not finding us. No wind has come."

"Another--horse?" asked O'Malley suggestively, with a sympathy meant to quiet him.

But the peasant shook his head; and this time it was not difficult to divine the expression on his face even in the darkness. At the same moment the tethered animal again uttered a long whinnying cry, plaintive, yet of pleasure rather than alarm it seemed, which instantly brought the man again with a leap from the blankets to his knees. O'Malley did not go to help him; he stuffed the clothes against his ears and waited; he did not wish to hear the peasant's sentences.

And this pantomime went on at intervals for an hour or more, when at length the horse grew quiet and O'Malley s.n.a.t.c.hed moments of unrefreshing sleep. The night lay thick about them with a silence like the silence of the sky. The boxwood bushes ran together into a single sheet of black, the far peaks faded out of sight, the air grew keen and sharp toward the dawn on the wave of wind the sunrise drives before it round the world. But to and fro across the Irishman's mind as he lay between sleep and dozing ran the feeling that his friends were close, and that those dancing forms of cosmic life to which all three approximated had come near once more to summon him. He also knew that what the horse had felt was something far from terror. The animal instinctively had divined the presence of something to which it, too, was remotely kin.

Rostom, however, remained keenly on the alert, much of the time apparently praying. Not once did he touch the weapons that lay ready to hand upon the folded burka ... and when at last the dawn came, pale and yellow, through the trees, showing the outlines of the individual box and azalea bushes, he got up earlier than usual and began to make the fire for coffee. In the fuller light which soon poured swiftly over the eastern summits and dropped gold and silver into the tremendous valley at their feet, the men made a systematic search of the immediate surroundings, and then of the clearings and more open stretches beyond.

In silence they made it. They found, however, no traces of another camping-party. And it was clear from the way they went about the search that neither expected to find anything. The ground was unbroken, the bushes undisturbed.

Yet still, both knew. That "something" which the night had brought and kept concealed, still hovered close about them.

And it was at this scattered hamlet, consisting of little more than a farm of sorts and a few shepherds' huts of stone, where they stopped two hours later for provisions, that O'Malley looked up thus suddenly and recognized the figure of his friend. He stood among the trees a hundred yards away. At first the other thought he was a tree--his stalwart form the stem, his hair and beard the branches--so big and motionless he stood between the other trunks. O'Malley saw him for a full minute before he understood. The man seemed so absolutely a part of the landscape, a giant detail in keeping with the rest--a detail that had suddenly emerged.

The same moment a great draught of wind, rising from depths of the valley below, swept overhead with a roaring sound, shaking the beech and box trees and setting all the golden azalea heads in a sudden agitation. It pa.s.sed as swiftly as it came. The peace of the June morning again descended on the mountains.

It was broken by a wild, half-smothered cry,--a cry of genuine terror.

For O'Malley had turned to Rostom with some word that here, in this figure, lay the explanation of the animal's excitement in the night, when he saw that the peasant, white as chalk beneath the tangle of black hair that covered his face, had stopped dead in his tracks. His mouth was open, his arms upraised to shield; he was staring fixedly in the same direction as himself. The next instant he was on his knees, bowing and sc.r.a.ping toward Mecca, groaning, hiding his eyes with both hands. The sack he held had toppled over; the cheese and flour rolled upon the ground; and from the horse came that long-drawn whinnying of the night.

There was a momentary impression--entirely in the Irishman's mind, of course,--that the whole landscape veiled a giant, rushing movement that pa.s.sed across it like a wave. The surface of the earth, it seemed, ran softly quivering, as though that wind had stirred response together with the trembling of the million leaves ... before it settled back again to stillness. It pa.s.sed in the flash of an eyelid. The earth lay tranquil in repose.

But, though the suddenness of the stranger's arrival might conceivably have startled the ignorant peasant, with nerves already overwrought from the occurrence of the night, O'Malley was not prepared for the violence of the man's terror as shown by the immediate sequel. For after several moments' prayer and prostration, with groans half smothered against the very ground, he sprang impetuously to his feet again, turned to his employer with eyes that gleamed wildly in that face of chalk, cried out--the voice thick with the confusion of his fear--"It is the Wind! _They_ come; from the mountains _they_ come! Older than the stones they are. Save yourself.... Hide your eyes ... fly...!"--and was gone.

Like a deer he went. He waited neither for food nor payment, but flung the great black burka round his face--and ran.

And to O'Malley, bereft of all power of movement as he watched in complete bewilderment, one thing seemed clear: the man went in this extraordinary fashion because he was afraid of something he had _felt_, not seen. For as he ran with wild and leaping strides, he did not run away from the figure. He took the direction straight toward the spot where the stranger still stood motionless as a tree. So close he pa.s.sed him that he must almost have brushed his very shoulder. He did not see him.

The last thing the Irishman noted was that in his violence the man had dropped the yellow bashlik from his head. O'Malley saw him stoop with a flying rush to pick it up. He seemed to catch it as it fell.

And then the big figure moved. He came slowly forward from among the trees, his hands outstretched in greeting, on his great visage a shining smile of welcome that seemed to share the sunrise. In that moment for the Irishman all was forgotten as though unknown, unseen, save the feelings of extraordinary happiness that filled him to the brim.

x.x.x

"The poets are thus liberating G.o.ds. The ancient British bards had for the t.i.tle of their order, 'Those who are free throughout the world.' They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism."

--EMERSON

To criticize, deny, perhaps to sneer, is no very difficult or uncommon function of the mind, and the story as I first heard him tell it, lying there in the gra.s.s beyond the Serpentine that summer evening, roused in me, I must confess, all of these very ordinary faculties. Yet, as I listened to his voice that mingled with the rustle of the poplars overhead, and watched his eager face and gestures, it came to me dimly that a man's mistakes may be due to his attempting bigger things than his little critic ever dreamed perhaps. And gradually I shared the vision that this unrhyming poet by my side had somehow lived out in action.

Inner experience for him was ever the reality--not the mere forms or deeds that clothe it in partial physical expression.

There was no question, of course, that he had actually met this big, inarticulate Russian on the steamer; that Stahl's part in the account was unvarnished; that the boy had fallen on the deck from heart disease; and that, after an interval, chance had brought O'Malley and the father together again in this valley of the Central Caucasus. All that was as literal as the superst.i.tious terror of the Georgian peasant. Further, that the Russian possessed precisely those qualities of powerful sympathy with the other's hidden longings which the subtle-minded Celt had been so quick to appropriate--this, too, was literal enough. Here, doubtless, was the springboard whence he leaped into the stream of this quasi-spiritual adventure with an eagerness of fine, whole-hearted belief which must make this dull world a very wonderful place indeed to those who know it; for it is the visioned faculty of correlating the commonest event with the procession of august Powers that pa.s.s ever to and fro behind life's swaying curtain, and of divining in the most ordinary of yellow b.u.t.tercups the golden fires of a dropped star.

Again, for Terence O'Malley there seemed no definite line that marked off one state of consciousness from another, just as there seems no given instant when a man pa.s.ses actually from sleep to waking, from pleasure to pain, from joy to grief. There is, indeed, no fixed threshold between the states of normal and abnormal consciousness. In this stranger he imagined a sense of companionship that by some magic of alchemy transformed his deep loneliness into joy, and satisfied his pa.s.sionate yearnings by bringing their subjective fulfillment within range. To have found acceptance in his sight was thus a revolutionary fact in his existence.

While a part of my mind may have labeled it all as creative imagination, another part recognized it as plainly true--because his being lived it out without the least denial.

He, at any rate, was not inventing; nor ever knew an instant's doubt.

He simply told me what had happened. The discrepancies--the omissions in his written account especially--were simply due, I feel, to the fact that his skill in words was not equal to the depth and brilliance of the emotions that he experienced. But the fact remains: he did experience them. His fairy tale convinced.

His faith had made him whole--one with the Earth. The sense of disunion between his outer and his inner self was gone.

And now, as these two began their journey together into the wilder region of these stupendous mountains, O'Malley says he realized clearly that the change he had dreaded as an "inner catastrophe" simply would mean the complete and final transfer of his consciousness from the "without" to the "within." It would involve the loss only of what const.i.tuted him a person among the external activities of the world today. He would lose his life to find it. The deeper self thus quickened by the stranger must finally a.s.sert its authority over the rest. To join these Urwelt beings and share their eternal life of beauty close to the Earth herself, he must shift the center. Only thus could he enter the state before the "Fall"--that ancient Garden of the World-Soul, walled-in so close behind his daily life--and know deliverance from the discontent of modern conditions that so distressed him.

To do this temporarily, perhaps, had long been possible to him--in dream, in reverie, in those imaginative trances when he almost seemed to leave his body altogether; but to achieve it permanently was something more than any such pa.s.sing disablement of the normal self. It involved, he now saw clearly, that which he had already witnessed in the boy: the final release of his Double in so-called death.

Thus, as they made their way northwards, nominally toward the mighty Elbruz and the borders of Swanetia, the Irishman knew in his heart that they in reality came nearer to the Garden long desired, and to those lofty Gates of horn and ivory that hitherto he had never found--because he feared to let himself go. Often he had camped beneath the walls, had smelt the flowers, heard the songs, and even caught glimpses of the life that moved so gorgeously within. But the Gates themselves had never shone for him, even against the sky of dream, because his vision had been clouded by alarm. They swung, it had seemed to him before, in only one direction--for those who enter: he had always hesitated, lost his way, returned.... And many, like him, make the same mistake. Once in, there need be no return, for in reality the walls spread outwards and--enclose the entire world.

Civilization and Humanity, the man of smaller vision had called out to him as pa.s.swords to safety. Simplicity and Love, he now discovered, were the truer clues. His big friend in silence taught him. Now he knew.

For in that little hamlet their meeting had taken place--in silence.

No actual speech had pa.s.sed. "You go--so?" the Russian conveyed by a look and by a movement of his whole figure, indicating the direction; and to the Irishman's a.s.senting inclination of the head he made an answering gesture that merely signified compliance with a plan already known to both. "We go, together then." And, there and then, they started, side by side.

The suddenness of this concerted departure only seemed strange afterwards when O'Malley looked back upon it, for at the time it seemed as inevitable as being obliged to swim once the dive is taken. He stood upon a pinnacle whence lesser details were invisible; he knew a kind of exaltation--of loftier vision. Small facts that ordinarily might fill the day with trouble sank below the horizon then. He did not even notice that they went without food, horse, or blankets. It was reckless, unrestrained, and utterly unhindered, this free setting-forth together.

Thus might he have gone upon a journey with the wind, the sunshine, or the rain. Departure with a thought, a dream, a fancy could not have been less unhampered.

The only detail of his outer world that lingered--and that, already sinking out of sight like a stone into deep water--was the image of the running peasant. For a moment he recalled the picture. He saw the man in the act of stooping after the fallen bashlik. He saw him seize it, lift it to his head again. But the picture was small--already very far away. Before the bashlik actually reached the head, the detail dipped into mist and vanished....