The Centaur Part 22

x.x.xI

It was spring--and the flutes of Pan played everywhere. The radiance of the world's first morning shone undimmed. Life flowed and sang and danced, abundant and untamed. It bathed the mountains and that sky of stainless blue. It bathed him too. Dipped, washed, and shining in it, he walked the Earth as she lay radiant in her early youth. The crystal presence of her everlasting Spring flew laughing through a world of light and flowers--flowers that none could ever pluck to die, light that could never fade to darkness within walls and roofs.

All day they wound easily, as though on winged feet, through the steep belt of box and beech woods, and in sparkling brilliant heat across open s.p.a.ces where the azaleas shone; a cooling wind, fresh as the dawn, seemed ever to urge them forwards. The country, for all its huge scale and wildness, was park-like; the giant, bushy trees wore an air of being tended by the big winds that ran with rustling music among their waving foliage. Between the rhododendrons were avenues of turf, broad-gladed pathways, yet older than the moon, from which a thousand gardeners of wind and dew had gone but a moment before to care for others further on. Over all brimmed up some primal, old-world beauty of a simple life--some immemorial soft glory of the dawn.

Closer and closer, deeper and deeper, ever swifter, ever more direct, O'Malley pa.s.sed down toward the heart of his mother's being. Along the tenderest pathways of his inner being, so wee, so soft, so simple that for most men they lie ignored or overgrown, he slipped with joy a little nearer--one stage perhaps--toward Reality.

Pan "blew in power" across these Caucasian heights and valleys.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!

Piercing sweet by the river!

Blinding sweet, O great G.o.d Pan!

The sun on the hill forgot to die, And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly Came back to dream on the river

In front his big leader, no longer blundering clumsily as on that toy steamer with the awkward and lesser motion known to men, pressed forward with a kind of giant sure supremacy along paths he knew, or rather over a trackless, pathless world which the great planet had charted lovingly for his splendid feet. That wind, blowing from the depths of valleys left long since behind, accompanied them wisely. They heard, not the faint horns of Elfland faintly blowing, but the blasts of the _Urwelt_ trumpets growing out of the still distance, nearer, ever nearer. For leagues below the beech woods poured over the enormous slopes in a sea of soft green foam, and through the meadow s.p.a.ces they saw the sweet nakedness of running water, and listened to its song. At noon they rested in the greater heat, sleeping beneath the shadow of big rocks; and sometimes traveled late into the night, when the stars guided them and they knew the pointing of the winds. The very moonlight then, that washed this lonely world with silver, sheeting the heights of snow beyond, was friendly, half divine ... and it seemed to O'Malley that while they slept they were watched and cared for--as though Others who awaited had already come halfway out to meet them.

And ever, more and more, the pa.s.sion of his happiness increased; he knew himself complete, fulfilled, made whole. It was as though his Self were pa.s.sing outwards into hundreds of thousands, and becoming countless as the sand. He was everywhere; in everything; shining, singing, dancing.... With the ancient woods he breathed; slipped with the streams down the still darkened valleys; called from each towering summit to the Sun; and flew with all the winds across the immense, untrodden slopes. About him lay this whole spread being of the flowered Caucasus, huge and quiet, drinking in the sunshine at its leisure. But it lay also _within_ himself, for his expanding consciousness included and contained it. Through it--this early potent Mood of Nature--he pa.s.sed toward the Soul of the Earth within, even as a child, caught by a mood of winning tenderness in its mother, pa.s.ses closer to the heart that gave it birth. Some central love enwrapped him. He knew the surrounding power of everlasting arms.

x.x.xII

"Inward, ay, deeper far than love or scorn, Deeper than bloom of virtue, stain of sin, Rend thou the veil and pa.s.s alone within, Stand naked there and know thyself forlorn.

Nay! in what world, then, spirit, vast thou born?

Or to what World-Soul art thou entered in?

Feel the Self fade, feel the great life begin.

With Love re-rising in the cosmic morn.

The Inward ardor yearns to the inmost goal; The endless goal is one with the endless way; From every gulf the tides of Being roll, From every zenith burns the indwelling day, And life in Life has drowned thee and soul in Soul; And these are G.o.d and thou thyself art they."

--F.W.H. MYERS. From "A Cosmic Outlook"

The account of what followed simply swept me into fairyland, yet a Fairyland that is true because it lives in every imaginative heart that does not dream itself shut off from the Universe in some wee compartment all alone.

If O'Malley's written account, and especially his tumbled notebooks, left me bewildered and confused, the fragments that he told me brought this sense of an immense, sweet picture that actually existed. I caught small scenes of it, set in some wild high light. Their very incoherence conveyed the gorgeous splendor of the whole better than any neat ordered sequence could possibly have done.

Climax, in the story-book meaning, there was none. The thing flowed round and round forever. A sense of something eternal wrapped me as I listened; for his imagination set the whole adventure out of time and s.p.a.ce, and I caught myself dreaming too. "A thousand years in His sight"--I understood the old words as refreshingly new--might be a day.

Thus felt that monk, perhaps, for whose heart a hundred years had pa.s.sed while he listened to the singing of a little bird.

My practical questions--it was only at the beginning that I was dull enough to ask them--he did not satisfy, because he could not. There was never the least suggestion of the artist's mere invention.

"You really felt the Earth about and in you," I had asked, "much as one feels the presence of a friend and living person?"

"Drowned in her, yes, as in the thoughts and atmosphere of some one awfully loved." His voice a little trembled as he said it.

"So speech unnecessary?"

"Impossible--fatal," was the laconic, comprehensive reply, "limiting: destructive even."

That, at least, I grasped: the pitifulness of words before that love by which self goes wholly lost in the being of another, adrift yet cared for, gathered all wonderfully in.

"And your Russian friend--your leader?" I ventured, haltingly.

His reply was curiously illuminating:--

"Like some great guiding Thought within her mind--some flaming _motif_--interpreting her love and splendor--leading me straight."

"As you felt at Ma.r.s.eilles, a clue--a vital clue?" For I remembered the singular phrase he had used in the notebook.

"Not a bad word," he laughed; "certainly, as far as it goes, not a wrong one. For he--_it_--was at the same time within myself. We merged, as our life grew and spread. We swept things along with us from the banks.

We were in flood together," he cried. "We drew the landscape with us!"

The last words baffled me; I found no immediate response. He pushed away the plates on the table before us, where we had been lunching in the back room of a dingy Soho restaurant. We now had the place to ourselves. He drew his chair a little nearer.

"Don't ye see--our journey also was _within_," he added abruptly.

The pale London sunlight came through the window across chimneys, dreary roofs, courtyards. Yet where it touched his face it seemed at once to shine. His voice was warm and eager. I caught from him, as it were, both heat and light.

"You moved actually, though, over country--?"

"While at the same time we moved within, advanced, sank deeper,"

he returned; "call it what you will. Our condition moved. There was this correspondence between the two. Over her face we walked, yet into her as well. We 'traveled' with One greater than ourselves, both caught and merged in her, in utter sympathy with one another as with herself..."

This stopped me dead. I could not pretend more than a vague sympathetic understanding with such descriptions of a mystical experience. Nor, it was clear, did he expect it of me. Even his own heart was troubled, and he knew he spoke of things that only few may deal with sanely, still fewer hear with patience.

But, oh, that little room in Greek Street smelt of forests, dew, and dawn as he told it,--that dear wayward Child of Earth! For "his voice fell, like music that makes giddy the dim brain, faint with intoxication of keen joy." I watched those delicate hands he spread about him through the air; the tender, sensitive lips, the light blue eyes that glowed. I noted the real strength in the face,--a sort of n.o.bility it was--his shabby suit of grey, his tie never caught properly in the collar, the frayed cuffs, and the enormous boots he wore even in London--"policeman boots" as we used to call them with a laugh.

So vivid was the picture that he painted! Almost, it seemed, I knew myself the pulse of that eternal Spring beneath our feet, beating in vain against the suffocating weight of London's bricks and pavements laid by civilization--the Earth's delight striving to push outwards into visible form as flowers. She flashed some sc.r.a.p of meaning thus into me, though blunted on the way, I fear, and crudely paraphrased.

Yes, as he talked across the airless gloom of that little back room, in some small way I caught the splendor of his vision. Behind the words, I caught it here and there. My own wee world extended. My being stretched to understand him and to net in fugitive fragments the scenes of wonder that he knew complete.

Perhaps his larger consciousness fringed my own to "bruise" it, as he claimed the Earth had done to him, so that I glimpsed in tinier measure an experience that in himself blazed whole and thundering. It was, I must admit, exalting and invigorating, if a little breathless; and the return to streets and omnibuses painful--a descent to ugliness and disappointment. For things I can hardly understand now, even in my own descriptions of them, seemed at the time quite clear--or clear-ish at any rate. Whereas normally I could never have compa.s.sed them at all.

It taught me: that, at least, I know. In some spiritual way I quickened to the view that all great teaching really comes in some such curious fashion--via a temporary stretching or extension of the "heart" to receive it. The little normal self is pushed aside to make room, even to the point of loss, in order to contain it. Later, the consciousness contracts again. But it has expanded--and there has been growth. Was this, I wondered, perhaps what mystics speak of when they say the personal life must slip aside, be trampled on, submerged, before there can be room for the divine Presences...?

At any rate, as he talked there over coffee that grew cold and cigarette smoke that made the air yet thicker than it naturally was, his words conveyed with almost grandeur of conviction this reality of a profound inner experience. I shared in some faint way its truth and beauty, so that when I saw it in his written form I marveled to find the thing so thin and cold and dwindled. The key his personal presence supplied, of guidance and interpretation, of course was gone.

x.x.xIII

"Why, what is this patient entrance into Nature's deep resources But the child's most gradual learning to walk upright without bane?

When we drive out, from the cloud of steam, majestical white horses, Are we greater than the first men who led black ones by the mane?"

--E.B. BROWNING