The Centaur Part 23

The "Russian" led.

O'Malley styled him thus to the end for want of a larger word, perhaps--a word to phrase the inner and the outer. Although the mountains were devoid of trails, he seemed always certain of his way. An absolute sense of orientation possessed him; or, rather, the whole earth became a single pathway. Her being, in and about their hearts, concealed no secrets; he knew the fresh, cool water-springs as surely as the corners where the wild honey gathered. It seemed as natural that the bees should leave them unmolested, giving them freely of their store, as that the savage dogs in the aouls, or villages, they pa.s.sed so rarely now, should refrain from attack. Even the peasants shared with them some common, splendid life. Occasionally they pa.s.sed an Ossetian on horseback, a rifle swung across his saddle, a covering burka draping his shoulders and the animal's haunches in a single form that seemed a very outgrowth of the mountains. But not even a greeting was exchanged. They pa.s.sed in silence; often very close, as though they did not see these two on foot. And once or twice the horses reared and whinnied, while their riders made the signs of their religion.... Sentries they seemed. But for the pa.s.sword known to both they would have stopped the travelers. In these forsaken fastnesses mere unprotected wandering means death. Yet to the happy Irishman there never came a thought of danger or alarm. All was a portion of himself, and no man can be afraid of his own hands or feet. Their convoy was immense, invisible, a guaranteed security of the vast Earth herself. No little personal injury could pa.s.s so huge defense. Others, armed with a lesser security of knives and guns and guides, would a.s.suredly have been turned back, or had they shown resistance, would never have been heard to tell the tale. Dr. Stahl and the fur-merchant, for instance--

But such bothering little thoughts with their hard edges no longer touched reality; they spun away and found no lodgment; they were--untrue; false items of some lesser world unrealized.

For, in proportion as he fixed his thoughts successfully on outward and physical things, the world wherein he now walked grew dim: he missed the path, stumbled, saw trees and flowers indistinctly, failed to hear properly the call of birds and wind, to feel the touch of sun; and, most unwelcome of all,--was aware that his leader left him, dwindling in size, dropping away somehow among shadows far behind or far ahead.

The inversion was strangely complete: what men called solid, real, and permanent he now knew as the veriest shadows of existence, fleeting, unsatisfactory, false.

Their dreary make-believe had all his life oppressed him. He now knew why. Men, driving their forces outwards for external possessions had lost the way so utterly. It truly was amazing. He no longer quite understood how such feverish strife was possible to intelligent beings: the fur-merchant, the tourists, his London friends, the great majority of men and women he had known, pain in their hearts and weariness in their eyes, the sad strained faces, the furious rush to catch a little pleasure they deemed joy. It seemed like some wild senseless game that madness plays. He found it difficult to endow them, one and all, with any sense of life. He saw them groping in thick darkness, s.n.a.t.c.hing with hands of shadow at things of even thinner shadow, all moving in a wild and frantic circle of artificial desires, while just beyond, absurdly close to many, blazed this great living sunshine of Reality and Peace and Beauty. If only they would turn--and look _within_--!

In fleeting moments these sordid glimpses of that dark and shadow-world still afflicted his outer sight--the nightmare he had left behind. It played like some gloomy memory through a corner of consciousness not yet wholly disentangled from it. Already he burned to share his story with the world...! A few he saw who here and there half turned, touched by a flashing ray--then rushed away into the old blackness as though frightened, not daring to escape. False images thrown outward by the intellect prevented. Stahl he saw ... groping; a soft light of yearning in his eyes ... a hand outstretched to push the shadows from him, yet ever gathering them instead.... Men he saw by the million, youth still in their hearts, yet slaving in darkened trap-like cages not merely to earn a competency but to pile more gold for things not really wanted; faces of greed round gambling-tables; the pandemonium of Exchanges; even fair women, playing Bridge through all a summer afternoon--the strife and l.u.s.t and pa.s.sion for possessions degrading every heart, choking the channels of simplicity.... Over the cities of the world he heard the demon Civilization sing its song of terror and desolation. Its music of destruction shook the nations. He saw the millions dance. And mid the bewildering ugly thunder of that sound few could catch the small sweet voice played by the Earth upon the little Pipes of Pan... the fluting call of Nature to the Simple Life--which is the Inner.

For now, as he moved closer to the Earth, deeper ever deeper into the enfolding moods of her vast collective consciousness, he drew nearer to the Reality that satisfies. He approached that center where outward activity is less, yet energy and vitality far greater--because it is at rest. Here he met things halfway, as it were, _en route_ for the outer physical world where they would appear later as "events," but not yet emerged, still alive and breaking with their undischarged and natural potencies. Modern life, he discerned, dealt only with these forces when they had emerged, masquerading at the outer rim of life as complete embodiments, whereas actually they are but partial and symbolical expressions of their eternal prototypes behind. And men today were busy at this periphery only, touch with the center lost, madly consumed with the unimportant details that concealed the inner glory. It was the spirit of the age to mistake the outer sh.e.l.l for the inner reality. He at last understood the reason of his starved loneliness amid the stupid uproar of latter-day life, why he distrusted "Civilization," and stood apart.

His yearnings were explained. His heart dwelt ever in the Golden Age of the Earth's first youth, and at last--he was coming home.

Like mud settling in dirty water, the casual realities of that outer life all sank away. He grew clear within, one with the primitive splendor, beauty, grace of a fresh world. Over his inner self, flooding slowly the pa.s.sages and cellars, those subterranean ways that honeycomb the dim-lit foundations of personality, this tide of power rose. Filling chamber after chamber, melting down walls and ceiling, eating away divisions softly and irresistibly, it climbed in silence, merging all moods and disunion of his separate Selves into the single thing that made him comprehensible to himself and able to know the Earth as Mother. He saw himself whole; he knew himself divine. A strange tumult as of some ecstasy of old remembrance invaded him. He dropped back into a more s.p.a.cious scale of time, long long ago when a month might be a moment, or a thousand years pa.s.s round him as a single day....

The qualities of all the Earth lay too, so easily contained, within himself. He understood that old legend by which man the microcosm represents and sums up Earth, the macrocosm in himself, so that Nature becomes the symbol and interpreter of his inner being. The strength and dignity of the trees he drew into himself; the power of the wind was his; with his unwearied feet ran all the sweet and facile swiftness of the rivulets, and in his thoughts the graciousness of flowers, the wavy softness of the gra.s.s, the peace of open s.p.a.ces and the calm of that vast sky. The murmur of the _Urwelt_ was in his blood, and in his heart the exaltation of her golden Mood of Spring.

How, then, could speech be possible, since both shared this common life?

The communion with his friend and leader was too profound and perfect for any stammering utterance in the broken, partial symbols known as language. This was done for them: the singing of the birds, the wind-voices, the rippling of water, the very humming of the myriad insects even, and rustling of the gra.s.s and leaves, shaped all they felt in some articulate expression that was right, complete, and adequate. The pa.s.sion of the larks set all the sky to music, and songs far sweeter than the nightingales' made every dusk divine.

He understood now that laborious utterance of his friend upon the steamer, and why his difficulty with words was more than he could overcome.

Like a current in the sea he still preserved ident.i.ty, yet knew the freedom of a boundless being. And meanwhile the tide was ever rising.

With this singular companion he neared that inner realization which should reveal them as they were--Thoughts in the Earth's old Consciousness too primitive, too far away, too vital and terrific to be confined in any outward physical expression of the "civilized" world today.... The earth shone, glittered, sang, holding them close to the rhythm of her gigantic heart. Her glory was their own. In the blazing summer of the inner life they floated, happy, caught away, at peace ...

emanations of her living Self.

The valleys far below were filled with mist, cutting them off literally from the world of men, but the beauty of the upper mountains grew more and more bewilderingly enticing. The scale was so immense, while the brilliant clearness of the air brought distance close before the eyes, altered perspective, and robbed "remote" and "near" of any definite meaning. s.p.a.ce fled away. It shifted here and there at pleasure, according as they felt. It was within them, not without. They pa.s.sed, dispersed and swift about the entire landscape, a very part of it, diffused in terms of light and air and color, scattered in radiance, distributed through flowers, spread through the sky and gra.s.s and forests. s.p.a.ce is a form of thought. But they no longer "thought": they felt.... O, that prodigious, clean, and simple Feeling of the Earth! Love that redeems and satisfies! Power that fills and blesses! Electric strength that kills the germ of separateness, making whole! The medicine of the world!

For days and nights it was thus--or was it years and minutes?--while they skirted the slopes and towers of the huge Dykh-Taou, and Elbrous, supreme and lonely in the heavens, beckoned solemnly. The snowy Kochtan-Taou rolled past, yet through, them; Kasbek superbly thundered; hosts of lesser summits sang in the dawn and whispered to the stars. And longing sank away--impossible.

"My boy, my boy, could you only have been with me...!" broke his voice across the splendid dream, bringing me back to the choking, dingy room I had forgotten. It was like a cry--a cry of pa.s.sionate yearning.

"I'm with you now," I murmured, some similar rising joy half breaking in my breast. "That's something--"

He sighed in answer. "Something, perhaps. But I have got it always; it's all still part of me. Oh, oh! that I could give it to the world and lift the ache of all humanity...!" His voice trembled. I saw the moisture of immense compa.s.sion in his eyes. I felt myself swim out into universal being.

"Perhaps," I stammered half beneath my breath, "perhaps some day you may...!"

He shook his head. His face turned very sad.

"How should they listen, much less understand? Their energies drive outwards, and separation is their G.o.d. There is no 'money in it'...!"

x.x.xIV

"Oh! whose heart is not stirred with tumultuous joy when the intimate Life of Nature enters into his soul with all its plenitude, ... when that mighty sentiment for which language has no other name than Love is diffused in him, like some powerful all-dissolving vapor; when he, shivering with sweet terror, sinks into the dusky, enticing bosom of Nature; when the meager personality loses itself in the overpowering waves of pa.s.sion, and nothing remains but the focal point of the incommensurable generative Force, an engulfing vortex in the ocean?"

--NOVALIS, _Disciples at Sas._ Translated by U.C.B.

Early in the afternoon they left the bigger trees behind, and pa.s.sed into that more open country where the shoulders of the mountains were strewn with rhododendrons. These formed no continuous forest, but stood about in groups some twenty-five feet high, their rounded ma.s.ses lighted on the surface with fires of mauve and pink and purple. When the wind stirred them, and the rattling of their stiff leaves was heard, it seemed as if the skin of the mountains trembled to shake out colored flames. The air turned radiant through a mist of running tints.

Still climbing, they pa.s.sed along broad glades of turfy gra.s.s between the groups. More rapidly now, O'Malley says, went forward that inner change of being which accompanied the progress of their outer selves.

So intimate henceforth was this subtle correspondence that the very landscape took the semblance of their feelings. They moved as "emanations" of the landscape. Each melted in the other, dividing lines all vanished.

Their union with the Earth approached this strange and sweet fulfillment.

And so it was that, though at this height the vestiges of bird and animal life were wholly gone, there grew more and more strongly the sense that, in their further depths and shadows, these ancient bushes screened Activities even more ancient than themselves. Life, only concealed because they had not reached its plane of being, pulsed everywhere about their pathway, immense in power, moving swiftly, very grand and very simple, and sometimes surging close, seeking to draw them in. More than once, as they moved through glade and clearing, the Irishman knew thrills of an intoxicating happiness, as this abundant, driving life brushed past him. It came so close, it glided before his eyes, yet still was viewless. It strode behind him and before, peered down through s.p.a.ce upon him, lapped him about with the stir of mighty currents. The deep suction of its invitation caught his soul, urging the change within himself more quickly forward. Huge and delightful, he describes it, awful, yet bringing no alarm.

He was always on the point of seeing. Surely the next turning would reveal; beyond the next dense, tangled group would come--disclosure; behind that cl.u.s.tered ma.s.s of purple blossoms, shaking there mysteriously in the wind, some half-veiled countenance of splendor watched and welcomed! Before his face pa.s.sed swift, deific figures, tall, erect, compelling, charged with this ancient, golden life that could never wholly pa.s.s away. And only just beyond the fringe of vision. Vision already strained upon the edge. His consciousness stretched more and more to reach them, while They came crowding near to let him know inclusion.

These projections of the Earth's old consciousness moved thick and soft about them, eternal in their giant beauty. Soon he would know, perhaps, the very forms in which she had projected them--dear portions of her streaming life the earliest races half divined and worshipped, and never quite withdrawn. Worship could still entice them out. A single worshipper sufficed. For worship meant retreat into the heart where still they dwelt. And he had loved and worshipped all his life.

And always with him, now at his side or now a little in advance, his leader moved in power, with vigorous, springing gestures like to dancing, singing that old tuneless song of the wind, happier even than himself.

The splendor of the _Urwelt_ closed about them. They drew nearer to the Gates of that old Garden, the first Time ever knew, whose frontiers were not less than the horizons of the entire world. For this lost Eden of a Golden Age when "first G.o.d dawned on chaos" still shone within the soul as in those days of innocence before the "Fall," when men first separated themselves from their great Mother.

A little before sunset they halted. A hundred yards above the rhododendron forest, in a clear wide s.p.a.ce of turf that ran for leagues among grey boulders to the lips of the eternal snowfields, they waited.

Through a gap of sky, with others but slightly lower than himself, the pyramid of Kasbek, grim and towering, stared down upon them, dreadfully close though really miles away. At their feet yawned the profound valley they had climbed. Halfway into it, unable to reach the depths, the sun's last rays dropped shafts like rivers slanting. Already in soft troops the shadows crept downwards from the eastern-facing summits overhead.

Out of these very shadows Night drew swiftly down about the world, building with her ma.s.ses of silvery architecture a barrier that rose to heaven. These two lay down beside it. Beyond it spread that shining Garden...only the shadow-barrier between.

With the rising of the moon this barrier softened marvelously, letting the starbeams in. It trembled like a line of wavering music in the wind of night. It settled downwards, shaking a little, toward the ground, while just above them came a curving inwards like a bay of darkness, with overhead two stately towers, their outline fringed with stars.

"The Gateway...!" whispered something through the mountains.

It may have been the leader's voice; it may have been the Irishman's own leaping thought; it may have been merely a murmur from the rhododendron leaves below. It came sifting gently through the shadows. O'Malley knew.

He followed his leader higher. Just beneath this semblance of an old-world portal which Time could neither fashion nor destroy, they lay upon the earth--and waited. Beside them shone the world, dressed by the moon in silver. The wind stood still to watch. The peak of Kasbek from his cloudy distance listened too.

For, floating upwards across the s.p.a.ces came a sound of simple, old-time piping--the fluting music of a little reed. It drew near, stopped for a moment as though the player watched them; then, with a plunging swiftness, pa.s.sed off through starry distance up among the darker mountains. The lost, forsaken Asian valley covered them. Nowhere were they extraneous to it. They slept. And while they slept, they moved across the frontiers of fulfillment.

The moon-blanched Gate of horn and ivory swung open. The consciousness of the Earth possessed them. They pa.s.sed within.

x.x.xV

"For of old the Sun, our sire, Came wooing the mother of men, Earth, that was virginal then, Vestal fire to his fire.

Silent her bosom and coy, But the strong G.o.d sued and press'd; And born of their starry nuptial joy Are all that drink of her breast.