The Centaur Part 28

"He never left Batoum at all, you see," Stahl continued, without looking up. "He went straight to the hospital the day we came into port.

I was summoned to him in the night--that last night while you slept so deeply. His old strange fever was upon him then, and I took him ash.o.r.e before the other pa.s.sengers were astir. I brought him to the hospital myself. And he never left his bed." He pointed down to the little nameless grave at their feet where a wandering wind from the sea just stirred the gra.s.ses. "That was the date on which he died."

"He went away in the early morning," he added in a low voice that held both sadness and sympathy.

"He went home," said the Irishman, a tide of joy rising tumultuously through his heart as he remembered. The secret of that complete and absolute Leadership was out. He understood it all. It had been a spiritual adventure to the last.

Then followed a pause.

In silence they stood there for some minutes. There grew no flowers on that grave, but O'Malley stooped down and picked a strand of the withered gra.s.s. He put it carefully between the pages of his notebook; and then, lying flat against the ground where the sunshine fell in a patch of white and burning glory, he pressed his lips to the crumbling soil. He kissed the Earth. Oblivious of Stahl's presence, or at least ignoring it, he worshipped.

And while he did so he heard that little sound he loved so well--which more than any words or music brought peace and joy, because it told his Pa.s.sion all complete. With his ears close to the earth he heard it, yet at the same time heard it everywhere. For it came with the falling of the waves upon the sh.o.r.e, through the murmur of the rustling branches overhead, and even across the whispering of the withered gra.s.s about him.

Deep down in the center of the mothering Earth he heard it too in faintly rising pulse. It was the exquisite little piping on a reed--the ancient fluting of the everlasting Pan....

And when he rose he found that Stahl had turned away and was gazing at the sea, as though he had not noticed.

"Doctor," he cried, yet so softly it was a whisper rather than a call, "I heard it then again; it's everywhere! Oh, tell me that you hear it too!"

Stahl turned and looked at him in silence. There was a moisture in his eyes, and on his face a look of softness that a woman might have worn.

"I've brought it back, you see, I've brought it back. For that's the message--that's the sound and music I must give to all the world. No words, no book can tell it." His hat was off, his eyes were shining, his voice broke with the pa.s.sion of joy he yearned to share yet knew so little how to impart. "If I can pipe upon the flutes of Pan the millions all will listen, will understand, and--follow. Tell me, oh, tell me, that _you_ heard it too!"

"My friend, my dear young friend," the German murmured in a voice of real tenderness, "you heard it truly--but you heard it in your heart. Few hear the Pipes of Pan as you do. Few care to listen. Today the world is full of other sounds that drown it. And even of those who hear," he shrugged his shoulders as he led him away toward the sea,--"how few will care to follow--how fewer still will _dare._"

And while they lay upon the beach and watched the line of foam against their feet and saw the seagulls curving idly in the blue and shining air, he added underneath his breath--O'Malley hardly caught the murmur of his words so low he murmured them:--

"The simple life is lost forever. It lies asleep in the Golden Age, and only those who sleep and dream can ever find it. If you would keep your joy, dream on, my friend! Dream on, but dream alone!"

XLI

Summer blazed everywhere and the sea lay like a blue pool of melted sky and sunshine. The summits of the Caucasus soon faded to the east and north, and to the south the wooded hills of the Black Sea coast accompanied the ship in a line of wavy blue that joined the water and the sky indistinguishably.

The first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers were few; O'Malley hardly noticed their existence even. An American engineer, building a railway in Turkey, came on board at Trebizond; there were one or two light women on their way home from Baku, and the attache of a foreign emba.s.sy from Teheran.

But the Irishman felt more in touch with the hundred peasant-folk who joined the ship at Ineboli from the interior of Asia Minor and were bound as third-cla.s.s emigrants for Ma.r.s.eilles and far America.

Dark-skinned, wild-eyed, ragged, very dirty, they had never seen the sea before, and the sight of a porpoise held them spellbound. They lived on the after-deck, mostly cooking their own food, the women and children sleeping beneath a large tarpaulin that the sailors stretched for them across the width of deck. At night they played their pipes and danced, singing, shouting, and waving their arms--always the same tune over and over again.

O'Malley watched them for hours together. He also watched the engineer, the over-dressed women, the attache. He understood the difference between them as he had never understood it before. He understood the difficulty of his task as well. How in the world could he ever explain a single syllable of his message to these latter, or waken in them the faintest echo of desire to know and listen. The peasants, though all unconscious of the blinding glory at their elbows, stood far nearer to the truth.

"Been further east, I suppose?" the engineer observed, one afternoon as the steamer lay off Broussa, taking on a little extra cargo of walnut logs. He looked admiringly at the Irishman's bronzed skin. "Take a better sun than this to put that on!"

He laughed in his breezy, vigorous way, and the other laughed with him. Previous conversations had already paved the way to a traveler's friendship, and the American had taken to him.

"Up in the mountains," he replied, "camping out and sleeping in the sun did it."

"The Caucasus! Ah, I'd like to get up there myself a bit. I'm told they're a wonderful thing in the mountain line."

Scenery for him was evidently a commercial commodity, or it was nothing.

It was the most up-to-date nation in the world that spoke--in the van of civilization--representing the last word in progress due to triumph over Nature.

O'Malley said he had never seen anything like them. He described the trees, the flowers, the tribes, the scenery in general; he dwelt upon the vast uncultivated s.p.a.ces, the amazing fruitfulness of the soil, the gorgeous beauty above all. "I'd like to get the overcrowded cities of England and Europe spread all over it," he said with enthusiasm. "There is room for thousands there to lead a simple life close to Nature, in health and peace and happiness. Even your tired millionaires could escape their restless, feverish worries, lay down their weary burden of possessions, and enjoy the earth at last. The poor would cease to be with us; life become true and beautiful again--" He let it pour out of him, building the scaffolding of his dream before him in the air and filling it in with beauty.

The American listened in patience, watching the walnut logs being towed through the water to the side of the ship. From time to time he spat on them, or into the sea. He let the beauty go completely past him.

"Great idea, that!" he interrupted at length. "You're interested, I see, in socialism and communistic schemes. There's money in them somewhere right enough, if a man only could hit the right note at the first go off. Take a bit of doing, though!"

One of the women from Baku came up and leaned upon the rails a little beyond them. The sickly odor of artificial scent wafted down. The attache strolled along the deck and ogled her.

"Get a few of that sort to draw the millionaires in, eh?" he added vulgarly.

"Even those would come, yes," said the Irishman softly, realizing for the first time within his memory that his gorge did not rise, "for they too would change, grow clean and sweet and beautiful."

The engineer looked sharply into his face, uncertain whether he had not missed a clever witticism of his own kind. But O'Malley did not meet his glance. His eyes were far away upon the snowy summit of Olympus where a flock of fleecy clouds hung hovering like the hair of the eternal G.o.ds.

"They say there's timber going to waste that you could get to the coast merely for the cost of drawing it--Caucasian walnut, too, to burn," the other continued, getting on to safer ground, "and labor's dirt cheap.

There's every sort of mineral too G.o.d ever made. You could build light railways and run the show by electricity. And water-power for the asking.

You'd have to get a Concession from Russia first though," he added, spitting down upon a huge floating log in the clear sea underneath, "and Russia's got palms that want a lot of greasing. I guess the natives, too, would take a bit of managing."

The woman beyond had shifted several feet nearer, and after a pause the Irishman found no words to fill, his companion turned to address a remark to her. O'Malley took the opening and moved away.

"Here's my card, anyway," the American added, handing him an over-printed bit of large pasteboard from a fat pocket-book that bore his name and address in silver on the outside. "If you develop the scheme and want a bit of money, count me in."

He went to the other side of the vessel and watched the peasants on the lower deck. Their dirt seemed nothing by comparison. It was only on their clothes and bodies. The odor of this unwashed humanity was almost sweet and wholesome. It cleansed the sickly taint of that other scent from his palate; it washed his mind of thoughts as well.

He stood there long in dreaming silence, while the sunlight on Olympus turned from gold to rose, and the sea took on the colors of the fading sky. He watched a dark Kurd baby sliding down the tarpaulin. A kitten was playing with a loose end of rope too heavy for it to move. Further off a huge fellow with bared chest and the hands of a colossus sat on a pile of canvas playing softly on his wooden pipes. The dark hair fell across his eyes, and a group of women listened idly while they busied themselves with the cooking of the evening meal. Immediately beneath him a splendid-eyed young woman crammed a baby to her naked breast. The kitten left the rope and played with the ta.s.sel of her scarlet shawl.

And as he heard those pipes and watched the grave, untamed, strong faces of those wild peasant men and women, he understood that, low though they might be in scale of evolution, there was yet absent from them the touch of that deteriorating _something_ which civilization painted into those other countenances. But whether the word he sought was degradation or whether it was shame, he could not tell. In all they did, the way they moved, their dignity and independence, there was this something, he felt, that bordered on being impressive. Their wants were few, their worldly possessions in a bundle, yet they had this thing that set them in a place apart, if not above, these others:--beyond that simpering attache for all his worldly diplomacy, that engineer with brains and skill, those painted women with their clever playing upon the feelings and desires of their kind. There _was_ this difference that set the ragged dirty crew in a proud and quiet atmosphere that made them seem almost distinguished by comparison, and certainly more desirable. Rough and untutored though they doubtless were, they still possessed unspoiled that deeper and more elemental nature that bound them closer to the Earth. It needed training, guidance, purifying; yes; but, in the last resort, was it not of greater spiritual significance and value than the mode of comparatively recently-developed reason by which Civilization had produced these other types?

He watched them long. The sun sank out of sight, the sea turned dark, ten thousand stars shone softly in the sky, and while the steamer swung about and made for peaked Andros and the coast of Greece, he still stood on in reverie and wonder. The wings of his great Dream stirred mightily ... and he saw pale millions of men and women trooping through the gates of horn and ivory into that Garden where they should find peace and happiness in clean simplicity close to the Earth....

XLII

There followed four days then of sea, Greece left behind, Messina and the Lipari Islands past; and the blue outline of Sardinia and Corsica began to keep pace with them as they neared the narrow straits of Bonifacio between them. The pa.s.sengers came up to watch the rocky desolate sh.o.r.es slip by so close, and Captain Burgenfelder was on the bridge.

Grey-headed rocks rose everywhere close about the ship; overhead the seagulls cried and circled; no vegetation was visible on either sh.o.r.e, no houses, no abode of man--nothing but the lighthouses, then miles of deserted rock dressed in those splendors of the sun's good-night. The dinner-gong had sounded but the sight was too magnificent to leave, for the setting sun floated on an emblazoned sea and stared straight against them in level glory down the narrow pa.s.sage. Unimaginable colors painted sky and wave. The ruddy cliffs of bleak loneliness rose from a bed of flame. Soft airs fanned the cheeks with welcome coolness after the fierce heat of the day. There was a scent of wild honey in the air borne from the purple uplands far, far away.

"I wonder, oh, I wonder, if they realized that a G.o.d is pa.s.sing close...!" the Irishman murmured with a rising of the heart, "and that here is a great mood of the Earth-Consciousness inviting them to peace!

Or do they merely see a yellow sun that dips beneath a violet sea...?"

The washing of the water past the steamer's sides caught away the rest of the half-whispered words. He remembered that host of many thousand heads that bowed in silence while a G.o.d swept by.... It was almost a shock to hear a voice replying close beside him:--

"Come to my cabin when you're ready. My windows open to the west.

We can be alone together. We can have there what food we need. You would prefer it perhaps?"