The Centaur Part 5

It may have been--O'Malley wondered without actually asking--that the man who shared the cabin with the strangers made some appeal for re-arrangement, but in any case Captain Burgenfelder approached the Irishman that afternoon on the bridge and asked if he would object to having them in his stateroom for the balance of the voyage.

"Your present gompanion geds off at Naples," he said. "Berhaps you would not object. I think--they seem lonely. You are friendly with them. They go alzo to Batoum?"

This proposal for close quarters gave him pause. He knew a moment or two of grave hesitation, yet without time to a.n.a.lyze it. Then, driven by a sudden decision of the heart that knew no revision of reason, he agreed.

"I had better, perhaps, suggest it to see if they are willing," he said the next minute, hedging.

"I already ask him dat."

"Oh, you have! And he would like it--not object, I mean?" he added, aware of a subtle sense of half-frightened pleasure.

"Pleased and flattered on the contrary," was the reply, as he handed him the gla.s.ses to look at Ischia rising blue from the sea.

O'Malley felt as though his decision was somehow an act of self-committal, almost grave. It meant that impulsively he accepted a friendship which concealed in its immense attraction--danger. He had taken the plunge.

The rush of it broke over him like a wave, setting free a tumult of very deep emotion. He raised the gla.s.ses automatically to his eyes, but looking through them he saw not Ischia nor the opening the Captain explained the ship would make, heading that evening for Sicily. He saw quite another picture that drew itself up out of himself--was thrown up, rather, somewhat with violence, as upon a landscape of dream-scenery.

The lens of pa.s.sionate yearning in himself, ever unsatisfied, focused it against a background far, far away, in some faint distance that was neither of s.p.a.ce nor time, and might equally have been past as future.

Large figures he saw, shadowy yet splendid, that ran free-moving as clouds over mighty hills, vital with the abundant strong life of a younger world.... Yet never quite saw them, never quite overtook them, for their speed and the manner of their motion bewildered the sight....

Moreover, though they evaded him in terms of physical definition he knew a sense of curious, half-remembered familiarity. Some portion of his hidden self, uncaught, unharnessed by anything in modern life, rose with a pa.s.sionate rush of joy and made after them--something in him untamed as wind. His mind stood up, as it were, and shouted "I am coming." For he saw himself not far behind, as a man, racing with great leaps to join them ... yet never overtaking, never drawing close enough to see quite clearly. The roar of their tramping shook the very blood in his ears....

His decision to accept the strangers had set free in his being something that thus for the first time in his life--escaped.... Symbolically in his mind this Escape had taken picture form....

The Captain's voice was asking for the gla.s.ses; with a wrench that caused almost actual physical pain he tore himself away, letting this herd of Flying Thoughts sink back into the shadows and disappear. With sharp regret he saw them go--a regret for long, long, far-off things....

Turning, he placed the field-gla.s.ses carefully in that fat open hand stretched out to receive them, and noted as he did so the thick, pink fingers that closed about the strap, the heavy ring of gold, the band of gilt about the sleeve. That wrought gold, those fleshy fingers, the genial gutteral voice saying "T'anks" were symbols of an existence tamed and artificial that caged him in again....

Then he went below and found that the lazy "drummer" who talked harvest-machines to puzzled peasants had landed, and in his place an a.s.sortment of indiscriminate clothing belonging to the big Russian and his son lay scattered over the upper berth and upon the sofa-bed beneath the port-hole.

VIII

"For my own part I find in some of these abnormal or supernormal facts the strongest suggestions in favor of a superior consciousness being possible. I doubt whether we shall ever understand some of them without using the very letter of Fechner's conception of a great reservoir in which the memories of earth's inhabitants are pooled and preserved, and from which, when the threshold lowers or the valve opens, information ordinarily shut out leaks into the mind of exceptional individuals among us."

--WILLIAM JAMES, _A Pluralistic Universe_

And it was some hours later, while the ship made for the open sea, that he told Dr. Stahl casually of the new arrangement and saw the change come so suddenly across his face. Stahl stood back from the compa.s.s-box whereon they leaned, and putting a hand upon his companion's shoulder, looked a moment into his eyes. With surprise O'Malley noted that the pose of cynical disbelief was gone; in its place was sympathy, interest, kindness. The words he spoke came from his heart.

"Is that true?" he asked, as though the news disturbed him.

"Of course. Why not? Is there anything wrong?" He felt uneasy. The doctor's manner confirmed the sense that he had done a rash thing.

Instantly the barrier between the two crumbled and he lost the first feeling of resentment that his friends should be a.n.a.lyzed. The men thus came together in unhindered sincerity.

"Only," said the doctor thoughtfully, half gravely, "that--I may have done you a wrong, placed you, that is, in a position of--" he hesitated an instant,--"of difficulty. It was I who suggested the change."

O'Malley stared at him.

"I don't understand you quite."

"It is this," continued the other, still holding him with his eyes. He said it deliberately. "I have known you for some time, formed-er--an opinion of your type of mind and being--a very rare and curious one, interesting me deeply--"

"I wasn't aware you'd had me under the microscope," O'Malley laughed, but restlessly.

"Though you felt it and resented it--justly, I may say--to the point of sometimes avoiding me--"

"As doctor, scientist," put in O'Malley, while the other, ignoring the interruption, continued in German:--

"I always had the secret hope, as 'doctor and scientist,' let us put it then, that I might one day see you in circ.u.mstances that should bring out certain latent characteristics I thought I divined in you. I wished to observe you--your psychical being--under the stress of certain temptations, favorable to these characteristics. Our brief voyages together, though they have so kindly ripened our acquaintance into friendship"--he put his hand again on the other's shoulder smiling, while O'Malley replied with a little nod of agreement--"have, of course, never provided the opportunity I refer to--"

"Ah--!"

"Until now!" the doctor added. "Until now."

Puzzled and interested the Irishman waited for him to go on, but the man of science, who was now a ship's doctor, hesitated. He found it difficult, apparently, to say what was in his thoughts.

"You refer, of course, though I hardly follow you quite--to our big friends?" O'Malley helped him.

The adjective slipped out before he was aware of it. His companion's expression admitted the accuracy of the remark. "You also see them--big, then?" he said, quickly taking him up. He was not cross-questioning; out of keen sympathetic interest he asked it.

"Sometimes, yes," the Irishman answered, more astonished. "Sometimes only--"

"Exactly. Bigger than they really are; as though at times they gave out--emanated--something that extended their appearance. Is that it?"

O'Malley, his confidence wholly won, more surprised, too, than he quite understood, seized Stahl by the arm and drew him toward the rails. They leaned over, watching the sea. A pa.s.senger, pacing the decks before dinner, pa.s.sed close behind them.

"But, doctor," he said in a hushed tone as soon as the steps had died away, "you are saying things that I thought were half in my imagination only, not true in the ordinary sense quite--your sense, I mean?"

For some moments the doctor made no reply. In his eyes a curious steady gaze replaced the usual twinkle. When at length he spoke it was evidently following a train of thought of his own, playing round a subject he seemed half ashamed of and yet desired to state with direct language.

"A being akin to yourself," he said in low tones, "only developed, enormously developed; a Master in your own peculiar region, and a man whose influence acting upon you at close quarters could not fail to arouse the latent mind-storms"--he chose the word hesitatingly, as though seeking for a better he could not find on the moment,--"always brewing in you just below the horizon."

He turned and watched his companion's face keenly. O'Malley was too impressed to feel annoyance.

"Well--?" he asked, feeling the adventure closing round him with quite a new sense of reality. "Well?" he repeated louder. "Please go on. I'm not offended, only uncommonly interested. You leave me in a fog, so far. I think you owe me more than hints."

"I do," said the other simply. "About that man is a singular quality too rare for language to have yet coined its precise description: something that is essentially"--they had lapsed into German now, and he used the German word--"_unheimlich_."

The Irishman started. He recognized this for truth. At the same time the old resentment stirred a little in him, creeping into his reply.

"You have studied him closely then--had him, too, under the microscope?

In this short time?"

This time the answer did not surprise him, however.

"My friend," he heard, while the other turned from him and gazed out over the misty sea, "I have not been a ship's doctor--always. I am one now only because the leisure and quiet give me the opportunity to finish certain work, recording work. For years I was in the H----"--he mentioned the German equivalent for the Salpetriere--"years of research and investigation into the astonishing vagaries of the human mind and spirit--with certain results, followed later privately, that it is now my work to record. And among many cases that might well seem--er--beyond either credence or explanation,"--he hesitated again slightly--"I came across one, one in a million, let us admit, that an entire section of my work deals with under the generic term of _Urmenschen_."