The Centaur

A >> Algernon Blackwood >> The Centaur

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He had found one such; and Stahl, by warnings that fought with urging
invitation at the same time, had confirmed it.

It was singular, he reflected, how worship had ever turned for him a
landscape or a scene enchantingly alive. Worship, he now understood,
of course invited "the gods," and was the channel through which their
manifestation became possible to the soul. All the gods, then, were
accessible in this interior way, but Pan especially--in desolate places
and secret corners of a wood.... He remembered dimly the Greek idea
of worship in the Mysteries: that the worshipper knew actual temporary
union with his deity in ecstasy, and at death went permanently into his
sphere of being. He understood that worship was au fond a desire for
loss of personal life--hence its subtle joy; and a fear lest it be
actually accomplished--whence its awe and wonder.

Some glorious, winged thing moved now beside him; it held him by
the hand. The Earth possessed him; and the whole adventure, so far as
he can make it plain, was an authoritative summons to the natural,
Simple Life.

For the next month, therefore, O'Malley, unhurrying, blessed with a
deeper sense of happiness than he had ever known before, dismissed
the "tempest" from his surface consciousness, and set to work to gather
the picturesque impressions of strange places and strange peoples that
the public liked to read about in occasional letters of travel. And by
the time May had passed into June he had moved up and down the Caucasus,
observing, learning, expanding, and gathering in the process through
every sense--through the very pores of his skin almost--draughts of a new
and abundant life that is to be had there merely for the asking.

That modification of the personality which comes even in cities to all
but the utterly hidebound--so that a man in Rome finds himself not quite
the same as he was in London or in Paris a few days before--went forward
in him on a profounder scale than anything he had known hitherto. Nature
fed, stimulated and called him with a passionate intimacy that destroyed
all sense of loneliness, and with a vehement directness of attack that
simply charged him to the brim with a new joy of living. His vitality,
powers, even his physical health, stood at their best and highest. The
country laid its spell upon him, in a word; and if he expresses it thus
with some intensity it was because life came to him so. His record is the
measure of his vision. Those who find exaggeration in it merely confess
thereby their own smaller capacity of living.

Here, as he wandered to and fro among these proud, immense, secluded
valleys, through remote and untamed forests, and by the banks of wild
rivers that shook their flying foam across untrodden banks, he wandered
at the same time deeper and ever deeper into himself, toward a point
where he lost touch with all that constituted him "modern," or held him
captive in the spirit of today. Nearer and ever nearer he moved into some
tremendous freedom, some state of innocence and simplicity that, while
gloriously unrestrained, yet knew no touch of license. Dreams had
whispered of it; childhood had fringed its frontiers; longings had even
mapped it faintly to his mind. But now he breathed its very air and knew
it face to face. The Earth surged wonderfully about him.

With his sleeping-bag upon a small Caucasian horse, a sack to hold
his cooking things, a pistol in his belt, he wandered thus for days,
sleeping beneath the stars, seeing the sunset and the dawn, drenched in
new strength and wonder all the time. Here he touched deeper reaches
of the Earth that spoke of old, old things, that yet were still young
because they knew not change. He walked in the morning of the world,
through her primal fire and dew, when all was a first and giant garden.

The advertised splendors of other lands, even of India, Egypt, and
the East, seemed almost vulgar beside this country that had somehow
held itself aloof, unstained and clean. The civilization of its little
towns seemed but a coated varnish that an hour's sun would melt away; the
railway, crawling along the flanks of the great range, but a ribbon of
old iron pinned on that, with the first shiver of those giant sides,
would split and vanish.

Here, where the Argonauts once landed, the Golden Fleece still shone o'
nights in the depths of the rustling beech woods; along the shores of
that old Phasis their figures might still be seen, tall Jason in the
lead, erect and silvery, passing o'er the shining, flowered fields upon
their quest of ancient beauty. Further north from this sunny Colchian
strand rose the peak of Kasbek, gaunt and desolate pyramid of iron,
"sloping through five great zones of climate," whence the ghost of
Prometheus still gazed down from his "vast frozen precipice" upon a world
his courage would redeem. For somewhere here was the cradle of the human
race, fair garden of some Edened life before the "Fall," when the Earth
sang for joy in her first, golden youth, and her soul expressed itself in
mighty forms that remain for lesser days but a faded hierarchy of
visioned gods.

A living Earth went with him everywhere, with love that never breathed
alarm. It seemed he felt her very thoughts within himself--thoughts,
however, that now no longer married with a visible expression as shapes.

Among these old-world tribes and peoples with their babble of difficult
tongues, wonder and beauty, terror and worship, still lay too deeply
buried to have as yet externalized themselves in mental forms as legend,
myth, and story. In the blood ran all their richness undiluted. Life was
simple, full charged with an immense delight. At home little cocksure
writers in little cocksure journals, pertly modern and enlightened, might
dictate how far imaginative vision and belief could go before they
overstepped the limits of an artificial schedule; but here "everything
possible to be believed was still an image of truth," and the stream of
life flowed deeper than all mere intellectual denials.

A little out of sight, but thinly veiled, the powers that in this haunted
corner of the earth, too strangely neglected, pushed outwards into men
and trees, into mountains, flowers, and the rest, were unenslaved and
intensely vital. In his blood O'Malley knew the primal pulses of the
world.

It was irresistibly seductive. Whether he slept with the Aryan
Ossetians upon the high ridges of the central range, or shared the stone
huts of the mountain Jews, unchanged since Bible days, beyond the
Suram heights, there came to all his senses the message of that Golden
Age his longings ever sought--the rush and murmur of the _Urwelt_
calling.

And so it was, about the first week in June that lean, bronzed, and
in perfect physical condition, this wandering Irishman found himself
in a little Swanetian hamlet beyond Alighir, preparing with a Georgian
peasant-guide to penetrate yet deeper into the mountain recesses and
feed his heart with what he found of loneliness and beauty.

This region of Imerethia, bordering on Mingrelia, is smothered
beneath an exuberance of vegetation almost tropical, blue and golden
with enormous flowers, tangled with wild vines, rich with towering soft
beech woods, and finally, in the upper sections, ablaze with leagues of
huge rhododendron trees in blossom that give whole mountain-sides
the aspect of a giant garden, flowering amid peaks that even dwarf the
Alps. For here the original garden of the world survives, run wild with
pristine loveliness. The prodigality of Nature is bewildering, almost
troubling. There are valleys, rarely entered by the foot of man, where
monstrous lilies, topping a man on foot and even reaching to his
shoulder on horseback, have suggested to botanists in their lavish
luxuriance a survival of the original flora of the world. A thousand
flowers he found whose names he had never heard of, their hues and
forms as strangely lovely as those of another planet. The grasses alone
in scale and mass were magnificent. While, in and out of all this
splendor, less dense and voluminous only than the rhododendron
forests, ran scattered lines of blazing yellow--the crowding clusters of
azalea bushes that scented the winds beyond belief.

Beyond this region of extravagance in size and color, there ran
immense bare open slopes of smooth turf that led to the foot of the
eternal snowfields, with, far below, valleys of prodigious scale and
steepness that touched somehow with disdain all memory of other
mountain ranges he had ever known.

And here it was this warm June evening--June 15th it was--while packing
his sack with cheese and maize-flour in the dirty yard of a so-called
"post-house," more hindered than helped by his Georgian guide, that he
realized the approach of a familiar, bearded figure. The figure emerged.
There was a sudden clutch and lift of the heart ... then a rush of wild
delight. There stood his Russian steamer-friend, part of the scale and
splendor, as though grown out of the very soil. He occupied in a flash
the middle of the picture. He gave it meaning. He was part of it, exactly
as a tree or big grey boulder were part of it.

XXVIII

"Seasons and times; Life and Fate--all are remarkably rhythmic, metric,
regular throughout. In all crafts and arts, in all machines, in organic
bodies, in our daily occupations everywhere there is rhythm, meter,
accent, melody. All that we do with a certain skill unnoticed, we do
rhythmically. There is rhythm everywhere; it insinuates itself
everywhere. All mechanism is metric, rhythmic. There must be more in it
than this. Is it merely the influence of inertia?"

--NOVALIS, Translated by U.C.B.

Notwithstanding the extent and loneliness of this wild country,
coincidence seemed in no way stretched by the abrupt appearance; for
in a sense it was not wholly unexpected. There had been certain
indications that the meeting again of these two was imminent. The
Irishman had never doubted they would meet. But something more than mere
hints or warnings, it seemed, had prepared him.

The nature of these warnings, however, O'Malley never fully disclosed.
Two of them he told to me by word of mouth, but there were others he
could not bring himself to speak about at all. Even the two he mentioned
do not appear in his written account. His hesitation is not easy to
explain, unless it be that language collapsed in the attempt to describe
occurrences so remote from common experience. This may be so, although he
grappled not unsuccessfully with the rest of the amazing adventure. At
any rate I could never coax from him more than the confession that there
_were_ other things that had brought him hints. Then came a laugh, a
shrug of the shoulders, an expression of confused bewilderment in eyes
and manner and--silence.

The two he spoke of I report as best I can. On the roof of that London
apartment-house where so many of our talks took place beneath the
stars and to the tune of bustling modern traffic, he told them to me.
Both were consistent with his theory that he was becoming daily more
active in some outlying portion of his personality--knowing experiences
in a region of extended consciousness stimulated so powerfully
by his strange new friend.

Both, moreover, brought him one and the same conviction that he
was no longer--alone. For some days past he had realized this. More
than his peasant guide accompanied him. He was both companioned
and--observed.

"A dozen times," he said, "I thought I saw him, and a dozen times I
was mistaken. But my mind looked for him. I knew that he was
somewhere close." He compared the feeling to that common experience
of the streets when a friend, not known to be near, or even expected,
comes abruptly into the thoughts, so that numberless individuals may
trick the sight with his appearance before he himself comes suddenly
down the pavement. His approach has reached the mind before his mere
body turns the corner. "Something in me was aware of his approach,"
he added, "as though his being were sending out feelers in advance to
find me. They reached me first, I think"--he hesitated briefly, hunting
for a more accurate term he could not find--"in dream."

"You dreamed that he was coming, then?"

"It came first in dream," he answered; "only when I woke the dream
did not fade; it passed over into waking consciousness, so that I could
hardly tell where the threshold lay between the two. And, meanwhile, I
was always expecting to see him at every turn of the trail almost; a
little higher up the mountain, behind a rock, or standing beside a tree,
just as in the end I actually did see him. Long before he emerged in this
way, he had been close about me, guiding, waiting, watching."

He told it as a true thing he did not quite expect me to believe. Yet,
in a sense, _his_ sense, I could and did believe it. It was so wholly
consistent with the tenor of his adventure and the condition of abnormal
receptivity of mind. For his stretched consciousness was in a state of
white sensitiveness whereon the tenderest mental force of another's
thought might well record its signature. Acutely impressionable he was
all over. Physical distance was of as little, or even of less, account to
such forces as it is to electricity.

"But it was more than the Russian who was close," he added quietly
with one of those sentences that startled me into keen attention. "He
was there--with others--of his kind."

And then, hardly pausing to take breath, he plunged, as his manner
was, full tilt into the details of this first experience that thrilled my
hedging soul with an astonishing power of conviction. As always when
his heart was in the words, the scenery about us faded and I lived the
adventure with him. The cowled and hooded chimneys turned to trees,
the stretch of dim star-lit London Park became a deep Caucasian vale,
the thunder of the traffic was the roaring of the snow-fed torrents. The
very perfume of strange flowers floated in the air.

They had been in their blankets, he and his peasant guide, for hours,
and a moon approaching the full still concealed all signs of dawn, when
he woke out of deep sleep with the odd sensation that it was only a part
of him that woke. One portion of him was in the body, while another
portion was elsewhere, manifesting with ease and freedom in some state
or region whither he had traveled in his sleep--where, moreover, he
had not been alone.

And close about him in the trees was--movement. Yes! Through and
between the scattered trunks he saw it still.

With eyes a little dazed, the active portion of his brain perceived this
processing movement passing to and fro across the glades of moonlight
beneath the steady trees. For there was no wind. The shadows of the
branches did not stir. He saw swift running shapes, vigorous yet silent,
hurrying across the network of splashed silver and pools of black in
some kind of organized movement that was circular and seemed not due to
chance. Arranged it seemed and ordered; like the regulated revolutions
of a set and whirling measure.

Perhaps twenty feet from where he lay was the outer fringe of what
he discerned to be this fragment of some grand gamboling dance or
frolic; yet discerned but dimly, for the darkness combined with his
uncertain vision to obscure it.

And the shapes, as they sped across the silvery patchwork of the moon,
seemed curiously familiar. Beyond question he recognized and knew them.
For they were akin to those shadowy emanations seen weeks ago upon the
steamer's after-deck, to that "messenger" who climbed from out the sea
and sky, and to that form the spirit of the boy assumed, set free in
death. They were the flying outlines of Wind and Cloud he had so often
glimpsed in vision, racing over the long, bare, open hills--at last come
near.

In the moment of first waking, when he saw them clearest, he declares
with emphasis that he _knew_ the father and the boy were among them.
Not so much that he saw them actually for recognition, but rather that
he felt their rushing presences; for the first sensation on opening his
eyes was the conviction that both had passed him close, had almost
touched and called him. Afterwards he searched in vain among the
flying forms that swept in the swift succession of their leaping dance
across the silvery pathways. While varying in size all were so similar.

His description of them is confused a little, for he admits that he
could never properly focus them in steady sight. They slipped with a
melting swiftness under the eye; the moment one seemed caught in vision
it passed on further and the next was in its place. It was like
following a running wave-form on the sea. He says, moreover, that while
erect and splendid, their backs and shoulders seemed prolonged in
hugeness as though they often crouched to spring; they seemed to paw
the air; and that a faint delicious sound to which they kept obedient
time and rhythm, held that same sweetness which had issued from the
hills of Greece, blown down now among the trees from very far away.
And when he says "blown down among the trees," he qualifies this
phrase as well, because at the same time it came to him that the sound
also rose up from underneath the earth, as if the very surface of the
ground ran shaking with a soft vibration of its own. Some marvelous
dream it might have been in which the forms, the movement, and the
sound were all thrown up and outwards from the quivering surface of
the Earth itself.

Yet, almost simultaneously with the first instant of waking, the body
issued its call of warning. For, while he gazed, and before time for the
least reflection came, the Irishman experienced this dislocating
conviction that he himself was taking part in the whirling gambol even
while he lay and watched it, and that in this way the sense of division
in his personality was explained. The fragment of himself within the
brain watched some other more vital fragment--some projection of his
consciousness detached and separate--playing yonder with its kind
beneath the moon.

This sense of a divided self was not new to him, but never before had
he known it so distinct and overwhelming. The definiteness of the
division, as well as the importance and vitality of the separated
portion, were arrestingly novel. It felt as though he were completely
out, or to such a degree, at least, that the fraction left behind with
the brain was at first only just sufficient for him to recognize his body
at all.

Yonder with these others he felt the wind of movement pass along
his back, he saw the trees slip by, and knew the very contact of the
ground between the leaps. His movements were natural and easy, light
as air and fast as wind; they seemed automatic, impelled by something
mighty that directed and contained them. He knew, too, the sensation
that others pressed behind him and passed before, slipped in and out,
and that through the whole wild urgency of it he yet could never make
an error. More--he knew that these shifting forms had been close and
dancing about him for a time not measurable merely by the hours of a
single night, that in a sense they were always there though he had but
just discovered them. His earlier glimpses had been a very partial
divination of a truth, immense and beautiful, that now dawned quite
gorgeously upon him all complete.

The whole world danced. The Universe was rhythmical as well as metrical.

For this amazing splendor showed itself in a flash-like revelation to
the freed portion of his consciousness, and he knew it irresistibly
because he himself shared it. Here was an infinite joy, naked and
unashamed, born of the mighty Mother's heart and life, a joy which, in
its feebler, lesser manifestations, trickles down into human conditions,
though still spontaneously even then, so pure its primal urgency,
as--dancing.

The entire experience, the entire revelation, he thinks, can have
occupied but a fraction of a second, but it seemed to smite the whole
of his being at once with the conviction of a supreme authority. And
close behind it came, too, that other sister expression of a spontaneous
and natural expression, equally rhythmical--the impulse to sing. He
could have sung aloud. For this puissant and mysterious rhythm to which
all moved was greater than any little measure of their own. Surging
through them, it came from outside and beyond, infinitely greater than
themselves, springing from something of which they were, nevertheless, a
living portion. From the body of the Earth it came direct--it was in
fact a manifestation of her own vibrating life. The currents of the
Earth pulsed through them.

"And then," he says, "I caught this flaming thought of wonder, though so
much of it faded instantly upon my full awakening that I can only give
you the merest suggestion of what it was."

He stood up beside me as he said it, spreading his arms, as so often
when he was excited, to the sky. I caught the glow of his eyes, and in
his voice was passion. He spoke unquestionably of something he had
intimately known, not as men speak of even the vividest dreams, but of
realities that have burned the heart and left their trails of glory.

"Science has guessed some inkling of the truth," he cried, "when it
declares that the ultimate molecules of matter are in constant vibratory
movement one about another, even upon the point of a needle. But I
saw--_knew_, rather, as if I had always known it, sweet as summer rain,
and close in me as love--that the whole Earth with all her myriad
expressions of life moved to this primal rhythm as of some divine
dancing."

"Dancing?" I asked, puzzled.

"Rhythmical movement call it then," he replied. "To share the life of
the Earth is to dance and sing in a huge abundant joy! And the nearer
to her great heart, the more natural and spontaneous the impulse--the
instinctive dancing of primitive races, of savages and children, still
artless and untamed; the gamboling of animals, of rabbits in the meadows
and of deer unwatched in forest clearings--you know naturalists have
sometimes seen it; of birds in the air--rooks, gulls, and swallows; of
the life within the sea; even of gnats in the haze of summer afternoons.
All life simple enough to touch and share the enormous happiness of
her deep, streaming, personal Being, dances instinctively for very
joy--obedient to a greater measure than they know.... The natural
movement of the great Earth-Soul is rhythmical. The very winds, the
swaying of trees and flowers and grasses, the movement of the sea, of
water running through the fields with silver feet, of the clouds and
edges of the mist, even the trembling of the earthquakes,--all, all
respond in sympathetic motions to this huge vibratory movement of her
great central pulse. Ay, and the mountains too, though so vastly
scaled their measure that perhaps we only know the pauses in between,
and think them motionless.... The mountains rise and fall and change;
our very breathing, first sign of stirring life, even the circulation of
our blood, bring testimony; our speech as well--inspired words are ever
rhythmical, language that pours into the poet's mind from something
greater than himself. And not unwisely, but in obedience to a deep
instinctive knowledge was dancing once--in earlier, simpler days--a
form of worship. You know, at least, how rhythm in music and ceremonial
uplifts and cleans and simplifies the heart toward the greater life....
You know, perhaps, the Dance of Jesus...."

The words poured from him with passion, yet always uttered gently
with a smile of joy upon the face. I saw his figure standing over me,
outlined against the starry sky; and, deeply stirred, I listened with
delight and wonder. Rhythm surely lies behind all expression of life.
He was on the heels of some simple, dazzling verity though he phrased it
wildly. But not a tenth part of all he said could I recapture afterwards
for writing down. The steady, gentle swaying of his body I remember
clearly, and that somewhere or other in the stream of language, he made
apt reference to the rhythmical swaying of those who speak in trance, or
know some strange, possessing gust of inspiration.

The first and natural expression of the Earth's vitality lies in a
dancing movement of purest joy and happiness--that for me is the gist of
what remains. Those near enough to Nature feel it. I myself remembered
days in spring ... my thoughts, borne upon some sweet emotion, traveled
far....

"And not of the Earth alone," he interrupted my dreaming in a voice
like singing, "but of the entire Universe. The spheres and
constellations weave across the fields of ether the immense old rhythm of
their divine, eternal dance...!"

Then, with a disconcerting abruptness, and a strange little wayward
laugh as of apology for having let himself so freely go, he sat down
beside me with his back against the chimney-stack. He resumed more
quietly the account of this particular adventure that lay 'twixt dream
and waking:

All that he described had happened in a few seconds. It flashed,
complete, authoritative and vivid, then passed away. He knew again the
call and warning of his body--to return. For this consciousness of being
in two places at once, divided as it were against himself, brought with
it the necessity for decision. With which portion should he identify
himself? By an act of will, it seemed, a choice was possible.

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