The Centaur

A >> Algernon Blackwood >> The Centaur

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If that outer life were the real one how could any intelligent being
think it worth while to live? How could any thinking man hold up his
head and walk along the street with dignity if that was what he believed?
Was a man satisfied with it worth keeping alive at all? What bigger
scheme could ever use him? The direction of modern life today was
diametrically away from happiness and truth.

Peace was the word he knew, peace and a singing joy.

* * * * *

He played with the Earth's great dawn and raced along these mountains
through her mind. _Of course>_ the hills could dance and sing and clap
their hands. He saw it clear. How could it be otherwise? They were
expressions of her giant moods--what in himself were thoughts--phases
of her ample, surging Consciousness....

He passed with the sunlight down the laughing valleys, spread with
the morning wind above the woods, shone on the snowy peaks, and
leaped with rushing laughter among the crystal streams. These were his
swift and darting signs of joy, words of his singing as it were. His main
and central being swung with the pulse of the Earth, too great for any
telling.

He read the book of Nature all about him, yes, but read it singing.
He understood how this patient Mother hungered for her myriad lost
children, how in the passion of her summers she longed to bless them,
to wake their high yearnings with the sweetness of her springs, and to
whisper through her autumns how she prayed for their return...!

Instinctively he read the giant Page before him. For "every form in
nature is a symbol of an idea and represents a sign or letter. A
succession of such symbols forms a language; and he who is a true child
of nature may understand this language and know the character of
everything. His mind, becomes a mirror wherein the attributes of natural
things are reflected and enter the field of his consciousness.... For man
himself is but a thought pervading the ocean of mind."

Whether or not lie remembered these stammering yet pregnant words from
the outer world now left behind, the truth they shadowed forth rose up
and took him ... and so he flowed across the mountains like a thing of
wind and cloud, and so at length came up with the stragglers of that
mighty herd of _Urwelt_ life. He joined them in a river-bed of those
ancient valleys. They welcomed him and took him to themselves.

* * * * *

For the particular stratum, as it were, of the Earth's enormous
Collective Consciousness to which he belonged, or rather that part and
corner in which he was first at home, lay with these lesser ancient
forms. Although aware of far mightier expressions of her life, he could
not yet readily perceive or join them. And this was easily comprehensible
by the analogy of his own smaller consciousness. Did not his own mind
hold thoughts of various kinds that could not readily mingle? His
thoughts of play and frolic, for instance, could not combine with the
august and graver sentiments of awe and worship, though both could
dwell together in the same heart. And here apparently, as yet, he only
touched that frolicsome fringe of consciousness that knew these wild
and playful lesser forms. Thus, while he was aware of other more
powerful figures of wonder all about him, he never quite achieved their
full recognition. The ordered, deeper strata of her Consciousness to
which they belonged still lay beyond him.

Yet everywhere he fringed them. They haunted the entire world. They
brooded hugely with a kind of deep magnificence that was like the slow
brooding of the Seasons; they rose, looming and splendid, through the
air and sky, proud, strong, and tragic. For, standing aloof from all the
rest, in isolation, like dreams in a poet's mind, too potent for
expression, they thus knew tragedy--the tragedy of long neglect and
loneliness.

Seated on peak and ridge, rising beyond the summits in the clouds,
filling the valleys, spread over watercourse and forest, they passed
their life of lonely majesty--apart, their splendor too remote for him as
yet to share. Long since had Earth withdrawn them from the hearts of men.
Her lesser children knew them no more. But still through the deep
recesses of her further consciousness they thundered and were glad...
though few might hear that thunder, share that awful joy....

Even the Irishman--who in ordinary life had felt instinctively that
worship which is close to love, and so to the union that love
brings--even he, in this new-found freedom, only partially discerned
their presences. He felt them now, these stately Powers men once called
the gods, but felt them from a distance; and from a distance, too, they
saw and watched him come. He knew their gorgeous forms half dimmed by
a remote and veiled enchantment; knew that they reared aloft like
ancient towers, ruined by neglect and ignorance, starved and lonely, but
still hauntingly splendid and engaging, still terrifically alive. And it
seemed to him that sometimes their awful eyes flashed with the sunshine
over slope and valley, and that wherever they rested flowers sprang to
life.

Their nearness sometimes swept him like a storm, and then the entire
herd with which he mingled would stand abruptly still, caught by a wave
of awe and wonder. The host of them stood still upon the grass, their
frolic held a moment, their voices hushed, only deep panting audible
and the soft shuffling of their hoofs among the flowers. They bowed
their splendid heads and waited--while a god went past them.... And
through himself, as witness of the passage, a soft, majestic power also
swept. With the lift of a hurricane, yet with the gentleness of dew, he
felt the noblest in himself irresistibly evoked. It was gone again as
soon as come. It passed. But it left him charged with a regal confidence
and joy. As in the mountains a shower of snow picks out the highest peaks
in white, tracing its course and pattern over the entire range, so in
himself he knew the highest powers--aspirations, yearnings, hopes--raised
into shining, white activity, and by these quickened splendors of
his soul could recognize the nature of the god who came so close.

* * * * *

And, keeping mostly to the river-beds, they splashed in the torrents,
played and leaped and cantered. From the openings of many a moist cave
others came to join them. Below a certain level, though, they never went;
the forests knew them not; they loved the open, windy heights. They
turned and circulated as by a common consent, wheeling suddenly together
as if a single desire actuated the entire mass. One instinct spread, as
it were, among the lot, shared instantly, conveying to each at once the
general impulse. Their movements in this were like those of birds whose
flight in coveys obeys the order of a collective consciousness of which
each single one is an item--expressions of one single Bird-Idea behind,
distributed through all.

And O'Malley without questioning or hesitation obeyed, while yet he was
free to do as he wished alone. To do as they did was the greatest
pleasure, that was all.

For sometimes with two of them, one fully-formed, the other of lesser
mold--he flew on little journeys of his own. These two seemed nearer
to him than the rest. He felt he knew them and had been with them
before. Their big brown eyes continually sought his own with pleasure.
It almost seemed as if they had all three been separated long away from
one another, and had at last returned. No definite memory of the
interval came back, however; the sea, the steamer, and the journey's
incidents all had faded--part of that world of lesser insignificant dream
where they had happened. But these two kept close to him; they ran and
danced together....

The time that passed included many dawns and nights and also many
noons of splendor. It all seemed endless, perfect, and serene. That
anything could finish here did not once occur to him. Complete things
cannot finish. He passed through seas and gulfs of glorious existence.
For the strange thing was that while he only remembered afterwards the
motion, play, and laughter, he yet had these other glimpses here and
there of some ordered and progressive life existing just beyond. It lay
hidden deeper within. He skimmed its surface; but something prevented
his knowing it fully. And the limitation that held him back belonged,
it seemed, to that thin world of trivial dreaming he had left behind. He
had not shaken it off entirely. It still obscured his sight.

The scale and manner of this greater life faintly reached him, nothing
more. It may be that he only failed to bring back recollection, or it may
be that he did not penetrate deeply enough to know. At any rate, he
recognized that this sudden occasional passing by of vast deific figures
had to do with it, and that all this ocean of Earth's deeper
Consciousness was peopled with forms of life that obeyed some splendid
system of progressive ordered existence. To be gathered up in this one
greater consciousness was not the end.... Rather was it merely the
beginning....

Meantime he learned that here, among these lesser thoughts of the great
Mother, all the Pantheons of the world had first their origin--the
Greek, the Eastern, and the Northern too. Here all the gods that men
have ever half divined, still ranged the moods of Her timeless
consciousness. Their train of beauty, too, accompanied them.

* * * * *

I cannot half recall the streams of passionate description with which
his words clothed these glowing memories of his vision. Great pictures
of it haunt the background of my mind, pictures that lie in early mists,
framed by the stars and glimmering through some golden, flowered
dawn. Besides the huge outlines that stood breathing in the background
like dark mountains, there flitted here and there strange dreamy forms
of almost impossible beauty, slender as lilies, eyes soft and starry
shining through the dusk, hair flying past them like a rain of summer
flowers. Nymph-like they moved down all the pathways of the Earth's young
mind, singing and radiant, spring blossoms in the Garden of her
Consciousness.... And other forms, more vehement and rude, urged
to and fro across the pictures; crowding the movement; some playful
and protean; some clothed as with trees, or air, or water; and others
dark, remote, and silent, ranging her deeper layers of thought and dream,
known rarely to the outer world at all.

The rush and glory of it all is more than my mind can deal with. I
gather, though, O'Malley saw no definite forms, but rather knew
"forces," powers, aspects of this Soul of Earth, facets she showed in
long-forgotten days to men. Certainly the very infusoria of his
imagination were kindled and aflame when he spoke of them. Through the
tangled thicket of his ordinary mind there shone this passion of an
uncommon loveliness and splendour.

XXXVII

"The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we
really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things, so much
the more is snatched from inevitable time."

--RICHARD JEFFERIES

In the relationship that his everyday mind bore to his present state
there lay, moreover, a wealth of pregnant suggestion. The bridge
connecting his former "civilized" condition with this cosmic experience
was a curious one. That outer, lesser state, it seemed, had known a
foretaste sometimes of the greater. And it was hence had come those
dreams of a Golden Age that used to haunt him. For he began now to
recall the existence of that outer world of men and women, though by
means of certain indefinite channels only. And the things he remembered
were not what the world calls important. They were moments when he had
known--beauty; beauty, however, not of the grandiose sort that holds the
crowd, but of so simple and unadvertised a kind that most men overlook it
altogether.

He understood now why the thrill had been so wonderful. He saw
clearly why those moments of ecstasy he had often felt in Nature used
to torture him with an inexpressible yearning that was rather pain than
joy. For they were precisely what he now experienced when the viewless
figure of a god passed by him. Down there, out there, below--in that
cabined lesser state--they had been partial, but were now complete.
Those moments of worship he had known in woods, among mountains,
by the shores of desolate seas, even in a London street, perhaps at the
sight of a tree in spring or of a pathway of blue sky between the summer
clouds,--these had been, one and all, tentative, partial revelations of
the Consciousness of the Soul of Earth he now knew face to face.

These were his only memories of that outer world. Of people, cities,
or of civilization apart from these, he had no single remembrance.

* * * * *

Certain of these little partial foretastes now came back to him, like
fragments of dream that trouble the waking day.

He remembered, for instance, one definite picture: a hot autumn sun
upon a field of stubble where the folded corn-sheaves stood; thistles
waving by the hedges; a yellow field of mustard rising up the slope
against the sky-line, and beyond a row of peering elms that rustled in
the wind. The beauty of the little scene was somehow poignant. He
recalled it vividly. It had flamed about him, transfiguring the world; he
had trembled, yearning to see more, for just behind it he divined with
an exulting passionate worship this gorgeous, splendid Earth-Being with
whom at last he now actually moved. In that instant of a simple
loveliness her consciousness had fringed his own--had bruised it. He
had known it only by the partial channels of sight and smell and
hearing, but had felt the greater thing beyond, without being able to
explain it. And a portion of what he felt had burst in speech from his
lips.

He was there, he remembered, with two persons, a man and woman
whose name and face, however, he could not summon, and he recalled
that the woman smiled incredulously when he spoke of the exquisite
perfume of those folded corn-sheaves in the air. She told him he
imagined it. He saw again the pretty woman's smile of incomprehension; he
saw the puzzled expression in the eyes of the man; he heard
him murmur something prosaic about the soul, about birds, too, and
the prospects of killing hundreds later--sport! He even saw the woman
picking her way with caution as though the touch of earth could stain
or injure her. He especially recalled the silence that had followed on
his words that sought to show them--Beauty.... He remembered, too,
above all, the sense of loneliness among men that it induced in himself.

But the memory brought him a curious, sharp pain; and turning to
that couple who were now his playmates in this Garden of the Earth,
he called them with a singing cry and cantered over leagues of flowers,
wind, and sunshine before he stopped again. They leaped and danced
together, exulting in their spacious _Urwelt_ freedom ... want of
comprehension no longer possible.

* * * * *

The memory fled away. He shook himself free of it. Then others came in
its place, another and another, not all with people, blind, deaf, and
unreceptive, yet all of "common," simple scenes of beauty when something
vast had surged upon him and broken through the barriers that stand
between the heart and Nature. Such curious little scenes they were. In
most of them he had evidently been alone. But one and all had touched his
soul with a foretaste of this same nameless ecstasy that now he knew
complete. In every one the Consciousness of the Earth had "bruised" his
own.

Utterly simple they had been, one and all, these partial moments of
blinding beauty in that lesser, outer world:--A big, brown, clumsy bee
he saw, blundering into the petals of a wild flower on which the dew
lay sparkling.... A wisp of colored cloud driving loosely across the
hills, dropping a purple shadow.... Deep, waving grass, plunging and
shaking in the wind that drew out its underworld of blue and silver over
the whole spread surface of a field.... A daisy closed for the night upon
the lawn, eyes tightly shut, hands folded.... A south wind whispering
through larches.... The pattering of summer rain upon young oak
leaves in the dawn.... Fingers of long blue distance upon dreamy
woods.... Anemones shaking their pale and starry little faces in the
wind.... The columned stillness of a pine-wood in the dusk.... Young
birch trees mid the velvet gloom of firs.... The new moon setting in a
cloud of stars.... The hush of stars in many a summer night.... Sheep
grazing idly down a sun-baked hill.... A path of moonlight on a
lake.... A little wind through bare and wintry woods.... Oh! he
recalled the wonder, loveliness, and passion of a thousand more!

They thronged and passed, and thronged again, crowding one another:--all
golden moments of revelation when he had caught glimpses of the Earth,
and her greater Moods had swept him up into herself. Moments in which a
god had passed....

These were his only memories of that outer world he had left behind:
flashes of simple beauty.

Was thus the thrill of beauty then explained? Was loveliness, as men
know it, a revelation of the Earth-Soul behind? And were the blinding
flash, the dazzling wonder, and the dream men seek to render permanent
in music, color, line and language, a vision of her nakedness? Down
there, the poets and those simple enough of heart to stand close to
Nature, could catch these whispered fragments of the enormous message,
told as in secret; but now, against her very heart he heard the
thunder of the thing complete. Now, in the glory of all naked bodily
forms,--of women, men and children, of swift animals, of flowers, trees,
and running water, of mountains and of seas,--he understood these
partial revelations of the great Earth-Soul that bore them, gave them
life. For one and all were channels for her loveliness. He saw the
beauty of the "natural" instincts, the passion of motherhood and
fatherhood--Earth's seeking to project herself in endless forms and
variety. He understood why love increased the heart and made it feel at
one with all the world.

* * * * *

Moreover in some amazing fashion he was aware that others from
that outer world beside himself had access here, and that from this
Garden of the Earth's deep central personality came all the inspiration
known to men. He divined that others were even now drawing upon it
like himself. The thoughts of the poets went past him like thin flames;
the dreams of millions--mute, inexpressible yearnings like those he
had himself once known--streamed by in pale white light, to shoot
forward with a little nesting rush into some great Figure ... and then
return in double volume to the dreaming heart whence first they issued.
Shadows, too, he saw, by myriads--faint, feeble gropings of men and
women seeking it eagerly, yet hardly knowing what they sought; but,
above all, long, singing, beautiful tongues of colored flame that were
the instincts of divining children and of the pure in heart. These came
in rippling floods unerringly to their goal, lingered for long periods
before returning. And all, he knew, were currents of the great Earth
Life, moods, thoughts, dreams--expressions of her various Consciousness
with which she mothered, fed, and blessed all whom it was possible to
reach. Their passionate yearning, their worship, made access possible.
Along the tenderest portions of her personality these latter came, as by
a spread network of infinitely delicate filaments that extended from
herself, deliciously inviting....

* * * * *

The thing, however, that remained with him long after his return
to the normal state of lesser consciousness was the memory of those
blinding moments when a god went past him, or, as he phrased it in
another way, when he caught glimpses of the Earth--naked. For these
were instantaneous flashes of a gleaming whiteness, a dazzling and
supreme loveliness that staggered thought and arrested feeling, while yet
of a radiant simplicity that brought--for a second at least--a measure
of comprehension.

He then knew not mere partial projections. He saw beyond--deep
down into the flaming center that gave them birth. The blending of his
being with the Cosmic Consciousness was complete enough for this.
He describes it as a spectacle of sheer glory, stupendous, even
terrifying. The refulgent majesty of it utterly possessed him. The shock
of its magnificence came, moreover, upon his entire being, and was not
really of course a "sight" at all. The message came not through any small
division of a single sense. With a massed yet soaring power it shook him
free of all known categories. He then fringed a region of yet greater
being wherein he tasted for a moment some secret comprehension of a true
"divinity." The deliverance into ecstasy was complete.

In these flashing moments, when a second seemed a thousand years,
he further _understood_ the splendor of the stage beyond. Earth in her
turn was but a Mood in the Consciousness of the Universe, that Universe
again was mothered by another vaster one ... and the total that included
them all was not the gods--but God.

XXXVIII

The litter of disordered notebooks filled to the covers with fragments
of such beauty that they almost seem to burn with a light of their
own, lies at this moment before me on my desk. I still hear the rushing
torrent of his language across the spotted table-cloth in that dark
restaurant corner. But the incoherence seems only to increase with my
best efforts to combine the two.

"Go home and dream it," as he said at last when I ventured a question
here and there toward the end of the recital. "You'll see it best that
way--in sleep. Get clear away from _me_, and my surface physical
consciousness. Perhaps it will come to you then."

There remains, however, to record the manner of his exit from that
great Garden of the Earth's fair youth. And he tells it more simply. Or,
perhaps, it is that I understand it better.

For suddenly, in the midst of all the joy and splendor that he tasted,
there came unbidden a strengthening of the tie that held him to his
"outer," lesser state. A wave of pity and compassion surged in upon him
from the depths. He saw the struggling millions in the prisons and cages
civilization builds. He felt _with_ them. No happiness, he understood,
could be complete that did not also include them all; and--he longed
to tell them. The thought and the desire tore across him burningly.

"If only I can get this back to them!" passed through him, like a
flame. "I'll save the world by bringing it again to simple things! I've
only got to tell it and all will understand at once--and follow!"

And with the birth of the desire there ran a deep convulsive sound
like music through the greater Consciousness that held him close. Those
Moods that were the gods, thronged gloriously about him, almost
pressing forwards into actual sight.... He might have lingered where
he was for centuries, or forever; but this thought pulled him back--the
desire to share his knowledge with the world, the passion to heal and
save and rescue.

And instantly, in the twinkling of an eyelid, the Urwelt closed its gates
of horn and ivory behind him. An immense dark shutter dropped
noiselessly with a speed of lightning across his mind. He stood
without....

He found himself near the tumbled-down stone huts of a hamlet that he
recognized. He staggered, rubbed his eyes, and stared. A forest of beech
trees shook below him in a violent wind. He saw the branches tossing. A
Caucasian saddle-horse beside him nosed a sack that spilt its flour on
the ground at his feet, he heard the animal's noisy breathing; he noted
the sliding movement of the spilt flour before it finally settled; and
some fifty yards beyond him, down the slopes, he saw a human
figure--running.

It was his Georgian guide. The man, half stooping, caught the woolen
bashlik that had fallen from his head.

O'Malley watched the man complete the gesture. Still running, he
replaced the cap upon his head.

And coming up to his ears upon the wind were the words of a broken French
sentence that he also recognized. Disjointed by terror, it completed an
interrupted phrase:--

"... one of them is close upon us. Hide your eyes! Save yourself!.
They come from the mountains. They are old as the stones ... run...!"

No other living being was in sight.

XXXIX

The extraordinary abruptness of the transition produced no bewilderment,
it seems. Realizing that without Rostom he would be in a position of
helplessness that might be serious, the Irishman put his hands to his
lips and called out with authority to the running figure of his
frightened guide. He shouted to him to stop.

"There is nothing to fear. Come back! Are you afraid of a gust of wind?"

And in his face and voice, perhaps too in his manner, was something
he had brought back from the vision, for the man stopped at once in
his headlong course, paused a moment to stare and question, and then,
though still looking over his shoulder and making occasional signs of
his religion, came slowly back to his employer's side again.

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