The Centaur

A >> Algernon Blackwood >> The Centaur

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"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 spaces, 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 gods.

"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 God 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 tassel 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 passengers came up to watch the rocky desolate shores
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 shore, 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 passage. 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 god is passing
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 god 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?"

He felt the touch of that sympathetic hand upon his shoulder, and
bent his head to signify agreement.

For a moment, face to face with that superb sunset, he had known a deep
and utter peace in the vast bosom of this greater soul about him. Her
consciousness again had bruised and fringed his own. Across that
delicately divided threshold the beauty and the power of the gods had
poured in a flood into his being. And only there was peace, only there
was joy, only there was the death of those ancient yearnings that
tortured his little personal and separate existence. The return to the
world was aching pain again. The old loneliness that seemed more than he
could bear swept icily through him, contracting life and freezing every
spring of joy. For in that single instant of return he felt pass into him
a loneliness of the whole travailing world, the loneliness of countless
centuries, the loneliness of all the races of the Earth who were exiled
and had lost the way.

Too deep it lay for words or tears or sighs. The doctor's invitation
came most opportunely. And presently in silence he turned his back
upon that opal sky of dream from which the sun had gone, and walked
slowly down the deck toward Stahl's cabin.

"If only I can share it with them," he thought as he went; "if only
men will listen, if only they will come. To keep it all to myself, to
dream alone, will kill me."

And as he stood before the door it seemed he heard wild rushing
through the sky, the tramping of a thousand hoofs, a roaring of the
wind, the joy of that free, torrential passage with the Earth. He turned
the handle and entered the cozy room where weeks before they held the
inquest on the little empty tenement of flesh, remembering how that
other figure had once stood where he now stood--part of the sunrise,
part of the sea, part of the morning winds.

* * * * *

They had their meal almost in silence, while the glow of sunset filled
the cabin through the western row of port-holes, and when it was over
Stahl made the coffee as of old and lit the familiar black cigar.
Slowly O'Malley's pain and restlessness gave way before the other's
soothing quiet. He had never known him before so calm and gentle, so
sympathetic, almost tender. The usual sarcasm seemed veiled in sadness;
there was no irony in the voice, nor mockery in the eyes.

Then to the Irishman it came suddenly that all these days while he
had been lost in dreaming the doctor had kept him as of old under close
observation. The completeness of his reverie had concealed from him this
steady scrutiny. He had been oblivious to the fact that Stahl had all the
time been watching, investigating, keenly examining. Abruptly he now
realized it.

And then Stahl spoke. His tone was winning, his manner frank and
inviting. But it was the sadness about him that won O'Malley's confidence
so wholly.

"I can guess," he said, "something of the dream you've brought with
you from those mountains. I can understand--more, perhaps, than you
imagine, and I can sympathize--more than you think possible. Tell me
about it fully--if you can. I see your heart is very full, and in the
telling you will find relief. I am not hostile, as you sometimes feel.
Tell me, my dear, young clear-eyed friend. Tell me your vision and your
hope. Perhaps I might even help ... for there may be things that I could
also tell to you in return."

Something in the choice of words, none of which offended; in the
atmosphere and setting, no detail of which jarred; and in the degree of
balance between utterance and silence his world of inner forces just then
knew, combined to make the invitation irresistible. Moreover, he had
wanted to tell it all these days. Stahl was already half convinced. Stahl
would surely understand and help him. It was the psychological moment
for confession. The two men rose in the same moment, Stahl to
lock the cabin doors against interruption, O'Malley to set their chairs
more closely side by side so that talking should be easiest.

And then without demur or hesitation he opened his heart to this
other and let the floodgates of his soul swing wide. He told the vision
and he told the dream; he told his hope as well. And the story of his
passion, filled in with pages from those notebooks he ever carried in
his pocket, still lasted when the western glow had faded from the sky
and the thick-sown stars shone down upon the gliding steamer. The
hush of night lay soft upon the world before he finished.

He told the thing complete, much, I imagine, as he told it all to me upon
the roof of that apartment building and in the dingy Soho restaurant. He
told it without reservations--his life-long yearnings: the explanation
brought by the presence of the silent stranger upon the outward voyage:
the journey to the Garden: the vision that all life--from gods to
flowers, from men to mountains--lay contained in the conscious Being of
the Earth, that Beauty was but glimpses of her essential nakedness; and
that salvation of the world's disease of modern life was to be found in a
general return to the simplicity of Nature close against her mothering
heart. He told it all--in words that his passionate joy chose
faultlessly.

And Heinrich Stahl in silence listened. He asked no single question.
He made no movement in his chair. His black cigar went out before
the half of it was smoked. The darkness hid his face impenetrably.

And no one came to interrupt. The murmur of the speeding steamer,
and occasional footsteps on the deck as passengers passed to and fro in
the cool of the night, were the only sounds that broke the music of that
incurable idealist's impassioned story.

XLIII

And then at length there came a change of voice across the cabin. The
Irishman had finished. He sank back in the deep leather chair, exhausted
physically, but with the exultation of his mighty hope still pouring at
full strength through his heart. For he had ventured further than ever
before and had spoken of a possible crusade--a crusade that should preach
peace and happiness to every living creature.

And Dr. Stahl, in a voice that showed how deeply he was moved, asked
quietly:--

"By leading the nations back to Nature you think they shall advance
to Truth at last?"

"With time," was the reply. "The first step lies there:--in changing
the direction of the world's activities, changing it from the transient
Outer to the eternal Inner. In the simple life, external possessions
unnecessary and recognized as vain, the soul would turn within and
seek Reality. Only a tiny section of humanity has time to do it now.
There is no leisure. Civilization means acquirement for the body: it
ought to mean development for the soul. Once sweep aside the trash
and rubbish men seek outside themselves today, and the wings of their
smothered souls would stir again. Consciousness would expand. Nature
would draw them first. They would come to feel the Earth as I did. Self
would disappear, and with it this false sense of separateness. The
greater consciousness would waken in them. The peace and joy and
blessedness of inner growth would fill their lives. But, first, this
childish battling to the death for external things must cease, and
Civilization stand revealed for the bleak and empty desolate thing it
really is. It leads away from God and from the things that are eternal."

The German made no answer; O'Malley ceased to speak; a long silence
fell between them. Then, presently, Stahl relighted his cigar, and
lapsing into his native tongue--always a sign with him of deepest
seriousness--he began to talk.

"You've honored me," he said, "with a great confidence; and I am deeply,
deeply grateful. You have told your inmost dream--the thing men find it
hardest of all to speak about." He felt in the darkness for his
companion's hand and held it tightly for a moment. He made no other
comment upon what he had heard. "And in return--in some small way of
return," he continued, "I may ask you to listen to something of my own,
something of possible interest. No one has ever known it from my lips.
Only, in our earlier conversations on the outward voyage, I hinted at it
once or twice. I sometimes warned you--"

"I remember. You said he'd 'get' me, 'win' me over--'appropriation' was
the word you used."

"I suggested caution, yes; urged you not to let yourself go too
completely; told you he represented danger to yourself, and to humanity
as it is organized today--"

"And all the rest," put in O'Malley a shade impatiently. "I remember
perfectly."

"Because I knew what I was talking about." The doctor's voice came across
the darkness somewhat ominously. And then he added in a louder tone,
evidently sitting forward as he said it: "For the thing that has happened
to yourself as I foresaw it would, had already _almost_ happened to me
too!"

"To you, doctor, too?" exclaimed the Irishman in the moment's pause
that followed.

"I saved myself just in time--by getting rid of the cause."

"You discharged him from the hospital, because you were afraid!" He said
it sharply as though are instant of the old resentment had flashed up.

By way of answer Stahl rose from his chair and abruptly turned up the
electric lamp upon the desk that faced them across the cabin. Evidently
he preferred the light. O'Malley saw that his face was white and very
grave. He grasped for the first time that the man was speaking
professionally. The truth came driving next behind it--that Stahl
regarded him as a patient.

* * * * *

"Please go on, doctor," he said, keenly on the watch. "I'm deeply
interested." The wings of his great dream still bore him too far aloft
for him to feel more than the merest passing annoyance at his discovery.
Resentment had gone too. Sadness and disappointment for an instant
touched him perhaps, but momentarily. In the end he felt sure that
Stahl would stand at his side, completely won over and convinced.

"You had a similar experience to my own, you say," he urged him. "I
am all eagerness and sympathy to hear."

"We'll talk in the open air," the doctor answered, and ringing the bell
for the steward to clear away, he drew his companion out to the deserted
decks. They moved toward the bows, past the sleeping peasants. The stars
were mirrored in a glassy sea and toward the north the hills of Corsica
stood faintly outlined in the sky. It was already long after midnight.

"Yes, a similar thing nearly happened to me," he resumed as they settled
themselves against a coil of rope where only the murmur of the washing
sea could reach them, "and might have happened to others too. Inmates of
that big _Krankenhaus_ were variously affected. My action, tardy I must
admit, saved myself and them."

And the German then told his story as a man might tell of his escape from
some grave disaster. In the emphatic sentences of his native language he
told it, congratulating himself all through. The Russian had almost won
him over, gained possession of his heart and mind, persuaded him, but in
the end had failed--because the other ran away. It was like hearing a man
describe an attempt to draw him into Heaven, then boast of his escape.
His caution and his judgment, as he put it, saved him, but to the
listening Celt it rather seemed that his compromise it was that damned
him. The Kingdom of Heaven is hard to enter, for Stahl had possessions
not of the wood and metal order, but possessions of the brain and reason
he was too proud to forego completely. They kept him out.

With increasing sadness, too, he heard it; for here he realized was the
mental attitude of an educated, highly civilized man today--a
representative type regarded by the world as highest. It was this he had
to face. Moreover Stahl was more than merely educated, he was
understandingly sympathetic, meeting the great dream halfway; seeing in
it possibilities; admitting its high beauty, and even sometimes speaking
of it with hope and a touch of enthusiasm. Its originator none the less
he regarded as a reactionary dreamer, an unsettling and disordered
influence, a patient, if not even something worse!

Stahl's voice and manner were singular while he told it all, revealing
one moment the critical mind that analyzed and judged, and the next
an enthusiasm almost of the mystic. Alternately, like the man and
woman of those quaint old weather-glasses, each peered out and showed
a face, the reins of compromise yet ever seeking to hold them well in
leash and drive them together.

Hardly, it seems, had the strange Russian been under his care a week
before he passed beneath the sway of his curious personality and
experienced the attack of singular emotions upon his heart and mind.

He described at first the man's arrival, telling it with the calm and
balanced phrases a doctor uses when speaking merely of a patient who
had stirred his interest. He first detailed the method of suggestion he
had used to revive the lapsed memory--and its utter failure. Then he
passed on to speak of him more generally: but briefly and condensed.

"The man," he said, "was so engaging, so docile, his personality
altogether so attractive and mysterious, that I took the case myself
instead of delegating it to my assistants. All efforts to trace his past
collapsed. It was as if he had drifted into that little hotel out of the
night of time. Of madness there was no evidence whatever. The association
of ideas in his mind, though limited, was logical and rigid. His health
was perfect, barring strange, sudden fever; his vitality tremendous;
yet he ate most sparingly and the only food he touched was fruit and
milk and vegetables. Meat made him sick, the huge frame shuddered
when he saw it. And from all the human beings in the place with whom
he came in contact he shrank with a kind of puzzled dismay. With animals,
most oddly it seemed, he sought companionship; he would run to the window
if a dog barked, or to hear a horse's hoofs; a Persian cat belonging to
one of the nurses never left his side, and I have seen the trees in the
yard outside his window thick with birds, and even found them in the room
and on the sill, flitting about his very person, unafraid and singing.

"With me, as with the attendants, his speech was almost nil--laconic
words in various languages, clipped phrases that sometimes combined
Russian, French, or German, other tongues as well.

"But, strangest of all, with animal life he seemed to hold this kind
of communication that was Intelligible both to himself and them. Animals
certainly were 'aware' of him. It was not speech. It ran in a deep,
continuous murmur like a droning, humming sound of wind. I took the hint
thus faintly offered. I gave him his freedom in the yards and gardens.
The open air and intercourse with natural life was what he craved. The
sadness and the air of puzzled fretting then left his face, his eyes grew
bright, his whole presentment happier; he ran and laughed and even sang.
The fever that had troubled him all vanished. Often myself I took the
place of nurse or orderly to watch him, for the man's presence more than
interested me: it gave me a renewed sense of life that was exhilarating,
invigorating, delightful. And in his appearance, meanwhile, something
that was not size or physical measurement, turned--tremendous.

"A part of me that was not mind--a sort of forgotten instinct blindly
groping--came of its own accord to regard him as some loose fragment
of a natural, cosmic life that had somehow blundered down into a
human organism it sought to use....

"And then it was for the first time I recognized the spell he had cast
upon me; for, when the Committee decided there was no reason to keep
him longer, I urged that he should stay. Making a special plea, I took
him as a private patient of my own. I kept him under closer personal
observation than ever before. I needed him. Something deep within me,
something undivined hitherto, called out into life by his presence, could
not do without him. This new craving, breakingly wild and sweet, awoke
in my blood and cried for him. His presence nourished it in me. Most
insidiously it attacked me. It stirred deep down among the roots of my
being. It 'threatened my personality' seems the best way I can put it;
for, turning a critical analysis upon it, I discovered that it was an
undermining and revolutionary change going steadily forward in my
character. Its growth had hitherto been secret. When I first recognized
its presence, the thing was already strong. For a long time, it had been
building.

"And the change in a word--you will grasp my meaning from the shortest
description of essentials--was this: that ambition left me, ordinary
desire crumbled, the outer world men value so began to fade."

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