The Centaur

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"And in their place?" cried O'Malley breathlessly, interrupting for
the first time.

"Came a rushing, passionate desire to escape from cities and live for
beauty and simplicity 'in the wilderness'; to taste the life _he_
seemed to know; to go out blindly with him into woods and desolate
places, and be mixed and blended with the loveliness of Earth and Nature.
This was the first thing I knew. It was like an expansion of my normal
world--almost an extension of consciousness. It somehow threatened my
sense of personal identity. And--it made me hesitate."

O'Malley caught the tremor in his voice. Even in the telling of it the
passion plucked at him, for here, as ever, he stood on the border-line of
compromise, his heart tempting him toward salvation, his brain and
reason tugging at the brakes.

"The sham and emptiness or modern life, its drab vulgarity, the
unworthiness of its very ideals stood appallingly revealed before some
inner eye just opening. I felt shaken to the core of what had seemed
hitherto my very solid and estimable self. How the man thus so powerfully
affected me lies beyond all intelligible explanation. To use the obvious
catchword 'hypnotism' is to use a toy and stop a leak with paper. For his
influence was _unconsciously_ exerted. He cast no net of clever,
persuasive words about my thought. Out of that deep, strange silence of
the man it somehow came. His actions and his simple happiness of face and
manner--both in some sense the raw material of speech perhaps--may have
operated as potently suggestive agents; but no adequate causes to justify
the result, apart from the fantastic theories I have mentioned, have ever
yet come within the range of my understanding. I can only give you the
undeniable effects."

"Your sense of extended consciousness," asked his listener, "was this
continuous, once it had begun?"

"It came in patches," Stahl continued. "My normal, everyday self was
thus able to check it. While it derided, commiserated this everyday self,
the latter stood in dread of it and even awe. My training, you see,
regarded it as symptom of disorder, a beginning of unbalance that might
end in insanity, the thin wedge of a dissociation of the personality
Morton Prince and others have described."

His speech grew more and more jerky, even incoherent; evidently the
material had not even now been fully reduced to order in his mind.

"Among other curious symptoms I soon established that this subtle
spreading of my consciousness grew upon me especially during sleep.
The business of the day distracted, scattered it. On waking in the
morning, as with the physical fatigue that comes toward the closing of
the day, it was strongest.

"And so, in order to examine it closely when in fullest manifestation,
I came to spend the nights with him. I would creep in while he slept
and stay till morning, alternately sleeping and waking myself. I watched
the two of us together. I also watched the 'two' in me. And thus it was
I made the further strange discovery that the influence _he_ exerted on
me was strongest while he slept. It is best described by saying that in
his sleep I was conscious that he sought to draw me with him--away
somewhere into his own wonderful world--the state or region, that is,
where he manifested completely instead of partially as I knew him here.
His personality was a channel somewhere out into a living, conscious
Nature...."

"Only," interrupted O'Malley, "you felt that to yield and go involved
some nameless inner catastrophe, and so resisted?" He chose his phrase
with purpose.

"Because I discovered," was the pregnant answer, given steadily while
he watched his listener closely through the darkness, "that this desire
for escape the man had wakened in me was nothing more or less than the
desire to leave the world, to leave the conditions that prevented--in
fact to leave the body. My discontent with modern life had gone as far
as that. It was the birth of the suicidal mania."

* * * * *

The pause that followed the words, on the part of Dr. Stahl at any
rate, was intentional. O'Malley held his peace. The men shifted their
places oil the coil of rope, for both were cramped and stiff with the
lengthy session. For a minute or two they leaned over the bulwarks and
watched the phosphorescent foam in silence. The blue mountainous shores
slipped past in shadowy line against the stars. But when they sat down
again their relative positions were not what they had been before. Dr.
Stahl had placed himself between his listener and the sea. And O'Malley
did not let the manoeuvre escape him. Smiling to himself he noticed it.
Just as surely he noticed, too, that the whole recital was being told him
with a purpose.

"You really need not be afraid," he could not resist saying. "The idea
of escape _that_ way has never even come to me at all. And, anyhow, I've
far too much on hand first in telling the world my message." He laughed
in the silence that took his words, for Stahl said nothing and made as
though he had not heard. But the Irishman understood that it was in
the spirit of feeble compromise that danger lay--if danger there was at
all, and he himself was far beyond such weakness. His eye was single
and his body full of light, and the faith that plays with mountains had
made him whole. Return to Nature for him involved no denial of human
life, nor depreciation of human interests, but only a revolutionary
shifting of values.

"And it was one night while he slept and I watched him in the little
room," resumed the German as though there had been no interruption,
"I noticed first so decisively this growing of a singular size about him
I have already mentioned, and grasped its meaning. For the bulk of the
man while growing--emerging, rather, I should say--assumed another
shape than his own. It was not my eyes that saw it. I saw him as _he felt
himself to be_. The creature's personality, his essential inner being,
was acting directly upon my own. His influence was at me from another
point or angle. First the emotions, then the senses you see. It was a
finely organized attack.

"I definitely understood at last that my mind was affected--and proved it
too, for the instant effort I made at recovery resulted in my seeing him
normal again. The size and shape retreated the moment I denied them."

O'Malley noticed how the speaker's voice lingered over the phrase.
Again he knew the intention of the pause that followed. He held his
peace, however, and waited.

"Nor was sight the only sense affected," Stahl continued, "for smell
and hearing also brought their testimony. Through all but touch,
indeed, the hallucination attacked me. For sometimes at night while I
sat up watching in the little room, there rose outside the open window
in the yards and gardens a sound of tramping, a distant roaring as of
voices in a rising wind, a rushing, hollow murmur, confused and deep
like that of forests, or the swift passage of a host of big birds across
the sky. I heard it, both in the air and on the ground--this tramping on
the lawns, this curious shaking of the atmosphere. And with it at the
same time a sharp and mingled perfume that made me think of earth
and leaves, of flowers after rain, of plains and open spaces, most
singular of all--of animals and horses.

"Before the firm denial of my mind, they vanished, just as the change
of form had vanished. But both left me weaker than they found me,
more tender to attack. Moreover, I understood most plainly, that they
emanated all from him. These 'emanations' came, too, chiefly, as I
mentioned, whilst he slept. In sleep, it seemed, he set them free. The
slumber of the body disengaged them. And then the instinct came to
warn me--presenting itself with the authority of an unanswerable
intuition--the realization, namely, that if, for a single moment in his
presence, I slept, the changes would leap forward in my own being, and
I should join him."

"Escape! Know freedom in a larger consciousness!" cried the other.

"And for a man of my point of view and training to have permitted
such a conviction at all," he went on, the interruption utterly ignored
again, "proves how far along the road I had already traveled without
knowing it. Only at the time I was not aware of this. It was the shock
of full discovery later that brought me to my senses, when, seeking to
withdraw,--I found I could not."

"And so you ran away." It came out bluntly enough, with a touch of
scorn but ill concealed.

"We discharged him. But before that came there was more I have to
tell you--if you still care to hear it."

"I'm not tired, if that's what you mean. I could listen all night, as far
as that goes."

He rose to stretch his legs a moment, and Stahl rose too--instantly.
Together they leaned over the bulwarks. The German's hat was off and
the air made by the steamer's passage drew his beard out. The warm soft
wind brought odors of sea and shore. It caressed their faces, then passed
on across those sleeping peasants on the lower deck. The masts and
rigging swung steadily against the host of stars.

"Before I thus knew myself half caught," continued the doctor, standing
now close enough beside him for actual contact, "and found it difficult
to get away, other things had happened, things that confirmed the change
so singularly begun in me. They happened everywhere; confirmation came
from many quarters; though slight enough, they filled in all the gaps and
crevices, strengthened the joints, and built the huge illusion round me
all complete until it held me like a prison.

"And they are difficult to tell. Only, indeed, to yourself who underwent
a similar experience up there in the mountains, could they bring much
meaning. You had the same temptation and you--weathered the same storm."
He caught O'Malley's arm a moment and held it. "You escaped this madness
just as I did, and you will realize what I mean when I say that the
sensation of losing my sense of personal identity became so dangerously,
so seductively strong. The feeling of extended consciousness became
delicious--too delicious to resist. A kind of pagan joy and exultation
known to some in early youth, but put away with the things of youth,
possessed me. In the presence of this other's soul, so strangely powerful
in its silence and simplicity, I felt as though I touched new sources of
life. I tapped them. They poured down and flooded me--with dreams--dreams
that could really haunt--with unsettling thoughts of glory and delight
_beyond the body_. I got clean away into Nature. I felt as though some
portion of me just awakening reached out across him into rain and
sunshine, far up into the sweet and starry sky--as a tree growing out of
a thicket that chokes its lower part finds light and freedom at the top."

"It caught you badly, doctor," O'Malley murmured. "The gods came close!"

"So badly that I loathed the prisoned darkness that held me so thickly
in the body. I longed to know my being all dispersed through Nature,
scattered with dew and wind, shining with the star-light and the sun.
And the manner of escape I hinted to you a little while ago came to
seem right and necessary. Lawful it seemed, and obvious. The mania
literally obsessed me, though still I tried to hide it even from myself
... and struggled in resistance."

"You spoke just now of other things that came to confirm it," the
Irishman said while the other paused to take breath. All this he knew.
He grew weary of Stahl's clever laboring the point that it was madness.
A little knowledge is ever dangerous, and he saw so clearly why the
hesitation of the merely intellectual man had led him into error. "Did
you mean that others acknowledged this influence as well as yourself?"

"You shall read that for yourself tomorrow," came the answer, "in the
detailed report I drew up afterwards; it is far too long to tell you now.
But, I may mention something of it. That breaking out of patients was
a curious thing, their trying to escape, their dreams and singing, their
efforts sometimes to approach his room, their longing for the open and
the gardens; the deep, prolonged entrancing of a few; the sounds of
rushing, tramping that they, too, heard, the violence of some, the silent
ecstasy of others. The thing may find its parallel, perhaps, in the
collective mania that sometimes afflicts religious communities, in
monasteries or convents. Only here there was no preacher and eloquent
leader to induce hysteria--nothing but that silent dynamo of power,
gentle and winning as a little child, a being who could not put a phrase
together, exerting his potent spell unconsciously, and chiefly while he
slept.

"For the phenomena almost without exception came in the night, and often
at their fullest strength, as afterwards reported to me, while I dozed in
his room and watched beside his motionless and slumbering form. Oh, and
there was more as well, much more, as you shall read. The stories my
assistants brought me, the tales of frightened nurse and warder, the
amazing yarns the porter stammered out, of strangers who had rung the
bell at dawn, trying to push past him through the door, saying they were
messengers and had been summoned, sent for, had to come,--large, curious,
windy figures, or, as he sometimes called them with unconscious humor,
'like creatures out of fairy books or circuses' that always vanished as
suddenly as they came. Making every allowance for excitement and
exaggeration, the tales were strange enough, I can assure you, and the
way many of the patients knew their visions intensified, their illusions
doubly strengthened, their efforts even to destroy themselves in many
cases almost more than the staff could deal with--all this brought the
matter to a climax and made my duty very plain at last."

"And the effect upon yourself--at its worst?" asked his listener quietly.

Stahl sighed wearily a little as he answered with a new-found sadness
in his tone.

"I've told you briefly that," he said; "repetition cannot strengthen it.
The worthlessness of the majority of human aims today expresses it
Best--what you have called yourself the 'horror of civilization.' The
vanity of all life's modern, so-called up-to-date tendencies for outer,
mechanical developments. A wild, mad beauty streaming from that man's
personality overran the whole place and caught the lot of us, myself
especially, with a lust for simple, natural things, and with a passion
for spiritual beauty to accompany them. Fame, wealth, position seemed the
shadows then, and something else it's hard to name announced itself as
the substance.... I wanted to clear out and live with Nature, to know
simplicity, unselfish purposes, a golden state of childlike existence
close to dawns and dew and running water, cared for by woods and blessed
by all the winds...." He paused again for breath, then added:--

"And that's just where the mania caught at me so cunningly--till I
saw it and called a halt."

"Ah!"

"For the thing I sought, the thing _he_ knew, and perhaps remembered,
was not possible _in the body_. It was a spiritual state--"

"Or to be known subjectively!" O'Malley checked him.

"I am no lotus-eater by nature," he went on with energy, "and so I
fought and conquered it. But first, I tell you, it came upon me like a
tempest--a hurricane of wonder and delight. I've always held, like
yourself perhaps, that civilization brings its own army of diseases, and
that the few illnesses known to ruder savage races can be cured by simple
means the earth herself supplies. And along this line of thought the
thing swept into me--the line of my own head-learning. This was natural
enough; natural enough, too, that it thus at first deceived me.

"For the quack cures of history come to this--herb simples and the
rest; only we know them now as sun-cure, water-cure, open-air cure, old
Kneipp, sea-water, and a hundred others. Doctors have never swarmed
before as they do now, and these artificial diseases civilization brings
in such quantity seemed all at once to mean the abeyance of some central
life or power men ought to share with--Nature.... You shall read it
all in my written report. I merely wish to show you now how the
insidious thing got at me along the line of my special knowledge. I saw
the truth that priests and doctors are the only possible and necessary
'professions' in the world, and--that they should be really but a single
profession...."

XLIV

He drew suddenly back with a kind of jerk. It was as though he realized
abruptly that he had said too much--had overdone it. He took his
companion by the arm and led him down the decks.

As they passed the bridge the Captain called out a word of welcome
to them; and his jolly, boisterous laugh ran down the wind. The
American engineer came from behind a dark corner, almost running
into them; his face was flushed. "It's like a furnace below," he said in
his nasal familiar manner; "too hot to sleep. I've run up for a gulp of
air." He made as though he would join them.

"The wind's behind us, yes," replied the doctor in a different tone,
"and there's no draught." With a gesture, half bow, half dismissal, he
made even this thick-skinned member of "the greatest civilization on
earth" understand he was not wanted. And they turned at the cabin door,
O'Malley a moment wondering at the admirable dignity with which the
"little" man had managed the polite dismissal.

Himself, perhaps, he would not have minded the diversion. He was a little
weary of the German's long recital. The confession had not been complete,
he felt. Much had been held back. It was not altogether straightforward.
The dishonesty which hides in compromise peeped through it everywhere.

And the incoherence of the latter part had almost bored him. For it
was, he easily divined, a studied incoherence. It was meant to touch a
similar weakness in himself--if there. But it was _not_ there. He saw
through the whole manoeuvre. Stahl wished to warn and save him by
showing that the experience they had partly shared was nothing but a
strange mental disorder. He wished to force in this subtle way his own
interpretation of it upon his friend. Yet at the same time the intuitive
Irishman discerned that other tendency in the man which would so
gladly perhaps have welcomed a different explanation, and even in some
fashion did actually accept it.

O'Malley smiled inwardly as he watched him prepare the coffee as of
old. And patiently he waited for the rest that was to come. In a certain
sense it all was useful. It would be helpful later. This was an attitude
he would often have to face when he returned to civilized life and tried
to tell his Message to the thinking, educated men of today--the men he
must win over somehow to his dream--the men, without whose backing, no
Movement could hope to meet with even a measure of success.

"So, like myself," said Stahl, as he carefully tended the flame of the
spirit-lamp between them, "you have escaped by the skin of your teeth,
as it were. And I congratulate you--heartily."

"I thank you," said the other dryly.

"You write your version now, and I'll write mine--indeed it is already
almost finished--then we'll compare notes. Perhaps we might even
publish them together."

He poured out the fragrant coffee. They faced each other across the
little table. But O'Malley did not take the bait. He wished to hear the
balance his companion still might tell.

And presently he asked for it.

"With the discharge of your patient the trouble ceased at once, then?"

"Comparatively soon. It gradually subsided, yes."

"And as regards yourself?"

"I came back to my senses. I recovered my control. The insubordinate
impulses I had known retired." He smiled as he sipped his coffee. "You
see me now," he added, looking his companion steadily in the eyes, "a
sane and commonplace ship's doctor."

"I congratulate you--"

"_Vielen Dank._" He bowed.

"On what you missed, yet almost accomplished," the other finished.
"You might have known, like me, the cosmic consciousness! You might
have met the gods!"

"In a strait-waistcoat," the doctor added with a snap.

They laughed at one another across their coffee cups as once before
they had laughed across their glasses of Kakhetian wine--two eternally
antagonistic types that will exist as long as life itself.

But, contrary to his expectations, the German had little more to tell.
He mentioned how the experience had led his mind into strange and
novel reading in his desire to know what other minds might have to
offer by way of explanation, even the most fanciful and far-fetched. He
told, though very briefly, how he had picked up Fechner among others,
and carefully studied his "poetic theories," and read besides the best
accounts of "spiritistic" phenomena, as also of the rarer states of
hysteria, double-consciousness, multiple personality, and even those
looser theories which suggest that a portion of the human constitution
called "astral" or "etheric" may escape from the parent center and,
carrying with it the subtler forces of desire and yearning, construct a
vivid subjective state of mind which is practically its Heaven of hope
and longing all fulfilled.

He did not, however, betray the results upon himself of all this curious
reading and study, nor mention what he found of truth or probability in
it all. He merely quoted books and authors, in at least three languages,
that stretched in a singular and catholic array from Plato and the
Neo-Platonists across the ages to Myers, Du Prel, Flournoy, Lodge, and
Morton Prince.

Out of the lot, perhaps,--O'Malley gathered it by inference rather
than from actual statement, from fragments of their talks upon the
outward voyage more than from anything let fall just then--Fechner
had proved the most persuasive to this man's contradictory and original
mind. It certainly seemed, at least, as if he knew some secret
sympathetic leaning toward the idea that consciousness and matter were
inseparable, and that a Cosmic Consciousness "of sorts" might pertain to
the Earth as, equally, to all the other stars and planets. The _Urwelt_
idea he so often referred to had seized a part of his imagination--that,
at least, was clear.

The Irishman drank it all in, but he was too exhausted now to argue,
and too full besides to ask questions. His natural volubility forsook
him. He let the doctor have his say without interruptions. He took the
warnings with the rest of it. Nothing the other said had changed him.

It was not the first sunrise they had watched together, and as they
took the morning air on deck once more, Corsica rising like a dream
the night had left behind her on the sea, he listened with fainter
interest to the German's concluding sentences.

"At any rate you now understand why on that other voyage I was so
eager to watch you with your friend, so keen to separate you, to prevent
your sleeping with him, and at the same time so desirous to see his
influence upon you at close quarters; and also--why I always understood
so well what was going on both outwardly and within."

O'Malley quietly reiterated the belief he still held in the power of his
own dream.

"I shall go home and give my message to the world," was what he said
quietly. "I think it's true."

"It's better to keep silent," was the answer, "for, even if true, the
world is not ready yet to listen. It will evaporate, you'll find, in the
telling. You'll find there's nothing to tell. Besides, a dream like yours
must dawn on all at once, and not on merely one. No one will understand
you."

"I can but try."

"You will reach no men of action; and few of intellect. You will merely
stuff the dreamers who are already stuffed enough. What is the use, I
ask you? What is the use?"

"It will set the world on fire for simplicity," the other murmured,
knowing the great sweet passion flame within him as he watched the
sun come slowly out of the rosy sea. "All the use in the world."

"None," was the laconic answer.

"They might know the gods!" cried O'Malley, using the phrase that
symbolized for him the entire Vision.

Stahl looked at him for some time before he spoke. Again that
expression of wistful, almost longing admiration shone in the brown
eyes.

"My friend," he answered gravely, "men do not want to know the gods. They
prefer their delights less subtle. They crave the cruder physical
sensations that bang them toward excitement--"

"Of disease, of pain, of separateness," put in the other.

The German shrugged his shoulders. "It's the stage they're at," he
said. "You, if you have success, will merely make a few uncomfortable.
The majority will hardly turn their heads. To one in a million you may
bring peace and happiness."

"It's worth it," cried the Irishman, "even for that one!"

Stahl answered very gently, smiling with his new expression of tenderness
and sympathy. "Dream your great dream if you will, but dream it, my
friend, alone--in peace and silence. That 'one' I speak of is yourself."

The doctor pressed his hand and turned toward his cabin. O'Malley
stood a little longer to share the sunrise. Neither spoke another word.
He heard the door shut softly behind him. The unspoken answer in his
mind was in two words--two common little adjectives: "Coward and
selfish!"

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