The Centaur

A >> Algernon Blackwood >> The Centaur

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But Stahl, once in the privacy of his cabin, judging by the glance
visible on his face ere he closed the door, may probably have known a
very different thought. And possibly he uttered it below his breath. A
sigh most certainly escaped his lips, a sigh half sadness, half relief.
For O'Malley remembered it afterwards.

"Beautiful, foolish dreamer among men! But, thank God, harmless--to
others and--himself."

And soon afterwards O'Malley also went to his cabin. Before sleep took
him he lay deep in a mood of sadness--almost as though he had heard his
friend's unspoken thought. He realized the insuperable difficulties
that lay before him. The world would think him "mad but harmless."

Then, with full sleep, he slipped across that sunrise and found the
old-world Garden. He held the eternal password.

"I can but try...!"

XLV

And here the crowded, muddled notebooks come to an end. The rest was
action--and inevitable disaster.

The brief history of O'Malley's mad campaign may be imagined. To a writer
who found interest in the study of forlorn hopes and their leaders, a
detailed record of this particular one might seem worth while. For me
personally it is too sad and too pathetic. I cannot bring myself to tell,
much less to analyze the story of a broken heart, when that heart and
story are those of a close and deeply admired intimate, a man who gave me
genuine love and held my own.

Besides, although a curious chapter in uncommon human nature, it
is not by any means a new one. It is the true story of many a poet and
dreamer since the world began, though perhaps not often told nor even
guessed. And only the poets themselves, especially the little poets who
cannot utter half the fire that consumes them, may know the searing
pain and passion and the true inwardness of it all.

Most of those months it chanced I was away, and only fragments of
the foolish enterprise could reach me. But nothing, I think, could have
stopped him, nor any worldly selfish wisdom made him even pause.
The thing possessed him utterly; it had to flame its way out as best it
could. To high and low, he preached by every means in his power the
Simple Life; he preached the mystical life as well--that the true
knowledge and the true progress are within, that they both pertain to
the inner being and have no chief concern with external things. He
preached it wildly, lopsidedly, in or out of season, knowing no half
measures. His enthusiasm obscured his sense of proportion and the
extravagance hid the germ of truth that undeniably lay in his message.

To put the movement on its feet at first he realized every possession
that he had. It left him penniless, if he was not almost so already, and
in the end it left him smothered beneath the glory of his blinding and
unutterable Dream. He never understood that suggestion is more effective
than a sledge-hammer. His faith was no mere little seed of mustard,
but a full-fledged forest singing its message in a wind of thunder. He
shouted it aloud to the world.

I think the acid disappointment that lies beneath that trite old phrase
"a broken heart" was never really his; for indeed it seemed that his
cruel, ludicrous failure merely served to strengthen hope and purpose by
making him seek for a better method of imparting what he had to say.
In the end he learned the bitter lesson to the full. But faith never
trailed a single feather. Those jeering audiences in the Park; those
empty benches in many a public hall, those brief, ignoring paragraphs in
the few newspapers that filled a vacant corner by labeling him crank and
long-haired prophet; even the silence that greeted his pamphlets, his
letters to the Press, and all the rest, hurt him for others rather than
for himself. His pain was altruistic, never personal. His dream and
motive, his huge, unwieldy compassion, his genuine love for humanity, all
were big enough for that.

And so, I think, he missed the personal mortification that disappointment
so deep might bring to dreamers with an aim less unadulteratedly
pure. His eye was single to the end. He attributed only the highest
motives to all who offered help. The very quacks and fools who flocked
to his banner, eager to exploit their smaller fads by joining them to his
own, he welcomed, only regretting that, as Stahl had warned him, he
could not attract a better class of mind. He did not even see through
the manoeuvres of the occasional women of wealth and title who sought
to conceal their own mediocrity by advertising in their drawing-rooms
the eccentricities of men like himself. And to the end he had the courage
of his glorious convictions.

The change of method that he learned at last, moreover, was
characteristic of this faith and courage.

"I've begun at the wrong end," he said; "I shall never reach men through
their intellects. Their brains today are occupied by the machine-made
gods of civilization. I cannot change the direction of their thoughts and
lusts from outside; the momentum is too great to stop that way. I must
get at them from within. To reach their hearts, the new ideas must rise
up _from within_. I see the truer way. I must do it _from the other
side_. It must come to them--in Beauty."

For he was to the last convinced that death would merge him in the
being of the Earth's Collective Consciousness, and that, lost in her deep
eternal beauty, he thus might reach the hearts of men in some stray
glimpse of nature's loveliness, and register his flaming message. He
loved to quote from Adonais:

"He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own.
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world..."

And this thought, phrased in a dozen different ways, was always on his
lips. To dream was right and useful, even to dream alone, because the
beauty of the dream must add to the beauty of the Whole of which it is a
part and an interpretation. It was not really lost or vain. All must come
back in time to feed the world. He had known gracious thoughts of Earth
too big to utter, almost too big to hold. Such thoughts could not ever be
really told; they were incommunicable. For the mystical revelation is
incommunicable. It has authority only for him who feels it. A corporate
revelation is impossible. Only those among men could know, in whose
hearts it rose intuitively and made its presence felt as innate ideas.
Inspiration brings it, and beauty is the vehicle. Their hearts must
change before their minds could be reached.

"I can work it better from the other side--from that old, old Garden
which is the Mother's heart. In this way I can help at any rate...!"

XLVI

It was at the close of a wet and foggy autumn that we met again, winter
in the air, all London desolate; and his wasted, forlorn appearance told
me the truth at once. Only the passionate eagerness of voice and manner
were there to prove that the spirit had not weakened. There glowed within
a fire that showed itself in the translucent shining of the eyes and
face.

"I've made one great discovery, old man," he exclaimed with old,
familiar, high enthusiasm, "one great discovery at least."

"You've made so many," I answered cheerfully, while my real thoughts were
busy with his bodily state of health. For his appearance shocked me. He
stood among a litter of papers, books, neckties, nailed boots, knapsacks,
maps and what-not, that rolled upon the floor from the mouth of the
Willesden canvas sack. His old grey flannel suit hung literally upon a
bag of bones; all the life there was seemed concentrated in his face and
eyes--those far-seeing, light blue eyes. They were darker than usual now,
eyes like the sea, I thought. His hair, long and disordered,
tumbled over his forehead. He was pale, and at the same time flushed. It
was almost a disembodied spirit that I saw.

"You've made so many. I love to hear them. Is this one finer than the
others?"

He looked a moment at me through and through, almost uncannily. He looked
in reality beyond me. It was something else he saw, and in the dusk I
turned involuntarily.

"Simpler," he said quickly, "much simpler."

He moved up close beside me, whispering. Was it all imagination that a
breath of flowers came with him? There was certainly a curious fragrance
in the air, wild and sweet like orchards in the spring.

"And it is--?"

"That the Garden's _everywhere!_ You needn't go to the distant Caucasus
to find it. It's all about this old London town, and in these foggy
streets and dingy pavements. It's even in this cramped, undusted room.
Now at this moment, while that lamp flickers and the thousands go to
sleep. The gates of horn and ivory are here," he tapped his breast. "And
here the flowers, the long, clean open hills, the giant herd, the nymphs,
the sunshine and the gods!"

So attached was he now to that little room in Paddington where his books
and papers lay, that when the curious illness that had caught him grew so
much worse, and the attacks of the nameless fever that afflicted him
turned serious, I hired a bedroom for him in the same house. And it was
in that poky, cage-like den he breathed his last.

His illness I called curious, his fever nameless, because they really
were so and puzzled every one. He simply faded out of life, it seemed;
there was no pain, no sleeplessness, no suffering of any physical kind.
He uttered no complaint, nor were there symptoms of any known
disorder.

"Your friend is sound organically," the doctor told me when I pressed him
for the truth there on the stairs, "sound as a bell. He wants the open
air and plenty of wholesome food, that's all. His body is ill-nourished.
His trouble is mental--some deep and heavy disappointment doubtless. If
you can change the current of his thoughts, awaken interest in common
things, and give him change of scene, perhaps--" He shrugged his
shoulders and looked very grave.

"You think he's dying?"

"I think, yes, he is dying."

"From--?"

"From lack of living pure and simple," was the answer. "He has lost
all hold on life."

"He has abundant vitality still."

"Full of it. But it all goes--elsewhere. The physical organism gets
none of it."

"Yet mentally," I asked, "there's nothing actually wrong?"

"Not in the ordinary sense. The mind is clear and active. So far as I
can test it, the process of thought is healthy and undamaged. It seems
to me--"

He hesitated a moment on the doorstep while the driver wound the
motor handle. I waited with a sinking heart for the rest of the sentence.

"...like certain cases of nostalgia I have known--very rare and very
difficult to deal with. Acute and vehement nostalgia, yes, sometimes
called a broken heart," he added, pausing another instant at the carriage
door, "in which the entire stream of a man's inner life flows to some
distant place, or person, or--or to some imagined yearning that he
craves to satisfy."

"To a dream?"

"It _might_ be even that," he answered slowly, stepping in. "It might be
spiritual. The religious and poetic temperament are most open to it,
_and_ the most difficult to deal with when afflicted." He emphasized the
little word as though the doubt he felt was far less strong than the
conviction he only half concealed. "If you would save him, try to change
the direction of his thoughts. There is nothing--in all honesty I must
say it--nothing that I can do to help."

And then, pulling at the grey tuft on his chin and looking keenly at me a
moment over his glasses,--"Those flowers," he said hesitatingly, "you
might move those flowers from the room, perhaps. Their perfume is a
trifle strong ... It might be better." Again he looked sharply at me.
There was an odd expression in his eyes. And in my heart there was an
odd sensation too, so odd that I found myself bereft a moment of any
speech at all, and when my tongue became untied, the carriage was
already disappearing down the street. For in that dingy sick-room there
were no flowers at all, yet the perfume of woods and fields and open
spaces had reached the doctor too, and obviously perplexed him.

"Change the direction of his thoughts!" I went indoors, wondering
how any honest and even half-unselfish friend, knowing what I knew,
could follow such advice. With what but the lowest motive, of keeping
him alive for my own happiness, could I seek to change his thoughts
of some imagined joy and peace to the pain and sordid facts of an
earthly existence that he loathed?

But when I turned I saw the tousled yellow-headed landlady standing
in the breach. Mrs. Heath stopped me in the hall to inquire whether I
could say "anythink abart the rent per'aps?" Her manner was defiant. I
found three months were owing.

"It's no good arsking 'im," she said, though not unkindly on the
whole. "I'm sick an' tired of always being put off. He talks about the
gawds and a Mr. Pan, or some such gentleman who he says will look
after it all. But I never sees 'im--not this Mr. Pan. And his stuff up
there," jerking her head toward the little room, "ain't worth a
Sankey-moody 'ymn-book, take the lot of it at cost!"

I reassured her. It was impossible to help smiling. For some minds,
I reflected, a Sankey hymn-book might hold dreams that were every bit
as potent as his own, and far less troublesome. But that "Mr. Pan, or
some such gentleman" should serve as a "reference" between lodger and
landlady was an unwitting comment on the modern point of view that
made me want to cry rather than to laugh. O'Malley and Mrs. Heath
between them had made a profounder criticism than they knew.

* * * * *

And so by slow degrees he went, leaving the outer fury for the inner
peace. The center of consciousness gradually shifted from the transient
form which is the true ghost, to the deeper, permanent state which is
the eternal reality. For this was how he phrased it to me in one of our
last, strange talks. He watched his own withdrawal.

In bed he would lie for hours with fixed and happy eyes, staring
apparently at nothing, the expression on his face quite radiant. The
pulse sank often dangerously low; he scarcely seemed to breathe; yet it
was never complete unconsciousness or trance. My voice, when I found the
heart to try and coax his own for speech, would win him back. The eyes
would then grow dimmer, losing their happier light, as he turned to the
outer world to look at me.

"The pull is so tremendous now," he whispered; "I was far, so far
away, in the deep life of Earth. Why do you bring me back to all these
little pains? I can do nothing here; _there_ I am of use..."

He spoke so low I had to bend my head to catch the words. It was
very late at night and for hours I had been watching by his side. Outside
an ugly yellow fog oppressed the town, but about him like an atmosphere
I caught again that fragrance as of trees and flowers. It was too
faint for any name--that fugitive, mild perfume one meets upon bare
hills and round the skirts of forests. It was somehow, I fancied, in the
very breath.

"Each time the effort to return is greater. In there I am complete and
full of power. I can work and send my message back so splendidly. Here,"
he glanced down at his wasted body with a curious smile, "I am only
on the fringe--it's pain and failure. All so ineffective."

That other look came back into the eyes, more swiftly than before.

"I thought you might like to speak, to tell me--something," I said,
keeping the tears with difficulty from my voice. "Is there no one you
would like to see?"

He shook his head slowly, and gave the peculiar answer:

"They're all in there."

"But Stahl, perhaps--if I could get him here?"

An expression of gentle disapproval crossed his face, then melted
softly into a wistful tenderness as of a child.

"He's not there--yet," he whispered, "but he will come too in the
end. In sleep, I think, he goes there even now."

"Where are you _really_ then?" I ventured, "And where is it you go to?"

The answer came unhesitatingly; there was no doubt or searching.

"Into myself, my real and deeper self, and so beyond it into her--the
Earth. Where all the others are--all, all, all."

And then he frightened me by sitting up in bed abruptly. His eyes
stared past me--out beyond the close confining walls. The movement
was so startling with its suddenness and vigor that I shrank back a
moment. The head was sideways. He was intently listening.

"Hark!" he whispered. "They are calling me! Do you hear...?"

The look of joy that broke over the face like sunshine made me hold
my breath. Something in his low voice thrilled me beyond all I have
ever known. I listened too. Only the rumble of the traffic down the
distant main street broke the silence, the rattle of a nearer cart, and
the footsteps of a few pedestrians. No other noises came across the
night. There was no wind. Thick yellow fog muffled everything.

"I hear nothing," I answered softly. "What is it that _you_ hear?"

And, making no reply, he presently lay down again among the pillows, that
look of joy and glory still upon his face. It lay there to the end like
sunrise.

The fog came in so thickly through the window that I rose to close
it. He never closed that window, and I hoped he would not notice. For
a sound of wretched street-music was coming nearer--some beggar playing
dismally upon a penny whistle--and I feared it would disturb him. But in
a flash he was up again.

"No, no!" he cried, raising his voice for the first time that night. "Do
not shut it. I shan't be able to hear then. Let all the air come in. Open
it wider... wider! I love that sound!"

"The fog--"

"There is no fog. It's only sun and flowers and music. Let them in.
Don't you hear it now?" he added. And, more to bring him peace than
anything else, I bowed my head to signify agreement. For the last
confusion of the mind, I saw, was upon him, and he made the outer
world confirm some imagined detail of his inner dream. I drew the sash
down lower, covering his body closely with the blankets. He flung them
off impatiently at once. The damp and freezing night rushed in upon
us like a presence. It made me shudder, but O'Malley only raised himself
upon one elbow to taste it better, and--to listen.

Then, waiting patiently for the return of the quiet, trance-like state
when I might cover him again, I moved toward the window and looked
out. The street was empty, save for that beggar playing vilely on his
penny whistle. The wretch came to a standstill immediately before the
house. The lamplight fell from the room upon his tattered, broken
figure. I could not see his face. He groped and felt his way.

Outside that homeless wanderer played his penny pipe in the night
of cold and darkness.

Inside the Dreamer listened, dreaming of his gods and garden, his
great Earth Mother, his visioned life of peace and simple things with a
living Nature...

And I felt somehow that player watched us. I made an angry sign to
him to go. But it was the sudden touch upon my arm that made me
turn round with such a sudden start that I almost cried aloud. O'Malley
in his night-clothes stood close against me on the floor, slight as a
spirit, eyes a-shine, lips moving faintly into speech through the most
wonderful smile a human face has ever shown me.

"Do not send him away," he whispered, joy breaking from him like
a light, "but tell him that I love it. Go out and thank him. Tell him I
hear and understand, and say that I am coming. Will you...?"

Something within me whirled. It seemed that I was lifted from my
feet a moment. Some tide of power rushed from his person to my own.
The room was filled with blinding light. But in my heart there rose a
great emotion that combined tears and joy and laughter all at once.

"The moment you are back in bed," I heard my voice like one speaking from
a distance, "I'll go--"

The momentary, wild confusion passed as suddenly as it came. I
remember he obeyed at once. As I bent down to tuck the clothes about
him, that fragrance as of flowers and open spaces rose about my bending
face like incense--bewilderingly sweet.

And the next second I was standing in the street. The man who played
upon the pipe, I saw, was blind. His hand and fingers were curiously
large.

I was already close, ready to press all that my pockets held into his
hand--ay, and far more than merely pockets held because O'Malley
said he loved the music--when something made me turn my head away.
I cannot say precisely what it was, for first it seemed a tapping at the
window of his room behind me, and then a little noise within the room
itself, and next--more curious than either,--a feeling that something
came out rushing past me through the air. It whirled and shouted as it
went...

I only remember clearly that in the very act of turning, and while my
look still held that beggar's face within the field of vision, I saw the
sightless eyes turn bright a moment as though he opened them and saw.
He did most certainly smile; to that I swear.

But when I turned again the street immediately about me was empty.
The beggar-man was gone.

And down the pavement, moving swiftly through the curtain of fog,
I saw his vanishing figure. It was large and spreading. In the fringe of
light the lamp-post gave, its upper edges seemed far above the ground.
Someone else was with him. There were two figures.

I heard that sound of piping far away. It sounded faint and almost
flute-like in the air. And in the mud at my feet the money lay--spurned
utterly. I heard the last coins ring upon the pavement as they settled.
But in the room, when I got back, the body of Terence O'Malley had
ceased to breathe.

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