The Centaur

A >> Algernon Blackwood >> The Centaur

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"Don't ye see what a foolish question that is," he said quietly, "and
how impossible to satisfy, inviting that leap of invention which can be
only an imaginative lie...? I can only tell you," and the breeze brought
to us the voices of children from the Round Pond where they sailed
their ships of equally wonderful adventure, "that my own longing
became this: to go with him, to know what he knew, to live where he
lived--forever."

"And the alarm you said you felt?"

He hesitated.

"That," he added, "was a kind of mistake. To go involved, I felt, an
inner catastrophe that might be Death--that it would be out of the body,
I mean, or a going backwards. In reality, it was a going forwards and a
way to Life."

VII

And it was just before the steamer made Naples that the jolly Captain
unwittingly helped matters forward a good deal. For it was his ambition
to include in the safe-conduct of his vessel the happy-conduct also of
his passengers. He liked to see them contented and of one accord, a big
family, and he noted--or had word brought to him perhaps--that there were
one or two whom the attitude of the majority left out in the cold.

It may have been--O'Malley wondered without actually asking--that
the man who shared the cabin with the strangers made some appeal for
re-arrangement, but in any case Captain Burgenfelder approached the
Irishman that afternoon on the bridge and asked if he would object
to having them in his stateroom for the balance of the voyage.

"Your present gompanion geds off at Naples," he said. "Berhaps you would
not object. I think--they seem lonely. You are friendly with them. They
go alzo to Batoum?"

This proposal for close quarters gave him pause. He knew a moment or two
of grave hesitation, yet without time to analyze it. Then, driven by a
sudden decision of the heart that knew no revision of reason, he agreed.

"I had better, perhaps, suggest it to see if they are willing," he said
the next minute, hedging.

"I already ask him dat."

"Oh, you have! And he would like it--not object, I mean?" he added, aware
of a subtle sense of half-frightened pleasure.

"Pleased and flattered on the contrary," was the reply, as he handed him
the glasses to look at Ischia rising blue from the sea.

O'Malley felt as though his decision was somehow an act of
self-committal, almost grave. It meant that impulsively he accepted a
friendship which concealed in its immense attraction--danger. He had
taken the plunge.

The rush of it broke over him like a wave, setting free a tumult of very
deep emotion. He raised the glasses automatically to his eyes, but
looking through them he saw not Ischia nor the opening the Captain
explained the ship would make, heading that evening for Sicily. He saw
quite another picture that drew itself up out of himself--was thrown
up, rather, somewhat with violence, as upon a landscape of dream-scenery.
The lens of passionate yearning in himself, ever unsatisfied, focused
it against a background far, far away, in some faint distance that was
neither of space nor time, and might equally have been past as future.
Large figures he saw, shadowy yet splendid, that ran free-moving as
clouds over mighty hills, vital with the abundant strong life of a
younger world.... Yet never quite saw them, never quite overtook them,
for their speed and the manner of their motion bewildered the sight....

Moreover, though they evaded him in terms of physical definition he knew
a sense of curious, half-remembered familiarity. Some portion of his
hidden self, uncaught, unharnessed by anything in modern life, rose with
a passionate rush of joy and made after them--something in him untamed as
wind. His mind stood up, as it were, and shouted "I am coming." For he
saw himself not far behind, as a man, racing with great leaps to join
them ... yet never overtaking, never drawing close enough to see quite
clearly. The roar of their tramping shook the very blood in his ears....

His decision to accept the strangers had set free in his being something
that thus for the first time in his life--escaped.... Symbolically
in his mind this Escape had taken picture form....

The Captain's voice was asking for the glasses; with a wrench that
caused almost actual physical pain he tore himself away, letting this
herd of Flying Thoughts sink back into the shadows and disappear. With
sharp regret he saw them go--a regret for long, long, far-off things....

Turning, he placed the field-glasses carefully in that fat open hand
stretched out to receive them, and noted as he did so the thick, pink
fingers that closed about the strap, the heavy ring of gold, the band of
gilt about the sleeve. That wrought gold, those fleshy fingers, the
genial gutteral voice saying "T'anks" were symbols of an existence tamed
and artificial that caged him in again....

Then he went below and found that the lazy "drummer" who talked
harvest-machines to puzzled peasants had landed, and in his place an
assortment of indiscriminate clothing belonging to the big Russian and
his son lay scattered over the upper berth and upon the sofa-bed beneath
the port-hole.

VIII

"For my own part I find in some of these abnormal or supernormal facts
the strongest suggestions in favor of a superior consciousness being
possible. I doubt whether we shall ever understand some of them without
using the very letter of Fechner's conception of a great reservoir in
which the memories of earth's inhabitants are pooled and preserved, and
from which, when the threshold lowers or the valve opens, information
ordinarily shut out leaks into the mind of exceptional individuals among
us."

--WILLIAM JAMES, _A Pluralistic Universe_

And it was some hours later, while the ship made for the open sea, that
he told Dr. Stahl casually of the new arrangement and saw the change come
so suddenly across his face. Stahl stood back from the compass-box
whereon they leaned, and putting a hand upon his companion's shoulder,
looked a moment into his eyes. With surprise O'Malley noted that the pose
of cynical disbelief was gone; in its place was sympathy, interest,
kindness. The words he spoke came from his heart.

"Is that true?" he asked, as though the news disturbed him.

"Of course. Why not? Is there anything wrong?" He felt uneasy. The
doctor's manner confirmed the sense that he had done a rash thing.
Instantly the barrier between the two crumbled and he lost the first
feeling of resentment that his friends should be analyzed. The men thus
came together in unhindered sincerity.

"Only," said the doctor thoughtfully, half gravely, "that--I may have
done you a wrong, placed you, that is, in a position of--" he hesitated
an instant,--"of difficulty. It was I who suggested the change."

O'Malley stared at him.

"I don't understand you quite."

"It is this," continued the other, still holding him with his eyes. He
said it deliberately. "I have known you for some time, formed-er--an
opinion of your type of mind and being--a very rare and curious one,
interesting me deeply--"

"I wasn't aware you'd had me under the microscope," O'Malley laughed, but
restlessly.

"Though you felt it and resented it--justly, I may say--to the point of
sometimes avoiding me--"

"As doctor, scientist," put in O'Malley, while the other, ignoring the
interruption, continued in German:--

"I always had the secret hope, as 'doctor and scientist,' let us put it
then, that I might one day see you in circumstances that should bring
out certain latent characteristics I thought I divined in you. I wished
to observe you--your psychical being--under the stress of certain
temptations, favorable to these characteristics. Our brief voyages
together, though they have so kindly ripened our acquaintance into
friendship"--he put his hand again on the other's shoulder smiling,
while O'Malley replied with a little nod of agreement--"have, of course,
never provided the opportunity I refer to--"

"Ah--!"

"Until now!" the doctor added. "Until now."

Puzzled and interested the Irishman waited for him to go on, but the
man of science, who was now a ship's doctor, hesitated. He found it
difficult, apparently, to say what was in his thoughts.

"You refer, of course, though I hardly follow you quite--to our big
friends?" O'Malley helped him.

The adjective slipped out before he was aware of it. His companion's
expression admitted the accuracy of the remark. "You also see them--big,
then?" he said, quickly taking him up. He was not cross-questioning;
out of keen sympathetic interest he asked it.

"Sometimes, yes," the Irishman answered, more astonished. "Sometimes
only--"

"Exactly. Bigger than they really are; as though at times they gave
out--emanated--something that extended their appearance. Is that it?"

O'Malley, his confidence wholly won, more surprised, too, than he quite
understood, seized Stahl by the arm and drew him toward the rails. They
leaned over, watching the sea. A passenger, pacing the decks before
dinner, passed close behind them.

"But, doctor," he said in a hushed tone as soon as the steps had died
away, "you are saying things that I thought were half in my imagination
only, not true in the ordinary sense quite--your sense, I mean?"

For some moments the doctor made no reply. In his eyes a curious
steady gaze replaced the usual twinkle. When at length he spoke it was
evidently following a train of thought of his own, playing round a
subject he seemed half ashamed of and yet desired to state with direct
language.

"A being akin to yourself," he said in low tones, "only developed,
enormously developed; a Master in your own peculiar region, and a man
whose influence acting upon you at close quarters could not fail to
arouse the latent mind-storms"--he chose the word hesitatingly, as
though seeking for a better he could not find on the moment,--"always
brewing in you just below the horizon."

He turned and watched his companion's face keenly. O'Malley was too
impressed to feel annoyance.

"Well--?" he asked, feeling the adventure closing round him with quite a
new sense of reality. "Well?" he repeated louder. "Please go on. I'm not
offended, only uncommonly interested. You leave me in a fog, so far. I
think you owe me more than hints."

"I do," said the other simply. "About that man is a singular quality
too rare for language to have yet coined its precise description:
something that is essentially"--they had lapsed into German now, and he
used the German word--"_unheimlich_."

The Irishman started. He recognized this for truth. At the same time
the old resentment stirred a little in him, creeping into his reply.

"You have studied him closely then--had him, too, under the microscope?
In this short time?"

This time the answer did not surprise him, however.

"My friend," he heard, while the other turned from him and gazed out over
the misty sea, "I have not been a ship's doctor--always. I am one now
only because the leisure and quiet give me the opportunity to finish
certain work, recording work. For years I was in the H----"--he mentioned
the German equivalent for the Salpetriere--"years of research and
investigation into the astonishing vagaries of the human mind and
spirit--with certain results, followed later privately, that it is now my
work to record. And among many cases that might well seem--er--beyond
either credence or explanation,"--he hesitated again slightly--"I came
across one, one in a million, let us admit, that an entire section of my
work deals with under the generic term of _Urmenschen_."

"Primitive men," O'Malley snapped him up, translating. Through his
growing bewilderment ran also a growing uneasiness shot strangely
with delight. Intuitively he divined what was coming.

"Beings," the doctor corrected him, "not men. The prefix _Ur-_, moreover,
I use in a deeper sense than is usually attached to it as in _Urwald_,
_Urwelt_, and the like. An _Urmensch_ in the world today must suggest a
survival of an almost incredible kind--a kind, too, utterly inadmissible
and inexplicable to the materialist perhaps--"

"Paganistic?" interrupted the other sharply, joy and fright rising over
him.

"Older, older by far," was the rejoinder, given with a curious hush and a
lowering of the voice.

The suggestion rushed into full possession of O'Malley's mind. There rose
in him something that claimed for his companions the sea, the wind, the
stars--tumultuous and terrific. But he said nothing. The conception,
blown into him thus for the first time at full strength, took all his
life into its keeping. No energy was left over for mere words. The
doctor, he was aware, was looking at him, the passion of discovery and
belief in his eyes. His manner kindled. It was the hidden Stahl emerging.

"... a type, let me put it," he went on in a voice whose very steadiness
thrilled his listener afresh, "that in its strongest development would
experience in the world today the loneliness of a complete and absolute
exile. A return to humanity, you see, of some unexpended power of
mythological values...."

"Doctor...!"

The shudder passed through him and away almost as soon as it came. Again
the sea grew splendid, the thunder of the waves held voices calling, and
the foam framed shapes and faces, wildly seductive, though fugitive as
dreams. The words he had heard moved him profoundly. He remembered how
the presence of the stranger had turned the world alive.

He knew what was coming, too, and gave the lead direct, while yet
half afraid to ask the question.

"So my friend--this big 'Russian'--?"

"I have known before, yes, and carefully studied."

IX

"Is it not just possible that there is a mode of being as much
transcending Intelligence and Will as these transcend mechanical
motion?"

--HERBERT SPENCER, _First Principles_

The two men left the rail and walked arm in arm along the deserted deck,
speaking in lowered voices.

"He came first to us, brought by the keeper of an obscure hotel where he
was staying, as a case of lapse of memory--loss of memory, I should say,
for it was complete. He was unable to say who he was, whence he came, or
to whom he belonged. Of his land or people we could learn nothing. His
antecedents were an utter blank. Speech he had practically none of his
own--nothing but the merest smattering of many tongues, a word here, a
word there. Utterance, indeed, of any kind was exceedingly difficult to
him. For years, evidently, he had wandered over the world, companionless
among men, seeking his own, finding no place where to lay his head.
People, it seemed, both men and women, kept him at arm's-length, feeling
afraid; the keeper of the little hotel was clearly terrified. This
quality he had that I mentioned just now, repelled human beings--even in
the Hospital it was noticeable--and placed him in the midst of humanity
thus absolutely alone. It is a quality more rare than"--hesitating,
searching for a word--"purity, one almost extinct today, one that I have
never before or since come across in any other being--hardly ever, that
is to say," he qualified the sentence, glancing significantly at his
companion.

"And the boy?" O'Malley asked quickly, anxious to avoid any discussion
of himself.

"There was no boy then. He has found him since. He may find others
too--possibly!" The Irishman drew his arm out, edging away imperceptibly.
That shiver of joy reached him from the air and sea, perhaps.

"And two years ago," continued Dr. Stahl, as if nothing had happened,
"he was discharged, harmless"--he lingered a moment on the word, "if not
cured. He was to report to us every six months. He has never done so."

"You think he remembers you?"

"No. It is quite clear that he has lapsed back completely again into
the--er--state whence he came to us, that unknown world where he
passed his youth with others of his kind, but of which he has been able
to reveal no single detail to us, nor we to trace the slightest clue."

They stopped beneath the covered portion of the deck, for the mist
had now turned to rain. They leaned against the smoking-room outer
wall. In O'Malley's mind the thoughts and feelings plunged and reared.
Only with difficulty did he control himself.

"And this man, you think," he asked with outward calmness, "is of--of
my kind?"

"'Akin,' I said. I suggest--" But O'Malley cut him short.

"So that you engineered our sharing a cabin with a view to putting
him again--putting us both--under the microscope?"

"My scientific interest was very strong," Dr. Stahl replied carefully.
"But it is not too late to change. I offer you a bed in my own roomy
cabin on the promenade deck. Also, I ask your forgiveness."

The Irishman, large though his imaginative creed was, felt oddly checked,
baffled, stupefied by what he had heard. He knew perfectly well what
Stahl was driving at, and that revelations of another kind were yet
to follow. What bereft him of very definite speech was this new fact
slowly awakening in his consciousness which hypnotized him, as it were,
with its grandeur. It seemed to portend that his own primitive yearnings,
so-called, grew out of far deeper foundations than he had yet dreamed
of even. Stahl, should he choose to listen, meant to give him
explanation, quasi-scientific explanation. This talk about a survival of
"unexpended mythological values" carried him off his feet. He knew it was
true. Veiled behind that carefully chosen phrase was something more--a
truth brilliantly discovered. He knew, too, that it bit at the
platform-boards upon which his personality, his sanity, his very life,
perhaps, rested--his modern life.

"I forgive you, Dr. Stahl," he heard himself saying with a deceptive
calmness of voice as they stood shoulder to shoulder in that dark corner,
"for there is really nothing to forgive. The characteristics of these
_Urmenschen_ you describe attract me very greatly. Your words merely give
my imagination a letter of introduction to my reason. They burrow
among the foundations of my life and being. At least--you have done
me no wrong...." He knew the words were wild, impulsive, yet he could
find no better. Above all things he wished to conceal his rising, grand
delight.

"I thank you," Stahl said simply, yet with a certain confusion. "I--felt
I owed you this explanation--er--this confession."

"You wished to warn me?"

"I wished to say 'Be careful' rather. I say it now--Be careful! I give
you this invitation to share my cabin for the remainder of the voyage,
and I urge you to accept it." The offer was from the heart, while the
scientific interest in the man obviously half hoped for a refusal.

"You think harm might come to me?"

"Not physically. The man is gentle and safe in every way."

"But there _is_ danger--in your opinion?" insisted the other.

"There _is_ danger--"

"That his influence may make me as himself--an _Urmensch_?"

"That he may--get you," was the curious answer, given steadily after
a moment's pause.

Again the words thrilled O'Malley to the core of his delighted,
half-frightened soul. "You really mean that?" he asked again; "as 'doctor
and scientist,' you mean it?"

Stahl replied with a solemn anxiety in eyes and voice. "I mean that you
have in yourself that 'quality' which makes the proximity of this 'being'
dangerous: in a word that he may take you--er--with him."

"Conversion?"

"Appropriation."

They moved further up the deck together for some minutes in silence, but
the Irishman's feelings, irritated by the man's prolonged evasion,
reached a degree of impatience that was almost anger. "Let us be more
definite," he exclaimed at length a trifle hotly. "You mean that I might
go insane?"

"Not in the ordinary sense," came the answer without a sign of annoyance
or hesitation; "but that something might happen to you--something that
science could not recognize and medical science could not treat--"

Then O'Malley interrupted him with the vital question that rushed
out before he could consider its wisdom or legitimacy.

"Then what really is he--this man, this 'being' whom you call a
'survival,' and who makes you fear for my safety. Tell me _exactly_ what
he is?"

They found themselves just then by the doctor's cabin, and Stahl,
pushing the door open, led him in. Taking the sofa for himself, he
pointed to an armchair opposite.

X

"Superstition is outside reason; so is revelation."

--OLD SAYING

And O'Malley understood that he had pressed the doctor to the verge of
confessing some belief that he was ashamed to utter or to hold, something
forced upon him by his out-of-the-way experience of life to which his
scientific training said peremptorily "No." Further, that he watched him
keenly all the time, noting the effect his words produced.

"He is not a human being at all," he continued with a queer thin whisper
that conveyed a gravity of conviction singularly impressive, "in the
sense in which you and I are accustomed to use the term. His inner being
is not shaped, as his outer body, upon quite--human lines. He is a Cosmic
Being--a direct expression of cosmic life. A little bit, a fragment, of
the Soul of the World, and in that sense a survival--a survival of her
youth."

The Irishman, as he listened to these utterly unexpected words, felt
something rise within him that threatened to tear him asunder. Whether
it was joy or terror, or compounded strangely of the two, he could not
tell. It seemed as if he stood upon the edge of hearing something--spoken
by a man who was no mere dreamer like himself--that would explain the
world, himself, and all his wildest cravings. He both longed and feared
to hear it. In his hidden and most secret thoughts, those thoughts he
never uttered to another, this deep belief in the Earth as a conscious,
sentient, living Being had persisted in spite of all the forces education
and modern life had turned against it. It seemed in him an undying
instinct, an unmovable conviction, though he hardly dared acknowledge it
even to himself.

He had always "dreamed" the Earth alive, a mothering organism to
humanity; and himself, _via_ his love of Nature, in some sweet close
relation to her that other men had forgotten or ignored. Now, therefore,
to hear Stahl talk of Cosmic Beings, fragments of the Soul of the World,
and "survivals of her early life" was like hearing a great shout of
command to his soul to come forth and share it in complete
acknowledgment.

He bit his lips, pinched himself, stared. Then he took the black cigar he
was aware was being handed to him, lit it with fingers that trembled
absurdly, and smoked as hard as though his sanity depended on his
finishing it in a prescribed time. Great clouds rose before his face. But
his soul within him came up with a flaming rush of speed, shouting,
singing....

There was enough ash to knock off into the bronze tray beside him before
either said a word. He watched the little operation as closely as though
he were aiming a rifle. The ash, he saw, broke firmly. "This must be a
really good cigar," he thought to himself, for as yet he had not been
conscious of tasting it. The ash-tray, he also saw, was a kind of nymph,
her spread drapery forming the receptacle. "I must get one of those," he
thought. "I wonder what they cost." Then he puffed violently again. The
doctor had risen and was pacing the cabin floor slowly over by the red
curtain that concealed the bunk. O'Malley absent-mindedly watched
him, and as he did so the words he had heard kept on roaring at the
back of his mind.

And then, while silence still held the room,--swift, too, as a second
although it takes time to write--flashed through him a memory of Fechner,
the German philosopher who held that the Universe was everywhere
consciously alive, and that the Earth was the body of a living Entity,
and that the World-Soul or Cosmic Consciousness is something more than a
picturesque dream of the ancients....

The doctor came to anchor again on the sofa opposite. To his great relief
he was the first to break the silence, for O'Malley simply did not know
how or where to begin.

"We know today--_you_ certainly know for I've read it accurately
described in your books--that the human personality can extend itself
under certain conditions called abnormal. It can project portions of
itself, show itself even at a distance, operate away from the central
covering body. In exactly similar fashion may the Being of the Earth
have projected portions of herself in the past. Of such great powers or
beings there may be conceivably a survival ... a survival of a hugely
remote period when her Consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in
shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing
humanity ... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a
flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all
sorts and kinds...."

And then, suddenly, as though he had been deliberately giving his
imagination rein yet now regretted it, his voice altered, his manner
assumed a shade of something colder. He shifted the key, as though to
another aspect of his belief. The man was talking swiftly of his
experiences in the big and private hospitals. He was describing _the_
very belief to which he had first found himself driven--the belief that
had opened the door to so much more. So far as O'Malley could follow it
in his curiously excited condition of mind, it was little more or less
than a belief he himself had often played lovingly with--the theory that
a man has a fluid or etheric counterpart of himself which is obedient to
strong desire and can, under certain conditions, be detached--projected
in a shape dictated by that desire.

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