LITMIR.BIZ

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two this thing came over him with a degree of intelligibility scarcely captured by his words. the man’s qualities—his quietness, peace, slowness, silence—betrayed somehow that his inner life dwelt in a region vast and simple, shaping even his exterior presentment with its own huge characteristics, a region wherein the distress of the modern world’s vulgar, futile strife could not exist—more, could never have existed. the Irishman, who had never realized exactly why the life of Today to him was dreadful, now understood it in the presence of this simple being with his atmosphere of stately power. He was like a child, but a child of some pre-existence utterly primitive and utterly forgotten; of no particular age, but of some state that antedates all ages; simple in some noble, concentrated sense that was prodigious, almost terrific. To stand thus beside him was to stand beside a mighty silent fire, steadily glowing, a fire that fed all lesser flames, because itself close to the central source of fire. He felt warmed, lighted, vivified—made whole. the presence of this stranger took him at a single gulp, as it were, straight into Nature—a Nature that was alive. the man was part of her. Never before had he stood so close and intimate. Cities and civilization fled away like transient dreams, ashamed. the sun and moon and stars moved up and touched him.

      This word of lightning explanation, at least, came to him as he breathed the other’s atmosphere and presence. the region where this man’s spirit fed was at the center, whereas today men were active with a scattered, superficial cleverness, at the periphery. He even understood that his giant gait and movements were small outer evidences of this inner fact, wholly in keeping. That blundering stupidity, half glorious, half pathetic, with which he moved among his fellows was a physical expression of this psychic fact that his spirit had never learned the skilful tricks taught by civilization to lesser men. It was, in a way, awe-inspiring, for he was now at last driving back full speed for his own region and—escape.

      O’Malley knew himself caught, swept off his feet, momentarily driving with him….

      The singular deep satisfaction of it, standing there with these two in the first moment, he describes as an entirely new sensation in his life—an awareness that he was “complete.” the boy touched his side and he let an arm steal round to shelter him. the huge, bearded parent rose in his massiveness against his other shoulder, hemming him in. For a second he knew a swift and curious alarm, passing however almost at once into the thrill of a rare happiness. In that moment, it was not the passengers or the temper of Today who rejected them; it was they who rejected the world: because they knew another and superior one—more, they were in it.

      Then, without turning, the big man spoke, the words in heavy accented English coming out laboriously and with slow, exceeding difficulty as though utterance was a supreme effort.

      “You…come…with…us?” It was like stammering almost. Still more was it like essential inarticulateness struggling into an utterance foreign to it—unsuited. the voice was a deep and windy bass, merging with the noise of the sea below.

      “I’m going to the Caucasus,” O’Malley replied; “up into the old, old mountains, to—see things—to look about—to search—” He really wanted to say much more, but the words lay dead or beyond reach.

      The big man nodded slowly. the boy listened.

      “And yourself—?” asked the Irishman, hardly knowing why he faltered and trembled.

      The other smiled; a beauty that was beyond all language passed with that smile across the great face in the dusk.

      “Some of us…of ours…” he spoke very slowly, very brokenly, quarrying out the words with real labor, “…still survive…out there…. We…now go back. So very…few…remain…. And you—come with us…”

      VI

      “In the spiritual Nature-Kingdom, man must everywhere seek his peculiar territory and climate, his best occupation, his particular neighborhood, in order to cultivate a Paradise in idea; this is the right system…. Paradise is scattered over the whole earth, and that is why it has become so unrecognizable.”

      —NOVALIS, Translated by U.C.B.

      “Man began in instinct and will end in instinct. Instinct is genius in Paradise, before the period of self-abstraction (self-knowledge).”

      —Ibid

      “Look here, old man,” he said to me, “I’ll just tell you what it was, because I know you won’t laugh.”

      We were lying under the big trees behind the Round Pond when he reached this point, and his direct speech was so much more graphic than the written account that I use it. He was in one of his rare moments of confidence, excited, hat off, his shabby tie escaping from the shabbier grey waistcoat. One sock lay untidily over his boot, showing bare leg.

      Children’s voices floated to us from the waterside as though from very far away, the nursemaids and perambulators seemed tinged with unreality, the London towers were clouds, its roar the roar of waves. I saw only the ship’s deck, the grey and misty sea, the uncouth figures of the two who leaned with him over the bulwarks.

      “Go on,” I said encouragingly; “out with it!”

      “It must seem incredible to most men, but, by Gad, I swear to you, it lifted me off my feet, and I’ve never known anything like it. the mind of that great fellow got hold of me, included me. He made the inanimate world—sea, stars, wind, woods, and mountains—seem all alive. the entire blessed universe was conscious—and he came straight out of it to get me. I understood things about myself I’ve never understood before—and always funked rather;—especially that feeling of being out of touch with my kind, of finding no one in the world today who speaks my language quite—that, and the utter, God-forsaken loneliness it makes me suffer—”

      “You always have been a lonely beggar really,” I said, noting the hesitation that thus on the very threshold checked his enthusiasm, quenching the fire in those light-blue eyes. “Tell me. I shall understand right enough—or try to.”

      “God bless you,” he answered, leaping to the sympathy, “I believe you will. There’s always been this primitive, savage thing in me that keeps others away—puts them off, and so on. I’ve tried to smother it a bit sometimes—”

      “Have you?” I laughed.

      “‘Tried to,’ I said, because I’ve always been afraid of its getting out too much and bustin’ my life all to pieces:—something lonely and untamed and sort of outcast from cities and money and all the thick suffocating civilization of today; and I’ve only saved myself by getting off into wildernesses and free places where I could give it a breathin’ chance without running the risk of being locked up as a crazy man.” He laughed as he said it, but his heart was in the words. “You know all that; haven’t I told you often enough? It’s not a morbid egoism, or what their precious academic books so stupidly call ‘degenerate,’ for in me it’s damned vital and terrific, and moves always to action. It’s made me an alien and—and—”

      “Something far stronger than the Call of the Wild, isn’t it?”

      He fairly snorted. “Sure as we’re both alive here sittin’ on this sooty London grass,” he cried. “This Call of the Wild they prate about is just the call a fellow hears to go on ‘the bust’ when he’s had too much town and’s got bored—a call to a little bit of license and excess to safety-valve him down. What I feel,” his voice turned grave and quiet again, “is quite a different affair. It’s the call of real hunger—the call of food. They want to let off steam, but I want to take in stuff to prevent—starvation.” He whispered the word, putting his lips close to my face.

      A pause fell between us, which I was the first to break.

      “This is not your century! That’s what you really mean,” I suggested patiently.

      “Not my century!” he caught me up, flinging handfuls of faded grass in the air between us and watching it fall; “why, it’s not even my world! And I loathe, loathe the spirit of today with its cheap-jack inventions, and smother of sham universal culture, its murderous superfluities and sordid vulgarity,

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