LITMIR.BIZ

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Beings. And of these distant and primitive manifestations, it is conceivable that one or two may still—here and there in places humanity has never stained—actually survive. This man is one of them.”

      He turned on the two electric lights behind him with an admirable air of finality. the extraordinary talk was at an end. He moved about the cabin, putting chairs straight and toying with the papers on his desk. Occasionally he threw a swift and searching glance at his companion, like a man who wished to note the effect of an attack.

      For, indeed, this was the impression that his listener retained above all else. This flood of wild, unorthodox, speculative ideas had been poured upon him helter-skelter with a purpose. And the abruptness of the climax was cleverly planned to induce impulsive, hot confession.

      But O’Malley found no words. He sat there in his armchair, passing his fingers through his tumbled hair. His inner turmoil was too much for speech or questions…and presently, when the gong for dinner rang noisily outside the cabin door, he rose abruptly and went out without a single word. Stahl turned to see him go. He merely nodded with a little smile.

      But he did not go to his stateroom. He walked the deck alone for a time, and when he reached the dining room, Stahl, he saw, had already come and gone. Halfway down the table, diagonally across, the face of the big Russian looked up occasionally at him and smiled, and every time he did so the Irishman felt a sense of mingled alarm and wonder greater than anything he had ever known in his life before. One of the great doors of life again had opened. the barriers of his heart broke away. He was no longer caged and manacled within the prison of a puny individuality. the world that so distressed him faded. the people in it were dolls. the fur-merchant, the Armenian priest, the tourists and the rest were mere automatic puppets, all made to scale—petty scale, amazingly dull, all exactly alike—tiny, unreal, half alive.

      The ship, meanwhile, he reflected with a joy that was passion, was being borne over the blue sea, and this sea lay spread upon the curved breast of the round and spinning earth. He, too, and the big Russian lay upon her breast, held close by gravity so-called, caught closer still, though, by something else besides. And his longings increased with his understanding. Stahl, wittingly or unwittingly, had given them an immense push forwards.

      XI

      “In scientific terms one can say: Consciousness is everywhere; it is awake when and wherever the bodily energy underlying the spiritual exceeds that degree of strength which we call the threshold. According to this, consciousness can be localized in time and space.”

      —FECHNER, Buchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode

      The offer of the cabin, meanwhile, remained open. In the solitude that O’Malley found necessary that evening he toyed with it, though knowing that he would never really accept.

      Like a true Celt his imagination took the main body of Stahl’s words and ensouled them with his own vivid temperament. There stirred in him this nameless and disquieting joy that wrought for itself a Body from material just beyond his thoughts—that region of enormous experience that ever fringes the consciousness of imaginative men. He took the picture at its face value, took it inside with his own thoughts, delighted in it, raised it, of course, very soon to a still higher scale. If he criticized at all it was with phrases like “The man’s a poet after all! Why, he’s got creative imagination!” To find his own intuitions endorsed, even half explained, by a mind of opposite type was a new experience. It emphasized amazingly the reality of that inner world he lived in.

      This explanation of the big Russian’s effect upon himself was terrific, and that a “doctor” should have conceived it, glorious. That some portion of a man’s spirit might assume the shape of his thoughts and project itself visibly seemed likely enough. Indeed, to him, it seemed already a “fact,” and his temperament did not linger over it. But that other suggestion fairly savaged him with its strange grandeur. He played lovingly with it.

      That the Earth was a living being was a conception divine in size as in simplicity, and that the Gods and mythological figures had been projections of her consciousness—this thought ran with a magnificent new thunder about his mind. It was overwhelming, beautiful as Heaven and as gracious. He saw the ancient shapes of myth and legend still alive in some gorgeous garden of the primal world, a corner too remote for humanity to have yet stained it with their trail of uglier life. He understood in quite a new way, at last, those deep primitive longings that hitherto had vainly craved their full acknowledgment. It meant that he lay so close to the Earth that he felt her pulses as his own. the idea stormed his belief.

      It was the Soul of the Earth herself that all these years had been calling to him.

      And while he let his imagination play with the soaring beauty of the idea, he remembered certain odd little facts. He marshaled them before him in a row and questioned them: the picture he had seen with the Captain’s glasses—those speeding shapes of beauty; the new aspect of a living Nature that the Russian’s presence stirred in him; the man’s broken words as they had leaned above the sea in the dusk; the curious passion that leaped to his eyes when certain chance words had touched him at the dinner-table. And, lastly, the singular impression of giant bulk he produced sometimes upon the mind, almost as though a portion of him—this detachable portion molded by the quality of his spirit as he felt himself to be—emerged visibly to cause it.

      Vaguely, in this way, O’Malley divined how inevitable was the apparent isolation of these two, and why others instinctively avoided them. They seemed by themselves in an enclosure where the parent lumberingly, and the boy defiantly, disported themselves with a kind of lonely majesty that forbade approach.

      And it was later that same night, as the steamer approached the Lipari Islands, that the drive forward he had received from the doctor’s words was increased by a succession of singular occurrences. At the same time, Stahl’s deliberate and as he deemed it unjustifiable interference, helped him to make up his mind decisively on certain other points.

      The first “occurrence” was of the same order as the “bigness”—extraordinarily difficult, that is, to confirm by actual measurement.

      It was ten o’clock, Stahl still apparently in his cabin by himself, and most of the passengers below at an impromptu concert, when the Irishman, coming down from his long solitude, caught sight of the Russian and his boy moving about the dark after-deck with a speed and vigor that instantly arrested his attention. the suggestion of size, and of rapidity of movement, had never been more marked. It was as though a cloud of the summer darkness moved beside them.

      Then, going cautiously nearer, he saw that they were neither walking quickly, nor running, as he had first supposed, but—to his amazement—were standing side by side upon the deck—stock still. the appearance of motion, however, was not entirely a delusion, for he next saw that, while standing there steady as the mast and life-boats behind them, something emanated shadow-like from both their persons and seemed to hover and play about them—something that was only approximately of their own outer shapes, and very considerably larger. Now it veiled them, now left them clear. He thought of smoke-clouds moving to and fro about dark statues.

      So far as he could focus his sight upon them, these “shadows,” without any light to cast them, moved in distorted guise there on the deck with a motion that was somehow rhythmical—a great movement as of dance or gambol.

      As with the appearance of “bigness,” he perceived it first out of the corner of his eye. When he looked again he saw only two dark figures, motionless.

      He experienced the sensation a man sometimes knows on entering a deserted chamber in the nighttime, and is aware that the things in it have just that instant—stopped. His arrival puts abrupt end to some busy activity they were engaged in, which begins again the moment he goes. Chairs, tables, cupboards, the very spots and patterns of the wall have just flown back to their usual places whence they watch impatiently for his departure—with the candle.

      This time, on a deck instead of in a room, O’Malley with his candle had surprised them in the act: people, moreover, not furniture. And this shadowy gambol, this silent Dance of the Emanations, immense yet graceful, made him think of Winds flying, visible and uncloaked, somewhere across long

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