“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….”
CHAPTER 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, a
nd 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!”
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…!”
CHAPTER 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.”
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 84