Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory;
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
For this passion for some simple old-world innocence and beauty lay in his soul like a lust—self-feeding and voracious.
III
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“Lonely! Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?”
—THOREAU
March had passed shouting away, and April was whispering deliciously among her scented showers when O’Malley went on board the coasting steamer at Marseilles for the Levant and the Black Sea. The mistral made the land unbearable, but herds of white horses ran galloping over the bay beneath a sky of childhood’s blue. The ship started punctually—he came on board as usual with a bare minute’s margin—and from his rapid survey of the thronged upper deck, it seems, he singled out on the instant this man and boy, wondering first vaguely at their uncommon air of bulk, secondly at the absence of detail which should confirm it. They appeared so much bigger than they actually were. The laughter, rising in his heart, however, did not get as far as his lips.
For this appearance of massive bulk, and of shoulders comely yet almost humped, was not borne out by a direct inspection. It was a mental impression. The man, though broad and well-proportioned, with heavy back and neck and uncommonly sturdy torso, was in no sense monstrous. It was upon the corner of the eye that the bulk and hugeness dawned, a false report that melted under direct vision. O’Malley took him in with attention merging in respect, searching in vain for the detail of back and limbs and neck that suggested so curiously the sense of the gigantic. The boy beside him, obviously son, possessed the same elusive attributes—felt yet never positively seen.
Passing down to his cabin, wondering vaguely to what nationality they might belong, he was immediately behind them, elbowing French and German tourists, when the father abruptly turned and faced him. Their gaze met. O’Malley started.
“Whew…!” ran some silent expression like fire through his brain.
Out of a massive visage, placid for all its ruggedness, shone eyes large and timid as those of an animal or child bewildered among so many people. There was an expression in them not so much cowed or dismayed as “un-refuged"—the eyes of the hunted creature. That, at least, was the first thing they betrayed; for the same second the quick-blooded Celt caught another look: the look of a hunted creature that at last knows shelter and has found it. The first expression had emerged, then withdrawn again swiftly like an animal into its hole where safety lay. Before disappearing, it had flashed a wireless message of warning, of welcome, of explanation—he knew not what term to use—to another of its own kind, to himself.
O’Malley, utterly arrested, stood and stared. He would have spoken, for the invitation seemed obvious enough, but there came an odd catch in his breath, and words failed altogether. The boy, peering at him sideways, clung to his great parent’s side. For perhaps ten seconds there was this interchange of staring, intimate staring, between the three of them … and then the Irishman, confused, more than a little agitated, ended the silent introduction with an imperceptible bow and passed on slowly, knocking absent-mindedly through the crowd, down to his cabin on the lower deck.
In his heart, deep down, stirred an indescribable sympathy with something he divined in these two that was akin to himself, but that as yet he could not name. On the surface he felt an emotion he knew not whether to call uneasiness or surprise, but crowding past it, half smothering it, rose this other more profound emotion. Something enormously winning in the atmosphere of father and son called to him in the silence: it was significant, oddly buried; not yet had it emerged enough to be confessed and labeled. But each had recognized it in the other. Each knew. Each waited. And it was extraordinarily disturbing.
Before unpacking, he sat for a long time on his berth, thinking….trying in vain to catch through a thunder of surprising emotions the word that might bring explanation. That strange impression of giant bulk, unsupported by actual measurements; that look of startled security seeking shelter; that other look of being sure, of knowing where to go and being actually en route,—all these, he felt, grew from the same hidden cause whereof they were symptoms. It was this hidden thing in the man that had reached out invisibly and fired his own consciousness as their gaze met in that brief instant. And it had disturbed him so profoundly because the very same lost thing lay buried in himself. The man knew, whereas he anticipated merely—as yet. What was it? Why came there with it both happiness and fear?
The word that kept chasing itself in a circle like a kitten after its own tail, yet bringing no explanation, was Loneliness—a loneliness that must be whispered. For it was loneliness on the verge of finding relief. And if proclaimed too loud, there might come those who would interfere and prevent relief. The man, and the boy too for that matter, were escaping. They had found the way back, were ready and eager, moreover, to show it to other prisoners.
And this was as near as O’Malley could come to explanation. He began to understand dimly—and with an extraordinary excitement of happiness.
“Well—and the bigness?” I asked, seizing on a practical point after listening to his dreaming, “what do you make of that? It must have had some definite cause surely?”
He turned and fixed his light blue eyes on mine as we paced beside the
Serpentine that summer afternoon when I first heard the story told.
He was half grave, half laughing.
“The size, the bulk, the bigness,” he replied, “must have been in reality the expression of some mental quality that reached me psychically, producing its effect directly on my mind and not upon the eyes at all.” In telling the story he used a simile omitted in the writing of it, because his sense of humor perceived that no possible turn of phrase could save it from grotesqueness when actually it was far from grotesque—extraordinarily pathetic rather: “As though,” he said, “the great back and shoulders carried beneath the loose black cape—humps, projections at least; but projections not ugly in themselves, comely even in some perfectly natural way, that lent to his person this idea of giant size. His body, though large, was normal so far as its proportions were concerned. In his spirit, though, there hid another shape. An aspect of that other shape somehow reached my mind.”
Then, seeing that I found nothing at the moment to reply, he added:
“As an angry man you may picture to yourself as red, or a jealous man as green!” He laughed aloud. “D’ye see, now? It was not really a physical business at all!”
IV
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“WE THINK WITH ONLY A small part of the past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will, and act.”
—HENRI BERGSON
The balance of his fellow-passengers were not distinguished. There was a company of French tourists gong to Naples, and another lot of Germans bound for Athens, some business folk for Smyrna and Constantinople, and a sprinkling of Russians going home via Odessa, Batoum, or Novorossisk.
In his own stateroom, occupying the upper berth, was a little round-bodied, red-faced Canadian drummer, “traveling” in harvest-machines. The name of the machine, its price, and the terms of purchase were his universe;
he knew them in several languages; beyond them, nothing. He was good-natured, conceding anything to save trouble. “D’ye mind the light for a bit while I read in bed?” asked O’Malley. “Don’t mind anything much,” was the cheery reply. “I’m not particular; I’m easy-going and you needn’t bother.” He turned over to sleep. “Old traveler,” he added, his voice muffled by sheets and blankets, “and take things as they come.” And the only objection O’Malley found in him was that he took things as they came to the point of not taking baths at all, and not even taking all his garments off when he went to bed.
The Captain, whom he knew from previous voyages, a genial, rough-voiced sailor from Sassnitz, chided him for so nearly missing the boat—"as usual.”
“You’re too late for a seat at my taple,” he said with his laughing growl; “it’s a pidy. You should have led me know py telegram, and I then kepd your place. Now you find room at the doctor’s taple howefer berhaps…!”
“Steamer’s very crowded this time,” O’Malley replied, shrugging his shoulders; “but you’ll let me come up sometimes for a smoke with you on the bridge?”
“Of course, of course.”
“Anybody interesting on board?” he asked after a moment’s pause.
The jolly Captain laughed. “‘Pout the zame as usual, you know. Nothing to stop ze ship! Ask ze doctor; he knows zooner than me. But, anyway, the nice ones, they get zeazick always and dizappear. Going Trebizond this time?” he added.
“No; Batoum.”
“Ach! Oil?”
“Caucasus generally—up in the mountains a bit.”
“God blenty veapons then, I hope. They shoot you for two pfennig up there!” And he was off with his hearty deep laugh and rather ponderous briskness toward the bridge.
Thus O’Malley found himself placed for meals at the right hand of Dr. Stahl; opposite him, on the doctor’s left, a talkative Moscow fur-merchant who, having come to definite conclusions of his own about things n general, was persuaded the rest of the world must share them, and who delivered verbose commonplaces with a kind of pontifical utterance sometimes amusing, but usually boring; on his right a gentle-eyed, brown-bearded Armenian priest from the Venice monastery that had sheltered Byron, a man who ate everything except soup with his knife, yet with a daintiness that made one marvel, and with hands so graceful they might almost have replaced the knife without off offence. Beyond the priest sat the rotund Canadian drummer. He kept silence, watched the dishes carefully lest anything should escape him, and—ate. Lower down on the opposite side, one or two nondescripts between, sat the big, blond, bearded stranger with his son. Diagonally across from himself and the doctor, they were in full view.
O’Malley talked to all and sundry whom his voice could reach, being easily forthcoming to people whom he was not likely to see again. But he was particularly pleased to find himself next to the ship’s doctor, Dr. Heinrich Stahl, for the man both attracted and antagonized him, and they had crossed swords pleasantly on more voyages than one. There was a fundamental contradiction in his character due—O’Malley divined—to the fact that his experiences did not tally as he wished them to do with his beliefs, or vice versa. Affecting to believe in nothing, he occasionally dropped remarks that betrayed a belief in all kinds of things, unorthodox things. Then, having led the Irishman into confessions of his own fairy faith, he would abruptly rule the whole subject out of order with some cynical phrase that closed discussion. In this sarcastic attitude O’Malley detected a pose assumed for his own protection. “No man of sense can possibly accept such a thing; it is incredible and foolish.” Yet, the biting way he said the words betrayed him; the very thing his reason rejected, his soul believed….
These vivid impressions the Irishman had of people, one wonders how accurate they were! In this case, perhaps, he was not far from the truth. That a man with Dr. Stahl’s knowledge and ability could be content to hide his light under the bushel of a mere Schiffsarzt required explanation. His own explanation was that he wanted leisure for thinking and writing. Bald-headed, slovenly, prematurely old, his beard stained with tobacco and snuff, under-sized, scientific in the imaginative sense that made him speculative beyond mere formulae, his was an individuality that inspired a respect one could never quite account for. He had keen dark eyes that twinkled, sometimes mockingly, sometimes, if the word may be allowed, bitterly, yet often too with a good-humored amusement which sympathy with human weaknesses could alone have caused. A warm heart he certainly had, as more than one forlorn passenger could testify.
Conversation at their table was slow at first. It began at the lower end where the French tourists chattered briskly over the soup, then crept upwards like a slow fire o’erleaping various individuals who would not catch. For instance, it passed the harvest-machine man; it passed the nondescripts; it also passed the big light-haired stranger and his son.
At the table behind, there was a steady roar and buzz of voices; the Captain was easy and genial, prophesying to the ladies on either side Of him a calm voyage. In the shelter of his big voice even the shy found it easy to make remarks to their neighbors. Listening to fragments of the talk O’Malley found that his own eyes kept wandering down the table—diagonally across—to the two strangers. Once or twice he intercepted the doctor’s glance traveling in the same direction, and on these occasions it was on the tip of his tongue to make a remark about them, or to ask a question. Yet the words did not come. Dr. Stahl, he felt, knew a similar hesitation. Each, wanting to speak, yet kept silence, waiting for the other to break the ice.
“This mistral is tiresome,” observed the doctor, as the tide of talk flowed up to his end and made a remark necessary. “It tries the nerves of some.” He glanced at O’Malley, but it was the fur-merchant who replied, spreading a be-ringed hand over his plate to feel the warmth.
“I know it well,” he said pompously in a tone of finality; “it lasts three, six, or nine days. But once across the Golfe de Lyons we shall be free of it.”
“You think so? Ah, I am glad,” ventured the priest with a timid smile while he adroitly balanced meat and bullet-like green peas upon his knife-blade. Tone, smile, and gesture were so gentle that the use of steel in any form seemed incongruous.
The voice of the fur-merchant came in domineeringly.
“Of course. I have made this trip so often, I know. St. Petersburg to Paris, a few weeks on the Riviera, then back by Constantinople and the Crimea. It is nothing. I remember last year—” He pushed a large pearl pin more deeply into his speckled tie and began a story that proved chiefly how luxuriously he traveled. His eyes tried to draw the whole end of the table into his circle, but while the Armenian listened politely, with smiles and bows, Dr. Stahl turned to the Irishman again. It Vas the year of Halley’s comet and he began talking interestingly about it.
“… Three o’clock in the morning—any morning, yes—is the best time,” the doctor concluded, “and I’ll have you called. You must see it through my telescope. End of this week, say, after we leave Catania and turn eastwards…”
And at this instant, following a roar of laughter from the Captain’s table, came one of those abrupt pauses that sometimes catch an entire room at once. All voices hushed. Even the merchant, setting down his champagne glass, fell silent. One heard only the beating of the steamer’s screw, the rush of water below the port-holes, the soft scuffle of the stewards’ feet. The conclusion of the doctor’s inconsiderable sentence was sharply audible all over the room—
“… crossing the Ionian Sea toward the Isles of Greece.”
It rang across the pause, and at the same moment O’Malley caught the eyes of the big stranger lifted suddenly and fixed upon the speaker’s face as though the words had summoned him.
They shifted the same instant to his own, then dropped again to his plate. Again the clatter of conversation drowned the room as before; the merchant resumed his self-description in terms of gold; the doctor discussed the gases of the comet’s tail. But the swift-blooded Irishman fel
t himself caught away strangely and suddenly into another world. Out of the abyss of the subconscious there rose a gesture prophetic and immense. The trivial phrase and that intercepted look opened a great door of wonder in his heart. In a second he grew “absent-minded.” Or, rather, something touched a button and the whole machinery of his personality shifted round noiselessly and instantaneously, presenting an immediate new facet to the world. His normal, puny self-consciousness slipped a moment into the majestic calm of some far larger state that the stranger also knew. The Universe lies in every human heart, and he plunged into that archetypal world that stands so close behind all sensible appearances. He could neither explain nor attempt to explain, but he sailed away into some giant swimming mood of beauty wherein steamer, passengers, talk, faded utterly, the stranger and his son remaining alone real and vital. He had seen; he could never forget. Chance prepared the setting, but immense powers had rushed in and availed themselves of it. Something deeply buried had flamed from the stranger’s eyes and beckoned to him. The fire ran from the big man to himself and was gone.
“The Isles of Greece—” The words were simple enough, yet it seemed to O’Malley that the look they summoned to the stranger’s eyes ensouled them, transfiguring them with the significance of vital clues. They touched the fringe of a mystery, magnificent and remote—some transcendent psychical drama in the ‘life of this man whose “bigness” and whose “loneliness that must be whispered” were also in their way other vital clues. Moreover, remembering his first sight of these two upon the upper deck a few hours before, he understood that his own spirit, by virtue of its peculiar and primitive yearnings, was involved in the same mystery and included in the same hidden passion.
The little incident illustrates admirably O’Malley’s idiosyncrasy of “seeing whole.” In a lightning flash his inner sense had associated the words and the glance, divining that the one had caused the other. That pause provided the opportunity…. If Imagination, then it was creative imagination; if true, it was assuredly spiritual insight of a rare quality.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 3