“Singing!” Ah! There was the clue! The sound he heard was singing—faint, low singing; close beside him too. It was the big man, singing softly in his sleep.
This ordinary explanation of the “wonder-sound” brought him down to earth, and so to a more normal feeling of security again. He stepped cautiously from the bed, careful not to let the rings rattle on the rod of brass, and slowly raised himself upright. And then, through a slit of the curtain, he—saw. The lips of the big sleeper moved gently, the beard rising and falling very slightly with them, and this murmur that he had thought so far away, came out and sang deliriously and faint before his very face. It most curiously—flowed. Easily, naturally, almost automatically, it poured softly forth, and the Irishman at once understood why he had first mistaken it for an echo of wind from distant hills. The imagery was entirely accurate. For it was precisely the singing cry that wind makes in a keyhole, in a chimney, or passing idly over the sweep of grassy hills. Exactly thus had he often listened to it swishing through the crannies of high rocks, tuneless yet searching. In it, too, there lay some accent of a secret, dim sublimity, deeper far than any other human sound could touch. The terror of a great freedom caught him, a freedom most awfully remote from the smaller personal existence he knew Today … for it suggested, with awe and wonder, the kind of primitive utterance that was before speech or the development of language; when emotions were still too vague and mighty to be caught by little words, but when beings, close to the heart of their great Mother, expressed the feelings, enormous and uncomplex, of the greater life they shared as portions of her—projections of the Earth herself.
With a crash in his brain, O’Malley stopped. These thoughts, he suddenly realized, were not his own. An attack of unwonted sensations stung and scattered his mind with a rush of giant splendor that threatened to overwhelm him. He was in the very act of being carried away; his sense of personal identity menaced; surrender well-nigh already complete.
Another moment, especially if those eyes opened and caught him, and he would be beyond recall in the region of these other two. The narrow space of that little cabin was charged already to the brim, filled with some overpowering loveliness of wild and simple things, the beauty of stars and winds and flowers, the terror of seas and mountains; strange radiant forms of gods and heroes, nymphs, fauns and satyrs; the fierce sunshine of some Golden Age unspoiled, of a stainless region now long forgotten and denied—that world of splendor his heart had ever craved in vain, and beside which the life of Today faded to a wretched dream.
It was the Urwelt calling….
With a violent internal effort, he tore his gaze from those eyelids that fortunately opened not. At the same moment, though he did not hear them, steps came close in the corridor, and there was a rattling of the knob. Behind him, a movement from the berth below the port-hole warned him that he was but just in time. The Vision he was afraid as yet to acknowledge drew with such awful speed toward the climax.
Quickly he turned away, lifted the hook of the cabin door, and passed into the passage, strangely faint. A great commotion followed him out: father and son both, it seemed, suddenly upon their feet. And at the same time the sound of “singing” rolled into the body of a great hushed chorus, as it were of galloping winds that filled big valleys far away with a gust of splendor, faintly roaring in some incredible distance where no cities were, nor habitations of men; with a freedom, too, that was majestic and sublime. Oh! the terrific gait of that life in an open world!—Golden to the winds!—uncrowded!—The cosmic life—!
O’Malley shivered as he heard. For an instant, the true grain of his inner life, picked out in flame and silver, flashed clear. Almost—he knew himself caught back.
And there, in the dimly-lighted corridor, against the paneling of the cabin wall, crouched Dr. Stahl—listening. The pain of the contrast was vivid beyond words. It seemed as if he had passed from the thunder of organs to hear the rattling of tin cans. Instantly he understood the force that all along had held him back: the positive, denying aspect of this man’s mind—afraid.
“You!“ he exclaimed in a high whisper. “What are you doing here?” He hardly remembers what he said. The doctor straightened up and came on tiptoe to his side. He moved hurriedly.
“Come away,” he said vehemently under his breath. “Come with me to my cabin—to the decks—anywhere away from this—before it’s too late.”
And the Irishman then realized that his face was white and that his voice shook. The hand that gripped him by the arm shook too.
They went quickly along the deserted corridor and up the stairs, O’Malley making no resistance, moving in a kind of dream. He has a fleeting recollection of an odor, sweet and slightly pungent as of horses, in his nostrils. The wind of the open decks revived him, and he saw to his amazement that the East was brightening. In that cabin, then, hours had been compressed into minutes.
The steamer had already slipped by the Straits of Messina. To the right
he saw the cones of Etna, shadowy in the sky, calling across the dawn to
Stromboli their smoking brother of the Lipari. To the left over the blue
Ionian Sea the lights of a cloudless sunrise rose softly above the world.
And the hour of enchantment seized and shook him anew. Somewhere, across those faint blue waves, lay the things that he so passionately sought. It was the very essence of their loveliness and wonder that had charged down between the walls of that stuffy cabin below. For every morning still, at dawn, the tired world knows again the splendors of her youth; and the Irishman, shuddering a little in his sacred joy, felt that he must burst his bonds and fly to join the sunrise and the sea. The yearning, he was aware, had now increased a thousandfold: its fulfillment was merely delayed.
He passed along the decks all slippery with dew into Dr. Stahl’s cabin, and flung himself on the broad sofa to sleep. Sleep, too, came at once; he was profoundly exhausted; and, while he slept, Stahl watched over him, covering his body with a thick blanket.
XIV
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“IT IS A LOVELY IMAGINATION responding to the deepest desires, instincts, cravings of spiritual man, that spiritual rapture should find an echo in the material world; that in mental communion with God we should find sensible communion with nature; and that, when the faithful rejoice together, bird and beast, hill and forest, should be not felt only, but seen to rejoice along with them. It is not the truth; between us and our environment, whatever links there are, this link is wanting. But the yearning for it, the passion which made Wordsworth cry out for something, even were it the imagination of a pagan which would make him ‘less forlorn,’ is natural to man; and simplicity leaps at the lovely fiction of a response. Just here is the opportunity for such alliances between spiritualism and superstition as are the daily despair of seekers after truth.”
—Dr. VERRALL
And though he slept for hours the doctor never once left his side, but sat there with pencil and notebook, striving to catch, yet in vain, some accurate record of the strange fragmentary words that fell from his lips at intervals. His own face was aflame with an interest that amounted to excitement. The very hand that held the pencil trembled. One would have said that thus somewhat a man might behave who found himself faced with confirmation of some vast, speculative theory his mind had played with hitherto from a distance only.
Toward noon the Irishman awoke. The steamer, still loading oranges and sacks of sulfur in the Catania harbor, was dusty and noisy. Most of the passengers were ashore, hurrying with guidebooks and field-glasses to see the statue of the dead Bellini or watch the lava flow. A blazing, suffocating heat lay over the oily sea, and the summit of the volcano, with its tiny, ever-changing puff of smoke, soared through blue haze.
To Stahl’s remark, “You’ve slept eight hours,” he replied, “But I feel as though I’d slept eight centuries away.” He took the coffee and rolls provided, and then smoked. The doctor lit a cigar. The red curtains over the port-holes
shut out the fierce sun, leaving the cabin cool and dim. The shouting of the lightermen and officers mingled with the roar and scuttle of the donkey-engine. And O’Malley knew perfectly well that while the other moved about carelessly, playing with books and papers on his desk, he was all the time keeping him under close observation.
“Yes,” he continued, half to himself, “I feel as if I’d fallen asleep in one world and awakened into another where life is trivial and insignificant, where men work like devils for things of no value in order to accumulate them in great ugly houses; always collecting and collecting, like mad children, possessions that they never really possess—things external to themselves, valueless and unreal—”
Dr. Stahl came up quietly and sat down beside him. He spoke gently, his manner kind and grave rather. He put a hand upon his shoulder.
“But, my dear boy,” he said, the critical mood all melted away, “do not let yourself go too completely. That is vicious thinking, believe me. All details are important—here and now—spiritually important, if you prefer the term. The symbols change with the ages, that is all.” Then, as the other did not reply, he added: “Keep yourself well in hand. Your experience is of extraordinary interest—may even be of value, to yourself as well as to—er—others. And what happened to you last night is worthy of record—if you can use it without surrendering your soul to it altogether. Perhaps, later, you will feel able to speak of it—to tell me in detail a little—?”
His keen desire to know more evidently fought with his desire to protect, to heal, possibly even to prevent.
“If I felt sure that your control were sufficient, I could tell you in return some results of my own study of—certain cases in the hospitals, you see, that might throw light upon—upon your own curious experience.”
O’Malley turned with such abruptness that the cigar ash fell down over his clothes. The bait was strong, but the man’s sympathy was not sufficiently of a piece, he felt, to win his entire confidence.
“I cannot discuss beliefs,” he said shortly, “in the speculative way you do. They are too real. A man doesn’t argue about his love, does he?” He spoke passionately. “Today everybody argues, discusses, speculates: no one believes. If you had your way, you’d take away my beliefs and put in their place some wretched little formula of science that the next generation will prove all wrong again. It’s like the N rays one of you discovered: they never really existed at all.” He laughed. Then his flushed face turned grave again. “Beliefs are deeper than discoveries. They are eternal.”
Stahl looked at him a moment with admiration. He moved across the cabin toward his desk.
“I am more with you than perhaps you understand,” he said quietly, yet without too obviously humoring him. “I am more—divided, that’s all.”
“Modern!” exclaimed the other, noticing the ashes on his coat for the first time and brushing them off impatiently. “Everything in you expresses itself in terms of matter, forgetting that matter being in continual state of flux is the least real of all things—”
“Our training has been different,” observed Stahl simply, interrupting him. “I use another phraseology. Fundamentally, we are not so far apart as you think. Our conversation of yesterday proves it, if you have not forgotten. It is people like yourself who supply the material that teaches people like me—helps me to advance—to speculate, though you dislike the term.”
The Irishman was mollified, though for some time he continued in the same strain. And the doctor let him talk, realizing that his emotion needed the relief of this safety-valve. He used words loosely, but Stahl did not check him; it was merely that the effort to express himself—this self that could believe so much—found difficulty in doing so coherently in modern language. He went very far. For the fact that while Stahl criticized and denied, he yet understood, was a strong incentive to talk. O’Malley plunged repeatedly over his depth, and each time the doctor helped him in to shore.
“Perhaps,” said Stahl at length in a pause, “the greatest difference between us is merely that whereas you jump headlong, ignoring details by the way, I climb slowly, counting the steps and making them secure. I deny at first because if the steps survive such denial, I know that they are permanent. I build scaffolding. You fly.”
“Flight is quicker,” put in the Irishman.
“It is for the few,” was the reply; “scaffolding is for all.”
“You spoke a few days ago of strange things,” O’Malley said presently with abruptness, “and spoke seriously too. Tell me more about that, if you will.” He sought to lead the talk away from himself, since he did not intend to be fully drawn. “You said something about the theory that the Earth is alive, a living being, and that the early legendary forms of life may have been emanations—projections of herself—detached portions of her consciousness—or something of the sort. Tell me about that theory. Can there be really men who are thus children of the earth, fruit of pure passion—Cosmic Beings as you hinted? It interests me deeply.”
Dr. Stahl appeared to hesitate.
“It is not new to me, of course,” pursued the other, “but I should like to know more.”
Stahl still seemed irresolute. “It is true,” he replied at length slowly, “that in an unguarded moment I let drop certain observations. It is better you should consider them unsaid perhaps: forget them.”
“And why, pray?”
The answer was well calculated to whet his appetite.
“Because,” answered the doctor, bending over to him as he crossed over to his side, “they are dangerous thoughts to play with, dangerous to the interests of humanity in its present state today, unsettling to the soul, shaking the foundations of sane consciousness.” He looked hard at him. “Your own mind,” he added softly, “appears to me to be already on their track. Whether you are aware of it or not, you have in you that kind of very passionate desire—of yearning—which might reconstruct them and make them come true—for yourself—if you get out.”
O’Malley, his eyes shining, looked up into his face.
“‘Reconstruct—make them come true—if I get out’!” he repeated stammeringly, fearful that if he appeared too eager the other would stop. “You mean, of course, that this Double in me would escape and build its own heaven?”
Stahl nodded darkly. “Driven forth by your intense desire.” After a pause he added, “The process already begun in you would complete itself.”
Ah! So obviously what the doctor wanted was a description of his sensations in that haunted cabin.
“Temporarily?” asked the Irishman under his breath.
The other did not answer for a moment. O’Malley repeated the question.
“Temporarily,” said Stahl, turning away again toward his desk, “unless—the yearning were too strong.”
“In which case—?”
“Permanently. For it would draw the entire personality with it….”
“The soul?”
Stahl was bending over his books and papers. The answer was barely audible.
“Death,” was the whispered word that floated across the heavy air of that little sun-baked cabin.
The word if spoken at all was so softly spoken that the Irishman scarcely knew whether he actually heard it, or whether it was uttered by his own thought. He only realized—catching some vivid current from the other man’s mind—that this separation of a vital portion of himself that Stahl hinted at might involve a kind of nameless inner catastrophe which should mean the loss of his personality as it existed today—an idea, however, that held no terror for him if it meant at the same time the recovery of what he so passionately sought.
And another intuition flashed upon its heels—namely, that this extraordinary doctor spoke of something he knew as a certainty; that his amazing belief, though paraded as theory, was to him more than theory. Had he himself undergone some experience that he dared not speak of, and were his words based upon a personal experience instead of, as he pretended, merely upon the observation of o
thers? Was this a result of his study of the big man two years ago? Was this the true explanation of his being no longer an assistant at the H—hospital, but only a ship’s doctor? Had this “modern” man, after all, a flaming volcano of ancient and splendid belief in him, akin to what was in himself, yet ever fighting it?
Thoughts raced and thundered through his mind as he watched him across the cigar smoke. The rattling of that donkey-engine, the shouts of the lightermen, the thuds of the sulfur-sacks—how ridiculous they all sounded, the clatter of a futile, meaningless existence where men gathered—rubbish, for mere bodies that lived amid dust a few years, then returned to dust forever.
He sprang from his sofa and crossed over to the doctor’s side. Stahl was still bending over a littered desk.
“You, too,” he cried, and though trying to say it loud, his voice could only whisper, “you, too, must have the Urmensch in your heart and blood, for how else, by my soul, could you know it all? Tell me, doctor, tell me!” And he was on the very verge of adding, “Join us! Come and join us!” when the little German turned his bald head slowly round and fixed upon the excited Irishman such a cool and quenching stare that instantly he felt himself convicted of foolishness, almost of impertinence.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 9