The shadows of the September afternoon were lengthening toward us from
the Round Pond by the time O'Malley reached this stage of his curious and
fascinating story. It was chilly under the trees, and the "wupsey-up,
wupsey-down" babies, as he termed them, had long since gone in to their
teas, or whatever it is that London babies take at six o'clock.
We strolled home together, and he welcomed the idea of sharing a dinner
we should cook ourselves in the tiny Knightsbridge flat. "Stewpot
evenings," he called these occasions. They reminded us of camping trips
together, although it must be confessed that in the cage-like room the
"stew" never tasted quite as it did beside running water on the skirts of
the forest when the dews were gathering on the little gleaming tent, and
the wood-smoke mingled with the scents of earth and leaves.
Passing that grotesque erection opposite the Albert Hall, gaudy in the
last touch of sunset, I saw him shudder. The spell of the ship and sea
and the blazing Sicilian sunshine lay still upon us, Etna's cones
towering beyond those gilded spikes of the tawdry Memorial. I stole a
glance at my companion. His light blue eyes shone, but with the
reflection of another sunset--the sunset of forgotten, ancient, far-off
scenes when the world was young.
His personality held something of magic in that silent stroll homewards,
for no word fell from either one of us to break its charm. The untidy
hair escaped from beneath the broad-brimmed old hat, and his faded coat
of grey flannel seemed touched with the shadows that the dusk brings
beneath wild-olive trees. I noticed the set of his ears, and how the
upper points of them ran so sharply into the hair. His walk was springy,
light, very quiet, suggesting that he moved on open turf where a sudden
running jump would land him, not into a motor-bus, but into a mossy
covert where ferns grew. There was a certain fling of the shoulders that
had an air of rejecting streets and houses. Some fancy, wild and sweet,
caught me of a faun passing down through underbrush of woodland glades to
drink at a forest pool; and, chance giving back to me a little verse of
Alice Corbin's, I turned and murmured it while watching him:
What dim Arcadian pastures
Have I known,
That suddenly, out of nothing,
A wind is blown,
Lifting a veil and a darkness,
Showing a purple sea--
And under your hair, the faun's eyes
Look out on me?
It was, of course, that whereas his body marched along Hill Street and
through Montpelier Square, his thoughts and spirit flitted through the
haunted, old-time garden he forever craved. I thought of the morrow--of
my desk in the Life Insurance Office, of the clerks with oiled hair
brushed back from the forehead, all exactly alike, trousers neatly turned
up to show fancy colored socks from bargain sales, their pockets full of
cheap cigarettes, their minds busy with painted actresses and the names
of horses! A Life Insurance Office! All London paying yearly sums to
protect themselves against--against the most interesting moment of
life. Premiums upon escape and freedom!
Again, it was the spell of my companion's personality that turned all
this paraphernalia of the busy, modern existence into the counters in
some grotesque and rather sordid game. Tomorrow, of course, it would
all turn real and earnest again, O'Malley's story a mere poetic fancy.
But for the moment I lived it with him, and found it magnificent.
And the talk we had that evening when the stew-pot was empty and we were
smoking on the narrow-ledged roof of the prison-house--for he always
begged for open air, and with cushions we often sat beneath the stars and
against the grimy chimney-pots--that talk I shall never forget. Life
became constructed all anew. The power of the greatest fairy tale this
world can ever know lay about me, raised to its highest expression. I
caught at least some touch of reality--of awful reality--in the idea that
this splendid globe whereon we perched like insects peeping timidly from
tiny cells, might be the body of a glorious Being--the mighty frame to
which some immense Collective Consciousness, vaster than that of men, and
wholly different in kind, might be attached.
In the story, as I found it later in the dusty little Paddington room,
O'Malley reported, somewhat heavily, it seemed to me, the excerpts
chosen by Dr. Stahl. As an imaginative essay, they were interesting, of
course, and vitally suggestive, but in a tale of adventure such as this
they overweight the barque of fancy. Yet, in order to appreciate what
followed, it seems necessary for the mind to steep itself in something of
his ideas. The reader who dreads to think, and likes his imagination to
soar unsupported, may perhaps dispense with the balance of this section;
but to be faithful to the scaffolding whereon this Irishman built his
amazing dream, I must attempt as best I can some précis of that
conversation.