"Privacy is ignorance."
--JOSIAH ROYCE
Somewhat after the manner of things suffered in vivid dreams, where
surprise is numbed and wonder becomes the perfect password, the Irishman
remembers the sequence of little events that filled the following day.
Yet his excitement held nothing of the vicious fling of fever; it was
spread over the entire being rather than located hotly in the brain and
blood alone; and it "derived," as it were, from tracts of his personality
usually unstirred, atrophied indeed in most men, that connected him
as by a delicate network of feelers with Nature and the Earth. He came
gradually to feel them, as a man in certain abnormal conditions becomes
conscious of the bodily processes that customarily go on in himself
without definite recognition.
Stahl could have told him, had he cared to seek the information, that
this fringe of wider consciousness, stretching to the stars and winds
and earth, was the very part that had caused his long unrest and
yearning--the part that knew the Earth as mother and sought the sweet
and savage freedom of what he called with the poverty of modern
terms--primitive. The channels leading toward a state of Cosmic
Consciousness, one with the Earth Life, were being now flushed and
sluiced by the forces emanating from the persons of his new companions.
And as this new state slowly usurped command, the readjustment of
his spiritual economy thus involved, caused other portions of himself
to sink into temporary abeyance. While it alarmed him, it was too
delicious to resist. He made no real attempt to resist. Yet he knew full
well that the portion sinking thus out of sight was what folk with such
high pride call Reason, Judgment, Common Sense!
In common with animal, bird, and insect life, all intimately close to
Nature, he began to feel as realities those subtle currents of the
Earth's personality by which the seals know direction in the depths of a
thousand-mile sea, by which the homing pigeons blaze trails through
space, birds fly south, the wild bees know their pathways, and all simple
life, from the Red Indian to the Red Ant, acknowledges the viewless
guidance of the mother's enveloping heart. The cosmic life ran through
his being, lighting signals, offering service, more--claiming leadership.
With it, however, came no loss of individuality, but rather a powerful
increase of life by means of which for the first time he dreamed of a
fuller existence which should eventually harmonize and combine the
ancient simplicity of soul that claimed the Earth, with the modern
complexity which, indulged alone, rendered the world so ugly and
insignificant...! He experienced an immense, driving push upon what
Bergson has called the _élan vital_ of his being.
The opening charge of his new discovery, however, was more than
disconcerting, and it is not surprising that he lost his balance. Its
attack and rush were overwhelming. Thus, it was a kind of exalted
speculative wonder lying behind his inner joy that caused his mistakes.
He had imagined, for instance, that the first sight of Greece would bring
some climax of revelation, making clear to what particular type of early
life the spirits of his companions conformed; more, that they would then
betray themselves to one and all for what they were in some effort to
escape, in some act of unrestraint, something, in a word, that would
explain themselves to the world of passengers, and focus them upon the
doctor's microscope forever.
Yet when Greece showed her first fair rim of outline, his companions
still slept peacefully in their bunks. The anticipated _dénouement_ did
not appear. Nothing happened. It was not the mere sight of so much land
lying upon the sea's cool cheek that could prove vital in an adventure
of such a kind. For the adventure remained spiritual. O'Malley had
merely confused two planes of consciousness. As usual, he saw the thing
"whole" in that extraordinary way to which his imagination alone held
the key; and hence his error.
Yet the moment has ever remained for him one of vital, stirring
splendor, significant as life or death. He remembers that he was early
on deck and saw the dawn blow up softly from behind the islands with
a fresh, salt wind that blew at the same time like music into his very
heart. Golden clear it rose; and just below, like the petals of some
vast, archetypal flower that gave it birth, the low blue hills of coast
and island opened magically into blossom. The rocky cliffs of Mattapan
slipped past; the smooth, bare slopes of the ancient shore-line followed;
treeless peaks and shoulders, abrupt precipices, summits and ridges all
exquisitely rosy and alive. He had seen Greece before, yet never thus,
and the emotion that invaded every corner of his larger consciousness lay
infinitely deeper than any mere pseudo-classical thrill he had known in
previous years. He saw it, felt it, knew it from within, instead of as a
spectator from without. This dawn-mood of the Earth was also his own;
and upon his spirit, as upon her blue-crowned hills, lay the tide of high
light with its delicate swift blush. He saw it with her--through one of
her opened eyes.
The hot hours the steamer lay in the Piraeus Harbor were wearisome,
the noise of loading and unloading cargo worse even than at Catania.
While the tourist passengers hurried fussily ashore, carrying guidebooks
and cameras, to chatter among the ruined temples, he walked the decks
alone, dreaming his great dream, conscious that he spun through leagues
of space with the great Being who more and more possessed him. Beyond
the shipping and the masts collected there from all the ports of the
Mediterranean and the Levant, he watched the train puffing slowly to
the station that lay in the shadow of Theseus' Temple, but his eyes at
the same tune strained across the haze toward Eleusis Bay, and while
his ears caught the tramping feet of the long Torchlight Procession, some
power of his remoter consciousness divined the forms of hovering gods,
expressions of his vast Mother's personality with which, in worship, this
ancient people had believed it possible to merge themselves. The
significant truths that lay behind the higher Mysteries, degraded since
because forgotten and misinterpreted, trooped powerfully down into his
mind. For the supreme act of this profound cult, denied by a grosser age
that seeks to telephone to heaven, deeming itself thereby "advanced," lay
in the union of the disciple with his god, the god he worshipped all his
life, and into whose Person he slipped finally at death by a kind of
marriage rite.
"The gods!" ran again through his mind with passion and delight, as
the letter of his early studies returned upon him, accompanied now for
the first time by the in-living spirit that interpreted them. "The
gods!--Moods of her giant life, manifestations of her spreading
Consciousness pushed outwards, Powers of life and truth and beauty...!"
* * * * *
And, meanwhile, Dr. Stahl, sometimes from a distance, sometimes coming
close, kept over him a kind of half-paternal, half-professional
attendance, the Irishman accepting his ministrations without resentment,
almost with indifference.
"I shall be on deck between two and three in the morning to see the
comet," the German observed to him casually toward evening as they
met on the bridge. "We may meet perhaps--"
"All right, doctor; it's more than possible," replied O'Malley, realizing
how closely he was being watched.
In his mind at the moment another sentence ran, the thought growing
stronger and stronger within him as the day declined:
"It will come tonight--come as an inner catastrophe not unlike that
of death! I shall hear the call--to escape...."
For he knew, as well as if it had been told to him in so many words,
that the sleep of his two companions all day was in the nature of a
preparation. The fluid projections of themselves were all the time active
elsewhere. Their bodies heavily slumbered; their spirits were out and
alert. Summoned forth by those strange and radiant evocative forces
that even in the dullest minds "Greece" stirs into life, they had
temporarily escaped. Again he saw those shapes of cloud and wind moving
with swift freedom over the long, bare hills. Again and again the image
returned. With the night a similar separation of the personality might
come to himself too. Stahl's warning passed in letters of fire across his
inner sight. With a relief that yet contained uneasiness he watched his
shambling figure disappear down the stairway. He was alone.