Stahl, he remembers, had been talking for a long time. The general sense
of what he said reached him, perhaps, but certainly not many of the
words. The doctor, it was clear, wished to coax from him the most
intimate description possible of his experience. He put things crudely
in order to challenge criticism, and thus to make his companion's reason
sit in judgment on his heart. If this visionary Celt would let his
intellect pass soberly and dissectingly upon these flaming states of
wider consciousness he had touched, the doctor would have data of real
value for his own purposes.
But this discriminating analysis was precisely what the Irishman found
impossible. His soul was too "dispersed" to concentrate upon modern terms
and phrases. These in any case dealt only with the fragments of Self that
manifested through brain and body. The rest could be felt only, never
truly described. Since the beginning of the world such transcendental
experiences had never been translatable in the language of "common"
sense; and today, even, when a few daring minds sought a laborious
classification, straining the resources of psychology, the results were
little better than a rather enticing and suggestive confusion.
In his written account, indeed, he gives no proper report of what Stahl
tried to say. A gaping hiatus appears in the manuscript, with only
asterisks and numbers that referred to pages of his tumbled notebooks.
Following these indications I came across the skeletons of ideas which
perhaps were the raw material, so to say, of these crude and speculative
statements that the German poured out at him across that cabin--blocks
of exaggeration he flung at him, in the hope of winning some critical
and intelligible response. Like the structure of some giant fairy-tale
they read--some toppling scaffolding that needed reduction in scale
before it could be focused for normal human sight.
"Nature" was really alive for those who believed--and worshipped; for
worship was that state of consciousness which opens the sense and
provides the channel for this singular interior realization. In very
desolate and lonely places, unsmothered and unstained by men as they
exist today, such expressions of the Earth's stupendous, central vitality
were still possible.... The "Russian" himself was some such fragment,
some such cosmic being, strayed down among men in a form outwardly
human, and the Irishman had in his own wild, untamed heart those
same very tender and primitive possibilities which enabled him to know
and feel it.
In the body, however, he was fenced off--without. Only by the
disentanglement of his primitive self from the modern development
which caged it, could he recover this strange lost Eden and taste in its
fullness the mother-life of the planetary consciousness which called him
back. This dissociation might be experienced temporarily as a subliminal
adventure; or permanently--in death.
Here, it seemed, was a version of the profound mystical idea that a
man must lose his life to find it, and that the personal self must be
merged in a larger one to know peace--the incessant, burning nostalgia
that dwells in the heart of every religion known to men: escape from
the endless pain of futile personal ambitions and desires for external
things that are unquenchable because never possible of satisfaction. It
had never occurred to him before in so literal and simple a form. It
explained his sense of kinship with the earth and nature rather than
with men....
There followed, then, another note which the Irishman had also
omitted from his complete story as I found it--in this MS. that lay
among the dust and dinginess of the Paddington back-room like some
flaming gem in a refuse heap. It was brief but pregnant--the block of
another idea, Fechner's apparently, hurled at him by the little doctor.
That, just as the body takes up the fact of the bruised lung into its
own general consciousness, lifting it thereby from the submerged,
unrealized state; and just as our human consciousness can be caught up
again as a part of the earth's; so, in turn, the Planet's own vast
personality is included in the collective consciousness of the entire
Universe--all steps and stages of advance to that final and august
Consciousnss of which they are fragments, projections, manifestations in
Time--GOD.
And the immense conception, at any rate, gave him a curious,
flashing clue to that passionate inclusion which a higher form of
consciousness may feel for the countless lesser manifestations below it;
and so to that love for humanity as a whole that saviors feel....
Yet, out of all this deep flood of ideas and suggestions that somehow
poured about him from the mind of this self-contradictory German,
alternately scientist and mystic, O'Malley emerged with his own smaller
and vivid personal delight that he would presently himself--escape:
escape under the guidance of the big Russian into some remote corner
of his own extended Being, where he would enjoy a quasi-merging with
the Earth-life, and know subjectively at least the fruition of all his
yearnings.
The doctor had phrased it once that a part of him fluid, etheric or
astral, malleable by desire, would escape and attain to this result. But,
after all, the separation of one portion of himself from the main
personality could only mean being conscious it: another part of it--in
a division usually submerged.
As Stahl so crudely put it, the Earth had bruised him. He would know
in some little measure the tides of her own huge life, his longings,
loneliness, and nostalgia explained and satisfied. He would find that
fair old Garden. He might even know the lesser gods.
* * * * *
That afternoon at Smyrna the matter was officially reported, and so
officially done with. It caused little enough comment on the steamer.
The majority of the passengers had hardly noticed the boy at all, much
less his disappearance; and while many of them landed there for Ephesus,
still more left the ship next day at Constantinople.
The big Russian, though he kept mostly to his own cabin, was closely
watched by the ship's officers, and O'Malley, too, realized that he was
under observation. But nothing happened; the emptied steamer pursued
her quiet way, and the Earth, unrealized by her teeming freight so busy
with their tiny personal aims, rushed forwards upon her glorious journey
through space.
O'Malley alone realized her presence, aware that he rushed with her
amid a living universe. But he kept his new sensations to himself. The
remainder of the voyage, indeed, across the Black Sea _via_ Samsoun and
Trebizond, is hazy in his mind so far as practical details are concerned,
for he found himself in a dreamy state of deep peace and would sometimes
sit for hours in reverie, only reminded of the present by certain pricks
of annoyance from the outer world. He had returned, of course, to his own
stateroom, yet felt in such close sympathy with his companion that no
outward expression by way of confidence or explanation was necessary. In
their Subconsciousness they were together and at one.
The pricks of annoyance came, as may be expected, chiefly from Dr.
Stahl, and took the form of variations of "I told you so." The man was
in a state of almost anger, caused half by disappointment, half by
unsatisfied curiosity. His cargo of oil and water would not mix, yet he
knew not which to throw overboard; here was another instance where
facts refused to tally with the beliefs dictated by sane reason; where
the dazzling speculations he played with threatened to win the day and
destroy the compromise his soul loved.
The Irishman, however, did not resent his curiosity, though he made
no attempt to satisfy it. He allowed him to become authoritative and
professional, to treat him somewhat as a patient. What could it matter
to him, who in a few hours would land at Batoum and go off with his
guide and comrade to some place where--? The thought he could never
see completed in words, for he only knew that the fulfillment of the
adventure would take place--somewhere, somehow, somewhen--in that space
within the soul of which external space is but an image and a figure.
What takes place in the mind and heart are alone the true events; their
outward expression in the shifting and impermanent shapes of matter is
the least real thing in all the world. For him the experience would be
true, real, authoritative--fact in the deepest sense of the word.
Already he saw it "whole."
Faith asks no travelers' questions--exact height of mountains, length
of rivers, distance from the sea, precise spelling of names, and so
forth. He felt--the quaint and striking simile is in the written
account--like a man hunting for a pillar-box in a strange city--absurdly
difficult to find, as though purposely concealed by the authorities amid
details of street and houses to which the eye is unaccustomed, yet really
close at hand all the time....
But at Trebizond, a few hours before Batoum, Dr. Stahl in his zealous
attentions went too far; for that evening he gave his "patient" a
sleeping-draught in his coffee that caused him to lie for twelve hours on
the cabin sofa, and when at length he woke toward noon, the Customs
officers had been aboard since nine o'clock, and most of the passengers
had already landed.
Among them, leaving no message, the big Russian had also gone
ashore. And, though Stahl may have been actuated by the wisest and
kindest motives, he was not quite prepared for the novel experience with
which it provided him--namely, of hearing an angry Irishman saying
rapidly what he thought of him in a stream of eloquent language that
lasted nearly a quarter of an hour without a break!