Summer blazed everywhere and the sea lay like a blue pool of melted sky
and sunshine. The summits of the Caucasus soon faded to the east and
north, and to the south the wooded hills of the Black Sea coast
accompanied the ship in a line of wavy blue that joined the water and
the sky indistinguishably.
The first-class passengers were few; O'Malley hardly noticed their
existence even. An American engineer, building a railway in Turkey,
came on board at Trebizond; there were one or two light women on their
way home from Baku, and the attaché of a foreign embassy from Teheran.
But the Irishman felt more in touch with the hundred peasant-folk
who joined the ship at Ineboli from the interior of Asia Minor
and were bound as third-class emigrants for Marseilles and far America.
Dark-skinned, wild-eyed, ragged, very dirty, they had never seen the sea
before, and the sight of a porpoise held them spellbound. They lived
on the after-deck, mostly cooking their own food, the women and children
sleeping beneath a large tarpaulin that the sailors stretched for
them across the width of deck. At night they played their pipes and
danced, singing, shouting, and waving their arms--always the same
tune over and over again.
O'Malley watched them for hours together. He also watched the engineer,
the over-dressed women, the attaché. He understood the difference
between them as he had never understood it before. He understood the
difficulty of his task as well. How in the world could he ever explain a
single syllable of his message to these latter, or waken in them the
faintest echo of desire to know and listen. The peasants, though all
unconscious of the blinding glory at their elbows, stood far nearer to
the truth.
"Been further east, I suppose?" the engineer observed, one afternoon
as the steamer lay off Broussa, taking on a little extra cargo of walnut
logs. He looked admiringly at the Irishman's bronzed skin. "Take a
better sun than this to put that on!"
He laughed in his breezy, vigorous way, and the other laughed with
him. Previous conversations had already paved the way to a traveler's
friendship, and the American had taken to him.
"Up in the mountains," he replied, "camping out and sleeping in the
sun did it."
"The Caucasus! Ah, I'd like to get up there myself a bit. I'm told
they're a wonderful thing in the mountain line."
Scenery for him was evidently a commercial commodity, or it was nothing.
It was the most up-to-date nation in the world that spoke--in the van of
civilization--representing the last word in progress due to triumph over
Nature.
O'Malley said he had never seen anything like them. He described the
trees, the flowers, the tribes, the scenery in general; he dwelt upon
the vast uncultivated spaces, the amazing fruitfulness of the soil, the
gorgeous beauty above all. "I'd like to get the overcrowded cities of
England and Europe spread all over it," he said with enthusiasm. "There
is room for thousands there to lead a simple life close to Nature, in
health and peace and happiness. Even your tired millionaires could
escape their restless, feverish worries, lay down their weary burden of
possessions, and enjoy the earth at last. The poor would cease to be with
us; life become true and beautiful again--" He let it pour out of him,
building the scaffolding of his dream before him in the air and filling
it in with beauty.
The American listened in patience, watching the walnut logs being
towed through the water to the side of the ship. From time to time he
spat on them, or into the sea. He let the beauty go completely past him.
"Great idea, that!" he interrupted at length. "You're interested, I see,
in socialism and communistic schemes. There's money in them somewhere
right enough, if a man only could hit the right note at the first
go off. Take a bit of doing, though!"
One of the women from Baku came up and leaned upon the rails a little
beyond them. The sickly odor of artificial scent wafted down. The
attaché strolled along the deck and ogled her.
"Get a few of that sort to draw the millionaires in, eh?" he added
vulgarly.
"Even those would come, yes," said the Irishman softly, realizing for
the first time within his memory that his gorge did not rise, "for they
too would change, grow clean and sweet and beautiful."
The engineer looked sharply into his face, uncertain whether he had
not missed a clever witticism of his own kind. But O'Malley did not
meet his glance. His eyes were far away upon the snowy summit of
Olympus where a flock of fleecy clouds hung hovering like the hair of
the eternal gods.
"They say there's timber going to waste that you could get to the coast
merely for the cost of drawing it--Caucasian walnut, too, to burn," the
other continued, getting on to safer ground, "and labor's dirt cheap.
There's every sort of mineral too God ever made. You could build light
railways and run the show by electricity. And water-power for the asking.
You'd have to get a Concession from Russia first though," he added,
spitting down upon a huge floating log in the clear sea underneath,
"and Russia's got palms that want a lot of greasing. I guess the natives,
too, would take a bit of managing."
The woman beyond had shifted several feet nearer, and after a pause
the Irishman found no words to fill, his companion turned to address
a remark to her. O'Malley took the opening and moved away.
"Here's my card, anyway," the American added, handing him an
over-printed bit of large pasteboard from a fat pocket-book that bore
his name and address in silver on the outside. "If you develop the scheme
and want a bit of money, count me in."
He went to the other side of the vessel and watched the peasants on
the lower deck. Their dirt seemed nothing by comparison. It was only
on their clothes and bodies. The odor of this unwashed humanity was
almost sweet and wholesome. It cleansed the sickly taint of that other
scent from his palate; it washed his mind of thoughts as well.
He stood there long in dreaming silence, while the sunlight on Olympus
turned from gold to rose, and the sea took on the colors of the fading
sky. He watched a dark Kurd baby sliding down the tarpaulin. A kitten was
playing with a loose end of rope too heavy for it to move. Further off a
huge fellow with bared chest and the hands of a colossus sat on a pile of
canvas playing softly on his wooden pipes. The dark hair fell across his
eyes, and a group of women listened idly while they busied themselves
with the cooking of the evening meal. Immediately beneath him a
splendid-eyed young woman crammed a baby to her naked breast. The kitten
left the rope and played with the tassel of her scarlet shawl.
And as he heard those pipes and watched the grave, untamed, strong faces
of those wild peasant men and women, he understood that, low though they
might be in scale of evolution, there was yet absent from them the touch
of that deteriorating _something_ which civilization painted into those
other countenances. But whether the word he sought was degradation or
whether it was shame, he could not tell. In all they did, the way they
moved, their dignity and independence, there was this something, he felt,
that bordered on being impressive. Their wants were few, their worldly
possessions in a bundle, yet they had this thing that set them in a place
apart, if not above, these others:--beyond that simpering attaché for all
his worldly diplomacy, that engineer with brains and skill, those painted
women with their clever playing upon the feelings and desires of their
kind. There _was_ this difference that set the ragged dirty crew in a
proud and quiet atmosphere that made them seem almost distinguished by
comparison, and certainly more desirable. Rough and untutored though they
doubtless were, they still possessed unspoiled that deeper and more
elemental nature that bound them closer to the Earth. It needed training,
guidance, purifying; yes; but, in the last resort, was it not of greater
spiritual significance and value than the mode of comparatively
recently-developed reason by which Civilization had produced these other
types?
He watched them long. The sun sank out of sight, the sea turned
dark, ten thousand stars shone softly in the sky, and while the steamer
swung about and made for peaked Andros and the coast of Greece, he
still stood on in reverie and wonder. The wings of his great Dream
stirred mightily ... and he saw pale millions of men and women trooping
through the gates of horn and ivory into that Garden where they should
find peace and happiness in clean simplicity close to the Earth....