And then at length there came a change of voice across the cabin. The
Irishman had finished. He sank back in the deep leather chair, exhausted
physically, but with the exultation of his mighty hope still pouring at
full strength through his heart. For he had ventured further than ever
before and had spoken of a possible crusade--a crusade that should preach
peace and happiness to every living creature.
And Dr. Stahl, in a voice that showed how deeply he was moved, asked
quietly:--
"By leading the nations back to Nature you think they shall advance
to Truth at last?"
"With time," was the reply. "The first step lies there:--in changing
the direction of the world's activities, changing it from the transient
Outer to the eternal Inner. In the simple life, external possessions
unnecessary and recognized as vain, the soul would turn within and
seek Reality. Only a tiny section of humanity has time to do it now.
There is no leisure. Civilization means acquirement for the body: it
ought to mean development for the soul. Once sweep aside the trash
and rubbish men seek outside themselves today, and the wings of their
smothered souls would stir again. Consciousness would expand. Nature
would draw them first. They would come to feel the Earth as I did. Self
would disappear, and with it this false sense of separateness. The
greater consciousness would waken in them. The peace and joy and
blessedness of inner growth would fill their lives. But, first, this
childish battling to the death for external things must cease, and
Civilization stand revealed for the bleak and empty desolate thing it
really is. It leads away from God and from the things that are eternal."
The German made no answer; O'Malley ceased to speak; a long silence
fell between them. Then, presently, Stahl relighted his cigar, and
lapsing into his native tongue--always a sign with him of deepest
seriousness--he began to talk.
"You've honored me," he said, "with a great confidence; and I am deeply,
deeply grateful. You have told your inmost dream--the thing men find it
hardest of all to speak about." He felt in the darkness for his
companion's hand and held it tightly for a moment. He made no other
comment upon what he had heard. "And in return--in some small way of
return," he continued, "I may ask you to listen to something of my own,
something of possible interest. No one has ever known it from my lips.
Only, in our earlier conversations on the outward voyage, I hinted at it
once or twice. I sometimes warned you--"
"I remember. You said he'd 'get' me, 'win' me over--'appropriation' was
the word you used."
"I suggested caution, yes; urged you not to let yourself go too
completely; told you he represented danger to yourself, and to humanity
as it is organized today--"
"And all the rest," put in O'Malley a shade impatiently. "I remember
perfectly."
"Because I knew what I was talking about." The doctor's voice came across
the darkness somewhat ominously. And then he added in a louder tone,
evidently sitting forward as he said it: "For the thing that has happened
to yourself as I foresaw it would, had already _almost_ happened to me
too!"
"To you, doctor, too?" exclaimed the Irishman in the moment's pause
that followed.
"I saved myself just in time--by getting rid of the cause."
"You discharged him from the hospital, because you were afraid!" He said
it sharply as though are instant of the old resentment had flashed up.
By way of answer Stahl rose from his chair and abruptly turned up the
electric lamp upon the desk that faced them across the cabin. Evidently
he preferred the light. O'Malley saw that his face was white and very
grave. He grasped for the first time that the man was speaking
professionally. The truth came driving next behind it--that Stahl
regarded him as a patient.
* * * * *
"Please go on, doctor," he said, keenly on the watch. "I'm deeply
interested." The wings of his great dream still bore him too far aloft
for him to feel more than the merest passing annoyance at his discovery.
Resentment had gone too. Sadness and disappointment for an instant
touched him perhaps, but momentarily. In the end he felt sure that
Stahl would stand at his side, completely won over and convinced.
"You had a similar experience to my own, you say," he urged him. "I
am all eagerness and sympathy to hear."
"We'll talk in the open air," the doctor answered, and ringing the bell
for the steward to clear away, he drew his companion out to the deserted
decks. They moved toward the bows, past the sleeping peasants. The stars
were mirrored in a glassy sea and toward the north the hills of Corsica
stood faintly outlined in the sky. It was already long after midnight.
"Yes, a similar thing nearly happened to me," he resumed as they settled
themselves against a coil of rope where only the murmur of the washing
sea could reach them, "and might have happened to others too. Inmates of
that big _Krankenhaus_ were variously affected. My action, tardy I must
admit, saved myself and them."
And the German then told his story as a man might tell of his escape from
some grave disaster. In the emphatic sentences of his native language he
told it, congratulating himself all through. The Russian had almost won
him over, gained possession of his heart and mind, persuaded him, but in
the end had failed--because the other ran away. It was like hearing a man
describe an attempt to draw him into Heaven, then boast of his escape.
His caution and his judgment, as he put it, saved him, but to the
listening Celt it rather seemed that his compromise it was that damned
him. The Kingdom of Heaven is hard to enter, for Stahl had possessions
not of the wood and metal order, but possessions of the brain and reason
he was too proud to forego completely. They kept him out.
With increasing sadness, too, he heard it; for here he realized was the
mental attitude of an educated, highly civilized man today--a
representative type regarded by the world as highest. It was this he had
to face. Moreover Stahl was more than merely educated, he was
understandingly sympathetic, meeting the great dream halfway; seeing in
it possibilities; admitting its high beauty, and even sometimes speaking
of it with hope and a touch of enthusiasm. Its originator none the less
he regarded as a reactionary dreamer, an unsettling and disordered
influence, a patient, if not even something worse!
Stahl's voice and manner were singular while he told it all, revealing
one moment the critical mind that analyzed and judged, and the next
an enthusiasm almost of the mystic. Alternately, like the man and
woman of those quaint old weather-glasses, each peered out and showed
a face, the reins of compromise yet ever seeking to hold them well in
leash and drive them together.
Hardly, it seems, had the strange Russian been under his care a week
before he passed beneath the sway of his curious personality and
experienced the attack of singular emotions upon his heart and mind.
He described at first the man's arrival, telling it with the calm and
balanced phrases a doctor uses when speaking merely of a patient who
had stirred his interest. He first detailed the method of suggestion he
had used to revive the lapsed memory--and its utter failure. Then he
passed on to speak of him more generally: but briefly and condensed.
"The man," he said, "was so engaging, so docile, his personality
altogether so attractive and mysterious, that I took the case myself
instead of delegating it to my assistants. All efforts to trace his past
collapsed. It was as if he had drifted into that little hotel out of the
night of time. Of madness there was no evidence whatever. The association
of ideas in his mind, though limited, was logical and rigid. His health
was perfect, barring strange, sudden fever; his vitality tremendous;
yet he ate most sparingly and the only food he touched was fruit and
milk and vegetables. Meat made him sick, the huge frame shuddered
when he saw it. And from all the human beings in the place with whom
he came in contact he shrank with a kind of puzzled dismay. With animals,
most oddly it seemed, he sought companionship; he would run to the window
if a dog barked, or to hear a horse's hoofs; a Persian cat belonging to
one of the nurses never left his side, and I have seen the trees in the
yard outside his window thick with birds, and even found them in the room
and on the sill, flitting about his very person, unafraid and singing.
"With me, as with the attendants, his speech was almost nil--laconic
words in various languages, clipped phrases that sometimes combined
Russian, French, or German, other tongues as well.
"But, strangest of all, with animal life he seemed to hold this kind
of communication that was Intelligible both to himself and them. Animals
certainly were 'aware' of him. It was not speech. It ran in a deep,
continuous murmur like a droning, humming sound of wind. I took the hint
thus faintly offered. I gave him his freedom in the yards and gardens.
The open air and intercourse with natural life was what he craved. The
sadness and the air of puzzled fretting then left his face, his eyes grew
bright, his whole presentment happier; he ran and laughed and even sang.
The fever that had troubled him all vanished. Often myself I took the
place of nurse or orderly to watch him, for the man's presence more than
interested me: it gave me a renewed sense of life that was exhilarating,
invigorating, delightful. And in his appearance, meanwhile, something
that was not size or physical measurement, turned--tremendous.
"A part of me that was not mind--a sort of forgotten instinct blindly
groping--came of its own accord to regard him as some loose fragment
of a natural, cosmic life that had somehow blundered down into a
human organism it sought to use....
"And then it was for the first time I recognized the spell he had cast
upon me; for, when the Committee decided there was no reason to keep
him longer, I urged that he should stay. Making a special plea, I took
him as a private patient of my own. I kept him under closer personal
observation than ever before. I needed him. Something deep within me,
something undivined hitherto, called out into life by his presence, could
not do without him. This new craving, breakingly wild and sweet, awoke
in my blood and cried for him. His presence nourished it in me. Most
insidiously it attacked me. It stirred deep down among the roots of my
being. It 'threatened my personality' seems the best way I can put it;
for, turning a critical analysis upon it, I discovered that it was an
undermining and revolutionary change going steadily forward in my
character. Its growth had hitherto been secret. When I first recognized
its presence, the thing was already strong. For a long time, it had been
building.
"And the change in a word--you will grasp my meaning from the shortest
description of essentials--was this: that ambition left me, ordinary
desire crumbled, the outer world men value so began to fade."
"And in their place?" cried O'Malley breathlessly, interrupting for
the first time.
"Came a rushing, passionate desire to escape from cities and live for
beauty and simplicity 'in the wilderness'; to taste the life _he_
seemed to know; to go out blindly with him into woods and desolate
places, and be mixed and blended with the loveliness of Earth and Nature.
This was the first thing I knew. It was like an expansion of my normal
world--almost an extension of consciousness. It somehow threatened my
sense of personal identity. And--it made me hesitate."
O'Malley caught the tremor in his voice. Even in the telling of it the
passion plucked at him, for here, as ever, he stood on the border-line of
compromise, his heart tempting him toward salvation, his brain and
reason tugging at the brakes.
"The sham and emptiness or modern life, its drab vulgarity, the
unworthiness of its very ideals stood appallingly revealed before some
inner eye just opening. I felt shaken to the core of what had seemed
hitherto my very solid and estimable self. How the man thus so powerfully
affected me lies beyond all intelligible explanation. To use the obvious
catchword 'hypnotism' is to use a toy and stop a leak with paper. For his
influence was _unconsciously_ exerted. He cast no net of clever,
persuasive words about my thought. Out of that deep, strange silence of
the man it somehow came. His actions and his simple happiness of face and
manner--both in some sense the raw material of speech perhaps--may have
operated as potently suggestive agents; but no adequate causes to justify
the result, apart from the fantastic theories I have mentioned, have ever
yet come within the range of my understanding. I can only give you the
undeniable effects."
"Your sense of extended consciousness," asked his listener, "was this
continuous, once it had begun?"
"It came in patches," Stahl continued. "My normal, everyday self was
thus able to check it. While it derided, commiserated this everyday self,
the latter stood in dread of it and even awe. My training, you see,
regarded it as symptom of disorder, a beginning of unbalance that might
end in insanity, the thin wedge of a dissociation of the personality
Morton Prince and others have described."
His speech grew more and more jerky, even incoherent; evidently the
material had not even now been fully reduced to order in his mind.
"Among other curious symptoms I soon established that this subtle
spreading of my consciousness grew upon me especially during sleep.
The business of the day distracted, scattered it. On waking in the
morning, as with the physical fatigue that comes toward the closing of
the day, it was strongest.
"And so, in order to examine it closely when in fullest manifestation,
I came to spend the nights with him. I would creep in while he slept
and stay till morning, alternately sleeping and waking myself. I watched
the two of us together. I also watched the 'two' in me. And thus it was
I made the further strange discovery that the influence _he_ exerted on
me was strongest while he slept. It is best described by saying that in
his sleep I was conscious that he sought to draw me with him--away
somewhere into his own wonderful world--the state or region, that is,
where he manifested completely instead of partially as I knew him here.
His personality was a channel somewhere out into a living, conscious
Nature...."
"Only," interrupted O'Malley, "you felt that to yield and go involved
some nameless inner catastrophe, and so resisted?" He chose his phrase
with purpose.
"Because I discovered," was the pregnant answer, given steadily while
he watched his listener closely through the darkness, "that this desire
for escape the man had wakened in me was nothing more or less than the
desire to leave the world, to leave the conditions that prevented--in
fact to leave the body. My discontent with modern life had gone as far
as that. It was the birth of the suicidal mania."
* * * * *
The pause that followed the words, on the part of Dr. Stahl at any
rate, was intentional. O'Malley held his peace. The men shifted their
places on the coil of rope, for both were cramped and stiff with the
lengthy session. For a minute or two they leaned over the bulwarks and
watched the phosphorescent foam in silence. The blue mountainous shores
slipped past in shadowy line against the stars. But when they sat down
again their relative positions were not what they had been before. Dr.
Stahl had placed himself between his listener and the sea. And O'Malley
did not let the manoeuvre escape him. Smiling to himself he noticed it.
Just as surely he noticed, too, that the whole recital was being told him
with a purpose.
"You really need not be afraid," he could not resist saying. "The idea
of escape _that_ way has never even come to me at all. And, anyhow, I've
far too much on hand first in telling the world my message." He laughed
in the silence that took his words, for Stahl said nothing and made as
though he had not heard. But the Irishman understood that it was in
the spirit of feeble compromise that danger lay--if danger there was at
all, and he himself was far beyond such weakness. His eye was single
and his body full of light, and the faith that plays with mountains had
made him whole. Return to Nature for him involved no denial of human
life, nor depreciation of human interests, but only a revolutionary
shifting of values.
"And it was one night while he slept and I watched him in the little
room," resumed the German as though there had been no interruption,
"I noticed first so decisively this growing of a singular size about him
I have already mentioned, and grasped its meaning. For the bulk of the
man while growing--emerging, rather, I should say--assumed another
shape than his own. It was not my eyes that saw it. I saw him as _he felt
himself to be_. The creature's personality, his essential inner being,
was acting directly upon my own. His influence was at me from another
point or angle. First the emotions, then the senses you see. It was a
finely organized attack.
"I definitely understood at last that my mind was affected--and proved it
too, for the instant effort I made at recovery resulted in my seeing him
normal again. The size and shape retreated the moment I denied them."
O'Malley noticed how the speaker's voice lingered over the phrase.
Again he knew the intention of the pause that followed. He held his
peace, however, and waited.
"Nor was sight the only sense affected," Stahl continued, "for smell
and hearing also brought their testimony. Through all but touch,
indeed, the hallucination attacked me. For sometimes at night while I
sat up watching in the little room, there rose outside the open window
in the yards and gardens a sound of tramping, a distant roaring as of
voices in a rising wind, a rushing, hollow murmur, confused and deep
like that of forests, or the swift passage of a host of big birds across
the sky. I heard it, both in the air and on the ground--this tramping on
the lawns, this curious shaking of the atmosphere. And with it at the
same time a sharp and mingled perfume that made me think of earth
and leaves, of flowers after rain, of plains and open spaces, most
singular of all--of animals and horses.
"Before the firm denial of my mind, they vanished, just as the change
of form had vanished. But both left me weaker than they found me,
more tender to attack. Moreover, I understood most plainly, that they
emanated all from him. These 'emanations' came, too, chiefly, as I
mentioned, whilst he slept. In sleep, it seemed, he set them free. The
slumber of the body disengaged them. And then the instinct came to
warn me--presenting itself with the authority of an unanswerable
intuition--the realization, namely, that if, for a single moment in his
presence, I slept, the changes would leap forward in my own being, and
I should join him."
"Escape! Know freedom in a larger consciousness!" cried the other.
"And for a man of my point of view and training to have permitted
such a conviction at all," he went on, the interruption utterly ignored
again, "proves how far along the road I had already traveled without
knowing it. Only at the time I was not aware of this. It was the shock
of full discovery later that brought me to my senses, when, seeking to
withdraw,--I found I could not."
"And so you ran away." It came out bluntly enough, with a touch of
scorn but ill concealed.
"We discharged him. But before that came there was more I have to
tell you--if you still care to hear it."
"I'm not tired, if that's what you mean. I could listen all night, as far
as that goes."
He rose to stretch his legs a moment, and Stahl rose too--instantly.
Together they leaned over the bulwarks. The German's hat was off and
the air made by the steamer's passage drew his beard out. The warm soft
wind brought odors of sea and shore. It caressed their faces, then passed
on across those sleeping peasants on the lower deck. The masts and
rigging swung steadily against the host of stars.
"Before I thus knew myself half caught," continued the doctor, standing
now close enough beside him for actual contact, "and found it difficult
to get away, other things had happened, things that confirmed the change
so singularly begun in me. They happened everywhere; confirmation came
from many quarters; though slight enough, they filled in all the gaps and
crevices, strengthened the joints, and built the huge illusion round me
all complete until it held me like a prison.
"And they are difficult to tell. Only, indeed, to yourself who underwent
a similar experience up there in the mountains, could they bring much
meaning. You had the same temptation and you--weathered the same storm."
He caught O'Malley's arm a moment and held it. "You escaped this madness
just as I did, and you will realize what I mean when I say that the
sensation of losing my sense of personal identity became so dangerously,
so seductively strong. The feeling of extended consciousness became
delicious--too delicious to resist. A kind of pagan joy and exultation
known to some in early youth, but put away with the things of youth,
possessed me. In the presence of this other's soul, so strangely powerful
in its silence and simplicity, I felt as though I touched new sources of
life. I tapped them. They poured down and flooded me--with dreams--dreams
that could really haunt--with unsettling thoughts of glory and delight
_beyond the body_. I got clean away into Nature. I felt as though some
portion of me just awakening reached out across him into rain and
sunshine, far up into the sweet and starry sky--as a tree growing out of
a thicket that chokes its lower part finds light and freedom at the top."
"It caught you badly, doctor," O'Malley murmured. "The gods came close!"
"So badly that I loathed the prisoned darkness that held me so thickly
in the body. I longed to know my being all dispersed through Nature,
scattered with dew and wind, shining with the star-light and the sun.
And the manner of escape I hinted to you a little while ago came to
seem right and necessary. Lawful it seemed, and obvious. The mania
literally obsessed me, though still I tried to hide it even from myself
... and struggled in resistance."
"You spoke just now of other things that came to confirm it," the
Irishman said while the other paused to take breath. All this he knew.
He grew weary of Stahl's clever laboring the point that it was madness.
A little knowledge is ever dangerous, and he saw so clearly why the
hesitation of the merely intellectual man had led him into error. "Did
you mean that others acknowledged this influence as well as yourself?"
"You shall read that for yourself tomorrow," came the answer, "in the
detailed report I drew up afterwards; it is far too long to tell you now.
But, I may mention something of it. That breaking out of patients was
a curious thing, their trying to escape, their dreams and singing, their
efforts sometimes to approach his room, their longing for the open and
the gardens; the deep, prolonged entrancing of a few; the sounds of
rushing, tramping that they, too, heard, the violence of some, the silent
ecstasy of others. The thing may find its parallel, perhaps, in the
collective mania that sometimes afflicts religious communities, in
monasteries or convents. Only here there was no preacher and eloquent
leader to induce hysteria--nothing but that silent dynamo of power,
gentle and winning as a little child, a being who could not put a phrase
together, exerting his potent spell unconsciously, and chiefly while he
slept.
"For the phenomena almost without exception came in the night, and often
at their fullest strength, as afterwards reported to me, while I dozed in
his room and watched beside his motionless and slumbering form. Oh, and
there was more as well, much more, as you shall read. The stories my
assistants brought me, the tales of frightened nurse and warder, the
amazing yarns the porter stammered out, of strangers who had rung the
bell at dawn, trying to push past him through the door, saying they were
messengers and had been summoned, sent for, had to come,--large, curious,
windy figures, or, as he sometimes called them with unconscious humor,
'like creatures out of fairy books or circuses' that always vanished as
suddenly as they came. Making every allowance for excitement and
exaggeration, the tales were strange enough, I can assure you, and the
way many of the patients knew their visions intensified, their illusions
doubly strengthened, their efforts even to destroy themselves in many
cases almost more than the staff could deal with--all this brought the
matter to a climax and made my duty very plain at last."
"And the effect upon yourself--at its worst?" asked his listener quietly.
Stahl sighed wearily a little as he answered with a new-found sadness
in his tone.
"I've told you briefly that," he said; "repetition cannot strengthen it.
The worthlessness of the majority of human aims today expresses it
Best--what you have called yourself the 'horror of civilization.' The
vanity of all life's modern, so-called up-to-date tendencies for outer,
mechanical developments. A wild, mad beauty streaming from that man's
personality overran the whole place and caught the lot of us, myself
especially, with a lust for simple, natural things, and with a passion
for spiritual beauty to accompany them. Fame, wealth, position seemed the
shadows then, and something else it's hard to name announced itself as
the substance.... I wanted to clear out and live with Nature, to know
simplicity, unselfish purposes, a golden state of childlike existence
close to dawns and dew and running water, cared for by woods and blessed
by all the winds...." He paused again for breath, then added:--
"And that's just where the mania caught at me so cunningly--till I
saw it and called a halt."
"Ah!"
"For the thing I sought, the thing _he_ knew, and perhaps remembered,
was not possible _in the body_. It was a spiritual state--"
"Or to be known subjectively!" O'Malley checked him.
"I am no lotus-eater by nature," he went on with energy, "and so I
fought and conquered it. But first, I tell you, it came upon me like a
tempest--a hurricane of wonder and delight. I've always held, like
yourself perhaps, that civilization brings its own army of diseases, and
that the few illnesses known to ruder savage races can be cured by simple
means the earth herself supplies. And along this line of thought the
thing swept into me--the line of my own head-learning. This was natural
enough; natural enough, too, that it thus at first deceived me.
"For the quack cures of history come to this--herb simples and the
rest; only we know them now as sun-cure, water-cure, open-air cure, old
Kneipp, sea-water, and a hundred others. Doctors have never swarmed
before as they do now, and these artificial diseases civilization brings
in such quantity seemed all at once to mean the abeyance of some central
life or power men ought to share with--Nature.... You shall read it
all in my written report. I merely wish to show you now how the
insidious thing got at me along the line of my special knowledge. I saw
the truth that priests and doctors are the only possible and necessary
'professions' in the world, and--that they should be really but a single
profession...."