The Centaur Part 18

O'Malley did not answer. He drank the liquid golden suns.h.i.+ne in his gla.s.s; his eyes lifted to the stars that watched above the sea; between the surge of human figures came a little wind from the grim, mysterious Caucasus beyond. He turned all tender as a child, receiving as with a shock of sudden strength and sweetness a thousand intimate messages from the splendid mood of old Mother-Earth who here expressed herself in such a potent breed of men and mountains.

He heard the doctor's voice still speaking, as from a distance though:--

"For here they all grow with her. They do not fight her and resist. She pours freely through them; there is no opposition. The channels still lie open; ... and they share her life and power."

"That beauty which the modern world has lost," repeated the other to himself, lingering over the words, and wondering why they expressed so little of what he really meant.

"But which will never--_can_ never come again," Stahl completed the sentence. There was a wistful, genuine sadness in his voice and eyes, and the sympathy touched the inflammable Celt with fire. It was ever thus with him. The little man opposite, with the ragged beard, and the bald, domed head gleaming in the electric light, had laid a card upon the table, showing a bit of his burning heart. The generous Irishman responded like a child, laying himself bare. So hungry was he for comprehension.

"Men have everywhere else clothed her fair body with their smothering, ugly clothing and their herded cities," he burst out, so loud that the Armenian waiter sidled up, thinking he called for wine. "But here she lies naked and unashamed, sweet in divinity made simple. By Jove!

I tell you, doctor, it burns and sweeps me with a kind of splendid pa.s.sion that drowns my little shame-faced personality of the twentieth century. I could run out and wors.h.i.+p--fall down and kiss the gra.s.s and soil and sea--!"

He drew back suddenly like a wounded animal; his face turned scarlet, as though he knew himself convicted of an hysterical outburst. Stahl's eyes had changed even as he spoke the flaming words that struggled so awkwardly to seize his mood of rapture--a thought the Earth poured through him for a moment. The bitter, half-mocking smile lay in them, and on the lips the cold and critical expression of the other Stahl, skeptic and science-man. A revulsion of feeling caught them both. But to O'Malley came the thought that once again he had been drawn--was being coaxed for examination beneath the microscope.

"The material here," Stahl said presently, with the calm tones of a dispa.s.sionate diagnosis, "is magnificent as you say, uncivilized without being merely savage, untamed, yet far from crude barbarism. When the progress of the age gets into this land the transformation will be grand.

When Russia lets in culture, when modern improvements have developed her resources and trained the wild human forces into useful channels...."

He went on calmly by the yard, till it was all the Irishman could do not to dash the wine-gla.s.s in his face.

"Remember my words when you are up in the lonely mountains," he concluded at length, smiling his queer sardonic smile, "and keep yourself in hand. Put on the brakes when possible. Your experience will thus have far more value."

"And you," replied O'Malley bluntly, so bluntly it was almost rudeness, "go back to Fechner, and try to save your compromising soul before it is too late--"

"Still following those lights that do mislead the morn," Stahl added gently, breaking into English for a phrase he apparently loved. They laughed and raised their gla.s.ses.

A long pause came which neither cared to break. The streets were growing empty, the personality of the mysterious little Black Sea port folding away into the darkness. The wilder element had withdrawn behind the shuttered windows. There came a murmur of the waves, but the soldiers no longer sang. The droschkys ceased to rattle past. The night flowed down more thickly from the mountains, and the air, moist with that malarial miasma which makes the climate of this reclaimed marsh whereon Batoum is built so unhealthy, closed unpleasantly about them. The stars died in it.

"Another gla.s.s?" suggested Stahl. "A drink to the G.o.ds of the Future, and till we meet again, on your return journey, eh?"

"I'll walk with you to the steamer," was the reply. "I never care for much wine. And the G.o.ds of the Future will prefer my usual offering, I think--imaginative faith."

The doctor did not ask him to explain. They walked down the middle of the narrow streets. No one was about, nor were there lights in many windows. Once or twice from an upper story came the faint tw.a.n.ging of a balalaika against the drone of voices, and occasionally they pa.s.sed a little garden where figures outlined themselves among the trees, with the clink of gla.s.ses, laughter of men and girls, and the glowing tips of cigarettes.

They turned down toward the harbor where the spars and funnels of the big steamers were just visible against the sky, and opposite the unshuttered window of a shop--one of those modern shops that oddly mar the town with a.s.sorted German tinware, Paris hats, and oleographs indiscriminately mingled--Stahl stopped a moment and pointed. They moved up idly and looked in. From the shadows of the other side, well hidden, an armed patrol eyed them suspiciously, though they were not aware of it.

"It was before a window like this," remarked Stahl, apparently casually, "that I once in Tiflis overheard two mountain Georgians talking together as they examined a reproduction of a modern picture--Bocklin's 'Centaur.' They spoke in half whispers, but I caught the trend of what they said. You know the picture, perhaps?"

"I've seen it somewhere, yes," was the short reply. "But what were they saying?" He strove to keep his voice commonplace and casual like his companion's.

"Oh, just discussing it together, but with a curious stretched interest,"

Stahl went on. "One asked, 'What does it say?' and pointed to the inscription underneath. They could not read. For a long time they stared in silence, their faces grave and half afraid. 'What is it?' repeated the first one, and the other, a much older man, heavily bearded and of giant build, replied low, 'It's what I told you about'; there was awe in his tone and manner; 'they still live in the big valley of the rhododendrons beyond--' mentioning some lonely uninhabited region toward Daghestan; 'they come in the spring, and are very swift and roaring....You must always hide. To see them is to die. But they cannot die; they are of the mountains. They are older, older than the stones. And the dogs will warn you, or the horses, or sometimes a great sudden wind, though you must never shoot.' They stood gazing in solemn wonder for minutes...till at last, realizing that their silence was final, I moved away. There were manifestations of life in the mountains, you see, that they had seen and knew about--old forms akin to that picture apparently."

The patrol came out of his shadows, and Stahl quickly drew his companion along the pavement.

"You have your pa.s.sport with you?" he asked, noticing the man behind them.

"It went to the police this afternoon. I haven't got it back yet."

O'Malley spoke thickly, in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. How much he welcomed that casual interruption of the practical world he could never explain or tell. For the moment he had felt like wax in the other's hands. He had dreaded searching questions, and felt unspeakably relieved. A minute more and he would have burst into confession.

"You should never be without it," the doctor added. "The police here are perfect fiends, and can cause you endless inconvenience."

O'Malley knew it all, but gladly seized the talk and spun it out, asking innocent questions while scarcely listening to the answers. They distanced the patrol and neared the quays and s.h.i.+pping. In the darkness of the sky a great line showed where the spurs of the Lesser Caucasus gloomed huge and solemn to the East and West. At the gangway of the steamer they said good-bye. Stahl held the Irishman's hand a moment in his own.

"Remember, when you know temptation strong," he said gravely, though a smile was in the eyes, "the pa.s.swords that I now give you: Humanity and Civilization."

"I'll try."

They shook hands warmly enough.

"Come home by this steamer if you can," he called down from the deck.

"And keep to the middle of the road on your way back to the hotel. It's safer in a town like this." O'Malley divined the twinkle in his eyes as he said it. "Forgive my many sins," he heard finally, "and when we meet again, tell me your own...." The darkness took the sentence.

But the word the Irishman took home with him to the little hotel was the single one--Civilization: and this, owing to the peculiar significance of intonation and accent with which this bewildering and self-contradictory being had uttered it.

XXVI

He walked along the middle of the street as Stahl had advised. He would have done so in any case, unconsciously, for he knew these towns quite as well as the German did. Yet he did not walk alone. The entire Earth walked with him, and personal danger was an impossibility. A dozen ruffians might attack him, but none could "take" his life.

How simple it all seemed, yet how utterly beyond the reach of intelligible description to those who have never felt it--this sudden surge upwards, downwards, all around and about of the vaster consciousness amid which the sense of normal individuality seemed but a tiny focused point. That loss of personality he first dreaded as an "inner catastrophe" appeared to him now for what it actually was--merely an extinction of some phantasmal illusion of self into the only true life. Here, upon the fringe of this wonder-region of the Caucasus, the spirit of the Earth still manifested as of old, reached out lovingly to those of her children who were simple enough to respond, ready to fold them in and heal them of the modern, racking fevers which must otherwise destroy them.... The entire sky of soft darkness became a hand that covered him, and stroked him into peace; the perfume that wafted down that narrow street beside him was the single, enveloping fragrance of the whole wide Earth herself; he caught the very murmur of her splendid journey through the stars. The cert.i.tude of some state of boundless being flamed, roaring and immense, about his soul....

And when he reached his room, a little cell that shut out light and air, he met that sinister denial of the simple life which, for him at least, was the true Dweller on the Threshold. Cras.h.i.+ng in to it he choked, as it were, and could have cried aloud. It gripped and caught him by the throat--the word that Stahl--Stahl who understood even while he warned and mocked and hesitated himself--had flung so tauntingly upon him from the decks--Civilization.

Upon his table lay by chance--the Armenian hotel-keeper had evidently unearthed it for his benefit--a copy of a London halfpenny paper, a paper that feeds the public with the ugliest details of all the least important facts of life by the yard, inventing others when the supply is poor. He read it over vaguely, with a sense of cold distress that was half pain, half nausea. Somehow it stirred his sense of humor; he returned slowly to his normal, littler state. But it was not the contrast which made him smile; rather was it the chance juxtaposition of certain of the contents; for on the page facing the accounts of railway accidents, of people burned alive, explosions, giant strikes, crumpled air-men and other countless horrors which modern inventions offered upon the altar of feverish Progress, he read a complacently boastful leader that extolled the conquest of Nature men had learned _by speed_. The ability to pa.s.s from one point to another across the skin of the globe in the least possible time was sign of the development of the human soul.

The pompous flatulence of the language touched bathos. He thought of the thousands who had read both columns and preened themselves upon that leader. He thought how they would pride themselves upon the latest contrivance for speeding their inert bodies from one point to another "annihilating distance"; upon being able to get from suburbia to the huge shops that created artificial wants, then filled them; from the pokey villas with their wee sham gardens to the dingy offices; from dark airless East End rooms to countless factories that pour out semifraudulent, unnecessary wares upon the world, explosives and weapons to destroy another nation, or cheapjack goods to poison their own--all in a few minutes less than they could do it the week before.

And then he thought of the leisure of the country folk and of those who knew how to be content without external possessions, to watch the sunset and the dawn with hearts that sought realities; sharing the n.o.ble slowness of the seasons, the gradual growth of flowers, trees, and crops, the unhurried dignity of Nature's grand procession, the repose-in-progress of the Mother-Earth.

The calmness of the unhastening Earth once more possessed his soul in peace. He hid the paper, watching the quiet way the night beyond his window buried it from sight...

And through that open window came the perfume and the mighty hand of darkness slowly. It seemed to this imaginative Irishman that he caught a sound of awful laughter from the mountains and the sea, a laughter that brought, too, a wave of sighing--of deep and old-world sighing.

And before he went to sleep he took an antidote in the form of a page from that book that accompanied all his travels, a book which was written wholly in the open air because its message refused to come to the heart of the inspired writer within doors, try as he would, the "sky especially containing for me the key, the inspiration--"

And the fragment that he read expressed a little bit of his own thought and feeling. The seer who wrote it looked ahead, naming it "After Civilization," whereas he looked back. But they saw the same vision; the confusion of time was nothing:--

In the first soft winds of spring, while snow yet lay on the ground-- Forth from the city into the great woods wandering, Into the great silent white woods where they waited in their beauty and majesty For man their companion to come: There, in vision, out of the wreck of cities and civilizations, Slowly out of the ruins of the past

Out of the litter and muck of a decaying world, Lo! even so I saw a new life arise.

O sound of waters, jubilant, pouring, pouring--O hidden song in the hollows!

Secret of the Earth, swelling, sobbing to divulge itself!

Slowly, building, lifting itself up atom by atom, Gathering itself round a new center--or rather round the world?old center once more revealed-- I saw a new life, a new society, arise.

Man I saw arising once more to dwell with Nature; (The old old story--the prodigal son returning, so loved, The long estrangement, the long entanglement in vain things)-- The child returning to its home--companion of the winter woods once more-- Companion of the stars and waters--hearing their words at first-hand (more than all science ever taught)-- The near contact, the dear dear mother so close--the twilight sky and the young tree-tops against it; The few needs, the exhilarated radiant life--the food and population question giving no more trouble; No hurry more, no striving one to over-ride the other: ... man the companion of Nature.

Civilization behind him now--the wonderful stretch of the past; Continents, empires, religions, wars, migrations--all gathered up in him; The immense knowledge, the vast winged powers--to use or not to use--...