The Centaur Part 25

And the forms moved down slowly from their mountainous pedestals; the woods breathed out a sigh; the running water sang; the slopes all murmured through their gra.s.s and flowers. For a wors.h.i.+pper, strayed from the outer world of the dead, stood within the precincts of their ancient temple. He had pa.s.sed the Angel with the flaming sword those very dead had set there long ago. The Garden now enclosed him. He had found the heart of the Earth, his mother. Self-realization in the perfect union with Nature was fulfilled. He knew the Great At-onement.

The quiet of the dawn still lay upon the world; dew sparkled; the air was keen and fresh. Yet, in spite of all this vast sense of energy, this vigor and delight, O'Malley no longer felt the least goading of excitement. There was this animation and this fine delight; but craving for sensation of any kind, was gone. Excitement, as it tortured men in that outer world he had left, could not exist in this larger state of being; for excitement is the appet.i.te for something not possessed, magnified artificially till it has become a condition of disease. All that he needed was now contained within himself; he was at-ease; and, literally, that unrest which men miscall delight could touch him not nor torture him again.

If this were death--how exquisite!

And Time was not a pa.s.sing thing, for it lay, he says, somehow in an ocean everywhere, heaped up in gulfs and s.p.a.ces. It was as though he could help himself and take it. That morning, had he so wished, could last forever; he could go backwards and taste the shadows of the night again, or forward and bask in the glory of hot noon. There were no parts of things, and so no restlessness, no sense of incompleteness, no divisions.

This quiet of the dawn lay in himself, and, since he loved it, lay there, cool and sweet and sparkling for--years; almost--forever.

Moreover, while this giant form of _Urwelt_-life his inner self had a.s.sumed was new, it yet seemed somehow familiar. The speed and weight and power caused him no distress, there was no detail that he could not manage easily. To race thus o'er the world, keeping pace with an eternal dawn, was as simple as for the Earth herself to spin through s.p.a.ce. His union with her was as complete as that. In every item of her being lay the wonder of her perfect form--a sphere. It was complete. Nothing could add to it.

Yet, while all recollection of his former, pettier self was gone, he began presently to remember--men. Though never in relation to himself, he retained dimly a picture of that outer world of strife and terror. As a memory of illness he recalled it--dreadfully, a nightmare fever from which he had recovered, its horror already fading out. Cities and crowds, poverty, illness, pain and all the various terror of Civilization, robbed of the power to afflict, yet still hung hovering about the surface of his consciousness, though powerless to break his peace.

For the power to understand it vanished; no part of him knew sympathy with it; so clearly he now saw himself sharing the Earth, that a vague wonder filled him when he recalled the mad desires of men to possess external forms of things. It was amazing and perplexing. How could they ever have devised such wild and childish efforts--all in the wrong direction?

If that outer life were the real one how could any intelligent being think it worth while to live? How could any thinking man hold up his head and walk along the street with dignity if that was what he believed?

Was a man satisfied with it worth keeping alive at all? What bigger scheme could ever use him? The direction of modern life today was diametrically away from happiness and truth.

Peace was the word he knew, peace and a singing joy.

He played with the Earth's great dawn and raced along these mountains through her mind. _Of course>_ the hills could dance and sing and clap their hands. He saw it clear. How could it be otherwise? They were expressions of her giant moods--what in himself were thoughts--phases of her ample, surging Consciousness....

He pa.s.sed with the sunlight down the laughing valleys, spread with the morning wind above the woods, shone on the snowy peaks, and leaped with rus.h.i.+ng laughter among the crystal streams. These were his swift and darting signs of joy, words of his singing as it were. His main and central being swung with the pulse of the Earth, too great for any telling.

He read the book of Nature all about him, yes, but read it singing.

He understood how this patient Mother hungered for her myriad lost children, how in the pa.s.sion of her summers she longed to bless them, to wake their high yearnings with the sweetness of her springs, and to whisper through her autumns how she prayed for their return...!

Instinctively he read the giant Page before him. For "every form in nature is a symbol of an idea and represents a sign or letter. A succession of such symbols forms a language; and he who is a true child of nature may understand this language and know the character of everything. His mind, becomes a mirror wherein the attributes of natural things are reflected and enter the field of his consciousness.... For man himself is but a thought pervading the ocean of mind."

Whether or not lie remembered these stammering yet pregnant words from the outer world now left behind, the truth they shadowed forth rose up and took him ... and so he flowed across the mountains like a thing of wind and cloud, and so at length came up with the stragglers of that mighty herd of _Urwelt_ life. He joined them in a river-bed of those ancient valleys. They welcomed him and took him to themselves.

For the particular stratum, as it were, of the Earth's enormous Collective Consciousness to which he belonged, or rather that part and corner in which he was first at home, lay with these lesser ancient forms. Although aware of far mightier expressions of her life, he could not yet readily perceive or join them. And this was easily comprehensible by the a.n.a.logy of his own smaller consciousness. Did not his own mind hold thoughts of various kinds that could not readily mingle? His thoughts of play and frolic, for instance, could not combine with the august and graver sentiments of awe and wors.h.i.+p, though both could dwell together in the same heart. And here apparently, as yet, he only touched that frolicsome fringe of consciousness that knew these wild and playful lesser forms. Thus, while he was aware of other more powerful figures of wonder all about him, he never quite achieved their full recognition. The ordered, deeper strata of her Consciousness to which they belonged still lay beyond him.

Yet everywhere he fringed them. They haunted the entire world. They brooded hugely with a kind of deep magnificence that was like the slow brooding of the Seasons; they rose, looming and splendid, through the air and sky, proud, strong, and tragic. For, standing aloof from all the rest, in isolation, like dreams in a poet's mind, too potent for expression, they thus knew tragedy--the tragedy of long neglect and loneliness.

Seated on peak and ridge, rising beyond the summits in the clouds, filling the valleys, spread over watercourse and forest, they pa.s.sed their life of lonely majesty--apart, their splendor too remote for him as yet to share. Long since had Earth withdrawn them from the hearts of men.

Her lesser children knew them no more. But still through the deep recesses of her further consciousness they thundered and were glad...

though few might hear that thunder, share that awful joy....

Even the Irishman--who in ordinary life had felt instinctively that wors.h.i.+p which is close to love, and so to the union that love brings--even he, in this new-found freedom, only partially discerned their presences. He felt them now, these stately Powers men once called the G.o.ds, but felt them from a distance; and from a distance, too, they saw and watched him come. He knew their gorgeous forms half dimmed by a remote and veiled enchantment; knew that they reared aloft like ancient towers, ruined by neglect and ignorance, starved and lonely, but still hauntingly splendid and engaging, still terrifically alive. And it seemed to him that sometimes their awful eyes flashed with the suns.h.i.+ne over slope and valley, and that wherever they rested flowers sprang to life.

Their nearness sometimes swept him like a storm, and then the entire herd with which he mingled would stand abruptly still, caught by a wave of awe and wonder. The host of them stood still upon the gra.s.s, their frolic held a moment, their voices hushed, only deep panting audible and the soft shuffling of their hoofs among the flowers. They bowed their splendid heads and waited--while a G.o.d went past them.... And through himself, as witness of the pa.s.sage, a soft, majestic power also swept. With the lift of a hurricane, yet with the gentleness of dew, he felt the n.o.blest in himself irresistibly evoked. It was gone again as soon as come. It pa.s.sed. But it left him charged with a regal confidence and joy. As in the mountains a shower of snow picks out the highest peaks in white, tracing its course and pattern over the entire range, so in himself he knew the highest powers--aspirations, yearnings, hopes--raised into s.h.i.+ning, white activity, and by these quickened splendors of his soul could recognize the nature of the G.o.d who came so close.

And, keeping mostly to the river-beds, they splashed in the torrents, played and leaped and cantered. From the openings of many a moist cave others came to join them. Below a certain level, though, they never went; the forests knew them not; they loved the open, windy heights. They turned and circulated as by a common consent, wheeling suddenly together as if a single desire actuated the entire ma.s.s. One instinct spread, as it were, among the lot, shared instantly, conveying to each at once the general impulse. Their movements in this were like those of birds whose flight in coveys obeys the order of a collective consciousness of which each single one is an item--expressions of one single Bird-Idea behind, distributed through all.

And O'Malley without questioning or hesitation obeyed, while yet he was free to do as he wished alone. To do as they did was the greatest pleasure, that was all.

For sometimes with two of them, one fully-formed, the other of lesser mold--he flew on little journeys of his own. These two seemed nearer to him than the rest. He felt he knew them and had been with them before. Their big brown eyes continually sought his own with pleasure.

It almost seemed as if they had all three been separated long away from one another, and had at last returned. No definite memory of the interval came back, however; the sea, the steamer, and the journey's incidents all had faded--part of that world of lesser insignificant dream where they had happened. But these two kept close to him; they ran and danced together....

The time that pa.s.sed included many dawns and nights and also many noons of splendor. It all seemed endless, perfect, and serene. That anything could finish here did not once occur to him. Complete things cannot finish. He pa.s.sed through seas and gulfs of glorious existence.

For the strange thing was that while he only remembered afterwards the motion, play, and laughter, he yet had these other glimpses here and there of some ordered and progressive life existing just beyond. It lay hidden deeper within. He skimmed its surface; but something prevented his knowing it fully. And the limitation that held him back belonged, it seemed, to that thin world of trivial dreaming he had left behind. He had not shaken it off entirely. It still obscured his sight.

The scale and manner of this greater life faintly reached him, nothing more. It may be that he only failed to bring back recollection, or it may be that he did not penetrate deeply enough to know. At any rate, he recognized that this sudden occasional pa.s.sing by of vast deific figures had to do with it, and that all this ocean of Earth's deeper Consciousness was peopled with forms of life that obeyed some splendid system of progressive ordered existence. To be gathered up in this one greater consciousness was not the end.... Rather was it merely the beginning....

Meantime he learned that here, among these lesser thoughts of the great Mother, all the Pantheons of the world had first their origin--the Greek, the Eastern, and the Northern too. Here all the G.o.ds that men have ever half divined, still ranged the moods of Her timeless consciousness. Their train of beauty, too, accompanied them.

I cannot half recall the streams of pa.s.sionate description with which his words clothed these glowing memories of his vision. Great pictures of it haunt the background of my mind, pictures that lie in early mists, framed by the stars and glimmering through some golden, flowered dawn. Besides the huge outlines that stood breathing in the background like dark mountains, there flitted here and there strange dreamy forms of almost impossible beauty, slender as lilies, eyes soft and starry s.h.i.+ning through the dusk, hair flying past them like a rain of summer flowers. Nymph-like they moved down all the pathways of the Earth's young mind, singing and radiant, spring blossoms in the Garden of her Consciousness.... And other forms, more vehement and rude, urged to and fro across the pictures; crowding the movement; some playful and protean; some clothed as with trees, or air, or water; and others dark, remote, and silent, ranging her deeper layers of thought and dream, known rarely to the outer world at all.

The rush and glory of it all is more than my mind can deal with. I gather, though, O'Malley saw no definite forms, but rather knew "forces," powers, aspects of this Soul of Earth, facets she showed in long-forgotten days to men. Certainly the very infusoria of his imagination were kindled and aflame when he spoke of them. Through the tangled thicket of his ordinary mind there shone this pa.s.sion of an uncommon loveliness and splendour.

x.x.xVII

"The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things, so much the more is s.n.a.t.c.hed from inevitable time."

--RICHARD JEFFERIES

In the relations.h.i.+p that his everyday mind bore to his present state there lay, moreover, a wealth of pregnant suggestion. The bridge connecting his former "civilized" condition with this cosmic experience was a curious one. That outer, lesser state, it seemed, had known a foretaste sometimes of the greater. And it was hence had come those dreams of a Golden Age that used to haunt him. For he began now to recall the existence of that outer world of men and women, though by means of certain indefinite channels only. And the things he remembered were not what the world calls important. They were moments when he had known--beauty; beauty, however, not of the grandiose sort that holds the crowd, but of so simple and unadvertised a kind that most men overlook it altogether.

He understood now why the thrill had been so wonderful. He saw clearly why those moments of ecstasy he had often felt in Nature used to torture him with an inexpressible yearning that was rather pain than joy. For they were precisely what he now experienced when the viewless figure of a G.o.d pa.s.sed by him. Down there, out there, below--in that cabined lesser state--they had been partial, but were now complete.

Those moments of wors.h.i.+p he had known in woods, among mountains, by the sh.o.r.es of desolate seas, even in a London street, perhaps at the sight of a tree in spring or of a pathway of blue sky between the summer clouds,--these had been, one and all, tentative, partial revelations of the Consciousness of the Soul of Earth he now knew face to face.

These were his only memories of that outer world. Of people, cities, or of civilization apart from these, he had no single remembrance.

Certain of these little partial foretastes now came back to him, like fragments of dream that trouble the waking day.

He remembered, for instance, one definite picture: a hot autumn sun upon a field of stubble where the folded corn-sheaves stood; thistles waving by the hedges; a yellow field of mustard rising up the slope against the sky-line, and beyond a row of peering elms that rustled in the wind. The beauty of the little scene was somehow poignant. He recalled it vividly. It had flamed about him, transfiguring the world; he had trembled, yearning to see more, for just behind it he divined with an exulting pa.s.sionate wors.h.i.+p this gorgeous, splendid Earth-Being with whom at last he now actually moved. In that instant of a simple loveliness her consciousness had fringed his own--had bruised it. He had known it only by the partial channels of sight and smell and hearing, but had felt the greater thing beyond, without being able to explain it. And a portion of what he felt had burst in speech from his lips.

He was there, he remembered, with two persons, a man and woman whose name and face, however, he could not summon, and he recalled that the woman smiled incredulously when he spoke of the exquisite perfume of those folded corn-sheaves in the air. She told him he imagined it. He saw again the pretty woman's smile of incomprehension; he saw the puzzled expression in the eyes of the man; he heard him murmur something prosaic about the soul, about birds, too, and the prospects of killing hundreds later--sport! He even saw the woman picking her way with caution as though the touch of earth could stain or injure her. He especially recalled the silence that had followed on his words that sought to show them--Beauty.... He remembered, too, above all, the sense of loneliness among men that it induced in himself.

But the memory brought him a curious, sharp pain; and turning to that couple who were now his playmates in this Garden of the Earth, he called them with a singing cry and cantered over leagues of flowers, wind, and suns.h.i.+ne before he stopped again. They leaped and danced together, exulting in their s.p.a.cious _Urwelt_ freedom ... want of comprehension no longer possible.