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 grass, 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 god went past them…. And through himself, as witness of the passage, a soft, majestic power also swept. With the lift of a hurricane, yet with the gentleness of dew, he felt the noblest in himself irresistibly evoked. It was gone again as soon as come. It passed. 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 shining, white activity, and by these quickened splendors of his soul could recognize the nature of the god 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 mass. 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 passed 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 passed 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 passing 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 gods 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 passionate 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 shining 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 passion of an uncommon loveliness and splendor.
XXXVII
“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 snatched from inevitable time.”
—RICHARD JEFFERIES
In the relationship 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 god passed by him. Down there, out there, below—in that cabined lesser state—they had been partial, but were now complete. Those moments of worship he had known in woods, among mountains, by the shores 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 passionate worship 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 ex
plain 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 sunshine before he stopped again. They leaped and danced together, exulting in their spacious Urwelt freedom…want of comprehension no longer possible.
* * * *
The memory fled away. He shook himself free of it. Then others came in its place, another and another, not all with people, blind, deaf, and unreceptive, yet all of “common,” simple scenes of beauty when something vast had surged upon him and broken through the barriers that stand between the heart and Nature. Such curious little scenes they were. In most of them he had evidently been alone. But one and all had touched his soul with a foretaste of this same nameless ecstasy that now he knew complete. In every one the Consciousness of the Earth had “bruised” his own.
Utterly simple they had been, one and all, these partial moments of blinding beauty in that lesser, outer world:—A big, brown, clumsy bee he saw, blundering into the petals of a wild flower on which the dew lay sparkling…. A wisp of colored cloud driving loosely across the hills, dropping a purple shadow…. Deep, waving grass, plunging and shaking in the wind that drew out its underworld of blue and silver over the whole spread surface of a field…. A daisy closed for the night upon the lawn, eyes tightly shut, hands folded…. A south wind whispering through larches…. the pattering of summer rain upon young oak leaves in the dawn…. Fingers of long blue distance upon dreamy woods…. Anemones shaking their pale and starry little faces in the wind…. the columned stillness of a pine-wood in the dusk…. Young birch trees mid the velvet gloom of firs…. the new moon setting in a cloud of stars…. the hush of stars in many a summer night…. Sheep grazing idly down a sun-baked hill…. A path of moonlight on a lake…. A little wind through bare and wintry woods…. Oh! he recalled the wonder, loveliness, and passion of a thousand more!
They thronged and passed, and thronged again, crowding one another:—all golden moments of revelation when he had caught glimpses of the Earth, and her greater Moods had swept him up into herself. Moments in which a god had passed….
These were his only memories of that outer world he had left behind: flashes of simple beauty.
Was thus the thrill of beauty then explained? Was loveliness, as men know it, a revelation of the Earth-Soul behind? And were the blinding flash, the dazzling wonder, and the dream men seek to render permanent in music, color, line and language, a vision of her nakedness? Down there, the poets and those simple enough of heart to stand close to Nature, could catch these whispered fragments of the enormous message, told as in secret; but now, against her very heart he heard the thunder of the thing complete. Now, in the glory of all naked bodily forms,—of women, men and children, of swift animals, of flowers, trees, and running water, of mountains and of seas,—he understood these partial revelations of the great Earth-Soul that bore them, gave them life. For one and all were channels for her loveliness. He saw the beauty of the “natural” instincts, the passion of motherhood and fatherhood—Earth’s seeking to project herself in endless forms and variety. He understood why love increased the heart and made it feel at one with all the world.
* * * *
Moreover in some amazing fashion he was aware that others from that outer world beside himself had access here, and that from this Garden of the Earth’s deep central personality came all the inspiration known to men. He divined that others were even now drawing upon it like himself. the thoughts of the poets went past him like thin flames; the dreams of millions—mute, inexpressible yearnings like those he had himself once known—streamed by in pale white light, to shoot forward with a little nesting rush into some great Figure…and then return in double volume to the dreaming heart whence first they issued. Shadows, too, he saw, by myriads—faint, feeble gropings of men and women seeking it eagerly, yet hardly knowing what they sought; but, above all, long, singing, beautiful tongues of colored flame that were the instincts of divining children and of the pure in heart. These came in rippling floods unerringly to their goal, lingered for long periods before returning. And all, he knew, were currents of the great Earth Life, moods, thoughts, dreams—expressions of her various Consciousness with which she mothered, fed, and blessed all whom it was possible to reach. Their passionate yearning, their worship, made access possible. Along the tenderest portions of her personality these latter came, as by a spread network of infinitely delicate filaments that extended from herself, deliciously inviting….
* * * *
The thing, however, that remained with him long after his return to the normal state of lesser consciousness was the memory of those blinding moments when a god went past him, or, as he phrased it in another way, when he caught glimpses of the Earth—naked. For these were instantaneous flashes of a gleaming whiteness, a dazzling and supreme loveliness that staggered thought and arrested feeling, while yet of a radiant simplicity that brought—for a second at least—a measure of comprehension.
He then knew not mere partial projections. He saw beyond—deep down into the flaming center that gave them birth. the blending of his being with the Cosmic Consciousness was complete enough for this. He describes it as a spectacle of sheer glory, stupendous, even terrifying. the refulgent majesty of it utterly possessed him. the shock of its magnificence came, moreover, upon his entire being, and was not really of course a “sight” at all. the message came not through any small division of a single sense. With a massed yet soaring power it shook him free of all known categories. He then fringed a region of yet greater being wherein he tasted for a moment some secret comprehension of a true “divinity.” the deliverance into ecstasy was complete.
In these flashing moments, when a second seemed a thousand years, he further understood the splendor of the stage beyond. Earth in her turn was but a Mood in the Consciousness of the Universe, that Universe again was mothered by another vaster one…and the total that included them all was not the gods—but God.
XXXVIII
The litter of disordered notebooks filled to the covers with fragments of such beauty that they almost seem to burn with a light of their own, lies at this moment before me on my desk. I still hear the rushing torrent of his language across the spotted table-cloth in that dark restaurant corner. But the incoherence seems only to increase with my best efforts to combine the two.
“Go home and dream it,” as he said at last when I ventured a question here and there toward the end of the recital. “You’ll see it best that way—in sleep. Get clear away from me, and my surface physical consciousness. Perhaps it will come to you then.”
There remains, however, to record the manner of his exit from that great Garden of the Earth’s fair youth. And he tells it more simply. Or, perhaps, it is that I understand it better.
For suddenly, in the midst of all the joy and splendor that he tasted, there came unbidden a strengthening of the tie that held him to his “outer,” lesser state. A wave of pity and compassion surged in upon him from the depths. He saw the struggling millions in the prisons and cages civilization builds. He felt with them. No happiness, he understood, could b
e complete that did not also include them all; and—he longed to tell them. the thought and the desire tore across him burningly.
“If only I can get this back to them!” passed through him, like a flame. “I’ll save the world by bringing it again to simple things! I’ve only got to tell it and all will understand at once—and follow!”
And with the birth of the desire there ran a deep convulsive sound like music through the greater Consciousness that held him close. Those Moods that were the gods, thronged gloriously about him, almost pressing forwards into actual sight…. He might have lingered where he was for centuries, or forever; but this thought pulled him back—the desire to share his knowledge with the world, the passion to heal and save and rescue.
And instantly, in the twinkling of an eyelid, the Urwelt closed its gates of horn and ivory behind him. An immense dark shutter dropped noiselessly with a speed of lightning across his mind. He stood without….
He found himself near the tumbled-down stone huts of a hamlet that he recognized. He staggered, rubbed his eyes, and stared. A forest of beech trees shook below him in a violent wind. He saw the branches tossing. A Caucasian saddle-horse beside him nosed a sack that spilt its flour on the ground at his feet, he heard the animal’s noisy breathing; he noted the sliding movement of the spilt flour before it finally settled; and some fifty yards beyond him, down the slopes, he saw a human figure—running.
It was his Georgian guide. the man, half stooping, caught the woolen bashlik that had fallen from his head.
O’Malley watched the man complete the gesture. Still running, he replaced the cap upon his head.