The First Algernon Blackwood MEGAPACK ®. Algernon Blackwood
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that matter being in continual state of flux is the least real of all things—”
“Our training has been different,” observed Stahl simply, interrupting him. “I use another phraseology. Fundamentally, we are not so far apart as you think. Our conversation of yesterday proves it, if you have not forgotten. It is people like yourself who supply the material that teaches people like me—helps me to advance—to speculate, though you dislike the term.”
The Irishman was mollified, though for some time he continued in the same strain. And the doctor let him talk, realizing that his emotion needed the relief of this safety-valve. He used words loosely, but Stahl did not check him; it was merely that the effort to express himself—this self that could believe so much—found difficulty in doing so coherently in modern language. He went very far. For the fact that while Stahl criticized and denied, he yet understood, was a strong incentive to talk. O’Malley plunged repeatedly over his depth, and each time the doctor helped him in to shore.
“Perhaps,” said Stahl at length in a pause, “the greatest difference between us is merely that whereas you jump headlong, ignoring details by the way, I climb slowly, counting the steps and making them secure. I deny at first because if the steps survive such denial, I know that they are permanent. I build scaffolding. You fly.”
“Flight is quicker,” put in the Irishman.
“It is for the few,” was the reply; “scaffolding is for all.”
“You spoke a few days ago of strange things,” O’Malley said presently with abruptness, “and spoke seriously too. Tell me more about that, if you will.” He sought to lead the talk away from himself, since he did not intend to be fully drawn. “You said something about the theory that the Earth is alive, a living being, and that the early legendary forms of life may have been emanations—projections of herself—detached portions of her consciousness—or something of the sort. Tell me about that theory. Can there be really men who are thus children of the earth, fruit of pure passion—Cosmic Beings as you hinted? It interests me deeply.”
Dr. Stahl appeared to hesitate.
“It is not new to me, of course,” pursued the other, “but I should like to know more.”
Stahl still seemed irresolute. “It is true,” he replied at length slowly, “that in an unguarded moment I let drop certain observations. It is better you should consider them unsaid perhaps: forget them.”
“And why, pray?”
The answer was well calculated to whet his appetite.
“Because,” answered the doctor, bending over to him as he crossed over to his side, “they are dangerous thoughts to play with, dangerous to the interests of humanity in its present state today, unsettling to the soul, shaking the foundations of sane consciousness.” He looked hard at him. “Your own mind,” he added softly, “appears to me to be already on their track. Whether you are aware of it or not, you have in you that kind of very passionate desire—of yearning—which might reconstruct them and make them come true—for yourself—if you get out.”
O’Malley, his eyes shining, looked up into his face.
“‘Reconstruct—make them come true—if I get out’!” he repeated stammeringly, fearful that if he appeared too eager the other would stop. “You mean, of course, that this Double in me would escape and build its own heaven?”
Stahl nodded darkly. “Driven forth by your intense desire.” After a pause he added, “The process already begun in you would complete itself.”
Ah! So obviously what the doctor wanted was a description of his sensations in that haunted cabin.
“Temporarily?” asked the Irishman under his breath.
The other did not answer for a moment. O’Malley repeated the question.
“Temporarily,” said Stahl, turning away again toward his desk, “unless—the yearning were too strong.”
“In which case—?”
“Permanently. For it would draw the entire personality with it….”
“The soul?”
Stahl was bending over his books and papers. the answer was barely audible.
“Death,” was the whispered word that floated across the heavy air of that little sun-baked cabin.
The word if spoken at all was so softly spoken that the Irishman scarcely knew whether he actually heard it, or whether it was uttered by his own thought. He only realized—catching some vivid current from the other man’s mind—that this separation of a vital portion of himself that Stahl hinted at might involve a kind of nameless inner catastrophe which should mean the loss of his personality as it existed today—an idea, however, that held no terror for him if it meant at the same time the recovery of what he so passionately sought.
And another intuition flashed upon its heels—namely, that this extraordinary doctor spoke of something he knew as a certainty; that his amazing belief, though paraded as theory, was to him more than theory. Had he himself undergone some experience that he dared not speak of, and were his words based upon a personal experience instead of, as he pretended, merely upon the observation of others? Was this a result of his study of the big man two years ago? Was this the true explanation of his being no longer an assistant at the H—hospital, but only a ship’s doctor? Had this “modern” man, after all, a flaming volcano of ancient and splendid belief in him, akin to what was in himself, yet ever fighting it?
Thoughts raced and thundered through his mind as he watched him across the cigar smoke. the rattling of that donkey-engine, the shouts of the lightermen, the thuds of the sulfur-sacks—how ridiculous they all sounded, the clatter of a futile, meaningless existence where men gathered—rubbish, for mere bodies that lived amid dust a few years, then returned to dust forever.
He sprang from his sofa and crossed over to the doctor’s side. Stahl was still bending over a littered desk.
“You, too,” he cried, and though trying to say it loud, his voice could only whisper, “you, too, must have the Urmensch in your heart and blood, for how else, by my soul, could you know it all? Tell me, doctor, tell me!” And he was on the very verge of adding, “Join us! Come and join us!” when the little German turned his bald head slowly round and fixed upon the excited Irishman such a cool and quenching stare that instantly he felt himself convicted of foolishness, almost of impertinence.
He dropped backwards into an armchair, and the doctor at the same moment let himself down upon the revolving stool that was nailed to the floor in front of the desk. His hands smoothed out papers. Then he leaned forward, still holding his companion’s eyes with that steady stare which forbade familiarity.
“My friend,” he said quietly in German, “you asked me just now to tell you of the theory—Fechner’s theory—that the Earth is a living, conscious Being. If you care to listen, I will do so. We have time.” He glanced round at the shady cabin, took down a book from the shelf before him, puffed his black cigar and began to read.
“It is from one of your own people—William James; what you call a ‘Hibbert Lecture’ at Manchester College. It gives you an idea, at least, of what Fechner saw. It is better than my own words.”
So Stahl, in his turn, refused to be “drawn.” O’Malley, as soon as he recovered from the abruptness of the change from that other conversation, gave all his attention. the uneasy feeling that he was being played with, coaxed as a specimen to the best possible point for the microscope, passed away as the splendor of the vast and beautiful conception dawned upon him, and shaped those nameless yearnings of his life in glowing language.
XV
The shadows of the September afternoon were lengthening toward us from the Round Pond by the time O’Malley reached this stage of his curious and fascinating story. It was chilly under the trees, and the “wupsey-up, wupsey-down” babies, as he termed them, had long since gone in to their teas, or whatever