The First Algernon Blackwood MEGAPACK ®. Algernon Blackwood
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said the parent’s deep voice, breaking in upon his thoughts as he drew him to one side with a certain vehemence, “See!”
He pointed downwards. And there, between them, half in the scuppers, against their very feet, lay the huddled body upon the deck, the arms outstretched, the face turned upwards to the stars.
* * * *
The bewilderment that followed was like the confusion which exists between two states of consciousness when the mind passes from sleep to waking, or vice versa. O’Malley lost that power of attention which enables a man to concentrate on details sufficiently to recall their exact sequence afterwards with certainty.
Two things, however, stood out and he tells them briefly enough: first, that the joy upon the father’s face rendered an offer of sympathy ludicrous; secondly, that Dr. Stahl was again upon the scene with a promptness which proved him to have been close at hand all the time.
It was between two and three in the morning, the rest of the passengers asleep still, but Captain Burgenfelder and the first officer appeared soon after and an orderly record of the affair was drawn up formally. the depositions of the father and of himself were duly taken down in writing, witnessed, and all the rest.
The scene in the doctor’s cabin remains vividly in his mind: the huge Russian standing by the door—for he refused a seat—incongruously smiling in contrast to the general gravity, his mind obviously brought by an effort of concentration to each question; the others seated round the desk some distance away, leaving him in a space by himself; the scratching of the doctor’s pointed pen; the still, young outline underneath the canvas all through the long pantomime, lying upon a couch at the back where the shadows gathered thickly. And then the gust of fresh wind that came in with a little song as they opened the door at the end, and saw the crimson dawn reflected in the dewy, shining boards of the deck. the father, throwing the Irishman a significant and curious glance, was out to join it on the instant.
Syncope, produced by excitement, cause unknown, was the scientific verdict, and an immediate burial at sea the parent’s wish. As the sun rose over the highlands of Asia Minor it was carried into effect.
But the father’s eyes followed not the drop. They gazed with rapt, intent expression in another direction where the shafts of sunrise sped across the sea toward the glens and dales of distant Pelion. At the sound of the plunge he did not even turn his eyes. He pointed, gathering O’Malley somehow into the gesture, across the Ægean Sea to where the shores of north-western Arcadia lay below the horizon, raised his arms with a huge sweep of welcome to the brightening sky, then turned and went below without a single word.
For a few minutes, puzzled and perhaps a little awed, the group of sailors and ship’s officers remained standing with bared heads, then disappeared silently in their turn, leaving the decks to the sunrise and the wind.
XXIII
But O’Malley did not immediately return to his own cabin; he yielded to Dr. Stahl’s persuasion and dropped into the armchair he had already occupied more than once, watching his companion’s preparations with the lamp and coffeepot.
With his eyes, that is, he watched, staring, as men say, absent-mindedly; for the fact was, only a little bit of him hovered there about his weary physical frame. the rest of him was off somewhere else across the threshold—subliminal: below, with the Russian, beyond with the traveling spirit of the boy; but the major portion, out deep in space, reclaimed by the Earth.
So, at least, it felt; for the circulation of blood in his brain ran low and physical sensation there was almost none. the driving impulse upon the outlying tracts of consciousness usually submerged had been tremendous.
“That time,” he heard Stahl saying in an oddly distant voice from across the cabin, “you were nearly—out—”
“You heard? You saw it all?” he murmured as in half-sleep. For it was an effort to focus his mind even upon simple words.
The reply he hardly caught, though he felt the significant stare of the man’s eye upon him and divined the shaking of his head. His life still pulsed and throbbed far away outside his normal self. Complete return was difficult. He felt all over: with the wind and hills and sea, all his little personal sensations tucked away and absorbed into Nature. In the Earth he lay, pervading her whole surface, still sharing her vaster life. With her he moved, as with a greater, higher, and more harmonious creation than himself. In large measure the cosmic instincts still swept these quickened fringes of his deep subconscious personality.
“You know them now for what they are,” he heard the doctor saying at the end of much else he had entirely missed. “The father will be the next to go, and then—yourself. I warn you before it is too late. Beware! And—resist!”
His thoughts, and with them those subtle energies of the soul that are the vehicles of thought, followed where the boy had gone. Deep streams of longing swept him. the journey of that spirit, so singularly released, drew half his forces after it. Thither the bereaved parent and himself were also bound; and the lonely incompleteness of his life lay wholly now explained. That cry within the dawn, though actually it had been calling always, had at last reached him; hitherto he had caught only misinterpreted echoes of it. From the narrow body it had called him forth. Another moment and he would have known complete emancipation; and never could he forget that glorious sensation as the vital essence tasted half release. Next time the process should complete itself, and he would—go!
“Drink this,” he heard abruptly in Stahl’s grating voice, and saw him cross the cabin with a cup of steaming coffee. “Concentrate your mind now upon the things about you here. Return to the present. And tell me, too, if you can bring yourself to do so,” he added, stooping over him with the cup, “a little of what you experienced. the return, I know, is pain. But try—try—”
“Like a little bit of death, yes,” murmured the Irishman. “I feel caught again and caged—small.” He could have wept. This ugly little life!
“Because you’ve tasted a moment of genuine cosmic consciousness and now you feel the limitations of normal personality,” Stahl added, more soothingly. He sat down beside him and sipped his own coffee.
“Dispersed about the whole earth I felt, deliciously extended and alive,” O’Malley whispered with a faint shiver as he glanced about the little cabin, noticing the small windows and shut door. “Upholstery” oppressed him. “Now I’m back in prison again.”
There was silence for a moment. Then presently the doctor spoke, as though he thought aloud, expecting no reply.
“All great emotions,” he said in lowered tones, “tap the extensions of the personality we now call subconscious, and a man in anger, in love, in ecstasy of any kind is greater than he knows. But to you has come, perhaps, the greatest form of all—a definite and instant merging with the being of the Earth herself. You reached the point where you felt the spirit of the planet’s life. You almost crossed the threshold—your extension edged into her own. She bruised you, and you knew—”
“‘Bruised’?” he asked, startled at the singular expression into closer hearing.
“We are not ‘aware’ of our interior,” he answered, smiling a little, “until something goes wrong and the attention is focused. A keen sensation—pain—and you become aware. Subconscious processes then become consciously recognized. I bruise your lung for instance; you become conscious of that lung for the first time, and feel it. You gather it up from the general subconscious background into acute personal consciousness. Similarly, a word or mood may sting and stimulate some phase of your consciousness usually too remote to be recognized. Last night—regions of your extended Self, too distant for most men to realize their existence at all, contacted the consciousness of the Earth herself. She bruised you, and via that bruise caught you up into her greater Self. You experienced a genuine cosmic reaction.”
O’Malley listened, though hardly to the actual words. Behind the speech, which was in difficult German for one thing, his mind heard the rushing past of this man’s ideas. They moved together along the same stream of thought, and the Irishman