The First Algernon Blackwood MEGAPACK ®. Algernon Blackwood

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 knew that what he thus heard was true, at any rate, for himself. And at the same time he recognized with admiration the skill with which this scientific mystic of a Schiffsarzt sought to lead him back into the safer regions of his normal state. Stahl did not now oppose or deny. Catching the wave of the Celt’s experience, he let his thought run sympathetically with it, alongside, as it were, guiding gently and insinuatingly down to earth again.

      And the result justified this cunning wisdom; O’Malley returned to the common world by degrees. For it was enchanting to find his amazing adventure explained even in this partial, speculative way. Who else among his acquaintances would have listened at all, much less admitted its possibility?

      “But, why in particular me?” he asked. “Can’t everybody know these cosmic reactions you speak of?” It was his intellect that asked the foolish question. His whole Self knew the answer beforehand.

      “Because,” replied the doctor, tapping his saucer to emphasize each word, “in some way you have retained an almost unbelievable simplicity of heart—an innocence singularly undefiled—a sort of primal, spontaneous innocence that has kept you clean and open. I venture even to suggest that shame, as most men know it, has never come to you at all.”

      The words sank down into him. Passing the intellect that would have criticized, they nested deep within where the intuition knew them true. Behind the clumsy language that is, he caught the thought.

      “As if I were a saint!” he laughed faintly.

      Stahl shook his head. “Rather, because you live detached,” he replied, “and have never identified your Self with the rubbish of life. the channels in you are still open to these tides of larger existence. I wish I had your courage.”

      “While others—?”

      The German hesitated a moment. “Most men,” he said, choosing his words with evident care, “are too grossly organized to be aware that these reactions of a wider consciousness can be possible at all. Their minute normal Self they mistake for the whole, hence denying even the experiences of others. ‘Our actual personality may be something considerably unlike that conception of it which is based on our present terrestrial consciousness—a form of consciousness suited to, and developed by, our temporary existence here, but not necessarily more than a fraction of our total self. It is quite credible that our entire personality is never terrestrially manifest.’” Obviously he quoted. the Irishman had read the words somewhere. He came back more and more into the world—correlated, that is, the subconscious with the conscious.

      “Yet consciousness apart from the brain is inconceivable,” he interposed, more to hear the reply than to express a conviction.

      Whether Stahl divined his intention or not, he gave no sign.

      “‘We cannot say with any security that the stuff called brain is the only conceivable machinery which mind and consciousness are able to utilize: though it is true that we know no other.’” the last phrase he repeated: “‘though it is true that we know no other.’”

      O’Malley sank deeper into his chair, making no reply. His mind clutched at the words “too grossly organized,” and his thoughts ran back for a moment to his daily life in London. He pictured his friends and acquaintances there; the men at his club, at dinner parties, in the parks, at theaters; he heard their talk—shooting—destruction of exquisite life; horses, politics, women, СКАЧАТЬ