"I'm not tired, if that's what you mean. I could listen all night, as far as that goes."
He rose to stretch his legs a moment, and Stahl rose too—instantly. Together they leaned over the bulwarks. The German's hat was off and the air made by the steamer's passage drew his beard out. The warm soft wind brought odors of sea and shore. It caressed their faces, then passed on across those sleeping peasants on the lower deck. The masts and rigging swung steadily against the host of stars.
"Before I thus knew myself half caught," continued the doctor, standing now close enough beside him for actual contact, "and found it difficult to get away, other things had happened, things that confirmed the change so singularly begun in me. They happened everywhere; confirmation came from many quarters; though slight enough, they filled in all the gaps and crevices, strengthened the joints, and built the huge illusion round me all complete until it held me like a prison.
"And they are difficult to tell. Only, indeed, to yourself who underwent a similar experience up there in the mountains, could they bring much meaning. You had the same temptation and you—weathered the same storm." He caught O'Malley's arm a moment and held it. "You escaped this madness just as I did, and you will realize what I mean when I say that the sensation of losing my sense of personal identity became so dangerously, so seductively strong. The feeling of extended consciousness became delicious—too delicious to resist. A kind of pagan joy and exultation known to some in early youth, but put away with the things of youth, possessed me. In the presence of this other's soul, so strangely powerful in its silence and simplicity, I felt as though I touched new sources of life. I tapped them. They poured down and flooded me—with dreams—dreams that could really haunt—with unsettling thoughts of glory and delight beyond the body. I got clean away into Nature. I felt as though some portion of me just awakening reached out across him into rain and sunshine, far up into the sweet and starry sky—as a tree growing out of a thicket that chokes its lower part finds light and freedom at the top."
"It caught you badly, doctor," O'Malley murmured. "The gods came close!"
"So badly that I loathed the prisoned darkness that held me so thickly in the body. I longed to know my being all dispersed through Nature, scattered with dew and wind, shining with the star-light and the sun. And the manner of escape I hinted to you a little while ago came to seem right and necessary. Lawful it seemed, and obvious. The mania literally obsessed me, though still I tried to hide it even from myself … and struggled in resistance."
"You spoke just now of other things that came to confirm it," the Irishman said while the other paused to take breath. All this he knew. He grew weary of Stahl's clever laboring the point that it was madness. A little knowledge is ever dangerous, and he saw so clearly why the hesitation of the merely intellectual man had led him into error. "Did you mean that others acknowledged this influence as well as yourself?"
"You shall read that for yourself tomorrow," came the answer, "in the detailed report I drew up afterwards; it is far too long to tell you now. But, I may mention something of it. That breaking out of patients was a curious thing, their trying to escape, their dreams and singing, their efforts sometimes to approach his room, their longing for the open and the gardens; the deep, prolonged entrancing of a few; the sounds of rushing, tramping that they, too, heard, the violence of some, the silent ecstasy of others. The thing may find its parallel, perhaps, in the collective mania that sometimes afflicts religious communities, in monasteries or convents. Only here there was no preacher and eloquent leader to induce hysteria—nothing but that silent dynamo of power, gentle and winning as a little child, a being who could not put a phrase together, exerting his potent spell unconsciously, and chiefly while he slept.
"For the phenomena almost without exception came in the night, and often at their fullest strength, as afterwards reported to me, while I dozed in his room and watched beside his motionless and slumbering form. Oh, and there was more as well, much more, as you shall read. The stories my assistants brought me, the tales of frightened nurse and warder, the amazing yarns the porter stammered out, of strangers who had rung the bell at dawn, trying to push past him through the door, saying they were messengers and had been summoned, sent for, had to come,—large, curious, windy figures, or, as he sometimes called them with unconscious humor, 'like creatures out of fairy books or circuses' that always vanished as suddenly as they came. Making every allowance for excitement and exaggeration, the tales were strange enough, I can assure you, and the way many of the patients knew their visions intensified, their illusions doubly strengthened, their efforts even to destroy themselves in many cases almost more than the staff could deal with—all this brought the matter to a climax and made my duty very plain at last."
"And the effect upon yourself—at its worst?" asked his listener quietly.
Stahl sighed wearily a little as he answered with a new-found sadness in his tone.
"I've told you briefly that," he said; "repetition cannot strengthen it. The worthlessness of the majority of human aims today expresses it Best—what you have called yourself the 'horror of civilization.' The vanity of all life's modern, so-called up-to-date tendencies for outer, mechanical developments. A wild, mad beauty streaming from that man's personality overran the whole place and caught the lot of us, myself especially, with a lust for simple, natural things, and with a passion for spiritual beauty to accompany them. Fame, wealth, position seemed the shadows then, and something else it's hard to name announced itself as the substance…. I wanted to clear out and live with Nature, to know simplicity, unselfish purposes, a golden state of childlike existence close to dawns and dew and running water, cared for by woods and blessed by all the winds…." He paused again for breath, then added:—
"And that's just where the mania caught at me so cunningly—till I saw it and called a halt."
"Ah!"
"For the thing I sought, the thing he knew, and perhaps remembered, was not possible in the body. It was a spiritual state—"
"Or to be known subjectively!" O'Malley checked him.
"I am no lotus-eater by nature," he went on with energy, "and so I fought and conquered it. But first, I tell you, it came upon me like a tempest—a hurricane of wonder and delight. I've always held, like yourself perhaps, that civilization brings its own army of diseases, and that the few illnesses known to ruder savage races can be cured by simple means the earth herself supplies. And along this line of thought the thing swept into me—the line of my own head-learning. This was natural enough; natural enough, too, that it thus at first deceived me.
"For the quack cures of history come to this—herb simples and the rest; only we know them now as sun-cure, water-cure, open-air cure, old Kneipp, sea-water, and a hundred others. Doctors have never swarmed before as they do now, and these artificial diseases civilization brings in such quantity seemed all at once to mean the abeyance of some central life or power men ought to share with—Nature…. You shall read it all in my written report. I merely wish to show you now how the insidious thing got at me along the line of my special knowledge. I saw the truth that priests and doctors are the only possible and necessary 'professions' in the world, and—that they should be really but a single profession…."
XLIV
He drew suddenly back with a kind of jerk. It was as though he realized abruptly that he had said too much—had overdone it. He took his companion by the arm and led him down the decks.
As they passed the bridge the Captain called out a word of welcome to them; and his jolly, boisterous laugh ran down the wind. The American engineer came from behind a dark corner, almost running into them; his face was flushed. "It's like a furnace below," he said in his nasal familiar manner; "too hot to sleep. I've run up for a gulp of air." He made as though he would join them.
"The wind's behind us, yes," replied the doctor in a different tone, "and there's no draught." With a gesture, half bow, half dismissal, he made even this thick-skinned member of "the greatest