The Centaur | Page 3

multiplied, and the point of saturation
was often dangerously near. "Some day," his friends would say,
"there'll be a bursting of the dam." And, though their meaning might be
variously interpreted, they spoke the truth. O'Malley knew it, too.
A man he was, in a word, of deep and ever-shifting moods, and with
more difficulty than most in recognizing the underlying self of which
these outer aspects were projections masquerading as complete
personalities.
The underlying ego that unified these projections was of the type
touched with so sure a hand in the opening pages of an inspired little
book: The Plea of Pan. O'Malley was useless as a citizen and knew it.
Sometimes--he was ashamed of it as well.
Occasionally, and at the time of this particular "memorable adventure,"
aged thirty, he acted as foreign correspondent; but even as such he was
the kind of newspaper man that not merely collects news, but discovers,

reveals, creates it. Wise in their generation, the editors who
commissioned him remembered when his copy came in that they were
editors. A roving commission among the tribes of the Caucasus was his
assignment at the moment, and a better man for the purpose would
have been hard to find, since he knew beauty, had a keen eye for
human nature, divined what was vital and picturesque, and had, further,
the power to set it down in brief terms born directly of his vivid
emotions.
When first I knew him he lived--nowhere, being always on the move.
He kept, however, a dingy little room near Paddington where his books
and papers accumulated, undusted but safe, and where the manuscripts
of his adventures were found when his death made me the executor of
his few belongings. The key was in his pocket, carefully ticketed with a
bone label. And this, the only evidence of practical forethought I ever
discovered in him, was proof that something in that room was deemed
by him of value--to others. It certainly was not the heterogeneous
collection of second-hand books, nor the hundreds of unlabeled
photographs and sketches. Can it have been the MSS. of stories, notes,
and episodes I found, almost carefully piled and tabulated with titles, in
a dirty kitbag of green Willesden canvas?
Some of these he had told me (with a greater vividness than he could
command by pen); others were new; many unfinished. All were
unusual, to say the least. All, too, had obviously happened to himself at
some period of his roving career, though here and there he had
disguised his own part in them by Hoffmann's device of throwing the
action into the third person. Those told to me by word of mouth I could
only feel were true, true for himself at least. In no sense were they mere
inventions, but arose in moments of vision upon a structure of solid
events. Ten men will describe in as many different ways a snake
crossing their path; but, besides these, there exists an eleventh man who
sees more than the snake, the path, the movement. O'Malley was some
such eleventh man. He saw the thing whole, from some kind of inner
bird's-eye view, while the ten saw only limited aspects of it from
various angles. He was accused of adding details, therefore, because he
had divined their presence while still below the horizon. Before they

emerged the others had already left.
By which I mean that he saw in commonplace events the movement of
greater tides than others saw. At one remove of time or distance--a
minute or a mile--he perceived all. While the ten chattered volubly
about the name of the snake, he was caught beyond by the beauty of the
path, the glory of the running glide, the nature of the forces that drove,
hindered, modified.
The others reasoned where the snake was going, its length in inches and
its speed per second, while he, ignoring such superficial details,
plunged as it were into the very nature of the creature's being. And in
this idiosyncrasy, which he shared with all persons of mystical
temperament, is exemplified a certain curious contempt for Reason that
he had. For him mere intellectuality, by which the modern world sets
such store, was a valley of dry bones. Its worship was a worship of the
form. It missed the essential inner truth because such inner truth could
be known only by being it, feeling it. The intellectual attitude of mind,
in a word, was critical, not creative, and to be unimaginative seemed to
him, therefore, the worst form of unintelligence.
"The arid, sterile minds!" he would cry in a burst of his Celtic
enthusiasm. "Where, I ask ye, did the philosophies and sciences of the
world assist the progress of any single soul a blessed inch?"
Any little Dreamer in