The Centaur | Page 5

were
consummately interpretative.
* * * * *
Before the age of thirty he had written and published a volume or two
of curious tales, all dealing with extensions of the personality, a subject
that interested him deeply, and one he understood because he drew the
material largely from himself. Psychology he simply devoured, even in
its most fantastic and speculative forms; and though perhaps his vision
was incalculably greater than his power of technique, these strange
books had a certain value and formed a genuine contribution to the
thought on that particular subject. In England naturally they fell dead,

but their translation into German brought him a wider and more
intelligent circle. The common public unfamiliar with Sally
Beauchamp No. 4, with Hélène Smith, or with Dr. Hanna, found in
these studies of divided personality, and these singular extensions of
the human consciousness, only extravagance and imagination run to
wildness. Yet, none the less, the substratum of truth upon which
O'Malley had built them, lay actually within his own personal
experience. The books had brought him here and there acquaintances of
value; and among these latter was a German doctor, Heinrich Stahl.
With Dr. Stahl the Irishman crossed swords through months of
somewhat irregular correspondence, until at length the two had met on
board a steamer where the German held the position of ship's doctor.
The acquaintanceship had grown into something approaching
friendship, although the two men stood apparently at the opposite poles
of thought. From time to time they still met.
In appearance there was nothing unusual about O'Malley, unless it was
the contrast of the light blue eyes with the dark hair. Never, I think, did
I see him in anything but that old grey flannel suit, with the low collar
and shabby glistening tie. He was of medium height, delicately built,
his hands more like a girl's than a man's. In towns he shaved and looked
fairly presentable, but once upon his travels he grew beard and
moustache and would forget for weeks to have his hair cut, so that it
fell in a tangle over forehead and eyes.
His manner changed with the abruptness of his moods. Sometimes
active and alert, at others for days together he would become absent,
dreamy, absorbed, half oblivious of the outer world, his movements
and actions dictated by subconscious instinct rather than regulated by
volition. And one cause of that loneliness of spirit which was
undoubtedly a chief pain in life to him, was the fact that ordinary folk
were puzzled how to take him, or to know which of these many
extreme moods was the man himself. Uncomfortable, unsatisfactory,
elusive, not to be counted upon, they deemed him: and from their point
of view they were undoubtedly right. The sympathy and above all the
companionship he needed, genuinely craved too, were thus denied to
him by the faults of his own temperament. With women his intercourse

was of the slightest; in a sense he did not know the need of them much.
For one thing, the feminine element in his own nature was too strong,
and he was not conscious, as most men are, of the great gap of
incompleteness women may so exquisitely fill; and, for another, its
obvious corollary perhaps, when they did come into his life, they gave
him more than he could comfortably deal with. They offered him more
than he needed.
In this way, while he perhaps had never fallen in love, as the saying has
it, he had certainly known that high splendor of devotion which means
the losing of oneself in others, that exalted love which seeks not any
reward of possession because it is itself so utterly possessed. He was
pure, too; in the sense that it never occurred to him to be otherwise.
Chief cause of his loneliness--so far as I could judge his complex
personality at all--seemed that he never found a sympathetic, truly
understanding ear for those deeply primitive longings that fairly
ravaged his heart. And this very isolation made him often afraid; it
proved that the rest of the world, the sane majority at any rate, said No
to them. I, who loved him and listened, yet never quite apprehended his
full meaning. Far more than the common Call of the Wild, it was. He
yearned, not so much for a world savage, uncivilized, as for a perfectly
natural one that had never known, perhaps never needed civilization--a
state of freedom in a life unstained.
He never wholly understood, I think, the reason why he found himself
in such stern protest against the modern state of things, why people
produced in him a state of death so that he turned from men to
Nature--to find life. The things the nations exclusively troubled
themselves about all seemed to him