"'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—?"