The account of what followed simply swept me into fairyland, yet a Fairyland that is true because it lives in every imaginative heart that does not dream itself shut off from the Universe in some wee compartment all alone.
If O'Malley's written account, and especially his tumbled notebooks, left me bewildered and confused, the fragments that he told me brought this sense of an immense, sweet picture that actually existed. I caught small scenes of it, set in some wild high light. Their very incoherence conveyed the gorgeous splendor of the whole better than any neat ordered sequence could possibly have done.
Climax, in the story-book meaning, there was none. The thing flowed round and round forever. A sense of something eternal wrapped me as I listened; for his imagination set the whole adventure out of time and space, and I caught myself dreaming too. "A thousand years in His sight"—I understood the old words as refreshingly new—might be a day. Thus felt that monk, perhaps, for whose heart a hundred years had passed while he listened to the singing of a little bird.
My practical questions—it was only at the beginning that I was dull enough to ask them—he did not satisfy, because he could not. There was never the least suggestion of the artist's mere invention.
"You really felt the Earth about and in you," I had asked, "much as one feels the presence of a friend and living person?"
"Drowned in her, yes, as in the thoughts and atmosphere of some one awfully loved." His voice a little trembled as he said it.
"So speech unnecessary?"
"Impossible—fatal," was the laconic, comprehensive reply, "limiting: destructive even."
That, at least, I grasped: the pitifulness of words before that love by which self goes wholly lost in the being of another, adrift yet cared for, gathered all wonderfully in.
"And your Russian friend—your leader?" I ventured, haltingly.