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

unlabelled 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.