Michael Forth

By Mary Johnston

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Title: Michael Forth

Author: Mary Johnston


        
Release date: August 21, 2026 [eBook #79418]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1919

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79418

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MICHAEL FORTH ***






  MICHAEL
  FORTH

  _by_

  MARY JOHNSTON

  AUTHOR OF
  "TO HAVE AND TO HOLD" "AUDREY" "LEWIS RAND"
  "SIR MORTIMER" "FOES"



  Harper & Brothers Publishers
  New York and London




  BOOKS BY
  MARY JOHNSTON

  MICHAEL FORTH
  FOES
  SIR MORTIMER

  HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
  [Established 1817]



  Michael Forth

  Copyright, 1919 by Mary Johnston
  Printed in the United States of America




MICHAEL FORTH



CHAPTER I

I was born at Restwell, two miles from the small town of Whitechurch,
in the county of ---- in Virginia.  The night of my birth, by going
to the top of Lone Tree Hill behind Restwell, one might see the smoke
and flare of a dying battle and hear in diminuendo the guns of North
and South.  I know this because Daddy Guinea went up there and heard
and saw and told me about it when I was six years old and sitting
with him in his cabin over the fire.

"'Fo' de Lawd, dat's so!" said Daddy Guinea.  "De tree shivered an'
Guinea shivered.  De sky low down wuz on fire lak you burnin'
breshwood, an' de guns holler hoarser 'n bullfrogs!  Dey soun' jes'
lak de folks in hell buttin' dey haids togedder.  'N' yo' father was
dere an' yo' grandfather an' yo' uncle Gilchrist an' mo' ob yo'
cousins dan you could shake er stick at!  An' er passel ob other
folk.  An' de folk on de other side--de Yanks.  An' de light flicker
lak breshwood burnin', an' de guns holler lak bullfrogs in hell, whar
dere ain't no water!  An' de tree shiver an' Guinea shiver."

"Did I shiver, Daddy Guinea?"

"I don' know 'bout de shiverin', but I sho know dat you hollered!  I
come down from Lone Tree Hill, an' de big house wuz lighted up, an' I
heard you hollerin' befo' I got to de kitchen door."

"What was I crying about?"

Daddy Guinea scraped the sweet-potatoes that we were roasting out of
the ashes.  "Dat's er question with er powerful lot ob joints!  Dar
now!  De ashes off de little, long 'tater, jes' lak you laks hit!"

My father, my grandfather, and Uncle Gilchrist came safely from the
battle visible from Lone Tree Hill.  But three months later in a
skirmish a hundred miles from Restwell my father was killed.  So I do
not remember him.  A daguerreotype and a photograph--_carte de
visite_--show a strong, irregular face.  He was twenty-six when he
died, and I was his only child.  I was born and he was killed in the
second year of the war.  I was three years old when came the
Surrender.  At present my native region found itself midseas in that
long and trying episode called Reconstruction.  South of Mason and
Dixon at this moment in history it was called Domination.  War,
Surrender, Reconstruction, or Domination--they were but words to a
six-year-old, yet words with something mystic, awful, wrapped around
them.  He could not but feel that, watching the faces of the
grown-ups who spoke them.

Daddy Guinea was old and bent and charcoal black and seamed.  He had
been born at Restwell, but his father and mother were born in Africa.
He was one of the handful of men and women, slaves once but now free,
who stayed on at Restwell after the war.  He was free, but made no
great fuss over it, took his wage in kind and in the very few dollars
my grandfather could give him, and once told me, "I wuz all de time
free in er place inside!"

Now, sitting in the cabin that was dark save for the hearth-fire,
waiting for the sweet-potato, watching Daddy Guinea's manipulations,
all of a sudden he linked and brought together for me the feel of all
the negro folk that I knew intimately or had casually viewed.  He was
like them and not like them, as all the others were like one another
and yet had their differences, so that I never mistook Uncle Plutus
for Mandy's Jim, nor Mandy for Aunt Esther, nor Mammy for either of
these, nor one of the children with whom I played for another.  Daddy
Guinea, now bending, now rising, from the fire, was certainly Daddy
Guinea.  Yet, like the giant shadow upon the wall and ceiling, there
was something around that was holding Daddy Guinea and Uncle Plutus,
Mandy's Jim and Mandy and Aunt Esther and all the others.  I don't
suppose in the least that sitting there, a small boy roasting
sweet-potatoes, I consciously entertained an idea of race or
accomplished a considerable synthesis.  Yet I did, with a sudden
sense of wideness, of novelty, open into a perception, not of Daddy
Guinea or Mammy or Uncle Plutus or Esther, but of colored people.  I
was due to meet often in life, am due still to meet often, that sense
of generalization.  It came then, as it comes now, with the breath of
space, with a dawnlike, happy surprise.

I sat staring into the embers.  "Don' you lak yo' sweet-potato?"
asked Daddy Guinea.  "Eat hit!"

When it was eaten he took me home to the big house.  Outside the
cabin was darkness and stars, the sound of the river and wind in the
oaks.  Also a whippoorwill was crying: "Whip-poor-will!
Whip-poor-will!"  I pressed close to Daddy Guinea.

Mammy waited for me in the kitchen door.  "Never wuz such a chile for
gallivantin' off to cabins!  Come in an' say yo' prayers an'
'celerate yo'self into bed!"

I always said my prayers kneeling beside my mother.  Now I said them
and climbed into my bed and she kissed me good night.  She went out
of the room, and Mammy, who had a bed in the corner, sat at a table
by the lamp and hemmed a great white neckerchief.  It was a warm
night.  Moths came in at the windows and flew around the light.
Mammy's shadow moved on the wall.  Her head nodded, up and down went
her arm.  I lay upon my side and watched the shadow.  The room was
large and square and the whippoorwill's voice, no less than the
moths, came in at the window.  I grew lonely, and to brighten matters
sat up and demanded a drink of water.  Mammy brought it to me in my
silver mug and told me to go to sleep.  I held her by her ample apron.

"Daddy Guinea saw them fighting from Lone Tree Hill.  Did you see
them, Mammy?"

Mammy looked down at me, and with a large, brown hand pushed the hair
from my forehead.  "You go to sleep, honey!  Yo' haid's as damp as a
dish-rag!  It's a hot night.  You go to sleep!"

"Did you see them?"

"No!  Where'd I fin' time to go up to Lone Tree Hill?  First I wuz
wukkin' with yo' mother, an' den I wuz holdin' you in dese two hands.
Now you lay right down an' go to sleep!"

I obeyed her, but in the nighttime I woke, terribly afraid.  At my
loud crying my mother came in.

"Dar now!" said Mammy.  "First you waked yo'self, an' den you waked
Mammy, an' den you waked yo' mother!"

I clung to my mother.  "Daddy Guinea said the sky was like brushwood
and the guns were like bullfrogs in hell, where there isn't any
water!"

My mother sat down beside me on the bed.  "There, Michael--there,
Michael!"

"And I wouldn't ever tell!  I was down at the big gate and a colored
man came by and he came over and made a face at me.  And he said,
'You were beaten poor--and I hope you'll be beaten poorer!'  And he
pulled my hair and he said, 'I couldn't useter do that!'  And he
said: 'Don't you dare go tell!  If you do I'll come at night and make
mincemeat of you!'"  I burst into a loud cry.  "I've told--I've told!"

"Michael!  Michael!"

"Will he make mincemeat of me?"

"No!  He can't.  He was a poor fool!"

Mammy's voice came from the other side of the room.  "Dat's jest what
he wuz!  Some no-'count, po' colored trash!"

I lay for a moment, quieted, in the bend of my mother's arm.  But
then came new perturbations, salt tears.  "What did we do to the
colored people?  What did they do to us?"

"My Lawd!" exclaimed Mammy.  "Listen to dat chile!"

My mother moved upon the bed.  "Mammy, I'll stay with him until he
goes to sleep.  Suppose you go lie down upon the little bed in my
room."

"Ef you wants to talk to him, Miss Cary, I ain't gwine listen!"

"What should I care if you did!  But, Mammy, you go get your sleep--"

Mammy, sheets and pillow in her arms, went into the next room.  My
mother retook her place beside me.  "Michael, I think sometimes that
you are as old as I, or that I am as young as you!  Now let's talk to
each other and get rid of being afraid!"

She had on a muslin wrapper tied with a blue ribbon.  I remembered it
always, I thought.  In the years since I could notice she had had few
new clothes.  Now I wiped away my tears with her flowing sleeve.

"What did we do to the colored people?"

After a moment she answered.  "There isn't anybody here but just
ourselves.  I am going to tell you how I see things.  You've got a
mind under that tousled hair.  Let us straighten out things together!
... Our great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers and
great-great-great-grandfathers robbed the colored people out of
Africa.  They didn't ask to come out of Africa.  The white folk,
North and South, and English, and everybody else, just stole them or
bought them from other robbers that were black.  The white folk
wanted to make wealth with them or out of them.  They brought them
over the sea in ships called slave-ships.  The white men who took
them were slavers.  The white folk who bought them were
slave-holders.  The words, slave, slaver, slaveholder were written
over everything.  For all the words of goodness that were written,
these words were written, too!"

"Written where, mother?  Written over where we live?"

"Yes!  Written over where we live.  But it isn't to be forgotten,"
said my mother, with a kind of passionateness, "that on a time--and
no such far time, either--they were written over everywhere else on
earth!  They are written over some places still.  It's a matter of
progression in time and place, and over varying obstacles, and they
wouldn't always have been written over us!"

I hardly think that she was speaking directly to me now, though we
did talk all manner of things over together, she and I.  She was
genial, with vision and reach and an independence of speech that
brought her into disfavor with many.  Now she sat upon the bed in the
white wrapper and blue ribbon and seemed to brood upon the darkness
outside the window.  The lamp had been lighted again and the moths
flew around it.  There came, too, the odor of the lilies in the
garden.  The whippoorwill had stopped calling, but there mounted and
entered a whole tide of little cricket sounds.

"Was the war about the colored people?"

My mother turned her face to me.  "As I see it, it was partly about
that and partly about another thing, called Theory of Government, and
partly, I reckon, about other things....  Oh, Michael, it was a
dreadful war!"

She bent herself and clung to me, and I cried again because she was
crying.  But she did not cry a long time.  She shook her tears away
and made a face at me and laughed so that I might laugh.  "It's over!
We're all in the Union again, or will be one day when those we fought
think we're punished enough!  And the slaves are free!"

"Are you sorry, mother?"

"No!"

"And they're not sorry?"

"The slaves?  No!"

"Well--"

"Well--isn't it--we should be happier than we were?  And some day we
shall be--some day we shall be, Michael!"

"The war killed father and made us poor."

"Yes, yes!  It killed father and made us poor.  So many fathers and
so much poverty!  And pain and humiliation....  Everybody concerned,
through long ages, might have been wiser, I think!  Our
great-grandfathers everywhere, our fathers, ourselves, and all.
North and South and over all the world.  Pain and wreck and
darkness....  But if nights are long, days are long, too, Michael!
And there is a place--I believe it!--where there is no night.  And we
are going to travel out of the night, Michael, Michael!  You and I
and father and all of us--"

"And the colored people--"

"Yes, yes--and the colored people!"

"Mammy wouldn't hurt us.  Nor Daddy Guinea, nor Uncle Plutus, nor
Mandy's Jim, nor Mandy, nor Aunt Esther--"

"No, no!  They're good people.  Almost all the colored people I've
ever seen were good people."

"But the man at the gate--"

"He was giving back the harm of the past.  But maybe at the bottom he
wasn't wicked.  Don't be frightened at him, Michael, and don't be
angry at him.  All your life try to understand and to like all colors
of people."

She rose from beside me and walked up and down in the room, and then,
going to a window, stood there looking out.  The warm wind lifted her
hair.  When she came back to me her voice was gay and rich and kind,
as I liked it--as I like it now, down all the years, around me and
with me in the midst of the years!  "Now I am going to sing 'Happy
Land!'  And you are going to shut your eyes and go to sleep."

She sang and I went to sleep.  And in the morning, when I waked, the
sun was shining and Mammy was making her bed, and I remembered that I
was going for blackberries with Ahasuerus, Aunt Esther's
twelve-year-old.  I seem somewhere to have heard that, had the old
régime continued, Ahasuerus would have been given to me for
body-servant.  But it had not continued, and Ahasuerus was my equal
before the law.  It did not trouble me then, nor has it troubled me
since.




CHAPTER II

Colonel Dugald Forth, my grandfather, fought very bravely through the
war, from first Manassas to Appomattox.  He saw two sons and a
brother slain, and many kinsmen and many friends.  He was five times
wounded, and the last hurt, at Cold Harbor, made him limp through
life.  He had put all the money he could raise into Confederate
bonds.  "The government must be supported, sir!"  He had seen his
government go down into the Swire Deep of lost governments.  The
bonds were worthless.  When he came home, after the Surrender, to
Restwell, it was to find the house standing, and that was better fare
than had many of his neighbors and friends.  But the negroes were
free, and were gone, most of them, to the four winds.  Those that
stayed were the inwardly attached, and that, in a case like this,
meant chiefly the elderly.  And, staying, they must henceforth not
only be clothed, housed, and fed, but paid.  He did not see whence
the money was to come with which to do it.  It was springtime when he
came home.  The fields lay unplowed, unplanted, unkempt, desolate.
The fences had disappeared.  The cattle, the horses, were gone from
the meadow-land.  Where was stock to come from--implements--seeds
even?  Who would labor the fields?  The earth of the plantation
stood, and the old pillared, brick house.  Behind, at the foot of
Lone Tree Hill, were the quarters, three-fourths deserted.  Over by
the big oak rose the overseer's house.  But his old overseer was
dead, killed at Sharpsburg.  He could not get, nor did he need, a new
one.  Down by the creek he saw a ruin where had been his mill.  He
could not rebuild.

The bridge was gone from over the river.  He had to find and cross by
the old ford.  Restwell, at that time, stood eight miles from a
railway.  He rode these miles over a highway, unmended for so long
that it must have forgotten the very look of road-menders.  The
railroad--the railroads--by which he had traveled from Richmond were
painful, decrepit things.  The fields to either side lay fenceless,
turned out, dead.  The villages, the wayside houses, had a beaten
look.  Gaunt chimneys stood up, all that was left of burned homes.
All the South was broken down.  My grandfather loved the South.
Before him and his region, to be traveled, perforce, ran the painful
bitter road of the years after the war.  Generosity is a great virtue
and is slow of acquisition.  It hung over North and South, it
descended here and there, but in these years there was little common,
public attempt to bring it down and mix it with the daily bread.

Colonel Dugald Forth came home.  My grandmother met him with
ejaculations of thankfulness and welcome.  His unmarried daughter, my
aunt Sarah, clung about him.  My mother, his widowed daughter-in-law,
came with the genial look behind the tears in her eyes.  I was set
upon his knee.  Mammy came and Uncle Plutus and Aunt Esther.


"We'll begin again, Dugald!"

"Father, they're here still--around and with us--a cloud of sharers!
And here's Michael to grow up and help you!"

Courage in any form insures a possible courage elsewhere.  My
grandfather, at fifty-five, took up an altered life and walked with
it bravely.  The year after the war my grandmother died.  I can
remember her--a small, active, gallant woman.  My mother and I lived
on at Restwell.  The man to whom my aunt Sarah had been betrothed had
died in the third year of the war, a prisoner at Camp Chase.  Her
life was at this time almost wholly subjective, a dreamy intercourse
with the past and with the future across the grave.  My grandmother,
feeling herself going, had turned to my mother.  "Cary, you take the
housekeeping.  You make them comfortable!"  Later, when they were all
around her, in the dead of night, she opened her eyes and said, "My
key-basket to Cary!"  Then she took her husband's hand and held it,
and with her odd, inscrutable smile, died.

So my mother took the reins that she dropped.  My mother had a strong
power of liking and loving.  And as she gave she drew.  My
grandfather, my aunt Sarah, the servants, the place, took light and
warmth from her, and gave her from their own store, great or small.
She was a flame-kindler, a beneficent ferment.  Kindred and
acquaintance differed from her at many points, would sometimes hotly
argue with her.  But the level lifted where she was.

Uncle Gilchrist was the youngest of my grandfather's children.
Nineteen when he fought in the battle to be seen from Lone Tree Hill,
he was presently transferred to the Army of Tennessee and henceforth
fought out of Virginia.  When the end came he was artillery captain,
somewhere far south.  Thence he wrote that as soon as might be he
would go to Mexico.  He went, and Restwell heard of him as fighting
with Juarez.  At very long intervals came a letter to his father.

My father was dead, and my uncle Robert.  Uncle Gilchrist was in
Mexico.  Aunt Sarah lived at Restwell.  There were left my aunts
Harriet and Kate--Mrs. Warringer, Mrs. Dallas.  Aunt Harriet lived in
Richmond, Aunt Kate at Flowerfield, in the next county.  The husbands
of both were living--General Warringer, Major Dallas, the latter with
an empty sleeve--but both men were impoverished, involved, like the
rest of our world, in the huge debacle.  They could not help Colonel
Forth.

My grandfather took up his burden.  Trouble of the past and of the
present, a cloudy day overspreading, to him, the future, made it
somewhat grim and heavy.  Men like him--like Warringer, like
Dallas--must somehow hold the time until children like me, like
Warringer's five and Dallas's four, grew up to improve it.  The
present work was to keep the South--Virginia--the heritage's head
above water.  That must be done despite very complete poverty,
despite disfranchisement, despite a stinging cloud of daily defeats,
despite a veritable upas-tree of memory, perpetually waving a
welcome, perpetually murmuring, "Come, sleep under me!"

My grandfather assumed his task, but it bent him like the stony
masses that they bear in the first round of the Mountain of Purgatory.

He must find an inner way to make it lighter, since there was no
outer way.  He first tried blind, proud endurance, an exoteric
Stoicism.  After a time this broke down.  He began to be a reader, a
ponderer.  Restwell owned a very fair number of books.  The Forths
possessed a good many, and my mother had brought with her from her
old home in eastern Virginia her inherited portion of a considerable
and well-chosen library.  My grandfather turned from book to book.
At last, in two or three quartos, he came upon Swedenborg.

Despite Scotch blood and name, the Restwell Forths were
Episcopalians.  Every Sunday, in the old time, the old, roomy,
high-swung carriage, the two sleek, strong chestnuts, and Mingo or
Daniel on the box, had taken the women of the family to St.
Matthew's, in the oak-grove, in the middle of Whitechurch.  Colonel
Forth and his sons had ridden there.  In the new time, in fine
weather, my mother and Aunt Sarah walked the two miles.  In bad
weather the two farm-horses were put to the old carriage, rusty now
and shaken, and Uncle Plutus, rusty too, drove them to St. Matthew's.
My grandfather, alone, rode upon Selim, brought somehow through the
war, but old now and with a trick of stumbling.

The Rev. Thomas Millwood belonged to St. Matthew's and St. Matthew's
to him.  He also belonged to Whitechurch and Whitechurch to him.  And
to the county at large and the county to him.  And likewise to
Virginia and Virginia to him.  When the war clanged down upon us he
became a fighting chaplain.  Then the army belonged to him and he to
the army.  After the Surrender all the one-time comrades-in-arms
belonged to him and he to them.  Later in history, I do not think
that he missed a single Confederate reunion.  A younger man than my
grandfather, the two had been at the university in the same
half-decade.  They had an affection for each other.  There was Mrs.
Millwood, but she moved like a cool, pale moon around the orb in
activity that was her husband.  The pair had no children, but
relatives, temporarily stranded, were always more or less permanently
at home in the pleasant, large-gardened, brick parsonage around the
corner from St. Matthew's.

During and after the war, the Millwoods, too, must cut the cloth of
life after altered patterns.  Old, pleasant, easy living and giving
had to be relinquished.  The toll-gate bar swung decisively across
the road of expenditure.  They gave up much, but kept their dogmas.

Mr. Millwood always spoke of himself as an active Christian.  He
preached good orotund sermons, and he practised a thousand brotherly
charities and kindlinesses.  He had, though always within his own
frontiers, a strong social gift.  I think that he was an active
Christian, though perhaps not as active as he considered himself.

His marked impatiences were with religious doubts: "How _can_ you
doubt, sir?  Here--and here!  Isn't it plain?"  And with tokens of a
changing mind where social and political theories were in question:
"Change, sir!  Look at the French Revolution!  Look at the French
character to-day!  Look at this tragic country!  What has brought
about all these horrors?  Old ways not good enough!  Unrest!  Minds
bitten by tarantulas!  What has been the result--is it lovely and of
good report?  Look at the Northern character!"

Mr. Millwood came often to Restwell.  All there, white and black, had
an old fondness for him, for all could remember many a goodness.  He
was a large man, with a broad, fresh-colored face and a manner at
once bluff and cordial.  He came one afternoon and stayed to supper,
the moon being full and the night fitted for a ride back to
Whitechurch on his most venerable gray Dobbin.  After supper, upon
the porch, while they smoked, my grandfather opened upon his inner
preoccupations.

"I read more than I used to, you know, Millwood--turn things over
more in my mind.  Origins and destinies, and so forth, you know.  I
happened, a while ago, upon Swedenborg."

"Ah yes!  Swedenborg!  I tried to read him once and couldn't," said
Mr. Millwood.  "'Origins and destinies!'  Stick to Moses, Colonel,
and to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and to Paul!"

"Swedenborg says that he is only giving the spiritual sense of the
Scriptures."

"Haven't you all your life heard given the spiritual sense of the
Scriptures?  What is the pulpit for?"

"Yes, I know.  But somehow....  We take help where we are lucky
enough to find it, Millwood!"

"Don't you go wandering after nightshade thinking you're getting
strawberries!  Swedenborg!"

"If God is Total and Divine Man--"

"God is God, and man is man!  I must say that you surprise me,
Forth--"

"As a commentary--"

"Heterodoxy always begins as a commentary!  You stick to the plain
letter of the Bible!  Look where the age is being led!  Emerson and
Beecher--this man Darwin in England--wild theories of
communism--women forgetting their nature!  For God's sake, Forth,
don't you be running after strange idols!  Don't you become a
betrayer!"

Now loyalty stood very high in my grandfather's scale of virtues.
For some days after this conversation he read no more Swedenborg.
Indeed, he read nothing.  It happened to be a depressing week.
Poverty bore hard upon the South; unmagnanimous political measures
were abroad.  There fell a chill rain.  The crops at Restwell proved
small, and yet, such as they were, it was hard to get them gathered.
The interest was due on the mortgage he had had to place.  Colonel
Forth's shoulders were beginning to be bowed.

One day, when it rained too much to be out in the fields, he took
from his desk the small Testament which he had carried through the
war.  He had read in it not infrequently during those four years.
But the reading had been more or less perfunctory, blind,
unintelligent.  What the book had chiefly given him was a sense of
protection, of lightness in having it upon his person.  It had been
something very like an amulet, a fetish.  It had turned no bullets,
averted no saber strokes, but the feel of it under his gray vest had
been a help to strength.  Once he had missed it.  There had been a
desperate charge, a hand-to-hand fight.  At the first possible
instant he returned to the scene of this, and, at risk of death or
capture, picked the book out of a bloodstained, trampled hollow.

Now he sat down before the long window, with the sobbing day outside,
and opened the Testament.  It opened at the Letter to the Romans.
The Colonel read, and now he touched idea where before had been
uncomprehended sound.  He held the book in his hand and sat gazing
out at mist and rain.  "I see," he thought.  "But Swedenborg helped
me to see.  Where is the harm, then, in Swedenborg?"  He kept on
thinking.  "Paul explained, interpreted....  Why should
interpretation stop when everything here was bound together? ... _It
has never stopped.  It is going on now._"

My grandfather began now to read both the Bible and Swedenborg.  It
was a comfort to him when he dug from the latter that members of all
churches might apprehend the Church above--the New Church--and yet
still sit among old congregations.  He did not want to cease to go to
St. Matthew's.  He did not want to break with Millwood, or his
neighbors, or kin.  He did not want the county to talk about Colonel
Forth and his defections.  He only wanted all helps toward finding a
shore above his wasted world.  Presently he began to read other
mystics besides Swedenborg.  And now the Bible was often in his
hands.  He acquired a habit of shaking or of nodding his head in
church, at first only at points in the sermon.  Fortunately, St.
Matthew's construed this as a slight palsy, creeping upon the colonel
and manifesting itself at inconvenient seasons.

Now I begin to remember my grandfather as he appeared to a small boy.
He was a tall, bent man, with a beard, with dreamy blue eyes and
lines of care above them.  He had a deep voice, somewhat drawling and
caressing--what is called "a Southern voice."  I used to follow him
about--field or orchard or barn--wherever he was going.  And often I
rode behind him on Selim.

I was very fond of him.  His long silences did not trouble me.  There
was always so much to see or to think about while he was saying
nothing.  When he did speak his voice wrapped me like a deep, old
wood, half melancholy, slow, and always kind.  He answered my
questions, too, with a satisfying open door in the answer.  In that
he and my mother were alike.  When, by the next day, I had found
another closed door to which the open door had led, he did his best,
with a simple seriousness, with this one also.

Dear grandfather!  Dear old movements about the old Restwell place!
Dear childhood!  I go there now at will.  I move or sit or stand at
will in the bright and tender world of Memory.  I alter there where I
see that alteration is needed.  I condense or expand, strengthen or
disintegrate.  I hasten or linger, I heighten, widen, and deepen.  I
recognize form within form.  The "irrecoverable Past"--there is no
such thing!  I treat my past as an artist should.  It is mine and I
visit my vineyard when I will.  I prune and tend the vineyard.  I
make wine from the grapes, and in one chalice, in deep moments, know
my past's essence.  "My" past!  These pronouns are the bane of
existence.  "My" past is the past--all the past.  And where has the
past gone to?  It is very sufficiently here!  Open the gate and go
into it at your will.  There is not even a gate; there is no barrier.




CHAPTER III

My aunt Sarah gave me my first book of poems.  It had her name in it,
and she wrote mine beneath hers on my seventh birthday.  Within its
worn blue covers was found a garland--old poems, old and
fine--gathered from twenty gardens.  The donor said that I could not
read the book now, but that later I should.  She said that evidently
I was going to be fond of reading.  So I was--I was already fond of
it.  And it was not so long before I read the garland, and not so
long before I set to work to memorize certain favorite pieces.
Before I was ten I knew by heart a number of these component
blossoms.  And by then I had found in the house other books of poetry.

My aunt Sarah at the time when she gave me the book, stood a pale,
slender woman, dressed always, when she could, in white, not very
strong, rather silent, and with beautiful eyes.  Every side of
Restwell life laid claim upon my mother's time.  Aunt Sarah was not
idle.  She sewed swiftly and beautifully.  Her long-fingered,
delicate hands accomplished many a task in a house where now all must
work.  But she stood aside from planning and overseeing, from
account-book and calculation.  Her needle flashed, her long fingers
wiped and dusted, but all the time heart and mind were traveling.
She did not desire household authority.  I think that it was only
with strong relief that she saw matters flowing toward my mother for
decisions.  Her own decisions were almost wholly upon inner
things--though that means, of course, that she did then choose and
decide outer things yet to come.  She was a great reader.  But here,
too, she read for practical aid in that other-lighted kingdom.  Her
inner theme was the ultimate union of all lovers.  The strengthening
of every perception, every intuition, that said, "It is so!" had
become her intense preoccupation.  She read to this end, thought to
this end, held herself still and invited her intuitions.  What marked
her off from many women of her acquaintance who had also lost, who
also dreamed reunion, was that she sought corroboration, related
experience, acceptable evidence, not alone in the Bible or in books
of devotion, but wherever she saw or heard of a rainbow glint.  Her
mind was bold in her good cause.  A defined, intense, personal will,
patient and massive, led her over the bound into a transcendentalism
that gathered food from every sea.  My grandfather, weary of trouble,
turned definitely to "sacred" writings.  But my aunt sought
everywhere.

About an eighth of a mile from the house there lay, on the eastern
slope of a little hill, the Restwell graveyard.  Here were laid in
earth the frames of my father and my uncle Robert, and of my
grandmother beside two infants she had lost.  And others were here,
men, women, and children of my grandparents' generation, and older
graves of the generation before these.  Piety kept fair the Restwell
burying-ground.  Lack of working hands might involve old lawn and
garden in barbarous upgrowths, but in the graveyard weeds were kept
down, the grass duly cut and the flowers tended.  My mother and Aunt
Sarah both worked here.  But my aunt Sarah was oftenest in the place.
It had become for her a secret palace, a cloister, a refuge.  Under
the oak-tree she had put a cross for the man who was buried far away,
where he died in prison.  The Whitechurch mason made it for her, cut
out of gray stone.  Above it rose the oak, of a hundred years and
more, with outcropping great roots.  My aunt Sarah sat beneath it,
with the cross before her.  Upright and arms, looked at so, it
quartered the field of the sky.  She brought flowers and laid them
against the base.  She had a pansy-bed just for this.  She laid
against the stone every color of pansy.  She scattered there fragrant
leaves, bits of lavender and myrrh, leaves of rose geranium and
citronalis.  She planted straw-flowers--"immortelles"--so that in the
autumn she might gather them, white and purple heads like clover,
wider, sun-hued disks, and treasure them until the snows came.  Then,
a cluster at a time, she placed them against this cross, and with
them sprays of cedar or white pine, ivy or holly.  She had a stand of
house plants and as they bloomed she cut from these and brought the
glowing bits of color to the graveyard.  The mounds of others there
were not neglected.  Flower and herb and evergreen went to these,
too.  She was scrupulous as to this.  But the clinging passion was
for the cross that had no mound.

As a child I spent much time in this graveyard.  I remember it when I
was five and I remember it when I was ten.  I entered it with my
mother or with my aunt, and here, while they worked or dreamed, I
pursued my own ends.  There was much that might entertain a child
used to collating and devising for himself.  With an old pair of
scissors I might cut away dead roses, or make my own small haymows of
shorn grass.  Or I might play at various houses between the numerous
upstanding oak roots.  I had many mansions here, and with bits of
clay and gravel made roads that linked the whole.  The place overhung
the river.  In a far corner rose a growth of ailanthus whence came
excellent long poles for many uses.  In another corner grew a wild
apple-tree.  The apples reddened and hung among the green leaves.
Later they might lie red upon the ground.  I could not understand why
my mother and my aunt would not let me eat them.  They lay there,
red, in the grass.

A stone wall divided in half the Restwell burying-ground.  On the
fairer aspect of the hill, with the richer trees and the rarer
flowers, with the marble headstones and footstones and the half-dozen
older flat slabs of granite, lay Restwell Forths.  On the other side
of the wall, in a stretch not untended and not unfair, but distinctly
simplified, were Restwell servants.  Here ranged themselves many
small, upright wooden slabs, with two or three of stone showing
resting-places of old, responsible negroes held in affection by the
big house.  The slabs were marked, the place was sweet, overwrought
with dark, running periwinkle, with here and there a bush of lilac or
althea, with locust-trees, heavy and sweet in May.  But still there
was the wall between, and a contrast running from of old....  I often
scrambled over this wall and played hide-and-seek with myself in and
out among the mounds and the wooden slabs.  And, first and last, I
learned to spell many words in the two-sided Restwell burying-ground.
On our side of the wall lichen and moss were to be kept from the
gravestones.  I liked to follow my aunt as she made each name and the
inscription beneath fair and clean.  She read them all to me.  Even
before I could read I knew the graves by name and verse.  But I
learned to read before I was five.

The bank that sloped to the river was truly a fairy place of moss and
fern and jutting rock and tremulous, slender trees.  It early became
to me an enchanted wood.  There was a shelf where I could stand and
throw small stones into the river over the bushy heads of willow and
alder.  Down in an arc went the flung stone; there followed a silver
flash and a liquid sound, then widening rings.  I stood here throwing
stone after stone....  Sometimes there was a rabbit or a squirrel,
and always there were birds and other winged things, and creeping,
charming grotesques.  Now and then I had a human playmate.  At
considerable intervals Ahasuerus came upon the scene.  "Miss Sarah
done axed me ter help her!"  Ahasuerus worked for a time, then,
dismissed, he and I crossed the wall and scampered over the matted
periwinkle, past the graves of his color, to the long, sloping bank.
Here, in the amplest camaraderie, we carried on Lilliputian
explorations, industries.  But Mandy's Jim almost always needed
Ahasuerus in potato-patch or corn-field.

My aunt Sarah and I grew into a kind of communion.  She was oftener
in the graveyard than was my mother, and I was often there with her.
She was also fond of walking by the river or through the home woods,
and here I was her companion.  My circle and hers found their point
of interfusion.  We had each a sense of Nature and of all musical
language.  That I was a child and she a woman made little difference.
We could talk and listen each to the other.  She had a way of
repeating poems to me, and she let me say over to her the verses I
learned.  It was she who first told me old legends and romances.  And
it was she who most distinctly aided me to see the arabesque, the
come and go, of natural phenomena, of night and day, rain and shine,
the seasons, the return and rhythm of all things.  She aided the
birth of my sense of periodicity, directed my ear to the drum of
time.  She never condescended to me, but talked as to an equal.  Of
what she said much went by me like the speaking wind.  But it went to
return in later life and give me up then its meaning.

I recall many an hour spent with her.  Here is one.

On a sunny morning we weeded the graveyard.  Then we sat down under
the oak and, taking a book that she had brought with her, she began
to read while she rested.  She often did this, and sometimes I
pursued my own ends while she read, and sometimes I came to her and
said, "Read it to me."

I said it this day.  She looked at me with her beautiful, seeking
eyes.  "It's a piece by Edgar Allan Poe.  I found it by chance in
this old magazine.  I read it yesterday, and now I'm reading it
again.  But you won't understand it.  You had better keep on playing."

But I was tired of playing and said so, and lay down on the clean
ground with my head against her knee.  Suddenly she began to read.
She read well, after a quiet, clear, impressive fashion.  Be it
understood that in speaking of my childhood I speak now according to
its simple, momentary impressions, and now after the larger knowledge
of the upheaping, remembering, sorting, comprehending years.  Now I
speak after the one book and now after the other.  She read Poe's
"Colloquy of Una and Monos."


UNA.  "Born again!"

MONOS.  "Yes, fairest and best-beloved Una, 'born again,'"

UNA.  "Death!"

MONOS.  "... You are confused and oppressed by the majestic novelty
of the Life Eternal.  Yes, it was of Death I spoke.  And here how
singularly sounds that word...."


On went my aunt Sarah's voice.  The two lovers, both "dead," both
living, moving, speaking in a land of added senses, new tones in the
scale, pursue their colloquy.  They speak of what they thought of
Death, in the old world, and of the mistakes and woes of that world.
And Monos had "died," and Una, a year later, had "died."  And time
had passed, and here they met, with emotion and memory clear,
sonorous, golden-true.  Una asks Monos for a detailed recital of his
passage from the old plane into the other.  He accedes and speaks
further:


MONOS.  "... Wearied at heart with anxieties which had their origin
in the general turmoil and decay, I succumbed to the fierce fever.
After some few days of pain, and many of dreamy delirium replete with
ecstasy the manifestation of which you mistook for pain, there came
upon me, as you have said, a breathless and motionless torpor, and
this was termed _Death_ by those who stood around me.

"Words are vain things.  My condition did not deprive me of
sentience....

"I breathed no longer.  The pulses were still.  The heart had ceased
to beat.  Volition had not departed, but was powerless.  The senses
were unusually active, although, eccentrically so--assuming often
each other's functions at random.  The taste and the smell were
inextricably confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal and
intense....  _All_ my perceptions were purely sensual.  The materials
furnished the passive brain by the senses were not in the least
degree wrought into shape by the deceased understanding.  Of pain
there was some little; of pleasure there was much; but of moral pain
or pleasures none at all....  And this was in truth the _Death_ of
which these bystanders spoke reverently, in low whispers....

"They attired me for the coffin--three or four dark figures which
flitted busily to and fro....  The day waned....

"And now from the wreck and the chaos of the usual senses there
appeared to have arisen within me a sixth, all perfect.  In its
exercise I found a wild delight--yet a delight still physical,
inasmuch as the understanding had in it no part.  Motion in the
animal frame had fully ceased.  No muscle quivered; no nerve
thrilled, no artery throbbed.  But there seemed to have sprung up in
the brain _that_ of which no words could convey to the merely human
intelligence even an indistinct conception.  Let me term it a mental,
pendulous pulsation.  It was the moral embodiment of man's abstract
idea of _Time_.  By the absolute equalization of this movement--or of
such as this--had the cycles of the fundamental orbs themselves been
adjusted.  By its aid I measured the irregularities of the clock upon
the mantel, and of the watches of the attendants.  Their tickings
came sonorously to my ears.  The slightest deviation from the true
proportion--and these deviations were omni-prevalent--affected me
just as violations of abstract truth are wont, on earth, to affect
the moral senses.  Although no two of the timepieces in the chamber
struck individual accords accurately together, yet I had no
difficulty in holding steadily in mind the tones, and the respective
momentary errors of each.  And this--this keen, perfect,
self-existing sentiment of _duration_, this sentiment existing (as
man could not possibly have conceived it to exist) independent of any
succession of events--this idea--this sixth sense upspringing from
the ashes of the rest, was the first obvious and certain step of the
intemporal soul upon the threshold of the temporal Eternity.

"It was midnight, and you still sat by my side....  They had
deposited me in the coffin.  The lamps burned flickeringly....  The
perfume in my nostrils ceased.  Forms affected my vision no longer.
The oppression of the Darkness uplifted itself from my bosom.  A dull
shock like that of electricity pervaded my frame, and was followed by
total loss of the idea of contact.  All of what man has termed sense
was merged in the sole consciousness of entity, and in the one
abiding sentiment of duration.  The mortal body had been at length
stricken with the hand of the deadly _Decay_.

"Yet had not all of sentience departed; for the consciousness and the
sentiment remaining supplied some of its functions by a lethargic
intuition.  I appreciated the direful change now in operation upon
the flesh....  I was not unconscious of those movements which
displaced you from my side, which confined me within the coffin,
which deposited me within the hearse, which bore me to the grave,
which lowered me within it, which heaped heavily the mold upon me....

"And here ... there rolled away days and weeks and months; and the
soul watched narrowly each second as it flew, and, without effort,
took record of its flight--without effort and without object.

"A year passed.  The consciousness of _being_ had grown hourly more
indistinct, and that of mere _locality_ had, in great measure,
usurped its position.  The idea of entity was becoming merged in that
of _place_.  The narrow space immediately surrounding what had been
the body was now going to be the body itself....

"Many lustra had supervened.  Dust had returned to dust.  The form
had food no more.  The sense of being had at length utterly departed,
and there reigned in its stead--instead of all things--dominant and
perpetual--the autocrats _Place_ and _Time_.  For that which was
not--for that which had no form--for that which had no thought--for
that which had no sentience--for that which was soulless, yet of
which matter formed no portion;--for all this nothingness, yet for
all this immortality, the grave was still a home, and the corrosive
hours co-mates."


There was no more of the colloquy.  It ended there, with the
definiteness of a stone dropped into the river.  Yet after the stone
the widening rings!  My aunt put down the book.  "It says no more.
But Una and Monos are talking, in happiness, each to the other.  They
move, they touch, they remember, reason, desire, and love.  They
speak of being 'born again' and of the 'august Eternal Life.'  I
think that as desire and will slept and rested, so now they awoke,
moved, and gathering themselves together, found richer being in a
richer world!  At any rate, separation passed away like a dream."

She sat with her hands locked over her knees, looking afar.  I had a
little heap of acorns, and I played with these--one acorn, then a
line, then two lines, then a square.

Ahasuerus taught me to swim, Mandy's Jim to shoot, my grandfather to
ride.  My mother taught me to read, to write, and to cipher.  She
carried me into geography and history, and through the gate of Latin.
All persons and all things at Restwell taught me.  I was born a
listener and a gatherer--a giver, too, I hope, of what I thought
valuable....  Out of a thousand faults I pick pride, an indolent
will, some fear, some obscure strains of cruelty, fretted thin, I
hope, by now.  I see, too, oversensitiveness to blame, and some
finesse.  Now and then I lied, but not often; generally under some
strong, imagined stress.  Physically, I was fairly strong, fairly
healthy.  I was early used to being told that I had a good mind.
"You have a good mind--you ought to study hard."--"You have a good
mind; you might grow up to be the greatest help!" ... The wings to
carry me, to lift my feet from the clogging faults, were a hunger and
thirst after understanding, a sense for the cleanly and the
harmonious, a considerable synthesizing power, a considerable power
of idealization.  So I ranged my first decade here at Restwell in
Virginia--small tiger in small jungle, small lion in small desert,
small man in small earth, small angel in small heaven.

Though I lived chiefly with grown persons there were times when I
forgathered with children.  Ahasuerus had a toddling brother, Creed,
and a sister, Mimy.  They were younger than I, but I made mud pies
with them down by the creek that flowed past the quarters.  And when
we went to Whitechurch or to neighboring country houses I met
children.  And there were the Dallas cousins at Flowerfield, twenty
miles away.  Each summer they came to Restwell for two or three
weeks--my aunt Kate and the four young Dallases, John, Miriam,
Catherine, and Lewis.  And, usually in October, my aunt Sarah went to
Flowerfield for as long a time, and I went with her.

Flowerfield!  That was a brick house somewhat larger than Restwell,
but otherwise quite like it.  It stood upon a hilltop and commanded a
most lovely, wide view.  Before the war Flowerfield had meant two
thousand acres of rich land, green, watered meadows, and a famous
breed of horses.  During the war the land went down, the horses were
taken away.  The house stood in the path of a noted "raider."
Together with its many outbuildings, it was first looted, then fired.
Barns, stables, cabins, went off in flame.  But the thick-walled
house withstood.  Great damage was done, but the strong shell rested.
After the war the two thousand acres were parted into three lots.
One moiety went for debt; one for some money with which to stock and
cultivate the remaining third.  The money it brought was little
enough.  There were no more famous horses.  The damage done to the
house could be but meagerly repaired.  When I knew it as a child,
bare indeed was the furnishing!  The raider had taken all that could
be taken and had smashed the rest.  To help Flowerfield into a
livable condition all that could be spared was sent from Restwell.
And more fortunate neighbors had given with prompt kindness what they
could.  But all the Flowerfield region stood in the swathe of
destruction.  Not much could be given from one to the other.  For
years after the Surrender Flowerfield, house and place, exhibited a
bareness not without its own distinction.  War-wrecked, it sang like
a ballad.

Of the young Dallases, John and Miriam were about of my age.  John
was--is--square-made, solid and good.  Miriam was--is--Miriam!

Winter and spring I looked forward to their coming with summer to
Restwell.  My aunt Kate, my mother said, was like my father.  I see
now her strong, irregular face, her brown eyes, both intent and
quizzical.  She and my mother were good friends.  "Cary"--"Kate"--I
hear their voices now.

Major Dallas, like his father-in-law, Colonel Forth, like his county
and like his state, was whelmed in the difficulties of a shattered
order.  He must build again, with effort, with struggle--must do his
part in the building up, after new patterns, of the South.  A young
man still, he put hand and mind to his work, with determination, with
courage and ableness.  His left sleeve hung empty, two-thirds of his
land must go, his house stood half a ruin.  There were children to
educate, a bedridden mother to keep in something like old comfort.
He set to work.  I do not remember him often at Restwell, but at
Flowerfield I knew and liked him.  He was a big man, magnetic,
humorous, fond of children.  Before the war, at the university, he
had read law, had been admitted to the bar in '61.  In '66 he rented
the quaintest of law-offices in the shadow of the court-house in the
county seat, four miles from Flowerfield.  In two years he had become
the principal lawyer of the county.  There was law business enough,
the lord of law knows, in those troubled years!  But it was business
for impoverished clients, individuals, fellow-Confederates, widows
and orphans.  Major Dallas made little money.  But he grew rich in
the good-will of his people.  These were the years when Achilles drew
the body of Hector around Troy.  Major Dallas waked and wrought for
his region, fought gloom and bitterness, cheered To-morrow, backed
Time to bring in one and all as winners.  He declined to be
pessimistic as to the United States--even to be ironic over the
"united."  "If we're big enough, each man jack of us, North and
South, we'll find that we are united!"

He turned gray early.  But, for all his empty sleeve and his gallant
record, he was a better soldier after the war than during it.

I loved Flowerfield.  I see it in autumn with all its noble trees
scarlet and gold, and, in the no great distance, blue waves of
mountains.  The house had--has--an emanation for me, indescribable,
its own, welcome to the inner senses.  I loved the bare, clean,
little room where I slept with John, loved the old, wide stair, the
big empty hall; loved the front porch, pillared differently from ours
at Restwell; loved the wide, sunny two-storied back porch; loved the
dogs that lay there.  October is, to me, to this day, a royal month.

John and Miriam and I ranged together.  Catherine and Lewis were too
small for deep plans and purposes, long strides afield.  But the
first three owned the world in those Octobers.

In mid-October came the nutting, came the smell of wood smoke, came
the Indian summer.  We might be poor, we might be surrounded by
dubitations and brain-rackings, we might encounter among our adult
acquaintances sighs and furrowed brows, we might, at times, from
visiting folk, hear bitter or indignant utterance when newspapers
were unfolded and read, we might be dimly aware that we had a life of
work before us.  A bitter war had been fought with immediately bitter
results.  But yet children might be happy.  On the whole, we children
thought precious little about the war, or reconstruction, or poverty,
or a new order ripped from the womb of the old.  We thought at times,
of course, archaically, queerly.  But then surged in the vital
present of chinkapin strings, ripening persimmons and black haws,
dropping chestnuts and tumbling walnuts.

June again, when Aunt Kate and the children came to Restwell....

Miriam was said to be like her mother, as her mother was said to be
like my father.  Now she was active, now she was a dreamer.  I have
seen her for half an hour on end, sitting in the sun or in the shade,
a little, motionless figure, her chin on her knees, her eyes on the
ground.  But when she arose she arose with a spring, became at once
the whole-hearted player.  She and I early found the corridor between
our natures.  I knew her--know her--from within, and she knows me.




CHAPTER IV

The Warringers lived in Richmond, considerably more than a hundred
miles away.  When, in the summer, they could leave town, they usually
went to General Warringer's parents, in Gloucester County.  I early
gathered, from some source or other, that my aunt Harriet and my
uncle Gilchrist were like each other and somewhat unlike my father,
Uncle Robert, Aunt Sarah, and Aunt Kate.  Restwell and Flowerfield
did not seem to have hold on them.  Daddy Guinea told me a little
about this.

"Mr. Gilchrist an' Miss Harriet, dey restless.  Lak de Flowerfield
colts--all wantin' ter be racers!"

"Isn't it good to be a racer?"

"Sho!  Ef you's er bawn racer.  But some of de colts jus' restless,
'n' thinkin' dey see er race-track where ain't any!  Of co'se," said
Daddy Guinea, "dey're jus' pawin' 'n' zigzaggin' dere way ter hit!
Ez I see hit, we're all on de big race-track."

"Is Aunt Harriet pretty?"

"She sho is!  'N' sweet ez honey de way she talks!"

I found this out for myself when I was something more than eight
years old and my grandfather took me with him to Richmond.  That was
an event!

The Surrender lay five years in the background.  The South showed
faint signs of recuperation.  But many individuals, speaking in terms
of material prosperity, were still upon the descending arc.  Others
apparently rested precisely at the nadir.  This last I gather to have
been my grandfather's case.  He had done his best.  Now he must have
help, or, despite all struggle, Restwell would go under the hammer.
He went to Richmond to see General Warringer.  Just why he took me
with him I do not remember, but he took me.

Mandy's Jim and the ancient carriage conveyed us through Whitechurch
and so on by the old highway, by long hills and level stretches, to
the small town that bragged of a railroad.  The colonel and I
together had a small leather trunk and a worn valise.  He wore the
broadcloth he had had before the war.  My suit had been fashioned by
my mother and Aunt Sarah out of clothes that had been my father's.
The colonel's hat was the Southern, wide-brimmed, soft, black felt.
I had a cap that my mother had made.

Every one on the train appeared to know my grandfather.  Every one
seemed to speak to me.  It was so novel!  The rows of seats covered
with dark-red velvet, and the windows like parallel lines of dirty
glass beads, and the stove at one end and the water-cooler at the
other, and the lamps up in the painted roof, and the roar and the
swaying and the jolting, and the smell and grime of soft smoke, and
the telegraph-poles going by, and the rushing country--I sat with my
eyes wide and my teeth coming down hard upon my lip.  I have reason
to believe that we made something under twenty-five miles an hour.
But all things are relative.  Mandy's Jim, the plow-horses, and the
carriage made four and a half miles an hour.  And when the whistle
screamed--what half-fearful, half-delightful agitation!

The conductor said: "You don't often travel with us, Colonel.  Glad
to see you!"  He had a patch over one eye and a great scar running
across forehead and cheek.  When he had punched my grandfather's
ticket and gone by, and my grandfather had explained why he had
punched the ticket, we entered upon this.

"Did he get hurt in the war?"

"Yes.  At Malvern Hill."

"Is he poor?"

"Yes, he's poor."

"Is everybody in the cars poor?"

"Mostly."

"If it lets us travel, I don't care!"

My grandfather smiled.  "Do you like to travel?"

I produced two of Mammy's big words.  "I extremely and fastidiously
like it."

Mr. Millwood was on the train.  I do not remember where he was
going--not to Richmond, for the latter part of the day we went on
without him.  But here he was, and an obliging farmer changed seats
with him so that he might be next to us.  At first I was afraid of
hurting the red velvet (though already it was hurt enough), but at
last, as the train was overhanging the river and there was a boat
upon it and men fishing, I got upon my knees and glued my forehead to
the window.  It was a very dirty window, but I managed to find an
unsmeared lane.  Now the train ran under limestone cliffs, and how it
roared!  Now it careered into open country, and I saw the willows of
the river and fields and houses.

Behind me Colonel Forth and Mr. Millwood were talking.

"So I thought I would go see Carter Warringer--"

"I hope he can help.  I wish I could help, Dugald!"

"I know you do, Tom.  If I can struggle on, I'd like to keep the
place for the boy."

"You'll pull through!  The Lord isn't going to desert you--even if
you do read stuff and nonsense!"

"The boy's got a good mind and strong affections.  He ought to do
well.  Dugald had it in him....  If I can give Michael his schooling
and start him fair--"

Mr. Millwood nodded his big head.  "In ten years' time Major Dallas
might take him in his office.  Then, as a lawyer, he'd be made!  If
Virginia ever gets up from the ground John Dallas can do what he
wants to--"

"Yes.  John's a strong man.  Sometimes I think that Michael won't
take to the law."

"Why not?  Now I don't see him," said Mr. Millwood, "in the
pulpit....  I've heard ever so many war doctors say that henceforth
doctors would have a great showing--"

"Doctor Gilbert doesn't believe he'll be a doctor.  Just as I," said
Colonel Forth, "don't see him as a farmer."

"It's a right hard thing to find--a way of living that your whole
heart's in!  _I_ found it," said Mr. Millwood.  "The law's the road
to political life--if ever we have any political life again!"

"I don't know.  I feel sometimes," said my grandfather, "strange new
things in the earth, pushing up.  A curtain's down, Millwood!"

We were on the river again.  It flashed and bent.  There was a broken
dam.  Then a mill with a great wheel....  Now we were away from the
water, rushing through forest.  The whistle screamed.  My knees sank
into the worn and blackened velvet; my hands held the cinder-strewn
window-sill, my forehead pressed the glass where the last shower had
left dirty tear marks.  Inside me was wild, bright, tense, rushing
adventure.

After a while I tumbled back and slept.

When I waked, Mr. Millwood was gone.  My grandfather, in the seat
behind me, read a newspaper.  We had dinner out of the willow basket
packed by my mother, and we shared it with an old lady and her
grandson, a boy of sixteen, also on their way to Richmond.  The boy
was to be entered with a cousin in the tobacco business.  "Make what
men want and sell it to them!" said the old lady.  "Just farming and
lawing and ruling have got to sit back for a spell, Colonel!"

In the physical landscape the mountains had sunk from sight.  The
hills had all lowered in height.  The wooded country showed another
aspect.  Broom sedge became plentifully in evidence.  All that ride,
out of my window, might be seen agricultural poverty, poverty of town
and village.  With something of frequency rose out of green or brown
earth, like ruined tombs, chimneys and hearths and nothing more.
Everywhere fencing was makeshift, and once-painted houses had
forgotten the event.  The roads that the train crossed or paralleled
showed stony ledge, rut, and mud-hole.  But the sun was shining and
the spring woods were greening.

A stout, well-dressed man came and sat beside my grandfather.  "Glad
to see you, Colonel Forth!  Well, what's the news in your part of the
state?"

They talked.  After a while said the stout man, looking out of
window: "I have been North.  Their country looks prosperous!"

My grandfather rested his thin brown hands, palm in palm, upon his
newspaper.  His voice when he spoke had an unusual deep vibrancy.  "I
am glad that part of our country is prosperous."

"'Our country'!  So you have come to that?"

"Yes," said my grandfather.  "Our South, our North, our East, our
West.  Our America, our Europe, our Asia, our Africa.  Our earth."

"Well, I'll be--!  You didn't talk that way, Colonel, during the
Seven Days, nor in the Petersburg trenches!"

"No," said my grandfather.  "Live and learn, Otway!  Live and learn."

"Well, I can tell you," said Otway, "that where I've been it's 'Our
North--and you in the South, damn you!'"

"Yes," said my grandfather.  "They, too, have got to live and learn.
We haven't been doing much living, any of us!"

"All that's a new lingo!" said the stout man, and presently went back
to his companion at the end of the car.  I think that he said: "The
old Colonel must have been a Union man before the war.  I never heard
of it, but he must have been!"

The worn engine and the worn cars and the worn road-bed, the engineer
with a wooden leg, the brakeman too young to have fought, the
conductor with the patched eye and the scar, the passengers
discussing Readmittance, and bad times, and better times perhaps in
the misty future, crops and Ku-Klux and the war in Europe, creaked
and jolted and roared, twenty-odd miles an hour.  Twice occurred
prolonged halts.  We were an hour and a half late and came upon
Richmond red in a great sunset flare.  The stout man, passing the
colonel and me, said, "It looks like the burning five years ago!"

Colonel Forth and I got out of the train.  He carried the old valise
and I the willow basket.  There seemed a kind of long shed, and so
many persons speaking and hurrying in the shadows, that I felt vague
fear and pressed close to my grandfather.  Then we heard General
Warringer's authoritative voice.  "Here they are!  Well, Colonel, and
how are you?  Is this giant Michael?  How do you like traveling,
youngster?"

A negro with the general took basket and valise.  We went through the
station.  Outside we encountered a throng of negro drivers,
vociferous, extolling the merits of various hotels--The Ford--The
Washington--The Exchange, and Ballard--gesticulating, long whip in
hand, toward painted omnibuses or ancient hacks.  Coming to a
carriage, we entered it, waited for the leather trunk to be deposited
beside the coachman, then moving off, began presently to climb a
hill.  The sunset reddened all the sky.  My grandfather sat as in a
dream.  "I have not been here since the Evacuation."  He bent forward.

"There's the Capitol! ... The Stars and Bars--The Stars and Stripes."

The Warringers' house, old, large, square, gray stucco, with tall
magnolias about it, furnished within with pier-glasses and crystal
chandeliers, long damask curtains and much mahogany, inspired me with
some awe.  The Warringers said they were poor, but I couldn't
immediately see it.  And Richmond was a broken city.  But to me it
showed Aladdin marvels of shop windows, spires of churches,
street-car, and market, General Washington on his bronze horse far up
against the blue sky, and squirrels in Capitol Square that took
peanuts from one's hand as one sat on benches.  I had never been able
to get a squirrel in a real wood to do this.  And the bronze horse
and rider that never moved, that stayed there!  Wouldn't you go
galloping through the sky?

Twice I was taken to the theater.  I saw a play of the West,
California, and the gold-diggers.  And I saw a noted actress in
"Maria Stuart." ... Wonder world!

I did not love the Richmond Warringers as I loved the Flowerfield
Dallases.  Yet I loved them.  It is my way to taste persons, to
perceive them volatilized, as it were, so that the mind passes in and
out among spoken and unspoken words, gestures, obvious and
unobvious--goes, too, off the absurd, medicine-dropper business of
present moments....

My aunt Harriet had a beautiful skin, beautiful hair, a beautiful
mouth.  She dressed beautifully, for all of poverty.  She loved
people around her, and she talked wittily.  The table was always
laughing.  She had a gift of mimicry.  She was ambitious for herself,
her husband, and her children.  She wished General Warringer to
become a public man.  She was sure that it was going to be possible,
now that Virginia was readmitted, and Southern men were beginning to
lay hands again on their own affairs.  She meant, in the first place,
Southern white men, and in the second place the old propertied class.
"Their own affairs!" meant traditional things, political, social, and
economic.  For herself she wished beautiful clothes, leisure to
attend to her beautiful body, leisure also to read clever books, to
observe, go about, "experience," feed her wit.  Leisure and
money--money being with positiveness the only way to get leisure and
the rest of it!  As women could not make money, General Warringer
must make it.  Such was her triple-walled castle.  Yet there was a
corner where the walls were really only honeycombs.  She had a gay
sweet garden here.

They had lost two children.  There remained Carter, Royal, and
Dorothea.  These made friends with me.  We fed the squirrels
together.  They boasted of the sea to which they went in the summer,
and I of the mountains.

My grandfather and I spent ten days in Richmond.  He got, I know, the
loan from his son-in-law, though I know, too, that there were
difficulties.  General Warringer considered him a dreamer.  Good
money would go after bad at Restwell, and God knew there was little
enough money, good or bad!  The colonel would not be able to keep the
place....  But he was fond of the colonel, and they were his wife's
people.  General Warringer, whose interests were tobacco and mining,
managed to scrape together the three or four thousands needed to
stave off the sale of Restwell.

There came up, too, the question of my future.

"If he's intelligent and energetic, I might, when he's finished his
schooling, find some opening for him.  If I were you I'd give him a
scientific education."

"Scientific?"

"Colonel, our old world is changing!  You and I got along very well
with the classics and what not.  But I'm going to make Carter an
engineer, and I want Royal to train for finance,
railroading--something live and moving--"

"Scientific."  It was a new thought to my grandfather.  It had not
occurred to him in the train, talking to Millwood....  Swedenborg had
begun with Science.

At General Warringer's he heard much speculative talk.  Men came
there who were looking ahead.  The South was to be developed, that
was evident.  Canals, railroads, furnaces, factories--the day for
such things was at hand.  "Five years, and you'll see it
beginning--beginning--beginning!  A quarter of a century and the
South 'll be richer than ever it was!  Northern capital?
Certainly--at first!  We'll mix--forget---get our arms round one
another there first.  In business!"

Colonel Forth made a diffident remark.  "We'll seek more, too, don't
you think, in ourselves?  Get things together there?"

"I don't know about all that," said his son-in-law, drinking his
coffee.  "Material enterprises are big enough for me just now!  You
mustn't underrate them, Colonel!  That's the danger for your kind."

The colonel admitted it.  "But you mustn't think either that mining
and engineering and railroading and canalling aren't carried on upon
other floors.  They go all through, I think."

Spring burst out softly, fully, while we were in Richmond.  The ten
days passed.  We said good-by to all the Warringers.  Here once more
was the train....  As we went through country that had been ground of
battle, and again battle, and again battle, the dogwood made a milky
way of each piece of woodland.  Once more, with knees sunk into
grimed velvet, I looked out of window.  The day was so warm that the
glass was up.  The world was the clearer for that.

My grandfather left me alone for a while.  At last he came back,
"Michael!" I turned from the window.

"General Lee is in the next car.  Come!  I want to show you to him."

He straightened my tie for me, brushed back my hair, and saw that my
hands were pretty clean.  We went into the next car, and to a
white-bearded, gentle, very fine-looking man.  He put out his hand to
me, asked me a question or two which I answered, and I stood held
against his knee for five minutes while he and the colonel talked.
Then we went, my grandfather and I, back to our own car and the
dogwood stars outside the window and the rushing country and the blue
sky and the flight of birds.




CHAPTER V

Madam Black had a French mother and a Russian father, an education
partly French, partly English, and an English husband who brought her
with him to America on a hunt for Fortune, to be found, presumably,
on a tract of Virginia land bought, without seeing it, from an agent.
The land proved a heinous disappointment.  Mr. Black died.  His wife
was left with admirable powers and education, but with no money, and
in what to her was a foreign country.  She must sell, if she could,
her poor piece of land.  Needing lawyer's advice, she came to the
nearest small town to her disastrous, stony mountain-side, and to
Major Dallas's office under the court-house oaks.  He gave her
counsel; she sold the land, though for a tiny sum, and presently
moved into the town, to a small, small white house behind syringa and
althea bushes.  The towns-folks discussed her, her foreign ways, her
gestures, her peculiar, stripped, efficient housekeeping.  She was a
big woman, somewhat gaunt, but supple and powerful, with iron-gray
hair, with a beak of a nose, and a mouth beneath, wide and wise and
humorous.  She spoke in Virginia a beautiful, pure, book English, but
thought in three languages.

My aunt Kate, at Major Dallas's instigation, went to see her, liked
her, went again, brought her to Flowerfield for two or three days.
The children liked her.  She had a great store of folk tales of all
lands and she told them with the vivid distinction of a good witch.
She was capable, as all her friends soon found out, as she herself
with honesty acknowledged, of explosions of anger quite alarming to
the uninitiated.  But these never occurred oftener than once a week.
Moreover, they were generously abstract.  The individual was only
chastised in the whole.  The storm cleared the air, and until the
next thunder-clap she was as good as sugar--brown sugar, maple sugar.
She was a pianist of no mean ability, she had a wide knowledge of
letters, she read and spoke English, French, Russian, and German--and
she got along well with children.

Major Dallas and Aunt Kate had the same thought.  In six months after
she had taken the little white house, Madam Black closed it and came
to Flowerfield as governess.  I don't think anybody ever regretted
it.  The Dallases and she flowed together with a certain natural
grace and strength.

I was nine years old.  My mother's life from morn till night was
filled with activities.  She had a fair Southern education, and a
beautiful, strong, lucid mind and heart that made the best of what
she had.  But she said that she saw that I was going ahead of her.
(I could never go ahead of her in the things of truest value.)  She
taught me for two hours each day, but then things waited for her at
the door.  I see her now, sitting in a low chair in the flickering
green light from the window, reading a letter from Aunt Kate, and
then, the letter in her lap, looking at me drawing pictures on my
slate.  I was copying a ship out of my geography.

Two or three days later she and I took the old red stage at
Whitechurch and went for a short visit to Flowerfield.  Madam Black
was there.  My mother liked her, too.  In less than a week we were
back at Restwell.

I couldn't go to sleep that night.  I sat up in my bed and stared at
the starry squares that were windows.  Then I took it into my head
that there were giants in the room and that I had better go
down-stairs.  Mammy no longer had her bed in the corner, and I made
sure through the open door that my mother was not in her room.  I
stole out of bed and over the cool, dark floor, out of the room and
across the landing to the stair and half-way down it.  Thence I could
see in my grandfather's room, for that door, too, was open.
Grandfather and mother and Aunt Sarah were sitting there, talking.  I
could not hear what they said--only the murmur of one voice, now of
another.  They looked so earnest!  They all sat near the table, where
were grandfather's books and papers, where he and my mother went over
accounts together.  The lamp that stood here made a kind of pale
sunlight about them.  Grandfather, with his white beard, looked
like--like--like King David!  This brought forth another imagination.
We had a book of fine, tinted prints--_The Women of the Bible_.
Mother and Aunt Sarah were sitting there out of this book.  I had a
curious feeling.  The giants were forgotten.  I sat on the stairs,
holding my feet in my hands.  The sensation was of being somewhere
outside, looking in upon the world.  After a time I started to
speak--but they looked so earnest.  I turned and without noise went
up-stairs and across the upper hall and into bed.  Anyhow, the giants
were gone.  I faced a square of branchy stars.  One of them caught
and held me ... and then I went to sleep.

The next morning my mother told me that when, in October, I went with
Aunt Sarah to Flowerfield, I was not coming back when Aunt Sarah
came.  I was going to stay with Aunt Kate and Uncle John and go to
school to Madam Black, with John and Miriam and Catherine and Lewis.
At Christmas I should come home for a week, and in May I should come
for the whole summer.  And grandfather would see me sometimes at
Flowerfield, and mother was certainly coming in the winter.  And I
was to be her Michael still, and learn, and grow--"grow always more
good, more wise, my Treasure, my Blessing--"

It awed me to be leaving home.  There was awe, too, in the thought of
living at Flowerfield.  I moved about, exalted.  Space seemed to have
enlarged between me and the sky, between me and the horizon.  I
experienced a desire for solitude.  I achieved this on the side porch
that gave on the lilac walk, and where there was nothing more
disturbing than a procession of young turkeys, in and out of the
light and shadow upon the grass.  I sat here with my chin on my
knees.  Really to live--live half the time--at Flowerfield!  Restwell
was dear--Flowerfield was dear.  I figured it out that, after all, a
half to each wasn't a bad thing.  Everybody at Restwell was going to
write to me, and I was going to write to them.  My, mother would
write every week, and I was to draw pictures for her and send them.
I dug out something else.  "Every time I think of them I can see
them."  I shut my eyes.  "Now I am thinking of grandfather.  I see
him.  Now I am thinking of mother--"

I tried this with other persons.  I was the experimenter, full swing.
The going from home fell into the background.  Persons and things in
Richmond--at Whitechurch--at Flowerfield--I could see them, hear
them!  The train to Richmond--I could make that so real that I felt
the velvet, smelled the coal smoke, found in my body the swaying and
jolting, turned a little dizzy....  I left that and sat in Capitol
Square, above me, against the blue sky, bronze General Washington.
Consciously, with desire and forethought, I walked into the past.
There had been a broken bench that we could not use, under the
greatest tree, whence one might see General Washington to best
advantage.  I now mended the bench and sat there.  I was on the road
to discovery that where there's a will there's a way--to alter
anything!

In October I went to Flowerfield.  For the next four years I spent
the major part of each year at Flowerfield.  I learned there, I grew
there, as in a spring season, as in south-by-west zephyrs.

Madam Black taught us in a bare, sunny room, in an ell of Flowerfield
house.  Outside were turf and a tremendous tulip-tree.  Catherine and
Lewis had their lessons early, were out and gone by eleven o'clock.
John and Miriam and I were her real scholars.

I think that she was a born teacher.  Madam Black--Madam Black, I
find you in me at many turns--a welcome inflowing!

She had a cosmopolitan mind.  She dwelt among ideas, hunted
relations, pounced upon likenesses.  She was as daring an explorer as
ever sailed for the pole.  Many a notion that I have watched emerge,
in these later days, tentatively, slowly, even now weighed most
doubtfully in the general hand, was hers in the 'seventies.  She had
a way of saying, "I fancy--" and then, from under her eagle nose out
of her wide mouth, in her deep, positive voice came "fancies" of an
extraordinary viability.

She was a geographer of the first water.  With her for cicerone, we
saw our earth throughout its structure, as pupils of our age, I am
sure, very rarely see it.  She had a genius for relating things, for
continuities and correspondence, for the stroke of the eye.  She
ranged like an eagle, swooped and rose like one.  The same traits
appeared when she taught us history.  We got out of "favored" lands
and times and "chosen" people--chosen, at least, in any orthodox
sense.  The cells called Kings and Queens and Important Events and
Great Battles ceased to protrude monstrously from the cellular
tissue.  The emphatic note, "Height of Mount Everest," became but an
orderly detail in the passage, "Himalayas," as the Himalayas
subordinated themselves to "mountains," and mountains remembered
valleys, and both that they were of the lithosphere.  When, for
reasons, we came to majesties of form and height, to the pictured
off, she could well make us see Mount Everest and the Himalayas.  She
herself knew Alp and Apennine and Caucasus.  Remembering, I feel
again snowy and deep-chasmed grandeur!

She did with watery surfaces as she did with the solid.  No one who
went to school to Madam Black might ever, for instance, see Niagara
as a giant plunge out of nothing into nothing, nor a strait or
channel like a waste snippet of thread.  What came before and after,
what flowed on the one side and on the other, what to any ranging
eagle would be simultaneous, contemporaneous, she saw herself and
made her pupil see.  Niagara and Gibraltar Strait came into a water
symphony that sounded from pole to pole, that ran, like Alpheus,
underground, and flew in clouds in the air.

So with tribes, nations, races, species.  Hers was a rich and large
realism in which abstractions and universals became, as it were,
tangible and visible, phenomena like other phenomena--to the born
eagle phenomena into which other phenomena were resolved.

She was a bold reader.  She had a friend in New York--a man doing
some kind of research work--who sent her from time to time great
parcels of books, English, French, and German.  She used to sink like
an eagle into these, to rise with meat in her talons....  These were
the years in which, certainly to the mass of the United States,
"Darwin" sounded mightily like "Antichrist," Huxley and Haeckel, and
all their company, like the Miltonic lesser fallen angels.  They were
the years when throughout a wide swathe of society _Middlemarch_ was
slurred because its author was not married to Lewes; when all French
literature was called immoral, when the good died young in
Sunday-school books, when Browning was thought unintelligible, when
Ingersoll was certainly damned, when architecture and furniture went
into a senile doze.  Up a long stair from this, it was the period of
Dickens and Thackeray, and Lord Tennyson was at his height of fame.
But Madam Black belonged to force-lines in the background--reserves
in the shadows of the future.  She took from books hall-marked
"advanced" what suited her, and flew on over the landscape.

Because of her very scope, she had a passion for the single word.
Every word opened into the whole scope of things, as back of every
facet opens the whole diamond.  She had a drill for us that I hold to
be a good drill for any.  For half an hour each day she gave us
words, one at a time, never more than a dozen in the half-hour--nouns
and verbs and adjectives, later on, pronoun and adverb, conjunction
and preposition.  There seemed no lesson about it--we did not then
repeat to her what we learned.  We simply and quietly, in firelight
or sunlight and each for one's self, regarded the word that her deep
voice gave out and what it carried.  The game was to see what volume
was there and what vistas would open.
Farmer--soldier--preacher--city--house--tree--sugar--salt--earth,
water, fire, and air--working, playing, moving, resting--truth,
wisdom, beauty, strength, and courage--moon, earth, and sun--hundreds
of words....  To our young strength and powers they expanded as they
might.  We saw countries within countries.  And we learned to pass
the first gate of contemplation.

Again, myths.  She had here an extraordinary knowledge.  I have since
learned that there was old scholarship in her blood.  She told
world-imaginings, world-symbolizations of its own drama, as a woman
Homer might.  Indian, Chaldean, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew,
Scandinavian--we knew the huge figures, localities, happenings.
Moreover, she compared them, linked them for us until there was a
great carcanet.  It was not given to our years to see what was behind
them all.  But she told us that there was something behind them all,
and that we would find it out for ourselves one day.  In the mean
time there was huge entertainment!  We sat, rapt, before a
Demeter-like woman.

She taught us arithmetic, put us into algebra, and the last year we
were with her, into geometry.  The last named was another strength.
We learned to read French as we did English and to speak it fairly.
We read German.  We had little formal "Science."  She taught us the
constellations and the simpler sidereal wonders.  And we had a clean,
straight, honest, lofty physiology with never an organ or function
blue-penciled.  And here I praise the adult Forths and Dallases who,
in a half-century that thought otherwise, said, "Give it to them
thus."

Year after year at Flowerfield....  But at last there came letters
for Madam Black from Russia.  An estate had been settled, there was
money--a brother in poor health, in the country near Moscow, longed
to see her.  Madam Black thought a night, then the next day told us
she must go.  Flowerfield grieved for that....  It was the
springtime.  In two weeks she was gone to New York, whence she
sailed.  For a long time letters from Russia came to Flowerfield.
But five years after her going she was killed in a railway accident.




CHAPTER VI

Now I speak of Miriam and myself when we were ten--and eleven--and
twelve--and thirteen.  Even so, how we can divide from all the
rest--take ourselves out of painting, canvas and frame, swim away,
two waves of the sea, rise and float off, two violins, from the
orchestra?  The orchestra and the sea and the painting, canvas and
frame, are Miriam and me.

But we still explain the new by the old....

I cannot remember when, at Restwell or Flowerfield, I first made the
acquaintance of my cousin Miriam.  We must have been very young
children.  Casting back, I have the feeling of having been always
with her.

In the days before we went to Madam Black, in the Flowerfield
Octobers and the Restwell Junes, it was John, Miriam, and I.  And
always, in a measure, it has been John, Miriam, and I.  It was so the
four years at Flowerfield.  But inside the triangle she and I paired
with spontaneity, vigor, and thoroughness.  The three of us roamed
together, learned, worked, and played together.  It was brothers and
sister, a simple, deep familiarity, a give and take, impersonally
sound.  But at last, within the general one-and-threeness, Miriam and
I sat on one throne.

She was oil to my fire and I was oil to hers.  Our flames shot up,
blended, coruscated, sang.  All vases held more, every color had
lamps behind it, every word rang with a doubled power.  Salt, zest,
importance, showered into everything undertaken.  When we were
together light penetrated farther, was intenser--warmth was warmer....

But now we were children still.  Yet we would have said in those
days, too, "I _understand_ Michael."--"I _understand_ Miriam."

We are in the barn at Flowerfield, in the hayloft.  It is Saturday
morning.  There is a fine rain--we cannot go after walnuts as we had
planned.  We lie in a scooped-out place in the hay.  Around us are
shaggy, fragrant walls; before us, one great open square through
which comes the moist air and gray light, and a dim, shifting view of
autumn hills.  The roof is the peaked roof of a brown tent.  Against
the beams are barn-swallows' nests, old and empty.  The swallows are
flying south.  The hay smells dry and sweet.  We have wine-sap apples
and the _Arabian Nights_.  John has, besides, a piece of red,
fragrant cedar and a jack-knife.  He is making a set of checkers.  I
am the story-teller.  I tell the story of the "Fisherman and the
Genie."  John listens, carving his round checkers.  Miriam, half
buried in the hay, listens.  We know all the fat blue volume from
"Ali Baba" to "Sinbad."  We have learned from Madam Black something
of how to tell stories.  We had rather tell them than read them from
the book.

I tell.  I have told the story before--we all know it--but I am on
the spiral above the last telling, and the auditors are above the
last listening.  And it is a good story-telling day.  The genie comes
out of the bottle.  "I see him," says Miriam, rising on her elbow.
(The audience always interrupts, assists.)  "He curls that way," she
demonstrated with her free arm.  "Thick and smoky!  Round and round
and up!  He hides the sea.--There's the bottle.  It's hard and round
and small.  It looks like an acorn under a tree."

John, whittling, nodded.  "I reckon that fisherman's frightened!  I
reckon he's thinking he's let out Satan!"

"I tell you I _do_ see it!" said Miriam.  She sat up, cross-legged,
tailor fashion.  Her hands rested on her knees.  "But I'm safe!  He
can't get me.  I'm everywhere."

"If you're everywhere you're right where the genie is.  You're
_him_," said John.  "You're just seeing yourself."

The fisherman and the genie argue together.  The fisherman seems
about to meet destruction.  Then his wits work and he gets the genie
back into the bottle.  When he lets him out again he is a reasonable
quantity, a harnessed energy.  He takes the fisherman into the
apparent desert where is the strange pool in the midst of barrenness.
The fisherman, having the clue to wealth, goes fishing and takes four
fish, white, red, blue, and yellow.

Miriam's voice rises again.  "I _see_ them.  I know their names:
Mussulman, Parsee, Christian, Jew!"

John again answers.  "Of course you know them!  If you didn't know
the story, and then knew them, that would be something!"

"I couldn't know them unless I knew them.  How could I?  But I know
them higher and deeper and faster and louder.  I know them like
that!"  She began to clap her hands together.  "Mussulman, Parsee,
Christian, Jew!"

"Now he takes them to the Sultan," directed John.  I continue to tell
the story and we go on to the King of the Black Isles who was half
man and half marble....  The barn and the slanting rain and the
warmth and the fragrance of the hay, the smell of the cedar, the
taste of the wine-saps leave the screen.

It is March.  The robins are here.  The plowed earth pleases them.
The maples are fire-tipped, the bloodroot blooms.  A roaring wind
goes around the house and shakes the trees.  There is a swing
fastened to a great outstretching bough of the tulip-tree.  The bough
is high, the ropes of the swing are long, the board is wide.  Miriam
and I stand here, swinging.  We have gotten a great start, we go
higher and higher, we bend together, rise together, the wind is in
our hair.  We go up, we go out, the leaves swirl up after us, we are
as high as the high windows.  We are drawn back, we rush forward,
high, high.  The wind is strong about us, there is delight, there is
thrill!  We shut our eyes.  The swing seems to have left the
tulip-tree.  We seem to be going away, away, through the air.  We are
high as a cloud and far as the mountains.  Flowerfield quits us--we
are in the air--there is not even the swing.  We are birds flying....
We are one bird, flying, great-winged.  The space we are in cracks
wide.  There is other space.  We feel exhilaration that becomes a
pounding thrill, a huge chord vibration.  Some one calls us from the
house.  We come back.  We are swinging high, that is all, up and out,
but locked still to the tulip-tree.

It is yet March, and cold, with a sudden spear from the north.  There
is a great wood fire in the school-room, burning at dusk.  Miriam and
I sit on two hassocks, on either side the hearth, watching the fire.
Catherine and Lewis are in the room, but they seem to be quiet.  John
sprawls on the hearth-rug, reading _Ivanhoe_.  Madam Black, in the
parlor, two rooms away, is playing Beethoven.  Miriam and I sit very
still.  The fire....  Pine feeds it.  The flames bend, roar together,
rise superb.  Suddenly, again, as in the swing, Miriam and I flow
into one.  The "she" and "I," the "twoness," come into "weness."  But
the "weness" itself--and that is the increase--springs into a new
"Iness."  Something, flashing together, uses the "twoness," but as we
use arms or hands.  More than that, the very room comes in.  The
fire, the logs that burn, the forest just behind them--the walls and
the furniture--Catherine and Lewis by the window, John and Madam
Black come in.  The music comes in.  It is quite simple, but very
satisfying.  Catherine and Lewis, by the window, fall out over their
box of colors.  And there is again the school-room fire, and Miriam
and Michael sitting upon hassocks.

It is the same springtime.  We are thirteen.  Madam Black is going.
Presently I shall return to Restwell.  October will come, but it will
not bring me to Flowerfield.  I am going to Hilltop Academy, in
Whitechurch.  That is an old school, reconstituted, invigorated, said
to be full of promise.  John is going, too.  He will live at Restwell
as I have lived at Flowerfield.  The old South is behind us, and
around us are the middle 'seventies.  Miriam's going to school is of
less importance than is John's.  She will have lessons at home with
Aunt Kate.  In a year or two, perhaps, she may go to Richmond, to a
school there, staying with the Warringers.

There is a hillside of dark trees, white pine and hemlock, sloping
steeply to a brook that here proceeds with a deep, sliding stillness,
and here plunges from ledge to ledge like a white-maned water-steed.
John, Miriam, and I come to this place.  We have been gathering
wake-robins on the other side the hill, where there is a sunnier
wood.  Then we pass around the shoulder to the shaded side, cool and
old.  We sit down on the brown-scented earth, clean save for a mat of
needles and fallen cones.  We have great bunches of the wake-robins,
the pink and the white.  We put them down on the cool earth in the
deep shade.  John and I are going to Restwell in a week.  Meantime
the three of us are pursuing one of our inner travels.  We lift, at
will, from the great book and reservoir of otherselves, _compagnons
de voyage_.  Our present scene is set in the island of the Swiss
Family Robinson.  But the characters who figure are from other
provinces.  Ourselves of course, Uncas from _The Last of the
Mohicans_; Gurth from _Ivanhoe_; a Knight and a Lady, first found in
the _Faery Queen_; Ariel, Oberon, and Titania; and Ulysses the Greek
wanderer.  I think, to-day, that it is a good choice and suited to an
isle of all climes and products.

We take up our adventures where we left them, over the hilltop.  They
have their reality--the reality of music, of dream, of play, of
lacework, of dance, of art.  Our bodies rest under the pine-trees,
but the image-making self has swooped to the island.  There we follow
Uncas through a wood that spreads as far and climbs as high as we
desire.  Uncas finds directions, Gurth fells the trees.  Ulysses--and
we--make whatever plan there lies ahead; Uriel, with moth wings,
flies beside us--but Oberon and Titania only look out doubtfully from
ferny recesses.  We are making a road for the Knight and the Lady.
Eventually we mean to build a castle--seven castles, like those the
King of China built for his daughter.  When we need to expand the
island we expand it.  When we need more and different persons, hey,
presto! in they tumble!  Oh, life of Uncas and of Gurth--life of
Ariel--life of Ulysses--life of the Knight and the Lady!




CHAPTER VII

John and I went to Restwell.  I cannot say that I missed Miriam, for
I seemed to take Miriam with me.  I missed the others at Flowerfield.

But Restwell was most dear to me.  I loved mother and grandfather and
Aunt Sarah, Daddy Guinea, Mammy, Ahasuerus, and the rest, the animals
and the trees and the house, and every other aspect.  I loved the
graveyard and the bank going down to the river, and the river itself.
John knew all the haunts, but now he learned them better with me.

What my grandfather had not read in these four years I do not know.
Colonel Forth's pecuniary affairs were yet shot with strain and
difficulty.  But somehow--and I know here how greatly my mother
helped him--he managed to pay the interest on the mortgage.  The old
Restwell shelter sheltered still.  Around him the affairs of the
South were slowly bettering.  The war was no longer blindingly,
thunderously present.  It had changed its shape, lowered its voice.
Its boulder weight was become spread sand.  It was always there,
always would be there.  You could as little kill the war as kill
anything else.  On thundered the long freight-train stacked with
effects.  At every station something was deposited.  But also other
unkillable things breathed on, such as man's ineradicable hope of
understanding all, of enjoying all, of being all.

My grandfather looked older and gentler.  He was busy all day with a
thousand active, patient adjustments.  But after supper, by
lamplight, until almost midnight, he read.  He had found his way to
Jacob Boehme, to Spinoza, to Blake.

My aunt Sarah read less, I thought, than she used to do--less, that
is, in books.  Remembering, I am aware, by the now stronger light,
that she had turned to that inner library, greater than any housed
collection.  There two and two, in a thousand places, came together
and made four.

My mother burned, as always, a light, a warmth, fed steadily by a
willing sacrifice.  She herself went with joy into the fire of
herself.

Oh, Restwell, and all that made Restwell!

John and I, in good and bad weather, walked to Whitechurch and walked
home again.  Hilltop Academy rose at the edge of town.  The distance
was nothing to strong youths, country bred.  We carried our books and
our dinner.  The many and many things that along the way we
ruminated, debated!  All the way there and the way back again, the
two hundred and odd school-days in each year, three years on end!
There are trees that rise in memory hung with talk as with fruit.

Hilltop Academy, brick, long and gaunt, had the luck to have gathered
about it a dozen really splendid cedars.  Except for these its hill
was a somewhat bare and windy one.  As each morning we approached it
we might see the boys running, jumping, playing ball, or knotted
together--the younger ones--over marbles.  In memory a wind seems
always to blow.  Sometimes snow falls.  There is a high, shifting
veil, and it and the boys are all of a piece.  Boarding pupils and
town and country pupils, there were not far from a hundred boys.  Out
of this number a score made our group.  Out of this group two or
three pressed closer.  They and John and I heard very nearly the same
sounds.  One of them, Gamaliel Young, came closer than the others.

The principal of the academy was his father, Dr. Abner Young.

I would say at once that Doctor Young was estimable.  There was even
about him a kind of sweetness, some errant fragrance, some spice
lurking beneath fold after fold of mummy linen.  His archaic rigidity
of line was not without distinction....  Lot's wife looked back,
remembered too exclusively the plain--the plane--that must be left,
and became a pillar of salt.  Salt preserves.  Where it is too
abundant green things do not grow.  She loved the past not wisely,
but too well.  Yet love is love and covereth a multitude.  And little
by little, doubtless, age by age, the rain and the wind and the fire
undid the form.

Hilltop Academy employed a number of teachers.  But Doctor Young kept
in his own hands Greek and Latin, history and English.  In the letter
of the languages he taught well.  In the letter of history and of the
literature of England he had knowledge.  But he was mineralized, and
what he did and what he gave partook of that quality.  An honest
mineral, with mineral beauty.

Each morning, at the ringing of a bell, occurred a Scripture reading,
a short homily, a prayer.  Doctor Young read, expounded, prayed.  The
hundred boys sat as still as they could.  Sometimes something caught
them, oftener nothing.  It was a mill-wheel turning.  One must feel
reverential when one sat by the mill-race and the wheel began to
turn.  But the wheat in the hopper very rarely indeed made any
connection with one's own private oven.  (Doubtless, now I think of
it, that was because the oven was not large enough.)  The mill-wheel
stopped, the church feeling flew away, out trooped the hundred boys
into the big, bare, echoing hall.

Each Wednesday, at two in the afternoon, Doctor Young lectured.  He
made these talks into occasions.  They took place in the
assembly-hall.  The smallest boys were excused, but the rest of us
sat in solemn rows with clean hands and smoothed hair.  All the
teachers were there, seated where they might observe both us and the
principal.  It happened--it grew by degrees into settled custom--that
friends of the academy, of Doctor Young, leading citizens of
Whitechurch, seeking culture, came to these Wednesday talks.  There
was always a little block of comfortable chairs, filled from
Whitechurch.  Ladies and gentlemen both attended.  They seemed to
think it necessary to listen very closely, to nod their heads at
regular intervals.  They did not applaud, because it seemed too much
like church and the Word of God.  I have forgotten to say that in his
early manhood Doctor Young had been a minister.  He believed with
intensity that he still ministered to souls.

The least of the Wednesday talks lasted half an hour.  I have known
them to run over the hour.  He spoke well, without a ragged edge,
without a sign of indefiniteness, and always as one having authority.
He had a thin, severe enthusiasm, very far from unction, but carrying
over.  Unwavering belief in one's own revelation cannot but do it.
He was the Apostle of the _Status quo Ante_.

Gamaliel sat with John and me and fidgeted.  This father and son
loved each other, but it was love dashed with profound care and
dissent.  Doctor Young felt the impatience in the corner.  His eyes
darted over.  I remember more than once or twice in the sequence of
Wednesdays a pause, a "Keep order there!"  I remember an angry
"Gamaliel"!

Gamaliel broke off his absent-minded drumming upon the desk before
him.  He sat up and looked at the speaker.  The father looked back.
Struggle was in the air.  "You will break from me!"--"I am breaking
from you!"--"Yet you are me!"--"Yet I will carry you with
me--Anchises on Æneas's shoulders!"  There were, of course, no such
articulate words.

These Wednesday discourses varied as to subject.  Doctor Young was
intensely interested in keeping the world good--in salting it down,
so to speak.  To do this one must be active and wary on all sides.
Weeds would grow!  But he would do what he could to fix the soil in
the young minds before him.  Specifically and sharply to fix it in
Gamaliel's mind.  There was jealousy of Gamaliel.  He must not take
the Inheritance and riot with it.

The Inheritance was stored in treasure-houses labeled
Religion--Political Life--Economics--Science--Arts and Letters.
Doctor Young stood before the door of each and expounded how all
things must be kept and polished.

He was a strict disciplinarian.  The younger boys--the little
fellows--came in, not infrequently, for corporal punishment.
Gamaliel was not among the younger boys.  But out of school, in the
father's bare study, he might yet taste the whip.  It was not often,
and this mode of dealing with him ceased before he was fifteen.  And
no doubt Doctor Young prayed afterward a quarter of the night.

I speak as though I did not like the pillar of salt.  But I did.
There were yearnings and sincerity, and an Egyptian moonlight of old
beauty, and great willingness to be kind if only we would stay within
bounds!

I hear him now upon the mad--that was a great word with him--the mad
attempt, originating in England, to undermine the Christian Religion.
He withered with irony Messrs. Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall.
Hilltop Academy must sooner or later go forth into the world.  He
would arm its units against insidious modernity!  He proceeded to arm
us.  I remember that Mr. Millwood was among those from the town who
was present that day.  I see now the big head and shoulders vibrating
assent.  The flaying of the evolutionists lasted an hour.

Again political economy.  Doctor Young gave up the divine right of
kings, but quite subtly and passionately inculcated divine right of
class.  He was devoted to the point of romance to class, order,
hierarchy, successiveness.  How feudal, reasonable, logical he was!

Out of his numerous "literary" talks I recall most plainly that upon
"Paradise Lost."  He labored Shakespeare, but he loved Milton.  I
remember, too, a scorching warning away from most modern novels,
poems, and other works--"modern" and highly explosive, that is, in
1876, to country-living folk.  George Eliot was armed against no less
than George Sand.  A young poet then writing, named Swinburne we must
never touch!  There were qualities in Browning, but also dangerous
heresies, to say nothing of impossible style.  The evolutionists--how
few were untainted by the evolutionists!  Coming to our own country,
Mr. Emerson was undoubtedly able, but could be followed only a little
way and through careful selection.  Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier
were safe.  Mr. Millwood, who was again among the listeners, shook
his head, remembering utterances "against the South."

But Doctor Young differed here from Mr. Millwood.  It was not the
South that he thought of, but the moral nationality....  I think of
him as a kind of Switzerland, shot up high from a narrow base.

Gamaliel had a stub of a pencil and the back of a long envelop and
was drawing while his father talked.  He drew a man reading and made
the figure look like himself.  The book held in both hands was quite
large.  The pencil hesitated, then printed on the cover, SWINBURNE.
He next stood on end around the reader a number of volumes, the back
of each of which he proceeded to letter.  GEORGE SAND--GEORGE
ELIOT--EMERSON--DARWIN.  There was just a tremor, then the pencil
added INGERSOLL.

Now I know Gamaliel, and he was not in the least trying to be
"smart."  Father and son were alike in dead earnest.

In the late summer, just before the beginning of my second year at
Hilltop, I met with an accident.  A colt that I was breaking threw me
and broke my ankle.  It was set and healed, but for a long time was
weak.  Doctor Gilbert said that I must not walk each day to and from
Whitechurch.  It ended in my becoming, from October to Christmas, one
of the boarding boys.

Mrs. Young was an invalid.  She lay on a sofa and looked with dark,
hollow eyes at some inner pageant.  The house where ate and slept and
forgathered twenty boys, under the eyes of four teachers and of
Doctor Young, was kept by two maiden sisters, cousins of the
principal.  It was well kept after our easy-going Southern fashion.
The teachers were intelligent and good-natured, the two maiden
sisters amiable, maternally-minded women.  Every one intended
kindness.  It was a pretty fair home.  The twenty boys slept in four
rooms.  I had the luck to be with Gamaliel.  Moreover, two out of the
five in our room went home in November upon some contingency.  The
remaining one was a "little fellow" of whom we were fond and who had
the good habit of going to sleep immediately upon getting into bed.
Gamaliel and I could talk till late.

But I do not speak now of the lasting nearness of Gamaliel and me.
With John and Miriam he came near.  We were countrymen, though Miriam
and I were more closely countrymen than any.  But we were all of one
language.  Gamaliel spoke it with poignancy and thrill, differing
there from John's long, slow waves, quiet and massive.

Whitechurch rambled around the foot of Doctor Young's hill like a
pleasant trailing vine, then went up and down and over a hill of its
own.  The spire of St. Matthew's, the spires of the Presbyterian,
Baptist, and Methodist churches, leaned against the sky.  The square
old court-house held its place.  There was Garth's Hotel with its row
of horse-chestnuts edging the brick pavement, pleasant for men's
souls who wished to loaf.  The Bank was found retired behind a
sycamore beneath which Indians may have lighted council fires.  Up
and down the High Street signs guided to stores where general
merchandise was bought and sold.  Whitechurch expected a railroad,
but as yet only expected it.  A ramshackle stage left Garth's in the
morning light and returned in the evening.  Folk looked out of window
or stopped upon the sidewalk to see it pass, with or without
passengers.  "There's the stage!"  Back from the High Street, down
short ways named for pioneers, Indian fighters, and Colonial
governors, along Washington Street that paralleled High Street,
gathered the homes, brick and frame, large and small, each a unit
compounded of units, a person synthesizing persons--as Whitechurch
was a person, and the county a person, and the state a person, and
the country a person, and the world a person.  Most of the houses had
gardens, large or small.  In the spring there bloomed old shrubs,
bowery and fragrant, lilac and snowball and syringa and weigelia.
And there were trees and again trees, so many that in June the place
grew leafy and sang like a forest.

Whatever there had been before the war, or might be in the future,
the present Whitechurch had exceedingly little money.  Just in these
years the whole country, North and South, knew financial depression.
Inflation met Nemesis in the road.  Whitechurch was poor, but
Whitechurch prided itself upon its ability to rise above what it
called "material considerations."  Mr. Millwood was a good leader
here, and Doctor Young likewise, and four or five other estimable
figures, men and women, whom I see now through a mist of laughing and
liking.  There was plenty of grit in Whitechurch.  It prided itself
upon its sense of values, religious, esthetic, and social.

Ten of the Hilltop boarding pupils were boys above fourteen.  Out of
this number the principal saw sparks of promise in at least five.
And there were the boarding teachers who should, who must, give
scholastic distinction to the cultural life of Whitechurch.  The
principal himself felt the weight of his responsibility.  Doctor
Young, the four boarding teachers, the five boys that scintillated
and the five that were supposed to be deader coals, attended in a
body the fortnightly meetings of the Whitechurch Literary and
Debating Society.  When there were concerts we went; when there came
to town stray lecturers (if Doctor Young approved their subjects) we
went.  Twice or thrice when there were passionate political harangues
(Democratic) we went.  Each summer and each winter each church had a
supper or festival or lawn party.  The Women's Mite Society or the
Women's Missionary Society made, collected, and sold good things to
eat.  We went to these fund-raising church affairs.  And of course we
went to church.  There Hilltop divided.  Episcopalians went to St.
Matthew's, Presbyterians to Doctor Baird's church, Baptists to the
Baptist church, Methodists to the Methodist church.  We had no
Catholics nor Quakers, nor Unitarians, nor other sectarians.
Church-going was not conceived of as among cultural activities.  It
was a flat command of God.  Commands of God were outside of question
or modification and outside of comparison with other activities.  I
discussed this with Gamaliel.  "Then something acts besides God?"  He
answered.  "Of course!  Don't you know your devil?"  We went to
Sunday-school and were in Doctor Young's class, and heard there
indeed of a fearful devil....  Only--only--he linked on so
beautifully to the devil Mandy's Jim believed in!  He was a devil of
physical terror--but, even so, of grotesque terror!

For all the devil that it talked about Whitechurch, as a whole, was
of a sunny temperament.  Evils were there, shadows of ignorance and
weakness, ancient falsehoods, lusts, vanities, arrogances, and
angers.  But it wanted to do right, it wanted to grow.  Gamaliel
wanted that, and I wanted that, and Doctor Young and Mr. Millwood,
and Mrs. Young upon her sofa, and the maiden cousins, and Aunt Ailsy
in the kitchen, and the teachers and the loafers about Garth's Hotel,
and all the townsfolk, those who had more momentum and those who had
less, souls ripening, and souls green and crude.




CHAPTER VIII

Once in a long while there came to Whitechurch the drama.  In those
days stock companies in dilution, shadows of the shadows of
metropolitan companies, might be met with traveling, might at times
be regarded upon extemporized stages in the smaller towns and larger
villages of the country.  Such a one came to Whitechurch and played
in the big room of Garth's Hotel.  An ambitious shadow, it opened its
three nights' course with "Midsummer Night's Dream."

Doctor Young permitted us to go.  He went himself with the four
teachers.

The advertisements promised "a classic performance."  _The Clarion_,
the weekly paper published in a neighboring town, said that the
actors were of somewhat extraordinary goodness and that none should
miss the performance.  And Shakespeare is always Shakespeare.  The
best of Whitechurch prepared to go.  Such was the bruit and rumor
that folk were coming in from the country.  Fortunately the room at
Garth's was really big, as big as a barn, as big as an ordinary hall.
Of old it had been used for political gatherings and the like.  There
was a platform with small rooms opening upon it, and floor space and
rows of benches.

John, appearing at Hilltop that morning, brought news that
grandfather and my mother were coming in.  There had not been a play
in Whitechurch for a long time, certainly not Shakespeare.  John
would stay in town, would indeed, at Doctor Young's invitation,
return to Hilltop after the play and spend the night with Gamaliel
and me.

All that day it was exciting to think of Garth's big room being
turned into a theater--exciting to envisage the company at Garth's.
Forth goes Imagination, questing his livelihood!

Evening came.  Eight of the boys at Hilltop had tickets and were
going.  Doctor Young would shepherd us down.

He did so; Gamaliel, John, and I at the tail of the string.  The
night, I remember, was full of stars, magnificent, Decemberish.  The
air seemed to rise on tiptoe, thrill, rise again, thrill....

Once in the High Street we meet with people, set in a stream, going
to Garth's.  The old hotel seems to blaze, perhaps it does blaze,
perhaps it is only our spirits!  We hear voices of men and voices of
women, talking, laughing, thrilling, expectant.  We enter the big
room and see that Shakespeare will have an audience.

So full was the place that Doctor Young's flock could not be herded
together.  Gamaliel and John and I found ourselves upon a bench
remote from the remainder of Hilltop.  Ladies entered by the door
near us and could not find seats.  We gave them ours and removed to
the broad window-sill.  So much the better!  We perceived that we
were going to be able to see splendidly.

We looked first at the curtain, that was of some dark stuff, and, to
the heightened fancy, wide and high.  A row of lamps burned before
it, shaded on our side, bright toward the stage that would presently
be revealed.  Ah! what mysteries behind it all, what delight, what
warm adventure--!

We were none too early.  This side the lamps a piano and two violins
and a horn were getting ready.  It was a stately company, that had
seen better days, that once would have smiled and passed by
Whitechurch.

The great room was warm and packed with men and women and not a few
children.  Young men and young women predominated.  But all the
leading citizens were here, all save those who would not go to the
theater--even if it was Shakespeare!

Colonel Forth and my mother came in.  A man rose and beckoned and
they found a place beside the Beechwood Corbins and the Mt. Pleasant
Byrds.  They were at a distance from our window, but almost
immediately my mother saw me, and then my grandfather.  We touched in
the face of "space."

The piano, the violins, and the horn began.  There seemed a start, a
thrill in the curtain's self.  I thrilled, and John and Gamaliel.
One wave broke against the three of us, perched in the deep window.
Piano and violin; now the horn--Greek horns--hunting-horns of Theseus!

The curtain parted.

Undoubtedly this company stood above the kind that was wont to play
in villages.  It was no worse off for scenery than was the sixteenth
century when the Mermaid Tavern went to plays.  Greek costumes are
easily managed--fairy dress, no less.

Theseus speaks.  It begins....  Theseus, Hermia, Demetrius, Bottom,
and the fairy king and queen are well played--the others more so-so.
But it is all good enough; it answers.  It is delicate, fine drama.

The room and the stage grow one.  We desire, will, and act in
England--Athens, ever old and ever new!  It is delicate, upper-key
drama.  We are not split into violent partizanships.  We can like, we
can hold them all.  We even find Bottom within, not without us.

Varying applications are made, similitudes seen.  When Egeus
complains against his child, cries that she is his, that he may, can,
and will rule her destinies, I know that Gamaliel shoots a thought
across to Doctor Young.  John likes the whole, but he shakes all over
when the Athenian "rude mechanicals" play.  So with all others
present.  There are individual linkings-up.  But the whole comes
under our skin--fairies and all.

There is rhythm in the big room.  Forth and return, forth and return,
with a soft, powerful, piston beat....

"Midsummer Night's Dream" goes on--"Midsummer Night's Dream" comes to
an end.  At least, the woolen curtain draws to; the violins slip into
their cases.  Whitechurch, after liberal applause, is on its feet, is
going out.  It must be over--but I doubted it, even then.

I greet mother and grandfather.  My ankle is as strong as ever.  I am
going home before Christmas.  There is in grandfather's and in my
mother's eyes the same look of distance and width that I feel in my
own.  I note the tranquil measure in their voices, deep on deep,
perspective.  They are in Whitechurch, but they are also in the wood
that neighbors Athens--and in other woods.

I have never questioned the literalness of being there.  I was there,
as also, certainly, here.  The there and here stood on a level.  It
seemed that there was a largeness that held them both.

Gamaliel and John and I walked to Hilltop under the stars.  Doctor
Young and the others came on some distance behind us.  We had half a
mile to go.  The night was high and starry, cold and still.  We did
not talk.  Our feet beat out rhymes, our hands were in our pockets,
we slanted a little forward, as though we met a wind, though there
was no wind materially perceptible.

Something was happening to me--or I was happening into something.  It
seemed to be a bigger kind of memory.

The world as Drama opened.  There was a cracking--a breaking through
a crust into a great sea, wide-shored.  There came first a strong
feeling of Madam Black, and then this deepening.  I went under the
surface.

There I met the course of true loves that did never run smooth, the
Warrior, and the Amazon Bride worth all labor of gaining; the child
and the parent, now together, now asunder; friends, and the
lightnings that rended them apart, and the rushings together again
when the lightnings explained themselves; honest, clownish attempt as
seen in its own mirror, and as seen from a balcony above, Asses'
Heads and Pucks, and frostwork, lacework, magic fabrics, night and
day, and quarrel and reconciliation, and a spectacle and a pageant, a
symphony playing itself, with many voices and fine contrapuntal work.
Everywhere and all the time....

My feet bore my body on under the stars, but an inner man stood with
parted lips.  Like sprang to like even here.  All arranged itself,
sprang where the composition demanded.  Then what huge Art--and what
towering Artist?  What Shakespeare built of Shakespeares--fused from
myriads of Shakespeares--fused and conscious?

I was half-way up a stair.

Doctor Young's voice caught us from behind.  "Wait, Gamaliel!--I want
you to hear what I am saying."

Down I came--we came--to the surface of the surface.

But this night started with Gamaliel and me--and with John, too--new
voyages.  All our old dreams, all our old make-believe, changed
somewhat in character.  The sphere of fancy, iridescent, tenuous,
hollow, gave way to the great orb of imagination.  End and Use came
in, though we were not conscious, then, of their entrance.  None has
ever come to conclusions with Imagination, nor seen where its high
Verity begins or ends.

At Christmas I went home to Restwell.  For the remainder of the
school year John and I walked to and fro.  I missed Gamaliel.  In the
springtime my mother persuaded Doctor Young to let him spend a week
at Restwell....  He and John and I swimming in the river!

Hilltop Academy closed doors behind pupils until mid-September should
come.  What I had chiefly learned there was Gamaliel.  That was not a
little to me.

Summer came on.  It was the summer of 1876, the Centennial summer.
My grandfather, sitting between the pillars upon the porch, after
supper, twilight about him, the fireflies beginning to sparkle, the
frogs singing down by the little pond, the evening star bright in the
west, was wont, this summer, to cast back and talk of early statesmen
and of events that broke into light at this step and at that of the
road called American.  He could remember Jefferson.  He had had some
acquaintance with Mr. Madison and to a lesser degree with Mr. Monroe.
He remembered when railroads and steamboats came into general use.
He was a boy of nine when he heard of the cession of Florida to us by
Spain.  He had made up his mind that now Florida was ours he would go
afoot and find Ponce de Leon's fountain of youth.  He had thought:
"What a present it will be for them all!  I'll let 'most everybody
drink!"  He had started and had gotten beyond Whitechurch when Daddy
Guinea, who was then a young man, overtook him....

A night or two after this I went to see Daddy Guinea.  He was much
older than my grandfather; he could not have been far from ninety.
Daddy Guinea remembered General George Washington.  He remembered the
building of Restwell.

I sat on the cabin door-step and he sat beside me, his great veined
hands hanging over his knees.  "What is dishyer Centennial I heah
erbout?"

"It's a hundred years since the Declaration of Independence."

"Sho-ly!  En what was er hundred years befo' that?"

I thought for a moment.  "We were colonies.  We lived along the
Atlantic Ocean, but everywhere back in the hills the Indians lived."

"En er hundred years befo' that?"

"The Indians lived on the ocean, too.  We lived in England and
Scotland and Ireland and France and Germany and Spain and Italy and
Africa."

Daddy Guinea's great hands moved together.  "Sho-ly!  Sho-ly!  In en
out.  In en out.  Look at hit one way en hit draws out long--longer
'n from heah to neber!  Look at hit ernother way en hit ain't enny
bigger 'n er bag of gyarden seed!  All those places en the N'United
States.... en above the N'United States Beulah Land, where old Guinea
gwine, gwine!"

He sat in silence.  There shone above us soft, reflected light.  The
creek was running to the river, the river was running to the sea, the
sea--  Up and down of continents, and mankind in waves!  I knew that
earth and all were flying through space.  For a moment I grasped
intellectual space, and the traveling and the travelers there.  Then
there were just the homey cabin, and Daddy Guinea, and the
whippoorwills.

The next day, Ahasuerus and I hoeing corn in the field under Lone
Tree Hill, Ahasuerus, too, wanted to know about the Centennial.  That
evening, after an early supper, my mother was looking over a pile of
magazines--new ones, and rather old ones--sent by Aunt Harriet from
Richmond.  Most current literature came to us from the Warringers.
Grandfather sat smoking, resting, dreaming back or forward.  Aunt
Sarah, seated where she could get the western light, was hemstitching
ruffles, and where her deep desire and will had gone I do not know.
Our old mastiff, Hercules, lay by me on the steps.  My mother spoke:
"This is a little bit, father, that I think you'll like.  It's from
'Topics of the Time,' in the January _Scribner's Monthly_."  She
began to read.


"All good Americans are looking forward to the passage of the year
1876 with great interest; and it is not to be denied that they are
animated by a new hopefulness.  The financial failures that occur do
not depress business circles as they once did.  There is a belief
that we have seen the worst, that it is well that the rotten houses
should go down, and that we shall practically start, during our
Centennial, on a new and prosperous national life.

"Of a certain kind of business there will undoubtedly be more done
during the year than ever before.  The passenger traffic on the
railroads will be immense.  All the West is coming East.  All the men
and women who have been desiring throughout their lives to visit the
Eastern coast, yet have never found the occasion for such an
expenditure of time and money, will come to the great Exhibition.
The thousands in Europe who have long intended to visit America will
naturally desire to take it at its best and they will come this year.
The Southern States will be similarly moved, and all the lines of
travel converging upon New York will be crowded.  Railroads and
steamboats will do unprecedented passenger business and hotels will
be overwhelmed with guests.  The whole Eastern coast of the country
north of Baltimore will feel this great influx of life.  Newport and
Saratoga ... will be full.  Every Englishman--every foreigner
indeed--will visit Niagara.  There will be a tremendous shaking up of
the people, a great going to and fro in the land, a lively
circulation of money, and a stimulation of trade....  There is still
another reason for hopefulness.  The nation is to be brought together
as it has never been brought together before during its history.  In
one hundred years of intense industry and marvelous development we
have grown from a few feeble colonies to a powerful nation of more
than forty millions of people.  We have been so busy that we have
never been able to look one another in the face, except during four
terrible years of civil war.  In a friendly way, for brotherly
courtesies, we have never come together.  Well, that which divided us
is past.  We are now all members of a consolidated nationality, and
this year around the old family altar at Philadelphia we expect to
meet and embrace as brothers.  We are profoundly hopeful that this
year is to do much to cast into forgetfulness the bitterness
engendered by the Civil War, and to make the nation as united and
sympathetic in feeling as it is in the political fact.  Of one thing
we are certain, if the South comes to the Centennial, it will receive
such a welcome as will be accorded to no guests from any other part
of the world.  The glories of the old Declaration are a part of their
inheritance, and without them our festivals would be but a mockery.
They are the guests without whom we cannot get along--without whom
there would be bitterness in our bread, sourness in our wine, and
insignificance in our rejoicings."


My mother laid down the magazine.  "I don't think anything could be
handsomer than that!"

My grandfather knocked the ashes from his cigar.  General Warringer
sent him good cigars.  "You're right, Cary!  All one country--all one
country.  Like a family--sometimes we pull against one another, and
we have differences; but we come together again.  More than
that--like an individual.  We are an individual....  I'd like to talk
with that editor."

On the steps, beside Hercules, I became conscious of a great desire
to go to the Centennial.




CHAPTER IX

Want and fine lines come together to supply!  In less than a week we
heard from Aunt Kate.  It had been a fairly prosperous year at
Flowerfield.  Major Dallas, Aunt Kate, John, and Miriam were going to
the Centennial--and they wanted me to go with them.  Uncle John would
give me the trip.  We were going in two weeks.  We might be away a
month, even longer.  We would stop in Washington on the way to
Philadelphia.  There was a possibility of New York beyond
Philadelphia.  There was--there was--just a possibility of Niagara
Falls.

How slowly went by those two weeks!

They passed.  I went to Flowerfield; we started from there.  I see us
now, at the railroad station, in the county town.  Look at 1876
pictures to see the type of clothes we wore, we who would not be too
far behind Fashion, but who certainly walked in her rear.  But Major
Dallas would have rested, no matter what he wore, a big, magnetic
man, able, and very kind.  Aunt Kate had a slight, small body, but a
big--oh! a big--nature.  John and Miriam and I stood in a brown study
waiting for the train to come.  I remember how the day was sunny, but
not heated.  John was fifteen.  Miriam a little under, I a little
over, fourteen.

The train came--we were aboard with our ancient satchels, our
unfashionable umbrellas and baskets.  Began our wonder-trip to the
Centennial Exhibition.

Virginia scenery was good, was desirable, but the love of our life,
for Miriam, John, and me, was getting out of Virginia.  We had never
been out of Virginia.  The long miles, the quite a number of hours
that must be overpassed before we entered the District of Columbia,
rather appalled us.  But then the journey, even through Virginia,
grew interesting.  John and I sat together, Miriam had the seat
across the aisle.  The train that day was not filled; we could move
about, exchange.  Uncle John and Aunt Kate were lovely persons with
whom to travel.  When the boy came through with fruit we had fruit.
When he brought magazines Uncle John bought our choice for each of
us.  We were traveling finely, _comme il faut_, with the bloom on the
event.

Miriam wore a blue-green poplin, with an embroidered tie at the
throat.  She had a small round hat of straw, colored like the dress,
with a wreath of cornflowers.  She was dark and slight and straight,
with strange, deep eyes, and a smile that was like a different dawn
each time it came.

In the late afternoon we approached the confines of Virginia.  At
Alexandria we began to thrill.  Now the Potomac River, great and
wide, with some little boats upon it.  Now the Virginia shore behind
us.  Now before us Washington....  "Look, children!  There's the dome
of the Capitol!"

Ours was an old hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, where we had three
rooms, and outside the long windows a narrow, ironwork balcony.
Standing here we saw, we felt, a sycamore-tree, a languorous, summer
air, warmer than in our part of Virginia where we lived well above
the sea, a pearly twilight, and out of it the gas street-lights
springing--then, with a white flash, an arc-light.  That was an
amazement to more than us that summer!  Electric light!  I remember
first reading this year a phrase that was beginning to come in like a
star in bright twilight, seen and not seen and then again seen, "The
Age of Electricity." ... We young folk leaned upon the balcony rail.
How wide was Pennsylvania Avenue--much wider than Richmond
streets--and how long and how straight!  We might also have said, in
1876, what strange, shabby buildings line much of it!

But we are in glamour.  The All of it was all right.  All right is,
presently, the hotel dinner instead of the supper familiar to us.
All right is the walk before bedtime that we take with Uncle John and
Aunt Kate.  We walk to the Capitol.  By the happiest circumstance
there hangs in the sky a full, a golden moon.  With that and with the
street-lights we might see the faces of the pedestrians whom we
passed or overtook or accompanied.  We liked the sound of the many
feet upon the pavement.  Some seemed to say, "We live in this happy
place."  Some said, "We are travelers like you; we are going to the
Centennial!"

Now we saw the Capitol.  We were in its grounds.  We stood still, we
travelers from Virginia, and gazed and gazed upon the moonlighted,
white mountain with the rounded crest.  It swam upon us in a beauty
that was pain.  Oh, all ye symbols, belting us like a Zodiac, three
dimensional mother-language, thick with visions....

We found a bench and sat down.  Major Dallas spoke.  "I don't suppose
that there have been many periods more politically corrupt than the
one we're in.  Financially corrupt, too.  There's rottenness.  The
sign of hope is that we smell it, we see it, and are beginning to be
ashamed of it.  I think we'll have a house-cleaning.  But it's going
to be hard to get the especial stain off these years....  Well!  And
still, Kate, there's the White Capitol!"

It seemed lambent there before us.  It grew more and more beautiful.
I heard Miriam sigh with delight.

We went back to the hotel.  Oh, the compounded taste, the long,
twisted romance and adventure of the hostel, inn, tavern, hotel!
Miriam, John, and I, I know, _contacted_ many an inn beside this one
on Pennsylvania Avenue.

We slept and woke to strong enchantment still.  We stayed in
Washington four days.  And here we went and there we went, and we
returned thrice to the Capitol.  We went, upon a river boat, down to
Mount Vernon.  "Now I feel at home!" said Aunt Kate, and laughed.
"That is, I feel more at home."

But Miriam and John and I were where the novel was to us home....  We
loved the Capitol, and we loved the balcony before our rooms at that
hotel....  Four days, and we went to the great Centennial Exhibition.

I have seen world's fairs since, but beside them always comes up 1876
in Philadelphia, so small in comparison, but to the child-country so
full of taste, so vivid, so sonorous, so remarkable!  We from
Virginia had a new pleasant tavern to dwell in and a new city to see.
We stood in Independence Hall before the cracked bell.  "Shut your
eyes!" said Miriam.  "Close the crack---lift the bell.  Now it's up
in the steeple!  It's whole--it's ringing--ringing!"

We see Philadelphia.  We see the great Exposition of the country and
its products, of other nations and their products.  All is so
novel--and yet is it so?  Or is it familiarity in perspective that
makes it so rich, so entertaining?  Old fairs, great markets,
medieval, ancient, further-than-ancient, seem involved in, floating
in, the present.  Always nation and product have gathered to look at,
value, exchange with, nation and product....  The Chinese and
Japanese greatly please us; the Swiss, the Italians.  Look at the
glass-blowers!  The iridescent shapes form, drop from the blower's
pipe.

Alike the Occident and the Orient please us.

We went to see the great machinery in which the West, and especially
our own country, excelled.  I do not remember in what factory, nor to
any nicety for what purpose the machine was devised--but I remember
Leviathan before which--before whom--we stood.  And again Miriam and
I seemed to open like two windows upon one garden.  In and out,
stilly, mightily, with ease, with grace, rhythmically, incredibly
swiftly, went a mighty piston.  Beneath it giant wheels turned,
according.  There were lesser wheels and lesser, and between the
wheels ran swiftly flowing bands.  There were rods and cogs and what
not, and all important, all upholding all.  The air vibrated.  Up and
down, and in and out, and to and fro, and here and there, and now and
then, and around and around, and--without a word coined to express
it--in the atmosphere of purpose, end, performance--acted the
machine.  Time and space and mass were caught at work.  We partook
of--we were--that complex-simple motion.

Of all the shows in the Centennial Show, I most liked this Machine.
It began to spin for me trains of ideas.

We saw and heard at work the newly invented telephone.  There was a
marvel, due to expand, like the Genie out of the Bottle in the
_Arabian Nights_!

We saw much at the great exhibition.  Paintings, for instance, and
models of many things upon the face of the earth.  And the people and
the people and the people, the American people, who went in and out
at gates!  The clusters, the groups, the relationships within
relationship, the dramas within drama!  Habit, manner, clothes,
gesture, voices, eyes, hands--what a variorum under summer light and
warmth, what rainbow molecules astir in a guessed-at form!

We spent a week in Philadelphia, and went each day to the Great
Exhibition.  Then we traveled on to New York.

We stayed at a hotel, much used in those days by Southerners....  And
out of New York I pick now the journeying forth from New York to see
the ocean.  That happened on the seventh day of our visit.  We had
seen the eight-story (I forget whether eight or ten-story) building,
the child skyscraper.  We had been to Wall Street and the Stock
Exchange and old Trinity.  We had seen the Bowery and Newspaper Row
and the City Hall and A. T. Stewart's store.  The horse-cars carried
us from sight to sight.  We had walked upon Fifth Avenue.  We knew
Union Square and Madison Square, and far, far up-town, Central Park,
named Central when it seemed to us Outlying, gave us a green welcome.
We went over to the banks of the Hudson and looked across to the
Palisades.  General Grant was in the White House, there was no
pillared white mausoleum as now.  We saw churches within and without,
and we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Major Dallas, relatively speaking, knew New York.  Affairs had
brought him here three or four times in late years.  He was our
pilot.  It was the wrong season for a number of things.  Old
acquaintances, Southerners now living here, were away for the heated
months.  And the theaters offered very light entertainment.  On the
other hand, it was prime out-of-door weather, and there was so much
to be seen from out-of-doors!  We crossed to Brooklyn by the ferry.
We walked on the Battery and visited Castle Garden.  We rose early
one morning and went to see an ocean liner depart for England.  It
was the Scythia, a Cunarder....  Again, for a moment, Madam Black
seemed to be with us.  Floating houses, moving bridges, devices to
bring into one mind Here and There....

Then, one day, we ourselves board a small boat and go to see the main
ocean.  We go to Coney Island.

The air is fresh and drenched with light, the salt is in our
nostrils.  We are going to view the sea that we think--Miriam and
John and I--that we have never seen.  True, the harbor is filled from
the sea, but we dream of surf and thunder and land so far away that
the world seems water.  In the mean time there is delight in the
boats in the harbor and the various shore.  There is as yet no Statue
of Liberty.  We pass Bedloe Island, but the giant woman does not rise
above it.  We are in the America of years and years ago.

We saw the ocean.  We landed from our boat.  Coney Island was not
then the flaming, clamant amusement park it was to become.  But there
was a beginning.  We landed at a pier; we saw a hotel and tents and
booths; some kind of music was playing; persons moved about in a
moderate throng.  But we had come to see the ocean.  We went upon the
beach, we walked until we were alone.  Here stretched the gleaming,
solitary sand, here moved and sounded the waves, here dwelt Ocean.
We sat down in the shadow of a dune, the five of us.

At sunset, returning to the city, Miriam and John and I kept to the
stern of the boat.  Major Dallas and Aunt Kate were forward, talking
with some chance-met acquaintance.  We three sat, arms upon rail,
keeping Ocean still with us.  The boat left a wake of dark green,
foam streaked and edged, but tapering at last into sunset-colored
water beneath the sunset sky.  There was aboard a band of four or
five pieces.  It played "Suwanee River."

The last note died.  Said Miriam: "Rivers and ocean and cities....  I
am going to travel and travel and travel!  Travel--come home--love
that and love travel.  Travel, come home, travel--"

"You'll have to go on your own wings," said John.  "Travel like that
takes money."

"Well, I'll grow the wings then--or make the money then.  Make the
honest money--grow the honest wings."  She rested her cheek upon her
arms, folded upon the rail.  Her eyes looked to where met sea and
air.  She began to sing under her breath.

  "Hear--taste--see.
  Taste--see--hear.--
  Power behind you--
  Go!"


The band was playing airs from "Norma."  Uncle John summoned us to
look at the light upon the approaching city.

A day or two after this we said farewell to New York.  We went to
Niagara.  We stayed at the Cataract House.  We saw the young moon
above the earth-shaking, long plunge of the waters.

Then, after two days, we turned back to Virginia, to Restwell and
Flowerfield.




CHAPTER X

I attended Hilltop Academy until I was seventeen.  Of course, I got a
good deal of instruction; of course, I grew.  But it remains that
Gamaliel was for me the living point there.  He had based his lever
upon an intention to see what was existence outside his father's
formula.  His adventures upon that line were due to give him some
wounds and bruises, but he proceeded with the quest.

From June to September I kept to Restwell and more and more became a
farmer.  There was need for all who could work to work.  My
grandfather was now an old man.  He had done and done largely his
part.  More and more my mother and I helped him; took at last the
major part of effort.  From September to June, in the short
afternoons, I worked still, in the fields, or with the stock, or at
the barn, or where not.  Mandy's Jim, Ahasuerus, a hugely humorous
son of Africa named Bob, and I worked together.  In the evenings came
book-work preparatory for next day's classes.  All times and
countries the like has fallen to boys and girls.  I, for one, do not
quarrel with what strenuousness there was.

And I remember many and many a strong splash of sunshine.

I graduated from the academy, John and Gamaliel and I together.  I
led in some things, the others in others.  Now stood out the question
whether my "education" should stop here, or whether I might be spared
and financed for the university.  There was need of me at home, and
need of every dollar at home.  If we could keep Restwell, it and my
profession lay in one before me.  I should farm, with what help I
could employ, the three hundred acres.

I was a knower and lover of the country.  I had, of course, often and
often again, dreams and longings, cloudy aspirations, passionate
tangential movements toward more or less vague otherwheres, other
spheres of action.  But I loved home, I loved Restwell, I loved my
mother, my grandfather, Aunt Sarah, the colored folk, the animals,
trees and plants, sticks and stones.  I could not see my grandfather
and Aunt Sarah happy elsewhere.  My mother would take her Restwell
with her wherever she might be.  But my grandfather was growing too
old to root elsewhere on this earth.  And Aunt Sarah held to the
place like a trail of ivy....  Farming was a most useful profession.
So long as the world believed that it must have wheat and corn for
food, some part of the world must sow and tend and reap the same.

I told my mother, when we talked it over, on the door-step of the
summer-house in our old flowery tangle of a garden, that I thought I
had better take what education I had, and become what I already was,
that is, a farmer.  I said that I shouldn't mind it; that, indeed,
there was much about it that I liked.

My mother listened, softly striking against her lips a piece of
honeysuckle.  Then she said, "I want you to go to the university."

"How can I?"

"I've got the loan, Michael.  Some day you'll pay it back to Carter
Warringer.  I'm perfectly confident as to that!"

"But--"

"It's enough to let us hire Wilson Reynolds for the spring and fall
work.  You'll be here, just the same, all the long summer.  I want
you to go.  I want you to be able to _choose_ whether you'll farm or
do something else.  You'll take engineering.  You want to do that,
don't you?"

"Yes, I want to.  But--"

"Yes?"

"I do not know if it is what I shall do in the end."

"It will be part of what you do in the end.  I fancy," said my
mother, "that there'll always be some kind of building roads and
driving tunnels and getting at mines and bridging rivers.  Even when
we travel through the air!"

I went to the university--John and I, still together.

Gamaliel did not go.  He was in trouble with his father.  Doctor
Young wished him to continue with all the classics and become a
teacher.  First he should be his father's assistant; then, when in
the course of nature that father passed on to his reward, there would
be for the son Hilltop, livelihood, usefulness, a great and dignified
profession.

"I do not want to teach," said Gamaliel.  "Not, at least, until I
learn something."

"This is nothing to you then?" asked the father.  His gesture
described a circle with himself seated in the middle.

Gamaliel answered: "I don't mean that.  I love you, father, and I am
built on all that.  But I want to stand on it all, and go on.  You
want me to stay in it, and to be just _it_."

"You do not know what I want!  You are simply selfish, ungrateful,
mulish--"

"If I could take chemistry or biology--"

"You will take the courses I indicate or none at all.  Biology!  That
is the way your Darwins and the like begin!"

Gamaliel turned pale.  His mouth, his brows, made dark, straight
lines across his face.  He spoke dryly, unemotionally.  "I am not
going, father, to the university."

The other answered in a strangled voice: "Then you shall clerk it,
right here in Whitechurch!  I hear that Walter Gilbert wants a youth
for the drug-store."

"May I go to see him about the job?"

"Yes!"

Gamaliel got up and said, "Thank you, father!" and left the study.
Doctor Young sat rigid in his chair.  He saw his own anger before
him.  He had intensity; he did not have breadth.  He sat staring for
a long time, little by little relaxed.  He put his head down upon the
desk and said a short prayer.  Then, bolt upright again, he turned to
finish the letter before him.  "Gamaliel" was the last written word.
Now he went on.  "Gamaliel has always opposed me.  Now he declares
that he will not go to the university.  Very well!  I am going to let
him find out his own mistake!  I shall give him a year to work for
his own bread here in Whitechurch.  I have just sent him to Walter
Gilbert, who, I hear, wants a clerk.  A year, I have no doubt, will
teach the lesson.  At eighteen he will be more amenable to reason and
my wishes than he is at seventeen.  It will not be too late for him
then, though I should prefer that he went now.  Of course, my pride
is hurt, but it is for the boy himself that I am anxious--"

So Gamaliel did not go with John and me to the university.  Nor did
he go at eighteen.

He came to Restwell to tell me good-by.  We went to the river and sat
on the bank above the old swimming-hole.  "Don't you fellows forget
me!"

"We won't."

"Life's just a fight."

"We three don't fight."

"That's true.  But fighting's such a sharp, close reality.  It feels
realer--like pain!  I've had a lot of pain."

We sat and threw small stones into the river.  The rings widened.

"How's the old drug-store?"

"I don't mind it so much.  I like the mixing things in the room
behind.  Mr. Gilbert shows me a lot.  I'm learning a lot.  And I
never knew that he had all those books!  My father doesn't know it
now.  I'm there at night, you know.  I take a book, and if any one
comes in to buy I sell.  Then when the store's empty there's the book
again.  And I like to get with my mind into the middle of all the
jars and things--the liquids and the powders and the grains and the
bark.  But everybody that comes in seems to know that my father and I
have quarreled.  I hate lectures and I hate pity!"  He lifted a
good-sized stone and flung it.  The water splashed, the rings spread.

"What are you going to do next year?"

"I don't know.  What _are_ we, anyway?  That's what I want to know!"

But I, no more than he, could answer that.  We lay by the river, and
after a while we climbed the old fairy bank and coppice to the
graveyard, and passed through this, and so across the field to the
house and up to my room.  And at the last it was again just:

"Don't you fellows forget me!"

"We won't!"

John and I went to the university.  Major Dallas accompanied us, to
see us established, to show us his old haunts and my father's, to
introduce us to old professors.  It was still in much the university
of the simpler Jeffersonian day.  Uncle John left us; John and I
settled down.  We felt strong men, and in the world!

We had rooms in one of the "ranges," all so cloister-like.  But our
meals we took at Doctor X's house, Doctor X's wife being a cousin of
my mother's.  We began to learn our fellow-students, to place
ourselves.  We stood initiations.  We sorted our friends and
no-friends....

The university was built upon a plan broad and free.  A student had
great liberty.  He might do or he might refrain from doing.  Karma
piled in either case, but outside of some agreed-upon matters, none
attempted forcibly to mold karma.  The student lived and took the
consequences.

In this year John and I skirted various obvious temptations.  Twice
or thrice--perhaps oftener--we ceased to skirt them; we dived or
sank, we embraced them, mer-things in old depths.

But we are men of the air, not of the sea.  That was an ancient home,
but we have parted from it.  The sea is in our veins, but there comes
something other than the sea.  It was hardly a question--or it was a
question, as you please--of virtue.  Simply, we did not like the
taste, we turned, we revolted.  Those ancient waters were no longer
for our thirst.  John, here, came out first, and I followed him.  We
stood upon the shore, we breathed the air.  John said: "I don't see
any fun in all that.  It's messy and dirty and small!"

So we came out and we found that we still had company.

We loved the university very well.  For its outward appearance there
was the antique and beautiful simplicity that still sets it apart.
We had fondness for many who taught us.  Even those we did not like
were no worse than stimuli.  We liked the life, half free, half
bounded, the throng of our fellows, the friends we made, the
societies we joined.  We liked our rooms, our independence.  In
retrospect, those two years are thick, for me, with tastes, aromas,
touches, characteristic, endearing.  Of course there were lassitudes,
dislikes, friction, and quarrels, stupidities, ugliness, hot heads
and hot hearts, tragic emotions.  But these I let disintegrate.  I
understand them and let them vanish.  But the honey of the other I
conserve, and put it in its due cell in the great hive.

Out of the hundreds of our fellows, out of all the friendly sort, I
pick three.  Royal Warringer, John's and my cousin, was there.  I
admired then and pulled against Royal Warringer, and the doing both
persisted.  His was the magnificent genius of material acquisition.
He knew all his life how to gather into barns, and it is a great
power.  But he meant to live, just himself, and of course his wife
and children, his friends, his servants, his "court," upon the
wide-gathered store.  Of course he gave gifts, but he regarded them
as gifts, and would direct where they fell.  So I think that, in a
partial and temporary fashion, he was harmful, though he never saw
himself as harmful, and so was no hypocrite.  And perhaps that is the
case with more of us than Royal.  He was a little older and in the
year above John and me.  He had the intention of being kind to us
because we were his kin.  He had even then more money than had we.
He was a handsome fellow, with a large, dreamy, almost mystical face.

And there was Phillip Garrett who was born for political life in a
high sense.  And Conrad Conrad who used to pass and repass, in the
dark or at dawn or sunset, the cell-like room of Poe.  I think that
he tried to conjure Poe forth, to walk, cloaked, beside him.

Life flowed on, bright and strong.

I went home for Christmas.  I went home for the summer, I went home
again at Christmas, and for three days to Flowerfield.  I now began
to see Miriam as she will look and be in glory.




CHAPTER XI

It was the second summer of that university stretch of existence.  I
was nineteen.  When I returned, that June, to Restwell,
acquaintances, meeting me, said: "You've grown.  You are a man!"

Whitechurch, too, they said, was grown.  I saw the new buildings, but
yet Whitechurch seemed shrunken.  It occurred to me for the first
time that it was a village....  Gamaliel was not there.  He had never
come to the university nor returned to his father's way of thinking.
A year past he had gone to Baltimore, Mr. Gilbert, to my thinking,
secretly helping him.  There he was drug clerk, in a larger pharmacy
than could be found in Whitechurch.  He clerked, he studied.  Out of
his letters, which came once a month, I might piece a curious, keen,
absorbed life.  I talked of him with Mr. Gilbert, the quaint, silent,
big-eyed druggist.

"He's an observer, a thinker, and a feeler, in about equal parts,"
said Mr. Gilbert.  "He won't go off in a dream, either!  He'll get up
and act.  He doesn't fancy; he imagines.  You've got imagination,
too, Michael.  What always interests me is a person strong enough to
occupy his imaginations--move in, so to speak!"

At Restwell we managed, this summer, to retain the services of Wilson
Reynolds.  He freed me for a wider social life.  I went to parties.
I spent hours at Beechwood and Mt. Pleasant, where bloomed young male
and female Byrds and Corbins.  I went to see Whitechurch young
ladies.  I dressed very carefully for church, having first thoroughly
groomed Boreas, upon whom I rode beside the carriage where sat my
grandfather, my mother, and Aunt Sarah.

And in August I went to Flowerfield.

Flowerfield was filled and gay this summer.  John had brought Phillip
Garrett home with him.  Aunt Harriet, sparing a month from the White
Sulphur, was here, and with her Dorothea.  The Dallases possessed in
full the Southern genius for hospitality.  Neighborhood girls and
youths rode in, walked in, at the old, ivy-covered gate.  Windows and
doors stood open; you heard the ripple of the piano, chatter,
singing, laughter, the sound of croquet balls.  If solitude was
wanted--or if _solitude à deux_ was wanted--you had the oak-grove,
the willowy meadow, the orchard, where the grass grew long and the
trees close and sweet.  There was also a lane called from old time
Lovers' Lane.

In mid-August came the tournament--and that belongs to the old South.
You do not meet it any longer, I imagine, in the South that grows out
of the old South.

The Flowerfield county was a debonair county, addicted to social
meetings, an entertained and entertaining county, a county, moreover,
of good horses and good riders.  This year, too, was a
young-man-and-woman year.  The sun rejoiced, the moon was mild at
night.

From a bouquet of lesser gatherings rises stately the picnic and
tournament to be held at Green Groves, between Flowerfield and the
town.  Here spread a field for carriages, and shady, gently sloping
Watteau banks for the assembly that drove or rode or came afoot,
while full before these stretched an ideal course for the mounted
knights.  I may say at once that the only tilting was riding at the
ring.  Seven poles, seven crosspieces, seven dangling iron rings,
stood at dignified distances.  The knights each shook a spear, rode
the course at a gallop, rode in all three times the round, came out
with as many of those rings as might be gleaming the length of the
spear.  It was not so extremely easy to gather the fruit!

Town and country, twenty knights entered themselves upon the
marshal's list.  Each knight rode for a lady.  There would be a
flowery crown for a Queen of Love and Beauty, and lesser chaplets for
three Princesses.  The knights chose each their lady, making
application to be her knight.

John must ask Dorothea, she being the guest of his house, though he
wanted, I knew, to ride for Amy Page.  But it happened that Dorothea,
who was as imperious as Semiramis, had set her heart upon George
Allen, whom she had seen ride at the White.  He did ride and shoot
very well and she thought that he would get the wreath.  She gave him
opportunity to ask her, just so soon as the tournament was in the
air, and he took it, under the grape-arbor in the garden.  So John,
after all, could ask Amy Page.

I forestalled Phillip Garrett and asked Miriam.  She said, "All
right, Michael."

The day of the tournament approached, arrived.  It was gay, clear,
bright, dry August weather.  The grass was browned, trillions of
insects sang.  I was the Knight of the Green Wreath; John, the Knight
of the Mountain, Phillip, the Knight of the Climbing Star.  We
carried these devices upon light wooden or pasteboard silvered or
gilded shields.  We rode in long boots with spurs, we had sash or
scarf, we had silvered casques or plumed hats.  We decked our horses.
We followed to the top of its bent all the bright foolery and dead
earnest of youth.

Green Groves presented a throng.  There were there every one you knew
and some you did not know.  The brown lists stretched to right and
left.  The marshals overpaced them.  Beyond was the beechwood where,
pending need of them, the knights' horses were fastened.  We did not
go so far in the ways of chivalry as to have squires, though Lewis,
indeed, volunteered to act for any one of the three of us from
Flowerfield.

The day at Green Groves began gaily, went well.  The tournament was
for the afternoon....  Afternoon came.  The knights withdrew
themselves, repaired to the beechwood and their horses.  Youth and
middle age and elder years left the plateau where had been spread the
abundant picnic feast, and came upon the slopes where all might see.
The marshals rode around, making sure that the rings swung right.
They backed their horses to the barrier.  Forth rode a herald in a
tabard--Dick Yorke, who knew how to wind a bugle, and had a voice
like that of Stentor.  The bugle sounded, Dick made proclamation.
Into the lists paced King Talliaferro, for the nonce the Knight of
the Heart and the Arrow.  The youngest women, the girls of seventeen
and eighteen and nineteen and thereabouts, sat in a bright parquet
upon a middle bank, beneath branchy, huge oaks.  It was a day of
half-draped, half-princess dresses, of flower-hung, bent, enshadowing
hats.  They sat in flowered or delicate-colored muslin, nainsook,
lawn, organdie, dimity, mull.  Marian, Miriam, Dorothea, Nancy,
Anne--Amy, Lucy, Nelly, Margaret, Alice--Elizabeth, Judith, Mary, and
Betty--Molly, Carrie, Fanny, Meta, and Hope.  They seemed a
flower-garden, they and the rainbow-scarfed knights.  There was a
breeze, a murmur, that was like the bees going to and fro.  When
Talliaferro rode out there might doubtless have been observed a lift
of Fanny's bosom beneath her rose organdie....  How long and wide and
rich are the vistas of the matter-of-fact!

Well, the tournament!  After all, George Allen did not win the
queen's wreath.  After all, John won it.  Warren Lightfoot won the
first princess's wreath, I the second, Talliaferro the third.  We
rode to the Watteau bank and laid the wreaths at the feet of Amy,
Alice, Miriam, Fanny.  Fiery blushes, laughter, applause through
Green Groves--flowery speeches by the best speechmakers--good
knights, fair ladies, beauty, devoir! ... Echoes and echoes when the
shell of the ages is held to the ear!

The picnic at Green Groves dissolves away.  But that night, at
Flowerfield, we had dancing--fifty young people and a dozen of the
elders to watch, and Jim Dandy, David, and Daniel, the best three
negro fiddlers in the county.  Jim Dandy called the figures.

The day was over.  The dance was over.  I lay in bed--I slept at
last.  The next day the house seemed still, resting, reminiscent.
Individuals appeared inclined to go individual ways.  I saddled and
mounted Boreas and rode to the great wood by Lost Creek.  When I was
deep in the brown shadows I fastened Boreas and went myself and lay
under a beech-tree.

Miriam....

I shut my eyes.  Miriam and I were together.  There was no
environment.  Just Miriam and I together.

All things came into the circle of Miriam and me....  Miriam and all
things came into the circle of me....  Miriam and I and all
things--all persons, all things--dissolved into Being, into Energy,
that with ache and with bliss communed with itself.

Time went by.  But I was in a timeless deep world where extreme
motion and extreme rest meet.  I thought in no separate, edged
fashion of Miriam.  There was a world, and Miriam and I, having
created it, moved within it--Miriam-Michael the name of the god.

The simple, strong delight wavered and frayed down.  The light of the
great sun, the warmth of the great body, diminished and diminished.
I came back to separation, to the half-god; farther still to one
Michael Forth in a wood by Lost Creek....  I looked at the sky and
noted the time of day.  Presently I left the earth beneath the
beech-tree, and, untying Boreas, mounted him and rode homeward.

But there stayed the glow from the experienced fire.

When I met Miriam at Flowerfield I saw a loved figure--a gate to
Being, Wisdom, and Joy.  She and I were two leaves of one gate.

At the end of the week I went home to Restwell, and Miriam and I had
said nothing of any new depths.

At Restwell for the remainder of the summer and the early autumn
there was work enough to do, despite the presence of Wilson Reynolds.
I worked with energy, earning sleep, earning also periods up above
conscious work, when the machine moved exquisitely, when there came
rays from the sun behind the sun.

Between these and the work of the fields fell periods more swiftly
vibrating than the one, less swiftly vibrating (clumsy words we use!)
than the other.  In one of these moods I began to versify.  I must
express, and so I took a way at hand.

I may have known dimly, for a long while, that it lay at hand.  I
could remember Madam Black saying, "You may turn to writing."  At the
academy, Doctor Young's class in English Composition had not bored
me.  A dance in fetters was still dancing.  At the university, "Write
it out!" that I have seen have terrors enough for some minds came to
me with an old familiarity, as of a chord sounding back of the
university and the academy, back of Madam Black, back of childhood
... at any rate, of this childhood.

Now the vast Field of the Emotional potently quickening once again,
potently feeling again the breath of spring, I began again to sing,
for the bird sings in May.  Before work, in the dawn, after work when
there was summer night, I wrote down lyrics.

But even so--even then--a stronger mood than alone the lyric began to
repossess me.  I came one day to filling out between three lyrics.  A
drama in one long act, infantine enough, doubtless, but to my then
eyes poetic, grandiose, and true, came out of my brain and nested in
a quire of foolscap paper.  I enjoyed writing it.  It was quite true,
as my mother said!  Engineering did not confine itself to one species
of material.  Driving roads, making connections, leveling mountains,
raising towers, conducting commerce, surveying the Unattempted,
Attempt in mind, appeared a continuous process, in operation upon
more planes than one.




CHAPTER XII

I returned to the university.  I came home at Christmas.  Again I
returned to the university, and all seemed well.  In mid-January came
the telegram.  My mother was ill with pneumonia.

Aunt Sarah, Mammy, and I nursed her.  We would have held her in our
arms, with us, if we could.  But on the seventh day she died....  I
touch through all the cells my woe again.

The wave was one that swept me forth.  In three months they found one
morning my grandfather, very tranquil, smiling, dead upon his couch.

The Dallases came from Flowerfield, General Warringer and Aunt
Harriet from Richmond.  There was again a funeral, and all the people
round about....  Then dead stillness, and the two fresh, raw mounds
in the graveyard.  It was early spring, but I sat there beside them
in what seemed December.

General Warringer and Major Dallas consulted in the house.  Restwell
was heavily mortgaged.  I was nearly twenty--must finish my
education.  If then I did well, engineering might take me afar.
There was scarcely any ready money.  I could not keep and farm
Restwell.  "He would feel the wrench, but he would get over it!  All
in all, it may well be the best for him.  But Sarah--" said Uncle
John.

General Warringer drummed upon the table.  "I want to talk to
Harriet--"

It was Uncle John who, a week later, asked me to walk with him, and
when we were by the river opened upon Restwell.  "Had I thought--?"

I said that I knew that we were dreadfully in debt, but that I
thought that Aunt Sarah and I might yet manage to pay the interest.

"It was your idea to remain at Restwell and farm?"

I said that I didn't see anything else to do.

"Is it more for Sarah, or for yourself?"

I said that I supposed that it was for both.  But at any rate, Aunt
Sarah wouldn't be happy elsewhere.

"But you could be so?"

"How can I feel just now that I would be happy anywhere? ... Yes, I
suppose so.  But it is pointed out, sir, that I should stay here and
try to pay the debts and keep the place."

"No.  It is only one way pointed out, Michael!  Now listen to me a
bit.  I've always recognized in you a spring of joy and strength.
You've got the root of genuine growth.  You won't be unhappy long,
and you'll carry with you wherever you go all that you want out of
the past, and no more than what you want.  You've got the faculty of
selection.  Now listen to me.  Carter Warringer and Harriet want to
buy Restwell."

It came to me with a positive physical shock and wrench.  I was being
uprooted.  I leaned against a tree; my feet clung, pressed into the
soil.  The river, the hills, the graveyard, the unseen house seemed
to strain with me.

Uncle John watched me without seeming to watch me.  He spoke on in
his good, manly, genial voice.  "It seems to us the simplest and best
thing, Michael.  The Warringers have been looking for a country
place.  Harriet has a natural love for Restwell.  She is extremely
anxious that the matter shall go through.  It provides for Sarah.
She will simply live on here in her own room and place.  Daddy
Guinea, Mammy--nothing of that kind will be changed.  The Warringers
do not mean to give up the Richmond house.  They will be there in the
winter-time, and Sarah with them, if she likes it so.  If she does
not, you know, Michael, and she knows, that there is always
Flowerfield.  More than that, Warringer would take on Wilson Reynolds
as manager, giving him and his wife the old overseer's house.  Sarah
is fond of Mrs. Reynolds; if she wishes she can stay at Restwell even
in the winter.  Harriet has talked to Sarah, and she is content.  She
thinks that it will be better for you.  She thinks about you just as
you think about her.  Carter Warringer is making money.  He is quite
able to buy the place and to clear off at once the mortgages.  It
isn't a favor to the situation.  He and Harriet have got a strong
desire for Restwell....  Of course, it won't be the old Restwell.
Still, Harriet's the colonel's daughter, your father's sister.
Carter and Royal and Dorothea are your close kin....  I think the
price should be about this figure."  He named it.  "That will clear
the place and take care, besides, of your debt to Warringer.  What is
left--it won't be much--should be invested for Sarah, with only
enough kept out to put you through the university and maintain you
until you are earning for yourself.  Between us, Warringer and I can
certainly find you an opening.  After that, I haven't the slightest
doubt of your making your way....  It really is the only thing,
Michael!  There is a heavier load of debt than we thought.  You could
not keep the place from being sold.  This way it goes still to Forths
and Sarah's happiness is cared for."

I said, hoarsely, that I wanted to do what was right....

General Warringer bought Restwell.

They did not come to it that year.  Repairs were in order, much
refitting and refurnishing.  General Warringer or Aunt Harriet came
from time to time.  But for the greater part of the summer Aunt Sarah
and I bided alone together under the old roof.  Wilson Reynolds was
in the manager's house, and more men in the fields than I ever
remembered there.  I was fond of Wilson, but I did not work with him
nor with Ahasuerus and Mandy's Jim, as I had been used to doing.  I
offered to do this, but Aunt Harriet had said, with decision, "I had
rather you wouldn't, Michael...."  The Dallases would have had Aunt
Sarah and me come to Flowerfield, but she did not wish it, and I did
not wish it--not this summer.  Had I felt an aching absence between
Miriam and me I might have wished it.  But I felt Miriam here--here
at Restwell.  That was a passion now and again of the body, but
steadfastly--steadfastly--of the Idea.

Aunt Sarah and I lived dreamy months at Restwell.  I say "dreamy,"
and yet that is not the word.

What is the word, I wonder?

I lay in the graveyard under the oak.  Aunt Sarah, who had been
cutting dead bloom from the Seven Sisters' rose, came and sat near
me.  A fleet of clouds sailed in a deep-blue sky, a wind tempered
June warmth.  Aunt Sarah looked at the graves and at the cross
without a mound, and then into the sky--not up into the sky, but into
the levels which ran with our hilltop.  "The dead come inside of us,"
she said, "come home inside of us!  Just as they feel now that we
have come inside them--come home inside them.  Waves back into the
sea--our sea--touching everywhere! ... What is accomplished,
everywhere and always, is a distillation, an elixir of life, free to
all....  I've reached to that with my finger-tips."  She smiled, and
her smile, I thought, had new beauty, the dawn of a golden humor.
"Just," she said, "as you all have beautifully, lovingly, cared for
my staying here, I touch with my finger-tips, I begin to draw myself
to where it truly does not much matter to me if I stay or go!  And
that is not," she said, "that I do not truly love resting here at
Restwell, for I do....  And I love the goodness of all of you, as I
love the goodness of those we said were dead."  She watched the sky.
"It is simple when once you find the key--your own key....  The
ever-stored elixir of life....  They are safe with us, as we are safe
with them."

I understood her.  I felt that way at times about the world, near and
far.

At any rate, I ceased to trouble about Aunt Sarah's happiness.  And,
this summer, I struggled with and threw a squalid jealousy that I
felt of the Warringers--more of Carter, Royal, and Dorothea, than of
the parents who had been the buyers of Restwell.  My mother helped me
here....

I was to return to the university and end, this year, my training
there.  By next June I should be an engineer, earning my living,
mining out my career ... somewhere.  Faring forth, independence, the
world outside the boy's round--all these stood and sang to me, no
evil sirens!  I was bent to go with them.

And then in late August Aunt Kate came to Restwell.  With her came
Miriam.

Miriam was slender, dark and straight, healthful, rightly energized.
She would walk ten miles without hesitation; she rode well as she
danced well, swam and skated well.  She had wit, could tell finely a
good story; could mimic, but rarely did it unkindly.  Back of her wit
lay a clear mind and beautiful, guided moods.  She had a hand upon
herself.

I was so free now from having to work that she and I might, and did,
roam afar.  Aunt Kate watched us go.  I think that she and Major
Dallas both guessed that we fitted together.  I think that any
skilled soul watching us would know that.  I think that Madam Black
had known it when we went to school to her.  But Aunt Kate and Uncle
John said nothing--and doubtless they did not know how closely we
could fit, and probably, as parents will, they thought of us as being
children still.

And Miriam and I had not yet said, "Let us be together on every
plane!"

We wandered to the river, we followed it up or down in a boat that I
had.  I got a horse for her from Whitechurch, and she upon Elf and I
upon Boreas rode to far points.  We took a book and read aloud to
each other in the garden, in the summer-house, or in the shade of our
huge linden-tree.  In the evening we sat by the white pillars upon
the porch, the steps between us, and watched the fireflies.

But I began to ache for Miriam and Miriam for me.

Then, suddenly, Aunt Kate took her away.  She had written, I think,
to Uncle John.  At any rate, she had a letter from him one morning,
and, an hour later, she spoke to me upon the porch where I stood
waiting for Miriam.  We had planned to spend the morning in the boat,
drifting along under the willows.  "Major Dallas writes that company
is coming and that Catherine and Lewis are running wild.  I've
determined, Michael, to go to-morrow instead of next Monday.  Miriam
says don't wait for her to-day.  She's helping me pack."

Aunt Kate's voice was perfectly kind, but I caught the thread of
decision.  "You are children.  You are first cousins.  Do not let us
kindle here a great fire until we know where we are and what we are
about!  Perhaps I ought not to have brought Miriam."

So they went the next day.

The night after she was gone I sat by the window in my room and laid
plans....  When I left the university I should be twenty-one.  Having
studied hard, having had some equipment to bring to the studying,
having incentive, having will, I meant, when that formal preparation
was over, to work hard, to earn, to make my name to be spoken when
experts spoke of engineering.  I should be away from Restwell--away
from the county, and from Flowerfield's county--away, perhaps, from
Virginia....  Engineering: that was the art of turning streams and
reservoirs of power to human use....  General Warringer had vaguely
spoken of coal-lands, South and West, in which he was interested.  I
did not know where I might go.  Very good!  But before I went Miriam
and I must put forth in words that we wished to marry.  Put it forth
for ourselves, Aunt Kate and Uncle John, everybody....  What would be
the salary that we could live upon, hardily brought up, knowing how
to be simple and to do things ourselves, as we did?  I pondered, then
set a figure.  How long--three years, four years, five years--before
I should earn it?  Certainly we must wait....  But when I went to
Flowerfield next summer we were going to talk about it.  I was
settled as to that.

I sat in the window.  The moon shone bright, the night was filled
with the papery, minute, ecstatic voice of an insect world.  Beauty
flowed in upon me....  I saw that beauty was wide love.

My mother came toward me, and with her my father.  I saw them as
lovers, and behind them others, and others, and others.  Everything,
everybody loved.  I touched the garden of it through the universe.
The universe was the garden.

The sense of Drama lifted and surged in me.  I ached with the falling
away of love--for and with the dying suns ... cold ... dark.  I
endeavored for and with all who endeavored to maintain radiance, or,
darkened, endeavored to regain, relume.  I knew great bliss when the
energy streamed and lifted.  All love....  Red suns--golden
suns--great, white, intense suns, the high lovers, who loved lovers,
loved love....  The highest Sun--nurse, mother and father and lover
of all--the reaper, the gatherer, feaster, the Eternal Laborer and
Enjoyer, the immortal Lover and Beloved together!

I sat in the window and knew old Vaughan's "bright shoots of
everlastingness."




CHAPTER XIII

The following summer John and I, Phillip Garrett, Royal Warringer,
Conrad Conrad, and a number beside, graduated from the university.
John saw before him the management of Flowerfield, and, if he cared
for it, a partnership with his father.  Phillip was for the law.  But
for him the law would prove but a stepping-stone to political life.
Conrad, who had a little money, was boldly, flat-footedly, for
travel.  When the money gave out he proposed journalism.  Royal had
no immediate plans.

Major Dallas came to the university to see John and me step from
formal tuition into a massive, unofficial school.  How green was the
lawn, the trees, how white the pillars, how warmly fragrant the air,
how kindly, intoxicating, the ceremonies, the farewells! ... Arrived
the moment when Uncle John, knocking at my door, was asked to enter
and given the one good chair.  I leaned against the mantel.  "I
wanted a moment to ourselves, Michael....  You've done mighty well!
We're proud of you.  We're sure of you."

I thanked him.

"Has Warringer spoken to you?"

"Yes.  He says I may have the place of assistant engineer at Landon."

"Just so.  Does it please you?"

I thought.  "Yes.  It's a long way off, but they say it's a big
field.  I should wish to earn promotion, sir."

"If you earn it you'll get it.  The Landon concern has alliances all
over the country.  You'll find passages open.  Well!  Do your
derndest, boy!  Keep honest--keep kind--keep open to the big waves.
You'll go, Carter says, to Landon in the fall.  He proposed that in
the mean time you come to them at Restwell."

"Yes."

"I told Carter that it was natural that that might be painful to you.
I suggested that you go to them for two or three weeks, but then come
to Flowerfield."

"Thank you, uncle.  Conrad is going on a riding trip from one end of
the valley to the other.  He had asked me to go with him, and I
should like that.  Then if I might stay ten days at Restwell, and
then come to Flowerfield--"

"All that's feasible.  All right!"

I went and sat by the table near him.  "I want to come to
Flowerfield, uncle, but I want you and Aunt Kate to know something
first....  I love Miriam.  I want to marry her--just as soon as I can
make and keep a home.  We haven't spoken about it, but I am sure that
she loves me and wants to marry me."

Uncle John, his elbow on the table, shaded his eyes with his hand.
We sat very still.  Laughter of men and women floated over the lawn,
June groups going by....  I experienced, suddenly, strongly, the
feeling of Miriam with me.  I could have said, "Miriam!"  I could
have expected to hear her answer, "Michael!"  Uncle John dropped his
hand.  "Well, I can't say that I am surprised, for I'm not.  Neither
Kate nor I....  Any one seeing you together must see that you and
Miriam are happy together.  Your differences don't seem to make any
difference....  There's a feeling against first cousins marrying.  I
don't know whether it's right or not."

"It's right for us to marry," I said.

He smiled.  "I suppose any cousin-couple would say that! ... Well, I
shouldn't put it in your way if you truly love each other, and I
believe that you do.  But you'll have to wait, Michael.  I wouldn't
hear to your marrying before you were twenty-six."

I took his hand and the eyes of both of us were wet.  "It's all
right.  It's all right!" he said.  "You'll come to Flowerfield, and
you and Miriam may talk it out together....  The world's built so--we
take our turn at the building--to be good builders, that's the
desideratum!"

I went home with Conrad from the university.  General Warringer and
Aunt Harriet were so good as to send Boreas to me there, Ahasuerus
bringing him.  Conrad's home held sisters and genial parents.  We had
a week of country gaiety, after which we set forth, like knights of
old, upon that planned riding-jaunt.  We meant to see good part of
our state, to wander for a month.  Around and about, we might cover
some hundreds of miles.  Riding so was an old fashion in Virginia,
beginning now to fade with the tournaments, the barbecues, the
camp-meetings, and twenty other features of the fields behind us.

Conrad was Conrad Conrad, though now he thought that he was Poe come
again, and now darkly hinted at some earlier wight.  Dark, not tall,
slight, he was intent upon wearing his hair somewhat long and upon
growing on lip and chin an imperial like Poe's.  He wished, besides,
to wear a cloak instead of an overcoat.  Occasionally he tried to get
drunk, but he did not really like whisky.  As years went on he
dropped the Poe and was content to be Conrad.  The latter had
idiosyncrasies enough to please him, without borrowing.

Conrad and I had great bouts of talk, alternating with as equally
great, long and significant riots of silence.  In some things each
was the extreme of the other and so we met.  I liked him, and I
suppose that he liked me.  I did not have to see everything as he saw
it, but it interested me, what he saw.

So we rode green miles through Virginia in very good fellowship.  The
country lay beautiful, around, behind, before us.  We slept in small
towns of red-brick and frame houses, abounding in trees, or in
farm-houses that were taking on a prosperous air.  By 1882 Virginia
wore a different look from that war-worn look I could remember.  The
South was beginning to prosper.  As we rode we saw schools building,
paint going on houses, fences standing whole, roads slowly bettering.
Persons whom we met bore a cheerful aspect.  An old farmer told us:
"Yes, by gosh!  Times air surely improving.  Reckon we've pulled out
of the mudhole!"

Conrad grumbled.  We had another long, free silence, then out he came
with his advocacy of the crumbled and broken-down.  He was a lover, I
told him, of vestigial remains.  He grinned.  "Well, you go in for
germinal things!  If I see the one, you go poking around for the
other!  You don't rest in this landscape, either.  If it wasn't for
your very comfortable, earthy sense of earthy drama you'd float--or
perhaps fly!"

"If you hadn't built a raft out of a kind heart and a sense of
harmony--down you'd sink!"

"I don't know about that.  Look at that terrible house!  They've
fresh painted the house, and not only that, they've painted the fence
and the horse-block and the well, and not only that, they've painted
the trees!"

"They've mended the chimney, too!"

"There's a great career in truly going in for dilapidation."

I whistled as I rode; then I said, "If you'd turn you might become
Lord Mayor of London."

"That is, there's as vast the other way."

"Vaster."

"Well, I don't know," said Conrad.  "At any rate, I don't like paint
on trees, and I don't believe that you do, either."

He showed me much as we traveled.  He had a gift for the elusive, the
just to be perceived then vanished.  "Thought forms--affection
forms," he called them, even then.  His range of color was
extraordinary.  He showed me hues and combinations of which I had not
been aware.  He saw something through the dismal and ugly.  He had an
influx of enthusiasm for neglected territories which removed the
neglect, gave them life, made them shine with a weird, metallic or
vegetative beauty.  The same thing poured over a decrepit horse, over
wandering swine, over a cur dog which ran along the roadside.  At
last I caught the key--the gipsy, wild, aromatic, piteous values.
First and last, Conrad gave me much.  Everybody and everything gave
me much.

We had no hard and fast route.  From the Valley pike, up and down
which had marched the weary armies, blue and gray, we turned aside
through New Market Gap to the Caverns of Luray.  We also went to
Wier's Cave, near Staunton.  After that, riding southward, we visited
the Natural Bridge.

We felt what it was, in these caverns, to be in the deeps of the
earth.  We breathed the unmoving air, mortally still and cold; tasted
beyond our candle rim the thick dark; saw the stony shapes, the
stalactites and stalagmites.  When we struck them, uncouth echoes
were about us.  There flowed underground water.  We felt dark height
above, and guessed that there was a roof to us that was a floor to
beings who walked in a different world.  When we came out the rushing
air, the heat, the light, were for an appreciable time excessive,
painful.  It had been Conrad's whim to stay within the earth
longer--much longer--than did the usual visitor, and he had paid our
guide to cease descriptions and engage in silence.

Coming to the Natural Bridge, we found there a hotel filled with
summer folk, and among them two or three acquaintances.  We were
welcomed with empressement--young men at summer resorts are always so
welcomed.  We saw pretty girls upon the porches, flitting in and out
of rooms.  We caught a glimpse of a tennis-court.  Colored musicians,
somewhere in the background, were tuning fiddles.  Almost immediately
a great supper-bell rang.  The pretty girls came into the dining-room
in thin silk or fine muslin dresses.  If I remember correctly, it was
the period of the polonaise.  Conrad's and my acquaintances
introduced us to heads of families and to their bright daughters.  It
appeared that there was to be a dance, and that we were counted upon.
Fortunately, we had each with us a small portmanteau.  We danced, and
there was a long porch for promenading, and steps and dusky angles
where groups of two might sit and murmur, and starlight and a
midnight moon, and around all the place the herding shapes of the
Blue Ridge.  The fiddlers fiddled, we danced the lancers and we
waltzed.  There was punch.  But dancing and all were held within
bounds.  Conrad and I had been in bed two hours when the cocks began
to crow and the summer dawn overlaid stars and moon.

The coming day was the Fourth of July.  During and after the war the
South had scantly or not at all celebrated this day.  But now it had
come to be that the Fourth had stolen back, and this summer throng
was going to celebrate it.

In the afternoon the country people were expected to come in.  The
hotel chanced temporarily to shelter a political light.  The light
had consented to shine.  We were to have a Fourth of July oration.
At night a novel thing would be done.  Paper lanterns were being hung
from the hotel to the gorge of Cedar Creek and down the steep path to
the gorge floor where you stood and gazed upon the mighty rock
bridge.  Bonfires were heaping, above and below, and the bridge was
to be illuminated by Bengal lights.  There would be fireworks.

Conrad and I, descending, found ourselves counted upon in the office,
upon the long porch, in the dining-room.  There was to be a ramble
under the bridge, to the cave, as far as the Lace Falls.  Twenty
pretty girls and certainly not, without us, twenty swains!  I may say
at once that it would have been a shock to us if we had not been
counted upon....  My picture of the Natural Bridge of Virginia
remains wreathed about with morning-glories.

Returning to the hotel, we had dinner with Fourth of July features.

By two o'clock country phaetons, carry-alls, buggies, sulkies, were
arriving, together with horsemen and walkers.  A pleasant, friendly
country crowd spread itself over the lawn.  Without the white social
pale, within their own social pale, drawn under their own clump of
trees, there had gathered, too, to hear the speaking, a number of
colored folk.  Speaking over, they would not further mix, but would
go on to their church, some distance away, where under the pine-trees
they would have their own festival.  At night they might come back
and look at the bridge when it was illuminated.  Where the two colors
came into chance neighborhood there fell neither harshness nor
sullenness of greeting.  That was due, perhaps, on both sides, to
some genialness of inner climate.

Apparently the management at the Natural Bridge would outdo itself.
It had provided a brass band, though a diminutive brass band.  Now
this discoursed music, "Dixie," "The Star-spangled Banner," "Yankee
Doodle."  The war was over by seventeen years.

The orator appeared.  He had the build--tall, spare frame, great
chest, smooth face, hair worn just a little longer than was the
fashion.  He had the voice.  He had the tradition.  And, a most
fortunate plus, he had a fair share of insight and foresight.

He spoke from the steps of the hotel, the summer guests massed in the
porch to right and left, the country gathering taking the foreground
of grass and driveway, checkered with light and shade.  The brass
band ended "Hail, Columbia," a gentleman of the old school introduced
the orator.  We all applauded.  Lord Orator bowed to all....
Virginia and the Revolution--Rockbridge County--Nature's Triumphal
Arch at hand--George Washington who had climbed and cut his name far
up upon it--Thomas Jefferson who often had ridden here to gaze upon
it, who had called it in his Notes "the most sublime of Nature's
works"--soldiers and statesmen who had gazed upon it--and now we, my
friends--

Presently he was fingering the ancient thread of triumph over old
Mother England.  It was in the Fourth of July repertory of orators.
This one overdid it less than others I have heard.  Nor was he
wildly, loosely, childishly spread-eagle.  A change had come or was
coming to the best of the type.  There was state spread-eagleism and
United States spread-eagleism.  In Virginia inevitably still, at this
period, it was state spread-eagleism--Southern spread-eagleism.  But
he muted it, used the soft pedal.  Even when he talked of the
Confederacy.  He did not fight the war all over again.  He quoted
Wordsworth--

  "Old, unhappy, far-off things
    And battles long ago,"

and left it at that.  Presently he really was panegyrizing the whole
country.  It had to be a panegyric, being the Fourth of July.  He had
a word of good for New England, two for the Middle States, three for
the unrolling West.  Vaguely might be seen above him the angel of
rapprochement, of unification, He spoke more and more appreciatively
of the United States of America.  A sense of enlarged being, a sense
of nation, really stretched and shimmered around us, through us.

Emerson and Longfellow had died this year.  The Fourth of July
speaker at the Natural Bridge in Virginia gave them a meed.  They
were "ours."  The Greely Expedition battled with Arctic seas.  He
spoke of "when we gain the Pole."  There were Apache risings in
Arizona.  He spoke of "our" settlers out there.  The East was
beginning, accumulatively, to know labor troubles.  He said, "I don't
see the outcome for the country, but we'll hope for the best"--not,
of course, that he said it short and unadorned like that.  "The
country."  The phrase, slowly, bashfully, came in in place of "My
state."

There occurred even an adumbration of a wider unity.  He closed his
hour's speech with something about "mankind."

There was applause.  The band played "Dixie," "Yankee Doodle," "The
Star-spangled Banner."

A lawyer from Lexington spoke.  Plans and purposes of very huge
moment of the Democratic party.  There was applause.  The band played
"Home, Sweet Home."

Dusk sifted into the air, but with warmth yet and a faint glowing.
The Chinese lanterns were lighted, there leaped a bonfire at the rim
of the ravine.  A ragged procession, here thick, here dwindled to an
Indian file, crossed the plateau of the hotel and cottages and,
beginning to descend, dipped beneath conifers--_Thuja occidentalis_,
arbor-vitæ--which may have been standing when Columbus discovered
America.  Some of the figures themselves bore lanterns; below by the
creek another bonfire flamed.  Above, around, below, the craggy gorge
with the bridge of rock was thrown into moving shadows and faint
ruddy light.

The procession, breaking, established itself wherever was
vantage-ground.  Conrad and I, counted upon still, found a nook for
four.  Up and down spread a Doré illustration.  The fireworks began,
sent from the plateau above.  The band still played.  Roman candles
shook forth bright planets.  Rockets rising with energy curved far
up, broke in stars red, green, and silver.  The Chinese lanterns
bobbed with delight.  Up and down, bass, barytone, tenor, contralto,
soprano, voices and voices rose into a chirping, singing sound.  The
great-boled trees, ever green, may have thought of old Indian
acquaintances, of bear and wolf and panther, of parent and
grandparent trees who held tradition of still a different earth.  And
yet all through had held the chirping, singing sound.  Old and old
and old--we are so old!

Down by the creekside dark figures touched off the colored light.
The water, the tree masses, the seamed cliff, the arch of rock two
hundred feet above the stream it spanned, turned fire-red, turned
living orange.  Ah!  Ah!

The lights sank.  A final lonely rocket burst into a last group of
stars.  The band had done its duty and its wages' worth; it wasn't
going to play any more.  In the Chinese lanterns the candles guttered
down.  There was indicated much helping up steep ways of those who
counted upon us.  The trees of life saw us go, settling back to their
cool dark dream under the stars.  Back upon the level before the
hotel the wheels of all the country vehicles seemed in motion.
Shadowy horsemen pushed away.  After the Bengal lights, all the dark
seemed spectral.

In the morning Conrad and I, too, rode away.  We quitted the place in
the sunshine, after breakfast, the porch filled with genial
summerers.  The twenty pretty maidens waved farewell, the young men
whom we left behind us grinned cheerfully.  We looked as well in the
saddle as we knew how--we rode away, riding over the Natural Bridge,
plunging into the green day.  We were for the Peaks of Otter.




CHAPTER XIV

Crossing James River in an ancient flat-bottomed, open ferry-boat, we
rode at leisure through the July weather, dined at a farm-house, and
in the golden afternoon light, by a road sufficiently long, rough,
and steep, climbed the mountain.  Well below the rocky top we found a
makeshift shed with spring water, and with hay piled in a corner.
Boreas and Conrad's mare Jenny we left here and climbed on afoot.  At
the top stood a cabin and stood watching us the solitary caretaker.
He greeted us, "Evenin'!"

"Evening!" we answered.

"I'm not," he said, "the regular man.  He's taking his Fourth of
July.  But I reckon I kin make you comfortable."

The hut was not remarkably clean, but we would not let that trouble
us.  The man set about filling the stove with wood.  "You-all take
coffee?  I kin make good coffee."

We left him making it and went without to see the sunset.  A great
boulder propped us.  Four thousand feet in air, we looked and saw the
cone shadow of the mountain lying purple upon the land.  We sat and
gazed.  "We've got a fair earth!  Look at the geometry of it--the
circle and the cone."

Conrad answered, "It's a 'tarnation queer place--old earth!"

The sun sank, but great rays, lanes of light in the sky, spread like
an open fan.  The Chinese lanterns of last night came into mind.
"Variousness!" said Conrad.  "My God! what an Artist!"

The air changed its quality, a carpet of violets covered the earth,
Venus was born in the western gold sea.  The caretaker spoke from
behind us.  "I thought maybe you'd like your coffee and bread out
here," and put down upon the rock a battered tray.  There were three
cups and three plates and we sat and ate together.  He was a man of
thirty-five, long, tawny, with blue eyes and a drooping tawny
mustache.  He had a drawling voice like dropping honey.  When we had
eaten and drunk he piled the dishes upon the tray and set it aside,
then leaning back against the boulder, lit a brier-root pipe.  By now
he knew our names and whence we had ridden and where we were going.
We knew, too, his name, and that he had a bit of a farm, and that he
had been in the war the last year, when he was seventeen, and had
been wounded at Cold Harbor, and hadn't any education beyond a little
free schooling, but wished that he had.  He was married and had
children.

There was yet coral in the sky.  Below us, in the vast expanse of
hill and vale flattened by our height, lights, separate and small,
were twinkling forth.  The day had been warm, and the night up here
struck only pleasantly cool, like July water.  "You see a right fair
slice of Virginia," said the man.  "Thar!  Did you see that
shooting-star?"

It was a considerable meteor and dripped gold.  Ship and wake went
out.  "You've been to the university," said the man.  "I wish you'd
tell me what that is--"

One of us told him what the text-books said.  "That's interestin',"
he remarked and smoked his pipe.  "I take spells of wonderin'....  A
smashed-up earth--a-shootin' for ages in little pieces here and there
as it gets drawn.  Well--"

He and Conrad smoked.  I did not smoke.  We all watched the sky where
now the stars were pressing thickly.  "I was raised a Baptist," said
the caretaker.  "I've got an inquirin' mind, and I gather that all
kinds of strange notions are goin' around.  Do you believe in
damnation?"

I said I didn't--not in the old way.  Conrad said he didn't know.  I
said that I thought I believed in occasional, finite
damnations--temporary damnations, so to speak.

"But they could last a long time?"

I agreed as to that.  "And one might tumble into them again and
again."

"But you don't believe in hell-fire?"

I said that I thought that was a metaphor.  But that it might get
mighty near reality sometimes.

"Damned near!" said the man.  "Well, who do you think damns you--or
saves you?"

I said that I thought that I did.

"That's the way I twist," said the tawny man.  "Times air changing!
We're like the past and we ain't just like it....  Old Daddy
Religion's got a son that appears to him somehow different!  Might as
well own him.  That's what I tell the preachers when they get after
me."

Conrad yawned.

  "I heard much talk of it about and about,
  But where I went in I still came out!

Listen to the locusts in those bushes!  They haven't stopped talking
since Troy fell!"

"I've got a habit of thinkin' and thinkin'," said the tawny man.
"Kind of rememberin' and rememberin'....  Anyhow, I believe in
kindness!"

We looked again around us--Scorpio in the south, the Bear in the
north, the Eagle in the east, the Lion in the west, and right
overhead the Crown.  The tawny man took up the tray of dishes and we
all moved to the cabin.  I have slept in better beds, but Conrad and
I were tired and we slept.  Waking once or twice, I heard without the
window the locusts still talking.

We were up for the sunrise.  The man called us while the stars still
lighted the sky, and gave us hot coffee and corn-cakes.  He had been
down, he told us, to the horses and had watered and fed them.  We ate
and drank, the thin light stealing in.  Then we went out again to our
boulder, but faced now the east.  Silver--silver and
amethyst--amethyst; a cloud shoal turning gold, in the forest below
us bird song, then the sun and the hollow of the air and the earth
beneath warm and sheen....  So we said good-by to the tawny man, paid
our reckoning, ran down the rough way to Boreas and Jenny, and in the
saddle again departed the mountain.

We rode and we rode on through Virginia, and we saw our state a
lovely country, aiming at being lovelier--lovelier--lovelier, body
and soul!

In two weeks more Conrad and I bade each other good-by.  He rode to
his own home, and I to Restwell.

I came to Restwell in a shimmery, warm afternoon.  Uncle Carter and
Aunt Harriet were very kind.

I had my old room....  I rose when the cocks were crowing, dressed,
and, letting myself out, went over the gray fields to the graveyard.
I saw the dawn from there, lying with my head upon my mother's grave.

That afternoon I came here again with Aunt Sarah....  Aunt Sarah and
I clung together, though not with any bodily touch.  It was one of
her "ways," the standing aside from all that.  I never saw her give
physical caress or embrace, or invite caress or embrace.  But her
spirit hovered, inclosed, was kind.

She said that she was happy--that they let alone her island,
respected territorial waters.  "They're the best--the very best--of
Nineveh, Babylon, and Rome!  They let me go softly in my far
Atlantides."  We sat beneath the oak, and then she took the dead
bloom from the roses, and I held the basket for her as of old.

Dorothea, Carter, and Royal were at home.  Royal was more to me than
were the others--for all that there was a picket fence somewhere
which, from his side, he refused to cross, and I from my side
refused.  But there was something of the colossal in Royal that must
be recognized.  He made me think of a vast, tireless, mental rather
than physical bull-god--Apis who was acting very simply, according to
his nature, and yet was big ... and feared ... and sacrificed to, and
on some sides certainly might be admired--and even loved.

I had a strange feeling about Royal.  Now he attracted me and now he
repelled.  Either way, I understood him.  It seemed to me that far
down time we had been nearer together.  I did not seek him again, but
I felt the pull of him.

Carter was a smaller person altogether--amiable, a little weak.  He
was a handsome fellow, with an agreeable voice, and he danced well
and was talkative and Aunt Harriet's idol.  His father was ambitious
for him, his eldest son, named for him.  But by degrees it grew
evident that Carter might adorn a fortune, or a society built on
fortunes, but that he could neither make a fortune nor strongly help
others to make one.  He was able to spend.  He was good-natured, and
I do not know that he ever did any especial harm.

Dorothea was another proposition.  I did not know whether I liked or
disliked Dorothea.  She had a sultry beauty, and an arrogance that
fitted her like a low-lying haze, a misty, heat atmosphere.  Out of
this started at times twisted beauties of thought or deed....

My cousins meant to be kind and were kind.  There must have been a
general agreement that it would be hard for me to return so to
Restwell, and that it must be made to seem like home and family.
They did their best.  I was not, I hope, ungrateful.

There were guests besides myself.  The Warringers kept the house
filled, entertained with something of the old before-the-war
lavishness.  Here were two sons and a daughter who must be persuaded
not to miss the Old White and Old Point.  Aunt Harriet liked, too,
many and young faces about her.

Twice or thrice I rode into Whitechurch.  There I saw Mr. Millwood
and everybody else--and Doctor Young, to whom I did not speak of
Gamaliel--and Mr. Gilbert, the druggist, to whom I did.  Gamaliel
still lived in Baltimore, earning and studying with a chemist there.
He wrote to me, but less frequently than at first he had written.  In
his last letter, after a paragraph of surface details, he had
suddenly dropped a line and written: "How long and wide have we
lived, anyhow?  Where do we begin or stop, or are beginning and
stopping words of ignorance?  I am going to work until I find
out--possibly after I find out."

Mr. Gilbert showed me a letter from the Baltimore chemist.  Gilbert's
drug-store had before it a vast horse-chestnut, giving in summer a
solid shade.  The place rests in mind forever dim and cool, small,
old-time, dispensing few articles besides drugs, having no throng of
customers.  One went down a step to go in at the door.  A bell rang,
the door opened, there came a waft of odors compounded so that one
caught far times and far lands.  A gnomelike, bright-eyed, elderly
man shuffled in from a back room.  Something that tasted of eternity
was in the place.

The Baltimore chemist stated that Gamaliel Young was getting on very
well.  He attended to business and in his odd hours studied hard.  "I
should say that he had a streak of genius--but he's as unsociable as
any hermit-crab!  He's got some queer associates.  They aren't wild,
except in their thinking.  They're wild enough there!"

Mr. Gilbert folded the letter.  "Sampson's a good man, but he's a
pedant.  He doesn't know eaglets when he sees them."

I said: "I think Gamaliel's an eaglet.  I'm glad that you think so,
too, sir."

"I don't know what, precisely, he's hunting.  But he's a seeker, all
right."

"He wants to find what he _is_--what we _are_," I said.

"Does he?  Well, that's a considerable job!" said the druggist.  "See
if you can find what we are not!  When he's as old as I am he'll be
content if he has laid hand upon one new land.  It takes a fleet made
up of fleets to find the universe!"

"In short, it takes the universe."

"Quite so! ... Well, and Michael, you're to be an engineer--"

Going out of town that day, I overtook Mr. Millwood upon the road to
Restwell, driving himself in an old buggy.  He said that he wanted to
talk to me, and so, dismounting, I fastened Boreas behind the vehicle
and took my seat beside our old family friend.  He talked about
Landon and the kind of place they said it was, and about my going
away, and about my mother and grandfather.  But what he most wanted
to say was that he hoped that I would take the Lord Jesus with me.

Now I truly loved Jesus of Nazareth, but I could not talk nor think
of Him as Mr. Millwood talked and thought, as Mr. Millwood wished me
to talk and think.  So it ended in silence on my part.  Mr. Millwood
sighed.  "One day you will know and love Him, Michael!  A young man
may keep on hardening his heart, but the Lord is the Lord and will
break it in His hands!"

I said: "That sounds like Doctor Young, Mr. Millwood.  I don't
suppose that I love Jesus well enough--that's true.  But I profoundly
do not feel that He's my enemy nor that I am His enemy.  I feel,
instead, that we are friends."

"But you must see that He is your Lord and Saviour!  If you do not
see that, you see nothing!"

As we jogged on I had a vision of Canaan and Galilee, and of a young
Jewish man who walked in and out of little villages and talked with
the folk, or who sat solitary on hillsides or by the blue water.  He
came warm against my heart.  I could feel a brown, lean, strong hand
in mine, a hand with grip and meaning.  I could and did feel for Him
love and vast reverence, but I could not feel that He alone was Only
God.  I could feel the Christ Idea, that had always been in the
world, nearer Him, not so near to me, and to that extent He was
diviner than me.  The extent might be huge.  He might be adult and I
a babe.  But Idea is free ocean and free atmosphere.  I, too, swam
and flew toward myself as Risen Man.

Nor do I think that there was, this sunny day, more pride and self in
me, sitting there, than in the old priest of the temple who had
baptized me and who now quite sorrowfully believed that, despite it,
he might have eventually to number me among the lost.  But Mr.
Millwood's imagination was not the imagination of Doctor Young.  He
could not devise a great lurid picture of the damned like the sands
of the sea for number, and of hell like an illimitable Inquisition
torture-chamber.  He felt discomfiture, some anger and solicitude.
But he was an optimistic, cheerful, ruddy man, and he could not
dislike me long, nor really picture me as sawn asunder and sawn
asunder again, or plunged into scalding oil in an eternal sequence of
horror.  Before we came to the new bridge across the river he was
once more discoursing of Landon and the temptations and dangers,
broadcast before young men, which he trusted I would avoid.  "But you
will!" he said.  "Your father and mother, and grandfather and
grandmother have saved you from that."

So we came to Restwell.  He missed old faces, but he was fond of Aunt
Harriet and she was fond of Mr. Millwood.

I stayed at Restwell three weeks.  It was not only the big house and
those in it, but it was Daddy Guinea and Mammy and Mandy's Jim and
Ahasuerus.  I loved these four a little more vigorously than I loved
Uncle Carter and Aunt Harriet--and, I may think, just as dutifully.
I should hardly see Daddy Guinea again on this stretch of the way.
No one knew how old he was, but he was very old.  He would talk a
little, but then he would sit on the doorstep in long silences.  I
sat with him, and I fell to looking back of him into Africa--back of
the fields, the slave-markets, the slave-ships, the enslavers, back,
back--back of the Guinea Coast into the center....  And the white
man, back, back, back--and here, too, were forests and miry, steamy
river bottoms and naked skins and the whirling rattle.  There came
into my memory Blake's "The Little Black Boy."  My mother read it to
me more than twice or thrice when I was little.

  And those black bodies, and this sunburnt face,
  Are but a cloud and like a shady grove ...
  When I from black, and he from white cloud freed ...

And I thought of untruth and ungenerosity and unlove, clothed in
whatever color it might be, and of the relativity of all things.




CHAPTER XV

I went on to Flowerfield.  The singing house still sang.  I tasted
its richness and simpleness.  It was so big and uncluttered, so
largely, wealthily itself.  Uncle John and Aunt Kate were the nearest
now to father and mother.  Catherine and Lewis had a bright, flashing
quality, skimming about like birds.  They went after their own
devices.  Old loved John showed preoccupied this summer.  Winds that
blew him toward Green view, nine miles away, where lived Amy Page,
were good winds, great, balmy trade-winds.  Other winds left him
inattentive.  He was at Greenview, or on the road to Greenview, or on
the road from Greenview.

Miriam and I went together.  That was old times keeping on.  But now
there had fallen down from heaven a full, strange, added bliss.

We came out of the old school-room door and crossed to the tulip-tree
where hung the swing, long-roped, wide-seated.  It was my third
morning at Flowerfield.  In this part of the place we thought of
Madam Black.  Looking over our shoulder, we might almost see her in
the school-room door.  We came under the tulip-tree and looked up
into the green and towering cone where branches made many a section,
and then we sat in the swing.  "When we used to swing--up, up--out
and away!  Do you remember once when we and the swing and all seemed
to be flying?  There was such a thrill!"

"Yes, yes ... Thrill....  A big, blossoming feeling, everything
dawning!"  She closed her eyes and kept them shut for half a minute.
Opening them, she turned full to me.  "Michael!  I told father and
mother that I wanted to tell you myself.  I am going to Baltimore
next month.  I am going to be a nurse."

"To be a nurse--"

"Yes.  A trained nurse.  You know more and more women are doing that.
One can make it a kind of big work--if one chooses!  It's all in the
choosing....  I don't feel urged toward teaching school.  I'm not a
writer.  I've tried, and it isn't very good.  I haven't been to
college, and there aren't many things open to women....  Nursing is
certainly half of doctoring--of doctoring and healing.  Even if I had
been to college I should still like to doctor and heal.  There's a
real star shining along that lane of clouds.  So I am going, Michael!"

I was getting up all my luggage and following her.  "Why?"

"Why? ... I want to work and earn.  I want to learn more and other
things.  I want to be, I want to do--fuller and fuller.  I want to
take--I want to give.  I want better to know how to take and to give."

I said: "You work here; you help no end.  You're joy to Uncle John
and Aunt Kate.  Uncle John can carry all."

"Yes, yes!" said Miriam.  "But I am going out--I am going out of the
nest, Michael.  Wings mustn't always stay in nests.  Father and
mother agree.  They understand....  I don't know that I think about
it.  I feel about it.  At first, somewhere, sometime, I must have
thought about it.  But now I feel....  So I am going, Michael!"

She told the details of her plan.  She watched me as she talked.  I
was thinking only.  "We cannot marry before we are twenty-six.  Will
this come in that's way?"  I had to find out.  Catherine and Lewis
came skimming around the corner of the house.  I was rather glad.
Just here, before the house, was not the place in which to find out.

I said, "Will you come this afternoon to Wakerobin Hill?"

"Yes....  I'll be ready at four."

We moved under the great hemlocks on the purple, somber side of
Wake-robin Hill.  "Somber" is not the word; it was coolly, darkly
lifted, pillared and ample, a true natural temple.  Blue space waked,
far up, beyond the tracery of the roof.  An organ wind rose and fell,
but not in storms of sound.  There was incense.  One felt in the
place gathered means, gathered ends.  Purpose lifted from the throng
of small desires.  Cause stood whole in effect.

Miriam and I went to our most loved hemlock and sat down upon the
dim, purple carpet.  For some time we rested without words.  The
place took us as it always took us.  The fret and foam, eddies and
bubbles, the debris gathered and carried, still moved, outside, on
the surface of the current.  But here were to be felt the purified
strength and depth, the eternal dimensions, the immortal impetus.
Quiet so far from quietism, stillness so far from death, intension so
far from inaction....

We sat upon the earth.  We had not spoken for a considerable time.
Our inner being flowed together, with a deeper sense of a deeper
pulse.  Came a momentary vision again of that mighty machine we had
watched at the Centennial Exhibition.  So doubled and redoubled, so
strong, so eased....

Power and love and knowledge!  Two rays fused into one beam, and the
resultant richly conscious--

  "Sat we two, one another's best....
  Our souls--which to advance their state
  Were gone out--hung betwixt her and me."


Miriam understood and I understood.  When at last we said, "I love
you"--and I know not which said it first--it was but the deep music
playing on this stair, also, which had long been playing everywhere
else....  I do not know when Miriam and I first met and loved.  I do
not think there is any "when" or "first" about it.

We moved nearer together, we put our arms about each other, we
kissed....  We sat hand in hand, and the organ wind was like the
lifting, falling, forming, dissolving, reforming of earths and eons
... and ever wiser, more beautiful!

One red sunset shaft came into the hemlock wood by Wake-robin Hill.
We stirred--we must go back to Flowerfield.

Somewhere, going, we laid the specter of separation because she would
have knowledge, and use it, of nursing and healing.  The specter was
a rather weak-jointed, grotesque elemental.  We were not so easy to
separate as that came to!

We felt bliss--we saw our milestone on the way to All--All--All!
First, the integration that names itself the conscious individual.
Second, the integration that says, "We love together--we two are
one!"  Third ... is it family, clan, nation, world ... is it an
integration called Christ, on the way to God?

Miriam and I were happy--most happy.  But still we saw the star--some
star that drew.  Love must go there, love must broaden its beam.  We
must carry our love on--carry on...

We felt how it transfigured, how the rivers heard the ocean.


Early in September I parted from Flowerfield and all there, going to
Restwell again for a week, and thence out of Virginia, south and west
by some hundreds of miles, to Landon, where coal and iron were being
mined, where eventually steel would be made.  I went to a position
carrying, for a young man, a fair beginning salary.  Behind me was
General Warringer with his large interests.  I should be given
opportunity.  "For the rest, you'll have to do it yourself," said my
uncle.  "You can make or you can mar, you know!"  He sighed.  I
covered with mine his hand, lying before him on the table.  "You've
been good to me, Uncle Carter--"

Ahasuerus went with me to Landon.  He said that he did not want to
stay any longer at Restwell.  Miss Harriet and the general were
mighty good folk--but he didn't like it without the colonel and Miss
Cary.  Of course, if Miss Sarah wanted him--but she didn't seem to
need any one....  He thought that he could get a job down there where
Mr. Michael was going.  He'd like, he told me, to drive a big wagon.
He stood six feet and strong, an even, beautiful brown, with an open,
not at all unintelligent face.  He was older by some years than I,
but we had been in each other's landscape for a long, long time.  We
had played together and we had worked together.  I was fond of him,
and he was fond of me.  He had neither wife nor child.  He wanted to
go where I went, and at last it was so agreed.  He could read and
write, and he had that practical knowledge of basic economic
processes which many a college man might envy.  He was genial, as his
people are, happy in himself.  Travelers, he must go in one car and I
in another.  That was custom, presently was to become law.  He must
obey it, I must obey it.  There were plenty of other customs--for
instance, he must give me the "Mr.," but I never gave it to
him--plenty of customs, not a few laws.  I suppose that some day the
colors of the spectrum will recognize that somewhere they really are
together, and that there is little use in playing ostrich.

I had said good-by to Flowerfield.  Now I said good-by to Restwell.
The boat that was upon the river saw that it was sharply turning.
Willows, hills, would come between it and the known, familiar
reaches.  There would be new scenery.  I said good-by.  Ahasuerus and
I traveled west and traveled south.




CHAPTER XVI

Landon, spreading over and between low hills, opened upon a bit of a
plain where furnaces were building.  Shaggy, higher hills, called by
courtesy mountains, made sides of an amphitheater.  In this direction
coal was being mined; in that, iron.  Near at hand ran a muddy,
sluggish river crossed by an untriumphant bridge.  The woods were
largely pine and small oak, the climate warmer than that I had left.

At this time the population of Landon might number three thousand.
That was two thousand more than had been in presence three years
earlier.  The dwelling-houses, big and little, were frame, and there
were many little and very few big, and the big only so by contrast
with the others.  The railway station was frame, the hotel, the two
churches.  But the offices of the company of which General Warringer
was a director were brick, as were the Landon Bank and the company
stores.  Brick, too, was the office of the Landon & Gulf Railway
Company.  All these constituted themselves into finger-posts which
proclaimed: "Here is Solidity and Permanence.  We point to a Future
in which we shall be larger--much larger--and stone!"

The company into whose service I came owned the mines, a range of
hills stuffed with coal, and a divergent range where iron outcropped.
It owned the furnaces being constructed; in great measure it owned
Landon.  Its rival was a company seated eight miles up the river,
with other coal and iron ownings, furiously building a furnace beside
its own wooden town, with its own brick offices.

Ahasuerus and I descended from the train at Landon.  About us was a
scrambling crowd, white men and negroes.  A slight, blond young man
met me.  "Mr. Forth?"

"Yes."

"I am Alec Battle, draftsman in the office here.  Your chief asked me
to get you and pilot you about.  That darky with you?"

"Yes.  Ahasuerus Robertson.  I'm responsible for him.  He's all
right.  He wants to drive a wagon."

"I'll turn him over to William at the office.  You'll find a number
of Virginians here."

That proved true.  The Landon Coal and Iron Company was built, to an
extent, with Northern capital, as the Landon & Gulf Railway Company
was built to an extent with Northern capital.  But the working force
was predominantly Southern and drawn from almost every state below
Mason and Dixon.  The president of the Landon Coal and Iron came
indeed from Pennsylvania, and the president of the Landon & Gulf from
Ohio.  These gentlemen did not live at Landon.  They came there in
private cars, visited for a few days, showed themselves very genial
with the generality, sometimes genial, sometimes the reverse with the
closeted few.  Then the private car, at the end of the passenger
express, disappeared around the curve.  But superintendent and
manager and down the line lived at Landon.  The railway, too, was
building beyond, looking darkly meantime at the probable
construction, just across the river, of a competing feeler from the
Debenham & Atlantic.  The sense of a career, of a future, hung
strongly over Landon.  Go up the river those few miles to Parisia and
you encountered the like prophetic sense--for Parisia.  But Parisia
granted for Landon no other career than one of disaster.  And Landon
returned the compliment.  They stood opposed like bulls with lowered
heads....  All this, and much besides, came later to my knowledge.
Now, in the moment, I left with Battle and Ahasuerus the dirty
station and stepped into the main street of Landon.  There shone the
brightest autumn sunlight, from the bluest sky.

I have come to realize the ills of the world's present economic life,
and I with others strive after a more understandable and
understanding system.  The sins and evils are great, and must be seen
and outgrown.  Else smash--and smash again and again--and at last,
facing every one, the ugliest monster to be dealt with, and all the
power of dealing enfeebled!  But I was in it, there and then, in the
system, not especially protesting, taking it for granted, working in
it with some cheerfulness, some conscience, and some aspiration, and
if with growing longings, growing doubts, yet with no crystalline
vision of direction out of it.  And so, by my own experience, I know
that others, too, in the old system, worked with cheerfulness,
conscience, and aspiration.  And yet how hedged, frontiered in,
continuously defeated, were the three!  And most folk seemed unaware
of anything on the whole to change.  Their individual satisfactions
ought to expand.  The circumstances of themselves and their immediate
families ought to change.  Nothing in the world with all of them was
so certain as that!  There they worked toward change quite ardently
and arduously.  But they thought of everything as happening in the
system.  _I_ go up; then, relatively speaking at least, _you_ go
down.  We didn't seem to be able to make good general.  It was, they
seemed to think, on the whole God's system and the way the world was
made....  Unhappy world!

There was mistake, I think.  But in this universe of power and joy so
much that is not mistake lives within us!  So steadily does what
heaven we have gained work at heavenizing our earth!  I feel mainly
now the lift in persons and things.  I see that from imperfect
systems, syntheses, grow steadily the imperfect yet, but the more
perfect....  At Landon, for all the narrow serving, for all the
low-order social mechanism, for all our dim vision, dim alike with
educated and uneducated, official and laborer, we were not hopeless.
We had industry, pluck, vigor.  We could laugh and clap a man upon
the back.  We could show kindness.  I remember now how many good folk
were there--in the offices, the bank, the churches, on the road, at
the furnaces, in the mines.

Battle and Ahasuerus and I went along Main Street.  Under the bright
sunshine there fell a gilding cheerfulness over the shacks and
shanties, the Italian-kept fruit-stand, the colored barber standing
beside his barber-pole, the Chinaman ironing, the gold mortar and
pestle before a drug-store that might have gone into a pocket, the
buzz about a saloon.

"Have a drink?" asked Battle.

I shook my head.  "No, I made a promise long ago."

"Well, you're lucky to have kept it!"

He pointed out as we went the more marked features of the town.
Every one whom we met, white and negro, spoke to him and he to them.
He placed many for me.  "I've been here two years.  Every one's
fastened together like a bead necklace.  The company's the
string--the company and the Landon & Gulf.  There's the office--but
I'm going to take you first to your boarding-place.  You'll want to
get rid of your bags and see where you are.  General Warringer's
mother was my father's second cousin.  So we're kind of kin.  Cousin
Harriet wrote to me to get you a good place to live in.  This is the
best here."

We had turned at right angles and were going up a steep and dusty
side-street, or, rather, road.  He indicated a large, rambling,
one-story house or considerable cottage behind maples and water-oaks.
It looked neatly kept, with a veranda, vines and flowers in a small
yard.  "Mrs. Sayre's," he explained.  "Doctor Sayre's legally, but
Mrs. Sayre's colloquially.  They belong in this state, but they moved
from a plantation somewhere to Landon because they've got two sons
here with the company.  Clerks.  Bob and Ferry.  The doctor is
crippled by rheumatism.  He doesn't practise.  Three-fourths of his
time he lies in a hammock and reads.  She's a benevolent despot.  You
can't help liking her.  She's a captain housekeeper.  I board here,
too.  See that little cottage at the side?  They own it.  Four rooms
in it--yours, mine, Bob's, and Ferry's."

We mounted the veranda steps.  A colored girl was sweeping away
fallen vine leaves.  Behind her the house door stood hospitably open,
showing a hall with an old clock and two or three pictures.  A large
lady in a pleasant, clean, and thin flowery gown, with a palm-leaf
fan in her hand, came toward us.  So I met Mrs. Sayre, before whom my
mind still halts in a kind of half-humorous amazement and regard.

From Mrs. Sayre's--I never heard it called anything but that--I was
conveyed by Battle to the office.  Mrs. Sayre capably disposed of
Ahasuerus.  She had a cook and a man, Mirandy and Harris, who lived
in the alley.  Landon already had alleys.  Mirandy and Harris could
put Ahasuerus somewhere.  If he was a handy man Mrs. Sayre could give
him work until his proper job appeared.  Harris, summoned, took
Ahasuerus in charge.  My room in the cottage--the big cottage was
called the house--proved small and furnished with a simplicity.  But
it was fresh and clean, and one of its two windows gave a wide view
of eastern sky and of the last roofs of Landon, of plain and building
furnaces, river and hills.

Battle and I went down the street together and on to the office,
half-way between Mrs. Sayre's and the railway station.  As we went he
discoursed various economic aspects of Landon.  He did not use the
word "economic."  It had not come perfectly into general use in the
eighth decade of the nineteenth century.  The decade used an older
jargon.  Words that are common to-day stayed at that time in learned
print.  The labor at Landon was in mass negro, and one mine used
convict labor.  The bosses, the foremen, petty heads of kinds, were,
of course, white, and chiefly American, though with a good sprinkling
of Irish and German.  There was one gang of Italians.  Mechanics,
carpenters, masons, etc., were white and mainly from Yankee-land and
Dixie.  The clerical force, paymasters, commissary men, bookkeepers,
clerks, and so forth, appeared to have come from every state east of
the Mississippi.  As for other citizens of Landon, here on their own,
there seemed an ethnic ruck of these.  Jewish names, Greek, Chinese
emerged....  And there were certain ladies....

Battle looked aside at me.  I shook my head.  "The same promise.  And
I do not want it, anyhow, any longer."

"Lucky man!" said Battle.  "Oh, my Lord, it _is_ a net!"

The street was dusty, dirty; the sidewalk narrow, made of board and
fouled with torn paper, fruit peeling, tobacco juice.  The east-bound
Landon & Gulf, puffing bituminous-coal smoke and with a loud-clanging
bell, went by out of Landon.  Children were crying in a room above
the tintype man's booth.  Farther down Mr. Abrahams stood in front of
his clothing-shop.  "Goot day, frients!" he said, as we passed.

I looked about me.  The exhilaration of the morning, arrival,
novelty, the sunshine, faded a little.  "What's going to be here,
after all?"

Battle grew animated.  "A big town!  The biggest kind of big town.
There's enough coal and iron and limestone in these mountains to run
the United States!  Presently there'll be blast-furnaces and
blast-furnaces.  I can imagine it any night, with the sky all lit up.
The old Landon & Gulf won't be the only railroad, either, though it
would like to be!  Parisia--"  He gave the word with quite
indescribable scorn.  "Parisia will take a back seat.  She hasn't got
the capital or the brains.  Landon's got both.  We've grown a
thousand since last year."  He took on an exalted look.  "It's
coming....  Street-cars--electric light--ice-cream
parlors--theaters--bigger salaries--"

I saw in Battle, and was to see in many at Landon, the overflowing of
the personality over something growing.  There collected a pool of
triumphing affection when the growing thing was esteemed friendly to
the self, but for the held-to-be-unfriendly a boding dislike
amounting at times to hatred.  Fear of the growing thing always chose
contempt for disguise.  Towns, industries, institutions, parties,
systems--points of view.  The pale earth seedling bent the way it was
inclined, then proclaimed at once papal infallibility.  "This, that,
with mathematical certitude, I know to favor me, is saved; this,
that, with like certainty, I am sure opposes me, is damned!  And not
at all relatively so, but in the eternal Absolute.  So, acclaiming
this growth, so, fighting and despising yonder growth, I with pride
become fanatic before the temple door!"

Well....  There is the joy of the fanatic!

We arrived before the office of the Landon Coal and Iron Company.
The building was brick, three-storied, quite well and widely paved in
front, with a big door, with rows of moderately clean windows, behind
which might be dimly seen much activity.  Men stood in the doorway,
men went in and came out.  The passageway which we entered felt most
gratefully cool after the midday sun.  Battle turned toward a large
room to the right.  "I'll introduce you to Colonel Ringgold.  Then
we'll go up-stairs."

It was the general superintendent's office.  Colonel Ringgold turned
in his swivel-chair.  Large, saturnine, with a scar acquired at
Chickamauga running from brow to chin, he looked at me with intent
gray eyes.  "Well, Mr. Forth!  General Warringer says we must look
after you.  Do you believe in reciprocity?"

"I do, sir."

"Very good!  We don't want to dig and dig only to find that the seam
has switched off or petered out, or wasn't at its thickest very
thick.  We want to make a drift into power, not into the reverse.
How do you find Mrs. Sayre's?  I understand you're boarding there."

I said that I was very well pleased.  He nodded and ever so slightly
turned the swivel-chair.  Battle said that we wouldn't trespass
longer.  "All right!" answered Colonel Ringgold.  "Rather a busy day.
My good wishes, Mr. Forth!"

In the passage Battle remarked, in a lowered voice: "Mrs. Sayre and
the doctor are cousins of his.  He's very good stuff, but he'll drive
you like the devil!"

But for me I liked Colonel Ringgold, though I have seen him drive the
weak like the devil.

We mounted the stairs.  There was a room with clerks.  Battle grinned
at the collectivity, then took me across to a gentle, elderly man,
Mr. Allen, the bookkeeper, sitting in a kind of cage.  From this room
we went down a narrow passage to my especial purview: "Mr. Maxwell
may be at the mine, or gone riding somewhere.  But his clerk, Jim
Standard, is here."

It turned out that Mr. Maxwell had just come in.  Looking out of
window, one might see his horse, a strong, gaunt sorrel, in charge of
a black Flibbertigibbet.

My chief stood, tall, raw-boned, sandy, blue-eyed.  He wore a gray
flannel shirt and corduroy breeches tucked into dusty riding-boots.
His slouch-hat hung on a nail above a shelf whereon was ranged
specimens of ore.  In his hand he held a piece of red hematite, and
he was dictating in a clipped, raucous voice to Jim Standard, who
took his words down in shorthand.  It was somewhat before the day of
women clerks, and only one letter in so many appeared typewritten.
Maxwell swung around at our entrance.  He was lithe, thirty-five
about, trained, I afterward found, in Edinburgh and Germany; still a
British subject, drawn to America through that old hunger for
experience.  After greeting me in a dry, casual manner he finished
his letter.  Then he said: "I am going to ride ten miles to-morrow.
I suppose that you ride?"

I answered that I did.  "I'll expect you here, then, at eight
o'clock.  Get a horse.  Country's rough.  We'll be gone all day."
His look added: "Try you out to-morrow.  If I don't like you the
company may keep you--but not as my assistant!"




CHAPTER XVII

On that day and that ride my chief put me through every known pace,
and through some that I had to devise, create, assemble from the
All-Egg on the moment's spurring.  I saw what he was doing, and it
became an acquiescence, with a real, aroused curiosity as to what he
could get out of me.  The one thing I was bent upon was that the
sponge should fill from its background as fast as it was wrung.  That
measure kept, let him squeeze away!

To change the figure, by the time we rode back into Landon at dusk I
felt that I had been wrestling all day.  I had respect, admiration,
for the thew and sinew that had deliberately and with such
continuousness tried my own.

The next day was an office day.  He had a little kind of laboratory,
a drawing-desk, a long, well-filled bookcase, a variety of maps,
surveys, what not, pinned against the wall, drawers filled with
specimens of ores and woods, a case of fossils, a small safe, his own
desk, a desk for Jim Standard.  I had an adjoining small room, very
bare at the moment.

The wrestling continued through this day.  Dusk found us both
standing in his room, by the shelf of ores.  He took his hat from the
nail above.  Standard was gone.  He spoke in his dry, succinct voice.
"The company may keep you as my assistant, Mr. Forth.  I fancy we may
get on together.  I am going down the river in the morning by train.
You'd better take the day off for your own affairs.  I'd buy that
horse of Smith's--"

I began to settle into Landon.  Power, knowledge, joy of living, were
to be mined there as elsewhere.

Ahasuerus was presently driving his wagon.  He, too, incorporated
into the Landon Coal and Iron.  He took to Mirandy and Harris,
domiciled himself with them.

My room in the cottage beside the Sayres' house was quite well
enough.  Restwell and Flowerfield also had Spartan simplicities, in
many ways trained for these.  So that there was cleanliness--and
there was that here--I was pleased enough.  The eastern window gave
upon extent and, to a considerable degree, beauty.  I sat in this
window and wrote to Miriam.  I drew my bed so that at night I got the
mounting stars, and at dawn first the white rose, then the pink.

In the adjoining house lived and administered Mrs. Sayre, with an
easy capacity in action, an instinct for process, that amounted to
genius.  She was so large and soft, and yet she moved with such
efficiency!  Four of the Landon Coal and Iron Company's men boarded
with Mrs. Sayre; three of the Landon & Gulf men and three
independents came to her table for meals.  We dwelt in a town of dust
and coal smoke, of increasing noise, of at once an energetic and
extraordinarily careless humanity.  To a considerable extent the
negro population had been drawn from yet farther south, from cotton
and rice fields.  Among them were to be found few who were trained
for house service.  White and colored, Landon exhibited a surface
disorderliness in varieties.  But Mrs. Sayre and Mrs. Sayre's house
and table, her porches, vines, grass, and flowers, her picket fence
and gate and the bit of cinder path before them, displayed old,
smooth order, suave, accomplished standards.  I never saw her
reading, though I think that she did read; she was an infrequent
speaker; she sat at the head of her long table, a slow, easy empress.
Inert, a stranger would have said, looking for the able ministers who
made her reign.  But if ministers there were, they were in Mrs.
Sayre.  After a time it might be seen that she did nothing and said
nothing apart from the purpose of some dim, central individuality.
One ended by being impressed with the sheer power of that
individuality.  She was Chinese--Confucian.

Doctor Sayre sat at the foot of the table, a small man with a dome of
a forehead and a slender, sensitive mouth and jaw, and wide-apart,
sunken eyes.  He was subject to long, melancholy, brooding
silences--I have known them last three days--out of which he burst at
last with a torrent of talk.  When he rose from table it was seen how
crippled he was by some rheumatic trouble.  One end of the veranda
running the length of the house was his especial holding.  He had a
hammock here and a pictured screen that must have come down from long
ago, and a table heaped with books.  He read the evolutionists, and
all the works on archeology that he could find.

The two sons, each with his room in the smaller cottage, were again
different.  Bob Sayre, good-natured, good-looking, with tolerable
abilities, had for avocation the sowing of a few wild oats.  He and
Battle ran together.  Ferry, the younger, went to church, liked
flowers, was a quiet, manly fellow.

Father Vesey lived at the Sayres'.  Mrs. Sayre--I discovered somewhat
to my surprise, and then on second thought not to my surprise--was a
Catholic.  Father Vesey had a big room with a little veranda of his
own.  He was a good talker, loved a joke, had two chins, a massive
frame, and a good eye.  Jim Standard and Mr. Allen, the bookkeeper,
made the other inmates.  The table-boarders presented each his facet
of the sempiternal diamond.  We had Robinson, the freight agent of
the Landon & Gulf; Walter Dupuy, the telegraph operator, and others.
I grew to see a good deal of Walter Dupuy.  He was a thin, dark,
slight fellow with an intense face.  He, too, was a reader ... a born
romantic and revolutionist.

Days slipped into weeks, weeks into months.  At Christmas there were
still a few pale roses in Mrs. Sayre's garden-plot.  I felt that I
had been set in the Landon pattern a long, long time.

Maxwell was a taskmaster that I could work under with no sense of
ennui.  A man who worked for Maxwell, recognizing his authority, went
into a school of parts.  The school reached deep, had a lateral sweep
of arm.  If there were softness, vagueness, indolence, Maxwell was a
whole college of ascetics to get it out.  He was a drill of steel, a
directed engine, a shaft of the dryest light.  I worked for him and
with him ten and sometimes twelve hours a day, eighty minutes an
hour.  He had in him a titan, dry, spare, and tireless.

Capital continued to come into the Landon Coal and Iron Company.  The
latter continued to send out questing antennas through a wide and
long region of mineral wealth.  It had a brace of lawyers said never
to be beaten--it was developing a lobby at the state capitol.  Tract
on tract of land was being gently, quietly acquired.  Up the river
the Parisia Company worked on similar lines.  But the Parisia Company
was going to go under--go under and come up, absorbed into the Landon
Coal and Iron.  Some would laugh and some would groan.

It was Maxwell's and my business to examine and report upon these
lands.  We had, besides, abundant occupation at the mines, new and
old, and about the furnaces, and no little work that must be done in
the office.  The New Year brought wintry rain, sleet, a little snow.
Maxwell and I worked on, indoors and out-of-doors in all weather.  He
did not seem involved, caught, in the Landon Coal and Iron Company's
future, nor overmuch in the fact that he was paid a salary to do so
and so.  He had undertaken to locate coal and iron, to see that coal
and iron hills were properly opened, and to attend to various cognate
matters, and he did the job as it ought to be done.

January and February, raw and gray, rounded into spring.  The sky
cleared, grew azure; we dipped into a riot of leaf and blossom.
Maxwell and I, out in the hills, saw bloom the yellow jasmine and the
pink honeysuckle.  One day we had ridden some miles, and at noon,
finding a trickling spring, sat by it and ate the cold meat and bread
I carried in an old geologizing bag.  Maxwell began to talk.  By this
time we had gone far into each other, and that though we were not
chatterers.  "Of course one day this system will die into another."

"'This system.'  The economic system, you mean?"

"It's lot and part with everything else!  One species grows in the
womb of another--at last buds off.  Yesterday transmutes into to-day;
to-day into to-morrow....  This is your first field, but I have seen
a lot of others.  Landon isn't yet typical.  Black labor with the
agricultural mind.  Africa strained through rice, cotton, and tobacco
fields.  But white labor is coming in--will be coming in in gushes
presently.  Natives and immigrants.  This is going to be a city.
Things are going to change."

"What do you think of labor-unions?"

"I think that they are healthy children."  He drank from the spring
and settled back again.  "A good many things appear to me to be in
the schedule of the Future.  Everywhere in civilization--generalized,
as it were."

"Dupuy, the telegraph operator, loaned me Karl Marx's _Capital_."

"Dupuy is going to lose his place one of these days....  _Das
Kapital_....  Yes."

"I'd like to know what you think of it."

"I've not the clearest leading as to what, from cover to cover, I do
think of it.  I'd agree here, and differ there.  But, on the whole, I
think it is a formulation that'll count.  It comes into the
guide-post category."

"The road doesn't stop--can't stop.  Everything's road--bridge."

"Yes.  Perpetually more grandiosely so.  Effects are cumulative....
A prolonged, insensible rise, swellings and sinkings, but more
swelling than sinking.  At last emerges climax--a new continent out
of the sea.  The Ark on Ararat.  Then life goes on upon that wheel
... until it's time to rise again."

We finished our bread and meat.  He leaned back against the rock, his
hands clasped around his knee.  "It's an unco' strange warld," he
said.  "Bonny and terrible!"

The fact that we both had Scotland behind us, though considerably
nearer to him than to me, had its effect in our relationship.  Now
and again, in our frequent voyaging together, he spoke of the country
there.  He had love for it as I had love for Virginia.  I think that
at times he was homesick for it, as certainly at times I was homesick
for Virginia.  He said once: "Go a little back and everybody is kin.
Edinburgh now, the Carse of Stirling, loch and sea!  Step backward
and we mingle there.  You came a little earlier to America.  I came a
little later.  Somewhere, everything is certainly one."

I recall a day when we came out blackened from the Red Hill mine and,
riding back to Landon, were caught in a great drive of wind and rain
and took refuge in the log house of two rooms and a lean-to occupied
by Roger Bins.  Roger, his wife and eight children were perfectly
hospitable.  He had been there, or his father, grandfather and
great-grandfather had been there for a long time, on the scrawny
hillside, with a kind of view and a kind of garden-patch.  They had
welcomed passers-by, "strangers," taken their bit of contact, their
sup of news, and settled back when the "strangers" went on.  The
storm over, we remounted and rode away.

"There's a seam that runs around the globe!" said Maxwell.  "It's
peat.  Low-order energy.  Getting relatively lower and lower--getting
covered over.  Perhaps miners will dig it out one day, exploit it,
use it, as we use peat and coal.  There's a law, I hold, of
retardation.  The environment grows hostile to Roger Bins in the
degree that it's quickened.  Can't keep up--can't even stay
put--sinking--sinking--becomes a left-over, a left-behind.  A
creeper--a racer--and the interval widening.  A left-behind species,
a barely man, while Man goes on.  One day there was a settling of the
dregs called Apes.  The same thing goes on to-day.  Bins and plenty
of others, city and country, and up and down.  They come on, but,
relatively speaking, slower and slower....  An under species in all
its degrees."

"That's a proclamation of aristocracy."

"I have no objection to the word, so that it's properly understood."

"If Bins thinks anything he thinks that he's within the aristocracy."

"Yes.  I have known millionaire and university and ecclesiastical
Binses.  There are a lot of royal Binses."

"Your species finds you out wherever you are."

"Precisely....  Whoever had any right to suppose that out of the
human species would not grow another species--out of man more than
man?  Then comes a day when what is left is classed as simply human."

We came upon Landon in a great golden glow of after-rain.  A bit of
rainbow hung against a yet dark cloud.  "But all move," I said.
"When the bell rings for their day the slow will come upward, too."

"Oh yes," answered Maxwell.  "That is the rainbow--and I'm not
denying that the rainbow has some kind of reality.  But Binses around
the world will have to do some hard work!"

"Perhaps the racer here is retarded, too.  Perhaps there is an order
out of sight before us.  Perhaps the fleetest here has hard work to
do.  Perhaps what you call the aristocracy, the very vanguard as we
think it, itself fell out, straggled, malingered, was left in the
rear--now itself has to catch up....  Sometimes you think you see the
twinkling of feet before you."

"Very like!" said Maxwell.  "The caravan before the caravan....  All
right!  Let Bins some day catch the twinkling of feet before him."

I recall another day.  There was a tract to be examined too far from
Landon for riding.  We went by train, with us Captain Joyce, one of
the company lawyers.  Getting off at a flag-station, we found there
the owner of the land with horses.  We waited until the train had
passed, then rode quietly into the woods.  It was not on the cards to
make display of destination and purpose.  Parisia or other spies in
the land might be watching.

We spent some hours upon this man's acres.  The lawyer, who was a
very quick, expansive, jesting, good fellow and sympathetic with the
farmer and his wife, talked with the two at the corner of their
crumbling porch.  Papers passed between them.  We had country dinner,
got back to the flag-station, took the ingoing train.  Presently some
trouble up the line halted us, kept us waiting half an hour.  We sat
in an almost empty car, and Captain Joyce fell upon discourse.  He
was in a good humor.  The man's holding was wanted against the
glittering, widening future of the company, and he could get it, and
get it cheaper than Colonel Ringgold and Martin and others had
thought possible.  He talked.  Maxwell put in an occasional question
or comment in his voice dry as Sahara's sands.  I sat and listened.
Captain Joyce embarked upon business, politics, and the country at
large.  Arthur was in the White House, but next year would see a
presidential election.  Names came into Captain Joyce's
talk--Republican names, Blaine and others; Democrat names, Cleveland
and others; the People's party, in a tone and with a grimace of doubt
mixed with amusement.  There was certainly a possibility, after long
years of under dog, of a Democratic victory.  The country was getting
out of the worst post-bellum tangles.  Captain Joyce saw Prosperity
and described the jade.  Her most prominent features were bigger and
bigger combinations of capital, and underneath, like mouth beneath
nose, ever skilfuller and skilfuller lawyers.  Press and legislatures
made, as it were, fields for the working (for the good of all) of
Money and Law.  I even divined that he had an eye to the school and
the pulpit.  In his personal aspect he was very jolly, likable.
Dupuy said that he was known to have hanged Justice, but Dupuy said
many bitter things.  The chief engineer listened, put in a slight
word now and then in a voice dry as oak leaves in January.  At last
he said, "How about action as a totality?"

"That's not possible.  Must have incentive--something to pull
against--somebody to compete with, defeat!  Must fight--conquer!
Contest of wits, you know, and all that."

"The irresistible force must continue to meet the immovable body?"

"That's a way of putting it."

"Horns locked to eternity....  Bull similes!"

The block up the road got itself removed.  The whistle shrieked and
we went on into town.




CHAPTER XVIII

Landon grew all the time.  When I had been there a year I saw how it
had grown over the autumn day when Battle met Ahasuerus and me.  When
I had been there two years and more it had six thousand people.  The
Debenham & Atlantic was an actuality.  At night, when there occurred
a run, furnace glare reddened the sky to a strange impermanent
sunrise.  There were streets where had been none, houses where had
stood pine-trees.  Two-story houses rose, better houses for the
higher-up people.  The huddle of houses for hand-workers grew into
great and greater huddles, but the houses stayed mean.  Along Main
Street were rising, fast as mushrooms, brick stores, a larger hotel,
a newspaper office, buildings of various sorts.  Paving was in
contemplation, sewerage, a glare of street-lighting.  Enterprises and
enterprises had started up.  A number stood in the magic rounds of
the Landon Coal and Iron, the Landon & Gulf, and the Debenham &
Atlantic.  Others were players for themselves.  Up the river Parisia
wore a blighted look.

Men and women from everywhere might be found collecting, streams into
a pool, at Landon.  One recognized America, Europe, a little of Asia,
a quantity of Africa.  And in the air the ghost of red men and the
creatures that they hunted.  And underfoot, down and down and down
again, the carbon world, the iron world.  At times, when upon hot
summer nights sleep did not come swiftly, when I sat in my window
that gave over a wide stretch of low roofs and broken, straggling
wood, and sky flushed by that furnace glare, I sank with imagination
or memory through the damp heat into a yet heavier, closer
atmosphere, far and far away, down in time, heavier, closer, steamy,
heated....  Here was the uncouthly high and broad; here the ferns and
grasses, weird trees, the very moss of to-day high overhead.  Dense,
palpitant, sluggish, choked, gigantic, the Carboniferous stretched
around.  Forms that were not fallen trees nor banks of black soil,
nor arms of the marsh moved....  Heavy voices were about me, like the
voice of the furnaces....  I gasped in the un-thin air!  Up!  And
here was Landon living upon that--and here was that living in Landon.
I looked up into the great night sky.  Landon, too, all of us, were
at the bottom of--what?  Something there thinking, back thinking,
down into our strata....

Two years.  Miriam was a nurse in a great hospital in Baltimore.  In
the two years I had had a month's holiday, dividing it between
Flower-field and Restwell.  Miriam had come from Baltimore for a
week.  Miriam and Michael--and each a traveler who had not been idle
in the two years, and so who kept together, kept together.  It was
two explorers meeting, each with a great tale to tell, with maps of
life to compare, with knowledge growing from the long marches of
each, with the urge of the undiscovered beckoning, beckoning!  Two
discoverers who loved heart and mind and soul.

Two years and more!  I wrote to her, she wrote to me, each Sunday.

Two years slipped toward three years.  Landon swelled each year, a
bigger and bigger Landon.  The South was growing, the country
growing.  With Cleveland in the White House, time had swung in, after
many years, a Democratic administration.  The Democratic South felt
itself moving toward power.  Business enterprise began to grow
thickly, south of Mason and Dixon.  Capital came, companies formed,
companies began to combine.  Corporations, trusts, swam on the
horizon line.  All the country was growing in money wealth.  Money
flowed into rivers.  If you owned the river-banks and used them for
villa sites and inclosed parks, there were due to ensue difficulties
as to general irrigation....

I worked hard.  As Landon grew, as the Landon Coal and Iron perfected
its holdings, dug its mines, engineer duties changed aspect.  There
was no longer the simple hard day's riding, geologizing, indicating,
reporting, the straightforward construction, supervision, of the
first year or two.  Occupation was abundant but nondescript.  Time
passed.  Colonel Ringgold became president of the company, and with
unexpectedness the directors offered Maxwell the position of general
superintendent.  He declined it.  "If I went 'up'--as they call
it--you might get my place, Michael!  But I don't care to be general
superintendent....  I sha'n't stay here longer than next year, I
think."  He sat down and stared out of the office window, then came
back to me.  "I have an old friend and distant kinsman in England who
is down for African exploration.  Head of the Nile, Mountains of the
Moon, and so forth.  I rather think I'll go with him.  D'ye want to
come along?"

"I want to with one part of me--very decidedly want to.  But I stay
here, I think."

"You're an explorer after the deep I," he answered.  "I knew that
early in our acquaintance....  I suppose that the opening up of
Africa is on the big voyage chart, and I suppose your exploration to
be on it."

"We're both romantics," I said.  "I take your Africa and walk about
it inside.  Old Nile and Mountains of the Moon and tropical forest,
the waste and the sand, the lakes, the cataracts and water-holes."

"And the tribes of native black men--"

"And the tribes of naked black men.  The chimpanzees, the
hippopotamuses, parrots, and crocodiles.  Themselves and their
correspondences."

He sat tilted in his chair, looking at me.  "When are you going to
organize all that you do?"

I answered truthfully.  "I don't know how."

"You have remarkably," he said, "the sense of the presence of the
universe and of all time."

I spoke.  "Hold yourself very deep and steady and perceive
matters....  Event now!  Everywhere from the world of the molecules
and below, to the hugest synthesis we can grasp.  Event in all its
range, physical, emotional, mental, and what we call spiritual.  And
up and down and round about in Time.  Event in my body, in your body,
in this room, this building, this town--all bodies, towns,
countrysides.  Event in this state--in America--event in the world.
Carry it over to other worlds, not forgetting the ether between.  To
suns and systems of suns.  Event.  All event.  Feel it multitudinous,
beyond multitude, multitude distilled from multitudes.  Event.  Life
yesterday, to-day, and forever.  Nebula to nebula and repeat.  The
universe, all, visible and invisible, the invisible just as real,
just as eventual as the visible.  Event and over event.  Event made
of events.  Motion, emotion, intense and shining
movement--mind-motion--spirit, intense, intense, light of light and
heat of heat, life of life!  Divine it somehow, spread into it....
Of course I mean that it is perceived almost infinitely too palely,
almost infinitely too far away, almost infinitely too infrequently,
too tenuously.  It's what we call a concept now.  But once strong
enough, the concept would become percept--appercept.  We should walk
into a new, an immense, reality....  Do you think I am talking
insanely?"

"No, I do not.  That's overman....  Well, I suppose it's the only
reasonable ambition!"

That talk with Maxwell had leadings forth, at the moment not seen.
At the moment we fell back to work.  The days went on.  A new general
superintendent came in.  Landon continued in its treading around
itself an ever larger circle.

By now I knew pretty thoroughly the older layers of population.  In a
certain sense Landon was home.  I must feel--did feel--the energy
there, the driving through and over obstacles, the sunniness on the
whole of men's hopes, the clasping hands, the determined feet.  So
much was good, so much was promising!  There was the feeling,
splendid and precious, of strength.  In much it might be misapplied,
yet it was there, inestimable.

I knew, of this population of all stations, hundreds of names and
faces, with a little of the real man clinging thereto.  A few scores
I knew better, and out of these a handful better yet.  Landon had a
"social" life.  Officials, men starting various enterprises,
professional men, had by now brought wives and families.  There was
visiting, entertaining, among these.  There was plenty of dear, good
people.  Young men, away from home and kindred, were in Landon in
numbers; and these families, making them welcome, gave them new ties
and feeling of home.  There was the church life.  Five denominations
now, each with its church and Sunday-school, each in its own way
helping along.  And there was a life of the street, of saloon and
brothel.  And there was an alley life for negroes.  And near the
furnaces, in a wide huddle of mean houses there was a life of white
laborers and the smallest employees.  Landon had now a newspaper and
was building a theater and better school-houses.  Evidently it was to
become a railroad center.  And more and more the glare from furnace
stacks reddened the night sky....  There was in Landon power, but
again and again came an ache with the power.

In these three years I read no little.  There were the evenings and
the Sundays.

Then suddenly--or then quietly after long preparation--I was again
borne afar.

Maxwell and I sat in his office alone.  He had despatched Jim
Standard upon some errand.  There were letters, maps, beside him upon
his desk, and as he talked his fingers rested on a long envelop with
a British stamp.  What he wanted was that I should go with him to
Africa.  What he had beneath his hand was the formal offer to him of
a post in the organizing expedition.  The latter's objective was a
further understanding of the headwaters of the Nile and a push across
Africa by way of the Congo.  The expedition was expected to serve
science as well as sheer exploration.  It was large, rightly equipped
and financed.  It offered Maxwell a very good salary for his services
as geologist and engineer and it empowered him to choose and employ
an assistant.

"That is where you come in," said Maxwell.  "I know these men.
They're my kind.  It's all right.  Now I want you! ... If you don't
know that you're after cognition and development of yourself, I know
it.  And I'm not meaning the selfish self, either!  You best know if
something like this isn't in your day's work."

He offered me no less than I was receiving from the Landon company.
I might be from America two years--perhaps even three years.  I said
that I must have a fortnight in which to determine.  I took a day and
night to walk around it as well as I might.  Then I wrote to Miriam.

The letter went, lay, I knew, in her hands, was read by her.
Waiting, I worked on, with the matter as far as might be out of my
head.  Three nights after the letter was sent I came into my room
and, putting out the lamp, sat in the eastern window.  There was no
moon; a quiet night with the stars burning softly.  Minutes
passed....  Then rose like a fountain out of ground the consciousness
of Miriam.  She was present in me--she was not present out of me.
There came a profound calm, profound, yet full of the sense of event.
There was a filling out of nature, to the extent that what had been
in appearance two orbs became in some sort one.  Something made
naught of space, naught of time, naught of outward form.  Miriam and
I talked without words, met in a large land behind Time and Space and
Form as we had known them.

It was affirmation....  I saw that I went with Maxwell.  I saw that
it was somehow indicated that that had its place in the world of
experience.  I saw that Miriam could as little desire to hold me as
to hold herself from the fullness of life.  I saw that we were one in
the desire to have knowledge, growth, and to have it more abundantly.
I saw that we played into each other's hands.  I saw that the wealth
of one flowed with the wealth of the other....  There came an
increase over even that perception.  Things that love stay together.
I knew now how profoundly she was with me.  I knew that she was
me....  Wherever she might be--wherever I might be--we could rise the
one in the other.




CHAPTER XIX

Experience widened again for me.  I wrote to Major Dallas, to General
Warringer, and to Aunt Sarah.  When I had the return letters I told
Maxwell that I would go.  He nodded.

"All right!  I am glad that you have determined so.  Will you ride
out this afternoon and see what is the matter at the Red Mine?"

Maxwell and I resigned from the employ of the Landon Coal and Iron.
The company was good enough to say that it regretted our going and to
offer an increase of salary.  But we must go, and the company turned
without more ado to a list of names of engineers.

I had affection by now for many, for much, in Landon.  Landon in much
would stay with me.  I had learned here, I had grown here.  I had
come to feel the striving soul behind all this industrial urge, to
respect the wrestler with industrial imperfection.  He was president
and manager, he was engineer and builder, he was clerk and operator,
he was spademan and pickman.  Up and down and all around, he was
really one, though he had not wakened to that fact.  I regarded my
own boyhood at Restwell.  I had not recognized it then, but in all
that countryside of farms and villages, what had obtained but the
same struggle?  The farmer and his men, white and black, the miller
and the smith, the boatmen on the river, and the village
storekeeper....  I felt again the heat of the sun when I used to hoe
corn with Ahasuerus and Mandy's Jim, when I used to plow the long
field.  All one with these furnace and railroad workers!  And
professional men, schoolmen, artists, inventors, men of research and
experiment, shapers of mind-matter--these, too, were tillers and
producers, transmuters of energy, spreaders of food before the infant
man that is to be.  All one, changing and sustaining, gathered into
the vast We, the world I.  Where, in the whole, stopped the
Worker--where, in the whole, began the Thinker?  The Worker thought,
the Thinker worked.

I was leaving Landon, and I saw now how, despite all doubts, I did
like Landon.

And I liked Mrs. Sayre and the doctor, and Father Vesey and Mr.
Allen, and Walter Dupuy and Battle, Bob and Ferry, Mirandy and
Harris, too, and Lula, the waitress, and Bruno, the doctor's old
setter.  They all made a clamor of home about me when I must go.

Mrs. Sayre sat one evening upon the veranda, waving to and fro her
palm-leaf fan.  The doctor was in his room, Father Vesey away upon
some parochial business, Mr. Allen had just said good night and was
gone.  I sat upon the step, my eyes on the furnace flare, reddening
low-hanging clouds.  When one paid attention the furnace throb was
there as well, dull in the warm, damp air.  Mrs. Sayre began to
speak.  She had a slow, lulling voice.

"Travel, now.  There are all kinds of travel.  Doctor travels, lying
in his hammock there--and Walter Dupuy travels--and you were
traveling, Michael, even before Mr. Maxwell asked you to go to Africa
with him."

"Yes," I answered.  "I was--I am."

"Yes, I know it.  I am a large, stay-at-home body who seems somehow
to have nursed you all, nursed and managed for you all.  For a long
time."  Her fan went tranquilly to and fro.  "You learn to notice
little things when you nurse and manage for all.  You're on the
lookout for signs....  I suppose, after all, one rears children for
travel ... nurses, manages, gives them a base to start from."

"You've traveled pretty far yourself," I said.

"Oh, I travel very slowly!  I have so many little things to think of.
Seeds in the earth--"  She ceased to speak and sat, slowly and
tranquilly moving the fan to and fro.

It was springtime and violets and daffodils were blooming beside the
veranda.  I saw, as it were, plant life underground, the tree and the
rose underground, over all the earth.  All animals little and warmly
laired, all birds nested ... all men and women, the oldest, the
strongest, the wisest, cradle-babes.  Traveling slowly, with
multitudes and multitudes of little things--

Ferry came in at the gate and up the path and steps and sat down with
his head resting against her chair.  I said good night and left them,
and at my own window my mother rose in me.

Maxwell and I finished apace at Landon.  He was a scimitar-edge and a
dry light.

The men to take our places came in.  We showed them the lines and the
steeds that had to be driven.  The office gave us a present, to each
as handsome a rifle as money could buy.  The _Landon News_ made a
full page of our departure and African exploration.  Hundreds in
Landon shook hands and wished us well.

Ahasuerus was to go with me.  He had made determined appeal and I
went to Maxwell about it.  He listened, then: "I don't see any reason
against it, if he wants to go.  He's strong and devoted.  That's the
kind such expeditions want."

I said good-by to Mrs. Sayre's, to all at the office, to Landon.
Maxwell was already gone to New York, where business of sorts awaited
him.  The east-bound express roared in.  Bob and Ferry and Battle,
Father Vesey, Mr. Allen, and a half-dozen more waved and cried
farewell.  We left the dark station; the houses went by, the
furnaces, the hills.  Ahasuerus and I, three and a half years older
than when first we had come to Landon, were going from Landon, going
home to Flowerfield and Restwell, then going overseas, afar and afar.

The train roared through the landscape toward Virginia.  I sat in a
brown study.  I was going afar, into I knew not what of physical
adventure.  Mental adventure, adventure of the imagination, I knew.
In some measure I could feel with, feel into, all adventure.  I took
it as scientifically true that, could all of me speak, it could speak
of all things.  But it was blocked from finding voice....  In my
inner world I had come to where I was in a manner keeping time,
waiting on a slow assimilation, waiting for some strengthening of
pulse and forward thrust.  There was a cry within me for flooding
light, color, fervent heat.  I knew that it was for light and heat
from the interior.  But it retarded its coming, and there grew in me
an urge toward review, recapitulation, seeing where I had been wrong,
mistaken, bettering perhaps, seeing how to take apart, dissolve,
remold the past.  The feeling was obscure, deep.  But I was going to
old, interior continents and search them over again....  And there
had grown a longing, too, for other, outward contacts, for wider
surges here.  So had run my mind when finally I had agreed with
Maxwell.

I sat and mused and the train rushed on.  It was taking me toward
much, and it was taking me first to Restwell and Flowerfield.  Miriam
was with me, thinking with me.

A man came and sat beside me.  He had a little, withered face and
figure and very limpid, untroubled eyes.  He held a book in his hand,
and I saw that it was an anthology that I knew.

"I like to read," he said, and presently.  "We're all a big book.
_Le livre de l'univers_.  A great story-book to some upper layer.
That layer's dream life.  It's reverie when it rests in the shade."

I turned the pages of the book.  "Don't you think we may be our own
reverie?"

"Oh yes, I do!" he nodded.  "Quite sure of it.  It's the personal
pronouns that get in the way."

"Did you ever," I asked, "achieve impersonality?"

"It depends upon what you mean by that.  Do you mean a larger
personality?"

"It may come to the same thing."

"I think it does," he said.  "These things are perfectly definite.
The trouble with folk is that they will not recognize grades of
cognition.  It's a long, long stair to the last, biggest personality.
But it's wonderful just to have lifted a step."

"Do you think there's a common experience among those who have
'lifted a step'?"

"They come under a common sky.  That means a great deal.  But there
would be always variation in experience--naturally."

"Yes," I said.  "But past experience would be, in a way, pooled."

"Yes.  Recognized as pooled.  It's been done always, but not cognized
as done.  Of course it is the food of the new experience."

"I see that....  We are still occupied with the chase--with the
garnering of food.  Still in a struggle with raw material."

"Yes.  But of course the artist, the conscious festival, comes along."

"Then after a while, when it is ripe, that plane also becomes food
for the gods.  The willing sacrifice."

"Yes," he said.

"Each stage the womb of the higher."

"Yes."

We sat looking out of the window.  "It's all _us_," said the man.
"Knowing that, we know a good deal.  We've seen our Jacob's ladder."

"The profound quest--the real Grail."

"Yes.

  'It is the star to every wandering bark,
  Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.'

The poets have always dimly known it, up in the dome of their house
where the angels live."

Before long he left me, the train bringing him to his station.  I
said that I hoped we should meet again.  "Oh, we will!" he answered.
"Life's full of these encounters, when you begin to look for them."

The train roared on, the landscape glided by.  There stretched a
night between me and Restwell.  I lay in my berth and lifted the
window-shade.  Dark woods were going by, then came a calm and broad
stretch of country with the horizon stretched afar.  Jupiter hung in
the sky.  There stole into me from the upper realms, cool, pure,
exalted and exalting, a sense of the greatness, of the utter
greatness, of the destiny of us all....  When I slept it was with
that clean and quiet aroma still about me.

When I awoke Virginia fields, Virginia mountains, were framed in the
window.




CHAPTER XX

Restwell made much of Ahasuerus and me.  General Warringer and Aunt
Harriet had acquiesced in my going with Maxwell, but not before, as
in duty bound, they had set forth a row of objections.  Aunt
Harriet's resolved into the propositions, that I might be
killed--that so I could not marry and carry on the family fortunes;
that, while there might result some distinction from being an
explorer (a successful one), she had noticed that men who went into
wild places for any length of time carried it around with them ever
afterward and lost touch with the society into which they were born.
"We met an Arctic man once at Old Point.  Well, when it came to the
amenities he was nothing but a polar bear walking upright!"

I said that if I came back like a rhinoceros or crocodile she must
have me shot.

She looked at me a little wistfully.  "You know, Michael, you're the
only bit of Dugald and Cary we've got.  More than that, you seem
somehow to hold and bring back father....  You've got a faculty,
somehow, of enwrapping and carrying with you a lot of things--a lot
of people, even."  She sighed.  "I'm not that kind myself, but I know
that there are all-around folk."

I kissed her and said that we were in the same boat.  I knew that
there must be all-around folk--but I was only a little of that
myself--nothing like, nothing like, the all-around that I could
image.  We sat on the summer-house step, and I found that we could
talk, in some ways, as my mother and I had used to talk ... no! as my
mother and I talked.

General Warringer, likewise, was concerned about my future.  "This
life's a bitter race, Michael.  If you begin to step aside to pick
flowers, down you go--smothered under!  I've seen a lot of men--men
with brains--scheduled just so to be poor and unknown all the rest of
their lives.  If you had chosen to stay you could have had Maxwell's
place when he went.  As Landon grew you could have left engineering,
become assistant superintendent--superintendent--what not.  You've
got brains and a steady-going energy--not flashy.  You might have
gone straight on up to the top.  You've got pull here, too, remember.
There's no helping you in Africa.  Your savings, too.  I had it in
mind to speak to you about that.  As you earned and saved I could
invest for you in a stock that'll presently be paying--I don't know
what it won't be paying!  And if, after a time, you wanted to
speculate, I should see to it that you got the inside word.  This
country's traveling, double-quick, toward the biggest kind of
expansion!  You might become a rich man--rich and useful--the most
valuable kind of citizen.  But if you break with the run now it's
going to be hard to get back.  As I said before, this world's a
breathless 'Keep your place, or I'll take it!'"

I said that I knew that it was a serious step, but that, as far as
engineering went, I felt that I could always find employment.  I had
no quarrel with engineering as a profession.  But I did not feel
myself fitted for the further course he had outlined.  It might be a
mistake, my going with Maxwell, but I had felt a strong inward
urging.  I thought that I should come back, and that the experience
would not be loss....  I said that I was grateful to him, and to many
at Landon.

"That's all right.  I gather that you gave very good work in
return....  Well, if you won't, you won't, Michael! ... Royal is
going to be a rich man--rich and powerful."

"If I had been Holbein or Rembrandt I should have liked to paint
Royal."

Royal was at home at the moment.  But he was going to New York, into
a big broking company in Wall Street.  In appearance he was so
different from his father, and yet they subtly paired.  The son stood
intellectually higher by a head.  They sat, as it were, above and
below the salt--but at the same board, in the same castle hall.  One
must give respect to the castle, it was so vast and powerful.  London
Tower or Carcassonne, a thousandfold.

Dorothea was very friendly....  We went out together one morning upon
the river.  It had become fairy spring weather, bloom and song and
first verdure.  We ran under the sweeping willows, by banks of
violets and bluebells.

"I should like to see Africa and Asia and all--the old buildings and
the old lands.  Oh, Michael, you're lucky!"

"Why don't you travel?  You could."

"Some day maybe I will ... but I'll take myself along."

"Why don't you sort out yourself and choose the best traveling-dress?"

"Oh, I'm lazy--except when people get in my way.  What do you do when
people get in your way?"

"They're _in_ the way because they're _out_ of the way.  Get them in
order inside you.  Penetrate them--understand them--be at one with
them.  Then the whole ship moves with the helmsman's hand.  You and
they are one, you know."  I laughed at the face she made.
"Gibberish, isn't it?  And nine times out of ten I fail to practise
my own magic....  All the same, don't poison them, Dorothea!  If you
do you'll feel the pangs."

"I like to poison them--starve them."

"Stop it--or you'll feel the pangs!"

She caught at the willows under which we were passing.  "Oh, I am not
so bad as I make myself out! ... Sometimes--often--I feel kind and
good."  The boat went a few strokes farther.  "Stop rowing," she
said.  "Let's rest here a bit.  Go close to the bank, by the
violets."  I obeyed.  She stretched her arms, then, leaning forward,
looked at me.  "You meet most persons, Michael.  Now I want to see if
you meet me!"

"Fire away!"

"Do you ever feel wicked?"

"Often."

"Just how?  Can you feel yourself murderer, thief, and all the rest
of it?"

"Yes."

"Well, to get off the plane of actually poisoning people or jerking
the bread out of their mouths....  When the world looks lovely, not
hateful--and you want all the jewelry in the window ... but are too
sleepy to go after it ... and so you only lust for it, envy it.  Do
you know that, too?"

"Yes.  At times I should like to roll in gold-dust and violets."

"Yes!"

"A great elephant to ride upon--caparisoned--an easy, swaying,
powerful gait.  No obstacles--all the crowd at once worshiping and
getting out of the way--"

"Yes!"

"Idle Lakes--and Mirth to row me--and Bowers of Acrasy--"

"H-mm?"

"_The Faery Queen_.  The second book.  It's a perfectly true tale."

"What else?  Your elephant figure I do most certainly
understand--though I understand the others likewise."

"I'd weary you with all the rest.  At the bottom of the bag....
Something big and dark--wind and wave--wishing just to roll over and
destroy.  The utterest explosive--wishing to rend sun, moon, and
stars.  Split them into little pieces.  Blow them into dust in the
wind.  And without a bit of better plan, without any plan--any
ultimate idea.  Blank Nothing--impossible to obtain!  But go toward
it, and so save oneself trouble.  Decline to make the God."

She stared; then, "I see..."

"It's the bottom of the bag.  But notice, will you, that still, blank
and mad as it is, it assumes cohesion.  It's to have force to do all
that....  So, after all, it will have to take trouble."

"Yes, I see that."

"Better take the full cup of finer effort!  Better make of yourself a
world that won't want to blow its brains out!"

She sighed.  "Get me a bunch of violets and let us go home."  I
picked her her violets, stepped back into the boat, put them in her
lap, and retook the oars.  She said, "You could have been an evil
soul."

"There's plenty of evil yet.  But the soul wants to change it to
good, Dorothea."

"But it understands it still."

"Yes, it understands it still."

We went on beneath the willows.  "Did you never read _The Faery
Queen_?  Well, read it all, but especially the second book."  We
traveled silently upon the clear river.  After a while she would have
talked of Miriam.  But I did not want to talk of Miriam, who was Una,
who was Alma, who was Belphœbe, who was Britomart to me.  So at
first we spoke of just the weather and then of Restwell plans, and at
last she deliberately fell silent, and when I saw that it was
deliberate I followed her lead, rowing without speaking, in a moving
dream with the long oar-stroke.  She sat with her eyes upon the
violets in her hand.  We made landing and I helped her out and we
went together up the bank and toward the house.  But under the wood
where the wild plum was blooming she stood still.

"Michael ... we're cousins."

I nodded.

"That ought to mean warm hearts toward each other."

"Agreed."

She was very close to me.  She put her hand upon my breast.  "Like
me, Michael ... like me!"  I felt her breath, her cheek touched mine.
"Like me--as I like you."  She kissed me and I kissed her.  But then
I felt the stroke of the crowned man.  As best I might I got back
from the edge of the precipice.  I drew myself away from her hands
and her face.

"Dorothea, Dorothea, Dorothea! leave that!  That's not innocent,
because it's not sincere.  You're stooping low with your
mind--tempting deliberately!  And I'm the leopard--the slave--the
worm yet....  Leave it!  Let's at least stand upright!"

She drew a long breath.  "Well...  I wondered--"

"Stop wondering!  It's all there, in my blood as it is in yours.  I
could, as you could.  Almost half of me plays the siren to just more
than half that's just wise enough to use every thong it can find to
keep it to the mast--"

"Well, you will please to understand that it was the mind--just
wanting to see--"

"I understand.  Now I want to tell you....  I think that we roved
together a lot in the past, you and I....  Suppose you, also, try to
stop that lorelei work of taking oneself in one's own net.  Every
fish you take--lovers, pride, domination, cruelty, indolence,
self-love, and all the rest of it--pulls you deeper yet into the
ancient sea.  I know, for not so long ago and not so far away I have
been there--am there quite sufficiently still!  Throw the net away,
stop the old singing, and see if you can't hear a lark overhead!"

"You're preaching!"

"No, I'm not.  I'm calling your attention to some facts in nature."

She began to walk again.  "I don't see that our old, long past was so
very wrong."

"I don't in the least say that.  I won't say a word against the
ancient sea.  When we were in it, if we were sincere, it was all that
we could do.  It had its own powers, beauties, and truths.  But the
winged thing mustn't return to the finned thing."

She looked at me over the violets that she had pinned at her throat.
"After Grandfather Forth's death I heard a man call him a mystic....
I suppose that's you, too, Michael?"

But the word didn't well describe how I felt as to the out-of-doors
around our houses of ancient habit.  She began to talk of things away
from this hour.  We climbed the hill and crossed the May grass to the
porch.

At no other time while I was at Restwell did we recall the one to the
other this morning.  She went her way and I went mine.  But I felt
her sultry beauty and the ancient sea call.  I piled images against
it, and drew at last strength from that dimension that fronts the
east.  And yet I knew, and that without shame, that life of old sense
through which certainly, in a million, million shapes, I had gone.
It streamed and weltered, fought and gloried, thrilled through its
coils of murky splendor, survived and somehow surpassed itself, and
rose.  Dorothea was me in that eon and I was Dorothea.  Miriam and I
and Dorothea had all been together.  If two were out, were partly
out, another would follow.

The days went by at Restwell.  Daddy Guinea was dead, but Mammy, Aunt
Esther, Mandy's Jim, and others still lived there.  Ahasuerus made
himself happy.  Restwell was oiled, smoothly running, with money as
never had I remembered it.  It was not that the Warringers were
hugely wealthy; they were not.  Royal would pass into that category,
but that time was not yet.  But they had means beside which my
grandfather's and my mother's old struggles seemed piteous enough.

Aunt Sarah had not oldened.  Her pale, smooth skin kept its firmness,
her hair its brown luster, her eyes their not young nor old, still,
immortal look.  I sat with her in her room, always so clean, hushed,
unlittered, or on the upper porch without her windows where in summer
she kept her many plants that would bloom in winter.  And three times
we were together in the graveyard.

"I understand better than I did," I said, "what you meant when you
said that they are within us."

"You'll grow to understand it better yet....  It's a vast world,
Michael, that 'within us'!"

"I am fast coming to see that."

"So vast that all things are there."

"I begin to see it."

"I have not the energy strongly to move and make move within it.  It
goes as a kind of still dream.  The faintest dawn is on the waters
and they lie still beneath it.  But I do not grieve any longer, nor
am I anxious.  It is a gain when women do not grieve, nor are
anxious."

The days swam on.  I went to Whitechurch.  I climbed the academy hill
and listened to Doctor Young in his study.  He reminded me of some
castle keep, narrow and darkened, but firm, built with a fierce
honesty of purpose, with good stone.  A life he fought was rising
around his hold--outer walls were crumbling now under strange shafts
and rays--but still stood the keep with fierce constancy.  I asked
him about Gamaliel.  His face twitched.  "I have not seen him for
three years.  I hear that he has put himself through some sort of
scientific school.  I suppose that he will go over, body and soul, to
science."  The timbre of the fortress voice carried, "Oh, thou deep
traitor to me--thou, my son, who grew from me!"  I felt the
drawbridge go up....

The days and nights went by.  In middle May I said good-by to
Restwell; as it proved, for three years.




CHAPTER XXI

Catherine and Lewis were away--Lewis at the university, Catherine at
Elton School.  John met me in town and drove out in the phaeton.
John and Amy Page would soon marry; he beamed on me with a full-orbed
serenity.  He was always serene, big, quiet, humorous, fond of
children and all animals.  He had interior mass.  In my own fashion I
considered most people by this.  Mrs. Sayre had it.  Maxwell had
it--interior mass with a dry, clear desert sweep and light.  Gamaliel
had it, with a keen, north-temperate clime.  My mother had possessed
it, and to a somewhat lesser degree my grandfather.  Aunt Sarah, too,
but with her it was moonlighted.  Major Dallas and Aunt Kate did not
lack it.  Madam Black had great mass.  Others whom I knew possessed
it, some more, some less.  Miriam and I, wherever we were ranked,
were twinned....

Flowerfield shone before us.  "Miriam comes to-morrow."  John had a
fondness for reminiscence.  Each time he brought richer appreciation
of the "isness" of what has been.  "I was thinking as I came along of
our old days in the barn--and nutting--and all over!  Weren't
we--aren't we--happy?"

The house greeted me.  I seemed to merge into it, it into me.  That
night I had my talk with Uncle John and Aunt Kate.  Africa, and away
assuredly for several years, and dangers to life and limb as great as
if I were going to war--my profession and the possibilities of
advance here at home in abeyance--Miriam and a long engagement....
It was all true, and yet related to a line of superseded truths, part
of a truth that seemed to me to be dimming before truth in swifter,
lighter planes.  And Uncle John and Aunt Kate, though they tried to
be conventionally prudent, careful, anxious, were themselves away
from the old line.

What I wished of widened experience that was now to me as food--what
I dimly felt of powers that might not, but yet might at last lead me
from the physical into other types of engineering--what I could get
into words of that road wherever we went between Miriam and me, and
of what I knew to be her deep consent to my going--of all this I
managed to give to Uncle John and Aunt Kate enough to turn doubt into
some fullness of assent.  We sat around a lightwood fire--John, too,
was there--and it chanced to be in the dear old school-room.  We
talked of Miriam.  Her training was done; she had taken an assistant
superintendent's place in a small, just-established hospital.  Her
father had been on to Baltimore.  "She's loved and trusted--she's a
fine child!"  Her mother made a little, murmuring sound.  "Miriam...."

She came next day.  I knew that they watched us together and were
satisfied.  John said, "You two lay in fairy cradles!"

The spring was around and through Miriam and me--a magical spring.

She stood just on the near side of tall, rightly slender, with a
gipsy, free, lithe vigor.  She had a wonderful brow, deep eyes that
said the happiest things, a short, well-cut nose, a mouth generously
wide and expressive.  Her skin had delicate wine hues, faintest
browns.  Her hair was thick and dark brown with beautiful tendrils.
No one with a poor nature could have owned her speaking voice.  Her
hands were long, strong, and fine.  Watching them, one felt the
movements they had made, the things they had modeled, the growth of
ages, the fine, perpetual change from far-sunken tentatives, through
all apprenticeships, all artisanries, crafts, to artist's knowledge.

We went here, we went there, we went to Wakerobin Hill.  We stretched
ourselves upon the good brown earth, we smelled the pine and hemlock.
We laughed--we were so glad; we understood in such full draughts ...
though we knew that all the rivers and fountains on earth could not
hold the first spring cup of the perfected, the ultimate
understanding.  The blue air floated within, without, above our wood,
the birds sang and rejoiced in their wings, and we, too, sang and
rejoiced in our wings.

She said, "Don't you know that we really meet--really, really,
really! for all that you may be under the earth in a mine and I may
be walking a hospital ward?"

"We meet so really that the preoccupation is to strengthen,
strengthen, strengthen reality."

"Yes, I know....  I deliberately try."

"And I."

"Sometimes there is a beautiful terror at what might come!"

"I mean the terror to lose itself in the beauty."

"And the goodness--the beauty and the wisdom."

"Yes, just."

"There couldn't be beauty unless there was wisdom ... goodness."

"The false Florimel--and the true Florimel."

She laughed.  "I thought that first!"

"I always did take the word from you like that."

"And I from you."

We smelled the rich and dark hemlock, we listened to the birds, we
sailed with the white clouds across the brilliant blue.  "All through
earth, everywhere, there are surely centers where is beginning a
marvelous knitting together....  There is coming to consciousness the
planetary spirit....  For us how exquisite that we guess it together!"

"Where will it stop? ... Oh, it will not stop!"

"No."

She sighed.  She put out her hands to me.  We rested against the
hemlock bank, our hands clasped, our faces touching.  "There will be
a sweetness, even in great light, in remembering night--in
remembering when we were little!"

"We'll not lose that, either.  We'll not lose anything that we want
to keep.  We shall taste it as we never did, as we never could
before!"

We rested silent, and the magnificence of the spring was all around
us.

We were walking the next day in the meadow.  There flowed here a
small, clear stream, with pebbly margins, and small, overhanging
sycamores and willows, with mint, marsh-marigold, and violets, with
soldier blackbirds coming and going.  We had walked in silence.  It
had always been with Miriam and me that we did not need to talk.  We
had been going, as it were, in a brown study, a reverie.
Imperceptibly this deepened.

I do not know in any detail how it was.  What will one day be general
powers are mysterious yet, fleeting in manifestation, withdrawing ere
one can say, "It lightens!"  Those who perceive, perceive
imperfectly, far and far away imperfectly, it is evident.  And they
cannot well tell what they perceive.  They say laboriously one--and
one--and one--and one--and one--and so on, with one and one.  They
cannot say--they have not yet the word--their tongue cannot say it
and none has ears to hear it--they cannot say TEN!  And then a
certain number begin to see "ten"--to try to say it--and their own
and the tribe's ancient vocabulary is not well fitted.  And evidently
there is great variety upon which the new door opens.  It is
"Ten"--but on that plane may be found a world of speeds and powers
and goods.  All sail from the old world to the new world, and all
have worked their way, but they sail in divers crafts and land in
divers zones.  There are evidently all manner of adventure, slight
and great--but all get out of space as we knew it before we said
"Ten," and out of time as we knew it.  For Miriam and me I will say
that we had begun, though palely, faintly, childishly enough, to
realize the world of imagination, of memory, and of inference.  I do
not suppose that there are roof, floor, or walls to that world.

There was the meadow and the sliding stream and the smell of mint.
We were moving in a brown study, a reverie, aware, as profoundly we
always were aware, of each other, but with all surface spray and
glancing subdued--silent, smooth, running deep....  Our bodies came
automatically, as it were, to rest.  There lay about us stones warmed
by the sun, with green grass growing around them.  We sat down.  Our
bodies fell into attitudes of quiet, of repose, all their myriads of
living points working on in some deep harmony of their own, the
spirit of the hive taking care of that....  But on upper levels
Miriam and I broke bounds.

We passed into an experience common to both, rememberable by both
when we came back to the sunlit meadow by Flowerfield and to what we
had called, and called only, actuality.  Now we never again called it
the only actuality.

The bond that we broke was that of narrowed space and narrowed time.
We came out of prison and we said, "Why should we have stayed in that
one room?"  In our prisons we had learned our book.  We knew in some
wise--in stronger wise, I must think, than did most of our
acquaintance--how to imagine and remember, how to draw ends together,
and like to like, how to ponder, brood, speculate, how at last to
desire and to will....  So one day, suddenly, things began to be put
into practice.

We were away from the Flowerfield meadow.  We left it as sailors
might leave ships at anchor while they themselves went into the
strange port....  There came a reinforced sense of being, of very
rapid, unobstructed motion, perception in sweeps instead of in
points.  We were at once mingled and apart.  We were one larger
self--we felt, as it were, the film that held us enveloped.  We were
one self, and yet at the moment's will moved Miriam and Michael.  As
we thought we traveled, as we imaged or remembered we saw, we heard,
we touched.  The concepted became the actually perceived.  We were in
the world of idea, grown vivid, solid, real.  We were as babes there.
Planes overlapped, powers were uneven; now we sank and now we swam.
But all weakness given, yet had we left the ship, yet were we out of
the dark tower.

Miriam and I stood in a city--it was Washington--we leaned upon the
rail of the ironwork balcony of an ancient hotel.  It was evening,
coral-lighted.  The long and broad shadow of a sycamore dappled all
the street.  The air breathed warm, still, striped with melody and
with romance.  We were there as we had been and as we had not been.
"As it was" hung modeled, colored, understood by the larger now.
Thought moved, we moved.  We sat upon a bench under trees, in
moonlight, before the white capitol....  This sufficed for
moments--new moments of new time--of wonder, of the more than doubled
beating life and interest.  Then again that movement unobstructed,
too swift for counting....  We were not in Washington, we were beside
heaped sand and the waves of the Atlantic.  We were girl and boy by
the waves, and we were man and woman, and we were something beyond
man and woman, inclosing, knowing, enjoying much....  We knew vaguely
that we were the ocean and the sand and the sky, just as well as the
boy and girl, the man and woman.  We knew, though hesitatingly,
dimly, that they were our Ideas, that we had set a stage.  In and
through that heightened rate of vibration, with that doublement of
energy, our ideas became solid, three-dimensional.

In the Flowerfield meadow a soldier blackbird flew to the stream to
drink and alighted at the feet of the two sitting there.  Ere one
could say or think, "The lightning goes!" we were back.  The bird
flew away before beak had touched water.  We saw him alight again a
hundred feet away.  We moved, we passed hands over eyes.
"Michael!"--"Miriam!" "What happened?"

"We went into the past together.  Into the time dimension where we
keep all things.  We went together--"

"The ocean sounds still in my ears!"

"The capitol---the balcony of the hotel--"

"Yes, of course.  The pink sky behind the sycamore....  Oh, the
strength, the abounding music! ... Now I feel shrunken."

We rose--walked.  "Do you think we can do that again? ... There is
something tremendous coming....  Oh, how could the world ever think
that this was all!"

"We shall try again.  Not now--"

"No.  The door opened, then the door shut."

We moved up the meadow in silence.  The little stream rippled, the
willows stirred in the spring breeze, the blackbirds chattered.  Far
off, cocks were crowing, a dog barking.  We smelled the perfume of
flowers, of young leaves.  She said: "All this is vivid--but that
memory is as present as is this meadow!  There, in effect, is the
sea, there the capitol, the balcony--"

"That is because the experience was so strong!  The memory is in
proportion.  We doubled desire, pooled energy.  Now the very memory
has what until just now we called 'reality.'  And besides that--"  I
looked around me.  "Miriam! isn't the day deeper, more vivid, more
resounding?"

She stopped short.  "Yes!  Oh, we keep something of the strength and
the glory!  We made a strange step--and it counts all around....  And
oh, it all feels so blessedly natural!"

"Miriam! a part of the world is passing beyond old powers into new.
We are somehow in the ranks of that expeditionary force.  I don't
know just where--away at the end, perhaps--but there, there together!
Miriam-Michael--Michael-Miriam!  Whatever is coming, there's that
bliss!"

"Yes, bliss!"  She paused, she looked at the land and the sky, and
then we gazed into each other's eyes.  "Everything deepens--"
Suddenly we put arms around each other, strained together, kissed.
"Oh, Love--Oh, Love!"




CHAPTER XXII

Early in June Ahasuerus and I joined Maxwell in New York.  In a few
hours we sailed for Liverpool, made the voyage in ten days, and were
presently in London.  Here I lodged with Maxwell.  He strode off to
find his chiefs, while Ahasuerus and I mounted to the top of an
omnibus and went to see what we could of this world-city.  The next
day Maxwell carried me with him to report to the two men heading the
expedition.

The first of these was Sir Charles Grantham, who had served in India,
who knew Egypt, and had shot and adventured in Abyssinia, Somaliland,
and Uganda, and had had some acquaintance with Speke and Burton and
with Baker.  He was a medium-sized, middle-aged, stocky man of little
speech and a steady eye, with a mouth shutting on what he said like a
trap, with broad, full temples and a finely stubborn chin.  This was
Maxwell's ancient friend and some kind of remote kinsman.  They had,
I think, a common great-grandmother.  The other head, Mr. Hugh
Llewellyn, had been twice in Equatorial Africa.  He was a man of
fifty, lean, of an Arab brown, with a black and vivid eye, a cool,
restrained, enduring enthusiasm.  Behind him doubtless were Welsh
chiefs and Welsh bards.  With all the glamour of a kind of Glendower,
he had abundant practical strength, could appraise skilfully, seize
wisely, hold tenaciously.  Ethnology was his passion.  He served his
science like a knight and lover.  Maxwell presented me to these two.
They talked and questioned me.  They had chambers together, somewhere
above a roaring street.

The next day I met John Sydney, the physician of the expedition.
Before long I knew also Philip Grantham, the young half-brother of
Sir Charles, and Carthew Roberts, a general utility, purely
adventurous spirit with an invaluable knack of seeing the joke in the
hardest places.  Somewhat later I became acquainted with Mannheim,
the naturalist.  We were, in all, eight white men.  Twice we dined
with Sir Charles and Mr. Llewellyn--to get the hang of one another,
said our hosts.  We met, too, various backers of the expedition,
Royal Geographic men, men of scientific societies, and others.  Sir
Charles's was largely the money, but to some extent there was help
from these bodies.  Preparations of sorts were still making.  Sir
Charles seized Maxwell, but the latter released me.  "You've got two
weeks.  Go where you want to and report here on the first."  I left
Ahasuerus with a West Indian man of color whom we found employed in
the small hotel where we stopped, and I myself went far and wide in
that holiday.  I went for two or three days to Edinburgh, thinking of
my grandfather, and of how he had talked of Scotland as though he saw
it, when his great-grandfather had been the last, in his direct line,
to see it.  Scotland--England--glowed fair to me that summer.

It was at York that there befell me a piece of reality--subjective,
if you please, but of such strength that the subjective forced, at
least for itself and to itself, the outer, the objective covering.

I had walked about the town and upon the old wall, and I had spent an
hour in the cathedral.  I went to my inn and sat down to write to
Miriam.  I told her of the day--the minster--the streets--the walls.
The page was half covered....

The old life of this place and of many another such place beat in me
strongly.  The rhythm grew marked, powerful--a great pendulum--a
great piston-rod--a mill turning--a dusky, stilly moving fervor, wide
under the arched sky, beginning to emit sparks.  I put down the pen,
and sat motionless, aiding the widening and deepening.  Sometimes I
could do this to an extraordinary extent.  There was nothing
supernatural about it.  How can there be anything supernatural?  All
that can be said is that there is much of the natural that is not yet
perceived or lived by us, and that certain energy-complexes know a
little more of the natural than do others.  Take a thinker, take an
artist--let him somehow find out how to prepare, concentrate,
intensify, in a high degree--take memory, imagination, knowledge,
power of inference, power of synthesis--make all more mighty by ten,
twenty, fifty, a hundred per cent.--and that complex will know more
of reality than it did.  If all is within the mind then the athlete
mind, in its periods of highest, skilfullest exercise, will meet its
own phenomena in a kinglier garb.  Sensation and emotion may find
themselves oceanic.  But where is the unnaturalness?  Now here--so
long as the control increases with the rest.

I went consciously, with volition, in and in.  And there I met a self
that was larger than the traveling, penetrative edge usually called
myself.  I was Michael Forth, sitting at the inn table, but there was
in presence--I of it, and it of me--a far larger, permeative,
recollecting, moving power.  There were the background and the
thickness of things.  Then out of the generalness, the universality,
one sector struck into light.  It was as if a Titan mind did as does
the mind of the average man--remembered a past strain of things.

The inn was gone, the table, Michael Forth sitting there.  Town and
country held, but they were changed.  The minster rose, but smaller;
the walls were there, but warded.  There spread over river flats,
over a shaggy forest, and over a wold, red light from a red and
sinking sun, red and great.  Here the river ran pale and gleaming
like vellum held before a candle, and here it ran red like missal
paint.  Far and near and in and out made little difference when the
Titan was remembering.  Black boats crept over the sea; black boats
rode in the river's mouth--many of them.  The rowers and those who
rowed not left them.  We were Northmen with shields and spears and
knives....  Wold and forest, but also grain-fields, meadows with kine
feeding, rough roads, timber homesteads with ruder, smaller houses
clustering around, with fence and ditch.  Taken far and wide, many of
these might be named; also there were larger clusters, hamlets,
villages.  And in all men were arming.  We were mostly tall men,
fair, strong.  The wold cut the sun in the middle, then the wold ate
the sun.  Dark!

We poured from homestead, hamlet, village, and we joined the
Northmen.  (They were common to me, in me; I was them all.)  We of
the boats, we of the land, Saxon-English and Danes, we moved like the
rivers of spring, bent on cleansing York.

We were asleep in York--we, Northmen also, by way of Normandy.  Many
and many we were asleep, in the castle, in stone houses that we held.
We slept also, citizens of York, Saxon-English men and women and
children, sleeping, sleeping, dreaming.  Castle sentinels waked, and
warders of the wall.  Normans all were these.  Certain of the
citizens waked, men and women with arms at hand, but hidden yet, with
beating hearts, with whispering speech.

My life--my life and Miriam's life--poured along roads with the
oncoming, watched with the watching, slept with the sleeping....
Knowledge did not descend to detail; small, sharp, inclosed events
remained unentered upon.  But there was massive, beating perception,
long, deep, and wide--perception and emotion.

This increased until there grew roar and surge of it.  Michael Forth
had not known that brain and heart could answer to such
reverberations.

Men of the black boats, Danes--English atheling and freeling and
læt--we reached the walls of York.  English within we opened a gate.
Norman within we shouted, "Arouse!" and started wildered from sleep.
Attackers and attacked, we locked and fought.  We fiercely locked, we
fiercely fought.  Self murderously fought self.

Wrath and pain and woe, and all titanic, for it was one body!  There
was one body there, one apprehension, one confused, fierce mind, one
volume of murky and terrible passion struck through here and there
with clean fierce light.  There was hideous fear, anger, woe, the
mouth brass, the ear discord, the touch pain.  All of us together!
All of us, in no wise separate, tearing at our own flesh, own hands
at own throats....

To that joined, enlarged, through-and-through consciousness all this
thousandfold event came as would come to the lesser, the minute, the
atomic consciousness painful, heavy thought.  It brought a pang of
self-weariness, lostness, and despair.  So painful was it that the
giant consciousness must dismiss it as a man dismisses a negative,
dragging, poisoned mood.

The wave sank--stiller yet--stiller.  The sea lay calm.

The inn came back, the room, the table, Michael Forth....  I drew
long breath, I lifted my head from my hands.  Before me lay the
letter to Miriam, and the sentence where I had put down the pen.  "I
believe, and you believe, that sooner or later we'll be able to walk
at will in the past.  It is us--it is our past--we own it."

I put out my hand toward the paper, then withdrew it.  The sea was
rising again.  That consciousness that could think and remember in
solids took repossession.  The Michael Forth of me again rested, head
in hands.

There was the outdoors, wide, wide!  There was the indoors--in the
monastery--stone passages, stone cells, stone church.  We were
chanting, monks were chanting.  Not only monastery in one place only,
not only one company of monks, but far and wide, double monasteries,
men and women, abbeys, priories, nunneries, hermit-cells.  That
Awareness flickered through them all....  It was as though that
greater consciousness, fevered and harmed the moment before, had
turned in its reverie and brought forward for relief another long
thought, a tranquilizing element.  The feeling now, though so
spacious, the composite feeling now, was artless, a little
melancholy, a little lifted....  It had been artless before, too,
like a child's pain and rage vastened.  (On that plane how could the
brain of the man by the table take more than lower, almost infantine
vibrations?) ... The waves then were calmer, the feeling was musical,
plaintive.  Within it might have been picked out a thousand discords,
but these were covered by harmonies, and the whole melted into this
music.  (I felt now that there had been music in the state before
this state, but more turbulent, heavier, greatly alloyed.)

I willed to contract, to find a concrete life in all these lives....
I was the monk Eadwine in his cell.

There was some penance for some heretical word.  I lay face down,
cross-shaped upon the flags, had lain there long, must lay there
long.  Cold was the cell, aching my body.  I heard the cock crow
beyond the garden.  I heard my brothers chanting in the church hard
by.  And still there went round in my brain just that for which I lay
there.  "What should God make souls out of other than Himself, seeing
that He is all?  Then, being of God, and there being no other than
God, the soul is still God--"

The cock crew, the chanting swelled, fainted, died.  There were
darkness and wind upon the wold.

Back I came to Michael Forth, sitting in the York inn.  I drew breath
and shook myself.  I touched the letter to Miriam.  I gathered round
me Flowerfield and Restwell.  Deep is life--deep, deep--wide is life,
wide as from Sinus to Vega--high is life!

I rose and walked the room.  I laid aside the letter till morning.  I
stood at the window and looked out upon the minster and the stars
behind it.  Ere I went to bed I prayed to the upper reaches, to the
heart and mind and spirit of that which we surely are, that Whole,
that God.

On the day named I reported to Maxwell in London.  Presently we were
gone from England.

It was the time of war with the Mahdi.  Egypt and the Nile that way
had ceased for a time to be practicable.  From Suez, Red Sea, and
Indian Ocean we passed to Zanzibar, and here, in a month's stay, we
outfitted beyond the outfitting in England.  When we touched the
coast of the old continent, when the in-country took us, we were a
party of not far from two hundred, counting many ebon men and
chocolate-hued men and a few pale-brown men and a handful of white
men.  We had pack-animals, mules, and donkeys, and all the
paraphernalia of a right scientific expedition.  At Zanzibar we had
found awaiting us an old African trader who knew many things and had
seen much since his boyhood on the Cornish coast, and with him
Ferraro, the Italian anthropologist.  These two joined us.  We had
besides, at the start, two missionaries from Mombasa who wished to go
to a daughter mission in the hills.  So we went into Africa, and more
than two years passed before, at the mouth of Congo, we saw with
rising hearts an English ship.




CHAPTER XXIII

Sickness and a Masai raid befell us early in our adventure.  The
porters suffered from the first, but in the raid all alike.  An Arab
caravan-man was killed, four negroes were wounded, Sir Charles had a
flesh wound from a flung spear, and I a rifle-ball through the left
arm, breaking the bone.  The Masai, finding us too strong, left as
suddenly as they had come.  We made camp, buried the Arab, and stayed
to heal the sick and the hurt in a place out of a fairy-book, so
strange and beautiful it was.  With my wound I had more than a touch
of fever.  Ahasuerus and Maxwell nursed me and John Sydney set the
bone and helped me up and out.  This was the end for me of illness.
I came out of it seasoned, and the rest of Africa gave me only
momentary hurts, though many an adventure when it seemed that death
or maiming was nigh.

We recovered the sick and moved on.  By degrees the first novelty,
beautiful, with a dash of terror, passed.  There set in routine
interest, routine toil.

We were not primarily an exploring expedition.  Exploration of much
of the route taken had been done for us.  But it fell to us to
lighten certain obscurities that overhung affluents of the two great
streams.  Nor had our enterprise political color.  Yet, where we
lived days or weeks with savage tribes, and some of these not at all
without glimmerings of things to be, we gave, I suppose, seed-ideas.
At one place, on high land, we met a tribe that was assuredly
lifting.  It had a king who was, in his way, an Alfred.  This man
learned more than one thing that would, in the long run, serve
him....  The expedition's official intent was to increase knowledge
of life in various forms, to read the rocks, make a great collection
of plants, draw and photograph wild, moving life, learn all we might
for zoölogy, anthropology, ethnology.  We were to put down in black
and white observation, experience, deduction.  We were to bring back
to Europe some valuable journal--journal made at last of journals,
half a dozen contributing.

Maxwell was no journalist.  He deputed it to me, and I kept our
common record.  But, besides this, I began, beyond Victoria Nyanza, a
record and comment of my own, written after my own fashion.  In the
weeks that we waited where Congo enters Atlantic, and upon the
England-bound ship, I put this in order, and it became _Letters from
Africa_.  The idea of the _African Dream_ came to me under Ruwenzori,
but I did not write it for three years.

At times this expedition tasted beauty and marvel to the height; at
times it wrestled with dangers, trials, and fears.  At times it met
gross weariness, or stumbled in tunnels of anxiety with a feeling of
all Africa caving in upon it.  Sickness visited us, and now and again
death.

Ere we were two months upon our way Philip Grantham died from some
poisonous thing.

We felt grief, we felt awe, he had been so bright, vigorous, like a
Greek boy.  Sir Charles stood, sat, moved, with lips so pressed
together that there was but one dark line.  We buried the shell out
of which was gone the young master.  We raised a little cairn over
it, we stayed there by it two days and nights.  We marched on, Sir
Charles very stern-looking, but himself, with a will to keep his
cloud of sorrow in his own sky.

That night we made camp in a sandy country, above a trickle of water,
with a sighing wind about us, blowing, twisting, the smoke from our
fire.  The white men's tents were pitched together, the Arabs' lay a
little apart, the many negroes couched about a fire with their heads
almost in the embers.  Each night two white men shared the watch.
One slept till the dark was half gone, when his fellow waked him and
himself slept.  The trader Robinson and I parted this night between
us.  He slept upon the sand, gleaming under a half-moon.  I sat and
listened to the wind and all it talked about.  The moon traveled
westward, the camp lay still.  I thought that in one place I saw
something move, and I went softly that way, to find that it was a
dwarf tree stirring in the wind.  Returning, as I passed Sir
Charles's tent I heard him groan.

I sat near the sleeping trader, and I looked toward Sir Charles, and
I wished--I willed--I tried to help him.

If indeed, and I believed it, we were members one of another, then he
was in me and I in him.  And the "dead" youth, the invisible
youth--so visible to the mind's eye, so penetrated by the mind's
touch, so felt for and felt with, understood, warmed with liking,
recognized as hardly had he been before--what perversity to say that
he was wholly gone!  He had not gone--he was here--in that sea
wherein all we bathed, in that organism where death and separateness
faded out.

I sat upon the sand, above the watercourse beneath the moon.  I drew
myself together, concentering, until the spark came, until the
vibration changed, until there were long, swift light and warmth--no
forms, but fluidity, energy, radiance.  I was aware that if I had
been strong enough to go farther, I might remake forms--make them
fairer, even, subtler, less destructible, greater.  But I was not
strong enough--nothing like strong enough.  I tried to direct the
waves of assurance, of comfort.  I wished him in the dark tent to
feel them.  I tried to soothe as I would have tried to soothe my own
hurt hand or arm, as I would have tried to comfort and recover
myself.  He was myself, his hurt my hurt.  That was the thing that I
believed with passion of all things.  I tried to bring the living
youth alive in him.  If there was _continuum_, if there was _plenum_,
we were all one.  I tried to make the underneath flowing rise in him,
bring the strongest comfort.  I did not go out to him; he was in
myself.  I found him there; I tried to make the true blood flow in a
numbed part of myself--and that self was not just Michael Forth.
Michael Forth was but a fiber of that self.  All the small "I's" of
earth were but surface colorations of that Identity.

The perception--the action--if action there were--could not be long
sustained.  I had tried from a fourth dimension to engender light and
warmth in one who suffered.  I did not know--I do not know--if there
was success--though I think that there was some success--filmy
enough, undoubtedly....  The inner sphere closed again from view.
The moon shone, the wind sighed, the water murmured.  It was time to
wake the trader.

We looked upon Victoria Nyanza and headwaters of Nile.  We lived for
a time beside a village in western Uganda, clean, with banana-groves,
inhabited by a Bahima folk, tall and handsome.  We were plentifully
provided with objects of barter, and they brought us in return what
we needed.  The country was most beautiful, high, and healthful.
Here were cattle and game in herds, and many a strange great
quadruped.  The native chiefs and strong men, the women, the old men,
and the children showed themselves friendly.  They came by the paths
that were everywhere, a faint reticulation over all the land, to our
camp, or we trod the same lines to the village.  We sat under the
trees that they favored.  Llewellyn and Ferraro more especially
throve here.  Llewellyn had picture-books which he showed the Bahima;
he told them stories like an old Welsh bard.  He had the gift of
discrimination.  I would watch his bright eye dart and fix upon some
one member of the bronze circle.  "There's one who can tell a story!
Come ye forth, friend, there, and unpack us tale or ballad!"  Two out
of three times Llewellyn succeeded.  The glories of the Bahima jetted
forth.  Meantime the Welshman, in the shadow of some one's broad
shoulder, drew out pocket tablet and pencil and fell to transcribing.
He and Ferraro had great knowledge of peoples and types.

We had in Africa strenuous hours, and again hours unoccupied.  In
some of the latter I put myself to school to Llewellyn and Ferraro.
I learned much from them.  I heard corroborated that which I had
always guessed, the profound unity of the human family.  And out of
the unity, that stem, that vine, but never detached from it, the
multitude of branches.  Some were wildings and some garden and
orchard and vineyard glories--all in proportion, it seemed to me, as
they kept knowledge of the fire and sap of the whole.  I learned much
of great drama from the Welshman and the Italian's lore--strange
tales of the divers leaves and buds, twigs and branches of the ash
Yggdrasil.

But it was with Mannheim, the naturalist, that I roamed farthest.
This man, twenty years my elder, son of a Jewish rabbi, born in
Hamburg, raised in London, had broken from cities into gardens, into
fields and lane sides, into forests.  The king who knew alike the
cedar and the hyssop of the wall might have found somewhat of himself
in this mind.  Mannheim had a tall, thin figure, soft, curled hair
upon head and chin, a hooked nose, eyes now keen and now deep, still,
and inward-looking.  Sometimes for days I went with him, in and out
of Uganda forests.  We took Ahasuerus with us and three or four
Bahima men.  At times Mannheim talked about himself, his youth and
hard schooling and emerging purposes.  "Each one finds what he
seeks," said Mannheim, "and each one seeks what he is able to find."

"Even if he seek the ultimate circle and the original fountain?"

"Even that.  But he must give himself time.  As you say, Rome was not
built in a day....  Certainly the new Jerusalem is not built in a
day."

We sat beneath an acacia and looked at lilies in an arm of
marsh-water.  I repeated aloud:

  "Bring me my bow of burning gold,
    Bring me my arrows of desire,
  Bring me my spear! oh, clouds unfold,
    Bring me my chariot of fire!
  I will not cease from mental fight,
    Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
  Till we have built Jerusalem
    In England's green and pleasant land."


"Who said that?"

"Blake."

We sat silent for a time.  Then said Mannheim: "The next century is
to be the psychic century.  _Fin de siècle_ they call this piece of
time; nineteen hundred will begin to listen to a still, small voice."

"You mean that the conscious subjective--and, correspondingly, the
objective--will widen its borders?"

"Yes.  We shall begin to use nerve and muscle that have been forming."

"What are the first movements of the new child?"

"They have great variety.  Naturally.  At first the freedom seems
wholly interior."

"Old self is very gloomy and insists to larger self that it is
mistaken."

"Yes.  All kinds of idle fears.  Babes learning to walk--the chair
and mother's arms too far away!"

"Perseverance and courage?"

"Yes.  It's worth all boldness."

I looked at the lilies by the reeds.  They were very fair; they
trembled on the dark water; they seemed lit from beneath, sapphire,
exquisite.  The reeds grew musical instruments and living green and
of a vivid grace.  It was a flash of transfiguration.  I knew these
at times.  They came and went, rifts of heaven, which then closed.  I
spoke.  "All that you call psychical--double-strengthened memory,
imagination at white heat, intuition that is a long reasoning process
flashed together, response to all manner of stimuli that once were
not noticed--all that is by no means all of it.  There is no rest
short of the conscious Totality!"

"I agree," said Mannheim.  "All that we can now conceive, or that we
can conceive to-morrow, is conceived but to be lost in greater light.
All the same, take what we can now do, and let it bring forth what
wonder it will!  It is first steps.  After walking comes running;
after running, flying; after flying we may begin to look toward that
wide home which is omnipresence."  He sat silent; then: "I recognized
you as one of the new children.  There are more of these children now
than used to be.  Presently there will be many--another race.  Then
will the mass of things begin to change."

One of the men brought him a strange flower.  Mannheim studied it,
touching, handling, with the naturalist's respect and understanding.

"I have not seen one like it," I said.

"No," he answered.  "It has fellows, but they are rare.  It is
emerging from a class.  See, here and here, how it differs....  But
all that it is doing is simply using its powers."

"There's a thing," I said, "in Dante's _Purgatory_ that struck me
sharp and quick when I read it as a boy.  There's a round of the
mountain where the souls lie prostrate with face pressed and eyes
blinded against rock and dust.  They have lain there, each one, very
long.  '_My soul hath cleaved unto the dust._'...  One of them stirs,
rises upon hands, rises to knees, stands, and goes.  The mountain
thrills and gives forth a cry of praise.  Presently to Dante and
Virgil appears the shade risen from that rock like Christ from the
grave.  They converse, and the soul--it is one Statius--tells them
that the mountain trembles and acclaims when any spirit among those
prostrate ones who have been covetous only of earth, of metal, and of
dust, and all the dream and cozenage of life

                          feels itself
  So purified, that it may rise, or move
  For rising....
  Purification, by the will alone
  Is proved, that free to change society
  Seizes the soul rejoicing in her will....
  Free wish for happier clime.


"So Statius.  Then says Virgil:

                "Now I see the net
  That takes ye here; and how the toils are loosed."


"Yes," said Mannheim.  "I hold that to be true through every order."

With the flower still in his hand we went back to camp.  Two or three
days after this we were out at the foot of a fairly high mountain, in
a grove of bamboo.  It was a grove of strange and rich suggestion;
fairy pillars, fairy arcades, smoothness, straightness, jewel-light
and fine, sere whispering.  After a while we rested, lying on dry,
clean earth.  Outside the bamboo the men with us sat under a
breadfruit-tree and played some game with bits of bone.  We saw them
brokenly, glintingly, through the forest of bronze-green jointed
stalks.

Said the naturalist: "There's a kind of experimenting that must go on
all the time if we are to get anywhere.  Laboratory work like any
other--patient trials and then patient trials again.  If once in a
hundred times there comes fluorescence--results--we are glad and
praise the America beyond the foam....  You get into wide past and
wide present easily?"

"Yes."

"And you travel within, as one calls it?  You say, 'I am in my
birthplace'--or, 'I am in New York'--or London--or maybe Canton or
Calcutta?"

"Yes."

"You use all your knowledge, sense of probabilities, associative
power, and so forth, and--sometimes palely, sometimes less
palely--comprehend, comprise, are things, situations, movements,
events, and trains of these?"

"Yes.  I go many places within myself, and I do many things.  But the
reality feeling is sometimes very weak."

"The reality will increase....  Let us experiment....  I have been in
America.  I have been to your Niagara Falls.  Have you been there?"

"Yes--long ago."

"Can you recall the cataract?  The rush of the river down, the
thunder, and the upflung churned water--"

"Yes."

"Then recall it now with all the energy you can!  I will do likewise.
See if we can meet and double the perception.  Sometimes it is
possible.  It is worth the trying."

The bamboo grove held us as in some magic grot, cool and dim,
stately, whispering.  I shut my eyes and sat still, breathing
lightly.  The inner man, into whose hands all places run, gave heed
to Niagara.

It was here, the roar and the intense, deep, swift, utter push of the
river over the brim!  The ground trembled; I knew again the smell of
the mass, the chill, the thundering fall, the outflung enormous
spray.  Niagara!  Very well, it was here, and in a high degree of
reality.  I had put my strength to bringing it here.  There was the
sense, as always when a thing like this was done, of a widened brain,
of a changed breathing, of a lifted inner firmament.  I held Niagara
in presence.  But Mannheim?  That needed another strength.  I put
forth energy of recognition....  I felt him.  For one instant the two
Niagaras roared together....  Immense sound, motion, light--all
significance doubled--sense of river where had been brooks, sense of
eagle where had been eaglets, sense of triumphing, outfilling life,
memory, knowledge--the subjective brain, the objective brain, great
planets where had been lesser ones--everywhere a changed dynamic....
The instant sank and passed.  There fell diminution, paling,
slowing....  Here was only the single Niagara, and it seemed a wraith
beside what had been.  It disappeared.  Two men sat in Africa in a
grove of bamboo.

Said Mannheim: "That was a fleeting synthesis of two.  Conceive, will
you, how it will be when we are all one!"




CHAPTER XXIV

We were in high country covered with tall grass, sparsely set with
trees, sweeping to a climbing forest.  There was a ragged, deep-cut
water-course, and there were ant-hills, little lower than the native
huts and shaped much like these.  So high were we that there was no
great heat.  We breathed salubriousness.  The mountains above us had
snow upon their brows.  This was elephant country, and we kept fires
about our camp to ward off any trampling rush from the herds we saw,
chiefly afar, but sometimes near.  We had had a stiff three days'
march through broken and hilly country, thinly inhabited.  Sir
Charles called a halt of two days and nights.

Maxwell, Ferraro, and I, and with us Ahasuerus and two Bantu porters,
made our way along the flanks of a hill a mile or two from camp.  We
had climbed a bold point and had gazed thence over a green and tawny,
just undulating sea to gigantic tumbled, frozen waves, white-tipped.
Coming down, we saw below us at no great distance a piece of the
forest in agitation, shaking and bending as though a bag of Eolus
were opening just there and nowhere else.  "Elephants!" said the
Bantus.

We came from the hillside out upon the plain and began to cross this
toward the watercourse.  Trees were still about us, but not many.
Between us and the camp stretched a ribbon of wood through which we
must pass.  We neared it.  Suddenly it, too, shook, and there poured
from it angry trumpeting.  We stopped short.  The Bantus began to
chatter.  "They surmise," said Ferraro, who was the language-master
of the three, "that the camp made some elephants angry, coming near
it perhaps and driven away by shots and sight of fire.  We missed
hearing the shots because the wind is blowing straight from us to the
camp.  But by the same token we had best look to ourselves, for the
elephants will presently know that we are here.  And they are angry.
Some one of them is hurt."

We were as far from the deeper forest that clothed the hill as from
the ravine of the watercourse, down which we might conceivably make
our way safely enough.  The grass grew so tall that in part it
screened us.  We began to move quickly across the plain to the
watercourse.  We had gone but a little way when the note of the
trumpeting changed.  "They've got our wind," said Maxwell.

The edge of the ribbon of wood seemed to bulge, to start forward, to
shake out pieces of shadow.  There were ten or twelve of these
protuberances.  They came away from the ribbon--showed themselves for
angry giants willing to charge us, overtake and trample us.  We were
men, not elephants, but we must and did run.  There was a great bull
in front.  We reached the watercourse, before us a precipitous bank,
down which we might plunge with some risk to neck and limb, but which
the angered herd and the more than angered leader might hardly
attempt.  Ferraro, Maxwell, Ahasuerus, the Bantus, and myself--all
seemed there.  Ahasuerus--

We were over the rim when I missed Ahasuerus.  I turned back.  I saw
him a hundred yards and more away, limping, trying to run.  The eight
or ten cows and young elephants with the great bull had stopped in a
grove of slender trees to the right, near the hill.  But the bull,
with lifted trunk, with gleaming tusks, was racing, trumpeting,
toward him.  I ran.  I shouted.  I waved above my head, above the
grass, a coat that I carried.

The oncoming elephant saw me and swerved from Ahasuerus.  I ran,
drawing him farther....  There was little in my mind but a singing of
old days in the corn-field, Ahasuerus and I working in the hot sun,
in the same furrow.  The corn-field and the swimming-hole--

The voice of the elephant was in my very ears.  I seemed to see
blended with my shadow the shadow of his tusks, of the trunk curving
toward me like a sickle, of the vast, lifted leg.  The report of
Maxwell's rifle blended with the trumpeting.

The elephant received the ball, but was not apparently severely hurt.
He half wheeled, missed me, tore beyond me, and stopped, bellowing.
Then from the distant wood, in agitation, came a burst of calling.
The cows moving in this direction now also called.  The elephant
seemed for one moment to think.  Then he swung his bulk about and
left us, trumpeting of his griefs.

Ahasuerus, running with the rest of us, had caught foot in some root,
suffered a heavy fall and a sprained ankle.  Now we gathered him up
and, keeping to the watercourse, made our way to camp.

Ahasuerus said: "Twas worse 'n cramp in the swimmin'-hole!  First, I
saw the horrors and nothing else to amount to anything.  And then I
saw Daddy Guinea, sitting somewhere, smoking his pipe, and looking
happy as a June-bug, and he said, 'Come erlong, boy--come erlong
through!'  I sho' was glad to hear you shouting at that elephant!"

Maxwell, in camp that night, supper eaten and bedtime come, leaned
against a tree before the tent.  "Ahasuerus all right?"

"Oh yes!  He'll have to ride one of the mules for several days."

Maxwell stood listening to the night sounds in the bush, beyond the
smoky ring of our fires.  "If that fellow had trampled you into pulp,
as for a little it certainly seemed that he would ... what then?
What next?"

"I didn't think," I answered; "but if I had, I should have said,
'There will still be a "then," and a "next."'  How are you going to
stop there being?  The rush of a bull-elephant--yes, or of
Niagara--is nothing to the impetus of you or of me!"

Lying on my bed that night the "you" and "me" went more subtly
together.  Variation and Unity.  Why did we think "Variation," and
then "Unity," and turn from one to the other, restless, perplexed,
still keeping succession, opposition, parties to choose between?  But
Variation-and-Unity, or Unity-and-Variation--the phrase one noun....
I lay there one power, an organism, and yet, God knows, I included
variousness....  To feel as and with this camp, both in its oneness
and its multiplicity--what was that but self-cognition as a larger
organism?  This camp, this Africa, these seven seas and five
continents, this earth, this solar system, this visible and invisible
universe....  Ever a greater, more conscious self....

Magnitude was around me, power, an upper realm of mind.  But it sank
away, it vanished, like sheet lightning.  It ever vanished thus, and
I cried within, "O God! when will the wings hold?"

But out of the flash came always, I knew, an angel into one of my
many hells.  Down there, under my daily consciousness, a light in
darkness, it continued to work.

Definitely now, in my life, I was come to the plane where two lives,
the inner and the outer, are in the crucible and must melt together.
Now the heat and light that were the crucible increased in intensity,
and now they sank to scarcely a glowing.  The crucible was immense,
the lives within it multiform; the process due to extend itself over
centuries, possibly through eons.  Much was within the crucible that
was obstinate, ignorant, selfish, and perverse.  But I knew at least
that I was in the crucible ... also that I was the crucible.

We went on from this country.  Here we changed carriers save for a
few who would still accompany us.  Zanzibar and Coast men, well paid,
in good humor, gave us ample good-bys.  Uganda men, tall and strong,
shouldered rolls and cases.  The moving line stretched afar over
rolling grassland.  I thought of Indians afile long since, through
American woods.  These Uganda folk, Hamitic men, placed beside the
Indian might not seem so very different.

The mountains rose higher.  We gazed upon purple giants, with
helmets, under the equator, of silver.  As we marched the robes grew
green, and we saw the shoulders of naked rock, and the whitened heads
held stark and high.  Now we were climbing, a moving line like an ant
army, upon the lower reaches of the giant's robe.  About us were
trees of wonder, and from them monkeys chattered at us.

At sunset the extended line subsided into the root-knot of camp.  We
slept in the midst of a forest much less than half asleep.  Plateau
that we had left, slope that we had mounted, we were eight thousand
feet above the sea.  High above us yet watched the snowy heads.

The following day we sought and found a lofty pass through which the
line might cross the range and begin the descent upon the western
side.  Here, in a hollow of fine Alpine grass and flowering shrub, we
slept, ten thousand feet above the far-distant sea.  The next day and
night camp rested here, under charge of Robinson, the trader, long
known and well liked by the Bahima men.  With him stayed Carthew
Roberts, and likewise Ahasuerus.  The rest of us would climb to the
helmet that lifted over the pass, to the very helmet feather.

So we did.  In the good, late afternoon light we came out below the
snow, upon a wide ledge of rock, from which we might see afar from
north to south by way of the west.  The white head above us, the very
crest, we left for sunrise.  This ledge was fitted for the night.
There was not only right surface, but at the back a sheltered
half-cavern.

Chancing to be in advance, I came first upon the ledge.  I saw, with
an intake of the breath, the great view.  To right and left mountain
arms; below in the pass the fairy plumes of our camp-fires; out and
beyond and very far below, washed in the gold of the lowering sun,
illimitable forest.  I stood and looked.  Out of a belt of dwarf
growth, up the difficult stony slope toward the ledge, came the
others, one by one.  With the sun behind me, I watched their coming.
Maxwell, with his long stride and his dry, poised strength, was
ahead.  Ferraro, so much smaller, but agile as a grasshopper, came
next, then Llewellyn, then Mannheim, then Sir Charles, then John
Sydney.

As I stood there Conrad Conrad flashed into mind--Conrad and the
Peaks of Otter and the tawny man.

The rich, the amber light bathed me standing on the rock, and bathed
them coming on.  But to my senses there seemed something more than
warm light from a ninety-odd million miles away, eight hundred
thousand miles in diameter, ball of fire.  There streamed from within
outward a happiest sense of strength and lightness.  It was as though
I had caught a ray from a supersensible sun.  My frame felt vast,
fluid without waste, transparent without colorlessness, strong
without weight, plastic to thought, a thrilling, lucent, finer
matter.  I felt this of the frame I called mine, and I felt it of
those companions in Africa coming toward me.  It was as though,
feeling it of the one frame, I must feel it of the others, because
all were in truth one frame.  The sense was of new bodies breaking
from old sheaths, bodies fed with, built up from, elements highly
evolved, grain of upland fields ground in golden mills.  It came with
indescribable breadth and depth, indescribable exquisiteness of
sensation, indescribable delicacy, richness, and strength of emotion.
Maxwell, stepping now upon the rock, was beautiful to me, and so were
Ferraro and Mannheim, Llewellyn, Sir Charles, John Sydney, and so
were the two Bahima men.

They mounted to the shelf of rock with the farther snowy crest behind
and half Africa, it seemed, below.  "Ha!" said Sir Charles.  "I
suppose we live for high lights such as these!"  His grim face
relaxed.  There came to him, and I suppose to all of us, the wave of
Philip Grantham's hand and his infectious laughter.

Below the ledge was broken scrub enough.  We gathered wood and made a
great fire.  We had food with us and we cooked and ate our supper.
It tasted most good there in the winey air, by the crackling flame.
Supper over, we examined the half-cave behind us for
sleeping-quarters and we gathered more wood.

We felt as yet no desire for sleep, and the west was magnificent,
while all the land below lay still beneath a purple pall.  Llewellyn
broke into song.  The words were Welsh.  "In praise of mountains,"
explained the singer.  "Of mountains and the spirit who couches among
them!"

We sat about the fire and fell to talking.  Llewellyn, usually rather
silent, seemed to have his lips unlocked by this place.  "There comes
out the golden Venus--Venus Urania!  Mannheim!  Where do you think
may be what they call the fourth dimension?"

"In the subjective.  Within us."

"We must be just being born in that world," said the Welshman.
"Earth and heaven!  What an objective we'll make ere we are grown!"

Sir Charles spoke.  "Where do you think are the dead?"

"Within us."

"But there's no real realization of that--any more than there is of
other things I read about, hear talked about, in this amazing world!"

"Give Time time.  You've just said that it is amazing."

Llewellyn began a half-spoken, half-chanted processional of thought.
It may have been partly an improvisation, partly a recitation from
some old bard.  It began about the mountains, and it went on about
the great drama and beauty of the earth.  He chanted of seas and
islands and continents, of zone and clime, of the outstretched
landscape of time, of scintillant currents of peoples.  And all came
under the mantle of an Individual.

He ceased his chant.  We looked at the stars--Rigel and Canopus and
Sirius, Achernar and the Southern Cross.  John Sydney spoke.
"Universal Energy or Everlasting God?  Which do you say, Mannheim?"

"I say the Self that I merge toward," answered Mannheim.  "It is the
same with Universal Energy and Everlasting God."

"And you, Michael?"

"I say the same."

We watched the sky.  There was splendor, there was pureness, there
was vigor.  Each one seemed to feel the center in the other, take
thence the point of view.  Therefore we had many mountain-tops in one.




CHAPTER XXV

We were in the forests where the water sank and trickled toward
Congo, not toward Nile.  There rose about us a fearful, a magical
beauty.

A path ran that seemed a chain of roots and rootlets, kindly pushed
above the soil by the trees for our use.  So light and yielding was
this soil that we seemed to step upon black air or black water that
did not wet, but into which there might be sinking.  The soil was
black vegetal life asleep, thick memories, premonitions of life in
infinite leaf.  We came into arcades, aisles where water ran, where,
far up, so far up, there glowed fillets of blue.  Away from these
there had never been aught since the world began but a green heaven,
a mighty emerald and jade arabesque.

The air hung humid, warm, oppressively still; the light, green light,
rayed from a sun that must be far away and small.  Birds or the face
of a chimpanzee looked down or out upon us.

The thin, extended line of burdened men wound on slowly, following
the naked guide ahead.  Footprint fell in footprint, over the black,
low-settled mist of old life, so pregnant, so fecund, so
instant-ready the moment the spark should call....

I walked in a forest of my own thought.  I was remembering that the
earth was alive--that those whom we called planets--stars--suns were
persons, individuals--that there was communication between them--that
they made a society--that they pursued an ideal unity and spoke of an
over-self.

Planetary consciousness--solar consciousness--universal
consciousness, universal, eternal, integrated!  I saw the star ahead,
faint and far, and between were light-years as the sands of the sea
for number, light-years and their vast successiveness of event.  The
strange sweetness was that the ray it sent was a ray of home and drew
with the cords of home.

All feeling, all knowing, all doing rang forth from that.  _There_
was the heart of action.  _There_ was all the action....  But what
was the action?  How to further it?  How definitely to let go the
little will, let the One Will pour through?  How to increase the
mind's weak zephyr until the eternal cleansing truth blew free?

The path wound, though still it went on.  The powdery earth that was
half-life seemed hardly to afford footing, and yet did give support.
Strange trees, ferns, mazy creepers, air-plants, roof over roof,
light like the depths of the sea!  Suddenly, smilingly, there walked
into my mind child-verses learned at my mother's knee:

  Little drops of water,
    Little grains of sand,
  Make the mighty ocean
    And the pleasant land.


Still the huge controversy!  Was that so--or the mighty ocean and the
pleasant land did they make the water drops, the sand grains?  Or was
there no true problem, and the whole vexed question but a
lantern-fantasy to melt in the flooding day?

The flooding day--that was what I wanted.

The enormous forest slept, a sea of strange shapes.  I wished to know
the life that made the shapes--drew limiting lines around its own
essence for its own uses--knew the use, the purpose, was at itself,
gathered its mind together and knew itself....  The only path was the
inner path, the way of the ever more inclusive, ever less inhibited
"I" or "We"--just as one chooses to call it.  Now Michael Forth
called it "I," and now he called it "We."  But never did he mean only
that manacled, dungeoned particle, born in the year 1862.

The forest halted.  Here came and passed and stayed a stream crossed
by a swaying bridge of woven lianas.  Upon the farther bank, in a
brown and green space, appeared rows of smallest, frailest huts of
cane, and a body of Pygmies, warned that we were friendly, drawn up
by their talk-house to meet us.  They struck their drums.  Boom!
Boom!  Their fetish-men advanced, striving hard to look terrible.
And all around stood the forest, the rooted, the yet further manacled.

We dwelt several months by this stream, with these Pygmies.  They
were a simple, low-scale folk, away down, away down.

I listened to the drum-beat in this village.  I watched the ritual of
the fetish-men.  They were children in height, but they wore
head-dresses that they thought made them towering.  Around and around
they went in a circle....  It was as though there was an invisible
stake, an invisible rope; they got to the end of their tether and
went round and round.  I thought, "Break the rope, for God's sake,
and rise!"

One night, in a half-dream I saw more than these Pygmies.  I saw
Africa and its stake and rope and weary circle....  Asia and its
circle--Europe and its circle--America and its circle....

This village, this forest, this stay with the Pygmies, came, with me,
into the column of turning-points, the hinge column.

I was weary of inner debate, weary of turning around my own stake in
my own circle.  There would come upon me here, if I stayed here
forever, withered horror....  I would clear out--trust to rising--but
move anyhow!

I had had intimations of a path.  To treat syntheses as phenomena to
be realized, used, and grown by just as their component phenomena had
been realized, used, and grown by--to take Memory and Imagination as
the great Powers that they were--to use Reason with a wider swing--to
trust Intuition--to cease saying, "It is not penetrable," or, "It is
afar," or, "It is dead," or, "Past and Future are unenterable," or,
"There is no participation nor perception outside this circle."

The night held dark and warm and close.  There was something tolling
in the forest.  A red light upsprang by the talk-tree, and the
fetish-men began again their twisted dance.  All the Pygmies followed
with their eyes; their bodies also moved in sympathy.

At Landon once there had been a lynching.  I had been among those who
tried to stop it.  But we had word too late and were there too late.
I saw again the swinging body, the crew of masked Pygmies beneath....
I thought of many another crippled truth and frozen love.  America
and its weary, ancient circle....

Break, break from ignorance!  Nor halt from fearing, "Is this a
path?"  Go the way you can go, and trust to its widening and serving
the others!

That night, my body lying straight in the tent that I shared with
Maxwell, I went away in the inner man.  Just as much as that inner
man could reap of inner space, time, and form, he might reap.  Just
as much as he could understand and share he might understand and
share.  There was no barrier save himself.

It had been an oppressive day in this forest and this Pygmy town.
The rains were at hand.  We faced a considerable stay here, and the
prospect had some distaste....  I went away.  I fled like the eagle
upon the breathing air.  Beneath me flowed the sea.  Then there was
land and mountain-tops....  But up in the air--up and up!--till it
thinned, till atmosphere lay below me as hydrosphere and lithosphere
lie under atmosphere.  The Sea of Air--and I saw its surface as from
a cliff is seen the surface of the sea.  It was in waves, little and
great, and the upper forces dashed against and through it, and there
was a wild spray of utterest light.

Down in the Pygmy village arose some night disturbance.  Maxwell sat
up.  "It's Ferraro's watch--"

I rose.  "I'll go see."

The affair proved to be nothing more than the push of some forest
beast against the last cane hut's most diminutive garden-patch.  I
returned to the tent.  "It's all right."

Maxwell lay back.  "I was dreaming of Scotland.  I smelled the
moors--had heather in my hand....  Michael, don't you think that the
whole round earth may be within us?"

"I certainly do.  Look in upon Scotland whenever you will!"

He turned.  I knew that there was a woman with him upon the moor.  In
sleep it mattered not at all that she was what they called "dead."  I
divined other planes where, too, it did not matter.

The rains began in the basin of the Congo.  We stayed their season
out among this Pygmy people.

We made for ourselves indoor work....  For one thing, among others,
while I was in this place, I wrote the beginning of a story.  I never
finished it, never used, later, the fragment.  I place it here
because I was writing out of my own straining toward light, and my
own intuitions of certain of the forms and ways of that faint, faint
dawn which was all that as yet I knew.

The fragment follows here as I wrote it in the huts of the Pygmies,
in tropical Africa.


ESCAPE

He had been in prison ten years.  The prison was a fortress where
were kept offenders against the state.  His prison chamber was a
place of stone pillars and arches, long, but not so wide.  The
shadows hung about the ends of it.  The loophole, grated window was
set in the middle of the outer wall; the lamp swung from the middle
pillar.  There was a low bed and a heavy chair and table.  The floor
was stone and sounded when he walked to and fro, unless he walked
lightly.  He walked much, to and fro, and to and fro.

Morning and evening came a jailer with food and water, a silent
jailer with a heavy and a weary air.  He evoked pity, chained to a
monotonous life.  Few others came.  If any came it was at
tremendously long intervals.  Nor were they friends of heart and mind
who came.

Often enough it was cold enough in the prison room that in part was
sunk below a river level.  In time of flood the river might be heard
without.  The prisoner had a thick coverlet for his bed, and a long,
wide and warm cloak.  He needed both when he saw, high up, the gray
snowflakes behind the window-grating.  Both had been the gift of a
woman.  He had never seen the woman.  At long intervals some
comfort--a book perhaps--had come from her, brought by the jailer.
She must have influence.  He knew that the giver was a woman only
because the jailer said, "A woman sends it."  And again, "A
woman--yes, the same woman--sends it."  But now for a long time, for
nearly two years, nothing had come from her.  The prisoner believed
that she was dead.

Ten years....

He knew very well his dungeon with pillars and arches.  There were
the two shadowy ends.  Lying on his bed, he gazed at one and the
other until they seemed to stretch forth like a giant stretching his
arms.  What was at the giant's finger-tips?  And what just beyond the
giant's reach?  When he walked that way it was merely into dimmer
parts of the fortress room.  There was the window high in the side
wall.  Beyond it spread breadth of the earth.  But the walls about
the window space, and the bars across, and his body passing to and
fro beneath, were alike material, and the first held back the second.
The free space of the window was smaller than his body.  It could not
go through.

How rigid were conditions!

Ten years....  To and fro--to and fro.  The dropping moments, falling
in a line....  Stalactite and stalagmite meeting--the pillar of them.

When first he came to this place he had been active with plans for
release or escape.  His mind had moved swiftly this way and that,
searching iron keys for an iron door, means to reach friends without,
means to change the views of foes without.  With his hands, with a
file made from some scrap of iron, he had worked at the stone that
cased the window.  In none of these things had he succeeded.  In them
all like was opposed by like, by a more numerous and massive like.
At last he saw that a heavy like was opposing a less heavy like, and
that in the nature of things, the latter could not beat down nor
penetrate the first.  He desisted from these efforts.  That had been
a long time ago.

Dull stagnation and despair.  There had been a frozen year of
that--gray, icicle-hung...

Out of that, little by little, he had reached a more clement season.
How he came into this he hardly knew.  Something had worked for him,
underground or overhead, in his own nature.  As the floor upon which
he trod was the roof of cellars and gave forth low sound as he
walked, so, doubtless, his own being had stories.

He came to where he could help himself, in that story where he
consciously dwelt--and so, doubtless, helped all the other stories....

Now he took up again, though not in the first fevered strain, and
with difference of aim and method, the deliberate, day-by-day
endeavor to remove himself from this prison.  If what opposed was too
numerous and too massive to-day, that might not be the case
to-morrow.  He worked with brain and hand.  Necessarily, it was inch
work....  The opposing forces had an air of resting yet in their
age-deep bed.  He persevered, but he saw that an angel must break
these prison bars.  Well ... make the angel!  Make or awaken--he
cared not which, so that the winged being arose.

He was born a thinker and artist.  It was the artist in him that had
set him here.  He had laid hands upon a misshapen state, trying to
bring it into juster proportions and beauty.  But Behemoth had
elected to remain for the present Behemoth.  Now he was here in
prison, but he would widen this from above if he could.  _Where
there's a will there's a way.  Where there's a will there's a way_.


The books were few that he had in his prison, but worth while.  He
had been allowed to bring a certain number with him upon his coming
here.  That same woman had sent more who now sent no more.  So well
did he know them now that he knew much in them that was not written
down.  He had also the much that he had read before coming here.
Pondering this mass, traveling in mind to and fro upon its surface,
learning by degrees to sink into its interior, to permeate, as it
were, its molecular structure--he found open to him, in a sort,
fields of space and rivers of time.  Emotional freedoms likewise,
releases of energy, desires, longings, aspirations, satisfactions ...
and higher vineyards, orchards, and wheat-fields where the mind
strengthened itself ... and mountain summits where the sky of spirit
seemed not far away.

It was a life....  But yet, compared to life that he longed for, it
was pallid, hushed, slow, twilight, a land never to be scorned, a
real land, always to be loved and thanked for good help for
travelers, but yet a Stygian land compared--

Compared to what?  Traveling to what?

He had a power of longing--but all was cut across by a wall of pearly
mist....  There must be light there, for he saw the wall.


When neither lamp nor window showed him the page of his book, or when
he lay awake upon his bed, he might sink into the sea of memory.
That was a dense element in which he was at home.  He could move to
and fro there and take much pleasure.  It was a very ancient, very
wonderful sea.  He became a skilled navigator, over and through its
waves and currents....  Mnemosyne!  Her face was fair, though turned
always over her shoulder....

He wrapped memory about him like a cloak, he sat beside it like a
fire.  Motionless upon his bed, or in his chair beneath the faded
window, he wrought until the dead lived again and the past put on the
present's crown.  Until the dead almost lived again and the past
almost put on the present's crown.  He wrought and wrought until he
opened blocked-up paths.  With an infinite patience he matched ends
and colors....

He began to see his life as he had not seen it before.  He sorted
past phenomena and put them in sequences.  He recovered moods and let
like flow into like, and felt the river systems of them and the
uninterruptedness of their being.  He put together purposes and saw
that always they were threads of larger purposes.

What at first he had called memory, and had bathed in for sensuous
warmth, repose, security--for a finer, haunting, melancholy
pleasure--for rhythm and returning chords--passed by stair and stair
into Recollection.  Mnemosyne came alive, looked around, moved....
The change was profound.  It was as though a geisha, soft,
attractive, exquisitely skilled to soothe material care, had given
way to a goddess--such a goddess as a man must be very high, subtle,
and deep to serve!


Yet were all these but inns, but shrines, but cities on the way out.
He must not rest, lob-lie-by-the-fire, in the inn--he must not kneel
too long before the image in the shrine--he must not even dwell, a
busy citizen, too long in the ant-hill city.  He was addressed to
real escape, with all his being....


Every power of desire, will, knowledge, judgment!  He brooded like a
witch over her caldron upon the data of science.  Each bit of
knowledge was a chink in the wall.  Get a finger in, work and work
until the hand slipped through....

Power of Recollection.  As a man awaked from sleep, as a man turned
to saneness from delirium, so there might be a still, smooth, deep,
and entire return to one's self.  Then these walls would be paper and
mist.

Power of Imagination.  He was alive to possibilities here.  It was
his belief that mankind was not using for flight one feather of that
mighty wing.  Then imagine!

What was reality?

What were real perception, real knowledge, real will, real
action--what was recognition of reality?

Could one make reality; give it, as it were, birth from desire, mind,
and will?

Make or find or recover reality....

He was a man religiously minded, for all that nine out of ten had
called him infidel or atheist.  Much of that life of his, outside
this prison, had been spent in what seemed to the nine destruction of
ancient and venerable buildings....  The work, too, within himself,
of dilapidation--how many years he had given to that!  To see fall
from his own interior world this tower and that keep--to take away
the clinging ivy--to disturb the winged life that had built in every
cranny--what sad and heavy and dogged work much of it had been!  Yet
he could do no else, for his own power drove him on, and there was a
word that rang somewhere above him.  In the light stood justification.

That anguished toil had passed into something like building and into
hopeful joy in building--long ago it had passed.

Religion!  To remember the god in you!

Every day a day of splendor, but fairly shadowy, almost night, before
the more splendid dawn it foresaw.  Ever the hunter in the keen air
of his own being--ever the adventurer with the wild-grape scent from
the new land just within his nostril--ever the lover with the beloved
wearing a starrier crown.

Religion!  Ever more comprehensive, comprehending, until there was
consciously but the Various One--who might have his own vast days and
dawns....

He paced his prison, up and down, across, around.  He sat in his
heavy chair, motionless, his eyes upon space.  One entering would
have thought him carved there, while all the time, within, was
intensity of action.  He lay upon his bed, his arms straight at his
sides or crossed upon his breast, so still that he might have been
thought dead.  Without the grated window the snow fell, the wind
struck the fortress like a flail.  The river could not be heard, for
it was covered with ice.  His mind was warm with its own deep speed.

Freedom ...

Plato's World of Ideas--not Plato's solely, but any man's before him
and after him, who might grasp the rim of that world and draw himself
up into it--over the wall, through the window.

Pragmatic Sanction....  What would work, what you could bring into
experience.  Truth.  The Actual.  Make it with your magic, if you
were so fortunate a magician.

The mind-born.  The born of mind and will.

"If ye have faith ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove, and it
shall remove."

Strength of a larger self--on the road to a larger yet.

Freedom--

Eleven years.  He had been in this fortress eleven years.

He lay on his bed and the snow fell without the window.  He lay
wrapped in the cloak that the woman had given.  The gray flakes fell,
he knew that the wind was high.  Then very quietly, gently, without a
jar, quite simply, naturally, he himself, his consciousness, awoke
outside his body.

It was both without and within.  It was as though he were free in the
room, but had left--just that much of himself--a guard within the
body.  The body lay as though it were asleep.  When, presently, he
would try experiments, he was immediately back within it, awake, and
looking at the falling snow behind the grating.  It was as if a very
high volition of itself raised or lowered its rate of vibration.  The
lower rate laid it here within the thick body, the higher freed it.
He gathered force and again passed out from that citadel.  He knew
where he left it, he kept a fine line of communication open between
him and that guard left within.  But with the intensed rest of him he
was out and away.

Not, indeed, that there was fullness here, either!  Even with so much
of blessed freedom, he was aware of stronger and vaster volitions to
be attained, to be exercised.  Compared to what might be here was
only a slow-spinning, cold, and dim star.  The blaze of glory was yet
above.  But compared to what had been he experienced strength and
bliss.

He passed out of the fortress, to his consciousness withdrawing from
it like a cloud, a vapor, or like light, like radiant energy, passing
through the pores of the stone, as if the stone were no more than a
gray fog-bank.  He was aware of sentries, but the sentries did not
stop him.  One or two might turn head as he went by, but they did not
call nor start forward nor threaten with any weapon.  He realized
that they did not know why they had turned.

He remembered an old wood, known to him when he was a boy, and
remembered it in its summer dress....  The wood was about him, and it
was green and the sun filtered in between the leaves.

That fact of infinite gradations in vibration, infinite intensities
of imagery and will!  He was here in the wood, and as formless as
air.  Into mind came the old warm pressure of the soil, the odor of
sun-washed pine and fern, the bird song from coverts, the boy's happy
abandon, down-flung upon Mother Earth....  He took form.  Whether his
power slackened to that or heightened to that he was not then clear.
But he was here, in the fair shape of a man, and he first kneeled and
then lay upon the warm earth, and felt deep joy.

Of old time, in this wood, when he was a boy and afterward in
manhood, he had been well able to image and remember, to dream and
picture, to disintegrate and bring into new combinations experiences
of his own or of others, to live in a manner in poetry-land,
romance-land, history-land, and in the news of the world that came to
him hot from the oven.  His faculty in this wise had been very
considerable.  And he could share in elemental life.  Wind and water,
earth and fire, were wide and deep words to him, holding wonder....
That so straitly bound, that steel and iron, that painful fortress
life, had forced, for very relief's sake, his ancient power to exert
itself and grow in massiveness and edge.  He recognized now that this
present enormous access of strength was a matter of altered degree
rather than kind.  Hastened by great need, lifted at last by will
grown athlete, he had in one effort overpassed many degrees.  He had
come into superconsciousness, but into what degree of that, or high
or low, he was not prepared to say.  He saw that his degree bordered
the old consciousness, in part blended with it.  He was not
arrogantly minded, and he was prepared to believe that it was not,
save relatively speaking, a high country.  But oh, beside the old, it
was high and wide and blissful!

This wood was dear to him whether it slumbered or whether, as now, it
bent its boughs in the summer wind.  A little thing that he thought
he had forgotten started solidly forth again.  A straying dog came by
and started a rabbit-hunt.  The rabbit went like a flash down the
forest-scape.  She and the dog disappeared, whereupon a pheasant
stood out from some dead leaves and twigs upon the ground and looked
at him, lying there motionless, with a knowing eye, then, turning,
whirred away.  That old time he had laughed, and now he sat up, arms
about knees, and laughed.  The dear old wood, the rabbit only half
scared, the knowing pheasant!

He laughed, then that without-wire spoke to him, and immediately he
was in the fortress chamber, returning as he had gone forth, slipping
again into the body there, coalescing with the guard he had left.
The key grated in the door, the jailer appeared bearing evening food
and water.  The prisoner sat up, rose from the bed, and came to the
table.  "Good evening, friend!"

"Good evening," said the jailer.  He set down the dish and jug.  "You
look very well, tall and strong," he said.  "I wonder!"

He stood and stared.  "Things turn inside out," he said.  "It seems
to me that the jailed are better off than the turnkeys."

"Perhaps they are," said the prisoner.  "I wish that we were well off
together!  There must be a way to that, too."

"Well, it's all a riddle," the other made reply, and went away.
"Good night," he said at the door.

"Good night--good night!"

The key turned and was withdrawn.  The prisoner, seated at the table,
ate sparingly, drank water.  Rising, he paced the floor, up and down,
up and down.  Outside the grating the snow was falling, falling, the
gray light fading.  The prisoner lay down upon his bed, drew the
thick coverlet over him.  Once or twice a fear had knocked at his
heart, hurriedly whispering at a keyhole.  "How do you know that you
can do that again?  How do you know that it was not a dream?"--Yet he
knew that it was not a dream, and that he could go free.

He lay still, he gathered energy, he heightened consciousness, he
felt that fear dissolve in inner light.  He left the body and the
fortress.

The snow.  He had watched it of late and imaged the fall of it, the
heaped silver of it far and wide.  Now with his freed consciousness
he entered, as it were, into the snow.  He was finding that it would
be difficult to resist the taking of form.  There was here a most
prolonged memory--whether to be indulged or overcome later judgment
might tell.  He thought of the veil, the continuity, the movement of
falling snow, thought of it with pleasure....

The air was thick with snow, drifting, endless.  He was snowing over
vast fields, steppes, tablelands and mountain systems, steadily,
quietly, restfully.  He needed this great escape into space, this
subdued mood, even, so solitary for so long had he been, this
solitariness.  With a quiet indifference, neither pleasure nor pain,
but stillness, he moved in whitening flakes.  He felt both the
movement and the rest where they lay.  He stretched himself in
gleaming white over leagues of land, and touched and melted into
leagues of ocean....  His thought changed and with it his form.  He
left the gray, multitudinous, crystalline peacefulness and became the
liquid sea.  He lay afar beneath the air, and here was sunlight and
here dark space and the stars.  The earth kept him curved about her,
but he quivered also toward the moon and followed her in tides.  But
most, he thought, he felt the sun.  When he did so he rose, in part,
from himself, he became mist and vapor, he rode on high as clouds.
Liquid again, he fell as rains, torrential or fine.  He sank upon the
earth and into the earth, he drew from springs and brooks into
rivers, and then in a vein-work of rivers great and small, and with a
lullaby, lullaby of going home, the mother calling and the thousand
thousand children returning, bringing experience, he returned to
himself and was ocean with an added hue and dream.  Again, elsewhere,
he mounted, and that perpetual wheel rolled on.  With his waves he
struck a thousand coasts and felt the rebound; in long rollers he
advanced upon the smooth beaches.  Currents flowed in him, rivers
vast and small, and he was their stream, their bed, their shores.  He
felt whirlpools, deeps, and shallows.  He lay quiet beneath the stars
and the sun, and where the air thickened and moved against him he
rose in a storm.  In hills of water with far-flung spray, he
contended with the air.  Yet down below was quiet, and elsewhere he
and the air lay at peace together.  He saw how universal was drama.

Water....  He followed himself afar.  Cloud and sea and stream, but
he was also present elsewhere.  He was locked in earth and mineral,
he was held in receptacles of myriad shapes and sizes.  He was
cradled in the plant, in the grass of the field, the reed, the rose,
the oak and the palm, the wheat ear and the grape.  In him, where he
gathered together and was the sea, moved the fish, waved the
sea-growths, dwelt the creatures of shell houses.  But likewise he
was within and of the fish, the sea-flowers and the shell creatures
and their houses.  The ships moved over his waves, but in minute
waves he moved within the timber of the ships and the bodies of the
sailors.  He was in the cup that was raised to the lips, and in the
hand that held the cup....

Beyond this orb, far in the fields of space, he felt himself, where
about other earths he stretched himself in other seas.

... Also, by likeness, in thought and imagination.  Like a great dawn
he realized presence in subtler fields.  As at a bell from a tower,
or a thunderclap, or a lark's song, he was in a realm like and not
like, changed and yet similar.

In the old, more narrowly conscious life, in the old remembering,
imagining, conceiving, in the huge dialectic that the emotions and
the mind, under some approval of the ultimate spirit, carried forever
on, there had been provided in line and color many a _mise-en-scène_
and of characters a multitude.  Always there had been a central self
and those portions of its periphery to which it gave provisional
attention.  But that peripheral world had been without visible body
and self-movement.  In dreams, truly, there was in some sort body and
self-movement.  But from dreams was lacking something of great value,
present in "waking" commerce with memory and imagination and
prophecy.  But however strong might be these latter they had never
been able to march beyond a certain point.  Now, that center moving
with heat and light unknown before or long forgotten, they marched.
They became three-dimensional and vital.  That middle power, fire of
desire and of will, rayed forth in correspondence with its central
strength.  All that now it abstracted from itself and looked at, all
that it imaged or remembered, had gone up a stage.  It was become
what in that old world they called reality....  And still he knew
that he but dimly divined himself across great space.

The present Adventure seemed new, yet in some wise he followed old
lines, traceries, co-ordinations.  He had made them, they were truly
to be used, scroll and arabesque, illumination in gold and silver,
scarlet and green and blue border of the great text of himself that
he could only stumble over, so little a child was he in Recollection!
Yet he had garments that he wove and wore, wealthy, lovely, and in
their moment satisfying.

He drew himself together from the silver sea.  A promontory, rock and
sand and sere sea-grass and small, twisted trees, rose at hand.
Behind spread an ancient, lovely country wound with tendrils of the
sea, and green-sloped mountains lifted above them.  "Poseidon!" he
said.  "I am Poseidon."

He rose, a giant form, strong, immortally young and potent, fluent
and various and mighty.  He moved upon his sea beaches, he stood upon
the promontory and looked far and wide.  At no great distance gleamed
a small temple with columns and a sculptured relief showing the god
of the sea and the goddess Demeter.  It glowed in light....

A giant woman came toward him.  Majesty breathed around her, but she
was genial, too....  He remembered the prisoner in the fortress, the
cloak and the books that had been sent.  Instantaneously he was
behind the barred window, within the body there--the prisoner of
state who had been shut away eleven years.

He sat up, he rose, he went to the table, he laid his hands upon the
books piled there.  Among others he touched a small and curiously
bound volume--Dante's _Vita Nuova_....  He lifted a fold of his cloak
and pressed his brow and cheek against it.  This was an accustomed
action.  He had felt that so he touched comfort of his kind--pity,
humaneness....

And all the time had she been himself?  Was her name Beatrice?  By
the sea he had named her Demeter--


The written fragment went no farther, ended there....  The rains came
down.  The Pygmies swarmed or slept.  They were not ill folk, and
each in his casket kept the spark of intelligence.  In some the spark
had better fuel, in some not so good.  But in all it burned and
taught the fuel to draw toward it.




CHAPTER XXVI

Mannheim died in this Congo forest, among these Pygmies.  At first
his sickness seemed but a low fever, obstinate, but not especially
perilous.  He lay in his tent and refused to let us trouble overmuch
about him.  "Go about your work.  I do perfectly well, lying here,
with a whole world to roam in!"

After a time his sickness was seen for the final one that it was.  He
wasted like snow in March.  When he had lain there a week he himself
said that he was going.  John Sydney tended him well, but gave Sir
Charles and the rest of us no false hopes.  Mannheim himself never
asked.

It seemed best that he should have one of us for nurse.  This grew
into my hands, with the others ready to give all needed relief.  His
mind was quite clear.  At times there8 was great weakness following
attacks of coughing.  But for the most part he did not suffer.

He lay very quiet and easy to nurse.  He liked to hear talk of the
camp and daily happenings, and liked the few minutes' visits from Sir
Charles and the others.  He had humor, and he laughed at the stories
Carthew Roberts brought.  At other times, when we were alone, he lay
most still, with an ingathered look.  Now and then, in his stronger
hours, he talked or bade me talk.  He was entirely serene, really
happy.  "Everything that is can be perceived and shared," he said.
"It is a matter of growing desire and will.  This body is
disintegrating, but I myself am integrating."

He could with no adequacy tell his visions any more than I could tell
mine.  But now and then word or phrase lit up a landscape.  And
occasionally he tried to describe what he was perceiving.  I remember
a velvet-black night when he could not sleep.  He slept little at any
time.  "We are one Person," he said.  "All these words--kind and kin
and what not!  What do they mean except that just somewhere all slip
into one?  All the partial consciousnesses flash into the whole.
Give me water, Michael!  I want to tell you--"  I gave him to drink.
He went on.  "I saw just now, in picture, a little child--a
babe--sitting upon its bed and bent upon observing and handling its
foot.  I saw that it believed that its foot was a separate thing, and
that it had not yet said of each and all its members, 'That is me--I
am that.'  But it was beginning to suspect and to experiment.  It was
a determined child, and it made me laugh the way it went about it....
We live embedded in symbols.  If I could bind together all the
visions that ever I have had, it would come to something! ... Well,
that was page the first of this vision.  But page the second--"  He
lay still for a few moments.  "I cannot well tell that.  I saw the
dim shape of man, and all the nations and all the ages and the rich
and the poor and the fortunate and the unfortunate moved within the
shape.  But its mind was shadow and denied that this extremity or
that member was itself.  Limb gazed at limb, and organ upon organ as
at a stranger, a foreigner, an unrelated existence across space.  But
for all that the great shape--and it was very great--was suspecting
and experimenting, just as was doing the child on the first page."
As Mannheim looked at me he visibly gathered energy.  He assumed
strength, he lifted himself on his arm.  "Then, Michael, I saw the
sun rise over the mind!  No longer these myriad, myriad, partial,
contending things, held only as by a film, an atmosphere, into a
shape--but where they had been, a glory of light and warmth,
essential, sufficing--a consciousness, a Being!  Man conscious at
last of Man's Self--the great Male-Female--the great
Man-Woman-Child--the Trinity--the One! ... And all so simple, far
simpler than being thousands apart!"

His face shone, he lay back; the light faded, and I thought for a
moment that he was going.  I gave him a stimulant.  After a while he
spoke again: "You're one of the new children.  The new children will
come into the sense of it.  There has been preached brotherhood.  But
brotherhood supposes something closer yet.  You will preach identity."

A few nights later he died.  Sir Charles and Llewellyn, Sydney, and I
watched him go.  It was a quiet death, simple and silent, a gradual
mounting a stair into light and distance.

We laid Mannheim's body in the forest, under a palm-tree.

The rains now were come.  The stream poured dark and swollen, the
forest was like sea moss, the sky all gray, the fall steady,
flooding, and loud.  We lived out this season in the Pygmy village.
Routine life and work carried themselves on.  We kept alike our own
men and the small people our hosts in hand and in a mood of amity.
With the former Ahasuerus was, throughout Africa, a mighty help.  He
became, as it were, their far-traveled prince and magician.  What
tales he told them I would not inquire too closely.  But he was a
tall, strong man, inside as outside, and he helped us greatly in many
a pinch.

Carthew Roberts, too, the born laugher, helped.  Once, as we sat
around our fire, he gave us his philosophy.  "Haven't you seen in
some park or estate, perched on some big viewpoint, a pavilion or
some such structure where each side is set with glass of a different
color?  There used to be one in the grounds of some villa above
Genoa.  Through this window showed a red world, through this one a
blue.  One saw everything cut in bronze, and another had a leaden
earth and sky, and to another the entire thing was bathed in _couleur
de rose_.  The world's the way you look at it!  You're the seer.
It's perfectly possible to view the whole great toyshop as filled
with the friendliest, grinning, grotesque, pleasant things.  To a
seer with a certain apparatus it's an amusing place, quite profoundly
odd and funny!  That's me.  The instant that isn't amusing gives the
fillip to the next instant that is.  I've heard the very skies
laugh--and as for the small things that laugh--!  Don't you know what
it is for a situation piece of the pattern, length of Penelope's
web--to laugh?"

"It's ironic laughter, often," said Ferraro.

"Oh yes!  I see, too, when the hook doesn't hit the eye--but there's
a laugh of pure delight because there's fun in the heart of things!"

"Oh, I grant you," answered the Italian.  "The thing that isn't at
the heart of things isn't anywhere.  And as for your windows, one may
look out of them all in turn.  Were we more evolved perhaps we might
look out of all at once!  But that would be fused rays--light of
glory--"

At night, ere I slept, I went from this village, this forest, to
Restwell and Flowerfield.  I now definitely ceased to say, "I go in
memory," or, "in imagination," or, "I go there because the reasoning
mind, holding these places to be in being, attended by such-and-such
features, can, by its own power, collect them before it--nay more,
because it is brought into a condition of calm and unhurry and,
speaking relatively, can see somewhat into the depth of things and
set them in wholes, it can give with correctness a heightened
reality."  I ceased to explain to myself.  I acted.  I simply went to
Flowerfield and Restwell--went in leading-strings, with the
limitations and inabilities of that but one degree advance in powers,
but went, as you, too, O reader, may go!  And if I went, or if I
said, "Arise in me!" what odds, so long as there came into presence
the desired?

Restwell--Flowerfield.  I lay in my old bed, in my old room.  Mammy
sang to me.  She sang "Golden Slippers," or she sang:

  "Swing low, sweet chariot,
  Coming for to carry me home--"


The stars looked in at the window.  The dawn blossomed.  The crowing
cock cried, "Boy, it's day!"  I went about the farm with my
grandfather.  His gentle, drawling voice said this, said that.  My
mother and I walked in the orchard....  Aunt Sarah and I kept the
gravestones clean.  The fire burned in Daddy Guinea's cabin, and he
told me how the fox and the bear and the deer and the rabbit grew
acquainted.

A thousand, thousand days and hours--great picture-books turned, leaf
by leaf--and all capable of a strange, rich vivification!  The
farther road brought to the aid of the earlier road--poems learned
long ago seen into now....  The past lost nothing worth the while; it
stood through and through to be the gainer.

I pervaded, like the ether, the big, unencumbered, singing house at
Flowerfield.  Every house, every place, had always for me its own
note, flavor, odor, personality, effect built from innumerable
effects....  Flowerfield and Miriam and I in one there....  John,
too, was with us.

Madam Black.  Swiftly, decisively, came awareness of our old teacher.
Now it was something more than that, now she was better understood.
There was communication between adults.

An old, wise, rich spirit was here.

Death is not an idle word, nor is change, nor absence.  But they are
far other than that which to most of us they seem.

Now far away from the surface mind, behind the golden vase that hides
so much, there was talk again with Madam Black, and in a surer,
swifter language than the surface tongue has mastered.

"You three," she said, "are all new children."  She used the term
that Mannheim had used.  "I felt that when I taught you, but it is
clearer now....  For those who can touch and hold there is endless
magic, richness, goodness!  Every single thing is a key and a portal.
What so many call life is only the skin of the grape."

Madam Black and Miriam and John and I went far afield together.  She
was like an old and very wise chieftainess, priestess, prophetess--a
great person with whom to mark the earth and the history of it.

"Of course we are many--that is much--in one!" she said.  "Everybody
is everybody else.  We bathe in one another's beams and find they are
our own.  What is the Great Day but the day when All remembers All?
The glorious Recollection.  Then we all find our market that we've
been weaving for and planning for.  The market is Life Everlasting.
The road to Recollection is by recollecting--to Recognition by
recognizing--to All Love is by loving.  Come!  Let us remember in
great landscapes and streams.  Where we dive in does not greatly
matter.  One thing leads to another."

I said to her, "What about that which should be forgotten?"

I felt her smile within me.  "Well--!  It forgets itself--in light."

We who were always together went far and wide with Madam Black.  And
as she said, there is magic and richness and goodness.

There was now a deep world back of the outward point of attention
that called itself, that was called, Michael Forth.  Behind that
point, as behind all such points, are interpenetrative spheres.




CHAPTER XXVII

Separation from those who are "dead" had melted from me.  Separation
from those who are living I saw to be a phantasm.  It would last as
long as we chose to let it last; it would go away when we chose that
it should go away.  Separation from those to come--they are
ourselves!  We returning, we continuing, we the world's future as we
are its present and its past.

The task was for the small city, the small country, at present
calling itself Michael Forth, to realize into all that it yet held to
be without, into all that it must hold to be above.  That was the
task, that was the desire ... desire that all cities and countries
waken to the mounting interest, the song, the lovers' meeting of
reality.

  "Journeys end in lovers' meetings
    Every wise man's son doth know--"


The rains were past.  We were gone from the stream and the Pygmies'
village, and the grave of Mannheim beneath the palm.  Maxwell and
Ferraro undertook care and furtherance of the naturalist's
collection, and, later, Llewellyn and I brought "Mannheim's Notes"
into order, and later yet saw to their publication.

We journeyed on through middle Africa.  We encountered heated,
endless forests, and tribes, much alike, of men near the foot of the
ladder.  Some had an uneasy stirring, looking toward the rung above.
We saw individuals who were climbing thither.  And never, in Africa
nor anywhere else, did I see, have ever I seen, anything save
climbing stuff!

Time passed.  At a certain village--capital of a king named
Tamewa--we were made and held prisoners for seven weeks.  There were
days here when we confidently looked for death.  There was a night
when we white men, and with us Ahasuerus, were bound with withes and
heard without the hut savage preparations for an execution, and saw
red, darting light of kindled fires.  But when the cocks were crowing
came rescue.  A man from among our carriers, stealing away, had gone
leagues through the forest, back to a friendly people from whose
village we had come to Tamewa's--had gone and come again with chiefs
and a considerable company of men and loud representations to Tamewa.
At last, after enormous discussion, entered agreement.  Released from
bonds, we became fantastically honored guests--and yet might not go
from Tamewa's town until that seven weeks had passed.

The night that we were tied within the hut, seeing that there could
be no sleeping, and it was best there be no talking, each went,
doubtless, according to his own drawing into the inner country.  I
was thinking....

A fact of communication between minds at a distance--space distance,
time distance, state of consciousness distance.  An over-voice, as
written or printed words, as telephone or telegraph were
over-voices--but without pen, paper, mail-trains, poles and wires.
Transmitters and receivers, each both ... vastly subtler
telegraphing, telephoning, interhearing, interseeing,
interknowing....  Circulation of thought, circulation of emotion,
sensation; circulation of experience, understanding--forever flowing,
forever, as it turned upon itself, richer, wiser, than it had been
before.  So, though it turned, it was not the same; so it became a
spiral movement, concentric rings, each including the earlier
turnings, each, in the long run, bettering those before....
Shoreless sea of energy, refining itself, transmuting forever its own
cold into fervor, its dark into light, changing forever less
knowledge for more, less love for more, less power and joy for more.

I thought it an absurdity if there be no deepening speech, no
farther-carrying vision, between part and part of a thing that as a
whole perpetually changed state for better state.  As the whole grew
more richly conscious, every part must do so, too....  Or as every
part grew more richly conscious the whole must do so, too....  Put it
as you choose!

The immediate sharing of sensation or of knowledge....  In strong
concentration, in contemplation, there was no thought given to the
field through which, from "far" points, perception flashed.  All was
lost in I-ness--One-ness--Continuousness.  Distance in
space--distance in time--partialness in event--ceased their troubling.

By the light passage we were but ten minutes from the sun.  The
universal draw of attraction took no time at all.
Ethereal--perfectly penetrative and penetrable....  Learn to use the
ether!

My mother spoke to me.  "Michael, they are coming through the
forest--men to help.  They will be here in an hour."

I said to the others: "The Bangala that we left are coming through
the forest.  Zurti persuaded them.  They will be here in an hour."

It happened so....  Sir Charles spoke to me, aside, the next day.
"How did you know that, Michael?"

"How do we know anything?  It's all of a piece that can be unrolled,
which is to say, understood, further and further....  My mother told
me."

"Within you?  You said on the mountain that all that was within you."

"Yes.  But 'within you' opens into a great land.  'The Kingdom of
Heaven is within you.'  It isn't a small kingdom."

"Tell me plainly," he said.  "Do you think that your mother lives?"

"I do."

"But conscious--remembering--able to act?"

"Yes.  Able to grow--that is, to increase in consciousness and power."

"And you expect to meet her?"

"I do meet her.  I expect to meet her more completely.  Far more
completely."

"I wish that I knew!" he said.  "There are persons with whom I wish
to live again."

The time-water flowed over the time-wheel.  This tribe, uncertain
between slaying and saving, let us go.  We went on.  Sometimes we
traveled through the forest.  Sometimes--often indeed--we went in
boats, long distances down the full river in native boats.  We
tarried in villages; we left the rubbing and beating of drums, the
chanting, the dancing, and we came in little time again to rubbing
and beating of drums, to chanting and dancing.  We left idols and
came to idols.  I felt no contemptuousness toward these.  Idols are
divinities and have a kinship, or in their stage of True-God-on-High,
or in their stage of relegation.

Middle Africa--Africa sloping to the west, country of the Congo with
all its ancestors gathered in its bosom....  There began, as it were,
an inward murmuring of ocean, of England--America.

The ancient, imperfect, compounded ideation that we call these
bodies, these purposes and acts, this environment, situation,
circumstance, this earth under our poor two eyes, all the accustomed,
remembered, repeated, "living," flowed or stumbled quite enough as
usual.  I was aware of certain differences.  All outward matters must
finally change as changes the inward star.  If the center strongly
shines the circumference will know it.  If the center grows
lethargic, all the outland stiffens, darkens.  I was aware that there
must be shining all along the way from the star.  Light grew
intenser, colors more brilliant.  Thorn hedges and hard walls
vanished, and there were richer wholes.  There was sense of the
in-ness of things, and sometimes cause and effect were seen as one
form.  The time sense, too, was changing....  But yet it was all but
one taste of the honey--

Llewellyn and I were moving in a boat up some arm of Congo,
volunteers to discover what lay beyond a certain sharp point of
shore.  The negroes who rowed us had their own preoccupations.  The
banks were somber, the stream deep and still and darkened by
overhanging clouds.  We had been sitting in silence.  Llewellyn broke
it.  "I, too, have the historic sense," he said.  "When you have that
very thoroughly you assume an individual and his acts.  You can't say
him or her; it's both.  Hermaphrodite, or some better word than that,
if you please!  It is all right as long as you know that all sex and
no sex is there.  You may call it This World, or Earth, or Planetary
Being, or Man, or what you please.  But the inorganic must go in as
well as the organic, plant as well as animal, animal as well as
human, one kind as well as another kind!  All the classes and castes.
Then This World thinks itself out, changing from power to power.
Hence Drama--its own.  Narratives, Epics, Tragedies, Comedies, and
the hair balance between.  Lyrical outbursts ...
Mnemosyne--Pythoness--Dionysos --Aphrodite--Apollo--Pallas--Zeus!
The wildest, greatest, most abandoned, most controlled drama in three
dimensions....  This world's a Genius!"

"More light than dark."

"I should hope so.  At any rate, the light must be growing....  I
seem to see that it's had its infancy and childhood, and that now
it's in the strangest turmoil of adolescence.  But infancy and
childhood--!  My God!  What resumes of what in our little way we call
Ancient Sin, Adult Wrong!"

We went on in silence for a time.  I looked at the leaden sky.
Llewellyn had been thinking aloud, and now I, too, thought aloud.
"In the Confessions of Saint Augustine there is a page that well
gives what is coiled up, remembered, stored, in one's self as little
infant in a little cradle.  It runs like this.  'Was it then good,
even for a while, to cry for what, if given, would hurt? bitterly to
resent that persons, free and its own elders, yea, the very authors
of its birth, served it not? that many besides, wiser than it, obeyed
not the nod of its good pleasure? to do its best to strike and hurt
because commands were not obeyed which had been obeyed to its hurt?
The weakness of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence.  Myself
have seen and known even a baby envious; it could not speak, yet it
turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother....  Is that,
too, innocence, when the fountain of milk is flowing in rich
abundance, not to endure one to share it, though in extremest need?
... This age I am yet loath to count in this life of mine which I
live in this world.  For no less than that which I spent in my
mother's womb is it hid from me in the shadows of forgetfulness....
But, I beseech thee, O my God, where, Lord, or when was I guiltless?'"

The banks were somber, the sky was a roof of whirling vapor.  "And
elsewhere he says, 'Did my infancy succeed another age of mine that
died before it?  Was it that which I spent within my mother's womb
... and what before that life again, O God my joy! was I anywhere or
anybody?  For this I have none to tell me, neither father nor mother
nor experience of others, nor mine own memory.'"

The boat moved on.  The forest was still, but the river voice carried
fathomless undertones.  "What do you think there?" said Llewellyn.

"I think that some day we will take, unravel, and look at our cell
life, embryonic life, child life.  Then will we know in our own
proper person, plane after plane, that past living that at each point
we called adult.  Species-mind cognizing species-life.  World-mind
cognizing world-life.  Then shall we see where came in the
lethargies, mistakes, self-limitations, inhibitions, perversions,
mislikes, recoils, fears--that at last we must call thick ignorance,
hatred, terror, guilt..."

Beyond the point of shore we found a long, narrow reach of water, and
upon one bank a diminutive settlement, a very few thatched huts dwelt
in by a remnant of a tribe, wasted apparently by disease and war.  By
now the clouds had broken in a downpour.  The day was advanced and
our rowers unwilling to turn down-stream into wet and night.  We were
armed, and we had with us beads and cloth for purposes of
propitiation and exchange.  Standing off the bank, we made due
explanations and proffers of friendship to the men who had run from
the huts with bows and arrows and menacing shouts.  Reassured, they
let us land.  The shining beads and scarlet cloth worked as almost
always they worked.  Presently we had food and shelter for the night.

Llewellyn and I lay in a fairly clean hut in thick darkness, with
river and wind for lullaby.  We lay wakeful, in silence.  "Well!  Let
us go to sleep," he said at last, and turned.

I addressed myself to sleep--but instead of entering that land a
curtain parted and I was in another.  Before I crossed the frontier I
was re-aware of a day at Restwell, two years ago.  The river there--a
boat--Dorothea and I rowing beneath the willows.  That hour had
extension and volume it had not seemed then to possess....  That
scene closed.  I was over the frontier--no longer Michael Forth only,
but many-folded sensation, knowledge, passion, life.

Without more warning than the mood of this place and that flash of
association, I stumbled into the woe of the world.

"_So I returned and considered all the oppressions that are done
under the sun._"

It seemed to me that I should die....

The oppressions and the woe were my own.  _Peine forte et dure_--and
I was the victim under the stone, and I was the weight that crushed,
and I was they who stretched me there and put the millstone on me.
And the misery of all three was the same.

  "If the red slayer think he slays,
    Or if the slain think he is slain--"

Woe and woe and double woe!

Into me drew, around, within me, whirled pain and guilt, the great
maelstrom.

Over and over the brain gave images--but it was that which touch gave
me, not that which sight gave....  Oh, God in me--my own hope in
me--raise hell to purgatory, purgatory to the beginning of wisdom!

Woe of the world--light-lack, love-lack....  As there can be no going
out, as never, never can we go out--where they lack, what can be but
aching want?

I ached--I ached.

It seemed recapitulation, it seemed also lateral sharing.  All of us
down there in those moments--and all of us now in these moments.  All
of us from pole to pole.  All of us that were one and are one.
Mankind is one being.  It feels the woe of head and the woe of foot,
the woe of the one hand and of the other hand.  It is the worse for
the ice-bound heart, and the worse for the tattered, lack-thrift
brain that will not learn to use its wealth.

It longed for health--poor Mankind--poor God-that-would-be! with all
its members warring, with hardly a piece of tissue glimpsing the
truth!

Oh, long woe and sickness!  Oh, tatters and dungeon of ignorance!
Oh, hearth where the fire is but a spark! ... Where shall we get fuel?

_Lay the little self there for fuel_.

... Time passed, though time passed slowly....  The wind and the rain
outside had ceased, there fell a great hush.  In me, too, was now a
stillness.  It was dark, but the air of it was not heavy--a clear
darkness, clean, with a taste of myrrh.  This enlarged--there seemed
a firmament very deep and vast, still, pure, ineffable, though still
dark....  Then gathered from somewhere the sense of truth--and there
was a white and splendid star in the dark.




CHAPTER XXVIII

Six months from that night we were out of Africa.  Sir Charles and
Llewellyn, Maxwell, Ferraro, Roberts, Sydney, and I entered the
English ship.

But in that very port town where we waited for it Ahasuerus died.

He and I held hands at the last.  We had been together since so early
at Restwell, when he used to lift me in his arms.  I lifted him now
in my arms and he said that he saw Daddy Guinea and went....

Those of us who came again to England walked the deck of the
slow-sailing ship, or by the rail watched the tumbling waves and
smelled the healthful brine.  Down in the cabin we gathered together;
we went over the written records of over two years.  Such and such
things were sheaves for the granary of knowledge.  Again we must
contemplate abortive attempts.  Even so, there had been learning,
even by the rule of false.  The trying out was not wasted.  Here is
thoroughfare--here seems no thoroughfare.  Out of all came enough
well to repay the backers of the expedition.  As for us, the
adventurers, we had the gain of experience--each one his sack of raw
material for further experience.

Upon the ship I put into legible shape _Letters from Africa_....  By
now I fully saw that I might not return to that engineering for which
I had trained.  I said as much to Maxwell.  "I've thought that for
some time," he answered.  "You're a good civil and mining engineer.
I've a curious, haunting feeling that I knew you once somewhere in
the Middle Ages when you were a good military engineer.  But I think
you'll go on now with another material, or the same material in
another condition--I don't know which!  Engineering intellect,
engineering imagination--"  He fell silent, looking at the
meeting-place of blue sky and blue sea.

"The old words are mostly good words," I said.  "They are sound
kernels that sprout and grow, and presently wave overhead where once
they thrilled underfoot.  So then I continue engineering!"

"Look at that blue," he said.  "How deep do you suppose it is?  I am
going with Sir Charles to Persia.  He wants to know if you'll come,
too."

"No.  I am going home now."

"What is before the world, Michael?  I'm a kind of desert spirit--dry
light and an uncluttered habitat....  But I do certainly feel that
there are things preparing in the very hollow of light."

"We're in the age of talk and dream."

"So!  Well, when is the world creature going to work?"

"It's an embryo.  It's fed yet from its mother, breathes yet with its
mother.  Wait till it breathes of itself."

"It's all figures and images and symbols!"

"It can't help it.  Its got to talk through its mother--earth with
tongue of moon, sun with tongue of earth....  Wait!  It will get its
own words."

"We are consciously to be the mighty one we dream at times?"

"Yes.  When the consciousness unfolds sufficiently we shall leave the
mother....  It is the second birth."

Sir Charles called him from the cabin door.  He went, but I stayed by
the rail, watching that marvel of sapphire.  The ship and the wind
lived and sang.  Old Mother Sea and all her people ran free.  They
cried, "We, too, are in you, and you are in us!"

I had a vision.  I saw the inhabitants of the earth--and a many and a
many were they--and I felt them in my veins.  I saw them as I would
see the points of my body, and I felt them as I felt my own warmth.
I heard the ocean voice of them, and it was such a sound that God
give us joy in sustaining it!  "_We are in you and you are in us!_"

We are One!  Now I am out to encounter the thoughts and feelings of
the One.

Only the all can know, enjoy, love the all.

The great lover and the as great beloved.

Ah, mighty hope of union--ah, romance everlasting! ...

The ship and the wind and the sapphire sea voyaged and came to
England.

I stayed a month in England.  Flowerfield cabled in answer to my
cable that all were well at Restwell and Flowerfield--all well, all
living.  Miriam cabled:

  MICHAEL.  Wake-robin Hill.
                              MIRIAM.


Maxwell was not now returning to America.  I was much with him in
this month and with the others, all of whom I loved.  Sir Charles had
an old, beautiful home in Kent.  I went here for a few days with
Maxwell.  And I went with John Sydney to an ancient, not large, house
that from the Sussex downs faced the sea.  In London befell for all
of us the to-be-expected lionizing.  Not excessive lionizing, for the
expedition was a quiet and solid thing and only some small extension
of knowledge appeared as result.  But the societies immediately
interested welcomed us, and the newspapers had their accounts.

I sought out Mannheim's lodging and found a set of old rooms, high,
fairly large, quiet, sparely furnished.  Beneath the window roared
London of the poor.  Here lived a sister, a brother, and a cousin.
The sister was much like the man whose body lay under the palms in
Africa.  She showed me the room where Mannheim had worked, and his
books and collections.  Once her tears fell, but she wiped them away.
"He and I _understand_," she said.  "It is going to be all right.
There is little to fret about."  But back in the outer room the
cousin was full of woe and could only croak and toll, poor thing! of
separation.  And going down-stairs the brother was full of fears.
"There was very little money.  Yes, I made him have his life
insured--but it isn't much.  I'll do my best, of course, but he was
the eldest.  He ought to have--"

Going away from here, poor London streamed about me.  I stood in a
church porch and watched the flood, listened to its voice.  Poverty
more than of clothes and dwellings--

I began to see in streams my own faults.

I saw them again when I went, a day or two later, to view some great
show where, a show itself, rich London went by.

One body and its humors.

Self-correction....  Oh, star in the dark, show how!

From within without--and behind every bit of without the vast within!
In the within was something like free movement.  In the within was
counsel.  Long patience--long effort in patience....

I went here, I went there in London.  From the country behind this
country Miriam and I looked at these things together--Miriam and I
and all our race....  Cities!  I saw them one night in
panorama--ancient and middle time and to-day--by the sea and among
the hills, by young rivers, on windy plains, and under volcanoes and
where the earthquake shook them and where the snow fell; cities where
the throngs moved in spare, light clothing, and cities where they
flung furs about their shoulders; cities where the muezzin cried to
prayer, and cities where the church-bells rang, and half-ruinous
cities of old temples; quiet cities; clanging, roaring cities....
And behind the stones and above the streets hung the motive and
purpose of cities and their desires.  And over all that the
supra-sensible city whence these descend.

One evening I was at a concert of music with Carthew Roberts.  When
it was over he took me to a small club for which he seemed half
apologetic, half proud.  It proved a happy oddity, a good-natured
gargoyle, a whimsy captured and content somewhere in London.  There
seemed to be here artists of sorts--one even who was a member of
Parliament.  They capped speeches, sang, told stories, or sat silent
behind tobacco smoke as it pleased them.  I thought that I caught
sight of Aristophanes, Falstaff, and Pantagruel.  There were,
besides, a fry of court jesters come again.  Necessary salt for such
a society, finding in turn their own salt market here, appeared half
a dozen of the solemner kind of earth.  I made out that one had a
church somewhere, and that another helped edit a newspaper so heavy
that it crushed many an opponent.  And one seemed sad because the
country was going to the dogs.

We had an extraordinarily amusing evening.  And they said when they
were going that they were coming oftener into this department of
happiness.

Pantagruel went homeward with us.  He made a large gesture that
seemed to gather a bunch of stars under his arm.  "Conceive a Lord of
the Cosmos who could not take a joke--make it and take it!"

It was Carthew Roberts again who showed me English royalty going by,
progressing from Buckingham to Windsor, or from Windsor to
Buckingham.  I looked at the old queen with a daughter or two beside
her--and I felt a kind of mist of regret for old sharp realities
growing tinsel and worn velvet....  The weather of it changed.  What
was worth keeping was ever kept!  Let the husk sink away, work done!
Elsewhere in space, in younger earths, Plantagenets,
Tudors--Richards, Edwards, Henrys, Elizabeths--still hewed, still
flashed in strong glamour.  To each day its miracle of unfolding!
Speed the parting, welcome the coming guest, and in due order love
both.

Again it was with Roberts and also with Pantagruel that I heard a
historic debate in the House of Commons.  Far peoples were talked of,
were handled, so to speak, like engraved gems of a collector.  Were
they so dense, so slumbering, so still as gems, I wondered?  And then
I knew that they were no such thing, and that it was the House of
Commons' error.  Coming away, said Pantagruel, "I love to hear
Littleman dispose his destinies!  'Now, gentlemen, I take myself from
this pocket, and I put myself in this pocket!  Applaud the juggler!'"

Pantagruel and I went to the British Museum together.  "It is Pi," he
said.  "Noble Pi, but Pi!  Imagine a giant child sitting down in this
hall and trying from the four corners of the place to get a clear
sentence out of an alphabet, pounded, broken, and mixed--"

"A shivered mirror.  Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen one!"

"Thoroughly shivered!  And yet Littleman the chimæra must put the
pieces together--"

"In order to cease being chimerical."

"Precisely so.  Amusing, isn't it?"

He appeared still to be studying this at the end of our day in the
museum.  As we went down the steps he said: "I know a man who sees
only the terror of the task.  I try to get him into a more manly, not
to say goodly, mind--but he delays and fears!"

I went alone in London here and there.  Sitting one day by the
fountain in the Temple precinct, Miriam and I were strongly together.
I mean that on a plane which is not the plane of small bodies, we
were together, using images, as water is together, as air is
together, as flame is together.  We interfused.  I do not know.  Had
I unconsciously fallen to writing upon the cover of the book beside
me the writing might have been as much the hand of Miriam as the hand
of Michael.  However that may be, there was felt the doubled power of
another plane.  It was a mind world, and a world, too, of sensation
and of sentiment, but in a far wealthier kind than the lower plane
could know....  And yet, though one speaks of planes, planes, too,
blend as fire blends!  The universe is unimaginably fluid and
powerful.

Miriam-Michael--but behind those two signs the widest transfusion!
Hosts that we had called separate, separate, were there.  Behind the
skin of here and now, the enormous communion!--away from the
stiffened cross-sections that we call form....  I sat still and the
oceans played together.

All that I had known was here, and there was a whispering of much
further that I should know.

And there was love--and there was enjoyment.

This very London--this England--I felt what it was to love a
country--love a world.  The very ones that a man calls foes--it is
impossible but to love them!  The fire in the veins is the fire of
all life.




CHAPTER XXIX

I bade well-liked companions good-by and I sailed west.  Then flowed
eight days of jade, emerald and lapis sea, and we came under the
figure of Liberty, to the American shore.

Another day and I was in Baltimore.

I waited in a small, simple parlor, in a corner of a hospital.  It
was Miriam's.  At twenty-eight she was superintendent here.  I
waited.  It was evening.  A soft light flooded and pulsed.  She
came....

We wished to be together, to work together, learn, know joy together
on all planes.  Marry!  That was simple, though our marriage now
would be more and other than many an older marriage of ours.  The
second day in Baltimore she took holiday, and we went in the early
morning out of the city into the country.  We found a small, quaint
village with a tolerable hotel, and thence we walked into woodland.
We were profoundly, of old time, at home in forest.

We sat down on the dry, clean earth under a beech.  It was early
spring.  The branches above, the boles of surrounding trees, the
curtains of amethyst made a council-chamber.  We sat, a king and
queen, and took counsel.

We wished living and home together.  We pondered, pacing around Ways
and Means.  It was her wish to keep her profession.  But wherever
were human beings there was room for the health-bringer.  She could
work, if need were, elsewhere than in Baltimore.  If I continued
engineering, and if that meant, perforce, a place like Landon, or
where not, we would go there.  She could organize and work toward
healthful tissue there as elsewhere.

But, alike, we had an intuition that I would not again take up--or
not for long take up--just that engineering.  We could not settle
this now; we laid it by; whatever difficulties might arise we would
meet and straighten when we better knew their field.  We were not
without money.  I had saved from what I had been paid as Maxwell's
assistant.  She, too, had put something by.  She had worked hard and
constantly in her hospital for two years.  She had trained one into
whose hands she could put the reins.  Let us take a good long
holiday--two months, three months--and look about us!  We agreed that
we would do so.

Our marriage.  We were of a mind here, too.  "Do you think they would
be hurt at Flowerfield?"

"If it were Catherine I think they might be.  But not with us....
They've got a grasp on us, and we on them.  They are here and we are
there, anyhow, and they feel it so.  Aunt Sarah, too, at Restwell."

We determined to be married in Baltimore, within a week--a civil
marriage.  She thought that she could so arrange that within a few
days thereafter she might take her good long holiday.  We would go
then to Flowerfield.

We rested upon the brown earth in the forest, or we strayed and
rambled at will in the differing beauty of every vista.  Toward
evening we turned back to the village and the rushing train and the
lit and murmurous city.

The next day I went to New York, and, sleeping there that night,
arose in the morning and took a letter that Llewellyn had given me,
and the manuscript of _Letters from Africa_ to a certain publisher.
He read the letter, he talked a little, then drew toward him the
packet of manuscript.  "We'll read this at once, Mr. Forth.  Where
are you staying?  Suppose you come in three days from now."

I used in various ways this length of time.  One was to view artists'
canvases, one just to mark and mark again the life of this great
hive.  The three days passed.  I went again to the publishing-house.
They would publish the _Letters from Africa_.  They thought it should
have a certain success--how much or how little, of course, could not
be predicted.  It might prove caviar to the general, and then, again,
popular taste being the great X, it might experience a certain
demand.  One could never tell about these things out of the usual
run.  At any rate, they would publish--in the autumn--and they would
be glad to see anything else that I was doing.  The publisher glanced
at the clock.  "It's about luncheon-time.  There's a good café around
the corner.  Come with me and tell me about Africa."  In mind I saw
him pin me and Llewellyn's letter and the possible interest of the
house together.  He was a pleasant, oldish fellow.  "African
explorer!" he said.  "There are people you ought to meet.  Come with
me to my club to-night."

The following day I signed a contract with the publishing-house.
When it was done I walked along Broadway.  The air lifted and moved,
brilliantly clear.  One could read detail afar.  A huge city, and to
be more huge.  It was strongly under my tongue, in my nostrils,
before my eyes--

A man coming toward me glanced at me, looked hard, stopped short.
"Isn't it Michael Forth?"

"Isn't it Conrad Conrad?"

We turned into Madison Square and sat upon a bench.  "Certainly seven
years!"

"Nearly that.  Do you still walk about with Poe?"

"Poe and others.  Do you still hammer at continuity?"

"Perhaps.  Or, having got it, I cease hammering."

"I heard that you were in Africa."

"I thought of you as yet in Paris."

"I was so till two years ago.  Paris, and all the Elsewhere to which
the Paris roads lead!"

"When I last heard from you you had taken to painting.  Are you
making strange, good demon pictures?"

He made his old grimace with the earnest coming out through the faun
mask.  "I partly own and edit _The Compass_.  Occasionally I write,
and in vacation I paint pictures on my own walls."

"What is _The Compass_?"

"It is a radical sheet.  It's by way of being very radical."

"Politically?"

"Politics, Economics, Social Arrangements in general.  Esthetics
also.  But chiefly economics.  We're subversive there.  It's 1890.  I
give the world ten years.  Then I think change will begin to be
apparent to the dullest!"

"_The Compass_ assisting?"

"Certainly!  Though I don't limit it to _The Compass_."

"Just a few quintillions of other points--"

"Exactly!  But do your individual mightiest all the same!"

"Just as though Hercules was not a composite?"

"Again you catch the idea.  Don't you want to do an article for the
June issue?  I think you could do it, Old Continuity!--Continuity of
Cosmic Adventure, for instance?  Continuity of Pioneering--

          "'For we cannot tarry here,
  We must march, my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
  We the youthful, sinewy races, all the rest on us depends--'"


"It is Whitman now, not Poe?"

"I carry Poe in Whitman....  I tell you, Michael, after a while, if
you're truly an artist, you've got to get your hands on the whole
material!"

"Agreed!  Just so long as, like Whitman, you guard every particle of
the 'I' that's flowing through and through the material."

"In other words, consider the Bigness of the Right?"

"Just."

"Do you remember that riding-trip we took?  The Bridge and the Fourth
of July oration and the Peaks?  Do you remember that debate on the
Color of Reality, in the Ultra-Violet Club?"

"Aye.  Iridescence, the Various We, for the descending arc--White
Light, Sunlight, for the ascending.  But you took black, old Conrad,
and made a very good case for it!"

"Well, I see the forlorn beauty in the shadow still....  But change
comes to one in thunderclaps.  I'd like to tell you about it one day.
What are you doing?  Can't you come with me?"

"I am going to-night to Baltimore.  But I have till then."

We spent the remainder of the day together.  I went with him to see
_The Compass_ and its far downtown and eastward-bearing habitat.  I
divined--I had divined at Landon--the onward-coming, economic
readjustment of our lives.  It was necessary, it was to be!  How soon
I did not know--probably a slow change toward health.  But it must
be.  Here, in the organism, was anemia; here the blood ran so thick
that it clotted.  I looked at Fifth Avenue in one hand, and at this
street in the other....  Walter Dupuy was walking with us....  Back
of this change, back of all changes now, was the growing sense of
union, essential, organic.  That was the change's metaphysic....

Conrad wore his old elvish look.  But he was good sprite, and I knew
it.  He and Walter Dupuy and many others fused, welded together.  Now
they seemed Hephæstos, smith of the gods, building machines for the
gods, better machines each age than the last.  The figure took
magnitude, took beauty, sublimed, became ethic.  It was economic lift
now in the widest, utterest sense, nutriment of the body, mind, and
spirit.  All came together--up stood the Genius filling space between
earth and heaven.  Where had been earthly sprites, where had been
limping Hephæstos....  Prometheus!

Conrad was not the traveler over the earth, as he and we had seen it
at the university.  I was not to stay at just the engineering all
then saw me in.  Miriam did not rest at Flowerfield.  Gamaliel did
not teach at Hilltop Academy.  He had passed from apprenticeship to
mastership.  Only yesterday I had seen his name in a scientific
journal.  The article had spoken with respect of "Young's discovery."
Who did according to the first paper plans?  The greater seized the
less, the real destiny, the fancied.

Conrad went with me to my train.  Crossing the ferry to Jersey City,
leaning against the rail, watching the moving lights in the water and
above the water, feeling the quickening of the salty wind, smelling
night and ocean, he began again to speak of Walt Whitman.

I had a feeling for Shelley, I had a feeling for Whitman, I had a
feeling for Blake, and for others--and for others!

I listened to Conrad's good talk, his intellectual rapture.  Back of
waking, back of the dream rapids, I felt the exquisite high air, the
stillness that is world's end to world's end from stagnation!

We came to Jersey City, and, leaving the ferryboat, Conrad and I
parted at the gates to the trains.  We said good-by, but each meant
truly to keep the other.  I might never write that article for _The
Compass_.  But I knew that that change in human affairs with which
_The Compass_ concerned itself was coming, and I felt little grief
over its coming.  Socialism, communism, had no terrors for me.  What
was truly my "property," truly "proper" to me, could not be taken
away.  But aggregate "property" should be to the aggregate, to whom
it is truly "proper." ... I guessed, indeed, that that word
"aggregate" stopped nowhere.

The train moved toward Baltimore.  I sat and gazed upon the shadowy,
fast-flying landscape, and at last I hardly saw that, but went deeper
and deeper within.  Human life, the sea of it; far-sounding voice and
infinite contact!  The mean between difference and likeness....
Wherever, in the deeps of space, Eternal Energy fell upon a certain
pace, a certain swing of the arm, there was human life.  All that was
I, and the experiences and thoughts of it....  But where Eternal
Energy used Power with a wider sweep there came quickening.  The
little I opened its gates.  A greater I set crown upon its head and
came through, a lord of glory....  All that was I, and the
experiences and thoughts of it.

As ever yet, illumination could not hold.  It came a flash from
above, from the future, perhaps the very-far future, when the clouds
should pass from between earth and sun.  I was content to conceive it
as from the future.  If all the past of human life is mine, it is
impossible but that all the future of human life is mine, too.

Wings flagged, eyes dimmed, perception lessened.  Yet it kept
somewhat aloft, skimming, as it were, in mental space.  Now it had to
do with liking, with contemplating, with unharmful entering into
environment and experience of so-called "others."  Perhaps it sunned
itself only in the emanations, the aura, so to speak, of those
"others."  Perhaps there was deeper sharing--I and I--through
affinity one I.  "Love thy neighbor _as thyself_."

First it was Conrad-Michael, here on the train, there in the great
city....  Since such and such is so, so, too, must be this and this.
It is barns full of data, sublimated sorting and reasoning, so
swiftly done that a thousand acts run together into an apparent one.
The data was gathered, the sorting was learned, I must think, through
many an age.  We have gone to school through many an eon....  That
problem of distribution that Conrad and many another were set to
solve.  How cosmic was the problem!  I saw earth and the world, and
the transfiguration, transvaluation of it all, through the Conrad
window.  Work, work, to keep the life flowing through the veins.
Work, work, to make the place a little, even were it a very little,
juster, sweeter!

Again I turned.  Now it was Maxwell.  Maxwell had to me the dry
light, the cleanness and independence of the desert.  Naught was
there of the humid, naught of the florid.  With him great heat was
dry and healthful, sparely energetic, rightly parsimonious.  How I
finally went, or where I finally went, I would not miss out Maxwell.
There moved a desert spirit, clean, spare, very strong, tireless,
building desert cities, or, nomad, journeying with tents or with no
tents.  There were in the spirit old echoes of desert lions,
golden-maned, ruby-eyed; echoes of Arab sheiks.  But the spirit was
tall as a palm-tree, and as it desired and thought, it was in every
desert of the universe, in desert cities and in all the oases, and
afar in the heaped sand.

Conrad and Maxwell and others.  Others who to most are dead.  They
are not dead and they are not away.

Shelley....  I entered into that personality....  Gone was the train
and the flying, inland country.  There sailed a boat, and around was
the Mediterranean, and around and above was air, now dawn, now
midday, now evening, colored the higher, rarer colors, sustaining
voices that the gross ear might hardly be strained to catch....
Water, air, and fire, and the ache for the lift of the spirit beyond
air--for the lift into ether.

I turned a little from that center and I met Blake.

In the fifth act of the second "Faust," in the scene before heaven,
Pater Seraphicus speaks to the blessed children, who have had their
death and found their life young.

  "Half unsealed the sense and brain....
  Enter in mine eyes, enjoy them,
    Organs for the earthy sphere,
  As your own ye may employ them--
    Look upon the landscape here!"


_He takes them into himself._

  "There are trees, there rocks defend us!
    Here's a stream that leaps below,
  And with plunges, wild, tremendous,
    Shorteneth its journey so."


The orb that was Blake had giant and terrible landscapes indeed--but
also, by crystal streamlets the tenderest, freshest, loveliest small
flowers!

Goethe.  The natural path leading from the "Faust" thought brought me
there, too....  The world from the rounded, Goethe nature, from the
rounded Plato nature.  Love and the union of love, and the
sublimation of love, and the sublimation of the union of love.

The train clove the night.  There was moonlight, and the shadow of
the cars and of the plume above the engine raced with us.  We ran
into industrial towns and out again.  Fire and lamp, gas and electric
light, ruby, gold, and silver, pointed and splashed the night, then
again was only the broken, weakened light tossed to us from the moon.
I thought of the prisons of the earth, the hovels and streets of
disaster.  Assuredly they, too, were mine.  Mine the criminal and the
sick and the mad, the impoverished, the adversity-trodden and the
strong swimmer in his agony.  Mine were the seer, the thinker, and
the artist, and mine the wretched and the brutal.  I had the shining
roads, the approaches to heaven, and I had the brute castles of
mistake, and the thieves' dens and the streets of the prostitute.
Mine, too, was all the so-so country, the half-lighted, and mine,
too, the simple, fair stretches, quiet vales, low hills.  Mine the
Himalaya peak, and mine the pit, and mine the long line between....

On rushed the train.

There came a picture of the vibratory ether.  The swift thunders and
lightning ate up, quickened, the less swift.  Ever the swiftness
above swiftness acted as an enzyme, an energizer.  The dim and dull,
slow moving, cold, heavily lumbering, was not left behind--was not
long left behind--in limbo.  The stagnant, the running the other way,
were overtaken.  Fearful hell was for them only till they quickened.
Through measureless heights and depths I saw continuing
transformation.  I saw the relativity of things; the hells and pits
were relative; they lifted; they were now only what yesterdays had
held to be not unlovely meadows, dells, and hollows.  But the fairer
things were now dazzling.  I felt an illimitable and general movement
toward light that was as darkness, and voices or a voice that was as
silence, because as yet there was no organ that could distinguish
things there.

One approached that sun not as fragments of a fragment.  There must
be some wholeness ere one traveled far.

I hold, with Berkeley, that the world is truly in the mind.
Therefore, self-quickening is world-quickening.  What thrill comes is
felt through that which we call God, from the transcendent I to the
poorest, meanest, weakest I.  The one increases its light; the other,
relatively yet the opposing pole, is positively less midnight dark.
At last the darkness comes to the place of what to-day we should call
light.

I saw that earth was to become sun.




CHAPTER XXX

Miriam and I walked under fair old trees in Druid Hill Park.  I told
her of New York, and the publisher, and the apparent prospect for
_Letters from Africa_.  We rejoiced.  All in all, we were glad to
think that earning and writing might with me go together.  We did not
delude ourselves with dreams of any great sum.  But what I earned and
what she earned might give us fair living.  We talked of dwelling in
Baltimore, a pleasant city and a rational one for slender purses.
She also had news.  Her hospital would give her this summer,
welcoming her return in the autumn.

We set three days from this fair day for our marriage.  It was
spring.  She knew a little, quiet, old-timey neighborhood by the sea.
She had been there three or four times, staying always at Miss Sally
Paradise's house.  "We'll go there."

Gamaliel had not been in Baltimore since my coming.  Some meeting of
scientific men had carried him so far north as Boston.  But he would
be back, they told me this morning at the house where he lived,
within the week.  Miriam and I agreed that he should come to us for
three or four days at Miss Sally Paradise's.

Druid Hill Park shone and sang.

A day and another day and another.  Then, on a shining, singing,
dancing day of lovely spring Miriam and I married.

We took a boat, we came in a coral, bright evening to a Chesapeake
Bay wharf, to a few old houses, and back among blossoming peach,
cherry, pear, and damson trees, to Miss Sally Paradise's.  That was
an old house of brick, with echoing, cool, highceilinged rooms.  The
wind murmured in them till it was like a sea-shell held up to catch
voices from an infinite sequence of shores....  We were happy at Miss
Sally Paradise's.

We had a sailboat and an ancient mariner sailed it for us.  The
garden beneath our windows had an ancient cultivator.  We knew about
gardens, and we helped him administer, order, raise the powers of
earth.  A fair country road ran back from the sea.  We followed it,
and came to lanes and paths and followed them.  Now and again where
was none we made a path.  At night we wandered under stars.  We loved
grandmother moon, silver, wrinkled.  We loved Mother Earth, colored,
genial.  We loved the world to come.  We loved each other.  We loved
the infinite, the eternal, the uncaused in each other.  Our hearts
stood as one; our minds as one.  We entered together a rich reality.
We saw how every ring melted into a larger, and how there was no
ending nor beginning, and how we had to grasp both the unity and the
difference.

We talked, we were silent; we wandered in thought at will, and came
back with our sheaves to one another and a golden, common barn.  Once
we were sailing--slowly, dreamlike, for the wind just pushed us.
There was a great, sinking sun, and a light upon water.  The east
hung ineffably blue, serene, still, holding knowledge of the sun's
travel and a rising day out of ancient sea.  Miriam and I sat still.
We had with us a book of poetry and it lay open beside us.

  "The world's great age begins anew,
    The golden years return....

  A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
    From waves serener far;
  A new Peneus rolls his fountains
    Against the morning star;
  Where fairer Tempes loom, there sleep
  Young Cyclades on a sunnier deep.

  A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
    Fraught with a later prize;
  Another Orpheus sighs again,
    And loves, and weeps, and dies;
  A new Ulysses leaves once more
  Calypso for his native shore.

  ... Although a subtler Sphinx renew
  Riddles of death Thebes never knew..."


Earth and sea and sky transfigured to us both.  All the tragedy, all
the joy and mirth, all the romance, questing, seeking, searching out,
finding, recovering, all the lustrous truth that the strength of her
and of me could hold, brimmed and sounded and shone.  It tasted and
it touched.  A great voice was singing.  We fell into rhythm--oh!
into a mighty rhythm!--the boat and the sea and the earth and the sky
into rhythm.  It was the sun singing, the mighty sun that was sun to
its outermost drop of light--and that knew it was sun and had
reconciled separation.


We had been ten days at Miss Sally Paradise's when Gamaliel came to
us from Baltimore.  We met him at the wharf and took him with us to
the pleasant house, to his big, bare room drenched with sunlight and
the salt of the sea.

Gamaliel moved or stood, spare and dark, with dark, deep-set eyes.
He had unfolded strongly.  He had put behind him the childishness of
bitterness.  He talked of Hilltop Academy and of his father, quietly,
naturally, gold of understanding gleaming in the river-bed.  I could
remember when his laughter had been scornful.  Sometimes still it was
pained laughter.  But into it was stealing patience, humor, with a
kind of admiration for the turn and twist of things.  He did not
vituperate Hilltop Academy nor the principal of it, nor Whitechurch
(saving out always Mr. Gilbert), though he parted from them--parted
from them only eventually to take them up into himself and there
alter and fulfil, not destroy.  He said once to me: "After all, it's
one stuff only, though, Heaven above! how it meanders!...  Ancient
choices....  Well, dive underneath, and see what we can do....  Come
out, perhaps, at some other side!"

As we sailed, as we walked, we talked of his work.  "There lacks some
idea--some fourth side--to most that we do.  Now and then we get wind
of him--almost see him....  Then comes up the damned fog! ... But
it's dogged does it!"

We talked of the world of the closing nineteenth century, and of that
express train, the future, rushing toward it.  "There's one thing the
world's got to give up, and that is that there is any hard and fast
line between anything and anything!  I don't believe in
impenetrability--and our miles and moments are of the doubtfulest
validity ever!  The atom?--I don't believe it is the last word!
Electrical?--What is electrical?  Is there a law of gravitation?
Then, at a certain power, comes one of levitation, too....  Our old
perception level is changing.  Our consciousness is changing.  Truth!
she has a new face each morning--and I mean nothing cynical nor
despairing by that!"

We sailed, the three of us, under a high, blue sky.  We roved the
green country, we sat at eve upon the pillared porch.  Miriam had a
good, contralto voice, pure, expressive, sweet, with a kind of
wilderness and gipsy ring.  We found in the house a guitar.  She sang
the old-time cherished songs, songs of the negroes in the field,
ballads, hymns of the traveler soul.  Sometimes we talked, sometimes
we sat in deep silence, having darted, each of us, afar.  We darted
each afar, and the middle sea of harmony continually widened,
richened.

What had been hard or resistive in Gamaliel, the quality of the
father, what had been bitter, what had been envious, was turning.
What had been felt from the first, what was also in the
father--fiber, grit, indomitableness--was there more strongly.  With
these was now uncovered a partly grim, partly humorous, partly
compassionate approach to an understanding of the inadequacies,
discomforts, dangers, even, of the inns of the road--of the
heartaches, the beaten brains.  He was riding to break the ring,
riding to fetch sunlight for the old cracks and crevices.  He was
determined toward that, determined as Conrad, as others that I knew,
many others, as Miriam and me.

In our school-days we had greatly liked each other's company.  This
in no wise changed.  There was always with Gamaliel and me an
intuitive, inner handclasp.  Now Miriam and he liked also.  Through
great countries we kept step, we three.  And with a strange, rich
fitness, there seemed to walk with us, out of all others, Madam
Black--Madam Black and my mother and, I think, Maxwell.

He returned after five days to Baltimore, but Miriam and I stayed
another week.  We walked by the shore, we loved, we lived, we knew!
From plane to plane we felt the fire shoot.  We traveled from
affinity to affinity; we held them together in the beautiful
spectrum, we ran into the color of light, we broke on the other side
into new iridescence.  We wished, we willed forever to cast the magic
net in the upper seas, to radiate, to gather our own, to give bloom,
sonorousness, giving beauty, recovering beauty ... growing wise, lit
with wisdom.  Wisdom was our word of aspiration.  Wisdom was love and
knowledge made one, and power was the child.  We wished and willed to
keep the great commandment, and the second that was like unto
it--ever better to keep....

In mid-May we went to Flowerfield.  Uncle John and Aunt Kate welcomed
us, forgiving the marriage away from the old place and way.  John and
Amy Page, living now at Flowerfield, welcomed us, and Catherine and
Lewis, and all the colored folk, and the animals who remembered.  The
neighborhood came to see us, and we returned its visits.  There
spread around the loveliness of full spring.

After a month at Flowerfield John and Amy, Miriam and I, went to
Restwell.  As we came in sight of the river Ahasuerus was in my mind.
The spirit in me touched him somewhere, strong and growing,
companying with Daddy Guinea....  Mammy, too, had died.

Aunt Sarah, at Restwell, was both changed and not changed.  More of
inner light had come through, more warmth and strength.  Aunt Harriet
and General Warringer stood and moved, hospitable, gracious, really
fond of us.  There was talking and laughing; many persons went in and
out of the house.  Aunt Harriet and I walked once or twice together.
One day for a while she had been quiet, thoughtful.  Suddenly she
said: "I used to think Miriam was an ugly duckling--but she's not!
She's beautiful.  Some day, when there's time, Michael, I'd like,
too, to grow like that--"

General Warringer talked much of politics and industrial growth, and
the country's future.  "Of course all these 'booms'--a 'boom'
wherever you can shake a stick--won't last!  But they're bands at the
head of the procession.  We're going to have wealth and power!  That
is, the people who are wise enough to get in the wagon are going to
have wealth and power!"

"And the others?"

"Well, I tell you, Michael--like the lazy everywhere, they'll have to
take the leavings!  That's a law of nature."

Carter, who had married Mary Grimes, was with his wife at the White
Sulphur.  But Royal came to Restwell from New York for a week.

He was still so paintable--more paintable than ever!  He was large,
he looked neither old nor young; if, on the one side, he could have
been used for Mammon or a Roman emperor, on another side he stood for
patient, massive adaptation, eagle eyes and wings.  He looked here
like an eleventh-century alchemist, like a Chaldean, Egyptian watcher
of the stars.  Perhaps he watched them to use them for black
magic--perhaps he did not know what he did, but was compounded out of
black and white, and acted with a dreamy strength, fatal, automatic.

I watched him.  He had a dragon power to draw me.  I could not
understand him and not be him.  Miriam watched me watch him.  Once
she turned to me in that inner movement and speech which we used.
"Take care!  He's us, his ill and his good!  Don't let him draw too
hard.  Give toward him, as you take from him!"

Dorothea....  Miriam knew here, too....  Dorothea, Miriam, Royal, and
I!  If we lived with Vera Black, with Mannheim, with Maxwell, Conrad,
Gamaliel--if we lived with others--we lived with Dorothea and Royal,
too.  "Do I understand Dorothea?  Are we not sisters and more than
sisters?  Here and here and here I meet her," said Miriam, "and she
meets me.  The waters flowing together must acknowledge their own
waves.  I am her sea as she is mine."

We knew that, and we knew that all that is in us--all that is
us--must lift and lift ... that is, that everywhere the one mass must
lift ... as it is lifting!

We went to Whitechurch; we embraced in the gold of the summer all
there.  We went to see the Millwoods, the Millwoods came to see us.

Mr. Millwood sat with me one evening on the porch.  The others were
walking to and fro in the bright dusk and perfume, with Vesper
shining above the hills.  He said, after a pause, "Have you found
Christ, Michael?"

I thought how best to answer him.  At last I said: "Have I come to
Risen Man?  I draw there, I hope and I believe, at least a first,
fluttering breath.  Risen Man hasn't drunk up yet all the night dews.
But Christ in me--me-Christ--lights up all the horizon.  The sun out
of the sea....  The manger-babe, weak yet in its swaddling clothes,
laid where the grain and the dried grass have been, where animals
have fed, where human forms bend and move about it ... and the star
that is its forehead above the roof....  They are all great symbols!
Man that is beyond men--Man that is the container of men....  I
believe that Christ which is Enlightenment is born in me."

"Ha!" said Mr. Millwood, and moved impatiently.  "In the plain prose
of the Bible, do you believe that Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified
by the Jews and Pontius Pilate is your Lord and Saviour?"

"One reads the Bible in one way, one in another--"

Mr. Millwood struck the porch floor with his large foot.  "There you
go--just like your grandfather!"  He spoke with a kind of
peevishness.  "I knew that you were still wandering when I heard that
you had not been married in a church!"

But I liked him, and I knew that he did duties that belonged to the
way of the Risen Man.  In a moment he was more genuinely an old, kind
heart.  Aunt Harriet approached, and residence and profession and
details of Miriam's and my household life to be came to the fore in
their old warm cloak.

I saw Doctor Young on his hilltop, in his chill, northerly-bearing
study, where fire flickering on the hearth above ashes caught at this
unburned fragment and at that.  I longed somehow to heap the fire and
warm the place.  He was solitary, and he gathered his solitariness
about him and dwelt with it, forlornly proud.  I so strongly saw
Gamaliel in him, him in Gamaliel--and yet Gamaliel gone forth, gone
on ... and yet Anchises on the younger man's shoulders.  Sinbad--the
old man of the sea; Anchises-Æneas--desperately, hopefully, one! ...
What war in the members of one being was here--and yet somewhere what
agreement!

We visited Mr. Gilbert in his most cool, most quiet place of
business, with the shadow of broad leaves almost covering the
pavement, with the tinkling bell, and the deep compounded aroma of
many a land.

The days ran by, swift, effective, graceful, strong.  Days at
Flowerfield--at Restwell--again at Flowerfield.  Autumn came.  When
the color of October was over the land Miriam and I went home to
Baltimore.

We found a small house in a street just by Miriam's hospital.  We
furnished it simply and barely, but with what, according to our
notions, had worth and beauty.  Friends helped.  There came to us
from Flowerfield Dacia, who was as good a cook and marketer and
cleaner as might be found--all that and a few things besides.  We
entered into a fragrant home life--home and fragrant, for all that
both man and woman made contacts and worked in what is called the
outside world.

In October was published _Letters from Africa_.  It was fortunate in
its appeal to a few men whose names counted.  It grew to a certain
success.  This winter I wrote the _African Dream_, and it was
published the following autumn.

I was at work upon _The Branch of Coral_, and we had lived with Dacia
almost two years in the small house by the hospital, when there came
an offer to Miriam from New York.  There was a chance to reconstruct,
to build fairer a great organ of usefulness.  She had in Baltimore
the trained comrade who might take over her work.  She accepted the
widening field, and we went from Baltimore to the huger city.  It had
drawn Gamaliel the year before, to a chair in a great school.  When
we went we were thirty-two, Miriam and I, for I was born in March and
she in October of the same year.




CHAPTER XXXI

Seven years passed over us.  It was nine years since Miriam and I had
made our home together.  Many things were done in the world.  Many
rudiments pushed upward, many vestiges tended decisively toward the
Button Molder's caldron--not, in the long, long run, a hopeless
place.  Other vestiges received a temporary strengthening, other
rudiments a temporary weighting down, dungeoning.  But on the whole
and for the whole, assuredly, naturally, completer life gained.

The Spanish War blew up, thundered through a spring and summer, and
sank into silence, where its consequences worked on.  The nineteenth
century passed into the twentieth century.  McKinley lived in the
White House.  Colonel Roosevelt was making his legend with might and
main.  One evening I had gone to see, at his hotel, an Italian
painter who had brought me a letter from Ferraro.  I found him with a
group of others, viewing from a gallery the annual dinner of an
important society.  There had arrived the moment of speeches.  A
general and an admiral spoke, a senator spoke, and I remember not
whom besides.  But the last speaker, a better speaker than most who
had gone before, was a teacher, a man named Woodrow Wilson.

In these days many were sensible of a change in all the atmospheres.
Throughout America, presumably throughout the world, a subtle
alteration; a physical, moral, psychical, mental, spiritual change
might be perceived by all who were attuned to note it.  The century
came in with a sense of liquid dawn.  Many did not feel it, too
closely held in Egypt.  But to many there seemed in the air the
virginal freshness of a promised land.

The earth turned, full of promise.  Regarding the conflicting forces,
the reluctant mother, the pangs of birth, the ancient strong titans,
the young gods, there might have been foreseen, perhaps dimly was
foreseen, war yet in many shapes, huge war.  But there lived a
feeling that those who warred were coming over, that the center of
gravity was changed and would draw all men.  Conrad said it was the
Rousseau period before the Revolutionary crash.  I in some sort
agreed with him.  Change of character doubtless was apt to exhibit
halcyon premonitory light, followed by downcrash, pangs of
dissolution, tragic bewilderment!  Then might rise the great
apparition, the new order clear of the fallen old, for a long time
wreathed yet with torn cloud and mist of the old.  The character ever
changed, building up and building up, so that the god of to-day was
to-morrow's titan, and to-morrow yet a younger, diviner Olympian! ...
I saw, then, revolution approaching.  But my revolution--and Conrad's
revolution, too--had not to do with blind and deaf and powerless
war....

The twentieth century rose, then, with a sense of dawn.

Miriam and I lived in an unfashionable quarter, in a rather ancient,
rather large, rather good house there.  Gamaliel lived with us, and
Wythe the engraver, and Mrs. Lobb the old actress.  And there were
Dugald and Kate, the two children whom Miriam and I had taken from an
orphanage and made our own.  Besides Dacia we had Martin and Mary to
take household care of us, and Norah for the children.  Each winter
Catherine came for a month, and there were other visitors.  Usually
there was a guest in the house.  Conrad and his wife Geralda lived in
the next street.

Miriam's was become a known name through much of the United States.
Hers was the administrator's genius.  She could patiently disentangle
the confused strands, firmly hold the skein, wind off with light,
exquisite touch the ball for use, and see that it was truly used.
Mrs. Sayre, at Landon, came into mind.  She had had the same faculty,
though not yet lifted and widened as was Miriam's.  Miriam worked for
the people through institutions and through movements.  She worked
with heart and head.  Her pen wrote, her voice spoke.  Her papers,
scattered here and there through journals of sociology and where not,
may one day be gathered together.  She was an able and a winning
speaker.  Everywhere she used the moment as best she could, and
everywhere she regarded and drew breath in the future.  So she worked
and so she earned, and above all the objective activity, raying down
into the objective, went on an intense and wide upward living and
earning.  In our house she was frank and kind and true and wise, with
her gipsy tang as of some wild, most good, most aromatic herb.
Dugald and Kate loved her dearly, as she loved them.  Out of the
house, or of houses like it, she often met, as I often met, a dire
opposition.  We knew that it was dire because it was our opposition,
through deep time and wide place made by ourselves.  We met it, let
it roar over and around us, converted, each time, what we could of
the tempest....  We had made it and we must alter it.

My own work whereby I earned lay now in the written drama.
Occasionally, and of late years with increasing frequency, a piece of
it reached the theater, where it had a longer or shorter playing.
Displeased critics called it "impracticable metaphysic, barely
playable."  Pleased critics--they were by no means so many--said that
to-day's metaphysic becomes to-morrow's physics, and that it was
increasingly playable.  There was enough audience to justify the
staging, and the published volumes found their readers.  These were
the years when I wrote _Out and Away--The Two Inns--Color and Another
Color--Who Cried?--The Blessed House--Mr. X_.

I worked hard.  I knew many people and many lines of life.  I had all
manner of contacts and insights.

We went in summer to Flowerfield.  To Dugald and Kate that was
Paradise....  The circle at Flowerfield stayed unbroken.  Each year
Aunt Sarah came there from Restwell for a month.  Her body was
growing old, but she herself, Miriam and I thought, had new
freshness, serenity, and bloom.  She told me that she had found her
lover.  "But not in the old 'here,' Michael--and there is much more
of him than I had guessed.  More of him and more of me.  'Being
together' is life and the background of life."

Each summer Miriam and I spent a fortnight at Restwell.
Occasionally, but not often, Royal was there.  He was now a rich man,
creator of a huge monopoly, at home in many boards.  He had married
wealth.  He and his wife had a great house upon Fifth Avenue.  There
were children.  He gave largely, he collected paintings.  His
especial liking was for illuminated missals.  His own living was
spare, healthfully abstemious.  As ever, he was a subject for a great
artist.  His eyes looked out of dream capitals, from dream thrones--

Dorothea had not married.  She traveled now; she went here and there
over the earth.  But now and then we found her at Restwell.  She
looked at me with her enigmatical face.  It seemed to say, "I like
you and I like you not."  And I, too, could have said in my turn, "I
like you and I like you not."  But Miriam went steadily out to
Dorothea.  I have seen the two dim forms at twilight, moving in the
orchard or seated under the great oak.

There rest deeps and deeps, inmosts and inmosts, yet to find.

Miriam and I worked hard and constantly.  Much was to be done in the
plain, apparent, known dimensions.  We, too, with all our kind, were
householders.  We, too, recapitulated, drew out the essences, learned
to manage a little better and a little better yet, daily living.  We
were not immoderates; we had a loving-kindness for daily living.
When the fleeting is known to be fleeting it can be well enjoyed!

As best we knew how we did what our hand found to do.  We were not
out of the plane of physical needs, neither we nor ours.  We worked
as others worked, for food and shelter.  If we bent ourselves to put
wisdom in this very getting--if we saw, now less clearly, now more
clearly, other food and shelter--yet must we work where we were with
so great part of our consciousness!  Even in the summer when we went
to Flowerfield we worked still, studying, planning, writing.  We
found that to do one thing was to do many things.

In these years something in us of upper lands measurably rested from
further beckoning, further climbing.

Yet there was inner action, and that of an intensity....  Levels and
levels below must somehow be worked out, and their life come up to
reinforce before the journeyer might move on.  Strength had to go and
did go to disintegrating ancient bars and reefs....  That principle
of sensibility which I felt in myself, that permeativeness, pervasion
of time and space, touch afar and near, worked for a long time
obscurely, in darkened chambers.  Herakles, I knew, had his own Hades
to visit, his own stable to clean, and both were vast enough to make
for a weary, long job!  At times Herakles inclined to think there was
naught besides Hades, naught besides stable, naught besides hydra,
bear, lion.  Even, once and again, Herakles trembled toward
contentment with, identification with, rest with, the monsters and
the dismal places and the squalor.

He trembled toward it, then he stood still and took thought, then,
dimly, dimly, he saw again the star above the murk and turned and
took up his task.

Outer life and its thousand cries I knew and must respond to.  But
the inner life saw the fight, the crusade, the quest, intense,
intense....  What I say of Michael applies also to Miriam.

There came sense of another turning, breaths of dawn.

The twentieth century was born.  We felt a trembling, trembling
together of mankind.  We said, "She begins to be
conscious--Humanity!"  Many were saying it, many scattered through
the earth.

Miriam and I stood at thirty-eight.  Dugald and Kate were our
children.  They were nine-year-olds, a happy pair with health and
good minds.  Miriam and I had friends.  We had what the world calls
name and place.  We were not rich, but we were not at all grindingly
poor....  The spirit went on.  The spirit cried to itself,
"Awake--awake!"

I had finished the play, "Catch and Catch Again."  Y., the actor, had
it--a subtle, good actor.  He and the play made an entry into public
liking.  One of the consequences of this was the arrival of some
means wherewith to travel.

Miriam, too, had made end of a train of work and there was
breathing-space before another tangled skein should lie in her hands.
She and I took holiday.  We left the children and Norah at
Flowerfield and for two months went wandering over the Western slopes
of this country.

At last, one day, we stood upon the Pacific shore.  We gazed in
silence, the wind murmuring about us, stirring the sere grass above
the sand.  We went afar in thought and touch, through and over the
waves.  A power that had somewhat drowsed away awoke in us quick and
strong.  "I go forth like a blue cloud!" said Miriam.  I nodded.  It
seemed to us that we were that ocean and all within it, and the ships
that sailed it, and the islands that rose from it, and their peoples,
and the farther shores, and all the Penelope web of interrelations,
woven, unwoven, woven anew!  "_Seems! ... I know not 'seems.'_"

Dimly we felt the Malay moving, faintly we made sail with seamen
brown and yellow and white.  Miriam sank upon the sand.  We rested
against a dune.  The sea wind went over us, in the long grass....  In
her first, then in me, in us both, arose the barn at Flowerfield.  It
is raining; we are children telling stories in our burrow in the hay.
John cuts his round checkers out of his piece of cedar.  The
barn-swallows flit by.  We are telling stories there, and we sit here
by the Pacific Ocean.  Coil within coil, the Fisherman and the Genie
rise about us, in an Araby that likewise has room.  The Fisherman
having the clue to wealth goes fishing and takes four fish--white,
red, blue, and yellow.

Miriam spoke and her voice was made out of all the voices of the sea.
She swayed with a movement like the movement of the sea.

"_Mussulman, Parsee, Christian, Jew--_"

Her voice sank.  The barn and the children there drew back....  The
Pacific sea, the ships and the islands, Japan, China, India--

"They are all in our limbs," she said.  "I feel them!  The film goes
over the universe."

A month from this day we were in the mesa land of Arizona.  A friend
of Miriam's lived here upon a small ranch with a brother who must
have the dry sunshine.  We stayed a week with them.  It was a lonely,
silver-gray spot, depending for beauty upon space and light.  Hardly
anywhere else have I seen such a canopy of stars at night.  The earth
tasted, smelled, very lonely, wild, to itself.  If one liked it not
he hurried or tried to hurry away; if one liked it he might like it
mightily.  There was room for thinking, and the inner life might come
out upon the door-step.  The sister and brother, Miriam and I, rode,
and in the evenings talked beside a crackling fire.  And in the
mornings, when the other two were busy, Miriam and I wandered upon
the mesa.

Here one day we sat, without speaking, in the deep light.  At last
she broke the silence.  "I feel that something that has been still a
long time is moving on again!  It was still to serve purposes, and it
moves on to serve purposes."

"I understand," I answered.  "I feel that."

"We have worked hard.  Doubtless we shall keep on working.  But some
land is drawing stronger and stronger!  Work there isn't just like
work here."

"No."

We walked again, then rested again.  The earth lay wide and clear,
lifted, still, and sunny.  I spoke: "You and I have all along been
developing powers.  Now and again we have vibrated more swiftly, or
we have entered greater vortexes, or we have felt a zephyr torch from
super-consciousness, or we have known, as in a mist, the touch of
godhood.  The terminology doesn't so much matter!  Biologically
speaking, a new center of consciousness, another sense, is in process
of development.  When we have it fully many things will be
self-explained.  When it is developed in a sufficient number of the
species, there will be a new heaven and a new earth.  As Mr. X would
say, 'It is very simple.' ... Perhaps it is, but the effect is still
a very wonder!"

"A marvel, a beauty, an awful, glorious sea."

"Each time, in all our life, that we have left the accustomed plane
to go higher rests in memory, grapes from Eshcol!  There is a
humbling sense that those times have been few.  All the same, they
have made a standard of comparison.  There is a longing for reunion,
homesickness for Trueself....  More realness--more realness--on the
way to Reality!"

"So!" she said.  "Well, I feel that we start up from the camp-fire
and move on!"

But our days in Arizona, breathing, alert, silver-gold as they
were--and our journey across the continent, filled, as it was, with
mind-zest--and our homecoming that glowed and crooned as it always
did--and the uptaking of familiar work, hardly carried the acute and
actual perception of a campfire left and a frontier crossed.  And yet
I, with Miriam, felt a premonition, felt hands upon the tent-pegs!




CHAPTER XXXII

I was writing in the study.  Now I sat at the desk, and now I walked
to and fro.  I was at work upon Aldebaran.  It struck eleven.  The
house stood quite quiet, above and below.  Some work that she was
doing had taken Miriam farther north for a week.  It was late.
Standing at the window, I saw only quiet night, dark houses.  The
feet of some passer-by rang loud on the pavement.  A train passed on
the "L," a block away.

Work had gone to-night nor well nor badly.  I had finished a scene,
but knew that to-morrow I must make much of it over.  I laid work by
and turned toward the book-shelves....

Light seemed in my brain--light!  The room, the old earth, all trains
and loops and garlands and nooses of phenomena vanished.  There was
light in excelsis.  There was no form, as old form is conceived, but
there was control.  There was no labor of motion, but there was
thrill.  There was not change as change here is conceived, but I
think there was change.  Only it was so vast....  The sense was of
power and infinite experience, of wisdom and of floods of balm.  In
the midst of the balm there was fiber, activity, mind, and all in a
time and space into which our time and space melted, raindrops into
sea!  I have said that there was no form, but there was a sense that
some supreme effort of perception might reveal form, though of a
magnitude and contour!--The feeling was that what yesterday had been
a collectivity--diffused, planetary life--was become, in a flash that
tore the heavens and rolled them away, a self-conscious, a living
Spirit.  The Earth became a Spirit with a vesture.  And that was I--I
was That.  And all history and all experience and all "otherness" was
but the honey in that hive!  And the hive was conscious as a man is
conscious....  There came another flash--core-light, core-voice....
Still, still, there were other forms, there were companion planets!
... There came a climax.  I knew the great dominant whom the old
congeries, in the old time, named "The Sun" ... Light, light, light!

The intensity of experience lessened.  The great thing, in all its
scope, paled, entered memory.

But out of lower space and out of lower time, and out of lower form,
stayed the sense of goal.  I knew the pilgrims and the pilgrimage,
the task, the quest, the America over the waves, the Grail, the
immortal adventure, eternal romance--

And Miriam, that was the spirit most near, most dear to me?  Before
twenty-four hours had passed there came a letter from her.


MICHAEL: Last night, about midnight, my soul sprang forward with a
certain burning quality.  There was great light, and in an inner
firmament I saw the sun that we are.--MIRIAM.




CHAPTER XXXIII

Miriam and I made nucleus of that moment.  To it, through inner space
came, drawn, all of its slightest kindred.  All intimations,
intuitions, all experience of planes that were not of every-day,
every flavor of Self that understood and transcended the old self,
every piece of delimitation, every removal of inhibition, every
positive approach to new power that we had known came into that light
and certitude.  We had centered, we had the point of view.  That
which was now our part was, with everincreasing fullness, to be, to
know, to enjoy, to act from that center.

Certain things emerged, could be handled and looked at without shock
and dazzling.

There existed a consciousness surpassing old levels that we had
known.  Mankind was tending toward this consciousness.  As man's
consciousness was larger than the animal's, so was this larger than
the old human.  As each higher dimension holds and surpasses the
dimensions below it, so this consciousness would contain and surpass
all the old, fainter, slower rates.  The point goes on reproducing
and reproducing itself, establishing memory, growing a sense of
relation.  One day it is capable of an electric flash, a
communication, a filling out!  Oneness is born again.  Point becomes
line.  There is perception, action, knowledge, enjoyment, in the
greater universe of the line.  The line, now the unit, in its turn
reproduces itself, acting right and left.  Line memory appears,
relation among lines.  One day, an electric flash, communication,
sense of continuity, filling out, oneness!  Plane is here, and acts
from the great universe of the plane that contains and unifies lines
and points, and goes upon its own adventure, under new skies, to a
dimly guessed great future.  The flash--and containing and yet beyond
the sense of all planes, lo! an overplane is born to you.  And the
solid runs its race.  But one day again the flash!  Again Oneness,
containing all that went before, with its own career beckoning, with,
far away, another transcendence beckoning!  One day the hyper-solid--

A house is built.  The builder-owner comes in and takes possession,
and begins another stretch of undying life.

Any man, attaining this consciousness, finds himself to be all men.

Love of Humanity and of a super-Humanity becomes love and care for a
Self that is old Humanity, new Humanity, and Humanity to be.  That
sub-human, dubbed animal, plant, and mineral, is likewise to be
comprehended.  It is all the Self, to be realized and lifted through
every level.  Environment is the Self, Nature the Self, God the Self.
The smaller God is dead, but by no means the greater God.  That
overarches, inheres, yet!

Miriam and I looked about us.  We saw vast streams of tendency,
rivers in which many a hundred smaller rivers flowed.  We saw
Occident and Orient interfusing.  We saw over the armies, the
bayonets, the fortresses and dreadnaughts of the nations, over wars
past and present and very probably to come, the approach of
internationalism.  We could say, "It comes--Tennyson's 'Parliament of
man, the Federation of the world!'"  We saw socialization at hand,
the common inheritance held as common inheritance.  We saw woman and
man alike free, the hands of the sexes joined, their brows touching.
We saw a changing attitude toward the child, and a changing toward
education.  We saw medicine and law opening windows in their
mansions.  Business was growing humane, politics clean.  Art and
letters and music subtly transformed themselves.  We saw in the
ancient body of the church, Protestant and Catholic and Jewish,
Mohammedan, Hindu and Buddhist, and what other names are given,
fountains rise of wider practice of religion.  We saw healthful
revolt.  The Christian Scientist went forth, the Theosophist, the man
of New Thought, and others....  We saw a strong tide flowing,
religious tolerance and more than that, religious understanding, and
more than that, religious love.  We saw the folk take up beauty; idea
stretching wing in a sunrise of loveliness.  We heard the voices
growing richer, deeper.  Travel in the air was upon us, and a power
of intercommunication once only longed for.  Many an extension of
enjoyment was upon us, and knowledge in great breadths.  We saw that
the scientific man had come into ground once trodden only by the
mystic.  We heard science say, "Here it makes of itself material, and
here it rests immaterial."  What Berkeley had said, gathering into a
line many a tome, hung to-day in the atmosphere.  "All is spirit and
its ideas." ... Those compacted ideas of spirit that we called "the
body!"  Kindness and sacredness were coming into the compact, and new
temperance and a new energy....  The great bells rang for the great
century.

Grandeur brooded over our time.

We knew conflict--did we not know it feelingly?  But through all
storms that were and storms to come, streamed on the unifying!  True
unifying comes only by love and understanding.  We touched the
profoundness with which already it was here.  It was not a dream; it
was here, though yet only as a shadow of itself.  Conflict and
conflict until in the dawn it rose into itself!  But we saw now the
immense extent of blue sky and sunshine, and how local were all
storms, even the worst.

We saw men accepting their neighbors.  We took Jesus of Nazareth's
definition of neighbors.

More and more the ships made the fleet.  Multiplicity did not vanish,
but it held together.

We saw that, truly speaking, there is but one man, one woman, one
child.  Comprising, transcending these, there will walk a Being--

That one is us.

We call it "I" because it is "I."

When we cease to talk of multiplicity we shall cease to talk of
unity.  I shall live with my ideas, of all dimensions.


Orientation--sense of direction--sense of right--sense of the
future--sense of destiny--such terms grew vital.

New mind, new fulcrum!  Will the lifter, the lever, applied itself to
new tasks.

Further and further, deeper and deeper, Miriam and I began to know
ourselves.  There was no end to that, could be no end to that.  We
met great countries that we had thought somehow to be "other" and
found to be our own.  We desired ever more adequate ideas, fairer,
stronger, kinder! ever more beautiful, ever more potent thought.  We
wished to dissolve concepts not well or wisely put together and to
assemble mightier, richer experiences.  Out of the horn of our own
plenty again and again and forever these might be drawn.

There is no barrier between in and out.  All that is thought, all
that is imaged, lives and moves, acts.

We addressed ourselves to discovery, to assimilation of that which
has been discovered, and to fresh discovery.  We set our minds to
higher and wider imagery.  Whatever, little or much, that we could
find or do of value would be for all, as in truth it would be All
that was finding or doing.  There is no other than All....  But there
is yet self-confusion, self-dissipation, and now we speak from one
degree of the Jacob's stair, and now from another....  But for all
that, all that we could do or find would be for all.  We might not
print it nor speak it, nor see it, woven into a present institution.
But nevertheless would it flow and penetrate.  Motion in that world
is spherical and inconceivably rapid....

Miriam and I worked on in our visible earth, with daily life, with
written dramas, with aid against the raw cruelty of many a human
situation.  But activity widened, though it flowed invisibly.  So
flowing, however, the order of results nearest to the old daily
living tended to become visible.  Or, rather, these merging with
daily living, the latter stood up stronger, brighter-eyed.

We knew that we were immortal.  So we drank, day by day, of that
fountain Ponce de Leon sought.

We experimented now with deliberation.  We planned experiments, and
we caught on the wing the birds of paradise that flew our way.  We
mined in this direction--bridged here--volatilized this
mass--redistributed.  Volatilization is one word for process.  More
and more particles left the old earth, rose to a new level, and there
recombined.  We did not discard old words; we used them.  But they
indicated, each one, something far more entire than once was the
case.  We learned volume and we learned momentum.  Touch, taste,
smell, color, sound, muscular sense, sense of equilibrium, sense of
motion, all senses, changed from fleeting sprites to strong angels.
We had faith that where was extension there were we, and where was
non-extension there were we.  That is, we were in this place or that,
and beside that, back of that, under that, over that, we were
everywhere.  We had faith that we touched all time, and that eternity
was our name.  We knew that we were spirit, and that we were more
conscious, more awakened, than once was so.  Being more conscious,
being more awake, we entered with naturalness into our mode of life.
Over our heads, like a star, hung knowledge that there was yet
consciousness, yet waking, fuller and fuller--consciousness,
awakening, to which all our new experience that we found so rich
might come, nay, must come, to seem the hour of a child, a dream, a
faint sound of singing, thin shells upon the shore just making one
guess at the life in the sea!

That which we set ourselves to do as far as we could was to think,
image, feel, act, into conscious being the Oneness of mankind, the
I-ness of all this that says, "We are separate--hard, concrete atoms,
mostly opposed to one another!--each for itself, living and dying,
and Wholeness your fancy!"

We had dimly seen for long the including Shape.  We had written of
it--worked for it.  But now we saw it far more plainly, now we felt
the vast magnetic drawing of it.  But now we had become convinced
that the external ways were not the only ways.  Now we saw that the
clasping, demonstrating action worked from within outward.  All these
"selves," to find it truly, must find it from the inner side.  They
could not be pinned together.  They must flow together.  Spirit
willing, seeing, everywhere!  But those who sailed the inner seas
might start thence waves of help--outgiven stimuli that might pass
from part to part.

Miriam and I strongly yearned over our kind.  We wished union.  We
wished the super-organism with the super-powers--the super-mind, the
super-heart.  We wished Earth to cross the Red Sea, to come out of
Egypt.  We saw that all things worked to that end, if they knew it,
or if they knew it not....

Where all are seas of God, the diver may enter from where he
stands--must enter from where he stands.

Miriam and I had certain dawning powers.  We entered through them.
That is, they grew to fuller powers, and around them, infant yet,
rose other powers.




CHAPTER XXXIV

A year after that moment of illumination we found ourselves upon a
ship bound for England.  We had sailed for months of travel.  There
were errands.  An international body, of which Miriam was an officer,
met that summer in Geneva, and she was to speak for certain measures
dear to her mind and heart.  In London was to be found a group of men
whom I wished to see.  There, too, was being played "Mr. X," and
Llewellyn, writing of it and its reception by a London ready for
"strange poetry," urged me to come over and stay awhile with him,
"for I am going to die some time, and we may not meet in these old
dresses that we have liked.  You see I expect meeting--indeed, to say
it all, I don't wait for death to practise meeting--but yet, my
friend, I want to see you in the old ways, too!  I likewise want to
see _Miriam_."

We went.  After England, after the Continent, we were going to meet
Maxwell, in Egypt.

The sea was smooth, the hour dusk, on the horizon line a pale gold
and green light, cool and pure, in the sky the strongest stars.
Miriam and I walked, then came to our deck-chairs and lay there, in
sheer, exquisite rest, in the envelop of sea and sky.  Other
passengers had gone below; only a few figures paced the deck or
reclined, moveless, in the wide silence.  We sat still....  Suddenly,
definitely, with all distinctness, I saw Maxwell.  He was in a boat
upon a river.  He made landing, stepped out and, turning, spoke to
the rowers.  I saw green-clad hills, palm-trees, the roof of a
temple.  There was with him an Englishman in uniform, and also a
stout, dark-skinned, turbaned individual.  The three went up a flight
of river steps.  Night came over it, it was gone.  Here were the sea
and the horizon light and the stars.  Miriam turned a little in her
chair and spoke softly.  "What did you see?"

I told her.  "He is somewhere in India."

"Curved light," she said.  "What is the date?  Can you tell if at all
he saw you?"

"I think that he did.  For just one moment as he reached the top of
the steps."

We rested in our chairs in silence.  The sky came down, dark blue, to
the sea, the stars thickened.  Darkness that was light, brine and
tune of the sea, kiss of the wind, held us....  Something more than
these, for now we entered with our faint, nebulous power of
perception, into a consciousness confused, multitudinous, but real.
Inchoately, faintly, we perceived our own life.  Vision and voice,
touch, presence, peoples, tribes and nations, groups, individuals,
flowed in us.  We held them as the sea holds its own, as the heaven
holds the stars.  The active principle knew that it surrounded,
contained, pervaded, preserved, transcended the ideas that it
created.  These ideas were three-dimensional, colored, real; they
were the sensible and intelligible world.

We lay, oceans whispering each to each, lost or found, with all
number in one.  The perceptions played.  So fathomless, so wealthy
was the feeling, so wealthy, so deep!  The broad face of the earth
was there, Asia and Europe and America were there, history, and names
great and small, yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow.  Vast events hung
in that inner space; they contained, as clouds contain the water that
had been and will be again in drops, myriads of small events.  We
tasted faiths and cultures, wildernesses, cities, movements of the
spirit continuing from of old.  Salt of the sea, tone of the wind, we
upheld desire, love.  We had the knowledge of the heart, we embraced
the law of kindness.  Within us long, long human love glowed and
chanted.  We were all lovers, we were all parents.  We were all
children.  We experienced family love, village, and tribal love,
nation love, world love.  We knew comrade love, and we knew also
kneeling reverence for the Wholeness all unattained.  We knew
sublimity, we knew awe....  We knew the flash of difference, the
outward passing sparks, the falling stars.  Yet were they in the
whole, and on the mission of the whole!  Difference and Likeness, for
so was attained the essential rich variety, the sweet taste of
novelty, the wild grapes of romance....  Faces came and went....
Summations and essences made the honey of the Ancient of Days.

The ship's musicians began to play--overture of "Die Meistersinger."
Miriam and I rose and walked the deck one or twice, then went within
to the lights and voices of the saloon.

That night, in our state-room, as she put out the light and stood
before the opened window, and all the zest and fragrance of the sea
made entry, she said: "How rich is every man and woman and child in
the world!  Golconda and California and Kimberley hang on the bough
above their head!"

"We shall not get the fruit until we grow tall enough."

"Yes.  But we are growing taller every moment.  Not a dwarf but shall
some day reach it!--oh, my darling world!"

We sailed across the sea.  We had acquaintances on this ship and we
made others.  By now, in our degree, she and I had that earth-fame
which brought folk to glance as we passed.  "That is Miriam
Forth--That is Michael Forth."  One evening an entertainment had been
arranged for some seamen's fund.  A star of opera sang three songs.
A mountain-climber related an adventure in the Himalayas, a dancer
danced, a famous violinist played a sweet, uncanny, ancient melody.
Miriam spoke, ten minutes, her theme, "To-morrow."  She was the
mountain-climber, the dancer, the violinist, and herself, herself!
She spoke to-night with extraordinary power....  I, listening, was
aware of Madam Black.  That great personality and Miriam and I made
union.  Behind the speaker, behind the listener, in a clear,
vibrating darkness, pulsed all Russia, all Europe, America.

A day after this, the sea running free, the sky like an archipelago,
many cloud islands, great and small, with deep straits of blue air
between, a man came up to us where we rested against the rail and
watched the foam-mosaic at the side of the ship.  We had noted him
before; we knew that he was Ransome, the traveler.  He greeted us and
we him; we did not need to give names to and fro.  After a little we
moved to our chairs, placed where we might watch the sea.  He found
one for himself and sat before us, dark and thin, with a fine eagle
face.  It seemed that he read and liked the dramas of Michael Forth.
We passed to talk of his wanderings.  He knew all the zones and man
in varieties of mind and passion--

  With many an arm and maw and face and eye.


Presently--I do not remember the connection--he was speaking of
Lourdes and more ancient pilgrimage goals, Compostella, and where
not, of faith and shrines of miracle, and legendary doings in the
Middle Ages and all other ages, in Europe and all other continents.
He brushed Arabia, Persia, and India, and talked of Yogins and Sufis;
then, with the calm, wide curve of a broad-pinioned bird, he was in
London, where, last year, he had gone with ---- and ----, Psychical
Researchers, to see ----, who came near to the powers of Stainton
Moses.  "Yes.  He did some quite wonderful things!  Why under the sun
shouldn't an exceptional person now and then?  We allow every other
machine to improve.  Why shouldn't the human machine--why shouldn't
it begin to respond to wider ends?"  "Between the first ship, with
its oar or rag of a sail, and this liner, differences in power!  The
nature of development--desire--will--mind--did the one.  Why isn't it
doing the other?  I hold that it is doing it--and that there isn't
any unnaturalness!"

He regarded blue sea and blue sky.  "Old wits continually bettered
and new wits continually inaugurated and more and more fully adopted.
The sum growing larger all the time, finer, too, as it works itself
over and over, keener, more lustrous....  What else is there than
just the-to-be-expected? ... I do not think to be of the substance of
a throned idiot--nor a throned villain, either!"

The sea ran around the world.  The fluid air was not here nor there,
it flowed afar and near....  I sat upon the deck of the _Zeus_ and
listened to Ransome the traveler--but also I was away from this--all
around and all through....  Flowing mind that was also Ransome's
mind, as it was Miriam's mind, and others and others and others in
incalculable numbers--the host of mind....  Strong was the rapture!
Thought there had great voice--god voice.  It sank away, but its
shadow, its echo, lingering, clothed itself, in words from an ancient
dialogue between man and Man--between the individual and the Generic
Consciousness.

"_Then the son of Pandu beheld the whole world with all its
differences gathered together in the body of that God of gods._"

The strong music rolled away.  Ransome was still speaking: "So,
little by little, do we acquire powers.  Genus Homo pulls himself
together!  Mother Nature learns finer magic!"

Miriam sang under her breath:

  "Magic--magic!
  Out of the cave,
  Out of the lead!
  Touch the gold,
  Spread the wings--
  Magician!"


"Magic?  What is it?" spoke Ransome.  "Unconscious truth? ... What is
it that is emerging--faster and faster--butterfly out of chrysalis?
Every fifth person you meet to-day has an inkling of it!  It is in
the air.  What should you call it?  Another sense?  A superior field
of consciousness?  Specie-thought?  Self-recognition?  The Real?"

"Somewhat of all that, perhaps!  Each fraction of understanding as it
is reached takes its fractional name....  Thousands of marvelous
half-way houses....  In the end a Person that endures--conceives,
acts, and enjoys."

The _Zeus_ sailed on--jade-colored seas and turquoise sky and a
healthful, singing wind.

We came to the Irish coast.  Out of those about us watching the bare,
the wild, the emerald beauty, rose a girl's voice.  "I wish we had
time for Killarney!"

One instant after the word fell, then Miriam sharply turned her head
and drew me with her gray eyes.  Our inner senses sprang each to
each, leaped together far down....  We were in Killarney.

The peat burned on the hearth, the smoke made itself tasted.  The boy
was dying, having received a sword-thrust in the battle.  The girl
sat upon the earth floor beside the low bed.  The hands of the two
touched on the covering of frieze; she sat staring, seeing union and
separation....  He felt the hurt of the sword; things went in a mist,
armies in a mist, the wings of sorrow.  The grandmother sat gathered
together in the corner of the hearth.  Now she was silent and now she
keened.  The sound was bitter.  The door opened and men and women
came in.  There was a burly priest carrying soul-comfort.  Behind him
walked a soldier, and it was all long ago, back perhaps as far as
Elizabeth's time.  The grandmother never left the corner where the
peat smoke curled about her, for all that the Host was coming in.
The grandmother was heathen, wild, believing a god in the lake and
the mountain.  Who would work for her now, and the times so horribly
ill? ... Boy and girl, grandmother, priest, the English soldier, the
mistier, fainter others, we, Miriam-Michael, we leaning there against
the rail of the _Zeus_, we were them all--we were Killarney.  The
thing was there with a great pang and vividness--then it was not....
We sighed, we came back to the _Zeus_....  There was a link made with
a night long ago at York and with the monk Eadwine listening to the
chanting in the church.  The infinite sea of the memory of this
earth!  Moments entered consciousness so, they are restored so--and
whence they came there are decillions of others!

What are words? ...

The Irish shore faded, the _Zeus_ came to Liverpool.  Ransome
traveled with us in the railway carriage to London.  We gazed and
gazed again upon the country through which we drew.

  England's green and pleasant land--

So fair it was!  So far fairer it might become, would become.  After
a time, when the eye was somewhat sated, Ransome began again to talk
of Psychical Research.  We had had companions in the carriage, but
they had dismounted at some town.  For a while we were alone.  He
wished to introduce us in London to three or four men and women whom
he named.  We agreed, and we came to owe to Ransome more than one
valued connection, besides his own rich mind.  At last he took out a
pocket book and from it a paper which he unfolded.  "That's a scheme
of powers that the late Frederick Myers drew up.  It belongs in his
book that is to be published.  A friend showed it to me, and I asked
leave to copy it."

I took it from him and Miriam and I read together Myers's _Synopsis
of Vital Faculty_.


_First Series.--Phenomena Supraliminally Controlled, or Occurring in
Ordinary Life..._

_Second Series.--Phenomena Subliminally Controlled..._

_Third Series.--Phenomena Claimed as Spiritually Controlled..._


We read it with attention, acquiescence.  "That's a good compendium.
We should say Spirit or Self, where he says 'spirits'--"

The country went by, so verduous, so sweet!  All the towns, villages,
solitary houses--"It is all in us, in us all," said Miriam.  "Bone of
bone and flesh of flesh and blood of blood and spirit of spirit.  Oh!
world our mother--world our child--world our self!"




CHAPTER XXXV

Llewellyn had aged.  His beard was almost white.  He talked of an old
house crumbling to pieces.  "I see some lines that the new will
follow.  Partly like the old, partly not....  Michael, do you
remember that evening on the mountain-top above Africa, where we lit
our fire, and the air was something finer than air, and we felt, all
of us, friends forever?  I remember what a strange beauty--vibrant,
shining--you had that night!"

"You had it, too--all had it!  We saw each upon the other the
radiance that we all gave."

"Well, it was there!  Well, we are friends forever, meeting and
meeting and meeting again....  Pilgrims, adventurers, explorers,
poets--all the race of romance."

We sat in the London house which he shared with Sir Charles.  Sir
Charles was in India--Maxwell, too.  "I go there also, pretty often,"
said Llewellyn.  "On the wings of--Poetry!  That is, without
wings....  He who flies without wings....  The one who is there
anyhow without flying is the poet we call God.  There and here!"  He
turned to Miriam.  "Don't you sing?  I should say that you did."

She sang for him, sitting there in the rich dusk, sang without
instrument, thrillingly, exquisitely.

The notes died.  We sat quietly till the lights were brought.  "I
look forward to million-folded wisdom," said Llewellyn, abruptly.
"The most vital, the vastest experience!"

"It _is_."

"Yes ... Michael, I have always waked at dawn.  It has always been my
season.  The bloom of the vineyard, the wind over the palms is then
... More and more I get wonder, pleased surprise, a sense of Olympian
food."

"The right bread and wine."

"Just!  You two, I am glad that you came."

John Sydney was in Australia.  But I met again Carthew Roberts, and I
was happy to find Pantagruel....  Miriam and I went together to the
house yet lived in by the Mannheims.  The brother was in the city, at
his place of business, where, said Llewellyn, he prospered.
Mannheim's sister also was away, but would return presently.  Would
we wait?  We waited, and talked with the plaintive, fearful cousin.
Her easy tears came yet for Mannheim, but chiefly for herself.  She
said that the world was a selfish, cruel place, distressing to God!
The house was clean, these three people loved and clung together, but
the cousin and, I knew, the brother heard foghorns day and night,
dreaded collisions, suffered shadowy shipwreck all the time.

Mannheim's sister came in.  A thousand thousand fingers of thought
and feeling had modeled her strong Jewish face.  She greeted us, and
we talked of Mannheim.  After a while she took us to the small room
where yet were kept his books and specimens.  We stood beside his
old, large, shabby desk.  Above hung a small painting, a good one, by
an unknown artist--Moses leading the people forth.

Mannheim's sister spoke: "My brother and my cousin in the other room
think he's dead.  The most that they can do is to see him in some
little outward way, as he looked or sat or spoke some day when, they
say, he was 'living.'"

Upon the desk stood an old hour-glass.  Her large, dark eyes regarded
it.  "They think, 'His life was an hour-glass, and the sand is run.'
I know that it is no such thing.  He is all hours, and his movement
does not stop."

That night, waking after sound sleep, I very clearly saw Mannheim.
The sense was that we had met in the dreamless state, that I had made
swift, preoccupied return through the dream-belt, bringing him with
me so wholly that, simply and swiftly, the objective senses opening,
the presence of him was transferred from the subjective, held, and he
stood in the room clad in the old familiar seeming.  Was this just
the process or was it not, I powerfully felt Mannheim, and for an
instant he stood visibly before me, like a light-filled figure from a
stained-glass window.  He moved, was gone.

I lay with a clear brain, not thinking in words, but receiving
impacts, understanding them as they came.  The process, the motion,
was always one of expansion, bringing with it a sense of clear order
and tranquillity.  Then followed a specific light and warmth, then
with a deep sense of pleased surprise the intellect took count of the
moment's content.  The content was oftenest a wide, fresh ordering of
much data, a sense of things coming from sequence into scope, a
mastery of the octave and the rhythm.  Mastery of the old octave and
the old rhythm--by no means mastery of the new.  On the one hand, the
moments were syntheses; on the other hand, but the barest elements.
They were "bright shoots of everlastingness."  Miriam and I and many
another divined the kingdom of everlastingness, and that we should
walk there.  But we could not walk there yet--not boldly and bodily,
through all our moments.

But every moment that we caught from the new order _neared_ us there;
and through us, as through all others who sailed for that America,
neared the whole world.  We, with all those others, who were no
"others," after all, were spiritual ancestors.

Lying there in the London bedroom, at the turn of the night, Michael
Forth saw how simply the dead are alive, saw how, presently, the
plane of communication widens until we know that, until we touch
again.  Touch the absent in time as we shall touch the absent in
space.

I slept again and waked to the divine morning freshness blessing the
city.  Miriam set apart the door between our rooms.  "I went home
last night and saw Kate and Dugald and mother and father and all."

In London we saw much, met many folk.  England was not yet through
with bitter war.  The Russo-Japanese cloud gathered.  We heard talk,
excited or depressed, as the case might be; we noted hate in many
dilutions.  Miriam and I sat silent here....  We had parted with war.
It had not been always thus with us--by no means always thus--but it
was so now.

London tasted to us; massively, dearly, was us.  We touched artists,
players, writers, and men and women workers toward upward alteration
in many a social form.  There were men of science with whom, through
Gamaliel, we came into relation.  Ransome gave us a fourth group.
All interested us; all were doing their work where they found
themselves.  And in and through and over all hung the sense of
traveling.  One by one, we waked to find ourselves on a far journey.

Now and again we went to the churches.  Here, too, as in America,
there seemed to us change.  Miriam said, "They seem to be throwing
away and they are coming closer."

She and I sat one day in Westminster Abbey.  The organ had ceased,
the clergy were gone, the folk had dispersed.  The light rayed down
upon us through the rose window.  The great place of the great dead
held so for a little, then it rocked and split and vanished and there
stood a Living Man....

Death?  Outgrow death.

But do not think that death will teach you to outgrow death.  It has
to be done by the living.

To save one mother alive ... Christ, that is Power and Wisdom and
Love flowing, rising, in each and all....

Miriam and I went out into the soft sunshine of London town.  She and
I with many another walking the earth to-day and yesterday and
to-morrow would grow into that Image, so profoundly general, so
profoundly individual!  We should grow into it as, in Judea, one
named Jesus had grown into it.  All, unconsciously and then
consciously, would grow there.  Christ and the comprehension of
Christ growing by multiplication, accretion, fusion, intuition....

In and through and over London town, holding London town and all the
towns, a sense of rock, a sense of power, a sense of warmth, a sense
of light, a sense of Personality, a sense of Risen Life--

"There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body.

"It is sown in corruption, it is raised in Incorruption."

Miriam and Michael Forth went down to Thames-side and found a bench
and sat there.  They turned each to the other; their eyes shone each
into the other's.  They saw immortal, reciprocal love, filling time
and space and supporting these.

The light came down on the river.  The river grew luminous.  The
great town spoke and said: "Oh, great indeed shall I become; oh, wise
indeed; oh, fair indeed!"  We sat there long, tasting truth that was
relative, but nearer kin to the real than our old relativities.  We
thought of the old, and we smiled at each other as we smiled at Kate
and Dugald's play.

The colored river flowed on.  We leaned upon the parapet of
Westminster Bridge and watched it flow.  The clock behind us struck
the hour--we walked home to Llewellyn's house.

The London days went by.  We bade these English selves farewell and,
Llewellyn with us, crossed to France, that, too, had its great
flavor, magic, multitudinous, one!




CHAPTER XXXVI

Miriam and I lingered at an inn in Savoy, awaiting the day when we
must go to Geneva.  The place in which we found ourselves was so very
fair--such high, green slopes, such woods of chestnuts, so blue, so
mountain-pure a lake, such gracious, stately mountain shapes crowned
with white wreaths!  We walked great distances, we lay in the long,
sweet grass, ate the bread we brought with us, and drank from our one
flask wine of the country.  On a certain day we walked to a small
gray village high above the lake, under a splendid mountain wall.
There, with a definite tone of strangeness, fitness, sweetness, whom
should I meet again but the little, wrinkled man with the book of
verse who had sat down beside me on the train from Landon, years and
years ago, when I would go to Africa?

We found him in the churchyard, sitting meditatively among the dark
crosses.  I stood before him, looking down into his eyes that were
remarkably limpid, past trouble and deep.  He put up a hand.  "Wait a
moment until I steady, until I steady the glass! ... You sat beside
me on a train in the South.  We talked.  You were poet, too.  Yes!
... I told you that we'd meet again!"

He was traveling with a party whom he must, presently, rejoin at the
nearest large town.  "I've just another day in this country.  I
walked up here from ----."

I told him who was Miriam, and Miriam how the two of us had met.  He
gave us his name, "Allen--Christopher Allen."  We walked through the
village that was a tiny place, and we sat under a great fir with the
mountain towering behind us, and the lake thrown below like a
sapphire.  Four or five children, walking on the road, stood still,
then came shyly over to us.  They had berries, which we bought, and
they answered questions; then one, quite suddenly, said: "I know the
story of the place.  Do you want me to tell it to you?"

She told it in a wild-bird way, on a treble note, a legend half
pagan, half Christian.  It ran now a grim and now a delectable
phantasy.  She finished.  We applauded the legend, her art and her
kindness.  A bell rang, sweet in the distance.  As though it were
some understood signal, the children bobbed and bowed to us and ran
away down the road.  Where they had been a friendly dog appeared and
came to be patted.  Then a sweet bird sang, and a butterfly with a
coat of many colors sailed to and from a tall flower.  We heard the
drone of bees; ants at our feet went by in a line.  The odor of the
mountain world was in our nostrils, sun entered our very hearts.

Our tongues uttered few words.  The inner world was shining, ringing,
loving.  We loved this place and all places.  We loved these beasts,
walking, creeping, and flying, and all beasts walking, creeping, and
flying up the Time-road out of beasthood.  We loved the children and
all children wherever they might be under the four winds.  We loved
the world--oh, bright and dark, we loved the world!

Said Miriam, in a low voice: "We are coming to the waters' meet.
Don't you hear the great sea?"

The man of ancient days, and he had again with him a book of verse,
sat gazing with us and we with him at the blue lake.  Joy from within
out makes beauty, love from within out makes goodness, wisdom from
within out makes knowledge and power, motion from within out makes
event.  All the music of the world plays for the coming of
intuitional life.

The scene about us rested, but a thousand more rolled in, wave on
wave ... mass sense of an exhaustless ocean rolling to eternity.
Memory waked and saw all her far homes, far and near, near and far.
We remembered ourself, and ourself was the world.  World past, world
present, world to come.  World past we held the clearest--world
present was a sound, a thrill, a grief, a gladness--world to come was
radiance.

The throb, the vision, the voice of understanding, passed on, wave
form.  We three had shared the impact....  How to teach that the
thought has muscle and moves, that the dream and the vision go forth,
that desire and will, that the image and the deed and the life are
circulatory!

I had not spoken aloud, but the man beside me took with ease my
thought.  He carried it on, speaking with his eyes upon a flower
which his hand moved to and fro: "There's not a desire nor
determination, nor mood, nor thought, nor aspiration, intuition,
super-thought, nor feeling that is not public, general, common goods!
Where's the wall just now between the minds of us sitting here?  If
in old life there seemed a wall, new life flies over it, runs through
it!  _Share and share alike.  All we are one_....  That, just now,
was a lovely glow from to-morrow--warmth from heaven, breeze from
home!  Going up to the One.  But for long, for very long, my friend,
it may almost seem forever, we shall find in One a society!"

"I shall not quarrel there.  It is all one."

"It is all music," said Miriam.

We went down the lake, over the happy roads to the inn.  Going, there
held a sense of exquisiteness, of harmonious movement throughout
humanity, quintessential pleasantness of vast give and take, infinite
variousness of liking.  The intensity of the glow up there on the
mountain receded--the strong, aromatic breeze from home passed on.
But for all that they seemed to pass and seemed to recede, was left
as ever a knowledge, a lift, a treasure of leaven!  Wider and wider,
higher and higher, subtler and subtler grows the brain.

The new-old companion stayed with us through the day and evening.  In
the morning he must go to join those others with whom also he was
traveling.

We walked by the lake.  There shone a young moon, and breathed around
a dry, healthful air, wave-break of delicate odors, delicate sounds.
Those over-perceptions, upon the shore of whose vast plane and order
we had come, gave us of their new, their delicious flowers and
fruits.  Blossom after blossom, purple cluster, gold orb, they fell
in our way.

In the morning, very early, Miriam and I were up to see the comrade
go.  How many comrades we were gathering, finding--were gathering,
finding us! ... Delicate and strange are the ways of the All.

He walked away in the coral light.  We had coffee and rolls together,
with simple talk of mountains, roads, and towns.  He went away who
did not go; we stayed who also went.

Miriam that morning had letters to write.  I walked to a fir wood
sloping upward.  The ground lay all purple, brown, and clean.
Innumerable pillars ranged themselves, strong and high, while there
sprang overhead a deep and marvelous roof, moving, fragrant.  I lay
down among strong roots, on the purple ground.  There was stillness,
and yet the ineffable, whispering surf.

It was to-day a surf of recollection....

Every one is Satan and every one is Christ and every one is that
third who moves from Satan into Christ.

I came full upon Royal and Dorothea--came upon them in my own nature
where they are because there is nowhere else for them to be.

Place, moment, expanded, extended.  Here were seas of
Royal-Dorothea....  And still they were seas of myself--my seas--as
Michael and Miriam were seas of them in America, their seas, found in
their nature because there is nowhere else for them to be....  We
flowed together--then something rose out of the seas and understood
them all.  _Oh, my clay that is to be given life!  Oh, the all of me
that must be adventured, lived, loved, sublimed!_

There is an "I" that is to vanish, and there is an "I" that is to
come, and time is long.

I sat in the fir wood, and on every hand it passed into infinity....
And then, like soundless thunder, there was a cry, and like invisible
lightning there was a shock, a change!  Miriam was with me as always
she was with me, but there was a difference felt from head to foot!
There was rending, sundering, and there was entrance....  She was not
at the inn yonder--for that one instant she had been in the fir
wood--now, I knew, I knew, she was in the realm to which you go by
the inner gate!

I ran from the wood and up the path....  She was sitting at the table
by the window, a letter to her mother under her hand.  Her head was
lifted, resting so against the chair's high back.  She had died in a
moment, the heart stopping--some trouble we had not guessed.  Her
face wore her gipsy smile, dauntless, magical.

I buried the loved body of her by the blue lake where the mountains
reflected, where the song of birds was heard.  Around it lay dust of
a mountain people.

I would not go back across the sea to Flowerfield just yet.  It was
full home to Kate and Dugald.  Aunt Kate and Uncle John, John and
Amy, Catherine and Lewis, all who loved Miriam, loving her still, for
she lived still and always, would find comfort ... still, still, as
stair after stair is mounted, companionship with that other mounting
spirit!

Miriam!

I wrote that I should come to Flowerfield in October.

Maxwell's whereabouts were known now to me.  I wrote asking him to
meet me in Athens.  I stayed a month in Savoy, by the lake, among the
mountains, in this inn, by this grave.




CHAPTER XXXVII

The "I" posited itself in a realm somewhat nearer to the All.  It
tented there.  Miriam was there, profoundly, deeply, truly, really
there.

O death, where is thy sting?  O grave, where is thy victory?

I saw man--that I was, that I had come through--as one turns and sees
a flower, a bird!

I was out, and about me was a cloud.  I could not yet well
distinguish where I was--I was a babe there.  But under me now was
the old kingdom I had come through.  A part of me lived there yet, a
vast part--but a vaster part was out.

The "I" that yet functioned in that kingdom was upon a ship on the
Mediterranean, on the Ægean--but the "I" that was above knew many a
ship, on many a sea, in many an age!  Walking the sea, walking the
land....

I came to Greece, to Athens, and found there Maxwell.

The heat burned, strong deserts seemed to spring about us--deserts
loved, wide, and clean, the superfluous stripped away.  A flash, a
beam in the whole, returned that day in Landon when he stood, sinewy,
tanned, beside his shelves of ores and we first grew acquainted ...
or thought then that we first grew acquainted.  Other beams fell from
those African days.  Ten years and more had passed since we had met
in the body like this.  Each had traveled far.  But where we were
now, as where then we had been, we found ourselves acquainted, and
acquaintable, able to take the same stride, to work together, liking
each other well in those great, quiet, desert spaces filled with dry
light.

... But that first night in Athens it was Miriam with me, Miriam and
my mother and Madam Black and the man with the book of verse.

I say "the first," but "firstness" applies only to that projection of
me named Michael Forth, and to those named projections of the others.
There was not any firstness in the case of I myself--of we ourselves.
We had seen Athens built.  As Athens lasted, so lasted our presence
there.

Maxwell and I went up and down in Hellas.  We saw the old sights
again, the temples, hills, and seas.

There was a place where we sat among blocks of man-wrought stone, by
the pillars of a little, roofless fane.  Honey-hued, the shafts rose
behind us; around grew a scant, parched herbage, before us poised the
still blue sea, and the profound sky held a cloud like Argo and a
cloud like the Golden Fleece.

We had been talking of Africa, of Mannheim, Ferraro, and Sir Charles,
but finally we fell silent and sat so for some time, the moving
sapphire filling the world.  Maxwell broke the stillness.  "Early in
April an errand took me up the Jamuna.  Just as I landed from a small
boat at a certain place, suddenly--like that!--distinctly, vividly,
consciously, I was at sea, upon a steamer called the _Zeus_, with you
and with Miriam.  She was no more strange to me than were you.
Effectively, we were all one!  I was there simply because you were
there."

"Yes.  You were climbing an old river-stair with a temple above.  You
stood still when you felt the ship about you.  You had with you an
English officer and a Hindu."

"Thorncliffe and Sastriar."

"We were effectively one.  I was there simply because you were there!"

He drew a long breath.  "Well!  Follow a clue like that, and one
might come out of the labyrinth....  I feel like Franklin with his
key and his kite--and overhead all that was to come to be meant by
'electric!' ... Michael, where are we going?"

"Into beyond-man.  What we call heaven and God."

"All of us?"

"Surely!  Some particles are ahead, some in the rear.  It is true
that some are almighty slow!  There are plenty of stragglers.  But
they won't always straggle.  All are going--Self-drawn.  And with
each day the momentum increases."

"I think it does.  But look at the present world!" he said.

We were lying by the temple, above the sea.  That which happened was
that forthwith we looked.  We looked at ourself as Man.  And we were
the Hottentot in the Bush, and we were what seers there have been and
are.  We were our neighbors whom we loved, and we were our neighbors
with whom we were at war.  We cheated ourself, sold ourself and
redeemed ourself.  We slew ourself, and we rose from battle-fields,
grew bodies again, and slew ourself again.  We put out our own
lights, and then with long pain relumed them.  With pangs and pangs
again we gave birth to ourself, and all the while feverishly we dug
graves for ourself that we had birthed.  We said, "You die--ha, ha!
You go under--ha, ha!" and we died and went under, and still we
stayed not there.  We were a welter, a brew in a caldron, a chaos--

Maxwell's voice came as from out a darkness.  "So at times I see it--"

"I see also....  There is truth in it, but it is too short range.
Look now!"

Out of chaos was coming cosmos.  Men were becoming Man--christs
becoming Christ--gods becoming God.  Perpetually we learned.  We lost
ignorance, but did not lose wisdom; lost discord, but did not lose
harmony; lost hatred, but did not lose love; lost weakness, but did
not lose might.  Despite all dull, distracted, hypnotized clutching
at the one it fell from us.  The other stayed.  And that which went
was of time, and that which stayed was timeless.

We returned to the self by the temple.

"Bitter-sweet--sad and bright!" he said.  "I pin by courage."

"Courage and good-will....  Love is power."

We sat silent, sat so for long.  Gradually our minds again united.
The intellect grew larger, keener, the feeling at once vivid and
extended.  Thought, emotion, sensation were toward lands and peoples.
We felt them, felt Greece and England and America, felt France,
Germany, Spain, Italy, felt China and Japan and India, and all the
others--felt them as complexes in the One Man--as we felt the sexes
in the One--as we felt in the One the children, the young, renewing
points, and the prime, and the fading before transformation that they
call age.  There was a mighty integration--and we felt the upstanding
god.

We sank back, always still we sank back.  We could not hold the
chord, keep the form!  Disintegration--but continually the muscles
grew stronger to draw all together again!

Maxwell sighed and moved.  "Nomads, Bedouins, wandering in the desert
and lifting eyes to the city of God."

"It is there--the truer self!  We dwelt there a moment."

"A moment of a moment."

"It was an earnest.  When we can dwell there an hour, how much, O
Miriam, shall we know and be!"

"Vast, lifted, simple--"

"Blissful, intimate....  All the beautiful old words, all myths have
meant it....  Gather the members of Osiris....  Feel as a tree and
find it as simple, one, natural, as feeling as a leaf.  Feel as the
Ash Yggdrasil."

Again one day we sailed to an island and sat among rocks where some
sweet-scented low shrub sent out an odor combining exquisitely with
that of the sea.  "I suppose," said Maxwell, "that there is
everywhere emerging a higher range of faculties.  The type of
consciousness changes, advances.  I meet of late years all kinds of
explorers, each with a different tale to tell, but all telling of the
new continent....  What we begin to be able to do falls under so many
heads.  The past now--all our history!  It is profoundly with me in a
kind of brooding regard."

"You may walk in the past--observe it--and alter it as a garden."

"You say 'alter.'  I believe that too.  The past can be altered."

"Yes.  You have abundant power of motion in it."

A bird passed us, high in air.  A wind came, bending the grass.  "You
know that I loved," he said, "a woman who is dead.  It is growing
that she and I walk hand in hand."

"That old blank wall is crumbling so that you can see the sun through
it.  Who that is dead has vanished?  We shall gather all the living
and we shall gather all the dead!"

He sat with his eyes upon the burning blue of that Greek sky.  For
me, I was in that country, but also Miriam and I climbed Wake-robin
Hill.  "Another thing develops in me," said Maxwell.  "I begin to
integrate waking life and sleeping."

"Yes.  It is to be done.  All manner of integrations...."

We mounted a long slope of brown light.  Atop, we stood under a
pine-tree, we looked afar.  "Do you think that you ever began to
live?"

"I do not.  I never began and I shall never end."

"Oh, the mystery--!"

"Is it so mysterious?  Standing there, you say 'I.'  Standing here, I
say 'I.'  It is the same word.  I take it that the quest, the
searched-for treasure, the Grail of all the ages, is for every 'I' to
find 'I' wherever it is, and that is everywhere.  All 'I' is I.  I AM
THAT I AM.  Each one is to find that all the 'I's' go into One Word.
The first and only Word--the Word of God....  God, self-conscious,
saying 'I.'"

"I see," he said.  We faced each other, eyes meeting.  "'_I_,'" he
said.  "I say it of what I have called 'you.'"

I answered.  "_I_.  I say it of what I have called 'you.'"

Going Athens-ward that day, all Greece sprang whole again.  Not one
age of it, but all ages of it, and the nimbus around its head that
was the future....  All earth sprang whole and had its nimbus.

Maxwell and I journeyed for a month.  Each liking, each understanding
has its own fragrance, characteristic tone, strength.  Maxwell and I
joined fast in strong intellectual spaces, and in common care for a
clean, taut, athletic physical, and in a heart that loved wild and
careless beauty.

At the end of this time I must go home to Virginia, to Flowerfield.
He, who had been engineering in the East, was now on his way to
England, where a new project awaited him.  We traveled together to
Italy and northward to Genoa where I could get my boat.  Arriving in
Rome, we spent there a week.

All countries were now homes--all cities my cities--all peoples
myself....  Over and over again the integrating energy slackened,
weakened--there was instantaneous descent just to Michael Forth.
Over and over again!  But there were times when the deep past and the
wide present seemed to stand in one form in some tremendous light and
warmth that were the future....  And all the myriad shades, degrees,
varieties, so rich each one, of experience!

Once here, walking at night, I was suddenly at one with an alchemist
who had lived I know not when.

Another time I knew that I, and Miriam with me, and, I thought, my
mother, had been martyred here in Rome nearly two thousand years
ago....  I looked from a cross, and I saw over a space of sand,
lifted and pierced in the same way, Gamaliel.

The monk Eadwine connected here....

Countless multitudes of lives that are our moments, phases! ... Stand
in One Life and see from the center thy universe!  "Michael Forth"
was now to me one of the moments, the phases.

Maxwell and I left Rome and came to Genoa, where I was to take ship.
Our inn had been a palace; we sat that night, with candles burning,
in a room so large that the verges were lost in shadow.  We sat
silent.  In at window came the ringing of a distant bell, sweet and
slow.  We were going to part on the morrow, who liked each other well.

To my perception time changed, space changed.  Many more causes were
simultaneously seen; many more effects.  Miriam and I did not part,
and Maxwell and I did not part.  The larger life is here and now.
Heaven is here and now.

He said: "There came then a wave of truth.  From what land do they
blow, these things? ... At any rate, you and I do not part."

The next evening the sea ran in vast blues and purples about the
ship.  The Italian shore was sinking; the mind's eye saw Africa and
Spain and the Strait, the Atlantic and America....  There held me an
emotion delicate and powerful, fragrant as the wild grape, all melody
and color and zest, and above it walked unhidden intelligence.  And
Miriam and I met in the whole.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

In New York, Conrad, who lived in the next street, came to see me
almost at once.  We walked up and down in the study that was a long,
high-ceilinged room.  He looked about him.  "I don't think she has
gone," he said.

"No.  She's not gone."

We walked up and down, Miriam with us.  "You were already profoundly
one," he said.

The city roared without the windows, the great city.  Now it was
Blake's tiger, tiger burning bright, and now Blake's lion with ruby
eyes and mane of gold, now half man and half brute--centaur--and now
whole man, and now half man, half god.

In very ancient times what long effort--prolonged, broken--to stand
upright, to use the hand, the tongue!  And now, upon the huge, next
stair, difficult, too--!

We talked of Conrad's especial work.  He also had grown in these
years, was stiller, more patient, massive, than he had been.

Around him beat difficulties of a disturbed hive, clouds of stinging
bees.  He could say, "I sting, I fret and hamper myself"--and work on
toward better things.  He, with all of us, was on the way to
knowledge and the master reconciliation.  The long road--oh, the
long, long road!--oh, the only road worth traveling!  He was like and
not like the old Conrad of the university, or the Conrad even of ten
years ago.  He worked hard, with vision and with temperance, building
not with gusty strokes, but to last.  The gain in him was that there
used to be the gusty strokes.  The emotion of the Whole, the fusing
passion, held him now so closely that he grew steadfast.

His old paper _The Compass_ continued, and he was starting a journal
named _The Evolutionist_.  I said that Evolutionist-Involutionist was
the better, if longer word--unless, serving a turn already made, he
was ready plainly to say Involutionist.

"It is too revolutionary a title--yet!  As I see the formula, it
goes: X--Evolution--Pause--Turn--Involution--X."

"X is the equilibrium, the identity, the Eternal Person."

"I suppose that is so."  He put his hands behind his head and leaned
back, his eyes upon the rows of books.  "None does anything else but
build at, build into the Greater Person....  'All men are different,'
said yesterday.  'All men are equal,' says a part of to-day.  'All
men are identical,' will say to-morrow....  Each man and woman,
consciously or unconsciously, lover and servant of that great Art
that makes us One!  All are pilgrims, seekers, workers in that
studio....  But one reaches Bewlah Land, while another is still at
Hill Difficulty."

His hands came down upon the table.  I put mine over them.  "All
right, brother--"

We talked late.  When he went away Cygnus was over the house-tops.
As I fell to sleep a great star shone in the inner world--and it had
mind and feeling and power and beauty!

I had found that Gamaliel was away from the city.  But the day after
Conrad he came.  It was a day of autumnal beating rain and a wind
that cried in the chimney and at the window.  Martin had built me a
fire in the study.  There was work to do before I could go to
Flowerfield.  I had worked almost all the day, but in the rainy, late
afternoon came Gamaliel.

I had always loved him and I did so now and should do so to-morrow
and all the days after.  Maxwell was comrade of manhood.  Gamaliel
was that, too, but comrade besides of boyhood.  This afternoon it was
boyhood that came all around us.  And he knew what it was to suffer
and to struggle, and far ages of that of my own had been in this room
to-day.  He knew--he was--Whitechurch and Baltimore, Restwell,
Flowerfield.  We could walk together in the still, the living, land
of the past.  How far we could walk together we had never plumbed,
but we knew that it was very far--it was very far--and in the present
and in the future as well as the past.  I understood the world
Gamaliel, and he the world Michael.  There was free trade between us.
The two capitals were homes each to the other; the two banners had a
common, splendid over-banner.  There was variousness, for richness,
for refreshment.  But in and through and with the variousness ran the
common passion for the All.  That Beatrix--that Mary--tore none
apart, made none jealous....

Gamaliel and I cohered, interpenetrated, tasted each other and liked
the taste.  We sat beside the fire, with the rain streaming, beating,
against the pane.  "I came from Whitechurch last night.  My father is
dead."

"I did not know that!  Tell me--"

"It was a short illness.  He had changed in this last year, Michael.
Walls were beginning to come down....  I did not mean to leave him,
nor to be left by him....  He lay, clear-headed and still, at the
last.  His small, bare room and he lying there, straight and gray....
I watched--and the stillest kind of night outside--and picture after
picture coming up.  Do you remember the night we saw 'Midsummer
Night's Dream'?  That came up.  How hardly I thought that night of
all fathers!  Old Ægeus who would kill his daughter if she went not
his way--and my father who would hold me with both hands to be still
the same....  I watched, and at last the cocks crew.  He turned his
head and opened his eyes.  He said, 'Gamaliel, if you conquer--'

"I answered that I didn't want to conquer.  Not now.  Not unless in
some way we both conquered ... by loving--by knowing.

"Do you know, Michael, what happened?  I held his hand....  And we
were one!...  All his memories were mine....  I felt his hand gather
my hand.  He said, 'Gamaliel--but that is my name, too!' ... It was
as though a hand passed over his face and wiped out severity and put
there knowledge.  'Life,' he said.  'Life everlasting!'  And he drew
my hand up to his heart ... and under it the heart stopped.  _But
then I felt it beat in me_."

"Just so."

He rose and walked the room, then came back to the hearth.  The fire
reddened all the place, and his tall form and lined and intellectual
face.  As the flame played it seemed to do away with all rigidity in
that appearance.  It seemed to change, to become, dissolve,
re-become--and now it carried with it this environment and now that.
I thought I saw great Proteus who could change from form to form,
from face to face, because all were his....  Gamaliel spoke, "And we
shall revive our dead."

We sat together through the closing day.  Now we talked and now we
sat in a silence of understanding, rest in company.  He supped with
me, and we came back to the study and built up the fire and talked of
work, his work, and mine, and Miriam's.

So stormy was the night that he agreed to stay with me.  It was
eleven when a cab stopped before the house and we heard Mrs. Lobb's
key in the door.  "She still plays?"

"She has a small part in 'Out and Away.'"

"Just as Wythe, the engraver, still engraves where he can get
work--and both would be sadder, very wistful, if they thought they
could not die in this house!  They can?"

"Yes.  Kate and Dugald and I shall live here, too, in the winter.
And Mary and Martin and Norah and Dacia.  _And Miriam_."

Mrs. Lobb tapped at the study door.  It was her habit, coming in so,
when she saw that the room was yet lighted.  I opened the door for
her.  She entered, wrapped in her long, warm cloak, and with the
rouge yet faintly on her cheeks.

When she had greeted Gamaliel, whom she liked, she sighed with
pleasure over the fire.  "The theater was cold--and all the winds of
heaven are in the streets!  But I played my old Madame part well--ah,
well!"  She sat and warmed herself by the fire, and she, too, looked
magic, many in one, to-night.  "The passion for the ideal!" she said.
"One only finds the real by that!  Ideal passion.  I did well, and I
felt as young as I shall be when I die....  For we go toward youth, I
am perfectly sure of that!"

Warmed, she said good-night, and left us.  There was magic about her
and about everything to-night--or not magic, but a true and powerful
light.

Gamaliel and I sat still until the wood should burn away.  Pictures
wrapped us....

The next day came to see me Royal Warringer.  His secretary
telephoned, asking if I were at home.  He came in a high, clear,
sunny day, the storm gone by, the streets glistening, the air free
and thrilling.  I met him down-stairs, in the parlor that with love
and care Miriam and I had made right.  But he said at once: "Haven't
you a study?  Let us go there."

In the study, when he had swept it with his eye, he went at once to
the small painting of her that Y---- had made and given us.  He said,
"She was more lovely, Michael, than I thought."

We stood before the painting.  It showed her very simply, sitting in
a flush of marvelously painted dawn.  "It is sunset light?" he said.
"No.  I see.  It is dawn light."

"Yes.  Dawn light."

We sat down, and he began to talk of Restwell.

How may any part of spirit change and not all change?  As I moved he
moved--as I heard the oceans he heard them--or as he heard the oceans
I heard them--it matters not which.  He had great power and
subtlety....  I found in him what I had not found before--what I had
not been strong enough to find before--I found in him, in remote,
half-tended gardens, small flowers of love.  We opened one toward the
other....

He stayed the better part of an hour and then went who, like all
persons else, yet stayed.  An aspect of him went, but aspects
remained....  Something powerful over us was correcting the one of us
by the other--gathering from each the desirable, the useful,
regarding the leaden portion of each, lifting the leaden portion of
each toward the crucible....  We were coming together up higher.

Michael, Royal, Miriam, and Dorothea--




CHAPTER XXXIX

Three days and I was in Virginia.  The train ran through October
lands to October hills and mountains.  I loved them, loved Virginia,
loved the Indian-summer day.  The South was mine--as was New England,
the West and the Middle West--as was America to the south, and the
northern Dominion, and the Indies.  And Europe was mine, and Africa,
Asia, and all the islands of the seas.  And the submerged continents
and the continents to be.  Owned without harm as all may own all....

The train rushed on.  That emotion that is above cry or laughter and
that thought that is above words held me....

Here was the county town, here were greetings.  At the last I had
come a day or two earlier than was thought for.  None from home was
at the station.  I walked to Flowerfield.

There lay a hilltop on the way where, walking or riding or driving,
or on the returning wings of thought, every lover of beauty made
pause and feasted.  Beside the way rested a wide boulder--how often
and how often had we who were walkers rested there with it!  I rested
there to-day.

A farm-wagon went by and the man in it and I called greeting.  A
negro carrying a bag of meal came by and we greeted; three boys and a
dog followed and we greeted.  Then came a surrey and women driving
and we greeted--then an old colored woman hobbling along with a stick
and we greeted.  Then for a space the road ran bare; just the October
wind blowing red and gold leaves across and along.  Around flowed the
widest landscape.

I saw.  I saw my country, earth, times, desires and passions and
determinations, the bound spirit and the spirit heaving against its
bonds, and the spirit partly free, and high above the bound I felt
the spirit free!  One spirit--as we say "one man and his freedoms and
unfreedoms."

The wind blew down the leaves.  A great ray of sun traveled like a
search-light.  Again negroes were passing, this time a number
together, and the one ahead sang, "Roll, Jordan Roll!"  We greeted.
I rose from the boulder and went on to Flowerfield.

Kate and Dugald were making a canal and tow-path down by the
streamlet under the willows.  I heard their caroling talk and went
that way.  They flung themselves upon me....

We sat under the willows and talked of her whom they called
"mother"--who was profoundly mother, as she was also child--mother
and child and lover and self of all!  They were so young--they felt
her everywhere.  We talked--then we finished and smoothed the
tow-path and planted witch-hazel twigs for fairy trees to shade the
elf drawers of an elf boat.  Then we washed our hands in the stream
and went up to the house.

Oh, Flowerfield!

John and Amy, Aunt Kate and Uncle John, Catherine, Lewis--dear lands
of being!  The house sang its old ballad, the splendid trees burned
like the phenix, seeing winter, divining the recurrent spring....

When a week had passed I went for a week to Restwell.

Nor Dorothea nor Carter nor Royal were there.  I had all kindness
from Aunt Harriet and General Warringer.  Aunt Sarah and I walked or
sat, talked or were silent together.

Her hair was now gray, but her eyes held their still glow, her face
was unwrinkled, her figure kept its grace, her step lightness.  We
went here, we went there, about the old place; we sat by the river or
under the orchard trees.  But oftenest we went to the graveyard.
Still she brought the flowers there.  We felt the ancient sweet
presences, and other days and days came now into the garland.  She
met herself as a young woman there.  Over the wall I heard Ahasuerus
calling, and he and I, boys, rampaged in the sloping, fairy wood.
Or, back this side the wall, I moved where my mother moved....  Under
the apple-tree, in the far corner, the red apples lay on the
ground....  Oh, miracle, marvel--magical life!

My aunt Sarah spoke: "Ten years or so ago, I entered a new world.
Perhaps imagination and memory and intuition and mind and emotion and
judgment were always on the road....  Perhaps we come, each of us,
like Christian, to a boundary-line, and there the burden drops and we
walk on, new man, new woman!  At any rate, I walk on, and now each
morning I say, 'What exquisite, sweet surprise shall I know to-day?'
Behind all outer meanings are inner meanings, and they come first,
come last--are Alpha and Omega into which all things go, out of which
all things come!"

The days slipped by at Restwell.  I walked to Whitechurch.  Hilltop
Academy had another principal, Mr. Smith, the history teacher,
teaching where had taught Doctor Young.  I went to see Mr. Gilbert.
The great tree shadowed the pharmacy.  One descended a step as into
the cave of a good anchorite.  The little bell rang.

The hermit was now an old man.  "Oh yes, I shall bury this!" he said.
"But _I_ shall simply live on.  Immortality is desirable.  I take it
that the school-books and the newspapers haven't yet the last word in
physics and mathematics."

I went to see the rector of St. Matthew's.  Mr. Millwood was in his
study, but presently we stepped into the garden and paced the path by
white and pink and purple asters.  He spoke of Miriam.

I said: "Death is a plane of consciousness.  By degrees the 'living'
and the 'dead' are finding and making a plane in which to meet.  When
the consciousness has grown great wings--"

"Yes?"

"Then there is no 'death.'"

"Consciousness--planes and states--degrees of awareness!  I hate,"
said Mr. Millwood, with vigor, "all the new-fangled lingo!"

I laughed.  I agreed that language was yet Bœotian.

But the sunshine was not Bo[eo]tian--nor the colors of the garden.
The three-dimensional language was not Bœotian....  Or was it,
too, Bœotian to what should be, would be?

We walked the brick path....

That evening at Restwell I went to Daddy Guinea's cabin.  It stood
vacant, the door open, behind it cavernous dark, before it red sumach
and farewell-summer.  I sat upon the door-step and all my childhood
came about me.

I had learned to walk in the past as simply as one turns from the
thronged street to walk in the park.  I walked there now.  Fire
burned on the cabin hearth and there Daddy Guinea and I baked sweet
potatoes and he told me about the battle seen from Lone Tree Hill.
But I asked him questions such as I had not asked then, and I saw in
his answers what I had not seen then--and yet was it play,
recreation!  The past is the vast playground where things are learned
in play.  There is motion there as everywhere.

The past ran into the now, the now rose from the past.  Spread in all
directions the tremendous shape of the present!  Flux and throb and
impact, shuddering thrill and thunder--mine of choices....

The future lifted me....  Those who live in the future live!

Chaplets of stars appeared.  The night wind breathed.  "Tu-whoo!
Tu-whoo!" said an owl in the wood.  The cricket world chirped.  The
soil, the plant world, entered in fragrance....  Oh, beauty and might
and wisdom!  AUM, saith the Hindu.  ALL--ALL.

We are Brahma, we are Vishnu, we are Shiva--Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost.

I looked at my little life, and I looked at my larger life, and I saw
that the one was to melt into the other.

The larger was to be the simple, continuing, every-day life--as the
little life had been.  The momentary was to become the day long....
I felt movement about me--presences--Presence.  I could not bring all
into radiance--I could not step wholly, bodily, into that super-world
that I divined--outer islands, I divined, of an inner world so great,
so bright--!  Ignorance held me, lethargy, weakness, unwisdom,
unlove.  I saw through a glass darkly, but all my being was bent
toward one day seeing clearly.  We pass into it as, long ago, we
passed through the brute into the human.  All the world shall go up
with a shout into God--shall find itself in its own heights.

I left the cabin and went down to the river and heard the sea talking
in it, to it.  I touched the sea that had put it forth and was taking
it again.  It was no distance, or I had overpassed distance.  All
experience had been, was, and would be mine ... and thine ... ours
... the ultimate, the un-selfed I.

In a week I went from Restwell back to Flowerfield.

Indian summer pervaded the land.  In the spring violets cover the
ground, in the late, late autumn they fill the air.

John and I walked the old road.  "Show me, Michael, some of the
things you see!"

"I see how good, how strong, how dear you are, John, John!"

"But you've stepped over a stream that still runs before me.  I can
see that.  You call to me from the other side."

"You will come.  You feel yourself moving....  'It's dogged does it.'
'Dogged' finds the direction--'dogged' pursues it.  'Dogged' is your
true knight errant, his adventure found--"

"But the mood," he said, "ceases to be one of doggedness."

"You are right.  It becomes a burning glory."

We walked in silence.  He drew a quick breath.  "I saw just then,
time, space, and causation."

"You are crossing the stream!  This is a world beyond the old.  We
passed into it because we were ready to pass into it.  But we are
babes here, half-blind new-comers, stammerers, uncertain feelers
toward bright truths.  That will change.  We shall grow."

"The 'I' sense--where does that go?"

"It passes into 'We'--and that passes into God."

We walked on, and Flowerfield and the County and the State and the
Country and the World were vividly fair....

The next day was a day of rain, the day after one of blowing wind,
but the third day broke in glory.  I went that morning to Wake-robin
Hill.  I passed the lesser wood where in spring the flowers abounded.
I climbed to the crown and lay under hemlocks.  Still, still, was I
hunting Reality, the thing which Is ... thing? ... the Person Who Is!

Miriam and I sought together.  She was with me on Wake-robin Hill.

We sought--and, as ever, seeking, we found.  We found wonder, high
peace, work to be done, adventure mystic, beckoning, vistas of travel!

To hear the voice of understanding, and to live the unselfish life--



THE END









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