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.