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.