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.