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.