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.