Chapter XXIX

I bade well-liked companions good-by and I sailed west. Then flowed eight days of jade, emerald and lapis sea, and we came under the figure of Liberty, to the American shore.

Another day and I was in Baltimore.

I waited in a small, simple parlor, in a corner of a hospital. It was Miriam's. At twenty-eight she was superintendent here. I waited. It was evening. A soft light flooded and pulsed. She came....

We wished to be together, to work together, learn, know joy together on all planes. Marry! That was simple, though our marriage now would be more and other than many an older marriage of ours. The second day in Baltimore she took holiday, and we went in the early morning out of the city into the country. We found a small, quaint village with a tolerable hotel, and thence we walked into woodland. We were profoundly, of old time, at home in forest.

We sat down on the dry, clean earth under a beech. It was early spring. The branches above, the boles of surrounding trees, the curtains of amethyst made a council-chamber. We sat, a king and queen, and took counsel.

We wished living and home together. We pondered, pacing around Ways and Means. It was her wish to keep her profession. But wherever were human beings there was room for the health-bringer. She could work, if need were, elsewhere than in Baltimore. If I continued engineering, and if that meant, perforce, a place like Landon, or where not, we would go there. She could organize and work toward healthful tissue there as elsewhere.

But, alike, we had an intuition that I would not again take up--or not for long take up--just that engineering. We could not settle this now; we laid it by; whatever difficulties might arise we would meet and straighten when we better knew their field. We were not without money. I had saved from what I had been paid as Maxwell's assistant. She, too, had put something by. She had worked hard and constantly in her hospital for two years. She had trained one into whose hands she could put the reins. Let us take a good long holiday--two months, three months--and look about us! We agreed that we would do so.

Our marriage. We were of a mind here, too. "Do you think they would be hurt at Flowerfield?"

"If it were Catherine I think they might be. But not with us.... They've got a grasp on us, and we on them. They are here and we are there, anyhow, and they feel it so. Aunt Sarah, too, at Restwell."

We determined to be married in Baltimore, within a week--a civil marriage. She thought that she could so arrange that within a few days thereafter she might take her good long holiday. We would go then to Flowerfield.

We rested upon the brown earth in the forest, or we strayed and rambled at will in the differing beauty of every vista. Toward evening we turned back to the village and the rushing train and the lit and murmurous city.

The next day I went to New York, and, sleeping there that night, arose in the morning and took a letter that Llewellyn had given me, and the manuscript of _Letters from Africa_ to a certain publisher. He read the letter, he talked a little, then drew toward him the packet of manuscript. "We'll read this at once, Mr. Forth. Where are you staying? Suppose you come in three days from now."

I used in various ways this length of time. One was to view artists' canvases, one just to mark and mark again the life of this great hive. The three days passed. I went again to the publishing-house. They would publish the _Letters from Africa_. They thought it should have a certain success--how much or how little, of course, could not be predicted. It might prove caviar to the general, and then, again, popular taste being the great X, it might experience a certain demand. One could never tell about these things out of the usual run. At any rate, they would publish--in the autumn--and they would be glad to see anything else that I was doing. The publisher glanced at the clock. "It's about luncheon-time. There's a good café around the corner. Come with me and tell me about Africa." In mind I saw him pin me and Llewellyn's letter and the possible interest of the house together. He was a pleasant, oldish fellow. "African explorer!" he said. "There are people you ought to meet. Come with me to my club to-night."

The following day I signed a contract with the publishing-house. When it was done I walked along Broadway. The air lifted and moved, brilliantly clear. One could read detail afar. A huge city, and to be more huge. It was strongly under my tongue, in my nostrils, before my eyes--

A man coming toward me glanced at me, looked hard, stopped short. "Isn't it Michael Forth?"

"Isn't it Conrad Conrad?"

We turned into Madison Square and sat upon a bench. "Certainly seven years!"

"Nearly that. Do you still walk about with Poe?"

"Poe and others. Do you still hammer at continuity?"

"Perhaps. Or, having got it, I cease hammering."

"I heard that you were in Africa."

"I thought of you as yet in Paris."

"I was so till two years ago. Paris, and all the Elsewhere to which the Paris roads lead!"

"When I last heard from you you had taken to painting. Are you making strange, good demon pictures?"

He made his old grimace with the earnest coming out through the faun mask. "I partly own and edit _The Compass_. Occasionally I write, and in vacation I paint pictures on my own walls."

"What is _The Compass_?"

"It is a radical sheet. It's by way of being very radical."

"Politically?"

"Politics, Economics, Social Arrangements in general. Esthetics also. But chiefly economics. We're subversive there. It's 1890. I give the world ten years. Then I think change will begin to be apparent to the dullest!"

"_The Compass_ assisting?"

"Certainly! Though I don't limit it to _The Compass_."

"Just a few quintillions of other points--"

"Exactly! But do your individual mightiest all the same!"

"Just as though Hercules was not a composite?"

"Again you catch the idea. Don't you want to do an article for the June issue? I think you could do it, Old Continuity!--Continuity of Cosmic Adventure, for instance? Continuity of Pioneering--

"'For we cannot tarry here,
We must march, my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful, sinewy races, all the rest on us depends--'"

"It is Whitman now, not Poe?"

"I carry Poe in Whitman.... I tell you, Michael, after a while, if you're truly an artist, you've got to get your hands on the whole material!"

"Agreed! Just so long as, like Whitman, you guard every particle of the 'I' that's flowing through and through the material."

"In other words, consider the Bigness of the Right?"

"Just."

"Do you remember that riding-trip we took? The Bridge and the Fourth of July oration and the Peaks? Do you remember that debate on the Color of Reality, in the Ultra-Violet Club?"

"Aye. Iridescence, the Various We, for the descending arc--White Light, Sunlight, for the ascending. But you took black, old Conrad, and made a very good case for it!"

"Well, I see the forlorn beauty in the shadow still.... But change comes to one in thunderclaps. I'd like to tell you about it one day. What are you doing? Can't you come with me?"

"I am going to-night to Baltimore. But I have till then."

We spent the remainder of the day together. I went with him to see _The Compass_ and its far downtown and eastward-bearing habitat. I divined--I had divined at Landon--the onward-coming, economic readjustment of our lives. It was necessary, it was to be! How soon I did not know--probably a slow change toward health. But it must be. Here, in the organism, was anemia; here the blood ran so thick that it clotted. I looked at Fifth Avenue in one hand, and at this street in the other.... Walter Dupuy was walking with us.... Back of this change, back of all changes now, was the growing sense of union, essential, organic. That was the change's metaphysic....

Conrad wore his old elvish look. But he was good sprite, and I knew it. He and Walter Dupuy and many others fused, welded together. Now they seemed Hephæstos, smith of the gods, building machines for the gods, better machines each age than the last. The figure took magnitude, took beauty, sublimed, became ethic. It was economic lift now in the widest, utterest sense, nutriment of the body, mind, and spirit. All came together--up stood the Genius filling space between earth and heaven. Where had been earthly sprites, where had been limping Hephæstos.... Prometheus!

Conrad was not the traveler over the earth, as he and we had seen it at the university. I was not to stay at just the engineering all then saw me in. Miriam did not rest at Flowerfield. Gamaliel did not teach at Hilltop Academy. He had passed from apprenticeship to mastership. Only yesterday I had seen his name in a scientific journal. The article had spoken with respect of "Young's discovery." Who did according to the first paper plans? The greater seized the less, the real destiny, the fancied.

Conrad went with me to my train. Crossing the ferry to Jersey City, leaning against the rail, watching the moving lights in the water and above the water, feeling the quickening of the salty wind, smelling night and ocean, he began again to speak of Walt Whitman.

I had a feeling for Shelley, I had a feeling for Whitman, I had a feeling for Blake, and for others--and for others!

I listened to Conrad's good talk, his intellectual rapture. Back of waking, back of the dream rapids, I felt the exquisite high air, the stillness that is world's end to world's end from stagnation!

We came to Jersey City, and, leaving the ferryboat, Conrad and I parted at the gates to the trains. We said good-by, but each meant truly to keep the other. I might never write that article for _The Compass_. But I knew that that change in human affairs with which _The Compass_ concerned itself was coming, and I felt little grief over its coming. Socialism, communism, had no terrors for me. What was truly my "property," truly "proper" to me, could not be taken away. But aggregate "property" should be to the aggregate, to whom it is truly "proper." ... I guessed, indeed, that that word "aggregate" stopped nowhere.

The train moved toward Baltimore. I sat and gazed upon the shadowy, fast-flying landscape, and at last I hardly saw that, but went deeper and deeper within. Human life, the sea of it; far-sounding voice and infinite contact! The mean between difference and likeness.... Wherever, in the deeps of space, Eternal Energy fell upon a certain pace, a certain swing of the arm, there was human life. All that was I, and the experiences and thoughts of it.... But where Eternal Energy used Power with a wider sweep there came quickening. The little I opened its gates. A greater I set crown upon its head and came through, a lord of glory.... All that was I, and the experiences and thoughts of it.

As ever yet, illumination could not hold. It came a flash from above, from the future, perhaps the very-far future, when the clouds should pass from between earth and sun. I was content to conceive it as from the future. If all the past of human life is mine, it is impossible but that all the future of human life is mine, too.

Wings flagged, eyes dimmed, perception lessened. Yet it kept somewhat aloft, skimming, as it were, in mental space. Now it had to do with liking, with contemplating, with unharmful entering into environment and experience of so-called "others." Perhaps it sunned itself only in the emanations, the aura, so to speak, of those "others." Perhaps there was deeper sharing--I and I--through affinity one I. "Love thy neighbor _as thyself_."

First it was Conrad-Michael, here on the train, there in the great city.... Since such and such is so, so, too, must be this and this. It is barns full of data, sublimated sorting and reasoning, so swiftly done that a thousand acts run together into an apparent one. The data was gathered, the sorting was learned, I must think, through many an age. We have gone to school through many an eon.... That problem of distribution that Conrad and many another were set to solve. How cosmic was the problem! I saw earth and the world, and the transfiguration, transvaluation of it all, through the Conrad window. Work, work, to keep the life flowing through the veins. Work, work, to make the place a little, even were it a very little, juster, sweeter!

Again I turned. Now it was Maxwell. Maxwell had to me the dry light, the cleanness and independence of the desert. Naught was there of the humid, naught of the florid. With him great heat was dry and healthful, sparely energetic, rightly parsimonious. How I finally went, or where I finally went, I would not miss out Maxwell. There moved a desert spirit, clean, spare, very strong, tireless, building desert cities, or, nomad, journeying with tents or with no tents. There were in the spirit old echoes of desert lions, golden-maned, ruby-eyed; echoes of Arab sheiks. But the spirit was tall as a palm-tree, and as it desired and thought, it was in every desert of the universe, in desert cities and in all the oases, and afar in the heaped sand.

Conrad and Maxwell and others. Others who to most are dead. They are not dead and they are not away.

Shelley.... I entered into that personality.... Gone was the train and the flying, inland country. There sailed a boat, and around was the Mediterranean, and around and above was air, now dawn, now midday, now evening, colored the higher, rarer colors, sustaining voices that the gross ear might hardly be strained to catch.... Water, air, and fire, and the ache for the lift of the spirit beyond air--for the lift into ether.

I turned a little from that center and I met Blake.

In the fifth act of the second "Faust," in the scene before heaven, Pater Seraphicus speaks to the blessed children, who have had their death and found their life young.

"Half unsealed the sense and brain....
Enter in mine eyes, enjoy them,
Organs for the earthy sphere,
As your own ye may employ them--
Look upon the landscape here!"

_He takes them into himself._

"There are trees, there rocks defend us!
Here's a stream that leaps below,
And with plunges, wild, tremendous,
Shorteneth its journey so."

The orb that was Blake had giant and terrible landscapes indeed--but also, by crystal streamlets the tenderest, freshest, loveliest small flowers!

Goethe. The natural path leading from the "Faust" thought brought me there, too.... The world from the rounded, Goethe nature, from the rounded Plato nature. Love and the union of love, and the sublimation of love, and the sublimation of the union of love.

The train clove the night. There was moonlight, and the shadow of the cars and of the plume above the engine raced with us. We ran into industrial towns and out again. Fire and lamp, gas and electric light, ruby, gold, and silver, pointed and splashed the night, then again was only the broken, weakened light tossed to us from the moon. I thought of the prisons of the earth, the hovels and streets of disaster. Assuredly they, too, were mine. Mine the criminal and the sick and the mad, the impoverished, the adversity-trodden and the strong swimmer in his agony. Mine were the seer, the thinker, and the artist, and mine the wretched and the brutal. I had the shining roads, the approaches to heaven, and I had the brute castles of mistake, and the thieves' dens and the streets of the prostitute. Mine, too, was all the so-so country, the half-lighted, and mine, too, the simple, fair stretches, quiet vales, low hills. Mine the Himalaya peak, and mine the pit, and mine the long line between....

On rushed the train.

There came a picture of the vibratory ether. The swift thunders and lightning ate up, quickened, the less swift. Ever the swiftness above swiftness acted as an enzyme, an energizer. The dim and dull, slow moving, cold, heavily lumbering, was not left behind--was not long left behind--in limbo. The stagnant, the running the other way, were overtaken. Fearful hell was for them only till they quickened. Through measureless heights and depths I saw continuing transformation. I saw the relativity of things; the hells and pits were relative; they lifted; they were now only what yesterdays had held to be not unlovely meadows, dells, and hollows. But the fairer things were now dazzling. I felt an illimitable and general movement toward light that was as darkness, and voices or a voice that was as silence, because as yet there was no organ that could distinguish things there.

One approached that sun not as fragments of a fragment. There must be some wholeness ere one traveled far.

I hold, with Berkeley, that the world is truly in the mind. Therefore, self-quickening is world-quickening. What thrill comes is felt through that which we call God, from the transcendent I to the poorest, meanest, weakest I. The one increases its light; the other, relatively yet the opposing pole, is positively less midnight dark. At last the darkness comes to the place of what to-day we should call light.

I saw that earth was to become sun.