Chapter XXX

Miriam and I walked under fair old trees in Druid Hill Park. I told her of New York, and the publisher, and the apparent prospect for _Letters from Africa_. We rejoiced. All in all, we were glad to think that earning and writing might with me go together. We did not delude ourselves with dreams of any great sum. But what I earned and what she earned might give us fair living. We talked of dwelling in Baltimore, a pleasant city and a rational one for slender purses. She also had news. Her hospital would give her this summer, welcoming her return in the autumn.

We set three days from this fair day for our marriage. It was spring. She knew a little, quiet, old-timey neighborhood by the sea. She had been there three or four times, staying always at Miss Sally Paradise's house. "We'll go there."

Gamaliel had not been in Baltimore since my coming. Some meeting of scientific men had carried him so far north as Boston. But he would be back, they told me this morning at the house where he lived, within the week. Miriam and I agreed that he should come to us for three or four days at Miss Sally Paradise's.

Druid Hill Park shone and sang.

A day and another day and another. Then, on a shining, singing, dancing day of lovely spring Miriam and I married.

We took a boat, we came in a coral, bright evening to a Chesapeake Bay wharf, to a few old houses, and back among blossoming peach, cherry, pear, and damson trees, to Miss Sally Paradise's. That was an old house of brick, with echoing, cool, highceilinged rooms. The wind murmured in them till it was like a sea-shell held up to catch voices from an infinite sequence of shores.... We were happy at Miss Sally Paradise's.

We had a sailboat and an ancient mariner sailed it for us. The garden beneath our windows had an ancient cultivator. We knew about gardens, and we helped him administer, order, raise the powers of earth. A fair country road ran back from the sea. We followed it, and came to lanes and paths and followed them. Now and again where was none we made a path. At night we wandered under stars. We loved grandmother moon, silver, wrinkled. We loved Mother Earth, colored, genial. We loved the world to come. We loved each other. We loved the infinite, the eternal, the uncaused in each other. Our hearts stood as one; our minds as one. We entered together a rich reality. We saw how every ring melted into a larger, and how there was no ending nor beginning, and how we had to grasp both the unity and the difference.

We talked, we were silent; we wandered in thought at will, and came back with our sheaves to one another and a golden, common barn. Once we were sailing--slowly, dreamlike, for the wind just pushed us. There was a great, sinking sun, and a light upon water. The east hung ineffably blue, serene, still, holding knowledge of the sun's travel and a rising day out of ancient sea. Miriam and I sat still. We had with us a book of poetry and it lay open beside us.

"The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return....

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star;
Where fairer Tempes loom, there sleep
Young Cyclades on a sunnier deep.

A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sighs again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies;
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.

... Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew..."

Earth and sea and sky transfigured to us both. All the tragedy, all the joy and mirth, all the romance, questing, seeking, searching out, finding, recovering, all the lustrous truth that the strength of her and of me could hold, brimmed and sounded and shone. It tasted and it touched. A great voice was singing. We fell into rhythm--oh! into a mighty rhythm!--the boat and the sea and the earth and the sky into rhythm. It was the sun singing, the mighty sun that was sun to its outermost drop of light--and that knew it was sun and had reconciled separation.

We had been ten days at Miss Sally Paradise's when Gamaliel came to us from Baltimore. We met him at the wharf and took him with us to the pleasant house, to his big, bare room drenched with sunlight and the salt of the sea.

Gamaliel moved or stood, spare and dark, with dark, deep-set eyes. He had unfolded strongly. He had put behind him the childishness of bitterness. He talked of Hilltop Academy and of his father, quietly, naturally, gold of understanding gleaming in the river-bed. I could remember when his laughter had been scornful. Sometimes still it was pained laughter. But into it was stealing patience, humor, with a kind of admiration for the turn and twist of things. He did not vituperate Hilltop Academy nor the principal of it, nor Whitechurch (saving out always Mr. Gilbert), though he parted from them--parted from them only eventually to take them up into himself and there alter and fulfil, not destroy. He said once to me: "After all, it's one stuff only, though, Heaven above! how it meanders!... Ancient choices.... Well, dive underneath, and see what we can do.... Come out, perhaps, at some other side!"

As we sailed, as we walked, we talked of his work. "There lacks some idea--some fourth side--to most that we do. Now and then we get wind of him--almost see him.... Then comes up the damned fog! ... But it's dogged does it!"

We talked of the world of the closing nineteenth century, and of that express train, the future, rushing toward it. "There's one thing the world's got to give up, and that is that there is any hard and fast line between anything and anything! I don't believe in impenetrability--and our miles and moments are of the doubtfulest validity ever! The atom?--I don't believe it is the last word! Electrical?--What is electrical? Is there a law of gravitation? Then, at a certain power, comes one of levitation, too.... Our old perception level is changing. Our consciousness is changing. Truth! she has a new face each morning--and I mean nothing cynical nor despairing by that!"

We sailed, the three of us, under a high, blue sky. We roved the green country, we sat at eve upon the pillared porch. Miriam had a good, contralto voice, pure, expressive, sweet, with a kind of wilderness and gipsy ring. We found in the house a guitar. She sang the old-time cherished songs, songs of the negroes in the field, ballads, hymns of the traveler soul. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we sat in deep silence, having darted, each of us, afar. We darted each afar, and the middle sea of harmony continually widened, richened.

What had been hard or resistive in Gamaliel, the quality of the father, what had been bitter, what had been envious, was turning. What had been felt from the first, what was also in the father--fiber, grit, indomitableness--was there more strongly. With these was now uncovered a partly grim, partly humorous, partly compassionate approach to an understanding of the inadequacies, discomforts, dangers, even, of the inns of the road--of the heartaches, the beaten brains. He was riding to break the ring, riding to fetch sunlight for the old cracks and crevices. He was determined toward that, determined as Conrad, as others that I knew, many others, as Miriam and me.

In our school-days we had greatly liked each other's company. This in no wise changed. There was always with Gamaliel and me an intuitive, inner handclasp. Now Miriam and he liked also. Through great countries we kept step, we three. And with a strange, rich fitness, there seemed to walk with us, out of all others, Madam Black--Madam Black and my mother and, I think, Maxwell.

He returned after five days to Baltimore, but Miriam and I stayed another week. We walked by the shore, we loved, we lived, we knew! From plane to plane we felt the fire shoot. We traveled from affinity to affinity; we held them together in the beautiful spectrum, we ran into the color of light, we broke on the other side into new iridescence. We wished, we willed forever to cast the magic net in the upper seas, to radiate, to gather our own, to give bloom, sonorousness, giving beauty, recovering beauty ... growing wise, lit with wisdom. Wisdom was our word of aspiration. Wisdom was love and knowledge made one, and power was the child. We wished and willed to keep the great commandment, and the second that was like unto it--ever better to keep....

In mid-May we went to Flowerfield. Uncle John and Aunt Kate welcomed us, forgiving the marriage away from the old place and way. John and Amy Page, living now at Flowerfield, welcomed us, and Catherine and Lewis, and all the colored folk, and the animals who remembered. The neighborhood came to see us, and we returned its visits. There spread around the loveliness of full spring.

After a month at Flowerfield John and Amy, Miriam and I, went to Restwell. As we came in sight of the river Ahasuerus was in my mind. The spirit in me touched him somewhere, strong and growing, companying with Daddy Guinea.... Mammy, too, had died.

Aunt Sarah, at Restwell, was both changed and not changed. More of inner light had come through, more warmth and strength. Aunt Harriet and General Warringer stood and moved, hospitable, gracious, really fond of us. There was talking and laughing; many persons went in and out of the house. Aunt Harriet and I walked once or twice together. One day for a while she had been quiet, thoughtful. Suddenly she said: "I used to think Miriam was an ugly duckling--but she's not! She's beautiful. Some day, when there's time, Michael, I'd like, too, to grow like that--"

General Warringer talked much of politics and industrial growth, and the country's future. "Of course all these 'booms'--a 'boom' wherever you can shake a stick--won't last! But they're bands at the head of the procession. We're going to have wealth and power! That is, the people who are wise enough to get in the wagon are going to have wealth and power!"

"And the others?"

"Well, I tell you, Michael--like the lazy everywhere, they'll have to take the leavings! That's a law of nature."

Carter, who had married Mary Grimes, was with his wife at the White Sulphur. But Royal came to Restwell from New York for a week.

He was still so paintable--more paintable than ever! He was large, he looked neither old nor young; if, on the one side, he could have been used for Mammon or a Roman emperor, on another side he stood for patient, massive adaptation, eagle eyes and wings. He looked here like an eleventh-century alchemist, like a Chaldean, Egyptian watcher of the stars. Perhaps he watched them to use them for black magic--perhaps he did not know what he did, but was compounded out of black and white, and acted with a dreamy strength, fatal, automatic.

I watched him. He had a dragon power to draw me. I could not understand him and not be him. Miriam watched me watch him. Once she turned to me in that inner movement and speech which we used. "Take care! He's us, his ill and his good! Don't let him draw too hard. Give toward him, as you take from him!"

Dorothea.... Miriam knew here, too.... Dorothea, Miriam, Royal, and I! If we lived with Vera Black, with Mannheim, with Maxwell, Conrad, Gamaliel--if we lived with others--we lived with Dorothea and Royal, too. "Do I understand Dorothea? Are we not sisters and more than sisters? Here and here and here I meet her," said Miriam, "and she meets me. The waters flowing together must acknowledge their own waves. I am her sea as she is mine."

We knew that, and we knew that all that is in us--all that is us--must lift and lift ... that is, that everywhere the one mass must lift ... as it is lifting!

We went to Whitechurch; we embraced in the gold of the summer all there. We went to see the Millwoods, the Millwoods came to see us.

Mr. Millwood sat with me one evening on the porch. The others were walking to and fro in the bright dusk and perfume, with Vesper shining above the hills. He said, after a pause, "Have you found Christ, Michael?"

I thought how best to answer him. At last I said: "Have I come to Risen Man? I draw there, I hope and I believe, at least a first, fluttering breath. Risen Man hasn't drunk up yet all the night dews. But Christ in me--me-Christ--lights up all the horizon. The sun out of the sea.... The manger-babe, weak yet in its swaddling clothes, laid where the grain and the dried grass have been, where animals have fed, where human forms bend and move about it ... and the star that is its forehead above the roof.... They are all great symbols! Man that is beyond men--Man that is the container of men.... I believe that Christ which is Enlightenment is born in me."

"Ha!" said Mr. Millwood, and moved impatiently. "In the plain prose of the Bible, do you believe that Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified by the Jews and Pontius Pilate is your Lord and Saviour?"

"One reads the Bible in one way, one in another--"

Mr. Millwood struck the porch floor with his large foot. "There you go--just like your grandfather!" He spoke with a kind of peevishness. "I knew that you were still wandering when I heard that you had not been married in a church!"

But I liked him, and I knew that he did duties that belonged to the way of the Risen Man. In a moment he was more genuinely an old, kind heart. Aunt Harriet approached, and residence and profession and details of Miriam's and my household life to be came to the fore in their old warm cloak.

I saw Doctor Young on his hilltop, in his chill, northerly-bearing study, where fire flickering on the hearth above ashes caught at this unburned fragment and at that. I longed somehow to heap the fire and warm the place. He was solitary, and he gathered his solitariness about him and dwelt with it, forlornly proud. I so strongly saw Gamaliel in him, him in Gamaliel--and yet Gamaliel gone forth, gone on ... and yet Anchises on the younger man's shoulders. Sinbad--the old man of the sea; Anchises-Æneas--desperately, hopefully, one! ... What war in the members of one being was here--and yet somewhere what agreement!

We visited Mr. Gilbert in his most cool, most quiet place of business, with the shadow of broad leaves almost covering the pavement, with the tinkling bell, and the deep compounded aroma of many a land.

The days ran by, swift, effective, graceful, strong. Days at Flowerfield--at Restwell--again at Flowerfield. Autumn came. When the color of October was over the land Miriam and I went home to Baltimore.

We found a small house in a street just by Miriam's hospital. We furnished it simply and barely, but with what, according to our notions, had worth and beauty. Friends helped. There came to us from Flowerfield Dacia, who was as good a cook and marketer and cleaner as might be found--all that and a few things besides. We entered into a fragrant home life--home and fragrant, for all that both man and woman made contacts and worked in what is called the outside world.

In October was published _Letters from Africa_. It was fortunate in its appeal to a few men whose names counted. It grew to a certain success. This winter I wrote the _African Dream_, and it was published the following autumn.

I was at work upon _The Branch of Coral_, and we had lived with Dacia almost two years in the small house by the hospital, when there came an offer to Miriam from New York. There was a chance to reconstruct, to build fairer a great organ of usefulness. She had in Baltimore the trained comrade who might take over her work. She accepted the widening field, and we went from Baltimore to the huger city. It had drawn Gamaliel the year before, to a chair in a great school. When we went we were thirty-two, Miriam and I, for I was born in March and she in October of the same year.