Chapter XXXI

Seven years passed over us. It was nine years since Miriam and I had made our home together. Many things were done in the world. Many rudiments pushed upward, many vestiges tended decisively toward the Button Molder's caldron--not, in the long, long run, a hopeless place. Other vestiges received a temporary strengthening, other rudiments a temporary weighting down, dungeoning. But on the whole and for the whole, assuredly, naturally, completer life gained.

The Spanish War blew up, thundered through a spring and summer, and sank into silence, where its consequences worked on. The nineteenth century passed into the twentieth century. McKinley lived in the White House. Colonel Roosevelt was making his legend with might and main. One evening I had gone to see, at his hotel, an Italian painter who had brought me a letter from Ferraro. I found him with a group of others, viewing from a gallery the annual dinner of an important society. There had arrived the moment of speeches. A general and an admiral spoke, a senator spoke, and I remember not whom besides. But the last speaker, a better speaker than most who had gone before, was a teacher, a man named Woodrow Wilson.

In these days many were sensible of a change in all the atmospheres. Throughout America, presumably throughout the world, a subtle alteration; a physical, moral, psychical, mental, spiritual change might be perceived by all who were attuned to note it. The century came in with a sense of liquid dawn. Many did not feel it, too closely held in Egypt. But to many there seemed in the air the virginal freshness of a promised land.

The earth turned, full of promise. Regarding the conflicting forces, the reluctant mother, the pangs of birth, the ancient strong titans, the young gods, there might have been foreseen, perhaps dimly was foreseen, war yet in many shapes, huge war. But there lived a feeling that those who warred were coming over, that the center of gravity was changed and would draw all men. Conrad said it was the Rousseau period before the Revolutionary crash. I in some sort agreed with him. Change of character doubtless was apt to exhibit halcyon premonitory light, followed by downcrash, pangs of dissolution, tragic bewilderment! Then might rise the great apparition, the new order clear of the fallen old, for a long time wreathed yet with torn cloud and mist of the old. The character ever changed, building up and building up, so that the god of to-day was to-morrow's titan, and to-morrow yet a younger, diviner Olympian! ... I saw, then, revolution approaching. But my revolution--and Conrad's revolution, too--had not to do with blind and deaf and powerless war....

The twentieth century rose, then, with a sense of dawn.

Miriam and I lived in an unfashionable quarter, in a rather ancient, rather large, rather good house there. Gamaliel lived with us, and Wythe the engraver, and Mrs. Lobb the old actress. And there were Dugald and Kate, the two children whom Miriam and I had taken from an orphanage and made our own. Besides Dacia we had Martin and Mary to take household care of us, and Norah for the children. Each winter Catherine came for a month, and there were other visitors. Usually there was a guest in the house. Conrad and his wife Geralda lived in the next street.

Miriam's was become a known name through much of the United States. Hers was the administrator's genius. She could patiently disentangle the confused strands, firmly hold the skein, wind off with light, exquisite touch the ball for use, and see that it was truly used. Mrs. Sayre, at Landon, came into mind. She had had the same faculty, though not yet lifted and widened as was Miriam's. Miriam worked for the people through institutions and through movements. She worked with heart and head. Her pen wrote, her voice spoke. Her papers, scattered here and there through journals of sociology and where not, may one day be gathered together. She was an able and a winning speaker. Everywhere she used the moment as best she could, and everywhere she regarded and drew breath in the future. So she worked and so she earned, and above all the objective activity, raying down into the objective, went on an intense and wide upward living and earning. In our house she was frank and kind and true and wise, with her gipsy tang as of some wild, most good, most aromatic herb. Dugald and Kate loved her dearly, as she loved them. Out of the house, or of houses like it, she often met, as I often met, a dire opposition. We knew that it was dire because it was our opposition, through deep time and wide place made by ourselves. We met it, let it roar over and around us, converted, each time, what we could of the tempest.... We had made it and we must alter it.

My own work whereby I earned lay now in the written drama. Occasionally, and of late years with increasing frequency, a piece of it reached the theater, where it had a longer or shorter playing. Displeased critics called it "impracticable metaphysic, barely playable." Pleased critics--they were by no means so many--said that to-day's metaphysic becomes to-morrow's physics, and that it was increasingly playable. There was enough audience to justify the staging, and the published volumes found their readers. These were the years when I wrote _Out and Away--The Two Inns--Color and Another Color--Who Cried?--The Blessed House--Mr. X_.

I worked hard. I knew many people and many lines of life. I had all manner of contacts and insights.

We went in summer to Flowerfield. To Dugald and Kate that was Paradise.... The circle at Flowerfield stayed unbroken. Each year Aunt Sarah came there from Restwell for a month. Her body was growing old, but she herself, Miriam and I thought, had new freshness, serenity, and bloom. She told me that she had found her lover. "But not in the old 'here,' Michael--and there is much more of him than I had guessed. More of him and more of me. 'Being together' is life and the background of life."

Each summer Miriam and I spent a fortnight at Restwell. Occasionally, but not often, Royal was there. He was now a rich man, creator of a huge monopoly, at home in many boards. He had married wealth. He and his wife had a great house upon Fifth Avenue. There were children. He gave largely, he collected paintings. His especial liking was for illuminated missals. His own living was spare, healthfully abstemious. As ever, he was a subject for a great artist. His eyes looked out of dream capitals, from dream thrones--

Dorothea had not married. She traveled now; she went here and there over the earth. But now and then we found her at Restwell. She looked at me with her enigmatical face. It seemed to say, "I like you and I like you not." And I, too, could have said in my turn, "I like you and I like you not." But Miriam went steadily out to Dorothea. I have seen the two dim forms at twilight, moving in the orchard or seated under the great oak.

There rest deeps and deeps, inmosts and inmosts, yet to find.

Miriam and I worked hard and constantly. Much was to be done in the plain, apparent, known dimensions. We, too, with all our kind, were householders. We, too, recapitulated, drew out the essences, learned to manage a little better and a little better yet, daily living. We were not immoderates; we had a loving-kindness for daily living. When the fleeting is known to be fleeting it can be well enjoyed!

As best we knew how we did what our hand found to do. We were not out of the plane of physical needs, neither we nor ours. We worked as others worked, for food and shelter. If we bent ourselves to put wisdom in this very getting--if we saw, now less clearly, now more clearly, other food and shelter--yet must we work where we were with so great part of our consciousness! Even in the summer when we went to Flowerfield we worked still, studying, planning, writing. We found that to do one thing was to do many things.

In these years something in us of upper lands measurably rested from further beckoning, further climbing.

Yet there was inner action, and that of an intensity.... Levels and levels below must somehow be worked out, and their life come up to reinforce before the journeyer might move on. Strength had to go and did go to disintegrating ancient bars and reefs.... That principle of sensibility which I felt in myself, that permeativeness, pervasion of time and space, touch afar and near, worked for a long time obscurely, in darkened chambers. Herakles, I knew, had his own Hades to visit, his own stable to clean, and both were vast enough to make for a weary, long job! At times Herakles inclined to think there was naught besides Hades, naught besides stable, naught besides hydra, bear, lion. Even, once and again, Herakles trembled toward contentment with, identification with, rest with, the monsters and the dismal places and the squalor.

He trembled toward it, then he stood still and took thought, then, dimly, dimly, he saw again the star above the murk and turned and took up his task.

Outer life and its thousand cries I knew and must respond to. But the inner life saw the fight, the crusade, the quest, intense, intense.... What I say of Michael applies also to Miriam.

There came sense of another turning, breaths of dawn.

The twentieth century was born. We felt a trembling, trembling together of mankind. We said, "She begins to be conscious--Humanity!" Many were saying it, many scattered through the earth.

Miriam and I stood at thirty-eight. Dugald and Kate were our children. They were nine-year-olds, a happy pair with health and good minds. Miriam and I had friends. We had what the world calls name and place. We were not rich, but we were not at all grindingly poor.... The spirit went on. The spirit cried to itself, "Awake--awake!"

I had finished the play, "Catch and Catch Again." Y., the actor, had it--a subtle, good actor. He and the play made an entry into public liking. One of the consequences of this was the arrival of some means wherewith to travel.

Miriam, too, had made end of a train of work and there was breathing-space before another tangled skein should lie in her hands. She and I took holiday. We left the children and Norah at Flowerfield and for two months went wandering over the Western slopes of this country.

At last, one day, we stood upon the Pacific shore. We gazed in silence, the wind murmuring about us, stirring the sere grass above the sand. We went afar in thought and touch, through and over the waves. A power that had somewhat drowsed away awoke in us quick and strong. "I go forth like a blue cloud!" said Miriam. I nodded. It seemed to us that we were that ocean and all within it, and the ships that sailed it, and the islands that rose from it, and their peoples, and the farther shores, and all the Penelope web of interrelations, woven, unwoven, woven anew! "_Seems! ... I know not 'seems.'_"

Dimly we felt the Malay moving, faintly we made sail with seamen brown and yellow and white. Miriam sank upon the sand. We rested against a dune. The sea wind went over us, in the long grass.... In her first, then in me, in us both, arose the barn at Flowerfield. It is raining; we are children telling stories in our burrow in the hay. John cuts his round checkers out of his piece of cedar. The barn-swallows flit by. We are telling stories there, and we sit here by the Pacific Ocean. Coil within coil, the Fisherman and the Genie rise about us, in an Araby that likewise has room. The Fisherman having the clue to wealth goes fishing and takes four fish--white, red, blue, and yellow.

Miriam spoke and her voice was made out of all the voices of the sea. She swayed with a movement like the movement of the sea.

"_Mussulman, Parsee, Christian, Jew--_"

Her voice sank. The barn and the children there drew back.... The Pacific sea, the ships and the islands, Japan, China, India--

"They are all in our limbs," she said. "I feel them! The film goes over the universe."

A month from this day we were in the mesa land of Arizona. A friend of Miriam's lived here upon a small ranch with a brother who must have the dry sunshine. We stayed a week with them. It was a lonely, silver-gray spot, depending for beauty upon space and light. Hardly anywhere else have I seen such a canopy of stars at night. The earth tasted, smelled, very lonely, wild, to itself. If one liked it not he hurried or tried to hurry away; if one liked it he might like it mightily. There was room for thinking, and the inner life might come out upon the door-step. The sister and brother, Miriam and I, rode, and in the evenings talked beside a crackling fire. And in the mornings, when the other two were busy, Miriam and I wandered upon the mesa.

Here one day we sat, without speaking, in the deep light. At last she broke the silence. "I feel that something that has been still a long time is moving on again! It was still to serve purposes, and it moves on to serve purposes."

"I understand," I answered. "I feel that."

"We have worked hard. Doubtless we shall keep on working. But some land is drawing stronger and stronger! Work there isn't just like work here."

"No."

We walked again, then rested again. The earth lay wide and clear, lifted, still, and sunny. I spoke: "You and I have all along been developing powers. Now and again we have vibrated more swiftly, or we have entered greater vortexes, or we have felt a zephyr torch from super-consciousness, or we have known, as in a mist, the touch of godhood. The terminology doesn't so much matter! Biologically speaking, a new center of consciousness, another sense, is in process of development. When we have it fully many things will be self-explained. When it is developed in a sufficient number of the species, there will be a new heaven and a new earth. As Mr. X would say, 'It is very simple.' ... Perhaps it is, but the effect is still a very wonder!"

"A marvel, a beauty, an awful, glorious sea."

"Each time, in all our life, that we have left the accustomed plane to go higher rests in memory, grapes from Eshcol! There is a humbling sense that those times have been few. All the same, they have made a standard of comparison. There is a longing for reunion, homesickness for Trueself.... More realness--more realness--on the way to Reality!"

"So!" she said. "Well, I feel that we start up from the camp-fire and move on!"

But our days in Arizona, breathing, alert, silver-gold as they were--and our journey across the continent, filled, as it was, with mind-zest--and our homecoming that glowed and crooned as it always did--and the uptaking of familiar work, hardly carried the acute and actual perception of a campfire left and a frontier crossed. And yet I, with Miriam, felt a premonition, felt hands upon the tent-pegs!