Michael Forth
Date: 2026-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Michael Forth

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Title: Michael Forth

Author: Mary Johnston

Release date: August 21, 2026 [eBook #79418]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1919

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79418

Credits: Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MICHAEL FORTH ***

MICHAEL
FORTH

by

MARY JOHNSTON

AUTHOR OF
"TO HAVE AND TO HOLD" "AUDREY" "LEWIS RAND"
"SIR MORTIMER" "FOES"

Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London

BOOKS BY
MARY JOHNSTON

MICHAEL FORTH
FOES
SIR MORTIMER

HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
[Established 1817]

Michael Forth

Copyright, 1919 by Mary Johnston
Printed in the United States of America

MICHAEL FORTH

CHAPTER I

I was born at Restwell, two miles from the small town of Whitechurch, in the county of —— in Virginia. The night of my birth, by going to the top of Lone Tree Hill behind Restwell, one might see the smoke and flare of a dying battle and hear in diminuendo the guns of North and South. I know this because Daddy Guinea went up there and heard and saw and told me about it when I was six years old and sitting with him in his cabin over the fire.

"'Fo' de Lawd, dat's so!" said Daddy Guinea. "De tree shivered an' Guinea shivered. De sky low down wuz on fire lak you burnin' breshwood, an' de guns holler hoarser 'n bullfrogs! Dey soun' jes' lak de folks in hell buttin' dey haids togedder. 'N' yo' father was dere an' yo' grandfather an' yo' uncle Gilchrist an' mo' ob yo' cousins dan you could shake er stick at! An' er passel ob other folk. An' de folk on de other side—de Yanks. An' de light flicker lak breshwood burnin', an' de guns holler lak bullfrogs in hell, whar dere ain't no water! An' de tree shiver an' Guinea shiver."

"Did I shiver, Daddy Guinea?"

"I don' know 'bout de shiverin', but I sho know dat you hollered! I come down from Lone Tree Hill, an' de big house wuz lighted up, an' I heard you hollerin' befo' I got to de kitchen door."

"What was I crying about?"

Daddy Guinea scraped the sweet-potatoes that we were roasting out of the ashes. "Dat's er question with er powerful lot ob joints! Dar now! De ashes off de little, long 'tater, jes' lak you laks hit!"

My father, my grandfather, and Uncle Gilchrist came safely from the battle visible from Lone Tree Hill. But three months later in a skirmish a hundred miles from Restwell my father was killed. So I do not remember him. A daguerreotype and a photograph—carte de visite—show a strong, irregular face. He was twenty-six when he died, and I was his only child. I was born and he was killed in the second year of the war. I was three years old when came the Surrender. At present my native region found itself midseas in that long and trying episode called Reconstruction. South of Mason and Dixon at this moment in history it was called Domination. War, Surrender, Reconstruction, or Domination—they were but words to a six-year-old, yet words with something mystic, awful, wrapped around them. He could not but feel that, watching the faces of the grown-ups who spoke them.

Daddy Guinea was old and bent and charcoal black and seamed. He had been born at Restwell, but his father and mother were born in Africa. He was one of the handful of men and women, slaves once but now free, who stayed on at Restwell after the war. He was free, but made no great fuss over it, took his wage in kind and in the very few dollars my grandfather could give him, and once told me, "I wuz all de time free in er place inside!"

Now, sitting in the cabin that was dark save for the hearth-fire, waiting for the sweet-potato, watching Daddy Guinea's manipulations, all of a sudden he linked and brought together for me the feel of all the negro folk that I knew intimately or had casually viewed. He was like them and not like them, as all the others were like one another and yet had their differences, so that I never mistook Uncle Plutus for Mandy's Jim, nor Mandy for Aunt Esther, nor Mammy for either of these, nor one of the children with whom I played for another. Daddy Guinea, now bending, now rising, from the fire, was certainly Daddy Guinea. Yet, like the giant shadow upon the wall and ceiling, there was something around that was holding Daddy Guinea and Uncle Plutus, Mandy's Jim and Mandy and Aunt Esther and all the others. I don't suppose in the least that sitting there, a small boy roasting sweet-potatoes, I consciously entertained an idea of race or accomplished a considerable synthesis. Yet I did, with a sudden sense of wideness, of novelty, open into a perception, not of Daddy Guinea or Mammy or Uncle Plutus or Esther, but of colored people. I was due to meet often in life, am due still to meet often, that sense of generalization. It came then, as it comes now, with the breath of space, with a dawnlike, happy surprise.

I sat staring into the embers. "Don' you lak yo' sweet-potato?" asked Daddy Guinea. "Eat hit!"

When it was eaten he took me home to the big house. Outside the cabin was darkness and stars, the sound of the river and wind in the oaks. Also a whippoorwill was crying: "Whip-poor-will! Whip-poor-will!" I pressed close to Daddy Guinea.

Mammy waited for me in the kitchen door. "Never wuz such a chile for gallivantin' off to cabins! Come in an' say yo' prayers an' 'celerate yo'self into bed!"

I always said my prayers kneeling beside my mother. Now I said them and climbed into my bed and she kissed me good night. She went out of the room, and Mammy, who had a bed in the corner, sat at a table by the lamp and hemmed a great white neckerchief. It was a warm night. Moths came in at the windows and flew around the light. Mammy's shadow moved on the wall. Her head nodded, up and down went her arm. I lay upon my side and watched the shadow. The room was large and square and the whippoorwill's voice, no less than the moths, came in at the window. I grew lonely, and to brighten matters sat up and demanded a drink of water. Mammy brought it to me in my silver mug and told me to go to sleep. I held her by her ample apron.

"Daddy Guinea saw them fighting from Lone Tree Hill. Did you see them, Mammy?"

Mammy looked down at me, and with a large, brown hand pushed the hair from my forehead. "You go to sleep, honey! Yo' haid's as damp as a dish-rag! It's a hot night. You go to sleep!"

"Did you see them?"

"No! Where'd I fin' time to go up to Lone Tree Hill? First I wuz wukkin' with yo' mother, an' den I wuz holdin' you in dese two hands. Now you lay right down an' go to sleep!"

I obeyed her, but in the nighttime I woke, terribly afraid. At my loud crying my mother came in.

"Dar now!" said Mammy. "First you waked yo'self, an' den you waked Mammy, an' den you waked yo' mother!"

I clung to my mother. "Daddy Guinea said the sky was like brushwood and the guns were like bullfrogs in hell, where there isn't any water!"

My mother sat down beside me on the bed. "There, Michael—there, Michael!"

"And I wouldn't ever tell! I was down at the big gate and a colored man came by and he came over and made a face at me. And he said, 'You were beaten poor—and I hope you'll be beaten poorer!' And he pulled my hair and he said, 'I couldn't useter do that!' And he said: 'Don't you dare go tell! If you do I'll come at night and make mincemeat of you!'" I burst into a loud cry. "I've told—I've told!"

"Michael! Michael!"

"Will he make mincemeat of me?"

"No! He can't. He was a poor fool!"

Mammy's voice came from the other side of the room. "Dat's jest what he wuz! Some no-'count, po' colored trash!"

I lay for a moment, quieted, in the bend of my mother's arm. But then came new perturbations, salt tears. "What did we do to the colored people? What did they do to us?"

"My Lawd!" exclaimed Mammy. "Listen to dat chile!"

My mother moved upon the bed. "Mammy, I'll stay with him until he goes to sleep. Suppose you go lie down upon the little bed in my room."

"Ef you wants to talk to him, Miss Cary, I ain't gwine listen!"

"What should I care if you did! But, Mammy, you go get your sleep—"

Mammy, sheets and pillow in her arms, went into the next room. My mother retook her place beside me. "Michael, I think sometimes that you are as old as I, or that I am as young as you! Now let's talk to each other and get rid of being afraid!"

She had on a muslin wrapper tied with a blue ribbon. I remembered it always, I thought. In the years since I could notice she had had few new clothes. Now I wiped away my tears with her flowing sleeve.

"What did we do to the colored people?"

After a moment she answered. "There isn't anybody here but just ourselves. I am going to tell you how I see things. You've got a mind under that tousled hair. Let us straighten out things together! ... Our great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers and great-great-great-grandfathers robbed the colored people out of Africa. They didn't ask to come out of Africa. The white folk, North and South, and English, and everybody else, just stole them or bought them from other robbers that were black. The white folk wanted to make wealth with them or out of them. They brought them over the sea in ships called slave-ships. The white men who took them were slavers. The white folk who bought them were slave-holders. The words, slave, slaver, slaveholder were written over everything. For all the words of goodness that were written, these words were written, too!"

"Written where, mother? Written over where we live?"

"Yes! Written over where we live. But it isn't to be forgotten," said my mother, with a kind of passionateness, "that on a time—and no such far time, either—they were written over everywhere else on earth! They are written over some places still. It's a matter of progression in time and place, and over varying obstacles, and they wouldn't always have been written over us!"

I hardly think that she was speaking directly to me now, though we did talk all manner of things over together, she and I. She was genial, with vision and reach and an independence of speech that brought her into disfavor with many. Now she sat upon the bed in the white wrapper and blue ribbon and seemed to brood upon the darkness outside the window. The lamp had been lighted again and the moths flew around it. There came, too, the odor of the lilies in the garden. The whippoorwill had stopped calling, but there mounted and entered a whole tide of little cricket sounds.

"Was the war about the colored people?"

My mother turned her face to me. "As I see it, it was partly about that and partly about another thing, called Theory of Government, and partly, I reckon, about other things.... Oh, Michael, it was a dreadful war!"

She bent herself and clung to me, and I cried again because she was crying. But she did not cry a long time. She shook her tears away and made a face at me and laughed so that I might laugh. "It's over! We're all in the Union again, or will be one day when those we fought think we're punished enough! And the slaves are free!"

"Are you sorry, mother?"

"No!"

"And they're not sorry?"

"The slaves? No!"

"Well—"

"Well—isn't it—we should be happier than we were? And some day we shall be—some day we shall be, Michael!"

"The war killed father and made us poor."

"Yes, yes! It killed father and made us poor. So many fathers and so much poverty! And pain and humiliation.... Everybody concerned, through long ages, might have been wiser, I think! Our great-grandfathers everywhere, our fathers, ourselves, and all. North and South and over all the world. Pain and wreck and darkness.... But if nights are long, days are long, too, Michael! And there is a place—I believe it!—where there is no night. And we are going to travel out of the night, Michael, Michael! You and I and father and all of us—"

"And the colored people—"

"Yes, yes—and the colored people!"

"Mammy wouldn't hurt us. Nor Daddy Guinea, nor Uncle Plutus, nor Mandy's Jim, nor Mandy, nor Aunt Esther—"

"No, no! They're good people. Almost all the colored people I've ever seen were good people."

"But the man at the gate—"

"He was giving back the harm of the past. But maybe at the bottom he wasn't wicked. Don't be frightened at him, Michael, and don't be angry at him. All your life try to understand and to like all colors of people."

She rose from beside me and walked up and down in the room, and then, going to a window, stood there looking out. The warm wind lifted her hair. When she came back to me her voice was gay and rich and kind, as I liked it—as I like it now, down all the years, around me and with me in the midst of the years! "Now I am going to sing 'Happy Land!' And you are going to shut your eyes and go to sleep."

She sang and I went to sleep. And in the morning, when I waked, the sun was shining and Mammy was making her bed, and I remembered that I was going for blackberries with Ahasuerus, Aunt Esther's twelve-year-old. I seem somewhere to have heard that, had the old régime continued, Ahasuerus would have been given to me for body-servant. But it had not continued, and Ahasuerus was my equal before the law. It did not trouble me then, nor has it troubled me since.

CHAPTER II

Colonel Dugald Forth, my grandfather, fought very bravely through the war, from first Manassas to Appomattox. He saw two sons and a brother slain, and many kinsmen and many friends. He was five times wounded, and the last hurt, at Cold Harbor, made him limp through life. He had put all the money he could raise into Confederate bonds. "The government must be supported, sir!" He had seen his government go down into the Swire Deep of lost governments. The bonds were worthless. When he came home, after the Surrender, to Restwell, it was to find the house standing, and that was better fare than had many of his neighbors and friends. But the negroes were free, and were gone, most of them, to the four winds. Those that stayed were the inwardly attached, and that, in a case like this, meant chiefly the elderly. And, staying, they must henceforth not only be clothed, housed, and fed, but paid. He did not see whence the money was to come with which to do it. It was springtime when he came home. The fields lay unplowed, unplanted, unkempt, desolate. The fences had disappeared. The cattle, the horses, were gone from the meadow-land. Where was stock to come from—implements—seeds even? Who would labor the fields? The earth of the plantation stood, and the old pillared, brick house. Behind, at the foot of Lone Tree Hill, were the quarters, three-fourths deserted. Over by the big oak rose the overseer's house. But his old overseer was dead, killed at Sharpsburg. He could not get, nor did he need, a new one. Down by the creek he saw a ruin where had been his mill. He could not rebuild.

The bridge was gone from over the river. He had to find and cross by the old ford. Restwell, at that time, stood eight miles from a railway. He rode these miles over a highway, unmended for so long that it must have forgotten the very look of road-menders. The railroad—the railroads—by which he had traveled from Richmond were painful, decrepit things. The fields to either side lay fenceless, turned out, dead. The villages, the wayside houses, had a beaten look. Gaunt chimneys stood up, all that was left of burned homes. All the South was broken down. My grandfather loved the South. Before him and his region, to be traveled, perforce, ran the painful bitter road of the years after the war. Generosity is a great virtue and is slow of acquisition. It hung over North and South, it descended here and there, but in these years there was little common, public attempt to bring it down and mix it with the daily bread.

Colonel Dugald Forth came home. My grandmother met him with ejaculations of thankfulness and welcome. His unmarried daughter, my aunt Sarah, clung about him. My mother, his widowed daughter-in-law, came with the genial look behind the tears in her eyes. I was set upon his knee. Mammy came and Uncle Plutus and Aunt Esther.

"We'll begin again, Dugald!"

"Father, they're here still—around and with us—a cloud of sharers! And here's Michael to grow up and help you!"

Courage in any form insures a possible courage elsewhere. My grandfather, at fifty-five, took up an altered life and walked with it bravely. The year after the war my grandmother died. I can remember her—a small, active, gallant woman. My mother and I lived on at Restwell. The man to whom my aunt Sarah had been betrothed had died in the third year of the war, a prisoner at Camp Chase. Her life was at this time almost wholly subjective, a dreamy intercourse with the past and with the future across the grave. My grandmother, feeling herself going, had turned to my mother. "Cary, you take the housekeeping. You make them comfortable!" Later, when they were all around her, in the dead of night, she opened her eyes and said, "My key-basket to Cary!" Then she took her husband's hand and held it, and with her odd, inscrutable smile, died.

So my mother took the reins that she dropped. My mother had a strong power of liking and loving. And as she gave she drew. My grandfather, my aunt Sarah, the servants, the place, took light and warmth from her, and gave her from their own store, great or small. She was a flame-kindler, a beneficent ferment. Kindred and acquaintance differed from her at many points, would sometimes hotly argue with her. But the level lifted where she was.

Uncle Gilchrist was the youngest of my grandfather's children. Nineteen when he fought in the battle to be seen from Lone Tree Hill, he was presently transferred to the Army of Tennessee and henceforth fought out of Virginia. When the end came he was artillery captain, somewhere far south. Thence he wrote that as soon as might be he would go to Mexico. He went, and Restwell heard of him as fighting with Juarez. At very long intervals came a letter to his father.

My father was dead, and my uncle Robert. Uncle Gilchrist was in Mexico. Aunt Sarah lived at Restwell. There were left my aunts Harriet and Kate—Mrs. Warringer, Mrs. Dallas. Aunt Harriet lived in Richmond, Aunt Kate at Flowerfield, in the next county. The husbands of both were living—General Warringer, Major Dallas, the latter with an empty sleeve—but both men were impoverished, involved, like the rest of our world, in the huge debacle. They could not help Colonel Forth.

My grandfather took up his burden. Trouble of the past and of the present, a cloudy day overspreading, to him, the future, made it somewhat grim and heavy. Men like him—like Warringer, like Dallas—must somehow hold the time until children like me, like Warringer's five and Dallas's four, grew up to improve it. The present work was to keep the South—Virginia—the heritage's head above water. That must be done despite very complete poverty, despite disfranchisement, despite a stinging cloud of daily defeats, despite a veritable upas-tree of memory, perpetually waving a welcome, perpetually murmuring, "Come, sleep under me!"

My grandfather assumed his task, but it bent him like the stony masses that they bear in the first round of the Mountain of Purgatory.

He must find an inner way to make it lighter, since there was no outer way. He first tried blind, proud endurance, an exoteric Stoicism. After a time this broke down. He began to be a reader, a ponderer. Restwell owned a very fair number of books. The Forths possessed a good many, and my mother had brought with her from her old home in eastern Virginia her inherited portion of a considerable and well-chosen library. My grandfather turned from book to book. At last, in two or three quartos, he came upon Swedenborg.

Despite Scotch blood and name, the Restwell Forths were Episcopalians. Every Sunday, in the old time, the old, roomy, high-swung carriage, the two sleek, strong chestnuts, and Mingo or Daniel on the box, had taken the women of the family to St. Matthew's, in the oak-grove, in the middle of Whitechurch. Colonel Forth and his sons had ridden there. In the new time, in fine weather, my mother and Aunt Sarah walked the two miles. In bad weather the two farm-horses were put to the old carriage, rusty now and shaken, and Uncle Plutus, rusty too, drove them to St. Matthew's. My grandfather, alone, rode upon Selim, brought somehow through the war, but old now and with a trick of stumbling.

The Rev. Thomas Millwood belonged to St. Matthew's and St. Matthew's to him. He also belonged to Whitechurch and Whitechurch to him. And to the county at large and the county to him. And likewise to Virginia and Virginia to him. When the war clanged down upon us he became a fighting chaplain. Then the army belonged to him and he to the army. After the Surrender all the one-time comrades-in-arms belonged to him and he to them. Later in history, I do not think that he missed a single Confederate reunion. A younger man than my grandfather, the two had been at the university in the same half-decade. They had an affection for each other. There was Mrs. Millwood, but she moved like a cool, pale moon around the orb in activity that was her husband. The pair had no children, but relatives, temporarily stranded, were always more or less permanently at home in the pleasant, large-gardened, brick parsonage around the corner from St. Matthew's.

During and after the war, the Millwoods, too, must cut the cloth of life after altered patterns. Old, pleasant, easy living and giving had to be relinquished. The toll-gate bar swung decisively across the road of expenditure. They gave up much, but kept their dogmas.

Mr. Millwood always spoke of himself as an active Christian. He preached good orotund sermons, and he practised a thousand brotherly charities and kindlinesses. He had, though always within his own frontiers, a strong social gift. I think that he was an active Christian, though perhaps not as active as he considered himself.

His marked impatiences were with religious doubts: "How can you doubt, sir? Here—and here! Isn't it plain?" And with tokens of a changing mind where social and political theories were in question: "Change, sir! Look at the French Revolution! Look at the French character to-day! Look at this tragic country! What has brought about all these horrors? Old ways not good enough! Unrest! Minds bitten by tarantulas! What has been the result—is it lovely and of good report? Look at the Northern character!"

Mr. Millwood came often to Restwell. All there, white and black, had an old fondness for him, for all could remember many a goodness. He was a large man, with a broad, fresh-colored face and a manner at once bluff and cordial. He came one afternoon and stayed to supper, the moon being full and the night fitted for a ride back to Whitechurch on his most venerable gray Dobbin. After supper, upon the porch, while they smoked, my grandfather opened upon his inner preoccupations.

"I read more than I used to, you know, Millwood—turn things over more in my mind. Origins and destinies, and so forth, you know. I happened, a while ago, upon Swedenborg."

"Ah yes! Swedenborg! I tried to read him once and couldn't," said Mr. Millwood. "'Origins and destinies!' Stick to Moses, Colonel, and to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and to Paul!"

"Swedenborg says that he is only giving the spiritual sense of the Scriptures."

"Haven't you all your life heard given the spiritual sense of the Scriptures? What is the pulpit for?"

"Yes, I know. But somehow.... We take help where we are lucky enough to find it, Millwood!"

"Don't you go wandering after nightshade thinking you're getting strawberries! Swedenborg!"

"If God is Total and Divine Man—"

"God is God, and man is man! I must say that you surprise me, Forth—"

"As a commentary—"

"Heterodoxy always begins as a commentary! You stick to the plain letter of the Bible! Look where the age is being led! Emerson and Beecher—this man Darwin in England—wild theories of communism—women forgetting their nature! For God's sake, Forth, don't you be running after strange idols! Don't you become a betrayer!"

Now loyalty stood very high in my grandfather's scale of virtues. For some days after this conversation he read no more Swedenborg. Indeed, he read nothing. It happened to be a depressing week. Poverty bore hard upon the South; unmagnanimous political measures were abroad. There fell a chill rain. The crops at Restwell proved small, and yet, such as they were, it was hard to get them gathered. The interest was due on the mortgage he had had to place. Colonel Forth's shoulders were beginning to be bowed.

One day, when it rained too much to be out in the fields, he took from his desk the small Testament which he had carried through the war. He had read in it not infrequently during those four years. But the reading had been more or less perfunctory, blind, unintelligent. What the book had chiefly given him was a sense of protection, of lightness in having it upon his person. It had been something very like an amulet, a fetish. It had turned no bullets, averted no saber strokes, but the feel of it under his gray vest had been a help to strength. Once he had missed it. There had been a desperate charge, a hand-to-hand fight. At the first possible instant he returned to the scene of this, and, at risk of death or capture, picked the book out of a bloodstained, trampled hollow.

Now he sat down before the long window, with the sobbing day outside, and opened the Testament. It opened at the Letter to the Romans. The Colonel read, and now he touched idea where before had been uncomprehended sound. He held the book in his hand and sat gazing out at mist and rain. "I see," he thought. "But Swedenborg helped me to see. Where is the harm, then, in Swedenborg?" He kept on thinking. "Paul explained, interpreted.... Why should interpretation stop when everything here was bound together? ... It has never stopped. It is going on now."

My grandfather began now to read both the Bible and Swedenborg. It was a comfort to him when he dug from the latter that members of all churches might apprehend the Church above—the New Church—and yet still sit among old congregations. He did not want to cease to go to St. Matthew's. He did not want to break with Millwood, or his neighbors, or kin. He did not want the county to talk about Colonel Forth and his defections. He only wanted all helps toward finding a shore above his wasted world. Presently he began to read other mystics besides Swedenborg. And now the Bible was often in his hands. He acquired a habit of shaking or of nodding his head in church, at first only at points in the sermon. Fortunately, St. Matthew's construed this as a slight palsy, creeping upon the colonel and manifesting itself at inconvenient seasons.

Now I begin to remember my grandfather as he appeared to a small boy. He was a tall, bent man, with a beard, with dreamy blue eyes and lines of care above them. He had a deep voice, somewhat drawling and caressing—what is called "a Southern voice." I used to follow him about—field or orchard or barn—wherever he was going. And often I rode behind him on Selim.

I was very fond of him. His long silences did not trouble me. There was always so much to see or to think about while he was saying nothing. When he did speak his voice wrapped me like a deep, old wood, half melancholy, slow, and always kind. He answered my questions, too, with a satisfying open door in the answer. In that he and my mother were alike. When, by the next day, I had found another closed door to which the open door had led, he did his best, with a simple seriousness, with this one also.

Dear grandfather! Dear old movements about the old Restwell place! Dear childhood! I go there now at will. I move or sit or stand at will in the bright and tender world of Memory. I alter there where I see that alteration is needed. I condense or expand, strengthen or disintegrate. I hasten or linger, I heighten, widen, and deepen. I recognize form within form. The "irrecoverable Past"—there is no such thing! I treat my past as an artist should. It is mine and I visit my vineyard when I will. I prune and tend the vineyard. I make wine from the grapes, and in one chalice, in deep moments, know my past's essence. "My" past! These pronouns are the bane of existence. "My" past is the past—all the past. And where has the past gone to? It is very sufficiently here! Open the gate and go into it at your will. There is not even a gate; there is no barrier.

CHAPTER III

My aunt Sarah gave me my first book of poems. It had her name in it, and she wrote mine beneath hers on my seventh birthday. Within its worn blue covers was found a garland—old poems, old and fine—gathered from twenty gardens. The donor said that I could not read the book now, but that later I should. She said that evidently I was going to be fond of reading. So I was—I was already fond of it. And it was not so long before I read the garland, and not so long before I set to work to memorize certain favorite pieces. Before I was ten I knew by heart a number of these component blossoms. And by then I had found in the house other books of poetry.

My aunt Sarah at the time when she gave me the book, stood a pale, slender woman, dressed always, when she could, in white, not very strong, rather silent, and with beautiful eyes. Every side of Restwell life laid claim upon my mother's time. Aunt Sarah was not idle. She sewed swiftly and beautifully. Her long-fingered, delicate hands accomplished many a task in a house where now all must work. But she stood aside from planning and overseeing, from account-book and calculation. Her needle flashed, her long fingers wiped and dusted, but all the time heart and mind were traveling. She did not desire household authority. I think that it was only with strong relief that she saw matters flowing toward my mother for decisions. Her own decisions were almost wholly upon inner things—though that means, of course, that she did then choose and decide outer things yet to come. She was a great reader. But here, too, she read for practical aid in that other-lighted kingdom. Her inner theme was the ultimate union of all lovers. The strengthening of every perception, every intuition, that said, "It is so!" had become her intense preoccupation. She read to this end, thought to this end, held herself still and invited her intuitions. What marked her off from many women of her acquaintance who had also lost, who also dreamed reunion, was that she sought corroboration, related experience, acceptable evidence, not alone in the Bible or in books of devotion, but wherever she saw or heard of a rainbow glint. Her mind was bold in her good cause. A defined, intense, personal will, patient and massive, led her over the bound into a transcendentalism that gathered food from every sea. My grandfather, weary of trouble, turned definitely to "sacred" writings. But my aunt sought everywhere.

About an eighth of a mile from the house there lay, on the eastern slope of a little hill, the Restwell graveyard. Here were laid in earth the frames of my father and my uncle Robert, and of my grandmother beside two infants she had lost. And others were here, men, women, and children of my grandparents' generation, and older graves of the generation before these. Piety kept fair the Restwell burying-ground. Lack of working hands might involve old lawn and garden in barbarous upgrowths, but in the graveyard weeds were kept down, the grass duly cut and the flowers tended. My mother and Aunt Sarah both worked here. But my aunt Sarah was oftenest in the place. It had become for her a secret palace, a cloister, a refuge. Under the oak-tree she had put a cross for the man who was buried far away, where he died in prison. The Whitechurch mason made it for her, cut out of gray stone. Above it rose the oak, of a hundred years and more, with outcropping great roots. My aunt Sarah sat beneath it, with the cross before her. Upright and arms, looked at so, it quartered the field of the sky. She brought flowers and laid them against the base. She had a pansy-bed just for this. She laid against the stone every color of pansy. She scattered there fragrant leaves, bits of lavender and myrrh, leaves of rose geranium and citronalis. She planted straw-flowers—"immortelles"—so that in the autumn she might gather them, white and purple heads like clover, wider, sun-hued disks, and treasure them until the snows came. Then, a cluster at a time, she placed them against this cross, and with them sprays of cedar or white pine, ivy or holly. She had a stand of house plants and as they bloomed she cut from these and brought the glowing bits of color to the graveyard. The mounds of others there were not neglected. Flower and herb and evergreen went to these, too. She was scrupulous as to this. But the clinging passion was for the cross that had no mound.

As a child I spent much time in this graveyard. I remember it when I was five and I remember it when I was ten. I entered it with my mother or with my aunt, and here, while they worked or dreamed, I pursued my own ends. There was much that might entertain a child used to collating and devising for himself. With an old pair of scissors I might cut away dead roses, or make my own small haymows of shorn grass. Or I might play at various houses between the numerous upstanding oak roots. I had many mansions here, and with bits of clay and gravel made roads that linked the whole. The place overhung the river. In a far corner rose a growth of ailanthus whence came excellent long poles for many uses. In another corner grew a wild apple-tree. The apples reddened and hung among the green leaves. Later they might lie red upon the ground. I could not understand why my mother and my aunt would not let me eat them. They lay there, red, in the grass.

A stone wall divided in half the Restwell burying-ground. On the fairer aspect of the hill, with the richer trees and the rarer flowers, with the marble headstones and footstones and the half-dozen older flat slabs of granite, lay Restwell Forths. On the other side of the wall, in a stretch not untended and not unfair, but distinctly simplified, were Restwell servants. Here ranged themselves many small, upright wooden slabs, with two or three of stone showing resting-places of old, responsible negroes held in affection by the big house. The slabs were marked, the place was sweet, overwrought with dark, running periwinkle, with here and there a bush of lilac or althea, with locust-trees, heavy and sweet in May. But still there was the wall between, and a contrast running from of old.... I often scrambled over this wall and played hide-and-seek with myself in and out among the mounds and the wooden slabs. And, first and last, I learned to spell many words in the two-sided Restwell burying-ground. On our side of the wall lichen and moss were to be kept from the gravestones. I liked to follow my aunt as she made each name and the inscription beneath fair and clean. She read them all to me. Even before I could read I knew the graves by name and verse. But I learned to read before I was five.

The bank that sloped to the river was truly a fairy place of moss and fern and jutting rock and tremulous, slender trees. It early became to me an enchanted wood. There was a shelf where I could stand and throw small stones into the river over the bushy heads of willow and alder. Down in an arc went the flung stone; there followed a silver flash and a liquid sound, then widening rings. I stood here throwing stone after stone.... Sometimes there was a rabbit or a squirrel, and always there were birds and other winged things, and creeping, charming grotesques. Now and then I had a human playmate. At considerable intervals Ahasuerus came upon the scene. "Miss Sarah done axed me ter help her!" Ahasuerus worked for a time, then, dismissed, he and I crossed the wall and scampered over the matted periwinkle, past the graves of his color, to the long, sloping bank. Here, in the amplest camaraderie, we carried on Lilliputian explorations, industries. But Mandy's Jim almost always needed Ahasuerus in potato-patch or corn-field.

My aunt Sarah and I grew into a kind of communion. She was oftener in the graveyard than was my mother, and I was often there with her. She was also fond of walking by the river or through the home woods, and here I was her companion. My circle and hers found their point of interfusion. We had each a sense of Nature and of all musical language. That I was a child and she a woman made little difference. We could talk and listen each to the other. She had a way of repeating poems to me, and she let me say over to her the verses I learned. It was she who first told me old legends and romances. And it was she who most distinctly aided me to see the arabesque, the come and go, of natural phenomena, of night and day, rain and shine, the seasons, the return and rhythm of all things. She aided the birth of my sense of periodicity, directed my ear to the drum of time. She never condescended to me, but talked as to an equal. Of what she said much went by me like the speaking wind. But it went to return in later life and give me up then its meaning.

I recall many an hour spent with her. Here is one.

On a sunny morning we weeded the graveyard. Then we sat down under the oak and, taking a book that she had brought with her, she began to read while she rested. She often did this, and sometimes I pursued my own ends while she read, and sometimes I came to her and said, "Read it to me."

I said it this day. She looked at me with her beautiful, seeking eyes. "It's a piece by Edgar Allan Poe. I found it by chance in this old magazine. I read it yesterday, and now I'm reading it again. But you won't understand it. You had better keep on playing."

But I was tired of playing and said so, and lay down on the clean ground with my head against her knee. Suddenly she began to read. She read well, after a quiet, clear, impressive fashion. Be it understood that in speaking of my childhood I speak now according to its simple, momentary impressions, and now after the larger knowledge of the upheaping, remembering, sorting, comprehending years. Now I speak after the one book and now after the other. She read Poe's "Colloquy of Una and Monos."

UNA. "Born again!"

MONOS. "Yes, fairest and best-beloved Una, 'born again,'"

UNA. "Death!"

MONOS. "... You are confused and oppressed by the majestic novelty of the Life Eternal. Yes, it was of Death I spoke. And here how singularly sounds that word...."

On went my aunt Sarah's voice. The two lovers, both "dead," both living, moving, speaking in a land of added senses, new tones in the scale, pursue their colloquy. They speak of what they thought of Death, in the old world, and of the mistakes and woes of that world. And Monos had "died," and Una, a year later, had "died." And time had passed, and here they met, with emotion and memory clear, sonorous, golden-true. Una asks Monos for a detailed recital of his passage from the old plane into the other. He accedes and speaks further:

MONOS. "... Wearied at heart with anxieties which had their origin in the general turmoil and decay, I succumbed to the fierce fever. After some few days of pain, and many of dreamy delirium replete with ecstasy the manifestation of which you mistook for pain, there came upon me, as you have said, a breathless and motionless torpor, and this was termed Death by those who stood around me.

"Words are vain things. My condition did not deprive me of sentience....

"I breathed no longer. The pulses were still. The heart had ceased to beat. Volition had not departed, but was powerless. The senses were unusually active, although, eccentrically so—assuming often each other's functions at random. The taste and the smell were inextricably confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal and intense.... All my perceptions were purely sensual. The materials furnished the passive brain by the senses were not in the least degree wrought into shape by the deceased understanding. Of pain there was some little; of pleasure there was much; but of moral pain or pleasures none at all.... And this was in truth the Death of which these bystanders spoke reverently, in low whispers....

"They attired me for the coffin—three or four dark figures which flitted busily to and fro.... The day waned....

"And now from the wreck and the chaos of the usual senses there appeared to have arisen within me a sixth, all perfect. In its exercise I found a wild delight—yet a delight still physical, inasmuch as the understanding had in it no part. Motion in the animal frame had fully ceased. No muscle quivered; no nerve thrilled, no artery throbbed. But there seemed to have sprung up in the brain that of which no words could convey to the merely human intelligence even an indistinct conception. Let me term it a mental, pendulous pulsation. It was the moral embodiment of man's abstract idea of Time. By the absolute equalization of this movement—or of such as this—had the cycles of the fundamental orbs themselves been adjusted. By its aid I measured the irregularities of the clock upon the mantel, and of the watches of the attendants. Their tickings came sonorously to my ears. The slightest deviation from the true proportion—and these deviations were omni-prevalent—affected me just as violations of abstract truth are wont, on earth, to affect the moral senses. Although no two of the timepieces in the chamber struck individual accords accurately together, yet I had no difficulty in holding steadily in mind the tones, and the respective momentary errors of each. And this—this keen, perfect, self-existing sentiment of duration, this sentiment existing (as man could not possibly have conceived it to exist) independent of any succession of events—this idea—this sixth sense upspringing from the ashes of the rest, was the first obvious and certain step of the intemporal soul upon the threshold of the temporal Eternity.

"It was midnight, and you still sat by my side.... They had deposited me in the coffin. The lamps burned flickeringly.... The perfume in my nostrils ceased. Forms affected my vision no longer. The oppression of the Darkness uplifted itself from my bosom. A dull shock like that of electricity pervaded my frame, and was followed by total loss of the idea of contact. All of what man has termed sense was merged in the sole consciousness of entity, and in the one abiding sentiment of duration. The mortal body had been at length stricken with the hand of the deadly Decay.

"Yet had not all of sentience departed; for the consciousness and the sentiment remaining supplied some of its functions by a lethargic intuition. I appreciated the direful change now in operation upon the flesh.... I was not unconscious of those movements which displaced you from my side, which confined me within the coffin, which deposited me within the hearse, which bore me to the grave, which lowered me within it, which heaped heavily the mold upon me....

"And here ... there rolled away days and weeks and months; and the soul watched narrowly each second as it flew, and, without effort, took record of its flight—without effort and without object.

"A year passed. The consciousness of being had grown hourly more indistinct, and that of mere locality had, in great measure, usurped its position. The idea of entity was becoming merged in that of place. The narrow space immediately surrounding what had been the body was now going to be the body itself....

"Many lustra had supervened. Dust had returned to dust. The form had food no more. The sense of being had at length utterly departed, and there reigned in its stead—instead of all things—dominant and perpetual—the autocrats Place and Time. For that which was not—for that which had no form—for that which had no thought—for that which had no sentience—for that which was soulless, yet of which matter formed no portion;—for all this nothingness, yet for all this immortality, the grave was still a home, and the corrosive hours co-mates."

There was no more of the colloquy. It ended there, with the definiteness of a stone dropped into the river. Yet after the stone the widening rings! My aunt put down the book. "It says no more. But Una and Monos are talking, in happiness, each to the other. They move, they touch, they remember, reason, desire, and love. They speak of being 'born again' and of the 'august Eternal Life.' I think that as desire and will slept and rested, so now they awoke, moved, and gathering themselves together, found richer being in a richer world! At any rate, separation passed away like a dream."

She sat with her hands locked over her knees, looking afar. I had a little heap of acorns, and I played with these—one acorn, then a line, then two lines, then a square.

Ahasuerus taught me to swim, Mandy's Jim to shoot, my grandfather to ride. My mother taught me to read, to write, and to cipher. She carried me into geography and history, and through the gate of Latin. All persons and all things at Restwell taught me. I was born a listener and a gatherer—a giver, too, I hope, of what I thought valuable.... Out of a thousand faults I pick pride, an indolent will, some fear, some obscure strains of cruelty, fretted thin, I hope, by now. I see, too, oversensitiveness to blame, and some finesse. Now and then I lied, but not often; generally under some strong, imagined stress. Physically, I was fairly strong, fairly healthy. I was early used to being told that I had a good mind. "You have a good mind—you ought to study hard."—"You have a good mind; you might grow up to be the greatest help!" ... The wings to carry me, to lift my feet from the clogging faults, were a hunger and thirst after understanding, a sense for the cleanly and the harmonious, a considerable synthesizing power, a considerable power of idealization. So I ranged my first decade here at Restwell in Virginia—small tiger in small jungle, small lion in small desert, small man in small earth, small angel in small heaven.

Though I lived chiefly with grown persons there were times when I forgathered with children. Ahasuerus had a toddling brother, Creed, and a sister, Mimy. They were younger than I, but I made mud pies with them down by the creek that flowed past the quarters. And when we went to Whitechurch or to neighboring country houses I met children. And there were the Dallas cousins at Flowerfield, twenty miles away. Each summer they came to Restwell for two or three weeks—my aunt Kate and the four young Dallases, John, Miriam, Catherine, and Lewis. And, usually in October, my aunt Sarah went to Flowerfield for as long a time, and I went with her.

Flowerfield! That was a brick house somewhat larger than Restwell, but otherwise quite like it. It stood upon a hilltop and commanded a most lovely, wide view. Before the war Flowerfield had meant two thousand acres of rich land, green, watered meadows, and a famous breed of horses. During the war the land went down, the horses were taken away. The house stood in the path of a noted "raider." Together with its many outbuildings, it was first looted, then fired. Barns, stables, cabins, went off in flame. But the thick-walled house withstood. Great damage was done, but the strong shell rested. After the war the two thousand acres were parted into three lots. One moiety went for debt; one for some money with which to stock and cultivate the remaining third. The money it brought was little enough. There were no more famous horses. The damage done to the house could be but meagerly repaired. When I knew it as a child, bare indeed was the furnishing! The raider had taken all that could be taken and had smashed the rest. To help Flowerfield into a livable condition all that could be spared was sent from Restwell. And more fortunate neighbors had given with prompt kindness what they could. But all the Flowerfield region stood in the swathe of destruction. Not much could be given from one to the other. For years after the Surrender Flowerfield, house and place, exhibited a bareness not without its own distinction. War-wrecked, it sang like a ballad.

Of the young Dallases, John and Miriam were about of my age. John was—is—square-made, solid and good. Miriam was—is—Miriam!

Winter and spring I looked forward to their coming with summer to Restwell. My aunt Kate, my mother said, was like my father. I see now her strong, irregular face, her brown eyes, both intent and quizzical. She and my mother were good friends. "Cary"—"Kate"—I hear their voices now.

Major Dallas, like his father-in-law, Colonel Forth, like his county and like his state, was whelmed in the difficulties of a shattered order. He must build again, with effort, with struggle—must do his part in the building up, after new patterns, of the South. A young man still, he put hand and mind to his work, with determination, with courage and ableness. His left sleeve hung empty, two-thirds of his land must go, his house stood half a ruin. There were children to educate, a bedridden mother to keep in something like old comfort. He set to work. I do not remember him often at Restwell, but at Flowerfield I knew and liked him. He was a big man, magnetic, humorous, fond of children. Before the war, at the university, he had read law, had been admitted to the bar in '61. In '66 he rented the quaintest of law-offices in the shadow of the court-house in the county seat, four miles from Flowerfield. In two years he had become the principal lawyer of the county. There was law business enough, the lord of law knows, in those troubled years! But it was business for impoverished clients, individuals, fellow-Confederates, widows and orphans. Major Dallas made little money. But he grew rich in the good-will of his people. These were the years when Achilles drew the body of Hector around Troy. Major Dallas waked and wrought for his region, fought gloom and bitterness, cheered To-morrow, backed Time to bring in one and all as winners. He declined to be pessimistic as to the United States—even to be ironic over the "united." "If we're big enough, each man jack of us, North and South, we'll find that we are united!"

He turned gray early. But, for all his empty sleeve and his gallant record, he was a better soldier after the war than during it.

I loved Flowerfield. I see it in autumn with all its noble trees scarlet and gold, and, in the no great distance, blue waves of mountains. The house had—has—an emanation for me, indescribable, its own, welcome to the inner senses. I loved the bare, clean, little room where I slept with John, loved the old, wide stair, the big empty hall; loved the front porch, pillared differently from ours at Restwell; loved the wide, sunny two-storied back porch; loved the dogs that lay there. October is, to me, to this day, a royal month.

John and Miriam and I ranged together. Catherine and Lewis were too small for deep plans and purposes, long strides afield. But the first three owned the world in those Octobers.

In mid-October came the nutting, came the smell of wood smoke, came the Indian summer. We might be poor, we might be surrounded by dubitations and brain-rackings, we might encounter among our adult acquaintances sighs and furrowed brows, we might, at times, from visiting folk, hear bitter or indignant utterance when newspapers were unfolded and read, we might be dimly aware that we had a life of work before us. A bitter war had been fought with immediately bitter results. But yet children might be happy. On the whole, we children thought precious little about the war, or reconstruction, or poverty, or a new order ripped from the womb of the old. We thought at times, of course, archaically, queerly. But then surged in the vital present of chinkapin strings, ripening persimmons and black haws, dropping chestnuts and tumbling walnuts.

June again, when Aunt Kate and the children came to Restwell....

Miriam was said to be like her mother, as her mother was said to be like my father. Now she was active, now she was a dreamer. I have seen her for half an hour on end, sitting in the sun or in the shade, a little, motionless figure, her chin on her knees, her eyes on the ground. But when she arose she arose with a spring, became at once the whole-hearted player. She and I early found the corridor between our natures. I knew her—know her—from within, and she knows me.

CHAPTER IV

The Warringers lived in Richmond, considerably more than a hundred miles away. When, in the summer, they could leave town, they usually went to General Warringer's parents, in Gloucester County. I early gathered, from some source or other, that my aunt Harriet and my uncle Gilchrist were like each other and somewhat unlike my father, Uncle Robert, Aunt Sarah, and Aunt Kate. Restwell and Flowerfield did not seem to have hold on them. Daddy Guinea told me a little about this.

"Mr. Gilchrist an' Miss Harriet, dey restless. Lak de Flowerfield colts—all wantin' ter be racers!"

"Isn't it good to be a racer?"

"Sho! Ef you's er bawn racer. But some of de colts jus' restless, 'n' thinkin' dey see er race-track where ain't any! Of co'se," said Daddy Guinea, "dey're jus' pawin' 'n' zigzaggin' dere way ter hit! Ez I see hit, we're all on de big race-track."

"Is Aunt Harriet pretty?"

"She sho is! 'N' sweet ez honey de way she talks!"

I found this out for myself when I was something more than eight years old and my grandfather took me with him to Richmond. That was an event!

The Surrender lay five years in the background. The South showed faint signs of recuperation. But many individuals, speaking in terms of material prosperity, were still upon the descending arc. Others apparently rested precisely at the nadir. This last I gather to have been my grandfather's case. He had done his best. Now he must have help, or, despite all struggle, Restwell would go under the hammer. He went to Richmond to see General Warringer. Just why he took me with him I do not remember, but he took me.

Mandy's Jim and the ancient carriage conveyed us through Whitechurch and so on by the old highway, by long hills and level stretches, to the small town that bragged of a railroad. The colonel and I together had a small leather trunk and a worn valise. He wore the broadcloth he had had before the war. My suit had been fashioned by my mother and Aunt Sarah out of clothes that had been my father's. The colonel's hat was the Southern, wide-brimmed, soft, black felt. I had a cap that my mother had made.

Every one on the train appeared to know my grandfather. Every one seemed to speak to me. It was so novel! The rows of seats covered with dark-red velvet, and the windows like parallel lines of dirty glass beads, and the stove at one end and the water-cooler at the other, and the lamps up in the painted roof, and the roar and the swaying and the jolting, and the smell and grime of soft smoke, and the telegraph-poles going by, and the rushing country—I sat with my eyes wide and my teeth coming down hard upon my lip. I have reason to believe that we made something under twenty-five miles an hour. But all things are relative. Mandy's Jim, the plow-horses, and the carriage made four and a half miles an hour. And when the whistle screamed—what half-fearful, half-delightful agitation!

The conductor said: "You don't often travel with us, Colonel. Glad to see you!" He had a patch over one eye and a great scar running across forehead and cheek. When he had punched my grandfather's ticket and gone by, and my grandfather had explained why he had punched the ticket, we entered upon this.

"Did he get hurt in the war?"

"Yes. At Malvern Hill."

"Is he poor?"

"Yes, he's poor."

"Is everybody in the cars poor?"

"Mostly."

"If it lets us travel, I don't care!"

My grandfather smiled. "Do you like to travel?"

I produced two of Mammy's big words. "I extremely and fastidiously like it."

Mr. Millwood was on the train. I do not remember where he was going—not to Richmond, for the latter part of the day we went on without him. But here he was, and an obliging farmer changed seats with him so that he might be next to us. At first I was afraid of hurting the red velvet (though already it was hurt enough), but at last, as the train was overhanging the river and there was a boat upon it and men fishing, I got upon my knees and glued my forehead to the window. It was a very dirty window, but I managed to find an unsmeared lane. Now the train ran under limestone cliffs, and how it roared! Now it careered into open country, and I saw the willows of the river and fields and houses.

Behind me Colonel Forth and Mr. Millwood were talking.

"So I thought I would go see Carter Warringer—"

"I hope he can help. I wish I could help, Dugald!"

"I know you do, Tom. If I can struggle on, I'd like to keep the place for the boy."

"You'll pull through! The Lord isn't going to desert you—even if you do read stuff and nonsense!"

"The boy's got a good mind and strong affections. He ought to do well. Dugald had it in him.... If I can give Michael his schooling and start him fair—"

Mr. Millwood nodded his big head. "In ten years' time Major Dallas might take him in his office. Then, as a lawyer, he'd be made! If Virginia ever gets up from the ground John Dallas can do what he wants to—"

"Yes. John's a strong man. Sometimes I think that Michael won't take to the law."

"Why not? Now I don't see him," said Mr. Millwood, "in the pulpit.... I've heard ever so many war doctors say that henceforth doctors would have a great showing—"

"Doctor Gilbert doesn't believe he'll be a doctor. Just as I," said Colonel Forth, "don't see him as a farmer."

"It's a right hard thing to find—a way of living that your whole heart's in! I found it," said Mr. Millwood. "The law's the road to political life—if ever we have any political life again!"

"I don't know. I feel sometimes," said my grandfather, "strange new things in the earth, pushing up. A curtain's down, Millwood!"

We were on the river again. It flashed and bent. There was a broken dam. Then a mill with a great wheel.... Now we were away from the water, rushing through forest. The whistle screamed. My knees sank into the worn and blackened velvet; my hands held the cinder-strewn window-sill, my forehead pressed the glass where the last shower had left dirty tear marks. Inside me was wild, bright, tense, rushing adventure.

After a while I tumbled back and slept.

When I waked, Mr. Millwood was gone. My grandfather, in the seat behind me, read a newspaper. We had dinner out of the willow basket packed by my mother, and we shared it with an old lady and her grandson, a boy of sixteen, also on their way to Richmond. The boy was to be entered with a cousin in the tobacco business. "Make what men want and sell it to them!" said the old lady. "Just farming and lawing and ruling have got to sit back for a spell, Colonel!"

In the physical landscape the mountains had sunk from sight. The hills had all lowered in height. The wooded country showed another aspect. Broom sedge became plentifully in evidence. All that ride, out of my window, might be seen agricultural poverty, poverty of town and village. With something of frequency rose out of green or brown earth, like ruined tombs, chimneys and hearths and nothing more. Everywhere fencing was makeshift, and once-painted houses had forgotten the event. The roads that the train crossed or paralleled showed stony ledge, rut, and mud-hole. But the sun was shining and the spring woods were greening.

A stout, well-dressed man came and sat beside my grandfather. "Glad to see you, Colonel Forth! Well, what's the news in your part of the state?"

They talked. After a while said the stout man, looking out of window: "I have been North. Their country looks prosperous!"

My grandfather rested his thin brown hands, palm in palm, upon his newspaper. His voice when he spoke had an unusual deep vibrancy. "I am glad that part of our country is prosperous."

"'Our country'! So you have come to that?"

"Yes," said my grandfather. "Our South, our North, our East, our West. Our America, our Europe, our Asia, our Africa. Our earth."

"Well, I'll be—! You didn't talk that way, Colonel, during the Seven Days, nor in the Petersburg trenches!"

"No," said my grandfather. "Live and learn, Otway! Live and learn."

"Well, I can tell you," said Otway, "that where I've been it's 'Our North—and you in the South, damn you!'"

"Yes," said my grandfather. "They, too, have got to live and learn. We haven't been doing much living, any of us!"

"All that's a new lingo!" said the stout man, and presently went back to his companion at the end of the car. I think that he said: "The old Colonel must have been a Union man before the war. I never heard of it, but he must have been!"

The worn engine and the worn cars and the worn road-bed, the engineer with a wooden leg, the brakeman too young to have fought, the conductor with the patched eye and the scar, the passengers discussing Readmittance, and bad times, and better times perhaps in the misty future, crops and Ku-Klux and the war in Europe, creaked and jolted and roared, twenty-odd miles an hour. Twice occurred prolonged halts. We were an hour and a half late and came upon Richmond red in a great sunset flare. The stout man, passing the colonel and me, said, "It looks like the burning five years ago!"

Colonel Forth and I got out of the train. He carried the old valise and I the willow basket. There seemed a kind of long shed, and so many persons speaking and hurrying in the shadows, that I felt vague fear and pressed close to my grandfather. Then we heard General Warringer's authoritative voice. "Here they are! Well, Colonel, and how are you? Is this giant Michael? How do you like traveling, youngster?"

A negro with the general took basket and valise. We went through the station. Outside we encountered a throng of negro drivers, vociferous, extolling the merits of various hotels—The Ford—The Washington—The Exchange, and Ballard—gesticulating, long whip in hand, toward painted omnibuses or ancient hacks. Coming to a carriage, we entered it, waited for the leather trunk to be deposited beside the coachman, then moving off, began presently to climb a hill. The sunset reddened all the sky. My grandfather sat as in a dream. "I have not been here since the Evacuation." He bent forward.

"There's the Capitol! ... The Stars and Bars—The Stars and Stripes."

The Warringers' house, old, large, square, gray stucco, with tall magnolias about it, furnished within with pier-glasses and crystal chandeliers, long damask curtains and much mahogany, inspired me with some awe. The Warringers said they were poor, but I couldn't immediately see it. And Richmond was a broken city. But to me it showed Aladdin marvels of shop windows, spires of churches, street-car, and market, General Washington on his bronze horse far up against the blue sky, and squirrels in Capitol Square that took peanuts from one's hand as one sat on benches. I had never been able to get a squirrel in a real wood to do this. And the bronze horse and rider that never moved, that stayed there! Wouldn't you go galloping through the sky?

Twice I was taken to the theater. I saw a play of the West, California, and the gold-diggers. And I saw a noted actress in "Maria Stuart." ... Wonder world!

I did not love the Richmond Warringers as I loved the Flowerfield Dallases. Yet I loved them. It is my way to taste persons, to perceive them volatilized, as it were, so that the mind passes in and out among spoken and unspoken words, gestures, obvious and unobvious—goes, too, off the absurd, medicine-dropper business of present moments....

My aunt Harriet had a beautiful skin, beautiful hair, a beautiful mouth. She dressed beautifully, for all of poverty. She loved people around her, and she talked wittily. The table was always laughing. She had a gift of mimicry. She was ambitious for herself, her husband, and her children. She wished General Warringer to become a public man. She was sure that it was going to be possible, now that Virginia was readmitted, and Southern men were beginning to lay hands again on their own affairs. She meant, in the first place, Southern white men, and in the second place the old propertied class. "Their own affairs!" meant traditional things, political, social, and economic. For herself she wished beautiful clothes, leisure to attend to her beautiful body, leisure also to read clever books, to observe, go about, "experience," feed her wit. Leisure and money—money being with positiveness the only way to get leisure and the rest of it! As women could not make money, General Warringer must make it. Such was her triple-walled castle. Yet there was a corner where the walls were really only honeycombs. She had a gay sweet garden here.

They had lost two children. There remained Carter, Royal, and Dorothea. These made friends with me. We fed the squirrels together. They boasted of the sea to which they went in the summer, and I of the mountains.

My grandfather and I spent ten days in Richmond. He got, I know, the loan from his son-in-law, though I know, too, that there were difficulties. General Warringer considered him a dreamer. Good money would go after bad at Restwell, and God knew there was little enough money, good or bad! The colonel would not be able to keep the place.... But he was fond of the colonel, and they were his wife's people. General Warringer, whose interests were tobacco and mining, managed to scrape together the three or four thousands needed to stave off the sale of Restwell.

There came up, too, the question of my future.

"If he's intelligent and energetic, I might, when he's finished his schooling, find some opening for him. If I were you I'd give him a scientific education."

"Scientific?"

"Colonel, our old world is changing! You and I got along very well with the classics and what not. But I'm going to make Carter an engineer, and I want Royal to train for finance, railroading—something live and moving—"

"Scientific." It was a new thought to my grandfather. It had not occurred to him in the train, talking to Millwood.... Swedenborg had begun with Science.

At General Warringer's he heard much speculative talk. Men came there who were looking ahead. The South was to be developed, that was evident. Canals, railroads, furnaces, factories—the day for such things was at hand. "Five years, and you'll see it beginning—beginning—beginning! A quarter of a century and the South 'll be richer than ever it was! Northern capital? Certainly—at first! We'll mix—forget—-get our arms round one another there first. In business!"

Colonel Forth made a diffident remark. "We'll seek more, too, don't you think, in ourselves? Get things together there?"

"I don't know about all that," said his son-in-law, drinking his coffee. "Material enterprises are big enough for me just now! You mustn't underrate them, Colonel! That's the danger for your kind."

The colonel admitted it. "But you mustn't think either that mining and engineering and railroading and canalling aren't carried on upon other floors. They go all through, I think."

Spring burst out softly, fully, while we were in Richmond. The ten days passed. We said good-by to all the Warringers. Here once more was the train.... As we went through country that had been ground of battle, and again battle, and again battle, the dogwood made a milky way of each piece of woodland. Once more, with knees sunk into grimed velvet, I looked out of window. The day was so warm that the glass was up. The world was the clearer for that.

My grandfather left me alone for a while. At last he came back, "Michael!" I turned from the window.

"General Lee is in the next car. Come! I want to show you to him."

He straightened my tie for me, brushed back my hair, and saw that my hands were pretty clean. We went into the next car, and to a white-bearded, gentle, very fine-looking man. He put out his hand to me, asked me a question or two which I answered, and I stood held against his knee for five minutes while he and the colonel talked. Then we went, my grandfather and I, back to our own car and the dogwood stars outside the window and the rushing country and the blue sky and the flight of birds.

CHAPTER V

Madam Black had a French mother and a Russian father, an education partly French, partly English, and an English husband who brought her with him to America on a hunt for Fortune, to be found, presumably, on a tract of Virginia land bought, without seeing it, from an agent. The land proved a heinous disappointment. Mr. Black died. His wife was left with admirable powers and education, but with no money, and in what to her was a foreign country. She must sell, if she could, her poor piece of land. Needing lawyer's advice, she came to the nearest small town to her disastrous, stony mountain-side, and to Major Dallas's office under the court-house oaks. He gave her counsel; she sold the land, though for a tiny sum, and presently moved into the town, to a small, small white house behind syringa and althea bushes. The towns-folks discussed her, her foreign ways, her gestures, her peculiar, stripped, efficient housekeeping. She was a big woman, somewhat gaunt, but supple and powerful, with iron-gray hair, with a beak of a nose, and a mouth beneath, wide and wise and humorous. She spoke in Virginia a beautiful, pure, book English, but thought in three languages.

My aunt Kate, at Major Dallas's instigation, went to see her, liked her, went again, brought her to Flowerfield for two or three days. The children liked her. She had a great store of folk tales of all lands and she told them with the vivid distinction of a good witch. She was capable, as all her friends soon found out, as she herself with honesty acknowledged, of explosions of anger quite alarming to the uninitiated. But these never occurred oftener than once a week. Moreover, they were generously abstract. The individual was only chastised in the whole. The storm cleared the air, and until the next thunder-clap she was as good as sugar—brown sugar, maple sugar. She was a pianist of no mean ability, she had a wide knowledge of letters, she read and spoke English, French, Russian, and German—and she got along well with children.

Major Dallas and Aunt Kate had the same thought. In six months after she had taken the little white house, Madam Black closed it and came to Flowerfield as governess. I don't think anybody ever regretted it. The Dallases and she flowed together with a certain natural grace and strength.

I was nine years old. My mother's life from morn till night was filled with activities. She had a fair Southern education, and a beautiful, strong, lucid mind and heart that made the best of what she had. But she said that she saw that I was going ahead of her. (I could never go ahead of her in the things of truest value.) She taught me for two hours each day, but then things waited for her at the door. I see her now, sitting in a low chair in the flickering green light from the window, reading a letter from Aunt Kate, and then, the letter in her lap, looking at me drawing pictures on my slate. I was copying a ship out of my geography.

Two or three days later she and I took the old red stage at Whitechurch and went for a short visit to Flowerfield. Madam Black was there. My mother liked her, too. In less than a week we were back at Restwell.

I couldn't go to sleep that night. I sat up in my bed and stared at the starry squares that were windows. Then I took it into my head that there were giants in the room and that I had better go down-stairs. Mammy no longer had her bed in the corner, and I made sure through the open door that my mother was not in her room. I stole out of bed and over the cool, dark floor, out of the room and across the landing to the stair and half-way down it. Thence I could see in my grandfather's room, for that door, too, was open. Grandfather and mother and Aunt Sarah were sitting there, talking. I could not hear what they said—only the murmur of one voice, now of another. They looked so earnest! They all sat near the table, where were grandfather's books and papers, where he and my mother went over accounts together. The lamp that stood here made a kind of pale sunlight about them. Grandfather, with his white beard, looked like—like—like King David! This brought forth another imagination. We had a book of fine, tinted prints—The Women of the Bible. Mother and Aunt Sarah were sitting there out of this book. I had a curious feeling. The giants were forgotten. I sat on the stairs, holding my feet in my hands. The sensation was of being somewhere outside, looking in upon the world. After a time I started to speak—but they looked so earnest. I turned and without noise went up-stairs and across the upper hall and into bed. Anyhow, the giants were gone. I faced a square of branchy stars. One of them caught and held me ... and then I went to sleep.

The next morning my mother told me that when, in October, I went with Aunt Sarah to Flowerfield, I was not coming back when Aunt Sarah came. I was going to stay with Aunt Kate and Uncle John and go to school to Madam Black, with John and Miriam and Catherine and Lewis. At Christmas I should come home for a week, and in May I should come for the whole summer. And grandfather would see me sometimes at Flowerfield, and mother was certainly coming in the winter. And I was to be her Michael still, and learn, and grow—"grow always more good, more wise, my Treasure, my Blessing—"

It awed me to be leaving home. There was awe, too, in the thought of living at Flowerfield. I moved about, exalted. Space seemed to have enlarged between me and the sky, between me and the horizon. I experienced a desire for solitude. I achieved this on the side porch that gave on the lilac walk, and where there was nothing more disturbing than a procession of young turkeys, in and out of the light and shadow upon the grass. I sat here with my chin on my knees. Really to live—live half the time—at Flowerfield! Restwell was dear—Flowerfield was dear. I figured it out that, after all, a half to each wasn't a bad thing. Everybody at Restwell was going to write to me, and I was going to write to them. My, mother would write every week, and I was to draw pictures for her and send them. I dug out something else. "Every time I think of them I can see them." I shut my eyes. "Now I am thinking of grandfather. I see him. Now I am thinking of mother—"

I tried this with other persons. I was the experimenter, full swing. The going from home fell into the background. Persons and things in Richmond—at Whitechurch—at Flowerfield—I could see them, hear them! The train to Richmond—I could make that so real that I felt the velvet, smelled the coal smoke, found in my body the swaying and jolting, turned a little dizzy.... I left that and sat in Capitol Square, above me, against the blue sky, bronze General Washington. Consciously, with desire and forethought, I walked into the past. There had been a broken bench that we could not use, under the greatest tree, whence one might see General Washington to best advantage. I now mended the bench and sat there. I was on the road to discovery that where there's a will there's a way—to alter anything!

In October I went to Flowerfield. For the next four years I spent the major part of each year at Flowerfield. I learned there, I grew there, as in a spring season, as in south-by-west zephyrs.

Madam Black taught us in a bare, sunny room, in an ell of Flowerfield house. Outside were turf and a tremendous tulip-tree. Catherine and Lewis had their lessons early, were out and gone by eleven o'clock. John and Miriam and I were her real scholars.

I think that she was a born teacher. Madam Black—Madam Black, I find you in me at many turns—a welcome inflowing!

She had a cosmopolitan mind. She dwelt among ideas, hunted relations, pounced upon likenesses. She was as daring an explorer as ever sailed for the pole. Many a notion that I have watched emerge, in these later days, tentatively, slowly, even now weighed most doubtfully in the general hand, was hers in the 'seventies. She had a way of saying, "I fancy—" and then, from under her eagle nose out of her wide mouth, in her deep, positive voice came "fancies" of an extraordinary viability.

She was a geographer of the first water. With her for cicerone, we saw our earth throughout its structure, as pupils of our age, I am sure, very rarely see it. She had a genius for relating things, for continuities and correspondence, for the stroke of the eye. She ranged like an eagle, swooped and rose like one. The same traits appeared when she taught us history. We got out of "favored" lands and times and "chosen" people—chosen, at least, in any orthodox sense. The cells called Kings and Queens and Important Events and Great Battles ceased to protrude monstrously from the cellular tissue. The emphatic note, "Height of Mount Everest," became but an orderly detail in the passage, "Himalayas," as the Himalayas subordinated themselves to "mountains," and mountains remembered valleys, and both that they were of the lithosphere. When, for reasons, we came to majesties of form and height, to the pictured off, she could well make us see Mount Everest and the Himalayas. She herself knew Alp and Apennine and Caucasus. Remembering, I feel again snowy and deep-chasmed grandeur!

She did with watery surfaces as she did with the solid. No one who went to school to Madam Black might ever, for instance, see Niagara as a giant plunge out of nothing into nothing, nor a strait or channel like a waste snippet of thread. What came before and after, what flowed on the one side and on the other, what to any ranging eagle would be simultaneous, contemporaneous, she saw herself and made her pupil see. Niagara and Gibraltar Strait came into a water symphony that sounded from pole to pole, that ran, like Alpheus, underground, and flew in clouds in the air.

So with tribes, nations, races, species. Hers was a rich and large realism in which abstractions and universals became, as it were, tangible and visible, phenomena like other phenomena—to the born eagle phenomena into which other phenomena were resolved.

She was a bold reader. She had a friend in New York—a man doing some kind of research work—who sent her from time to time great parcels of books, English, French, and German. She used to sink like an eagle into these, to rise with meat in her talons.... These were the years in which, certainly to the mass of the United States, "Darwin" sounded mightily like "Antichrist," Huxley and Haeckel, and all their company, like the Miltonic lesser fallen angels. They were the years when throughout a wide swathe of society Middlemarch was slurred because its author was not married to Lewes; when all French literature was called immoral, when the good died young in Sunday-school books, when Browning was thought unintelligible, when Ingersoll was certainly damned, when architecture and furniture went into a senile doze. Up a long stair from this, it was the period of Dickens and Thackeray, and Lord Tennyson was at his height of fame. But Madam Black belonged to force-lines in the background—reserves in the shadows of the future. She took from books hall-marked "advanced" what suited her, and flew on over the landscape.

Because of her very scope, she had a passion for the single word. Every word opened into the whole scope of things, as back of every facet opens the whole diamond. She had a drill for us that I hold to be a good drill for any. For half an hour each day she gave us words, one at a time, never more than a dozen in the half-hour—nouns and verbs and adjectives, later on, pronoun and adverb, conjunction and preposition. There seemed no lesson about it—we did not then repeat to her what we learned. We simply and quietly, in firelight or sunlight and each for one's self, regarded the word that her deep voice gave out and what it carried. The game was to see what volume was there and what vistas would open. Farmer—soldier—preacher—city—house—tree—sugar—salt—earth, water, fire, and air—working, playing, moving, resting—truth, wisdom, beauty, strength, and courage—moon, earth, and sun—hundreds of words.... To our young strength and powers they expanded as they might. We saw countries within countries. And we learned to pass the first gate of contemplation.

Again, myths. She had here an extraordinary knowledge. I have since learned that there was old scholarship in her blood. She told world-imaginings, world-symbolizations of its own drama, as a woman Homer might. Indian, Chaldean, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Scandinavian—we knew the huge figures, localities, happenings. Moreover, she compared them, linked them for us until there was a great carcanet. It was not given to our years to see what was behind them all. But she told us that there was something behind them all, and that we would find it out for ourselves one day. In the mean time there was huge entertainment! We sat, rapt, before a Demeter-like woman.

She taught us arithmetic, put us into algebra, and the last year we were with her, into geometry. The last named was another strength. We learned to read French as we did English and to speak it fairly. We read German. We had little formal "Science." She taught us the constellations and the simpler sidereal wonders. And we had a clean, straight, honest, lofty physiology with never an organ or function blue-penciled. And here I praise the adult Forths and Dallases who, in a half-century that thought otherwise, said, "Give it to them thus."

Year after year at Flowerfield.... But at last there came letters for Madam Black from Russia. An estate had been settled, there was money—a brother in poor health, in the country near Moscow, longed to see her. Madam Black thought a night, then the next day told us she must go. Flowerfield grieved for that.... It was the springtime. In two weeks she was gone to New York, whence she sailed. For a long time letters from Russia came to Flowerfield. But five years after her going she was killed in a railway accident.

CHAPTER VI

Now I speak of Miriam and myself when we were ten—and eleven—and twelve—and thirteen. Even so, how we can divide from all the rest—take ourselves out of painting, canvas and frame, swim away, two waves of the sea, rise and float off, two violins, from the orchestra? The orchestra and the sea and the painting, canvas and frame, are Miriam and me.

But we still explain the new by the old....

I cannot remember when, at Restwell or Flowerfield, I first made the acquaintance of my cousin Miriam. We must have been very young children. Casting back, I have the feeling of having been always with her.

In the days before we went to Madam Black, in the Flowerfield Octobers and the Restwell Junes, it was John, Miriam, and I. And always, in a measure, it has been John, Miriam, and I. It was so the four years at Flowerfield. But inside the triangle she and I paired with spontaneity, vigor, and thoroughness. The three of us roamed together, learned, worked, and played together. It was brothers and sister, a simple, deep familiarity, a give and take, impersonally sound. But at last, within the general one-and-threeness, Miriam and I sat on one throne.

She was oil to my fire and I was oil to hers. Our flames shot up, blended, coruscated, sang. All vases held more, every color had lamps behind it, every word rang with a doubled power. Salt, zest, importance, showered into everything undertaken. When we were together light penetrated farther, was intenser—warmth was warmer....

But now we were children still. Yet we would have said in those days, too, "I understand Michael."—"I understand Miriam."

We are in the barn at Flowerfield, in the hayloft. It is Saturday morning. There is a fine rain—we cannot go after walnuts as we had planned. We lie in a scooped-out place in the hay. Around us are shaggy, fragrant walls; before us, one great open square through which comes the moist air and gray light, and a dim, shifting view of autumn hills. The roof is the peaked roof of a brown tent. Against the beams are barn-swallows' nests, old and empty. The swallows are flying south. The hay smells dry and sweet. We have wine-sap apples and the Arabian Nights. John has, besides, a piece of red, fragrant cedar and a jack-knife. He is making a set of checkers. I am the story-teller. I tell the story of the "Fisherman and the Genie." John listens, carving his round checkers. Miriam, half buried in the hay, listens. We know all the fat blue volume from "Ali Baba" to "Sinbad." We have learned from Madam Black something of how to tell stories. We had rather tell them than read them from the book.

I tell. I have told the story before—we all know it—but I am on the spiral above the last telling, and the auditors are above the last listening. And it is a good story-telling day. The genie comes out of the bottle. "I see him," says Miriam, rising on her elbow. (The audience always interrupts, assists.) "He curls that way," she demonstrated with her free arm. "Thick and smoky! Round and round and up! He hides the sea.—There's the bottle. It's hard and round and small. It looks like an acorn under a tree."

John, whittling, nodded. "I reckon that fisherman's frightened! I reckon he's thinking he's let out Satan!"

"I tell you I do see it!" said Miriam. She sat up, cross-legged, tailor fashion. Her hands rested on her knees. "But I'm safe! He can't get me. I'm everywhere."

"If you're everywhere you're right where the genie is. You're him," said John. "You're just seeing yourself."

The fisherman and the genie argue together. The fisherman seems about to meet destruction. Then his wits work and he gets the genie back into the bottle. When he lets him out again he is a reasonable quantity, a harnessed energy. He takes the fisherman into the apparent desert where is the strange pool in the midst of barrenness. The fisherman, having the clue to wealth, goes fishing and takes four fish, white, red, blue, and yellow.

Miriam's voice rises again. "I see them. I know their names: Mussulman, Parsee, Christian, Jew!"

John again answers. "Of course you know them! If you didn't know the story, and then knew them, that would be something!"

"I couldn't know them unless I knew them. How could I? But I know them higher and deeper and faster and louder. I know them like that!" She began to clap her hands together. "Mussulman, Parsee, Christian, Jew!"

"Now he takes them to the Sultan," directed John. I continue to tell the story and we go on to the King of the Black Isles who was half man and half marble.... The barn and the slanting rain and the warmth and the fragrance of the hay, the smell of the cedar, the taste of the wine-saps leave the screen.

It is March. The robins are here. The plowed earth pleases them. The maples are fire-tipped, the bloodroot blooms. A roaring wind goes around the house and shakes the trees. There is a swing fastened to a great outstretching bough of the tulip-tree. The bough is high, the ropes of the swing are long, the board is wide. Miriam and I stand here, swinging. We have gotten a great start, we go higher and higher, we bend together, rise together, the wind is in our hair. We go up, we go out, the leaves swirl up after us, we are as high as the high windows. We are drawn back, we rush forward, high, high. The wind is strong about us, there is delight, there is thrill! We shut our eyes. The swing seems to have left the tulip-tree. We seem to be going away, away, through the air. We are high as a cloud and far as the mountains. Flowerfield quits us—we are in the air—there is not even the swing. We are birds flying.... We are one bird, flying, great-winged. The space we are in cracks wide. There is other space. We feel exhilaration that becomes a pounding thrill, a huge chord vibration. Some one calls us from the house. We come back. We are swinging high, that is all, up and out, but locked still to the tulip-tree.

It is yet March, and cold, with a sudden spear from the north. There is a great wood fire in the school-room, burning at dusk. Miriam and I sit on two hassocks, on either side the hearth, watching the fire. Catherine and Lewis are in the room, but they seem to be quiet. John sprawls on the hearth-rug, reading Ivanhoe. Madam Black, in the parlor, two rooms away, is playing Beethoven. Miriam and I sit very still. The fire.... Pine feeds it. The flames bend, roar together, rise superb. Suddenly, again, as in the swing, Miriam and I flow into one. The "she" and "I," the "twoness," come into "weness." But the "weness" itself—and that is the increase—springs into a new "Iness." Something, flashing together, uses the "twoness," but as we use arms or hands. More than that, the very room comes in. The fire, the logs that burn, the forest just behind them—the walls and the furniture—Catherine and Lewis by the window, John and Madam Black come in. The music comes in. It is quite simple, but very satisfying. Catherine and Lewis, by the window, fall out over their box of colors. And there is again the school-room fire, and Miriam and Michael sitting upon hassocks.

It is the same springtime. We are thirteen. Madam Black is going. Presently I shall return to Restwell. October will come, but it will not bring me to Flowerfield. I am going to Hilltop Academy, in Whitechurch. That is an old school, reconstituted, invigorated, said to be full of promise. John is going, too. He will live at Restwell as I have lived at Flowerfield. The old South is behind us, and around us are the middle 'seventies. Miriam's going to school is of less importance than is John's. She will have lessons at home with Aunt Kate. In a year or two, perhaps, she may go to Richmond, to a school there, staying with the Warringers.

There is a hillside of dark trees, white pine and hemlock, sloping steeply to a brook that here proceeds with a deep, sliding stillness, and here plunges from ledge to ledge like a white-maned water-steed. John, Miriam, and I come to this place. We have been gathering wake-robins on the other side the hill, where there is a sunnier wood. Then we pass around the shoulder to the shaded side, cool and old. We sit down on the brown-scented earth, clean save for a mat of needles and fallen cones. We have great bunches of the wake-robins, the pink and the white. We put them down on the cool earth in the deep shade. John and I are going to Restwell in a week. Meantime the three of us are pursuing one of our inner travels. We lift, at will, from the great book and reservoir of otherselves, compagnons de voyage. Our present scene is set in the island of the Swiss Family Robinson. But the characters who figure are from other provinces. Ourselves of course, Uncas from The Last of the Mohicans; Gurth from Ivanhoe; a Knight and a Lady, first found in the Faery Queen; Ariel, Oberon, and Titania; and Ulysses the Greek wanderer. I think, to-day, that it is a good choice and suited to an isle of all climes and products.

We take up our adventures where we left them, over the hilltop. They have their reality—the reality of music, of dream, of play, of lacework, of dance, of art. Our bodies rest under the pine-trees, but the image-making self has swooped to the island. There we follow Uncas through a wood that spreads as far and climbs as high as we desire. Uncas finds directions, Gurth fells the trees. Ulysses—and we—make whatever plan there lies ahead; Uriel, with moth wings, flies beside us—but Oberon and Titania only look out doubtfully from ferny recesses. We are making a road for the Knight and the Lady. Eventually we mean to build a castle—seven castles, like those the King of China built for his daughter. When we need to expand the island we expand it. When we need more and different persons, hey, presto! in they tumble! Oh, life of Uncas and of Gurth—life of Ariel—life of Ulysses—life of the Knight and the Lady!

CHAPTER VII

John and I went to Restwell. I cannot say that I missed Miriam, for I seemed to take Miriam with me. I missed the others at Flowerfield.

But Restwell was most dear to me. I loved mother and grandfather and Aunt Sarah, Daddy Guinea, Mammy, Ahasuerus, and the rest, the animals and the trees and the house, and every other aspect. I loved the graveyard and the bank going down to the river, and the river itself. John knew all the haunts, but now he learned them better with me.

What my grandfather had not read in these four years I do not know. Colonel Forth's pecuniary affairs were yet shot with strain and difficulty. But somehow—and I know here how greatly my mother helped him—he managed to pay the interest on the mortgage. The old Restwell shelter sheltered still. Around him the affairs of the South were slowly bettering. The war was no longer blindingly, thunderously present. It had changed its shape, lowered its voice. Its boulder weight was become spread sand. It was always there, always would be there. You could as little kill the war as kill anything else. On thundered the long freight-train stacked with effects. At every station something was deposited. But also other unkillable things breathed on, such as man's ineradicable hope of understanding all, of enjoying all, of being all.

My grandfather looked older and gentler. He was busy all day with a thousand active, patient adjustments. But after supper, by lamplight, until almost midnight, he read. He had found his way to Jacob Boehme, to Spinoza, to Blake.

My aunt Sarah read less, I thought, than she used to do—less, that is, in books. Remembering, I am aware, by the now stronger light, that she had turned to that inner library, greater than any housed collection. There two and two, in a thousand places, came together and made four.

My mother burned, as always, a light, a warmth, fed steadily by a willing sacrifice. She herself went with joy into the fire of herself.

Oh, Restwell, and all that made Restwell!

John and I, in good and bad weather, walked to Whitechurch and walked home again. Hilltop Academy rose at the edge of town. The distance was nothing to strong youths, country bred. We carried our books and our dinner. The many and many things that along the way we ruminated, debated! All the way there and the way back again, the two hundred and odd school-days in each year, three years on end! There are trees that rise in memory hung with talk as with fruit.

Hilltop Academy, brick, long and gaunt, had the luck to have gathered about it a dozen really splendid cedars. Except for these its hill was a somewhat bare and windy one. As each morning we approached it we might see the boys running, jumping, playing ball, or knotted together—the younger ones—over marbles. In memory a wind seems always to blow. Sometimes snow falls. There is a high, shifting veil, and it and the boys are all of a piece. Boarding pupils and town and country pupils, there were not far from a hundred boys. Out of this number a score made our group. Out of this group two or three pressed closer. They and John and I heard very nearly the same sounds. One of them, Gamaliel Young, came closer than the others.

The principal of the academy was his father, Dr. Abner Young.

I would say at once that Doctor Young was estimable. There was even about him a kind of sweetness, some errant fragrance, some spice lurking beneath fold after fold of mummy linen. His archaic rigidity of line was not without distinction.... Lot's wife looked back, remembered too exclusively the plain—the plane—that must be left, and became a pillar of salt. Salt preserves. Where it is too abundant green things do not grow. She loved the past not wisely, but too well. Yet love is love and covereth a multitude. And little by little, doubtless, age by age, the rain and the wind and the fire undid the form.

Hilltop Academy employed a number of teachers. But Doctor Young kept in his own hands Greek and Latin, history and English. In the letter of the languages he taught well. In the letter of history and of the literature of England he had knowledge. But he was mineralized, and what he did and what he gave partook of that quality. An honest mineral, with mineral beauty.

Each morning, at the ringing of a bell, occurred a Scripture reading, a short homily, a prayer. Doctor Young read, expounded, prayed. The hundred boys sat as still as they could. Sometimes something caught them, oftener nothing. It was a mill-wheel turning. One must feel reverential when one sat by the mill-race and the wheel began to turn. But the wheat in the hopper very rarely indeed made any connection with one's own private oven. (Doubtless, now I think of it, that was because the oven was not large enough.) The mill-wheel stopped, the church feeling flew away, out trooped the hundred boys into the big, bare, echoing hall.

Each Wednesday, at two in the afternoon, Doctor Young lectured. He made these talks into occasions. They took place in the assembly-hall. The smallest boys were excused, but the rest of us sat in solemn rows with clean hands and smoothed hair. All the teachers were there, seated where they might observe both us and the principal. It happened—it grew by degrees into settled custom—that friends of the academy, of Doctor Young, leading citizens of Whitechurch, seeking culture, came to these Wednesday talks. There was always a little block of comfortable chairs, filled from Whitechurch. Ladies and gentlemen both attended. They seemed to think it necessary to listen very closely, to nod their heads at regular intervals. They did not applaud, because it seemed too much like church and the Word of God. I have forgotten to say that in his early manhood Doctor Young had been a minister. He believed with intensity that he still ministered to souls.

The least of the Wednesday talks lasted half an hour. I have known them to run over the hour. He spoke well, without a ragged edge, without a sign of indefiniteness, and always as one having authority. He had a thin, severe enthusiasm, very far from unction, but carrying over. Unwavering belief in one's own revelation cannot but do it. He was the Apostle of the Status quo Ante.

Gamaliel sat with John and me and fidgeted. This father and son loved each other, but it was love dashed with profound care and dissent. Doctor Young felt the impatience in the corner. His eyes darted over. I remember more than once or twice in the sequence of Wednesdays a pause, a "Keep order there!" I remember an angry "Gamaliel"!

Gamaliel broke off his absent-minded drumming upon the desk before him. He sat up and looked at the speaker. The father looked back. Struggle was in the air. "You will break from me!"—"I am breaking from you!"—"Yet you are me!"—"Yet I will carry you with me—Anchises on Æneas's shoulders!" There were, of course, no such articulate words.

These Wednesday discourses varied as to subject. Doctor Young was intensely interested in keeping the world good—in salting it down, so to speak. To do this one must be active and wary on all sides. Weeds would grow! But he would do what he could to fix the soil in the young minds before him. Specifically and sharply to fix it in Gamaliel's mind. There was jealousy of Gamaliel. He must not take the Inheritance and riot with it.

The Inheritance was stored in treasure-houses labeled Religion—Political Life—Economics—Science—Arts and Letters. Doctor Young stood before the door of each and expounded how all things must be kept and polished.

He was a strict disciplinarian. The younger boys—the little fellows—came in, not infrequently, for corporal punishment. Gamaliel was not among the younger boys. But out of school, in the father's bare study, he might yet taste the whip. It was not often, and this mode of dealing with him ceased before he was fifteen. And no doubt Doctor Young prayed afterward a quarter of the night.

I speak as though I did not like the pillar of salt. But I did. There were yearnings and sincerity, and an Egyptian moonlight of old beauty, and great willingness to be kind if only we would stay within bounds!

I hear him now upon the mad—that was a great word with him—the mad attempt, originating in England, to undermine the Christian Religion. He withered with irony Messrs. Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall. Hilltop Academy must sooner or later go forth into the world. He would arm its units against insidious modernity! He proceeded to arm us. I remember that Mr. Millwood was among those from the town who was present that day. I see now the big head and shoulders vibrating assent. The flaying of the evolutionists lasted an hour.

Again political economy. Doctor Young gave up the divine right of kings, but quite subtly and passionately inculcated divine right of class. He was devoted to the point of romance to class, order, hierarchy, successiveness. How feudal, reasonable, logical he was!

Out of his numerous "literary" talks I recall most plainly that upon "Paradise Lost." He labored Shakespeare, but he loved Milton. I remember, too, a scorching warning away from most modern novels, poems, and other works—"modern" and highly explosive, that is, in 1876, to country-living folk. George Eliot was armed against no less than George Sand. A young poet then writing, named Swinburne we must never touch! There were qualities in Browning, but also dangerous heresies, to say nothing of impossible style. The evolutionists—how few were untainted by the evolutionists! Coming to our own country, Mr. Emerson was undoubtedly able, but could be followed only a little way and through careful selection. Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier were safe. Mr. Millwood, who was again among the listeners, shook his head, remembering utterances "against the South."

But Doctor Young differed here from Mr. Millwood. It was not the South that he thought of, but the moral nationality.... I think of him as a kind of Switzerland, shot up high from a narrow base.

Gamaliel had a stub of a pencil and the back of a long envelop and was drawing while his father talked. He drew a man reading and made the figure look like himself. The book held in both hands was quite large. The pencil hesitated, then printed on the cover, SWINBURNE. He next stood on end around the reader a number of volumes, the back of each of which he proceeded to letter. GEORGE SAND—GEORGE ELIOT—EMERSON—DARWIN. There was just a tremor, then the pencil added INGERSOLL.

Now I know Gamaliel, and he was not in the least trying to be "smart." Father and son were alike in dead earnest.

In the late summer, just before the beginning of my second year at Hilltop, I met with an accident. A colt that I was breaking threw me and broke my ankle. It was set and healed, but for a long time was weak. Doctor Gilbert said that I must not walk each day to and from Whitechurch. It ended in my becoming, from October to Christmas, one of the boarding boys.

Mrs. Young was an invalid. She lay on a sofa and looked with dark, hollow eyes at some inner pageant. The house where ate and slept and forgathered twenty boys, under the eyes of four teachers and of Doctor Young, was kept by two maiden sisters, cousins of the principal. It was well kept after our easy-going Southern fashion. The teachers were intelligent and good-natured, the two maiden sisters amiable, maternally-minded women. Every one intended kindness. It was a pretty fair home. The twenty boys slept in four rooms. I had the luck to be with Gamaliel. Moreover, two out of the five in our room went home in November upon some contingency. The remaining one was a "little fellow" of whom we were fond and who had the good habit of going to sleep immediately upon getting into bed. Gamaliel and I could talk till late.

But I do not speak now of the lasting nearness of Gamaliel and me. With John and Miriam he came near. We were countrymen, though Miriam and I were more closely countrymen than any. But we were all of one language. Gamaliel spoke it with poignancy and thrill, differing there from John's long, slow waves, quiet and massive.

Whitechurch rambled around the foot of Doctor Young's hill like a pleasant trailing vine, then went up and down and over a hill of its own. The spire of St. Matthew's, the spires of the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches, leaned against the sky. The square old court-house held its place. There was Garth's Hotel with its row of horse-chestnuts edging the brick pavement, pleasant for men's souls who wished to loaf. The Bank was found retired behind a sycamore beneath which Indians may have lighted council fires. Up and down the High Street signs guided to stores where general merchandise was bought and sold. Whitechurch expected a railroad, but as yet only expected it. A ramshackle stage left Garth's in the morning light and returned in the evening. Folk looked out of window or stopped upon the sidewalk to see it pass, with or without passengers. "There's the stage!" Back from the High Street, down short ways named for pioneers, Indian fighters, and Colonial governors, along Washington Street that paralleled High Street, gathered the homes, brick and frame, large and small, each a unit compounded of units, a person synthesizing persons—as Whitechurch was a person, and the county a person, and the state a person, and the country a person, and the world a person. Most of the houses had gardens, large or small. In the spring there bloomed old shrubs, bowery and fragrant, lilac and snowball and syringa and weigelia. And there were trees and again trees, so many that in June the place grew leafy and sang like a forest.

Whatever there had been before the war, or might be in the future, the present Whitechurch had exceedingly little money. Just in these years the whole country, North and South, knew financial depression. Inflation met Nemesis in the road. Whitechurch was poor, but Whitechurch prided itself upon its ability to rise above what it called "material considerations." Mr. Millwood was a good leader here, and Doctor Young likewise, and four or five other estimable figures, men and women, whom I see now through a mist of laughing and liking. There was plenty of grit in Whitechurch. It prided itself upon its sense of values, religious, esthetic, and social.

Ten of the Hilltop boarding pupils were boys above fourteen. Out of this number the principal saw sparks of promise in at least five. And there were the boarding teachers who should, who must, give scholastic distinction to the cultural life of Whitechurch. The principal himself felt the weight of his responsibility. Doctor Young, the four boarding teachers, the five boys that scintillated and the five that were supposed to be deader coals, attended in a body the fortnightly meetings of the Whitechurch Literary and Debating Society. When there were concerts we went; when there came to town stray lecturers (if Doctor Young approved their subjects) we went. Twice or thrice when there were passionate political harangues (Democratic) we went. Each summer and each winter each church had a supper or festival or lawn party. The Women's Mite Society or the Women's Missionary Society made, collected, and sold good things to eat. We went to these fund-raising church affairs. And of course we went to church. There Hilltop divided. Episcopalians went to St. Matthew's, Presbyterians to Doctor Baird's church, Baptists to the Baptist church, Methodists to the Methodist church. We had no Catholics nor Quakers, nor Unitarians, nor other sectarians. Church-going was not conceived of as among cultural activities. It was a flat command of God. Commands of God were outside of question or modification and outside of comparison with other activities. I discussed this with Gamaliel. "Then something acts besides God?" He answered. "Of course! Don't you know your devil?" We went to Sunday-school and were in Doctor Young's class, and heard there indeed of a fearful devil.... Only—only—he linked on so beautifully to the devil Mandy's Jim believed in! He was a devil of physical terror—but, even so, of grotesque terror!

For all the devil that it talked about Whitechurch, as a whole, was of a sunny temperament. Evils were there, shadows of ignorance and weakness, ancient falsehoods, lusts, vanities, arrogances, and angers. But it wanted to do right, it wanted to grow. Gamaliel wanted that, and I wanted that, and Doctor Young and Mr. Millwood, and Mrs. Young upon her sofa, and the maiden cousins, and Aunt Ailsy in the kitchen, and the teachers and the loafers about Garth's Hotel, and all the townsfolk, those who had more momentum and those who had less, souls ripening, and souls green and crude.

CHAPTER VIII

Once in a long while there came to Whitechurch the drama. In those days stock companies in dilution, shadows of the shadows of metropolitan companies, might be met with traveling, might at times be regarded upon extemporized stages in the smaller towns and larger villages of the country. Such a one came to Whitechurch and played in the big room of Garth's Hotel. An ambitious shadow, it opened its three nights' course with "Midsummer Night's Dream."

Doctor Young permitted us to go. He went himself with the four teachers.

The advertisements promised "a classic performance." The Clarion, the weekly paper published in a neighboring town, said that the actors were of somewhat extraordinary goodness and that none should miss the performance. And Shakespeare is always Shakespeare. The best of Whitechurch prepared to go. Such was the bruit and rumor that folk were coming in from the country. Fortunately the room at Garth's was really big, as big as a barn, as big as an ordinary hall. Of old it had been used for political gatherings and the like. There was a platform with small rooms opening upon it, and floor space and rows of benches.

John, appearing at Hilltop that morning, brought news that grandfather and my mother were coming in. There had not been a play in Whitechurch for a long time, certainly not Shakespeare. John would stay in town, would indeed, at Doctor Young's invitation, return to Hilltop after the play and spend the night with Gamaliel and me.

All that day it was exciting to think of Garth's big room being turned into a theater—exciting to envisage the company at Garth's. Forth goes Imagination, questing his livelihood!

Evening came. Eight of the boys at Hilltop had tickets and were going. Doctor Young would shepherd us down.

He did so; Gamaliel, John, and I at the tail of the string. The night, I remember, was full of stars, magnificent, Decemberish. The air seemed to rise on tiptoe, thrill, rise again, thrill....

Once in the High Street we meet with people, set in a stream, going to Garth's. The old hotel seems to blaze, perhaps it does blaze, perhaps it is only our spirits! We hear voices of men and voices of women, talking, laughing, thrilling, expectant. We enter the big room and see that Shakespeare will have an audience.

So full was the place that Doctor Young's flock could not be herded together. Gamaliel and John and I found ourselves upon a bench remote from the remainder of Hilltop. Ladies entered by the door near us and could not find seats. We gave them ours and removed to the broad window-sill. So much the better! We perceived that we were going to be able to see splendidly.

We looked first at the curtain, that was of some dark stuff, and, to the heightened fancy, wide and high. A row of lamps burned before it, shaded on our side, bright toward the stage that would presently be revealed. Ah! what mysteries behind it all, what delight, what warm adventure—!

We were none too early. This side the lamps a piano and two violins and a horn were getting ready. It was a stately company, that had seen better days, that once would have smiled and passed by Whitechurch.

The great room was warm and packed with men and women and not a few children. Young men and young women predominated. But all the leading citizens were here, all save those who would not go to the theater—even if it was Shakespeare!

Colonel Forth and my mother came in. A man rose and beckoned and they found a place beside the Beechwood Corbins and the Mt. Pleasant Byrds. They were at a distance from our window, but almost immediately my mother saw me, and then my grandfather. We touched in the face of "space."

The piano, the violins, and the horn began. There seemed a start, a thrill in the curtain's self. I thrilled, and John and Gamaliel. One wave broke against the three of us, perched in the deep window. Piano and violin; now the horn—Greek horns—hunting-horns of Theseus!

The curtain parted.

Undoubtedly this company stood above the kind that was wont to play in villages. It was no worse off for scenery than was the sixteenth century when the Mermaid Tavern went to plays. Greek costumes are easily managed—fairy dress, no less.

Theseus speaks. It begins.... Theseus, Hermia, Demetrius, Bottom, and the fairy king and queen are well played—the others more so-so. But it is all good enough; it answers. It is delicate, fine drama.

The room and the stage grow one. We desire, will, and act in England—Athens, ever old and ever new! It is delicate, upper-key drama. We are not split into violent partizanships. We can like, we can hold them all. We even find Bottom within, not without us.

Varying applications are made, similitudes seen. When Egeus complains against his child, cries that she is his, that he may, can, and will rule her destinies, I know that Gamaliel shoots a thought across to Doctor Young. John likes the whole, but he shakes all over when the Athenian "rude mechanicals" play. So with all others present. There are individual linkings-up. But the whole comes under our skin—fairies and all.

There is rhythm in the big room. Forth and return, forth and return, with a soft, powerful, piston beat....

"Midsummer Night's Dream" goes on—"Midsummer Night's Dream" comes to an end. At least, the woolen curtain draws to; the violins slip into their cases. Whitechurch, after liberal applause, is on its feet, is going out. It must be over—but I doubted it, even then.

I greet mother and grandfather. My ankle is as strong as ever. I am going home before Christmas. There is in grandfather's and in my mother's eyes the same look of distance and width that I feel in my own. I note the tranquil measure in their voices, deep on deep, perspective. They are in Whitechurch, but they are also in the wood that neighbors Athens—and in other woods.

I have never questioned the literalness of being there. I was there, as also, certainly, here. The there and here stood on a level. It seemed that there was a largeness that held them both.

Gamaliel and John and I walked to Hilltop under the stars. Doctor Young and the others came on some distance behind us. We had half a mile to go. The night was high and starry, cold and still. We did not talk. Our feet beat out rhymes, our hands were in our pockets, we slanted a little forward, as though we met a wind, though there was no wind materially perceptible.

Something was happening to me—or I was happening into something. It seemed to be a bigger kind of memory.

The world as Drama opened. There was a cracking—a breaking through a crust into a great sea, wide-shored. There came first a strong feeling of Madam Black, and then this deepening. I went under the surface.

There I met the course of true loves that did never run smooth, the Warrior, and the Amazon Bride worth all labor of gaining; the child and the parent, now together, now asunder; friends, and the lightnings that rended them apart, and the rushings together again when the lightnings explained themselves; honest, clownish attempt as seen in its own mirror, and as seen from a balcony above, Asses' Heads and Pucks, and frostwork, lacework, magic fabrics, night and day, and quarrel and reconciliation, and a spectacle and a pageant, a symphony playing itself, with many voices and fine contrapuntal work. Everywhere and all the time....

My feet bore my body on under the stars, but an inner man stood with parted lips. Like sprang to like even here. All arranged itself, sprang where the composition demanded. Then what huge Art—and what towering Artist? What Shakespeare built of Shakespeares—fused from myriads of Shakespeares—fused and conscious?

I was half-way up a stair.

Doctor Young's voice caught us from behind. "Wait, Gamaliel!—I want you to hear what I am saying."

Down I came—we came—to the surface of the surface.

But this night started with Gamaliel and me—and with John, too—new voyages. All our old dreams, all our old make-believe, changed somewhat in character. The sphere of fancy, iridescent, tenuous, hollow, gave way to the great orb of imagination. End and Use came in, though we were not conscious, then, of their entrance. None has ever come to conclusions with Imagination, nor seen where its high Verity begins or ends.

At Christmas I went home to Restwell. For the remainder of the school year John and I walked to and fro. I missed Gamaliel. In the springtime my mother persuaded Doctor Young to let him spend a week at Restwell.... He and John and I swimming in the river!

Hilltop Academy closed doors behind pupils until mid-September should come. What I had chiefly learned there was Gamaliel. That was not a little to me.

Summer came on. It was the summer of 1876, the Centennial summer. My grandfather, sitting between the pillars upon the porch, after supper, twilight about him, the fireflies beginning to sparkle, the frogs singing down by the little pond, the evening star bright in the west, was wont, this summer, to cast back and talk of early statesmen and of events that broke into light at this step and at that of the road called American. He could remember Jefferson. He had had some acquaintance with Mr. Madison and to a lesser degree with Mr. Monroe. He remembered when railroads and steamboats came into general use. He was a boy of nine when he heard of the cession of Florida to us by Spain. He had made up his mind that now Florida was ours he would go afoot and find Ponce de Leon's fountain of youth. He had thought: "What a present it will be for them all! I'll let 'most everybody drink!" He had started and had gotten beyond Whitechurch when Daddy Guinea, who was then a young man, overtook him....

A night or two after this I went to see Daddy Guinea. He was much older than my grandfather; he could not have been far from ninety. Daddy Guinea remembered General George Washington. He remembered the building of Restwell.

I sat on the cabin door-step and he sat beside me, his great veined hands hanging over his knees. "What is dishyer Centennial I heah erbout?"

"It's a hundred years since the Declaration of Independence."

"Sho-ly! En what was er hundred years befo' that?"

I thought for a moment. "We were colonies. We lived along the Atlantic Ocean, but everywhere back in the hills the Indians lived."

"En er hundred years befo' that?"

"The Indians lived on the ocean, too. We lived in England and Scotland and Ireland and France and Germany and Spain and Italy and Africa."

Daddy Guinea's great hands moved together. "Sho-ly! Sho-ly! In en out. In en out. Look at hit one way en hit draws out long—longer 'n from heah to neber! Look at hit ernother way en hit ain't enny bigger 'n er bag of gyarden seed! All those places en the N'United States.... en above the N'United States Beulah Land, where old Guinea gwine, gwine!"

He sat in silence. There shone above us soft, reflected light. The creek was running to the river, the river was running to the sea, the sea— Up and down of continents, and mankind in waves! I knew that earth and all were flying through space. For a moment I grasped intellectual space, and the traveling and the travelers there. Then there were just the homey cabin, and Daddy Guinea, and the whippoorwills.

The next day, Ahasuerus and I hoeing corn in the field under Lone Tree Hill, Ahasuerus, too, wanted to know about the Centennial. That evening, after an early supper, my mother was looking over a pile of magazines—new ones, and rather old ones—sent by Aunt Harriet from Richmond. Most current literature came to us from the Warringers. Grandfather sat smoking, resting, dreaming back or forward. Aunt Sarah, seated where she could get the western light, was hemstitching ruffles, and where her deep desire and will had gone I do not know. Our old mastiff, Hercules, lay by me on the steps. My mother spoke: "This is a little bit, father, that I think you'll like. It's from 'Topics of the Time,' in the January Scribner's Monthly." She began to read.

"All good Americans are looking forward to the passage of the year 1876 with great interest; and it is not to be denied that they are animated by a new hopefulness. The financial failures that occur do not depress business circles as they once did. There is a belief that we have seen the worst, that it is well that the rotten houses should go down, and that we shall practically start, during our Centennial, on a new and prosperous national life.

"Of a certain kind of business there will undoubtedly be more done during the year than ever before. The passenger traffic on the railroads will be immense. All the West is coming East. All the men and women who have been desiring throughout their lives to visit the Eastern coast, yet have never found the occasion for such an expenditure of time and money, will come to the great Exhibition. The thousands in Europe who have long intended to visit America will naturally desire to take it at its best and they will come this year. The Southern States will be similarly moved, and all the lines of travel converging upon New York will be crowded. Railroads and steamboats will do unprecedented passenger business and hotels will be overwhelmed with guests. The whole Eastern coast of the country north of Baltimore will feel this great influx of life. Newport and Saratoga ... will be full. Every Englishman—every foreigner indeed—will visit Niagara. There will be a tremendous shaking up of the people, a great going to and fro in the land, a lively circulation of money, and a stimulation of trade.... There is still another reason for hopefulness. The nation is to be brought together as it has never been brought together before during its history. In one hundred years of intense industry and marvelous development we have grown from a few feeble colonies to a powerful nation of more than forty millions of people. We have been so busy that we have never been able to look one another in the face, except during four terrible years of civil war. In a friendly way, for brotherly courtesies, we have never come together. Well, that which divided us is past. We are now all members of a consolidated nationality, and this year around the old family altar at Philadelphia we expect to meet and embrace as brothers. We are profoundly hopeful that this year is to do much to cast into forgetfulness the bitterness engendered by the Civil War, and to make the nation as united and sympathetic in feeling as it is in the political fact. Of one thing we are certain, if the South comes to the Centennial, it will receive such a welcome as will be accorded to no guests from any other part of the world. The glories of the old Declaration are a part of their inheritance, and without them our festivals would be but a mockery. They are the guests without whom we cannot get along—without whom there would be bitterness in our bread, sourness in our wine, and insignificance in our rejoicings."

My mother laid down the magazine. "I don't think anything could be handsomer than that!"

My grandfather knocked the ashes from his cigar. General Warringer sent him good cigars. "You're right, Cary! All one country—all one country. Like a family—sometimes we pull against one another, and we have differences; but we come together again. More than that—like an individual. We are an individual.... I'd like to talk with that editor."

On the steps, beside Hercules, I became conscious of a great desire to go to the Centennial.

CHAPTER IX

Want and fine lines come together to supply! In less than a week we heard from Aunt Kate. It had been a fairly prosperous year at Flowerfield. Major Dallas, Aunt Kate, John, and Miriam were going to the Centennial—and they wanted me to go with them. Uncle John would give me the trip. We were going in two weeks. We might be away a month, even longer. We would stop in Washington on the way to Philadelphia. There was a possibility of New York beyond Philadelphia. There was—there was—just a possibility of Niagara Falls.

How slowly went by those two weeks!

They passed. I went to Flowerfield; we started from there. I see us now, at the railroad station, in the county town. Look at 1876 pictures to see the type of clothes we wore, we who would not be too far behind Fashion, but who certainly walked in her rear. But Major Dallas would have rested, no matter what he wore, a big, magnetic man, able, and very kind. Aunt Kate had a slight, small body, but a big—oh! a big—nature. John and Miriam and I stood in a brown study waiting for the train to come. I remember how the day was sunny, but not heated. John was fifteen. Miriam a little under, I a little over, fourteen.

The train came—we were aboard with our ancient satchels, our unfashionable umbrellas and baskets. Began our wonder-trip to the Centennial Exhibition.

Virginia scenery was good, was desirable, but the love of our life, for Miriam, John, and me, was getting out of Virginia. We had never been out of Virginia. The long miles, the quite a number of hours that must be overpassed before we entered the District of Columbia, rather appalled us. But then the journey, even through Virginia, grew interesting. John and I sat together, Miriam had the seat across the aisle. The train that day was not filled; we could move about, exchange. Uncle John and Aunt Kate were lovely persons with whom to travel. When the boy came through with fruit we had fruit. When he brought magazines Uncle John bought our choice for each of us. We were traveling finely, comme il faut, with the bloom on the event.

Miriam wore a blue-green poplin, with an embroidered tie at the throat. She had a small round hat of straw, colored like the dress, with a wreath of cornflowers. She was dark and slight and straight, with strange, deep eyes, and a smile that was like a different dawn each time it came.

In the late afternoon we approached the confines of Virginia. At Alexandria we began to thrill. Now the Potomac River, great and wide, with some little boats upon it. Now the Virginia shore behind us. Now before us Washington.... "Look, children! There's the dome of the Capitol!"

Ours was an old hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, where we had three rooms, and outside the long windows a narrow, ironwork balcony. Standing here we saw, we felt, a sycamore-tree, a languorous, summer air, warmer than in our part of Virginia where we lived well above the sea, a pearly twilight, and out of it the gas street-lights springing—then, with a white flash, an arc-light. That was an amazement to more than us that summer! Electric light! I remember first reading this year a phrase that was beginning to come in like a star in bright twilight, seen and not seen and then again seen, "The Age of Electricity." ... We young folk leaned upon the balcony rail. How wide was Pennsylvania Avenue—much wider than Richmond streets—and how long and how straight! We might also have said, in 1876, what strange, shabby buildings line much of it!

But we are in glamour. The All of it was all right. All right is, presently, the hotel dinner instead of the supper familiar to us. All right is the walk before bedtime that we take with Uncle John and Aunt Kate. We walk to the Capitol. By the happiest circumstance there hangs in the sky a full, a golden moon. With that and with the street-lights we might see the faces of the pedestrians whom we passed or overtook or accompanied. We liked the sound of the many feet upon the pavement. Some seemed to say, "We live in this happy place." Some said, "We are travelers like you; we are going to the Centennial!"

Now we saw the Capitol. We were in its grounds. We stood still, we travelers from Virginia, and gazed and gazed upon the moonlighted, white mountain with the rounded crest. It swam upon us in a beauty that was pain. Oh, all ye symbols, belting us like a Zodiac, three dimensional mother-language, thick with visions....

We found a bench and sat down. Major Dallas spoke. "I don't suppose that there have been many periods more politically corrupt than the one we're in. Financially corrupt, too. There's rottenness. The sign of hope is that we smell it, we see it, and are beginning to be ashamed of it. I think we'll have a house-cleaning. But it's going to be hard to get the especial stain off these years.... Well! And still, Kate, there's the White Capitol!"

It seemed lambent there before us. It grew more and more beautiful. I heard Miriam sigh with delight.

We went back to the hotel. Oh, the compounded taste, the long, twisted romance and adventure of the hostel, inn, tavern, hotel! Miriam, John, and I, I know, contacted many an inn beside this one on Pennsylvania Avenue.

We slept and woke to strong enchantment still. We stayed in Washington four days. And here we went and there we went, and we returned thrice to the Capitol. We went, upon a river boat, down to Mount Vernon. "Now I feel at home!" said Aunt Kate, and laughed. "That is, I feel more at home."

But Miriam and John and I were where the novel was to us home.... We loved the Capitol, and we loved the balcony before our rooms at that hotel.... Four days, and we went to the great Centennial Exhibition.

I have seen world's fairs since, but beside them always comes up 1876 in Philadelphia, so small in comparison, but to the child-country so full of taste, so vivid, so sonorous, so remarkable! We from Virginia had a new pleasant tavern to dwell in and a new city to see. We stood in Independence Hall before the cracked bell. "Shut your eyes!" said Miriam. "Close the crack—-lift the bell. Now it's up in the steeple! It's whole—it's ringing—ringing!"

We see Philadelphia. We see the great Exposition of the country and its products, of other nations and their products. All is so novel—and yet is it so? Or is it familiarity in perspective that makes it so rich, so entertaining? Old fairs, great markets, medieval, ancient, further-than-ancient, seem involved in, floating in, the present. Always nation and product have gathered to look at, value, exchange with, nation and product.... The Chinese and Japanese greatly please us; the Swiss, the Italians. Look at the glass-blowers! The iridescent shapes form, drop from the blower's pipe.

Alike the Occident and the Orient please us.

We went to see the great machinery in which the West, and especially our own country, excelled. I do not remember in what factory, nor to any nicety for what purpose the machine was devised—but I remember Leviathan before which—before whom—we stood. And again Miriam and I seemed to open like two windows upon one garden. In and out, stilly, mightily, with ease, with grace, rhythmically, incredibly swiftly, went a mighty piston. Beneath it giant wheels turned, according. There were lesser wheels and lesser, and between the wheels ran swiftly flowing bands. There were rods and cogs and what not, and all important, all upholding all. The air vibrated. Up and down, and in and out, and to and fro, and here and there, and now and then, and around and around, and—without a word coined to express it—in the atmosphere of purpose, end, performance—acted the machine. Time and space and mass were caught at work. We partook of—we were—that complex-simple motion.

Of all the shows in the Centennial Show, I most liked this Machine. It began to spin for me trains of ideas.

We saw and heard at work the newly invented telephone. There was a marvel, due to expand, like the Genie out of the Bottle in the Arabian Nights!

We saw much at the great exhibition. Paintings, for instance, and models of many things upon the face of the earth. And the people and the people and the people, the American people, who went in and out at gates! The clusters, the groups, the relationships within relationship, the dramas within drama! Habit, manner, clothes, gesture, voices, eyes, hands—what a variorum under summer light and warmth, what rainbow molecules astir in a guessed-at form!

We spent a week in Philadelphia, and went each day to the Great Exhibition. Then we traveled on to New York.

We stayed at a hotel, much used in those days by Southerners.... And out of New York I pick now the journeying forth from New York to see the ocean. That happened on the seventh day of our visit. We had seen the eight-story (I forget whether eight or ten-story) building, the child skyscraper. We had been to Wall Street and the Stock Exchange and old Trinity. We had seen the Bowery and Newspaper Row and the City Hall and A. T. Stewart's store. The horse-cars carried us from sight to sight. We had walked upon Fifth Avenue. We knew Union Square and Madison Square, and far, far up-town, Central Park, named Central when it seemed to us Outlying, gave us a green welcome. We went over to the banks of the Hudson and looked across to the Palisades. General Grant was in the White House, there was no pillared white mausoleum as now. We saw churches within and without, and we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Major Dallas, relatively speaking, knew New York. Affairs had brought him here three or four times in late years. He was our pilot. It was the wrong season for a number of things. Old acquaintances, Southerners now living here, were away for the heated months. And the theaters offered very light entertainment. On the other hand, it was prime out-of-door weather, and there was so much to be seen from out-of-doors! We crossed to Brooklyn by the ferry. We walked on the Battery and visited Castle Garden. We rose early one morning and went to see an ocean liner depart for England. It was the Scythia, a Cunarder.... Again, for a moment, Madam Black seemed to be with us. Floating houses, moving bridges, devices to bring into one mind Here and There....

Then, one day, we ourselves board a small boat and go to see the main ocean. We go to Coney Island.

The air is fresh and drenched with light, the salt is in our nostrils. We are going to view the sea that we think—Miriam and John and I—that we have never seen. True, the harbor is filled from the sea, but we dream of surf and thunder and land so far away that the world seems water. In the mean time there is delight in the boats in the harbor and the various shore. There is as yet no Statue of Liberty. We pass Bedloe Island, but the giant woman does not rise above it. We are in the America of years and years ago.

We saw the ocean. We landed from our boat. Coney Island was not then the flaming, clamant amusement park it was to become. But there was a beginning. We landed at a pier; we saw a hotel and tents and booths; some kind of music was playing; persons moved about in a moderate throng. But we had come to see the ocean. We went upon the beach, we walked until we were alone. Here stretched the gleaming, solitary sand, here moved and sounded the waves, here dwelt Ocean. We sat down in the shadow of a dune, the five of us.

At sunset, returning to the city, Miriam and John and I kept to the stern of the boat. Major Dallas and Aunt Kate were forward, talking with some chance-met acquaintance. We three sat, arms upon rail, keeping Ocean still with us. The boat left a wake of dark green, foam streaked and edged, but tapering at last into sunset-colored water beneath the sunset sky. There was aboard a band of four or five pieces. It played "Suwanee River."

The last note died. Said Miriam: "Rivers and ocean and cities.... I am going to travel and travel and travel! Travel—come home—love that and love travel. Travel, come home, travel—"

"You'll have to go on your own wings," said John. "Travel like that takes money."

"Well, I'll grow the wings then—or make the money then. Make the honest money—grow the honest wings." She rested her cheek upon her arms, folded upon the rail. Her eyes looked to where met sea and air. She began to sing under her breath.

"Hear—taste—see.
Taste—see—hear.—
Power behind you—
Go!"

The band was playing airs from "Norma." Uncle John summoned us to look at the light upon the approaching city.

A day or two after this we said farewell to New York. We went to Niagara. We stayed at the Cataract House. We saw the young moon above the earth-shaking, long plunge of the waters.

Then, after two days, we turned back to Virginia, to Restwell and Flowerfield.

CHAPTER X

I attended Hilltop Academy until I was seventeen. Of course, I got a good deal of instruction; of course, I grew. But it remains that Gamaliel was for me the living point there. He had based his lever upon an intention to see what was existence outside his father's formula. His adventures upon that line were due to give him some wounds and bruises, but he proceeded with the quest.

From June to September I kept to Restwell and more and more became a farmer. There was need for all who could work to work. My grandfather was now an old man. He had done and done largely his part. More and more my mother and I helped him; took at last the major part of effort. From September to June, in the short afternoons, I worked still, in the fields, or with the stock, or at the barn, or where not. Mandy's Jim, Ahasuerus, a hugely humorous son of Africa named Bob, and I worked together. In the evenings came book-work preparatory for next day's classes. All times and countries the like has fallen to boys and girls. I, for one, do not quarrel with what strenuousness there was.

And I remember many and many a strong splash of sunshine.

I graduated from the academy, John and Gamaliel and I together. I led in some things, the others in others. Now stood out the question whether my "education" should stop here, or whether I might be spared and financed for the university. There was need of me at home, and need of every dollar at home. If we could keep Restwell, it and my profession lay in one before me. I should farm, with what help I could employ, the three hundred acres.

I was a knower and lover of the country. I had, of course, often and often again, dreams and longings, cloudy aspirations, passionate tangential movements toward more or less vague otherwheres, other spheres of action. But I loved home, I loved Restwell, I loved my mother, my grandfather, Aunt Sarah, the colored folk, the animals, trees and plants, sticks and stones. I could not see my grandfather and Aunt Sarah happy elsewhere. My mother would take her Restwell with her wherever she might be. But my grandfather was growing too old to root elsewhere on this earth. And Aunt Sarah held to the place like a trail of ivy.... Farming was a most useful profession. So long as the world believed that it must have wheat and corn for food, some part of the world must sow and tend and reap the same.

I told my mother, when we talked it over, on the door-step of the summer-house in our old flowery tangle of a garden, that I thought I had better take what education I had, and become what I already was, that is, a farmer. I said that I shouldn't mind it; that, indeed, there was much about it that I liked.

My mother listened, softly striking against her lips a piece of honeysuckle. Then she said, "I want you to go to the university."

"How can I?"

"I've got the loan, Michael. Some day you'll pay it back to Carter Warringer. I'm perfectly confident as to that!"

"But—"

"It's enough to let us hire Wilson Reynolds for the spring and fall work. You'll be here, just the same, all the long summer. I want you to go. I want you to be able to choose whether you'll farm or do something else. You'll take engineering. You want to do that, don't you?"

"Yes, I want to. But—"

"Yes?"

"I do not know if it is what I shall do in the end."

"It will be part of what you do in the end. I fancy," said my mother, "that there'll always be some kind of building roads and driving tunnels and getting at mines and bridging rivers. Even when we travel through the air!"

I went to the university—John and I, still together.

Gamaliel did not go. He was in trouble with his father. Doctor Young wished him to continue with all the classics and become a teacher. First he should be his father's assistant; then, when in the course of nature that father passed on to his reward, there would be for the son Hilltop, livelihood, usefulness, a great and dignified profession.

"I do not want to teach," said Gamaliel. "Not, at least, until I learn something."

"This is nothing to you then?" asked the father. His gesture described a circle with himself seated in the middle.

Gamaliel answered: "I don't mean that. I love you, father, and I am built on all that. But I want to stand on it all, and go on. You want me to stay in it, and to be just it."

"You do not know what I want! You are simply selfish, ungrateful, mulish—"

"If I could take chemistry or biology—"

"You will take the courses I indicate or none at all. Biology! That is the way your Darwins and the like begin!"

Gamaliel turned pale. His mouth, his brows, made dark, straight lines across his face. He spoke dryly, unemotionally. "I am not going, father, to the university."

The other answered in a strangled voice: "Then you shall clerk it, right here in Whitechurch! I hear that Walter Gilbert wants a youth for the drug-store."

"May I go to see him about the job?"

"Yes!"

Gamaliel got up and said, "Thank you, father!" and left the study. Doctor Young sat rigid in his chair. He saw his own anger before him. He had intensity; he did not have breadth. He sat staring for a long time, little by little relaxed. He put his head down upon the desk and said a short prayer. Then, bolt upright again, he turned to finish the letter before him. "Gamaliel" was the last written word. Now he went on. "Gamaliel has always opposed me. Now he declares that he will not go to the university. Very well! I am going to let him find out his own mistake! I shall give him a year to work for his own bread here in Whitechurch. I have just sent him to Walter Gilbert, who, I hear, wants a clerk. A year, I have no doubt, will teach the lesson. At eighteen he will be more amenable to reason and my wishes than he is at seventeen. It will not be too late for him then, though I should prefer that he went now. Of course, my pride is hurt, but it is for the boy himself that I am anxious—"

So Gamaliel did not go with John and me to the university. Nor did he go at eighteen.

He came to Restwell to tell me good-by. We went to the river and sat on the bank above the old swimming-hole. "Don't you fellows forget me!"

"We won't."

"Life's just a fight."

"We three don't fight."

"That's true. But fighting's such a sharp, close reality. It feels realer—like pain! I've had a lot of pain."

We sat and threw small stones into the river. The rings widened.

"How's the old drug-store?"

"I don't mind it so much. I like the mixing things in the room behind. Mr. Gilbert shows me a lot. I'm learning a lot. And I never knew that he had all those books! My father doesn't know it now. I'm there at night, you know. I take a book, and if any one comes in to buy I sell. Then when the store's empty there's the book again. And I like to get with my mind into the middle of all the jars and things—the liquids and the powders and the grains and the bark. But everybody that comes in seems to know that my father and I have quarreled. I hate lectures and I hate pity!" He lifted a good-sized stone and flung it. The water splashed, the rings spread.

"What are you going to do next year?"

"I don't know. What are we, anyway? That's what I want to know!"

But I, no more than he, could answer that. We lay by the river, and after a while we climbed the old fairy bank and coppice to the graveyard, and passed through this, and so across the field to the house and up to my room. And at the last it was again just:

"Don't you fellows forget me!"

"We won't!"

John and I went to the university. Major Dallas accompanied us, to see us established, to show us his old haunts and my father's, to introduce us to old professors. It was still in much the university of the simpler Jeffersonian day. Uncle John left us; John and I settled down. We felt strong men, and in the world!

We had rooms in one of the "ranges," all so cloister-like. But our meals we took at Doctor X's house, Doctor X's wife being a cousin of my mother's. We began to learn our fellow-students, to place ourselves. We stood initiations. We sorted our friends and no-friends....

The university was built upon a plan broad and free. A student had great liberty. He might do or he might refrain from doing. Karma piled in either case, but outside of some agreed-upon matters, none attempted forcibly to mold karma. The student lived and took the consequences.

In this year John and I skirted various obvious temptations. Twice or thrice—perhaps oftener—we ceased to skirt them; we dived or sank, we embraced them, mer-things in old depths.

But we are men of the air, not of the sea. That was an ancient home, but we have parted from it. The sea is in our veins, but there comes something other than the sea. It was hardly a question—or it was a question, as you please—of virtue. Simply, we did not like the taste, we turned, we revolted. Those ancient waters were no longer for our thirst. John, here, came out first, and I followed him. We stood upon the shore, we breathed the air. John said: "I don't see any fun in all that. It's messy and dirty and small!"

So we came out and we found that we still had company.

We loved the university very well. For its outward appearance there was the antique and beautiful simplicity that still sets it apart. We had fondness for many who taught us. Even those we did not like were no worse than stimuli. We liked the life, half free, half bounded, the throng of our fellows, the friends we made, the societies we joined. We liked our rooms, our independence. In retrospect, those two years are thick, for me, with tastes, aromas, touches, characteristic, endearing. Of course there were lassitudes, dislikes, friction, and quarrels, stupidities, ugliness, hot heads and hot hearts, tragic emotions. But these I let disintegrate. I understand them and let them vanish. But the honey of the other I conserve, and put it in its due cell in the great hive.

Out of the hundreds of our fellows, out of all the friendly sort, I pick three. Royal Warringer, John's and my cousin, was there. I admired then and pulled against Royal Warringer, and the doing both persisted. His was the magnificent genius of material acquisition. He knew all his life how to gather into barns, and it is a great power. But he meant to live, just himself, and of course his wife and children, his friends, his servants, his "court," upon the wide-gathered store. Of course he gave gifts, but he regarded them as gifts, and would direct where they fell. So I think that, in a partial and temporary fashion, he was harmful, though he never saw himself as harmful, and so was no hypocrite. And perhaps that is the case with more of us than Royal. He was a little older and in the year above John and me. He had the intention of being kind to us because we were his kin. He had even then more money than had we. He was a handsome fellow, with a large, dreamy, almost mystical face.

And there was Phillip Garrett who was born for political life in a high sense. And Conrad Conrad who used to pass and repass, in the dark or at dawn or sunset, the cell-like room of Poe. I think that he tried to conjure Poe forth, to walk, cloaked, beside him.

Life flowed on, bright and strong.

I went home for Christmas. I went home for the summer, I went home again at Christmas, and for three days to Flowerfield. I now began to see Miriam as she will look and be in glory.

CHAPTER XI

It was the second summer of that university stretch of existence. I was nineteen. When I returned, that June, to Restwell, acquaintances, meeting me, said: "You've grown. You are a man!"

Whitechurch, too, they said, was grown. I saw the new buildings, but yet Whitechurch seemed shrunken. It occurred to me for the first time that it was a village.... Gamaliel was not there. He had never come to the university nor returned to his father's way of thinking. A year past he had gone to Baltimore, Mr. Gilbert, to my thinking, secretly helping him. There he was drug clerk, in a larger pharmacy than could be found in Whitechurch. He clerked, he studied. Out of his letters, which came once a month, I might piece a curious, keen, absorbed life. I talked of him with Mr. Gilbert, the quaint, silent, big-eyed druggist.

"He's an observer, a thinker, and a feeler, in about equal parts," said Mr. Gilbert. "He won't go off in a dream, either! He'll get up and act. He doesn't fancy; he imagines. You've got imagination, too, Michael. What always interests me is a person strong enough to occupy his imaginations—move in, so to speak!"

At Restwell we managed, this summer, to retain the services of Wilson Reynolds. He freed me for a wider social life. I went to parties. I spent hours at Beechwood and Mt. Pleasant, where bloomed young male and female Byrds and Corbins. I went to see Whitechurch young ladies. I dressed very carefully for church, having first thoroughly groomed Boreas, upon whom I rode beside the carriage where sat my grandfather, my mother, and Aunt Sarah.

And in August I went to Flowerfield.

Flowerfield was filled and gay this summer. John had brought Phillip Garrett home with him. Aunt Harriet, sparing a month from the White Sulphur, was here, and with her Dorothea. The Dallases possessed in full the Southern genius for hospitality. Neighborhood girls and youths rode in, walked in, at the old, ivy-covered gate. Windows and doors stood open; you heard the ripple of the piano, chatter, singing, laughter, the sound of croquet balls. If solitude was wanted—or if solitude à deux was wanted—you had the oak-grove, the willowy meadow, the orchard, where the grass grew long and the trees close and sweet. There was also a lane called from old time Lovers' Lane.

In mid-August came the tournament—and that belongs to the old South. You do not meet it any longer, I imagine, in the South that grows out of the old South.

The Flowerfield county was a debonair county, addicted to social meetings, an entertained and entertaining county, a county, moreover, of good horses and good riders. This year, too, was a young-man-and-woman year. The sun rejoiced, the moon was mild at night.

From a bouquet of lesser gatherings rises stately the picnic and tournament to be held at Green Groves, between Flowerfield and the town. Here spread a field for carriages, and shady, gently sloping Watteau banks for the assembly that drove or rode or came afoot, while full before these stretched an ideal course for the mounted knights. I may say at once that the only tilting was riding at the ring. Seven poles, seven crosspieces, seven dangling iron rings, stood at dignified distances. The knights each shook a spear, rode the course at a gallop, rode in all three times the round, came out with as many of those rings as might be gleaming the length of the spear. It was not so extremely easy to gather the fruit!

Town and country, twenty knights entered themselves upon the marshal's list. Each knight rode for a lady. There would be a flowery crown for a Queen of Love and Beauty, and lesser chaplets for three Princesses. The knights chose each their lady, making application to be her knight.

John must ask Dorothea, she being the guest of his house, though he wanted, I knew, to ride for Amy Page. But it happened that Dorothea, who was as imperious as Semiramis, had set her heart upon George Allen, whom she had seen ride at the White. He did ride and shoot very well and she thought that he would get the wreath. She gave him opportunity to ask her, just so soon as the tournament was in the air, and he took it, under the grape-arbor in the garden. So John, after all, could ask Amy Page.

I forestalled Phillip Garrett and asked Miriam. She said, "All right, Michael."

The day of the tournament approached, arrived. It was gay, clear, bright, dry August weather. The grass was browned, trillions of insects sang. I was the Knight of the Green Wreath; John, the Knight of the Mountain, Phillip, the Knight of the Climbing Star. We carried these devices upon light wooden or pasteboard silvered or gilded shields. We rode in long boots with spurs, we had sash or scarf, we had silvered casques or plumed hats. We decked our horses. We followed to the top of its bent all the bright foolery and dead earnest of youth.

Green Groves presented a throng. There were there every one you knew and some you did not know. The brown lists stretched to right and left. The marshals overpaced them. Beyond was the beechwood where, pending need of them, the knights' horses were fastened. We did not go so far in the ways of chivalry as to have squires, though Lewis, indeed, volunteered to act for any one of the three of us from Flowerfield.

The day at Green Groves began gaily, went well. The tournament was for the afternoon.... Afternoon came. The knights withdrew themselves, repaired to the beechwood and their horses. Youth and middle age and elder years left the plateau where had been spread the abundant picnic feast, and came upon the slopes where all might see. The marshals rode around, making sure that the rings swung right. They backed their horses to the barrier. Forth rode a herald in a tabard—Dick Yorke, who knew how to wind a bugle, and had a voice like that of Stentor. The bugle sounded, Dick made proclamation. Into the lists paced King Talliaferro, for the nonce the Knight of the Heart and the Arrow. The youngest women, the girls of seventeen and eighteen and nineteen and thereabouts, sat in a bright parquet upon a middle bank, beneath branchy, huge oaks. It was a day of half-draped, half-princess dresses, of flower-hung, bent, enshadowing hats. They sat in flowered or delicate-colored muslin, nainsook, lawn, organdie, dimity, mull. Marian, Miriam, Dorothea, Nancy, Anne—Amy, Lucy, Nelly, Margaret, Alice—Elizabeth, Judith, Mary, and Betty—Molly, Carrie, Fanny, Meta, and Hope. They seemed a flower-garden, they and the rainbow-scarfed knights. There was a breeze, a murmur, that was like the bees going to and fro. When Talliaferro rode out there might doubtless have been observed a lift of Fanny's bosom beneath her rose organdie.... How long and wide and rich are the vistas of the matter-of-fact!

Well, the tournament! After all, George Allen did not win the queen's wreath. After all, John won it. Warren Lightfoot won the first princess's wreath, I the second, Talliaferro the third. We rode to the Watteau bank and laid the wreaths at the feet of Amy, Alice, Miriam, Fanny. Fiery blushes, laughter, applause through Green Groves—flowery speeches by the best speechmakers—good knights, fair ladies, beauty, devoir! ... Echoes and echoes when the shell of the ages is held to the ear!

The picnic at Green Groves dissolves away. But that night, at Flowerfield, we had dancing—fifty young people and a dozen of the elders to watch, and Jim Dandy, David, and Daniel, the best three negro fiddlers in the county. Jim Dandy called the figures.

The day was over. The dance was over. I lay in bed—I slept at last. The next day the house seemed still, resting, reminiscent. Individuals appeared inclined to go individual ways. I saddled and mounted Boreas and rode to the great wood by Lost Creek. When I was deep in the brown shadows I fastened Boreas and went myself and lay under a beech-tree.

Miriam....

I shut my eyes. Miriam and I were together. There was no environment. Just Miriam and I together.

All things came into the circle of Miriam and me.... Miriam and all things came into the circle of me.... Miriam and I and all things—all persons, all things—dissolved into Being, into Energy, that with ache and with bliss communed with itself.

Time went by. But I was in a timeless deep world where extreme motion and extreme rest meet. I thought in no separate, edged fashion of Miriam. There was a world, and Miriam and I, having created it, moved within it—Miriam-Michael the name of the god.

The simple, strong delight wavered and frayed down. The light of the great sun, the warmth of the great body, diminished and diminished. I came back to separation, to the half-god; farther still to one Michael Forth in a wood by Lost Creek.... I looked at the sky and noted the time of day. Presently I left the earth beneath the beech-tree, and, untying Boreas, mounted him and rode homeward.

But there stayed the glow from the experienced fire.

When I met Miriam at Flowerfield I saw a loved figure—a gate to Being, Wisdom, and Joy. She and I were two leaves of one gate.

At the end of the week I went home to Restwell, and Miriam and I had said nothing of any new depths.

At Restwell for the remainder of the summer and the early autumn there was work enough to do, despite the presence of Wilson Reynolds. I worked with energy, earning sleep, earning also periods up above conscious work, when the machine moved exquisitely, when there came rays from the sun behind the sun.

Between these and the work of the fields fell periods more swiftly vibrating than the one, less swiftly vibrating (clumsy words we use!) than the other. In one of these moods I began to versify. I must express, and so I took a way at hand.

I may have known dimly, for a long while, that it lay at hand. I could remember Madam Black saying, "You may turn to writing." At the academy, Doctor Young's class in English Composition had not bored me. A dance in fetters was still dancing. At the university, "Write it out!" that I have seen have terrors enough for some minds came to me with an old familiarity, as of a chord sounding back of the university and the academy, back of Madam Black, back of childhood ... at any rate, of this childhood.

Now the vast Field of the Emotional potently quickening once again, potently feeling again the breath of spring, I began again to sing, for the bird sings in May. Before work, in the dawn, after work when there was summer night, I wrote down lyrics.

But even so—even then—a stronger mood than alone the lyric began to repossess me. I came one day to filling out between three lyrics. A drama in one long act, infantine enough, doubtless, but to my then eyes poetic, grandiose, and true, came out of my brain and nested in a quire of foolscap paper. I enjoyed writing it. It was quite true, as my mother said! Engineering did not confine itself to one species of material. Driving roads, making connections, leveling mountains, raising towers, conducting commerce, surveying the Unattempted, Attempt in mind, appeared a continuous process, in operation upon more planes than one.

CHAPTER XII

I returned to the university. I came home at Christmas. Again I returned to the university, and all seemed well. In mid-January came the telegram. My mother was ill with pneumonia.

Aunt Sarah, Mammy, and I nursed her. We would have held her in our arms, with us, if we could. But on the seventh day she died.... I touch through all the cells my woe again.

The wave was one that swept me forth. In three months they found one morning my grandfather, very tranquil, smiling, dead upon his couch.

The Dallases came from Flowerfield, General Warringer and Aunt Harriet from Richmond. There was again a funeral, and all the people round about.... Then dead stillness, and the two fresh, raw mounds in the graveyard. It was early spring, but I sat there beside them in what seemed December.

General Warringer and Major Dallas consulted in the house. Restwell was heavily mortgaged. I was nearly twenty—must finish my education. If then I did well, engineering might take me afar. There was scarcely any ready money. I could not keep and farm Restwell. "He would feel the wrench, but he would get over it! All in all, it may well be the best for him. But Sarah—" said Uncle John.

General Warringer drummed upon the table. "I want to talk to Harriet—"

It was Uncle John who, a week later, asked me to walk with him, and when we were by the river opened upon Restwell. "Had I thought—?"

I said that I knew that we were dreadfully in debt, but that I thought that Aunt Sarah and I might yet manage to pay the interest.

"It was your idea to remain at Restwell and farm?"

I said that I didn't see anything else to do.

"Is it more for Sarah, or for yourself?"

I said that I supposed that it was for both. But at any rate, Aunt Sarah wouldn't be happy elsewhere.

"But you could be so?"

"How can I feel just now that I would be happy anywhere? ... Yes, I suppose so. But it is pointed out, sir, that I should stay here and try to pay the debts and keep the place."

"No. It is only one way pointed out, Michael! Now listen to me a bit. I've always recognized in you a spring of joy and strength. You've got the root of genuine growth. You won't be unhappy long, and you'll carry with you wherever you go all that you want out of the past, and no more than what you want. You've got the faculty of selection. Now listen to me. Carter Warringer and Harriet want to buy Restwell."

It came to me with a positive physical shock and wrench. I was being uprooted. I leaned against a tree; my feet clung, pressed into the soil. The river, the hills, the graveyard, the unseen house seemed to strain with me.

Uncle John watched me without seeming to watch me. He spoke on in his good, manly, genial voice. "It seems to us the simplest and best thing, Michael. The Warringers have been looking for a country place. Harriet has a natural love for Restwell. She is extremely anxious that the matter shall go through. It provides for Sarah. She will simply live on here in her own room and place. Daddy Guinea, Mammy—nothing of that kind will be changed. The Warringers do not mean to give up the Richmond house. They will be there in the winter-time, and Sarah with them, if she likes it so. If she does not, you know, Michael, and she knows, that there is always Flowerfield. More than that, Warringer would take on Wilson Reynolds as manager, giving him and his wife the old overseer's house. Sarah is fond of Mrs. Reynolds; if she wishes she can stay at Restwell even in the winter. Harriet has talked to Sarah, and she is content. She thinks that it will be better for you. She thinks about you just as you think about her. Carter Warringer is making money. He is quite able to buy the place and to clear off at once the mortgages. It isn't a favor to the situation. He and Harriet have got a strong desire for Restwell.... Of course, it won't be the old Restwell. Still, Harriet's the colonel's daughter, your father's sister. Carter and Royal and Dorothea are your close kin.... I think the price should be about this figure." He named it. "That will clear the place and take care, besides, of your debt to Warringer. What is left—it won't be much—should be invested for Sarah, with only enough kept out to put you through the university and maintain you until you are earning for yourself. Between us, Warringer and I can certainly find you an opening. After that, I haven't the slightest doubt of your making your way.... It really is the only thing, Michael! There is a heavier load of debt than we thought. You could not keep the place from being sold. This way it goes still to Forths and Sarah's happiness is cared for."

I said, hoarsely, that I wanted to do what was right....

General Warringer bought Restwell.

They did not come to it that year. Repairs were in order, much refitting and refurnishing. General Warringer or Aunt Harriet came from time to time. But for the greater part of the summer Aunt Sarah and I bided alone together under the old roof. Wilson Reynolds was in the manager's house, and more men in the fields than I ever remembered there. I was fond of Wilson, but I did not work with him nor with Ahasuerus and Mandy's Jim, as I had been used to doing. I offered to do this, but Aunt Harriet had said, with decision, "I had rather you wouldn't, Michael...." The Dallases would have had Aunt Sarah and me come to Flowerfield, but she did not wish it, and I did not wish it—not this summer. Had I felt an aching absence between Miriam and me I might have wished it. But I felt Miriam here—here at Restwell. That was a passion now and again of the body, but steadfastly—steadfastly—of the Idea.

Aunt Sarah and I lived dreamy months at Restwell. I say "dreamy," and yet that is not the word.

What is the word, I wonder?

I lay in the graveyard under the oak. Aunt Sarah, who had been cutting dead bloom from the Seven Sisters' rose, came and sat near me. A fleet of clouds sailed in a deep-blue sky, a wind tempered June warmth. Aunt Sarah looked at the graves and at the cross without a mound, and then into the sky—not up into the sky, but into the levels which ran with our hilltop. "The dead come inside of us," she said, "come home inside of us! Just as they feel now that we have come inside them—come home inside them. Waves back into the sea—our sea—touching everywhere! ... What is accomplished, everywhere and always, is a distillation, an elixir of life, free to all.... I've reached to that with my finger-tips." She smiled, and her smile, I thought, had new beauty, the dawn of a golden humor. "Just," she said, "as you all have beautifully, lovingly, cared for my staying here, I touch with my finger-tips, I begin to draw myself to where it truly does not much matter to me if I stay or go! And that is not," she said, "that I do not truly love resting here at Restwell, for I do.... And I love the goodness of all of you, as I love the goodness of those we said were dead." She watched the sky. "It is simple when once you find the key—your own key.... The ever-stored elixir of life.... They are safe with us, as we are safe with them."

I understood her. I felt that way at times about the world, near and far.

At any rate, I ceased to trouble about Aunt Sarah's happiness. And, this summer, I struggled with and threw a squalid jealousy that I felt of the Warringers—more of Carter, Royal, and Dorothea, than of the parents who had been the buyers of Restwell. My mother helped me here....

I was to return to the university and end, this year, my training there. By next June I should be an engineer, earning my living, mining out my career ... somewhere. Faring forth, independence, the world outside the boy's round—all these stood and sang to me, no evil sirens! I was bent to go with them.

And then in late August Aunt Kate came to Restwell. With her came Miriam.

Miriam was slender, dark and straight, healthful, rightly energized. She would walk ten miles without hesitation; she rode well as she danced well, swam and skated well. She had wit, could tell finely a good story; could mimic, but rarely did it unkindly. Back of her wit lay a clear mind and beautiful, guided moods. She had a hand upon herself.

I was so free now from having to work that she and I might, and did, roam afar. Aunt Kate watched us go. I think that she and Major Dallas both guessed that we fitted together. I think that any skilled soul watching us would know that. I think that Madam Black had known it when we went to school to her. But Aunt Kate and Uncle John said nothing—and doubtless they did not know how closely we could fit, and probably, as parents will, they thought of us as being children still.

And Miriam and I had not yet said, "Let us be together on every plane!"

We wandered to the river, we followed it up or down in a boat that I had. I got a horse for her from Whitechurch, and she upon Elf and I upon Boreas rode to far points. We took a book and read aloud to each other in the garden, in the summer-house, or in the shade of our huge linden-tree. In the evening we sat by the white pillars upon the porch, the steps between us, and watched the fireflies.

But I began to ache for Miriam and Miriam for me.

Then, suddenly, Aunt Kate took her away. She had written, I think, to Uncle John. At any rate, she had a letter from him one morning, and, an hour later, she spoke to me upon the porch where I stood waiting for Miriam. We had planned to spend the morning in the boat, drifting along under the willows. "Major Dallas writes that company is coming and that Catherine and Lewis are running wild. I've determined, Michael, to go to-morrow instead of next Monday. Miriam says don't wait for her to-day. She's helping me pack."

Aunt Kate's voice was perfectly kind, but I caught the thread of decision. "You are children. You are first cousins. Do not let us kindle here a great fire until we know where we are and what we are about! Perhaps I ought not to have brought Miriam."

So they went the next day.

The night after she was gone I sat by the window in my room and laid plans.... When I left the university I should be twenty-one. Having studied hard, having had some equipment to bring to the studying, having incentive, having will, I meant, when that formal preparation was over, to work hard, to earn, to make my name to be spoken when experts spoke of engineering. I should be away from Restwell—away from the county, and from Flowerfield's county—away, perhaps, from Virginia.... Engineering: that was the art of turning streams and reservoirs of power to human use.... General Warringer had vaguely spoken of coal-lands, South and West, in which he was interested. I did not know where I might go. Very good! But before I went Miriam and I must put forth in words that we wished to marry. Put it forth for ourselves, Aunt Kate and Uncle John, everybody.... What would be the salary that we could live upon, hardily brought up, knowing how to be simple and to do things ourselves, as we did? I pondered, then set a figure. How long—three years, four years, five years—before I should earn it? Certainly we must wait.... But when I went to Flowerfield next summer we were going to talk about it. I was settled as to that.

I sat in the window. The moon shone bright, the night was filled with the papery, minute, ecstatic voice of an insect world. Beauty flowed in upon me.... I saw that beauty was wide love.

My mother came toward me, and with her my father. I saw them as lovers, and behind them others, and others, and others. Everything, everybody loved. I touched the garden of it through the universe. The universe was the garden.

The sense of Drama lifted and surged in me. I ached with the falling away of love—for and with the dying suns ... cold ... dark. I endeavored for and with all who endeavored to maintain radiance, or, darkened, endeavored to regain, relume. I knew great bliss when the energy streamed and lifted. All love.... Red suns—golden suns—great, white, intense suns, the high lovers, who loved lovers, loved love.... The highest Sun—nurse, mother and father and lover of all—the reaper, the gatherer, feaster, the Eternal Laborer and Enjoyer, the immortal Lover and Beloved together!

I sat in the window and knew old Vaughan's "bright shoots of everlastingness."

CHAPTER XIII

The following summer John and I, Phillip Garrett, Royal Warringer, Conrad Conrad, and a number beside, graduated from the university. John saw before him the management of Flowerfield, and, if he cared for it, a partnership with his father. Phillip was for the law. But for him the law would prove but a stepping-stone to political life. Conrad, who had a little money, was boldly, flat-footedly, for travel. When the money gave out he proposed journalism. Royal had no immediate plans.

Major Dallas came to the university to see John and me step from formal tuition into a massive, unofficial school. How green was the lawn, the trees, how white the pillars, how warmly fragrant the air, how kindly, intoxicating, the ceremonies, the farewells! ... Arrived the moment when Uncle John, knocking at my door, was asked to enter and given the one good chair. I leaned against the mantel. "I wanted a moment to ourselves, Michael.... You've done mighty well! We're proud of you. We're sure of you."

I thanked him.

"Has Warringer spoken to you?"

"Yes. He says I may have the place of assistant engineer at Landon."

"Just so. Does it please you?"

I thought. "Yes. It's a long way off, but they say it's a big field. I should wish to earn promotion, sir."

"If you earn it you'll get it. The Landon concern has alliances all over the country. You'll find passages open. Well! Do your derndest, boy! Keep honest—keep kind—keep open to the big waves. You'll go, Carter says, to Landon in the fall. He proposed that in the mean time you come to them at Restwell."

"Yes."

"I told Carter that it was natural that that might be painful to you. I suggested that you go to them for two or three weeks, but then come to Flowerfield."

"Thank you, uncle. Conrad is going on a riding trip from one end of the valley to the other. He had asked me to go with him, and I should like that. Then if I might stay ten days at Restwell, and then come to Flowerfield—"

"All that's feasible. All right!"

I went and sat by the table near him. "I want to come to Flowerfield, uncle, but I want you and Aunt Kate to know something first.... I love Miriam. I want to marry her—just as soon as I can make and keep a home. We haven't spoken about it, but I am sure that she loves me and wants to marry me."

Uncle John, his elbow on the table, shaded his eyes with his hand. We sat very still. Laughter of men and women floated over the lawn, June groups going by.... I experienced, suddenly, strongly, the feeling of Miriam with me. I could have said, "Miriam!" I could have expected to hear her answer, "Michael!" Uncle John dropped his hand. "Well, I can't say that I am surprised, for I'm not. Neither Kate nor I.... Any one seeing you together must see that you and Miriam are happy together. Your differences don't seem to make any difference.... There's a feeling against first cousins marrying. I don't know whether it's right or not."

"It's right for us to marry," I said.

He smiled. "I suppose any cousin-couple would say that! ... Well, I shouldn't put it in your way if you truly love each other, and I believe that you do. But you'll have to wait, Michael. I wouldn't hear to your marrying before you were twenty-six."

I took his hand and the eyes of both of us were wet. "It's all right. It's all right!" he said. "You'll come to Flowerfield, and you and Miriam may talk it out together.... The world's built so—we take our turn at the building—to be good builders, that's the desideratum!"

I went home with Conrad from the university. General Warringer and Aunt Harriet were so good as to send Boreas to me there, Ahasuerus bringing him. Conrad's home held sisters and genial parents. We had a week of country gaiety, after which we set forth, like knights of old, upon that planned riding-jaunt. We meant to see good part of our state, to wander for a month. Around and about, we might cover some hundreds of miles. Riding so was an old fashion in Virginia, beginning now to fade with the tournaments, the barbecues, the camp-meetings, and twenty other features of the fields behind us.

Conrad was Conrad Conrad, though now he thought that he was Poe come again, and now darkly hinted at some earlier wight. Dark, not tall, slight, he was intent upon wearing his hair somewhat long and upon growing on lip and chin an imperial like Poe's. He wished, besides, to wear a cloak instead of an overcoat. Occasionally he tried to get drunk, but he did not really like whisky. As years went on he dropped the Poe and was content to be Conrad. The latter had idiosyncrasies enough to please him, without borrowing.

Conrad and I had great bouts of talk, alternating with as equally great, long and significant riots of silence. In some things each was the extreme of the other and so we met. I liked him, and I suppose that he liked me. I did not have to see everything as he saw it, but it interested me, what he saw.

So we rode green miles through Virginia in very good fellowship. The country lay beautiful, around, behind, before us. We slept in small towns of red-brick and frame houses, abounding in trees, or in farm-houses that were taking on a prosperous air. By 1882 Virginia wore a different look from that war-worn look I could remember. The South was beginning to prosper. As we rode we saw schools building, paint going on houses, fences standing whole, roads slowly bettering. Persons whom we met bore a cheerful aspect. An old farmer told us: "Yes, by gosh! Times air surely improving. Reckon we've pulled out of the mudhole!"

Conrad grumbled. We had another long, free silence, then out he came with his advocacy of the crumbled and broken-down. He was a lover, I told him, of vestigial remains. He grinned. "Well, you go in for germinal things! If I see the one, you go poking around for the other! You don't rest in this landscape, either. If it wasn't for your very comfortable, earthy sense of earthy drama you'd float—or perhaps fly!"

"If you hadn't built a raft out of a kind heart and a sense of harmony—down you'd sink!"

"I don't know about that. Look at that terrible house! They've fresh painted the house, and not only that, they've painted the fence and the horse-block and the well, and not only that, they've painted the trees!"

"They've mended the chimney, too!"

"There's a great career in truly going in for dilapidation."

I whistled as I rode; then I said, "If you'd turn you might become Lord Mayor of London."

"That is, there's as vast the other way."

"Vaster."

"Well, I don't know," said Conrad. "At any rate, I don't like paint on trees, and I don't believe that you do, either."

He showed me much as we traveled. He had a gift for the elusive, the just to be perceived then vanished. "Thought forms—affection forms," he called them, even then. His range of color was extraordinary. He showed me hues and combinations of which I had not been aware. He saw something through the dismal and ugly. He had an influx of enthusiasm for neglected territories which removed the neglect, gave them life, made them shine with a weird, metallic or vegetative beauty. The same thing poured over a decrepit horse, over wandering swine, over a cur dog which ran along the roadside. At last I caught the key—the gipsy, wild, aromatic, piteous values. First and last, Conrad gave me much. Everybody and everything gave me much.

We had no hard and fast route. From the Valley pike, up and down which had marched the weary armies, blue and gray, we turned aside through New Market Gap to the Caverns of Luray. We also went to Wier's Cave, near Staunton. After that, riding southward, we visited the Natural Bridge.

We felt what it was, in these caverns, to be in the deeps of the earth. We breathed the unmoving air, mortally still and cold; tasted beyond our candle rim the thick dark; saw the stony shapes, the stalactites and stalagmites. When we struck them, uncouth echoes were about us. There flowed underground water. We felt dark height above, and guessed that there was a roof to us that was a floor to beings who walked in a different world. When we came out the rushing air, the heat, the light, were for an appreciable time excessive, painful. It had been Conrad's whim to stay within the earth longer—much longer—than did the usual visitor, and he had paid our guide to cease descriptions and engage in silence.

Coming to the Natural Bridge, we found there a hotel filled with summer folk, and among them two or three acquaintances. We were welcomed with empressement—young men at summer resorts are always so welcomed. We saw pretty girls upon the porches, flitting in and out of rooms. We caught a glimpse of a tennis-court. Colored musicians, somewhere in the background, were tuning fiddles. Almost immediately a great supper-bell rang. The pretty girls came into the dining-room in thin silk or fine muslin dresses. If I remember correctly, it was the period of the polonaise. Conrad's and my acquaintances introduced us to heads of families and to their bright daughters. It appeared that there was to be a dance, and that we were counted upon. Fortunately, we had each with us a small portmanteau. We danced, and there was a long porch for promenading, and steps and dusky angles where groups of two might sit and murmur, and starlight and a midnight moon, and around all the place the herding shapes of the Blue Ridge. The fiddlers fiddled, we danced the lancers and we waltzed. There was punch. But dancing and all were held within bounds. Conrad and I had been in bed two hours when the cocks began to crow and the summer dawn overlaid stars and moon.

The coming day was the Fourth of July. During and after the war the South had scantly or not at all celebrated this day. But now it had come to be that the Fourth had stolen back, and this summer throng was going to celebrate it.

In the afternoon the country people were expected to come in. The hotel chanced temporarily to shelter a political light. The light had consented to shine. We were to have a Fourth of July oration. At night a novel thing would be done. Paper lanterns were being hung from the hotel to the gorge of Cedar Creek and down the steep path to the gorge floor where you stood and gazed upon the mighty rock bridge. Bonfires were heaping, above and below, and the bridge was to be illuminated by Bengal lights. There would be fireworks.

Conrad and I, descending, found ourselves counted upon in the office, upon the long porch, in the dining-room. There was to be a ramble under the bridge, to the cave, as far as the Lace Falls. Twenty pretty girls and certainly not, without us, twenty swains! I may say at once that it would have been a shock to us if we had not been counted upon.... My picture of the Natural Bridge of Virginia remains wreathed about with morning-glories.

Returning to the hotel, we had dinner with Fourth of July features.

By two o'clock country phaetons, carry-alls, buggies, sulkies, were arriving, together with horsemen and walkers. A pleasant, friendly country crowd spread itself over the lawn. Without the white social pale, within their own social pale, drawn under their own clump of trees, there had gathered, too, to hear the speaking, a number of colored folk. Speaking over, they would not further mix, but would go on to their church, some distance away, where under the pine-trees they would have their own festival. At night they might come back and look at the bridge when it was illuminated. Where the two colors came into chance neighborhood there fell neither harshness nor sullenness of greeting. That was due, perhaps, on both sides, to some genialness of inner climate.

Apparently the management at the Natural Bridge would outdo itself. It had provided a brass band, though a diminutive brass band. Now this discoursed music, "Dixie," "The Star-spangled Banner," "Yankee Doodle." The war was over by seventeen years.

The orator appeared. He had the build—tall, spare frame, great chest, smooth face, hair worn just a little longer than was the fashion. He had the voice. He had the tradition. And, a most fortunate plus, he had a fair share of insight and foresight.

He spoke from the steps of the hotel, the summer guests massed in the porch to right and left, the country gathering taking the foreground of grass and driveway, checkered with light and shade. The brass band ended "Hail, Columbia," a gentleman of the old school introduced the orator. We all applauded. Lord Orator bowed to all.... Virginia and the Revolution—Rockbridge County—Nature's Triumphal Arch at hand—George Washington who had climbed and cut his name far up upon it—Thomas Jefferson who often had ridden here to gaze upon it, who had called it in his Notes "the most sublime of Nature's works"—soldiers and statesmen who had gazed upon it—and now we, my friends—

Presently he was fingering the ancient thread of triumph over old Mother England. It was in the Fourth of July repertory of orators. This one overdid it less than others I have heard. Nor was he wildly, loosely, childishly spread-eagle. A change had come or was coming to the best of the type. There was state spread-eagleism and United States spread-eagleism. In Virginia inevitably still, at this period, it was state spread-eagleism—Southern spread-eagleism. But he muted it, used the soft pedal. Even when he talked of the Confederacy. He did not fight the war all over again. He quoted Wordsworth—

"Old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago,"

and left it at that. Presently he really was panegyrizing the whole country. It had to be a panegyric, being the Fourth of July. He had a word of good for New England, two for the Middle States, three for the unrolling West. Vaguely might be seen above him the angel of rapprochement, of unification, He spoke more and more appreciatively of the United States of America. A sense of enlarged being, a sense of nation, really stretched and shimmered around us, through us.

Emerson and Longfellow had died this year. The Fourth of July speaker at the Natural Bridge in Virginia gave them a meed. They were "ours." The Greely Expedition battled with Arctic seas. He spoke of "when we gain the Pole." There were Apache risings in Arizona. He spoke of "our" settlers out there. The East was beginning, accumulatively, to know labor troubles. He said, "I don't see the outcome for the country, but we'll hope for the best"—not, of course, that he said it short and unadorned like that. "The country." The phrase, slowly, bashfully, came in in place of "My state."

There occurred even an adumbration of a wider unity. He closed his hour's speech with something about "mankind."

There was applause. The band played "Dixie," "Yankee Doodle," "The Star-spangled Banner."

A lawyer from Lexington spoke. Plans and purposes of very huge moment of the Democratic party. There was applause. The band played "Home, Sweet Home."

Dusk sifted into the air, but with warmth yet and a faint glowing. The Chinese lanterns were lighted, there leaped a bonfire at the rim of the ravine. A ragged procession, here thick, here dwindled to an Indian file, crossed the plateau of the hotel and cottages and, beginning to descend, dipped beneath conifers—Thuja occidentalis, arbor-vitæ—which may have been standing when Columbus discovered America. Some of the figures themselves bore lanterns; below by the creek another bonfire flamed. Above, around, below, the craggy gorge with the bridge of rock was thrown into moving shadows and faint ruddy light.

The procession, breaking, established itself wherever was vantage-ground. Conrad and I, counted upon still, found a nook for four. Up and down spread a Doré illustration. The fireworks began, sent from the plateau above. The band still played. Roman candles shook forth bright planets. Rockets rising with energy curved far up, broke in stars red, green, and silver. The Chinese lanterns bobbed with delight. Up and down, bass, barytone, tenor, contralto, soprano, voices and voices rose into a chirping, singing sound. The great-boled trees, ever green, may have thought of old Indian acquaintances, of bear and wolf and panther, of parent and grandparent trees who held tradition of still a different earth. And yet all through had held the chirping, singing sound. Old and old and old—we are so old!

Down by the creekside dark figures touched off the colored light. The water, the tree masses, the seamed cliff, the arch of rock two hundred feet above the stream it spanned, turned fire-red, turned living orange. Ah! Ah!

The lights sank. A final lonely rocket burst into a last group of stars. The band had done its duty and its wages' worth; it wasn't going to play any more. In the Chinese lanterns the candles guttered down. There was indicated much helping up steep ways of those who counted upon us. The trees of life saw us go, settling back to their cool dark dream under the stars. Back upon the level before the hotel the wheels of all the country vehicles seemed in motion. Shadowy horsemen pushed away. After the Bengal lights, all the dark seemed spectral.

In the morning Conrad and I, too, rode away. We quitted the place in the sunshine, after breakfast, the porch filled with genial summerers. The twenty pretty maidens waved farewell, the young men whom we left behind us grinned cheerfully. We looked as well in the saddle as we knew how—we rode away, riding over the Natural Bridge, plunging into the green day. We were for the Peaks of Otter.

CHAPTER XIV

Crossing James River in an ancient flat-bottomed, open ferry-boat, we rode at leisure through the July weather, dined at a farm-house, and in the golden afternoon light, by a road sufficiently long, rough, and steep, climbed the mountain. Well below the rocky top we found a makeshift shed with spring water, and with hay piled in a corner. Boreas and Conrad's mare Jenny we left here and climbed on afoot. At the top stood a cabin and stood watching us the solitary caretaker. He greeted us, "Evenin'!"

"Evening!" we answered.

"I'm not," he said, "the regular man. He's taking his Fourth of July. But I reckon I kin make you comfortable."

The hut was not remarkably clean, but we would not let that trouble us. The man set about filling the stove with wood. "You-all take coffee? I kin make good coffee."

We left him making it and went without to see the sunset. A great boulder propped us. Four thousand feet in air, we looked and saw the cone shadow of the mountain lying purple upon the land. We sat and gazed. "We've got a fair earth! Look at the geometry of it—the circle and the cone."

Conrad answered, "It's a 'tarnation queer place—old earth!"

The sun sank, but great rays, lanes of light in the sky, spread like an open fan. The Chinese lanterns of last night came into mind. "Variousness!" said Conrad. "My God! what an Artist!"

The air changed its quality, a carpet of violets covered the earth, Venus was born in the western gold sea. The caretaker spoke from behind us. "I thought maybe you'd like your coffee and bread out here," and put down upon the rock a battered tray. There were three cups and three plates and we sat and ate together. He was a man of thirty-five, long, tawny, with blue eyes and a drooping tawny mustache. He had a drawling voice like dropping honey. When we had eaten and drunk he piled the dishes upon the tray and set it aside, then leaning back against the boulder, lit a brier-root pipe. By now he knew our names and whence we had ridden and where we were going. We knew, too, his name, and that he had a bit of a farm, and that he had been in the war the last year, when he was seventeen, and had been wounded at Cold Harbor, and hadn't any education beyond a little free schooling, but wished that he had. He was married and had children.

There was yet coral in the sky. Below us, in the vast expanse of hill and vale flattened by our height, lights, separate and small, were twinkling forth. The day had been warm, and the night up here struck only pleasantly cool, like July water. "You see a right fair slice of Virginia," said the man. "Thar! Did you see that shooting-star?"

It was a considerable meteor and dripped gold. Ship and wake went out. "You've been to the university," said the man. "I wish you'd tell me what that is—"

One of us told him what the text-books said. "That's interestin'," he remarked and smoked his pipe. "I take spells of wonderin'.... A smashed-up earth—a-shootin' for ages in little pieces here and there as it gets drawn. Well—"

He and Conrad smoked. I did not smoke. We all watched the sky where now the stars were pressing thickly. "I was raised a Baptist," said the caretaker. "I've got an inquirin' mind, and I gather that all kinds of strange notions are goin' around. Do you believe in damnation?"

I said I didn't—not in the old way. Conrad said he didn't know. I said that I thought I believed in occasional, finite damnations—temporary damnations, so to speak.

"But they could last a long time?"

I agreed as to that. "And one might tumble into them again and again."

"But you don't believe in hell-fire?"

I said that I thought that was a metaphor. But that it might get mighty near reality sometimes.

"Damned near!" said the man. "Well, who do you think damns you—or saves you?"

I said that I thought that I did.

"That's the way I twist," said the tawny man. "Times air changing! We're like the past and we ain't just like it.... Old Daddy Religion's got a son that appears to him somehow different! Might as well own him. That's what I tell the preachers when they get after me."

Conrad yawned.

"I heard much talk of it about and about,
But where I went in I still came out!

Listen to the locusts in those bushes! They haven't stopped talking since Troy fell!"

"I've got a habit of thinkin' and thinkin'," said the tawny man. "Kind of rememberin' and rememberin'.... Anyhow, I believe in kindness!"

We looked again around us—Scorpio in the south, the Bear in the north, the Eagle in the east, the Lion in the west, and right overhead the Crown. The tawny man took up the tray of dishes and we all moved to the cabin. I have slept in better beds, but Conrad and I were tired and we slept. Waking once or twice, I heard without the window the locusts still talking.

We were up for the sunrise. The man called us while the stars still lighted the sky, and gave us hot coffee and corn-cakes. He had been down, he told us, to the horses and had watered and fed them. We ate and drank, the thin light stealing in. Then we went out again to our boulder, but faced now the east. Silver—silver and amethyst—amethyst; a cloud shoal turning gold, in the forest below us bird song, then the sun and the hollow of the air and the earth beneath warm and sheen.... So we said good-by to the tawny man, paid our reckoning, ran down the rough way to Boreas and Jenny, and in the saddle again departed the mountain.

We rode and we rode on through Virginia, and we saw our state a lovely country, aiming at being lovelier—lovelier—lovelier, body and soul!

In two weeks more Conrad and I bade each other good-by. He rode to his own home, and I to Restwell.

I came to Restwell in a shimmery, warm afternoon. Uncle Carter and Aunt Harriet were very kind.

I had my old room.... I rose when the cocks were crowing, dressed, and, letting myself out, went over the gray fields to the graveyard. I saw the dawn from there, lying with my head upon my mother's grave.

That afternoon I came here again with Aunt Sarah.... Aunt Sarah and I clung together, though not with any bodily touch. It was one of her "ways," the standing aside from all that. I never saw her give physical caress or embrace, or invite caress or embrace. But her spirit hovered, inclosed, was kind.

She said that she was happy—that they let alone her island, respected territorial waters. "They're the best—the very best—of Nineveh, Babylon, and Rome! They let me go softly in my far Atlantides." We sat beneath the oak, and then she took the dead bloom from the roses, and I held the basket for her as of old.

Dorothea, Carter, and Royal were at home. Royal was more to me than were the others—for all that there was a picket fence somewhere which, from his side, he refused to cross, and I from my side refused. But there was something of the colossal in Royal that must be recognized. He made me think of a vast, tireless, mental rather than physical bull-god—Apis who was acting very simply, according to his nature, and yet was big ... and feared ... and sacrificed to, and on some sides certainly might be admired—and even loved.

I had a strange feeling about Royal. Now he attracted me and now he repelled. Either way, I understood him. It seemed to me that far down time we had been nearer together. I did not seek him again, but I felt the pull of him.

Carter was a smaller person altogether—amiable, a little weak. He was a handsome fellow, with an agreeable voice, and he danced well and was talkative and Aunt Harriet's idol. His father was ambitious for him, his eldest son, named for him. But by degrees it grew evident that Carter might adorn a fortune, or a society built on fortunes, but that he could neither make a fortune nor strongly help others to make one. He was able to spend. He was good-natured, and I do not know that he ever did any especial harm.

Dorothea was another proposition. I did not know whether I liked or disliked Dorothea. She had a sultry beauty, and an arrogance that fitted her like a low-lying haze, a misty, heat atmosphere. Out of this started at times twisted beauties of thought or deed....

My cousins meant to be kind and were kind. There must have been a general agreement that it would be hard for me to return so to Restwell, and that it must be made to seem like home and family. They did their best. I was not, I hope, ungrateful.

There were guests besides myself. The Warringers kept the house filled, entertained with something of the old before-the-war lavishness. Here were two sons and a daughter who must be persuaded not to miss the Old White and Old Point. Aunt Harriet liked, too, many and young faces about her.

Twice or thrice I rode into Whitechurch. There I saw Mr. Millwood and everybody else—and Doctor Young, to whom I did not speak of Gamaliel—and Mr. Gilbert, the druggist, to whom I did. Gamaliel still lived in Baltimore, earning and studying with a chemist there. He wrote to me, but less frequently than at first he had written. In his last letter, after a paragraph of surface details, he had suddenly dropped a line and written: "How long and wide have we lived, anyhow? Where do we begin or stop, or are beginning and stopping words of ignorance? I am going to work until I find out—possibly after I find out."

Mr. Gilbert showed me a letter from the Baltimore chemist. Gilbert's drug-store had before it a vast horse-chestnut, giving in summer a solid shade. The place rests in mind forever dim and cool, small, old-time, dispensing few articles besides drugs, having no throng of customers. One went down a step to go in at the door. A bell rang, the door opened, there came a waft of odors compounded so that one caught far times and far lands. A gnomelike, bright-eyed, elderly man shuffled in from a back room. Something that tasted of eternity was in the place.

The Baltimore chemist stated that Gamaliel Young was getting on very well. He attended to business and in his odd hours studied hard. "I should say that he had a streak of genius—but he's as unsociable as any hermit-crab! He's got some queer associates. They aren't wild, except in their thinking. They're wild enough there!"

Mr. Gilbert folded the letter. "Sampson's a good man, but he's a pedant. He doesn't know eaglets when he sees them."

I said: "I think Gamaliel's an eaglet. I'm glad that you think so, too, sir."

"I don't know what, precisely, he's hunting. But he's a seeker, all right."

"He wants to find what he is—what we are," I said.

"Does he? Well, that's a considerable job!" said the druggist. "See if you can find what we are not! When he's as old as I am he'll be content if he has laid hand upon one new land. It takes a fleet made up of fleets to find the universe!"

"In short, it takes the universe."

"Quite so! ... Well, and Michael, you're to be an engineer—"

Going out of town that day, I overtook Mr. Millwood upon the road to Restwell, driving himself in an old buggy. He said that he wanted to talk to me, and so, dismounting, I fastened Boreas behind the vehicle and took my seat beside our old family friend. He talked about Landon and the kind of place they said it was, and about my going away, and about my mother and grandfather. But what he most wanted to say was that he hoped that I would take the Lord Jesus with me.

Now I truly loved Jesus of Nazareth, but I could not talk nor think of Him as Mr. Millwood talked and thought, as Mr. Millwood wished me to talk and think. So it ended in silence on my part. Mr. Millwood sighed. "One day you will know and love Him, Michael! A young man may keep on hardening his heart, but the Lord is the Lord and will break it in His hands!"

I said: "That sounds like Doctor Young, Mr. Millwood. I don't suppose that I love Jesus well enough—that's true. But I profoundly do not feel that He's my enemy nor that I am His enemy. I feel, instead, that we are friends."

"But you must see that He is your Lord and Saviour! If you do not see that, you see nothing!"

As we jogged on I had a vision of Canaan and Galilee, and of a young Jewish man who walked in and out of little villages and talked with the folk, or who sat solitary on hillsides or by the blue water. He came warm against my heart. I could feel a brown, lean, strong hand in mine, a hand with grip and meaning. I could and did feel for Him love and vast reverence, but I could not feel that He alone was Only God. I could feel the Christ Idea, that had always been in the world, nearer Him, not so near to me, and to that extent He was diviner than me. The extent might be huge. He might be adult and I a babe. But Idea is free ocean and free atmosphere. I, too, swam and flew toward myself as Risen Man.

Nor do I think that there was, this sunny day, more pride and self in me, sitting there, than in the old priest of the temple who had baptized me and who now quite sorrowfully believed that, despite it, he might have eventually to number me among the lost. But Mr. Millwood's imagination was not the imagination of Doctor Young. He could not devise a great lurid picture of the damned like the sands of the sea for number, and of hell like an illimitable Inquisition torture-chamber. He felt discomfiture, some anger and solicitude. But he was an optimistic, cheerful, ruddy man, and he could not dislike me long, nor really picture me as sawn asunder and sawn asunder again, or plunged into scalding oil in an eternal sequence of horror. Before we came to the new bridge across the river he was once more discoursing of Landon and the temptations and dangers, broadcast before young men, which he trusted I would avoid. "But you will!" he said. "Your father and mother, and grandfather and grandmother have saved you from that."

So we came to Restwell. He missed old faces, but he was fond of Aunt Harriet and she was fond of Mr. Millwood.

I stayed at Restwell three weeks. It was not only the big house and those in it, but it was Daddy Guinea and Mammy and Mandy's Jim and Ahasuerus. I loved these four a little more vigorously than I loved Uncle Carter and Aunt Harriet—and, I may think, just as dutifully. I should hardly see Daddy Guinea again on this stretch of the way. No one knew how old he was, but he was very old. He would talk a little, but then he would sit on the doorstep in long silences. I sat with him, and I fell to looking back of him into Africa—back of the fields, the slave-markets, the slave-ships, the enslavers, back, back—back of the Guinea Coast into the center.... And the white man, back, back, back—and here, too, were forests and miry, steamy river bottoms and naked skins and the whirling rattle. There came into my memory Blake's "The Little Black Boy." My mother read it to me more than twice or thrice when I was little.

And those black bodies, and this sunburnt face,
Are but a cloud and like a shady grove ...
When I from black, and he from white cloud freed ...

And I thought of untruth and ungenerosity and unlove, clothed in whatever color it might be, and of the relativity of all things.

CHAPTER XV

I went on to Flowerfield. The singing house still sang. I tasted its richness and simpleness. It was so big and uncluttered, so largely, wealthily itself. Uncle John and Aunt Kate were the nearest now to father and mother. Catherine and Lewis had a bright, flashing quality, skimming about like birds. They went after their own devices. Old loved John showed preoccupied this summer. Winds that blew him toward Green view, nine miles away, where lived Amy Page, were good winds, great, balmy trade-winds. Other winds left him inattentive. He was at Greenview, or on the road to Greenview, or on the road from Greenview.

Miriam and I went together. That was old times keeping on. But now there had fallen down from heaven a full, strange, added bliss.

We came out of the old school-room door and crossed to the tulip-tree where hung the swing, long-roped, wide-seated. It was my third morning at Flowerfield. In this part of the place we thought of Madam Black. Looking over our shoulder, we might almost see her in the school-room door. We came under the tulip-tree and looked up into the green and towering cone where branches made many a section, and then we sat in the swing. "When we used to swing—up, up—out and away! Do you remember once when we and the swing and all seemed to be flying? There was such a thrill!"

"Yes, yes ... Thrill.... A big, blossoming feeling, everything dawning!" She closed her eyes and kept them shut for half a minute. Opening them, she turned full to me. "Michael! I told father and mother that I wanted to tell you myself. I am going to Baltimore next month. I am going to be a nurse."

"To be a nurse—"

"Yes. A trained nurse. You know more and more women are doing that. One can make it a kind of big work—if one chooses! It's all in the choosing.... I don't feel urged toward teaching school. I'm not a writer. I've tried, and it isn't very good. I haven't been to college, and there aren't many things open to women.... Nursing is certainly half of doctoring—of doctoring and healing. Even if I had been to college I should still like to doctor and heal. There's a real star shining along that lane of clouds. So I am going, Michael!"

I was getting up all my luggage and following her. "Why?"

"Why? ... I want to work and earn. I want to learn more and other things. I want to be, I want to do—fuller and fuller. I want to take—I want to give. I want better to know how to take and to give."

I said: "You work here; you help no end. You're joy to Uncle John and Aunt Kate. Uncle John can carry all."

"Yes, yes!" said Miriam. "But I am going out—I am going out of the nest, Michael. Wings mustn't always stay in nests. Father and mother agree. They understand.... I don't know that I think about it. I feel about it. At first, somewhere, sometime, I must have thought about it. But now I feel.... So I am going, Michael!"

She told the details of her plan. She watched me as she talked. I was thinking only. "We cannot marry before we are twenty-six. Will this come in that's way?" I had to find out. Catherine and Lewis came skimming around the corner of the house. I was rather glad. Just here, before the house, was not the place in which to find out.

I said, "Will you come this afternoon to Wakerobin Hill?"

"Yes.... I'll be ready at four."

We moved under the great hemlocks on the purple, somber side of Wake-robin Hill. "Somber" is not the word; it was coolly, darkly lifted, pillared and ample, a true natural temple. Blue space waked, far up, beyond the tracery of the roof. An organ wind rose and fell, but not in storms of sound. There was incense. One felt in the place gathered means, gathered ends. Purpose lifted from the throng of small desires. Cause stood whole in effect.

Miriam and I went to our most loved hemlock and sat down upon the dim, purple carpet. For some time we rested without words. The place took us as it always took us. The fret and foam, eddies and bubbles, the debris gathered and carried, still moved, outside, on the surface of the current. But here were to be felt the purified strength and depth, the eternal dimensions, the immortal impetus. Quiet so far from quietism, stillness so far from death, intension so far from inaction....

We sat upon the earth. We had not spoken for a considerable time. Our inner being flowed together, with a deeper sense of a deeper pulse. Came a momentary vision again of that mighty machine we had watched at the Centennial Exhibition. So doubled and redoubled, so strong, so eased....

Power and love and knowledge! Two rays fused into one beam, and the resultant richly conscious—

"Sat we two, one another's best....
Our souls—which to advance their state
Were gone out—hung betwixt her and me."

Miriam understood and I understood. When at last we said, "I love you"—and I know not which said it first—it was but the deep music playing on this stair, also, which had long been playing everywhere else.... I do not know when Miriam and I first met and loved. I do not think there is any "when" or "first" about it.

We moved nearer together, we put our arms about each other, we kissed.... We sat hand in hand, and the organ wind was like the lifting, falling, forming, dissolving, reforming of earths and eons ... and ever wiser, more beautiful!

One red sunset shaft came into the hemlock wood by Wake-robin Hill. We stirred—we must go back to Flowerfield.

Somewhere, going, we laid the specter of separation because she would have knowledge, and use it, of nursing and healing. The specter was a rather weak-jointed, grotesque elemental. We were not so easy to separate as that came to!

We felt bliss—we saw our milestone on the way to All—All—All! First, the integration that names itself the conscious individual. Second, the integration that says, "We love together—we two are one!" Third ... is it family, clan, nation, world ... is it an integration called Christ, on the way to God?

Miriam and I were happy—most happy. But still we saw the star—some star that drew. Love must go there, love must broaden its beam. We must carry our love on—carry on...

We felt how it transfigured, how the rivers heard the ocean.

Early in September I parted from Flowerfield and all there, going to Restwell again for a week, and thence out of Virginia, south and west by some hundreds of miles, to Landon, where coal and iron were being mined, where eventually steel would be made. I went to a position carrying, for a young man, a fair beginning salary. Behind me was General Warringer with his large interests. I should be given opportunity. "For the rest, you'll have to do it yourself," said my uncle. "You can make or you can mar, you know!" He sighed. I covered with mine his hand, lying before him on the table. "You've been good to me, Uncle Carter—"

Ahasuerus went with me to Landon. He said that he did not want to stay any longer at Restwell. Miss Harriet and the general were mighty good folk—but he didn't like it without the colonel and Miss Cary. Of course, if Miss Sarah wanted him—but she didn't seem to need any one.... He thought that he could get a job down there where Mr. Michael was going. He'd like, he told me, to drive a big wagon. He stood six feet and strong, an even, beautiful brown, with an open, not at all unintelligent face. He was older by some years than I, but we had been in each other's landscape for a long, long time. We had played together and we had worked together. I was fond of him, and he was fond of me. He had neither wife nor child. He wanted to go where I went, and at last it was so agreed. He could read and write, and he had that practical knowledge of basic economic processes which many a college man might envy. He was genial, as his people are, happy in himself. Travelers, he must go in one car and I in another. That was custom, presently was to become law. He must obey it, I must obey it. There were plenty of other customs—for instance, he must give me the "Mr.," but I never gave it to him—plenty of customs, not a few laws. I suppose that some day the colors of the spectrum will recognize that somewhere they really are together, and that there is little use in playing ostrich.

I had said good-by to Flowerfield. Now I said good-by to Restwell. The boat that was upon the river saw that it was sharply turning. Willows, hills, would come between it and the known, familiar reaches. There would be new scenery. I said good-by. Ahasuerus and I traveled west and traveled south.

CHAPTER XVI

Landon, spreading over and between low hills, opened upon a bit of a plain where furnaces were building. Shaggy, higher hills, called by courtesy mountains, made sides of an amphitheater. In this direction coal was being mined; in that, iron. Near at hand ran a muddy, sluggish river crossed by an untriumphant bridge. The woods were largely pine and small oak, the climate warmer than that I had left.

At this time the population of Landon might number three thousand. That was two thousand more than had been in presence three years earlier. The dwelling-houses, big and little, were frame, and there were many little and very few big, and the big only so by contrast with the others. The railway station was frame, the hotel, the two churches. But the offices of the company of which General Warringer was a director were brick, as were the Landon Bank and the company stores. Brick, too, was the office of the Landon & Gulf Railway Company. All these constituted themselves into finger-posts which proclaimed: "Here is Solidity and Permanence. We point to a Future in which we shall be larger—much larger—and stone!"

The company into whose service I came owned the mines, a range of hills stuffed with coal, and a divergent range where iron outcropped. It owned the furnaces being constructed; in great measure it owned Landon. Its rival was a company seated eight miles up the river, with other coal and iron ownings, furiously building a furnace beside its own wooden town, with its own brick offices.

Ahasuerus and I descended from the train at Landon. About us was a scrambling crowd, white men and negroes. A slight, blond young man met me. "Mr. Forth?"

"Yes."

"I am Alec Battle, draftsman in the office here. Your chief asked me to get you and pilot you about. That darky with you?"

"Yes. Ahasuerus Robertson. I'm responsible for him. He's all right. He wants to drive a wagon."

"I'll turn him over to William at the office. You'll find a number of Virginians here."

That proved true. The Landon Coal and Iron Company was built, to an extent, with Northern capital, as the Landon & Gulf Railway Company was built to an extent with Northern capital. But the working force was predominantly Southern and drawn from almost every state below Mason and Dixon. The president of the Landon Coal and Iron came indeed from Pennsylvania, and the president of the Landon & Gulf from Ohio. These gentlemen did not live at Landon. They came there in private cars, visited for a few days, showed themselves very genial with the generality, sometimes genial, sometimes the reverse with the closeted few. Then the private car, at the end of the passenger express, disappeared around the curve. But superintendent and manager and down the line lived at Landon. The railway, too, was building beyond, looking darkly meantime at the probable construction, just across the river, of a competing feeler from the Debenham & Atlantic. The sense of a career, of a future, hung strongly over Landon. Go up the river those few miles to Parisia and you encountered the like prophetic sense—for Parisia. But Parisia granted for Landon no other career than one of disaster. And Landon returned the compliment. They stood opposed like bulls with lowered heads.... All this, and much besides, came later to my knowledge. Now, in the moment, I left with Battle and Ahasuerus the dirty station and stepped into the main street of Landon. There shone the brightest autumn sunlight, from the bluest sky.

I have come to realize the ills of the world's present economic life, and I with others strive after a more understandable and understanding system. The sins and evils are great, and must be seen and outgrown. Else smash—and smash again and again—and at last, facing every one, the ugliest monster to be dealt with, and all the power of dealing enfeebled! But I was in it, there and then, in the system, not especially protesting, taking it for granted, working in it with some cheerfulness, some conscience, and some aspiration, and if with growing longings, growing doubts, yet with no crystalline vision of direction out of it. And so, by my own experience, I know that others, too, in the old system, worked with cheerfulness, conscience, and aspiration. And yet how hedged, frontiered in, continuously defeated, were the three! And most folk seemed unaware of anything on the whole to change. Their individual satisfactions ought to expand. The circumstances of themselves and their immediate families ought to change. Nothing in the world with all of them was so certain as that! There they worked toward change quite ardently and arduously. But they thought of everything as happening in the system. I go up; then, relatively speaking at least, you go down. We didn't seem to be able to make good general. It was, they seemed to think, on the whole God's system and the way the world was made.... Unhappy world!

There was mistake, I think. But in this universe of power and joy so much that is not mistake lives within us! So steadily does what heaven we have gained work at heavenizing our earth! I feel mainly now the lift in persons and things. I see that from imperfect systems, syntheses, grow steadily the imperfect yet, but the more perfect.... At Landon, for all the narrow serving, for all the low-order social mechanism, for all our dim vision, dim alike with educated and uneducated, official and laborer, we were not hopeless. We had industry, pluck, vigor. We could laugh and clap a man upon the back. We could show kindness. I remember now how many good folk were there—in the offices, the bank, the churches, on the road, at the furnaces, in the mines.

Battle and Ahasuerus and I went along Main Street. Under the bright sunshine there fell a gilding cheerfulness over the shacks and shanties, the Italian-kept fruit-stand, the colored barber standing beside his barber-pole, the Chinaman ironing, the gold mortar and pestle before a drug-store that might have gone into a pocket, the buzz about a saloon.

"Have a drink?" asked Battle.

I shook my head. "No, I made a promise long ago."

"Well, you're lucky to have kept it!"

He pointed out as we went the more marked features of the town. Every one whom we met, white and negro, spoke to him and he to them. He placed many for me. "I've been here two years. Every one's fastened together like a bead necklace. The company's the string—the company and the Landon & Gulf. There's the office—but I'm going to take you first to your boarding-place. You'll want to get rid of your bags and see where you are. General Warringer's mother was my father's second cousin. So we're kind of kin. Cousin Harriet wrote to me to get you a good place to live in. This is the best here."

We had turned at right angles and were going up a steep and dusty side-street, or, rather, road. He indicated a large, rambling, one-story house or considerable cottage behind maples and water-oaks. It looked neatly kept, with a veranda, vines and flowers in a small yard. "Mrs. Sayre's," he explained. "Doctor Sayre's legally, but Mrs. Sayre's colloquially. They belong in this state, but they moved from a plantation somewhere to Landon because they've got two sons here with the company. Clerks. Bob and Ferry. The doctor is crippled by rheumatism. He doesn't practise. Three-fourths of his time he lies in a hammock and reads. She's a benevolent despot. You can't help liking her. She's a captain housekeeper. I board here, too. See that little cottage at the side? They own it. Four rooms in it—yours, mine, Bob's, and Ferry's."

We mounted the veranda steps. A colored girl was sweeping away fallen vine leaves. Behind her the house door stood hospitably open, showing a hall with an old clock and two or three pictures. A large lady in a pleasant, clean, and thin flowery gown, with a palm-leaf fan in her hand, came toward us. So I met Mrs. Sayre, before whom my mind still halts in a kind of half-humorous amazement and regard.

From Mrs. Sayre's—I never heard it called anything but that—I was conveyed by Battle to the office. Mrs. Sayre capably disposed of Ahasuerus. She had a cook and a man, Mirandy and Harris, who lived in the alley. Landon already had alleys. Mirandy and Harris could put Ahasuerus somewhere. If he was a handy man Mrs. Sayre could give him work until his proper job appeared. Harris, summoned, took Ahasuerus in charge. My room in the cottage—the big cottage was called the house—proved small and furnished with a simplicity. But it was fresh and clean, and one of its two windows gave a wide view of eastern sky and of the last roofs of Landon, of plain and building furnaces, river and hills.

Battle and I went down the street together and on to the office, half-way between Mrs. Sayre's and the railway station. As we went he discoursed various economic aspects of Landon. He did not use the word "economic." It had not come perfectly into general use in the eighth decade of the nineteenth century. The decade used an older jargon. Words that are common to-day stayed at that time in learned print. The labor at Landon was in mass negro, and one mine used convict labor. The bosses, the foremen, petty heads of kinds, were, of course, white, and chiefly American, though with a good sprinkling of Irish and German. There was one gang of Italians. Mechanics, carpenters, masons, etc., were white and mainly from Yankee-land and Dixie. The clerical force, paymasters, commissary men, bookkeepers, clerks, and so forth, appeared to have come from every state east of the Mississippi. As for other citizens of Landon, here on their own, there seemed an ethnic ruck of these. Jewish names, Greek, Chinese emerged.... And there were certain ladies....

Battle looked aside at me. I shook my head. "The same promise. And I do not want it, anyhow, any longer."

"Lucky man!" said Battle. "Oh, my Lord, it is a net!"

The street was dusty, dirty; the sidewalk narrow, made of board and fouled with torn paper, fruit peeling, tobacco juice. The east-bound Landon & Gulf, puffing bituminous-coal smoke and with a loud-clanging bell, went by out of Landon. Children were crying in a room above the tintype man's booth. Farther down Mr. Abrahams stood in front of his clothing-shop. "Goot day, frients!" he said, as we passed.

I looked about me. The exhilaration of the morning, arrival, novelty, the sunshine, faded a little. "What's going to be here, after all?"

Battle grew animated. "A big town! The biggest kind of big town. There's enough coal and iron and limestone in these mountains to run the United States! Presently there'll be blast-furnaces and blast-furnaces. I can imagine it any night, with the sky all lit up. The old Landon & Gulf won't be the only railroad, either, though it would like to be! Parisia—" He gave the word with quite indescribable scorn. "Parisia will take a back seat. She hasn't got the capital or the brains. Landon's got both. We've grown a thousand since last year." He took on an exalted look. "It's coming.... Street-cars—electric light—ice-cream parlors—theaters—bigger salaries—"

I saw in Battle, and was to see in many at Landon, the overflowing of the personality over something growing. There collected a pool of triumphing affection when the growing thing was esteemed friendly to the self, but for the held-to-be-unfriendly a boding dislike amounting at times to hatred. Fear of the growing thing always chose contempt for disguise. Towns, industries, institutions, parties, systems—points of view. The pale earth seedling bent the way it was inclined, then proclaimed at once papal infallibility. "This, that, with mathematical certitude, I know to favor me, is saved; this, that, with like certainty, I am sure opposes me, is damned! And not at all relatively so, but in the eternal Absolute. So, acclaiming this growth, so, fighting and despising yonder growth, I with pride become fanatic before the temple door!"

Well.... There is the joy of the fanatic!

We arrived before the office of the Landon Coal and Iron Company. The building was brick, three-storied, quite well and widely paved in front, with a big door, with rows of moderately clean windows, behind which might be dimly seen much activity. Men stood in the doorway, men went in and came out. The passageway which we entered felt most gratefully cool after the midday sun. Battle turned toward a large room to the right. "I'll introduce you to Colonel Ringgold. Then we'll go up-stairs."

It was the general superintendent's office. Colonel Ringgold turned in his swivel-chair. Large, saturnine, with a scar acquired at Chickamauga running from brow to chin, he looked at me with intent gray eyes. "Well, Mr. Forth! General Warringer says we must look after you. Do you believe in reciprocity?"

"I do, sir."

"Very good! We don't want to dig and dig only to find that the seam has switched off or petered out, or wasn't at its thickest very thick. We want to make a drift into power, not into the reverse. How do you find Mrs. Sayre's? I understand you're boarding there."

I said that I was very well pleased. He nodded and ever so slightly turned the swivel-chair. Battle said that we wouldn't trespass longer. "All right!" answered Colonel Ringgold. "Rather a busy day. My good wishes, Mr. Forth!"

In the passage Battle remarked, in a lowered voice: "Mrs. Sayre and the doctor are cousins of his. He's very good stuff, but he'll drive you like the devil!"

But for me I liked Colonel Ringgold, though I have seen him drive the weak like the devil.

We mounted the stairs. There was a room with clerks. Battle grinned at the collectivity, then took me across to a gentle, elderly man, Mr. Allen, the bookkeeper, sitting in a kind of cage. From this room we went down a narrow passage to my especial purview: "Mr. Maxwell may be at the mine, or gone riding somewhere. But his clerk, Jim Standard, is here."

It turned out that Mr. Maxwell had just come in. Looking out of window, one might see his horse, a strong, gaunt sorrel, in charge of a black Flibbertigibbet.

My chief stood, tall, raw-boned, sandy, blue-eyed. He wore a gray flannel shirt and corduroy breeches tucked into dusty riding-boots. His slouch-hat hung on a nail above a shelf whereon was ranged specimens of ore. In his hand he held a piece of red hematite, and he was dictating in a clipped, raucous voice to Jim Standard, who took his words down in shorthand. It was somewhat before the day of women clerks, and only one letter in so many appeared typewritten. Maxwell swung around at our entrance. He was lithe, thirty-five about, trained, I afterward found, in Edinburgh and Germany; still a British subject, drawn to America through that old hunger for experience. After greeting me in a dry, casual manner he finished his letter. Then he said: "I am going to ride ten miles to-morrow. I suppose that you ride?"

I answered that I did. "I'll expect you here, then, at eight o'clock. Get a horse. Country's rough. We'll be gone all day." His look added: "Try you out to-morrow. If I don't like you the company may keep you—but not as my assistant!"

CHAPTER XVII

On that day and that ride my chief put me through every known pace, and through some that I had to devise, create, assemble from the All-Egg on the moment's spurring. I saw what he was doing, and it became an acquiescence, with a real, aroused curiosity as to what he could get out of me. The one thing I was bent upon was that the sponge should fill from its background as fast as it was wrung. That measure kept, let him squeeze away!

To change the figure, by the time we rode back into Landon at dusk I felt that I had been wrestling all day. I had respect, admiration, for the thew and sinew that had deliberately and with such continuousness tried my own.

The next day was an office day. He had a little kind of laboratory, a drawing-desk, a long, well-filled bookcase, a variety of maps, surveys, what not, pinned against the wall, drawers filled with specimens of ores and woods, a case of fossils, a small safe, his own desk, a desk for Jim Standard. I had an adjoining small room, very bare at the moment.

The wrestling continued through this day. Dusk found us both standing in his room, by the shelf of ores. He took his hat from the nail above. Standard was gone. He spoke in his dry, succinct voice. "The company may keep you as my assistant, Mr. Forth. I fancy we may get on together. I am going down the river in the morning by train. You'd better take the day off for your own affairs. I'd buy that horse of Smith's—"

I began to settle into Landon. Power, knowledge, joy of living, were to be mined there as elsewhere.

Ahasuerus was presently driving his wagon. He, too, incorporated into the Landon Coal and Iron. He took to Mirandy and Harris, domiciled himself with them.

My room in the cottage beside the Sayres' house was quite well enough. Restwell and Flowerfield also had Spartan simplicities, in many ways trained for these. So that there was cleanliness—and there was that here—I was pleased enough. The eastern window gave upon extent and, to a considerable degree, beauty. I sat in this window and wrote to Miriam. I drew my bed so that at night I got the mounting stars, and at dawn first the white rose, then the pink.

In the adjoining house lived and administered Mrs. Sayre, with an easy capacity in action, an instinct for process, that amounted to genius. She was so large and soft, and yet she moved with such efficiency! Four of the Landon Coal and Iron Company's men boarded with Mrs. Sayre; three of the Landon & Gulf men and three independents came to her table for meals. We dwelt in a town of dust and coal smoke, of increasing noise, of at once an energetic and extraordinarily careless humanity. To a considerable extent the negro population had been drawn from yet farther south, from cotton and rice fields. Among them were to be found few who were trained for house service. White and colored, Landon exhibited a surface disorderliness in varieties. But Mrs. Sayre and Mrs. Sayre's house and table, her porches, vines, grass, and flowers, her picket fence and gate and the bit of cinder path before them, displayed old, smooth order, suave, accomplished standards. I never saw her reading, though I think that she did read; she was an infrequent speaker; she sat at the head of her long table, a slow, easy empress. Inert, a stranger would have said, looking for the able ministers who made her reign. But if ministers there were, they were in Mrs. Sayre. After a time it might be seen that she did nothing and said nothing apart from the purpose of some dim, central individuality. One ended by being impressed with the sheer power of that individuality. She was Chinese—Confucian.

Doctor Sayre sat at the foot of the table, a small man with a dome of a forehead and a slender, sensitive mouth and jaw, and wide-apart, sunken eyes. He was subject to long, melancholy, brooding silences—I have known them last three days—out of which he burst at last with a torrent of talk. When he rose from table it was seen how crippled he was by some rheumatic trouble. One end of the veranda running the length of the house was his especial holding. He had a hammock here and a pictured screen that must have come down from long ago, and a table heaped with books. He read the evolutionists, and all the works on archeology that he could find.

The two sons, each with his room in the smaller cottage, were again different. Bob Sayre, good-natured, good-looking, with tolerable abilities, had for avocation the sowing of a few wild oats. He and Battle ran together. Ferry, the younger, went to church, liked flowers, was a quiet, manly fellow.

Father Vesey lived at the Sayres'. Mrs. Sayre—I discovered somewhat to my surprise, and then on second thought not to my surprise—was a Catholic. Father Vesey had a big room with a little veranda of his own. He was a good talker, loved a joke, had two chins, a massive frame, and a good eye. Jim Standard and Mr. Allen, the bookkeeper, made the other inmates. The table-boarders presented each his facet of the sempiternal diamond. We had Robinson, the freight agent of the Landon & Gulf; Walter Dupuy, the telegraph operator, and others. I grew to see a good deal of Walter Dupuy. He was a thin, dark, slight fellow with an intense face. He, too, was a reader ... a born romantic and revolutionist.

Days slipped into weeks, weeks into months. At Christmas there were still a few pale roses in Mrs. Sayre's garden-plot. I felt that I had been set in the Landon pattern a long, long time.

Maxwell was a taskmaster that I could work under with no sense of ennui. A man who worked for Maxwell, recognizing his authority, went into a school of parts. The school reached deep, had a lateral sweep of arm. If there were softness, vagueness, indolence, Maxwell was a whole college of ascetics to get it out. He was a drill of steel, a directed engine, a shaft of the dryest light. I worked for him and with him ten and sometimes twelve hours a day, eighty minutes an hour. He had in him a titan, dry, spare, and tireless.

Capital continued to come into the Landon Coal and Iron Company. The latter continued to send out questing antennas through a wide and long region of mineral wealth. It had a brace of lawyers said never to be beaten—it was developing a lobby at the state capitol. Tract on tract of land was being gently, quietly acquired. Up the river the Parisia Company worked on similar lines. But the Parisia Company was going to go under—go under and come up, absorbed into the Landon Coal and Iron. Some would laugh and some would groan.

It was Maxwell's and my business to examine and report upon these lands. We had, besides, abundant occupation at the mines, new and old, and about the furnaces, and no little work that must be done in the office. The New Year brought wintry rain, sleet, a little snow. Maxwell and I worked on, indoors and out-of-doors in all weather. He did not seem involved, caught, in the Landon Coal and Iron Company's future, nor overmuch in the fact that he was paid a salary to do so and so. He had undertaken to locate coal and iron, to see that coal and iron hills were properly opened, and to attend to various cognate matters, and he did the job as it ought to be done.

January and February, raw and gray, rounded into spring. The sky cleared, grew azure; we dipped into a riot of leaf and blossom. Maxwell and I, out in the hills, saw bloom the yellow jasmine and the pink honeysuckle. One day we had ridden some miles, and at noon, finding a trickling spring, sat by it and ate the cold meat and bread I carried in an old geologizing bag. Maxwell began to talk. By this time we had gone far into each other, and that though we were not chatterers. "Of course one day this system will die into another."

"'This system.' The economic system, you mean?"

"It's lot and part with everything else! One species grows in the womb of another—at last buds off. Yesterday transmutes into to-day; to-day into to-morrow.... This is your first field, but I have seen a lot of others. Landon isn't yet typical. Black labor with the agricultural mind. Africa strained through rice, cotton, and tobacco fields. But white labor is coming in—will be coming in in gushes presently. Natives and immigrants. This is going to be a city. Things are going to change."

"What do you think of labor-unions?"

"I think that they are healthy children." He drank from the spring and settled back again. "A good many things appear to me to be in the schedule of the Future. Everywhere in civilization—generalized, as it were."

"Dupuy, the telegraph operator, loaned me Karl Marx's Capital."

"Dupuy is going to lose his place one of these days.... Das Kapital.... Yes."

"I'd like to know what you think of it."

"I've not the clearest leading as to what, from cover to cover, I do think of it. I'd agree here, and differ there. But, on the whole, I think it is a formulation that'll count. It comes into the guide-post category."

"The road doesn't stop—can't stop. Everything's road—bridge."

"Yes. Perpetually more grandiosely so. Effects are cumulative.... A prolonged, insensible rise, swellings and sinkings, but more swelling than sinking. At last emerges climax—a new continent out of the sea. The Ark on Ararat. Then life goes on upon that wheel ... until it's time to rise again."

We finished our bread and meat. He leaned back against the rock, his hands clasped around his knee. "It's an unco' strange warld," he said. "Bonny and terrible!"

The fact that we both had Scotland behind us, though considerably nearer to him than to me, had its effect in our relationship. Now and again, in our frequent voyaging together, he spoke of the country there. He had love for it as I had love for Virginia. I think that at times he was homesick for it, as certainly at times I was homesick for Virginia. He said once: "Go a little back and everybody is kin. Edinburgh now, the Carse of Stirling, loch and sea! Step backward and we mingle there. You came a little earlier to America. I came a little later. Somewhere, everything is certainly one."

I recall a day when we came out blackened from the Red Hill mine and, riding back to Landon, were caught in a great drive of wind and rain and took refuge in the log house of two rooms and a lean-to occupied by Roger Bins. Roger, his wife and eight children were perfectly hospitable. He had been there, or his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had been there for a long time, on the scrawny hillside, with a kind of view and a kind of garden-patch. They had welcomed passers-by, "strangers," taken their bit of contact, their sup of news, and settled back when the "strangers" went on. The storm over, we remounted and rode away.

"There's a seam that runs around the globe!" said Maxwell. "It's peat. Low-order energy. Getting relatively lower and lower—getting covered over. Perhaps miners will dig it out one day, exploit it, use it, as we use peat and coal. There's a law, I hold, of retardation. The environment grows hostile to Roger Bins in the degree that it's quickened. Can't keep up—can't even stay put—sinking—sinking—becomes a left-over, a left-behind. A creeper—a racer—and the interval widening. A left-behind species, a barely man, while Man goes on. One day there was a settling of the dregs called Apes. The same thing goes on to-day. Bins and plenty of others, city and country, and up and down. They come on, but, relatively speaking, slower and slower.... An under species in all its degrees."

"That's a proclamation of aristocracy."

"I have no objection to the word, so that it's properly understood."

"If Bins thinks anything he thinks that he's within the aristocracy."

"Yes. I have known millionaire and university and ecclesiastical Binses. There are a lot of royal Binses."

"Your species finds you out wherever you are."

"Precisely.... Whoever had any right to suppose that out of the human species would not grow another species—out of man more than man? Then comes a day when what is left is classed as simply human."

We came upon Landon in a great golden glow of after-rain. A bit of rainbow hung against a yet dark cloud. "But all move," I said. "When the bell rings for their day the slow will come upward, too."

"Oh yes," answered Maxwell. "That is the rainbow—and I'm not denying that the rainbow has some kind of reality. But Binses around the world will have to do some hard work!"

"Perhaps the racer here is retarded, too. Perhaps there is an order out of sight before us. Perhaps the fleetest here has hard work to do. Perhaps what you call the aristocracy, the very vanguard as we think it, itself fell out, straggled, malingered, was left in the rear—now itself has to catch up.... Sometimes you think you see the twinkling of feet before you."

"Very like!" said Maxwell. "The caravan before the caravan.... All right! Let Bins some day catch the twinkling of feet before him."

I recall another day. There was a tract to be examined too far from Landon for riding. We went by train, with us Captain Joyce, one of the company lawyers. Getting off at a flag-station, we found there the owner of the land with horses. We waited until the train had passed, then rode quietly into the woods. It was not on the cards to make display of destination and purpose. Parisia or other spies in the land might be watching.

We spent some hours upon this man's acres. The lawyer, who was a very quick, expansive, jesting, good fellow and sympathetic with the farmer and his wife, talked with the two at the corner of their crumbling porch. Papers passed between them. We had country dinner, got back to the flag-station, took the ingoing train. Presently some trouble up the line halted us, kept us waiting half an hour. We sat in an almost empty car, and Captain Joyce fell upon discourse. He was in a good humor. The man's holding was wanted against the glittering, widening future of the company, and he could get it, and get it cheaper than Colonel Ringgold and Martin and others had thought possible. He talked. Maxwell put in an occasional question or comment in his voice dry as Sahara's sands. I sat and listened. Captain Joyce embarked upon business, politics, and the country at large. Arthur was in the White House, but next year would see a presidential election. Names came into Captain Joyce's talk—Republican names, Blaine and others; Democrat names, Cleveland and others; the People's party, in a tone and with a grimace of doubt mixed with amusement. There was certainly a possibility, after long years of under dog, of a Democratic victory. The country was getting out of the worst post-bellum tangles. Captain Joyce saw Prosperity and described the jade. Her most prominent features were bigger and bigger combinations of capital, and underneath, like mouth beneath nose, ever skilfuller and skilfuller lawyers. Press and legislatures made, as it were, fields for the working (for the good of all) of Money and Law. I even divined that he had an eye to the school and the pulpit. In his personal aspect he was very jolly, likable. Dupuy said that he was known to have hanged Justice, but Dupuy said many bitter things. The chief engineer listened, put in a slight word now and then in a voice dry as oak leaves in January. At last he said, "How about action as a totality?"

"That's not possible. Must have incentive—something to pull against—somebody to compete with, defeat! Must fight—conquer! Contest of wits, you know, and all that."

"The irresistible force must continue to meet the immovable body?"

"That's a way of putting it."

"Horns locked to eternity.... Bull similes!"

The block up the road got itself removed. The whistle shrieked and we went on into town.

CHAPTER XVIII

Landon grew all the time. When I had been there a year I saw how it had grown over the autumn day when Battle met Ahasuerus and me. When I had been there two years and more it had six thousand people. The Debenham & Atlantic was an actuality. At night, when there occurred a run, furnace glare reddened the sky to a strange impermanent sunrise. There were streets where had been none, houses where had stood pine-trees. Two-story houses rose, better houses for the higher-up people. The huddle of houses for hand-workers grew into great and greater huddles, but the houses stayed mean. Along Main Street were rising, fast as mushrooms, brick stores, a larger hotel, a newspaper office, buildings of various sorts. Paving was in contemplation, sewerage, a glare of street-lighting. Enterprises and enterprises had started up. A number stood in the magic rounds of the Landon Coal and Iron, the Landon & Gulf, and the Debenham & Atlantic. Others were players for themselves. Up the river Parisia wore a blighted look.

Men and women from everywhere might be found collecting, streams into a pool, at Landon. One recognized America, Europe, a little of Asia, a quantity of Africa. And in the air the ghost of red men and the creatures that they hunted. And underfoot, down and down and down again, the carbon world, the iron world. At times, when upon hot summer nights sleep did not come swiftly, when I sat in my window that gave over a wide stretch of low roofs and broken, straggling wood, and sky flushed by that furnace glare, I sank with imagination or memory through the damp heat into a yet heavier, closer atmosphere, far and far away, down in time, heavier, closer, steamy, heated.... Here was the uncouthly high and broad; here the ferns and grasses, weird trees, the very moss of to-day high overhead. Dense, palpitant, sluggish, choked, gigantic, the Carboniferous stretched around. Forms that were not fallen trees nor banks of black soil, nor arms of the marsh moved.... Heavy voices were about me, like the voice of the furnaces.... I gasped in the un-thin air! Up! And here was Landon living upon that—and here was that living in Landon. I looked up into the great night sky. Landon, too, all of us, were at the bottom of—what? Something there thinking, back thinking, down into our strata....

Two years. Miriam was a nurse in a great hospital in Baltimore. In the two years I had had a month's holiday, dividing it between Flower-field and Restwell. Miriam had come from Baltimore for a week. Miriam and Michael—and each a traveler who had not been idle in the two years, and so who kept together, kept together. It was two explorers meeting, each with a great tale to tell, with maps of life to compare, with knowledge growing from the long marches of each, with the urge of the undiscovered beckoning, beckoning! Two discoverers who loved heart and mind and soul.

Two years and more! I wrote to her, she wrote to me, each Sunday.

Two years slipped toward three years. Landon swelled each year, a bigger and bigger Landon. The South was growing, the country growing. With Cleveland in the White House, time had swung in, after many years, a Democratic administration. The Democratic South felt itself moving toward power. Business enterprise began to grow thickly, south of Mason and Dixon. Capital came, companies formed, companies began to combine. Corporations, trusts, swam on the horizon line. All the country was growing in money wealth. Money flowed into rivers. If you owned the river-banks and used them for villa sites and inclosed parks, there were due to ensue difficulties as to general irrigation....

I worked hard. As Landon grew, as the Landon Coal and Iron perfected its holdings, dug its mines, engineer duties changed aspect. There was no longer the simple hard day's riding, geologizing, indicating, reporting, the straightforward construction, supervision, of the first year or two. Occupation was abundant but nondescript. Time passed. Colonel Ringgold became president of the company, and with unexpectedness the directors offered Maxwell the position of general superintendent. He declined it. "If I went 'up'—as they call it—you might get my place, Michael! But I don't care to be general superintendent.... I sha'n't stay here longer than next year, I think." He sat down and stared out of the office window, then came back to me. "I have an old friend and distant kinsman in England who is down for African exploration. Head of the Nile, Mountains of the Moon, and so forth. I rather think I'll go with him. D'ye want to come along?"

"I want to with one part of me—very decidedly want to. But I stay here, I think."

"You're an explorer after the deep I," he answered. "I knew that early in our acquaintance.... I suppose that the opening up of Africa is on the big voyage chart, and I suppose your exploration to be on it."

"We're both romantics," I said. "I take your Africa and walk about it inside. Old Nile and Mountains of the Moon and tropical forest, the waste and the sand, the lakes, the cataracts and water-holes."

"And the tribes of native black men—"

"And the tribes of naked black men. The chimpanzees, the hippopotamuses, parrots, and crocodiles. Themselves and their correspondences."

He sat tilted in his chair, looking at me. "When are you going to organize all that you do?"

I answered truthfully. "I don't know how."

"You have remarkably," he said, "the sense of the presence of the universe and of all time."

I spoke. "Hold yourself very deep and steady and perceive matters.... Event now! Everywhere from the world of the molecules and below, to the hugest synthesis we can grasp. Event in all its range, physical, emotional, mental, and what we call spiritual. And up and down and round about in Time. Event in my body, in your body, in this room, this building, this town—all bodies, towns, countrysides. Event in this state—in America—event in the world. Carry it over to other worlds, not forgetting the ether between. To suns and systems of suns. Event. All event. Feel it multitudinous, beyond multitude, multitude distilled from multitudes. Event. Life yesterday, to-day, and forever. Nebula to nebula and repeat. The universe, all, visible and invisible, the invisible just as real, just as eventual as the visible. Event and over event. Event made of events. Motion, emotion, intense and shining movement—mind-motion—spirit, intense, intense, light of light and heat of heat, life of life! Divine it somehow, spread into it.... Of course I mean that it is perceived almost infinitely too palely, almost infinitely too far away, almost infinitely too infrequently, too tenuously. It's what we call a concept now. But once strong enough, the concept would become percept—appercept. We should walk into a new, an immense, reality.... Do you think I am talking insanely?"

"No, I do not. That's overman.... Well, I suppose it's the only reasonable ambition!"

That talk with Maxwell had leadings forth, at the moment not seen. At the moment we fell back to work. The days went on. A new general superintendent came in. Landon continued in its treading around itself an ever larger circle.

By now I knew pretty thoroughly the older layers of population. In a certain sense Landon was home. I must feel—did feel—the energy there, the driving through and over obstacles, the sunniness on the whole of men's hopes, the clasping hands, the determined feet. So much was good, so much was promising! There was the feeling, splendid and precious, of strength. In much it might be misapplied, yet it was there, inestimable.

I knew, of this population of all stations, hundreds of names and faces, with a little of the real man clinging thereto. A few scores I knew better, and out of these a handful better yet. Landon had a "social" life. Officials, men starting various enterprises, professional men, had by now brought wives and families. There was visiting, entertaining, among these. There was plenty of dear, good people. Young men, away from home and kindred, were in Landon in numbers; and these families, making them welcome, gave them new ties and feeling of home. There was the church life. Five denominations now, each with its church and Sunday-school, each in its own way helping along. And there was a life of the street, of saloon and brothel. And there was an alley life for negroes. And near the furnaces, in a wide huddle of mean houses there was a life of white laborers and the smallest employees. Landon had now a newspaper and was building a theater and better school-houses. Evidently it was to become a railroad center. And more and more the glare from furnace stacks reddened the night sky.... There was in Landon power, but again and again came an ache with the power.

In these three years I read no little. There were the evenings and the Sundays.

Then suddenly—or then quietly after long preparation—I was again borne afar.

Maxwell and I sat in his office alone. He had despatched Jim Standard upon some errand. There were letters, maps, beside him upon his desk, and as he talked his fingers rested on a long envelop with a British stamp. What he wanted was that I should go with him to Africa. What he had beneath his hand was the formal offer to him of a post in the organizing expedition. The latter's objective was a further understanding of the headwaters of the Nile and a push across Africa by way of the Congo. The expedition was expected to serve science as well as sheer exploration. It was large, rightly equipped and financed. It offered Maxwell a very good salary for his services as geologist and engineer and it empowered him to choose and employ an assistant.

"That is where you come in," said Maxwell. "I know these men. They're my kind. It's all right. Now I want you! ... If you don't know that you're after cognition and development of yourself, I know it. And I'm not meaning the selfish self, either! You best know if something like this isn't in your day's work."

He offered me no less than I was receiving from the Landon company. I might be from America two years—perhaps even three years. I said that I must have a fortnight in which to determine. I took a day and night to walk around it as well as I might. Then I wrote to Miriam.

The letter went, lay, I knew, in her hands, was read by her. Waiting, I worked on, with the matter as far as might be out of my head. Three nights after the letter was sent I came into my room and, putting out the lamp, sat in the eastern window. There was no moon; a quiet night with the stars burning softly. Minutes passed.... Then rose like a fountain out of ground the consciousness of Miriam. She was present in me—she was not present out of me. There came a profound calm, profound, yet full of the sense of event. There was a filling out of nature, to the extent that what had been in appearance two orbs became in some sort one. Something made naught of space, naught of time, naught of outward form. Miriam and I talked without words, met in a large land behind Time and Space and Form as we had known them.

It was affirmation.... I saw that I went with Maxwell. I saw that it was somehow indicated that that had its place in the world of experience. I saw that Miriam could as little desire to hold me as to hold herself from the fullness of life. I saw that we were one in the desire to have knowledge, growth, and to have it more abundantly. I saw that we played into each other's hands. I saw that the wealth of one flowed with the wealth of the other.... There came an increase over even that perception. Things that love stay together. I knew now how profoundly she was with me. I knew that she was me.... Wherever she might be—wherever I might be—we could rise the one in the other.

CHAPTER XIX

Experience widened again for me. I wrote to Major Dallas, to General Warringer, and to Aunt Sarah. When I had the return letters I told Maxwell that I would go. He nodded.

"All right! I am glad that you have determined so. Will you ride out this afternoon and see what is the matter at the Red Mine?"

Maxwell and I resigned from the employ of the Landon Coal and Iron. The company was good enough to say that it regretted our going and to offer an increase of salary. But we must go, and the company turned without more ado to a list of names of engineers.

I had affection by now for many, for much, in Landon. Landon in much would stay with me. I had learned here, I had grown here. I had come to feel the striving soul behind all this industrial urge, to respect the wrestler with industrial imperfection. He was president and manager, he was engineer and builder, he was clerk and operator, he was spademan and pickman. Up and down and all around, he was really one, though he had not wakened to that fact. I regarded my own boyhood at Restwell. I had not recognized it then, but in all that countryside of farms and villages, what had obtained but the same struggle? The farmer and his men, white and black, the miller and the smith, the boatmen on the river, and the village storekeeper.... I felt again the heat of the sun when I used to hoe corn with Ahasuerus and Mandy's Jim, when I used to plow the long field. All one with these furnace and railroad workers! And professional men, schoolmen, artists, inventors, men of research and experiment, shapers of mind-matter—these, too, were tillers and producers, transmuters of energy, spreaders of food before the infant man that is to be. All one, changing and sustaining, gathered into the vast We, the world I. Where, in the whole, stopped the Worker—where, in the whole, began the Thinker? The Worker thought, the Thinker worked.

I was leaving Landon, and I saw now how, despite all doubts, I did like Landon.

And I liked Mrs. Sayre and the doctor, and Father Vesey and Mr. Allen, and Walter Dupuy and Battle, Bob and Ferry, Mirandy and Harris, too, and Lula, the waitress, and Bruno, the doctor's old setter. They all made a clamor of home about me when I must go.

Mrs. Sayre sat one evening upon the veranda, waving to and fro her palm-leaf fan. The doctor was in his room, Father Vesey away upon some parochial business, Mr. Allen had just said good night and was gone. I sat upon the step, my eyes on the furnace flare, reddening low-hanging clouds. When one paid attention the furnace throb was there as well, dull in the warm, damp air. Mrs. Sayre began to speak. She had a slow, lulling voice.

"Travel, now. There are all kinds of travel. Doctor travels, lying in his hammock there—and Walter Dupuy travels—and you were traveling, Michael, even before Mr. Maxwell asked you to go to Africa with him."

"Yes," I answered. "I was—I am."

"Yes, I know it. I am a large, stay-at-home body who seems somehow to have nursed you all, nursed and managed for you all. For a long time." Her fan went tranquilly to and fro. "You learn to notice little things when you nurse and manage for all. You're on the lookout for signs.... I suppose, after all, one rears children for travel ... nurses, manages, gives them a base to start from."

"You've traveled pretty far yourself," I said.

"Oh, I travel very slowly! I have so many little things to think of. Seeds in the earth—" She ceased to speak and sat, slowly and tranquilly moving the fan to and fro.

It was springtime and violets and daffodils were blooming beside the veranda. I saw, as it were, plant life underground, the tree and the rose underground, over all the earth. All animals little and warmly laired, all birds nested ... all men and women, the oldest, the strongest, the wisest, cradle-babes. Traveling slowly, with multitudes and multitudes of little things—

Ferry came in at the gate and up the path and steps and sat down with his head resting against her chair. I said good night and left them, and at my own window my mother rose in me.

Maxwell and I finished apace at Landon. He was a scimitar-edge and a dry light.

The men to take our places came in. We showed them the lines and the steeds that had to be driven. The office gave us a present, to each as handsome a rifle as money could buy. The Landon News made a full page of our departure and African exploration. Hundreds in Landon shook hands and wished us well.

Ahasuerus was to go with me. He had made determined appeal and I went to Maxwell about it. He listened, then: "I don't see any reason against it, if he wants to go. He's strong and devoted. That's the kind such expeditions want."

I said good-by to Mrs. Sayre's, to all at the office, to Landon. Maxwell was already gone to New York, where business of sorts awaited him. The east-bound express roared in. Bob and Ferry and Battle, Father Vesey, Mr. Allen, and a half-dozen more waved and cried farewell. We left the dark station; the houses went by, the furnaces, the hills. Ahasuerus and I, three and a half years older than when first we had come to Landon, were going from Landon, going home to Flowerfield and Restwell, then going overseas, afar and afar.

The train roared through the landscape toward Virginia. I sat in a brown study. I was going afar, into I knew not what of physical adventure. Mental adventure, adventure of the imagination, I knew. In some measure I could feel with, feel into, all adventure. I took it as scientifically true that, could all of me speak, it could speak of all things. But it was blocked from finding voice.... In my inner world I had come to where I was in a manner keeping time, waiting on a slow assimilation, waiting for some strengthening of pulse and forward thrust. There was a cry within me for flooding light, color, fervent heat. I knew that it was for light and heat from the interior. But it retarded its coming, and there grew in me an urge toward review, recapitulation, seeing where I had been wrong, mistaken, bettering perhaps, seeing how to take apart, dissolve, remold the past. The feeling was obscure, deep. But I was going to old, interior continents and search them over again.... And there had grown a longing, too, for other, outward contacts, for wider surges here. So had run my mind when finally I had agreed with Maxwell.

I sat and mused and the train rushed on. It was taking me toward much, and it was taking me first to Restwell and Flowerfield. Miriam was with me, thinking with me.

A man came and sat beside me. He had a little, withered face and figure and very limpid, untroubled eyes. He held a book in his hand, and I saw that it was an anthology that I knew.

"I like to read," he said, and presently. "We're all a big book. Le livre de l'univers. A great story-book to some upper layer. That layer's dream life. It's reverie when it rests in the shade."

I turned the pages of the book. "Don't you think we may be our own reverie?"

"Oh yes, I do!" he nodded. "Quite sure of it. It's the personal pronouns that get in the way."

"Did you ever," I asked, "achieve impersonality?"

"It depends upon what you mean by that. Do you mean a larger personality?"

"It may come to the same thing."

"I think it does," he said. "These things are perfectly definite. The trouble with folk is that they will not recognize grades of cognition. It's a long, long stair to the last, biggest personality. But it's wonderful just to have lifted a step."

"Do you think there's a common experience among those who have 'lifted a step'?"

"They come under a common sky. That means a great deal. But there would be always variation in experience—naturally."

"Yes," I said. "But past experience would be, in a way, pooled."

"Yes. Recognized as pooled. It's been done always, but not cognized as done. Of course it is the food of the new experience."

"I see that.... We are still occupied with the chase—with the garnering of food. Still in a struggle with raw material."

"Yes. But of course the artist, the conscious festival, comes along."

"Then after a while, when it is ripe, that plane also becomes food for the gods. The willing sacrifice."

"Yes," he said.

"Each stage the womb of the higher."

"Yes."

We sat looking out of the window. "It's all us," said the man. "Knowing that, we know a good deal. We've seen our Jacob's ladder."

"The profound quest—the real Grail."

"Yes.

'It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.'

The poets have always dimly known it, up in the dome of their house where the angels live."

Before long he left me, the train bringing him to his station. I said that I hoped we should meet again. "Oh, we will!" he answered. "Life's full of these encounters, when you begin to look for them."

The train roared on, the landscape glided by. There stretched a night between me and Restwell. I lay in my berth and lifted the window-shade. Dark woods were going by, then came a calm and broad stretch of country with the horizon stretched afar. Jupiter hung in the sky. There stole into me from the upper realms, cool, pure, exalted and exalting, a sense of the greatness, of the utter greatness, of the destiny of us all.... When I slept it was with that clean and quiet aroma still about me.

When I awoke Virginia fields, Virginia mountains, were framed in the window.

CHAPTER XX

Restwell made much of Ahasuerus and me. General Warringer and Aunt Harriet had acquiesced in my going with Maxwell, but not before, as in duty bound, they had set forth a row of objections. Aunt Harriet's resolved into the propositions, that I might be killed—that so I could not marry and carry on the family fortunes; that, while there might result some distinction from being an explorer (a successful one), she had noticed that men who went into wild places for any length of time carried it around with them ever afterward and lost touch with the society into which they were born. "We met an Arctic man once at Old Point. Well, when it came to the amenities he was nothing but a polar bear walking upright!"

I said that if I came back like a rhinoceros or crocodile she must have me shot.

She looked at me a little wistfully. "You know, Michael, you're the only bit of Dugald and Cary we've got. More than that, you seem somehow to hold and bring back father.... You've got a faculty, somehow, of enwrapping and carrying with you a lot of things—a lot of people, even." She sighed. "I'm not that kind myself, but I know that there are all-around folk."

I kissed her and said that we were in the same boat. I knew that there must be all-around folk—but I was only a little of that myself—nothing like, nothing like, the all-around that I could image. We sat on the summer-house step, and I found that we could talk, in some ways, as my mother and I had used to talk ... no! as my mother and I talked.

General Warringer, likewise, was concerned about my future. "This life's a bitter race, Michael. If you begin to step aside to pick flowers, down you go—smothered under! I've seen a lot of men—men with brains—scheduled just so to be poor and unknown all the rest of their lives. If you had chosen to stay you could have had Maxwell's place when he went. As Landon grew you could have left engineering, become assistant superintendent—superintendent—what not. You've got brains and a steady-going energy—not flashy. You might have gone straight on up to the top. You've got pull here, too, remember. There's no helping you in Africa. Your savings, too. I had it in mind to speak to you about that. As you earned and saved I could invest for you in a stock that'll presently be paying—I don't know what it won't be paying! And if, after a time, you wanted to speculate, I should see to it that you got the inside word. This country's traveling, double-quick, toward the biggest kind of expansion! You might become a rich man—rich and useful—the most valuable kind of citizen. But if you break with the run now it's going to be hard to get back. As I said before, this world's a breathless 'Keep your place, or I'll take it!'"

I said that I knew that it was a serious step, but that, as far as engineering went, I felt that I could always find employment. I had no quarrel with engineering as a profession. But I did not feel myself fitted for the further course he had outlined. It might be a mistake, my going with Maxwell, but I had felt a strong inward urging. I thought that I should come back, and that the experience would not be loss.... I said that I was grateful to him, and to many at Landon.

"That's all right. I gather that you gave very good work in return.... Well, if you won't, you won't, Michael! ... Royal is going to be a rich man—rich and powerful."

"If I had been Holbein or Rembrandt I should have liked to paint Royal."

Royal was at home at the moment. But he was going to New York, into a big broking company in Wall Street. In appearance he was so different from his father, and yet they subtly paired. The son stood intellectually higher by a head. They sat, as it were, above and below the salt—but at the same board, in the same castle hall. One must give respect to the castle, it was so vast and powerful. London Tower or Carcassonne, a thousandfold.

Dorothea was very friendly.... We went out together one morning upon the river. It had become fairy spring weather, bloom and song and first verdure. We ran under the sweeping willows, by banks of violets and bluebells.

"I should like to see Africa and Asia and all—the old buildings and the old lands. Oh, Michael, you're lucky!"

"Why don't you travel? You could."

"Some day maybe I will ... but I'll take myself along."

"Why don't you sort out yourself and choose the best traveling-dress?"

"Oh, I'm lazy—except when people get in my way. What do you do when people get in your way?"

"They're in the way because they're out of the way. Get them in order inside you. Penetrate them—understand them—be at one with them. Then the whole ship moves with the helmsman's hand. You and they are one, you know." I laughed at the face she made. "Gibberish, isn't it? And nine times out of ten I fail to practise my own magic.... All the same, don't poison them, Dorothea! If you do you'll feel the pangs."

"I like to poison them—starve them."

"Stop it—or you'll feel the pangs!"

She caught at the willows under which we were passing. "Oh, I am not so bad as I make myself out! ... Sometimes—often—I feel kind and good." The boat went a few strokes farther. "Stop rowing," she said. "Let's rest here a bit. Go close to the bank, by the violets." I obeyed. She stretched her arms, then, leaning forward, looked at me. "You meet most persons, Michael. Now I want to see if you meet me!"

"Fire away!"

"Do you ever feel wicked?"

"Often."

"Just how? Can you feel yourself murderer, thief, and all the rest of it?"

"Yes."

"Well, to get off the plane of actually poisoning people or jerking the bread out of their mouths.... When the world looks lovely, not hateful—and you want all the jewelry in the window ... but are too sleepy to go after it ... and so you only lust for it, envy it. Do you know that, too?"

"Yes. At times I should like to roll in gold-dust and violets."

"Yes!"

"A great elephant to ride upon—caparisoned—an easy, swaying, powerful gait. No obstacles—all the crowd at once worshiping and getting out of the way—"

"Yes!"

"Idle Lakes—and Mirth to row me—and Bowers of Acrasy—"

"H-mm?"

"The Faery Queen. The second book. It's a perfectly true tale."

"What else? Your elephant figure I do most certainly understand—though I understand the others likewise."

"I'd weary you with all the rest. At the bottom of the bag.... Something big and dark—wind and wave—wishing just to roll over and destroy. The utterest explosive—wishing to rend sun, moon, and stars. Split them into little pieces. Blow them into dust in the wind. And without a bit of better plan, without any plan—any ultimate idea. Blank Nothing—impossible to obtain! But go toward it, and so save oneself trouble. Decline to make the God."

She stared; then, "I see..."

"It's the bottom of the bag. But notice, will you, that still, blank and mad as it is, it assumes cohesion. It's to have force to do all that.... So, after all, it will have to take trouble."

"Yes, I see that."

"Better take the full cup of finer effort! Better make of yourself a world that won't want to blow its brains out!"

She sighed. "Get me a bunch of violets and let us go home." I picked her her violets, stepped back into the boat, put them in her lap, and retook the oars. She said, "You could have been an evil soul."

"There's plenty of evil yet. But the soul wants to change it to good, Dorothea."

"But it understands it still."

"Yes, it understands it still."

We went on beneath the willows. "Did you never read The Faery Queen? Well, read it all, but especially the second book." We traveled silently upon the clear river. After a while she would have talked of Miriam. But I did not want to talk of Miriam, who was Una, who was Alma, who was Belphœbe, who was Britomart to me. So at first we spoke of just the weather and then of Restwell plans, and at last she deliberately fell silent, and when I saw that it was deliberate I followed her lead, rowing without speaking, in a moving dream with the long oar-stroke. She sat with her eyes upon the violets in her hand. We made landing and I helped her out and we went together up the bank and toward the house. But under the wood where the wild plum was blooming she stood still.

"Michael ... we're cousins."

I nodded.

"That ought to mean warm hearts toward each other."

"Agreed."

She was very close to me. She put her hand upon my breast. "Like me, Michael ... like me!" I felt her breath, her cheek touched mine. "Like me—as I like you." She kissed me and I kissed her. But then I felt the stroke of the crowned man. As best I might I got back from the edge of the precipice. I drew myself away from her hands and her face.

"Dorothea, Dorothea, Dorothea! leave that! That's not innocent, because it's not sincere. You're stooping low with your mind—tempting deliberately! And I'm the leopard—the slave—the worm yet.... Leave it! Let's at least stand upright!"

She drew a long breath. "Well... I wondered—"

"Stop wondering! It's all there, in my blood as it is in yours. I could, as you could. Almost half of me plays the siren to just more than half that's just wise enough to use every thong it can find to keep it to the mast—"

"Well, you will please to understand that it was the mind—just wanting to see—"

"I understand. Now I want to tell you.... I think that we roved together a lot in the past, you and I.... Suppose you, also, try to stop that lorelei work of taking oneself in one's own net. Every fish you take—lovers, pride, domination, cruelty, indolence, self-love, and all the rest of it—pulls you deeper yet into the ancient sea. I know, for not so long ago and not so far away I have been there—am there quite sufficiently still! Throw the net away, stop the old singing, and see if you can't hear a lark overhead!"

"You're preaching!"

"No, I'm not. I'm calling your attention to some facts in nature."

She began to walk again. "I don't see that our old, long past was so very wrong."

"I don't in the least say that. I won't say a word against the ancient sea. When we were in it, if we were sincere, it was all that we could do. It had its own powers, beauties, and truths. But the winged thing mustn't return to the finned thing."

She looked at me over the violets that she had pinned at her throat. "After Grandfather Forth's death I heard a man call him a mystic.... I suppose that's you, too, Michael?"

But the word didn't well describe how I felt as to the out-of-doors around our houses of ancient habit. She began to talk of things away from this hour. We climbed the hill and crossed the May grass to the porch.

At no other time while I was at Restwell did we recall the one to the other this morning. She went her way and I went mine. But I felt her sultry beauty and the ancient sea call. I piled images against it, and drew at last strength from that dimension that fronts the east. And yet I knew, and that without shame, that life of old sense through which certainly, in a million, million shapes, I had gone. It streamed and weltered, fought and gloried, thrilled through its coils of murky splendor, survived and somehow surpassed itself, and rose. Dorothea was me in that eon and I was Dorothea. Miriam and I and Dorothea had all been together. If two were out, were partly out, another would follow.

The days went by at Restwell. Daddy Guinea was dead, but Mammy, Aunt Esther, Mandy's Jim, and others still lived there. Ahasuerus made himself happy. Restwell was oiled, smoothly running, with money as never had I remembered it. It was not that the Warringers were hugely wealthy; they were not. Royal would pass into that category, but that time was not yet. But they had means beside which my grandfather's and my mother's old struggles seemed piteous enough.

Aunt Sarah had not oldened. Her pale, smooth skin kept its firmness, her hair its brown luster, her eyes their not young nor old, still, immortal look. I sat with her in her room, always so clean, hushed, unlittered, or on the upper porch without her windows where in summer she kept her many plants that would bloom in winter. And three times we were together in the graveyard.

"I understand better than I did," I said, "what you meant when you said that they are within us."

"You'll grow to understand it better yet.... It's a vast world, Michael, that 'within us'!"

"I am fast coming to see that."

"So vast that all things are there."

"I begin to see it."

"I have not the energy strongly to move and make move within it. It goes as a kind of still dream. The faintest dawn is on the waters and they lie still beneath it. But I do not grieve any longer, nor am I anxious. It is a gain when women do not grieve, nor are anxious."

The days swam on. I went to Whitechurch. I climbed the academy hill and listened to Doctor Young in his study. He reminded me of some castle keep, narrow and darkened, but firm, built with a fierce honesty of purpose, with good stone. A life he fought was rising around his hold—outer walls were crumbling now under strange shafts and rays—but still stood the keep with fierce constancy. I asked him about Gamaliel. His face twitched. "I have not seen him for three years. I hear that he has put himself through some sort of scientific school. I suppose that he will go over, body and soul, to science." The timbre of the fortress voice carried, "Oh, thou deep traitor to me—thou, my son, who grew from me!" I felt the drawbridge go up....

The days and nights went by. In middle May I said good-by to Restwell; as it proved, for three years.

CHAPTER XXI

Catherine and Lewis were away—Lewis at the university, Catherine at Elton School. John met me in town and drove out in the phaeton. John and Amy Page would soon marry; he beamed on me with a full-orbed serenity. He was always serene, big, quiet, humorous, fond of children and all animals. He had interior mass. In my own fashion I considered most people by this. Mrs. Sayre had it. Maxwell had it—interior mass with a dry, clear desert sweep and light. Gamaliel had it, with a keen, north-temperate clime. My mother had possessed it, and to a somewhat lesser degree my grandfather. Aunt Sarah, too, but with her it was moonlighted. Major Dallas and Aunt Kate did not lack it. Madam Black had great mass. Others whom I knew possessed it, some more, some less. Miriam and I, wherever we were ranked, were twinned....

Flowerfield shone before us. "Miriam comes to-morrow." John had a fondness for reminiscence. Each time he brought richer appreciation of the "isness" of what has been. "I was thinking as I came along of our old days in the barn—and nutting—and all over! Weren't we—aren't we—happy?"

The house greeted me. I seemed to merge into it, it into me. That night I had my talk with Uncle John and Aunt Kate. Africa, and away assuredly for several years, and dangers to life and limb as great as if I were going to war—my profession and the possibilities of advance here at home in abeyance—Miriam and a long engagement.... It was all true, and yet related to a line of superseded truths, part of a truth that seemed to me to be dimming before truth in swifter, lighter planes. And Uncle John and Aunt Kate, though they tried to be conventionally prudent, careful, anxious, were themselves away from the old line.

What I wished of widened experience that was now to me as food—what I dimly felt of powers that might not, but yet might at last lead me from the physical into other types of engineering—what I could get into words of that road wherever we went between Miriam and me, and of what I knew to be her deep consent to my going—of all this I managed to give to Uncle John and Aunt Kate enough to turn doubt into some fullness of assent. We sat around a lightwood fire—John, too, was there—and it chanced to be in the dear old school-room. We talked of Miriam. Her training was done; she had taken an assistant superintendent's place in a small, just-established hospital. Her father had been on to Baltimore. "She's loved and trusted—she's a fine child!" Her mother made a little, murmuring sound. "Miriam...."

She came next day. I knew that they watched us together and were satisfied. John said, "You two lay in fairy cradles!"

The spring was around and through Miriam and me—a magical spring.

She stood just on the near side of tall, rightly slender, with a gipsy, free, lithe vigor. She had a wonderful brow, deep eyes that said the happiest things, a short, well-cut nose, a mouth generously wide and expressive. Her skin had delicate wine hues, faintest browns. Her hair was thick and dark brown with beautiful tendrils. No one with a poor nature could have owned her speaking voice. Her hands were long, strong, and fine. Watching them, one felt the movements they had made, the things they had modeled, the growth of ages, the fine, perpetual change from far-sunken tentatives, through all apprenticeships, all artisanries, crafts, to artist's knowledge.

We went here, we went there, we went to Wakerobin Hill. We stretched ourselves upon the good brown earth, we smelled the pine and hemlock. We laughed—we were so glad; we understood in such full draughts ... though we knew that all the rivers and fountains on earth could not hold the first spring cup of the perfected, the ultimate understanding. The blue air floated within, without, above our wood, the birds sang and rejoiced in their wings, and we, too, sang and rejoiced in our wings.

She said, "Don't you know that we really meet—really, really, really! for all that you may be under the earth in a mine and I may be walking a hospital ward?"

"We meet so really that the preoccupation is to strengthen, strengthen, strengthen reality."

"Yes, I know.... I deliberately try."

"And I."

"Sometimes there is a beautiful terror at what might come!"

"I mean the terror to lose itself in the beauty."

"And the goodness—the beauty and the wisdom."

"Yes, just."

"There couldn't be beauty unless there was wisdom ... goodness."

"The false Florimel—and the true Florimel."

She laughed. "I thought that first!"

"I always did take the word from you like that."

"And I from you."

We smelled the rich and dark hemlock, we listened to the birds, we sailed with the white clouds across the brilliant blue. "All through earth, everywhere, there are surely centers where is beginning a marvelous knitting together.... There is coming to consciousness the planetary spirit.... For us how exquisite that we guess it together!"

"Where will it stop? ... Oh, it will not stop!"

"No."

She sighed. She put out her hands to me. We rested against the hemlock bank, our hands clasped, our faces touching. "There will be a sweetness, even in great light, in remembering night—in remembering when we were little!"

"We'll not lose that, either. We'll not lose anything that we want to keep. We shall taste it as we never did, as we never could before!"

We rested silent, and the magnificence of the spring was all around us.

We were walking the next day in the meadow. There flowed here a small, clear stream, with pebbly margins, and small, overhanging sycamores and willows, with mint, marsh-marigold, and violets, with soldier blackbirds coming and going. We had walked in silence. It had always been with Miriam and me that we did not need to talk. We had been going, as it were, in a brown study, a reverie. Imperceptibly this deepened.

I do not know in any detail how it was. What will one day be general powers are mysterious yet, fleeting in manifestation, withdrawing ere one can say, "It lightens!" Those who perceive, perceive imperfectly, far and far away imperfectly, it is evident. And they cannot well tell what they perceive. They say laboriously one—and one—and one—and one—and one—and so on, with one and one. They cannot say—they have not yet the word—their tongue cannot say it and none has ears to hear it—they cannot say TEN! And then a certain number begin to see "ten"—to try to say it—and their own and the tribe's ancient vocabulary is not well fitted. And evidently there is great variety upon which the new door opens. It is "Ten"—but on that plane may be found a world of speeds and powers and goods. All sail from the old world to the new world, and all have worked their way, but they sail in divers crafts and land in divers zones. There are evidently all manner of adventure, slight and great—but all get out of space as we knew it before we said "Ten," and out of time as we knew it. For Miriam and me I will say that we had begun, though palely, faintly, childishly enough, to realize the world of imagination, of memory, and of inference. I do not suppose that there are roof, floor, or walls to that world.

There was the meadow and the sliding stream and the smell of mint. We were moving in a brown study, a reverie, aware, as profoundly we always were aware, of each other, but with all surface spray and glancing subdued—silent, smooth, running deep.... Our bodies came automatically, as it were, to rest. There lay about us stones warmed by the sun, with green grass growing around them. We sat down. Our bodies fell into attitudes of quiet, of repose, all their myriads of living points working on in some deep harmony of their own, the spirit of the hive taking care of that.... But on upper levels Miriam and I broke bounds.

We passed into an experience common to both, rememberable by both when we came back to the sunlit meadow by Flowerfield and to what we had called, and called only, actuality. Now we never again called it the only actuality.

The bond that we broke was that of narrowed space and narrowed time. We came out of prison and we said, "Why should we have stayed in that one room?" In our prisons we had learned our book. We knew in some wise—in stronger wise, I must think, than did most of our acquaintance—how to imagine and remember, how to draw ends together, and like to like, how to ponder, brood, speculate, how at last to desire and to will.... So one day, suddenly, things began to be put into practice.

We were away from the Flowerfield meadow. We left it as sailors might leave ships at anchor while they themselves went into the strange port.... There came a reinforced sense of being, of very rapid, unobstructed motion, perception in sweeps instead of in points. We were at once mingled and apart. We were one larger self—we felt, as it were, the film that held us enveloped. We were one self, and yet at the moment's will moved Miriam and Michael. As we thought we traveled, as we imaged or remembered we saw, we heard, we touched. The concepted became the actually perceived. We were in the world of idea, grown vivid, solid, real. We were as babes there. Planes overlapped, powers were uneven; now we sank and now we swam. But all weakness given, yet had we left the ship, yet were we out of the dark tower.

Miriam and I stood in a city—it was Washington—we leaned upon the rail of the ironwork balcony of an ancient hotel. It was evening, coral-lighted. The long and broad shadow of a sycamore dappled all the street. The air breathed warm, still, striped with melody and with romance. We were there as we had been and as we had not been. "As it was" hung modeled, colored, understood by the larger now. Thought moved, we moved. We sat upon a bench under trees, in moonlight, before the white capitol.... This sufficed for moments—new moments of new time—of wonder, of the more than doubled beating life and interest. Then again that movement unobstructed, too swift for counting.... We were not in Washington, we were beside heaped sand and the waves of the Atlantic. We were girl and boy by the waves, and we were man and woman, and we were something beyond man and woman, inclosing, knowing, enjoying much.... We knew vaguely that we were the ocean and the sand and the sky, just as well as the boy and girl, the man and woman. We knew, though hesitatingly, dimly, that they were our Ideas, that we had set a stage. In and through that heightened rate of vibration, with that doublement of energy, our ideas became solid, three-dimensional.

In the Flowerfield meadow a soldier blackbird flew to the stream to drink and alighted at the feet of the two sitting there. Ere one could say or think, "The lightning goes!" we were back. The bird flew away before beak had touched water. We saw him alight again a hundred feet away. We moved, we passed hands over eyes. "Michael!"—"Miriam!" "What happened?"

"We went into the past together. Into the time dimension where we keep all things. We went together—"

"The ocean sounds still in my ears!"

"The capitol—-the balcony of the hotel—"

"Yes, of course. The pink sky behind the sycamore.... Oh, the strength, the abounding music! ... Now I feel shrunken."

We rose—walked. "Do you think we can do that again? ... There is something tremendous coming.... Oh, how could the world ever think that this was all!"

"We shall try again. Not now—"

"No. The door opened, then the door shut."

We moved up the meadow in silence. The little stream rippled, the willows stirred in the spring breeze, the blackbirds chattered. Far off, cocks were crowing, a dog barking. We smelled the perfume of flowers, of young leaves. She said: "All this is vivid—but that memory is as present as is this meadow! There, in effect, is the sea, there the capitol, the balcony—"

"That is because the experience was so strong! The memory is in proportion. We doubled desire, pooled energy. Now the very memory has what until just now we called 'reality.' And besides that—" I looked around me. "Miriam! isn't the day deeper, more vivid, more resounding?"

She stopped short. "Yes! Oh, we keep something of the strength and the glory! We made a strange step—and it counts all around.... And oh, it all feels so blessedly natural!"

"Miriam! a part of the world is passing beyond old powers into new. We are somehow in the ranks of that expeditionary force. I don't know just where—away at the end, perhaps—but there, there together! Miriam-Michael—Michael-Miriam! Whatever is coming, there's that bliss!"

"Yes, bliss!" She paused, she looked at the land and the sky, and then we gazed into each other's eyes. "Everything deepens—" Suddenly we put arms around each other, strained together, kissed. "Oh, Love—Oh, Love!"

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.

CHAPTER XXIII

Sickness and a Masai raid befell us early in our adventure. The porters suffered from the first, but in the raid all alike. An Arab caravan-man was killed, four negroes were wounded, Sir Charles had a flesh wound from a flung spear, and I a rifle-ball through the left arm, breaking the bone. The Masai, finding us too strong, left as suddenly as they had come. We made camp, buried the Arab, and stayed to heal the sick and the hurt in a place out of a fairy-book, so strange and beautiful it was. With my wound I had more than a touch of fever. Ahasuerus and Maxwell nursed me and John Sydney set the bone and helped me up and out. This was the end for me of illness. I came out of it seasoned, and the rest of Africa gave me only momentary hurts, though many an adventure when it seemed that death or maiming was nigh.

We recovered the sick and moved on. By degrees the first novelty, beautiful, with a dash of terror, passed. There set in routine interest, routine toil.

We were not primarily an exploring expedition. Exploration of much of the route taken had been done for us. But it fell to us to lighten certain obscurities that overhung affluents of the two great streams. Nor had our enterprise political color. Yet, where we lived days or weeks with savage tribes, and some of these not at all without glimmerings of things to be, we gave, I suppose, seed-ideas. At one place, on high land, we met a tribe that was assuredly lifting. It had a king who was, in his way, an Alfred. This man learned more than one thing that would, in the long run, serve him.... The expedition's official intent was to increase knowledge of life in various forms, to read the rocks, make a great collection of plants, draw and photograph wild, moving life, learn all we might for zoölogy, anthropology, ethnology. We were to put down in black and white observation, experience, deduction. We were to bring back to Europe some valuable journal—journal made at last of journals, half a dozen contributing.

Maxwell was no journalist. He deputed it to me, and I kept our common record. But, besides this, I began, beyond Victoria Nyanza, a record and comment of my own, written after my own fashion. In the weeks that we waited where Congo enters Atlantic, and upon the England-bound ship, I put this in order, and it became Letters from Africa. The idea of the African Dream came to me under Ruwenzori, but I did not write it for three years.

At times this expedition tasted beauty and marvel to the height; at times it wrestled with dangers, trials, and fears. At times it met gross weariness, or stumbled in tunnels of anxiety with a feeling of all Africa caving in upon it. Sickness visited us, and now and again death.

Ere we were two months upon our way Philip Grantham died from some poisonous thing.

We felt grief, we felt awe, he had been so bright, vigorous, like a Greek boy. Sir Charles stood, sat, moved, with lips so pressed together that there was but one dark line. We buried the shell out of which was gone the young master. We raised a little cairn over it, we stayed there by it two days and nights. We marched on, Sir Charles very stern-looking, but himself, with a will to keep his cloud of sorrow in his own sky.

That night we made camp in a sandy country, above a trickle of water, with a sighing wind about us, blowing, twisting, the smoke from our fire. The white men's tents were pitched together, the Arabs' lay a little apart, the many negroes couched about a fire with their heads almost in the embers. Each night two white men shared the watch. One slept till the dark was half gone, when his fellow waked him and himself slept. The trader Robinson and I parted this night between us. He slept upon the sand, gleaming under a half-moon. I sat and listened to the wind and all it talked about. The moon traveled westward, the camp lay still. I thought that in one place I saw something move, and I went softly that way, to find that it was a dwarf tree stirring in the wind. Returning, as I passed Sir Charles's tent I heard him groan.

I sat near the sleeping trader, and I looked toward Sir Charles, and I wished—I willed—I tried to help him.

If indeed, and I believed it, we were members one of another, then he was in me and I in him. And the "dead" youth, the invisible youth—so visible to the mind's eye, so penetrated by the mind's touch, so felt for and felt with, understood, warmed with liking, recognized as hardly had he been before—what perversity to say that he was wholly gone! He had not gone—he was here—in that sea wherein all we bathed, in that organism where death and separateness faded out.

I sat upon the sand, above the watercourse beneath the moon. I drew myself together, concentering, until the spark came, until the vibration changed, until there were long, swift light and warmth—no forms, but fluidity, energy, radiance. I was aware that if I had been strong enough to go farther, I might remake forms—make them fairer, even, subtler, less destructible, greater. But I was not strong enough—nothing like strong enough. I tried to direct the waves of assurance, of comfort. I wished him in the dark tent to feel them. I tried to soothe as I would have tried to soothe my own hurt hand or arm, as I would have tried to comfort and recover myself. He was myself, his hurt my hurt. That was the thing that I believed with passion of all things. I tried to bring the living youth alive in him. If there was continuum, if there was plenum, we were all one. I tried to make the underneath flowing rise in him, bring the strongest comfort. I did not go out to him; he was in myself. I found him there; I tried to make the true blood flow in a numbed part of myself—and that self was not just Michael Forth. Michael Forth was but a fiber of that self. All the small "I's" of earth were but surface colorations of that Identity.

The perception—the action—if action there were—could not be long sustained. I had tried from a fourth dimension to engender light and warmth in one who suffered. I did not know—I do not know—if there was success—though I think that there was some success—filmy enough, undoubtedly.... The inner sphere closed again from view. The moon shone, the wind sighed, the water murmured. It was time to wake the trader.

We looked upon Victoria Nyanza and headwaters of Nile. We lived for a time beside a village in western Uganda, clean, with banana-groves, inhabited by a Bahima folk, tall and handsome. We were plentifully provided with objects of barter, and they brought us in return what we needed. The country was most beautiful, high, and healthful. Here were cattle and game in herds, and many a strange great quadruped. The native chiefs and strong men, the women, the old men, and the children showed themselves friendly. They came by the paths that were everywhere, a faint reticulation over all the land, to our camp, or we trod the same lines to the village. We sat under the trees that they favored. Llewellyn and Ferraro more especially throve here. Llewellyn had picture-books which he showed the Bahima; he told them stories like an old Welsh bard. He had the gift of discrimination. I would watch his bright eye dart and fix upon some one member of the bronze circle. "There's one who can tell a story! Come ye forth, friend, there, and unpack us tale or ballad!" Two out of three times Llewellyn succeeded. The glories of the Bahima jetted forth. Meantime the Welshman, in the shadow of some one's broad shoulder, drew out pocket tablet and pencil and fell to transcribing. He and Ferraro had great knowledge of peoples and types.

We had in Africa strenuous hours, and again hours unoccupied. In some of the latter I put myself to school to Llewellyn and Ferraro. I learned much from them. I heard corroborated that which I had always guessed, the profound unity of the human family. And out of the unity, that stem, that vine, but never detached from it, the multitude of branches. Some were wildings and some garden and orchard and vineyard glories—all in proportion, it seemed to me, as they kept knowledge of the fire and sap of the whole. I learned much of great drama from the Welshman and the Italian's lore—strange tales of the divers leaves and buds, twigs and branches of the ash Yggdrasil.

But it was with Mannheim, the naturalist, that I roamed farthest. This man, twenty years my elder, son of a Jewish rabbi, born in Hamburg, raised in London, had broken from cities into gardens, into fields and lane sides, into forests. The king who knew alike the cedar and the hyssop of the wall might have found somewhat of himself in this mind. Mannheim had a tall, thin figure, soft, curled hair upon head and chin, a hooked nose, eyes now keen and now deep, still, and inward-looking. Sometimes for days I went with him, in and out of Uganda forests. We took Ahasuerus with us and three or four Bahima men. At times Mannheim talked about himself, his youth and hard schooling and emerging purposes. "Each one finds what he seeks," said Mannheim, "and each one seeks what he is able to find."

"Even if he seek the ultimate circle and the original fountain?"

"Even that. But he must give himself time. As you say, Rome was not built in a day.... Certainly the new Jerusalem is not built in a day."

We sat beneath an acacia and looked at lilies in an arm of marsh-water. I repeated aloud:

"Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire,
Bring me my spear! oh, clouds unfold,
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."

"Who said that?"

"Blake."

We sat silent for a time. Then said Mannheim: "The next century is to be the psychic century. Fin de siècle they call this piece of time; nineteen hundred will begin to listen to a still, small voice."

"You mean that the conscious subjective—and, correspondingly, the objective—will widen its borders?"

"Yes. We shall begin to use nerve and muscle that have been forming."

"What are the first movements of the new child?"

"They have great variety. Naturally. At first the freedom seems wholly interior."

"Old self is very gloomy and insists to larger self that it is mistaken."

"Yes. All kinds of idle fears. Babes learning to walk—the chair and mother's arms too far away!"

"Perseverance and courage?"

"Yes. It's worth all boldness."

I looked at the lilies by the reeds. They were very fair; they trembled on the dark water; they seemed lit from beneath, sapphire, exquisite. The reeds grew musical instruments and living green and of a vivid grace. It was a flash of transfiguration. I knew these at times. They came and went, rifts of heaven, which then closed. I spoke. "All that you call psychical—double-strengthened memory, imagination at white heat, intuition that is a long reasoning process flashed together, response to all manner of stimuli that once were not noticed—all that is by no means all of it. There is no rest short of the conscious Totality!"

"I agree," said Mannheim. "All that we can now conceive, or that we can conceive to-morrow, is conceived but to be lost in greater light. All the same, take what we can now do, and let it bring forth what wonder it will! It is first steps. After walking comes running; after running, flying; after flying we may begin to look toward that wide home which is omnipresence." He sat silent; then: "I recognized you as one of the new children. There are more of these children now than used to be. Presently there will be many—another race. Then will the mass of things begin to change."

One of the men brought him a strange flower. Mannheim studied it, touching, handling, with the naturalist's respect and understanding.

"I have not seen one like it," I said.

"No," he answered. "It has fellows, but they are rare. It is emerging from a class. See, here and here, how it differs.... But all that it is doing is simply using its powers."

"There's a thing," I said, "in Dante's Purgatory that struck me sharp and quick when I read it as a boy. There's a round of the mountain where the souls lie prostrate with face pressed and eyes blinded against rock and dust. They have lain there, each one, very long. 'My soul hath cleaved unto the dust.'... One of them stirs, rises upon hands, rises to knees, stands, and goes. The mountain thrills and gives forth a cry of praise. Presently to Dante and Virgil appears the shade risen from that rock like Christ from the grave. They converse, and the soul—it is one Statius—tells them that the mountain trembles and acclaims when any spirit among those prostrate ones who have been covetous only of earth, of metal, and of dust, and all the dream and cozenage of life

feels itself
So purified, that it may rise, or move
For rising....
Purification, by the will alone
Is proved, that free to change society
Seizes the soul rejoicing in her will....
Free wish for happier clime.

"So Statius. Then says Virgil:

"Now I see the net
That takes ye here; and how the toils are loosed."

"Yes," said Mannheim. "I hold that to be true through every order."

With the flower still in his hand we went back to camp. Two or three days after this we were out at the foot of a fairly high mountain, in a grove of bamboo. It was a grove of strange and rich suggestion; fairy pillars, fairy arcades, smoothness, straightness, jewel-light and fine, sere whispering. After a while we rested, lying on dry, clean earth. Outside the bamboo the men with us sat under a breadfruit-tree and played some game with bits of bone. We saw them brokenly, glintingly, through the forest of bronze-green jointed stalks.

Said the naturalist: "There's a kind of experimenting that must go on all the time if we are to get anywhere. Laboratory work like any other—patient trials and then patient trials again. If once in a hundred times there comes fluorescence—results—we are glad and praise the America beyond the foam.... You get into wide past and wide present easily?"

"Yes."

"And you travel within, as one calls it? You say, 'I am in my birthplace'—or, 'I am in New York'—or London—or maybe Canton or Calcutta?"

"Yes."

"You use all your knowledge, sense of probabilities, associative power, and so forth, and—sometimes palely, sometimes less palely—comprehend, comprise, are things, situations, movements, events, and trains of these?"

"Yes. I go many places within myself, and I do many things. But the reality feeling is sometimes very weak."

"The reality will increase.... Let us experiment.... I have been in America. I have been to your Niagara Falls. Have you been there?"

"Yes—long ago."

"Can you recall the cataract? The rush of the river down, the thunder, and the upflung churned water—"

"Yes."

"Then recall it now with all the energy you can! I will do likewise. See if we can meet and double the perception. Sometimes it is possible. It is worth the trying."

The bamboo grove held us as in some magic grot, cool and dim, stately, whispering. I shut my eyes and sat still, breathing lightly. The inner man, into whose hands all places run, gave heed to Niagara.

It was here, the roar and the intense, deep, swift, utter push of the river over the brim! The ground trembled; I knew again the smell of the mass, the chill, the thundering fall, the outflung enormous spray. Niagara! Very well, it was here, and in a high degree of reality. I had put my strength to bringing it here. There was the sense, as always when a thing like this was done, of a widened brain, of a changed breathing, of a lifted inner firmament. I held Niagara in presence. But Mannheim? That needed another strength. I put forth energy of recognition.... I felt him. For one instant the two Niagaras roared together.... Immense sound, motion, light—all significance doubled—sense of river where had been brooks, sense of eagle where had been eaglets, sense of triumphing, outfilling life, memory, knowledge—the subjective brain, the objective brain, great planets where had been lesser ones—everywhere a changed dynamic.... The instant sank and passed. There fell diminution, paling, slowing.... Here was only the single Niagara, and it seemed a wraith beside what had been. It disappeared. Two men sat in Africa in a grove of bamboo.

Said Mannheim: "That was a fleeting synthesis of two. Conceive, will you, how it will be when we are all one!"

CHAPTER XXIV

We were in high country covered with tall grass, sparsely set with trees, sweeping to a climbing forest. There was a ragged, deep-cut water-course, and there were ant-hills, little lower than the native huts and shaped much like these. So high were we that there was no great heat. We breathed salubriousness. The mountains above us had snow upon their brows. This was elephant country, and we kept fires about our camp to ward off any trampling rush from the herds we saw, chiefly afar, but sometimes near. We had had a stiff three days' march through broken and hilly country, thinly inhabited. Sir Charles called a halt of two days and nights.

Maxwell, Ferraro, and I, and with us Ahasuerus and two Bantu porters, made our way along the flanks of a hill a mile or two from camp. We had climbed a bold point and had gazed thence over a green and tawny, just undulating sea to gigantic tumbled, frozen waves, white-tipped. Coming down, we saw below us at no great distance a piece of the forest in agitation, shaking and bending as though a bag of Eolus were opening just there and nowhere else. "Elephants!" said the Bantus.

We came from the hillside out upon the plain and began to cross this toward the watercourse. Trees were still about us, but not many. Between us and the camp stretched a ribbon of wood through which we must pass. We neared it. Suddenly it, too, shook, and there poured from it angry trumpeting. We stopped short. The Bantus began to chatter. "They surmise," said Ferraro, who was the language-master of the three, "that the camp made some elephants angry, coming near it perhaps and driven away by shots and sight of fire. We missed hearing the shots because the wind is blowing straight from us to the camp. But by the same token we had best look to ourselves, for the elephants will presently know that we are here. And they are angry. Some one of them is hurt."

We were as far from the deeper forest that clothed the hill as from the ravine of the watercourse, down which we might conceivably make our way safely enough. The grass grew so tall that in part it screened us. We began to move quickly across the plain to the watercourse. We had gone but a little way when the note of the trumpeting changed. "They've got our wind," said Maxwell.

The edge of the ribbon of wood seemed to bulge, to start forward, to shake out pieces of shadow. There were ten or twelve of these protuberances. They came away from the ribbon—showed themselves for angry giants willing to charge us, overtake and trample us. We were men, not elephants, but we must and did run. There was a great bull in front. We reached the watercourse, before us a precipitous bank, down which we might plunge with some risk to neck and limb, but which the angered herd and the more than angered leader might hardly attempt. Ferraro, Maxwell, Ahasuerus, the Bantus, and myself—all seemed there. Ahasuerus—

We were over the rim when I missed Ahasuerus. I turned back. I saw him a hundred yards and more away, limping, trying to run. The eight or ten cows and young elephants with the great bull had stopped in a grove of slender trees to the right, near the hill. But the bull, with lifted trunk, with gleaming tusks, was racing, trumpeting, toward him. I ran. I shouted. I waved above my head, above the grass, a coat that I carried.

The oncoming elephant saw me and swerved from Ahasuerus. I ran, drawing him farther.... There was little in my mind but a singing of old days in the corn-field, Ahasuerus and I working in the hot sun, in the same furrow. The corn-field and the swimming-hole—

The voice of the elephant was in my very ears. I seemed to see blended with my shadow the shadow of his tusks, of the trunk curving toward me like a sickle, of the vast, lifted leg. The report of Maxwell's rifle blended with the trumpeting.

The elephant received the ball, but was not apparently severely hurt. He half wheeled, missed me, tore beyond me, and stopped, bellowing. Then from the distant wood, in agitation, came a burst of calling. The cows moving in this direction now also called. The elephant seemed for one moment to think. Then he swung his bulk about and left us, trumpeting of his griefs.

Ahasuerus, running with the rest of us, had caught foot in some root, suffered a heavy fall and a sprained ankle. Now we gathered him up and, keeping to the watercourse, made our way to camp.

Ahasuerus said: "Twas worse 'n cramp in the swimmin'-hole! First, I saw the horrors and nothing else to amount to anything. And then I saw Daddy Guinea, sitting somewhere, smoking his pipe, and looking happy as a June-bug, and he said, 'Come erlong, boy—come erlong through!' I sho' was glad to hear you shouting at that elephant!"

Maxwell, in camp that night, supper eaten and bedtime come, leaned against a tree before the tent. "Ahasuerus all right?"

"Oh yes! He'll have to ride one of the mules for several days."

Maxwell stood listening to the night sounds in the bush, beyond the smoky ring of our fires. "If that fellow had trampled you into pulp, as for a little it certainly seemed that he would ... what then? What next?"

"I didn't think," I answered; "but if I had, I should have said, 'There will still be a "then," and a "next."' How are you going to stop there being? The rush of a bull-elephant—yes, or of Niagara—is nothing to the impetus of you or of me!"

Lying on my bed that night the "you" and "me" went more subtly together. Variation and Unity. Why did we think "Variation," and then "Unity," and turn from one to the other, restless, perplexed, still keeping succession, opposition, parties to choose between? But Variation-and-Unity, or Unity-and-Variation—the phrase one noun.... I lay there one power, an organism, and yet, God knows, I included variousness.... To feel as and with this camp, both in its oneness and its multiplicity—what was that but self-cognition as a larger organism? This camp, this Africa, these seven seas and five continents, this earth, this solar system, this visible and invisible universe.... Ever a greater, more conscious self....

Magnitude was around me, power, an upper realm of mind. But it sank away, it vanished, like sheet lightning. It ever vanished thus, and I cried within, "O God! when will the wings hold?"

But out of the flash came always, I knew, an angel into one of my many hells. Down there, under my daily consciousness, a light in darkness, it continued to work.

Definitely now, in my life, I was come to the plane where two lives, the inner and the outer, are in the crucible and must melt together. Now the heat and light that were the crucible increased in intensity, and now they sank to scarcely a glowing. The crucible was immense, the lives within it multiform; the process due to extend itself over centuries, possibly through eons. Much was within the crucible that was obstinate, ignorant, selfish, and perverse. But I knew at least that I was in the crucible ... also that I was the crucible.

We went on from this country. Here we changed carriers save for a few who would still accompany us. Zanzibar and Coast men, well paid, in good humor, gave us ample good-bys. Uganda men, tall and strong, shouldered rolls and cases. The moving line stretched afar over rolling grassland. I thought of Indians afile long since, through American woods. These Uganda folk, Hamitic men, placed beside the Indian might not seem so very different.

The mountains rose higher. We gazed upon purple giants, with helmets, under the equator, of silver. As we marched the robes grew green, and we saw the shoulders of naked rock, and the whitened heads held stark and high. Now we were climbing, a moving line like an ant army, upon the lower reaches of the giant's robe. About us were trees of wonder, and from them monkeys chattered at us.

At sunset the extended line subsided into the root-knot of camp. We slept in the midst of a forest much less than half asleep. Plateau that we had left, slope that we had mounted, we were eight thousand feet above the sea. High above us yet watched the snowy heads.

The following day we sought and found a lofty pass through which the line might cross the range and begin the descent upon the western side. Here, in a hollow of fine Alpine grass and flowering shrub, we slept, ten thousand feet above the far-distant sea. The next day and night camp rested here, under charge of Robinson, the trader, long known and well liked by the Bahima men. With him stayed Carthew Roberts, and likewise Ahasuerus. The rest of us would climb to the helmet that lifted over the pass, to the very helmet feather.

So we did. In the good, late afternoon light we came out below the snow, upon a wide ledge of rock, from which we might see afar from north to south by way of the west. The white head above us, the very crest, we left for sunrise. This ledge was fitted for the night. There was not only right surface, but at the back a sheltered half-cavern.

Chancing to be in advance, I came first upon the ledge. I saw, with an intake of the breath, the great view. To right and left mountain arms; below in the pass the fairy plumes of our camp-fires; out and beyond and very far below, washed in the gold of the lowering sun, illimitable forest. I stood and looked. Out of a belt of dwarf growth, up the difficult stony slope toward the ledge, came the others, one by one. With the sun behind me, I watched their coming. Maxwell, with his long stride and his dry, poised strength, was ahead. Ferraro, so much smaller, but agile as a grasshopper, came next, then Llewellyn, then Mannheim, then Sir Charles, then John Sydney.

As I stood there Conrad Conrad flashed into mind—Conrad and the Peaks of Otter and the tawny man.

The rich, the amber light bathed me standing on the rock, and bathed them coming on. But to my senses there seemed something more than warm light from a ninety-odd million miles away, eight hundred thousand miles in diameter, ball of fire. There streamed from within outward a happiest sense of strength and lightness. It was as though I had caught a ray from a supersensible sun. My frame felt vast, fluid without waste, transparent without colorlessness, strong without weight, plastic to thought, a thrilling, lucent, finer matter. I felt this of the frame I called mine, and I felt it of those companions in Africa coming toward me. It was as though, feeling it of the one frame, I must feel it of the others, because all were in truth one frame. The sense was of new bodies breaking from old sheaths, bodies fed with, built up from, elements highly evolved, grain of upland fields ground in golden mills. It came with indescribable breadth and depth, indescribable exquisiteness of sensation, indescribable delicacy, richness, and strength of emotion. Maxwell, stepping now upon the rock, was beautiful to me, and so were Ferraro and Mannheim, Llewellyn, Sir Charles, John Sydney, and so were the two Bahima men.

They mounted to the shelf of rock with the farther snowy crest behind and half Africa, it seemed, below. "Ha!" said Sir Charles. "I suppose we live for high lights such as these!" His grim face relaxed. There came to him, and I suppose to all of us, the wave of Philip Grantham's hand and his infectious laughter.

Below the ledge was broken scrub enough. We gathered wood and made a great fire. We had food with us and we cooked and ate our supper. It tasted most good there in the winey air, by the crackling flame. Supper over, we examined the half-cave behind us for sleeping-quarters and we gathered more wood.

We felt as yet no desire for sleep, and the west was magnificent, while all the land below lay still beneath a purple pall. Llewellyn broke into song. The words were Welsh. "In praise of mountains," explained the singer. "Of mountains and the spirit who couches among them!"

We sat about the fire and fell to talking. Llewellyn, usually rather silent, seemed to have his lips unlocked by this place. "There comes out the golden Venus—Venus Urania! Mannheim! Where do you think may be what they call the fourth dimension?"

"In the subjective. Within us."

"We must be just being born in that world," said the Welshman. "Earth and heaven! What an objective we'll make ere we are grown!"

Sir Charles spoke. "Where do you think are the dead?"

"Within us."

"But there's no real realization of that—any more than there is of other things I read about, hear talked about, in this amazing world!"

"Give Time time. You've just said that it is amazing."

Llewellyn began a half-spoken, half-chanted processional of thought. It may have been partly an improvisation, partly a recitation from some old bard. It began about the mountains, and it went on about the great drama and beauty of the earth. He chanted of seas and islands and continents, of zone and clime, of the outstretched landscape of time, of scintillant currents of peoples. And all came under the mantle of an Individual.

He ceased his chant. We looked at the stars—Rigel and Canopus and Sirius, Achernar and the Southern Cross. John Sydney spoke. "Universal Energy or Everlasting God? Which do you say, Mannheim?"

"I say the Self that I merge toward," answered Mannheim. "It is the same with Universal Energy and Everlasting God."

"And you, Michael?"

"I say the same."

We watched the sky. There was splendor, there was pureness, there was vigor. Each one seemed to feel the center in the other, take thence the point of view. Therefore we had many mountain-tops in one.

CHAPTER XXV

We were in the forests where the water sank and trickled toward Congo, not toward Nile. There rose about us a fearful, a magical beauty.

A path ran that seemed a chain of roots and rootlets, kindly pushed above the soil by the trees for our use. So light and yielding was this soil that we seemed to step upon black air or black water that did not wet, but into which there might be sinking. The soil was black vegetal life asleep, thick memories, premonitions of life in infinite leaf. We came into arcades, aisles where water ran, where, far up, so far up, there glowed fillets of blue. Away from these there had never been aught since the world began but a green heaven, a mighty emerald and jade arabesque.

The air hung humid, warm, oppressively still; the light, green light, rayed from a sun that must be far away and small. Birds or the face of a chimpanzee looked down or out upon us.

The thin, extended line of burdened men wound on slowly, following the naked guide ahead. Footprint fell in footprint, over the black, low-settled mist of old life, so pregnant, so fecund, so instant-ready the moment the spark should call....

I walked in a forest of my own thought. I was remembering that the earth was alive—that those whom we called planets—stars—suns were persons, individuals—that there was communication between them—that they made a society—that they pursued an ideal unity and spoke of an over-self.

Planetary consciousness—solar consciousness—universal consciousness, universal, eternal, integrated! I saw the star ahead, faint and far, and between were light-years as the sands of the sea for number, light-years and their vast successiveness of event. The strange sweetness was that the ray it sent was a ray of home and drew with the cords of home.

All feeling, all knowing, all doing rang forth from that. There was the heart of action. There was all the action.... But what was the action? How to further it? How definitely to let go the little will, let the One Will pour through? How to increase the mind's weak zephyr until the eternal cleansing truth blew free?

The path wound, though still it went on. The powdery earth that was half-life seemed hardly to afford footing, and yet did give support. Strange trees, ferns, mazy creepers, air-plants, roof over roof, light like the depths of the sea! Suddenly, smilingly, there walked into my mind child-verses learned at my mother's knee:

Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land.

Still the huge controversy! Was that so—or the mighty ocean and the pleasant land did they make the water drops, the sand grains? Or was there no true problem, and the whole vexed question but a lantern-fantasy to melt in the flooding day?

The flooding day—that was what I wanted.

The enormous forest slept, a sea of strange shapes. I wished to know the life that made the shapes—drew limiting lines around its own essence for its own uses—knew the use, the purpose, was at itself, gathered its mind together and knew itself.... The only path was the inner path, the way of the ever more inclusive, ever less inhibited "I" or "We"—just as one chooses to call it. Now Michael Forth called it "I," and now he called it "We." But never did he mean only that manacled, dungeoned particle, born in the year 1862.

The forest halted. Here came and passed and stayed a stream crossed by a swaying bridge of woven lianas. Upon the farther bank, in a brown and green space, appeared rows of smallest, frailest huts of cane, and a body of Pygmies, warned that we were friendly, drawn up by their talk-house to meet us. They struck their drums. Boom! Boom! Their fetish-men advanced, striving hard to look terrible. And all around stood the forest, the rooted, the yet further manacled.

We dwelt several months by this stream, with these Pygmies. They were a simple, low-scale folk, away down, away down.

I listened to the drum-beat in this village. I watched the ritual of the fetish-men. They were children in height, but they wore head-dresses that they thought made them towering. Around and around they went in a circle.... It was as though there was an invisible stake, an invisible rope; they got to the end of their tether and went round and round. I thought, "Break the rope, for God's sake, and rise!"

One night, in a half-dream I saw more than these Pygmies. I saw Africa and its stake and rope and weary circle.... Asia and its circle—Europe and its circle—America and its circle....

This village, this forest, this stay with the Pygmies, came, with me, into the column of turning-points, the hinge column.

I was weary of inner debate, weary of turning around my own stake in my own circle. There would come upon me here, if I stayed here forever, withered horror.... I would clear out—trust to rising—but move anyhow!

I had had intimations of a path. To treat syntheses as phenomena to be realized, used, and grown by just as their component phenomena had been realized, used, and grown by—to take Memory and Imagination as the great Powers that they were—to use Reason with a wider swing—to trust Intuition—to cease saying, "It is not penetrable," or, "It is afar," or, "It is dead," or, "Past and Future are unenterable," or, "There is no participation nor perception outside this circle."

The night held dark and warm and close. There was something tolling in the forest. A red light upsprang by the talk-tree, and the fetish-men began again their twisted dance. All the Pygmies followed with their eyes; their bodies also moved in sympathy.

At Landon once there had been a lynching. I had been among those who tried to stop it. But we had word too late and were there too late. I saw again the swinging body, the crew of masked Pygmies beneath.... I thought of many another crippled truth and frozen love. America and its weary, ancient circle....

Break, break from ignorance! Nor halt from fearing, "Is this a path?" Go the way you can go, and trust to its widening and serving the others!

That night, my body lying straight in the tent that I shared with Maxwell, I went away in the inner man. Just as much as that inner man could reap of inner space, time, and form, he might reap. Just as much as he could understand and share he might understand and share. There was no barrier save himself.

It had been an oppressive day in this forest and this Pygmy town. The rains were at hand. We faced a considerable stay here, and the prospect had some distaste.... I went away. I fled like the eagle upon the breathing air. Beneath me flowed the sea. Then there was land and mountain-tops.... But up in the air—up and up!—till it thinned, till atmosphere lay below me as hydrosphere and lithosphere lie under atmosphere. The Sea of Air—and I saw its surface as from a cliff is seen the surface of the sea. It was in waves, little and great, and the upper forces dashed against and through it, and there was a wild spray of utterest light.

Down in the Pygmy village arose some night disturbance. Maxwell sat up. "It's Ferraro's watch—"

I rose. "I'll go see."

The affair proved to be nothing more than the push of some forest beast against the last cane hut's most diminutive garden-patch. I returned to the tent. "It's all right."

Maxwell lay back. "I was dreaming of Scotland. I smelled the moors—had heather in my hand.... Michael, don't you think that the whole round earth may be within us?"

"I certainly do. Look in upon Scotland whenever you will!"

He turned. I knew that there was a woman with him upon the moor. In sleep it mattered not at all that she was what they called "dead." I divined other planes where, too, it did not matter.

The rains began in the basin of the Congo. We stayed their season out among this Pygmy people.

We made for ourselves indoor work.... For one thing, among others, while I was in this place, I wrote the beginning of a story. I never finished it, never used, later, the fragment. I place it here because I was writing out of my own straining toward light, and my own intuitions of certain of the forms and ways of that faint, faint dawn which was all that as yet I knew.

The fragment follows here as I wrote it in the huts of the Pygmies, in tropical Africa.

ESCAPE

He had been in prison ten years. The prison was a fortress where were kept offenders against the state. His prison chamber was a place of stone pillars and arches, long, but not so wide. The shadows hung about the ends of it. The loophole, grated window was set in the middle of the outer wall; the lamp swung from the middle pillar. There was a low bed and a heavy chair and table. The floor was stone and sounded when he walked to and fro, unless he walked lightly. He walked much, to and fro, and to and fro.

Morning and evening came a jailer with food and water, a silent jailer with a heavy and a weary air. He evoked pity, chained to a monotonous life. Few others came. If any came it was at tremendously long intervals. Nor were they friends of heart and mind who came.

Often enough it was cold enough in the prison room that in part was sunk below a river level. In time of flood the river might be heard without. The prisoner had a thick coverlet for his bed, and a long, wide and warm cloak. He needed both when he saw, high up, the gray snowflakes behind the window-grating. Both had been the gift of a woman. He had never seen the woman. At long intervals some comfort—a book perhaps—had come from her, brought by the jailer. She must have influence. He knew that the giver was a woman only because the jailer said, "A woman sends it." And again, "A woman—yes, the same woman—sends it." But now for a long time, for nearly two years, nothing had come from her. The prisoner believed that she was dead.

Ten years....

He knew very well his dungeon with pillars and arches. There were the two shadowy ends. Lying on his bed, he gazed at one and the other until they seemed to stretch forth like a giant stretching his arms. What was at the giant's finger-tips? And what just beyond the giant's reach? When he walked that way it was merely into dimmer parts of the fortress room. There was the window high in the side wall. Beyond it spread breadth of the earth. But the walls about the window space, and the bars across, and his body passing to and fro beneath, were alike material, and the first held back the second. The free space of the window was smaller than his body. It could not go through.

How rigid were conditions!

Ten years.... To and fro—to and fro. The dropping moments, falling in a line.... Stalactite and stalagmite meeting—the pillar of them.

When first he came to this place he had been active with plans for release or escape. His mind had moved swiftly this way and that, searching iron keys for an iron door, means to reach friends without, means to change the views of foes without. With his hands, with a file made from some scrap of iron, he had worked at the stone that cased the window. In none of these things had he succeeded. In them all like was opposed by like, by a more numerous and massive like. At last he saw that a heavy like was opposing a less heavy like, and that in the nature of things, the latter could not beat down nor penetrate the first. He desisted from these efforts. That had been a long time ago.

Dull stagnation and despair. There had been a frozen year of that—gray, icicle-hung...

Out of that, little by little, he had reached a more clement season. How he came into this he hardly knew. Something had worked for him, underground or overhead, in his own nature. As the floor upon which he trod was the roof of cellars and gave forth low sound as he walked, so, doubtless, his own being had stories.

He came to where he could help himself, in that story where he consciously dwelt—and so, doubtless, helped all the other stories....

Now he took up again, though not in the first fevered strain, and with difference of aim and method, the deliberate, day-by-day endeavor to remove himself from this prison. If what opposed was too numerous and too massive to-day, that might not be the case to-morrow. He worked with brain and hand. Necessarily, it was inch work.... The opposing forces had an air of resting yet in their age-deep bed. He persevered, but he saw that an angel must break these prison bars. Well ... make the angel! Make or awaken—he cared not which, so that the winged being arose.

He was born a thinker and artist. It was the artist in him that had set him here. He had laid hands upon a misshapen state, trying to bring it into juster proportions and beauty. But Behemoth had elected to remain for the present Behemoth. Now he was here in prison, but he would widen this from above if he could. Where there's a will there's a way. Where there's a will there's a way.

The books were few that he had in his prison, but worth while. He had been allowed to bring a certain number with him upon his coming here. That same woman had sent more who now sent no more. So well did he know them now that he knew much in them that was not written down. He had also the much that he had read before coming here. Pondering this mass, traveling in mind to and fro upon its surface, learning by degrees to sink into its interior, to permeate, as it were, its molecular structure—he found open to him, in a sort, fields of space and rivers of time. Emotional freedoms likewise, releases of energy, desires, longings, aspirations, satisfactions ... and higher vineyards, orchards, and wheat-fields where the mind strengthened itself ... and mountain summits where the sky of spirit seemed not far away.

It was a life.... But yet, compared to life that he longed for, it was pallid, hushed, slow, twilight, a land never to be scorned, a real land, always to be loved and thanked for good help for travelers, but yet a Stygian land compared—

Compared to what? Traveling to what?

He had a power of longing—but all was cut across by a wall of pearly mist.... There must be light there, for he saw the wall.

When neither lamp nor window showed him the page of his book, or when he lay awake upon his bed, he might sink into the sea of memory. That was a dense element in which he was at home. He could move to and fro there and take much pleasure. It was a very ancient, very wonderful sea. He became a skilled navigator, over and through its waves and currents.... Mnemosyne! Her face was fair, though turned always over her shoulder....

He wrapped memory about him like a cloak, he sat beside it like a fire. Motionless upon his bed, or in his chair beneath the faded window, he wrought until the dead lived again and the past put on the present's crown. Until the dead almost lived again and the past almost put on the present's crown. He wrought and wrought until he opened blocked-up paths. With an infinite patience he matched ends and colors....

He began to see his life as he had not seen it before. He sorted past phenomena and put them in sequences. He recovered moods and let like flow into like, and felt the river systems of them and the uninterruptedness of their being. He put together purposes and saw that always they were threads of larger purposes.

What at first he had called memory, and had bathed in for sensuous warmth, repose, security—for a finer, haunting, melancholy pleasure—for rhythm and returning chords—passed by stair and stair into Recollection. Mnemosyne came alive, looked around, moved.... The change was profound. It was as though a geisha, soft, attractive, exquisitely skilled to soothe material care, had given way to a goddess—such a goddess as a man must be very high, subtle, and deep to serve!

Yet were all these but inns, but shrines, but cities on the way out. He must not rest, lob-lie-by-the-fire, in the inn—he must not kneel too long before the image in the shrine—he must not even dwell, a busy citizen, too long in the ant-hill city. He was addressed to real escape, with all his being....

Every power of desire, will, knowledge, judgment! He brooded like a witch over her caldron upon the data of science. Each bit of knowledge was a chink in the wall. Get a finger in, work and work until the hand slipped through....

Power of Recollection. As a man awaked from sleep, as a man turned to saneness from delirium, so there might be a still, smooth, deep, and entire return to one's self. Then these walls would be paper and mist.

Power of Imagination. He was alive to possibilities here. It was his belief that mankind was not using for flight one feather of that mighty wing. Then imagine!

What was reality?

What were real perception, real knowledge, real will, real action—what was recognition of reality?

Could one make reality; give it, as it were, birth from desire, mind, and will?

Make or find or recover reality....

He was a man religiously minded, for all that nine out of ten had called him infidel or atheist. Much of that life of his, outside this prison, had been spent in what seemed to the nine destruction of ancient and venerable buildings.... The work, too, within himself, of dilapidation—how many years he had given to that! To see fall from his own interior world this tower and that keep—to take away the clinging ivy—to disturb the winged life that had built in every cranny—what sad and heavy and dogged work much of it had been! Yet he could do no else, for his own power drove him on, and there was a word that rang somewhere above him. In the light stood justification.

That anguished toil had passed into something like building and into hopeful joy in building—long ago it had passed.

Religion! To remember the god in you!

Every day a day of splendor, but fairly shadowy, almost night, before the more splendid dawn it foresaw. Ever the hunter in the keen air of his own being—ever the adventurer with the wild-grape scent from the new land just within his nostril—ever the lover with the beloved wearing a starrier crown.

Religion! Ever more comprehensive, comprehending, until there was consciously but the Various One—who might have his own vast days and dawns....

He paced his prison, up and down, across, around. He sat in his heavy chair, motionless, his eyes upon space. One entering would have thought him carved there, while all the time, within, was intensity of action. He lay upon his bed, his arms straight at his sides or crossed upon his breast, so still that he might have been thought dead. Without the grated window the snow fell, the wind struck the fortress like a flail. The river could not be heard, for it was covered with ice. His mind was warm with its own deep speed.

Freedom ...

Plato's World of Ideas—not Plato's solely, but any man's before him and after him, who might grasp the rim of that world and draw himself up into it—over the wall, through the window.

Pragmatic Sanction.... What would work, what you could bring into experience. Truth. The Actual. Make it with your magic, if you were so fortunate a magician.

The mind-born. The born of mind and will.

"If ye have faith ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove, and it shall remove."

Strength of a larger self—on the road to a larger yet.

Freedom—

Eleven years. He had been in this fortress eleven years.

He lay on his bed and the snow fell without the window. He lay wrapped in the cloak that the woman had given. The gray flakes fell, he knew that the wind was high. Then very quietly, gently, without a jar, quite simply, naturally, he himself, his consciousness, awoke outside his body.

It was both without and within. It was as though he were free in the room, but had left—just that much of himself—a guard within the body. The body lay as though it were asleep. When, presently, he would try experiments, he was immediately back within it, awake, and looking at the falling snow behind the grating. It was as if a very high volition of itself raised or lowered its rate of vibration. The lower rate laid it here within the thick body, the higher freed it. He gathered force and again passed out from that citadel. He knew where he left it, he kept a fine line of communication open between him and that guard left within. But with the intensed rest of him he was out and away.

Not, indeed, that there was fullness here, either! Even with so much of blessed freedom, he was aware of stronger and vaster volitions to be attained, to be exercised. Compared to what might be here was only a slow-spinning, cold, and dim star. The blaze of glory was yet above. But compared to what had been he experienced strength and bliss.

He passed out of the fortress, to his consciousness withdrawing from it like a cloud, a vapor, or like light, like radiant energy, passing through the pores of the stone, as if the stone were no more than a gray fog-bank. He was aware of sentries, but the sentries did not stop him. One or two might turn head as he went by, but they did not call nor start forward nor threaten with any weapon. He realized that they did not know why they had turned.

He remembered an old wood, known to him when he was a boy, and remembered it in its summer dress.... The wood was about him, and it was green and the sun filtered in between the leaves.

That fact of infinite gradations in vibration, infinite intensities of imagery and will! He was here in the wood, and as formless as air. Into mind came the old warm pressure of the soil, the odor of sun-washed pine and fern, the bird song from coverts, the boy's happy abandon, down-flung upon Mother Earth.... He took form. Whether his power slackened to that or heightened to that he was not then clear. But he was here, in the fair shape of a man, and he first kneeled and then lay upon the warm earth, and felt deep joy.

Of old time, in this wood, when he was a boy and afterward in manhood, he had been well able to image and remember, to dream and picture, to disintegrate and bring into new combinations experiences of his own or of others, to live in a manner in poetry-land, romance-land, history-land, and in the news of the world that came to him hot from the oven. His faculty in this wise had been very considerable. And he could share in elemental life. Wind and water, earth and fire, were wide and deep words to him, holding wonder.... That so straitly bound, that steel and iron, that painful fortress life, had forced, for very relief's sake, his ancient power to exert itself and grow in massiveness and edge. He recognized now that this present enormous access of strength was a matter of altered degree rather than kind. Hastened by great need, lifted at last by will grown athlete, he had in one effort overpassed many degrees. He had come into superconsciousness, but into what degree of that, or high or low, he was not prepared to say. He saw that his degree bordered the old consciousness, in part blended with it. He was not arrogantly minded, and he was prepared to believe that it was not, save relatively speaking, a high country. But oh, beside the old, it was high and wide and blissful!

This wood was dear to him whether it slumbered or whether, as now, it bent its boughs in the summer wind. A little thing that he thought he had forgotten started solidly forth again. A straying dog came by and started a rabbit-hunt. The rabbit went like a flash down the forest-scape. She and the dog disappeared, whereupon a pheasant stood out from some dead leaves and twigs upon the ground and looked at him, lying there motionless, with a knowing eye, then, turning, whirred away. That old time he had laughed, and now he sat up, arms about knees, and laughed. The dear old wood, the rabbit only half scared, the knowing pheasant!

He laughed, then that without-wire spoke to him, and immediately he was in the fortress chamber, returning as he had gone forth, slipping again into the body there, coalescing with the guard he had left. The key grated in the door, the jailer appeared bearing evening food and water. The prisoner sat up, rose from the bed, and came to the table. "Good evening, friend!"

"Good evening," said the jailer. He set down the dish and jug. "You look very well, tall and strong," he said. "I wonder!"

He stood and stared. "Things turn inside out," he said. "It seems to me that the jailed are better off than the turnkeys."

"Perhaps they are," said the prisoner. "I wish that we were well off together! There must be a way to that, too."

"Well, it's all a riddle," the other made reply, and went away. "Good night," he said at the door.

"Good night—good night!"

The key turned and was withdrawn. The prisoner, seated at the table, ate sparingly, drank water. Rising, he paced the floor, up and down, up and down. Outside the grating the snow was falling, falling, the gray light fading. The prisoner lay down upon his bed, drew the thick coverlet over him. Once or twice a fear had knocked at his heart, hurriedly whispering at a keyhole. "How do you know that you can do that again? How do you know that it was not a dream?"—Yet he knew that it was not a dream, and that he could go free.

He lay still, he gathered energy, he heightened consciousness, he felt that fear dissolve in inner light. He left the body and the fortress.

The snow. He had watched it of late and imaged the fall of it, the heaped silver of it far and wide. Now with his freed consciousness he entered, as it were, into the snow. He was finding that it would be difficult to resist the taking of form. There was here a most prolonged memory—whether to be indulged or overcome later judgment might tell. He thought of the veil, the continuity, the movement of falling snow, thought of it with pleasure....

The air was thick with snow, drifting, endless. He was snowing over vast fields, steppes, tablelands and mountain systems, steadily, quietly, restfully. He needed this great escape into space, this subdued mood, even, so solitary for so long had he been, this solitariness. With a quiet indifference, neither pleasure nor pain, but stillness, he moved in whitening flakes. He felt both the movement and the rest where they lay. He stretched himself in gleaming white over leagues of land, and touched and melted into leagues of ocean.... His thought changed and with it his form. He left the gray, multitudinous, crystalline peacefulness and became the liquid sea. He lay afar beneath the air, and here was sunlight and here dark space and the stars. The earth kept him curved about her, but he quivered also toward the moon and followed her in tides. But most, he thought, he felt the sun. When he did so he rose, in part, from himself, he became mist and vapor, he rode on high as clouds. Liquid again, he fell as rains, torrential or fine. He sank upon the earth and into the earth, he drew from springs and brooks into rivers, and then in a vein-work of rivers great and small, and with a lullaby, lullaby of going home, the mother calling and the thousand thousand children returning, bringing experience, he returned to himself and was ocean with an added hue and dream. Again, elsewhere, he mounted, and that perpetual wheel rolled on. With his waves he struck a thousand coasts and felt the rebound; in long rollers he advanced upon the smooth beaches. Currents flowed in him, rivers vast and small, and he was their stream, their bed, their shores. He felt whirlpools, deeps, and shallows. He lay quiet beneath the stars and the sun, and where the air thickened and moved against him he rose in a storm. In hills of water with far-flung spray, he contended with the air. Yet down below was quiet, and elsewhere he and the air lay at peace together. He saw how universal was drama.

Water.... He followed himself afar. Cloud and sea and stream, but he was also present elsewhere. He was locked in earth and mineral, he was held in receptacles of myriad shapes and sizes. He was cradled in the plant, in the grass of the field, the reed, the rose, the oak and the palm, the wheat ear and the grape. In him, where he gathered together and was the sea, moved the fish, waved the sea-growths, dwelt the creatures of shell houses. But likewise he was within and of the fish, the sea-flowers and the shell creatures and their houses. The ships moved over his waves, but in minute waves he moved within the timber of the ships and the bodies of the sailors. He was in the cup that was raised to the lips, and in the hand that held the cup....

Beyond this orb, far in the fields of space, he felt himself, where about other earths he stretched himself in other seas.

... Also, by likeness, in thought and imagination. Like a great dawn he realized presence in subtler fields. As at a bell from a tower, or a thunderclap, or a lark's song, he was in a realm like and not like, changed and yet similar.

In the old, more narrowly conscious life, in the old remembering, imagining, conceiving, in the huge dialectic that the emotions and the mind, under some approval of the ultimate spirit, carried forever on, there had been provided in line and color many a mise-en-scène and of characters a multitude. Always there had been a central self and those portions of its periphery to which it gave provisional attention. But that peripheral world had been without visible body and self-movement. In dreams, truly, there was in some sort body and self-movement. But from dreams was lacking something of great value, present in "waking" commerce with memory and imagination and prophecy. But however strong might be these latter they had never been able to march beyond a certain point. Now, that center moving with heat and light unknown before or long forgotten, they marched. They became three-dimensional and vital. That middle power, fire of desire and of will, rayed forth in correspondence with its central strength. All that now it abstracted from itself and looked at, all that it imaged or remembered, had gone up a stage. It was become what in that old world they called reality.... And still he knew that he but dimly divined himself across great space.

The present Adventure seemed new, yet in some wise he followed old lines, traceries, co-ordinations. He had made them, they were truly to be used, scroll and arabesque, illumination in gold and silver, scarlet and green and blue border of the great text of himself that he could only stumble over, so little a child was he in Recollection! Yet he had garments that he wove and wore, wealthy, lovely, and in their moment satisfying.

He drew himself together from the silver sea. A promontory, rock and sand and sere sea-grass and small, twisted trees, rose at hand. Behind spread an ancient, lovely country wound with tendrils of the sea, and green-sloped mountains lifted above them. "Poseidon!" he said. "I am Poseidon."

He rose, a giant form, strong, immortally young and potent, fluent and various and mighty. He moved upon his sea beaches, he stood upon the promontory and looked far and wide. At no great distance gleamed a small temple with columns and a sculptured relief showing the god of the sea and the goddess Demeter. It glowed in light....

A giant woman came toward him. Majesty breathed around her, but she was genial, too.... He remembered the prisoner in the fortress, the cloak and the books that had been sent. Instantaneously he was behind the barred window, within the body there—the prisoner of state who had been shut away eleven years.

He sat up, he rose, he went to the table, he laid his hands upon the books piled there. Among others he touched a small and curiously bound volume—Dante's Vita Nuova.... He lifted a fold of his cloak and pressed his brow and cheek against it. This was an accustomed action. He had felt that so he touched comfort of his kind—pity, humaneness....

And all the time had she been himself? Was her name Beatrice? By the sea he had named her Demeter—

The written fragment went no farther, ended there.... The rains came down. The Pygmies swarmed or slept. They were not ill folk, and each in his casket kept the spark of intelligence. In some the spark had better fuel, in some not so good. But in all it burned and taught the fuel to draw toward it.

CHAPTER XXVI

Mannheim died in this Congo forest, among these Pygmies. At first his sickness seemed but a low fever, obstinate, but not especially perilous. He lay in his tent and refused to let us trouble overmuch about him. "Go about your work. I do perfectly well, lying here, with a whole world to roam in!"

After a time his sickness was seen for the final one that it was. He wasted like snow in March. When he had lain there a week he himself said that he was going. John Sydney tended him well, but gave Sir Charles and the rest of us no false hopes. Mannheim himself never asked.

It seemed best that he should have one of us for nurse. This grew into my hands, with the others ready to give all needed relief. His mind was quite clear. At times there8 was great weakness following attacks of coughing. But for the most part he did not suffer.

He lay very quiet and easy to nurse. He liked to hear talk of the camp and daily happenings, and liked the few minutes' visits from Sir Charles and the others. He had humor, and he laughed at the stories Carthew Roberts brought. At other times, when we were alone, he lay most still, with an ingathered look. Now and then, in his stronger hours, he talked or bade me talk. He was entirely serene, really happy. "Everything that is can be perceived and shared," he said. "It is a matter of growing desire and will. This body is disintegrating, but I myself am integrating."

He could with no adequacy tell his visions any more than I could tell mine. But now and then word or phrase lit up a landscape. And occasionally he tried to describe what he was perceiving. I remember a velvet-black night when he could not sleep. He slept little at any time. "We are one Person," he said. "All these words—kind and kin and what not! What do they mean except that just somewhere all slip into one? All the partial consciousnesses flash into the whole. Give me water, Michael! I want to tell you—" I gave him to drink. He went on. "I saw just now, in picture, a little child—a babe—sitting upon its bed and bent upon observing and handling its foot. I saw that it believed that its foot was a separate thing, and that it had not yet said of each and all its members, 'That is me—I am that.' But it was beginning to suspect and to experiment. It was a determined child, and it made me laugh the way it went about it.... We live embedded in symbols. If I could bind together all the visions that ever I have had, it would come to something! ... Well, that was page the first of this vision. But page the second—" He lay still for a few moments. "I cannot well tell that. I saw the dim shape of man, and all the nations and all the ages and the rich and the poor and the fortunate and the unfortunate moved within the shape. But its mind was shadow and denied that this extremity or that member was itself. Limb gazed at limb, and organ upon organ as at a stranger, a foreigner, an unrelated existence across space. But for all that the great shape—and it was very great—was suspecting and experimenting, just as was doing the child on the first page." As Mannheim looked at me he visibly gathered energy. He assumed strength, he lifted himself on his arm. "Then, Michael, I saw the sun rise over the mind! No longer these myriad, myriad, partial, contending things, held only as by a film, an atmosphere, into a shape—but where they had been, a glory of light and warmth, essential, sufficing—a consciousness, a Being! Man conscious at last of Man's Self—the great Male-Female—the great Man-Woman-Child—the Trinity—the One! ... And all so simple, far simpler than being thousands apart!"

His face shone, he lay back; the light faded, and I thought for a moment that he was going. I gave him a stimulant. After a while he spoke again: "You're one of the new children. The new children will come into the sense of it. There has been preached brotherhood. But brotherhood supposes something closer yet. You will preach identity."

A few nights later he died. Sir Charles and Llewellyn, Sydney, and I watched him go. It was a quiet death, simple and silent, a gradual mounting a stair into light and distance.

We laid Mannheim's body in the forest, under a palm-tree.

The rains now were come. The stream poured dark and swollen, the forest was like sea moss, the sky all gray, the fall steady, flooding, and loud. We lived out this season in the Pygmy village. Routine life and work carried themselves on. We kept alike our own men and the small people our hosts in hand and in a mood of amity. With the former Ahasuerus was, throughout Africa, a mighty help. He became, as it were, their far-traveled prince and magician. What tales he told them I would not inquire too closely. But he was a tall, strong man, inside as outside, and he helped us greatly in many a pinch.

Carthew Roberts, too, the born laugher, helped. Once, as we sat around our fire, he gave us his philosophy. "Haven't you seen in some park or estate, perched on some big viewpoint, a pavilion or some such structure where each side is set with glass of a different color? There used to be one in the grounds of some villa above Genoa. Through this window showed a red world, through this one a blue. One saw everything cut in bronze, and another had a leaden earth and sky, and to another the entire thing was bathed in couleur de rose. The world's the way you look at it! You're the seer. It's perfectly possible to view the whole great toyshop as filled with the friendliest, grinning, grotesque, pleasant things. To a seer with a certain apparatus it's an amusing place, quite profoundly odd and funny! That's me. The instant that isn't amusing gives the fillip to the next instant that is. I've heard the very skies laugh—and as for the small things that laugh—! Don't you know what it is for a situation piece of the pattern, length of Penelope's web—to laugh?"

"It's ironic laughter, often," said Ferraro.

"Oh yes! I see, too, when the hook doesn't hit the eye—but there's a laugh of pure delight because there's fun in the heart of things!"

"Oh, I grant you," answered the Italian. "The thing that isn't at the heart of things isn't anywhere. And as for your windows, one may look out of them all in turn. Were we more evolved perhaps we might look out of all at once! But that would be fused rays—light of glory—"

At night, ere I slept, I went from this village, this forest, to Restwell and Flowerfield. I now definitely ceased to say, "I go in memory," or, "in imagination," or, "I go there because the reasoning mind, holding these places to be in being, attended by such-and-such features, can, by its own power, collect them before it—nay more, because it is brought into a condition of calm and unhurry and, speaking relatively, can see somewhat into the depth of things and set them in wholes, it can give with correctness a heightened reality." I ceased to explain to myself. I acted. I simply went to Flowerfield and Restwell—went in leading-strings, with the limitations and inabilities of that but one degree advance in powers, but went, as you, too, O reader, may go! And if I went, or if I said, "Arise in me!" what odds, so long as there came into presence the desired?

Restwell—Flowerfield. I lay in my old bed, in my old room. Mammy sang to me. She sang "Golden Slippers," or she sang:

"Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home—"

The stars looked in at the window. The dawn blossomed. The crowing cock cried, "Boy, it's day!" I went about the farm with my grandfather. His gentle, drawling voice said this, said that. My mother and I walked in the orchard.... Aunt Sarah and I kept the gravestones clean. The fire burned in Daddy Guinea's cabin, and he told me how the fox and the bear and the deer and the rabbit grew acquainted.

A thousand, thousand days and hours—great picture-books turned, leaf by leaf—and all capable of a strange, rich vivification! The farther road brought to the aid of the earlier road—poems learned long ago seen into now.... The past lost nothing worth the while; it stood through and through to be the gainer.

I pervaded, like the ether, the big, unencumbered, singing house at Flowerfield. Every house, every place, had always for me its own note, flavor, odor, personality, effect built from innumerable effects.... Flowerfield and Miriam and I in one there.... John, too, was with us.

Madam Black. Swiftly, decisively, came awareness of our old teacher. Now it was something more than that, now she was better understood. There was communication between adults.

An old, wise, rich spirit was here.

Death is not an idle word, nor is change, nor absence. But they are far other than that which to most of us they seem.

Now far away from the surface mind, behind the golden vase that hides so much, there was talk again with Madam Black, and in a surer, swifter language than the surface tongue has mastered.

"You three," she said, "are all new children." She used the term that Mannheim had used. "I felt that when I taught you, but it is clearer now.... For those who can touch and hold there is endless magic, richness, goodness! Every single thing is a key and a portal. What so many call life is only the skin of the grape."

Madam Black and Miriam and John and I went far afield together. She was like an old and very wise chieftainess, priestess, prophetess—a great person with whom to mark the earth and the history of it.

"Of course we are many—that is much—in one!" she said. "Everybody is everybody else. We bathe in one another's beams and find they are our own. What is the Great Day but the day when All remembers All? The glorious Recollection. Then we all find our market that we've been weaving for and planning for. The market is Life Everlasting. The road to Recollection is by recollecting—to Recognition by recognizing—to All Love is by loving. Come! Let us remember in great landscapes and streams. Where we dive in does not greatly matter. One thing leads to another."

I said to her, "What about that which should be forgotten?"

I felt her smile within me. "Well—! It forgets itself—in light."

We who were always together went far and wide with Madam Black. And as she said, there is magic and richness and goodness.

There was now a deep world back of the outward point of attention that called itself, that was called, Michael Forth. Behind that point, as behind all such points, are interpenetrative spheres.

CHAPTER XXVII

Separation from those who are "dead" had melted from me. Separation from those who are living I saw to be a phantasm. It would last as long as we chose to let it last; it would go away when we chose that it should go away. Separation from those to come—they are ourselves! We returning, we continuing, we the world's future as we are its present and its past.

The task was for the small city, the small country, at present calling itself Michael Forth, to realize into all that it yet held to be without, into all that it must hold to be above. That was the task, that was the desire ... desire that all cities and countries waken to the mounting interest, the song, the lovers' meeting of reality.

"Journeys end in lovers' meetings
Every wise man's son doth know—"

The rains were past. We were gone from the stream and the Pygmies' village, and the grave of Mannheim beneath the palm. Maxwell and Ferraro undertook care and furtherance of the naturalist's collection, and, later, Llewellyn and I brought "Mannheim's Notes" into order, and later yet saw to their publication.

We journeyed on through middle Africa. We encountered heated, endless forests, and tribes, much alike, of men near the foot of the ladder. Some had an uneasy stirring, looking toward the rung above. We saw individuals who were climbing thither. And never, in Africa nor anywhere else, did I see, have ever I seen, anything save climbing stuff!

Time passed. At a certain village—capital of a king named Tamewa—we were made and held prisoners for seven weeks. There were days here when we confidently looked for death. There was a night when we white men, and with us Ahasuerus, were bound with withes and heard without the hut savage preparations for an execution, and saw red, darting light of kindled fires. But when the cocks were crowing came rescue. A man from among our carriers, stealing away, had gone leagues through the forest, back to a friendly people from whose village we had come to Tamewa's—had gone and come again with chiefs and a considerable company of men and loud representations to Tamewa. At last, after enormous discussion, entered agreement. Released from bonds, we became fantastically honored guests—and yet might not go from Tamewa's town until that seven weeks had passed.

The night that we were tied within the hut, seeing that there could be no sleeping, and it was best there be no talking, each went, doubtless, according to his own drawing into the inner country. I was thinking....

A fact of communication between minds at a distance—space distance, time distance, state of consciousness distance. An over-voice, as written or printed words, as telephone or telegraph were over-voices—but without pen, paper, mail-trains, poles and wires. Transmitters and receivers, each both ... vastly subtler telegraphing, telephoning, interhearing, interseeing, interknowing.... Circulation of thought, circulation of emotion, sensation; circulation of experience, understanding—forever flowing, forever, as it turned upon itself, richer, wiser, than it had been before. So, though it turned, it was not the same; so it became a spiral movement, concentric rings, each including the earlier turnings, each, in the long run, bettering those before.... Shoreless sea of energy, refining itself, transmuting forever its own cold into fervor, its dark into light, changing forever less knowledge for more, less love for more, less power and joy for more.

I thought it an absurdity if there be no deepening speech, no farther-carrying vision, between part and part of a thing that as a whole perpetually changed state for better state. As the whole grew more richly conscious, every part must do so, too.... Or as every part grew more richly conscious the whole must do so, too.... Put it as you choose!

The immediate sharing of sensation or of knowledge.... In strong concentration, in contemplation, there was no thought given to the field through which, from "far" points, perception flashed. All was lost in I-ness—One-ness—Continuousness. Distance in space—distance in time—partialness in event—ceased their troubling.

By the light passage we were but ten minutes from the sun. The universal draw of attraction took no time at all. Ethereal—perfectly penetrative and penetrable.... Learn to use the ether!

My mother spoke to me. "Michael, they are coming through the forest—men to help. They will be here in an hour."

I said to the others: "The Bangala that we left are coming through the forest. Zurti persuaded them. They will be here in an hour."

It happened so.... Sir Charles spoke to me, aside, the next day. "How did you know that, Michael?"

"How do we know anything? It's all of a piece that can be unrolled, which is to say, understood, further and further.... My mother told me."

"Within you? You said on the mountain that all that was within you."

"Yes. But 'within you' opens into a great land. 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.' It isn't a small kingdom."

"Tell me plainly," he said. "Do you think that your mother lives?"

"I do."

"But conscious—remembering—able to act?"

"Yes. Able to grow—that is, to increase in consciousness and power."

"And you expect to meet her?"

"I do meet her. I expect to meet her more completely. Far more completely."

"I wish that I knew!" he said. "There are persons with whom I wish to live again."

The time-water flowed over the time-wheel. This tribe, uncertain between slaying and saving, let us go. We went on. Sometimes we traveled through the forest. Sometimes—often indeed—we went in boats, long distances down the full river in native boats. We tarried in villages; we left the rubbing and beating of drums, the chanting, the dancing, and we came in little time again to rubbing and beating of drums, to chanting and dancing. We left idols and came to idols. I felt no contemptuousness toward these. Idols are divinities and have a kinship, or in their stage of True-God-on-High, or in their stage of relegation.

Middle Africa—Africa sloping to the west, country of the Congo with all its ancestors gathered in its bosom.... There began, as it were, an inward murmuring of ocean, of England—America.

The ancient, imperfect, compounded ideation that we call these bodies, these purposes and acts, this environment, situation, circumstance, this earth under our poor two eyes, all the accustomed, remembered, repeated, "living," flowed or stumbled quite enough as usual. I was aware of certain differences. All outward matters must finally change as changes the inward star. If the center strongly shines the circumference will know it. If the center grows lethargic, all the outland stiffens, darkens. I was aware that there must be shining all along the way from the star. Light grew intenser, colors more brilliant. Thorn hedges and hard walls vanished, and there were richer wholes. There was sense of the in-ness of things, and sometimes cause and effect were seen as one form. The time sense, too, was changing.... But yet it was all but one taste of the honey—

Llewellyn and I were moving in a boat up some arm of Congo, volunteers to discover what lay beyond a certain sharp point of shore. The negroes who rowed us had their own preoccupations. The banks were somber, the stream deep and still and darkened by overhanging clouds. We had been sitting in silence. Llewellyn broke it. "I, too, have the historic sense," he said. "When you have that very thoroughly you assume an individual and his acts. You can't say him or her; it's both. Hermaphrodite, or some better word than that, if you please! It is all right as long as you know that all sex and no sex is there. You may call it This World, or Earth, or Planetary Being, or Man, or what you please. But the inorganic must go in as well as the organic, plant as well as animal, animal as well as human, one kind as well as another kind! All the classes and castes. Then This World thinks itself out, changing from power to power. Hence Drama—its own. Narratives, Epics, Tragedies, Comedies, and the hair balance between. Lyrical outbursts ... Mnemosyne—Pythoness—Dionysos —Aphrodite—Apollo—Pallas—Zeus! The wildest, greatest, most abandoned, most controlled drama in three dimensions.... This world's a Genius!"

"More light than dark."

"I should hope so. At any rate, the light must be growing.... I seem to see that it's had its infancy and childhood, and that now it's in the strangest turmoil of adolescence. But infancy and childhood—! My God! What resumes of what in our little way we call Ancient Sin, Adult Wrong!"

We went on in silence for a time. I looked at the leaden sky. Llewellyn had been thinking aloud, and now I, too, thought aloud. "In the Confessions of Saint Augustine there is a page that well gives what is coiled up, remembered, stored, in one's self as little infant in a little cradle. It runs like this. 'Was it then good, even for a while, to cry for what, if given, would hurt? bitterly to resent that persons, free and its own elders, yea, the very authors of its birth, served it not? that many besides, wiser than it, obeyed not the nod of its good pleasure? to do its best to strike and hurt because commands were not obeyed which had been obeyed to its hurt? The weakness of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence. Myself have seen and known even a baby envious; it could not speak, yet it turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother.... Is that, too, innocence, when the fountain of milk is flowing in rich abundance, not to endure one to share it, though in extremest need? ... This age I am yet loath to count in this life of mine which I live in this world. For no less than that which I spent in my mother's womb is it hid from me in the shadows of forgetfulness.... But, I beseech thee, O my God, where, Lord, or when was I guiltless?'"

The banks were somber, the sky was a roof of whirling vapor. "And elsewhere he says, 'Did my infancy succeed another age of mine that died before it? Was it that which I spent within my mother's womb ... and what before that life again, O God my joy! was I anywhere or anybody? For this I have none to tell me, neither father nor mother nor experience of others, nor mine own memory.'"

The boat moved on. The forest was still, but the river voice carried fathomless undertones. "What do you think there?" said Llewellyn.

"I think that some day we will take, unravel, and look at our cell life, embryonic life, child life. Then will we know in our own proper person, plane after plane, that past living that at each point we called adult. Species-mind cognizing species-life. World-mind cognizing world-life. Then shall we see where came in the lethargies, mistakes, self-limitations, inhibitions, perversions, mislikes, recoils, fears—that at last we must call thick ignorance, hatred, terror, guilt..."

Beyond the point of shore we found a long, narrow reach of water, and upon one bank a diminutive settlement, a very few thatched huts dwelt in by a remnant of a tribe, wasted apparently by disease and war. By now the clouds had broken in a downpour. The day was advanced and our rowers unwilling to turn down-stream into wet and night. We were armed, and we had with us beads and cloth for purposes of propitiation and exchange. Standing off the bank, we made due explanations and proffers of friendship to the men who had run from the huts with bows and arrows and menacing shouts. Reassured, they let us land. The shining beads and scarlet cloth worked as almost always they worked. Presently we had food and shelter for the night.

Llewellyn and I lay in a fairly clean hut in thick darkness, with river and wind for lullaby. We lay wakeful, in silence. "Well! Let us go to sleep," he said at last, and turned.

I addressed myself to sleep—but instead of entering that land a curtain parted and I was in another. Before I crossed the frontier I was re-aware of a day at Restwell, two years ago. The river there—a boat—Dorothea and I rowing beneath the willows. That hour had extension and volume it had not seemed then to possess.... That scene closed. I was over the frontier—no longer Michael Forth only, but many-folded sensation, knowledge, passion, life.

Without more warning than the mood of this place and that flash of association, I stumbled into the woe of the world.

"So I returned and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun."

It seemed to me that I should die....

The oppressions and the woe were my own. Peine forte et dure—and I was the victim under the stone, and I was the weight that crushed, and I was they who stretched me there and put the millstone on me. And the misery of all three was the same.

"If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain—"

Woe and woe and double woe!

Into me drew, around, within me, whirled pain and guilt, the great maelstrom.

Over and over the brain gave images—but it was that which touch gave me, not that which sight gave.... Oh, God in me—my own hope in me—raise hell to purgatory, purgatory to the beginning of wisdom!

Woe of the world—light-lack, love-lack.... As there can be no going out, as never, never can we go out—where they lack, what can be but aching want?

I ached—I ached.

It seemed recapitulation, it seemed also lateral sharing. All of us down there in those moments—and all of us now in these moments. All of us from pole to pole. All of us that were one and are one. Mankind is one being. It feels the woe of head and the woe of foot, the woe of the one hand and of the other hand. It is the worse for the ice-bound heart, and the worse for the tattered, lack-thrift brain that will not learn to use its wealth.

It longed for health—poor Mankind—poor God-that-would-be! with all its members warring, with hardly a piece of tissue glimpsing the truth!

Oh, long woe and sickness! Oh, tatters and dungeon of ignorance! Oh, hearth where the fire is but a spark! ... Where shall we get fuel?

Lay the little self there for fuel.

... Time passed, though time passed slowly.... The wind and the rain outside had ceased, there fell a great hush. In me, too, was now a stillness. It was dark, but the air of it was not heavy—a clear darkness, clean, with a taste of myrrh. This enlarged—there seemed a firmament very deep and vast, still, pure, ineffable, though still dark.... Then gathered from somewhere the sense of truth—and there was a white and splendid star in the dark.

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.

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.

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.

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!

CHAPTER XXXII

I was writing in the study. Now I sat at the desk, and now I walked to and fro. I was at work upon Aldebaran. It struck eleven. The house stood quite quiet, above and below. Some work that she was doing had taken Miriam farther north for a week. It was late. Standing at the window, I saw only quiet night, dark houses. The feet of some passer-by rang loud on the pavement. A train passed on the "L," a block away.

Work had gone to-night nor well nor badly. I had finished a scene, but knew that to-morrow I must make much of it over. I laid work by and turned toward the book-shelves....

Light seemed in my brain—light! The room, the old earth, all trains and loops and garlands and nooses of phenomena vanished. There was light in excelsis. There was no form, as old form is conceived, but there was control. There was no labor of motion, but there was thrill. There was not change as change here is conceived, but I think there was change. Only it was so vast.... The sense was of power and infinite experience, of wisdom and of floods of balm. In the midst of the balm there was fiber, activity, mind, and all in a time and space into which our time and space melted, raindrops into sea! I have said that there was no form, but there was a sense that some supreme effort of perception might reveal form, though of a magnitude and contour!—The feeling was that what yesterday had been a collectivity—diffused, planetary life—was become, in a flash that tore the heavens and rolled them away, a self-conscious, a living Spirit. The Earth became a Spirit with a vesture. And that was I—I was That. And all history and all experience and all "otherness" was but the honey in that hive! And the hive was conscious as a man is conscious.... There came another flash—core-light, core-voice.... Still, still, there were other forms, there were companion planets! ... There came a climax. I knew the great dominant whom the old congeries, in the old time, named "The Sun" ... Light, light, light!

The intensity of experience lessened. The great thing, in all its scope, paled, entered memory.

But out of lower space and out of lower time, and out of lower form, stayed the sense of goal. I knew the pilgrims and the pilgrimage, the task, the quest, the America over the waves, the Grail, the immortal adventure, eternal romance—

And Miriam, that was the spirit most near, most dear to me? Before twenty-four hours had passed there came a letter from her.

MICHAEL: Last night, about midnight, my soul sprang forward with a certain burning quality. There was great light, and in an inner firmament I saw the sun that we are.—MIRIAM.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Miriam and I made nucleus of that moment. To it, through inner space came, drawn, all of its slightest kindred. All intimations, intuitions, all experience of planes that were not of every-day, every flavor of Self that understood and transcended the old self, every piece of delimitation, every removal of inhibition, every positive approach to new power that we had known came into that light and certitude. We had centered, we had the point of view. That which was now our part was, with everincreasing fullness, to be, to know, to enjoy, to act from that center.

Certain things emerged, could be handled and looked at without shock and dazzling.

There existed a consciousness surpassing old levels that we had known. Mankind was tending toward this consciousness. As man's consciousness was larger than the animal's, so was this larger than the old human. As each higher dimension holds and surpasses the dimensions below it, so this consciousness would contain and surpass all the old, fainter, slower rates. The point goes on reproducing and reproducing itself, establishing memory, growing a sense of relation. One day it is capable of an electric flash, a communication, a filling out! Oneness is born again. Point becomes line. There is perception, action, knowledge, enjoyment, in the greater universe of the line. The line, now the unit, in its turn reproduces itself, acting right and left. Line memory appears, relation among lines. One day, an electric flash, communication, sense of continuity, filling out, oneness! Plane is here, and acts from the great universe of the plane that contains and unifies lines and points, and goes upon its own adventure, under new skies, to a dimly guessed great future. The flash—and containing and yet beyond the sense of all planes, lo! an overplane is born to you. And the solid runs its race. But one day again the flash! Again Oneness, containing all that went before, with its own career beckoning, with, far away, another transcendence beckoning! One day the hyper-solid—

A house is built. The builder-owner comes in and takes possession, and begins another stretch of undying life.

Any man, attaining this consciousness, finds himself to be all men.

Love of Humanity and of a super-Humanity becomes love and care for a Self that is old Humanity, new Humanity, and Humanity to be. That sub-human, dubbed animal, plant, and mineral, is likewise to be comprehended. It is all the Self, to be realized and lifted through every level. Environment is the Self, Nature the Self, God the Self. The smaller God is dead, but by no means the greater God. That overarches, inheres, yet!

Miriam and I looked about us. We saw vast streams of tendency, rivers in which many a hundred smaller rivers flowed. We saw Occident and Orient interfusing. We saw over the armies, the bayonets, the fortresses and dreadnaughts of the nations, over wars past and present and very probably to come, the approach of internationalism. We could say, "It comes—Tennyson's 'Parliament of man, the Federation of the world!'" We saw socialization at hand, the common inheritance held as common inheritance. We saw woman and man alike free, the hands of the sexes joined, their brows touching. We saw a changing attitude toward the child, and a changing toward education. We saw medicine and law opening windows in their mansions. Business was growing humane, politics clean. Art and letters and music subtly transformed themselves. We saw in the ancient body of the church, Protestant and Catholic and Jewish, Mohammedan, Hindu and Buddhist, and what other names are given, fountains rise of wider practice of religion. We saw healthful revolt. The Christian Scientist went forth, the Theosophist, the man of New Thought, and others.... We saw a strong tide flowing, religious tolerance and more than that, religious understanding, and more than that, religious love. We saw the folk take up beauty; idea stretching wing in a sunrise of loveliness. We heard the voices growing richer, deeper. Travel in the air was upon us, and a power of intercommunication once only longed for. Many an extension of enjoyment was upon us, and knowledge in great breadths. We saw that the scientific man had come into ground once trodden only by the mystic. We heard science say, "Here it makes of itself material, and here it rests immaterial." What Berkeley had said, gathering into a line many a tome, hung to-day in the atmosphere. "All is spirit and its ideas." ... Those compacted ideas of spirit that we called "the body!" Kindness and sacredness were coming into the compact, and new temperance and a new energy.... The great bells rang for the great century.

Grandeur brooded over our time.

We knew conflict—did we not know it feelingly? But through all storms that were and storms to come, streamed on the unifying! True unifying comes only by love and understanding. We touched the profoundness with which already it was here. It was not a dream; it was here, though yet only as a shadow of itself. Conflict and conflict until in the dawn it rose into itself! But we saw now the immense extent of blue sky and sunshine, and how local were all storms, even the worst.

We saw men accepting their neighbors. We took Jesus of Nazareth's definition of neighbors.

More and more the ships made the fleet. Multiplicity did not vanish, but it held together.

We saw that, truly speaking, there is but one man, one woman, one child. Comprising, transcending these, there will walk a Being—

That one is us.

We call it "I" because it is "I."

When we cease to talk of multiplicity we shall cease to talk of unity. I shall live with my ideas, of all dimensions.

Orientation—sense of direction—sense of right—sense of the future—sense of destiny—such terms grew vital.

New mind, new fulcrum! Will the lifter, the lever, applied itself to new tasks.

Further and further, deeper and deeper, Miriam and I began to know ourselves. There was no end to that, could be no end to that. We met great countries that we had thought somehow to be "other" and found to be our own. We desired ever more adequate ideas, fairer, stronger, kinder! ever more beautiful, ever more potent thought. We wished to dissolve concepts not well or wisely put together and to assemble mightier, richer experiences. Out of the horn of our own plenty again and again and forever these might be drawn.

There is no barrier between in and out. All that is thought, all that is imaged, lives and moves, acts.

We addressed ourselves to discovery, to assimilation of that which has been discovered, and to fresh discovery. We set our minds to higher and wider imagery. Whatever, little or much, that we could find or do of value would be for all, as in truth it would be All that was finding or doing. There is no other than All.... But there is yet self-confusion, self-dissipation, and now we speak from one degree of the Jacob's stair, and now from another.... But for all that, all that we could do or find would be for all. We might not print it nor speak it, nor see it, woven into a present institution. But nevertheless would it flow and penetrate. Motion in that world is spherical and inconceivably rapid....

Miriam and I worked on in our visible earth, with daily life, with written dramas, with aid against the raw cruelty of many a human situation. But activity widened, though it flowed invisibly. So flowing, however, the order of results nearest to the old daily living tended to become visible. Or, rather, these merging with daily living, the latter stood up stronger, brighter-eyed.

We knew that we were immortal. So we drank, day by day, of that fountain Ponce de Leon sought.

We experimented now with deliberation. We planned experiments, and we caught on the wing the birds of paradise that flew our way. We mined in this direction—bridged here—volatilized this mass—redistributed. Volatilization is one word for process. More and more particles left the old earth, rose to a new level, and there recombined. We did not discard old words; we used them. But they indicated, each one, something far more entire than once was the case. We learned volume and we learned momentum. Touch, taste, smell, color, sound, muscular sense, sense of equilibrium, sense of motion, all senses, changed from fleeting sprites to strong angels. We had faith that where was extension there were we, and where was non-extension there were we. That is, we were in this place or that, and beside that, back of that, under that, over that, we were everywhere. We had faith that we touched all time, and that eternity was our name. We knew that we were spirit, and that we were more conscious, more awakened, than once was so. Being more conscious, being more awake, we entered with naturalness into our mode of life. Over our heads, like a star, hung knowledge that there was yet consciousness, yet waking, fuller and fuller—consciousness, awakening, to which all our new experience that we found so rich might come, nay, must come, to seem the hour of a child, a dream, a faint sound of singing, thin shells upon the shore just making one guess at the life in the sea!

That which we set ourselves to do as far as we could was to think, image, feel, act, into conscious being the Oneness of mankind, the I-ness of all this that says, "We are separate—hard, concrete atoms, mostly opposed to one another!—each for itself, living and dying, and Wholeness your fancy!"

We had dimly seen for long the including Shape. We had written of it—worked for it. But now we saw it far more plainly, now we felt the vast magnetic drawing of it. But now we had become convinced that the external ways were not the only ways. Now we saw that the clasping, demonstrating action worked from within outward. All these "selves," to find it truly, must find it from the inner side. They could not be pinned together. They must flow together. Spirit willing, seeing, everywhere! But those who sailed the inner seas might start thence waves of help—outgiven stimuli that might pass from part to part.

Miriam and I strongly yearned over our kind. We wished union. We wished the super-organism with the super-powers—the super-mind, the super-heart. We wished Earth to cross the Red Sea, to come out of Egypt. We saw that all things worked to that end, if they knew it, or if they knew it not....

Where all are seas of God, the diver may enter from where he stands—must enter from where he stands.

Miriam and I had certain dawning powers. We entered through them. That is, they grew to fuller powers, and around them, infant yet, rose other powers.

CHAPTER XXXIV

A year after that moment of illumination we found ourselves upon a ship bound for England. We had sailed for months of travel. There were errands. An international body, of which Miriam was an officer, met that summer in Geneva, and she was to speak for certain measures dear to her mind and heart. In London was to be found a group of men whom I wished to see. There, too, was being played "Mr. X," and Llewellyn, writing of it and its reception by a London ready for "strange poetry," urged me to come over and stay awhile with him, "for I am going to die some time, and we may not meet in these old dresses that we have liked. You see I expect meeting—indeed, to say it all, I don't wait for death to practise meeting—but yet, my friend, I want to see you in the old ways, too! I likewise want to see Miriam."

We went. After England, after the Continent, we were going to meet Maxwell, in Egypt.

The sea was smooth, the hour dusk, on the horizon line a pale gold and green light, cool and pure, in the sky the strongest stars. Miriam and I walked, then came to our deck-chairs and lay there, in sheer, exquisite rest, in the envelop of sea and sky. Other passengers had gone below; only a few figures paced the deck or reclined, moveless, in the wide silence. We sat still.... Suddenly, definitely, with all distinctness, I saw Maxwell. He was in a boat upon a river. He made landing, stepped out and, turning, spoke to the rowers. I saw green-clad hills, palm-trees, the roof of a temple. There was with him an Englishman in uniform, and also a stout, dark-skinned, turbaned individual. The three went up a flight of river steps. Night came over it, it was gone. Here were the sea and the horizon light and the stars. Miriam turned a little in her chair and spoke softly. "What did you see?"

I told her. "He is somewhere in India."

"Curved light," she said. "What is the date? Can you tell if at all he saw you?"

"I think that he did. For just one moment as he reached the top of the steps."

We rested in our chairs in silence. The sky came down, dark blue, to the sea, the stars thickened. Darkness that was light, brine and tune of the sea, kiss of the wind, held us.... Something more than these, for now we entered with our faint, nebulous power of perception, into a consciousness confused, multitudinous, but real. Inchoately, faintly, we perceived our own life. Vision and voice, touch, presence, peoples, tribes and nations, groups, individuals, flowed in us. We held them as the sea holds its own, as the heaven holds the stars. The active principle knew that it surrounded, contained, pervaded, preserved, transcended the ideas that it created. These ideas were three-dimensional, colored, real; they were the sensible and intelligible world.

We lay, oceans whispering each to each, lost or found, with all number in one. The perceptions played. So fathomless, so wealthy was the feeling, so wealthy, so deep! The broad face of the earth was there, Asia and Europe and America were there, history, and names great and small, yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow. Vast events hung in that inner space; they contained, as clouds contain the water that had been and will be again in drops, myriads of small events. We tasted faiths and cultures, wildernesses, cities, movements of the spirit continuing from of old. Salt of the sea, tone of the wind, we upheld desire, love. We had the knowledge of the heart, we embraced the law of kindness. Within us long, long human love glowed and chanted. We were all lovers, we were all parents. We were all children. We experienced family love, village, and tribal love, nation love, world love. We knew comrade love, and we knew also kneeling reverence for the Wholeness all unattained. We knew sublimity, we knew awe.... We knew the flash of difference, the outward passing sparks, the falling stars. Yet were they in the whole, and on the mission of the whole! Difference and Likeness, for so was attained the essential rich variety, the sweet taste of novelty, the wild grapes of romance.... Faces came and went.... Summations and essences made the honey of the Ancient of Days.

The ship's musicians began to play—overture of "Die Meistersinger." Miriam and I rose and walked the deck one or twice, then went within to the lights and voices of the saloon.

That night, in our state-room, as she put out the light and stood before the opened window, and all the zest and fragrance of the sea made entry, she said: "How rich is every man and woman and child in the world! Golconda and California and Kimberley hang on the bough above their head!"

"We shall not get the fruit until we grow tall enough."

"Yes. But we are growing taller every moment. Not a dwarf but shall some day reach it!—oh, my darling world!"

We sailed across the sea. We had acquaintances on this ship and we made others. By now, in our degree, she and I had that earth-fame which brought folk to glance as we passed. "That is Miriam Forth—That is Michael Forth." One evening an entertainment had been arranged for some seamen's fund. A star of opera sang three songs. A mountain-climber related an adventure in the Himalayas, a dancer danced, a famous violinist played a sweet, uncanny, ancient melody. Miriam spoke, ten minutes, her theme, "To-morrow." She was the mountain-climber, the dancer, the violinist, and herself, herself! She spoke to-night with extraordinary power.... I, listening, was aware of Madam Black. That great personality and Miriam and I made union. Behind the speaker, behind the listener, in a clear, vibrating darkness, pulsed all Russia, all Europe, America.

A day after this, the sea running free, the sky like an archipelago, many cloud islands, great and small, with deep straits of blue air between, a man came up to us where we rested against the rail and watched the foam-mosaic at the side of the ship. We had noted him before; we knew that he was Ransome, the traveler. He greeted us and we him; we did not need to give names to and fro. After a little we moved to our chairs, placed where we might watch the sea. He found one for himself and sat before us, dark and thin, with a fine eagle face. It seemed that he read and liked the dramas of Michael Forth. We passed to talk of his wanderings. He knew all the zones and man in varieties of mind and passion—

With many an arm and maw and face and eye.

Presently—I do not remember the connection—he was speaking of Lourdes and more ancient pilgrimage goals, Compostella, and where not, of faith and shrines of miracle, and legendary doings in the Middle Ages and all other ages, in Europe and all other continents. He brushed Arabia, Persia, and India, and talked of Yogins and Sufis; then, with the calm, wide curve of a broad-pinioned bird, he was in London, where, last year, he had gone with —— and ——, Psychical Researchers, to see ——, who came near to the powers of Stainton Moses. "Yes. He did some quite wonderful things! Why under the sun shouldn't an exceptional person now and then? We allow every other machine to improve. Why shouldn't the human machine—why shouldn't it begin to respond to wider ends?" "Between the first ship, with its oar or rag of a sail, and this liner, differences in power! The nature of development—desire—will—mind—did the one. Why isn't it doing the other? I hold that it is doing it—and that there isn't any unnaturalness!"

He regarded blue sea and blue sky. "Old wits continually bettered and new wits continually inaugurated and more and more fully adopted. The sum growing larger all the time, finer, too, as it works itself over and over, keener, more lustrous.... What else is there than just the-to-be-expected? ... I do not think to be of the substance of a throned idiot—nor a throned villain, either!"

The sea ran around the world. The fluid air was not here nor there, it flowed afar and near.... I sat upon the deck of the Zeus and listened to Ransome the traveler—but also I was away from this—all around and all through.... Flowing mind that was also Ransome's mind, as it was Miriam's mind, and others and others and others in incalculable numbers—the host of mind.... Strong was the rapture! Thought there had great voice—god voice. It sank away, but its shadow, its echo, lingering, clothed itself, in words from an ancient dialogue between man and Man—between the individual and the Generic Consciousness.

"Then the son of Pandu beheld the whole world with all its differences gathered together in the body of that God of gods."

The strong music rolled away. Ransome was still speaking: "So, little by little, do we acquire powers. Genus Homo pulls himself together! Mother Nature learns finer magic!"

Miriam sang under her breath:

"Magic—magic!
Out of the cave,
Out of the lead!
Touch the gold,
Spread the wings—
Magician!"

"Magic? What is it?" spoke Ransome. "Unconscious truth? ... What is it that is emerging—faster and faster—butterfly out of chrysalis? Every fifth person you meet to-day has an inkling of it! It is in the air. What should you call it? Another sense? A superior field of consciousness? Specie-thought? Self-recognition? The Real?"

"Somewhat of all that, perhaps! Each fraction of understanding as it is reached takes its fractional name.... Thousands of marvelous half-way houses.... In the end a Person that endures—conceives, acts, and enjoys."

The Zeus sailed on—jade-colored seas and turquoise sky and a healthful, singing wind.

We came to the Irish coast. Out of those about us watching the bare, the wild, the emerald beauty, rose a girl's voice. "I wish we had time for Killarney!"

One instant after the word fell, then Miriam sharply turned her head and drew me with her gray eyes. Our inner senses sprang each to each, leaped together far down.... We were in Killarney.

The peat burned on the hearth, the smoke made itself tasted. The boy was dying, having received a sword-thrust in the battle. The girl sat upon the earth floor beside the low bed. The hands of the two touched on the covering of frieze; she sat staring, seeing union and separation.... He felt the hurt of the sword; things went in a mist, armies in a mist, the wings of sorrow. The grandmother sat gathered together in the corner of the hearth. Now she was silent and now she keened. The sound was bitter. The door opened and men and women came in. There was a burly priest carrying soul-comfort. Behind him walked a soldier, and it was all long ago, back perhaps as far as Elizabeth's time. The grandmother never left the corner where the peat smoke curled about her, for all that the Host was coming in. The grandmother was heathen, wild, believing a god in the lake and the mountain. Who would work for her now, and the times so horribly ill? ... Boy and girl, grandmother, priest, the English soldier, the mistier, fainter others, we, Miriam-Michael, we leaning there against the rail of the Zeus, we were them all—we were Killarney. The thing was there with a great pang and vividness—then it was not.... We sighed, we came back to the Zeus.... There was a link made with a night long ago at York and with the monk Eadwine listening to the chanting in the church. The infinite sea of the memory of this earth! Moments entered consciousness so, they are restored so—and whence they came there are decillions of others!

What are words? ...

The Irish shore faded, the Zeus came to Liverpool. Ransome traveled with us in the railway carriage to London. We gazed and gazed again upon the country through which we drew.

England's green and pleasant land—

So fair it was! So far fairer it might become, would become. After a time, when the eye was somewhat sated, Ransome began again to talk of Psychical Research. We had had companions in the carriage, but they had dismounted at some town. For a while we were alone. He wished to introduce us in London to three or four men and women whom he named. We agreed, and we came to owe to Ransome more than one valued connection, besides his own rich mind. At last he took out a pocket book and from it a paper which he unfolded. "That's a scheme of powers that the late Frederick Myers drew up. It belongs in his book that is to be published. A friend showed it to me, and I asked leave to copy it."

I took it from him and Miriam and I read together Myers's Synopsis of Vital Faculty.

First Series.—Phenomena Supraliminally Controlled, or Occurring in Ordinary Life...

Second Series.—Phenomena Subliminally Controlled...

Third Series.—Phenomena Claimed as Spiritually Controlled...

We read it with attention, acquiescence. "That's a good compendium. We should say Spirit or Self, where he says 'spirits'—"

The country went by, so verduous, so sweet! All the towns, villages, solitary houses—"It is all in us, in us all," said Miriam. "Bone of bone and flesh of flesh and blood of blood and spirit of spirit. Oh! world our mother—world our child—world our self!"

CHAPTER XXXV

Llewellyn had aged. His beard was almost white. He talked of an old house crumbling to pieces. "I see some lines that the new will follow. Partly like the old, partly not.... Michael, do you remember that evening on the mountain-top above Africa, where we lit our fire, and the air was something finer than air, and we felt, all of us, friends forever? I remember what a strange beauty—vibrant, shining—you had that night!"

"You had it, too—all had it! We saw each upon the other the radiance that we all gave."

"Well, it was there! Well, we are friends forever, meeting and meeting and meeting again.... Pilgrims, adventurers, explorers, poets—all the race of romance."

We sat in the London house which he shared with Sir Charles. Sir Charles was in India—Maxwell, too. "I go there also, pretty often," said Llewellyn. "On the wings of—Poetry! That is, without wings.... He who flies without wings.... The one who is there anyhow without flying is the poet we call God. There and here!" He turned to Miriam. "Don't you sing? I should say that you did."

She sang for him, sitting there in the rich dusk, sang without instrument, thrillingly, exquisitely.

The notes died. We sat quietly till the lights were brought. "I look forward to million-folded wisdom," said Llewellyn, abruptly. "The most vital, the vastest experience!"

"It is."

"Yes ... Michael, I have always waked at dawn. It has always been my season. The bloom of the vineyard, the wind over the palms is then ... More and more I get wonder, pleased surprise, a sense of Olympian food."

"The right bread and wine."

"Just! You two, I am glad that you came."

John Sydney was in Australia. But I met again Carthew Roberts, and I was happy to find Pantagruel.... Miriam and I went together to the house yet lived in by the Mannheims. The brother was in the city, at his place of business, where, said Llewellyn, he prospered. Mannheim's sister also was away, but would return presently. Would we wait? We waited, and talked with the plaintive, fearful cousin. Her easy tears came yet for Mannheim, but chiefly for herself. She said that the world was a selfish, cruel place, distressing to God! The house was clean, these three people loved and clung together, but the cousin and, I knew, the brother heard foghorns day and night, dreaded collisions, suffered shadowy shipwreck all the time.

Mannheim's sister came in. A thousand thousand fingers of thought and feeling had modeled her strong Jewish face. She greeted us, and we talked of Mannheim. After a while she took us to the small room where yet were kept his books and specimens. We stood beside his old, large, shabby desk. Above hung a small painting, a good one, by an unknown artist—Moses leading the people forth.

Mannheim's sister spoke: "My brother and my cousin in the other room think he's dead. The most that they can do is to see him in some little outward way, as he looked or sat or spoke some day when, they say, he was 'living.'"

Upon the desk stood an old hour-glass. Her large, dark eyes regarded it. "They think, 'His life was an hour-glass, and the sand is run.' I know that it is no such thing. He is all hours, and his movement does not stop."

That night, waking after sound sleep, I very clearly saw Mannheim. The sense was that we had met in the dreamless state, that I had made swift, preoccupied return through the dream-belt, bringing him with me so wholly that, simply and swiftly, the objective senses opening, the presence of him was transferred from the subjective, held, and he stood in the room clad in the old familiar seeming. Was this just the process or was it not, I powerfully felt Mannheim, and for an instant he stood visibly before me, like a light-filled figure from a stained-glass window. He moved, was gone.

I lay with a clear brain, not thinking in words, but receiving impacts, understanding them as they came. The process, the motion, was always one of expansion, bringing with it a sense of clear order and tranquillity. Then followed a specific light and warmth, then with a deep sense of pleased surprise the intellect took count of the moment's content. The content was oftenest a wide, fresh ordering of much data, a sense of things coming from sequence into scope, a mastery of the octave and the rhythm. Mastery of the old octave and the old rhythm—by no means mastery of the new. On the one hand, the moments were syntheses; on the other hand, but the barest elements. They were "bright shoots of everlastingness." Miriam and I and many another divined the kingdom of everlastingness, and that we should walk there. But we could not walk there yet—not boldly and bodily, through all our moments.

But every moment that we caught from the new order neared us there; and through us, as through all others who sailed for that America, neared the whole world. We, with all those others, who were no "others," after all, were spiritual ancestors.

Lying there in the London bedroom, at the turn of the night, Michael Forth saw how simply the dead are alive, saw how, presently, the plane of communication widens until we know that, until we touch again. Touch the absent in time as we shall touch the absent in space.

I slept again and waked to the divine morning freshness blessing the city. Miriam set apart the door between our rooms. "I went home last night and saw Kate and Dugald and mother and father and all."

In London we saw much, met many folk. England was not yet through with bitter war. The Russo-Japanese cloud gathered. We heard talk, excited or depressed, as the case might be; we noted hate in many dilutions. Miriam and I sat silent here.... We had parted with war. It had not been always thus with us—by no means always thus—but it was so now.

London tasted to us; massively, dearly, was us. We touched artists, players, writers, and men and women workers toward upward alteration in many a social form. There were men of science with whom, through Gamaliel, we came into relation. Ransome gave us a fourth group. All interested us; all were doing their work where they found themselves. And in and through and over all hung the sense of traveling. One by one, we waked to find ourselves on a far journey.

Now and again we went to the churches. Here, too, as in America, there seemed to us change. Miriam said, "They seem to be throwing away and they are coming closer."

She and I sat one day in Westminster Abbey. The organ had ceased, the clergy were gone, the folk had dispersed. The light rayed down upon us through the rose window. The great place of the great dead held so for a little, then it rocked and split and vanished and there stood a Living Man....

Death? Outgrow death.

But do not think that death will teach you to outgrow death. It has to be done by the living.

To save one mother alive ... Christ, that is Power and Wisdom and Love flowing, rising, in each and all....

Miriam and I went out into the soft sunshine of London town. She and I with many another walking the earth to-day and yesterday and to-morrow would grow into that Image, so profoundly general, so profoundly individual! We should grow into it as, in Judea, one named Jesus had grown into it. All, unconsciously and then consciously, would grow there. Christ and the comprehension of Christ growing by multiplication, accretion, fusion, intuition....

In and through and over London town, holding London town and all the towns, a sense of rock, a sense of power, a sense of warmth, a sense of light, a sense of Personality, a sense of Risen Life—

"There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body.

"It is sown in corruption, it is raised in Incorruption."

Miriam and Michael Forth went down to Thames-side and found a bench and sat there. They turned each to the other; their eyes shone each into the other's. They saw immortal, reciprocal love, filling time and space and supporting these.

The light came down on the river. The river grew luminous. The great town spoke and said: "Oh, great indeed shall I become; oh, wise indeed; oh, fair indeed!" We sat there long, tasting truth that was relative, but nearer kin to the real than our old relativities. We thought of the old, and we smiled at each other as we smiled at Kate and Dugald's play.

The colored river flowed on. We leaned upon the parapet of Westminster Bridge and watched it flow. The clock behind us struck the hour—we walked home to Llewellyn's house.

The London days went by. We bade these English selves farewell and, Llewellyn with us, crossed to France, that, too, had its great flavor, magic, multitudinous, one!

CHAPTER XXXVI

Miriam and I lingered at an inn in Savoy, awaiting the day when we must go to Geneva. The place in which we found ourselves was so very fair—such high, green slopes, such woods of chestnuts, so blue, so mountain-pure a lake, such gracious, stately mountain shapes crowned with white wreaths! We walked great distances, we lay in the long, sweet grass, ate the bread we brought with us, and drank from our one flask wine of the country. On a certain day we walked to a small gray village high above the lake, under a splendid mountain wall. There, with a definite tone of strangeness, fitness, sweetness, whom should I meet again but the little, wrinkled man with the book of verse who had sat down beside me on the train from Landon, years and years ago, when I would go to Africa?

We found him in the churchyard, sitting meditatively among the dark crosses. I stood before him, looking down into his eyes that were remarkably limpid, past trouble and deep. He put up a hand. "Wait a moment until I steady, until I steady the glass! ... You sat beside me on a train in the South. We talked. You were poet, too. Yes! ... I told you that we'd meet again!"

He was traveling with a party whom he must, presently, rejoin at the nearest large town. "I've just another day in this country. I walked up here from ——."

I told him who was Miriam, and Miriam how the two of us had met. He gave us his name, "Allen—Christopher Allen." We walked through the village that was a tiny place, and we sat under a great fir with the mountain towering behind us, and the lake thrown below like a sapphire. Four or five children, walking on the road, stood still, then came shyly over to us. They had berries, which we bought, and they answered questions; then one, quite suddenly, said: "I know the story of the place. Do you want me to tell it to you?"

She told it in a wild-bird way, on a treble note, a legend half pagan, half Christian. It ran now a grim and now a delectable phantasy. She finished. We applauded the legend, her art and her kindness. A bell rang, sweet in the distance. As though it were some understood signal, the children bobbed and bowed to us and ran away down the road. Where they had been a friendly dog appeared and came to be patted. Then a sweet bird sang, and a butterfly with a coat of many colors sailed to and from a tall flower. We heard the drone of bees; ants at our feet went by in a line. The odor of the mountain world was in our nostrils, sun entered our very hearts.

Our tongues uttered few words. The inner world was shining, ringing, loving. We loved this place and all places. We loved these beasts, walking, creeping, and flying, and all beasts walking, creeping, and flying up the Time-road out of beasthood. We loved the children and all children wherever they might be under the four winds. We loved the world—oh, bright and dark, we loved the world!

Said Miriam, in a low voice: "We are coming to the waters' meet. Don't you hear the great sea?"

The man of ancient days, and he had again with him a book of verse, sat gazing with us and we with him at the blue lake. Joy from within out makes beauty, love from within out makes goodness, wisdom from within out makes knowledge and power, motion from within out makes event. All the music of the world plays for the coming of intuitional life.

The scene about us rested, but a thousand more rolled in, wave on wave ... mass sense of an exhaustless ocean rolling to eternity. Memory waked and saw all her far homes, far and near, near and far. We remembered ourself, and ourself was the world. World past, world present, world to come. World past we held the clearest—world present was a sound, a thrill, a grief, a gladness—world to come was radiance.

The throb, the vision, the voice of understanding, passed on, wave form. We three had shared the impact.... How to teach that the thought has muscle and moves, that the dream and the vision go forth, that desire and will, that the image and the deed and the life are circulatory!

I had not spoken aloud, but the man beside me took with ease my thought. He carried it on, speaking with his eyes upon a flower which his hand moved to and fro: "There's not a desire nor determination, nor mood, nor thought, nor aspiration, intuition, super-thought, nor feeling that is not public, general, common goods! Where's the wall just now between the minds of us sitting here? If in old life there seemed a wall, new life flies over it, runs through it! Share and share alike. All we are one.... That, just now, was a lovely glow from to-morrow—warmth from heaven, breeze from home! Going up to the One. But for long, for very long, my friend, it may almost seem forever, we shall find in One a society!"

"I shall not quarrel there. It is all one."

"It is all music," said Miriam.

We went down the lake, over the happy roads to the inn. Going, there held a sense of exquisiteness, of harmonious movement throughout humanity, quintessential pleasantness of vast give and take, infinite variousness of liking. The intensity of the glow up there on the mountain receded—the strong, aromatic breeze from home passed on. But for all that they seemed to pass and seemed to recede, was left as ever a knowledge, a lift, a treasure of leaven! Wider and wider, higher and higher, subtler and subtler grows the brain.

The new-old companion stayed with us through the day and evening. In the morning he must go to join those others with whom also he was traveling.

We walked by the lake. There shone a young moon, and breathed around a dry, healthful air, wave-break of delicate odors, delicate sounds. Those over-perceptions, upon the shore of whose vast plane and order we had come, gave us of their new, their delicious flowers and fruits. Blossom after blossom, purple cluster, gold orb, they fell in our way.

In the morning, very early, Miriam and I were up to see the comrade go. How many comrades we were gathering, finding—were gathering, finding us! ... Delicate and strange are the ways of the All.

He walked away in the coral light. We had coffee and rolls together, with simple talk of mountains, roads, and towns. He went away who did not go; we stayed who also went.

Miriam that morning had letters to write. I walked to a fir wood sloping upward. The ground lay all purple, brown, and clean. Innumerable pillars ranged themselves, strong and high, while there sprang overhead a deep and marvelous roof, moving, fragrant. I lay down among strong roots, on the purple ground. There was stillness, and yet the ineffable, whispering surf.

It was to-day a surf of recollection....

Every one is Satan and every one is Christ and every one is that third who moves from Satan into Christ.

I came full upon Royal and Dorothea—came upon them in my own nature where they are because there is nowhere else for them to be.

Place, moment, expanded, extended. Here were seas of Royal-Dorothea.... And still they were seas of myself—my seas—as Michael and Miriam were seas of them in America, their seas, found in their nature because there is nowhere else for them to be.... We flowed together—then something rose out of the seas and understood them all. Oh, my clay that is to be given life! Oh, the all of me that must be adventured, lived, loved, sublimed!

There is an "I" that is to vanish, and there is an "I" that is to come, and time is long.

I sat in the fir wood, and on every hand it passed into infinity.... And then, like soundless thunder, there was a cry, and like invisible lightning there was a shock, a change! Miriam was with me as always she was with me, but there was a difference felt from head to foot! There was rending, sundering, and there was entrance.... She was not at the inn yonder—for that one instant she had been in the fir wood—now, I knew, I knew, she was in the realm to which you go by the inner gate!

I ran from the wood and up the path.... She was sitting at the table by the window, a letter to her mother under her hand. Her head was lifted, resting so against the chair's high back. She had died in a moment, the heart stopping—some trouble we had not guessed. Her face wore her gipsy smile, dauntless, magical.

I buried the loved body of her by the blue lake where the mountains reflected, where the song of birds was heard. Around it lay dust of a mountain people.

I would not go back across the sea to Flowerfield just yet. It was full home to Kate and Dugald. Aunt Kate and Uncle John, John and Amy, Catherine and Lewis, all who loved Miriam, loving her still, for she lived still and always, would find comfort ... still, still, as stair after stair is mounted, companionship with that other mounting spirit!

Miriam!

I wrote that I should come to Flowerfield in October.

Maxwell's whereabouts were known now to me. I wrote asking him to meet me in Athens. I stayed a month in Savoy, by the lake, among the mountains, in this inn, by this grave.

CHAPTER XXXVII

The "I" posited itself in a realm somewhat nearer to the All. It tented there. Miriam was there, profoundly, deeply, truly, really there.

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

I saw man—that I was, that I had come through—as one turns and sees a flower, a bird!

I was out, and about me was a cloud. I could not yet well distinguish where I was—I was a babe there. But under me now was the old kingdom I had come through. A part of me lived there yet, a vast part—but a vaster part was out.

The "I" that yet functioned in that kingdom was upon a ship on the Mediterranean, on the Ægean—but the "I" that was above knew many a ship, on many a sea, in many an age! Walking the sea, walking the land....

I came to Greece, to Athens, and found there Maxwell.

The heat burned, strong deserts seemed to spring about us—deserts loved, wide, and clean, the superfluous stripped away. A flash, a beam in the whole, returned that day in Landon when he stood, sinewy, tanned, beside his shelves of ores and we first grew acquainted ... or thought then that we first grew acquainted. Other beams fell from those African days. Ten years and more had passed since we had met in the body like this. Each had traveled far. But where we were now, as where then we had been, we found ourselves acquainted, and acquaintable, able to take the same stride, to work together, liking each other well in those great, quiet, desert spaces filled with dry light.

... But that first night in Athens it was Miriam with me, Miriam and my mother and Madam Black and the man with the book of verse.

I say "the first," but "firstness" applies only to that projection of me named Michael Forth, and to those named projections of the others. There was not any firstness in the case of I myself—of we ourselves. We had seen Athens built. As Athens lasted, so lasted our presence there.

Maxwell and I went up and down in Hellas. We saw the old sights again, the temples, hills, and seas.

There was a place where we sat among blocks of man-wrought stone, by the pillars of a little, roofless fane. Honey-hued, the shafts rose behind us; around grew a scant, parched herbage, before us poised the still blue sea, and the profound sky held a cloud like Argo and a cloud like the Golden Fleece.

We had been talking of Africa, of Mannheim, Ferraro, and Sir Charles, but finally we fell silent and sat so for some time, the moving sapphire filling the world. Maxwell broke the stillness. "Early in April an errand took me up the Jamuna. Just as I landed from a small boat at a certain place, suddenly—like that!—distinctly, vividly, consciously, I was at sea, upon a steamer called the Zeus, with you and with Miriam. She was no more strange to me than were you. Effectively, we were all one! I was there simply because you were there."

"Yes. You were climbing an old river-stair with a temple above. You stood still when you felt the ship about you. You had with you an English officer and a Hindu."

"Thorncliffe and Sastriar."

"We were effectively one. I was there simply because you were there!"

He drew a long breath. "Well! Follow a clue like that, and one might come out of the labyrinth.... I feel like Franklin with his key and his kite—and overhead all that was to come to be meant by 'electric!' ... Michael, where are we going?"

"Into beyond-man. What we call heaven and God."

"All of us?"

"Surely! Some particles are ahead, some in the rear. It is true that some are almighty slow! There are plenty of stragglers. But they won't always straggle. All are going—Self-drawn. And with each day the momentum increases."

"I think it does. But look at the present world!" he said.

We were lying by the temple, above the sea. That which happened was that forthwith we looked. We looked at ourself as Man. And we were the Hottentot in the Bush, and we were what seers there have been and are. We were our neighbors whom we loved, and we were our neighbors with whom we were at war. We cheated ourself, sold ourself and redeemed ourself. We slew ourself, and we rose from battle-fields, grew bodies again, and slew ourself again. We put out our own lights, and then with long pain relumed them. With pangs and pangs again we gave birth to ourself, and all the while feverishly we dug graves for ourself that we had birthed. We said, "You die—ha, ha! You go under—ha, ha!" and we died and went under, and still we stayed not there. We were a welter, a brew in a caldron, a chaos—

Maxwell's voice came as from out a darkness. "So at times I see it—"

"I see also.... There is truth in it, but it is too short range. Look now!"

Out of chaos was coming cosmos. Men were becoming Man—christs becoming Christ—gods becoming God. Perpetually we learned. We lost ignorance, but did not lose wisdom; lost discord, but did not lose harmony; lost hatred, but did not lose love; lost weakness, but did not lose might. Despite all dull, distracted, hypnotized clutching at the one it fell from us. The other stayed. And that which went was of time, and that which stayed was timeless.

We returned to the self by the temple.

"Bitter-sweet—sad and bright!" he said. "I pin by courage."

"Courage and good-will.... Love is power."

We sat silent, sat so for long. Gradually our minds again united. The intellect grew larger, keener, the feeling at once vivid and extended. Thought, emotion, sensation were toward lands and peoples. We felt them, felt Greece and England and America, felt France, Germany, Spain, Italy, felt China and Japan and India, and all the others—felt them as complexes in the One Man—as we felt the sexes in the One—as we felt in the One the children, the young, renewing points, and the prime, and the fading before transformation that they call age. There was a mighty integration—and we felt the upstanding god.

We sank back, always still we sank back. We could not hold the chord, keep the form! Disintegration—but continually the muscles grew stronger to draw all together again!

Maxwell sighed and moved. "Nomads, Bedouins, wandering in the desert and lifting eyes to the city of God."

"It is there—the truer self! We dwelt there a moment."

"A moment of a moment."

"It was an earnest. When we can dwell there an hour, how much, O Miriam, shall we know and be!"

"Vast, lifted, simple—"

"Blissful, intimate.... All the beautiful old words, all myths have meant it.... Gather the members of Osiris.... Feel as a tree and find it as simple, one, natural, as feeling as a leaf. Feel as the Ash Yggdrasil."

Again one day we sailed to an island and sat among rocks where some sweet-scented low shrub sent out an odor combining exquisitely with that of the sea. "I suppose," said Maxwell, "that there is everywhere emerging a higher range of faculties. The type of consciousness changes, advances. I meet of late years all kinds of explorers, each with a different tale to tell, but all telling of the new continent.... What we begin to be able to do falls under so many heads. The past now—all our history! It is profoundly with me in a kind of brooding regard."

"You may walk in the past—observe it—and alter it as a garden."

"You say 'alter.' I believe that too. The past can be altered."

"Yes. You have abundant power of motion in it."

A bird passed us, high in air. A wind came, bending the grass. "You know that I loved," he said, "a woman who is dead. It is growing that she and I walk hand in hand."

"That old blank wall is crumbling so that you can see the sun through it. Who that is dead has vanished? We shall gather all the living and we shall gather all the dead!"

He sat with his eyes upon the burning blue of that Greek sky. For me, I was in that country, but also Miriam and I climbed Wake-robin Hill. "Another thing develops in me," said Maxwell. "I begin to integrate waking life and sleeping."

"Yes. It is to be done. All manner of integrations...."

We mounted a long slope of brown light. Atop, we stood under a pine-tree, we looked afar. "Do you think that you ever began to live?"

"I do not. I never began and I shall never end."

"Oh, the mystery—!"

"Is it so mysterious? Standing there, you say 'I.' Standing here, I say 'I.' It is the same word. I take it that the quest, the searched-for treasure, the Grail of all the ages, is for every 'I' to find 'I' wherever it is, and that is everywhere. All 'I' is I. I AM THAT I AM. Each one is to find that all the 'I's' go into One Word. The first and only Word—the Word of God.... God, self-conscious, saying 'I.'"

"I see," he said. We faced each other, eyes meeting. "'I,'" he said. "I say it of what I have called 'you.'"

I answered. "I. I say it of what I have called 'you.'"

Going Athens-ward that day, all Greece sprang whole again. Not one age of it, but all ages of it, and the nimbus around its head that was the future.... All earth sprang whole and had its nimbus.

Maxwell and I journeyed for a month. Each liking, each understanding has its own fragrance, characteristic tone, strength. Maxwell and I joined fast in strong intellectual spaces, and in common care for a clean, taut, athletic physical, and in a heart that loved wild and careless beauty.

At the end of this time I must go home to Virginia, to Flowerfield. He, who had been engineering in the East, was now on his way to England, where a new project awaited him. We traveled together to Italy and northward to Genoa where I could get my boat. Arriving in Rome, we spent there a week.

All countries were now homes—all cities my cities—all peoples myself.... Over and over again the integrating energy slackened, weakened—there was instantaneous descent just to Michael Forth. Over and over again! But there were times when the deep past and the wide present seemed to stand in one form in some tremendous light and warmth that were the future.... And all the myriad shades, degrees, varieties, so rich each one, of experience!

Once here, walking at night, I was suddenly at one with an alchemist who had lived I know not when.

Another time I knew that I, and Miriam with me, and, I thought, my mother, had been martyred here in Rome nearly two thousand years ago.... I looked from a cross, and I saw over a space of sand, lifted and pierced in the same way, Gamaliel.

The monk Eadwine connected here....

Countless multitudes of lives that are our moments, phases! ... Stand in One Life and see from the center thy universe! "Michael Forth" was now to me one of the moments, the phases.

Maxwell and I left Rome and came to Genoa, where I was to take ship. Our inn had been a palace; we sat that night, with candles burning, in a room so large that the verges were lost in shadow. We sat silent. In at window came the ringing of a distant bell, sweet and slow. We were going to part on the morrow, who liked each other well.

To my perception time changed, space changed. Many more causes were simultaneously seen; many more effects. Miriam and I did not part, and Maxwell and I did not part. The larger life is here and now. Heaven is here and now.

He said: "There came then a wave of truth. From what land do they blow, these things? ... At any rate, you and I do not part."

The next evening the sea ran in vast blues and purples about the ship. The Italian shore was sinking; the mind's eye saw Africa and Spain and the Strait, the Atlantic and America.... There held me an emotion delicate and powerful, fragrant as the wild grape, all melody and color and zest, and above it walked unhidden intelligence. And Miriam and I met in the whole.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

In New York, Conrad, who lived in the next street, came to see me almost at once. We walked up and down in the study that was a long, high-ceilinged room. He looked about him. "I don't think she has gone," he said.

"No. She's not gone."

We walked up and down, Miriam with us. "You were already profoundly one," he said.

The city roared without the windows, the great city. Now it was Blake's tiger, tiger burning bright, and now Blake's lion with ruby eyes and mane of gold, now half man and half brute—centaur—and now whole man, and now half man, half god.

In very ancient times what long effort—prolonged, broken—to stand upright, to use the hand, the tongue! And now, upon the huge, next stair, difficult, too—!

We talked of Conrad's especial work. He also had grown in these years, was stiller, more patient, massive, than he had been.

Around him beat difficulties of a disturbed hive, clouds of stinging bees. He could say, "I sting, I fret and hamper myself"—and work on toward better things. He, with all of us, was on the way to knowledge and the master reconciliation. The long road—oh, the long, long road!—oh, the only road worth traveling! He was like and not like the old Conrad of the university, or the Conrad even of ten years ago. He worked hard, with vision and with temperance, building not with gusty strokes, but to last. The gain in him was that there used to be the gusty strokes. The emotion of the Whole, the fusing passion, held him now so closely that he grew steadfast.

His old paper The Compass continued, and he was starting a journal named The Evolutionist. I said that Evolutionist-Involutionist was the better, if longer word—unless, serving a turn already made, he was ready plainly to say Involutionist.

"It is too revolutionary a title—yet! As I see the formula, it goes: X—Evolution—Pause—Turn—Involution—X."

"X is the equilibrium, the identity, the Eternal Person."

"I suppose that is so." He put his hands behind his head and leaned back, his eyes upon the rows of books. "None does anything else but build at, build into the Greater Person.... 'All men are different,' said yesterday. 'All men are equal,' says a part of to-day. 'All men are identical,' will say to-morrow.... Each man and woman, consciously or unconsciously, lover and servant of that great Art that makes us One! All are pilgrims, seekers, workers in that studio.... But one reaches Bewlah Land, while another is still at Hill Difficulty."

His hands came down upon the table. I put mine over them. "All right, brother—"

We talked late. When he went away Cygnus was over the house-tops. As I fell to sleep a great star shone in the inner world—and it had mind and feeling and power and beauty!

I had found that Gamaliel was away from the city. But the day after Conrad he came. It was a day of autumnal beating rain and a wind that cried in the chimney and at the window. Martin had built me a fire in the study. There was work to do before I could go to Flowerfield. I had worked almost all the day, but in the rainy, late afternoon came Gamaliel.

I had always loved him and I did so now and should do so to-morrow and all the days after. Maxwell was comrade of manhood. Gamaliel was that, too, but comrade besides of boyhood. This afternoon it was boyhood that came all around us. And he knew what it was to suffer and to struggle, and far ages of that of my own had been in this room to-day. He knew—he was—Whitechurch and Baltimore, Restwell, Flowerfield. We could walk together in the still, the living, land of the past. How far we could walk together we had never plumbed, but we knew that it was very far—it was very far—and in the present and in the future as well as the past. I understood the world Gamaliel, and he the world Michael. There was free trade between us. The two capitals were homes each to the other; the two banners had a common, splendid over-banner. There was variousness, for richness, for refreshment. But in and through and with the variousness ran the common passion for the All. That Beatrix—that Mary—tore none apart, made none jealous....

Gamaliel and I cohered, interpenetrated, tasted each other and liked the taste. We sat beside the fire, with the rain streaming, beating, against the pane. "I came from Whitechurch last night. My father is dead."

"I did not know that! Tell me—"

"It was a short illness. He had changed in this last year, Michael. Walls were beginning to come down.... I did not mean to leave him, nor to be left by him.... He lay, clear-headed and still, at the last. His small, bare room and he lying there, straight and gray.... I watched—and the stillest kind of night outside—and picture after picture coming up. Do you remember the night we saw 'Midsummer Night's Dream'? That came up. How hardly I thought that night of all fathers! Old Ægeus who would kill his daughter if she went not his way—and my father who would hold me with both hands to be still the same.... I watched, and at last the cocks crew. He turned his head and opened his eyes. He said, 'Gamaliel, if you conquer—'

"I answered that I didn't want to conquer. Not now. Not unless in some way we both conquered ... by loving—by knowing.

"Do you know, Michael, what happened? I held his hand.... And we were one!... All his memories were mine.... I felt his hand gather my hand. He said, 'Gamaliel—but that is my name, too!' ... It was as though a hand passed over his face and wiped out severity and put there knowledge. 'Life,' he said. 'Life everlasting!' And he drew my hand up to his heart ... and under it the heart stopped. But then I felt it beat in me."

"Just so."

He rose and walked the room, then came back to the hearth. The fire reddened all the place, and his tall form and lined and intellectual face. As the flame played it seemed to do away with all rigidity in that appearance. It seemed to change, to become, dissolve, re-become—and now it carried with it this environment and now that. I thought I saw great Proteus who could change from form to form, from face to face, because all were his.... Gamaliel spoke, "And we shall revive our dead."

We sat together through the closing day. Now we talked and now we sat in a silence of understanding, rest in company. He supped with me, and we came back to the study and built up the fire and talked of work, his work, and mine, and Miriam's.

So stormy was the night that he agreed to stay with me. It was eleven when a cab stopped before the house and we heard Mrs. Lobb's key in the door. "She still plays?"

"She has a small part in 'Out and Away.'"

"Just as Wythe, the engraver, still engraves where he can get work—and both would be sadder, very wistful, if they thought they could not die in this house! They can?"

"Yes. Kate and Dugald and I shall live here, too, in the winter. And Mary and Martin and Norah and Dacia. And Miriam."

Mrs. Lobb tapped at the study door. It was her habit, coming in so, when she saw that the room was yet lighted. I opened the door for her. She entered, wrapped in her long, warm cloak, and with the rouge yet faintly on her cheeks.

When she had greeted Gamaliel, whom she liked, she sighed with pleasure over the fire. "The theater was cold—and all the winds of heaven are in the streets! But I played my old Madame part well—ah, well!" She sat and warmed herself by the fire, and she, too, looked magic, many in one, to-night. "The passion for the ideal!" she said. "One only finds the real by that! Ideal passion. I did well, and I felt as young as I shall be when I die.... For we go toward youth, I am perfectly sure of that!"

Warmed, she said good-night, and left us. There was magic about her and about everything to-night—or not magic, but a true and powerful light.

Gamaliel and I sat still until the wood should burn away. Pictures wrapped us....

The next day came to see me Royal Warringer. His secretary telephoned, asking if I were at home. He came in a high, clear, sunny day, the storm gone by, the streets glistening, the air free and thrilling. I met him down-stairs, in the parlor that with love and care Miriam and I had made right. But he said at once: "Haven't you a study? Let us go there."

In the study, when he had swept it with his eye, he went at once to the small painting of her that Y—— had made and given us. He said, "She was more lovely, Michael, than I thought."

We stood before the painting. It showed her very simply, sitting in a flush of marvelously painted dawn. "It is sunset light?" he said. "No. I see. It is dawn light."

"Yes. Dawn light."

We sat down, and he began to talk of Restwell.

How may any part of spirit change and not all change? As I moved he moved—as I heard the oceans he heard them—or as he heard the oceans I heard them—it matters not which. He had great power and subtlety.... I found in him what I had not found before—what I had not been strong enough to find before—I found in him, in remote, half-tended gardens, small flowers of love. We opened one toward the other....

He stayed the better part of an hour and then went who, like all persons else, yet stayed. An aspect of him went, but aspects remained.... Something powerful over us was correcting the one of us by the other—gathering from each the desirable, the useful, regarding the leaden portion of each, lifting the leaden portion of each toward the crucible.... We were coming together up higher.

Michael, Royal, Miriam, and Dorothea—

CHAPTER XXXIX

Three days and I was in Virginia. The train ran through October lands to October hills and mountains. I loved them, loved Virginia, loved the Indian-summer day. The South was mine—as was New England, the West and the Middle West—as was America to the south, and the northern Dominion, and the Indies. And Europe was mine, and Africa, Asia, and all the islands of the seas. And the submerged continents and the continents to be. Owned without harm as all may own all....

The train rushed on. That emotion that is above cry or laughter and that thought that is above words held me....

Here was the county town, here were greetings. At the last I had come a day or two earlier than was thought for. None from home was at the station. I walked to Flowerfield.

There lay a hilltop on the way where, walking or riding or driving, or on the returning wings of thought, every lover of beauty made pause and feasted. Beside the way rested a wide boulder—how often and how often had we who were walkers rested there with it! I rested there to-day.

A farm-wagon went by and the man in it and I called greeting. A negro carrying a bag of meal came by and we greeted; three boys and a dog followed and we greeted. Then came a surrey and women driving and we greeted—then an old colored woman hobbling along with a stick and we greeted. Then for a space the road ran bare; just the October wind blowing red and gold leaves across and along. Around flowed the widest landscape.

I saw. I saw my country, earth, times, desires and passions and determinations, the bound spirit and the spirit heaving against its bonds, and the spirit partly free, and high above the bound I felt the spirit free! One spirit—as we say "one man and his freedoms and unfreedoms."

The wind blew down the leaves. A great ray of sun traveled like a search-light. Again negroes were passing, this time a number together, and the one ahead sang, "Roll, Jordan Roll!" We greeted. I rose from the boulder and went on to Flowerfield.

Kate and Dugald were making a canal and tow-path down by the streamlet under the willows. I heard their caroling talk and went that way. They flung themselves upon me....

We sat under the willows and talked of her whom they called "mother"—who was profoundly mother, as she was also child—mother and child and lover and self of all! They were so young—they felt her everywhere. We talked—then we finished and smoothed the tow-path and planted witch-hazel twigs for fairy trees to shade the elf drawers of an elf boat. Then we washed our hands in the stream and went up to the house.

Oh, Flowerfield!

John and Amy, Aunt Kate and Uncle John, Catherine, Lewis—dear lands of being! The house sang its old ballad, the splendid trees burned like the phenix, seeing winter, divining the recurrent spring....

When a week had passed I went for a week to Restwell.

Nor Dorothea nor Carter nor Royal were there. I had all kindness from Aunt Harriet and General Warringer. Aunt Sarah and I walked or sat, talked or were silent together.

Her hair was now gray, but her eyes held their still glow, her face was unwrinkled, her figure kept its grace, her step lightness. We went here, we went there, about the old place; we sat by the river or under the orchard trees. But oftenest we went to the graveyard. Still she brought the flowers there. We felt the ancient sweet presences, and other days and days came now into the garland. She met herself as a young woman there. Over the wall I heard Ahasuerus calling, and he and I, boys, rampaged in the sloping, fairy wood. Or, back this side the wall, I moved where my mother moved.... Under the apple-tree, in the far corner, the red apples lay on the ground.... Oh, miracle, marvel—magical life!

My aunt Sarah spoke: "Ten years or so ago, I entered a new world. Perhaps imagination and memory and intuition and mind and emotion and judgment were always on the road.... Perhaps we come, each of us, like Christian, to a boundary-line, and there the burden drops and we walk on, new man, new woman! At any rate, I walk on, and now each morning I say, 'What exquisite, sweet surprise shall I know to-day?' Behind all outer meanings are inner meanings, and they come first, come last—are Alpha and Omega into which all things go, out of which all things come!"

The days slipped by at Restwell. I walked to Whitechurch. Hilltop Academy had another principal, Mr. Smith, the history teacher, teaching where had taught Doctor Young. I went to see Mr. Gilbert. The great tree shadowed the pharmacy. One descended a step as into the cave of a good anchorite. The little bell rang.

The hermit was now an old man. "Oh yes, I shall bury this!" he said. "But I shall simply live on. Immortality is desirable. I take it that the school-books and the newspapers haven't yet the last word in physics and mathematics."

I went to see the rector of St. Matthew's. Mr. Millwood was in his study, but presently we stepped into the garden and paced the path by white and pink and purple asters. He spoke of Miriam.

I said: "Death is a plane of consciousness. By degrees the 'living' and the 'dead' are finding and making a plane in which to meet. When the consciousness has grown great wings—"

"Yes?"

"Then there is no 'death.'"

"Consciousness—planes and states—degrees of awareness! I hate," said Mr. Millwood, with vigor, "all the new-fangled lingo!"

I laughed. I agreed that language was yet Bœotian.

But the sunshine was not Bo[eo]tian—nor the colors of the garden. The three-dimensional language was not Bœotian.... Or was it, too, Bœotian to what should be, would be?

We walked the brick path....

That evening at Restwell I went to Daddy Guinea's cabin. It stood vacant, the door open, behind it cavernous dark, before it red sumach and farewell-summer. I sat upon the door-step and all my childhood came about me.

I had learned to walk in the past as simply as one turns from the thronged street to walk in the park. I walked there now. Fire burned on the cabin hearth and there Daddy Guinea and I baked sweet potatoes and he told me about the battle seen from Lone Tree Hill. But I asked him questions such as I had not asked then, and I saw in his answers what I had not seen then—and yet was it play, recreation! The past is the vast playground where things are learned in play. There is motion there as everywhere.

The past ran into the now, the now rose from the past. Spread in all directions the tremendous shape of the present! Flux and throb and impact, shuddering thrill and thunder—mine of choices....

The future lifted me.... Those who live in the future live!

Chaplets of stars appeared. The night wind breathed. "Tu-whoo! Tu-whoo!" said an owl in the wood. The cricket world chirped. The soil, the plant world, entered in fragrance.... Oh, beauty and might and wisdom! AUM, saith the Hindu. ALL—ALL.

We are Brahma, we are Vishnu, we are Shiva—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

I looked at my little life, and I looked at my larger life, and I saw that the one was to melt into the other.

The larger was to be the simple, continuing, every-day life—as the little life had been. The momentary was to become the day long.... I felt movement about me—presences—Presence. I could not bring all into radiance—I could not step wholly, bodily, into that super-world that I divined—outer islands, I divined, of an inner world so great, so bright—! Ignorance held me, lethargy, weakness, unwisdom, unlove. I saw through a glass darkly, but all my being was bent toward one day seeing clearly. We pass into it as, long ago, we passed through the brute into the human. All the world shall go up with a shout into God—shall find itself in its own heights.

I left the cabin and went down to the river and heard the sea talking in it, to it. I touched the sea that had put it forth and was taking it again. It was no distance, or I had overpassed distance. All experience had been, was, and would be mine ... and thine ... ours ... the ultimate, the un-selfed I.

In a week I went from Restwell back to Flowerfield.

Indian summer pervaded the land. In the spring violets cover the ground, in the late, late autumn they fill the air.

John and I walked the old road. "Show me, Michael, some of the things you see!"

"I see how good, how strong, how dear you are, John, John!"

"But you've stepped over a stream that still runs before me. I can see that. You call to me from the other side."

"You will come. You feel yourself moving.... 'It's dogged does it.' 'Dogged' finds the direction—'dogged' pursues it. 'Dogged' is your true knight errant, his adventure found—"

"But the mood," he said, "ceases to be one of doggedness."

"You are right. It becomes a burning glory."

We walked in silence. He drew a quick breath. "I saw just then, time, space, and causation."

"You are crossing the stream! This is a world beyond the old. We passed into it because we were ready to pass into it. But we are babes here, half-blind new-comers, stammerers, uncertain feelers toward bright truths. That will change. We shall grow."

"The 'I' sense—where does that go?"

"It passes into 'We'—and that passes into God."

We walked on, and Flowerfield and the County and the State and the Country and the World were vividly fair....

The next day was a day of rain, the day after one of blowing wind, but the third day broke in glory. I went that morning to Wake-robin Hill. I passed the lesser wood where in spring the flowers abounded. I climbed to the crown and lay under hemlocks. Still, still, was I hunting Reality, the thing which Is ... thing? ... the Person Who Is!

Miriam and I sought together. She was with me on Wake-robin Hill.

We sought—and, as ever, seeking, we found. We found wonder, high peace, work to be done, adventure mystic, beckoning, vistas of travel!

To hear the voice of understanding, and to live the unselfish life—

THE END

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MICHAEL FORTH ***

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Table of Contents

- MICHAEL FORTH
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- CHAPTER IX
- CHAPTER X
- CHAPTER XI
- CHAPTER XII
- CHAPTER XIII
- CHAPTER XIV
- CHAPTER XV
- CHAPTER XVI
- CHAPTER XVII
- CHAPTER XVIII
- CHAPTER XIX
- CHAPTER XX
- CHAPTER XXI
- CHAPTER XXII
- CHAPTER XXIII
- CHAPTER XXIV
- CHAPTER XXV
- CHAPTER XXVI
- CHAPTER XXVII
- CHAPTER XXVIII
- CHAPTER XXIX
- CHAPTER XXX
- CHAPTER XXXI
- CHAPTER XXXII
- CHAPTER XXXIII
- CHAPTER XXXIV
- CHAPTER XXXV
- CHAPTER XXXVI
- CHAPTER XXXVII
- CHAPTER XXXVIII
- CHAPTER XXXIX
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE