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.