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.