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.