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.