Steve and I were camping together for a few weeks on the Southern
California strand. One morning he looked up from the pages of a book in
his hands and remarked:
"This fellow is one of us."
The book was _Youth_, by Joseph Conrad.
"I haven't read a book for a long time," Steve added. "There are three
stories in this. I've read only one--_Heart of Darkness_--in fact, I
haven't finished that.... You have to fall into this Conrad and be
his--to get him. You let your mind open into a cup, and presently after
six or seven pages, you find it brimming. If you fall into him deep
enough, you get almost what he sees--not quite though. No reader ever
does. But you get something intense, fascinating, a restlessness, a
terror. You find that all your somnolence and inertia has caught fire."
There had been a ten minutes' rain at dawn. The smell of the tropics
moved over the sterile sand. It was cool, but there was no wind. The
day promised heat. We had been up in Canada for the winter, and it was
hard to believe that hot sunlight was free. A broad quilt of gulls and
plover sat together on the shore waiting for the drying light or for
the mist to rise, or the tide to ebb....
Steve resumed:
"He tells about a boy who loved maps--who used to look for hours at the
continents--thrillingly attracted to the darkest places, the patches
still unprotected. There was one heart of darkness with a river winding
through. He doesn't tell you the continent or the river, but there were
elephants there. He should have called the story _Ivory_.... Years
afterward, the man, worn to the bone from the world's lies, sets out to
penetrate this deepest black of the planet. He reaches the river and
follows it for endless days, but the world has arrived. Some nation is
there colonising for Ivory--you don't know which. The story is told
like that--unplaced in time and space. Really it doesn't matter what
particular imperialistic tendency is at work. The fact is, he climbed
the river into the ghastliest chaos....
"You get the deep green of the heart of the continent, the mournful
brooding leafiness--the natives herded and distracted, more afraid of
the blast of a river-steamer's whistle than of any kind of violent
death. Death was familiar to them. They were chained to labour,
cast loose to die. Vultures swept the sky waiting for their limbs
to fall still. There was the salty pester of fever in the air--men
foolish with fever and heat--a haze of flies--white men burning out
inside--oxidisation of human souls--a steady and hideous beat of
death--devils of hate and violence and acquisitiveness--clerks making
entries of Ivory--a nation's young men running through the jungles
for Ivory--carloads of bright glass beads and painted calico for
Ivory--all standards of life and career-building set upon Ivory--murder
for that--lives lost, tribes shattered--the leafy heart of a fresh
continent seared with the civil flame of greed--commodities dumped
in river beds--mails that men would die for torn open by vandal
hands--waste, perversity, nothing clean-cut even of crime, the horrible
non-initiative of the middlemen.... All this told with patient
exactitude, but with indescribable intensity; told by a master-hand
that trembles; with the control that one can only know who is sensitive
enough to tremble. You feel a big man bending forward to make you see
something that all but killed him to find out. You feel him scarred
and sick, his heart leaking, because he found it all so hideously and
stupidly rotten. It's a little picture of a trade war--that's the
point--the war of middlemen--middlemen turning to rend each other....
Heart of darkness--after that the light comes."
Steve opened and shut his fingers in the sunlight. The warmth was
sweeter every minute.
"This fellow sees it all," he went on. "He's done a big job for me--for
anybody who gives himself to the book. There's something immortal about
being a workman like that--about any workman. That's why one wants to
cast a weep after the passing hordes of middlemen. They can't do work.
They don't even see the fog of human agony they've painted the world
with. They are _it_. It is the old against the old. It's all about
Ivory. They crucify for fossil."
Steve was lighting up.
"This Conrad brought back to me to-day a bigger love for the workman.
The starved and scorned inventor gets the best of it, after all--not
in Ivory--but he builds something in himself. He quickens something in
himself that goes on in freed consciousness when the body falls. No, I
don't insist that anything goes on in any particular way, but the deep
moments of work somehow show a man that the best of him here is but a
nexus between a savage past and a splendid future.... It's wonderful to
be alive to-day. I believe there are secret agencies at work behind all
the governments--that they are one at the top. I don't mean detectives,
not intelligence or espionage bureaus. Potent, mystic, infallible
forces. It doesn't matter. _Some person or some group is holding the
plan of the New Age._
"We're learning life as never before--plucking the deeper fruits and
mysteries of pain. But one must go apart from the crowd to see. One
must cease to be a partisan. The real seer sees the whole, not the
part. All the war-lands are in pain. One sees only the part, when one
is in pain. Not one man out of a million sees it all. A few Russians
see it all--a few in China--a few in India. Romain Rolland sees it all.
This fellow, Conrad, sees it all.... It's a pity if America doesn't
soon get the full picture. It's worth seeing----"
Ocean and sunlight and mountains. The world was a brimming cup. If a
man could take all the beauty there was for him, he could never die....
We went over to the post-office of the little town. The business men of
the place were coming in. The first mail had just been distributed....
Grocers, butchers, the hardware man, the real estate men, the man
who ran the newspaper, fishermen, barbers, lawyers--mainly fat and
pleasant--children on the way to school.
They were short-breathed and short-armed. They dressed in wool and wore
heavy dark hats. I had never noticed before how short-armed the race
of tradespeople are. Labourers and peasants are not so; painters and
musicians have a tendency to be long-armed. I mentioned this to Steve.
"The middlemen," said he. "They are tightened throughout--ligaments
contracted--contraction taking place in the deeper weaves of
mind, a drying up of the deeper sources of life. Contraction,
self-centering--that's what madness is. A man must sing, or weave, or
build or make bricks. The ways of competitive life are paltry ways.
They hide their ways from one another, and afterward from themselves.
They pluck no fruits; they contrive no short cuts; they do not become
intimate even with the commodities of the earth--the very things
they worship and pare margins from. They eat infamously, filch from
each other.... It's all here--all that Conrad pictured in the heart
of darkness. These are the sick, the maimed, the blind of the earth.
They live in the realm of fear, pain, anger, desire. These are the
war-makers.... Their arms are twisting and shortening in to their
navels----"
Sunlight streamed in through the open doors of the post-office. Motors
going by drowned the soft rustling from the sea. The hell of the
outer world trickled in through bits of conversation. Everybody had
read the morning paper at the same time. No one thought of telling
anything that his neighbour did not know.... Europe was starving--the
President was ill--railroads in strike, coal famine, prohibitive cost
of staples--France cracking with the dry-rot of exhaustion--England ...
a voice--Germany choking in her own blood.
The tradespeople of the little town by the sea gathered in their bills
and orders and advertisements and hurried back to their shops. Nothing
astonished any more. There were no words for the world's woe--no ears
for lamentations--no mind but to buy cheap at the right time and sell
dear all the time. We walked back to the shore.
* * * * *
"I once saw a little town on a hill-side," Steve said. "A grand
boot-maker was there, and a man who made clocks with such tools as he
had--big noble clocks that ran unvaryingly eight full days. Another
man made furniture--perfect woods from the forest drying in his kilns
and sheds. There was a sweet smell about his shop. There was a weaver
and a potter there. The days were long and singing, full of labour and
peace. No one multiplied by mechanical means. Every artisan had his
apprentices. The age of the apprentices will come back--with a new
dimension added----"
"Switzerland or dream?" said I.
Steve smiled. "They are starting communities all along this coast," he
said. "Many are on the quest of the town I saw."
We sat down upon the sand again. The sun was higher. White clouds
brooded in heaven's own daylight; white wings moved upon the sea, I
was thinking about Steve and all he had said. What Conrad pictured in
the dark continent existed here in one of the cleanest small towns
of America--an earlier stage of the same malignant disease. From the
broad and beautiful vantage points of democracy and fraternity--every
shop here was a lair, the products, exposed and secreted, a spectacle
of moral decay and insensate devouring; every schoolhouse a place of
dismal enchantment where competition was not only taught but enforced.
Steve knew deeply well when he spoke, that the creative artist, the
producer of every real and true and beautiful thing, comes into the
power to express himself, in spite of such education, not because of
them.
One can laugh at all mediocre men occupying seats of the mighty and
calling their dead gods to witness that they are right--but one
who knows that the intrinsic gift of each child is the one thing
in sunlight to be promoted, turns away a bit dismally from the
spectacle of the standardisation of the child mind--from the wholesale
manufacture of middlemen by school system.
Steve loves America. I know of no one who loves America more. He
doesn't rise and cheer when the orchestra plays a questionable bit
of verse and tune in a movie-hall where imagination is being put to
death--_but he believes in the vision of the Founders of America_. He
believes in the spaciousness and splendour of the American spirit; that
the dream of a few mystics will triumph at the last, and that the many
will follow the dream of the few. He does not believe that the voice of
the middlemen is the voice of God.
It's hard to credit, but this young man does not hate one country to
love another. He loves America because the dream of a new heaven and a
new earth has a quicker chance for breaking through into matter here
than elsewhere. He perceives the tissues of the senile and the obscene
breaking down in America, under intense civil and martial and moral
processes. He believes that this breaking down is essential before the
building begins. He believes that the future will be built upon the
thoughts of men who are great enough to stand apart from the dumas,
from the cabinets and the senates, just now. As Steve sees it, all
partisans have to do with the parts, and the parts of the partisans
have to do with the Old, which is destroying itself--sense against
substance, limb against limb, organ against organ.
The young men of the New Race are born of a mating of the East and
West. They are naturally intolerant of partitions. Steve is one of
these. He isn't a spirit alone. He is a body and brain. He has stayed
awake through the full night and day. He sees the planet in one piece.
He has crossed all the rivers. He knows the young men of America. He
is one of them. He loves America because he knows the rest of the
world. He has friends among the Chinese young men--among the young
men of Russia and India. He says that all three have greater obstacles
to overcome in getting the dream through, than we of America--that
everybody will be singing it after the wreckage is cleared away.
"America, Russia, India, China--they are lands, not pavements," Steve
declared.
He was looking across and to the south. The sun was a glory about
us--all the background a tentative, swiftly passing thing, all but
forgotten now, stilled by the rustle of the long, low white lines of
the sea.
"The New Age will redeem all the broad lands," he said, with a trace of
a smile--"lands for meadows and fields and gardens--meadows for milk,
fields for wheat, gardens for honey--the New Race is particular for the
perfect foods--foods for the giant and the child--broad lands for the
toilers--the great sea coasts for the dreamers.... It's all a matter of
taste," he added.
* * * * *
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