Chapter Thirty-four

It was at this precise moment that Dave, after Dora had dashed from him into the long row of elms, reached the little eminence of land, on his way home, from where he could see, on one side, the remote, low-lying roofs of High Ridge, and, on the other, the roof of the Igrotte place.

The moon had come out of its snow-bank, wafer-thin, and throwing a light the color of steel over the countryside. Fields billowed around him, as if under his very feet, he could feel the movement of their flow. Valley whose magnesia of the soil was the soil of his own make-up. He had that sense of oneness with the ground, as if the roots of him, like the roots of a tree, flowed down through layers of the curiously alive earth into sub-strata——

Years of his dreams, dreamed from the flat of his back, had risen off that soil. Folded close to the deep, the loamy, the fructifying dirt, what countless times he had dropped his book on its face, to float off to worlds of pirate and raft, shark and Tartar. North Pole. Airship. Submarine. Dick Needham. Later, Ivanhoe. de Galis. Tom Brown. Cecil Rhodes. Galileo. Captain Kidd. Peary. Teddy! Marconi. Orville Wright. Othello.

Everyone of them had sat on the slope of his hill that slid down on one side toward Bek’s and on the other side toward the Igrotte house.

Why, buried somewhere on the left slope of hillside was a copy of Darwin’s Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. He had played at Captain Kidd burying his treasure on damp spring afternoons. That was his treasure. For months, it had lain moldering there, waiting for him to find time to go searching the spot, over which tufts of grass had grown meanwhile, erasing trace of the ritual.

Dreams had been dreamed here, and now culminating within him, in what seemed actual spurts of energy, came the first concrete impulse to be up-and-doing he had ever known.

Here was his soil flowing into a future that seemed suddenly to draw aside one of its many thicknesses of curtain for him. The future that was to be flecked with the rise and dip of aeroplanes. The future when this soil must run fertile and yielding as far as Stefansson had been able to visualize in the Northward Course of Empire. The future that suddenly was something to arm cap-a-pie for. That he must rush to meet. The future that suddenly, amidst the vision, the dipping of the planes, the onward rush of empire, had its nucleus under his feet and stretched out to new horizons. Suddenly that future became alive. A future of men whose ideals must rise above the soaring of the planes, or who would be crashed to earth by them.

A future that was suddenly luminous, because it contained him and Dora under the rooftree of a semi-detached home of their own making, in a town called Springfield.

How suddenly and gloriously alive this future, starting under his feet and radiating outward, chiefly toward Springfield! Clerkship. Husbandship. Dora!

Something else, too. The something else that was part of that future. Uncorrelated. The fields all about him were soaked with his dreams; with his inchoate impulses. To launch new ships. Dreadnoughts, with nothing to dread, were the only kind of ships that ultimately must mark man’s ability to rise above his mechanical age.

One thought a great deal about that. Henry said, what good is the telephone, the telegraph, the aeroplane, the motor-car, if man use these magnificences of his own inventive brain against himself....

Henry said. Henry said ... Henry said ... somehow swam out of the vast ether of moving molecules—Henry said! Impulse to warn men lest the power of brain prove to be a boomerang. Impulse to jerk the world into compactness by quick navigation of air. To make men less strange to one another, less afraid of one another, by annihilating distance. Supremacy of the air must mean just that—not the power of poison-gas. Henry said——

To tread new altitudes that back, through the ages, only eagles had dared. To seek new pastures. A world to be tamed by its mechanical magnificence, not made savage by it. A world to leap to the stars on the quick mechanical steeds of its achievement, not to hurl bombs from them—not to rush to intellectual, spiritual, idealistic destruction on them. Henry said—Henry said——

The impulse to straddle the world as if it were Pegasus gone mad and check-rein it—Henry’s words—Henry’s words were kindling in one. To ride toward the stars, instead of into destruction, on a steed with mechanical entrails and seven-thousand-league hoofs.

And above all, to come back to Dora four years hence, with money in the pockets of a blue serge suit that was nattier than Kenneth Chipman’s, and carry her back to a Springfield that had a shingle over his office door, a client on his books, and a first month’s rent planked down on a two-family house! Dora!

Against the horizon, from the direction of the Howey place, her silhouette unmistakable, climbed the figure of his sister Bek, at enormous stride, even for her. A stride that seemed to spin the road, a little contemptuously back from under her strong feet. A stride that somehow, as he stood on his eminence of small hilltop, with a rising wind flapping his shabby, baggy trousers, filled him with a curious and comforting sense of inheritance.

Some of that power that made his sister magnificent and his father like a stanch old phaeton that would carry its burden even when the spring groaned; that made his brother full of a wisdom that seemed to begin far behind things and leap so far ahead of them—some of that power must be his!

There were new ships to launch—somewhere—air ships! Dream-ships come true. Power!

Why, he had seen his mother, who was full of years and had fainting-spells, deny her chilblains and walk miles on feet that must have been fiery and icy furnaces under her. He had seen her, who sickened at blood finish sticking a knife into a pig, when a farm-hand cut himself. Even his nephew Stephen, whom he had seen kick in the side of a dog, had a valor that had pulled him through.

Some of that power, flowing like a mill-stream through his family, must be in him. Big wheels to turn. Why not? Half of a two-family house in Springfield—someday—who knows—there was a future to law—corporation law—if Kenneth Chipman could—well—if Kenneth Chipman could——

His dreams must be struck into life, as one would strike a match into flame.

As Dora had struck the match of him into flame!