They sat and talked, and the poem gave leadings to their talk, though they did not speak of the poem. At first it was Fay, answering Hagar's questions, telling of the struggle of muscle and brain with the physical earth, of mountain-piercing, river-spanning, harbour-making. He was thirty-nine; he had been engineering, building in strange and desert places since he was a boy; he had a host of memories of struggles, now desperate and picturesque, now patient and drudging, grapples of mind with matter, first-hand encounters with solids and liquids and gases. He had had to manage men in order to manage these; he had had to know how to manage men. Born with an enquiring mind, he learned as he went along his governments and peoples, their customs, institutions, motor-faiths, strengths and weaknesses; also he knew the natural history of places, and loved Mother Earth and a good part of her progeny. He had also a defined, quizzical humour which saved the day for him when it grew too strenuous. He talked well, with a certain drawling fitness of phrase which brought Medway into Hagar's mind, but not unpleasantly. There had been much in Medway which she had liked.
Fay was no monopolist. The talk went from one to another, and Denny drew more into it. He had been listening attentively to Fay. "It's your work," he said, "and it's tremendous and basic work. You've been doing it through the ages ever since it first occurred to us that we could lengthen an arm with a stick and crack a nut—or an enemy's head—with a stone. It's tremendous and basic still. And the people who work under your direction, and atom by atom give you power?"
"Why, one day," said Fay, "they'll work as artists. A far day, doubtless, and there are degrees in artists; but I see no other conclusion. And to give the artist component in the mass of humanity a chance to strengthen and come out is, I take it, the tremendous and basic work to which we've all got to devote the next century or two."
"Oh, you're all right!" said Denny.
Hagar smiled. "My old 'News from Nowhere'—"
"But with a difference," said Denny. "Morris's was an over-simplified dream."
"Yes; we are more complex and flowing than that. But it was lovely. Do you remember the harvest home, and the masons, so absorbed and happy in their building ... like children, and yet conscious artists, buoyant, free—"
Fay looked at her. "What," he said, "is your vision of the country that is coming?"
Her candid eyes met his. "I have no clear vision," she said. "Visions, too, are flowing. The vision of to-day is not that of yesterday and to-morrow's may be different yet. Moreover, I don't want to fix a vision, to mount it like a butterfly and keep it with the life gone out. We've done too much of that all along the way behind us. Vision grows, and who wishes to say 'Lo, the beautiful End!' There is no End. I do not wish a rigid mind, posturing before one altar-piece. Pictures dissolve and altars are portable."