And this is Influence, the work of one will upon another, sometimes apparent, dramatic, tragic; sometimes subtle, unknowable, speaking across dark gulfs. The meaning of that dead man's austere face, the howl of journalists on his uncovered trail, the old man dead in his hotel room disgraced, the deep current of purpose in his new wife,—all these and much more sent messages into the man's unyielding soul to change the atmosphere therein, to alter the values of things seen, to shape—at last—the will. For what makes an act? Filaments of nerve, some shadowy unknown process in brain cells? These are but symbols for mystery! Life pressing multifariously its changing suggestions upon the sentient organism prompts, at last, the act. But there is something deeper than the known in all this wondrous complexity….
John Lane, the man of fact, the ordered efficient will, was dimly conscious of forces other than physical ones, beyond,—not recognizable as motives,—self-created and impelling, nevertheless; forces welling up from the tenebrous spaces in the depths of his being, beneath conscious life. And at last, something higher than Judgment swayed the man.
CHAPTER LXXIX
The private car Olympus had been switched for the day to a siding at the little town of Orano on the edge of the Texas upland. The party within—the Lanes, Margaret and her children, and several men interested in the new railroad—had been making a leisurely tour of inspection, passing through the fertile prairies and woodlands of Oklahoma, stopping often at the little towns that were springing up along the road, aiming south until they had reached the Panhandle. These September days the harvests were rich and heavy, covered with a golden haze of heat,—the sweat of earth's accomplishment. The new soil was laden with its fruit. The men had been amazed by the fertility, the force of the country. "Traffic, traffic," Lane had murmured enthusiastically, divining with his trained eye the enormous possibilities of the land, the future for the iron highroad he was pushing through it. Traffic,—in other words, growth, business, human effort and human life,—that is the cosmic song that sings itself along the iron road.
Margaret had said mockingly:—
"Wouldn't it do our New York friends a world of good to get out here once a year and realize that life goes on, and very real life, outside the narrow shores of Manhattan!"
That was the illuminating thought which had come to them all in different ways during this slow progress from St. Louis south and west. This broad land of states had a vital existence, a life of its own, everywhere, not merely in the great centres, the glutted metropolitan points. Men lived and worked, happily, constructively, in thousands and thousands of small places, where the seaboard had sunk far beneath the eastern horizon. Life was real, to be lived vitally, as much here in prairie and plain as anywhere on the earth's surface. The feeling which had come to Isabelle on her westward journey in March—the conviction that each one counted, had his own terrestrial struggle, his own celestial drama, differing very little in importance from his neighbor's; each one—man, woman, or child—in all the wonderful completeness of life throughout the millions—swept over her again here where the race was sowing new land. And lying awake in the stillness of the autumn morning on the lofty plateau, as she listened to the colored servants chaffing at their work, there came to her the true meaning of that perplexing phrase, which had sounded with the mockery of empty poetry on the lips of the district attorney,—"All men born free and equal." Yes! in the realm of their spirits, in their souls,—the inner, moving part of them, "free and equal"! …
"It's the roof of the world!" Margaret said, as she jumped from the car platform and looked over the upland,—whimsically recalling the name of a popular play then running in New York.
An unawakened country, dry and untilled, awaiting the hand of the master, it lifted westward in colored billows of undulating land. Under the clear morning sun it was still and fresh, yet untouched, untamed.
"It is the roof of the world," she repeated, "high and dry and extraordinarily vast,—leading your eyes onward and upward to the heavens, with all the rest of the earth below you in the fog. How I should like to live here always! If I were you, Isabelle, I should get your husband to give you a freight-car like those the gangs of track-layers use, with a little stovepipe sticking out of one corner, and just camp down in it here,—on the roof of the world."