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.