"It is good to see you place your hands together. To me it is a symbol of the marriage of the East and West, for the East and West must mate. Long ago the East went up to God and the West went down to men. The East has learned Vision and the West has learned Action. These two must meet and mate again for the glory of God and the splendour of earth. The East has lifted its soul to the hills and held fast to its memory of the Father's house. The West has descended into the folds of the valley, and won from agony and isolation its efficacy in material things. And now the mystic is looking down and the materialist is looking up. Soon their hands shall join--like your two hands in mine--and there shall be great joy in the Father's House." * * * * * 9 STEVE 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....