"This Conrad brought back to me to-day a bigger love for the workman. The starved and scorned inventor gets the best of it, after all--not in Ivory--but he builds something in himself. He quickens something in himself that goes on in freed consciousness when the body falls. No, I don't insist that anything goes on in any particular way, but the deep moments of work somehow show a man that the best of him here is but a nexus between a savage past and a splendid future.... It's wonderful to be alive to-day. I believe there are secret agencies at work behind all the governments--that they are one at the top. I don't mean detectives, not intelligence or espionage bureaus. Potent, mystic, infallible forces. It doesn't matter. _Some person or some group is holding the plan of the New Age._ "We're learning life as never before--plucking the deeper fruits and mysteries of pain. But one must go apart from the crowd to see. One must cease to be a partisan. The real seer sees the whole, not the part. All the war-lands are in pain. One sees only the part, when one is in pain. Not one man out of a million sees it all. A few Russians see it all--a few in China--a few in India. Romain Rolland sees it all. This fellow, Conrad, sees it all.... It's a pity if America doesn't soon get the full picture. It's worth seeing----" Ocean and sunlight and mountains. The world was a brimming cup. If a man could take all the beauty there was for him, he could never die.... We went over to the post-office of the little town. The business men of the place were coming in. The first mail had just been distributed.... Grocers, butchers, the hardware man, the real estate men, the man who ran the newspaper, fishermen, barbers, lawyers--mainly fat and pleasant--children on the way to school. They were short-breathed and short-armed. They dressed in wool and wore heavy dark hats. I had never noticed before how short-armed the race of tradespeople are. Labourers and peasants are not so; painters and musicians have a tendency to be long-armed. I mentioned this to Steve. "The middlemen," said he. "They are tightened throughout--ligaments contracted--contraction taking place in the deeper weaves of mind, a drying up of the deeper sources of life. Contraction, self-centering--that's what madness is. A man must sing, or weave, or build or make bricks. The ways of competitive life are paltry ways. They hide their ways from one another, and afterward from themselves. They pluck no fruits; they contrive no short cuts; they do not become intimate even with the commodities of the earth--the very things they worship and pare margins from. They eat infamously, filch from each other.... It's all here--all that Conrad pictured in the heart of darkness. These are the sick, the maimed, the blind of the earth. They live in the realm of fear, pain, anger, desire. These are the war-makers.... Their arms are twisting and shortening in to their navels----"