VIII
Matthew wrote to Kautilya at the New Willard in Washington, and in one of his letters he said: “I am digging a Hole in the Earth. It is singular to think how much of life is and has been just digging holes. All the farmers; all the miners; all of the builders, and how many many others have just dug holes! The bowels of the great crude earth must be pierced and plumbed and explored if we would wrest its secrets from it. I have a sense of reality in this work such as I have never had before—neither in medicine nor travel, neither as porter, prisoner, nor lawmaker. What I am actually doing may be little, but it is indispensable. So much can not be said of healing nor writing novels. I am digging not to plant, not to explore, but to make a path for walking, running, and riding; a little round tunnel through which man may send swiftly small sealed boxes full of human souls, from Dan even unto Beersheba.
“Yes, just about that. Just about fifty miles of tunnel we will have before this new Chicago subway is finished. And you have no idea of the problems—the sweat, the worry, the toil of digging this little hole. For it is little, compared to the vast and brawny body of this mighty earth. It is like the path of some thin needle in a great football of twine. The earth resists, frantically, fiercely, tenaciously. We have to fight it; to outguess it; to know the unknown and measure the unmeasured.
“There lies the innocent dust and sand of a city street held down from flying by bits of stone and pressed asphalt. So pliant and yielding, so vulnerable. But it is watching—watching and waiting. I can feel it; I can hear it. It will make a bitter struggle to hide its heart from prying eyes. Its very surrender is danger; its resistance may be death. I go down girded for a fight with a hundred others in jersies and overalls and thick heavy shoes. We are like hard-limbed Grecian athletes, but less daintily clad. One can see the same ripple and swelling of muscles, and I felt at first ashamed of my flabbiness. But this thing is real, not mere sport: we are not playing. There is no laughing gallery with waving colors and triumphant cries. For us this thing is life and death, food and drink, commerce, education, and art. I am in deadly earnest. I am bare, sweating, untrammeled. My muscles already begin to flow smooth and unconfined. I have no stomach, either in flesh or spirit. My body is all life and eagerness, without weight.
“Rain, sun, dust, heat and cold; the well, the sick, the wounded, and the dead. I saw a man make a little misstep and jump forward; his head struck the end of a projecting beam and cracked sickeningly. In fifteen minutes he was forgotten and the army closed ranks and went forward; I just heard the echo of the cry of his woman as it sobbed down to the mud underneath the ground. Yes, it is War, eternal War from the beginning to the end. We plumb the entrails of the earth.
“The earth below the city is full of secret things. Voices are there calling day and night from everywhere to everybody. I did not know before the paths they chose, but now I see them whispering over long gray bones beneath the streets. Lakes and rivers flow there, pouring from the hills down to the kitchen sinks with steady pulse beneath the iron street. Thin blue gas burns there in leaden pockets to cook and heat, and light is carried in steel to blaze in parlors above the dark earth. There is a strange world of secret things—of wire pipes, great demijohns and caverns, secret closets, and long, silent tunnels here beneath the streets.
“The houses sag, stagger, and reel above us, but they do not fall: we hold them, force them back and prop them up. A slimy sewer breaks and drenches us; we mend it and send its dirty waters on to the canal, the river, and the sea. Gas pipes leak and stifle us. Electricity flashes; but we are curiously armed with such power to command and such faith like mountains that all nature obeys us. Lamps of Aladdin are everywhere and do their miracles for the rubbing: great steel and harnessed Genii, a hundred feet high, lumber blindly along at our beck and call to dig, lift, talk, push, weep, and swear. Yesterday, one of the giants died; fell forward and crumpled into sticks and bits of broken steel; but it shed no blood; it only hissed in horror. We strain in vast contortions underneath the ground. We perform vast surgical operations with insertions of lumber and steel and muscle; we tear down stone with thunder and lightning; we build stone up again with water and cement. We defy every law of nature, swinging a thousand tons above us on nothing; taking away the foundations of the city and leaving it delicately swaying on air, afraid to fall. We dive and soar, defying gravitation. We have built a little world down here below the earth, where we live and dream. Who planned it? Who owns it? We do not know.
“And right here I seem to see the answer to the first question of our world-work: What are you and I trying to do in this world? Not merely to transpose colors; not to demand an eye for an eye. But to straighten out the tangle and put the feet of our people, and all people who will, on the Path. The first step is to reunite thought and physical work. Their divorce has
