Part 14

"'It ain't likely,' she says, 'that we'll ever, any of us, hev a letter of our own from places like these. We don't get many letters, an' what we do get come from the same old towns, over an' over again, an' quite near by. Do you know,' she says, 'I believe this Writin' here'--she held out the tiny fine writing that was like a woman with soft ways--'would understand if we each took one of her letters an' glued it together here an' now an' carried it home an' pasted it in our Bibles. _She_ went travellin' off to them places, an' she must have wanted to; an' she would know what it is to want to go an' yet never get there.'

"I think Mis' Amanda was right--we all thought so. An' we done what she mentioned, an' made our choice o' postmarks. I know Mis' Amanda took Cairo.

"''Count of the name sort o' picturin' out a palm tree a-growin' an' a-wavin' against a red sky,' she says, when she was pinnin' her shawl clear up over her hat to go out in the cold. 'Think of it,' she says; 'she might 'a' passed a palm the day she wrote it. Ain't it like seein' 'em grow yourself?'

... "Mebbe it all wasn't quite regular," Calliope added, "though we made over five dollars at the Ten Cent Fête. But the minister, when we told him, he seemed to think it was all right, an' he kep' smilin', sweet an' deep, like we'd done more'n we _had_ done. An' I think he knew what we meant when we said we was all feelin' nearer, lion an' lamb, to them strange missionary countries. Because--oh, well, sometimes, you know," Calliope said, "they's things that makes you feel nearer to faraway places that couldn't hev any postmark at all."

XV

PETER

Last night in my room there was no sleeping, because the moon was there. It is a south room, and when the moon shines on the maple floor with its white cotton rugs and is reflected from the smooth white walls, to step within is like entering an open flower. Who could sleep in an open flower? I might sleep in a vast white petunia, because petunias do not have as much to say to me as do some other flowers. But in the bell of a lily, as in the bell of the sky or in my moonlit room, I should wish my thought to stay awake and be somebody. Be Somebody. On these nights, it is as if one had a friend in one's head conferring with one. And I think of this comrade as Her, the Custodian of me, who lives deep within and nearly comes outside to this white porch of the moon.

I like to light my candle and watch its warm rays mix with the blue-white beams from without. There would have been a proper employment for a wizard: to diffuse varying insubstantialities, such as these, and to look within them, as within a pool--a pool free of its basin and enjoying the air. Yes, they were an unimaginative race, wizards. When will the era of white art come, with æsthetic witches and wizards who know our modern magics of colour and form and perception as a mere basis for their sorceries? Instead of pottering with thick, slab gruel and mediæval newts' eyes, think what witches they will be! Sometimes I think that they are already arriving. The New Lady told me the most delightful thing about a Thought of hers that she saw ... but it was such an elusive thing to tell and so much of it I had to guess, because words have not yet caught up with fancies, that it is hard to write down. Besides, perhaps you know. And if you did not know, you would skip this part anyway. So I merely mention that _she_ mentioned the coming alive of a thought of hers which helped her spirit to grow, quite without her will. Very likely you understand other wizardries. An excellent place to think them out must be the line where candle rays meet moonbeams, but there is no such discoverable line, just as there is no discoverable line between the seeing and the knowing, where the Custodian dwells.... By all of which I am merely showing you what the moon can do to one's head and that it is no great wonder that one cannot sleep.

"Ain't the moon kind of like a big, shinin' brain," Calliope said once, "an' moonlight nights it gets in your head and thinks for you."

So last night when I went in my room I did not try to sleep; nor did I even light my candle. I went straight to a window and opened it--the one without a screen. I would not live in a house that did not have certain windows which one could open to let in the moon, or the night, or the living out-of-doors, with no screens to thwart their impulse. Suppose that sometime Diana--well, suppose what you will that is sensible, no moon can shine through a screen. Really, it cannot do its best through even an open window. And this was why I gave up trying to make it do so and went downstairs again--which is the earthly and rational of floating out into that utter beauty as I wanted to float.

Of going out into such a night I would like to write for a long time, as I would like to keep on breathing lilies-of-the-valley and never have done. I think, though, that "into" such a night is not the word; to go out _upon_ the night is the essential experience. For, like a June day, a moonlit night of itself will not let us inside. We must know some other way of entrance. And I suspect that some of us never quite find the way--I wonder if we are missed?

I stepped round the house to the open ocean of light that broke on soft shores of leaf and line, solemnizing, magnifying. It was like a glimpse into something which, afterward and afterward, is going to be. The definiteness of its premonitory message was startling. As when on seeing once that something had happened on my birthday, 1500, I felt as if I had heard from a kind of twin-time, so now I understood that this night was the birthday of far-off, immortal moments of my own, yet to be lived ... so friendly near we are to the immeasurable kindred.

And there, from the shadow of the flowering currant bush, which just now is out of flower and fallen in meditative quiet--a man arose. My sharp fear, as savage a thing as if the world were ten thousand years younger, or as if I were a ptarmigan and he a cougar--was only momentary. For the cougar began to apologize and I recognized him.

"Why," I said, "Peter."

"Yes'm," said he, "I couldn't help being here--for a little while."

"Neither could I, Peter," I told him.

These were remarkable admissions of ours, for a large part of evening in the village is an uninhabitable part of day and, no matter in what splendour of sky it comes, is a thing to be shut outside experience. If we relate being wakened by something that goes bang, we begin it, "In the middle of the night, about twelve o'clock;" and, "They have a light in their house 'most every night till midnight," is a bit of sharp criticism not lightly to be lived down. But now it was as if Peter were a part of the time itself, and outlaw too, if the evening was outlaw. "I'm glad I saw you," Peter said--as if we were here met by chance in the usual manner. "I wanted to see you and tell you: I'm going away--to be gone right along."

"Why," I said again, "Peter!"

"You'd go too," he said simply.

"I should want to go," I told him, "but I doubt if I would go. Where are you going?"

"They want to put in a cannery at Marl. It'd be a branch. I'd run it myself."

I did not miss the implication of the conditional mood. And _Marl_. What wonderful names they give to some of the towns of this world. That word makes a picture all of white cornices and white wings of buildings and bright façades. I dare say from the railroad track the real town of Marl shows an unpainted livery barn and a blue barber shop, but the name sounds like the name of a chapter of travel, beginning: To-day we drove to Marl to see the queen. Or the cataract. Or the porch of the morning.

"Why are you going, Peter?" I drove in the peg for him.

"I guess you know," he said. "It's all Miggy with me."

I knew that he wanted before all else to tell somebody, to talk to somebody, to have somebody know.

"Tell me, Peter," I said.

And now Peter told me how things were with him. If I should repeat what he said you would be scornful, for it was so little. It was broken and commonplace and set with repetition. It was halting and unfinished, like the unformed writing of a boy. But in his words I felt the movings of life and destiny and death more than I feel them when I think about the rushing of the stars. He loved her, and for him the world became a transparent plane wherein his soul moved as simply as his body. Here was not only a boy longing for a girl. Here was not only a man, instinct with the eager hope of establishing a home. Here was something not unlike this very moon-washed area won from the illimitable void, this area where we stood and spoke together, this little spot which alone was to us articulate with form and line and night sounds. So Peter, stumbling over his confession of love for Miggy, was like the word uttered by destiny to explicate its principle. It mattered not at all what the night said or what Peter said. Both were celestial.

These moments when the soul presses close to its windows are to be understood as many another hint at the cosmic--Dawn, May, the firmament, radio-activity, theistic evolution, a thousand manifestations of the supernal. In this cry of enduring spirit it was as if Peter had some intimacy with all that has no boundaries. I hardly heard his stumbling words. I listened to him down some long avenue of hearths whose twinkling lights were like a corridor of stars.

And all this bright business was to be set at naught because Miggy would have none of it.

"She seems to like me," Peter said miserably, "but I guess she'd like me just as well if I wasn't me. And if I was right down somebody else, I guess she'd like me a good deal better. She--don't like my hands--nor the way my hair sticks up at the back. She thinks of all such things. I wouldn't care if she said all her words crooked. I'd know what she meant."

I knew the difference. To him she was Miggy. To her he was an individual. He had never in her eyes graduated from being a person to being himself.

"Calliope says," I told him, "that she likes almond extract better than any other kind, but that she hardly ever gets a bottle of almond with which she does not find fault. She says it's the same way with people one loves."

Peter smiled--he is devoted to Calliope, who alone in the village has been friendly with his father. _Friendly._ The rest of the village has only been kind.

"Well," he tried to put it, "but Miggy never seems to be thinking of me as _me_, only when she's finding fault with me. If she'd only think about me, even a little, the way I think about her. If she'd only miss me or want me or wonder how the house would seem if we were married. But she don't care--she don't care."

"She says, you know," I ventured, "that she can't ask you to support Little Child too."

"Can't she see," he cried, "that the little thing only makes me love her more? Don't she know how I felt the other night--when she let me help her that way? She must know. It's just an excuse--"

He broke off and his hands dropped.

"Then there's her other reason," he said, "I guess you know that. I can't blame her for it. But even with that, it kind of seems as if,--if she loved me--"

"Yes," I said, "Peter, it does seem so."

And yet in my heart I am certain that the reason is not at all that Miggy cannot love him--I remember the woman-softening of her face that forenoon when she found the spirit of the old romances in the village. I am not even certain that the reason is that she does not love Peter now--I remember how tender and feminine she was the other night with Peter and Little Child. I think it is only that the cheap cynicism of the village--which nobody means even when it is said!--has taught her badly; and that Life has not yet touched her hand, has not commanded "Look at me," has not bidden her follow with us all.

I looked into the bright bowl of the night which is alternately with one and against one in one's mood of emprise; the bright bowl of the night inverted as if some mighty genii were shaking the stars about like tea-leaves to fortune the future. What a pastime _that_ for a wizard!

"Oh, Peter," I said, "_if_ one were a wizard!"

"I didn't understand," said Peter.

"How pleasant it would be to make folk love folk," I put it.

He understood that. "Wouldn't it, though?" he assented wistfully. So does everybody understand. Wouldn't it, though! Oh, _don't you wish you could_?

In the silence which fell I kept on looking at those starry tea-leaves until I protest that a thought awoke in my mind as if it wanted to be somebody. Be Somebody. It was as if it came alive, quite without my will, so that almost I could see it. It was a friend conferring in my head. Perhaps it was the Custodian herself, come outside to that white porch of the moon.

"Peter," I said, "I think I'm going to tell you a story."

For I longed to make him patient with Miggy, as men, who understand these things first, are not always patient with women, who often and often understand too late.

He listened to the story as I am setting it down here--the story of the New Village. But in it I could say nothing of how, besides by these things celestial, cosmic, I was touched by the simple, human entreaty of the big, baffled man and that about his hands and the way his hair sticks up at the back.

XVI

THE NEW VILLAGE

Once upon a time there was a village which might have been called The-Way-Certain-Folk-Want-It-Now. That, however, was not its name--it had a proper, map-sounding name. And there every one went to and fro with a fervour and nimbleness which proved him to be skilfully intent upon his own welfare.

The village had simple buildings and white walls, lanes and flowering things and the flow of pure air. But the strange thing about the town was that there each inhabitant lived alone. Every house had but one inmate and he well content. He liked everything that he owned and his taste was all-sufficient and he took his pleasure in his own walls and loved best his own ways. The day was spent in lonely selling or lonely buying, each man pitted against all others, and advantage and disadvantage were never equal, but yet the transactions were dreary, lacking the picturesqueness of unlicensed spoliation. The only greeting which folk exchanged in passing was, "Sir, what do you do for yourself?" There were no assemblings of the people. The town kept itself alive by accretion from without. When one died another appeared and took his place gladly, and also others arrived, like precept added to precept and not like a true flowering. There were no children. And the village common was overgrown and breast-high with weeds. When the day was done every one retired to his own garden and saw his flowers blossoming for him and answering to the stars which came and stood over his head. There was in the town an epidemic of the intensive, only the people thought of it as the normal, for frequently epidemics are so regarded.

In one soul the contagion did not prevail. The soul was the lad Matthew, whose body lived on the town's only hill. When others sat at night in their gardens Matthew was wont to go up an airy path which he had made to the upper spaces and there wander conjecturing about being alive. For this was a detail which he never could take wholly for granted, in the manner in which he had become wonted to door-mats, napkin-rings, oatmeal, and mirrors. Therefore he took his thought some way nearer to the stars, and there he found so much beauty that he longed to fashion it to something, to create of it anew. And as he opened his heart he began to understand that there is some one of whom he was the offspring. As he was companioned by this idea, more and more he longed for things to come nearer. Once, in his walking a hurrying bird brushed his face, grew confused, fluttered at his breast, and as he would have closed it in his hands he found that the bird was gone and his hands were empty, but beneath them his own heart fluttered and throbbed like a thing apart.

One night, so great was the abstraction of the boy, that instead of taking the upper path he fared down into the town. It was a curious way to do--to go walking in the town as if the thing were common property, but then the walls were very high and the gates were fast closed and bound round with creeping things, which grow very quickly. Matthew longed to enter these gardens, and he wondered who lived in the houses and what might be in their hearts.

Amazingly, at the turn of a white wall, a gate was opened and she who had opened it leaned into the night as if she were looking for something. There was a fluttering in the breast of Matthew so that he looked down to see if the bird had come back. But no bird was there. And it smote him that the lady's beauty, and surely her goodness, were great enough so that of them something might be created, as he would fain have created marvels from the sky.

"I would like to make your beauty into something other," he said to her. "I cannot think whether this would be a song or a picture or a vision."

She looked at him with as much pleasure as if he had been an idea of her own.

"Tell me about my beauty," she bade him. "What thing is that?"

"Nay, that will take some while," Matthew said. "If I do that, I must come in your garden."

Now, such a thing had never happened in the town. And as this seemed why it never happened, it seemed likely to go on never happening indefinitely. But loneliness and the longing to create and the conjecture about life have always been as potent as battles; and beauty and boredom and curiosity have had something to do with history as well.

"Just this once, then," said the lady, and the gate closed upon the two.

Here was a garden like Matthew's own, but indefinitely atmosphered other. It spoke strangely of a wonted presence, other than his own. In his own garden he fitted as if the space for him were niched in the air, and he went as a man accustomed will go without thinking. But here he moved free, making new niches. And whereas on his own walks and plots he looked with lack-lustre eye as a man looks on his own gas-jet or rain pipe, now Matthew looked on all that he saw as on strange flame and sweet waters. And it was not the shrubs and flowers which most delighted him, but it was rather on a garden bench the lady's hat and gloves and scissors.

"How pleasing!" said he, and stopped before them.

"Do you find them so?" asked the lady.

And when he told her about her beauty, which was more difficult to do than he had imagined and took a longer time, she said:--

"There can be no other man in the world who would speak as you speak."

On which he swore that there was no man who would not speak so, and likewise that no man could mean one-half what he himself meant. And he looked long at her house.

"In those rooms," he said, "you go about. I wish that I could go about there."

But that frightened her a little.

"In there," he said, "are the lamps you light, the plates you use, the brush that smooths your hair. How strange that is."

"Does it seem strange?" she asked.

"Sometime I will go there," said he, and with that he thought that the bird once more was fluttering at his breast. And again there was no bird.

When the time was come that he must leave her, this seemed the most valiant thing to do that ever he had done. It was inconceivable to accept that though now she was with him, breathing, sentient, yet in another moment he would be out alone in the empty night. Alone. For the first time the word became a sinister thing. It meant to be where she was not.

"How is this to go on," he said, "I living where you do not live?"

But she said, "Such things have never been any other way," and closed the gate upon him.

It is a mighty thing when one who has always lived alone abruptly finds himself to have a double sense. Here is his little box of ideas, neatly classified, ready for reference, which have always methodically bobbed out of their own will the moment they were mentioned. Here are his own varieties of impression ready to be laid like a pattern upon whatever presents itself to be cut out. Here are his tastes, his sentiments, his beliefs, his longings, all selected and labelled and established. And abruptly ideas and impressions and tastes are thrown into rapt disorder while he wonders what this other being would think, and his sentiment glows like a lamp, his belief embraces the world, his longing becomes only that the other being's longing be cast in counterpart. When he walks abroad, the other's step accompanies him, a little back, and invisible, but as authentic as his own. When he thinks, his thought, without his will, would share itself. All this is a new way of consciousness. All this makes two universes where one universe had previously been competent to support life.

Back on his hill Matthew went through his house as if he were seeing it for the first time. There was the garden that he had planted, and she was not walking there. There was his window, and she was not looking from it; his table, and she was not sitting beside it; his book which he could not read for wondering if she had read. All the tools of his home, what could they not become if she touched them? The homely tasks of the cupboard, what joy if she shared them? But what to do? He thought that it might be something if they exchanged houses, so that he could be where she had been, could use what she had used, could think of her in her setting. But yet this did not wholly delight him, either.

And now his house stifled him, so that he rushed out upon that airy path of his that he had made to reach the upper spaces, and he fled along, learning about being alive. Into the night he went, farther than ever he had gone before, till the stars looked nearer to him than houses commonly look, and things to think about seemed there waiting for him.

So it adventured that he came abruptly upon the New Village. It lay upon the air as lightly as if strong, fair hands were uniting to bear it up, and it was not far from the stars and the clear places. Before he understood its nearness, the night was, so to say, endued with this village, and he entered upon its lanes as upon light.

This was a town no larger than his own and no more fortuned of Nature. Here were buildings not too unlike, and white walls and flowering things and the flow of pure air. But here was also the touch of bells. And he saw that every one went to and fro in a manner of quiet purpose that was like a garment.

"Sir, what do you do for yourself?" he asked courteously of one who was passing.

The citizen gave him greeting.

"I make bread for my family," said he, "and, it may be, a dream or two."

Matthew tried hard to perceive, and could make nothing of this.

"Your family," he said, "what thing is that?"

The citizen looked at him narrowly.

"I see that you rebuke me," said he, gently; "but I, too, labor for the community, so that the day shall become a better day."

"Community," said Matthew. "Now I know not at all what that may be, either."

Then the man understood that here was one who would learn about these things, and in the New Village such a task is sacred and to be assumed on the moment by any to whom the opportunity presents. So the man took Matthew with him.

"Come," he said, "this is the day when we meet together."

"Together," said Matthew, and without knowing why he liked what he felt when he said that.

They went first to the market-place, trodden of many feet, and about it a fair green common planted in gracious lines. Here Matthew found men in shops that were built simply and like one another in fashion, but with pleasant devices of difference, and he found many selling together and many buying, and no one was being robbed.

"How can these things be?" he asked. "Here every man stands with the others."