Part 10

The storm continued. Sweet Rocket had early supper. Zinia and Mimy, with raincoats and a huge umbrella, went by the swaying, chanting orchard to their own fireside, to Sarah and Julia and Jim and Just So. The Danes and Curtin and Drew, Linden and Marget, sat or moved about in the old Sweet Rocket parlor. They might watch the storm from the windows, or they might sit by the fire. The great wind blew through Sweet Rocket Valley. They heard the stream rushing, and the trees had a voice, as though they had taken foot out of ground and were now a herd. The rain was driven against the panes, and the wind hurled dead leaves with the rain. Wall and roof and glass shut out the physical rain, but the psychical man cognized it far and near, rain since the world began. And the fire also, and the warm room, and they in company listening to the storm. The momentary outlines shifted. There fell a sense of having done this times and times and times, a sense of hut and cave, so often, so long, in so many lands, that there was a feel of eternity about it. Rain and the cave and the fire, and the inner man still busied with his destiny! There was something that awed in the perception that ran from one to another, that held them in a swift, shimmering band. "How old--how old! How long have we done this?"

The rhythm of the storm, the rhythm of the room, the rhythm of the fire, passed into a vast, still sense of ordered movement. "Of old, and now, and to-morrow--everywhere and all time--until we return above time and place, and division is healed."

They felt a lightness, a detachment. The spirit soared with the mind and made it look.

"There is the natural man and there is the spiritual man. That last finds himself in all selves, and all selves in him. There is the spiritual man, and there is the divine man who works with power. Both are words of inclusion. It is to leave the old small I for the spiritual I, and it is to transcend the last and enter that which is above. Then is left the shrunken pond for the ocean! Only we say it upside down. It is the ocean that overflows and drinks up the pond."

"When God enters life there will still be said I?"

"Otherwise, still pond and ocean, still separation! Who shall lose his life here shall find it. But never sink to thinking that it is what in the past we have meant when we said I! When God enters how shall he not say I? But it is the ocean now that speaks! The pond is gone."

They sat still, and the fire played and leaped.

Through the night the rain beat and the wind blew, but at dawn it cleared. There was wreckage about the world, but life laughed and took her wreckage and built with it anew. Valley, hills, and mountains gleamed like precious stones. Navies of clouds rode for a while, then melted into the deep azure. The upper sea hung so calm and clear that down through it to the earth bottom ran light that seemed intenser than the light of every day.

Curtin said good-by, and went. Marget and Linden drove him to Alder.

The river ran swollen, the road lay deep in leaves, few leaves now on the trees. The trees stood still in vast ranks. They seemed to be holding something, to be turning it over in mind. There flashed across Curtin, "Who lifts, all lifts."

"Yes!" said Marget, beside him, as though he had spoken.

It was what he carried with him from this valley.

Linden and Marget drove home through the wood. "How still it is! Barring foot and wheel on the wet leaves you would say there was no stir. We are passing pine trees. How fragrant!"

"A bluebird is watching us from a maple. Now here is the great beech. It holds its leaves, though they are brown and curled upon themselves like cocoons. The ground underneath is clean and brown. A grapevine goes over and up with those young trees. There are yet bunches of grapes and they hang so still! There are brown loops for swings for all the forest children, whether they be Indians or dryads and fauns."

"I see them," said Linden, "all the graceful, tawny forest children!"

"Here is the oak glade with the grass yet green far down it, to where hangs the purple curtain. The outstanding great roots glisten, and the moss holds the water drops. You see a long way. Yonder is tree trunk and stone, light and shadow, that looks like a hermit's cell. It is an alley for the whole Middle Ages to come riding down--for a paladin to come riding down, the Red Cross Knight, or Guyon, or Galahad, or Parsifal--or it might be Robin Hood in Lincoln green!"

"I see."

"Here are green brier and red dogwood berries, and witch-hazel with dull gold fingers. Can you hear the water?"

"Yes. Three silver threads of it, like a lute!"

"The day is a castle and a church, the day is a city and a star! Now we pass the great rock and the two hemlocks, like cathedral spires. Here are the little oaks, and there is a guess of crimson about them yet. The birch and the hickory and the tall oaks, and the tops are far and fine and melt into the sky--"

They came down to the river, and crossed. "The light washes the pillars, the cedars are little earth clouds. The arch of the sky has none, it springs clear blue. Music of home!"

"Yes. Music of home!"

After supper, with Robert and Frances and Drew they watched the fire. "Anna sends the city to us, and Curtin sends the rush of the train and the flying scenery. As we send this place and this mood and this thought to the city and the train!"

The violin bow drew across the strings. Frances played, and love and release filled the ancient room. The world entered into harmony.

The next day rose gray pearl. Linden and Drew went with the woodcutters. Marget sat at her typewriter in the study. Robert and Frances took a long walk. Three days, and they, too, must go cityward. Now they walked by the Alder road, and at the great pine took the Rock Mountain trail.

The pearly light filled the forest like a water. All sound lay subdued. When a stone rolled underfoot it was not loudly; when a branch broke it was with a slow, deliberate, musing voice. When they saw a wild thing, the wild thing had no motion of flight, but pottered stilly on upon its business of the time. "We are far away! We have crossed to another land. It is as though we died, and this is the quiet ground where we take our reckoning before we find another busy world. Oh, a busy world in each of us, and a quiet land!"

They rested upon a bowlder half sunken in brown leaves. "There is a touch of eternity about this day.... Yet in five days how busy a world for you and me!"

"Yet I love that as I love this. How happy that we are so rich!"

They sat still on the gray bowlder in the gray wood in the pearl-gray air. Minutes passed. A bird flew across the path, a gray squirrel ran up an oak. "Something is coming down the trail."

The something proved to be a man on horseback. The intervening boughs, branches, twigs, made him to be seen like a horseman behind a great window filled with small, leaded panes. He came close, and, seeing them, drew rein. "Good day!"

"Good day!"

"From Sweet Rocket?"

"Yes, from Sweet Rocket."

"Do I speak to Mr. Linden? My name is Smith--Malcolm Smith from the Reserve on Rock Mountain."

Robert gave their names. Mr. Smith said: "Have you ever seen a stiller day? It is one of the still days that set you on new action. I thought I would ride over. I want to see Drew, and there is something else--"

After a minute or two he addressed himself again to the path. "I'll go on, as I have only this afternoon and to-night. I must get back to camp to-morrow." He made no doubt, it might be noticed, of the hospitality of Sweet Rocket. "I shall see you again?"

"Yes. We shall turn presently."

They watched him along the trail until, as the figure had entered, so it vanished from the leaded window. They sat awhile longer in the gray-pearl world, and then they rose and followed the horseman down to Sweet Rocket.

XXII

Malcolm Smith and Drew had their talk, walking by the river in the still, November dusk. Drew said: "I was glad to be on Rock Mountain, and after a few months, if you will have me, I am going there again. But I am glad that I came here. I am growing to see that it is not here nor there, camp on mountain or Sweet Rocket, that a man goes to find himself. But yet there are helpers.... There's a principle of induction, don't you think, sir? Those who find start a wave of finding. The wave caught them, too. There isn't any first or last."

Turning, they saw fire gleaming through the window. "He says that we (and when he says that he means the whole of us. When he says 'I' it is the other word for 'we.' It is the Whole of the many) are growing fast to-day. Sometimes he says Evolving Life, sometimes the Principle of Integration, or the Great Synthesis. He may say Humanity Awake, or Going Home, or Realizing Deity, or Liberation in God, or Becoming Real, or Fulfilling Want, or Recollection, or Union, or the Eternal, Including _SELF_, or Love at Last. He seems to think that almost any phrase will answer if you know the thing."

Zinia's bell rang from the porch behind them. They went in to the pleasant supper table, set with wholesome, delicate bread, and fragrant coffee, cottage cheese, and baked apples and cream. The table talk was merry this evening, after the dreamy day. Supper over, all walked out to see the night, and found it clearing, with river banks of clouds and stars between like lit craft sailing, sailing. The air breathed exquisitely mild, warm to-night as early October. "Let us sit by the river and watch awhile." They took capes and coats and went down to where, before the cedars, was placed a long bench. Sitting here, though no entire constellation was visible, yet they pieced out the figures.

They sat in silence, watching the ships of the universe. At last said the visitor: "I have been thinking a good deal about you down here by this river, and about Drew, and of two or three things Mr. Curtin said when he was at camp. So I came down. I have been thinking a good deal. Look! there is Pleiades, a magic island in a sea. I have had my inklings of the way currents arise in this world. Let's grant that it is a universe of thought and will and feeling, and that, from ignoring as much as we could that fact, and then from wondering about it, and then from in some wise earning it, we begin to be it--"

"Just," said Linden. "Well?"

The other continued, "Once, when I was recovering from an illness, I found or was found by--and I don't suppose the expressions matter--"

"No. They are distinctions without a difference."

"Once, then, I walked into a state of consciousness that transcended the level that I had thought was the true level. I was there for it might be five seconds of our time. But though again in mass we parted, there remained an influence--like one of those rivers up there. The world has never since been just the old world. But the main experience did not repeat itself, though there have been times when I have met the shadows of it. Until the other night. But I will come to that presently. Though it was not repeated I have known ever since that there is a consciousness as much above our usual one as the latter is above the ape's. A consciousness that it is profoundly desirable to reach. Before that moment I was like almost any European of say 1491. During it--for that one minute--I was in America. After it, though I returned to Europe, I could say, there is America!"

"Yes. Just."

"But I had fallen out of America and I could never get quite back, though I often tried. And then the other night--"

He broke off, and seemed to ponder the sky. "I rode over from Rock Mountain because the other night I had, not that first experience again, but one that was again in America--New America. From what I have heard I felt certain that this place knows these experiences. I wanted to compare, and be confirmed. So I rode over." He was speaking to Linden. "I had meant to ask to talk with you alone, but I see that there is nothing here that jars or makes it difficult. It's a good place, this bench, with the river sounding, and the clouds and the stars."

"There is just ourself here."

"I was coming down from the top of Rock. I had had a still twenty minutes there, watching the sunset. I had thought of nothing in particular, only gathered rest. I was halfway down when this torrent rose and overtook me. I stood still. I remember a pine tree, and beyond that a great wash of sky. But I--I was in the torrent that now seemed Ocean, and now seemed Air, and now was Fire. The combination called Malcolm Smith was gone into that, like rain into sea or a candle flame into sun. And yet--and that was the miracle of it--there was an I, only it was oceanic, only it was the sun! It held in a sheaf, it sucked out pith and marrow of all the small 'me's' in creation, and soared and rang, an All-Person. But what are words? If I could give you that sense--"

"Perhaps you do. As long ago we developed gesture in order faintly to understand and be at one, and then developed speech, so now the Will within is propelling and the Will within is receiving these mightier waves. I feel what you would give. Go on."

"If I could find the words! I passed into a subtle consciousness that went everywhere, and all our old time became space to it. There was motion, as of all the winds of the world brought into one current--only nor air nor fire is swift enough, vast enough! And yet you would say 'Quietude.' ... All the movements of our world penetrated, understood, furthered--all the honey fields, all the bees, all the hives--and Valhalla and Olympus and Paradise, where the honey is eaten! And it is all a figure, but what will you have! I can but stammer. I have seen home."

He rose, and walked up and down beneath the cedars. "I talk about it so calmly, and yet all that I ever believed or hoped, all that I ever thought or felt or did, is babyhood to that! I am patient, and that astonishes me; I who am back at Malcolm Smith!"

"You are not wholly back. The rising pendulum swings, but now a great part of you is above the old, lower range. And at the last not anticipation, but reality, not light of home, but home!"

The river sounded, the stars shone in the upper rivers with the cloud banks. The clouds made rivers, but, the clouds dissolved, there were no more rivers, but Ocean, but Space, but the Eternal Fire!

"It is all I have to tell," said Smith. "It sank with long reverberations, and there was the pine tree, and the camp below, and Malcolm Smith."

They sat in silence. At last, said Linden: "America is a term of vastness. They who adventured there and arrived found all manner of experience, but all in America. They sailed in many crafts--and yet in the end all were as one ship, all being for America. They landed north or south, in varying climes; they stayed by the sea or went toward the mountains, but all in America. They met with great variety in adventure, the land being so vast and so rich in might, but all was American adventure.... So it is, I hold, with the New America, the New World now lighting the horizon. It resounds and flames thus to this one, and thus to the other one. But it resounds and flames. The Great Symphony takes in all the music. Feel it as you can, know it as you can! In proportion as you draw the breath of the All, comparisons become odious. You have access as I have access. Enter by the door of your inner nature!"

"A new man is born?"

"Yes. Everywhere. Including and transcending men. Men fading into Man, men left behind. Man moving toward his full Consciousness. What in prophecy we have called Christ."

They watched the clouds and the stars, and they saw, each of them, a new Country that was fair and strong and keen and glowing....

At last they rose and went back to the house, and by the fire listened to the violin.

XXIII

Day rose in sapphire, tranquil, pure, still and sunny, white smoke going straight up from morning fires. Malcolm Smith, mounting his horse, turned again to his mountain. Sweet Rocket bade him good-by, but Linden and Marget said, "All who come together in this consciousness part no more!"

"I believe that."

He rode away, and in the afternoon was back with his work. But the inner eye might view, between mountain and Sweet Rocket, a shimmering, ethereal highway, a nerve, as it were, thrown from space to space, joining and making one.

Robert and Frances and Marget, on this last day of the Danes' visit, walked to the hill with the solitary tree atop. The sapphire day continued, quiet and sunny, the air being of an extreme fineness charged with light. Far and near the mountains made a cup of amethyst. Fields and hillsides at hand were a lighted umber. They saw long rows of stacked corn, and in the meadows hayricks. Beyond the orchard they made out the steep roof of the great barn. There were corn and wheat for the mill, there were stored apples. In the wood below them they heard the woodman's ax.

"I can see," said Robert Dane, "I can see that Humanity is mastering its own organism. I see that it is lifting toward Unitary Consciousness. Here, now, in this present year as in past years, each year now with greater momentum. Reaction and recoil, of course--but back again, and farther! Everywhere shows the swift inter-approach. All over, all through, America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the islands of the sea. The revolutions of our day are woven of it. We are leaving separation and partialness, fortress and dungeon."

"Yes. All our 'movements' rush into the one. All our vortices approach with a fearful joy the Great Vortex. The Correlation will be established, the Summation made. We go to join and strengthen the Ancient Heavens. The Ancient of Days draws and redeems and fuses and Ones another layer of his being. Faster and faster our age begins to see what is happening. The language men use to describe it does not so much matter. The poet names it Life, Beauty, and Joy; the scientific man says Knowledge and Use; the philosopher says Energy and Substance in conscious union; the Hindu says the _SELF_; our peoples say God.... All one."

They came to the hilltop and stood to look about them. "There is such joy!" went on Marget. "Pain and pleasure outgrown, now blooms the joy! 'Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.' The being found and the finding. One after another lays hand upon that world, clings, braces himself, draws himself up and over and finds the manna lying around him. Joy, wisdom and power! and the taste of them but begun. Possession still to be possessed--forever and forever!"

They sat beneath the tree and all around sprang the valley and the mountains and Virginia and the world. "Alive--deathlessly alive! The valley and the mountains, Virginia and the world!"

Frances spoke. "I know a woman who speaks in the terms of the East. Is it the Principle of Sensibility--the Buddhic plane?"

"Yes. Atma is yet to arrive. What we see is the light before his face. When he fully comes that is the Day of the Lord. What all work has been toward, all toil, all hoping. As Atma rises in us--as Christ rises in us--comes newer and richer life, fuller and fuller, inner powers and principalities, thrones and dominions, and their objective garments. But when WE ARE THE LORD--I know not! There is Light there that is as darkness to us yet."

The exquisite valley heightened its values throughout, became richer. The mountains around hung in the eye like the Delectable Mountains.

"If one grows, all things and all places grow with that one?"

"Inevitably so! The wealth is for all."

"The new consciousness that we feel is a pale film to what will be?"

"Yes. A borderland, the islands fringing the New World. But such as it is it wipes out the old, blind, scattered, little consciousnesses. To what shall be felt and shall be known it is the one leaf of green, it is the olive leaf that the dove brings. But before us are enormous growth, strange and fair adventure, work, joy, love--"

Through the air they felt the ether, through the sunlight they felt the Great Sun. Light and warmth came to them from the Sun behind the sun. It touched, it passed, but each time it came they strengthened.

That night by the fire they sat in silence that was full and rich and understanding. "To-morrow night, here at Sweet Rocket, just Richard and Marget and Drew--and all the rest of us!"

The next day dawned, and still it was Indian summer. Robert and Frances went from place to place, as had gone Curtin and Anna Darcy, saying farewell. "We wish and hope to bring our bodies here again next year. But if that is not done, still, still, still we shall have Sweet Rocket!"

"You have access now to all places and times and peoples. You are through the gate, you two! All your good dreams now will come true. If not in this way then in that. Every dream that does no injury to the Whole."

Richard and Marget, Daniel and the phaeton, took them to Alder. The still forest was clothed to-day in purple. For much of the way silence held within the phaeton as without. But it was the silence that Anna Darcy had early noted. It was rhythmic, it was thronged, it was fused and made into the richest solitude.

"But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound or foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home."

Now and then they spoke. Once Robert said, abruptly, "And all the effort of the world is to stand and grow in grace?"

"Just. All the effort. Everywhere! Whether it be stone or plant or animal or man or over-man. And where the Emerging Character is so mighty none is to despise his brother's path or rate of speed. Once it was his own. Everything has been and is our own. Work! but who hates or despises halts and weakens the effort."

"But work!"

"Yes, steadily. In all realms. 'What thy hand findeth to do, do with thy might.' What thy judgment findeth to do. The other name of Lubber Land was Good Enough."

They came to Alder with its churches and sere gardens lying in violet light. Here was the little station--in a few moments they heard the train.

"Good-by!"

"Good-by!"

Frances and Robert looked through the car window. The platform had men, women, and children upon it. Two or three arriving travelers found friends to meet them; there were the workers about the station and the loafers, with country folk and village folk brought by some business, and in the throng Richard Linden and Marget Land. Just the usual village station. Then all of it sprang into light, into music, into significance, into importance. The train moved. There was a cry of "Good-by! Come again!" All seemed to enter into it, to cry it out.

The houses went by, the village street, the hills, the river, and all, all, and this train upon which they found themselves had color and music and significance and importance.

"The I that says of every living thing, 'It is I,' says it and means it and understands it and proceeds to live from it, says it of the total objective, and so takes the objective up into the Subject--that I is over the verge of the old into the New--"

The hills went by, the river gleamed.

Marget and Richard traveled homeward through the purple forest. To-day they hardly used the outer voice. The blind man sat with a smile upon his lips as though he saw, with such a face as could only have come from much seeing. The woman, too, sat still, the body relaxed, the spirit gleaming in the soul. Daniel drew them through the forest; nor did Daniel, either, lack some sense of growth, dim belief in a higher world, dim will to reach it. Below Daniel the forest felt that, and below the forest the rock. The utter stream of pilgrims--

THE END