Part 2

Supper over, they went into the parlor that was opposite the dining room, and was no more parlor than library. It stretched around, a big room with old pictures, old furniture, with books. A fire flamed and sang. They sat in the firelight, Richard Linden on one side of the hearth and Marget on the other, and Miss Darcy beside the latter. Still there was talk. The visitor would have gathered where they stood on questions of the day, then suddenly saw that they stood all round and through, and that the day to them was so old and young that it included yesterday and to-morrow. That being so, their solutions were not always those currently offered.

She also found that though they talked they were not talkative. With them conversation became a rhythmic thing--tranquil pause, deep retirement, then again the word. And it startled her almost, how completely they were one.

When they had sat by the fire an hour Marget, rising, put violin music upon a victrola. Hafitz played to them a Hebrew melody; Kreisler played, and Maud Powell. The flames danced, the world heightened. Then, one after the other, came three songs, and between each, as between the violin pieces, they watched the fire, and the forest and the night wind were felt around.

"Oh, that we two were maying!"

The song ended, the fire burned, they heard the river, the forest was all around. A man's voice was lifted.

"Oh, that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come into His Presence!"

Again the wide and deep pause, and then the third song.

"And the world shall go up with a shout unto God."

Marget shut the victrola. Again they sat in that quiet. It was systole and diastole, it was in and out, and inexpressibly it rested! And that was what she wanted, rest.

Marget lighted a lamp that stood upon the table. Linden said, "Hadn't you rather not read, to-night?"

"No. We won't read long."

He turned to the visitor. "Do you mind listening?"

Miss Darcy was glad to listen. Marget began to read. Her old teacher remembered that she had read well twenty years ago. She read better now. The book was Lafcadio Hearn's _West Indies_. "We travel so," said Linden. "We take a right journeyer and journey with him."

The fire flickered, then seemed to pass into actual fire of sun. They were in Martinique, under Pelée, in Saint Pierre, in Grand Anse. Again she was startled to feel how real it was. She touched, she knew, the people of Martinique.

Later, when the book had been closed, when they had said good night, one to the other, when she lay in bed in the dark quiet, she experienced strongly what a certain number of times in her life she had been able to experience faintly. She experienced coherence that was wider than old coherences. She interlocked with this place and her hosts. She held them, they held her. At the end of the week she must go afar. "But never any more so far that I lose the tune--never any more!" She went to sleep with a strange, fair feeling of sea about her. Not that the forest, the hills and mountains, were not there, but she felt the sea likewise. "Of course it is there, but I never thought to look at it or taste it! The sea and mountains and they and me, threaded together, talking together!" She slept.

III

As she dressed, the next morning, she heard Mimy singing, but no stir of her hosts. The sun was shining. In at window streamed life-giving air. Her mind was upon the evening before and its current of happenings. As she had gone to sleep with the sea, of which they had read, about her, so now the three songs to which they had listened returned to mind, returned almost to sense. That was one remarkable thing about this place--the great vividness and depth of perception.... She knew the difference between usual or even intent thinking and intuition. Her intuitions had not been vigorous--she had looked at them with a kind of gray wonder, as at pale children from afar. They came at long intervals, but were never forgotten. It now seemed that this was a good clime for them.

She stood still in the middle of her room. Her mind opened. "'Oh, that we two were maying!' That is man and woman love, time out of mind; love and cry of love! It is Romeo and Juliet, it is Tristan and Isolde. 'Oh, that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come into His presence!' That is religious love that goes up from man and woman love. That is the onward going, the seeking of Great Lovers. 'And the world shall go up with a shout unto God.' That is when we move and feel and think, not as men and women, but as Humanity. The Great Mating."

The little firmament closed like eyelids and hid the greater. She was a small, gray woman, and she had beaten about in the intellect, and when gleams came like this she had taken them and promptly, when the sky closed, had doubted if they had ever existed. But to-day she was less inclined to doubt. There remained a faint luminousness in mind, a sense of depth behind feeling. She thought, "If I could stay in that garden I should indeed know bloom and music!" She moved about the room. "The point is that there _is_ such a garden."

She finished dressing, and went downstairs. Zinia met her in the hall. "Good mahning! I hope you slept well? Miss Marget says you're to have breakfast on the porch. It's so warm and beautiful this mahning."

"She has had hers?"

"Yes'm. She said tell you Sweet Rocket was home. I put the table here. But if it's too sunny I can move it."

"It's not too sunny. I like sun," said Miss Darcy.

"I like it, too," said Zinia, and departed kitchenward. Anna Darcy sat and slowly ate Catawba grapes. The porch was wide, the table placed between high, mellowed pillars. Beyond them the autumn turf ran to great trees colored like Venetian glass. The river crescent sparkled in light. Beyond it she saw the fields and the woods through which they had driven. All was closed by the mountain wall, very soft and gracious in the sun, in the still, warm air.

Zinia brought coffee and rolls. There was honey upon the table, and an old blue basket-dish filled with red-amber grapes. Zinia was very dark, supple, and strong. She had large, kind, African eyes, and beautiful teeth, and she moved with an ample and conscious majesty. Miss Darcy loved to watch her.

The evening before, a collie lay upon the steps. Miss Darcy asked of him.

"Tam? He's gone with Mr. Dick."

Zinia stood by a pillar, watching with kind eyes the visitor's evident enjoyment of her breakfast. Miss Darcy had noted before, and noted now, the lack of any servility at Sweet Rocket. They all seemed too much a part of one another for that. But there was also that fine courtesy and feeling that did not speak out of the way when speech was not wanted. They all seemed to sail upon some inner current of understanding.

She finished breakfast, and, rising, helped Zinia to carry away the table. Dining room and pantry shone clean and simple. Zinia had flowers in the pantry, and upon the shelf below the china press an open book. Miss Darcy glanced. "What are you reading?--_Pilgrim's Progress?_"

"Yes'm," said Zinia, in her rich voice. "I like that girl Mercy."

The house was clean and sunny; still, and yet singing somehow, like a great shell held to ear. She walked about, and at last went out into the high morning and the flower garden. The brick paths glistened. Box smelled sweet, mignonette and citronalis. Around flowed bird life and a vast insect life. Multitudinous song and hum and chirr fell into harmony. She walked up and down the paths and partook of garden amusements, then went out by a wicket gate and found herself near the outdoor kitchen. A brown four-year-old was seated on the stone step. She stopped before him. "Good morning!"

"Mahning."

"What is your name?"

"Just So."

"Just So?"

"Yass'm."

Mimy appeared in the doorway. Mimy was a small woman with a face like a carved cherry stone for wrinkles. "He's my grandson, ma'am, Just So."

"I heard you singing," said Miss Darcy. "I loved it."

"Singing's like butter on the griddle," said Mimy. "It helps you turn things!" She sighed portentously, and then she groaned. "I've had a lot of things to turn! Yes'm, I've lived long and turned a lot of things!"

Her voice was gloom, and yet carried more than a suspicion of rich chuckle. She enjoyed her old woes, disaster had grown so shallow. "I, too," thought the visitor, "have had a lot of things to turn! I, too, have come to where I can stand back and see the drama and feel the play thrill!"

Just So was a solemn young one. He sat and gazed as though in contemplation of the many things he would have to turn. Then a brown hen came by, and he put out a brown toe and dug in the earth, and said, "Shoo!" and laughed. Miss Darcy left him playing with a string of spools and a broken coffee mill. Mimy in the kitchen was toasting coffee and singing. The coffee smelled better than good, the singing was without age in the voice.

"Who built the Ark? Oh, Noah built the Ark! It rained forty days, And it rained forty nights! 'There ain't any sun and there ain't any heights!' Oh, Noah built the Ark!"

Miss Darcy's path led on to the barn. Cocks and hens, white and red, held the barnyard. She watched them with pleasure, and the sun on the gray walls and the barn swallows going in and out. Then she found Mancy sitting under a shed, mending a wagon shaft.

"Good morning!"

"Good morning!"

"It's a lovely day."

"It is so, ma'am! You're from the city, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I hope you like Sweet Rocket?"

"I do. It makes you feel whole."

Mancy glanced at her. He was a long, brown man, with features between negro and Indian. What you liked very much was his smile. It dropped over his face slowly, like sun on brown hills, out of quiet, cloudy weather. "That's a true saying!" he offered. "That's what I think about heaven. We'll just feel and know that we're well and whole."

The school-teacher's mind said: "The negro is a religious character. He is always willing to talk of the Lord and of heaven."

"All the little torn bits coming together," finished Mancy.

He sat mending the wagon shaft. It came to her, standing watching him, to say something of the distracted and warring earth. His slow smile stole again over his face. "Yes'm. We hurt ourselves right often."

"You call it that--hurting oneself?"

"Yes'm. What do you call it?"

"I don't know.... I suppose it _is_ hurting one's self--suicidal mania!" she thought. "Perhaps all the history I have ever taught has been the story of self hurt and self heal--perhaps we fight our self in Europe and Asia and America. Perhaps, in the tissue wide as space, centers here and centers there are beginning to learn self heal above self hurt--"

She stood looking at the mountains while Mancy worked on at the wagon shaft. Presently she said, "You would say that this was a very lonely place, but I have touched a thousand things since I came that run out and touch everywhere!"

"Mountains aren't walls," said Mancy.

She left the barn and walked on to the orchard. The apples had been gathered, but a few red orbs yet hung from the branches. She walked beneath the trees and she thought of old, dull troubles and anxieties that had attended her life. This morning light seemed at work among them, disintegrating them.

The sun came down between the trees. The air blew soft and fine. She returned to the house, and upon the porch steps found Mrs. Cliff with baskets to sell, woven of white-oak splits, in a mountain cabin, by her son and herself. She was waiting for Marget and seemed content to wait as long as the sun shone. She wore a faded calico and a brown sunbonnet, and she dipped snuff.

"Good morning!"

"Mornin'!"

Mrs. Cliff put her snuffbox in her pocket. "Don't you want to buy a basket? These three are fer Miss Marget."

Miss Darcy examined and admired. "I'd like this little one." Mrs. Cliff put it aside. "I hain't seen you here before."

"I've just come. You've got a lovely country."

"Yaas. We think so. Do you see yon clearing on mountain? I come from thar." Miss Darcy sat down, and she and the mountain woman talked of basket weaving and of the times, which Mrs. Cliff said were hard. "What do you think sugar is? An' what you got to give fer a pair of shoes? You've got to sit an' fergit, even while you're rememberin', or you don't git nowhar! I wish Jesus Christ would come on back!"

"He is somewhat needed," Anna Darcy agreed.

"I had a funny thing happen to me yesterday," said Mrs. Cliff. "I had jest finished that basket. I was setting on the step an' awful tired, an' I shet my eyes an' leaned my head back against the door. An jest like that I thought, 'He's in little bits in all of us, an' we've got to put him together.' An' jest thinking it, all in a minute I felt so big and rested! But it couldn't last. I wish it would come again."

Marget's voice was heard, speaking to Zinia. "She's come back. They're mighty kind folk here!"

"I know that."

"They _like_ doin' you a good turn," said Mrs. Cliff, and, getting to her feet, gathered up her baskets.

IV

In the afternoon the three and Tam went for a walk. They crossed the river by a footbridge and walked a mile by waterside. This brought them to valley end. The stream slipped on between close-standing hills, but the strollers turned aside into a glade from which the greater forest had been cut. Young trees and tall old trees were set with some spareness. All wore robes like princes; all glowed in a dream of spring behind winter. The ground had gray moss and green moss, and all manner of minute and charming growths. The sun so came into this glade that the wild grape found and took advantage. It leaned its wine-hued, shaggy stem against trunks; it climbed and overran, and made bridges from tree to tree. Its festoons shone aloft, its broad leaves and blue clusters dreamed against autumn sky. The air breathed dry and fine. Sunshine lay on ground in shafts and plaques of gold.

Richard Linden used a staff. Marget kept near him and Tam just ahead. Walking so, you would not think he was a blind man. Indeed, he seemed to have a sixth sense, he moved so easily. The three walked without much speech. The day was the sumptuous speaker; these woods, this feather air, the admirable poise of the year before its journey from hearth fire, the plain chant of the crickets, the trill of the bird.

In a roll over his shoulder Linden carried a wide and thick plaid. Presently Marget said: "Let us rest before we turn back. Miss Darcy isn't the tramp that we are!" whereupon they pitched camp for half an hour, spreading the plaid beneath a tree. Richard Linden, resting against a chance bowlder, locked his hands behind his head and lifted his face to the high, free sky. Marget took off her wide hat and lay down beside Miss Darcy, who sat on a stone. Tam had the dry grass and moss and the fringe of the plaid.

Marget spoke. "We are under a young hickory, Richard. It is all gold. There is a dogwood close by, and its leaves are red, and it is very full of berries. Wild grape has started by the dogwood and crossed to the hickory. It is far and near and up and down. The leaves are half green and half yellow, and there are a thousand bunches of grapes."

"I see!" he said; "and I hear a woodpecker."

"It's yonder on a white oak. It's a flicker. There isn't a cloud in the sky, and far, far up, small as a dragon fly, is a buzzard sailing. There's a cedar waxwing in the dogwood stripping berries. There is another--a third! We frightened them away, but they are coming back. They're after the grapes. There will be fifty in a moment--"

They kept still and watched, Marget's hand on Tam. Slender, graceful, tawny, crested birds came in a flock. They entered the hickory and the dogwood. With quick movements of head and body they stripped the grapes and the scarlet dogwood berries. They perched and removed, and perched again. They kept up a low talk among themselves and a perpetual flutter of wings. It was as though a wind were in the trees, so continuous was the sound. Blue grapes, dogwood berries, dropped upon the ground. For ten minutes the flock fluttered and fed, while with intent, pleased faces the human beings watched or listened. Then Tam became aware of a rabbit down the glade and started up. Away flew the cedar waxwings.

"Oh, wasn't it lovely?"

They sat still. Richard Linden, resting against the rock, kept his face raised to blue sky. "Their life!" he said. "As we enter upon their life--"

Tam came back, the rabbit having vanished. "Lie still, Tam, lie still! Get into your life-to-be for a little, and be quiet shepherd on a hill instead of shepherd's dog!"

"Their life--"

The visitor to Sweet Rocket sat still, with her eyes upon the gold fretwork of the hickory. She was thinking of the birds. It was very sunny, very still in the glade. Her companions also rested silent. They seemed to be in reverie, to be going where they would in their inner worlds.

Miss Darcy followed the waxwings in their flight. She saw the flock that had been here, and other flocks, stripping wild grape and dogwood and cedar berries. They were far and near, in many a woodland glade. In thousands they twined and turned, they talked in the clan, their wings made a windy sound. And the woodpeckers! Hammer and hammer, through the forests of the world! And the thrush that she had heard this morning, and the humming bird in the garden--and the crows that had cawed from a hillside, the hawk and the owl.... Suddenly she saw in some space an eagle rise to its nest upon a crag edge. From the one she saw others. Eagles in all the lands. For one instant she caught a far glimpse of the Idea, the absolute eagle. There was the rush of a loftier sense. Then she sank from that, but she saw eagles in all the lands. She saw the great hawks and the condors. Green waves were beneath her; with sea birds she skimmed them in the first light, and the cries of her kind were about her. On the ice floes walked the penguins, the albatross winnowed solitude. With heron and flamingo and crane she knew shore and marsh. The white swan and the black swan oared their way through still waters. In their right circle moved the peacock and the pheasant, the lyre bird, the bower bird, and the bird of paradise. The nightingale sang in deep woods, and in southern thickets of yellow jessamine sang the mocking bird. The lark mounted into the air, the cuckoo called from the hedge, the wren built under the eaves. In the gray dawn, from a thousand farms and hamlets, crowed the cocks. Over all the earth clucked the hen, peeped the downy chick. The swallows crossed a saffron sky and the whippoorwill cried in the night, and in the morning the quails said "Bob White!" Migrating hordes, like scuds of clouds, drove before favorable winds, north, south! She was plunged in the life of birds, where they waded between deep water and solid shore, where they lived in a world of green, where they flew aloft and afar, over land, over sea--all their plumage, shapes, and magnitudes. She seemed to hear their cheepings, cries and songs, to hear them and touch them, their sleekness, lightness, threaded beauty! Over all the earth spread the passionate wooing, the daylong song. Here were the nests, the multitudes, and the eggs, green and blue and white and dark. The nests and eggs became transfigured. The straw of the nests burned lines of white fire, the cup was diamond light, the shell of the egg no more than a window, and through it was seen the bird-past, and the bird desire and will and power. Out of the egg the young--she heard the nightingales in the woods, the lark in the sky!

"See the love and beauty and power and daring! See the thought and feeling pressing on--see them trooping into fuller being--see them men and women, their tribes and nations! When we have gone far, far on, see their human earth!"

It was Linden, she thought, who said that. She came back with a great throb of her heart to the earth beneath a golden hickory, to the October sun, in a little Virginian valley. Yet the two reclining there seemed still in a brown study, gone away. She thought: "I am come into a strange country! Are they knowing, feeling all that life more intensely than I, for all that they lie there so quietly, thinking, one would say, of to-morrow's work, of a book they are reading, or of the cedar waxwings?... It is all in the range of perception, could I run like light all over the earth! There are those birds and their life. I only saw what _is_!"

But she felt that while she had had a wave of it those two had a whole breadth of ocean. She felt that they were expert, adept. She felt again the breath of wonder. It was at once wonder and homelikeness. "Glad--glad--glad that I came! My gray road turns!"

Richard Linden dropped his hands from behind his head and passed them over his eyes. Marget rose to her knees. There was deep light in her face. She lifted then let fall her arms. "Oh, the _beauty_ when life is seen as a landscape, heard as a symphony, smelled as a garden, tasted as nectar, dwelt in as a house!" She rose to her feet. "The sun is gone from the grass. It is dawn in Tibet. Come, Tam, let us be going home!"

They folded the plaid and left the hickory and the dogwood. The glade was turning violet, but the hilltops showed golden and the mountains stood in light. A rich scent breathed from the earth, while the air carried a spear from the north. Leaving the wood, they took again the path by the river, that sang toward them, that held pools of light.

Walking so, Marget fell to talking of Anna Darcy's life, the manner of it, her steadfast work from year to year, and all her kindnesses, and all that she had given. At first Miss Darcy tried to stop her, but then she could not try any longer, the appreciation was so sweet. Her life had been difficult, isolated for all the stir around her, subject to sorrows, a little withered and gray. She felt the exquisite caress of their interest. It was more than that to her; it was recognition.

How would it be if all were truly interested in all? If there were general recognition?

As she walked, the valley and the hills, the river and warm, dusky air, the collie, the man and woman with her, herself, seemed to shift and quiver into one. Walls vanished. There happened rest, understanding, imperviousness to harm, blood warmth, and new and strange aspiration.

It was impossible for her to hold the moment. She seemed to herself to sink again to the rigid and small shape of Anna Darcy, like an Egyptian figure graved on stone, a plane figure. But she did not wholly fit back into the figure. She felt that above it was fullness and youth and song, and that they were hers as well as another's.

V

Again, the next morning, she found neither of her hosts. "We breakfast early and work early," Marget had said. Again Zinia served her alone, again she walked in the flower garden, again she went farther afield. The day was brilliantly, vividly clear, white clouds in the sky, and between, great seas of cobalt. She went at once to the river path, but turned this morning up the stream. The day hung joyous, the high and moving clouds, the light and shadow had magnificence. She felt very well; she really looked five years younger. Before her, beyond a spur of orchard, she made out the roof of a building. When she came nearer she felt an assurance that this was the overseer's house. "Where Marget was born," she thought; "where she lived with her father and mother and brothers."

Presently she stood still to regard the place.