Part 3

The house was a small one, two-storied, frame, painted white with green blinds. It had a small porch with a window to either side. At the back she made out a wider porch, and there were outbuildings. The whole was buried among locust trees and old shrubs, that when she came nearer she recognized for lilac and althea and syringa. Door and windows stood open. At first she thought she would turn from the river to the house, but then she said, "No, not till she herself brings me here some day." But the place was plain before her where she stood. When she had moved a few paces she looked full to the door, between locust trees and bushes. She was now beside a giant sycamore, very old, all copper colored as to leaf, with dappled white and brown arms. Built around the bole was a wooden bench, old and weather-worn. "She played here when she was a child. They have all set here beneath this tree. She comes here now, I fancy, often."

She took her seat. No one came in or out of the house door a stone's throw away. The place was sunny and deserted. There came, as it were, a veil over it. She shut her eyes the better to look at child life here with father and mother and Will and Edgar. The old overseer, who had fought in the war for the old order, but who, when it came crash! had built in the new; and the mother, Elizabeth Land, overworked and uncomplaining; and the boys with their desires and broodings and hopes--she felt them all.

Sitting with her eyes shut, she passed into feeling them very strongly. The place turned to be of thirty, forty years ago. She moved with the overseer as he went to his work and came from it. With Marget Land's mother she was cooking, sewing, cleaning. She was with the three children, the boys older than the girl, at tasks and in play. Swim in the river, swing under the locust tree, go for berries, for persimmons, chinquapins, walnuts, for grapes and haws, go for the cow, work in the garden patch, shell the peas, shuck the corn, look for eggs, pick the currants and gooseberries, split the kindling, gather the chips, wash the dishes, clean the lamps, sit by the fire and study reading, writing, and arithmetic--she was deep in it, deep in a slow, steady current of participation. It did not seem to curve, but now it was her own childhood, her parents and brothers and sisters, an old town house and a leafy town square--life, life, so varied and so the same! Deep, deep wash of deep waves, and so pleasant, so sweet, all the pang and ill lost! A past that was winnowed, understood, forgiven, appreciated, loved by mind and heart of Farther On, and that was present, gone nowhere, here, in finer space and finer time, a vast country capable of being visited! Going into it was to find the deathless taste of eternity. It was not dark; you could fill it with golden light. The forms there were not immovable, not dead. As you understood, they lived and were yourself. As you remembered, you saw that you were remembering, that you were re-collecting from far and near, your Self.

Anna Darcy sat very still. "I had to wait till I was fifty-eight years old to see that."

As on yesterday it had grown out of a commonplace of imagination and memory. Memory and imagination had, by degrees, entered _their_ deeper selves.

Again, as on yesterday, she could not hold it. Increased energy, increased perception, what the ancients called the Genius, and the mystic called illumination, or voice of God, and the moderns higher vibration, superconsciousness--whatever it was, and perhaps the name did not much matter, she had touched it and then lost it. But she knew that it had been touched, and that it was desirable to know it or its like again.

She was a member of the church, a praying woman. She bent her forehead upon her hands: "O God, let thy kingdom come! As it comes near us, send thy breezes!"

Presently, rising, she went on up the stream. It was not wide; it just came into the category of river, headwater, she knew, of a greater river. October painted it with russets and golds and reds. Midcurrent showed the ineffable blue of the sky, or when clouds drove by the zenith, the clouds. She walked on until before her she saw the eastern gate of the vale. The hills closed in, leaving a bit of grassy meadow on either side the stream. This narrowed. The hills grew loftier, insensibly became mountains. She was in a mountain pass, gray cliff to the right, hemlocks overhanging the water that was broken now by bowlders, débris of an ancient rock. The path was cool and dark and washed by the scent of the conifers. Only here and there the climbing sun sent splashing through an intensity of light that showed every fallen needle, every cone or twig or leaf upon the path. Not far before her the path turned and went up over the mountain. She thought, "That will be the way to Mrs. Cliff's."

She came upon a fisherman. He sat among the roots of a hemlock, and was engaged in reeling in his line. He was a man neither old nor young, with a long, easy frame, and a short, graying beard. His dress was that of a fisherman who goes forth from the city to fish--but not for the first nor the second nor the third time. Nothing that he had on was new, but all was well cut.

"Good morning!" he said.

"Good morning!"

He worked on at his reel. "Each time that I do this I say that it is the last time."

"Why?"

"I grow too damned able--I beg your pardon!--to put myself in the fish's place."

"Have you caught any?"

"This morning? Not a ghost of one! Yet they say this is a good stream! I think that I warn them off the hook. 'Monsieur Black Bass, or Signor Trout, as it may be, my desire not to take you is gaining, I feel, upon my desire to take you! Your own desire naturally aiding the first, I grow to feel that we make a strong combination!'"

He laughed, putting up his rod. Then his mustaches went down and his face became serious enough, "So much mangling! I've had my fill."

"How did you come? Over the mountain?"

"Yes. I am camping with a dozen New York and Washington fellows on another little river over there. The others fish that stream. I'm like Mrs. Elton. I adore exploring! I slept last night in a mountain cabin--Cliff's. Can you tell me how far I am from Sweet Rocket farm?"

"Less than a mile."

"No! I didn't think from what the mountain folk said that it was so near. I knew before I came that he was somewhere in these parts."

"Do you know Mr. Linden?"

"I was his classmate at the university. Then, fifteen years ago, I met him in Southern Russia. We had a couple of weeks together, and then I must hurry on to Constantinople, where I was due. He went into the Caucasus. I lost sight of him. It was two years later that I heard of that accident which blinded him, and I've heard since only second-and third-hand things. The other day in the club a man told me that he was living where his people had lived, down here in Virginia. I meant to go to see him, but I meant to write first."

"I am a visitor at Sweet Rocket. But I am sure that Mr. Linden would wish you to come on to the house. Had you not better do so?"

"Why, yes, then, I think that I shall." He stood up from the hemlock roots. "You are very good. My name is Curtin--Martin Curtin."

She gave her own. He took up fisherman's paraphernalia and a light coat. They moved out of ravine into meadow strip; before them lay the jewel valley. Mr. Curtin drew a deep breath.

"And he hasn't eyes to look at it!"

Anna Darcy found herself answering with certitude. "He sees it and a thousand places beside."

They walked on, Mr. Curtin gazing at river, hills, and mountains, and quiet valley floor. "I have known of his doing some splendid things in life--simple and splendid--the kind that steals into folk, and they do likewise!"

"Yes, I should think that."

"What is that house?"

"In old times it is the overseer's house. Now the young farmer who helps him lives there."

"'In old times it _is_'--that's an unusual phrase."

"I mean that to me, for reasons, it stays that way and _is_."

"I agree! When you turn to a thing it _is_. Turn with decision enough, and your overseer would come out to meet you. That's a sycamore for you! Do you ever feel the Indians by these streams? If you can see your overseer you can see your Indians, too."

They walked on. "Is that the house?"

"Yes."

"It's a simple place, too--but I like it. Houses, now! I make a specialty of keeping them in duration."

Anna Darcy thought, "A week ago I wouldn't have understood that."

The house where she was born, the house facing, across a row of box and a finely wrought iron paling, the old, leafy city square, walked bodily into her. She was through it, up and down, like the air. It seemed to her that there wasn't anything she didn't know about it, and it all came together into an inner aroma, taste and tone, dry, warm, pungent and likable, idiosyncratic, its very own. It had been a loss, a grief, when the city had taken and torn down that house. And all the time it was waiting for her, in a deep reality, to walk in and take possession!

She thought: "What is happening? I shall never be lonely again!"

Mr. Curtin looked from side to side of Sweet Rocket valley. "It's like a beaker of Venetian glass! You'd say there was a magic drink in it.... But how clean and drenched with sun is this air!"

"Yes!"

"He never married? Archer said he thought not."

"No, he didn't marry."

"He's rather the kind that marries the world."

"Yes, I think so. We turn here to the house. Have you the time?"

"It's almost noon."

"He will be home, then. He works upon the farm as though he had eyes."

They left the pebbly beach and went by the cedars up to the house. Tam came to meet them, and Linden rose from the bench upon the porch.

VI

"And so he was killed," said Curtin, speaking with strongly controlled emotion. "And I can tell you that when I heard it I felt physically that shock and crash and mortal bruising. It wasn't only my heart that was wounded. My nerves and my flesh felt it. Even now I think that there must be but one body--I got away for a time after he was buried. I went down to Hyères. I used to sit there by the sea. He was a lovable fellow, square as they make them. We were brothers and friends, too. Well, that is the way it runs! Life--death. Life--death! I would give a good deal--"

He had been thirty-odd hours at Sweet Rocket. They had sent up mountain to Cliff, who took down to his camp news that he would be gone for some days. They had given him the room next to Linden, and he had become at once delightfully at home.

When with Miss Darcy he had stepped upon the porch Linden had said: "Don't think you take me by surprise! I saw you in my looking-glass this morning!"

"It is good to find you again, Linden! What do you mean by your looking-glass?"

Linden laughed, his hands upon the old classmate's shoulders. "Only that I had been thinking of you. And the other night I was with you by the Sea of Azof. I thought, 'I should like to see him again!' And you know yourself that when you make a current boats appear upon it!"

Now, as the four sat about the fire in the big parlor, before the lamp was lighted, he had been telling of the death of his brother, an aviator. There had followed silence; then, "Well, let us talk of something else!" said Curtin. He took up the pipe he had laid upon the hearth beside him, and raking out a coat from the fire, relit it. "What do you think is going to happen now, Linden?"

They sat and talked, and the flames leaped, many and small, in the mahogany of the room. At ten they rose to separate for the night.

"Come look at the sky," said Linden. "The first week in October, and diamond clear!" They went out to the porch, and then, so majestic was the night, to the sweep before the house, whence they might see the great expanse. It was very still. The river sounded, but the air rested a thin and moveless veil. It was not cold. Richard Linden stood bareheaded, his face uplifted to the vault that writes forever its runes before men.

"By George! I forgot!" thought Curtin. "But doubtless he knows them so well that he knows where they are, season by season." It seemed that it might be so. Linden spoke as though he saw. "See the Pleiades and Capella and Aldebaran! The Great Square is at its height. The Cross and the Eagle and the Lyre. The mountains hide Fomalhaut." They walked a little way upon the road. Immense and tingling was that view, looking outward, looking inward, upon those stars. At last they came indoors and said good night.

Martin Curtin lay in a big four-poster bed and stared out of window. Upon going to bed he had slept quickly and soundly. Now he was awake, and he thought it might be past four of the morning. He felt the subtle turn toward the day. He heard a dog bark and a cock crow. He was aware that he had waked suddenly and completely. He was wide awake, and more than that. There was a keenness, an awareness; keen, sharpened, but also wide. His body lying very still, he began to remember, but it was remembering with a deeper and fuller pulse than was ordinarily the case. He remembered that younger brother who was dead, and not him alone, but many another, kindred and friends and associates. The past lived again, but lived with a difference. What multitudes of kindred, and friends, and associates! The meeting went deep and wide. Had he touched all those in one life or had it been in many lives? Was the whole texture coming alive, and in effect did it include the whole past, the whole dead and gone? However it might be, it was a world transmuted and without pain. He lay still, regarding it. It was strong and light, and he and it grew together with a sense of frictionlessness, of exquisite relief, even with a kind of golden humorousness. None had been truly any better or worse than another, nor in any way miraculously different, and now they could understand and laugh together! The sense of union was exquisite, and the sense of variousness hardly less so. The variousness was without hostility. It glided and turned smoothly, much as personal thought and mood might glide and turn. The sense of well-being flowed in every realm. The perception included environment. Remembered, recalled persons meant remembered, recalled houses, towns, country, forest and river, fields and gardens, a thousand, thousand places! Where were they all? They were all over the earth--light and golden--loved places and the right people in them! There was nothing rigid--even the places understood one another. Curtin felt a profound happiness. This one body, lying at Sweet Rocket, was not wholly forgot nor relinquished. It came into the pattern of variousness. But Curtin himself was moving in a wider consciousness. All these people, all these selves of himself! and he understood their old difficulties and he understood their old misunderstandings. The _piece_ understood, the beautiful tissue! The music understood, the notes moving so richly together! It was throbbing in the present and in the understood, the appropriated past. He never thought, "How grotesque the thought that we are dead!" The thought could not even occur.

For one flash, for less than an instant, the plane lifted. There started forth a high, a tremendous sense of unity--Presence. It towered, it overflowed him, he was of it--then the instant closed. As it had come like a towering wave, so it sank like a wave. But there was left the lasting thrill of it, and there was left undying aspiration. "Ah, to find it again! Ah, if it will come again!"

Where had been sense of the whole, again befell fragmentariness. Loss--great loss--and yet was there falling sweetness, exquisiteness still of order! He felt again the wide world that they said was dead, and yet surely was no such thing. There happened again wide and subtle change. Out of a stillness, a silence, an isolation, exquisite and tingling, a state of clarity and poise, one spoke to him _within_, "Martin!"

He answered in that space. "Yes, John.... No, grief is absurd!... Just because we're ignorant!"

"You can be content. We can be content."

"Yes, I see! We are all in one, who cannot be destroyed."

There came no more, but the world was a rhythm, swinging, swinging. There reigned great rest and calm. Out of this, with much of it yet clinging, he sank to the square, clean, sparely furnished bedroom at Sweet Rocket, with the cock crowing, with the old clock in the lower hall striking five. Curtin lay very quiet in the big bed. Dawn was coming, but his sense was that of an afterglow. He had felt beauty and still wonder like this in high mountains, watching Alpine glow. It faded and faded, but there was left with him assurance, rest, the sense of a dawn to be, a consciousness behind this consciousness, another consciousness towering, sun-gilt, in the future. He lay very still, at rest, hardly wondering. The great things, the beautiful things, were the natural things. The wholly full and blissful would be the finally natural. Dawn came in rose and amethyst.

When it was full light Curtin left his bed, dressed, and went downstairs. He thought that he would walk by the river or in the garden. The house was still, the front door open. Early though it was, he found Linden on the porch starting forth with Tam. He had found, he said, that he must see Roger Carter, who was riding to-day to Alder and would be starting presently. "Will you walk with me? But you shouldn't miss your breakfast. I've had bread and milk."

"I won't go now," answered Curtin. "I'll walk up and down before the house for a while. Something happened to me last night, or I happened into something. I'd like to talk to you about it, Linden--but it won't fade before you come back. I don't indeed think it will ever fade."

There was that in Linden's remembered face, when Linden himself had gone away toward Roger Carter's, that made Curtin think, walking now before the house as they had walked the night before under the stars: "Does he know what I felt? Could he even have helped--put a shoulder to the wheel, seeing that I was grieved and uncertain?" Not so long ago he might have answered, "That's fantastic!" but he did not so answer now.

He went into the garden and walked up and down. Before seven Marget came out to him. "I saw you walking in the dawn like a man in a ballad. Could you not sleep?"

"I slept till nearly five."

They walked by the late asters and the stocks. Said Curtin: "I remember a line of Masefield's:

"... the dim room had mind, and seemed to brood.

And again:

"And felt the hillside thronged by souls unseen Who knew the interest in me and were keen That man alive should understand man dead.

Miss Land, do you think that is true?"

"Yes. Surely."

"Do you think we can be reassured about the dead--all the dead--and ourselves when we die?"

"Yes, I do. Very safe, very sure."

"Well, I think so this morning."

They walked by the marigolds and larkspur. "Where do you meet the dead? In this space?" He indicated it with a wide gesture.

"No. In space that permeates this space. In added space. When and where we make space. Though I think," said Marget, "that one day the edges will have so flowed together that we shall say 'in this space.'"

"You and Richard Linden both have that assurance?"

"Yes. Many have it now." She added, "I think, perhaps, that it is more easily felt in some places than in others."

He thought, "As we put telescopes on heights."

They walked by the wall with the ivy. Her quiet, dark eyes were upon him, friendly, kindly. He thought: "No less than Linden she hoped such a night for me. Perhaps--"

A bell rang. "That is for us. Miss Darcy, too, comes down early now."

They went indoors. Anna Darcy met them in the hall and they went together into the bright dining room, to their pleasant breakfast, and Zinia waiting, with "that girl Mercy" still at heart.

VII

The next day was Sunday. Zinia and Mimy and Mancy walked early to their church, two miles down the river. Marget and Miss Darcy, Linden and Curtin, went to Alder in the phaeton, drawn by Daniel and Bess. It was as sunny and still a day as might be found in any autumn land, and most beauteous was that forest through which they drove. Anna Darcy was glad to see it again. It rested forever in her mind, a true magic approach. Marget drove, Curtin sitting beside her, Miss Darcy and Richard Linden behind them. The jewel miles went by and the pleasant, pleasant air. Here rose Alder on a green hill, and Alder had three streets, a hundred dwelling houses, and three white-spired churches. The houses were brick or frame, with shady yards and late-blooming flowers. They drove by a small, quaint courthouse, a rambling hotel, and several stores, closed to-day. The trees were maples and Lombardy poplars and a few ancient mulberries. Folk were going to church, and they spoke to Sweet Rocket and Sweet Rocket to them.

Before them rose a church of white frame, set in an ample churchyard, all glowing maples with a mosaic of red and gold leaves underfoot. Street before it and bordering lane held horses and buggies and Fords and Buicks. The second bell had not rung. Men and boys waited around the doors, talk and laughter at a Sunday pitch. Women were entering, some with children in their hands. Sweet Rocket folk, leaving the phaeton, walking up churchyard path, took and gave greeting. They entered the church, Marget's hand upon Linden's arm, just guiding him to a pleasant pew by a pleasant, open window, the weather being yet so warm. Curtin took his seat, and, turning a little, watched the folk enter. He did not know when he had been in a village church like this, nor, indeed, had he been for long in any church at all, barring the cathedrals and churches abroad, into which he went as artist. A clear, sweet sound, overhead, rang the second bell. Men and youths came in; the building filled. A simple place, it was well proportioned and to-day filled with a dreamy, golden, softened light. In that soft, flowing atmosphere, men and women and children were gathered as in a bouquet. The choir assembled, the young woman who was the organist took her place. A woman in the pew behind Curtin leaned over and gave him an opened hymn book. The minister appeared, a kindly faced, small, elderly man. The bouquet became more and more Sunday.

Curtin glanced at Linden. He sat as always, with ease, and a certain still power. He seemed to Curtin as simple and whole as a planet in the sky. This village Methodist church seemed within his frontier, as, when you thought of it, all other places seemed within it. Curtin remembered. They were talking, he and Linden, in Odessa, in their hotel, after having been to a great service in a great church. Linden was telling him that Religion held all religions, and that he, Linden, belonged solely to no one church, but liked at times to go sit in any one of them. He had gone on to say other things, but Curtin--and Curtin remembered this with a certain pang--had yawned, and said that it had been a tiring day and that he would off to bed. "My God, I was crass in those years!" thought Curtin. He still watched Linden, who could not know that he was being watched; and at the thought Linden turned his head and smiled at him. His face said as distinctly as if his voice had uttered it, "Yes, that night at Odessa!"

Again Curtin, startled at first, felt the startling vanish. He thought--and, as on last night, his thought seemed to lay hold upon and give form to a down-draught from some upper region--"Truly the startling should be over mind broken from mind, not over mind beginning to heal!"

He sat in a deep study. There came like a picture into his mind Jesus of Nazareth's parable of the talents. "Ability to perceive thought! If the world should take that talent and improve it, a different world we should have anon!"

"Let us pray," said the minister. When they had prayed, he said, "Let us sing hymn number--"

They sang: