Part 8

She became aware that, waking, she was becoming rested, refreshed, as though she had profoundly slept. She was awake above the old waking. The old waking was dreaminess to this state. Vigor poured into her being, and all the past was passed. That is, it was passed in its heaviness and friction, its strain and anxiety. All that seemed to drop away, like dross leaving gold. It was curious, her sense of gold color of all things in a gold light of their own, not from without. She became distinctly aware of influences. They were good. She acquiesced, "Yes, I will travel with you." Will consenting, her strength was added to those other strengths. In the plane where she now was flashed out co-operation.

Marget--Richard! Certainly they were where she had been wont to call "within her." But certainly she felt them, was aware of them, presently saw them, as never had she done before in that "within," though often in memory, thought, and imagination she, like others, had been with Marget and Richard there "within." She had used those words as a matter of course. Even then that "within" had, when you examined it, its own space and time, its own mechanics, warmth, color, and sound. That "within" and this "within" were of a piece, but where that had been faintly real this was vividly real. She had no doubt of its reality. It was so, but reality of another, of a farther on, order. Marget that afternoon had talked of another order. It seemed that one might rise or deepen into it. She was consciously there now, though in the order below it she rested at Sweet Rocket. It was not the plane of tremendous power and illumination, but it was a state of developed powers. It was as far as just then she could go.

The boy Stuart--Stuart Black. How many a time had she wished that she could give this boy travel! "If I might take him and let him see!" As he had longed, as he had imagined himself traveling with Mr. and Mrs. Dane. "If I could travel with you!" And now to-night they had somehow caught and held to the ether and were seeing what they wished to see. The influence, the individuality that was Marget and Richard strongly aided.

She was in Rome with Marget and Richard and Stuart Black. She did not question them nor him, and the boy did not question. They were there, and it was sunny weather, and they were strong and happy. They stayed in no hotel, they depended on no cab nor car, they needed no food of the old sort. When they looked at one another they saw body, since where is still multiplicity must still be body. There was something of old bodies in these bodies, but also there was difference, and all to the good. Old defect had vanished. Stuart Black was no cripple; she herself had lost fatigue. There was translucence, a golden appearance, and where they wished to go they were. She wished for Robert, and immediately felt that in wishing she had said to the others, "I wish." They strengthened her wish with theirs. Here, then, was Robert with them, though intermittently, not on the whole so strongly, but coming as he could answer, sleeping there at Sweet Rocket. And now and then another joined them, though somewhat dimly, and that was the boy's father, whom he loved and wished to include in his joy.

The body of Rome, too, was like and not like the old body of Rome. Rome had a Self to match this Self of theirs. Spirit and body and mind and soul, Rome understood itself better. There rose a Rome richer, purer; nothing of fair and wonderful lost, all such quality strengthened; the unfair, unwise, unstrong of old, everywhere tending to drop the prefix. Yet to the new self Rome was herself, singing, enchanted, of the past and present and future.

Marget and Richard, who seemed truly Marget-and-Richard, one word, had said, "a week in Rome," and that was what seemed to pass. They saw as in old travel they had seen, they went about as in old travel they had gone about, they enjoyed as in old times they had enjoyed, but with freedom and power and joy that left the old behind. All was vigor, heightened and transfiguring perception, and yet friendly, homelike, not solemn nor stilted, the boy here enjoying like a boy. Frances became aware of a control, keeping experience to a vivid and fair finiteness, not sacrificing current form. That was for the boy's sake, perhaps for her and Robert also.

And after Rome, Athens--an Athens, too, sublimed. And after Athens, for the splendid richness of things and for the boy, the vast North, forest and plain, and an intense exhilaration of life that swept out upon the great sea and encircled the earth. They spent long, bright days in ships and at ports of call. Then they went to China, and India, and Egypt. They crossed the desert of Sahara, and again in a great ship passed between the Pillars of Hercules. Followed ocean days, and that greater will and awareness slowly diminishing, gently returning upon its still habitual self. Diminishing, diminishing, slower, slower, a little melancholy, but tranquil, with a subtle smile.... A sense of a giant woman in stone rising from an islet in a harbor--a sense of a familiar city in the year 1920--a sense of dreamy farewells, a quiet darkness and lapse....

Frances turned herself in her bed at Sweet Rocket. Starlight flooding the room dimly revealed walls and furniture. Across by the other window Robert lay sleeping. How much time had passed, or how little, or how widely could you live in no time at all? Here was reality, but there, too, had been reality! It had been real, that companionship and that travel. The memory of it was memory of reality. Mind had attended there not less, but more than here. The whole compound self had achieved a unity and power. Achievement--ungrown wings--first flights! She thought: "The possibilities! O life of life, our possibilities!" Old warmth and drowsiness took her. There was a kindly fatigue, as though she had walked on a bright day to mountain top and back and now thrown herself down for rest. She saw the stars through half-open eyes, then slept.

The sun was streaming in when she waked; Robert already up and dressing. She raised herself upon her arm. "Good morning!"

"Good morning!"

She rubbed her eyes. "There is a strange and happy feeling of 'there' being here!"

Robert said: "That somehow hits it. I had the most vivid dream of long, sunny travel, with you and Marget and Richard and Stuart Black! It wasn't like a dream. I feel as if I were just off the ship--had all the memories and a most tremendous refreshment! I could take down any wall this morning!"

"Why do you put it that way?"

"I don't know. We have so walled ourselves in from wide doing--are so afraid of our own landscape!" He stood by the window. "I think I'll ask you a question that never, never would occur to Mr. Gradgrind to ask! Do you remember it, too? For instance, Athens and some dim, northern forest--and a lot of islands with palms? Do you remember music?"

"Oh, it was all music--and I think that I'll play it all my life!"

Dressed, they went down to the others, Zinia's bell ringing for coffee, omelet, honey, and cakes. Linden and Drew had eaten and gone to meet Roger Carter and William where the winter wood was being cut. Marget sat behind the coffee urn. "Good morning, Robert and Frances!" Her face of a subtle, moving beauty, more of look than of feature, did not turn upon them with a "Do you remember?" It seemed to assume that they remembered. Frances thought, "Certainly she remembers, and as much more strongly than I as I remember more strongly than Robert!" It was of a piece with all that they had talked of. "At last, with all of us, talk passes to action." Frances Dane drank her coffee. All of them in the room seemed bound in a ribbon, Linden and Drew also, wherever they might be in the forest, and Stuart Black in that small, dark room in New York, and how many others! She did not name them, but she knew they were many, in fact all. In a flash she saw how, to Marget and Richard, might appear not many selves and binding ribbon, but One Self. To realize this was to realize that for her, also, there was but One Self.

XVII

Three days after this Curtin and Anna Darcy, who often walked together, having gone to the pass of hemlock, cliff and tumbling water, turned in the broken sunlight and shadow back to Sweet Rocket. The maples of the upper slopes had cast almost all their leaves, but the oaks stood yet in carmine. Yesterday had fallen light rain. Earth lay moist, and soil and leaf and fern and moss sent out a haunting odor. The sun stood in Scorpio. The drama of the year was on the homeward road. It saw ahead the Archer and the Goat and the Water Bearer, the Fishes of the great deep, and the Ram that, springing forth, should take once more the road, the old road, the new road, the old-and-new road!

Now Curtin and Anna Darcy spoke, and now they were silent. It was a blessed feature of this valley that none need be talkative in order to convey, "I am at home with you."

Her visit was approaching its end. That was what people would say. "Physical presence and metaphysical presence!" said Curtin, answering her thought. "Physical and above-physical--and the generations to come will find the inclusive word."

"Oh, I shall be here still--or 'here' will be with me in the city--or it will be both. At any rate, no desolate parting!"

They passed from under hemlock and gray rock to beech trees and a dappled path. The small river calmed itself and began to flow through cultivated land. Gentian and farewell-summer made a purple fringe for the way.

"In old romances one walked into an inn or house by the road--always saying, 'It is by the road that goes on as it went before, and I presently again with it!' But never again as it was before, and never again I as before! For just there befalls the adventure that sets one climbing to a new road."

Sweet Rocket vale opened before them. Each time they looked it grew fairer, and that, they had begun to see, was because it was not separated from anything.

Said Anna Darcy, presently: "Do you know Morris's _Earthly Paradise_? Do you remember the Story of Rhodope? I used to know almost all of it by heart. When Rhodope is born the countryman, her father, dreams, and he seems to himself to be standing with the mother, watching

"... a little blossom fair to see."

Then:--

"The day seemed changed to cloudiness and rain, And the sweet flower, whereof they were so fain, Was grown a goodly sapling, and they gazed Wondering thereat, but loved it nothing less. But as they looked, a bright flame round it blazed, And hid it for a space, and weariness The souls of both the good folk did oppress, And on the earth they lay down side by side, And unto them it was as they had died.

"Yet did they know that o'er them hung the tree Grown mighty, thick-leaved, on each bough did hang Crown, sword or ship, or temple fair to see; And therewithal a great wind through it sang, And trumpet blast there was; and armor rang Amid that leafy world, and now and then Strange songs were sung in tongues of outland men.

"It is something like that that I feel for any place--and perhaps now it will be so for this and every place! It was such a blossom and now it is such a tree. All hangs therein, peoples and nations, things past and things to come! When I go away I shall find it so in any place."

"That is what you will do--and I also. Everywhere that Tree, that Man, that God!"

The vale widened at the overseer's house. The sycamore by the river stretched in the sun its great arms of white and brown, and these and the blue vault made a pattern. A dozen turkeys crossed the path in a stately, slow-stepping procession. Mary Carter was singing in the house, and little Roger singing after her. As they approached the tree and the bench around it other voices reached them; then one voice reading aloud. They saw the two Danes seated there--Frances, reading a letter. "So I _did_ travel with you and Mr. Dane. It was so wonderful--it is all around me now! I don't clearly remember little, sharp bits of it, but I remember the whole. It has shown me a lot of things. I don't any longer mind living. It's funny, but father, too--"

Frances looked up as Curtin and Anna stepped under the tree. Bright tears stood in her eyes. She shook them away and smiled at the two. "It's a letter from the crippled boy I told you about--"

The four walked back to Sweet Rocket House. "Robert and I have but a week longer. But this place tempers the wind of the whole year. It drops honey into winter days."

Curtin asked Robert Dane, "Forth from here you go on with the work you are doing?"

"Of course. That is a department of this. But I wish to work without bitterness or violence."

The day shone about them. Rain of the night had brought into late autumn a sense of spring. Spring and autumn seemed to touch across shortened winter. The air held a divine, sweet freshness. They were aware of new life, and all objects of perception tossed back vigor and luster.

"The world renews--the world renews!" sang the river.

A little later Robert and Frances Dane at their window saw, coming up from the river, a somewhat worn automobile. Stopping before the porch the driver and owner descended and mounted the steps. "There's an old type!" said Robert. "Tall and thin, black clothes and soft hat, low collar and string tie, white hair, mustache and imperial--look, Frances, it's a picture! Once it was the horse, and he swung himself down--then the carriage, and at the door he helped out the ladies. Now it's the car. To-morrow he will descend from the airship--just like that!"

She looked over his shoulder. "It's old Major Hereward from Oakwood. He was here four years ago, that time I came alone. He's all the past! But that car's symbolic, too. He's all the past beginning to say, 'For all my fighting I begin to find myself, with all I care for, here in the present--perhaps also in the future!' He's beginning to think that it may be so with the airship. There with all that he really, really cares for! 'I always said that they couldn't get along without me, and now I begin to see that neither can I get along without them!'"

Major Hereward appeared at the dinner table. It seemed that he, too, was a cousin of Linden's, on the other side from the Danes. His place was Oakwood, twenty miles away. Old Major Linden and he had been boyhood friends. He breathed knowledge of Sweet Rocket in ancient days. His manner to Marget was delightful, though perhaps he still held in comparison, in a "this--that," Sweet Rocket House and the overseer's house. His manner to all was delightful--like old wine.

Robert Dane pondered that, and also Frances's words of the morning. Like others, he could speak as though the past, the present, and the future were islands with nothingness between. But truly he knew it was not so, and he assumed that much self-knowledge in those to whom he spoke. Now he had it, in a flash of vision, how the old wine and wheat, how the old strength of man and woman, did go on. All within the whole flashed and changed. But the whole held all. The tangential itself only went so far, then returned, and was met and welcomed. _The prodigal son._ He saw that contrary winds were not so contrary after all. "In the whole, and in the whole only, I am not contrary to him nor he to me. In the end one sail and one wind--and the sail due to arrive and the wind favorable."

That afternoon Major Hereward walked over the place; with him, Linden and Curtin. "I came to talk to you about something, Richard. But we'll leave it till night. I can always pull things together better then--after the day. Here's the oak Phil Linden and I planted the day we heard of First Manassas! He was eighteen and I was sixteen. The next year we both went in."

They stood beneath the tree. Said Curtin, "Much water has gone over the wheel since then!"

Major Hereward nodded. "Much! But Phil Linden and I seem to stand here together. Not just of the mind we were, but together! _And many a foe grew to be a friend._"

The bright day declined. The sun set in a coral sea, a crescent moon appeared, earth grew an amethyst, the stars came out. Brush was being burned and wood smoke clung in the air, and there was the multitudinous chirping, chirping in grass and bush of late autumn. It was almost November, and they built larger fires. The old parlor gleamed.

"It's a dear room, a dear, dear room!" said Major Hereward. "I don't believe any here can love these portraits as I do. Richard may look at them often, but--" He broke off. "I forgot that he is blind! I'm always forgetting it! Well, he may see the reality of them."

Richard entered, and a moment later Marget. "It's a night of the gods! How the fire leaps!"

They sat around it, Anna Darcy and Curtin and Drew and the two Danes and Major Hereward, Linden and Marget. Anna Darcy was saying: "I went down to Mimy's before supper. The preacher is there for the night--Brother Robinson."

Linden answered her. "Yes. He will be here presently. He always comes to us for an hour or so. He's a fine fellow."

Rising, he fetched Frances's violin. "What deep and dear pleasure you give, Frances!"

She played old music and new, into which the old glided, until there seemed neither old nor new, but a content very vast and rich. The wing of the music lifted them; music and flame blended. They sat in reverie, and the wealth of the world flowed, circularly flowed.

Without, in the night, a lantern passed the windows. "There is Brother Robinson," said Marget. Richard went out--they heard his voice in the hall--then he returned with the negro preacher and Zinia. He said, "Mr. Robinson--friends, all of us!" The circle widened. The preacher sat down between Linden and Robert Dane, and Zinia sat between Marget and Frances. "Play a little longer, Frances!"

The music blended with the flame, the wealth of the world flowed, flowed, circularly flowed. The Rev. William Robinson sat, a gaunt, dark figure, in long-preserved broadcloth, with a rugged, deep brown face. When he spoke his voice had unction--like the voices of most of his people--unction, but not too much of it. By sheer indomitableness he had gained a fair education, and he was a good man and a wise one. In her blue dress Zinia sat beside Marget Land. She kept silence, but her poise was like her poise in the dining room and pantry, or on the porch when Miss Darcy had taken her breakfasts there. The latter always thought of her standing beside the pillar, or in the clean, airy pantry, by the jar of flowers and the open _Pilgrim's Progress_, always heard her rich voice, saying, "I like that girl Mercy!"

It seemed that Robert Dane had met Brother Robinson before this at Sweet Rocket. When the violin was put by the two talked together a little, as folk might talk who liked each other. Curtin, from his corner, watched with interest Sweet Rocket in Virginia. A voice from somewhere went through his head: _Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ is all and in all_. He looked at Major Hereward, and the old man, who had stiffened at the "Mr. Robinson" and the seating in the circle about the fire, seemed now to rest at ease, in a brown study, as one who regards the expanse of things.

Miss Darcy spoke. "At Mimy's this afternoon you had begun to tell me of the building of your church and schoolhouse down the river. Then they called me and I had to go--"

"Tell them now, brother," said Linden.

Brother Robinson told, and what he told had humor and pathos and heroism. There passed, as upon a screen, the littles gathered that were much to spare, quaint efforts at money raising, labor at twilight and dawn given by laboring men, the women's extra work and their festivals. Brother Robinson was a born raconteur. Into the sheaf of his homely narrative fell vast swaths of human effort and aspiration. "And Brother Linden helped us, and old Mr. Morrowcombe gave us five dollars."

A voice came from the corner of the hearth, from Major Hereward: "I'd like to help you, too, Brother Robinson! Put me down for ten dollars."

They left the material building of the schoolhouse and the church. Said Brother Robinson: "I've got something else I want to tell you. I've had an Experience, and it's taken the heart out of my bosom and crumbled it between its fingers and put in a new one! I came to Sweet Rocket to tell it to you, Mr. Linden. But I don't see anyone here that I'd be afraid to tell it to."

"There isn't any such," said Linden. "Tell it!"

XVIII

"I was going to preach," said Brother Robinson, "at Piny Hill Church, that's twelve miles from Old Lock, where I live. I started out Saturday afternoon to walk, counting on a lift or two on the road, and I got them. I was going to sleep at Will Jones's, who works at the mill on Piny Creek. The first lift I got was from a wagon full of hay going to Cherry Farm. That was two miles. Then I walked three miles. Then a Ford came along and said, 'Hey, Brother Robinson, are you going as far as Llewellyn?' I said that I was, and farther, and the Ford took me to Llewellyn. That didn't leave but four miles to do, and that was nothing. So I was a-walking, and the leaves hung red and yellow, and the evening was powerful sweet! I went through the woods by the Thessaly place. I was thinking as I was walking. And then, just like that, Mr. Linden, thinking with words stopped! My old body stopped, too. I just lowered it under a cedar tree and left it there.

"But I myself went higher and wider. I was everywhere and all over! I was in and through everything! They were just shapes in me. It was like being air, or like that inside air you told me about, called ether. You told me about that, but when you told it I hadn't experienced, and so it was just words. Now I have experienced. Everything was right here and now, or there and then, it didn't matter a mite which!