XV

"Oh, Jesus tell you once befo',Babylon's fallin' to rise no mo'.Oh, go in peace and sin no mo',Babylon's fallin' to rise no mo'!"

"Oh, Jesus tell you once befo',

Babylon's fallin' to rise no mo'.

Oh, go in peace and sin no mo',

Babylon's fallin' to rise no mo'!"

In the evening Frances played again to them, and the rich and sweet music filled the old room. The violin put by, they talked by the fire; then Linden said, "Read for a little while, Marget." She took up a volume of Blake, and read. "Read that letter to Butts." She read:

"... Over sea, over landMy eyes did expandInto regions of fire,Remote from desire;The light of the morningHeaven's mountains adorning;In particles bright,The jewels of lightDistinct shone and clear.Amazed and in fearI each particle gazed,Astonished, amazed;For each was a ManHuman formed. Swift I ran,For they beckoned to me,Remote by the sea,Saying: 'Each grain of sand,Every stone on the land,Each rock and each hill,Each fountain and rill,Each herb and each tree,Mountain, hill, earth and sea,Cloud, meteor and star,Are men seen afar.'...My eyes, more and more,Like a sea without shore,Continue expanding,The heavens commanding;Till the jewels of light,Heavenly men beaming bright,Appeared as One Man,Who complacent beganMy limbs to enfoldIn his beams of bright gold;Like dross purged awayAll my mire and clay.Soft consumed in delight,In his bosom sun brightI remained. Soft He smiled.And I heard his voice mild,Saying: 'This is my fold,O thou ram horned with gold,Who awakest from sleepOn the sides of the deep.'..."

"... Over sea, over land

My eyes did expand

Into regions of fire,

Remote from desire;

The light of the morning

Heaven's mountains adorning;

In particles bright,

The jewels of light

Distinct shone and clear.

Amazed and in fear

I each particle gazed,

Astonished, amazed;

For each was a Man

Human formed. Swift I ran,

For they beckoned to me,

Remote by the sea,

Saying: 'Each grain of sand,

Every stone on the land,

Each rock and each hill,

Each fountain and rill,

Each herb and each tree,

Mountain, hill, earth and sea,

Cloud, meteor and star,

Are men seen afar.'...

My eyes, more and more,

Like a sea without shore,

Continue expanding,

The heavens commanding;

Till the jewels of light,

Heavenly men beaming bright,

Appeared as One Man,

Who complacent began

My limbs to enfold

In his beams of bright gold;

Like dross purged away

All my mire and clay.

Soft consumed in delight,

In his bosom sun bright

I remained. Soft He smiled.

And I heard his voice mild,

Saying: 'This is my fold,

O thou ram horned with gold,

Who awakest from sleep

On the sides of the deep.'..."

"Energy in larger units, affinities gathering strength and flowing together with power!" said Curtin. "Everyone has seen it and felt it in some wise. When it is blamable, unguided, 'mob spirit'! When it is praised, 'esprit de corps, mass heroism, mass enthusiasm, conflagration of genius, voice of the people, unity of spirit,' what not! Most folk have a glimpse of the fact that there is an ocean of desire, emotion, will, as well as rivers and rivulets."

Marget came and sat with them on the steps of the little summer-house in the flower garden. She wore a great check apron, denoting housekeeping and helping Zinia. She sat down beside them. "What have you been doing, Marget?"

"Once a week Zinia and I have a general straightening day. Then my mother and I have been visiting together."

"Truly, truly, Marget?"

"Truly. But in a little wider order, my dear, a little wider order! The order above this order—into which this will melt. Mother and father, and Will and Edgar."

"Two of those are living and two are dead."

Marget smiled. "Ask Wordsworth!"

"I see," said Anna Darcy.

"Very well. Do more than that.Touch!"

With a trail of ivy in her hand she looked past the snapdragon and marigold and larkspur, still blooming, so rich and mild had been this autumn. "Then, as the rooms grew clean, I was with my mother in her birthplace, two hundred miles from here. We were there as adults, moving, loving, understanding with a grown mind, but there in her childhood and girlhood as well, loving to contemplate all the past that was us two! Mine as hers, hers as mine. Mind and feeling ran and caught up with her brothers and sisters, her parents and friends. Her parents remembered their parents and those remembered theirs. Home rose after home, garden after garden, loved place after loved place." Her eyes were upon Drew, whose eyes were upon her. "Do you not see that you can, that you will, recover it all? All that you have been, and you have been very much; all that you are, and you are very much!"

Mimy's singing floated to them from the kitchen:

"There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land,Oh, pat yo' foot, chillun, don't you get weary!There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land."

"There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land,

Oh, pat yo' foot, chillun, don't you get weary!

There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land."

"And then," said Marget, "I was in Rome with Richard. The sun shone, the wind was incypress and pine, the fountains made liquid sound. Father Tiber glided, Saint Peter's stood. We went to the Sistine Chapel, and then it was the Capitol within and without, and then the Appian Way and all the Campagna—all Rome—not to-day alone, butallRome. And then not Rome, but starlight nights from the decks of ships. And then—"

"This was actuality, while your hands swept and dusted the parlor there?"

"My body was in its duty and happy there. Yes. Actuality, but of another order, an order we are coming into. The order of intensified, guided,realizedmemory and imagination."

"And of reason?"

"And of reason. Profoundly so. It is reason that is guiding. Reason has its higher levels, grows comprehensive, knows longer sequences, completer syntheses. And from the decks of ships we were in the desert watching the stars, shepherds on the hills and shepherds on the plains, shepherds and villagers and wanderers of far days!" She lifted hand and arm in a curious and commanding gesture. "Watching the skies above Queen Rain and King Wind! In desert and plain and upon hills and on seas, thousands and thousands of us strewn in time!"

For an appreciable moment, to some degree, those listening to her became aware of, made, as it were, junction with their own far wandering, far wondering, savage and barbarian self. Itwas evident that Drew made junction. They touched the mind struggling there, and the lifted gaze. The sense was one of enormous, calm pervasion. They entered into, they aided, their own early man, where he marked the heavens, and around them was the wistfulness of early lands.

Marget spoke on. "Then while I worked we were building pyramids and mountains of the god. We were watching and watching, patterning and naming, comparing, all the skies, the moon, and the planets and the times of the sun, and the white path through the heavens and the great named princes—everywhere, swarthy folk and pale folk! Now we were many and many. Then in us rose the Devoted, the Searchers of the skies, seeking from city roofs and temple roofs knowledge of the Whole for the Whole."

Their interior self opened its wings and used its eyes. As space expanded, so did time. They were there in the October sunshine, on the summer-house steps, but likewise they attended, and in some vast, liberated way they were that collective effort, that process. They might carry the method over into all processes. There swam across the mind other words—"commerce"—"government"—"family"—many and many a word.

Marget's voice went on. "Now one has made a telescope. Our theories change; we stand on dead theories and study on. Thousands of usstudying, thousands building knowledge, learning vision! We gaze, we watch, we turn to desks and write and figure, we reason, we divine, we better our instruments, we gather results and make fortunate guesses, we hearken to intuition. We stand on a mossy stone in space and study the Promised Land, the universe that is ours, the ever perpetuating, the ever bettering! Time widens. Here are mountain summits and the observatories of this day, and the clockwork and the pierced dome, and the great eye that we have made, and the photograph. Mind sits at the knee of Great Mind and learns its alphabet. And all the thousands that were and are and will be are one Astronomer, and it is I, still working to know!" She ceased to speak, and sat wrapped in the golden light.

Said Robert Dane: "We follow where you step. You make us follow you."

"I do not make you. You walk with me because you can walk. We walk. It is your Self as it is mine."

"We move and we feel, then, where you are. You live there more fully and keenly than we, but we can breathe and feel and see. Go on! We would have your life, as you have ours."

"Then, after the stars, while I wound the clocks, I walked into the minute. Again thousands of us working and watching, noting, divining—thousands and thousands, years past and to-day and to-morrow! And one devisesthe microscope. All the laboratories!... Into the cell, into the atom, the infinite dance of relativities and small collections! And the intensed, pointed endeavor, using perception as fine as the millionth part of a hair—we knowing, marking, understanding ourself there, where we are moving clouds! We working there, patient, patient, the god working! The great and the small. We who forever remember and make richer ourself. We the I— And then I was again with my dead, who are just as much and just as little dead as I myself! And then I came out into the garden."

They sat on the summer-house steps, and the marigolds glowed around them. She spoke again. "Here and there, throughout the past, and often now I think in our own day, a man or woman lays hold upon faculties that some day all will lay hold upon.And greater things than these.Forerunners, pioneers! Regard this late flood of books describing communion with the dead and giving detail of the life hereafter. What they describe is the widening consciousness here and now! The increasing awareness. One does not wait for death. Richard and I would not have you think that we are deep, deep, deep in that realm. Were it so nothing could hide it. Were we or any full in the next order you would see the shining. We are not there, but we are in motion toward it, as are many to-day. The road thitherward has itsgreat scenery and long, thrilling adventure! And you, too, all of you, too, are in motion toward it. In this day of ours, each day of the sun, more and more are in motion."

She rose from the step. "I have rested this body that we call Marget Land and now I shall put it again to work in the house we call Sweet Rocket."

That evening, after she had played to them, Frances fell to telling of a crippled boy, almost a man, living in a poor flat in New York, the father an overworked head clerk, the mother a strong, gadabout, well-meaning person, more apt to reproach than to sustain. There was a sister, a stenographer, who meant to marry, if she could, some employer. This nineteen-year-old boy had a passion for travel, who could rarely travel as far as the street. At intervals, when his father had leisure to accompany him, he went to a movie. If the piece had scenery, country and ocean and strange cities, moving throngs and great buildings and places of which he had read, he was happy. He took theGeographic, and got travel books from a library. He knew more of the earth's surface than did many a "traveled" person. But it was hot in the city, in his little stuffy room, or it was cold in the city in houses that could never buy coal in quantity. He had a good deal of pain, and his eyes got bigger and bigger.

Curtin had claimed the small bedroom at the end of the upper hall. Drew slept in thedormer-windowed room above. Frances and Robert Dane possessed the large room opposite Marget's, next to Linden's. Here were four windows and each narrow bed placed where it might look forth. This night the Danes talked awhile, then addressed themselves to sleep. Robert slept, but Frances found that she was wakeful. Yet she had definitely turned from care and question of the day, from concern for her own work left in suspension, even from the face and incident of Sweet Rocket. From her pillow she saw the stars as they rimmed and rose above the mountains. At first she seemed to be over there, with the shadow below and the diamond above, but then to herself she left it all. There seemed naught about her but cool space. She lay without fret at wakefulness, though she was intensely awake.

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-nightthey 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 tomatch 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. Theycrossed 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 uponthem 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.

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—andthe 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'sEarthly 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 gazedWondering thereat, but loved it nothing less.But as they looked, a bright flame round it blazed,And hid it for a space, and wearinessThe 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 treeGrown mighty, thick-leaved, on each bough did hangCrown, sword or ship, or temple fair to see;And therewithal a great wind through it sang,And trumpet blast there was; and armor rangAmid that leafy world, and now and thenStrange songs were sung in tongues of outland men.

"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 treeGrown mighty, thick-leaved, on each bough did hangCrown, sword or ship, or temple fair to see;And therewithal a great wind through it sang,And trumpet blast there was; and armor rangAmid that leafy world, and now and thenStrange songs were sung in tongues of outland men.

"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 bencharound it other voices reached them; then one voice reading aloud. They saw the two Danes seated there—Frances, reading a letter. "So Ididtravel 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 ancientdays. 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 herepresently. 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 porchwhen 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 openPilgrim'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 laboringmen, 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!"

"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 througheverything! 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!

"The first thing I felt was just infinite cleanness and coolness. It was me and it was not me. If it was me it was something vast in me that had got the upper hand. There was a me, a self, like a tired, dirty child. To that me the other was God. But God turning out to be me, too. I had preached about God for thirty years, but I never really tasted or touched God till that day. It was cool and whole and pure, and bigger than the sky. And it forgave all my sins, or it saw clean through them. It saw a long way and all at once.... The tired and dirty me was everybody else, too. It was me and it was everybody, and we were healed by our God, and that was us, too, us, and more than we had ever dreamed of in that us! It healed with its might, and the lower part understood and went up.... I can't give you a description. It was awe and joy. The little body of William Robinson couldn't have held it, but something bigger than that held it. And then, just as light changes on the mountains here—when you are on top of Rock Mountain maybe, and see everything below you—and it's all there, but it's got another tone andyou feel it in a different way—just so that cool awe and greatness changed a little. It was joy still, but now it was friendly and natural. It was the whole earth looking like a garden, and all mine, all me, and in that me was all I had ever thought was you or him or her, and all that I had ever said was it. The bird and the beast were there, the trees and the grass and the air. And it was lovely; it was just love, and beauty!" He brushed his hand across his eyes. "I can't tell you about that beauty. And we weren't dead; all was living. If you'll think of the very best moment you ever had, when you were deepest friends with yourself and found that it took in everybody, it might be something like that a million times over. It was innocent and wise. And all the times that I'd ever thought I was happy were just plain misery beside it! I couldn't hold it, any more than a young robin can hold the flight he will hold after a while. I reckon we're all fledglings! Back I flopped toward William Robinson. Here was old Virginia, and the woods and the road and the hills and the mountains, and Old Lock, and Piny Hill Church. But just before I settled in I got for just a minute this very country and our daily life in the light and the glow and the music and the wonder! All that was fair kept in and strengthened, and all that was unfair just melted out! I knew then that though we talk about it we haven't begun to love ourcountry. It went, too, into the world. 'For God so loved the world.' ... Well, that vanished, too. I was back. I was just the colored preacher, William Robinson. I was back, but I could remember! I've touched what it's like to be God."

He ceased speaking, and sat bent toward the fire. A little of that luminousness of which he had told seemed to show through his flesh, a dark translucence. He said, under his breath, "'Little children, love one another!'" and rested silent, in communion with the flame.

"'For all we are members one of another.' Feeling that," said Linden, "is to feel as One. Then the One no longer counts as separate his members. He says IAM."

Stillness held in the old room. The fire gave it crimson and amber life and warmth. The canvases on the walls, the pictured men and women, seemed self-luminous. Major Hereward spoke abruptly: "Where are the dead? Where are my brother Dick, my son Walter, my mother and father?"

"They are here. Re-member yourself and you shall find them."

"Where is heaven?"

"It is here, the moment you begin to perceive it."

"You mean that you perceive the dead, Richard?"

"Yes. Do not you?"

The old man stared. He drew a long breath. "Never before did I think that I did!"

Robert Dane spoke. "You mean that as the Great Consciousness expands it becomes aware of itself there, too? That that realm becomes open?"

"Yes. Discovery there is within the grasp of our age. It is not so far away as many might think! As Power comes through. The 'dead' and the 'living' do meet. They have met all the time. The general recognition and use of the fact is to be strengthened, developed."

"It is not the only recognition and use of Oneness impending!"

"By no means! No. In every field there is ripening corn. How should it not be so?"

Major Hereward's voice came in again. "'The spiritual sense of the dead.' I've heard that phrase. I didn't know what it meant. Do you mean that when I seem to myself to move about in company with Dick, when things come into my mind that he knew about or that we did together, when I seem, as I go on, to understand his character better and better, and to see life as he did, when he seems here with me or when we are just happy together in old places—that it'strue? And Walter and my mother and father and Helen and others—oh, scores of others—they enter my mind and heart just as though they came in at a door! Do you mean that when I think of them suddenly and strongly,feel them as it were, thattheyare doing part of it, that thereisintercourse? Good Lord! I thought it was only myself!"

"I mean that," said Linden. "It will grow to be more than that. A higher, fuller thing than that."

The old man rose. Face and voice showed emotion. "I've got what I came for. God bless you, Richard, and God bless you, too, Brother Robinson! Oh, we've been little! Marget, I'll say good night, my dear. Out of my life goes fear and loneliness!"

Brother Robinson likewise, with Zinia, rose to say good night. "I'll see you in the morning," said Richard. "I want to talk to you about the school."

That night Curtin, also, increased his sense of life, life that included those that were said to be dead. There had been no repetition of the hour when, lying in the room where now slept Robert and Frances Dane, he had touched with an inward sense that brother who had fallen from the aeroplane, who had been jostled out of the body, but who lived! Surely the life was not quite that of the old life, though surely built from that; certainly Curtin might not fully understand until he, too, slipped the body. Yet there was life and living. He had not experienced that hour again, and he had tried doubting if he had ever experienced it. But doubt did not prove to be a going proposition.Memory smiled it down. Yet the experience had not been repeated, or rather what had come had diffused itself in the wide awakening of these Sweet Rocket weeks. Nor did its distinctiveklangreturn to-night. There was not the same white keenness. That which beamed about him now was more like that which Marget had spoken of on the summerhouse steps. Not one now, but many of his dead; not the human only, but the flower and the tree, the bird and the beast, the scene, the water, land and sky. "The old and sweet is here, but chosen, redeemed, gathered up, understood, become immortal! And we have had it all the time. It has been here all the time! Just as we had electricity and did not know it."

He fell asleep, rocked by the waves of a sunny sea of love and home and kindred.

Major Linden spent two days at Sweet Rocket, chiefly sitting upon the porch in the sunshine or walking about the place, sometimes in company, sometimes alone, but never, Curtin noticed, with an old man's look of loneliness, though he thought that at times before this Major Hereward would have shown that loneliness. But now there was vigor in him, vigor and interest and life. "If they are here, living for me as I for them, talking to me and I talking to them—it is the strangest thing what life does when it comes!" His laughter had a clear and happy ring. "I had thought of all kinds of solutions! And here it is, the needle threaded, while I was still looking for it in the haystack!" He stood beneath the oak he had planted almost sixty years ago. "Phil is here. Trying, wasn't it, Phil, when I said, 'Oh, fancy!' or, 'It's just Wilmot Hereward talking to himself!'"

When he met Linden on the porch he said: "Richard, if it's so with those folk whom we so promptly insisted hadn't any reality in them, isn't it so all over? When I'm pondering Bobwho's in England, or when I'm thinking of nothing in particular and in he walks into mind and affection—"

"Yes. It is part of the same truth. It all rests on the oneness of Being. That is why you must in some wise grasp that Oneness first. A time will come where there will be no saying 'My brother Dick,' or 'Bob in England,' because they and Wilmot Hereward and all others will have advanced beyond all such divisions. But on the road there you will meet many a fair power!"

The old man went the next morning back to Oakwood in his battered car. He went alone and not alone, with a peaceful face.

In the afternoon Anna and Curtin, Drew and the two Danes, walked down the river, in among the partly forested, partly grassy hills that here closed the valley. Indian summer had now stolen over the land. The air hung smoky amethyst, and still as still! No motion was in the fallen leaves, the birds sailed stilly by, the stubble fields dreamed, the river sang low. Wood smoke clung in the nostril. Turning, coming homeward, the brick house and yellowed pillars stood pictured. They passed through the orchard and by a small cider mill. Zinia, on the back porch, poured for each out of an amber pitcher an amber glassful. "Was-hael!" said Drew, and lifted the glass. Curtin caught from memory the answering phrase,"Drink-hael!" A shaft of wonder, like a gleam of light, touched them all with strange fingers. Something trembled in the air. If it said aught it said, "So Earth begins tolivePoetry!" Drew set down the cup with a sharp, clear sound. "Life, everlasting life!" he said. "I see it now! We have always lived!"

Again evening in the old parlor, the fire and music, Tam lying beside Linden, Marget seated by Anna Darcy. Robert Dane spoke. "This finding ourselves in all and all in us, this lifting the all into a mighty I, this is it behind the slowly accelerating movements of the ages, behind all efforts for freedom, for knowledge, for interchange and intercourse, swifter and swifter, subtler and subtler intercourse—this is it?"

"Yes. Behind a hundred shapes of dawn."

"Effort does not cease?"

"No. But effort, too, is finer and far more powerful. You act now from within upon the within."

"To touch through and through that we are one! Hercules's labor isn't in it!"

"Yet it is done and to be done. Find me if you can an individual to-day who has not some dim perception of it, or who is not in some wise acting toward it! Even the most unpromising—look and you will see! It is so tremendous, that finding, it runs through every fiber. We can cut out no pattern, but we move from light to light, from love to love!"

In her room that night, when she had put out the lamp, Anna Darcy, lying in bed, watched the firelight on wall and ceiling. A cricket chirped, she could hear the river. Her visit to Sweet Rocket was ending. "Only it will never end; it is immortal within me!"

She saw how all life interlocked, how shock to one was taken up by the whole, how joy to one thrilled through all. "What we call space is Being; what we call time is our own Story, our colored, toned lastingness! Give and take, forever and forever, forever and forever! Find lovely things to give, and from the other side of us take lovely things, lovelier and lovelier! Know thyself—know thyself—know Thyself. 'If ye do it unto one, the least of these, ye do it unto Me.' 'And all we made One.'"

The walls of the room disappeared. Anna Darcy, a slight, worn, teaching woman, sixty years old, vanished or altered. There was wide life, land and sea, deep life that did not talk in births and deaths, lofty life that said, "Better than this wave even, shall you know!"

It was Strength, it was Peace, it was Wisdom and Balm.

Across the hall Robert Dane lay thinking. In his youth he had the passion of a Shelley for a regenerate world. Older, the vision dulled, and yet he worked on doggedly, heroically, one with thousands of others breaking and making a road for the feet of Coming Man. He workedheroically, never sparing himself, a devoted life. Sometimes the gleam shone fair before him, oftener mists made it faint, sometimes he lost it. Then it shone again. He worked on. To-night, lying here at Sweet Rocket, his youth came back, but higher, fuller, wiser! He saw what might be done, what was doing. He saw the interrelated roads and the travelers upon them, the hosts of travelers. A vision came to him in the night. His body lay very still, but he himself saw clearly a great thing.

There was a City that was country also, and sea and land and sky, that was a world, harmonious, great, not a dead thing, not unintellectual, but living, living with a vast fervor and beauty and interest and knowledge, throwing out even, it might be, silver lines toward a world yet more light, more fervent, more living! But it was there, all that he could now image of body and spirit, mind and soul's desire:

He saw like a pale film another city that was pale and sorrowful to this. And he saw that city, as it were, send out itself, by rivers and seas and roads, thousands and thousands of paths, upon a journey to the other. There was hardly a point—truly he thought there was not any point—that did not travel. So many living beings, so many ships or rafts, caravans or solitary travelers to that Desired Haven! All going, some ahead, some behind, but all going. The pale and sorrowful city wasmoving into that other, and brightening as it moved. That other was drawing it, steadily, steadily! He felt it like a loadstone; he felt it like a mother calling home.

The vision passed, but there was left Assurance. He lay still in the starry night. The mind kept up an underhumming with words like "reintegration," "superconsciousness," but the spirit dealt only with the bliss of a great coming to itself. He slept at last, and his sleep was dreamless and profoundly renewing.

"It is the flowering land, it is the music land. You go to it through every moment and incident and encounter of the day. You read, and it is behind the words. You think, and it smiles through. It is the Higher Us that resolves the discords and reaps the fields. Experience it once, and it is miracle and wonder; experience it twice, and you say, 'Columbus was not the only discoverer!' Experience it thrice, and you work for it day and night! You yourself, drawing yourself out of the old man and the old house. Read 'The Chambered Nautilus.'"

"It is religion—"

"It always has been Religion."

"And the gloom and storm of our day?"

"It isnotgloom, it isnotstorm. It is the pains of growth. Feel the epic and voyage that it is!... Every proper and general noun in all dictionaries now and to come is my name, as it is yours. Every verb is my doing, as it is yours. The use of language, use anddis-use, is mine as it is yours—"

They were walking in the orchard beneath the apple trees, whose leaves were slow to fall.There had been, this morning, a heavy frost. The garden flowers were going, the creeper over Mimy's house had shed its scarlet leaves, but held its dark-blue berries. The heavens hung a blue crystal. The air had the cool of mountain water.

It was the day when Anna Darcy must leave Sweet Rocket. After dinner Daniel and the phaeton and Marget would take her to Alder to the north-going train. Now, with Marget, she went the round of the place, saying good-by. They had been to Mimy's, and had talked to Mancy at the barn. "Come again!" said Mancy. "But you ain't really going, you know! Sweet Rocket will hold you, and you'll hold Sweet Rocket."

They came by the kitchen. Mimy was singing:

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