CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Day after day Anne sat at rest in the vast silence. Far back in space and time she had waved a last good-bye up the black funnel of the staircase to Hilda, holding Rogie, for, in the end, Belle had prevailed and Anne had come alone. Trains and stages and the creaking wagon of old Timothy Potter had brought her from the world below and laid her in the heart of this little grassy meadow. Ringed by mountain peaks it lay, small and still, at the top of the world.
In the morning the sun rose with sudden gladness, not with the slow reluctance of the lowlands, but as if forced by its own energy and desire from the blackness of night. All day it poured its warmth into the meadow and when it went, yielding to night in a blaze of color; it called good-by in brilliant purple and crimson and went as gladly as it had come. In the afternoons a busy little wind came down from the snowy peaks, went its round of inspection over the lush green grass of the meadow, chatted with the little brook, whispered to the trees, saw all was well and slipped back again into the granite gorges. The stars came out, not with furious twinkling and effort to reach through to men so far below, but, with still gold, they moved forward into night.
It seemed to Anne that she made no definite motion of her own volition. The day came, lifted her into the perfect rhythm of its rotation, carried her through the clear warm morning, the still gold-filled afternoon, deposited her gently in the deep black peace of night.
This was the silence she had sought, the perfect peace. No artificial formula summoned it. No bodily posture propitiated it. It was there, deep, all pervading, everlasting, to one's need.
Perhaps, in incalculable space, other worlds were being made and destroyed. But this world was finished. In the marvelous perfection of its completion, the beginning was impossible to visualize, an ending inconceivable. No force could ever move again those granite peaks, melt the glacial ice, upheave the profound permanence of that tiny grassy meadow. It was done; perfectly done and left in peace.
Even old Timothy Potter and his wife were part of this profundity of accomplishment. They could never have been other than they were. Through the years of close companionship they had grown to look alike. It was impossible to imagine them ever having been younger, slimmer, more agile than they were. They must always have been together since the beginning of time, stout and quiet, with their understanding smile, their white hair, the little wrinkles of happiness about their kindly eyes.
As a separate human unit, apart from the spirit of the universe, she no longer existed. She was alone with old Timothy and Mary, his wife, at the very center of the all-living; so deep within the heart of Life that words were not needed. They communicated in silence like the earth and grass and trees. They were not bodies, opposed in their humanity to an exterior spirit without. They were part of the whole, as grass, the gnarled cedars growing in the clefts of the granite mountains, and the brook bubbling through the little meadow, were parts. Sitting in utter stillness Anne felt this engulfing Unity, drawing her gently down into the single purpose that ran through the granite mountains, the dancing brook, the rustling leaves, through her own body, and linked them all, each to the other.
Now, a poem of Wordsworth that she had thought silly and sentimental in the days of college extension, came back to her with new meaning, and often, sitting on the porch after the early supper, watching the day's gorgeous farewell to the granite peaks, Anne whispered slowly:
To her fair works did Nature linkThe human soul that through me ran;And much it grieved my heart to thinkWhat Man has made of Man.
To her fair works did Nature linkThe human soul that through me ran;And much it grieved my heart to thinkWhat Man has made of Man.
To her fair works did Nature linkThe human soul that through me ran;And much it grieved my heart to thinkWhat Man has made of Man.
To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What Man has made of Man.
The rest of the stanzas she had forgotten, except the three final lines of all:
If such be Nature's Holy plan,Have I not reason to LamentWhat Man has made of Man?
If such be Nature's Holy plan,Have I not reason to LamentWhat Man has made of Man?
If such be Nature's Holy plan,Have I not reason to LamentWhat Man has made of Man?
If such be Nature's Holy plan,
Have I not reason to Lament
What Man has made of Man?
Far off beyond distant Dana, rising in ice-capped majesty above the last range of mountains, hate and discord and confusion were positive qualities. Men struggled against each other, ideals clashed, faiths oppressed. Even love fought for its place and in the end surrendered. There was nothing sure, nothing positive, nothing motionless like this in its own perfection. It was all distorted, ugly and forever battling.
Sitting on the porch, after an early supper, watching the day's farewell to the granite peaks, Anne's eyes filled with tears. If only she had Rogie with her she would never leave this peace. The world beyond could fight its futile battles. If only Rogie were with her, nothing would be lacking. Undisturbed by the world's confusion, they would live out their lives, and sink, at last into the stillness of the earth.
What did it matter if they made no place for themselves among men; if no one ever heard of them; the ambitions of men were such pitiful things?
In the arrogance of his conceit, man had appropriated to himself the pinnacle of creation. In his fury of effort he rushed about over the surface of the great, still earth, erecting his little cities and civilizations, setting up his little philosophies for the guidance of others. His ideals, his religions, his pretentious systems of thought, so futilely abstruse and complicated, were like the rules and regulations for the guiding of traffic in public places: "Keep to the right"; "turn here"; "cross there"; vast in their pretension of public usefulness; needed because of the confusion created by himself. In the peace of the mountains his efforts had less cohesion, less purpose than the movements of the ants, running here and there, making long circuits about some tiny obstacle. So man made circuits through his own philosophies in a stupendous effort to reach the truth which he had lost in the involved processes of his own journey to it. Anne could almost see these myriads of tiny individuals rushing about over the surface of life, jostling, shouting, getting in each other's way, going down, being trampled, struggling to rise, each shouting his own foolish solution of the problem of life.
When Anne had been a month in the mountains she wrote to Belle asking her to find some way of sending Rogie. Belle wrote back promising to do so, even to bring him herself, if no other way opened, but the days slipped again to weeks and Rogie did not come.
Anne grew restless. The peace was disturbed now by this need. At the end of the second month she wrote more insistingly, but this time Belle did not answer.
The leaves began to fall. In the mornings the grass of the meadow was white with frost. The nights were clear, black and cold now with a kind of thrill in the coldness, as if the air were tingling with hidden excitement.
Anne's restlessness increased. Something was creeping upon the world from the places hidden beyond all puny human knowledge.
She no longer sat for hours on the porch, absorbed in the peaceful stillness, but moved about the house or went for long walks. In the evenings she sat with Mary and Timothy, and, although she rarely listened to the words, she liked to hear Timothy read from one of their few books. He read slowly with long pauses instead of comment. These pauses were like caves into which the old people went silently, hand in hand, to look for the deeper truths hidden in words. At the end of these pauses they smiled quietly at each other and the reading began again.
It was one evening in mid-September that a nervous motion of Anne's disturbed the reading and Timothy looked over the steel rim of his spectacles with kindly interest:
"You're worried."
"I'm sorry," Anne apologized. "I didn't mean to interrupt. I was thinking about something else."
Mary Potter leaned across the red-checked cloth and laid her hand on Anne's.
"You were thinking about the baby. Isn't your sister going to send him?"
"I don't know. I can't make it out and I feel so helpless. You won't be going down to Milton again for mail for weeks, will you?"
"I hadn't thought of going again this year," Timothy took off his glasses now and laid them on the closed book. "I don't usually go after the middle of September. Soon the road'll be closed even to Milton."
"Closed!"
"In a few weeks now the snow'll begin."
"Nobody can get in after the snow begins," the old woman explained.
"Nothing can get through!"
"Nothing gets through after the snow begins. Pretty soon it'll come and we'll be shut in tight till Spring."
Anne rose quickly. "Shut—in—tight till Spring!"
Timothy nodded and his eyes lit as if in welcome of the snow.
"Oh, it's wonderful then," he said softly. "You think it's quiet and peaceful now, but it ain't nothing to what it is then—between the storms. You'll love it, white and so still you can almost hear God movin' round. And then the storms." He rose, the first restless motion Anne had ever seen him make. "They're wonderful. Trees that have stood for centuries go crashing down. Mountain sides slip away." His eyes blazed as if he were watching the Creator at work. "When Spring comes, it's a new world. Me and Mary go round like children, don't we, mother, looking up things to see if they're there yet. Last Spring that little creek down there came a~bubbling up to look at us, just like a new baby, laughing and smiling through the snow. It weren't there the year before. A storm cut the channel and there it was dancing and laughing as if it had just been waiting to surprise us. Wasn't it, mother?"
The old woman nodded. "And do you remember that spruce we used to call 'The Hunchback?'" She turned to Anne. "It was so old and twisted and it never seemed happy, like other spruces; they're always so glad and straight. We used to wish a storm would take him, for his own sake, and one winter that gorge yonder opened and when Spring came, he was gone."
"Gone!" Under cover of the snow, cliffs slid away, gorges opened, century-old trees disappeared!
"Yes. Winter makes great changes up here in the mountains. Down in the cities you think winter is a time when everything stops and rests and nothing moves. But up here we see it moving. It's like watching God fix things up, cut out a bit here and there, tinker round making improvements. Nothing ain't ever fixed to stay forever. It stands to reason it can't be. There wouldn't be any life to things that's fixed like that. Things keep moving and changing. Why, that doesn't frighten you, does it?" he asked curiously at the look in Anne's eyes. "There ain't nothing to be afraid of, Mrs. Barton."
"I'm—not afraid," Anne whispered. "Only I—don't want it to change. I want it to stay like this—perfect always, quiet and still."
Timothy shook his head and smiled gently. "Oh, no, it wouldn't be good that way. You wait and see. You'll love it. Why, me and mother's often spoke about it—when we go, we'd like to be out in a big storm and just be swept down. Not be sick and helpless for a long time, just have God throw us in along of some change He's making and use us again in another way, wouldn't we, ma?"
The old woman nodded. "It would be a grand way to go. I suppose we'd get there in the end just the same, even if we was buried in one of them tight little city cemeteries under a marble slab like people put over the dead as if they wanted to keep them shut up in their little boxes forever; or even if we was burned like some people hold with, we'd get back into the earth somehow. But folks have their preference, and me and pa'd like to go, as he says, in some storm that'd sweep us out clean and sudden into the midst of things."
Into the midst of things!
For a few moments Anne stood motionless, her hands gripping the back of the chair, staring at the old people, who, lost in the coming of the snow, seemed already to have slipped away together—into the midst of things. Then, without a word, she went quickly out of the room and upstairs to her own.
It was very cold but she threw the window wide and leaned far out into the night.
In the full moonlight, the peak of Dana rose, the burnished helmet of a giant warrior leading the mountains into the coming battle. In the black secrecy of the granite gorges the courier wind ran swiftly with its orders. The trees took counsel together. Everything was whispering, moving, preparing. Nothing was motionless any longer in the security of its own permanence. Everything was awaiting now the fulfillment of the law beyond its power to anticipate, change, or deviate from its own purpose.
In a few weeks now the snow would come. Mountain sides would slip away. Giant trees go crashing down. New rivers open. God would tinker with the world! Make his changes, form it to his further plan.
Nothing was completed beyond change. Nothing was still. From rocks to man, the force moved, making, changing, destroying, recreating, fashioning to—what? Chaos or perfection.
There was no permanent silence and peace apart from motion, from the ever-changing march of the universe on—to what? A purpose hidden from finite sense. A scale so vast that its first note was lost in the birth of time, its last in infinity.
And she, deaf to this tremendous harmony, had stood scornful of all but the small, thin note of her own personal security! The chord of the world's pain, so clear to Roger and Black Tom, she had not heard. Of the perfect scale so clear to Charlotte Welles, she had not grasped a note. The joy of life that thrust through her mother's muddled thinking was a far sweeter note than her own blind assurance of superiority. Even the sensuous longing of Merle for physical beauty was a finer understanding of the purpose of life than her own.
The moon had moved on across the world, the little meadow lay in darkness, when Anne closed the window at last and went to bed.
A week later, the first snow fell. It came in the night and Anne waked to a white world so white and still that the very stillness throbbed with its own intensity. Anne stood for hours staring out at the snow-filled hollows. Under that thick white, perhaps change was already beginning, a little opening here, a little closing here, the small first notes of the great orchestra tuning for the vast symphony.
In the night the snow fell again, thicker, whiter, heavier.
Early in the morning Anne sought Mary Potter.
"I can get through, can't I? If I go at once?"
"Yes. But there won't be many days longer. The snow's going to be heavy this year. It's going to be a wild winter. Did you hear that crash last night? It was that cedar you say looks like an old woman with a basket. It snapped clear off like——"
"If I pack to-day, can Mr. Potter get me down to Miller's? The stage will take me to Raymond."
The old woman was making bread, her arms deep in the clinging dough. But as Anne spoke, she scraped the dough from them and came quietly round the table.
"You're going back and, do you know, I'm glad. We'll miss you. When we heard you was coming we were kind of upset only there didn't seem to be any good reason why you shouldn't. But now, we'll miss you. You fit in. I guess me and pa got to think we were the only people that like it quiet and I suppose there's lots—even down there." She always spoke so of the world beyond the mountains, "down there," with a nod and a little gesture out and downward.
"Yes. I think that they want quiet down there more than they want anything in the whole world. They look and look for it and—some find it. The world is getting noisier and faster, and yet there are more and more people looking for—Stillness." She smiled. "Churches even advertise it in the papers—half hours and quarter hours of Silence."
"Well! Down there they'd make a business out of most anything, wouldn't they? Advertising silence! Why, it's about the only thing everybody can have."
"Yes—but we don't find that out. We're all making such a noise looking for it."
Mary Potter wiped one hand on her apron and laid it on Anne's shoulder. "I guess you won't make much noise looking for it now, will you?"
"No—I don't—think I will. I'll try not to, anyhow."
"I'd like to have seen the baby. His picture's awful cute."
"He is cute. And as good as gold."
"Maybe you'll want to come back in the Spring and can bring him with you?"
Anne's lip trembled. "I'm never coming back again, Mrs. Potter, unless—I don't have to come."
The old woman did not answer for a moment and then she nodded. "I know. Well, I don't think, my dear, you'll ever have to come again. You—don't—lose it—once you really get it up here."
She patted Anne's shoulder, but Anne suddenly threw her arms round the other and kissed her. The old woman's eyes lit with pleasure. She said nothing. She rarely did when she understood.