Chapter XXI

Catherine and Lewis were away--Lewis at the university, Catherine at Elton School. John met me in town and drove out in the phaeton. John and Amy Page would soon marry; he beamed on me with a full-orbed serenity. He was always serene, big, quiet, humorous, fond of children and all animals. He had interior mass. In my own fashion I considered most people by this. Mrs. Sayre had it. Maxwell had it--interior mass with a dry, clear desert sweep and light. Gamaliel had it, with a keen, north-temperate clime. My mother had possessed it, and to a somewhat lesser degree my grandfather. Aunt Sarah, too, but with her it was moonlighted. Major Dallas and Aunt Kate did not lack it. Madam Black had great mass. Others whom I knew possessed it, some more, some less. Miriam and I, wherever we were ranked, were twinned....

Flowerfield shone before us. "Miriam comes to-morrow." John had a fondness for reminiscence. Each time he brought richer appreciation of the "isness" of what has been. "I was thinking as I came along of our old days in the barn--and nutting--and all over! Weren't we--aren't we--happy?"

The house greeted me. I seemed to merge into it, it into me. That night I had my talk with Uncle John and Aunt Kate. Africa, and away assuredly for several years, and dangers to life and limb as great as if I were going to war--my profession and the possibilities of advance here at home in abeyance--Miriam and a long engagement.... It was all true, and yet related to a line of superseded truths, part of a truth that seemed to me to be dimming before truth in swifter, lighter planes. And Uncle John and Aunt Kate, though they tried to be conventionally prudent, careful, anxious, were themselves away from the old line.

What I wished of widened experience that was now to me as food--what I dimly felt of powers that might not, but yet might at last lead me from the physical into other types of engineering--what I could get into words of that road wherever we went between Miriam and me, and of what I knew to be her deep consent to my going--of all this I managed to give to Uncle John and Aunt Kate enough to turn doubt into some fullness of assent. We sat around a lightwood fire--John, too, was there--and it chanced to be in the dear old school-room. We talked of Miriam. Her training was done; she had taken an assistant superintendent's place in a small, just-established hospital. Her father had been on to Baltimore. "She's loved and trusted--she's a fine child!" Her mother made a little, murmuring sound. "Miriam...."

She came next day. I knew that they watched us together and were satisfied. John said, "You two lay in fairy cradles!"

The spring was around and through Miriam and me--a magical spring.

She stood just on the near side of tall, rightly slender, with a gipsy, free, lithe vigor. She had a wonderful brow, deep eyes that said the happiest things, a short, well-cut nose, a mouth generously wide and expressive. Her skin had delicate wine hues, faintest browns. Her hair was thick and dark brown with beautiful tendrils. No one with a poor nature could have owned her speaking voice. Her hands were long, strong, and fine. Watching them, one felt the movements they had made, the things they had modeled, the growth of ages, the fine, perpetual change from far-sunken tentatives, through all apprenticeships, all artisanries, crafts, to artist's knowledge.

We went here, we went there, we went to Wakerobin Hill. We stretched ourselves upon the good brown earth, we smelled the pine and hemlock. We laughed--we were so glad; we understood in such full draughts ... though we knew that all the rivers and fountains on earth could not hold the first spring cup of the perfected, the ultimate understanding. The blue air floated within, without, above our wood, the birds sang and rejoiced in their wings, and we, too, sang and rejoiced in our wings.

She said, "Don't you know that we really meet--really, really, really! for all that you may be under the earth in a mine and I may be walking a hospital ward?"

"We meet so really that the preoccupation is to strengthen, strengthen, strengthen reality."

"Yes, I know.... I deliberately try."

"And I."

"Sometimes there is a beautiful terror at what might come!"

"I mean the terror to lose itself in the beauty."

"And the goodness--the beauty and the wisdom."

"Yes, just."

"There couldn't be beauty unless there was wisdom ... goodness."

"The false Florimel--and the true Florimel."

She laughed. "I thought that first!"

"I always did take the word from you like that."

"And I from you."

We smelled the rich and dark hemlock, we listened to the birds, we sailed with the white clouds across the brilliant blue. "All through earth, everywhere, there are surely centers where is beginning a marvelous knitting together.... There is coming to consciousness the planetary spirit.... For us how exquisite that we guess it together!"

"Where will it stop? ... Oh, it will not stop!"

"No."

She sighed. She put out her hands to me. We rested against the hemlock bank, our hands clasped, our faces touching. "There will be a sweetness, even in great light, in remembering night--in remembering when we were little!"

"We'll not lose that, either. We'll not lose anything that we want to keep. We shall taste it as we never did, as we never could before!"

We rested silent, and the magnificence of the spring was all around us.

We were walking the next day in the meadow. There flowed here a small, clear stream, with pebbly margins, and small, overhanging sycamores and willows, with mint, marsh-marigold, and violets, with soldier blackbirds coming and going. We had walked in silence. It had always been with Miriam and me that we did not need to talk. We had been going, as it were, in a brown study, a reverie. Imperceptibly this deepened.

I do not know in any detail how it was. What will one day be general powers are mysterious yet, fleeting in manifestation, withdrawing ere one can say, "It lightens!" Those who perceive, perceive imperfectly, far and far away imperfectly, it is evident. And they cannot well tell what they perceive. They say laboriously one--and one--and one--and one--and one--and so on, with one and one. They cannot say--they have not yet the word--their tongue cannot say it and none has ears to hear it--they cannot say TEN! And then a certain number begin to see "ten"--to try to say it--and their own and the tribe's ancient vocabulary is not well fitted. And evidently there is great variety upon which the new door opens. It is "Ten"--but on that plane may be found a world of speeds and powers and goods. All sail from the old world to the new world, and all have worked their way, but they sail in divers crafts and land in divers zones. There are evidently all manner of adventure, slight and great--but all get out of space as we knew it before we said "Ten," and out of time as we knew it. For Miriam and me I will say that we had begun, though palely, faintly, childishly enough, to realize the world of imagination, of memory, and of inference. I do not suppose that there are roof, floor, or walls to that world.

There was the meadow and the sliding stream and the smell of mint. We were moving in a brown study, a reverie, aware, as profoundly we always were aware, of each other, but with all surface spray and glancing subdued--silent, smooth, running deep.... Our bodies came automatically, as it were, to rest. There lay about us stones warmed by the sun, with green grass growing around them. We sat down. Our bodies fell into attitudes of quiet, of repose, all their myriads of living points working on in some deep harmony of their own, the spirit of the hive taking care of that.... But on upper levels Miriam and I broke bounds.

We passed into an experience common to both, rememberable by both when we came back to the sunlit meadow by Flowerfield and to what we had called, and called only, actuality. Now we never again called it the only actuality.

The bond that we broke was that of narrowed space and narrowed time. We came out of prison and we said, "Why should we have stayed in that one room?" In our prisons we had learned our book. We knew in some wise--in stronger wise, I must think, than did most of our acquaintance--how to imagine and remember, how to draw ends together, and like to like, how to ponder, brood, speculate, how at last to desire and to will.... So one day, suddenly, things began to be put into practice.

We were away from the Flowerfield meadow. We left it as sailors might leave ships at anchor while they themselves went into the strange port.... There came a reinforced sense of being, of very rapid, unobstructed motion, perception in sweeps instead of in points. We were at once mingled and apart. We were one larger self--we felt, as it were, the film that held us enveloped. We were one self, and yet at the moment's will moved Miriam and Michael. As we thought we traveled, as we imaged or remembered we saw, we heard, we touched. The concepted became the actually perceived. We were in the world of idea, grown vivid, solid, real. We were as babes there. Planes overlapped, powers were uneven; now we sank and now we swam. But all weakness given, yet had we left the ship, yet were we out of the dark tower.

Miriam and I stood in a city--it was Washington--we leaned upon the rail of the ironwork balcony of an ancient hotel. It was evening, coral-lighted. The long and broad shadow of a sycamore dappled all the street. The air breathed warm, still, striped with melody and with romance. We were there as we had been and as we had not been. "As it was" hung modeled, colored, understood by the larger now. Thought moved, we moved. We sat upon a bench under trees, in moonlight, before the white capitol.... This sufficed for moments--new moments of new time--of wonder, of the more than doubled beating life and interest. Then again that movement unobstructed, too swift for counting.... We were not in Washington, we were beside heaped sand and the waves of the Atlantic. We were girl and boy by the waves, and we were man and woman, and we were something beyond man and woman, inclosing, knowing, enjoying much.... We knew vaguely that we were the ocean and the sand and the sky, just as well as the boy and girl, the man and woman. We knew, though hesitatingly, dimly, that they were our Ideas, that we had set a stage. In and through that heightened rate of vibration, with that doublement of energy, our ideas became solid, three-dimensional.

In the Flowerfield meadow a soldier blackbird flew to the stream to drink and alighted at the feet of the two sitting there. Ere one could say or think, "The lightning goes!" we were back. The bird flew away before beak had touched water. We saw him alight again a hundred feet away. We moved, we passed hands over eyes. "Michael!"--"Miriam!" "What happened?"

"We went into the past together. Into the time dimension where we keep all things. We went together--"

"The ocean sounds still in my ears!"

"The capitol---the balcony of the hotel--"

"Yes, of course. The pink sky behind the sycamore.... Oh, the strength, the abounding music! ... Now I feel shrunken."

We rose--walked. "Do you think we can do that again? ... There is something tremendous coming.... Oh, how could the world ever think that this was all!"

"We shall try again. Not now--"

"No. The door opened, then the door shut."

We moved up the meadow in silence. The little stream rippled, the willows stirred in the spring breeze, the blackbirds chattered. Far off, cocks were crowing, a dog barking. We smelled the perfume of flowers, of young leaves. She said: "All this is vivid--but that memory is as present as is this meadow! There, in effect, is the sea, there the capitol, the balcony--"

"That is because the experience was so strong! The memory is in proportion. We doubled desire, pooled energy. Now the very memory has what until just now we called 'reality.' And besides that--" I looked around me. "Miriam! isn't the day deeper, more vivid, more resounding?"

She stopped short. "Yes! Oh, we keep something of the strength and the glory! We made a strange step--and it counts all around.... And oh, it all feels so blessedly natural!"

"Miriam! a part of the world is passing beyond old powers into new. We are somehow in the ranks of that expeditionary force. I don't know just where--away at the end, perhaps--but there, there together! Miriam-Michael--Michael-Miriam! Whatever is coming, there's that bliss!"

"Yes, bliss!" She paused, she looked at the land and the sky, and then we gazed into each other's eyes. "Everything deepens--" Suddenly we put arms around each other, strained together, kissed. "Oh, Love--Oh, Love!"