Chapter VI

Now I speak of Miriam and myself when we were ten--and eleven--and twelve--and thirteen. Even so, how we can divide from all the rest--take ourselves out of painting, canvas and frame, swim away, two waves of the sea, rise and float off, two violins, from the orchestra? The orchestra and the sea and the painting, canvas and frame, are Miriam and me.

But we still explain the new by the old....

I cannot remember when, at Restwell or Flowerfield, I first made the acquaintance of my cousin Miriam. We must have been very young children. Casting back, I have the feeling of having been always with her.

In the days before we went to Madam Black, in the Flowerfield Octobers and the Restwell Junes, it was John, Miriam, and I. And always, in a measure, it has been John, Miriam, and I. It was so the four years at Flowerfield. But inside the triangle she and I paired with spontaneity, vigor, and thoroughness. The three of us roamed together, learned, worked, and played together. It was brothers and sister, a simple, deep familiarity, a give and take, impersonally sound. But at last, within the general one-and-threeness, Miriam and I sat on one throne.

She was oil to my fire and I was oil to hers. Our flames shot up, blended, coruscated, sang. All vases held more, every color had lamps behind it, every word rang with a doubled power. Salt, zest, importance, showered into everything undertaken. When we were together light penetrated farther, was intenser--warmth was warmer....

But now we were children still. Yet we would have said in those days, too, "I _understand_ Michael."--"I _understand_ Miriam."

We are in the barn at Flowerfield, in the hayloft. It is Saturday morning. There is a fine rain--we cannot go after walnuts as we had planned. We lie in a scooped-out place in the hay. Around us are shaggy, fragrant walls; before us, one great open square through which comes the moist air and gray light, and a dim, shifting view of autumn hills. The roof is the peaked roof of a brown tent. Against the beams are barn-swallows' nests, old and empty. The swallows are flying south. The hay smells dry and sweet. We have wine-sap apples and the _Arabian Nights_. John has, besides, a piece of red, fragrant cedar and a jack-knife. He is making a set of checkers. I am the story-teller. I tell the story of the "Fisherman and the Genie." John listens, carving his round checkers. Miriam, half buried in the hay, listens. We know all the fat blue volume from "Ali Baba" to "Sinbad." We have learned from Madam Black something of how to tell stories. We had rather tell them than read them from the book.

I tell. I have told the story before--we all know it--but I am on the spiral above the last telling, and the auditors are above the last listening. And it is a good story-telling day. The genie comes out of the bottle. "I see him," says Miriam, rising on her elbow. (The audience always interrupts, assists.) "He curls that way," she demonstrated with her free arm. "Thick and smoky! Round and round and up! He hides the sea.--There's the bottle. It's hard and round and small. It looks like an acorn under a tree."

John, whittling, nodded. "I reckon that fisherman's frightened! I reckon he's thinking he's let out Satan!"

"I tell you I _do_ see it!" said Miriam. She sat up, cross-legged, tailor fashion. Her hands rested on her knees. "But I'm safe! He can't get me. I'm everywhere."

"If you're everywhere you're right where the genie is. You're _him_," said John. "You're just seeing yourself."

The fisherman and the genie argue together. The fisherman seems about to meet destruction. Then his wits work and he gets the genie back into the bottle. When he lets him out again he is a reasonable quantity, a harnessed energy. He takes the fisherman into the apparent desert where is the strange pool in the midst of barrenness. The fisherman, having the clue to wealth, goes fishing and takes four fish, white, red, blue, and yellow.

Miriam's voice rises again. "I _see_ them. I know their names: Mussulman, Parsee, Christian, Jew!"

John again answers. "Of course you know them! If you didn't know the story, and then knew them, that would be something!"

"I couldn't know them unless I knew them. How could I? But I know them higher and deeper and faster and louder. I know them like that!" She began to clap her hands together. "Mussulman, Parsee, Christian, Jew!"

"Now he takes them to the Sultan," directed John. I continue to tell the story and we go on to the King of the Black Isles who was half man and half marble.... The barn and the slanting rain and the warmth and the fragrance of the hay, the smell of the cedar, the taste of the wine-saps leave the screen.

It is March. The robins are here. The plowed earth pleases them. The maples are fire-tipped, the bloodroot blooms. A roaring wind goes around the house and shakes the trees. There is a swing fastened to a great outstretching bough of the tulip-tree. The bough is high, the ropes of the swing are long, the board is wide. Miriam and I stand here, swinging. We have gotten a great start, we go higher and higher, we bend together, rise together, the wind is in our hair. We go up, we go out, the leaves swirl up after us, we are as high as the high windows. We are drawn back, we rush forward, high, high. The wind is strong about us, there is delight, there is thrill! We shut our eyes. The swing seems to have left the tulip-tree. We seem to be going away, away, through the air. We are high as a cloud and far as the mountains. Flowerfield quits us--we are in the air--there is not even the swing. We are birds flying.... We are one bird, flying, great-winged. The space we are in cracks wide. There is other space. We feel exhilaration that becomes a pounding thrill, a huge chord vibration. Some one calls us from the house. We come back. We are swinging high, that is all, up and out, but locked still to the tulip-tree.

It is yet March, and cold, with a sudden spear from the north. There is a great wood fire in the school-room, burning at dusk. Miriam and I sit on two hassocks, on either side the hearth, watching the fire. Catherine and Lewis are in the room, but they seem to be quiet. John sprawls on the hearth-rug, reading _Ivanhoe_. Madam Black, in the parlor, two rooms away, is playing Beethoven. Miriam and I sit very still. The fire.... Pine feeds it. The flames bend, roar together, rise superb. Suddenly, again, as in the swing, Miriam and I flow into one. The "she" and "I," the "twoness," come into "weness." But the "weness" itself--and that is the increase--springs into a new "Iness." Something, flashing together, uses the "twoness," but as we use arms or hands. More than that, the very room comes in. The fire, the logs that burn, the forest just behind them--the walls and the furniture--Catherine and Lewis by the window, John and Madam Black come in. The music comes in. It is quite simple, but very satisfying. Catherine and Lewis, by the window, fall out over their box of colors. And there is again the school-room fire, and Miriam and Michael sitting upon hassocks.

It is the same springtime. We are thirteen. Madam Black is going. Presently I shall return to Restwell. October will come, but it will not bring me to Flowerfield. I am going to Hilltop Academy, in Whitechurch. That is an old school, reconstituted, invigorated, said to be full of promise. John is going, too. He will live at Restwell as I have lived at Flowerfield. The old South is behind us, and around us are the middle 'seventies. Miriam's going to school is of less importance than is John's. She will have lessons at home with Aunt Kate. In a year or two, perhaps, she may go to Richmond, to a school there, staying with the Warringers.

There is a hillside of dark trees, white pine and hemlock, sloping steeply to a brook that here proceeds with a deep, sliding stillness, and here plunges from ledge to ledge like a white-maned water-steed. John, Miriam, and I come to this place. We have been gathering wake-robins on the other side the hill, where there is a sunnier wood. Then we pass around the shoulder to the shaded side, cool and old. We sit down on the brown-scented earth, clean save for a mat of needles and fallen cones. We have great bunches of the wake-robins, the pink and the white. We put them down on the cool earth in the deep shade. John and I are going to Restwell in a week. Meantime the three of us are pursuing one of our inner travels. We lift, at will, from the great book and reservoir of otherselves, _compagnons de voyage_. Our present scene is set in the island of the Swiss Family Robinson. But the characters who figure are from other provinces. Ourselves of course, Uncas from _The Last of the Mohicans_; Gurth from _Ivanhoe_; a Knight and a Lady, first found in the _Faery Queen_; Ariel, Oberon, and Titania; and Ulysses the Greek wanderer. I think, to-day, that it is a good choice and suited to an isle of all climes and products.

We take up our adventures where we left them, over the hilltop. They have their reality--the reality of music, of dream, of play, of lacework, of dance, of art. Our bodies rest under the pine-trees, but the image-making self has swooped to the island. There we follow Uncas through a wood that spreads as far and climbs as high as we desire. Uncas finds directions, Gurth fells the trees. Ulysses--and we--make whatever plan there lies ahead; Uriel, with moth wings, flies beside us--but Oberon and Titania only look out doubtfully from ferny recesses. We are making a road for the Knight and the Lady. Eventually we mean to build a castle--seven castles, like those the King of China built for his daughter. When we need to expand the island we expand it. When we need more and different persons, hey, presto! in they tumble! Oh, life of Uncas and of Gurth--life of Ariel--life of Ulysses--life of the Knight and the Lady!