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THE  KINGDOM  IN  THE  SKY

FOREWORD

I would not have any one who is so good as to read this book think I conceive it to be adding a line either to the literature of belief or unbelief, or that the liberties I have taken with time and space seek any possible justification in the exactitudes of physical laws. Yet where there are such superlative happenings opened up to the modern eye and brain, surely one may, without offense, go farther in venturing upon marvels which differ from the real in kind, though not in degree, even if they are not susceptible of proof. As to this license of imagery, I have simply allowed myself to take refuge in a perhaps foolishly literal transcript of what might befall us when we leave this scene of our conflict and our nostalgia, for some not too remote and kindly refuge after death. We may not feel ourselves of a greatness to bear the burning lustre of those heavenly conceptions the prophets have chanted down to us. Suffer us therefore to stay for a little—if Eternity awes us over-much—in a habitat not too unlike the “hills of home.”

Alice Brown

I

It was a late afternoon in northern New England, with a significant hush in the hot air and thunder climbing up the sky. A farmhouse of harmonious dignity in bulk and line stood within the cool reach of shade cast by a row of elms at the west. Nothing could have looked more hospitable, in a silent way, than this austere dwelling-place, no longed-for refuge on an oasis in a burning desert: for it was simplicity itself, and the quiet of it promised an inviting solitude. You felt, as you came along the dusty road and up the perennial-bordered path to the door, that if you could lift the latch softly and go in, you would enter into an inheritance, which might become all your own. It would be assuaging to the heart as to tired feet and dust-filled throat; you would find there the unexpected, and it might prove the long desired as well.

How did it strike the young man and woman who approached its side door from the cart path that traversed the wide mowing at the west, a young man and woman from the motor ditched by its plunge from the knoll the cart path traversed? They were lithe young creatures, very good-looking yet not dressed for a lengthy trip, as something about them—their half excited, half jaded air—seemed to indicate. She, the tall, long-stepping girl, wore a shimmering green frock, with silver slippers, and her short hair was bound by a line of green, a leafy coronet an oread might have made for herself in the wood, and the young man was in outing shirt and white flannels. He also was hatless, red-haired, impetuous, not much given to thinking things over, but taking obstacles at a leap and wondering, in the instant before coming down, what his feet were likely to strike. He had been a very good young man always, in the years he had lived with his mother in Canada adding dutiful deeds one to another, as an accountant, before he should get away and achieve a man’s public standing in the States. He had a serviceable quality of brains under his red thatch, but he had not yet been called on to meet many of the pressing questions life has ready for good young men, and so far his impetuosity had served him sufficiently in enabling him to fall upon his difficulties and do them. He had not yet been done by them. These two came along in a loping progress, her hand in his, and in her demeanor a high exhilaration, as if she said: “It’s here at last.” She had wanted something overwhelmingly and it had come, and now, while they were racing up through Milton Blake’s meadow, the man all eagerness touched by a nervous sense that, although he was running away with another man’s wife, he wondered whether he was doing it in the approved way, the girl was wild with the gaiety of achieved adventure. She felt her dominance. She had done it all. She had smiled him into the madness which had made of him a person he did not know in himself, and manoeuvred his mind, by quick inevitable stages, into the scurry of flight. He was Terence Denny, absconding cashier of what can be known here as the Midas Bank, and she was Annette Selden, wife of Peter Selden, a playwright who had never been played, except in little theatres, and never would be on this earth. It was quite unnecessary, this madly passionate flight. Selden would never have detained a woman unwillingly his, even by the warning nip of thumb and finger on her wrist, but Annette was avid of wild drama as she heard it beating away under the surface of life. She had to break the shell of it and get at the living thing within. How would it behave in her cool questioning hands, this foolish innocence of unspoiled youth delivered into them? Disastrously, they were not running away from Selden only. They were running away from the bank, and the bag Terence carried in a desperate grasp, held what seemed to him a fortune in negotiable securities. He was not only aware of the mental chicanery the possession of the securities had cost him, but he was oddly alive to the bank’s resultant attitude. The Midas had, indeed, become, in his sensitized mind, an outraged entity, an aged gentleman who could point an accusing finger and wheeze flatly out: “Picked my pocket, have ye? I’ll be even with ye.”

Terence, when not under the urge of emotion, was an unimaginative person, and this picture of old Midas scared him the more for that. He was not used to writing on the wall, and the convex outline of old Midas had a minatory significance exceedingly distasteful to him. There were many bits of drama going on in his mind which he pretended not to hear, pages of memory he never turned, but when, in the wind of his dancing progress with Annette, they had fluttered open, he shuddered at the rubrication of their accusatory records. It would be unthinkable for him to rob the bank. Yet had he not been planning his secret campaign against it for as many weeks as, befuddled by Annette, he had doubted her allegiance to him? Why had he been working on that one line of putting his hand on the cash while he kept his records clear? Was it a game? Was it a clever accountant’s permissible dabbling in imaginative trickery he would scorn to commit in fact? When Annette had, with an art of her own, confided to him her weariness of city life, why had he suggested to her the possibility of flight from it, and with him? This last he had not emphasized: only flight, to the north, to Canada. And why did he tell her he had made due preparation in case he wanted to return there suddenly? Was it to suggest that she also prepared? No, none of these fanciful possibilities were ever meant to be true. He could have sworn to that. He was only allowing himself the dangerous diversion of thinking what might be, what often was in the case of some other fellow of his temptations and opportunities who did not happen to be a good young man. He had never done so much thinking about himself in his life as since he saw Annette. Again and again, he turned the pages of his past, to wonder over the chance that had brought him to her and again, in a simple honesty, over his unfitness for the worldly splendor that ought to be hers and must be his if he could ever climb to the dizziness of possessing her. But then, Terence was only a boy though in years he was a man, merely youth, yeast, bewilderment at the variety and dazzle of life. The calls of it! he had never guessed such calls were sounding. In his native town he had been known as a boy with a queer wizardry over figures, from the days when he confounded schoolmates with his dart ahead of them into the higher mathematics to the moment when, after his mother’s death, he had, again to the village wonder, been picked up by a keen-eyed city magnate on an enforced rest in the neighborhood, taken to New York and given a “place in a bank.” There his rise was rapid, commensurate with the benevolent fancy of his patron, but nobody, least of all his daily associates, knew how bewildering city life was to him while he tried to turn himself from a country boy into a man who “knew his way about.” And the inevitable step he had taken, after joining the other fellows in their standardized quests of pleasure, was toward Annette Selden. She was lovely to him, in an exotic way, but that was not all. She had singled him out. He had a significance for her. Amazing! And, never to be understood, but believed because she told him so, she needed him. They had met and danced together for a swift course of nights and he, under her sophisticated charm, had been roused to a tender championship by her implication of the loneliness implied by a husband pursuing the arts. She might, for all Terence knew of her, have been fighting domestic poverty, in spite of the comforts he saw about her when he was allowed to take her home, after their vivid evenings, to her conventional house. But how wistfully, how pathetically she questioned the face of life! Her husband, whose growing repute had at first attracted her, had not advanced beyond his admirable beginnings, and as the days of his unproductive effort fled by, and she found herself behind in the race for pleasure, she grew hungrier, with the greed of ease and competitive display and, more than that, experience. Modern life demanded it.

Terence learned the catchwords and began to act upon them, and that was why old Midas came into the game. At first, it was only as a matter of imagination: a cleverly balanced fiction on the inexorable page. But this was not until he had run deeply into his own thrifty account, first for a car (thinking all the time how easily old Midas could have bought it for him) and then an emerald she flaunted even before her husband’s unobservant eyes. The car took her into the country now and then for an after midnight spin, and it was at one such hour when they were both keyed too high to feel the jaded pallor before the dawn, that she turned to him like a child, and he knew the moment had come. The man in him must speak, and he told her he loved her, like a lover in an old-fashioned tale, stammering boyishly. She said nothing, but gave him her confirming lips, and the moment seemed to him ineffably right, and holy as the dawn. For so far he saw nothing in life but that it moves and glows. After that, their desires were one: his for advancing in the race to a point where he could somehow make her safe from all the ills she vaguely pictured as her portion and she to play the game as cleverly as she might, meanwhile losing no moment of preening herself in the eye of her world. Peter Selden, sitting in his penthouse, hired for the perfect isolation he could work in, and weaving plays as far from Broadway’s liking as from hers, would never capitulate for the ends she sought. And her blood ran hotter with the madness of life, mere life, as she saw its gaudy counterfeit about her, read of it, dreamed of it, took it for life itself and not the fevered vision, and ran headlong after it, doubling and feinting with all the tricks she knew. Strange measures of the dance of life: Annette, as the revel surged past her—she saw it as a revel, the bizarre movement, the breath of jigging humanity on her cheek—toeing the measure, now with this one, now that. Perhaps it was not a dance, but the weaving of a web of which the higher powers alone knew the aim: Terence throwing the shuttle intermittently as his mind turned, in spite of him, from the exigent routine of his desk to the adventure old Midas seemed himself to be offering, and Peter in his workroom matching the colors of the pattern that was a play. And not one of them guessed whether the web would prove a poisoned shirt or white samite, “mystic, wonderful.” All they knew was that the hurly-burly of haste which is this present orgy demanded something of them and that they had to weave. And neither Terence nor Annette had a moment’s doubt of enjoying what they so breathlessly strove for, and Peter, though he worked in an uncomprehending wonder, as many of a creative urge are forced to do, did know, in a vague fashion, that there was a vision. There was something to follow, something to find. He hadn’t it, but it was there. If he could only get it into his plays, then even the people for whom there was no vision would have to go to see them and would simply love them, as he himself loved the inception of them. And so he sat shut up with the vision trying to see it a little clearer, trying to make lenses for mortal eyes so they too could see, and forgetting all about his wife to whom he couldn’t be a lover, because she simply didn’t look to him like the creature he had met those years before, when she told him by all the implication of crafty nature: “I am she whom thy soul loveth.” And she wasn’t. There never was a man more ruthless than Peter when he saw the truth and somebody persuading him to treat it like a lie. “But you can’t,” he would have said. “You simply can’t.” Why, he couldn’t have told you exactly, but there it was.

He was all courtesy to his wife, and friendliness also. He hadn’t an ostentatious abundance of money, but he endowed her with what he had. Beyond that, nothing: as for the game of recalling the “first fine careless rapture” of the days when her delicate outward show seemed to promise an elusive spirit, it simply couldn’t be done. There was no longer a flame to fan, and to take thought for a possibly happier morrow would be to prolong the hunger and cold of his own inward loss. Really, though Terence had never been an imaginative lad and Peter, the playwright, was “of imagination all compact,” they had had the same sort of thoughts about her in the beginning: and this because she herself had the mother wit to inoculate them into the mind of man. Tribute: that was what she demanded, and it was tribute of one sort or another they gave, Peter, being a poet, after his own fashion and Terence after hers. Yet any man may be a poet if he is successfully inoculated—though very briefly until the current of his blood runs cool again; and Terence was offering her a rather rare quality of incense the while he planned his picturesque thievery from the Bank.

When he talked of Canada, how much did she guess? For all he could tell, after her wistful listening, she thought two runaways would be as safe there as in Thibet, and he did not undeceive her. He had his own plan, a cosy, quiet little plan, which had nothing to do with highways and hotels. His mind, running ahead with his desires, saw the deep woods he knew and Antoine, the guide, who had lived so long that he might live forever, and who would hide them and cook for them and ask no questions. And when the weather broke and the woods froze them out, it would be time enough to plan another flight and another haven. She had talked so much in the beginning about getting away, of being free! And she should be free. He had his pretty fancies about her, as Selden had in the days when she put her spell on him and he, too, saw her slender youngness in the green of faerie woods.

And now Terence’s theft had been neatly accomplished and one lap of their journey was done. They had driven since their mad start in the morning, with an interval of irritated waiting while a puncture was repaired and twenty minutes for coffee and rolls at a down-at-heels little inn, just off the main road, which he was childishly proud of himself for guessing out. He was, he knew, taking all possible precautions against being traced, and yet he was conscious that the precautions were to be of no use. They were as puerile as his mind in conceiving them. Who was he, to whom the ways of the world were still strange, to plan a crime against property such as is discovered every day, and a crime against the social order that is the commonplace of detective bureaus and the publicity that now hangs, like an inexorable searchlight, over the deeds of men? He was playing a game to which he knew himself, even by nature, to be entirely unequal, and he was afraid. Perhaps it was this weakness of nerve that had led him to suspect that, for the last hour, a car had been pursuing them, and now swept him into the impetuous folly of turning in at this cart path and then driving riskily over an unfriendly rut. He began to recognize in himself what the escaping ill-doer often finds generated in the breathlessness of escape: the certainty that earth is resounding with the patter of pursuing steps and that the clouds are full of eyes regarding him from a hostile knowledge. And now, when he most needed his mind in its perfect clarity, to defend himself and Annette from the perils of their dangerous way, it escaped him and kept going in futile, wild excursions over their brief past together. He was aware of the folly of these divagations, but he had to make them. Something within him not only responded to the practical risks of open adventure but insisted on forcing upon his unwilling memory scene after scene traversed before they reached the climax that was To-day. Every smallest event sprung from his meeting with Annette and their quick recognition that they were not to part, had seemed to him destiny. Now again, on this wild ride, he was looking that destiny in the face, interrogating it with a grieved wonder that she could have been given him and then snatched from him by a new man in the game. And her husband, he savagely thought, was as blind to the newcomer as to him. There had been the night when he could not trace her either by telephoning or trying to find her in her accustomed haunts and took to the old sad shift of hanging about the streets and watching for her to come home. Then there was the last fury of seeing her opening her door at three o’clock and the man who had brought her driving away down the street. It was innocent enough. He knew it was innocent. The man had been dancing with her; he was only prolonging their happy evening. But Terence, dog-tired, strained now not over her ills but his own, had just come from a session at the bank where old Midas was forever worrying him. He turned away, though it seemed to him he was turning not only from her house but from her also and all the wild beauty of their coming life together, and went home to bed. He slept deep, and got up resolved, went to the bank as usual and told old Midas the minute had come. He’d got to fork over. That night again he took up his vigil near her house, this time with the bag of plunder in his hand. Old Midas had forked over, perhaps with a blessing on his persuasiveness. Who could tell? Midas might easily have a streak of romance in him though it went no farther than figures that, sacred as they are, can yet be briefly made to lie. Wonderful romance of magnificent perjury, to take two and two and make them five! Again the car he was waiting for came slowly to her door. It was earlier to-night, not much past two. This time the man he hated not only went up the steps with her but stood for full ten minutes, talking softly. But when he had gone, Terence, mad with jealous haste, ran up the steps and rang the bell. She had delayed a little in the hall and when the door was opened, she came forward, with a look all sweetly radiant, expecting, it was plain, to find the man he hated returned again on some forgotten word. Terence, running back over the course of it, thought he motioned the maid to go. At all events, she did go on the instant, glad to get to bed and wondering at nothing in that free and easy house. The door had hardly closed upon her when he took Annette into his arms and kissed her roughly in a way meant to warn her she was his, and the interloper out there driving off through the night was hurrying out of her life. She understood. It was half aspiring passion in him, half the crude jealousy of denied possession, and she gave him her lips delicately, whispering: “No! no! He’ll be here any minute.” Did she mean the interloper who had gone, or did she mean her husband who, the maid might have told her, had not yet come in? It sickened him. He had never allowed himself to think very much about the husband except as her custodian and his own lawful enemy. But here they two were in the old vulgar attitude, not so much to blame for kissing as despicable in concealing it. He put his lips to her ear.

“Annette,” said he, “we’re going away.”

“Away?” she repeated, wishing he would not breathe on her, for she was not a woman of crude sensual acceptances and she liked approaches delicately made. “Where? how can we?”

This he could not stay to answer.

“Hide yourself down here,” said he, “until I get the car and come back. It’ll be only a minute. When I tap on the door—so, one long, two short—come out.”

She began a doubting remonstrance, but he silenced it. For the first time, he had become as masterful as he believed she liked a man to be.

“Don’t go upstairs. You won’t need anything. You can buy things. I’ve taken plenty of money.”

“Plenty of money,” she repeated incredulously.

It seemed to him, in his impatience, that she could do nothing but parrot his words after him, and she might be going on with it until daylight.

“Yes,” said he grimly, “plenty of money. You don’t know where it came from and you don’t need to know. But we’ve got to run for it. And I don’t mean to stand any more nonsense from you. You’re coming, and you’re coming now.”

And as he realized afterward it was quite meekly she came, though with a light in her eyes that might be, he was growing man enough to wonder, love of him and his mastery or love of adventure for its own sake. She did not ask him if their dream was being realized and they were bound for Canada and the deep woods. She did not ask him how he carried the money he confessed to having, for their amplitude of pleasure, but somehow he knew she knew there was a bag discreetly hidden under a rug behind them. He was beginning to have a fatalistic belief in her knowing what had led to all this, perhaps of having planned it and let him in on it as the despairing servitor of her will. Perhaps old Midas had given him this terrifying clairvoyance, keying him up to a point where he saw and heard so much beyond mere facts that her mind as well as his own was open to him.

II

Though Terence had planned their flight with all the coolness of which his brain was capable, he was, with every mile, the more excited. Could it be the more afraid? Not fear, his desperate soul assured him,—this was assuredly not fear. But something, possibly that sense of enquiring eyes or voices from the sky, had led him into panic over the car that had been dogging them, and committed him to the folly of turning in at Milton Blake’s cart path where the deep rut midway threw him against a boulder and then into a ditch, where his car careened, disabled. The following car had gone on. He could hear it climbing the hill he had seen before them as he left the highway, and for an instant he took comfort in thinking he had done well to turn aside, even toward disaster. It might be, his mind warned him in the instant after stopping, that the other car had merely continued to wait for him farther on. It might be there was another one behind that and that he was trapped; but for the moment here was security, and Annette, who had given a gay little laugh at the first jolt of the accident, was unhurt. How game she was, helping him when he had crawled out and then dragged her through the window at its awkward angle! And when they faced each other, breathless, she laughed again. But she was immediately serious.

“Get out the bag,” said she.

Terence was allowing himself that first luxury of feeling, for the instant, secure. They were off the law-infested road. They were in a wide meadow that looked like tranquillity, if not shelter, and they were at least still, not flying along with the wind in their faces, a desperate, fateful wind, it seemed, blowing them back to disgrace and penalty. In the moment of going over, he had no thought whatever of the bag in its decorous seclusion at the back. But Annette had not forgotten. She stood there shifting from one impatient foot to the other, and ordering him:

“Get it out. There it is, under the rug. Give it to me. You’ll have to get men to help you with the car and they mustn’t see it, unless they’re to think it’s mine.”

He obeyed her, craning into the car and dragging the bag out with difficulty at that angle, and she took it from him, took it with both hands, he noted, as if she perhaps expected it to be heavier than it was. He marveled at her, she seemed so entirely mistress of herself. She was bright-eyed with an excitement that might be happy for all he could guess, exhilarated, as if they found themselves in some merry game together and she were waiting for the next move. But there wasn’t time for dwelling on her looks and manner. He took the bag from her, and now he did have an instant’s wonder over her caution to him:

“Be careful of it, won’t you?”

It was as if it were she who had packed their golden harvest into it and made him responsible. Then they took hands and ran for the house they had both accepted as sanctuary. And here they were at its side door, the first one they reached, which was presumably communicating with the dining-room or kitchen. Annette drew her hand from his, ran up the steps and knocked loudly with the old brass knocker. Terence set down the bag at his feet, took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead as if it had been by his own muscular exertion that the bag had made its journey from the custody of old Midas to this dwelling which might prove a refuge and might not. He noted, in the idle way the mind has of taking in irrelevant trifles, that the knocker was a lion’s face, which looked, from the width between the eyes, surprisingly benevolent; but he was the more amazed by the bearing of Annette, her air of listening for steps from within, the implication of haste in her attitude and the insistence with which she plied the knocker. Finally, having beat her tattoo in several measures, conventionally at first and then with the rhythm of a drum, some of it martial, so that Terence, in his dumb waiting half expected a bugle to take up the call, she turned to look down at him and announce, still gaily and not as if she cared very much: “Nobody at home!” She knocked once more, a prolonged fusillade, and then ran down the steps and stood beside him.

“I call that a joke,” said she. “Don’t you?”

“Glad you feel so,” said he. “Any way, if it’s a joke, it’s on us.”

“Why is it?” she enquired, as if they were in some sort of legitimate coil of circumstance and might find it merely interesting to grope their way out. “Don’t you see? Nobody here. We’ve inherited the property. We can settle down in it—settle our minds, I mean, get cool and decide what to do.”

“That’s the devil of it,” said he. “We’ve decided what to do. And any way we take it, it’s disaster. For you, I mean. I don’t care a hang. But you’re disgraced, don’t you know you are? And there’s Selden.”

“Peter won’t care,” said she hardily, smiling at him in a perfect good nature. “That is, only so so. Underneath, he’ll be relieved. He can live on sandwiches and write plays. What more does he want?” She faced him with a frank smile, and then, her mouth twitching a little in an effort to suppress the smile which, she knew, was hurting him, she asked whimsically: “Rather late to think of it? Like to go back?”

He was answering her with narrowed eyes, and he said angrily:

“You know I don’t want to go back. You know what it is to have you here—boldly, all the hole and corner business done with—but it’s this damned bagful of money.”

“It isn’t money,” she said practically, as if that were the issue. “It’s bonds, things of that kind, isn’t it? I don’t suppose,” she continued speculatively, “you could carry so much real money in a bag of that size. It’s too heavy.”

“Oh, what difference does that make,” he cried impatiently. “Who cares whether it’s bonds or bullion? Whatever it is, it’s a straight steal. I’m absconding. I’m a common thief.”

“Because you stole me, too?” she asked, with a lift of the eyebrows. “Does that come into it?”

“I am,” said he, “a common thief. As to you, I’m mad about you. You pretty well know that. However I’ve got you, I don’t care—if I’ve got you, that is. I never know. I don’t know any more now than I did when you walked out of the house and got into the car.”

“Come,” said she, rather gently, because she had to wile him away from these unproductive vaporings, “we can’t stop now for soul analysis. Let’s get over the border and unpack our bag and then we can talk about anything you like, quote poetry if you want to. Only—” she cried, her face twisting up into a calculated drollery, “don’t you go and do the husband act and forget all about me while you write a play. If you do that, I tell you plainly, I’ll pack up the bonds or whatever it is you’ve got there, and abscond, myself. With a Governor-General or something. I adore Englishmen.”

But she wasn’t distracting him from his dangerous remorses: only recalling him to the present situation with its imminent needs.

“You see,” he said, as if he were taking time to think it out at length, “it isn’t so much disgracing you I mind, by running away with me. It’s not doing it with any decency. It’s not having money enough to support you as—as you ought to be,” he ended lamely, because he came so near the implication that deep down in his mind he suspected the money bore the aspect of a bribe. “It’s hateful. It’s hideous. It’s a disgrace smeared on you at the start. You’ve run away with a common thief.”

“Well, what of it?” said she. “Don’t we all read ourselves to sleep with stories about common thieves, and if they’re dashing enough aren’t our sympathies with ’em and aren’t we grateful to ’em for giving us a good yarn? It won’t be many days before everybody’ll be reading our yarn, and for my part I’m deuced glad to have ’em. They’re welcome to it. Come along, old boy. Have a cigarette.”

She passed him her case and he did light one with, she noted amusedly, an unsteady hand. She would never despise him for the faltering remonstrance of his nerves. She often remarked that in men and whispered herself with an approving self-estimate: “I’m seven times the man they are.”

“There,” she said, after a puff or two, “now here we are on our desert island—deserted island, any way. Lots of things we can do. What say? Break and enter and see if there are any oak leaf cookies in the stone jar in the pantry? Or we could go to bed with our boots on, in the best chamber, and scare Aunt Melissy into fits when she hears a noise and comes in to see if the cat’s got in. Or go through Uncle Eli’s desk and pinch the wad he got from selling the oxen yesterday. What say?”

Was this the distressed damsel he had known, a changeling out of the realms of faerie? Where did she get her homespun phrases? She had told him once that she was born in the country, but he was far from linking her with cookie jars and colloquialisms. Was this the difference: she was actually on her adventure now and she was letting herself go? All the better. He had tightened up a little himself, this weather of a romantic elopement not being precisely what he had expected of it, and he could get down to brass tacks. It looked as if she would understand.

“Listen,” said he. “I’ve got something to propose. Do you see that woodpile?”

She raised a wondering eyebrow.

“The woodpile?” she repeated. “Do I see it. Plainly.”

It was a large woodpile speaking well for the “forehandedness” of the man who had assembled it. He was a “good provider.” It was not piled in symmetrical cords, like the woodpiles in old almanacs, but the sticks, stove wood length, were thrown together in an “admired disorder,” a rough pyramid.

“Now,” said Terence, “this is what I propose. I’m going to pull away that side of the pile furthest from the house door. It’s the one they haven’t been using from. It’s not so conveniently reached, so it’s the side they won’t use from till they get to it. They’ll eat through from here.”

She looked at him sympathetically.

“Darling,” said she, “you’re going too fast. We’d better take possession inside first, get some grub and maybe rehang the curtains or something, if they get on our nerves. Why begin at the woodpile?”

“I shall pull it away,” said he, “make a cavity, set the bag in there and throw the wood back over it.”

For a moment she studied it. Then her brow cleared.

“Aha!” she said. “I see. You think, in our debilitated condition, without a car, we might be able to get somebody to take us over the border, but that we couldn’t very well hike to the next town to find him. We shall be safer without the bag. Is that it?”

“We shall,” said he grimly, “be safer without the bag.”

“Then,” said she, interpreting, “we hire—or buy—a car. We wait till night, come back here and dig the bag out again. And tuck it into the car. That’s it, is it?”

“Annette,” said he, desperately, “this is that I want to do. We leave the bag here hidden under the wood. We buy a second-hand car. I’ve got enough on me for that. We run for Canada and when we’re over the line I telephone the Midas telling them exactly where they’ll find the bag.”

“They!” she repeated. “Where they’ll find it. Our bag?”

“It isn’t our bag,” said he. “You can despise me, if you like, but I can’t go through with it.”

She looked at him in a dispassionate consideration.

“Shall we go back?” she enquired.

“No!” he said, so loudly that she started and then smiled a little, for she had a mind for catchwords and she wanted to repeat a Carrollian line: ‘You needn’t speak so loud.’ “You see,” she said, in a reasonable way, “we could carry the bag back ourselves and begin just where we left off. You could drop into the Midas with the loot just as you dropped in to get it, I could go home and when Peter asked me where the devil I’d been—he does like to know where I am, you see, even if he’s plugging away at his scenarios—I could tell him I’d been detained. He’d find that ample. I give you my word he would.”

“You’re not going home,” said he violently. “And I’m not either. I’m going to do precisely what I said: hide this devilish thing in here and then go along to the next town and negotiate for a car. And you’re going with me. Don’t make any mistake about that. You’re going. That’s the real adventure, hiking off together with no certainties, no prospects. That’s what we’re going to do.”

He took up the bag, went to the farther section of the woodpile, set the bag on the ground at his feet and began tossing the sticks of wood behind him in a clucking fusillade. She watched him, a little smile curling her expressive mouth. She saw that he had involuntarily placed the bag of contention between his feet because he suspected her of the devilry of snatching it up and making off with it. And he was a conventional soul; a scrimmage with her, to regain possession, would have been unthinkable to him. She watched him as he worked, brooding, in the hidden feminine way, over the possibilities of swaying the revolting male. Now she began talking, in her low, husky voice.

“I can’t really see why you should feel so off your nut about a pot of money. This kind any way. Out of a bank! not picked out of pockets or tills or anything of that kind, but just funds. Isn’t that what you’d call it? Funds, assets, call money—what the dickens is that? but I’ve seen it in the papers any way. Oh, I guess it’s the stock market! Don’t you see, child, you couldn’t get anything more conventional than a bank, all iron doors and porters in livery and machine guns somewhere round. Only if they’ve got all that, they ought to defend themselves. The safes and guns and things are a challenge, that’s all they are. They’re a challenge and we’ve accepted it, don’t you see?”

He paid no attention. He was still hurling wood behind him and it bade fair to be a Penelope’s job: for the brow of the pile, released and weakened, began to tumble.

“And there’s something to consider,” she informed him, in her cool, deep tones. “We’re on an adventure, quest of the Golden Fleece, English boats sailing out to do for Spain and her treasure ships, Spain coming over to Mexico and looting the churches. My Peter shouldn’t have read me all those gay old tales when he used to read to me, if he didn’t want me to believe ’em. This is nothing but treasure, old boy, and we’ve got it. And your car breathing her last out there in the ditch is our treasure ship. We’ve had to take to the long boat, but we’ve got the treasure. I’d be ashamed of myself if we hadn’t.”

The time was to come when he wondered why he had not wondered more then at the amazing change in her, the bravado and the half-cleverness of her ranting speech. She sounded, in comparison with the wistful creature he had thought her in the beginning, half drunk on some ichor of life he hadn’t tasted and never even suspected himself of wanting. Now she was talking again, and even more to the point and disconcertingly, so far as he was concerned.

“And,” she queried, “if you’re so down in the mouth about it all, why didn’t you think of it before? We’ve only been gone a few hours and you want to go home.”

“I don’t,” said he. “I don’t want to go home.”

“But you want to send the loot home, and it’s the same thing, now isn’t it?”

It wasn’t the same thing, but he couldn’t get sufficiently into order to tell her so. He hardly knew himself. But he did feel mean and squalid, now that he had learned how full the air may be of eyes and voices, and for the moment old Midas had him in an iron grip. The rules men live by seemed to have something in them not to be controverted by what he believed to be passionate love. It was one thing to plan a romantic escape gilded by money subtly manoeuvred. It was quite another to flee what he had believed to be a flesh and blood pursuer, damage his own car through nervous driving and find himself the butt of his lady’s raillery. But all this he had no time to think out, however she demanded it, especially as, at that moment, a voice broke upon the air, and gave him pause. A rooster in the wired hen yard behind the pile gave a crow so lustily golden that you would think the sun itself might smile to hear. It was assurance full blown, as one might blow a gigantic bubble strong enough to float away into infinity and never break, it was a record of a dynastic roosterdom that had never yet failed in unearthing the largest worm, it was a paean of triumph. It startled Terence. There was no doubt about that. And seeing him wince, stop excavating and look about him with a menaced air, Annette broke into laughter.

“Do you know what you are, old dear?” said she. “You’re just plain murderer hiding the body, and you’re as funny as frogs. Give it up, darling. If you keep on this way you’re going to spoil my fun. I didn’t run away with a pacifist or a minor poet: I ran away with a bold, bad man.”

Still Terence paid no attention to her, and now he saw himself near the end of his labors. He had made a large enough hole and he set in the bag and began throwing back the sticks. But again a voice bade him pause, only not like chanticleer’s with its innate authority. It was the voice of a woman unmistakably not young, for it was reedy and thin, though sweet: good homespun, not velvet. It called in an agitated way, as if it must speak against its will and would far rather not, considering the perplexities of situations likely to be questionable.

“Here! what you doing down there?”

Terence straightened and looked up at the chamber window whence it came. This was the room over the kitchen, and Annette moved away from the steps and approached him where she also could look up. As she did so, a small derisive sound escaped her lips, Terence was so funny with his mouth open in a naïve surprise. Yet it was surprising, what they saw. A slender woman of something over sixty was leaning out of the window and looking down at them. She had pushed up the screen and it rested on her pink brocade shoulders. For she was amazingly dressed. She was of an old-fashioned type, with blue eyes, pink cheeks, a distinguished nose with a delicate curve in it, and wavy white hair parted and drawn back in a classic fashion suggesting the sculptured Greeks. And—one has to return here to her dress which Annette at once began puzzling over—the dress of pink brocade was square in the neck, disclosing her unabashed thinness, and, as one arm disclosed—the one steadying the screen—elbow sleeves with a fall of lace. She was a charming old lady, “sweet-pretty,” Annette commented to herself, remembering a country phrase, and she was at the moment dignified and prim with anger against them.

“What you doing with our woodpile?” she enquired. “I don’t know what father’d say to you. You hiding something there? Is it some o’ that bootlegging stuff?”

III

They stared up at her, saying nothing. Unexpected as she was, it seemed as if there were nothing to say. Only Annette did give a little nervous laugh at the word bootlegging. Here she was up to the neck—and yet able to swim through—in the adventure of her life, here was Terence as tragically moved as if he already felt the hand of the law, and the old lady in pink brocade was reducing the whole situation to comedy by one colloquial word. She heard a little sound from Terence. It was what she called a glug, a sound she had caught from his throat before, in moments of unreadiness. He was about to speak, and it seemed to her she might well forestall him. Terence had never been on a real adventure, and she had been on hundreds. He was manifestly not so thoroughly equipped. But as she opened her lips to make what she hoped would prove an unconcerned statement of their reasons for having conjured a stranger’s woodpile into a safe deposit vault, the old lady in pink brocade pushed up the screen, stiffly withdrew her shoulders and let the screen fall into place.

“You wait,” she called to them. “I’m coming down.”

She came. They stood facing her as she opened the outside door and descended the steps leading to the drive. Terence, meanwhile, had been flinging wood over the bag which now lay completely, if raggedly, concealed. As the old lady opened the door, her bright glance sought the woodpile and she noted that, since their mysterious luggage was not in sight, it must be there. But doubtful as its presence had made the standing of the two who awaited her, she evidently dismissed all suspicion and smiled upon them hospitably.

“Pleased to meet you,” said she. “Won’t you step in?”

Annette at once took upon herself the burden of reply.

“Thank you, no,” said she. “My husband and I had a little accident in crossing your field—”

“My sakes alive!” said the old lady, in a vexed tone. “You don’t mean to say you turned into the lot?”

“Yes, Madam,” said Terence, advancing a step. “It looked to me like a short cut—”

“But it ain’t a right o’ way,” said she. “That’s what father always says: it ain’t a right o’ way. Once every year he closes up the gate and puts a sign on it to say it’s a private way. Then he takes it down, it’s so much more convenient to have it open, the hay and all. He’d be real tried with you if he knew you’d turned in. Where’s your car?”

“Ditched,” said Terence briefly. “Coming over that rise, you know, there’s a rock sticking up like a monument and a swampy hole on the other side. Of course I hit the rock and the car keeled over into the swamp.”

“Do tell!” said she. “Well, father will be tried.”

She was very gentle in her manner but a little irritating to Terence because she seemed to see no side of the incident but father’s. He could not rid himself of the feeling that this was an unusual occasion: a hitherto irreproachable bank cashier absconding with a bag of securities, and an old lady in pink brocade wasting his time by dwelling on father’s probable annoyance. She, on her part, seemed to find the two a little eccentric, merely for remaining outside.

“I don’t hardly see,” said she, “why you won’t come in.”

“It’s this way,” said Annette: but Terence, without an apologetic look, forestalled her.

“We’re traveling, that’s all, and we’re in a good deal of a hurry.”

“I’ve lost my aunt,” said Annette, with an air of graceful condescension. “That is—no, she’s not passed away”—that occurred to her as the phrase likely to be understood by the lady in the pink brocade. “But she’s very sick and we want to get to her bedside before—before—”

“I see,” said the lady sympathetically, “and your car tipped over and now”—

“Now we shall have to walk, to the next town at least,” said Terence, forcing his explanations because it seemed at last as if they might be getting somewhere. “And find a car, do you see? Hire it. Buy it, preferably. That’s why I was hiding my bag in your woodpile. It’s heavy to carry, and I thought we could come back and pick it up.”

“Certain,” said the old lady. She beamed upon them. They had evidently begun to assume the appealing guise of youth in difficulty.

“And the bag,” said Annette, “is very important—of no value to anybody but us—because it contains relics of auntie’s youth, things she was fond of and we thought it might please her to see them again before she—went. There’s a china cat and a christening mug and—”

Terence, to her satisfaction, was staring as if he had never seen her before, and indeed this Annette he never had seen. She had hitherto dwelt in pure romance. He could only utter her name, and as it seemed purely exclamatory, she found no reason for answering. A tall young woman, she had appropriately no baby ways. She might be dashing but not coy. Still, in a fashion of her own, she pouted. There were many things she wanted to say. Was she to run away with him, she wanted to enquire, in the manner of a procession of Elks or War Veterans? If there wasn’t to be any fun in it she might as well have stayed at home, Peter’s scenarios strewn about her on the dining table and a tray of delicatessen stuff at one end. For even if Peter did work in his penthouse, he had a way of bringing a brief case of folly home. Now when a horse ran away he did it with some dash and abandon, and the cop had hard work to come up with that spouting flame of strength and valor. And here was she, tamely standing over against a woodpile and lying herself out of a scrape where Terence himself ought to be slashing a way for her. Where? Anywhere, simply a way. Every instant it was becoming more evident to her that she did not believe in this century of pacifism and paltering. She belonged on a man’s saddle-bow, going, going— Here she was reft out of her dream by hearing Terence ask, in a quick decisive tone she found adequate:

“Your husband got a car?”

“He’s just bought it,” said the lady, beaming.

Annette began at that moment to think it would be rather fetching to call her auntie.

“Where is it?” asked Terence. “Can’t I hire it?”

“You can’t do one single thing, not about father’s car,” said the old lady firmly, “till he’s here on the spot. I couldn’t take the responsibility. Not any ways in the world.”

“But where is he?” pursued Terence.

“Well,” said she, “he may be here any minute. You see father’s had a kind of a queer thing happen to him. I might as well tell you. There’s a lot o’ land he’s always wanted, over there beyond the run, but it’s been standing in the Jackson name,—not rightly, you know. Father’s been to court and made it all clear. One o’ his folks, way back, was said to sold it into the Jackson family, but somehow there wa’n’t any deeds passed or they wa’n’t recorded and now there ain’t hide nor hair of ’em to be found, and father’s always been possessed to get his fingers onto that land. And I’ll be whipped if now he ain’t done it. He’s been working on it longer’n I can count, and this day the whole lot’s passed over to him and he’s as proud as that old rooster there.”

For chanticleer, as if desiring to announce the family magnificence of fortune, crowed again, clear as a bell.

“And father,” she continued, “took a man with him this afternoon and went over it to have it surveyed. There wa’n’t no need of it, he said. He knew the boundaries well as he knew his own barn, but it kinder pleased him to do it. Father’s possessed about land. I don’t know what he wouldn’t do to get his finger on it, if so he took a notion.” Here she paused, seeming to feel she had gone far enough, and concluded primly, “No harm, I hope.”

But to Terence the fact of father’s absence was the only one of any value.

“Then,” said he, “if he’s gone away, he’s gone in his car.”

“No,” said she, “I guess he didn’t feel quite up to it. Father’s but now got his license and he’s a little timorous, as you might say. He just harnessed up old Doll.”

Terence drew out a wad of bills. He couldn’t have told her what sum they represented, but he shook them before her distended eyes. They were his own, not filched from a reluctant Midas, and for the moment he felt a natural pride in them.

“Then,” said he, “you let me deposit this with you—we’ll count it over—you shall do it yourself—but I’m pretty sure it will cover the cost of any car you’ve got. I’m in a hurry, I tell you. Every minute counts.”

“Yes,” said Annette sweetly, wondering how he could advertise himself more clearly, as an absconding cashier, “every single minute, auntie desperately ill and asking if we haven’t come.”

The lady in the pink brocade shook her head. Her underlip trembled. She was sorry for them.

“I couldn’t do it,” said she, “not any way in the world. If you knew father—why, you must of heard of Mr. Milton Blake. He’s been selectman. No, I couldn’t. Father never’d overlook it in me, never in the world.”

Annette came a step nearer her and laid a caressing finger on the brocade skirt. If pathos would not serve, would woman’s flattery?

“What a lovely silk,” said she. “It’s made so pretty, too. The long skirt and all those gathers round the waist. You look as if you’d just stepped off the stage.”

Mrs. Blake glanced down at her dress in what seemed a guilty haste. She blushed pink.

“I forgot all about it,” said she. “What I had on, I mean.” She felt very foolish over it, and her crisp tones faltered. “That was the reason I didn’t come down when I first heard you talking. You see—I shouldn’t tell it if father was here—it makes him real tried with me—I’m kind of possessed about clothes. I guess I’m as much possessed about ’em as he is about land. Days I’m tired, I step up stairs sometimes—up attic, I keep it—and put on this. It’s old as the hills. I guess this fashion went way back to 1850 or so and by rights I ought to have a hoop skirt. I found it one day last spring, in an old chest up there. I guess I can’t be much of a housekeeper or I should ha’ come on it before. But I never thought there was anything in that chest but bundles o’ newspapers all dropping apart. I always thought it must ha’ belonged to Amabel Gerrish—she married a Jackson and ’twas her husband that got that property every which way, the land father’s got hold of now. Well, how I do run on! All that’s neither here nor there, only, far as the dress goes, I slip up attic sometimes when father’s off the place and put it on. It kinder rests me. Sometimes I parade up and down in it and sometimes I just set.”

Annette was listening absently. Terence did not listen at all. He stood with his brows bent, frowning down at his feet and trying to plan out the next move, and Annette, considering him, had a rueful consciousness that if he were playing an absconding cashier in one of the popular comedies, he would be playing it very badly. Again she put out a caressing hand and stroked the pretty skirt, but she did it absently, for she saw quite plainly the next move Terence ought to make or, failing that—for he would never think of it—the move that was up to her. Of course, what he ought to do was to throw the wad of money at auntie’s feet, seize the bag, rush to the garage, back out the car, step on the gas and then—Canada and freedom! But where was the garage? Was there one at all, or did farmers keep their cars in a dark corner of the barn she had heard designated as the tie-up? She could perfectly well do it all herself, only, would Terence abet her in it? or would he seize the bag from her, sit down by the disordered woodpile and wait to make restitution? She burst into laughter at the thought of Terence sitting there waiting to be cuffed by the hand of the law, and Mrs. Blake looked at her in a mild surprise.

“You’re tired, dear, ain’t you?” said she, and Annette, gulping down her laughter, answered tremulously:

“Yes, I’m very tired.”

“We’ll go into the house,” said Mrs. Blake soothingly, “and I’ll make you a cup o’ tea. I’ll just take off this dress first, in case father comes. Why,” she cried, on a rising note of apprehension, as one fearful of being found in pink brocade, “here’s father now.”

IV

Father had driven into the yard, and, seeing three persons expectantly regarding him, he dropped the reins and sprang out of his wagon, tethered the horse by the weight and walked rapidly up to the little group by the steps. He was what one might have expected from his wife’s commentary on his habit of action: a solid, muscular, light-moving man with no hesitancy in his manner and a direct way of governing his body, as if to ends clearly determined. He gave, even in the minute of his approach, this impression of being needed, as a doctor might, in haste to arrive and yet with no particular interest in it all, save as it was evidently his job. His face, Annette rapidly decided, was like old engravings of senators and village fathers of repute: firm as to nose and mouth, a little frowning. Terence felt nothing. Milton Blake was little to him save an agent miraculously provided to be moved, in some way, toward providing a car. Milton’s first glance had swept the little group into the foreground of his mind, but his accompanying words came as a surprise to Terence, who was thinking about nothing but a possible deal. The words were addressed to his wife, and they were curtly personal, touching pink brocade.

“What you got on?” said he.

She understood, not only the words but their familiar intonation. Milton was “put out” with her. She had many ways, innocent in themselves, that seemed to him “terrible childish,” and her love of finery was one. In spite of herself, her eyes sought the brocade, her hands stole down to the skirt with an effect of covering it, so far as possible, smoothing it away into invisibility.

“I’ll go up chamber and take it off,” said she, wifely conciliation in her tone. “I only put it on—” There she paused. Why had she put it on? At this uneasy moment she hardly knew, and certainly Milton would never know if she told him.

“Don’t you do it,” said Annette, in her sophisticated voice. “It’s a duck of a dress. What’s the matter with it, Mr. Blake? Don’t you like pink? I do. I just adore it.”

He looked at her as if she were not even, she wanted to tell him, fit for bait, and this put her immediately on edge to speak again.

“Don’t you go,” she bade Mrs. Blake, in a low aside. “We shall be getting away shortly. I want you to see us off.”

Mrs. Blake had a hand on the door, still with the effect of an anxious determination to obliterate the dress, if not actually, by some form of hypnotic jugglery; but at this she began listening intently because Terence had begun to lay his case before her husband and Milton was considering it, with his frown. Flavia Blake had long ago learned, among other data gathered from an hour unto hour study of her husband, that he was prone to censure as a matter of routine, but when she was foxy enough to wait, she could often escape consequences. Annette, during these tactics, was watching Terence, with increasing doubt of his ability to play the innocent tourist, and ready to cut in, at threatening points, to prompt or silence him. But Terence proved to be doing very well. He had informed the swiftly apprehending Milton that he and his wife were going north in a tremendous hurry. He had turned into Milton’s pasture, feeling convinced, from the cart path, that he should find it a short cut—his listener frowned here as remembering that day, once a year, when he put up the sign to keep his right of way—and by ill luck capsized into the ditch. He understood Mr. Blake had a car. Would he sell it?

“No,” flatly interjected Milton. (“I know a thing or two,” his Yankee face testified. “You’d pay me in counterfeit money, or you wouldn’t pay me at all.”) “Sell my machine? Why, I’ve just bought it, ain’t I? No, siree.”

“Or let it,” proffered Annette.

Milton shook his head.

“Or,” concluded Terence, hopelessly, having by this time ceased to expect anything, “will you take us to the nearest place where we could buy a car—or hire one?”

Milton reflected, looking at the ground. One could still read in his expression—or its lack—the cunning of the man perpetually afraid of being done. What could result from his acceding to this? Milton’s face seemed to ask. What could possibly happen to his pocket or his car? There must be an out about it somewhere. Let him walk warily.

“I’ll pay you now,” said Terence, answering that unspoken query. “Pay in advance, you know. What do you ask?”

Milton nailed him at once, with that half triumphant, half challenging look of the born bargainer. “I’ve got ye,” said the look. “Now you’ll make it worth my while.”

“Let me see,” said he, the look still skinning his adversary. “I could take ye as fur as Woodsville. You could get ye a car there. But fur’s I’m concerned, it’ll be a pretty costly job.”

“How much?” snapped Terence, now, at a hint of concession, all eagerness to get on, and Milton ventured the biggest bid he dared.

“Eight dollars.”

It sounded so absurdly little compared with the preamble that Annette laughed out, and even Terence found his mouth twisting in an unwilling grin. Milton looked from one to the other. “Got ye, ain’t I?” he seemed to say again, implying further, “Well, you needn’t think you can carry it off by makin’ light.”

“Too high?” he asked.

“No,” said Terence, soberly, recalled to the necessity of haste. “It’s fair enough. Get out your car, and we’ll be off.”

“I’ve got to unharness,” said Milton. “I’ll take the mare out o’ the shafts and leave her in the barn floor.”

“Very well,” said Terence. “Your car all right? want me to look it over?”

“No,” said Milton. (A stranger looking over his new car? He should rather think not.) “She’s all right. I’ll bring her round.”

He turned away with his habitual manner of being needed at once, lifted the weight and tossed it into the wagon and led the horse off somewhere behind a tall lilac hedge, where the barn bulked at the west. But no one watched him. Terence was addressing Mrs. Blake, with that deferential courtesy which had impressed Annette in the first moments of their meeting. It had seemed to her then a fitting tribute to herself, and she had had to learn that it came from something gentle and sympathetic in him, ready to flow at call; and now it was Mrs. Blake’s.

“Rather funny, I suppose,” he was saying, “my putting my bag in there. But now it’s there, I’d like to ask you if I mayn’t leave it, and come back for it. Come or send. You see we may not find a car. Your husband thinks we shall, but we might not.”

The old lady was bewildered. He had judged her rightly as being of an acquiescent nature, used to obedience to her menfolks, and it seemed quite possible to convince her through reasons that were no reasons. She replied in words she had used in nearly every exigency of her married life:

“I guess you better ask father.”

Here Annette, feeling herself needed to deflect the gently tremulous mind, laid an arm about the pink brocade waist and said caressingly:

“You’ll come with us, won’t you? Your husband’ll drive and you and I’ll sit behind and have a nice talk.”

A gleam of incredulous delight shot into the old lady’s eyes.

“Why,” said she, “I don’t know what father’d say.”

“Doesn’t he take you out in the car?” asked Annette. “Of course he does. My husband takes me everywhere.” She accorded Terence a brilliant smile. (“Tell, if you dare,” the smile said. “You won’t? I thought not. Get you well scared and there’s nothing I can’t do with you, even escape from you as I have from Peter. But where? Is there a man anywhere that can’t be trifled with?”)

“Why, no,” said Mrs. Blake, with a suggestion of reproof. She was not used to criticism of her natural lord. “Father ain’t took me out at all yet, because he ain’t drove himself except with the man that’s learning him. He’s got his license, but this’ll be the first time he’s been out alone.”

“Well, any way,” said Annette, “you come.” She liked to give pleasure when it was convenient, quite as much as she expected to give pain. It was life to her, life and motion. She liked to see the little “saucy jacks” of drama dancing under her fingers, and when they gave her back the melody of a grateful appreciation she was pleased. “But,” she adjured the old lady, who seemed to have become in a manner her especial charge, “he never’ll let you go in that dress.”

Upon this, Mrs. Blake, in a sad certainty of its truth, glanced down at the dress despairingly. She wanted to go, and she was sick with the recognition of her own folly in dressing up at all. To Annette, regarding her amusedly and yet with a certain kindness, it seemed that she was likely to cry.

“No,” said Flavia Blake, “I can’t change it. I ain’t got time. My other’s way up attic where I slipped this on. I’d like to, but I never could in the world.”

“Haven’t you a coat, a rain coat or something?”

Annette spoke rapidly. She opened the screen door and, by a touch on the shoulder, propelled the old lady through. Perhaps her guiding hand was supplemented by Mrs. Blake’s ingrained respect for screen doors as bulwarks that had to be banged in haste against the besieging fly.

“A scarf!” Annette was calling after her. “Tie it over your head. But get a coat, too. You can take it off in the car. They won’t know.”

The pronoun bore the emphasis we are familiar with from feminine lips when the helpless male is in question, an “affection mingled with contempt.” Now Annette, in a buoyant good humor, turned to Terence to settle his course as definitely.

“You’re inclined to talk too much,” said she, the more explicitly because their moment together might be so short. “Dear boy, you are. Be careful. Remember, the only thing we want of Father Blake is to drop us at the nearest town where you can buy or hire a car. You don’t have to tell him you’re bound for Canada and ask him for a road map. If you’ve got to talk, tell him you’re going south.”

But Terence was not listening to her. He was deep in his own mind, prowling about among the queer things he found there. She also had to be advised of the course he meant to take, and she must not defeat it by rash remonstrance.

“You understand,” he said, “I’m going to leave the bag right here where it is now, covered up in that woodpile. At the first minute possible—that is, when we’ve reason to think we’re in any way safe—I shall telephone Midas directions for finding it.”

For an appreciable second she gazed at him, a neutral look it might have seemed, disclosing none of the dancing imps of doubt behind it. There are those looks, carrying no more than a suggestion of polite interest in the words evoking them. But all the time the imps are dancing about behind there, waving flags of dust because they don’t understand, chattering out protests, declaring they do understand and then subsiding to solemn silence, to draw up pert resolutions declaring that whether they understand or not they don’t propose to do anything about it. Annette was fast learning—indeed, she had learned it already—that if she meant to get the full flavor out of this adventure she must, at critical moments, go it alone. Her companion—her lover, she had called him in the first buoyant moments of their flight—wasn’t regarding it as an adventure. He was accepting it very seriously, so seriously that the adventure was simply the prelude to his possession of her. She had begun to suspect—though there was no time now to follow this out—that the man for whom you leave your husband has simply, when you get him, become another husband, no better, no worse. To Terence, the possession of all the “monies” in the bag was incidental to the possession of her. He must have thought they were necessary to place her in the surroundings fitted to her beautiful self, but really at the bottom of his mind must have been mirrored the certainty existing placidly in hers, that she wouldn’t have gone without them. And now he couldn’t play out the game. To him it was dead earnest, the setting for the noble passion between them, and to her the most egregious bit of fun she had ever seen. Had he no sense of humor? (She had suspected it.) Or how could he tolerate the idea of telephoning back that he had left his spoil in a farmer’s woodpile and they could come and get it if they liked? Kingdoms would fall and empires perish if you were going to tumble into bathos. You might as well say the crown jewels of Russia were being raffled for at a village women’s club. No! if she was to get any adequate fun out of her game, she must play a lone hand.

“Very well,” said she, lifting to him the liquid glance that had roused the sleeping wonder of his soul. “By all means leave it there. That is, if you think best.”

“And you,” said he, priming her with the more confidence now that she seemed so reasonable, “take it on yourself to tell the old lady she’s not to mention it to him—Blake, I mean. You can talk to her as we go along. She’ll do whatever you say. She thinks you’re great. Tell her she’s simply not to mention the thing: just let it alone, and within two or three days somebody’ll come for it. She’s to give it to ’em whether her husband’s there or not. And let her understand there’s no danger of the wrong parties coming. She’s to give it to whoever comes.”

“Very well,” said Annette meekly. “I’ll do my best. But,” she added, “I advise you to get into the car as soon as it’s ready and keep father engaged. Tell him auntie’s coming, too. I’ll trail along behind, and that will give me a chance to hush her up. For she’s sure to remind you of the bag, and he’ll hear, and you’ll have to go all over it with him. And if I know Father Blake, he’s not going to leave a phantom bag in his woodpile without knowing all about it, or taking it in and locking it up in the best room. He’ll say it’s bootlegging, just as she did, or think you’re going to charge him with stealing it and come down on him for damages.”

Terence dropped the question of the moment to look at her with the frank wonder she derisively loved, it made him so vulnerable and childlike.

“You can think of more things in a minute,” said he, “than I could do in a week. However could you,” he ended, out of his plain honesty, “come away with me when Selden—why, his very brain’s the spit and image of yours. His very talk—”

“That’s it,” said she practically. “Our talk is alike because it’s his and I stole the knack of it. He would be nice to play with,” she ended ruefully, in a childishness that pierced him with a jealous pang, it seemed to be bringing Peter so intimately near. “Only, don’t you see, he uses his cleverness up on his miserable old plays. He doesn’t waste any of it on me. He doesn’t want me in his game and—oh, you know!”

Terence forgot the bag and the woodpile. His passion came upon him as simply as if they hadn’t done an absurd thing and were likely to make it more absurd by his expedient for getting out of it.

“You’re not sorry?” he cried, on so sharp a note that Mrs. Blake’s face appeared momentarily at the window, and she called down to them:

“I’m coming. I’ll be right along.”

“You’re not sorry?” Terence was insisting. “You don’t want to go back?”

“No, duckie,” Annette answered him, in a sweet small tone of irony that pricked him while it soothed. “Not one bit. Only you must remember I’m out for what’s coming to me, whatever it is. I’ve been pretty dull, and now it almost looks as if things were moving, and if we watch our step we can set the pace. But if I’m bottled up, I won’t guarantee—”

Terence stared at her. He could not have told her a thousandth part of what he was feeling, what her disclosures made him feel. Was this his lady, his floating denizen of the upper air, his delicate winged delight? Not that he could have put it thus. It would have taken Peter, or a minor poet. But the picture of her, printed, as he thought, for all time, on the sensitive plate of his desire, was of a creature ineffably helpless to withstand the roughness of the world and stretching out her hand for his to guide and solace her. What were these new impressions, varicolored and confusing, settling down upon him, the more horrible that he had no time to brush them off and regard them in a clearer sunlight before they smothered him? They were buzzing in his ears, dwelling on things he had suspected before he met his lady, but never after. The novels, the few of them he had read, had told him in various forms that a woman wooed is seldom of the same stripe as a woman won. The supreme charmers, past masters in magic, Helen, Cleopatra, Annette, were of course piquing and unknowable to the last degree, and you could never feel you had them until, the world well lost, you found yourself in the heaven of their arms. But the case was proving to be far otherwise. Annette was laying down the law. She was telling him exactly what she expected and meant to have, and there were implications that if anybody was to do the steering of their boat of love—oh, silken sails and masts of gold, where is your magic now?—it would be she. Terence lifted his hand to his sweating forehead and wondered. If this were she indeed, then he had certainly been happier when he sat at his task in the money changer’s house of Midas and dreamed of her. But just as this astonishing implication raised its horrid head in what served him for imagination, the sound of an approaching car smote him to blankness and Milton Blake drove round from his garage and stopped in the road at the end of the driveway, waiting for them to come. He was evidently not proposing to drive into the yard. Possibly he was not sure of his ability to get out again. He might not have been willing to be regarded as nervous, but he looked like many another man who has had his license less than a week, and he was driving with an intensity of earnestness which left him no eyes for his two passengers who now came promptly down to him, and he honked, with a prolonged note. “Come! come!” it seemed to say, in the very way Milton would have said it. “I’ve no time to waste.”

“Don’t you bother, Mr. Blake,” said Annette speciously. “She’ll only be a minute. I’ll run back and get her.”

So she sped up the driveway, and Terence gave his mind to tapping Milton for information about the less frequented roads going north. As Annette reached the house, Flavia came out from it with an agile haste, letting the screen door bang behind her. She was, according to her mental estimate, “all of a twitter” to go to ride in the new car and with these charming young people. She thought them as sweet as bluebirds in the spring, the sight of them as warming to her starved heart. Perhaps she had not known how starved it was until she saw them in their trouble, asking something of her, asking something of Milton, exactly as children might have done. She could not bear to part from them. She herself looked like a bit of old enchantment, running out in a hurry, the pink brocade catching the sun, a plaid shawl about her shoulders and a big garden hat over her hair, her cheeks as pink as the brocade and blue eyes full of light.

Annette was upon her quickly, in a little rush.

“Take it off,” she said. “That hat. I’ve got a scarf somewhere. No, I haven’t. It’s down there in our car. But you can’t wear that, dear creature. It’ll blow off, and then what’ll father say? Here! give it to me.” She lifted the hat from Flavia’s head and, opening the screen door, tossed it within, yet tenderly. “There!” she said, “come along, bare-headed.”

Flavia looked with a helpless admiration at the cropped yellow head, and shook her own neat poll.

“No,” she said. “He never’d let me in the world.”

Annette was paying no attention. She was at the woodpile, flinging sticks behind her like a dog, burrowing.

“Come,” she called over her shoulder. “Get busy. We’ve got to take the bag. My husband’s forgotten it. I’m going to hide it behind me and not let him see it till we get to—wherever it is we stop.”

Flavia had joined her at the pile, and, being trained to a thousand farm activities, worked with a vigor far exceeding hers. It was she who, with an expert tug, drew out the bag.

“My!” said she. “Ain’t it heavy!”

“Give it to me,” said Annette.

She seized it without ceremony, took Flavia’s hand and started at a run for the car, the bag bumping behind her from the other hand. Milton and Terence had just finished a short discussion of the best route to take: whether it would be preferable to go north, which Terence preferred because it was nearer the Canada line or by a road to the southeast, to a town of a size to furnish cars in plenty, this last being advocated by Milton, who, on his part, did not disclose his reason. For Milton was not feeling his oats, like Flavia, in this testing of the new car. He was having his first experience of an uneasy humility in wondering if he was up to his job, and the fact that the road to the southeast was of an admirable straightness, appealed to him beyond all else. He was not the man, at this stage of his driving, to encounter tortuous ways. And here were the two women, Annette stepping into the car before Flavia and slipping the bag in at her feet. Flavia was far from remembering bags or Milton’s probable censorship over what she must do in these exhilarating circumstances. She sank into her place with a contented sigh. She was “going out in the car.” The buggy-riding of her youth was as nebulous as the pastimes of another life.

“Step on it!” called Annette, in the gaiety of a triumph almost attained.

And Milton was doing it, solemnly, as befitted a man who had a car and knew how to weigh the responsibility of it and the cunning of making it earn an extra bit for him, which was, thanks to his acumen, more than the trip was worth. They were off. Annette put a hand over Flavia’s, to show her she knew perfectly well what a joyous occasion it was, and that they must make the most of it by being girls together, and began to sing. At first she sang something wild and thrilling, she has never been able to remember what, but thinks it must have been a mangled aria from some opera. She hadn’t much voice and what she had was barbaric, quite unlike the soft harmony of the speaking voice she had acquired: for this was of wistfulness and languor all compact. But snatches of things wafted into her brain, and they would come out in disorderly gusts when life whipped her into unfed longings, and always there was a kind of beauty in them. She could not do anything creative in this or any other way, partly because she lacked the patience which is the godmother of art; but nothing she did was other than a signal, a call to hidden impulses and wild desires. And after she had embarked on this uncharted thing, and felt Flavia’s hand trembling under hers with the thrill of speed, it came to her that she might sing something Flavia could sing, too. Should it be a hymn, not likely to be offensive to Milton’s Sunday mind, or was there something she could remember out of her own country life, something that had the flare of old devotion? She had not long to think before she broke into Coronation. Flavia must have sung it all her life, at prayer-meetings, church picnics, even Sunday schools, and she had no more than begun but Flavia was with her, and, at “the royal diadem”, going strong, with not much diminution of voice from its old time gush and spring. Annette’s demanding heart beat loud with vibratory glee. At last the adventure was gaily launched. Milton had caught the speed infection and they were eating up the miles. Intoxicated by his amazement at the creature under his hand—and his fear of it—he had no more idea of the rate of their going than his wife behind there who had forgotten to walk softly before him and only knew it was a wonderful thing to see trees and villages run past and the road roll up like a reel. A hill before her was like a mountain. They were not going to conquer it. They were going to hurl themselves into it, and be engulfed; but even for that she didn’t care. And lo! they were upon it and it was not a hostile waiting giant, but only a road, and they careered over it. Annette had led her on through three camp meeting hymns with a wild flare to them, and was not surprised that Milton did not turn his head to bellow down the pother behind him: for though it hit his shoulders and surged about his ears, he was afraid to intermit his watchfulness over the car. He was a mad driver, afraid to go on and perhaps afraid to stop. Again she struck into Coronation and Flavia joined her. At the same moment, she noticed that Milton did give a sudden irritated shrug of the shoulders, as if he were acutely aware of the turmoil in the rear; but the shrug was all. In front of them was a load of hay they seemed to have been running down, and now they were passing it. But Milton, though firm in his certainty of having space enough, succumbed to an equally firm obsession that if there were any doubt of his getting his rights, he’d better be on the safe side. He had room enough to pass, but if the six inches that made exactly one half the road were overhung by the wisps of hay, should it not be his?

“Turn out! turn out!” he shouted, though also knowing that the driver, ensconced in his cubbyhole of hay in front, could by no means hear. Then—was it his nervous hand, his excited brain swerving too cautiously from the ravine at the left, or was it that his temerity drove him over the few inches of fatal nearness? He was even with the load, he was passing it, he was upon it, and the impact drove the car careening into the ditch. And the voices of the two women, as it went over, stopped on the last word of their hymn:

“And crown Him Lord of all!”

I

It was Annette who wakened first, and this was natural because she was so full of life, if only the eager life of the body, that the passage from one state of being to another was almost without a break. It really, she thought, was the sound of the bugle that wakened her, a bugle possibly blown from a hill or at least carrying such a sense of height and dominance as it might be a clangor of the dawn, calling on living things to wake. And calling authoritatively: there was no doubt that he who set it to his lips had great will to blow. She opened her eyes and sat up. They were in a verdurous spot on the bank of a stream where small sailboats were going back and forth idly, tacking because of a capricious breeze. Near by were her three companions, and, as it seemed, asleep, though as she looked at them Flavia also awoke and sat up. Annette was not precisely bewildered: but although she remembered perfectly the overturn into the ravine, she still did not understand how they should have escaped harm. She found nothing disordered about the scene. The others were simply disposed in natural attitudes, as if they had lain down at ease. As she looked at them, her gaze lingered longest on Terence, not out of anxiety or affection, but because he looked so helpless and irritatingly young: for the youth of a man, to be engaging, must show some element of potential hardness. Only a woman essentially virile or maternal is drawn instinctively to what is weaker than herself. This was a boy, little more, and a slight smile moved her lips, remembering that it was he who had been cast for her companion in high adventure, to “play opposite” her, Peter would have said, in the romance she had dreamed out and manipulated to this curious end. She did not question whether Terence was worth the part, but she did see the irony of leaving one man who had not been able to feed her appetite for life and taking up with this innocent, who, for all the implications of his face, might have been a sleepy acolyte of passion and not a swashbuckling captain sailing her to destruction—and delight. But Flavia! Flavia was gazing at her with eyes full of wonder incredulous of itself, eyes as young as dawn. Instantly Annette’s own unformulated wonder was transferred to her.

“My stars, Flavia!” she cried, fitting her form of speech to Flavia’s idiom.

Flavia was no longer, in affectionate patronage, an aunt. She was young, like the “young-ey’d cherubins”, though curiously her outward form was reminiscent of the Flavia who had donned the pink brocade. She was Flavia, yet, even to this girl, who had known her only in the most casual way, immortally different. She was, in some manner not to be described, so exhilarated, so stung into life, one might say, through sudden transition to another phase of it, that Annette found her bewildering. The girl was still looking at her and again she saluted that primal beauty in her with an exclamation. “My stars!” she said. Flavia’s eyes met hers still with wonder in them but more than that, an exultant satisfaction.

“Well,” said she, “so it’s come. It’s over. I must say I’m glad.”

This was another subtle difference. The tones of her voice were harmoniously full, her intonation had changed, her selection of words. It was still simple, but it had a completeness. What Annette would have called the New England of it had been wiped away, as if she had gone through some smoothing process and come out the same and yet, as somebody has said, with her resurrection face. She turned to Milton lying there at ease and called him softly. She did not call him father as she had for forty years, but the name she knew him by when they were young married folk. “Milton!” she called. “Wake up.”

Milton did not wake. He seemed relaxed, at ease, and Annette thought they could do very well without him, while she interrogated the new Flavia.

“Let them sleep,” said she, “unless you think—it isn’t coma, is it? They’re not hurt, are they?”

A curious little smile curved Flavia’s lips. The redness of the wild rose near by was not more soft.

“No,” she said. “They’re not hurt, either of them, any more than we are. They’re only—” There she stopped and, the smile continuing, let her eyes dwell on Annette as if wondering how far and how quickly she could take her into the secret which was really no secret at all. Only Annette, with incredible innocence of what might be at any minute, in the curious vulnerability of life on the earth, had not yet seen what had happened. Flavia, from a tenderness all maternal, wondered if she would shrink from it. Would it frighten her? The word itself seemed to frighten so many people. They had euphemisms for it: “passed away,” a more awkward phrase, something about spirit life—whereas it was simply the austere bare word the English speaking race had learned to call it, as bare as the skeleton of man after he has suffered his change and has only his bones to leave the prying eyes of generations after. It was curious to Flavia, and yet it was as commonplace as the opening of a flower. You might not have expected to come on the flower when you did, you might never have imagined the tint of blue it wore: but a flower is a flower. It fits into the scheme of created life as you have known it from your birth. So did this morning on the riverbank fit into Flavia’s past and her expectations of the future. She knew beyond all guesswork that she was dead—and yet alive. It had been so sudden that the grievousness of the mortal pang was not only past; it had never been. If she had not remained as simple as a child in her obedience to all the demands of her life as they came upon her, she might have found herself worried and perplexed over the unlikeness of the scene to the heaven she had accepted from her Bible teaching and tried, still obedient, to fit herself to long for. But she never had been able. Flavia was a woman who loved her dairy and her garden. The imagery that clothes the towers of Revelation was like banners flying, but she could never see herself in the picture without an extreme discomfort. And this—this was a river bank with roses, and the sky looked like morning and Milton was here, though still asleep. To see herself at ease in a country whereof there was no evidence save that of the highest poetry was beyond her. To be at home in it she would have had to be changed beyond all her conceptions of change, and that in itself wistfully implied a loss. And here she was, herself in something like her pink brocade, full of wonder and not uneasiness. And again the bugle sounded flaringly.

“Do you suppose,” she said to Annette,—and she trembled a little, though not with fear—“it’s to call us?”

“To call us?” Annette repeated. “Call us where?”

“To the Seat?”

“The Seat?”

“Yes, the Judgment Seat.”

Annette put out her hand and patted Flavia’s, trembling a little, there on Flavia’s knee.

“You’ve had a good deal of a shock,” she said kindly. “It was no joke going over that bank and dropping out of the car like spilled peas. But where is the car?” She looked about her with a quickened interest not yet apprehension. “I don’t remember this place. But I seemed to notice everything in the instant we went over. There wasn’t any water. I could swear to that. And here’s this. A river, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Flavia gently. “Here’s the river. ‘A pure river of water of life’ ”—she began, and then, because Annette had drawn her brows together in a puzzled frown, stopped, in compassion for her. Annette did not know. Nothing in her past life, no yearning, no memory of majestic words, had fitted her for knowing. This Flavia in some way saw. Annette’s mind was open to her as no mind—not even Milton’s—had ever been to her on earth. She did not speculate on this. She knew it, and the knowledge seemed inevitable and as natural as that she herself was still herself, yet different.

“I wonder,” said Annette, “if you did get a biff, after all—on the head.”

“No,” said Flavia, regarding her with that new concern, because she was wondering how Annette would take it and whether she ought to begin the revelation to her. “The river, you know,” she ventured again, still watching Annette. “ ‘Clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne.’ Not that I think it does,” said Flavia suddenly, spurred to revulsion by the difference of it all from her expectations. “It looks like just a river, no more, no less. Maybe we came that way. Still, I don’t have any recollection of coming, have you?”

She forgot for the moment that Annette was really not bewildered at all in the sense that she herself was: for however Annette might frown in perplexity over finding a river where none had been when her eyes closed to the earth she knew, the old words meant nothing to her.

“You lie down,” said Annette decisively, “and I’ll see what I can do for these men of ours. They haven’t a scratch, so far as I can judge. I’ll bet we all landed on our heads and got concussion. All but me. I’m perfectly fit. You got it less than they did; but they’re simply knocked out. I’m going to call them and see.”

“No! no!” cried Flavia. She put a hand on Annette’s arm and so detained her. “You mustn’t.”

“It won’t hurt them,” said Annette. She laughed. “I’ll bet you’re afraid of father. You don’t want to wake him.”

“It’s only,” said Flavia, trying with difficulty to formulate, for her own composure, what she felt so strongly, “it’s only that it may not be the usual way.”

“The usual way?” Annette repeated. “What is the usual way? Telephoning a doctor? or the police? But where’s a telephone, good gracious! This is all very pretty here, but it doesn’t look much like civilization, now does it? There it is again.”

The flare of the bugle was winging over their heads, and Flavia involuntarily looked up. She would not have been surprised to see flying angels in “stoles of white” outlined against the sky. The clear blue was void. No one was there and she could have broken down and cried in the extremity of mental tension. She knew exactly how things ought to happen, but they were not happening that way. She had come, with a certain shy elation, to her Father’s house and no one was at home. He had built the house for her. His messages had told her all about it, and here she lingered, trembling, at the door. At that instant, perhaps in answer to the bugle call, her husband and Terence opened their eyes and sat up, as if nothing had happened and their chief concern were to get on with the interrupted business of the day. Milton, like his wife, seemed to Annette entirely himself and yet different. It was a fact that he did look younger, of a fresher color and a brighter glance. His lips, though they had kept in a measure their obstinate curve, were the lips of youth. That was not quite so, only, in her bewilderment, it was the only way she had of putting it. As for Terence, she laughed aloud at seeing, he was precisely himself. He had been young before. He could hardly look younger now, unless he relapsed into boyhood. And he was puzzled.

Flavia, at her husband’s waking, stretched out a hand to him and spoke his name. It was a moving tone of voice, and it must have meant many things, for there were many in her heart. She wanted, if she could be sure it were permitted, if it were usual, to be the first to tell him. “Milton,” she wanted to say, “it’s over. We’ve died, darling.” (She had not called him that in many years, except as she said it silently sometimes when she saw him coming home through the dusk from his hard work in the woods or field. And then she only greeted him with: “You got your feet wet? You better change your shoes.”) “Don’t you see we have? I always thought it would be awful to go through, but it wasn’t, was it? I didn’t know anything, and I don’t believe you did. And here we are alive, you and I, and together, same as we were before. Milton!”

All this was in her heart, crowding to her lips but not allowed to leave them because she felt so strongly the ban upon the place, the obedience she owed it, the sense that she must wait and let things be done in the destined way. For she had not even begun then to have that sense of the great freedom in the universe, the freedom that goes hand in hand with its continuing mystery, and may look like disorder, but is only liberty. Milton was casting about the quick glance of his demanding eyes. He opened his lips, and Flavia bent toward him breathlessly, to be sure he also knew.

“Where’s the car?” said he.

Terence was looking at Annette. He was confused. “The darling!” she thought, overcome again by her helpless wonder at him. He’d always be confused, in the face of something different. What a man to go on adventure with! what a man! Still, he was looking at her sweetly and with deep concern.

“Are you hurt?” he was asking her, and all his heart was in his voice.

She shook her head, for Milton was speaking. He, too, had begun to wonder.

“We’d run about nine miles, as I remember, when that devilish load of hay jammed into us. But this water here—it don’t look like any water within forty mile of home.”

“The water of life!” chanted Flavia, though really to herself.

He frowned at her, as if reminding her not to break in.

“It couldn’t be the Pond. No, it’s a river all right.” But the question was irksome and he shook it off. His last grievance had him. “Elmer Drown was drivin’ that load,” said he darkly. “I’d have known it if it had been pitch dark. A man don’t need to take the whole width o’ the highway. I’ll make him smart for that. The car’s insured, but that ain’t all. It’s the spirit a man shows. I’ll make Elmer Drown smart.”

Again the bugle, nearer, a brighter flare of sound. Flavia trembled and again looked up. She was wondering what they would think, this uncomprehending three, when they saw the angels overhead. But now Milton cried out in a loud voice. He was amazed. He stretched out his hand and shook Terence by the shoulder.

“Look at that!” he cried. “Only you look at that.”

He was pointing inland, and Flavia, with Annette, followed the direction of his hand. They had been looking at the river and, seeing no shore beyond, to right and left at dim outlines of trees and a sweet rippling fantasy of the slightly moving water below the bank. Terence turned his head in a quick attention. Milton’s voice had rung out desperately.

“It’s a meetin’-house, ain’t it?” insisted Milton. “Though I never see a meetin’-house like that.”

At a point behind the bank where they were sitting two roads began, one going up the gradual hill at the right, the other diverging at the left. There were no signs of life on the right hand road, but on the left, an eighth of a mile up the hill, was a long, low building of noble qualities. It was so fitted to the scene, so satisfying in the harmony of its lines, that it seemed to be a part of the landscape, as if it belonged precisely there and could not be imagined anywhere else. It had the extremest beauty of colonnades, and yet their simplicity, and the imaginative eye could fancy the young men of an older Athens pacing back and forth while they learned the duties of the civic and moral life from grave discourse. Three of our little group regarded it without understanding its appeal to the eye, but their hearts were lifted up by the authority of its divine completeness. To Milton only it was a meetin’-house of an eccentric style, and after the first glance he was able to accept it without special wonder. But in a moment even he was stirred. The building was inhabited. There were figures weaving in and out of the colonnades, coming from two sides, as if streets led that way. They were dressed in short white garments of a flowing outline and they stepped strongly, like youth. Flavia lifted her hands slightly and then dropped them in her lap, in the ecstasy of a realized hope. “The Just!” she murmured to herself. “What?” said Milton, turning upon her. He was so at sea, that a word, even from her, was grateful to him. Anything might mean enlightenment. She did not answer. What she might guess was, she humbly knew, of no value. It came from her diligent Biblical reading, and yet, so solid did the realities of the place look to her, that she could not believe that what she had been used to call the promises were not yet to be fulfilled. Again there came a flare of the bugle, and the white-robed group seemed to come together in close formation, as if the space within could not conveniently hold them, and when they had formed a sizable compactness a figure appeared from within the colonnade, mounted some invisible dais and began to address them. What he said could not be heard from below, but it was reasonable to see that he was talking from the movements of his head to right and left, the gestures of his arm and the sound, from time to time, of cheering from the crowd.

“What is it?” Annette asked of the others, impartially. She was vaguely troubled. “Let’s go up and see?”

The men did not answer, but Flavia shook her head. Why they were not to go she could not say, but she still had a feeling that there were rules to be observed, and that they must wait to be taken charge of and instructed. Terence was a little paler than Annette had seen him. He was frowning in perplexity. The wonder of it had run from Flavia to him.

“Annette,” he said sharply, “what is it?”

She glanced at him in a perfect innocence.

“Don’t ask me,” she said lightly. “I don’t know what they’re doing. But they look mighty picturesque up there.”

The orator had ceased. His arms fell. He stepped down from the rostrum and the others, pressing about him for a moment, broke up and began moving in a leisurely way, down toward the water. It seemed to Flavia that she could not allow her husband, who was still gazing at them in a hopeless curiosity, to be swamped by the wonder of their presence, unprepared. Yet was she the one to tell him?

“Queer rig they’ve got on,” he muttered. “Wonder who they be.”

Then, in spite of herself, her desire broke bounds and she answered him, with the sharpness of an alarm which was not for herself but the effect on him.

“The Blest,” she heard herself calling, as if to warn him. “Milton, it’s the Blest.”

II

Milton merely looked round at his wife, shook his head a little, as if what she said was of no consequence, and resumed his puzzled observation of the group which had broken up again, and stood in a kind of pleasurable agitation, talking. Then he, turning from his wife, did vouchsafe that patronizing quietus “There! there!” which he had used, all their married life, to suppress what he thought her more foolish impulses, and on that forgot her altogether. Now he was challenging Terence:

“What do you sp’ose they be? Celebratin’ or somethin’? Elks? Odd-Fellows? Can’t be. All them white clo’es. Summer, though. That might be it. White duck. But they’re a queer cut.”

He might as well not have spoken. Terence, in his turn, took no notice. He had grown pale in an alarming way, as if the blood were drained out of him and his set face registered terror at its going. He leaned across Annette and, ignoring her, said to Flavia:

“What did you mean by that? You said ‘the Blest.’ Who are the Blest?”

Flavia was smiling at him. There were tears in her eyes, and she looked very beautiful, though none noted that. They were all too busy with their own bewilderment. She shook her head at him.

“No, dear, no,” she said. “I can’t tell you. I was wrong, you see. It wasn’t so. I guess we’ve got to learn it all from the beginning, and it’s as dark to me as it is to you. No, they’re not the Blest. Any way, not as I thought they’d look. But they’re nice, very nice. Handsome, so to speak, they’re all so young. You better watch ’em and see what they do. Maybe you can find out.”

Annette was breathless with an unnamed emotion. This was the different, the new. However she came here, the scene delighted her in that it promised something, she saw not what. But anything was welcome, so it was action, color. Out of the pleasing harmony of this moving throng, one man emerged, attended on the right and left by a youth bending attentively as he talked. This was a moderately tall man, erect and of a great presence. He evidently did have a distinction above the others, for some ceased speaking as he approached, as if it would be unwise to address him unbidden and again because every word he might say conveyed authority. Terence started, at the nearer sight of him, and looked at him more closely. The man was familiar, in a remote way. Had he come on his portrait in a book? His clothes, too, were odd, even in this exotic landscape, Roman, or possibly Greek. That fitted in with the possibility of having met him on the printed page. It was Flavia who was to help him to a clue. She gave a little breathless cry.

“Why,” she stammered, “why—that must be—I’ve seen him—his likeness anyhow.”

Annette broke into a little tolerant laugh. She had kept a kindly hand on Flavia’s and she pressed it softly. Flavia, she still believed, had had a knock on the head, and must be gently used.

“I’ve seen him, too,” said Terence, his face growing paler with the words. “You think?—by God! I thought so, too.”

The man had heard them. He turned his head in their direction, gave them a quick look from rather cold dark eyes and with a word to those who seemed to be his followers, walked down to them with a trained martial step. He came directly up to this little group and, with no concerted purpose but because it seemed proper to do so, they rose to their feet. He spoke first to Milton who had advanced a pace before the others. He was grave, courteous, but in no degree welcoming.

“When,” said he, “did you arrive?”

Milton felt, for the only time he could remember, at a loss. He had always been an active figure in town meeting. He had once spoken a few words of welcome to a presidential candidate. But to these occasions he brought a consciousness of his own civic virtues and of being as good as any man. Here were a new people and an unknown scene. The man had asked him a simple question and he could only mumble in reply. Yes, the mumble could be understood, they had just come. (But as Milton said this, terror began knocking at his heart. Just come? Come where? What was this place, so strange, so strangely populated?) The man whom he could only call the stranger, though it was he who was familiarly at home here and Milton who was the interloper, now turned to Flavia, and Terence noted that the young men who were behind him, with an effect of backing him up, turned also, as if whatever he did were supremely important. This was with no effect of flattery but gravely, as if he were the immediate business of their lives. And Flavia met his gaze with a similar gravity and, Terence marvelled to see, no slightest shyness, such as a newcomer might feel in these far latitudes. Annette, too, was noting it, and looked at her in a questioning way. Once she opened her lips to speak.

“I saw the resemblance,” said Flavia. “I saw it at once.” This new manner of hers was as perfect as if she had been born to it. Milton could not interpret its untroubled courtesy. He could only stare at her. “There is a bust of you in our library in Vermont. Your name is on it. That’s how I knew.”

She was speaking differently, too, Milton thought uneasily. This was the way she used to talk when she was the school teacher and he, the ignorant, handsome farm hand, had married her and, after her father had died, and they had inherited the old house, had directed her life as it seemed best to him. Milton did not know he had been handsome, so much of a man in strength and beauty that the girl who had been Flavia accepted him as something from the hand of God and sent to earth by God’s own special grace; but he did know he had a certain hunger to eat up the earth and a capacity for judging what was best to be done both by him and the men he dealt with. And usually it was done. Most men got tired of withstanding him, and Flavia, in this one small matter of speech, conformed, after the first time he bade her “talk United States.” It was not so much the weight of his daily will upon her as an exquisite desire to adapt herself to him as he was, inviting no shallow comparison between them.

“Vermont,” the stranger repeated, drawing his brows together and looking down at the ground as if he sought some prompting there.

One of the young men beside him now interposed, but with the greatest respect:

“It is in North America, General. We had a good many of them at the time of the European War. Good fellows, so far as I found, but with no idea of conquest in itself. Brave, but reasonable and ready to give every man a chance.”

“Ah!” said the General, as if that threw some faint light on the two men before him but was not quite what he had hoped to hear. He turned to Milton with a manner which, though dignified, was distinctly ingratiating. About this manner of his, it is difficult to tell what it was. It impressed you as being the acquired air of a man who wanted to please and wanted it for his own ends, and yet as if he spoke from an assured eminence to his inferior. But courteously: he was distinctly courteous.

“Are you,” said he to Milton, “interested in land? Should you care for a holding of your own?”

Milton, perhaps at the sound of Vermont, had recovered his native poise. He seemed, like the General, to see no need to assert himself, since none was better than he.

“As to that,” he said rather bluffly, “I’ve got as much now as I can carry on without hirin’. None too easy to get help these times. Somethin’ more than a one-man farm mine is.” Yet his eyes had narrowed speculatively at the mention of land, and this last was perhaps only the prelude to possible bargaining.

Annette had been watching them, and now she had her cue. She came into the talk with a rush, relieved at knowing at last what it was all about. The scene, though unexpected, was simple enough. This was the rehearsal of a colossal film. The costumes of the General and his followers, startling to eyes that had looked last upon a New England road, were exquisitely fitted to the spot. She took a step forward, and curtsied with professional ease and grace. Something had to be said, she knew, to indicate her adequacy for a part, some bizarre appeal. She was a little afraid of the General. Her quickened pulse warned her not to go too fast or far; but whatever the scene before them, she felt the nerve to play it out.

“Won’t you,” she said, with a beguiling modesty of bearing, “give me something to do?”

He wheeled round upon her. Terence, who was not imaginative but whose brain now seemed to be quickening in some new way—wondering, answering its own wonder and then wondering again—thought he had never before understood that phrase of bending the brows. The General was bending his brows on Annette, and there was no doubt that she trembled back a little, though she kept her charming pose and faced him. Flavia, too, was alive to this.

“Annette!” she said in a low tone, warningly, and Terence added, in a voice almost inaudible: “Don’t!”

What they expected of the General neither of them knew; but he said nothing. Apparently she wasn’t worth it. He turned back to the two men.

“Up there,” said he, indicating the colonnade which they learned later to call the market-place, “behind that building and up on a height which has a very good view, are some small but comfortable houses I have had erected for newcomers. They can stay there free of charge until they look about them and decide what they want to do. Or they can stay permanently. You will be welcome.”

This offer was made in the most courteous tone—not, however, a tone with any warmth in it, and Terence, who, with every second, seemed to be gaining a kind of pained acuteness felt that there was something behind it, and that though the houses were probably there and the General was sincere in his hospitable gesture, the something behind it was not for him. Milton turned to his wife. He began to look troubled.

“I calculated,” said he, “on going—home”.

The words knocked at Flavia’s heart. He had calculated on going home! Was it not his home? Was it not the home of every one? And yet it was very strange. She had an idea that there was kindliness at the back of it all, that they really had got home in as definite a way as when they drove back from market after buying grain for the stock, but as if there were some unfulfilled condition connected with it, something for them to do. What she would have liked to do, or rather what would have seemed to her timid obedience the most sensible thing, was to sit down and wait for darkness, when one was most likely to get back some of the confidence used up by the long day. It had been always so with her. The night brought counsel. But then she reflected that she had been told there would be no night, and settled herself, a little sadly, to take it as it was. The General was looking at Milton thoughtfully as if, Terence could not help feeling, he was wondering what bribe would move him. Perhaps he decided in the brief space of the look, for he said, in a peremptory way, as if it were an order:

“You,” he turned to the men who were so unmistakably his followers, “may disperse. You two”—he included Terence and Milton in a glance, “will come with me.”

His men, drilled to obedience, wheeled and did disperse, each one his own way, and Milton, moving in a certain dazed fashion, took a step nearer the General, prepared to follow him. Terence, about to join him, turned back to the two women. He stopped before Annette and looked into her face.

“I suppose,” he said, “we’ve got to do what we are told. But I hate to leave you.”

She laughed and gave him a little flick on the arm.

“Run along,” she said. “We’re all right. And if you find there’s a chance for me, put it up to them. Tell them I’m the best ever. But you won’t get anything for yourself. They won’t keep you. You’d be a stick on any stage. I needn’t worry about your going. You’ll be back.”

He looked at Flavia who had withdrawn some paces to leave them to their talk. His air was all a questioning distress, and she smiled and shook her head at him.

“No use,” the look advised him. “You’d better go.”

But he could not go. He turned back again to Annette.

“Don’t you see, my dear,” he said miserably. “Don’t you really see?”

“Of course I see.”

Yet she was entirely unmoved, and he told himself, in despair, that everything which seemed to him so bewildering, even so threatening, had passed her by. She continued:

“Something’s happened in the company. They want understudies. But if he thinks he can pull you into shape! He’s looking. He wants you. Don’t keep him waiting.”

So Annette and Flavia were left alone in the beautiful strange scene, Flavia a little anxious at last because the time was slipping along and none of the signs she had been taught to look for were visible in her sky. Annette was humming a tune and picking a flower here and there; and Flavia noted absently that they were flowers she knew: long-stemmed violets and a feathery sort of plume that grew in the meadow at home. But which was home? She could not allow herself to wonder. Now Annette had finished her nosegay and she held it against Flavia’s cheek and smiled to see how it became her.

“The fact is,” said she, “you’re growing younger every minute. What you’ve needed is change of air. And now you’re far enough from home to feel it.”

“Yes,” said Flavia, surprising herself by the new irony in her voice, “it is a change. And you’re right: it’s far from home. Look! there’s a woman coming.”

“Two women,” said Annette. “There’s one walking behind. Yes, they belong together. Now they’re hurrying.”

The woman had appeared from behind the building with the colonnades, and she was coming toward them, fast. Flavia saw she was beautiful, with her pale cheeks and gold hair parted and drawn softly back, and Annette knew her dress was that of muses and goddesses as she had seen them in sculpture. Having also a little superficial knowledge of the phrases in general reading, she remembered the words incessu patuit dea, and saw that the woman walked divinely, as Flavia also knew, though without help from classic imagery. The other was but a girl and the basket she carried was full of fruit of various glowing sorts, and there was something about her, as compared with the maturer woman, which indicated service and a carefully trained behavior. She was not tall and was brown of face and arms as if she lived out of doors. It seemed as if she might be of no individual account, there being many like her; but she had a sincere and kindly look. The mistress, for there was no further doubt about their relation, came on with that lovely pace of hers, a dignity not to be described, stretching out both her hands to Flavia.

“I am so sorry,” she said, in a voice moving from its sincerity. “I was to meet you. It was my charge. And then some one came who was in special trouble, tired and afraid, afraid for somebody else, and I had to stop a little while with him. My name is Cintra.” She was holding Flavia’s hands and Flavia looked her in the face as if all happiness depended on her, and loved her exceedingly. “You’ve seen him?” asked the other. “The General? I’m sure you have, because I saw him myself, taking two men along to the market-place, and I was sure they belonged to you.”

Now she included Annette in her smile and Annette, though tremendously impressed, was vaguely uncomfortable. She had never seen so great a lady. Nor had Flavia, but to her the greatness was a part of the trust she felt. It was like a promise of unguessed things.

“Yes,” said Flavia, “it was my husband. Milton Blake his name is. And the other is this young lady’s husband here, and they’ve gone to look at a house the General”—the title came easily, but she meant in a minute to ask if it really could be the man of Long Ago whose bust was at home there in the Vermont library. The Roman matron must have divined her question, for she said gently:

“You will have to know about us, and I want you to know at once so you won’t make any mistakes. He is my husband and he is called the General because it is forbidden to call him anything else. It is thought to be unwise.”

Flavia trembled before what she was going to ask.

“Is he,” said she, “the same as—was he in the old time before he died—was he—” she paused.

The woman looked at her in a still seeming wonder.

“How do you know?” she asked. “You! why you don’t appear—” There she paused, and Flavia answered meekly:

“No, I’m not anybody in particular and I don’t really know anything, but there’s a head of him in our library at home. Soon as I set my eyes on him I knew him. He isn’t changed.”

“He kept his old likeness,” said the woman gravely. “He chose to. It is permitted, you know. That is, if one doesn’t change. But if one changes—it is said—our scientists say it—the body keeps time with the soul. Really, I don’t know how to put it, perhaps because I don’t understand it, and the best of the scientists say they don’t either. But my husband has never changed. He wants the same things now he wanted all those years ago before your Leader changed the world—or tried to change it. He didn’t really, you know.”

There was no offense in the words. Her laugh had softened them, that little whimsical laugh.

“Yes, I know,” Flavia hastened to say. “He came to save us, but we would not be saved.”

“We mustn’t talk of Him,” said the other. “It’s all very difficult when it comes to that. You are a Christian, aren’t you? Yes. And I—well, never mind. Your Leader is sacred to you. To me, too, though I—No, we must talk of my husband. He, too, is a leader, in a worldly way, you understand. He has worked very hard all these years—years upon years”—she drew a breath as if the memory lay heavy on her—“and gone from star to star, as they turned him out, trying—”

“What does he want to do?” asked Flavia, yet guessing, for had she not known the unconquered love of dominion in Milton Blake? They were alike—she had seen it in the moment of seeing them together, that imperial Roman and the Yankee, Milton Blake.

“He wants to found a kingdom,” said Cintra defiantly, as if she could not have him blamed for it by anybody but her, “and summon back all the people that were on earth in those old days when he came near reigning there—and had to die for it.”

“Yes,” said Flavia, “I remember.”

She was thinking of the bust in the library at home and looking him up in an old school history. And as broken bits of recollection kept shattering into her mind as they had begun to do in this disquieting country, she now found she was also thinking in the words of an old hymn:

Who should reign save the Lord who was the One? Yet these things were too deep for her, and she put them humbly aside to think about this man who had her husband among his followers. Him at least she might possibly understand, and for Milton’s sake she had to do it. Cintra had patently ranged herself beside the General who led and she must be as valorous where Milton followed. What was the General beyond the few plain facts she knew about him? He was, his wife had said, a man who wanted to reign and he wanted it still. The weariness of the years rose before her mind, gray, unscalable, and she felt his weariness and that of Cintra, in her own bones. But she said only, with the simplicity she might have used to a neighboring farmer’s wife whose husband had been long ill:

“It’s been a great trial for you.”

Cintra’s face changed perceptibly as a little quiver ran over it; but she ignored it proudly.

“You must call me Cintra,” said she, “and as I told you he is always the General.”

“My first name is Flavia,” said Flavia shyly. “You must call me by it.”

Cintra flushed with pleasure.

“That isn’t a name I am accustomed to among your people,” said she. “It sounds like one of ours, the General’s and mine. Do you think you have our blood in your veins?”

“No,” said Flavia shyly still but proudly because she had always prized what little she knew about her lineage. “We were Devonshire folks. My grandmother was a Drake. But,” she hastened to add, “my father was a great reader and he named me out of an old book. Maybe he knew your folks,” she hastened to add. “I can remember stories he told me about ’em and they were—” She had been about to say, in her eagerness to give pleasure, “and they were very nice.”

Here a doubt assailed her. She remembered conquest and slaves brought into Rome. There was blood to mark the way. Yet somehow things were too colossal then not to be noble. It was not like Milton’s coveting his neighbor’s field. But was it not the same, after all? It was a puzzling business, whatever you made of it, especially in this clear atmosphere where the light seemed to fall differently from what it did at home. Was it more revealing? Cintra, she found, was looking at Annette, who had been listening, but only to her own bewilderment, and at last was consciously troubled. Cintra was smiling at her in a warming way, and put out a hand to her. Annette yielded to the hand and, like a child, allowed herself to be drawn near.

“I’m afraid it was hard for you, coming so suddenly, without warning,” said Cintra gently. “You must have courage. This air is very healing. Don’t you find it so? Many notice the air at once and take comfort in it.”

Annette’s face had the sharpness of anxiety and her eyes had sunken. She spoke with difficulty, moistening her dry lips.

“What does it mean? She understands.” She made a little gesture of the hand toward Flavia. “I don’t. I’ve been listening to you, but I don’t know yet whether I’m dreaming—Am I unconscious and just coming back? Is it—morphia? I’ve heard some people can’t stand it. It makes them dotty. They dream. Is all this a dream?”

To Cintra, it seemed that the agonized appeal of her voice was one with the darkness of her mind and that she kept on in these hurrying phrases as if she were afraid to stop, for fear of hearing what might send her mad indeed. She gave Flavia a questioning, perhaps a warning look.

“She doesn’t know,” said she, and then betrayed her own doubt in a question. “Doesn’t she really know?”

Flavia shook her head. The three had been grouped, united by the clasp of Cintra’s right hand and her left, and now she dropped Flavia’s hand to draw Annette a little closer. The maid had been waiting, aloof, holding her basket and looking, with her out-door serviceableness and her stillness, like a statue of Flora and as sweet. Cintra signalled her and she came alive.

“Go on in advance,” said Cintra. “Tell them we are coming and have the table spread. We will have wine”— She stopped short, remembering her guests were not of Latin blood and that they had a table ritual of their own, and she laughed a little, delightfully. The laugh was foreign to her stately type, and yet interpreted one phase of her. You could see what a playmate she might be of a grave general if ever he bent himself to play. “No!” she said. “Bread! Little cakes, those that are very sweet, and tea! Make it yourself and make it as the English lady told you, and put it in the large thin cups.” Then she turned back to Annette, who was regarding her even more piteously than before. “Come, my dear,” said she. “You have traveled. You’ve been in other countries besides your own. This is no different, in a way. Come, Flavia.”

III

They began walking up the gentle slope toward the colonnade, Cintra between them. The air had a singular sweetness, not so much from the alembic of garden flowers as with a quality of its own. It was exhilarating, though not in a heady way. It sustained and lightened the weight of effort, as if it were a medium and you were buoyed by it. These were tall women and walked with a good stride. Flavia, moving as lithely as she had not moved for years, was thrillingly conscious of it, and old longings came to her with what seemed to be the resurrection of her lost youth. But she had never, even then when day was “at the morn,” been so full of the urge of life. Annette would have said of herself that she felt more than usually fit, but she was withal a good deal dampened by anxiety: for she did not know where she was nor how she had come there, nor why the other two should be talking in riddles. Yet they were so incalculably serious about it all that she was impressed, against her reason, and felt slightly pulled down, unequal to the changed conditions, whatever they might be. They went on by the road which was apparently intended to be a popular highway, for it was wide and made with all the thoroughness of the road-maker’s art. Trees bordered it at right intervals, and to Flavia they looked like elms. They were not great canopies, with sweeping branches like those she knew at home, but were beautiful, with the look of being very old. Cintra glanced at her once when she gave a little exclamation of pleasure at the gentle and luxuriant face of things, and spoke with what seemed pride.

“You like our road, don’t you? The General isn’t quite satisfied with it. They wouldn’t let him build it as he wished. He wanted it to go straight, straight as an arrow. That’s the way he likes a road. But the others wanted it to curve, and turn out for a tree or a rock, as it does there. I think they were right. I like the curves.”

Annette hardly listened. Now she stopped short.

“I suppose,” she said, “you know where you’re taking us.”

The others also stopped, and Cintra answered gently:

“Oh, yes, I know! It’s quite all right, quite as it has to be. Only don’t worry. That’s the only trouble here. You’re likely to worry at first, and that’s a pity, because there isn’t the slightest reason for it. Nothing has changed, dear child, except—oh, I never know how to put it—you are just the same, don’t you see? Only—you tell her,” she begged Flavia.

She had never seen anyone like Annette. But Flavia shook her head. She could not escape her conviction that things should be allowed to take their course, that the soul—if this were Annette’s soul that was undergoing its change—should be left to come to itself slowly. Annette had put out her lips a little, like a sullen child. Her eyes were full of fear. She seemed about to cry.

“If it’s a dream,” she said, “I want to wake up. I’ve got to get out! Oh, let me get out!”

This was in no ordinary voice. She was gasping, possessed by the idea of nightmare, and she could speak in no other way.

“Draw a long breath,” said Cintra quietly. “Now, another! That’s right. It isn’t a dream, my dear,” she said, with authority. “You are awake, and you must realize it and behave yourself. That’s the thing to do. Tell her it is,” she commanded, turning to Flavia. “Tell her she must behave herself.”

But Flavia put her hand through Annette’s arm and pressed it a little, merely as a sign that it would be better to go on.

“Come, my dear,” she said, “we must go where we are going and you’ll see him the sooner. Terence, I mean.” She did not say “your husband,” as she had said, up to this time. For now, in some way she did not question, it had come to her that Terence was not the girl’s husband. But Annette obstinately stood her ground.

“I don’t want to see him,” she said. Her color had faded out. Her lips were pale. She looked wan and cold. “All I want is to wake up. I’ve had queer dreams before.” She was trying to smile, but her lips trembled piteously. “I’ve had them when I knew it was a dream, as I do now. You can’t wake me. I see that. Because you’re in the dream, too. But if I try hard enough, I can wake myself. Only it’s awful, awful.”

The last came when she began to gasp in that way of her nightmare obsession, and both the others believed she was doing it wilfully, though not consciously, out of her nightmare feeling.

“Stop that,” said Cintra. “Get your breath, and come along. We’re not far from my house. When we get there you can lie down, if you like. Though there’s no need of it,” she added ruthlessly. “You’re a strong young woman, in perfect condition. Get hold of yourself and come along.”

Annette, wholesomely angry, did get hold of herself and they went along. Now the road turned slightly, with an effect, from the roadside foliage, of a wall of green; but when they had rounded the curve they stopped involuntarily, the two strangers in wonder and Cintra perhaps a responsive pride. Near the top of the slope was a house, long, low with the same colonnaded aspect of the great building they had seen first. To Flavia, it was ineffably beautiful with a note of strangeness added to its beauty, because she had never seen such a house nor such terraced gardens, nor trees artfully disposed to reflect themselves in clear pools, nor a fountain such as the one in the garden sending up jets of water, with a murmurous climb and fall. All this could not be seen at once, but the general effect was of a large placidity, an inexhaustible abundance of flower and foliage, a calmness and dignity greatly soothing and yet uplifting to the mind. Annette saw nothing, in that moment of pausing, except that here was a house. She was still in her nightmare, beating vainly about in it, trying to escape.

“Shall we go on?” asked Cintra, and they led Annette between them up the slope, and entered a spacious colonnade where were reclining benches and seats, and here Cintra drew forward a chair and gently pressed Annette into it. “Sit down,” she said, “and look about you, and we will have something to eat and drink.”

The scene of their wonder must now shift to Annette’s mind, for Flavia was so obedient to the changing scene, so unmoved in her certainty that things were as they were and she was not to compare them with anything she had previously known, that she sat in a state of quiet thankfulness. She had reached the spot where everything would be as it was appointed; here was journey’s end. But Annette’s mind was a battlefield. Fears and wonders struggled there like disordered hosts. They did not know why they were fighting, but they fought. She saw everything clearly. The little girl who seemed to be Cintra’s maid and who had returned with them from below, had disappeared within the house and she now came back with two other maids, not unusual like herself, but pleasing and decorous, and they brought up little tables, and presently served tea on them, and also wine and cakes, with fine napery and lovely cups and glasses to make the service beautiful. Cintra herself put a small glass to Annette’s lips, and Annette drank, saying absently, when she had finished:

“It smells of flowers.”

“It is a cordial,” said Cintra. “You need it.”

Flavia, being asked to do it, was pouring herself a cup of tea, and drank it with enjoyment. She also ate bread with a fine appetite.

“But it says,” she ventured, when Cintra came back to her and sat sipping a small cup of red wine, “‘they shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more.’ But I’m hungry,” said Flavia, with a sudden candor. “Yes, I’m hungry.”

“I know,” said Cintra, smiling at her. “What you said is poetry, you know. But it’s nice to be hungry. And it doesn’t contradict the poetry. You’ll find nothing contradicts that.”

Annette, her heart reviving from the cordial, sat upright in her chair and called to them.

“If it isn’t a dream”—she began. But she stopped. Her cheeks and lips were suddenly white again. She put her hands on the arms of the chair, to brace herself.

“It isn’t a dream,” said Cintra quietly.

“Then,” Annette called out loudly, as if she had to put everything into her voice to be sure of getting any sound at all, “what is it?”

Cintra had made up her mind that the moment had come. She moved over to Annette and sat down in a chair in front of her, so near that their knees were touching.

“It isn’t a dream,” she said quietly, “but it is something that occurs as often as dreams. It is death.”

Annette sat looking at her without moving in the least. Cintra continued to look at her.

“Death?” said Annette at last, in a husky voice. “Who has died?”

“You,” said Cintra, still quietly, but watching her. “You have, as we are accustomed to call it, died. We may as well keep on calling it that. There’s no need of new words. Apparently you died, all of you together, for you came very suddenly. I don’t know about that. And the thing for you to do is to get hold of yourself at once, and look at the advantages of your present state. There are advantages. Your friend here has done it without the least difficulty.” She indicated Flavia by a glance and smile, a different glance from the judicial one she bent upon Annette. “The thought of it wasn’t unfamiliar to her, I judge. It is to you.”

Certainly it was to Annette, as she had no doubt in conceding for the moment when she found herself believing what Cintra had said. But her credulity did not last. Cintra had impressed her, but only while her warm reasonable voice lingered upon the air. Annette shook her head irritably, as if she shook away a hovering fancy.

“But,” said she, with an uneasy sense that whatever she said was likely to be knocked out from under her, “evidently I’m alive.”

“You are alive,” conceded Cintra promptly, as if she had to brush that part of the argument away before she could get on to things more relevant. “So is your friend here. So are the two men who came with you. So am I, though I lived on the earth hundreds of years ago. The only point is that we have lived on the earth. Uneasy tenants, the General says. And we died and came here, which is, to all intents and purposes, another earth. We were there and were alive. We are here and we are still alive.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Annette.

But she did believe it. The strange beauty of the scene, the more beautiful because of its strangeness, pressed upon her, a weight of evidence. The inanimate part of all this seemed to build itself up like a wall of witnesses. There were a thousand things she wanted to say in rebuttal, all of them in the half-remembered idiom of the beliefs that had, in their turn, been battering at her ears all her previous life. Now they were returning upon her in catchwords, half phrases, and she found herself repeating some of them—unprepared—sin—belief in immortality—but Cintra who may or may not have heard the catchwords, because they had not been spoken aloud, said to her decisively:

“Don’t waste time over those things. You’re alive. That’s the whole point of it. Breathe, eat, drink, live. And see what happens to you next.”

“What does happen?” Annette asked, eagerly, in spite of her resolve to keep an unmoved front. And Flavia, too, bent forward, listening.

“I don’t know,” said Cintra. “Nobody knows. Nobody did on the earth, did they? Well, nobody does here, except a few that seem to—they look so, any way—and they don’t know how to tell. Maybe they know they mustn’t. Maybe they only know it’s a mystery and they adore the mystery and leave it at that.”

“Mystery!” Annette repeated, with a pang of remembrance of something she had heard and dismissed with lifted eyebrow and a mental yawn. But just here she would have quoted it to get a foothold in this very nebulous conversation which yet seemed demanded by the place. “My husband wrote a sonnet,” she said, and very prettily began quoting:

But there of necessity she stopped, remembering how she had told Peter she wouldn’t read beyond the first line of a thing like that, and still unable to do less than approve her own astuteness. She wished she had remembered it for this moment only; it was the dope the occasion called for. Cintra was listening with a courteous expectancy, and Annette, unable to go on spouting, retired behind her defense of incredulity, and said again, with a calculated bravado: “I don’t believe it.” But on the heels of this came a question she could not weigh deliberately enough to suppress: “Is this heaven?”

And again Flavia said nothing; but she listened.

“If you mean,” said Cintra promptly, “is it the common idea of heaven, I’m pretty safe in telling you it’s not. As to the name, various parts of the country are named for different parts of your earth. I have to say ‘your’. We always do to newcomers, for clearness only. They seem to assume it is still theirs, in a way. The General has never ceased to feel that he owns certain real estate, though he left it for the good of the people: estates on the earth, I mean. He’s never become detached. Well! well! we mustn’t any of us go back to that.”

But it was evident that she had gone back to it, over and over, for the wistful lines of her face were those of old thought and tragic conquest. For the moment they suggested ineffable things: torn banners waving over ruins and the wail of winds about coigns and battlements of no more value to the uses of any world. Annette, who was entirely dense to any mysticism that might be the commonplace of this new sphere, was pursuing her chance of first-hand information. If the woman is crazy, she tried to think, if—if—well, let us see how far the craze will carry her.

“You say it’s heaven,” she insisted, with what assurance she could manage. “No, perhaps not, but you’ve all but said so. You do say it’s another planet or a star or something or other that isn’t the earth. I notice you speak English. I suppose that indicates that, if it’s heaven—I’m not asking, you know—only I suppose if it’s heaven it would have to be English. You are English, aren’t you, you, yourself?”

Annette was instantly ashamed of this, the fretful outcry of a tired child, but she was on edge, a little angry, for no reason she could find, and very much afraid. Cintra straightened in her chair. Her cheeks had become delicately suffused. Such dignity had she that you would not, in any stress of emotion, have expected of her an angry flush.

“I have a great respect for the English,” she said, and she added in a tone of pride, and of a degree for which there is no word but “royal,” “I myself am Roman.”

Light broke on Annette, a candle glimmer and illuminating the wrong angle, but enough.

“Is that why,” she asked impulsively, “he calls himself the General? Does he think he’s Caesar?”

“He is Caesar,” said Cintra rather impatiently, but seeming to imply she found Annette of so negligible a quality that indignation would be misplaced. “He is Caesar, the conqueror, the noblest Roman of them all. No, no,” she interrupted herself, apparently to forestall correction, “I know all that. We have your Shakespeare here—his plays—the gods alone know where he is, a man like that. But it wasn’t Brutus. It was Caesar who was the noblest Roman. And so they stabbed him in the Capitol.” Her voice took on an indignant grief as if the stabbing had just been done and she was incredulous of the infamy.

“O you dear creatur’!” said Flavia, going back, in an extremity of sympathy, to her Vermont speech. “Don’t tell me you see it done.”

“No,” said Cintra, still adequately, from her proud memories. “But I heard Marc Antony—” there she paused a moment and seemed to enquire of herself why she was dragging out these jewels of remembrance for strangers of a different class and land. “I was a girl,” she said. “I call myself a Roman, but I had been brought from Spain, a captive. I never saw the soldier who brought me after he had used me and thrown me away. And I was glad. I loved Caesar only. He was very tired,” she said, a thrill of exquisite pity in her voice. “And he looked like my father they had killed, and I loved him. Men wanted me, but I got away from them. I saw him every day, far off, and I loved him. I began to sell flowers, wandering up and down the streets. And that day, the day he was killed, the crowd was horrible. And I was trampled to death.”

Flavia gave a little horrified sound, and Cintra laid a hand on her knee.

“No, no,” she said. “That wasn’t bad. It was good. For I died only a little after Caesar, and when he came to himself I took his head on my breast and he thought it was his mother—or some woman—I never knew—and the waking was easy for him. And I’ve never left him since.”

Annette was looking at her curiously. A little of her fear had gone, but her eyes were large with an enormous curiosity. Cintra saw that, and answered it.

“Yes,” she said, with the same pride in her voice: pride of caste Annette had thought it, but suddenly realized it was part of the woman herself. “I’d loved him a long time. I’d watched him come in from his triumphs. I knew his tragedies. They were common talk. He never saw me, of course. I told you: I was a flower-girl.”

“As I remember,” said Flavia, in her gently courteous way, “it was a good while ago. Time passes so,” she added, as if affectionately tolerant of the fleeting years. She knew the date on the bust in the Vermont library, but in spite of having accepted this place with all the incredible difference of a heaven not in Revelation, it was still unthinkable that Cintra should have come so far and lived so long. Cintra herself laughed out, looking at Flavia as if she delighted in her. With her laugh she was instantly lovelier in a curious way, not as if she had gone back to a flickering reflection of the girl she had been, but like a nymph among the leaves, evanescent like all beauty, yet unchanging, as if there might be women of another type than ours and she was one.

“It was,” she said, sobering before Flavia could wonder if she had said a foolish thing, “years and years ago. And I’ve told you this,” she said, shaking off recollection and returning to her present task, “because there are other things I have to tell you and you’ll need some preparation or you won’t believe them. My husband,” she continued, turning to Annette, “the man you saw, the man we are told to call the General, is the man your historians write about and your children study, the man your Shakespeare wrote of. His name—no, we won’t speak that name again. We will call him the General, nothing else.”

Annette believed everything now, but again her fear came upon her and she fought it desperately. She reasoned with herself, in a mad way. If she had died and gone—what was this place where she had gone?—These casual glances back through centuries were too much for her, these names were heavier than funeral bells. She wanted her own kind. So only could she be unconcerned, and death, they had taught her, was at least peace: retribution, possibly, but one could hope for peace.

“Now,” said Cintra, “I am going to tell you certain things about my husband, because he is at this minute telling the same things to your two men, only in another way. And it’s a perfectly true way. So is my way true. And I have to tell you because I have fought him, every day of every year of all the years, and you, because you are women, must fight on my side.”

To Flavia, the sacredness of the bond between the man and this woman was apparent. She spoke to Cintra gently, but in a reminding way.

“You sure you want to, dear? You sure you want to tell?”

Cintra smiled at her.

“I’m sure,” she said. “I may tell him afterward. I do,—when I can, though I’ve not had to betray him so often as you might think. But your husband,” said she to Flavia, “is a dangerous man. The General knows it. He will make him an ally. I saw him going by here with them both—your men—and the General was talking, and I made a pretext and ran out to ask him a question, and I saw your husband’s eyes,—and he’s a dangerous man.”

To Annette this was all moonshine. Had she not seen Milton Blake in his own home lot and hidden a small fortune in his woodpile? He might be an old screw—he might—she thought of country phrases—be as nigh as the bark to a tree—but dangerous! What was dangerous?

“They said,” Cintra was continuing, fast now as if the time was slipping by too quickly and she had to make an end, “they said he would be king. Suppose he had been king? There would have been no such king on the earth as it was then. He knew that. He never ceased knowing it. And when he died and woke to find his head here on my breast and my arms about him—oh, yes, yes,” she said impatiently, answering the question in Flavia’s eyes, “he was glad to find me with him. Yes, he loves me. He’s loved me ever since, because—why, I’m like his hand, his foot, he can’t get rid of me. Except by cutting it off! And then he’d be crippled, you see, only half alive.”

Just here her smile was a little twisted, hardly a smile, a signal to the ironic gods to take notice she saw the humor of these things as well as they. But she went on with her story.

“Well, when he came really to himself, he wanted—what do you think he wanted instantly?” She threw the question at them as if to say, “Catch! if you don’t, it’ll hit you and put your eyes out, knock you down.”

“Why,” said Flavia, hesitating, though not because she had any doubt of the thing to want, “he wanted to find out if any of his folks were here.”

“Wrong,” said Cintra. Her eyes lighted with a half whimsical, half wistful pleasure in the game. She turned to Annette. “Catch!” the look said. “It’s up to you.”

Annette was blazing with what she felt to be a full understanding of a man who wanted to be king and found himself in a difficult place where no such extraneous ornaments were supposed to exist. Yet she knew.

“He wanted—” she cried out—and Cintra would not let her wait for the slow reward of an ended phrase.

“Precisely,” said she. “I knew you’d know. You’d want to be. He wanted to be king.” But she turned instantly from the ironic vein into what was her vindication of him, her defense. “He said to himself, ‘Here are many of my countrymen. Here are the sinews of a greater Rome. What happened there was bound to happen as it did. A little dark planet, the childhood of a race! It was a vision. It was a dream. Now we are awake. The vision might come true.’ ”

Flavia was loving this. Her eyes were brighter than they had ever been when she heard moving utterances from the few speakers who had talked in her “home town”, on occasions of moment like those during the war when men and women came to tell the farmer folk what their duties were, as to food and loans.

“I guess,” she said warmly to Cintra, “you’re used to public speaking.”

“No, no,” said Cintra, impatiently. “I’m only quoting him. That’s what he used to say to them when he tried to raise an army and overthrow the government.”

“Was that here?” asked Annette crisply. She was beginning to see some action in this.

“No, no, it was far away, farther than you would believe or understand until you begin to see where we are, what star this is, the relation to the other worlds—Good heavens!” she cried. “I can’t tell you these things. You’ve got to study them out as the rest of us do. You’re nothing but a baby here, as you were on your earth. But you’ve got to understand a little and at once. You’ve got to!” She beat her hand upon her knee. It was agony of haste. “I’ll tell you a little, and you must take in as much of it as you can. But the point is this. They had their government. They didn’t want another, and especially they didn’t want him. They’d outlived kings. And they simply banished him—banished him here, because this is, from one source or another, an English speaking people, and they thought he would be weakened by exile, cast down through living under a foreign government, and he’d be less dangerous.”

“I see,” said Annette excitedly. “And he hasn’t been downed. He’s simply kept on recruiting for an army and—but where are his people? Is he trying to get back to them, even if they don’t want him, as—as Napoleon did?”

“He is trying,” said Cintra proudly, as if she defended him while, at the same time, she conspired against him, “to call them here to him, those that are still loyal. He is trying to establish a kingdom in readiness for them, and the city in it would be another Rome.”

“Where is the city?” Annette persisted. “Is it here?”

Cintra found nothing surprising in her eagerness. So tremendous were these things to her that she could never understand indifference to them.

“I don’t know,” said she. “When it comes to that, even he isn’t sure. But after dark—”

“No,” broke in Flavia irrepressibly, “it won’t be dark. It mustn’t be. Yes, I know you live here and we’ve just come but—‘there shall be no night there.’ ”

“Oh,” cried Cintra, in an extremity of the haste they could not understand, “don’t go back to that. I know it as well as you do. I know the words, beautiful, beautiful! But what they mean I don’t know, for they are a promise to creatures who could bear everlasting light and are worthy to live in it. But not for us, not for us! I only know that in this place we have times and seasons and day and night, and when it is night, and often, too, by day, you will see off there”—she pointed—“yes, but higher than you’re looking. That’s it. In the clouds, perhaps, or on land so much higher than this that it seems to be clouds, there’s a great glow. The astronomers don’t know what it is. They have their theories. Some of them say it’s the light of another star,—I don’t know. But he thinks—”

“The General?” Flavia prompted her.

“Yes. He believes it’s a city. He wants to march to it. To conquer it. When he says that, I am afraid. The gods may hear it. To conquer—a thing like that!”

“The Holy City!” said Flavia. She, too, was in great excitement. “No, he mustn’t do that.”

Cintra made a little fleeting movement of the hands as if, knowing all these futile assumptions and denials, she yet cast them away, because there were other things of more immediate use.

“He has done a great deal for the present government—we are a republic—built roads and endowed scientists—and discovered precious metals—he is—oh, sometimes I think he is almost a god!”

“No,” said Flavia quietly, from the authority that had come on her with the renewal of her life, “not that, my dear.”

“Oh, I don’t mean your One God,” said Cintra, “or ours, only the names are different. Of course there is but One. But sometimes there are those of such power that, century upon century, they seem to reign”—she broke off here, and Flavia felt that perhaps these were her midnight rebellions and that she could not be allowed to let them follow her into the day. (“So it will make us mad.”) “He has done so much for them, the people,” Cintra went on, still with her air of haste, “that he carries great weight. He has had public office offered him—the highest—but he refuses everything but what concerns the social well-being, roads, learning, everything of that sort. The people, the simplest, the least educated, they lean on him. He thinks of them constantly. He is very generous to them. I can’t help feeling it is because”—there she paused and debated within herself, darkly, it seemed. She decided to speak. “He wants their votes,” she said curtly. “When the time comes, he will want their votes.”

Flavia made a little protesting sound. It could not be possible, the sound said: no one here, in this state of being, could want votes.

“It is true,” said Cintra conclusively. “You heard the bugle?”

“Yes,” said Annette, eagerly. “Was it one of the army calls?”

“It was to summon his friends, his followers among the young men. They meet for athletics and for games and lectures. He talks to them. He teaches them the military manoeuvres of his day and those he has devised from time to time. It is all above-board. But they are the General’s men. And that, Flavia, is what he wants your husband for. He’ll do a great deal for him because he wants him very much. He knows precisely what sort of man he is, just as I do, just as you do: obstinate, acquisitive, never giving up. That’s what they are, the General’s men.”

Annette, as she listened, hated what struck her as the madness of this, and made up her mind afresh that it was all impossible. The nightmare was returning upon her, and she faced again the need of fighting it. She would have to fight Cintra, who looked amazingly solid for a figure in a dream and Flavia, who patently believed it all. But she would fight.

“I don’t believe it,” she cried out. “Not one word.”

The others turned their eyes upon her in an unrebuking calm, and somehow, because this made her ashamed of her own violence and again angry at being ashamed, her own eyes fell and, for the first time, she saw the dress that covered her prettily and knew it felt unfamiliar to her hands. And this, curiously, shook her mental state more violently than anything that had happened or any word that had been said.

“My dress!” she cried sharply. “Where did I get it? Who put it on me without my knowing? I never saw this dress before.”

She looked up from it at Flavia’s dress. It was not the rose brocade, but it was lustrous and rosy—a dress, though not of any fabric she had ever seen. Nor had Flavia seen it, with even a wondering eye. She, too, looked at it in a puzzled way.

“Why, yes,” said she. “It’s something the same; but, yes, it’s different. Of course it’s different,” she added triumphantly, as if she found another proof. “Considering where we are. But that’s nothing,” said Flavia. “Such things don’t amount to much. It’s being here at all that’s wonderful.”

“Of course,” said Cintra impatiently. “It’s very simple about the clothes. We weave. We have the garments ready. Everybody is surprised by that. We wrap you in them by what you’d call a kind of magic. It’s not magic. It’s just taking care of you when you come, and trying to save you the shock of all the strangeness. Don’t waste time over that,” she urged, “when we’ve only a little bit more and I’ve got to make you promise to keep your husbands from being the General’s men.”

Now Annette believed, and her mind went back to the last moment she remembered of what she called her life. And again she had to know.

“Where am I?” she cried, in a shrill voice. “Where am I as I was, in my réséda dress and with—” She broke off and began to call monotonously: “God! God! God!”

The two women, one at her right and the other her left, took each a hand of hers and held it. Suddenly Annette turned to Flavia and asked, in a low voice, as if she were afraid:

“Did I call somebody? What did I call?”

“Never mind, dear,” said Flavia compassionately. “Yes, you called Him. That was the right thing to do. He wouldn’t want you to be afraid. You call Him all you want to, and we’ll just sit here and keep you company.”

“But what makes me afraid?” cried Annette, with sudden angry passion. “I’m not wicked? Is it that”—she began to laugh—it seemed to her a devilish comedy—“Is it that bag? Have I got that tied to me and don’t see it? Do you see a bag about me, a heavy bag? It belongs to the Midas Bank.”

They looked at each other compassionately over her head and did not answer. Annette continued to laugh, and Cintra gave her hand a little impatient pressure. Then she dropped it. She had seen many amazed newcomers, but few so helpless, and there were exigent things in her own mind.

“I told you,” she said to Flavia, as if dismissing Annette and her childish woes, “about the glow in the sky. There it is. It’s coming now.”

I

This is the testimony of me, Peter Selden. I am putting it down because my present life is so strange beyond belief—as well as being so oddly familiar—that I should not wonder at anything that might come of it, and I want to make a record of what has passed, either to be read by the one person who would prize it most or to remind me, in case I forget.

I am sitting at a table in a little dark house in the woods, a house far away from the earth where I was born. It is so far away that it seems near, as if you followed an orbit, thus giving yourself an impression of distance, and approached it from the other side. When I say this is a dark house, I don’t mean to say it is gloomy. It merely stands in the shade of friendly trees admitting shafts of sunlight here and there, and what I have called dark is perhaps only the grateful sense of solitude.

That last night of my being on earth, I was at the theatre, watching a play then in vogue, trying to get under the skin of it, and find out, if I could, what there was in it to draw the crowd. Impossible to learn, I concluded, unless I could also get under the skin of the crowd itself, feel its hunger, burn with its thirst, be altogether one with it and from that point write my own plays, if it were not dishonor to puddle about in imagery so very far from the noble conceptions of a nobler time. Annette, my wife, had seen it. She, so she said, had “loved” it. Well, I had now drowsed through two acts and I could not love it, much less stomach it. I got up to leave, and at that moment came the cry of fire; the asbestos curtain went down and the fools who had been dribbling laughter all the evening fell into equally imbecile panic and began to trample one another in the aisles. A girl had sat beside me. I hadn’t really seen her face, but I had noted the hand lying on her knee: a well kept hand, alive with the kind of power implying the intelligence and training that go toward doing things exactly. We stood still, I blocking her way and watching the tumult of that horrid river in the aisle, and now I spoke to her over my shoulder.

“Don’t bother,” I said. “Wait till it’s clear. Tell your people I’ll move along as quick as I can.”

“There’s nobody with me,” she said. It was a lovely voice, not excited in the least, and as full of latent power as the hand. “I’m quite alone.”

“Then,” said I, “we’ll hang together.”

We were near the front, the last in our row, and now the worst of the turmoil was half way toward the door. I turned to her again.

“If we can get onto the stage,” I said to her, “we can find an exit. I know the door. Want to come?”

“Yes,” she said. Her voice choked a little now, not with fear, I thought: but probably she had never seen her fellow beings in precisely that sort of fight. “Anywhere.”

We stepped out into the aisle, and I took her hand. It closed on mine firmly, not nervously, but as if we were on an adventure demanding an equal resolve, and we went on. I saw her fully but could not have told how she looked, except that she seemed familiar, as if I had become accustomed to her in the beaten ways of life. If we had parted at that moment, perhaps I should not have recognized her if we met again. And yet perhaps I should. But we were not thinking of each other, only of the fire and the quick call of desperate need. We got into the orchestra pit and I lifted her up to the stage and then pulled myself up and we edged along in front of the asbestos curtain to the wings, this by feeling only. And then we knew nothing more. My theory now is that we were suffocated by some chemical that made the hideous glamour of that unholy show or that some of the scenery fell on us. But that is unimportant. We awoke—I have to call it waking because there was an interval of blankness—and we were, still hand in hand, in a pleasant country where the sun shone and the earth smelled good, and I heard my wife’s voice, Annette’s voice, crying out something about a bag. I laughed. I wondered if I could be dreaming, and the dream was absurd. The country was real as it was lovely, in a tender, comforting way, and there was a river. I loved that. Whatever the dream was, I had no mind to break it. I felt but one anxiety: to keep the unknown girl’s hand in mine and to know, as soon as possible, everything about her. You know—you? Who are you, the person who reads this? Will it be the girl herself, or will it be I in some lonely muse when the path that seems to have opened before me ends in a thicket like all my paths, and I sit down to feed my hunger on the past?—you know how it is when you come first upon the well beloved. You are lost in wonder. Everything that may have happened to her in the life before you met her seems of the greatest consequence. You are troubled by an overwhelming interest. You must learn everything about her as soon as possible. The world will not go on unless you have jealously gathered her past, ripe and unripe, and sated your thirst on it: because these are the apples of paradise. I turned to look at her. Annette’s voice, her low, turgid voice, the words clipped and muffled according to fashion, was still in my ears, repeating that absurdity about a bag. But I had no time for that, no curiosity either. I was looking at the girl beside me, and my eyes must have invited hers to drown themselves in me. That was it. We stood drowned in each other’s being. It was recognition, it was delight, and above all it was the sanest, simplest thing I had ever known. I believe it was the same to her. She was beautiful, wonderfully so, and yet I couldn’t describe her for my life. Only the impression she made on me was newness, youth, the bright beginning of things. (And still, like a queer rather harsh night bird with a cold, now that her apparent alarm seemed to be mounting, Annette’s voice broke again into the heaven of our mystery with that strident note about a bag.) Now my Love spoke, and her voice had the excellence of beauty that was her face. She laughed a little, and I saw her deep eyes full of tears.

“What do we do?” she asked. “Do we wait to be—welcomed?” She stumbled over that because she knew no more than I whether we were guests in this strange country and presently to go on, or whether we were in a place appointed for us. “Or do we begin to live?”

I dared everything. I was sure she would understand.

“All I know,” said I, as decisively as I could, “is that we stay together. That is all that is of the least importance to me—you and I, here by incredible chance—together.”

She took it with a perfect simplicity.

“Yes,” she said gravely, “together. Just think: but for that idiotic play we should have missed each other, and it might have meant years upon years of trying to meet, perhaps never meeting at all.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. I spoke with the arrogance of unfamiliar love, and it sounded like the purest reason. “We should have met. We had to meet. Don’t you know it?”

“Yes,” her eyes told me gladly. She knew it.

“And now,” I went on, with the same arrogance of certainty, “we must simply see to it that we never part again.”

For I had looked back, with a momentary fear of the dark way along the path we must have come before we met at that play off there on the earth, and it seemed to me that wherever I had been from the beginning of what was I, there she, too, had been. Was that so? Even now I don’t know. There are mysteries. But while my mind shrank back from the dark path, Annette’s voice was upon me, and now she was calling my name. Over and over she called it, and I was conscious of my desire to escape from it, to be the most insignificant thing in the universe, so she might not find me. (But that was how I had felt toward her the last three years when we were man and wife together on the earth. Was this to be the earth all over again, and were we going to pay for our sins and follies through eternal days?) “Peter! Peter!” she was calling. And now I saw her. She ran to me as if she were taking refuge. But who was I to be her refuge? I had indeed been her refuge from debt and taxes, in those last years when we both wanted to struggle loose. And why was she glad to see me? It had been a long time since she hailed the sight of me. She began a confused, half crying torrent of talk. How did I come there? Did I know where I was? She had just found out. But it wasn’t what she had expected. She thought people were going to be happy—but here we were—and there was something going on, she didn’t quite know what—and then there was the bag. Maybe she could be happy if it wasn’t for having to carry the bag.

I was swamped by this, and two tall noble looking women who had remained slightly behind her evidently saw it was time to save me from my quagmire. They came forward, and spoke to me. They were alike in their dignity and a species of maternal authority, though so different. One, very graceful, yet commanding, was dressed in white, and, from her robe, a Roman matron of an ancient time. The other brought up in me I do not know what surging of something like old affection. Surely it was a kind of nostalgia, and nothing else. Was it for the earth? No, I was not homesick for the earth. Whatever it was, I had by this time accepted my status as a denizen of another place. I was glad to be here. Perhaps I hadn’t understood the earth very well. I might not have seen how to make the most of it. My quarrel with it had been that it hadn’t seemed to have much to give me, or, if it had, it had asked of me prices I couldn’t pay. But now I drew free breath. I felt a certainty of things possible to be done, and also this woman not only roused in me my thwarted hopes and longings, but she seemed to comfort me, with a promise of recompense to come. It was the first one who spoke now, the Roman lady.

“You are bewildered,” she said.

She had taken the hand of the girl whom I had, in my own mind, called my Love. I had by this time learned that her name was Mary, but she would always be my Love, and still, in my soul, I cannot call her anything else.

The Roman lady went on.

“You have come at a difficult time. Ordinarily you would be met. You would be given quarters where you could stay until you decide where you want to live, what you want to do, take part in one of the migrations and find your people if it happens they are not here.”

“Yes, I am,” Annette began clamoring. “I am here.” It was strange that in this, the greatest migration known to mortal minds, her voice had still not changed. “This is my husband. He is a playwright. We live in New York—” She stopped, blasted by sudden realization. Did we live in New York? I honestly believe this was the first time it had struck her that we could not get back there.

But no one took any notice of her. Mary was listening gravely, and the Roman lady went on in haste, as if it were necessary for me to know things and know them at once.

“There is a great upheaval,” she said. “It has been threatening for a long time. And now it is so near, the climax of it all, that some have moved away and shut themselves up in their houses because they do not want to be involved in it, and some—a few of the men—are over beyond those trees where the armory is, and the manoeuvres take place. I think they are forming. There will be a march. I think it will be soon.”

“He is there,” said the other lady quietly, and I knew “he” was her husband and that she was troubled for him, or by what he might do. And here I might as well begin to call these two by their names which I learned later. The Roman lady was Cintra and the other Flavia.

“Do you mean,” said I, “you are at war?”

“No,” said Cintra, “not war here on this plateau: but siege, a march, an attack, the conquest of another place.”

“What is the place?” I asked.

She turned slightly and pointed. The drapery of her arm fell in lovely folds.

“Do you see,” she asked, “that glow off there in the sky?”

Now the day was still so lucent that I could not see a special brightness; but Mary answered for me.

“Yes, I see it: rose, green, blue and gold. It is like—” But she could not tell what it was like.

“Yes,” said Cintra, turning to her as if Mary really understood more than her words implied. “Those are probably the gates.”

When she said that, a light came into Flavia’s face and she said, really to herself, I thought, as if she were recalling a lesson imperfectly memorized: “‘The city was pure gold, like unto clear glass’ ”—and she went on:—“‘all manner of precious stones . . . jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald.’ ”

And, the darling! she mispronounced chalcedony as she probably had on the earth. No doubt her country minister had had it right, but she had read it oftener than she heard it and taken her own way.

“But that,” said I, “is Revelation.” I was much confused. “Do you mean,” I said, “that it’s heaven, a place? Is it actually true? Is it heaven?”

Cintra knew no more than we, not so much as Flavia who had the knowledge which is belief, and certainly not so much as Mary. But it was Cintra who went on, and passionately as if she had to convert us to what she did know.

“I can tell you this. It is presumably a city on a hill. It is defended. And because it is defended and because it is built of all manner of light—yes, when they are nearer they say it does seem to be built of gems—men think it is a very rich city, richer than anything that has been, richer than Rome, than Peru, than Mexico, and so they want it. If it is rich, they want it. They can’t resist it. And one”—she did not then say it was her husband or her lover, I suppose because she was in such haste—“one of them, the General, falls upon every man that comes here and persuades him to his cause, and it is these that make his forces on the plain up there. Sooner or later, they are going to march. And,” she said to me, “he will know you are here. He has his heralds. They will run with it. And you will receive a message, or he will even come to you himself: for every man is of value, and you will be charmed or bribed or commanded, and you, too, will march.”

“Oh, no, I sha’n’t,” I said, thinking of Mary and how we had found each other and I must not lose her. “I haven’t any interest in a city on a hill.”

Mary herself spoke. She had understood more quickly than I. Indeed, throughout all my acquaintance with her—so short, so short! but I must not go into that now—she was the one who understood the spirit of the place.

“They will see to it that you do,” she said. “Yes, you will have an interest. They will offer you—oh, I know how men are bribed! My father is a leader, just that kind. He paints each man a picture of his heart’s desire. And he is doing it on the earth now.”

There was impatience in this, a certain weight of weariness. Did we bring with us, I wondered, the passions that had swayed us, perhaps worn us out? A line leaped into my mind—“ruling passion, strong in death.” What if the old game were still in our own hands, in our hands merely while the compassionate gods watched? or were they indifferent and stood aloof and aided when they could? What if it were still “in ourselves that we are underlings” and ever would be, and not merely the flowering of new sap put into us by this recurrent spring? But all that had to wait. I have been here now—how long?—but it is waiting stiff. Flavia was speaking.

“I know one thing they must be promised,” she said. There was no bitterness in her tone: only a sad conviction. “Land. That’s what they must have promised Milton. He’s possessed about land.”

“The city,” said Cintra, as if she must drive it home to our hearts. “The city. That’s what they are promised. And the more mysterious the city is, the more it draws them.”

Mary was looking at me in what seemed a wistful tenderness, the brows eloquent, the smiling mouth.

“Don’t you see yourself?” she asked me. “Don’t you know what they would promise you? The beauty of music and dancing; life in action, poetry and life.”

Yes, that was I. She had got me absolutely. I did want to see plays, always to me the most beguiling art, the nearest to mankind. But was that anything to besiege a city for? Though after all, it was one man’s heart’s desire, and a man will fight for his desire. She was laughing a little now, reminiscently, as if she remembered things about me, though we had never met before, and this was only the knowledge of a divine guesswork, or perhaps of the past, when we may have been together.

“Why,” said she, as if she had discovered something, “they might even let you put on a play. Perhaps that’s what they do up there in the city. Perhaps they’re putting on the divinest of plays.”

Flavia, too, was talking, but as if to herself. I caught a tag of it—“a sea of glass mingled with fire.”

“What if”—Mary began, and stopped, confounded at her own guess. “No,” she said, ashamed. “That would be too childish. There isn’t really any heaven—only the poet’s dream of it. But the dream, why shouldn’t they try to visualize the dream? What if there is a refuge, a workshop, we’ll say, where all the people that have known how to make things, are allowed to go and work and make the things they’ve always bungled over?”

I found myself smiling at her as you would at a child who had read faerie tales and talked of unreasonable things. And I answered irrelevantly, with something I seemed to have found out about her and that was more important even than holy cities or all the plays in the world.

“What a child you are!” said I.

And as I said it, I noticed Annette had come up to me, close to my side, and she slipped a hand into mine. I must have frowned, for I was not pleased, and Mary looked at me, surprised. Yet why I should have minded Annette’s hand I do not know, for it did not feel as it had on the earth in the old days when it used to seek mine. Now it was trembling, as if it needed to be held and reassured. That, too, was like a child’s hand, and I wondered if everybody in this place, so like a long forgotten home and yet so strange to me, had got to be soothed and comforted. Annette was whispering to me: that is, in a half whisper with all the implication of secrecy a whisper brings.

“Peter! Peter!” she said. “Where are we going to live?”

Now if she had asked me that question while we were on earth, if some catastrophe had thrown us out of the house where we had been staying together, I should have known that I was bound to answer her, bound to pacify any uneasiness she might have, by pointing out some reasonable course. But if there was one thing I was sure of, it was that we had done with earth. Its joys, its disappointments—surely they were over. But was everything else over, too, its civil contracts which even there had become void of meaning? And curiously, as I thought this thing, I knew three of the women present understood me, and Annette was not of the three. Amazing that in this other state of being there is an inner communication which needs no speech! We seem to have been quickened to an extraordinary extent. We are more sensitive to understanding and response. Yet this does not imply a promiscuity of mental or spiritual life. We are understood only when the connection is voluntary as well as perfect. I can’t explain. I have been here so short a space. So it was Cintra who answered Annette, not giving me time.

“You will come with me,” she said, in a tone of authority. “Leave him to get his bearings and hear what the General has to say to him. There is the messenger now.”

II

There was a messenger. I looked up the slope and saw him, a young man with a fine free stride, and I went to meet him. Somehow I felt I must, for my own liberty of action, see him alone, this on account of Annette, who was still close by my side,—once, for a few minutes until I could draw away from her without causing her chagrin before the others, with her hand on my arm. I was unwilling to let her hear whatever the mysterious General might have to ask of me or try to influence my replies. For whatever he felt he had a right to require of me, I was resolved to commit myself to nothing until I had talked the matter over with Mary, gained her concurrence in whatever it was to be, and made arrangements with her about our meeting again. Now that I had discovered, at a leap into this alien world, the boundless possibilities of a universe, I proposed to use all the blended experience of these two lifetimes so distinct in my mind, for keeping track of the woman I loved. I was now face to face with the messenger. He saluted smartly and I returned the salute.

“The General,” said he, “will see you, if you go to him at once. He was not advised of your coming. He noticed you down here at the landing and assumes that you have just arrived. He’s at leisure, and will see you.”

I answered this rather autocratic statement with a question:

“Who is the General? Is he in residence here in a military capacity?”

Though really I did know who he was, because Cintra had told me; but I was not going to obey orders without learning a good deal more about him and his incredible pretensions. The young man did not resent this. His face crinkled up, in a whimsical way, and he laughed.

“Oh, come along,” said he, “just come up there and let him talk to you a bit. You won’t have any doubt of what you ought to do. Come! I’m going back there to report that I’ve delivered the message, and I’d like to hand you over to him myself. He’ll be mighty glad to get one of your sort. You’re the kind he’s looking for, and there aren’t many just now.”

And curiously, whether out of vanity or the magic the General wrought even in my unwilling mind, I wanted to go. It was all very confused, but yet compelling, and first I turned to the three women down there watching us and waved my hand to them. Two of them would understand, Cintra, that I was in a manner moved by this magic, whatever it might be, and Mary would know I had, for some reason, to go, but that I meant surely to return. And I wheeled about and went up the hill with the messenger, at a smart clip, and he turned aside into a grove that was dark, like laurel, where stood a man of no imposing size but a possessive power. He was alone, and I felt a little sudden warmth, perhaps of vanity because it looked as if he had sent away his men, to give me special audience. I need not describe him. Those who will read this must have seen him many times and will remember. This at least I will say: that he had the very air of authority, and as soon as he spoke to me, which was at once as if he had waited for me and was relieved that I had come, I found that he knew men. That is, he knew me, and something about me which no one had ever guessed save only Mary, in a moment after this, and she had put it vaguely: “O poor boy! you’ve not been happy. You’ve never been. What can we do to make you? O poor boy!” And when she said this, it did not sound as childish as I make it in repeating it, but only as if she had penetrated into the heart of me, and this was what she saw. And she, seeing it, wished in her own heart to mend it and make me whole, while he, having learned that men can be really influenced only by their desires, had caught the knack of spying into a man’s heart and seeing how his desire might be used. And he spoke:

“You have not had any of the things you want most, and as you want them. Love—we’ll put that aside. No man can speak of it to another without offense. The life of action,—that was not for you. The arts—that is where your desire lay. But the world would not listen. It would have none of you. What you wanted, that you could not do. But has life ceased? Has desire? All men are subject to despair, but only the weak give way to it.”

Then he went on, steadily, forcefully, like the tramp of marching men, and it was what the tall Roman woman had told me in brief. Now this was his argument. There was a city on a hill, and it was to be taken by himself and his forces, of which I, he assumed, was already one. It was to be taken for all sorts of practical and holy purposes. I was fascinated by the subtlety of this; but I couldn’t help feeling a little shrewd about it, too, as if he knew men so well that he was trying, in this argument about the Holy City, to promise every man his heart’s desire. And let me say here that when he called it the Holy City I was tempted to ask him whether he was doing it out of deference to my supposed religious creed or whether to him also it was holy. Had he, in this need, centuries old, of swaying men of diverse races, given up the beliefs of his own race? How about the shades where his dead were pacing in their remote and noble calm? Yet he should be among them, in that static paradise, if he had not apostatized for purposes of reigning again, more mightily even than he had once tried to reign. And where were his gods, the beautiful rascally semblance of them? Where, for that matter, were my own gods, the One who was “Maker and Ruler of heaven and earth” and the Man of Beauty who was to “judge the quick and the dead”? Had we merely entered upon another phase in the eternal guesswork which is the occupation of mankind? But he was talking. This, in brief, was what he said: There on those heights was the City, call it Holy, if you like, but at all events desirable. Nobody, so far as he knew, was able to reach it.

“Perhaps,” I said, testing his loyalty of ancient belief, “nobody can reach it. Perhaps it’s the heavenly Olympus, the city of the Immortal Gods.”

He glanced at me sharply, as if wondering how sincerely this was meant, but went on as if I had not spoken.

“There is,” he said, quite seriously, “a magic about it. Nobody can reach it, not because it is too far or the way too difficult: but there is a magic. People get misled on the march. They seem to see strange things or hear whispers about the places where they find themselves from time to time. I wouldn’t say they get—scared, do you call it?” (This was the first time I heard him hesitate for a word. He was always on the lookout for idiomatic English, and even slang was a serious matter with him. Sometimes, though it seems incredible when you realize with what painful solemnity we read him in school, he erred so humanly there as to be funny: tremendously funny, Mary said afterward. She had a great relish of the things I told her of him.) Well, he was going on, frowning, as he recalled the difficulties of the hill he had been all these years trying to climb. At first, he said, they built a road, straight as the road in Britain and as amenable to marching men. The history of that road-building was in the archives. The archives were in the library. He waved his hand toward the colonnaded market-place, indicating that the library lay somewhere there. But when they had gone three-quarters of the way up hill, and strangely, at a point where the Holy City looked no nearer than it had at the start, they found it impossible to proceed. They were blocked. How? he did not know. Yes, he knew, but nothing that seemed really to account for it. First, there was a boulder, so large, though not so high, that virtually it was a mountain. Of course they could have tried blasting, but when he proposed it, his men rebelled. It was one morning when he ordered it, after a night’s thought, and during the night the men had wandered off prospecting; and they came back with strange tales. Their stories agreed. They had seen a man and talked with him and after that, apparently, they were not the same. The martial aspect of things no longer appealed to them. Had they ceased to believe in war? No, that did not appear to be the case, but their present expedition seemed to them unsatisfactory and impossible.

“And,” here his voice sank and he looked perplexed and troubled, so that his face became older than I had ever seen it in any bust or picture, “the strange part of it was that they all agreed upon one thing. The man had had an identical effect upon them, but to each he seemed a different person. Each man found him, as it were, a person who comprehended his own nature to the full. To the painter, he was a painter, to a poet a poet, and to a farmer a man of the soil.”

“But did the man represent himself as being these persons?” I asked. “Was he playing a game to ‘get’ them?”

And again I thought this also was the sort of man who acted many a part to draw men unto him.

“No, no,” he said impatiently. The unknown man had evidently made the strongest impression on him, an impression he had to yield to, though unwillingly. “No, he seemed to each the mirror of his own mind, his own desires, so that he was able to turn them whichever way he would. And the consequence was that I could not blow up the mountain or drain the swamps, because my army melted away, and when I myself turned back—yes, here, here, I had to retreat, and by myself, alone, see you?—here they were waiting for me, each one carrying on his accustomed occupation and everybody a little embarrassed, but not much concerned, and not afraid. No, they were not afraid.”

That is to say, as I understood, they were no longer afraid of him, and the tone of it more than the words, told me how it had affected him. There was bitterness in it, but most of all, wonder.

“Deserted,” said I, a superfluous conclusion, but, I hoped, implying that they’d had to suffer for it.

“Yes,” said he, in a voice of deepest gloom, and I knew that, for reasons of policy, they had not had to suffer at all. Evidently things were not carried on here as had been found necessary in the other world I had grown used to.

“But”—he recovered himself—“I propose now to send out a scouting party to disperse, perhaps two-thirds of the way up, as had unluckily happened before, and find out by observation, each man for himself, whether there are by-paths, no matter how difficult, so long as they are viable, to reach the summit.”

“What then?” said I. “Suppose the way is found and charted for you? You couldn’t depend on your army before. Can you depend on it now?”

He had flushed, perhaps with eagerness. He wanted all this so much. He was a seasoned man, but he wanted it like a boy.

“I am forming another force,” he said, “a small force, but I can rely on it. And in my opinion, it would take a small force only to invest the place. That is, if they have the heart for it.”

“Yes,” said I skeptically, “if—”

“And,” said he, “I want you to lead the prospecting party. You will want—how many men?”

He looked at me keenly. I do not think he was giving the matter over into my hands, or even asking my advice. That would have been incredible. He was simply seeming to consult me, to puff me up with pride of brain and blood. I knew that then as I know it now, and I was adequately puffed up as he wished me to be. For I wanted to go. I didn’t care anything about his ideas of Holy Cities and sieges and conquest, but at that moment I happened to be looking, not at him, but absently (thinking, as I was of Mary and what she would say to it all) at the distant hill and the line of sky above it, and as I looked, the glow flamed out, splendid, tremendous, and I caught my breath. Never, so I knew, had there been on earth such throbbing violet, such lucent green, such roseate ecstasies. His eyes had followed mine. His face, too, changed like mine, for I felt my lips quivering and the blood in my cheeks and forehead.

“Yes, yes,” he said vehemently, “that’s it. Now you see it almost at its best. Sometimes it’s more than that, more, I tell you, more! Think what it must be, what wealth, what shrines there to the gods! Or if the shrines are empty, will not the gods come back to them?”

So he had not repudiated his gods! Was this a world where you might choose your own gods and worship them? Was He so tolerant, the One God of all? (For I believed at least, though I was a little shy before the creeds, in the One God.) Perhaps He even smiled a little at them all, the others, and wished them well. I spoke, and more decisively than if I had not feared he would override a wavering answer.

“I can’t decide at this minute,” I said. “Give me a night to think it over.”

By that time I had guessed out about night and day, a small working knowledge that served me at this pinch. He didn’t like it, but neither did he resent it. I saw again that this was a place where freedom was the very air. In such matters of choice, a man was not constrained.

“Will you report to me?” he said.

“Where?” I asked.

“Here.”

“And at what time?”

“When the sun reaches the top of that third cypress tree.”

There was a row of cypress trees that seemed to be walking up the hill. I repeated his directions exactly, and added:

“If I am near enough to reach this spot, I will be here.”

I don’t know what made me qualify the answer he actually wanted by any such indirectness, but the place, the scene, the whole atmosphere were so strange to me that I felt I could do no less—or more. But he accepted it, though with no satisfaction. Probably he had had to accept many things foreign to his nature, there had been so many disappointments for him in this strange world as on the earth. He turned about and at his gesture of leave-taking the guard which had been standing at ease, at a few paces, joined him, and marched with him up the hill, and I went down again to the spot where the women were waiting for me.

III

At this point I am tempted to describe the new world at greater length than I had, in the beginning, proposed to do. But the temptation is only for a moment, induced by that moment’s forgetfulness of my purpose in writing at all. As I further reflected, I could not possibly be writing for the earth, because no inhabitant of the earth could have access to it until he came here as I have come. There is but one road: the road of death. As I knew in the beginning, it is for Mary, as everything in my poor life is for her, and also I am aware that I have to write it because I am so bewildered by all the strangeness, and so it is for me also, at some time when I may settle into a more quiet mind. It might be added to the annals of the country, the thoughts of a person newly come. If that could be, there must be many such accounts in the public records, and would mine be any more significant than the testimony of those who were before me? And one thing, at least, I do see. I see why it would be disastrous for all ordinary life on the earth to become cognizant of the state of things known in what is here called heaven. The earth is not ready for it. It will not be for years upon years, judging from the slow progress of mankind. For what would be the effect of it? If the rebellious and unhappy were convinced that there is another country, such as this, would they not, in an unthinking haste, kill themselves—their earthly bodies—to reach it? Wouldn’t the adventurous gamble for a chance at it? Wouldn’t the disappointed and still credulous lie down on their jobs in certain hope of a life to come and another chance?

As I had left the earth, I left it in that impoverished state of having ceased to worship a mystery, and indeed of having ceased to believe in any. For the scientists were telling us what authentic measurements they had been able to make, and there were solemn jabberings of infinite and finite. And one man told us that, having learned that immortality was impossible, the lucky ones who came after us would cease to want it. (Since when did a man stop being hungry when he found there was no food?) And that more accurate knowledge of the space about the earth showed no other planet where continued life is possible. Now I knew that such ultimata came, not from the advance of science but from the dearth of the imagination and, with that, the sense of mystery. Because science has its own exactitude, but so also does the poetry of symbolism, and in that earthly span, and even now when my eyes had seen and my ears heard, I could think only of the ancient words: “Behold I show you a mystery.” And: “We shall be changed.” And here we were, a little group imperfectly assimilated as yet, with an existing government, and we were changed. For myself, I felt the flooding of youth and strength, and looking down at my own hand, I felt invulnerable. There is no other word to express it: so sanely strong that I could not conceive of circumstances where I should be found wanting. And the women down there, waiting: what gracious miracle had befallen them! Mary, who stood gravely listening to what Cintra was telling her, was like a Greek poet’s imaginings of a goddess when the world was young. I caught my breath at the renewed sight of her. Could it be she loved me? And yet I knew she did. Cintra’s change had come upon her long ago, and there was no surprise in what I felt for her. Annette was sitting on a low stone seat, her hands in her lap, her head a little bent. She looked profoundly sad, and smaller than I had remembered her: a wisp of a creature, who, I felt, could not have found within herself the helpful strength of this new hopefulness. The young man—I had known his name on earth and now I had forgotten it—he was not there. Perhaps he meant something vital to her confidence and she regretted him.

As I approached, Cintra, evidently guessing I should want to see Mary alone, moved away and, when Annette spoke to her in a low voice—I thought she asked a question—went round behind the stone seat and with one hand on its back, leaned down slightly and answered her.

“Well?” said Mary, when my eyes returned to her.

Standing near her, so that I could speak without being heard by the others, I told her, as succinctly as I could, all the General had said to me. When I had finished with his request—or had it been really a command?—that I should head an exploring party for the heights, she spoke.

“I don’t like it,” said she.

“No,” said I, “I don’t like it either. That’s why I put him off. I told him I must have time.”

The color flushed into her cheeks and her eyes questioned me, daringly, as if what she had to say were reckless indeed, and yet it had to be said.

“Why don’t we,” said she, “you and I, go off alone to-night and try it by ourselves? There’s no reason why we shouldn’t know what’s up there, though I see no possible reason for that brigand’s annexing it.”

“Are you up to it?” I asked, though I could see she was up to anything. I shouldn’t have been surprised to have her spread wings and fly away through the radiant air. “You know he spoke of a boulder like a mountain, and quagmires and blind ways.”

She lifted her arms so that she stood there an instant like a cross, and again I thought of wings. She spoke exultantly.

“I’m equal,” she said, “to anything. Never in my life have I felt like this. I feel”—she hesitated for a word—“immortal.”

Our eyes met, and we stood there looking at each other enchanted, happy without speech and, in a moment or two, Cintra left Annette and came to us.

“What is it?” she asked me. “What did he want you to do?”

So I told her also, and like Mary, she asked me: “What are you going to do?” Then I realized that if we had a plan, Mary and I, for going off in secrecy and essaying the difficult way, it must not be told. For though Cintra wanted the General balked by any possible means, still, she loved him, and if we were to defeat him in his dearest wishes, would she not perhaps break down and tell him all? For a woman may desire the thwarting of the man she loves, but she can ill bear the strain of it. We are all children, we men, to the women who love us. Who of them could hurt a child? So I temporized. I told her exactly what I had said to him. He should know when the light had reached the cypress tree. That apparently contented her. She was evidently willing to take me as more straightforward than I was, and a rueful certainty came over me that even here, in what we had been taught of old to call heaven, we were not relieved from the temptation of obliquity of speech and act. And as suddenly I was glad, for I had learned, as I have since been learning, every day a page here and there, another of the laws in this new phase of being: that the choice is not over. It is going on; ever and ever are we to be met by the aspects we call good and evil, and choose between them. This was not a lazy man’s paradise. We had not attained good by entering another place under another sky. We were not to have good thrust upon us whether we would or no. Was it true perhaps, what I had always thought? that evil is not a malicious demon sent to tease and puzzle us, but a beneficence, a sharp medicine of God, whereby, and only so, we learn the freedom of the will? And that attained—but my small wits could go no further, and I think I smiled a little, for I realized I was about to let Cintra believe a lie. For her own good? but when we lie, we’re always saying it’s for somebody’s good,—possibly our own.

“Then,” she said, “you’ll tell him later. I hope”—her tone was worried, yet emphatic—“I hope you will tell him, no.”

And then I felt Mary’s hand in a touch on my own, and I looked at her and followed her eyes to see Flavia coming toward us across the sward. Cintra also saw her and turned back to Annette again, seeing, I thought afterward, that Flavia wanted to speak to us, and it was better she should do it when we were alone. How strangely different she was, this country Flavia! For one thing, I should say she was young as well as beautiful, and yet herself, as I who had not seen her before to-day, could have imagined her. Did she look as she must have looked in her girlhood? I thought not. There was nothing shy or indeterminate about her. She was simply a woman—and beautiful. But she was greatly troubled. She swept on toward me, her draperies flying back a little, though there was no wind. And here I am thinking, with an odd amusement, what I should say if I could write a chronicle of this place and had a time to send or take it back to earth. The clothes of these women, my own clothes—why, indeed, our very bodies!—what were they? I cannot tell, and again I find myself going back to the same simple phrase: “We shall be changed.”

Flavia spoke. She addressed me directly.

“You have been talking with him,” she said, and I found I answered her in a reversal of her own words, the General seemed to me so great a person.

“Yes, he has been talking to me.”

“And now—” she said, as if she might burst out into passionate lament, “he has gone off, and Milton is up there with the rest of them, and I can’t go up to find him.”

Why couldn’t she? because the General would be angry? or would Milton be angry? Did she feel with me that we must subscribe to a kind of military precision, the whole thing looked so grave? But I immediately began and told her what the General had proposed to me, adding that, if the whole thing was to be put off until to-morrow’s light, as he had agreed, evidently her husband would not be asked to march, and although she might not be able to reach the encampment above there, she would still know where he was. This perhaps sounded rather futile, and Mary, perhaps for that reason, took it out of my hands, and went on, telling Flavia what she and I had decided to do. Did Flavia want to join us, to follow the gleam of those colors on the hill and perhaps—she spoke with a rashness I loved but couldn’t uphold her in—for wasn’t I impressed into service? wasn’t I one of the General’s men?—

“Perhaps,” she said, “when we find out what the place is, we shall want to warn them. Of the attack, you know.”

The response to this was far other than I had expected. Flavia’s face broke up into a confusion of fear. She was excited, wildly so.

“Oh,” said she, “you mustn’t speak in that way about it—about that place. Don’t you know what it is?”

No, Mary said, she didn’t know, and I shook my head.

“Why,” said Flavia, “there’s only one thing it can be. It’s the Holy City. Only I can’t understand—” Here she broke down, and though she shed no tears, began trembling in a way more moving than the wildest passion,—“I can’t understand any of it. We are dead—” This last she cried out so piercingly that Annette heard and gave a little echoing cry, and then buried her face in Cintra’s dress, and Cintra, standing beside her, put out a kindly hand and laid it on her shoulder. Flavia gave them a glance and went on talking.

“We are here, here,” she said passionately, “where the Book told us we should be, and there’s nobody to meet us. Doesn’t anybody care?”

Then Mary, in the extremity of her pity, called her something Flavia had perhaps never been called in her life, because she belonged to a dumb and rigorous breed.

“Darling!” said Mary, and murmured it again, softly, as if to say she was sorry, “darling, you’re thinking about the poetry, Saint John—Revelation—and it’s all true. Only perhaps we’ve got to find our way up to it, just as we’ve had to find our way everywhere in the world. I mean, on our earth. Come along with us. Come. We’re going to find the way. And if it’s over hot ploughshares, we’ll find it—for you.”

The tears were burning in my eyes, though I could but smile, hearing how she had gone back, for Flavia’s sake, to an old symbolism of heat, when every-day science might have lent her a hotter one.

“Maybe,” said Flavia, “maybe.” She had a way all through this time of getting used to our new conditions, of going back to her homespun speech. “But I can’t go,” she said distractedly. “I can’t go and leave Milton up there with that—” She paused. She was afraid of the General—for he was immortally old and was not his bust in the library at home?—and yet she despised him for the hunger she had been all her life despising in Milton: the craving for conquest, for land. “They’re as alike as two peas,” she said, the mother element crying out in her. She could have whipped them both. “Now what is there about a parcel o’ land that should make anybody want to lay hands on it, if only to get it away from somebody else? Milton never set eyes on a piece o’ land running with his but his fingers itched for it. And he—” her awed emphasis told us she had shifted to the General—“he wants to break into the Holy City.”

“Come with us,” said Mary, gently. She was very persuasive. “If it is the Holy City, there’s nothing in it to harm us. It couldn’t be wrong to get nearer and see what the light really is.”

“No,” said Flavia, “he might come down some other way, to find me, and if I wasn’t here I don’t know what would happen to him, alone and all. Why,” said she, in the extremity of her bewilderment allowing herself to speak her entire mind, “sometimes within this last hour I’ve wondered whether it was so, after all, whether I really am dead and whether you are, and why mother hasn’t met me—I don’t think so much about father, he’d be too busy somewheres, law papers and all—and whether I sha’n’t wake up in a minute and see the bedpost and find it’s four o’clock and time for milking.”

Now I didn’t feel myself in this at all. I, too, had had a moment of wondering now and then whether I should wake, but that was a possibility I could at once dismiss, for, with the strangeness of this place, I had also a perfect conviction of its reality and kindliness. Even the General, with his shield and armor militarism, wouldn’t, I felt, be allowed to harm us. The world here meant us well. Mary began speaking, and to me.

“I had a talk with Cintra while you were at your conference with him. She can tell us about nearly everything that seems so strange, only she’s so frightfully disturbed about him that she can’t really give her mind to our little worries. She knows they’ll be settled somehow, and as to him, she evidently thinks he’ll come out all wrong and give her a few centuries more of hanging round trying to protect him from his own stupidity. But we’re here together, like a queer picnic party, I judge, not so much because we died at the same time as that our lives are so twisted up together we couldn’t get free of each other if we wanted to. There’s you and I—we couldn’t be separated—”

“No,” I said, “we couldn’t.”

And then I thought of Annette sitting there in a daze and wondered: what about her? Suppose we told her we were going off on the quest of a Holy City? Would she want to go? Had she the nerve and imagination for it, if she did want it? She herself settled that by rising and coming to me. Suddenly she looked strong, tense and wilful and determined on something she felt I should deny her.

“Peter,” she said, “is it true?”

I knew what she meant and that she couldn’t bear to put it into words.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s true.”

“And where”—it came with a rush—“where are we going to live?”

We fell into a queer dialogue.

“I judge,” I said, “that it’s easy to get all those practical things settled at the start. Cintra spoke, you know, of temporary quarters. The General, too. All such things would have been settled for us almost at the moment of our coming, if the whole population had not taken to their houses to show—not perhaps their disapproval but their unwillingness to be drawn into any of these military movements.”

This was a rambling speech, but it was what I really thought. And in the main, as I found out afterward, it was true.

“Do you want me,” said she, “to live with you?”

“Do you want to?” I asked.

And she said: “No.”

I was not surprised by this. I wasn’t even glad, because I had been so sure of it. There is a something in the air of this enchanting spot—yes, it is enchanting! it has come upon me more and more convincingly—something that renders clarity of speech almost inevitable because there is clarity of thought. And suddenly another phrase came to me, as if it whispered itself in my ear: “Then shall I know even as also I am known.”

Annette continued:

“Cintra has asked me to stay with her for the present. I have accepted. They are the best people here.”

I had a momentary curiosity about the pathetic boy who had seemed to be with her at our meeting, who had been conciliating her, protecting her, in a young way, and who was not in sight. Perhaps her mind caught the trend of mine, for she said, and not as if she cared about it:

“He went up there. The General sent for him. I told him to go—and see if he could make good.”

She turned away, apparently having nothing further to say to me, and again I was not surprised but very glad. It was amazing that it could end so simply. A relation that had been undertaken—on my part, at least—as a lifelong duty and delight, had dissolved into something hardly to be remembered. I suppose it could all have been recalled if we had wanted it to be, but it would have meant only the reviving of old confusions, pains, disappointments and even, so far as I was concerned, agonies. For already I had learned this: one question of bereaved and doubting hearts on earth had been settled. We did “remember”. But she turned back again, though for an instant only.

“Peter,” said she, and rather wistfully, “you’re sure? You know it’s—that? You see, it’s queer, but it might be anything. It’s no queerer than wireless or—think of Hollywood and what they go through to make a picture.”

“Yes,” said I, “it’s true. It’s no picture. We have died, and we are alive. That’s all I know.”

And then, looking even more bewildered and more profoundly discouraged than when I had come down from the market-place, she turned about and followed Cintra away.

Mary made a little hurried rush toward Flavia who was looking after them, a sort of lost-dog expression on her face.

“We’re going,” said Mary. “Yes, up there. See how it’s flaming out! I can hardly wait. Won’t you please come?”

“No,” said Flavia quietly, but out of an unmoved resolve, “I must stay here. I told you. He might want me.”

“But about sleeping,” said Mary, “about eating!” This she said as if it were incredible not to have thought of it before. “About everything!”

But Flavia knew. She had, in talking with Cintra, informed herself.

“There’s a place,” said she, “right along to the east. (Yes, she told me the points of the compass. I can’t be contented anywhere unless I know ’em. My father was just that way. He always had a little compass in his pocket, all complete. And there was a vane on the barn.) You go along that path—look like lilacs, don’t they, them blooms—and there’s a building, a long building. You can just see it from here. I should think it was as much as a mile long. It’s a kind of a strangers’ rest for folks that have just come and ain’t got settled yet. I thought maybe if Milton didn’t come down right away—” here her voice broke and she went on bravely—“I could get a place helping round when folks come, keeping them from being down-hearted and all.”

She had learned a good deal. This was her heaven, as she worshipfully knew, but she had learned you must make your way into it through old bewilderments she had thought done with forever. And yet was there not some benign solace in those very bewilderments, linking the earth love and perhaps the earth nostalgia—for some of us have deeply loved the earth—to that yearning mother land which is heaven? I wondered then, and now, when I have been a citizen of that new country long enough to see how it reflects earth and yet justifies it—as if you turned page after page of an old text-book, to compare it with the finished problem—I do not wonder. I wonder about other things. The universe is rich with them. But of this I am sure. The earth cannot be forgotten in the assurances of another life. There is link after link of—glory, shall I say? Yes, it is glory, only that is, perhaps, too spectacular. Glory is a flaming word—save when you apply it to the Highest, He that is God. But I was speaking to Flavia, with an unthinking honesty.

“It’s funny,” I said, “about—food.”

“Yes,” said she. “That was one of the first things I thought of,—for Milton, you know. He needs his food. But if you’re going up the hill you’ll find a place that way, too. You can stop at the Hermit’s. He’ll tell you.”

The Hermit! How did she know all the byways of the place? Who was the Hermit? This she answered before I had asked it, save in my mind.

“He lives there alone, up along,” she said. “Not the road where the military are. That other one, to the right. Cintra seemed to think very highly of him. There’s another name for him, too. They call him the Memory Man.”

“Then,” I said, “perhaps he’s the man they met, the one the soldiers saw when they were trying to go up there, the one who seemed to every man like himself and could persuade him to anything.”

“Oh, no,” said Flavia. What I call her worshiping look stole into her face, the look reflecting every thought touching her religion. “Why,” said she, “didn’t you know Who that was, Who it must have been?”

She loved and reverenced Him too much to tell Who it was, and so must the disciples have looked when they spoke of Him when He had not long been dead. I was shocked at my own dense intelligence in not seeing at least how it had seemed to her, and I began to mumble some sort of disclaimer. I had not meant—I had not thought—but Mary laid a finger on my arm and signalled that we must go. And as we started together into the shade of ancient trees fringing the road where it began, Flavia also turned and went on her own way toward the east.

IV

There at the beginning the highway was broad and, though shaded by trees, their branches almost meeting at the top, light enough to be inviting. The traveler, so it said, would find diversion enough as he went on and good fortune at the end. Knowing for what it had been planned, how it was to be the General’s path to conquest and glory, I looked with interest at the road-bed and guessed, out of my slight experience, that it had been laid out with an eye to lasting service. Yet the air of it was one of silence and desertion. Here it was, a road for retinues, cohorts, commerce, all the human activities you could think of, lying there as if an invading race had come in, had built it and then sailed away to other lands and left it for the historian to wonder over. For whatever reason, nobody was going that way. Mary and I had taken hands and walked along silently for a half mile or so, each of us occupied with the strangeness of it and, I believe, both of us thinking of Flavia whom we had left behind. Finally I spoke and without preamble, knowing, as I had from the first hour of my meeting her, that she would understand.

“I suppose,” I said, “that might be called one of the great love stories.”

“You mean,” said she, “because she won’t desert him even for a chance of finding her Holy City. No, I don’t know that it’s love. Maybe it’s protective. She’s so frightfully sorry for him. She’s that kind of woman, you see. She’s all maternal.”

“Are you?” I asked, and she was so wonderful to me that I probably said it as we do say the most ordinary things to the one we love, half tenderly, and with a whimsical shade, as you speak to a child. “Are you all maternal?”

To my surprise, an almost shocked surprise, she stopped and looked at me with tragic meaning.

“Oh,” she said, “I don’t know what I am. I’ve put it off all the time we’ve been here because I’ve said there was nothing I could do to help, and everybody we’ve seen here seems to be in a hole, and yet we’re calling it heaven, especially Flavia down there hanging round waiting for a man who doesn’t exist—”

“Why,” said I stupidly, “you haven’t heard anything have you? There hasn’t anything—happened to any one?”

(Did things “happen”, I wondered, in this which Flavia, at least, believed to be the land of eternal bliss? What could happen? And yet while souls like the General existed there would be, if not war, at least rumors of war.)

“I’ve no business to spoil it,” she said, “by being terrified and wondering what’s going on at home. No! no!” she corrected herself desperately, “this is home, safe, lovely as nothing has ever been for any of us, and we’ve got that last ineffable certainty, the one we never, never had on earth, no matter how terribly we tried to find it. But I keep thinking about him. I drive it away, the thought, because I tell myself it’s of no use. It keeps coming back. I may know I’m alive as I never was before, but he doesn’t know that. He’s in the dark. He knows I’m dead. He heard it when he heard the theatre burned. He knows I was there.”

My whole body went cold, all but my heart. That must have felt itself called on to meet the shock and compensate it: for it seemed to be choking me. As I didn’t speak, she turned to me, saw my face and then caught at my hand.

“It’s my father,” she said. “There were only two of us. Mother ran away from him when I was little. She took me and he stole me back. And he isn’t the kind of person—”

She stammered here, as if not knowing how to tell it, and I was so glad it was a father and not a lover she was lamenting that at that minute I didn’t care what kind of a father he was. But I did care later for anything that concerned her. Fathers and mothers have to do a good deal of standing aside and waiting while young love has its way. Then, sometimes long after, they may come into their own again.

“Never mind,” I said stupidly. “Don’t tell me, if it’s hard.”

“But I want to tell you,” she said passionately. “It’s all so different here. Don’t you see it is? The old loyalties don’t obtain. There’s a new kind of loyalty. I don’t know what it is, but perhaps we learn here at a leap what it takes us a lifetime to learn there, and we hardly manage it then. You see if we were on the earth again, I should have you meet him and he’d be very fascinating, as he is to everybody, and try to put something over on you, and I should protect him in all sorts of underground ways and perhaps never let you know the kind of man he was. But here—he’s an outsider, father is, he’s wicked, wrong, and I love him.”

She looked very lovely, defiantly lovely, as if she challenged me to deny her the right of mourning over a scamp. But I had no mind to deny it.

“Yes,” I said, “I see. And you’re the dearest thing he’s got, and he’s had to learn you’re—”

“I shouldn’t say,” she went on, still defiantly, “that I’m the dearest thing he’s got. I don’t feel sure I’m dear at all—or was, when I was there, blocking him, keeping him straight so far as I could and making him so furious I sometimes wished I’d let him be crooked and been crooked with him so we could both have had some peace. But now, all alone, and being sorry—you see there is something awful in knowing the one person that’s fond of you has died, gone off without a word—well, he’ll be desperate, and he’ll be worse than ever, and I can’t help it. Come along. No, don’t look so sorry, dear. Why, this is heaven, and I’m poisoning the air of it by all this tattling! But I’m glad you know it, for it’ll probably keep coming back to me like—what is it they used to say when they threatened us?—like the worm that dieth not.”

And it seemed to be coming back again at that minute, all over again, for her lip trembled and she said, like a child:

“Peter, I can’t bear to have him keep on being crooked. I want him to be good.”

And just at that minute, we stopped, as if somebody had put a hand on her arm and said, “There! never mind talking any more about it now, but look ahead and see what you see.”

She gave a little gasp, and touched my arm.

“Why, Peter,” said she, “there’s a house, a little brown house.”

I looked, not with much interest for, with all she had been saying, she kept me interested only in her. Yes, there was a house, a small brown house with a roof as dull yet bright a green as if it had been the ooze on a pond. There were windows—it was a proper house though there was something so fairy-like about it—and there was a door which stood open, though not on the highway but looking up the hill. We did not question what to do. We must go to the door of the little house and see what happened next. We wouldn’t have failed to do it for anything. We turned into the path that led to it, and though the path was so narrow we didn’t go single file. It seemed such an adventure that we must approach it together. And in a moment we were standing before the open doorway looking in, and we saw a man sitting at a table, his head bent slightly over a confusion of small objects within the circle of light from a low shaded lamp. I simply knew he was making something, for I had the sense to see that his tools and the materials lying before him were in that helter-skelter which is disorder to the unpractised eye but are really arranged so that a master artisan can lay his hand upon them unerringly. To this day, I don’t know what the work was in any detail I could possibly explain, though he proved so willing to tell us all he could. I think we must have been very silent in our coming and also as we stood there waiting, and that when he noticed us at length it was probably from the sense of being looked at, the mind—or the soul—being summoned back from the spot where it was occupied. He glanced up—with the brightest eyes I think I had ever seen—and smiled a little, as if in a perfunctory welcome. When I say that, I mean as if it were not personal to us, but as if he were used to being interrupted and wanted to show us at once that it was not of any consequence. His eyes were not only the brightest I remember having seen, but the bluest. At once you thought of the most extreme similes: sky, blue water, sapphire—no, that was too dark a blue—violets, gentians—I was unconsciously rattling over the list in my mind when he spoke. But first, before I set down what he said, I will describe the room, as much as we saw of it then. It was a room of this house where I am now sitting, but the two rooms, his and mine, have no communication, the one with the other. He had carefully, in building, guarded his solitude, and I, when I accepted his offer of a chair and writing table in the room where I now am, was only too glad to accept from him a nearness which, from his quality of soul, would keep me warm. But now as to his room: it was all a soft leaf brown, and though dark, you could see the outlines of the simple furniture. There wasn’t much: the long table where he was at work, a couple of brown wooden chairs besides his and a cupboard with dishes in it. The dishes seemed to indicate cooking, but I saw no sign of stove or fireplace. And his clothes,—they, too, were brown, and soft and lichen-y. I got the feeling that as to his outside equipment he wasn’t very permanent, that he could change, or be changed, by a word or a wand, into something else quite as serviceable and that without discomfort to himself. And still you’d be sure, if you’d stood there with us, looking at him, that he was the most natural thing possible, a part of the needful things of life.

“Hullo!” said he. His voice was clear and pleasant, and I got the impression that he was saying Hullo because he knew we had come from the earth and ought to have something homespun and familiar said to us, and we both answered, “Hullo.” And on that Mary asked:

“May we come in?”

“If you don’t mind,” said he, with the air of arranging things as we should prove to like them, “I’ll come out. There’s a bench there at your right. Just sit down and I’ll come.”

We had neither of us noticed the two benches, one at each side of the door, and I wondered, for an instant, if it was going to be a faerie story and they had both sprung out of the ground. But we sat down on our bench—the back and arms were of smooth interwoven branches—and it felt solid and right; and he rose from his seat, laid down a small tool he had been using, and came out and sat down on the other bench facing us. He was a very satisfactory looking person; that I saw anew, and Mary told me afterward that she “loved” him. He was smiling at us now, full face, and even showing a line of teeth white as a dog’s, and he asked, as if our meeting and the place were the most casual possible:

“Just come?”

Mary, on the heels of her confidence to me, couldn’t wait to tell.

“Yes,” she said, “there was an accident on earth, two accidents, and so a lot of us are here together, the queerest lot. And we can’t get assorted, all but Peter here and I. We’re just where we ought to be, where we’ve been trying to get for hundreds of years, I dare say. We’re together.”

He nodded.

“I fancy,” he said, “you’re not quite settled in. Seems disorderly a bit, does it? Not what you’d expected?”

Now it didn’t seem disorderly to me, but if anything too orderly, with all the bugling and the speech making and the marching which I wasn’t in, it is true; but I knew they were going on. And yet the place was sparsely peopled. It seemed to have been created for the General to hold manoeuvres in and persuade men to things their wives didn’t want them to do.

“Where are the people?” I asked.

“You don’t meet them much at first,” he said.

I had been impressed by his great kindliness, the way he looked at us, the way he spoke, and now it seemed even greater than at first, for he was evidently seeking about in his mind for things to tell us, to make us at ease. And Mary had a question.

“What is it really? Is it—heaven?”

He nodded encouragingly, with a smile that ought to have beamed on children, it was so full of understanding of little wants and odd childish make-believe.

“Yes,” he said, but rather lightly, I thought. I was used, just as Flavia was, to a solemn heaven, the gates and the sea of glass, only I didn’t believe in it and she did. We had both been brought up on its poetry though I had, as it were, chanted the verbal loveliness of it to put my mind to sleep, and to her it was daily bread. “You can call it so. And it is—in a way. The trouble is, when we’re on the earth we get too rarefied about it. We try to think in terms of it, that gigantic symbolism, you know, and we almost persuade ourselves it’s going to be like that and we could sink into it and feel at home. But you wouldn’t, now would you? You never could go from—from griddle-cakes, for instance, and step into that epic grandeur and feel at home?”

He looked at us a little anxiously yet encouragingly, too, as if he wanted us to learn as soon as possible to take things as they were and like them in a sensible way.

“You see,” he said, “if you were pitchforked into the heaven I was taught when I was little, and there were angels and music and that gigantic chant”—I knew what he meant, the “Holy! Holy!” of the enraptured seer—“you’d break, you’d collapse. I don’t know what you’d do. Why,” he went on gravely, kindly, as if we were infinitely young and he infinitely old (I could almost feel him putting out a hand to stroke my hair) “when babies are born into the world you’ve come from—and I, too, I came long ago—you wouldn’t shove ’em right into the daily life there, would you, bond selling, running for office and all that sort of thing? Well, you’re nothing but babies, you two, in a strange world, and you’ll have to go slow, I tell you, slow, and when you’ve got your eyes open— My dear!”

That last consoling word was directed at Mary who was leaning toward him, her hands clasped in a gesture like that of prayer. It was quite unconscious, but I know she believed in him so much that it really was like praying to him.

“Tell me,” she said, “what I can do. That’s my father down there— Is it down there or ‘off’ there? What do you say?— Well, he knows I’m dead and I can’t tell him I’m not.”

He regarded her from a depth of pity which was understanding as well, and I learned all over again that beneficent lesson of the place. If another mind is opened to you, if it is willing to lie open, you can understand without words. But you cannot spy upon an unwilling mind: that, though only through its impossibility, is tacitly forbidden. There are lenses, it is true, but in the great justice of new being, there are also shadows, and no man can see what would render another man his victim or his tool. So—he knew, and more than she had told him. He knew how vital it was to her that this particular man, still on the earth, should hear how she had left it, and that for reasons not connected with happiness or unhappiness but with the right and wrong of things.

“It is almost always so,” he said. “The first thing we think of is that we must—well, write home, you might say. You have landed and you are safe.”

“Yes,” said Mary, drawing a quick breath. “I have landed and I am safe. How shall I tell him? Is it ever done?”

“It is not forbidden,” said he, “but—is it done? I don’t know. But you might try.” And then he flamed out into what sounded like a great belief, the tenet of a creed, unproven, but so living in his eyes that he had to testify to it. “I think,” he said, with a great emphasis on the I, “I think it can be done.”

She bent a little nearer him. She was still beside me on the bench, but she seemed, in a spiritual way, to be kneeling to him.

“Then,” she said, “tell me. How can it be done?”

He smiled at her and shook his head. She saw, as I did, that he was repudiating that spiritual gesture of prayer, and she was not hurt, though she did draw back a little. She wished to behave with the beautiful propriety which is here silently enjoined upon us.

“No,” he said, “I’ve no authority. I’m not one of those. There are—but you’ll see them, as time goes on. Only there are things I believe and I can tell you, and you can believe them, too,—that is, if you can—and you might act on them. I’m trying to.”

I had my question to ask.

“We’ve heard a story,” I said, “a strange story, that once, when the General’s men tried to swarm up the height, to the Holy City”—I used the two words in as commonplace a manner as I could, to indicate that he might trust us, seeing that we were ready to accept it under that name and not be overthrown by it—“they were met by a person—a Personage—and one after another the men saw him, talked with him, and to each one he seemed different. Each man saw him as of his own kind, one that could understand him, make himself understood. You’re not—”

I hesitated, perhaps because it seemed preposterous, in a way; and yet it wasn’t. They had said it was a man, and why not One who took the form of a man?— “It wasn’t—or was it—you?”

“No,” said he, at once. “Oh, no! no! I’ve heard that. I don’t account for it. Nobody does. There are plenty of things here you’ll find it impossible to account for, not because they’re story-book things, not in accordance with law, natural law, I mean, but because we don’t know much about law yet. So we say ‘legend’—and that’s all right, too—and the laws are quite simple and every-day, once we know them. But call it legend. You’d better, for the present. Now!” he turned his bright gaze on Mary. “What are you going to do?”

V

“What can I do?” she asked him, all in a breath, and believingly, as if he were sure to know. “You don’t mean what they called communication—on earth, that is?”

“No,” said he, “there’s no clear communication. You can’t send a message in a recognized way, as it might be wireless. But some few things do get through. Only not from here.”

“Where from?” she asked. Her eyes, now bright as his, confronted, challenged them.

“Not from here,” he said. “From another—” There he paused. I think he was suddenly brought up standing by the mere fact of her being what she was: brave to the finish but vulnerable, capable of being staggered by a too sudden knowledge of the immensity of things. But she had to meet it.

“Do you know,” he said, “our distance from the earth?”

He pulled himself up. It was no sort of thing to tell her who was so far from home and, for the moment, wearying to get back there. Millions of miles are hardly more disconcerting than flocks of midges on the blithe scientist’s printed page, the sun of speculation on their gauzy wings. They are quite other when you have yourself been trapped by eternity and are dismayed at it. He hardly waited for the answer. Of that, too, he may have been afraid.

“But,” he said, “there’s another station nearer home, nearer the earth, you see. The conditions aren’t favorable to life, our life, as we live it now. But from time to time there are migrations from here, exploring parties, broken-hearted people who want to ‘communicate,’ as you say. As it happens, there’s an expedition on now. You can join it. I’ll do the arranging and put you aboard. All you have to do is to realize the safety of it, be calm, and give no trouble.”

Her lips were trembling.

“Oh,” said she, “I assure you I’ll be calm. I’ll give no trouble.”

“You understand,” I said to him, “I’m to go, too.”

“No,” said he. “There’s room for one only. I had a place kept for me. I thought I might go myself. I’ve been several times, though without success. To test out things, see how the system’s getting on.”

“Is it,” she asked, “on another star?”

I remembered how she had asked me, on the way up: “Which is a planet and which is a star?” adding, with the childlike confidence she had shown me from the first: “But it’s all one, so far as we’re concerned, isn’t it? It’s all so lovely.”

He ignored the question. She wasn’t to be allowed to stumble on facts too big for her.

“It’s much nearer the earth than we are,” he again said, but as if it didn’t matter. “And the conditions are more favorable, atmospheric, you know.”

“Then we go—” said she.

“Yes, of course you go by air. It isn’t too long. Nor dangerous. As I’ve told you, I’ve done it. Trying, though. You have to behave.”

“How can you say it’s not dangerous?” I challenged him.

I tried to sound indignant, for I thought the tremendous nature of it all called for at least a show of spirit. But I wasn’t indignant, really. You couldn’t be, with him. He turned to me and spoke in a quiet, reasonable way.

“There’s just one reason why it isn’t dangerous. You’d realize it if you made use of the first vital fact you learned here. It’s that you are here. You’re alive. If you’re alive after one death of the body, don’t you know you’ll be alive after another? Even the body isn’t lost. It’s only changed. Do you think you can die, the immortal you? Suppose you smash up on this migration, do you suppose you won’t turn up again, bright and shining?”

“Shall I turn up here?” she asked quickly, and I knew she was weighing the possibility of finding me again. That was in my mind, too. It seemed to be about the only thing there. I wasn’t used to dealing with rushing journeys in stellar space. All I could do was to bid myself remember we were, in a way, speaking a new language, struggling with gigantic unproven facts. If I had a part to play, let me play it decently. He was answering her.

“I don’t know,” said he. “I only know, in this business of meddling with time and space, there are enormous risks that take enormous courage.”

She looked at me for a long minute. I looked at her. Then I must have smiled: for suddenly I saw the way out and I loved it.

“You’re not going,” said I. “I’m going for you. Tell me what you want said, and I’ll say it.”

He intervened.

“You can’t do it,” said he. He frowned. The blue eyes signalled me. “Don’t!” they said. “Let me manage it. You don’t know how. She must go, and if she goes, in confidence.”

Also I think he was greatly moved by the emotional quality of the scene and wanted to get it over.

“You don’t understand,” said he. “How should you? This is not sending a message by wireless.” He looked at her and began to explain. “When I tell you how vague it all is, how unsatisfactory it might turn out, you may not want to undertake it. Yet I think you may.” This last he seemed to say to himself, as if confirming his judgment of her. “You will be given a quiet place for detachment and the exercise of your will.”

“A cell?” she asked. She was thinking of the old tales of anchorites and meditation.

“It might be,” he said quietly. “It might be a cell made of green branches and you’d see a river or the sky. But you would have to be secluded and you would have to fix your mind on your father and what you want him to understand. Don’t diffuse it, as you might if you were talking or thinking in the same room with him. Fix your mind on one thing, perhaps some little phrase you were accustomed to use together. Or think up a simple little dream. Sometimes a good deal can be done with dreams. Often they get grotesque in transmission, but they at least enable the dreamer to wake and think: ‘I dreamed of her last night.’ And it comforts him.”

“I understand,” she said. “That is, I understand I must do as I am told, and that it may result in something and it may not. Peter!” She rose and I rose with her. She held out her hands and I took them. “I shall come back,” she said. “That is, I shall try to come back. But if it’s a long time, you’ll know I tried and that in the end I shall do it. You do think, don’t you,” she said, turning her candid eyes upon him—and I knew that if he meant to give her any specious comfort he couldn’t, in the face of that childlike gaze—“you think there’s no doubt about coming back? People do—always?”

“They always have,” said he, “ever since the migrations have been possible. I went, and I came back.”

Again she looked me in the face. Then she smiled—divinely. It was not exactly a smile, but that look suggesting the old commonplace of sunlight through the clouds.

“Well,” she said to him, shaking her head a little, as if she shook off the tears of things, and turning another sort of smile on him, “I’m ready. What next?”

“We must hurry,” he said, glancing up at the light filtering through the forest ways. He turned to me. “Where were you going,” he asked me, “when you stopped here?”

I told him as briefly as I could, and somehow I was not proud of being on a mission for the General or, on the other hand, of having those cautious reservations of my own.

“Ah!” said he. “Well, you go on, and I’ll take her down to the port.”

“But I’m going with her,” I said violently.

“Better not,” said he, and she, who had begun, I saw, to trust him absolutely as if he were indeed the One who spoke to each man in his own tongue, confirmed him. (And I trusted him, too. Otherwise, should I have let her go?)

“No,” said she. “I must go alone. And you must go back—to Annette and Flavia. O Peter, you must go to Flavia.”

“Is there any likelihood,” I asked him, ignoring her for the moment but keeping her hands in mine, “is there any likelihood of my getting to it, the city up there? I take it for granted it is a city. They all seem to think so.”

He looked at me absently.

“I can’t tell you much about it,” he said. “That is, I’d better not. Very few people have reached it. Some find one thing, some another.”

“But tell me, at least,” said I. “If there’s no good going, why should I go?” I wanted to add: “Now that she will not be with me and the charm of the adventure is lost.”

They both understood. She held my hands the closer, and he answered:

“Better not! better not!”

“Is it forbidden?” I persisted.

“Oh, dear, no,” said he, “nothing is forbidden here. It’s as free as—the rest of the universe. The only things forbidden are those you forbid yourself because you learn they shouldn’t be done. Mustn’t be. Now you go first. It’ll be easier for her to see you walking up the hill than to go and leave you.”

“One minute,” I said. I wasn’t going to drop her hands quite yet. “What did you mean,” I asked her, “about Flavia and Annette?”

“Don’t you know,” she said, “Flavia is terribly worried about that Milton of hers? You’ve got to see her through that, either pull him out of the General’s clutches, or somehow—oh, I don’t know how—get her into the atmosphere she’s always believed in. You wouldn’t have her think she’d died and hadn’t gone to heaven, the kind of heaven her Bible promised her?”

How could I invent a heaven for Flavia and conduct her to it when nothing could stir her until her Milton was planted somewhere, to live a life as unadventurous as his own earthly cabbages?

“And,” I said, I hope not too sulkily, “Annette?”

“She’s very forlorn,” said Mary. “She hasn’t any foothold here. I don’t believe anybody’s died that she could find, or that she’s left anybody she’s fond of on the earth.”

“You don’t think,” I began—and she interrupted me.

“Oh, no! no! not that. It’s nothing, nothing.”

And I understood her to mean that the mere fact of my having sworn things to Annette to be observed “until death do us part” did not, in her mind, carry over into this present life. I was not to look out for Annette because I had to, in decency, but because Annette was frightened and Mary happened to know it.

“Very well,” I said. “I’ll do the best I can. But you’ll come back. And you’ll come soon?”

“I’ll come,” said she, “as soon as I can. Wait! I want to think.” We stood there quietly a moment, and then she said, in a rush, as if to get it over: “I haven’t told you everything. I can’t tell him even. But I see I must tell you. It isn’t wholly to save my father the pain of thinking I am dead—dead without hope, you know. It’s that he had a deal on, a wicked deal, that would hurt a lot of people horribly, and there was no way I could fight it. I went to the theatre that night to get away from him and think it over. And it’s that I want to stop. I couldn’t do it there, but maybe from here—”

She was silent, her dear face for a moment convulsed. My heart leaped to answer her.

“Yes, my darling,” I said. “Yes! yes!”

While we talked to each other in this haste of leave-taking, the Hermit had gone back into the house, and now he appeared again with a little packet which he gave me as one might give an apple to a boy starting on a short expedition, saying: “You’ll want something to eat, you know.”

Mary’s face, all trembling as it was, crinkled up in the nicest way.

“Oh,” said she, “I love that. Now I know I shall come back. You didn’t do it for that, just to make us feel commonplace and cosy?”

He crinkled up, too, in the same kind of smile.

“No,” said he. “It’s a good long way. He’ll want it.”

“Then,” said she, “where’s mine?”

But he shook his head, still smiling, and we knew she would be provided for. And she lifted her face and we kissed each other.

“Now!” said she, and drew her hands out of mine. And I, not daring to look again into the sweet loveliness of her child face, turned away from them and went out into the path and began my march up the hill. And my eyes were full of tears.

It was a long time before I could look back upon that scene and understand why I had to do this without further argument. And I have made up my mind that it was the place itself, the bonds it laid upon you. You had to line up to something, though you didn’t quite know what. Once I thought of it as being drawn into a gorgeous procession, full of holy imagery. You may not have thought of yourself as in any way fitting for such company, but being there you have to hold your head up and march as stately as you can, though you cannot even guess how long a way it is or what the end may be. But the very look of those who also march and their high behavior teach you that you must, in decency, conform.

VI

And there was I, pursuing my way up the hill alone, with that incredible adventure developing itself behind me. It would not, in my previous life, have been possible to imagine such a step, let alone taking part in it and seeing no other way to do. But here, as I have already said, we were dealing with things on a gigantic scale, and quite simply, as if covering the distance from star to star were no more than crossing the Channel from England into France. Another thing had occurred to me while the Hermit was ordering me to go on with my adventure and leave Mary to hers: whether from age-long inheritance and a recognition of the conflict between good and evil, the difficult happenings of life used to present themselves to me as tests. I was exasperated by it, but I could not help at least half believing it. This or that temptation resisted, won some sort of standing among the arbiters of destiny, or at least it stiffened our backbones, and I was even conscious, in moments of discontent, of wondering if temptations really were set for our feet, a kind of unsportsmanlike snaring, so that we might become expert in picking ourselves up. But here things were simpler. They were on the square. Life was not a discipline cleverly administered. Certain people knew something about the rules, and they passed them on to you with the utmost good will, and you wanted to keep them because you saw how hideous it would be not to. Also there was a kind of fear about it. You weren’t so much afraid of being punished as of being left out. The blueness of the sky and the trembling of leaves would go on without you, not because their Creator wanted to come down on you but because there was no other way conformable with His nature and yours as He had made you. Although He had made the laws, was He not Himself bound by them? All this I thought out later, but the beginnings of it were stirring in me now, as I went up the hill. For quite a long time I did not take much notice of the highway or my progress on it. I was following those two in their course as I imagined it, and because the quest they were on was so mysterious and wonderful, I thought the way to it must be mysterious and wonderful, too. On my own course, several things happened that were quite new, in my sojourn. First, out of a silence, a bird sang, and perhaps since it had been really a silence, there was a significance about the unexpected song which made that also seem a part of our separate quests, Mary’s and mine. For though I had not expected anything thrilling out of my own, in comparison with her flight to another star, everything since our talk with the Hermit had put on a new significance for me, and knowing that I must not think too deeply upon her lest the thought become unbearable, I looked from side to side of the highway, in search of the singing bird. But I could not find him, chiefly because he must have been one of a multitude in the trees, singing in a variety of delightful tones. They reminded me of the nightingale and of the oriole from a something liquid in their notes. There was no cheeping or twittering, but “full-throated ease.” I do not know to this day what names they bore, but only that they had supremely the liberated throat, the swelling breast. Presently I came to a spot where, looking through the trees, I saw the sun lying upon a green glade at the right, and there were more birds and more, darting down and rising again to fly away or return to the branches, where they went on with their delightful singing. I judged that there must be water in that green space, and I turned aside and went in to it, and there it was, a bubbling spring, with a clean pebbly bottom, wandering away in a thread of clear brown water between willow-weed and other plants I knew but could not name. There was a large flat stone beside the spring and I lay down on it and drank my fill, and then sat up and thought of poetry and plays and Mary and heaven and all the things that make mere breathing a delight; and I opened the packet the Hermit had given me, and there was bread, brown and white, and—I gave a shout, so that the birds cocked an eye at me, though not one of them stirred from his perch.

“Cheese!” that was the word I shouted, and when I remembered how cheese came into being, I lay down on my stone and laughed until the birds again cocked an eye at me. Cheese! since there was cheese there must be cows. Cows in heaven! I thought of the foolish slow creatures perhaps wandering up here to drink and gazing at me with their brown eyes full of a moving vacuity, that ought, in its clearness, to mean everything and yet meant nothing. And at that point they served me to good purpose, for I thought of Milton, stumbling about in Flavia’s great love story, and the comfort a cow might be to him. And then I told myself I’d better eat my luncheon and plod up the hill, so as to get back to her and carry out Mary’s parting mandate. The bread was like no other I had ever eaten. Perhaps it was the surprise it had given me in the matter of cheese, but it seemed to feed my soul, equally with my body. And when I smiled at myself for thinking so, I remembered this was only a left-over from my old way of regarding the earth, trying to see all kinds of things she was not through the veil of what she was. But it was heavenly bread. I got up and looked about me before going on. Should I say good-bye to the birds? not so fantastic a thing to do, in a country like this. It was their country, not yet quite mine. I didn’t know the customs of it. But they were paying me no more heed than when I came. Only one, as blue as the jay, only of an ethereal loveliness far other than his braggart beauty, curved downward, ’lighted on my shoulder, gave a peck at it and then flew off. I dare say some bud or berry was sticking to my shirt, but, on my soul, I thought for an instant the little creature had brought me a message from Mary, to tell me all was well. Why not? Everything was possible that might assuage the spirit in its loneliness. I had learned that, at least, and it simply wasn’t fairyland because fairyland is capricious. It breaks the rules and flouts them while it does it, and here we are under the divinest of laws, because they satisfy small and great alike. There are unimagined beauties and delights, and we were all heirs to them. It doesn’t have to be the cleverest or the noblest born, or Prince Charming with a feather in his cap. It can easily be the beggar by the gate, only, so far as I have seen, there are no beggars, because there is an unending plenty. Yet, as to the bird: if it were possible to send a little quick message like that, Mary was the one to do it. I don’t know. So I went back into the highway and walked briskly along for perhaps a mile. There are so many things I want to know about this place! I have already found out many, but there are thousands more crowding in on me from the distance, waving banners and singing in beguiling voices, inviting me to learn all I can, since the more I learn the happier I shall be. But the few things I knew then, in that short time, I cannot stop here to explain. Let me talk in terms of earthly miles and day-and-night, and moons and weather. It is simpler so, because they come more glibly to my tongue.

Well, I went on up the hill walking even more lightly than before, and suddenly lifting my eyes—for I had been looking down as I walked, still thinking, I believe, about the bird that had swooped to me and flown away—I saw that the highway stopped abruptly and that before me were deep woods, like a barrier across the path. Many of the trees were pines. There was no wind and yet I heard them whispering. What did they say? Were they passing it along from one to another that I had come? The poor fool—not the hero—they whispered, is here. Only another of them, but he has come. As I stood and looked at them, I amused myself absently by seeing how many ways I could invent for that pine-like sighing: “He has come.” The wall they made seemed at first to be of an unbroken density, and then, as I looked, I could see in it the thread of a curiously wallowing path with torn branches of undergrowth on each side, as if some animal had broken his way through with blundering feet. Somehow, in spite of what the General had told me of crags and morasses, I had assumed that one could find, not a little path like this, but a way amenable to his purposes. The question had been, should one find it and betray it to him? But at this point it looked dubious and, for a force of men, impassable. As I stood there wondering whether I should go on into the dark—for, though there was quivering sunlight on the road behind me, all before me did look as black and heavy as old midnight—I heard running steps, halting intermittently as if the animal hurrying down might be blundering into trees and then recovering himself and dashing on, breaking the branches as he came, and I moved aside a pace to let him go rushing by and down the hill. On he came, faster and faster with his own momentum, and suddenly I fancied he was frightened. Those were the steps of fear. Now I saw him. It was a man. I gave a shout, a reassuring one I meant it to be, and stepped back into the road to meet him. He gave a leap to clear a small tree that had fallen across the track, and bounded into the highway where I was. Yes, it was a man and I knew him. It was Terence Denny, who used to play round with Annette not so many days ago. Were they days? but that was another of the things I don’t know. How can you orient yourself when you can’t talk in terms the physicist juggles with like apples, millions and trillions and unguessed distance after that and then slyly taking refuge in infinite and finite! And I hereby swear that the sudden sight of him brought the impact of night clubs and jazz and jigging dances on my brain, and I was, for the first time since I had begun to think in terms of this heavenly spot, half mad with bewilderment. (Can you be mad in this ordered place? I think not. I soon got over it. But—Heaven and New York! At least I had the most grotesque sense possible of—well, I can only repeat it: Heaven and New York.) I hope I at least behaved like a man of the world. I knew my way about: funny phrase, but useful, even as a legacy from earth! I think I made him a bow. Perhaps it was ironical. I don’t know. But I remarked, in what I hoped was a fitting manner:

“Rather heavy going, isn’t it?”

He stopped short and recovered himself. It had been with him as with me: the fact of his finding a man there was the surprising thing. But—what man?

“Selden!” he said, in a low tone, as if awed by the coincidence. “Good God!”

Now I think Flavia would have told him, had she been there, invulnerable on the rock of her faith, that in this particular country one didn’t call loosely on God as mankind sees fit to do upon the earth. One reserves that name for petitions for friendly aid or sudden quick rushes of love and thankfulness for dreams fulfilled. I wanted to say to him:

“Do you mind my telling you not to call on Him merely because you’re surprised? It isn’t done, you know.”

But I said, and I didn’t mean it flippantly, though it must have sounded so.

“Did you know there are cows here?”

He looked at me as if I were only one more of the terrors he must have been encountering, and suddenly buried his face in his hands. I didn’t suspect him of crying, but I did know he was somehow overset by the strangeness of the place and his own situation, and did not want me to know. So I affected not to notice it, but turned aside, pulled a leaf from a bush and examined it more closely. I held it out to him.

“That looks like laurel,” I said. “Do you suppose it has the old significance?”

He stared at me angrily, his lip trembling and his face reddened a little, perhaps by the pressure of his fingers when he had hidden it. And I knew exactly why he was angry. It was a passing wave that came over us all from time to time when we had not been long here: a recognition of our strangeness, and not so much nostalgia as a memory of what we had been so long used to calling home. And as for me, there was the added sense of my having lost Mary, away there on her unimaginable quest. But I did not even for that propose to break down before this poor lad. For another thing, I had a feeling that he and his fate, we’ll say, had something to do with mine. But what? In those few times I had seen him on earth he seemed merely one of those “boys” as young men were called there no matter if they could have worn the toga virilis, one of those striplings, half artistic, half wilfully queer, who hung about women with a show of devotion which, as I had seen it, meant nothing more than their jigging up and down in what they called a dance. And he was hanging about Annette. Had I cared? No, but perhaps that was because I had ceased to care about her, so long as she would leave me to my own devices. He was speaking.

“Has he sent you up there, too?”

“He,” of course, was the General. I had just enough distaste for the General not to want to accept any fealty as his “man” and I answered, I suppose a little stiffly:

“He wanted it done. Did he send you?”

“Yes,” he said, like a tormented boy. “He told me to do it and she backed him up.”

“Who?” I asked. “Cintra, his—” And yet I didn’t know whether she was his wife, or what relations did obtain between them. Love, certainly, survived the tomb, just as the great lovers have always desperately sworn, but what had it become here? Was there no “marrying,” as we had been taught? That was a bleak thought to me.

“No, no,” he said. “She, Annette—” he caught himself up here, as if this were a verbal indiscretion, only to fall into a boldness of angry speech he could scarcely have thought possible save that our whole interview was a cumulative surprise. “Oh, you know,” he said, “as well as if I told you. We—were everything to each other. We—we ran away.”

I suppose I stiffened, and as it always happens to me when people touch me too near, I grew ceremonious.

“Indeed,” said I. “Where did you run to?”

And he quite simply, we standing there like two chaps who have met in the street and thought it a good chance to talk over some pressing question, told me all about it. And, to his renewed ire, I laughed, not ironically or angrily, but because I was amused.

“I never heard anything so absurd,” I said. “It’s like a mild New England story made into a film: that tight-fisted old Reuben and his angel wife and the bag of loot slung into a woodpile because you got cold feet. Is that what Annette means by the bag? And has it appeared here in—in heaven—to haunt her, and what’s she got to do to get rid of it and restore it to the bank?”

He was more tried with me than ever. I gathered he hadn’t that sense of the grotesque known as humor. He shook his head impatiently.

“No, no,” he said. “Of course there’s no bag here.”

“No,” said I solemnly. “Of course it’s there in the woodpile, waiting for the heirs of Milton Blake to find it, in course of time, as they burn up the wood.”

“No,” said he, the more patiently now as he began to see me as a foolish person who wasn’t likely to get the right values of anything. “I did put it in the woodpile, don’t you see, but she hung round behind while the old man and I were talking things over—the car, and all, and whether I could buy one—and she got out the bag and took it with her, and when we went over the bank it went over too. And that’s all I know.”

“But the spiritual essence of the bag,” said I, still more pleased as I developed my thesis, “went along with the spiritual essence of Annette, and now she can’t get rid of it.” And then I grimaced, for I thought of things that must have gone along with me, things I hadn’t yet recognized.

“There isn’t any bag” he said, with his pathetically careful patience toward me. “Only she thinks there is. She’s dotty, do you see? and it’s enough to make anybody. It’s made me.”

And it had. He looked at me miserably, a poor harassed boy.

“Buck up,” I said. “This is the most beautiful place you or anybody else ever conceived of—‘eye hath not seen,’ you know—and we’re in for life, so far as I can judge. Don’t you see how beautiful it is?”

“Oh,” he said wretchedly, “I suppose it is, but I can’t see anything much, except that she wants me to fetch and carry for that—” He paused. Evidently it occurred to him that epithets suited to the General might not fit the place.

“But why?” I asked. “Why does she want it?”

He looked at me again as if I were too simple to be reared.

“Why,” said he, “he’s her—I don’t know what to call it here. But he’s the big man of the place, and she wants to take him on, or have him take her on, somehow—I don’t know how—and he won’t have anything to say to her—his mind isn’t on women—it’s on war—and I’m the only tool she’s got. That’s all.”

He looked supremely wretched.

“Poor boy!” said I, without chaffing now, for I was sorry for him. “I see. It’s broken you all up.”

He flashed me a quick look. He had not struck me as a handsome boy, in those past days, but now he did. It is strange how some new kind of life seems to surge up in you here, until you look and feel all full of the sun and wind, and godliness, too! you may not be godly any more than you were before you came, but somehow you seem to have bathed in it and it’s washed you clean. I’ve said that here, before, I know: but I have to say it again.

“Well,” said he rather roughly, “what do you think about it, now I’ve told you? Don’t you think, knowing her, it’s the likeliest thing to happen? And as to my being broken up, how about you?”

I looked at him steadily for the minute that sometimes seems so long. I was wondering how far the decency of outworn loyalties obtained, or whether nothing mattered, so much as the plain truth.

“No, Terence,” I said, surprised for an instant that I was speaking not only gravely but so familiarly as to use his name. “My heart isn’t in it. She didn’t love me. (We have to use the old words, don’t we? probably there are other ones here. I don’t quite know what.) I don’t want to seem unreasonable, but that’s the amount of it, you know. If she had cared about me back there, would she—” I paused. I couldn’t say: “Would she have run after you?” But he understood me. “And,” I went on, for the air had to be cleared, “I don’t care about her in the least except as—” Here I thought I could indicate that there was a decency of finished relations and I hoped I could observe it and that she would let me. “And,” I said, “you can be as happy as you want to, so far as I’m concerned. There’s nothing between us. There never will be anything.”

And as I said it, I thought, with an overwhelming thankfulness, of Mary, off there on her quest, and whether I looked my happiness or not I don’t know. But if I had, he did not see it, for he had thrown his head back and he laughed, like a boy who had won a race or seen his happy future unrolling before him, mile on mile, and the rainbow at the end.

“Nor I!” he shouted, “nor I! I don’t love any woman except my mother, and if she’s dead and I’m dead, I want to see her. By God, I do!” And somehow it’s being a question of the old heart-break in those two words—we’ll say heaven and mother—I didn’t think his swearing by his Creator was too stiff an oath.

“Well,” said I, “there’s my mother, too, when it comes to that.”

But I could not bring to her the longing that was in him because I was too deep in the active body of poignant life. Mary’s going was all too near.

Now one of the things told me by Cintra had been that the meeting of those you had known on earth might be, for a time, delayed, but it always came if you desired it, and you could yourself bring it about by telling them where you were. Sometimes two souls were so interlaced in love that the bonds between them seemed never to have been riven, and the one who had gone first was as instant a welcoming beauty of renewed life as the new sky and the trees. I thought for a moment, my eyes on the ground, and curiously, so do the little things strike us to the heart, the “still small voice” of leaf or smell, that something—were these tears?—stung my eyes: for I was looking down at a green mat of partridge berry, now in its white bloom. And I said aloud, remembering that old line I had known as authentic poetry: “The wood spurge has a cup of three.”

“What?” he asked, and I shook off my nostalgic lethargy and looked up at him.

“Do you know,” I asked, “what time it is likely to be dark?”

Time! and I had no means of telling it; but I did know where the sunrise came. That was behind us. He also knew, and I found he had an alert mind as to soil and stars, and it came out quite simply afterward that all the first part of his life on earth, he had, with his father, had a good deal to do with salt water. That was the manly part of him. When he came to the city, misled, as I now think, by the desire to “get on,” he fell into the constricted ways of artificial life. Now he squinted through the trees and up at the sky visible between leaves.

“I’ve been checking it up,” he said, “ever since I’ve been here. I judge it won’t be dusk under three hours at least.”

He had switched me off from the human exigencies of our state to the universe itself, and I saw how even his simple knowledge of the ether gave him status over me who knew nothing save the beauties apparent to the untrained eye and brain.

“The stars,” I said. “I’ve seen them of course, but they don’t mean anything to me as related to the old familiar ones at home. The constellations: are they our old ones, or as if they might be, seen differently, from another angle?”

“Why, no,” said he, looking at me as if my expectations of the stars of home proved me again so much simpler than he who had learned to use his eyes at sea. “No, I don’t know any more about it than you do, but last night I did try to check it up, and I think the daylight’s good for what we should call a number of hours. And that woman—the crackerjack—”

“Cintra?” I asked.

“Yes. She gave me some kind of condensed thing to eat, in case I didn’t find anything by the way. He made her do it.”

“He” in this speech was still the General. So great was Terence’s distaste for that noble Roman that he never at any time owned to more than the scantiest knowledge of him. “I judged she didn’t want to. She didn’t want me to go.”

“No,” I said, “she doesn’t want him to find the way up there. But she gave you food? What is it? do you know?”

“Not what it’s made of. They call it manna.”

“Like the old manna we read about? It couldn’t be.”

“No, it’s something they make, and they call it that—well, I guess just in memory of old things. Everybody’s pretty sentimental up here, don’t you find? They don’t mean to forget the earth. They just can’t bear to. And that’s why they call that Hermit down there the Memory Man.”

VII

“What do you mean by a Memory Man?” I asked, remembering Flavia had used the words to me when I could not stay to question her.

“Why,” said he, “it seems there’s something queer about that chap. Ever since he came here—a long time ago, I gather—he’s had his mind chiefly on the earth and how to make folks there believe in this sort of thing, this place, you know: not the way the churches gas about it, but really, you know.”

“I know,” said I.

And I smiled a little, thinking how futile it was to expect the highest poetry of aspiration, the flaming flower of simile touching the Christian heaven, to mean anything vital to Milton Blake, for example, while he was on earth intent only on adding inches to inches in compliance with an instinct he seemed born to. What was organized religion to him? a stained glass window mysteriously diversified by saints and angels blocked out in “unlikely” colors when you wanted light to go to milking by! But I couldn’t get any further. The boy before me was thoughtful, in a worried way, but he had had no imagination to speak of, when he was on earth, and he brought none with him. His speculative wonders might bother him, like a stomach-ache, but they were of no great interest to a mind so sore beset as mine. Yes, I was sore beset. I was different. If it is not too childishly figurative to say, I was growing up. And I began to believe new things suddenly, as if I were going along a road more or less like the roads of home and became aware of little windows, as it were, in spaces between the fringing trees, and through them I caught glimpses of things that did not seem more than commonplace; and yet I knew they belonged to that part of life we know as divine. For example, I now saw that the full perception of immortality does not come upon us at once on leaving the earth. If it did, it would be a weight too heavy for the soul, which is a pilgrim from life to life, and can only proceed in health and happiness if it is fed sparingly, with the blessed bread of a new understanding. I looked at Terence from an added interest. He, too, was changed. I wanted to know what he thought about these things, and I tried him.

“Well,” said I, in as practical a way as if we were climbing a mountain on earth and not a mysterious hill of what I saw as heaven, “what do you think we’d better do?”

“I don’t know,” said he. “You see, I’d gone quite a ways up there, after the path narrowed, and then I gave it up. I suppose I got scared.”

I thought a moment, remembering what Mary had said about my looking out for Flavia and Annette. But I did not believe there was any great hurry about that. Cintra would look out for them, so far as mere safety was concerned. I suppose I mean their tranquillity of mind: for who could anticipate bodily ill in a place like this? And I did not even know what our bodies were, in their elastic health and comeliness. Could they be destroyed?

“Want to go back over the same ground?” I asked him.

“Yes,” said he, adding, with a simplicity I liked, “with you.”

So we struck into the narrow path. He had been over it before. So far, it was his path. It was a very irregular one, intermittently curving, so that we came, at times, face to face with the wall of green where it almost doubled upon itself before recovering and going on. The trees on either side were evergreen, tall and straight, and below them was underbrush, some of it thorny, which gave us a good deal of trouble. By and by I noted that the space under the trees, farther in from the path, was free of this underbrush. It was as if it had sprung up wilfully—with a good will perhaps—to make the path impassable. I do not know how long we had stumbled on, silent for the most part, except that we exchanged a laughing word or two when one or the other of us almost lost foothold from the sudden irregularities of the way. I think we had tacitly resolved to be as game as possible and object to nothing. But there was no doubt that it all had the queerest aspect of being enchanted: an enchanted wood. It seemed to be alive, not with birds or four-footed creatures going on their various ways, but having, deep in its greenness and quiet, a secret life of its own. Yet it was not like the magic forests of old that laid a spell upon the invader. There were in this solitude of tremulous greenery, intervals of what I might call a trustworthy wholesomeness. Hard as we were trying to make our way through it, when we might well have fallen into unreasoning rage against it, we felt only a serenity of oneness with it, and this I can’t describe. I was not tired, and Terence said he felt like going on forever. He asked me if I wanted to stop and eat the manna Cintra had provided. I didn’t want it then, save perhaps from curiosity to see what it was like, nor did he. Hunger and thirst were in abeyance, and so strong was my feeling that the forest was in all respects friendly to us that I felt as if it somehow were sustaining us. And suddenly, after what seemed a half day’s travel, as days used to be counted on earth, we turned the shoulder of a curve in the path, such as we had now become used to, and faced what looked like an unpassable wall of green. We were not surprised nor disconcerted. This frowning denial was only apparent; it would yield to one step more. But this time the denial proved to be real, though still friendly. Everything in the forest continued to whisper that we were not unwelcome. Yet somehow we had to be denied. If we had had axes or other tools of forestry, I did not then know what impression we might have made on the defending wall. Could we have cut our way through? I doubted it. The forest was guarding something we were not to find, and whatever its magic, the magic worked. Three times I tried, in defiance of thorns, to break the lianas with breast and hands and push my way along. Impossible! Terence, who had added his strength to mine, stared at me in a perplexity like my own. It was not to be expected that we should really make our way through, but at least we might have gone so far as to create a disorder of broken twigs and branches. I tried to find some slight assurance in the fact that we had come as far as we could and were of necessity on the right track, if only because the woven barrier had forbidden our turning aside into a false one.

“At least,” I said, “it’s prevented our going round in a circle, and the brightness up there shows us we’re still headed right.”

“Does it?” said he, with a slight trembling in his voice as if he were startled at an omen he found sinister. “Look!”

I did look, straight ahead of me up the hill and then to right and left. Where was the light, that jewelled beacon we had questioned ever since our coming to this unknown land? I spoke, and my voice sounded cracked and husky from my dry throat, and somehow I couldn’t say “It’s gone out,” as if it had been an ordinary light that had suffered some mischance of man’s carelessness or nature’s ill directed malice.

“There isn’t any light,” I said weakly, and he replied:

“We’d better go down. We could ask the Memory Man.”

But I had a moment of obstinacy. I felt that if we abandoned the position we had already won, it would be in some way a grave loss to us. Here we were in the very heart of magic, if magic it could be called which was simply the working of laws we did not know, and what should it profit us to abandon this leafy jail of a forest merely to ask somebody else why we had been jailed? This was not wilful nature’s work, this weaving of branches into a gigantic mesh. It was the work of a nature that felt at her unreasoning heart what man wills her to do. And, in that moment of delayed action, a further change came over me. Through all my veins I found new strength and a kind of resolution I cannot well describe. Doubtless I looked in some manner different, for I became aware that Terence was staring at me curiously, and even, as it were, alarmed. And I knew what I felt inside me was to be shared with him, since we were fellow travelers. I spoke, and though I knew the things I had to say were almost beyond belief, still they were so inevitable to me that I could have sworn another, more authoritative voice, spoke through mine.

“Terence,” said I, “do you know where we are?”

“Why, yes,” said he, as if he saw how bemused I was and judged it best to be merely reasonable. “We’re a long way up the hill towards—towards the light.” There he stumbled a little because he thought it best for me to assume that the light was still there. “I don’t know how far we’ve gone. But,” he ended lamely, “it’s a good ways.”

I wasn’t paying much attention to him. My mind was centred on the things it at last knew.

“We are in heaven,” I said, “no matter what this body, so like earth, is called.” And I felt myself, in a deep awe and gratitude, apostrophizing whatever had brought us there. “It was promised, through the unspeakable suffering of men, wrung out of their hearts in centuries of pain. And it is fulfilled. It’s here, and our feet are on it, and we’re talking as if it were as commonplace as Fifth Avenue, and yet we—we, Terence, are somehow changed. The bodies we had once are rotting there, somewhere—I don’t know where the earth is, nor how many millions of miles away—and we’re walking round in serviceable flesh, and I do know, if we had to cast that off, we should be—” I didn’t know how to put it—“clothed in immortality. And there’s a magnificence about it, a simplicity, and—don’t you see?—we’ve got to behave like the rest of that great company?”

He didn’t say a word. He held out his hand and I struck mine into it, and even then, trembling as I was with the passion of the universal drama fulfilled, I noted that our hands were firm to grip and hold. They were flesh with fire in it.

“And now,” I said, “let’s go down, as far as the Memory Man’s any way, and see if he’s got anything to say to us.” But I was also wondering whether he could have got back from taking Mary to what he called the port. I didn’t know how swift that “by air” of his might be. It might, in these far ethereal spaces, be like a planet whizzing round the sun and immortal travelers feeling none the worse for it.

We wound back down the hill, and before we got to the curve hiding that last barrier in the pathway, I paused and glanced back. It had been slowly darkening, and now I thought I saw a glow, through the forest spaces, upon the leaves.

“Look!” I said, and he did look and gave a gasp of wonder. It was not the sunset we saw. It was the brightness from the height above us, and whether or not those were the gates of the Holy City, it was the glow that had drawn us up there at the General’s bidding or our own desire. But though it was kindly, we turned our backs on it and went on, and by the time we had got down to the open highway again, the dark was thick about us. It was then that Terence took out the little package of manna, and we broke it and went on, eating it, and though so pleasant to the taste the little we had of it was enough to satisfy us. And now we were getting down to the zone where I had heard so many birds singing by day, and it was silent, only for a sleepy note here and there, and presently we came to the little house of the Memory Man which we should not have seen, it had melted so deeply into the darkness of the woods, save that the door was still open to the warm air and his lamp was burning. We walked up to the door rather softly because, I think, we had an idea that it would be unsuited to the place to startle him, and stood for a minute, waiting for him to sense our being there. I was sure he would, and though we made no sound, he evidently did feel us through the unseen wall surrounding him and shutting him, with his thoughts, into that workroom where he wrought, as I believe, sacred and beautiful things. He did not look up at once. First he began smiling a little. Then he spoke.

“Come in,” said he, “unless you’d rather I’d come out. Yes, it’s you two, isn’t it? I thought so.”

For we had stepped in, and he laid down one of his delicate little tools and looked at us as if he were really glad to see us.

“Sit down,” he said, and I sat down in a chair not far from the door and Terence sat on a high stool, seeming to indicate his humility in the presence of his elders. The Hermit—I call him that because, at the time, I didn’t know just what a Memory Man might be—he looked at me with a species of soft regard, as if he knew I had been through a good deal that day and might have more before me yet.

“Yes,” said he, “she got off very well. We were in ample time, and they were all glad to take her on. She’s so beautiful, you see, so good!” He said this with a commonplace air as if he were saying: “I noticed her hair was light,” and my heart warmed to him. And now I wanted to know if she had sent me any message, and I couldn’t ask. But there was no need of asking, for he gave me that pleasant look again and said:

“Yes, the last minute almost, she said to me, ‘Tell him’—. That was all. Just ‘tell him.’ She knew you’d know.”

I did know. There was a world in those two words, a world created out of my lifelong need of her and my gratitude because she had come. And since I had but now bade myself to remember that we had all of us here entered on a knowledge of our immortal destiny, I would not repeat my futile question at her going: When will she come back? And this was not because he had told me he could not answer it, but merely that I was pledging great destinies, hers and mine. There were many questions I wanted to ask the Memory Man, and I plunged in, not without compunction. For how busy he was! and who could tell what things would be affected by the work he tried to do?

“Are there dangers here,” I asked, “just as on earth?”

He smiled at me and lifted his eyebrows slightly. It was evident that he could indeed think of dangers.

“Plenty,” he said, “but not the same kind. For instance, there’s death. That was felt to be the great danger on earth, for we didn’t know what it was. We seemed to get used to it because everybody died, sooner or later, but we didn’t know what happened after.”

“Some did,” I countered. “That is,” I qualified it, “they thought they did.”

“Yes,” he said patiently, “they thought they did.”

“What is it here?” I asked, yet hesitating to know. For now I almost feared for Mary on her gallant quest.

“Not death,” said he quietly, “for we have learned that even if we take on other forms, it won’t be death. I should say,” he went on, as if he were counting up the possibilities of fire and flood, “the greatest danger is not to accept immortal life.”

“But we’ve got it,” said I stupidly. “How could we help accepting it?”

“I mean,” said he, “not to shut our eyes to it, and be willing to slip back into nothingness.”

“Can we?” I asked. “Can we slip back? And what happens then? Do you have to go into some other form and begin all over?”

“I don’t know,” said he. “I’ve never got within millions of miles of those ultimate mysteries. I’ve been too busy. Maybe it wouldn’t have done any good if I had. You see, I don’t think much about anything but getting into touch with the earth. I’ve been frightfully unhappy here, because I did so many devilish things on the earth. Not what we call sins and think we can be forgiven and it will all be as if it hadn’t been, but wrongs, great wrongs. And they’re remembered there, and I want to be able to say to them, ‘I remember, too.’ And I’ve said it, when there might have been a chance of its being understood and often when there pretty surely wasn’t.”

“You want,” I said, in the old phrase, “to be forgiven.”

“No, no,” said he. “Forgiveness is the least of it. I simply want to be remembered as not being forgiven. Not the old idea of hell, though there’s something in that, too. But I’d like to be remembered as, having done the wrongs, being everlastingly different because I did them. You see I was able to get away with it there—”

I saw Terence blinking at him, and I knew why. He was all amort, as I was, because it was so strange to hear a commonplace of modern slang from a man who had been here “a long time.”

“But I want them to know I didn’t really get away with it.”

“You want,” I said, “a clear historical estimate.”

“No, no,” said he. “Bother all that. Though that’s the amount of it. Not to clear up my name for history books, but to let it be understood that I didn’t get away.”

And he looked so worried and so really fagged, as if by the hard work of thinking about it, that I began to wonder if we were really so much changed by death as we imagine.

“That’s it,” said he, answering the thought in me. “When we come here, we bring ourselves with us—the remorses, you know, the cancers and ulcers that grew into our souls. Why, you,” he said to me suddenly, “what did you want to do on the earth? Don’t you want to do the same thing here?”

I was indeed brought to book, for I had wanted to write poetry and plays. Did I want to write them now? I was certainly not thinking of them with my old daily longing. They had been swallowed up by my one delight of having found Mary; but I couldn’t say so. How could I tell even him,—and he was a man who knew more than anyone I had seen in my life—how could I tell him that on earth I had also wanted to love perfectly and to be perfectly loved? One can’t quite say those things, except perhaps to one person, and Mary was not here. But he understood. As I have said, we can be understood when our minds are forereaching toward a receptive mind. It is a question of willingness.

“It’s the same thing,” he said gently, as if it were all too sacred to be taken in any way except sacredly. “It’s a part of poetry—love. It’s beauty, really, and you wanted it there, and you could have done with any form of it—beauty, love—but here it’s got to be ‘face to face’.”

Terence looked bewildered. I fancied he might be wondering whether all this was because Annette had not loved me. Incredible! his eyes seemed to say, all this pother about Annette, when she couldn’t have loved anybody.

“You,” said the Hermit, turning to him with another sort of smile, indulgent, very kindly, “you didn’t have many wrongs to repent of.”

Terence blushed scarlet. I saw he was thinking of the bag, and of Annette’s tugging about the invisible soul of it, while he, I suspected, though honestly sorry, hadn’t thought of it tragically at all. He had been very young, and now that he had come to heaven he was younger still.

“It’s all queer to me,” he blurted out. “That’s all.”

Evidently the piling up of words made him distinctly uneasy in a heaven where he might be expected to think a great many things he had never even heard of.

“I don’t want any—any of those things.” And then he saw a loophole before him, a shining track, a great safety, and he said, as if it were an escape, though impossible: “I’d like to go to sea.”

“Well,” said the Hermit, as casually as if he were God or King Midas. “You can.”

And my mind went chanting silently: “And there was no more sea.” But I said nothing.

“Of course not,” said the Hermit, “not for a tired and buffeted apostle who knew he’d have his wish in heaven; but for a sailor that wants the sea! Come,” he said to the lad, who looked to me younger and younger and more pathetic, “you cast your eyes over that way where the mist is rising. Well, my son, over there is the sea. You can be there in short order, if you let me send you, or you can walk, in not so very long. And you can hire a boat there and go out fishing and sell your fish when you come in.”

“Hire?” Terence repeated, in a stupor at the word, “with money?”

The Hermit laughed.

“Not exactly,” said he. “You can tell them what you want, and they’ll fix it up for you. They’ll be square with you. They’ll know you’ve just come.”

“My father was a fisherman,” said the boy. He was frowning in his endeavor to find something tangible in it all. “He died, and we moved inland.”

“Maybe he’s there,” said the Hermit, “Just ask.”

“You make everything sound so easy,” said I. “And yet it isn’t easy. I’ve been baffled in a lot of things.”

“Try for ’em,” said he, “if they’re good things.”

“But,” said I, “what if I get the idea they’re not permitted?”

“Everything is permitted,” said he, “if you can get it. But it’s surprising how soon you learn there are a lot of things you mustn’t try to get, and so you make up your mind you’ll stop wanting ’em.”

“In other words,” said I, “it’s made hard for us so we can find it out for ourselves.”

“A trap?” said he. “As the old schoolmen used to set you a trap, and be mighty pleased when they’d caught you? No, no, everything’s on the square. This isn’t a nursery for the infant soul. It’s just a grand big table spread with all the kinds of things you’ve always longed for, only somehow you feel, as soon as you come, that you mustn’t pig it, you mustn’t grab. I don’t know what it is in the air that tells you that, but there’s something. Perhaps it’s the new bodies we’ve got, and the way they work and report things to us and make us feel all soft and pleasant inside. ‘Why,’ we say to ourselves, first thing, ‘that was death. It’s over. I’ve got to heaven.’ And, man alive! what kind of a heaven would it be if everything was passed to you on a gold plate and you lay stretched out at a banquet, leaning on one elbow like a Roman emperor and had nothing to do but drink and eat and throw it up and drink and eat again.”

“So you think,” said I, “we come into heaven like new settlers and make it what we like? But what if what pleases us doesn’t please the rest? That’s how it seems to be with that military gentleman over there.”

“The General!” said Terence softly. I could see that even at this distance he was afraid of him.

“Doesn’t it seem to you,” said the Hermit drily, “that he’s pretty well left to himself? Even the new recruits fall away from him. Look at you two! You were sent out on espionage. Are you going back to report—and be sent again?”

What were we going to do? I did not need to look at Terence. I knew where his heart was hurrying, even if his feet did not carry it: to the misty signal at the left that was the sea. But I was due down below. The General awaited me and so did Flavia and Annette. And that strange mounting of energy which I had never known, even in my first youth on earth, possessed me and set my heart clamoring. I felt that I could compose a hymn that should run in galloping measures and sing it mightily as I hurried down the hill to do the deeds that were calling me. Terence, watching me, also caught fire.

“Do you think,” he said in an excited undertone, “I ought to go back?”

And then I saw that the nobility of all decisions and all quests, as they present themselves to the denizens of this happy land, rose up before him like a commanding vision, telling him what to do, and he saw that he should not depend upon any other soul for a decision he must make himself. He said just one word, the name of the woman he had once thought he loved: “Annette?” And I saw that he would stand by to help her, if she needed other help than mine.

“No,” I said. “You couldn’t do anything. I can do it. I will. I want to. Good-bye. Go off and find your sea, and sometime tell me. Good-bye!”

I took hands with him and the Hermit and we stood so for a moment as if we had entered into a pact—as indeed I think we had, to do our best as it seemed to us—and I turned and went down the hill.

VIII

I walked fast, at times breaking into a little run, for I was not only spurred by this unreasoning haste but by an inner well-being to fit it. I had within me a sense of boundless opportunity. There were riches everywhere of a scope I had never even guessed. They had always been within my reach, on the earth as here, but I had lacked the robustness to meet them: the vision also. Now I knew, though in a meagre way, something about the resources of the universe. And I was perhaps less than an atomic part of it all, but with the freedom to use it as I would. How long it took me to go back on my trail I do not know. Darkness came and went, brightened by what I called a moon, and before long things began to look familiar, and I knew I was near the spot where Mary and I had started for our expedition up the hill. Down here, I saw, the world was bright with unshadowed morning. A figure was coming toward me from below, and for an instant I was breathless in the madness of thinking it was Mary. Who else could it be, with the birds singing and some sun or other rising to full day? But it was Flavia, and as I saw how she came, how she was light-footed as the dawn itself, and ran, though up hill, with a buoyant grace, I knew that, as in me, a new marvel had been wrought of growing strength to fit the growing moment, though her difference was of beauty whereas mine was hardihood. At least, though she, too, was moving with an adaptability of muscle I cannot describe, what struck me first was the beauty of it. Perhaps that is what we are used to looking for in woman: beauty. And then, if it shows itself in a harmony of action and sovereignty over the needs of earth, so much the more royal is it. Yes, she was beautiful, and as she came on in that floating rhythm which might have been the motive of a dance, though so unconsidered, it looked as if she hurried to meet me only and because she had a message from me.

“You!” she said, stopping before me, not breathless but full of arrested action ready to renew itself. “I knew you would be coming. He said you had got cast away. But we don’t get cast away, do we? This place is safe. Don’t you find it safe?”

It was marvelous how, with the quickened tempo of her interest in what I might have found, her language itself had altered. This was as sharp a difference as that in her looks. I had left a quiet, suffering creature binding herself to the cross that was a dull man’s possible need of her. I found her a radiant being ablaze with adventure, the adventure of continued life.

“Who said I was cast away?” I asked her. I felt a need of holding her down. She seemed so flaming, like the stars, that I should not have been surprised to see her throw her draperies over her arm like a cloud wreath in the heavens and float off through unknown distances.

“No,” she said. “I haven’t seen him. I wouldn’t see him, for fear he should ask me to do things, as he has the rest of you.”

So there was a probably unspoken conspiracy against him, the General. Not only had Cintra been fighting him for all time, but the eternal feminine itself was down on him. He was not to exist, as he was, not to be allowed to be. And what was this feminine part of the universe, I hastily wondered. For all my thoughts just now were a rushing sequence of questions Flavia seemed to have brought with her like a cloud of gnats, to settle on me. It was nothing so material as what we were childishly used to calling sex. Was it the part of the universe that is forever watching and brooding and inciting and hindering, that unfostered germs may come to life? Was Flavia the pity, the defending ruth of things? She spoke.

“I’m talking about Milton,” she said. “He is down there at the river’s mouth, where you left us. He has just come down. He sent him.”

“He? you mean the General?” Her perversity, when it came to according him name or title, did not seem like perversity. (Perhaps it might, if she had not been so beautiful!) It merely seemed, in some way, inevitable, the General being what he was, and symbolic of her stand against him.

“He,” she said again, as if that fully explained it. “He sent Milton down to see if you had come and to get your report. If you had nothing definite to say, you were to go up to him and report yourself, and that would leave Milton free to start at once. For if you’ve not found out anything, Milton is to go up there himself. I think he sees how crazy he’s made Milton with his talk about a place—and land—crazier than any of the young men: for they’ve been here long enough to think back over the things they’ve been promised—things that never came to pass. So now he wants Milton to go.” She broke off, and her face, suddenly lifted to the sky, was as the face of an angel of dawn. “Look! look!” she said. “O look!”

I did look, and I saw the colors I had begun to call, in my mind, the gates. There they were, the flames, not of earthly dawn, but, I thought, of Paradise. Now there is no one living, save in some boreal spot as yet unimagined by man, who has not seen sunsets painted by the very hand of God, and a God whose passion was, for the shifting moment, at least, color and naught else. But remembering all the skyey glories I had ever seen on earth and striking the chord of their thunderous power fortissimo, I knew I had seen no such rage of loveliness as this. It transcended the eye to compass it, the brain to take it in. Flavia spoke, in her agony of longing for her dream fulfilled.

“Didn’t you find it?” said she, “then, when you were nearer?”

“No,” said I. “I found nothing but a thorny wall across the way.”

“Did it grow brighter?” Here she paused, in awe. How could we, she must have asked herself, her gaze still on that destructive beauty which might well have seemed to threaten the responsive eyesight we had taken on with the rest of our equipment for immortal life—how could we have approached it and not suffered annihilation from such glory?

“No,” she said, “it doesn’t seem as if it could grow brighter and you be here alive. Tell about it,” she commanded, in an anguish of impatience. “Can’t you tell?”

And then I was again impressed with what I had seen in her before: the passion of her hunger for God and what she believed He had, with His own voice, promised her. And though I expected to have a certain satisfaction in telling the General, if indeed I told him anything, that I had seen no signs of a city lighted by these colors of the dawn, it was bitter indeed to say what I knew would dull the eagerness in Flavia’s voice and veil the brightness of her face. But I did not yet know her. As concisely as I could, I gave her an account of my climbing the hill, of meeting Terence, and our finding the leafy barrier across the path. I said that, at this point, we had ceased seeing the light. I believed it might have been growing dimmer for some time, but I had been so engrossed by the difficulty of the way that I had not noticed it. Indeed, I said (and this occurred to me for the first time, and I wondered if she would find reason in it) wasn’t it true that one could become used to even a thing so beautiful? It had been so on earth. We had had flaming sunsets there, but we could get so absorbed in our work or play that we turned our backs on the west, saying, perhaps, and that absently: “Lovely sunset!” But this she did not seem to hear, and she was not saddened, not roughly haled from her trance by my crude reasoning.

“No,” she said. An ineffable look had come into her face. Now she was not all mother, but angel-like, an angel at a tomb, one who knows there is perhaps more suffering to come. “No. It is the Holy City, and the Lord God is the light thereof. And if we don’t find it, if we’re not—” There her voice broke. I don’t know whether she meant “If we’re not worthy;” but the sentence was never to be finished, for I doubt if she knew clearly how to finish it, and also, at that moment, Milton came hurrying up the road. And Milton, as I allowed my irreverent mind to comment, was, in a homespun way, a complete refutation of Biblical foretelling. He was not, like Flavia, “changed.” I must qualify this. He had taken on every indication of having the strength and fitness of youth. Where he had before been gnarled and sunken-shouldered, he was now erect and apparently equal to all demands on him. But whereas Flavia seemed to have swum to heaven in a sea of beauty and risen out of it glorified, he was mere man, of a goodly strength and promise of endurance, and just now he looked worried and undone. As soon as he saw us he began calling to us. He was in a fever of haste.

“What was it?” he hailed me. “Up there? What d’you find?”

I waited until he reached us, reflecting that he also could wait. He’d have to do a good deal of waiting before he got through that prickly hedge above, even by the efforts of some more expert woodsman than I. Now he was beside us, and Flavia laid a hand on his arm as if to remind him that calmness was the very air of the place. She was so sure it was heaven that she had no uncertainty about adapting herself to the ways of it. And I, too, I was sure it was heaven, but with the growing ache inside me that was the sharpening sense of Mary’s absence, I could only make the best of it in a half-hearted way. Milton’s clothes added to the queerness of him. They seemed, in their rustic sobriety, to be consigning him to his own place. He was a farmer just come in from the tie-up: nothing less nor more. But even he, insensitive as he was, had caught what I was thinking and had not meant to say.

“I know it,” said he, in a species of worried rebuttal. “These ain’t my clothes. They couldn’t be; you know that yourself.”

He looked down at them in that same wounded perplexity and up at Flavia, as if she could do something about it.

“Any way,” said he, explaining for himself, as he always had done everything, oblivious of his own incapacities, “any way, they’re more like ’em than them things he wanted me to ’pear out in. My own overhauls are good enough for me. No, they ain’t mine exactly, but”—and he was embarking on the question of what clothes the body and what may clothe the body that calls itself the spirit, but realized the futility of it and gave it up. He turned to me, Flavia not being able to save him from his sartorial bog, and came to the matter in hand.

“Now,” said he, “that place up there? What is it? I shouldn’t be surprised,” he added, before I could answer, “if all the folks down here would admire to get hold on’t. Settle up there, you know. It’s a sightly place. And them colors; they might be signal lights they keep goin’ to show some other place somethin’ or other, I don’t know what.”

He ended lamely, and I said:

“I know no more about it than you do. I only know I couldn’t get within—oh, I don’t know how far of it. Miles don’t mean anything to me here. Do they to you? We can’t make estimates even, the atmospheric conditions may be so different. Haven’t you found that out? Don’t you find you can’t depend on your eyes?”

And he said, with a simplicity I found grotesque:

“Be things different?”

And I understood he meant atmosphere and light. Now consider the queerness of all this: Here were we three, stranded, as it were, on a strange isle. You might call it heaven, and refer it, as Flavia did, to the authority of an ancient and thrilling dream, and try to accept it all with a childlike obedience. Or, you might, like me, have come quickly to the conclusion that it was actually continued being, neither heaven nor hell, but as we take it so, and to be met in no sacerdotal blankness, but as a grateful soul might determine to love God and keep His commandments (as he found them out or other more sensitive souls had for him) knowing a tremendous step had been accomplished in his own being. The things the seers had told us might not be true as they got to us, strained through the density of mortal minds, but in everything that mattered they were true. The incredible riches of being were opened before us at the leap that is death, and I could have laughed and sung like those birds that were discoursing eloquently in the trees, except that Mary was not there. And yet I did not doubt her safety on her quest, any more than I did when she set out on it. How could I when I knew she was a “thing immortal,” like myself? But my heart, being a heart with needs and hungers, as of old, cried out for her. Mary was not there. And to include Milton in the mental picture I had of the three of us standing there, perplexed, he was the unimaginative man confronted, like the other two of us, by the initial step of that great progress which is the continuance of the soul. Whatever he saw here, he had to refer to the phenomena of the world he had left behind, and this from no moral lack in him, not because he was bad or good, but because the great gift of imagination which bears fruit on earth carries over into its next state which is heaven, and in the economy of the universe, is not lost. And of course, as I believed then and have seen no cause to disbelieve, that brings in the implied injustice of one man’s being endowed with imagination at the start and having it to carry with him; but that, too, is to be included under the covering mantle of justice which is being. For this I know: it is a solvent universe, and understand bits of it as we may or may not, the justice of it is of God. And while I go on prosing here, perhaps to comfort myself in some moment of blackness when I may need to look back to it and think, “This I thought then, when the first beauty of the place knocked at my heart and wakened it to what is,” we three were standing there, facing the problem of the present moment and not knowing what to do. Flavia spoke.

“I think,” said she to me, quietly, as if there were nothing odd in it, “we must tell him he’s got to stop sending folks up there to find the Holy City. If it was right for us to know, we should be told. Or we should be there, inside the gates, same as we expected.”

A little quiver moved her face. She had been denied her heaven, and she acquiesced. But more than the two of us who had expected nothing, she was bewildered and undone. Milton answered by indirection. He turned to me.

“Do you take any stock in that?” he asked.

I knew what he wanted. Did I believe, in the words of Saint John’s Revelation, that there was a Holy City?

“I don’t need to,” said I, really hoping to comfort Flavia’s troubled mind. “I know I died and I am alive. And it’s up to me to take everything I meet—” There I stuck and found I could only continue in the old words—“on faith.” And then, since the letter does kill and even a beautiful abstraction will not always hearten us when we are just managing to live, I broke out: “Don’t you see how ignorant we are? Don’t you see we’ve got to learn this place just as we learned the earth: only it’s easier because we know we’re alive, and on the earth we knew we’d got to die? I don’t want it easy, do you?” I challenged him. (But as I said it I knew the ease I wanted was an ease of the heart, a word from Mary.)

Flavia looked at me pityingly. I was an educated man, her look seemed to say. I could hear her mind saying it. I had had great advantages on earth, but what did they profit me if I couldn’t see clearly enough to know what to do when earth was over?

“We’re not ignorant,” said she. “We’ve got the Word of God.”

And now I knew she did not mean the written scriptures. She meant the silent, everlastingly authentic word of God as she had been feeling it flood her mind ever since she had been here.

“Pshaw!” said Milton. He used the syllable in a conclusive scorn. “You talk more about them things now you’re here than you did back there.” By this I understood him to mean the earth. “We’ve got to look round us,” he continued, “and see what we can do. We’ve got to get busy. I s’pose,” he said to me, bending on me the frowning brows of an anxious consideration, “we could take axes up with us and cut away that underbrush. There ain’t any brush nor any tree that ever sprung but I can cut my way.”

He looked down at his arms, and I, also looking, found in myself the childish wonder that they should have been so tanned. Why should they be tanned in heaven because they had been tanned on earth? Tan, in itself, is an incidental thing. These questions, errant as floating seeds, kept recurring to me, and I thought I did not get any answers because the times were disturbed and nobody would have words to tell me. I was wrong. The universe itself is always answering. But as it had been with us on earth, there were a million daily mysteries nobody yet knew. I was in one of my blank trances of mind, when I had to stop the business of the moment to assure myself that I trusted it, this new country. I believed in it up to its last mystery. But how amazing it was! I must have seemed too dazed to be of much active use as an ally, for Milton said, recalling me:

“Here! you! Can’t you speak? What about axes? Maybe there’s dynamite, if anybody could get hold of it. He wouldn’t think of declarin’ war unless he’d got some kind of an explosive. ’Tain’t natural, in these days.” And then even he stopped blankly, under a sudden cloud of wonder—wonder like my own. “In these days!” What were these days? Where were we living them? Could it be that we were really living them in heaven, a disturbed heaven we couldn’t get into the heart of without fire and blood? A pale change came over his face. He seemed to succumb, though only for that moment, to the mortal chill he must have felt at least a few times on earth, naked of imagination as he was. His voice sank, and he looked at me imploringly, as if he were afraid. “Tell me,” the look unwillingly besought, “not to lose my grip.”

Flavia had been waiting, glancing from one to the other of us to see how far we would go in fitting what she knew as the kingdom of heaven to what we all remembered as the disorder of earth. Now she could wait no longer.

“Lay an axe to it?” she said. “Dynamite? Blast your way into the kingdom of God?”

But I believe I had a clearer conception of things as they were in this new country than she, with her unassailable faith and her necessity of making what seemed to be the rich weave of all this strangeness into the pattern of heavenly intent. I had come here without a creed, I had found a tangible world, and it gave me foothold. I did not need to fit it to any world I had seen, even with the eyes of a bewildered worship. I did not answer Milton. He was now regarding her with that weary impatience the confident male has always felt for his unreasoning mate.

“Flavia,” I said, and now perhaps I, also, took on the part of the patronizing male, “that was a picture.”

Her breath came faster. She was not angry with me. She did begin to feel that she was face to face with something which had been growing in her own mind. Now it had stepped out of her mind and it confronted her. My words would have been nothing. Reason had no weapons against her faith. But her mind had bred its own antagonist. I picked my words carefully. “Remember,” I warned myself inwardly, “these are high themes. Remember you used to love the ‘sounding line.’ Remember, you hoped you might write such lines yourself. And you held the desire as sacred as Flavia holds her faith. Now speak to her from that level of emotion. Speak as if you loved the things she loved and could understand her because you loved them in the same way. And tell her how they seem to you.”

“Flavia!” I said again. “Don’t you see all that was poetry?”

“The Revelation of Saint John,” she repeated, as if she read it from a page.

“Yes. It is the most heavenly poetry. It’s the way he tried to tell us how he saw the future for us if we were—” I stumbled here. I was no orator—“if we were faithful. And we’ve died. And we’re alive, in a new place. And we’ll call it heaven, if you like. But don’t you see it’s far better, far—” I hesitated and lost my hold—“far better, because we’ve got to make it ourselves? It isn’t a lazy eternity, full of surfeit. It’s full of work.”

“Surfeit?” said Milton to himself, in a daze, as if we two, in our madness, were galloping off along the Milky Way and he could never follow us.

“We?” said Flavia, her stiff lips halting on the word. “We? It is the Lord God. He is—the Creator.”

“Yes,” said I, and knew, as I said it, that it was the only fact that mattered in the whole universe. Our puny discoveries, by which we used to live and of which we chattered so madly, were as dust beside it. “And don’t you see? He lets us be creators. He gives us a world. I suppose He’s got millions of worlds He’d give us if we wanted them. And we can make it the kind we want.”

“Then why didn’t we before?” said she, with a certain hardness, remembering the earth.

“Think back,” said I, at a venture, but believing it. “Couldn’t we, all of us together, have made the earth into one of His heavens if we’d tried.”

There she broke, and the tears of earth came into her eyes and her face quivered.

“We didn’t know,” she said. “We didn’t really know. But He told us,” she added passionately, and I saw her mind seeking its weary way where all the generations of men have sought it so long amid—what is the dry formula?—“faith, free will, foreknowledge absolute.”

“Never mind,” said I—for I was determined on being a practical man, I who had once crept along within leagues of being a poet. “Here we are. Here is our world. God gave it to us as much as if we found a sea of glass mingled with fire. Yes, Flavia, yes!” I was answering her beseeching look that bade me, even in persuading her to what I thought wholesome, not to tell her by the shadow of a word, more than I could stand by. “I do believe in Him! As much as you do. He is God. That’s all I know. He’s the beginning and the end. Only there is no end,” I stumbled foolishly, and went on with more babbling. “Or if there is, it’s because He wants it so.”

And Milton, who was looking from one to the other of us, with the frowning consideration that bade us, in the face of all these bewilderments, which we understood no more than the dead—and I believe he hardly thought for more than three seconds at a time, when he was assured of it, that he was actually what he called dead—his look bade us come awake and deal with what was about us. And I, too, wanted to deal with it, and that quickly. I could scarcely keep my hands off. And if it had been material for him to understand what was going on, I should have had to tell him that my inchoate babblings did seem even to me singularly devoid of wisdom when it came to the question of what’s to do.

He spoke.

“Ain’t you got anything to offer?” he said to me. “What do you mean by standin’ here talkin’ folderol?”

Light flashed from Flavia’s eyes.

“Milton Blake,” said she, “you better pick your words. We’re talking of the Word of God.”

“You may be,” said Milton. “He ain’t.” His glance indicted me. “He don’t believe in it any more’n—” I think he was going to add, “Any more than I do,” but the fire of her eyes halted him. So does the mother in womankind flash out and dominate the male who is, in his more rebellious moments, the little boy again.

“I do,” I asserted hotly, “I do believe.” I wanted to say I believed so much that faith in any transmitted word of God might be taken as a small part of it. I did try to say that, though, as it happened, it turned out quite differently.

“I believe,” I said, “that any least thing gone wrong in the universe puts the whole business out of joint. The machine won’t work. Now take this place. Something’s gone wrong in it. We’ve got to tinker it up. How, I don’t know. But he’s the cause of it. We’ve got to begin with him. Come up and talk to him.”

“Him?” repeated Milton. He sounded merely obstinate, and as if he thought, in his sly, country way, I ought to be taken down a peg for upholding Flavia in her mysticism and making her twice as hard to get along with. How could anybody know whether “him” meant the General or meant God? Certainly God seemed omnipresent in this queer place. Milton would have had Him reserved for prayer-meeting.

“You know what I mean,” said I. “Come along up and have it out with him.”

IX

But Milton did not want to have it out. He settled into his mail of obstinacy and looked more than ever like a gnarled tree buttressed against the wind. He spoke.

“I don’t see it that way. We don’t rightly know anything about that light up there. We’ve got to find out.”

And as he spoke, the light flamed up, effulgent. I had never seen it so bright. Also, it looked nearer, and Flavia also noted that. She caught a startled breath and looked at me. Milton looked merely—shall I say curious? Everything visible was to him a part of the tangible earth, perhaps unexpected and to be accounted for, but not, as to Flavia (and to me, I hope, though in another sense), informed with the spirit.

“I don’t,” said Milton, his eye rather cautiously on her, as if with the expectation of being made to yield, “I don’t see any sense in startin’ him up all over again. Get up there among them cutthroats he’s got round him and nobody knows what’ll happen. He’d talk the legs off an iron pot. Don’t let him get hold on ye.”

Still his eye was upon Flavia. Since when, I wondered, had she been able to impress him in the slightest with her point of view? For it was easy to be seen that in the former life he had ruled his house and his woman with an unyielding hand. Only since her death and his had she come into her full fighting strength and ventured to assert herself. And now she spoke, as if she had had it in reserve until the right moment, and the moment had come.

“Do you know,” she said to him, “why we’re here—here, not off the other side there by the sea where there’s thousands of the living—no, the dead—no, the living that were dead—” She had a strange fact to tell him, and between her imperfect understanding of it and her certainty that nothing at this stage could make him understand, it was a difficult task. “Why,” she said, giving up her preamble as it was and trying from another point, “there’s millions over there that have been met by the ones they loved, the ones that died and never have forgotten ’em, but we’ve come here because he”—again the General—“he drew us to him.”

Milton looked at her more leniently now and I saw that this was really the earth to him, in spite of its strangeness, and he thought her wits were gone. And he was sorry for her.

“There! there!” he said, in the time-honored words of consolation and reproof, “you’re kind o’ beat out. You’d better find that woman that’s got the house up there and lay down a spell.”

“No,” said Flavia, “I ain’t crazy. I know. I’ve been told.”

“Who told you?” said he. “The woman—his woman?”

“No,” she said, quietly. “Cintra wouldn’t. She’s too bound up in him. I don’t believe she knows it, either.”

And then she turned to me. What kindly belief in me told her I could help her? I saw confidence in her eyes, in her suddenly ravaged face, and prayed—to Something or Some One, it didn’t matter—that I should be worthy of it and understand. As to her face: I have said here that when I saw her first, on coming down the hill, she was all youth and loveliness. Now she was still all loveliness, but it had the indescribable drenched, clarified look that may come after tears. Only the tears must have sprung from joy, a joy that was still a bewilderment and a wonder.

“I started,” she said to me, “this morning, to walk up the road here. I don’t know anything about days—”

Here I interrupted her. I wanted her to get on before she had begun to be halted by any of these practical bewilderments. They were a part of the science of being here. They could be studied out in good time. We had only to think of the science of earth, so quick moving, yet so elementary. That had, in some measure, yielded to us. So would this yield, for man has an unquenchable wonder.

“I don’t know anything about days either,” I said, “day nor night. We shall get to that by-and-by. All we know now is that there’s light and dark.”

“Yes,” she said, “the light was coming. The birds begun. It seemed—I don’t hardly know—it seemed like heaven. I guess,” said Flavia, a little wanly—and then I saw how old griefs and old rebellions can weave so thick a web about even a soul like hers that truth has much ado to pierce it—“I guess it’s the first time—everything happening so and all—the first time it’s really seemed like heaven. And I went along and wondered if I’d better keep on up the hill towards the light—it was terrible bright just then—and before I sensed it Somebody was there and He was talking to me.”

I knew. She paused as if to give me time to accept it and get used to it.

“It was the One,” I said, “Who talked to every man in his own tongue.”

She smiled a little and said:

“Yes, I guess so. And I don’t know whether He talked or whether I understood. But He was the only one that ever knew just how I felt about Milton.”

And she was talking about Milton as if he were not there casting at us sharp glances of half reproving interrogation.

“I’ve been so worried about Milton,” she said, ineffably, like a mother who sees her child in straits and cannot save him. “I never knew it would end like this, but I knew it must end somehow, so he’d be saved. And then I found He knew all about Milton, too. And it’s Milton that brought us all here, to this very spot, to meet that one up there.”

“The General?”

“Yes, because Milton’s just like him. There’s—oh, I don’t know how to put it—but there’s something between folks that draws ’em towards each other—”

“An attraction?”

“Yes, and you, you folks, had to come because Milton had to, and I had to because nothing in this world or the next would separate me from him. Oh, I know it: this is the next. But never mind! And somehow the others, you and your Mary had to come, too, because you’d got to be in all this with him and Milton, and if you were here Mary’d have to be, too, because the time had come for you to meet. And then there’s Annette. Somehow you had to be here to help her along. The angels can’t help us: that is, not so we don’t have to act for ourselves. Maybe we can’t do it all, but we’ve got to do the better part.”

“But Mary!” I said, because I had to hear her name again. “Why didn’t she go off somewhere into your heaven, the one you dream about? For she’s an angel.”

“Why, don’t I tell you,” said Flavia, wondering at me, “she couldn’t, that beautiful Mary? Don’t you see she couldn’t? She’d found you. Nothing could take her away from you, that first minute, unless it was some God’s-command, some—” She stopped in the despair we all felt in our guesswork at the way the worlds were run. “But I don’t know. I don’t even know where she is. I could see you knew, see it right off. I could tell by the look on your face. You’re waiting for her. She’ll come.”

“God bless you,” I said, hardly knowing I said it. “Did He say so? Will He help her to come?”

“He’ll help everybody to do everything that’s right and good,” she said. “Right and good!” what verbal bathos but what dear human belief! “That’s what made God send Him here this blessed morning.”

And so God took note of Milton Blake playing the meagre rôle of skinflint farmer away off there in New England, a small fraction of the earth, how many miles away? And how could His messenger—for now I knew without doubt who He was—how could He, after all the centuries of appeal to Him, the rivers of tears we have sent flowing toward Him, to drown Him in a despair like our own—how could He be greatly concerned about Milton Blake? And as phrases kept coming into my ears like music as one or another touched a note and words gushed forth—“sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty . . . to judge the quick and the dead.” But He wasn’t judging. He was coming here at dawn to comfort Flavia’s poor heart. Was there no more to hear? For a moment it seemed so.

“What did He tell you to do?” I asked.

She gave me a look of perfect clarity. How could it be otherwise, it seemed to ask, what she had gathered from it all? Surely I ought to see. “Why, no,” she said, “He didn’t tell me to do anything. He just wanted us to feel He is here, and He knows, and—” she stopped, and then burst out into what sounded like pure “New England”: “I couldn’t help thinking He was worried. About Milton, I mean.”

Milton, who was looking at her now in a complete despair, gave a little groan that also was despair. They’d gone, that sound seemed to say, her wits were gone. I think he felt compassion for her. I felt something I was ashamed of. Perhaps it was the dramatic urge in me, the appetite that always made me wonder how strange or great emotions would be acted on a stage. I had not thought of life from that angle, of late. Things had been too exigent. But now my old desire to know not only human events but the raiment they would wear, was so strong in me that I asked her:

“How did He look?”

Could it be that we brought here with us the memorized lineaments the painter’s brush had printed on our minds? What would the Memory Man have said? But Flavia was gazing at me like a dutiful child sent with a message she had but half fulfilled. She hesitated.

“I don’t know,” said she.

“Didn’t you see Him?” I found courage to say. Less than anything did I want to trouble that clear pool of her mind He had left so tranquil. She answered slowly, trying to remember.

“I don’t know,” she said again. “It wasn’t that He didn’t want to be seen, or tried not to be. He was—” She had it now and came out with it triumphantly— “He was just like anybody else.”

“And then He went away?”

“He was gone,” she amended. “I don’t mean He disappeared. Only,” she said happily, knowing Him, in these efforts of recollection more truly than when He was before her, “He’s equal to things. He does things better. He wouldn’t mean to hurry away, but when He goes—He’s gone.”

I saw, without her having told me, a being so equipped with all the possibilities of material life that He could be pure spirit and yet, to bring Him nearer His mortal friends, take on what I had to think of as a working mortality.

“How did He leave you?” I ventured. “What did He say?”

She reflected.

“No,” she said, “He didn’t say He was going or anything. I said the last thing. I can hear myself. I said—I guess I said it kind of quick and sharp, knowing maybe He’d be gone. ‘Any way, I’ve got to save Milton. Milton’s got to be saved.’ That was all, I guess.”

Milton was shaken to his unbelieving heart, though not by any idea of the beauty of it all or of her beauty as she dwelt on the unknown Visitant.

“Flavia,” said he, “what do you mean by savin’ me? Ain’t I been saved? Didn’t I join the church? And it was to satisfy you I done it. You kept thornin’ me. ’Twas in March before we were married.”

And Flavia laughed. The sound of it was good in heaven.

“No, dear, no,” said she. “I don’t want you to be converted. I just want you to come into the kingdom of heaven like a good boy and not steal other folkses’ property and put out the light up there on the hill and all.”

“Then what’s all this talk about any way?” cried he, going straight back on his tracks and showing what seemed to him most ominous of all because it boded her growing difference from him. “Here you stand talkin’ nineteen to the dozen, and you don’t talk—you don’t talk so’s anybody can foller,” cried poor harassed Milton, showing how bitterly he felt the change in her. “You talk for all the world—I guess it ain’t what you say but how you say it—as you did when you kep’ school.”

Again Flavia laughed. She was still wildly anxious, but a new spring of life had wakened in her. The Visitant Who had not, as she said, told her anything to do, had nevertheless showered her with heavenly balm.

“No, I don’t, dear,” said Flavia. “I’ll talk like you. See if I don’t.”

And then something, a sound far up the hill where the General held his camp, began, with a rhythmic rush, and grew louder and louder, and down the hill came a rider on a white horse. And the rider was a woman dressed in white with what looked to be a gold helmet on her head, and as she came cantering down she waved a hand to us. And I saw it was Annette. She was very much alive. The place where she had found herself had evidently ceased to frighten her. And to me she was a welcome sight, for I, too, was made more at home by the something childish in her looks and manner which met my unchanged sense of humor. I can’t quite elucidate my feeling, even to myself: but there was drama in this horseback business; it pleased me greatly. As for Annette, she looked as if she now found the life about us of a quality she could understand. It was action, and she had a part in it; yet to me her part was a species of “character” work and undeniably grotesque. I saluted her with irreproachable courtesy, but I wanted to say: “Annette, you’re the comic relief.”

Milton was not thinking of her. He was simply more puzzled about the place than ever. Here was Flavia talking to me about Saint John and the Kingdom, and now here was Annette riding down to us on an animal he had probably never expected to see again. And this was what he said, in a low, awed tone, as if to himself:

“God Almighty! that’s a horse!”

I wondered what would happen if I asked him:

“What shall you say the first time you see a cow?”

X

Annette was a good horsewoman, not especially daring but well taught and capable. She drew in beside me with a dash calculated to show off the action of her mount, and sat looking down at me. Her face was flushed, evidently with a satisfied pride, and her eyes challenged me as they had never done, even in the days when she thought it desirable to please a young man with a future before him. What did it indicate? Had I still a future in these unpredicted surroundings, or had she attained an assured footing of her own and was quite naturally flaunting it?

“Peter,” she said, “it’s perfectly true. Isn’t it queer that it was true all along, and we never knew it?”

And though I saw she was talking about the renewal of life after death, I could not well meet her with the simplicity the place itself demanded. So I temporized.

“What is it that’s true?” I asked.

“Why,” said she, precisely in her old reproving way of showing me how to conciliate the gods of fortune, “dying, you know. And heaven! I never believed in it. You didn’t. Nobody did.”

“Oh, yes, they did,” I said, glancing at Flavia who had withdrawn a step and was talking to Milton in a low tone, and adding, I saw, to the scowling impatience of his look. “Some did.”

Her glance had followed mine.

“Oh!” was her dismissal of Flavia and all her works. “She believes just what was taught in her Sunday school: no more, no less. She hasn’t been changed a particle by finding it’s only the earth all over again, with a few differences of climate and—and things of that sort.”

“Don’t you go too far on that supposition,” said I. “You haven’t any imagination to speak of. You never did have, and though, like the rest of us, you’ve brought what you had with you, it isn’t going to set the Thames afire.”

A literary allusion! but where was the Thames?

She looked at me in frank amazement. I had never before seen her surprised into the naïveté of truth.

“Why, Peter,” said she, “you never spoke to me like that. What’s come over you?”

It was true. In the first days of my knowing her I had seen her through the enchantment the earth casts about a man and a maid when it finds them apt for love. And when we had groped together a while along that worn pathway which is marriage, I had spoken to her less often. For the last years, she had seemed to me no more than a little gaudy rag of life, an ineffectual signal on masts that mount into the very heavens; for the ship we were all on—life, being, whatever you might call it—challenged the stars, and there was the little provocative wisp which was Annette fluttering there and calling, by every movement of every thread: “Look at me! Annette!”

And as I looked at her now, something broke in me, some rigor of the mind or will that I had spent my earthly life in toughening, and I saw the enormity of it all. We had now experienced the greatest change foretold to man. We had put on new flesh, how we did not know, new raiment that was to save us from the shock of strangeness if we walked naked among our kind; and we were precisely the same men and women we had been the day before we died. Even Flavia was probably unchanged within: for in the heart and soul of her, she must so have fitted the harmony of the place that there was no unease about it, as there was for me and for Annette. And a great wave rose up in me and I experienced what might be called a change of heart and mind, and I swore within myself I would not be unfaithful to the tender, silent suasions of our lot. And, so unaccountable is human will, that I had no sooner resolved not to be a spoiler of paradise than I pounced upon Annette, resolved that she, too, should take the way of grace with me.

“Annette,” said I, “get down off that horse. Here, I’ll help you.”

She stared.

“But I can’t,” said she. “I’m on a mission. He sent me.”

“Where has he sent you?”

She pointed with her riding crop: a willow wand.

“Off that way.” She was indicating a path skirting the water to the right of us. “Don’t you know where that leads? I do. He told me.”

“Have you been living in their house, with them?” I asked. “Did Cintra take you home with her to—console you,” I said lamely, remembering how stricken with the strangeness of all this she had seemed when I saw her last, “and he’s begun to make use of you for his infernal plans?”

Her eyes gleamed in mockery. She looked like a cat who’s got away with her mangled mouse and leers at you from safety. Now I had thought of cats, she was rather like one. Were they prepared for cats in heaven? She answered gaily. She’d got the best of me. Of a certainty she could be gay.

“Yes,” she said, “he’d no use for me, but when I got a word with him, I told him how bored I’d been all my life and how, if I had half a chance, I didn’t mean to be bored again. Then he asked if I could ride. That was all. He said he had a message to be taken. I could take it.”

Evidently it was true. We entered into heaven as we left the earth. It did not purge us, all this beauty of strangeness. Again I knew that somehow we must purge ourselves. Or was there something so mighty it could wash us clean? but not without our consenting will. I didn’t want it under the law: only under love, what the avowedly righteous used to call the love of God.

“Don’t stand there looking cataleptic,” said Annette, laughing in what seemed lightmindedness and happy mirth. “I must be off. Want to say anything else to me?”

I did.

“What is your message?” I asked.

“Oh, I can tell you. The more I spread it the better. Did you know that he’s boycotted up there? All the rest of the province—it’s a province, he says—moved off when he came in. It was what they call a great migration. They have them sometimes. Did you know that?” Her eyes questioned me, rather wildly now. The iris was black. She couldn’t get used to this planetary talk. It frightened her. “Sometimes,” she said, and I knew by the haste of her words, pell-mell, that she was really frightened, “they go from star to star.”

But I couldn’t let her get rattled until she had told me all she knew. Now she had a question to put, one she certainly balked at, and she put it quickly:

“Peter, can they get killed?”

“I don’t know,” said I. “Who?”

“If they fight. If he gets his men up there to the gates and they force their way in, can they—kill each other—as it is on earth?”

Now she was the distraught woman I had seen just after her coming to this place, her eyes wandering, her hands loose.

“I don’t know,” said I.

“You must know,” said she desperately. “You look—happy.”

“Aren’t you happy?” I ventured.

“I was,” she cried miserably, “until I saw you.”

Poor child! and this was how a man’s wife, when he meets her in what he calls paradise, may feel toward him. This had been my wife, and Mary had asked me to “save” her. At this moment I hadn’t the least idea what she could have meant. I diverged from the tangle always waiting for me, of late years, when I approached Annette, and asked a question touching the things at hand.

“Annette,” I said, “exactly what are you to do when you get round that bend of the shore and find the people you say are living there? What are you going to say?”

The sense of life and motion, dash and pure abandon, came again into her face. Again she thrilled to her adventure.

“I’m to rouse them,” she said, “tell them what it’s all about, what he’ll do for them and how he’s waiting here to do it.”

“Joan of Arc?” I suggested, with a wilful irony.

It touched her: “a very palpable hit.” She raised her head slightly and looked as martial as she could.

“Something of that sort,” she said defiantly. “You needn’t laugh. Queerer things have happened. He told me I was gifted, and my great gift was something he could use. My audacity, that was how he put it, and that’s something you hate in me, now isn’t it?”

And then, having got the best of me, she was gone. A word and a touch of the willow wand, and the horse answered her while I stood there gaping at his lovely action as he took the curve along the shore. And as I stood there I was aware of a Presence at my side, and I thought I could see something of the height and shape of a man; but so tremendous was Its effect on me that I dared not look at It,—not fully, I mean, but only as if it were my mind that saw It, not my eyes. Really I believe the reason did not lie in fear as it is so often felt. It was rather that I dared not confront It lest It should not be there. And my heart was reaching out to It so passionately that I could not bear to know It was not there. My mind seemed to cry out to It to stay, and It did stay, and this dialogue went on between us. I began, though possibly not in spoken words but in my own mind. But I heard the answer plainly, though that also must have been in my own mind. The first question I asked was the one human creatures have been asking since the beginning of what they know as time, so long as man has been man: “What shall I do?” And I understood that I was to go forward and I was not to be afraid. I find I must now cease saying It of the Presence. Indeed, I did so at first, not because It seemed to me impersonal, as an aspect of nature, but from my humility before It. But now that He had spoken, I had to call Him otherwise. I went on, compelled by an eagerness as great as my wonder, to know what He would have me do. I was to accomplish something that was dear to Him. How was I to do it? But that I was not, in explicit terms, to know. Was I to ask it of my own inner mind? Was I to think it out, as our elders told us when we were picking our way in difficult places? Was the old method to obtain here, an anguished effort and failure and effort again, to reach a possibly shifting goal?

But suddenly a change came over me, as a teasing wind dies down and her sister wind blows from another quarter and brings calm. I did not want to know. A light-heartedness pervaded me beyond anything I could remember. I thought of this in human terms, as the most charming person I had ever imagined, and my delighted mind flew to Mary as if it must insist on her coming, though she had not previously come for all my calling her, to be delighted also. He spoke of other things than those which concerned the General: trees, flowers, night and day, I should find this, He said, a most equable climate, but many customs obtained here, in every-day life, which had been planned simply to give newcomers from the earth a sense of home. There were gardens where what we called old-fashioned flowers grew to admiration. As to food, the question of food: of course I had begun to get acquainted with what was really my new body, my spiritual body? Yes, it was different. It didn’t clamor to renew itself, like the old earth bodies, didn’t get out of order except in impalpable ways when our desires were unwholesome. But we needn’t go into that. I should learn. And if I felt the old earth hungers too clamorous to be borne, there was always balm for those very things. There was one thing I wanted uncontrollably to ask him. “Are You,” I said, “really here with me as You seem to be, or could all the others that need You get You at the same time? Are You”—I hesitated—“are You real, a body, as on earth?”

He laughed. He actually did. There was no studied solemnity about him.

“Yes,” He said, “I am here.”

He surely said it, and not reassuringly, not for the solace of my seeking mind, but in the simple way of truth. He seemed to say more: that others could project themselves into far places in the way of friendliness, if they wanted to enough. But for Himself, at this present moment: “Yes, I am here.” And suddenly, as He said it, He was gone; but He had left behind Him what I can only call an odor of remembrance. The place was not the same, I was not the same, and so exalted was I, so keyed to a higher pitch of being that I felt events were about to happen, swiftly, decisively, and I must be ready for them. And so I was not surprised when I saw a shadow fall beside me and turned about to find that Terence was standing there waiting to speak. The difference in people as events called out potential response in them! I couldn’t get used to it. Terence, for example. I thought I could apply to him the greeting of my old grandmother in the country when, in my changing years, I used to arrive, to spend my vacation there: “Why, laddie, how you’ve grown!” This was not the agitated boy, we’ll call him, who came bursting down the thorny path into the highway leading up the hill. Then he had been doubtful, distraught, not sure of his standing in this or any other world. Now he was direct of glance, eager, equipped for some action I didn’t yet know, and he struck his hand into mine without a doubt that he could tell me all that had befallen him and find me glad to hear.

“Selden,” said he, “it’s all right. It’s the most marvelous thing yet.”

“What is?” I enquired, with an unreasoned feeling that it concerned me, too.

“I found him. I found my father.”

“That’s great,” said I inadequately, continuing, for it seemed now whatever he had to tell was the part that concerned me: “But why didn’t you stay?”

“He wouldn’t let me,” said he, still eager, still on the top of the wave. “I found him—where do you suppose I found him?”

“Fishing, the Memory Man told you; but that was only because you said he’d been a sailor and loved the sea.”

“No, not fishing, but down at the shore of the loveliest bay you ever set your eyes on—deep water, Selden, deep, clear water and seaweeds down below, and he’s there—what do you s’pose?—studying marine life.”

“Glass-bottomed boats?” I asked, in my halting way. Must I always be so unprepared?

“No! no! Good God, man, no! He’s got a kind of a contraption—not that tinware the divers are photographed in, but light, light as air, and he goes down under water, chums it with the algae and the mermaids, too, for all I know.”

“Oh, come off,” said I.

“It’s true, I tell you. Not mermaids, maybe, but lots of little fellows just as good. There’s a fish that talks. I give you my word.”

“What does he say?” I enquired flippantly, to spur him on. “Remove the tartar sauce?”

“He talks, that’s what he does, talks! It’s a kind of singing like an A string on a fiddle, and I give you my word—Selden, I give you my word my father understood everything he said.”

“Well,” said I, “that’s all very interesting, but what did your father say to you? Had he known you were coming?”

Terence grew so red that I looked at his cheeks in admiration. He was now a manly fellow, but no girl ever wore a lovelier damask of the red, red rose.

“No,” said he, in a low voice, very seriously. This was all tremendously unnerving to him. “He didn’t know I was coming. But he—he—Selden, he was glad.”

“How did he look?” I asked. “As you remember him?”

He couldn’t flush any more deeply, but his blue eyes flamed and he said:

“I remembered him as a sort of a gnarly sailor man, but he looked like—he looked like Achilles.”

The great name was in a tone of profound awe. What did this young man know about Achilles? anything that might be taken as the last news from Troy or the shades? I asked him plainly, for what might not happen in this surprising spot?

“You don’t mean,” said I, “that Achilles is here, too, and you’ve seen him?”

“Oh, no,” said he indifferently, as if it were a small matter. “But when I first knew Annette I began to read old Greek things, translations, you know, to please her.”

To please Annette! So far as I knew, Annette would have been far more likely to establish relations with a French couturier than with a mythical hero unless, indeed, he might have sold his shield for her adorning.

“Why should it please her?” I insisted. “She asked you to?”

To him also, I fancy, it began to seem a little grotesque. He looked slightly sheepish, but he answered directly enough.

“You were a great gun, you know. She used to talk about you and your work and I got the idea she—liked that sort of thing. So—I don’t just know why I picked it out—I began to read about Greece. And it’s wonderful, Selden, you know it’s really wonderful. Achilles was a great chap.”

“Yes,” said I gravely, “I believe he was.”

So this was the trophy his love had asked from him. This was the sort of head hunting that obtained when the poor bemused lover didn’t know precisely what his charmer would look on kindly. And all that was left of it in the halls of what earth knew as eternity was a fleeting memory of one figure who had been, to that infantile mind, a man.

“Does your father live there,” I asked, “down by the water, or just go there to observe?”

“He lives there,” said he, “in a house, a small house, something like the ones you see on Cape Cod. It has a garden. And”—

Here he stopped. I gathered that he wanted to tell me more but, for some reason, found it difficult to go on. I was right.

“Selden,” said he, “if you don’t believe this I never’ll—” He paused, trying to compass an adequate threat. He had it. “I never’ll tell anybody on this planet anything again as long as”—could he say “as long as I live?” He apparently thought not. How long was life here? Did one know? Was it presumptuous to build on the old stories and pretend one knew?

“Go on,” said I. “You won’t surprise me. Too much has happened here for that. I shouldn’t be surprised at anything.”

He began, slowly and thoughtfully.

“We went to the house,” he said, talking very quietly now, though his voice shook. “His house—our house, you understand. When we’d got part way up the path, he called—to my mother, you know—and told her I was coming. And Selden, she appeared in the doorway, between the climbing roses—sort of blush, they were—and Selden, I swear to you she looked as she used to before her last sickness. An old woman, Selden, but lovely, don’t you see! And when I kissed her, her lips and her cheek were sort of soft and nice, same as I remember ’em. Old cheeks, you know. Same as your mother’s and your grandmother’s are when they’re old.”

“She died much later than your father?” said I, trying to meet him lucidly. “He’d had time to grow younger—and like Achilles—but she’d stayed an old lady?”

“I thought so,” said he gravely, still searching me with his eyes, as if to challenge my credulity, “but it wasn’t so. It was an—an aspect you can put on, from the past, they explained to me. She’d been prepared for my coming. She wanted to stay the same as I’d known her. She was afraid I’d be disappointed, shocked, you see, if she was different. And Selden, before I went—to come back here, you know—she grew into what she is now, and father said when she came into the room—all shy, as if she wasn’t sure how we’d take it—he said, ‘That’s the way she looked when you were about a year old.’ And he asked me if I liked her and—I don’t care what I tell you, Selden. I guess you see—I began to cry like a baby, and we sat down, all three of us, and sort of held hands—and I guess that’s all.”

“But why, when you’d got home and you were all so happy, didn’t you stay there?” I asked. “You couldn’t have wanted to come away. And how could they let you?”

His face settled into a sort of quizzical despair I had never seen on it. Was the child developing a sense of humor? He found himself recalled to what, in his happiness, he had momentarily forgotten.

“They sent me,” said he ruefully. “Father did.”

“But what for?” I insisted.

“We sat there,” he said, falling into the steady pace of the painstaking chronicler, “telling what happened since we’d seen each other. Father only told a little. Mother, too. Hers was chiefly about how she’d begged and prayed to be allowed to keep on looking old till her son came—that’s me, you know—and how easy she found it was. Scientific, you know, a kind of a change that fits in with the different sort of life. Do you know, Selden, I thought maybe it might account for all the old stories of ghosts. There is a way of seeming the same as when we were alive, honest there is.”

“Alive on earth,” I corrected.

“Yes, on earth. We’re alive now, of course. Don’t I know it? But that we didn’t go into. There wasn’t time. You see they wanted to know all about me since mother’d seen me, and I told ’em, Selden, I gave it all away, the whole business.”

“About Annette?” I ventured. “About the bag?”

“Yes, the whole damn’ business, I tell you.”

“What did they say?”

“Mother didn’t say anything. She put one hand over mine and looked at father. And he was mighty troubled. I don’t remember his ever looking at me so when he was on earth, but I was only a kid then and maybe I was pretty decent. Father sat and looked me through and through. I felt as if I was a book he was reading. I wanted to say: ‘For God’s sake, turn the page.’ And then he said: ‘You must go back.’ ”

“To the earth?” I asked.

“No! no! He knew I couldn’t do that. Come back here where we are now.”

“To the bag?” I asked.

Were we always to be pursued by a phantom bag?

“No, not exactly. To Annette.”

XI

“Sit down here,” I bade him, and I led the way to one of those seats at the side of the highway where, it seemed, passersby might sit and talk, though I never saw them there. And as he followed me, the strangeness of this place came over me in a way it never had before. Perhaps my mind had been too busy with the emergencies brought upon the small group of us who had come together from the earth. We had arrived at a time when the General’s agitation for an attack was at its height. We had got the full force of it. But now, as Terence and I sat side by side, and he had turned to me, waiting for me to speak, I said,—though I had meant to continue the talk of the phantom bag:

“Terence, does it ever seem to you that there’s something queer about all this?”

“About what?” he asked.

“We died, Mary and I together, you and Annette and the old farmer and his wife. We found ourselves here. But thousands of people died on that same day. Thousands have died since. Where did they go? This place is delightful. But it looks as if a scene had been set for us, as if we were the only people expected from the earth or any other planet, and, if you’ll think back, you’ll see there hasn’t a soul come since we came ourselves. I have to say ‘soul’, though I don’t know what we are, you and I sitting here together. But it isn’t a dream.”

“No,” said he thoughtfully, “it isn’t. I’ve dreamed about my mother, time and again, since she died, but never so. Oh, no, it isn’t a dream!”

I called my reasoning faculties back to me, whatever they are, to work on the problem of the moment. There was no time, at this point, to speculate on dreams.

“About Annette,” I said. “Your father told you to come back to her. What for?”

“Because I’d got mixed up with her,” he said clumsily. “She was a responsibility I couldn’t escape. I’d got her. She was mine.”

“Oh, no,” I said, for I wanted him to be let off from that liability, at least. It was too far a cry to the soul of Annette, who had never known she had one, and certainly hadn’t felt that it involved itself with this ingenuous boy who but capered while she pulled the strings. “Annette isn’t yours. She isn’t mine either,” I hastened to add. I couldn’t go so far as to tell him that she was now, in some theatrical sense, a chattel of the General; but I wished he knew it. For being what I was, I couldn’t, no matter how cleanly I was trying to live after the fashion of this country, I couldn’t keep myself from seeing the drama of the life here in the sky, and exulting in its keen straight working, in its quick results, as right as Nemesis. I suppose I wanted to see what he would say to that. For after all, a theatric sense is, in a way the nth power of the village gossip. “So,” I repeated, “you’re not responsible for Annette.”

He qualified it a little, for I don’t believe even he could see how he was to braid up his destiny again with hers.

“Any way,” said he, “I’m not to skin off and leave her. We did a low trick. We did it together. Of course it’s more mine than hers. And it’s all very well to laugh over a phantom bag—” he looked the worried boy he was before he had seen his father and drunk in the certainty of old kindliness—“but what about the bag?”

“Well,” said I, “what about it?”

“That’s just what father said, ‘What about it?’ It wasn’t,” he went on, “as if we could duplicate that stuff and sift it down on the Midas and say we’d paid it back. It wasn’t as if Midas hadn’t found it, if I was right in thinking it was with us in the car when we smashed—for that,” he added drearily, with a disillusioned sense of the value of Annette’s evidence—“for that all hangs on Annette’s word. But wherever the stuff is, we did a dirty trick and we did it together, and if I’m anything of a man, I shall stick by Annette till we’ve thought of a way of paying it back, in some coin or other, not money, you understand, because that’s no good here, but something this place can accept and be the better for.”

“Heaven be the better for!” I flung out, for I was more bound by old beliefs than he, in the ratio of my academic life. “Why, man, you’re dotty. So’s he, I don’t care if he is your father. He’s way off. This is heaven. Look at the way everything works here, as if the hinges had been oiled by a careful hand. It’s perfect. It’s we that can’t fit ourselves to it, that’s all.”

“No,” said he obstinately. “It’s in the making, and it seems as if we’d got to carry on and see the job’s done shipshape. I begin to think, Selden, the whole business—what you might call the universe, you know—it seems as if it wasn’t finished, never would be, if you see what I mean, and the fun of it’s in keeping at it.” But the bigness of it was too much for him, and after fixing me for a helpless moment, with staring eyes, he sighed and recurred to Annette, perhaps, after the universe, the smallest thing he could think of. “And father said it looked to him as if Annette really had more of a conscience than I because she did believe she’d got to lug round the bag, and I was so carried away over being here, with the chance of seeing him and mother and all that, I’d simply forgotten about it.”

Poor boy! he was worried indeed. Whatever he’d done for himself by making off with that batch of precious engraved papers, those miles on miles away, he had spoiled the rapture of his homecoming here. I thought of Annette’s riding dashingly along on her white horse, armed with her audacity, and I wondered how his father would feel about her conscience in action if he could have seen that. But Terence had cocked his head. He was listening.

“What’s that?” he asked, and now I, too, caught the sound, a low whimpering, such as I had not before heard in this place. And as we turned in its direction, Annette came running into the highway from the road she had taken when I saw her on horseback, all in her bravery of what she had so proudly called “audacity.” Only now she was on foot. Her gold helmet was gone and her short hair disordered. I was familiar with the conventional phrase of wringing one’s hands, but I didn’t remember having seen it either in life or on the stage, and I had always wondered how it was to be done convincingly. Well, I knew now. Annette was wringing her hands. She saw us and came to us, not slackening her run. We got up from the bench and she threw herself down on it, bent over and unashamedly began to cry. There she sat, sobbing, and we waited. I didn’t look at Terence. I don’t know what effect it all had on him, but I felt man’s helpless irritation at a woman’s tears. They always seemed to me unfair: a weapon, indeed, but one too mean to use. But she was not using it consciously. She was quite honestly undone, and entertained no thought of us. Nobody spoke until she lifted her head, smoothed her hair mechanically and then turned her tear-sodden face to us, first on Terence and then on me.

“Hullo,” she said, in a weary commonplace. “Well,” to me, with a bitter sort of smile, “I’ve come back.”

I didn’t dare ask her if she’d been thrown. It was too banal. But I did allow myself the question:

“Where’s your horse?”

She was at once furiously angry, apparently not at my question but the plight wherein she found herself.

“Do you know what there is,” she said, pointing back the way she had come, “a few miles from here?”

No, I said, I didn’t know, and Terence sat as still as a squirrel on a stump, waiting for what might happen to him and perhaps wondering how he was going to fulfil his father’s command to “stick by the woman he’d led away.” But she granted him hardly a look. I thought Terence’s father himself would have been taken aback if he had known how far from her ken Terence now was or how far she had always been from being led away. She was addressing me.

“You ride along that road for a while,” she said, her eyes newly wet, but with the tears of anger, whatever they had been before, “perhaps five or six miles. I don’t know. It’s very pretty. Then you turn a corner—no, not a corner—you go round a curve, and you come to a hedge, straight across the road, a hedge, ten or fifteen feet high, all woven in and out with thorny branches and I don’t know how deep. It looked four or five feet: a hedge as deep as that, with thick glossy leaves—like holly, you know—and thorns.”

I knew just how it looked.

“Like that one up there on the hill,” I said to Terence, and he nodded.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I looked and looked, on one side and then the other. There were fields on the right and on the left, and I wondered if we could leap the fences that bordered the road and go along—skirting the hedge, you know—till there was a way through and back to the road again. For there must be some way to get into the place, else why was there a road at all?—a place it was, you see, a city, I should guess. I could see the tops of roofs over the hedge, and the towers and steeples. Not near, a good ways in. But they were there all right.”

Here she stopped, forgetting us and looking into the greenery at the side of the road, as if even the growing things of heaven had thwarted her and she would find a way round them or through them or die another death as she had already died one. She amazed me. I had misjudged her. How should I have believed her desires were only the childish greediness of her wilful playtime on earth, budding out into the same weedy growth in heaven? She wanted things still, but she wanted them tragically and with all her being. And she herself gave me the key.

“And I’ve got to go back,” she said fiercely, “and tell him I’ve failed.”

“Tell him?” I repeated. I knew, but I wanted to see how she would characterize him if she went on.

“Why, he sent me,” she said. “I told you. I was the only one who could do it. He actually said so. My courage! my audacity! And I’d rather die than disappoint him.”

My brain whirled with it. Were the old earth destinies to go on, inexorably budding and bearing fruit? Many ladies had on earth immolated themselves, for one reason or another, for our General’s pastime or his solace—or, indeed, for their own advancement and desires—but was it to continue beyond the bounds of planetary credulity? There were other things I had to know, touching the minutiae of this day’s work.

“You were walking,” I said, which was a mild way of describing her desperate pace. “Where did you leave your horse?”

Now the white horse, as I remember from that short space of time, though he was different in no apparent way from the blooded stock I had seen on earth, was so beautiful in his form and action that one might have called him, in the way of simile, a fairy horse, the mount of a fairy prince, a creature to fulfil the needs of old mythologies. And so I was the more taken aback when Annette burst forth in a shrill invective:

“The little devil! what do you think he did? I was waiting there trying to make up my mind whether to get into the field on one side or the other and see if the hedge was impassable there—and suddenly he shied, as if he saw something I didn’t, backed, took a leap and cleared the hedge, and I haven’t seen him since.”

“He threw you?”

I still knew how offensive this was to a rider of her degree, but now I had to know; and possibly, so strong are the perverse habits left in us even after we have ceased to be wilfully perverse, I rather enjoyed nettling her.

“Didn’t I tell you? And now I’ve got to go up there and tell him.”

She clenched her fists. Indeed, she pounded her knees with them, in a way that must have hurt, and her angry eyes stared far off, though they could see nothing but the green shrubbery, into the disorder of the battle which is life. She still wanted the spoils, the more fiercely as they escaped her. And with one of those biting memories which might be called remorse, because they allow us to see the past from another angle and more clearly, I thought of the profound pathos of her time on earth. She had seemed to me then a mere rudimentary nexus of wild desires. What did she want? So far as I could see then, to swim in the whirlpool of dizzy life which is not life but the maelstrom that sucks us down. And who of us tried to rescue her? Not I, for I was at my lonely worship of classic beauty. My mind was formed on academic lines, and I did not see that the madness of a Fury-hunted Greek was no more my business than the raging discontent of a world-tainted child like this. Terence and I! he was as simple as clear water. He could have understood no more than I. Dense as I had been, he could not have understood so well. And it was on us that had been vainly laid the burden of this maenad of wild life. Then it suddenly came to me that if she had been—incredible thought!—in the General’s confidence, she might know the secret of this place and explain what disconcerted me. Why was it so solitary? Why did it seem to be a stage especially set for the little game our small group was called upon to play?

“Annette,” said I, “has anybody told you how large a force the General has?”

She looked serious and important. She wished to seem to know.

“It’s enormous,” she said, with certainty. “Simply enormous.”

In spite of my desire to tap her possible knowledge, I smiled. Something, indeed, she might know, with those keen eyes of hers, that prying mind, and I had no compunction in drawing it out of her. But unless she had been able to look over the ground and make her own conclusions, she would know nothing. For though the General might have used her as an emissary, I could not imagine his handing her over even that one word: enormous! His frigid dignity would have been laughable, put to such straits.

“Where is it?” I asked.

She pointed, up the slope where I had first seen him haranguing his men.

“There’s a great building up there,” she said. “You can’t see it from here. The trees are too thick.”

Yes, I said, I had seen it. But she couldn’t mean an enormous force had headquarters in the building. That was absurd.

“Oh, no,” she said. “But the land rises behind it and then it falls and there’s a plain, a great plain. That’s where they’re encamped.”

Had she seen it?

“No,” she said, annoyed at my persistence. “How should I see it? But I know it’s there.”

“Did he tell you?”

“Peter,” said she, in the exasperation I had learned to associate with my name as she used it, “everything is confidential. Don’t you see it is? It would have to be. Why, I’m a messenger. I’m”—she hesitated, pouncing on a pompous word—“I’m one of his staff. He’s sent me out to do something and I’ve had bad luck with it—damn that horse!” she flashed. “I don’t believe he was a horse. He’s a devil. Anything could happen here. It isn’t healthy, this place. You think you’re getting on all right and then you come to something that throws you, and you don’t know where you are.”

Now it still seemed to me the most wholesome spot the mind of man could conceive. It had its difficulties, but when I came up against them I knew the trouble was not with them, but with me. On earth, when we come up against a law, we think—though unjustly—that the law itself is wrong. You can’t crack your crown against some of those boulders you meet on your tobogganing through mortal life and not momentarily curse the boulder for being there; but here, whether from an access of new reason or obedience I do not know, you can’t lightly question a law, it’s justice or indeed its ideal perfection. At least I couldn’t. But, as it seemed, Annette could, and I looked on her at that time as one who, by earthly habit or by this new birth, was alien to the country. She might take on its customs and observe them with a suitable grace, but she did not feel the sweet constraining of home.

“Peter!” she said. I knew that note in her voice. She had planned something out. “Peter, if he wants anything, you’ll do it for him, won’t you? Not stop to argue, I mean. Certainly you can’t refuse. You’ll do it for him and do it quickly.”

“What does he want?” I asked her. “He’s sent me on one errand, and I couldn’t do that. Like you on your white horse. You came to a thorny hedge and the horse threw you. I didn’t have a horse and so I didn’t have to be thrown. But there was a thorny hedge just the same, and I couldn’t get through.”

“It won’t be a hedge,” said she. “It will be something in the line of what you’ve always wanted. I’ve been talking with him about you. He asked me things.”

“About me?” I said, as she paused.

“Yes. He thought I could tell him, and fortunately I could. I’ve paved the way for you. I’ve set the stage, as you’d say. And that’s it, Peter. It’s the stage.”

When had she ever before been interested in the glamour I lived under when I fancied myself within hailing distance of that mimic life? Not since she had learned, in our very early days together, that by the stage I didn’t mean revues and popular balderdash. I meant something I was myself too small to reach, but which was the human magnificence of truth and beauty the stage might actually attain. As we talked, Terence had been edging farther and farther away, evidently because our dialogue had grown more and more confidential. He was patently uneasy, and I could see why. What between his father’s scrupulous chivalry in consigning him to Annette,—or was it mere honesty, and that infernal bag again?—there seemed nothing for him to do but hang about until one of us should by chance notice him. And somebody did, though it was neither of us. A figure was coming down the highway, a figure all in leaf brown, spinning along, it came so fast, like a wheel magically turned. Terence saw and lost his defeated look of being outside the game.

“Hi!” he called to me. “Look at him. He’s after you.” And indeed the figure seemed to be making for us. “Don’t you know him?” called Terence. “It’s the Memory Man.”

“Who’s the Memory Man?” asked Annette, also turning to look.

But I didn’t answer, and he came on, an embodiment of haste. He made a great picture, that running man in his brown tunic and gaitered legs. I don’t really know about his clothes, but they outlined his slender figure in a way that made you think, “That’s how a runner ought to look.” His brown hair, not long but thick, was tossed all over his head, and his blue eyes had a fiery appeal in them. They looked as if a shaft of steely blue shot straight from each of them into mine. They seemed to burn me as he came. There was no noise, even of a footstep, in his coming. He ran so fast that now he was nearer he seemed to float. I remembered the old simile of winged feet, and when he stopped beside me he was not panting like a runner after his maddest effort. He was at once all still.

“Didn’t you get me?” he asked, controlled and yet as if desperately anxious. “I’ve been calling you.”

“By telephone?” I asked stupidly. “How could you? I’m not on any line.”

“No, no, nothing so clumsy. Didn’t you hear me calling? I knew you were down here. I’ve been saying ‘Come! come!’ ”

Why, yes, of course I had. There had been that undercurrent of response in me all the time while I was talking. Something inside me was knocking at the door. I had known these things were done in this way and if I had given my full attention, he could have made me hear. That was how they spoke to each other in this magic world. I would remember. Annette was listening. She gave my arm a reminding touch.

“Peter,” she said. “Present your friend to me.”

I didn’t answer. Really I didn’t dare. You simply couldn’t admit her to any possibly confidential confusion of emotion or fact, or there’d be the devil to pay. Annette, in one of her moods of wanting the earth and the moon and seven stars, was no joke to deal with. Even at that moment, my mind flashed me a ribald comment that Terence’s fisherman father, with his austere championship of her moral rights, had better have the managing of her. I put my other hand over and laid it, as if to warn her, on her reminding one, and she had to content herself with listening. That, too, was dangerous, whatever she might hear, but I had to risk it.

The Memory Man took no notice of her. He was too possessed by his subject matter to see more than that there was a woman standing at my side. And as I looked at him, in that moment of waiting, I saw it was hard for him to speak, it meant so much to him. He grew pale under his brown.

“I’ve got it,” he said, and I thought I knew.

“What you’ve been trying for?” I asked, in my turn excitedly. For it might mean Mary.

“No, no,” said he, “not that. I’ve got it by chance, picked it up, not in the line I was working on. God in heaven!” This last adjuration he made so low that I hardly heard him, and in a tone of deepest awe, as if he could hardly believe in such colossal fortune. “Picked it up, I tell you. Out of the air.”

And then as I almost began to hear Annette listening beside me, so intent was her curiosity, he continued, in short phrases, like gasps of wonder he had scarcely breath to voice:

“The picture of what happened in Rome, before Christ, the picture, I tell you, the voices even. I don’t half know their language. I wish to God I’d been a scholar. But it’s Rome. It’s what happened. We’ve all read about it. It’s that man up there.”

The General! was it always to be he? Were we all to be dragged at the tail of his chariot and never get into any orbit of our own? I could hear Annette’s hurried breath. Far from wanting to speak, now she was as still as snow, all but that telltale breath, she wanted so to hear. But suddenly I was on fire with the wastefulness of his being here talking about it when pictures of historic moment were piling up there in that little house above us.

“What are you down here for?” I cried, losing all caution, as one might cry to a man whose house was burning and scourge him back to save it. “Go back and I’ll go with you.”

What good that would do I didn’t know. But he shook his head. It wasn’t hopelessly as if he had lost something and despaired of finding it but, I thought afterward, as if he were rather glad not to go on with an adventure so terrible. It was better to make a rift in it, long enough to return to normal values for a time, and take his chance of beginning at another scene of it.

“No,” he said. “It blacked out. Something went wrong. I don’t know what. Chance gave it to me. Chance killed it. But I got a complete transmission. I got Rome, when she was plotting to kill her Caesar. I got the killing. Then it blacked out.”

I had to say something here to keep him going.

“Did he say Et tu Brute?” I asked, like a fool, and yet then it sounded sensible enough.

“No,” said he absently, and I guessed he was, in his own wildly overthrown mind, more concerned with the mysterious process that had given him a picture of Roman life two thousand years ago than with the life itself.

Terence, forgotten as ever, had been listening.

“But,”—he said, and we turned and looked at him, the Memory Man frowningly as if he wished to heaven the child wouldn’t interrupt, and Terence, round-eyed and red in the face went on—“but Caesar! that’s the General up there. What you going to do about it?”

At the time, the question was not grotesque. It sounded natural.

“He must be told,” said Annette, imperiously, as if still thinking of the audacity which had been her road to favor. “Let me!”

I don’t think the Memory Man heard.

“Have you put it down as it happened?” I asked him. “It’s too important not to. I can do shorthand. Got a pencil?”

Oh, this strange, strange country! familiar and yet so different! Our rich welcoming home—yet not the earth! Had he a pencil!

“No,” said he quietly. “But it’s all down inside my skull. Things are different in this new kind of a body. You’ll see. But this is what I want. I want to verify it. I want to see him—or have you—and ask him about three or four points. That’s why I came to you. He’s no use for me. He never has had, since I wouldn’t go up there exploring for him. But you—will you?”

Of course I would.

“But,” I said, “you must go with me. Nobody but you could explain how the thing came about: you must give him the scientific side of it, tell him what you were trying to do and what message you got.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I know no more about it than you. It’s something that never has happened here before—to my knowledge. Besides”—he saw a new possibility, and his face flushed and his eyes brightened with that common realization of having been on the wrong track—“besides,” he said, “how do I know what it meant to have it blacked out? How do I know that failure of connection I could account for was not the very thing that made that new connection possible? I’ll go back. Go up to him by yourself and if he wants to know more, bring him to me.”

And with the same untiring motion as if charging up hill were no more to him than down, he was away to the little house in the woods.

XII

Neither did I stay upon the order of my going. I, too, charged up the hill, but not on the highway he had taken. My objective was the General, probably up there fuming in his tranquil colonnades. And one reason why I did not even cast one look behind me was that I was not only doing the Memory Man a service, but I was leaving Terence and Annette to themselves, either to come less alertly after me or possibly to talk over his dutiful relation to her. If I once looked back at them, if I threw them a word of civil leave-taking and they bade me wait, I should, in all decency, have to do it. I was gone. With the Memory Man’s lithe action in my mind I began running, and I found it exhilaratingly easy. What was there in the air that spurred you on and, at the same time, forbade your tiring? I loved it. I almost accomplished the absurdity of loving myself for being such a bully boy of my legs and lungs, when I trotted up to the colonnade and stopped, not winded and at happy ease. No one was there. I never felt a place so still. I had, in my previous life, known thick forests where “no birds sing,” where it seemed the fall of a leaf could have been heard and every leaf was too shy to fall. But this? Here were the grave proportions of a place man had made for himself either to calm his emotions or to share them with other men in noble converse. The place spoke of man, of man at his best where he meets his kind to plan out with them the more beautiful ways of life. But there were no men here. The columns were of such a height and proportion as to testify to their own rightness, even to the ignorant eye. But just then they spoke, in a strange way, of their own desolation in having no adjunct of mankind striving consciously to mirror their completeness. I stood, as silent as they. Somehow, from not having been on this ground before, I expected to find the General animating some part of it by his masterful presence. And when suspense got stronger in me, so that I felt it in my throat and the trembling of my hands, he appeared, walking out between the columns, and I felt suddenly young and almost defrauded of some one who meant much to me, and whom, it seemed, I had come near to losing.

I don’t think he greeted me, even by a nod. He stood there waiting for me to speak. And he looked at me severely. His face was always severe until it lighted by what I called to myself the persuasion of his look, that kindling which was for the moving of men, to do his will. I began to talk, and I think I talked clearly, but that is because my memory is of a vitally sensitive nature and I was able to repeat the incident which had just occurred as the Memory Man reported it to me. To be the quicker about it, I assumed he might not know what the Memory Man’s daily toil was about. So I told him. This man, I said, was engaged in desperate research for his own use, to get communication with the earth, that he might tell the earth the right story about some of the things he had done to her before his death. As he listened, his eyes may have changed; certainly no other part of his face. But, I said, just as some little device in his apparatus went wrong—and that I couldn’t explain—the man found he was getting something different from anything he had got before, and the new connection established was not enabling him to tell his own story. It was giving him a story to listen to, a picture to see, and that picture was the killing of Julius Caesar over two thousand years ago. When I got there, to the crowning audacity of that name, he shook with an emotion I had not foreseen, or I should never have dared challenge it. He seemed to be dissolving into weakness before my eyes. It happens with us often in this life after death that faint echoes of the earth life unexpectedly beat upon the memory and for the moment cause our normal life to tremble with the reconciliation of what was and now is. And so I was briefly shaken by the one word “epilepsy” which belonged to my school-boy memory of his earth life, and I could throw it off: for I knew that whatever had or had not tormented his physical body, it would not have clung to the spirit that gave it breath. In that moment of my pause at his look and movement, he had recovered himself.

“Why does he send this tale to me?” he said, coldly and in a dry and difficult voice.

“He heard things in it he had never heard before,” I assured him. “And he knows you can verify them. It isn’t because it concerns you, sir,” I said, with a doubtful tact. “It is because it concerns his—I can’t call it his invention, for it came to him of itself—but the whole experience. If it’s true it’s—it’s tremendous.”

As I spoke I realized I had begun to call him “sir”, a deference I have never ceased in, and I knew then it was not so much that I had been struck anew by the world-old dramatic value of his life as that I had begun to see the pathos of it. He was as arrogant as a god—not the One God Who since he holds all things in His own being must hold humility also—but a god made out of fire and clay. And he thought he was born to lord it over life itself in this new sphere as on the earth in those old days, and no one, not the One God who created him or the men he thought himself made to rule, not one would advance him a step on his road.

“He suddenly thought,” I said, “that the very change in his receiving apparatus which gave him the message might continue it in his absence. And he asked me to invite you—to beg you to go up to his house, and do your verifying there.”

At this he cried out in these inexplicable words which could have nothing to do with my previous talk to him; and though he was within a long pace of me as we stood there within the pillars, he called them in anguish of resounding stress, as if he meant this whole world to judge between him and what were somewhere—if only in the jungles of his uneasy mind—his enemies. And this was what he said:

“I am a broken man!”

Terence and Annette, half way up to us—I had been too absorbed to think of them or see them coming—paused and stood, down there, a dark blot upon the road. Even the sound of his cry had frightened them as the words were frightening me. And again I became eerily conscious of the silence and loneness of the place. Where was his soldiery? There was, of course, the multitude, over the brow of the hill, covering the great plain, as Annette had said, but never had I seen him before when there was none of his staff about. All this was quickly over. He was himself again, and I had a confused feeling that the cry had not been. He, too, had seen the halted figures below.

“It is that woman,” he said. “I sent her on a mission. Where is the horse?”

“She will tell you, sir,” I answered decorously, out of my very earthly sediment of mischief toward Annette. If she would play the devil in these matters where none of us knew our way about, let her explain and save herself. “The young man,”—I offered, meaning to save Terence from the risk of seeming disaffected. The boy was too good a boy to be meddled with. Let him pay his scot to Annette and then go back to his Achilles of a father and rejoice in the youth of heaven.

But he interrupted me.

“I know. I’ve tried him. Is he her lover?”

Now this was too concise, even from a gentleman of long ago. I answered with a courteous inflection implying, I hoped, that I was deaf and he might cover his break with an equal courtesy.

“I beg your pardon!” I said, interrogatively, inclining my head.

“I know! I know!” he said again. “Tell them to go away.”

But I wasn’t telling them anything. I stood where I was, and one of his quick changes came upon him. I had already learned, little as I had seen of him, that he had a facile play in emergencies. Nothing could defeat him, in an earthly sense, save perhaps the way the Roman senators had taken. And that had not defeated him. Here he was, simply transferred from one sphere of activity to another. Had it been necessary on the earth? Could nations only fulfil themselves if the compensating aspects of change swept over them? But surely it could not be so here, though indeed we had brought our spiritual bodies, moulded and adapted by the will of earth, our own or that of men and circumstance, with us. All this was of the quickness of thought, and I saw there was no need of answering his question. He had already forgotten it. Annette and Terence were of no importance. They had both been tried for his service and found wanting, and when he was caught in these coils of destiny, there was no room in his mind for resentment or regret. They but exhausted energy. Let him—or let orderly fate herself—brush them off the working map. He did not crave the trouble. One task he had for Annette before he let her go. He had a new project, and she, having babbled to him about me, could introduce it.

“She,” he said, with a little wave of his hand toward where she stood, “she has told me what you were. A playwright, she said. But you had never had any recognition from the world because your demands had been too high, your aims too glorious. They would have none of it. That is so?”

It was hardly an interrogation: evidently a statement of his own. I gave an instant’s bitter thought to Annette’s version of my earthly aims. So she had really taken it in when, in the beginning of our life together, I had told her what I wanted to do in the way of plays. Then I had not known she listened. She had been too occupied in citing the rewards of the sort of drama the world expected. But I now heard myself answering as if it were another man:

“I wasn’t up to it, that was all. I had a kind of vision of things too big for me.”

“But,” he said, drawing me on, “they wouldn’t listen to you. The world wouldn’t listen.”

“Ah,” said I, knowing the reason I had always given myself was still the true one, “but they would have listened if I’d been up to the job of making them. There would have been such a glamour in it they couldn’t have resisted. In plays, you know—”

There I stopped. I felt rather an ass. I wasn’t here to give an exposition, as it were a talk to a Drama League. Couldn’t he see what I meant, he who knew men by a magic that subdued them to his will? Couldn’t he see that play writing was the art of an exquisite persuasion, the art of presenting all life, through the expedients of your craft, so enchantingly that the poorest intelligence should be able to see it as you saw? And the greater it was, the more universal: it covered bad and good alike, the beautiful, the common and unclean. Shakespeare had his gravediggers and his clowns. But I, not being Shakespeare, had only been able to sit before my canvas, the great figures perhaps sketched in, and agonise because I could not throw over them the light that is beyond life because it is also art. He did, I think, understand. He himself knew those values, for had not his own written work been an apologia for his life? Had he not tried, to make men believe, with him, in the dramatic value of all he had done? He was speaking.

“But you still want to do it?”

Did I want to do it? If I did, should I not be thinking of it with a growing passion, as I had, of late years, thought of it so hungrily on earth? And I knew the answer. Save that I did not believe it well to tell him all my mind, I knew I might have answered, like a child that cannot eat until the step of the absent mother is heard coming up the path to the door:

“I can’t tell you until Mary comes.”

For indeed I could not now think of other things than that, however vital, without a sad consciousness that it was all through the numbing chill which was her absence. Strange! I had not known her long enough to have grown into life with her, to dwindle now under the breaking of old habit, but I did want her beyond any assuaging from reasonable thought. So I did not answer, and he continued:

“You are to write a play. It is to be produced here. You and your wife—yes, I understand, you have no desire of love toward her, but we will call her your wife. Men have taken women for many reasons, all necessary, all sufficiently to be understood. I myself—” there he stopped, with a dignified effect of withdrawal, not as if he had spoken impetuously and regretted it, but as if, by those two words, he was willing to admit me to the adventures which gods like him might compass without damage to their godhead. “I myself!” I tried to think of the historic group of women he had taken and, being no scholar, I could remember only the names the schoolbooks had. But as it is and ever will be, poetry remains beyond the fact, and into my mind did flash, like a writing before my eyes, something about “full-fortuned Caesar.” Was he full-fortuned, save for his triumphing moment in the scenic labyrinth of Egyptian lures? Did he not rather, as he conquered, destroy, an avalanche taking its inevitable way? This as to lands and men: but women! had he loved none of them save the first, the young bride he had refused to put away when he was bidden? And Cintra? did he love her, after her age-long worship?

He had come to a conclusion.

“You,” he said, “will write the play. It will cover my last weeks on earth. You will bring into it all the designs I cherished in those days, the great works I would have done. Always for the people: you know that. You will go up to this Hermit and get from him a clear transcript of what he has learned. You will submit that to me, and I will tell you whether it can be used.”

I was bewildered. I was prepared, having accepted the fact that I now lived in a world where amazing values obtained, to understand that these values were not outside the universal laws, as I had known them in a childish way, but merely an extension of them to another sphere. But he did amaze me. I could not answer. Suddenly a light welled into his face. I cannot describe that signal light of brilliant intuition. I had seen it on his face before, but never like this. There was no warmth in it, but simply a flash of something I have to call, for lack of knowledge, the sudden ultimate action of pure intellect.

“There was,” he said rather slowly, as if he were testing me, “another Leader. He came after my death. He was born in Bethlehem of Judea. He was crucified at Jerusalem.”

There he paused and bent on me the full power of that enquiring look. I caught my breath.

“No! no!” I said. I was not repudiating anything he had meant to say. I simply had an overwhelming consciousness that we must not, in this evident pursuit of sheer dominion, bring in what was not only a mysterious personality, but a sacred one.

“Suppose I had lived,” said he, still proving me. “Suppose I had become very old. I might have, surely, for the purposes of a play. Suppose, being then in the East, I could have rescued that Person. Suppose we together had remade the world,—what about that? There is your play. Isn’t that your play?”

Again I cried: “No! no! no!”

“Are you afraid?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said quietly, for though much moved I was never less excited in my life. Things were too great for that. “I am afraid.”

He was looking at me, not compellingly now, but in an effort to understand.

“It is a matter of belief?” he asked. “You have a feeling—a superstitious feeling, let us say—about that Person?”

What feeling had I? Certainly none I could share with him. I had not, on earth, allied myself with any church. I had had, regarding that Person—as we may continue to call Him—a warmth of possible worship which might well belong only to pure poetry and not in any way to dogma. From some of the church legends I shrank, seeing in them a perhaps helpful interpretation of Him to the universal mind but not one that brought me nearer Him. I believe the whole triumphant tragedy of His life had been for me something too sacred to be approached—by me, at least. And curiously, the only person who, in the simplicity of recognized belief, had ever had the power to bring me nearer Him, was Flavia. In that moment of trying to define Him to my own mind, perhaps that I might protect Him from this other mind assaulting Him, as it were, from its incredible arrogance, I found I had at once believed that Flavia had spoken with Him. I had thought that only she among us all could have done it, because she alone was pure in heart. Not that He would have kept Himself at a distance from us, in rigorous majesty, but that, if He had come to us, we should not have seen or heard. And what of that moment afterward when He seemed to speak to me and talk about the small sweet beauties of this place? That I simply did not dare to think of at this time, lest the man should drag it from my mind. I seemed to myself to have thrown over it something dark and sacred, like an altar cloth.

“So,” he said again meditatively, as if it might stir me into denial, “you are afraid.”

“Yes,” I answered as before, “I am afraid.”

“Is He your god?” he asked.

And wanting to answer worthily and with dignity, as befitted the question, I said, in a low tone: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty.”

And again he asked me: “Are you afraid?” and now I tried to answer him more explicitly; but this was all I could summon to say:

“There are things I can’t—touch.”

He seemed to shrug himself into another attitude. So, he seemed to imply, “we’ll shift our ground.” When he was trying to impose his will on men, it was indeed like a whirlwind of rapid change.

“You will,” he said, again like a command, “think it over. But quickly!” he burst out with a heat I had not seen in him. “My fortunes will not admit delay.”

And then, as it had happened to me several times of late, there came upon me that strange feeling of the loneliness of the place. In spite of the unbroken calm of the sky and the entrancing smell of unseen flowers, I longed for men. Why were we, this little group of us, playing what seemed to be a predetermined drama on what might be called a stage, so removed was it from all the changeful atmosphere of myriad life? Why was this man, though he was surely one in authority, standing here alone talking to me, as if we were met by chance on a deserted street? Where were all the signs of what he meant to make a mighty enterprise? Over the brow of the hill, his forces were, of course, encamped, but surely they must be carrying on the bustling activities of the soldier’s life. There was no sound of it. We might have been a world deserted since it began to roll through space. I could not bear it: the human part of me rebelled and clamored for my kind. I blundered into speech.

“I suppose,” I said, “I am told, your forces are encamped over yonder.”

He turned his quick glance on me.

“Who told you?” he asked.

But I was hurrying on. Why not ask a little thing of him who, in his arrogance, had made nothing of asking much of me.

“Let me go up there,” I said, in a rush, “to the top of the hill and look down on them. It must be a wonderful sight.”

XIII

He considered, his eyes on mine. They, by some probably accustomed action of his will, were consciously trying to dominate. And they did dominate me, though not to the extent he wished. At least I saw his purpose. I was to agree with him, but he had only succeeded in showing he meant me to agree. It was simply the fact that he was so powerful, from some inner fount of will, that you could feel the impact of him like a calculable force, and though you might have set your mind against it, still you knew you could only effectually resist it by the use of all your own forces, mind and body. And now he spoke.

“That,” said he, “is forbidden.”

And I saw that if he said it was forbidden, it was irrevocably so, and though I was, if I could judge, stronger than he in every physical sense, I must not even push past him to the point he denied me, lest I infringe upon an authority I neither respected nor understood. Yet suddenly a devil of impatience possessed me, and I said to myself: “I’ll go, if only to see whether I can.” How it would have turned out I don’t know for, facing, as I was, down the hill, I saw Annette turn about and walk back over the road she had taken, while Terence, at a run, started up the hill toward us. Here again seemed urgent business. We were always charging about, as if on summons, and usually to no purpose. This the more annoyed me, because I thought it probably was instigated by Annette. She had conceived some new way of convincing the General that she could serve him, and thought it more skilful to send Terence with a message than to face him herself, she who was ever making men her tools. Terence, approaching us, looked bothered, as he seemed always to be, in these intricacies of an unfamiliar world where he wanted to escape the shackles thrust upon him by his impetuous earth life, and sit down to a homely intercourse with “home.” He halted, and saluted awkwardly, not as if he knew very well how to do it but supposed it was required.

“There is a message for you,” he said to me. “The Memory Man wants you.”

“A message?” I repeated, my heart quickening, for I thought of Mary in that far place and knew she would not know how to communicate with me, unless the Memory Man could manage it. “How did it come?”

That was too much for him. I could have laughed when I realized that he was confused, as I often found myself, by the simplicities of the place, and yet took them for granted in the most unthinking way.

“Why,” he said, “I don’t know. I guess I just heard it, that’s all. Anyhow, that’s it. He wants you. The Memory Man.”

The General gave a little impatient shake of the head.

“It is quite simple,” he said, “from mind to mind. He could have reached you direct, if he had taken the trouble to find out where you were.”

“That’s it,” said Terence innocently. The boy was the most ingenuous soul. “But he didn’t want anybody to know. The message was confidential.”

So the General himself was not to know, and Terence had plainly told him. The Roman face took on a look of pride.

“Go at once,” he said to me. “Whatever he has to say to you, make him also give you a clear report of that picture he says he received by chance. Set it down, or let him, unless you are sure you will not forget. Have you fitted yourself with that capacity?” he asked, piercing into my mind, I felt, with those all-seeing and yet defeated eyes. “Do you know how to transfer words and impressions to your brain so that they are as accurate as a transcript on metal?”

No, I said humbly, I did not.

“Then,” he commanded, “see that the man sets it all down in a concise form and do you bring it here to me.”

And Terence and I set off at once down the hill. But we had not gone three paces before he called us back. The order, in one word, was quick and short. Strangely, I do not now remember what the word was. It might have been something from a language I did not know. But it rang with an authority I should no more have dared resist than if it had been the command of an officer set over me by all the military fiats of empire. In that moment he was changed, and I saw, for the first time adequately, the appalling force of the man, his destructive power, if this be not obscure to say: for I cannot express it fully. I saw his godlike quality of brain, though how that should have lasted when his earthly brain had long been burnt to ashes in his native Rome, I could not tell; and I saw the force in him which was as potent for destruction as for building up. I wondered at him and I feared that dreadful quality. Yet I did not love him. I was not for a moment overcome by that rush of the blood which is hero-worship and, in our humility before it, makes us whisper: “Here is the model of what man should be.” He had determined upon some new thing, some untried gesture to meet a change of circumstance. I now began to read those signs in him, and I never lost the trick.

By an imperious gesture he motioned Terence back. Raw, innocent youth was of no use to him. For his purposes I was the better man, because I, too, while I was on earth had wanted things unduly. I had learned, through wanting them, some slight knowledge of the minds of men. He could use me. Therefore it was to me he spoke. He stood there in the manner of one delivering an oration, and began with a dignity commensurate with great matters. He was of slight build. I think I have said that he was not over tall, and yet in his pose and his entire manner of delivery he was majestic. I can not repeat what he said, either word for word or in the order of his dialectic. But this it was in substance, and of this I am sure. He had, he said, a great belief in me as a bearer of his instructions to the Hermit known by many as the Memory Man. But it laid me open to the possibility of being known as his, the General’s, confidant. Therefore I might at some points, find myself open to question about affairs up here at the camp, and I must be prepared to answer with discretion. I had found him alone, and I might easily have wondered at that. It had not seemed well, at that time, to explain. But the moment had come. I was to know. I had asked if I might look over the brow of the hill at the encampment where his forces lay. He had forbidden it. Now, the conditions having changed, he retracted that refusal. We would go together to the vantage point where I must naturally expect to see his men engaged in their manoeuvres.

“Come,” he said.

He turned with me and we paced together to the top of the hill. I was as tall as he and, though not heavily built, a bigger man; but I was conscious of the meanness of my presence and action, as they might have looked to anyone watching us: for I was mere man, though a man who had taken on that strange garb, a heavenly body, and he was imperial. Was it his belief in himself, his assumption that not the earth alone but the universe owed him homage and would continue to owe it until he could exercise authority from his rightful eminence? We reached the brow of the hill, I adapting my pace to his uneasily, and there he stopped and said no more, leaving my eyes to tell me what they would. What did I see? A spacious plain, adorned by every fair device of nature with a green boskage of trees at intervals beyond what might be called the ample borders of the plain, and all lying under a warm, beneficent light of heaven, sufficiently broken by shadows from the few light clouds in a sapphire sky. And the field was empty. Even tents were lacking or any form of engines of war: in short, what one might have expected to find in an expanse recently occupied by troops under martial discipline. The only sign of their occupation I could see was that the ground was not of the tender green I had grown accustomed to in this spot I called heaven. It was brown and bare from the trampling of many feet. I turned to him. He was waiting for me in what looked like a proud isolation, as if it had been necessary to bring me here, that I might make of it what I would. But he must have known I could make nothing of it, and he said, as if it were a commonplace of his command:

“My forces have been drawn off there to the west for a series of manoeuvres I could not well initiate here. I shall join them later. Meantime I have waited here to receive your report from him you call the Memory Man. It is well for me to enjoy an interval of rest and quiet. I do not like an uninterrupted acquaintance with the panoply of war. Here alone—for a moment, as it were—I feel myself to be the statesman merely, who needs actual seclusion now and then, to think on the problems of empire. But if the man you call the Memory Man, has learned, by some of his scientific devices, that my forces have marched, assure him that it is by my orders.”

“Naturally your orders,” said I stupidly. “I see.”

But my mind was venturing a comment of its own, which I had no reason for sharing with him. He had called himself a statesman. Was he a statesman? He did not strike me as being one. He was a soldier. He turned about and we walked together to the colonnade where I had found him, and he dismissed me with a gesture, and I hurried down the hill after Terence who had been waiting for me.

XIV

When I came up with Terence he turned and went on with me.

“Selden,” said he, “things are different somehow. They look mighty strange. Something’s brewing down here. And up there, too. Where was he taking you?”

“He took me,” I said, “to the brow of the hill. It overlooks the plain.”

“Well?” he said, in an impatience not like his first boyish wonder over the place. “Get on, Selden, get on.”

“You know what we were told,” I reminded him. “That is, I was. His encampment was there, his forces. I had asked to see them.”

“Well? well?” he clamored.

I saw no reason for not telling him.

“There are no forces,” I said. “Not a man.”

He had a counter surprise for me.

“Oh, I knew that,” said he.

What else was he likely to know?

“Where are they then?” I asked.

He answered as if it were all as simple as the latest press despatch.

“Oh, the old man marched ’em away.”

“What old man?”

“The old farmer.”

“Milton Blake? Who told you?”

“His wife. She’s down here, too. Waiting for you. Pretty well out of her head. She and Cintra are wild, somehow, quiet but wild, you know, the way women are. They’ve got something on hand.”

And there, as we came down the hill, the two women were, sitting on a bench and no other person in sight, and about them that strange look of composure as if the stage had been set for them to enter. They rose, as we came, and I had a sense that it was without agreement, but that each knew the talk was to be momentous, and they felt they could best carry out their part in it by facing us. I had got into the habit of looking keenly at men and women here, even after so short an absence, because I was curious over the changes that could befall them in the briefest intervals. And these two were no longer the women whom my eyes had been dwelling on ever since I had been here, with wonder at their growing beauty. Each wore a look of grave concentration that may come of thought. They had, I believe, decided upon something and I was to know what it was. Flavia spoke.

“Milton,” said she, “has gone.”

“Where?” I asked.

Then her anxiety crept out, though in a controlled way, because, it became evident, she had to consider Cintra’s feelings in addition to her own.

“He got tired of it,” she said, from a determined calm. “Milton’s never been accustomed to being ordered round, and as soon as he saw it wasn’t leading anywheres, he struck. He went off. I knew how it would be. I knew he never’d put up with it, never in this world.”

Cintra was watching her rather mournfully as if quite understanding what she felt and waiting to tell her what you might expect from wilful men you could not influence.

“He doesn’t feel so much interested in the idea of conquest,” I ventured to suggest. I purposely made it as grandiloquent as I could, because it seemed to me easier for everybody to relinquish an idea of moment than to see it dwindle to something hardly worth the giving up. But that was not to be. Both women were on edge. They were not irritated in a vulgar way, but it could be seen they were bearing a strain which surprised while it excited them.

“That isn’t it,” said Flavia miserably, and I couldn’t help noting the queer dramatic value of her more cultured speech broken by frequent lapses of old New England dialect. And she added, as if in despair and yet an unwilling admiration, “I’ve got to tell you. Milton’s gone off with the troops.”

I laughed, a note only and quickly controlled, but I couldn’t help it. Here was New England turning the tables on ancient Rome. But there was no laughter in it for Flavia, nor for Cintra either. They looked at me sadly, and I should not wonder if both of them despised me. Indeed, Cintra virtually told me so.

“You don’t understand,” said she.

Flavia gave her a look evidently of implied thanks for coming in, and herself continued:

“You know,” she said to me, “I guess you know there ain’t any troops to speak of any way. There was. I understand there was.”

She turned to Cintra, who put in, with a painstaking air, as if what she had to tell must be told rightly.

“At one time,” said Cintra, “soon after the General came here, there was a good deal of enthusiasm for him and many flocked to his standard. But with the attempt to build the road to the”—she hesitated, and then went on calmly as if knowing that was what I had been taught to call it—“the Holy City, and the failure of the attempt, and then with the news that seemed to filter about that there were”—here again she paused, but went on bravely—“gods who talked with the forces as they met them alone and seemed to forbid it—the men got discontented. Some, I suppose, were frightened. Any way, they began deserting, and they did desert until none were left except the General’s own bodyguard. And now they, too, have gone.”

“With Milton,” added Flavia, from a certain fatalistic satisfaction. “They’ve gone with Milton.”

And so strangely are we made that I felt she deplored the whole business, but that she was proud of her conquering Milton.

“Did he tell you he was going?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Did he tell you why?”

“Oh, yes, he told me why.”

Again her voice rang with that unwilling pride.

“He said there was nothing on earth”—she bit her teeth upon the word, but it refused to be stopped by them—“nothing that could be done till somebody or other’d gone up and seen what was there. And he told the men so, and one after another they slunk off home—you know, the homes they’d come from round the bend of the other road.”

I looked at Terence and I found he, too, was remembering how Annette had come crying back without her horse.

“I know,” I said. “The homes they’d left when they went to join him.”

“Yes, and they went back there and armed themselves,” she said, “no, not with guns, but axes and all kinds of things you could think of for cutting through that woods up there. And when they’d got fixed up, all complete, like—like choppers, you know—they met Milton somewheres they’d agreed upon and,” she concluded, “I s’pose they’re up there now cutting their way through.”

I remembered Annette’s angry yet clear-headed testimony about the green barrier she had found.

“But,” I said, “you can’t get into that city or province, or whatever it’s called. It’s been tried.”

“Oh, yes, you can,” said Flavia, adding with a childlike confidence, “These could. Why, of course they could. Their folks are there. They know ways. It’s their home.”

“The point is,” said Cintra patiently, with an implication of its being best to waive all this, “he has gone for that very purpose, and the men have gone with him. I do not for a moment believe,” she said generously, “that if he should find the way, he would keep his discovery from the General. He is an honest man, headstrong but honest, and he has now taken matters into his own hands because he knows there is great disaffection among even these few men who are left. They have seen the General’s fortunes go steadily down. They know he has promised and promised and has not been able to perform. And now he is alone.”

Her face fell into such despairing bitterness that I ventured on an impulsive word of sympathy.

“He is not alone,” I said. “He has you.”

She turned her heavy look on me, and shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I have left him.”

That, I knew, was impossible, and I also knew she could not play the childish game of leaving him to repent his arrogance. I said so.

“No,” said I. “You haven’t left him. You couldn’t, after—” I was remembering the long, long past, but I remembered, too, his saying: “I am a broken man.” If she knew he had said that, surely she would go back to him. But I did not dare tell her, for how should I know whether it was best for her to go back? I had at least begun to learn that the spirit might have to take its own way in loneness for a time. Or could it obstinately make its own time the “forever” that is perhaps a figure of speech, yet an appalling one?

“We are going together,” said Flavia quietly, and I, seeing they were in agreement, felt a little tranquillized. But could Flavia leave her Milton? I thought not. Cintra spoke again.

“The way up there,” said she quietly, “has got to be found. We are going to find it.”

Where was all the gentle obedience of Flavia’s trust in it as the Holy City to be entered only by consent of Powers too sacred to be named? It was she who answered me. I suppose she read my mind.

“We think,” she said, with great simplicity, “it will be all right for us to find it if we can, but not for them. For they want to find it to hack and hew—no, no,” she cried, as if the words themselves had frightened her. “But they want to march in, and we want to just go up to it, go up quiet as we can and kneel down, and pray for them to be stopped.”

Cintra was looking at her in an ineffable mildness of patience which spoke plainly of great love. Laid upon her proud beauty like a veil, it only subdued it to a new pathetic quality. I could see that Flavia was lovely to her in a way she could not comprehend; but I did not see her kneeling to any gods not of her own conception.

“And now,” said Flavia, with a quaint homely courtesy, “I guess we’d better be going.”

The same thought leaped into my mind and into Terence’s. We tossed it, each to the other like a ball, a bright-colored ball it was, I thought, I was so pleased with it. I seemed to see it gleaming in the sun. I don’t know who tossed it first, but it was I who spoke, and I did it with all gentleness.

“No,” said I to Flavia. “You mustn’t try to do that by yourselves. You don’t know how others have tried it nor what they’ve found.”

“Oh, yes,” said Flavia, gently in her way. “We know. Cintra here knows more than tongue can tell. Yes, we’re going, and as far as I can see, we’d better start right off.”

“But first,” I said,—and this was the bright ball Terence and I had tossed each other—“we want you to talk it over with somebody else. That’s where we were going when we saw you here.”

“Who?” asked Cintra. “Who is it we could ask, or even listen to?”

“The Memory Man,” said Terence eagerly. He was so sure of its being the right thing that he couldn’t wait for me, though he was always so scrupulous about retiring behind me as an older man. “He’s the best ever. He found my father for me. That is, he told me how. And mother. And—”

He was tumbling over himself with eagerness, and I put in:

“He knows—” and then I, too, became foolish and eager. “Everything!” I said. “He knows how to send you to places you never heard of. You don’t even know they exist. Come along, any way. There’s no harm in asking him.”

Now it was the two women who looked at each other in unspoken question. And the answer was that they turned about up the hill, and we were glad, Terence and I, and turned with them and we all went on together. They walked beautifully, yet with a difference: Cintra with a sweeping stride and the action suited to processions or where dignity was all, and Flavia with great steadiness but in a self-forgetful ease. And being at Cintra’s side, I said to her:

“You walk as if you were used to”—and I could not think how to put it, and ended with a commonplace—“Roman streets and people looking on.”

She smiled a little, scornfully, I thought, not of me but of the past.

“When I was in the Roman streets,” she said, “I was a flower-girl. Since then, I have been thinking what it would be to be the wife of a conqueror—and not to disappoint him.”

Again that look came into her face, scorn of the thing her Caesar was fighting for, and yet a mother’s anguish for his misery if he failed to get it. And Terence read her thoughts, as did I, and I could see, by the quick trembling of his lip, how beautiful he found her and how sad. After that, we went on in silence, taking very little time about it: for our feet, like the Memory Man’s when he came down to us, seemed to be winged. And once I had that feeling of the unseen Presence when it seemed to speak to me, and I stopped short. But though I waited an instant and let them go on a few paces, nothing came of it. And somewhat farther on, when we had nearly reached the house indeed, Flavia stopped. The color was in her face. Her eyes were large and, of a sudden, brilliant.

“What’s that?” she cried sharply.

She was looking at a point on the left of us, at about the height of her own waist.

“What is it?” we echoed, Terence and I.

Cintra said nothing, but she looked at Flavia, her eyes exploring her face, and not leaving it to follow the direction of Flavia’s own excited gaze.

“I am not sure,” said Flavia uncertainly. “No. I can’t be sure. Unless—but I can’t do it now,” she concluded. “Come, let’s get on.”

So we did go on, and there, at the left, was the path leading into the woods, and we took it, single file, and there was the little brown house and, to my delight, the Memory Man in the doorway, waiting for us. And he, too, was excited, though only, I believe, with impatience for things to be accomplished. He was too wise to the ways of this perfectly working world to shudder back from anything it offered him. He had learned what I believe he felt to be the mathematics of conduct: obedience. He had, of course, not expected Cintra and Flavia, unless he had learned they were coming by some of those delicate means of communication I did not yet know; but he merely smiled at them and bowed in a courtly, though not an exaggerated welcome, with a little gesture toward the doorway, standing aside to let them pass. But they did not go in, and nobody noticed, for he immediately said to me:

“Why isn’t he here?”

“The General?” I asked, hoping it would be a signal to Cintra to say all she wanted to or get her mind into order not to say anything. The forthright habit of speech was not always implicit in me. I was trying to learn it, but I could not always tell the truth without wondering what was wise to tell. The General and I were of one piece in that. We had not by any means been cleansed of our earthly cowardice and expediency.

“Of course,” said the Memory Man, his blue eyes on me as if they might have burnt me. “I sent for him to come.”

“I know,” said I.

“Did you tell him?”

Now he included Terence and me in his curt interrogation.

“Yes,” I said. “Terence brought me word, and I passed it on to him.”

“Well?”

“He refused to come.”

“He refused to come,” said the Memory Man thoughtfully, looking down at the ground and evidently considering. “He refused to come! well!” If my answer had troubled him he seemed to throw it off, as if, one way having failed, he must find another. “Come in,” he said. “We’ll talk it over.”

But Flavia and Cintra, by one consent (for I did think I saw a hint conveyed by the quick pressure of Flavia’s hand on Cintra’s arm) sat down together on one of the benches at the door. Flavia made a little courteous gesture of her own, meaning that we should enter without them, and the Memory Man took it so, for he gave them a smile and followed us. I thought I could well understand why they did not want to be in at the conclave. They might have to disclose more of the General’s purposes than they wished or listen to our discussion of them. They had seemed to speak freely to Terence and me, though not fully, it is true; but the Memory Man wore an air of authority they had no mind to challenge. As to him, he had hardly taken them into the picture at all; and now when they effaced themselves he was undisturbed. He spoke to me, abruptly:

“Do you,” he said, “see a difference in this room?”

I looked about me. It was the same dusk of brownness, as if it had been built out of a world of dying leaves, of old mellowed wood, of woman’s lovely hair. I pause to laugh at myself because I am mixing in this confusion such brown loveliness as I think of without reference to its form and body. Can one build a house out of brown leaves or a woman’s hair? Perhaps not: but we can take our pleasure in thinking those things into a house after it is built. But there was something I did notice, and I should have said I had not found it so before, simply because the trees had been so thick. At the right of the door we entered was a window and high over this a smaller window with a closed shutter. In the shutter was an eye-hole, and through that hole came a shaft of light, and the light was beyond words beautiful, broken into colors not merely, I should say, of the spectrum, but exceeding it in range.

“Is that what you mean,” I asked, “the effect of light? That wasn’t so the other day.”

“It isn’t an effect of light,” he said impatiently. “It is light.”

“But what does it mean?” I asked. “What breaks it up? have you got a prism out there? But any way, the sunlight couldn’t get through to it. The woods are too thick.”

He shook his head.

“No,” he said, “that wasn’t what I meant. It never was there before.”

“The window isn’t new,” I said. “I saw it and noticed the eye-hole and thought it was of no use because it looked on those dark woods,—lovely, like the house and everything round it, but dark.”

“Yes,” he said, “so it was; but now there’s a shaft, a clean cut through the tops of the trees, and the light comes in. And don’t you see what it is? It’s the light from the place that has driven our noble Roman crazy. Here! step up on this chair and get your eyes level with the window. Now, do you see?”

I did see. Through the leaves, there was an open shaft, and along it, in the silence of light, came those fires of heaven. I couldn’t bear it with any appearance of composure. I stepped down from the chair, mazed by the wonder of it.

“But who,” I said, finding my voice, “who’s been cutting the way for it through the trees? at that height? and with that exactness? How did they know where the light would fall? and did they mean it to fall just here? for you?”

I had never seen his face so set nor of such stern purpose. Before this, I had found him apparently content among his daily pursuits, amazing though they were; but here he was no more at home. The strangeness of it baffled him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know anything. Sometimes I think it’s a message. I’ve got a little daft about messages. I want so to get mine through to the earth. Then I began to think it might be a sort of consolation: ‘Be of good cheer,’ you know. ‘Don’t give up the ship.’ Those things do happen here. It’s such a kind place, Peter!” The tears came into his eyes, and he dashed them away with his hand. “There never was anything like it. Now isn’t that bathos!”

And he laughed a little, remembering what we had reason to believe, and I laughed, too. And Terence had turned away, so that only one shoulder was toward us, and I knew he also was thinking, with a boy’s unformulated emotion, about the kindness of the place.

“Now,” said the Memory Man, dismissing these mysteries of our state because we had immediate things to do, “as to this room. Look round you. Don’t you see any difference? the table, for instance?”

“Why!” I cried loudly, “there’s nothing on it. Before, you had a million contraptions, wires, batteries, I dare say. And now—now—”

“Now,” said he, laying his fingers lightly on what looked to me like a little box and no more, “this is all there is. It was through this the story came: Rome, two thousand years ago. It’s alive now. It can tell me other things and I shall hear. But for the rest, what I’d been working on for years, I’ve given it up.”

XV

He had given it up. Why? Simply because he had worked so long at it without result? Because he had had a vagrant message that led him back two thousand years, and involved him with the destiny of the man up there for whom, I knew, he felt no personal concern? He motioned me to a chair, and we sat down. When I saw him now, seated, I realized how small he was, not so much short as slender and clothed in the dusty brown that made him look like a moth bewitched into the form of man, and with those blue eyes that might well have served, in their brilliancy, for the jewelry of a moth’s wing. His hands were on his knees and he stared at me thoughtfully. Indeed, his absorption made it seem almost as if he need not talk at all, but only think within himself and I was in the line of his mind’s action and so he talked to me. I thought how different he looked from the moment when I had seen him first: not tired, so much as carried away out of himself. Though I had never seen anyone here who looked tired: concerned, anxious, it might be, but never as if life ebbed out of them.

“I have given it up,” he said, “what I told you I was after. It isn’t that I’m discouraged because I didn’t get it. I still think I might. But in the light of what’s going on here now, I see it’s of no importance. It was one of the great egotisms, that’s all.”

“Like love,” I ventured, “or poetry, or plays. All the arts. They’re all great egotisms.”

He scarcely heard me. He went on, from his trance.

“What difference does it make whether I’m remembered on earth, remembered as I was? What I did there, the deeds, they abide. They were not good deeds. No, they were ill. But the earth somehow has righted herself, that part of it I disturbed, and if she hasn’t, I can’t do anything now.”

“But why did you think”—I began and he, as I stopped, went on with it:

“Why did I think I could? Because I wanted it so frightfully, and the great liberty of this place made it seem as if it might be done. Don’t you feel that, Selden? the kindliness of it, as if all the ground is fertile and if you want anything you’ve only to plant a seed?”

“But,” I said, “you don’t think it deceives us? It lets us plant the seed, and then somehow we’re betrayed? That’s the way it was on earth, you know.” I thought of all my own mad desires and their wasted growth. “When we were there, we could put every drop of blood into life and get nothing out of it.”

“Yes,” he said, “but that was freedom, too, a perfect liberty, just as it is here. Exactly as it is here. We get nothing out of it, you say. Nothing we see. Nothing anybody sees. But, by God, Selden, I believe the seeds come up. I believe if we tend them they grow.”

“Then why,”—I was going back to his own balked purpose, “why don’t you hang on and see what comes of it?”

He did not answer for a moment, and then his thin face softened magically, and I could have said the blue eyes were again wet.

“Selden,” he said, “something queer happened to me. I’ve heard two other people tell about it. That woman out there, Flavia, she that’s so simple—she had it happen to her.”

Then I knew.

“You mean,” I said, “the Person, the Voice, I don’t know exactly what—It came to you?”

He nodded, as if, under the weight of his recollection, he could not speak.

“And,” he said, “it was at the moment when I’d given up the thing I wanted so damnably. I’d seen for the first time I’d got to be told off for what’s being enacted here now, and in order to carry on I’d got to throw away all that old junk,—my sins and what they’d done. Don’t you see? I’d got to fall in.”

“Then you don’t mean,” I said, “that it was the Person, the Voice, we’ll say, that showed you that?”

“No, not to my knowledge. It may have been trying to get at me, of course, but it was only clear after—well, after the line was clear. And all I can tell you—all I want to tell anybody—is that I was right. I wasn’t needed in the sort of thing I’d been grizzling over. But I was needed here.”

Another pause, while he reflected. It wasn’t any sort of daydreaming, this. It was an intensity of thought, a pursuit of the mind into her dark recesses where she keeps her memories and does her work. I could almost see her taking down huge mouldy tomes at his bidding and carefully turning pages yellowed by the past.

“Selden,” he said, “haven’t you suspected there’s something going on here beyond the every-day life of an active people living in the sun?”

“Yes,” I said. I felt as if I shouted it, I was so quick and glad to answer. He was thinking in the way I had begun to think and the companionship of it showed me how lonely I had been. “It’s like a stage,” I said, “all set and waiting for the actors to come on. And who are the actors? Nobody but us? we two or three poor devils, thrown off the earth apparently by chance and finding ourselves here! And there were thousands of others—do we say souls?—that died the same day or the same minute! where are they? where are the ones who died since?”

He smiled a little there, and when he spoke it was quizzically.

“Let’s remember,” he said, “there’s really a good deal of space in the universe. However uneasy we feel—and I own I’m as uneasy as you are—it needn’t be on account of space.”

“Yes,” I went plunging along. Having got what I knew was his sympathetic ear, I wouldn’t be quieted or reasoned down. “But why should it seem familiar, as heaven ought to seem, all kindliness and freedom, just as you’ve said, and yet queer? That’s the only word, queer! And green hedges as strong as the moral law that you can no more break through than—” I paused for a simile. I knew you could break through what we had learned to call moral laws, though perhaps with extreme inconvenience in the end.

“That’s it,” he said quietly. “The hedges. They’re a part of it. I begin to understand ’em. I never did before. Have you ever thought they are walls, living walls, to keep somebody in?”

“In?” I repeated. “Like a prison, you mean? like a jail?”

“No, I don’t say that. But if there exists a roaming spirit who threatens the happiness of a great many other spirits, wouldn’t you say it was a matter of wisdom to confine him in one place? And what could be safer than living walls?”

I seem to have selected just one significant word out of this, and I answered:

“Living! So if they were broken through, they’d grow again.”

“I’ve known it to happen,” he said, with a careful composure. “I saw it above there, the first time a squad of men tried to hack their way through. The hedge began to renew itself. Little leaves appeared in the spaces, and they grew like mad. When a thorn came out it was about an inch long, one minute, and the next a savage thing three times as long. Yet not savage. It didn’t look so. It was just a thorn that had made itself long because something beneficent wanted it so.”

“But what did it mean to you?” I asked. “Magic?”

I thought of him sitting there at work in his wilderness of wires, letting the world outside his windows run away with itself, and I wondered at him.

“Oh, no,” he said calmly. “Not magic. I knew it wasn’t. Magic is outside law, if anything could be. But not here, any way. Nothing is outside law. I simply know the soil gushes with fertility and the sun is—well, you know what the sun is here. As to accounting for it—that’s the way it was, that’s all.”

How secure he seemed! but he’d had time to get used to the place in a measure. He’d been here longer than I. Should I ever get used to it? Yet it probably wasn’t so much a question of time as the eyes we’d opened in ourselves before we left the earth, the ears we’d unsealed—but what do I know? Nothing, except that I know nothing. I began again, painfully, crawling along after him: that is, my mind after his, trying to guess out where his was going, because I must be there when he came to something that might be clear to him. I must hear it. I must know. I suppose I came nearer hero-worship than I ever had in my life. I understood it, the strong wine of it, the cleansing wind.

“You say,” I began, “it looks as if all this silence, this loneliness, this jailing in green hedges, might be to keep in some dangerous spirit”—and I gave a great cry and wondered, at the moment, whether it would summon the two women from the outside. “The General!”

Why had I not thought at once? He nodded, smiling a little, and spoke with a peculiar gentleness that was, I thought, for the man up there on the hill who had so misread the intent of earth and heaven and was doomed to a great loneliness until he should understand.

“I think,” he said, as if he were feeling his way through a most intricate guesswork to the truth, “I think there is what I have to call a climax coming and almost here. Why, you write plays, man! Haven’t you the feel of the theatre when it’s most like life? when it’s been leading up and up through—how many acts, say?”

He gave me that quizzical look of his, not like any I had ever seen, as if he meant to chaff me a little for caring so childishly about the stage, and I answered, smiling back at him:

“How many acts? Four, according to my mind. If you mean climbing up to the solution and then—the end. You think this is the fourth act?”

“I think,” he said, “that great soldier”—he was too generous to call him a poor sad spirit who had missed the life he sought for and hadn’t found any other—“I think, from some reason I am the last to know, that he has not, in all the time since he left the earth, changed in any one particular. And so whatever is godlike here, whatever is justice and is love, is ceasing to work slowly upon him as it has been working. It is going to work faster, through you, through me, through Flavia and the woman who loves him”—Here he lowered his voice, remembering the two outside, and I cried out, abashed at my own littleness in such company:

“Through me?”

“Through all of us,” he said gravely. “The curtain is ringing up on the fourth act.”

“But why”—I was going back to what he had said, “why hasn’t he changed? I changed in a minute. Not much. But I began to change. I hadn’t been here”—how long had I been here and what calendar did we use?—“why, man alive!” I cried. “I see myself now as I was. And if there’s a smaller maggot than I that’s crawled into this place I’d like to meet him, that’s all—even if he’s too little to be smashed.”

“I know,” he said, and he smiled at me as if he were glad I’d found it out, because there’d be no help for me else, and in spite of the pity of it I knew he liked me, too. Oh, the kindliness of the place! I have to stop here and say it again. It was all of it saying it, and all the time: “Yes. Do you want it? You may have it if it is good for you and you can get it. Are you hungry? Here is the fruit. Lift up your hand to the tree.”

“But,” I said, “things aren’t given to us here, free gift, you know, as we used to be taught they would be.”

“A land flowing with milk and honey,” he said quietly, as if he were musing and inclined to smile. “I think you could get it, my boy, only you see you’re not to go swimming in the milk or get stuck up with the honey. Now!” He recalled himself. Of a sudden he was serious. “Selden,” he said, “I haven’t lost my earth habit of doubt. A scientist can’t throw away that. He’d cease to be a scientist. He’s got to question things forever. That’s how he gets his proof. And I find myself doubting my Roman friend up there. I find I can’t help thinking these two women have been deceived. He lets you into his big secret, the thing that’s a colossal confession of failure. Instead of showing you his forces, he shows he hasn’t any. They’ve gone. Where? The women, also innocently deceived, tell you their version. I don’t feel obliged to accept that either. I’m inclined to think, not from their testimony but all the logic of events in the past, that if the old farmer has taken a squad away with him to hack down the hedge of Almighty intent—”

“Is that what it’s called?” I broke in.

“No! no! I call it so. Again the testimony of events. I can’t think hedges growing in precisely those positions of defense would be likely to renew themselves automatically except by divine intent. However, that isn’t the point now. The point with me is that I think we shall find old Milton is working under orders, and the women are off on their own just out of anxiety over the whole business. For they think the noble Roman is deserted and their natural force of sympathy, love, allegiance, is involved to better the situation for him. And for Milton, too, so far as Flavia’s in it. They’re negligible, in a way, where the General is concerned. Yes,” he said, with a little grimace, “I’ve got to call him the General, I suppose, now he’s going to take the centre of the stage. Nobody’ll understand me otherwise. But I don’t like the beggar myself. What right has he to be upsetting the balance of power in these worlds spinning along about their own business? It’s got to stop, I’m pretty sure of that. It isn’t going to be allowed.”

“Well,” I said, “what are we going to do?”

He wheeled his chair about a little and looked through the window into the dark forest. He was thinking. Presently he came back to me.

“I’m going to try to call him down here,” he said.

“The General?” I asked.

“Yes. Maybe I can’t. I have an idea he’s so wrapped up in his own toils that he isn’t accessible. I can send him a message. But he won’t get it. Nobody at home.”

“You mean,” I said, “you can send a message from your mind to his, without wires, without any sort of appliances? The way you told me?”

“Yes,” he said, “the way we do when the line is clear. But it isn’t clear. He and I have nothing in common. There’s nothing between us but my beastly scorn of him and his rage at me because I haven’t played his game. But I’ve got to tell him I’m going to play. For whether I’m on his side or whether it’ll prove I’m not, the time has come when we’ve got to know what’s up there in—”

Here he hesitated and brooded frowningly.

“In the Holy City?” I asked.

“Yes, yes,” said he impatiently. “Call it so. That’s the devil of life. There’ve got to be names for things. And when you’ve named a thing, you’ve bounded it. Shut it in,—built a hedge round it,” he added, with his sudden radiance of a smile. “Now! let me alone. No, don’t go out of the room. Only don’t think towards me. I’m going to send my mind up there to him.”

I wondered if I could add the force of my poor uninstructed mind to his, and this he must have felt in me, for he said:

“No! no! you can’t help. You’d only foul the line.”

And he turned away from me again and fixed his eyes on the silent leaves outside. I, too, turned away, but my eyes were on the wall. I tried to withdraw my actual self, where, I didn’t quite know. At first, I wondered a little why Flavia and Cintra were not talking together, or whether we should have heard them, and then I concluded that, with the patience of women when they have to brood and wait, they were as obedient to the needs of the situation as the silent forest and the growing hedge. Then I tried to induce in myself that numbness where we resolve: “I am going to sleep”; and how long it was I do not know when I heard him give a disappointed sigh and say:

“No use! I can’t get him. We’re walled in, each of us, by our own egotism. Well!”

He had turned his chair toward me, and now he rose from it and stood, apparently thinking. I also rose, and waited.

“Well,” said I, at last.

“Do you want to go up there again,” he asked, “to take a message?”

I said I did want to go, I wanted to do anything in the world—here I had one of my queer wonders that were always rising up in me when a commonplace word recalled me to the past. The world? what world did I think I meant? “Anything,” I amended, “to get us all out of this sort of thing. Especially Cintra and Flavia. They’re beside themselves. Or they would be if they weren’t so altogether splendid.”

Then I found I wanted to ask him a question but I couldn’t begin it by his name. And how foolish! It’s so natural to call your friend’s attention. It’s a kind of springboard. If you mean to dive to any sort of depth, you quite need it.

“See here,” I said, “I don’t know what to call you. The others down there below have got you all mapped out. But I can’t say: ‘Hermit, look here!’ Or ‘Memory Man!’ ”

He laughed.

“Yes,” he said, “they did nickname me. And I haven’t formed any intimacies. I didn’t need any other name. But it’s different with you. Why not call me Jacques?”

“Good name,” I said cautiously. Was I disappointed? Did I want to know where he had lived and what were the offenses of his old life on earth, those he had been trying so hotly to expiate? I did, I am ashamed to say, venture one question. “Does that mean you’re—French?”

He thought none the worse of me for my pryingness. He wasn’t one to waste feeling on small things, and I believe he knew then how truly I loved him and how I was to love him in time to come.

“Not now,” he said. “But—Jacques. That’s all. Now,” he added, “I’ll give you your message. Tell him he is to come here with you to consult about certain advices I believe myself to have had, on the state of things here imminent. Tell him I cannot well go to him because I am listening for any further communications such as came to me and with which I acquainted him. And tell him—this is important, so put it before anything else. It will predispose him in our favor. Tell him that so far as refusing to share his interest in the city above there, I now believe that it is for the best interest of us all that we inform ourselves about every circumstance connected with it: its government, its status in this present world and our own right attitude. That’s all.”

I saluted, in a perhaps dramatic desire to inform him that he was my commanding officer, at which act he smiled. But I am sure he understood. Then I hurried out, intending to pass the two women waiting for us with a word only, not telling them anything about the message I was taking. I would leave that to him. But as I stepped out of the door, I found before me only the waiting forest with its silent implication of having a good intent toward all it surrounded, but nothing more. The bench by the door was empty. Not only were the two women not there but I had, in the sense of stillness and forest isolation about me, a certainty that they were intentionally beyond sight or call. I had to tell him, but somehow I couldn’t step back into the house to do it. I mustn’t leave the empty stage of this waiting scene. I called to him, low and eagerly.

“Jacques!” I called. “Jacques!”

He came at once, and the empty bench told him its story.

“But where are they?” he said, as if to himself rather than to me. And something, some light of discovery, of satisfied intelligence, played upon his face. “Nothing could be better,” he said. “They’ve gone, gone where they said they were going, to find the path. Two women alone! Tell him that. He’s the very one to despise the practical value of a woman’s act. Cintra has probably never been anything to him but his right hand, to do what he commanded, or a breast to give him ease. If he cares anything for her—anything—he’ll go wild at thinking of her in that maze of growing leaves—and thorns. Tell him to come, come quickly, here.”

“But,” I threw back at him, a stride away, “Flavia’s with her. She can take care of her. Flavia’s an angel, more or less.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” he called. “But what are angels to him?”

I didn’t answer, for I was far down the hill.

XVI

Running, as I was, I tried, at intervals, a few tricks of speed. I remembered how Jacques had seemed, in coming down the hill that other time, to be half running, half flying. Why shouldn’t I see what that half flying meant? And I tried lifting my feet together in a wild rhythm. It wasn’t leaping. It was rather like the dreams I used to have when I was a boy, about giving a little push with the toes and finding I was slightly above the floor, floating, with a sense of the most buoyant power. And whether I did float at moments, I don’t know—I have never had time to prove it indubitably, and I wouldn’t ask Jacques—I wanted it to be my own little private give and take with the universe—but it was true that I did make great speed down the hill. As I went, I glanced from side to side of the highway wondering if I could perhaps cut across to my advantage, and hit the market-place. But always there was the hedge of green, and though once I did stop, at the point where Flavia had given her little cry of discovery, I saw nothing, no sign nor loophole, and I went, running or half floating, on. But still I wondered vaguely what she could have seen there. When I reached the spot where the two roads converged, I turned up the hill again and took the other road, and it was not long before I was at the market-place, and there he stood, the General, arms folded, a monument of life at its acme of repose. He was gazing down the hill, with the air of a man looking out to sea; his gaze went over my head and he did not lower it to greet me as I came. Yet he must have seen me. I was the only thing on the road; but evidently it did not suit his ideas either of dignity or real aloofness to take me in. I did not pause before him to deliver my message in correct form. Jacques had inspired me too fully with the idea of shocking him into action. I began before I got to him. I called to him, and very rudely, I suppose:

“They are gone!” I cried. “Gone! gone! Don’t you hear me? They are gone!”

By that time I was close upon him and I stopped, not out of breath from the rate I had been running, but calm as he. I had a devil of enjoyment within me: for all mixed up in my determination to move him as Jacques wanted him to be moved was a queer glint of fun in thinking this way of getting over the ground was great. Who needed air-planes when their legs were their own best servitors and their lungs seemed to be up to all emergencies, and ready to take on an ordinary pace after the emergency was over? You see, at that time I didn’t know much about my new body nor how it was constructed. I know more now, but not enough. Even then it was exquisite to me, so easy moving, so—well, so invincible. And the feel of it all was glorious. He had lowered his gaze to take me in, as if he were not surprised, perhaps not interested, but ready to accord me a dignified attention: ready to help me perhaps, in case I needed it, for even then, deserted by his followers and with the iris light from the Holy City beating ironically down on him, he had the air of owning the scene and being adequate to its governance.

“Who are gone?” he said, a little arrogantly.

I could see he suspected I had brought him news of his vanished host, and he would not let himself be shaken. Surprise? that was not for him.

“Cintra,” I said, and at her name more black leaped into his eyes and he did start a little. “She and Flavia,” I said. “I saw them when I went down from here. They talked with me. Then they walked up with me to the Hermit’s house,”—Jacques, I thought, with a throb of pride, was his name to me, perhaps to me only. “They sat down there,” I continued, in a rush, “on those benches outside the door.” I thought he lifted his eyebrows slightly. I had to translate him as I went along. It was part of the excitement of him. That little muscular comment of the brows seemed to ask how he should know of benches outside a Hermit’s door? What was the man to him? “I went in,” I said. “We left them there. When I came out, they were gone.”

“And where were they gone?” he enquired, with what seemed but a mild interest. And I had my answer ready, the answer Jacques would have had me make:

“Where they told me they were going,” I said. “I assume so. They had only put it off because I begged them to. The Hermit is so wise I knew he’d dissuade them from trying it, if the idea of it troubled him as much as it did me. What they were on their way to do, I mean.”

“And what were they going to do?” he asked indifferently. Yet I felt the anxiety underneath.

“They were going,” said I, not perhaps keeping a triumphant interest entirely out of my voice, “to find, alone, mind you, the two of them, the way up to the Holy City.”

“No!” he cried, as truly beside himself as I could wish. “No! no! It is foolhardy. It is worse. It’s tempting the gods. She must come back before she is destroyed. Do you hear me? Tell her so.”

“I can’t tell her,” I said, with all the calmness I could manage; and I really had time to think I was acting the rôle Jacques had outlined for me and acting it very well. “She’s gone, I tell you. They’ve both gone. They’re lost—in the maze. It is a maze, you know,” I said. “Didn’t you know it? Well, you’ve lost them in it.”

His face took on a sharper outline. Curious! when that strange, invincible self of his began to act within him he looked more than ever like marble that had never softened into the changing lineaments of man. He was all anger now, though it was so controlled.

“Have they gone,” he asked, “with that man, that peasant, the tiller of the soil?”

“Milton?” I said. I spoke lightly, for I was beginning to enjoy myself. The sharp contrast of it all, the grotesque drama played by these two men in spite of themselves, men who could no more understand each other than dumb animals born an earth’s circumference apart. “Milton?” I repeated. “He’s not a peasant. He’s a farmer. A freeholder.” I had forgotten what they had been called in Rome. “No. That’s the joke of it. They’ve lost him, too.”

He stood looking at the ground; perhaps he was thinking, perhaps he felt too deeply to let his eyes betray themselves.

“That’s the joke of it,” he repeated absently, and it occurred to me he might not have heard the phrase before. Nobody was likely to have ventured it for his academic ear. And I saw I was lagging in my rôle of haste.

“We must find them,” I insisted. “That’s what I’m here for. The Hermit sent me. I was to tell you he understood at last that it was necessary for him to put aside his own work and go in with you. Things are about to happen. They’re happening now.” Here I saw I was exceeding my instructions, and I pulled up short, adding: “And first, those two have got to be found. We know where they’re likely to be. In that green prison that grows all the time, nobody knows how, thicker and thicker, taller and taller. And full of thorns.”

And then he said the most incredible thing I could have imagined from lips of man, and such a man, if there ever were such as he. He did not say it for my hearing. He had forgotten me. He was remembering only the sweet consolation of his saddest hours, which had followed him through all the years and now, having left him, must have done it for his mysterious good. And this was Cintra. And what he said was, in that low, half whispering voice:

“And she is timid in the dark!”

He loved her, then! And I, poor maudlin playwright, ready to catch at that lovely flower, emotion, pluck it, smell it for an instant, even if I had to drop it and go on, I could have cried—and so doing, summoned perhaps another flash into those eyes of his: for should I not have seemed even a lesser man than the peasant poor old Milton looked to him? He spoke, quickly, the soldier in him:

“Come. We must go.”

And without pause of a moment, we were hurrying down the hill. Was he armed? I thought of the dagger he drew when they stabbed him, those years long past. Did he wear a dagger now? And we went down the hill, not speaking, I silent from a queer sense I had that I must wait for him to begin, and he probably from his anxious recognition of the perplexities and dangers of his life. No, I should not say dangers, because this place is so unbelievably kind. The ordinary perils of life, I could believe, have no place here. And yet the peril of wrong action might be in those delays whereby the spirit defeats herself on the way to a grounded happiness. I do not know. But the fact of my waiting to be spoken to, as I have said, does have something humorous in it: for here was I, a plain citizen of a democracy, acting before him as if he were a scion of royal blood. And there was something royal about him. It could not have been that he was used to being obeyed, used to looking at the created works of God as if they were no more than raw material turned over to him for his good pleasure. He was a portent. He was something the universe had made, either for God’s purposes or by chance—was there such a thing as chance?—and now she had him on her hands lest he despoil other fields and cities and roads of being, as he had done in the past. When, on our way uphill, we reached the point where Flavia had given that little start and halted to look so earnestly into the green, I gave it as cursory a glance as possible, hoping he would not see. But he saw. He saw everything. I had begun to understand, now that I had him on a specific quest, how ready he was: the soldier and nothing else.

“What is it?” he asked. “What did you see?”

“Nothing, sir,” I told him, with the ceremony his presence asked for.

“You expected something?” he insisted, and I answered:

“Hardly expected. But I saw nothing.”

We kept on without further talk and presently came to the little brown house. The door was open, as I had always found it, and there stood Jacques in the doorway, slender and brown and—I had time to think it—young, as if he had entered into some vestibule of fresh hope and action, and the light of it was in his eyes. He saluted ceremoniously and the General acknowledged the salute, and then Jacques stepped aside and we entered the house. There I saw that preparations had been made for us. The brown table was still clear of the scientific appliances I had once seen on it, though now I noted them, or their like, an orderly confusion of them, on a little table near by; and three chairs, patently for us, were ready at the long table, one at the head and one at the foot and one at the side opposite the window looking up the green hill. I placed myself behind that, as Jacques drew out the larger chair in the place of authority, and stood waiting for the General to sit down in it. And the General did so, as if it were his right, and Jacques went on and sat facing him at the foot. It was not a large table, so that we were not far separated; but the whole aspect of things was very formal. The General spoke.

“Did you,” he said to Jacques, “wish to tell me any details of the story you received from Rome?”

He spoke in a perfectly commonplace manner, as if he meant the Rome of last week from which Jacques might have been receiving news by cable; and Jacques was equal to that, too. His eyes burned, but he spoke with a deliberative calmness. He had, it seemed, detected certain new vibrations in his apparatus. Something different had happened to it. What? He did not know. Then the story began to reach him.

“Who,” asked the General, “was telling the story? There were no wireless operators then, such as you say there have been since.”

“No one was telling the story,” said Jacques quietly. “No human voice. The air was telling it.”

“To your ears?”

“To my ears and to my eyes.”

“Do you mean you heard—and saw?”

“I heard and saw.”

“Without any appliances? wire or—or whatever attracts that quality from the air?”

It was evident that he knew no more than I about the mechanical devices for communication through the air. His clumsy attempt at indicating them could have been no more futile had it come from me. And Jacques, knowing how impossible it would have been to induct either of us into the labyrinth of mystery wherein he lived at home, merely said quietly:

“My equipment for listening—and for looking—is very simple. As it happens, I have caught a great many messages from the air. Or—not messages. Not what I was working for. But stray words—music sometimes—life that wanders my way. This time something went—I won’t say it went wrong, but something was different. And I was looking and listening and I heard—and saw—that scene acted out in Rome when you were”—He hesitated on the word, and the General supplied it for him, in a skillful negative.

“I was not,” he said, with a tremendous dignity, “killed. They did not know then that we cannot be killed. And I am alive to-day. Your Leader,” he said, turning to me, “preached that shortly after. Nor was He killed, though He was, I believe, treated with great ignominy.”

Jacques drew a sharp breath and perhaps I did, too. The General, it seemed, in his imperial assumptions, would not accept a place lower than the highest. Jacques did not answer this last. He began a slow and careful recital of what he had seen, and I was breathless with interest, for it accorded marvelously with the details that have come down to us. And as Jacques went on, he was watching the man opposite him, and with what eyes! Throughout the entire recital, neither of them looked at me. I believe they had forgotten I was there. Except the General, perhaps: when he was playing any determined part, he was oblivious of nothing. I believe if there had been a flaw in the wood of the table where his hand lay, in a supple strength, he would have memorized it and set it down in a corner of his mind, possibly to be used in some great manoeuvring game.

“You were late,” said Jacques, “in going to the Capitol. The senators were keyed up to the highest pitch. Talk went back and forth. I couldn’t understand that, of course. Latin. Old Latin. A little school-boy Latin is all I know. But they were nervous. And then one went to summon you, and you came. Why was it you didn’t come? Did you know what was happening? Were you afraid”—I think he was going to complete the sentence so that the rashly chosen word should be less offensive. “Afraid they meant to do it at that time,” he may have meant: for Jacques was wise and also adroit, as a man should be who mingles in great affairs. But the General lifted his hand. It was an imperative gesture, and Jacques was silent. The General was asking something.

“Do you know,” he said, “what I had it in mind to do at that time: the state I should have built up, the tribute I should have brought in from east and west, the glory that would have dawned upon the earth wherever a Roman soldier set his foot? But”—he smiled a little, yet with a bitterness easily seen through the veil of his sad tolerance—“I was there. I am here. And I am seeking to-day the kingdom I sought then.”

And from his way of saying it, you would have believed he had voluntarily left the earth, to assume a more regal state where he was now sitting: in that chair at the table where the miracle had been born concerning his death and the downfall of his imperial dreams. And suddenly Jacques himself who, sitting at the table in all the long travail of his inventive mind and who had unwittingly caught that picture out of the air, seemed the greater of the two. But Jacques hadn’t got an answer to his question, and I saw at once that, in the manner of the clever tactician, he had given it up. And I saw another thing. We weren’t here to check up the accuracy of that picture on the air. The table had turned into something else, as one might say. It was the judge’s bench and the prisoner was to be tried. And it was the General who was the prisoner. Jacques leaned forward and, as one in authority, though so simple in all his ways of speech, began interrogating him.

XVII

And strangely the General, however unwilling, could not help answering him.

“You came here,” said Jacques, “from—”

And he named a name, that of the planet where the General had last lived in his long pilgrimage from world to world. I do not name it here for what may be a childish reason. I have a feeling that somehow, ineptly so far as I am concerned, what I write here may, through some freak of strange knowledge, find its way to earth, and there, I believe, not all names are yet to be known. The reason Mary gave me for that still seems to me a valid one: the earth must live in the veil of her ignorance for a long, long time, until a larger track of her orbic destiny is complete. For otherwise how shall her children learn, through their wonder and their pain, that great certainty, the freedom of the will? The General had answered “Yes,” his eyes on his judge’s face, but nothing in his air to betray any depth of interest in what might follow.

“You were sent here,” said Jacques, as if he were reading from an invisible document—as if, indeed, from the script he found in the other man’s eyes—“because your ambition was threatening the innocent and rousing, even here, the evil passions dormant in the weak—those who had left the earth guiltless, we’ll say, of great sins, but were like children, meant to grow up here in peace and happiness.”

This sounded like an accusation a man would shrink from meeting; but strangely it did not strike the accused, as we may call him, in that way. Although he had been sitting straight in his chair—he was always erect, as if with the tacit implication of what a soldier should be—he drew into himself, with a breath, an access of dignity.

“You mean,” he said, “that my dominion over the earth was known”—

Jacques interrupted him.

“Everything is known,” he said.

The General went on as if he had suffered no check.

“And,” he concluded, “there were those who resented my further dominion in the universe?”

Jacques still regarded him, not as if he wondered at his having learned so little here, but as if he were sorry for him. Then he spoke, even more patiently than before.

“You have not,” he said, “changed in any particular that would affect the happiness of other men, not since you left the earth.”

The General remarked, not scornfully, but with simplicity:

“Why should I have changed? If Those by whose hands I was created, had wanted me different, could They not have created me so? Why should I change? Let Them change me for whose interest it is to do so.”

And Jacques continued looking at him. I think he was dazed by the nature of this reply, the naïveté of it, the colossal effrontery which was not conscious effrontery at all. It was merely the statement of a man who had never seen life save by the myopic testimony of his own eyes. But the General, so to speak, came alive. He had suddenly remembered. He rose from his chair.

“We must go,” he said. “At once. What are we met here for but to plan the way to find them?”

“Sit down,” said Jacques, quietly, and the General did sit down. The pupils of his eyes were again darker: that was all to mark the surprise in him.

“I understand your anxiety,” said Jacques. “The two women: you agree with us that we must find them. Not that they are in danger.”

“Not in danger?” said the General, repeating the word in the tone of an imprecation. “Not in danger, shut up, with their own ignorance, in that green inferno of growing thorns and leaves?”

“No,” said Jacques, still quietly, “the leaves won’t hurt them, nor the thorns. There’s nothing in this whole round world to hurt creatures like them. Wait.”

There was a sudden sharp sound, not the tinkling of a bell, but a sound. He got up out of his chair and went to the little table behind the General where all his scientific outfit was arranged in that complicated order. There he slipped over his head what looked to me like a transparent cap of some sort covering his ears and eyes. He lifted one hand and held it up, a wordless injunction to us to be still, and as he stood there his slender body was the most beautiful model I could conceive of a figured Silence, or a heavenly messenger waiting to receive the word he was presently to carry. The General sat immobile, withdrawn into himself. I could see that nothing interested him but the matter in hand, which was Cintra’s rescue from what he still considered the menace of green leaves, and following that, his own threatened prospects. Suddenly Jacques smiled, and the warmth of the smile was wonderful, even below the strangeness of the hooded eyes. Now he slipped the cap from his head and came back to his place, and there he stood a moment, his hand on the back of the chair, regarding me. And he was looking at me, still smiling, and as if there were something ineffable entrusted to him to say and he hadn’t quite the words to say it in. My heart began beating in a responsive warmth and I wondered if it could be what I had expected so many times and what had never come.

“It is for you,” he said.

Then I, uncontrolled in my eagerness, got out of my chair, and was about to rush to the table where the little cap still lay: for if the message was for me, I wanted it for my own ears, every shade and syllable.

“No, no,” he said. “Sit down. You couldn’t take it. But you’re right. It is from her.”

From Mary! and as my heart told me that, the General, also surprised out of himself, said, though in a voice not greatly moved: “From her?”

I knew he meant Cintra. Even now there was nothing in all nature but must be for him alone.

“No,” said Jacques, who was sorry for him. And he turned to me and said:

“Yes. She is coming.”

“When?” I asked thickly. “Can I meet her?”

“At once, she says. And you can’t meet her. You are to carry out what we had previously decided upon, you and I. We are to find Cintra and Flavia. And Mary will go to my house in the woods and wait, however long, until you come. She knows there are disturbances here. She knows you are needed. She begs you will not think of her.”

And, having learned at least the vital need of obedience in this place, I knew I must not think of her. I must “carry on.” A greater voice even than my need had pressed me into this service I did not yet understand but had begun to worship, and I was content. But the excitement of it still bathed me like love itself distilled into drops of a sweet medicament I knew not, even in my imaginings. My veins ran delight mixed with their own warm current. Now I felt that, unpractised as I was in holy living, I had a heavenly heritage. I ventured one question only.

“Has she done what she went to do?”

“No,” he said, “Not entirely. It failed. But it had to fail. She sees that now.”

And his own heart’s desire: that, too, had failed. And here he was, told off by the unseen powers to rescue this imperial egotist from a universe that, in its turn, had also to be rescued. He sat down again, and I saw—or felt, let me say, by the force of that unspoken communion I was beginning to learn—that he wondered whether he ought not rather to bid us, with him, be up and away. Apparently he did see that things had got to be conclusive, and as if the old formulae of earth were never to be done with, but had to be used over and over for the earth-born soul, he said, leaning slightly toward the General, across the space of the empty table:

“I accuse you”—

The old “J’accuse!” I had time to tell myself I loved the continuity of time.

“I accuse you,” said Jacques, “of threatening the peace and happiness of this place and of all places where you set your foot. The Roman foot! that was what you said, wasn’t it? What do you bring into a world where you set that invading foot of yours?”

“Order,” said the General, short and sharp, as if at last he felt constrained to meet another soul as man to man. “Law and order. Plenty. Prosperity. Gold. Corn. For all, understand you. For the poor man as for the rich. Temples to the gods. An architecture that will never die.”

“And who,” asked Jacques, still quietly, though I saw the magnitude of the moment had begun to tell upon him and he was pale, “who will be king?”

The General, as if prepared for immediate answer, was suddenly upon his feet.

“Look you,” he said, “there are whisperings about here. I have not heard them, but I know. And there is talk of One Whom every man worships in his heart and longs to see, and if he does not see Him, still worships Him. That is your Leader,” he said, throwing a glance at me, and speaking passionately as if, though I were so small a thing, I was yet one who, by my fear of the commanding voice, also hindered his own empery. He went on. “What is one Leader to be worshiped and another to be forsaken, as I have been? You ask who is to be king of this kingdom I am trying to build up,” he said, still more passionately. “Do you want it for this Leader of yours Who is invisible to me?”

“Not to everyone,” said Jacques, recalling him. “Many have seen Him. Not I, but many. That wife of the old farmer,—she has seen him, I am very sure.”

“Why,” asked the General, “does He keep Himself hid?” Evidently he was distraught with the unreason of it all. “Why? I am not hidden. I show myself to men as I am. And they desert me. And He is hidden, and the very mystery of it draws all men unto Him.”

How did he know those words, the very form of them? But I could imagine there was a great deal of talk in this place, about the Presence so beneficent to it, and if he had not heard it, Cintra might, even in perplexity, have brought it to him. Jacques spoke, and his voice grew ever gentler as he was the more sorry for a soul so heavily ridden by its own desires.

“He doesn’t hide Himself,” he explained patiently. “He is here, but we do not see Him. It is we who are”—he hesitated—“deaf to Him, not He to us.”

“Here?” said the General, casting about him his quick, competent glance. “Here in this room?”

Strangely, by one impulse, Jacques and I rose and stood. It was not that any tacit argument demanded it, but we stood. The General looked at us, from one to the other, in a frowning perplexity.

“Is this,” he said, “a part of your ritual?”

“No,” said Jacques, and, feeling that we might, we sat down.

“Then,” said the General, “give your minds to the matter in hand. You seem, for some reason I do not know except that you”—he glanced at Jacques—“have a certain familiarity with the other planets, probably through your scientific pursuits,—you seem to have assumed control of the military situation.”

“There is no military situation,” said Jacques. “Except such as you are trying to bring about.”

“Very well,” said the General. “We will say that it did not exist before I came. We will say that none of you saw the marvelous adaptability of that place above there”—And as he spoke the light flamed up, and bloomed resplendent. The track of it, as if laid by hands used to the touch of magic, came straight through the little window opposite me and lay upon the table in a lake of gold. It hardly seems possible to me, even now, though I have never been able to think differently, but I believe he, the Roman, in his absorption in those gigantic dreams of greatness, did not see it. Jacques started and then settled back in his chair, his eyes contentedly upon it. I say contentedly because I think it seemed to him a sign from heavenly witnesses who would be with us in our ignorance and the dark ways of our good intent.

“What is it?” the General said shortly. He had seen the change in us.

But neither of us answered, even by a look at him, and he went on:

“For some reason, that place is rich in every possibility of riches known to man. The mysterious light that falls from it”—and there was the light itself striking in through the window and he did not see it!—“the colors, men say like no earthly colors they ever saw, indicate to me that there are minerals there such as we never had on earth. And the buildings! others who have stronger sight than I tell me there are shadowy outlines of citadels, of mountains also, perhaps, but roofs and towers. And those must be the work of hands.”

He was a necromancer indeed. It was his personal quality, I think, not so much the words that went far toward persuading me; but, even in the face of that bar of burning light, I saw myself following him, acquiescent, up the thorn-defended hill. He must have seen that, for now it was to me he spoke.

“And all that is waiting for the people, the people, mind you, the great multitude, to enjoy. And I call on you to come. And if another voice—the voice of One hidden in a secrecy I do not understand—if the voice of your former Leader forbids your going”—here he stopped and ended imperiously, “I bid you choose between us two.”

And for me the spell broke, and though Jacques was wiser and more steadfast than I and for him there had been no spell, again we leaped to our feet and both of us were crying “No! no!” as if we were a multitude.

The General looked at us. He waited a stern discouraged moment for us to recant, and then, with an indescribable air of puzzled futility, he sank into his chair again, and drummed upon the table with his hand. Now he looked only at the hand, moving idly there as if to comfort him, in that useless activity, for its impotence in serving him. And to my mind he was mere man again, not one of the half gods who can delude us for a little, before the gods arrive. Jacques had become as quiet as a stone. I, with my never-failing recurrence to the stage, felt that he had stepped out of a moment’s melodrama where he had found himself and was glad to be again confronted by the needs of actual life.

“Now,” said he, addressing the General, “shall we go?”

The General looked up at him under frowning brows.

“Where?” he asked.

“To find her,” said Jacques. “To find your wife.”

And the General said, with an ingenuous defection from his rhetorical artifice:

“I had forgotten her.”

XVIII

If this was in the least surprising to Jacques, he gave no sign of it. His time for action had come. He rose, went into the other room, of which the door stood open, and returned with three short-handled axes. The blades were bright, not only at the edge, as if they had just been ground for use, but the entire metal. I don’t know why I set that down; perhaps because the brightness of them somehow struck my eye, and the helves were of a white wood that seemed to indicate their having just been brought out for this present purpose. I hadn’t been a very mechanical person, myself; but I did remember the way all axes had looked to me, the head darkened with use or lying about for generations and the handle grimed with sweat and dirt. Somehow Jacques had got these together for our present vague expedition. I didn’t know whether he hadn’t made them. As I thought of him then (and indeed as I have not ceased to think of him) he could have made anything. And out of nothing, perhaps, in these surroundings: and I said to myself, merely entertained for a minute by the suggestion of the words, the contrast of the old earth legends and this unreasonable certainty: “Bricks without straw!”

He threw me a quick enquiring glance, but I shook my head and the minute passed. He gave me one of the axes and I took it, and then he held out one to the General, who merely looked at it and at him, as if tools of that sort were not for his using. Whatever execution he had done with cold steel in the battlefield, those centuries ago, he was, doubtless for reasons of what he considered policy, a leader here. But Jacques did not stay for argument. He gave a little impatient push with the axe he was holding by the head. I think he even nudged that imperial arm.

“Take it, man, take it,” he said impatiently. “We’ve got to be getting on.”

And the General, not exactly of his own will, but naturally, took it. It is my opinion that he was not so much shocked into action by having an order addressed to him as by one word in the order. When had he been called “man” before? “Take it, man,” Jacques had said, unthinkingly; but that it could be without thought showed how indubitably this dominating soul had been reduced to the status of all the souls born upon the earth and translated to this place by birth again. Well, he took the axe, and Jacques preceded us to the door leading into the woods, and here he stood aside as did I, to let the General pass out. And the General, still apparently a little dazed by his own inability to resist the tacit assumption that he was to do as he was told, did step out, and we three stood there for a moment, Jacques in thought and we waiting upon the outcome. But what conclusion he was making, I shall never know: for suddenly that bright light of discovery flashed over his face. He cocked his head a little. Like a dog, he was listening.

“Hark!” he said, putting up his hand to be the more emphatic. “What’s that?”

It was, if I may say so, an earth sound, simply for the reason that I had not yet heard it here. It was a sound I loved: the sharp clip of an axe on solid wood and the answering echo in still air. I had always loved it, nearly as much as “the baying of the watch-dog in the hollow distance,” only nobody had so perfectly expressed it. In the way my queer mind had of running parallel to all the happenings of earth—earth, did I say again?—I had time, even in that instant, to wish I myself could put that sound into words. What a passion it is, the passion to create, to “hold the mirror up to nature” and copy her least language! It had possessed me with a tighter grip than ever. It had gone into me, blood, bone and muscle, on earth, so that I couldn’t have released myself if I’d wanted to. If I had, it would have been by the atoms falling apart and there wouldn’t have been any man standing there, all these lightning thoughts piercing his brain while Jacques and the General did their instant of listening. Were they having lightning flashes of their own at the same time, telling them how wonderful it was not to have been allowed to escape from what might once have been thought the prison of the flesh but was now the freedom of the universe? Perhaps so. The General answered, rather casually, as if he did it merely as the best brain there. But I did think I saw an awakened interest in his face.

“Woodsmen,” he said, “cutting trees. No woman could do it with such force.”

“No,” said Jacques, “but if the women are about here—and they haven’t had time to go far—I think they must have heard it, and it would have been a natural thing to make their way toward it. An axe, the sound of blows,—that means a man, men. They wanted help. Men were there who could help them.”

“Yes,” said I, “but when I saw them, they were determined to find their own way to the citadel and find it alone.”

“Doubtless, at that time,” said the General. “But being women and unused to work like this, they would have changed their plan of action. It may have been to a kind of ignorant strategy, but they would have changed it.” He turned to Jacques. “You are right,” he said conclusively. “They are there.”

Jacques nodded at him as if they were two good fellows who were lucky to agree, and, by one accord, we stepped into the little path to the highway and went very slowly a few paces down the hill. The reason we were so slow about it was that Jacques, who was making the pace, was not only listening keenly, as I could see by his cocked head, but he was looking for something. And now he had found it: a shred of brown cloth tied round a twig two feet or so in from the highway, on the right. And it was from the right that the sound of echoing blows still came. He stopped and looked round at us with a queer little smile. I saw he was thinking, as I had been every minute of my being here: “How strange it is! how jolly! how like a splendid boy’s game in a place where there’s nobody to say ‘Don’t’.”

“But,” he said, and this to me, as if he were sure I should understand the dramatic side of it, “see what this is?” He brought up a fold of his brown tunic, or whatever you’d call it, and laid it against the shred. “It’s me, part of me, my old working clo’. I went in here once—oh, it must have been a year ago!—went in at random to see if I couldn’t guess out the way to the place up there.”

“Was it at the time,” said the General, “that you refused to join my forces? You thought you preferred to find the way for yourself?”

“No, oh, no,” said Jacques. “It was just that I’d got homesick. I was lonesome, trying to get a word—well, I believe that night, I called it a word from nowhere. Any way, a word that wouldn’t come. And just as I’d got to that, and leaned back in my chair and thought how homesick I was, the light streamed out so strong it could have knocked me down, if I hadn’t been down already. And I remember I said out loud: ‘Is that what You’re going to do about it?’ And I ran out at the door and somehow—I don’t know how or why—I ran to this particular place and tried to get through. I thought I’d got to get up there as quick as possible.”

The General was breathing sharply.

“That’s it,” he said, “that’s it. You saw just as I did what wealth there is up there, how men, if they could storm the hill, would hunger no more, neither thirst any more”—

How did he get the very phrasing of the divine words and turn them quite honestly to bread and circuses?

“No, no,” said Jacques, “nothing of the sort. I didn’t think of anybody but myself. I was in trouble, and I’d got to have somebody to speak to and the light—well,” here he seemed ashamed like a boy who had been caught in too great emotion—“I thought if God was anywhere He’d be there.”

“And was He?” cried the General uncontrollably. “Was He there?”

Did he mean Zeus, I wondered—no, Jupiter rather, or what majesty did he mean? At that, the emotion went out of Jacques as suddenly as if it had been a bubble, collapsed. His queer smile crinkled up his face. He looked at me. It seemed I was the one he was answering, why, I am not prepared to say.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess not,—that is, any more than He is everywhere. All I know is, I tore my jacket, and I thought I’d leave that rag there in case I wanted to try it again.”

“And did you?” the General asked.

“No,” he answered soberly. “But I’m ready to do it now.”

He bent down and with the axe began cutting very fast at the tough growth near his feet. In that space, about the width of a man’s body, where he was beginning the narrowest possible path, I didn’t see how I could help at the moment, nor did I want fussily to attempt doing it. As for the General, he stood in a statuesque pose with the axe laid along his arm, not as if it were a tool but a martial weapon, and also waited. When I say he was statuesque, I don’t mean that he voluntarily assumed anything theatrical in word or gesture. He was simply born of an older time and he had never left it. I suppose it had never occurred to him, in all the years, that he could be anything but what he was, and therefore he simply stayed so. I smiled a little to myself to think I must be a perfect example of what the scientists said about man’s rising on his hind legs because he wanted to be there, bringing down the fruit of a tree. Now if I ever got to be anything desirably different, it would be because I was perpetually dissatisfied with the thing I was and perpetually ready to stretch my neck up into the tree of possibility. But for the General it was everlastingly different. He didn’t know he wasn’t quite right as he was. Of course, to follow out the simile of the tree, the Holy City was his tree; but I don’t believe he ever guessed he might have to be a different person to attain it: only to march and march and batter down the walls.

But while I go on at this length, with guesswork spinning through my head like light, Jacques was cutting away at his task, and in a minute there was room beside him for me to begin cutting, and I saw how neatly he was keeping to the left edge of his little path leaving me to hack away at the right. I began working with all his diligence but none of his expertness, and presently the General had stepped into the path behind us, and stood waiting for us to clear the way. Time went on and Jacques and I kept at it. My face grew hot and wet and I felt tightened in my breathing from the heavy green smell of the space where we worked; but Jacques seemed to me more than ever like an immortal creature hardened to all the shocks of toil and time. I heard, or thought I heard, the sound of the woodsman’s axe, more plainly, but it did not seem that we could have gone far enough to make any difference. It sounded like the clip of one axe now, not two as before, and the blows fell with such savage haste and power that I wondered whether the tool could have been in any hands but those of Milton, with his mad energy. I raised my head to get a breath and dash the sweat off my forehead, and as I did so I turned slightly, to estimate the space behind us. And when I saw what was going on there, I wonder I did not cry out, for it afflicted me with a kind of fear I had never in my life felt: the fear of the impossible suddenly become real. I didn’t cry out. Somehow I felt I mustn’t. It didn’t belong with a man’s job in meeting the unknown. He must keep himself in hand. If this were magic, it was a magic we had been prepared for. And hadn’t all we had learned about the universe heretofore shown us that it hadn’t a vein of magic in its whole corporate system? it had, when things came to their dramatic worst, only aspects we didn’t understand. Come on, then! let us understand them. That would be a way of getting our long necks and our nibbling teeth up into a wholesome acquaintance with the tree of life. But I had to tell Jacques. He might have known how it was going to be, but as yet he had not seen it.

“It is growing again behind us,” I said quietly. “The path is quite closed up.”

And the General, hearing, turned and saw that it was so. But he made no comment, only stood with his back to us, evidently watching to see the magic at its loom. Jacques did not, through the whole of his stooping body, seem to move by a thrill to what I had said. He worked the faster.

“Better not look,” he said. “It does no good.”

And I, too, went to work again and, a little ashamed, I think, of my hysteria, with an added keenness of eye and hand. The next information came from the General and this, at the rate we were now working, when we had got bravely forward into the increasing gloom. I did not look at him but, from the sound of his voice, I knew he had turned about and was facing forward toward us. And his voice, too, was unmoved, not I fancied, because he had forbidden himself a terror like my own, but because this great business of being a soldier forbade him ever to be shaken.

“We are enclosed,” he said. “We are in a cell. The green grows up as fast as we can cut. I think, as I am able to estimate, it can grow as fast as it likes.”

“Yes,” said Jacques, cutting like a surgeon who, having a malignant tissue under his knife, has to work with desperate skill and haste, “we are enclosed. It mustn’t get too high. That keeps off the air.”

Whether he meant this for a suggestion, I don’t know, but the General turned and began to cut down the fresh shoots that had just come up, and from the sound I could guess at his speed, though I could not turn to watch it. He did not work so skilfully as Jacques, but with a power that trebled mine. And when he had made a sweep of what lay behind us, he turned back to us and cut again the little shoots that were springing, in what I thought might be a happy abandon of their own, as if the earth under them were foaming with life and had to toss them up. And with all this severing of young stems, there came another strangeness I did not at first understand: a heavy odor, in no way like the enervating smell of a greenhouse, but as if the pure juices of growth were pouring themselves out of an earth whose very veins were opened for it. At first I didn’t know whether I liked the heady smell or whether I could bear it. It was like the jungle, in a way, though there was no offensive rottenness. And suddenly, as I was wondering whether or not I could bear it or should presently succumb in some unfamiliar manner, I knew we were all three working faster and faster, and we were getting on amazingly, and that ringing axe ahead of us was like a sound at twilight when the tired child gives over his last game and remembers, with a sense of sleepy confidence, that father’s still at work. The steamy scent was heady, but it was good. It took us on our way. And all the time, unless that were indeed my eager prevision of what I wanted, the rainbow light kept streaming in, seeming to offer us assurance that we should not be betrayed. But as to that, how could we be? For nothing here could possibly betray. It might withstand us when we were on a wrong track, but it could not lure us to an unjust doom. We worked in silence now, and so far as my own feelings went, without fatigue. And though the time ran swiftly, owing to my absorption, I had also that queer undercurrent of conviction that it was long, long, and that it would be longer still before we came to the end. And the end came, at least so far as concerned our certainty of being on the right track: for now we could hear, not only the sharper clip of the axes, but a voice, indubitably Milton’s, giving orders, telling one man to let another take his place, and finally a general order to stand clear. “She’s comin’ down. Look out!” And she did come down, and fortunately not in our direction, or she might have smashed us flat; she came down with that groan of parting wood and whisper of astounded leaves, and the final despairing crash of branches which is the lament of the tree condemned to fall. And we, inspired to wildness, worked like madmen, even the General abandoning his imposing calm; and we cut through the last few feet of our prison walls and came on them, standing at rest, seven men in all, just as Milton was saying, in a tone of actually boyish triumph: “Now we’ll lay off a spell.”

XIX

But Milton and his men had rested for only a minute or so before they became aware of us. We had no idea of rest. We hadn’t got to that point, as they had: for with them a long step of their way was attained, and they were lying back on the delusive certainty of the human mind that this meant something conclusive. And we knew we hadn’t got any appreciable distance at all. For though coming upon them at the moment of their triumph over a big tree promised that we could somehow share that triumph, what did it amount to? What was Milton’s plan of campaign? What had the tree meant to him that he must put such expenditure of force into getting rid of it, instead of hacking his way round? When we got to our last two feet of the green barrier, I believe we stopped cutting with precision: at least I did. I used my axe, it is true, but I pulled and tore with my left hand as I cropped with my right, and when Jacques stepped over the last debris and found the butt of the great tree facing him—it was at least five feet through—I was following, and when he had swung himself up on it and taken a step along the trunk I was close behind. It was not intentional, our leaving the General to follow us, but for that instant we forgot all about him. At least I did, and Jacques was the last person to omit deference to any man. But whatever the General may have felt, he, like the soldier he was, took the only step possible, hoisted himself up and stood there behind us in, I dare say, his usual pose of authority. And it was then that Milton Blake, far along beside the branches, where he was chopping a détour to avoid them, saw us and gave a shout, of recognition, of rage, perhaps, and turned to his followers, cutting beside him, and yelled to them, as if not only must they be sure to hear him, but we also.

“Look a-there!” was what Milton said, in his despairing tones. “Only you look a-there.”

They did look, and I thought their faces showed something beyond surprise at us. They smiled a little, all of them, and I could believe they were not only amused by our arrival at the precise moment for spoiling Milton’s grand coup, but perhaps the green walls and the heady smell of them had got on their nerves a little, and we, insignificant group as we were, had an encouraging look of reënforcements. We ran along the trunk of the tree and when we got to Milton, standing there in the little clearing he had made on the left of the great disorder of the branches, we jumped off and faced him. And Jacques was the one to speak. I was glad he did it instantly: for close to Milton as I stood, I could see how angry he was, and I knew why. He had probably got into a coil he saw no way of getting out of, and not only were there three more of us to witness his discomfiture, but we complicated things, as well. Here was the General whom he had deserted. In these queer circumstances, whose authority would hold? And he looked grimly past us at the General himself, who had not spoken.

“That was a clever bit of work,” Jacques was saying. “You found the tree in your way and you felled it for a path and a kind of refuge from the ground. You’ve gained—why, you’ve gained at least a hundred feet. More, haven’t you?”

The General spoke.

“If I may put it so,” he began, as one arrogating no authority, but, I thought, not unmindful of his own mental superiority over Jacques, “you have given yourself a great amount of trouble for nothing. The vines were wounded by the fallen trunk and they are simply growing the faster. Presently the trunk will be covered. And our feet.”

It was true. The process had begun. I lifted one foot and then the other, and the vines, as I tore away from them, sent forth an added gust of the green smell. Milton, seeing me do this, turned upon me and gave a cry, perhaps because he saw fear in my face, of the sort he was beginning to feel in his own heart.

“What is this devilish stuff any way?” he cried. “Do you know? do you?”

He had given me up as unable to help him, and the last two questions were hurled at the General and at Jacques.

“Get to work,” said Jacques shortly. “And will you take command?” This, in a perfect deference, as if to assure Milton he knew who was best fitted to fight a forest up in arms.

In spite of myself, I glanced at the General. His face remained unmoved. Either he could not conceive of having been set aside or, realizing, he could not acknowledge it. But it was only a glance I gave him, out of my trivial curiosity, and then I turned to Milton to see how he would take advancement given him in so commonplace a way. For the first time, I saw him smile. His face was irradiated, the wrinkles round his eyes that heaven hadn’t been able to do away with, deepened into channels, and his mouth broadened in what might be a laugh.

“Come along then,” said he, “get to work. You”—he addressed the General in a casual sort of manner, as if he respected him though he had his own ideas about obeying, “you better come along in the rear with one o’ my men”—he indicated a gaunt earnest looking chap something like himself in build—“an’ chip off them little devils as they come up an’ the rest of us’d work at cuttin’ out a path, an’ gettin’ ahead. We’ll lay it out wider’n we’ve been doin’, but not till we get beyond them branches. A highway forty feet wide won’t be any too much, to keep us from gettin’ closed in.”

Again we started, in close formation, cutting and throwing the branches to right and left, and once when Milton made the pause of a moment to straighten and rest himself, I asked him:

“How do you get your direction? Points of the compass: how do you know what they are? Where’s the north?” This I said, all of a piece, so to speak, so that my questions might hammer their way into his head before he stooped and began chopping again. But it did not take him long to answer. He lifted his arm, axe in hand, and pointed at the rainbow light still flooding down on us.

“That way,” he said. “That’s the way we took.” And as he stood for a moment, his arm still raised, he looked almost menacing. And when the arm went slowly down he turned his face to me and it was lowering and yet, I could not help thinking, there was fear on it, too. “What do you make o’ that,” he asked me, in a low unwilling tone, as if the question burst forth in spite of him. And I could answer honestly, without pausing to think what it was best for him and the others to believe.

“I don’t know,” I said, and he, the emotion—rage, fear, whatever it was—all gone out of his face, bent to work again.

So we went on, and I couldn’t guess how long, but it seemed for a long, long time. You must remember—I say this colloquially, as if I were sure some one would read my script—I had not as yet any working knowledge of the physical character of this place, even the regular sequence of day and night. But I do know that, owing to the tall growth we were cutting through, the dark came early, and I know, too, that, in spite of it, we kept on because the rainbow glow, directed straight upon us, was like a searchlight and we could see to work. I say directed upon us, but really, of course, we were, according to Milton’s conception, following it. Yet I liked, at that moment, to think of it the other way about. It went far toward giving me some degree of heart and patience, for I was losing both. I wanted horribly to stop work for a moment, and call Jacques to me and ask him what he thought of Mary’s message, and whether, in this expedition, I was not risking her finding me. We had told no one our objective. How could she know? And as we went on, silent save for the sound of our axes and the crackle and whisper of the vines as we threw them to one side, I saw, raising myself for an instant to rest, a chink in the leafy screen at my right, and through the chink a flat stone, perhaps four feet by six, and it struck me as being queer that if the vines were so avid to crawl over the pathway we had cut and the trunk of the tree Milton had felled, they should avoid the surface of the stone. And I had a sickness of childish desire to rest, merely to stretch myself on the stone and shut my eyes to the sight of my green prison and my mind to the fever of getting on in a task where there was perhaps no end, but ever a persistence of work upon a living growth perpetually renewed. I slipped back a pace, allowing the two men in the rear to pass me, and with a pretence of clearing a slightly wider track, brought myself to the tail of the line. Even they did not notice, near as they were to me: for their brains, too, were probably clouded by the long-continued monotony of our job and their ordinary apprehension by the heady scent of the severed twigs. And with a sudden effort that had in it every atom of force my tired mind and body could compass, I turned upon the wall at my right and fell upon it as if it could strangle me, and hacked a hole through it at about the height of my knee. And as soon as I judged the hole to be large enough to admit my body, I put my foot over the low barrier and dragged myself through, and the thorns tore at me and the leaves thrust themselves into my eyes, in their desire to fret me. But I did not mind. I was half torpid by now, and I cast myself down on the stone, and, placing my axe securely, with my hand on the helve, I fell into a delighted sleep. I use the word advisedly. Sleep seemed to me my helper and my love, of so exquisite a kindness that I could not imagine anything more like our imagined love of God than that the universe itself should be one vast pool of sleep and His dearest children—if one could indulge the fantasy that any are dearer to Him than others—should drown there everlastingly.

And in my sleep I dreamed a dream.

XX

And the dream was this: I don’t know whether all human creatures have the underlying belief that if they could only be given the answer to one thing, all else would be made clear to them. It is a belief I have always had, a childish thing, of course, one of the little conceits our discontented minds, ever at war with circumstance, ever seeking a way out, wave before us for an instant like a flag of hope. I know no clearer way of describing it than the poet’s apostrophe to “flower in the crannied wall,” which, if he knew it, “root and all, and all in all,” would tell him “what God and man is.” Well, lying there on the rock in that sleep of exhaustion, I had suddenly a sense of the utmost lightness of body and clarity of mind. I was not conscious of being within the framework of a dream, the unsubstantial made for the moment real, but I had a sense of the transcending reality of which everything else is but the garment, the means, I might say of its becoming visible. I knew where I was, there on a rock in the midst of a sea of green, and if the green were indeed hostile, that it might at any moment begin to grow from the spot where I had wounded it, grow until it enveloped me, tie my hands and shut my eyes and my mouth and ears and leave me there forever in a trembling grave. And suddenly I didn’t mind. And this was not from what I remembered as despair in my old earth life, when, at odds with love and life itself, I had often cast myself into the void that is repudiation of both. It was the other pole of that, a gigantic world away. I cared tremendously, not to live but to live as That Which created me would have me live. If He—I have to bring Him down into the acorn cup of a pronoun. Surely He belongs there, as in the invisibility of the sky!—if He would have me bound forever under the fettering of green leaves, it was ecstasy so to be. And even if it ceased being conscious ecstasy, even if the leaves choked any silent Gloria my lips or even my heart might long to raise, if I became as insensate as the multitude of the leaves, it was all one to me. I was here, where it was decreed that I should be.

Who knew whether, even to rescue Flavia and Cintra, it had been the will of What was over us that we should hack out the path? Wherever Flavia and Cintra were, they too were under the exquisitely kind compulsion that determined all our ways. And I seemed to be going from spacious room to room, in a progress that took no note of time. For centuries I lay there and dreamed my dream. I shall always feel this to be so, though I know the idea of almost endless time was given me by the change it had wrought in myself. For when I woke and saw the green still about me and heard no sound of voices nor the axes in the hands of men, I knew I was different. I had learned something. And to learn it I had not given up one longing for the dear intimate joys of life. They were warm in me at that moment, possibly warmer than they had ever been in my awakened strength; but somehow they were delightedly subject to the Power that had seemed to speak to me. Somebody had brought me something as I slept. Something had administered to me a sacrament I had not risen to my knees to take. For an instant, I wondered if it had been so with all of us here in trouble with the leaves; and then I saw a reason why it might not be so. Perhaps I was the one in greatest need: the most closely earth-bound still. For the General and Milton, who continued to hunger for what might be called the things of the flesh, did not yet know they were bound by them, and the others—men of simple heart, I believed, from the sight of them—might be going on doing a mere duty, as they conceived it, to men of a stronger will than theirs. But I had always been tormented by life, always torn by the struggle between what I knew I ought to do and what my blind desires led me on to do. I was easily the weakest, the most foolish of us all. And so, in pure compassion, my dream had been sent to me, and an unseen hand stretched down to draw me on. And I opened my eyes and looked about me in the dark, and being dark it gave back nothing to me, not even a borrowed hint of light from the glow we had been following. And suddenly there came a voice quite near me, at the side of the rock which was farthest from the path.

“Are you here?” it asked. My heart leaped to it, for it had given me a gradation of surprise and longing: first, knowing how foolish the thought was, I wondered, for the space of a heart-beat, if it could be the voice of the unseen Visitant, and then if it were Mary’s. But it was Flavia’s own, and I was wholeheartedly pleased, since I must not taste the incredible joy of those others, to have it she who had come. I put out my hand and she took it with hers which was warm and firm, and sat down beside me on the rock, and she said to me:

“I’m afraid it’s been pretty bad.”

“We’ve done a good bit,” I said, “but I don’t know how far we’ve got. I dare say not anywhere at all.”

But that she did not answer, though I fancied she could have done it. Indeed, I had a feeling you have when you are very little and sick, and pretty lightheaded, and mother comes and sits beside you and it’s all right.

“Where is Cintra?” I asked.

Now there was a little trouble in her voice, but she quelled it instantly and answered as if all our journeys here were as natural as the road to market.

“She’s up there,” she said, “in a nice place, it is, but we thought best for her not to go any further.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Well,” said Flavia hesitating, “I got an idea she wasn’t to. You know the One that talked to me that day”—

She stopped.

“Yes,” I said, “yes. It was a Voice, a Person at your side. And you’ve seen something again? You’ve heard something?”

“Yes,” she said, relieved, I thought, to be questioned, since it was all so debatable. Should she tell or should she not? “We found a place—a clearing, I guess they’d call it out west—and I got the idea she’d better stay there and I keep on.”

“Were you ordered to do that?” I persisted. “Was it a command?”

“Oh, no,” said she. “Only it seemed as if we’d better. So we did.”

“And when you went on,” I asked, “where did you go?”

“Oh,” she said, “I kept on, up to the top—where they are, you know.”

“Where who are?” I asked her. “You don’t mean Milton and the General?”

“Oh, no,” she said, as if she had expected me to see. “The place, you know, we’ve been wondering about. ’Way up there at the top.”

I was breathless with the surprise of it.

“Flavia,” said I, “the Holy City? is that what you mean?”

“Yes,” said she quietly, as if again it were the road to market. “What we called the Holy City. I don’t believe there’s anybody in there that calls it so. But it don’t make any difference about that.”

In spite of my feeling of acceptance, the feeling I had when I woke from my dream, now I felt merely the most human haste. I had to know what she had seen. I closed my fingers tighter on her hand that was still holding mine. I would give her a concrete problem.

“Flavia,” I said, “what is that light?”

“Oh,” she answered tranquilly, “I don’t know. I guess there wouldn’t anybody when they got up there and found all the things.”

“What things?” I asked. “What things?”

In my impatience I wanted to beat her kind hand on the stone, if that would make her talk. And I had here a cynical view of myself. “You’re not so sanctified as you thought you were, Peter, my boy,” I thought. “Go easy.”

“All the things there is,” she said, lapsing into the speech Milton used to expect of her, lest her schoolma’am talk put him to shame. “But come. We’ve got to go.”

“Go where?” I asked, sitting up and still keeping her hand. I was afraid she might escape me, she with her curious access of knowledge and her calmness in carrying it about with her and never sharing it, unless it were demanded, this as if she saw it as a precious jewel she must guard for reasons she did not herself know.

“Up there,” she said. “That’s what I’m down here for: to fetch you with me.”

And I wanted to go with her, with all my heart, but I could not leave the others.

“Up there?” I said. “I can’t, not with you, and by another road. Don’t you see, I’ve deserted. I was so dog-tired I stopped for a minute to get my wind, and I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but long or short I’ve got to find my way to them. It’ll be easier if it comes light. They can’t be working in the dark, for the light’s shut off for them, of course, as it is here. I can’t go back on them. Jacques—” And I stopped there, choked by my inability—or my unwillingness—to tell her what Jacques meant to me, and how I owed him a voluntary fealty that, in my feeling for the others, simply didn’t exist.

She was quite unmoved.

“No,” she said. “I see how you feel about it, and I should, too, but it ain’t in our hands now. Don’t you see it ain’t? They let us pick out our own way for a long time; but sometimes it comes to a place where They have to step in. And that’s why we’ve got to go up there and go now. Come. We better be getting along.”

It was precisely the air of mother who tells her young son he’d better do what he was bidden and without delay. Something in me answered it—something quick like a salute when the hand goes up at the sight of a superior officer—and I got on my feet.

“But how are you going?” I asked. “Can you remember the way you came?”

“Oh, yes,” said she, “it’s a narrow path but I can find it in the dark. Maybe there ain’t any other. I don’t know.”

She took my hand again and we stepped off the stone into a clear way and began walking in it slowly, though not, I fancy, from any caution of hers but because she may have thought I did not trust her guidance. And I, wanting to know how she found the path at all, began questioning.

“What made you,” I asked, “run away from the Memory Man’s, you and Cintra, and leave us in the lurch?”

“We thought best,” said she, in what I felt to be a preoccupied tone, and I judged that she saw no special need of accounting to me for her doings, though she had a friendly willingness to oblige. Her real allegiance was evidently somewhere else.

“But where did you break through from the highway?” I asked, “to get your direction? You see we’re much to the left of that.”

“First we went back,” said she, still preoccupied, “down the road a piece—look out for that branch!—I was kind of led on by an opening there I see earlier in the day, when we went by it, you and the young man and we two, Cintra and me.”

“Where you stopped and looked,” I said. “But then you went on.”

“Yes,” said Flavia, “I went on, because I didn’t hardly know what to think, for I see the light was shifted for a minute and it laid right on that spot. And it didn’t look like a hole any more, for the light stretched right through it beyond. It looked like a gate.”

“I didn’t see anything,” I said. “I went back to look. Not the light lying there, not anything. And was it a gate?”

“Not so as you might say,” she answered carefully, “a gate on hinges or anything, but something you could push back so’s you could go through.”

“But it was after you’d gone through that I was there,” I said, “and I saw no signs of you—broken twigs or anything of that sort, such as the mess we’ve been making up here.”

“No,” she said. “I pulled it to after me. I went as careful as I could.”

“Did They tell you to?” I asked.

“No,” she said, with a perfect simplicity, “I thought that was the way it ought to be.”

So I gave it up, and we went on in a clear path with, it might be, a firm sward under our feet, it felt so soft and welcoming.

“And where,” I asked, “is Cintra?”

“Oh,” said Flavia, “she had to go another road. I went with her part way and see her started. I left her pretty busy.”

“Busy about what?” I asked, and she said this amazing thing:

“Sweepin’ up the floor.”

On that I judged that there was no more news for me anywhere, and I cleared my mind, so far as I could, of all curiosity, and put my thoughts into my legs. And I did not know how far we had gone nor what time we had done it in, when the dawn came, and I could look about me into what seemed an entirely different zone of vegetation and a brilliant and friendly reach of sky. The dark leaves of my old enemy were gone, they which had made the confining walls of our first ascent, and instead there was on each side of us something like the tender umbrage of spring. There were white birches—I was sure those maiden trees were birches—and there were hollows, all violets, and a few fir trees, not too tall, to overshadow the birch, but enough to give the semblance of a soft repose. And at the point when I was enjoying this to the full, Flavia took my hand, which she had dropped when, with the dawn, I had got more confidence, and drew me to one side. Here was a little cleared space of happy sward, looking as if it fulfilled some grave intent. (But that is how so many aspects of life struck me in these days. I was always leaping back from them to an unseen meaning. How could I help it, when I had come here to live in a place where, I believed, we were all nearer to the meaning which is life itself, the whole, of which we are a half insensate part?)

“Come,” she said, “we’ll stand on this ridge and you look over.”

And we did stand there, and I saw what I should call a smiling country of rich farming land, and houses, not too close for a farming country, but neighborly enough for the onlooker to say “How pleasant!” not, “How desolate!”

“See that house down there?” Flavia asked, pointing to a long low building, possibly of marble: for it was slightly yellowed and took the early morning light like the temples of old Greece. “That’s where Cintra is.”

“Is it there she’s sweeping?” I asked, at random.

“That’s what I meant,” she said. “Maybe ’tisn’t so. But somehow I thought that’s what I should want to do, if I came on anything so old-ancient and the floor all covered with dead leaves that blew in—maybe in the fall: I don’t know.”

“So you’ve been there?” I asked.

“Yes, They took us both, by air, and I waited while They landed her and told her to get it ready for him to come.”

“The General?”

“Yes. This is where he’s bound for, though he don’t know it. But it’s where he’s got to be led.”

“And Milton?” I ventured. “Your husband. Where will he be led?”

She was silent for a moment. She was commanding in herself the power to speak.

“Do you see that blue water over there?” She asked it quietly. I did see it, a lake apparently, of a blue like the clearest of water under the warmest skies. “There’s a farm there,” she continued, “right on the lake. Horses, cows, everything to do with, and nobody owns it except—well, except Them that tell how things are going to be.”

I began to see a purpose in some of this foresight.

“And is Milton to be there?” I asked. She nodded, still looking with sad hungry eyes. “And,” I said, “are you to be there with him?”

“I hope so,” she breathed, as if it were not to me, but a prayer to invisible Powers. “O God! I hope so.”

We stepped back into our path and went on, and I heard a cry, a man’s voice calling. And it called my name. “Selden!” it called. “Selden!” And strange it was to hear it, piercing that clear air, and, over at my left, the echo of it thrown back as if a hundred personalities, tiny ones perhaps but gifted with some power over nature we didn’t own, all wanted Selden. And I called back, only I called “Hullo!” and then, as if that had been enough to give my whereabouts, the voice spoke no more. I had been located. Selden—for after all it didn’t seem I, this stranger who was wanted—he had been found. Flavia understood. In her simplicity of faith that everything in this place must be as right as possible, she did not have to reason about it or wonder why it must be thus. She simply put her whole mind into seeing what was required of us: for that we must do.

“I guess,” she said, “it’s that nice man. You know: the one that had the house where we left you talking, Cintra and I.”

Jacques! of course it was Jacques. He had missed me and refused to go on without me. And again I lifted my voice and called his name. There was no answer.

“I’ve got to go back,” I said, “and quick, before all that devilish stuff he’s fighting has time to wall him in. We can’t make it from here. We’ve got to go back to the stone where you found me and get through from there. You see, we’ve no idea how much growth there is between us and the path he’s on. And we do know how it is with them.”

“Oh, I guess we ain’t any further away here than there,” said she. “You better try cutting through right here where we be. There’s this bush, this one all full of red bloom. There’s another just like it, opposite to it across the path, and that one’s on the edge of the path you were on before. I remember it.”

“How do you know?” I asked impatiently.

“There’s a little peephole through the leaves,” said she. “Same as there was way back there when Cintra and I first started out. You look.”

I did look, and I thought I could see. I surely saw the red blossomed bush she had pointed out, though then I had not seen it. But I was in a fury of impatience and it made me short with her. How had she picked up these queer bits of magic? Why couldn’t I learn them as well as she?

“Do you mean to say you believe,” I asked her, “that somebody’s been through this impassable wilderness—yes, it is impassable if it grows up as soon as you cut it down!—and made eye-holes that don’t grow up?”

“Yes,” said she quietly. “I guess that’s the way it is. It’s like the old pioneers, you know. They used to blaze their way, don’t you know they did? And these up here—the ones that have to see to things—They cut little places, same as if it was a spy-glass and you wanted to study the heavens. And why the holes don’t grow up after They’ve made ’em, that’s more than I can tell. But I guess it’s all natural enough and according to law, same as it was when we planted corn and so on, and it always come up. That is,” said Flavia, laughing a little to herself in that wistful way I had noted in her when she spoke of the earth, “unless the crows brought it up first. But that’s natural, too.”

This was a long speech for her, and its effect on me was that, although I didn’t in any definite way believe she knew what she was talking about, I saw nothing to do but follow what she said. She thought she knew something; I was perfectly sure I knew nothing at all. So I turned to the green wall at my left and began slashing at it with all my powers of arm and angry will. But first I lifted my voice and called Jacques. Six times I called him. There was no reply.

XXI

And it was as Flavia had said. By making the red bush my objective, I had cut straight across from our path to the one I had left when I fell into my dream. There we were, she and I, at the old game of retracing our steps, going somewhere in good faith and being recalled to go somewhere else. Again I shouted: “Jacques! Jacques!” and immediately, before the echoes had time to get his name back to me, came his “Hullo!” It was surprisingly near, and I was glad. I turned to look down the path and see him come; but besides the quick springing of shoots from the ground, there was another portentous thing. The tall growth on each side leaned forward into the path as if by wilful purpose. At least it seemed like that, for I could not believe any perspective would make the road dwindle so in width before the eyes, and close up so darkly. Besides, there was the light, as before, and so narrow was the path that even that could not quite illuminate it. But for the moment nothing troubled me: for Jacques was coming, and he did come, with a surprising swiftness, throwing his arms out on each side as if warning the encroaching green to let him alone, and now he was here and I was standing with my hand on his shoulder and looking into his eyes. And my first words, though not calculated, were an accusation of myself:

“I deserted. I lay down and I went to sleep.”

He laughed, not as if he were trying to carry off the awkwardness of a situation not creditable to me, but, as I thought, in a phrase, from fulness of life. Since I had seen him he had become possessed of something. Was it a deeper breath, a more enchanted movement of the blood? Was it more delightful to be on the road, cutting his way out, than to be sitting in a little brown house in a wood, trying to coerce nature to the yielding of secrets she had not yet made up her mind to deliver?

“What now?” said he. “Are you going on with us, both of you?” his eyes including Flavia in an incurious kindliness, “or are you off on a hunt of your own?”

I hadn’t really anything to explain, more than any other deserter, I suppose. Something had failed in me, my conviction, shall I say, or my nerve? Any way, whatever it was, when I had heard his voice it was all different. I was going back.

“Are they waiting for you?” I asked. “If they’re cutting their way along, all of them together, we shall lose them. Shall we go?”

He laughed a little and his face crinkled up in a way that disclosed nothing to me. Did he want to hurry on, or had something about the whole situation changed so that, in some odd fashion, he was pleased?

“We shouldn’t find all of them,” he said. “We should find two. The others—the remnant of the General’s army—have gone.”

“Gone?” I echoed. “Gone where?”

“Back to their homes, I assume, somewhere over there. That’s the way the airplane went, any way: the White Bird it’s known as. You haven’t seen it, I fancy, but you might, any minute, over that way.”

He made a gesture toward the quarter where Flavia had pointed out the silhouetted outline of buildings beyond the blue inlet of that dividing sea.

“Yes,” she said quietly, “after they landed us, first Cintra and then me, they must have come over here and took them. I’m glad of it,” said Flavia, her face lighting, “proper glad. How pleased the men must be to get back to their own homes. But,” she added, with a sudden anxiety, “I better stay here and let you go along back. I’ve got a kind of an idea they’ll want to see me settled down there where that house is before Milton comes.”

“You needn’t bother about that,” said Jacques. “They’ll sight you easily. And as for making a landing, the White Bird never balks at that. She ’lights like thistledown—or snow.” He turned to me. “I wish you could have seen it,” he said. “No wonder they call them birds. There’s the look of a bird about it, you know, not a dragon-fly, such as you’ve been used to, but almost conscious beauty, conscious grace: they’ve had that in mind, you see, safety, of course, but beauty, grace. And silent! you might have seen it away off there, but could you have heard it? No, of course you couldn’t. Well, you don’t hear an eagle either. Speaking of that, I dare say they’ll make them yet so they’ll sing. ‘At heaven’s gate,’ Selden! And never too many of ’em. They never’ll be allowed to spoil the sky.”

He was in a trance of delight, the creator’s delight, he who sees the absolute perfection of dreams not yet fulfilled. I had, however, another question to ask; but it touched Milton and here was Flavia also longing to ask it and probably, even with all her faith, shrinking from the answer. Would the White Bird come for her, and was she trembling with the eagerness of wonder whether it would bring Milton also? Then, I said, at a venture:

“If the General’s alone, sha’n’t we go along as soon as possible? The leaves will get him. He can’t keep the way clear by himself. No man could.”

Again Jacques smiled a little, but he answered soberly:

“They are together, you know, two of them, the General and”—he turned to Flavia—“your husband.”

And Flavia, as always in supreme emotion, lapsed into her New England speech.

“O my land!” she breathed, “they mustn’t be left to fight it out together.”

Jacques’ eyes were still smiling, but he answered gravely:

“I’m afraid it can’t be helped. I have an idea that it’s intended, the will of Those Who know better about it than we. I have wondered,” he continued, still gravely and to me, and with an immense relish in his tone, “if this is what you would call one of your dramatic moments. Here is a man, plucked out of the past, confronted by another plucked out of the present. One is of a superfine intelligence and the other”—the vision of Milton fresh from a rude life fitted to his equally rude inheritance evidently rose before him and, remembering Flavia, he stopped an instant before going on—“is in dramatic contrast to him. It is the east and the west. But they are of the same unappeased desires and each is evidently destined to be the other’s Nemesis. Dramatic!” His eyes dwelt on me thoughtfully as if he wondered whether I saw the full value of it. “But strange.”

Whatever I saw, Flavia evidently got the picture in full.

“Don’t stand here talking,” she adjured us. “Go along! go! There they are ’way off there by themselves, locked horns like two bulls in a pastur’ and they never’ll stop to think about that green stuff growing up all round ’em till it’s hemmed ’em in and grown over their feet and fettered ’em and bound their hands and closed up their eyes and mouths, so they can’t even swear. And there they’ll be till Judgment Day,” she cried piercingly, and she added, with a sharper cry: “O God! is it Judgment Day now? Is this it?”

I was merely shaken and surprised by her. Jacques was more. He was deeply, terribly stirred: but it was to save her from her fear.

“Never mind, Flavia,” he said. “Whatever happens to them, they’re safe. Don’t you know they are? Think how kind this place is. If they should seem to be lost forever, they’d be found. Don’t you know they’d be found?”

And I, remembering my formless dream on the great rock, could only venture a stammering confirmation:

“Yes, Flavia, yes. We can’t be lost, no matter if the green does grow over us.”

She had quieted, not so much in conformity with what we had said but because she was inherently obedient and because, from the purity of her heart, she knew many things. That was it: the doors of her heart stood open and God could enter in. But she was paler, she was shaken, and she said:

“I guess I forgot. But you go right along to where they are, if you’re willing, and leave me here. It’ll come for me, the White Bird’ll come, and whether Milton’s on board or not, I shall be glad to go.”

I expected Jacques to demur, to tell her we could not leave her alone to uncertain fortunes; but evidently her unreason was no greater than his faith. He turned about and she, knowing what he would have, was ready. She looked as if she were on household tasks to which she was entirely adequate, and which could hold no surprises for her.

“I’ll poke along,” she said. “I know my way. You can just think of me on that big rock”—she turned to me—“you know. They’ll be on the lookout for me, if they want me, and they’ll be sure to see me, ’way up over everything so. You can tell Milton where I be. If you think best,” she added. “Maybe he ain’t in any state to put his mind on it.”

I, also, thought that likely. I had a vision she had conjured up, of the two beasts in a pasture, horns locked and deaf to the world. Jacques was at her side. I suppose there was something humorous about their going, it was so like the scrupulous courtesy of a gentleman, we’ll say of the old school, opening a door for a lady. He went with her to the aperture we had cut, did a little more expert cutting, soothed her way through with the formula: “Mind your head,” and they stepped into the cross-path by the red bush. I had fallen to cutting the growing shoots on what was going to be my own way back to Milton and the General, and I could hear their voices as they went, decreasing with the distance. I knew the shoots would grow again. I knew Jacques also might have to cut his way behind me if he were long delayed, but the springing green was my enemy and his. All it had to do was to put out its amazing force, and all I could do, ignorantly and in obedience to the appearance of things, was to cut it down. And yet, was it my enemy? Was anything in this place, or in the whole universe, enemy to anything else? Must we not all, green leaves or souls of men, be ready to be slashed or buried or burnt to ashes if that proved to be the way of life? For suddenly I saw life everlasting, not as a matter of duration. Time had ceased. It was a wholesome expedient, kindly competent to keep our hands at their tasks and our feet on right roads, but it was only an expedient. Life everlasting was—well, I couldn’t tell. I could only blow it with my breath into the cloud and brightness for which I had one unbounded name: God. And before long Jacques was back there, working beside me, and I was glad.

“All right?” I asked him.

“All right,” he answered, slashing away. “That woman’s amazing. She’d always be all right, wherever you put her.”

“I know it,” I said. “She doesn’t seem to be fazed by anything, life, death or the Immortal Gods.”

“It seems to me,” said Jacques judicially, “that she’s the only person I ever met, fresh from the earth, who actually believed what she thinks she does. And things have turned out very differently from what she expected. She’d built her faith on majestic similes, seas of glass mingled with fire, and harpers harping on their harps. Has she got ’em? No, sir. She’s just got tangled up in this queer horticultural mystery, and she’s shifted her ground to that, and goes along in it like a child sent on an errand.”

“But why,” said I. “Is it because she’s so simple?”

“It’s because she is a child sent on an errand,” he said. “So are we. Only we—we’ve brought all our old metaphysical doubts and our desires with us. She’s a child of God. Oh, get along, man, get along,” he said impatiently. “Don’t you know what’s been happening? Those two Roman Emperors have either turned each other into stone or they’re fighting it out, as Flavia said.”

And we did get along, and suddenly, after what seemed to me a very great time, we did hear voices, not at first faintly and then with greater distinctness, as we went on, but all at once, as if they had been quiet and had then burst out again with perhaps added force. One was Milton’s.

“I dunno anything about that,” said he. “I know when I come here you were at the head of things and now you ain’t. You had your army. I was given to understand it was of consid’able size. Well, you lost it. And here we be, you and me together. And you can’t fight out what you meant to when you had your army, and there’s only one thing left to fight out. It’s betwixt you and me, which of us is the best man. And whichever is, the other one’s got to knuckle under.”

To my surprise, there was no answer. Was the General standing there in toga-ed majesty, letting himself be railed at? But now we were on them, and there they were, good soldiers both, not omitting their obvious duty, but, backs bent, going on with it. At the sound of our footsteps they stopped cutting and turned to us, and in the General’s drawn face I saw relief. He may easily have felt himself to be in the company of an uncouth giant whom he could neither control nor pacify. When I say his face was drawn, I do not mean that it expressed incapable emotion. It was simply wasted, as it might have been after sharp illness, the mouth in a severe line of repression, the eyes cold and dead. He had a bleak look as if he had been out a long time breasting a storm which he would continue to fight to the death, but which had beaten him and chilled him to a point where his every movement was mechanical and he had no purpose left, save to keep on. Milton looked, in a phrase I had once heard in the area that gave him birth, like a meat-axe. The General gave us a glance only, and saying: “We waste time in talk,” applied himself to his task.

Milton, being, not like him, merely up against another colossal obstacle in a world incredibly hard to possess and govern, was fighting mad.

“Where’d you take yourself off to?” he demanded of me, in the manner of a small-town man paying for work he didn’t get.

I made no answer. Jacques and I disposed ourselves in what seemed a right order in the growing pathway and went on cutting. And Milton was madder still. He stood, not at ease, though idle, but in a trembling impatience that looked as if nothing would calm him but to get at me.

“Where’d you take yourself off to?” he repeated, like an embattled farmer who has been defied.

And I still did not answer, and Jacques, calmly, as if it had nothing to do with him, addressed the General in a tone of scrupulous courtesy:

“Had you noticed, sir,” he asked, “that the light has gone out?”

It was true. The guiding ray of color had ceased and we were working at a random guess in the direction we thought we were to take. And why had we thought it? Because the light had come from what we called the Holy City, and that was our objective. And it occurred to me that it was incredible that Jacques should not have data other than an ocular guesswork. He had lived here—how long? I didn’t know. But however long or short, he had been peering into the physical framework of things, he had been trying to send messages out and he had actually received a message, though by chance. He must have studied the lore of the stars and their influences. He must be conversant with the succession of night and day. Were there not definite scientific means of mapping out our path to the height above? The most ordinary desert traveler even in old days on the earth might be expected to have a compass in his pocket, and roughly know which way to go. Where was Jacques that he apparently knew no more than we, and was as blindly at the mercy of appearances? Thinking these things, I wondered if he caught the sound of them from my mind, for he turned to me and smiled.

“It isn’t a case of certainties,” he said. “It’s far above that, more subtle, more incredible. We’re carrying out something—we don’t know what. We can only feel our way.”

And at once I acquiesced. So he was being obedient merely, like Flavia, she from ignorance and he because he had learned, in his time here, that there are subtleties of design not to be guessed from the apparent working of the mechanism of life. The two rival leaders of our expedition had also heard, and for an instant, by an according impulse, they straightened and looked from one to the other of us as if we might explain. But Jacques took no notice of them, and I bent the more arduously to my work. I felt, as I believe he did, that if either of them wanted sovereignty, he could, at this juncture, have it over the other only: certainly not over us. In the kingdom of our green seclusion, they were as truly imprisoned as if they had been shut into stone walls, to fight it out. And I felt that, hard as we were working, it was not to continue. I felt no inward hope that we were to reach the Holy City at all. Something would happen, perhaps not to deflect us, but at least to indicate whether we were to keep on or to retreat. I was beginning to have a very little of Flavia’s faith in the unerring direction of things. And as a shadow crossed the dark pathway before us, I looked up, as Jacques did also, and there I saw sweeping in a lovely arc, the great airy bulk of the White Bird. She made no sound, but so beautiful was she that I half expected to hear the music Jacques had said she might sometime sing. Nothing, no slight movement of any of us, ever escaped the General. He was a soldier to the last possible item of the observation necessary to war. His face flushed into triumph. He was transformed. For the moment, in spite of our poverty of equipment, he saw himself as one in authority over that wonder of the skies.

“Signal!” he cried to us. “Wave your arms! Anything! They must take us off.”

But she had swept down in her noiseless flight, and the growth blurred her landing.

“The red bush!” Jacques said to me, in a quick undertone.

And while the General waved his arms to an empty heaven—and strangely it looked to me not so much a signal of distress as an unconscious act of worship—the White Bird, with Flavia in her winged security, had risen and was away: not in the direction where Flavia had believed she was to go, but back toward the Holy City and the heights.

XXII

And the General looked at Jacques who had a more serviceable mind than the rest of us, and I, staring, waited upon them both. Milton was, for the moment, forgotten. He had no mental armory for use in such an emergency: only the strength of his body and his obstinate will. He stood scowling with haste and waiting, it was evident, to see how the matter affected those whom he considered of some slight importance after himself. The General spoke in a perplexed way that was also, for him, a little wistful.

“What does it mean?” he asked. “Was it a forced landing? or were they in search of us?”

“No,” said Jacques quietly. “Not of us.”

“No,” said the General, thoughtfully. “They couldn’t have known we were here.”

“I think they could have known,” said Jacques, still quietly, as if he must find a way toward telling him what it might be time for him to know, yet not hurrying it, lest he hasten the opening of his mind before the moment determined on by Those who had this turmoil in hand. “I think everything is known. You must have learned that. Don’t you see there is an intelligence of matter here, an exceeding subtlety, an activeness of life”—here he paused, because he was getting farther than anything he himself knew. “I’m quite sure of it,” he ended. “Everything is known.”

The General was ready for him, and with the instant readiness of the soldier whose mind is alert to leap at the call of his trained will.

“You mean,” he said, “there is a better system of espionage here than I know anything about? I have suspected it, but you who work in mechanical appliances must know. Tell me. Tell me all you have heard.”

As I looked at him, I thought it would be a clever and a valiant man who did not tell him all, once the General had turned upon him the full force of his dexterous will. And I stood there wondering about the spirit of man, its tremendous might—like a wind, like a torrent, and the wonders wrought by it when it gathers itself for assault. And just as it struck me with all its force that there was nothing I had yet seen that was like it, the commanding power of it quieted to an almost wistful gentleness. Yet this too was another form of dominance, a weapon of this mental war. I knew this, yet even though I did, it swayed me in spite of myself. I knew now that he could not have his will. My belief that Jacques was assured of that was enough for me. But oh, the pity of it! not that he must be denied by all the gracious influences of the sky, but that there was not an atom in him that would not revolt savagely at being denied. And there was something godlike about him: not the ineffable splendor of the soul clad in humility and love, but the greatness of power made incarnate and having nothing within it to heal its wounds when it is made to bleed. He spoke almost wistfully.

“I have been unfortunate here,” he said, “as I was before I came.”

I knew he meant the long road he had traveled in his fight for empery.

“There are countless inventions I have not, in any place, been able to use. I have been obliged to keep to the simple arts of an older time. It has delayed me incalculably. You know that, don’t you?” he said to Jacques.

“Yes,” said Jacques, still with a steady quietude as if he were bent on answering, being perhaps set to do that very task, but resolved not to exceed his mission. “I know that. When you were sent here, you had been the cause of uneasiness in other places. When you at once began to persuade men to your standard, it was at first with the design of building and laying out roads. And this was done with the apparent purpose of beautifying this place and making it more convenient for daily living. But when the roads were seen to be for the purpose of penetrating into the country, when military drill, though of an outdated type, began”—here he paused, as if again uncertain whether he exceeded his office, and gazing steadily at the General, waited for him to speak. There they stood looking each other in the face, and Milton and I, as of no account because, I suppose, our slender endowment for this business was not yet needed, stood and watched them. But the General merely repeated, in a reflective tone, as if it were a wonder to him, and he begged enlightenment:

“I have been refused a knowledge of the advanced arts which characterise the place. Means of travel, of communication which are commonplaces here, have been denied me. Though indeed I am not refused. I simply lack the means of getting them. When I find a man who has inventive genius, and who could perhaps find means for me to withstand this conspiracy of”—the word evidently failed him and he substituted another more clumsy which evidently displeased him even as he used it—“of loneliness, the man deserts. He disappears. He either knows a track through this trackless place, or he is taken off by that car they call the White Bird.” His manner changed. Of a sudden it became imperious. “Who governs this place?” he asked, with an emphasis far over the border into haughtiness.

Jacques made no reply. All the evidence of his face, so far as I had known it, was that of an immeasurable pity, a recognition of pain he could not of himself alleviate. The General turned to me. He repeated his question and with an access of command. I was not of sufficient importance to conciliate.

“Who governs this place?” he asked. “Is it your Leader?” And the last was with an added shade of curiosity and wonder, as if that leadership perplexed him greatly.

I did not answer. How could I? I knew Who it was he meant by my Leader, but all these things pertaining to this life were to me so dim with mystery that they had to be called divine. I did not know how far I might be expected to go in my guesswork, nor whether I should add my small weight to what Jacques had said and again refused to say. I knew within me that it was indeed what was on earth called divine, as touching a supernatural will and perhaps unseen intervention; but had I not learned—or thought I had—that nothing is supernatural? that all nature herself is quick with a normal life we had neither traced home to its source nor can indeed account for? So I did not speak, not merely because it was wisest to follow Jacques in what must be the wisdom of his silence, but because I had no smallest thing to offer. Milton, probably stifled under clouds of supposition, now spoke.

“Come, come,” said he imperatively. “Get to work! get to work!”

“Yes,” said Jacques, “if we are going to move on, we must get to work. Shall we move on?”

He gave the General a brightly questioning look, as if to say it didn’t matter to him, either his judgment or his will, but only to throw out a feeler, perhaps for more wisdom, a new guess. It was Milton who answered, not waiting for the General, and there was something strange in his voice: a wildness of surprise and, I thought, terror.

“Only you look a-there!” he bade us, and his voice trembled.

We did look, and I, too, in spite of my dream, which had bade me fear nothing even though it were what used to be called the death of the body, was conscious of the sudden sickness which is fear. While we had stood there for that futile talk between the General and Jacques, the green shoots at our feet had been growing, and the ground was matted with them.

“Lift your feet,” yelled Milton. “Lift ’em! lift ’em! See if you can.”

I did lift my right foot. Yes, I could do it, but it was hard to do. The confining growth had, in the last few minutes, grown over it, and one stiff thong enwrapped my ankle. I stood in greenness like a silent river, and the river was rising at a speed I could not help thinking magical, and, I knew, it would get me in the end. But suddenly I was roused, not to hope that it would fail to get me but to that high-heartedness I had begun to understand, the belief that nothing, nothing, can be contrary to the will of That Which is over us. And the sound that roused me was a laugh. It was Jacques. He was laughing, rather low as if he mused over the whole thing and the laugh were the outcrop of his musing.

“Yes,” he said, “it’s going to get us and shortly, too, unless we look out. Come on. We’ve got to fight it—that is, if we want to fight. It’s all in what you want, when you know as little as we four do. There, sir! There you are.” While he was talking, he had been deftly cutting the lianas about the General’s feet and now began an onslaught on the tall growth in front of him. “Come on, Selden,” he called, glancing at my feet, which I had freed. “You and I’ll go ahead, and you two”—he looked back at the General and Milton who were savagely attacking the short growth where we had been standing, “you’d better cut back twenty feet or so behind us, so, if we get hemmed in, we shall have foot-room. We shall want some air—that is, I s’pose we shall,” he added, with his boyish recklessness and that amused, excited laugh. “Great drama, this, Selden, great! I can tell you we’re in at one of the first acts of all time. Do you know,” he called back to the General, with another laugh that seemed not so much amusement as the rising of a tide of life in him, “you’re in luck, sir. Things are getting busy. And it’s all for you, sir, for you. Selden, our friend here, would say the curtain’s about to go up. I’d say it’s up already, and our rôle is to chop away.”

Whether the General heard or not—that is, with his mind—I do not know. He was working like an experienced woodsman, and I thought, as I so often did, how perfect a mechanism was lodged in his skull, that workshop where he contrived and wrought. We had abandoned parley, and, however it was with the others, I had given up all attempt at understanding what was expected of us. To whatever end, this was the task before us now. And since the light from the hill had left us, we were working in a slight dimness of shade, and, I could not help feeling, were losing the direction given us by the ray. It was entirely a matter of feeling. My eyes, in the uniformity of shadow, told me nothing to the purpose. I felt I was veering to the right, but as Jacques kept shoulder to shoulder with me, I concluded I must be wrong. For I trusted him so, his intuition and the keenness of his mind, that I believed we could not, under his guidance, go far wrong. So I worked on and said nothing, but my inner self, attuned to the feel of things, told me we were off our course. And suddenly the constricted space about us became darker still, and I said to him, not knowing why but only that my hands prickled with nervousness and my breath came short:

“I heard a droll thing. On earth, it was. A fellow who’d lived a lot in the mountains—west—said the mules were queer when they got off the trail. If they wandered off at night, you hunted for them to the left. They always veered that way. Did you know it?”

“No,” said he, turning to look at me. I thought he seemed anxious, as if my inconsequence meant I was too tired of the close air and our strenuous work to get nowhere. And I did feel a little odd. Perhaps it was only the anxious look. I trusted him so much that he could always put an idea into my head, and before I knew it I was acting on it.

“But,” I said, in a voice that sounded hollow even to me, “we’re going to the right.”

“So I see,” he answered, and he added, in a tone that seemed to sum up the whole situation and show me we were going where we were bidden: “Perhaps this is the reason. Look.”

I did look, and there in front of us, at a distance of a few feet, the green ceased, and though it had apparently been our enemy, I could not be glad to see it no more, for what stood there in its place was an enemy no less invincible. It was a sheer wall of rock, seamed irregularly as if water had run down its towering side; but there were no roughnesses that might have served as footholds. And to right and left it fronted us as if it stretched from east to west of a firmament and divided a world in two. We stood there, staring at it, and there was silence all about us: for the General also had seen it, and Milton, and of course they knew, as we did, that it was not a gigantic boulder. It was a mountain, with a secret power of resistance in its awful bulk, and it could not be crossed. Jacques had ceased looking straight before him at the body of it on a level with his eyes, and now his gaze traveled up and up as if he could at least allow himself to spy out a way, and Milton’s gaze followed his. Milton spoke now, in a queer cracked voice, as if he were afraid: yet it might have been only the extremity of his wonder.

“It comes up to a pick,” he said. “It’s a mountain all right. If the pick was cut off, I should think it might ha’ been a volcano. That’s how they looked in the jographies. It’s everlastin’ high. Don’t you take it for a mountain, sir?”

He was speaking to Jacques, and I noted he had taken on a more ceremonious address. He was beginning to feel, as I did, the amazing inner life of Jacques, that leaping flame, responding to every natural stimulus. The General had his question, too, and he followed on with it so quickly that Milton got no answer from Jacques, only a little assenting nod.

“Can we skirt it perhaps?” the General asked, in what I began to see as a joy in action. Here was the soldier again. Cut him off by fire, flood, or sheer bulk of earth’s resistance, and he was all in a fever controlled by his seasoned habit of mind. But the fever was not of the apprehensive nerves. It was that of the chafing spirit, restrained so long and ready now to leap.

“I doubt if it could be done,” said Jacques. “For, look! When this green stuff gets to the mountain base, it’s different. It has all the appearance of a similar growth I’ve known further down, and that springs up in quagmires. Probably—yes, I’m almost sure if we strike off to the right we shall be caught and mired to our necks—and more. And to the right, you know the land falls rapidly. That never would take us to the height.”

I was not looking at the mountain. I was looking at a sight far more amazing: the General’s face. It was, in a white, set way, incarnate rage. Yet when he spoke, his dry voice sounded entirely controlled.

“What do they mean,” he said to me, because, I think, he suspected in me a weaker fibre, an emotionalism which would lead me to answer whether I would or no, “what do they mean who talk about what your Leader has promised them, when They—They Who have made this earth—go about to fill it with traps and hideous methods of keeping us in prison?”

Jacques answered him, and I was glad. I should not have known how, though I still knew the country was all kindly and full of the intents of God.

“The entire place is mapped out and charted,” said Jacques. “This is not a barbarous country. This is—” But he paused and that ineffable look of light and wonder came over his face. It was not Flavia’s look, what I always thought of as “worshiping.” It was recognition, and at the same time a child’s marvel, as if one couldn’t possibly conceive of anything so fair. Except with other senses: and perhaps not then.

“Where are the maps? where are the charts?” said the General imperiously, and Jacques answered him with that same beguiling gentleness, as if he were brother of mercy to all mankind.

“Not here,” said he. “Look you.”

He spoke earnestly, and to me he suddenly sounded like a person out of an ancient time. Perhaps it was that “Look you”, so gravely said.

“We have come here,” he continued, “for what purpose? You because you want to scale those heights.” He pointed, but though he meant the Holy City, it was the bulk of the mountain he pointed at, facing us, as it did, like a Titan Who Denied. “This other man,” he did not use Milton’s name, but Milton knew he was meant, and looked at him frowningly, “he is here for the same reason. Selden and I—when it comes to us, I can’t quite tell you why we’re here, for I don’t know. But I feel we are told off to stand by you in your great exile, and”—he stopped and his voice broke a very little—“bring you home at last.”

One word only seemed to have struck the General full in his angry mind.

“Exile?” he repeated. “You say exile?”

“Yes,” said Jacques, with his unyielding gentleness. “Aren’t you conscious of it? You’ve been here a long time. You tell us what you’ve been denied: tools to work with, arms of the latest efficiency, an army. In spite of all your military craft, your army crept away. You are alone, except for us. Isn’t that exile, man?”

Had anybody ever called him “man” precisely in that tone? It was not depreciatory. It was merely a reminding word from another man, bidding him remember the dust from which they both had sprung and the dust and ashes they had been resolved into on the way to this inexorable place. I did not dare now to look the General in the face, fearing what I should see there and unwilling to let him know I might read it and remember. But his voice came quickly, and it was no longer angry. It shook a little. He asked a question, and it was of me he asked it, and in as commonplace a way as he could manage.

“Where is she?”

“Cintra?” I asked, looking at him quickly and finding myself shocked at the pinched misery of his iron mask. He bowed his head slightly, and my tongue contrived wretchedly: “I don’t know.”

He bowed again, as if I had made adequate answer and the matter was therefore closed.

XXIII

And then I saw something. Usually inept and slow as I was, I turned a little, without purpose, and fixed my eyes on the wall of green growing there straight and tall. Perhaps I really turned away from the General because I did not want to invite further questioning for which I had no answers. And what I saw was this: at about the height of my eyes, an aperture in the green, which looked superficially like the hole Flavia had seen below and which gave entrance to the little path she and Cintra had then taken to the height. And at once, on seeing it, I was sure, as eagerly so as if I knew invisible mechanicians were preparing for us a way out of the place.

“Look,” I said to Jacques. I laid my finger on the lower line of it as if I were touching the sill of a window. “I have seen one like this before. It is an eye-hole, a blaze in the forest. It means that this is the way we are to go.”

I expected him to smile at it, and remind me that we were not working in magic but a perfectly commonplace mechanism of physical growth to be dealt with only by physical laws. He did nothing of the kind. He took my place at the little window and put his face to it, to look.

“Yes,” he said, “a perfectly good path on the other side. We’ll open up here and see. Help me cut the stems on this right side. I’ve an idea it may swing out like a door. Ah!” For after a little cutting it did swing out, and then the others turned from their hostile staring at the mountain and saw what we had done. There was some crackling and whispering of the vines that made the green door, and torn leaves fluttered at our feet; but the door stood fully open, sustained by the growth beside it, and Jacques stepped through, and I after him. It may have been imaginary—and who can tell what is actual in the world of nature and what is within us in response to it?—but I at once felt a lightness, a lifting of the heart wholly different from what I had been feeling in that constricted place. It was more open to the sky, and the confining hedges were not only lower but they were of a softer leaf and a less gnarly growth. Indeed, there were no thorns at all, and I should not have been afraid to gather the branches in my bare hands. The General now came through, looking rather frowning as if he suspected us—or the green hedges—of playing some new hoax on him, and Milton followed. Jacques received them with a smile, as if this were all his eminently successful handiwork, created for them alone.

“Do you see?” he said. “A perfectly good path. Shall we take it?”

The General, with his quick weighing of possibilities, shook his head. He gave his reason. He said:

“It goes down hill.”

Jacques nodded, accepting the reason, but he said:

“Perhaps we are intended to go down hill. Nobody has suggested our going uphill at all, you know. We simply took it into our heads to go.”

I thought it rather handsome of him to assume an equal complicity with the General; but it was lightly said and it sounded well. Milton spoke. He looked at Jacques as if assuring him they had one mind about it, and he sounded oracular.

“We can’t climb the mountain. If ’tis a mountain. I say it’s a volcano. I bet two to one. We can’t skirt it to the left, not if there’s shaker-beds there.” (I loved his using that old name.) “And fur’s I know, that’s so. I cut a sapling and I found I could ram it down ten feet, usin’ main strength. If we go down along here, we can skirt round further down and get a clear sweep, and then we can tackle the upland grade all over again. And maybe that pesky stuff we’ve been cuttin’ ain’t spread round this side at all.”

And he pushed past the General with no ceremony and began striding down the slope. I think he was, like me, exhilarated by the clearer air, the added light and the sudden freedom from the confining green. And we followed, the General evidently agreeing in the sense of it and wasting no breath on maintaining an authority he felt to be so real that he could take it up again at need. It was a lovely way, so soft and kindly that I named it in my mind Mary’s Way. It seemed fitted for slender bare feet dancing up the slope at dawn, to carry out some ancient rite of worship. I thought of all kinds of things, as we went lightly down: of games and lovely four-footed beasts, all in a fearless freedom with men, and the chrism of dew on those slender feet,—everything that the mind of man has conceived of what might be the morning of the world. Jacques came up with me and we walked close, side by side, for the path was narrow.

“I feel Greek,” I said to him, in a low tone. “Don’t you?”

He understood what I meant.

“Yes,” he said, with that under thrill of laughter in his voice. “I feel all kinds of ways.”

“If those two women should appear,” I said—I dared not use their names, Cintra and Flavia, lest the others should catch the familiar sounds and ask what we knew of them—“if they should appear, how would they look? Just as they have or—processional?”

The last word was silly, but I really wondered if the spell of the place would fall on them also, and they would have emerged from their maturer mask of beauty into nymph-like incarnations of some unknown rapture, throwing wild arms in time with dancing feet. He answered gravely:

“I don’t know what it would do to them. Something. A good deal is being done to us. We’ve stepped into the circle of some other influence, Selden. Pan? no, it isn’t soulless. It’s only beauty of a sort we haven’t seen before, and beauty is here, Selden. Life! old, yet—at the dawn.”

By which it can be seen that we were exalted, enrapt with some juice of wonder that is not the vintage of every day. This path was not straight. It curved slightly, winding with an ease that made it tenfold beautiful by the element of surprise. For we would come on a little grove of trees, slender birch, many of them, at a turn of the way, or a tall cedar, like a green candle pointing, as if with meaning, to the sky. Sometimes there would be a cleared space of tender sward inviting the eye to peaceful acquaintanceship, and once there gleamed through the softness of our defining hedge a bank of violets so blue that the eye was amazed at them. Once Jacques stooped and cut a fringe of the hedge where it had encroached on the path. I thought he was doing it absently, as we had with other defensive growth which had threatened us before, and I asked him:

“Do we need to do that?”

He smiled up at me, clipping the last wayward shoot.

“No,” he said. “Only of course it mustn’t grow in too far.”

“But,” said I, “have you an idea we shall come back this way?”

“No,” he said. “Oh, no! I’ve no idea what we’re to do. But somebody may. The others that may need it.”

“The others?” I said, perplexed. “What others?”

Then he laughed out.

“I don’t know,” said he. “Only I hate to see a path destroyed. There’s always somebody to want it—somewhere.”

Milton and the General were in front of us now, walking fast, the General with a quick light tread full of grace and a sort of steady implication of endurance fitted to keep up indefinitely, and Milton more heavily, but with the plod, plod of an equal purpose. Suddenly a sound came up to us from below, the sharp bellow of an animal in pain or terror. Milton stopped short. The General was going on, but Milton put out a hand and plucked him back. It was only by a grasp on the sleeve, but I had time to wonder what such sacrilege to that imperial person would bring down upon him, before the General turned about to him and asked brusquely:

“What is it, man?”

The bellow came again, and Milton turned to Jacques.

“D’you hear that?” he demanded, out of what seemed a quick anxiety.

“Yes,” said the General, taking it on himself to answer. “You think there’s a farm near by. It doesn’t mean that, necessarily. There’s rich pasturage about here. Cattle are everywhere. I’ve heard about it from my soldiery who came from here. They were homesick for their farms, unsettled in mind. Then,” he said morosely, “it was the next step to go back to them.”

There was the sound again, and Milton looked distraught. It might, from his passion, have been a human cry.

“She’s mired, that’s about it,” he announced, turning to Jacques, as we all did when we came to a queer spot in our way. “That’s a heifer. Don’t you know a heifer’s loo?” He looked at me now as if enraged at our inability to cope with things really vital in this unaccountable world. “She’s got mired in one o’ them devilish shaker-beds. I had a heifer once—Alderney—that got mired and went crazy, she was so scairt. Hear that?”

We heard it, the sharp distracted cry. I was ashamed to find that it gave me a certain homely pleasure. I had missed the animals that were our familiar friends on earth. Where were they all? There hadn’t even been time to ask; but I carried a little homesick ache for them.

“Perhaps,” I said, my mind going back to similar bellowings, “perhaps they’ve taken her calf away from her. You know”—

But I wasn’t permitted to explain. Milton cut me short.

“Don’t be a damn’ fool,” he said. “Can’t ye tell when a creatur’s scairt to death?”

And I felt there was indeed something humiliating in not understanding the language of our lesser friends.

“Here!” he said. He was addressing Jacques. “I’m goin’ down there. You can come or not as you will. I dunno how sound travels here, but I lay that creatur’ ain’t so fur away. She’s right down there.” He pointed with a brown forefinger. “If we foller this damned windin’ path, it’s goin’ to lead us straight away from her. I’m goin’ to put through here and chance it.”

Even as he spoke, he was forcing his great shoulders through the tender green of the hedge. He did not even turn his head to see whether we were following. Like the General, he had the unthinking egotism of the born leader. He saw his objective and, having set it before us, he had no doubt but we must follow. I heard him crashing away through underbrush, and once he called “Hullo! Hullo!” and followed it by “So, Boss! So!” And I knew he was not signalling back to us, but reassuring the beast and telling her, in what man has adopted as a syllable of beast language, that he was coming. The General, without comment, had started along down the path, and Jacques, giving me a little nod, as if to say, “What a merry old world it is!” started along after him, and I was at his heels.

“What do you make of it?” I asked him.

“Oh, it’s a cow all right,” said he. “And she’s in trouble. Probably,” said he, half to himself, while the wrinkles about his eyes began crinkling up, “this is the first contented minute the old fellow’s had since he came. If he finds her, I shouldn’t be surprised if he put his arms round her neck and kissed her. He’s probably taken it for granted he’d come on Flavia again, but he never thought he’d be so lucky as to hear the voice of a cow.”

“But what if he’s right?” I said. “What if she is mired? He can’t get her out alone. Even I know that.”

“Oh, yes, he can,” said Jacques easily. “He’s a great leader. A great leader can find a million roads to his heart’s desire. And the heifer is his heart’s desire.”

I couldn’t be quite so merry-hearted. I had some sort of humor, a glass that reflects the queerness, the grotesquerie of life; but I thought he was going a little too lightly over what looked like some of the quagmires of our own discouragement.

“Don’t you think,” I said, “he misses Flavia at all?”

“No,” said Jacques, “not yet. But all that sort of thing he expects her to settle. She’s always been in the background like a guardian angel—or his dinner. He could always wait for his dinner, because he knew it would come. He probably hasn’t enjoyed her much, after their first youth, but he’s no more idea she isn’t still feeding him from her breasts than that the light here doesn’t come from some kind of a sun. Flavia’s a heavenly body to him. The cow’s a part of earth.”

Neither of us had any idea that the General was listening, though I did have a quick wonder, as Jacques fell silent, whether he, too, bemused by the beckoning gleams of his own fate, thought of Cintra merely as a heavenly body. Did he miss her, or did he assume that she was pursuing her orbit, sure to bring her round to him again? or, if it did not bring her, would he even know? As I got to that, he turned his head slightly, and remarked:

“You speak in symbols. Man is made for reality. If he forsakes it, he dies.”

“Well,” said Jacques easily, as if he were keeping up a desultory conversation and too much stress need not be laid on anybody’s part in it, “the question is, you see, what is reality?”

“He dies,” the General repeated. “Whole races die.”

I could believe that he had never acquired the habit of considering the individual and a plot of ground to feed him, so long as the military were subsidized. He thought in terms of races and dominion over nothing less than worlds.

There was no more talk after this, except that twice on the way down Jacques and I bade each other note that there was no more sound of the heifer. Had she been rescued, or had she gone under, with the mud sucking her sweet breath? And after a time, how long I do not know, though it was so long that I even became dulled to the serene beauty of the way, the bordering hedges straggled off into a shorter growth and we came out on a broad elevated plateau facing a scene of such satisfying pleasantness as I had not yet beheld, even in this place. It was not that it was lovelier than the rest: only it was different. It extended to a horizon where I seemed to see a line of roofs with all the irregularity that makes for beauty in the houses of men. But all the broad rolling plain between us and them seemed of a waiting tranquillity I cannot describe. There were groves carelessly disposed, as by their own will, there were fields and threading streams, and it all had the look—though this is a fanciful way of putting it—as if it were for the bountiful service of gentle animals as well as man. Jacques caught that thought, full-winged, from me.

“Well, it is, you know,” said he. “Quite evidently it is. Herds of cows! don’t you see them over there. And if that isn’t a farmhouse—well, any way there’s a gray barn.”

I had been enraptured enough with the place to find in it the added beauty of newness; but suddenly it took on an aspect even more moving. I had seen it before, and the charm of familiarity touched it like a sunset light.

“What is it?” asked Jacques.

“I’ve seen it before,” I told him. “It was there after I’d deserted and had my sleep on the rock. Only that was from a slightly different direction, and at first I didn’t know it was the same. And down there”—I pointed to the farther bank of the broad lake Flavia and I had looked upon together, “is a sort of—” I hesitated. Was the General to be told who was there hoping for him and, as Flavia had guessed, ‘sweeping up the floor?’ I ended, “with pillars. Those tall cedars pretty well hide it, but we can see a bit of the roof.”

Jacques suspected me of a more accurate knowledge than I had.

“I see,” he said quietly. “I can get gleams of it, but nothing definite. Low, it must be, rambling perhaps, and with pillars. Well, that’s not our business, at present. What I should say is”—he turned to the General—“we’d better make our way across the meadowland to that house and barn. And if Milton and his heifer haven’t brought up there, we may be able to get some sort of tackle and go back to him.”

The General was scanning the slope from which we had descended. The mountain of rock rose steeply; from every point it was inaccessible. The farther hill, where we believed the Holy City to be, looked far, far away and also inaccessible, being hid by a mist-like atmosphere of a most tender blue. “Do not look at me,” it seemed to breathe through that enveloping mist. “I do not forbid you to come, but I beseech you. I am not unwelcoming, but I am far from being anything you have dreamed of me.” And there was no guiding ray of light. All the doors and windows of the clouds were locked. The sky was of an inscrutable gray. At the foot of our slope we came directly upon a spring. It was at the very end of the path as if the path led to it, trodden perhaps by little hoofs from the mountains: wild animals who came down to drink. It was a deep spring of clear water over a pebbly bottom and all about it were the tracks of these animals that, coming to drink, had also fed down the lush grass about its brim. Jacques struck into the path, the General behind him, and I followed on, and we talked no more until we got to the herd of cattle feeding midway between the mountain and the house. They were beautiful creatures, some of them white and long-horned of a type I had seen only in Italy, and a few of that red so common and so adapted to landscape warmth and calm. They lifted their heads, one after another, in a mildness of interest, and went on feeding.

“‘Forty feeding like one,’ ” said Jacques to me, and the General looked at him in a frowning question. He evidently, with all he knew of what the centuries had brought to this spot where all sorts and conditions had found harbor, did not know that, and Jacques only said it again, more clearly. And to shorten the chronicle of our journey as we tried to shorten the journey itself, with a haste to be there and come to the aid of Milton, if we could, we were at the farmhouse and found it beautiful, in a rambling way, of a gray tint, as I have said, as if that came rather from the weather than any sort of stain, and a look of ancient peace. A low gray fence surrounded it—or rather bounded it in front: for behind it was a well-trodden courtyard and the barn. There was a gate in the fence—the kind of fence made of pointed pickets—and a path led up to the front door. And in the yard so enclosed were many flourishing plants, all in bloom, and as I looked at them with a grateful eye, I saw that these were flowers I had known on earth; and I felt that quick pain of longing memory the earth had then the power to rouse in me. It was not that I wanted to go back there, but forever and forever it would be my first dear home.

XXIV

I opened the gate and stood aside to let the others pass through. If there were anything in precedence, I had meant Jacques to go first, for he had become, by reason of his insight, the head of our wandering expedition. But the General, in a perfectly unconscious assumption of his own rights, had already taken the step necessary to make him first and so Jacques, with his unvarying courtesy, had also stood aside, and the General went up the path to the open door, we two following. And when we reached the door, I, at least, paused, inevitably arrested by the picture I saw there. It was not of any unique beauty we might have divined from this unpredicted place. It was all of earth, and the most homespun corner of earth as I had seen it. This was, as I guessed, the model of a New England farmhouse of the prosperous type, with furnishings of what I should call on the earth a time long past. The hall was broad, and a staircase with a dignified railing ascended to the floor above. There was a room on each side of the hall, of the old square amplitude, I guessed, though I could see only the front half of each, and here were chairs, table and desk of an olden time, and on the floor homespun rugs that, so I thought, would have delighted the heart of Flavia. The hall itself led through the house, and the door at the back, also open, gave upon green sward cut by a well-trodden path leading back to the gray barn.

The General looked round at me, as if suggesting a further action which he might be too removed in dignity to take, and I, knowing what it must be, stepped up on the doorstone, to the brass knocker of a lion’s head, and rapped long and loud. And as I did that, a figure came out at the open door of the barn and took the path to the house in as business-like and brisk a walk as any farmer coming in from doing the chores. It was Milton Blake. Apparently he had not heard my knock and his mind was on affairs of its own: for instead of entering the house by way of the back hall door, he turned aside into a smaller path at his right and disappeared. I, regardless of the fact that I had knocked, and leaving the others to meet whatever answer the summons might evoke, followed the bidding of an impulsive curiosity and went through the hall to the door at the back. I looked to the left where Milton had gone and saw the queerest sight I had seen in all the surprises of this new world, yet of all sights the most commonplace. On that side, the house had been built out into an ell containing, as I afterward found, the kitchen and its door. But it was not there Milton was bound. He had stopped midway on a patch of green sward and he was solicitously communing with a white heifer who, on her part, seemed to have given over her feeding for an equally beguiling interest in him. She was a beautiful creature, white as snow except for her legs which were dark, up to the knee, with dried mud, and it was the legs Milton was examining, with a crooning accompaniment of “So, Bossy” to which her ears were evidently attuned or which she found fitting, because he was her rescuer and all he did was good in her sight. Now Jacques and the General had come up behind me, and Jacques said to me:

“Right, wasn’t he? That’s the heifer and he fished her out. And it’s a case of love, isn’t it? love at sight.”

Milton was aware of us, the sound of Jacques’ voice perhaps, or the consciousness of being stared at, and he jerked up his head and looked at us. The pastoral scene was broken. The beautiful group a sculptor would have been mazed at finding in a pose no trained imagination could have bettered, dissolved, though memory herself, in my mind and in that of Jacques, would keep it everlastingly, one of the jewels of time that Time himself thought nobly of. Milton set down the foot resting in his hand while he gently felt the leg all over, and, plain farmer once more, came forward to us. We stepped out at the door, and I think Jacques and I had the same feeling about the bit of statuesque beauty our coming had disturbed. We seemed to have been thrown back centuries into an ancient simple life where man tilled the ground for the animals he lived on, leaving them only for war when he was summoned by chieftains whose minds were not on the hard culture of the earth. Yes, we had taken a long journey back, Jacques and I, into the infancy of time, and our eyes were wet with the emotion of it. Never again would Milton be to us a mere son of earth, untutored, dull. He was a part of the framework on which the universe is formed. As for the General, I do not pretend to know what the scene meant to him. His mind was a better tempered blade than mine could ever be, but he had kept it for carving its way into paths that led to power, and I doubt if he now saw any other use for it. The evening and the morning might cast their diversely bewildering lights unheeded, the flowers die under the feet of marching men. Milton snapped his quick frowning glance at us.

“Well,” he said, “I found her. Found her straight off. In half an hour she’d ha’ been underground. Pretty creatur’ as ever I see, she was, there bellerin’ herself to death.”

“How’d you get her out?” Jacques asked. “Did you have help?”

“No, sir, I didn’t have help,” said Milton, the fierce light of victory in his eye. “I cut some saplings and laid ’em down front of her, and I got a foothold on ’em myself, and I lifted her, one foot and then another. And we done it; by hook or by crook, we done it. If she’d been down another three inches,” he conceded generously, “we couldn’t ha’ fetched it. But there she is. I’m goin’ to sluice her legs off when I can find a pail.”

The object of this protective passion was cropping the grass in a hungry absorption, as if she had already forgotten the cool wet peril of the bog. The General, I saw, had had enough of her: for he turned back and went to the open door of the front room at the right which, to my remembering gaze, bore the greatest resemblance to the “parlor.” We followed him, and Milton, as we stood looking in, put this pertinent question. It was to me he put it, as I doubtless seemed to him a more common citizen of earth as he remembered it.

“What do you make o’ this place?” said Milton, cocking a rather anxious eye.

I gathered that the place pleased him and that he would be sorry to leave it and the heifer he probably had begun to think of as his own. I had nothing to say but that, as usual, I didn’t know. He looked at the others. They didn’t know either, as he saw by their unresponsive faces.

“Don’t seem to be anybody at home,” said he. “Went away,” he said, doing his own thinking aloud, since there was nothing to be done with us. “Might ha’ been called away. Left the doors open an’ all. Might ha’ been some kind of a raid, soldiers an’ all, same as it was in the Civil War. Folks took what things they could an’ run—silver an’ so on. What should you think?”

This he addressed to the General who, to my surprise, did speak, though if it was an answer, it was in the form of a command, and to me.

“I propose camping here,” he said, “where we can sit down in quiet and make plans for the coming campaign. You at a desk,” he said to me. “I have work for you to do. From what your wife has told me, you are eminently fitted for it. Your life has led up to it.” As if this settled the matter, he walked into the room, gave a cursory look at the desk which stood open with blank paper disposed on it in readiness for use, and said, again to me: “As I thought. You can work in comfort and seclusion.”

And he turned about to the great sofa between the two windows, lay down on it and closed his eyes. His face was a death mask. He was evidently too tired to keep up for another minute his assumption of an almost godlike immobility. There, by one consent, we left him, Milton leading and going through the hall again to the back. But the heifer, still placidly browsing, was no longer in our minds, not even in his, for he, too, was tired.

“God sakes!” he said, as if to himself, “I wish I had a cup o’ tea.”

And a scene followed of such incredible homeliness that I could but think Jacques had known what was destined to happen and had himself rung up the curtain on it.

“If there is a kitchen,” said Jacques, “why not tea?” And he opened a door at the back where one might have expected to find the dining-room. But being a farmhouse, this was not so. We were in the kitchen itself, a large room with windows nearly square, the two sashes of sixteen panes each, and it had a wooden table in the midst—scoured white, I noticed,—and a dark dresser of dishes on the wall. Now I had always been led to understand—and had accepted it as reasonable—that a proper kitchen should face the sun, to be flooded with light in every part; but the contentment of my eye demanded that a kitchen should be dark, its illumination to depend on brightly polished copper and brass and the perennial bloom of old blue dishes on the wall. And such was this. I thought of Dutch interiors and queer nobbly old women with thick noses moving about in the occupation of broiling and baking, and though I saw no oven and found the great fireplace black and cold, inhospitable to the gentle arts of cookery, I swear I did smell all sorts of sugared and savory things, as if they were just done and ready to be taken forth for our gustation. I loved the place suddenly with such entirety that I desired never to leave it. Jacques, too, loved it. “Perfect!” I heard him comment, in a low contented tone. But Milton, though he also was momentarily softened by this homely comfort, had his own comment to make, which I found entirely natural, though I was glad his fell purpose could not be carried out.

“Wants a coat o’ paint,” said Milton, and then, casting a glance up at the great beam and plaster of the undoubtedly ancient ceiling, “and a coat o’ whitewash.”

Jacques had gone over to a set of low shelves near the fireplace. It was full of dishes, and the top was furnished with three electric plates of the sort used for elementary cooking, broiling, toasting, anything that does not call for oven heat. So exactly was it like small kitchen arrangements in the absurd city apartments where housewives live on the fringe of domestic life, that I was not surprised to find it here. Jacques found a switch, turned it, and the heat sprang red in one of the three covers. He glanced about him, but I had seen what he must be looking for.

“Here!” said I, and I caught a teakettle from a shelf where it sat alone in fatness, and looked about for water. So commonplace did it all seem, so unlike a faerie house, that I expected to find a faucet at my hand. But no! it was a little more like a faerie house than that, and it was Milton who took a wooden pail from the sink. A wooden sink it was: so did modernity live pleasantly with the past.

“There’s a well out there,” said Milton. “I just gave her some.”

By that I knew he had refreshed his heifer, home from her great adventure. I heard the bucket go down with a clang and splash, and he was back, bearing clear water, and himself filled the kettle gravely and set it on to boil.

“Now,” said Jacques, “we’ll hunt for the tea. Yes, here’s the pot and here’s the caddy.”

There they were, companionably on a shelf of their own. And how he made the tea and poured it into blue cups for us, cups I seemed sometime to have known, rich in vines and leopards and shaggy men (and this homespun touch was in a universe of which we knew no more than that we believed implicitly in its hospitality toward us); how he went in to offer the General a cup for his heart’s sustaining, and was refused with an absent-minded coldness indicating that no beverage short of hippocrene befitted that lordly gullet—all this passed as swiftly and neatly as if it were one of the hourly happenings of an earthly day. Milton drank his tea very fast, as if he must get back to the chores without, and I lent myself to the enchantment of stillness and the silent tokens about me that life had been thus for many years and would be so until land and beasts and men ceased to exist in any primitive alliance of need and satisfaction.

“But after all,” I said to Jacques, “it isn’t ours. They’ll come back. Won’t they come back?” I added, in a sudden wild confidence that they never would.

He shook his head a very little. It indicated a suspicion of what might be, but no certainty.

“I doubt,” he said, “if there’s anybody to come.”

Milton had got up and gone to the door, and now he stood there, his back to me, hands in his pockets, and he, Milton of the firm unchanging aspect and every outward implication that his firmness had gone straight through him, was whistling. It was an ancient tune. I could not remember the name, but it was an old English song of the maypole I had heard when I was young.

“Many mansions!” said Jacques suddenly, and laughed. He seemed to be laughing at himself for translating the tender imagery of the past into rich farm land and a sheltering roof. “I have an idea,” he said slowly, as if he were thinking it out, “that we are on a path that has been prepared for us. Every step is prepared, always has been. Why not this place, as well as all the steps we took to get here?”

“You think,” I said, “it’s as you said before: it’s all for him, to keep him from climbing the path to the Holy City. To keep him wandering about here, until he sees—”

Until he saw what? I did not know. I felt that there was a breathless excitement about us, perhaps spreading in ripples, how far we could not guess, to conserve somehow the wasted strength of this determined soul. He was almost immeasurably strong in the power of him, but he was not good,—and by “good” I mean fitted for the reasonable usages of worlds. He was evil, because he was fighting for the power to live and reign. And God, having made him, could not destroy. He could only open paths before his eyes, here and there, a great maze of indirection, through which his childish will to reign should toughen itself to worship and be humble, the state where God could say to him: “My son, come home to Me.” I had forgotten all about Jacques and about Milton, whistling there in the doorway. My head felt tense with the thought of this. My eyes were dazed with staring unseeingly into the benign shadows while I reached out with my pitiful inadequacy for the least of the causes of things. And Jacques had probably followed my mind, as it groped and wandered.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I make of it. And it’s my belief that we’re to stay here for a time: that is, until we get some sign that we’re to move on. And we sha’n’t be disturbed. I’m sure we sha’n’t be disturbed.”

I was so intent upon my desire to know, that I ventured this:

“Do you say so out of what you think yourself, or have you been told? Have you heard a voice? the voice of that Presence, you know? His voice?”

“No,” said Jacques. “I have heard nothing. But I believe if we were not on the right track we should have heard.”

XXV

Then there came a time of peace. As to the General, the virtue had gone out of him. Or so I thought then: now I believe that however exhausted he might seem, the brooding mind that moved him, never swerving, on his track, was darkly at work in its own fierce ways. Milton was every instant more enraptured with what he called, quite simply, the farm. I was mildly surprised that he did not say “my” farm: for, so far as his pride in it went, and his protective care, it was his. He sat down anxiously by Jacques and tried to get him to talk about atmospheric conditions, weather and seasons, and how they were likely to affect that happy herd feeding all about us and lying in the shade. Jacques listened sympathetically, but he had nothing to tell. At least, there was nothing he would tell. He reminded Milton that his own life here had been a very secluded one. He had devoted himself to a scientific problem which he had now abandoned, and though he considered the physical aspect of the place of an absorbing interest, he had not observed it with any eye to scientific data. Milton only looked worried. They were out at the back door, Milton sitting on the doorstep and Jacques lying at length on the green sward, which the heifer had now forsaken for a place with her kind.

“What about victuals?” asked Milton, out of his worry. “I ain’t had a meal o’victuals sence I’ve been here—only that one cup o’tea. Two, I had,” he added, to be accurate. “Two cups o’ tea.”

“Are you hungry?” asked Jacques idly, touching with his finger a little blue flower that had escaped the cropping heifer. I knew it. I had seen it on the earth: self-heal, an every-day sort of weed that yet had a look of being especially staunch and adapting itself to the fickle scheme of things. And being of the earth, though I had probably set my foot upon it many times when I was there, now I loved it. Milton was thinking, and Jacques asked his question again: “Are you hungry?”

“No,” said Milton grudgingly, as if that added to the queerness of it.

“Well,” said Jacques, “you see!”

“No, I don’t,” said Milton tetchily. “There’s nothin’ I see, not to do me any good. And when it comes to eatin’ my three meals a day, it ain’t that I can’t get along without ’em. It ain’t that I feel the need of ’em nor think of ’em unless my mind goes back to—things.”

He limped a little there. I wondered if he thought of Flavia and the homely comforts she had brought him.

“Don’t you feel well?” enquired Jacques, in his dispassionate way.

“Yes, sir,” said Milton emphatically. “I never felt better. I could throw an ox.”

Jacques hesitated a moment, regarding him with that considering look of his, so kind and yet so penetrating. “Milton,” said he, at length, “you’re a spirit. Didn’t you know that?”

“Tchah!” said Milton. It was unbridled exasperation. “Now if you’re goin’ to talk religion to me you can stop right where ye be, for I won’t stand it, I tell ye plainly.”

Jacques made no answer, and Milton sat glowering.

“Well,” said Milton, at length, “what ye got to say?”

Still no answer, and he was constrained, again by his exasperation, to go on. “What is a spirit?” he asked, as if nothing could surprise him further.

And Jacques answered with a simplicity which I knew to be nothing but the truth:

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” said Milton, “d’ye mean a ghost? Ye must know that.”

“Perhaps I do mean ghostly, in a way,” said Jacques, turning to me. “That is, so far as the word goes. ‘Ghostly father!’ instead of priest. I always wanted to bring it back into the language. You ought to do that, you fellows that write.”

Then he turned again to Milton and went on with his kindly ministrations.

“No,” he said, “I don’t know what the spirit is any more than you do. Except the Holy Spirit. No! no!” he put in quickly, as Milton opened his mouth, presumably in revolt against more religion. “I suppose,” he said, turning to me again, “that’s a sign, a symbol, isn’t it, for us common chaps, to signify what we love, what we’re beloved by. No, Milton,” he said conclusively, as if he were taking out all the last wares of his pack and bidding him see there were no more, “I don’t know a blessed thing except that there is a spiritual body, and we’ve got it, and it’s the most unaccountable, obliging, serviceable beauty of a mechanism a God could create. It lets you eat if you’re hungry or fast if you’re not. If you see a plum tree full of plums, and want to climb it and gorge yourself, like an old dream of boyhood in a place you never’ll forget to love, why, you can. If you want to go wild over your own strength and never rest your legs, you can, and you won’t have to pay for it afterwards; and if you want to sleep you can. I used to think I knew what a spiritual body might be. I didn’t. I thought it was dear, indestructible, like—oh, like throbbing light, or a transparent gem. It wasn’t tangible, you know. But we’re tangible. It couldn’t cast a shadow. Milton!”

He shot out the name like a command, and I expected Milton to spring to his feet, even to salute. He didn’t, of course. He was too deeply intrenched in his own crusty dignity for that, but his alertness was on edge.

“Milton,” said Jacques, asking him now, not commanding, “get up, won’t you? Stand over there, out of the shade of the house. See! the light comes that way. There! I want to find out whether you cast a shadow.”

To my surprise, I found Milton, too, wanted to see. He was infected with the wild adventure of being in another place, a place like none he could ever have imagined and, being in a measure like the earth he knew, far removed from the holy symbolism he had only gaped at.

“He does,” said Jacques, to me. “See the shadow? I don’t know whether I’m glad or not. Yes, I’m glad. A man’s only half a man without his shadow. Stand up there, Selden, and let me see. Yes, you do, too.”

“Of course,” I said, going back to the steps again. “It would be a hideous world without shadows, and if the world has them—if matter—” I began to bungle there and had to stop, choked as usual by the possibilities of this life thronging in on me as they did, and he ended for me:

“Yes, matter: and I suppose spirits are a kind of matter, don’t you? It’s all one.” And then he remembered Milton, left angrily floundering, and asked him straight out: “Don’t you like it? Don’t you like using a body such as you never’ve had in your life, not getting tired, not thinking: ‘I don’t hardly feel like going to milking, but I must.’ ”

The last words were exactly as Milton would have said them, and I laughed. But Milton did not laugh. Milking! that perhaps was what set him off again.

“But who owns all this?” he said. “Who owns them cows? Who’s it all belong to?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jacques. “The Ones above us, I suppose.”

“Above us?” frowned Milton. He didn’t like that. I expected him to add, “I’m as good as any man.” “The government?” he pursued. “What kind of a government is it?”

“Milton,” said Jacques, with decision, “I know no more than you do. Ever since I’ve been here—and it’s a long time—I’ve been working on lines I thought would give me my own way. That’s why I don’t know anything. But I am very sure there is a government that’s right and just. And—” he did not seem to know how to continue, and he ended: “I know what Flavia would say.”

“Flavia?” echoed Milton. “Flavia?”

There was a wonder in his tone. What had Flavia to do with governments? Or, I wondered, had he actually forgotten her? And Jacques repeated this, meaning I knew, that this was what Flavia would say: “‘For the Lord God giveth them light’.”

Milton, after staring at him a moment, went slowly to the corner of the house where he could see the pasturage before him and stood looking at the cattle feeding there. And again he was whistling under his breath.

“I’m not so sure of it all—that about shadows,” said Jacques to me. “Pure spirit might not cast a shadow. But we’re more or less muddy, we three and the noble Roman in there. But pure spirit!”

“Jacques,” said I, in what I thought sudden discovery, “did you write poetry?”

“No,” said he, in a strong, passionate voice, “I planned great deeds.”

XXVI

It was within half an hour, we’ll say, of that last happening, the talk of shadows and Milton’s discontent. The General called to me, and I went in. He was standing, and he said to me:

“I am going to begin over again from the beginning.”

I looked a question, and perhaps he thought I was wilfully dull, for he continued irritably:

“I must have men.”

I wondered whether I had the cleverness to withstand him even as little as Jacques had been doing and whether I had authority to try, and I asked:

“What do you need them for?”

He stiffened a little into his habitual pose, and said, in anger, this time, though it was well controlled:

“Do you realize that we are as effectually cut off from service of all sorts as if we were beginning life in a wilderness unknown to man, with no arms and no tools to make them with? The first need is men. We must persuade them into our service. There is no way to press them, in this god-ridden place.” And I understood he was again thinking of Him he called our Leader and wondering at His dreadful power. “God that made us!” he cried, in anguish. “We are back again at the beginning of time. We might as well be savages, killing the beasts and wearing their skins.”

He stopped, as in despair, and I wondered if the mad aspect of it all overcame him to the point of actual unreason. For here there was no need of skins to be clothed in. The benign hospitality of the place had apparently fitted us, at the start, with all the trappings of a gentle life: we were clothed with a curious art of fitness and beauty, and except for our solace when the earthly part of us waked and cried, we did not need to eat. Yet here we were, stranded in a desert of loneliness, and he, at least, the General, wild with discontent. He had sought to tame a world and make it pliant to his hand. Scourged out of it by death, he had risen unchanged into new being, and he was as forsaken and alone as an exile banned from all the kindly offices of men. And suddenly I knew I loved him, not from tolerance of what he sought, but out of compassion for his loneliness. And I believe Jacques, too, loved him with the same helpless pity, and I thought we should both choose to stay with him, not to help him toward his mad desires, but to warm his desolate heart.

“Where is she?” he asked me suddenly, “that woman of yours, she that was your wife?”

I didn’t know, I told him. She had gone— And he interrupted me.

“I know, I know,” he said impatiently. “She went with her lover, to some foolish place where they talk with the fishes in the sea. Get her back,” he said imperiously. “She had a strange power of energy. She could rouse the passions of men and make them believe they wanted what they did not. You are to send for her. There is a curious means of communication here. I have seen it at work. I have not used it,” he added haughtily, as if it were beneath him. “But I am told it is so.”

I was ready to withstand him. It would be unwillingly, but the time had come.

“No,” I said. “I shall not send for her.”

He looked at me for a moment as if the power of life and death were his. But the look passed as quickly as it came. He was, I judged, at last bitterly familiar with the risk of being set at nought, and pride forbade him to recognize revolt he could not punish.

“You,” he said, “are to write the play I commissioned you to write. Doubtless your mind was busy with it while we battled with the mountain there. I understand there are strange mental procedures in the arts. The mind, I am told, withdraws into some inner communion of its own and works without fatigue or action of the conscious will. I have not used the process,” he continued, from his foolish pride. “My mind is not of that subserviency. I command it, and it does my will. Do you write verse?” he asked me. “Do you know the forms of it, the dignified, high forms from my time to yours?”

I spoke humbly, and I told the truth.

“No,” I said. “I am not a learned man. What I wrote when I was on earth was of a shallowness I am now ashamed of.”

At that moment, Jacques came into the room and, as by one consent, we all three sat, as if knowing that something had to be talked out. And Milton was still standing at the outer door, his slender whistle of that song of England’s merrymaking coming to my ears as softly as a breath.

“Now,” said the General, “the play. It is to be of my life on earth, as it would have been, entwined with His, your Leader’s. Have you thought it out?”

“No,” I said. “But I have told you it is not possible.”

“Because,” he questioned, “as you said then, our lives did not run parallel? That is a trifle to a great imagination.”

“It is not a trifle to me,” I said. “It is—” I hesitated for I did not want to be tragic over such an issue. I wanted to be as clear and simple as yes and no, like the issue itself. But I did add, not finding a less imposing word: “It would be sacrilege.”

“Ah,” he said, as if he had found out at last. “He is indeed your god. Tell me,” he said imperatively to Jacques, “the very words you heard when that picture came to you in your dark house. Paint it, every lineament. It swept by you, I understand, like a procession, as it might have been of one of my triumphs: the bringing in of booty, the strange savage animals, the slaves. It might easily have been that, a triumph, not a death.”

It sounded magnificent, as if he had been an arbiter of life and death, even for men unborn. Jacques began and told the tale. He spoke in a low, clear voice, without break or apparent token of the way it seemed to him. I believe the knowledge of the earth, the rich fruit of what we call science, was so much a part of him that he could accept anything from the hands of nature with delight but no surprise. The General listened with a close attention, as if to correct him, should he fail. At intervals he gave a movement of assent. He had forgotten nothing. It was as if it were yesterday. Only at the point where Jacques described the uneasiness of the conspirators at Caesar’s delay in coming to the Capitol, that day of doom, did he lift a hand and add a word to the swift chronicle. And curiously it was in regard to the way he had himself felt, that morning. It was not alone that there had been dreams and auguries, but his own physical state had been inadequate. For the first time in my knowledge of him, he seemed to pity, and to pity himself. It was anger, too, the pity served us from that vintage of the past, anger that his poor body had been so vilely used by earth, her wanton injuries. Cintra, if she had been there, might have thrown her arms about him in a mother’s ruth for the poor body called on for such august endurance, and riddled by its own revolt. But though he surely did pity himself, it was not for long. In a moment he had thrown it aside. He turned to me.

“There,” he said, “there’s your play.”

And so exactly were the words and gesture those of a Hebraic gentleman I had known on earth who had called my attention to a plot he thought I might bejuggle, that I laughed out.

“There’s your play!” I repeated, and he said it after me as if it were a contract and we had signed.

“And this,” he continued, “is the end. When I—when my body fell there at the foot of Pompey’s statue, let us say there came a man, your Leader. He raised me up. I lived. I do not grudge Him all the pride of what are called His miracles,” he conceded, “for they will serve us here. And, the populace gaping at us, we walked away. And we continued together in our progress, and no man dared stay us because we were as gods and unafraid, and with Him and His magic at my hand I became the ruler of the east and west.”

It was monstrous but he did not make it so. He simply looked at me with his compelling gaze, and I was afraid: not of him, for I had now learned the piteousness of his desires, and I was still woefully sorry for him. I think I was chiefly afraid because the gentle twilight aspect of the place seemed to me so precious, so to be preserved with no impious stain upon it, and I was childishly moved lest all this despoiling of legend might prove a wind to blow the picture into nowhere, and we be gone with it. I suppose I was weakly putting off the issue, for I asked a question.

“You speak of magic,” I said. “Do you believe in magic?”

It did not seem as if he could, he was so tempered, so serviceable, cut on a pattern to meet stark circumstance.

“No, no,” he said impatiently. “But it is believed that He did exercise it. I myself believe that He went about in far countries for years before He began to assert His kingship, learning the strange arts of the east. But those who listen to the play will not think of that. They will believe the acts were real, and we must meet their belief as if we also were convinced of it. So only will the relation between actors and audience be preserved. It must be plausible beyond the shadow of a doubt.”

How modern it sounded! how often I had heard it before about the trumpery plausibilities of earth! only we had called it “putting it over.”

“Now,” he said, as if we had a clear way at last, “you will make use of Him from that point of view. You will go on.”

And I found my only answer to him was No, and No, and No. And suddenly I remembered who was near to help me, and I turned to Jacques. Probably my glance implored him. For a minute I thought I was imploring that other Person Whose words came when they were needed and Whom Flavia had seen. But I knew I must not invoke Him, lest hearing these strange conceits of greedy man it should be one last thorn the more to wound Him. And Jacques knew how I was calling on him for help, and he said, the strangest thing to say in such a monstrously conceived design:

“How peaceful it is here! You write poetry, Selden. Say us some.”

And at once the dull conceits of greedy man were gone. The old farmhouse knew them no more, and the slender pipe of Milton’s whistling came pleasantly on the air. At least, I think it did, or it may be that it seems fitting to the scene and so I braid it in unconsciously. All evil had vanished. All good was here, and happy tasks of earth and gay content. Something like a spirit of mischief ran into me, like a clear thread of water down a parching throat.

“I will,” I said to him. “Only it isn’t mine.”

Perhaps it was the scene, the simplicity of it, the green sward all about us, the beasts that lived on it, and perhaps it was the mind of the General himself, returned, for those moments, to the earth: it all threw me back to some lines in the Georgics, and I began spouting them. They were from the First Book, all about the melting snow trickling down the cold mountainsides and the shining plough and the laboring bull in the furrows. Really the reason I hit upon that particular bit was that it came so near the beginning, and I had conned it duteously. It was probably the only Latin I remembered well enough to quote, and I was half impudent in handing the General’s mother tongue over to him, and half shy. And I did well to be shy, for he took the line from my lips, and went on with it, but not in such Latin as I had been taught. It swung and halted in a way I had never heard, and when he stayed I was tremendously excited over it and amazed.

“But you can’t know it, sir,” I cried. “That was after your day.”

“Yes,” he said, unmoved by the unending miracle of it all, “but I have seen him since. He has repeated it to me. I had not remembered that I kept it; but you remind me.”

He had seen Vergil, and the poet had given him his verses, not in a book as it would have been on the earth but said them to him merely, and this man, in the every-day habit of the place, had filed them in his brain, and he could take them down, as a book from a shelf, and read them with the eyes of his mind. I was in despair at the beauty of it and the wonder. These were miracles happening quietly all about us. Yet they were commonplaces, no more to be amazed at than switching the light from nowhere into an electric bulb.

“It can’t be,” I said, but it was to Jacques I said it. “And yet it is. Do you understand?”

If he couldn’t understand, who had himself worked in wonders of the physical universe, how could I?

“No,” he said, “I don’t understand. But it’s true. It’s a perfectly recognized means of communication. You can do it. So can I.”

And then I wondered, in a strange daring, since the General had met here and talked with the poet of his Italy, if he had seen those other men who slew him and fought their way out to the spot where he fell in the pool of blood, that dreadful day in Rome. But it would have been an audacious man who would have probed him there, and I was not the man.

“Now,” he said, turning to me abruptly, in that haste he always showed for others to finish and leave the stage to him, “we will talk about the play.”

“Yes,” I answered, not hesitating an instant and really, in my exalted state, not knowing what I was to answer. “I will write it. I see it, full-bodied, as real as you two sitting there. Give me time—only a little—and you shall see it, too.”

He rose at once, bowed gravely though, as always, slightly enough to indicate that it was a concession to form and not in any way a recognition of equality, and indicated the hall door.

“Follow me,” he said, including Jacques also, by a glance. “We will go into that room at the right. It is a little darker. It will be best for concentration. You,” he said to Jacques, as we followed him, “need not repeat the substance of the message, but you will furnish the details I want. That will be necessary for scene setting. And you,” he said to me as we entered the front room, he preceding us, “will dress the skeleton as simply as you can, but poetically, and in your highest vein. It must be sonorous without being pompous. It must fit the event.”

So it was to be actually his play, not mine! I was not surprised. Nothing else would have suited his stupendous egotism. But I did not withstand him. Indeed, I did not know whether he should be withstood, and as Jacques, with an unmoved countenance, seemed to accept the procedure and drew forth a chair for him, I also sat down. But now, following the General’s nod toward the great desk near the corner, I seated myself there and waited with the pen ready to my hand. I had turned slightly, to look at the other two, and though my hand lay on the paper, I saw no certainty of writing. It was not that I expected to resist him. I was too depressed in my humility, for that. Also, I was curious about it. I knew the quality of his mind; it was of such a perfection that it could no doubt turn itself to this new game of scenic life with a brilliancy before which I should be a willing pupil. Besides, had I not seen the harried playwright make his way on earth? Had he not, the lower grade of him, been bullied by producers and critics alike, until he fell into the pit of standardization and gave them what they wanted? If that process of flaying the author alive had not taught me something, I reflected, with what is called a wry smile, then I had been on earth to little purpose,—except perhaps to prove that I wasn’t sensitive enough to be changed. Well, there we sat, the General—and this was as funny as his self-imposed mission of teaching me to suck eggs—he was sitting in a tall, high-backed chair I had seen in prosperous farmhouses and nowhere else. It was a chair Milton would have suited in every way, but the General made it a throne. He couldn’t help turning everything into magnificence, and, when I remembered what Jacques had said about humility, I was primitive enough to think it would be a shame, from the mere point of scenic value, to spoil anything so arrogant. Jacques sat, not far from him, by a window, in an ordinary straight chair, his feet together and his hands on his knees. He looked like a child who had been told to be good and to sit there until he should be called.

“Now we begin,” said the General to me. “Do you want to write?”

“No,” I said, “I find I don’t. I shall remember.” My mind, or, as I used to say on earth when I fumbled things, “what I called my mind,” was unfamiliar to me, and yet adequate, a willing servitor. It had been somehow sensitised, and though I didn’t know how, I so believed in its adequacy that I was calm.

“We are at the Colonnade of Pompey,” said the General. “A few of the senators are walking about. They know what is to be done. How should they not know!” he broke forth, in that sudden anger so long a part of him that he accepted it as the corroding enemy to his peace, never to be ignored, never to be controlled. “They had planned it among them. Well!” He got himself in hand. “They are excited, tense with apprehension. Undoubtedly at the time they were able to be outwardly calm, but in the play, their tumult of mind must be insisted upon. That feel of apprehension must be in the air. There must be no doubt about the audience—their getting it without delay.”

That side of my brain which was always making notes on what happened about me and commenting, often satirically, even on matters of the greatest pith and moment, told me that if he was sufficiently in touch with earth to say “put it over” I should collapse in a wild laughter. But no! he continued to use the stilted diction of his academic style. He continued:

“There is a performance in the theatre of Pompey. That will give us a chance for music—soft, as at a distance.”

I interrupted him.

“Did they have music?” I ventured. “Would the performance have been a play, or beasts, games, gladiators, wrestling?”

He brushed me aside, the ever-old magisterial attitude of stage manager toward author, and went on.

“It makes no difference about that. We need music, a recurrent theme, to waken every pulse. I should not mind its being an antiphonal strain of love and war, a wild flare of barbaric conquest and a wild melody of barbaric lust.”

His face was convulsed with a passion, perhaps of remembrance, and even at the sweeping moment I thought of Egypt.

“The litter is borne in,” he said. He had, as by a gesture of passing a hand over his face, wiped out old death passions and summoned back the mastery of his mind. “He is lying on the litter.”

And throughout he did not use his own name. He used the pronoun of the third person whenever possible, and once he said “the king.” But I believe that was not a slip of the memory. His mind was incapable of bungling. It was probable that he had long thought of his many forms of supremacy as kingly and it seemed to him that, in all respects of a man’s right deserts, he was indeed a king. At no time did he use any form of words suggesting a lesser state.

“He is worn, wasted by anxiety,” he continued, and now again with that betraying indignation. How should the world, it seemed to say, have done its utmost to corrode so splendid a weapon of the state? “Yet he is calm, as the gods are calm. It must be seen that although he is beset on all sides—by the foes of the body within and by a madness of malice from without—he can withstand it all. He enters the senate-house, and now what takes place is hidden from the audience. We concede something to the Greeks,” he explained to me. “Not too much blood. The carnage off the stage. That gives a pause for music. And for shrieks of horror. The Furies, do you see? But the music! I depend on that. Prolong it to the limit of human endurance, yes, until the audience shrieks it down. It’s an assault on them. Their nerves won’t stand it. They are on the point of getting up and fleeing from it when he is there on the stage again, his assassins all about him, striking at him and one another. And he fights his way to the foot of Pompey’s statue and falls dead—in blood.”

That last word he uttered from an indescribable horror of remembrance and at the same time a wistful inflection, as if querying whether such monstrous things could be.

But here ensued a curious dramatic change. Although the word death and its derivatives were used quite simply here, as indicating the form of change from life to life, he seemed to remember that he had not been dead, for still he was alive. And he repeated the sentence in effect, saying simply: “He fights his way to the foot of the statue. He falls.”

“And then?” I asked.

I was a good deal shaken. Although his mind, as I had watched it, was a mercilessly accurate piece of dynamic power, it had not seemed to me likely to kindle the emotions, stir them to action or sear them to their death. But now that he had put the whole force of his remembered life into that impassioned apologia, he had his way with me. I was overwhelmed by it, and, as is usual with me in the face of the heroic, I can never speak in heroic measures. I stammer into the simplest words.

“But you,” I said. “What happened then? How did you come alive?”

And as I said it, I remembered what Cintra had told us of her part in that dreadful day, and I wondered if he too remembered. Would he, although the scene had shifted then, say he woke with his head upon her breast? I hardly believe he did remember. That I have never known.

“Let there be fighting,” he said savagely. “They fight each other. Well they may. At that moment, will not the gods themselves avenge what has been done? Look you!” he cried passionately, now to Jacques who still sat in that attitude of a listening child. “The whole earth—what we knew of the earth—was falling to pieces, and their medicine for it was to kill the one man who—” Here he stopped, as if that one man’s capabilities were beyond even his power to tell. “They did that,” he said. “They did it to your Leader also.” This he threw at me, and turned again to Jacques. “As if, when an empire falls to pieces there could be more than one man so strong he could bind an iron band about it with his own hands.”

And he seemed so terrible in his strength that I believed, if he had been let to live, he could indeed have bound the iron band. And yet afterwards, when I had time to balance even the little I knew in terms of earth, her health and sanity, I knew it was not so.

“The music stops with a crash,” he said, coming back to me and at once in his mental working garb of perfect adequacy. “The people rush out from the theatre and swell the crowd. The gladiators, they also come. And now it is in your hands. You will do it with sympathy, with an appeal to the emotional side of these people here. Racially, they believe, the majority of them, in the supernatural mission of your Leader. When you make it evident to them that He did not abandon me, that He recalled me to life, that we went on our mission together, mutually sustaining, reigning as no two ever reigned together before, they will flock to my standard. See you! they will not dare do other. Can they who wept over His repudiation repudiate Him again? The earth will be ours and its fulness. They will see that, and if they give us two our regnancy now, they will see it is what He meant His Kingdom to be.”

(Strangely, in that littered workshop of my mind, never cleared up, but its ill-assorted bits often of some queer practical use, I heard what seemed to be a remembered echo of Flavia’s voice in her comfortable old hymn:

“But,” I said, and my lips were dry, “you don’t accept Him. If He had really come in your time and you didn’t have to snatch Him back all those years as you are doing now, to eke out what you call your destiny—you would not have accepted Him. Why do you think you would?”

He answered with the truth.

“I should have accepted anyone who would have saved—Rome.”

And at his pause before the great name, I wondered if he had not been tempted to say “who would have saved me.” But I believed in him enough to know that now, at least, he thought it was Rome and her imperial destiny, and not his own.

XXVII

While we talked, it had been growing dark, and I remember thinking that these gentle twilights were exquisitely tranquillizing at the end of a long day. And this twilight was strange indeed to me, for more and more I felt alone in it. I could distinguish the forms of Jacques and the General, each with his head resting on the top rail of his chair; and so still were they, one might have thought they slept. But that was pleasing to me, since it gave me the deeper isolation for blocking out my play. I shut my eyes and immediately, as if I could manipulate all sorts of stage devices in my mind, I opened them again on a darkness that was Rome. This seemed to pass, and my mind labored, though not in the old irritating frenzy over a halting plot. I knew what was to be done would be well done. The happier I, if it were done quickly. Then slowly I abandoned my mental seclusion, whatever it may have been, and came out from it, and I looked back upon it in wonder as some trance-like state to become familiar in the travail of what was now in my mind. It was perhaps what a cerebral childbirth might be, when the brain is isolated from outward circumstance. Had I been actually asleep, or was this only a more intense form of the gestation whereby anything living, whether of the natural body or creative art, builds about itself a stillness whence, in due time, it comes forth? No, I could not understand. I could only look forward, in tremulous anticipation, to entering that enchanted workshop again. I was waking, at least, with the aid of a strange force that used to be my brain. About us, the force and what I recognize as my mysterious self, it was all dark, as it might have been on the face of the waters before “there was light.” And this, I am sure, lasted for a long time, before I fell into the contented languor of a task completed. And the darkness became even more profound, and upon that dawned—though slowly, that the eyes might not be discomforted—a lighted stage.

We three, Jacques, the General and I, were sitting in a spacious place, the like of which I had never seen. It was an immense amphitheatre, roofed only by the sky, and the seats of it were filled with a multitude, most of them dressed in white, but many in lovely hues like those of April flowers, lilac, blue and rose. And before us, on the enormous stage backed by the pillars of old Rome, my play began. The First Act was opened by the conspirators, full of apprehension and betraying the boding signs of guilt. They were awaiting Caesar. What was delaying him who must not be the sport of bodily ill or accident, he the pattern statesman, soldier, protector of the poor? This they said to one another, in a specious anxiety, to cover their dark knowledge. For they had planned it and he must die. And then a litter was borne in; he was upon it worn, raddled with care, and one at his side was talking to him with nervous eagerness. I did not know, at this point, whether this were the work of Caesar’s mind, as he had imposed it on me, or my own: but from Pompey’s theatre came the music as he had planned it, a plucking of strings falling most insistently upon the nerves and then a wild flare of trumpets, feeding I know not what savagery in men’s breasts, because it roused strange things in me. The conspirators gathered about the litter, but with good theatrical art not hiding it from our view, and the worn shadow of a man—yet tense with the energy of his will, left it and stood for a moment among them. We who saw—even I who thought I had made the play—expected the killing to take place then and there; but it was not so. By a dignified word or two, he disposed of those who spoke to him and went on into the senate-house. Then the music took the stage. It rose higher and higher in volume and fell to foreboding depths. I had never before known its power to speak almost in actual words, it was so clear and plain, yet without losing a shade of its mystery of things unsaid. And then, after I do not know what interval, for I was entirely rapt, bemused, it stopped upon its higher heights with a flare so evilly triumphant that I knew the deed was done; and upon that the human actors took up the argument, rushing out of the hall, Caesar not so much pursued by them as among them, fighting his ineffectual way. And all was red with blood. The twisted folds of the togas about the left arms of the murderers were red. Here came a phrase I did not know I had remembered: “empurpled hands.” And strange to hear, a voice even called it in horror from the crowd: their “empurpled hands.” And, the last blow given, he fell, and the crowd pressed back, jostling one another, and there was left a space about him where we could see the disordered wreck that was he and, in the forward leaning throng, they who knew what they had done and were affrighted. I believe this was not actually the course of things. I believe they stumbled and dashed madly away; but for my purposes of dramatic pause and explication, while the audience learned the value of the mad moment, it had to be.

One of the conspirators is moved by remorse. Was this Brutus? Yes, it was he, and his question: “Were it well done?” was followed by a speech of great passion and dignity, rehearsing Caesar’s benefactions to Rome, and fast as the tide was flowing, I was conscious of familiar phrases, and suddenly I knew them for my own, written long ago and doubtless modeled on Shakespeare’s Caesar; but the acting went with such swing and passion that my own poor lines seemed to stand the test of that high tradition, and I trembled with delight. He was sowing a doubt, in the conspirators’ minds. Was the deed well done? We were ourselves apprehensive, we, the audience, and the recurrent throb of music from Pompey’s Theatre, not as I remembered it in my stage directions but as the General had ordered it, this played upon our nerves and woke them to a frenzy. And when we were keyed to the last pitch of enthusiasm for the Caesar who had been, there came a girl, almost a child, running, with extended arms, and dropped beside him, lamenting silently. And this was Cintra, in her young beauty, who had learned that he was dead. Some one lifted her and bore her away a pace or two, and at that moment the gladiators came pouring from the Theatre, and the crowd, as if in sudden realization, turned and fled. The music from the Theatre seemed to urge them, with a barbaric dominance, and as they pushed and struggled, the girl Cintra fell and the trampling feet swept over her. And without an instant’s delay for change of scene, the lights came on and we were again facing the Forum, empty now save for a few excited men running here and there, as if expecting they knew not what, and deepening our suspense. And Caesar came: the body of him on its ivory bier, covered by the sombre magnificence of the gold and purple pall, and borne on the shoulders of his friends, while attendant singers sang the lament for him who had saved others though himself he could not save. And on the coming of the bier, the crowd came also, with the very spirit of the mob in their wildness of look and gesture. They swarmed up the steps of the temples, they, as it seemed, took possession of the entire Forum, with what was even then some wildness of purpose, and when they were menaced back, they obeyed unwillingly with that hoarse low antiphone of resentment so terrifying from a crowd. Strangest of all, Cintra, the child Cintra, stood there by the dead body, unseen of any, for she, too, was dead, and this was her spiritual body that waited there by Caesar for the awakening of his. How I knew she was dead I could not say, though I had seen the crowd sweep over her, and had indeed decreed all this within the workshop of my mind. And yet, if I had not seen her killed, I should have known, for she wore the radiance of death—though as she looked at the body she loved it was a despairing radiance: a strange translucence of mortality. Even her hair, the rippling abundance of it, was tipped with light. And I knew that, by some magic of the stage, my own mind, which was now working with a fury of action, had been able to contrive the illusion of it, and it did not surprise me that I had been equal to the task.

Antony began to speak, and though I have since been told that it was but a few words, I had given him the lines Shakespeare put into his mouth. How I remembered the speech in its entirety I do not know. Possibly my brain had been carrying the record of it ever since I spouted it in boyhood, and, in the way I did not understand then and never have understood, it had been transferred to my spiritual body and was ready for me. And when the crowd had been wrought to the last pitch of frenzy by the recital of their Caesar’s beneficence to them, the magistrates, knowing that their concerted will must be diverted from violence by a new attraction, prepared to lift the bier. Then shouts arose, and the crowd surged forward. Some cried “Burn! burn!” and the cry was taken up by the multitude, and it was Caesar’s body that was to be burned there in the Forum instead of being taken by a ceremonial procession to the Campus Martius, as had been determined. Instantly the Forum was alive with the maddened crowd, building his funeral pyre. They flung on it benches and tables, anything that would burn. Musicians threw in their instruments and workmen their tools. And while they raged and the tumult rose louder and more distractedly dreadful, we were aware that Caesar himself, the spiritual self of him, was standing beside his mortal body lying on the bier. There he was, pale, it is true, but not disordered, his face composed to the calm of an awful knowledge. He raised his hand for silence. He wished to speak. What revelation could he have made, he who had all his life turned life itself into a tumult, now that he had encountered that stillness which is death? And the last indignity the living unconsciously show the dead, was happening to him. No one saw him. No one heard. The mob continued to feed the flames, and as the fury of concerted action rose higher and higher in themselves, their clamor became wilder and more animate with savage fury. They seemed—those frenzied ministrants—to be taking back to an older strain. It was like savages who had, in a moment of drunken passion, forgotten even the god they were sacrificing to, and were overcome by the lust of sacrifice itself. Caesar, possessed by wonder, even this spiritual body of him, at being regarded no more than the splintered wood consuming his dishonored flesh, stood there, his hand still raised for silence and his lips moving in the effort to be heard. And beside him, ineffable in the beauty of her spiritual body, was the child, Cintra. I have to call her a child from the loveliness of her wistful youth, though she was a girl, full grown. And as she had loved Caesar from afar, so now her humble love had brought her to him at the end. But not only was the yelling mob ignorant of her presence, but he also, he who was, like her, alive though he was dead, had no consciousness of her being there until, as he slowly lowered his arm, knowing it got no hearing for him, she bent toward him entreatingly, yet with a glorified face, and stretched out both her hands. “Look at me!” her eloquent face implored. “I am your handmaid! Suffer me to go with you. My lord! my lord!”

I knew, in my listening, that I myself had put these words into her mouth, and, despite the clamor of the crowd, I believe I actually did hear them. Certainly the people about me heard, or they were gifted with a more astute apprehension than I had ever seen in an earthly audience: for they were gripped by the pathos of it and there were tears on their cheeks.

Then the unthinkable happened. Caesar himself, he who had even defied his fits of epilepsy, so that his mastery of life went on after them, was failing, fading, sinking in a way the more terrifying here, where the spirit has to flee, for the sustenance of immortal draughts, to its own home. He was distraught with the wonder of it. What anguish of strangeness was about his heart at that moment, surrounded by the ravening crowd of his own countrymen, in the familiarity of his own city, and not yet caught away to that other country he might never have thought of save as the twilight retreat of souls drained of the fierce vigor that had made his own life all he could conceive of happiness! But in that moment when you could only suffer with him in a sharp community of grief, your sorrow lightened. You remembered he was not alone; you were forced to remember it, and you felt within yourself a quick assuagement of relief. For she was there, the child who had loved him. Though a child, she was adequate. And as he almost imperceptibly sank, in the manner the body does, fighting for its lost regnancy, giving a little at the knees, drawing into itself, resigning its high office of bearing aloft the sacred skull where all the archives of a life are stored for the uses of everlasting life itself—Cintra had her arms about him. For an instant, she seemed even to lift him up to his lost empery; and then, as the smoke of the funeral pyre rose more dense, so that it concealed them both, Caesar had fallen, but with an effect of being pillowed in her arms, and she, half visible, sat there, his head upon her breast. And there was no longer the body on the bier, because it had burned into its first elements; the smoke pervaded the entire place, and the blackness of it fell, like a pall, on the wild ministrants that made it. And the music began again, this time a bright ascending strain, all pagan, but full of a yearning acquiescence and a worship of human love.

The Third Act was—shall I say heaven? For do I know what heaven is, I who am neither theologian nor, as I have now learned, poet? But we may use the word for the purpose of this chronicle: for it was this, my home, and where my play was given. Again there was music, and this time of a military sort, brasses throbbing with the incitement to what we call “glory” and with undertones of menace and regret. And the stage was filled with men upon men, yet not unduly crowded: so skilfully were they disposed. But the effect was of armies, not only those in evidence but with more and more in the background, ready to come. And why I had done this I don’t know, for I had but now learned that Caesar’s men, so far as they were concerned, had deserted him. There were no more to come. But as it always was with me, the dramatic exigency was all. Fact had its privilege, but it could wait. These men were not in military action. They were disposed about the stage with tools and appliances, making arms, swords and lances such as had been used in his day. And there were coals hot upon anvils and the clangor of metal, though not too much to interrupt the spoken lines. In the foreground stood Caesar, and just behind him, like an attendant spirit, Cintra, as we saw her in heaven to-day, of a maturer beauty than when she died in Rome. The immaturity she was had become a perfect flowering. The measure of her childish misery was completed and she was what his spirit needed her to be. And he was being tried for his past lives, the one on earth and the one here in what we are calling heaven. The judge was not seen, nor any panoply of court, though they were there at the stage Right, shadowy figures, in motionless quiet, and the shadows that enwrapped them made them, as I had hoped, very terrible in their impenetrability. And who were Caesar’s accusers? They were—children: and though there was no large band of them you got the idea, from their disposition on the stage, that there were multitudes, stretching back to an earlier age and forward into all time. A good deal of this vastness of perspective is, of course, merely visual. Into the subtleties of stage lighting I need not go here, but it is an astounding craft. The artificers are masters, and the fictitious passion of the actor looks to be their plaything, so simple seems the way to stage convincingness. But it is not a plaything. It is only another perfectly scientific use of light: a vibrant message from the actor to the listener’s receptive eyes and mind.

As to these children, they were very beautiful, as they should have been in this garden of perfection: but each had a look of wistful incompleteness, and a little song they sang told why. They had been denied the earth and its rude nourishing, and so they came with homesick hearts to heaven. They who should have called them to earth had themselves died untimely, and the children, destined to be their fruit of love, lived in beauty, it is true, but still seeking some lost part of being due to them. (Yet in the end they found it, though after a long time.)

I ceased to think wholeheartedly of the counterfeit Caesar, my mind absorbed by the General here at my side, he who was really Caesar. I dared not yet look at him. What were they to him, these wistful children? Did they in the least take hold on his own destiny of remorse, he who had been a destroyer, a killer of men? Or did he, in his conversance with all forms of art, remember, even in the emotion all about him, that these were actors on the stage—“little eyases”—and, as I too thought, with unrepressed delight, acting mighty well? But there was another tacit argument to be followed out. At Cintra’s side, holding her right hand and her left, were the two children who, I believed, might have been hers, and who also belonged to the accusatory throng because somehow, in the disordered rigor and magnificence of Caesar’s stay on earth, he had tangled the threads of her life equally with his own. If he had been indeed the half-god he had believed he was, would not his all-beneficent mind have so brooded over the possibilities of things that she, captive child as she was, haled into Rome in the commonplace of captivity, would by some of the marvels of God, have come to his arms and his children would have been hers? And so perceptive was this audience—for I have learned that the high possibilities of acting here are equalled by the intelligence of those who listen—the house saw it as I meant they should. They were ineffably moved by Cintra and the two children that were somehow hers, and showed it in silence: their highest form of commendation. After the children had sung their little song, his accusers stood, their faces turned to him with a look of expectancy which bade him consider his state and theirs in this large universe. What was it they wanted him to do? I thought it was to submit himself at last to Him at Whose will this pageantry—like all created life—was proceeding. And their voices ceased upon one word which was the equivalent of the word Annette had fallen upon in her terror: “God! God! God!” And yet that was not the word. It was one I had never known. It was His Secret Name. And how did I know it? How did those about me know? And yet they did. There was, throughout the auditorium, the silence which is the silence of worship. And through the silence Caesar began to speak, not to the children or to us, but with his face slightly lifted as if he addressed the One Whom we cannot help conceiving as in the sky. He was passionately moved. He rehearsed his deeds and bade Him Who had brought about this tumult of judgment against him to remember that he had drawn the nations of the earth nearer together, that he had served the manufactures and the arts by the throngs of captive labor and the impulses of trained minds and serviceable hands. It was the most eloquent panegyric on a man’s life the man himself could give; and when it was ended the children turned aside their faces, and Cintra gathered her two closer to her knees, and they clung there in the attitude of the children who, in their sculptural terror, cling to Niobe. And ever her gaze was averted from the man she loved—yes, she loved him and would always love—and he turned from the faces of his child accusers to her, and stretched his arms to her. And when, for the first time, he found no refuge on her breast, he fell at her feet, and darkness hid it all.

I rose to go. The audience was standing now, in a silence eloquent of thought and praise, and Jacques led the way through them to the fuller air. The General was behind me. I had forgotten he should have precedence, it seemed so slight a thing, and I thought he stumbled and turned to look at him. And his face was tormented much as that of his double on the stage.

XXVIII

I had wondered briefly, in a pause between acts, how it would seem to be leaving the auditorium with all that multitude. Were they friendly, as suited this ordered place, or altogether strange? I was not to know. There seemed to be no going out at all, or we three were quietly spirited away, and after a period of silence, a darkness as of sleep, I opened my eyes on the farmhouse parlor. There we were, the General, Jacques and I, and I blinked my eyes to recognition of the scene and looked from one to another to see what these things meant to them. Jacques was not quite the same, by the shade of an added seriousness, but even that was of weight with me. He was so alert, so instantly receptive to every wind that blew, so simple and so gaily wise! He was piquing, he was unaccountable, he was my friend. That last covered it. I did want to know what he thought. But he was looking at the General, waiting. And I, also looking, could scarcely brook the tragedy of that altered face. The lines in it had deepened, as if by years of adverse destiny. His eyes seemed to have been washed by tears, though there were none in them now: only an anguished and accusatory hardness.

“Where is she?” he demanded of Jacques.

And Jacques made the answer we were always making in that as yet unaccountable land: “I don’t know.”

“You saw fit,” said the General, and with a bitterness I should have feared if I had been one of his men in the olden time, “you saw fit to change the play from what I had given you. Why was that?”

I smiled a little, but it was in pride over Jacques, my friend, his quality was so apparent. The play was mine, though in a mysterious way I did not then know; but so alluringly competent was this man that it was he the General had to interrogate. It evidently did not occur to him to do otherwise. Jacques did not disclaim it. That was the simplicity of him. He disclaimed nothing, ever. He could not take the time. He simply met each issue as it came and did what he might, with the careful attention he gave his verifying while he questioned and besought the universe. And when the tide of destiny swept him on, he went, with the same meditative, untroubled look in his blue eyes. He was answering:

“I should say the play was inevitable at every point. Didn’t you think so?”

“It was an infamy,” said the General. “It was an accusation. It accused me.”

The harshness of appeal in that last word was very moving. It seemed to cry, not for pity, but for justice. Here was a man who, in one short drama, had seen his past condemned and his future denied him. It was like the fall of a cliff which has withstood the onslaught of the sea until the appointed moment long, long after every foot had trusted it as being strong as God; and then the appointed wave had come, and it was gone. And what strange crumbling horrors had the eye found there at its granite heart!

“Yes,” said Jacques quietly. “You are accused.” His was the quiet of the smiling inland plain that hears the breaking of the cliff but knows the sky will bend as gently over the mad disorder of it and the sun and rain convert the crumbling waste of it to flowers. (But after a long time of patience and decay, oh, how long! Still, the centuries are patient. Why should not the broken piecemeals be—and Jacques?) He repeated it: “Yes, you are accused. It’s something we all lie under, from time to time, until we pick ourselves up and go on again. Come along, sir.” He was smiling at him, and I thought it was worth having the universe against you, to be smiled at like that. “I’ve an idea you’re to get out of this, go somewhere else. Where, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure about its being determined for you. In kindness, you know, great kindness. Don’t you see, old fellow”—had anybody ever called him that before and in that tone?—“you’ve been running rather wild, you know, and I’ve a notion you can’t be allowed to keep on with it. Too many people inconvenienced, you see, too many made unhappy. There’s Cintra, now! she’s got to be considered.”

The General drew his brows together in what was not so much a frown of anger as of pure surprise.

“She?” he said. “What has she to do with it? The play was given over to her. And why? What do these things mean?”

Again Jacques said he didn’t know; but he continued smilingly:

“It’s very easy, you see, after you’ve been on the wrong road, to find out how They’d like you to get back into the right one. You’ve only to ask Them and think a bit.”

“Ask Them?” the General repeated. It was a tone addressed in anger, but it achieved no more than a tremulous uneasiness. “Who are They? Your Leader, do you mean?” Here he gave a quick look of what was indubitably scorn, at me, whom he credited with bad faith toward him and a recreant loyalty to that mysterious leadership.

Jacques was answering.

“As to the Person to ask, it might be He. It might be—” There he paused, and I wondered if it were upon the name of the Unknown God. But after that breath of silent reverence, he went on. “All I can say is that, from my own conclusions, you’ve been on the wrong track—really lost, so to speak—and there’s evidently a right track all marked out for you. They take an enormous amount of trouble about us. Don’t you find They do?”

There was no doubt of his delighted wonder at the Beneficence that had marked out the track. And I, to my surprise, saw the General supremely moved by this, but, as his next speech showed, only because it fell in with his unchangeable desire for his own life as he had himself determined it.

“You mean to tell me,” he said, “that there is a track to that city on the height, and if I seek about, I shall yet find it?”

Jacques stood looking at him for a moment, sad things blended in his face. There was a patient surprise that the man could so have misconceived him and perhaps new acceptance of the time upon added time it would take to teach him where his futile steps had led.

“No,” he said, “I don’t mean any track to what we’ll call the Holy City. Ah!”

It was only a sharp intake of the breath, but to me it was as moving as a cry. And I, too, could have cried out with the surprise of it. For straight as the path of a shot from some engine of Titan power in the sky, the great beam of light was stretching from that farthest source of what we did not know, and down to us. I could not, awed though I was, abide the silent majesty of it, and I said to Jacques, sharply, before I even knew I was going to speak:

“What is it? Is it God?”

He shook his head, not in denial but again because he did not know. I was not sure whether the General saw it. Or had it become to him a commonplace he need not notice? He was looking from one to the other of us in a questioning way, and he said, in a voice meant to be repudiatory and scornful, but weakened by a trembling misery:

“What is it? what do you hear? Your Leader, He that keeps Himself unseen?”

And Jacques was answering him, perhaps answering himself also, in his own wonder over the course of things.

“Possibly,” he said—and I wondered again at the quietude with which he addressed the man, as if he were infinitely sorry for him without the means to help—“possibly He could be seen if we—” There he stopped a moment and went on, more moved than I had ever seen him by what seemed a poverty of the human soul, to be avoided if the soul but knew its way a little better among these clouds of destiny. “Some have seen Him, I believe,” he went on calmly. “It isn’t that He decrees not to be seen. It’s only—”

Whether he could have said anything conclusive I do not know, but at that moment a figure blocked the doorway at the back of the room and we looked up. There was Milton, harassed and definitely holding us to blame.

“Where you been?” he asked me, and I was in my turn puzzled, because he assumed that we had “been” somewhere and I wondered whether our minds had left our bodies while we sat there at the play and whether Milton, coming in, would have found us here asleep. But we were not to know. Before I could answer with a counter question, he had said: “I’ve been round in the backyard doin’ the chores, and I didn’t hear a sound in here. You been out prospectin’ or anything?” Now he addressed the General, who paid no attention, but stood looking, with an absent longing look, from the window where the ray of light came pulsing in; and I wondered that he could face it and not see its throbbing glow. “There’s the devil to pay,” Milton continued, now addressing Jacques. “Somebody’s been in and drove off all them cows. I can’t find ’em, hide nor hair. D’you know it?” he ended, abrupt and quarrelsome. Certainly we were to blame.

“No,” said Jacques, as if cows were a commonplace to him. “But I’m not surprised. We found them here. It’s not strange to have them go.”

“Not strange!” echoed Milton, as if such tomfoolery were beyond him. “Do you know how many there was of ’em? Twenty-seven! I’ve been tryin’ to find pails to milk ’em into, but even them I can’t find.”

“Well,” said I, placidly, as we do when it isn’t our hunt, “maybe they’ll come back.”

“Oh, no, they won’t,” said a voice at the door. And there was Flavia. She came in with an unhurried step, but as if she felt herself bound to an unwelcome task. Who does not know the placidity of tense endurance on a woman’s face when she has accepted life as it is, physical pangs or mental torture? And as we seemed, all of us, to change, with changing circumstance, her entire look was different. (Did we, by a natural magic, dress for the parts we were to act? Did our outer forms bloom out in beauty as the soul within attuned itself more and more to that beauty which is still unknown to us but can be approached—oh, so freely—if we will?) There we stood, the little group of us, our eyes on her as if we awaited her elucidation, the General a pace aside from us, either because he felt our lack of sympathy or was still conforming to his own status of imperial dignity. Milton had taken an eager step, to meet her. It was evident that he expected something to happen, now mother had come. So I had felt myself, in the days very long before when, as a boy, I had hung round the gate until mother, somehow detained, had got home. The household world, I knew, could not go on without her.

“Flavia,” said he, in his old peremptory way, “you know more’n you see fit to say. If you know who’s drove off them cows and where they be you tell me, right off now.”

Flavia looked at him briefly: an absent look it was, as if she had more immediate things to do.

“No, father,” she said, “I don’t know anything about the cows. But if they’re gone, they’re gone, and that’s all there is to it. And you and I are going to stay here a spell, and carry on the place and talk things over. And after that, I don’t know.”

“Talk what over?” asked Milton, in his pish-and-pshaw manner. “What is there to talk over?—except the cows?”

“I’ve been through a good deal, since I’ve seen you,” said Flavia quietly. But her eyes were eloquent with their deep inward glow.

Jacques spoke quickly, as if he could not repress anxiety over her.

“Not hard things?” he said, “not trouble—here?”

“Oh, no!” said Flavia, suddenly smiling at him, as if wondering how he could think it. “Nice things! Only I can’t talk about ’em. I’m all bewildered. That’s why,” she said shrewdly, “I guess that’s why They thought best to send me here to bring the news. I shouldn’t be tempted to argue it out. What’s going to be done. You see, I’m so lacking,” said Flavia, in the old country phrase. “I guess I’ve always been, only it never come out before.”

Yes, she had been lacking always: in the wisdom of the earth. And now here she was, finding herself simple enough to do the will of heaven.

“That’s all right,” said Milton, testily. “But if you think I’m goin’ to hang round here to get religion, you’ll miss your guess.”

So he had begun to see, in its outward form, what she might require of him. Were the old days coming back, he might have asked, when she had made it one of the unspoken conditions of their marriage that he should “get converted?”

“It’s a mighty good farm,” he went on, in a quarrelsome way, “this is. As good a stock farm as ever I see. But what’s the use o’ stayin’ here and carryin’ it on and nothin’ to carry it on for? The stock’s gone, and if I wanted to sow and reap, there’s no seed and nothin’ to do it for. And there’s that place up there we ain’t been able to get at—”

He stopped, at last, I thought, startled at having mentioned it: for the great shaft of light struck through the window and seemed to end there, diffused among us. I swear I felt the glow of it as heat, as beauty—for the color was ecstasy—and I turned to Jacques to see if it was to him as to me. And it was, for he looked like the immortal spirit of himself, as I had seen him the moment before.

“Yes,” said the General, unmoved. “You are right. Only fools and cowards would give up the quest. Why,” he cried, and for an instant I saw the old unyielding power of him flash forth like something visible as the shaft of light itself, “this is the hour that counts. The minute! the one last minute when all seems lost and you must act. Here we are, four of us.” He gave us a sweeping glance. “We will go, slowly and calmly, using all the wisdom we have gained from our past failures. The woman”—Flavia had an instant’s tribute of the estimating glance—“the woman will stay here and keep this place open for us, if we should fail, to retreat to, and start again. But now we shall not fail.”

And so faithful was my commenting mind to old dramatic tags of memory that I found myself stupidly filling out the phrase: “Screw your courage to the sticking place, and we’ll not fail.” And as if the little scene had been rehearsed, we answered. “No,” said Jacques. “No,” said I, and Flavia said quietly: “No! oh, no, indeed!”

Milton, from an equal lust of power, looked the General in the eye and said:

“Look a-here. Who’s goin’ to take command? If you’ll put yourself under my orders, I go. If not, not.”

And it was Flavia who spoke, like an earthly mother, sweetly and with wisdom.

“You two foolish boys!” said she. “Don’t you fight over it. For it won’t be the way. God Almighty won’t have it so.”

“What do you know about your Almighty God?” the General hurled at her, and I think he called her “Woman.”

“Nothing,” said Flavia, with a sincerity that made Jacques briefly smile. “Not one thing.”

“Who sent you here?” the General asked her, in his tone of mastery.

Flavia thought a moment. Then she answered, in a perfect earnestness of simplicity:

“I don’t truly know. But I do know this,” she plucked up heart to say. “I was sent. There were things I had to say.”

“Your Leader,” the General put in bitterly, turning his rebellious glance on Jacques. “That is his way. A voice! And nothing more. And as to whether there is such a Person, you don’t even know—”

“Oh, yes,” cried Flavia, and as she spoke the silent shaft of light seemed in some way to beat about her for an instant and enfold her. “Yes, that was it. And now I know all the things I was to tell. You,” she said to me, smiling a little as if she could not forget, in the midst of these convulsions of unquiet minds, how friendly things had been between us,—“you, They wanted—He wanted—” She gathered up her composure and tried to speak with the dignity befitting her task. “You are to go back to his house.” She gave a little glance at Jacques to indicate it was his house she meant. “There’s a little dark path near by. I’ve seen it, off there by the barn. And that’s the path to bring you there. I don’t know how I’m so sure of it, but any way I feel to know. And when you get there—to his house, you see—you’ll find her—”

“Mary?” I cried. But I knew.

“Yes. And you and she’ll talk things over and make up your mind what next. You two together, Mary and you. Now, sir,” she said humbly, turning to the General and as if the humility sprang from her sorrow over him and not from his deserts, “you’ve got to go over to that house, that long, low-studded one—” She pointed, and our eyes followed through the doorway to the pillared house we had looked down on from the height. “I guess,” said Flavia, “you’ll think best to stay there quite a spell.”

“Is she there?” he asked thickly, yet governing his voice. He was broken, but still all pride.

“Cintra?” she said. “Oh, no. She’s gone somewhere else. I don’t know where. Truly I don’t, even if I was allowed to tell.”

“Is it of her own will?” he persisted, his voice as dry as ashes. “Does she go of her own will?”

But that she would not, or she could not, answer.

“I guess you know,” she said, “what women folks be in things like that. They don’t scarcely ever leave you so they won’t come back. But,” said Flavia, “maybe They showed her it was best. And it’s something about the children, two nice boys. They might have been born on the earth, you see, hers, her little sons. If you had both stayed there you were going to meet. I don’t understand the rights of it, sir, but somehow, then, they had to stay here, kind of little angels, don’t you see? But they needed her. And she’s doing that for you. Everything’s for you.”

His mouth twisted in a piteous way.

“I understand,” he said scornfully. “You saw her in that travesty of a play. You remembered it. You are probably quite sincere in being influenced by it. These things can always be accounted for, if you know the human mind.”

He turned to me. It was with his old swiftness in doubling. He was a soldier. He had to meet the unexpected.

“Where,” he asked, with a certain brutality, “is that woman of yours?”

It was Flavia who answered.

“Oh,” she said, “don’t you try to stir up her. She’s gone where there are two men—that nice boy and his father—and the nicest woman you ever see, and they’re terrible sorry for her, and all they want is to kind of make her over. And when she’s got hold of things as they be, maybe They’ll send her away somewheres else. But you needn’t think you can meddle with her,” said Flavia staunchly. “It wouldn’t be allowed.”

I remembered what Terence had told me about her adventurous mind pervading the sea and my own wilful mind couldn’t help wondering whether they meant to turn her into a mermaid and whether they would succeed. And what about the comic relief—the bag? I haven’t seen Annette since that day, but I am unable to think of her except as the conventional mermaid, with, as the old tale goes, a comb and a glass in her hand. And it isn’t comedy. It’s the “tears of things.” And thank God for poets who give us things to remember when common phrases wouldn’t fit.

The General looked at us briefly as if he said good-bye, not as regretting us but as if our presence was the best thing he had left him, and even that meant something in the downfall that was as near death as anything to befall a man in this kingdom of light. He spoke—and to Jacques, with a ceremonious courtesy. I gathered that he hated Flavia too much for having what she would have called the upper hand to ask her anything.

“Do you,” said he, “know the building in question? I suppose it to be the one we see there at the east.”

Jacques saluted, in good punctilious style. He was saving him, in that small way, as much as he might, all the large ways being forbidden us.

“I do not know it, sir,” he said. “That is, I have never entered it. But I am willing to predict that in your exile there you will find books—and musical instruments—and probably scientific appliances. For all sorts of study, you know, any you may choose. And you’ve an astoundingly valuable mind, sir, if you’ll allow me to say so, and there are things you can do here with color and form and even making things, like flowers. Digging into the universe, as you might say. I’ve heard of persons going into that sort of retreat—same as you are, you know—it was always to find means of making life as rich as—as they liked,” said Jacques, smiling at him. “It’s all voluntary, you understand, just what you may elect.”

The General looked at him a full minute, and you could see him think.

“Exile,” he said, at last. “You called it exile.”

Jacques nodded more familiarly now. They were approaching a little, his mind and the General’s, by the imperceptible distance he was managing.

“It is that,” he said, “virtually. Exile. It’s very gently administered, but it’s exile just the same.”

This time, the General did not wait. He had his counter thrust all ready.

“What if,” he said, “I do not submit? What if I climb the heights alone?”

Jacques answered smilingly. He might have been denying a somewhat wilful person a merely ordinary request—ordinary, but not unthinkable.

“O my dear fellow,” he said, “you can’t do that, you know. You really mustn’t try.”

But though the General had the hesitant look of one about to go, even though unwillingly, he had one more move to make.

“You say I can’t,” he said, his voice husky in his throat and his face so drawn that Flavia stared compassionately, and I, too, was quite childishly moved. “What if—I will?”

But the last two words were anything but masterful.

“No, no,” said Jacques gently, as if to a child. “You mustn’t. You can’t. Don’t even think of it. Well, Peter, old boy,” he said, turning to me. And he put out his hand, but I knew even before he did it what was bound to come. I laid my hand in his, and my eyes were hot with tears: his eyes, too. And then I knew he loved me. But not as I loved him: for in the arrogance of new handfasting I felt, as any man would, that what I gave was more than could possibly be measured in exchange for it.

“You’ll do what she said?” Jacques asked me. “Go over to my house? Yes. The little path. It’s long, but you’ll have pleasant thoughts.”

“When shall you come?” I asked, and amended it. “When shall you come home?”

He lifted an eyebrow in a quizzical way, and he had to answer in the old phrase:

“I don’t know.” But he went on. “There’s time enough. Maybe I sha’n’t come for centuries. But I’ll find you—somewhere. And Mary. My love to her.”

Then he dropped my hand and turned to Flavia, smiling at her. And she smiled back. He gave Milton a humorous tap on the shoulder, and said, short and sharp, to the General:

“Are you ready, sir? Shall we go?”

The General, at the door now, but lingering as if he could not yet make up his mind, began to speak: an inarticulate sort of effort I could not understand. But Jacques did.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I’m going with you, if you’ll allow me. No,” he went on, answering what the dry lips of the General were quivering to ask, “it’s not an order. I’m not commanded, but I take it for granted I may make my own choice. And I choose to go with you.”

Again the General straightened. He made a valiant effort to get back his lost muscular command. And he wanted most pitiably to be reassured, to be told he was still almost a king. He spoke with difficulty:

“You—believe in me?”

And Jacques, in his wisdom, evidently thought the truth must at last be told.

“O, bless you!” he said. “O, you poor beggar! I’m sorrier for you than I ever was for anybody in all my born days. Come, sir! come on! We’ll make for—for the place they’ve told us off for, and I shouldn’t be surprised if we found some books in your own language. Maybe a pipe. I don’t know. Come on.”

And he ran his hand somehow through that sacred arm, all be-togaed as it was, and they went off together, slowly, as if the General had to be upheld, and Jacques not glancing back. And that I understood. We couldn’t look at each other again and keep what the occasion itself demanded: a Roman spirit of the heroic times. And quickly, because I wanted to get it over, I put out my hand to grip Milton’s, and he surrendered his to it in a dazed way, as if he couldn’t understand these foolish rites when a man might be helped on his quest for wandering cows. And I kissed Flavia’s hand in, I hoped, as handsome a manner as Jacques had done it, and pelted out of the house and turned into the little path, at a run.

XXIX

It was, as Flavia had said, a little dark path. Perhaps the first ten feet of it were clear, well trodden but narrow, and then it merged gradually into a footway through light foliage, some of it evergreen with a pleasant smell. Seeing it, dark shadowed, before me, it was inevitable that I should remember the encroaching lianas of that way we had hewn ourselves through on the heights, and the menace of that was, for a time, present with me. How should I not fear that at any moment it might be merged into such a coil of difficulty? and though I knew I was permitted to follow it, the difficulty might be some obscure necessity for me, to prove my fitness to come to my Love at last. I walked at a good pace, and when I had actually learned to trust the friendliness of the way, I ran a little and was only exhilarated and not breathless, however fast I sped. And ever the way went straitly, with none of those disconcerting walls, made by the abrupt turns we knew in our futile climbing; and though it was at first trodden bare, as if by small animals that liked the neighborhood of the farm, soon it became grassy and easier to the tread. More and more I hurried, for I was in a fever of uncertainty: could she be there? I wanted, if possible, to be at the house before her, to give her no time for lonely wondering. For though I knew everything that was fostering us and our meeting was doing it with the most accurate prevision, I was all alive with that anguish of uncertainty which is one of the most exquisite aspects of love, a pinion of his wing, a note in the voiceless song of invitation he sends before him as he comes.

How long I walked and ran I do not know. The dark came once and then the light again, and the way seemed to distil itself into a million fragrances, all enamored of one another, so did they harmonize. And as I breathed them, I grew more light of foot and light of heart, and my breath, instead of choking at the speed of my going, was like a sharp ecstasy in my throat and lungs. And the way became lighter with the morning light and then, after a long time, darker again and I came out in an open space—a small one for the trees of the forest were all about—and there was what seemed a great bulk before me, and it was Jacques’ house, approached from the wood, and though it was so small as a house, seeming large indeed compared with the slender aloofness of the trees. And then indeed my breath failed and my blood drowned me in my veins and heart: for the quest was over and what should I find? Was she there? or was she not? Had she been sent on one of those age-long deeds the securities of this benignant place allowed, to bring us home at last? For the first time, I was not acquiescent. I was merely human. I was mortal. I could not bear the long attrition of great destinies. Where was she? Where was my Love? I rounded the corner of the house and came to the open door, and there she stood, her sweet face anxious as my heart. For had she not been wondering: will he come? And while we stood there the one instant looking at each other in delight fulfilled, there was time for the picture of her to grave itself on my heart and mind, so that it became one with the inmost part of me. She was so slender-sweet, my Mary! and dressed somehow, simply—I do not know!—in shimmering green, she was like the stem of some flower of grace with the silken gold of her small head the April bloom of it. Almost I dared not touch her. She was so lightly poised, yet so fervid with still welcome that it was almost as if spring had lighted a fire within her and I saw the cloud of it rising about her and smelt the sweet smell of it like incense that was not hot and earth compelling, but the very breath of spring. And then, to add to the wonder of it, her arms were out to me before mine could constrain them, and all her sweet body grew to me, and I was as a god and a very humble man. And as we stood there, saying no word, it seemed as if all the birds of the forest were aware of us and burst into song; but now I do suppose they had been singing all the way as I came, only my thoughts had deafened me to outer things and I had not heard. I have forgotten to ask her if it was so with her. In those first hours there was so much to say it was easy to forget.

Then she drew her face away from me a little and laughed softly, as only a mother could, seeing her child come home, and said: “We must go in.”

And I loosed her from my arms so that we did go in, and she asked me all the questions prepared, like welcoming garlands, for the homecoming beloved. Was I tired? Did I want to wash my face? That was the funniest thing of all, and we both laughed at the sound of it, and then kissed again. And I told her I believed we should spend months of laughter about nothing, and sorrow and crying would have passed away. And I believe I didn’t wash my face because she concluded it tasted salt—like tears of happiness—and spicy of the woods, and that seemed to settle the question at once, as all questions proved to be settled wonderfully. And we sat down at Jacques’ table, near enough for me to hold her hand lest she dissolve and flow, like a little stream of Paradise, home to God, and I think we sat there and talked things over because it was Jacques’ work table and we were so grateful to him for giving us his dear house. And I asked her, thinking she knew more of these things than I:

“Where are we going to live?”

“Here, for a little while,” she said, and I could not think why she said it so steadily, as if she had to command herself not to be sorrowful. But the next instant I knew. “I have to go back,” she said. “To my father. To try once more.”

Then all the selfishness of earth entered into me, and I cried No! And I said: “You couldn’t get him. Jacques said you couldn’t. It failed. It was bound to fail.”

“Ah,” she said, “but once I did get something. I got the woman that loves him.”

“A woman?” I asked. “One you had known when you were there?”

Yes, she had known her and hated her.

“I thought,” said Mary, “she was the most evil thing about him. She was his mistress, do you see? a coarse, loud, full-blown sort of woman. All passion, you understand, what I thought all lust. And when I began to try to get my father by the ways they told me, listening, sending simple messages, even single words, I couldn’t get him. But, dearest, I got her.”

“Is that my name?” I asked, switching off from souls and their sad passions, because, in this ecstasy of her, I was “as glad and gay as a fool.”

“What?” said Mary. Then she, too, recalled herself from passions and their sad betrayals, and she laughed. “Dearest?” she said. “Yes, that’s your name. I hereby christen you.”

And now, having got my name, I did want her to go on, and I asked her:

“But why was it? how could you get her when you could not get him?”

“Because,” said Mary, “she was beautiful, really. More spiritual. I hadn’t known she was. You see, she probably was all the other things, too, those strong lusts that are like—oh, like eating raw meat. I can’t get any nearer to it. But, dearest, she loved him. I found that out at once. She was sacrificing herself for him. His last scheme didn’t go through, the one I tried to save him from. And they were living simply and she was working with her hands for him and—well, it’s all in that one thing. She loved him. Loved him exquisitely, now he was poor. Like a wife.”

“Perhaps she is his wife,” I hazarded.

“No,” said Mary, a light thread of scorn in her voice. But it was not scorn for the woman. “He’d never marry her. My father is a very proud man.”

“And,” I said, “what do you think you can do for her?”

“Not much,” said she. “Give her a little dream perhaps. Let her feel there’s somebody somewhere that’s sorry for her and might—well, if she comes here when she dies and I’m allowed, I might meet her when she comes. You see, she’s been treated horribly. By him, I think. By everybody, I dare say. Because she seems so coarse and strong and daring, they think she can’t be hurt. But she can, by him, by anybody she loves. And she’s not dreadful, dearest. She’s beautiful. She loves him terribly. She really doesn’t love herself at all.”

“Well,” said I, in the old earth phrasing, “what about me?”

“You,” said she at once, “are to go—it’s very specially beautiful, what you’re to do. And as to me, we’ve got ages upon ages to live together. But you are to go up there where your play was given, and work out things and do what you’re told until you’re big enough to tell other people. It’s very special, dearest.”

“Who told you?” I asked her, and then, as she was silent, I knew.

“Did He—” I asked—“did He talk to you?”

“Yes,” she said, in the low voice they all had when they spoke of Him.

“When was it?” I asked her, and she answered:

“Just before you came. I was getting anxious. I stood there in the doorway, listening.”

“Did you see Him?” I asked, not knowing whether I should.

“No,” she said, at once, “I think not.”

“You’re not sure?”

“No. I thought at moments I was seeing Him. But I couldn’t be sure of it. And I got the idea it wasn’t because He willed me not to see Him. It was in me. When we’ve been here longer,” she said, in a happy voice, “and grown up to things, you know, I think we shall see Him. Perhaps quite plain.”

A hush fell upon us, and we listened. By one accord we rose and stood there facing the open doorway, and the dusk seemed to yield a little, and I was sure I saw a figure standing there. She saw it, too, at the same moment, for I felt her hand tighten on mine. And we moved forward toward the figure not, I think, from any mandate or invitation, but from the great love we felt for Him. I had loved Jacques. I did love him and should always love. But I loved this Presence more. I do not compare it with my love for Mary, because that was, by now, not like love for any other creature outside myself. She was a part of me, as I of her. As we stood there before the silent figure, I know we were made aware of things we had not even dreamed, about the beauty and the sacredness of what we felt for each other. I could not have told what, nor, if we had spoken about it afterward, could we have told each other. And for a moment the great light came, though not in a revealing way, and instantly was gone, as if it had one word for us, and the word was said. Then—and this we did tell each other we saw, though not until morning had reft us a little from our ecstasy—the shadowy arm was raised, and we bent our heads, and He blessed us and was gone.

And that night we lay in mortal and immortal happiness in each other’s arms, and in the morning Mary went away.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of The Kingdom in the Sky by Alice Brown]