Day after day Anne sat at rest in the vast silence. Far back in space
and time she had waved a last good-bye up the black funnel of the
staircase to Hilda, holding Rogie, for, in the end, Belle had prevailed
and Anne had come alone. Trains and stages and the creaking wagon of
old Timothy Potter had brought her from the world below and laid her
in the heart of this little grassy meadow. Ringed by mountain peaks it
lay, small and still, at the top of the world.
In the morning the sun rose with sudden gladness, not with the slow
reluctance of the lowlands, but as if forced by its own energy and
desire from the blackness of night. All day it poured its warmth into
the meadow and when it went, yielding to night in a blaze of color; it
called good-by in brilliant purple and crimson and went as gladly as it
had come. In the afternoons a busy little wind came down from the snowy
peaks, went its round of inspection over the lush green grass of the
meadow, chatted with the little brook, whispered to the trees, saw all
was well and slipped back again into the granite gorges. The stars came
out, not with furious twinkling and effort to reach through to men so
far below, but, with still gold, they moved forward into night.
It seemed to Anne that she made no definite motion of her own volition.
The day came, lifted her into the perfect rhythm of its rotation,
carried her through the clear warm morning, the still gold-filled
afternoon, deposited her gently in the deep black peace of night.
This was the silence she had sought, the perfect peace. No artificial
formula summoned it. No bodily posture propitiated it. It was there,
deep, all pervading, everlasting, to one's need.
Perhaps, in incalculable space, other worlds were being made and
destroyed. But this world was finished. In the marvelous perfection of
its completion, the beginning was impossible to visualize, an ending
inconceivable. No force could ever move again those granite peaks,
melt the glacial ice, upheave the profound permanence of that tiny
grassy meadow. It was done; perfectly done and left in peace.
Even old Timothy Potter and his wife were part of this profundity
of accomplishment. They could never have been other than they were.
Through the years of close companionship they had grown to look alike.
It was impossible to imagine them ever having been younger, slimmer,
more agile than they were. They must always have been together since
the beginning of time, stout and quiet, with their understanding smile,
their white hair, the little wrinkles of happiness about their kindly
eyes.
As a separate human unit, apart from the spirit of the universe, she
no longer existed. She was alone with old Timothy and Mary, his wife,
at the very center of the all-living; so deep within the heart of Life
that words were not needed. They communicated in silence like the earth
and grass and trees. They were not bodies, opposed in their humanity to
an exterior spirit without. They were part of the whole, as grass, the
gnarled cedars growing in the clefts of the granite mountains, and the
brook bubbling through the little meadow, were parts. Sitting in utter
stillness Anne felt this engulfing Unity, drawing her gently down into
the single purpose that ran through the granite mountains, the dancing
brook, the rustling leaves, through her own body, and linked them all,
each to the other.
Now, a poem of Wordsworth that she had thought silly and sentimental in
the days of college extension, came back to her with new meaning, and
often, sitting on the porch after the early supper, watching the day's
gorgeous farewell to the granite peaks, Anne whispered slowly:
To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What Man has made of Man.
The rest of the stanzas she had forgotten, except the three final lines
of all:
If such be Nature's Holy plan,
Have I not reason to Lament
What Man has made of Man?
Far off beyond distant Dana, rising in ice-capped majesty above the
last range of mountains, hate and discord and confusion were positive
qualities. Men struggled against each other, ideals clashed, faiths
oppressed. Even love fought for its place and in the end surrendered.
There was nothing sure, nothing positive, nothing motionless like this
in its own perfection. It was all distorted, ugly and forever battling.
Sitting on the porch, after an early supper, watching the day's
farewell to the granite peaks, Anne's eyes filled with tears. If only
she had Rogie with her she would never leave this peace. The world
beyond could fight its futile battles. If only Rogie were with her,
nothing would be lacking. Undisturbed by the world's confusion, they
would live out their lives, and sink, at last into the stillness of the
earth.
What did it matter if they made no place for themselves among men;
if no one ever heard of them; the ambitions of men were such pitiful
things?
In the arrogance of his conceit, man had appropriated to himself the
pinnacle of creation. In his fury of effort he rushed about over the
surface of the great, still earth, erecting his little cities and
civilizations, setting up his little philosophies for the guidance
of others. His ideals, his religions, his pretentious systems of
thought, so futilely abstruse and complicated, were like the rules and
regulations for the guiding of traffic in public places: "Keep to the
right"; "turn here"; "cross there"; vast in their pretension of public
usefulness; needed because of the confusion created by himself. In the
peace of the mountains his efforts had less cohesion, less purpose
than the movements of the ants, running here and there, making long
circuits about some tiny obstacle. So man made circuits through his own
philosophies in a stupendous effort to reach the truth which he had
lost in the involved processes of his own journey to it. Anne could
almost see these myriads of tiny individuals rushing about over the
surface of life, jostling, shouting, getting in each other's way, going
down, being trampled, struggling to rise, each shouting his own foolish
solution of the problem of life.
When Anne had been a month in the mountains she wrote to Belle asking
her to find some way of sending Rogie. Belle wrote back promising to
do so, even to bring him herself, if no other way opened, but the days
slipped again to weeks and Rogie did not come.
Anne grew restless. The peace was disturbed now by this need. At the
end of the second month she wrote more insistingly, but this time Belle
did not answer.
The leaves began to fall. In the mornings the grass of the meadow was
white with frost. The nights were clear, black and cold now with a kind
of thrill in the coldness, as if the air were tingling with hidden
excitement.
Anne's restlessness increased. Something was creeping upon the world
from the places hidden beyond all puny human knowledge.
She no longer sat for hours on the porch, absorbed in the peaceful
stillness, but moved about the house or went for long walks. In the
evenings she sat with Mary and Timothy, and, although she rarely
listened to the words, she liked to hear Timothy read from one of their
few books. He read slowly with long pauses instead of comment. These
pauses were like caves into which the old people went silently, hand
in hand, to look for the deeper truths hidden in words. At the end of
these pauses they smiled quietly at each other and the reading began
again.
It was one evening in mid-September that a nervous motion of Anne's
disturbed the reading and Timothy looked over the steel rim of his
spectacles with kindly interest:
"You're worried."
"I'm sorry," Anne apologized. "I didn't mean to interrupt. I was
thinking about something else."
Mary Potter leaned across the red-checked cloth and laid her hand on
Anne's.
"You were thinking about the baby. Isn't your sister going to send him?"
"I don't know. I can't make it out and I feel so helpless. You won't be
going down to Milton again for mail for weeks, will you?"
"I hadn't thought of going again this year," Timothy took off his
glasses now and laid them on the closed book. "I don't usually go after
the middle of September. Soon the road'll be closed even to Milton."
"Closed!"
"In a few weeks now the snow'll begin."
"Nobody can get in after the snow begins," the old woman explained.
"Nothing can get through!"
"Nothing gets through after the snow begins. Pretty soon it'll come and
we'll be shut in tight till Spring."