Clink of metals striking together, hammer sound, sound of the wheel,
sound of the fed furnace, sound of voices among metals. Diccon Dawn,
worker in rich metals with Jankin to help and a boy to help Jankin. All
day were voices in the long room, footsteps to and fro, sound of the
craft. Richard Englefield beginning again to make beautiful things.
As he worked he saw a lace-maker. Rich and beautiful lace.
He saw Wander forest, he saw the ruined farm, he saw Middle Forest, the
prison there and the house by the river.
He worked from dawn to dusk. Work,--let some ease come that way! He was
artist at work and some lightening came. One must love all.
The nights at first brought him long and faintly terrible dreams. He
could not remember them in sequence, but some had horror and some had
beauty, and now and again his brain caught from them small, vivid
pictures.
Then, one night, he saw, half he thought in dream and half not in
dream, a furnace and seated within it a man with a hammer and an anvil,
and on the anvil a man, and they were both the one man, only the man
with the hammer was the greater in aspect.
Work, work, and at last, after terrible dreams, pray! But no set
prayers, only a wild cry upward to the man with the hammer.
The street lay baked clay under the sun, the street darkened beneath
cloud. Rain poured down, cleansing and sweetening, making brooks of
gutters, pattering and driving, singing the clean and the fresh,
turning when out came the sun into uncounted glistening or rainbow
orbs. Wind swept the street, a great bellows quickening life. Fog stole
in, and the familiar became a foreigner, strange, remote, chill; surely
the world was dying! Then came the sun, and the world was not dying.
He went to Old Anchor. The street of half ruinous houses was filled
with a crowd of voices of sea-going and from-sea-returning folk. A
woman with a child told him where to find her. She sat with bobbins in
her hand, at a lace pillow. “Thou’rt pale! Weave, weave like this all
day long!”
“So I buy bread. I do well.”
“So wretched a place! Morgen, come to my house. Richard and Alice
Dawn--brother and sister.”
“No--no!”
They talked, they parted. Old Anchor and Thames side and street of
the smiths. That night, lying awake, suddenly he saw her life; he
passed into a calm and wide and lifted moment and saw it spread from
childhood. Seeing so, it appeared his own experience,--not appeared,
but was. Something like a great shutter closed upon that moment, then
there opened another as wide and as deep. Space, there was space! “I
have standing and moving room again!”
After a week he went once more to Old Anchor. “Morgen, I better
understand your life and my life. This place harms you. Come into the
smiths’ street and to the house where I am and where there is all room.
We have need to be together and to learn together.”
“No--no!”
Again he went away. The next day, suddenly, while he was turning in
his hands a bar of silver, his thoughts for a moment ran gold. He was
back with a certain day in his stone workroom at Silver Cross and he
was making a cup for Abbot Mark to give to a bishop. The great picture
was in his thoughts, the Blessed among women. There were rolling fields
and the villages of Palestine. Palestine? Everywhere she was, she was
everywhere! That day had been two years ago. Now again to-day he saw
that everywhere she was, that she was everywhere. Everywhere! In all
realms, upper and lower, afar and near, great and small. Everywhere.
Who had hurt her? No one and nothing. Naught!
Who had hurt him? No one.
That night he saw a great thorny field and two wanderers. Each had a
great burden on his shoulders and each a staff. There seemed a path of
pilgrimage. And now one came full upon it and pursued it and now the
other. But they were not together, and there seemed a desolateness.
Each fell away into the thorns and came again with toil. The mist
closed all away. Again Richard Englefield prayed. “If it be in God that
we are together--”
Night passed, day passed. Night again in the street of the smiths. A
light through the window, a cry in the street, a bell that leaped into
clanging. Fire! Fire!
Diccon Dawn hurrying on clothing, went with the rest. It seemed to be
on the water side and to the eastward,--a great fire. When they came
to the Thames they saw that it was a stretch of old buildings, a maze
where the poor lived, together with seafaring folk. So joined were the
houses that it might be one, or they might be ten. Old Anchor--Old
Anchor!
The sky was murk and flame, any face might be read; the fire-ocean
leaped in breakers, roared, licked up and sucked under. All the air was
sound, all the bells were ringing, all the heart was bursting. Middle
Forest! A heap of fagots by town cross.
Old Anchor, and many heroic things done that night by men and women and
children. But a man, a goldsmith, entered farthest, endured longest,
brought forth in his arms whom he had gone to seek, out of the heart
of it. “Is she dead? No! Dead with the smoke, and fire has touched
her arms and her breast and her sides. Who is she? The man’s sister.
Where will he take her? He will carry her through the street to his
house. Diccon Dawn, a goldsmith. He will nurse her there--oh, tenderly,
tenderly.”
It was so.
He nursed here there, oh, tenderly, and she came back to life and to
strength through much suffering.
“It hurts? I would that I could take that!”
“Oh, aye, it hurts sore! But I will keep it and bear it and see it
change.”
“So much more I know about thee than I used to know! Thou hast
courage.”
“So much more I know of thee. Thou hast strength, patience. If I moan
with the pain, it helps me to utter it.”
“See thou, it is meant for us to be together.”