The long train pulled slowly into the station of the little seaport town.
It was late, as always at this turning-point of the season, when the summer
population was changing its roost from sea to mountain or from the north to
the south shore. Falkner, glancing anxiously along the line of cars for a
certain figure, said again to himself, 'If she shouldn't come--at the last
moment!' and ashamed of his doubt, replied, 'She will, if humanly
possible.' ... At last his eye caught sight of Margaret as she stepped from
the last car. She had seen him at the instant, and she smiled rapidly above
the crowd, one of her fleeting smiles, like a ray of April sun. Another
smile, he took her bag from the porter's hand, and their meeting was over.
It was not until they were seated at a table in a sheltered corner of the
station restaurant that he spoke:--
"The _Swallow_ is waiting at the wharf. But we had best get something hot
to eat here. We shall have a long sail."
He took charge, at once, and while he ordered the luncheon, she looked at
the travellers swarming to their food. Once during the long ride she had
thought, "If we were seen by some one!" and her face had burned at the
miserable fear. Now looking at the passing faces, she had a fierce wish
that she might be seen by all the world! To speak out, to act
unashamed,--but not yet,--no; the time was not ripe. As her look returned
to Falkner, who was dressed in yachting flannels with a white sweater she
smiled again:--
"I am so hungry!"
"I am afraid it will be bad. However--"
"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters--to-day!"
Neither of them, she reflected, cared for the detail of life, for luxury,
mere comfort. They had shed superfluity, unlike those around them, who
lived for it.
"Is it all right?" he asked as the waitress slung the dishes on the table.
"Everything!" and she added: "I can telephone Ned? I promised to speak to
him every day."
"Of course!"
"Now let us forget.... What a lot of people there are in the world running
about!"
"We'll say good-by to them all very soon," he replied.
Their spirits rose as they ate. It was festive and joyous, even this dirty
country station. The September sun was shining brightly through the window,
and a faint breeze came straying in, smelling of the salt water. She had
given no thought to what they would do, to where they would go. She did not
ask. It was good to trust all to him, just to step forth from the old maze
into this dreamed existence, which somehow had been made true, where there
was no need to take thought. She pushed away her ice untouched and began
slowly to draw on her gloves.
"All the way here from Bedmouth I had a queer feeling that I was making a
journey that I had made before, though I was never here in my life. And now
it seems as if we had sat by this window some other day,--it is all so
expected!" she mused. And she thought how that morning when she got up, she
had gone to her little girl, the baby Lilla, and kissed her. With her arms
about the child she had felt again that her act was right and that some day
when the little one was a woman she would know and understand.
Her lips trembled, and then a slow smile suffused her face, bringing color,
and leaning forward she murmured:--
"I am so happy!" Their eyes met, and for the moment they were lost in
wonder, unconscious of the noisy room....
With a familiarity of old knowledge, Falkner descended the winding streets
to the water front. In this lower part of the town the dingy old houses had
an air of ancient grandeur, and tall elms drooped dust-laden branches over
the street.
"Dear old place!" he exclaimed, memories reviving of his boyhood cruises.
"It was in ninety-one when I was here last. I never expected to put in here
again."
The streets were empty, a noon stillness brooding in them. Margaret slipped
her hand into his, the joy, the freedom, the sense of the open road
sweeping over her afresh. The world was already fading behind them.... They
came out upon the wharves, and threaded their way among the sagging gray
buildings that smelt of salt fish, until the harbor water lapped at the
piles beneath their feet.
"There's the _Swallow_!" Falkner cried, pointing into the stream.
They were soon aboard, and Margaret curled herself in the cockpit on a rug,
while Falkner ran up the sails. Little waves were dancing across the
harbor. Taking the tiller, he crouched beside her and whispered:--
"Now we are off--to the islands of the blest!"
It was all so in her dream, even to the white sail slowly filling before
the breeze. They glided past hulking schooners lying idle with grimy sails
all set, and from their decks above black-faced men looked down curiously
at the white figure in the cockpit of the little sloop. Behind the
schooners the wharves and the red brick warehouses, the elms and the white
houses on the hill, the tall spires--all drew backwards into the westering
sun. A low gray lighthouse came into sight; the _Swallow_ dipped and rose;
and the breeze freshened as they entered the lower bay. A great ship was
slowly rounding the point, bound outward, too, laboring into the deep--for
what? For some noisy port beneath the horizon. But for her the port of
starlight and a man's arm,--the world was wonderful, this day! Falkner
raised his hand and pointed far away to the eastward where a shadow lay
like a finger on the sea,
"Our harbor is over there!"
Away to the east, to the broad open ocean, it was fitting they should
speed,--they who had shaken themselves loose from the land....
She held the tiller when he rummaged below for a chart, and while she was
there alone, a pot-bellied pleasure steamer, swarming with people, rolled
past, shaking the _Swallow_ with its wake. The people on the decks spied
the sail-boat, raised glasses, looked down, and had their say. 'A bit of
the chattering world that is left,' thought Margaret, 'like all the rest.'
And something joyful within cried: 'Not to-day! To-day I defy you. To-day I
have escaped--I am a rebel. You can do nothing with me. Oh, to-day I am
happy, happy, happy,--can you say that?' Falkner came up from the cabin
with his chart, and shading his eyes, swept the sea for the landmarks of
their course. And the _Swallow_ sped on out of the noisy to-day through a
path of gold and blue to the radiant to-morrow.
"See!" Falkner pointed back to the old seaport grown dim in the distance
behind them. The sun was falling behind the steeples, and only the black
smoke from engine and chimney marked the edge of the shore. Far away to the
north opened a long reach of blue water and at the head of the bay green
fields descending gently to the sea. The _Swallow_ was a lonely dot in the
open waters, dipping, rising, the sun on its white sail,--fleeing always.
Falkner sat beside her, circling her shoulders with his arm, talking of the
sea and the boat as if they had sailed for many days like this together and
were familiar with all. His arm as it touched her said, 'I love you!' And
his eyes resting on her face said, 'But we are happy, together, you and
I,--so strangely happy!'
What was left there behind--the city and the vessels, the land itself--was
all the mirage of life, had never been lived by them. And this--the
swaying, sweeping boat, a dot upon the ocean and they together, heart by
heart, going outward to the sea and night--was all that was real. Could it
be possible that they two would ever land again on that far shore of
circumstance, hemmed in by petty and sorrowful thoughts?
Yet across the dream came the thought of the Little Man, waiting behind
there, and the woman knew that on the morrow after the morrow she should
wake. For life is stronger than a single soul! ...
To the west and north there were islands, long stretches of sea opening
between their green shores, far up into the coast land. The wind freshened
and died, until at last in the twilight with scarcely a ripple the
_Swallow_ floated into a sheltered cove on the outermost of all the
islands. A forest of stiff little spruces covered the sea point, and behind
this was a smooth green field, and above on the crest of the island a small
white farm-house.
"A man named Viney used to live there," Falkner said, breaking a long
silence. "Either he or some one else will take us in." Margaret helped him
anchor, furl the sails, and then they went ashore, pulling the tender far
up on the shingle beech beside the lobster-pots. They crossed the field--it
was nearly dark and the _Swallow_ was a speck on the dark water
beneath--and knocked at the white farm-house.
"It is like what you knew must be so when you were a child," whispered
Margaret.
"But suppose they turn us away?"
"Why, we'll go back to the _Swallow_ or sleep under the firs! But they
won't. There is a charm in all our doings this day, dearest."
The Vineys welcomed them, and gave them supper. Then Mr. Viney, divining
that with these two wanderers a love matter was concerned, remarked
suggestively:--
"Maybe you'd like to go over to my son's place to sleep. My son's folks
built a camp over there on the Pint. It's a sightly spot, and they've gone
back to the city. Here, Joe, you show 'em the path!"
So in the starlight they threaded the spruce forest down by the sea, and
found the "camp," a wooden box, with a broad veranda hanging over the
eastern cliff.
"Yes!" exclaimed Margaret, taking now her woman's place of command; "this
is the very spot. We'll sleep here on the veranda. You can bring out the
bedding. If we had ordered it all, we could not have discovered the perfect
thing, like this!"
The gray pathway of the ocean lay at their feet, and from the headlands up
and down the coast, from distant islands, the lights began to call and
answer each other. A cloud of smoke far eastward hung over a seagoing
steamer. And throughout the little island, over the floor of the ocean, in
the wood about them, there was perfect stillness, a cessation of all
movement.
"Peace! Such large and splendid peace!" Margaret murmured, as they stood
gazing at the beauty of the coming night. Peace without and answering peace
within. Surely they had come to the heart of solitude, removed from the
tumultuous earth.
"Come!" he whispered at her ear, and she slowly turned her face to him.
"Now, I know!" she said triumphantly. "This has been sent to answer
me,--all the glory and the wonder and the peace of life, my dearest! I know
it all. We have lived all our years with this vision in our hearts, and it
has been given to us to have it at last."
And as they lay down beside each other she murmured:--
"Peace that is above joy,--see the stars!"
And there beneath the tranquil stars in the calm night came the ecstasy of
union, transcending Fate and Sorrow....
Thus at the extreme verge of human experience these two realized that inner
state of harmony, that equilibrium of spirit, towards which conscious
beings strive blindly, and which sanctioning what man forbids gives reason
to life. The spirit within them declared that it was best so to gain the
heights, whether in the final sum of life it should lie as Sin or Glory,
For this night, for these immediate hours, as man and woman they would rise
to wider kingdoms of themselves than ever otherwise might be reached.
Thus far to them had come revelation.
* * * * *
In the morning Margaret would play housewife. Sending Falkner to the
Vineys' for the things needed, she cooked the meal while he swam out to the
_Swallow_ and made ready for the day's sail. Whimsically she insisted on
doing all without his help, and when he was ready, she served him before
she would eat herself,--"Just as Mrs. Viney would her man."
Did she wish to show him that she was equal to the common surface of
living,--a comrade to do her part? Or, rather, was the act
symbolical,--woman serving joyfully where she yields real mastery? The
woman, so often capricious and disdainful, was submissive, as if she would
say: "This man is my mate. I am forever his. It is my best joy to be
through him myself."
And after the meal she insisted on completing the task by washing the
dishes, putting all to rights in the camp; then mended a rent in his coat
which he had got from a stumble in the dark the night before. He laughed,
but her eyes shone.
"Let me _do_ as long as I can! ... There--wouldn't you and I shed things!
That's the way to live,--to shed things." As they passed the Vineys' house
on their way to the boat, Margaret observed:--
"That would do very well for us, don't you think? You could go lobstering,
and I would have a garden. Can you milk a cow?" She was picturing the mould
for their lives.
And all that day as they sailed among the islands, up thoroughfares, across
the reaches of the sea, they played a little game of selecting the right
cottage from the little white farm-houses dotted along the shores, and
said, "We'd take this or that, and we'd do thus and so with it--and live
this way!" Then they would laugh, and grow pensive, as if the land with its
smoke wreaths had suddenly drifted past their eyes, reminding them of the
future. 'You are bound with invisible cords,' a voice said. 'You have
escaped in fancy, but to-morrow you will find the world wagging its old
way.' But the woman knew that no matter what came, the morrow and all the
morrows could never be again as her days once had been. For the subtle
virtue of a great fulfilment is its power to alter the inner aspect of all
things thereafter. Nothing could ever be the same to either of them. The
stuff of their inner lives had been changed....
They sailed the day long in the full sun, which beat down with a memory of
summer that already had departed. At noon they landed on a rocky islet, a
mere clump of firs water bound, and after eating their luncheon they lay
under the fragrant trees and talked long hours.
"If this hadn't been," Falkner said with deep gratitude, "we should not
have known each other."
She smiled back triumphantly. That was the truth she had divined the night
he was to have left her.
"No," she assented, "we should have been almost strangers and been
dissatisfied always."
"And now nothing can come between us, not time nor circumstance, nor pain.
Nothing! It is sealed for all time--our union."
"Our life together, which has been and will be forever."
None of the surface ways of life, no exchange of words, no companionship,
could have created anything to resemble this inner union which had come
about. The woman giving herself with full knowledge, the man possessing
with full insight,--this experience had made a spirit common to both, in
which both might live apart from each other, so long as they could see with
the spirit,--an existence new, deep, inner.
So they talked of the life to be with perfect willingness, as two might who
were to part soon for a long journey, which both would share intimately and
real loneliness never seize them.
"And beyond this luminous moment," suggested the man,--his the speculative
imagination,--"there must lie other levels of intimacy, of comradeship. If
we could go on into the years like this, why, the world would ever be
new,--we should go deeper into the mysteries every day, discovering
ourselves, creating ourselves!"
The warm sunlight, the islands mirrored in the waveless sea, the aromatic
breath of the spruce and fir, the salty scent of the tidal shore--this
physical world in which they lay--and that other more remote physical world
of men and cities--all, all was but the pictured drama of man's inner life.
As he lived, each day dying and recreated, with an atmosphere of the soul
as subtly shifting as the atmosphere of the earth, so this wonderful
panorama of his faded, dissolved, was made anew. For out of the panorama of
sense man builds his tabernacle, and calls it life, but within the veil
there lies hidden beneath a power, that can unlock other worlds,--strange,
beautiful worlds, like the mazes of the firmament through which the earth
pursues its way. And the tide ebbing past this islet to the sea, flowing
fast outward into the deep, carried them in its silent depths out into the
new, the mysterious places of the spirit.
The sun sank, covering the islands and the sea with a rare amethystine glow
deepening to a band of purple, like some old dyed cloth, then fading to
pale green at the rim of the earth. There ensued a hush, a pause in life,
that filled the air. 'We are fading, we are withdrawing,' whispered the
elements. 'Our hour is past, the riotous hour, the springtime flood, the
passionate will. And in our place the night will come and bring you peace.'
The sadness of change, the sense of something passing, of moments slipping
away to eternity! ...
"Tell me," she said as they drifted back with the tide, "what is it?"
"Only," he answered, "the thought of waste,--that it should have come late,
too late!"
Proudly denying the flaw in the perfect image, she protested:--
"Not late,--the exact hour. Don't you see that it could never have been
until now? Neither of us was ready to understand until we had lived all the
mistakes, suffered all. That is the law of the soul,--its great moments can
neither be hastened nor delayed. All is appointed."
Her gentle voice touched his heart like a soothing
hand,--'Accept--rejoice--be strong--it must be so! And it is good!'
"Dearest, we should have passed each other in the dark, without knowing,
earlier. You could not have seen me, the thing you love in me, nor I you,
until we were stricken with the hunger.... It takes time to know this
babbling life, to know what is real and what is counterfeit. Before or
after, who knows how it might have been? This was the time for us to meet!"
In these paths her eyes were bright to see the way, her feet accustomed. So
it was true. By what they had suffered, apart, by what they had tested and
rejected, they had fitted themselves to come together, for this point of
time, this flame of fulfilment. Mystery of waste to be accepted. No
wistfulness for loss! Brave smiles for that which had been given. And
resolved hearts for that to come....
Slowly, with the mood of the day in her lingering feet, Margaret crossed
the field towards the Vineys' cottage, while Falkner stayed to make the
_Swallow_ ready for its homeward journey in the morning. Joe Viney rowed
out to the boat with him. Nodding towards the slight figure on the path
above, the fisherman observed simply:--
"She ain't strong, your wife?"
With that illumined face! He had thought her this day pure force. Later as
he followed her slow steps to the camp, he said over the old man's words,
"She ain't strong." She lived behind her eyes in the land of will and
spirit. And the man's arms ached to take her frail body to him, and keep
her safe in some island of rest.