"And so he was killed," said Curtin, speaking with strongly controlled
emotion. "And I can tell you that when I heard it I felt physically that
shock and crash and mortal bruising. It wasn't only my heart that was
wounded. My nerves and my flesh felt it. Even now I think that there
must be but one body--I got away for a time after he was buried. I went
down to Hyères. I used to sit there by the sea. He was a lovable fellow,
square as they make them. We were brothers and friends, too. Well, that
is the way it runs! Life--death. Life--death! I would give a good
deal--"
He had been thirty-odd hours at Sweet Rocket. They had sent up mountain
to Cliff, who took down to his camp news that he would be gone for some
days. They had given him the room next to Linden, and he had become at
once delightfully at home.
When with Miss Darcy he had stepped upon the porch Linden had said:
"Don't think you take me by surprise! I saw you in my looking-glass this
morning!"
"It is good to find you again, Linden! What do you mean by your
looking-glass?"
Linden laughed, his hands upon the old classmate's shoulders. "Only that
I had been thinking of you. And the other night I was with you by the
Sea of Azof. I thought, 'I should like to see him again!' And you know
yourself that when you make a current boats appear upon it!"
Now, as the four sat about the fire in the big parlor, before the lamp
was lighted, he had been telling of the death of his brother, an
aviator. There had followed silence; then, "Well, let us talk of
something else!" said Curtin. He took up the pipe he had laid upon the
hearth beside him, and raking out a coat from the fire, relit it. "What
do you think is going to happen now, Linden?"
They sat and talked, and the flames leaped, many and small, in the
mahogany of the room. At ten they rose to separate for the night.
"Come look at the sky," said Linden. "The first week in October, and
diamond clear!" They went out to the porch, and then, so majestic was
the night, to the sweep before the house, whence they might see the
great expanse. It was very still. The river sounded, but the air rested
a thin and moveless veil. It was not cold. Richard Linden stood
bareheaded, his face uplifted to the vault that writes forever its runes
before men.
"By George! I forgot!" thought Curtin. "But doubtless he knows them so
well that he knows where they are, season by season." It seemed that it
might be so. Linden spoke as though he saw. "See the Pleiades and
Capella and Aldebaran! The Great Square is at its height. The Cross and
the Eagle and the Lyre. The mountains hide Fomalhaut." They walked a
little way upon the road. Immense and tingling was that view, looking
outward, looking inward, upon those stars. At last they came indoors and
said good night.
Martin Curtin lay in a big four-poster bed and stared out of window.
Upon going to bed he had slept quickly and soundly. Now he was awake,
and he thought it might be past four of the morning. He felt the subtle
turn toward the day. He heard a dog bark and a cock crow. He was aware
that he had waked suddenly and completely. He was wide awake, and more
than that. There was a keenness, an awareness; keen, sharpened, but also
wide. His body lying very still, he began to remember, but it was
remembering with a deeper and fuller pulse than was ordinarily the case.
He remembered that younger brother who was dead, and not him alone, but
many another, kindred and friends and associates. The past lived again,
but lived with a difference. What multitudes of kindred, and friends,
and associates! The meeting went deep and wide. Had he touched all those
in one life or had it been in many lives? Was the whole texture coming
alive, and in effect did it include the whole past, the whole dead and
gone? However it might be, it was a world transmuted and without pain.
He lay still, regarding it. It was strong and light, and he and it grew
together with a sense of frictionlessness, of exquisite relief, even
with a kind of golden humorousness. None had been truly any better or
worse than another, nor in any way miraculously different, and now they
could understand and laugh together! The sense of union was exquisite,
and the sense of variousness hardly less so. The variousness was without
hostility. It glided and turned smoothly, much as personal thought and
mood might glide and turn. The sense of well-being flowed in every
realm. The perception included environment. Remembered, recalled persons
meant remembered, recalled houses, towns, country, forest and river,
fields and gardens, a thousand, thousand places! Where were they all?
They were all over the earth--light and golden--loved places and the
right people in them! There was nothing rigid--even the places
understood one another. Curtin felt a profound happiness. This one body,
lying at Sweet Rocket, was not wholly forgot nor relinquished. It came
into the pattern of variousness. But Curtin himself was moving in a
wider consciousness. All these people, all these selves of himself! and
he understood their old difficulties and he understood their old
misunderstandings. The _piece_ understood, the beautiful tissue! The
music understood, the notes moving so richly together! It was throbbing
in the present and in the understood, the appropriated past. He never
thought, "How grotesque the thought that we are dead!" The thought could
not even occur.
For one flash, for less than an instant, the plane lifted. There started
forth a high, a tremendous sense of unity--Presence. It towered, it
overflowed him, he was of it--then the instant closed. As it had come
like a towering wave, so it sank like a wave. But there was left the
lasting thrill of it, and there was left undying aspiration. "Ah, to
find it again! Ah, if it will come again!"
Where had been sense of the whole, again befell fragmentariness.
Loss--great loss--and yet was there falling sweetness, exquisiteness
still of order! He felt again the wide world that they said was dead,
and yet surely was no such thing. There happened again wide and subtle
change. Out of a stillness, a silence, an isolation, exquisite and
tingling, a state of clarity and poise, one spoke to him _within_,
"Martin!"
He answered in that space. "Yes, John.... No, grief is absurd!... Just
because we're ignorant!"
"You can be content. We can be content."
"Yes, I see! We are all in one, who cannot be destroyed."
There came no more, but the world was a rhythm, swinging, swinging.
There reigned great rest and calm. Out of this, with much of it yet
clinging, he sank to the square, clean, sparely furnished bedroom at
Sweet Rocket, with the cock crowing, with the old clock in the lower
hall striking five. Curtin lay very quiet in the big bed. Dawn was
coming, but his sense was that of an afterglow. He had felt beauty and
still wonder like this in high mountains, watching Alpine glow. It faded
and faded, but there was left with him assurance, rest, the sense of a
dawn to be, a consciousness behind this consciousness, another
consciousness towering, sun-gilt, in the future. He lay very still, at
rest, hardly wondering. The great things, the beautiful things, were the
natural things. The wholly full and blissful would be the finally
natural. Dawn came in rose and amethyst.
When it was full light Curtin left his bed, dressed, and went
downstairs. He thought that he would walk by the river or in the garden.
The house was still, the front door open. Early though it was, he found
Linden on the porch starting forth with Tam. He had found, he said, that
he must see Roger Carter, who was riding to-day to Alder and would be
starting presently. "Will you walk with me? But you shouldn't miss your
breakfast. I've had bread and milk."
"I won't go now," answered Curtin. "I'll walk up and down before the
house for a while. Something happened to me last night, or I happened
into something. I'd like to talk to you about it, Linden--but it won't
fade before you come back. I don't indeed think it will ever fade."
There was that in Linden's remembered face, when Linden himself had gone
away toward Roger Carter's, that made Curtin think, walking now before
the house as they had walked the night before under the stars: "Does he
know what I felt? Could he even have helped--put a shoulder to the
wheel, seeing that I was grieved and uncertain?" Not so long ago he
might have answered, "That's fantastic!" but he did not so answer now.
He went into the garden and walked up and down. Before seven Marget came
out to him. "I saw you walking in the dawn like a man in a ballad. Could
you not sleep?"
"I slept till nearly five."
They walked by the late asters and the stocks. Said Curtin: "I remember
a line of Masefield's:
"... the dim room had mind, and seemed to brood.
And again:
"And felt the hillside thronged by souls unseen
Who knew the interest in me and were keen
That man alive should understand man dead.