"I see," said Anna Darcy.
"Very well. Do more than that. _Touch!_"
With a trail of ivy in her hand she looked past the snapdragon and
marigold and larkspur, still blooming, so rich and mild had been this
autumn. "Then, as the rooms grew clean, I was with my mother in her
birthplace, two hundred miles from here. We were there as adults,
moving, loving, understanding with a grown mind, but there in her
childhood and girlhood as well, loving to contemplate all the past that
was us two! Mine as hers, hers as mine. Mind and feeling ran and caught
up with her brothers and sisters, her parents and friends. Her parents
remembered their parents and those remembered theirs. Home rose after
home, garden after garden, loved place after loved place." Her eyes were
upon Drew, whose eyes were upon her. "Do you not see that you can, that
you will, recover it all? All that you have been, and you have been very
much; all that you are, and you are very much!"
Mimy's singing floated to them from the kitchen:
"There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land,
Oh, pat yo' foot, chillun, don't you get weary!
There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land."
"And then," said Marget, "I was in Rome with Richard. The sun shone, the
wind was in cypress and pine, the fountains made liquid sound. Father
Tiber glided, Saint Peter's stood. We went to the Sistine Chapel, and
then it was the Capitol within and without, and then the Appian Way and
all the Campagna--all Rome--not to-day alone, but _all_ Rome. And then
not Rome, but starlight nights from the decks of ships. And then--"
"This was actuality, while your hands swept and dusted the parlor
there?"
"My body was in its duty and happy there. Yes. Actuality, but of another
order, an order we are coming into. The order of intensified, guided,
_realized_ memory and imagination."
"And of reason?"
"And of reason. Profoundly so. It is reason that is guiding. Reason has
its higher levels, grows comprehensive, knows longer sequences,
completer syntheses. And from the decks of ships we were in the desert
watching the stars, shepherds on the hills and shepherds on the plains,
shepherds and villagers and wanderers of far days!" She lifted hand and
arm in a curious and commanding gesture. "Watching the skies above Queen
Rain and King Wind! In desert and plain and upon hills and on seas,
thousands and thousands of us strewn in time!"
For an appreciable moment, to some degree, those listening to her became
aware of, made, as it were, junction with their own far wandering, far
wondering, savage and barbarian self. It was evident that Drew made
junction. They touched the mind struggling there, and the lifted gaze.
The sense was one of enormous, calm pervasion. They entered into, they
aided, their own early man, where he marked the heavens, and around them
was the wistfulness of early lands.
Marget spoke on. "Then while I worked we were building pyramids and
mountains of the god. We were watching and watching, patterning and
naming, comparing, all the skies, the moon, and the planets and the
times of the sun, and the white path through the heavens and the great
named princes--everywhere, swarthy folk and pale folk! Now we were many
and many. Then in us rose the Devoted, the Searchers of the skies,
seeking from city roofs and temple roofs knowledge of the Whole for the
Whole."
Their interior self opened its wings and used its eyes. As space
expanded, so did time. They were there in the October sunshine, on the
summer-house steps, but likewise they attended, and in some vast,
liberated way they were that collective effort, that process. They might
carry the method over into all processes. There swam across the mind
other words--"commerce"--"government"--"family"--many and many a word.
Marget's voice went on. "Now one has made a telescope. Our theories
change; we stand on dead theories and study on. Thousands of us
studying, thousands building knowledge, learning vision! We gaze, we
watch, we turn to desks and write and figure, we reason, we divine, we
better our instruments, we gather results and make fortunate guesses, we
hearken to intuition. We stand on a mossy stone in space and study the
Promised Land, the universe that is ours, the ever perpetuating, the
ever bettering! Time widens. Here are mountain summits and the
observatories of this day, and the clockwork and the pierced dome, and
the great eye that we have made, and the photograph. Mind sits at the
knee of Great Mind and learns its alphabet. And all the thousands that
were and are and will be are one Astronomer, and it is I, still working
to know!" She ceased to speak, and sat wrapped in the golden light.