That evening, after she had played to them, Frances fell to telling of a
crippled boy, almost a man, living in a poor flat in New York, the
father an overworked head clerk, the mother a strong, gadabout,
well-meaning person, more apt to reproach than to sustain. There was a
sister, a stenographer, who meant to marry, if she could, some employer.
This nineteen-year-old boy had a passion for travel, who could rarely
travel as far as the street. At intervals, when his father had leisure
to accompany him, he went to a movie. If the piece had scenery, country
and ocean and strange cities, moving throngs and great buildings and
places of which he had read, he was happy. He took the _Geographic_, and
got travel books from a library. He knew more of the earth's surface
than did many a "traveled" person. But it was hot in the city, in his
little stuffy room, or it was cold in the city in houses that could
never buy coal in quantity. He had a good deal of pain, and his eyes got
bigger and bigger.
Curtin had claimed the small bedroom at the end of the upper hall. Drew
slept in the dormer-windowed room above. Frances and Robert Dane
possessed the large room opposite Marget's, next to Linden's. Here were
four windows and each narrow bed placed where it might look forth. This
night the Danes talked awhile, then addressed themselves to sleep.
Robert slept, but Frances found that she was wakeful. Yet she had
definitely turned from care and question of the day, from concern for
her own work left in suspension, even from the face and incident of
Sweet Rocket. From her pillow she saw the stars as they rimmed and rose
above the mountains. At first she seemed to be over there, with the
shadow below and the diamond above, but then to herself she left it all.
There seemed naught about her but cool space. She lay without fret at
wakefulness, though she was intensely awake.
She became aware that, waking, she was becoming rested, refreshed, as
though she had profoundly slept. She was awake above the old waking. The
old waking was dreaminess to this state. Vigor poured into her being,
and all the past was passed. That is, it was passed in its heaviness and
friction, its strain and anxiety. All that seemed to drop away, like
dross leaving gold. It was curious, her sense of gold color of all
things in a gold light of their own, not from without. She became
distinctly aware of influences. They were good. She acquiesced, "Yes, I
will travel with you." Will consenting, her strength was added to those
other strengths. In the plane where she now was flashed out
co-operation.
Marget--Richard! Certainly they were where she had been wont to call
"within her." But certainly she felt them, was aware of them, presently
saw them, as never had she done before in that "within," though often in
memory, thought, and imagination she, like others, had been with Marget
and Richard there "within." She had used those words as a matter of
course. Even then that "within" had, when you examined it, its own space
and time, its own mechanics, warmth, color, and sound. That "within" and
this "within" were of a piece, but where that had been faintly real this
was vividly real. She had no doubt of its reality. It was so, but
reality of another, of a farther on, order. Marget that afternoon had
talked of another order. It seemed that one might rise or deepen into
it. She was consciously there now, though in the order below it she
rested at Sweet Rocket. It was not the plane of tremendous power and
illumination, but it was a state of developed powers. It was as far as
just then she could go.
The boy Stuart--Stuart Black. How many a time had she wished that she
could give this boy travel! "If I might take him and let him see!" As he
had longed, as he had imagined himself traveling with Mr. and Mrs. Dane.
"If I could travel with you!" And now to-night they had somehow caught
and held to the ether and were seeing what they wished to see. The
influence, the individuality that was Marget and Richard strongly aided.
She was in Rome with Marget and Richard and Stuart Black. She did not
question them nor him, and the boy did not question. They were there,
and it was sunny weather, and they were strong and happy. They stayed in
no hotel, they depended on no cab nor car, they needed no food of the
old sort. When they looked at one another they saw body, since where is
still multiplicity must still be body. There was something of old bodies
in these bodies, but also there was difference, and all to the good. Old
defect had vanished. Stuart Black was no cripple; she herself had lost
fatigue. There was translucence, a golden appearance, and where they
wished to go they were. She wished for Robert, and immediately felt that
in wishing she had said to the others, "I wish." They strengthened her
wish with theirs. Here, then, was Robert with them, though
intermittently, not on the whole so strongly, but coming as he could
answer, sleeping there at Sweet Rocket. And now and then another joined
them, though somewhat dimly, and that was the boy's father, whom he
loved and wished to include in his joy.
The body of Rome, too, was like and not like the old body of Rome. Rome
had a Self to match this Self of theirs. Spirit and body and mind and
soul, Rome understood itself better. There rose a Rome richer, purer;
nothing of fair and wonderful lost, all such quality strengthened; the
unfair, unwise, unstrong of old, everywhere tending to drop the prefix.
Yet to the new self Rome was herself, singing, enchanted, of the past
and present and future.
Marget and Richard, who seemed truly Marget-and-Richard, one word, had
said, "a week in Rome," and that was what seemed to pass. They saw as in
old travel they had seen, they went about as in old travel they had gone
about, they enjoyed as in old times they had enjoyed, but with freedom
and power and joy that left the old behind. All was vigor, heightened
and transfiguring perception, and yet friendly, homelike, not solemn nor
stilted, the boy here enjoying like a boy. Frances became aware of a
control, keeping experience to a vivid and fair finiteness, not
sacrificing current form. That was for the boy's sake, perhaps for her
and Robert also.
And after Rome, Athens--an Athens, too, sublimed. And after Athens, for
the splendid richness of things and for the boy, the vast North, forest
and plain, and an intense exhilaration of life that swept out upon the
great sea and encircled the earth. They spent long, bright days in ships
and at ports of call. Then they went to China, and India, and Egypt.
They crossed the desert of Sahara, and again in a great ship passed
between the Pillars of Hercules. Followed ocean days, and that greater
will and awareness slowly diminishing, gently returning upon its still
habitual self. Diminishing, diminishing, slower, slower, a little
melancholy, but tranquil, with a subtle smile.... A sense of a giant
woman in stone rising from an islet in a harbor--a sense of a familiar
city in the year 1920--a sense of dreamy farewells, a quiet darkness and
lapse....
Frances turned herself in her bed at Sweet Rocket. Starlight flooding
the room dimly revealed walls and furniture. Across by the other window
Robert lay sleeping. How much time had passed, or how little, or how
widely could you live in no time at all? Here was reality, but there,
too, had been reality! It had been real, that companionship and that
travel. The memory of it was memory of reality. Mind had attended there
not less, but more than here. The whole compound self had achieved a
unity and power. Achievement--ungrown wings--first flights! She thought:
"The possibilities! O life of life, our possibilities!" Old warmth and
drowsiness took her. There was a kindly fatigue, as though she had
walked on a bright day to mountain top and back and now thrown herself
down for rest. She saw the stars through half-open eyes, then slept.
The sun was streaming in when she waked; Robert already up and
dressing. She raised herself upon her arm. "Good morning!"
"Good morning!"
She rubbed her eyes. "There is a strange and happy feeling of 'there'
being here!"
Robert said: "That somehow hits it. I had the most vivid dream of long,
sunny travel, with you and Marget and Richard and Stuart Black! It
wasn't like a dream. I feel as if I were just off the ship--had all the
memories and a most tremendous refreshment! I could take down any wall
this morning!"
"Why do you put it that way?"
"I don't know. We have so walled ourselves in from wide doing--are so
afraid of our own landscape!" He stood by the window. "I think I'll ask
you a question that never, never would occur to Mr. Gradgrind to ask! Do
you remember it, too? For instance, Athens and some dim, northern
forest--and a lot of islands with palms? Do you remember music?"
"Oh, it was all music--and I think that I'll play it all my life!"
Dressed, they went down to the others, Zinia's bell ringing for coffee,
omelet, honey, and cakes. Linden and Drew had eaten and gone to meet
Roger Carter and William where the winter wood was being cut. Marget sat
behind the coffee urn. "Good morning, Robert and Frances!" Her face of a
subtle, moving beauty, more of look than of feature, did not turn upon
them with a "Do you remember?" It seemed to assume that they remembered.
Frances thought, "Certainly she remembers, and as much more strongly
than I as I remember more strongly than Robert!" It was of a piece with
all that they had talked of. "At last, with all of us, talk passes to
action." Frances Dane drank her coffee. All of them in the room seemed
bound in a ribbon, Linden and Drew also, wherever they might be in the
forest, and Stuart Black in that small, dark room in New York, and how
many others! She did not name them, but she knew they were many, in fact
all. In a flash she saw how, to Marget and Richard, might appear not
many selves and binding ribbon, but One Self. To realize this was to
realize that for her, also, there was but One Self.