Mr. Fayn starts another game.
“I’m foolish,” he announces seriously. “You never win twice in one
sitting.”
“There’s a good law,” says Doctor Stein, “to break.”
Mr. Fayn shakes his head.
Mildred’s interest pierces me. Philip sits heavy at her side, a little
closer since I left my chair.
Before me is the night.--Well, why not look? Behind me, the real, the
light: my dear ones. As I move across the floor, my eyes, ere they have
looked, are heavy and are strained.
“There is nothing to see.”
The words have come ere my eyes truly saw if there was nothing to see.
It is as if my will spoke the words ... lying words?... My mother nods,
content. Mildred bends toward Philip. Father smokes and Mr. Fayn taps
his foot on the floor.
“Will you know,” the low warm voice of Philip, “how to look for the
dawn at midnight?”
“You have told us,” Mildred thrums her guitar. “It will rise
perpendicular like a flaming arrow.”
“From where?”
“From the deep.”
“From the deep below the mountain.”
“If I see,” said I, “any signs in the blackness, any stirring in the
night, will that not be the dawn?”
And as I spoke I knew that I was speaking to help my eyes from having
to look. They held back from the night as if my body had shrunk from
plunging with them down into a cold black sea.
“It might be another house, if all you saw was a light.”
“No, mother,” I spoke nervously, eager to answer every word that came
lest the silence behind me push my eyes indeed into the blackness.
“There is no other house.”
“There is one house on the mountain top,” said Mildred.
“No house could live upon the mountain side,” said Philip.
“Oh, what futile conversation,” mocked my mother. “Really, Doctor
Stein, is this all your fault?”
“No house could live,” said Philip, “on the mountain side. And no man
could hold to it.”
“He would fall back ere he had risen a single step.”
Doctor Stein soothed my mother: “Do not blame me, Mrs. Mark. And do not
blame me, either, if someone asks next how we came here ... high up on
the impassable mountain.”
Mother smiled and patted his fine hand: as much as to say “No, that
foolish you are not, dear Doctor. That foolish none of us is.”
And then, as they all smiled at the Doctor’s jest, there came from all
the room what I most dreaded: silence. No more words to pull me back:
but silence pressing against the base of my brain, as I stood near the
window.
I breathed at ease, for it was really darkness. I began to exult.
I prepared my words as if to fling at them in answer to a hostile
challenge.
“See--there is no sign of dawn at midnight.”
The words were not uttered.... I forgot the cozy room in which I stood.
I saw the night. And there was something there by which to see it!
The black of the sky was limpid: a well of blackness, a blackness that
received my sight passively, and my sight sank in it and was lost.
This sky had no cloud, and yet no moon or star. It was a black thing
enfolding me. But the slope of the mountain was a harder blackness:
dense and wilful the mountain side struck down athwart the mellow
blackness of the sky. My eyes went immensely far, until the vast stroke
of the mountain faded, became moltenly one with the warm night of the
sky that folded all about.
Deep down where the mountain melted into space and solid and fluid
merged into a blindness, I saw a spot of light. I was silent: and as I
held my breath, the spot of light moved up.