“Something is down there ... and it is bright ... and it is moving up.”
But there was no answer in the room. My words seemed naked, almost
ashamed: so strange they sounded in the place I held between the room
and the night.
I turned around: they had not heard my words. They had forgotten me.
They had forgotten their own impulse, their own words which sent me on
this errand. Even Mildred. She thrummed her guitar and her emerald body
swayed, and her face, its opalescent smile, beamed upon Philip, whose
eyes she held in hers. My mother was conversing low with Doctor Stein
and my father had taken a chair beside Mr. Fayn: they were intent
together over the cards.
“Something is down there ... bright ... and it moves up.”
My words, first naked, now seemed disembodied.
--They cannot hear my words! Once more I faced the window and the night.
The little light, as it grew larger, changed from a bright glow to a
vague gray. It became less like flame, more like some substance through
whose translucent stuff a flame ran fragilely. And as it moved up the
dense mountain slope, it seemed to limn with its march the vastness of
this world upon whose summit stood the house: and at whose depth lay
the sky.
The words behind me in the room, the tap of a foot on the floor, and
Mildred’s hands merging with the silver strings of her guitar, lay
in my ears now evanescent. The thing that was a light, yet grayly
swelling, moved up the slope of the mountain. The room with its words
and its music and its laughter became a tinkle of gilt beside this
gorgeous silence. And in the silence moved the light thing up.