There were sublime moments in that period--moments that were sparks for
later fires and that abided with him until the end.
Professor Deering had said to him: “The atheist is a man in whom a sense
is lacking.”
Armed with this, Quincy went forth into the night to be alone with it.
He sought a terrain that he already knew. The road crawled out of the
town at a low incline. And then, abrupt from it, rose a path over a hill
that was clad thick in summer. Now, it lay naked above the squatting
road--a vast blue grey, a round of briar stalks and matted underbrush
that sang with his racing feet. Upon the summit was a rock that Quincy
loved. From one approach it was sheer and rugged. Beyond, a cleft in it,
deepened with soil, curved gently down to a copse of elder bushes. From
its sheer corner rose an oak tree. Several new tufts sprang from its
foot. Above twined ivy and at the top a blaze of quartz, set in the
granite, made a seat so that the hill’s declivity rolled away from the
eyes to a distant murmurous valley. Here, flashing in sun or moonlight,
one caught the river--agleam through its thick marge of summer, or swift
and sleek without hindrance for the eye when the gaunt trees of winter
basketed its flow.
Upon the rock, now, Quincy sat and shivered a bit and looked up at the
frozen stars and the steely pool of heaven and asked to sense God.
Everything stood in silence. The voice of the forest was in the silence
like the grain in a smooth surface,--perceptible but without harm to
it. And such a surface, so fretted by innumerable stirrings, was the
silence. Quincy huddled low, head forward, and let the silence enter and
pervade him. At last he was drenched with it. And now, it frightened him
no longer. He felt free, now, to career in it; since he was part of it,
he could go forth beyond it and hear the voice it scabbarded. While his
heart had beat against it, he had sat there, strangely afraid and alien
to it all. But now, his heart rhythmed to its measure so that he heard
it beat no longer. Now, his soul was swathed and soaked to its color, so
that he could mount upon the silence and traverse it without sinking,
and attain beyond. He and the silence were one. He, then, could know
what it knew; feel the purple flame that gave it forth; and sense the
slow-moving pulse of which its undulant shadows were a shroud.
With his eyes so freed, Quincy looked up, his head no longer stiffly
straining forward.
* * * * *
And then, slowly, like the colors of sunset upon the eastern sky, it
came to him. A fibre here, in his soul; a dart there, of fire, and
beyond, over a space of grey, a shred of light. Until at last, like the
glow of the hid sun below the land, all of him was athrob and painted
with it, all of him flamed and sang and quickened to it. There against
the stars; there in the deep mazes where other stars lay drowned like
pearls in wine; there in that hinted ecstasy of space before which the
vibrant lights were hung like a fine girdle before a quivering passion.
And below sat Quincy, breathing a calm breath, knowing no cold, no fear,
no strangeness--in communion....
His soul loosed within him. Without pain, it broke the bonds of body and
went forth. The firm air was an illimitable path, whose boundlessness
pointed one way toward that which made it as a candle’s flash, short and
ephemeral. All of the world breathed and rolled underneath. All of the
world and its firm atmosphere--he saw it swinging eastward, away from
the night and toward the long-set sun that it must meet again at dawn.
He rested above the rock and above the hill. But beyond him were the
stars and the veiled voice, so that he also swung--back, back, back ...
to meet the morning.
And so poised, in tremulous unison with the earth and the other stars,
he rested--while below, vaguely, he was aware of his crouched body and
his burning eyes....
* * * * *
A tuft of wind fingered his hair. It tumbled against his forehead. The
soft bonds of his body clamped close upon his soul. Like a dream on
waking, the stars retreated; and as they went, closed in to an
infinitude of hopeless depth the subtle Hand that had drawn him forth
with its own ecstasied advance.
He sat there, cold under the heavens. A fresh wind pierced him. He
shivered with it. He arose. He sought out the squatting road that
tumbled back into the town. And he was glad to find it; glad of the
vulgar lights that blinked against the noiseless houses, glad of the
rattle of the car that brought bed nearer.
Like a magnet had the Hand drawn from him that which could be at home
with silence and the stars. And like the tremor of a harp, the voice
came on the wind:
“I keep you until each time that you seek Me. Then, shall you come forth
and receive.”