Marise thought, "We seem to be the only living things in all creation."

In that huge, black, cold glittering universe how tiny was the little glow of life they made!

Tiny but unquenchable! Those myriads of hard staring eyes could not look down the immortal handful of human life and love which she and Neale had created between them.

There was a silence, filled with still, breathless cold; with enormous s.p.a.ce, with infinity.

Marise felt a rigorous shudder run over her, as though something vital were coming to her, like the rending pang of pain which heralds child-birth. After this, did she close her eyes for a moment, or did it come to her while she continued to gaze wide-eyed at the stern greatness of the universe? What was this old, familiar, unknown sensation?

... as though, on a long journey in the dark it had grown light, so that she had suddenly recognized which way she was going.

Then she knew what it was. Conscious and awake, she was feeling herself one with the great current, advancing with an irresistible might, majesty and power, in which she shared, to which she gave her part.

VI

January.

She was putting away the clean sheets from the washing on the shelves at the end of the hall, upstairs, her mind entirely on the prosaic task, wondering when she would have to replace some of the older ones, and wishing she could put off buying till the outrageous post-war prices went down. Someone stirred behind her and she turned her head quickly to see who was there. It was Neale, come in early. He was standing, looking at her back; and in the instant before he saw that she had turned, she caught the expression on his face, the tender fathomless affection that was there.

A warm gush of happiness surged up all over her. She felt a sudden intense physical well-being, as though her breath came more smoothly, her blood ran more sweetly in her veins.

"Oh, _Neale_!" she said, under her breath, flushing and turning to him.

He looked at her, his strong, resolute face and clear eyes smiled, and opening his arms he drew her into them. The ineffable memory of all the priceless past, the ineffable certainty of the priceless future was in their kiss.

That evening, after a long golden hour at the piano, she chanced to take down the Largo in the Chopin sonata. As she began it, something stirred in her mind, some memory that instantly lived with the first notes of the music. How thick-cl.u.s.tered with a.s.sociations music became, waking a hundred echoes and overtones!

This was the memory of the time when she had played it, almost a year ago, and had thought how intimacy and familiarity with music but deepened and enriched and strengthened its hold on you. It was only the lower pleasures of which one grew tired,--had enough. The others grew with your growing capacity to hold them. She remembered how that day she had recalled the Wordsworth sonnet, "A beauteous evening, calm and free," and had thought that music took you in to worship quite simply and naturally at the Temple's inner shrine, that you adored none the less although you were at home there and not breathless with adoration like the nun: because it was a whole world given to you, not a mere pang of joy, because you could live and move and be blessedly and securely at home there.

She finished the last note of the Largo and sat silent. She was thinking that her marriage was like that, too.

Presently she got up, took out the old portfolio of photographs, and pinned upon the wall over the piano the view taken from Rocca di Papa.

VII

February 24.

Marise had been drilling the chorus in the Town Hall of Ashley after the men's working-hours, and now in the dimming light of the early evening was going home on snow-shoes, over the hill-path. She liked to use snow-shoes and occasionally said that she could walk more easily and more lightly on them than on bare ground. She trod over the tops of the deep drifts with an accentuation of her usual strong free step.

The snow fell thickly and steadily, a cold, finely-spun, straight-hung curtain, veiling all the m.u.f.fled sleeping valley. There was an inconceivable silence about her as she drew her snow-shoes over the velvet-like ma.s.ses of the snow. But within her were ringing echoes of the rhythms and cadences of the afternoon's struggle, imperfectly sung most of them, haltingly, or dully, or feebly, or with a loud misunderstanding of the phrase. At the recollection of these failures, she clenched her hands hard inside her fur gloves with an indomitable resolution to draw something better from her singers the next time.

But mingled with them was a moment of splendor. It was when the men had tried over the pa.s.sage she had explained to them the week before. She had not known then, she did not know now, how clearly or definitely she had reached them with her summary of the situation of the drama: the desperate straits of the Israelites after the three-year drought, the trial by fire and water before the scorning aristocracy, Elijah stark and alone against all the priesthood of Baal, the extremity of despair of the people ... and then the coming of the longed-for rain that loosened the terrible tension and released their hearts in the great groaning cry of thanksgiving. She had wondered how clearly or definitely she had reached their understanding, but she knew that she had reached their hearts, when suddenly she had heard all those men's voices pealing out, pure and strong and solemn and free, as she had dreamed that phrase could be sung.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Thanks be to G.o.d! He laveth the thirsty land.]

The piercing sweetness of the pleasure this had brought to her came over her again in a wave. She halted on the crest of the hill, and for a moment in place of the purples and blues of the late snowy afternoon there hung before her eyes the powerful, roughly clad bodies of those vigorous men, their weather-beaten faces, their granite impa.s.sivity, under which her eye had caught the triumph of the moment, warming them as it did her, with the purest of joys this side of heaven, the consciousness of having made music worthily. The whole valley seemed to be filled to its brim with that shout of exultation. It had taken all of her patience, and will-power, and knowledge of her art and of these people to achieve that moment. But it had lifted her high, high above the smallness of life, up to a rich realm of security in joy.

The snow fell more and more thickly, covering her as she stood with a fine, soft mantle of white. She had heard the men that afternoon saying they had seen signs of the winter break-up, and she wondered at it now, looking about the frozen, buried, beautiful valley and up to the frozen towering mountains, breathing in the cold air, as pure as the ether itself. It seemed to her that spring was as remote and unreal and impossible an imagination of the heart as a child's fairy-tale.

Then suddenly, bursting out of the dimming distance, close in front of her, flying low, silently, strongly, a pair of wild geese went winging off towards the north, their gray shapes the only moving thing in all the frost-held world.

Marise drew a great breath of delight in their strong and purposeful vitality. She looked after them, her heart rising and singing with comradely pride in them. She would have liked to shout an exultant greeting after them, "Hurrah!"

They went beating off, fast and straight, for their unseen destination, while, treading the velvet-like snow-drifts with her strong free tread, Marise went home.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Music]

VIII

March 2.

It was the first warm day of the year. The hard-frozen ruts of the road thawed on top and glistened. The snow-banks shrank visibly from one hour to the next under a warm wind and a hazy sun. The mountains were unbelievably beautiful and seductive in a shimmer of blue and silver.

The children had brought home a branch of p.u.s.s.y-willows, and as Marise and Neale stood for a moment at the open door breathing in the new softness, they saw Toucle, old and stooped and shabby, her reticule bag bulging, her flat feet in enormous overshoes plodding up the road towards the mountain.

They smiled at one another. It was in truth the first day of spring.

Marise said, after a pause, "Do you know what she goes off for?"

Neale shook his head with a wide indifference as to the reason. "Because she's an Injun," he conjectured casually.

"She told me once," said Marise, with a sudden wonder what Neale would think of that glimpse into the old mystic's mind, how he would (for she knew beforehand he would) escape the wistfulness which struck at her even now, at the thought of that door to peace. She repeated to him word for word what Toucle had told her on that hot August day.

Neale gave her his usual careful attention. Marise thought to herself, "Neale is the only person I ever knew who could listen to other people's ideas." But when she finished he made no comment. She asked him, "Did you ever think that old carven-image had that in her? How profound a disdain for us busy-about-nothing white people she must have!"

Neale nodded. "Most likely. Everybody has a good deal of disdain for other people's ideals."

"Well, you haven't for hers, have you?" challenged Marise. Neale looked thoughtful. "I'm no mystic. Their way of managing life often looks to me like sort of lying down on the job. I'm no mystic and I'm no fish. Looks to me as though the thing to do isn't to go off in a far corner to get your momentary glimpse of daylight, but to batter a hole in the roof of your cave and let daylight in where you live all the time. I can't help being suspicious of a daylight that's so uncertain you have to go away from life and hold your breath before you can see it for a minute. I want it where I do my work."

Marise looked at him, thinking deeply. That was just what Neale did. But when she looked back at the old Indian woman, just now turning into the wood-road, she sighed wistfully, and did not know why.

There was so very much growing always to be done in life.

IX

March 10.

(_A letter from Eugenia_:)

"... I'm planning perhaps to make the trip to the temples in the Malay jungle. Biskra was deadly, and Italy worse ... vulgarity and commonness everywhere. What an absolutely dreary outlook wherever one turns one's eyes! There is no corner of the modern world that is not vulgar and common. Democracy has done its horrible leveling down with a vengeance ..."

(_A letter from Mr. Welles_:)

"... The life here is full of interest and change, and it's like dew on my dusty old heart to see the vitality of the joy-in-life of these half-disinherited people. I'm ashamed to tell you how they seem to love me and how good they are to me. Their warmness of heart and their zest in life... . I'm just swept back into youth again. It makes me very much mortified when I think what a corking good time I am having and what sanctimonious martyr's airs I put on about coming down here. Of course a certain amount of my feeling younger and brisker comes from the fact that, working as I am, n.o.body feels about me the laid-on-the-shelf compa.s.sion which everybody (and me too) was feeling before. I _am_ somebody here and every time I say 'Dr. Martin' to a well-educated Negro physician whom another white man has just hailed as 'Andy' I feel not only a real sense of righteous satisfaction but the joyful mischievous fun that a small boy has. Give my love to Paul (speaking of small boys) and tell him I'm saving up for the fishing-pole I am going to use when I go fishing with him next summer. He said in his last letter he wanted to come down here and make me a visit; but you tell him I think he'd better get his growth before he does that."