CHAPTER XXV Clink of metals striking together, hammer sound, sound of the wheel, sound of the fed furnace, sound of voices among metals. Diccon Dawn, worker in rich metals with Jankin to help and a boy to help Jankin. All day were voices in the long room, footsteps to and fro, sound of the craft. Richard Englefield beginning again to make beautiful things. As he worked he saw a lace-maker. Rich and beautiful lace. He saw Wander forest, he saw the ruined farm, he saw Middle Forest, the prison there and the house by the river. He worked from dawn to dusk. Work,--let some ease come that way! He was artist at work and some lightening came. One must love all. The nights at first brought him long and faintly terrible dreams. He could not remember them in sequence, but some had horror and some had beauty, and now and again his brain caught from them small, vivid pictures. Then, one night, he saw, half he thought in dream and half not in dream, a furnace and seated within it a man with a hammer and an anvil, and on the anvil a man, and they were both the one man, only the man with the hammer was the greater in aspect. Work, work, and at last, after terrible dreams, pray! But no set prayers, only a wild cry upward to the man with the hammer. The street lay baked clay under the sun, the street darkened beneath cloud. Rain poured down, cleansing and sweetening, making brooks of gutters, pattering and driving, singing the clean and the fresh, turning when out came the sun into uncounted glistening or rainbow orbs. Wind swept the street, a great bellows quickening life. Fog stole in, and the familiar became a foreigner, strange, remote, chill; surely the world was dying! Then came the sun, and the world was not dying. He went to Old Anchor. The street of half ruinous houses was filled with a crowd of voices of sea-going and from-sea-returning folk. A woman with a child told him where to find her. She sat with bobbins in her hand, at a lace pillow. “Thou’rt pale! Weave, weave like this all day long!” “So I buy bread. I do well.” “So wretched a place! Morgen, come to my house. Richard and Alice Dawn--brother and sister.” “No--no!” They talked, they parted. Old Anchor and Thames side and street of the smiths. That night, lying awake, suddenly he saw her life; he passed into a calm and wide and lifted moment and saw it spread from childhood. Seeing so, it appeared his own experience,--not appeared, but was. Something like a great shutter closed upon that moment, then there opened another as wide and as deep. Space, there was space! “I have standing and moving room again!” After a week he went once more to Old Anchor. “Morgen, I better understand your life and my life. This place harms you. Come into the smiths’ street and to the house where I am and where there is all room. We have need to be together and to learn together.” “No--no!”