Mysticism -- Fiction; Supernatural -- Fiction; Virginia -- Fiction
"No. Mountain folk ain't curious in them ways. You'd better have let me
sing to you about John Horn. Lucinda says she took her body away, but
not her spirit. Says she can feel her any still and sunny day. I reckon
Jonathan Morgan feels the same way. I don't know. It's been a long time
ago! Brother Carraway's dead and Jonathan Morgan is Brother Morgan now
and preaches in the old church. Things air sure changing in this world!
Last summer I heard him say myself that Christ was inside us and not
outside--might never have been outside us, so much in the world being
parable! James Curdy's so old now he couldn't do anything but look mad
as an old beast in winter and get right up and go out of church, looking
like a snow cloud and talking to himself.... Lucinda says people keep on
acting and persuading if we see them or if we don't see them!"
He lifted himself, long, lank, and brown, and moved from the hemlock.
"You air welcome--Mr. Smith, you'd better speak to Jim Harris about them
logs."
XIII
Malcolm Smith, talking with Curtin in the cool twilight, before Hall's,
had no word against Drew's departure for Sweet Rocket. "He's a valuable,
likable fellow! There's a curious sense when you are with him of depth
or background that he doesn't understand himself. Violin wood! He says
that this friend of yours has something to teach that he wants to learn.
That's all right! I can generally tell when a man's real destiny is
ruling him. I've got that feeling now about Drew. He needs to buy in a
certain city and he's going there. If we're here next year--and there's
a lot to do on Rock Mountain--I'll be glad to take him on again."
Bedtime came. Again Curtin slept profoundly, restfully, waked early, and
climbed again to crest of mountain to see again the sun rise over so
great expanse. He sat in the stone chair and before him hung the morning
star and the senescent moon. Below them was spread violet and jonquil
and one strange sea of blue.
Again he felt the Spiritual Sun. He thought: "This is what they have
perceived at Sweet Rocket. They have not waited for death. They live
now, and forever, and know it. This body will go from them, but they are
building or remembering--I do not know which, and perhaps it is both--a
life that will not go from them. And I also, also, though I am a babe
yet--"
Sitting in the hollow of stone at the top of the upraised wave of earth
he watched the sunrise from Rock Mountain.... He conceived that what was
true of him was true of others, had been true age after age, was true
now over this round earth of others. He thought: "There has always been
a fellowship. The eidelweiss does not guess the roses and the
heliotrope, nor the violet and the meadow rue. But at last the garden of
the earth guesses! It becomes the living garden. The living garden
becomes the living man. Naught is right, naught is reasonable, until you
get it from the whole."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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