Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.) -- Fiction
After mid-day meal, she ensconced herself in a steamer chair on the
piazza facing the mountain; but her book lay face downward. It was a
book on coniferous trees. She had thought the Valley monotonous when
she had first come back. Now she knew it never remained the same for
two whole hours. The dazzling white of morning had given place to the
yellow glow of afternoon. The River that had flowed quicksilver now
swept seaward pure amber rilled with gold. The fleece clouds herded by
wandering winds had massed to towering cumulus where the sheet
lightnings played; and the Mountain where the silver snow-cross had
glistened in the morning seemed to have changed perspective, to have
retreated and withdrawn to a weird upper world. You no longer saw the
wind-blown cataracts. Purpling shadows, palpable sabling mournful
ghost-forms, folded and wrapped the Ridge with here and there shafts of
slant light, yellow as bars of gold. You could no longer hear the
rampant roar of streams disimprisoned from snow by mid-day sun. With
the slant light came the sibilant hush, the quiet tangible.
She reclined very still in the steamer chair. Life and love and
mystery wrapped her round, the great reverie of the race, the ecstasy
of devotees that sent to death and crusade in the Middle Ages, the
lovelight of life brooding warm and radiant. She no longer saw the
shining pageant of sunlight on the argent fields of an infinite
universe; the sparks and spangles of light in silver cataracts; a world
veiled in gold mist, flame-fired of joy, little cressets of rose edging
every sky-line. She was possessed, obsessed, bathed, enveloped in a
flame of new life. If she thought at all, 'twas in the symbol of the
old Apostle, "in Him we live and move and have our being." She
recalled that God had been defined in the consciousness of the race as
Love. Deep draughts of new existence whelmed her. No longer life
coursed somnolent through unconscious veins. Life ran riotous of
gladness tingling to a living joy so poignant it became pain. Was it
fool-joy born of swifter pulse and time-old inheritance in the flesh?
Was it the rhapsody of self-hypnotism, which ancients would have called
vision? Of such dreams does creation spring full born and enfleshed.
Of such dreams does heroism laugh at death. Of such dreams does life
invest the daily round with rain-bow mist, with the spectrum gamut of
all the colors that blend to the pure white light of daily life. As a
lense splits up light, so love had brought out the hidden colors of
existence, of eternity; as she dreamed, eternity itself seemed short.
Then came the restlessness that had shaken Wayland on the Ridge the
night before, the fire that tests the vessel; and whether the life go
to pieces depend on whether the vessel be both strong and clean. Yet
she was not afraid. She remembered their talk the night before of the
snow flake falling to the same law as the avalanche; and was she not
also a part of the Great Law?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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