I could have sworn some subtle change went through the surrounding darkness as he said the words. Fire and wind sprang at me, so vivid was their entrance into my thought. Again that slight shudder ran tingling up my spine.
“The place,” he continued, “is therefore already prepared to some extent, for the channels that we need are partly open. The veil is here unthickened. We can work with less resistance.”
“There is certainly peace,” I agreed, “and an uplifting sense of beauty.”
“You feel it?” he asked quickly.
“I feel extraordinarily and delightfully alive,” I admitted truthfully.
Whereupon he turned to me with a still more significant rejoinder:
“Because that which worship and consecration-ceremonies ought to accomplish for churches—are meant to accomplish, rather—has never been here undone. All places were holy ground until men closed the channels with their unbelief and thus defiled them by cutting them off from the life about them.”
I heard a window softly closing above us; we turned and went indoors. Julius put the lamps out one by one, taking a candle to show me up the stairs. We went along the wooden passage. We passed several doors, beneath one of which I saw a line of light. My own room was at the further end, simply, almost barely, furnished, with just the actual necessaries. He paused at the threshold, shook my hand, said a short “good night,” and left me, closing the door behind him carefully. I heard his step go softly down the passage. A door in the distance also opened and closed. Then complete silence hushed the entire house about me, yet a silence that was listening and alive. No ancient, turreted castle, with ivied walls and dungeons, with forsaken banqueting-hall or ghostly corridors, could possibly have felt more haunted than this peasant’s châlet in the Jura fastnesses.
For a considerable time I sat at my open window, thinking; and yet not thinking so much, perhaps, as—relaxing. I was aware that my mind had been at high tension the entire day, almost on guard—as though seeking unconsciously to protect itself. Ever since the morning I had been on the alert against quasi-attack, and only now did I throw down my arms and abandon myself without reserve. Something I had been afraid of had shown itself friendly after all. A feeling of security stole over me; I was safe; gigantic powers were round me, oddly close, yet friendly, provided I, too, was friendly. It was a singular feeling of being helpless, yet cared for. The valley took hold of me and all my little human forces. To set myself against it would be somehow dangerous, but to go with it, adopting its overmastering stride, was safety. This became suddenly clear to me—that I must be sympathetic and that hostility on my part might involve disaster.
Here, apparently, was the first symptom of that power which Julius declared was derived from “feeling-with.” I began to understand another thing as well; I recalled his choice of words—that the veil hereabouts was “unthickened” and the channels “open.” He did not say the veil was thin, the channels cleared. It was in its native, primitive condition.