That was the month of the great eclipse. For a week Miss Ladd's boarders had talked about it, exchanging among themselves much newspaper astronomical misinformation—which the learned Miss Moore good-naturedly corrected. It was her suggestion that the household should make a night of it: "Let's all go up on the roof and see the show!" So the friendly gayety was planned—a supper in the basement dining room at half past eleven—ginger ale! ice cream! chocolate! Then an adjournment en masse to the top of the house. Of course Miss Moore, engineering the affair, invited the Curtises, confident of a refusal—and an acceptance;—both of which, indeed, she secured; but, to her astonishment, it was Mr. Curtis who declined, and his wife who accepted.
"It's a bore," Maurice told Eleanor, listlessly.
She looked worried: "Oh, I am so sorry! I told them at luncheon that we would come. I thought you'd enjoy it" (Her acceptance, which had been a real sacrifice to her, was a bomb to the other boarders. "What has happened?" they said to each other, blankly. "She'll be an awful wet blanket," some one said, frowning; and some one else said, "She's accepted because she won't let him out at night, alone!")
When the heterogeneous household gathered in the dining room, and corks popped and jokes were made, Eleanor and Maurice were there; he, watching the other people eat and drink and saying almost nothing; she, talking nervously and trying hard to be slangy about astronomy. Once he looked at her with faint interest—for she was so evidently "trying"! At midnight they all toiled up four flights of stairs from the basement to the garret, where, with proper squeamishness on the part of the ladies, and much gallantry of pushing and pulling on the part of the gentlemen, and all sorts of awkwardnesses and displaying of legs, they climbed a ladder and got out through the scuttle on to the flat roof. Then came the calculating of minutes, and facetiousness as to other people's watches and directions as to what one might expect to see. "It'll look like a bite out of a cookie, when it begins," the bond salesman said; and Miss Ladd tittered, and said what the ladies wanted to see was the man in the moon!
Maurice, intolerably irked, had moved across to the parapet and was staring out over the city. Below him spread the dim expanse of roofs and chimneys, with here and there the twinkle of light in an attic window. Leaning on the coping and looking down, he thought of the humanity under the dark roofs: a horizontal humanity—everybody asleep! The ugly fancy came to him that if that sleeping layer of bodies could be stirred up, there would be instantly a squirming mass of loathsome thoughts—maggots of lust, and shame, and jealousy, and fear. "My God! we're a nasty lot," he thought.
"Look!" a voice said at his shoulder. He sighed, impatiently—and looked. Above him soared the abyss of space, velvet black, pricked faintly here and there by stars; and, riding high—eternal and serene—the Moon.
He heard Miss Moore say, "It's beginning." ... And the solemn curve of the Shadow touched the great disk. No one spoke: they stood—a handful of little human creatures, staring up into immensity; specks of consciousness on a whirling ball that was rushing forever into the void, and, as it rushed, its shadow, sweeping soundless through the emptiness of Space, touched the watching Moon ... and the broad plaque, silver gilt, lessened—lessened. To half. To a quarter. To a glistening line. Then coppery darkness.
No one spoke. The flow of universes seemed to sweep personality out upon eternal tides. Yet, strangely, Maurice felt a sudden uprush of personality! ... Little he was—oh, infinitely little; too little, of course, to be known by the Power that could do this—spread out the heavens, and rule the deeps of Space; and yet he felt, somehow, near to the Power. "It's what they call God, I suppose?" he said. It flashed into his mind that he had said almost exactly the same thing that day in the field (when he was a fool), of the fire of joy in his breast: he had said that Happiness was God! And some people thought this stupendous Energy could know—us? Absurd! "Might as well say a man could know an ant." Yet, just because Inconceivable Greatness was great, mightn't it know Inconceivable Littleness? "The smaller I am—the nastier, the meaner, the more contemptible—the greater It would have to be to know me? To say I was too little for It to know about, would be to set a limit to Its greatness." How foolish Reason looks, limping along behind such an intuition—Intuition, running and leaping, and praising God! Maurice's reason strained to follow Intuition: "If It knows about me, It could help me, ... because It holds the stars. Why! It could fix things—with Eleanor!" Looking up into the gulf, his tiny misery suddenly fell away. "It would just prove Its greatness, to help me!" While he groped thus for God among the stars, the order of rushing worlds brought light, just as it had brought darkness: first a gleam; then a curving thread; then a silver sickle; then, magnificently! a shield of light—and the moon's unaltered face looked down at them. Maurice had an overwhelming impulse to drop his weakness into endless, ageless, limitless Power; his glimmer of self-knowledge, into enormous All-Knowledge; his secrecy into Truth. An impulse to be done with silences. "God knows; so Eleanor shall know." The idea of telling the truth was to Maurice—slipping and sinking into bottomless lying—like taking hold upon the great steadinesses of the sky....
People began to talk; Maurice did not hear them. Miss Ladd made a joke; Miss Moore said something about "light miles"; the old, sad, clever woman said, "The firmament showeth his handiwork,"—and instantly, as though her words were a signal—a voice, as silvery as the moon, broke the midnight with a swelling note:
"The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky ..."