“Isn’t it still?” whispered Vivian, holding Virginia’s hand. “You can just hear the silence in your ears. I believe it’s louder than the creek!”
“I love it!” said Mary, unlocked doors all forgotten in a blessed, all-together feeling. “See the stars come out one by one. You can almost see them opening the doors of Heaven before they look through. I never saw so many in all my life. And isn’t the sky blue? It’s never that way at home!”
“I can understand better than ever, Virginia,” said Priscilla, “how you used to feel at school when we would open the French doors and go out on the porch. You said it wasn’t satisfying someway. I thought I understood on the getting-acquainted trip, but now I know better than ever.”
“It makes you feel like whispering, doesn’t it?” Vivian whispered again. “It’s all so big and we’re so little. But it doesn’t scare me so much now.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Virginia softly, “of Matthew Arnold’s poem—the one on Self-Dependence, you know, Vivian, which we had in class, and 103 which Miss Wallace likes so much. Of course, he was on the sea when he thought of it, but so are we—on a prairie sea—and I’m sure the stars were never brighter, even there. I learned it because I think it expresses the way one feels out here. I used to feel little, too, Vivian, but I don’t any more. I feel just as though some strange thing inside of me were trying to reach the stars. It’s just as though all the little things that have bothered you were gone away—just as though you were ready to learn real things from the stars and the silence and the mountains—learn how to be like them, I mean. You know what he said in the poem, Vivian—the stanza about the stars—the one Miss Wallace loves the best:
| ‘Unaffrighted by the silence round them, Undistracted by the sights they see, These demand not that the things without them Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.’” |
Vivian sighed—a long, deep sigh that somehow drew them closer together.
“I don’t believe I’ll ever be like that,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ll always want sympathy and—love!” 104
“But it doesn’t mean that, Vivian,” explained Virginia. “I’m sure it doesn’t. Of course, we all want those things—more than anything else in the world. But I think it means just as Miss Wallace said, that instead of demanding them we’re to live so—so nobly that they will come to us—unsought, you know. Doesn’t that make it a little easier, don’t you think?”
The August night grew cold, and soon they went indoors to a friendship fire in the stone fire-place. They watched the flames roar up the chimney, then crackle cheerily, and at last flicker away to little blue tongues, which died almost as soon as they were born. There was no other light in the cabin. Virginia had said that none was needed, and she did not notice the apprehensive glances which the other Vigilantes cast around the shadowy, half-lit room. At last Vivian yawned.