THE house stands on the height of a mountain. I am aware of the mountain more than of the house. The room in which I am, in which we are, has a door that opens on a narrow hall: and at the hall’s end there is another room. That is the whole of the house. Along the room’s length there are three French windows giving upon a roofless porch: and the slope of the mountain starts down from the porch.
Our room is lighted by a single lamp that burns on the end wall away from the wall with the door. (I feel that the hall is dark and that the other room is dark and that the mountain is dark, and that the night holding the world is dark save for our lighted room.) The walls of our room are unpainted pine, the rafters break and cast into wild shapes the shadow of the lamp. The long wall opposite the windows is broken by no window, the lamp’s shadows do not fall there, its wood is white. All about is the night, for the house stands on the very mountain crest. Night has invaded even the hall, even the other room. And all about is silence. The mountain sinks in silence beyond our senses. And our senses like prisoned birds live in this shut room where alone there is not blackness and silence.
We are I and Mildred, lovely in a gown of green that shimmers on her body like an emerald molten by the white flame of her flesh. We are I and Mildred and Mildred’s father, and both my parents, and Philip LaMotte and Doctor Isaac Stein. We are seven: brightly at ease and talking in this silent night upon a mountain top so high that the air about us moves not toward earth but the spaces; so high that these silences are bathed in a celestial prescience free from the marring noises of men. And straight from our room with its solitary lamp weaving deep shadows in the ceiling’s softness, the slope bears down dense into a depth too vast for the penetration even of our thoughts.
Mildred is touching a guitar, and she sings:
“As ye came from holy land
Of Walsinghame,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?
How should I know your true love
That have met many a one