And then, as they all smiled at the Doctor’s jest, there came from all the room what I most dreaded: silence. No more words to pull me back: but silence pressing against the base of my brain, as I stood near the window.
I breathed at ease, for it was really darkness. I began to exult. I prepared my words as if to fling at them in answer to a hostile challenge.
“See—there is no sign of dawn at midnight.”
The words were not uttered.... I forgot the cozy room in which I stood. I saw the night. And there was something there by which to see it!
The black of the sky was limpid: a well of blackness, a blackness that received my sight passively, and my sight sank in it and was lost. This sky had no cloud, and yet no moon or star. It was a black thing enfolding me. But the slope of the mountain was a harder blackness: dense and wilful the mountain side struck down athwart the mellow blackness of the sky. My eyes went immensely far, until the vast stroke of the mountain faded, became moltenly one with the warm night of the sky that folded all about.
Deep down where the mountain melted into space and solid and fluid merged into a blindness, I saw a spot of light. I was silent: and as I held my breath, the spot of light moved up.
I spoke:
“Something is down there ... and it is bright ... and it is moving up.”
But there was no answer in the room. My words seemed naked, almost ashamed: so strange they sounded in the place I held between the room and the night.
I turned around: they had not heard my words. They had forgotten me. They had forgotten their own impulse, their own words which sent me on this errand. Even Mildred. She thrummed her guitar and her emerald body swayed, and her face, its opalescent smile, beamed upon Philip, whose eyes she held in hers. My mother was conversing low with Doctor Stein and my father had taken a chair beside Mr. Fayn: they were intent together over the cards.