T

THE EARTH BOND

KATHARINE METCALF ROOF

HE tide that runs into Black Rock Inlet is swift on the

rise and in the ebb, but at the flood there is a moment -hushed, portentous-when the waters pause, gathering strength for the turn, and the rapids become a moveless pool. It was then that Mary, leaning over the bridge, dropped a leaf upon their surface. We watched it as it lay there an instant motionless; then slowly the spirit that impels the waters lifted and bore it from our sight.

Beautiful, inexplicable Mary! The springs of her being remain as deep a mystery to me to this day as the unseen force that controls the tides. Years afterward I found Craig leaning on the bridge at that same crisis of the waters. Perhaps for all of us there is such a moment.

I have thought of the drama of their lives as Mary's story -for if I must start out to write romance, whom should it be about but Mary? Never was a being so inevitably created for the imagination to play upon. But since I have reviewed the curious psychology of the situation, it has come to me that it is after all Craig's story. If the tragedy of unfulfilment, as we are accustomed to rate such things, is Mary's, the human catastrophe is surely Craig's-as unlikely a subject for tragedy as was ever created, and as impotent to meet it;-poor Craig, for he has not Mary's unhuman vision which causes her to see the whole panorama of life impersonally, as might the returned spirit from some wiser, more radiant realm. That she had this power, not in her calm age-even now sufficiently remote-but in the day of her beautiful passionate youth, in the zenith of her promise and her powers, is only a part of the spiritual mystery of Mary. One disposed to occult philosophizings would have said that she was an "old soul" made perfect through many lifetimes of experience. Even the unimaginative in her presence seem dimly aware of that hovering suggestion of the light that never was. Yet it is a light that rests softly upon her, not to blind, but to

illumine. I have a feeling that no one but Noel has ever come very near Mary. I mean spiritually near. Here am I, her cousin, living in the same house-for we have slipped into the arrangement since Craig went away; we sit together in the evening about the lamp, Mary's wonderful hands busy with some humble task, yet I never entirely lose the feeling that Brünhilde has condescended to mend Siegfried's girdle of skins. For some reason Mary has chosen to live among us-my imagination unconsciously frames it that way-but the essence of her spirit is remote. There was one who for an instant glimpsed her inner temple and upon him the door closed, as it had opened, of her will; as if, having seen it, he had forfeited the right to enter. Yet the goddess, instead of blinding him in pagan fashion, sent him away with a deathless vision in his heart. That vision of her he has wrought into his art.

The bond that drew Mary to earth-or say back to earth, if you care to reconcile it with such beliefs-entwined her destiny or her mission with the lives of those two-Craig and Noel. One could not regard the course of events in their conjoined lives as accidental. Should you become impatient here with my fantasies and speculations, please remember that this is a story of strange happenings in three human souls, and for the most part a wordless drama. Mary's course concerning those two whose lives became most closely interwoven with her own remains a mystery to the world; and, after all, are we ever entirely conscious of those inner sources of our being that move to action? Even the most unimaginative must have felt at times certain deeper intimations.

II

I am supposed to know Mary better than her other friends or relatives. If I do it seems to me that my nearness consists in my realization of her remoteness. Mary dwells upon heights, yet is not lonely as such dwellers are commonly supposed to be. I have sometimes thought that it is the degree of what Noel called my impersonality that has made Mary willing to permit

me within the circle of her home, for there are things that Mary will not allow to come near her and others that she lives above, breathing her different ether. I know that in her all-wise, deepseeing way she loves me, like a sort of spiritual mother. I am eight years younger, absorbed in my work, conscious of the outer world principally in tones and values and schemes of color; and Mary, who has inspired deep loves, wild passions and all degrees of personal attachment, knows that she has no need to fear my importunities. To me she is one of the wonderful products of life as the Mona Lisa is of art; a human being transposed to the ideal plane, too finely wrought to invoke our descriptive phrases in their common meanings. But it is no pagan art that Mary embodies. There is in her smile a more spiritual secret than that in the face of Leonardo's lady of mysteries.

She is the type of the goddess woman. Yet Ralph Ashburton loved her with a consuming passion; and Noel, while he glimpsed her as a goddess, loved her as a woman. But Craig saw her unimaginatively as his wife. Craig is a contented dweller in the plains, unaware of the existence of mountains. Perhaps you have decided that that is why she married him, secretly relieved to descend from her heights; but you could not think that if you knew Mary and apprehended even dimly the fine inscrutabilities of her spirit.

I have never tried to paint Mary's portrait, yet I am supposed to have a flair for likenesses. I once made a sketch of her standing high up against the sea in a blue fall mist, a suggestion, not a portrait. I should not dare attempt her face. I doubt if there is a painter living who could transpose to canvas more than her outlines. There are qualities in light that cannot be transmitted in art.

Mary was twenty-two and I fourteen when we first met. Some family feud of obscure beginnings had separated us up to that period. I saw her first standing valkyr-like upon the top of one of those stern Maine rocks, very much as I sketched her. She might indeed have gloriously flung out Brünhilde's cry, for she has the voice. I remember how she looked down at me and

held out her hand to help me up. "So this is Nannie," she said with her smile, and I knew in that instant that she was beautiful

and different from anything I had seen before, for even then the inner quality was stamped upon the outer mask. Aloof, even in that early stage of her youth, yet not cold; thinly and sensitively cut about the nostrils, her lips subtly moulded yet warm. Her quality, if transcendental, was not-has never been-ascetic. What I felt about her, most strongly then as now, was the sense of light.

I was a little afraid of her. Everyone was but Craig and her father, the bishop. Their code was too simple, their vision too limited to realize Mary. The bishop, I often thought, had his moments of half-conscious inferiority, but he was ambitious and concentrated upon his own affairs. People said that he had made her give up her musical career, but it is not true. It was Mary who chose to accede to his prejudice. If she had elected to go on, she would have swept aside the bishop like a leaf before the wind. She composed in the intervals of her housekeeping and social duties, but it was her work that she would always allow to be put aside or interfered with, yet not, I am sure, from any idea of duty as we understand it. Her compositions, although strikingly original, were not exotic. On the contrary, they were often contrived out of the simplest harmonic means, as she herself showed me at the instrument. You remember that Wagner's divine Walhalla motive was built out of the common chord. Yet some of her songs were as unearthly as Schumann's Vogel Als Prophet. I don't know enough of the quality and effects of different keys to explain these things, moreover I do not think Mary's music could be entirely explained. Music is the most psychic of the arts, musical genius the most inexplicable in its nature and manifestation. I must have recourse again to the fantastic and say that it always seemed to me as if in some way Mary had caught a far-off echo of that music of the spheres said to be a reality to the trained occultist. But she could sing Schubert's Du Bist die Ruh so that the eternal peace seemed to descend upon one; she could fling out the valkyrie cry with a voice like all the wild winds of heaven, and she could bring tears to your eyes with the humanity of a Grieg cradle song. To me Mary has always suggested both unattainability and the willingness to give all, to forswear godhood for

love's sake. Yet it was not for love's sake that she finally took upon herself that which is reckoned woman's common destiny-that seemed another of the mysteries.

Mary and Noel met in England. He followed her to America on the next steamer. I realized the minute I saw her the something different in her face. She had a new unquiet beauty that made her for the time another being. It was then that Ralph Ashburton so spectacularly lost his head and haunted the place, threatening to shoot himself. Everyone was upset but Mary. She said he wouldn't do it, and he didn't. I felt at that time, without being able to analyze it, that in some way Mary's perfect harmony was disturbed. Obscure and contradictory currents commanded her being, yet she was wonderful, like a flower at full noon. Then Noel came and I understood. Noel was godlike in his way, too—a strong, radiant pagan god. I always mentally see him outdoors in the sunlight with green leaves in his hair. I once used him for a figure in a decoration, mythologically clad, piping upon a bank. When Mary saw it she smiled. "Yes, that is where he belongs," she said.

Looking back upon those days I can see that they had the quality of the thing that cannot last. It was like that first ineffable fleeting instant of spring with its impossible intimations. There is a kind of beauty that has that quality, a kind of love. There are some human beings who have it that die young.

One evening I came upon them on the shore. An intruder, I saw the thing that no other eye should have seen. At first I saw only their silhouettes against the sky, then Mary turned, moonlight and fading daylight revealing her face. I saw her put out her hands to him, then I fled. When they speak of Mary's coldness I recall her face as it looked then. Mary cold -as the blue part of the flame is cold, as white heat is like ice! Then, some weeks later, came that other evening, when we walked Mary and I-down to the bridge, and leaning upon its edge looked into the dark water at the moment of flood tide, and Mary dropped a leaf upon its surface. I felt dimly then that the thing going on in her soul was like that mystery of the waters. For I had seen her looking at Noel as a mother who knows of her approaching death might watch her unconscious