The world of men was asleep, sodden, dead to the splendor of the truth that shone brilliantly throughout it. He felt kin to the stars, the night, the vast mountain that sustained him. The full force of the newspaper verse that he had clipped some days before, and carried around with him, held his mind; he had grown into its mood. The lines obtruded themselves in fragmentary fashion:
Like calls to like; the high stars sing for me, The harsh rude breezes speak to me alone; I hear the voices of the hill and sea; I talk with them, in language all our own.
Over the fields of heaven the stars are sown, Vast shining ones, who fling their melody To those whose ears can catch the brave clear tone. Like calls to like; the high stars sing for me.
Stirred by the whirling stars, wild-tongued and free, The winds out of the far-sky realms are blown, Chanting their boisterous rebel litany; The harsh rude breezes speak to me alone....
Flesh of their flesh am I, bone of their bone, Blood-brother to them all eternally. All things are one with me, and we are grown One in our speech, our sadness, our high glee....
This was the boisterous rebel speech, this the message that they had been trying so long to tell him. This was the answer to his soul-hunger for an answer to life's unresting questionings.
Men, women, children--the iron city, the world--staggered blindly on, pulled here and there by vast laws which they did not guess. There was enough and to spare for all; there was plenty, plenty, only for the taking, for all of the children of men. There could be, if men would but have it, God's kingdom upon earth.... He felt a strange sense of reverence. Life was sweet to him, it had given him the answer to these things.
The following Friday--it was the fourth time he had seen Jane, and the third evening with her--he tacked the talk around to this theme that had so grown upon him in these brief iconoclastic days. The drowsy throb of his motor left the mountain far behind; shot over the creaking wooden bridge that unbarred Shadow Creek, traversed the graveyard glimmer of the moon-mottled sandstone above Shadow Mountain, and now purred and loitered through a further farm-broken valley, nosing toward the East, where the stars rose.