第68章

"Last night," he answered, "there was--there was a change.The Answer was--" he drew a deep breath--"nearer.""You are sure?"

The other smiled with absolute certainty.

"It was not that I found the Answer sooner, easier.I could not be mistaken.No, that which has troubled the darkness, that which has entered into the empty night--is coming nearer to me--physically nearer, actually nearer."

His voice sank again.His face like the face of younger prophets, the seers, took on a half-inspired expression.He looked vaguely before him with unseeing eyes.

"Suppose," he murmured, "suppose I stand there under the pear trees at night and call her again and again, and each time the Answer comes nearer and nearer and I wait until at last one night, the supreme night of all, she--she----"Suddenly the tension broke.With a sharp cry and a violent uncertain gesture of the hand Vanamee came to himself.

"Oh," he exclaimed, "what is it? Do I dare? What does it mean?

There are times when it appals me and there are times when it thrills me with a sweetness and a happiness that I have not known since she died.The vagueness of it! How can I explain it to you, this that happens when I call to her across the night--that faint, far-off, unseen tremble in the darkness, that intangible, scarcely perceptible stir.Something neither heard nor seen, appealing to a sixth sense only.Listen, it is something like this: On Quien Sabe, all last week, we have been seeding the earth.The grain is there now under the earth buried in the dark, in the black stillness, under the clods.Can you imagine the first--the very first little quiver of life that the grain of wheat must feel after it is sown, when it answers to the call of the sun, down there in the dark of the earth, blind, deaf; the very first stir from the inert, long, long before any physical change has occurred,--long before the microscope could discover the slightest change,--when the shell first tightens with the first faint premonition of life? Well, it is something as illusive as that." He paused again, dreaming, lost in a reverie, then, just above a whisper, murmured:

"'That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die,'...

and she, Angele...died."

"You could not have been mistaken?" said Presley."You were sure that there was something? Imagination can do so much and the influence of the surroundings was strong.How impossible it would be that anything SHOULD happen.And you say you heard nothing, saw nothing.""I believe," answered Vanamee, "in a sixth sense, or, rather, a whole system of other unnamed senses beyond the reach of our understanding.People who live much alone and close to nature experience the sensation of it.Perhaps it is something fundamental that we share with plants and animals.The same thing that sends the birds south long before the first colds, the same thing that makes the grain of wheat struggle up to meet the sun.And this sense never deceives.You may see wrong, hear wrong, but once touch this sixth sense and it acts with absolute fidelity, you are certain.No, I hear nothing in the Mission garden.I see nothing, nothing touches me, but I am CERTAIN for all that."Presley hesitated for a moment, then he asked:

"Shall you go back to the garden again? Make the test again?""I don't know."

"Strange enough," commented Presley, wondering.

Vanamee sank back in his chair, his eyes growing vacant again:

"Strange enough," he murmured.

There was a long silence.Neither spoke nor moved.There, in that moribund, ancient town, wrapped in its siesta, flagellated with heat, deserted, ignored, baking in a noon-day silence, these two strange men, the one a poet by nature, the other by training, both out of tune with their world, dreamers, introspective, morbid, lost and unfamiliar at that end-of-the-century time, searching for a sign, groping and baffled amidst the perplexing obscurity of the Delusion, sat over empty wine glasses, silent with the pervading silence that surrounded them, hearing only the cooing of doves and the drone of bees, the quiet so profound, that at length they could plainly distinguish at intervals the puffing and coughing of a locomotive switching cars in the station yard of Bonneville.

It was, no doubt, this jarring sound that at length roused Presley from his lethargy.The two friends rose; Solotari very sleepily came forward; they paid for the luncheon, and stepping out into the heat and glare of the streets of the town, passed on through it and took the road that led northward across a corner of Dyke's hop fields.They were bound for the hills in the northeastern corner of Quien Sabe.It was the same walk which Presley had taken on the previous occasion when he had first met Vanamee herding the sheep.This encompassing detour around the whole country-side was a favorite pastime of his and he was anxious that Vanamee should share his pleasure in it.

But soon after leaving Guadalajara, they found themselves upon the land that Dyke had bought and upon which he was to raise his famous crop of hops.Dyke's house was close at hand, a very pleasant little cottage, painted white, with green blinds and deep porches, while near it and yet in process of construction, were two great storehouses and a drying and curing house, where the hops were to be stored and treated.All about were evidences that the former engineer had already been hard at work.The ground had been put in readiness to receive the crop and a bewildering, innumerable multitude of poles, connected with a maze of wire and twine, had been set out.Farther on at a turn of the road, they came upon Dyke himself, driving a farm wagon loaded with more poles.He was in his shirt sleeves, his massive, hairy arms bare to the elbow, glistening with sweat, red with heat.In his bell-like, rumbling voice, he was calling to his foreman and a boy at work in stringing the poles together.