Eh, Doctor Stein, what do you think of
the foolish ideas of my boy?”

“If you went high enough,” smiles Doctor Stein, “above the earth, you
could catch dawn at sunset.”

My mother tosses her head, tossing the discomfort of the thought away. Mildred’s laughter peals: “Oh, I shan’t be satisfied till I’ve seen
that.”

“We are high up,” ponders Philip. “I have won!” shouts Mr. Fayn. “Come, look. It’s all clear. Look!”

“But we believe you, Fayn.” My father languidly blows a ring toward the
rafters. “And even if we aren’t so high,” says Mildred, “perhaps we are high
enough to catch the dawn at midnight.”

“We are very high,” says Philip. “Well,” cries Mildred, “why does no one look? It’s midnight now. Instead of arguing, instead of theorizing, why does not someone look?”

She tosses her head up and down. “Oh, you’re all too comfortable, here, to budge,” she taunts. “And you, what about you?” says my mother savagely, while she lights a
cigarette. Mildred turns toward me. I arise from my chair. “I will look for you, Mildred.”

All of them are seated: all of them are laughing at my words, for even
as I hear them, my voice is solemn. What nonsense is this? I accept as
real and right this comfortable group of laughing persons, dear to me,
who mock from the bright assurance of their world matriced in black, my
gesture as I rise to seek the dawn at midnight. “Look at him,” cries mother. “He’s really going to look. Doctor Stein,
what _will_ we do with my boy?”

My father sneers in his kindliest way, and Mildred’s laughter like a
precious stone says nothing to me. But I am up from my chair.... And I
am near the window. “Will you know,” says Philip, “how to look for it?”

I do not answer. Mr. Fayn starts another game. “I’m foolish,” he announces seriously. “You never win twice in one
sitting.”

“There’s a good law,” says Doctor Stein, “to break.”

Mr. Fayn shakes his head. Mildred’s interest pierces me. Philip sits heavy at her side, a little
closer since I left my chair. Before me is the night.--Well, why not look? Behind me, the real, the
light: my dear ones. As I move across the floor, my eyes, ere they have
looked, are heavy and are strained. “There is nothing to see.”

The words have come ere my eyes truly saw if there was nothing to see. It is as if my will spoke the words ... lying words?... My mother nods,
content. Mildred bends toward Philip. Father smokes and Mr. Fayn taps
his foot on the floor. “Will you know,” the low warm voice of Philip, “how to look for the
dawn at midnight?”

“You have told us,” Mildred thrums her guitar. “It will rise
perpendicular like a flaming arrow.”

“From where?”

“From the deep.”

“From the deep below the mountain.”

“If I see,” said I, “any signs in the blackness, any stirring in the
night, will that not be the dawn?”

And as I spoke I knew that I was speaking to help my eyes from having
to look. They held back from the night as if my body had shrunk from
plunging with them down into a cold black sea. “It might be another house, if all you saw was a light.”

“No, mother,” I spoke nervously, eager to answer every word that came
lest the silence behind me push my eyes indeed into the blackness. “There is no other house.”

“There is one house on the mountain top,” said Mildred. “No house could live upon the mountain side,” said Philip. “Oh, what futile conversation,” mocked my mother. “Really, Doctor
Stein, is this all your fault?”

“No house could live,” said Philip, “on the mountain side. And no man
could hold to it.”

“He would fall back ere he had risen a single step.”

Doctor Stein soothed my mother: “Do not blame me, Mrs. Mark. And do not
blame me, either, if someone asks next how we came here ... high up on
the impassable mountain.”

Mother smiled and patted his fine hand: as much as to say “No, that
foolish you are not, dear Doctor. That foolish none of us is.”

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. “Something is down there ... bright ... and it moves up.”

My words, first naked, now seemed disembodied. --They cannot hear my words! Once more I faced the window and the night. The little light, as it grew larger, changed from a bright glow to a
vague gray. It became less like flame, more like some substance through
whose translucent stuff a flame ran fragilely. And as it moved up the
dense mountain slope, it seemed to limn with its march the vastness of
this world upon whose summit stood the house: and at whose depth lay
the sky. The words behind me in the room, the tap of a foot on the floor, and
Mildred’s hands merging with the silver strings of her guitar, lay
in my ears now evanescent. The thing that was a light, yet grayly
swelling, moved up the slope of the mountain. The room with its words
and its music and its laughter became a tinkle of gilt beside this
gorgeous silence. And in the silence moved the light thing up. I see it clear. “Something was down there ... and is moving up ... something convolved
and gray. Some Thing....”

Now they heard me. And in the stillness of their mouths I heard their
bodies rise, and move across the floor, take place beside me.