They both stood motionless for a long time.
As the summer drew slowly to a close, Roger spent many quiet hours alone by
the copse of birches, where the glory of autumn was already stealing in and
out among the tall slender stems of the trees. And he thought of the silent
winter there, and of the spring which would come again, and the long
fragrant summer. And he watched the glow on the mountains above and the
rolling splendors of the clouds. At dusk he heard the voices of animals,
birds and insects, murmuring up from all the broad valley, then gradually
sinking to deep repose, many never to wake again. And the span of his life,
from the boyhood which he could recall so vividly here among these
children, seemed brief to him as a summer's day, only a part of a mighty
whole made up of the innumerable lives, the many generations, of his
family, his own flesh and blood, come out of a past he could never know,
and going on without him now, branching, dividing, widening out to what his
eyes would never see.
Vaguely he pictured them groping their way, just as he himself had done. It
seemed to Roger that all his days he had been only entering life, as some
rich bewildering thicket like this copse of birches here, never getting
very deep, never seeing very clearly, never understanding all. And so it
had been with his children, and so it was with these children of Edith's,
and so it would be with those many others--always groping, blundering,
starting--children, only children all.
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