“It is either to go back that way,” Herman insisted, “or stripped and unremembering.”
“If you were to forget all you know and had to begin over again,” I suggested, “there would be a sociological experiment for you.”
“Mona, you don’t really want to forget all this?”
“I don’t know,” I said; “a little forgetting is good medicine.” And singularly I thought of the tall woman in the woods, and wondered when I should see her again, and what she would have thought of Herman’s idea.
This was the last of the rains, and the very morning of the day when the Outlier from beyond the Singing Ford came back with the word about Daria. Messengers were sent to fetch her and her husband, and all we of Deep Fern went down half a day to meet them. The messengers had found the former Ward and her young husband on their way, drawn by our wish and their own willingness. Love had made them subservient, emptied them of self.
The examination took place in a half hollow full of trees. What sunlight there was lay in white patches like a stain. All up the green and golden slope the women sat listening, now discovered by the stirring of the wind on their loose garments, now disappearing in stillness. Daria stood up among the men and answered faithfully. It was true, she admitted, that she remembered things. Some things. She did not know how much. She had just begun to connect facts with the vague sense of familiarity. Questioned, the memories revealed themselves but sticks and straws, wreckage of experience, a name here, there a trivial circumstance, and there a blank. All of them such images as might have been floating in her mind at the time, or a little before she drank forgetfulness.
Did she remember the place of the Treasure?
The question, when it came, took her fairly. She spun about, rocking her arms, burst into dry sobbing. Give her the Cup, she said, she would take the Cup again if they wished it, but let her not be questioned any more. In a broad splash of sunlight I could see her shiver, but not her judges; their faculty for quiescence served them better than speech.
How could she say? She had not remembered that there was a treasure until her husband explained her situation to her. And then suddenly while he talked there had come into her mind a place in the hills, rocks, pine trees, she did not know quite where, all the rest of the country cut off in a mist like a landscape in a dream. But there was the picture, young pines posturing for the dance, and all her attention centered on a certain spot. If she happened upon that district she thought she could have gone straight to that spot. She broke off: begged them to deliver judgment. But there were other considerations. Members already scattered to their homes must be summoned—there were formalities. The meeting broke up quietly. Daria moved over and placed herself beside Zirriloë, between the keepers. Her husband did not come to her, nor she look toward him. She was in Ward again.