The Beginning Place

5

It was as if he had been blind and she had come to him, and his eyes had cleared to see her. Seeing her he saw the world, for the first time; there is no other way to see. Each act and object had its meaning, now, for when she had touched him her touch had taught him the language of life. Nothing was changed, but now it made sense. Apples three for twenty-nine and the canned snack pudding on sale eighty-nine for the first sixpack, all right, but that was the numbers and the words, and now he understood the equations, the grammar: the beauty of the world. The faces he had never seen before, because he had been afraid to look at the beauty of the world. People stood in line at his checkstand, restless and docile, obedient to hunger, their own hunger, their children’s. Mortal creatures have to eat, so they were here, in the lines, pushing the wire baskets. So they would come to die. They were very fragile. They were spiteful, hateful when they were tired out and their money couldn’t get them what they wanted or even what they needed; he felt their anger but it no longer angered or frightened him, for all things now contained the idea of her and were transfigured by it. The face of a little boy carried through the checkline by a tired mother, the dignity and patience of the little face and the heavy, unconscious grace of the mother’s holding arm, made him want to cry out, as if he had cut or burned his hand. Things hurt. He had been numb. The anesthetic had worn off, he was alive, feeling pain. But within the pain, the reason for the pain, was joy. Beneath every word he said or heard, within everything he saw and did, lay her name, and around her name like a halo, an armor of light, the unshaken joy.

He looked at every blonde woman who came through the store. None had hair like hers, soft and pale, finely curled like a fleece, but he looked at them with tenderness and liking because they resembled her by so much at least, by being blonde. But there would be no woman like her, here. No woman here could speak her language. Her voice was clear and soft. His last day of the three days in the town on the mountain she had worn a green dress, a soft, narrow dress fitted to her round, slight body. Her wrists and neck were delicate and very white. In her all other women were beautiful, but there was none like her. There could not be, for she was alone, there, in the other land, where the soul became itself.

In books, men said that they could die for such and such a woman. He had always thought it made poetry but no sense, a mere habit of words. He understood it now as meaning exactly what it said. He felt in himself the longing, the yearning to give so greatly to the beloved that nothing was left, to give all, all. To protect and guard her, to serve her, to die for her—the thought was unendurably sweet; again he caught his breath as if a knife had gone into him, when that thought came to him.

“You haven’t gone and joined that Swami Maha-Jiji or whatever it is, have you, Buck?”

He laughed.

“You got that sort of cross-eyed look they get, those hairy krisheners,” Donna said.

She teased him in all sympathy, and he could not long resist her. He told her as much of the miracle as he could. “I met this girl,” he said. Donna said, “I knew you did!” with delight and satisfaction. But of course she wanted to know more, and he regretted having said even so much. It was wrong. He could not talk about anything from the evening land here. There was no way to say it. “I met this girl” was not true. The truth was that he had seen a princess, that he loved her, that he would give his life for her. How could Donna understand that?

She was kindhearted. She seemed to realise that he was unhappy at having said anything, and she stopped teasing him or even asking questions. But when she looked at him there was a glint in her eye, a cheerful twinkle of complicity. He did not want to see it. Donna was O.K., Donna was a very nice person, but how could anybody like that understand what had happened to him?—the strangeness, the mystery, the tragic fear; the fair, imperiled woman whom he loved in silence, the silence of worship, the silence of the unchanging twilight of the forests of that world.

This world of daylight and the night was strange enough, all that week. He had expected his impatience to return to the town on the mountain would make the waiting hard, but it was not so. Indeed, he savored and treasured these days when, at work or walking home or at home, he could cherish the thought of his princess and let her name fill his mind, instead of standing clumsy and tongue-tied in her presence, unable to speak to her and only guessing what she said.

He did not go the creek, the mornings of that week. He was afraid to risk the gate’s being closed. He did not trust himself. Why had he been so stupid, going on across the threshold that had not been there, pushing on and on when he knew the way led nowhere? If, as soon as he saw the gateway was not open, he had headed straight back to Mountain Town and asked the girl to help him, he would have saved himself that nightmare, the endless walking, telling himself that if he just kept straight on he would “come out all right,” and the panic that had taken him over when he thought he had lost his path, and the terror, and the hunger. It had all been stupid and unnecessary, and had left him not only so tired that he found workdays long and hard all week, but also distrustful of himself, or of the place.

“This is where I’m not afraid,” he had said to the girl (in Allia’s house, in the long room with the windows full of the clear twilight), but that was now no longer true. He knew now a little of the risk he might run in returning there. He knew also that he knew only a little of the risk. There was danger there; and he could not count on himself to act rationally. Given that, and the unreliability of the gateway, it seemed right to assess his chances of coming back as no more than equal. He saw this as part of the balance of the two places, and accepted it. It was the chance, the service he craved. But all the same, so long as he was here in the commonplace world, with the usual delusory options and nothing larger than life size to cope with, he would enjoy the light of day.

Towards his mother he felt the compunction, the grieving patience of potential disloyalty, strained only by her relentless crossness. She forgave him nothing. His coming back a couple of hours later than he had said he would on Sunday afternoon had brought bitter accusations of unreliability down on him. He understood that but did not understand why his unconcealable exhaustion (lamely explained by “getting lost on a shortcut”) had aroused her antagonism and contempt. “You got lost in the woods? Why were you in the woods? If you don’t know how to look after yourself it’s a stupid, stupid, stupid thing to do. People like you should do their exercising in a gym. You haven’t got the build for boy scouting. What are you trying to prove?” And so on: speaking from an uncontrollable irritation, it seemed, which made him think that it was not his coming back in such a state that enraged her, so much as his coming back at all. But that made no sense.

Lately she had been staying out three or four evenings a week, sometimes till midnight, at her séances with Durbina. Several other people with spiritualist interests had joined them. Mrs. Rogers had proved to have talent as a medium: she could do automatic writing without going into trance. Thanks to her gift, they were now carrying on a lively conversation, or correspondence, with one of Durbina’s past incarnations, a priestess of Isis. The coffee table in the Rogers’s living room was piled with books about ancient Egypt, borrowed from Durbina or, expensive as they were, bought new. When the priestess of Isis contradicted a statement in one of the books, or corrected an erroneous translation of a hieroglyph, Mrs. Rogers was triumphant. Sometimes when she got home she would talk excitedly about what had happened at the séance; but as soon as Hugh tried to respond she would come down from her high. “Of course, this sort of thing doesn’t interest you,” she said, no matter what he had said or asked. He saw that she was happy with these people who admired and valued her spiritualist talent, that she flourished among them. But she could not bring her ease or happiness home with her. Her new interests only increased her distrust and discontent. Hugh was unable to do anything to please her. If she did the laundry she complained savagely about odd socks, shirts with dirty collars and grass stains, T-shirts not turned right side out; but if he put the wash through she did it all over again because he hadn’t done it right. If he brought something from the supermarket because it was on sale or a good buy, she said it was “day-old stuff,” and let it molder in the refrigerator till he threw it out. When they were both in the apartment she made him feel that he was forever in her way, yet she said nothing to change her demand that he be there whenever she got home. If she stayed out half the evenings of the week, resented his presence yet insisted upon it, how were they going to manage, when he came back?…But the fact was, he was going. Against that fact his mother’s non-negotiable demands became, at last, insignificant. Her rudeness and impatience hurt him, but not deeply; his will was turned aside from her. No knife’s edge could reach him where he walked thinking of Allia.

It was hot, he said to himself, everybody got cross in weather this hot.

He moved through the long days of that week in silence, mostly. At night he had no sound sleep, but many dreams and wakings, and more than once in the small hours would get up to stand a while at the window to look up at the stars or the first high glory of the dawn.

On Friday Donna, who got Saturdays off, asked him what he was going to do over the holiday, and he answered, as he had planned, “Go hiking with some people I know.” Donna gave him that sidelong flick of a glance that somehow implied that, in loving a woman, he had merited the approval of all womanhood as represented by Donna—or was it approval? But then she looked at him straight on, and her face changed. She put her hand on his arm. “Don’t let anything happen to you, Buck,” she said.

“What’s going to happen to me hiking?”

“I don’t know!” she said as if surprised at herself, and laughed it off.

But her look and words and the touch of her plump, hard hand with red-lacquered nails served him, in need, as a talisman, an assurance that in fact there was one person concerned about him, however ineffectually, through a mere intuition that he was in trouble or at risk.

If his mother’s gift as a spiritualist led her to see the same thing she held it against him, as evidence of disloyalty, and did not forgive him for it.

On Friday evening he told her that he planned to be gone all Sunday night. This was what he had dreaded all week. He mumbled through the routine he had prepared about going hiking with some friends in the state park north of the city, taking the early bus on Sunday morning, sleeping out Sunday night, getting back on Monday afternoon. She said nothing. She kept her eyes on the television all the time he spoke, so that he could not be sure she heard. Though the live weight of guilt made it hard to breathe, he finished his statement, and then was silent, not asking, not permitting himself to ask, for confirmation, for permission, for the approval he craved, had always craved, had never got and would not get. But he would not permit himself anger either, and a while later, when her program was over and she had got up to turn the television off, he asked her as naturally as he could how her séance last night had gone. She did not answer. She took up a book on Akhenaton, and sat down with it, not looking at him or speaking to him. He tried to tell her himself that her silence was easier to take than one of her tirades would have been; but as he sat in the room with her, trying to read Time, he found that he was beginning to shake, as if with cold. He got up and went to his room. She did not reply to his “Good night.”

Usually she stayed abed on Saturday morning, but this day she was up and off in the car before Hugh got up. He went to work as usual. It was a heavy day, coming before the two-day holiday. She was not home when he got home. He ate supper alone. She came in at ten-thirty, looking thin, grim, a little disheveled in her cotton print dress. She did not answer his greeting but started straight down the hall to her bedroom.

“Mother,” he said, and there was some authority of passion in his voice, for she stopped, though she did not turn to face him. The silence stood between them like a substance.

“There’s no use you calling me that,” she said in a clear, dry tone, and went into her room and shut the door.

Who can I call that? he thought, standing there. He felt as if something was being taken from him, out of his body; he pressed his arms against his ribs to protect himself. There isn’t anybody that there’s any use calling father, he thought, and now there isn’t anybody that there’s any use calling mother. What a joke, I was born without parents. There isn’t any use; she’s right. And all that other stuff, the evening land, the town, Allia, that isn’t real either. Kid stuff. But I’m not a kid. Kids have a father and a mother. I’m not, I don’t. I haven’t got anything and I’m not anything. He stood there in the hall knowing this to be the truth. It was at this time that he remembered, physically, with his body not his mind, the touch of Donna’s hand on his arm, the color of her nail polish, the sound of her voice: “Don’t let anything happen to you, Buck.” He turned away from his mother’s door then, went back into the kitchen and his own room to get ready what he would need tomorrow morning: the clothes he would wear, and a packet of bread, salami, and fruit for the long walk to the mountain.

He was awake at three, and again at four. He would have got up and gone, but there was no use starting early, since he had told the girl to meet him at the gate at six. He turned over and tried to sleep. The twilight of daybreak in the room, a shadowless dim clarity, was like the light of the other land. His alarm clock ticked by the head of the bed. He gazed at the whitish face, the hands both drawing downward. There were no clocks, there. There were no hours. It was not the river of time flowing that moved the clock’s hands forward; their mechanism moved them. Seeing them move men said, Time is passing, passing, but they were fooled by the clocks they made. It is we who pass through time, Hugh thought. We walk. We follow beside the streams, the rivers; sometimes we may cross the stream…He lay half-dreaming until five. As the silenced alarm clicked he stood up, feeling the floor cool on the soles of his feet. Within two minutes he was dressed and out of the house.

He was at the gateway before six. The girl was there waiting.

He was still not sure what her name was. When the people of the twilight said it, it sounded like Rayna or Dana; she had corrected him when he said Rayna, but he had not understood the correction. “The girl,” he called her when he thought of her, and the word had about it a color of darkness and anger and the sound of the creek running. There she was standing near the blackberry thicket in the bluish, dusty, warm light of early morning under the thin-foliaged trees of the gateway woods. She looked up when she heard him coming. Her sallow face did not soften, but she held out her hand, palm up, purple-stained, offering him blackberries. “They’re getting ripe,” she said, and dumped them into his hand. They were small and sweet with the long heat of August.

“Did you try the gate?” he asked.

She picked a few more berries and joined him on the path, offering them to him. “It was shut.” She went a little ahead and looked down the tunnel-like drop of the path among the bushes.

“It’s there now.”

“In again Finnegan, that’s me,” Hugh said, following. “Here goes.” But he stopped on the threshold between the lands and turned, as he had never done before, to look back at the daylight: the dusty leaves, the sun-washed blue between the leaves, the flutter of a small brown bird from one branch to another. Then he turned and followed the girl into the dusk.

After he had knelt for his ceremonial first drink of the water of the creek, he saw that the girl had done the same thing. She was kneeling on the shelf-rock looking down at the running water, in no conventional posture of prayer or worship; but he knew from the hold and poise of her body that that water was, to her as it was to him, holy. She looked round presently, and stood up. They crossed the creek and went on into the evening land together. She went ahead, silent. The forest was entirely silent, once they had lost the voice of the water. No wind stirred the leaves.

After the broken, wakeful night Hugh felt thickheaded, content to walk forward through the forest wordlessly, mindlessly, following the steady pace the girl set. All thought and all emotion was in abeyance. He walked. He felt again that he could go on like this, striding easily under still trees, the cool air of the forest on his face, endlessly. He abandoned himself to the image without fear. When he had gone past the gateway, when he had lost himself, he had been terrified by that idea that he could go on and on and on under the trees in the twilight and there would never be any change or end; but now, following the axis, going the right way, he was entirely at peace. And he saw Allia at the end of the endless journey, like a star.

The girl had stopped and was waiting for him in the path, short solid figure, jeans and blue checked shirt, round grim face. “I’m hungry, you want to stop and eat?”

“Is it time?” he said vaguely.

“We’re nearly to Third River.”

“O.K.”

“Did you bring anything?”

He could not get his mind in focus. Only after she had chosen a place to sit, near the path, beside a tributary stream-let that had been running parallel to their road, did he react to her question and offer to share his bread and meat. She had brought hard rolls, cheese, hardboiled eggs, and a sack of little tomatoes, rather squashed in transit but tempting in their bright innocent red, in this dim place where all colors were muted and no flower bloomed. He put his supplies beside hers; after he took a tomato from her side, she took a slice of salami from his; after which they shared freely. He ate a great deal more than she did, finding himself very hungry, but as he ate it faster they came out more or less even.

“Does the town on the mountain have a name?” he asked, feeling awake at last but much relaxed, and starting on the last piece of bread and salami.

She said a couple of words or a long word in the language of the land. “It just means Mountain Town. That’s what I call it when I think in English.”

“I guess I did too. What do you…You called the place something, once. The whole place.” He gestured with his sandwich at all the trees, all the twilight, the rivers behind and ahead.

“I call it the ain country.” Her eyes flashed at him, distrustful and defiant.

“Is that from their language?”

“No.” Presently she said, unwilling, “It’s from a song.”

“What song?”

“There was this folk singer in assembly in school once and he sang it, it got stuck in my head. I couldn’t even understand half of it, it’s in Scotch or something. I don’t even know what ‘ain’ means, I guess I thought it means ‘own,’ my own country.” Her voice was savage with self-consciousness.

“Sing it,” Hugh said very low.

“I don’t know half the words,” she said, and then, looking away from him and with her head bent down, she sang,

Her voice was like a child’s, like a bird’s voice, sudden, clear, and sweet. The voice and the craving tune made the hair stand up on Hugh’s head, made his eyes blur and a tremor of terror or delight shake his body. The girl had looked up at him, staring with eyes gone dark. He saw that he had reached out his hand towards her to stop her singing, and yet he did not want her to stop, he had never heard a song so sweet.

“It wasn’t—it isn’t right to sing here,” she said in a whisper. She looked around, then back at him. “I never did before. I never thought. I used to dance. But I never sang—I knew—”

“It’s all right,” Hugh said, meaninglessly. “It’ll be all right.”

They were both motionless, listening to the tiny murmur of the stream and the immense silence of the forest, listening as if for a reply.

“I’m sorry, that was dumb,” she murmured at last.

“It’s O.K. We ought to go on, maybe.”

She nodded.

He ate one more tomato for the road as they packed up their remnants. She went first again, which seemed right as she knew the way far better than he did. He followed her back to the axial path, the way she called the south road. Behind them and before them, to left and right, it was quiet, and the deep, clear light of evening never changed.

After they had crossed the last of the three creeks and begun the first steep climb, he found that he kept gaining on the girl instead of keeping about the same distance behind her. The quick pace she went had slowed, or become fitful.

At the crest of a foothill ridge from which, through a screen of thin, pale birches, the bulk and mass of the mountain loomed above and ahead, a darkness, she stopped. Arriving beside her in a couple of strides, Hugh said, “I could use a breather,” for it had been a steep pull, and he thought she was tired and did not like to admit it.

She turned to him a drained face, a death’s-head.

“You don’t feel it?” He could scarcely hear her voice.

“Feel what?”

His heart had jumped, and was pounding uncomfortably.

She shook her head. She made a slight, hurried gesture towards the dark wall of the mountain.

“There’s something ahead of us—?”

“Yes,” she said, on the in-breath.

“Blocking our way?”

“I don’t know.” Her teeth chattered as she spoke. She was drawn together, hunched up like an old woman.

Hugh said aloud, “Listen, I want to get to the town.” His anger was not against the girl but against her fear. “Let me go first.”

“We can’t go on.”

“I have to go on.”

She shook her head, despairing.

Determined to resist her reasonless panic, Hugh put his hand gently on her arm and began to say, “We can make it—” but she dodged from his touch as if his hand were hot iron, and her pinched face went dark with anger as she said aloud, “Don’t ever touch me!”

“All right,” he said with a flash of answering contempt. “I won’t. Calm down. We have to go on. They’re waiting for us. I said I’d come. Come on!”

He led off. To save his pride he did not look back to see if she was following; but he kept listening, down the long descent, for the light sound of her coming behind him. When the path went up again, he looked back for her. He knew what it was like to be afraid here. She kept fairly close behind him, and did not falter or hang back. Her face was closed like a fist under the black tangle of hair. In the high trees the wind made a sound like the sea heard from far off, the sea that lay far, far, far to the west, to the left, in the direction of the dark. Between the night and day they walked on the long path. It went on and on, and if she had not been coming behind he would have stopped. There was no end to the slope of the mountain, and he was getting tired. He had never felt so tired in his life, a weakness all through his body, a languor that might have been pleasant if only he could sit down, could lie down, could stop and have rest. It was hard to go on, and it would be so much easier to go downhill.

“Hugh!”

He turned, and looked around bewildered for some time before he saw her. She was not behind him but above him on the slope, standing among dark firs. It was a dark place, the sky closed out by meeting branches and rocky slopes.

“This way,” she whispered.

He realized that she was standing on the path. He had slanted off on a random track between trees, downhill.

The few steep paces back up to the path were a heavy labor.

“I’m getting tired,” he said shakily.

“I know,” she whispered. She looked as if she had been crying, her face puffed and blotchy. “Keep on the path.”

“O.K. Come on.”

At the end of the slope under the firs the way leveled out but was no easier, because the weariness kept growing, the heaviness, the longing to lie down. She came beside him now; there was room for them to walk together. When had the path become so wide, a road? She forced his pace now. He tried to keep up. It was not fair. He had not hurried her when she could not go on by herself.

“There—”

The gleam in the wide, cold evening: firelight, lamplight. Fear and tiredness were only shadows cast by that yellow gleam, shadows that fell behind them on the road.

They came into the town. There between the first houses they stopped.

The girl stood beside him, her weary, puffy face cocked back in defiance. “I’m going to the inn,” she said.

He tried to shake off his dullness. Now that he was here where all his desire had tended he felt heavy, awkward, out of place. He had not the courage to go present himself at that great house, and did not know where else to go. “I guess I will too,” he said.

“They’re expecting you at the manor.”

“The what?”

“The manor. Isn’t that what they call where a lord lives? Lord Horns house. Where you were last time.”

Her tone was sharp and jeering. Why did she turn against him after the hard way they had come together? She was unreliable, not to be trusted. She liked to see him make a fool of himself. Well, that was a wish easily granted.

“So long,” he said, and turned towards the first side street that led up the hill.

“One street farther down. The one with the steps,” the girl said, and went on towards the peak-gabled, bow-windowed, galleon-like bulk of the inn.

He followed, passed the inn, turned left up the many-stepped street. The air smelled of woodsmoke like all autumn in a breath; a child’s voice called far off where the town below ran out into pale pastures. There was a strange noise in the low-fenced yard by the top house of the street: geese hissing, Hugh realised when he saw the big, white-shouldered birds eying him. There were birds and beasts here in the town, there were voices, but still no voice sang. The geese hissed and shifted. Although he had come where he desired to come he was tired and cold, a chill not from wind or weather but from within, from the marrow of the bone and the dark pit of the bowels, a hollow, weary coldness.

He passed under the iron gateway and between the lawns and came to the high house, its roofs dark against the evening sky, two windows throwing a soft light across the walk. He lifted the knocker in the shape of a ram’s head, and knocked.

The old servant opened the door, and he heard his own name pronounced as they said it here, foreign, all one word, spoken with energy and welcome. The old man hurried before him through the unlit galleries, and opening the door to a crimson-walled, firelit room, announced him joyously by that same splendid half-familiar name: “Hiuradjas!”

Allia was there in the glowing room. She rose, dropping some handwork, and came forward, her hands held out to him. Her light hair was lifted by the lift and turn of her body. There is no way to expect beauty, or to deserve it. He took her hands. He could have fallen at her feet. He did not know her language but her voice said, “You are welcome, welcome, welcome! You have come back at last!”

He said, “Allia,” and she smiled again.

She asked him something. The look of her blue eyes and the tone of her voice were so gentle in their concern that he said, “It was hard coming, it was frightening—I got tired—” but he saw from her gesture now that she was only asking him if he would sit down, which he did, gratefully. Then he was up again because Lord Horn had come in, greeting him with cordiality and with something else which Hugh did not recognize at first: respect. This man, elderly, called “Lord,” clearly used to personal authority, showed towards him not deference, not mere politeness, but the regard of equality: as if they were of the same family. As if Horn spoke to some quality in him which he did not know himself, but which the old man knew and greeted.

Allia’s friendliness, though shy and mannerly, was much less sober than her father’s. All conversation they could have was a kind of running language lesson. She happily performed the necessary pointing and handwaving and face-making, and laughed at her misunderstandings and at his mistakes. Yet in her too he sensed an attitude towards him which he did not want to call respect but dared not call love; the most he could admit to himself was that she seemed to like him, to admire him—what for? What had he done? Nothing. How could she value him for what he was? Equally nothing. Yet in her soft, frank look and voice and even in her laughter at his blunders there was the underlying grave temper of admiration. Such admiration as he felt for her: but it was her due. All she was and did was admirable and beautiful. If he was to be admired it was only by a kind advance. Nothing was due him. But to earn, to deserve what she gave him undeserved, to be the man she mistook him for, he would do anything.

They dined in a candlelit, long room. He was so tired that the meal passed in a blur of light and warmth. When he was alone in his room he felt drunk with weariness. The bedroom, where he had slept the three nights of his first stay here, surprised him by its deep familiarity: the walls painted in faded blue and almost-rubbed-off gold, the oak bedstead, the brass-capped andirons, were as pleasant to recognize as if he had known them all his life. Though in no way like it, the room recalled to him a room he had carried in his mind for many years, an attic in the first house he had lived in, his father’s mother’s house. His bed had been by the window that looked out on the dark green fields and blue hills of Georgia. That was another country and a long time ago. Here the high windows were curtained. A fire burned, bright and almost soundless, in the small fireplace. The bed was high and hard, the sheets cold, heavy, silky to the touch. In that bed, the gold eye of the fire gleaming between half-closed lashes, there were no dreams. There was only sleep, the wide, drifting darkness of sleep. As he gave himself up to that all thoughts, distinctions of light, impulses of will slipped away from him; only for a moment he heard above the darkness a thin voice like a bird,

He turned over and buried his head in his arms, driving the song away, deeper down, into the source. It had no place here, where no flower came into bud, and no leaf fell, and no voice sang. But Allia was here, holding out her hands to him as he went gladly into darkness.