The Compass Rose

Gwilan’s Harp

The harp had come to Gwilan from her mother, and so had her mastery of it, people said. “Ah,” they said when Gwilan played, “you can tell, that’s Diera’s touch,” just as their parents had said when Diera played, “Ah, that’s the true Penlin touch!” Gwilan’s mother had had the harp from Penlin, a musician’s dying gift to the worthiest of pupils. From a musician’s hands Penlin too had received it; never had it been sold or bartered for, nor any value put upon it that can be said in numbers. A princely and most incredible instrument it was for a poor harper to own. The shape of it was perfection, and every part was strong and fine: the wood as hard and smooth as bronze, the fittings of ivory and silver. The grand curves of the frame bore silver mountings chased with long intertwining lines that became waves and the waves became leaves, and the eyes of gods and stags looked out from among the leaves that became waves and the waves became lines again. It was the work of great craftsmen, you could see that at a glance, and the longer you looked the clearer you saw it. But all this beauty was practical, obedient, shaped to the service of sound. The sound of Gwilan’s harp was water running and rain and sunlight on the water, waves breaking and the foam on the brown sands, forests, the leaves and branches of the forest and the shining eyes of gods and stags among the leaves when the wind blows in the valleys. It was all that and none of that. When Gwilan played, the harp made music; and what is music but a little wrinkling of the air?

Play she did, wherever they wanted her. Her singing voice was true but had no sweetness, so when songs and ballads were wanted she accompanied the singers. Weak voices were borne up by her playing, fine voices gained a glory from it; the loudest, proudest singers might keep still a verse to hear her play alone. She played along with the flute and reed flute and tambour, and the music made for the harp to play alone, and the music that sprang up of itself when her fingers touched the strings. At weddings and festivals it was, “Gwilan will be here to play,” and at music-day competitions, “When will Gwilan play?”

She was young; her hands were iron and her touch was silk; she could play all night and the next day too. She travelled from valley to valley, from town to town, stopping here and staying there and moving on again with other musicians on their wanderings. They walked, or a wagon was sent for them, or they got a lift on a farmer’s cart. However they went, Gwilan carried her harp in its silk and leather case at her back or in her hands. When she rode she rode with the harp and when she walked she walked with the harp and when she slept, no, she didn’t sleep with the harp, but it was there where she could reach out and touch it. She was not jealous of it, and would change instruments with another harper gladly; it was a great pleasure to her when at last they gave her back her own, saying with sober envy, “I never played so fine an instrument.” She kept it clean, the mountings polished, and strung it with the harp strings made by old Uliad, which cost as much apiece as a whole set of common harp strings. In the heat of summer she carried it in the shade of her body, in the bitter winter it shared her cloak. In a firelit hall she did not sit with it very near the fire, nor yet too far away, for changes of heat and cold would change the voice of it, and perhaps harm the frame. She did not look after herself with half the care. Indeed she saw no need to. She knew there were other harpers, and would be other harpers; most not as good,some better. But the harp was the best. There had not been and there would not be a better. Delight and service were due and fitting to it. She was not its owner but its player. It was her music, her joy, her life, the noble instrument.

She was young; she travelled from town to town; she played “A Fine Long Life” at weddings, and “The Green Leaves” at festivals. There were funerals, with the burial feast, the singing of elegies, and Gwilan to play the Lament of Orioth, the music that crashes and cries out like the sea and the seabirds, bringing relief and a burst of tears to the grief-dried heart. There were music days, with a rivalry of harpers and a shrilling of fiddlers and a mighty outshouting of tenors. She went from town to town in sun and rain, the harp on her back or in her hands. So she was going one day to the yearly music day at Comin, and the landowner of Torm Vale was giving her a lift, a man who so loved music that he had traded a good cow for a bad horse, since the cow would not take him where he could hear music played. It was he and Gwilan in a rickety cart, and the lean-necked roan stepping out down the steep, sunlit road from Torm.

A bear in the forest by the road, or a bear’s ghost, or the shadow of a hawk: the horse shied half across the road. Torm had been discussing music deeply with Gwilan, waving his hands to conduct a choir of voices, and the reins went flipping out of those startled hands. The horse jumped like a cat, and ran. At the sharp curve of the road the cart swung round and smashed against the rocky cutting. A wheel leapt free and rolled, rocking like a top, for a few yards. The roan went plunging and sliding down the road with half the wrecked cart dragging behind, and was gone, and the road lay silent in the sunlight between the forest trees.

Torm had been thrown from the cart, and lay stunned for a minute or two.

Gwilan had clutched the harp to her when the horse shied, but had lost hold of it in the smash. The cart had tipped over and dragged on it. It was in its case of leather and embroidered silk, but when, one-handed, she got the case out from under the wheel and opened it, she did not take out a harp, but a piece of wood, and another piece, and a tangle of strings, and a sliver of ivory, and a twisted shell of silver chased with lines and leaves and eyes, held by a silver nail to a fragment of the frame.

It was six months without playing after that, since her arm had broken at the wrist. The wrist healed well enough, but there was no mending the harp; and by then the landowner of Torm had asked her if she would marry him, and she had said yes. Sometimes she wondered why she had said yes, having never thought much of marriage before, but if she looked steadily into her own mind she saw the reason why. She saw Torm on the road in the sunlight kneeling by the broken harp, his face all blood and dust, and he was weeping. When she looked at that she saw that the time for rambling and roving was over and gone. One day is the day for moving on, and overnight, the next day, there is no more good in moving on, because you have come where you were going to.

Gwilan brought to the marriage a gold piece, which had been the prize last year at Four Valleys music day; she had sewn it to her bodice as a brooch, because where on earth could you spend a gold piece. She also had two silver pieces, five coppers, and a good winter cloak. Torm contributed house and household, fields and forests, four tenant farmers even poorer than himself, twenty hens, five cows, and forty sheep.

They married in the old way, by themselves, over the spring where the stream began, and came back and told the household. Torm had never suggested a wedding, with singing and harp-playing, never a word of all that. He was a man you could trust, Torm was.

What began in pain, in tears, was never free from the fear of pain. The two of them were gentle to each other. Not that they lived together thirty years without some quarrelling. Two rocks sitting side by side would get sick of each other in thirty years, and who knows what they say now and then when nobody is listening. But if people trust each other they can grumble, and a good bit of grumbling takes the fuel from wrath. Their quarrels went up and burnt out like bits of paper, leaving nothing but a feather of ash, a laugh in bed in the dark. Torm’s land never gave more than enough, and there was no money saved. But it was a good house, and the sunlight was sweet on those high stony fields. There were two sons, who grew up into cheerful sensible men. One had a taste for roving, and the other was a farmer born; but neither had any gift of music.

Gwilan never spoke of wanting another harp. But about the time her wrist was healed, old Uliad had a travelling musician bring her one on loan; when he had an offer to buy it at its worth, he sent for it back again. At that time Torm would have it that there was money from selling three good heifers to the landowner of Comin High Farm, and the money should buy a harp, which it did. A year or two later an old friend, a flute player still on his travels and rambles, brought her a harp from the South as a present. The three-heifers harp was a common instrument, plain and heavy; the Southern harp was delicately carved and gilt, but cranky to tune and thin of voice. Gwilan could draw sweetness from the one and strength from the other. When she picked up a harp, or spoke to a child, it obeyed her.

She played at all festivities and funerals in the neighborhood, and with the musician’s fees she bought good strings; not Uliad’s strings, though, for Uliad was in his grave before her second child was born. If there was a music day nearby she went to it with Torm. She would not play in the competitions, not for fear of losing, but because she was not a harper now, and if they did not know it, she did. So they had her judge the competitions, which she did well and mercilessly. Often in the early years musicians would stop by on their travels and stay two or three nights at Torm; with them she would play the Hunts of Orioth, the Dances of Cail, the difficult and learned music of the North, and learn from them the new songs. Even in winter evenings there was music in the house of Torm: she playing the harp—usually the three-heifers one, sometimes the fretful Southerner—and Torm’s good tenor voice, and the boys singing, first in sweet treble, later on in husky unreliable baritone; and one of the farm’s men was a lively fiddler; and the shepherd Keth, when he was there, played on the pipes, though he never could tune them to anyone else’s note. “It’s our own music day tonight,” Gwilan would say. “Put another log on the fire, Torm, and sing ‘The Green Leaves’ with me, and the boys will take the descant.”

Her wrist that had been broken grew a little stiff as the years went on; then the arthritis came into her hands. The work she did in house and farm was not easy work. But then who, looking at a hand, would say it was made to do easy work? You can see from the look of it that it is meant to do difficult things, that is is the noble, willing servant of the heart and mind. But the best servants get clumsy as the years go on. Gwilan could still play the harp, but not as well as she had played, and she did not much like half measures. So the two harps hung on the wall, though she kept them tuned. About that time the younger son went wandering off to see what things looked like in the North, and the elder married and brought his bride to Torm. Old Keth was found dead up on the mountain in the spring rain, his dog crouched silent by him and the sheep nearby. And the drouth came, and the good year, and the poor year, and there was food to eat and to be cooked and clothes to wear and to be washed, poor year or good year. In the depth of a winter Torm took ill. He went from a cough to a high fever to quietness, and died while Gwilan sat beside him.

Thirty years, how can you say how long that is, and yet no longer than the saying of it: thirty years. How can you say how heavy the weight of thirty years is, and yet you can hold all of them together in your hand lighter than a bit of ash, briefer than a laugh in the dark. The thirty years began in pain; they passed in peace, contentment. But they did not end there. They ended where they began.

Gwilan got up from her chair and went into the hearth room. The rest of the household were asleep. In the light of her candle she saw the two harps hung against the wall, the three-heifers harp and the gilded Southern harp, the dull music and the false music. She thought, “I’ll take them down at last and smash them on the hearthstone, crush them till they’re only bits of wood and tangles of wire, like my harp.” But she did not. She could not play them at all any more, her hands were far too stiff. It is silly to smash an instrument you cannot even play.

“There is no instrument left that I can play,” Gwilan thought, and the thought hung in her mind for a while like a long chord, till she knew the notes that made it. “I thought my harp was myself. But it was not. It was destroyed, I was not. I thought Torm’s wife was myself, but she was not. He is dead, I am not. I have nothing left at all now but myself. The wind blows from the valley, and there’s a voice on the wind, a bit of a tune. Then the wind falls, or changes. The work has to be done, and we did the work. It’s their turn now for that, the children. There’s nothing left for me to do but sing. I never could sing. But you play the instrument you have.” So she stood by the cold hearth and sang the melody of Orioth’s Lament. The people of the household wakened in their beds and heard her singing, all but Torm; but he knew that tune already. The untuned strings of the harps hung on the wall wakened and answered softly, voice to voice, like eyes that shine among the leaves when the wind is blowing.

Malheur County

“Edward,” said his mother-in-law, “face the facts. You can’t withdraw from your life. People aren’t going to let you. You’re too useful, too likable, too good-looking even, though you don’t seem to be aware of it.” She paused for breath, then said in a colder voice, “I used to wonder if Mary was really aware of it.”

He sat silent across the hearth from her, huddled up over his long arms and legs.

“You can’t withdraw from something you haven’t got into! Oh, I’m sorry,” she said savagely.

He smiled, but looked a little punch-drunk.

“The Navajo Indians,” she said, “I think, don’t let mothers-in-law and sons-in-law speak to one another. It’s tabu. A very sensible arrangement. We’re so damned sophisticated, no tabus, no defenses.” She fell grimly silent, a grey-haired, full-figured woman in her sixties sitting erect in an armchair in the firelight. She always sat erect. The cigarette in her left hand and whiskey glass in her right appeared as elements of her rugged femininity. She came from eastern Oregon, from Malheur County, the last, barren frontier, from a decent feckless family that had left a century of failed farms, male suicides, and infant graves across the land from Ohio to the Coast, pushing always unprofitably westward.

“Of course she knew that you were good-looking,” she went on thoughtfully, “she was proud of it. But I never saw that she got much pleasure out of it. Not as you took pleasure in her, real joy.”

He was only twenty-seven. Leaning forward to toss her cigarette into the fire Harriet Avanti saw, through her shrewdly rambling thoughts and the press of various emotions, his face; and the rest dropped clear away. “I shouldn’t think aloud,” she said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“You don’t. You can’t.” He turned his kind, somber young face to her, reassuring.

“But I do. You’re sensitive, and I’m not. You’re guilt-ridden, and I don’t even know what guilt is.”

But again she had touched a nerve; he frowned, and spoke: “No, I’m not guilt-ridden, Harriet. It wasn’t my fault. It’s not my fault that I survive. Only I don’t see the point.”

“The point!” She sat erect, moveless. “There is no point.”

Staring at the fire he whispered, “I know.”

They were silent a good while. Harriet thought of her daughter Mary, the beautiful dissatisfied child. “This is Edward, Mother.” And the young man watching the girl with incredulous, delighted passion—oh, it had been he, alone, who had roused Harriet from her long drab grief after her husband’s death, who had shown her once again, from the flat plain and barren land, the incredibly high peaks. He had reminded her that after all there is more in life than endurance. For unfortunately, as she knew, endurance was her native style. She would have endured right through life, steady and heavy as a rock, if she hadn’t had the luck to meet and marry John Avanti, who taught her joy. He dead, she had fallen back at once upon endurance, and never would have known delight again if her daughter had not marched in one night with the tall radiant boy: “This is Edward, Mother.”

“I don’t think you do know,” she said abruptly. “Pointlessness isn’t your line. It’s mine. I was intended to lead a pointless life, like my parents and my brothers. By some mistake I got into a highly rewarding life with a point to it. Just the sort of life you were intended for. And then you, of all people, meet up with this, with the drunk on the highway, with waste and senselessness, when you’re only twenty-five. Another mistake, no doubt. But it’s not essential, Edward. Mary’s death is not going to be the essential event in your life. To accept it as essential, to accept pointlessness, would be—for you—an act of cowardice.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But the fact is, Harriet, that I, lately, that I seem to have about reached my limit.”

She was frightened by his anguish, diffident as it was. She did not know much about anguish, only about misery, the endurable unending pain not the destroying one. She tried now to back away from the point of agony, saying, “Well, a limit’s always a beginning…” What she feared was his crying. Twice here in this room with her he had broken down and wept, once when he was first home from hospital after the wreck, then again months later. She dreaded his tears, the coping with pain at second hand. It shattered her to pity as to be pitied. When he got up suddenly from the low hearth seat she sat tense. But he said only, “I’d like another shot. You?” He took her glass and went off to the kitchen. As he went the clock behind her on the mantel struck twelve solemnly, taking a long time about it; and now it was November not October. They had lived another month. Here she sat by the fire, there was Edward opening cupboards in the kitchen, both of them warm and full of good bourbon; and then there was Mary, eighteen months dead. Was it because she was a hard woman that she had not really wept for her child’s death? If she had died before John, I would have cried for her, Harriet thought.

Edward returned, sat down, stretched out his legs. “I have tried,” he said with such serious equanimity that she lost all fear of his breaking down and waited to find out what he meant. He was candid but inarticulate, and his mind, trained to the rigors of chemistry, pursued logic into places where it does not exist. “I’ve honestly tried,” he repeated, lapsed into silence, crossed his ankles, drank thoughtfully, and at last went on, “Technician in the med-ical department. Elinor Schneider. Fairly good-looking, blond, very intelligent. She’s around my age.” (Older, thought Harriet.) “Well, so…” Edward paused, raised his glass in self-mocking salute. “I tried.”

“To?”

“To get interested.”

Poor Elinor Schneider, lying awake now perhaps seeing in the dry darkness his face. Pain is self-centered. Harriet sighed a little. “I suppose a laboratory is the place for an experiment…”

“Anyway, it was an effort to reconnect, whatever you want to call it. It didn’t work. I can’t do it. I don’t want to do it. I know you think me weak.”

“You? I certainly don’t. And if I did, what then? You know yourself best.”

“No, I don’t, Harriet. You’re really the first person who seems to know much about me. To judge me objectively. My parents…” He was the child of a divorce, passed back and forth from father and wife to mother and husband, a bone of contention. He let that go, but added, “And Mary and I were rather stupid about each other, in some ways.”

“You were very young.”

“We had no time,” he said, so clear and quiet in his statement of the chance lost that Harriet sat still, outclassed, rejoicing in being outclassed.

“So,” he said, pursuing logic, “in you I see the first clear reflection of myself. It looks weak.”

“The mirror is old, it warps.”

“No; you see people very justly.”

“Do you really want to know how I see you?” she demanded, for he had poured her a strong drink and she wasn’t used to a second nightcap. He did want to know. “As a bright and fortunate man,” she said after seeking the words. “Fortunate, not lucky. You haven’t had much luck. And yet you’ve been fortunate. You got your freedom early, too early, but then a lot of people never get it. You’ve known real passion, real fulfilment, and no letdown. You never will know the letdown, the dead level. You got into manhood a free man, and you’ll go on free,or—” But the “or” had carried her too far. Had she been younger, his equal, she could have finished the sentence, “or you’ll kill yourself.” But between generations there should not be talk of death. Of the dead, yes, of dying, yes, of your death, no. Tabu, Harriet told herself, disgusted at her whole speech. Edward however seemed pleased or intrigued; he brooded over it a while. Then he said, “Another thing about Elinor, this girl at the lab, she likes kids. I always think of Andy.”

“Andy’s got me, Edward, he’ll survive, for mercy’s sake. Nobody’s asking you to marry a nursemaid! God forbid!”

He looked relieved, but slowly, through the mists of weariness and whiskey, she perceived that Elinor had turned up again.

“When I said you’d find that you couldn’t withdraw, couldn’t disengage yourself, disconnect yourself, you know, I was warning you. You’re in a very vulnerable position. You could get caught. I don’t want to see you caught.” As you were by Mary, she thought; for she believed her daughter had married less for love than self-assertion, even envy. She knew in Mary, under the dark soft vivacity and Italian grace, the hard destructive strain from her side, the fecklessness, the pointless yen that brought them all in the end to the County of Malheur. She had never been able to weep much for Mary, she had never been able to judge her; yet it was very bitter to think, as she had thought before, that Mary’s early death might prove a fortunate thing for the man who loved her.

“You spoil me, Harriet,” said the young man, gravely considering.

“Of course I do. But I don’t spoil your son. I discriminate between incorruptibility and mere innocence.” She gave a short laugh of pleasure at her own multisyllables. “I’m getting verbose, I’m going to bed. Good night.”

“Good night,” he answered reluctantly as she went to the stairs, so reluctantly he almost held her back. As if he need worry about “reconnecting.” He had never, even in the worst of his pain, withdrawn himself, ceased to give to those who needed him. What he had left, the baby and the old woman, he loved with perfect generosity. And there was no denying that the three of them got on pretty happily. At least I’m a good stopgap, she thought with pride.

Since her husband’s death four years ago she had not slept well at night. Half the dark hours she waked and read, and was up often before the baby started chirping. So she remembered her mother in old age, in the silent kitchen lit by a kerosene lamp, looking in silence out the window at the huge sky paling above the sagebrush plain. But this night Harriet slept at once, falling into a nightlong trap of dreams. They kept coming and telling her that someone was dead, but would not tell her exactly who, or whether he was dying now or dead already; only once, in a summerhouse she had not known was in her garden, she found him lying huddled on the floor, one long arm thrown out, but that was only the empty sleeve of a grey suit. She ran away in terror into an older nightmare, fifty years older, of the blind thing that hunted her over the desert. At last sunlight broke down the walls and horizons of the dreams and woke her, yet it did not illuminate her fear. She denied that her anxiety had been for Edward, but she was rather grim with him at breakfast. All morning she housecleaned, making the baby play by himself, trying to work off that fear before her conscience made her accept it as a rational one.

The baby could not be indefinitely resisted. He was two. He looked like a little chimpanzee; the physical beauty of his parents, mixed, had got lost. His disposition was thoughtful and experimental. “Hat, Hat, Hat,” he cried, staggering into the kitchen. “Mulk! Mulk!”—“Not till lunchtime,” Harriet told him. He smiled, gazing up with wise eyes like a chimpanzee. “Mulk? Cacky? Appa?”—“Nothing till lunch, you greedy-gut,” the grandmother said sternly. “Hat, Hat!” said the baby, madly embracing her leg.

He was a loving child, a very fine child. That afternoon she dropped housework and took him down the hill to the park, the rose garden full of the last roses, lemon-yellow, peach-yellow, gold, bronze, crimson, following him as he trotted and shouted along the paths between the thorny, fragrant bushes in the autumn sun.

Edward Meyer sat in his parked car looking across the lights of Berkeley and across the black, diamond-shackled bay to the Golden Gate, faint fragile center of the great sweep of lights and darknesses. Eucalyptus rustled over the car in a dry wind from the north, the winter wind. He stretched. “Damn,” he said.

“Why?” said the woman beside him.

“What’s in it for you?”

“All I want.”

“Sorry,” he muttered, and took her hands. When they touched they both quieted. Her grace was silence. He drank stillness from her as water from a spring. The dark dry wind of January blew, city after city flared below them round the bridge-strung bay.

He lit a cigarette; Elinor murmured, “Not fair.” She had recently given up smoking for the fifth or sixth time. She was a woman not very sure of things, biddable and quiet, taking what came. Edward handed her the lighted cigarette. She took it with a small sigh and smoked it.

“This is the right idea,” he said.

“For now.”

“But why stop halfway?”

“We’re not stopping. Only waiting.”

“Waiting for what? Till my psyche’s patched up, or you’re sure I’m not on the rebound, or something. Meanwhile we make love in my car because you’ve got a roommate and I’ve got a mother-in-law and we don’t go to motels because we’re supposed to be waiting—only we don’t. The whole thing’s illogical.”

At this she suddenly gave a hard, dry sob. His nervous anger turned to alarm, but she drew away from him, refusing comfort. She had never refused him anything before. He tried to apologise, to explain. She said, “Please take me home,” and all down the steep streets from Grizzly Peak to South Berkeley she sat silent, a silence turned against him, a defense. She was out of the car before he had it fully stopped in front of her rooming house; she whispered “Good night” and was gone. He sat in the car, blank, anxious, foolish. He started the engine, and with the noise of it his anger rose. When he got home ten minutes later he was very angry. Harriet, looking up from her book by the fireside, seemed startled. “Well!” she said. “Well,” he said.

“Excuse me,” said Harriet, “I’m finishing a chapter.”

He sat down, stretched out his legs, stared at the fire. He was bitterly angry at Elinor’s weak obstinacy, her irresolute, indecisive, temporising ways. There sat Harriet, thank God, like a rock, like an oak, finishing her chapter. If the house fell down in an earthquake around Harriet she would fix a bed for the baby, light a fire, and finish her chapter. No wonder Elinor hadn’t married before this, there was nothing to her, she had no character. He sat there full of self-vindicating anger and warm with the perfect sexual satisfaction she had given him, ready for more anger, more passion, more fulfilment, and for the first time in two years happy. Harriet finished her chapter. “Nightcap?” he said.

“No, I’m going to bed.” She stood up, erect, short, solid; he looked at her with admiration. “You look grand,” he said.

“Pooh,” she said, “whatever have you been up to? Good night, my dear.”

She had a cold. She usually got a cold in April. It went into her chest so that she rumbled like a truck and ached and coughed; at last she got on the phone and asked old Joan to come out and look after Andy. When Edward got home and looked surprised, she snapped, “I’m not up to running after the child today.” Then she went back to bed and lay cursing herself for having complained. One must never complain to men. Women at least knew complaint for what it was, part of coping, but he would interpret it, he would take it to mean that the full-time care of a child was too much to ask of a women of sixty-two; and then nothing she said or did would matter; he would have the idea in his head. And the child would be taken from her. Gradually or all at once she would lose him, the son she had always missed and to whom she was a wiser mother than she had been to her own two girls. The little monkey-face, the song at morning, the shirts to iron, the small automobiles and journals of chemistry left lying about, the presence by night and day of the son, of the man, of the man of the house gone, gone, all of it gone.

When he came in she did not turn her face to him. She lay grim, aching in the marrow of her bones.

“Well,” he said, “Andy’s spilled his milk and thrown his egg on the floor. Hear him yelling for Hat?” There were in fact loud, theatrical cries from below. “If you don’t recover in a day or two we’ll have to send him to reform school.”

“I intend to recover tomorrow,” she said, still grim, but lying easier. His kindness was exact: it hit the spot, carelessly it seemed, and healed.

“I detest being sick,” she said after a while.

“I know. You aren’t very good at it. Look here, I asked those people in Friday night, I’ll put them off a week.”

“Nonsense, I’ll be up day after tomorrow. Is your friend the checkers player coming?”

Edward laughed. “Yes. He wants to be pulverised again.” She had heard the young Philadelphian boast that he had never lost a game of checkers since he was fifteen, had taken him on and beat him six games running.

“I am a vengeful old woman, Edward,” she said, lying moveless, her short grey hair disordered.

“He doesn’t care—he’s trying to figure out your game.”

“I don’t like boasting.” That was Malheur County that spoke in her, the frontier without hope, the end of pushing on. “We’re all fools enough without adding that,” she said, unyielding, desolate.

“How about a drink before dinner?”

“Yes, I’d like a whiskey in hot water. But no dinner, I can’t eat with a cold. Bring me a hot toddy, and Dombey and Son, would you? I was just starting it.”

“How many times have you read it?”

“Why, I don’t know. Every few years since I was twenty. And put that poor baby to bed, Edward, he isn’t used to Joan.”

“She scares me too,” he said.

“Well she might; you won’t get round her with charm and persuasion. I have an understanding with her,” she went on, driven by a sudden will she did not stop to understand, “that when you and Andy move out she’ll move in with me, if it still suits her. She isn’t doing any regular cleaning any more, and her husband’s dead and her son’s in the Marines. And we’ve always got on.”

He stood silent, taken off guard. She looked up at him, the tall figure that dominated all the house, vulnerable and kingly, the young man.

“Don’t look so stricken,” she said with mild irony, “can’t I provide ahead for the winter? Now do go get my whiskey, Edward, my throat’s like sandpaper.”

To leave him free, that was her job. And she was good at her job. That had been her fault as a mother of daughters, she did not know if a girl should be left free or not, and so had vacillated; Rose had come out a bit weak, and Mary spoilt. But with a boy there was no question, he must have courage, and so needed freedom. Perhaps what a girl must have was patience, but she was not sure; in any case she was herself too impatient—not for pleasure and possession, like Mary, but for completion, for the end of things: unhopeful, and impatient.

She enjoyed her night and day in bed, entertained by Dickens, rain on the window, Joan in the kitchen singing long dreadful Methodist hymns. She rose much refreshed on Thursday, washed and ironed all the bedroom curtains, and weeded the iris beds in the fresh wind of April while the baby investigated all the possibilities of fresh wet dirt, and discovered the earthworm. On Friday night Edward’s friends came: two married couples, Tom the checkers expert, whom she beat twice and once inadvertently let win, and a little fair woman called Elinor. Elinor, what had she heard, a while ago, about an Elinor? She was pleasant to look at, anyhow, with thick fair hair and a face as quiet as a pool of water. She was looking at Edward. Water in sunlight. O radiance, incredible brightness of the true sun, incredible heights.

“I’m never as good playing the red,” Harriet said, an ungraceful loser. “But I’ll leave you holding the field, Mr. Harris.” And young Tom Harris, appalled at having beaten her, apologised in his Eastern voice till she had to laugh. He so plainly thought her a wonderful old woman, a daughter of the pioneers, if she told him she learned checkers from Chief Joseph he would probably believe it. But all the time her heart’s eye was on Elinor.

No beauty. Timid, often defeated, getting on for thirty. Oh, yes, but patient; a patient woman: owning that passionate, intelligent patience that will wait, wait ten years, not for a lucky break but for the known, foreknown, fulfilment. One of the fortunate ones, who know that there is a point. It takes luck too, Harriet cried inwardly: you might have waited all your life, and let it all go by!—But this one was like Edward, one of the fortunate. They did not push on, they were not restless. They took what came, and when they spoke they were answered. They had seen the high peaks, and tragedy served them. Edward had met his match.

Harriet did not go upstairs before she had chatted a while with Elinor. Each felt the other’s earnest effort to show goodwill, to offer true friendliness; neither could quite accept; yet liking arose. Harriet went upstairs at ten feeling pleased with herself. In her dressing gown she crossed her room to look at the photograph of her husband, a vivid dark face, John Avanti at thirty, when she had first known him. Her heart rose as always to meet the challenge of him. He had changed her utterly, he lived therefore in her; she spoke to him. Well, John, I push on, she said, not aloud. She got into bed, finished Dombey, listened to the soft cheerful sound of voices downstairs, and fell asleep.

She woke in the grey light before sunrise and knew what she had lost. They would go now, within a year or so, the child and the man; all grace, all danger, all fulfilment, leaving her, as John dying had not left her, alone.She need not be impatient any longer. Even that wore out in the end. She had done right, she had done her job. But there was no point to it, for her. All she would need from now on was endurance. She was back down to bedrock, she had come in the end where all her people came. She sat up in bed, grey-haired in the grey light, and wept aloud.

The Water Is Wide

“You here?”

“To see you.”

After a while he said, “Where’s here?” He was lying flat, so could not have much in view but ceiling and the top third of Anna; in any case his eyes looked unfocussed.

“Hospital.”

Another pause. He said something like, “Is it me that’s here?” The words were slurred. He added clearly enough, “It’s not you. You look all right.”

“I am. You’re here. And I’m here. To see you.”

This made him smile. The smile of an adult lying flat on his back resembles the smile of an infant, in that gravity works with it, not against it.

“Can I be told,” he said, “or will the knowledge kill me?”

“If knowledge could kill you, you’d have been dead for years.”

“Am I sick?”

“Do you feel well?”

He turned his head away, the first bodily movement he had made. “I feel ill.” The words were slurred. “Full of drugs, some kind drugs.” The head moved again, restless. “Don’t like it,” he said. He looked straight at her now. “I don’t feel well,” he said. “Anna, I’m cold. I feel cold.” Tears filled the eyes and ran down from them into the greying hair. This happens in cases of human suffering, when the sufferer is lying face up and is middle-aged.

Anna said his name and took his hand. Her hand was somewhat smaller than his, several degrees warmer, and very similar in structure and texture; even the shape of the nails was similar. She held his hand. He held her hand. After some time his hand began to relax.

“Kind drugs,” he said. The eyes were shut now.

He spoke once more; he said either “Wait,” or “Weight.” Anna answered the first, saying, “I will.” Then she thought he had spoken of a weight that lay upon him. She could see the weight in the way he breathed, asleep.

“It’s the drugs,” she said, “he’s asked every time if you could stop giving him the drugs. Could you decrease the dose?”

The doctor said, “Chemotherapy,” and other words, some of which were the names of drugs, ending in zil and ine.

“He says that he can’t sleep, but he can’t wake up either. I think he needs to sleep. And to wake up.”

The doctor said many other words. He said them in so rapid, distinct, and fluent a manner, and with such assurance, that Anna believed them all for at least three hours.

“Is this a loony bin?” Gideon inquired with perfect clarity.

“Mhm.” Anna knitted.

“Thought wards.”

“Oh, it’s all private rooms here. It’s a nice private sort of place. Rest home. Polite. Expensive.”

“Senile, incont… incontinent. Can’t talk. Anna.”

“Mhm?”

“Stroke?”

“No, no.” She put her knitting down on her knee. “You got overtired.”

“Tumor?”

“No. You’re sound as a bell. Only a little cracked. You got tired. You acted funny.”

“What’d I do?” he asked, his eyes brightening.

“Made an awful fool of yourself.”

“Did?”

“Well, you washed all the blackboards. At the Institute. With soap and water.”

“That all?”

“You said it was time to start all over. You made the Dean fetch the soap and buckets.” They both jolted softly with laughter at the same time. “Never mind the rest. You had them all quite busy, believe me.”

They all understood now that his much publicised New Year’s Day letter to the Times, which he had defended with uncharacteristic vehemence, had been a symptom. This was a relief to many people, who had uncomfortably been thinking of the letter as a moral statement. Looking back, everyone at the Institute could now see that Gideon had not been himself for some months. Indeed the change could be traced back three years, to the death of his wife Dorothea of leukemia. He had borne his loss well, of course, but had he not remained somewhat withdrawn—increasingly withdrawn? Only no one had noticed it, because he had been so busy. He had ceased to take vacations at the family cabin up at the lake, and had done a good deal of public speaking in connection with the peace organisation of which he was co-chairman. He had been working much too hard. It was all clear now. Unfortunately it had not become clear until the evening in April when he began a public lecture on the Question of Ethics in Science by gazing at the audience in silence for 35 seconds (approx.: one of the mathematical philosophers present in the audience had begun to time the silence at the point when it became painful, though not yet unendurable), and then, in a slow, soft, rough voice which no one who heard it could forget, announced, “The quantification of Death is now the major problem facing theoretical physicists in the latter half of the Western Hemisphere.” He had then closed his mouth and stood gazing at them.

Hansen, who had introduced his talk and sat on the speakers’ platform, was a large man and a quick-witted one. He had without much trouble induced Gideon to come backstage with him, to one of the seminar rooms. It was there that Gideon had insisted that they wash all the blackboards perfectly clean. He had not become violent, though his behavior had been what Hansen termed “extraordinarily wilful.” Later on, in private, Hansen wondered whether Gideon’s behavior had not always been wilful, in that it had always been self-directed, and whether he should not have used, instead, the word “irrational.” That would have been the expectable word. But its expectability led him to wonder if Gideon’s behavior (as a theoretical physicist) had ever been rational; and, in fact, if his own behavior (as a theoretical physicist, or otherwise) had ever been adequately describable by the term “rational.” He said nothing, however, of these speculations, and worked very hard for several weekends at building a rock garden at the side of his house.

Though he offered no violence to others or himself, Gideon had attempted escape. At a certain moment he appeared to understand suddenly that medical aid had been summoned. He acted with decision. He told the Dean, Dr. Hansen, Dr. Mehta, and the student Mr. Chew, all of whom were with him (several other members of the audience or of the Institute were busy keeping busybodies and reporters out), “You finish the blackboards in here, I’ll do Room 40,” and taking up a bucket and a sponge went rapidly across the hall into a vacant classroom, where Chew and Hansen, following him at once, prevented him from opening a window. The room was on the ground floor, and his intention was made clear by his saying, “Let me get out, please, help me get out.” Chew and Hansen were compelled to restrain his arms by force. He struggled briefly to free himself; failing, he became silent and apparently thoughtful. Shortly before the medical personnel arrived he suggested in a low voice to Chew, “If we sat down on the floor here they might not see us.” When the medical personnel entered the room and came close to him he said loudly, “All right, have it your way,” and at once began to yell wordlessly, or scream. Thegraduate student Chew, a brilliant young biophysicist who had not had much experience of human suffering, let go of his arm and broke into tears. The medical personnel, having had perhaps excessive experience of human suffering, promptly administered a quick-acting sedative or tranquilliser by hypodermic. Within 35 seconds (approx.) the patient fell silent and became tractable, accepting the straitjacket without resistance, and with only a slight expression (facial, not verbal) of bewilderment, or, possibly, curiosity.

“I have to get out of here.”

“Oh, Gid, not yet, you need to rest. It’s a decent place. They’ve eased up on the drugs. I can see the difference.”

“I have to get out, Anna.”

“You’re not well yet.”

“I am not a patient. I am impatient. Help me get out. Please.”

“Why, Gid? What for?”

“They won’t let me go where I have to go.”

“Where do you have to go?”

“Mad.”

“Here’s your clothes. You’ll have to get up and get dressed, Gideon. If you want to come away with me. I didn’t get permission. I just can’t get through to that doctor, he wants to cure you. If you want to go, you’ll have to get up and walk.”

“Shall I take up my bed?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Bible.”

“For God’s sake don’t go religious now. If you do I’ll bring you right back here. Hurry up. Here’s your pants.”

‘‘Please get off me just for a minute,” he said to the dying children and old men and women.

“Oof, how thin you are. Let me button that. All right. Can you manage? Hang on. No! hang onto me. You haven’t been eating, you’re dizzy.”

“Dizzy Giddy.”

“Do shut up! Try to look ordinary.”

“We are ordinary.”

They walked out of the room and down the hall arm in arm, an ordinary middle-aged couple. They" walked past the old woman in the wheelchair nursing her doll, and past the room of the young man who stared. They walked past the receptionist’s desk. Anna smiled and said in a peculiar voice at the receptionist, “Going out for a walk in the garden.” The receptionist smiled and said, “Lovely weather.” They walked out onto the brick front path of the rest home, and down it, between lawns, to the iron gate. They walked through the gate and turned left. Anna’s car was parked halfway down the block, under elm trees.

“Oh, oh, if I have a heart attack it’s all your fault. Wait. I’m so shaky I can’t get the key in. You all right?”

“Sure. Where are we going?”

“To the lake.”

“He went out with his sister, doctor. For a walk. About half an hour ago.”

“A walk, my God,” the doctor said. “Where to?”

I am Anna. I am Gideon. I am Gideanna. I am sister’s brother, brother’s sister. I am Gideon who am dying, but it is your death I die, not mine. I am Anna who am not mad, but I am your brother, who is mad. Take my hand, brother, from the dark! Reich’ mir das Hand, mein Leben, komm’ in mein Schloss mit mir. Oh, but that castle I do not want to enter, brother mine; that is the castle I do not want to enter. It has a dark tower. Who do you think I am, Childe Roland? A Roland to your Oliver? No, look, we know this place, this is the old place, where we were children. Let’s dance here, on the lakeshore, by the water. You be the tower, I will be the lake. You will dance in me reflected, I will be full of you, of the wave-broken shimmering stones. Lie lightly on me, tower, brother, see, if you lie lightly we are one. But we have always been one, sisterbrother. We have always danced alone. I am Gideon who dances in your soul, and I am dying. I can’t dance any longer. I am borne down, borne down, borne down. I cannot lie, I cannot dance. All the reflections are dissolved. I cannot dance. I cannot breathe. They lie on me, they lie in me. How can the starving be so heavy, Anna?

Gideon, is it our fault? It can’t be your fault. You never harmed a living soul.

But I am the fault, you know. The fault in my soul and yours, the fault itself. The line on which the ground moves. So the earthquake comes, and the people die, the little puzzled children, and the young men with guns, and the women pausing shopping bag in hand in the dissolving supermarket, and the old people who crouch down and reach out with wrinkled fingers to the faltering earth. I have betrayed them all. I did not give them enough food to eat.

How could you have? You’re not God!

Oh yes I am. We are.

We are?

Yes, we are. Indeed we are. If I weren’t God how should I be dying now? God is what dies. God is bereavement. We all die for each other.

If I am God I am the Woman-God, and I shall be reborn. Out of my own body I shall bear my birth.

Surely you will, but only if I die; and I am you. Or do you deny me, at the grave’s edge, after fifty years?

No, no, no. I don’t deny you, though I’ve often wanted to. But that’s not a grave’s edge, my young darkness, my terror, my little brother soul. It’s only a lakeshore, see?

There is no other shore.

There must be.

No; all seas have one shore only. How could they have more?

Well, there’s only one way to find out.

I’m cold. It’s cold, the water’s cold.

Look: there they are. So many of them, so many. The children float because they’re hollow, swollen up with air. The older people swim, for a while. Look how that old man holds a clod of earth in his hand, the piece of the world he held to when the earthquake came. A little island, not quite big enough. Look how she holds her baby up above the water. I must help her, I must go to her!

If I touch one, they will take hold of me. They will clutch me with the grip of the drowning and drag me down with them. I’m not that good a swimmer. If I touch them, I’ll drown.

Look there, I know that face. Isn’t that Hansen? He’s holding onto a rock, poor soul, a plank would serve him better.

There’s Kate. There’s Kate’s ex-husband. And there’s Lin. Lin’s a good swimmer, always was, I’m not worried about Lin. But Kate’s in trouble. She needs help. Kate! Don’t wear yourself out, honey, don’t kick so hard. The water’s very wide. Save your strength, swim slowly, sweetheart, Kate my child!

There’s young Chew. And look there, there’s the doctor, in right over his head. And the receptionist. And the old woman with the doll. But there are so many more, so many. If I reach out my hand to one, a hundred will reach for it, a thousand, a thousand million, and pull me down and drown me. I can’t save one child, one single child. I can’t save myself.

Then let it be so. Take my hand, child! stranger in the darkness, in the deep waters, take my hand. Swim with me, while we can. Let us be drowned together, for it’s certain we shall not be saved alone.

It’s silent, out here in the deep waters. I can’t see the faces any more.

Dorothea, there’s someone following us. Don’t look back.

I’m not Lot’s wife, Louis, I’m Gideon’s wife. I can look back, and still not turn to salt. Besides, my blood was never salt enough. It’s you who shouldn’t look back.

Do you take me for Orpheus? I was a good pianist, but not that good. But I admit, it scares me to look back. I don’t really want to.

I just did. There’s two of them. A woman and a man.

I was afraid of that.

Do you think it’s them?

Who else would follow us?

Yes, it’s them, our husband and our wife. Go back! Go back! This is no place for you!

This is the place for everyone, Dorothea.

Yes, but not yet, not yet. O Gideon, go back! He doesn’t hear me. I can’t speak clearly any more. Louis, you call to them.

Go back! Don’t follow us! They can’t hear us, Dorothea. Look how they come, as if the sand were water. Don’t they know there’s no water here?

I don’t know what they know, Louis. I have forgotten. Gideon, O Gideon, take my hand!

Anna, take my hand!

Can they hear us? Can they touch us?

I don’t know. I have forgotten.

It’s cold, I’m cold. It’s too deep, too far to go. I have reached out my hand, and reached out my hand into the darkness, but I couldn’t tell what good it did; if I held up some child for a while, or if some shadow hand reached back to me, I don’t know. I can’t tell the way. Back on the dry land they were right. They told me not to grieve. They told me not to look. They told me to forget. They told me eat my lunch and take my pills that end in zil and ine. And they were right. They told me to be quiet, not to shout, not to cry out aloud. Be quiet now, be good. And they were right. What’s the good in shouting? What’s the good in shouting Help me, help, I’m drowning! when all the rest of them are drowning too? I heard them crying Help me, help me, please. But now I hear nothing. I hear the sound of the deep waters only. O take my hand, my love, I’m cold, cold, cold.

There is, oh, there is another shore! Look at the light, the light of morning on the rocks, the light on the shores of morning. I am light. The weight’s gone. I am light.

But it is the same shore, Gideanna.

Then we have come home. We rowed all night in darkness, in the cold, and we came home: the home where we have never been before, the home we never left. Take my hand, and step ashore with me, my sister life, my brother death. Look: it is the beginning place. Here we begin, here by the flood that parts us.