by Paul Hazel
would have sat as anxiously and as still and would, when he
started, have begun to write with much the same ferocity and
panic had he lectured on the E n cyclopaedia B ritannica. The
windows along the sloping sides of the hall were opaque and
emitted an uncertain light. I might as well lecture in a cave,
Harwood thought; yet, in a way, it was almost pleasant, the
air grown heavy and quiet. The world was shut out. Harwood
felt a little flutter in himself.
“Shall we begin?” he asked. His voice, like the voice in a
cave, surprised him. He opened a book and then for several
minutes did not look at it.
“Even the smallest details are conserved,” he said, now
in earnest. “However minor and distracting, I shall expect
you to remember. I have prepared a list. . .”
There was a groan.
“. . . of birthmarks and certain articles of clothing, birds
seen at midnight, objects as simple and as serviceable as
china, isolated in aspect. And yet, gentlemen, reiterated.
Infinitely recombined. Characteristic, I should think, of the
obsessive nature of literary imagination.’ His voice became
louder. He had forgotten his usual embarrassment. “But
today,” he announced, “I shall ask you to take a broader view.
1 shall ask you to stand back and to see, if you can, the beauty
of the underlying pattern. . . .”
The Duke, who had come in before the lecture had
started, sat in the back. On the wall directly above his head
was a painting of a clergyman, most probably one of the
Mathers, giving a Bible into the hand of a muscular Indian.
The plaque beneath it read A nsantaw ae, by the G race o f
G od, R eceives the B o o k . The clergyman, his features hardened into a look of moral belligerence, is imbued nevertheless with a kind of wooden glory. But it is the Indian who is
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WINTERKING
bathed in light. He stands under it as unnaturally as under a
lamp.
It is the light that gives the painting its essential falseness.
Its anemic shining reduces the ragged hills to a few cidtivated
fields, the bend of the intruding river to the ordinary flatness
of an English pond. Harwood, who each morning faced it
squarely, had often wondered what purposes were served in
presenting a Pequod chief with a Christian testament. “They
could not speak together,” he had once told his students.
“Ansantawae understood only Algonquin.” In fact, in this
detail alone, the painting preserved the delicate relic of truth.
It had been commissioned by Benjamin Church, who at
the head of a militia of farmer soldiers had driven to their
deaths the last remnant of the Pequod nation. Captain Church
himself had supervised the final slaughter in the Fairfield
swamps. He had shot three young men trapped between the
water and the wood. Because of the cumbersomeness and
delay in reloading, he had continued the killing with the
stock of his gun. The corpses were muddied. It had been
difficult to tell them apart. Nevertheless it had been the
general opinion that Ansantawae was among them. It was this
victory that the painting commemorated. The artist had been
given a free hand. The captain, being well acquainted with
John Bunyan, saw nothing amiss when a purposeful Mather
was depicted in his place. In the darkening pigment of three
centuries, his only contribution is now scarcely legible. Yet it
is the one detail based on observation rather than religious
bigotry.
Almost from the first, Captain Church had felt a deep
affinity with the Indians. The entries in his diary describe
how, before he turned to murder them, he had lived in their
villages and made expeditions with their young men into the
Dutch territories across the Hudson. He had admired their
bravery and their wisdom. “They know this Dark Land better
than we ever shall,” he had written. As sympathetically as
any of the English he had learned their ways and he had
insisted, although now one must stand up very close to see it,
that the Bible, its pages folded back to a passage in Genesis
and given from the hand of a clergyman who clearly had not
been there into the hand of an Indian who only may have
been, be written in Welsh.
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127
The Duke leaned into his seat. His head pounded. The
outside world was hushed. The windows were whitened by rain.
“Reality— ” Harwood was explaining when he stopped.
His tongue, as though waiting inspiration, pressed on the
edge of his teeth. It was, he felt, his most potent effect. It
gave the illusion of spontaneity, the impression of a mind
poised on a knife-edge and conjuring with darkness. Harwood
smiled with excitement. “— Is a Protean fog— ” he continued,
“— into which we read—
He paused. “— Not so much what
is but what we have been led to expect.” He waited.
“Consider, if you will,” he said, “the pre-Copernican
universe: the earth at its center. Devils beneath.”
l b ere came into his mind’s eyes a picture of angular little
creatures with drooling mouths and leather wings.
“Very real devils, it would seem,” he went on, “for they
had a very real place— the vast basement of the universe—
and could and therefore did tempt us to perdition. Only
Nicolaus Copernicus— ” He seized the book he had put
down, from which in a moment, although it had nothing to do
with Copernicus, he intended to read a long passage. “One
man,” he said, “one man learning to look some other way,
feeling, though none before him had felt it, the apparently
fixed and solid earth, our oldest foundations, begin to slip, to
slide beneath his feet, to— ”
Someone coughed.
Harwood could feel his words creeping cold and friendless over the hall. No more than a handful were still listening.
The lines deepened on the Duke’s forehead.
“Truth, gentlemen, particularly literary truth,” Harwood
persisted, “must be encountered suddenly.” He opened the
book.
There was only the ignorant murmur of rain on the
windows. The Duke tapped his long fingers. He considered
the old woman buried on the grounds of the school in Bristol,
the young man dead in New Awanux.
“Imagine a table,” George Harwood was saying.
The Duke rose quickly and went to wait in the corridor.
There was a moment’s hush and then the clap of spring
seats snapping shut. The young men pushed past him. The
Duke scowled. Harwood gathered up his books and his coat
and came up the aisle. Until he saw the coat the Duke had
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W IN TER IN G
not truly recognized him. His clerk had made certain inquiries of the Dean. In the space of a few hours the Duke had learned that Harwood had been Wykeham’s advisor, the one
man at the college with whom, if it could be said of anyone,
Wykeham had been intimate. The Duke had written straight
off requesting a meeting. He had not troubled himself to
think who the man was. He had cared only to discover what
Harwood knew, what, if anything, he could explain about
Wykeham’s behavior. He had not stopped to wonder what
effect Wykeham might have had on him. The Duke had only
half listened to the lecture. Perhaps it had been clever. He
was no judge. Certainly there was little else to recommend
him. Harwood’s figure was stout, his face without delicacy.
Ordinarily, having learned what he could, the Duke would
have left him abruptly in the emptied corridor. It was surprising, and even foreign to his nature, that instead His Grace had taken the man by the shoulders.
T shall need two hours of your time,” he had said. “If
you can spare it. Afterward, my driver will drop you wherever
you like.”
He felt the perspiration on the man’s heavy shoulder.
“I hope I can drag you away,” he continued, though now
he had not the least doubt. He had seen the expensive coat
Harwood carried. He remembered the little lighted windows
of the train into which Wykeham had vanished, leaving them
both on the platform, both stranded and, for a moment,
unable to walk away.
The street was mobbed with students running to get out
of the rain. It was several minutes before the college towers
slipped grudgingly behind. For the better part of a mile they
crawled beside the long snaking wall of the First Settlers
Cemetery, past the statues of Protestant saints, centuries old,
crumbling back toward the shapelessness of the original
stone. It was not until East Bridge, after they had emerged
from under the railroad trestle, that they were able to pick up
speed again. By then the unfamiliar street had narrowed.
Between the poor row houses they caught a glimpse now and
then of the river. Backed up by the wind, the estuary had
swollen and was flooding the weirs. The traffic had thinned.
The wipers thudded dully on the windscreen.
F a ce s in the Earth
1 2 9
"H e told you something of his travels?” The Duke asked
finally.
Uneasy in the Duke’s presence, Harwood rearranged his
coat. “Very little,” he acknowledged. “I gather he had seen
much of the empire. Certainly wherever there were any
number of English.” Looking out at the river, Harwood was
reminded, unhappily, of all the places he had never been.
“Though who can say,” he added depreciatingly, “what exactly
he remembers. He was, I believe, Your Grace, quite young.”
The Duke watched Harwood carefully.
“He isn’t,” he said.
Harwood turned.
“Isn’t English,” the Duke said.
This one point, at least, although he had been slow
himself to see it, was indisputable. The ledgers, of course,
had been in the vault. He had devoted his life to them, to
records which in themselves were a kind of history, repeating
not only Wykeham’s existence but, in a sense, his own. Yet
strangely, until the past evening, he had not brought them
all, not one after another to his desk. And even then,
knowing them too well, he had not known where to start and
at first he had looked in all the wrong places. He felt his heart
sink.
“It is, I should have thought,” Harwood protested, “the
most English of names.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” The Duke nodded. Somehow the
topic had gotten away from him. His head still ached. He had
been thinking of women.
It was not the first time. More than once he had found
himself worrying over a mere few hundred invested yearly in
a Norwegian bank. But the amounts had been so trivial he
had let them pass. Nevertheless, he had gone on his own to
visit the young women’s academy. He had been a young man
himself when he had walked over the lawn, stopping at the
edge of the open pit where the new building would go up.
The woman had trailed behind him from the house. He had
not conversed with her. At the time he had not even been
troubled. Surely there woidd be women. He had expected
that. The trust could well afford the expense. His own habits
were regular. He was not himself much given to foolishness.
It all seemed so long ago.
In the morning he had awakened at his desk. The
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ledgers had been scattered in front of him. On the borders of
sleep he had seen her, a dark-haired woman in a blue dress,
sweeping across the green lawn. She had almost stumbled.
The brightness had been in his eyes. Until she was quite
close to him he had not noticed that she wept.
His head still pounded.
"You shared, one would imagine,” he said quietly, “certain confidences.” He tried to calm his mind, to remember that the dead woman, however he felt bound to her, was
Wykeham’s. “You were his teacher,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And you talked?”
“We traded books." Harwood smiled. He meant to be
honest. “I may have given him one or two,” he said. “He
gave me dozens. Late in the evenings he would come to my
rooms and we would talk.”
“Of?”
Harwood thought he had been clear. “About books,” he
said. He was puzzled. The Duke was watching him strangely.
“He may have mentioned acquaintances.”
“Your Grace?” Watching him in return, Harwood realized
that the Duke was drunk. Not alarmingly so. But there was a
gauntness about the Duke’s eyes, behind his deliberateness,
the clear possibility of panic.
Harwood frowned.
“Did you gather— ” the Duke continued. “Forgive me,
these questions are necessary.” His large, veined hands shifted
uncomfortably in his lap. “There were women,” he said. “I
know for a fact there were several. Not that I find that
astonishing. But afterward.”
For a moment he was unnaturally conscious of the sound
of the rain. He waited until his head had stopped buzzing.
He said: “There had always to be something new, don’t you
think? To distract him. Something to worry over.” His eyes
shone. “Something,” he said, “to stir up all the wells of
thought and feeling at once— ”
His head tilted awkwardly. A strand of his dark, parted
hair fell abruptly over his forehead.
The Duke sank again into his seat. He was tired. Since
he had seen the photograph, he had barely slept. He had
been drawn up short, suddenly, without reason. He knew
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131
that much. It was no help. Reason, he had decided, was of no
help.
"May I ask,” His Grace began once more. He stopped.
It was all too long ago. When Wykeham had abandoned Willa
Brelling, Harwood had yet to be born. "There were others,”
he said. “Probably more than I know. You are quite certain he
never— ”
“Your Grace?”
“Women,” the Duke said, a bit sh
arply.
“No,” Harwood answered. “Not to me.”
On the outskirts of New Awanux there was more open
land. Grimly, the Duke stared at the patchwork of meadows.
Harwood kept his gaze resolutely forward. Still His Grace
was not without hope.
“Would you remember,” he asked, “if Wykeham ever
spoke to you of horses?”
Harwood shook his head dismally.
Crossing the trackbed, the car jerked twice. The driver
cut the wheel sharply. A cluster of blurry shapes appeared
out of the rain. At the end of the lane there were five
rectangles of gray stone. Two of the mossed roofs had already
fallen. The house itself was set back and to the left, its few
small windows broken, its side porches rotted. The Duke felt
an immediate twinge of displeasure. It was no longer a
working farm. That it had been preserved at all was due to
the rent he paid one year to the next, at Wykeham’s direction, for the use of the barn.
Beyond the rusted front gate the car halted. The rain
went on clinking on the hood. The sky, which until that
moment had held a slight glow, had darkened. Harwood
could see little but the two phosphorescent circles the headlamps
cut in the fog and, even less perfectly, in snatches, the track
that went up to the doors of the barn and, seemingly, under
them. He rubbed at the glass.
The barn was unusually large, perhaps three stories. Its
high eaves appeared and disappeared in the mists. Harwood
peered up at it doubtfully.
“Is this what you wished me to see?” he asked.
The Duke did not answer. Without a word, he swung the
door open. Suspicious and yet not wanting to be left behind,
Harwood followed.
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The yard, blocked up against the foundation, spread
before him like a deepening pool, Harwood ran. But by the
time he had reached the old, closed doors his shirt and
trousers were soaked. Sheets of water rolled down his face.
The Duke grunted. He was trying, unsuccessfully, a set of
large keys in a padlock. For what seemed a very long time
Harwood stared at his hack. The air was much cooler. The
rain was so heavy that neither heard the splash of the tires on
the stones.
The cab ran onto the gravel and stopped. The small man