The Other Side of the Sun

by Madeleine L'engle

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not in the least like Delilah with Samson, are you? Aren’t you curious? Couldn’t you have wormed something out of him?”

  I made one attempt, at which my husband sternly, and not very gently, let me know that I was not to question him. It was a side of Terry for which I was not prepared, and which I did not want to provoke often.

  The old lady gave her small girl’s giggle. “All right, lovey, I won’t try to pump you. I know you’ve been trained never, never to ask questions.”

  True: and I would never forget my nanny and the reprimand I got, physical as well as verbal, when, aged five or thereabouts, I asked a distinguished visitor if he wore a wig.

  “So was I. So were we all. But the older I grow the more I lose the proper veneer, like the furniture in Illyria. I’m like the sideboard and the highboys, buckled and cracked. Just you wait: it’s amazing what being on the further side of eighty does to freeing a body from the shackles of civilization. How did Terry and your father get along?”

  “Superbly—probably because they’re so different. Terry’s no philosopher, he’s a—a person of action. But he admired my father’s books.”

  “Do you have any with you?”

  “Yes, of course. Would you like to read one?”

  “Oh, Stella, I would! It would make you closer if I could read something of your father’s. I’m so glad you’ve come! Usually storms don’t frighten—Illyria’s stood through many a storm. But I’m afraid for Illyria now. The angels have gone, and there’s nothing to keep the weather at bay.”

  “Hush, Miss Livvy, hush.” Honoria’s voice was calm and firm as a rock. “The storm done gone by. Hush now.” She began to sing, softly, caressingly; her old voice was deep and smoky.

  “Dreamland opens here,

  Sweep the dream path clear.

  Listen, child, now listen well

  To what the tortoise may have to tell,

  To what the tortoise may have to tell.”

  I lay back, the listening child, against the pillows.

  “Dreamland opens here,

  Sweep the dream path clear.

  Listen, child, now listen awhile

  To the song of the crocodile.

  To the song of the crocodile.”

  This low, slow lullaby belonged to Illyria, to palmettos and pelicans; it was totally unlike the nursery rhymes with which Nanny had sung me to sleep. But it, too, gave me a sense of pattern, a promise of order in the chaos of the unknown. And now the air was lighter. A soft breeze, rather than gusts of hot sulphur, came through the open windows.

  “Dreamland opens here.

  Sweep the dream path clear.

  Listen, child, now close your eyes,

  In the canebrake the wild cat cries.

  In the canebrake the wild cat cries.”

  “You didn’t shut the windows,” Aunt Olivia said sleepily. “Why didn’t we shut the windows?”

  “Nothing bad going to come in,” Honoria said. “Maybe something bad go out.”

  “What would keep the bad things from coming in?”

  “Miss Stella,” Honoria said.

  Lying there in the big brass bed, half asleep, I wondered: what kind of responsibility is Honoria trying to put on me?

  Aunt Olivia stirred comfortably in Honoria’s strong arms. “My bones feel better. How lovely it is when they don’t ache! Mado used to write in this room. It was her room, her special place where she could be private. Only the children were allowed in.”

  A last, distant growl of thunder rumbled on the horizon.

  “Do you know anybody who can call up storms?” Aunt Olivia asked.

  “Hush.”

  “Or quiet them down? To still a storm. That’s better, I think.”

  “Hush.”

  I stopped listening. Despite the fact that Honoria seemed to be handing me a responsibility which I did not understand and certainly was unprepared to accept, the mere presence of the old colored woman in the rocker gave out a warm sense of strength and comfort.

  I slept.

  THREE

  1

  In the morning I wakened to the plaintive mewling of sea gulls and the far more demanding mewing of the kitten who was announcing in my ear that it was time to rise. I untucked the mosquito netting to let him out; in the daylight I could see that in several places the netting was meticulously darned. “And small wonder,” I remarked to the kitten, “with claws like yours around.” The kitten looked at me with enigmatic, Oriental eyes. “You won’t catch me without shoes today,” I promised it, “even if my feet burn right off. Where do you suppose my shoes are, kitty? I must go look for them right after breakfast. Where’s my husband, this morning, Minou? In darkest Africa? I wish he were here in darkest Illyria.” Then I felt ashamed for having called Illyria dark. I yawned and stretched, pushed the mosquito netting aside, and went to the balcony.

  The early-morning light scattered gold over sea and sand. The peaks of the waves glinted. There was more movement in the ocean than there had been the day before. The wind ruffled up white horses; the waves pranced into the beach, rearing up and back, then curving over in a concave arc of green, breaking, scattering foam. The panaches of the palms shook with royal dignity. The sun touched bits of shell on the beach which threw back sparkles of glittering light. A sea gull, stark white against the early blue of sky, flapped past my balcony. There was nothing dark about Illyria this morning, and despite the interrupted night I felt rested and refreshed: in the light of daytime reason I would find some simple explanation for my fears the night before—not the storm, there had been no terror in the storm—but my inordinate reaction to the old woman back in the jungle. If I believed in witches—but to believe in witches is superstition.

  I turned back to the room where my light-dazzled eyes could see nothing but shadows. I closed my eyes, breathing quietly, resting, preparing myself—

  I wanted to know more about Honoria from Mado’s point of view. I sat on the edge of my bed and riffled carefully through the journals, pausing when I saw Honoria’s name.

  “I have been innocent where Honoria is concerned,” I read, “and this is inexcusable. Innocence has no place in this evil world. When I was a child, it was one thing to be innocent. But now I am married to Theron, and I have a child of my own, and in me, now, innocence is in effect a form of sin. Theron should have someone beside him who was prepared for the world, not someone who all her life has been protected from it. He will not find my stupidity charming for long; it is his magnanimity which enables him to love me despite my ignorance not only of his country and his people, but of human nature. Naïveté is no quality to be desired in a wife. He will not want it in the mother of his children.

  “I blame myself for my sense of shock, of outrage, at what has happened. Theron got so exhausted the first week the hospital was opened that it brought back his malaria, so off we went to Nyssa to stay with James and Xenia till he was better. The night we got back to Jefferson I knew that Honoria needed me, I felt her calling me, my skin tingled with the strength of her cry. It was too late to go to her, or even to send her a message. But in the morning I went. I thought we would never get there. When we finally arrived, I found Honoria’s little maid hovering about, waiting for me. ‘We knowed you’d come, Miss Mado, we just knowed you’d come.’ I found Honoria half conscious, so badly had Broadley beaten her, not for anything she’d done, this time, but because a group of young blades had come out to the plantation and tried to get Honoria for themselves. They were—of course—drunk, and kept shouting: Why should old Claudius have all the fun with the beautiful African princess? So—typique—after he’d driven them away, and then proven to himself that Honoria is his possession (thank God he does not seem able to give her children), he beat her. I must get him to take Honoria away from Jefferson. Perhaps if he were to build her a small place by the ocean she would be safe there. So I must not antagonize him. I must not be innocent and outraged. Everything in me c
ries out against playing up to Broadley, smiling and laughing and being coquettish. But is this not what I must do? There is no longer any role for the innocent in this world.”

  I closed my eyes against Mado’s and Honoria’s pain. Was I, too, unpardonably innocent? Ron had accused me of being so. If I were innocent, was I then without a role to play in Illyria? I did not understand what Mado meant by this. I turned the pages of the journal until again I saw Honoria’s name. “The trip up-river was woefully hot,” Mado wrote, “and then there was the drive past the slave quarters to the plantation. I sensed a strange quiet as we started up the wide road between the live oaks, and then I heard a long-drawn-out animal scream. The coachman turned around in his seat and gave me a level look, but said nothing. I had automatically put my hands to my mouth as though to stifle a scream of my own. The scream came again, ending up with a horrible, frothy, bubbly sound, as though it were coming over blood. Probably it was. Everybody knows that Broadley beats his slaves, and nobody does anything. Honoria sees to it that the slaves get proper food—Broadley used to starve them as well as beat them. But if she tries to stop the beating, then she, too, gets beaten for her pains. I pray that Broadley will get Illyria built before he beats her to death. Why couldn’t he have been satisfied with a simple cottage? But no, he must have this mad, magnificent monstrosity.”

  I let the journal drop onto my crumpled sheet. I felt sick. What kind of an insulated, nonexistent world had I grown up in? Why hadn’t my father taught me about the real world? No, that’s not fair. It is an enormous ocean that lies between Oxford and this strange jungle which must become my home.

  Mado, too, had known nothing about slaves when she first came to Illyria, except those in history books, those of the ancient world, a world which need not touch us today. Did anybody question the right to own slaves in Greece or Rome? Not Plato. Not Aristotle. Were slaves beaten in ancient Greece? Probably. In any case, one does not have to be a slave to be beaten. I remembered my own sense of outrage when Cousin Octavian’s groom beat a stable boy for no reason. Had I felt, then, rushing to the defense of that scrawny, sniveling child, the way Mado felt about Claudius Broadley?

  “Oh, God,” Mado wrote, “how can your world be so beautiful and so terrible? Why do we betray and destroy your creation?” And then, a few pages later, “Today before lunch Honoria offered to run the cards for me. I asked her how she had learned such a thing. She told me that it was on the ship on the long voyage to the States. Honoria had a small cabin for herself and her maid, but she could hear the cries and groans of the slaves in the belly of the ship. She knew that many of them were dying. She made friends with an old sailor with a gold ring in his nose and tattoos all over his body, and got him to send extra bread and water down to them, and old gunny sacks to use as blankets—it was stifling hot by day, freezing cold by night. The old man had a pack of cards, and he must have sensed Honoria’s powers, because he taught her how to use them. Honoria did not understand why I got so upset, why I refused so violently to let her ask the cards about my future. Neither did I—though I am quite convinced that my guardian angel would disapprove most strongly of anybody, even somebody like Honoria, trying to manipulate the future. And isn’t that what running the cards really is? It’s more than just asking. The Greeks call it hubris, and it leads to disaster.”

  I did not want to think about running cards, or fortune tellers. I put the journals carefully back on my bed table, and dressed in the fashionable but cumbersome bathing outfit which was part of my trousseau: bloomers, skirts, stockings, shoes, buttons and more buttons—it hardly made swimming easy, and certainly seems laughable now. But I was very proud of it then, and felt wholly fascinating in it.

  I descended the stairs, hearing soft clinking sounds from the kitchen and sniffing the fragrance of coffee as I walked softly through the empty living room. A shaft of sunlight struck the portrait of the two young girls, the two young musicians. I turned to look at another portrait, of a young man standing near a wintry tree, holding a book in his hands. He had dark hair and eyes and so he completely surprised me by reminding me painfully of my husband.

  “Up early, Miss Stella? That’s nice. Going for a swim? You’ll enjoy that.”

  I turned to smile at Clive, in a rusty black alpaca jacket, an apron tied about his waist, polishing a crystal decanter.

  He pointed to the portrait. “That’s Miss Mado’s father. Favors Mr. Terry, don’t it? for all Mr. Terry’s so fair. Mr. Hoadley’s crazy mad to get it away from the beach. Also the picture of Miss Mado painted by Mr. Jean Dominique Augustin Ingres—” (How lovely, how gentle the names as he said them) “—which come with Miss Mado all the way crost the ocean. You seen it?”

  “No. Where is it, Clive?”

  “In the library. Maybe this morning you wants to wander round and look at things?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I want to do.”

  “It look zackly like Miss Mado, that picture. Even when she grew to be an old lady she still had that look, expecting, like watching a sunrise. Mr. Hoadley say the sea wind crack and kill the paint and the canvas. He want to take all the portraits away. Miss Olivia and Miss Des say it no better in town. Wind from the river come just as damp as wind from the sea. Miss Olivia clean the portraits every autumn and spring, the way Miss Mado show her. Miss Mado left the portraits to Miss Livvy and Miss Des, but then they is to go to you and Mr. Terry.”

  I looked at the portraits with a difference: the unexpected fact that they would one day belong to Terry and me, that we would look at them all the days of our lives, pulled me in closer to Illyria, made me more indubitably Mrs. Theron Renier.

  Clive gave me his quiet smile. “You go on in the water, Miss Stella. Miss Livia and Miss Des just gone and they was hoping you’d be along.”

  The sun had not yet warmed the ramp from the drench of the storm, and the wood was cool through the thin soles of my bathing slippers. The dark leaves of the jungly undergrowth, stunted myrtles, palmettos, scrub oak, were clean and shiny. A dragonfly, a startling shimmer of blue, brushed by me. The sand at the foot of the ramp was firm and wet from the rain, and I hurried across the beach and into the shallow waves where the great-aunts were waiting. They greeted me affectionately. Aunt Olivia made no mention of the night before, so neither did I. Aunt Mary Desborough did not mention it, either; perhaps from her point of view storms were so commonplace at Illyria that they were not worth mentioning.

  “The beach is glorious this summer,” Aunt Olivia said. “When we walk out past the first file of breakers, there’s a lovely slough, a deep one, over our heads. There hasn’t been a slough like this since the year we all came to live in Illyria. The ocean floor shifts and changes all the time, and Hoadley says we’re going to have to put in a proper bulkhead soon because the high tides are nibbling at our shoreline. Beyond the blessed slough there’s a sand bar, and then the ocean proper. You have to watch out for undercurrents there.”

  The shallow water was stinging, even through my bathing stockings; the waves were full of shells ground fine from the pounding of the night before. Then the sand sloped abruptly and I slid into cool, deep water, so that my searching feet found no bottom: this, then, was the slough. Beyond it the water was a lighter color where the sand bar rose, and waves were breaking as though on a separate beach. I rolled onto my face, blew bubbles, opened my eyes to the sting of salt water, took in an accidental mouthful, spat it out, rolled over onto my back and lay there, arms and legs stretched loosely, rocking in the swells as Aunt Olivia had rocked in Honoria’s arms the night before.

  (… As Terry had held me in his arms our last night together in Oxford. ‘It is all right.’ The sea brought me the echo of his loving, persuasive voice, ‘Because I am you, and you are me, and we are one.’

  My tears had been salt, salt as the water which slapped now gently against my face. ‘Then how can we be torn apart?’

  ‘Dear love, we aren’t,’ he had said. ‘I take you with me, and me with yo
u. Mica, mica, parva Stella, you knew when you married me that …’

  I could not hear. The tears covered my face and I licked the brine from my lips. My nose was running and I fumbled under the pillow for Terry’s handkerchief. But it was in the pocket of his nightshirt which lay in a crumpled heap on the floor.

  He kissed my tear-blurred face. ‘Wait for me in Illyria. Time is magic there, and before you know it I’ll come for you. Illyria’s a joyful place; there’s a blessing on it, put there by Mado’s angels. And, my sweet wife, there is a blessing on you, too.’

  ‘Me? How?’

  ‘Because you are my Star, my mica mica parva Stella. Because you’ll be able to look on Illyria with fresh eyes, free from preconceptions. The way you look at me.’)

  “Stella,” Aunt Mary Desborough splashed over to me, “is your ring tight enough? There isn’t any chance of its slipping off, is there?”

  I held up my hand, with the entwined golden serpents firmly binding my finger. “I think it’s all right. The ring is quite tight. I’m sure it’s safe.”

  Aunt Olivia put her hands up to her face, speaking through her fingers. “When Therro and Kitty were drowned—oh, God, Honoria and I went with Mado to identify the bodies. It was only the ring on Kitty’s finger which made me sure—” Her voice was muffled with pain.

  “Hush, Livvy,” Aunt Mary Desborough said. “It doesn’t do any good to remember horrible things like that. It’s over now.”

  “Things like that are never over,” Aunt Olivia said.

  I touched the ring again, and shivered, for the first time fully realizing that it had been worn before Terry put it on my finger when we were married. The ring not only symbolized the beginning of our marriage; it also contained the past.

  I slid both my hands under the water.

  Aunt Olivia paddled contentedly in the gentle wavelets of the slough which, in summer, never lost the healing heat of the sun, letting it ease her painful joints. Old Finbarr came loping across the beach, breasted the waves into the slough, and swam protectively beside her, holding his grizzled head up out of the water.