She nodded her final thanks and set off up the graveled path. Over the hedge floated the voice of Ryn’s sister, saying cheerfully, “I’d better rescue your milk shake before it turns to butter. I guess it’s safe to go in now!”
Georgine looked across at the house, and saw a large young man framed in one of the windows. His shoulders were drooping and his hands were jammed into his pockets. Even at that distance she could read penitence and dejection into his pose. The girl in blue skipped nimbly up the steps and disappeared into the house.
Georgine climbed on, her path zigzagging across the face of the steep hill. She looked down from one point of vantage and saw a foreshortened blue figure moving toward the olive tree, carrying something on a yellow saucer; something else moved, too, in the green of the garden: a leaping streak of fawn and white that made for the deck chair.
The path twisted back on itself, and she paused behind a clump of bushes to catch her breath and cool off for a moment. When she came into the open again, the scene below her was still visible, very clear in the mild, sunless air. The lively sister had gone in again, it seemed, but the cat was still leaping back and forth.
There was a stir among the leaves of the olive tree, and a white blur that might have been Ryn’s face seemed to be tilted upward for a moment. Then a hand set down a yellow saucer on the ground, on the side of the chair that was away from the house. The hand began pouring something into the saucer, and the cat swooped toward it; it poured and poured, slowly, and the little patch of fawn and white crouched over the saucer, seeming to be lapping steadily. The hand with the glass in it stayed there. The glass was never raised to anyone’s lips.
Georgine went round another hairpin turn, and the garden below was lost to view.
Some paces back she had gone past a small but professional-looking greenhouse, with a compost heap half hidden behind it. Now the last turn of the path brought her to the top of the cliff, and she stood breathing hard and looking about her.
This garden, and the low redwood house it sheltered, must have been here for a long, long time, and for all those years it had been carefully tended. There were trees and shrubbery, meticulously pruned and shaped; there were different levels of flower beds, dormant now except for a glorious bank of chrysanthemums at the end nearest the house, and there were patches of lawn bordered by succulently dark and rich strips of cultivated soil, where the green spears of narcissus were already appearing.
About fifty feet away knelt a small figure in a tweed skirt and a denim smock, working at a sloping patch of ground. Georgine walked toward the woman, making her footsteps as audible as she could, and once clearing her throat; but she received no greeting except for a half turn of a head bound up in a multicolored scarf. As she approached she could see tiny bulbs in a box, and watch the neat, rapid movement of a brown hand that set one after another into the soil and covered it.
“Oh, grape hyacinth!” said Georgine involuntarily; she had had a vision of that bank in the spring, blazing with violet-blue flowers. “How lovely—”
The woman turned now, displaying a little pointed face with darting eyes as bright and black as a sparrow’s, and a wrinkled neck adorned with several chains of colored beads. “Yes,” she said in a quick, pecking voice. “Had to take them all up and separate them. Anything you wanted?”
“I’d like to see Mrs. Majendie. Are you she?”
“No. Godfrey’s my name. I’m her companion. Who are you?”
“Mrs., uh, Wyeth. I’m not selling anything,” Georgine added quickly. “I’m interested in Mrs. Majendie as a leader of the Beyond-Truth.”
“Oh. Oh, you are? The place to go,” said Miss Godfrey with a suspicious fixing of the black eyes, “is to the Colony. They’ll give you literature, you study it. Then you come back and make a formal profession of your interest.”
“I’m afraid I’m not a convert.”
“Then what’s your business? I can’t let every stranger that comes around see Mrs. Majendie. I’m here to save her time and energy. They’re precious.”
Georgine murmured, “It was for a personal interview.”
“If it’s about the Beyond-Truth,” said Miss Godfrey, “I can tell you all you want to know. It was founded by our first great mental leader, Dr. Nicholas Majendie. He grasped the truth which has been self-evident for centuries but which the blindness of most minds has kept obscure, that all human facts are relative.” Her sparrow eyes seemed to grow opaque, and her brittle voice took on a chanting tone. “They send out vibrations which on meeting in other dimensions form combinations and patterns vastly different from their original semblance in the fallible human mind.” She paused for a gulp of air and Georgine interjected, “It was Mrs. Majendie herself that I—” “Therefore,” said Miss Godfrey, drowning her out, “what appears as a distortion or contradiction of mundane knowledge may, in the sphere just beyond us, be perfectly true, true in perfection. The human mind may, by the exercise of self-control in the simplest forms—”
“Joan!” said a deep voice from behind the bank of earth.
The sentence broke like a synthetic rubber band, the brightness came back to Miss Godfrey’s eyes, and she turned on her heel. Over the top of the bank rose the head and shoulders of a tall, craggy-faced old woman, who must, Georgine thought, have been squatting in hiding for some minutes. “Joan,” she said, “you should have learned by now to judge voices. I’ll talk to Mrs. Wyeth.”
“Thank you,” said Georgine faintly, and moved in answer to a directing nod toward a wooden bench under an apple tree’s denuded branches. She sat down, watching Chloe Majendie walk unhurriedly from behind the sloping bank, taking off heavy gardening gloves as she came.
There is a type of elderly woman which may be indigenous to other university towns, but which seems to reach its fullest flower in Berkeley. Its exponents may be the daughters or wives of professors, or may long ago have won their own doctorates, or may simply have taken on color from their surroundings; but almost without exception they have a look of being far above fashion and beauty-culture, a touch of eccentricity worn as proudly as Dowager-Queen Mary’s toques. Without exception, they look highly intelligent and sometimes they look formidable. Their eyes are young.
Georgine thought that in her years of residence in this town she had never seen a more magnificent specimen of the Berkeley Old Lady. Mrs. Majendie had probably been a tall, rawboned and homely young woman; she had spread conspicuously about the hips now, and was cheerfully unconcerned about it. As she sat down she took off a man’s ancient felt hat, and crinkly gray hair sprang out in a wild bush above a weathered and hawk-nosed face. She brushed a chunk of leaf mold from the knee of her jeans, turned a pair of piercing gray eyes on Georgine, and said, “Well, my dear? What can I do for you?” in that startlingly deep voice whose beautiful overtones seemed to linger humming in the ears after she had fallen silent.
Georgine began her prepared story, feeling more than glad that it was not too far from the truth. She and her husband were writers, rather obscure ones, and they were about to try a series of stories on noted personalities of the Bay Region. Mrs. Majendie was, of course, particularly interesting as a person who was carrying on her husband’s work—unusual background—old estate—great help to them if Mrs. Majendie would consent, especially since the articles were to be in the nature of an experiment and might never see print—
She heard her own voice going on and on, sounding normal and earnest, for which she was thankful. There was something disconcerting about the steadiness of those gray eyes; they were not suspicious, only penetrating; but it was not unheard of that a Berkeley Old Lady might have a touch of the fanatic in her make-up, too, and Georgine wondered if the living brilliance of this gaze was not only alert but a bit screwball. Mrs. Majendie nodded when she had finished. “I’ll be glad to help you,” she said. “We have a saying at the Colony, to the effect that we never miss a chance for dignified publicity. Someone who sees it may be looking for the right path.�
� She gave Georgine an unexpected smile, disclosing good and genuine teeth. “I must say, the undignified kind is just about as good.”
Huh? said Georgine’s mind, while she looked expectant and poised a pencil. —What does that mean? Is she poking a little fun at her own beliefs, or does she see through me? I feel rather mean as it is—
Mrs. Majendie was giving her an outline of the beginnings of Beyond-Truth, substantially the same as Hartlein’s, but making it sound different indeed. —I could almost believe it made sense, thought Georgine, scribbling industriously on her pad. That voice, and all those long vague words; there’s that bit about going into the Beyond-Truth after fasting, but she makes it sound as if she really could do it—
“And will the—the new generation carry on the work?” Georgine prompted.
Mrs. Majendie gave her a considering look. “We hope so. Of course, there are no children of the members.”
“It’s a celibate community?”
“In one way, yes,” said the old lady smoothly. “There is no marriage in the world sense, though many couples are legally man and wife, and very dear companions. But—” She paused, and there was something in the silence that brought Georgine’s eyes up to hers; her voice softened and deepened almost hypnotically. “But it wouldn’t be consistent of us, would it, if we deliberately brought children into being to face the future that my husband saw so clearly?”
“Of course not,” said Georgine, her eyes still held by the shrewd old ones. There was something in that idea, maybe; if you believed the visions, you couldn’t—if you believed? It wasn’t only the Beyond-Truthers who could imagine Hiroshima reenacted in America, and who wondered about their children. She’d thought of it herself plenty of times. And if the only way to push away that dread were the refusal to have children—
She forced herself to look back at her notebook. Her breath was coming rather fast. Why, this was the way converts were made: the grand old lady, making everything sound so reasonable, quietly playing on your own hidden fears, almost forced you into belief. The whole thing was based on fear; it couldn’t be right.
But that, she thought with a sudden chill, was what Hartlein implied.
Joan Godfrey had gone back to her planting, but as Mrs. Majendie was dismissing her own stewardship of the cult in a brief final sentence, she got up and stood by the bench. “May I interrupt, Chloe?” she said intensely. “You’ll never say this yourself. Anyone hearing of the Beyond-Truth for the first time must be told. There were those who thought we could not go on after dear Dr. Nikko passed into the cosmos. We did. We believed. We are stronger than ever. And it is due to Chloe, the inspired mental leader, as inspired—yes, I will say it!—as great as Dr. Nikko. She has fanned the flame.”
“The members themselves have kept it alive, Joan.”
“No, no, it’s you! And you, Mrs. What’s-your-name, ask any of the members who have been with us since we began; go out to the Colony if you want the full story. Talk to Jennie Michaelson, Alvah Burke, Tina Cortelyou. They’ll say the same.”
“May I take down those names, please?” Georgine said. “They’re, uh, charter members? It might be interesting to have a list, could you give me some other names? Joseph France, May Gordon—” She looked up, half laughing, choosing a name at random from Hartlein’s absurd collection. “Was there one called Sybil Grant?”
There was an instant of silence, so filled with feeling that it seemed to stretch out endlessly. Georgine’s heart began a slow and sickening descent toward her heels; she was conscious of the creaking bench under her, and of a strange far-off growling sound from some unidentified animal. Then Mrs. Majendie spoke with infinite regret in the depths of her voice.
“Sybil Grant is dead. She died last year.”
Georgine was looking, not at her, but at Joan Godfrey. The scrawny neck had gone taut, the whole slight body quivered, and on the sparrow-face a light seemed to blaze for the fraction of a second: a light of triumph. Then it was gone.
“She passed into the cosmos,” Joan Godfrey corrected gently. “Young, and lovely, and—forgetting all that she—”
“Joan,” said Chloe Majendie without inflection.
The little woman turned away without another word, and walked toward the house.
“Does that give you enough material, Mrs. Wyeth?” Chloe inquired, obviously preparing to rise.
No guest ever took a hint faster. Georgine was on her feet before the question was finished. “Oh, yes. Yes, thank you very much. Good-bye, you’ve been very kind.”
She was halfway down the twisting path before her heart stopped thundering. —Good heavens, what a moment that had been—like touching an innocent-looking button and finding that it set off a burglar-alarm. Everything was going perfectly well up to then—
She glanced down and saw the garden of the gray cottage. A man had emerged and was walking rapidly down the path toward the gate. She lost sight of him as the bushes obscured the last few yards of her descent, and when she came along beside the hedge he was nowhere to be seen. There were muttering and coughing sounds from the far side of the garage; someone was working at a car engine.
Georgine was within a few feet of the garage, just stepping onto the roadway, when the coughing suddenly swelled to a hoarse roar. The ramshackle car that had been parked beside the garage came shooting out in reverse, turning up the hill toward her. She saw a dusty rear window, a lopsided taillight. —Good Heavens, it wasn’t stopping, it was aimed right at her! It swelled into a grayish-black mass and a cloud of fumes half an inch from her elbow—
She jumped backward, staggered for a moment on uneven footing and sat down hard on the graveled path. The car went past for half its length; confusedly she glimpsed broad shoulders hunched over the wheel, a face set blindly forward; then with a crash of gears it shot off forward down the hill and was lost to view at the turn. The roar died away. For a minute there was nothing but the angry chipping of birds disturbed in the hedge, the smell of crushed grass, and the waves of anguish going up Georgine’s spine.
She tried to get up, uttered an involuntary grunt of pain, and stayed where she was, fighting back tears of shock and a rising fury. Feet sounded inside the gate, and the cool voice of the girl called Ryn inquired, “Oh, dear, did you fall and hurt yourself?” A pair of beautiful gray gabardine slacks appeared in Georgine’s line of vision, and then a violet sweater and a white, concerned face. “My God, it wasn’t David? Did his car hit you?”
Georgine, unable to unclench her teeth, shook her head. The girl called toward the house, “Cass! Come out here! An accident—” and the sister in blue appeared at headlong speed.
“I can get up by myself now, thanks,” said Georgine crossly, resisting the hands under her armpits. “How do I feel? Like something out of a s-slapstick comedy. I’ve never been so mad!” Her shock-released anger had the upper hand. “No, your friend’s car didn’t hit me, because I jumped, but it darned near wiped the plaid off my skirt. May I ask who that crashing idiot is, gunning a car up the hill backward without so much as looking around first?”
“How about the aromatic spirits, Cass?” Ryn said quietly from above her. Cass nodded and made another of her headlong rushes for the cottage. Her blue-clad behind gave a quaint little hitch like the flicker of a rabbit’s tail, as she scampered up the low porch steps.
Ryn looked down at Georgine. “That was David Shere,” she said, “and he’s not always a crashing idiot, but sometimes he’s—out of temper, and then he gets reckless. I can’t apologize enough for him. If you’d been a few feet nearer, I suppose he might really have killed you, and then he’d have wanted to die himself of remorse.”
Her sister returned, breathing fast; Georgine set her teeth against a fresh wave of pain and angrily accepted the small glass that was pressed into her hand. “A fat lot of good that would do me,” she said. “I’d be just as dead. They’d have a hard time making that look like the Hand of God!” She held her breath and got the spirits of ammonia do
wn with the inevitable moment of choking afterward. When she looked up it was to see the sisters exchanging a long gaze over her head, which broke hastily as her eyes met theirs. Cass stepped through the gate and came back with Georgine’s bag, which had burst open and scattered cards, compact and writing pad over the grass. “Thank you,” Georgine snapped, shakily grabbing out one of her own cigarettes and trying to light it.
“Suppose you relax for a few minutes,” Cass said briskly. “Good Lord, I do hope you’re going to be all right; somebody hurt at our own gate by our own guest—”
“I see you got your interview,” said Ryn, glancing upward. “Aunt Chloe’s quite a personage, isn’t she? I can’t remember her looking any different in twenty years, and I suppose she’ll be the same when she’s eighty-seven. She didn’t frighten you, I hope?”
Georgine could manage no more than a shake of the head.
“That’s good. She can be pretty terrifying when she’s in the mood. She brought us up, you know, my two sisters and me. Our name’s Johnson, by the way, Chloe’s our father’s sister.”
“You’re Mrs. Wyeth, aren’t you?” Cass put in. “I couldn’t help seeing the cards when I picked them up.”
Georgine changed the subject after a faint smile which might have been taken for affirmation. “Are there three of you living here, then? You have a very attractive house.”
“No, just Cass and me, or do I mean ‘I’? When Bell was here it was something of a crowd, but we never minded.” Ryn’s lovely pale face seemed to grow a shade whiter. She turned suddenly and moved toward the house with a sort of controlled haste, her steps wavering a little. Cass, looking anxious, said, “Ryn hasn’t been very well, really. D’you have a family? Well, are they all absolute sillies about taking care of themselves? Honestly, I don’t know what to do sometimes! Being the practical one in the outfit isn’t much fun; I hate to see Ryn going on these long fasts, but there’s no stopping her.”
“Long ones?” Georgine murmured.
The Smiling Tiger Page 3