by Tanith Lee
But preposterously this—this was like that first soaring love. It was the artist in him, he supposed helplessly. For however poor his work, his soul was still that of the artist. The dazzle of pure whiteness on the dark lake, accented by swans, the sinking moon. He had been put in mind of a rusalka, the spirit of a drowned girl haunting water hi a greed for male victims. And in this way, to his seemingly asexual desire was added a bizarre twist of dread, not asexual in the least.
“Been riding?” said Uncle Janov on his return. “Good, good.”
“I thought I might try the boat this afternoon,” said Viktor, with a malicious sense of the joy of implicit and unspoken things.
But he did not take the boat. He lay on the grass of the lawn, now, staring through the willows, over the bright water, toward the islands, all afternoon. In his head he attempted to compose a poem. White as snow, she moves among the swans… the snow of her hands, falling… Disgusted with it, he would not even commit it to paper. Nor did he dare to make a drawing. His mother’s parasoled shadow falling over him at intervals as she patrolled the lawns, made any enterprise save thought far too conspicuous. Even to take the boat could be a disaster. “Where is that boy going? He’s too far out—”
Sugaring her conversation, as ever, fashionably with French, Ilena somehow made constant references to love throughout dinner. By a sort of telepathic means, she had lit on something to make Viktor suddenly as excruciatingly uncomfortable as a boy of thirteen. Finally she sought the piano, and played there, with Chopinesque melancholy and Mozartian frills, the old ballads of romance: Desirée, Hèlas, J’ai Perdu. She could, of course, in fact know nothing. He himself scarcely knew. What on earth had got hold of him?
It was inevitable. To be so bored, so entrapped. There must be something to be interested in. He sprawled in a chair as Ilena plunged into Lied, trying longingly to remember the features of the girl’s face.
—
When the house was quiet, save for some unaccountable vague noise the servants were making below, Viktor came downstairs and went out. He dragged the boat from its shed, pushed through the reeds, and started to row with a fine defiance.
There was no moon, which was excellent, even though he could not see where he was going.
An extraordinary scent lay over the lake, a smell of sheer openness. At first it went to his head. He felt exhilarated and completely in command of everything, himself, the night. He rowed powerfully, and the chateau, a dark wash of trees against the star-tipped sky, drew away and away. Then, unused to this particular form of labor, his arms and his back began to ache and burn. He became suddenly physically strained to the point of nausea, and collapsed on the oars, only too aware he would have to return by this modus operandi, and already certain he could not make another stroke in any direction.
But the rim of the island was now much closer than the far shore. He could distinguish the matchstick pavilion. Something white in the water shot blood through him like a charge of electricity, but it was only one of the swans mysteriously feeding or drinking from the lake.
Cursing softly, his teeth clenched, Viktor resumed work with the oars and pulled his way through the water until the boat bumped softly into the side of the island.
There was a post there among the reeds, sodden and rotted, but he tied the boat to it. The swan drifted away, weightless as if hollow.
Viktor scrambled up the incline. He stood beside the little pavilion, back broken, and full of a sinister excitement, trespassing and foolish and amused, and dimly afraid.
There was no music now, only the sound the lake made, and a soft intermittent susurrus of the leaves. Viktor glanced into the summer house, which was romantically neglected, conceivably even dangerous. Then, without hesitation, he began to make a way between the stalks of pine trees, and over the mounds of the grass, passing into the utter blankness of moonless overgrowth which had somehow seemed to make this venture permissible.
Beyond the trees was a house, surrounded by a wild lawn and a clutter of outbuildings. Viktor took a sudden notion of dogs, and checked, appalled, but nothing barked or scrabbled to get out at him.
There was something reassuringly ramshackle about the place. Even the house, far younger than the chateau, had a weird air of desuetude and decline. Viktor walked nearer and nearer through the rogue grass, passed under a rose-wine unraveling on a shed. A few feet from the veranda, in a clump of bushes, he came on a small china animal of indistinct species lying on its side as if dead, beside a wooden pole stuck in the ground. The purpose of the pole was moot. For the running up of a flag, perhaps?
Viktor laughed aloud, unable to prevent himself. To his outraged horror there came an echo, a feminine laughter that pealed out instantly upon his own.
“Good God,” he said.
“Good God,” said the voice.
Viktor, struck dumb, pulled himself together with an effort at the moment the echo voice said clearly: “Why don’t you come here?”
“Where?” said Viktor.
“Wait,” said the voice.
It seemed it was above him, and throwing back his head in a gesture of unnecessary violence, he noted a pale thing like tissue-paper in the act of turning away from a window. A moment later, he saw a light spring up and go traveling across the house. The impulse to flee was very strong. A lack of social etiquette had brought him here, but now the trauma of good manners, of all things, restrained him from flight. He felt a perfect fool. What would he say when the door opened? I was shipwrecked on your island by this terrible storm that has been silently and invisibly happening for the past hour?
Then the door opened and the light of a small oil lamp opened likewise, a large pale yellow chrysanthemum across the wooden veranda. There was a hammock strung there, and a little table, and in the dark oblong of the doorway, the lamp in her hand, the girl he had seen swimming, naked as a swan, in the lake.
Of course, he had known the second he heard her voice that it was she, no other.
“My God,” he said again. He had an insane impulse to tell her how he had looked on her before, and choked it back with the utmost difficulty.
“Won’t you come in?” said the girl.
He stared.
She wore a white frock, white stockings and shoes, her blond hair pinned on her head in an old-fashioned rather charming way, and in the thick yellow light she glowed. Her face was not pretty, but had an exquisite otherworldliness.
“I was looking for—that is, I think I have the wrong house—” he blurted.
“Well, never mind. Since you’re here, why don’t you come in?” And when he still hesitated, she said with the most winning innocence, devoid of all its implications, “There’s no one here but myself. My uncle is in town on business.”
Viktor discovered himself walking toward her. She smiled encouragement. There was not a trace of artifice about her, not even a hint of the powder he had learned to recognize, on her eggshell face.
She led him inside, and he had the impression of one space tumbling over into another in a mélange of panelings and furnishings, and huge crazed shadows flung by the lamp. Then he was himself falling over a little card table, righting it, glimpsing the open window framed in the wings of opened shutters, the tassel of the blind swinging idly in the night air. He saw the lawn he had stood upon, the flagpole and the dead china animal. It was uncanny, surreal almost to him in that moment, to see from her viewpoint the spot he had only just vacated. She was saying something.
“—Russian tea,” she finished. He turned too quickly, and observed a samovar. “Will you take some?” And he thought of Circe. He would drink the tea and change into a pig.
“Thank you.”
And beyond the samovar, a beast with a monstrous horn. He noted the source of yesterday’s music with another small shock. Not an orchestra at all. Of course not.
She had set the oil lamp on the card table, and the light had steadied. Presently they sat down and drank the dark sweet tea, looking at each o
ther neatly over the rims of the cups. There was nothing special about the room. He had seen many rooms like it. It was rather untidy, that was all, and the paper on the walls was distressfully peeling, due to damp he supposed. But the room smelled of water, not dampness, and of the tea, and of some elusive perfume which he wondered about, for it did not seem to be hers.
They did not speak again for a long while. It was so absurd, the whole thing. He did not know what to say. And was afraid besides of letting slip some reference to her nocturnal swim.
But he must say something—
“The chateau—” he said.
She smiled at him, polite and friendly, hanging graciously on his words.
“My mother,” he said. “She owns—we live at the chateau.”
“Yes?” she said. “How nice.”
“And you,” he fumbled.
“I live here,” she said.
This was quite inane.
“It’s very beautiful here,” he said, inanely.
“Oh, yes.”
“You must be wondering,” he said, oddly aware she was not, “why I came up here.”
“You said you thought it was another house. Someone you were looking for.”
“Did I say that?” Yes, he had said it. “I’m afraid it was a lie. I came here out of curiosity. We used to own this land.” Oh God, how pompous. “I say ‘we.’ I mean my mother’s family. And I was… curious.”
She smiled enigmatically. He finished the scalding tea at a gulp that seared his throat and stomach. Oink?
“Well,” she said, standing up as if at a signal. “It was kind of you to call.” She held out her hand and, disbelievingly, he rose and took it. Was she dismissing him?
“Well…” he repeated. Unsure, he felt in that instant another very strong urge to escape. “I suppose I should go back. Thank you for being so hospitable to a lawless trespasser.” The words, gallant, buccaneering, pleased him. Cheered, he allowed her to lead him out to the veranda. “I heard your gramophone,” he said, “the other night. Sound carries sometimes over the lake.”
“Good-bye,” she said.
He was on the lawn, and she stood above him on the veranda steps, white against the dark. He wanted to say: Do you often swim? And a vague wave of desire curled through him, making him tingle, and with it a strange aversion, drawing him away. But he said, without thinking, suddenly, “May I come back tomorrow?”
“Oh, no,” she said. Nothing else. He stood waiting for almost a minute, waiting for there to be something else, some explanation, excuse, equivocation, or some softening reversal: Well, perhaps… But there was nothing. She stood there kindly smiling upon him, and presently he said, like a fool, “Good night, then.” And walked off across the lawn.
When he came to the trees, he looked back. She had gone in, and the door was shut on the lamp, the peeling paper. It occurred to him for the first time that, before he had been seen, she had sat there in that large decaying house in the darkness. As if his arrival alone had woken her, brought her to life along with the bubbling samovar.
He was disgusted with it all, himself, her. She was that vile and typically bourgeois combination of the nondescript and the obscure. He climbed in the boat, loosed it, and pushed away from shore.
As he rowed, inflamed muscles complaining, he cursed over and over. What on earth had happened? What had it been for? She bored him.
By the time he reached the willow banks of the chateau he was exhausted. He dragged the boat into its shed with an embarrassed need to hide his escapade, and went in through one of the unlocked little side entrances of his mother’s ancestral house. He threw himself on his bed fully clothed and began in sheer bewilderment to read a novel.
He fell asleep with his cheek on the open book, dissatisfied and disappointed.
The dawn woke him, stiff and cramped from the night’s exercise. The long resinous light filled him with a terrible religious hunger for unspecified things. He thought of the nameless girl and how she had bored him, and her peculiar demeanor, and her slender pallor, and the moment of stupid desire. And realized in astonishment that it was the depression of jail he was feeling. He was certainly in love with her.
—
Halfway through the afternoon, as Viktor was lying encushioned on the lawn in an anguish of stiffness, dreading movement of any kind, a strange man appeared, walking around the chateau from the pine trees with a determined air.
Viktor sensed imminence at once. He hauled himself painfully into a sitting position. Ilena and her parasol, an odd creature from another planet, its second stalk-necked head twirling so far above the first, was parading gracefully up and down a long way off. Janov was indoors, engaged in billiards.
The stranger approached.
“Young man,” he said.
He towered over Viktor on the grass, an awful figure incongruously done up, even in the summer heat, in a black greatcoat caped like wings, and a tall black hat. A red beard streaked with darker red frothed between the two blacknesses, and a set of beautiless features, beaklike nose, small cold eyes of a yellowish, weaselish tinge.
“What do you want?” Viktor inquired haughtily.
The stranger considered.
“You, I think. I think I want you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get up, if you please. We must have words, you and I."
Viktor flushed with nerves.
“I don’t think so.”
“I think so.”
“And who the hell are you,” Viktor cried, “to think anything?”
The man’s gelid face did not alter. Only the mouth moved, as if the rest of the countenance were a mask. But he pointed inexorably out across the lake.
“Over there,” he said. “The house on the island. You know it?”
“Do I?”
“Yes, you know it. In the night, a visitor. You.” Viktor sneered. He was still sitting, helpless from the stiffness of that illicit row which now loomed above him, it seemed, in the retributive person of the red-bearded man.
“I will say this,” said the man, “I do not like my niece disturbed when I am away. I do not like it. You hear me?”
Viktor stared arrogantly into the distance, blind. He could not bring himself to any more fruitless denials, Or to argue.
“No further visits,” said the man. “You will leave my niece alone. You hear me?”
Viktor stared. He was appalled but not entirely astonished when the ghastly black thing swooped on him like a bird of prey, close to his ear, hissing, “You hear me?”
“I hear,” said Viktor, coldly, feeling an inner trembling start.
“Otherwise,” said the man, “I shall not be responsible for anything I may do.”
Miles off, in some other country, Ilena had turned, her parasol tilting like a fainting flower. “Viktor!” she called.
“You hear me?” the man said again.
“Yes.”
“Good,” said the man. He rose up and his shadow withdrew. He moved in short powerful strides, across the lawn, away into the pine trees.
Viktor, crouched in an agony of muscles and inarticulate fury, watched him go. The mystery of the whole momentary episode added to its horror. That the man was uncle to the white girl in the house—very well, one could accept that. That he had reached the shore, rowing an unseen boat himself in his heavy unsuitable garments—this seemed unlikely. But how else had he come here, save by flight? And the threats, out of all proportion to anything—Viktor became aware he should have stood up, threatened in turn, gone for one of the servants. That the very activity for which he was accused—yes, accused—had kept him riveted to the earth, seemed damning.
And the girl. She must have reported his coming to the island. Said she did not care for it, was afraid. Ridiculous horrid little bourgeoise. Since dawn, he had been thinking of her, wondering if he could bear to woo her, and how it might be done, tactfully and pleasantly. Wondering too with romantic dread if she were a ghost, brought to quic
kness only by his arrival, swirling into a tomb at his retreat. A vampire who would drink his blood, a rusalka who would drown him… And then, hammered flat across these sexually charged, yearning images, this beastly ordinary evil thing, the uncle like an indelible black stamp.
“Who was that man?” Ilena said, manifesting abruptly at his side.
“I don’t know, Maman.” Not quite a lie. No name had been given.
“Viktor, you are white as death. What did he say? Is it something you’ve done? Tell me. Some gambling debt— Viktor!”
“No, Maman. He was looking for another house, and asked the way.”
“Then why,” she said, “are you so pale?”
“I feel rather sick.” That was sure enough.
“You drank too much at dinner,” she said.
“Yes, Maman. Probably.”
“What am I to do with you?” she asked.
“Send me back to the city?” he cried imploringly, the perpetual pleading shooting out of him when he least expected it to do so, had not even been thinking of it at all.
“Don’t be foolish,” she said. “In the city you would drink twice as much, gamble, do all manner of profligate idiotic things.” She was smiling, teasing, yet in earnest. It was all true. Under her fragile cynicism her fear for him lurked like a wolf. She was afraid he would destroy himself as his father had done. And he caught her fear suddenly, fear of some lightless vortex; he did not even know its name.
“All right,” he said, “all right, Maman. I’ll stay here. I’ll be good.”
“There’s my sensible darling.”
When she had gone, he flopped on his face. Images of his father, a drunken man who died in Viktor’s childhood, rose and faded. He recalled the lamps burning low on a winter’s afternoon, and being told to play very quietly. And later, men in black at the door, and a white wax face in a long box that did not look remotely like anyone Viktor had ever seen before in his life.