The Other Side of the Sun

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

“Daz it, he was not! Why do people always have to put horrid interpretations on things that are simple and innocent? He loved youth, and he was young at heart, but there wasn’t anything sloppy about it. The little boys loved him, and he was wonderful with them. When he gave me the guns it was with the understanding that they were to go to Therro. But Therro never used them. General Everard lived in his tent till he was way up in the nineties—so maybe his theory did work after all, Des—and one winter’s morning Mado went to take him some fruit, and he was stone-cold dead.”

  “It’s not nice to touch people the way he did,” Aunt Mary Desborough reiterated.

  “Oh, daz it, of course it is. Fear not to touch the best; The truth shall be thy warrant.”

  “Is it Shakespeare?”

  “It is not Shakespeare. I’ll give you the next two lines. Go, since I needs must die, And give the world the lie.”

  “I am well aware that we all must die some day, but I fail to understand why you harp on it so constantly.”

  “I don’t harp. The quotation was, Fear not to touch the best. Don’t change the subject. You don’t know what it is.”

  “All right, I don’t know. At least I admit it when I don’t.”

  “You’re accusing me of not admitting it when I don’t know?”

  “You never admit it. You always make some wild guess.”

  “Half of any game is intelligent guessing.”

  “Ha. You identified something this afternoon as Henry IV, part I, and it was Romeo and Juliet. If it had been part II, or even Merry Wives of Windsor, I might have called it intelligent guessing. But you were just pretending.”

  “Aunties.” Uncle Hoadley banged his book against the arm of his chair. “That will do.”

  Aunt Olivia broke into her giggle. “Sorry, Hoadley-love. Really. It was Sir Walter Raleigh, Des.”

  Aunt Mary Desborough said rather stiffly, “I’m sorry, too, Hoadley.”

  Uncle Hoadley opened his book again. “Apologies accepted.” He smiled. “I think I would be inclined to be a little anxious if you two played your game without squabbling. As long as we have a hot game of Shakespeare going on in Illyria, I know that the world is still going around.”

  With these words of reassurance I was able to say good night and go upstairs to bed.

  When I was undressed and washed and in my thinnest nightgown, I stood again on my balcony, looking at the comforting light from the lightship. The next morning we were all to go to Cousin James’s beach cottage for “church.” That is, Aunt Olivia told me, Cousin James would read Morning Prayer, since there was no church in San Feliz and the trip into Jefferson was thought to be much too tiring for the great-aunts. After “church” we were to have dinner at Cousin Lucille’s.

  I sighed, and went to bed, under the mended mosquito netting. A large, many-legged insect with gossamer wings walked up the netting and peered at me, waving two long forelegs. The kitten was waiting for me, curled up as before in an amber-striped circle on my pillow. I took Mado’s journals from the bed table, then tucked the netting in and shivered against the heat: odd reaction. But I found that the extreme heat made me break out in goose-flesh the way extreme cold does. I was tempted to shove the stifling mosquito net aside, but the curious night insects fluttering about the room stopped me.

  I turned to the journals, arranging them in chronological order. Only the first was in French, and towards the end there were entries in English. The second was in English, with occasional French words or phrases. I held it in my hands and felt a sudden and terrible alienation from my husband. When we were in Oxford, when I had been able to touch the golden healthiness of his body, to see his open and direct regard, it had seemed only admirable to me that he was able to do secret work for his country, work he could not share even with me. But now I wondered if it were not the very honesty of his myopic blue eyes which made him so useful in intelligence work. And: if he could keep state secrets from me, could he not also keep other things? things I ought to know? I ought not to have had to hear about Jimmy’s lynching from Ron—

  I opened the first journal. It was written by a young girl, joyful and in love. I was filled with a wild envy, because Mado went with Theron wherever he went: why couldn’t I have gone with Terry?

  Life in the new country was strange for Mado, too, but she never lost her sense of humor. There were servants to do everything for them, and of course she had her own maid, a young girl from Nyssa who had been educated by Cousin Xenia, and it was she who often read aloud to Mado in the evening, as well as dressing her hair, taking care of her clothes. “I had thought,” Mado wrote, “to teach my maid something about reading and writing; instead I am the one to be taught.”

  There were balls and dinner parties and Mado loved Charleston, though the heat bothered her. Then came the move to Jefferson, and heat even more oppressive than that of Charleston. They took a house, nevertheless, and people flocked to them and they were happy and busy. I had a mental image of Mado sitting at a beautifully appointed table and drawing everybody to her by her beauty and gaiety, and of course she was able to be beautiful and gay because her Theron was at the head of the table, they were together …

  She described one of the ball gowns she had brought over from Paris, black lace over a scarlet underdress, very daring. “People are buzzing about it,” she wrote, “and say I am a French hussy, no better than I should be. Theron says all women are wildly jealous. He doesn’t realize that people are jealous of him, too, because he’s handsome and brilliant and from Charleston. Jefferson is raw and rough in comparison to Charleston; there’s an unfinished quality to it. But it has—or could have—its own beauty and ambiance if only people would stop trying to imitate Charleston mores and patterns. People from the West and North live on the far side of the river, and even if they build magnificent houses, they are looked down on. I think I shall go call on some of them and see what they’re like.”

  Then Therro was born, and Theron began talking about the inevitability of war, and a more serious note came to the pages of the journals. “I am afraid of war,” Mado wrote, “not for myself, but for the baby. What kind of a world has he been born into? And I am afraid for Theron. He says that he will not fight; he is a doctor, and he has been trained to save life, not to take it. James has warned me that if there is a war it will not be easy for Theron—and, it just now occurs to me, for James, either. A lot of people hate Nyssa, hate James.”

  Mado and Theron and the baby made frequent visits to Nyssa to get out of the heat, and I learned that every possible impediment had been put in the way when James freed his slaves; he succeeded only because he was a lawyer and a Renier; he had money and influence. And he was hated and called a maniac. A rumor went around that he had drugged and hypnotized his freed slaves to keep them working for him.

  Mado wrote, “When the war comes—and now it is when, not if—Theron says the children and I are to go to Nyssa.” There was a second baby now, another little boy. I knew from Terry’s chart that he must have died. “Olivia and Des will leave Charleston and come to Nyssa, too. Yes, that is best. Nyssa is a tiny island of sanity in this sea of madness. I did not understand at first what James was doing at Nyssa. I thought it was the old heresy of a Utopia on earth, man presuming to think that he can return, of his own virtue, to Eden. But James is not a blind dreamer. I am not sure how long he will be able to keep Nyssa going, simply because Nyssa is in the world, and worldly people always want to destroy those whose true home is heaven. Nyssa succeeds, I think, in a far more realistic way than Little Gidding, or any of the Utopian colonies attempted in New England. It has the structure of worship and prayer to outline and define the day that Little Gidding did, but it is far more possible in a thousand acres in North Carolina to be self-contained than it was in either England or New England. All the food needed for the community is grown right at Nyssa. Every man and woman there works hard, but lovingly. Every man is free, not just in the sense of being, legally, a freed slave, but in being
free to work with love. James has an extraordinary capacity for leadership; he knows how to love with open hands, and to take his own importance as head of Nyssa both factually and lightly. And he knows how to delegate authority, too. Xenia is magnificent. She runs both house and school completely and capably. People—his younger sister, Lucille, being a prime example—would like to provoke jealousy between Xenia and James, but I don’t think they’re likely to succeed …

  “We begin and end the day in prayer, the entire family. It gives meaning and dignity to everything that is done. The work in the fields under the blazing American sun is hot and hard, but there is singing and laughter. There is always singing at Nyssa. Unless it rains, most meals are eaten on long trestle tables under the live oaks; the food is not elegant—at least it would not be considered so by most of the people we know—but there is plenty, and I always eat enormously when I am at Nyssa. After everyone has eaten there is more singing. There is a beauty to the rich voices of James’s people I have never heard anywhere else. It is joyful singing, in natural harmony, and the closest I can come to describing the quality is that it is like music I heard at the Imperial court in Russia. When there is so much love and so much beauty at Nyssa, why do people hate it so? I thought Theron was being oversensitive, that he was imagining it, until I went into town yesterday to get supplies. I wanted to buy several bolts of gingham, and the shop woman spat on me. I was spat on! I did not want to tell James and Theron, but when we returned to Nyssa without the gingham, I had to. But Theron said calmly that we were self-sufficient at Nyssa in most ways, and the solution was to spin our own thread and weave our own cloth. He and James called a meeting of the community, and everybody was enthusiastic about the idea. And angry for me. I did not like being spat on; it was one of the most disgusting things that has ever happened to me. But the concern of the community, the love I felt from all of them, more than made up for it, and I was undressed, bathed, gentled, as tenderly as though I were a baby. And that evening, eating out under the trees with the moonlight coming through the dusty, autumn leaves, we were all unusually close and happy.”

  Mado was a sporadic journal writer. While Therro was a baby she wrote seldom. There was an occasional cry to her guardian angel if something upset her, or if she felt particularly joyful. She and Theron took Therro and the new infant and a few servants and went out to the Western territories for several months because Theron had been asked to try to break up an epidemic of yellow fever.

  I looked up from the journal, suddenly listening, aware of something more than the usual creakings of an old house. Silence. Then footsteps climbing up to the third floor. Footsteps moving down the passage, moving softly to my door, stopping. I waited, but there was no further movement, no knock on the door. Nonetheless I felt a presence waiting outside. I listened: listened: heard a small creaking of the floorboards. It was not my imagination. There was someone outside my door.

  The kitten moved from his place between my feet, stalked over me, planting his tiny paws deliberately and disdainfully upon me, and curled up in the curve of my arm, giving a yawn and starting to purr, his warm sides vibrating with pleasure.

  The footsteps left my door, moved back down the hall, down the stairs.

  I was afraid, and I did not know of what—or of whom. Heat and darkness and an awful sense of the unknown surrounded me like mosquito netting. I turned, almost frantically, back to Mado’s journal. But what I read was hardly comforting.

  “O my angel my guardian, come to me tonight and return me to myself. I would that Theron were beside me so that I could sleep. But he is in Jefferson, and I am in Nyssa because of the babies. The heat has been intense, even here, and the malaria has been worse than usual, and now Jefferson is filled with dengue fever, so Theron sent us here into cooler weather. Children are dying in the heat of Jefferson; I should feel only grateful that I am able to bring my little ones to Nyssa. Instead, I feel guilt and anguish. How can I love myself, or let God love me, or you, angel, guard and protect me, while evil is done around me and I stand still and do nothing to prevent it? Today, out of duty, I went to call on James’s sister, Lucille Hutlidge—would that I had not. I saw William Hutlidge, the beast she calls her husband, beat a man with a whip, and I, myself, bear the marks of his whip. I ran, I threw myself between the whip and the slave, there is across my back a strange and painful welt—now at least I share this with Honoria—but it did more harm than good. I am sure that the slave’s beating was the worse for my interference, that Hutlidge gave extra lashes because I infuriated him. How can I love Hutlidge? But I must. If I cannot love William Hutlidge I cannot love myself, I cannot love God. Not only do I not love him: I do not want God to love him. It is all right for me to thrust William outside my loving forgiveness, but not to want him outside God’s. I am dark with anger.”

  In the next journal I read, more quietly, “In our differing ways Honoria and I are both aristocrats. There are not many around. When I come to Illryia to stay with Honoria for a few days I feel that at last I have found my proper level. This is a dangerous feeling, particularly for me in this raw country which is about to explode; and a total lack of understanding of levels is one of the reasons we’re not going to be able to avoid the explosion. Theron understands how to bend, Theron, my darling, the real aristocrat, who is able to bend down to people. And let me be quite clear with myself: true aristocracy has to do with personality rather than birth, or social group, or class, or caste. Honoria is an aristocrat because she is Honoria, and not just because she is a princess. I am an aristocrat—no need for false humility in these pages—because I am Mado, not because of my forebears. Aristocracy is not a right or a privilege; it never makes demands on others; it gives; it is in itself an obligation. Theron and James try to answer the demands made on them. I suppose what Theron and James want to do at Nyssa is to make every man there an aristocrat—Clive, for example, certainly is one! It is not, as the Hutlidges and their ilk think; that Theron and James want to lower themselves, to descend, but that they want to go down in order to bring up. That’s it! It’s like the water level in a reservoir! And every loving and giving and aristocratic act raises the level. Perhaps Theron and James and Xenia are ahead of their time. Perhaps the world is not ready for them, or for Nyssa. The world can sometimes tolerate dreams of Utopia, but it cannot bear the brilliant flame of reality. But we cannot wait until the world is ready! Meanwhile it is right and proper that I should enjoy this breathing spell here at Illyria with Honoria. Theron and the babies and I are going to Nyssa next week; James needs Theron. Darling James, I wish he’d find a wife.”

  I had a strong feeling that darling James would not, because James loved Mado.

  When I ran across the beach the following morning, Uncle Hoadley was there before me, wetting himself in the shallow waters at the edge of the slough. He stood and waved. In his long dark woolen bathing suit he looked old and ascetic; his somewhat sallow skin had tanned only lightly on Illyrian weekends; there was a parchment-like quality to the sparse flesh over the long delicate cage of bones which spoke of self-denial.

  “So you and I are the early risers this Sunday, Stella-child?”

  “Hello, Uncle Hoadley. Good morning.”

  He gave a long, sweeping gesture with one arm, taking in the expanse of sea, sand, dune. “On a fine morning like this one I think that Illyria is the most beautiful place in the world. As a matter of fact, I know of no place more beautiful, though there are those who claim the blue hills of Kairogi to be the spot on earth closest to Eden.”

  “Have you been to Kairogi!”

  “I’ve done a good deal of traveling in my day, child. But Illyria has a kind of peace I’ve never felt anywhere else. So you think Terry may be in Kairogi?”

  I was resting in the gentless of the water and now I rolled over and stood up. “No, Uncle Hoadley. It’s possible he may be there, but it’s also possible he’s anywhere else in the world. I have no idea where he is.”

  “My dear,” he s
aid mildly, “there’s no need to sound so defensive: I am merely interested. After all, Terry has filled the place of the son Irene and I were never able to have. He is very close to our hearts.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t realize I was sounding defensive. Perhaps if I knew where Terry was, if I could imagine him in some particular place, then he wouldn’t seem so—so very far away.”

  “Poor lamb, of course. Terry can see you in his mind’s eye here in Illyria, and you have no setting in which to visualize him. I think I understand how particularly painful this is.” He held his fingers up and yawned, delicately, then smiled, “Last night was a white one for me, I have them rather frequently, and around two o’clock in the morning I left the house and walked for miles up the beach. The wind was blowing across the sea, and I lay in the sand of a far dune and it had been cooled by moonlight so that it was almost like lying in a snowdrift. The wind blew over the sea oats and over my body and the moon swung across the sky and poured its clean cold rays over me and all the insects hushed and listened. When I walked back to Illyria I thought I saw a light in your room?”

  “Yes, Uncle Hoadley. I couldn’t sleep either.”

  His voice was gentle. “If you will love Illyria, and all it has to offer you, then I think you can be happy with us. Perhaps it’s a good thing for your relationship with Terry, in the long run, that you are given these weeks in which to become acclimated. Try to learn not to ask too many questions, child. There are problems which need not concern you. Do try to remember that.” He gave me a small wave of his fingers and splashed into shore, then raised his head, gazing while a flock of pelicans broke against the sky. I, too, followed their passage. When I looked again, Uncle Hoadley was going along the narrow path by the ramp into under-Illyria.

  6

  After I had pumped sulphury water over my salt-soaked bathing costume, the sun was already steaming the air, and I dressed hurriedly and went into the cool of the house. Aunt Olivia was in the living room, under the stairs where the piano stood. The lid was up, and she held a lighted lamp over the strings, singing softly.