Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  But joy cometh in the morning—

  Do you remember that?”

  “You’ll leave Saturday?” Brand asked as he stopped dancing and released her, panting, laughing, gasping for his breath.

  “Yes—I can’t believe it—I’ve been concentrating on it for so long; somewhere in the darkness of my mind was a flicker of light that said it would all work out eventually—but oh, to be free again—to be free!”

  “I’ve played so hard my fingers are numb,” Lorenzo said, putting down Ilsa’s mandolin.

  Joshua caught hold of my hand and laughed childishly. “I must sit down and get my breath. I’m behaving like a madman.”

  “Have another drink,” Werner said, handing him a glass.

  “Yes—thanks.” He clutched the drink and stood there grinning.

  “What train do you plan to take Saturday?” Werner asked.

  “I don’t know. Whatever train I can get. I suppose the new noon train would be best.”

  “Maybe we could travel together,” Werner suggested.

  “Must you go so soon?” Ilsa said in a low voice.

  “I’ll probably have to. I’ll be surprised if Helstone doesn’t give me hell for stopping off here this long.” He took one of her hands and held it tightly in both of his.

  “When are you going to call him?” she asked.

  “There’s no point in trying before one or two. He wouldn’t be in.”

  “I’ll go down to the station later on,” Joshua said, “and find out about trains. It would be very pleasant if we could go up together. I’ll have to go by day coach, though.”

  Werner laughed, rather bitterly. “So will I.”

  “Well, see you later,” Joshua said, and hurried into the house.

  Werner pulled Ilsa to him. He didn’t seem to care who saw him, and her discretion, too, seemed to have fled into the heat of the late summer night.

  “Let’s go down by the river and walk until it’s time for me to phone,” he said.

  She leaned close to him. “All right.”

  “Remember the last time we walked down by the river?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Um hm.”

  “It’s almost time for the moon to rise. Another moon for me to look at you by tonight. Most considerate of it.”

  “You know, it’s a funny thing,” Ilsa said.

  “Hm?” Werner asked.

  As they stood there on the steps, the shadows of the Ligustrum bushes closing them in, the darkness seemed to me almost unendurable.

  “The subconscious mind is so much cleverer than the conscious,” I heard Ilsa’s voice say. “I could see you so beautifully and clearly in my dreams—so really you—but when I tried to remember you when I was awake I could never really do it, could never visualize you completely. And the most irritating, the most infuriating, the most damnable part of it is that I still have to count on dreams.… It doesn’t matter.… It was never your face I fell in love with, but your foolish, gaudy, blatant soul.”

  “Come along,” Werner said.

  As they walked down the path they became visible again in the flittering lightning. Then they turned around by the side of the house and disappeared into the darkness.

  60

  “Who is that man?” Lorenzo asked.

  “Why ask me?” Brand’s voice was hard. “Mamma told you. Ask Uncle Henry if you want to know more.”

  Lorenzo turned to me. “How did he happen to come here?”

  “To see Ilsa,” I said.

  “But why?” Brand asked angrily. “What right has he got?”

  “He seems to think he has a lot of right,” Lorenzo said quietly. He got down from the porch rail and flung himself into the hammock. “I don’t think I’ll show him my harpsichord,” he said.

  I wandered over to the steps and sat down. They were still warm where Ilsa and Werner had been sitting on them. Lorenzo heaved himself out of the hammock and went over to Brand again.

  “It might interest you to know, Brand,” he said, “that I’m going west in October.”

  “West? Where?”

  “Wisconsin.”

  “What on earth are you going to do in Wisconsin?”

  “Study ancient instruments.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s what I want to do.”

  “But why Wisconsin, Lorenzo!” Brand cried.

  “Because the best man happens to be teaching there. I have a scholarship at the University. I just got the letter in the evening mail.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything about it before?”

  “I wanted to be sure I’d be accepted. I did tell your mother.”

  “But I thought you were going to be a minister!”

  “Everybody thought that, it seems.”

  “You aren’t?”

  “No.”

  “But why not?”

  “I don’t like dogma, I don’t like sects, I don’t believe half the things I’d have to believe if I had any sense of honesty about it, and I want a private life, not a public one.”

  “I see,” Brand said, kicking her feet against the horizontal bars of the porch rail.

  “Do you?” Lorenzo asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll try to. But what are you going to do when you finish studying?”

  “Teach.”

  “Oh,” Brand said, in a small voice.

  “What do you think of it, Uncle Henry?” Lorenzo asked politely, drawing me into the conversation.

  I looked at his small bird face glimmering on and off in the lightning, the determined beak of a nose, the small firm chin. Lorenzo knew what he wanted and he usually got it. He wanted to study ancient instruments instead of going into the ministry, and that was what he was going to do. He had made up his mind to marry Brand and I had no doubt that he would do that, too. She would make a good teacher’s wife and he would know how to manage her. His fragile, almost weak-looking appearance was entirely deceptive.

  “If you have the courage of your own convictions, more power to you,” I said, sounding almost jealous.

  Lorenzo was going to Wisconsin. Joshua was going to New York. Myra thought she was going to pieces. Franz Josef Werner had returned as I had known one day he must, and now I must leave, too; I saw that. But where? To hell, like Mvra Turnbull, or to some definite destination like the others?

  I got up and wandered down the path. The odors of the summer night were so hot and heavy that I felt stifled. We were due the northeaster that would mark the end of summer, and, for me, the end of everything. I remembered that when I was little and had suddenly been brought face to face with infinity as I contemplated the dark night ocean fading into the horizon, as I watched the stars burning forever above me, I had felt almost the same way I did now. All space and all time had seemed to confront me, as I stood, a tiny particle on all the tiny particles of sand that made the beach. To a sand crab, I thought, it must seem that this world of shifting sand is the only thing there is. To a starfish it must seem that there is nothing but the cool luminous water. And yet suddenly the starfish will find itself tossed carelessly up onto the beach, spewed out and ignored by the ocean it adores, left impartially to dry on the burning breathless sand. So is it not, I thought, consistent to wonder if there is not somewhere an end to our space, to our infinity? Beyond that purple sea of sky and stars what arid sands may not lie? Beyond our own clumsy conception of time—seconds, hours, days, weeks, years, centuries—what may there not be? And my child’s heart was afraid.

  Well, I thought now—coming back to the particular with the usual human inability to forget the self for long—I have come to the end of one small space, one small infinity. I knew that I no longer had the courage to go on being a coward. I did not have Lorenzo’s serene indifference to what people thought of me. I valued my sister’s opinion, Cousin Anna’s, Joshua’s, Myra Turnbull’s, most of all Ilsa’s. If I left home now and took whatever job Eddie could get for me, I would lose my life of being a dead, burnt-out satelite fo
rever revolving around a living sun that had no use for me, no need of my inadequate convolutions—an existence certainly not noble, and desirable to no one but me. If I flung myself out of my accustomed course, they might at least say, “Look, there goes a shooting star,” as I flashed briefly across the sky.

  When I turned and went back to the house Lorenzo and Brand were still perched on the rail, talking.

  “It’ll be all right when he goes,” Brand was saying. “I was afraid he was going to stay, but I don’t think he will.”

  I climbed the steps. “It’s late,” I said. “You should both be in bed. Won’t they be worried about you at home, Lorenzo?”

  He slid down from the rail. “Yes. I’d better go,” he said. “I’ll be over tomorrow at nine, Brand.”

  She answered with more respect than I had heard her use. “All right, Lorenzo. I’ll be ready.”

  Most of the lights in the house were out now; only the dim hall light was burning. Fireflies flittered in the bushes. Lightning still hovered over the heavy air. I saw a shadow at the door, and Myra Turnbull drifted onto the porch, her toothbrush mug in her hand. Brand nudged Lorenzo.

  “Where’s Ilsa Woolf?” Myra asked.

  “She’s down by the river, Miss Turnbull,” Brand said.

  “I want to talk to her.” Myra leaned against the railing, and some of the liquor in her mug spilled over onto the bushes. She jerked back. “I want to talk to her. Out of the morass of my memory I’ve pulled something that I want to say to her. Where is she?”

  “She went down by the river, Miss Turnbull,” Lorenzo said.

  “Come on in with me,” I suggested, taking her arm. She pulled away, ignoring me.

  “But I wanted to talk to her,” she said again. “There was something I wanted to say to her—pulled out of the morass of my memory. It’s not fair.… Brand, Lorenzo. It’s very late. You should be in bed.”

  “So should we all, Myra,” I said.

  “You leave me alone, Henry Porcher.” Urgently she caught hold of Brand’s arm. “When your mother comes back, tell her I want to talk to her. Tell her it’s very important. Before it goes back into the marshes of the mind a little poem out of the morass of my memory.…”

  She turned abruptly and went in as we heard voices coming around the corner of the house. Ilsa and Werner came up the Steps.

  “I guess I’ll go in and phone Helstone,” Werner said.

  “Collect,” she reminded him.

  “Yes, liebling.” He slammed the screen door behind him. Ilsa flung herself down in the hammock.

  “Who’s here?” she asked.

  “I am,” I answered. “Henry. And Brand and Lorenzo.”

  “Children, you should have been in bed hours ago.”

  “I’m just going home. It was my fault.” Lorenzo went over to the hammock and shyly touched her sleeve.

  “It doesn’t matter this once. All the punch we drank—I guess we all got a little tight. I know I did. Poor Myra—” she laughed sleepily.

  “Good night,” Lorenzo said.

  She pulled him to her for a moment. “Good night, dear.”

  She listened as he went running down the steps and his footsteps sounded and diminished along the path.

  “Brand,” she said.

  “Yes, Mamma?”

  “Go to bed.”

  “I’m just going, Mamma.” The girl, moved toward the door.

  Hearing the footsteps, Ilsa called, “Come kiss me good night.”

  “No,” Brand said. “I—can’t. Not tonight.… Good night, Mamma.” She ran into the house.

  Ilsa sighed deeply. “I feel so guilty, Henry,” she said.

  “What about?”

  “Brand.”

  “Why should you?”

  “It’s my fault, because I let her get dependent on me and now she wants to break away and she can’t. She’s afraid of freedom. I’m glad Lorenzo’s going to Wisconsin. He’s got too skeptically searching a mind to make a good preacher. I hope she’ll marry him. I think they belong together. Thank God he hasn’t any ties of blood to the family at any rate.” She started to laugh and kept on until I wasn’t sure whether she was laughing or crying. “Forgive me, Hen,” she said at last. “It’s this fag end of summer—I’m tired.”

  “Ilsa Woolf.” It was Myra’s voice. She had come out on the porch again.

  “What?” Ilsa said.

  “You’re back!”

  “Yes. I’m back. What is it?”

  “Something I want to say to you—I pulled it up—up by the roots from the muddy meadows of the mind, the meandering morasses of the memory—”

  “What is it?” Ilsa asked.

  “It’s a poem. A little poem. I want you to hear it. He should hear it, too. In the marvelous mazes of the mind I found and plucked it up with its bleeding roots. May I say it?”

  “Of course.”

  Myra almost whispered the words:

  I hear a sudden cry of pain!

  There is a rabbit in a snare:

  Now I hear the cry again,

  But I cannot tell from where.

  But I cannot tell from where

  He is calling out for aid;

  Crying on the frightened air,

  Making everything afraid.

  Making everything afraid,

  Wrinkling up his little face,

  As he cries again for aid;

  And I cannot find the place!

  And I cannot find the place

  Where his paw is in the snare:

  Little one! Oh, little one!

  I am searching everywhere.*

  “Are you?” Myra demanded.

  Ilsa didn’t answer She had turned away in the hammock. I couldn’t see her face.

  Myra went on. “You must, you know. The blood runs fast and in the snare we die. You must find us and set us free. Are you searching or will you leave us, will you turn from our cry?”

  Ilsa got up from the hammock and stood beside her. “Come inside.”

  Myra shook her head, fumbling for her handkerchief. “It’s so dark, it’s so dark,” she wept.

  “When I was little,” Ilsa said gently, “I used to go along the dunes with one of Father’s specimen jars and catch fireflies to make a lantern for myself.” Her voice sounded muffled by the night which seemed suddenly to press inexorably about them both. She put her arm about Myra and took her indoors, soothing her like a very little child. Her shoulders, too, were shaking with sobs. It was the first time I had ever heard her cry. From the distance a train wailed.

  * “The Snare.” From Songs from the Clay, by James Stephens. By permission of The Macmillan Company, publishers.

  61

  The first thing in the morning I called Silver.

  “If you still think Eddie can get me a job somewhere out of town, I want it,” I said.

  There was a short pause at the other end of the wire. “All right, Brother. Eddie has to go to New Orleans next week. Wait just a minute till I talk to him.” Afer a few moments she came back. “He says he thinks he can arrange to have you go down with him Monday. Can you be ready by then?”

  “Yes,” I said. We both knew that if I didn’t leave immediately I would never leave.

  “Come on out for dinner tomorrow night, then,” she said, “and talk things over with him.”

  “All right. Thank you, Sister.”

  “Don’t thank me, Henry,” she answered. “Thank yourself.”

  62

  I went over to Ilsa’s shortly after breakfast, though I was sure she and Werner would not be ready. As I heard music I paused at the rice portieres, my hands pushing them slightly apart. In the drawing room Ilsa was giving a piano lesson.

  “Bring out the tune in your left hand, child. Don’t you hear it? The little tune you start with. Listen to it in your left hand.” I heard the stumbling notes of the music and Ilsa saying “That’s better.”

  I wandered upstairs and knocked at the door of Myra Turnbull’s room. I knew that on
Friday she had no classes till afternoon so she wouldn’t be at school.

  “Come in,” she called crossly.

  Setting my shoulder against the door, which always stuck in summer, I pushed into the room, went over to her bed, and sat down. I ran my fingers over the slender coolness of one of the brass bars. She was sitting at her desk correcting papers.

  “Don’t sit on the bed,” she said. “You’ll make it sink down on that side.”

  I moved to a chair. “What’s the matter?”

  “I should think it would be quite obvious that I’ve got what you would call a hangover.” Her voice was acid. “Did you want anything?”

  “Just to talk.”

  “Why talk?”

  “Well, I did want to tell you I was going away.”

  “Away? Where?”

  “New Orleans. Eddie’s going to get me work there. I’m going with him on Monday.”

  “It’s about time. It seems that everybody’s going away, doesn’t it? Joshua Tisbury, you, Franz Werner …”

  “Ilsa,” I said.

  “No.” Myra closed her notebook and screwed on the top to her pen. It took several attempts before she could fit it together. “I don’t think Ilsa will leave.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “What’s to prevent her?”

  “Use your head, Henry,” Myra said. “Everything. Her intelligence, primarily.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, be quiet!” she said irritably, not to me, but to a vine that was tapping against her window. “Her room’s next to mine.”

  “I know that,” I said. “Well?”

  “The walls aren’t too thick and I’ve got sharp ears.”

  “And?”

  “They were talking together last night after I’d gone to bed.”

  “You mean you listened?” My heart began pounding against my ribs the way imprisoned cargo must pound against the ribs of a wrecked ship.

  “Oh, let’s be honest, Henry,” Myra said. “You sit around and listen to a lot of conversations that aren’t meant for your ears and you know it. So do I. Why shouldn’t we? We’re both shadows.”

  “I—I never mean to listen. I don’t do it intentionally. I—I just forget to go away,” I stammered.

  “Oh, of course!” She laughed her little dry laugh. “You’re here all the time. You’re quiet, unobtrusive. People forget Henry Porcher’s in the room. They forget you exist. And you don’t. You’re not as real as Ilsa’s piano or that old bamboo chaise longue or the marble horse eternally trying to drink out of the marble fountain. Why should people feel strained about talking in front of you?… It’s not quite the same with me. I have an unfortunately aggressive personality. It’s better to be nothing, like you. Far less torturing.”