Dragons in the Waters

by Madeleine L'engle

  Outside the open cabin door he heard voices; he had been aware of them for some time without focusing on them.

  “ … have nothing to hide.” That was Cousin Forsyth, speaking in a warm and intimate way Simon had not heard before.

  “Oh, do we not?” Simon recognized Dr. Wordsworth’s strong, slightly harsh voice.

  “Are you still dwelling on that, my dear? I had almost forgotten. No, I was not referring to that. But I was thinking that the fact that a young man should have fallen in love with a beautiful young girl is nothing that need be hidden. I am charmed that our cabins are adjoining.”

  “And I am not.” Dr. Wordsworth’s voice did not soften. “I waited because I wished to speak to you.”

  Simon cleared his throat, but evidently not loud enough to call attention to his presence, because Cousin Forsyth continued, “Lovely! I wish to speak to you, too.”

  “And I do not wish that. What I want to say to you is that I will not let you bring up the past. It is dead and buried and I want it to stay that way.”

  “Are you ashamed to claim acquaintance with me?”

  “Acquaintance, F.P.” She emphasized the initials. “Nothing more. And I would not speak of shame if I were you.”

  Simon felt acutely uncomfortable.

  Dr. Wordsworth’s voice shook with emotion. “I prayed that we might never meet again. I left Caracas and made a new life in a new world. I never should have come with Ruth—”

  “Come, come, Ines. It’s not so extraordinary that our paths should cross again. Can’t this be an opportunity for a new understanding between us?”

  She had difficulty keeping her voice low. “After what happened? I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Can’t I help you to forget? Can’t you? After all this time?”

  “I had forgotten, until I saw you. I will not allow you to presume on the past,” Dr. Wordsworth said with icy control. “We are mere acquaintances. No more.”

  Phair’s voice was tolerant. “How intense you still are, Inés. That has not changed. I hope that before the voyage is over, you may be willing to forget. Meanwhile, of course, I defer to your wishes, though I fail to understand.”

  “I gave up expecting you to understand anything a long time ago. The past is past. I’ll kill you if you rake it up. Have I made this clear?”

  Simon heard the door to the next cabin open. “Ines!” called Dr. Eisenstein. “I thought I heard your voice. Have you seen my green notebook?”

  Dr. Wordsworth sighed. “Dear Ruth, you’re always misplacing things. I’ll go look in the salon.”

  Simon, too, sighed, and looked out to sea. At the horizon the light was soft and rosy, pulsing into green above, and then deepening to a blue almost as dark as the sea. It occurred to him that if he went down to the deck below and walked around or climbed over various pieces of cargo, he could get to the very prow of the ship and pretend to be his ancestor, Quentin Phair, who was indirectly the cause of Simon’s being on the Orion now, sailing to Venezuela with the portrait of Bolivar.

  He huddled into Mynheer Boon’s heavy sweater and took courage. Quentin Phair may have been nineteen, a grownup, a man, when he left England to go to Venezuela to fight with Bolivar, but Simon had the same adventurous blood in his veins—he hoped. If Aunt Leonis had been with him, thirteen would have seemed a great deal older than it did when he was with Cousin Forsyth.

  The tall radiators were too hot to touch. It seemed improbable that in just a few days the sun would be warm and they might even need to turn on the cabin fan.

  “Hello, Simon.” It was Cousin Forsyth. “What have you been up to?”

  Simon got down from the bunk and stood politely before his cousin. “Looking at the ocean, sir.”

  “All settled in?”

  “Yes, sir, thank you, sir. If you don’t mind I think I’ll go out on deck.” He could not explain to Cousin Forsyth —he would not have needed to explain to Aunt Leonis —that he was going to take a journey into the past and pretend to be his own ancestor, Quentin Phair, setting out from England to the wild and glamorous new world of South America. Quentin was Simon’s hero and model, and it was far more splendid to make believe that he was Quentin Phair, the white knight in shining armor, than Simon Bolivar Quentin Phair Renier, who was only a thirteen-year-old boy.

  “Be careful,” Cousin Forsyth warned, “and be sure that you’re in time for dinner. Ship’s meals are served promptly.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll be on time.”

  He left the cabin and as he walked along the passage he heard the cabin door shut behind him with a firm click. It was difficult suddenly to accept Cousin Forsyth as a man with the complete fabric of a past. Until a few minutes ago Cousin Forsyth had been for Simon only a month old. Before a month ago Simon had never heard of this tall, grave, suave man with whom he was traveling. It seemed unlikely that this close-mouthed, middle-aged person had once been young and in love.

  He started down the steps, remembering that only a few hours ago Mynheer Boon had hustled him, blanketed and dripping, across the foredeck with a high sill over which he had tripped, past the crew’s quarters and up these same steps which Mynheer Boon had told him were properly called a ladder, though they looked like an ordinary staircase.

  From the crew’s quarters came sound and smell, both delightful: someone was playing a guitar; someone else was rendering the melody on a flute or recorder. Through a partly open curtain he saw two young sailors lounging on a double-decker bunk. A delicious scent of baking wafted toward him as he passed the galley, and he could see the chef, a young man with round spectacles and a high white hat, taking a tray of steaming pastry out of the oven. The loveliness of the music and the comfortableness of the cooking cheered him. He remembered to step high over the sill and went out on deck into the clean raw wind. Most of the doorways on the Orion had sills far higher than those in a house, but the sill to the foredeck was even higher than the others, to keep out the waves in rough weather.

  The boy stood on the gently rolling deck, breathing salt air, listening to the music coming sweetly from within the ship, punctuated by the sound of men’s voices; he picked his way through the cargo, pausing in the clear evening light to look at the writing on the wooden crates. If it was Dutch he had trouble even in guessing; if it was Spanish he could usually decipher it; there was a lot of equipment for oil wells and refineries. He guessed that most of the bags of grain and seed he had seen being loaded were now stashed away down in the hold.

  He moved through the narrow walkways left open between cargo, past the station wagon, two cars, and a large black hearse. He did not like the idea of having the hearse aboard. It was five years since the death of his parents, and he loved Aunt Leonis and was happy with her; nevertheless, the sleek dark hearse was a reminder of death, of grief, of the terrifying precariousness of all life. As he hurried past it he saw a rayed-out shattering in the windshield that looked as though it had been made by a bullet.

  Simon shivered, only partly from the blustery wind, and hurried on until he came to the prow of the ship. By standing on one of the bales he could look out to sea. The cold wind blew through the heavy sweater. He pulled the cap down over his eyes and crouched so that he was protected from the wind. If he tried hard enough he could visualize the Orion’s great yellow masts holding billowing sails which slapped in the wind, as Quentin Phair must have heard them …

  But he couldn’t. Usually he was able to move deep into a daydream, the intense daydream world of an only child, so real that he heard nothing of what was actually going on around him. But the fact that the Bolivar portrait no longer belonged to Aunt Leonis, that it would never belong to Simon, that it had been bought by Cousin Forsyth, made it difficult for him to plunge deep into his favorite daydream of being the brave and heroic Quentin.

  He felt lonely and lost. Poly and Charles were safe with their father; they had forgotten him. He closed his eyes tightly, forbidding tears, and withdrew inside himself, not onto a sailing vesse
l en route from England to Venezuela, but back to the known world of South Carolina and Aunt Leonis, back in time to the difficult decision to sell the portrait.

  This time his concentration was deep. The sounds of the M.S. Orion no longer reached him. He was reliving a heavy, humid August evening at Pharaoh, the small cottage on an acre and a half which was all that was left of the once great plantation. Simon and Aunt Leonis sat on the tiny porch to their house—“shack” would have been a more realistic word, though it had once been a solid cottage—fanning themselves in slow, rhythmic movements with palm-leaf fans, rocking in quiet and companionable silence. Boz, the ancient pointer, snored contentedly at their feet. It was not yet dark, and Simon could see an expression of grief move across the old woman’s face.

  As though his awareness had been a blow, she put her hand up to her cheek. “Night soon,” she said quietly. “There’ll be a breeze later.”

  “Aunt Leonis, couldn’t I get a job?”

  “You’re too young.”

  “But, ma’am, I could work as a field hand or something.”

  “No, Simon. Education is a tradition in our family, and I am going to see to it that you have yours.”

  “With you for a teacher, don’t you think I’m educated enough?”

  “No one is educated enough,” Aunt Leonis said. “I am still learning. When I stop learning, you will bury me.”

  “That will be never, then.”

  “I’m an old woman, Simon, and ready to meet my Maker. I look forward to it with great anticipation. But I would prefer to be certain that you have mastered Latin, which you are not being taught at school. And next week I intend to start you on Spanish, a language I have forgotten, and which both of us surely should know.”

  Simon scowled. “I’m not apt to go to Spain.”

  “You have an ancestor who helped liberate the South American continent.”

  “And I’m not likely to go to South America.”

  “I realize that you are insular, child, but things will change, and meanwhile I will not permit you to be lazy.”

  “No, ma’am. But you’ve already taught me French.”

  “Next week we will start Spanish. I still have my old books.”

  “Buenas noches, senorita,” Simon said. “¿Cómo está?”

  “That is hardly adequate, and you are speaking with a French accent. And you are being ugly. Is something wrong?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  They lapsed into silence, and darkness fell with the abruptness of the subtropics. Around them a light wind emerged from nowhere and stirred the Spanish moss in the live oaks. Aunt Leonis’s fan moved more and more slowly until it stopped and rested lightly on the faded black of her dress. “Simon, I will have to sell the Bolivar portrait.”

  “But, ma’am, you can’t! It’s your most treasured thing.” He was shocked and incredulous.

  “It is only a thing, my son, and we must not be bound by material things.”

  “But, Aunt Leonis—”

  “You think that I would let you go undernourished in order to hold on to some oil paint on an old, already decaying piece of wood?”

  “Oh, Aunt Leonis, ma’am, let me get a job, please.”

  “Simon, you are not yet thirteen, and I made a promise to your parents.”

  “They wouldn’t have wanted you to sell the portrait.”

  “When one nears a century, one surely should have learned not to depend on that which will rust or decay. You are the only person left in my life who has not crossed to the other side of time. I have survived much death, the loss of my only brother, of Pharaoh, of all the other things I used to believe made up the woman who is Leonis Phair. But we are not our possessions. That is one thing I have discovered. I am not sorry that I will be leaving you with no material goods. But I must leave you with enough education so that you will be able to choose the manner in which you will earn your living, and you are not getting that from the local school, particularly if you continue in your wish to be a doctor. You must be able to pass examinations and earn scholarships. I have to supplement your education. You are a good student, Simon.”

  “Yes, ma’am, but you’re easy to learn from. You make it all fun.”

  Miss Leonis picked up her fan. “I will put a notice about the portrait in the Charleston papers and in The New York Times. I am not rushing into this unadvisedly. We have enough money to get us frugally through one more year, and by then we should have found an appropriate buyer.” The summer dark was so thick that Simon could no longer see the old lady, but he reached over and took her hand in his. Her hand felt as thin and warm and dry as an old leaf. He knew full well that if she said they would start learning Spanish next week, start they would. He understood with a corner of his mind that Aunt Leonis was an extraordinary old lady, but she had always been part of his environment; now she was home, the rock on which he stood, and he could not look without flinching on another change of life which would be even more radical than the change that followed his parents’ death. Without Aunt Leonis, where would he go? Who would he be?

  As though following his thoughts, she said, “Quentin Phair’s journals, his letters to Niniane, and to his mother in England, are in my jewel box. You might be able to sell them one day. When you are twenty-one they will be yours to read, even in the unlikely event that I am still alive, and who knows what you will learn? They are all that you will find in the box, but they will stand you in good stead. I have honored Quentin Phair’s written request not to read letters or journals for six generations, which I consider a wise precaution. Even the most innocent of journals, if they are honest, contain pages which could hurt other people. It will be interesting for you to learn whether you are like him in spiritual as well as physical characteristics.”

  Simon demurred, “I’d rather read them with you.”

  “No. My memory stretches back a long way. There may be things in journals or letters which I’d rather not know.”

  Each month Aunt Leonis put the notice about the portrait in the papers. “We will not sell it to just anybody. It must be somebody who will appreciate and honor it.”

  On a cold evening in January, Cousin Forsyth Phair appeared.

  Simon and Aunt Leonis were indoors, keeping warm by a lightwood fire. The resin-saturated wood burned so brightly that Simon was studying by it. He had finished his regular schoolwork and was doing the Spanish lesson Aunt Leonis had prepared for him. Together they could speak slowly but with moderate fluency, although she still deplored his French accent.

  A knock on the door took them both by surprise. Aunt Leonis reached for her cane, and Boz growled deep in his throat. Simon went to the door.

  They had learned to do without electricity, so he saw the man at the door only in the glow of the fire. Aunt Leonis rose rheumatically to her feet and turned on a lamp by the round table which served them as desk and dining table.

  “Good evening,” the man said. “Is Miss Leonis Phair in?”

  “Yes, sir. Who is it, please?”

  The man moved past Simon into the circle of lamplight. He was tall and thin and dark and elegant, despite stooped shoulders; his dark hair was greying at the temples and about the ears, and he held a dark hat in his gloved hands. “Miss Leonis Phair?”

  She stood facing him, holding her cane as though it were a weapon. “Who are you, sir?”

  “I am your cousin, Forsyth Phair. I saw your notice about the Bolivar portrait in The New York Times, and I have come to inquire about it.”

  “Hey, Simon!” It was Poly’s voice.

  Simon stood up, out of the protection of the lee of the ship. “Here!”

  Poly and Charles were halfway across the foredeck and came hurrying toward him. Charles said, “We’ve been calling and calling.”

  “I didn’t hear you. I’m sorry.”

  Poly asked, “What are you, deaf or something?”

  “I guess I was concentrating.”

  Charles clambered over a bale and jumpe
d to where Simon was standing in the Orion’s prow. “What a great place, Simon! How did you find it?”

  “I came looking for a private place. Cousin Forsyth was in the cabin, and I thought people would be coming into the salon.”

  Poly put her hands on her slender hips and looked around. “You’ve found it, all right. We’d better check with the captain for protocol’s sake, but this is it, Simon, this is absolutely it. I was wondering where we could go to escape the grownups. You’re marvelous.”

  Simon felt himself flush with pleasure. “It’s a little cold here unless you crouch down.”

  “It won’t be cold in a couple of days. Hey, did you see that hearse with a bullet hole in the windshield?”

  Simon spoke shortly. “Yes.”

  “Who would want to be driven in a hearse with a bullet hole in the windshield?”

  “Who would want to be driven in a hearse, period?” Charles countered.

  Simon did not laugh. Instead, he gave a small, involuntary shudder.

  “Someone walk over your grave?” Poly asked.

  Simon did not answer. He looked out at the foam breaking whitely about the prow.

  Charles stuck his elbow into Poly’s ribs, and she said quickly, “It’s cold out here tonight, all right. Let’s go in, Simon. I’m starved. How about you?”

  “I’m pretty hungry, I guess.”

  “Charles and I looked in the galley and spoke to the cook. Dinner is going to be good. He’s a super cook. I don’t speak much Dutch, but enough to find out what we’re eating. Come on.”

  “Poly thinks she speaks every language in the world,” Charles said.

  “I like languages!”

  “Just stop bragging about them. Pride goeth before you know what.”

  Simon followed the amicably arguing brother and sister. As they approached the doorway they met the captain, dressed in a dark serge winter uniform, who greeted the children with paternal friendliness.