Shortest Day

by Jane Langton

  It wasn’t the people in motion who interested Henshaw. It was the still ones, the unmoving ones, the people sitting on the sidewalk or leaning against the iron fence beside the cemetery, or sitting on wooden benches smoking cigarettes.

  To Henshaw they looked wonderful. They glowed with an adorable simplicity. No multiplying heaps of boxes were piled up beside them. They did not own half a million separate and individual objects. They were alone, they were themselves, they were nothing but themselves.

  Twice he walked past a grim-looking old man with the stub of a cigarette between forefinger and thumb. He walked past him a third time, staring at him. The man avoided his gaze, lost in his own emptiness, his own lack of boxes, his pure isolation from tens of thousands of miscellaneous possessions.

  Henshaw did not speak to him. Walking past for the fourth time, he slowed his steps, turned to the fence, walked up to it, turned his back to it, and leaned his Harris tweed coat against it.

  Then—very slowly—he slid down until he was sitting on the sidewalk. It was amazingly comfortable. Henshaw pulled at his pants, hunched up his legs, and slumped forward.

  The man beside him did not look up.

  PART EIGHT

  THE LUCK

  Be there loaf in your locker

  and sheep in your fold,

  A fire on the hearth

  and good luck in your lot,

  Money in your pocket

  and a pudding in the pot.

  Saint George and the Dragon

  CHAPTER 45

  Bells in the cold tower, ’midst the snow of winter,

  Sound out the Spring song,

  That we may remember

  Bells in the cold tower, after the long snowing

  Come months of growing.

  Traditional Hungarian carol

  The sun was low in the sky, moving toward the horizon in a long shallow arc. Slanting rays touched the old tombstones in the ancient churchyard near Harvard Square, grazed the thin hair on Henshaw’s head, skipped across Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Yard, struck the gold pennant on the steeple of Memorial Church, and glowed on the red-tile roof of Sever Hall.

  It was four o’clock. The bell in the steeple of Memorial Church clanged for sixty seconds to mark the hour. Within the hundred buildings scattered around the Yard and along Oxford Street and Kirkland, Francis Avenue and Divinity, scores of men and women labored, free for the moment from the task of lecturing to classrooms full of students. In a hundred scholarly disciplines they bowed over books or crouched in front of computer monitors, exploring their individual jeweled caves.

  On the eighth floor of the Science Center, Arlo Field gazed at the solar image cast by the spectrohelioscope on the observing table. In the last week the sun had moved away from Supernova 1995K, and therefore there was no bright speck beside it. Astronomers everywhere were monitoring from hour to hour the extraordinary changes in the optical and radio emissions of Field’s Star, but here in Arlo’s teaching lab there was only the sun, this middle-range ordinary star, dependable and stable, replacing the lost energy of its shining by nuclear fusion deep within its core. It was not about to blow up.

  The tremendous heat of the interior was not visible in this light, nor the spicules and flares thrown up from gigantic electromagnetic storms. It was strange, thought Arlo, how innocent the sun looked when you saw it in the sky, that friendly and necessary companion glowing through the branches of trees, sending down its basking heat—and how alarming it was really, enlarged in an X-ray image with all the wild splendor of its coronal holes.

  Arlo shrugged himself into his coat and went out on the terrace. As usual, the universe expanded around him in all directions. Most of it was invisible at the moment, but it was there all the same. His childhood cosmos was still part of it, the far-flung planets rolling around the sun, the Milky Way arching overhead, and the Orion nebula flinging out its veils of gauze. Now his vision stretched to the vast cluster of galaxies within the constellation Hydra, to quasars emitting more energy than the Milky Way, to black holes warping space and time, to the fringe of galaxies on the edges of the perceivable universe.

  Looking over the railing on the south side of the terrace, he could see the overpass with its half-dismantled campsite, and a number of little figures pulling down the remaining tents and walking away, their problems still unsolved. A woman in a purple hat was doing something strange, but he couldn’t see what it was.

  From here they all looked very small. The earth itself was small, with its squirming surface of organic life, all those struggling creatures taking themselves so seriously, as if it mattered what happened on this small piece of rock wobbling around a minor star so undistinguished that it was right in the middle of the main stellar sequence. These hectic lives, these squabbling nations, these tiny destinies working themselves out on this microscopic planet, how could they matter in a universe so complex and so vast? Once again he asked himself which was the more real, the more important.

  Arlo watched one of the homeless women trying to push a grocery cart over the rough snow, and told himself that misery was important. Surely it was at least as important as the explosion of Supernova 1995K; in fact, it stank to high heaven. Then he looked east in the direction of Maple Avenue, where he had just left Sarah sleeping, drowsy and smiling, content with the drumming inside her, the lively motions of the child that was to be born in April. Love too was important, as important as the black hole in Cygnus X-l or the Cepheid variables in the Magellanic Clouds.

  Down on the overpass, Dr. Box ignored the departing residents of Harvard Towers and the people passing between the Science Center and the Yard. She had an agenda of her own. She was delaying the sunset, holding it back by a method employed by the wizards of New Caledonia. Scraping a few inches of the walk clear of snow with her shoe, she put down a bundle of well-chosen charms, struck a match, and set the bundle on fire. As a wisp of smoke rose into the cold air, she invoked her ancestors in Cornish, New Hampshire, and addressed the western horizon. “Sun! I do this mat you may be burning hot and eat up all the clouds in the sky.”

  From his high vantage point at the railing of the balcony on the eighth floor of the Science Center, Arlo had forgotten the woman in the purple hat. He was watching the winter sun go down over the Charles River and Harvard Stadium and the cities of Allston and Brighton. It was taking too long. Feeling the cold, he went inside and closed the door. He could keep track of the sunset on the observation table. There now, at last the image was flattening and trembling at the edges. As he watched, it grew faint and fainter, then darkened and disappeared.

  Arlo looked at his wristwatch and smiled. It must be running a little fast. It said four-twenty-four, as though the sun were setting even later than the almanac’s prediction. But of course his watch was wrong in the right direction. The lengthening of the hours of sunlight was inexorable. Once again the Northern Hemisphere had passed through the shortest day. The earth was roving closer and closer to the vernal equinox, spinning and turning without end.

  Spring would come. There was no way of stopping it. The dance would go on.

  Our play is done; we must be gone.

  We stay no longer here.

  We wish you all, both great and small,

  A happy, bright New Year!

  Saint George and the Dragon

  AFTERWORD

  The performance of the Revels in this work of fiction is modeled after the Christmas Revels celebrated each year at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The gifted creators of that annual festival of course know a different and deeper Revels, and so do the hundreds of volunteer participants. My outsider’s interpretation is not the fault of the generous people who answered my questions.

  A principal sourcebook for this story was John Langstaff’s Saint George and the Dragon: A Mummer’s Play. Another was The Christmas Revels Songbook, compiled by Nancy and John Langstaff. Many carol verses were taken from The Oxford Book of Carols.

  With he
r kind permission the title of this book comes from Susan Cooper’s poem, “The Shortest Day.” I have also used passages from her dramatized version of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” as well as her words for the song about the donkey, “Orientis Partibus,” and the carol “Sing We Noël.”

  A number of the chapter epigraphs are taken from Alex Helm’s book, The English Mummers’ Play, which gives verbatim many similar local versions of a few traditional original types.

  Astronomer Alan Hirshfeld of the University of Massachusetts introduced me to the mysteries of the analemma, and figured out the coordinates of the supernova. I had friendly help, too, from Harvard astronomers Robert Kirshner, Josh Grindlay, and Robert Noyes.

  Tremendous thanks are due also to the Reverend Stewart Guernsey, that witty and compassionate friend of the homeless.

  The view given here of Memorial Hall is the last glimpse of an old friend. The interior is currently being rehabilitated to serve Harvard students in new ways. In an earlier novel I high-handedly restored the pyramidal roof of the tower, which had been destroyed by fire in 1956. The actual living tower has remained ever since uncrowned, unpinnacled, and unclocked, a sad stump rising on the Cambridge horizon. There are rumors—whispered, fading, whispered again—that the tall summit is to rise once more, with or without its fabled clocks and pinnacles.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Homer Kelly Mysteries

  CHAPTER 1

  My Dear Hooker,

  The hawks have behaved like gentlemen, and have cast up pellets with lots of seeds in them; and I have just had a parcel of partridge’s feet well caked with mud!!! Adios,

  Your insane and perverse friend,

  C. Darwin

  (1856)

  When Homer and Mary Kelly came to Oxford that October, they were not the only new arrivals.

  As their bus from the airport began nosing through the suburbs, a swarm of goldfinches landed on the oak trees in the Botanic Gardens, pausing on the way to their winter quarters in Cornwall. Chattering and calling, they rose from one tree, came down on another, and fluttered up again to change places.

  On the Cherwell, beyond the University Parks, a flock of migrating swans settled on the water, remembering from last year the bridge where people threw down torn scraps of lettuce and kernels of cracked corn.

  And beside the ditch next to the car-rental company on the Botley Road a small cluster of wigeon rested on their flight from the north. One of the females stood on the tangled bank and pecked furiously at the feathers on her back. Wading into the water, she loosened from her feet the mud of the River Spey. The mud settled at once to the bottom of the creek, but the seeds embedded in it rose to the surface and floated to the shore.

  They were peculiar seeds, new to the county of Oxfordshire. They lay on the damp ground for only a few hours.

  Then a succession of migrating mallards trampled them into the soil, and at once the foreign seeds made themselves at home.

  Homer and Mary Kelly knew nothing about these arrivals. They saw only the other Americans on the bus from Gatwick. Most were reference librarians heading for a conference in the Oxford University Museum.

  Mary introduced herself to the woman across the aisle. She was surprised to learn about the conference in the museum. “That’s where my husband is going to be lecturing. What kind of conference is it?”

  The librarian fished in her pocketbook and showed Mary a pamphlet, New Directions in Information Storage.

  “Oh, then you won’t be listening to Homer,” said Mary. “He doesn’t know anything about information storage. He’ll be tutoring a few students, and he has to give a lot of lectures on American literature.”

  The librarian leaned across the aisle and stared past Mary at Homer, who was slumped against the window fast asleep. “You mean, you’re Mr. and Mrs. Homer Kelly? Like your husband’s a famous detective?”

  “Oh, well, it’s true he was a detective once, but not anymore. He’s just a teacher now. I mean, we both teach. Homer has a lectureship for this term from one of the Oxford colleges. It’s just Homer, unfortunately. They didn’t offer one to me.”

  “How sexist!” said the librarian. “You two teach at Harvard, right? And now at Oxford? How distinguished!”

  Mary smiled. If the librarian knew the truth about teaching at Harvard, she wouldn’t be so impressed. It was like teaching anywhere. There were good students and bad students, academic rivalries, malicious gossip, the constant scrabbling up of the next day’s lecture, the endless grading of papers and exams, and faculty meetings so boring they were like penances for abominable crimes.

  “The golden towers of Oxford,” said the librarian sentimentally, looking out the window as they crossed Magdalen Bridge. “The dreaming spires.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Mary, gazing up at the tower of Magdalen, rising beside them on the right.

  There were no dreaming spires at the Gloucester Green bus station, and no green. It was a busy square with buses pulling in and out and passengers getting on and off.

  Homer roused himself sleepily and followed Mary and the librarians down off the bus. “What day is this anyway?” he said, smoothing down his wild hair. “Wednesday or Thursday?”

  “Wednesday,” said Mary cheerfully. “We’re just in time for the reception.”

  “Reception? My God, what reception?”

  “The reception at the museum. You remember, Homer, Dr. Jamison invited us.”

  “But everybody else will be bug experts and mineralogists, people of that ilk.” Homer groaned. “All I want to do is go to bed. I didn’t get a wink of sleep on that goddamned plane.”

  “Buck up, Homer.” Mary prodded his arm. “Look, the taxis are right out of an old movie.”

  They dragged their baggage across the brick pavement, and Mary opened the back door of a neat black car with high rounded curves.

  “Sorry, love,” said the driver, “take the one up front.”

  “Ah,” mumbled Homer, grinning. “British fair play. There’s always a queue.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “You are old, Father William,” the young man said,

  And your hair has become very white;

  And yet you incessantly stand on your head—

  Do you think, at your age, it is right?

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Mark Soffit was a student of zoology, but he failed to notice the rare black squirrel dodging out of his way as he approached the Oxford University Museum. Nor did he look up to see the heavy flapping of a pair of gray lag geese racing over the roof on their way to the River Cherwell. His thoughts were fixed on the object of his journey from the United States.

  The great William Dubchick would surely be present at this reception. Mark was eager to meet him. The whole thrust of his application for a Rhodes scholarship had centered on Dubchick. The opportunity to study with the eminent Oxford zoologist William Dubchick will advance my investigation of the work of Charles Darwin.

  In his application he had not admitted that Dubchick had never heard of him. Nor did he explain that his concentration on Darwin would be an attack on that old nineteenth-century fossil. In any case, the application had worked, and here he was, a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford, about to meet the greatest naturalist in the world.

  At the door to the museum Mark looked down at himself. Back in Arizona he had bought an expensive tweed jacket, assuming it was the right uniform for an Oxford man. The jacket was crisp and bristling with woolly fibers. But when he opened the door and saw the crowd in the courtyard, there wasn’t a tweed jacket in sight. Most of the younger people standing around with glasses in their hands were wearing jeans and T-shirts.

  Blanching, Mark backed up, tore off his jacket, and dumped it over an umbrella stand. He wrestled with his tie, stuffed it in the pocket of the jacket, and undid the top button of his shirt.

  Then, gazing at the men and women talking and laughing among the animal skeletons and
glass cases, he started forward, wondering which was the great Dubchick.

  God, who was this? An old man was walking toward him, smiling and extending his hand. He had a full white beard and a long fringe of untidy white hair. Mark placed him instantly as one of those embarrassing outcasts who hang around the edges of a party. Turning his back on the outstretched hand, he grinned at nobody, waved hugely, and walked into the courtyard.

  And there his jittering self-doubt blinded him. He did not look up at the high pyramidal roof of glass, he did not see the towering cast-iron columns crowned with pond lilies and pineapples. He ignored the lofty grinning skeleton of the iguanodon, he missed the golden statues of scientists surrounding the courtyard, even though he ran smack into the pedestal of Roger Bacon. Does it ever occur to you, said Bacon, that the mind is illuminated by divine truth?

  No such thought had ever occurred to Mark, who had barked his shin painfully. Shit.

  He had to get in somehow. Mark studied the little groups of people standing among the bones and picked out a likely trio, a big sleepy-looking guy with frowsy hair, a clever-looking tall woman, and a plump balding man in a business suit.

  “Hello,” said the woman, moving aside to let him in. “I’m Mary Kelly. This is my husband, Homer. Do you know Dr. Jamison, the director of the museum?”

  Suddenly the entire courtyard with all its bones and glass cases and stone statues and living people was transfigured by the sun. The lofty space was shot with arcs and shafts of light. There was a pervasive sound, too, as dazzling as the light, a murmuration of voices. Somehow it was more than the multiplication of the jabbering conviviality at the reception. The sum of all the talk and rustling movement was a pleasantly mysterious humming, not quite corporeal, not quite the simple product of sound waves ricocheting from stone and glass and bone.