The Book of Fantasy

by Jorge Luis Borges

  Of Mortimer she saw very little; farm and woods and trout-streams seemed to swallow him up from dawn till dusk. Once, following the direction she had seen him take in the morning, she came to an open space in a nut copse, further shut in by huge yew trees, in the centre of which stood a stone pedestal surmounted by a small bronze figure of a youthful Pan. It was a beautiful piece of workmanship, but her attention was chiefly held by the fact that a newly cut bunch of grapes had been placed as an offering at its feet. Grapes were none too plentiful at the manor house, and Sylvia snatched the bunch angrily from the pedestal. Contemptuous annoyance dominated her thoughts as she strolled slowly homeward, and then gave way to a sharp feeling of something that was very near fright; across a thick tangle of undergrowth a boy’s face was scowling at her, brown and beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes. It was a lonely pathway, all pathways round Yessney were lonely for the matter of that, and she sped forward without waiting to give a closer scrutiny to this sudden apparition. It was not till she had reached the house that she discovered that she had dropped the bunch of grapes in her flight.

  ‘I saw a youth in the wood today,’ she told Mortimer that evening, ‘brown-faced and rather handsome, but a scoundrel to look at. A gipsy lad, I suppose.’

  ‘A reasonable theory,’ said Mortimer, ‘only there aren’t any gipsies in these parts at present.’

  ‘Then who was he?’ asked Sylvia, and as Mortimer appeared to have no theory of his own, she passed on to recount her finding of the votive offering. ‘I suppose it was your doing,’ she observed; ‘it’s a harmless piece of lunacy, but people would think you dreadfully silly if they knew of it.’

  ‘Did you meddle with it in any way?’ asked Mortimer.

  ‘I—I threw the grapes away. It seemed so silly,’ said Sylvia, watching Mortimer’s impassive face for a sign of annoyance.

  ‘I don’t think you were wise to do that,’ he said reflectively. ‘I’ve heard it said that the Wood Gods are rather horrible to those who molest them.’

  ‘Horrible perhaps to those that believe in them, but you see I don’t,’ retorted Sylvia.

  ‘All the same,’ said Mortimer in his even, dispassionate tone, ‘I should avoid the woods and orchards if I were you, and give a wide berth to the horned beasts on the farm.’

  It was all nonsense, of course, but in that lonely wood-girt spot nonsense seemed able to rear a bastard brood of uneasiness.

  ‘Mortimer,’ said Sylvia suddenly, ‘I think we will go back to Town some time soon.’

  Her victory had not been so complete as she had supposed; it had carried her on to ground that she was already anxious to quit.

  ‘I don’t think you will ever go back to Town,’ said Mortimer. He seemed to be paraphrasing his mother’s prediction as to himself.

  Sylvia noted with dissatisfaction and some self-contempt that the course of her next afternoon’s ramble took her instinctively clear of the network of woods. As to the horned cattle, Mortimer’s warning was scarcely needed, for she had always regarded them as of doubtful neutrality at the best: her imagination unsexed the most matronly dairy cows and turned them into bulls liable to ‘see red’ at any moment. The ram who fed in the narrow paddock below the orchards she had adjudged, after ample and cautious probation, to be of docile temper; today, however, she decided to leave his docility untested, for the usually tranquil beast was roaming with every sign of restlessness from corner to corner of his meadow. A low, fitful piping, as of some reedy flute, was coming from the depth of a neighbouring copse, and there seemed to be some subtle connection between the animal’s restless pacing and the wild music from the wood. Sylvia turned her steps in an upward direction and climbed the heather-clad slopes that stretched in rolling shoulders high above Yessney. She had left the piping notes behind her, but across the wooded combes at her feet the wind brought her another kind of music, the straining bay of hounds in full chase. Yessney was just on the outskirts of the Devon-and-Somerset country, and the hunted deer sometimes came that way. Sylvia could presently see a dark body, breasting hill after hill, and sinking again and again out of sight as he crossed the combes, while behind him steadily swelled that relentless chorus, and she grew tense with the excited sympathy that one feels for any hunted thing in whose capture one is not directly interested. And at last he broke through the outermost line of oak scrub and fern and stood panting in the open, a fat September stag carrying a well-furnished head. His obvious course was to drop down to the brown pools of Undercombe, and thence make his way towards the red deer’s favoured sanctuary, the sea. To Sylvia’s surprise, however, he turned his head to the upland slope and came lumbering resolutely onward over the heather. ‘It will be dreadful,’ she thought, ‘the hounds will pull him down under my very eyes.’ But the music of the pack seemed to have died away for a moment, and in its place she heard again that wild piping, which rose now on this side, now on that, as though urging the failing stag to a final effort. Sylvia stood well aside from his path, half hidden in a thick growth of whortle bushes, and watched him swing stiffly upward, his flanks dark with sweat, the coarse hair on his neck showing light by contrast. The pipe music shrilled suddenly around her, seeming to come from the bushes at her very feet, and at the same moment the great beast slewed round and bore directly down upon her. In an instant her pity for the hunted animal was changed to wild terror at her own danger; the thick heather roots mocked her scrambling efforts at flight, and she looked frantically downward for a glimpse of oncoming hounds. The huge antler spikes were within a few yards of her, and in a flash of numbing fear she remembered Mortimer’s warning, to beware of horned beasts on the farm. And then with a quick throb of joy she saw that she was not alone; a human figure stood a few paces aside, knee-deep in the whortle bushes.

  ‘Drive it off!’ she shrieked. But the figure made no answering movement.

  The antlers drove straight at her breast, the acrid smell of the hunted animal was in her nostrils, but her eyes were filled with the horror of something she saw other than her oncoming death. And in her ears rang the echo of a boy’s laughter, golden and equivocal.

  Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched

  May Sinclair, English writer, born in Cheshire in 1865, died at Aylesbury in 1946. Author of The Divine Fire (1904), The Three Sisters (1914), and Mary Oliver (1919).

  There was nobody in the orchard. Harriott Leigh went out, carefully, through the iron gate into the field. She had made the latch slip into its notch without a sound.

  The path slanted widely up the field from the orchard gate to the site under the elder tree. George Waring waited for her there.

  Years afterwards, when she thought of George Waring she smelt the sweet, hot, wine-scent of the elder flowers. Years afterwards, when she smelt elder flowers she saw George Waring, with his beautiful, gentle face, like a poet’s or a musician’s, his black-blue eyes, and sleek, olive-brown hair. He was a naval lieutenant.

  Yesterday he had asked her to marry him and she had consented. But her father hadn’t, and she had come to tell him that and say good-bye before he left her. His ship was to sail the next day.

  He was eager and excited. He couldn’t believe that anything could stop their happiness, that anything he didn’t want to happen could happen.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘He’s a perfect beast, George. He won’t let us. He says we’re too young.’

  ‘I was twenty last August,’ he said, aggrieved.

  ‘And I shall be seventeen in September.’

  ‘And this is June. We’re quite old, really. How long does he mean us to wait?’

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘Three years before we can be engaged even—Why, we might be dead.’

  She put her arms round him to make him feel safe. They kissed; and the sweet, hot, wine-scent of the elder flowers mixed with their kisses. They stood, pressed close together, under the elder tree.

  Across the yellow fields of charlock they heard the village clock strike seven
. Up in the house a gong clanged.

  ‘Darling, I must go,’ she said.

  ‘Oh stay—Stay five minutes.’

  He pressed her close. It lasted five minutes, and five more. Then he was running fast down the road to the station, while Harriott went along the field-path, slowly, struggling with her tears.

  ‘He’ll be back in three months,’ she said. ‘I can live through three month.’

  But he never came back. There was something wrong with the engines of his ship, the Alexandra. Three weeks later she went down in the Mediterranean, and George with her.

  Harriott said she didn’t care how soon she died now. She was quite sure it would be soon, because she couldn’t live without him.

  Five years passed.

  The two lines of beech trees stretched on and on, the whole length of the Park, a broad green drive between. When you came to the middle they branched off right and left in the form of a cross, and at the end of the right arm there was a white stucco pavilion with pillars and a three-cornered pediment like a Greek temple. At the end of the left arm, the west entrance to the Park, double gates and a side door.

  Harriott, on her stone seat at the back of the pavilion, could see Stephen Philpotts the very minute he came through the side door.

  He had asked her to wait for him there. It was the place he always chose to read his poems aloud in. The poems were a pretext. She knew what he was going to say. And she knew what she would answer.

  There were elder bushes in flower at the back of the pavilion, and Harriott thought of George Waring. She told herself that George was nearer to her now than he could ever have been, living. If she married Stephen she would not be unfaithful, because she loved him with another part of herself. It was not as though Stephen were taking George’s place. She loved Stephen with her soul, in an unearthly way.

  But her body quivered like a stretched wire when the door opened and the young man came towards her down the drive under the beech trees.

  She loved him; she loved his slenderness, his darkness and sallow whiteness, his black eyes lighting up with the intellectual flame, the way his black hair swept back from his forehead, the way he walked, tiptoe, as if his feet were lifted with wings.

  He sat down beside her. She could see his hands tremble. She felt that her moment was coming; it had come.

  ‘I wanted to see you alone because there’s something I must say to you. I don’t quite know how to begin. . . .

  Her lips parted. She panted lightly.

  ‘You’ve heard me speak of Sybill Foster?’

  Her voice came stammering, ‘N-no, Stephen. Did you?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t mean to, till I knew it was all right. I only heard yesterday.’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘Why, that she’ll have me. Oh, Harriott—do you know what it’s like to be terribly happy?’

  She knew. She had known just now, the moment before he told her. She sat there, stone-cold and stiff, listening to his raptures, listening to her own voice saying she was glad.

  Ten years passed.

  Harriott Leigh sat waiting in the drawing-room of a small house in Maida Vale. She lived there ever since her father’s death two years before.

  She was restless. She kept on looking at the clock to see if it was four, the hour that Oscar Wade had appointed. She was not sure that he would some, after she had sent him away yesterday.

  She now asked herself, why, when she had sent him away yesterday, she had let him come to-day. Her motives were not altogether clear. If she really meant what she had said then, she oughtn’t to let him come to her again. Never again.

  She had shown him plainly what she meant. She could see herself, sitting very straight in her chair, uplifted by a passionate integrity, while he stood before her, hanging his head, ashamed and beaten; she could feel again the throb in her voice as she kept on saying that she couldn’t, she couldn’t; he must see that she couldn’t; that no, nothing would make her change her mind; she couldn’t forget he had a wife; that he must think of Muriel.

  To which he had answered savagely: ‘I needn’t. That’s all over. We only live together for the look of the thing.’

  And she, serenely, with great dignity: ‘And for the look of the thing, Oscar, we must leave off seeing each other. Please go.’

  ‘Do you mean it?’

  ‘Yes. We must never see each other again.’

  And he had gone then, ashamed and beaten.

  She could see him, squaring his broad shoulders to meet the blow. And she was sorry for him. She told herself she had been unnecessarily hard. Why shouldn’t they see each other again, now he understood where they must draw the line? Until yesterday the line had never been very clearly drawn. Today she meant to ask him to forget what he had said to her. Once it was forgotten, they could go on being friends as if nothing had happened.

  It was four o’clock. Half-past. Five. She had finished tea and given him up when, between the half-hour and six o’clock, he came.

  He came as he had come a dozen times, with his measured, deliberate, thoughtful tread, carrying himself well braced, with a sort of held-in arrogance, his great shoulders heaving. He was a man of about forty, broad and tall, lean-flanked and short-necked, his straight, handsome features showing small and even in the big square face and in the flush that swamped it. The close-clipped, reddish-brown moustache bristled forwards from the push-out upper lip. His small, flat eyes shone, reddish-brown, eager and animal.

  She liked to think of him when he was not there, but always at the first sight of him she felt a slight shock. Physically, he was very far from her admired ideal. So different from George Waring and Stephen Philpotts.

  He sat down, facing her.

  There was an embarrassed silence, broken by Oscar Wade.

  ‘Well, Harriott, you said I could come.’ He seemed to be throwing the responsibility on her.

  ‘So I suppose you’ve forgiven me,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes, Oscar, I’ve forgiven you.’

  He said she’d better show it by coming to dine with him somewhere that evening.

  She could give no reason to herself for going. She simply went.

  He took her to a restaurant in Soho. Oscar Wade dined well, even extravagantly, giving each dish its importance. She liked his extravagance. He had none of the mean virtues.

  It was over. His flushed, embarrassed silence told her what he was thinking. But when he had seen her home, he left her at her garden gate. He had thought better of it.

  She was not sure whether she were glad or sorry. She had had her moment of righteous exaltation and she had enjoyed it. But there was no joy in the weeks that followed it. She had given up Oscar Wade because she didn’t want him very much; and now she wanted him furiously, perversely, because she had given him up. Though he had no resemblance to her ideal, she couldn’t live without him.

  She dined with him again and again, till she knew Schnebler’s Restaurant by heart, the white panelled walls picked out with gold; the white pillars, and the curling gold fronds of their capitals; the thick crimson velvet cushions, that clung to her skirts; the glitter of silver and glass on the innumerable white circles of the tables. And the faces of the diners, red, white, pink, brown, grey and sallow, distorted and excited; the curled mouths that twisted as they ate; the convoluted electric bulbs pointing, pointing down at them, under the red, crinkled shades. All shimmering in a thick air that the red light stained as wine stains water.

  And Oscar’s face, flushed with his dinner. Always, when he leaned back from the table and brooded in silence she knew what he was thinking. His heavy eyelids would lift; she would find his eyes fixed on hers, wondering, considering.

  She knew now what the end would be. She thought of George Waring, and Stephen Philpotts, and of her life, cheated. She hadn’t chosen Oscar, she hadn’t really wanted him; but now he had forced himself on her she couldn’t afford to let him go. Since George died no man had loved her, no other man ever would. And s
he was sorry for him when she thought of him going from her, beaten and ashamed.

  She was certain, before he was, of the end. Only she didn’t know when and where and how it would come. That was what Oscar knew.

  It came at the close of one of their evenings when they had dined in a private sitting-room. He said he couldn’t stand the heat and noise of the public restaurant.

  She went before him, up a steep, red-carpeted stair to a white door on the second landing.

  From time to time they repeated the furtive, hidden adventure. Sometimes she met him in the room above Schnebler’s. Sometimes, when her maid was out, she received him at her house in Maida Vale. But that was dangerous, not to be risked too often.

  Oscar declared himself unspeakably happy. Harriott was not quite sure. This was love, the thing she had never had, that she had dreamed of, hungered and thirsted for; but now she had it she was not satisfied. Always she looked for something just beyond it, some mystic, heavenly rapture, always beginning to come, that never came. There was something about Oscar that repelled her. But because she had taken him for her lover, she couldn’t bring herself to admit that it was a certain coarseness. She looked another way and pretended it wasn’t there. To justify herself, she fixed her mind on his good qualities, his generosity, his strength, the way he had built up his engineering business. She made him take her over his works, and show her his great dynamos. She made him lend her the books he read. But always, when she tried to talk to him, he let her see that that wasn’t what she was there for.