It was six months without playing after that, since her arm had broken at the wrist. The wrist healed well enough, but there was no mending the harp; and by then the landowner of Torm had asked her if she would marry him, and she had said yes. Sometimes she wondered why she had said yes, having never thought much of marriage before, but if she looked steadily into her own mind she saw the reason why. She saw Torm on the road in the sunlight kneeling by the broken harp, his face all blood and dust, and he was weeping. When she looked at that she saw that the time for rambling and roving was over and gone. One day is the day for moving on, and overnight, the next day, there is no more good in moving on, because you have come where you were going to.
Gwilan brought to the marriage a gold piece, which had been the prize last year at Four Valleys music day; she had sewn it to her bodice as a brooch, because where on earth could you spend a gold piece. She also had two silver pieces, five coppers, and a good winter cloak. Torm contributed house and household, fields and forests, four tenant farmers even poorer than himself, twenty hens, five cows, and forty sheep.
They married in the old way, by themselves, over the spring where the stream began, and came back and told the household. Torm had never suggested a wedding, with singing and harp-playing, never a word of all that. He was a man you could trust, Torm was.
What began in pain, in tears, was never free from the fear of pain. The two of them were gentle to each other. Not that they lived together thirty years without some quarrelling. Two rocks sitting side by side would get sick of each other in thirty years, and who knows what they say now and then when nobody is listening. But if people trust each other they can grumble, and a good bit of grumbling takes the fuel from wrath. Their quarrels went up and burnt out like bits of paper, leaving nothing but a feather of ash, a laugh in bed in the dark. Torm’s land never gave more than enough, and there was no money saved. But it was a good house, and the sunlight was sweet on those high stony fields. There were two sons, who grew up into cheerful sensible men. One had a taste for roving, and the other was a farmer born; but neither had any gift of music.
Gwilan never spoke of wanting another harp. But about the time her wrist was healed, old Uliad had a travelling musician bring her one on loan; when he had an offer to buy it at its worth, he sent for it back again. At that time Torm would have it that there was money from selling three good heifers to the landowner of Comin High Farm, and the money should buy a harp, which it did. A year or two later an old friend, a flute player still on his travels and rambles, brought her a harp from the South as a present. The three-heifers harp was a common instrument, plain and heavy; the Southern harp was delicately carved and gilt, but cranky to tune and thin of voice. Gwilan could draw sweetness from the one and strength from the other. When she picked up a harp, or spoke to a child, it obeyed her.
She played at all festivities and funerals in the neighborhood, and with the musician’s fees she bought good strings; not Uliad’s strings, though, for Uliad was in his grave before her second child was born. If there was a music day nearby she went to it with Torm. She would not play in the competitions, not for fear of losing, but because she was not a harper now, and if they did not know it, she did. So they had her judge the competitions, which she did well and mercilessly. Often in the early years musicians would stop by on their travels and stay two or three nights at Torm; with them she would play the Hunts of Orioth, the Dances of Cail, the difficult and learned music of the North, and learn from them the new songs. Even in winter evenings there was music in the house of Torm: she playing the harp—usually the three-heifers one, sometimes the fretful Southerner—and Torm’s good tenor voice, and the boys singing, first in sweet treble, later on in husky unreliable baritone; and one of the farm’s men was a lively fiddler; and the shepherd Keth, when he was there, played on the pipes, though he never could tune them to anyone else’s note. “It’s our own music day tonight,” Gwilan would say. “Put another log on the fire, Torm, and sing ‘The Green Leaves’ with me, and the boys will take the descant.”
Her wrist that had been broken grew a little stiff as the years went on; then the arthritis came into her hands. The work she did in house and farm was not easy work. But then who, looking at a hand, would say it was made to do easy work? You can see from the look of it that it is meant to do difficult things, that is is the noble, willing servant of the heart and mind. But the best servants get clumsy as the years go on. Gwilan could still play the harp, but not as well as she had played, and she did not much like half measures. So the two harps hung on the wall, though she kept them tuned. About that time the younger son went wandering off to see what things looked like in the North, and the elder married and brought his bride to Torm. Old Keth was found dead up on the mountain in the spring rain, his dog crouched silent by him and the sheep nearby. And the drouth came, and the good year, and the poor year, and there was food to eat and to be cooked and clothes to wear and to be washed, poor year or good year. In the depth of a winter Torm took ill. He went from a cough to a high fever to quietness, and died while Gwilan sat beside him.
Thirty years, how can you say how long that is, and yet no longer than the saying of it: thirty years. How can you say how heavy the weight of thirty years is, and yet you can hold all of them together in your hand lighter than a bit of ash, briefer than a laugh in the dark. The thirty years began in pain; they passed in peace, contentment. But they did not end there. They ended where they began.
Gwilan got up from her chair and went into the hearth room. The rest of the household were asleep. In the light of her candle she saw the two harps hung against the wall, the three-heifers harp and the gilded Southern harp, the dull music and the false music. She thought, “I’ll take them down at last and smash them on the hearthstone, crush them till they’re only bits of wood and tangles of wire, like my harp.” But she did not. She could not play them at all any more, her hands were far too stiff. It is silly to smash an instrument you cannot even play.
“There is no instrument left that I can play,” Gwilan thought, and the thought hung in her mind for a while like a long chord, till she knew the notes that made it. “I thought my harp was myself. But it was not. It was destroyed, I was not. I thought Torm’s wife was myself, but she was not. He is dead, I am not. I have nothing left at all now but myself. The wind blows from the valley, and there’s a voice on the wind, a bit of a tune. Then the wind falls, or changes. The work has to be done, and we did the work. It’s their turn now for that, the children. There’s nothing left for me to do but sing. I never could sing. But you play the instrument you have.” So she stood by the cold hearth and sang the melody of Orioth’s Lament. The people of the household wakened in their beds and heard her singing, all but Torm; but he knew that tune already. The untuned strings of the harps hung on the wall wakened and answered softly, voice to voice, like eyes that shine among the leaves when the wind is blowing.
Malheur County
“Edward,” said his mother-in-law, “face the facts. You can’t withdraw from your life. People aren’t going to let you. You’re too useful, too likable, too good-looking even, though you don’t seem to be aware of it.” She paused for breath, then said in a colder voice, “I used to wonder if Mary was really aware of it.”
He sat silent across the hearth from her, huddled up over his long arms and legs.
“You can’t withdraw from something you haven’t got into! Oh, I’m sorry,” she said savagely.
He smiled, but looked a little punch-drunk.
“The Navajo Indians,” she said, “I think, don’t let mothers-in-law and sons-in-law speak to one another. It’s tabu. A very sensible arrangement. We’re so damned sophisticated, no tabus, no defenses.” She fell grimly silent, a grey-haired, full-figured woman in her sixties sitting erect in an armchair in the firelight. She always sat erect. The cigarette in her left hand and whiskey glass in her right appeared as elements of her rugged femininity. She came from eastern Oregon, from Malheur Count
y, the last, barren frontier, from a decent feckless family that had left a century of failed farms, male suicides, and infant graves across the land from Ohio to the Coast, pushing always unprofitably westward.
“Of course she knew that you were good-looking,” she went on thoughtfully, “she was proud of it. But I never saw that she got much pleasure out of it. Not as you took pleasure in her, real joy.”
He was only twenty-seven. Leaning forward to toss her cigarette into the fire Harriet Avanti saw, through her shrewdly rambling thoughts and the press of various emotions, his face; and the rest dropped clear away. “I shouldn’t think aloud,” she said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“You don’t. You can’t.” He turned his kind, somber young face to her, reassuring.
“But I do. You’re sensitive, and I’m not. You’re guilt-ridden, and I don’t even know what guilt is.”
But again she had touched a nerve; he frowned, and spoke: “No, I’m not guilt-ridden, Harriet. It wasn’t my fault. It’s not my fault that I survive. Only I don’t see the point.”
“The point!” She sat erect, moveless. “There is no point.”
Staring at the fire he whispered, “I know.”
They were silent a good while. Harriet thought of her daughter Mary, the beautiful dissatisfied child. “This is Edward, Mother.” And the young man watching the girl with incredulous, delighted passion—oh, it had been he, alone, who had roused Harriet from her long drab grief after her husband’s death, who had shown her once again, from the flat plain and barren land, the incredibly high peaks. He had reminded her that after all there is more in life than endurance. For unfortunately, as she knew, endurance was her native style. She would have endured right through life, steady and heavy as a rock, if she hadn’t had the luck to meet and marry John Avanti, who taught her joy. He dead, she had fallen back at once upon endurance, and never would have known delight again if her daughter had not marched in one night with the tall radiant boy: “This is Edward, Mother.”
“I don’t think you do know,” she said abruptly. “Pointlessness isn’t your line. It’s mine. I was intended to lead a pointless life, like my parents and my brothers. By some mistake I got into a highly rewarding life with a point to it. Just the sort of life you were intended for. And then you, of all people, meet up with this, with the drunk on the highway, with waste and senselessness, when you’re only twenty-five. Another mistake, no doubt. But it’s not essential, Edward. Mary’s death is not going to be the essential event in your life. To accept it as essential, to accept pointlessness, would be—for you—an act of cowardice.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But the fact is, Harriet, that I, lately, that I seem to have about reached my limit.”
She was frightened by his anguish, diffident as it was. She did not know much about anguish, only about misery, the endurable unending pain not the destroying one. She tried now to back away from the point of agony, saying, “Well, a limit’s always a beginning...” What she feared was his crying. Twice here in this room with her he had broken down and wept, once when he was first home from hospital after the wreck, then again months later. She dreaded his tears, the coping with pain at second hand. It shattered her to pity as to be pitied. When he got up suddenly from the low hearth seat she sat tense. But he said only, “I’d like another shot. You?” He took her glass and went off to the kitchen. As he went the clock behind her on the mantel struck twelve solemnly, taking a long time about it; and now it was November not October. They had lived another month. Here she sat by the fire, there was Edward opening cupboards in the kitchen, both of them warm and full of good bourbon; and then there was Mary, eighteen months dead. Was it because she was a hard woman that she had not really wept for her child’s death? If she had died before John, I would have cried for her, Harriet thought.
Edward returned, sat down, stretched out his legs. “I have tried,” he said with such serious equanimity that she lost all fear of his breaking down and waited to find out what he meant. He was candid but inarticulate, and his mind, trained to the rigors of chemistry, pursued logic into places where it does not exist. “I’ve honestly tried,” he repeated, lapsed into silence, crossed his ankles, drank thoughtfully, and at last went on, “Technician in the med-ical department. Elinor Schneider. Fairly good-looking, blond, very intelligent. She’s around my age.” (Older, thought Harriet.) “Well, so...” Edward paused, raised his glass in self-mocking salute. “I tried.”
“To?”
“To get interested.”
Poor Elinor Schneider, lying awake now perhaps seeing in the dry darkness his face. Pain is self-centered. Harriet sighed a little. “I suppose a laboratory is the place for an experiment...”
“Anyway, it was an effort to reconnect, whatever you want to call it. It didn’t work. I can’t do it. I don’t want to do it. I know you think me weak.”
“You? I certainly don’t. And if I did, what then? You know yourself best.”
“No, I don’t, Harriet. You’re really the first person who seems to know much about me. To judge me objectively. My parents...” He was the child of a divorce, passed back and forth from father and wife to mother and husband, a bone of contention. He let that go, but added, “And Mary and I were rather stupid about each other, in some ways.”
“You were very young.”
“We had no time,” he said, so clear and quiet in his statement of the chance lost that Harriet sat still, outclassed, rejoicing in being outclassed.
“So,” he said, pursuing logic, “in you I see the first clear reflection of myself. It looks weak.”
“The mirror is old, it warps.”
“No; you see people very justly.”
“Do you really want to know how I see you?” she demanded, for he had poured her a strong drink and she wasn’t used to a second nightcap. He did want to know. “As a bright and fortunate man,” she said after seeking the words. “Fortunate, not lucky. You haven’t had much luck. And yet you’ve been fortunate. You got your freedom early, too early, but then a lot of people never get it. You’ve known real passion, real fulfilment, and no letdown. You never will know the letdown, the dead level. You got into manhood a free man, and you’ll go on free,or—” But the “or” had carried her too far. Had she been younger, his equal, she could have finished the sentence, “or you’ll kill yourself.” But between generations there should not be talk of death. Of the dead, yes, of dying, yes, of your death, no. Tabu, Harriet told herself, disgusted at her whole speech. Edward however seemed pleased or intrigued; he brooded over it a while. Then he said, “Another thing about Elinor, this girl at the lab, she likes kids. I always think of Andy.”
“Andy’s got me, Edward, he’ll survive, for mercy’s sake. Nobody’s asking you to marry a nursemaid! God forbid!”
He looked relieved, but slowly, through the mists of weariness and whiskey, she perceived that Elinor had turned up again.
“When I said you’d find that you couldn’t withdraw, couldn’t disengage yourself, disconnect yourself, you know, I was warning you. You’re in a very vulnerable position. You could get caught. I don’t want to see you caught.” As you were by Mary, she thought; for she believed her daughter had married less for love than self-assertion, even envy. She knew in Mary, under the dark soft vivacity and Italian grace, the hard destructive strain from her side, the fecklessness, the pointless yen that brought them all in the end to the County of Malheur. She had never been able to weep much for Mary, she had never been able to judge her; yet it was very bitter to think, as she had thought before, that Mary’s early death might prove a fortunate thing for the man who loved her.
“You spoil me, Harriet,” said the young man, gravely considering.
“Of course I do. But I don’t spoil your son. I discriminate between incorruptibility and mere innocence.” She gave a short laugh of pleasure at her own multisyllables. “I’m getting verbose, I’m going to bed. Good night.”
“Good night,” he answered reluctantly
as she went to the stairs, so reluctantly he almost held her back. As if he need worry about “reconnecting.” He had never, even in the worst of his pain, withdrawn himself, ceased to give to those who needed him. What he had left, the baby and the old woman, he loved with perfect generosity. And there was no denying that the three of them got on pretty happily. At least I’m a good stopgap, she thought with pride.
Since her husband’s death four years ago she had not slept well at night. Half the dark hours she waked and read, and was up often before the baby started chirping. So she remembered her mother in old age, in the silent kitchen lit by a kerosene lamp, looking in silence out the window at the huge sky paling above the sagebrush plain. But this night Harriet slept at once, falling into a nightlong trap of dreams. They kept coming and telling her that someone was dead, but would not tell her exactly who, or whether he was dying now or dead already; only once, in a summerhouse she had not known was in her garden, she found him lying huddled on the floor, one long arm thrown out, but that was only the empty sleeve of a grey suit. She ran away in terror into an older nightmare, fifty years older, of the blind thing that hunted her over the desert. At last sunlight broke down the walls and horizons of the dreams and woke her, yet it did not illuminate her fear. She denied that her anxiety had been for Edward, but she was rather grim with him at breakfast. All morning she housecleaned, making the baby play by himself, trying to work off that fear before her conscience made her accept it as a rational one.
The baby could not be indefinitely resisted. He was two. He looked like a little chimpanzee; the physical beauty of his parents, mixed, had got lost. His disposition was thoughtful and experimental. “Hat, Hat, Hat,” he cried, staggering into the kitchen. “Mulk! Mulk!”—“Not till lunchtime,” Harriet told him. He smiled, gazing up with wise eyes like a chimpanzee. “Mulk? Cacky? Appa?”—“Nothing till lunch, you greedy-gut,” the grandmother said sternly. “Hat, Hat!” said the baby, madly embracing her leg.
The Compass Rose Page 21