Lilith

by J. R. Salamanca

“It will get all stained,” I said.

  “Oh, that doesn’t matter.”

  I tucked it into the pocket of my shirt and clambered down the boulder, picking my way to the pool among the rocks. I parted the elder branches and knelt above the water, holding her scarf beneath the surface to saturate it.

  “Oh, I’ve dropped my brush, Mr. Evshevsky,” I heard Lilith say. “Will you get it for me?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  I did not look up immediately, as there seemed nothing extraordinary either in the question or in his reply to it. But a moment later the considerable pause before he had answered, and the exact intonation of his voice when finally he had—thrilled and a little harsh with fright—echoed darkly in my mind, like the black image one sees a moment after staring into the sun. I raised my head swiftly, feeling a cold glitter of fear run throughout my body. Warren had disappeared from sight, and Lilith, her hands lifted and laid lightly against her breast, stood at the very edge of the boulder, where it fell away to the river, staring down raptly into the chasm.

  I was wearing leather-soled shoes which slipped on the smooth rock face, making my panicky, overhasty effort to scale the boulder a floundering, hideously comic and interminable burlesque. It seemed to me an age of excruciating length before I managed to reach the top of it and run to where Lilith stood at its edge; and when I did I was so convinced that Warren was dead and swept away in the waters below that I was almost more shocked than I would have been if this were true to see him halfway down the slope, clinging desperately to stony outcroppings of rock and lying almost flat against the sheer face of the cliff as he worked his way with terrified determination downward.

  “Stay still,” I shouted. “Don’t go any farther.”

  He turned his face up slowly, clutching the stones to preserve his balance, and called weakly, “But I haven’t got it yet.”

  “Don’t be a fool. It doesn’t matter. Don’t move from where you are. I’ll come down and help you back.”

  He turned his head to look downward again and called out in a moment, “I think perhaps I’d better. I can’t see it any more, anyway. I think it may have fallen on down.”

  I took off my shoes and socks to gain better traction on the stone and, dropping my legs over the edge of the boulder, began what is surely the most terrifying adventure of my life. I have always been afraid of great heights and was in a constant sickening state of fear as I lowered myself down the face of the cliff, sliding in mounds of loose shale, clutching at roots and stony projections in the bank, pausing sometimes to look down, trembling, at Warren’s slight figure, superimposed with pitiful fragility against the thundering mass of water far below. Yet when I reached him he seemed to be as bewilderedly repentant as afraid, lowering his head and murmuring, “I’m sorry. I hope I haven’t caused you too much trouble. I didn’t realize it was quite so difficult.”

  As I had no rope, or any other equipment, there was perhaps little practical advantage in my presence; but I think it was of psychological assistance to him, for he seemed greatly reassured to see me and climbed with surprising confidence, following the route I picked for our ascent with the unperturbed obedience of a child who has unquestioning faith in the ability of its parent to deliver it from any peril; and I was able, from time to time, to offer him the more tangible assistance of reaching down, when I had gained the relative security of a boulder or a firm foothold above, and helping him toward it. I had to fight constantly against the horrible dizziness which threatened all the while to send me reeling outward from the face of the cliff to which we clung; and for this reason, and out of an extraordinary sense of pride as well, I did not dare look upward to the top of it. I did not know if Lilith was still standing there or not, or whether, if she was, she might not roll a boulder down upon us at any moment. And yet, all the while I was climbing, I felt a profound conviction of her presence there; I was sure that she was standing above us at the edge of the cliff, as I had left her—her hands still lifted and laid against her breast in an oddly devout attitude, staring down at us with her deep, enchanted gaze—and experienced a peculiar satisfaction, so strong and so nearly embarrassing in its incongruity that I was, as I say, too proud (and too dizzy!) to confirm it.

  It was only when I had reached the top of the cliff and was grappling for a handhold to haul myself up onto it that I allowed myself to look at her. She was standing, just as I had imagined and just as I had left her, with her bare feet touching the very edge of the rock, enthralled. She did not smile or speak.

  When I had helped Warren up onto the boulder, we both collapsed and sat panting, with our backs against a stone. I was full of an idle, thoughtless feeling of vacancy which always follows great physical or emotional excitement on my part, and had neither the will nor inclination to reprimand Lilith nor to try to determine exactly what it was that she had done. She came and sat in front of us on the rock, spreading her torn skirt daintily.

  “How brave you are,” she said gently. “It was beautiful to watch.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t get your brush,” Warren said. “I think it must have fallen further down. I couldn’t see it anywhere.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I can make another one easily.”

  “Then why in God’s name did you ask him to get it?” I said with sudden anger, which I think was as much irritation at Warren’s simplicity as at the outrageousness of her remark.

  “I’m sorry. It was thoughtless of me. But he didn’t have to, of course.”

  “Oh, no, it was my fault entirely,” Warren said. “She didn’t realize how dangerous it was. I shouldn’t have gone down.”

  Lilith dropped her head and stared at her white hands thoughtfully, twining her fingers together in her lap. In a moment she said, “I believe we were both rather foolish. I hope Mr. Bruce won’t report us too severely, because if he does I’m afraid it will prejudice our chances of taking any more trips with him.”

  I believe this remark was the most disturbing thing she said or did in the entire day. It seemed to me, the more I thought about it, to be a very clear invitation to conceal or adjust the details of our misadventure in my report—not only to disguise my own inadequacy, but to reduce the possibility of any interpretation by the staff of malice or dangerous mischief on her part, and to offer me, by way of incentive, the preserved prospect of future outings in her company. What a presumptuous and insidious suggestion! Yet even more disturbing was the fact that, being able to make so sensitive an analysis of its significance, I could not have been entirely invulnerable to it. I was perhaps so anxious to acquit myself of any such indictment, and Lilith of any such design, that I began to dwell determinedly instead on what must after all have been her entirely uncalculating and natural enough desire to escape the suspicions of the staff and any possible penalty for her behavior; and also upon the unfortunate—if fascinating—ambiguity about everything she said or did, which made it possible to interpret this as a darkly hinted offer of collusion.

  Still, I could not permanently or entirely evade the implications of her remark; all the while we were driving home I had the unhappy opportunity of considering my utter failure at this first assignment and the possible consequences of a full and conscientious report of it to Bea. I might—how terrible and total a humiliation!—be dismissed from the staff; or I might, if retained on a probationary basis, have my responsibilities greatly limited—perhaps even to the point of not being entrusted alone with patients again. I would, at any rate, suffer an inevitable loss of respect and trust on the part of Bea and other members of the staff, have undermined my own confidence and crippled my effectiveness at the only thing in which I had ever taken pride and wished to do well. (All this could be avoided or reduced, if I invented some less culpable account, in which, of course, she would support me!)

  To Bob, whose guarded inquiries about the condition of our clothing—torn and soiled from the climb—and our general state of fatigue invited it, I was able to postpone a full explanation
of the event by means of an exaggerated air of circumspection in the presence of the other patients; but with every mile of the drive toward the Lodge I was more miserably aware of the imminent necessity of producing one for Bea and of the malicious alternative which Lilith’s words had suggested to me. She seemed exquisitely unaware of the distress she had caused me, leaning her head on the open sill with a soft smile and letting her golden hair stream out beside us in the wind, like a pennon of frayed and glittering silk.

  When we reached the Lodge she had become contrite, replying to my directions in a modest, obedient tone and following me silently along the hall while I carried the paintbox and easel to her room. As I unfolded and set it up in its accustomed corner she unrolled the sheet of work that she had done and spread it out on her desk top, holding it flat with her finger tips.

  “You haven’t said anything about my picture,” she murmured. “I don’t want to. However good it may be, it isn’t worth what it cost.”

  “What is that?”

  “Very nearly Warren’s life, and very likely my job.”

  “Oh, I hope not.” She looked up at me with a long grievous gaze which failed slightly before my sustained ironic silence. “Really I do, Mr. Bruce.”

  “It’s difficult to believe you’re so concerned about me,” I said.

  She lowered her head sedately. “I think you can do a great deal of good here,” she said hesitantly but clearly. “I think the patients . . . trust you. It would be so foolish if you—if you were to leave.”

  Her anxiety for me to remain seemed so honest and touching that I found it difficult to resist being moved by it and was somewhat startled by the harshness of my own words when, after a considerable pause, I asked, “Why do I have the impression that you’re trying to bribe me, Miss Arthur?”

  “To bribe you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have no idea.”

  She raised her eyes with a look of astonishment and injury that made me feel immediately callous and absurd. How could I suspect her of wishing only to conceal her own behavior? After all, she was not responsible for it, and any penalty she might incur would be only a temporary and relatively minor one—further postponement of her privileges, perhaps—in which she seemed to take little interest anyway. Surely her real concern was for me to stay. She sensed in me, as she had confessed, a sympathetic personality, one whom she trusted and who she felt could help her greatly. How grossly I had misinterpreted her humble appeal to me to forgive her irresponsibility, to remain and help to cure her of it! Yet some devil of doubt made me persist in my sudden determination to expose her.

  “How could you ‘drop’ your paintbrush ten yards in front of you, over the edge of a cliff?” I demanded.

  “I was flipping it—like this—in my fingers, to shake the color out. I always do that.” Her hurt and startled look gathered slowly into anger as we spoke. “You are very stern.”

  “Yes, I am. You’ve made me fail at something I cared very much about.”

  “Perhaps it was your own incompetence that made you fail.”

  “It was. But you’ve reminded me of it.”

  “And you hate being reminded of it, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. Why did you ask Warren to get the brush?”

  “Because he is a fool.”

  “Then why did you let him . . . touch your hair that way?”

  “Because I am mad.”

  She turned abruptly toward the window, leaving me suddenly aghast at the unreasonable and undignified way in which I had questioned her. Far from being a calm, professional effort to help an emotionally unstable person to solve her difficulties, it had developed suddenly into a heated, vulgar quarrel, leaving me with this fresh and added sense of failure to carry to my interview with Bea. She would say nothing more, standing with her back to me beside the window and refusing to answer either my murmured apology or, as I stood with my hand on the door, my conciliatory goodbye.

  I KNOCKED at the door of Bea’s cottage in a state of total despondency. She must have been anticipating my arrival, for she asked me immediately to come in and greeted me with a look of prepared cheerfulness, sitting on the edge of her desk as I entered.

  “Well, have you got them all back safely?”

  “They’re all back safely,” I said, “but with very little thanks to me.”

  She watched me for a moment and smiled. “You’d better sit down and have a drink. I have a bottle of Scotch here that I keep especially for stricken therapists.”

  “Thank you.” I sat down wearily and watched her pour the whiskey into glasses on her desk.

  “I talked to Bob, and he said you looked pretty miserable on the way back, but hadn’t had much chance to talk about it.” She set a glass on the edge of the desk in front of me and lifted her own. I nodded to her and drank, feeling with the scalding benison of the whiskey in my throat, a sudden bitter recall of nights of drinking under a steaming tarpaulin in the jungles of New Guinea.

  “So you had a pretty rugged time,” Bea said.

  “I think I violated, categorically, every piece of advice you’ve given me: improper vigilance, gullibility, permitting myself to be persuaded against my judgment, failure of objectivity, and even quarreling with a patient.”

  “Well, you’re thorough, anyway. How did all this happen?”

  I gave her laboriously, pausing to recall details with painful precision, a description of the entire day’s events, just as I have recorded it here. Only once or twice did she interrupt, at particularly critical or ambiguous points, to question me more closely. When I had finished she sat in serious silence for a moment before she answered, “Now tell me, Vincent, how do you feel about it?”

  “I think, frankly, that I’ve made a mistake in coming here. It seems pretty obvious to me that I’m not suited for this work. I just don’t have the temperament for it.”

  “Do you mean you want to quit? That you’ve had enough?”

  “No, it isn’t that; I’d like very much to succeed at it, but I don’t think I can.”

  “Are you resigning, then?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “I think perhaps I’m hoping you’ll ask me to.”

  “I see. Now let’s go back and take every one of these ‘failures’ of yours as they occurred, right in order. What was first?”

  “Well . . . letting her choose a place herself to paint from, I suppose.”

  “You had Bob’s authority for that. You asked his permission, quite properly, and it was entirely in keeping with our policy of ‘babying’ her a little—to get her out more often—that he agreed to it. Then what?”

  “I don’t know—letting her collect those weeds and things.”

  “I would have done just the same—I have, as a matter of fact. It’s a harmless enough thing, and she probably couldn’t have done her painting without them.”

  “But it wasn’t harmless; she ate some of them,” I said.

  “No one could have prevented that. She could snatch a handful of berries and eat them any time she’s out walking, before anyone could interfere. What else did you do?”

  “I approved a dangerous place for her to paint.”

  Bea nodded. “Yes, it was relatively dangerous. But there are always many things to consider in making such a decision. Is she in general a violent or suicidal patient? No. Is it dangerous enough to warrant earning her hostility by refusing? That’s doubtful. Is it worth permitting her to stay there as a demonstration of your confidence in her? What is her general condition at the time? Is she cheerful, responsible, obedient, or sullen, depressed, antagonistic? Can you offset any danger there may be by being particularly alert? All these things considered, I think I would have let her stay there, too.”

  “But I didn’t offset its danger,” I said. “She lured me away, and then coaxed Warren down that cliff. She was so damned cheerful and obedient that she fooled me.”

  “Are you sure she lured you away? Do you think it was a premeditated ru
se?”

  “No. I’m not sure of anything she does.”

  “But you think she intended to kill Warren?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If she wanted to kill him, why do you suppose she didn’t simply push him off the edge when he started down?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps she didn’t want to be directly responsible. I don’t think Lilith would actually strike the blow herself—it would be too crude. But if he had been killed this other way, there would have been a kind of poetry about it—if you see what I mean—that I think would appeal to her.” I looked out of the window, recalling her rapt gaze as she had stared at Warren down the cliff. “I had the feeling she was testing him,” I said. “That she was demanding a ‘demonstration of courage’ from him, as she called it. Maybe she was fascinated by his fear; she knows he’s rather timid. Or perhaps she accepted it as an act of worship from him, the only kind that’s possible to them in their situation. I don’t know what it was. But whatever it was, she succeeded at it. She was too clever for me.”