Текст книги "Summer Morning, Summer Night"

Автор книги: Raymond Douglas Bradbury

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

THE BEAUTIFUL LADY

IT SEEMED THERE was never a time when someone did not say, “There was the Rose of Sharon, there was the lilies of the valley.” “She walked like a princess. She could walk across the sands by the lake and the smallest breeze would blow the footprints away, she made so little mark in passing.” The voices moved with the calendar through his life. “Have you ever put your head down in a bed of mint-leaves in May?” “In the middle of the hottest summer night you ever knew, have you felt the curtains blow out into your room, cool and white, suddenly. And the first rain falling on the hot night roof over your head?” They went all around and over and about the beautiful lady, trying to describe what it was about her. “It’s like trying to tell you what red looks like, or blue, with your eyes shut.” But they never gave up trying.

“She couldn’t have been as beautiful as all that,” cried George Gray. “Show us a picture of her!”

“That’s fifty years ago,” they said. “I suppose if you search around town you’ll find one, but it’s doubtful. She died young. It seems the whole town turned out for her, she was only nineteen and unmarried, when she died. I think everyone was in love with the girl, she was that special.”

George Gray was alternately enchanted and in a rage with his elders. “Well, is she like Helen there, passing?” He pointed.

They only shook their heads with the faintest allowable degree of smugness. They had been to London, they had seen the queen. He had only been to Chicago, poor boy, and to Kankakee.

“Now there’s a lovely girl, really lovely,” said George, and he nodded to someone named Susanna passing in a car.

“That’s a flower without scent,” observed the old people. “So many girls today are flowers like that. When you touch them you find they’re made of paper, to last. Alice wasn’t made to last; she was like the first snow. You look out one December morning and it’s falling but you never see it touch. It never covers the grass, it never has and never will.”

“Oh, my God!” said George. “Shut up with this talk!”

He was only twenty, and hopelessly involved with every woman who sat rocking on a porch as he passed, or waved from a bus going by. He was always turning in circles and colliding with trees. He had fallen down several hypothetical elevator shafts and hit bottom a half dozen times, and still not found the woman he was looking for. There was a freckle on each, the nose was too long or the ear too large, or the mouth too open most of the time and making noise.

“All very well for you to talk,” he said. “Memory plays tricks. It doubles and redoubles, it squares things for you. Why if Alice Langley strolled by on that sidewalk right now, you wouldn’t know her.”

“That’s like saying,” said old man Pearce, “I wouldn’t know a certain species of transparent butterfly. Have you ever seen one, brought up from the Mexican rain-forests, the wings look like they were cut from blown glass, from crystal, you can see through them. When the butterfly sits on a flower it is a flower, when the butterfly sits on a peach it is a peach, there’s nothing of the butterfly at all, except what you see through and beyond its wings. Don’t tell me what I have or have not seen, young man, I have seen the butterfly with the crystal wings and you have not. Now, come on, let’s have a game of chess.”

GEORGE GRAY was alternately seized with paroxysms of despair and hatred. He wanted very much to see this rose, this butterfly, this first falling of the snows of winter, for he admired, above all else, beauty. If this woman was as they said she was, oh God to have a look at her! But this was patently impossible, the peach was harvested, the apple blossoms blown off in a wind that had failed fifty years before. You might just as well chase the rain with a sieve! And so his passion turned from despair to hatred and that variety of scorn best practised by a man only recently turned twenty. “A pack of lies!” he cried. “And fifty-two cards in the pack, all marked!”

“All except the Queen of Hearts,” said old man Pearce. “Not a mark on her, not a spot, not a smirch,” and lit his pipe.

“I’ll prove she wasn’t that beautiful!” cried George.

“How!”

“By her pictures, if I can find them! If you haven’t burnt them, to cover up your story!”

“Lad,” said Mr. Pearce. “Two thousand people don’t show up at a maiden lady’s funeral for no reason at all. People only show up in this world for things like the following: the golden spike being driven in the last tie of a railroad, the inauguration of a president, a man flies the Atlantic alone. They turn up for single events, lonely things, apart things, separate things, for things that are one of a kind and never another like it. She was one of a kind, lad, so why don’t you let her be, eh?”

“I’ll prove she wasn’t as beautiful as you say, it’s just you who were young and a fool, like myself,” said George.

“Part of what you just said is wisdom,” admitted the old man. “The last part.”

“If I have to go out to where’s she buried and dig her up and see for myself,” said George.

The old man let his pipe die out. After a long while of sitting in the summer night he said, “George, George. You’re cruel. They say youth is cruel. But this is the first time I’ve seen it this close. Oh, but you are mean, aren’t you? What’s got you so mean this year? Is it breaking up with Susanna last month?”

“I’m not mean, I’m just practical,” said George, lighting a cigarette.

“When a man talks as you just talked it’s all the mean things ever was. Don’t let me hear you speak again of bothering Miss Alice. Oh, that’s a foul and awful thing to suggest, that’s ghoul’s talk, that’s unhealthy. And besides—unfair. What can you find in a coffin anyway, but the seed of the plum, the skin left behind by a departed coral-snake, so much chaff and husk. There’s a great difference between a wheat field in August with the sun and wind, and walking through the straw stubble in November. Is that how you’d judge a crop and a harvest, unfair like that?”

“I just want to prove you wrong,” said George.

“You’re a child,” said Mr. Pearce, “in the body of a man. Why don’t you fall down and kick on the floor?”

“I’ll find a way,” said George, smoking quietly and hastily. “I’ll find a way, so help me.”

“George,” said the old man, sitting there by his chessboard. “I wish you’d go away now. I don’t want to play another game tonight with someone like you. The heat’s got hold of you for sure. Your talk’s bad. Come back when you clean it up. A good walk in a hard rain would work wonders for you. Good night.”

“You’re afraid,” and George smiled quietly. “You’re afraid I’ll take her away from you, aren’t you. You’re afraid of the facts, you’re afraid I can find proof she was never what she seems to be now. I’ve got you running. I’ve got you scared.”

“Good night, George,” said the old man, in the shadows, and his voice was very tired and he did not move.

“Good night,” said George, going down the porch steps.

He whistled away down the streets, his hands in his pockets, his head back, pausing only now and again from his song to smile.

“COME ON, Jack, why not?”

“George, it’s crazy.”

“We don’t have to tell anybody. For my own satisfaction.”

“George, let go of it. For cry-yi. Whinnikers, George.”

“It’ll be a clear night, cool and warm both.”

“That’s dirty and nasty, it’s not clean.”

“Where’s your spunk?”

“It ain’t in digging up nice people, darn it!”

“Old people always braggin’, they should stop that.”

“Sometimes it’s all they got, give ’em that, George. Take it easy. Why you want to take things away from them? They already got so much taken away, why take the last bit, can you tell me?”

THERE WAS nothing inside the great box.

Or, at first, there seemed to be nothing. And then the wind blew just a little bit and stirred a few things there. And George Gray stood looking down upon these few things and counted them and named them over to himself and remembered them for many years after, and the meanness went out of himself, he felt the meanness go from his eyes and from around his mouth and from the muscles in his jaws and his lips, and the meanness drain from the hard muscles under his ribs and in the tendons of his back as he bent there. He let all the meanness melt away as if he were standing in the rain in a suit made of tissue papers and the first wash made him naked.

For inside of the box were the following things:

A single delicate green fern, as soft as breathing. A sprig of fresh summer mint. One new August peach, with the bloom still warm in it. One single violet, purple and alive. A red rose. And one blade of green summer grass.

That was all.

These things were placed, the green fern so, the peach this way, the red rose that, the summer grass another way, to suggest a form and a shape and a being. And standing there, George Gray found time to enact in his imagination the entire elaborate afternoon just over, Mr. Pearce, and a half dozen other old men, and the keeper of this vast and quiet land inside the fence and the iron gate, taking turns in the sun, digging, planning, arranging, and burying again, and going off in the sun, spades on shoulders, smiling. Why? To make a convert of a disbeliever, to bring him into their clan, the last one in the town, the skeptic, the cynic. To stop his mouth, to stop his doubt, to put an end forever to his threat. He glanced at the chimney of the oven-house on the far side of this marbled field; the faintest trace of smoke still went up to the sky.

He took one last look at the flowers and the delicate green fern and the blade of grass. Then he closed the lid gently and began filling the earth in over it, working steadily and quietly.

It was midnight when he reached his street, walking. It was five after midnight when, in passing the old man’s place, he heard his own name called. He went up to the porch.

“Hello, George,” said the old man.

“Hello,” said George, uncertainly.

“George,” said the old man, after a pause. “Are you still feeling mean and cantankerous?”

“I feel just fine,” said George.

“You changed your mind any since last time I seen you?” asked the old man. “What do you think now?”

George said, “She’s beautiful. She’s the most beautiful lady I’ve ever seen, so help me.”

“That’s what I like to hear, George,” said the old man. “That’s what I like to hear. Tell you what; you just trot on over tomorrow night for a little game of chess, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll beat the pants off you, son.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, good night, George.”

“Good night, sir.”

George went down the steps and away from the house and left the old man sitting there in the dark. He did not look back, but waved his hand quietly when he heard the old man call good night again, and as George opened the screen door at this own house, a moth flew up suddenly, with a very soft touch indeed, and brushed his face, and was gone so quickly that it almost seemed it had never been there.

LOVE POTION

ALONE THEY LIVED in their house, the two old sisters, as quiet as spiders, as large as sofas, both of them, stuffed with time and dust and snow. Walking by their house at night you saw their faces, like porcelain plates in the unlit windows, or you saw their hands put up to draw the green shade. And you heard no noise inside, save the dry crackling of newspapers. Miss Nancy Jillet and her sister Julia took their air at four in the morning when the town was undercover, and the only one who ever saw them was the policeman walking by swinging his nightstick threateningly at his shadow which ran away ahead of him down the lanterned street as he marched away from the raw lonely light.

So it was not impossible, then, that on an evening in summer, unable to sleep, with lines in her forehead and perspiration in a dew upon her upper lip, Alice Ferguson, out for a walk around the block, and not afraid for the moon was out and the town serene and beautiful, and she was aged eighteen and nothing could happen to her, happened upon the Jillets, the two old ladies, sitting in the milky dark of 2 a.m., with needley, silver stars for eyes and fat porcelain hands across their pincushion breasts rocking slowly in their asthmatic rocking chairs, alone, alone.

At first, Alice Ferguson was quite startled, and then, remembering the tales of their solitary confinement within life, lifted her hand and called, “Good evening,” across the lawn to the silvered porch.

After a time, one of the chairs stopped rocking and one of the sisters said, “Good morning.”

Alice Ferguson laughed. “Of course, it is morning. Good morning, then.”

The sisters nodded silently.

“It’s a lovely night,” said Alice Ferguson.

“You’re Alice Ferguson,” said one of the old women.

“Yes, how did you know?”

“And you’re 18 years old.”

“Yes,” she replied, uncertainly.

“Come here, child,” said Nancy Jillet, the oldest and fattest of the two, in shadow.

She crossed the soft moon lawn to the edge of the railinged porch and peered in at the two half-seen faces.

“And you’re in love,” said Nancy Jillet, in an awful whisper.

“How did you know?”

The sisters rocked and looked at each other wisely.

“How did you know?” demanded Alice Ferguson.

“And he doesn’t love you,” said Nancy Jillet.

“Oh,” said Alice.

“And you’re unhappy and out walking late tonight,” said the other sister in an old voice.

Alice stood before them, her head sinking, her eyelids flickering.

“Never you mind, child, never you mind,” whispered Nancy Jillet, uncrossing her arms from her amazing breast. “You came to the right place.”

“I didn’t come...”

“Sh, we’ll help you.”

Alice found herself whispering, also, they were a trio of black velvet and white ermine conspirators, half moon, half shadow, there at the center of the night.

“How?” she whispered.

“We’ll give you a love potion.”

“Oh, but...”

“A love potion, child, to take with you.”

“I can’t afford...”

“No money, child.”

“I don’t believe...”

“You will, child, you’ll believe, when it works.”

“I don’t want to...”

“Bother us? No bother. It’s right inside, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“I must be going.”

“Stay just a moment.” The sisters had stopped rocking altogether and were putting their hands out, like hypnotists or tight rope walkers, at her.

“It’s late.”

“You want to win him, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“All right then. Directions on the bottle. Get it, sister.” And a moment later, in and out of the house like a huge dream, the sister had gone and fetched the green bottle and it rested, glittering, on the porch railing. Alice reached up her hand in the moonlight. “I don’t know.”

“Try it,” whispered Nancy Jillet. “Try it once, is all we ask. It’s the answer to everything when you’re 18. Go on.”

“But, what’s in it...”

“Nothing, nothing at all. We’ll show you.” And from herself, as if she were bringing forth part of her bosom, Nancy Jillet drew forth a wrapped kerchief. Opening this she spread it on the rail in the moonlight, where a smell of fields and meadows arose instantly from the herbs contained therein.

“White flowers for the moon, summer-myrtle for the stars, lilacs for the rain, a red rose for the heart, a walnut for the mind, for a walnut is cased in itself like a brain, isn’t it, do you see? Some clear water from the spring well to make all run well, and a sprig of pepper-leaf to warm his blood. Alum to make his fear grow small. And a drop of white cream so that he sees your skin like a moonstone. Here they all are, in this kerchief, and here is the potion in the bottle.”

“Will it work?”

“Will it work!” cried Nancy Jillet. “What else could it do but make him follow you like a puppy all the years of your life? Who else would know better how to make a love potion than us? We’ve had since 1910, Alice Ferguson, to think back and mull over and figure out why we were never courted and never married. And it all boils down to this here, in this kerchief, a few bits and pieces, and if it’s too late for us to help ourselves, why then we’ll help you. There you are, take it.”

“Has anyone ever tried it before?”

“Oh, no child. It’s not just something you give to everyone or make and bottle all the time. We’ve done a lot of things in our life, the house is full of antimacassars we’ve knitted, framed mottos, bedspreads, stamp collections, coins, we’ve done everything, we’ve painted and sculpted and gardened by night so no one would bother us. You’ve seen our garden?”

“Yes, it’s lovely.”

“But it was only last week, one night, on my seventieth birthday, I was in the garden with Julia, and we saw you go by late, looking sad. And I turned to Julia and said, because of a man. And Julia said, if only we could help her in her love. And I was fingering a rose bush at the time and I picked a rose and said, Let’s try. So we went all around the garden picking the freshest flowers and feeling young and happy again. So there it is, Alice, rose-water to whirl his senses and mint-leaves to freshen his interest and rain-water to soften his tongue and a dash of tarragon to melt his heart. One, two, three drops and he’s yours, in soda pop, lemonade or iced-tea.”

“I DO LOVE you,” he said.

“Now I won’t need this,” she said, taking out the bottle.

“Pour a little out,” he said, “before you take it back, so it won’t hurt their feelings.”

She poured a little out.

She returned the bottle.

“DID YOU give him some?”

“Yes.”

“Good, good, just wait and see.”

“And now we’ll take some.”

“Will you? I thought it was only for men?”

“It is, dear. But just this once, tonight, we’ll take some, too. And we’ll have beautiful dreams and dream we’re young again.”

They drank from it.

In the very early morning, she awakened to the sound of a siren in the streets of the green town. Running to the window, she looked out and saw what everyone had seen a few minutes before and would remember for years afterward. Miss Nancy and Miss Julia Jillet sitting on their front porch, not moving, in the broad daylight, a thing they had never done before, their eyes closed, their hands dangling at their sides, their mouths agape strangely.

There was something about them, something that suggested sheaths from which the iron blade is gone. This, Alice Ferguson saw, and the crowd moving in, and the police, and the coroner, putting his hand up for the green bottle that glittered brightly in the sunlight, sitting on the rail.

NIGHT MEETING

IT WAS AN evening unlike any he could remember in all of his life. Very early, after the sun went down, and the air was incredibly fresh, he began to tremble, an inner, hidden trembling, of excitement, almost of waiting. He arrived at the depot amid the dispersal of buses, the routine, the pattern, the gas, acceleration, the brakes, and then he was out, in his own bus, the tremor still in him. There were no accidents, it was a clear night, little traffic, few passengers. He drove through the ocean-quiet streets, smelling the salt air and feeling that certain thing in the wind that spelled spring no matter where you were, no matter what you were doing.

He was thirty-eight or thirty-nine, the first faint recession of hair beginning on his brow, the first quilled pricklings of silver touching his temples, the first criss-crossed leather creases starting to fold the back of his neck. He rotated the driver’s wheel now this way, now that, automatically, and it was eleven at night, a sultry hour, warm, a spring night, and the trembling all through his body. He found himself looking and searching everything with his eyes, taking a special pleasure in the lemon ice neon signs and the green mint neon signs, glad to be out of his small apartment, glad of this night routine.

At the end of his first run he walked down to the edge of the sea for a cigarette and a nervous moment of looking at the phosphorescence in the water.

Looking at the ocean, he remembered a night long ago when someone explained the phosphorescence to him; millions upon billions of tiny animal lives were boiling there, seething, reproducing, bringing others like themselves into myriad life, and dying. And the glow of this love in spring caused the shoreline to burn green, and in places like red coals, along the beach as far north as San Francisco, they said, as far south as Acapulco, or Peru, who could say, who could tell?

With his cigarette finished he stood a moment more by the sea wall feeling the wind blow the smell of the old apartment house off his clothes. His hands, though he had washed them, still felt greasy from the deck of solitaire cards he had used most of the afternoon in his room.

He went back to his bus, started the motor and let it idle, humming to himself. The bus was empty, this run was an empty run through sleeping avenues. He talked and sang to himself, to spin out the hours, alone, passing through shadowed moon streets toward the hour when he could go home, fall into a lonely bed, sleep late, and start all over again tomorrow afternoon at four.

At the fourth stop he paused long enough to open all the windows on the empty bus and turn out all but a few lights. Then he let the night wind run like a summer river, sluicing through every lifted pane, making the bus roar like a blown sea-shell. And there was only moonlight to ride on, silver asphalt to float over on boulevards of milk and black-velvet shadow.

He almost went past the young woman at the seventeenth stop.

She was standing in the open, but he was so preoccupied with breathing and smiling to himself, that he ran the bus a good twenty yards beyond her and she had to run quietly to get on when he opened the door. He apologized, she dropped her money in the silver-sounding box and sat in the seat across from him where he could see her from the corner of his eyes, and in the overhead mirror. She sat quietly, in the dim light, her hands folded upon her lap, her knees and feet together, her head up, her hair blowing.

And he was in love with her.

It was as immensely simple as that. He fell in love with this woman, very young, sitting in the seat across from him, her face pale as a milk-flower, everything about her folded and pressed and cleanly neat. Her hair was dark and blew like smoke in the wind and she sat so calmly and complacently there, not knowing she was beautiful or very young. She had used some light perfume early in the evening and the night had blown a good deal of it away, but some still remained faintly on the air. She looked very happy, as if some great news had come into her life tonight, her face shone, her eyes sparkled, and she rode, swaying gently, occasionally putting out her hand to hold when he slowed for a corner.

“I love her,” he thought, and was surprised. “It’s ridiculous, but I love her.”

He knew how her voice must be, very gentle and kind, and how she would be and act, anywhere, at any time. It was in her dark eyes and in the way her hands touched everything, with a careful consideration. And then the pale light in her face glowed out upon things, it did not burn in upon herself and feed upon herself. It nourished others. It illumined the bus. It reflected the world and himself.

“Do you know?” he thought to her image in the mirror. “I love you? Do you suspect?”

They rode in the summer streets, toward midnight.

AND THEN he knew. Inside each man, though he did not know it, nor ever considered it, was the image of the woman he someday must love. Whether she was composed of all the music he had ever heard or all the trees he had ever seen or all the friends of his childhood, certainly no one could tell. Whether the eyes were his mother’s, and the chin that of a girl cousin swimming in a summer lake twenty-five years ago, this was unknowable also. But most men carried this image, like a locket, like a pearl-cameo, in their head a lifetime, taking it out only rarely, taking it out never, after marriage, afraid then to compare it to the reality. And most men never saw the woman they would love anywhere, in the dark theatre, in a book, or passing on the street. They saw her only after midnight when the city was asleep and the pillow was cool under their heads. And she was a composite of all dreams and all women and every moonlit night since the calendar began.

“SHALL I tell you now?” he thought. “Do I dare?”

Now she had closed her eyes and leaned back to think of how this evening had been to her.

“If only you knew,” he thought, and then the panic grew in him. There were only nine more stops. Somewhere along the way she would ring the buzzer and step out into the night and be gone. Somewhere ahead he would have to cry out suddenly, or be silent,

“My name is William Becket, what’s yours? Where do you live? Can I see you again?”

Eight stops. She was shifting in her seat and watching the streets. “My name is William Becket, and I love you,” he thought.

She raised her hand to the cord.

“No,” he thought.

THE BUZZER rang. She arose as he slowed the bus toward its stop. He could come back in the morning, of course, to this stop. He could stand here and wait for her to come by, and say to her...and say to her...

His face was jerking now, a bit, up toward the mirror, down toward the avenue and the moon was very lovely in the trees. He knew he could not come here in the morning.

He stopped the bus and she was waiting at the door. Waiting for him to open it. He paused a moment and said, “I—”

She half-turned and looked at him with her beautiful face, the face that was everything he had ever thought about at night walking by the sea, in his free time.

He pressed the air-release, the door hissed open, she stepped out and was walking in the leafy moonlight.

I don’t even know her name, he thought, I never even heard her voice. He kept the door open and watched her move off down the dark street. I didn’t even see if she was married, he thought.

He closed the door and started the bus off and away, very cold now, his hands trembling on the wheel, not quite able to see where he was driving. After a moment he had to stop again and put down all the windows, there was too much draught. Half an hour later, coming back along this same street, he was rushing his bus too fast, for the avenues were empty and there was only the moon and the empty bus behind his back, and he was hurrying, hurrying, thinking to himself, if I hurry I’ll reach the sea and if I’m lucky, it all depends, there may be some phosphorescence left, and there’ll be time for a smoke and a walk before I turn the bus around and come back empty through the empty town.