Ursula K Le Guin - Malafrena

In a starless May night the town slept and the river flowed quietly through shadow. Over the empty courts of the university loomed the chapel tower, full of silent bells. A young man was climbing over the ten-foot iron gates of the chapel quadrangle. Clinging to the ironwork he dropped down inside, and crossed the courtyard to the doors of the chapel. He took out of his coat pocket a large sheet of paper, and unfolded it, fished around and brought out a nail; stooped and took off one of his shoes. Having got the paper and nail positioned high on the iron-barred oak door he raised the shoe, paused, struck. The sound of the blow crashed around the dark stone courts, and he paused again as if startled by the noise. A voice not far off shouted something, iron grated on stone. He struck three more blows until the head of the nail was driven home to the wood, then, holding one shoe and wearing the other, he ran hopping back to the gates, threw his shoe over, climbed up and over, caught his coattails on a spike, jumped down outside with a tearing noise, and vanished into the shadows just before two policemen arrived. They peered into the chapel yard, argued in German about the height of the gate, shook its lock, and went off, boots ringing on the cobbles. Cautiously the young man reappeared, feeling about in the shadows for his shoe. He was laughing wildly but silently. He could not find the shoe. The guards were returning. He went off in his stocking feet through the dark streets as the bells of Solariy cathedral struck midnight.

As the bells were striking noon next day a lecture on the apostasy of Julian ended, and the young man was leaving the with other young men when his name was spoken: “Herr Sorde. Herr Itale Sorde.”

The students, deaf mutes, walked past the uniformed officer of the university guard without a glance; only the one called stopped.

A handsome red Persian carpet, badly worn, covered the floor of the rector’s office. There was a purplish growth on the left side of the rector’s nose: a wart, a birthmark? Another man stood near the windows.

O come, put your neck in the collar

Of Müller, Von Gentz, and Von Haller!

All the best Governments

Have replaced Common Sense

With Von Haller, and Müller, and Gentz.

“And…” The rector glanced at the other man, out the windows, and asked in a mild deprecating tone, “And you nailed it on the door of the chapel?”

“My dear boy,” the rector said, paused, frowned, and said, “My boy, if nothing else the sanctity of the place—”

“I was following an historical precedent. I’m a student of history.” From white he turned red.

“Until now, an exemplary student,” the rector said. “This is really most regrettable. Even understood as a mere prank—”

“It’s obvious that the intent was serious; why else have you called me in?”

“Young man,” said the other man, the man with no wart, no title, no name, “you talk about seriousness; you can find serious trouble, you know, if you insist upon it.”

The young man went dead white this time. He stared at the man, and finally managed a very short, stiff bow. He faced the rector again and said in an unnatural voice, “I do not intend to apologise, sir. I will withdraw from my college. You have no right to ask more of me.”

“I haven’t asked that, Mr Sorde. Please control yourself and listen. This is your last term at the university. We should wish you to finish your studies without hindrance or disturbance.” He smiled, and the purplish wart on his nose moved up and down. “I ask you therefore to promise me that you will attend no student meetings during the remainder of the term, and to stay home, in your rooms, after sunset until morning. That is the long and the short of it, Mr Sorde. Will you give me your word?”

When he had gone the provincial inspector folded up the paper and laid it on the rector’s desk, smiling. “A young man of spirit,” he observed.

“Luther had ninety-five theses,” the provincial inspector said, “he has only one, it seems.”

“No, he’ll go back to the family estate. An only son. I taught his father, my first year of teaching. Val Malafrena, up there in the mountains, depths of the country, you know, a hundred miles from anything.”

When he had gone, the rector sighed. He sat down behind his desk and looked up at the portrait on the facing wall; his look, absent at first, gradually sharpened. The portrait was of a well-dressed, well-fleshed woman with a thick lower lip, Grand Duchess Mariya, first cousin once removed of Emperor Francis of Austria. On the scroll she held, the red and blue colors of the nation of Orsinia were quartered with the black two-headed eagle of the Empire. Fifteen years ago the portrait on the wall had been of Napoleon Bonaparte. Thirty years ago it had been of King Stefan IV in his coronation regalia. Thirty years ago when the rector had first become a dean he had called boys onto the carpet for their follies, he had tonguelashed and excoriated them, they had been sheepish and they had grinned. They had not turned grey in the face. He had not felt this painful wish to apologise, to say to young Sorde, “I’m sorry—You see how it is!” He sighed again and looked at the documents he must approve, governmental revision of curriculum, all in German. He put on his spectacles and opened the sheaf, his hands reluctant, his face weary in the radiance of May noon poking in the windows.

Sorde meanwhile had gone down to the park along the Molsen and was sitting there on a bench. Behind scrubby willows the river stretched smoky blue in sunlight. Everything was quiet, the river, the sky, the willow-leaves against the sky, the sunshine, a pigeon sunning and strutting on the gravel. At first he sat with his hands on his knees, frowning, his face vivid with emotions; then gradually he relaxed, stretched out his long legs, then stretched out his arms along the back of the bench. His face, distinguished by a big nose, heavy eyebrows and blue eyes, got to looking more and more dreamy, even sleepy. He watched the river run.

A voice went off like a gunshot. “There he is!” He looked round slowly. His friends had found him.

Blond, stocky, scowling, Frenin said, “You haven’t proved your point at all, I disallow the proof.”

“But once they were there it was them, the words, that would act and bring about results—”

“What results did they bring about in your case?” inquired Brelavay, a long, thin, dark young man with an ironical look.

“Austria will keep you pure, by God.” Brelavay laughed delightedly. “Did you see the crowd in front of the chapel this morning? The whole college saw it before the Ostriches found it. Almighty Christ! I thought they’d arrest the lot of us!”

“Go to the head of the class, Herr Sorde,” said Frenin. “Das würde ich auch gerne wissen!”

“The rector didn’t say anything about Amiktiya. There was an Ostrich there. Do you think it’ll make trouble for the society?”

“Look here, Frenin!” Brelavay burst out—both had spent the last hour in the anxious search for Itale, and were upset and hungry—“You’re the one who keeps telling us that we talk and do nothing. Now Itale’s done something and you start complaining about it! Personally I don’t care if the society gets into trouble, it’s a stupid lot of fellows, I’m not surprised there’s a spy amongst them.” He sat down by Itale on the bench.

“If you’d let me finish, Tomas,” said Frenin, joining them on the bench, “what I was going to say was this. There are about five of us in Amiktiya who are serious about the ideas, right? Well, after this, with Itale under observation and the whole society suspect, we’re getting to the time when we have to decide how serious we are. Are we in it for the wine and the songs, or is there more to it than that? Do you nail up your verse, and take your scolding, and finish the term and go home to your farm, or are there in fact further consequences? Are our words acts?”

“There’s nothing here in Solariy. There’s nothing in the provinces—these damned burghers, your peasants. We can’t fight the Middle Ages. The capital is the only place for us, if we’re serious. My God, is it so far away, Krasnoy?”

“I suppose the Molsen was running through it a day or two ago,” said Itale, looking at the blue river beyond the trees. “Listen, this is an idea, this is a real idea, Givan. I’ve got to think. I’ve got to eat something. Come on. Krasnoy, Krasnoy!” He looked at his friends joyously. “We can’t go to Krasnoy!” he said. They went off together laughing.

When they parted late in the afternoon and Itale set off home his mood was still one of joyful and wondering anticipation. Was it possible that a new life was going to begin? Would he in fact go to the city, live there, work with other men in the cause of freedom? It was inconceivable, fantastic, splendid, how did one go about it? There must be men in the city who would welcome them and put them to work. There were said to be secret societies there, which corresponded with similar groups in Piedmont and Lombardy, Naples, Bohemia, Poland, German states; for throughout the territories and satellites of the Austrian Empire and even beyond, throughout Europe, stretched the silent network of liberalism, like the nervous system of a sleeping man. A restless sleep, feverish, full of dreams. Even in this sleepy town people referred to Matiyas Sovenskar, in exile on his estate since 1815, as “the king.” Which he was, by right and by the will of his people, hereditary and constitutional king of a free country, and emperor and Empire be damned! Itale went striding down the shady street like a summer whirlwind, his face hot, his coat open.

He lived with the family of his uncle Angele Dru; before supper he explained to his uncle that he was under nightly house arrest. His uncle laughed. He and his wife, parents of a large brood, had given their nephew a small room, large meals, and unlimited trust; their own elder sons were none too steady, and sometimes they seemed as surprised as they were pleased by Itale’s justification of their trust. “What’s the scrape, what did you pups do now?” his uncle asked.

“Is that all? Have I told you about the night we brought the Gypsy girls right into the college? They didn’t use to lock it up at night,” and Angele retold the story. “So what’s your poem, eh?”

Angele continued smiling but a line of dismay or disappointment appeared in his forehead. “What sort of politics?” To appease him Itale repeated his verse, and then had to explain it.

“I see,” Angele said vaguely. “Well, now, I don’t know. Things have changed since I was your age. All these Prussians and Swiss, Haller, Müller, Jesus Mary, what’s that to us? Now I know who Von Gentz is, he’s the head of the Imperial Police, that’s a very important position. What such men do is none of our affair.”

“None of our affair! When everything we do is theirs? When we’re arrested if we open our mouths?” Itale always meant to avoid discussing politics with his uncle, but his ideas were so clear and the facts so patent that, each time, he was sure he could convince him. Angele got more and more alarmed and obstinate, till he was refusing to admit even that he disliked the foreign militia who policed the city and the university, and that he, too, thought of Matiyas Sovenskar as the king. “It’s just that we got on the wrong side in ’13. Should have joined the Alliance and let Bonaparte hang himself on his own rope. You don’t remember what it’s like when all Europe’s at war, all you hear is war, the Prussians lose, the Russians win, an army’s here, an army’s there, the food gets short, nobody’s safe in bed. Plenty of money to be made but no security in it—no stability. Peace is a great thing, lad! If you were a few years older you’d have learnt that.”

“Oh, well, liberty, rights—don’t be fooled by words, Itale my lad. Words go down the wind, but peace is a God-given thing, that’s the truth.” Angele was sure he had convinced Itale: the ideas were so clear, the facts so patent. Itale, at least, gave up arguing. At table, Angele went off into a tirade against the new tax laws imposed by the grand ducal government which an hour ago he had been defending. He ended on a plaintive note; when he smiled and glanced around apologetically at his family he looked very like his sister, Itale’s mother. The young man looked at him with affection, forgiving him. He could not be blamed for his obtuseness; after all, he was nearly fifty.

At midnight Itale was sitting at his table in his little attic bedroom. His legs were stretched out again, his chin was on his hands, he gazed over stacks of books and papers out the open window into the dark. There was the rustle and storm and hush of trees in the May night; the house was near the edge of town, and no other light was to be seen. Itale was thinking of the window of his room at home over Lake Malafrena, and of going to Krasnoy, and of the death of Stilicho, and of the blue smoky river beyond the willows, and of man’s life, all in one long unarticulable thought. The clap of two pair of military boots, Austrian issue, came down the street, stopped before the house, went on.

“If it must be so, it must; it’s necessary,” he thought with apprehensive joy, as if these words summed up the rest, and listened to the soft storming of the leaves. His climb over the gate into the silent courts of the university and his interview with the rector now seemed to have occurred long ago, when he was a boy, before his acts had significance. It now seemed to him that when Frenin had said, “I’m thinking of Krasnoy,” he had expected the words: they had to be said; they were inevitable. He would not go back and live out his life on the farm in the mountains. That was no longer possible. It was so completely impossible that he was free to look back on that existence, which until today he had considered his unquestionable destiny, with longing and regret. He knew every foot of the earth there, every act of the day’s work, every soul, knew them as he knew his own body and soul. Of the city he knew nothing.

“It must be, it must be,” he repeated with conviction, joy, and fear. The night wind, fresh with the smell of damp earth, touched his face and swayed the white curtains; the town slept on under the stars of spring.

His memories of childhood were fathomless, dateless, all place and no time, the rooms of the house, the floorboards of the stair-landing, the blue-ringed plates, the fetlocks of a great horse standing at the smithy, his mother’s hand, sunlight on gravel, rain on water, the outlines of the mountains against dark winter sky. Among these one time was distinct: that time when he stood in a room lit by four candles and saw a head on a pillow, the eye-sockets pits of black, the large nose shining like metal; and a hand lay on the quilt, but did not move, as if it were not a hand but a thing. A voice kept murmuring. It was his grandfather’s room but his grandfather was not there. His uncle Emanuel cast a huge shadow that moved behind him on the wall. There were huge shadows behind all the people, the servants, the priest, his mother, he was afraid to look at them. The murmur of the priest’s voice was like water lapping up the walls of the room, higher and higher, singing in his ears, closing over his head. He began to gasp for breath. In suffocating terror and shadow he had felt a big hand touch his back, and his father had said quietly, “You’re here too, Itale?” And his father had taken him out of the room, and told him to play in the garden a while. He had run out gladly, discovering that outside the room with the candles it was not even dark yet; the bronze of sunset still glowed on the lake, the humped back of the mountain called the Hunter over Evalde Gulf, the peak of San Larenz in the high west. His little sister Laura had been put to bed. He stayed out alone, and did not know what to do; he tried the door of the tool-house but it was locked; he picked up a reddish stone from the path, and whispered to himself, “I am Itale. I am seven years old,” but he was not sure of that, a child wandering in a garden in the broad, dark wind of night, lost, lost, until at last his aunt Perneta came scolding and reassuring and hurried him off to bed.

Itale Sorde the grandfather had lived in France in the 1770’s and had travelled in Germany and Italy. His neighbors of Val Malafrena slowly forgave him, though some of them never trusted him again. At forty he had returned for good to the mountain province and to his wife, a cousin of his neighbor Count Guide Valtorskar; had improved his estate, rebuilt his house, and settled down. He sent his sons down to Solariy to college, but both returned without further divagation to the Montayna, the elder to run the estate and the younger to practice law, moderately, in Portacheyka. Their father never left the province after 1790. Over the years his correspondence with friends abroad had slowly decreased, then stopped; they were dead, or had forgotten him, or knew he had chosen to be forgotten. After his death in 1810 he was remembered for his good management of the estate, his stately kindness, his skill as a gardener.

The family was of the domey, the commoner-landowner class, which had in 1740 been granted by royal charter equal privilege with the nobles of the kingdom. In the eastern provinces the domey still stood outside the old social hierarchy, insulated off; in the center and west they had, with the burghers of the capital and the major cities, become more closely engrafted with the nobility by intermarriage and custom than convention permitted most people to admit, more numerous and potentially more influential than most of them realised themselves. The magic of names still held minds enchanted. The domey did not have names; they had property.

Dom Itale’s property was small, but excellent. The house he built there looked out on three sides on the lake; it stood on a blunt peninsula, the end of a ridge running down from the shoulder of San Givan Mountain. The steep ridge was crowned with native oak and pine, so that approached from the east the house seemed to stand alone in a somber sweep of lake and mountain. But coming from Portacheyka, the town in the pass, one saw the fields and orchards and vineyards, the peasants’ and leaseholders’ houses, the roofs of other manors. The estate raised wine-grapes, pears, apples, rye, oats, barley; it was a dramatic but not a harsh climate. In a hard winter snow lay deep on the forested peaks, but not for a century had the ice frozen across Malafrena or the other lakes that stretched in a chain among the mountains to the southwest border of the land. Summers were long and hot, and thunderstorms roamed growling among the mountains. The years there were marked by drought or great rain, vintage, weather, harvest, rather than by the events of history; whether King Stefan ruled, or Napoleon and Grand Duke Matiyas, or Francis and Grand Duchess Mariya, it did not much affect the weather and the earth, the flavor of the wine, the aspects of the hills. Landowners and their tenants lived wholly within the mountain barrier. Taxation they grumbled at; so had their great-grandfathers.

Guide Sorde, the inheritor, was a tall man, spare, dark, with acute grey eyes, a good type of the taciturn peasants of his province, from whom his ancestors had risen to be landowners in the seventeenth century. His wife Eleonora, born in Solariy on the southern plain, was the only thing he had found outside the mountains that he prized; and he brought her back with him, for good.

In 1803 their son was born, their daughter three years later. Eleonora taught both children until Itale was eleven and Laura eight; then, since education had got to be a tradition in the family and Guide upheld all traditions, a tutor began to come in thrice a week for Laura, and Itale went off to school with the Benedictines on Sinviya Mountain. He came home most weekends; it was only seven miles. On the Thursday half-holiday he would go down to Portacheyka, whose peaked slate roofs and climbing streets lay under the windows of the monastery school, and have dinner with his uncle Emanuel and aunt Perneta in their high wooden house with its garden full of marigolds, pansies, phlox, and its view over the dark streets and roofs out through the pass. The town was set in a deep gap between Sinviya and San Givan Mountains; framed by the towering slopes, Portacheyka’s northward view had a quality of vision. It seemed as if the shadowed pass could not lead out to those remote and sunlit, azure hills, but only look down on them as if on fabled kingdoms across the barrier of possibility. When clouds gathered full of thunder on the peaks and hung low over the town sometimes the view of the lower hills shone out in a clear, golden light, an enchanted realm, free of the storm and darkness of the heights. Idling by the Golden Lion Inn, Itale saw the coaches of the Southwestern Post set off for distant cities or come in, high, swaying, dusty, from their journeys; and Portacheyka, the gateway of his province, had for him the glamor of voyage and the unknown that a seaport has for one whose country’s border is the sea.

Saturdays at noon he walked down through town, through the oak-wooded rolling foothills, past the slopes of vine and orchard, to the house by the lake. On the way he might meet and stop with his friends among the boys of the estate, or stop to talk with Bron, the master vintner, a long-legged, high-shouldered, grim old man. He would ask and tell Bron all the events of the week; if triumphs, “Aye, but work’s certain and reward’s seldom, Dom Itaal!”

When he was seventeen the monks of Sinviya sent him home with blessings and a first prize in Latin, and he took up the life of a young landowner, learning how to prune grape stocks and drain fields and keep accounts, hunting, riding, sailing his boat Falkone on the lake. The work filled his time but not his mind. He got restless. An important person to his family, he felt he ought to do something important. Status was obligation: that he had learned from his father, who never talked about duty but, autocrat as he was, served it unquestioning. Seeking a worthy duty, the boy studied the lives of great men. Aeneas had been his first hero; his grandfather had told him the story, then he had read it in school in his father’s battered school copy; but he found others in the meager lot of books he could get: Pericles, Socrates, Hector, Hannibal. And there was Napoleon. His childhood passed under the Empire, his boyhood during the exile. Powerless on his island jail, defeated, humiliated, Napoleon loomed there like Prometheus in chains, while over the broad lands of Europe and Russia ruled little, apprehensive kings…In his grandfather’s library the seventeen-year-old found so many French books that—enlisting his sister’s willing aid, for she was being tutored in French—he taught himself enough of the language to be able to read Voltaire. Laura tried to read with him, but found it boring and returned to her mother’s favorite, the New Heloise, at which Itale was relieved, since at the monastery school Voltaire had been mentioned only in the same breath with the devil, and he was not quite sure what he was getting into. There were some odd volumes of the Moniteur. the French government newspaper. He looked at one from 1809 and found it like all newspapers he had ever seen, the mouthpiece of authority. But later he chanced on a volume from the early 1790’s. He did not at first recall what had been going on in Paris then—the monks had not been strong on recent history. He came on speeches made by M. Danton, M. Mirabeau, M. Vergniaud; they were strangers to him. M. Robespierre he had heard mentioned, along with Voltaire and the devil. He turned back to the year 1790 and began reading steadily. He held the French Revolution in his hands. He read the speech in which the orator called down the wrath of the people on the house of privilege, the speech that ended, “Vivre libre, ou mourir!”—Live free, or die. The yellowed newsprint crumbled under the boy’s touch; his head was bowed over dry columns of words spoken to a lost Assembly by men thirty years dead. His hands felt cold as if a wind blew on him, his mouth was dry. He did not understand half what he read, knowing almost nothing of the events of the Revolution. It did not matter. He understood that there had been a Revolution.

The speeches were full of rant, cant, and vanity; he saw that clearly enough. But they discussed freedom as a human need, like bread, like water. Itale got up and walked up and down the quiet little library, rubbing his head and staring blankly at the bookcases and the windows. Freedom was not a necessity, it was a danger, all the lawmakers of Europe had been saying that for a decade. Men were children, to be governed for their own good by the few who understood the science of government. What did this Frenchman Vergniaud mean by stating a choice—live free or die? Such choices are not offered to children. The words were spoken to men. They rang bald and strange; they lacked the logic of statements made in support of alliances, counter-alliances, censorships, repressions, reprisals. They were not reasonable.

Itale came late to supper, looking feverish. He ate little, and soon escaped the house, going down to the lake-shore in the darkness. There he wrestled for some hours with the angel, the messenger, who had challenged him that afternoon. He put up the best fight he could, since, for a nineteen-year-old, he regarded clear thinking highly; but the angel won hands down. Itale could not refuse what he had wanted and sought: the ideal of human greatness, not embodied in a person, but to be won for all by the fellowship of mankind. So long as one soul is unjustly jailed I am not free, thought the new convert, and when he thought of these things his face took on a stern expression, and also a look of great happiness. His twentieth year was in fact the happiest of his life. When out of long silence he would reply to something his mother said, she would look at him wistfully and wonder where it was he had been, so far from her that his blue eyes looked at her with joyous recognition, as if he had been long away in distant lands.

She knew before he did that he wanted to leave home; he found it out for himself that summer. When his work was done he would take his boat and run the shining lake, returning at dusk from the farthest, eastern gulfs where the river Kiassa sprang from the lake and sorted down the forested mountainsides to the foothills and the plains, to join the Molsen and run on with it. The stream he watched chasing down amongst the rocks would, by summer’s end, have reached the sea; while he stayed home by the still lake.

Guide Sorde was told that it was natural for a young man to want to leave home for a while, but he saw it as mere folly. The estate had to be run; Itale was the heir; if one had a job, one did it. Eleonora, following her brother-in-law’s suggestion, had proposed sending Itale to college in Solariy. “After all, your father sent you and Emanuel there…”

“There’s nothing there he needs,” said Guide in his quiet voice in which one could hear, like a wind blowing from the edge of distant storm, a muted resonance of passion. “Waste of time.”

Eleonora had never combatted her husband’s arrogant provincialism for herself, but for Itale she did. “He needs to meet people, to know the world a little. What good will he be to his peasants if he’s no more than another peasant?”

Guide scowled. His wife was using his own weapons against him, more cleverly than he could use them; and he felt besides that he had not been able to express his real reason for not wanting to let the boy go. He was angry at his family for not understanding this motive which he did not understand himself, and offended because he knew he must give in. Everybody knew he would give in, even Itale. Only Eleonora had the tact to argue with him.

So in September of 1822 Itale set off on the Montayna Diligence, northward through the pass and down. Looking back he saw the mountains above long rising ranges of foothills, their familiar outlines changed and changing. San Givan had revealed a great falling eastern slope, Sinviya a second peak; the faint blue outline beyond them, the farthest away, must be the Hunter. As it sank out of sight Itale got out his watch, his grandfather’s silver watch, and checked the hour: nine-twenty of the morning. Here on the descending road, now bending towards the southeast, it was sunny, crickets sang in the mown fields, harvesters were at work, the villages were deserted, tranquil in the sunlight. It was the golden land he had seen from beneath the stormclouds of Portacheyka. They passed through towns and villages whose names he knew from hearsay, Vermare, Chaga, Bara; with the last they left the Montayna Province, and at Erreme he changed to the Sudana Post. He looked intently at the people, the houses, the chickens and pigs, as the Sudana Post rolled along, to see what pigs, chickens, houses, people looked like, down here.

In Solariy all things were sleepy. Livestock was fat, houses drowsed in their overgrown gardens full of roses, even the Molsen slept as it flowed through Solariy under the old bridge, sending its wide flood slow and shining to the south. The students of the university did not work hard, they did not duel, they drank a lot of wine and fell in love continually, and the girls of Solariy fell in love with them. In his second year Itale, abandoned by a faithless baker’s daughter, renounced love violently and turned to politics. He became a leader in the student society, Amiktiya. The government was barely tolerant of Amiktiya; all such student groups had been outlawed in the Germanies; a society at the University of Wilno so aggravated the Tsar of All the Russias that in 1824 he disbanded it, exiled the boys that led it, and put the entire student body and faculty under permanent surveillance. It was this sort of thing that gave Amiktiya its spice. They drank a lot of wine and sang the society’s forbidden anthem, “Beyond this darkness is the light, O Liberty, of thine eternal day.” They passed contraband books around, discussed the revolutions of France, Naples, Piedmont, Spain, Greece, talked of constitutional monarchy, equality before the law, popular education, a free press, all without any clear idea of what they were getting at, where it all led. They were not supposed to talk, so they talked. So the third year passed and Itale thought himself ready to go home for good, until he found himself half-shod and laughing in the dark court of the chapel, until he heard Frenin saying in the sunlight over the river, “I’m thinking of Krasnoy.”

III

Emanuel Sorde cleared his throat and remarked with the carelessness suitable to an explosive topic, “The newspaper’s quite a puzzle this week. I wonder if the Estates aren’t going to be convened after all.”

“The National Assembly? Why, dear me, they haven’t met, have they, since King Stefan died.”

“It’s only my guess, Count. The Courier-Mercury says nothing; therefore one suspects something.”

“Yes.” Count Orlant Valtorskar sighed. “My wife used to have me subscribe to the Aisnar Mercury. It seemed to have more facts in it. Whatever became of it?”

“It was banned so long that its owners went bankrupt,” Itale answered, with heat. “Since then we’ve had no free press at all.”

“What if the Estates do meet?” said Guide in his slow, hard, quiet voice. “They’ll talk and do nothing, as in ’96.”

“Talk!” said his son, setting down a wine glass, which continued to ring for a moment. “It’s not unimportant that—” But Emanuel interrupted him: “They might be able to do something about taxation, at least. The Hungarian Diet’s won back control over their taxes from Vienna.”

“The money wouldn’t go to support a foreign police force, at any rate,” said Itale.

Count Orlant’s long face, smooth and rosy for his years, wore a look of increasingly bewildered compunction as the discussion went on. He felt sorry for them all, emperors, policemen, tax-collectors, poor fellows caught in the webs and pressures of material affairs, but he knew something more than sympathy was expected of him, and he was never able to meet their expectations. There was Guide looking black, Emanuel watchful, Itale getting hotter and hotter and finally bursting out as usual, “A time will come—!” But to Count Orlant’s relief Guide spoke setting the challenge aside: “Let’s go out to the terrace.”

They joined the women on the railed and paved garden old Itale had built out over the lake under the south windows of the house. It was a warm evening, the last of July. The water reflected the pale blue sky evenly except where, in the large shadows of the mountains, it lay translucent brown. Far off east where the lake was hidden by slopes descending sheer into it a little haze veiled the water. In the west sunset still colored the sky behind San Larenz Mountain and lighted the air so that the white flagstones of the terrace, the white nicotiana flowering in pots, the white dress Laura wore, the blue surface of the lake all were faintly flushed with rose, fading now as the sky paled and Vega overhead sent its first broken radiance down through the quiet air. The cypress at the outer corner of the terrace stood black against luminous water and sky, and the air bore a scent of dusk, dampness, flowers, and the murmur of women’s voices.

“Oh, Lord, Lord, what a wonder of an evening!” sighed Count Orlant, in a strong provincial accent, submissively, as if asking what he had ever done to merit so fine an evening. He stood looking out over the lake, his long face serene. Eleonora and her sister-in-law were going through the week’s gossip, which they exchanged weekly, Eleonora reporting on Val Malafrena and Perneta covering events in Portacheyka; the two girls, Piera Valtorskar and Laura, were talking together, and lowered their voices when the men came out. “He can’t dance at all,” Laura was saying.

“The hair on the back of his neck looks like moss on a stump,” said Piera, dreamily, with complete lack of feeling. She was sixteen years old. Her face, like her father’s, was long and naturally serene. She was small, and her figure and hands were still childishly plump.

Piera asked with sudden interest, “Do you think they’ll have vanilla ices?”

Perneta meantime had interrupted a complex narration to ask her husband, “Emanuel, isn’t Alitsia Verachoy Alexander Sorentay’s second cousin?”

“Then it was his mother who married a man from Val Altesma named Berchoy in 1816, wasn’t it?”

“But Perneta dear,” said Eleonora, “Givan Verachoy died in 1820, so how could his wife have remarried in 1816?”

“Su, su, su,” Emanuel went, and escaped, while Perneta said, “But Rosa Berchoy is Alitsia’s mother-in-law, don’t you see,” and Eleonora cried, “Oh, it’s Edmund Sorentay you mean, not Alexander, and it was her father that died in 1820!”

Guide’s brother, though six years younger than he, was greyer; his face was more mobile, less strongly marked. Unambitious and sociable, he had chosen to live in town and practice the law, in which he had taken his degree at Solariy. He had twice refused a judgeship, never explaining his refusal, which most people ascribed to indolence. He was in fact indolent and inclined to irony, describing himself both as a superfluous man and a supremely fortunate one. He deferred to his brother; he would counsel him, but unwillingly. A lawyer’s experience of humanity had rubbed him down, worn the corners off him, while Guide, like a flint never dislodged from its cliff above the torrent, had kept every angle and salience of his character intact. Emanuel and Perneta had had one child, stillborn. She, an active woman of a temperament dryer and more sardonic than his own, made no comment when he described himself as supremely fortunate; nor did she ever meddle in the upbringing of her niece and nephew; but they were her sunlight, her pride, her fortune.

Itale joined his uncle at the balustrade under the cypress. The young man’s face was still flushed, his hair and cravat were rather wild. “You saw in the Courier-Mercury that the Provincial Diet of the Polana is meeting? That’s the man I was talking about, Stefan Oragon.”

This was not the kind of question the members of Amiktiya had asked one another.

“And which people?” Emanuel pursued his advantage. “Our class is scarcely ‘the people’—The merchants? The peasants here? The city rabble? Don’t the different classes have rather different demands?—”

“Not ultimately,” Itale said, thinking as he spoke. “The ignorance of the uneducated limits the usefulness of education in those who receive it; you can’t limit the light. You can’t build equity on any foundation but equality—for four thousand years that has been proved over and over again—”

“Proved?” Emanuel demanded, and they were off, full gallop. Their discussions always started thus with Emanuel in control, pressing Itale to defend his opinions, and always ended with Itale out of control, prevailing through sheer goodnatured eloquent conviction. Then Emanuel would reorganise, provoke another defense, all the while persuaded that he did so to keep his nephew from second-hand thinking, and not because he, too, craved to hear and speak the words, our country, our rights, our freedom.

Itale’s mother called to him to fetch Perneta’s shawl which she had left in the gig. When he returned sunset was over, the breeze smelled of night. Sky, mountains, lake lay drowned in a deep obscurity of blue, shot through with luminous mists. Laura’s white gown showed against the shrubbery with the same misty gleam. “You look like Lot’s wife,” her brother said.

Laura was tall like her brother, thin, with strong, delicate wrists and hands. She loved her brother passionately, but was ruled by an imperative honesty of heart. When I tale’s mother brought him down out of the clouds she scarcely knew it and never intended it; his sister, admiring and intolerant, always did. She wanted him to be himself, considering him, in himself, superior to all fashions, opinions, authorities. A very gentle, unassuming girl of nineteen, she was in this as intransigent as her father. Itale valued her opinion of him above any other, but at this point he was merely mortified, because Piera Valtorskar was listening; having rapidly adjusted his necktie, he said with pedantry, “I have no idea why you think I should want to imitate Lord Byron in any way, except perhaps his death. He died a hero, no doubt of that. But the poetry is trivial.”

“But last summer you made me read that whole book about Manfred! And you were quoting today—Thy something or other wings are something—”

“‘Thy wings of storm are held at rest,’ that’s not Byron, that’s Estenskar! You mean you haven’t read the Odes?”

“But I haven’t read the translation of Lord Byron. I think papa hid it.” Piera spoke very softly.

“That’s all right, at least you’ve read Estenskar. You liked it, didn’t you? That was ‘The Eagle’—and it ends,

But, caged, thou seest the centuries

Open before thee, like the open sky.—

“But who is it about?” Laura inquired in honest confusion. “Napoleon!” her brother thundered, outraged. “Oh, dear, Napoleon again,” said their mother. “Itale, dear, will you fetch my shawl, too? It’s in the hall, or call Kass, but I expect he’s having his dinner now.”

Itale brought her shawl and then hesitated, standing by her chair, as to where to go next. He ought to return to his uncle at the balustrade and have a sensible, manly conversation, thus proving to Piera and himself that it was only because she was so childish that he appeared to be childish when he was with her. But he wanted to stay and talk with the two girls.

His mother looked up at him. “When ever did you grow so tall?” she asked in a puzzled, musing tone. Light from the house windows shone on her upturned face. When she smiled her under lip hid beneath the top one, and this gave her a demure, sly look that was perfectly charming. Itale laughed for no reason, looking down at her, and she laughed at him because he looked so tall and because he was laughing.

Count Orlant had wandered over and asked, touching his daughter’s hair, “You’re not cold, contesina?”

“What’s become of the picnic in the pine forest?” asked Perneta. “We’ve been promised it all summer.”

“Oh, I forgot to say, if we want we can go tomorrow, the weather will hold, won’t it, dear?”

“Likely,” said Guide, who sat near her, sunk in his own thoughts. He did not like the discussions his son and his brother carried on at his table. He treated all political discussions with contempt. Some of his fellow landowners, who had no interest in events outside the province but were engrossed in local politics, returned the contempt: “Sorde never looks up from his plough.” Others said with envy, “Sorde’s one of the old breed, the independent gentry,” comparing him to their fathers and grandfathers for whom, as usual, life had been so much simpler. But Guide knew well enough that his father had not been one of the “old breed.” He remembered the letters that had used to come from Paris, Prague, Vienna, the guests from Krasnoy and Aisnar, the discussions at table and in the library. Yet old Itale had taken no part in local politics and had never explained his own ideas except in direct answer to a question. There had been more to his silence and self-exile on the estate than natural tolerance and reserve; it had been a choice, scrupulously kept, made perhaps in self-knowledge, perhaps in the bitterness of defeat: Guide did not know. The child of that choice, he had never questioned it. Now for the first time he was forced to, and to consider that what he had considered his destiny was also, perhaps, an unacknowledged, unexamined choice. So he sat somber in the mild summer dusk. His son’s voice, the girl’s voices flowed past him like water. Perneta sat silent; Count Orlant and Eleonora had joined Emanuel at the terrace edge; the three young people were talking softly.

“It’s going to sound very silly, but you know, I have an idea about that,” Laura was saying. “I don’t believe you have to die, if you don’t want to. I mean, I know you do, and still…I can’t believe people would die if they really, absolutely wanted not to.” She smiled; her smile was like her mother’s. “I told you it was silly.”

“No, I’ve thought the same thing,” said Itale. He found it extraordinary, mysterious, that he and his sister had had the same thought. He admired Laura: she had had the courage to speak it, he had not. “I can’t find the reason for dying, the need. People simply get tired, give in, isn’t that it?”

“Yes. Death comes from outside, a disease, or a whack on the head, something from outside, not oneself.”

“Exactly. And if one were really oneself, one would say, ‘No, sorry, I’m busy, come back later when I’ve done everything I have to do!’” All three of them laughed, and Laura said, “And that would be never. How could you ever get everything done?”

“You certainly can’t in seventy years. It’s ridiculous. If I had seven hundred, I’d spend the first century thinking—finishing thoughts I never have time to finish. After that I could do things properly, instead of rushing in and making a mess every time.”

“I’d go somewhere where no one knew me at all,” said Laura. “It wouldn’t have to be that far, Val Altesma would do. I’d like to live where no one knew me, and I didn’t know anyone. And I think I’d like to travel too; I should like to see Paris; and the volcanoes in Iceland.”

“I’d stay here,” said Piera. “I’d buy up all the land around the lake, except yours, and make the disagreeable people move away. I shall have an enormous family. Fifteen at least. On July thirty-first every year they’ll all come home from wherever they were and we’ll have a great, enormous party on the lake, with boats.”

“I’ll bring volcanoes from Iceland,” said Laura, and again they all laughed.

“A decent-sized nose,” he said gravely, after consideration. “One that people didn’t take notice of. And I’d like to be at King Matiyas’s coronation.”

“Oh, nothing else, that’s enough,” Itale said with his quick, broad smile. “I’ll give the third one to Piera, I expect she has a use for it.”

“No, three’s plenty,” Piera said, but she would not tell what her three wishes were.

“All right,” Laura said, “I’ll use up Itale’s spare wish. I’d wish we find out we were right, and all live seven hundred years.”

“I never listen to them, Lele,” Perneta answered in her dry contralto. “It’s no use.”

“It’s just as sensible as all that about whose mother-in-law is somebody else’s stepsister’s uncle!” Laura retorted.

“Oh, but the Sorentays’ ball, we haven’t even decided on Piera’s dress, and when is it to be, the twentieth?”

“The twenty-second,” both girls replied. The conversation turned with vigor to the subject of taffeta, organdie, swiss; empire, tuckered, à la grecque; “White swiss with tiny green dots, with a dropped tucker, I can show you the very thing in Perneta’s book.”

“My dear, if we did dress in fashion up here, who would know it?” Eleonora inquired without asperity. She had been a beautiful and admired girl in Solariy, but had left all that behind her, “down there,” without a backward glance, when she married Guide Sorde. “I think the dropped tucker is an uncommonly pretty style. Do you like the idea, Piera?”

Piera’s mother had died, fourteen years ago, in an epidemic of the cholera that had also taken the Sordes’ last-born, a baby girl. There were nurses and servants aplenty in Count Orlant’s house, an ancient great-aunt, cousins, relatives of the mother; but Eleonora had taken charge of the two-year-old Piera at once, firmly, as if by right. Count Orlant, grieving, anxious, grateful, soon dared not decide anything concerning his daughter without consulting Eleonora: who in turn had never presumed on the privilege of affection. She and Piera loved each other more easily, more cheerfully, than any mother and daughter could do however good their disposition.

Piera, often slow to speak, was considering Eleonora’s question. “Yes,” she said, and thought a little longer. “I’d like a grey silk gown with panels,” she said, “like that plate for the Court Bal dress. And a gold scarf. And silk shoes with gold roses.”

Count Orlant was listening. He had never got over a deep wonder at the fact that Piera, this young person who was so candid yet so secret, and in whom he glimpsed when he least expected it a whole, strange world of ideas, knowledge, and emotions which could not possibly have had time in sixteen years to grow so deep and strong, that this extraordinary child on the point of becoming a woman was, when you came right down to it, his daughter. Though he relied upon her love he was often afraid of her. Just now the wonder returned: he saw her vision, a royal maiden in silk and cloth of gold. “That sounds very charming,” he said, timidly proffering his opinion to the wise ladies. They sighed, hedged. “Perhaps a gold scarf with a white organdie?” Eleonora went on trying to soften the veto. The Valtorskars, father and daughter, accepted the judgment without question, listened to further suggestions, and, listening, continued to entertain their tacit and contented vision of magnificence.

Guide and Emanuel were talking about hunting; it was Itale that now sat unheeding, tense with his thoughts. Down in Solariy he had planned to tell his family his decision on the night he came home: he must not deceive them by letting them think him home to stay. He had been home three weeks now and had said nothing. Coming in at the Golden Lion in Portacheyka, as he swung down off the coach, he had seen his father turn to look for him. On Guide’s face had been the rare smile that made him look a different man, awkward, vulnerable. At the memory of it Itale clenched his hands in unavailing protest. It was unjust of his father to be so happy, to show his happiness, at his return! How could a man act like a man, say what he had to say and do what he had to do, when all these unspoken feelings clung and clustered round him holding him back, tying him down? And not only other people’s feelings—he would admit—but his own; all the happiness of his boyhood around him once again, unchanged, all his own love and loyalty, all his old expectations of life. The earth itself held him here more strongly than any other bond, the red dirt of the vineyards, the long great lines of the mountains against the sky. How could he leave all that? The scythe he was honing or the boat tiller or the book in his hand would be forgotten for a moment and he would look unseeing out over Malafrena, with a heaviness in him. It was as if a spell was laid upon him here, which he could not break, though he might escape from it; a charm that grew strongest in certain hours, certain conversations—he did not want to think about it. That was the rankest injustice, the least tolerable. He could not fall in love here, with a mere child; there was no question of it, of childish flirtations and unspoken understandings: he had outgrown all that. It was love he wanted, adult love, and he would find it in Krasnoy; for he had to go to Krasnoy. Beneath all his hesitations the same voice said to him, resolutely and mournfully, “It’s necessary, it must be.”

“Did you track her, Itale?” Emanuel was talking of the she-wolf that had been seen up on San Larenz.

“No luck,” he answered; and as he spoke he decided that he must speak to his father.

He prepared himself for the ordeal by speaking to his uncle, that night after the others had gone indoors. Emanuel seemed not unprepared for the revelation. After he had determined Itale’s plans—which consisted of going to Krasnoy and finding how he could be useful to the patriotic cause, if in fact there was one—and after he had watched and listened to his nephew a while, he made his meditative noise: “Su, su, su…It all sounds vague, it all sounds dangerous, to me; but lawyers always see the wrong side of things…I don’t know how Guide will see it. I’m afraid it make no sense whatever to him, in any terms.”

“He won’t. He’s counted on you these twenty years to work with him. Grudged you the three years in the south. Now this?…Besides, I don’t know that you understand what you’re doing yourself. You aren’t following reason, as well as I can see. Like him, you act from passion, a passion for moral clarity, the will to be yourself. And now your will is different from his, radically different. You think you’re going to discuss that difference reasonably and come to an agreement? I doubt it!”

“But Father believes in duty, in serving principle. Of course in a way I’d rather stay here—I wish I could stay here—but this is more important than any private wish, and I know he could understand that. I can’t stay here until I’m free to stay here.”

“I won’t win it,” the young man said. “Freedom consists in doing what you can do best, your work, what you have to do, doesn’t it? It’s nothing you have or keep. It is action, it is life itself. But how can you live in the prison of others’ servitude? I can’t live for myself until everyone is free to do sol”

“Until the Kingdom is come,” Emanuel murmured ironically, with pain. The lake stretched away from them very dark, very still, barely a noise of water lapping the foundation of the terrace or the pilings of the boat house. Eastward, the bulks and slopes of the mountains stood outlined against a dim whiteness in the sky, moonrise; westward was only darkness and the stars.

The cry re-echoed off the water that lay sparkling between the boats, but there was no answering call, and the sharp brown sail ahead of them skimmed on unheeding.

“They’re turning,” said Count Orlant, frowning into the dazzle. The brown sail, sharp as a hawk’s wing, was coming round. Count Orlant brought Mazeppa into the wind, heading her home; soon the smaller boat had come up even with her and they heard the boatsman’s hail, “Hoy there!”

“Hoy!” Eleonora hailed gallantly, sounding like a quail. “Clouds—It’s going to storm—We ought to start home!”

“Home!” Perneta contributed, waving at the passing thunderclouds over San Larenz.

“Oh dear, I can’t shout any more—do tell them it’ll take too long to hunt mushrooms, and I already have two barrels down in pickle—It’s going to ra-ain! Oh dear.” They heard laughter in Falkone, and presently Emanuel’s voice: “Mushrooms?”

“Home!” Count Orlant roared in an unexpected mountaineer’s bellow. The figure in the prow of the other boat made a sweeping bow, executed a few dance steps, and vanished. “He fell in!” Eleonora cried, but Falkone sailed on past them, Itale and Laura now performing a minuet in the stern. By the time Mazeppa lumbered in, Emanuel and the three young people were already up on the terrace. Itale was expounding something; his blue eyes shone in his wind-flushed face. Eleonora and Perneta both looked at him with unqualified admiration, and Perneta said, “Itale, what on earth did you do with your hat?”

Piera suddenly laughed, a loud irrepressible laugh. “He was fishing with it…”

“With his hat,” said Emanuel. “And two young ladies holding a leg apiece and shrieking ‘Don’t kick! Don’t kick!’”

“Piera dropped her ferns overboard when the boom came round, so I tried to get them back, and what’s become of the dipper I keep in Falkone?” He and the girls were red with laughter.

“And Laura, you never once put up your parasol, now you’ll be freckled till Michaelmas.”

“Freckles,” said Count Orlant, thoughtfully. “I remember when this contesina was small and running about all day, I once counted eighteen freckles on her nose alone. Rather becoming, I thought.”

“And a fine thing if they go to the Sorentays’ ball looking like a pair of old saddles,” said Eleonora. “You needn’t look so pleased with yourselves, you two!”

Itale looked at Piera as she stood half turned from him and saw on the slender nape of her neck, below the wind-loosened chignon, three freckles: a pleasant sight.

“Because neither of you would hold on, and I couldn’t keep my face out of the water!”

“He bubbled,” Piera said, and they all began laughing again. “Oh, he lay there on the water waving his arms and b-bubbling, oh—” When they recovered, Eleonora said, wiping her eyes, “How can you all be so silly? Is Guide still out? he probably hasn’t even looked up at the sky…”

“Dear lady,” said Emanuel, taking his sister-in-law by the waist. “Twenty-seven years in Val Malafrena and she still isn’t used to thunderstorms!”

“Twenty-eight years, dear, but I do think it’s a shame all the best days up here end in a lot of pouring and growling and Guide coming in dripping on the floor.” She and Emanuel rocked back and forth on their heels, beaming at the others. There was a long roll of thunder from San Larenz, and one of them said, “Here it comes.” The thunderheads had massed, gray and gray-black, boiling over the mountain and reaching across the lake. “In with us!” said Eleonora.

Guide was standing at the south windows of the living room. Itale stopped short in the hall, looking at the black figure against the stormy light.

“A beautiful day,” said Count Orlant, sitting down with relief in one of the heavy old oaken armchairs. “Wish you’d been with us, Sorde.”

“I should be having some days free soon. I’d like you to try the hawk old Rika’s trained.”

Falconry was still a common sport in the Montayna. Guide and his son were adepts, Emanuel took pleasure in it, and Count Orlant could appreciate the points of a hawk, though in his heart there was no great desire to go trotting about the countryside carrying on his wrist a big bird before whose cruel, straight stare he felt, somehow, inferior.

“I wish you’d take her out, Itale,” Guide was saying. “She should fly. I haven’t had the time, working with Starey.”

He answered the simple request with a bad conscience, and was relieved when his mother interrupted the falconers’ talk, coming in with Eva the cook and tea. The pleasure of the day was gone; as soon as he had entered the house he could think of nothing but that he must speak to his father tonight. He sat, his damp hat between his knees, like an awkward guest who could neither talk nor take his leave. The women were aware of his attitude. His mother was profoundly uneasy, knowing there was some change in him. Laura thought he was up on his pedestal showing off again; she did not know why he would no longer talk to her about what preoccupied him, and felt cheated and resentful. Perneta thought him very funny and very handsome as he sat there nursing his weed-looped hat; she never worried about him, convinced no harm could come to a boy like that. As for Piera, who sat next to him on the couch, she was aware of his silence, of the blue coat he wore, of the slight rough darkness of his cheek, of his presence, the weight and reality of his being there. She went no further. Had he spoken she would have listened to his voice as part of that inexplicable presence; he was silent; she listened to his silence. She thought she had never been so happy as she was right now, and most likely would never be so happy again, since things would not be exactly the same again. Her joy, undulled by age and habit, unfounded on any permanence of life, knew its own defenselessness. She dared not handle it, clear and fragile as glass. If she felt the trouble in him it was as part of her own trouble and joy, part of the strangeness of and of their sitting side by side on the couch drinking tea.

Count Orlant returned from prowling in the library: “That must be an interesting botanical collection your father made, Sorde. I wish he’d gone in for astronomy. I suppose no one much reads those?”

“Itale’s in there a good deal, but not for botany,” said Laura, hoping for a rise out of her brother.

“I remember your grandfather teaching you the Latin names of the plants, out in the garden; I don’t suppose you remember that.”

“At least Itale can still tell me the name of that exotic under the east windows, that I always forget again immediately, what is it?” Eleonora said.

Brief hard rain whitened the windows. The thunder had passed over; low sun shone gold on the lake through rain.

“Oh, do you know, these summer storms are pleasant, they lighten the air…”

“I get much the best results with my telescope after a thundershower,” Count Orlant confirmed. As Emanuel asked him something about his astronomy, Itale said to Piera, without knowing he was going to say anything, “Have you read Estenskar’s other books?”

Itale frowned. “Estenskar is a great poet. And a noble mind. It’s fear that bans his works, but mere sloth that accepts the ban. You should insist on a freedom which is your obligation.”

The sixteen-year-old countess, with her round arms, her curly hair and slender, freckled neck, glanced at her father, who was saying, “But if a comet came very close to the earth there’s no telling…” and looked at Itale, and said, “I will.” After a moment she added, “Papa likes to know what I read, and I think he did hide Lord Byron, but I don’t think he’d really stop me from reading anything…”

“I didn’t mean him exactly, that is, not personally. But let me lend you the book, Piera. I really think you’ll find it very fine.” He ended up pleading. The matter, like everything that came up that day, seemed of illimitable importance.

“But you’ll be over Tuesday night, and if you brought it then, papa wouldn’t notice me carrying it home and ask.”

She was puzzled, but took the book he brought her and did not ask what could keep him from coming to Valtorsa on Tuesday night.

Everyone went out together to leave or say goodbye; as they went down the path there was a gust of perfume about them in the rainwashed evening air. Piera asked, “Is that the mandevilia…?”

As Emanuel and Perneta were driving up to Portacheyka, fields and wooded hills flowing past them molasses-dark in the late evening, the clop of the horse’s hooves dull on the dust-thick road, the wife broke a long silence between them. “Our nephew’s come home moody.”

“No, I suppose I do. I’ve seen it once. Guide, in ’97. He was a new man in a new world, that year. So they married. How long did it last? Eight months, ten months? Most people never have that much. A few hours, if anything. Rubbish.”

“Funny old man,” said his wife, in one of her rare and always private impulses of tenderness. “But all the same, Piera and Itale…”

“Of course. It’s the most natural thing in the world. But Itale’s leaving.”

“Our provincial politics are a swindling game played by idle landowners and professional incompetents.”

“Well, but—” Perneta meant that was what all politics meant to her, and Emanuel understood her.

“Do you mean,” she asked after pondering, “the Sovenskarists—those people? Like that writer in Aisnar that was put in jail?”

“Yes. They’re not common criminals, you know. They’re mostly gentlemen and parish priests, I believe. Decent men all over Europe are involved in this sort of thing. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it,” Emanuel said violently, and shook the patient horse’s reins.

“No, it won’t. I know you women. The more risks he runs, the more follies he commits, the prouder you’ll be of him. But Guide! The boy is Guide’s future—To see that at risk, astray—”

“The boy is his own future,” Perneta said very gravely. “But how much risk is there in this?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. I think too much about risk, about people’s feelings, all that—That’s why I’m a provincial lawyer and have never done anything that took courage. And never because I’m too old now to upset the housekeeping. I wish that once, only once, when I was twenty-two, I’d said to someone as Itale said to me, ‘This is important.’ Even if it wasn’t important, even if it wasn’t true!”

Perneta put her large, hard hand over his, lightly. She said nothing. They drove on through the warm night to Portacheyka that lay, a few scattered lights, below them in the pass.

At about the same time Itale, standing at the foot of the stairs, was saying, “This is rather important, Father.”

In the high-windowed room starlight defined the shadows of leaves against the glass. Guide lit a lamp and sat down at the table in his carved, age-black chair, a relic of the furniture of the house built by his great-grandfather in 1682 and rebuilt by his father a century later. The table was piled with documents, some written in the fine cursive of law clerks dead two hundred years: the deeds and titles, contracts and records, of the Sorde estate. Most of them concerned rents and settlements with the tenant farmers or deeds and rights to new properties acquired over the generations. That stack of Latin documents, Itale had thought when he saw Guide and Emanuel at work on them, was the Middle Ages: obscure, intricate, muddled, arid, beneath the aridity pungent with life and overwhelming in its concreteness, its multifarious humanity, its absorption in the land, the land worked, owned, rented, leased, the land that made a peasant bound and a landowner free, the land source, root, subject and end of life. Over against all that was a sheaf of printed papers to which Emanuel would refer, scowling: the Tax Laws of 1825, concise, precise, impersonal, modern, and when applied to the Middle Ages in the form of those piled-up records, meaningless. Here was the Family and the Land; here was the State and Uniformity; and nothing existed to bridge the gulf between, no revolution, no representation, no reforms, nothing.

At Itale’s end of the long table, not yet swamped by documents, lay only a copy of Rousseau’s Social Contract, which he had been rereading. He picked it up and turned it round absently in his hands as he spoke.

“Since Austria wants us to use Napoleonic tax methods, it would help if she’d let us carry out the reorganisation the French began here, wouldn’t it?”

“It would. If they must have money why don’t they come to me for it, do they think the peasants can raise cash? City men…”

Guide’s face stood out heavily shadowed against the obscurity of the book-lined walls. It was a hard, strong face, but what impressed Itale in it as a quality he had never consciously seen in it before was its repose. That was not temperament, for Guide’s temper was not reposeful; it was character, the gift of time, and not only the years of Guide’s own life but the time he had accepted and made his own, the seasons and the generations past. Itale could see in his father’s face that he was tired tonight, that he wished Itale would say what he had to say and at the same time dreaded what he might say; all that was plain enough. But beneath it was the passive, unmoved repose, the will underlying all personal emotion; his inheritance.

“I’m aware that we disagree on certain matters. Times change. We needn’t think alike on everything. Time spent discussing opinions is time wasted.”

“Nor have I.” The Social Contract came down on the table with a light thump, raising dust from the old papers and parchments. “None at all. But I wish to act by my principles, as you do by yours.”

“Your mind is your own. Your time is your own. So long as you do your work here, and you do; you always have done.”

“If you won’t listen there’s no use my trying to speak.” Itale stood up. So did Guide: “Stay here,” he said. He walked down the room and back, down it and back a second time. He sat down again in the carved chair. Itale remained standing by the table. Behind the house in the valley a sleepy cock crowed; old Eva was singing in the kitchen, rooms away.

Itale tried to repress his resentment and defiance, making so harsh an effort over himself that it weakened him physically. For a moment the reaction was so strong that he wanted to go to his father like a child and ask his pardon: anything to spare this anger. He sat down as before across the table from Guide, picked up the book as before, watched the lamplight flicker on its worn gold edging, and finally said, “I will find work. My friends and I hope to write—perhaps to start some kind of journal.”

“These are words, too. This book. It brought the Bastille down. Those are words, those documents about our land. You’ve given your life to what they stand for.”

Guide spoke with careful restraint. “Let me tell you how I see this. You want to go down there, mix yourself up with other people’s business; you say you see that as a matter of principle. Of duty. What I see much more clearly is your duty here, to your family and your property and the people on it. Who is to run this estate when I die? A Krasnoy journalist?”

“You cannot speak to me as if I were a child. I’m not a child. I am what you made me, and I know what duty is; and I respect your principles; therefore I ask you to respect mine.”

Guide was speechless a moment before Itale’s self-confidence. “Respect? Respect for what? Your theories, your opinions, your secondhand words that you want to throw away all this for? You are of age, you needn’t obey me, but you can’t touch your inheritance until you’re twenty-five, and thank God for that.”

“But you’re throwing it away, you’re turning your back on it, everything I’ve worked for. It’s not yours to throw away!” That was a cry from the heart. The young man answered desperately, “I’m not—I’ll come back when you need me—”

“I’ll go,” Itale answered, on his feet. “You keep all that, but you can’t take my loyalty to it, to this house, to you—A time will come when you’ll see that—”

“A time will come, will it!” The Social Contract landed on the floor, pages down, a loose endpaper skittering across the room like a scared bird. “Not in my time, or in yours!”

Both were suffocated with self-righteous anger, both knew there was no more to say, nothing.

Guide turned away at last. “If you think better of this,” he said in a stifled voice, “no more needs to be said. If not, the sooner you go the better.”

His silver watch said eight-twenty. They had gone into the library only a few minutes before. He felt that hours had passed.

His mother came into the hall, looking puzzled. “Is your father in the library, dear?”

“Yes.” He went quickly upstairs, to his room, and shut the door. The room was full of the blue of late evening reflected upward from the lake beneath the windows, a warm unreal atmosphere in which objects seemed to hang suspended like the dim plants seen underwater just off shore. The serenity of light, vague, weightless, picked up and opened out the anguish that bore him down; he felt he could draw breath again. But never in his life had he felt so lonely and so deathly tired.

It was the fifth of August, a day hot with the dull intensity that ends in storm. Since dawn the fields had baked in sunlight; the lake lay glassy; the sun was warped and reddish in the sky pale with heat. Crickets sang in the mown and the yellow fields, in the orchards, under the oaks. Shadows now touched the lake from the western peaks and there was a softer color low in the sky, a vague blue-violet, but still no wind rose, and Malafrena lay like a bowl of heat and light. Piera Valtorskar was coming downstairs, an action that to her, in this huge timeless afternoon of August, seemed to last a long while, an interval full of intangible thoughts and manifold sensations. The house, built of limestone and marble, was cool; one knew it was a hot day only by the dryness of the air, the cricket-chant, the molten glare of a sun-streak finding its way through a shuttered window. Piera was wearing the women’s dress of her province, a full dark-red skirt, black vest, linen blouse embroidered at the neck. The sleeves of the blouse were stitched at the shoulder into twelve pleats: it had been made in Val Malafrena. A blouse made in Val Altesma would have gathered sleeves, and certain motifs and stitches of the embroidery would be different, a flower design instead of a pattern of birds and branches. All these things were as they should be, as they had always been; so Piera preferred this dress to any other. As she descended the stairs she was smoothing out the skirt, aware of the garnet color feeling the cool grainy texture of the homespun cloth. Her right hand was on the marble stair-railing, soap-slick and cold. Step by step she descended, feeling herself descend, feeling the heavy skirt sway, feeling the railing under her hand, thinking of a great deal though she could not have said what. On the fourth step from the bottom she began to hum the song, “Red are the berries on the autumn bough”; on the last step she stopped humming and ran her finger down the backbone of the Cupid on the newel post. He was a crude, squat, provincial Cupid carved of grey Montayna marble. He looked anxious and dyspeptic. Piera poked his belly to see if he would belch; then all at once she wheeled round and darted up the stairs in a fifth the time it had taken her to come down them.

The upstairs hall was dark and smelled of dusty velvet. She listened at her father’s door. Silence. Count Orlant was still asleep. On hot days he generally slept away the afternoon on his old leather couch, though he never meant to. Piera went back down the stairs smartly, trip-trip-trip, swung round the newel post using Cupid as a fulcrum, and went off to her great-aunt’s room.

Auntie—so she was always called, and the servants called her Countess Aunt—was very old. She had been very old during all Piera’s life. She had birthdays, like other people; but she could not possibly remember them, as Piera remembered all her birthdays since the eleventh one; and what difference could a ninety-fifth birthday make? Whether she was ninety-three or ninety-four or ninety-five, Auntie sat in her straight-backed chair, wearing a black dress and grey shawl, and sometimes dozed and sometimes did not. Her face was netted with countless dry lines radiating from her mouth and the corners of her eyes. Her features, nose, cheekbones, cheek-hollows, were as if obliterated by that network of tiny lines. Most of her teeth were gone, her lips sunken. Her eyes were like her grandniece’s eyes, grey, translucent. Auntie was not dozing this afternoon. She looked at Piera with clear grey eyes across the gulf of eighty years.

“This afternoon when I was lying down, I dreamed I could float. All it takes is knowing you can. You just push off from the wall, so, with one finger, holding your breath, and then take long steps, you see? and to change direction you just push off the wall again. I’m sure I was doing it. I came clear downstairs without touching Shall I hold wool for you?”

Auntie’s hands had got too stiff years ago for knitting or embroidery, but she liked to hold needles and wool, or a panel and silk, and doze with them; and she particularly liked to wind the hanks of wool and silk into balls. Piera also enjoyed this. She could bold hanks for Auntie for an hour, watching the red or blue or green yarn slip off her parallel hands and gleam in Auntie’s stiff, deliberate fingers winding it round and round and round.

Auntie said nothing; it was not time for her tea. She dozed, and her grandniece slipped away. She looked into the kitchen, an enormous low room darkened by the oaks outside. The house of Valtorsa, built in 1710, was screened from the lake by trees and faced the valley and the foothills: old Itale Sorde’s notion of building his house right on the water had been one of his foreign fancies. No one was in the kitchen now but Mariya the cook, gutting a hen. Piera came and looked.

“It’s that old fool Maati, I told him the brown hen with white specks and he brought the Kiassafonte hen instead, and her head off already, the old fool. She’s old but she was a fine layer. Look there, the bitty eggs, like beads on a necklace…” The stout woman and the girl peered into the blood-scented innards, Mariya roused to momentary interest by Piera’s interest.

“Yes, I know, the he-bird,” Piera murmured. She sighed, wrinkling her nose at that dry smell of blood. “Are you going to bake this afternoon, Mariya?”

“Everybody’s in the fields all day, they might as well have died and gone to heaven. I wish winter would come!” Piera spun round to make her skirt balloon out, investigated a huge iron soup-kettle hanging in a corner of the hearth, then wandered out. Her domain was desolate. All the farm people were getting the late hay in, Mariya had nothing to say, Auntie was asleep, the count was asleep, the governess was off on her holiday, it was too dull to stay indoors and too hot to go outdoors, and she could not go to see Laura because Itale was leaving tomorrow, leaving all at once for the city, forever. She wandered to the front room with its drawn blinds, marble fireplace with more marble Cupids, its long, shiny, empty floor and sparse, stiff furniture. The floor looked cool; she knew it was cool, and was tempted to lie down on it flat on her stomach as she had used to do on hot afternoons. But she was too old, in her garnet skirt and linen blouse, to go crawling on the floor. She curled up on the windowseat and peered out between the shutter and the frame at the empty, shady side yard. The whole trouble was that there was nobody to talk to, nobody to understand what she did not understand, nothing to do with the life that filled her, nothing to do…Piera sat still, her feet tucked under her, her hand holding aside the corner of the linen blind so that she could see the same dull bit of the yard and the foothills building up towards Sinviya Mountain, and she was sad, sad, sad, with the dull, deep, immense sadness of August, of a hot eternal afternoon of August.

The Sorde house was also silent, but under the summer trance there was some coming and going, now and then the sound of voices. Itale’s bedroom was hot; he had opened the window to get air, indifferent to the bar of fiery sunshine that lay across the floor. He was in shirtsleeves and his hair, wet with sweat, stuck up in tangles above his forehead. He was sorting through papers, putting most of them back in a tin box, leaving out a few to take with him. Soon done with the task, he shoved the box back under the table and stood up. The first breath of wind broke the day’s great stillness: a catspaw streaked the lake near shore, taking long to disappear, and the topmost paper of the little pile on the desk stirred. He put his hand on it mechanically, then looked down. Not this time a dream, O Liberty.…It was a poem on the revolution of Naples he had written last winter; his friends in Amiktiya had thought it very fine. He began to stuff the papers into the valise open on the bed. Metastasio’s words to his mistress, sung in the streets of Naples by a people briefly free, went on in his head, I am not dreaming this time…Non sogno questa volta, non sogno libertà!—over and over, like the cricket-chant, till he stopped listening. The breath of wind had passed. The bar of sunlight lay across the bare floor, intolerably bright.

A knock; Laura came in at his word. “Here’s the linens. Mother’s finishing a shirt for you to wear tomorrow.”

“All done except for these.” He began stuffing the clean shirts into the valise, needing something to occupy him in Laura’s presence; each felt oppressed, unnatural, and aware of the other’s feeling so.

“The Estenskar—get it from her when she’s done with it. You ought to read it. Don’t post it to me, it’s a contraband edition.” He stood looking out the window again. “It’s going to be a real storm tonight.”

“I hope so.” Laura straightened up and watched with him the slow faint massing of clouds in the southwest, behind the Hunter.

“Ten to one Count Orlant hasn’t got his hay in from Arly’s Field. Every year I can remember he’s racing a storm for that hay.”

There was no one but Itale who could ask her “Why?” and smile because he knew the answer. There was no other man to whom she could talk as an equal, whom she could trust absolutely. There were beloved parents, relatives, friends, but one brother only.

He went on looking at her and finally asked, “Why?” in a different tone, a voice full not of unconscious but conscious, regretful love.

Among women, all of whom he desired, all of whom baffled and frightened him, among them all there was one sister only.

Until he went to college he and she had gone every year at dawn of the spring equinox across the lake to the gulf of Evalde, where a river broke from caverns in a high cascade to the lake. On the shore there was a high rock curiously marked, called the Hermit’s Rock; Count Orlant ascribed the markings to druids, others, dubious of druids, said it marked the place where St Italus the Missionary had preached to the heathen tribes of Val Malafrena. The spirit it roused in the brother and sister was heathen enough; to them in adolescence the true year began with that silent course before dawn across the lake and arrival on that shore, a solitary celebration of rock and mist and light above the waters.

“Of course. But will you? Real letters? You wrote such stupid letters before you came home!”

“I couldn’t explain about being under house arrest. Everything got so complicated…” Laura was at last getting the whole story of Müller, Von Haller, and Gentz, when her mother came in; she and Itale had been laughing, they felt ashamed of laughing on the day before Itale left, knowing that their mother had wept for his going. Laura escaped, and Eleonora showed him the shirt she had ironed herself. “To wear tomorrow,” she said. She was used to the inadequacies of life, to the shirt ironed because the words cannot be said, or will do no good. He was not.

“I think so, dear. I only wish you were happier about it yourself.” She looked into his valise. “Will you wear your blue coat?”

“I don’t. Only if he—” Itale stammered slightly when he was keyed up. “If he’d try to understand that I’m trying to do right!”

Eleonora was silent; then she said, mild and tenacious, “You mustn’t hold anger against him, Itale.”

“Believe me, I try not to!” he said with his passionate candor and seriousness, so that she turned to him smiling. “But if we could only talk to each other, if I could explain to him—”

“I don’t know if people can ever really explain,” she said. “Not in words, anyway.” She saw he did not believe her. That was all right. She too had once believed that people could be entirely honest with one another; she did not consider herself better for having lost that faith. If she were to be entirely honest with her son right now she would beg him to stay home, not to go, for if he went he would never come home again; so she repeated, “Will you wear your blue coat? It’ll be cold on the coach in the morning.”

“I want to put up a lunch for you; Eva saved some roast beef,” she said, and at that, the reality of the roast beef, the coach wheels turning, the dust of the road that led away from home, the silence of the dining room where she and Guide and Laura would sit down tomorrow without him, all this threatened her all over again, and she left him hastily so that she could struggle with it alone.

He went on down to the boat house, having time to reset Falkone’s tiller, a job he had promised himself to do before he left. The long light was intense on the road and the green, hollow lawn above the boat house. Behind the Hunter now clouds banked heavy; there was a greenish cast to the air over the lake. When the steering was mended he set to waxing the seats and rail of the boat, wanting to be busy. It was hot and dim in the boat house, smelling of wax, soaked wood, water-weeds. The raw pine roof trembled with webbed, moving reflections of the sunlit water. Men were coming back from haying; he heard their voices on the road above. One went by after the others singing a song that rose and fell on a few notes in the minor.

Red are the berries on the autumn bough,

Sleep, my love, and sleep thee well,

The grey dove sings in the forest now,
Sleep till thou wilt waken.

He finished his job, went up the grassy slope and through the line of poplars to the road. The men from haying in the north field had all gone by, done in good time, for Guide was seldom caught racing a storm for his hay; no one was on the road but old Bron and David Angele returning from the vineyards, and with them Marta, Astolfe’s wife. The men wore somber, shapeless work-clothes; only on feastdays would there be any color about their dress, and the vivid white of the heavy embroidered shirt. Bron strode along long-legged, unhurried, self-contained, like an old animal, taciturn: his strength was that of old age, economical, a wisdom of movement. David Angele, a young man, looked entirely insignificant beside him. On his left Marta, in garnet-red skirt and embroidered blouse, took two steps to his one. She had been a beauty ten years ago, when she was twenty. The smile that creased her cheeks and showed her bad teeth was still radiant, as she said to her landlord’s son, “And you’re off again, Dom Itaal!”

They all knew, of course, that Dom Guiid and Dom Itaal had quarreled. David Angele glanced slyly at Itale; Bron was silent; only Marta knew how to continue the dangerous subject with tact. “And it’s the king’s city you’re going to this time, so David Aangel says?”

“So Dom Guiid told young Kass,” David Angele put in hastily, exculpating himself.

“What a grand place it must be,” Marta went on, evidently without the least desire to see it. “People thick as flies on sugar, they say.”

“But you’re not to call it the king’s city now, Marta,” said the young vintner, again with a sly glance. “You know there’s no king in these days.”

“There’s the foreign duchess lady, you needn’t teach me, lad. But I like the sound of the old name, it’s how my mother always called it, ain’t I right, uncle?”

“Aye,” said old Bron, striding along. Itale asked Marta about her three little daughters, which made her laugh. She laughed about them since, as she explained, they couldn’t yet give her cause to cry. With Bron he discussed the state of the grapes and the new planting of Oriya vines; he had been Bron’s student and disciple in the vineyards all his life. But they were already at the Dowerhouse Road, and Marta said, “You must turn off here, then I wish you a safe journey and Godspeed, Dom Itaal.” Worn and solid, gap-toothed, she gave him her radiant smile. Itale shook hands with David Angele with a warmth that rose from bad conscience at disliking him, and turned last to Bron: “When I come back, Bron—”

“Aye, you will.” Their eyes met. It seemed to Itale, because he so much desired it to be so, that the old man understood all he meant, knew more than he himself knew, and found no need to say it. So they parted, and he went to the house for supper.

They ate early because they must be up early. They did not linger over the meal. When Eva came in from the kitchen to change the blue-ringed plates, her slippers creaking, they looked up at her with relief. But her old face was as gloomy as any of theirs.

Guide went out to the stables after supper, the women sat with their sewing in the front room. Itale stood at the windows that looked over the terrace to the lake. The light was strange: the water nearly black, but above Evalde the long forest ridge unearthly bright against a somber sky. A strong wind blew from the southwest now, breaking the water into netted streaks. Air and lake darkened fast with the night and storm coming on together. Itale turned round and looked at his mother and sister. So they would sit together here, their faces bent to their work, when he was gone; those who kept the house. His mother glanced up at him as she always did from sewing with a grave, peaceable look, then said, “It’s going to be very pretty, I think; see?”—shaking out the goods she was working on, a drift of white stuff. “It’s her first real evening dress.”

“Aye,” he said, staring at it. “I’ll go see the Valtorskars, I think. The count should be in by now.”

He went up to his room three steps at a time—he had been twelve when he got tall enough to take the stairs three at a time, he recalled for a moment as he went—and looked over his bookcase hastily, and took out a small book bound in whitish leather, well worn; a translation of Dante’s Vita Nova which he had bought in Solariy. He sat down with it at his desk and there in the dusk wrote on the flyleaf a few words, his name, the date; then slipped it in his pocket and went out.

No one was about. The sound of his steps on the path was the only sound. Crickets were silent, birds had left the air. The wind was down and the sky dark except for a green streak over San Givan, the last of daylight. As he brought his boat out and set off westward, skirting the shore, it was so quiet that he heard across the breadth of the lake the remote music of the waterfall at Evalde. Then a mutter of thunder; then the first, huge whisper of rain on the slopes across the lake. The sail went slack. The twilight seemed all at once to give place to black night: the noise grew and grew, he felt rain on his hands, on his face, and then the storm was on him, dark and stiff as all the trees of the forests, a roar of rain, a wall of wind, lightning, thunder echoing redoubled off the water. The boom swept right across as Falkone jibbed like mad and ran in towards shore. It took all his strength to hold the wet sail, on which the wind pushed with demented violence; he could not bring the boat back against the wind, and now she bucked and heeled till the sail touched the water. In a half-lull he got the sail down and got out the oars. His clothes clung to him like silk, his hands were so cold with rain and so stiff from fighting the sail that he could hardly feel their grip on the oars. He rowed into the storm, getting through it if he could not harness it, defeated, immensely happy.

On the marble steps of Valtorsa he took off his hat, poured the water off the brim, got his breath for a minute, and knocked. The Valtorskars’ old servant opened the door and stared in wonder. “Are you drooned, Dom Itaal?” he said at last. “Come in! Come in!”

Count Orlant was shouting from the front room in his unexpectedly strong voice, “Hoy, who’s there? That you, Rodenne? What the devil sent you out in this storm?” He came into the hall. Itale would not come in, saying he was too wet and had to get back home, so Count Orlant wished him good luck and goodbye there beside the coatracks, earnestly shaking his wet hand while Itale clutched the Vita Nova in the other. He had turned to take his leave when Piera appeared. “You’re going, Itale?” she said. Her face was bright and startled. The old servant drew back, and she came to the doorway where Itale stood with the rain and wind behind him.

“I wanted to give you this.” He held out the book. “I wanted to give you something.”

She took the book, did not look at it, but at him. “Did you come in Falkone?”

“Aye, nearly turned her over.” He smiled self-deriding, exulting. The wind blew in past him, making Piera hug her arms to her sides.

She did not move to close the door but stood within the doorway looking at the rain and flashing darkness where he had gone, till old Givan bumbled up and shut the door. “Look there, that rain, not stopped yet, crazy to take a boat out in such a storm.”

Piera went down the hall, looked in the living room; her father and Auntie were ensconced there, with yarn-skein and astronomical chart. She slipped upstairs to her own room. Curtains hid the darkness, the candlelight was golden and serene; but she heard the sound of the rain, the sound of Itale’s voice. He had been wet with rain, wet through, his hand strong and cold. Had he actually come? She shivered. The little book in her hand was cold and slightly damp.

She looked down at it and read the title, The New Life. She turned a few pages and saw prose, full of thereasmuches and wherefores, and verse: “Of Love so sweetly speaking that all my will is his…” The book opened of itself to the flyleaf and she held it closer to the candle to read what was written there.

“Here begins the new life.”
Piera Valtorskar from Itale Sorde, August 5th, 1825.

She sat looking at the words, written clear and black, the capital S blurred from hasty blotting or the rain; she smiled at last as she had smiled at him, and bent her head, and kissed his name.

PART ONE In the Provinces

I

II

III

IV

V

PART ONE
In the Provinces