Ursula K Le Guin - Malafrena

“In Rakava, beneath the high walls…” The tune had stuck with Itale all the way from Esten, jolting in his head as he jolted over the roads of the Polana on an outside seat of the springless coach, in the wind, between hills that hid themselves at last in slow-drifting clouds and veils of autumn rain. It was in the rain that he first saw the high walls, and from the south. Coming to Rakava from the north, from the plains, one would see first a swell of land, a hill rising a thousand feet so gradually that it could hardly be seen as a whole, and below the long skyline a patch of something like broken pearls, that as one came closer would take form, becoming a walled city built of white and tawny stone, towered and battlemented, remote, magnificent. But coming up from the south over the crest of the great hill, Itale first saw Rakava below him, exposed and dingy in the rain of an October afternoon. The houses had spread out far beyond the walls; the towers huddled in a maze and jumble of streets, dominated by the featureless bulk of several buildings that stood massive at the north edge of the city, the cloth factories. In older centuries Rakava had been the pearl of the east, the glory and fortress of the province, the untaken, the unsullied, Racava intacta. Now the high walls were breached in fifty places to let in and out the swarms of men and women going to work in the factories, coming back from work in the factories. There was still wealth there; industry was modern and on a scale unmatched in any other city of the land. Wool and silk was the city’s wealth; silkworms were raised, baled fleeces stored, yarns spun and dyed, cloth woven and cut, in the huge sheds and buildings along the northern wall; the life of the city was there, and the old towers of feudal defense stood useless, like the rusty iron fingers of a gauntlet thrusting up through the chalk of a barren hill. The coach passed under those towers and Itale looked up at their blind, massive walls uneasily. One, a fort, all but windowless, was the St Lazar Prison, another next to it, higher and elaborately battlemented, housed the provincial Courts of Law; he saw no sign of use or habitation in the others, their dark gates barred. Dusk came fast in the narrow streets. The coach rattled down cobbles slippery with rain. One of the horses slipped, plunged, and went down with a sickening crash, leaving its mate straining to stay afoot in the broken harness and the coach tilted over, so that Itale half jumped and half slid down to the street, where he too slipped, and so greeted the stones of Rakava on hands and knees, his head badly jolted and his palms scraped raw. The horse had broken its knees, a crowd had gathered immediately and pressed in close on the horses, the coach, the passengers. Itale got his valise out of the boot and pushed his way out of the crowd, his head still ringing; he got directions from a woman and set off down the street to the Rosetree Inn, where Isaber was waiting for him.

The ex-student-teacher, nineteen now and an ardent acolyte at Novesma Verba, was very glad to see him; he had been alone in Rakava two days and had apparently had a wretched time of it. He talked all the time Itale had his bath, which was the first thing he had ordered, a hot tub in front of a hot fire. Even as he finally got warm he could feel the cold he had taken on the rainy trip settling itself in his throat and nose and eyesockets, moving in, making itself at home. The quantity of hot water brought up had been meager, the fire did not burn well. As he stood on the hearth to towel himself dry he observed two cockroaches the size of his thumb bickering over a greasy spot on the floor. “No rose, this Rosetree,” he said.

“The rats run up on the beds at night. It’s foul. The whole city’s foul.”

Itale shivered. “Hand me my shirt there, would you, Agostin? Thanks. Well, is it any worse than the Krasnoy slums?”

“Yes. Because that’s all there is. The rest of it is dead. And the people are like rats. They won’t even talk to you.”

“You’re an outsider. You’re not one of ’em. All provincials are suspicious. I know, I’m a provincial.” He always found himself reassuring Isaber, trying to cheer him up, making light of difficulties; it made him feel much more than five years older than the boy, and roused a sense of hypocrisy in him. “They are probably human, anyhow,” he said drily. “Come on, I’m hungry.”

“I ordered mutton, there isn’t much else,” Isaber said, despondent, and they went down to a greasy supper in the gloomy depths of the inn. When Itale got to bed, with his cold, and a sharp ache in his wrist where he had wrenched it landing on the cobblestones, he reflected that his arrival in Rakava had been inauspicious; and indeed that the journey had begun ill; why had Amadey turned away like that without a word, as if he could not wait to see him go? A rat scrabbled in the wall, or under the bed. The air of the room was sour with the smell of the cheap tallow candles just blown out. “What am I doing here?” Itale thought in discouragement, and let the unanswered question magnify his sense of being in a strange room among unfamiliar walls and streets, until his own tired, unrelaxed body felt strange to him. The pain in his wrist and hand increased. He could not find an easy position. As his waking intelligence began to blur, the pressure of the alien and the inimical increased until he felt himself unable to move, lying as still and tense as a hunted man in hiding yet half-asleep and longing for full sleep, and still the stupid question hanging in his mind, “What am I doing here?”

Next morning he had not forgotten that night-mood, and could not shake it off entirely. Only the question had resumed its primary form, waiting for him among the stones of Rakava as it had waited for him in a kindlier disguise among the fountains and gardens of Aisnar, borrowing from them the aspect of desire, or of longing; here it was undisguised and blunt, a mere question, “What am I doing?”

There was no disguise here, no distraction. Here in this city whose existence was a suction of crowds into the factories and rejection of them, suction and rejection, repetitive unvarying activity like that of a powerful machine, work irrelevant to climate, to season, to the land or the hour of sunrise or sunset, or the wits or the wishes of any soul among those crowds, here, Itale thought after he had been in Rakava a few days, he had crossed some boundary towards which he had been tending for a long time; but he did not know where he had come, or why, or if there was any way back home.

He did, of course, what he had come to do: called on factory owners and managers, used Oragon’s introductions to meet the political leaders of the city and among the workers, studied the functioning and organisation of the factories; he was profoundly impressed by the men and the city, by the vigor, the tremendous, inorganic energy of the system, which, less than twenty years and only beginning to reach full development, had transformed the lives of a hundred thousand people. After a fortnight he had so much material for a series of articles that he began to write them, calling the series, with an irony perceptible only to himself, “Industry in Rakava.” He was industrious enough, his mind worked with speed and concentration, he was tireless; only he had to avoid certain questions in his writing and his thoughts, or they would lead him back round to the one he could not answer. And it seemed to him sometimes that his senses were dulled, here, so that he did not feel keenly nor see clearly; his emotions too were cool, as if insulated off.

Isaber worked hard for him, and stuck close to him. The boy was not the companion Itale would have liked. His loyalty verged too much upon dependence; he demanded that Itale lead and inform him. That Itale should question his own purposes was unthinkable to him. They were working for Freedom and that was all that was needed. Sometimes this trust was a comfort to Itale, sometimes he was moved by it to destructive cynicisms which he did not let himself say aloud. Perhaps he had no right to do what he was doing; certainly he had no right to destroy the whole fabric of Isaber’s beliefs and hopes.

The days went by rapidly, evenly. They were well into November and rain or sleet and snow fell every day. Itale put off his plans to leave. He continued to gather material for his articles, his understanding of the subject continued to grow. He wrote to Brelavay that he might stay on till Christmas, if their money held out. Under his steady activity there was a lethargy, an unwillingness to move again, to go on or go back. He was here, he would stay. He kept returning to the factories to watch the rattling grey-black efficiency of the wooden and iron machines out of which came long webs of pure white wool, fragile silks the colors of jewels and flowers, patterned velvets, splendid and delicate products of the looms and racks, the stinking vats of dye and sizing, the crazy dancing spindles, the endless trays of leaves and worms. The big new Ferman Wool factory had two steam-driven looms, the first in the country; he had read Sangiusto’s descriptions of such machines in the northern English cities, and went to see them in some intellectual excitement, but was drawn back to them again and again simply to watch them work: the swift endless back-and-forth, the deft, effaced men that served them. He could stand watching them for an hour, all the time with a slightly sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. They were the same motions, it was the same product, as Kounney working at his loom in his rooms in Mallenastrada; it was weaving, there had been weaving done since the dawn of human time, why did the powered looms so fascinate and frighten him? He wrote an article describing them, their structure, their product, and their probable effect on the economy if more came into use. “What a lot you know about all this,” Isaber said reading it, admiring as always. “What are you calling the piece?”

The workman told off to demonstrate the powered loom to Itale was named Fabbre. Itale had quickly discovered the man’s politics to be radical, and they had struck up a kind of friendship, very cautious on both sides. Fabbre lived with his wife, his father-in-law, and five children in a four-room house outside the east wall. The Ferman managers had built this row of houses for their skilled workmen: Fabbre was an aristocrat, and treated as such. The houses had floors, and small fenced front yards, though the back doors opened on an alley of mud. The children played in troops in the alley, never in the little bare yards. These houses fascinated Itale as the machinery of the factories did. The slums of Rakava were like the slums of Krasnoy or any other city; that dirt and misery was old, coeval with the cities, the poor you have always with you—but Fabbre and his family were not poor; they were not dirty; if they were miserable it was not by the ancient causes of cold, hunger, and disease. They did not plant flowers in these front plots, or vegetables, which would be stolen, Fabbre’s wife said, it was not worth the trouble. Anyway they would likely move soon, there were new houses being built by the East Gate, water piped in to a pump in your own yard, they said. “The Company keeps us well enough,” she said factually and yet with a cold irony.

Itale knew the peasant houses of Val Malafrena: more crowded even than this house, darker, and warm. Opposite the hearth would be a partition and visible and audible across it the cow and perhaps a couple of pigs or goats. The enormous bed, usually next to the stall, the clothespress, the table and chairs were of oak. Everything smelled of hay, manure, bedding, onions, woodsmoke. Whatever the housewife owned of pewter, copper, or painted ware stood out on a shelf above the table. One was not asked into those houses, any more than into a badger’s earth or a foxes’ den. One stood in the doorway speaking to the housewife or the husband, the youngest children staring from the rich darkness. In such places people had lived always, on the land. The houses of privilege, Valtorsa and the Sorde house, were the same house made light and large, and the cattle moved out. But this house, Fabbre’s house in the double row, this was something else; it was slave quarters. “The Company keeps us well enough…”

Itale saw them stand in groups on the streets on Saturday nights, knots and clumps of women and men, dark and forceful then, null when they walked alone; he listened to their talk in the soft, nasal dialect, always of the factories and politics; he saw they knew more, wanted more, hoped for more than the peasants, and sensed their violence, the will to justice too long outraged; and he wanted to withdraw from them, to dissociate himself from their impotence and violence, their inchoate lives and the clever, inchoate, slave minds of their spokesmen such as Fabbre. He could not do so. He was one of them. He and they could talk, could understand one another’s ideas. He could never be one of or one with the peasants of his home: the difference of experience and knowledge, the difference of privilege there was too wide and nothing could annull it, nothing bridge it, even, except personal affection, personal love. But here among these people who understood what he was working for he began, for the first time, to doubt his own purposes. If this was progress, if this was the future, did he want it—did anyone want it except the rich, the powerful, the owners?

In Krasnoy crowds formed and unformed easily, coalitions and driftings-apart of individuals; here it was the crowd that was the center, not the man, and the mob temper was always uneasy, angry. There was little street oratory in Krasnoy, beyond street-corner debates in the River Quarter; here there seemed always to be a speech going on somewhere in the city, and a crowd around the speaker. The governor of the Polana province had forbidden public meetings, any man seen addressing a crowd was liable to arrest and imprisonment, but it made no difference: they spoke, they met, they lived in unrest, resentment, wakefulness. They had all that Itale had sought first as a student in Solariy: the sense of justice, the spirit of revolt. But then revolt to what end?

He let some of this break out one night talking with Isaber. “Whom are we really working for, I wonder? For whom are we making the way plain? The king—old Duke Matiyas—a restored constitutional monarchy…That’s a bit flat but perhaps it’s the best of a bad lot. Better than working for Emperor Franz and Metternich, by making an armed rebellion which they can crush and use for an excuse to snuff out national independence altogether. Better than working for the Ferman Brothers by telling the poor they can better their lot, they can rise in the world, so long as the Ferman Brothers rise on their necks, of course.”

Isaber gaped, scared, for he had never seen Itale bitter. “But as the people become educated—” he stammered.

“Educated!” Itale jeered, but then he looked at Isaber, the fragile enthusiast whom he had educated, for whom he was literally responsible. “Forget it, Agostin. I’m in a bad temper, this place gets on my nerves.”

He turned back to the table and got on with his writing. A half hour passed. Isaber was restless, roaming around the room—they had taken a two-room tenement flat, since it was cheaper than staying at an inn—stirring the fire, rearranging papers. Itale knew he wanted reassurance, but he had none to offer. His conscience was heavy. Isaber was a born follower; and he, he had seen himself as a leader, guiding men on towards the light. A leader! Had he outgrown that ambition, or merely fallen short of it? It was hard enough to keep the single candle alight in the depths of one’s mutable, vulnerable being, against the indifferent winds of heaven; it was hard to stand up alone, and know where one stood, let alone where one was going.

The next night he was to speak to a meeting of journeymen silkweavers, a strong association despite the government bans on laborers’ unions. They wanted a report on the Assembly meetings in Krasnoy, and he could not refuse them. Since his journal was prevented from publishing the news, he was obliged to give it as he could; that was one reason, perhaps the best reason, for his coming to Rakava. Isaber did not go with him this time. His talk went well enough. They asked questions for an hour after, and that was an ordeal, for, lacking a politician’s unfailing flow of words, he thought before he answered and while he answered: so he was slow, and his audience grew impatient. They wanted quick answers and definite ones. He got still slower, more cautious. He heard his own voice, dry and hesitant. The blood began to burn in his cheeks, he resented the men, sitting so patient in their worn clothes, the tired, intelligent faces, the minds impatient, destructive, arrogant. “Why don’t the Assembly do something about the Bura’ o’ Censorship then? Why don’t they question its pow’rs?” a thin, persistent man demanded. Itale flung out his hands and laughed, driven out of patience. “Why don’t they question the powers of the emperor of Austria? Why don’t they question the powers of Light and Darkness? What can the Assembly do, man? If it once directly questions the government’s authority, the government will dissolve it by force. Would you defend it then? Do you want armed revolution? That’s what you’re asking for. Are you ready for it? We’ve got no arms, and no allies. Yet suppose we rebelled and won out—then what? What next? You know what you don’t like, and I don’t like it either, but what is it you do like—when there’s no censorship what are you going to say?”

He had found his tongue at last, and set them all against him. It was inevitable. They turned on him because he was an outsider and because he was middle-class, and yet they demanded that he offer them hope. He, feeling that to promise them hope was to lie to them and to deny them hope was to betray them, stood answering their questions, fighting back at their attacks, defiant and sore-hearted.

When the meeting broke up, one of the officers of the weavers’ association, a man named Klenin, caught up with him in the hall. “Will you come out this way, Mr Sorde,” he said, leading him away from the main door where the crowd was going out.

“Are they that angry?” Itale said sarcastically, but began to cool down as he looked at Klenin’s face, sensitive as were so many faces among these city workmen; he looked like Itale’s neighbor in Krasnoy, Kounney the linen-weaver.

“They don’t stop us meeting, since ’21,” Klenin explained in his soft voice, “but lately they’ve been taking up some o’ the speakers, different places in the city, and questioning ’em. Just bogeying. If they don’t see you then you’re spared the trouble. You had to answer enough questions tonight, maybe.” He smiled.

Klenin looked at him. His eyes were blue, a soft blue, intent and serious. “The men always jump Krasnoyers, you know. I respect what you said, Mr Sorde. There’s no use pretending it’s easy.”

They were at the door, and Itale said, “Thanks, Klenin.” He wanted to tell this man that he was grateful, he wanted to express the liking he felt for him, his blue eyes and fine, tired face, but all he could do was say “Thank you” and shake his hand, the one human touch, the one meeting with another man, of the whole evening. They parted on a dark street in the rain.

He was glad to look up from the dark streets at last and see the light shine from his windows. Isaber, with a Krasnoyer’s instinct for good cheer, had put up red curtains which he had got for a few pennies as mill-ends. The candle light shone rosy through them, and Itale felt his heart lighten a little. At least he was not alone here! Isaber was a good fellow, with his loyal heart and his red curtains. He climbed the unlit staircase and turned off at the second landing; a baby was crying, a thin, almost ceaseless wail, on the floor above. As he felt with his key for the lock he thought he heard Isaber call something, “Come in!” or “Don’t come in!” As he hesitated, startled, the door was opened abruptly from within. He saw Isaber standing by the table, and other men in the room, one at the door not a foot from him. His first action was to step back and turn. A man stood behind him halfway up the stairs. His conscious reaction was to the fixed, staring look on Isaber’s face: this troubled him, and he said, “What’s wrong, Agostin?”

Itale came in, followed by the man who had been on the stairs. The man who had opened the door closed it, carefully, taking the trouble not to be noisy, rather like a butler, Itale thought.

“You are Itale Sorde, employed by the journal Novesma Verba of Krasnoy, is that correct?”

“Yes.” Isaber was looking down now, still with a stuporous expression. The other men stood wooden-faced, a lot of posts. “Will you sit down, gentlemen?” Itale said in a clear, harsh voice. They all went on standing. None of them looked at his face. “Stand if you like,” he said, and sat down in his usual chair by the table.

They were his last dispatch to Krasnoy, two articles and a private letter to Brelavay.

“When I saw them last they were sealed,” he said, and leaned back in his chair a little to keep himself sitting down, to keep his rage under control. “Is opening mail your profession or do you do it for pleasure?”

“My name is Arassy,” the man said with annoyance. He had a tenor voice, an intelligent, inexpressive face.

“And mine’s Sorde, as you know, but that gives me no right to ask you questions, I think? Who are you, and am I under arrest or merely being intimidated?”

“You’re under arrest, Mr Sorde, and I think the rest of this can wait—all right, Gavral?”

“You’ll want your coat, Mr Isaber. This room will be sealed until you’ve stood trial, Mr Sorde. You might want to bring along a change of clothing.”

Isaber still had not moved. Itale went to him. “Come on, Agostin,” he said, and then, lower, with irritation, “Don’t freeze like a rabbit. Get your coat.”

Tears started into the boy’s eyes and he whispered, staring at Itale, “Sorde, I’m sorry!”

They rode in a closed cab through the dark rainswept streets uphill to the building Itale had seen when he first entered the city, the Courts of Law. Its crenellated tower loomed up through sweeping clouds of half-frozen rain, dizzying in the flare of the cab-lamps. In a warm shabby room without windows Arassy interrogated them briefly before a secretary. “Very good, Mr Sorde,” he said, rubbing his hand over his forehead as if he had a headache. “Thanks. You and Mr Isaber will be detained here until trial.”

“Article 15, activities prejudicial to public order. It’s a very common charge, Mr Sorde.”

Arassy bowed. Two militiamen came at his signal and took Itale and Isaber off down a corridor, up three long flights of stone steps, and to a dark room at the end of a last, curving corridor. They entered the room, the soldiers with them. “Gentlemen, please, you carry knives, penknives, any metal instrument?” The accent as usual was foreign, German or Bohemian. Isaber mechanically surrendered his penknife, Itale as mechanically did not; in fact he was surprised to find it in his pocket next morning. “Very good. Good night, gentlemen.” The door of the room closed with a loud, peculiar click.

“What do—” Itale began and then backed against the door with a start, seeing a faceless figure rear up from a couch or bench almost under his left hand. It gave a kind of groaning snarl. The only light in the room came from a lamp or candle down the corridor, reflected dimly on the ceiling through a grating high in the door. Everything was high, the ceiling eighteen or twenty feet, the door ten or twelve, a queer effect in the faint wavering light. The shapeless figure on the bench pushed its face out of blankets, though no features were visible, and said, “Cell-mates?” Only at the word did it occur to Itale that this curious room was a prison cell.

“Right,” he said, interested; but he had to turn and give his attention to Isaber, who had crouched down onto his heels and was rocking back and forth, back and forth, saying nothing. Itale talked to him but he squatted there silent, swaying. At last Itale hauled him up by the arm, by main force, and said, “Sit down!”—pushing him onto the bench that ran around two walls of the room. “Get hold of yourself!” He was rough, and his voice was very angry. The boy sank his head into his hands and burst into tears.

“How long were they there before I came?” Itale asked him after a while, casting about for some hook of simple fact to draw Isaber out of his formless and grotesque abasement.

“I don’t know. I tried not to answer. Oh, Jesus, Mary!” He clenched his hands over his face. “I’m sorry, Itale, I’m sorry!”

“Look, Agostin, they are trying to frighten us; don’t give them that pleasure.”

“I believe you gentlemen are politicals,” said the third man, sardonic, still faceless in the shadowy deep room.

“Yes. My name’s Sorde.” He did not know if giving your name was prison etiquette; he did not introduce Isaber, who was still crying.

“Sorde? From Krasnoy? Yes. What an honor. Not surprised perhaps, but honored.” The man gave an edgy, ingratiating snicker. “I’m Givan Forost. I’ll be out in a few days, and you gents will have more room.”

“Is this St Lazar Prison?” Itale asked, remembering that the two towered buildings, the court and the jail, adjoined.

“St Lazar! Are you joking! This is the Courts tower, this is no jail, look at it, a palace! Blankets, light, window, all the comforts. Thought you political gentlemen knew more about the inside of jails than that. What’s wrong with sonny?” Forost got up, trailing the blankets he had cocooned himself in, and approached them.

“Needs his mammy,” Forost said. “All right. So long as he doesn’t keep it up all night. Choose your beds, plenty of room, in Lazar there’d be forty in a room like this. Piss-pot’s in the corner. Sleep well, gents.” He rolled himself up again in his blankets and was silent. Itale talked a little while softly with Isaber, persuaded him to lie down, and then did the same himself, feeling suddenly dead tired. Forost had not shared his blankets with them, but the bench was covered with a burlap matting and the air, though cold, was still and fresh. Itale stretched out and at once felt comfortable. He closed his eyes, all his thoughts escaped him, and he fell into sound and peaceful sleep.

Forost was with them for a week. He never said what he had been arrested for; he was apparently some kind of clerk, but was vague about that too. He was certain of being released, and was indeed released at the end of the week—“Friends in power,” he said with his snicker. He gave them detailed descriptions of the St Lazar Prison, without ever saying if he had been jailed there or visited it or spoke from hearsay: the wards of twenty to a hundred men, sick and well, sane, insane, and imbecile, murderers and petty thieves all together; the rats, fleas, lice, bedbugs; the typhus, typhoid, and smallpox that twice in the last forty years had, in Forost’s phrase, “cleaned out the prison”; the solitary cells, and the cells below street level, where the water was a foot deep on the floor in winter. “That’s a real prison,” Forost said with admiration. “But see, you gents don’t fit. Rioters, sure, they get locked up in the wards in Lazar, commoners, workingmen, lock ’em up, who cares? But you gentlemen politicals, they don’t want you on their hands. You two aren’t going to stand trial yet for a while. They don’t want to bring you up and sentence you, see, because they don’t know where to put you when you’re sentenced. If they get orders from the government, from Krasnoy, give this one a sentence, then they’re in for it, they have to do it, but God knows where they stick him. So the longer you wait the safer you are. You’ll wait six months, then be released without trial. That’s how they like to do it. Cool you off a while here in the tower, then let you out; you run off quick; and they don’t have to worry about you any more.”

Itale listened with interest but no particular emotion. Six days or six months, there was nothing he could do about it, and probably, as Forost implied, it was just as well that he could not. He thought of his escapade in Solariy and the house arrest that had been his punishment. This was not all that much worse. He lay back on the bench, his shoes for a pillow, looking up at the single window set high in the high wall, and sang under his breath, “All the best Governments, Have replaced Common Sense, With Von Müller, and Haller, and Gentz…”

“Go on,” said Forost, who was paring his nails with Itale’s penknife. “Give us a concert.”

“What would you like?—‘Beyond this darkness is the light, O Liberty, of thine eternal day!…’” Forost grinned, Isaber looked scared. He was still depressed, brooding miserably most of the time.

“Not jail songs. What do you sing here?” He began the song he had heard at Esten, “In Rakava, beneath the high walls,” knowing only the first line; Forost picked it up in a sweet tenor. “That’s no jail song, that’s an old song,” he said when he had sung it, and he began a monotonous and obscene ballad to which Itale listened, grateful for any entertainment. He liked Forost for never complaining. When Forost was released and left them with a jaunty bow and a “Goodbye, good luck, Robespierre, don’t cry for me, Sonny!”—Itale was sorry to see him go. At this point cheerful degradation was worth more to him than noble gloom. He did not hold against Forost his flat refusal to try and smuggle out a message to Itale’s friends; Forost had no reason to take risks, no hope of profit from the game Itale was playing.

Still, the isolation worried him, the not being able to write to any one of his friends, his family, “I’m here, I’m all right.”

Isaber, sensing his low spirits, fell into one of his fits of apathetic, self-accusing despair.

An hour passed in total silence. Itale fell asleep, and slept an hour or more. When he woke, Isaber was sitting in the same position, brooding. Itale felt a spasm of hatred, of loathing for him, which terrified m by its intensity. He turned away, as well as one could turn away from another person in the featureless room, and began to whistle the tune of a Mozart rondo Luisa had used to play. He stood up. “I have to do something, I have to move,” he said. “I need exercise. Can we get up to that window? See if you can stand on my shoulders. Come on!” So the guard bringing their evening soup and bread found Isaber balanced on Itale’s shoulders, clinging to the bars of the window, describing the view. “Stop that! Stop them! Guards!” the soldier, a big Swabian, shouted, startling Isaber so that he fell rather than jumped down. Itale began to laugh. “You cannot escape—you must not do that—it’s forbidden!” the guard roared. Isaber too began to laugh.

“Escape? Are we three inches wide?” Itale said. The Swabian, embarrassed, motioned away the other guard that had come at his call. “It’s forbidden, gentlemen, I’m sorry, forbidden, no climbing!”

Itale stifled his laughter, Isaber snickered, both of them exhilarated by the physical exertion and by the guard’s discomfiture. After that they took turns daily on each other’s shoulders to look out at the jumbled view of rooftops and the winter sky. Itale’s turns were short, as Isaber could not long support his hundred and fifty pounds. The boy’s health was shaky; an orphan, born in the waterfront slums, fed by parish charity and housed by luck, he had not had a good start in life. The flour soup they got gave him colic, and racking headaches kept him wakeful in the night.

One such night, their eighteenth in the cell, both were awake. As the almost jovial serenity, the acceptant mood of the first days wore away, as he began to suffer from the frustration of all physical and mental energies, Itale had become as if in compensation more patient with Isaber’s lassitude. Compunction and compassion were strong in him this night, and when he heard Isaber move and sigh, he sat up and asked, “Headache?”

Isaber propped himself up on his elbow. It was never fully dark in the tower cell, or fully light. Itale saw him only as a dim shape.

“I wanted to say that I’m sorry I got you into this. All of this. I have meddled with your life. I had no right. At first it made this harder for me—realising that I’d pulled you in after me, that it was my fault—But what I wanted to say now is that all the same I’m glad you’re here. I don’t know how I’d get through this without you. Without your friendship. That is what it comes down to.”

“I’d rather be here with you than free if you were here,” the boy said, urgently, with relief.

That was all they said. Isaber soon slept. It was cold in the deep room; the first heavy snow had fallen that day on the city outside their narrow window. Itale huddled under the thin blanket, wearing his coat, and when he finally got to sleep he dreamed vividly. Most of his dreams these eighteen nights had been of open places, familiar faces and voices, the mountains. This dream began in horror. He was in the tower cell trying to wash his hands, which were dirty, as were the walls and floor, with a sort of soot or black, charry grease. The wash basin was filled with acid, printer’s acid, such as they used in the shop where Novesma Verba was printed. “It’ll wash it off,” Forost said.—“I can’t use this,” he explained, “this is printer’s acid.”—“It’s not acid,” Amadey Estenskar told him with a sneer, “look there, it’s not eating away the basin, what are you afraid of?” But from the lip of the basin a fine yellowish smoke was rising; the metal disintegrated, the smoking acid ran out over the table and over his hands, eating tracks in them like worm-tracks in wood, painlessly. Then he was kneeling down staring into a pool of water, into which the disintegrated pieces of the basin had fallen. His arms were bare, plunged up above the elbow in the cold, dark green water which was slowly rising. The dim, clear surface came nearer and nearer his eyes. He looked up with a great effort. The water stretched on, quiet and deep, shining darkly, a lake. Above it and reflected on its surface was one immense shadow of a mountain, the Hunter. The reflection reached close to his eyes. Behind it, in the water and in the air, was nothing: the vast, pale, empty gulf of the sky after sunset.

He woke; he was shivering; the pale light of snow was reflected on the high ceiling.

One of the guards told them that day that they were to stand trial the following day, Isaber in the morning and Itale in the afternoon. Isaber’s spirits went up, this time, while Itale’s went down. If Forost had known what he was talking about, the later their trial came the better. He kept his misgivings to himself, and sent Isaber off next morning with the guards, trying to believe or at least to act as if he believed that everything would be well.

Isaber returned before noon. “Released!” he shouted before the guard had got the door unlocked. “Released!” A rush of unexpected, overwhelming relief, joy, hope welled up in Itale, he hugged Isaber, his eyes filled up with tears—“You’re free, then? you’re free?”

“I’m to be out of Rakava tonight and out of the Polana by Wednesday noon. Do they think I’m likely to stay, the fools?” He laughed a long, shaky, triumphant laugh. Itale hugged him again, jubilant, laughing.

“I didn’t really hope—Thank God, thank God! But what are you back here for?”

“I asked to come back till you’re through. They agreed, they’re not as bad as I thought they’d be—Let me tell you about the trial.” He did so, excitedly and not very coherently. As they talked Itale’s mind began to recover from the shock of hope.

“A defense attorney who’s never even talked to us,” Isaber said, “it’s a farce, what kind of justice is that?”

“Oh, he talked about my youth and inexperience, a lot of rigmarole,—nothing important.” He became uneasy, he was suppressing something the attorney had said, probably a plea that Isaber had been led astray by older men. Isaber’s mind was quick at apprehension, and he knew that Itale had picked up his omission; after that they were ill at ease with each other, pretending confidence. Yet Isaber had been released, set free, his trial a mere formality; it did not matter what the attorneys said or did not say.

When the Swabian came to take Itale to the courtroom Isaber came with them. He was barred from entering the court and they did not even shake hands in the hallway outside the courtroom, as Itale was hurried on by a second guard.

In the courtroom the defense, a tall, sad-eyed lawyer on state pay, consulted with Itale for five minutes. “It’s all about these papers, you see. These articles you wrote. We’ll admit that you wrote them.”

“Yes. Then you spoke to a workmen’s meeting on the seventh, and again—a different group—on the twentieth.”

“Yes, well, we’ll just admit that, and throw ourselves on the mercy of the court; the charge is activity prejudicial to—”

“Don’t ask to speak,” the lawyer said, looking down at the papers and scratching his lined, ill-shaven cheek. “Believe me, Mr Sorde. Don’t try to defend yourself.”

Prosecution and defense took about a quarter of an hour. The three judges conferred and talked with one another most of that time. When the two lawyers had finished reading their case the judge on the left asked something of a clerk, took up a sheet of paper, and read in a loud voice, “On this evidence and the defendant’s confessions and on the recommendation of the Chief of the National Police in Krasnoy, under Article 15 of the law of June 18, 1819, this court judges the defendant Itale Sorde guilty of the crime of inciting and participating in activities prejudicial to the public order, peace, and safety, and sentences him to five years imprisonment without labor, the sentence to be effective without delay.” He laid the paper down and spoke again to the clerk. Itale sat waiting, he thought the judge was going to speak again, say something else. The lawyer for the defense, sitting beside him, muttered something, shaking his head. There was a scraping of chairs. The judges got up and left, two of them still deep in talk. The guards who had brought Itale into the courtroom reappeared, jerky and wooden like figures that appear across a clock-face at the hour. “Get up, sir,” one of them was saying; Itale realised he had said it before. He got up. He looked for the lawyer for the defense to ask him what was happening, but the lawyer was gone, none of the courtroom officials was left but the clerk, still writing, under the judges’ long desk. “Come on,” the guard said, and in front of one guard and behind the other he left the courtroom, went down a hall, and outside for the first time in three weeks—into a snowy yard, where the frozen wind, the east wind of the Polana, cut his breath off short. His eyes watered in the cold, he looked up in bewilderment. They were between two enormous black buildings, crossing a courtyard with an iron fence. Itale stopped. “Let me see Isaber,” he said. He heard his voice thin as a boy’s in the wind.

“Yes, specially recommended. Ask Ganey. Here, watch your step!” Itale, turning, had slipped on the ice; the guard’s grab at his arm off-balanced him, and once more he went down hard on hands and knees on the stones of Rakava. He scrambled to his feet and the guards led him into St Lazar walking blindly with his head back, very erect. His head rang and there was a taste of blood in his mouth.

When he became clearly aware of the world again he found himself in a small, dark, cold room. Light came in faintly through a grating high up in the door. The ceiling was high. He was standing up; he had been measuring the length and width of the room in paces, he realised. It was four paces by three. There was a sleeping-bench long enough for one person, and under it an earthenware basin covered with a shingle. It was cold, the damp heavy cold of a cave or cellar, but the air was close. Down the corridor outside the door a baby was crying, a thin, angry, ceaseless squall; he kept thinking that it was the baby he had heard crying when he climbed the stairs the night he was arrested. That was stupid, it could not be the same baby. He went to the door and tried to look out, but could see nothing but the wall of the passage opposite. He stood there a long time. He did not want to sit down. If he sat down it would seem that he was going to stay here.

A guard came and unlocked the door, not a soldier but a civilian prison guard, a big old man taller than Itale, with a square grey face. He asked Itale to change clothes.

“I don’t want these,” Itale said, looking at the heap of grey clothing the guard had put down on the bench.

“I don’t want this stuff,” Itale repeated. He heard his voice shake. He was ashamed. “I want—” he began to cover his confusion, and stopped.

“They’ll keep your things for you, sealed up. It’s regulations,” the guard said. Like Arassy he had the coercive yet reassuring manner of a good servant, so that Itale obeyed him, beginning to unbutton his shirt, since he was expected to change his clothes.

“Have to request that of the governor of the prison, sir. You’re specially recommended.” Like the other guards he said these two words in a respectful, portentous tone. His voice was rather loud and flat, he was probably somewhat deaf. Itale noticed this, he identified the grey material of the prison shirt and trousers as the rewoven stuff they called “shoddy” in the mills here, he noticed and thought vividly and quickly but none of it hung together; he did not understand. “That baby, crying,” he said, “why is there a baby here?”

“Born here, sir. The mother’s in one of these solitaries like your honor, she’ll be sent back to the ward soon.” The guard gathered up Itale’s things, handing him back his waistcoat. “Keep that if you like, sir, for the warmth,” he said. He was respectful and kindly, he went out and locked the high door behind him.

The prison clothes were loose and rough, without much warmth; he put on the waistcoat and his plum-colored coat, which was creased and somewhat grimy after the three weeks in the tower cell, but warm; and the silken sleeve-lining touching his hand as he put it on gave him a moment of pure comfort.

He had been in the tower for three weeks, twenty-one days, that was over now. The judge had said something, he had said something about five years, but that did not mean five years in prison. That was impossible. Five years, after all, that was a very long time, he would be thirty at the end of it. Three weeks had gone on and on, three weeks was enough. This was December. Then January; then February—He succeeded in stopping himself from reciting the twelve months. The guard brought soup, the same flour soup, he ate it, the bowl was taken away, after a time the light in the corridor was put out and in the cell it was totally black, for a while, until the eye learned to see the faintest hint of form, the dull stone echo of some distant lamp, and to cling to that. The night passed and did not pass. Sometimes his mind worked fast, excitedly, and sometimes it did not work at all. His heart pounded and pounded, paused, pounded; he tried to count minutes by his heartbeat. He was afraid he was going mad. In this darkness without event swollen with empty time to come the hot sting of the vermin that swarmed in the bench-matting was welcome, it was life.

He was worn out by that night when the day came, and dozed all morning, laying contentedly enough on the bench. In the afternoon a pair of guards came and took him out to a courtyard for exercise. It was a small inner courtyard, forty or fifty feet square. The snow had been trodden into a firm greyish-black floor, holed and stained yellow with urine against the walls. The two guards watched five prisoners, who were not permitted to speak to one another. One of them was taking his exercise methodically, trotting round and round the court, pumping his arms; his legs moved oddly, in short steps. Itale knew that that was the right thing to do but he could not make himself do it; his legs were shaky. He must get control of himself. He must try to keep himself fit. He would plan how to use this time in the open air, and also try to exercise himself in the cell. To plan the time, and measure it out, and use it, that was the thing to do. Right now, even if it was very difficult, he should walk once around this courtyard, and breathe the clean air as deep as he could. He started out. One of the guards stopped him as he came by, a thin, red-faced man. “Was that the fellow stood trial with you that hopped?” His dialect was heavy and he was missing most of his teeth; Itale was not sure he had understood the words.

“What did he want to do that for? Jesus, what a thing to do, eighty feet down, was he crazy?”

“Shut up, Anto,” the other guard said with a chopping gesture, and Itale walked away from them. He longed to kneel down and put his hands into the snow, get his hands and wrists cold, ice-cold, but the stuff was hard-crusted and dirty. The guards called the prisoners; he came last, feeling the others looking at him, unable to look at them. He was locked into the cell. He lay there on the bench. He did not think of Isaber, but of Estenskar, of one of the days they had gone shooting in the woods of Esten; he could see how Amadey had looked and hear the tone of his voice so clearly that he said his name aloud, very softly, but the sound of his voice frightened him. He put his head into his folded arms and lay still. The color and smell and feel of his coat was familiar, he held onto the double thickness at the cuff, seeking reassurance.

“Smith’s shop, sir,” the guard said in his loud toneless voice. “Come on.”

When Itale understood he took hold of the bench with both hands as he sat on it, and said with a kind of gasping laugh, “No, no. I won’t come on. Not there. I won’t—I won’t put my own neck in the collar.”

The deaf guard called two others. Adept, and without much brutality, they pinioned Itale, frogmarched him to the prison smithy, held him while the smith welded the loose ankle fetter onto his leg, brought him back to the little, dark, cold room, fastened a short length of chain between the fetter and hasp set into the wall, and left him. He was trembling and cursing, in tears. “Sorry, sir,” the deaf guard said as he left. “You’ll get used to it.”

III

Under a grey sky Piera Valtorskar left Aisnar on December 19, 1827; under a grey sky the family carriage lumbered southward over the roads of the Western Marches; and as it passed through the village of Vermare, high in the foothills, the gray sky descended softly all at once in flakes, heavy, thick, silent, filling all the air, whitening the fat rumps of the horses, the fur cap of the driver, hiding the way ahead. With a great push Piera got the window down so that she could put out her hand and feel the cold touch of winter. “Oh my dear we’ll catch our death, oh do put up the window, oh do put on your gloves!” cried Cousin Betta Berachoy, who had gone all the way to Aisnar in the carriage alone to fetch Piera back, since Count Orlant had come down with a very bad bronchitis a week before he was to set off for her and spend Christmas at the Belleynins’, but Cousin Betta was only too glad to go, indeed she was, the idea of that poor child coming all the way alone in the carriage like a pea in a gourd even if old Godin was as trusty as could be—At any rate, Cousin Betta was so upset that Piera raised the window again, only murmuring, “It never snows in Aisnar.”

“Oh I believe it does, indeed it does I’m sure. I suppose the Warm Fountain quite melts it, wouldn’t that be odd, does it? Oh dear me how very thick it’s coming—if we should be snowed in up in the passes—Far from any house!” Cousin Betta’s eyes shone. From time to time romances, stronger fare than The New Heloise, had been finding their way up to Portacheyka, and Cousin Betta read them, and though the possibility of getting snowbound on the mountain road was neither remote nor pleasant, the phrase “far from any house” sounded so like a novel that it thrilled her. Piera merely said, “The wind mostly keeps the Portacheyka pass clear.” Cousin Betta had discovered already that Piera had become a strongminded young woman at the convent; she was always calm, and doubtless never read romances.

The snow made little trouble for their horses. It melted as soon as it touched earth after its fall through the soft windless air. Only as they reached Portacheyka at the end of the afternoon was it holding, icing all the roofs and gables of the steep town as a baker ices a dark plumcake. “Oh but look, look,” cried Piera, not calm, “the mountains, look at the snow on the roofs—” and then she fell silent. The golden lighted windows of the little town under the great slopes almost veiled in driving snow and nightfall, the welcome of the lighted windows amongst the strangeness of winter, that was too much for her. All the way down from Portacheyka to the lake she was grateful for the falling snow and darkness that hid from her the orchards, the fields, the mountains, the lake. She did not want to see them. They were not hers to see. Even as the carriage rolled onto the paved court in back of her home, even as she saw her father, bundled up till he looked more like a bolster than a man, coming to her with snow on his shoulders and his arms held out, she was saying in her heart, “Why did I come home, why did I come home!” Then she was in her father’s arms, squashed against his rough coat, the snow off his shoulder cold on her ear.

“Yes, of course, I’m fine,” said Count Orlant hoarsely, while the tears ran down his handsome face. He had been quite ill, and was sixty-two this winter. It had occurred to him that he might die. He was not particularly afraid of dying, but he had been afraid of not seeing Piera again. “Well, well, well, what a commotion,” he said, still with his arm around her, and then the others were around them, Eleonora and Laura and Mariya the cook and Miss Elisabeth who lived on at Valtorsa, old Givan and the rest, bandying Piera about and bringing her inside in a flurry of welcoming faces and voices, warmth and light. Guide Sorde had not come outside, and treated the excitement coolly: “Well, contesina, three months away and you see how your value’s risen?” It was true she had been gone only three months, but last summer had been her next to last visit home, this was her last. Guide knew the difference as well as any of them. He consistently called her you, now, instead of thou. None of them forgot that she was to be married, that she no longer belonged to them nor they to her, that this was the last time they would see Piera Valtorskar. When she was in her own in her own room, she lay thinking, and her thoughts were as bleak as her body was comfortable. The last time. Itale had been right, of course, you can’t come back, there is no coming home. She looked over at her bookshelf. There was the book he had given her, the Vita Nova, the New Life, its gold-lettered back winking comfortably in the firelight. But she did not want the New Life. She wanted the old one.

The next night, Christmas eve, all the Valtorsa people but Auntie, with the Sordes and Sorentays and many people of the estates, went in to Portacheyka for the midnight mass. It had snowed again during the day, clearing after sunset. Carriage-lamps and lanterns crossed yellow beams over the snow, snow on the forests of the mountainsides showed faint in starlight. The church of Portacheyka was crowded from wall to wall as always on Christmas, the little boys of the choir sang shrilly, babies squalled, old men sighed long, horselike, devout sighs and scratched their necks under their holiday white shirts, little old women who went to mass daily muttered the service a word or two ahead of the priest; in the hot candle light the cross shone like molten gold above the altar; now and then one got a dry, clean whiff of the pineboughs that decorated the church, through the smell of packed humanity, or shivered in an icy, inexplicable draft of air creeping along the stone floor amongst all the legs in skirts or trousers. It took the crowd half an hour to come out of the church, and everyone stood around in the street waiting for the rest of the party. Children got lost, horses stamped, snow-dust glittered in rays and shafts of lantern-light and lamp-light. While the older people found the friends and relatives they had brought in or wanted to greet in town, Piera and Laura joined the young Sorentays, who were singing the old carol of the Angels.

We have heard the angels sing

Sweetly on the mountainsides,

And the echoing valleys ring

With the song that well betides:
Gloria in excelsis Deo!

Alexander Sorentay went flat on the Glorias and his betrothed, Mariya the daughter of Advocate Kseney, cried, “Oh, Saandre! don’t sing so loud!” and everybody laughed. On the way home, crammed in the Valtorskar carriage with Count Orlant, Guide, Eleonora, Cousin Betta, Emanuel, Perneta, and the overseer Gavrey, Piera and Laura kept up their carolling until Guide himself joined in his baritone on the Glorias, and Eleonora, looking up into his face as she sat squeezed next to him, said, “Guide, I haven’t heard you sing in twenty years!”

“I have,” said Laura. “When he shaves, but he always stops in the middle.”

“Sing on, then,” Guide said, and they all sang; Count Orlant had lost his voice when he was ill, but he thumped time on the windowframe. They all stopped at the Sorde house for the supper and Christmas cake after the mass; the cake, shaped like a log, was twined with holly and ivy; Count Orlant discoursed on hollytrees, standing stones, and druids; nobody went to bed till five. At eleven some of them went to the morning service at St Anthony chapel up the lake-shore. The pines above the chapel sparkled with melting snow in the wintry sunlight. On the north side of each headstone in the little churchyard snow lay white, though the graves themselves were bare. The words of the service were half lost in the sound of the wind in the forests of San Larenz. After the service Piera and Laura walked in the churchyard, waiting for Eleonora. They separated a little as Piera wandered on reading the inscriptions. All the stones were old, the churchyard was not used any longer. Many of them were small, unmarked, the graves of infants dead a hundred years ago. All the names were familiar names. Itale Sorde, 1734-1810. In te Domine speravi.—She stood still. She looked at the graveyard dappled with patches of snow and shadows of the pines, at the squat stone chapel, its eaves dripping with thawing snow, at the lake lying calm in the winter noon, at Laura coming towards her, tall and pale in her coat and fur-trimmed cap.

“I can remember him standing in front of the south windows. I had to reach up to hold his hand. He seemed so tall…”

“It’s strange, how when Itale and I die, there won’t be anyone, anyone in all the world, who ever saw him, ever knew him. Till then he’s not really dead. But after that…”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” Laura said. “In te Domine speravi…Just for it to be all over, all gone; air and earth and sun. Would that be so bad?”

“But—but I was just thinking—Your grandfather, he was young, a young man, seventy years ago. Young, like—like any young man now—like us. And then we get old. And maybe he was in love. Of course he was, with your grandmother, and they got married, and they lived, and had two sons, and they thought, and talked, and wanted things, and there was wind and rain and sunshine on the snow and they saw it, and…now…It seems so strange. And there were the people before them, and now us, and the people that come after us, and we can’t know any of them, because time keeps going on and on. What was my own father like, when he was twenty? Does he even remember himself?—I have to believe in the afterlife, I think. It would be so strange and senseless without it—never to understand—” She looked around the graves streaked with sun and shadow, and her light voice shook a little. “Why were they ever young?”

Gavrey came round the corner of the church. “Your mother was asking for you, Miss Laura,” he said, standing cap in hand by the wicket-gate.

Piera walked home with him and Cousin Betta. He had proved a good, reliable manager, and had taken the onus of running the estate from Count Orlant, but he had never spoken to Piera more than civility required him to do. They did not speak now; but Cousin Betta did. Piera escaped from her to Count Orlant’s study, where, a bit tired by the long Christmas night, he sat beside his fireplace bedecked with garlands and Cupids and a few stray French horns carved in the same greyish native marble as the headstones in St Anthony churchyard; there was a bright fire on the hearth; Piera sat down next to him, and they talked. Count Orlant had discovered, this past summer, that he could talk to his daughter. It was very like talking with his wife, in the old days; after all she had not been much older than Piera was now. They rarely said much, but somehow it was very pleasant. In fact it was the pleasantest thing he knew; especially now, in this winter cold. He had spent some desolate hours the past month when he was ill. He foresaw and accepted his loneliness when Piera should be married and gone. But the comfort of her presence, now, outweighed it all. He was content.

Piera herself was not content, but was happy, as she sat with her father before the fire; happier, at least, than she had ever been last summer. All those weeks at home had been a time of strain, suspense, toneless and colorless. She had been waiting, waiting, for what? It must be for marriage, for love. She was home but not home for good, betrothed but alone, in the middle, suspended, waiting. It had been all wrong. She had written Givan Koste every post, a dull note once a fortnight. Writing them had been a chore, as bad as her compositions for Miss Elisabeth, the Duties of the Young Female…If Givan loved her why was he not there? She had left home, gone back to Aisnar, with relief. Had she been happy then this autumn, in Aisnar? Of course, but still it had been waiting; now the waiting was over, now time went fast and she clung to the moments, treasured them. Everything now was for the last time. She would not think either back or ahead.

Twelfth-night came and passed bringing snapping cold, clear weather. The roads were frozen so the horses’ hooves rang like bells, the sun was bright in a sky of dark, blazing blue. Laura and Piera rode in to Portacheyka for the mail, and the overseer Gavrey, having business at the mill, went with them, still saying nothing. The girls went on to the Golden Lion leading his horse, as the Lion served as tavern, hotel, coaching station, post office, and livery stable; as they went Piera said, “Of all the close-mouthed men in the Montayna that one’s the closest.”

“Who does talk, here, but us women? I suppose men jabber all the time, down there?” Laura often teased Piera about the sophisticated ways and customs of Aisnar, it was a game between them, but just now there was a sting in her words. Piera knew she had in some way been tactless, and said no more about Gavrey. They greeted the old hostler of the Lion and gave him the horses, and after his due bit of conversation went on in and greeted the innkeeper’s wife in her shining domain of oak and brass; she was ready for them, handing three letters across the bar, one for Piera, two for Laura. “Ah!” said Laura, coming alive. “Thank you, Mrs Karel!”

“Oh aaye, from Dom Itaal, I saw it this mornin’ first thing in the sack, I know his black writin’ ,” said Mrs Karel with a smugness that declared mere illiteracy no handicap. After her due bit of conversation the girls set off for Emanuel’s house. “Come on, Peri,” Laura said, “hurry up, I want to read it. What’s this other one I wonder, it must be for uncle. And yours is from…?”

“Itale’s still has the return address in Rakava on it. That’s why we haven’t heard from him for a month. The mails must be slow in the east. It’s such a long way.” Walking at twice her usual pace, and studying the cover of the letter, which she would not dishonor by opening on the street, Laura strode down the cobbled streets and steps, Piera in her wake, to Emanuel’s house. He was out; Perneta received them, and without wasting any more time she and Laura opened Itale’s letter and read it standing, while Piera retired into a chair by the window that looked out northward through the pass, and read her letter from Givan Koste. It was a quiet, fond letter, husbandly. Little Battiste enclosed a note written in a round clear hand: “Dear Countess Piera, the preserved ginger was very good although it was very hot so that I ate a little at a time, but I have eaten it all. I hope you are well. Father is well. I am well. My rabbits are well. They like to eat oat meal as you said. With all good wishes for a happy New Year, I am your loving friend, Battiste Venseslas Koste.”

She wanted to show the child’s note to Laura, and yet did not do so. It was so queer, that is, it would seem so queer to Laura, that this child was to be Piera’s child, her stepson. Here he was, seven years old, eleven years younger than Piera, your loving friend Battiste Venseslas Koste—well, Laura was not used to the idea, as Piera was. No need to embarrass her. “What does Itale have to say?”

“Read it, my dear. Now, Laura, you’ve read it twice, let Piera have it. What’s that? Another letter?”

“Oh, yes, I forgot. Look: ‘For Mr Sorde of Val Malafrena, Portacheyka, Mont. Prov.’—now who’s it for? Father or uncle?”

Laura perched on the arm of the chair and reread her brother’s letter as Piera read it.

“Look at that!” said Laura, “two months to get here! Even in winter and clear across the country, how can it take two months? His first letter from Rakava only took two weeks!”

“My dear family: I’m sorry I missed last week’s post, and trust that you have not given me up for lost. I have been busy ever since I arrived here, and my quiet week at Esten seems several centuries in the past. My impression of Rakava remains much the same as when I last wrote: I still dislike the city, and still find it exceptionally interesting. The misery of the poor here is beyond anything I have seen. I am glad not to be alone in a place where it is very easy to become discouraged. Young Agostin has put up a pair of red curtains to cheer up our rooms and save us washing the windows. My contribution to the domestic economy has been a large box of Gossek’s Wonderful Powder. I would not myself call it wonderful. The Prussians eat it up enthusiastically, no doubt thinking it a thoughtful gesture on the part of a stranger.”

“—of a stranger. I wish they would all die in awful agony, but I don’t think they will.

“If my letters are delayed, please don’t be alarmed. The State mail service has existed for only three years in the Polana—the Polana is historically disinclined to do anything the other nine provinces are doing—and I am assured that it is as slow and as untrustworthy as any censor’s heart could desire. Agostin and I will probably take the Krasnoy coach during Christmas week, and when I am back in Mallenastrada you can trust my letters to come regularly again. And what’s much more I can look forward to receiving yours. I have not heard from you since the week before I left for Esten (I am not accusing, you know, only lamenting) and feel rather as if I had made my way to the nethermost pole of the Earth.”

“We have written him, every post,” Laura put in. “I despise that Polana province, why did he have to go there?”

“—the nethermost pole of the Earth. But knowing how faithful your letters are I think with comfortable anticipation of finding a whole bundle of them when I get back to Krasnoy.

“I have not much to tell you beyond what I wrote in my last. Please tell me if the Bellerofon is coming. The two boys in charge of circulation by post are very green, and when I left Krasnoy they were in a fine muddle. If it’s still not coming regularly and you are interested in it, I shall see to it myself that your copy gets on the Diligence. Karantay is beginning a new story in the December number. He says, and I incline to believe him, that it will not be as good as The Young Man Liyve. One can’t ask for such a work as that again, so soon, even from such a man. There is no going back, or doing things over, I think.

“My dear mother and father, my dear sister, my heart is with you now as always. My loving duty to uncle and aunt, to Count Orlant, to them all by the lake. If this letter should be the last to reach you before Christmas may it bear my affectionate wishes for the new year and always. Your loving son, Itale Sorde.”

As Piera read the last paragraph her eyes began to prickle and burn. She read the words over, the moment passed.

“He doesn’t sound very flourishing,” Laura said wistfully. “The letter doesn’t really say anything at all. Except that he’s homesick.”

“Of course it does. Oh dear! Mama’s been worried about him for weeks, and this isn’t going to cheer her up, one page and no news. Is it because of the censors, I wonder, or because he’s trying not to sound unhappy when he really is?”

Piera bowed her head as if rereading part of the letter. “What did he say,” she asked at last, “what did he write, I mean, after he was in Aisnar, last April?”

“Why, I told you, didn’t I? He couldn’t say much, because you’d asked him not to mention your betrothal—you explained that later. I know I wrote you that he wrote that you looked very tall and very pretty. Is that what you wanted to hear again?”

“No. I was just thinking…It shouldn’t have been me that got to see him. It should have been you or your mother. Things work out so stupidly!…”

“But it was such a stupid conversation. I never told you. We didn’t know what to say. And he looked so different, not changed, really, but completely different, a man, you know, and he was just a boy when we were all here. And he said we’d probably never meet again, that if we did it wouldn’t mean anything, it would just be like people who don’t know anything about each other meeting and parting, and neither of us, he or I, would ever really go home again. And—” But her voice, which had been getting strained and faint, choked off in a sob. “This is so ridiculous!” she gasped, “please don’t pay any attention, Laura, I’ve been doing this ever since I got home—it goes away in a minute—”

Laura, at a loss, stroked her hand; Piera got control of herself very promptly, and stood up to greet Emmanuel with a smile as he came in.

Seeing, from Laura’s face rather than Piera’s, that something was amiss, he went on upstairs at once, after one question: “Anything from Itale?”

When he heard his wife talking with the girls he judged Piera’s fit was over. What would be wrong with the child? Waiting for marriage, no doubt, this fashion of long betrothals was detestable. He came downstairs. “Where’s dinner, women?”

“Three women, a cook, and no dinner ready. Su! You’re nearly as inefficient as we are at the Magistrature. Well, let’s see what was new in Rakava six weeks ago.”

When he had read Itale’s letter, Laura showed him the second one: “Which of you is it for, uncle?”

“But why don’t you open it. If it is for you, someone would have to ride back with it, and if it’s estate business father will consult you about it anyhow.”

“Practical woman,” Emanuel said. “Very well.” And carefully, reluctantly, he opened the cover and began to read.

Piera was watching him, curious about the letter as the others were, but she noticed nothing; it was the wife who said quietly, “What is it, Emanuel?”

He looked at her for a moment, blank-faced. “Let me finish it, my dear,” he said as quietly. They waited in silence. He finished reading the letter, folded and unfolded it, sat down in the chair by the window. “It’s rather bad news,” he said. “Itale. He’s all right. It would appear he has been arrested. They don’t actually know very much.”

“It is intended for Guide,” Emanuel said, and then looking up into their faces opened the letter again and read: “Sir, I must take the liberty of introducing myself as a friend of your son Itale Sorde, in order to ask you to have the very great kindness to write me whether you have received any word from your son since the middle of November last, or to tell me if you have any news which confirms or, God willing, disproves the report we have received here of his arrest, together with the young man who was with him, by the Provincial Government of the Polana, in November. The first such report we received appeared unsubstantial, but we now have heard a more circumstantial report from an apparently reliable person, coming to Krasnoy from Rakava, stating that both men were tried on the charge of inciting activities prejudicial to the public order, convicted, and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. If this is true they are presumably in the St Lazar Prison in Rakava, as State prisoners. We have heard nothing from Mr Sorde since November sixth, but are now aware that mail both in and out of the east is under supervision and liable to be read and stopped, or read and resealed, without notice. To the best of our knowledge the posts in the center and west are not tampered with as a general rule, but this rule may be changed of course at any time. As you know your son has many friends here all of whom earnestly desire to be of use to him and to support him against this monstrous injustice, but at this time and until we are certain of the facts, we are following the advice of a man very familiar with the political situation of the eastern provinces, who counsels us all to wait, since an attempt at direct intervention or personal appeal could at this time do more harm than good. I beg you to write me if you have better, or more certain, news of him, and I pray God to uphold a just and candid man, my friend and your son, in the knowledge of his own integrity and of our steadfast affection and loyalty. I am, Sir, your servant, Tomas Brelavay. Krasnoy, 2 January 1828.”

Emanuel folded the letter. His face appeared thoughtful, still a little blank. “This Brelavay sounds like an honest fellow,” he said at last. “Itale’s mentioned him often, I think.”

“They were in Solariy together,” Laura said. “He runs the journal’s finances.” She spoke calmly. It was Perneta who, shaking her clenched fists in front of her breast in a jerky, quickly-repeated, strange motion, said in a loud, high voice, “I never had, I never had any son but him!”

“Come, Perneta!” Emanuel said roughly, and went and stood at the window while Laura comforted his wife. She had never broken down on him before, never once. It was as if something in his own body broke at the sound of her voice crying out, as if the strength went out of his backbone; he could not look at her.

Piera came over to him and took his hand. He looked down at the girl, her pale face and clear eyes. “If we’re going out to the lake,” she said, “I should go tell Gavrey not to wait for Laura and me.”

She left, moving light and fast. In the depths of his confusion and distress Emanuel considered her and Laura with wonder: both of them calm, efficient. Yet he knew what this news was to Laura, and as for Piera she had been weeping about something or other not a quarter of an hour ago. They were all nerves till you came to the test, and then, my God, they were sword-steel. And here were he and Perneta no better than two blocks of wood, wringing their hands, struck dumb. He sat down and reread both letters to give himself the countenance of doing something. But the two girls did and decided everything, until the moment when he was on his own again, alone with his brother in the library of the house by the lake. “Well, what’s up, Emanuel?”

“No. It appears that, a few days after he wrote that letter, he was arrested.”

Guide waited. Emanuel cleared his throat. “It’s not certain,” he said. “Here’s all we know.” He gave Guide Brelavay’s letter, and watched him read it. Guide read it through attentively; his expression did not change. At the end he lifted his head a little and said after a pause, without expression, “What am I to do?”

“Do?—How should I know? No doubt the fellow’s right and there’s nothing we can do, nothing at all. But is this a time to say I told you so, is your self-righteousness—” He stopped short. Guide was not looking at him.

“Arrested him,” Guide said softly, as if trying out the words. “What right have they to judge him—to touch him—” His face contorted into a strange frown. “What have they done to him?” he said aloud.

Emanuel sat down at the table, rubbing his hand over his forehead. He had misjudged his brother utterly. He had forgotten how ignorant Guide was, how, in this sense, innocent. Guide had been furious with Itale for debasing himself, but it had never entered his head that any human power could debase Itale. Evil to him was personal vice, greed or avarice or cruelty, envy, pride: a man fought such evil within himself and in other men, and with God’s help prevailed. That injustice could be institutionalised under the name of law, that inhumanity could embody and perpetuate itself in the form of armed men and locked doors, this he knew but did not believe, had not believed, until now. He did not separate himself from Itale, had never done so, even in his anger. What they did to his son they did to him; this letter was his sentence. He was fifty-eight, and this was the first hold that human evil had taken hold on his hard, uncompromising soul; this was the first time he had ever been humiliated. He had held himself apart, kept himself clean, and now, very late, he must pay the cost of cleanness.

“Guide, if this is true, which we do not know—but if it is true, then we have got to look at it squarely. It’s very bad but it could be worse. They haven’t sent him to jail in Austria, they haven’t given him a life sentence. Five years—Five years is—”

Emanuel had been a law student in Solariy. He had visited the provincial prison there several times, in a deliberate self-discipline. It was because he knew what prison was like that he had refused to qualify himself to be a judge, and, when offered the judgeship of the county court, had thrice declined the honor.

“Listen, Guide. I have excused myself, since Itale left, for having encouraged him to go—I thought it his right, his choice, I still do, but I was responsible, partly responsible—I have no excuse, I never looked to see what danger, it was my fault much more than his, he was very young!”

“No matter,” Guide said. “That’s all past. Does Laura know about this?”

“She was there when I read the letter. She got Perneta over the shock of it. And Piera did the same for me. They’re with Eleonora now. I left it to them. They’re better at this than we are, Guide.”

“Aye. This is their world. Their time, not mine. I’ve known that since he left.”

“I used to wonder if he’d not marry Piera,” Guide said. “Forty years ago there’d have been no question. A good match, a good pair. They’d have married. He’d never have run off.”

“He sat there where you’re sitting now, when he told me he meant to go. I was angry, I called him a fool and worse.”

“For God’s sake, Guide, are you going to blame yourself? Of course you were hard on him, do you think you’ve ever been soft? He’s not soft either. He’s your son, God knows!”

“I was not blaming myself. Or Itale. The time for all that’s long past. I blame the men who dared judge him. I would give my life—” But he did not go on. There was no vengeance to which he could give his life, and no redress. There was nothing at all he could do.

Count Orlant was overwhelmed by Piera’s news. She had hoped for comfort from him; instead, to her surprise, she found that she must and could be the one to offer comfort. She knew of course that her father was fond of Itale and had been deeply distressed by what he, too, called his “running off”; she knew that he tried to read Novesma Verba and to understand politics, and that it always left him puzzled and depressed. He was unworldly, as Piera had learned, or as he himself put it, he hadn’t a head for these things. That had led her to assume that he would not be too much dismayed at her tidings. After all, what did he know about state offenses, trials, accusations, prisons? Less even than she. But his ignorance instead of protecting him left him open to the blow. “In prison? They put him in prison—Guide’s son?” he said over and over. “Why, that’s absurd. It must be a mistake. What would Itale ever do to make them put him in prison? He’s a gentleman, he’s a gentleman’s son, he’s not the sort of fellow they lock up in jails!” Then as he began to believe her and his imagination grasped the event, his protests ceased; he fell silent, and soon said in a humble voice, “I think I’ll lie down for a while, my dear. I feel a little tired.”

She went upstairs with him and built up the fire in his hearth, for he said he felt the chill. He looked old as he lay there on the leather couch, old, patient, quiet. Why must this, too, hurt him? the girl thought with outrage, kneeling at the hearth. Orlant Valtorskar had never wished harm to any creature, and for all good that had come to him he had been grateful. Now he was old, not well, Piera would leave him soon, after his death his estate would be sold. Everything he knew, everything he had, was slipping away from him. It was as if he had written his name on the wind. Why then must he suffer the ills of other men?

“I suppose they’ll let the boy have letters from his people, at least,” he said, moving his head restlessly.

“Emmanuel thinks the man in Krasnoy is right, they shouldn’t do anything at all just at first, not even write. So the people who had him arrested will forget about him.”

“You mean they’re to behave as if no one cared what became of him? But how will that make him feel?”

“Not let him see letters from his own people? What harm can it do, when he’s locked in jail? I don’t understand it. I don’t understand any of it.”

“Perhaps they will let him get letters. And of course Emanuel plans to make an appeal if he has to. But it’s really all so unsure, now; where he is, even.”

Count Orlant was silent for a minute. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “Do you remember when he came over here to say goodbye, in the storm, that night? It seems no time at all since then.”

It seemed a long time to Piera since that night, but she said only, gently, “Don’t talk as if he was dead, papa. He isn’t. He’ll come back. Laura says so too.”

And Count Orlant accepted, at least for the moment, the weighty judgment of Laura and Piera.

When she left her father Piera put on her coat and went outside into the early dark, the cold and starlight of winter night. She could not stay shut in the warmth indoors. The sky was hard and the stars bright, small, multitudinous. The lake lay black. There was the queer snapping silence of frost, and the air bit throat and lungs as if instead of breathing one were drinking ice-cold water. Piera walked down to the shore and stood there under the pines looking out to the lake and the height of the winter sky. Orion hung there, the belt and sword of stars, the bright dog at heel. Piera stood still, her bare hands thrust deep into the sleeves of her coat, shivering now and then from head to foot, and in that hour she came into her inheritance. She knew the great hour as it passed. She accepted without reservation what it brought her: the passion of her generation; the end of her childhood.

If this was her world, she was strong enough to live in it. She was a woman, not trained for any public act, not trained to defiance, brought up to the woman’s part: waiting. So she would wait. For any act done consciously may be defiant, may be independent, may change life utterly.

But one can act thus only if one knows there is no safety. So she thought, that Epiphany night, looking up at Orion and the other stars. One must wait outside. There is no hiding away from storm, waste, injustice, death. There is no shelter, no stopping, only a pretense, a mean, stupid pretense of being safe and letting time and evil pass by outside. But we are all outside, Piera thought, and all defenseless. There is no safe house but death. Nothing of our own building will protect us, not the jails, nor the palaces, nor the comfortable houses. But the grandeur of knowing that, the pride and grandeur of being on one’s own at last, alone, under the enormous and indifferent sky, unhoused and unprotected! To be nothing, a girl, confused, grieved, frightened, foolish, shivering in the January frost, all that, yes, but also to learn at last the stature of her spirit: to come into her inheritance.

She went back to the house presently, and sat alone by the fire in the living room. Her thoughts went on, calmer, less exalted, though sourced in that hour’s exaltation as a stream in a rising spring. She did not think now about Itale, yet he, the man in prison, the absent one, was the cause and center of this change. She thought of Laura, of Guide and Eleonora, and of her father; and of Aisnar, of Givan Koste, of herself.

“I don’t belong there,” she thought, and presently, “What I have to do is here, here at home.” She could not have explained what it was she had to do. She was not carrying on a dialogue, not questioning and answering, but discovering.

“I don’t want to go back to Aisnar. Papa’s getting old, he’s not well, he needs me. But I wouldn’t stay here, if that were all. He wouldn’t let me stay here, if that were all. He knows you have to send your children away. But I have no reason to go to Aisnar. I would just be safe and comfortable there. That’s Givan’s life, not mine. He has work to do there. I don’t. I’d keep his house, I’d be a good wife, I’d help bring up Battiste, I could do it. I could do it perfectly well. I’d be in jail. I’d be in prison for all my life. I can’t leave Malafrena. I have to do what I have to do, not other people’s work, I have to find my way, I have to wait, to wait…”

She thought of Givan Koste, his dark, grave face, the turn of his head. She had not the least sense of disloyalty to him in her thoughts; that would come later, along with self-doubt and shame, when the social human world came back into the balance. At the moment she was still as far as Orion from all that. She was alone with herself trying to find out the truth, and nothing was in the balance but truth and lies. She had lied to Givan Koste, promising him what she could not give.

The house was still; she could hear the cook and a maid talking back in the kitchens, a murmur of voices like a brook far off.

If he would wait for her, until she had done here what she had to do But what had she to do here, but wait?

There was nothing urgent. No one could not get on without her. No one needed her to stay. No one wanted her, perhaps, so much as Givan did. “But it’s me he wants,” she said, and now the inward dialogue began, and would go on for a long time. “And who am I? He doesn’t know, neither do I. I have to find out by myself, or else I never will. I have to wait. But he won’t understand…If he’d come here, I could make him understand, here. I’m not myself in Aisnar, I’m always what other people want me to be, there. Here is the only place I will ever understand…”

Laura would understand her. Laura had understood Itale, when she had not. She had never until this night understood why he had left home; now it was perfectly clear to her. He had felt towards Malafrena as she felt towards Aisnar: it was a shelter, not part of the way. They had all known what to expect of him, here, and all they asked of him he could have done, easily, too easily. He had had to go off and try to find what it was that he and only he could do, what was necessary to him. So, in Aisnar, if she chose, she could avoid ever staking herself. She could do and be all they asked of her, and the reward was sure.

Piera thought of the stars she had seen flaring over the lake and mountains outside. In daylight, in summer, if you could see the stars, they would be those, the stars of the midwinter.

What she had at stake, what she had to give and to lose, she thought, did not amount to much. She had no talents at all, no great intellect, and nothing special to undertake. All she had to do was, like all things women had to do, a matter of daily redoing, an endless reaffirmation, nothing ever finished and complete. It would never be done, and it had to be done. It was her life she wanted, the whole of it: not a reward. Such as it was it was hers to live, so long as she would take the risk; so long as, having received her inheritance, she would not let it become a prisonhouse; so long as she set freedom first.

But it was very difficult. No one had ever spoken to her about what freedom is for a woman, what it might consist of and how it is to be won. Or not won, that seemed the wrong word for a woman’s freedom; worked at, perhaps.

She heard her father moving about upstairs; he soon came down, and they went in for supper. The overseer Gavrey, just returned from Portacheyka, joined them. When he had reported his negotiations at the mill to Count Orlant, he asked Piera, in his low husky voice, “I hope it wasn’t bad news that took you and Miss Sorde home, contesina.”

Piera let her father reply: “Aye, it was bad, Gavrey. Young Sorde has been put in prison in the east somewhere.”

Gavrey looked taken aback, but said nothing, evidently feeling that he could not with propriety ask what a gentleman had done to get put in prison. Count Orlant stared gloomily at his plate. Piera spoke up: “He didn’t steal somebody’s watch, you know. He’s a political prisoner. I suppose the government doesn’t like something he printed in his journal. So they put him in jail for five years.”

Gavrey winced. “I didn’t know they’d do that,” he said. “We’re a bit beside the way of all that, up here. It seems very hard.” And he added, surprising Piera, “This is hard for Miss Laura, she thinks the world of her brother, I guess.”

She caught what he meant at once: the talk, the gossip around the lake, the speculation and commiseration, the gloating on disaster. “They don’t know what it means,” she said haughtily.

“I don’t know what it means but shame, and waste, and pain, for the lad and his people,” her father said.

“Itale did what he believed he ought to do, what he had to do. He’s freer than the man who put him in jail, he’s freer than any of us. Even if he died there it wouldn’t be wasteful, it wouldn’t be shameful!”

“You may be right, daughter. I don’t know much about these things; neither do you. It seems a waste to me when a man of twenty-five is thrown away like that, locked up to do nothing. And how can Guide help but feel shame when they say to him where’s your son? And how is it for Eleonora who can do nothing for him, maybe not even write to him? All I can see in it is grief and long worry, and praying the good Lord to look after the lad, for he never meant harm to anyone, that’s clear.”

Gavrey spoke: “Times I think a man’s lucky to work out his evils done here, where he did them, and so can go to dying without fear.”

She looked curiously at him. What he said was not new to her, it was only a variant on the somber tenet of all her people, but there was in his voice a note of intense, suppressed emotion, echoing obscurely her own inward, dark exaltation. And the last word he spoke stayed with her. The builder of the prisonhouse, the sneakthief, the weakener, the enemy, was fear. There was no way to serve fear and be free.

During the next weeks she saw Laura daily, for most of each day, their companionship of the old years regained, and more than regained. It had used to be onesided, Laura listening to Piera talking, Laura comforting Piera distressed; now Piera could give, and listen, and comfort. It was a joy to her to be of use to Laura; and thus to receive as it were a sign or confirmation of her change from girl to woman, her wealth, which she could give away, spend as she chose.

One afternoon near the end of the month they were together. They had been silent for half an hour; outside, snow was falling again over the snow that whitened hills and fields. It was a hard winter, and this week was the cold heart of it. Guide was out in the cattle barns or the storehouses, Eleonora was lying down upstairs; she had not been very well. Laura and Piera sat sewing by the downstairs fire, looking now and then to the high south windows outside which the snow continued to fall thick and straight. “I have to write a difficult letter,” Piera said, a little while after the clock had struck three. Laura looked up, but did not ask to whom; to whom else could Piera consider writing?

Laura rethreaded her needle, leaning forward to catch the tremulous, snow-thickened light of the windows.

“You look like Auntie, you know, sometimes. I wonder if Auntie wasn’t very pretty, once.”

“Papa says she was quite beautiful, but she never liked any of her suitors. Isn’t it strange…Poor Auntie, she hates cold weather. She hasn’t said anything but No all week.”

“We can try. She hasn’t even wound yarn this week. It’s the rheumatism, or else she doesn’t care any more. Oh, Laura, I hope I die young, sometimes!”

“I know…Well, it was just this. You haven’t talked about the wedding, and so on, at all, really. I wondered if you were feeling a…sense of duty, that you ought to stay here.”

“Like Miss Nina Bounnin in Portacheyka. Living and living and living with that awful mother of hers who goes on dying and dying and dying, she’s been dying ever since I was born, and poor old Lontse Abbre who was supposed to marry Nina, he must be sixty now, and still running errands for Advocate Ksenay—oh, no, not that kind of duty. That is just cowardice.”

“I know you do. Then what is it, Peri? It isn’t us, it isn’t me, you’re thinking of; you’re not that foolish.”

“No. I’m not that generous, I’m not that useful to you. I’m selfish, Laura. I’m thinking only of myself. But I’m not clever enough to settle my own fate.”

“I can’t,” Piera said. Then after a rather long pause, “I find I can’t, Laura. I don’t know why. In Aisnar I could. It’s all so simple down there, ready-made. But up here I seem to change. To have changed. I’m not the person who is to be married in Aisnar in March. And that can’t be! If I’m to marry I must marry with all my heart. Anything less would be wrong, a lie, an unforgivable lie.”

“I believe that. But we may be wrong, Peri. Does love matter as much in marriage as the will to love? I don’t know. I keep watching people, trying to find out.—Is it simply that you’re away from him, that makes you feel you’ve changed?”

“No. It’s that whenever I am with him or whenever I think of him, I’m indoors. Inside. In the light. And how can I turn my back on all the rest?”

“The darkness,” Piera said, looking up from her work. “Air. Space. The wind, the night. I don’t know how to say it, Laura! The things you can’t trust, the things that are too big for you, that don’t care about you. I am just learning what that is and what I am, and I can’t leave it, give it up, not yet!”

“Then you should ask him to wait,” Laura said slowly. “I don’t know if I understand you. But I think you have that right.”

So that night Piera sat down to write the most difficult of all her difficult letters. Her spelling had improved at the Ursulines, but she still hated to write things down: on paper they became remote and trivial, humiliating.

“We are all well here and I hope you and Miss Koste and Battiste are well. It is still snowing and is the heaviest winter since 1809, the year I was born, Papa says. All the bays of the lakeshore are frozen and on some of them the ice will bear for skating which is very unusual. But it does not last for long.

“This is difficult to write and I hope you will understand if I ask if there is any possibility that if the roads clear you might come here to Valtorsa for a short visit some time in the next few weeks before I planned to come down to Aisnar. Are you very busy at the Customs? If so I shall certainly understand! It is hard to write and I hoped to talk to you if possible but if not do not worry, I will come as we planned. My father is not quite well yet from the laryngitis in December and it is partly that which I want to talk about with you, but I hope we can talk because it is so hard to write. But do not worry if you cannot come, I will come. My love to Battiste. I am as ever your very affectionate friend, Piera Givana Valtorskar.”

The letter went down on the Aisnar Post on Monday, and back with the Montayna Diligence the following week came Koste’s reply, “I shall arrive on February 8.”—“Oh Lord,” Piera said to herself, “now I’ve made him come in the dead of winter, and wait to change coaches at Erreme, and leave his work”—Koste was head of the Secretariat of Customs Inspection and Regulation for the Western Marches—“and I’ve got to tell papa what I’ve done…”

“Papa,” she said that night after supper, “you know I wrote Mr Koste last week.”

“You always do, my dear,” Count Orlant said reassuringly. He was comparing astral maps, trying to decide how many Pleiades there were.

She came to the table and looked over his shoulder for a while. “Is that one a Pleiadee?”

“A Pleiad, my dear. One Pleiad, several Pleiades, it’s Greek. No, it’s a neighbor. D’you see, this map shows seven, it agrees with our peasants, who call the group the Seven Sisters. But most people can see only six. And the book says at least twelve can easily be seen with lenses. But this map shows eight. It’s very odd, I wonder if they eclipse from time to time.”

“Letter? Oh yes.” Count Orlant sat back in his chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“To come here!” said her father, looking scared, and also a little affronted.

“I’m sorry I didn’t ask you first, papa. I was so…I felt so stupid about it. In case he couldn’t come anyway.”

The count was really shocked, and Piera’s heart sank. “I want to talk with him, and with you, about putting off the wedding for a while.”

“I didn’t want to tell you before he answered my letter, in case he couldn’t come. Because I didn’t want to worry you. And I’m not really sure about anything. But he says he will come. On February eighth. So I wanted you to know,” she ended feebly.

“Yes, where else.” Count Orlant had met Koste only briefly, and was afraid of him. “But is it—are you regretting your engagement?”

“No. But I want to wait.” It was the only formula she had, and the only explanation Count Orlant, and later Eleonora, could get out of her. She shook her head, knitted her broad, stubborn forehead, and said, “I have to wait…” Then she would say imploringly, “Don’t you think he’ll understand?” Count Orlant thought he would, but Eleonora said, “I think he’ll agree, dear, since he is a gentleman. But I’m not at all sure he’ll understand.”

Givan Koste arrived in Portacheyka towards the end of the winter day. Piera and old Godin met him with the open buck-board, since the heavy horses that pulled the family carriage were not sharpshod and the road was icy. He was half-frozen from the coach journey, and almost completely frozen by the time they had driven down through the foothills in the still, bronze-colored, bitter cold mountain twilight to Valtorsa. He was so humanly grateful that even Count Orlant was unable to be afraid of him, and took pleasure in reviving him with food, drink, fires, and early bed. And Piera, alert and silent, watched him. She had known him always in one setting: Aisnar, his house or the Belleynin house, afternoon or evening, among people he knew, dressed as he was dressed, speaking as he spoke. Now she had seen him out of place, on the snowy street of Portacheyka, wearing a fur-lined Russian overcoat, looking cold and tired and anxious; and this man, this stranger, attracted her powerfully.

Next morning she came downstairs in her old red skirt and peasant blouse, and the cook scolded her. “Contesina, what sort of a way to dress is that when there’s a gentleman in the house?”

“There’s always a gentleman in the house while my father’s here, and I dress to please him!” said Piera, and then, because the old woman was huffed, she made up to her again, hugging her and whispering, “O Mariya, Mariya, don’t scold me today…”

The sun had come out brilliant on the snow; they spent a pleasant day, Count Orlant, Piera, and their visitor, walking down the shore to the Sordes’, receiving a visit from Cousin Betta and the Sorentay girls, and riding to St Anthony’s. On the second morning Piera and Koste walked down to the lake-shore alone in the bright wind of the thaw, and there came to the point. He spoke rather brusquely: “Piera, I hope that you know I want no explanation. I was very glad to come. It has troubled me sometimes that I had never been here, to meet your people.”

“It was partly that. I wanted you to see me here, too. And I wanted to see you here.”

His gentleness made her flinch. “I am different, here,” she said, hearing the cold, stubborn sound of her voice.

“You love this place and these people very deeply. I knew that. But you were right to bring me here.” He stopped, and stopped walking, standing to look out over the flashing, windy water to the Hunter, dark under its crown of snow. She said nothing, and presently he went on, “And—forgive me, once again—you’re very young. Eighteen years old. And are your father’s only daughter and only child. There is time—There is no cause, no reason to rush you. If you wish the engagement between us to end, if you wish to be released, you need only tell me.”

She stood beside him, pulling her shawl up round her neck as the cold, bright wind rose, rattling the trees. This was, of course, the one thing she had not expected. She never did expect the right thing. This was so easy, too easy, this cutting of the Gordian knot. You can’t go about cutting knots, or things begin to fall apart…He was being kind, ultimately, sacrificially kind to her, as he was bound as a gentleman to be. But it was not kindness she wanted.

“I didn’t mean to ask you that, Givan. I only want—I think—to wait. For a while. If we’d married right away, last spring, it would have been all right. But I—I feel I must wait, now. But I don’t want to make you unhappy!”

“It would make me very unhappy to know that I had in any way lessened your happiness. Piera, don’t perjure your heart in trying to be merciful to me.”

He was a gallant man. She turned to him as if in anger, her eyes alight: “But that’s what you’re doing—not I! I don’t know what I want, and you do!”

“There’s no chance of our ever living here,” she asked at last, childishly, very softly, knowing the answer.

“No,” he said, and unable to say more he walked away from her along the shore. She watched his spare, slight figure against the wintry brightness of the lake, on the empty shore between water and sky.

He came back and stood near her. “Isn’t it best,” he said, quietly enough, “to break all bonds, Piera, and let time work as it will? I had intended to ask you to wait until you’re twenty. Perhaps you had that in mind. But it is scarcely fair to you, and it could be much harder in the end, if there were promises left between us. You know in any case that I won’t change. But that’s not a promise, only a fact. I can’t help it.” He smiled and turned away, unable to look at her, waiting for her answer.

“But can’t we—But what will you—” She clenched her hands in a kind of rage. “All right, Givan. Let it be so. I wish you’d chosen better, chosen a woman who knew her own mind!”

“I never saw you till now,” he said turning back to her, “I never knew you!” He spoke the truth; he was afire, his restraint broken, so that they stood face to face for once. Piera raised her hands open towards him, her eyes on his.

“I’ll leave tomorrow on the Post,” he said in a contained, dry voice. They started back to the house together in silence. He took her arm to help her over a patch of thawing mud on the path. She looked down at his strong, thin hand on her sleeve. He said nothing and did not look at her.

That night she had to tell her father that the engagement was broken, not extended, and that she had broken it; but inwardly she protested her words. It was he, not she, that had refused. He knew, now, that what he asked of her she would give; and would not ask, denying his own passion, denying her the right to passion.

Piera had thought that no one would take much notice of her broken engagement, aside from a flurry of gossip which she did not care about. The only people beside her father whose opinion mattered to her were the Sordes, and the Sordes had troubles of their own. They would sympathise with her and that would be that. But it wasn’t that at all. Guide and Eleonora had met Givan Koste; they had accepted him as Piera’s betrothed; when they found the promise broken and him gone overnight, they did not condone. Laura bore the brunt of their disapproval. Neither of them said anything directly to Piera. But Guide did not joke with her any more, or greet her with a smile, or go back to calling her thou. She knew she was out of his good graces and might never, he being the man he was, get back in them.

“If he was too old for her,” he said to Laura, “she might have known it a year ago. If there’s twenty years between them now, there was twenty years between them then. I don’t like it that she gave her word and then took it back.”

“A broken engagement’s better than a bad marriage,” Laura answered, as dogged as he. “Besides, she didn’t jilt him. She wanted to wait. He insisted they break it off.”

“Because he saw, no doubt, that she meant to go back on her word, soon or late.”

“I just don’t understand,” said Eleonora, “what it is she wants and why it came up so suddenly. There wasn’t a hint of all this till after Epiphany. She says she wants to stay here. But what is there for her here, once Count Orlant is gone? The day’s coming, and she knows it, when she’ll be alone. And if she stays here she’ll be left to the estate. Is that what she wants? I don’t believe it.”

“I don’t know that she particularly wants it, but if she wants to stay at Valtorsa she knows somebody has to look after it.”

“Aye,” Guide said, getting up and turning rather heavily to go out. “We must leave our land to women, it would seem, if not to strangers, in the end.”

His wife and daughter were silent. He went out, straight and stiff, with his heavy walk.

Eleonora took up her work. Presently she said, in her mild voice which no longer had much lilt or lift in it, “It isn’t that I blame the child, you know. But it seems…So much goes to waste I liked the man.”

“All right,” she said. “But what is it you want, you two? If the good men are too good—and there are few enough good men up here, goodness knows—and you won’t consider a man from down below, because he’ll take you from home—Who are you going to marry?”

“I don’t know that I want to marry,” Laura said placidly. “Where are the sheets that wanted mending?—Piera will marry, I expect. In time. She could run Valtorsa perfectly well by herself, better than Count Orlant, I expect. She takes more interest in running the estate than in the house, really. I begin to wonder whether anybody could win her away. He’ll have to come and help her run Valtorsa…”

“They’re there in the bottom of the work table, aren’t they? Well, all right, but what about you?”

“No—I know there’s a lot I can’t do—But he isn’t doing so much actual work any more, you know, mother, of that kind. But the accounts and the sales, and going in to Portacheyka, and the management, I could learn that. I could help him with it and—help carry the estate over till Itale comes back.”

Eleonora did not answer, and presently Laura said in a lower tone, “I know it—I know the idea doesn’t suit him.”

“He believes very deeply, my dear, that we’re each called to play the part we were given as best we can. As woman or man, or master or servant. That we are to do what we were given to do. That to try to do otherwise is idle, or folly, or…ruin…” Eleonora’s voice died out on the last word.

But she could not choose between the husband and the son. She shook her head. “I don’t know, Laura.”

“Would he teach me to help with the accounts—just that? Would it be wrong to ask him?”

“No. Of course not. Ask him,” Eleonora said with a little increase of firmness; and added presently, “Talk to Emanuel about it. I think he might agree with you.”

“No. I can’t. He feels…you know, as if he were to blame, as if father blamed him for…He won’t interfere for me. I can’t ask him.”

Emanuel had gone to Krasnoy, late in February, following a second letter from Brelavay. Brelavay wrote very briefly that they had received official confirmation of Itale’s conviction and sentence and knew him to be in the St Lazar prison in Rakava. It was a cold, guarded letter. Guide had not replied to the first, and clearly Brelavay had expected some response.

“For telling me my son’s in jail? What thanks do I owe these men that led him into ruin?”

“Nobody led him,” Laura burst out. “He went his own way. It’s the government and their police that put him in jail, and if you won’t write this man to thank him for trying to help and for sticking by Itale, then I will!”

“You will not,” said Guide, and she did not. He did, however; and posted the letter along with a letter of request to the regents of St Lazar prison, composed under Emanuel’s guidance. No answer came to the latter; Brelavay answered promptly. There was enough encouragement in his reply that Emmanuel decided to go to Krasnoy to meet him and see if the machinery of appeal could be set going, or to try to win permission to visit Itale, or all else failing, permission to write to him.

He came back in March with nothing. Stefan Oragon, with a caution that was the reverse side of his oratorical flamboyance, had felt out the ground and found it impossible to take a step: The men jailed in the eastern provinces in November and December were object-lessons, warnings, their disappearance was precisely their importance to the government; to bring attention to any one of them was to increase his risk. Only if they were allowed to become or to appear unimportant would there be any chance, after some lapse of time, of bringing them back into the light. “Every time you say Sorde’s name you put a bar on his window,” Oragon said. “I could wish your name were different, sir, so long as you’re here in Krasnoy…” And Emanuel, cowed and embittered, had soon left Krasnoy.

“I didn’t know,” he said to his brother. “I didn’t know what it was like. I thought the law—I am a lawyer, I thought I knew the power of the law. I knew nothing about it! God help me, I thought it drew its power from justice!”

In October there was a letter from Rakava: a refusal of Guide’s request for permission to visit or write the man in prison.

“Eight months to send me this,” Guide said, crushing the paper in his hand, and his hand shook.

Early in 1829, on Oragon’s advice, he wrote to the governor of the Polana Province renewing the request. He received no reply. In March Emanuel, who had kept up correspondence with Brelavay and others, received a hand-delivered note from Givan Karantay: “Lately in the east and north the families of suspects and prisoners have been brought under suspicion and in some cases held by the police for questioning. It is surely best that while this situation lasts you cease writing us; we will try to keep you informed of any news we get, but not through the mails, which are now closely surveyed…”

The year had come in mild, but in April there was a late hard frost for a night and a day when the peach orchards were in full flower. The crop was lost, a crippling blow to those tenant farmers whose livelihood was in the orchards. Guide’s own profits came principally from grain and vines, and he could afford to help his tenants through the bad year; but the loss galled him, the waste of those acres of fair, gnarled little trees. That May and June he would go to the orchards and walk down the grass between the trees that bore no fruit. He would return to the house frowning, erect, walking heavily. In July the rejection of his second plea came from Rakava. That night, coming to bed late and without light other than the starlight in the windows, he lay down and lay still, knowing from the quality of her silence that Eleonora was still awake. He spoke in the darkness, not loud, but harshly.

They lay side by side, both silent, hearing the crickets trill and trill in the warm furrows and along the roadsides in the summer night.

“Oh my dear, my dear,” she said turning to him, putting her arms about him; but even she, his life’s stay, his one enduring joy, had no comfort for him.

That night Laura too lay awake, in her room down the hallway, by the window that gave on the fields where the crickets were trilling. She had turned twenty-three in June. It was an age she had long ago picked as a dividing age, a watershed. It had seemed a remote goal, even when she was twenty. When she was twenty-three she would be certain; she would be settled in the course of her life, through with yearnings, turmoils, and reversals: a woman, beginning to be wise.

Three weeks ago Piera had come over in the afternoon with a book to read aloud down at their old place by the boat house below the road. They had gone there but had never opened the book. Piera, very lively and pretty in a new flowered cotton, wanted to tell her friend something. “Well?” Laura said at last, lazy and teasing. “I haven’t asked the right question yet, I can see that; tell me what to ask, please.”

“Oh, nothing. All right, very well. Ask me who proposed marriage to me!” Piera blushed, and blew the seeds off a dandelion clock.

Alexander Sorentay had been jilted dramatically by Advocate Ksenay’s daughter Mariya, who ran off two weeks before the wedding-day with an itinerant buttons-and-needles vendor from Vermare and never appeared in Portacheyka again. This event had quite eclipsed the duller gossip-matter of Piera’s broken engagement. Alexander had restrained his determination to marry as long as decency demanded but not a day longer, and on that day had laid siege once more on his first love. This time his wooing was overt and all but spectacular; he was past shame, and need not fear damaging her reputation since everybody knew he was having no success. “He coorts and she discoorages,” Marta Astolfeya had said, and this became the general summary. “Still coortin?” Emanuel would ask when the Valtorskars came over to sit on the Sordes’ terrace above the lake after supper, and Piera would answer, “Oh aye, uncle, and I’m still discooragin!” She had been distressed by Alexander’s suit at first, having never lost her guilt concerning that letter written him from Aisnar; but his persistence wore out first her pity and then her patience. She was civil, and skilful at avoiding offense to his family, who favored the match; but she had no intention of accepting the leavings of the lawyer’s daughter.

“Alexander indeed,” she said. “No, no. This was a surprise. A bolt from the blue. Guess! You’ll never guess it.”

“There isn’t anyone,” Laura said, reviewing mentally. “The fact is, there are no men here, when you look at them in this light.”

“Yes. Out of the blue. Nothing to prepare me. No warnings. He scarcely speaks to me, as a general rule, except on business, of course. We get on very well working, I will say that. But to turn to me with no preparation at all over the rental account book and, ‘Contesina, will you—’ No, I won’t imitate him. I don’t feel like making fun of him, really. In fact I am a little upset, I think.”

After a little silence Laura said, “Because of the…differences between you.”

“What do you mean? That he’s a farmer’s son, and apparently illegitimate? Is that what you think? I was afraid he would think that, but I thought you—All right, of course one would consider that; but if I wanted to marry Berke Gavrey I would do so. In many ways I wish I could. We work together well, as I said. I believe we could make a very good thing of the estate. He knows that, I suppose that’s why he brought up marriage. He is a very practical man. And an ambitious one. But he is not a man I wish to marry.”

Piera had completely dropped her embarrassed, mocking tone; Laura had seldom heard her speak so seriously, or so bluntly. She made only the most conventional response, and they did not stay much longer there by the boat house. Piera went to rejoin her father, who had been in ill health for some weeks, and Laura went up to her room and got by herself at last. “The coward,” she whispered, and it was all she found to say, there in the wreckage of what had been passionate emotion and now was nothing at all. “The coward!”

Two years ago in spring, while Piera had been away in Aisnar, a little while after Itale’s letter describing his meeting with Piera at the convent school, there had come a week of sweet April weather; and Laura, long confined to the house with a lingering bronchitis, was released rejoicing into the sunshine. She walked up into the peach orchards, just coming into bloom. The morning sun shone on the trees and the short, fresh, young grass between them. She did not walk far, but put down her rug and sat down. The soft wind blew. All around her were dark, vigorous trunks and branches, twigs knotted and knotted with pale flowerbuds. From the barnyard eastward down the valley came the ring of metal on metal, the hiss of hot iron in water, the creaking of an ancient bellows. Bron’s great-grandson, Zeske, would be working the bellows; they were fitting horseshoes, shaping them on the anvil; shoeing, too, perhaps, for she heard the stamping and sharp neigh of a draft-horse, distinct and clear as were all sounds here, yet softened and made miniature by distance and by the vast, southward motion of the air. Then Gavrey had come running down through the trees, and stopped short, seeing her. His was on his back, his hound Roshe was with him, panting. He had been up in the forests, in the high places, and the strangeness of the forests was still with him. He stopped not ten feet from Laura. Neither spoke. His gaze, at first simply startled, became the intent look that was characteristic of him. He stood there, from motion to stillness in one instant, gazing.

He moved then, took off his cap and ran his hand over his sweaty, dark reddish hair. “Aye, I know you, Miss Laura,” he said hoarsely. “You took me by surprise, sitting there.”

She patted the hound, which had sat down by her and dropped its head nearly to the ground.

He shook his head. He sat down on the grass, at some distance from her. “Now I’ve stopped I can’t stay up…Went up this morning before light. To get up high. Where they say the she-wolf is.”

“No one’s ever run her, these five years. I wonder if there really is a wolf, if she’s only a hunters’ dream.”

She watched him as he sat there, his loose dark hands on his knees, his chest rising and falling as he got his breath, the sunlight glinting in his hair.

“She’s up there, all right. Your Kass saw her last month. But the dog fell on a deer scent. Led me half over the mountain and back, you fool dog…It must be getting on to noon. Ah! the…” He shrugged, looking over at Laura, a curious, quick, comradely glance. “I lost my last place, in Altesma, for too much hunting. Once I’m on the mountain I could go a week and never know it, same as this fool dog.”

When he had gone, his hound trotting sore-footed at his heels, she could not get him out of her thoughts, that sharp, frank look of recognition, the half-smile on his face that had always been shut and set. She had caught him off guard, seen him himself, the hunter. She could not forget the moment, and when she met him again she saw that he had not forgotten it. He would not look at her, now. He never had spoken much to her, but he had used to look at her, in his intent, calm way, as if he were looking at a picture in a book.

After a time she got used to him again, to his not looking at her. They met only at Valtorsa, in company with her parents, Count Orlant, Cousin Betta, Auntie, Rodenne and the rest. When a vist game was in session she would notice Gavrey’s hands, fine-boned, loose, and dark; she knew, without knowing she knew, the angle of his wrist, the position his left hand took half open on the table as he waited for the next card to fall.

In the autumn she spoke to him again alone. She was at St Anthony’s, bringing flowers for the chapel for the service of All Saints; old Father Klement had kept her there. She was fond of the kind, ignorant, dirty old priest. She was the woman of his life; he did not know it, but she did. He had no assistant, and she had helped him set out the chrysanthemums, dahlias, and autumn daisies she had brought from her garden, flowers colored like fire and ash, crimson, russet, gold, dun and pale. The colors filled her eyes, the fresh rank smell of them clung to her hands, as she knelt in the dark chapel, hardly listening to the priest’s whispering mumble. The few old women who always came for the evening service were there, and Kass, who had been sent to fetch her, and, coming in as the service began, had got stuck with it. He was a young fellow, a bantam, not one to come pray with the old biddies if he could help it. There was another man, and presently she saw from the set of his shoulders and the thick curling hair that it was Gavrey. Had he gone devout? She doubted it, but there was no telling with these silent men. The peasant woman, wrinkled and toothless at forty, who never missed mass, took communion, confessed, boasted of her nephew in the seminary, kissed the priest’s hand, she might tell you, if you asked, that she did not believe in God. “But there’s the Saints, and the holy water is a great thing,” one such woman had said to Laura, rock-sure in her paganism. Then you might come on one of the hard-faced men who called the church a place for priests and women, come on in pain and glimpse a spiritual intensity, a terrible longing for God. They had a name for these crises. “He’s borne down,” they said.—“Why’s Sorentay’s Tomas off at church then?”—“He’s borne down hard, these two months…” Suffering, misery, mystery, what was it that bore them down? They could not say, but they recognised the agony; and so did Laura Sorde. She glanced again across the chapel at Gavrey. Was he borne down? Was the hunter caught? It was a strange thought. Sometimes when she saw a man in church she was strangely moved. A man on his knees, his dirty thick boot-soles sticking up behind and his head bared and bowed, asking for help, used as she was to it it was strange, moving her to a pity very close to shame.

Gavrey came out of the chapel directly after her, and spoke. Young Kass was waiting for her, Father Klement would follow. Well defended, she felt bold, curious, wanting to provoke the man who would not look at her. “What brought you out here tonight? Are you borne down?”

She thought she had stopped, there on the steps, but found herself walking on beside him.

“What for?” she said at last, and winced at her own words and tone, hypocritical, false.

He stopped and faced her, by the wicket gate of the churchyard. They were the same height, their eyes met straight. “Did you ever look at me?”

She glanced round at Kass unhitching the horse, at the old women chatting on the path. He had spoken aloud as if they were alone in all the world, in a passionately resentful voice; but self-defense was a strong habit in him, and her movement roused it. He half turned from her and spoke lower. “Why did you ask me was I borne down? What’s that to you?”

“Aye, sorry. Will you leave me alone? Will you leave me alone?” He was gasping for breath as when he had stood above her in the orchard six moths ago. He broke away from her, strode off into the dusk along the road under the pines of San Larenz.

As they drove home with Kass, Father Klement asked, “What was Berke Gavrey telling you, then?” The old priest had a piping voice. Laura felt that every ear in Val Malafrena, every beast in the dark woods, could hear him piping, “What was Berke Gavrey telling you?”

“He’s a good fellow,” the priest said, pipy and sententious. “As good as need be no matter what they say of him.”

“I never heard anything against him,” Laura said, and at once accused herself of complicity with him.

Father Klement was delighted: new ears for old gossip, irresistible. He never considered what was suitable for a priest to repeat, whether the gossip he relayed was offensive or malicious; to him it was all words, stories, the savor of existence. “Why, now, you never heard what that Val Altesma woman had to say?” And he went on to tell Laura that Gavrey had left Val Altesma because he had got a girl pregnant, a peasant freeholder’s daughter at Kulme. “She had nobody but womenfolks and an old granddad, the Altesma woman said, so there was nothing she could do but tell the story, and she did that, and so he got away and went to Raskayna where he was under-steward, and they say he was a terror among the young women there as well.”

“That’s stupid, a stupid story,” Laura said. “If all that was true Count Orlant would never have taken him on.”

“Why not?” the old priest asked, puzzled. “It’s true enough, but so’s it true that he don’t make trouble here. He’s a good man and a good steward, none ever said different in Val Maalafren.” He sought a suitable moral and said at last with satisfaction, “Young men will be wild, before they settle down.”

What do you know about it, you fat old capon? thought Laura; and she upbraided the priest for gossiping. Father Klement got flustered and looked beseechingly at the gentle, tall, soft-voiced girl who had suddenly turned on him as stern and hard as her father. “But I did say he’s a good man!” he appealed.

“A good man! If he’s done what you say, what right have you to him good? I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

All the trees of San Larenz were listening, and Gavrey the hunter hidden amongst them listening, understanding.

What was terrible to her was that, with nothing said, with hardly a word and no touch between them, for they had never touched, yet she understood him, and he her. There was no place to hide.

She had believed that only in the spirit is there true understanding: flesh is the darkness that hides the light, the barrier to communion. Now all that unquestioned belief fell away from her. It is the spirit that is alone, she thought with a kind of horror of certainty, and the spirit that dies. Only in the body do we know communion, and hold fast to the present, which is eternal. The shadows will not wither away to leave the child soul bathed in light at last: what last, what endures, is the darkness, the opacity and weight of shadow-casting body; the breath of life is breath itself. One night in November she was sewing after supper with her mother, and rose to refill the bronze oil-lamp at her elbow. She poured in the oil too fast, overfilling the lamp; the flame on the wick sputtered, flickered, went out, drowned in the fuel that fed it. She watched in fascination. The oil spilled on her fingers, on the table, “Why, look what you’re doing, Laura,” her mother said, “don’t get it on your dress!” The girl stood staring at the lamp, the drowned wick, a little black scrap. The shadows had closed in about her. She turned to her mother, and Eleonora got up, spilling her sewing things about her—“Laura, what is it?”

“Oh, Mother, I’m borne down,” Laura said, and began to laugh, then cry; then she got control of herself, all within a minute, and would say no more to Eleonora except that she was overtired.

She went to bed and lay awake, trying to exorcise from herself, from her body, by sheer force of will, the presence of the man who obsessed her. She did not pray.

In the end she found her help in the knowledge that had undone her in the first place, the knowledge that he was as helpless as she. His desire, which conquered her, put him at a disadvantage: he was driven by it, but unwillingly, afraid to trust her. When his chance came he missed it. They spoke together, having met by chance, by the lake-shore in a red December dusk.

She knew how to hurt him. “Fired? Who told you that? I left of my own will.”

“And to get away from a woman that wouldn’t let me alone,” he said in his rancor.

“Better than to burn,” the girl said, weak with hatred of him, spite, fear, yearning. “No matter what kind you are.”

He flushed up crimson in the red light, and took a step backwards. Trapped and self-destructive, afraid, he said hastily, “I don’t know why I said that.”

“You torment yourself, Berke,” she said, looking at him and speaking with her old natural gentleness. He did not know he was her equal, and she was never going to tell a man who did not know it without being told.

And she smiled at him; but he did not answer, standing wordless and helpless. When she saw that she was ashamed of him. “You should stay here,” she said calmly. “You’ll run out of places to move to. Besides, you owe something to Count Orlant, I should think.”

“Aye, that I do,” he said. He spoke almost submissively. She longed to be away from him. She pitied him and wished him gone, out of her sight.

She no longer looked at him, but out over the lake, where the red light was fading into obscure brown-violet dusk. She was desolate. Now he came to her, reached out to touch her, and she allowed him: because he must have it that she allow him, that she permit him, that she be the lady and he the servant, that there not be between them any honesty, but only this game of owner and beggar. He felt her unresponsiveness and let her go, saying, “It’s no good—why do you make a fool of me?”

She looked at him then. “You are a fool, Berke,” she said. “It’s not my doing. If you haven’t got the courage to walk this road then you’d better go back to Val Altesma, to the first girl you ran away from.” She turned and went down the shore away from him, towards the promontory. He let her go.

That was the end of it, she told herself, and so it was, though he did not leave Valtorsa. When she had to be with him she spoke to him as little as possible, ignoring his cringing, questioning look and her own humiliated, defiant longing for a kind word from him, the touch of his hand. She could not shake him off. He was the first man to waken her. No other took his place. The weeks and months went on, and without knowing it Laura nursed the sterile desire, tried to keep it alive. There was so little in her life, and he was the only man who had ever touched her. She let herself dream of some future reconciliation and understanding, as if there were anything left to reconcile or explain.

Now she had lost even that pretense, the last bit of warmth in the cold. She wondered at first if he had proposed to Piera simply in order to hurt her, Laura. She told herself that that was mere self-flattery. He was afraid of Guide Sorde, and not afraid of Orlant Valtorskar, that was the principal key—perhaps. Perhaps he wanted Piera more than he had wanted her. She told herself she must accept this possibility, but she did not. It was because he did not desire Piera as a woman that he was bolder, able to propose the marriage that he had not dared even envisage with Laura, the hunter caught in his own trap: of this she was certain, and then she called herself a fool for her certainty, for her vanity, for clinging to the love he had never even offered her. And now he had succeeded in dividing her from her friend. She was not jealous of Piera. She was envious, she always had envied Piera, envy was part of the rock their friendship was built upon; that was no harm. But he had spoilt the frankness between them, prevented the unreserved conversation that was the one relief to Laura’s essential loneliness. She had never told Piera of the sensual storm she had gone through, never said anything about Gavrey at all; partly through inability, lacking the very words to speak of that middle ground, that obscure country, between the vocabulary of animal sex which she as a farmer’s child of course knew but was not, as a lady, to speak, and the vocabulary of love and sentiment; partly also because she had felt no need to speak. Now that she wanted to, in order to clear the air and restore the trust between her and her friend, she could not. She was ashamed to. She was ashamed of the meanness of the story, ashamed of herself for wanting to tell it, even.

And this was the wisdom and strength of her womanhood, of her twenty-three years…

The worst of it was the fear of losing Piera. That she could not bear, and it was not many days before she set her teeth on her humiliation and told her friend as much of the story as she could. She did it awkwardly and unclearly, so that Piera did not understand at first, asking in dismay, “But you mean you love—you loved him, Laura?”

“No,” the older girl answered steadily, “I mean I could hardly keep my hands off him. And it was the same with him. For a while.”

She saw Piera climbing up over that fence, looking at the strange lands on the other side. She felt herself corrupted, corrupting. But Piera said simply, after a little while, “No wonder you understood about Givan Koste.”

“We came at it different ways. You found too much of what I didn’t find enough of…But what’s wrong with Berke, what was he afraid of?”

“You; he was afraid of you,” Piera said, brooding. “Not of me. Because I’m not as strong as you; because he’s not in love with me. So it’s me he proposed to. How stupid he is! How stupid it all is!—I thought of accepting him, Laura. That night. I knew I could get him to ask again. He’s a very good overseer. I was afraid he might leave. And I can work with him. I’m beginning to learn what to do and how to do it, how the estate should be run. He’s taught me most of that. So—” She smiled rather bleakly.

“Because if I am marrying for practical reasons, Sandre is a much better match.”

“I don’t understand it,” Piera said. “I don’t really understand what happened between you and Berke. I don’t understand what love is, or what it’s supposed to be. Why is it supposed to be my whole life?”

Laura shook her head. She looked up at the golden slope of grass above the boat house.

“Itale always said the time will come. But we wait, and we wait. What are we waiting for, Laura? Why does he have to be in jail, why do men have to be such fools, why are we wasting our lives? Is love the answer to all that? I don’t understand, I don’t understand…”

PART FIVE
Prisons

I

II

III

IV

V

PART FIVE Prisons

I

II

III

IV

V

PART FIVE
Prisons