All the Days and Nights (49 page)

“If I had a son the
last
thing in the world I’d want would be for him to read this filth!”

“— and tell him he can read them if he wants to. And if he doesn’t want to, he can decide what should be done with them. It might be a help to him to know that there was somebody two generations back who wasn’t in every respect what he seemed to be.”

“Who was, in fact —”

“Since he didn’t know your father, he won’t be shocked and upset. You stay right where you are while I make us another of these.”

But she didn’t. She didn’t want to be separated from him, even for the length of time it would take him to go out to the kitchen and come back with a margarita suspended from the fingers of each hand, lest in that brief interval he turn into a stranger.

“M
ADAME
M
OLE
,” everyone said, out of respect. For what she was and how she did things. The thick fur and the usually cold eye that saw immediately the disadvantages of a poorly located and badly laid out tunnel. Her own tunnel had never been equaled and indeed the full extent of it, taking both the upper and the lower level into consideration, was only guessed at, for visitors had seen only the first hundred anterooms. She was descended on her mother’s side from the Moles of Longview, whose enormous spreading family tree had for its trunk a mole brought over in a cage by one of William the Conqueror’s body servants. It escaped during the Battle of Hastings, into a land that had hitherto been happily free of them, and before that fatal moment when Harold glanced up at the sun and received an arrow in his eye, the mole had already established a temporary home under the battlefield. The family was ennobled under William Rufus, for the harassment they had caused the Saxons, and Charles II made the ninetieth baronet an earl in gratitude for the number of Cromwell’s horses that had stepped in a tunnel and — but it is better not to go into all that, especially if you like horses. In a time of war, disasters are to be expected, unless you are a mole and can go below into the silence of old roots, and sleeping grubs, and ant chambers, flints, and fossils.

Madame Mole’s husband was never called anything but Mole, for she had married beneath her. His family didn’t bear thinking of, but he was a large good-natured willing creature, and, though not very many of her acquaintances realized this, she would have been nowhere without him. For she designed the new shafts of her great masterwork and he went to work with the hard end of his socially undistinguished nose and by nightfall there the new shaft was, ready for her to explore, and having reached
the end of it, they would settle down cozily together and she would chew his ears by way of showing her love and appreciation. Then she would go about arranging the furniture and putting out pieces of bone china where they would show to advantage. What is the natural life of a mole? I don’t actually know, but a good long time, I should think. Mole traps rust immediately and are notoriously inefficient, and what exasperated gardener is willing to stand waiting at twenty minutes after 10 a.m. and twenty minutes after 4 p.m. for the barely perceptible heaving at the end of a run, and start furiously digging with a spade when it begins. Not one mole in a hundred thousand meets with an accident of any kind, and when it does happen you can be sure it was because they had grown careless. What happened to Madame Mole and her husband was something so much larger than a mere accident that they were at a loss to describe it. They were lying in bed one morning and she was comfortably chewing on his ear, when he saw that the bedroom chandelier was swinging. “Stop jiggling the bed,” she said, and he said, “I’m not.
It’s
doing it.” At which point all the fine china plates fell off the wall and broke into smithereens and dirt began raining down on the bedsheets. While he was taking in what was happening, she leapt out of bed and rushed to each of the seven doors in turn. What should have been a shaft, and
was
a shaft when they went to sleep the night before, was blocked with stones, timbers, and rubbish. In places she could see the sky, and it would not have been too difficult to tunnel up into the open, at this stage, but think what would meet them if they did! She took hold of his ear with her teeth and dragged him out of the bed and under it, and while she lay huddled next to him in fright, he put his hard nose to the ground and started tunneling. Straight down, hour after hour, without any plan to guide him or any consideration for how it would look when the furniture was arranged and the china plates hung where they would show to best advantage: The Longview Willow and Spode that had come down to her from the Shaftsburys, and the hand-painted Limoges chocolate set that was a wedding present from Cousin Emma Noseby and I forget what all, but
she
never forgot. An earthquake was what they assumed it must be, and it did bear certain resemblances to an earthquake, for after a period of very difficult going suddenly they would find themselves in a fissure leading straight down toward the center of the earth, and then it was possible to make very good progress with no effort whatsoever. Machines is what it was. Huge yellow machines rented out by an Italian contractor at two, three, and four hundred dollars a day. Weighing many tons. Big enough
to lift great trees and fling them aside, with their roots exposed to the shocked gaze of the sky. The arrangements of thousands and thousands of years — roots, stones, fossilized ferns, and fossilized fish from the earliest years of the planet were crushed, scraped up in huge mechanical shovels, poured into trucks, and hauled away to desecrate some other part of the landscape. And if Madame Mole and Mole had emerged from their ruined mansion to see what was happening, they would have been scooped up with the Longview Willow, and the sweet-smelling leaf mold of centuries, the dear green grass, and the murdered trees. There had been nothing to equal it in the way of pure destruction since the Battle of Hastings. If it had been for a housing development Madame Mole would have perhaps accepted it with some degree of philosophic resignation. She could understand homemaking even when it was aboveground and so not very practical. But this was to make an eight-lane highway for cars, a means for more people to get away from their homes faster, because of all the things that had made home unbearable — the polluted air, the noise of jet airplanes and so on. It is just as well they never knew the nature of the disaster that sent them down, down, down to the center of the earth. When they reached it they had no idea. It was dark there, of course, and he had left his wristwatch on the table beside their bed, and so they simply kept on going. When he grew tired or discouraged she chewed on his ear until he felt better. And when she wept thinking of all of her treasures left behind, he curled his fur tightly around her fur and in the shared warmth they fell asleep. And when they woke he commenced digging. Eventually the soil began to be looser, and the grubs more frequent, and finally there were root hairs and then big roots and suddenly without any warning they emerged into broad daylight. They were in a terraced field, on a mountainside, in a country that Madame Mole recognized instantly because there was the blue leaning willow tree, and there was the lake, and the bluebird in the sky, and the blue curlicue clouds, and the houses with eaves that curled up at the corners. It was a view she had seen ever since she could remember, because it was on every single piece of the Longview Willow china. “Oh you clever Mole, how glad I am I married you!” she cried, and they withdrew into the tunnel so that, chewing on his ear, she could plan the layout of their new home.

O
NCE
upon a time, in the west of England, there was an industrious tailor who was always sitting cross-legged, plying his needle, when the sun came up over the hill, and all day long he drove himself, as if he were beating a donkey with a stick. “I am almost through cutting out this velvet waistcoat,” he would tell himself, “and when I am through cutting the velvet, I will cut the yellow satin lining. And then there is the buckram, and the collar and cuffs. The cuffs are to be thirteen inches wide, tapering to ten and a half — his lordship was very particular about that detail — and faced with satin. The basting should take me into the afternoon, and if all goes well, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t, I ought to be able to do all twenty-seven buttonholes before the light gives out.”

When snow lay deep on the ground and the sheep stayed in their pens, the shepherd came down to the tavern and in the conviviality he found there made up for the months of solitude on the moors. During the early part of the summer, when it was not yet time for anybody to be bringing wheat, barley, and rye to the mill to be ground into flour, the miller got out his hook and line and went fishing. In one way or another, everyone had some time that he called his own. On the first of May, lads and lasses went into the wood just before daybreak and came back wearing garlands of flowers and with their arms around each other. From his window the tailor saw them setting up the Maypole, but he did not lay aside his needle and thread to go join in the dancing. It is true that he was no longer young and, with his bald head and his bent back and his solemn manner, would have looked odd dancing around a Maypole, but that did not deter the miller’s wife, who weighed seventeen stone and was as light on her feet as a fairy and didn’t care who laughed at her as long as she was enjoying herself.

When the industrious tailor came to the end of all the work that he could expect for a while and his worktable was quite bare, he looked around for some lily that needed gilding. Sorting his pins, sharpening his scissors, and rearranging his patterns, he congratulated himself on keeping busy, though he might just as well have been sitting in his doorway enjoying the sun, for his scissors didn’t need sharpening, and his patterns were not in disorder, and a pin is a pin, no matter what tray you put it in.

As with all of us, the tailor’s upbringing had a good deal to do with the way he behaved. At the age of eight, he was apprenticed to his father, who was a master tailor and not only knew all there is to know about making clothes but also was full of native wisdom. While the boy was learning to sew a straight seam and how to cut cloth on the diagonal and that sort of thing, the father would from time to time raise his right hand, with the needle and thread in it, and, looking at the boy over the top of his spectacles, say “A stitch in time saves nine,” or “Waste makes want,” or some other bit of advice, which the boy took to his bosom and cherished. And he had never forgotten a wonderful story his father told about an ant and a grasshopper. Of all his father’s sayings, the one that made the deepest impression on him was “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today,” though as a rule the industrious tailor had already done it yesterday and was hard at work on something that did not need to be done until the day after.

W
HAT
is true of the day after tomorrow is equally true of the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that, and so on, and in time a very curious thing happened. There was the past — there is always the past — and it was full of accomplishment, of things done well before they needed to be done, and the tailor regarded it with satisfaction. And there was the future, when things would have to be done, and bills would have to be made out and respectfully submitted and paid or not paid, as the case might be, and new work would be ordered, and so on. But it was never right now. The present had ceased to exist. When the industrious tailor looked out of the window and saw that it was raining, it was not raining today but on a day in the middle of next week, or the week after that, if he was that far ahead of himself, and he often was. You would have thought that he would sooner or later have realized that the time he was spending so freely was next month’s, and that if he had already lived through the days of this month before it was well begun he was living beyond his means. But what is “already”? What is “now”? The words
had lost their meaning. And this was not as serious as it sounds, because words are, after all, only words. “I could kill you for doing that,” a man says to his wife and then they both cheerfully sit down to dinner. And many people live entirely in the past, without even noticing it. One day the tailor pushed his glasses up on his forehead and saw that he was in the middle of a lonely wood. He rubbed his poor tired eyes, but the trees didn’t go away. He looked all around. No scissors and pins, no bolts of material, no patterns, no worktable, no shop. Only the needle and thread he had been sewing with. He listened anxiously. He had never been in a wood before. “Wife?” he called out, but there was no answer.

He knew that it was late afternoon, and that he ought to get out of the wood before dark, so he stuck the needle in his vest and started walking along a path that constantly threatened to disappear, the way paths do in the wood. Sometimes the path divided, and he had to choose between the right and the left fork, without knowing which was the way that led out of the wood. The light began to fail even sooner than he had expected. When it was still daytime in the sky overhead, it was already so dark where he was that he could find the path only by the feel of the ground under his feet.