Lilith (22 page)

“But I have!” he cried. “There are so many things that I take joy in. I have a very exuberant nature. Perhaps you haven’t noticed it. But I’m not very brave. I admit I’m not very brave. I’m afraid of all sorts of things cuts and bruises, sudden changes of temperature, for example. I catch cold very easily, you know. I have never been physically very strong.”

Lilith burst into a peal of laughter and turned back to her painting. “You are a fraud!” she said. “You talk about submitting to holy powers, but you’re terrified of little bruises or of catching cold. I think you’re as devoted to misery as Mr. Bruce is. And you boast of your capacity for joy!”

“But I have it!” Warren cried. “You don’t understand me. I have!”

“Eat these, then.”

She turned suddenly, plunging her hand into her pocket and flinging a handful of the scarlet berries toward him. They bounced and rolled on the gray rock, settling in the crevices, where they lay glittering like little beads. I lunged forward involuntarily in the beginning of a gesture to clutch his hand if he should reach for them, but I saw there was no need. He stared at the red berries with a sudden look of fright, drawing his hand inward against his breast and recoiling from them humbly.

“Oh, no. They would make me sick. They may be poisonous.”

“Perhaps,” Lilith said. “But perhaps they have a thrilling, exotic flavor, like nothing you have ever tasted.”

She took another handful of the berries from her pocket and, dropping her head back, tossed them into her mouth. Before I could reach her to prevent it she had swallowed them and drawn her wrist across her lips to wipe away the scarlet stain.

“They’re delicious. Clean and bitter, like anise. You see how foolish you are.”

I had leapt to my feet—much too late, as I say, to interfere—and stood frowning at her with chagrin.

“Have I made you angry, Mr. Bruce?” she asked softly. “It was very foolish. They may be poisonous, as he says.”

“They won’t hurt me if they are.”

“I hope not. If you do any more foolish things like that I’ll have to take you back.”

“Are you worried about me, then?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’m responsible for you.”

“Yes. Then I’ll be very good. I promise not to get sick. I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.” She held her hand out toward me, her palm glittering with scarlet juice from the crushed berries. “Would you like to taste it, too?”

“No, thank you.”

“You see, you are both alike. You’re concerned about your health. But I have tasted a flavor of this world that you will never know.”

“Yes, but I’m afraid of things like that,” Warren said. He sat with his head drooped, staring rather shamefully at the ground. “Poison, and things of that kind. I’ve read about it in books—how you die in agony. I believe you draw your knees up against your chest and resume the fetal posture. It’s really dreadful.”

He rose and prowled restlessly about the rock, examining the boulder wall with his long fingers, which he poked in a sorrowful and abstracted way into the dust and rubble of its crevices, turning sometimes to look at Lilith. We were both suffering, I believe, from the same curious sense of defeat at her hands, and went without speaking for several minutes, each silently considering his own inadequacy. In a moment he turned, chuckling in his noisy childish way, and called excitedly, “Look what I’ve found! A mantis! Look how huge it is!”

It was indeed an enormous insect, with a plump brilliant-green body the size of a large cigar, and great flat forelegs which it held lifted and bent in an attitude of savage piety. It had fallen from the foliage above and stood with calm and monstrous dignity on a ledge of the boulder, turning its small head in a deliberate way from side to side while it regarded us with a look of fearful intelligence in its bulging eyes.

“How beautiful he is!” Lilith said. “And how wise he looks!” She had come to stand beside Warren at the boulder, and the three of us, our shoulders touching, peered with fascination at the little monster.

“I wonder what he’s praying for?” I said.

“For victims.” Lilith laughed as the mantis revolved its head slowly, seeming to survey each of us in turn. “I wonder which of us he will choose?”

“It’s an ugly thing,” Warren said suddenly. He picked up a long flat blade of shale which lay broken in a rift of the rock and lifted it to strike the insect.

“Oh, no, don’t kill him!” Lilith cried. “No, no!” She clutched at Warren’s hand as it descended, but insufficiently to deflect the blow; the mantis lay crushed and quivering against the gray rock. “What a terrible thing to do! He was beautiful!”

“I didn’t know it really mattered to you,” Warren mumbled. He raised his hand and stared at the long ragged scratch her nails had made across the back of it. “You scratched me.”

“Let me see,” Lilith said.

He turned his hand toward her and she stared at it somberly for a moment.

“Why, you have beautiful hands,” she said in a quaintly reflective way, as if she had never before observed them.

Warren blushed and closed his fingers quickly. “I bite my nails,” he murmured, and then, with a terrible effort of will which one could read in the tension and deepening color of his face, he straightened his fingers slowly, as if to exhibit his disgrace, and asked softly, “Do you really think that if I learned to trust them, as you say, they would find me things I loved?”

“Yes, I know they would.”

Knowing the painful shyness and formality of his nature, I was more than ever aware of the intensity of the impulse which made him raise his hand in a slow, trembling gesture of agonized determination and take very gently between his fingers a strand of her soft bright hair. She did not withdraw, or look at him directly, but bowed her head slightly in a delicately feigned unawareness, suffering his touch.

“Then I will try to learn to,” he murmured. He withdrew his hand and stood watching her averted face with a composed radiance of expression that was quite moving to see. Lilith turned suddenly and walked back to her easel, dipping her hand into her pocket and taking out more of her wild berries. She worked swiftly for a moment, making broad violet strokes across the top of her paper, and then said suddenly, “I need some water to wash it out; I’ve gotten it too dark. May I get some?”

“Where?” I asked.

“There’s a pool in the rocks back there, where we climbed up.”

She pointed down the shelf of rock and I saw the water shining among the branches of an elder bush. It was scarcely ten yards away, a little below us and easily in sight of the boulder on which we stood. When I hesitated for a moment, she said, “It will only take me a minute.” I am not sure, although I had much time and occasion to consider it in the days that followed, just what prompted my unfortunate reply to her request; surely even with the few yards’ advantage she would have had if she had tried to run away I could easily have overtaken her, and she would, at any rate, have been able to make very little headway through the dense thicket. Yet Bea had told me that she had tried previously to escape, and the possibility remained that she might do so again and might, however futile the attempt, have injured herself stumbling about the rocks and through the bracken. I think my reasoning was that it was better to keep her in front of me, with the only possible avenue of escape—the thicket behind the rock—barred by myself. It was also the forthrightness of the request which made me suspect that if she intended to deceive me in any way, it was in order to separate herself from Warren and me by getting the water herself. It was the first time I had had to trust my own initiative with patients and was not yet fully familiar with the involutions of their cunning. (I say “cunning,” although I am not yet sure, and perhaps never will be, if it was such.) I am not really sure, in my threadbare and guilty memory of the event, what my reasoning was; but I soon had shocking evidence of its error.

“Let me get it for you,” I said with assumed casualness. “That’s very kind of you.”

“Do you have a cup or something in your box?”

“No. You can just soak my scarf in it, if you will. That’s all I need.” She untied the pale silk scarf from her throat and tossed it to me lightly. It fell across my fingers like breath.

“It will get all stained,” I said.

“Oh, that doesn’t matter.”

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

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

“Yes, I will.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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