Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (288 page)

At a modest celebration in the big kitchen that night, the Haven revealed more of the talents it harbored. Hiro produced a gallon of liquor he had distilled from sawdust and called cellusaki. Mr. Haggerwells pronounced it fit for a cultivated palate, following with an impromptu discourse on drinking through the ages. Midbin sampled enough of it to imitate Mr. Haggerwells’s lecture and then, as an inspired afterthought, to demonstrate how Mr. Haggerwells might mimic Midbin’s parody. Ace and three others sang ballads; even the dumb girl, persuaded to sip a little of the cellusaki under the disapproving eyes of her self-appointed guardians, seemed to become faintly animated. If anyone noted the absence of Barbara Haggerwells, no one commented on it.

Fall became winter. Surplus timber was hauled in from the woodlots and the lignin extracted by compressed air, a method perfected by one of the fellows. Lignin was the fuel used in our hot water furnaces, and it provided the gas for the reflecting jets which magnified a tiny flame into strong illumination. All of us took part in this work, but just as I had not been able to help Hiro to his satisfaction in the laboratory, so here too my ineptness with things mechanical soon caused me to be set to more congenial tasks in the stables.

I did not repine at this, for though I was delighted with the society of the others, I found it pleasurable to be alone, to sort out my thoughts, to slow down to the rhythm of the heavy Percherons or enjoy the antics of the two young foals. The world and time were somewhere shut outside; I felt contentment so strong as to be beyond satisfaction or any active emotion.

I was currying a dappled mare one afternoon and reflecting how the steam plow used on the great wheat ranches of British America deprived the farmers not merely of fertilizer but also of companionship, when Barbara, her breath still cloudy from the cold outside, came in and stood behind me. I made an artificial cowlick on the mare’s flank, then brushed it glossy smooth again.

“Hello,” she said.

“Uh…Hello, Miss Haggerwells.”

“Must you, Hodge?”

I roughed up the mare’s flank once more. “Must I what? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

She came close, as close as she had in the bookstore, and I felt my breath quicken. “I think you do. Why do you avoid me? And call me ‘Miss Haggerwells’ in that prim tone? Do I look so old and ugly and forbidding?”

This, I thought, is going to hurt Ace. Poor Ace, befuddled by a Jezebel; why can’t he attach himself to a nice quiet girl who won’t tear him in pieces every time she follows her inclinations?

I smoothed the mare’s side for the last time and put down the currycomb.

“I think you are the most exciting woman I’ve ever met, Barbara,” I said.

XIII.

TIME

“Hodge.”

“Barbara?”

“Is it really true you’ve never written your mother since you left home?”

“Why should I write her? What could I say? Perhaps if my first plans had come to something, I might have. But to tell her I worked for six years for nothing would only confirm her opinion of my lack of gumption.”

“I wonder if your ambitions in the end don’t amount to a wish to prove her wrong.”

“Now you sound like Midbin,” I said, but I wasn’t annoyed. I much preferred her present questions to those I’d heard from her in the past weeks: Do you love me? Are you sure? Really love, I mean; more than any other woman? Why?

“Oliver has had accidental flashes of insight.”

“Aren’t you substituting your own for what you think might be my motives?”

“My mother hated me,” she stated flatly.

“Well, it isn’t a world where love is abundant; substitutes are cheap and available. But hate—that’s a strong word. How do you know?”

“I know. What does it matter how? I’m not unfeeling, like you.”

“Me? Now what have I done?”

“You don’t care about anyone. Not me or anyone else. You don’t want me; just any woman would do.”

I considered this. “I don’t think so, Barbara—”

“See! You don’t think so. You’re not sure, and anyway you wouldn’t hurt my feelings needlessly. Why don’t you be honest and tell the truth. You’d just as soon it was that streetwalker in New York. Maybe you’d rather. You miss her, don’t you?”

“Barbara, I’ve told you a dozen times I never—”

“And I’ve told you a dozen times you’re a liar! I don’t care. I really don’t care.”

“All right.”

“How can you be so phlegmatic? So unfeeling? Nothing means anything to you. You’re a real, stolid peasant. And you smell like one, too, always reeking of the stable.”

“I’m sorry,” I said mildly; “I’ll try to bathe more often.”

Her taunts and jealous fits, her insistent demands did not ruffle me. I was too pleased with the wonders of life to be disturbed. All I’d dreamed Haggershaven could mean when I was sure I would never be part of it was fulfilled and more than fulfilled. Haggershaven and Barbara; Eden and Lilith.

At first it seemed the bookstore years were wasted, but I soon realized the value of that catholic and serendipitous reading as a preparation for this time. I was momentarily disappointed that there was no one at the Haven to whom I could turn for that personal, face-to-face, student-teacher relationship on which I’d set so great a store, but if there was no historical scholar among the fellows to tutor me, I was surrounded by those who had learned the discipline of study. There was none to discuss the details of the Industrial Revolution or the failure of the Ultramontane movement in Catholicism and the policies of Popes Adrian VII, VIII, and IX, but all could show me scheme and method. I began to understand what thorough exploration of a subject meant as opposed to sciolism, and I threw myself into my chosen work with furious zest.

I also began to understand the central mystery of historical theory. When and what and how and where, but the when is the least. Not chronology but relationship is ultimately what the historian deals in. The element of time, so vital at first glance, assumes a constantly more subordinate character. That the past is past becomes ever less important. Except for perspective it might as well be the present or the future or, if one can conceive it, a parallel time. I was not investigating a petrification but a fluid. Were it possible to know fully the what and how and where one might learn the why, and assuredly if one grasped the why he could place the when at will.

During that winter I read philosophy, psychology, archaeology, anthropology. My energy and appetite were prodigious, as they needed to be. I saw the field of knowledge, not knowledge in the abstract, but things I wanted to know, things I had to know, expanding in front of me with dizzying speed while I crawled and crept and stumbled over ground I should have covered years before.

Yet if I had studied more conventionally I would never have had the Haven or Barbara. Novelists speak lightly of gusts of passion, but it was nothing less than irresistible force which drove me to her, day after day. Looking back on what I had felt for Tirzah Vame with the condescension twenty-four has toward twenty, I saw my younger self only as callow, boyish, and slightly obtuse. I was embarrassed by the torments I had suffered.

With Barbara I lived only in the present, shutting out past and future. This was only partly due to the intensity, the fierceness of our desire; much came from Barbara’s own troubled spirit. She herself was so avid, so demanding, that yesterday and tomorrow were irrelevant to the insistent moment. The only thing saving me from enslavement like poor Ace was the belief, correct or incorrect I am to this day not certain, that to yield the last vestige of detachment and objectivity would make me helpless, not just before her, but to accomplish my ever more urgent ambitions.

Still I know much of my reserve was unnecessary, a product of fear, not prudence. I denied much I could have given freely and without harm; my guard protected what was essentially empty. My fancied advantage over Ace, based on my having always had an easy, perhaps too easy way with women, was no advantage at all. I foolishly thought myself master of the situation because her infidelities, if such a word can be used where faithfulness is explicitly ruled out, did not bother me. I believed I had grown immensely wise since the time when the prospect of Tirzah’s rejection had made me miserable.

I was wrong; my sophistication was a lack, not an achievement.

Do I need to say that Barbara was no wanton, moved by light and fickle voluptuousness? The puritanism of our time, expressing itself in condemnations and denials, molded her as it molded our civilization. She was driven by urges deeper and darker than sensuality; her mad jealousies were provoked by an unappeasable need for constant reassurance. She had to be dominant, she had to be courted by more than one man; she had to be told constantly what she could never truly believe: that she was uniquely desired.

I wondered that she did not burn herself out, not only with conflicting passions, but with her fury of work. Sleep was a weakness she despised, yet she craved far more of it than she allowed herself; she rationed her hours of unconsciousness and drove herself relentlessly. Ace’s panegyrics on her importance as a physicist I discounted, but older and more objective colleagues spoke of her mathematical concepts, not merely with respect, but with awe.

She did not discuss her work with me; our intimacy stopped short of such exchanges. I got the impression she was seeking the principles of heavier-than-air flight, a chimera which had long intrigued inventors. It seemed a pointless pursuit, for it was manifest such levitation could no more replace our safe, comfortable guided balloons than minibiles could replace the horse.

Spring made all of us single-minded farmers until the fields were plowed and sown. No one grudged these days, for the Haven’s economic life was based first of all on its land, and we were happy in the work itself. Not until the most feverish competition with time began to slacken could we return to our regular activities.

I say “all of us,” but I must except the dumb girl. She greeted the spring with the nearest approach to cheerfulness she had displayed; there was a distinct lifting of her apathy. Unexpectedly she revealed a talent which had survived the shock to her personality or had been resurrected like the pussywillows and crocuses by the warm sun. She was a craftsman with needle and thread. Timidly at first, but gradually growing bolder, she contrived dresses of gayer and gayer colors in place of the drab school uniform; always, on the completion of a new creation, running to me as though to solicit my approval.

This innocent if embarrassing custom could hardly escape Barbara’s notice, but her anger was directed at me, not the girl. My “devotion” was not only absurd, she told me, it was also conspicuous and degrading. My taste was inexplicable, running as it did to immature, deranged cripples.

Naturally when the girl took up the habit of coming to the edge of the field where I was plowing, waiting gravely motionless for me to drive the furrow toward her, I anticipated still further punishment from Barbara’s tongue. The girl was not to be swayed from her practice; at least I did not have the heart to speak roughly to her, and so she daily continued to stand through the long hours watching me plow, bringing me a lunch at noon, and docilely sharing a small portion of it.

The planting done, Midbin began the use of a new technique, showing her drawings of successive stages of the holdup, again nagging and pumping me for details to sharpen their accuracy. Her reactions pleased him immensely, for she responded to the first ones with nods and the throaty sounds we recognized as understanding or agreement. The scenes of the assault itself, of the shooting of the coachman, the flight of the footman, and her own concealment in the cornfield, evoked whimpers, while the brutal depiction of the Escobars’ murder made her cower and cover her eyes.

I suppose I am not particularly tactful; still I had been careful not to mention any of this to Barbara. Midbin, however, after a very gratifying reaction to one of the drawings, said casually, “Barbara hasn’t been here for a long time. I wish she would come back.”

When I repeated this she stormed at me. “How dare you discuss me with that ridiculous fool?”

“You’ve got it all wrong. There wasn’t any discussion. Midbin only said—”

“I know what Oliver said. I know his whole silly vocabulary.”

“He only wants to help you.”

“Help me? Help me? What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing, Barbara. Nothing.”

“Am I dumb or blind or stupid?”

“Please, Barbara.”

“Just unattractive. I know. I’ve seen you with that creature. How you must hate me to flaunt her before everyone!”

“You know I only go with her to Midbin’s because he insists.”

“What about your little lovers’ meetings in the woodlot when you were supposed to be plowing? Do you think I didn’t know about them?”

“Barbara, I assure you they were perfectly harmless. She—”

“You’re a liar. More than that, you’re a sneak and a hypocrite. Yes, and a mean, crawling sycophant as well. I know you must detest me, but it suits you to suffer me because of the Haven. I’m not blind; you’ve used me, deliberately and calculatedly for your own selfish ends.”

Midbin could explain and excuse her outbursts by his “emotional pathology,” Ace accepted and suffered them as inescapable, so did her father, but I saw no necessity of being always subject to her tantrums. I told her so, adding, not too heatedly I think, “Maybe we shouldn’t see each other alone after this.”