fingerling; knows nothing; he wouldn’t care to know—wouldn’t care to ask them, even supposing (another inward window slides open silently) they would answer, whether on a certain night in August a certain young man. Standing on these rocks which lift their dry brows into the perishing air. A young man struck by metamorphosis as this pool was once struck by lightning. For presumably some affront, you have your reasons, don’t get me wrong, it’s nothing to do with me. Only suppose this man imagines remembering, imagines his only and final memory to be (the rest, all the rest, is supposition) the awful strangulated gasping in deadly waterlessness, the sudden fusing of arms and legs, the twisting in air (air!) and then the horrible relief of the plunge into cold, sweet water where he ought to be—must now be forever.
And suppose he cannot now remember why it happened: only supposes, dreaming, that it did.
What was it he did to hurt you so?
Was it only that the Tale required some go-between, some
Why can’t I remember my sin?
But Grandfather Trout is deep asleep now, for he could not suppose any of this if he were not. All shutters are shut before his open eyes, the water is all around and far away. Grandfather Trout dreams that he’s gone fishing.
V.
The next morning, Smoky and Daily Alice assembled packs more complete than Smoky’s City pack had been, and chose knobbed sticks from an urn full of walking-sticks, umbrellas, and so on that stood in the hail. Doctor Drinkwater gave them guides to the birds and the flowers, which in the end they didn’t open; and they took along also George Mouse’s wedding present, which had arrived that morning in the mail in a package marked Open Elsewhere and would turn out to be (as Smoky hoped and expected) a big handful of crushed brown weed odorous as a spice.
Lucky Children
Everyone gathered on the porch to see them off, making suggestions as to where they should go and whom of those that hadn’t been able to get to the wedding they ought to visit. Sophie said nothing, but as they were turning to go, she kissed them both firmly and solemnly, Smoky especially as if to say So there, and then took herself quickly away.
While they were gone, Cloud intended to follow them by means of her cards, and report, insofar as she could, on their adventures, which she supposed would be small and numerous and just the kind of thing these cards of hers had always been best for discovering. So after breakfast she drew the glass table near the peacock chair on that porch, and lit a first cigarette of the day, and composed her thoughts.
She knew that first they would climb the Hill, but that was because they said they would. She saw with the mind’s eye the way they went up over the well-trodden paths to the top, to stand there then and look out over morning’s domain and theirs: how it stretched green, forested and farmed across the county’s heart. Then they would go down the wilder far side to walk the marches of the land they had looked at.
She laid down cups and wands, squires of coins and kings of swords. She guessed that Smoky would be falling behind Alice’s long strides as they crossed the sun-whitened pastures of Plainfield; there Rudy Flood’s brindled cows would look up at them with lashy eyes, and tiny insects would leap from their footfalls.
Where would they rest? Perhaps by the quick stream that bites into that pasture, undermining the upholstered tussocks and raising infant willow groves by its sides. She laid the trump called the Bundle within the pattern and thought: Time for lunch.
In the pale tigery shade of the willow-grove they lay fulllength looking into the stream and its complex handiwork in the bank. “See already,” she said, chin in hands. “Can’t you see apartments, river-houses, esplanades or whatever? Whole ruined palaces? Balls, banquets, visiting?” He stared with her into the fretwork of weed, root, and mud which striped sunlight reached into without illuminating. “Not now,” she said, “but by moonlight. I mean isn’t that when they come out to play? Look.” Eye level with the bank, it was just possible to imagine. He stared hard, knitting his brows. Make-believe. He’d make an effort.
She laughed, getting up. She donned her pack again that made her breasts stand. “We’ll follow the brook up,” she said. “I know a good place.”
So through the afternoon they went up and slowly out of the valley, which the gurgling stream in malapert pride had taken over from some long-dead great river. They drew closer to fcrest, and Smoky wondered if this were the wood Edgewood is on the edge of. “Gee, I don’t know,” Alice said. “I never thought about it.”
“Here,” she said at last, wet and breathless from the long climb up. “This is a place we used to come to.”
It was like a cave cut in the wall of the sudden forest. The crest they stood on fell away down into it, and he thought he had never looked into anywhere so deeply and secretly The Wood as this. For some reason its floor was carpeted with moss, not thick with the irregulars of the forest’s edge, shrub and briar and small aspen. It led inward, it drew them inward into whispering darkness where the big trees groaned intermittently.
Within, she sat gratefully. The shade was deep, and deepened as the afternoon perceptibly passed. It was as still and as stilling as a church, with the same inexplicable yet reverent noises from nave, apse, and choir.
“Did you ever think,” Alice said, “that maybe trees are alive like we are, only just more slowly? That what a day is to us, maybe a whole summer is to them—between sleep and sleep, you know. That they have long, long thoughts and conversations that are just too slow for us to hear.” She laid aside her stick and slid one by one the pack-straps from her shoulders; her shirt was stained where she had worn them. She drew up her big knees glossy with sweat and rested her arms on them. Her brown wrists were wet too, and damp dust was caught in their golden hair. “What do you think?” She began to pluck at the heavy thongs of her high-top shoes. He said nothing, only took all this in, too pleased to speak. It was like watc.hing a Valkyrie disarm after battle.
When she knelt up to force down her creased, constricting shorts he came to help.
By the time Mother snapped on the yellow bulb above Cloud’s head, changing her card-dream from evening blue to something harsh and not quite intelligible, she had discerned what most of her cousins’ journey might be like in the days to come, and she said: “Lucky children.”
“You’ll go blind out here,” Mother said. “Dad’s poured you a sherry.”
“They’ll be all right,” Cloud said, shutting up the cards and getting up with some difficulty from the peacock chair.
“They did say, didn’t they, that they’d stop in at the Woods’.”
“Oh, they will,” Cloud said. “They will.”
“Listen to the cicadas still going,” Mother said. “No relief.”
She took Cloud’s arm and they went in. They spent that evening playing cribbage with a polished folding board, one missing ivory peg replaced with a matchstick; they listened to the knock and rasp of great stupid June
