The doggerel chuckled satirically through his thoughts, and its crude rhythm thumped against him like an insult, accompanied by slow stripper's music. He wondered if there were an overweight goddess somewhere in the mystical heavens of the universe, grinding out his burlesque fate: A proper push
But he could not sneer his way out of that thought, because at one time he had been a kind of golden boy. He had been happily married. He had had a son. He had written a novel in ecstasy and ignorance, and had watched it spend a year on the best-seller lists. And because of it, he now had all the money he needed.
I would be better off, he thought, if I'd known I was writing that kind of book.
But he had not known. He had not even believed that he would find a publisher, back in the days when he had been writing that book-the days right after he' had married Joan. Together, they did not think about money or success. It was the pure act of creation which ignited his imagination; and the warm spell of her pride and eagerness kept him burning like a bolt of lightning, not for seconds or fractions of seconds, but for five months in one long wild discharge of energy that seemed to create the landscapes of the earth out of nothingness by the sheer force of its brilliance-hills and crags, trees bent by the passionate wind, night-ridden people, all rendered into being by that white bolt striking into the heavens from the lightning rod of his writing. When he was done, he felt as drained and satisfied as all of life's love uttered in one act.
That had not been an easy time. There was an anguish in the perception of heights and abysses that gave each word he wrote the shape of dried, black blood. And he was not a man who liked heights; unconstricted emotion did not come easily to him. But it had been glorious. The focusing to that pitch of intensity had struck him as the cleanest thing that had ever happened to him. The stately frigate of his soul had sailed well over a deep and dangerous ocean. When he mailed his manuscript away, he did so with a kind of calm confidence.
During those months of writing and then of waiting, they lived on her income. She, Joan Macht Covenant, was a quiet woman who expressed more of herself with her eyes and the tone of her skin than she did with words. Her flesh had a hue of gold which made her look as warm and precious as a sylph or succuba of joy. But she was not large or strong, and Thomas Covenant felt constantly amazed at the fact that she earned a living for them by breaking horses.
The term
Watching her, Covenant had felt daunted by her ability. Even after she taught him to ride, he could not overcome his fear of horses.
Her work was not lucrative, but it kept her and her husband from going hungry until the day a letter of acceptance arrived from the publisher. On that day, Joan decided that the time had come to have a child.
Because of the usual delays of publication, they had to live for nearly a year on an advance on Covenant's royalties. Joan kept her job in one way or another for as long as she could without threatening the safety of the child conceived in her. Then, when her body told her that the time had come, she quit working. At that point, her life turned inward, concentrated on the task of growing her baby with a single-mindedness that often left her outward eyes blank and tinged with expectation.
After he was born, Joan announced that the boy was to be named Roger, after her father and her father's father.
Roger! Covenant groaned as he neared the door of the phone company's offices. He had never even liked that name. But his son's infant face, so meticulously and beautifully formed, human and complete, had made his heart ache with love and pride-yes, pride, a father's participation in mystery. And now his son was gone-gone with Joan he did not know where. Why was he so unable to weep?
The next instant, a hand plucked at his sleeve. “Hey, mister,” a thin voice said fearfully, urgently. “Hey, mister.” He turned with a yell in his throat-Don't touch me! Outcast unclean! — but the face of the boy who clutched his arm stopped him, kept him from pulling free. The boy was young, not more than eight or nine years old-surely he was too young to be so afraid? His face was mottled pale-and-livid with dread and coercion, as if he were somehow being forced to do something which terrified him.
“Hey, mister,” he said, thinly supplicating. “Here. Take it.” He thrust an old sheet of paper into Covenant's numb fingers. “He told me to give it to you. You're supposed to read it. Please, mister?”
Covenant's fingers closed involuntarily around the paper. He? he thought dumbly, staring at the boy. He?
“Him.” The boy pointed a shaking finger back up the sidewalk.
Covenant looked, and saw an old man in a dirty ochre robe standing half a block away. He was mumbling, almost singing a dim nonsense tune; and his mouth hung open, though his lips and jaw did not move to shape his mutterings. His long, tattered hair and beard fluttered around his head in the light breeze. His face was lifted to the sky; he seemed to be staring directly at the sun. In his left hand he held a wooden beggar-bowl. His right hand clutched a long wooden staff, to the top of which was affixed a sign bearing one word: “Beware.”
Beware?
For an odd moment, the sign itself seemed to exert a peril over Covenant. Dangers crowded through it to get at him, terrible dangers swam in the air toward him, screaming like vultures. And among them, looking toward him through the screams, there were eyes-two eyes like fangs, carious and deadly. They regarded him with a fixed, cold and hungry malice, focused on him as if he and he alone were the carrion they craved. Malevolence dripped from them like venom. For that moment, he quavered in the grasp of an inexplicable fear.
Beware!
But it was only a sign, only a blind placard attached to a wooden staff. Covenant shuddered, and the sir in front of him cleared.
“You're supposed to read it,” the boy said again.
“Don't touch me,” Covenant murmured to the grip on his arm. “I'm a leper.”
But when he looked around, the boy was gone.
Two: “You Cannot Hope”
IN his confusion, he scanned the street rapidly, but the boy had escaped completely. Then, as he turned back toward the old beggar, his eyes caught the door, gilt-lettered: Bell Telephone Company. The sight gave him a sudden twist of fear that made him forget all distractions. Suppose-This was his destination; he had come here in person to claim his human right to pay his own bills. But suppose—
He shook himself. He was a leper; he could not afford suppositions. Unconsciously, he shoved the sheet of paper into his pocket. With grim deliberateness, he gave himself a VSE. Then he gripped himself, and started toward the door.
A man hurrying out through the doorway almost bumped into him, then recognized him and backed away, his face suddenly grey with apprehension. The jolt broke Covenant's momentum, and he almost shouted aloud, Leper outcast unclean! He stopped again, allowed himself a moment's pause. The man had been Joan's lawyer at the divorce-a short, fleshy individual full of the kind of bonhomie in which lawyers and ministers specialize. Covenant needed that pause to recover from the dismay of the lawyer's glance. He felt involuntarily ashamed to be the cause of such dismay. For a moment, he could not recollect the conviction which had brought him into town.
But almost at once he began to fume silently. Shame and rage were inextricably bound together in him. I'm not going to let them do this to me, he rasped. By hell! They have no right. Yet he could not so easily eradicate the lawyer's expression from his thoughts. That revulsion was an accomplished fact, like leprosy-immune to any question of right or justice. And above all else a leper must not forget the lethal reality of facts.
