wondered, since he’d thought of Sally Brown? It was strange, he knew, that
he had not thought of her, that he now was shocked by the memory of a
one-time neighbor girl named Sally Brown. For the two of them once had been
in love, or only thought, perhaps, that they had been in love. For even in
the later years, when he still remembered her, he had never been quite
certain, even through the romantic mists of time, if it had been love or no
more than the romanticism of a soldier marching off to war. It had been a
shy and fumbling, an awkward sort of love, the love of the farmer’s daughter
for the next-door farmer’s son. They had decided to be married when he came
home from war, but a few days after Gettysburg he had received the letter,
then more than three weeks written, which told him that Sally Brown was dead
of diphtheria. He had grieved, he now recalled, but he could not recall how
deeply, although it probably had been deeply, for to grieve long and deeply
was the fashion in those days.
So Mary very definitely was partly Sally Brown, but not entirely Sally.
She was as well that tall, stately daughter of the South, the woman he had
seen for a few moments only as he marched a dusty road in the hot Virginia
sun. There had been a mansion, one of those great plantation houses, set
back from the road, and she had been standing on the portico, beside one of
the great white pillars, watching the enemy march past. Her hair was black
and her complexion whiter than the pillar and she had stood so straight and
proud, so defiant and imperious, that he had remembered her and thought of
her and dreamed of her-although he never knew her name-through all the
dusty, sweaty, bloody days of war. Wondering as he thought and dreamed of
her if the thinking and the dreaming might be unfaithful to his Sally.
Sitting around the campfire, when the talk grew quiet, and again, rolled in
his blankets, staring at the stars, he had built up a fantasy of how, when
the war was ended, he’d go back to that Virginia house and find her. She
might be there no longer, but he still would roam the South and find her.
But he never did; he had never really meant to find her. It had been a
campfire dream.
So Mary had been both of these-she had been Sally Brown and the unknown
Virginia belle standing by the pillar to watch the troops march by. She had
been the shadow of them and perhaps of many others as yet unrealized by him,
a composite of all he had ever known or seen or admired in women. She had
been an ideal and perfection. She had been his perfect woman, created in his
mind. And now, like Sally Brown, resting in her grave; like the Virginia
belle, lost in the mists of time; like all the others who may have
contributed to his molding of her, she was gone from him.
And he had loved her, certainly, for she had been a compounding of his
loves-a cross section, as it were, of all the women he had ever loved (if he
actually had loved any) or the ones he had thought he loved, even in the
abstract.
But that she should love him was something that had never crossed his
mind. And until he knew her love for him, it had been quite possible to
nurse his love of her close inside the heart, knowing that it was a hopeless
love and impossible, but the best that he could manage.
He wondered where she might be now, where she had retreated-into the
limbo he had attempted to imagine or into some strange non-existence,
waiting all unknowing for the time she’d come to him again.
He put up his hands and lowered his head in them and sat in utter
misery and guilt, with his face cupped in his fingers.
She would never come again. He prayed she’d never come. It would be
better for the both of them if she never came.
If he only could be sure, he thought, of where she might be now. If he
only could be certain that she was in a semblance of death and untortured by
her thoughts. To believe that she was sentient was more than one could bear.
He heard the hooting of the whistle that said a message waited and he
took his head out of his hands. But he did not get up off the sofa.
Numbly his hand reached out to the coffee table that stood before the
sofa, its top covered with some of the more colorful of the gewgaws and
gimcracks that had been left as gifts by travelers.
He picked up a cube of something that might have been some strange sort
of glass or of translucent stone-he had never been able to decide which it
was, if either-and cupped it in his hands. Staring into it, he saw a tiny
picture, three-dimensional and detailed, of a faery world. It was a prettily
grotesque place set inside what might have been a forest glade surrounded by
what appeared to be flowering toadstools, and drifting down through the air,
as if it might have been a part of the air itself, came what looked for all
the world like a shower of jeweled snow, sparkling and glinting in the
violet light of a great blue sun. There were things dancing in the glade and
they looked more like flowers than animals, but they moved with a grace and
poetry that fired one’s blood to watch. Then the faery place was wiped out
and there was another place-a wild and dismal place, with grim, gaunt,
beetling cliffs rearing high against a red and angry sky, while great flying
things that looked like flapping dishrags beat their way up and down the
cliffs, and there were others of them roosting, most obscenely, upon the
scraggly projections that must have been some sort of misshapen trees
growing from the very wall of rock. And from far below, from some distance
that one could only guess, came the lonesome thundering of a rushing river.
He put the cube back upon the table. He wondered what it was that one
saw within its depths. It was like turning the pages of a book, with each
page a picture of a different place, but never anything to tell where that
place might be. When he first had been given it, he had spent fascinated
hours, watching the pictures change as he held it in his hands. There had
never been a picture that looked even faintly like any other picture and
there was no end to them. One got the feeling that these were not pictures,
actually, but that one was looking at the scene itself and that at any
moment one might lose his perch upon wherever he was roosting and plunge
head first down into the place itself.
But it had finally palled upon him, for it bad been a senseless
business, gawking at a long series of places that had no identity. Senseless
to him, of course, he thought, but not senseless, certainly, to that native
of Enif V who had given it to him. It might, for all he knew, Enoch told
himself, be of great significance and a treasure of great value.
That was the way it was with so many of the things he had. Even the
ones that had given pleasure, he knew, be might be using wrongly, or, at
least, in a way that had not been intended.
But there were some-a few, perhaps-that did have a value he could
understand and appreciate, although in many instances their functions were
of little use to him. There was the tiny clock that gave the local times for
all the sectors of the galaxy, and while it might be intriguing, and even
essential under certain circumstances, it had little value to him. And there
was the perfume mixer, which was as close as he could come in naming it,
which allowed a person to create the specific scent desired. Just get the
mixture that one wanted and turn it on and the room took on that scent until
one should turn it off. He’d had some fun with it, remembering that bitter
winter day when, after long experimenting, he had achieved the scent of
apple blossoms, and had lived a day in spring while a blizzard howled
outside.
He reached out and picked up another piece-a beautiful thing that
always had intrigued him, but for which he had never found a use-if, indeed,
it had a use. It might be, he told himself, no more than a piece of art, a
pretty thing that was meant to look at only. But it had a certain feel (if