“They can be meek,” he told me, “that have no other cause. A wretched soul, bruised with adversity, we bid be quiet when we hear it cry; but were we burdened with like weight of pain, as much, or more, we should ourselves complain.”
“Poetry!” I yelled. “Poetry, for the love of God! As if equations and senseless rhyming weren’t enough. . .”
He clambered to his feet and danced a merry, clanking jig and sang: “The capon burns, the pig falls from the spit. The clock hath strucken twelve upon the bell; my mistress made in one upon my cheek. She is so hot because the meat is cold; the meat is cold because you came not home; you came not home because you have no stomach; you have no stomach, having broke your fast. . .”
He stopped in mid-caper and stared wonderingly at me. “Fast,” he said. “Last, mast, cast.”
At least he was back to normal.
He hunkered down by the fire again, no longer talking to me, but mumbling to himself.
The twilight deepened and the galaxy blossomed in the sky, first the brilliance of the central core, hanging just above the eastern horizon, and then, as night came on, the wispy filaments of the spiral arms became apparent, first as a structure of silvery mist, which brightened as the darkness grew. Wind whispered overhead and the campfire smoke, after rising vertically for a short distance, leaned over and slanted off into the darkness as it met the wind. Far off something was chuckling softly to itself and tiny forms of life scurried in the grass and brush just beyond the circle of firelight.
Shakespeare? I wondered. Had it been Shakespeare he had spouted? The words had sounded like it, but I could not be sure; it had been many years since I’d even thought of Shakespeare. And if it were, how had Roscoe known of Shakespeare? In the long flight out from the galaxy, on the long march up the trail, had Knight read it aloud beside the nightly campfire? Had he carried in his knapsack or in a sagging pocket of his jacket a copy of that ancient, almost forgotten writer?
I finished my meal and washed the dishes in the stream beside which we were camped, and set them aside for morning. Roscoe still squatted at the fire, writing with an outstretched finger on a piece of ground he’d smoothed.
I picked up Knight’s wooden box and opened it. Inside lay a thick sheaf of paper, almost filling it. Lifting out the first page, I held it so it was lighted by the fire and read:
Blue and high. Clean. Upstanding blue. Water sound. Stars ahead. Ground unbare. Laughter high above and blue. Blue laughter. We move unwise. Think unhard.
The writing was in a crabbed hand and the characters were cramped and small. Slowly I picked the words apart:
and thin. No end to start, no end to come. Foreverness and more. Blue foreverness. Runners after nothingness. Nothingness in emptiness. Emptiness is bare. Talk is nothingness. Deeds are emptiness. Where to find but empty? Nowhere, comes the answer. High and blue and empty.
It was gibberish, worse than the gibberish of Roscoe. I glanced down the page and the gibberish went on. Lifting a handful of pages from the box, I extracted another one. Page 52, it said in the upper right hand corner. And the text:
far is distant. Distances are deep. Neither short nor long, but deep. Some without a bottom. And cannot be measured. No stick to measure with. Purple distances are deepest ones of all. No one walks a purple distance. Purple leads to nowhere. There is nowhere to lead to.
I put the pages back into the box and closed the lid and held my hand hard against the lid to prevent the pages getting out. Mad, I thought; living out a life of gentle madness in a Grecian valley of a strange enchantment. And that was where Sara was at this very moment. Not knowing. Not caring, even if she knew.
I fought to keep from jumping up and screaming. I held as hard a hand against myself as I held against the lid to keep from leaping to my feet and go running back the way we’d come.
Because, I told myself, I had no right to do it. For once in my life, I had to think of someone other than myself. She had chosen to go back to the valley. There was something that drew her there. Happiness, I wondered, and asked myself what was happiness and how much did it count?
Knight was happy, writing his drivel, not knowing it was drivel, not caring it was drivel. Wrapped in a cocoon of happiness, in the sense of having reached a devoutly sought and lifelong goal, he was content, not knowing and not caring that the goal might be delusion.
If only Hoot were here, I thought. Although I knew what he would have told me. You cannot interfere, he’d say, you must not interfere. He’d talked of destiny. And what was destiny? Was it something not written in the stars, but in the genes of men that said how they would act, what they would want, how they would set about to get what they wanted most?
The loneliness came on me and I crouched close against the fire, as if its light and heat might be protection against the loneliness. Of all the ones I’d traveled with, there was only Roscoe left and in Roscoe there was nothing that would counter loneliness. In his own way, he was as lonely as I.
All the others had reached that half-seen, half-guessed vision they had followed. Perhaps because they had known, deep inside themselves, what they might be seeking. And me, what was I seeking? I tried to figure what thing I wanted most and, for the life of me, I could think of nothing.
TWENTY-FOUR
In the morning we found Tuck’s doll, where it had been dropped beside the trail. It was in plain view, not more than six feet off the path. How we’d missed it before was hard to understand. I tried to pinpoint the place, wondering if this were in the area where we had hunted for him. But there was no landmark that stood out in my mind.
I had not really had a chance to take a good look at it before. The only time I had really seen it had been that night when we had been penned inside the red-stone edifice at the outskirts of the city. Now I did have a chance to look at it, to absorb the full impact of the sorrow that lay on the rudely carven face. Either, I thought, the one who’d carried it had been a primitive who, by sheer chance, had fashioned the sorrow in it, or a skilled craftsman who, with a few simple strokes, evoked the hopelessness and anguish of an intellectual being facing the riddle of the universe and overwhelmed by it.
The face was not entirely humanoid, but human enough so that one could equate it with humanity-a human face twisted out of shape by some great truth that it had learned-surely no truth that it had sought, but rather one that had been thrust upon it.
Having picked it up, I tried to throw it away, but could not throw it away. It had put roots into me and would not let me go. It haunted me and would not forego its haunting. I stood with one hand clutching it and tried to toss it to one side, but my fingers would not loosen their grip nor my arms make a throwing motion.
That had been the way it had been with Tuck, I thought, except that Tuck had been a willing captive of it, finding in it some attraction and significance that I did not find. Perhaps because it said to him a thing he found inside himself. Because, perhaps, he saw within it a condition from which he was seeking to escape. A madonna, Sara had said, and it could have been, but I saw no madonna in it.
So I went marching down the trail, like Tuck, hanging onto that damn thing, raging at myself-not so much for being unable to let go of it, as for the fact that it made me, after a fashion, a blood brother of the vanished Tuck. Sore that I should be even in the slightest way like him, for if there ever had been a man I had despised it had been Tuck.
We moved across the great blue plateau and behind us the purple mountains lost detail and resolved into a purple cloud. I wondered if Knight’s fascination with blueness, as revealed in those first few paragraphs of his manuscript, might not be an echo of this blue land which he had crossed to reach the mountains and the valley, leaving Roscoe at the gate, with Roscoe later blundering down the trail to finally reach the city where, in his stupidity, he’d become a captive of the gnome.