She had planned to continue further down the slope, but the slatted red bench in a sun-flooded bend of the path had proved too great an adventure. It was an adventure because it was there at all, demanding nothing, feigning indifference, and promising the secret pleasures of truancy. The wood was warm to her touch. The three hundred pages of The Machining of Plastics in their neatly tied folder remained unedited at her side, and in the late afternoon light, bright but no longer hot, Judith continued to look with pleasure through the opening in the trees at the sunny cliff with its gazebo of pale, peeled logs, and beyond to the dark green and light green and blue green of low hills. On the hills lay darker green patches that slowly moved: the shadows of clouds. They looked like carelessly strewn dark doilies. A young woman in faded blue jeans and a crimson T-shirt lay on her back on the cliff. Her boyfriend sat crosslegged beside her, drinking a can of beer that flashed in the sun. His shadow was so richly black that it might have been wet. They spoke, but quietly, as if hushed by the peacefulness of the view, and Judith would not have wished them to leave. It struck her, watching their stillness, that there was also a pleasurable truancy from play. One of the attractions of the place was its twenty-seven, or was it twenty-nine, scenic trails, and it was possible to feel much too responsible for covering the territory. She had been marching up and down trails all morning and half the afternoon, looking down at valleys with red barns and across at hills with little white houses, identifying fourteen wildflowers with the aid of Peterson’s Field Guide to the Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America and a four-page pamphlet she had bought for ninety-five cents at the gift shop near the dining room, resting only for a few minutes in the rustic gazebos placed along the cliff trails before setting off again, and she realized, seated gratefully on her bench, how delightful it was simply to stop. Simply to stop. At her feet grew a purple wildflower, with four-petaled clusters arranged along the upper part of a thick green stalk, and she purposely refrained from opening her shoulder bag and checking in the purple section of the field guide. The warm sun on her face made her feel healthy and sleepy. Flower, tree, rock, sky—for a moment Judith longed for a world without detail. It would be enough.
She heard footsteps approaching along the upper path and turned to look. A woman, walking slowly, appeared around the bend, and as she did so Judith felt a little sharp burst of annoyance. It was their third encounter of the day. The woman—she couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven or -eight, though indoors she looked thirty—was wearing a black sweater and an ankle-length wraparound in dark blue, with purple and pale-blue swirls. Over her slumped shoulder she wore a large cloth pocketbook with two wide wooden strips at the top; the cloth was dull red with little dark green leaves all over it. A mane of black hair, lightly clasped at the neck, flowed down to the small of her back. She looked at Judith with large dark melancholy eyes that seemed perpetually to be making a mute appeal, and it was above all those eyes with their mute appeal that irritated Judith, who was suddenly afraid the intruder might want to join her on the bench. Indeed she had almost stopped walking and seemed to be looking tentatively at the unoccupied corner of the small bench, where Judith thanked God she had placed her manuscript and her bag. She was afraid the woman might ask if she could sit down, and then what hope was there? But she only looked again at Judith, who looked severely away. The woman had never quite stopped walking, and she now turned off the main path onto the narrow trail leading to the cliff with the gazebo. She stopped halfway, seeing the lovers, and stood for a few moments looking out at the view with one hand resting on top of her pocketbook. She then turned back and, without a glance at Judith, stepped onto the main path and continued down. Judith’s heart was beating quickly; she felt shocked by her own rudeness.
But she couldn’t help it. She had first seen her the night before. Judith had left the office at midafternoon on Friday and arrived barely in time for dinner in the great dining hall, with its thirty or forty small square tables and its darkening view of the hills. The long bus ride from Port Authority had tired her, and she had had to wait twenty minutes for the limousine that carried her and four others up the long, winding road to the Mountain Lodge. But as soon as the chateaulike building came into view, sprawling and turreted in all the exuberance of splendidly bad Victorian taste, the little irritations of the trip fell away from her. Her room was at the top of the south wing, in the rear. She had just enough time to drop her suitcase and take in the patchwork quilt in brown and blue and yellow, the dark, curving headboard with pineapple finials, the pale brown wallpaper with pale pink and pale green nosegays, and the view of blackening green hills under a fading sunset before hurrying along the carpeted corridor, past window nooks with cushioned seats, to the main stairway, with its thick and glistening banister. From the lobby at the foot of the stairs it was not far to the dining hall at the rear of the north wing. Dinner was served from six to eight, and it was seven-forty-five. Many guests still lingered at their tables, and Judith was pleased: she liked the combination of privacy and company provided by a reserved table in a crowd. It so happened that the tables in her immediate vicinity were unoccupied, except for one a few feet away, and at that table sat a woman with melancholy eyes and a mane of black hair. The absence of other diners nearby had the effect of throwing the two of them into accidental relation, and Judith noticed that she and the younger woman seemed to be the only ones dining alone. It was enough to set her, however unreasonably, against acquaintance. Those melancholy and mutely appealing eyes, which seemed to be seeking a soul mate with whom to share, in hushed tones, in a corner of lamplit darkness, intimate disheartening confessions, were only another reason for keeping between them a decent stretch of spiritual distance. With particular annoyance Judith noted the woman’s slumped, defeated shoulders. She longed to say: “Good God, woman, enough. Shoulders back—sit up straight—get a grip on yourself—it can’t be as bad as all that. And stop wearing your sorrow like a string of pearls. He isn’t worth it. Down with it.” She contented herself with studying the menu.
That was the first meeting, if silence and avoidance could in any sense be called a meeting. For Judith it seemed to insist on remaining no less than that. The melancholy woman finished half her slice of pecan pie, lit up a cigarette, and left in a cloud of smoke, without having ventured a syllable. But even the hoped-for silence managed to annoy Judith: it seemed too pointedly a reproach. It was as if it had been up to Judith, who at thirty-six supposed she was the “older woman,” to break the silence and launch them into gloomy intimacy. She, however, was planning to enjoy herself for a change. There was a certain kind of exasperating woman who never recovered from the world of the college dormitory, and spent the rest of her life longing for tragic confidences and cozy confessions in an atmosphere of leathery lounges, heaped ashtrays, and crumpled Almond Joy wrappers crackling faintly while the gray of early dawn showed through the many-paned high windows. The dark woman would probably go searching unhappily for that dormitory until doomsday. She ought to get on with it. But Judith’s good spirits quickly returned. After dinner she made her way back to the lobby, which led to the front lounge, and when she stepped from the side door into the darkness of the open veranda, she felt something expand within her. She walked to the handrail in front, overlooking the lamplit lake. On three sides the long veranda was built on piles over the water. A wicker chair creaked. Footsteps crunched in the graveled paths beside the lake. In the dark, shining water the reflections of windows broke into ripples of yellow as three ducks, forming a triangle, floated by. On the dry side of the veranda a flight of steps led to a path. Judith crossed the path by the side of the lake and walked partway up the dark hill on the other side. She looked across at the great porch and the tiers of yellow windows, and later, in an armchair in the lamplit lounge, when she sat with The Machining of Plastics beside her and the folded Times before her and paused over a five-letter word meaning “crest of a mountain,” she thought of the dark hill over the lake. The fourth letter was “t.” She looked up, as if hoping to find the missing letters in the air before her, and saw the melancholy woman passing slowly across the room. Her dark green sweater seemed to emphasize her slumped shoulders, her long black skirt hung as if despondently about her, and with the sound of a sigh she exhaled a long stream of swirling smoke while she looked around as if searching for someone who had failed to keep an appointment.
Judith rose early the next morning and came down to breakfast at seven-fifteen in jeans and hiking boots. Her melancholy companion was not there, and Judith had the wickedly pleasurable sense that she would drag herself out of bed with a headache a little before noon. It occurred to Judith that she did not much care for the company of single women; there had been a time when they were her only friends. After breakfast she set off at once along the steepest trail, which still lay in shadow. It led high above the lake to a stone tower with a view. Despite the early hour there were already many strollers on the path, and she smiled at a gray-haired couple whom she recognized from the dining hall. “Fine morning,” the man said, touching his fingertips to his temple in a little salute. His blue-eyed wife, whose gray bangs looked like a row of commas, at once remarked vigorously, as if in contradiction: “I think it’s a wonderful morning!” Suddenly Judith stepped into the sun. She felt like flinging herself onto the grass at the side of the path, she felt like rolling over and over, but instead she continued climbing. She burst out laughing: she had caught herself humming “Zippity doodah.” She wondered when she had last thought of it. With startling vividness she saw Uncle Remus with a bluebird on his shoulder. Judith rested in a sunny gazebo, where she looked down at the long, massive lodge and at the lake, half in sun and half in shade, that stretched along one wing and under the veranda, and then she continued up to the tower. In the bright grass at the foot of the tower six teenagers in patched and faded jeans, three boys and three girls, lay on their backs with their eyes closed. It was windy and their hair moved a little over their immobile sunstruck faces. Judith climbed the winding stone stairs to the top and emerged from a shelter in the center of the round tower. Half a dozen people were already there. At the parapet she looked down at the teenagers, the lake, and the lodge. In the lake a few rowboats were out. She watched one pass from shade to sun. She began to walk slowly round the tower for a view of the valley on the other side, and as she passed into the shadow of the stairway shelter she saw the woman in bright sunlight not ten feet away. She wore a black sweater and a dark blue wraparound with pale blue and purple swirls. She stood conspicuously alone, staring out over the valley with her hands resting on the stone parapet.
Judith made a motion as if to retreat, but stopped herself. It was too silly to sneak away; there was no reason for it. But still she hesitated, wondering whether to stride boldly over and look at the view. The woman remained strangely motionless, and the wild thought struck Judith that she knew she was being observed, knew in fact that Judith was there. But that was mad. The woman moved suddenly, but it was only to lean forward and place her forearms on the parapet, bringing one foot behind the other and balancing it on the toe. Judith stepped to a portion of parapet that did not give the best view of the valley and was separated by a good distance from her solitary companion. She stared fixedly down for what seemed many minutes, gradually leaning forward and placing her arms on the parapet. She became aware of her pose and irritably straightened up. The woman still leaned on the parapet, staring into the distance.
Judith spent the rest of the morning following a long trail that led deep into the wooded hills. Sometimes the trail grew so narrow that the overarching white oaks, beeches, and Norway maples, which she identified with the aid of A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs, shut out all but a few trembling spots of sun. Sometimes it led her to the edges of sun-dazzled, perilous cliffs, where nothing grew but yellowing grass and pink thistles. On one such cliff Judith rested on sun-warmed stone. She stretched out her legs, leaned back on her hands, and lifted her face, with closed eyes, to the sun. The hot mid-morning sun, the richly blue sky, and the distant hills seemed to flow into her and wash her clean, as if she had accumulated an inner grime. When she opened her eyes she saw a white butterfly on her knee.
The trail did not end, but went in a great loop that led back to the lodge. On her return she began to pass more and more people, moving in both directions: the day crowd, already out in force. The noisy crowd irritated her, for it seemed a rude interruption of her peace, but as she came in sight of the great veranda, thronged with visitors, her impatience gave way to a sense of the festive. She was in too good a humor to spurn the crowd-energy she felt all about her. She walked along the gravel path at the edge of the lake and climbed the steps at the side of the veranda. Children ran up and down the long porch, stopping to lean over the rail and point at the water. A little girl in a pink dress and black patent-leather shoes was dragging behind her a clattering yellow duck on red wheels. A tall, thin, very pale man burst suddenly into deep, hearty laughter. Through the side door she entered the sunny lounge, where people strolled back and forth, talking and laughing. She saw the elderly couple that she had passed early in the morning and gaily waved. When she entered the dining hall she saw that it was filled, and she approached her table with a pleasurable sense of proprietorship. Her dark companion had not yet returned for lunch. In the crowded and lively room Judith felt both soothed and excited, and she ate hungrily the handsomely served items of her lunch: a cup of onion soup, slices of small sweet rye and pumpernickel, a crab salad, and a French pastry so shamefully sweet that she vowed to hike vigorously all afternoon. But it felt good to sit lazily over her coffee; her thigh muscles were a little sore. The table beside her remained empty, and it seemed to Judith that the woman was deliberately spurning the crowd—striking an attitude on some lonely cliff.
After lunch Judith sat in a sunny corner of the veranda. Her long hike had pleasantly tired her, and she was tempted to sit for hours in the cushioned wicker armchair, feeling the sun on her arms and face and listening to the sounds about her: the knock of heels on the wood of the porch, the shouts of children, the creak of wicker furniture, the opening and closing of the side door leading to the lounge. The temptation to remain was so great that she forced herself up, reminding herself that the next day was her last. Perhaps it would rain. She followed a trail in the opposite direction from her morning’s hike, one that led past the tennis courts and into the woods. The wooded trail led to a rushing brook; over it was a shady wooden bridge, flecked with sunlight. Judith stood on the bridge, looking at the bits of sun moving on her hand and at the stones under the clear water. She crossed over and continued on the trail. Here and there wooden benches were placed at the side of the path. A smaller path led off the main trail, and Judith turned into it. It was shady and quiet. The path wound in and out. As Judith rounded a turn, she saw the woman seated on a bench. Judith was so startled that she drew in her breath sharply, and the woman turned to look at her. She had been reading a book, which she continued to hold up in both hands with her arms pressed against her sides as she sat with her head turned a little awkwardly toward Judith, who for a moment, in her surprise and alarm, had come to a full stop. The woman’s eyes were melancholy and kind.
“You startled me,” Judith said, and broke into stride.
“I hadn’t meant to,” the other said gently, but Judith was already past.
She hiked in the woods for several hours before deciding to turn back. Her little encounter had upset her, and she hesitated to return along the path that led to the stream. She felt irritated at her hesitation, made up her mind that she didn’t care whom she passed, and was relieved to discover a new path leading back to the tennis courts. In her room she washed her face and lay down on the sunny bed for five minutes with her arm over her eyes. Then she picked up The Machining of Plastics and went down to the veranda. It was far too noisy for her to work. Consulting her map, she decided to take a twisting path that led down through a beech grove and a meadow to a pond. She had not yet come to the beech grove when, suddenly on her right, she saw a red-slatted bench in a sunflooded bend of the path.
The late afternoon sun burned against her face. Judith’s sense of pleasurable truancy, disturbed by the woman’s appearance and by her own rudeness, did not return. Her present mood eluded her. She felt not so much a restlessness as an unpeace-fulness, a dissatisfaction. It was as if a cloud had moved across an inner sun, darkening the green, peaceful, inner hills. The bench was uncomfortably hard, but it was no longer possible to continue down the slope, now that the dark woman had passed that way.
On the cliff the boy set down his flashing beer can. It occurred to Judith that they had chosen that place in order to watch the sunset. All at once, as if he were bowing to the sun, the boy leaned slowly and gracefully over, untucked the girl’s crimson T-shirt, and kissed her on the stomach. Judith rose, picked up her manuscript, slung her handbag over her shoulder, and trudged up the trail.
Children, indifferently watched by parents, ran up and down the veranda. A burst of laughter came from one corner: four fat women, all wearing tight pants in pastel shades, were playing cards at a wicker table. Judith passed through the side door into the lounge, where people were walking in every direction. She remembered that tea was served in the dining room at four; perhaps it was not too late, though it was getting on toward half-past. But on the way she decided that she didn’t want tea. It wasn’t the Isle of Wight, for God’s sake. She went up to her room to work until dinner.
Judith felt better for the little work she had done, and on her way down to the dining hall she permitted the charm of the place to cast its spell again. She loved the wide window recesses with their cushioned window seats and the bookshelves on both sides, and she loved the dark, paneled walls hung with glass-covered photographs of the Mountain Lodge at the turn of the century, glass-covered photographs of bearded men in tweed caps and tweed knickerbockers, and glass-covered drawings of herbs and ferns carefully labeled in Latin and English. She loved the broad, thick-carpeted stairway with its sturdy and shiny old banister, whose thick balusters were shaped like bowling pins. She had showered and changed into a rose-colored blouse, beige slacks, and beige sandals, and as she entered the filled and festive dining hall, with its soaring paneled walls and the orange sunset through the tall windows, she felt not merely pleasure but gratitude. The diners, unlike the day crowd, were all here for at least the weekend, sharing the same gentle adventure. The Mountain Lodge was a great ship sailing into the hills, and they were all passengers. She recognized many faces: the tall, very thin man with the hearty laugh, two of the teenagers who had lain on the grass before the tower, the elderly couple who had spoken to her in the morning. They greeted her as she passed; Judith smiled at the woman and, turning to the man, touched the tips of her fingers to her temple. The table beside hers was empty, as were several others here and there in the hall, and when, halfway through dinner, Judith looked up to see the dark woman in her chair, it struck her as being so natural, so entirely without menace or meaning of any kind, that she could have laughed aloud to think of the absurd pains she had taken to evade this harmless creature with the slumped shoulders and melancholy eyes, who had been placed beside her by wildest chance and whom she was not called upon to elude or know. For each to the other was entirely a stranger.
And it was splendid after dinner to sit on the darkening veranda among quiet voices and the sound of creaking wicker. She looked at the sky above hills slowly draining of color. The darkening blue of the east turned to pale, pale blue above, to a blue that was almost white but gave off no light, like a darkness. It was growing cool. “Cheesecloth,” a man’s voice said decisively, and she tried to hear the next sentence, but his words were interwoven with sounds of footsteps, creaking furniture, a pipe knocking against a glass ashtray. “It’s getting a little chilly,” a woman said to her husband. A few older men lit up cigars. “I think I’ll go in and get my sweater,” someone said. “It’s this mountain air,” someone else said. And all at once, for no reason, the missing letters came to her: arête. The side door opened and closed, someone yawned loudly, people walked on the gravel paths lit by carriage lamps. The veranda smelled of lake water, cigar smoke, and damp wood. It was growing dark.
Someone cried out, then there were gasps and shouts: and the moon, large and fiery orange, rose slowly from the black hills. It was nearly round, except that one side was slightly blurred, as if someone had started to erase it before giving up.
Judith could almost hear the machinery hidden behind the hills, creakily hoisting the cumbrous old moon, which in a moment would probably tumble back down with a crash. But it detached itself from the hill and sat there, looking pleased with itself.
She decided to take a little walk in the lamplit dark before going inside. On the gravel paths by the side of the lake, couples strolled slowly, stopping now and then to look at the water. Judith walked along a path to the other side of the lake and began climbing the dark hill. She had hoped to sit in one of the gazebos on the cliffs along the way, but in each one she passed there sat a couple looking out across the lake. On a stretch of bare flat moon-brightened cliffs, a little distance from the paths, lovers sat and lay as if they were on a beach. Some had brought blankets and lay on their backs, staring up at the night sky. And an irritation came over Judith, at this invasion, this conspiracy of lovers to occupy the best places. The moon had climbed and was pale yellow now. Judith continued up the steep trail, hoping to exhaust the lovers. When she came to the next gazebo she saw a heavy man smoking a pipe, alone. She turned back down the path.
In the warm, lamplit lounge, in an armchair beside one of the big empty fireplaces, Judith sat reading a book about Victorian architecture in New England, which she had found in the small library off the Winter Lounge. In winter there would be fires blazing in all the fireplaces, and suddenly she longed for it to be winter, with logs snapping in the fireplace beside her and, through the bay windows, fields of smooth snow glistening under the moon.
“Hello there.” The voice startled her, and she looked up to see the elderly man who had saluted her on the path. His wife, who had spoken, stood beside him.
“Oh, hello,” Judith said.
“We saw you sitting here all by your lonesome, and we thought, now why don’t we just go over and say hello.”
“We saw you reading a book by yourself here. I told Bea, we shouldn’t disturb her, if she’s reading.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I’m just sitting here, really. Soaking up the atmosphere.”
“Well, that’s fine,” said the woman. “It’s a fine evening. We saw you sitting alone, dear, and we just wanted to come over and say hello. We’ll be right across the room there, if you’d care for comp’ny.”
The woman pointed across the room. The man bent his head slightly, touched two fingers to his temple, and lifted them. Taking his wife by the arm, he turned and walked with her slowly back across the room.
A warm, tender feeling rose in Judith, as if the word “dear” had been a hand laid on her cheek. A desire came over her to follow the kindly couple across the room, to pull up an armchair beside them and recount the little adventures of her day: the fourteen wildflowers, the climb to the top of the tower, the red bench in the sun, her unedited manuscript, the three ducks in a triangle scattering the yellow windows, the wooden bridge over the stream. Perhaps she could even tell them about the dark woman, and about the beauty and grace of the boy as he bent over the girl. Then they would explain to her what everything meant. And the man would touch his fingers to his temple, and the woman would say: “That’s all right, dear. That’s as it should be, dear.”
Judith looked up, and saw a plump, bald man with the face of a child, who sat with his knees apart, his plump hands resting on his thighs, and his pants cuffs raised to show red-and-blue argyle socks. She saw a woman with blue-gray hair who sat stiffly upright in her armchair, raising her thin arm to pat gently at her hair while her ivory bracelet slipped slowly from her wrist to her forearm. In an armchair a girl of twenty in tight faded jeans and a burnt-orange sweater sat hugging her raised knees and staring over the tops of them as, flexing and unflexing her bare toes, she listened intensely to a young man with a short blond beard, black-rimmed eyeglasses, and bright blue eyes. Judith felt that she wanted to tell these people something important, something about how strange it was to be sitting in chairs in a lounge in the middle of the hills, how everything was startling and utterly unknown, how each of them was as wondrous as a giraffe or a rhinoceros, but her thoughts grew confused, the expansive, mysterious feeling passed away, and she saw before her a roomful of dull people, sitting around with nothing to do.
A tiredness came over her, and leaning back for a moment she closed her heavy-lidded eyes. The sun and the hiking had tired her; it had been a long day. It was already past nine. Tomorrow’s weather was supposed to be sunny and warm, with highs in the mid-seventies, possibly clouding over in the afternoon. She wanted to be up early: breakfast at six, or say six-thirty at the latest, and out in the sun by seven. She would set her alarm for five-thirty; she could be in bed by half-past nine.
When she opened her eyes, she was surprised to see that several of the lamps were out. A number of chairs and couches were empty. She glanced at her watch: it was nearly ten. She must have drifted off. Across the room, the elderly couple was no longer there. She wanted to say good night to them, but they must have gone up to their room while her eyes were closed. She wished they would come back so that she could say good night to them.
Wearily Judith pushed herself to her feet. She would sleep well tonight.
In her room Judith changed quickly into her nightgown and set her alarm for twenty of six. In bed she picked up the book on Victorian architecture, but she could scarcely keep her eyes open. Her body was deliciously tired; there was no need to read herself to sleep. Turning out the lamp beside the bed, she closed her eyes and felt herself falling down, down, toward deepest sleep.
But something was wrong; she could not fall asleep. She turned from side to side, searching restlessly for sleep, as if it lay waiting for her in some precise portion of the bed. No doubt her nap—that disastrous little nap—had taken the edge off her tiredness. And yet she was tired, she longed for sleep. It was a mistake not to have read a little, as she always did. When she looked at the clock, she saw with dismay that it was eleven-thirty-five. Even if she fell asleep instantly she would get only six hours of sleep. It was hopeless. She felt doomed.
Judith turned on the bed lamp, grimly opened the book on Victorian architecture, and began to read. The sentences struck her as at once childish and pedantic, as if she were being lectured by a bright eighth-grader who had taken notes from a dubious encyclopedia. Instead of flowing from one to the next, the sentences stumbled against each other and walked off in every direction, rubbing their shins. The margins were comically wide. For the sake of the photographs the text had been printed on shiny stock, and the bedlamp glared on the print, which for that matter should have been two points larger. The stillness of the room, the whiteness and dryness of her fingers in the glow of the lamp, her blue leather suitcase standing stiffly on the rug, all these began to irritate her, to fill her with anger and unhappiness. Even the steady, monotonous beating of her heart exasperated her—she could feel it in there, drudging away, preventing sleep.
She slammed the book shut and sat up. It was nearly midnight. Oh, it was hopeless; she was making things worse by staying in bed. She needed to move about, to do something; and it came to her that she would return the book to the library.
Quickly she threw the covers off and changed into a sweater, jeans, and slippers.
Her eyelids were heavy but she felt restlessly awake as she walked swiftly along the dim-lit corridor past dark, slumbering doors. At the top of the main stairway she placed her hand on the smooth wood of the banister and hurried down the thick-carpeted stairs. At the bottom she saw light coming from the main lounge. Softly she walked over to the open doorway; she was surprised to see two elderly women reading quietly in armchairs. They did not look up, and Judith tiptoed away. She went back through the lobby, turned down a small corridor, and entered the Winter Lounge. A single lamp was lit; the lounge was deserted. The door of the library was open and a faint light streamed into the darkness of the lounge.
When Judith entered the library she did not at first see the dark woman. A single dim lamp was lit, on a little table beside an empty armchair with a flowered slipcover, and her gaze first fell on the lamplit pink flowers of the chair. The woman sat alone on a dark couch across from the lamp. She turned her head as Judith entered.
“I didn’t know you’d be here,” Judith said sharply. But of course the woman would be. She was everywhere.
“Were you looking for me?” the other asked.
“No,” Judith said quietly, as if she were suppressing a shout. “I couldn’t sleep. I came to return a book.” She held up the book, as if to show that she wasn’t lying. She entered the room quickly and began looking nervously about, peering at the dark rows of books, searching for the proper space.
“Almost no one comes in here. I hope you won’t mind if I speak frankly. You see, I have feelings sometimes, deep within, and I trust what they tell me. This morning on the tower I felt so certain you wanted to speak to me.”
“To speak to you?” Holding the book in both hands, as if it were as large as a storm window, Judith turned to look at her.
“Yes, to speak. To me. I felt so certain that was what you wanted.”
Judith laughed lightly and, raising a hand in nervous irritation, smoothed back her dark hair. “I really think you—and you say you have these feelings?”
“Yes. I feel that you are so unhappy.”
The words burst into flame within Judith. She could scarcely breathe.
“I see. Thank you very much.”
“Please. There’s no need to sound that way. To hold things inside. Won’t you sit down?”
“I’m perfectly all right. Thank you. I came to return a book.” She thrust it between two books as if she had stolen it. “There. Thank you. I am perfectly fine.”
Judith turned and walked violently from the room.
She hurried up the stairway and along the dark corridor. Once she nearly stumbled, and gave a gasp that seemed as loud as a cry. In her room she locked the door and lay down on the bed. Her heart was beating savagely. Rage surged in her—the rudeness of that witch, the insolence. She was obviously insane. “You see, I have feelings sometimes, deep within.” She had spoken gently, calmly; she was insane. “I feel you are so unhappy.” How dare she feel anything at all? That demented woman had looked at her with pity. Judith sat up abruptly and walked over to the mirror on the door. In the dim lamplight her face looked pale and worn, her dark eyes mournful. She returned to the bed and lay down. Ah, how dare she? “I feel you are so unhappy.” The sentimental words burned in her—she was burning up in them. Unhappiness like a fire broke out in her. Alone in her room, Judith wept.
The tears shocked her; she couldn’t stop. She wept because the woman had looked at her kindly and with pity. She wept because she was alone in a place where lovers lay on the rocks. She wept because things had not turned out the way she had hoped. She wept because she had loved the wrong man, she wept because she was no longer young, she wept because she had started and could not stop. She wept like a child, passionately, with terrible conviction. Her tears seemed to burn a flaming passage through her life. But it was intolerable. She detested it—the banality of tears. Grief wasn’t a flame—it was riot, it was madness. It had sprung to life at a madwoman’s touch. There was no reason for it. But it had fooled her; it must have been waiting there all along. She wept again for her beautiful weak man, who had done such terrible harm. She had been his greatest accomplice. With his hands in his pockets he had come strolling into her life, looking nervously about. He had not been sure, he had never been sure. And she, overflowing with new powers of sympathy, had beautifully understood. She had blossomed with understanding, she had grown brilliant with it. And so he had settled down uncertainly, looking at her with his beautiful nervous eyes, and she had dared to be happy: she had done that thing. And he had left, in stages; he had shown weakness even in that, while she in her panic had spun round him glittering delicate threads of understanding. Judith wept for those glittering threads, and for the fire that had raged in her, and for the deadness that had slowly come over things. She wept at the waste of it. She shook with weeping, it poured out of her, she couldn’t stop.
As Judith wept, her unhappiness seemed to expand and grow more generous. She wept for the lovers on the sunflooded cliff, who did not know what lay ahead. She wept for the elderly couple, who perhaps woke in the night, trembling with death fear. She wept for the dark woman, who in the arrogance of her sadness had developed cruel gifts of divination. Judith felt herself dilate with unhappiness; and as she wept, her sorrow grew rich and darkly lovely, a black flower, opening petal by velvet petal.
For a while it seemed as if she would sleep. But again it struck her, shaking her like an illness. She got up from the bed and walked weeping around the nearly dark room. She felt ugly with sorrow, as if her tears were wearing lines into her face. Damn the witch. She was too tired for this.
She lay down, exhausted, and it flashed in her that this would end. It was bound to end. Everything ended. Tomorrow she would be sitting in sunshine on her red bench. She would eat dinner early, take the limousine to the bus station, and ride toward the city in the dark. In the morning she would be at her desk. There were letters to dictate, a meeting at ten with the three new trainees, and a luncheon appointment with the author of a college math text that proposed to teach the concept of number by using the history of number systems in different cultures. She wouldn’t have a minute to spare for sorrow, and if the thought of the tears now pouring from her came into her mind, they would seem as dreamlike and implausible as her father’s explanation, when she was a child, that the lawn on which they were standing was part of a great globe that was not only turning round and round but was rushing along like a ball shot out of a cannon.
But it was ugly; humiliating. She was helpless against it. She lay on the bed, utterly given over to grief. Her grief seemed to be growing stronger, as if it were gaining confidence. It was not ennobling, it was not even interesting. People suffered the way they loved—not with their hearts but with their stomachs. It bored her. But still it went on.
And again it struck at her, the ugly and humiliating thing. It overmastered her, ranging through her at will. Judith lay weakly on her pillow and felt herself slowly give up. She tried to remember if she had ever felt peaceful, and it seemed to her that long ago, in some other life, she had sat in sunlight. She no longer existed; she was only a lump of ugly suffering. She had no respect for these tears, these shakings. Weak, weak, she was weak. Weak! She despised weepy women.
The thought came to her that she might be having a breakdown. At the thought a terror came over her; calmed for a moment by terror, she forced herself up from the bed.
She walked over to the window and pushed aside the shade. She was startled to see her shocked face staring at her from the dark glass. Through her face she saw black hills and a dark blue sky rich with stars. Once when she was a child her father had taken her out at night to the top of the driveway and let her look through his telescope at the moon and stars. The telescope stood on a tripod and he had lowered the legs for her. He had told her that a long time ago people believed the sky was a bowl filled with little holes, and that the stars were those little holes, through which the sun was shining. He had explained gravely and carefully what the stars really were, but she had come away knowing that the night was a bowl with the sun shining through the holes.
A coolness flowed from the glass. Judith leaned forward toward the coolness and saw her pale face bowing to meet her. She pressed her burning forehead against the cool glass. The room seemed stifling, unbearable. The whole room was filled with sorrow. All at once she released the shade; it clattered as if she had hurled it against the glass. She went over to the bed and began to put on her hiking boots.
Struggling to pull her arm through a sweater she stepped into the hall. Her head ached and tears burned in her eyes. At the top of the stairs she stopped to button her sweater; it was black with black buttons. She placed her hand on the smooth wood of the banister and watched the hand slide down alongside her as she swiftly descended. At the bottom the hand swept up over the wooden globe of the stairpost and joined her again. From the lobby she passed into the empty lounge, where a single lamp dimly glowed. An old woman was asleep in a chair. Judith stepped through the side door onto the dark veranda, hurried down the steps onto the gravel path, and stopped.
The moon shocked her: it was burning white. It had burned the blackness out of the sky, leaving a radiant dark blue. She felt like breaking off a piece of the moon and pressing it against her forehead, plunging it into her mouth. She felt crazed. Tears streamed along her face.
She had come out with no plan except to escape the sorrow in her room, but as if she knew where she wanted to go she did not hesitate. The moon would light her way.
The twisting downward path was speckled with pale patches of moonlight. A stone cast a sharp shadow. She could see leaf shadows printed on the path. Overhead the night was so deeply blue that she refused to believe it; she was reminded of the fraudulent and enchanting skies of night scenes in old Technicolor movies. A nearby crackle startled her. She had read that there were possums, raccoons, and deer in the woods. Judith had never seen a possum. What if one leaped out at her? She wouldn’t even know what it was.
When she reached the bench at the bend of the path she stopped in surprise. It had no color, though the moon shone on part of it—it was only darkness and light. There, where she had been peaceful, she sat down.
On the brilliantly moonlit cliff the gazebo cast a hard-edged shadow. There were many parallel stripes and criss-crosses. Through the pale, radiant beams of the gazebo she could see diamonds and parallelograms of dark blue night. Near the pointed roof-shadow something gleamed, and she recognized the beer can. It threw a long shadow. At the very edge of the cliff, brightness turned into darkness. She tried to see the precise place where the brightness stopped.
She raised a hand to her face and was startled to feel wetness there. She remembered that she had been crying. The woman had hurt her. And at the memory it began again: something rose in her and she was shaken with it, she wept and bent her face into her hands. She took deep breaths, as if she had to reach far down to find strength for her sorrow. Her body shook, her ribs ached, her shoulders hunched old-womanishly.
She could not stop. She wept as if some deep restraint of pride or breeding had given way in her. She wept beyond shame, crudely and obscenely, as if grief were a form of ugliness she could no longer escape. She had no sympathy for the grief that filled her and shook her, that seemed too large for her, as if it did not fit her insides correctly. Her grief was the wrong size. It spilled out of her and left her far behind. It was larger than the Mountain Lodge, larger than anything; and it seemed to her that she had left her room and come out into the night because only the night was large enough.
Sick with sorrow, twisted with grief, Judith stumbled from the bench and struck for the path leading to the cliff. She wanted to run away from her unhappiness, to leave it behind. Trembling and weeping she emerged from the trees into a brilliance of moonlight. The moon hurt her tear-burned eyes. Now that she was out of the woods Judith advanced slowly, as if her hair had become tangled in the brilliance of the night sky—in twigs and branches of light. The moonlight tore at her hair. The blazing beer can stunned her, distracted her. She looked up at the moon. It burned out her eyes. She came to the edge of the cliff, where the dark place began.
She looked down, and the dark seemed to reach up and seize her ankles. A dizziness came over her. She felt herself falling into the soothing dark. Her hair streamed in the wind of her falling; and as she fell down and down, she felt her sorrow streaming from her like a wind. It was blowing out of her in all directions. It was spreading through the dark hills and valleys, flowing into the night sky, rising higher and higher, slowly filling the blue bowl of night.
Judith opened her eyes. She looked about. She stepped back suddenly. She was standing near the edge of a cliff. She looked at the edge of the cliff. She looked up at the moon. It was night. There was a moon in the sky.
Judith raised a hand and smoothed back her hair. She said: “My name is Judith Hahn. This is a rock. That is the moon. Shhh. It’s all right. Shhh. It’s over now. You can go back. Shhh, dear. That’s all right. Go back. Shhh.”
Obediently, Judith turned and went slowly back up the path.