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THE SECOND INQUISITION

Joanna Russ

If a man can resist the influences of his townsfolk, if she can cut free
from the tyranny of neighborhood gossip, the world has no terrors for
him; there is no second inquisition.

-John Jay Chapman

I often watched our visitor reading in the living room, sitting under the
floor lamp near the new, standing Philco radio, with her long, long legs
stretched out in front of her and the pool -of light on her book revealing
so little of her face: brownish, coppery features so marked that she
seemed to be a kind of freak and hair that was reddish black .but so
rough that it looked like ,the things my mother used for .scouring pots
and pans. She read 'a great deal, that summer. If I ventured out of the
archway, where I was not exactly hiding but only keeping in the
shadow to watch her read, she would often raise her face and smile
silently at me before beginning to read again, and her skin would take on
an abrupt, surprising pallor as it moved into the light. When she goat
up -and went into the kitchen with the gracefulness of a stork, for
something to eat, she was almost too tall for the doorways; she went
on legs like a spider's, with long swinging arms and a little body in the
middle, the strange proportions of the very tall. She looked down at my
mother's plates and dishes from a great, gentle height, remarkably
absorbed; and asking me a few odd questions, she would bend down
over whatever she was going to eat, meditate on it for a few moments
like a giraffe, and then straightening up back into the stratosphere, she
would pick up the plate in one thin hand, curling around it fingers like
legs, and go back gracefully into-the living room. She would lower
herself into the chair that was always too small, curl her legs around it,
become dissatisfied, settle herself, stretch them out again-I remember so
well those long, hard, unladylike legs-and begin again to read.

She used to ask, "What is that? What is that? And what, is this?" but
that was only at first.

My mother, who disliked her, said she was from the circus and we
ought to try to understand and be kind.: My father made jokes. He did
not like big women or short -hair--which was still new in places like
ours- women who read, although she was interested in his carpentry
and he liked that.

But she was six feet four inches tall; this was in 1925.

My father was an accountant who built furniture as a: hobby; we had a
gas stove which he actually fixed once when it broke down and some
outdoor tables and chair ' he had built in the back yard. Before our
visitor came o, the train for her vacation with us, I used to spend all my
time in the back yard, being underfoot, but once we had met her ,at the
station and she shook hands with my. father-I think she hurt him whets
she shook hands-I would watch her read and wish that she might talk to
me.

She said: "You are finishing high school?"

I was in the archway, as usual; I answered yes.

She looked up at me again, then down at her book. She said, "This is a
very bad book." I said nothing. Without looking up, she tapped one
finger on the shabby hassock on which she had put her feet. Then she
looked up and smiled at me. I stepped tentatively from the floor to the
rug, as reluctantly as if I were crossing the Sahara; she swung her feet
away and I sat down. Art close view her face looked as if every race in
the world had been mixed and only the worst of each kept; an American
Indian might look like that, or Ikhnaton from the encyclopedia, or a
Swedish African, a Maori princess with the jaw of a Slav. It occurred to
me suddenly that she might be a Negro, but no one else had ever
seemed to think so,
possibly because nobody in our town had ever seen a
Negro. We had none. They were "colored people."
She said; "You are not pretty, yes?"
I got up. I said, "My father thinks you're a freak."

"You are sixteen," she said, ".sit down," and I .sat down. I crossed my
arms over my breasts because they were (too big, like balloons. Then
she said, "I am reading a very stupid book. You will take it away from
me, yes?"

"No," I said.

"You must," she said, "or it will poison me, sure as God," and from her
lap she plucked up The Green Hat: A Romance, gold letters on green
binding, last year's bestseller which I had had to .swear never to read,
and she held it out to me, leaning back in her chair with that long arm
doing all the work, .the book enclosed in a cage of fingers wrapped
completely around it. I think she could have put those forgers around a
basketball. I did not take it.

"Go on," she said, "read it, go on, go away," and I found myself at the-
archway, by the foot of the stairs with The Green Hat: A Romance in
my hand. I turned it so the title was hidden. She was smiling -at me and
had her arms folded back under her head. "Don't worry," she said.
"Your body will be in fashion by the time of the next war." I met my
mother at the top of the stairs and had to hide :the book from her; my
mother said, "Oh, the poor woman!" She was carrying some sheets. I
went to my room .and read through almost the whole night, hiding the
book in the bedclothes when I was through. When I slept, I dreamed of
Hispano-Suizas, of shingled hair and tragic eyes; of women with
painted lips who had Affairs, who went night after night with Jews to
low drives, who lived as they pleased, who had miscarriages in
expensive Swiss clinics; of midnight swims, of desperation, .of money,
of illicit love, of a beautiful Englishman and getting into a taxi with him
while wearing a cloth-of-silver cloak and a silver turban like the ones
shown in the society pages of the New York City newspapers.

Unfortunately our guest's face kept recurring in my dream, and because
I could not make out whether she was amused or bitter or very much
of bath, it really spoiled everything.

My mother discovered the book the next morning. I found it next to
my plate at breakfast. Neither my mother

nor my father made any remark about it; only my mother kept putting
out the breakfast things with a kind of tender, reluctant smile. We all
sat down, finally, when she had put out everything, and my farther
helped me to rolls and eggs and ham. Then he took off his glasses and
folded them next to his plate. He leaned back in his chair and crossed
his legs. Then he looked at the book and said in a tone of mock
surprise, "Well! What's this?"

I didn't say anything. I only looked at my plate.

"I believe I've seen this before," he said. "Yes, I believe I have." Then
he asked my mother, "Have you, seen this before?" My mother made a
kind of vague movement with her head. She had begun to butter some
toast and was putting it on my plate. I knew she was not supposed to
discipline me; only my father was. "Eat your egg," she said. My father,
who had continued to look at The Green Hat: A Romance with the
same expression of unvarying surprise, finally said:

"Well! This isn't a very pleasant thing to find on a Saturday morning, is
it?"

I still didn't say anything, only looked -at my food. I heard my mother
say worriedly, "She's not eating, Ben," and my father put his hand on
the back of my chair so I couldn't push it away from the .table, as I
was trying .to do.

"Of course you have an explanation for this,'." he said. "Don't you?"

I said nothing.

"Of course she does," he said, "doesn't she, Bess? You wouldn't hurt
your mother like this. You wouldn't hurt your mother by stealing a
book that you knew you weren't supposed to read and for very good
reason, too. You know we don't punish you. We talk things over with
you. We try to explain. Don't we?"

I nodded.

"Good," he said. "Then where did this book come from?"

I muttered something; I don't know what.

"Is my daughter angry?" said my father. "Is my daughter being
rebellious?"

"She told you all about it!" I blurted out. My father's face turned red.

"Don't you dare talk about your mother that way!" he
shouted, standing up. "Don't you dare refer to your mother in that
way!"

"Now, Ben-" said my mother.

"Your mother is the soul of unselfishness," said my father, "and don't
you forget it, missy; your mother has worried about you since the day
you were born and if you don't appreciate that, you can damn well-"

"Ben!" said my mother, shocked.

"I'm sorry," I said, and then I said, "I'm very sorry, Mother." My
father sat down. My father had a mustache and his hair was parted in
the middle and slicked down; now one lock fell over the part in front
and his whole face was gray and quivering. He was staring fixedly at
his coffee cup. My mother came over and poured coffee for him; then
she took the coffeepot into the kitchen and when she came back she
had milk for me. She put the glass of milk on the table near my plate.
Then she sat down again. She smiled tremblingly at my father; then she
put her hand over mine on the table and said:

"Darling, why did you read that book?"

"Well?" said my father from across the table.

There was a moment's silence. Then:

"Good morning!"

and

"Good morning!"

sand

"Good morning!" said our guest cheerfully, crossing the dining room in
two strides, and folding herself carefully down into .her breakfast chair,
from where her knees stuck out, she reached across the table, picked
up The Green Hat, propped it up next to her plate and began to read it
with great absorption. Then she looked up. "You have a very
progressive library," she said. "I took .the liberty of recommending this
exciting book to your daughter. You told me it was your favorite. You
sent all the way to New York City on purpose far it, yes?"

"I don't-I quite-" said my mother, pushing back her chair from the
table. My mother was trembling from head to foot and her face was set
in an expression of fixed distaste. Our visitor regarded first my mother
and then my

father, bending over .then tenderly and with exquisite interest. She said:

"I hope you do not mind my using your library."

"No no no," muttered my father.

"I eat almost for two," said our visitor modestly, "because of my
height. I hope you do not mind that?"

"No, of course not," said my father, regaining control of himself.

"Good. It is all considered in the bill," said the visitor,. and looking
about at my shrunken parents, each hurried, each spooning in the food
and avoiding her gaze, she added deliberately:

"I took also another liberty. I removed from the end-' papers certain-ah-
-drawings that I did not ,think bore any relation to the text. You do not
mind?"

And as my father and mother looked in shocked surprise and utter
consternation-at each other-she said to me in a low voice, "Don't eat.
You'll make yourself sick," and then smiled warmly at the two of them
when my ; mother went off into the kitchen and my father on to the he
was lane for work. She waved at them. I jumped up as soon as they
were out of the room.

"There were no drawings in that book!" I whispered.

"Then we must make some," said she, and taking a pencil off the
whatnot, she drew in the endpapers of the book a series of sketches:
the heroine sipping a soda in an ice-cream parlor, showing her legs and
very chic; in a sloppy bathing suit and big grin, holding up a large fish;-
r driving her Hispano-Suiza into a tree only to be catapulted straight
up into the air; and in the last sketch landing demure and coy in the
arms of the hero, who looked violently surprised. Then she drew a
white mouse putting on lipstick, getting married to another white
mouse in a , church, the two entangled in some manner I thought I
should not look at, the lady mouse with a big belly and two little mice
inside (who were playing chess), then the little mice coming out in
separate envelopes and finally= the whole family having a picnic, with
somethings around' the picnic basket that I did not recognize and
underneath in capital letters "I did not bring up my children to test-';
cigarettes." This left me blank. She laughed and rubbed it out, saying
that it was out of date. Then she drew a white
mouse with a rolled-up umbrella chasing my mother. I
picked that up and looked at it for a while; then I tore it
into pieces, and tore the others into pieces as well. I said,
"I don't think you have the slightest right to-" and
stopped. She was looking at me with not anger exactly
-not warning exactly-I found I had to sit down. I
began to cry.

"Ah! The results of practical psychology," she said dryly, gathering up
the pieces of her sketches. She took matches off the whatnot and set
fire to the pieces in a saucer. She held up the smoking match between
her thumb and forefinger, saying, "You see? The finger is-shall we say,
perception?-but the thumb is money. The thumb is hard."

"You oughtn't to treat my parents that way!" I said, crying.

"You ought not to tear up my sketches," she said calmly.

"Why not! Why not!" I shouted.

"Because they are worth money," she said, "in some quarters. I won't
draw you any more," and indifferently taking the saucer with the ashes
in it in one palm, she went into the kitchen. I heard her voice and then
my mother's and then my mother's again, anal then our visitor's in a
tone that would've made a rock weep, but I never found out what they
said.

I passed our guest's room many times at night that summer, going in by
the hall past her rented room where the second-floor windows gave out
onto the dark garden. The electric lights were always on brilliantly. My
mother had sewn the white curtains because she did everything like
that and had bought the furniture at a sale: marbletopped bureau, the
wardrobe, the iron bedstead, an old Victrola against the wall. There was
usually an open book on the bed. I would stand in the shadow of the
open doorway and look across the bare wood floor, too much of it and
all as slippery as the sea, bare wood waxed and shining in the electric
light. A black dress hung on the front of the wardrobe and a pair of
shoes like my mother's, T-strap shoes with thick heels. I used to
wonder if she had silver evening slippers inside the wardrobe.

Sometimes the open book on the bed was Wells's The Time Machine
and then I would talk to the black glass of the window, I would say :to
the transparent reflections and the black branches of trees that moved
beyond it:

"I'm only sixteen."

"You look eighteen," she would say.

"I know," I would say. "I'd like to be eighteen. I'd like to go away to
college. To Radcliffe, I think." ,

She would say nothing, out of surprise.

"Are you reading Wells?" I would say then, leaning against the door
jamb. "I think that's funny. Nobody in this town reads anything; they
just .think about social life. I read a lot, however. I would like to learn
a
great deal."

She would smile then, across the room.

"I did something funny once," I would go on. "I mean funny ha-ha, not
funny peculiar." It was a real line, very popular. "I read The Time
Machine and then I went around asking people were they Eloi or were
they Morlocks; everyone liked it. The point is which you would be if
you could, like being an optimist or a pessimist or do you like- bobbed
hair." Then I would add, "Which are you?" and she would only shrug
and smile a little more. She would prop her chin on one long, long hand
and look into my eyes with her black Egyptian eyes and then she
would say in her curious hoarse voice:

"It is you who must say it first."

"I think," I would say, "that you area Morlock," and sitting on the bed
in my m-other's rented room with The Time Machine open beside her,
she would say:

"You are exactly right. I am a Morlock. I am a Morlock on vacation. I
have come from the last Morlock meeting, which is held out between
the stars in a big goldfish bowl, so all the Morlocks have to cling to the
inside walls like a flock of black bats, some right side up, some upside
down, for there is no up and down there, clinging like a flock of black
crows, like a chestnut burr turned inside out. There are half a thousand
Morlocks and we rule the worlds. My black uniform is in the
wardrobe."

"I knew I was right," I would say.

"You are always right  she would say, "and you know the rest of it,
too. You know what murderers we are and how terribly we live. We are
waiting for the big bang
when everything falls over and even the Morlocks will be destroyed;
meanwhile I stay here waiting for the signal and I have messages
clipped to the frame of your mother's amateur oil painting of Main
Street because it will be in a museum-some day and my friends can find
it; meanwhile I read The Time Machine."

Then I would say, "Can I come with you?" leaning against the door.

"Without you," she would say gravely, "all is lost," and flaking out
from the wardrobe a black dress glittering with stars and a pair of silver
sandals with high heels, she would say, "These are yours. They were
my great-grandmother's, who founded the Order. In the name of
TransTemporal Military Authority." And I would put them on.

It was almost a pity she was not really there.

Every year in the middle of August the Country Club gave a dance, not
just for the rich families who were members but also for the "nice"
people who lived in frame houses in town and even for some of the
smart, economical young couples who lived in apartments, just as if
they had been in .the city. There was one new, red-brick apartment
building downtown, four stories high, with a courtyard. We were
supposed to go, because I was old enough that year, but the day before
the dance my father became ill with pains in his left side and my
mother had to stay home to take care of him. He was propped up on
pillows on the living-room daybed, which we had pulled out into the
room so he could watch what my mother was doing with the garden
out back and call to her once in a while through the windows. He could
also see the walk leading up to the front door. He kept insisting that
she was doing things all wrong. I did not even ask if I could go to the
dance alone. My father said:

"Why don't you go out and help your mother?"

"She doesn't want me to," I said. "I'm supposed to stay here," and then
he shouted angrily, "Bess! Bess!" and began to give her instructions
.through the window. I saw another pair of hands appear in the
window next to my mother's and then our guest-,squatting back on her
heels and smoking a cigarette-pulling up weeds. She was working
quickly and efficiently, the cigarette between her teeth.

"No, not that way!" shouted my father, pulling on the blanket that my
mother had put over him. "Don'-t you know what you're doing! Bess,
you're ruining everything! Stop it! Do it right!" My mother looked
bewildered and; upset; she passed out of the window and our visitor
took 'her place; she waved to my father and he subsided, pulling the
blanket up around his neck. "I don't like women who. smoke," he
muttered irritably. I slipped out through the

kitchen.         --

My father's toolshed and working space took up the farther half of the
back yard; the garden was spread over the nearer half, part kitchen
garden, part flowers, an then extended down either side of the house
where w e< had fifteen feet or so of space before a white slat fence `
and the next people's side yard. It was an on-and-offis

garden, and the house was beginning to need paint. My mother was
working in the kitchen garden, kneeling. our guest was standing,
pruning the lilac trees, still smoking.' I said:

"Mother, can't I go, can't I go!" in a low voice.

My mother passed her hand over her forehead and called "Yes, Ben!"
to my father.

"Why can't I go!" I whispered. "Ruth's mother and Betty's mother
will be there. Why couldn't you call Ruth's mother and Betty's
mother?"

"Not that way!" came a blast from the living-room window. My
mother sighed briefly and then smiled a cheerful smile. "Yes, Ben!" she
called brightly. "I'm listening." My father began to give some more
instructions.

"Mother," I said desperately, "why couldn't you-"

"Your father wouldn't approve," she said, and again she produced a
bright smile and called, encouragingly to my father. I wandered over to
the lilac trees where our visitor, in her usual nondescript black dress,
was piling the dead wood under the tree. She took a last puff on her
cigarette, holding it between thumb and forefinger, then ground it out in
the grass and picked up in both arms the entire lot of dead wood. She
carried it over to the fence and dumped it.

"My father says you shouldn't prune trees in August," I blurted
suddenly.

"Oh?" she said.
"It hurts ?hem," I whispered.

"Oh," she said. She had on gardening gloves, though much too small;
she picked up the pruning shears and began snipping again through inch-
thick trunks and dead branches that snapped explosively when they
broke and whipped out at your face. She was efficient and very quick.

I said nothing at all, only watched her face.

She shook her head decisively.

"But Ruth's mother and Betty',s mother-" I began, faltering.

"I never go out," she said.

"You needn't stay," I said, placating.

"Never," she said. "Never at all," and snapping free a particularly large,
dead, silvery ,branch from the lilac tree, she put it in my arms. She
stood there looking at me and her look was .suddenly very severe, very
unpleasant, something foreign, like the look of somebody who had seen
people go off to battle to die, the "movies" look but hard, hard as nails.
I knew I wouldn't get to go anywhere. I thought she might have seen
battle in the Great War, maybe even been in some of it. I said, although
I could barely speak:

"Were you in the Great War?"

"Which great war?" said our visitor. Then she said, "No, I never go
out," and returned -to scissoring the trees.

On the night of the dance my .mother told me to get dressed, and I did.
There was a mirror on the back of my door, but the window was
better; it softened everything; it hung me out in the middle of a black
space and made my eyes into mysterious shadows. I was wearing pink
organdy and a bunch -of daisies from the garden, not the wild kind. I
came downstairs and found our visitor waiting for meat the bottom:
tall, bare-armed, almost beautiful, for she'd done something to her
impossible hair and the rusty reddish black curled slickly like the best
photograph s. Then she moved and I thought she was altogether
beautiful, all black and rippling silver like a Paris dress or better still
a
New York dress, with a silver band around her forehead like an Indian
princess's and silver shoes with the chunky heels and the one strap
over the instep.

She said, "AH! don't you look nice," land then in a

whisper, taking my arm and looking down -at me with curious
gentleness, "I'm going to be a bad chaperone. I'm going to disappear."

"Well!" said I, inwardly shaking, "I hope I can take care of myself, I
.should think." But I hoped .she wouldn't leave me alone and I hoped
that no one would laugh at her. She was really incredibly tall.

"Your father's going to sleep at ten," said my mother. "Be back by
eleven. Be happy." And she kissed me.

But Ruth's father, who drove Ruth and I and Ruth's mother and our
guest to the Country Club, did not laugh. And .neither did anyone else.
Our visitor seemed to have put ,on a strange gracefulness with her
dress, and a strange sort of kindliness, too, so that Ruth, who .had
never seen her but had only heard rumors about her, cried out, "Your
friend's lovely!" and Ruth's father, who taught mathematics at high
school, said (clearing his throat), "It must be lonely staying in," and our
visitor said only, "Yes. Oh yes. It is," resting one immensely long, thin,
elegant hand on his shoulder like some kind of unwinking spider, while
his words and hers went echoing out into the night, back and forth,
back and forth, losing themselves in the trees that rushed past the
headlights and massed blackly to each side.

"Ruth wants to join a circus!" cried Ruth's mother, laughing.

"I do not!" said Ruth.

"You will not," said her father.

"I'll do exactly as I please," said Ruth with her nose in the air, and -she
took a chocolate cream ,out of her handbag and put it in her mouth.

"You will not!" said Ruth's father, scandalized.

"Daddy, you know I will too," said Ruth, serenely though somewhat
muffled, land under cover of the dark she wormed over to me in the
back seat and passed, from her hot hand to mine, anther chocolate
cream. late it; ~it was unpleasantly and piercingly sweet.

"Isn't it glorious?" said Ruth.

The Country Club was much more bare than I had expected, really
only a big frame building with a veranda three-quarters of the way
around it and not much lawn, but there was a path down front to two
stone pillars that
made a kind of gate and somebody had strung .the gate and the whole
path with colored Chinese lanterns. That part was lovely. Inside, the
whole first storey was one room, with a varnished floor like the high
school gym, and a punch table at one end and the ribbons and Chinese
lanterns hung all over the ceiling. It did not look quite like the movies
but everything - was beautifully painted. I had noticed that ,there were
wicker armchairs scattered on the veranda. I decided it was "nice."
Behind the punch table was a flight of stairs that led to a gallery full of
tables where the grown-ups could go and drink (Ruth insisted they
would be bringing real liquor for "mixes," although of course the
Country Club had to pretend not to know about that) and on both
sides of the big room French windows that opened onto the veranda
and the Chinese lanterns, swinging a little in the breeze. Ruth was
wearing a better dress than mine. We went over to the punch table and
drank punch while she asked me about our visitor ,and I made up a lot
of lies. "You don't know anything," said Ruth. She waved across the
room to some friends of hers; then I could see her start dancing with a
boy in front of the band, which was at the other end of the room. Older
people were dancing and people's parents, some older boys and girls. I
stayed by the punch table. People who knew my parents came over
and talked to me; they asked me how I was and I said I was fine; then
they asked me haw my father was and I said she was fine. Someone
offered to introduce me to someone but I said I knew him. I hoped
somebody would come over. I thought I would skirt around the dance
floor and try to talk to some of the girls I knew, but then I thought I
wouldn't; I imagined myself going up the stairs with Iris March's lover
from The Green Hat to sit at a table and smoke a cigarette -or drink
something. I stepped behind the punch table and went tut through the
French windows. Our guest was a few chairs away with her feet
stretched out, resting on the lowest rung of the veranda. She was
reading a magazine with the aid of a small flashlight. The flowers
planted around the veranda showed up a little in the light from the
Chinese lanterns: shadowy clumps and masses of petunias, a few of
the white ones springing into life as she turned the

page of her book and the beam of the flashlight moved in her hand. I
decided I would have my cigarette in a long holder. The moon was
coming up over the woods past the Country Club lawns, .but it was a
cloudy night and all I could see was a vague lightening of the sky in
that direction. It was rather warm. I remembered something about an
ivory cigarette holder flaunting at the moon. Our visitor turned another
page. I thought that she must have been aware of me. I thought again of
Iris March's lover, coming .out do get me on the "terrace" when
somebody tapped me on the shoulder; it was Ruth's father. He took
me by the wrist and led me to our visitor, who looked up and smiled
vaguely, dreamily, in the dark under the colored lanterns. Then Ruth's
father said:

"What do you know? There's a relative of yours inside!" She continued
to smile but her face stopped moving; she smiled gently and with
tenderness at the space next to her head for the barely perceptible part
of a moment. Then she completed the swing of her head and looked at
him, still smiling, but everything had gone out of it.

"How lovely," she said. Then she said, "Who is it?"

"I don't know," said Ruth's father, "but he's tall, looks just like you-beg
pardon. He says he's your cousin."

"Por nada," said our guest -absently, and getting up, she shook hands
with Ruth's father. The three of us went back inside. She left the
magazine and flashlight on the chair; they -seemed to belong to the
Club. Inside, Ruth's father took us up the steps to the gallery and
there, at the end of it, sitting at one of the tables, was a man even taller
than our visitor, tall even sitting down. He was in evening dress while
half the men at the dance were in business suits. He did not really look
like her in the face; he was a little darker and .a little flatter of
feature;
but as we approached him, he stood up. He -almost reached the ceiling.
He was a giant. He and our visitor did not shake hands. The both of
them looked at Ruth's father, smiling formally, and Ruth's father left
us; then the stranger looked quizzically at me but our guest had already
sunk into a nearby seat, all willowiness, all grace. They made a
handsome couple. The stranger brought a silver-inlaid flask out of his
hip pocket; he took the pitcher
of water that stood on the table and poured some into a clean glass.
Then he added whisky from the flask, .but our visitor did not take it.
She only turned it aside, amused, with one finger, and said to me, "Sit
down, child." which I did. Then she said:

"Cousin, how did you find me?"

"Par chance, cousin," said the stranger. "By luck." He screwed the top
back on the flask very deliberately and put the whole thing back in his
pocket. He began to stir the drink he had made with a wooden muddler
provided by the Country Club.

"I have endured much annoyance," he said, "from that man to whom
you spoke. There is not a single specialized here; they are all half-
brained: scattered and stupid."

"He is a kind and clever man," said she. "He teaches mathematics."

"The more fool he," said the stranger, "for ;the mathematics he thinks
he teaches!" and he drank his own drink. Then he said, "I think we will
go home now."

"Eh! This person?" said my friend, drawing up the ends of her lips
scornfully, half amused. "Not this person!"

"Why not this person, who knows me?" said the strange man.

"Because," said our visitor, and turning deliberately away from me, she
put her face next to his and began to whisper mischievously in his ear.
She was watching the dancers on the floor below, half the men in
business suits, half the couples middle-aged. Ruth and Betty and some
of their friends, and some vacationing college boys. The band was
playing the fox-trot. The strange man's face altered just a little; it
darkened; he finished his drink, put it down, and then swung massively
in his seat to face me.

"Does she go out?" he said sharply.

"Well?" said our visitor idly.

"Yes," I said. "Yes, she goes out. Every day."

"By car or on foot?" I looked -at her but she was doing nothing. Her
thumb and finger formed a circle on the table.

"I don't know," I said.

"Does she go on foot?" he said.

"No," I blurted suddenly, "no, -by car. Always by car!" He .sat back
in his seat.

"You would do anything," he said conversationally. "The lot of you."

"I?" she said. "I'm not dedicated. I can be reasoned with."

After a moment of silence he said, "We'll talk."

She shrugged. "Why not?"

"This girl's home," he said. "I'll leave fifteen minutes after you. Give
me your hand."

"Why?" ,she said. "You know where I live. I am not going to hide in
the woods like an animal."

"Give me your hand," he repeated. "For old time's sake." She reached
across the table. They clasped hands and she winced momentarily.
Then they both rose. She smiled dazzlingly. She took me by the wrist
and led me down the stairs while the strange man called after us, as if
the phrase pleased him, "For old Mime's sake!" and then "Good
health, cousin! Long life!" while the band struck up a march in ragtime.
She-stopped to talk to five or six people, including Ruth's father who
taught mathematics in the high school, and the band leader, and Betty,
who was drinking punch with a boy from our class. Betty said to me
under her breath, "Your daisies are coming loose. They're -gonna fall
off." We walked through the parked cars until we reached one that she
seemed to like; they were all open and some owners left the keys in
them; she got in behind the wheel and started up.

"Burt this isn't your car!" I said. "You can't just--2'

"Get in!" I slid in next to .her.

"It's after ten o'clock," I said. "You'll wake up my father. Who-"

"Shut up!"

I did. She drove very fast and very badly. Halfway home she began to
slow down. Then suddenly she laughed -out loud and .said very
confidentially, not to me but as if to .somebody else:

" I told him I had planted a Neilsen loop around here that would put
half of Greene County out of phase. A dead man's control. I had to go
:out and stop it every week."

"What's a Neilsen loop?" I said.

"Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today," she quoted.
"What," said I emphatically, "is a-"

"I've told you, baby," she said, "and you'll never know more, God
willing," and pulling into our driveway with a screech that would have
wakened the dead, she vaulted out of the car and through the back door
into the kitchen, just as if my mother and father had both been asleep or
in a cataleptic trance, like those in .the works of E. A. Poe. Then she
told me to get the iron poker from .the garbage burner in the back yard
and find out if the end was still hot; when I brought the thing in, she laid
the hot end over one of the flames of the stove. Then she rummaged
around under the sink and came up with a bottle of my mother's Clear
Household Ammonia.

"That stuff's awful," I said. "If you let that get in your eyes-"

"Pour some in the water glass," she said, handing it to me. "Two-thirds
full. Cover it with a saucer. Get another glass and another saucer and
put all of them on the kitchen table. Fill your mother's water pitcher,
cover that, and put that on the table."

"Are you going to drink that?" I cried, horrified, halfway to the table
with the covered glass. She merely pushed me. I got everything set up,
and also pulled three chairs up to the kitchen table; I then went to turn
off the gas flame, but she took me by the hand and placed me so that I
hid the stove from the window and the door. She said, "Baby, what is
the specific heat of iron?"

"What?" I said.

"You know it, baby," she said. "What is it?"

L only stared at her.

"But you know it, baby," she said. "You know it better than I. You
know that your mother was burning garbage today and the poker would
still be hot. And you know better than to touch the iron pots when
they come fresh from the oven, even though the flame is off, because
iron takes a long time to heat up and a long .time to cool off, isn't that
so?"

I nodded.

"And you don't know," she added, "how long it takes for aluminum
pots to become cold because nobody uses aluminum for pots yet. And
if I told you how scarce the heavy metals are, and what a radionic oven
is, and how

the heat can go through the glass and the plastic and even the ceramic
lattice, you wouldn't know what I was talking about, would you?"

"No," I said, suddenly frightened, "no, no, no."

"Then you know more than some," she said. "You know more than me.
Remember how I used to burn myself, fiddling with your mother's
things?" She looked at her palm and made a face. "He's coming," she
said. "Stand in front of the stove. When he asks. you to turn off the gas,
turn it off. When I say `Now,' hit shim with the poker."

"I can't," I whispered. "He's too big."

"He can't hurt you," she said. "He doesn't dare; that would be an
anachronism. Just do as I say."

"What are you going to do?" I cried.

"When I say 'Now,"' she repeated serenely, "hit .him with the poker,"
and sitting down by .the table, she reached into a jam-jar of odds and
ends my mother kept on the windowsill and began to buff her nails with
e Lady Marlene emery stick. Two minutes passed by the kitchen clock.
Nothing happened. I stood there with my hand on the cold end of the
poker, doing nothing until I felt I had to speak, so I said, "Why are you
making a face? Does something hurt?"

"The splinter in my palm," she said calmly. "The bastard."

"Why don't you take it out?"

" It will blow up the house."

He stepped in through the open kitchen door.

Without a word she put both arms palm upward on the kitchen table
and without a word he took off the black cummerbund of his formal
dress and flicked it at her. It settled over both her arms and then began
to draw tight, molding itself over her arms and the table hike a piece of
black adhesive, pulling her almost down onto it and whipping one end
around the table edge until the wood almost cracked. It seemed to
paralyze her arms. He put his finger to his tongue and then to her palm,
where there was a small black spot. The spot disappeared. He laughed
and told me to turn off the flame, so I did.

"Take it off," she said .then.

He said, "Too bad you are in chiding or you too could
carry weapons," and then, as the edge of the table let out a startling
sound like a pistol shot, he flicked the black tape off her arms,
returning it to himself, where it disappeared into his evening clothes.

"Now that I have used this, everyone knows where we are," he said,
and he sat down in a kitchen chair that was much too small for him
and lounged back in it, his knees sticking up into the air.

Then she said something I could not understand. She took the saucer
off the empty glass and poured water into it; she said something
unintelligible again and held it out to him, but he motioned it away.
She shrugged and drank the water herself. "Flies," sh e said, and put
.the saucer back on. They sat in silence for several minutes. I did not
know what to do; I knew I was supposed to wait for the word "Now"
and then hit him with the poker, but no one seemed to be saying or
doing anything. The kitchen clock, which I had forgotten to wind that
morning, was running down at ten minutes to eleven. There was a
cricket making noise close outside the window and I was afraid the
ammonia smell would get out somehow; then, just as I was getting a
cramp in my legs from standing still, our visitor nodded. She sighed, -
too, regretfully. The strange man got to his feet, moved his chair
carefully out of the way and pronounced:

"Good. I'll call them."

"Now?" said she.

I couldn't do it. I brought the poker in front of me and stood there
with it, holding it in both hands. The stranger -who almost had to
stoop to avoid our ceiling-wasted only a glance on me, as if I were
hardly worth looking at, and then concentrated his attention on her.
She had her chin in her hands. Then she closed her eyes.

"Put that down, please," she said tiredly.

I did not know what to do. She opened her eyes and took the saucer
off the other glass on the table.

"Put that down right now," she said, and raised the glass of ammonia
to her lips.

I swung at him clumsily with .the poker. I was not sure what
happened next, -but I think he laughed and seized the end-the hot end-
and then threw me off balance just as he screamed, because the next
thing I knew I was

down on all fours watching her trio him as he threw himself at her, his
eyes screwed horribly shut, choking and coughing and just missing her.
The ammonia glass was lying empty and broken on the -floor; a brown
stain showed where it had rolled off the white tablecloth on the
kitchen table. When he fell, she kicked him in the side of the head.
Then she stepped carefully away from him and held out her hand to
me; I gave her the poker, which she took with the folded edge of the
tablecloth, and reversing it so that she held the cold end, she brought it
down with immense force-not on his head, as I had expected, but on
his windpipe. When he was still, she touched the hot end of the poker
to several places on his jacket, passed it across where his belt would
be, and to two places on both of his shoes. Then she said to me, "Get
out."

I did, but not before I saw her finishing the job on his throat, not with
the poker but with the thick heel of her silver shoe.

When I came back in, there was nobodv there. There was :a clean,
rinsed glass on the drainboard next to the wooden sink and the poker
was propped up in one corner of the sink with cold water running on
it. Our visitor was at the stove, brewing tea in my mother's brown
teapot. She was standing under -the Dutch cloth calendar my mother,
who was very modern, kept han ping on the wall. My mother pinned
messages on it; one of them read "Be Careful. Except for the
Bathroom, More Accidents Occur in the Kitchen Than in Any Other
Part of ,the House."

"Where-" I said, "where is-is-"

"Sit down," she said. "Sit down here," and she put me into his seat at
the kitchen table. But there was no he anywhere. She said, "Don't
think too much." Then she went back to the tea and just as it was
ready to pour, my mother came in from the living room, with a blanket
around her shoulders, smiling foolishly and saying, "Goodness, I've
been asleep, haven't I?"

"Tea?" said our visitor.

"I fell asleep just like that," said my mother, sitting down.

"I forgot," said our visitor. "I borrowed a car. I felt ill. I must call
them
on the telephone," and she went out onto the hall, for we had been
among the first to have a  she
phone. She came black a few minutes later. "Is it all right?" said my
mother. We drank our lea in silence.

"Tell me," said our visitor at length. "How is your radio reception?"

"It's perfectly fine," said my mother, a bit offended.

"That's fine," said our visitor, and then, as if she couldn't control
herself,
"because you live do a dead area, you know, thank God, a dead area!"

My mother said, alarmed, "I beg your par-"

"Excuse me," said our visitor, "I'm .ill," -and she put her cup into her
saucer witch a clatter, got up and went out of the kitchen. My mother
put one ;hand caressingly over mine.

"Did anyone . . . insult her at the dance?" ,said my mother, softly.

"Oh no," I said.

"Are you sure?" my mother insisted. "Are you perfectly sure? Did
anyone comment? Did anyone say anything about her appearance?
About her height? Anything that was not nice?"

"Ruth did," I said. "Ruth said she looked like a giraffe." My mother's
hand slid off mine; gratified, she got up and began to gather up the tea
things. She put ahem into the sink. She clucked her tongue over the
poker and put it away in the kitchen closet. Then she began to -dry the
glass that our visitor had previously rinsed and put on the drainboard,
the glass that had held ammonia.

"The poor woman," said my mother, drying it. "Oh, .the poor woman."

Nothing much happened after that. I began to get my books ready for
high school. Blue cornflowers sprang up along the sides of the house
.and my father, who was better now, cut them down with ,a scythe. My
mother was growing hybrid ones in the back flower garden, twice as Ball
and twice as big as -any of the wild ones; she explained to me about
hybrids and why they were bigger, but I forgot it. Our visitor took up
with a man, not a nice man, really, because he worked in the town garage
and was Polish. She didn't go out .but used to see him in the kitchen at
night. He was a thickset, stocky man, very blond, with a real Polish
name, but everyone called him

Bogalusa Joe because he had spent fifteen years in Bogalusa, Louisiana
(he called it "Loosiana") and he talked about it all the time. He had a
theory, that the ` colored people were just like us and that in a hundred
> years everybody would be all mixed up, you couldn't tell them apart.
My mother was very advanced in her views but she wouldn't ever let me
talk to him. He was very respectful; he called her "Ma'am," and didn't
use any bad s language, but he never came into the living room. He
would always meet our visitor in the kitchen or some-. times on the
swing in the back garden. They would drink coffee; they would play
cards. Sometimes she would say to. him, "Tell me a story, Joe. I love a
good story," and he would talk about hiding out in Loosiana; he had had
to ; hide out from somebody or something for three years in . the middle
of the Negroes and they had let him in and let shim work and took care
of him. He said, "The coloreds are like anybody." Then he said, "The
nigras are smarter. They got to be. They ain't nobody's fool. I had a
black girl for two years once was the smartest woman in the world.
Beautiful woman. Not -beautiful like a white, though, not the same.

"Give us a -hundred years," .he added, "and it'll all be mixed."

"Two hundred?" said our visitor, pouring coffee. He put a lot of sugar in
his; then he remarked that he had: learned that in Bogalusa. She sat
down: She was leaning her elbows on the table, smiling at him. She was
stirring her own coffee with a spoon. He looked at her a moment, and
then he said softly:

"A black woman, smartest woman in the world. You're' black, woman,
ain't you?" .

"Part," she said.

"Beautiful woman," he said. "Nobody knows?"

"They know in the circus," she said. "But there they don't care. Shall I
tell you what we circus people -think of x you?"

"Of who?" he said, looking surprised.

"Of all of you," she said. "All who aren't in the circus. `All who can't do
what we can do, who aren't the biggest or the best, who can't kill a man
barehanded or learn a, new language in six weeks or slit a man's jugular at
fifteen
yards with nothing but a pocketknife or climb the Greene County
National Bank from the first storey to the .sixth with no equipment. I
can do all that."

"I'll be damned," said Bogalusa Joe softly.

"We despise you," she said. "That's what we do. We think you're slobs.
The scum of the earth! The world's fertilizer, Joe, that's what you are."

"Baby, you're blue," he said. "You're blue tonight," and then he took her
hand across the table, but not the way they did it in the movies, not the
way they did it in the books; there was a look on his face I had never
seen on anyone's before, not the high school boys when .they put a line
over on a girl, not on grown-ups, not even on the brides and grooms
because all that was romantic or showing off or "lust" and he only
looked infinitely kind, infinitely concerned. She pulled .her hand out of
his. With the same faint, detached smile she had had all night, she pushed
back her chair and stood up. She said flatly:

"All I can do! What good is it?" She shrugged. She added, "I've got to
leave tomorrow." He got up .and put his arm around her shoulders. I
thought that looked bad because he was -actually -a couple of inches
shorter than she was.

He said, "Baby, you don't have to go." She was staring out into the back
garden, as if looking miles away, miles out, far away into our vegetable
patch or our swing or my mother's hybrids; into something nobody could
see. He said urgently, "Honey, look-" and then, when she continued to
stare, pulling her face around so she had to look at him, both his broad,
mechanic's hands under her chin, "Baby, you can stay with me." He
brought his face closer to hers. "Marry me," he said suddenly. She began
to laugh. I had never heard her laugh like that before. Then she began to
choke. He put his arms around her and she leaned against him, choking,
malting funny noises like someone with asthma, finally clapping her
hands over her face, then biting her palm, heaving up and down as if she
were sick. It took me several ,seconds to realize that she was crying. He
looked very troubled. T ey stood there: she cried, he, distressed-and I
hiding, watching all of it. They began to walk slowly toward the kitchen
door. When they had gone out and put out the light, I followed

them out into the back garden, to the swing my father had rigged up
under the one big tree: cushions and springs to the ground like a piece of
furniture, big enough to hold-' four people. Bushes screened it. There
was a kerosene lantern my father had mounted on a post, but it was out.
I could just about see them. They sat for a few minutes, saying nothing,
looking up through .the tree into the darkness. The swing creaked a little
as our visitor crossed and uncrossed her long legs. She took out a
cigarette and lit it, their faces with even that little glow: an orange spot
that wavered up and down as she smoked, making the darkness more
black. Then it disappeared. She had ground it out underfoot in the grass.
h could see them. again. Bogalusa Joe, the garage mechanic, said:

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," she said. Then they kissed each other. I liked that; it was
all right; I had seen it before. She--' leaned back against the cushions of
the swing and seemed; to spread her feet in the invisible grass; she let her
head and arms fall back onto tile cushion. Without saying a word, he
lifted her skirt far above her knees and put his .' hand between her legs.
There was a great deal more of the same business and I watched it all,
from the first twisting to the stabbings, the noises, the life-and-death -_
battle in the dark. The word Epilepsy kept repeating itself in my head.
They got dressed and again began to smoke, ,talking in tones I could not
hear. I crouched in the bushes, my heart beating violently.

She did not leave the next day, or the next or the next; and she even
took a dress to my mother and asked if she .: could have it altered
somewhere in town. My school-:_ clothes were out, being aired in the
back yard to get the mothball smell out of them. I put covers on all my
books. ' I came down one morning to ask my mother whether I couldn't
have a jumper taken up at the hem because the _ magazines said it was
all right for young girls. I expected a fight over it. I couldn't find my
mother in the hall or the kitchen so I tried the living room, but before I
had r got halfway through the living-room arch, someone said,: "Stop
there," and I saw both my parents sitting on two
chairs near the front door, both with their hands in their laps, both
staring straight ahead, motionless as zombies.

I said, "Oh for heaven's sake, what're you-"

"Stop there," said the same voice. My parents did not move. My
mother was smiling her social smile. There was no one else in the
room. I waited for a little while, my parents continuing to be dead, and
then from some corner on my left, near the new Philco, our visitor
came gliding out, wrapped in my mother's spring coat, stepping softly
across the rug and looking carefully at all the living-room windows.
She grinned when she saw me. She tapped the tap of the Philco radio
and motioned me in. Then she took off the coat and draped it :over
.the radio.

She was in .black from head to foot.

I thought black, but black was not the word; the word was blackness,
dark beyond dark, dark that drained the eyesight, something I could
never have imagined even in my dreams, a black in which there was no
detail, no sight, no nothing, only an awful, desperate dizziness, for her
body-the thing was skintight, like a diver's costume or an acrobat's-had
actually disappeared, completely blotted out except for its outline.
Her head and bare hand floated in the air. She said, "Pretty, yes?"
Then she at crosslegged on our radio. She said, "Please pull the
curtains," and I dial, going from one to the other and drawing them
shut, circling my frozen parents and then stopping in the middle of the
quaking floor. I said, "I'm going to faint." She was off the radio and
into my mother's coat in an instant; holding me by the arm, she got me
onto the livingroom couch and put her arm :around me, massaging my
back. She said, "Your parents are asleep." Then she said, "You have
known some of this. You area wonderful little pickup but you get
mixed up, yes? All about the Morlocks? The Trans-Temporal
Military Authority?"

I began to say "Oh oh,oh oh-" -and she massaged my back again.

"Nothing will hurt you," she said. "Nothing will hurt your parents.
Think how exciting it is! Think! The rebel Morlocks, the revolution in
the Trans-Temporal Military Authority."

"But I-I-" I said.

"We are friends," she continued gravely, taking my

hands. "We are real friends. You helped me. We will not forget that,"
and slinging my mother's coat off onto the couch, she went and stood
in front of the archway. She put her hands an her hips, then began
rubbing the back of her neck nervously and clearing her throat. She
turned around to give me one last look.

"Are you calm?" she said. I nodded. She smiled at me. "Be calm," she
said softly. "Sois tranquille. We're friends," and then she put herself
to watching the archway. She said once, almost sadly, "Friends," and
then stepped back and smiled again at me.

The archway was turning into a mirror. It got misty, then bright, like a
cloud of bright dust, then almost like a curtain; and then it was -a
mirror, although all I could see in it was our visitor and myself, not my
parents, not the furniture, not the living room.

Then the first Morlock stepped through.

And the second.

And the third.

And the others.

Oh, the living room was filled with giants! They were like her, like her
in the face, like her in the bodies of the very tall, like her in the black
uniforms, men and women of all the races of the earth, everything
mixed and huge as my mother's hybrid flowers but a foot taller than
our visitor, a flock of black ravens, black bats, black wolves, the
professionals of the future world, perched on our furniture, on the
Philco radio, some on the very walls and drapes -of the windows as if
they could fly, hovering in the air as if they were out in space where
the Morlocks meet, half a thousand in a bubble between the stars.

Who rule the worlds.

Two came through the mirror who crawled on the rug, both in diving
suits and goldfish-bowl helmets, a man and a woman, fat and shaped
like seals. They lay on the rug breathing .water (for I saw the specks
flowing in it, in and out of strange frills around their necks, the way
dust moves in air) and looking up at the rest with tallowy faces. Their
suits bulged. One of the Morlocks said something to one of the seals
and one of seals answered, fingering a ,thing attached to the barrels -on
its back, gurgling.
Then they all began to talk.

    Even if I'd known what language it was, I think it
would have been too fast for me; it was very fast, very
hard-sounding, very urgent, like the numbers pilots call in
to the ground or something like that, like a code that
everybody knows, to get things done as fast as you can.
Only the seal-people talked slowly, and they gurgled and
stank like a dirty beach. They did not even move their
faces except to make little round mouths, like fish. I
think I was put to sleep for a while (or maybe I just
fell asleep) and then it was something about the seal-
people, with the Morlock who was seated on the radio
joining in--and then general enough-and then something
going round the whale room-wand then that fast, hard
urgent talk .between one of the Morlocks .and my friend.
It was still business, but they looked at me; it was awful
to be looked at and yet I felt numb; I wished I were
asleep; I wanted to cry because I could not understand a
word they were saying. Then my friend suddenly shouted;
she stepped back and threw both arms out, hands ex-
tended and fingers spread, .shaking violently. She was
shouting instead of talking, shouting desperately about
something, pounding one fist into her palm, her face con-
torted, just as if it was not business. The other Morlock
was breathing quickly and had gone pale with rage. He
whispered something, some thing very venomous. He .took
from his black uniform, which could have hidden any-
thing, a silver dime, and holding it up between thumb
and forefinger, he said in perfectly clear English, while
looking at me:

"In the name of the war against the Trans-Tempor-"

She had jumped him in an instant. I scrambled up; I saw her close his fist
about the dime with ,her own; then it was all a blur on the floor until the
two of them stood up again, as far as they could get from each other,
because it was perfectly clear that they hated each other. She said very
distinctly, "1 do insist." He shrugged. He said something short and
sharp. She took out of her own darkness a knife-only a knife-and looked
slowly about the room at each person in it. Nobody moved. She raised
her eyebrows.

"Tchal grozny?"

The seal-woman hissed on the floor, like steam coming out of a leaky
radiator. She did not get up but lay on her back, eyes blinking, -a woman
encased in fat.

"You?" said my friend insultingly. "You will stain the carpet."

The seal-woman hissed again. Slowly my friend walked toward her, the
others watching. She did not bend down, as I had expected, but dove
down abruptly with a kind of sidewise roll, driving herself into the seal-
woman's side. She had planted one heel on the stomach :of the woman's
diving suit; she seemed to be trying to tear it. The sealwoman caught my
friend's knife=hand with one glove and was trying to turn it on my friend
while she wrapped the other gloved arm around my friend's neck. She
was trying to strangle her. My friend's free arm was extended on the rug;
it seemed to me that she was either leaning on the floor .or trying to pull
herself free. Then again everything went into a sudden blur. There was a
gasp, a loud, mechanical click; my friend vaulted up and backward, _.
dropping her knife and clapping one hand to her left eye. The seal-
woman was turning from side to :side on th floor, a kind of shudder
running from her feet to he -'' head, an expressionless flexing of her body
and face.: Bubbles were forming in the goldfish-bowl helmet. They other
seal-person did not move. As I watched, the water` began falling in the
seal-woman's helmet and then it w all air. I supposed she was dead. My
friend, our visitor,; was standing in the middle of the room, blood welling:
from under her hand; she was bent over with pain and her face was
horribly distorted :but not one person in th room moved to touch her.

"Life-" she gasped, "for life. Yours," and then she crashed to the rug. The
seal-woman shad slashed open hex eye. Two of the Morlocks rushed to
her then and picked up her and her knife; they were dragging her toward
the. mirror in the archway when she ,began muttering some-; thing.

"Damn your sketches!" shouted the Morlock she ha fought with,
completely losing control of himself. "W are at war; Trans-Temp is at
our heels; do you think we have time for dilettantism? You presume on
being than, woman's granddaughter! We are fighting for the freedom
of fifty billions of people, not for your scribbles!" and motioning to the
others, who immediately dragged the body of .the seal-woman through
the mirror and began to follow it themselves, he turned to me.

"You!" he snapped. "You will speak to nobody of this. Nobody!"

I put my arms around myself.

"Do not try to impress anyone with stories," he added
contemptuously. "You are lucky to live," and without another look he
followed the last of the Morlocks through the mirror, which promptly
disappeared. There was blood on the rug, a few inches from my feet. I
bent down and put my fingertips in it, and then with no clear reason, I
put my fingers to my face.

"--come back," said my mother. I turned to face them, the wax manikins
who had seen nothing.

"Who the devil drew the curtains!" shouted my father. "I've told you"
(to me) "that I don't like tricks, young lady, and if it weren't for your
mother's-"

"Oh, Ben, Ben! She's had a nosebleed!" cried my mother.

They told me later that I fainted.

I was in bed a few days, because of the nosebleed, but then they let me
up. My parents said I probably had had anemia. They also said they
had seen our visitor off at the railroad station that morning, and that she
had boarded the train as they watched her; tall, frizzy-haired, freakish,
dressed in black down to between the knees and ankles, legged like a
stork and carrying all '.her belongings in a small valise. "Gone to the
circus," said my mother. There was nothing in the room that had been
hers, nothing in the attic, no reflection in the window at which she had
stood, brilliantly lit .against the black night, nothing in the kitchen and
nothing at the Country Club but tennis courts overgrown with weeds.
Joe never came back to our house: The week before school I looked
through all my books, starting with The Time Machine and ending with
The Green Hat; then I went downstairs and looked through every book
in the house. There was nothing. I was invited to a party; my mother
would not let me go. Cornflowers grew around the house. Betty came
over once and was

bored. One afternoon at the end of summer, with the wind blowing
through the empty house from top to bottom and everybody away,
nobody next door, my parents in the back yard, the people on the other
side of us gone swimming, everybody silent or sleeping or off
somewhere -except for someone down the block whom I could bear
mowing the lawn-I decided to sort and try on all my shoes. I did this
in front of a full-length mirror fastened to -the inside of my closet door.
Iliad been taking off and putting on various of my winter dresses, too,
and I was putting one particular one away in a box on the floor of ;the
closet when I chanced to look up at the inside of the closet door.

She was standing an the mirror. It was all black behind her, like velvet.
She was wearing something blackand silver, half-draped, ;half-nude, and
there were lines on her face that made it look sectioned off, or like a
cobweb; she had one eye. The dead eye radiated spinning white light,
like a Catherine wheel. She said:

"Did you ever think to go back and take care of yourself when you are
little? Give yourself advice?"

I couldn't say anything.

"I am not you," she said, "but I ;have had the .same thought and now I
have come back four hundred and fifty years. Only there is nothing to
say. There is never anything to say. It is a pity, but natural, no doubt."

"Oh, please!" I whispered. "Stay!" She put one foot up on the edge of
the mirror as if it were the threshold of a door. The silver sandal she
had worn at .the Country Club dance almost came into my bedroom:
thick-heeled, squat, flaking, as ugly as sin; new lines formed on her face
and all over her bare skin, ornamenting her all over. Then she stepped
back; she shook her head, amused; the dead eye waned, filled again,
exploded in sparks and went out, showing the naked .socket, ugly,
shocking and horrible.

"Tcha!" .she said, "my grandma thought she would bring something
hard to a world that was soft and silly but nice, and now .it's silly and
not so nice and the hard has got too hard and the soft too -soft and my
greatgrandma-it is she who founded the order-is dead. Not that it
matters. Nothing ends, you .see. Just keeps going on and on."
"But you can't see!" I managed. She poked herself in the temple and the
eye went on again.

"Bizarre," she said. "Interesting. Attractive. Stone blind is twice as good.
I'll tell you my sketches."

"But you don't-you can't " I said.

"The first," she said, lines crawling all over her, "is an Eloi having the
Go-
Jollies, and that is a bald, fat man in a toga, a frilled bib, a sunbonnet
and
shoes you would not believe, who has a crystal ball .in his lap and from it
wires plugged into his eyes and his nose and his ears and his tongue and
his head, just like your lamps. That is an Eloi having the Go-Jollies."

I began to cry.

"The second," she went on, "is a Morlock working; and that is myself
holding a skull, like Hamlet, only if you look closely at the skull you will
see it is the world, with funny things sticking out of the seas and the
polar ice caps, and that it is full of people. Much too full. There are too
many of the worlds, too."

"If you'll stop-!" I cried.

"They are all pushing each other off," she continued, "and some are
falling into the sea, which is a pity, no doubt, but quite natural, and if
you will look closely at all these Eloi you will see that each one is
holding his crystal ball, or running after an animated machine which runs
faster than he, or watching another Eloi on a screen who is cleverer and
looks fascinating, and you will see that under the fat the man or woman
is screaming, screaming and dying.

"And my third sketch," she said, "which is a very little one, shows a
goldfish bowl full of people in black. Behind that is a smaller goldfish
bowl full of people in black, which is going after the first goldfish bowl,
and behind the second is a third, which is going after the second, and so
on, or perhaps they alternate; that would be more economical. Or
perhaps I am only bitter because I lost my eye. It's a personal problem."

I got to my feet. I was so close I could have touched her. She crossed her
arms across her breast and looked down at me; she then said softly, "My
dear, I wished to take you with me, but that's impossible. I'm very
sorry,"

and looking for the first time both serious and tender, she disappeared
behind a swarm of sparks.

I was looking at myself. I had recently made, passionately and in secret,
the uniform of the Trams-Temporal Military Authority as I thought it
ought to look: a black tunic over black ;sleeves and black tights. The
tights were from a high school play I .had been in the year before and the
rest was cut .out of the lining of an old winter coat. That was what I
was wearing ,that afternoon. I had also fastened a silver curling-iron to
my waist with a piece of cord. I put -one foot up in the air, as if on the
threshold of the mirror, and a girl in ragged black stared back at me. She
turned and frantically searched the entire room, looking for sketches, for
notes, for specks of silver paint, for anything at all. Then she sat down
on my bed. She did not cry. She said to me, "You look idiotic."
Someone was still mowing the lawn outside, probably my father. My
mother would be clipping, patching, rooting up weeds; she never
stopped. Someday I would join the circus, travel to the moon, write a
book; after -all, I had helped kill a man. I had been somebody. It was
all nonsense. I took off the curling-iron and lad it on the bed. Then I
undressed .and got into my middy-blouse and skirt and I put the costume
on the bed in a heap. As I walked toward the -door of the room, I
turned to take one last look at myself in the mirror and at my strange
collection of old clothes. For a moment something else moved in the
mirror, or I thought it did, something bebind me or to one side,
something menacing, something half-blind, something heaving slowly
like a shadow, leaving perhaps behind it faint silver flakes like the
shadow of a shadow or some carelessly dropped coins, something
glittering, something somebody had left on the edge of vision, dropped
by accident in the dust .and cobwebs of an attic. I wished for it
violently; I stood and clenched my fists; I almost cried; I wanted
something to come out of the mirror and strike me dead. If I could not
have :a protector, I wanted a monster, a mutation, a horror, a murderous
disease, anything at all to accompany me downstairs so that I would not
have to go down alone.

Nothing came. Nothing god, nothing bad. I heard the lawnmower going
on. I would have to face by myself
father's red face, his heart disease, his temper, his nasty' insistencies. I
would have to face my mother's sick smile, looking up from the
flowerbed she was weeding, always on her knees somehow, saying
before she was ever asked, "Oh the poor woman. Oh the poor
woman." And quite alone. No more stories.