Masters of the Maze (7 page)

In short, a stroke of luck, this letter was not to be passed up.

It had been years since Nate rode on any but a very few — in fact, one or two — main route trains, and the deterioration of service on the smaller, branch lines was an unpleasant surprise. The trains grew dirtier and later and older with each successive change … and four changes were involved. However, regarding the journey as (a) a fun thing in itself, and (b) practice for tripping and touring in Ruritania and Graustark, he was able to regard the worsening and the waits with equanimity. If the train was too hot, he took off his jacket and if it was too cold he put it back on, also his overcoat. He regretted most of all that the filthy-dirty windows prevented his observing most of the scenery. The railroads might still have to carry passengers, but they didn’t have to let them look out at their own country. As for making available food and drink (except sometimes a trickle of dirty water), ha ha.

The final train was, as a baggage-smasher at the transfer point predicted, “some late.” It was also the oldest, dirtiest, smelliest, most rust-eaten one of all. But it was the only game in town, so N. Gordon boarded it, and, after a gloomy, chilly, jerky ride, was let off at a goat shed in the snow-covered foothills. Fortunately, he was awaited.

“You, Mr. Jordan? I’m Ozzie Heid, work for Mr. Bellamy, let’s get in the car. Lordy, it’s cold out here, gimme your grip: there.”

The warmth of the automobile was worth a mispronunciation, Nate thought; though the car seemed almost as old and worn and untidy as the railroad coach, it seemed somehow infinitely less nasty. The upthrusting springs of the front seat were covered well enough with old blankets and sheepskins; in the back, jammed with groceries and a pair of snowshoes and a shotgun, an old red setter bitch helped a pile of winter apples to mature.

“Long time since I picked up any visitor there at Fishokan,” Ozzie said, wiping the inside of the windshield. “Man from the bank, doctor, and repairmen and such, they come by car. Fellow of your name and about your general type appearance, picked
him
up at the depot a few years ago, he wasn’t feeling no pain, like they say, stood on his head and whistled
Dixie,
nice sparkly young fellow, didn’t stay long, though, mmmm, well …”

Ozzie’s face resembled one of those bas-relief maps which children are sometimes encouraged to make out of
papier-mâché
or plaster or whatever it is, and then color, instead of being taught to read and write and cypher, the little bastards; there were ranges and ridges and riverine systems and coastlines and valleys, in a surprising variety of colors — red, white, orange, yellow, purple. It seemed rather unfair to describe him as a Kallikak and he had only five fingers on each hand.

“That’s Nokomas,” he said, by and by, as they passed through a cluster of old-looking houses dotted with new-looking gas stations and a lunch-wagon; “that’s where
we
live, the people that work for Mr. Bellamy, used to be Nokomas
Mills,
first woolen mills in this here entire part of the state, used water power, but that’s all been done away with now, oh, years and years ago. Next place we hit, Fisher’s Crossings, nothing but the roadhouse there and that’s closed this time of year, and the old Fisher house, after that, why, just woods and hills till we get to Darkglen. Ought to make it just about at dark, too. More or less I just unload you and pick up Glory, that’s Mrs. Smith, turn around and drive back to home. Only body else that works there this time o’ year, that’s Keren, she drives her own Buick.”

“Drives it where?”

“Why, back to Nokomas, too — there, see there, that’s where my boy and me cut most our wood for this winter, I burn wood, that’s what I burn,
wood.
Takes us a lot of time to cut enough cords, I can tell you, there’s people who laugh at us, got an oil burner, a person I could name, ‘All I do is switch a button,’ he says. Yes, and come one good storm, down go the wires, down goes the electricity, his oil tank might just be a puddle of piss for all the good it does him, but I just go out and get another armful of wood; here we turn off the county road,
lie
down, Beauty,
lie
down…. Smells something in the woods, dog has a nose that you wouldn’t believe, she used to cut up something wonderful at the big house from time to time, seems to get terrible excited and then scared half to death, so I don’t bring her no more, except for just a short trip like now.”

Second-growth timber began to give way to thicker stands of higher, older trees, and the land commenced rising more steeply. It had been weeks since it had snowed in New York City, and that fall had long since been churned into a greasy black muck and washed away by rains. But here it still lay “white and smooth and even” — or, Nate mused, was it “white and
crisp
and even?”

The question was perhaps not so much why there were no more such houses as Darkglen but why there ever had been. They really had no natural source in the United States at all. A case might be made for possible origins in the southern “plantations” or the relatively fewer “manors” of the Hudson Valley patroonships, but it could be a case only for the sake of argument. No — the American country mansion did not descend from anything, but neither was it original. It was imitative, artificial, conspicuous construction, neither useful nor ornamental, and often not even picturesquely ugly. No owner of Darkglen or any of its fellows had ever cultivated his fields for sustenance or even profit. It was one of the examples of giganticism which so often herald the coming extinction of a species, a great prostrate dinosaur of a house, sprawled in the glade which had given it its name, neo-Tudor out of mock-Gothic, with outbuildings wallowing about it like whale calves.

“There she be,” said Ozzie Heid. Nate interrupted his socio-philosophizing to catch back at something Ozzie had answered earlier.

“You and Mrs. Smith drive back to Nokomas and so does Mrs. — you mean, nobody stays here overnight but Mr. Bellamy?”

Ozzie braked to a stop beside a smaller phenotype of the big house. “That’s right, but we’ve got the guest place all fixed up for you, it’s nice and warm there.”

It was, indeed, even though it smelled of recent cleaning and of having been long closed up. The furniture was dark and heavy and the lamp shades had
art nouveau
designs in colored glass, the bathroom sink was marble — but it produced hot water. Nate unpacked, looked around some more while the long tub filled, and then took a long, slow bath. After that he remembered his mother’s warning about the danger of exposing himself to the cold air after a hot soak (“Your
pores
are open!”) and, bundling up warmly, he went off to see for the first time the master of Darkglen.

• • •

Certainly he had never met anyone exactly like him before.

The difference lay in small things — he used a cocktail shaker — he had the dry, rather quiet, rather sexless look of an old, male librarian — the alert air of a hunter in the season of his chosen game — he quoted Paracelsus — his manner was old-fashioned, courteous, decisive — his skin seemed to show an inner unhealth as well as an outer pallor — and so on and on.

“You are fortunate in your profession,” Mr. Bellamy said, as they drank their cocktails. “For one thing, it indicates … and I suppose it must tend to cultivate … the possession of inner resources, thus leaving you less dependent on the outer world for stimulus.”

Nate said, “I hadn’t thought about it that way.” He at once began to think of it in that way, and this brought him back, of course, to the problems he had brought along with him.

“But it can happen … it has been known to happen … that a certain attention away from the outer world has brought forth an outward-turning which proves in the long run much richer.”

Nate made a brief attempt to grapple with this statement, which his host had made rather intently, even leaning forward a bit; but it only made him think of monasteries, and this in turn made him wonder if he ought to visit any monasteries on his European trip … Mount Athos seemed always good for an article … if he ever got to make a European trip … perhaps he might do a piece out here … hmmm … Buddhist monasteries …
evil Buddhist monks,
the public might go for that just at the moment: Evil Buddhist Monks Tried to Burn Me Alive,
It all began one mad, marijuana-merry night in a Zen “coffeehouse” in —

“ — I don’t know that the concepts of duty and of self-gratification are incompatible,” Joseph Bellamy was saying, surveying the heavy glass held in his hand, “and — ”

“ — I don’t, either,” Nate replied, to the surprise of both.

Mr. Bellamy’s expression lightened, brightened. “It came, though, you know, as a slow surprise to me, that the highest form of self-gratification could come about only through self-fulfillment, and that duty could be the most certain path to this … Eh?”

Nate said, “Mmm …”

Bellamy waited a moment, then he sat back, looked away into the eye of the fire. It was a good, big fire tonight; his young visitor made no work at all of feeding it. He might be getting through to him, then, again, he absolutely might not; they might have other things in mind altogether. Well. He would not rush it. So far the approach was purely on the level of philosophy and attitudes. Specifics and tangibles must come later, if they came at all. He would not hurry. Either this not-quite-kinsman of his would stay long enough … for if he did not, if the loneliness overmastered him and bore him away, then he was clearly not the man for the work.

But, clearly, from the way he nursed his drink, he was not a common drunkard like his older brother.

Bellamy after all could not know that Nate Gordon didn’t care for cocktails and was wondering if he might, should, could, later on, try to put through a call to Peggy Stone in New York. Or that one corner of Nate’s mind was comforting itself with the safe recollection of a bottle of hundred-proof rye in the valise in the guest house.

• • •

Word was brought to Et-dir-Mor that a great red fish, a veritable mer-mother, was seen slowly making her way up River Rahanarit, pausing to graze along the way in the shallow eel-meadows, lifting her head above water with increasing frequency, trying her long-unaccustomed lungs. The gongs sounded slowly and the great drums beat with measured, signal pulse, and at each village the folk trooped down, joyful and sedate, with flowers and festal bread to strew upon the water. And as the signals resounded slowly over land and water, the fen-men obediently removed all nets and stakes and weirs and retreated to the thinlets where the red mother would not go. For who knew in what marsh or estuary it might please her at last to heave her great bulk from water long enough to scour out a nest and — panting and whispering — deposit her clustering eggs.

Then she would ease her vast scarlet body back into the channel and drift down-river to the sound of quick and joyful bells and further offerings. But when the huge he-fish made his own journey up along the river-road not a gong would beat nor a drum sound, nor any offering be made, for the fish-fathers never ate at such times. Unfailingly, infallibly, he would find the nest and there do his own part, as no one watched. She was scarlet, he was crimson, she was huge, he was more huge. And as he in his own turn descended the river, from each riverine village one boat of chosen men would follow him until, as the great red mer-father disembogued into the bay, an entire procession of boats followed him, paddles flashing in the sun. Each group of six vessels would choose among its number by the odd-or-even paddle game, and then the choices would repeat this until one boat was selected.

And then the boatmen would draw lots.

At this time, and not before, was silence broken. The great shell-horns brayed and boo-boo’d from every boat. Thus they signaled the great red fish-father. Then, spread out now into a crescent formation, they approached, the winning boat apart and first, and in formal, fitting language, they challenged him.

If he withdrew, then, being excused, they mocked him and cursed him and covered him with scorn, and returned to the river in a fine bitter humor. Subsequently they would get drunk.

But if he chose to accept, if he turned for fight, then none but the fighting boat met him, the man of choice poised with his lances ready. One boat less might return to the river, or they might all return, towing the honored form of the great red fish behind the flotilla. They would honor him, praise him, mourn him, eat him.

Such was the nature of things; it was like wind and rain and sunlight and the acts of love and birth and dance.

Et-dir-Mor smiled when he heard that a red mer-mother was ascending River Rahanarit, the same warm smile with which he heard that a young man had been seen going off into the woods with one of his granddaughters. Life continued, the wheel turned, the earth moved, and even death — that delightful biological necessity — was an aspect of life. It delighted him to think how much he had to reflect upon this day: the appearance of a great red fish, a number of absolutely new mathematical problems sent him by the Council to be solved at his leisure, the promise shown as a Watcher by his twin grandsons — and, as always, the amusing speculation as to who their begetting father might have been! — and the promised visit of his old friend, Am-bir-Ros.

“I think I might cheer me by seeing the old mother,” he said, aloud. It was casually said, merely vocal expression of what, after all, was no more than a thought. But Ro-ved-Per was so immediately pleased at the notion of his grandfather having his pleasure that the thought became at once an intention, and so, a fact.

He looked at the flower-colored thing beneath his grandson’s gaze. He pointed. “The lines …
here
… are, it seems to me, in more of a state of flux than usual. If you see any extension of that from the present level down along,” his finger traced, “this group of lines, do, my daughter’s son, send word to me directly.”

“I will.”

Et-dir-Mor pinned a light mantle over one shoulder and, going, turned only to ask, “Where is your twin? Is he studying?”