“This day next week,” said the senior member, “we have a meeting with him in his hotel.” He rose, looking around him, ready to go. Those members who had accepted drinks swallowed them hastily. “I’m sorry,” the senior member said, “that after all your labors we’ve gone our own way.”
“It’s no doubt just as well,” Hawksquill said, not rising.
They looked at each other—all standing now—in that unconvincing manner, this time expressing thoughtful doubt or doubtful thought, and took a muted leave of her. One hoped aloud as they went out that she had not been offended; and the others, as they inserted themselves into their cars, pondered that possibility, and what it might mean for them.
Hawksquill, alone, pondered it too.
Released from her obligation to the Club, she was a free agent. If a new old Empire were rearising in the world, she couldn’t but think it would give her new and wider scope for her powers. Hawksquill was not immune to the lure of power; great wizards rarely are.
And yet no New Age was at hand. Whatever powers stood behind Russell Eigenblick might not, in the end, be as strong as the powers the Club could bring against them.
Whose side then, supposing she could determine which side was which, would she be on?
She watched the legs her brandy made on the sides of the glass. A week from today… She rang for the Maid of Stone, ordered coffee, and readied herself for a long night’s work: they were too few now to spend one asleep.
A Secret Sorrow
Exhausted by fruitless labor, she came down some time after dawn and went out into the bird-loud street.
Opposite her tall and narrow house was a small park which had once been public but which was now sternly locked; only the residents of those houses and private clubs which faced on it, viewing it with calm possessiveness, had keys to the wrought-iron gates. Hawksquill had one. The park, too chock-full of statues, fountains, birdbaths and such fancies, rarely refreshed her, since she had more than once used it as a sort of notepad, sketching quickly on its sunwise perimeter a Chinese dynasty or a Hermetic mathesis, none of which (of course) she was now able to forget.
But now in the misty dawn on the first day of May it was obscure, vague, not rigorous. It was air mostly, almost not a City air, sweet and rich with the exhalation of newborn leaves; and obscurity and vagueness were just what she required now.
As she came up to the gate she used, she saw that someone was standing before it, gripping the bars and staring within hopelessly, obverse of a jailed man. She hesitated. Walkers-abroad at this hour were of two kinds: humdrum hard workers up early, and the unpredictable and the lost who had been up all night. Those seemed to be pajama bottoms protruding from beneath this one’s long overcoat, but Hawksquill didn’t take this to mean that he was an early riser. She chose a grand-lady manner as best suited to the encounter and, taking out her key, asked the man to excuse her, she’d like to open the gate.
“About time too,” he said.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said; he had stood aside only slightly, expectantly, and she saw that he intended to follow her in. “It’s a private park. I’m afraid you can’t come in. It’s only for those who live around it, you see. Who have the key.”
She could see his face now clearly, with its desperate growth of whisker and its wrinkles etched deeply with filth; yet he was young. Above his fierce yet vacant eyes a single eyebrow ran.
“It’s damned unfair,” he said. “They’ve all got houses, what the hell do they need a park for too?” He stared at her, rageful and frustrated. She wondered if she should explain to him that there was no more injustice in his being locked out of this park than out of the buildings that surrounded it. The way he looked at her seemed to require some plea; or then on the other hand perhaps the injustice he complained of was the universal and unanswerable kind, the kind Fred Savage liked to point up, needing no spurious or ad-hoc explanations. “Well,” she said, as she often did to Fred.
“When your own great-grandfather built the damn thing.” His eyes looked upward, calculating. “Great-great-grandfather.” He pulled, with sudden purpose, a glove from his pocket, put it on (his medicus extending naked from an unseamed finger) and began brushing away the new-leaving ivy and obscuring dirt from a plaque screwed to the rusticated red-stone gate-post. “See? Damn it.” The plaque said—it took her a moment to work it out, surprised she had never noticed it, the whole history of Beaux-Arts public works could have been laid on its close-packed Roman face and the floweret nailheads that held it in place—the plaque said “Mouse Drinkwater Stone 1900.”
He wasn’t a nut. City-dwellers in general and Hawksquill in particular have a sure sense, in these encounters, of the distinction—fine but real—between the impossible imaginings of the mad and the equally impossible but quite true stories of the merely lost and damned, “Which,” she said, “are you, the Mouse, the Drinkwater, or the Stone?”
“I guess you wouldn’t know,” he said, “how impossible it is to get a little peace and quiet in this town. Do I look like a bum to you?”
“Well,” she said.
“The fact is you can’t sit down on a God damn park bench or a doorway without ten drunks and loudmouths collecting as though they were blown together. Telling you their life stories. Passing around a bottle. Chums. Did you know how many bums are queer? A lot. It’s surprising.” He said it was surprising but in fact he seemed to feel it was just what was to be expected and no less infuriating for that. “Peace and quiet,” he said again, in a tone so genuinely full of longing, so full of the dewy tulip-beds and shadowed walks within the little park, that she said: “Well, I suppose an exception can be made. For a descendant of the builder.” She turned her key in the lock and swung open the gate. For a moment he stood as before those final gates of pearl, wondering; then he went in.
Once inside his rage seemed to abate, and though she hadn’t intended it, she walked with him along the curiously curving paths that seemed always about to lead them deeper within the park but in fact always contrived to direct them back to its perimeters. She knew the secret of these—which was, of course, to take those paths which seemed to be heading outward, and you would go in; and with subtle motions she directed their steps that way. The paths, though they didn’t seem to, led them in to where a sort of pavilion or temple—a tool shed in fact, she supposed—stood at the park’s center. Overarching trees and aged bushes disguised its miniature size; from certain angles it appeared to be the visible porch or corner of a great house; and though the park was small, here at the center the surrounding city, by some trick of planting and perspective, could hardly be perceived at all. She began to remark on this.
“Yes,” he said. “The further in you go, the bigger it gets. Would you like a drink?” He pulled from his pocket a flat clear bottle.
“Early for me,” she said. She watched, fascinated, as he undid the bottle and slid a good bit of it down a throat no doubt now so flayed and tanned it couldn’t feel. She was surprised then to see him shaken by big involuntary shudders, and his face twisted in disgust just as hers would have been if she’d tried that gulp. Just a beginner, she thought. Just a child, really. She supposed he had a secret sorrow, and was pleased to contemplate it; it was just the change she needed from the hugeness she had been struggling with.
They sat together on a bench. The young man wiped the neck of his bottle on his sleeve and recapped it carefully. He slid it into the pocket of his brown overcoat without haste. Strange, she thought, that glass and clear cruel liquid could be so comforting, so tenderly regarded. “What the hell is that supposed to be?” he said.