A Getaway Look
Doc meanwhile had also drifted away from his wife’s discourse, leaving her only Sophie (who was asleep) and Great-aunt Cloud (who was also asleep, though Momdy didn’t know it). Doc went with Auberon following the toiling caravan of ants bearing goodies to their hilclass="underline" a good big new one, when they found it.
“Stocks, supplies, inventory,” Doc translated, a look of quiet absorption in his face and his ear cocked to the little city. “Watch your step, watch your back. Routes, work-loads, chain of command, upper echelons, front-office gossip; drop it, forget it, circular file, pass the buck, wander off, let George do it; back in line, the old salt mines, in harness, in and out, lost and found. Directives, guidelines, grapevine, schedules, check in, knock off, out sick. Much the same.” He chuckled. “Much the same.”
Auberon, hands on his knees, watched the miniature armored vehicles (driver and vehicle in one, and radio antenna too) tumble in and out. He imagined the congress within: endless busyness in the dark. Then he half-saw something, as though there were a darkness or a brightness in the corner of his vision, gathering until it was large enough for him to notice. He looked up and around.
What he had seen or noticed was not something, but something missing. Lilac was gone.
“Now up, or down, at the Queen’s, that’s very different,” Doc said.
“Yeah, I see,” Auberon said, looking around. Where? Where was she? Though there were often long periods when he didn’t exactly notice her presence, he had always been aware of her, had always sensed she was there by him somewhere. Now she was gone.
“This is very interesting,” Doc said.
Auberon caught sight of her, down the hill, just going around a group of trees antechamber to the woods. She looked back for a moment, and (seeing that he saw her) hurried out of sight. “Yes,” Auberon said, sidling away.
“Up at the Queen’s,” Doc said. “What is it?”
“Yes,” Auberon said, and ran, racing toward the place where Lilac had disappeared, apprehension in his heart.
He didn’t see her when he entered that stand of trees. He had no idea which way to follow further, and a panic seized him: that look she had given him as she turned away into the woods had been a getaway look. He heard his grandfather’s voice calling him. He stepped carefully. The beechwood he stood in, smooth-floored and regular as a pillared hall, showed him a dozen vistas down which she could have fled…
He saw her. She stepped out from behind a tree, quite calmly, she even had what appeared to be a bunch of dog-tooth violets in her hand, and seemed to be looking around herself for more. She didn’t look back at him, and he stood confused, knowing deeply that she had run away from him, though she didn’t look now like she had, and then she was gone again, she’d tricked him with the bouquet into standing still one moment too long. He raced to the place she’d disappeared, knowing even as he ran that she was gone for goodnow, but calling: “Don’t go, Lilac!”
The woods into which she had escaped were various, dense and briary, dark as a church, and showed him no prospects. He plunged in blindly, stumbling, torn at. Very quickly he found himself deeper in The Wood than he had ever been, as though he had shot through a door without noticing that it opened on a flight of cellar stairs to pitch him headlong down. “Don’t,” he called out, lost. “Don’t go.” An imperious voice, such as he had never used to her before, such as he had never had to, such as she could not conceivably have refused. But nothing answered him. “Don’t go,” he said again, not imperiously, afraid in the dark of the wood and more bereft more suddenly than his young soul could have conceived possible. “Don’t go. Please, Lilac. Don’t go, you’re the only secret I ever had!”
Gigantic, aloof, not much disturbed but quite interested, old ones looked down like trees at the small one who had so suddenly and fiercely come in among them. Hands spread on their enormous knees, they considered him, insofar as they could consider someone or something so minute. One put his finger to his lips; silently they watched him stumble amid their toes; they cupped huge hands behind their ears, and with eavesdroppers’ slight smiles they heard his cry and his grief, though Lilac could not.
Two Beautiful Sisters
“Dear Parents,” Auberon in the Folding Bedroom wrote (typing featly with two fingers on an old, old machine he had discovered there), “Well! A winter here in the City is going to be quite an experience! I’m glad it won’t last forever. Though today temp. is 25, and it snowed again yesterday. No doubt it’s worse where you are, ha ha!” He paused, having made this gay exclamation carefully out of the single-quote mark and the period. “I’ve been twice now to see Mr. Petty at Petty, Smilodon & Ruth, Grandpa’s lawyers as you know, and they’ve been kind enough to advance me a little more against the settlement, but not much, and they can’t say when the darn thing will be straightened out at last. Well Im sure everything will turn out fine.” He was not sure, he raged, he had shouted at Mr. Petty’s automaton of a secretary and nearly balled up the paltry check and thrown it at her; but the persona whacking out this letter, tongue between teeth and searching fingers tense, didn’t make admissions like that. Everything was fine at Edgewood; everything was fine here too, Everything was fine. He made a new paragraph. “I’ve already about worn out the shoes I came in. Hard City streets! As you know, things have got very expensive here and the quality is no good. I wonder if you could send the pair of tall lace-up ones in my closet. Theyre not very dressy but anyway I’ll be spending most of my time working here at the Farm. Now that winters here theres a lot to do, cleaning up, stableing the animals and so on. George is pretty funny in his galoshes. But hes been very good to me and I appreciate it even if I do get blisters. And there are other nice people who live here.” He stopped, as before a precipice he was about to tumble over, his finger hovering above the S. The machine’s ribbon was old and brownish, the pale letters staggered drunkenly above and below the line they should be walking. But Auberon didn’t want to display his school hand to Smoky; it had degenerated, he had lately taken up ball-points and other vices; what now about Sylvie? “Among them are:” He ran down in his mind the current occupancy of Old Law Farm. He wished he hadn’t taken this route. “Two sisters, who are Puerto Rican and very beautiful.” Now what the hell had he done that for? An old secret-agent obfuscation inhabiting his fingers. Tell them nothing. He sat back, unwilling to go on; and at that moment, there was a knock at the door of the Folding Bedroom, and he drew the page out, finish it later (though he never did) and went—two steps across the floor was all it took his long legs—to admit the two beautiful Puerto Rican sisters, wrapped into one and all his, all his.
But it was George Mouse who stood on the threshold. (Auberon would soon learn not to mistake anyone else at the door for Sylvie, because Sylvie instead of knocking always scratched or drummed at the door with her nails; it was the sound of a small animal wanting admission.) George had an old fur coat over his arm, an antique lady’s peau-de-soi black hat on his head, and two shopping bags in his hands. “Sylvie not here?” he said.