And then if we’re lonely and happen to see someone else loved, the greedy child wakes, the savage stirs, the frustrated Puritan clenches his teeth. We seethe, we resent, we hate.
No, I saw that I couldn’t tell the others about Helen and myself. Not Louis. Not even Es. And as for
Gene, I’m afraid that with his narrow-minded upbringing, he’d have been deeply shocked by what he’d have deduced about our relationship. We were supposed, you know, to be “wild” young people, “bohemians.” Actually we were quite straitlaced—Gene especially, the rest of us almost as much.
I knew how I would have felt if Helen had happened to become Louis’s or Gene’s girl. That says it.
To tell the truth, I felt a great deal of admiration for the Gang, because they could do alone what I was only doing with Helen’s love. They were enlarging their minds, becoming creative, working and playing hard—and doing it without my reward. Frankly, I don’t know how I could have managed it myself without Helen’s love. My admiration for Louis, Es, and Gene was touched with a kind of awe.
And we really were getting places. We had created a new mind-spot on the world, a sprouting-place for thought that wasn’t vain or self-conscious, but concerned wholly with its work and its delights. The Gang was forming itself into a kind of lens for viewing the world, outside and in.
Any group of people can make themselves into that sort of lens, if they really want to. But somehow they seldom get started. They don’t have the right inspiration.
We had Helen.
Always, but mostly in unspoken thoughts, we’d come back to the mystery of how she had managed it. She was mysterious, all right. We’d known her some six months now, and we were as much hi the dark about her background as when we first met her. She wouldn’t tell anything even to me. She’d come from “places.” She was a “drifter.” She liked “people.” She told us all sorts of fascinating incidents, but whether she’d been mixed up in them herself or just heard them at Benny’s (she could have made a Trappist jabber) was uncertain.
We sometimes tried to get her to talk about her past. But she dodged our questions easily and we didn’t like to press them.
You don’t cross-examine Beauty.
You don’t demand that a Great Books discussion leader state his convictions.
You don’t probe a goddess about her past.
Yet this vagueness about Helen’s past caused us a certain uneasiness. She’d drifted to us. She might drift away.
If we hadn’t been so involved in our thought-sprouting, we’d have been worried. And if I hadn’t been so happy, and everything so smoothly perfect, I’d have done more than occasionally ask Helen to marry me and hear her answer, “Not now, Larry.”
Yes, she was mysterious.
And she had her eccentricities.
For one thing, she insisted on working at Benny’s although she could have had a dozen better jobs. Benny’s was her window on the main street of life, she said.
For another, she’d go off on long hikes hi the country, even in the snowiest weather. I met her coming back from one and was worried, tried to be angry. But she only smiled.
Yet, when spring came round again and burgeoned into summer, she would never go swimming with us in our favorite coal pit.
The coal pits are a place where they once strip-mined for the stuff where it came to the surface. Long ago the huge holes were left to fill with water and their edges to grow green with grass and trees.
They’re swell for swimming.
But Helen would never go to our favorite, which was one of the biggest and yet the least visited—and this year the water was unusually high. We changed to suit her, of course, but because the one she didn’t like happened to be near the farmhouse of last August’s “rural monster” scare, Louis joshed her.
“Maybe a monster haunts the pool,” he said. “Maybe it’s a being come from another world on a flying disk.”
He happened to say that on a lazy afternoon when we’d been swimming at the new coal pit and were drying on the edge, having cigarettes. Louis’ remark started us speculating about creatures from another world coming secretly to visit Earth—their problems, especially how they’d disguise themselves.
“Maybe they’d watch from a distance,” Gene said. “Television, supersensitive microphones.”
“Or clairvoyance, clairaudience,” Es chimed, being rather keen on para-psychology.
“But to really mingle with people.” Helen murmured. She was stretched on her back in white bra and trunks, looking deep into the ranks of marching clouds. Her olive skin tanned to an odd hue that went bewitchingly with her hair. With a sudden and frightening poignancy I was aware of the catlike perfection of her slim body.
“The creature might have some sort of elaborate plastic disguise,” Gene began doubtfully.
“It might have a human form to begin with,” I ventured. “You know, the idea that Earth folk are decayed interstellar colonists.”
“It might take possession of some person here,” Louis cut in. “Insinuate its mind or even itself into the human being.”
“Or it might grow itself a new body,” Helen murmured sleepily.
That was one of the half dozen positive statements she ever made.
Then we got to talking about the motives of such an alien being. Whether it would try to destroy men, or look on us as cattle, or study us, or amuse itself with us, or what not.
Here Helen joined in again, distant-eyed but smiling. “I know you’ve all laughed at the comic-book idea of some Martian monster lusting after beautiful white women. But has it ever occurred to you that a creature from outside might simply and honestly fall in love with you?”
That was another of Helen’s rare positive statements.
The idea was engaging and we tried to get Helen to expand it, but she wouldn’t. In fact, she was rather silent the rest of that day.
As the summer began to mount toward its crests of heat and growth, the mystery of Helen began to possess us more often—that, and a certain anxiety about her.
There was a feeling in the air, the sort of uneasiness that cats and dogs get when they are about to lose their owner.
Without exactly knowing it, without a definite word being said, we were afraid we might lose Helen.
Partly it was Helen’s own behavior. For once she showed a kind of restlessness, or rather preoccupation. At Benny’s she no longer took such an interest in “people.”
She seemed to be trying to solve some difficult personal problem, nerve herself to make some big decision.
Once she looked at us and said, “You know, I like you kids terribly.” Said it the way a person says it when he knows he may have to lose what he likes.
And then there was the business of the Stranger.
Helen had been talking quite a bit with a strange man, not at
Benny’s, but walking in the streets, which was unusual. We didn’t know who the Stranger was. We hadn’t actually seen him face to face. Just heard about him from Benny and glimpsed him once or twice. Yet he worried us.
Understand, our happiness went on, yet faintly veiling it was this new and ominous mist.
Then one night the mist took definite shape. It happened on an occasion of celebration. After a few days during which we’d sensed they’d been quarreling, Es and Gene had suddenly announced that they were getting married. On an immediate impulse we’d all gone to the Blue Moon.
We were having the third round of drinks, and kidding Es because she didn’t seem very enthusiastic, almost a bit grumpy—when he came in.
Even before he looked our way, before he drifted up to our table, we knew that this was the Stranger.
He was a rather slender man, fair haired like Helen. Otherwise he didn’t look like her, yet there was a sense of kinship. Perhaps it lay in his poise, his wholly casual manner.