All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  He knew that it was late afternoon, and that he ought to get out of the wood before dark, so he stuck the needle in his vest and started walking along a path that constantly threatened to disappear, the way paths do in the wood. Sometimes the path divided, and he had to choose between the right and the left fork, without knowing which was the way that led out of the wood. The light began to fail even sooner than he had expected. When it was still daytime in the sky overhead, it was already so dark where he was that he could find the path only by the feel of the ground under his feet.

  “I don’t see why this should happen to me,” he said, and from the depths of the wood a voice said “To who?” disconcertingly, but it was only an owl. So he kept on until he saw a light through the trees, and he made his way to it, through the underbrush and around fallen logs, until he came to a house in a clearing. At this time of night they’ll be easily frightened, he thought. I must speak carefully or they’ll close the door in my face. When the door opened in answer to his knock and a woman stood looking out at him from the lighted doorway, he said politely, “It’s all right, ma’am, I’m not a robber.”

  “No,” the woman said, “you’re an industrious tailor.”

  “Now, how did you know that?” he asked in amazement.

  The woman did not seem to feel that this question needed answering, and there was something about her that made him uneasy, and so, though he would much rather that she invited him in and gave him a place by the fire and a bit of supper, he said, “If you would be kind enough to show me the way out of the wood —”

  “I don’t know that I can,” the woman said.

  “Isn’t there a road of some kind?”

  “There’s a road,” the woman said doubtfully, “but it wasn’t built in your lifetime.”

  “I beg pardon?”

  “And anyway, you’d soon lose it in the dark. You’ll have to wait until morning. How did you happen to —”

  At that point a baby began to cry, and the woman said, “I can’t stand here talking. Come in.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “That’s very kind of you, ma’am,” and as he stepped across the threshold there was suddenly no house, no lighted room, no woman. Nothing but a clearing in the wood.

  In disappointment so acute that it brought tears to his eyes, he sat down on the ground and tucked his legs under him and tried to get used to the idea that he wasn’t going to sit by a warm fire, under a snug roof, with a bit of supper by and by, and a place to lay his head at bedtime.

  I will catch my death of pneumonia, he thought. He put his hand to his vest; the needle was still there. He felt his forehead, and then took his glasses off, folded them carefully, and put them in his vest pocket. Then he stretched out on the bare ground and, looking up through the trees, thought about his tailor shop, and about a greatcoat that he was working on. It was of French blue, part true cashmere and part Lincoln wool, with a three-tiered cape, and it wasn’t promised until a fortnight, but he would have finished it and have given it to his wife to press if he hadn’t suddenly found himself in this lonely wood. Then he thought about his wife, who would be wondering why he didn’t come upstairs for his supper. And then about his father, who had a stroke and never recovered the use of his limbs or his speech. In the evening, after the day was over, the industrious tailor used to come and sit by his father’s bed, and he would bring whatever he was working on — a waistcoat or a pair of knee breeches, or an embroidered vest — and spread it out on the counterpane, to show his father that the lessons had been well learned and that he needn’t worry about the quality of work being turned out by the shop. And instead of being pleased with him, his father would push the work aside impatiently. There seemed to be something on his mind that he very much wanted to say, some final piece of wisdom, but when he tried to speak he could only utter meaningless sounds.

  Now, through the tops of the bare trees, the tailor could see the stars, so bright and so far away … But how did it get to be autumn, he wondered. And why am I not cold? Why am I not hungry? He fell asleep and dreamed that he had more work to do than he could possibly manage, and woke up with the sun shining in his face.

  “Wife?” he called out, before he remembered where he was or what had happened to him.

  He sat up and looked around. There was no house in the clearing, and no sign that there ever had been, but there was a path leading off through the woods, and he followed it. At this time, more than half of England was forests, and so he knew that it might be days before he found his way out of the wood. “I must be careful not to walk in a circle,” he told himself. “That’s what people always do when they are lost.” But one fallen tree, one sapling, one patch of dried fern, one bed of moss looked just like another, and he could not tell whether he was walking in a circle or not. Now and then, not far from the path, there would be a sudden dry rustle that made his heart race. Was it a poisonous viper? What was it? The rustle did not explain itself. Oddly enough, he himself, stepping on dry leaves and twigs, did not make a sound.

  “I ought to be living on roots and berries,” he said to himself, and though there were plenty of both, he did not know which were edible and which were not, and he did not feel inclined to experiment. But when he came to a spring, he thought, I will drink, because this far from any house or pasture it cannot be contaminated.… He knelt down and put his face to the water and nothing happened. His throat was as dry as before. The water remained just out of reach. He leaned farther forward and again nothing happened. The water kept receding until his face touched dry gravel. He raised his head in surprise and there was the beautiful spring, glittering, jewel-like in the sunlight, pushing its way under logs and between boulders, murmuring as it went, but not to be drunk from. “Can it be that I am dead?” the tailor asked himself. And then, “If I am dead, why has nobody told me where to go, or what’s expected of me?”

  As he walked on, he tried to remember if in the old days, before he suddenly found himself in this wood, he had ever got down on his hands and knees to drink from a spring. All he remembered was that when the other boys were roaming the woods and bathing in the river, he was in his father’s shop learning to be a master tailor.

  “It is possible that I am dreaming,” he said to himself. But it did not seem like a dream. In dreams it is always — not twilight exactly, but the light is peculiar, comes from nowhere, and is never very bright. This was a blindingly beautiful sunny day.

  “At all events,” he said to himself, “I am a much better walker than I had any idea. I have been walking for hours and I don’t feel in the least tired. And even if it should turn out that I have been walking in a circle —”

  At that moment he saw, ahead of him, what seemed like a thinning out of trees, as if he was coming to the edge of the wood. It proved to be a small clearing with a house in it. Smoke was rising from the chimney, and as the tailor came nearer an unpleasant suspicion crossed his mind.

  “Oh, it’s you,” the woman said, when she opened the door and saw him standing there. She had a baby in her arms, and she didn’t look particularly pleased to see him, or concerned that he had passed the whole night on the bare ground and the whole day walking in a circle.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you, ma’am,” he said, “but if you will be so kind as to show me that road you were speaking of —”

  The baby began to fret, and the woman jounced it lightly on her shoulder. “As you can see, I’m busy,” she said. “And I don’t see how you got here in the first place.”

  “Neither do I,” he said.

  “Did you come on a spring anywhere in the wood?”

  He nodded.

  “And did you drink from it?”

  “I couldn’t,” he said. “When I put my face to the water, there wasn’t any.”

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do,” the woman said, and he saw that she was about to close the door in his face.

  “Please, ma’am,” he said, “if you’ll just show me where that road b
egins I won’t trouble you any further, I promise you.”

  “Why you had to come today of all days, when the baby’s cutting a tooth, and the fire in the stove has gone out, and I still have to do the churning.… You haven’t murdered somebody? No, I can see you haven’t. If the police are after you —”

  “The police are not after me,” the tailor said with dignity, “and I haven’t committed any crime that I know of.”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean anything,” the woman said. “Come, let me show you the road.”

  He followed her across the clearing, and when she stopped they were standing in front of a clump of white birch trees. Beyond it the tangled underbrush began, and the big trees.

  “I don’t see any road,” the tailor said.

  “That’s what I mean,” the woman said. She stood looking at him and frowning thoughtfully.

  “Even if there was only a path —” the tailor began, and the woman said, “Oh, be quiet. If I let you go off into the woods again, you’ll only end up here the way you did before. And I can’t ask you into the house, because — Have you ever held a baby?”

  “Oh, yes,” the tailor said. “My children are grown now, but when they were little I often held them while my wife was busy doing something.”

  As he was speaking, the woman put the baby in his arms. The baby turned its head on its weak neck and looked at him. Though the woman made him uneasy, the baby did not. The baby’s face contorted, and he saw that it was about to cry. “Hush-a,” he said, and jounced it gently against his shoulder, and felt the head wobble against his neck, and the down on the baby’s head, softer than any material in his shop.

  “This may not work,” the woman said, and started back across the clearing, and he followed her, still holding the baby.

  At the door of the house she took a firm grip on the hem of the baby’s garment and then she said, “Go in, go in,” and after a last look over his shoulder at the clearing in the wood he stepped across the threshold, expecting to find himself outside again, and instead he was in his own shop, sitting cross-legged on his worktable.

  HE listened and heard the twittering of birds as they flitted from branch to branch in the elm tree outside, and then the miller’s wife, laughing at some joke she had just made. He saw by the quality of the light outside that it was only the middle of the afternoon. A wagon came by, and the miller’s wife called to whoever was in the wagon, and a man’s voice said, “Whoa, there … Whoa … Whoa.” The tailor listened with rapt attention to the conversation that followed, though he had heard it a hundred times. Or conversations just like it. All around him on the worktable were scraps of French-blue material, and he could see at a glance what was waiting to be stitched to what. Finally the man said, “That’s rich! That’s a good one. Gee-up …” and the wheels turned again, and the slow plodding was resumed and grew fainter and was replaced by the sound of a child beating on a tin pan. The miller’s wife went home, but there were other sounds — a dog, a door slamming, a child being scolded. Then it was quiet for a time, and without thinking the tailor put his hand to his vest and found the needle. Two boys went by, saying, “I dare you to do it, I dare you, I double-dare you!” Do what, the tailor wondered, and went on sewing.

  The quiet and the outbreaks of sound alternated in a way that was so regular that it almost seemed planned. A loud noise, such as a crow going caw, caw, caw, seemed to produce a deeper silence afterward. He studied the beautiful sound of footsteps approaching and receding, so like a piece of music.

  The light began to fail and he hardly noticed it, because as the light went it was accompanied by all the sounds that mean the end of the day: men coming home from the fields, shops being closed, children being called in before dark.

  When the tailor could not see any longer, he put his work aside and sat, listening and smiling to himself at what he heard, until his wife called him to supper.

  3. The country where nobody ever grew old and died

  THERE used to be, until roughly a hundred and fifty years ago, a country where nobody ever grew old and died. The gravestone with its weathered inscription, the wreath on the door, the black arm band, and the friendly reassuring smile of the undertaker were unknown there. This is not as strange as it at first seems. You do not have to look very far to find a woman who does not show her age or a man who intends to live forever. In this country, people did live forever, and nobody thought anything about it, but at some time or other somebody had thought about it, because there were certain restrictions on the freedom of the inhabitants. The country was not large, and there would soon not have been enough land to go around. So, instead of choosing an agreeable site and building a house on it, married couples chose an agreeable house and bought the right to add a story onto it. In this way, gradually, the houses, which were of stone, and square, and without superfluous ornamentation, became towers. The prevailing style of architecture was very much like that of the Italian hill towns. Arriving at the place where you lived, you rang the concierge’s bell and sat down in a wicker swing, with your parcels on your lap, and were lifted to your own floor by ropes and pulleys.

  A country where there were no children would be sadness incarnate. People didn’t stop having them, but they were placed in such a way that the smallest number of children could be enjoyed by the greatest number of adults. If you wanted to raise a family, you applied for a permit and waited your turn. Very often by the time the permit came, the woman was too old to have a child and received instead a permit to help bring up somebody else’s child.

  Young women who were a pleasure to look at were enjoyed the way flowers are enjoyed, but leaving one’s youth behind was not considered to be a catastrophe, and the attitudes and opinions of the young were not anxiously subscribed to. There is, in fact, some question whether the young of that country really were young, as we understand the word. Most people appeared to be on the borderline between maturity and early middle age, as in England in the late eighteenth century, when the bald pate and the head of thick brown hair were both concealed by a powdered wig, and physical deterioration was minimized by the fashions in dress and by what constituted good manners.

  All the arts flourished except history. If you wanted to know what things were like in the period of Erasmus or Joan of Arc or Ethelred the Unready, you asked somebody who was alive at the time. People tended to wear the clothes of the period in which they came of age, and so walking down the street was like thumbing through a book on the history of costume. The soldiers, in every conceivable kind of armor and uniform, were a little boy’s dream.

  As one would expect, that indefatigable traveler Lady Mary Wortley Montagu spent a considerable time in this interesting country before she settled down in Venice, and so did William Beckford. Lady Mary’s letters about it were destroyed by her daughter after her death, because they happened to contain assertions of a shocking nature, for which proof was lacking, about a contemporary figure who would have relished a prosecution for libel. For Beckford’s experiences, see his Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents (Leipzig, 1832).

  One might have supposed that in a country where death was out of the question, morbidity would be unknown. This was true for I have no idea how many centuries and then something very strange happened. The young, until this moment entirely docile and unimaginative, began having scandalous parties at which they pretended that they were holding a funeral. They even went so far as to put together a makeshift pine coffin, and took turns lying in it, with their eyes closed and their hands crossed, and a lighted candle at the head and foot. This occurred during Beckford’s stay, and it is just possible that he had something to do with it. Though he could be very amusing, he was a natural mischief-maker and an extremely morbid man.

  The mock funerals were the first thing that happened. The second was the trial, in absentia, of a gypsy woman who was accused of taking money with intent to defraud. This was not an instance of a poor foolish widow’s being persuaded to bring her husband’s sav
ings to a fortune-teller in order to have the money doubled. In the first place, there were no widows, and the victim was a young man.

  The plaintiff — just turned twenty-one, Beckford says, and exceedingly handsome — stated under oath that he had consulted the gypsy woman in the hope of learning from her the secret of how to commit suicide. For it seems that in this country as everywhere else gypsies were a race apart and a law unto themselves. They did not choose to live forever, so they didn’t. When one of them decided that life had no further interest for him, he did something. What, nobody knew. It was assumed that the gypsy bent on terminating his existence sat down under a tree or by a riverbank, some nice quiet place where he wouldn’t be disturbed, and in a little while the other gypsies came and disposed of the body.

  The plaintiff testified that the gypsy woman studied his hand, and then she looked in her crystal ball, and then she excused herself in order to get something on the other side of a curtain. That was the last anybody had seen of her or of the satchel full of money which the plaintiff had brought with him.

  The idea that a personable young man, on the very threshold of life, had actually wanted to die caused a tremendous stir. The public was barred from the trial, but Beckford was on excellent terms with the wife of the Lord Chief Justice and managed to attend the hearing in the guise of a court stenographer. The story is to be found in the Leipzig edition of his book and no other, which suggests that he perhaps did have something to do with the events he describes, and that from feelings of remorse, or shame, wrote about them and then afterward wished to suppress what he had written. At all events we have his very interesting account. The jury found for the plaintiff and against the gypsy woman. After the verdict was read aloud in the court, the attorney for the defense made an impassioned and — in the light of what happened afterward — heartbreaking speech. If only it had been taken seriously! He asked that the verdict stand, but that no effort be made to find his client, and that no other gypsy be questioned or molested in any way by the police. The court saw the matter in a different light, and during the next few days the police set about rounding up every single gypsy in the country. The particular gypsy woman who had victimized the young man with a bent for self-destruction was never found. The others were subjected to the most detailed questioning. When that produced no information, the rack and the thumbscrew were applied, to no purpose. You might as well try to squeeze kindness out of a stone as torture a secret out of a gypsy. But there was living with the gypsies at that time a middle-aged man who had been stolen by them as a child and who had spent his life among them. When he was brought into the courtroom between two bailiffs, the attorney for the defense lowered his head and covered his eyes with his hand. The man was put on the witness stand and, pale and drawn after a night of torture, gave his testimony. Shortly after this, the gravestone, the wreath, the arm band, and the smiling undertaker, so familiar everywhere else in the world, made their appearance here also, and the country was no longer unique.