The Small Rain

by Madeleine L'engle

  “I know I’m early,” he shouted up the stairs, as she leaned over the banisters, calling down, “Who is it?”

  He came panting up, out of breath, his coat falling off, his blond hair disheveled. “Can we light the fire?” he asked, straightening his tie.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Katherine Forrester, be a darling and make me some tea. I’m congealed to the bone.” As Katherine went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, he called after her, “Sarah said Sergeievna gave her a terrific dressing down.”

  “Aunt Manya thought she was swell,” Katherine called back, turning on the hot water too hard and splashing herself as she filled the kettle. Back in the living room, she stretched out on the sofa. “If Aunt Manya hadn’t thought Sarah was really good, she would either have practically ignored her or just told her point-blank she didn’t belong in the theater.”

  “Sure? Sal’s feeling sort of depressed.”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “That’s O.K. then. Go see if my hot water’s ready.”

  In the kitchen the lid of the kettle was gently lifting and shutting again while a soft hiss of steam came out of the spout. Katherine made the tea and brought it in.

  “You’re very good to me,” Felix said.

  “Because I make you tea?”

  “Never desert me! Promise me you’ll never desert me!” he begged impetuously.

  “Why should I?”

  “I don’t know. I just get scared … Why is it so easy for me to talk to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sometimes I wish I never had to talk—to be a human being—to be involved in any human relationships. When I’m composing or working at my violin, I’m good, and the music’s good, and there isn’t anything else in the world. When I was a little boy, I knew my music was going to be so wonderful for people. I would play and play in the great concert halls and all the people who listened to me would be happier and better people because they had listened. So last year I got a job in one of those Village night clubs and I desecrated my violin by playing low and passionate music on it. And I became low and passionate myself … I wish you could help me, Katherine Forrester, but there are some things I can’t talk even to you about.”

  To Katherine, lying sprawled on the big couch, it seemed that there was nothing Felix Bodeway couldn’t talk about, nothing he couldn’t put into words as facile as they were intense. And maybe that was good, she thought, maybe that was a way of exorcising things that worry you. For when you put something into words, it becomes an affair of the intellect as well as of the emotions, and therefore loses some of its fearsome power.

  The light from the cannel-coal fire fell on Felix’s fair hair, on his pale face, his undernourished body, and soft delicate fingers with the small golden hairs on them. Then the front door opened and Sarah and Pete came in, flushed and clean from the cold, carrying bottles of Rhine wine and seltzer.

  “I called for Pete after his show,” Sarah said. “I thought we might as well come down together. Don’t move, Kat. I’ll fix the drinks.”

  Pete sat down on the sofa beside Katherine. “Practice hard this evening, kitten?”

  “Pretty hard.”

  “Everything all right?”

  “Yes, Pete.”

  “Do you ever walk along the streets and look at the people and feel you’re a race apart?” Felix asked. “I suppose I’m being asinine again … But it doesn’t matter, black and white and yellow, French, English, American, Polish, Greek. That’s not the way the world’s divided up. It’s not that simple. More complications we’ve made for ourselves. I walk along the streets and I’m a race apart. I used to think it was just artists. That all artists were a race of their own. But it’s even smaller than that. It’s the smallest group of all, my race. At least, that’s the way it seems to me.”

  “Pete!” Sarah called from the kitchen. “This beastly ice tray’s stuck. Come help me with it, will you?”

  “Sure thing, Sal.” Pete ambled off.

  “Katherine the Forrester,” Felix said.

  “Yes, Bodeway the window cleaner?”

  “You’re very fond of Sarah, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re in love with Pete.”

  “Yes … why?”

  “Nothing. I just wondered.”

  “What did you wonder?”

  “Nothing in particular. Know Sarah well?”

  “No. Not awfully, if I stop to think about it. I guess I know her about as well as anyone does. But Sarah’s not easy to know well.”

  “No. Doesn’t give herself. Smart girl. Likes to take. Glad I don’t have to marry her. When are you going to marry Pete?”

  “I told you. Next November.”

  “Pray for November to come quickly.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll be happier when you’re married.”

  “I couldn’t be happier than I am now.”

  “You’re really happy?”

  “Happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

  “I want you to be happy, Katherine Forrester.”

  “Well, look at me! Look at everything I’ve got to be happy about! My music. Pete. This beautiful wonderful glorious apartment with Sarah. Everything I’ve ever dreamed of having.”

  Pete came back in the living room with the wine. “You know, kitten, something occurred to me tonight.”

  “What, Pete?”

  “You know the part of LeStrade’s daughter? That bit in the last act?”

  “Um-hum.”

  “Gert Kendall, the girl who’s playing it, is leaving for Hollywood at the end of the month. I was wondering if Sarah mightn’t be able to step into it. She even looks like Gert.”

  “Oh, Pete, that would be wonderful!”

  Sarah sat down in front of the fire next to Felix. “I don’t dare think about it. Pete said he’d speak to the stage manager tomorrow before the matinee. Oh, Kat, wouldn’t it be wonderful! That would show Madame Sergeievna, wouldn’t it? But it’s one of those things that don’t happen.”

  The things that don’t happen are often the very ones that do. Especially in the theater. One young actress will spend years tramping from office to office and never get a job. Another, of equal talent, through knowing a well-thought-of young actor, will be given a chance before she has even started to look for one. The stage manager was willing to give Sarah a reading. He liked her. Paul LeStrade heard her and liked her. It was a small part, but one that she was singularly right for at this particular stage of her development. And Sarah was only too glad to leave the Academy and join what she considered the “grown-up” world of the theater.

  Sarah’s being in the play didn’t seem at first to change the routine of life much. It meant that Katherine and Pete saw more of Sarah and Felix in the daytime. It meant that often Katherine did not call for Pete at the theater but waited for him to come home with Sarah. It meant that Sarah was often included in their plans for the future, as Pete’s leading lady—for of course they would all be famous stars. Felix would compose great piano concertos for Katherine, and double concertos for them to play, while Sarah and Pete were in the most successful plays on Broadway. They would all have a glorious, glamorous and illustrious life.

  Katherine saw to it that her father heard Felix play, and showed him some of Felix’s compositions. “Well?” she asked him eagerly, when she went up to the apartment for dinner.

  “He’s undeniably very talented,” Tom said. “Quite brilliant. Perhaps too brilliant.”

  “What do you mean, Father?”

  “I can’t quite explain, baby, but somehow I don’t think he’ll get very far, your friend Felix Bodeway. There’s something too showy, too lightweight. It seems to me he’s burning himself out with one quick burst of flame. Of course, I may be quite wrong.”

  “He’s an attractive boy,” Manya said. “Charming. But somehow, I agree with your father. He struck me as being lightweight, too. And he has t
he honest blue eyes of the congenital liar.”

  “But you think Sarah’s good, don’t you, Aunt Manya?”

  “Yes. I think Sarah’s very good. And I think she has the drive that Bodeway lacks … I like your friends, Katya, but I think you’re a great deal more important than any of them, and I hope you’re not neglecting your work because of them.”

  “I don’t think I’m neglecting it.”

  “I know what fun it is to be your age and part of a congenial group of young people. Especially in a big city like New York, and especially when you all have high ideals—as I think your friends have, from the little I saw of them that one afternoon at tea—and a very good tea you prepared too, my Katyusha. But—”

  “But what?”

  “Nothing. I guess Pete will take care of you.”

  “Of course he will.”

  “You and Pete are just as happy as ever?”

  “Yes. Of course. Why?”

  “Don’t sound like a snapping turtle, Katya! I just thought you looked tired and a little distraught, and I was worried about you.”

  “Have you noticed anything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you noticed anything that would make you ask if Pete and I were as happy as ever?”

  “Of course not. What should I notice?” Manya answered, but she didn’t look at Katherine, and she held her very tenderly when she kissed her good-bye before leaving for the theater. At the door she turned back.

  “Katya, why don’t you and Pete drive out to the country with your father and me this week end?”

  “Oh! That would be lovely, Aunt Manya!”

  “I don’t know why I haven’t thought of it before—so stupid of me—self-centered, selfish old woman. Meet us at the stage door Saturday night. Your father’ll have the car there. It will be lovely to have you, darling. So, until then. Kiss me again. Good-bye, my precious.”

  “Good-bye, Aunt Manya.”

  It was a wonderful week end. Katherine and Pete felt alone and allied and close, as they had not felt since the night she came down with flu. On Sunday evening, after dinner, they took a long walk. Katherine wore one of Manya’s old fur coats, Pete carried a heavy fur rug. The March evening was clear and cold. They stumbled slowly up the mountain. The path was covered with patches of ice and snow shining white, like marble, like broken statues in the twilight. The air around them was of that peculiar greenish-blue that is only to be seen on an evening that is still wintry, before the trees have spread out their leaves.

  Most of the trees were still quite bare and black. But if you looked up at some of them, the sharpness of their outline against the sky was gone; there was the faintest fuzziness in their silhouettes. Where the trees cleared, at the top of the mountain, the snow was almost gone, except for a few patches by the stone wall. The sumac bushes seemed like frowsy old women, with their long dead, brown leaves still clinging tenaciously to them. Katherine and Pete spread Manya’s fur rug on the flat rock that seemed to lean out over space and sat down on it to watch the stars come out, to watch the moon rise slowly from behind the mountains. It was a waning moon, and, though just beyond fullness, quite late in rising. When it slipped up over the edge of the mountains, it seemed very fragile, almost of eggshell consistency, or like a skull that has been washed paper-thin by centuries of salt ocean waves, with darker patches where the bone has been almost worn through.

  Katherine sat very close to Pete, her head against his shoulder, his arm holding her warm and secure. Every once in a while he would kiss her very gently. When he said, “Kitten, we ought to be alone together more,” it was as though he were reading her thoughts.

  “Yes,” she nodded.

  “I wish you didn’t have the apartment with Sarah.”

  “Why, Pete?”

  “I thought if you got away from your father and Madame Sergeievna, you’d be more mine. But Felix is always around, and those dreadful kids from the Academy. We’re never alone any more.”

  “I wish we could be.”

  “We’ll make it a point to be. Shall we, kitten?”

  “Please let’s, Pete.”

  She leaned against his shoulder, watching the thin shell of moon and the stars dimmed for a wide arc around it, and thought of the times they had been alone, of their walks together, evenings in Pete’s room, evenings in Katherine’s room at Manya’s when the leaves were still falling. As the stars made a pattern across the sky, so her thoughts seemed to make a pattern as they crossed her mind.

  Out of the trees below them rose a large night bird with a great flapping of wings, screaming its path across the sky, jolting Katherine out of thought and into speech again.

  “It’s a funny thing,” she said.

  “What, kitten?”

  “I’ve been thinking mostly in the past tense.”

  “Don’t you usually?”

  “No. I usually think in the future.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “Oh—life with a capital L, and—”

  “And what?”

  “You and me.”

  “Me and you in the past tense?”

  “Sort of as if we were both memories. Does that mean anything bad?”

  “It probably means we’ve sat here too long and you’re in a cramped position and it’s very cold. The moon’s hidden. We’d better go down.”

  Clouds were racing across the sky. All that could be seen of the moon, now high above them, was a misty glow whenever the clouds were thinnest. Pete helped Katherine up.

  “I guess I am pretty stiff. My foot’s half asleep. Pete—”

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “Don’t let go my hand.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Not once all the way down the mountain.”

  “All right, baby.” He picked her up and held her in his arms for a moment. “You’re such a funny little thing. I love you so very much.”

  “I love you, Pete.”

  “One minute I think you know so much, and the next minute you don’t know anything; you’re just a child with a face shiny from being scrubbed with soap and water … Why can’t it be like this always? We get so messy and unsimple.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s so beautifully simple now. I love you and here we are.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure you know the way down the path?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s start, then.”

  “You won’t let go my hand?”

  “Afraid?”

  “Yes.”

  They left the top of the mountain and plunged into the shadow of the March night trees. Black across the clouds flapped the cormorant, screaming as it plummeted downward and disappeared into the woods.

  Far too soon they were back in New York. Far too soon did Albert Peytz give Katherine the blowing up to which she was entitled. The anger of Albert Peytz was an impressive sight. He stood up, holding his blanket around him with furious fingers; his white eyebrows seemed to stand on end with rage; little blue veins came out in his old cheeks, and his high forehead seemed to have the thin-boned consistency of the waning moon in Connecticut the week end before. When Katherine saw him struggling out of his chair after she had finished playing, her own fingers began to twitch nervously.

  “I know it wasn’t very good,” she said, swinging around on the piano bench.

  “Good! Good!” He sputtered so that he could hardly speak. “Who do you think you are! Good!! Good!! God! Do you think I am going to go on teaching a gutless little idiot like you? I’m old, I deserve a rest, I was having a rest, and then you come along and for your mother’s sake I give up my comfortable detective story and wear myself out teaching you, deliberately cutting my life span—and I like life, let me tell you! I don’t want to die early for an ungrateful, lazy, stupid, thankless, spineless little fool! Harold! Harold! Come here at once!”

  Harold came hurrying in
, breathless as usual. “Yes, Mr. Peytz, yes, Mr. Peytz, what is it?”

  “Go into my room at once and bring me the third album from the left on the fourth shelf. Hurry up, you crawling tortoise. I said at once!”

  Katherine stood very still, as if mesmerized by the old man’s fury.

  “Don’t you know it’s bad for me to lose my temper and get excited?” Mr. Peytz stormed at her. “I might have a stroke, or a heart attack, and you and your ungrateful idiocy would be responsible. Mark that! Harold! What are you doing in there? Taking a bath? I thought I told you to hurry!”

  Harold came panting in with an album of records. “Here I am, Mr. Peytz. I came as quickly as I could.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t admit it if I were you. Twenty years younger than I am! Are you suffering from premature senility? Well, turn on the victrola and give it a chance to warm up. Have you no initiative?”

  Fumblingly Harold turned on the victrola.

  “All right,” Mr. Peytz shouted, “Play the fourth record, and have the kindness to put the first side on first. If you look carefully with those half-sightless eyes of yours, you will see that it is marked ‘A.’ As for you, Katherine, you will please sit down and listen carefully.”

  Katherine sat down. She felt ashamed and sullen as the first notes of the record poured forth the Bach Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, on which she had been working. Then, all at once, she sat up very straight. “But—” she began.

  “Sh!” Albert Peytz raised his hand imperiously for silence. “Listen!”

  She listened. When Harold went to turn the record, she gasped. “But it sounds like Mother!”

  “It is your mother,” Albert Peytz said. “Be quiet and listen.”

  She sat very still through to the end of the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue.

  “Very well,” he said. “You may go now, Harold.” Then he turned to Katherine. “Now you will play it.”

  “No.”

  “Play it!”

  She sat down at the piano. “I can’t—” she wailed, dropping her hands in her lap.

  “Go on!” Albert Peytz roared. “Play it!”

  She played the music with a sort of desperation that left her limp. When she had finished, Albert Peytz sat looking at her for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was quite calm and gentle.