Green Shadows, White Whale

by Ray Bradbury

  “I won’t tell you,” I said. “The news would crack your heart.”

  She turned and truly looked at me. “Are you one of the good ones, then, the gentle men who never lie and never hurt and never have to hide? Sweet God, I wish I’d known you first!”

  The wind rose, the sound of it rose in her throat. A clock struck somewhere far across the country in the sleeping town.

  “I must go in,” I said. I took a breath. “Is there no way for me to give you rest?”

  “No,” she said, “for it was not you that cut the nerve.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “You don’t. But you try. Much thanks for that. Get in. You’ll catch your death.”

  “And you …?”

  “Ha!” she cried. “I’ve long since caught mine. It will not catch again. Get!”

  I gladly went. For I was full of the cold night and the white moon, old time, and her. The wind blew me up the grassy knoll. At the door, I turned. She was still there on the milky road, her shawl straight out on the weather, one hand upraised.

  “Hurry,” I thought I heard her whisper. “Tell him he’s needed!”

  I rammed the door, slammed into the house, fell across the hall, my heart a bombardment, my image in the great hall mirror a shock of colorless lightning.

  John was in the library, drinking yet another sherry, and poured me some. “Someday,” he said, “you’ll learn to take anything I say with more than a grain of salt. Jesus, look at you! Ice cold. Drink that down. Here’s another to go after it!”

  I drank, John poured, I drank. “Was it all a joke, then?” “What else?” John laughed, then stopped.

  The croon was outside the house again, the merest fingernail of mourn, as the moon scraped down the roof.

  “There’s your banshee,” I said, looking at my drink, unable to move.

  “Sure, kid, sure, uh-huh,” said John. “Drink your drink, kid, and I’ll read you that great review of your book from the London Times again.”

  “You burned it, John.”

  “Sure, kid, but I recall it as if it were this morn. Drink up.”

  “John,” I said, staring into the fire, looking at the hearth where the ashes of the burned paper blew in a great breath. “Does … did that review really exist?”

  “My God, of course, sure, yes. Actually …” Here he paused and gave it great imaginative concern. “The Times knew my love for you, kid, and asked me to review your book.” John reached his long arm over to refill the glass. “I did it. Under an assumed name, of course—now ain’t that swell of me? But I had to be fair, kid, had to be fair. So I wrote what I truly felt were the good things, the not-so-good things in your book. Criticized it just that way I would when you hand in a lousy screenplay scene and I make you do it over. Now ain’t that Á-one double absolutely square of me? Eh?”

  He leaned at me. He put his hand on my chin and lifted it and gazed long and sweetly into my eyes.

  “You’re not upset?”

  “No,” I said, but my voice broke.

  “By God, now, if you aren’t. Sorry. A joke, kid, only a joke.” And here he gave me a friendly punch on the arm.

  Slight as it was, it was a sledgehammer striking home.

  “I wish you hadn’t made it up, the joke, I wish the article was real,” I said.

  “So do I, kid. You look bad. I—”

  The wind moved around the house. The windows stirred and whispered.

  Quite suddenly I said, for no reason that I knew:

  “The banshee. It’s out there.”

  “That was a joke, kid. You got to watch out for me.”

  “No,” I said, looking at the window. “It’s there.”

  John laughed. “You saw it, did you?”

  “It’s a young and lovely woman with a shawl on a cold night. A young woman with long black hair and great green eyes and a complexion like snow and a proud Phoenician prow of a nose. Sound like anyone you ever in your life knew, John?”

  “Thousands.” John laughed more quietly now, looking to see the weight of his joke. “Hell—”

  “She’s waiting for you,” I said. “Down at the bottom of the drive.”

  John glanced, uncertainly, at the window.

  “That was the sound we heard,” I said. “She described you or someone like you. Called you Joey, Joe, Joseph. But I knew it was you.”

  John mused. “Young, you say, and beautiful, and out there right this moment …?”

  “The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

  “Not carrying a knife …?”

  “Unarmed.”

  John exhaled. “Well, then, I think I should just go out there and have a chat with her, eh, don’t you think?”

  “She’s waiting.”

  He moved toward the front door.

  “Put on your coat; it’s a cold night,” I said.

  He was putting on his coat when he heard the sound from outside, very clear this time. The wail and then the sob and then the wail.

  “God,” said John, his hand on the doorknob, not wanting to show the white feather in front of me. “She’s really there.”

  He forced himself to turn the knob and open the door. The wind sighed in, bringing another faint wail with it.

  John stood in the cold weather, peering down that long walk into the dark.

  “Wait!” I cried, at the last moment.

  John waited.

  “There’s one thing I haven’t told you,” I said. “She’s out there, all right. And she’s walking. But … she’s dead.”

  “I’m not afraid,” said John.

  “No,” I said, “but I am. You’ll never come back. Much as I hate you right now, I can’t let you go. Shut the door, John.”

  The sob again, and then the wail.

  “Shut the door.”

  I reached over to knock his hand off the brass doorknob, but he held tight, cocked his head, looked at me, and sighed.

  “You’re really good, kid. Almost as good as me. I’m putting you in my next film. You’ll be a star.”

  Then he turned, stepped out into the cold night, and shut the door quietly.

  I waited until I heard his steps on the gravel path, then locked the door and hurried through the house, putting out the lights. As I passed through the library, the wind mourned down the chimney and scattered the dark ashes of the London Times across the hearth.

  I stood blinking at the ashes for a long moment, then shook myself, ran upstairs two at a time, banged open my tower room door, slammed it, undressed, and was in bed with the covers over my head when a town clock, far away, sounded one in the deep morning.

  And my room was so high, so lost in the house and the sky, that no matter who or what tapped or knocked or banged at the door below, whispering and then begging and then screaming …

  Who could possibly hear?

  I arrived at Courtown House late.

  When John answered the door, I shoved the short story in but did not follow.

  “What’s wrong, kid?” John asked.

  “Read that.”

  “It looks like a story. Where’s the script?”

  “Later. The story first. And listen, don’t throw it page by page on the floor as you walk through the house reading it.”

  John cocked his head to one side. “Now, why in hell would I do a thing like that, son?”

  “God. Just don’t.”

  He walked away, leaving me to shut the door. Down the hall, I saw him turning the pages, nodding. In the library, I heard him mutter:

  “Well, now. Looks like no more practical jokes at lunchtime. No more jokes.”

  Chapter 28

  “Good God in heaven, what’s that?” I said.

  “What’s what?”

  “Are you blind, man? Look!” I said.

  And Garrity, the elevator operator, looked out to see what I was staring at.

  And in out of the Dublin morn, sweeping through the front doors of the Royal Hibernian Hotel, along the entrywa
y, and to the registry was a tall willowy man of some forty years, followed by five short willowy youths of some twenty years, a burst of bird song, their hands clapping all about on the air as they passed, their eyes squinching, batting, and flickering, their mouths pursed, their brows enlightened and then dark, their color flushed and then pale—or was it both?—their voices now flawless piccolo, now flute, now melodious oboe, but always tuneful. Carrying six monologues, all sprayed forth upon each other at once, in a veritable cloud of self-commiseration, peeping and twitting the discouragements of travel and the ardors of weather, the corps de ballet as it were flew, cascaded, flowed eloquently in a greater bloom of cologne by me and the transfixed elevator man. They collided deliciously to a halt at the desk, where the manager glanced up, to be swarmed over by their music. His eyes made nice round O’s with no centers in them.

  “What,” whispered Garrity, “was that?”

  “You may well ask,” I said.

  At which point the elevator lights flashed and the buzzer buzzed. Garrity had to tear his eyes off the summery crowd and heft himself skyward.

  I whipped out my notepad and pen, sensing a new book of Revelations was about to be born.

  “We,” said the tall slender man with a touch of gray at the temples, “should like a room, please.”

  The manager remembered where he was and heard himself say, “Do you have reservations, sir?”

  “Dear me, no,” said the older man, as the others giggled. “We flew in unexpectedly from Taormina,” the tall man with the chiseled features and the moist flower mouth continued. “We were getting so awfully bored, after following summer around the world, and someone said, Let’s have a complete change, let’s do something wild. What? I said. Well, where’s the most improbable place in the world? Let’s name it and go there. Somebody said the North Pole, but that was silly. Then I cried, Ireland! Everyone fell down. When the pandemonium ceased we just scrambled for the airport. Now sunshine and Sicilian shorelines are like yesterday’s lime sherbet to us, all melted to nothing. And here we are to do … something mysterious!”

  “Mysterious?” asked the manager.

  “We don’t know what it is,” said the tall man. “But we shall know it when we see it, or it happens, or perhaps we shall have to make it happen—right, cohorts?”

  The cohorts responded with something vaguely like Tee-hee.

  “Perhaps,” said the manager, with good grace, “if you gave me some idea what you’re looking for in Ireland, I could point out—”

  “Goodness, no,” said the tall man. “We shall just plummet forth with our intuitions scarved about our necks, taking the wind as ’twere, and see what we shall tune in on. When we solve the mystery and find what we came to find, you will know of our discovery by the ululations and cries of awe and wonder emanating from our small tourist group.”

  “You can say that again,” said the manager, under his breath.

  “Well, comrades, let us sign in.”

  The leader of the encampment reached for a scratchy hotel pen, found it filthy, and flourished forth his own absolutely pure fourteen-karat solid-gold pen, with which in an obscure but rather pretty cerise calligraphy he inscribed on the registry the name David followed by Snell followed by dash and ending with Orkney. Beneath, he added, “And friends.”

  The manager watched the pen, fascinated, and once more recalled his position in all this. “But, sir, I haven’t said if we have space—”

  “Oh, surely you must, for six miserable wanderers in sore need of respite from overfriendly airline stewardesses. One room would do it!”

  “One?” said the manager, aghast.

  “We wouldn’t mind the crowd, would we, chums?” asked the older man, not looking at his friends.

  No, they wouldn’t mind.

  Neither did I, scribbling away madly.

  “Well,” said the manager, uneasily fumbling at the registry. “We just happen to have two adjoining—”

  “Perfecto!” cried David Snell-Orkney.

  And, the registration finished, the manager behind the desk and the visitors from a far place stood regarding each other in a prolonged silence. At last the manager blurted, “Porter! Front! Take these gentlemen’s luggage—”

  But just then the hall porter ran over to look at the floor.

  Where there was no luggage.

  “No, no, none.” David Snell-Orkney airily waved his hand. “We travel light. We’re here only for twenty-four hours, or perhaps only twelve, with a change of underwear stuffed in our over-coats. Then back to Sicily and warm twilights. If you want me to pay in advance …”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said the manager, handing the keys to the hall porter. “Forty-six and forty-seven, please.”

  “It’s done,” said the porter.

  And like a collie dog silently nipping the hooves of some woolly, long-haired, bleating, dumbly smiling sheep, he herded the lovely bunch toward the elevator, which wafted down just at that precise moment.

  I paused in my scribbling because … at the desk, the manager’s wife came up, steel-eyed, behind him. “Are you mad?” she whispered wildly. “Why? Why?”

  “All my life,” said the manager, half to himself, “I have wished to see not one Communist but ten close by, not two Nigerians but twenty in their skins, not three cowboy Americans but a gross fresh from the saddle. So when six hothouse roses come in a bouquet, I could not resist potting them. The Dublin winter is long, Meg; this may be the only lit fuse in the whole year. Stand by for the lovely concussion.”

  “Fool,” she said.

  No, I think not, I thought.

  As we watched, the elevator, freighted with hardly more than the fluff from a blown dandelion, whisked up the shaft, away.

  It was exactly at high noon that a series of coincidences occurred that tottered and swerved toward the miraculous, and myself at the eye of the maelstrom.

  Now, the Royal Hibernian Hotel lies half between Trinity College, if you’ll excuse the mention, and St. Stephen’s Green, which is more like it, and around behind is Grafton Street, where you can buy silver, glass, and linen, or pink hacking coats, boots, and caps to ride off to the goddamned hounds; or, better still, duck in to The Four Provinces pub for a proper proportion of drink and talk—an hour of drink to two hours of talk is about the best prescription.

  It was high noon, and out of the Hibernian Hotel front who should come now but Snell-Orkney and his canary five, myself following and taking dictation, but telling no one.

  Then there was the first of a dumbfounding series of confrontations.

  For passing by, sore torn between the sweet shops and The Four Provinces, was Timulty himself.

  Timulty, as you recall, when Blight, Famine, Starvation, and other mean Horsemen drive him, works a day here or there at the Kilcock post office. Now, idling along between dread employments, he smelled a smell as if the gates of Eden had swung wide again and him invited back in after a hundred million years. So Timulty looked up to see what made the wind blow out of the Garden.

  And the wind, of course, was in tumult about Snell-Orkney and his uncaged pets.

  Timulty, frozen to the spot, watched the Snell-Orkney delegation flow down the steps and around the corner. At which point he decided on sweeter things than candy and rushed the long way to the Provinces.

  I walked briskly after, feeling like a stage manager at an animal fair.

  Ahead of me, rounding the corner, Mr. David Snell-Orkney-plus-five passed a beggar lady playing a harp in the street. And there, with nothing else to do but dance the time away, was my taxi driver, Mike himself, flinging his feet about in a self-involved rigadoon to “Lightly o’er the Lea.” Dancing, Mike heard a sound that was like the passing of warm weather from the Hebrides. It was not quite a twittering nor a whir, and it was not unlike a pet shop when the bell tinkles as you step in and a chorus of parakeets and doves starts up in coos and light shrieks. But hear he did, above the sound of his own shoes and the pringle
of harp. He froze in mid-jig.

  As David Snell-Orkney-plus-five swept by, all tropic-smiled and gave him a wave.

  Before he knew what he was doing, Mike waved back, then stopped and seized his wounded hand to his breast. “What the hell am I waving for?” he cried to me as I arrived. “I don’t know them, do I?”

  “Ask God for strength!” I said as the harpist flung her fingers down the strings.

  Drawn as by some strange new vacuum cleaner that swept all before it, Mike and I followed the Team down the street.

  Which takes care of two senses now, the sense of smell and the use of the ears.

  It was at the next corner that Nolan, bursting from The Four Provinces pub with an argument pursuing, came around the bend fast and ran bang into David Snell-Orkney. Both swayed and grabbed each other for support.

  “Top of the afternoon!” said David Snell-Orkney.

  “The back side of something!” replied Nolan, and fell away, gaping to let the circus by. I could see in his eyes that he had a terrible urge to rush back in to report upon his fell encounter with a feather duster, a Siamese cat, a spoiled Pekingese, and three others gone ghastly frail from undereating and overwashing.

  The six stopped outside the pub, looking up at the sign.

  Lord, I thought. They’re going in. What will come of it? Who do I warn first? Them? Or the bartender?

  Then the door opened. Finn himself looked out. Finn, come into town to visit his cousin, and now ruining the occasion by his very presence! “Damn,” said Nolan, “that spoils it! Now we won’t be allowed to describe this adventure. It will be Finn this, Finn that, and shut up to us all!”

  There was a long moment when Snell-Orkney and his cohorts looked at Finn. Finn’s eyes did not fasten on them. He looked above. He looked over. He looked beyond.

  But he had seen them, this I knew. For now a lovely thing happened.

  All the color went out of Finn’s face.

  Then an even lovelier thing happened.

  All the color rushed back into Finn’s face.

  Why, I thought, he’s … blushing!

  But still Finn refused to look anywhere save the sky, the lamps, the street, until Snell-Orkney trilled, “Sir, which way to St. Stephen’s Green?”