Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Surely he’ll understand me, if he’ll listen to me.”

  “He won’t. He’s counted on you these twenty years to work with him. Grudged you the three years in the south. Now this? . . . Besides, I don’t know that you understand what you’re doing yourself. You aren’t following reason, as well as I can see. Like him, you act from passion, a passion for moral clarity, the will to be yourself. And now your will is different from his, radically different. You think you’re going to discuss that difference reasonably and come to an agreement? I doubt it!”

  “But father believes in duty, in serving principle. Of course in a way I’d rather stay here—I wish I could stay here—but this is more important than any private wish, and I know he could understand that. I can’t stay here until I’m free to stay here.”

  “And you’re to win that freedom by serving other men’s needs?”

  “I won’t win it,” the young man said. “Freedom consists in doing what you can do best, your work, what you have to do, doesn’t it? It’s nothing you have or keep. It is action, it is life itself. But how can you live in the prison of others’ servitude? I can’t live for myself until everyone is free to do so!”

  “Until the Kingdom is come,” Emanuel murmured ironically, with pain. The lake stretched away from them very dark, very still, barely a noise of water lapping the foundation of the terrace or the pilings of the boat house. Eastward, the bulks and slopes of the mountains stood outlined against a dim whiteness in the sky, moonrise; westward was only darkness and the stars.

  IV

  “Hoy-y!”

  The cry re-echoed off the water that lay sparkling between the boats, but there was no answering call, and the sharp brown sail ahead of them skimmed on unheeding.

  “Call again, Count Orlant.”

  “They’re too far away,” said Perneta.

  “Oh dear, and we’ll never catch Falkone. Itale! Dear!”

  “They’re turning,” said Count Orlant, frowning into the dazzle. The brown sail, sharp as a hawk’s wing, was coming round. Count Orlant brought Mazeppa into the wind, heading her home; soon the smaller boat had come up even with her and they heard the boatsman’s hail, “Hoy there!”

  “Hoy!” Eleonora hailed gallantly, sounding like a quail. “Clouds— It’s going to storm— We ought to start home!”

  “What’s up?”

  “Home!” Perneta contributed, waving at the passing thunderclouds over San Larenz.

  “Laura wants to hunt mushrooms at Evalde!”

  “Oh dear, I can’t shout any more—do tell them it’ll take too long to hunt mushrooms, and I already have two barrels down in pickle— It’s going to ra-ain! Oh dear.” They heard laughter in Falkone, and presently Emanuel’s voice: “Mushrooms?”

  “No mushrooms!”

  “Evalde?” called Itale, standing up in the prow.

  “Home!” Count Orlant roared in an unexpected mountaineer’s bellow. The figure in the prow of the other boat made a sweeping bow, executed a few dance steps, and vanished. “He fell in!” Eleonora cried, but Falkone sailed on past them, Itale and Laura now performing a minuet in the stern. By the time Mazeppa lumbered in, Emanuel and the three young people were already up on the terrace. Itale was expounding something; his blue eyes shone in his wind-flushed face. Eleonora and Perneta both looked at him with unqualified admiration, and Perneta said, “Itale, what on earth did you do with your hat?”

  “It’s all wet,” Eleonora said, “you did fall overboard!”

  Piera suddenly laughed, a loud irrepressible laugh. “He was fishing with it. . . .”

  “With his hat?”

  “With his hat,” said Emanuel. “And two young ladies holding a leg apiece and shrieking ‘Don’t kick! Don’t kick!’”

  “But what for?”

  “My ferns.”

  “Piera dropped her ferns overboard when the boom came round, so I tried to get them back, and what’s become of the dipper I keep in Falkone?” He and the girls were red with laughter.

  “I begged you to let me come in Mazeppa,” Emanuel said.

  “And Laura, you never once put up your parasol, now you’ll be freckled till Michaelmas.”

  “Freckles,” said Count Orlant, thoughtfully. “I remember when this contesina was small and running about all day, I once counted eighteen freckles on her nose alone. Rather becoming, I thought.”

  “And a fine thing if they go to the Sorentays’ ball looking like a pair of old saddles,” said Eleonora. “You needn’t look so pleased with yourselves, you two!”

  Itale looked at Piera as she stood half turned from him and saw on the slender nape of her neck, below the wind-loosened chignon, three freckles: a pleasant sight.

  “And he never even got the ferns,” said Laura.

  “Because neither of you would hold on, and I couldn’t keep my face out of the water!”

  “He bubbled,” Piera said, and they all began laughing again. “Oh, he lay there on the water waving his arms and b-bubbling, oh—” When they recovered, Eleonora said, wiping her eyes, “How can you all be so silly? Is Guide still out? he probably hasn’t even looked up at the sky. . . .”

  “Dear lady,” said Emanuel, taking his sister-in-law by the waist. “Twenty-seven years in Val Malafrena and she still isn’t used to thunderstorms!”

  “Twenty-eight years, dear, but I do think it’s a shame all the best days up here end in a lot of pouring and growling and Guide coming in dripping on the floor.” She and Emanuel rocked back and forth on their heels, beaming at the others. There was a long roll of thunder from San Larenz, and one of them said, “Here it comes.” The thunderheads had massed, grey and grey-black, boiling over the mountain and reaching across the lake. “In with us!” said Eleonora.

  Guide was standing at the south windows of the living room. Itale stopped short in the hall, looking at that black figure against the stormy light.

  “Tea. Eva!” cried Eleonora, vanishing kitchenward.

  “A beautiful day,” said Count Orlant, sitting down with relief in one of the heavy old oaken armchairs. “Wish you’d been with us, Sorde.”

  “I should be having some days free soon. I’d like you to try the hawk old Rika’s trained.”

  Falconry was still a common sport in Montayna. Guide and his son were adepts, Emanuel took pleasure in it, and Count Orlant could appreciate the points of a hawk, though in his heart there was no great desire to go trotting about the countryside carrying on his wrist a big bird before whose cruel, straight stare he felt, somehow, inferior.

  “I wish you’d take her out, Itale,” Guide was saying. “She should fly. I haven’t had the time, working with Starey.”

  “I will.”

  He answered the simple request with a bad conscience, and was relieved when his mother interrupted the falconers’ talk, coming in with Eva the cook and tea. The pleasure of the day was gone; as soon as he had entered the house he could think of nothing but that he must speak to his father tonight. He sat, his damp hat between his knees, like an awkward guest who could neither talk nor take his leave. The women were aware of his attitude. His mother was profoundly uneasy, knowing there was some change in him. Laura thought he was up on his pedestal showing off again; she did not know why he would no longer talk to her about what preoccupied him, and felt cheated and resentful. Perneta thought him very funny and very handsome as he sat there nursing his weed-looped hat; she never worried about him, convinced no harm could come to a boy like that. As for Piera, who sat next to him on the couch, she was aware of his silence, of the blue coat he wore, of the slight rough darkness of his cheek, of his presence, the weight and reality of his being there. She went no further. Had he spoken she would have listened to his voice as part of that inexplicable presence; he was silent; she listened to his silence. She thought she had never been so happy as she was right now, and most likely would never be so happy again, since things would not be exactly the same again. Her joy, undulled by age and habit, unfounded on any permanence of life, kn
ew its own defenselessness. She dared not handle it, clear and fragile as glass. If she felt the trouble in him it was as part of her own trouble and joy, part of the strangeness of him and of their sitting side by side on the couch drinking tea.

  Count Orlant returned from prowling in the library: “That must be an interesting botanical collection your father made, Sorde. I wish he’d gone in for astronomy. I suppose no one much reads those?”

  “Itale’s in there a good deal, but not for botany,” said Laura, hoping for a rise out of her brother.

  “I remember your grandfather teaching you the Latin names of the plants, out in the garden; I don’t suppose you remember that.”

  “At least Itale can still tell me the name of that exotic under the east windows, that I always forget again immediately, what is it?” Eleonora said.

  “Mandevilia suaveolens,” said her son.

  Brief hard rain whitened the windows. The thunder had passed over; low sun shone gold on the lake through rain.

  “Oh, do you know, these summer storms are pleasant, they lighten the air. . . .”

  “I get much the best results with my telescope after a thundershower,” Count Orlant confirmed. As Emanuel asked him something about his astronomy, Itale said to Piera, without knowing he was going to say anything, “Have you read Estenskar’s other books?”

  “Just the Odes.”

  “May I lend you The Torrents of Karesha? It’s very fine.”

  “If— If papa approves.”

  Itale frowned. “Estenskar is a great poet. And a noble mind. It’s fear that bans his works, but mere sloth that accepts the ban. You should insist on a freedom which is your obligation.”

  The sixteen-year-old countess, with her round arms, her curly hair and slender, freckled neck, glanced at her father, who was saying, “But if a comet came very close to the earth there’s no telling . . .” and looked at Itale, and said, “I will.” After a moment she added, “Papa likes to know what I read, and I think he did hide Lord Byron, but I don’t think he’d really stop me from reading anything. . . .”

  “I didn’t mean him exactly, that is, not personally. But let me lend you the book, Piera. I really think you’ll find it very fine.” He ended up pleading. The matter, like everything that came up that day, seemed of illimitable importance.

  “I’d like to read it very much, Itale.”

  He started up to bring the book from his room.

  “But you’ll be over Tuesday night, and if you brought it then, papa wouldn’t notice me carrying it home and ask.”

  He hesitated. “I’d better give it to you now.”

  She was puzzled, but took the book he brought her and did not ask what could keep him from coming to Valtorsa on Tuesday night.

  Everyone went out together to leave or say goodbye; as they went down the path there was a gust of perfume about them in the rainwashed evening air. Piera asked, “Is that the mandevilia . . . ?”

  “Suaveolens,” said Itale, walking beside her, and smiled.

  As Emanuel and Perneta were driving up to Portacheyka, fields and wooded hills flowing past them molasses-dark in the late evening, the clop of the horse’s hooves dull on the dust-thick road, the wife broke a long silence between them. “Our nephew’s come home moody.”

  “Mh,” said the husband.

  “Owl.”

  “What?”

  “Owl flew over.”

  “Mh.”

  “He and Piera. . . .”

  “Girl’s sixteen.”

  “I was nine the first time I saw you.”

  “You’re not saying they’re in love.”

  “Certainly not. But you never think anyone’s in love.”

  “Don’t know what the word means.”

  “Mh,” said Perneta in her turn.

  “No, I suppose I do. I’ve seen it once. Guide, in ’97. He was a new man in a new world, that year. So they married. How long did it last? Eight months, ten months? Most people never have that much. A few hours, if anything. Rubbish.”

  “Funny old man,” said his wife, in one of her rare and always private impulses of tenderness. “But all the same, Piera and Itale. . . .”

  “Of course. It’s the most natural thing in the world. But Itale’s leaving.”

  “Leaving?”

  “Going to Krasnoy.”

  The horse snorted several times, starting the pull up towards the pass.

  “Why?”

  “He wants to work for a patriot group.”

  “Politics? But there are offices here to be had.”

  “Our provincial politics are a swindling game played by idle landowners and professional incompetents.”

  “Well, but—” Perneta meant that was what all politics meant to her, and Emanuel understood her.

  “Itale’s not looking for an office, but for a revolution.”

  “Do you mean,” she asked after pondering, “the Soven­s­karists—those people? Like that writer in Aisnar that was put in jail?”

  “Yes. They’re not common criminals, you know. They’re mostly gentlemen and parish priests, I believe. Decent men all over Europe are involved in this sort of thing. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it,” Emanuel said violently, and shook the patient horse’s reins.

  “Does Guide know?”

  “Do you remember when Giulian’s flourmill blew up?”

  She stared; then nodded. “When did Itale tell you?”

  “Last night.”

  “Did you encourage him?”

  “I? I, at fifty, encourage a boy of twenty-two to go remake the world? Su!”

  “This will break Eleonora’s heart.”

  “No, it won’t. I know you women. The more risks he runs, the more follies he commits, the prouder you’ll be of him. But Guide! The boy is Guide’s future— To see that at risk, astray—”

  “The boy is his own future,” Perneta said very gravely. “But how much risk is there in this?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. I think too much about risks, about people’s feelings, all that— That’s why I’m a provincial lawyer and have never done anything that took courage. And never will, because I’m too old now to upset the housekeeping. I wish that once, only once, when I was twenty-two, I’d said to someone as Itale said to me, ‘This is important.’ Even if it wasn’t important, even if it wasn’t true!”

  Perneta put her large, hard hand over his, lightly. She said nothing. They drove on through the warm night to Portacheyka that lay, a few scattered lights, below them in the pass.

  At about the same time Itale, standing at the foot of the stairs, was saying, “This is rather important, father.”

  “Very well. Come into the library.”

  In the high-windowed room starlight defined the shadows of leaves against the glass. Guide lit a lamp and sat down at the table in his carved, age-black chair, a relic of the furniture of the house built by his great-grandfather in 1682 and rebuilt by his father a century later. The table was piled with documents, some written in the fine cursive of law clerks dead two hundred years: the deeds and titles, contracts and records, of the Sorde estate. Most of them concerned rents and settlements with the tenant farmers or deeds and rights to new properties acquired over the generations. That stack of Latin documents, Itale had thought when he saw Guide and Emanuel at work on them, was the Middle Ages: obscure, intricate, muddled, arid, beneath the aridity pungent with life and overwhelming in its concreteness, its multifarious humanity, its absorption in the land, the land worked, owned, rented, leased, the land that made a peasant bound and a landowner free, the land source, root, subject and end of life. Over against all that was a sheaf of printed papers to which Emanuel would refer, scowling: The Tax Laws of 1825, concise, precise, impersonal, modern, and when applied to the Middle Ages in the form of those piled-up records, meaningless. Here was the Family and the Land; here was the State and Uniformity; and nothing existed to bridge the gulf between, no revolution, no representa
tion, no reforms, nothing.

  At Itale’s end of the long table, not yet swamped by documents, lay only a copy of Rousseau’s Social Contract, which he had been rereading. He picked it up and turned it round absently in his hands as he spoke.

  “Since Austria wants us to use Napoleonic tax methods, it would help if she’d let us carry out the reorganisation the French began here, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would. If they must have money why don’t they come to me for it, do they think the peasants can raise cash? City men. . . .”

  Guide’s face stood out heavily shadowed against the obscurity of the book-lined walls. It was a hard, strong face, but what impressed Itale in it as a quality he had never consciously seen in it before was its repose. That was not temperament, for Guide’s temper was not reposeful; it was character, the gift of time, and not only the years of Guide’s own life but the time he had accepted and made his own, the seasons and the generations past. Itale could see in his father’s face that he was tired tonight, that he wished Itale would say what he had to say and at the same time dreaded what he might say; all that was plain enough. But beneath it was the passive, unmoved repose, the will underlying all personal emotion; his inheritance.

  “I want to try to explain some—a change in my thinking, father.”

  “I’m aware that we disagree on certain matters. Times change. We needn’t think alike on everything. Time spent discussing opinions is time wasted.”

  “Some ideas are more than opinions. To hold them is to serve them.”

  “That may be. But I have no wish to argue, Itale.”

  “Nor have I.” The Social Contract came down on the table with a light thump, raising dust from the old papers and parchments. “None at all. But I wish to act by my principles, as you do by yours.”

  “Your mind is your own. Your time is your own. So long as you do your work here, and you do; you always have done.”

  “My work’s not here.”

  Guide raised his head at that. He said nothing.

  “I have to go to Krasnoy.”

  “You have to do nothing of the sort.”

  “I’m trying to explain—”