Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “I thought you were in bed.”

  “I wanted to look at the lake.”

  In her white nightgown Laura was very tall and thin, a white crane startled from the reeds at night.

  “You’re barefoot! Come to bed before you catch a pleurisy.” She followed Laura to her bedroom, which looked out onto the valley, the orchards, San Givan dark against stars. The window was half open, letting in the sweet, dry odors of an autumn night in farmlands. Laura curled up in bed, her mother sat down by her. Her long, thin hand lay on the coverlet, and the girl looked at it and at the wedding ring, of soft gold, worn thin.

  “Mama, when you fell in love first. . . .”

  “With your father.”

  “Not the Cavalry Lieutenant?”

  Eleonora laughed, and her underlip drew in, demure and sly. “Oh, no; that was just moustaches . . . and the boots. . . .”

  “Can people fall in love intentionally?”

  Eleonora considered. “I really don’t know. It sounds very odd. But I believe . . . Well, so much of love comes after marriage. At least for us.” She meant, for women. “I don’t believe one can force an inclination; but if it is there, one can certainly improve upon it.”

  They sat in peaceable silence for a minute, the girl thinking forward, the woman thinking back.

  “Wasn’t Father Klement funny about the soup?”

  They both laughed. “I never see him,” said Eleonora, “but I think of the grey hen Eva was so fond of, do you remember it? it had such a peculiar way of clucking when it laid an egg, he sounds very like it.” They both laughed again. Guide’s step was on the stairs, coming up; Eleonora rose. She looked at her daughter with her head a little to one side. “You’re sad,” she said.

  “Oh, no.”

  The mother said nothing, but continued to gaze.

  “I miss Itale. On letter nights.”

  “It’s high time we answered Matilda’s letter.”

  Eleonora’s brother Angele Dru and his wife Matilda, in Solariy, had invited Laura to stay with them over the winter.

  “I’d rather go in spring,” Laura said imploringly.

  “The winter down there would be good for your chest. And some new faces at Christmas. . . . Well, we really must think about it, dear. Put your feet under the covers, do you breathe through your toes? Good night, my darling.” Eleonora blew out the candle on the chest of drawers and went out, a little round figure in the darkness. Laura did not lie down, but put her feet obediently under the covers; with her arms round her knees she sat for a long time looking out at the mountain and the hazy stars beside and above it, flaring in the gulfs of night and autumn and the wind.

  PART THREE

  Choices

  I

  IN THE autumn of 1826 Piera set off for Aisnar, some forty miles north of her home, to complete her education. Her father went with her, and Miss Elisabeth, who was a native of Aisnar, and Cousin Betta Berachoy of Portacheyka who wanted to visit friends there and was of course invited to share the Valtorskar carriage, and Count Orlant’s man, and old Godin who had been the Valtorskar coachman for fifty years. They set off from Valtorsa on a morning of late September in the immense, creaking, luggage-laden family carriage, older even than the coachman. Piera’s face, pressed to the window to bid farewell to her friends and Malafrena, looked small and pale. Laura burst into tears, and Alexander Sorentay trotted his horse beside the carriage all the way to Portacheyka, though he could not talk to Piera since the window was stuck shut.

  There had been some coolness between him and Piera that summer. As the secret engagement wore on into its second year, he had begun to question the necessity of its secrecy; and Piera had at once begun a quarrel with him. It did not get very far, because he would not quarrel: he went into a flat panic at the thought of losing her. He promptly revived the New Heloise and the meetings at the boathouse after dark. But Piera had played all those scales a hundred times, and was getting bored. She would have much preferred a good quarrel and either a reconciliation with tears or no reconciliation and a broken heart; but Alexander would not quarrel. He was staunch, he was tender, he was patient, he was faithful. He said, “Every hour you’re gone I’ll think of you. I will never change, Piera!” She had wept at their last parting. Now as the carriage came to the wide gates of Portacheyka, Alexander reined in his horse and raised his hand in farewell. She looked back at him as long as she could through the yellowish isinglass of the rear window of the carriage. She pressed her hand against the carnelian ring beneath her bodice. She saw the young figure on the motionless horse dwindle away, dwindle away down the street, as if she saw her own childhood, the years spent amongst dreams and mountains in the stillness of Malafrena valley, dwindle away behind her and be lost to sight. Yet her eyes were dry, now. “Discreet young fellow, that Sandre Sorentay,” Count Orlant said with a chuckle that was, for him, sly. “I wondered if he’d have the face to escort us straight through town. . . .”

  Through Portacheyka and out through its northern gate, past the ruined Tower Keep of Vermare, down into the golden lands. Towards evening a fine rain fell, veiling the hills. Concerted efforts had got the window unstuck, and Piera leaned out head and shoulders into the grey, wet freshness. Count Orlant was not one for long stages, and old Godin was protective of the fat horses: they spent the night a little less than halfway, at the inn of Bovira village. Next day they came down out of the hills, onto the long, faintly rolling plain of the Western Marches, a quiet sea of earth. In the evening they came to Aisnar and drove up Fontarmana Street beneath plane-trees already touched with gold, beside fountains, between grave, high houses to left and right. Piera had visited Aisnar when she was eight. All she remembered of it was Fontarmana Street, the fountains, the over-arching trees. Now she saw the houses row after row, the elegant equipages at the Round Fountain, well-dressed women walking in a way no woman in the Montayna knew how to walk; she was wild with silent excitement. The city, she thought, the city, the city!

  It was a very quiet city. The loudest voice in Aisnar was the voice of water: the fountains. There were no still covered wells; the water leapt up into light and air and fell back with a silver rush at every corner and courtyard. From the dormitory of the convent school two fountains could be heard, the bright, thin jet down in the court and the Ring Fountain on the triangular place in front of the school, a dialogue without pauses, sweet and serene, like a colloquy of blessed souls who have been so long together in heaven that they can talk and listen at the same time. That was Piera’s fancy, her first nights in the dormitory. Her mind ran more than usual on images of the blessed, since she had not before lived among nuns, and worn a nun-grey uniform, and walked by twos on the street—nun, little girls, middle-sized girls, big girls, nun—and knelt with fifty other girls and women at dawn on bare stone in a bare chapel for hour-long devotions. None of the customs of this new life fretted her, even after her father had gone and silent excitement had turned into silent and miserable homesickness. She liked the city, the school, the new friends, and willingly changed her garnet-red skirt for the grey uniform, not pining for the long liberty of her childhood. She did not pine for her father, Laura, the familiar beloved faces of home. It was her home itself she missed, Valtorsa, the high cool rooms, the orchards and vineyards and fields, the line of the mountains on the sky, the lake, the stones of the lake-shore. Piera was one to whom the thing, not its use nor its meaning, but the thing itself mattered; she knew the thing only, as a lark knows the sun or a wolf the rain. What was given her she accepted, willingly. But what was taken from her she missed, and did not cease to miss.

  All round Aisnar stretched calm, soft-colored fields. On clear days Piera looked southwards from the windows of the convent school, to see the bluish drift or massing of clouds, the clouds behind which lay the mountains and the lake.

  She was seventeen. She had grown an inch since April. The conventual fashion of her hair revealed a broad forehead, gentle and stubborn, like the forehead of a
little bull. In the grey school dress she looked cleanly and novicelike, and she moved and spoke more quietly than she had used to do; for she was in love now with the French teacher, Sister Andrea Teresa, a frail woman of infinite restraint, and all that was restrained, delicate, modest, gracious was now holy to Piera. All her thoughts that autumn were devotional. At the height of her love for Sister Andrea Teresa and in the spirit of Christian sacrifice, she wrote Alexander Sorentay, returning him his carnelian ring. The letter was sincere and tender, written in an ecstasy of renunciation. But for the rest of her life she never thought of it and of the grubby little packet containing his ring without a deep, hard stab of shame.

  Came Christmas; she did not go home for the holidays, for the Montayna roads were deep in snow and rain and mud. She would have liked to stay on at the school, with the nuns, as did a few other girls; but obedient to her father’s wish she went to stay with the relatives they had stopped with in September, cousins on her mother’s side, the Belleynins.

  The house was on the New Side, in Prince Gulhelm Square, four blocks from the Roman Fountain. It was about a hundred years old, built of the yellow Aisnar sandstone; in its walled garden was a little fountain. Inside and out the house was plain and elegant, more shabby than shiny. The aristocrats of Aisnar did not polish. Silver needs polishing, gold does best left alone; that was their attitude. Emerging from their walled gardens and high-ceilinged privacies they could be formidable, but they were not arrogant; they were too peaceable. Their manners were reserved and gentle. They had been civilised for a long time, here in the west of the country. Piera, who unlike Laura and Itale was seldom at the mercy of overpowering emotions, felt at ease amongst these people. Her feelings were slow-moving, obscure, and mute, beneath a surface play of vivacity. In the convent and with the gentlefolk of Aisnar the vivacity was subdued, the reserve refined; she behaved with the pleasant sedateness of seventeen. The Belleynins had already become very fond of her. He was a handsome, short man of sixty with a slight stammer, she, born Countess Rochaneskar, was a delicate grey-gold lady of fifty. Their two daughters, long since married, lived one in Brailava, the other around the corner. Life in the house in Gulhelm Square was ordered, serene, a little desolate. Since it was Christmas time and they had a young guest the Belleynins did more entertaining than usual, yet the days passed very quietly. Piera fitted in so well that she might always have lived there, might have been their late daughter and have played away a solitary childhood in the golden-walled garden on the lawn between the pear tree and the fountain.

  Very much the same people were at all the holiday dinner parties and evenings of the Belleynins’ circle. Most of them, to Piera’s eyes, were old. She did not mind. She was used to being the youngest, and knew how to enjoy the position. And among the elderly she did not feel threatened. Young men were frightened and frightening; things always went awkwardly with them. It was much easier to talk to men of forty, there was nothing serious about it, it was like meeting an interesting foreigner.

  The New Year’s Eve party was at the house of a close friend of the Belleynins’ son-in-law, a widower named Koste. His sister was hostess, and his young son was allowed to stay with the guests for an hour before being taken off to bed. Piera and six-year-old Battiste had met before and had taken a fancy to each other. She had not been with little children very much, and she found the little boy’s conversation wonderfully funny and touching. He was as handsome and well-bred as his father and his maiden aunt, but had not yet achieved their deep reserve: he prattled to Piera, admired her artlessly, and pleased her by giving her a trust and affection she had done very little to win. It was a pleasant task to attempt to deserve them. When the father, a shy, grave man, reproved Battiste for bothering her, she defended the child warmly. That earned her Battiste’s gratitude; also, perhaps, the father’s. When Battiste’s hour was up she went with his nurse to see him to bed, and got warmly kissed, and returned to the salon thinking what an extraordinary thing a child was and how pleasant it would be to have children around. Just as it was pleasant to have men around, to hear the bass notes of the human voice, not always the tweedle-tweedle-tweedle of the convent. She sat down near the fireplace. The party was cheerful and quiet. Talk flowed as clear and unhurried as the water of the fountains of Aisnar. There were some faces Piera had not seen before, but their owners behaved like all the rest. The quarter-hours slipped by quickly, marked by the tiny ping! of the French clock on the mantel. Piera sat mostly in silence, enjoying her silence, her decorum, the knowledge that by it she pleased the others. At ten a few last guests entered, Baron Arrioskar and his wife and sister and brother-in-law and their visitor from Krasnoy.

  The visitor was a young woman. Perhaps in deference to provincial sobriety she wore no jewels at all, but her violet dress was magnificent, and her bearing was superb. A woman who could walk like that did not even need to be beautiful. Piera sat and gaped at her. She could not keep her eyes off her. All her standards of the admirable shook to their foundation. What was Sister Teresa beside this? mild, tenuous, sterile. This was not the brittle beauty of restraint, but the splendor of a woman’s strength and freedom. “She is wonderful,” Piera thought, “that’s what people ought to look like, she is wonderful.” They were introduced: Countess Valtorskar, Baroness Paludeskar.

  The lady from the capital acknowledged the introduction in a cool, distinct contralto and prepared to be led on to the next introduction, but Piera spoke, utterly without premeditation. “I believe we both know a mutual friend, baroness,” she said, terrified at what she was saying and how stupidly she said it. The beautiful baroness smiled inquiringly.

  “Mr Sorde, of Malafrena—”

  “Sorde!” Baroness Paludeskar’s onward movement definitely ceased, and her eyes for the first time definitely looked, for an instant, at Piera. “Really, do you know him?” she asked indulgently.

  “We’re neighbors of the Sordes’, my family. In Val Malafrena.”

  “Then you’ve known Itale a long time.”

  “All my life,” Piera said; and blushed. No becoming rosy flush but a hot, red blush; her cheeks stung, her ears sang; she stood rigid and could think nothing but “O please stop, stop, stop!” If the beautiful baroness would just go away, go on, then this stupid embarrassment would pass off, she would never say anything to a stranger again.

  The baroness smiled at her escort, relinquishing further introductions, and sat down in the gilt chair by the hassock on which Piera had been sitting.

  In despair, Piera sat down, and folded her hands in her lap.

  “My dear cousins have walked me clear around Aisnar twice today, I think,” the baroness said, and smiled a mischievous, friendly smile. “I have been longing to sit down. But what a pleasure to meet someone that knows Itale! I’m very fond of him, you know. We’ve known him since he first came, what is it, over a year now. How he’s changed!”

  “Yes, he—has he— How?”

  “Oh, well, when he first came he was funny, you know—very stiff, disapproving, altogether suspicious of everyone. It was inexperience; he cuts a quite impressive figure now—without intending to, I should add.” Her voice was beautifully modulated. Piera listened to it with fascination, and smiled stiffly in response to the lingering, mocking, friendly smile, which deepened now. “Tell me, tell me,” the baroness said, leaning forward ready for confidences, “tell me what the father’s like, the ogre!”

  “Itale’s father?”

  “Yes. I want to know, I really want to know what sort of creature disinherits his son because the son wants to live like a civilised human being in the city for a while! What does the man want? What are they like, up there among the mountains? I’ve never met a woman from the Montayna, you see, that’s the trouble; men never can explain things. You explain it to me. Are you all very passionate souls?”

  The beautiful woman was not teasing her; she was friendly and kindly; she did not mean to tease. It was just that Piera was a stupid provincial schoolgirl w
ho didn’t know anything and couldn’t talk. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  “I think Itale is the most passionate man I have ever known,” Baroness Paludeskar said, her voice now soft and thoughtful. “It’s the secret of his success, of course. If he had been a saint in the old days, he would have converted whole nations of the heathen! —You know that he is becoming very well known in Krasnoy, these days?”

  “No, I didn’t— I don’t—”

  “One can never believe it of someone one played with as a child. I know! You’re thinking, ‘What, him? but he used to have warts and pull his sister’s hair, he can’t be famous!’ I’ve known little boys who I’m now asked to believe are councillors and judges and radicals and I don’t know what all. . . . And one must take them seriously, you know, countess. It is up to women to take men seriously. If we didn’t, society might quite crumble away; the men would be left taking each other seriously while the rest of us laughed. . . . Well, that’s all nonsense, but it is true that our friend is taken almost too seriously by some important people. But you don’t believe me. . . .”

  “Oh, yes, yes, I do,” Piera mumbled wretchedly. If only she didn’t have to say anything, but could just watch the baroness and listen to her and try to understand the things she said. If only she didn’t keep talking about Itale: that confused Piera. When she looked down she saw the baroness’ slim foot in a silver sandal. She tucked her own feet under her dress. She had to say something. “I suppose it’s the—the paper—”

  “What? The paper?” the baroness said brusquely. “Oh, his journal, yes. It’s quite popular, I believe. It isn’t that sort of thing that matters, you know. The fact is, Itale is in fashion—his ideas, I should say, although I wonder— But now we’re all patriots, you see!”

  “Oh, yes, I see,” said Piera, in despair. She was completely lost. The baroness went on, smiling so charmingly, and telling a story about Itale and somebody named Helleskar and some general and something about Austria, and it was funny at the end, so that she should have laughed, but she only smiled and nodded. Her throat was so contracted that she no longer trusted herself to say “Yes” to show she was listening. When their host came over to them she looked at him as if across a chasm, gazing wistfully at his quiet face. The baroness had not yet been introduced to the Belleynins, and he took her over to them. Presently he returned and sat down where the baroness had been sitting. “I am sorry to have interrupted your chat,” he said in his shy, grave way. Piera thought he knew she had been miserable and had saved her, and was now saving her pride; full of gratitude to him for his simple kindness, she said, “Oh, I couldn’t say a word to her, she’s too beautiful—”