Many Mansions. Isabel Bolton
out of this black hole, the better. He searched his pants to find the check, looked at it, put it in his waistcoat pocket, buttoned up his coat. Now to discover if he had some change. Why, he’d be damned. The Lord was on his side. Here was fifty cents, here was a nickel. He’d go out now and find the nearest drug store.
Mol—My Old Lady—he said, as he groped his way through the dark hall to find the outer door. She’d let him have the cash.
THREE
There had been of course, thought the old woman as she reflected on her childhood and the manuscript she was about to read, the two large inhospitable houses where she had been so lost and so unhappy, the Fosters and the Chamberlains and all the rest of them walking about among their splendid properties. But there had also been the outdoor, the open world—certain experiences looked forward to each year, annually repeated and becoming, as the seasons circled round her completing the cycle of the years and memories, the very essence of life and anticipation. Winter and spring, summer and the autumn: yes, that was their sequence in her memory.
Winter!—it was the cold smell, the no-smell, snow smell, the first flakes falling on the mittens, on the coat sleeves, and never one exactly like another, it was those storms that changed the rhythms of the blood and the behavior of the nerves, the wind blowing the white dust off the drifts, swathing the lawns, whirling the snow up in a great darkness, sucking it like a typhoon into the cloud, sweeping it from the roofs of houses, from the boughs of trees, creating such a dark the flying flakes were lost to sight. The lull, and snowfall seen again, that soft accumulation of the flakes. It was the clear cold days that followed, the glitter of the sun upon the snow, the lambent shadows on the lawn, the fiery incandescent atoms dancing, gyrating by their billions and quadrillions in the air. It was the breath that streamed before her as she walked, the snow creaking beneath her shoes, the numbed face and feet and not a thing to smell but the sharp keen no-smell of the cold. The sudden thaws, the drip, drip, dripping from the eaves, the sound of icicles shattering as they fell, snowballs easy to manufacture, the mittens soaked, the coat hem drenched. It was scent returning to the breath, memory stirring, rain and again the cold and all those crystal exhibitions, groves and gardens, fountains, pavilions, palaces of ice—sights glittering and splendid but unrelated, severed from the flow. And finally, finally, communications, whispers, that little mesh and maze of sparrow voices and the whir of sparrows wings, the gutters running rivers and the grass exposed, feet sinking in the mud, rubbers sucked clean off the shoes, roots stirring—intimations, memories, buds swelling on the boughs of trees.
Spring was that swamp where all the violets grew in such abundance, variously tinted, poised and spurred, the large deep blues, those with large white faces delicately penciled, the short-stemmed red variety, and always when she saw them that sense of having been divinely conducted to some secret ground.
It was that search for flowers in the woods, the spell cast over her, the light dim, the stillness of a place enclosed. Above, the brown buds sheathed in their brown casings casting gloom upon the light that filtered through the boughs, and on the ground to the right and to the left all the adorable green shoots and tendrils, the little antic flowers of the woods springing to life and vigor among the skeletal leaves, the dry dead needles of the pine, ferns pushing their unfurled fronds above the earth, standing about like little wool-clad gnomes in the grotesquest attitudes, stems of the moss tipped with the minutest blossoms. And there on that bed of rusty, far from springlike leaves, arbutus, perfect and precise as stars, pink as though they had been washed in the pure waters of the dawn, peering up at her—kneeling to pick them, burying her face in the evanescent, the ineffable fragrance, that sense she’d had of waiting on some memory, some intimation, of having been—but when but where she could not tell.
Summer was that field on the high shelf above the ocean, the meadow-larks rising, the bobolinks swinging on the timothy. It was that dance of joy, that dance of life, that perfect union with the summer day, exact accord with all the little flying creatures and the business they accomplished, something physical about it, visceral, planted very deep in memory, singing with the larks, skimming with the swallows, everything barging up, blowing up, buzzing, humming, floating—all the white, the innocent daisies, the oxeyed daisies, the buttercups, and the grasshoppers transparent as the grass, hopping, springing, squatting, working their horses’ jaws, making spittle on the grass blades, and some of them with wings shaped like little fans, opening and shutting them with such a clack and clatter, flying in every direction, the butterflies descending noiseless on this flower and on that, spreading the velvet and the satin, here the yellow, there the purple, the cat’s eyes, the tiger’s stripes. Running here, running there, and something in her crying out to that blue, mysterious element beyond the dunes to wait, to keep its distance, to allow her still a little longer to belong completely to the earth.
It was that swift descent upon the beach, the surf strong, the waves breaking. Something pretty terrible about it—getting it in one fell swoop, the fury of the breakers carried back to crash and echo in the dunes, waves running up the shore in all their sound and smother, the wild cold smell of the salt spray inducing maniac excitement. Up the path of the waves shrieking, down the hard wet slope again, the waves springing, leaping forward, and one more terrible than all the others standing up in its intolerable beauty, seeing the jellyfish and seaweed and the flung sand churned within its glassy caverns, hearing amid the roar and thunder that little dreadful music of the bubbles breaking, opening their lips on air, on sand, on stone.
Autumn was the orchard where she used to come to bury katydids and spiders, and a state of the clammiest contentment—the air webbed with all manner of tiny tunes and gossamer occurrences, gnats humming, flies and bees and hornets droning, shining threads attached to no visible bough or leaf or spider slack in the bright air, wings flashing, vanishing, bits of down and fluff and feather disappearing in the blue, appearing in the sunlight, those fat worms squirming loose from the grave she opened, and the sepulchral smell of the autumnal earth.
But not a word of all this recorded in that manuscript, she thought as she rose to take her novel from the desk where it had lain so long unread.
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