The Chamber Of Life Part 4

Baret and Selda

I remember that I lived nearly two months--or so it seemed--in that other world. I was a.s.signed an apartment near to Edvar's--Selda was between us. Edvar instructed me in the details of the life I was to lead. But he was a rather cold sort: his interests were ancient history and archeology, and he would spend his mornings at work in the Library of History or in his study, the rest of his time flying about the world on curious expeditions of discovery--examining the soil, I suppose, and investigating the customs and records of other cities.

Selda devoted most of her time to me. It was she who took me from place to place, showing me the natural beauties of that world. There were, you see, not only gentle slopes and hill-tops. There were mountainous crags as high and as wild as the Alps, forests as impenetrably deep and still as the jungles of the Amazon, and rivers that rushed and tumbled over rocks, or fell for thousands of feet from mountain cliffs.

The first time I went with her, she took me to a gigantic peak that overlooked the sea. There was, of course, a small level place for the airship to land. We left it there, and climbed on foot the last hundred yards or so. Our way lay through the heavy snow, but it was not too cold to be more than gloriously bracing, exhilarating. We wore our usual costume of trunks and tunic.

We stood at the top and looked out over the grandest horizon I had ever seen. To the east there lay the sea, deep and very blue in the sunlight.

The sh.o.r.e was just a dark line far away and below us. There was a long strip of gra.s.s and field bordering the sea for miles, and behind that the forest. Toward the north, the mountains crept out from under the forest and moved down to the sea, rising until they became a vast wilderness of cliffs and rocks, and hid the sea, with peak after peak rising as far as the eye could reach into the snow and the mist. Then the hills sloped down westward into a series of wooded valleys, through which ran the wide river I had seen at my awakening, coming down from the mountains and through the valleys until it flattened broadly out into the low plains in the south and moved eastward to the sea.

Everywhere in the valleys and over the plains, I knew that cities were scattered, lonely and tall like the one they called Richmond. But we were so high in the mountains that they were invisible to us--perhaps a keen eye could have found them, tiny white dots crouching upon the earth.

I turned to Selda--and caught my breath. The wind, swooping up from the sea, whipped her thin covering against her body and fluttered it like the swift wings of a b.u.t.terfly behind her. Her short, dark hair, too, was lifted and blown back from her forehead, revealing the clean, soft profile of her face. I had never seen a girl who stood so clean, so straight. I watched her until she turned, too, and met my eyes. In them I thought I detected something startled and unfathomable.

"My G.o.d!" I cried across the wind, "you are beautiful!" She frowned a little, but her eyes still looked searchingly into mine. I stepped forward, facing her. But I didn't touch her. I was afraid to touch anything so clean.

"You belong here, Selda," I added. "The wind is a part of you, and the mountains, and the sea. You shouldn't have to live in the midst of all those people in the city. You belong here." She smiled faintly, looking up at me.

"You belong here more than I do, Baret," she said. "You came to us, not from the city, but from the hills."

We stood there, examining each other's eyes, for a long while. I wanted to take her in my arms, but I didn't. I looked away at last, back at the sea, puzzled and disturbed. I had never been aware of anything so fine as this before, nor of anything so painful. Suddenly I found myself wanting to be something, to do something--not for myself, but for her.

It was strange.

"Come," she said at last, "we had better go back."

"I'd like to stay here forever," I answered moodily, glancing around a last time at the versatile horizon.

"So would I," she admitted. Then, in a low voice, she added, "But one can't. One has to follow one's program."

We returned to the airship, raid rose into the cool, thin air. I stood behind her on the way back, watching her slender body as she guided the plane. Once in a while she would turn her head and look up at me over her shoulder, then quickly look away again.

"Why is it," I asked her as we pa.s.sed over the valleys and the river on our way home, "why is it that these hills have such a cultivated look--as though they had been laid out?" She glanced back, and smiled.

"They _have_ been laid out," she said. "The hills, and the rivers, and the tallest mountains have all been constructed by our landscape artists in order to achieve their various effects. Even the line of the sea has been determined and arranged by the artists."

"But why?" I said. "Wasn't it a frightful waste of energy?"

"It didn't seem so to us," she answered. "We had no further need to cultivate the land except in small patches, when we learned the secret of artificial food. And we wanted to have perfect beauty about us. So we remodeled the outlines of the earth, and eliminated the insects and the harmful animals and the weeds. We made the land clean and fine as it had never been before."

"It must have been a terrific labor."

"It pleased us. Our instinct is to arrange and remodel things, to order our life so that we know what it is and what it will always be." She paused for a moment, and added in a low voice, "One is necessarily a determinist here."

We said no more until our arrival in Richmond.

It is not my purpose to detail here all that happened during the time I spent on that world. Most of it had to do with Selda, and our daily expeditions about the world. This is not, after all, a love story, but the account of a very strange experience; and, too, none of it was real.

During my last week, a series of strange moods and happenings complicated my life. One day, after a visit to the sea with Selda, we were walking back to our plane across the sand. Without any warning, surrounded by the brilliant morning sunlight and the miles of sea and beach, I struck my knee against something hard and immovable, and, flinging out my hand to catch myself from falling, I clung to a hard surface like an iron railing. For a moment I was stunned and confused.

The sunlight seemed to fade, and there was a vague hint of darkness all about me, with black walls looming up on all sides. It was as though I stood in two worlds at once, transfixed between night and day. Then the darkness went away, the sunlight brightened. I looked around, and found Selda watching me curiously, a little alarmed.

"What happened, Baret?" she asked, puzzled. I shook my head in bewilderment.

"I seemed to stumble--" I said. There was nothing underfoot but the soft sand, and where I had flung my hand against a sort of railing, there was nothing either. We went back to the airship in silence, both of us confused.

After that, with increasing frequency, there would come interruptions, like iron bars striking dark, jagged holes in the tissue of life. From time to time I heard inexplicable noises--the whirring of motors, the skid-skid of tires on invisible streets, the rumble of carts around corners of a world where there were no carts. Again and again those moments of confusion would come over me, when I seemed to be looking into two worlds at once, one superimposed upon the other, one bright, the other dark with faint points of light in the distance. Once, walking along the corridor beyond my room in Richmond, I collided with a man.

For a moment the corridor faded completely. I stood on a street with dark houses about me. Overhead was the glow of a street-lamp, and a milk-cart was just rattling away around a corner. A man with a frightened face stood before me, his hat on the pavement, his eyes staring. We looked at each other in astonishment. I started to speak.

Then he reached for his hat quickly, and brushed by me, muttering close to my ear.

"For G.o.d's sake, look where you're going...."

I stood in the corridor again, staring. Down the corridor, coming toward me, was a single figure--Selda. Behind me there was n.o.body. I went to meet Selda, dazed and uneasy. I could still hear, close to my ear, an echo of that m.u.f.fled, hoa.r.s.e voice that I had never heard before.

That was two days before the end. We were leaving the city on that final bright morning, when a representative of the Bureau stopped us. I looked at him inquiringly.

"I have come to tell you, Baret," he said, "that your departure is scheduled for this evening." I drew back, startled, and looked at Selda.

"My departure?" I repeated in a low voice, hardly understanding. "So soon?" I had forgotten that one day I should have to leave.

"It has been arranged," he said impersonally.

We bowed slightly to each other, and he went away. Selda and I stepped aboard our ship in silence.

That time we flew up the river until we came to the foothills of the mountains in the north. We landed in a little clearing by the river at the foot of a waterfall hundreds of feet high, towering over us. The forest stood about us on all sides, coming down to the river's brim on the opposite bank and meeting it not far from us on the near bank. The precipice, covered with moss and small bushes, stood above us.

We sat a long while in silence, before I said bitterly:

"So I must go."

She didn't look at me, but answered quietly, "Yes, you must go."

"I don't want to go," I cried, "I want to stay here!"

"Why?" she asked me, averting her face.

"Don't you know?" I said swiftly. "Haven't you understood long ago that I love you?" She shook her head.

"Love is something that we don't know here--not until we have been married and lived with our men. Sometimes not then." But she looked at me, and I thought there were tears in her eyes. Suddenly the impulse I had been resisting ever since the morning on the mountain became insupportable, and I caught her in my arms almost roughly. Her face was close to mine, and she closed her eyes. I kissed her, forgetting everything but the knowledge that I had stumbled upon the sort of love that doesn't pa.s.s away, no matter how long a man lives.

After a while, though, she drew away as if she resisted not my desire, but her own.