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.“I said that one day she would wake up and”—she began to laugh again—”and she would be able to ignore the fact that it was raining and go for a walk without protective clothing and come home and catch pneumonia and die saying what a lovely day it had been.”I became impatient.“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Regan,” I said.“But I do know that you’re making a public spectacle of yourself.Come home.”She sobered down and said, “I suppose so.That’s all there is to do, isn’t it?”* * * *the drum heater is beating tonight.He beat for many hours last night and the night before, drumming through the night while we kept fire alight with many logs.We did not sleep till morning.We love that wild drumming and our blood runs hot and fast.* * * *Regan, Arthur and I ate our evening meal in my room at the top of the house this evening.We had never done it before.Through the glass walls we can see south, over the broad, white streets of the city and forward, north, down over the lawn to the forest.The building work lay abandoned.The men had downed tools in the afternoon.Bricks lay in small piles along its length; tools had been flung down on the grass.The deep trench lay like a gash across the lawn between the forest and my house.The foundations were almost ready.The real work should begin tomorrow.A cool breeze shook the trees of the forest.The sky overhead was cloudy.We sat on as the evening grew darker.* * * *drums beating, drums, beating, beating, beating.* * * *Suddenly, in the dusk, a figure appeared, treading over the ramparts, straddling them, head down to examine them.“Keeney,” Regan said.We sat watching him in silence.In the gloom we could not make out his face.We could see his thickset figure walking heavily along the course of the foundations, bending over the bricks and tools.Then, in the dusk, he stood athwart the trench, raised his big head, stood with his large hands hanging by his sides and laughed out loud, up at the sky.From where we sat we could catch the faint sound of his laughter.Arthur said nothing at first.He looked at Keeney laughing in the dark.Then he said, “What the boys say is right.“What do they say?” I asked.But he only shook his head.I looked at Regan.At last I had identified the uneasiness, uncertainty, I had felt this morning and wondered at.It was fear of the future.Regan shot a glance at Arthur.Regan stood up suddenly and said, “I’m going down to talk to Keeney.” She ran out of the room.I heard her feet on the stairs and saw her running over the lawn —and suddenly Keeney was gone.He had vanished in the darkness.Regan came back and said, “Come on, Arthur—bed.”Arthur followed her out of the room.It was quite dark now.I could see the trees ahead and the dim lights of the town behind.Later I said to Regan, “Shall we leave for another city?”“It would be the same anywhere else,” she said.“Other cities may be more ready to defend themselves.”“After five hundred years of developing our kind of life,” she said mildly.‘Electing councils, planting gardens, living by the law, playing gentle music, writing gentle verse, creating beauty, pleasure and peaceful scenes everywhere, avoiding every kind of violence, even that of birth and death, as if it were a dreadful, contagious disease—”“As it is,” I said.“Oh, certainly,” Regan said.“The cities came out of the ruin created by violence, aggression and competitiveness.But our fear of violence may have been as destructive as the violence itself.Do you know what it’s like to rear a child in constant terror of its rages, its hatreds, its inability to tell the difference between order and chaos? And then to know, and have to pretend not to know, that all these things were in us once— and probably still are? You men—hypocrites, all of you.Your Unexpected Arrivals—unexpected by you, perhaps, not by us.Your solemn conclaves, decisions that someone must leave the city for this crime or that.We women conceal the worst for you—we hide births and deaths, we deal with malformed babies as we’ve always done, we get sent away for conceiving, for giving birth without permission, we hide children who bite, whine and scream until we can eradicate enough of them to present them as citizens, we secretly threaten the older children until they abandon their uncontrolled way.And then we conceal from ourselves what we do.”“I’m going to bed,” I said.“Go to bed,” she said.“But we still have to face the results of what we’ve done.And what about Arthur?”“What about him?” I asked.“What about him indeed,” she said savagely.“When it happens—this thing we aren’t talking about—what will happen to Arthur?”“I’ll think about that in the morning,” I said.“Goodnight,” she said.“Goodnight.’* * * *the drums do not beat anymore.It is the Holy Time.* * * *It is happening at last.Night after night we have come up to my room here at the top of the house.We have eaten and sat in silence as the darkness came down, catching the scents and gentle sounds from the city on one side, seeing the trees of the forest waving ahead on the other [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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