: Outland by Austin Mary - Fantasy fiction; California Fiction

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OUTLAND

I CONCERNING THE TRAIL AT BROKEN TREE

The trail begins at the Broken Tree with the hawk's nest. As often as we have talked of it since, Herman and I, and that is as often as the ceanothus blooms untimely for a sign of rains delayed, or there is a low moon and a following star, or a wind out of the south with the smell of wild honey in it, we have agreed together that the trail begins at Broken Tree.

There were some other landmarks I was quite as sure of at the time, but the creek makes so many turns here I could never find them again, and the second time of Herman's going in, he had altogether other things to think about. So as often as we have occasion to talk of it, we end by saying that it begins at Broken Tree.

I remember very well how Fairshore looked that day as we stood gazing back at it from the edge of the plowed lands; the pines sketched blackly against the smudgy, fawn-colored slope, the sea as blue as lazuli, and the leaning surf. I had another reason for remembering it, since it was the last time of Herman's asking and of my refusing to marry him. I don't know why Herman's being a professor of sociology should have led him to suppose that our liking the same sort of books and much the same people, and having between us an income fairly adequate to the exigencies of comfortable living, should have been reason enough for my marrying him, but he had spent a great deal of time that summer trying to convince me that it was. I recall being rather short with him that afternoon. For, in the first place, if I had meant to marry Herman I should not have put all I had into a house at Fairshore, and in the next place, though I had not got to the point of admitting it, the house was proving rather a failure.

For a long time I had believed that it needed but a little space of collected quietness for the vague presages of my spirit to burst freely into power. Somewhere within myself I was aware of a vast, undiscovered country full of wandering lights and crying voices, from whence the springs of great undertakings should issue. But now that the house was accomplished and my position in the English Department definitely resigned, all that I had got by it was an insuperable dryness of heart and a great deal of time which hung rather heavily upon my hands. I had done no work at Fairshore that I was willing to confess to in print. I know I should not, until I could escape from this inward desertness into that quarter from whence still, at times, I could feel a wind blowing that trumpeted up all the lagging forces of my soul. And just when I was wanting most to know passion and great freedom of feeling, Herman's offer of a reasonable marriage, of which the particular recommendation was that no feeling went to it, took on the complexion of a personal affront. The more so since there was no very definite way in which I could make clear to Herman just what offended me.

"And that?" He turned to me with a sincere and astonished inquiry in his lifted brows.

"Would be merely that you love me and can't live without me."

It might have been the wind that blew from the country beyond Broken Tree at that moment, or something in my face, that turned that last repetition of my name upon the point of interrogation. Though it was my crying objection to Herman that he could not produce in me those raptures and alarms and whirlings to and fro, out of which I knew all creative art to proceed, yet to have him so renounce for us both the possibility of such a relation filled me with sudden wounding and affront. And at that, or at some new shadow of wonder in his eyes with the turning of his voice upon the word, I found myself so little able to give back look for look, that it was a great relief to me to discover the hawk's nest in the Broken Tree. The creek makes a turn here, and the stepping-stones were so far apart it was necessary for Herman to go ahead and reach me back his hand. As I swung past him I heard him say my name again with so new a touch of shamed credulity that I was glad to put my hand up over my eyes, making believe I had not heard him, and look very attentively at Broken Tree.

It stands on the upper bank of the creek, snapped off midway by the wind. Below the break two great sweeping boughs spread either way like the arms of a guide-post. The nest is in the splintered hollow of the trunk.

"It is a nest," I said, as though a doubt I had were the reason for my not hearing him. Herman was so used to this sort of interruption when we walked in the woods together that I hoped it had a natural sound. He answered quite simply that if it was, it should be empty by this time of the year. Suddenly the hawk, unfurling from the upper branches, pitched a slow downward spiral above our heads, then beat back into upper air, uttering sharp cries, and, settling slowly to the left, preened himself and neglected us. As if being but a watchman, having cried our coming, he had no other interest in the affair.

Just beyond the pine there was a thicket of wild lilac grown across the way, and as I put up my hand to defend my face, I saw that a light spray of it had burst untimely into bloom. Though this was the second week in October the grass was brittle as new silk and the earth was hard with drought. I remember holding the branch toward Herman for him to see.

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