“And to translate preoccupation with ethics into terms of life work?”
“Teach. Write. Preach. Act, though action is always dangerous.”
“Always?” said Sharon.
“Always, unless you can trace out the possible consequences to a pretty large distance. Sometimes you can, with a moderate degree of certainty, enough for practical purposes. If you can’t, then the time-tested actions are — well, safer anyway, as the man in the street has always recognized: not necessarily better of course.”
“I wonder,” said Abraham, “if I’d ever think I knew enough to act.”
“If you don’t, then study all your life and talk a little when you believe you have something to say.”
He chuckled and threw a handful of pine needles at me. Sharon framed his head in her hands and moved it from side to side, not very playfully. “I’d like to take you home with me this evening. You haven’t met Mother Sophia yet.” I could see her face as he did not. She was thinking not only of Mother Sophia but of the piano. “How long, Abe, since you’ve done any painting?”
He hesitated; there was a frown that she rubbed away with a finger. “Quite a while, Sharon.”
“Maybe,” I suggested, “it doesn’t hitch up closely enough to a preoccupation with ethics?”
“Maybe.” He was startled and interested. “You can preach in oils, but—”
“Not really,” said Sharon. “Propaganda is bad art.”
“Aren’t you thinking in terms of music, though?”
“No. In music the problem just doesn’t exist. You don’t even start looking for propaganda in music unless your head’s already addled.”
“Yes. But in art — well, Daumier, Goya, Hogarth—”
“They live,” said Sharon, “because they were good artists. If their social ideas had been the kind we don’t happen to like in the twentieth century, their work would last just the same. Cellini was a louse. The piety of Blake and El Greco almost doesn’t exist nowadays. Their work does.”
“I think you’re right,” said Abraham after a while. “I think Will is right too. Painting isn’t enough for a frustrated moralist late of reform school.”
Sharon winced and tightened her fingers, but Abraham was still smiling. I thought I had heard something she missed. I said: “Abe, that’s the first time I’ve heard you speak of the past without bitterness.”
He twisted his head to look up at his sweetheart almost with merriment, reminding her, I think, to share the memory of some words they must have spoken earlier. “I don’t think I have any, Will. Not any more.”
“Not even for Dr. Hodding and the men who bought him?”
Abraham murmured: “Bound on the wheel.” He sat up then and pulled Sharon into the hollow of his arm, kissing her hair, sensing that for the moment she wanted to be the sheltered one.
“So now the boy is a Buddhist,” said Sharon.
“Of course. Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Mohammedan—”
“One moment. One wife will be quite enough—”
“Hoy! Mohammedan, Christian, Socratic, Hindu—”
“Okay, only kind of hard for a girl to keep up with on a Sunday afternoon, and I still say—”
“You get used to it,” said Abraham. “We dispense with the veil. It merely means you have to take your shoes off when you go through the house in order to reach the bo tree in the back yard.”
I said: “You forgot Mithra.”
“Tradesmen’s entrance,” said Abraham. “Plenty room. Not forgetting the Greek Pantheon, which can use the front door any time.” He stuck out his tongue at me, not much more than twelve years old. “Syncretism in North Jersey yet! Will, this bottle still has life in it.”
We killed it without help from Sharon, who didn’t want to move.
But it seemed to make Abraham more sober, not less. He watched me over her drowsy head, and at length he asked: “Do you still have that mirror?”
Dubiously I said: “I’ve always carried it with me, Abraham.”
“So…?”
“And never exactly forgiven myself for letting you see it when you were twelve.” Sharon looked up at him, with questions unspoken. “Since then I’ve looked in it many times.”
“And found…?”
“Oh, if you can stand it, if you turn it often enough this way and that, you can usually find something like the truth you look for. Most people would say it’s only a distortion in the bronze, imagination supplying the rest. I wouldn’t say yes or no to that.”
“Mirror?” said Sharon sleepily.
“Just something I carry around with me. Call it a talisman. It was given me years ago by an archaeologist. A little Cretan hand mirror, Sharon, said to be about seven thousand years old.”
“You see, honey? Just modern stuff after all.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Yes, if you’re interested in ethics, you could do worse than think in terms of geological time. Well, Sharon, you can’t find any wave or imperfection in the reflecting surface, but there must be one, for the plague-take-it thing never looks the same twice. I wouldn’t care to have you peep into it unprepared. Usually it doesn’t show your face as other people see it. It might show you very old, or very young. Different. Things you might never have guessed yourself — and who’s to claim there’s any truth in it? A trick. A toy…”
When I said nothing more and made no move to take out the mirror, Sharon spoke with her head drowsy again on Abraham’s shoulder: “Will, don’t be so damn gentle.”
“Really I’m not. But I learned some years back that human nature is volatile stuff in a world full of lighted matches.”
Meeting my eyes tranquilly, Abraham said: “We wouldn’t be scared to look, Will.”
I unfastened the mirror from the strap hidden under my shirt, the same strap that holds my old grenade and the new one Supply sent me, and put it in Abraham’s hand. They gazed into it, two young and uncorrupted faces side by side. Not so very young. Twenty-one and nineteen. But out of certain black places even I could never explore, Twenty-one had groped his way, undefiled; and Nineteen was a grown-up, proud, and humble priestess in what may be the greatest of the arts.
Drozma, I felt the beginning of that peace which we Observers know when the end of a mission is not far away. What Abraham had predicted was not quite true: they were frightened. That was almost unimportant. What mattered was that nothing they felt — fright, shock, amazement, disappointment — made them turn away from what they saw. I can’t know what that was. They are both articulate with words. They also knew as I did that this was beyond the narrow territory of words. I could guess, from the passage of emotional lights and shadows in their faces — puzzled, rapt, startled, hurt, sometimes amused and often tender. I could guess as much as I had any right to know. I asked nothing when Abraham handed the mirror back to me. Showing that sleepy smile which I remembered from long ago, from a summer afternoon in the cemetery at Byfield, from a few other nearly silent summer afternoons in the pine woods, Abraham said: “Well, it would seem we’re human. I did have a suspicion of it all along.”
“Yes. You, and the maker of the mirror, and Mordecai Paxton.”
He grinned and remarked softly: “Hi-ho, Mordecai! Wha’ d’ya know — is she asleep?”
“Not entirely,” said Sharon. I think that’s what she murmured. I had glanced into the mirror before putting it away, and I saw nothing of myself.
I saw nothing of myself, Drozma.
Did you know, my second father, that there might be a time when I would look there and see only the motion behind me of friendly trees and open sky? A bush of viburnum, a rank of heavy undergrowth dividing the clearing from the forest and full of the innocent secret hurry of birds. This and the maples with leaf buds newly stirring, and the pines, and far and high the passage of a white cloud…. Did you also foresee that there might be no pain in that moment at all — or at least only such daylong, nightlong pain as we and humanity must live with because of our mortality, finding it a sort of background music not very different from the love song of tree frogs at night or the imagined music of May-flies in the late sun? Did you know that I might be able to smile, and put the mirror carelessly away, stretch like a human being, and remind Sharon that we ought to be starting home?