Then, after he had shaved, he worked on his house. He neatened it, rearranged the furniture to minimize the danger of protruding corners, hard edges, hidden obstacles; he eliminated everything which could trip, bruise, or deflect him, so that even in the dark his rooms would be navigable, safe; he made his house as much like his cell in the leprosarium as possible. Anything that was hazardous, he threw into the guest room; and when he was done he locked the guest room and threw away the key.
After that he went to his hut and locked it also. Then he pulled its fuses, so that there would be no risk of fire in the old wiring.
Finally he washed the sweat off his hands. He washed them grimly, obsessively; he could not help himself-the physical impression of uncleanness was too strong.
Leper outcast unclean.
He spent the autumn stumbling around the rims of madness. Dark violence throbbed in him like a picar thrust between his ribs, goading him aimlessly. He felt an insatiable need for sleep, but could not heed it because his dreams had changed to nightmares of gnawing; despite his numbness, he seemed to feel himself being eaten away. And wakefulness confronted him with a vicious and irreparable paradox. Without the support or encouragement of other people, he did not believe he could endure the burden of his struggle against horror and death; yet that horror and death explained, made comprehensible, almost vindicated the rejection which denied him support or encouragement. His struggle arose from the same passions which produced his outcasting. He hated what would happen to him if he failed to fight. He hated himself for having to fight such a winless and interminable war. But he could not hate the people who made his moral solitude so absolute. They only shared his own fear.
In the dizzy round of his dilemma, the only response which steadied him was vitriol. He clung to his bitter anger as to an anchor of sanity; he needed fury in order to survive, to keep his grip like a stranglehold on life. Some days he went from sun to sun without any rest from rage.
But in time even that passion began to falter. His outcasting was part of his law; it was an irreducible fact, as totally real and compulsory as gravity and pestilence and numbness. If he failed to crush himself to fit the mould of his facts, he would fail to survive.
When he looked out over the Farm, the trees which edged his property along the highway seemed so far away that nothing could bridge the gap.
The contradiction had no answer. It made his fingers twitch helplessly, so that he almost cut himself shaving. Without passion he could not fight-yet all his passions rebounded against him. As the autumn passed, he cast fewer and fewer curses at the impossibilities imprisoning him. He prowled through the woods behind Haven Farm-a tall, lean man a with haggard eyes, a mechanical stride, and two fingers gone from his right hand. Every cluttered trail, sharp rock, steep slope reminded him that he was keeping himself alive with caution, that he had only to let his surveillance slip to go quietly unmourned and painless out of his troubles.
It gave him nothing but an addition of sorrow to touch the bark of a tree and feel nothing. He saw clearly the end that waited for him; his heart would become as affectless as his body, and then he would be lost for good and all.
Nevertheless, he was filled with a sudden sense of focus, of crystallization, as if he had identified an enemy, when he learned that someone had paid his electric bill for him. The unexpected gift made him abruptly aware of what was happening. The townspeople were not only shunning him, they were actively cutting off every excuse he might have to go among them.
When he first understood his danger, his immediate reaction was to throw open a window and shout into the winter, “Go ahead! By hell, I don't need you!” But the issue was not simple enough to be blown away by bravado. As winter scattered into an early March spring, he became convinced that he needed to take some kind of action. He was a person, human like any other; he was kept alive by a personal heart. He did not mean to stand by and approve this amputation.
So when his next phone bill came, he gathered his courage, shaved painstakingly, dressed himself in clothes with tough fabrics, laced his feet snugly into sturdy boots, and began the two-mile walk into town to pay his bill in person.
That walk brought him to the door of the Bell Telephone Company with trepidation hanging around his head like a dank cloud. He stood in front of the gilt-lettered door for a time, thinking,
These are the pale deaths…
and wondering about laughter. Then he collected himself, pulled open the door like the gust of a gale, and stalked up to the girl at the counter as if she had challenged him to single combat.
He put his hands palms down on the counter to steady them. Ferocity sprang across his teeth for an instant. He said, “My name is Thomas Covenant.”
The girl was trimly dressed, and she held her arms crossed under her breasts, supporting them so that they showed to their best advantage. He forced himself to look up at her face. She was staring blankly past him. While he searched her for some tremor of revulsion, she glanced at him and asked, “Yes?”
“I want to pay my bill,” he said, thinking, She doesn't know, she hasn't heard.
“Certainly, sir,” she answered. “What is your number?”
He told her, and she moved languidly into another room to check her files.
The suspense of her absence made his fear pound in his throat. He needed some way to distract himself, occupy his attention. Abruptly, he reached into his pocket and brought out the sheet of paper the boy had given him. You're supposed to read it. He smoothed it out on the counter and looked at it.
The old printing said:
A real man-real in all the ways that we recognize as real-finds himself suddenly abstracted from the world and deposited in a physical situation which could not possibly exist: sounds have aroma, smells have colour and depth, sights have texture, touches have pitch and timbre. There he is informed by a disembodied voice that he has been brought to that place as a champion for his world. He must fight to the death in single combat against a champion from another world. If he is defeated, he will die, and his world-the real world-will be destroyed because it lacks the inner strength to survive.
The man refuses to believe that what he is told is true. He asserts that he is either dreaming or hallucinating, and declines to be put in the false position of fighting to the death where no “real” danger exists. He is implacable in his determination to disbelieve his apparent situation, and does not defend himself when he is attacked by the champion of the other world.
Question: is the man's behaviour courageous or cowardly?
This is the fundamental question of ethics.
Ethics! Covenant snorted to himself. Who the hell makes these things up?
The next moment, the girl returned with a question in her face. “Thomas Covenant? Of Haven Farm? Sir, a deposit has been made on your account which covers everything for several months. Did you send us a large check recently?”
Covenant staggered inwardly as if he had been struck, then caught himself on the counter, listing to the side like a reefed galleon. Unconsciously he crushed the paper in his fist. He felt light-headed, heard words echoing in his ears: Virtually all societies condemn, denounce, cast out-you cannot hope.
He focused his attention on his cold feet and aching ankles while he fought to keep the violence at bay. With elaborate caution, he placed the crumpled sheet on the counter in front of the girl. Striving to sound conversational; he said, “It isn't catching, you know. You won't get it from me-there's nothing to worry about. It isn't catching. Except for children.”