She looked at his hands on the chair back; he was gripping the wooden bar tightly; his hands were nerve and bone under the dark skin, strong, fragile.
“All right. I have to go back,” she said, and stood up.
“Wait. You should tell this to the others.”
“I can’t. You tell them.”
“But you said you ran away from Macmilan. Now you’re going back to him?”
“No! To my father—to my house—”
But he was right. It was the same thing.
“I came to warn you,” she said coldly, “because Macmilan was going to trick you, and deserves to be tricked himself. That’s all.”
But it wasn’t enough.
She looked out the open door and saw the lane she would have to walk on, beyond it the street, then the road, then the City and its streets and her house and her father—
“I don’t understand,” she said. She sat down again, abruptly, because she was shaky again, though not with fear, now, but with anger. “I didn’t think. Vera said—”
“What did she say?”
“She said to stop and think.”
“Has she—”
“Wait. I have to think. I didn’t then, I have to now.”
She sat still in the chair for some minutes, her hands clenched in her lap.
“All right,” she said. “This is a war, Vera said. I should be—I have betrayed my father’s side. Vera is a hostage to the City. I’ll have to be a hostage to the Town. If she can’t come and go, neither can I. I have to go through with it.” Her breath stuck in her throat, making a catching sound at the end of the sentences.
“We don’t take hostages, make prisoners, Lux—”
“I didn’t say you did. I said I have to stay here. I choose to stay here. Will you let me?”
Lev strode off down the room, ducking automatically as he came under the low crossbeam. His shirt had been drying on a chair before the fire; he put it on, went into the back room, came out with his shoes in his hand, sat down at a chair by the table to put them on. “Look,” he said, stooping down to get his shoe on, “you can stay here. Anybody can. We don’t make anybody go, we don’t make anybody stay.” He straightened up, looking directly at her. “But what is your father going to think? Even if he believed you were staying here by choice—”
“He wouldn’t allow it. He’d come to get me.”
“By force.”
“Yes, by force. With Macmilan and his little army, no doubt.”
“Then you become the pretext for violence they seek. You must go home, Luz.”
“For your sake,” she said.
She was simply thinking it out, seeing what she had done and what consequences must follow. But Lev sat motionless, a shoe—a muddy, battered, low boot, she noticed—in his hand.
“Yes,” he said. “For our sake. You came here for our sake. Now you go back for our sake. And if they find out you’ve been here—?” There was a pause. “No,” he said. “You can’t go back. You’d be caught in the lie—yours and theirs. You came here. Because of Vera, because of us. You’re with us.”
“No, I’m not,” Luz said, angrily; but the light and warmth in Lev’s face bewildered her mind. He spoke so plainly, with such certainty; he was smiling now. “Luz,” he said, “remember, when we were in school? You were always—I always wanted to talk to you, I never got up the courage—We did talk once, at sunset, you asked why I wouldn’t fight Angel and his crowd. You never were like the other City girls, you didn’t fit, you didn’t belong. You belong here. The truth matters to you. Do you remember when you got mad at the teacher once, when he said coneys don’t hibernate and Timmo tried to tell how he’d found a whole cave of them hibernating and the teacher was going to whip him for being insolent, do you remember?”
“I said I’d tell my father,” Luz said in a low voice. She had turned very white.
“You stood up in the class, you said the teacher didn’t know the truth and was going to whip Timmo for telling it—you were only about fourteen. Luz, listen, come with me now, we’ll go to Elia’s house. You can tell them what you told me and we can settle what to do. You can’t go back now and be punished, be ashamed! Listen, you can stay with Southwind, she lives outside of town, you can be quiet there. But come with me now, we can’t lose time.” He reached out his hand to her across the table, that fine, warm hand full of life; she took it, and met his eyes; her eyes filled up with tears. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, in tears. “You only have one shoe on, Lev.”
8
Short as the time was, the entire community must be rallied, brought together, to stand firm together, to hold fast. Indeed haste was in their favor, for, under no pressure, the timorous and halfhearted might fall away; under threat of imminent attack, all were eager to find and keep the center, the strength of the group.
A center there was, and he was in it—was the center, himself, with Andre, Southwind, Martin, Italia, Santha, and all the others, the young, the determined. Vera was not there, and yet was there, in all their decisions, her gentleness and unshakable firmness. Elia was not there; he and Jewel and several others, mostly older people, stood aside, must stand aside, because their will was not the will of the community. Elia had never been strong for the plan of emigration, and now he argued that they had gone too far, the girl must be sent back to her father at once, with a delegation who would “sit down with the Council and talk—if we’ll only sit down and talk to each other, there’s no need for all this distrust and defiance … .”
“Armed men don’t sit down and talk, Elia,” said old Lyons, wearily.
It was not to Elia that they turned, but to “Vera’s people,” the young ones. Lev felt the strength of his friends and the whole community, supporting and upholding. It was as if he were not Lev alone, but Lev times a thousand—himself, but himself immensely increased, enlarged, a boundless self mingled with all the other selves, set free, as no man alone could ever be free.
There was scarcely need to take counsel, to explain to people what must be done, the massive, patient resistance which they must set against the City’s violence. They knew already, they thought for him and he for them; his word spoke their will.
The girl Luz, the stranger, self-exiled: her presence in Shantih sharpened this sense of perfect community by contrast, and edged it with compassion. They knew why she had come, and they tried to be kind to her. She was alone among them, scared and suspicious, drawing herself up in her pride and her Boss’s-daughter arrogance whenever she did not understand. But she did understand, Lev thought, however much her reason might confuse her; she understood with the heart, for she had come to them, trusting.
When he told her that, told her that she was and always had been, in spirit, one of them, one of the People of the Peace, she put on her disdainful look. “I don’t even know what these ideas of yours are,” she said. But she had, in fact, learned a great deal from Vera; and during these strange, tense, inactive days of waiting for word or attack from the City, while ordinary work was suspended and “Vera’s people” were much together, Lev talked with her as often as he could, longing to bring her fully among them, into the center where so much peace and strength was and where one was not alone.
“It’s very dull, really,” he explained, “a kind of list of rules, just like school. First you do this, next you do that. First you try negotiation and arbitration of the problem, whatever it is, by existing means and institutions. You try to talk it out, the way Elia keeps saying. That step was Vera’s group going to talk with the Council, you see. It didn’t work. So you go on to step two: noncooperation. A kind of settling down and holding still, so they know you mean what you said. That’s where we are now. Then step three, which we’re now preparing: issue of an ultimatum. A final appeal, offering a constructive solution, and a clear explanation of what will be done if that solution isn’t agreed upon now.”