Gordon Dickson: Hour of the Horde

Automatically he had picked up his fork and begun to eat. Now, at these words, he laid his fork down again. The wave of exhaustion inside him, the wave of anger first pricked to life by the alarm and concern of the people on campus he had passed on his way back to the rooming house, returned with force to wash his appetite away. The mashed potatoes and gravy he had just put into his mouth seemed to have no more taste than if they were made of flour and water and artificial coloring.

“The other two billion won’t miss me if I stick to my own work,” he said. “I’ve got more important things to worry about. I spent all day today painting the river bluffs and the freeway bridge. Do you want to know how it came out?”

“I can guess how it came out,” answered Marie. She too was a student in the school of art at the university. Like Miles, she was graduating this spring. Unlike Miles, she had neither a grant for European study waiting for her nor the supporting belief of her instructors that she had the makings of a truly unusual artist in her. It did not help that Miles himself could see promise in her work. For even he could not bring himself to class that promise with what he himself was after in painting.

“Marie,” an instructor had said bluntly to Miles one day in a burst of frankness, “is going to be good—possibly quite good—if she works hard at it. You’re either going to be unmatchable or impossible.”

Yet in spite of this, there were elements in Marie’s work which were the equivalent of those very elements for which Miles searched in his own. Where he was stark, she was beautiful; where he was violent, she was gentle. Only, he wanted his equivalents of these things on a different level from that on which she had found hers.

“Well, it was the same thing all over again,” said Miles. He picked up the fork once more and mechanically tried to force himself to eat. “The painting turned savage on me—as usual.”

“Yes,” answered Marie in a low voice, “and I know why.”

He looked up sharply from his plate at her and found her eyes more brilliant upon him than ever.

“And this business about the sun proves it,” she went on, more strongly. “I don’t mean the change in color itself; I mean the way you’re reacting to it—” She hesitated, then burst out with a rush. “I’ve never said this to you, Miles. But I always knew I’d have to say it someday, and now this thing’s happened and the time’s come! You aren’t ever going to find the answer to what’s bothering you about the way you paint. You never will because you won’t look in the right direction. You’ll look everywhere but there!”

“What do you mean?” He stared at her, the cooling hot beef sandwich now completely forgotten. “And what’s this business of the sun got to do with it?”

“It’s got everything to do with it,” she said tightly, taking hold of her edge of the table with both hands, as if her grip on it were a grip on him, forcing him to stand still and listen to her. “Maybe this change in the color of the sun hasn’t hurt anything yet—that’s true. But it’s frightened a world full of people! And that doesn’t mean anything to you. Don’t you understand me, Miles? The trouble with you is you’ve got to the point where something like this can happen, and a world full of people be frightened to death by it—and you don’t react at all!”

He looked narrowly at her.

“You’re telling me I’m too wound up in my painting?” he asked. “Is that it?”

“No !” Marie answered fiercely. “You’re just not interested enough in the rest of life!”

“The rest of life?” he echoed. “Why, of course not! All the rest of life does for me is get between me and the painting—and I need every ounce of energy I can get for work. What’s wrong with that?”

“You know what’s wrong!” Marie started out of her corner and leaned across the table toward him. “You’re too strong, Miles. You’ve got to the point where nothing frightens you anymore—and that’s not natural. You’re all one-sided, like that overdeveloped arm of yours and nothing on the other side—” Abruptly she began to cry, but silently, the tears streaming down her face, even while her voice went on, low and tight and controlled as before.

“Oh, I know that’s a terrible thing to say!” she said. “I didn’t want to say it to you, Miles. I didn’t! But it’s true. You’re all one huge muscle in the part of you that’s a painter, and there’s nothing left in you on the human side at all. And still you’re not satisfied. You keep on trying to make yourself even more one-sided, so that you can be a bloodless, camera-eyed observer! Only, it can’t be done—and it shouldn’t be done! You can’t go on in this way without destroying yourself. You’ll turn yourself into a painting machine and still never get what you want, because it really isn’t pictures on canvas you’re after, Miles. It’s people! It really is! Miles—”

Her words broke off and echoed away into the silence of the empty dining area at the back of the Lounge. Into that silence, from the bar at the front, came the unintelligible murmur of the announcer speaking from the television set and still relaying news, or the lack of it, about the sudden change of color of the sun. Miles sat without moving, staring at her. Finally, he found the words for which he was reaching.

“Is this what you called me up, and asked me to meet you here, to say?” he asked, at last.

“Yes!” answered Marie.

He still sat, staring at her. There was a hard, heavy feeling of loneliness and pain just above his breastbone. He had thought that at least there was one person in the universe who understood what he was trying to do. One person, anyway, who had some vision of that long road and that misty goal toward which he was reaching with every ounce of strength he had and every waking hour of his days. He had thought that Marie understood. Now it was plain she did not. She was, in the end, as blind as the rest of them.

If only she had understood, she would have realized that it was people he had been striving to get free of, right from the start. He had been trying to pull himself out of the quicksand of their bloody history and narrow lives, so that he would be able to see clearly, hear clearly, and work without their weight clinging to his mind and hampering the freedom of his mind’s eye.

But Marie had evidently never seen this fact, any more than the rest.

He got to his feet, picked up his check and hers, and walked away from her to the cashier and out of the Lounge without another word.

Outside, still the streets were all but deserted. And through this desert cityscape, under a full moon made dusky by the reflection of reddened sunlight, he returned slowly to his rooming house.

In the night he woke suddenly for no apparent reason. He lay staring at the darkness of the ceiling above him and wondering what had wakened him at such an hour. The bedroom was hot and stuffy, and he had kicked off all his covers.

His pajama top was wet with perspiration. It clung like a clammy hand to his chest, and this, plus the thickness of the air, filled him with a strange sense of some lurking presence as of a crouching danger in the dark. He wondered whether Marie was sleeping peacefully or whether she had also wakened.

It was unnatural for the room to be so stuffy and hot. He got up and went to open the window, but it already stood wide open from the bottom, as high as it could be raised. Outside, the night air hung unmoving, as unnaturally warm and stuffy as the room air.

No breeze stirred. Below, silhouetted against the corner streetlight beyond, a tall, horizontal-armed oak towered over the lilac bushes and the small flowering crab tree in the dark rooming house yard. Bushes and trees alike stood like forms of poured concrete, all stiffly upright, darker than the night.