Ursula Le Guin: Orsinian tales

"Why not?" I was chagrined. I'd talked a lot about Ileskar, and she had seemed interested.

"He doesn't want women and strangers around," she said. "Let the poor fellow be."

"Nonsense. He's very lonely, and doesn't know how to break out of it."

"Then you're just what he needs," she said, with a smile. I insisted – I was bent on doing Galven good, you see – and finally she said, "I have queer ideas about that place, Gil. When you talk about him, I keep thinking of the forest. The old forest, I mean, the way it must have been. A great, dim place, with glades no one ever sees, and places people have known but forgotten, and wild animals roaming in it. A place you get lost in. I think I'll stay home and tend my roses."

I suppose I said something about "feminine illogic," and the rest. Anyhow, I trampled on, and she gave in to me. To yield was her grace, as not to yield was Gal-ven's. No day had been set for our visit, and that reassured her. In fact it was a couple of months before she went to Ile.

I remember the wide, heavy, February sky hanging over the valley as we drove there. The house looked naked in that winter light among bare trees. You saw the shingles off the roof, the uncurtained windows, the weedy driveways. I had spent an uneasy night, dreaming that I was trying to track somebody, some little animal it seemed, through the woods, and never finding it.

Martin wasn't about. Galven put up our pony and brought us into the house. He was wearing old officer's trousers with the stripe taken off, an old coat and a coarse woollen muffler. I had never noticed, till I looked through Poma's eyes, how poor he was. Compared with him, we were wealthy: we had our coats, our coals, our cart and pony, our little treasures and possessions. He had an empty house.

He or Martin had felled one of the oaks to feed the enormous fireplace downstairs. The chairs we sat in were from his room upstairs. We were cold, we were stiff. Galven's good manners were frozen. 1 asked where Martin was. "Hunting," Galven said, expressionless.

"Do you hunt, Mr Ileskar?" Poma asked. Her voice was easy, her face looked rosy in the firelight. Galven looked at her and thawed. "I used to go over to the marshes for duck, when my wife was alive," he said.

"There aren't many birds left, but I liked it, wading out in the marshes as the sun came up."

"Just the thing for a bad chest," I said, "take it up again by all means." All at once we were all relaxed. Galven got to telling us hunting stories that had been passed down in his family – tales of boar-hunting; there'd been no wild boar in the Valone for a hundred years. And that sent us to the tales that old villagers like Minna could still tell you in those days; Poma was fascinated with them, and Galven told her one, a kind of crude, weird epic of avalanches and axe-armed heroes which must have come down from hut to hut, over the centuries, from the high mountains above the valley. He spoke well, in his dry, soft voice, and we listened well, there by the fire, with drafts and shadows at our back. I tried to write that tale down once, and found I could remember only fragments, all the poetry of it gone; but I heard Poma tell it to her children once, word for word as Galven told it that afternoon in Ile.

As we drove away from the place I thought I saw Martin come out of the forest towards the house, but it was too dark to be sure.

At supper Poma asked, "His wife is dead?"

"Divorced."

She poured some tea and dreamed over it awhile.

"Martin was avoiding us," I said.

"Disapproves of my coming there."

"He's a dour one all right. But you did like Galven?"

Poma nodded and presently, as if by afterthought, smiled. And soon she drifted off to her room, leaving a filmy pink scarf clinging to her chair by a thread.

After a few weeks Galven called on us. I was flattered, and startled. I had never imagined him away from He, standing like anybody else in our six-by-six parlour. He had got himself a horse, in Mesoval. He was tremendously pleased and serious, explaining to us how it was a really fine mare, but old and overridden, and how you went about "bringing back" a ruined horse. "When she's fit again, perhaps you'd like to ride her, Miss Pomona," he said, for my sister had mentioned that she loved riding. "She's very gentle."

Pomona accepted at once; she never could resist a ride – "It's my laziness," she always said, "the horse does the work, and I just sit there."

While Galven was there, Minna kept peering through the crack of the door. After he'd gone she treated us with the first inkling of respect she'd shown us yet. We'd moved up a notch in the world. I took advantage of it to ask her about the man from Brailava.

"He used to come to hunt. Mr Ileskar used to entertain, those days. Not like in his father's day, but still, there'd be ladies and gentlemen come. That one come for the hunting. They say he beat his horse blind and then had an awful quarrel with Mr Ileskar about it and was sent off. But he come back, I guess, and made a fool of Mr Ileskar after all."

So it was true about the horse. I hadn't been sure. Galven did not lie, but I had a notion that in his loneliness he had not kept a firm hold on the varieties, the distinctions, of truth. I don't know what gave me that impression, other than his having said once or twice that his wife was dead; and she was, for him, if not for others. At any rate Minna's grin displeased me – her silly respect for Ileskar as "a gentleman," and disrespect for him as a man. I said so. She shrugged her wide shoulders. "Well, doctor, then tell me why he didn't up and follow 'em? Why'd he let the fellow just walk off with his wife?"

She had a point there.

"She wasn't worth his chasing after," I said. Minna shrugged again, and no wonder. By her code, and Galven's, that was not how pride worked.

In fact it was inconceivable that he had simply given in. I had seen him fight a worse enemy than an adulterer. . . . Had Martin somehow interfered? Martin was a strong Christian; he had a different code. But strong as he might be he could not have held Galven back from anything Galven willed to do. It was all very curious, and I brooded over it at odd moments all that spring. It was the passiveness of Galven's behavior that I simply could not fit in to the proud, direct, intransigent man I thought I knew. Some step was missing.

I took Poma out several times to ride at Ile that spring; the winter had left her a bit run down, and I prescribed the exercise. That gave Galven great pleasure. It was a long time since he'd felt himself of use to another human being. Come June he got a second horse, when his money from the Kravay plantations came in; it was called Martin's horse, and Martin rode it when he went to Mesoval, but Galven rode it when Poma came to ride the old black mare. They were a funny pair, Galven every inch the cavalryman on the big raw-boned roan, Poma lazy and smiling, sidesaddle on the fat old mare. All summer he'd ride down on Sunday afternoon leading the mare, pick up Poma, and they'd ride out all afternoon. She came in bright-eyed from these rides, wind-flushed, and I laid it to the outdoor exercise – oh, there's no fool like a young doctor!

There came an evening of August, the evening of a hot day. I'd been on an obstetrics call, five hours, premature twins, stillborn, and I came home about six and lay down in my room. I was worn out. The stillbirth, the sickly heavy heat, the sky grey with coalsmoke over the flat, dull plain, it all pulled me down. Lying there I heard horses' hooves on the road, soft on the dust, and after a while I heard Galven's and Pomona's voices. They were in the little rose plot under my window. She was saying, "I don't know, Galven."

"You cannot come there," he said.

If she answered, I could not hear her.