The girl on the hill made Mark think of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Perhaps it was because of the way she was standing there in the afternoon sun,
her dandelion-hued hair dancing in the wind; perhaps it was because of the way
her old-fashioned white dress was swirling around her long and slender legs. In
any event, he got the definite impression that she had somehow stepped out of
the past and into the present; and that was odd, because as things turned out,
it wasn't the past she had stepped out of, but the future.
He paused
some distance behind her, breathing hard from the climb. She had not seen him
yet, and he wondered how he could apprise her of his presence without alarming
her. While he was trying to make up his mind, he took out his pipe and filled
and lighted it, cupping his hands over the bowl and puffing till the tobacco
came to glowing life. When he looked at her again, she had turned around and
was regarding him curiously.
He walked
toward her slowly, keenly aware of the nearness of the sky, enjoying the feel
of the wind against his face. He should go hiking more often, he told himself.
He had been tramping through woods when he came to the hill, and now the woods
lay behind and far below him, burning gently with the first pale fires of fall,
and beyond the woods lay the little lake with its
complement of cabin and fishing pier. When his wife had been unexpectedly
summoned for jury duty, he had been forced to spend alone the two weeks he had
saved out of his summer vacation and he had been leading a lonely existence,
fishing off the pier by day and reading the cool evenings away before the big
fireplace in the raftered living room; and after two days the routine had
caught up to him, and he had taken off into the woods without purpose or
direction and finally he had come to the hill and had climbed it and seen the
girl.
Her eyes were
blue, he saw when he came up to her—as blue as the sky that framed her slender
silhouette. Her face was oval and young and soft and sweet. It evoked a déjà vu
so poignant that he had to resist an impulse to reach out and touch her
wind-kissed cheek; and even though his hand did not leave his side, he felt his
fingertips tingle.
Why, I'm
forty-four, he thought wonderingly, and she's hardly more than twenty. What in
heaven's name has come over me? "Are you enjoying the view?" he asked
aloud.
"Oh,
yes," she said and turned and swept her arm in an enthusiastic semicircle.
"Isn't it simply marvelous!"
He followed
her gaze. "Yes," he said, "it is." Below them the woods
began again, then spread out over the lowlands in warm
September colors, embracing a small hamlet several miles away, finally bowing
out before the first outposts of the suburban frontier. In the far distance,
haze softened the serrated silhouette of Cove City, lending it the aspect of a
sprawling medieval castle, making it less of a reality than a dream. "Are
you from the city too?" he asked.
"In a
way I am," she said. She smiled at him. "I'm from the Cove City of
two hundred and forty years from now."
The smile
told him that she didn't really expect him to believe her, but it implied that
it would be nice if he would pretend. He smiled back. "That would be A.D.
twenty-two hundred and one, wouldn't it?" he said. "I imagine the
place has grown enormously by then."
"Oh,
it has," she said. "It's part of a megalopolis now and extends all
the way to there." She pointed to the fringe of the forest at their feet.
"Two Thousand and Fortieth Street runs straight through that grove of
sugar maples," she went on, "and do you see that stand of locusts
over there?"
"Yes,"
he said, "I see them."
"That's
where the new plaza is. Its supermarket is so big that it takes half a day to
go through it, and you can buy almost anything in it from aspirins to aerocars. And next to the supermarket, where that grove of
beeches stands, is a big dress shop just bursting with the latest creations of
the leading couturiers. I bought this dress I'm wearing there this very
morning. Isn't it simply beautiful?"
If it was,
it was because she made it so. However, he looked at it politely. It had been
cut from a material he was unfamiliar with, a material seemingly compounded of
cotton candy, sea foam, and snow. There was no limit any more to the syntheses
that could be created by the miracle-fiber manufacturers—nor, apparently, to
the tall tales that could be created by young girls. "I suppose you
traveled here by time machine," he said.
"Yes.
My father invented one."
He looked
at her closely. He had never seen such a guileless countenance. "And do
you come here often?"
"Oh,
yes. This is my favorite space-time coordinate. I stand here for hours
sometimes and look and look and look. Day before yesterday I saw a rabbit, and
yesterday a deer, and today, you."
"But
how can there be a yesterday," Mark asked, "if you always return to
the same point in time?"
"Oh, I
see what you mean," she said. "The reason is because the machine is
affected by the passage of time the same as anything else,
and you have to set it back every twenty-four hours if you want to maintain
exactly the same co-ordinate. I never do because I much prefer a different day
each time I come back."
"Doesn't
your father ever come with you?"
Overhead, a
V of geese was drifting lazily by, and she watched it for some time before she
spoke. "My father is an invalid now," she said finally. "He'd
like very much to come if he only could. But I tell him all about what I
see," she added hurriedly, "and it's almost the same as if he really
came. Wouldn't you say it was?"
There was
an eagerness about the way she was looking at him that touched his heart.
"I'm sure it is," he said—then, "It must be wonderful to own a
time machine."
She nodded
solemnly. "They're a boon to people who like to stand on pleasant leas. In
the twenty-third century there aren't very many pleasant leas left."
He smiled.
"There aren't very many of them left in the twentieth. I guess you could
say that this one is sort of a collector's item. I'll have to visit it more
often."
"Do
you live near here?" she asked.
"I'm
staying in a cabin about three miles back. I'm supposed to be on vacation, but
it's not much of one. My wife was called to jury duty and couldn't come with
me, and since I couldn't postpone it, I've ended up being a sort of reluctant
Thoreau. My name is Mark Randolph."
"I'm
Julie," she said. "Julie Danvers."
The name
suited her. The same way the white dress suited her—the way the blue sky suited
her, and the hill and the September wind. Probably she lived in the little
hamlet in the woods, but it did not really matter. If she wanted to pretend she
was from the future, it was all right with him. All that really mattered was
the way he had felt when he had first seen her, and the tenderness that came
over him every time he gazed upon her gentle face. "What kind of work do
you do, Julie?" he asked. "Or are you still in school?"
"I'm
studying to be a secretary," she said. She took a half step and made a
pretty pirouette and clasped her hands before her. "I shall just love to
be a secretary," she went on. "It must be simply marvelous working in
a big important office and taking down what important people say. Would you
like me to be your secretary, Mr. Randolph?"
"I'd
like it very much," he said. "My wife was my secretary once—before
the war. That's how we happened to meet." Now, why had he said that? he wondered.
"Was
she a good secretary?"
"The very best. I was sorry to lose her; but then when I lost her in one sense, I
gained her in another, so I guess you could hardly call that losing her."
"No, I
guess you couldn't. Well, I must be getting back now, Mr. Randolph. Dad will be wanting to hear about all the things I saw, and I've got
to fix his supper."
"Will
you be here tomorrow?"
"Probably. I've been coming here every day. Good-bye now, Mr. Randolph."
"Good-bye,
Julie," he said.
He watched
her run lightly down the hill and disappear into the
grove of sugar maples where, two hundred and forty years hence, Two Thousand
and Fortieth Street would be. He smiled. What a charming child, he thought. It
must be thrilling to have such an irrepressible sense of wonder, such an
enthusiasm for life. He could appreciate the two qualities all the more fully
because he had been denied them. At twenty he had been a solemn young man
working his way through law school; at twenty-four he had had his own practice,
and small though it had been, it had occupied him completely—well, not quite
completely. When he had married Anne, there had been a brief interim during
which making a living had lost some of its immediacy. And then, when the war
had come along, there had been another interim—a much longer one this time—when
making a living had seemed a remote and sometimes even a contemptible pursuit.
After his return to civilian life, though, the immediacy had returned with a
vengeance, the more so because he now had a son as well as a wife to support,
and he had been occupied ever since, except for the four vacation weeks he had
recently been allowing himself each year, two of which he spent with Anne and
Jeff at a resort of their choosing and two of which he spent with Anne, after
Jeff returned to college, in their cabin by the lake. This year, though, he was
spending the second two alone. Well, perhaps not quite alone.
His pipe
had gone out some time ago, and he had not even noticed. He lighted it again,
drawing deeply to thwart the wind, then he descended
the hill and started back through the woods toward the cabin. The autumnal
equinox had come and the days were appreciably shorter. This one was very
nearly done, and the dampness of evening had already begun to pervade the hazy
air.
He walked
slowly, and the sun had set by the time he reached the lake. It was a small
lake, but a deep one, and the trees came down to its edge. The cabin stood some
distance back from the shore in a stand of pines, and a winding path connected
it with the pier. Behind it a gravel drive led to a dirt road that gave access
to the highway. His station wagon stood by the back door, ready to whisk him
back to civilization at a moment's notice.
He prepared
and ate a simple supper in the kitchen, then went into the living room to read.
The generator in the shed hummed on and off, but otherwise the evening was
unsullied by the usual sounds the ears of modern man are heir to. Selecting an
anthology of American poetry from the well-stocked bookcase by the fireplace,
he sat down and thumbed through it to Afternoon on a Hill. He read the
treasured poem three times, and each time he read it he saw her standing there
in the sun, her hair dancing in the wind, her dress swirling like gentle snow
around her long and lovely legs; and a lump came into his throat, and he could
not swallow.
He returned
the book to the shelf and went out and stood on the rustic porch and filled and
lighted his pipe. He forced himself to think of Anne, and presently her face
came into focus—the firm but gentle chin, the warm and compassionate eyes with
that odd hint of fear in them that he had never been able to analyze, the
still-soft cheeks, the gentle smile—and each attribute was made more compelling
by the memory of her vibrant light brown hair and her tall, lithe gracefulness.
As was always the case when he thought of her, he found himself marveling at
her agelessness, marveling how she could have continued down through the years
as lovely as she had been that long-ago morning when he had looked up, startled, and seen her standing timidly before his desk.
It was inconceivable that a mere twenty years later he could be looking forward
eagerly to a tryst with an overimaginative girl who
was young enough to be his daughter. Well, he wasn't—not really. He had been
momentarily swayed—that was all. For a moment his emotional equilibrium had
deserted him, and he had staggered. Now his feet were back under him where they
belonged, and the world had returned to its sane and sensible orbit.
He tapped out
his pipe and went back inside. In his bedroom he undressed and slipped between
the sheets and turned out the light. Sleep should have come readily, but it did
not; and when it finally did come, it came in fragments interspersed with
tantalizing dreams.
"Day
before yesterday I saw a rabbit," she had said, "and yesterday a
deer, and today, you."
* * *
On the
second afternoon she was wearing a blue dress, and there was a little blue
ribbon to match tied in her dandelion-colored hair. After breasting the hill,
he stood for some time, not moving, waiting till the tightness of his throat
went away; then he walked over and stood beside her in
the wind. But the soft curve of her throat and chin brought the tightness back,
and when she turned and said, "Hello, I didn't think you'd come," it
was a long while before he was able to answer.
"But I
did," he finally said, "and so did you."
"Yes,"
she said. "I'm glad."
A nearby
outcropping of granite formed a bench of sorts, and they sat down on it and
looked out over the land. He filled his pipe and lighted it and blew smoke into the wind. "My father smokes a pipe
too," she said, "and when he lights it, he cups his hands the same
way you do, even when there isn't any wind. You and he are alike in lots of
ways."
"Tell
me about your father," he said. "Tell me about yourself too."
And she
did, saying that she was twenty-one, that her father
was a retired government physicist, that they lived in a small apartment on Two
Thousand and Fortieth Street, and that she had been keeping house for him ever
since her mother had died four years ago. Afterward he told her about himself
and Anne and Jeff—about how he intended to take Jeff into partnership with him
someday, about Anne's phobia about cameras and how she had refused to have her
picture taken on their wedding day and had gone on refusing ever since, about
the grand time the three of them had had on the camping trip they'd gone on
last summer.
When he had
finished, she said, "What a wonderful family life you have.
Nineteen-sixty-one must be a marvelous year in which to live!"
"With
a time machine at your disposal, you can move here any time you like."
"It's
not quite that easy. Even aside from the fact that I wouldn't dream of
deserting my father, there's the time police to take into consideration. You
see, time travel is limited to the members of government-sponsored historical
expeditions and is out of bounds to the general public."
"You
seem to have managed all right."
"That's
because my father invented his own machine, and the time police don't know
about it."
"But
you're still breaking the law."
She nodded.
"But only in their eyes, only in the light of their concept of time. My
father has his own concept."
It was so
pleasant hearing her talk that it did not matter really what she talked about,
and he wanted her to ramble on, no matter how farfetched her subject.
"Tell me about it," he said.
"First
I'll tell you about the official concept. Those who endorse it say that no one
from the future should participate physically in anything that occurred in the
past, because his very presence would constitute a paradox, and future events
would have to be altered in order for the paradox to be assimilated.
Consequently the Department of Time Travel makes sure that only authorized
personnel have access to its time machines, and maintains a police force to
apprehend the would-be generation-jumpers who yearn for a simpler way of life
and who keep disguising themselves as historians so they can return permanently
to a different era.
"But
according to my father's concept, the book of time has already been written.
From a macrocosmic viewpoint, my father says, everything that is going to
happen has already happened. Therefore, if a person from the future
participates in a past event, he becomes a part of that event—for the simple
reason that he was a part of it in the first place—and a paradox cannot possibly
arise."
Mark took a
deep drag on his pipe. He needed it. "Your father sounds like quite a
remarkable person," he said.
"Oh,
he is!" Enthusiasm deepened the pinkness of her cheeks, brightened the
blueness of her eyes. "You wouldn't believe all the books he's read, Mr.
Randolph. Why, our apartment is bursting with them! Hegel and
Kant and Hume; Einstein and Newton and Weizsäcker.
I've—I've even read some of them myself."
"I
gathered as much. As a matter of fact, so have I."
She gazed
raptly up into his face. "How wonderful, Mr. Randolph," she said.
"I'll bet we've got just scads of mutual interests!"
The
conversation that ensued proved conclusively that they did have—though the
transcendental esthetic, Berkeleianism and relativity
were rather incongruous subjects for a man and a girl to be discussing on a
September hilltop, he reflected presently, even when the man was forty-four and
the girl was twenty-one. But happily there were compensations—their animated
discussion of the transcendental esthetic did more than elicit a priori and a
posteriori conclusions, it also elicited microcosmic stars in her eyes; their
breakdown of Berkeley did more than point up the inherent weaknesses in the
good bishop's theory, it also pointed up the pinkness of her cheeks; and their
review of relativity did more than demonstrate that E invariably equals mc2; it
also demonstrated that far from being an impediment, knowledge is an asset to
feminine charm.
The mood of
the moment lingered far longer than it had any right to, and it was still with
him when he went to bed. This time he didn't even try to think of Anne; he knew
it would do no good. Instead he lay there in the darkness and played host to
whatever random thoughts came along—and all of them concerned a September
hilltop and a girl with dandelion-colored hair.
Day before
yesterday I saw a rabbit, and yesterday a deer, and today, you.
Next
morning he drove over to the hamlet and checked at the post office to see if he
had any mail. There was none. He was not surprised. Jeff disliked writing
letters as much as he did, and Anne, at the moment, was probably incommunicado.
As for his practice, he had forbidden his secretary to bother him with any but
the most urgent of matters.
He debated
on whether to ask the wizened postmaster if there was a family named Danvers
living in the area. He decided not to. To have done so would have been to undermine
the elaborate make-believe structure which Julie had built, and even though he
did not believe in the structure's validity, he could not find it in his heart
to send it toppling.
That
afternoon she was wearing a yellow dress the same shade as her hair, and again
his throat tightened when he saw her, and again he could not speak. But when
the first moment passed and words came, it was all right, and their thoughts
flowed together like two effervescent brooks and coursed gaily through the
arroyo of the afternoon. This time when they parted, it was she who asked,
"Will you be here tomorrow?"—though only
because she stole the question from his lips—and the words sang in his ears all
the way back through the woods to the cabin and lulled him to sleep after an
evening spent with his pipe on the porch.
Next
afternoon when he climbed the hill it was empty. At first his disappointment
numbed him, and then he thought, She's late, that's
all. She'll probably show up any minute. And he sat down on the granite bench
to wait. But she did not come. The minutes passed—the hours. Shadows crept out
of the woods and climbed partway up the hill. The air grew colder. He gave up,
finally, and headed miserably back toward the cabin.
The next
afternoon she did not show up either. Nor the next. He
could neither eat nor sleep. Fishing palled on him. He could no longer read.
And all the while, he hated himself—hated himself for behaving like a lovesick
schoolboy, for reacting just like any other fool in his forties to a pretty
face and a pair of pretty legs. Up until a few days ago he had never even so
much as looked at another woman, and here in the space
of less than a week he had not only looked at one but had fallen in love with
her.
Hope was
dead in him when he climbed the hill on the fourth day—and then suddenly alive
again when he saw her standing in the sun. She was wearing a black dress this
time, and he should have guessed the reason for her absence; but he didn't—not
till he came up to her and saw the tears start from her eyes and the telltale
trembling of her lip. "Julie, what's the matter?"
She clung
to him, her shoulders shaking, and pressed her face against his coat. "My
father died," she said, and somehow he knew that these were her first tears, that she had sat tearless through the wake and
funeral and had not broken down till now.
He put his
arms around her gently. He had never kissed her, and he did not kiss her now,
not really. His lips brushed her forehead and briefly touched her hair—that was
all. "I'm sorry, Julie," he said. "I know how much he meant to
you."
"He
knew he was dying all along," she said. "He must have known it ever
since the strontium 90 experiment he conducted at the laboratory. But he never
told anyone—he never even told me … I don't want to live. Without him there's
nothing left to live for—nothing, nothing, nothing!"
He held her
tightly. "You'll find something, Julie. Someone.
You're young yet. You're still a child, really."
Her head
jerked back, and she raised suddenly tearless eyes to his. "I'm not a
child! Don't you dare call me a child!"
Startled,
he released her and stepped back. He had never seen her angry before. "I
didn't mean—" he began.
Her anger
was as evanescent as it had been abrupt. "I know you didn't mean to hurt
my feelings, Mr. Randolph. But I'm not a child, honest I'm not. Promise me
you'll never call me one again."
"All
right," he said. "I promise."
"And
now I must go," she said. "I have a thousand things to do."
"Will—will
you be here tomorrow?"
She looked
at him for a long time. A mist, like the aftermath of a summer shower, made her
blue eyes glisten. "Time machines run down," she said. "They
have parts that need to be replaced—and I don't know how to replace them.
Ours—mine may be good for one more trip, but I'm not sure."
"But
you'll try to come, won't you?"
She nodded.
"Yes, I'll try. And Mr. Randolph?"
"Yes,
Julie?"
"In
case I don't make it—and for the record—I love you."
She was
gone then; running lightly down the hill, and a moment later she disappeared
into the grove of sugar maples. His hands were trembling when he lighted his
pipe, and the match burned his fingers. Afterward he could not remember
returning to the cabin or fixing supper or going to bed, and yet he must have
done all of those things, because he awoke in his own room, and when he went
into the kitchen, there were supper dishes standing on the drainboard.
He washed
the dishes and made coffee. He spent the morning fishing off the pier, keeping
his mind blank. He would face reality later. Right now it was enough for him to
know that she loved him, that in a few short hours he would see her again.
Surely even a run-down time machine should have no trouble transporting her
from the hamlet to the hill.
He arrived
there early and sat down on the granite bench and waited for her to come out of
the woods and climb the slope. He could feel the hammering of his heart and he
knew that his hands were trembling. Day before yesterday I saw a rabbit, and
yesterday a deer, and today, you.
He waited
and he waited, but she did not come. She did not come the next day either. When
the shadows began to lengthen and the air grow chill,
he descended the hill and entered the grove of sugar maples. Presently he found
a path, and he followed it into the forest proper and through the forest to the
hamlet. He stopped at the small post office and checked to see if he had any
mail. After the wizened postmaster told him there was none, he lingered for a
moment. "Is—is there a family by the name of Danvers living anywhere
around here?" he blurted.
The
postmaster shook his head. "Never heard of them."
"Has
there been a funeral in town recently?"
"Not
for nigh onto a year."
After that,
although he visited the hill every afternoon till his vacation ran out, he knew
in his heart that she would not return, that she was
lost to him as utterly as if she had never been. Evenings he haunted the
hamlet, hoping desperately that the postmaster had been mistaken; but he saw no
sign of Julie, and the description he gave of her to the passersby evoked only
negative responses.
Early in
October he returned to the city. He did his best to act toward Anne as though
nothing had changed between them; but she seemed to know the minute she saw him
that something had changed. And although she asked no questions, she grew
quieter and quieter as the weeks went by, and the fear in her eyes that had
puzzled him before became more and more pronounced.
He began
driving into the country Sunday afternoons and visiting the hilltop. The woods
were golden now, and the sky was even bluer than it had been a month ago. For
hours he sat on the granite bench, staring at the spot where she had
disappeared. Day before yesterday I saw a rabbit, and yesterday a deer, and
today, you.
Then, on a
rainy night in mid-November, he found the suitcase. It was Anne's, and he found
it quite by accident. She had gone into town to play bingo, and he had the
house to himself; and after spending two hours watching four jaded TV programs,
he remembered the jigsaw puzzles he had stored away the previous winter.
Desperate
for something—anything at all—to take his mind off Julie, he went up to the
attic to get them. The suitcase fell from a shelf while he was rummaging
through the various boxes piled beside it, and it sprang open when it struck
the floor.
He bent
over to pick it up. It was the same suitcase she had brought with her to the
little apartment they had rented after their marriage, and he remembered how
she had always kept it locked and remembered her telling him laughingly that
there were some things a wife had to keep a secret even from her husband. The
lock had rusted over the years, and the fall had broken it.
He started
to close the lid, paused when he saw the protruding hem of a white dress. The
material was vaguely familiar. He had seen material similar to it not very long
ago—material that brought to mind cotton candy and sea foam and snow.
He raised
the lid and picked up the dress with trembling fingers. He held it by the
shoulders and let it unfold itself, and it hung there in the room like gently
falling snow. He looked at it for a long time, his throat tight. Then,
tenderly, he folded it again and replaced it in the suitcase and closed the
lid. He returned the suitcase to its niche under the eaves. Day before
yesterday I saw a rabbit, and yesterday a deer, and today, you.
Rain
thrummed on the roof. The tightness of his throat was so acute now that he
thought for a moment that he was going to cry. Slowly he descended the attic
stairs. He went down the spiral stairway into the living room. The clock on the
mantel said ten-fourteen. In just a few minutes the bingo bus would let her off
at the corner, and she would come walking down the street and up the walk to
the front door. Anne would … Julie would. Julianne?
Was that
her full name? Probably. People invariably retained
part of their original names when adopting aliases; and having completely
altered her last name, she had probably thought it safe to take liberties with
her first. She must have done other things, too, in addition to changing her
name, to elude the time police. No wonder she had never wanted her picture
taken! And how terrified she must have been on that long-ago day when she had
stepped timidly into his office to apply for a job! All alone in a strange
generation, not knowing for sure whether her father's concept of time was
valid, not knowing for sure whether the man who would love her in his forties
would feel the same way toward her in his twenties. She had come back all
right, just as she had said she would.
Twenty
years, he thought wonderingly, and all the while she must have known that one
day I'd climb a September hill and see her standing, young and lovely, in the
sun, and fall in love with her all over again. She had to know because the
moment was as much a part of her past as it was a part of my future. But why
didn't she tell me? Why doesn't she tell me now?
Suddenly he
understood.
He found it
hard to breathe, and he went into the hall and donned his raincoat and stepped
out into the rain. He walked down the walk in the rain, and the rain pelted his
face and ran in drops down his cheeks, and some of the drops were raindrops,
and some of them were tears. How could anyone as agelessly
beautiful as Anne—as Julie—was, be afraid of growing old? Didn't she
realize that in his eyes she couldn't grow old—that to him she hadn't aged a
day since the moment he had looked up from his desk and seen her standing there
in the tiny office and simultaneously fallen in love with her? Couldn't she
understand that that was why the girl on the hill had seemed a stranger to him?
He had
reached the street and was walking down it toward the corner. He was almost
there when the bingo bus pulled up and stopped, and the girl in the white
trench coat got out. The tightness of his throat grew knife-sharp, and he could
not breathe at all. The dandelion-hued hair was darker now, and the girlish
charm was gone; but the gentle loveliness still resided in her gentle face, and
the long and slender legs had a grace and symmetry in the pale glow of the
November street light that they had never known in the
golden radiance of the September sun.
She came
forward to meet him, and he saw the familiar fear in her eyes—a fear poignant
now beyond enduring because he understood its cause. She blurred before his
eyes, and he walked toward her blindly. When he came up to her, his eyes
cleared, and he reached out across the years and touched her rain-wet cheek.
She knew it was all right then, and the fear went away forever, and they walked
home hand in hand in the rain.
The End
© 1961 by the Curtis Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate. Originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, April 1, 1961.