• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 8864 0

In the taller trees beyond there was a cracking, a rebellious tearing, and a rattling, as of cordage; boughs like booms swung darkly and stiffly about her, broad leaves unfurled. There was a sense of black conspiracy, like ships in harbour before a storm, among these trees, suddenly through which, far up in the mountains, lightning flew, and the light in the cantina flickered off, then on again, then off. No thunder followed. The storm was a distance away once more. Yvonne waited in nervous apprehension: the lights came on and Hugh--how like a man, oh God! but perhaps it was her own fault for refusing to come in--was having a quick drink with the Mexicans. There the bird was still, a long-winged dark furious shape, a little world of fierce despairs and dreams, and memories of floating high above Popocatepetl, mile on mile, to drop through the wilderness and alight, watching, in the timberline ghosts of ravaged mountain trees. With hurried quivering hands Yvonne began to unfasten the cage. The bird fluttered out of it and alighted at her feet, hesitated, took flight to the roof of El Petate, then abruptly flew off through the dusk, not to the nearest tree, as might have been supposed, but up--she was right, it knew it was free--up soaring, with a sudden cleaving of pinions into the deep dark blue pure sky above, in which at that moment appeared one star. No compunction touched Yvonne. She felt only an inexplicable secret triumph and relief: no one would ever know she had done this; and then, stealing over her, the sense of utter heartbreak and loss.

Lamplight shone across the tree roots; the Mexicans stood in the open door with Hugh, nodding at the weather and pointing on down the path, while within the cantina the barman helped himself to a drink from under the bar.

--"No!... "Hugh shouted against the tumult. "He hasn't been there at all! We might try this other place though!"

"On the road!"

Beyond the El Petate their path veered to the right past a dog-kennel to which an anteater nuzzling the black earth was chained. Hugh took Yvonne's arm.

"See the anteater? Do you remember the armadillo?"

"I haven't forgotten, anything!"

Yvonne said this, as they fell into step, not knowing quite what she meant. Wild woodland creatures plunged past them in the undergrowth, and everywhere she looked in vain for her eagle, half hoping to see it once more. The jungle was thinning out gradually. Rotting vegetation lay about them, and there was a smell of decay; the barranca couldn't be far off. Then the air blew strangely warmer and sweeter, and the path was steeper. The last time Yvonne had come this way she'd heard a whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will, whip-peri-will, the plaintive lonely voice of spring at home had said, and calling one home--to where? To her father's home in Ohio? And what should a whip-poor-will be doing so far from home itself in a dark Mexican forest? But the whip-poor-will, like love and wisdom, had no home; and perhaps, as the Consul had then added, it was better here than routing around Cayenne, where it was supposed to winter.

They were climbing, approaching a little hilltop clearing; Yvonne could see the sky. But she couldn't get her bearings. The Mexican sky had become strange and tonight the stars found for her a message even lonelier than that remembered one of the poor nestless whip-poor-will. Why are we here, they seemed to say, in the wrong place, and all the wrong shape, so far away, so far, so far away from home? From what home? When had not she, Yvonne, come home? But the stars by their very being consoled her. And walking on she felt her mood of detachment returning. Now Yvonne and Hugh were high enough to see, through the trees, the stars low down on the western horizon.

Scorpio, setting... Sagittarius, Capricornus; ah, there, here they were, after all, in their right places, their configurations all at once right, recognized, their pure geometry scintillating, flawless. And tonight as five thousand years ago they would rise and set: Capricorn, Aquarius, with, beneath, lonely Fomalhaut; Pisces;