"No--wait," I said. "Let's watch this for a while." I don't know why I
wanted to--except that the girl made my pulse run a little faster and I
felt like looking at her for a couple of years.
* * * * *
She was half crying. She said: "Then, if for no other reason--for my
sake."
"For yours!" The boy looked harassed.
She nodded. "You'll sweep away his life work with a few words and a few
sheets of paper."
"My own work, too."
"Oh, but won't you understand? You're young. I'm young. Youth loves to
shatter the old idols. It feasts on the broken shards of destruction.
It destroys the old ideas to make way for its own. But he's not young
like us. He has only his past work to live on. If you shatter that,
he'll have nothing left but a futile resentment. I'll be pent up with a
broken old man who'll destroy me along with himself. Darling, I'm not
saying you're wrong--I'm only asking you to wait a little."
She was crying openly now. The boy took her by the arm and led her to
the crusted window. She turned her face away from the light--away from
him. The boy said: "He was my teacher. I worship him. What I'm doing
now may seem like treachery, but it's only treachery to his old age.
I'm keeping faith with what he was thirty years ago--with the man who
would have done the same thing to his teacher."
She cried: "But are you keeping faith with me? You, who will have all
the joy of destroying and none of the tedious sweeping away the pieces.
What of my life and all the weary years to come when I must coddle him
and soothe him and lead him through the madness of forgetting what
you've done to him?"
"You'll spend your life with me. I break no faith with you, Barbara."
She laughed bitterly. "How easily you evade reality. I shall spend my
life with you--and in that short sentence, _poof_!"--she flicked her
hand--"you dismiss everything. Where will he live? Alone? With us?
Where?"
"That can be arranged."
"You're so stubborn, so pig-headed in your smug, righteous
truth-seeking. Steven--for the very last time--please. Wait until he's
gone. A few years, that's all. Leave him in peace. Leave us in peace."
He shook his head and started toward the oaken doors. "A few years
waiting to salvage the pride of an old man, a few more catastrophies, a
few more thousand lives lost--it doesn't add up."
She sagged against the window, silhouetted before the riot of color,
and watched him cross to the doors. All the tears seemed drained out
of her. She was so limp I thought she would fall to the floor at any
instant. And then, as I watched her, I saw her stiffen and I realized
that another figure had entered the foyer and was rushing toward the
boy. It was an oldish man, bald and with an ageless face of carved
ivory. He was tall and terribly thin. His eyes were little pits of
embers.