"The ones on the ship? They--"
"No," Robin interrupted, "you always said, when I was older you'd tell
me about the other people. I mean the other people _here_. The ones in
the woods. The ones you can't see."
Helen stared at the boy in blank disbelief. "What do you mean? There
are no other people, just us." Then she recalled that every imaginative
child invents playmates. _Alone_, she thought, _Robin's always alone,
no other children, no wonder he's a little--strange._ She said,
quietly, "You dreamed it, Robin."
The boy only stared at her, in bleak, blank alienation. "You mean," he
said, "you can't _hear_ them either?" He got up and walked out of the
hut. Helen called, but he didn't turn back. She ran after him, catching
at his arm, stopping him almost by force. She whispered, "Robin, Robin,
tell me what you mean! There isn't anyone here. Once or twice I thought
I had seen--something, by moonlight, only it was a dream. Please,
Robin--please--"
"If it's only a dream, why are you frightened?" Robin asked, through a
curious constriction in his throat. "If they've never hurt you--"
No, they had never hurt her. Even if, in her long-ago dream, one of
them had come to her--_and the sons of God saw the daughters of men
that they were fair_--a scrap of memory from a vanished life on another
world sang in Helen's thoughts. She looked up at the pale, impatient
face of her son, and swallowed hard.
Her voice was husky when she spoke.
"Did I ever tell you about rationalization--when you want something to
be true so much that you can make it sound right to yourself?"
"Couldn't that also happen to something you wanted _not_ to be true?"
Robin retorted with a mutinous curl of his mouth.
Helen would not let go his arm. She begged, "Robin--no, you'll only
waste your life and break your heart looking for something that doesn't
exist--"
The boy looked down into her shaken face, and suddenly a new emotion
welled up in him and he dropped to his knees beside her and buried his
face against her breast. He whispered, "Helen, I'll never leave you,
I'll never do anything you don't want me to do, I don't want anyone but
you--"
And for the first time in many years, Helen broke into wild and
uncontrollable crying, without knowing why she wept.
Robin did not speak again of his quest in the forest. For many months
he was quiet and subdued, staying near the clearing, hovering near
Helen for days at a time, then disappearing into the forest at dusk. He
heard the winds numbly, deaf to their promise and their call.
Helen too was quiet and withdrawn, feeling Robin's alienation through
his submissive mood. She found herself speaking to him sharply for
being always under foot; yet, on the rare days when he vanished into
the forest and did not return until after sunset, she felt a restless
unease that set her wandering the paths herself, not following him, but
simply uneasy unless she knew he was within call.
Once, in the shadows just before sunset, she thought she saw a man
moving through the trees, and for an instant, as he turned toward her,
she saw that he was naked. She had seen him only for a second or two,
and after he had slipped between the shadows again, common sense told
her it was Robin. She was vaguely shocked and annoyed; she firmly
intended to speak to him, perhaps to scold him for running about naked
and slipping away like that; then, in a sort of remote embarrassment,
she fore-bore to mention it. But after that, she kept out of the forest.
Robin had been vaguely aware of her surveillance and knew when it
ceased. But he did not give up his own pointless rambles, although
even to himself he no longer spoke of searching, or of any dreamlike
inhabitants of the woods. At times it still seemed that some shadow
concealed a half-seen form, and the distant murmur grew into a voice
that mocked him; a white arm, the shadow of a face, until he lifted his
head and stared straight at it.
One evening toward twilight he saw a sudden shimmer in the trees,
and he stood, fixedly, as the stray glint resolved itself first into
a white face with shadowy eyes, then into a translucent flicker of
bare arms, and then into the form of a woman, arrested for an instant
with her hand on the bole of a tree. In the shadowy spot, filled only
with the last ray of a cloudy sunset, she was very clear; not cloudy
or unreal, but so distinct that he could see even a small smudge or
bramble-scratch on her shoulder, and a fallen leaf tangled in her
colorless hair. Robin, paralyzed, watched her pause, and turn, and
smile, and then she melted into the shadows.
He stood with his heart pounding for a second after she had gone; then
whirled, bursting with the excitement of his discovery, and ran down
the path toward home. Suddenly he stopped short, the world tilting and
reeling, and fell on his face in a bed of dry leaves.
He was still ignorant of the nature of the emotion in him. He felt only
intolerable misery and the conviction that he must never, never speak
to Helen of what he had seen or felt.
* * * * *
He lay there, his burning face pressed into the leaves, unaware of the
rising wind, the little flurry of blown leaves, the growing darkness
and distant thunder. At last an icy spatter of rain aroused him, and
cold, numbed, he made his way slowly homeward. Over his head the boughs
creaked woodenly, and Robin, under the driving whips of the rain, felt
their tumult only echoed his own voiceless agony.
He was drenched by the time he pushed the door of the shack open, and
stumbled blindly toward the fire, only hoping that Helen would be
sleeping. But she started up from beside the hearth they had built
together last summer.
"Robin?"