the neck down, she could be thought a bit gangly. With her head on, she is something else. Her neck is long, her head small, molded by the tight braids. Her eyes are hazel, her teeth white and even. Her mother correctly thinks her a striking young woman, and her mind ventures off into speculations. “All right,” Charity says indifferently. “If he’s a pest we’ll just shoo him off.”
“Nevertheless,” says her mother, “let me give you a word of advice. It is neither decorous nor kind to mislead a boy in the condition you say he is in. Unless you’re serious, or think you might be, don’t encourage him. As the saying goes, I don’t want his blood on the rug. Remember that.”
So Sidney Lang, at the end of his first year as a graduate student in English literature, makes his entry into the world of Battell Pond. He arrives, at a guess, about midafternoon, having started from Cambridge at first daylight and driven hard in the rain only to realize, an hour short of his destination, that he will arrive at lunch time. He pulls off the road and sits for two hours, missing his own lunch and watching the peaks of the White Mountains to the south and east appear and disappear in the alternations of sun and rain. Accustomed to making every hour count, he reads a hundred pages of
Middlemarch
while he waits.
When he is sure that his arrival will interrupt neither lunch nor possible after-lunch naps, he drives on. He comes to the village— white frame houses on a single street with a single cross street, nothing very picturesque—and following Charity’s instructions, goes on one mile to some mailboxes mounted on a wagon wheel. A dirt road leads him left between a farmhouse and a pair of lakeside cottages. At once he is engulfed in dense, dripping woods. The track is rutted and chuck-holed, full of puddles, humped with roots. Even dimmer tracks lead off to glimpses of cottages and lake. Both sides. He seems to be on a narrow peninsula. Keeping right, he arrives in a clearing before a weathered shingled cottage. The car parked on the grass he recognizes as Charity’s. Both front windows are open. He leaps out, rolls her windows shut, and crowds back into his own car to ponder strategy.
His view is cut off by the cottage. Off in the woods on the right, a weathered gable shows through the trees: the dorm, though he doesn’t know then what it is. On the left, a path curves behind a clump of young conifers and into thick woods. That leads, though again he doesn’t know, to George Barnwell Ellis’s think house, a shack heated by a sheet-iron stove, where a single hanging light bulb shines down on a desk loaded with books in three dead languages and learned journals in four living ones. Here Professor Ellis has been engaged for ten summers on a book about the twelfth-century heretical sect called the Bogomils. He will still be working on it when he dies, fifteen years from now. He has already distinguished himself with his book on the Albigenses.
Sidney Lang looks at the door that is the only break in the wall of shingles facing him. Hoping that Charity might have been watching for him, he waits for it to open. But the longer he waits, the more he is convinced that that door has not been opened in years. It looks rusted shut and mossed over. A plank walk leads around the cottage on the right-hand side. To welcome him from there, Charity would have to come out in the rain.
For a few minutes more he waits, imagining her under a big umbrella, dazzling the downpour with her smile. She does not appear. No one appears. He hears only the steady patter and rustle and drip of rain in the wet woods, and the gush of water from the downspout at the corner. The woods around him are an intense, wet green. Even the air is green.
Eventually, reluctantly, he reaches his slicker from the back seat, shawls it over head and shoulders, opens the door, sets his L.L. Bean moccasins down on the drenched grass, and is committed. Hunching, he
“Nevertheless,” says her mother, “let me give you a word of advice. It is neither decorous nor kind to mislead a boy in the condition you say he is in. Unless you’re serious, or think you might be, don’t encourage him. As the saying goes, I don’t want his blood on the rug. Remember that.”
So Sidney Lang, at the end of his first year as a graduate student in English literature, makes his entry into the world of Battell Pond. He arrives, at a guess, about midafternoon, having started from Cambridge at first daylight and driven hard in the rain only to realize, an hour short of his destination, that he will arrive at lunch time. He pulls off the road and sits for two hours, missing his own lunch and watching the peaks of the White Mountains to the south and east appear and disappear in the alternations of sun and rain. Accustomed to making every hour count, he reads a hundred pages of
Middlemarch
while he waits.
When he is sure that his arrival will interrupt neither lunch nor possible after-lunch naps, he drives on. He comes to the village— white frame houses on a single street with a single cross street, nothing very picturesque—and following Charity’s instructions, goes on one mile to some mailboxes mounted on a wagon wheel. A dirt road leads him left between a farmhouse and a pair of lakeside cottages. At once he is engulfed in dense, dripping woods. The track is rutted and chuck-holed, full of puddles, humped with roots. Even dimmer tracks lead off to glimpses of cottages and lake. Both sides. He seems to be on a narrow peninsula. Keeping right, he arrives in a clearing before a weathered shingled cottage. The car parked on the grass he recognizes as Charity’s. Both front windows are open. He leaps out, rolls her windows shut, and crowds back into his own car to ponder strategy.
His view is cut off by the cottage. Off in the woods on the right, a weathered gable shows through the trees: the dorm, though he doesn’t know then what it is. On the left, a path curves behind a clump of young conifers and into thick woods. That leads, though again he doesn’t know, to George Barnwell Ellis’s think house, a shack heated by a sheet-iron stove, where a single hanging light bulb shines down on a desk loaded with books in three dead languages and learned journals in four living ones. Here Professor Ellis has been engaged for ten summers on a book about the twelfth-century heretical sect called the Bogomils. He will still be working on it when he dies, fifteen years from now. He has already distinguished himself with his book on the Albigenses.
Sidney Lang looks at the door that is the only break in the wall of shingles facing him. Hoping that Charity might have been watching for him, he waits for it to open. But the longer he waits, the more he is convinced that that door has not been opened in years. It looks rusted shut and mossed over. A plank walk leads around the cottage on the right-hand side. To welcome him from there, Charity would have to come out in the rain.
For a few minutes more he waits, imagining her under a big umbrella, dazzling the downpour with her smile. She does not appear. No one appears. He hears only the steady patter and rustle and drip of rain in the wet woods, and the gush of water from the downspout at the corner. The woods around him are an intense, wet green. Even the air is green.
Eventually, reluctantly, he reaches his slicker from the back seat, shawls it over head and shoulders, opens the door, sets his L.L. Bean moccasins down on the drenched grass, and is committed. Hunching, he
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