Tam Lin

  "Huh," said Molly. "I've got a copy of The Prophet; that's worth ten army jackets."

  "Bleah!" said Janet, involuntarily.

  "You be quiet. Nobody who reads Hermann Hesse has any right to sneer at The Prophet. "

  "Hesse may be boring, but he's not stupid."

  Tina cleared her throat. "Is anybody dressing up or not? We've only got half an hour."

  "I'm going to put on a clean shirt," said Janet, hauling her green wool sweater, her gray Blackstock T-shirt, and her cotton undershirt over her head in one wad and shoving them under the bed. She did it mostly to see Tina wince, and was immediately ashamed of herself.

  "I," said Tina, "am going to put on a dress."

  "Thomas will be delighted," said Janet. "Did you guys take your pills yet?"

  "I'm going to take it late," said Molly. "I prefer to feel nauseous at noon the day after a party, thank you."

  "Nauseated," said Janet. "Nauseous means to afflict, not to be afflicted."

  "Ah," said Molly. "I get it. I am nauseated, you are nauseous."

  "She, he, it is nauseized," said Janet, diverted.

  Tina opened her top bureau drawer, took out the dispenser, and clicked a pill into her hand. "Hey," she said, "four more days, a week off for my period, and then—"

  "Good-bye unicorns," said Janet.

  "Only you," said Tina with mild exasperation, "would think of it like that. I've never seen a unicorn—"

  "I never hope to see one," offered Molly.

  "Well, I do," said Janet, nettled.

  "Have you explained this to Nick?" said Molly.

  "Not yet. I've got till the end of the term."

  "Oho," said Molly. "I see that there are advantages to living in town."

  "A few," said Janet. "A few." She went around the corner to her closet and pulled out the white muslin shirt her grandmother had made, with green leaves and vines embroidered on all the hems, and three tiny roses that it was a game to find. Tina came past her, rummaged in her own closet, took out something black, and left the room.

  "Are you going to dress up?" said Janet to Molly. "Nobody will mind if you don't."

  "What a gorgeous shirt," said Molly. "It doesn't go with jeans, though, somehow."

  "It probably wants a skirt," said Janet, "but I haven't got anything but jean skirts."

  "Oh well," said Molly. "I don't want to be called Hannibal again." She propped her chin in her hands, scowling, and then brightened suddenly. " I know!" she said, and bolted out of the room.

  When she came back, she was wearing a very large and shabby army shirt over the blue long underwear and the red-and-blue flannel shirt she had already had on. "There!"

  she said. "Nora let me raid the lost-and-found. So here I am, radical college student, scoffers, for the use of." She climbed up on her desk and reached her copy of The Prophet off the topmost shelf, which it shared with The Wind in the Willows, the complete works of Ezra Pound, and a battered copy of Three Men in a Boat. She called it her security shelf, and Janet knew she had not touched one of those volumes since she got here.

  Tina came back into the room in a soft black dress with a scooped neck and a short skirt. She had belted it with a pink scarf. She looked, for once, a great deal more elegant than healthy. Molly whistled at her.

  "What a wonderful dress," said Janet. "You look like Mata Hari."Tina dimpled and blushed at them, and the first knock came at the door. It was Peg Powell in her best Victorian nightgown ("I even ironed it," she said) and Sharon in a tight one-piece trousered garment of a peculiar color between ginger and mustard. It went gloriously with her skin, but suggested that she had been rather thinner when she bought it. "Wouldn't dare wear this in public," she said, "but I thought you guys'd appreciate it."

  Somebody else knocked, and Janet let in Nora, looking extremely tall in a narrow orange dress and orange tights with black cats on them; Diane Zimmerman, dressed like the Tenniel Alice in Wonderland; and the two foolish children from the end of the hall. The one with the horn-rimmed glasses had come as the Patchwork Girl of Oz; her roommate with the wire frames was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, and said sheepishly that she had been obliged by a term-paper deadline to come as she was. Janet got Nora aside and ascertained that the Patchwork Girl was Rebecca and the other one was Susan.

  The hot cider went around, in borrowed Food Service cups; Janet opened the box of gingerbread and the box of pumpkin cookies; people shuffled around and sat down shyly.

  Susan perched on the end of Molly's bed, and Molly greeted her with enthusiasm.

  "Perfect," she said, "I am a radical college student and you are a conservative one."

  "Oh, nonsense," said Diane. "A conservative one would wear a wool kilt and a white blouse and a sweater."

  "Not here she wouldn't."

  "And a radical one," said Diane ruthlessly, "would have—"

  "My costume," proclaimed Molly, "is perfect. I have a copy of The Prophet. " She waved it.

  "What's radical about The Prophet? " demanded Diane.

  "I never said it wasn't radical," said Janet hastily. "I said it was stupid. It's bland and badly written."

  "Read us something better, then," said Molly.

  Janet looked at her. No, she wasn't angry. She wanted to know what Janet thought was better. Janet got up and pulled the volume of Keats from her bottom shelf. It fell open in her hands. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." Yes, that would do nicely. It was Hallowe'en, after all.

  She sat down on her desk and began to read.

  "O what can ail thee, Knight at arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?

  The sedge has withered from the lake,

  And no birds sing."

  "What's sedge?" said Tina.

  Janet dropped her eyes to the footnotes. "Sweet flag or yellow iris," she said peacefully; and went on reading.

  "O what can ail thee, Knight at arms,

  So haggard and so woebegone?

  The squirrel's granary is full,

  And the harvest's done."

  Only a faint cry from Tina of "Foul! No repetition" marred that verse. Janet read on.

  "I see a lily on thy brow,

  With anguish moist and fever dew,

  And on thy cheeks a fading rose

  Fast withereth too."

  This produced a prolonged wrangle on its exact meaning; Diane Zimmerman finally overrode everybody and parsed the sentence for them. "His brow is moist with anguish and with the dew of fever," she said. Somebody made a rude pun about excrement, and Janet hurried to the next verse. To the Knight's meeting with the Lady in the Meads, his setting her on his pacing steed, her finding him roots of relish sweet and honey wild and manna dew, her taking him to her elfin grot, where he shut her wild, wild eyes with kisses four, her audience returned only a few mild giggles.

  "And there she lulled me asleep,

  And there I dreamed, Ah Woe betide!

  The latest dream I ever dreamt

  On the cold hill side."

  Nobody said a word.

  "I saw pale Kings, and Princes too,

  Pale Warriors, death-pale were they all;

  They cried, 'La belle dame sans merci

  Thee hath in thrall!'"

  Nobody breathed.

  "I saw their starved lips in the gloam

  With horrid warning gaped wide,

  And I awoke, and found me here,

  On the cold hill's side.

  "And this is why I sojourn here,

  Alone and palely loitering,

  Though the sedge is withered from the lake,

  And no birds sing."

  Janet closed the book and looked at all the upturned faces, variously solemn, pleased, thrilled, or bemused. Molly was grinning. "That's lovely," said she, "but what does it mean?"

  "It's about love," said Janet, holding Molly's wide blue stare with her own eyes, "and what do we know about that?"

  Somebody knocked on the door. Rebecca, who had not yet progressed beyond the end
of the room's little corridor, as if she wanted to make sure an escape route was handy, opened the door. It was Thomas, resplendent in his red silk shirt and black pants and boots.

  Janet felt the room, all full of women, go quiet with attention. She smiled down the corridor at Thomas, who was looking dubiously at Rebecca, whom he did not know. "Come on in,"

  she said. "Tina, it's Thomas."

  Tina made room for Thomas on her bed, and he sat down with an arm around her waist. He looked a little nervous. Janet introduced him to everybody; Susan said timidly,

  "You're in my history class, I think—Europe in the Age of the Reformation, with Larkin?"

  "Yes, of course," said Thomas, smiling kindly into her earnest brown eyes. "You always sit in the back. What did you think of Thursday's lecture?"

  Susan, though she looked alarmed, managed to say she thought Larkin had contradicted himself; Thomas pressed her for details; Nora, who had taken the same course two years ago, joined in; and Janet felt she could safely tend to replenishing the supply of cider.

  Everything went swimmingly. The history discussion drifted sideways and divided into three or four, one economical, one concerned with costume, one with literature, and one with Reformation gossip. The literary discussion became musical; it developed that Rebecca played the banjo, and she was sent to fetch hers. She played a selection of folk songs, union songs, and contemporary ballads, after which Molly got out the Grateful Dead albums and made everybody sing "Box of Rain." Thomas appeared to have resigned himself to being the only male present, and made a neat and unobtrusive circle around the room, flirting or confiding or teasing or just conversing as the various guests seemed to demand. He got to Janet last, on his way back to Tina, and seemed to realize that she had been noticing him.

  "I like your friends," he said peaceably. "Very soothing, after a bunch of bickering classicists."

  "Where are they?" said Janet, who had promised herself not to ask him.

  He did not pretend that her question was too ambiguous for him. "Did they say they were coming?"

  "No, and they didn't say they weren't."

  "Well, they aren't," said Thomas. "Medeous has a Hallowe'en party every year."

  "And they didn't want to bring us?" said Janet, equal parts of hurt and anger warring in

  her stomach.

  "They couldn't bring you, you're not Classics majors."

  "Neither is Nick, at least not yet."

  "No, but he's taking Latin."

  "Why aren't you there?" said Janet.

  She expected him to say something about Tina. He looked at her out of his pure gray eyes, the only eyes of that color she had ever seen, with the pale lashes longer than Tina's, and he said, quietly, as if he were entrusting her with some great secret, "I am become weary of that crew."

  You're talking like them all right, thought Janet. She felt herself beginning to frame a sentence that was in effect an apology for Nick's behavior, and made herself stop. If he baited Thomas incessantly, he must have a reason. Thomas could surely take care of himself—as he had in fact done by coming here tonight; or if he couldn't, he had Robin, quick and sharp as a rapier. "What's wrong with them?" she said, trying to make it a request for information rather than a challenge.

  Thomas drew in his breath, and let it out again audibly. "I can't explain."

  "Robin does get wearing," said Janet, offering Molly's suitor in place of her own.

  "Does he?" said Thomas, as if she had proposed some resplendent new literary theory.

  "Well, then, if I tell you that, when that lot is all together, he is the best of the lot, you may understand why sometimes I choose other company."

  "Are Anne and Odile Beauvais part of that crew?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "Do they do drugs when Medeous is around?"

  Thomas made an abrupt noise that might have been a laugh. "What would stop them?"

  "Common sense?" If Medeous was winking at illegal drugs, Janet didn't want to know about it. Her reputation did not hint at it: quite the contrary; but one could, presumably, be a demon in the classroom and as mild as milk in a social setting.

  Thomas simply shook his head. "They haven't got any," he said. He went on looking at her. "If you stay with Nick," he said, "and you ought to—if you do, it's going to be like this. Either you are excluded, or you join them. And you oughtn't to join them."

  "Can I beat them?" said Janet, more or less automatically.

  "It's worth a try," said Thomas. He put a hand on her shoulder. Through the stiff muslin, his fingers were cold. "But you mustn't seem jealous, ever. If—"

  At this point Nora suggested that they turn out the lights and light all the candles and tell ghost stories.

  "Later," said Thomas, and went to sit by Tina.

  Janet joined Molly and Susan on Molly's bed, and listened to Nora tell a comic story, Peg a creepy but predictable one, and Sharon a perfectly terrifying tale that she said was Spanish. In the silence that followed it, through the open window came the complaint of the bagpipes.

  "Oh, Robin, " said Molly with a kind of loving exasperation.

  "Let's go catch him," said Sharon, scrambling to her feet and turning Tina's desk lamp on. "I've heard about this fellow for three years and never seen him."

  This seemed to please the entire party; in a gabble of agreement, they streamed out the door. Molly snatched her jacket out of her closet and bolted after them. Janet looked at Thomas and Tina.

  "I wouldn't," said Thomas.

  "It's only Robin," said Tina, considering him with some confusion.

  "What she said," Janet said to Thomas, snatched her own jacket from the floor of her closet, and ran after the others.

  She caught up with them on the wooden bridge between Eliot and Dunbar; they had stopped to listen for the elusive sound of the pipes. For a group of young, festive women, they were very quiet. Janet made her feet scuff on the dust of the path, and Molly said quietly, "Here's Janet."

  "Shhhh," said everybody.

  Janet joined them on the bridge and stood looking out over the lake. It was as clear, flat, and dark as the starry sky, except where a lone street lamp set by the bridge at its other end sent a line of wavery yellow across it. The night was cold; only a clean, weedy smell came from the lake. From Eliot on her left and Dunbar on her right came muffled sounds of merriment. Beyond them, after a few minutes, the sound of the pipes skulked again. It was somewhere beyond Dunbar.

  They went up the hill, past the long bulk of that building, and stopped to listen again.

  At the hill's crest, past the parking lot, in the lilac maze, perhaps. When they got to the edge of the maze, the sound was definitely coming from the fields beyond; and when they got to those, it was clearly somewhere across the highway, in the Lower Arboretum. They tumbled down the long slope to the highway and darted across its empty asphalt to the gravel space on the other side. The woods were dark, dryly rustling. The stream made a tiny sound; it was rather low just now. The pipes were silent.

  Nora and Molly, in the lead, started down the path to the wooden bridge; and Janet hissed, "Wait."

  They stopped obediently. Janet edged through the crowd of girls to Molly. "Horses,"

  she whispered.

  They all stood still. And under the rustle of dry leaves in the light wind, the sounds came clearer now: not only the sedate thud of hoofs and the creak of leather, but a dim jingling that, as it grew louder, made a music purer than the bagpipes. Janet opened her eyes wide, staring into the mottled darkness; next to her, Peg pushed her glasses up her nose and said, "I see lights."

  Janet saw them too. They looked like fireflies, and then perhaps like lanterns; and then they were just an enormous greeny-gold glow that showed up the trunks and branches of the trees, the dead dry stalks of weed and a few late-blooming flowers, like things in a pencil sketch. The broad path on the other side of the bridge lit up, every stone and stick on it like a jewel; the light touched the rough wooden bridge and made it dazz
ling; and then they could see the riders.

  Janet murmured, "Get back," to Peg, and pushed Sharon and Molly into the bushes.

  Peg turned and did the same for Susan and Rebecca. Nobody protested. The first riders came, sedately walking, down the broad path to the bridge. The horses were black as coal.

  Their manes and tails were braided and strung with beads and ribbons that did not sparkle, but glowed, with a light that showed the riders but cast no shad ow. The riders were strung

  with beads and ribbons, too, covered with flowing clothes of no familiar pattern. Their faces were pale and solemn. Their yellow hair blew behind them, though they went slowly and there was little wind.

  These were the first three, who might have been men or women. The fourth was a woman in artful tatters of red and green. If you had seen a picture of her, or tried to describe her, you would have had to say she was in rags. But in motion her dress was complete and perfect. She had red hair, not like Janet's or Melinda Wolfe's, but like black wood with a red grain in it. Her face was high and pale like the others', and her hair sprang from a peak at her forehead and waved back at her temples in the same way as theirs.

  The three riders and the woman on the black horses passed by, stirring up the gravel, and swung onto the highway. Behind them were smaller horses, brown, homely-looking ones that might have come from the farm attached to Blackstock. They, too, were alight with beads and ribbons. On them were men and women exceedingly beautiful, but looking, after the four who had just passed, as homely as the horses. Janet thought she saw Anne and Odile, but they all looked so much the same, she was not certain. She did see Melinda Wolfe, in a dress that looked sometimes green and sometimes gray, and knew her by her red hair and the tilt of her head. With her was a young man who might have been the newest instructor in Classics, or might not; and behind them an older man with dark hair and an angelic face, who was definitely Professor Ferris of Classics.