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Title: Ile Forest Author: Ursula K. Le Guin Date: 1976 Language: en Topics: anti-punishment, punishment, crime, law, fiction, abolition, prison Source: From the short story collection *Orsinian Tales*.
“SURELY,” said the young doctor, “there are unpardonable crimes! Murder
can’t go unpunished.”
The senior partner shook his head. “There are unpardonable people,
perhaps; but crimes…they depend…”
“On what? To take a human life—that’s absolute. Self-defense aside, of
course. The sacredness of human life—”
“Is nothing the law can judge of,” the older man said drily. “I have a
murder in the family, as a matter of fact. Two murders.” And, gazing
mostly at the fire, he told his story.
My first practice was up north in the Valone. I went there with my
sister in 1902. Even then it was a drab place. The old estates had sold
out to the beetroot plantations, and collieries spread a murk on the
hills to the south and west. It was just a big, dull plain; only at the
east end of it, Valone Alte, did you get any sense of being in the
mountains. On the first day I drove to Valone Alte I noticed a grove of
trees; the trees in the valley had all been cut down. There were birches
turning gold, and a house behind them, and behind it a stand of huge old
oaks, turning dim red and brown; it was October. It was beautiful. When
my sister and I drove out on Sunday I went that way, and she said in her
drowsy way that it was like the castle in the fairy tale, the castle of
silver in a forest of gold. I had several patients in Valone Alte, and
always drove that road. In winter when the leaves were down you could
see the old house; in spring you could hear the cuckoos calling, and in
summer the mourning-doves. I didn’t know if anyone lived there. I never
asked.
The year went round; I didn’t have all the practice I’d hoped for, but
Poma, my sister Pomona, was good at making ends meet, for all she looked
so sleepy and serene. So we got on. One evening I came in and found a
call had been left from a place called He on the Valone Alte road. I
asked Minna, the housekeeper, where it was.
“Why, in Ile Forest,” she said, as if there was a forest the size of
Siberia there. “Past the old mill.”
“The castle of silver,” Poma said, smiling. I set right off. I was
curious. You know how it is, when you’ve built up your fancies about a
place, and then suddenly are called to go into it. The old trees stood
round, the windows of the house reflected the last red of the west. As I
tied up my horse, a man came out to meet me.
He didn’t come out of any fairy tale. He was about forty and had that
hatchet face you see up north, hard as flint. He took me straight in.
The house was unlit; he carried a kerosene lamp. What I could see of the
rooms looked bare, empty. No carpets, nothing. The upstairs room we came
to had no rug either; bed, table, a few chairs; but a roaring hot fire
in the hearth. It helps to have a forest, when you need firewood.
The patient was the owner of the forest, Ileskar. Pneumonia. And he was
a fighter. I was there on and off for seventy hours, and he never drew a
breath in all that time that wasn’t an act of pure willpower. The third
night, I had a woman in labor in Mesoval, but I left her to the midwife.
I was young, you know, and I said to myself that babies come into the
world every day, but it’s not every day a brave man leaves it. He
fought; and I tried to help him. At dawn the fever went down abruptly,
the way it does now with these new drugs, but it wasn’t any drug; he’d
fought, and won. I drove home in a kind of exaltation, in a white windy
sunrise.
And I dropped in daily while he convalesced. He drew me, the place drew
me. That last night, it had been one of those nights you have only when
you’re young—whole nights, from sunset to sunrise, when life and death
are present with you, and outside the windows there’s the forest, and
the winter, and the dark.
I say “forest” just as Minna did, meaning that stand of a few hundred
trees. It had been a forest once. It had covered all Valone Alte, and so
had the Ileskar properties. For a century and a half it had all gone
down and down; nothing left now but the grove, and the house, and a
share in the Kravay plantations, enough to keep one Ileskar alive. And
Martin, the hatchet-faced fellow, his servant technically, though they
shared the work and ate together. Martin was a strange fellow, jealous,
devoted to Ileskar. I felt that devotion as an actual force, not sexual,
but possessive, defensive. It did not puzzle me too much. There was
something about Galven Ileskar that made it seem quite natural. Natural
to admire him, and to protect him.
I got his story from Minna, mostly, her mother had worked for his
mother. The father had spent what was left to spend, and then died of
the pleurisy. Galven went into the army at twenty; at thirty he married,
retired as a captain, and came back to Ile. After about three years his
wife deserted him, ran away with a man from Brailava. And about that I
learned a little from Galven himself. He was grateful to me for my
visits; I suppose it was plain that I wanted his friendship. He felt he
should not withhold himself. I’d rambled on about Poma and myself, so he
felt obliged to tell me about his marriage. “She was very weak,” he
said. He had a gentle, husky voice. “I took her weakness for sweetness.
A mistake. But it wasn’t her fault. A mistake. You know she left me,
with another man.”
I nodded, very embarrassed.
“I saw him whip a horse blind once,” Galven said, in the same
thoughtful, painful way. “Stand and whip its eyes till they were open
sores. When I got there he’d just finished. He gave a big sigh of
satisfaction, as if he’d just gotten up from dinner. It was his own
horse. I didn’t do anything. Told him to get off the place, clear out.
Not enough…”
“You and your—wife are divorced, then?”
“Yes,” he said, and then he looked across the room at Martin, who was
building up the fire. Martin nodded, and Galven said, “Yes,” again. He
was only a week or so convalescent, he looked tired; it was a bit
strange, but I already knew he was a strange fellow. He said, “I’m
sorry. I’ve forgotten how to talk to civilised people.”
It was really painful to have him apologising to me, and so I just went
on with the first thing that came to mind about Poma and myself and old
Minna and my patients, and presently I wound up asking if I might bring
Poma sometime when I came out to He. “She’s admired the place so much
when we drive past.”
“It would be a great pleasure to me,” Galven said. “But you’ll let me
get on my feet again, first? And it is a bit of a wolf’s den, you know…”
I was deaf. “She wouldn’t notice that,” I said. “Her own room’s like a
thicket, scarves and shawls and little bottles and books and hairpins,
she never puts anything away. She never gets her buttons into the right
buttonholes, and she leaves everything around behind her, sort of like a
ship’s wake.” I wasn’t exaggerating. Poma loved soft clothes and gauzy
things, and wherever she’d been there was a veil dripping off a
chair-arm, or a scarf fluttering on a rose bush, or some creamy fluffy
thing dropped by the door, as if she were some sort of little animal
that left bits of its fur around, the way rabbits leave white plumes on
the briars in the early morning in the fields. When she’d lost a scarf
and left her neck bare she’d catch up any sort of kerchief, and I’d ask
her what she had on her shoulders now, the hearth-rug? and she’d smile
her sweet, embarrassed, lazy smile. She was a sweet one, my little
sister. I got a bit of a shock when I told her I’d take her out to He
one of these days. “No,” she said, like that.
“Why not?” I was chagrined. I’d talked a lot about Ileskar, and she had
seemed interested.
“He doesn’t want women and strangers around,” she said. “Let the poor
fellow be.”
“Nonsense. He’s very lonely, and doesn’t know how to break out of it.”
“Then you’re just what he needs,” she said, with a smile. I insisted—I
was bent on doing Galven good, you see—and finally she said, “I have
queer ideas about that place, Gil. When you talk about him, I keep
thinking of the forest. The old forest, I mean, the way it must have
been. A great, dim place, with glades no one ever sees, and places
people have known but forgotten, and wild animals roaming in it. A place
you get lost in. I think I’ll stay home and tend my roses.”
I suppose I said something about “feminine illogic,” and the rest.
Anyhow, I trampled on, and she gave in to me. To yield was her grace, as
not to yield was Galven’s. No day had been set for our visit, and that
reassured her. In fact it was a couple of months before she went to Ile.
I remember the wide, heavy, February sky hanging over the valley as we
drove there. The house looked naked in that winter light among bare
trees. You saw the shingles off the roof, the uncurtained windows, the
weedy driveways. I had spent an uneasy night, dreaming that I was trying
to track somebody, some little animal it seemed, through the woods, and
never finding it.
Martin wasn’t about. Galven put up our pony and brought us into the
house. He was wearing old officer’s trousers with the stripe taken off,
an old coat and a coarse woollen muffler. I had never noticed, till I
looked through Poma’s eyes, how poor he was. Compared with him, we were
wealthy: we had our coats, our coals, our cart and pony, our little
treasures and possessions. He had an empty house.
He or Martin had felled one of the oaks to feed the enormous fireplace
downstairs. The chairs we sat in were from his room upstairs. We were
cold, we were stiff. Galven’s good manners were frozen. 1 asked where
Martin was. “Hunting,” Galven said, expressionless.
“Do you hunt, Mr Ileskar?” Poma asked. Her voice was easy, her face
looked rosy in the firelight. Galven looked at her and thawed. “I used
to go over to the marshes for duck, when my wife was alive,” he said.
“There aren’t many birds left, but I liked it, wading out in the marshes
as the sun came up.”
“Just the thing for a bad chest,” I said, “take it up again by all
means.” All at once we were all relaxed. Galven got to telling us
hunting stories that had been passed down in his family—tales of
boar-hunting; there’d been no wild boar in the Valone for a hundred
years. And that sent us to the tales that old villagers like Minna could
still tell you in those days; Poma was fascinated with them, and Galven
told her one, a kind of crude, weird epic of avalanches and axe-armed
heroes which must have come down from hut to hut, over the centuries,
from the high mountains above the valley. He spoke well, in his dry,
soft voice, and we listened well, there by the fire, with drafts and
shadows at our back. I tried to write that tale down once, and found I
could remember only fragments, all the poetry of it gone; but I heard
Poma tell it to her children once, word for word as Galven told it that
afternoon in Ile.
As we drove away from the place I thought I saw Martin come out of the
forest towards the house, but it was too dark to be sure.
At supper Poma asked, “His wife is dead?”
“Divorced.”
She poured some tea and dreamed over it awhile.
“Martin was avoiding us,” I said.
“Disapproves of my coming there.”
“He’s a dour one all right. But you did like Galven?”
Poma nodded and presently, as if by afterthought, smiled. And soon she
drifted off to her room, leaving a filmy pink scarf clinging to her
chair by a thread.
After a few weeks Galven called on us. I was flattered, and startled. I
had never imagined him away from He, standing like anybody else in our
six-by-six parlour. He had got himself a horse, in Mesoval. He was
tremendously pleased and serious, explaining to us how it was a really
fine mare, but old and overridden, and how you went about “bringing
back” a ruined horse. “When she’s fit again, perhaps you’d like to ride
her, Miss Pomona,” he said, for my sister had mentioned that she loved
riding. “She’s very gentle.”
Pomona accepted at once; she never could resist a ride—“It’s my
laziness,” she always said, “the horse does the work, and I just sit
there.”
While Galven was there, Minna kept peering through the crack of the
door. After he’d gone she treated us with the first inkling of respect
she’d shown us yet. We’d moved up a notch in the world. I took advantage
of it to ask her about the man from Brailava.
“He used to come to hunt. Mr Ileskar used to entertain, those days. Not
like in his father’s day, but still, there’d be ladies and gentlemen
come. That one come for the hunting. They say he beat his horse blind
and then had an awful quarrel with Mr Ileskar about it and was sent off.
But he come back, I guess, and made a fool of Mr Ileskar after all.”
So it was true about the horse. I hadn’t been sure. Galven did not lie,
but I had a notion that in his loneliness he had not kept a firm hold on
the varieties, the distinctions, of truth. I don’t know what gave me
that impression, other than his having said once or twice that his wife
was dead; and she was, for him, if not for others. At any rate Minna’s
grin displeased me—her silly respect for Ileskar as “a gentleman,” and
disrespect for him as a man. I said so. She shrugged her wide shoulders.
“Well, doctor, then tell me why he didn’t up and follow ’em? Why’d he
let the fellow just walk off with his wife?”
She had a point there.
“She wasn’t worth his chasing after,” I said. Minna shrugged again, and
no wonder. By her code, and Galven’s, that was not how pride worked.
In fact it was inconceivable that he had simply given in. I had seen him
fight a worse enemy than an adulterer…Had Martin somehow interfered?
Martin was a strong Christian; he had a different code. But strong as he
might be he could not have held Galven back from anything Galven willed
to do. It was all very curious, and I brooded over it at odd moments all
that spring. It was the passiveness of Galven’s behavior that I simply
could not fit in to the proud, direct, intransigent man I thought I
knew. Some step was missing.
I took Poma out several times to ride at Ile that spring; the winter had
left her a bit run down, and I prescribed the exercise. That gave Galven
great pleasure. It was a long time since he’d felt himself of use to
another human being. Come June he got a second horse, when his money
from the Kravay plantations came in; it was called Martin’s horse, and
Martin rode it when he went to Mesoval, but Galven rode it when Poma
came to ride the old black mare. They were a funny pair, Galven every
inch the cavalryman on the big raw-boned roan, Poma lazy and smiling,
sidesaddle on the fat old mare. All summer he’d ride down on Sunday
afternoon leading the mare, pick up Poma, and they’d ride out all
afternoon. She came in bright-eyed from these rides, wind-flushed, and I
laid it to the outdoor exercise—oh, there’s no fool like a young doctor!
There came an evening of August, the evening of a hot day. I’d been on
an obstetrics call, five hours, premature twins, stillborn, and I came
home about six and lay down in my room. I was worn out. The stillbirth,
the sickly heavy heat, the sky grey with coalsmoke over the flat, dull
plain, it all pulled me down. Lying there I heard horses’ hooves on the
road, soft on the dust, and after a while I heard Galven’s and Pomona’s
voices. They were in the little rose plot under my window. She was
saying, “I don’t know, Galven.”
“You cannot come there,” he said.
If she answered, I could not hear her.
“When the roof leaks there,” he said, “it leaks. We nail old shingles
over the hole. It takes money to roof a house like that. I have no
money. I have no profession. I was brought up not to have a profession.
My kind of people have land, not money. I don’t have land. I have an
empty house. And it’s where I live, it’s what I am, Pomona. I can’t
leave it. But you can’t live there. There is nothing there. Nothing.”
“There’s yourself,” she said, or I think that’s what she said; she spoke
very low.
“It comes to the same thing.”
“Why?”
There was a long pause. “I don’t know,” he said. “I started out all
right. It was coming back, maybe. Bringing her back to that house. I
tried it, I tried to give He to her. It is what I am. But it wasn’t any
good, it isn’t any good, it’s no use, Pomona!” That was said in anguish,
and she answered only with his name. After that I couldn’t hear what
they said, only the murmur of their voices, unnerved and tender. Even in
the shame of listening it was a wonderful thing to hear, that
tenderness. And still I was afraid, I felt the sickness, the weariness I
had felt that afternoon bringing the dead to birth. It was impossible
that my sister should love Galven Ileskar. It wasn’t that he was poor,
it wasn’t that he chose to live in a half-ruined house at the end of
nowhere; that was his heritage, that was his right. Singular men lead
singular lives. And Poma had the right to choose all that, if she loved
him. It wasn’t that that made it impossible. It was the missing step. It
was something more profoundly lacking, lacking in Galven. There was a
gap, a forgotten place, a break in his humanity. He was not quite my
brother, as I had thought all men were. He was a stranger, from a
different land.
That night I kept looking at Poma; she was a beautiful girl, as soft as
sunlight. I damned myself for not ever having looked at her, for not
having been a decent brother to her, taking her somewhere, anywhere,
into company, where she’d have found a dozen men ready to love her and
marry her. Instead, I had taken her to Ile.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said next morning at breakfast. “I’m fed up with
this place. I’m ready to try Brailava.” I thought I was being subtle,
till I saw the terror in her eyes.
“Are you?” she said weakly.
“All we’ll ever do here is scrape by. It’s not fair to you, Poma. I’m
writing Cohen to ask him to look out for a partnership for me in the
city.”
“Shouldn’t you wait a while longer?”
“Not here. It gets us nowhere.”
She nodded, and left me as soon as she could. She didn’t leave a scarf
or handkerchief behind, not a trace. She hid in her room all day. I had
only a couple of calls to make. God, that was a long day!
I was watering the roses after supper, and she came to me there, where
she and Galven had talked the night before. “Gil,” she said, “I want to
talk with you.”
“Your skirt’s caught on the rose bush.”
“Unhook me, I can’t reach it.”
I broke the thorn and freed her.
“I’m in love with Galven,” she said.
“Oh I see,” said I.
“We talked it over. He feels we can’t marry; he’s too poor. I wanted you
to know about it, though. So you’d understand why I don’t want to leave
the Valone.”
I was wordless, or rather words strangled me. Finally I got some
out—“You mean you want to stay here, even though—?”
“Yes. At least I can see him.”
She was awake, my sleeping beauty. He had waked her; he had given her
what she lacked, and what few men could have given her: the sense of
peril, which is the root of love. Now she needed what she had always had
and never needed, her serenity, her strength. I stared at her and
finally said, “You mean to live with him?”
She turned white, dead white. “I would if he asked me,” she said. “Do
you think he’d do that?” She was furious, and I was floored. I stood
there with the watering can and apologised—“Poma, I’m sorry, I didn’t
mean to—But what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said, still angry.
“You mean you just intend to go on living here, and he there, and—” She
already had me at the point of telling her to marry him. I got angry in
my turn. “All right,” I said, “I’ll go speak to him.”
“What about?” she said, defensive of him at once.
“About what he intends to do! If he wants to marry you, surely he can
find some kind of work?”
“He has tried,” she said. “He wasn’t brought up to work. And he has been
ill, you know.”
Her dignity, her vulnerable dignity, went to my heart. “Oh Poma, I know
that! And you know that I respect him, that I love him; he was my friend
first, wasn’t he? But the illness—what kind of illness?—There are times
I don’t think I’ve ever really known him at all—” I could not say any
more, for she did not understand me. She was blind to the dark places in
the forest, or they were all bright to her. She feared for him; but she
did not fear him at all.
And so I rode off that evening to Ile.
Galven was not there. Martin said he had taken out the mare to exercise
her. Martin was cleaning a harness in the stable by lanternlight and
moonlight, and I talked with him there while I waited for Galven to come
back. Moonlight enlarged the woods of Ile; the birches and the house
looked silver, the oaks were a wall of black. Martin came to the stable
door with me for a smoke. I looked at his face in the moonlight, and I
thought I could trust him, if only he’d trust me.
“Martin, I want to ask you something. I have good reason for asking it.”
He sucked at his pipe, and waited.
“Do you consider Galven to be sane?”
He was silent; sucked at his pipe; grinned a little. “Sane?” he said.
“I’m not one to judge. I chose to live here too.”
“Listen, Martin, you know that I’m his friend. But he and my sister,
they’re in love, they talk of marrying. I’m the only one to look after
her. I want to know more about—” I hesitated and finally said, “About
his first marriage.”
Martin was looking out into the yard, his light eyes full of moonlight.
“No need to stir that up, doctor. But you ought to take your sister
away.”
“Why?”
No answer.
“I have a right to know.”
“Look at him!” Martin broke out, fierce, turning on me. “Look at him!
You know him well enough, though you’ll never know what he was, what he
should have been. What’s done is done, there’s no mending it, let him
be. What would she do, here, when he went into his black mood? I’ve
lived day after day in this house with him when he never spoke a word,
and there was nothing you could do for him, nothing. Is that for a young
girl to live with? He’s not fit to live with people. He’s not sane, if
you want Take her away from here!”
It was not wholly jealousy, but it was not logic, either, that led his
argument. Galven had argued against himself in the same way last night.
I was sure Galven had had no “black mood” since he had known Poma. The
blackness lay further behind.
“Did he divorce his wife, Martin?”
“She’s dead.”
“You know that for a fact?”
Martin nodded.
“All right; if she’s dead, that story’s closed. All I can do is speak to
him.”
“You won’t do that!”
It wasn’t either question or threat so much as it was terror, real
terror in his voice. I was clinging to common sense by now desperately,
clutching at the straw. “Somebody’s got to face reality,” I said
angrily. “If they marry they’ve got to have something to live on—”
“To live on, to live on, that’s not what it’s about! He can’t marry
anybody. Get her out of here!”
“Why?”
“All right, you asked if he was sane, I’ll answer you. No. No, he isn’t
sane. He’s done something he doesn’t know about, he doesn’t remember, if
she comes here it will happen again, how do I know it won’t happen
again!”
I felt very dizzy, there in the night wind under the high dark and
silver of the trees. I finally said in a whisper, “His wife?”
No answer.
“For the love of God, Martin!”
“All right,” the man whispered. “Listen. He came on them in the woods.
There, back in the oaks.” He pointed to the great trees standing somber
under moonlight. “He’d been out hunting. It was the day after he’d sent
off the man from Brailava, told him get out and never come back. And she
was in a rage with him for it, they’d quarrelled half the night, and he
went off to the marshes before dawn. He came back early and he found
them there, he took a shortcut through the woods, he found them there in
broad daylight in the forest And he shot her point-blank and clubbed the
man with his rifle, beat his brains out. I heard the shot, so close to
the house, I came out and found them. I took him home. There were a
couple of other men staying here, I sent them away, I told them she’d
run off. That night he tried to kill himself, I had to watch him, I had
to tie him up.” Martin’s voice shook and broke again and again. “For
weeks he never said a word, he was like a dumb animal, I had to lock him
in. And it wore off but it would come back on him, I had to watch him
night and day. It wasn’t her, it wasn’t that he’d come on them that way
like dogs in heat, it was that he’d killed them, that’s what broke him.
He came out of it, he began to act like himself again, but only when
he’d forgotten that He forgot it. He doesn’t remember it. He doesn’t
know it. I told him the same story, they’d run off, gone abroad, and he
believed it. He believes it now. Now, now will you bring your sister
here?”
All I could say at first was, “Martin, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Then,
pulling myself together, “They—what did you do?”
“They’re where they died. Do you want to dig them up and make sure?” he
said in a cracked, savage voice. “There in the forest. Go ahead, here,
here’s the manure shovel, it’s what I dug a hole for them with. You’re a
doctor, you won’t believe Galven could do that to a man, there wasn’t
anything left of the head but—but—” Martin put his face into his hands
suddenly and rocked back and forth, crouching down on his heels,
crouching and rocking and sobbing.
I said what I could to him, but all he could say to me was, “If I could
just forget it, the way he has!”
When he began to get himself under control again, I left, not waiting
for Galven. Not waiting, I say—I was running from him. I wanted to be
out from under the shadow of those trees. I kept the pony at a trot all
the way home, glad of the empty road and the wash of moonlight over the
wide valley. And I came into our house out of breath and shaking; and
found Galven Ileskar standing there, by the fire, alone.
“Where’s my sister?” I yelled, and he stared in bewilderment.
“Upstairs,” he stammered, and I went up the stairs four at a time. There
she was in her room, sitting on her bed, among all the pretty odds and
ends and bits and tatters that she never put away. She had been crying.
“Gil!” she said, with the same bewildered look. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing—I don’t know,” and I backed out, leaving her scared to death,
poor girl. But she waited up there while I came back down to Galven;
that’s what they’d arranged, the custom of the times, you know, the men
were to talk the matter over.
He said the same thing: “What’s wrong, Gil?” And what was I to say?
There he stood, tense and gallant, with his clear eyes, my friend, ready
to tell me he loved my sister and had found some kind of job and would
stand by her all his life, and was I supposed to say, “Yes, there’s
something wrong, Galven Ileskar,” and tell him what it was? Oh, there
was something wrong, all right, but it was a deeper wrong, and an older
one, than any he had done. Was I to give in to it?
“Galven,” I said, “Poma’s spoken to me. I don’t know what to say. I
can’t forbid you to marry, but I can’t—I can’t—” And I stuck; I couldn’t
speak; Martin’s tears blinded me.
“Nothing could make me hurt her,” he said very quietly, as if making a
promise. I don’t know whether he understood me; I don’t know whether, as
Martin believed, he did not know what he had done. In a way it did not
matter. The pain and the guilt of it were in him, then and always. That
he knew, knew from end to end, and endured without complaint.
Well, that wasn’t quite the end of it. It should have been, but what he
could endure, I couldn’t, and finally, against every impulse of mercy, I
told Poma what Martin had told me. I couldn’t let her walk into the
forest undefended. She listened to me, and as I spoke I knew I’d lost
her. She believed me, all right. God help her, I think she knew before I
told her!—not the facts, but the truth. But my telling her forced her to
take sides. And she did. She said she’d stay with Ileskar. They were
married in October.
The doctor cleared his throat, and gazed a long time at the fire, not
noticing his junior partner’s impatience.
“Well?” the young man burst out at last like a firecracker—“What
happened?”
“What happened? Why, nothing much happened. They lived on at He. Galven
had got himself a job as an overseer for Kravay; after a couple of years
he did pretty well at it. They had a son and a daughter. Galven died
when he was fifty; pneumonia again, his heart couldn’t take it. My
sister’s still at He. I haven’t seen her for a couple of years, I hope
to spend Christmas there…Oh, but the reason I told you all this. You
said there are unpardonable crimes. And I agree that murder ought to be
one. And yet, among all men, it was the murderer whom I loved, who
turned out in fact to be my brother… Do you see what I mean?”
1920