Read an Excerpt
Prologue
A car is traveling along one of the roads which cross the Mojave Desert, skirting the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
Presently, it leaves the highway and turns uphill, along a rough dirt road. The slope is dotted with Joshua trees, striking still, fantastic attitudes. Higher up, there are thickets of juniper.
The road gets worse and worse, deeply furrowed by mountain rains. It winds through a narrowing defile and climbs a flat shelf of land above the canyon. The flat land is cultivated. There are fruit trees, leafless at this season.
The car stops in front of a gate. The driver, a man in his late thirties, leans out of the window and shouts:
"Is this Mr. Ericson's place?"
From the other side of the gate, a middle-aged man looks up from the beehive over which he has been bending. He wears the veil and gloves of a beekeeper, so that we cannot see his face. He walks to the gate and opens it in a leisurely manner.
"Jacob'll be feeding the chickens, I guess." His pleasant, good-humored drawl reveals that he is a Negro.
Bees are crawling all over him. Some of them fly off his arms, and one flies into the car. Next to the driver sits a woman, well-dressed and still attractive. Her makeup does not conceal the fact that she is no longer young.
She flaps irritably at the bee.
"Get it out! Do something, can't you!" she cries to her companion. Her voice betrays nervous tension, verging on hysteria. After a moment, the bee flies out of the window of its own accord.
"Don't be such a fool, Mary!" the man exclaims angrily. His nerves are evidently as bad as her own.
Crossly, he closes the window and drives on up the road. We see a rickety old house, unpainted and almost a ruin, standing on the rising ground above the trees.
"You might at least not talk to me that way in front of strangers," says the woman, resentfully. "Haven't you any consideration? And you made him come to the gate when he was all covered with bees."
"Oh, cut it out, for Pete's sake!"
We sense the chronic bad feeling between these two people.
The car stops in front of the house. They get out. From the seat, beside her, the woman picks up a round basket in which, covered by a blanket, lies a brown toy Pomeranian, obviously very sick. The woman pulls back the blanket and looks at the little animal. Her strained, angry expression changes to one of tenderness.
"Poor little Topsy!"
She follows the man to the back of the house. Here, in a ramshackle wire pen, surrounded by the chickens to which he is throwing corn, stands a tall, strongly built man in his fifties. His face is tanned, leathery, and deeply lined; with very bright eyes under bushy eyebrows.
"It's Mr. Ericson, isn't it?"
"Yes, I'm Ericson," says the big man. He speaks slowly and deliberately, in a deep quiet voice. His appearance and movements give us an impression of calm independence and strength. The woman feels this at once. She becomes much more amiable, even a little bit coy.
"Well--we certainly had a time finding you! Hidden away up here in the mountains, miles from anywhere! I certainly do hope you can help us--I'm sure we've used up every drop of our gasoline ration--but we just had to come, didn't we, Allan? Oh, this is my husband--"
Jacob Ericson nods to the other man in a friendly, undemonstrative way.
"This is our little dog," the woman continues. "The vet said there wasn't a thing he could do for her. Then our friends the Hiltons told us about you. They were here last month. The Mr. Hilton, you know. The president of the Hilton National Bank."
Ericson looks blank. Evidently he doesn't know.
"Their cocker spaniel was hit by an automobile. They said you did a miracle."
"Yeah," says Ericson drily, "I remember the dog."
He comes out of the chicken pen and takes the basket from the woman. He pulls back the blanket and, with a strange gentleness, lays his big, gnarled hand on the tiny dog.
The woman watches him anxiously. "We should have come sooner. You don't think it's too late?"
Ericson doesn't answer immediately. He is examining the dog, which lies quite passive, regarding him with feverishly bright eyes.
"No," he says, after a considerable pause. "No. It isn't too late."
Husband and wife both watch him with fascinated interest, as he sits down on a bench beside the house. He takes the little dog out of the basket and holds her between his two hands, looking at her closely. Then he lays her on his knees and passes his hands over the small body in a series of slow, rhythmical movements. His eyes become abstracted, and somehow indrawn, and we have the impression that all his senses are concentrated in his big, sensitive hands.
"Just what do you think is wrong with her?" The woman evidently can't keep quiet for long. "The vet told us some Latin name or other."
Ericson doesn't answer, but he looks up for a moment and gives her a surprisingly sweet, happy, reassuring smile. There is silence, while he continues to pass his hands over the dog.
"It must be just too wonderful to have the gift of healing," says the woman, gushingly.
"You think so?" Ericson speaks with a certain grave irony, not looking up.
"Why, yes--I should say I do! Being able to do so much good in the world!"
"Don't you cure anything but animals?" the husband asks.
"Kids, sometimes. When they're little."
"But not grown people?"
Ericson shakes his head slowly. "Not anymore."
"Why not?" the woman insists.
"Why not?" Ericson looks up at them. Then, after a silence, he says
abruptly, "Read your Bible. ÔWhether it is easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Arise and take up thy bed and walk.'"
"I don't understand," says the woman. "Surely there's never anything wrong in healing people, is there? There couldn't be--"
Ericson doesn't answer. He continues to move his hands over the dog. His face, deeply thoughtful, is seemingly troubled. His lips move. He murmurs to himself, "Yes--whether it is easier...."
Copyright (c) 1998 by Laura and Matthew Huxley, Executors of the Estate of Aldous Huxley, and by Don Bachardy, Executor of the Estate of Christopher Isherwood. Published by St. Martin's Press, Inc. New York, NY
