The Heavenly Tenants by William Maxwell

Author:William Maxwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2017-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

“Did it work out better that way?” Roger asked.

“The book seemed to think it did,” Mr. Marvell said. “But that was a long time ago.”

“How long?” Heather asked.

“I don’t know how many thousand years,” her father answered.

“Then the Little Girl must be quite an old woman by now,” Heather said.

“The Little Girl is still a little girl, and the Twins are no bigger than Tom and Tim,” Mr. Marvell said. “In the sky things must not be the way they are on earth. Some people believe that what a person is like depends on the position of the stars at the time of his birth. And maybe that’s right Who knows? Take Roger, for instance. Roger was born in December when the sun is going through Sagittarius,—that’s another name for Archer. Well, Roger is a very good shot with a bow and

arrow.”

“Where was the sun when I was born?” Tim asked.

“Gemini,” Mr. Marvell said. “That means the Twins.”

“Do you hear, Tom?” Heather asked, poking her little brother gently. Then she turned to her father. “Do you suppose the zodiac people are like us?”

“I’d put it the other way round,” Mr. Marvell said. “Do you think we could be anything like them?”

“What happened to that woman?” Roger asked. “Did she get over her cold?”

“After weeks and weeks,” Mr. Marvell said. “And the first thing she did after she was up and around was to have the well filled with dirt clear to the top. Then she planted flowers in it.”

“What kind of flowers?” Heather asked.

“Stars of Bethlehem,” Mr. Marvell said. “By that time, though, her husband knew everything that was in the book, so it didn’t matter that the well was full of dirt and he couldn’t go down it any more to look at the constellations in the daytime.”

It was quite dark now. Mr. Marvell got up and polished the lens of the telescope with his pocket handkerchief.

“The first person ever to watch the stars through a telescope,” he said, “was a man named Galileo. He lived about three hundred years ago and he had a lot of new ideas. I wish I could of known him. Galileo’s telescope was probably no larger than this one. He saw that the Milky Way was not a river, like everybody thought, but a cloud of little tiny stars. Now there are telescopes that are — why I saw a picture of one in the Milwaukee Journal that was bigger than our house at home, and astronomers can see millions of stars that Galileo never knew existed.”

Mr. Marvell bent down and peered through the telescope for several seconds. “Why!” he exclaimed finally. “That’s the queerest thing I ever heard of!”

“What’s the queerest thing you ever heard of?” the children asked.

“I can’t find the Crab,” Mr. Marvell said solemnly. “It just isn’t there.”

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