Swamp Angel (15 page)

“Do you believe in Providence?” asked Albert Cousins.

Mrs. Severance paused. (She thought of Mrs. Spink … I couldn’t say, I’m shaw.) “I went to school to one teacher every day for more than forty years … and I still don’t know,” she said. “If by ‘Providence’ you mean (as the word would imply) a provider who in fact provides cakes and ale for a thousand people and no bread and milk for a million people and no rice and whatever-it-is-they-drink for a million people … well, ‘Providence’ is just a word and I don’t believe in that kind of Providence. But,” she said diffidently, for she had not spoken of these things for a long time, “it seems to me that one has to move on to the … ultimate … that’s God … it
makes things very complicated but quite simple…. Yet there is still coincidence.”

“What
do
you believe?” asked Albert Cousins.

She thought for a moment, scrutinizing the end of her cigarette. “I believe in faith.”

“Faith in what?” he asked.

Mrs. Severance did not answer.

“Faith in what?” he asked.

(Really, it might be Philip speaking; only he doesn’t look like Philip.)

Mrs. Severance screwed up her lips, looking downward, and so made an expression that seemed to Albert Cousins skeptical in the extreme. He waited.

“I shall not tell you today.” she said, “I shall tell you another day. There is too much to say about it.”

“You are cheating.”

“No, I am not cheating. I believe in faith. I believe in God … and in man, to some extent. I really shall tell you another day. Now go and let Mrs. Spink know you’re staying for supper.”

He went, and came back, and sat down again in the chair facing Mrs. Severance.

“When my father first began the business …” he said, jerking a little in a way that betrayed the fact that at one time he had been shy. Perhaps he was still shy.

Albert Cousins talked and Mrs. Severance listened, with her eyes on him.

Hilda Severance, coming lightly up the steps, poised and paused for one moment to look in at the window before going into the house. She saw her mother sitting in the accustomed place, listening to a man who sat opposite to her. Hilda could not see who this was because the chair had a solid back which
concealed the man who must have been describing or explaining. His hands moved outward in explanation.

Mrs. Severance listened with her habitual look that was both disillusioned and indulgent.

She turned aside her head to blow a spiral of smoke away from him and her eyes looked through the window. Her face changed. Her face shone. She spoke. She took hold of the arms of her chair and tried to raise herself. The man sprang up, and Hilda, turning, putting down her baggage, found the door suddenly opened by Albert Cousins.

Hilda exclaimed. She looked up at him with all the holiday in her face, and this return. And then – What has she been up to now, she thought at once. She looked at her mother and saw the bandaged foot. “Mother, what have you done?” she cried and hurried across the room, sinking down beside her mother’s chair.

“It was a trap. I trapped him with it,” said Mrs. Severance. “Albert, tell Mrs. Spink three.”

“But what
did
you do?” asked Hilda, laying her hand gently on her mother’s strapped ankle and looking earnestly at her. “And what
have
you been up to with Albert?” she murmured, as Albert came back from the kitchen.

“I’ll tell you about it. I fell,” said her mother. “But first. Was it nice?”

“Did you have a good time?” said Albert Cousins in the same breath. Hilda still looked with surprise at him, so strangely at home in her home. He stood there, looking down at her, tall, fair, rather wispy, pleasant, liable at any moment to grow a beard which she would applaud. She had for some time divined in him something which, with her own hesitating permission to herself, she could dare to love, and here he was.

Mrs. Severance was thinking Well, I hope to God they’ll
show a little sense between them. Albert can take over from here … I’ve had enough. She looked away and her hand moved automatically to the table. Her fingers sought something and then lay still. Something in the room became simple again as Hilda, scrambling to her feet, began “It was marvellous …” and the listeners felt freshly in the room the sea and the road and the wind and the wheeling crying seagulls which she had brought in with her, which were still there, fading, fading away as she spoke.

“Oh it was divine … !” exclaimed Hilda. “We went as far as Comox and up to the Forbidden Plateau, and I
must
tell you …” Mrs. Spink pushed the door open with her hip.

H
aldar came into the kitchen.

“We should have got an answer from that boy, the Chinese boy. You wrote him, didn’t you?” he said.

Maggie looked up. “Not yet.”

More than once Maggie had set about writing to Joey, and then she did not write. A current was flowing through their lives and it flowed from Vera. There was no current, and then it could be felt again. That indwelling
arrière-pensée
which makes one ill at ease made Maggie ill at ease. Each act of hers which was beyond routine caused Vera to manifest ill feeling, not much ill feeling, just a small ill feeling brushed away by a little sudden sweetness. Maggie began to experience some of the self-consciousness which she had formerly felt with Edward Vardoe, but now the tenuous relations between herself and Vera did not stop at Vera but seemed to draw in Haldar and the little boy. Maggie must do well, but not too well. She must be responsible, but not too responsible. Vera was able to create a feeling of guilt in those near to her. Therefore Maggie had not written to Joey, preferring rather that Haldar should think her negligent than that Vera should
think her possessive – a situation as light as a cobweb, as strong as prison, and sillier than a poor joke.

“You really
do
want me to write?”

“Of course. I thought we’d settled that weeks ago!”

Maggie wrote to Joey, and close on receipt of her letter,

Joey came.

N
ow Maggie stood alone, listening to the last sound of Joey’s car, fainter, fainter, really gone. She was alone for further than voice could call, further than loon could cry. If belated fishermen should come she would not turn them away. They could stay overnight and she would feed them with what she had; and they could fish, and then they must go. If the weather held, and food lasted, she would stay here for three weeks, but first she must waste no time before cleaning out and closing up the cabins and the lodge. When that was safely done against the winter, she could let go this tight wire of work, rest her hands, and take her holiday. Her companions would be the chipmunks and the squirrels scampering, stopping, getting ready, too, for winter. The hand some gray whiskey-jacks would grow bolder, too bold. So would the bluejays. Perhaps she would, if she stayed long enough, see the sandhill cranes in their flyways. The sound of the cranes’ silver music approaching in all that silence would take her at once out of a cabin with her broom, and into the open, to look up, to listen, and, when they had passed over, to recapture the sight and the silver sound which moved on over
other lakes and hills. She would walk up the long overgrown trail to the far end of the lake and, in the evening, approach softly, and stand, waiting to see the heads and backs of beaver in the water, leaving their lodge and returning again. She would hear the gunshot sound of the beaver’s tail upon the water as, startled, he dived. She would examine the stumps of the birches, neatly chiseled to clean points by the sharp teeth of the sagacious beaver; then, with her flashlight, she would pick her way home to the lodge, hearing sometimes a stealthy movement in the forest. She would fish.

She went to the cabins and stood at each doorway in turn, estimating what had to be done, and what must be repaired in the spring. She came at last to her own small cabin, and there, on the bed, she saw the parcel – about the size and shape of a shoe box, it was – that Joey had brought with him from the post office in Kamloops. It lay where she had tossed it.

Joey had come in the midmorning. He had driven most of the night. He had breakfasted in Kamloops, had seen Henry Corder according to Maggie’s instructions, had gone to the store and the post office, and had driven on, up the hill, past the high lookout over the joining rivers and the town, past the Iron Mask mine, on up into the hills. Young Angus was with him, sitting owlish behind his spectacles, beside his older brother. The boys had driven with few stops from Vancouver to the North Thompson road, up the mountain to the lake where the young Chinese brother and sister – native born like Joey and Angus, but country bred – had their fishing camp, down the road again, up into the hills, and now here they were. Joey slid from behind the wheel and walked with his easy lounging tread to where Maggie stood, her face alight, her hands outstretched. Angus stumped behind his brother.

Joey coming toward her in this so different place drew a
veil of sunlight across the rain in Chinatown, the tension and the pitch of emotion in the blackness of the taxi, the crowd in the bus station where were, as if unchangeable, fundamental, her clear memories of the Chinese boy. Mrs. Lloyd, standing in this sunlight, was a different person to Joey from the tired yet strong woman whose side he had taken, somehow, as against some person or persons unknown who were not on her side. Her face was tanned and healthy, and her gray eyes looked surprising in the tan. She wore a shirt and blue jeans and she belonged to this place. Joey did not think these things, but they composed the picture that he saw. A dark man of strong build stood there, leaning on a stick. A woman came from one of the cabins. A little brown boy in swimming trunks ran up from the water. The place looked very nice.

“Joey!” cried Maggie, “and who’s this?”

“It’s Angus, my kid brother,” said Joey.

“And this is Mrs. Gunnarsen, and Mr. Gunnarsen, who own the place. And … come here, Alan … this is Alan.” Angus and Alan were watchful.

Maggie then did some invisible stage managing. She went to the kitchen, while Haldar, walking slowly, showed the camp to the boys. Alan went with them. Vera packed. Maggie prepared a meal.

When they had eaten fried trout and bacon, homemade bread, tomatoes still smelling of the leaves of the tomato plant, apple pie and coffee, they all went out onto the veranda.

“Do you always feed them like that, Mrs. Lloyd?” Joey asked. “That sure was a swell meal!”

“Just about,” said Maggie.

“I was thinking …” said the boy. “If you had kind of a stand off from the house for parties that came for the day. Give em wieners or somep’n. Like they have in Stanley Park
down by Lumberman’s Arch … save you a lot of work …”

Haldar and Maggie hesitated, and then Maggie spoke. “This is different, Joey. A fishing place … well, you want to keep it like this …” and she spread her hands, pointing. She saw the litter of the hot-dog and fried-potato stand, the paper droppings of the people like the droppings in a poultry yard; and she realized how new to this boy’s eyes was the casual untamed scene. The very cabins were as trees in the forest. Joey was pure city. Perhaps it would never do.

As he sat on the veranda, replete and still, Joey was aware of some enormous difference. This stillness. So it would be like this, would it. His restless eyes ranged the lake, the shores. Joey did not yet know Time that flowed smoothly, as in this place. In all of his life Time had jerked by with a rat-tat-tat, with the beating of a clock, with shrill cries to come to supper, with the starting up of an engine, with the slamming of doors, with the change of radio program, with the traffic, with voices, the fire engine, the change of the traffic lights, separately and all together. He did not think of these things, but it was their absence that made the enormous difference.

Maggie glanced at the boy’s face and glanced away. The skin of a smooth yellow beige, was drawn over fine aquiline bones. She thought again, Yes, he is a young priest in a monastery, a young lord, a young Chinese taxi-driver, a young boy sitting on the veranda edge, reflecting, choosing what, thinking what. He was thinking Tennis. I’d never get down to the park for tennis with the kids. Well, I don’t get down often now. Less and less. Look, now, at the tennis courts at Stanley Park and the Chinese players – some of them dressed in white – who were his friends, and were not taxi drivers but had day jobs that let them go down and play steady every evening in spring and summer and fall. And now they were far out of his
class because he hadn’t the kind of time it takes to play tennis and some of those kids were going in for tournaments now. I’d have the winters in town and the summers up here, I guess. No, more than the summers. He reviewed again with critical pride the place up the North Thompson. People coming and going, there’d be lots to do, and spot cash. It’s a nice place. A nice life. Haldar Gunnarsen smoked his pipe and said little.

Angus, full, happy, comfortable, with no dreams of tennis, said ingratiatingly. “What about me staying to help the lady close up?” Maggie smiled at his round dark peasant face with the thick glasses. If I could just get out on that lake, thought Angus who had never been in a boat. If I could sleep in one of those cute little houses! If I just could!

“No you can’t,” said Joey, getting to his feet. “We never asked Mother and Dad. You gotta get home for school. We gointa leave right away. If it’s okay by you, Mr. Gunnarsen, we better get going.”

The boys lifted out some supplies and a parcel from the car. Angus handed the parcel to Maggie and the boys carried the cartons to the kitchen. They piled the Gunnarsens’ gear into the car. Oh, thought Maggie, watching, to have a young easy-to-get-on-with man round this place, to haul up the boats, to drive, to pile, to fetch, to lift! The three boys got into the front of the car and the Gunnarsens sat behind, surrounded by gear. There were farewells. Everyone waved. Good-by Good-by. Take care of yourself. Good-by.

“We’d need a jeep like that guy up the North Thompson on this road, Mrs. Lloyd,” called Joey before he drove away. Good-by.