Swamp Angel (3 page)

She crossed Main Street on that day and walked through the rain until she came to the shop where they sold the peacock feather fans. At this place she saw only Chinese on the street. Some were old and spare, with the bony temples and eye sockets, the almost somnambulist appearance of certain of the older Chinese; there were some whose brisk Westernness overlay them; nearly all of them had the immemorial look which distinguishes their race. Mrs. Lloyd, sitting, now, in the dark of the taxi with her eyes on the Chinese boy’s head, entered, then, into Lee Sing’s shop; she smelled the smell, felt the lure in the air, bought the smallest of the peacock feather fans, fingered and resisted the bowls of yellow, of green, of blue rice-china; then fingered and bought one small six-sided yellow bowl. It seemed to her that she held in her hand all beauty in a cheap yellow Chinese bowl. (I shall take it with me, she had thought, and now it lay in the bag at her feet.) She went out of the store, and saw there the young Chinaman who was now driving her.

He stood at the curb of the pavement beside a taxi. It looked as though he and the taxi belonged to one another, as they did. His nonchalant attitude had a certain grace. He was waiting for someone. He stepped quickly and lightly across the pavement to where an elderly Chinese woman, dressed in black, appeared in a doorway. There was, Mrs. Lloyd had thought, a sort of swagger, a downtown arrogance in his movements. He bent over the woman who appeared to be lame. Composed, dignified, she handed him her parcels; he took
her arm, escorted her across the pavement, helped her into the car, closed the door and returned with his quick yet lounging tread, his almost animal tread, to a small office out of whose doorway the elderly woman had come. Mrs. Lloyd stood, uncertain, interested. Only the need of the peacock feathers had brought her to Chinatown and so, for a few minutes to spare, she stood looking at the windows full of Chinese artifacts, at the people reflected in the windows, and at the people in the street. The young man talked and listened to an older Chinaman who stood in the doorway. They talked in Chinese and without gesture. The young man took his orders with a sort of brashness, nodded, and said “Okay.”

“Okay, Joey,” said the older man. The young man strode lightly across the pavement, slipped behind the steering wheel of the car and drove off. The older man stood in the doorway, looking up and down the street. He was fat, bland, amused, and his face was the pleasing color of smooth old ivory.

Mrs. Lloyd looked at the window beside the open door and saw the words Universal Taxi, and a telephone number. The Chinaman’s bland intelligent eyes saw her inclusively and moved on. A smile broke over Mrs. Lloyd’s face. The completion of her plan lay before her. She went toward the man.

“May I come in?” she asked.

“Sure, lady.” And he moved aside to let her pass.

So, as she sat in the car which had now reached the outskirts of New Westminster, the peacock feather fan, the small yellow bowl, the youth whose qualities she had seen in his four times crossing the pavement, her unquestioned agreement with his father – all joined to make her departure un-strange, familiar, and were part of her happiness.

The taxi drew up at the bus station. She got out, and the driver handed her the knapsack which she slung on her
shoulder, gave her the handbag and the slender case with the fishing rod.

“Going fishing?” he asked. The usual question.

“Yes, I am,” she said pleasantly.

She paid him, said “Good-by Joey, and thank you,” went into the open station and sat down. There was some time to wait. Mrs. Lloyd felt suddenly tired. She slipped her pack aside, leaned back and closed her eyes.

She heard a voice. “You all right, lady?”

She opened her eyes and saw the young Chinaman standing there. He looked down as he rolled a cigarette.

“You’re not sick, are you?”

“No,” she said, “I’m all right. I think I’m a little tired but I’m not ill.”

He looked at the station clock.

“You got fifteen minutes. Don’t you think,” tentatively, “… a cuppa coffee …?”

She rose to her feet and said gratefully “Oh yes let’s!” and they went together to the coffee counter.

“I didn’t mean …” the young man said awkwardly, “that I … that you gotta …”

“Oh Joey,” said Mrs. Lloyd, “you don’t know how glad I am! This is a queer journey I’m on,” he nodded, “and it’s nice to start it like this … with a new friend, I mean.”

The hot coffee was put before them and they sipped, not speaking.

Then – “Joey,” said Mrs. Lloyd suddenly, “do you know what?”

“What,” said the boy.

“I don’t know where I’m going, but I know the kind of place I want to find and I know what I want to do. I want to have a certain kind of business. I know what I want. I’ve
worked it all out and I know I can do it. But there’s one thing missing. Maybe I’ll find it up-country and maybe I won’t. I’ll need a partner with a good head who’s got a car and who’s a good driver. To go halvers or nearly halvers.” She looked at the boy and her calm eyes held new interest in him. His face, she thought, had not a secret look. She thought that she understood him and that East and West blended in him in a way that seemed open to her. Perhaps he was now more Canadian than Chinese. By certain processes he was both.

The boy’s upper lip lifted in a smile that gave his face a fastidious expression (like a young priest, like a young lord, like a young tiger, she thought), and looked away across the coffee bar to the placarded advertisements that covered the wall – advertisements so familiar, so blatant, that the eye no longer saw them and the mind no longer read them. He stared not at but through the placards without speaking. Then he looked quickly at his wrist watch.

“Did you mean me and you … partners … in a business?” he asked, looking at her.

She gave a quick nod. “You don’t have to say now. It just fits in with something … it
does
sound crazy, doesn’t it, Joey,” she smiled, “but it’s not.”

“I guess your bus’ll be coming and I gotta get going,” he said evasively, “and Dad’s got another call for me. I’d … well, I might be innerested, lady … it’d depend. But, well, say, I don’t know your name!”

“You’d know it if I wrote to you, maybe two … three … months from now … maybe in a year. You’d know me. Oh … thank you …”

“Well, so long, lady,” he said, standing with awkward grace.

“Good-by,” she said. She forgot that she was tired. She
watched him vanishing, slipping neatly through the crowd. She walked toward the bus which now stood waiting.

“Is this the bus for up the Valley, for Chilliwack?” she asked.

The conductor moved an assenting hand. She got into the bus, carrying quite easily the bag, her knapsack and the fishing rod.

“Going fishing?” asked the conductor.

“Yes, I am,” she said pleasantly.

A
short time before Mrs. Lloyd stepped up into the bus, Edward Vardoe, having reached a boiling point of fury, found himself unable to enjoy boiling in a sitting posture any longer and leaped to his feet. In addition to the annoying incidents of the tweed suit and the roast of beef there had been something queer, an untouchableness, about his wife’s manner at dinnertime. In fact, there was no “manner.” She had seemed not to be, or, perhaps, to be somewhere else.

Edward Vardoe, high with grievance, marched to the door, flung it open, and looked into the kitchen. She was not there. My God, she’s left the dishes, she must be dead. A few plates were washed and lay there, drained. But the meat pan was there, and the vegetable saucepans, untouched. Edward Vardoe went into the kitchen and stood, looking about him. All was still. The back door through which his wife had fled stood open. Beyond lay the dark garden and the invisible woodshed. He listened. His feelings were confused. Surprise at the simple and unusual absence of his wife allayed his anger a little. He called through the open door “Maggie!” There was
no sound but a small wind flapping in the dark garden. He called more loudly “Maggie!” There was no answer. He was aware of people passing, gone, in front of the house, but, at the back, nothing except the dark. He became aware of a listening in the empty kitchen.

He turned abruptly and saw on the floor beside the sink her apron lying as if thrown down in haste. He looked at the peg where her raincoat sometimes hung. It was not there.

“Maggie!”

He went through the dining room to the row of pegs in the little hall. Her raincoat was not in its regular place, neither was her beret.

Louder. Louder. “Maggie! Maggie!”

He walked upstairs, listening as he went up step by step. The figure in the shirt sleeves rounded the turn at the top of the stairs. He turned on a light and went into the bedroom. All was the same, but different. The bedroom was listening, too.

He turned and went into the only other room and into the bathroom. No one was there. The whole small house was listening. He went back into the bedroom and opened the door of the clothes cupboard. He cleared his confused and angry mind and tried to remember which of her clothes hung customarily there. The tweed suit was, of course, gone. Her one hat was still on its shelf but something was missing. Shoes seemed to have gone. He turned and sprang to the chest of drawers. Some things (what things?) were not there. In a storm of rage he threw the remaining garments to the floor. He emptied the next drawer and the next. He rushed to the drawer where she kept her brush and comb and face powder. Empty. He dashed it to the floor. He hurried to the bathroom. His awakened suspicions could not tell. Poor human doll, running from room to room in the empty house. Oh rage, hurt pride,
fury! Maggie had gone secretly out into the night. She had taken her brush and comb; and he who lived habitually on the edge of other suspicions was aware that she had left him.

Edward Vardoe did not know that he was trembling. He went downstairs. His hands and eyes seemed to prevent his finding a telephone number in the book but at last he dialed the telephone.

“You are calling the wrong number,” said a flat voice. His hands, his eyes, the dial, all objects conspired against him. He dialed again, bringing the small disc down flang, flang, flang, flang.

“Hello,” said Hilda Severance.

“Is she there?” he asked, and his voice shook.

“Is who there?”

“You know who!” he shouted.

“You have the wrong number,” said the cool voice of Hilda Severance. He slammed down the telephone.

Lights were now burning throughout the house. He started for the front door, turned back and put on his coat. He banged the door and walked hurriedly down the wooden sidewalk.

An expanse of air in the night, endless, soft, fluent, still, blowing, moving, clearing, closing, sliding through dark leaves and branches and past houses and lampposts and black silent areas and bright areas of sound, movement and smell, separating lover from lover, victim from approaching thief, thief from hunter, mother from child, quite hid Maggie afar from Edward Vardoe who walked with prim quick steps along the shabby sidewalk in the dark on Capitol Hill. As he walked, an assurance of something monstrous and impossible rose within him. Maggie had left him. His humiliation, still awaiting sure knowledge of the fact, would overwhelm him. He did not love
Maggie, not as love counts for love. But she was his wife, and by God she had left him. Hardly a small space in his mind remained lighted by sense to tell him that somewhere there was a valid reason for the departure of Maggie and that it was intrinsic in him that she should go. Then that space closed up and no reason lighted his mind. He muttered “Maybe she went to … the … drugstore.” He did not know that he talked aloud but he knew that his muttering was futile. Face powder, brush and comb, that good suit, the open door, the dropped apron, her strangeness – and by gum that big roast! – rose up and retired again after telling him coldly that Maggie had left him.

Edward Vardoe, swimming in a murky sea of emotions of hate and self-pity (“I’ve been done, done, had for a sucker!”), ascended the steps of a small house which showed only one light, and rang the bell.

The porch light then shone and there were lights in a room and the hall. The door was opened, and Hilda Severance stood there, dark and slim.

The sight of his wife’s friend stirred the fury again in Edward Vardoe.

“Is she here?” he asked abruptly.

“Oh, it was you that telephoned!” remarked Hilda Severance.

“Sure it was me! She’s here! She came here!”

Hilda Severance shook her head. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about but I suppose it’s Maggie. You’d better come in.”

Edward Vardoe walked in and they went into the little parlor. His quick glances searched the room.

“She’s not here. You can look anywhere you like,” said Hilda Severance, “and I don’t know what you’re talking about. Has Maggie gone away?”

“Gone!” he said, throwing up his hands. “She’s gone.”

Hilda Severance said nothing, but stood, looking at him and thinking.

“You’re her friend,” he said, “she talks to you! She never talks to me! She must have told you she was going! Is it a man? or …”

But Maggie had not the fatal gift of intimacy. Hilda Severance had long ago divined that Maggie was a quiet woman who, though not secretive, did not require to talk, to divulge, to compare, to elicit; and she had not resented this. Maggie, brought up from childhood by a man, with men, had never learned the peculiarly but not wholly feminine joys of communication, the déshabille of conversation, of the midnight confidence, the revelation. And now, serenely and alone, she had acted with her own resources, and whatever she had chosen to do, Hilda Severance was glad that Maggie had not delivered herself into the hands of a friend, even into
her
hands. Thus she knew nothing. Edward Vardoe broke into a torrent of accusation and abuse.

Mrs. Severance, sitting up in bed in her room, listened, put out her cigarette stub, got out of bed with agility considering her size, thrust her small feet into bedroom slippers, shed her shawl, put on her dressing gown, knotted the cord, reached for her package of cigarettes, and walked with ponderous softness into the parlor. She stood in the doorway and looked at Edward Vardoe without expression. She crossed the room, lowered herself into a chair, took out a cigarette, tapped it firmly, lighted it, drew heavily, and blew twin spirals through her nostrils. Through the spirals she looked at Edward Vardoe. She did not speak.