Swamp Angel (4 page)

Edward Vardoe checked himself for a moment. Then, seeing that this massive woman in the armchair seemed to be
only a spectator, he continued.

“She said she came here today and you were both out.”

“I took some typing out to the University this afternoon, and when Mother’s lying in bed she doesn’t get up for anybody.”

Edward Vardoe threw his arms wide.

“If there was anything wrong, why didn’t she say so? If she … if there’s a man … where would there be a man … I been a good husband … her wearing that good suit tonight … I knew … she’s quiet and artful as the devil … planned all this … if there’s a man by God I’ll find her … I’ll fix her … I’ll …”

Mrs. Severance narrowed her eyes and looked at him. She leaned across the table beside her and picked up a small nickel-plated revolver, pearl-handled. On the metal was inscribed in flowing script the words Swamp Angel. Mrs. Severance twirled the Swamp Angel as if absentmindedly, then like a juggler she tossed it spinning in the air, caught it with her little hand, tossed it again, higher, again, higher, spinning, spinning. It was a dainty easy practiced piece of work, the big woman with the Swamp Angel. Edward Vardoe stopped speaking and watched her, taken out of himself.

He turned to Hilda Severance. “Why does she do that?”

“She likes doing it,” said Hilda equably. “That was hers, and her father’s.” She smiled. “That’s the family pet. It’s the Swamp Angel. Her father used it in the business and so did she.”

“Business?”

Mrs. Severance looked coldly at her daughter.

“Can she shoot?”

Hilda Severance laughed. “You’d best go home, Mr. Vardoe,” she said, “and pull yourself together. Perhaps Maggie’s not gone. If she
has
gone, there’s not much you can do, is there? Maggie won’t change her mind. If she’s gone, she won’t
come back. You’d better settle to that. I don’t think there’s a man. In fact I’m sure.”

Mrs. Severance got up slowly as one bored by proceedings, and walked ponderously back to her room, taking her cigarettes and the Swamp Angel with her. Hilda Severance continued. “Go home,” she said rather kindly, “and get a night’s sleep and face it all in the morning.”

Edward Vardoe rose as if drunk or dreaming. He went out without a word, down the steps and along the dark road. As his thoughts outpaced him he saw the confusion of the bedroom, the pans at the kitchen sink, and – by gum – all the lights on, and him so careful. Then in the shade of tomorrow waited the new car and Mr. Weller and humiliation that only venom could assuage. His life was broken off, splintered like a stick, and she’d done it.

Mrs. Severance kicked off her little slippers and heaved herself up into the bed. She settled herself against the pillows with satisfaction and was just striking a match when her daughter came and stood in the doorway.

“You’re a wicked old woman and should be ashamed of yourself,” said her daughter.

“I know,” said Mrs. Severance comfortably.

She pulled the shawl well round her and blew two spirals.

“You go and make a good pot of coffee,” she said, “and we’ll have it here. That was a sweet bit of melodrama wasn’t it … what d’you suppose happened to Maggie? …”

M
aggie Lloyd who was Maggie Vardoe left the bus at Chilliwack and asked her way to the modest auto camp where she proposed to spend the night. Seventy miles away Mrs. Severance demonstrated to Edward Vardoe her art with the Swamp Angel, and three people confronted each other with strong feelings all on account of Maggie. But Maggie, as free of care or remembrance as if she had just been born (as perhaps she had, after much anguish), followed the proprietor to a small cabin under the dark pine trees. He unlocked the door, pushed it open, turned on a meager light, and looked at his customer.

“There’s plenty wood and paper beside the stove if you want a fire … there’s matches … here’s the key … the privies is back behind the cabins … there’s a light … going fishing?”

“Yes, I am,” said Maggie as she put down her gear.

“Well, good night then, I hope you sleep good.”

“Good night,” she said, and closed the door behind him and locked it.

As she lay in the dark in the hard double bed and smelled the sweet rough-dried sheets, she saw through the cabin
windows the tops of tall firs moving slowly in a small arc, and back, against the starred sky. Slowly they moved, obliterating stars, and then revealing them. The place was very still. The only sound was the soft yet potential roar of wind in the fir trees. The cabin was a safe small world enclosing her. She put out a hand, groped on the stand beside her bed, took up the small yellow bowl, ran her thumb round its smooth glaze like a drowsy child feeling its toy. How lovely the sound of the wind in the fir trees. She fell asleep.

H
ope is a village on the forested banks of the Fraser River at a point where that river deploys dramatically from the mountains. The history of Hope goes back into the last century when it was a point of arrival, meeting, and departure for miners who were working the Fraser River bars or pressing on to the mines of the Cariboo Country, for Hudson’s Bay men, and for many travelers. “Many” has a relative meaning. British Columbia’s small population, scattered sparsely from the northern Rockies to west and south, and up from the coast, was centered chiefly at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, where Fort Camosun became Victoria; but there was a surge from the United States and from Vancouver Island. Because the rumor and the fact of gold drew white men and Chinamen to the Fraser River bars and further and still further north and east, and because the powerful and difficult Fraser River formed a route – not a highway – and because the Cariboo Trail (first a toehold, then an earthen trail shored up against the mountains high above the river, and now with full crescendo a fine winding well-graded motor road) followed and skipped the river’s lines and
curves, the village of Hope and other companion villages and forts – Yale and Langley – held importance for the small seat of government in Victoria, for the Hudson’s Bay traders, for thousands of American miners, and for other people in the young colony. This bit of history is implicit in the road; it accompanies the water and the air of the river.

Hope is still a village set among noble trees on the bank of a great and wicked river, backed by ascending mountains, and until lately it retained its look of dreaming age. But the look of dreaming age has gone, and Hope lies between two forks of highroads, each going into the mountains, and is subsidiary to them. The main highroad from Vancouver, passing through Chilliwack where Maggie had spent the night, splits at the village of Hope. The northern fork follows the old Cariboo Trail along the steep banks of the Fraser River which winds in broad sweeps and narrow hairpin curves on the sides and rumps of hills and mountains growing ever nearer, ever higher, until at Hell’s Gate Canyon the close rocks of the river banks confine the raging waters – and further west until the first sagebrush is seen. On goes the road to Kamloops and beyond.

For a long time past the word at the back of Maggie’s mind, and at the end of her plan and her journey, had been Kamloops.

The second road, which branches at Hope, turns to the right, that is, south of the Cariboo Road and nearer to the American border. It follows the Hope-Princeton Trail (historic trail of miners and cattlemen) which is now the Hope-Princeton Highway, climbing into the mountains. Here are many streams, and the Coquihalla River, the young Skagit River, and at last the Similkameen River. The Hope-Princeton Highway, like the Cariboo Highway, moves into British
Columbia’s heart. It leads to a mining country, and orchard countries, past lakes, rivers and mountains into the Boundary Country fabulous with mines, with old ghost towns, with thriving communities divided by mountains and forests and waterfalling rivers, and to and beyond the mighty and mysterious concentration at Trail. This was the road that Maggie chose, at least as far as the river with the dancing name Similkameen. Then she would turn her back on what lay beyond, return to Hope and follow, somehow, the road to Kamloops.

She was so far now from what she had left behind her on Capitol Hill that she had no fear of being overtaken. Make no mistake, when you have reached Hope and the roads that divide there you have quite left Vancouver and the Pacific Ocean. They are disproportionately remote. You are entering a continent, and you meet the continent there, at Hope.

If at any time now, Maggie thought, she should by some ridiculous calculation or miscalculation be overtaken and confronted by Edward Vardoe, she would not mind. She was Tom Lloyd’s own widow again. She would not hide nor be afraid. She would not protest, upbraid, defend. She grieved a little, and helplessly, because (she thought) another woman would have done this thing better. Another woman would have faced Eddie Vardoe and told him that she could not live with him any longer. She would have left him more fairly, Maggie thought. Maggie had to go almost under his very eyes, or she would have involved her friends. She, Maggie, could not have borne the small scenes and the big scenes and the pursuit and the shoutings if she had quite faced him. She had borne the humiliations that she had borne, but she could not endure the others. He would never have let me be, she said to herself with revulsion; he would have given Hilda and her mother no peace; I know him so well. He is he, and I am I. And this was
the only way for me. On a shining morning she waited for the Hope-Princeton bus at Chilliwack. She settled down beside a window.

When she first saw the Similkameen River, the dancing river with the dancing name, it was a broad mountain stream of a light blue that was silver in the bright morning, and of a silver that was blue. There was a turn in the road, and crowded somber jack pines hid the Similkameen River. There was another turn, and the river flowed laughing beside the road again. Across the rapid moving river was the forest of lodgepole pine. Shafts of sunlight smote the first trees and they stood out against the somberness and denseness of the forests behind them. Maggie looked at, but she could not look into the pine forest, for it was sealed in its density and blackness. The Similkameen River, of fairly uniform breadth, ran blue and silver and alive, level and life giving past the forests.

A sign on the roadside said “Beware of deer crossing the road.” Maggie went forward to the driver. She waited until a stretch of the highway lay clear ahead and then she spoke.

“Will you set me down, please, somewhere near the river?”

The driver did not answer at once. His eyes were on the road. Then he said, “We don’t usually set folks down here, lady. There’s nowhere near. The next camp is a matter of some miles on.”

“I shall be all right. Just set me down near the river.”

The driver slowed up, and Maggie, with her gear, left the bus. The bus picked up speed and was soon out of sight. Maggie walked down to the margin of the river as in an enchantment. The pine-needle earth felt soft. She set down her gear, gazed up and down the stream, sat down, and then lay down, looking up at the sky.

Some rivers are sweet and equable. Such was the lightly dancing Similkameen River at that place, and such was Maggie lying beside it. She gave herself up to the high morning. Was she not lucky. Chipmunks watched her.

The bend of the river beside which she lay was so far from the road that the sound of the immediate rippling water filled her ears, and so she heard no sound of passing cars, and lay high up in these mountains, near the sky – it seemed – on the fringe of some open pinewoods. Something had happened, she thought as she lay there, to her sense of smell. It had become vitiated. But now her breath drank and drank again the scent of firs and pines and juniper. Time dissolved, and space dissolved, and she smelled again the pinewoods of New Brunswick, one with these woods, a continent away, and she was all but a child again. No, she was nothing. No thought, no memories occupied her. The clouds that drifted across the blue drifted through her mind as she lay idle. She sat up at last, and, looking round, saw a doe standing by a tree trunk, regarding her. The lovely silly eyes of the deer regarded her without fear. It flicked its ears, turned and nibbled at its own coppery flank, turned again its elegant neck, looked at her, and passed on into the woods. Maggie, smiling with pleasure at the sight of the deer, took out of her knapsack some fruit and biscuits, dipped her little plastic cup, drank of the water, and lay down again. Her fingers strayed and found a pine cone, and through her fingers she saw its rich and elegant brownness. Later, when the sun had passed somewhat over, she set up her rod, chose a likely fly, and on a good clear piece of bank cast across the flowing river.

Maggie continued to cast. In the pleasure of casting over this lively stream she forgot – as always when she was fishing – her own existence. Suddenly came a strike, and the line ran
out, there was a quick radiance and splashing above the water downstream. At the moment of the strike, Maggie became a co-ordinating creature of wrists and fingers and reel and rod and line and tension and the small trout leaping, darting, leaping. She landed the fish, took out the hook, slipped in her thumb, broke back the small neck, and the leaping rainbow thing was dead. A thought as thin and cruel as a pipefish cut through her mind. The pipefish slid through and away. It would return.

Maggie drew in her line and made some beautiful casts. The line curved shining through the air backward forward backward forward, gaining length, and the fly dropped sweetly. Again she cast and cast. Her exhilaration settled down to the matter of fishing. Then she became aware that the sun had passed over the arc of sky between the mountains. She reeled in her line, gathered up her gear and climbed to the highway.

She walked along the highway, and she walked straight and well and carried her load so lightly that passing cars did not stop for her. The evening grew darker. A plane, full of invisible beings, roared across the patch of sky between the mountains and disappeared to the west. Maggie walked on – cars had headlights now – and her bags had begun to grow heavy long before she saw lights on the right-hand side of the road, country lights among the trees. She approached a row of small cabins, each with its glow over the door, then a little lighted store. She put down her load and went in.