The Dawning of the Day (10 page)

Had Rossetti written those words to his Elizabeth? she wondered. It didn't matter, she had found them, Philippa Hathaway; now they were hers.

The girls' voices were a chattering blur out under the apple trees, sometimes sweet and sometimes as harsh as the squawk of blue jays. Then Jenny's voice stood out alone, with the alluring huskiness that Philippa so bitterly envied.

“Poor Phil, it's good that she's bright because she'll never be pretty. She'll never be a man's woman. . . . She's all legs and jaw. It's father's jaw, of course, but on him it's distinguished.”

“The only thing for a girl with Phil's bones,” Mary Taylor said judiciously, “is to be terribly sophisticated.”

There was a peal of laughter. “Can you imagine Philippa being
sophisticated
? A setter pup like
her
?”

“And she's such a horrible little Puritan!”

I should go out there now, the fifteen-year-old thought, trembling. They'll be sick when they realize I was here all the time. I should smile at them a little, as if they amused me beyond words, and walk by them into the house without speaking.

But she could not do it. She was terrified of what might happen. Her smile would be sick and pitiful; they would look at her as if they'd wronged a baby. If she walked with her head in the air, she'd fall over something. So she stayed where she was, her throat aching with the sobs of self-pity she fought to hold back, her hands clawing into her knees. She knew how badly she was stricken because she was not angry; she did not want to fight them, but to stay out of their sight forever.

But Jenny and Mary Taylor and the rest had been only seventeen or so, she thought now with a rush of tenderness. They'd been as stupid and innocent in their judgments as she had been to believe them. But they had felt so sure in their opinions, and it had gone on for so long. She wondered how many years it had taken her to forgive them for driving her to such frantic efforts to be sophisticated, to stop being a little Puritan.

There was Jenny coming into her room at two in the morning, her delicately cut face so stern she looked like an avenging angel. “I just wanted to tell you, Philippa,” she began in a low intense voice, “that the way you acted at the dance tonight was a disgrace to the entire Hathaway family. When it gets to Mother and Father, it will break their hearts. And
then
maybe you'll be satisfied.”

Philippa, flat under the covers, felt her stomach begin to quiver with sickness. Cousin Robert, the battered plush rabbit of her babyhood, who usually sat enthroned on her pillow when the bed was made, had fallen to the rug when she pulled back the covers a little while before. Now, instinctively, her arm swung down and her hand groped for Cousin Robert's ears. She smiled at Jenny.

“What did I do that was so awful?”

“The way you danced with that George Masters, for one thing. So close it was absolutely disgusting, and then you went out into his car, and don't you deny it. He gave you something to drink, didn't he?”

But it had made her sick. It had been horrible. She yawned, patting her mouth insolently with her fingers. “Well, there's more than one way of being popular. Maybe I'm turning out to be a man's woman.”

Let her ask where I got that idea, and I'll tell her, all right. I'll tell her once and for all that she's to blame if I'm a disgrace to the Hathaway family. I'll tell her—

“If I'd ever
dreamed
,” Jenny hissed at her, “that a sister of
mine
would get to be a byword! And with just
anybody
!”

“Not with anybody,” said Philippa. “Just with boys.” She giggled at Jenny's face. But when Jenny went out, Philippa tightened her grip on Cousin Robert's ears and hurled him with all her strength at the door. He fell to the rug, and she saw with horror that his stuffing had begun to come out. She burst into tears, scrambling blindly out of bed, and went to gather him up in her arms. Holding him against her breast, she tried to push back the cotton.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered to him, choking. “I'm sorry.” But it was a long time before she could stop crying. She knew it was too much weeping and storm over a little old rabbit whose seams had burst. After all, he could be mended. But still she cried, burrowed under the covers with her mouth pushed against Cousin Robert's back, until she was exhausted enough to fall asleep. . . .

I suppose everybody goes through it in one form or another, Philippa thought sitting in the orchard on Bennett's Island. The fortunate ones, like Jenny, aren't so plentiful. And even Jenny had her bad moments. The important thing is that she and I have grown up to be friends. But can I deny that there is a certain elemental satisfaction in leaving my child with Jenny? He must remind her at every turn that the setter pup wasn't so hopeless, after all.

Philippa smiled, and opened her eyes on the orchard. The excursion into the past had refreshed her so that she saw everything with a heightened sensitivity. Whatever has happened to me in the past eight years, she thought, I have had more, felt more, and seen more than I ever dreamed possible for me. I have no right to feel resentment, except for Justin's sake. He is the one who has been bitterly served.

It's just that I've been left, she finished wryly, without any Cousin Robert.

At that moment she thought she saw something moving in the shadows on the slope. She shaded her eyes against the sunlight and stared into the dimness. Then she saw the children, running down the slope. The first to pass through the slot of light was a little girl in a short skimpy dress, with pale hair flying. She ran on into the duskiness among the tree trunks like a gauzy apparition. An older girl followed her through the long ray, leading a small child by the hand and giving an impression of desperate haste. She had the same pale, flying hair, and for an instant her face shone clearly out at Philippa, strained and unseeing; then she, too, was out of the light. The last was a boy who seemed no bigger than Eric. He came down the steep path in a series of leaps, swinging a heavy stick and looking back over his shoulder.

It was a fantastic little procession, a frieze of figures running from light to darkness. They disappeared completely, but a young growth of spruce at the fringe of the orchard must have hidden them, for suddenly they broke out among the apple trees and stood in a cluster in the tall grass, their heads turned toward the woods in strained alertness.

Philippa didn't move. A bank of goldenrod half concealed her, and her dress was a muted grey-green. The children stood tightly together. The tallest girl kept her arms around the smaller two. The boy in thin and shrunken overalls gripped his stick and kept staring into the woods.

“He's gone, I guess,” the girl said hoarsely.

The boy cried out something; the words were unintelligible, but the intent was clear as he swung the stick back.

“No, he's gone,” the girl repeated. She turned her head toward the wood in a listening attitude. Her profile showed white against the dark trees, the features pointed and delicate. Her neck was too thin, her shoulders sloping. The younger children pressed against her in an unnatural stillness.

There was another movement at the outer rim of Philippa's field of vision. She looked back to where she had first seen the children and saw Perley Fraser coming down the steep path. He plunged heavily over the slippery needles. The long ray of light caught him like a spotlight, and his thick features were transfigured with an intense alertness. He had no cap on, and a cluster of black curls fell over his forehead. Then he disappeared the way the strange children had done, but the image of his face stayed in Philippa's mind, coarse and eager and wild.

She realized that the children hadn't seen him yet, but presently he would appear behind them. He had been tormenting them, she supposed. They'd be fair game for teasing, such white nervous creatures, as high-strung as deer though not beautiful like deer in any way that she could see.

She stood up and walked around the bank of goldenrod; just as Perley came into her view behind the children, she appeared before them. They gazed at her in an appalled stillness, but she looked over their heads at Perley. The intentness was gone from him, his face was as blankly sullen as it had always been.

“Going for a walk, Perley?” she asked pleasantly.

Her voice released the children from their spell. They began to sidle away; then one of them saw Perley, and all four of them broke into a frantic run toward the end of the orchard. It seemed kinder not to watch them.

“Those are the Webster children, aren't they?” she asked.

Perley grunted. He looked around her and beyond her, and then squinted at the dim trail behind him. “Got to go back and get my gun.”

“What were they afraid of, do you know?”

He pulled at his lower lip, rolling it out so that the moist inner part showed. “I d'no. I was tryin' to find out. I was amblin' along mindin' my business when they come stuggerin' out of the pucker brushes and took off like a lot of fool pa'tridges. So I come after them to see what scared 'em.”

You're lying, Philippa thought. It was you who frightened them, somehow. He disappeared behind the bright green young growth and reappeared on the slope, moving fast in spite of his lumpishness. Then she walked down through the orchard. When she reached the alley of trees, there was no sign of the children. One way the path led to a gate, beyond which she caught a glimpse of the gables of the Fennell house. The other way led out to the Bennett meadow. She went this way.

The vision of the running children stayed with her. If they had been attractive, she would not have been moved so deeply. But they had been as fragile and as unwholesome as the Indian pipes that grew in the darkest part of the woods, pushing blindly out of the sterile carpet of needles. Because of this, there had been something in their fear to infuriate her.

She remembered the time when Eric wanted a kitten and she had finally decided they might keep one in the apartment. Someone promised her a chunky yellow male as soon as it could be weaned. But in the meantime Eric came home from the park one day bearing tenderly in his sweater a weak, lanky, thoroughly ugly, and pregnant female. Eric called her Strange. She never grew to trust Philippa and was only grudgingly civil with Eric, but once she had thrust herself upon them there was no forgetting her. Eric and Philippa tended her, Eric with patient love and Philippa with a grim sense of duty, until the night she had died having her one kitten. The kitten died too. Philippa had been unwillingly moved by their deaths, but when she suggested the promised kitten, Eric refused. He would have no other cat. Strange had been his cat, he had found her, or she had found him. She had never liked him very well, but it didn't matter. In her weakness and wildness she had claimed him completely.

The cat had rearranged their lives around hers, and they had allowed it because the duty of the strong toward the weak was an inescapable thing. After she died, the change was still there. In Eric it was irrevocable because it was his first experience of the sort. For a long time afterward Philippa had wished, with a surprising passion, that Eric had taken a different route home from the park that day. Now, walking out into the Bennett meadow, she wondered if the time would ever come when she would wish with the same passion that the Webster children had never run down into the orchard this afternoon.

She repudiated the idea. Premonitions, she could hear Justin enunciate clearly, are a fine stock in trade for a medium, but not for a schoolteacher. He trained me so thoroughly, she thought, that I wouldn't even let myself imagine that he might be killed.

She was out of the shelter of the trees now, and the wind blustered coldly across the meadow. At the same time a dog came racing toward her through the tall grass, barking—a large dark dog of the indeterminate shepherd type seen in old engravings of farm scenes. His bark was tremendous, as if he were trying to outdo the wind, but the plumed tail was waving.

“
Dick
!” a woman's voice called, clear and imperious as a bell. “It's all right, he doesn't bite!”

“I know.” Philippa answered. As the woman came nearer, she recognized Joanna Sorensen, Mark and Steve Bennett's sister. She was as tall as Philippa, with a strong supple build. Her coloring was warm and dark.

“Hello! I've been wanting to meet you. We wanted to plan a sort of party for you at the clubhouse, but with the men out after herring every night it's had to be put off.” She put out her hand. “Jamie's very much impressed with you. But when I said I'd visit school one day, he was horrified.”

“They hate it,” Philippa said. “My son's always been thankful I've had something to keep me busy in school hours, so I can't embarrass him.”

“How old is he?”

“Eight. Just the age of Jamie.” They stood there in the wind, smiling at each other. Birch leaves blew past them in a dry gilt shower, and the meadow grass billowed like a pale sea.