The Dawning of the Day (11 page)

“I've been out for a walk. Looking for cranberries, incidentally.” Mrs. Sorensen pulled open the pocket of her old leather jacket, and Philippa looked in at the berries.

“They're so pretty. They must be fun to pick.”

“Come with me some time. You can get enough to supply all your relatives with genuine, rare, sea- and sun-kissed, Bennett's Island cranberries.” She had a way of throwing back her head when she laughed, and her strong throat was as smooth and round as a girl's. She might have been forty; there was gray glinting in the black hair that ruffled out from under her beret.

Philippa felt a quick reaction from her introspective mood. “They look a lot healthier than the children I just saw. Nothing sea- and sun-kissed about them, but I must say they were rare.” Mrs. Sorensen's black eyebrows lifted. “The Websters,” Philippa explained. “That name was beginning to sound like a species of elf or gnome long before I laid eyes on them, and now I know why. I saw them for the first time about ten minutes ago.”

“Haven't they been in school?” Mrs. Sorensen demanded. “Wait a minute. I remember, now. Young Charles said something one night, but I was making biscuits and the children were at each other's throats, so all I heard was the name and something about school.”

“Tell me about them,” said Philippa.

“I'll tell you all I know to tell,” Mrs. Sorensen answered. “But not out in this wind. Come home with me and have a cup of coffee.”

They walked toward the grove of big birches and ancient alders that bounded the meadow on the side toward the harbor. The dog loped ahead of them with an air of good-natured importance. For him there would be no nonsense about barking at a sparrow flushed out of the grass or chasing off on the trail of a cat.

“There's nothing much to say about the Websters,” Mrs. Sorensen said as they came into the sheltered path through the alders. “Jude's an intelligent man, but he doesn't have much ‘git up and git'. He's had a lot of bad luck, and maybe it's broken his spirit. I don't know. But he's ambitious for his children. If it was left to Lucy, they'd be as wild as squirrels.” Her laughter was faintly cynical. “I don't know but what they are, anyway. They've had all summer to go woods-queer in. But if they haven't been to school, I know why. They've got nothing to wear. Lucy's taken to her bed and hasn't fixed up anything for them, poor young ones.”

“I've been to the house, but nobody answered.”

“She's having one of her spells, I suppose. Well, I'll get up to see her tomorrow and stir her up.” Joanna Sorensen frowned thoughtfully. “The men have been seining every night, getting in way late, and I've been so busy I've been right out straight, or else I'd have seen her earlier. I like to go up there every so often and blow in like a nor'easter, to see if I can't shake her up.” She gave Philippa a dark amused glance over her shoulder. “That sounds as if I was just plain mean, but I honestly believe Lucy likes it. Jude fairly fives on tiptoe for fear of snapping her nerves like violin strings.”

“There's nothing more maddening than watching someone trying to handle you with gloves.”

“You know, that's exactly what I think. Nils lets me get just so far with my vaporings, and then he starts hauling me back to earth again.” She led the way across the plank bridge that spanned the little brook between the alder swamp and barnyard. “Here we are. It's getting late—can't you make it supper instead of just coffee?”

Dick, who had been to the house and back several times, leaned against her legs, and she bent to scratch his ears, looking up earnestly at Philippa. “I'll send Jamie around the harbor with a message.”

“All right,” said Philippa. They smiled at each other with a mutual sense of pleasant discovery. “But there's one more thing, before we go into the house. I'm still thinking about the Webster children. I'd like to see them and talk to them, if it's possible, before I see their parents. What do you suggest?”

“I can send Jamie up now to tell them to come down for some eggs. They'll all come. They never get tired of the hens and the pig and Jamie's banties.”

“They won't scatter when they see me?”

“I don't know, but it's worth a try, isn't it?”

There was something exciting about the instant sparking of Philip-pa's mind to this woman's. Philippa felt a stirring of expectancy, and then her training and experience assumed firm control over instinct. In a small community it was not wise for a teacher to have a particular friend among the mothers. Besides, a person who appeared as vital and candid as Joanna Sorensen was sometimes a cruel disappointment. Their charm wore thin, their directness had other less pleasant manifestations.

Am I telling this as a consolation, Philippa wondered ironically, so I won't be tempted to give in and choose her as a friend?

It was a thing to consider later. Meanwhile Mrs. Sorensen was halfway across the yard to the back door. From somewhere out of sight a pig that had heard her voice was lifting up its own. The Rhode Island Reds in their big enclosure crowded conversationally to the fence, and the privileged bantams scurried like blowing leaves around her feet and Dick's big paws.

How Eric would love this, Philippa thought. Mrs. Sorensen was waiting for her at the end of the walk between the tall lilac bushes. None of the barnyard citizens followed them. “Dick keeps them in their place,” she said. “Kind but firm. Just like Nils.” She laughed, and opened the door into the warm house.

S
teve Bennett walked home with Philippa later that evening. Charles, who had been excited and gay all through supper, didn't speak to them when they left. Philippa felt sorry for him, and oddly guilty, as if she had hurt a child's feelings. But as she walked beside Steve, the faint discomfort was lost in the night's splendor. The wind had dropped at sunset and the air was still. The northern lights moved over Brigport, sweeping across the sky, shooting toward the zenith and withdrawing, slipping sideways like the sticks of a fan.

“It'll be warmer tomorrow,” Steve said. “The wind will be southerly.”

“Weather is as important out here as food, isn't it?” Philippa asked. “Even the children talk about it. The boys come into school saying, ‘It's airing up,' or ‘It's a weather breeder, be an easterly tomorrow.' And while we're on the subject, what's a hand-bill? And fog crumbs?”

“Hand-bills are little clouds, sort of round, that race before the wind. And fog crumbs are the thin wisps without much shape.”

“Thank you,” said Philippa. “I'll write it all to my child, so he can have something to impress his friends with.”

“That's important. I could never impress anybody at home, being the youngest, but I could make my chum's eyes pop. He was Nils's kid brother, by the way. I went down one day chewing raw prunes and spitting through the gap in my teeth. Told Dave it was tobacco. He believed me till he got close enough to smell.” His laughter was low and reminiscent, going past Philippa to a far-off place that excluded her. “I was eight then.”

“When I was eight,” Philippa said, “I impressed people by telling whoppers. The stories varied with everything I read. I impressed people, but not the way I'd hoped.”

“Who thinks a kid's life is simple?” He held a package of cigarettes toward her.

“No, thanks.” While he got one out and lit it, she looked around her. They were on the path that led to the shore and had stopped by the house called the Binnacle. It was a lofty old place set close to the harbor. On the side toward the path only one window, a lower one, was lighted. Philippa could see the smoky hand lamp on the table close to the pane. In this room someone played the clarinet. The key was a minor one and the melody woeful, but the tone was poignantly true.

“That's Gregg, isn't it?” she whispered. “Who is he?”

“A derelict,” he said. “We've always had one in the Binnacle. Sometimes two or three at a time. No one knows where they come from or where they go when they leave here. One of them comes chugging into the harbor some day in a little one-cylinder putt-putt and wants to rent a place. We put 'em in the Binnacle—it belongs to our family—and if they make enough, hand-lining or lobstering, to pay rent, all right. If they don't—” He laughed. “Well, they stay just the same. My father never hounded them for the rent, and I guess his reputation still goes on—they expect to get a roof over their heads on Bennett's Island.”

“Your father's reputation seems to be upheld by his sons,” said Philippa. “It's a rather nice thing to discover in this day and age—a true haven for derelicts.”

“Don't flatter us.” He sounded amused, though she couldn't see his face distinctly. “Maybe we're not good, just lazy. We used to think my father was soft, and we had plenty to say about it then. But I don't think any one of us is half the man he was.” He went on before she had a chance to comment. “Gregg's no addition to the place, none of them are, but he does no harm. He drinks himself into the D.T.'s now and then, but he can play that clarinet in a way to break your heart. He told me once he played it in the Navy Band. That's about all anyone knows about him.”

The tune followed them from the Binnacle, pure and unearthly clear in the quiet night. Philippa had seen Gregg sunning himself on his doorstep or wheezing around the shore to the wharf on boat days, a balding untidy little man with watery eyes, and pants that always sagged under the round of his belly. As she listened now, she tried to see him young and slender in his uniform, his hair thick and his eyes unfaded. And she saw him playing the music she heard, the young man, not the grimy old stray the island knew as Gregg.

For a moment, as she walked beside Steve along the shore, she felt as if the situation were completely unreal; the great unseen presence of the sea whose nearness was proved by the quiet breathing on the beach, the ghostly light fanning the sky, and now the melancholy clarinet. And through her awareness of the strange night moved the memory of the Webster children, who a few hours before had come shyly into the Sorensen house out of the dusk, like small white deer coaxed from the woods. They had been torn between the trust of their friends and their extreme consciousness of the stranger, even though Philippa made no move toward them. She had sat on the woodbox, holding four-year-old Linnea Sorensen in her lap; and while she was appalled by their suspicion of her, she was not surprised that Joanna Sorensen could draw them to her.

Nils Sorensen was a squarely built man in his forties with fair hair and unequivocal dark blue eyes; he didn't speak to them or move from his chair. He took out his knife and began to hone it on a small oilstone. The smallest child, a thin waxen boy who could have been four or an undersized six, went to him without hesitation to watch the process. Jamie slung his arm around his father's neck in a proprietary manner, but at the same time he smiled at the other child with a sweetness that touched Philippa.

The younger girl kept close to the older one, who made what answers were required of her in the hoarse breathless voice Philippa had heard in the orchard. Her pale straggling hair was tied at the nape of her neck with a bit of bait-bag twine. She stood stiffly quiet in the kitchen. Sometimes her eyes darted toward Philippa and then quickly away. They were an odd light color Philippa couldn't distinguish and shallow set above the sharp, narrow cheekbones.

The boy who had carried the stick said nothing at all and never advanced farther into the kitchen than just inside the door. He stood warily, and Philippa, by means of casual glances, saw that he was older than eight. He looked much like the girl, Rue. What a strange and sad name that was: Rue.

When the children began to fidget, Steve took down a lantern and lit it, and led them out to the hen house.

“Steve is a genius at getting eggs out from under hens,” Joanna said. “They all hate me. And it's not because I'm another female. Gromyko hates me too. That's the rooster.”

The spell was broken and Philippa was glad. She found herself stiff with strain. A cat appeared and Linnea hurried out of Philippa's lap to greet her. Jamie went back to his airport spread out on the sitting-room floor and made loud engine noises. Nils turned on the radio for news and weather.

“What do you think?” asked Mrs. Sorensen, taking dishes out of the cupboard.

“I don't know,” said Philippa frankly. “I never saw such frightened children. The embarrassing thing is that they seem as afraid of me as they are of—anybody.” She had almost said
Perley
.

“Naturally!” Mrs. Sorensen laughed. “You're the teacher, you're going to drag them away from this heavenly existence, building brush camps and all the rest. And what's more you'll be telling their father what they've been up to.”

“That's what I don't want to do. When you go to see Mrs. Webster—” She paused as Charles came in by the front way.

Joanna Sorensen nodded. “I won't mention it,” she murmured. “If you can get them back by yourself, that'll be best.”

Philippa became aware suddenly that Steve had finished lighting his cigarette and was watching her. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I was looking around.”

“There's a good deal to see, even at night. And to hear.” He sounded as if he had seen nothing odd in her abstraction. “Gregg's probably in bad shape, but he stays in tune.”

They began to walk again, not hurrying. The night was too still for hurry. It was good to be leisurely and have a companion. In some remote way she was reminded of the long walks with Justin through empty city streets at midnight. They had moved slowly, savoring the quietness, feeling the place to be particularly their own because they were almost alone in it. It was an alien thing for her to be so much at ease with a stranger. Perhaps, she thought, it was because his own affairs left no room for interest in hers.