The Dawning of the Day (16 page)

“You spent the whole day with the girl down on the Western End,” his father went on as if he had not paused, or even recognized Terence's violence. “You picked her up over behind the point somewhere. You took her down there and you stayed. I want to know the truth here and now; what went on down there?”

Terence made a strangled sound, but his father's voice ignored the interruption. Philippa looked at her watch. She must eat and get to school; it was a damnable situation. She walked back toward the stairs, wondering how to make a noise they'd hear above their own. “Your mother and I have a right to know if you've been up to some deviltry with this girl. We want to know so we'll be prepared for Mark Bennett to walk in here some day and say, ‘The girl's in trouble and your son's the one who did it.' The Bennetts would be mighty glad to have something to yammer about, make no mistake. They don't like us any more than we like them. So I want to know if they've got a right to have you arrested.”

Was this the Asanath she knew? Philippa wondered in shocked surprise. The Asanath who seemed to preach moderation and tolerance in every word he spoke? It was not so much his questioning Terence that startled her; sometimes plain language was necessary between father and son. It was his comments about the Bennetts.

Terence was shouting no longer. He was saying in his singularly quiet voice, “I'll tell you nothing. For the same reason I never did tell you anything. Because you're so
very
sure of yourselves. Everything Iever thought of, you knew beforehand it wouldn't work. You could knock it down with a grin. Supposed to be fatherly love. To keep me from thinking too proud of myself.”

Suze was weeping. The sound was swallowed sometimes by the wind.

“You've been living under a sorry misapprehension, son,” Asanath said slowly.

“A misapprehension that I shouldn't have been born?” Terence answered. “Unless maybe I'd got set to be a girl. You already had your boy.”

Suze made a pathetic bleating cry, and Asanath cleared his throat. “That'll be enough, son. You've had your say.”

“But you still haven't found out anything, have ye? And you won't find out anything. You've got your mind in the gutter, and you can keep it there. You can just stew in your own juice.”

It was out of the question for Philippa to go into the kitchen now. She took her coat from the closet and went out the front way. As she stopped in the lee of the sunporch to knot her kerchief, the back door slammed, and Terence came out and around the corner of the house. He passed her, saw her, and came back. He looked at her without speaking, his long jaw thrust forward like a weapon, his eyes glittering under the lids.

She guessed at his thoughts, and spoke to him calmly. “I didn't tell them, Terence. I'm not a tattle-tale.”

He turned abruptly toward the fishhouse and she fell into step with him. At least he was no longer a shadow; in his anger he had become violently alive. She followed him into the building and shut the door. He began to kindle a fire in the rusty stove, while she spoke to him above the splashing and chortling of water around the spilings.

“I think I know who might have told,” she said. He was pouring kerosene on the kindling, and didn't look around. “It might have been Perley,” she said, and waited.

He dropped a match into the stove and stepped back; the leaping flame threw an orange light on his face. “Did you see him?” He was alert now, still without looking straight at her.

“No, but there was a good chance that he was around where the Webster children were.”

“What in the devil do you mean by
that
?” He came toward her, pushing back his cap and reaching automatically for a cigarette.

She told him what she meant, keeping her words sparse and to the point. “The boys weren't lying,” she said. “They were too nervous and uncomfortable to be lying. I'd seen Perley following the children, but I didn't know then what it meant. Now I know. Perley's quite a specialist at torture, I understand, and the Webster children are fair game. Nobody cares about them, and besides, they're so puny they can't put up much of a fight. They're like sickly kittens.”

“Ayeh, like kittens,” Terence repeated softly. “Kittens never stood much of a chance with Perley. Helen always figgered it was funny their kittens met up with so many accidents—if she ever caught on it was Perley, she didn't say anything, for fear somebody might think her baby was a mite cruel.” The cigarette in his fingers broke suddenly, he dropped it and ground it with his boot. “That cat they got now belongs to Peg. That's the only reason it lived to grow up. Peg can find a way to get even with anybody that crosses her, and I guess that's got through Perley's thick skull.”

He went back to the fire, and Philippa spoke to the back of his head. “The reason I've told you all this,” she said, “is to see if you'd get a message to those children, the next time you see them. Will you tell them that nobody will dare to tease them any more, and they'll be safe from Perley, if they come to school?”

He stood looking out at the harbor, giving her no sign that he had heard. She waited, her stomach queasy with hunger and tightening nerves. It was getting on toward school time. The echo of her voice seemed to hang in the smoky air, above the crackling in the stove. She tried to recall just what she had said. If it was simply an affair of wasted breath, at least she needn't fear that Terence would carry the story. She wasn't even sure that he had heard her.

But after a time he said idly, “Why don't you let Kathie do it?”

“Because it's nothing to concern any of the other pupils. Besides, Rue saw Kathie try to fight for her in the schoolyard, and lose. Perley is a great one for twisting arms, I hear.” Terence moved. He went to the stove and looked in, but she felt now that he was listening.

“She wouldn't believe Kathie half as fast as she'd believe you, because you're an adult. If you tell her, it'll be all right—there's a chance that it's the truth. Rue hasn't gone to anyone with this thing, but I have a feeling that if she thought some grown person—not her father
—knew
, in spite of her secrecy, she'd be relieved. It's a terrible strain for a child.” She remembered Terence's accusation flung so viciously at his father, and added, “A youngster can feel awfully alone sometimes.”

Terence said, “Well—” He looked at his cigarette. Apparently he was capable of standing immobile for moments at a time, and Philippa had a compulsive desire to shake him or at least to shout, “Will you or won't you?”

“I'd better get my breakfast,” she said curtly, and left him.

T
he lane that led off behind Foss Campion's place to the school was somewhat sheltered, by a growth of young spruce, from the wind and rain beating down across the field. Coming back after the noon hour, Philippa didn't hurry. Dinner had been a silent and yet ominous meal, as if at any moment some wild outburst might take place.

Though the trouble in the house was no concern of hers, the portentous atmosphere was inescapable. Philippa walked slowly in the sodden lane, finding a peculiar relaxation in the tumult around her. The dark cloud masses scudded overhead; with each long, high gust the branches were whipped about in a frenzy, the small tender tips were torn loose and lay bright green against the drowned dead grass in the path. The rain beat through the trees in icy showers. The sound of surf lay over and beneath all other sounds. The cold wet air reeked of the fresh rockweed ripped loose and thrown up on the beaches. It grew stronger as she reached the end of the lane.

She rounded the huge boulder that was a beleaguered fortress or pirate island during recess, and came into the lee of the schoolhouse. A man in oilskins was leaning against the wall, smoking. The oilskins gave him a broad, bulky look, and he wore a sou'wester. He looked up. It was Steve Bennett. Above the yellow oil clothes and against the white clapboards, he was very dark.

At the sight of him she felt an extraordinary degree of surprise, keen enough to be unpleasant. She was aware of its strangeness and of her impulse to retreat as she walked toward him, smiling conventionally.

“Are you just out for a stroll in the fine weather?”

He tipped back his sou'wester. “I had an errand.”

“Oh?” She took her handkerchief from her raincoat pocket and wiped the wet hair around her temples, where the rain had beat past her hood. He watched her, and his smile began around his eyes, a faint narrowing at the corners.

“A nor'easter looks good on you,” he said. “You must like it.”

“I do. I love rough weather, but not in people. I suppose a psychiatrist would say I was fundamentally violent, but civilized about it, or inhibited.”

“I'm not much of a stormy petrel, myself.” He looked off peacefully across the drenched and wind-flattened marsh. There was no hurry in him. The incongruity of the situation struck her, and she laughed aloud.

“Here we stand, looking at the view as if it's midsummer, and the wind's shrieking through the belfry like a banshee. I've got to see to the fire.” She went around to the door.

She felt comfortably normal again; the shock of astonishment, as if he had no right to be leaning against the schoolhouse when she came along, had gone all in an instant. Following her, Steve said, “When I took my turn at janitor I almost burned the schoolhouse down.”

“I'd have thought you were the efficient type.” They went up the steps; there was a little lull in the wind, and for a moment there was only the low thunder of the surf behind their voices.

“I was. I stuffed the stove with good dry spruce, opened up everything, let her go Gallagher, and went out to ring the bell.” He opened the door. “I was a real fancy bell ringer, as fancy as you can be with one bell. Thought I was ringing Dick Whittington's Bow-bells that day—we'd been reading about him.” The wind struck the schoolhouse with a shuddering impact; the door was slammed violently shut. They were shut in the narrow dark space of the entry.

“All but took my hand off,” said Steve in mild astonishment. His voice was suddenly too close, and the stiff crackle of oilskins became deafening. They had a queer, pungent scent she had never noticed before. Half stifled, she groped for the knob of the inner door. Always her hand had gone straight to it; this wasn't the first time the door had blown shut and left her in the dark. Nerves prickled in the small of her back as she searched, using the flat of both hands. It was as if the close black area of the entry had some unique symbolism which she feared. Idiot! she cried contemptuously within herself.

“Lost the knob?” Steve said. “Wait, I've got a match.” His oil clothes rustled loudly. A new gust struck, forcing a faint clang like a cry from the bell. She found the knob just as the match flared up behind her.

“I've got it!” she said eagerly. She laughed, out of breath; she might have just been running. The gray light of the schoolroom was inexpressibly dear to her, the torrents of rain streaming down the windows on the windward side, the familiar scents of the birch fire, chalk dust, the recent occupancy of children. She was safe now in her own frame of reference.

“Anyway,” he said, “I set the chimney afire, and they wouldn't let me be janitor any more.”

She turned toward him, smiling. He sat on a desk in his bright oil clothes, looking ruefully at the stove. She said, “You sound as if you were still unhappy about it.”

“I was remembering how I used to wish I'd burned the place to the ground. Everybody disapproved of me for so long afterward, and then when they got over the scare, it got to be a good joke, even on Brig-port. . . . ‘Here's the tyke who set the chimney afire, hey? You think you was Steamboat Bill, chummy?' I wished I'd burned the schoolhouse down so they'd look at me as if I was a famous criminal instead of a joke.”

Philippa laughed. “Funny how we go through the stage when we ache to be wicked and have everybody look at us with horror. There's a certain respect with that; it gives you some kind of stature. But ridicule turns you into nothing.”

“You sound as if you'd been through it too.”

“I have.” She went to her desk. “Was your errand to do with me?” she asked.

He looked at her as if he was thinking of something else. She waited, and then he came back from his remoteness, smiled and rubbed the side of his jaw. “The boys are getting up a dance at the clubhouse Wednesday night. I'd like to take you. You can see I'm getting my bid in early, while the others are working out their strategy.”

“Does it take strategy to invite the schoolma'am to a dance?”

“On this island,” said Steve, “it takes strategy for everything. Saves us from monotony.”

“Well, yours worked today. I'm so flattered by the way you beat through a storm that I couldn't think of refusing. Will there be square dances?”

“Square dances and waltzes are all you get around here. If any reckless feller comes up with something later than 1900, he learns right off that nobody approves of those flighty modern ideas.”

“I can see that this is my spiritual home,” said Philippa solemnly. “At school dances I was always stuck with some bright boy who had a lot of original steps to try out. It'll be nice to know exactly what to expect.”

“Our dances aren't that cut and dried. The boys got Gregg to say he'd play his clarinet, and now they're trying to think of a way to keep him sober till Wednesday night. Then they'll give him a bottle of wine because he plays the best when he's had just enough. The problem is to keep him from going past the margin of safety.”

“I can see it's going to be a very interesting affair,” said Philippa. The outside door opened and crashed shut, and there was a series of thuds and gasps in the entry. “My janitor is arriving,” she said. “In two parts.”