The Dawning of the Day (46 page)

No one went to haul that day, and Philippa knew why by morning recess. The feeling of snow was imminent; its smell was in the sunless, heavy air. The children's voices rang piercingly, but there were few gulls to cry from the harbor ledges.

The snow began at noon. Philippa walked back to school in it after lunch. It was a soft, theatrical snow, falling gently with no wind behind it yet. Brigport and the farther places of the island itself were obscured. There was a peaceful silence everywhere. As the roofs and chimneys of the village became outlined in the clinging wet snow and the spruces were frosted on one side with white, the place took on the quality of a black and white drawing. The wharves above the quiet water and the old workshops along the shore became irresistibly picturesque.

The children had collected early for school and were playing wildly in the snow, wrestling like puppies. Some tried to scrape up enough for snowballs, and others were trying to make angels. Kathie had Rob by the neck and was trying to wash his face with snow. He called her horrible names, which Philippa ignored as she passed them, and Kathie was laughing tremendously. Of all the children, only Peggy Campion hadn't come yet.

How attractive they all are today, Philippa thought. Even the sharp little faces of the Percy girls were softened and gay. Sky Campion stood by the steps, wiping the snow off his glasses, and he smiled at her. Sky had not smiled directly at her since that terrible day Perley hid in the woods waiting for Rue. It was the snow, of course. Even Sky was not immune to the spell of the first snow.

In this mood she was unprepared for trouble. The bitter feelings between Bennetts and Campions, the miserable plight of Randall Percy, Nils' anger—all this seemed far away. When the screams went up from the lane behind the schoolhouse, she thought it was a game. When she realized a certain quality in the shrieks, she got up, thinking tiredly, At least it's not Edwin this time. She could see him standing by the boulder, staring intently toward the lane.

She ran down the steps and around the corner. There was an indistinct tangle in the narrow wet space between the spruces. Kathie stood looking on with enthusiastic interest. Rue and Faith stood behind her. Rob circled the tangle warily. Sky was not there at all.

The tangle became Peggy Campion and the Percys. Clare and Frances hung on Peggy with a clawing tenacity. Ralph had her by the hair. His voice sang out in exultant incantation over the screams of his sisters. The pain from her scalp and the little girls' nails, the shrieking so close to her ears, must have added up to an agonizing result. But Peggy fought them off with a dispassionate patience. It was as if her pride were inviolable even when she was outnumbered. She would go down despising them, her contempt for them was absolute, and they knew it.

It was an infinitely more dreadful scene than if Peggy had been screaming back at them. Philippa rushed at the tangle and caught Ralph by the shoulders. Her strength surprised him; he stared at her, gaping, and let go a handful of fawn-colored hair.

“Ralph, I'm ashamed of you!” she said angrily. “Go inside at once.”

He backed off from her, shouting, “If my old man's a crook, hers is a worse one!”

“
Go inside
, Ralph!”

He ran around the corner, swearing; she heard the door bang. She reached out to Frances and Clare, but they dodged back, too transported with excitement to be afraid. She looked around at the others. “Kathie and Rob,” she said coldly, “I'm ashamed of you both. Do you think it was a pretty sight, Ralph attacking a girl? Don't you have any conception of fair play?”

Rob pulled his cap doltishly over his eyes. “
She
never worried much about a fair fight, did she?” asked Kathie.

“We'll talk about this later,” Philippa said. “We'll all go in now.” She beckoned to Frances and Clare, took Daniel by the hand, and said in a pleasant, ordinary voice, “We start our Christmas cutouts today. Be thinking what you want to make first, a Santa Claus or a snow man or maybe a house for Bethlehem on the sand table.”

“Is it going to have a stable and a little Lord Jesus?” Faith asked excitedly.

“It will have everything,” Philippa promised. The children looked at each other expectantly; the balance of the day was restored. The teacher's promise belonged with the promise of the snow and superseded completely the brawl in the lane. When they had gone in, outtalking each other in the excitement of anticipation, she turned to Peggy. They were alone in the lane. The snow fell thickly around them. The sound of the foghorn at the Rock came blundering out of the thickening storm. Peggy's face was white, streaked with thin red scratches. But her mouth was perfectly steady.

“Come in, Peggy,” Philippa said, “and let me do something about those scratches.”

“I'm not coming in,” Peggy said. “I'm never going to that school again. I hate it and you. That's final.”

She turned around and walked down the lane toward her home. There was no use in calling her back; she would not have answered. She had made her decision in some climax of emotion, icy and hidden. She walked proudly with her head up. When her red coat faded in the snowfall, Philippa went into the school. She would, of course, be called to account by Helen Campion, but the prospect was not even mildly alarming. She had a curious sympathy for Helen, who would have to bow to Peggy as she had always done. What Peggy wanted, and perhaps had wanted for a long time, was a school on the mainland where there was room for her talents; she despised the little island schoolhouse as a piece of the existence her parents had forced on her. Everything about Peggy pointed to her inherent conviction that she had been thrust by the unfairness of birth into the wrong station in life, an inferior station. Some day she would free herself of it with a vengeance. Her mother was part of it. Helen adored Peggy and in turn was only tolerated, but probably not for long. Today, Philippa thought, perhaps Peggy had taken her first positive step toward freedom. One had to keep reminding oneself that Peggy was still a child. There was such unchildish strength of purpose behind those cool eyes.

As Philippa came into the entry, the clamor inside died down abruptly, leaving Ralph Percy's voice nakedly proclaiming, “I don't give a hoot what she says to me!”

Sky had mysteriously reappeared, although he had apparently been absent during his sister's beating. Helen did not come that afternoon. The Christmas decorations were begun, and the session passed quietly except for Ralph's tendency to be on the defensive. She kept him, his sisters, Rob, and Kathie after school. The smaller girls were dismissed after a brief discussion. Had Peggy harmed them, personally? If there was trouble between Peggy's father and theirs, was that Peggy's fault? They said
yes
and
no
in the right places, which did not deceive her; she knew they had taken a passionate pleasure in the attack. She let them go and turned to the older ones. There was a different sort of discussion with Ralph and again the same conviction of failure. From Ralph's viewpoint, he had been entirely in the right. Peggy deserved a comeuppance for a number of reasons, and he was as certain as he was of his own name that she was in the wrong. He, too, said
yes
and
no
in the proper places, fixing Philippa with a glazed stare, and she said the conventional things and tried not to be too stuffily virtuous.

“The thing is, Ralph,” she explained to him, “that while you may get a certain amount of satisfaction from lighting into Peggy, you and she aren't the only persons concerned. It makes trouble for me; I'll be blamed for what happened today. It might make more trouble for your father, and he has enough on his mind, don't you think?”

At mention of his father Ralph looked at the floor. A quick fierce blush flowed up under his freckles. She looked past him at Rob and Kathie. “Almost the same thing goes for you two. You're old enough to have a sense of responsibility about what goes on here. Regardless of the things you've seen Peggy do, if you use her tactics, you're sinking to the same level.”

“It's the only thing she can understand,” said Kathie. “Some people despise you for being decent. They think you're soft.”

“I know,” said Philippa. “But the only way to keep the last shreds of goodness from passing out of the world is to practice it. I'm not preaching. This is just common sense. I don't even expect you to see it my way until you're my age. When you have children coming into the world, you'll want to feel they have some security, that you haven't turned them out to the wolves.”

“Well—” Kathie was wavering. Suddenly she smiled at Philippa. “O.K. But I'm going to teach mine to fight for their rights. Fair, of course.”

“Of course,” said Philippa. The boys had nothing to say. The session had been a dismal failure.

T
he wind was rising when she came home from school, and the temperature was dropping. As she passed the deserted beach, the dry snow blew in stinging, powdery clouds across the rocks. From the harbor points came the dull rhythmic roar that meant storm.

It was dark enough in her rooms for her to light the lamps. The snow hissed dryly against the windows, and the gale made the familiar bagpipe sounds that meant it came from the northeast. She felt safely immured in solitude at the top of the Binnacle, and she took a purely sensuous delight in the storm.

Steve came earlier than she expected him, his clothes sugared with snow, his cheekbones red from the stinging wind. He carried a bowl of lobster meat and a covered pasteboard box containing hot biscuits. “I've come to supper,” he said. “I've brought it with me.”

She could only smile at him without words for a moment; she felt something she had not felt for years, a happiness that was almost too extreme for a frail human body to contain. After he had set the food on the dresser and taken off his jacket and boots, she said, “Steve, do you think we've reached a turning point? That things are straightening out at last? This is the first time for a long while that I haven't felt burdened down with all sorts of problems.”

“You mean you've decided you're not personally responsible for all the wild goings on around here?”

She laughed and moved into his arms. “I don't know whether I'll feel like that tomorrow or not, but right now I feel very calm and hopeful. A storm always affects me like this when it's time to light the lamps, and all the boats are safe in the harbor, and the island's all battened down for the night.”

“Not all the boats are here,” said Steve. He brushed his lips across her cheekbone and she shut her eyes, the better to savor the caress. “Gregg went over to Brigport before the snow began. Fort and Charles went with him.”

“I thought it was awfully quiet downstairs.” She tilted her head back to look at him in some alarm. “They won't try to come back tonight, will they?”

“Good Lord, no. They'll have themselves a good time visiting around. Lots of girls over there for Fort and Charles and liquor for Gregg. That's what started him off today.” He grinned reminiscently. “‘He was moaning around the shore all morning, saying he was dryer than a cork leg and couldn't stand it, and finally he said he'd go to Brigport and see if there were any Good Samaritans over there. None on Bennett's, he says, and gives me a hard look from those bleary eyes. The kids had been up in the woods cutting pot limbs, and they showed up in the fishhouse about that time and heard him talking and decided to go along. Just for the ride, I guess.”

“I'm glad they've straightened things out between them,” Philippa said. “You know, those two were my first friends on Bennett's Island. I hated to see them separated. Who would have thought Fort had so much pride, to let his father's behavior cut him off from everything like that?”

“Everybody's a mystery to everybody else,” said Steve. “You, for instance. You'll probably surprise me every day of our life. Let's sit down on the couch and make love in comfort.”

“You sit down.” She unclasped his hands from behind her back and moved free of him. “I'll set the table.”

While she worked, he lay on the couch smoking and gazing at the pattern made on the ceiling by the old-fashioned lamp shade. The wind rushed over Campions' point and past the Binnacle with a roar, the hard snow hissed on the windows, but neither could penetrate her shell of wood and glass. She didn't talk to Steve; their silence was restful and as full of communication as words could be.

When she had supper ready, she looked over at Steve. She was used to the solemn dark absorption with which he followed her every motion. At first she had been self-conscious, feeling big and gangly and thinking too often of Vinnie, who had probably moved like grass in the wind. But now she hardly ever thought of Vinnie, except with a curious stab of pity, as if the girl had never been Steve's wife and known his body but had been instead a child who had died.

Now Steve's eyes were closed. His face was so peacefully clear of all expression that she thought suddenly of death, and this time it was a personal terror. She remembered the times she had watched Justin sleeping and had never been afraid. But because Justin had died, she would never again know that serenity. She felt heavy with too much knowledge. It was only the ignorant who began their new lives so gaily.

She knelt beside the couch and lifted his hand, watching his face. She held the hand to her mouth; then she caught the glistening line between his lashes. He opened his eyes and looked into hers.

“What are you thinking about?” he murmured.

“Death,” she answered honestly. “I watched you sleep and thought I should wake you and tell you all the things I want you to know. That's the horror of death, I think. There's always so much left unsaid.”

“Start telling me now, then,” he said. He reached out and pulled her onto the couch beside him and into his arms. She put her hands on his face, the fingers curving and their tips moving along the contours of his cheekbones and into the faintly hollowed temples. She felt her eyes smart as if she held back tears.