Cold Pastoral (38 page)

“It's a dreadful disease, Tim. The Cove was full of it, just wasting and wasting, spitting up blood, and such a cough! Nobody would want to die like that. Now if the man dies he'll go quick and clean. And if he has weak lungs and was alone on the sloven I don't suppose he's married, but, if he is, we'll see. I expect he was very tired, driving his pony and cart to town day after day, and not having enough energy to put a light on his shafts. He'll be at rest. Don't worry about that, Tim. And you won't have to be a mining engineer. I knew, when I saw you playing tonight, you should have had a chance. Your hands were so smooth and firm. Your music was lovely, Tim, and those things will be there, independent of us. Now it won't be any different, I'll carry you round, like I do Mater, and I hope, dear Tim, it won't be so good and grand where you're going, that you'll forget me and our hocus-pocus.”

He had gone too far for vocal reply. Only the top of his brow was visible, leaning in ghastly whiteness against her lips. A bare stir of his head made his last repudiation of her fear. Her voice got deeper, like the notes of a tone-poem.

“I was a child, and she was a child! Remember, and the wind that came out of the clouds chilling Annabel Lee. There's nearly always a bit of cold in the wind, Timmy-Tim, but days come when it's all west. We had such fun,Tim,and we didn't seem to mind the storms—”

Who would tell her she could stop talking? Philip was incapable. There was no nurse. Perhaps that was why Philip had stayed himself, all the time, in a subconscious effort to lessen the publicity that must surely surround them. Only four of them attended this death-bed, with David outside the door. Would Felice ask Philip if Tim were dead? He looked like a child asleep, with no sound of breath. The girl would go on until she was released. She was like a voice now in a dream.

“Remember spring by the river bank, Tim; the pear-blossoms, and the purple Rhodora. They're just over now, and the cherry-blossomfell last week. How many times did we see them by the river, and how vulgar we were when we used to spit in the water. Anything is fun, Tim, when two people do it like you and me. I could never have done all those lessons at the Place, or remembered my hair and teeth, if you hadn't come. I would have been in awful trouble….”

Tim's mother rose to her feet and stared at her son. She looked a beaten type of woman, with an acquiescent expression. Now her lips smiled in a twisted, heartbroken way. It was apparent she had no resentment for the two figures on the bed. She moved heavily, putting her hand on the girl's shoulder.

“Say good night to him, my dear.”

Mary Immaculate raised herself on one elbow, looking down at Tim. “Is he dead ?” she asked wonderingly. “He doesn't look very different. Why is he so pale?” Looking up at the woman, she gave her identification. “You're Tim's mother.” She looked back at her son, seeming to sense what she had done. “Forgive us,” she whispered; “we've been very selfish to you.”

Felice thought the answer the most despairing a mother could make. “My dear, I couldn't comfort him when he was a little boy. I never knew what he wanted. I can only thank you. Some day…”

Her face broke, and she sobbed in a distorting way. Still lying on the bed, the girl looked back at Tim. “There's lots to cry about, Timmy-Tim. Your foolishness and my foolishness, that brought all this.” She put her lips against his face for a last whisper. “I'm going now. Your dream, Tim, meant leaving me!”

She got off the bed, and Tim's mother blotted out the sight of his face.

“Come, my dear,” said Felice, wiping her nose very noisily, “we'll go back to the cottage. It's nearly dawn, and the air will be fresh.”

“Yes, the cottage,”she agreed, letting Felice take her arm. It was without intent that she ignored Philip, standing like a statue against the wall. Capacity was gone. The first intimate death is steadying, the second is overwhelming when it is violent and personal with long consequences. Besides, the girl was sloughing off a skin something like a cap and bells she had worn too long. The skin held all the trappings of her make-believe, and the changeling heart she had brought from the Cove. She had been jolted to bed-rock reality, and she was utterly dazed. The tough fibre of her body permitted her to walk firmly. Outside the door David met them. Words died on his lips when he saw her face. His news was received with dumb indifference. The other case had died on the operating table. He made one remark :

“I'll stay with Philip for a while.” He kissed the girl, letting her go with his wife. Felice drove through air bleak with dawn. The water was metallic, tarnished with brown spots running from the shore. Sky and sea met in a blurred line. Sea-fog writhed inland, touching the land with a ghostly kiss.

The girl did not speak. When they entered the cottage Felice found evidence of her husband's thought. The maids were up, the fire was in, and hot-water bottles were in the beds. Creature comforts did their best. It was useless to persuade the girl to eat. She sat stunned, with glazed, tearless eyes. Felice undressed her, slipping one of her own nightdresses over her head. It fell midway to the girl's legs. Under the clothes she lay in a long line, staring ahead. Mary Immaculate was not the type to cling or invite the spontaneous caress. One hesitated before proffering the arms of comfort. Felice bit her lips, wondering what to do. Already she had won the girl's confidence when they had waited after her faint. Sitting down on the bed, she decided to attack.

“Mary, I've just thought of something. You and I are going to England for a few months. You can do what you like, find yourself without rules and routine. Can you pick yourself up and do it?”

The girl shivered a little. “Felice,” she said, as if she had not heard, “I'm beginning to see. I thought I could do as I liked, I believe I enjoyed the risk of knowing Hannah might get me into trouble at any moment. I never feared Mater. She was so understanding, and I was always ready to tell her everything. Tim and I have never had a shameful thought.”

“Of course not, Mary. That was easy to see. My dear, you were ideal to him tonight….”

“No, no,” she said, irritated as she had been when Philip said she was adequate with the Mater. “That sounds silly, Felice. Tonight I was Tim. I know him so well, and ever since we were children we could put our arms round each other at any time. I knew how to talk to him. I'll never lose him. It's what I've done to others—I feel like Judas—ever since last September. I've been waiting, like somebody on a see-saw, waiting for something to weight a side.”

“You don't hate Philip ?” asked Felice tentatively.

“No,”she said, shaking her head. “It's just how I would have expected him to act. Before Timdied—Felice—Felice—we had such fun—”

She turned her face into the pillow, shivering hard. Felice bit her lip, hoping the girl would cry. She did not, looking back with a hard, set jaw. “Felice, did you say you would take me away?”

“Yes, my dear. David will stay with Philip, and we'll go and have a lovely trip together. If you'll promise me you won't shut me out of anything? Mary, what you need is complete confidence in someone—”

“I had in Tim.”

“But, darling,” said Felice earnestly, “it was in a place where you did not have the right to place it. Don't you see that?”

“Yes,” she said with chattering teeth, “I've never been a human being. Felice, take me where I can be ordinary, where I'm not always playing up to something. I want to be some thing by myself. I think I'm deceitful. God, God!—I could cry and cry and cry…”

“Why don't you, Mary?”

The girl regarded the black-haired woman with the compassionate smile showing her gums.

“Felice,” she said, closing her eyes, “help me not to be a fool any more? I've been like somebody in a story-book, and now Tim is dead.”

Suddenly she flung herself into Felice's thin arms, shivering like a person walking in spiritual zero. Holding her, Felice felt a body as fresh as spring. The girl was clearly at the end of her tether.

“Mary,” she said, “you're going to take a sedative for me, and go to sleep, will you ?”

“Yes,” she said.

Obediently she washed down two little pills, with her teeth chattering against the glass. Felice covered her up, sitting down by the bed. Several times the yellow eyes opened and shut, as if to rest on some security. Then they closed, and the long body slacked to the limpness of extreme exhaustion. Felice did not move until she saw David in the room. A hand warned him away, and they tip-toed to the living-room. Fire still burned, and Felice added a birch-log. David crouched over it, shivering himself. For a long time husband and wife talked in the daylight increasing behind the curtains.

“I'm not surprised now, Felice, when I know it. Often I saw her like a sleek little cat, looking as if she had an extra supply of cream she could put her tongue into at any time. Why was she the perfect child to Mater and Phil? Because she had the perfect escape. They were the fools to think she could exist without youth.”

“How is Phil?”

“Asleep, I hope. Actually I bullied him, if you can imagine it. We went back to the Place, and I told Hannah to keep out of sight. At present Phil has forgotten her. We've travelled so far from the starting-point. Then he raved, blasphemed against himself and acted like an hysterical girl, calling himself a murderer, a double-murderer, that he'd been strict with Mary because he was afraid of the diagnosis saying she was abnormal.”

“She's not, David, only the product of two ways of living. I think from now on she'll be ordinary. It seems to be her one desire.” Telling her husband of her suggestion to take the girl away, she was surprised at his answer.

“I was going to suggest it myself. I'll stay for a few months and try to get Philip to live here and drive to town in the mornings. We've both got a job. But, Felice, will you go and see the boy's mother? She nearly broke my heart.”

“I will, Dave, I will. I could have howled when she just sat. Dave,” she asked softly.

“What, my dear ?”

“What do you think of Mary and Tim?”

David looked into the fire burning a little dead at that hour in the morning. His face had the grey tinge of depletion.

“Did you hear her?” pressed his wife.

“Every word,” said her husband. “Does anybody ever know anyone else, Felice? I thought I knew Mary, but I realized she was beyond me when she was talking. Do you know what broke me? When she spoke of spitting in the water. The companionship that can run the whole gamut and be vulgar together. Two stages of life can produce that. Something in childhood when the flesh does not call, and adult attainment when the flesh is beyond. I gather the boy was getting dissatisfied, and attempting to wake her up. That he did not stampede her is all to his credit. Did you notice how true to form she ran? The Pagan side. When Mater died she worried about Holy Communion and prayed at her bed. She did not say a word of orthodoxy tonight. Phil says he died easier than he ever remembers a case, other than a baby. It's better so, Felice. Try to picture a sensitive boy being hounded by lawyers looking for convictions, and Mary, herself, having to give evidence. It may be cowardly, but I'm glad it's like this. Thank God Mater is not here.''

“It would never have happened if she had been here, Dave dear.”

“No, you're right, and we should never have left them together. Phil only commands himself as a doctor. As a lover he shows all the resentments, makes all the wrong answers, and that shows his inexperience. I really booted him tonight, and then made him take one of his own damn potions and go to bed. For the first time I came down hard on the elder brother side, and bossed the existence out of him. I had it in mind to suggest sending Mary to England at once. Take her, and let her be free as air. She was the independent breed, and Phil turned her into a cherished little darling, chaperoned every minute of the day.”

“She says she feels like Judas, about what she's done to others.”

“All the better,” shrugged David. “It will keep her in sight of Phil. If she marries someone else he'll have to take it. I'm going to insist on Vienna. He can afford it at any moment, but I'll give you a few months in England first. I wish to God he'd go sleeping round with a few other women to make him more earthbound…. He's as young as herself on some counts—”

“I think she's very old,” said Felice thoughtfully. “Dave, if she's able to go with it, as she told the boy, she'll save herself many stiff necks looking backwards.”

David looked at his wife.

“Yes, Felice. We've never seen Mary. She comes of people who have lived generations in a predatory fight with nature. People who sail schooners to Labrador, and take the hazard of the seasons. She's as tough as a young Eskimo. They can watch the Northern Lights guiding their dead, and wake up and shoot their caribou. Poetry and predacity!”

“Poor Tim,” murmured Felice.

“Poor young devil! He had spirit, and he used some of his last breath to tell Philip what he thought of him…. Well, they had enchantment, and that's something, my dear….” David sat on, staring in the fire, quoting gloomily to himself: “Music, moody food, for us that trade in love!” Before his wife could speak he went on, “Do you think she'll wear sackcloth, and walk softly for her Tim?”

“I think she'll be as good as gold, and I'm keeping her here, Dave, where she can talk herself out.”

David smiled at his wife, knowing her faith in the liberation of psychic poison.

“Hannah is a problem!”

“But not tonight, dear,”said Felice firmly. “Order flowers for Tim, something from us and something tremendous from Mary. It will please the mother. Auntie Minnie will probably broadcast everything, but we can't help that.”