Psyche (20 page)

Nick, with quiet modesty, presented himself in the simplest language as a respectable craftsman intent only on earning his bread and butter, his sole interest in Psyche a paternally businesslike one. He solemnly congratulated Mag on her excellent supervision of her ward, and made passing, but reverent mention of his own parents, omitting to add that they, divorced when he was in his teens, had been on speaking terms neither with each other nor with himself since that time. He admired the shack, something no one else had previously found cause to do, and stated—this with truth—that he would like to paint both it and, if she would be gracious enough to permit it, herself. Privately, he envisaged a Rabelaisian portrait designed to invoke humour and sympathy in equal proportions.

Psyche, a silent audience to this performance, was never to forget a syllable of it. It was her first introduction to the theatre, and her first intimation of the power of the spoken word when used softly rather than explosively.

The final upshot of the conversation was that Nick stayed to lunch at the shack, while marveling inwardly that any human being could find such a milieu supportable, and obtained permission for Psyche to pose for him as often as he wished.

He was preparing to return to work with his now accredited model, when Mag was struck by an after-thought.

“No takin' off of clothes, nor nothin' like that, when you paints the kid, like some of them artist fellows does.”

Nick contrived to look extremely shocked. “I wouldn't dream of such a thing!”

“Well, just so's you know the kid's been brung up right,” Mag amended almost apologetically.

During the following three weeks the sun rose and set, day after day, a changeless copper ball in a cloudless, burning sky, while Nick, demanding even more of himself than he did of Psyche, made four studies of her and finished “Mountains of the Moon”.

This was a period when they learned very little about one another, for in his utter absorption in his work he cut all conversation to a minimum. Psyche, however, studying him all the time, began, as the days passed, to form a very clear impression of a stratum of society, hitherto absolutely unknown to her, in which money, because it was plentiful, was relatively unimportant; in which artistic and intellectual achievement ranked above any other endeavour; in which cleanliness was more important than godliness; in which words were used to conceal rather than express feeling.

One day, while resting from a pose, she asked thoughtfully, “You're a gentleman, ain't you, Nick?”

“Oh, my God, Venus! Where did you ever pick up such an obscene word?”

Psyche frowned. “You're bein' clever, ain't you? What do you mean?”

“I mean that there are men and women, and that I find no other distinction admissible.”

“Why?”

Nick looked up from his painting, and his hazel eyes were both quizzical and amused. “Damned if I know.”

“Supposin' I had said you ain't no gentleman?” “I would have been flattered.”

“Honestly?”

“Must you always be so precise, Venus? All right, let us qualify the statement, and say that my composure would have remained undisturbed, my male vanity unscarred.”

Sighing, Psyche said, “You say things just to say them, don't
you, Nick? You just like hearin' yourself talk. I wisht I could talk like you.”

“A very laudable ambition. I wisht you could, too.”

“Couldn't you tell me when I was makin' mistakes? Kind of learn me some?”

He was busy cleaning brushes in a can of turpentine made uncomfortably warm by the heat. “Later, perhaps,” he said absently. And they both knew that there was unlikely to be any “later”.

That night Psyche sat cross-legged on her bed, and by the light of a guttering stub of candle searched her dictionary for the word “obscene”. Since she had no idea how to spell it, she could not find it for some time. When she did, it took her an even longer time to appreciate its use in the context in which she had heard it used. That she finally should understand was proof that, although he did not know it, she had already learned a great deal from Nick.

2

T
HE
cave-in which occurred at the mine on the last day of May of that year was a relatively unimportant disaster, but it killed three men.

Butch came home in the middle of the afternoon, his lumbering gait more awkward than it usually was. His arms hung stiffly by his sides, and his great hands opened and shut spasmodically.

Mag was bringing in a grey batch of laundry, and two ragged towels dropped unheeded to the ground when she saw his face. “Butch—what is it—what happened?”

He looked at her blankly, and then said hoarsely, “It's Bert. He's gone, Mag. He won't be comin' no more on Sattiday nights.”

In silence they stared at one another, sharing without word or action a dumb animal grief. And for once there was nothing even faintly ludicrous about these two grotesque people who asked so little from life and received even less.

That night the dull roar of rain on the roof muffled the small familiar sounds to which the shack was usually host, and Psyche, lying sleepless in the thick darkness of the storeroom, faced an adult loneliness unlike anything she had known before. The knowledge that nowhere was there anybody who truly needed her, to whom she was bound by any real bonds, was more crystal-clear than it had ever been. Butch and Mag, mortally afraid of any open demonstration, had, in their inarticulate misery, for a time shut her away from them as effectively as if they had slammed a door in her face. Their unawareness that they had done so made it worse, served to underline sharply the basic temperamental differences between them and herself.

With her aching sympathy bottled up inside her, her longing for someone with whom she could really communicate was almost unbearable. Earlier she had wept for the little man with the nut-cracker face, the little man whose bright squirrel's eyes would never again peer at her over a close-held poker hand. Now, feeling slow, warm tears on her cheeks, ashamed because she knew that this time she wept for herself alone, she prayed in silent desperation, “Dear God—don't let it be like this always! Somewhere, some day—someone like me. Dear God, take me back where I comed from!”

Moving very gently, lest she disturb Dwight, Sharon pushed aside the blankets on her own side of the bed, and swung slender bare feet out on to the carpet. Steady rain covering the small sounds of her going, she crossed in the darkness to the door, and quietly let herself out into the upper hall. A moment later another
door opened and closed, and she was alone in the room that no one but herself ever entered
.

The night-light sprang on under a hand that had known exactly where to find it, and she stood, motionless, her blue eyes returning the unwinking regard of a small brown teddy-bear
.

Suddenly, the rigid control that she usually imposed on herself broke, and with a choking sob she fell to her knees, frantic fingers torturing white lambs that gambolled across a small, blue bedspread. “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy— Oh, God, bring her back—give her back to me—it has been so long——”

The triple funeral service was held toward the close of a rainy afternoon two days after the cave-in.

It took Butch, and Mag, and Psyche more than an hour and a half to make the wet pilgrimage to the church, for Mag, so long unaccustomed to walking at all, needed to come to a wheezing halt every few minutes in order to catch her breath.

When they finally climbed the short flight of steps to the church door, the knell for the dead was already being tolled, an overtone of mourning which followed them into the undemonstrative, apathetic grief within the church itself.

Psyche, wedged between Butch and Mag in a back pew, stifled by the humid warmth of too many people crowded into too small a space, thought at first that she was going to be sick. Sensitive to atmosphere of any kind, her sickness was not all physical. The defeated hopelessness around her seemed to seep through the pores of her skin like a dark, invisible liquid, sticky but saturating, and she, who had never been in a church before, found herself hoping that she need never enter one again. In vain her eyes sought for even a vestige of the spiritual splendour she had naïvely imagined would illuminate such a place with a radiance born of something other than the sun. But there was only a grey light struggling through narrow windows to mingle with the murky glow of naked bulbs that failed to draw fire from a brass cross
on the altar; that discovered no beauty in cramped bunches of flowers already wilting, symbol in themselves of the mortality of all living things.

Her hands knotted tightly together in her lap, her head bowed, she shut eyes, ears, and mind to her surroundings, and concentrated on a mental image of the Garden of Eden.

When the service was over, a service conducted by a man incapable of producing any real hope of an after-life; when the three simple coffins had been borne away; when there was at last no reason to linger longer in that most dreary of God's houses, the people filed silently out into the empty square, there to stand in small, huddled groups, unwilling to remove themselves at once from their only present comfort, the comfort of the herd.

Psyche, although thoroughly depressed, was yet, as always, to some extent set apart from those around her by her unwavering conviction that this was not truly her way of life, that the mines would not forever govern her future, her fate. She felt a very real compassion for the shrunken little woman in black who was Bert's widow, but she could not identify herself with her in any way. Tall, fair, vital, she was certain that she would never wear widow's weeds beside an unsung miner's grave.

Standing on the edge of a group, a few feet away from Butch and Mag, she became gradually aware that she was being watched. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and one to which she was peculiarly unused. For a time she resisted the temptation to turn and find the source of her growing unease. Drawing her old blue coat more closely to her, she put on, and then took off again, the darned cotton gloves, too small for her long hands, which Mag had given her just before leaving the shack. At last, unable to stand it any longer, she swung round, and her searching eyes found, and locked with, a hot blue stare, insolent and unwavering, which seemed to strip her of more than coat and gloves.

He was a young man, dark and sleekly handsome. Better dressed than any man she had ever seen before, he wore a grey suit smoothly fitted to broad shoulders and narrow hips. Lounging negligently against a rickety porch across the square, contemptuous
of his surroundings, he contrived to insult the occasion in a manner as offensive as his appraisal of herself.

When he straightened up and started to walk toward her, Psyche knew that, in any other place or at any other time, she would have run from him. Instinctively her hand went to her hip where for so long she had carried Butch's service Colt. The man, mistaking the nature and purpose of the gesture, smiled, regular teeth flashing white against his brown skin. This, he thought, was going to be easier than he had anticipated. A pity, really, because he did not like them easy.

When he stood beside her, he said softly, “Hello, beautiful— doing anything special to-night?”

At the sound of his low voice, as sensual as his bold blue eyes, Psyche experienced a sensation so entirely new to her, and so unexpected, that her voice, shaking in spite of her every effort to control it, carried little or no conviction. “Not with you, I ain't.”

“We could take a ride, and talk it over?” He pointed casually to the red convertible on the other side of the road, a startling bird of paradise aloof from the dusty flock of sparrows clustering closer to the church. It was a bait which had often been a sufficient lure in itself.

Psyche scarcely looked at it, which annoyed him. He was still further annoyed when she repeated her refusal, this time no more than a blunt, “No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't want to.”

He smiled again. He was very sure of himself. “Come on, beautiful, don't be like that. We're wasting time.”

Trembling visibly now, hating herself as much as she hated him, Psyche cast wildly around for a refusal as wounding as it was positive. And then she thought of Nick who was everything that this handsome, self-satisfied animal was not. Suddenly calm, she lifted her pointed chin, narrowed her eyes, and said with quiet viciousness, “I ain't goin' nowhere with you never, because you—ain't—no—gentleman!”

The arrow had been too well chosen.

A dark flush appearing in his cheeks, he replied to it with soft
spoken but terrifying violence. “You'll pay for that, you little bitch, and in the way I most want you to. That's a promise.” “Hey, kid!”

Mag's hoarse summons was more than welcome, and turning abruptly, Psyche went to her side. “You want somethin'?”

Mag peered at her suspiciously. “What was you talkin' to that big bastard about?”

“Nothin' much.”

“You know who he is?”

“No, an'I don't care.”

“He's the super's son.”

Psyche shrugged. “So what?”

“So what did he want with you?”

“He wanted for me to go somewheres with him.”

“You ain't goin', I hope?”

Psyche's reply was more than emphatic. “I ain't.”

Mag nodded her approval, her one and only hat, a strange concoction of bedraggled black feathers, wobbling precariously on its red perch. “You're a good kid. I don't really worry none over you. Look, Butch an' me's goin' over to sit a while with Bert's old woman. You might's well go on home an' get supper goin'.”

“You want I should take the lantern out to the road for you? It's likely goin' to get dark right early.”

Mag looked up at the lowering sky, and sighed her weariness at the prospect of having to take the longer route back. “Guess you better had. You don't mind goin' back by yourself, kid?”