Swamp Angel (22 page)

He left Henry and Maggie talking beside the gate and limped back to the house. Alan came running home in the dusk.

“Come son,” said Haldar. “Let’s go in and see how your mother’s getting along.”

“Sure,” said Alan, breathless.

Henry Corder turned and looked back at them.

“Can you work it somehow Maggie so’s them two gits together?” he said.

“
I
can’t Henry. Maybe Alan can without ever knowing it. Perhaps there’s a way. I think there might be a way. It isn’t easy and it’s not going to be easy.”

“I’ll tell the cockeyed world,” said Henry Corder. He meditated, spitting – from time to time – into the night.

Then “It’s cold,” he said, and they went in.

One day there came a letter.

Can this be Hilda Severance, the scornful one, daughter of Nell Severance? No, this is Hilda Cousins, blender of bottles, mother of Monty, who is writing.

So Nell has gone now. She is my greatest friend and the friend of my spirit. Henry and Haldar and Vera and Alan – they’re my people but not of the spirit like Nell. What a life she had lived, thought Maggie, standing with the letter in her hand. Even if she had never moved from her house, what a life she had lived, the worldly unworldly woman. For me there is no one like her. Maggie did not mourn for Mrs. Severance. There is mourning and missing.

As Maggie and Angus drove up the hill past the Iron Mask mine the country became more delicately, coolly vernal. Strong fresh green had spread in the valley of the Thompson River.
A pale frigid green had now begun to flow over the dun-colored upper levels. There still were distant pockets of snow. Here, once more, they drove past the great solitary bull pines with their strongly hatched and corrugated bark – all the delights of this country spoke afresh to Maggie – swelling hills, wild and widespread sage, look! there is a coyote and his coat is the same dun color as the hill on which he runs purposefully about his business. He vanishes. This was Maggie’s third year in. Breathe this sagey air! See, a bluebird! Floating cloud, drifting scent, tree, wild creature, curving fleeting hill – each made its own statement to Maggie in the imperishable spring.

The back part of the car was piled with supplies, tools, nails, two sacks of cement, new stove piping. Angus cleared his throat and said “Saw Mr. Carruthers at the post office yesterday. Him or the other Mr. Carruthers going out to the ranch Friday. Said he’d call around n see n if I hadn’t picked up Mr. Gunnarsen he’d bring him out. I said Okay. But I guess I’d better get back Wednesday or Thursday n then we’ll know what else we need n tell Mr. Gunnarsen n give him a chance to order. Mr. Carruthers said he’d come around next week n get me started on the new cabins.”

“Good,” said Maggie, and then she said warmly, “Bless you Angus, you’re a wholly satisfactory boy!”

Angus drove neatly along the winding trail. He was greatly astonished to hear Mrs. Lloyd call him a holy boy. Gosh, he thought, but he did not like to argue. Then he said “Thank you Mrs. Lloyd.” Looking ahead through his thick spectacles he felt that he would indeed try to be holy although he did not quite know what Mrs. Lloyd meant. However he trusted her because she was Mrs. Lloyd and that was enough.

“When we get there,” said Maggie who would have been
surprised by all this, “– oh stop a minute, here’s the signpost we made, it’s stood the winter well! – when we get there we’ll open up everything right away and start the fires everywhere. I’ll do the kitchen one – but get a boat out for me first and a couple of oars – I want to go on the lake for about half an hour before we settle to work, and by the time I’m back the stove’ll be going well and I’ll give us lunch.”

“Okay Mrs. Lloyd.”

“That little cubbyhole Alan’s always slept in, it’s too small for him now and anyway we need it for stores. You two boys will have to go in together in that first cabin – the little old one – when they come up and till we get things going. You put your things in that cabin Angus, and when I’ve aired the blankets you make up your bed. But be sure you make your own fire first of all and have your cabin good and warm by bedtime won’t you?”

“Okay.”

“And if you’ve any ideas about things as you go around just make a note of them in that little notebook of yours and tell me will you.”

“Sure.”

Things were falling into place; thus and so they should be. This was Maggie’s own sphere. This she could do well, with Angus. As for Angus, he was no longer the middle child, the brother surrounded and eclipsed by the family. He was a man of eighteen who had worked at the lake all summer and had operated a taxi all winter and who knew more how to go about things, and did not always have to ask now; and he kept a notebook. Three times during the winter he had driven up with another boy with a cute little power saw in the back seat and had cut wood; and there was all that lumber laying there for the new cabins, brought in from a sawmill in the hills but,
he thought, he daresnt touch it till Mr. Carruthers showed him how. At the lake last summer very important old guys who came to fish, like Mr. Roberts and Mr. Cunningham, seemed to think he knew about things. He was regarded as a real person and responsible there by those solid guys and by Mrs. Lloyd and the Gunnarsen family. He was more of a person than he would be on Pender Street. Wait a couple of years and get Dad up here to see; bet he’ll be surprised. Angus is right. A man, and even a man’s dog, has special quality and value in a landscape with trees.

After Maggie had lighted the fire she went down to the lake with the Angel in her pocket. She loosed the boat and rowed out into the lake. She rowed easily and with pleasure. The pull on the oars felt good throughout her body. At last she looked around her and shipped her oars. She picked up the revolver from where she had laid it in the bottom of the boat.

Maggie sits in the rowboat turning the Angel in her hands and she knows that this little gun has a virtue which was more than pearl and nickel to old Mrs. Severance; it has its own properties and its small immortality. That is why Maggie handles the Swamp Angel and looks at it curiously and thoughtfully as she sits there gently moving with the slight movement of the boat on the water in the fine fresh air; and that is why she thinks that this is a rite of some kind which she is about to perform. Just the same, this revolver is far too good to be thrown away.

The Swamp Angel in its eighty years or so had caused death and astonishment and jealousy and affection and one night it frightened Edward Vardoe on Maggie’s behalf, although Maggie does not know that, and soon it will be gone. It will be a memory, and then not even a memory, for there will be no one to remember it. Yet does the essence of all custom and
virtue perish? How can she know. Quick … waste no time … you must go back to work … Angus is hungry … throw that little gun into the lake at once.

Maggie did not drop the Swamp Angel over the side of the boat into the water. She stood in the boat and with her strong arm she threw the Angel up into the air, higher than even Nell Bigley of the Juggling Bigleys had ever tossed it. It made a shining parabola in the air, turning downward – turning, turning, catching the sunlight, hitting the surface of the lake, sparkling down into the clear water, vanishing amidst breaking bubbles in the water, sinking down among the affrighted fish, settling in the ooze. When all was still the fish, who had fled, returned, flickering, weaving curiously over the Swamp Angel. Then flickering, weaving, they resumed their way.

Maggie, turning, rowing quickly back to the lodge, had the bow of the boat pointed toward the lodge and the stern pointed toward the farther and ever receding shore of the lake, the hills. The far shore (like Mrs. Severance) would recede until it was nearly out of sight, but it would still be there. There were certain things that Maggie could not settle. Would a recovered but enfeebled Vera return to the lake and to the poignant sight of that memorable and melancholy shore? And if she did not return, could Haldar so far bend his own strong will as to stay with her in town? Maggie thought (but she was not thinking of these things now) that they would both return – yet she did not know. She had, during the winter, arrived at a conclusion that, for better for worse, there were certain things that two people must resolve – however mistakenly, however uncertainly – between themselves. Outside influence would not avail. The springs of action, deeply hidden, were too difficult for her. And so Maggie had applied herself to the matters in hand. Now she stopped rowing for a moment to get
her direction, and looked back toward the lodge. She saw the stocky comfortable figure of Angus moving from cabin to cabin. Smoke had begun to rise from the stovepipes of the cabins, and smoke flowed up abundantly into the still air from the kitchen chimney. Maggie turned again, took the oars, and rowed hard, straight in the direction of the lodge.

E
thel Wilson lived in a posh neighbourhood of Vancouver. She was the wife of a prominent doctor, and employed immigrant servants. Her first book was published in her sixtieth year, her last book fourteen years later, though Wilson would live to be almost ninety-three. Her few public remarks about writing appear quite unassuming. In her 1959 essay, “A Cat Among the Falcons,” she referred to literary critics as high-flying falcons and herself as a “country cat” sitting and looking out a window.

Her early critics took her at her word. They did not know, perhaps, that she was an expert fly fisherwoman as is her protagonist Maggie Lloyd. Even her supporters, most of them men who matured in the school of modern realism, tended to patronize her, presenting her as an unambitious chronicler, innocent of intellectual and moral matters but somehow gifted in limning character.

Most of these commentators regretted certain faults in Wilson’s writing style. These included inconsistency, irritating changes of pace, and above all “authorial intrusion.” None explained how an author can be said to intrude upon her own
invention. They saw her direct remarks to her reader as slips into Victorianism. They should have re-read her feline essay, noticing that the fiction writers she cites are the innovators, what hurried critics call the “stylists.” They might have noticed that she praises the “incandescence in a lighted mind” to be found in Sheila Watson’s newly published
The Double Hook
.

A remarkable exception among the early critics was Helen Sonthoff (“The Novels of Ethel Wilson,”
Canadian Literature
, 1965), who found treasure just where the fellows were finding lapses. Hers is one of our great essays. It locates Ethel Wilson among those writers who make their readers experience the writing, and Sonthoff quotes Gertrude Stein, who said that the sentence should “make you know yourself knowing it.” Ethel Wilson, whenever she was asked to say what it was that the young writer had to learn, suggested the sentence.

Once in a while you will find a Wilson sentence that strikes you as odd. It might have a crack in it; it might have forgotten which way it was going. When you find a little oddity in a Wilson sentence, you should question the seeming simplicity that has gone before. You could be afforded a glimpse of the moral, philosophical world of which Wilson was supposed to be unmindful. In the midst of the world the author has made familiar, you might suffer some defamiliarizing. At that moment you may get irritated and fault the narrative’s professionalism – or you may sense the presence of a cat, and feel the hairs on the back of your neck rise.

Wilson’s purpose is not cheery. When you are least expecting it, she lets you see a moment of something dark, something Joseph Conrad’s river-travelling Marlow might have seen between the wide leaves. Consider the idyllic scene of Maggie’s fishing the bright Similkameen River:

In less than a page the cruel thought does return, and it brings Edward Vardoe with it. For the second time in the novel we are brushed with the thought of “humiliation” that drove Maggie to leave him, the guilt in deciding to cease her “outraged endurance of the nights’ hateful assaults and the days’ wakings in a passing of time where daily and nightly repetition marked no passing of time.” As in our reading of Conrad, we do not know with certainty, yet we think we’ve seen the edge of a universal darkness. When Nell Severance suggests to Edward Vardoe that in his own darkest vengeful mind “murder would be a pleasure,” he does not contradict her. Neither he nor his estranged wife is an innocent traveller; nor is their creator. More and more as Wilson composed her fictions, her characters were compelled to consider unexplainable death and the fear that wreathes it like vapour around the fragments of a train wreck.