The Dawning of the Day (20 page)

A
s the lamp flame grew in her room, she looked around at the familiar things, the tidiness that was at once chaste and fussy. She half believed that in the morning she would discover the interlude with Steve had become detached from her existence, that the atmosphere of intimacy and longing had been a form of self-deception brought on by the night.

But sleep would have to come in between, and it looked as if there would be no sleep. Resolutely she relaxed each muscle and breathed deeply. She tried poetry, the sedative rhythms of “Evangeline” and “Hiawatha.” But fragments of verse she thought she had safely outgrown with her adolescence came winging into her consciousness like goldfinches across the fields. Ernest Dowson, Rossetti, Swinburne. Swinburne! She laughed softly. How greedily she had devoured the pages out in the arbor or in bed at night by the beam of her scout flashlight. The words had scorched and intoxicated her. She had memorized things she barely understood, reciting the rich cadences as she walked to and from school, feeling that she lived an ecstatic life apart. But at twenty she had laughed at herself for the Swinburne episode. Why Swinburne now? He was a ridiculous and unnecessary adjunct to a difficult situation. She sat up in bed, looking at the streaks of star reflections trembling on the black water, and repeated wryly the words that kept plaguing her.

She hadn't known, at sixteen, what the poem really meant, but it didn't matter now; the words were still lovely after all.
Stars for the foot of morning, waters that answer waters
. She heard the long-drawn rote, and a slight wash of water on the shore outside as the tide turned and the wind freshened.

You're still sixteen, Philippa. Sitting up in bed and reciting Swinburne. What about tomorrow? Will Swinburne carry you through a day with a roomful of tired children?

She lay down meekly and fixed her eyes on the brightest star she could see. Perhaps it would hypnotize her. Sleep would turn everything back to its normal level.

She awoke at daylight, and Steve was in her mind before she was fully conscious. Nothing was detached. No perspective had shifted. She awoke remembering his fingers smoothing her hair and stroking the nape of her neck.

She wanted to finish a letter to Eric, now that she was awake and had time to spare. But she felt ill at ease when she began to write, and eventually she put the letter aside.

Routine had its uses besides efficiency. By the time school was under way, she felt almost natural again. There were no chances for reverie. Most of the children were tired from the night before, and a variety of small annoyances went on continually. Someone was forever being tripped by a foot thrust into the aisle; pencils prodded the sensitive spot between the shoulder blades; almost everyone sent to the board had the questionable gift of making the chalk squeal.

With no need to practice square dances, the older boys at recess began a campaign against the girls. Kathie and Ralph were after each other tooth and claw when Philippa discovered it. Though these two showed the greatest potentiality for damaging each other, the whole schoolyard was embroiled. Philippa dismissed the younger grades until the afternoon session and sent the older ones to the blackboard to work out some complicated problems.

She was watching Rob's heroic battle with his work when she heard the hiss of Peggy Campion's indrawn breath and a choked spasm of snickers. When she looked along the board, everyone but Peggy was working hard, scowling intensely to indicate concentration, and with only a contorted stiffness of feature to suggest repressed emotion. Peggy stood back, chalk in hand. Her face was immobile. She stared at Ralph without blinking.

Philippa walked to where Peggy stood, and looked at the board. Peggy's numerals were always gracefully formed—they never soared up or staggered down; they were the same height, and their conclusions were invariably correct. The word scrawled across them was as blatant as if it had been shouted aloud.

Philippa looked at Ralph. The back of his neck became a rich red, contrasting unpleasantly with the bright color of his hair. The sound of his chalk took on a frenzied rhythm. Numbers appeared at a dizzy speed and with no meaning whatever. Then he erased furiously and filled the space with new figures. The rest of the class slid into a state of suspended animation; heads turned as slowly but irrevocably as sunflower heads followed the progress of the sun.

“Ralph,” said Philippa at last. Ralph's shoulders jerked violently. He dropped his chalk on the floor, went down to find it, and came up with an incredible return of composure.

“Ma'am?” he enquired, looking like an eager spaniel.

“Are you responsible for that?” She moved her head toward the word.

“Ayeh,” Ralph said. “Guess I am.” He looked at the word with no visible shame but rather as if he were appraising a paint job. “Yep, I did it.”

“Any explanation?” she asked coldly. Ralph scratched his head, looked at the floor, and then smiled at her.

“Dunno as there is. It just come over me, sudden. Like one of them big waves comes up out of nowhere.” He snapped his fingers, and the rest gazed at his outflung hand. “I s'pose I hadn't ought to've yielded to temptation, like the feller says,” said Ralph, “but I did. That's the way I am.”

“What did Mrs. Gerrish do when anything like this happened?”

“Strap,” said Ralph cheerfully, looking at his hard-calloused palms. Philippa took a large sheet of paper from her desk and handed it to him.

“Go to your seat, please, Ralph,” she said, “and write your word five hundred times. After you've yielded to that temptation five hundred times, perhaps you won't find it so irresistible.”

Ralph gaped at her as if he hadn't heard correctly. He took the paper gingerly, as if he expected it to burst into flame, and went to his desk. “You'd better sharpen your pencil,” Philippa said after him. Moving like a sleepwalker, he went to the sharpener. When he had finally sat down, Philippa glanced at the class, and they returned to their own work.

“Erase Ralph's place,” Philippa said to Peggy, “and copy your work there. Then you can erase the other.” She walked over to the windows that looked out on the marsh and stood there watching the yellow grass rippling in the wind.

There was a notable change in the atmosphere of the schoolroom. Some gazed at her in somber awe, others in confusion. In their experience, anyone who spoke or wrote such a word in the presence of an adult was strapped—usually by both teacher and parents—and sent off to mull over his offense in solitary confinement. This new punishment had an Olympian tinge to it. There was no pain with it, but neither was there the excited admiration of friends who watched you stand up to the teacher and take your strapping with insouciance. It carried only the most stultifying of emotions, boredom.

Ralph began his chore with a certain dash, but it was plain that his bravado was false. By the hundredth time and the third sharpening, he looked as if he were being forced to cross the Sahara Desert on foot, and there was still an hour of school to go.

He regretted, too, the death of the word. It was like saying good-by to an old friend, not quite reputable but exciting and often very helpful. Never again would he scribble it or shout it with such an exhilarating knowledge of his own wickedness. After being written five hundred times, it would not even be a mildly bad word, just a dull one. The others knew it too, and so they looked at Ralph with a sort of compassion, and at Philippa with the admiration that otherwise would have gone to Ralph.

Philippa looked toward the harbor and saw the gulls. Their wings twinkled as they caught the sun. Perley came across the marsh with his shotgun in the crook of his arm and went up into the Bennett meadow. It was too rough for him to go to haul in his peapod today, or else he had his traps in to dry out and repair. In the fall the men set their traps in deeper waters. The boys who fished in fine weather from a peapod would go out with their fathers in the winter weather.

Perley walked clumsily in his rubber boots, his free hand in his pocket, his head pushed forward; he stared morosely at the path ahead of him. He was a lonely figure in the high-colored gusty day. Philippa could have been sorry for him if it were not for the Websters.

She came back early to school after dinner and worked on her letter to Eric. She described the dance, the music, and then told him how the island looked from the water after dark, and how the water blazed when the oars stirred it, and about the herring. Again she was disturbed by a peculiar self-consciousness. But she took a resolute stand. The thing to do, she thought, as if she were setting someone else in order, is to remember that Eric and I are two separate persons; if I want him to live his own life, I mustn't be afraid to live my own. . . . But in this case, it's idiotic to think in terms of the future. In twenty-four hours this may have all died down to nothing.

At that thought, meant to be encouraging, she felt a qualm like illness at the pit of her stomach.

She put Eric's letter away, finally, and considered the afternoon session. They might begin work on Halloween decorations; they needed some sort of occupational therapy today.

She heard the outer door open and shut with stealthy ease. Ralph and Rob must have been sobered by the morning's experience. She smiled, and leaned down to open the bottom drawer of her desk and find the patterns for the Halloween cutouts. When she straightened up, the inner door was open, and Rue Webster stood on the sill. She had young Daniel by the hand and the others were behind her, their pale pointed faces peering round her like background figures in a medieval tapestry. Rue looked at Philippa from exhausted eyes.

“Come in,” Philippa said pleasantly. They came forward. Daniel looked around him and Faith had a spasmodic little smile like a grimace, but Edwin and Rue moved warily. They had thin sweaters over their clothes; the little boy was fitted into a pair of dungarees made crudely over into his size. The legs were wide and clumsy, but at least his tender skin was not exposed to the weather.

When they had reached the desk, they stood there in a silent knot. Rue's eyes were ringed in muddy shadows. She lifted her hand to brush a lank strand of hair back from her forehead, and when her sweater sleeve pulled up, Philippa saw that her skinny wrist was braceleted with bluish-red welts. Philippa looked away quickly, but the girl pulled her sleeve down to her knuckles.

“Where do you want us to sit?” she asked hoarsely.

“Where did you sit before?”

Rue jabbed her sharp forefinger. “I sat there, 'n' Edwin over there, and Faith—”

“
I
sat here.” Beaming at Philippa, Faith slid into the seat. She wriggled around a little, as if to fit herself into a nest, folded her hands on the desk, and looked happily at the others. The seat belonged to the youngest Percy.

“But that was your seat last year,” said Philippa, “and now you're a grade ahead, so I think you can move back one row.”

“I don't know if Mis' Gerrish gave us our passes,” Rue said suspiciously.