The Dawning of the Day (24 page)

“
No
. This isn't over yet, Mrs. Marshall. You keep trying to make light of it, but you'll find out that when we support a teacher, we're not paying her to keep critters in the classroom that should be taken off by the state! We're making it so you can have a living and keep your own little boy—but if you had
him
out here, you'd soon see to it that he wouldn't run afoul of the Websters!”

Philippa said coldly, “The incident is closed, Mrs. Campion. You've made your complaint, and that's your privilege as a parent. But your privilege doesn't include an attack on any of my pupils or on my personal affairs.” She walked down the aisle in a profound silence and waited at the door.

Helen stood by the desk. The children were merciless in their avid curiosity. Her fine color became blotched, and she pressed her mouth into a small tight knot. Then with a defiant toss of her head, she went down the aisle. When she came to Peggy's desk she stopped, and touched the bruise with conspicuous tenderness. The girl pulled her head away and went on reading. Mrs. Campion's big face looked absurdly hurt, her eyes were swimming in tears as she came toward Philippa, but she managed to leave with dignity.

Philippa opened the door for her and said, “Good-by, Mrs. Campion.”

There was no answer. After a moment the outer door slammed viciously. It might have been the wind, Philippa thought charitably, and went back to her desk. She saw the pheasant feather passing the windows again. Peggy saw it too. The child watched until it went out of sight past the boulder, and her expression was one of complete and unforgiving contempt.

She had dramatized herself at home in the noon hour, Philippa guessed, but she hadn't intended that her mother should visit school. She was humiliated now, and besides, she was probably sure that she could handle Philippa better than her mother could. She considered her mother stupid, and Peggy would never be able to excuse stupidity.

Philippa's own anger died quickly, and before the afternoon was over she had achieved a sort of pity for Helen Campion.

By the time school was out, the fog had lifted, and the island lay bleak and dark in the dreary light; the grasses looked dead, the woods sodden, the shingled roofs black with moisture. The tide was very low. The gulls picking around the refuse of old bait and fish entrails under the wharves looked chilly and desultory.

Philippa came out of the lane by the Foss Campion place and saw Perley lounging in the fishhouse doorway. He had his mother's coarse, vigorous, curly hair and big regular features, without her passionate vitality. In consequence, when there was nothing to animate him his dark face looked sleepy and stupid.

“Hello, Perley,” Philippa called. “Wretched weather, isn't it? Is it going to storm?”

He was chewing on a match and now he took it out of his mouth, hawked loudly, and spat on the ground. He replaced the match and went on chewing.

Philippa walked on past the boarded-up house. She would have liked to knock the match out of his mouth and slap his face. Then she was ashamed; her response was as childish as his action. And what else was she to expect from him? He suspected her, and therefore she was his enemy. She had seen his pursuit of the Webster children in the woods; she had coaxed those children into the safety of the school.

Nobody was home at Asanath's. Suze had left a piece of apple pie on the table, and Philippa made herself some coffee to drink with it. After she had tidied herself and put on fresh lipstick, she went to see the Webster parents.

No one had cleared the spruces away from the front of the Webster house for several years. They pressed close around the porch, and their branches scraped the roof. Philippa walked under them, turning up her coat collar against the drip. She went up the steps and knocked at the front door. The silence around the place made her uneasy. Surely the children didn't go to their brush camp after school in this bleak weather. She shivered; her raincoat seemed too clammy.

She knocked again, and suddenly Rue opened the door. “Oh!” she exclaimed. She put her hand up to her mouth.

Philippa smiled at her and said, “I've come to see your mother, Rue. Aren't you going to ask me in?”

“About Edwin?” Rue whispered, and Philippa shook her head.

“It's just a call.”

Rue's relief was like a light coming on. She stepped back and said huskily, “Come in. Be careful you don't fall over anything.” Philippa went through a shadowy room oppressive with the raw, stale chill of a place kept shut up. Rue opened the door into the big kitchen, into lamplight and the scented warmth of a wood fire. The shades had been pulled down to shut out the dark day and the spruces. The big lamp on the table shed a kind light over the bare floor and cupboards scrubbed paintless. The children and the woman gathered around the paper-littered table and stared at Philippa as if she were an apparition. Then Faith shouted, drunk with excitement. “Hi, Mis' Marshall!”

Daniel grinned around his thumb. Edwin gazed at her defiantly. He had a pencil in his hand, and paper spread out before him.

“It's the teacher, Mamma,” Rue said nervously.

Philippa had expected antagonism, or an obvious state of tension. She had been unprepared for Lucy Webster as she appeared now, watching her from beyond the unshaded lamp. All her children looked like her, in the triangular face and wide-set light-colored eyes. But with her the eyes had a curious glow, unearthly in the lamplight; her hair fell in an untidy tawny mass to her shoulders. She had her arms folded on the table so that her shoulders were hunched, and in her whole pose and the unblinking stare there was a fantasy effect of youth. Rue looked older than her mother at this moment.

“How do you do, Mrs. Marshall?” said Mrs. Webster, smiling suddenly. She had a deep, hoarse voice. When she stood up she became tall, very thin and angular. The lamplight shining upward outlined the bony contour of her jaw and the strained slenderness of her long neck. She came around the table. “Won't you sit down?” she asked.

Rue pushed forward a small rocker. “You better take off your coat. It's hot in here.”

“Lovely and warm,” said Philippa. “You have a good fire going. It smells so nice.”

Rue nodded primly and arranged the coat over the back of a chair. The children went back to their drawing and coloring. The square table was a litter of old coloring books, sheets of used wrapping paper, and cut-open paper bags. They seemed happy and busy, shut into their lamplit cave.

Mrs. Webster sat on a straight chair near Philippa and folded her hands in her lap. “I'm so glad that you came,” she said with a meticulous respect for each word. “I've been wanting so much to meet you.”

“I owe you an apology for not coming sooner,” said Philippa.

Mrs. Webster's smile was constant, like a reflex. It followed a pattern; she squinted her eyes into bright slits, wrinkled her nose, and then curved her mouth widely without opening her lips. Philippa guessed that her teeth were bad, and also that her nose-wrinkling must have enchanted people when she was a child.

“I hope my children are a credit to me, Mrs. Marshall,” she said.

“Oh, they are! I enjoy them very much!” Daniel was watching her soberly, and she gave him the ghost of a wink. He grinned and turned his head away.

“Well, I enjoy them too,” said Mrs. Webster vivaciously. “You can see for yourself. Sometimes I play with them for hours, as if I was no older!” Again the smile. She arranged her dress over her knees. Like the children, she was extremely tidy though everything seemed faded and outgrown. “Probably you think it's silly,” she said.

“I think it's splendid,” said Philippa. “I wish more mothers felt that way. It's a tragedy not to enjoy your children.”

“Oh, it
is
!” Lucy Webster refolded her hands in her lap, tightly. “We have a real snug little nest here. We don't care what goes on outside! We pull down the shades and forget the world!” The smile twitched around her mouth like a tic.

“It's a help to be able to do that, once in a while,” said Philippa. “Not too often, of course, but it gives you a chance to rest when things seem too much for you.”

There was a faint darkening like a cloud shadow over Mrs. Webster's face, and then she nodded her head and smiled fervently. But her eyes were different, a little distracted.

Daniel was watching Faith cutting paper dolls from an old catalogue. His mother looked around her in a distraught way, and all at once reached out her long arm and caught hold of him, sweeping him against her side. The boy gasped in fright at the sudden swoop, and Philippa felt Rue's uneasy stir behind her.

“Daniel loves school. It's so
sweet
of you to bother with him! He's lonely without the others, and of course when I'm not well—you wouldn't believe it but sometimes I have to stay in bed for days and days—I haven't the energy to
move
, but I have a
wonderful
hubby, the way he waits on me hand and foot, and such good darling children. . . . Sometimes I tell Rue she's the mother and I'm the little girl, she's so efficient and I can't do anything, really—” She stopped, panting, but the smile continued. Behind Philippa, Rue didn't move. Edwin went on drawing, Faith stolidly cut paper dolls, and Daniel tried stealthily to slide out from under her arm. But she was very strong. The bare arm was thin and sinewy.

“You're lucky to have Rue,” Philippa said. “I love my boy, but I wish sometimes that I had a girl too.” She wanted to leave, but she could not embarrass Rue.

“Even Edwin's a grand help to his silly mum,” Mrs. Webster burst out gaily. “Poor little Edwin! Folks think he's bad, but it's just that he doesn't
know
. His little brain stopped growing. I used to explain it to everybody and they were terribly sympathetic. Now I think they can just take him as he is, poor little addled chick! Of course it was an awful thing for my hubby—he just can't
bear
to mention it, but I believe a mature person should face those things, don't you?” She fixed Philippa with a brilliant gaze.

“I do indeed,” said Philippa. She stood up. “I've enjoyed meeting you, Mrs. Webster, and I'd like to come again some time. Perhaps when Mr. Webster is home.”

“Oh, do!” Lucy Webster cried. She released Daniel, who scuttled to the far side of the table beyond Edwin. The way she carried her lanky bony frame was a travesty of adolescence. “I'll go to the door with you.”

“No, mamma,” Rue said. “You stay where it's warm. You don't want another cold.”

Her mother laughed and shrugged. She fluffed up her lank masses of fair hair with her hands. “You see? She's the mother!”

In the dark cold sitting room, Philippa said, “Hurry back to the fire, Rue.”

“I'm glad you came,” Rue whispered, “only . . . well, you see what I mean about Edwin.”

Philippa put her hand on the bony shoulder and felt it stiffen. “Edwin's going to be fine, Rue,” she whispered back. “Don't you worry. Between the two of us, we can help Edwin a lot.” The shoulder relaxed.

Going down the steps, Philippa thought, Well, I've committed myself. And God help me. I don't know what I can do for Edwin or for any of them. Suddenly she remembered her resentment of them when they had first broken into her sight, that day in the orchard. She had resented them because she had known that once she had seen them like this, desolate yet brave in their fear, she would not be able to forget them.

P
hilippa woke in the night and thought of Helen Campion and Mrs. Webster. She tried not to think of them; her consciousness slid to Steve and put her farther from sleep than before. She saw him against the darkness; there was a movement of his lips, as if he were saying her name.

When she was with him, it seemed to her that an entirely new personality had been set free in her, one with neither the wish nor the power to remain aloof. But apart from him she went on questioning her motives endlessly, even while her body was still warmed and invigorated by their moment of contact.

She hadn't known she could be so indecisive, and she tried to find reasons. I suppose at my age most women see all relationships with a view to permanency, she thought, lying in the chilly dark with the small wind crying past the window. That's why there has to be absolute assurance. He has it, and I trust it in him. It's entirely possible that he's an egotistical scamp trying to see how far he can get with an unattached woman. Yet I can believe with all my heart that he's honest and still doubt myself.

She slept finally, and when she awoke the wind had changed and brought a day with the texture of summer. The sea was an infinite and flowery blue. While she was dressing, Steve's boat went out of the harbor. She saw him turn and glance toward the house, and she stood very quietly behind the windowpanes, as if he could see her if she moved. The practical thing, she thought, the obvious solution to be seized upon by a sophisticated woman, was to have an affair with Steve. She would find out then just how deep her emotions went. But she was not sophisticated . . . or perhaps she was. Surely it was only a very naive person who thought an affair solved anything.

It would set a dozen new questions for each one it answered and would be at best a shoddy compromise. One became neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring.

She walked dreamily to school through the light-dappled lane, her coat open to the morning warmth. The chickadees disputed her way in a noisy crowd; she laughed at them, wanting to stroke their black caps with her finger.

She was suddenly possessed with happiness, as if it had swept around her from the outside like the sun's warmth or the delicate springlike aroma from the ground. The moment had an almost unendurable sweetness; she knew it could not last.

The day was a peaceful one in the school. The children seemed to be soothed by the summery atmosphere. She tidied her desk after they had all gone, not hurrying about it; she had the doors open, and some of the windows, so that the scent of Schoolhouse Cove and the sun-dried sweet grass in the field could blow in on her. She could hear in the stillness the harbor sounds, boats coming in, a dog barking, a child shouting, the gulls' faint but everlasting crying.