The Dawning of the Day (3 page)

It was a strange thing, how Mrs. Campion seemed to take on body only when he turned toward her; it was like the moon soaking up the sun's light.

“Yes, it'll be real nice having you, Mis' Marshall.” Her voice was less vague. “Helmi Bennett wanted you, but Asa told her, 'twould be better for you with us.” She gathered depth and momentum. “It's real close to the school and you'd have an ungodly long walk from over there in the winter, besides her being under Joanna's thumb—”

Asanath's voice calmly overrode her. “We figgered 'twas better for the teacher to board where there was no school-age young ones, Mis' Marshall. Well now, you've got things to do. And so have we.”

Suze started faintly. “Ayeh.” She turned toward the door, and Philip-pa took a long step to reach it and open it for her. She looked down at Suze, smiling.

“My grandmother always used to say she hated lady boarders, Mrs. Campion. They were always fussing around in her kitchen, wanting to wash out a pair of stockings or make a cup of tea. I can promise you I shan't get in your way.”

“Ayeh,” Mrs. Campion's eyes were blank again behind her glasses. Asanath made an odd, courtly, little duck of his head.

“It's an honor for us to board the schoolma'am, Mis' Marshall. She's kind of important to us.”

“Thank you,” said Philippa. “Thank you very much.” She was dismayed by the strange sensation in her throat. She had never been a sentimentalist.

Foss Campion was the last to go. “My kids'll be relieved to know you aren't eighty and deaf. They gave us orders to find somebody pretty.”

The sensation in her throat blossomed into laughter. She laughed with Foss Campion as if they were old friends.

When they had gone, she felt wanted and cherished; these were island people, sensitive and shrewd, demanding much, and they had chosen her for something beyond her city clothes and the timbre of her voice with its alien accent. For the first time in years she felt the solemn rapture of dedication which she had brought to her first school. She met it with a deep thrill of recognition; she had believed it dead. Perhaps on this unknown island, so far out that it was not even a dim blue cloud on the horizon, she would find a renascence in more ways than one.

She watched them go down the street, the woman and the two lean, angular figures in dark blue who walked like the proud fishermen they were. Justin would have been impressed, she thought. He would have called them the men of Thoreau and Emerson.

On the grassy rise beyond the wharf at Brigport, the people milled in and out of the store like bees around a honeysuckle bush. The captain of the
Ella Vye
returned to the boat and went down into the cabin. Philippa was surprised to see him put her luggage out on deck.

“Wind's not lessening,” he said around his cigar. “It's too rough for me to try to work in and out of that small harbor down there. It's all right for a small boat. And there's one coming to fetch ye.” He looked over her head down the length of the harbor. “Here she comes now.”

Philippa turned and looked. The boat came up through a narrow passage between walls of rock that flung the echoes back and forth. The tranquillity of the harbor was gone; as the water curled back from either side of the high white bow, small waves rushed at the wharves, the moored boats rolled and danced, the gulls flew up from the rockweed and circled, crying. The little boy in the dory pulled at the long oars until he had turned the dory's bow into the wake.

The powerboat slid swiftly toward the wharf, its engine cut down to a throaty murmur. The sides had a wet gleam and the two men in the cockpit wore oil clothes and sou'westers. If it was too rough for the mail boat, Philippa thought with dread, why should the mail and herself be entrusted to this
smaller
boat.

The man at the wheel shut off the engine. “Got the mail for you, commodore!” he sang out. “What you scared of, Link? That little old tide rip out there?”

He had a soft merry voice. When he took off his sou'wester, she saw he was hardly a man after all, but a boy with a thick short curly crop of black hair and skin as dark as that of the gypsies who had come recently to her sister's door on the mainland with their baskets and fortunes. “Throw those mailbags at Link, Fort,” he said to the other boy, “and see if you can wrap 'em around his neck.”

Fort was a red-headed and stocky boy with a clownish grin. He laid hold of the
Ella
's rail with a gaff and pulled the powerboat in close. The captain shifted his cigar and received the mailbags. “I guess you got more than a little tide rip down there,” he said without expression. “With all that wind blowing off the island, it's too bad the government couldn't use it for something.”

“I ain't said a word, Link,” said the red-headed boy. His grin danced continually all over his broad face, like sunlight on the water.

The dark boy's gaze moved to Philippa's face and settled there, with a child's steady, opaque curiosity. The mail-boat captain flung another set of mailbags down into the smaller boat's cockpit and handed Philip-pa's luggage down after it. She felt a sudden constriction of anxiety in her stomach; the roar of surf outside the harbor and along the far shores of the island seemed deafeningly loud. What a letter this will make for Eric, she thought. He mustn't ever know what a jelly his mother was at this historic moment. She walked to the side of the boat, and the captain unhooked a short length of chain that formed part of the railing around the deck.

“Here's your passenger,” he said to the boys. The red-headed Fort came quickly up onto the wide washboards and took her arm in a strong grip. “Step aboard,” he said. “She's steady as a rock.” His face with its wide cheekbones and freckles shining through the tan was all honest, earthy good humor. “And if your legs go out from under ye on account of the way Link's cement mixer tossed ye around, Charles'll ketch ye, he's awful good at that.”

She looked down at the other boy as he put a box in place for a step. “I'm sure he is,” she said. Charles glanced up at her and smiled; his eyes had a soft beguiling twinkle.

“Link, you've gone and forgot to bring us our schoolma'am.” He spoke past her. “Sure you didn't see her standing all forlorn on the wharf? Stiff in one leg and sprung in the other?”

“Sure, I saw her,” said Link without expression. “But she warn't what I'd call enticing, so I brought this one. You better put for home with the mail. Try not to go aground on Tenpound just because you got an interesting passenger.”

Philippa waved her hand to him. “Good-by, and thank you,” she said. The boat was backing away from the
Ella Vye
, and Philippa went to sit down on the clean crate placed for her in the lee of the cabin. She watched the two boys in yellow oilskins by the wheel, her first Bennett's Islanders, except for the Campion brothers.

The boat made a slow circle and slipped forward, the water rippling and chuckling along her sides. I hope I don't get frightened out there, Philippa thought. Or if I do, I hope I can hide it. It will be a good thing for me if they tell the rest that I didn't turn green with terror or seasickness no matter how bad it was.

And with a desire to armor herself in all ways possible against what was coming, she got up from the crate, turned, and folded her arms on the shoulder-high roof of the cuddy. Suddenly the engine moved into a higher speed; the boat made a long smooth lunge forward that reminded her of a deer leaping over a fallen tree, and seemed to rush headlong toward the open water and the wind.

S
he did not have to pretend. The boat reassured her with the even rhythm of the engine beating through the sturdy planking; at the same time it might have been composed of feathers and air, like the medricks that skimmed over the water just outside Brigport Harbor. In spite of the tired ache in her bones, Philippa felt a springing of exhilaration as she watched the shape of Bennett's Island grow large and sharply defined upon the horizon.

The magic of islands, Justin said, was as old as life. They had been talking of other islands, then, the ones they planned to visit and explore, the isles of the Aegean, the Hebrides, Skye. But they'd had no time to find out about them.

Halfway between Brigport and Bennett's they passed a hump of islet, all sun-washed rock crowned with green turf. Gulls flew up from it, balancing on the wind and crying; a black ram stood on a high place and looked down at the boat as it rolled in the backwash from the shore.

“Tenpound Island,” the red-haired boy shouted to her. “Lots of good grass there for sheep!” She looked back for a long time at the ram braced arrogantly against the pale turquoise sky. She wanted to get the picture complete for Eric.

When she turned toward the bow again, Bennett's Island had changed from a low blue mass to a definite shape composed of thick green spruce woods, steep rocky beaches wet in the shade and shimmering in the sun, and a sudden wide field of yellow grasses that seemed to stretch across the island to open sea.

They came abreast of a ledge rearing out of the surf; a spruce-covered point loomed above them. Suddenly the boat lunged and bucked as if in panic. Philippa was thrown off balance and gripped at the cuddy door for support. As the boat seemed to sink away from her feet, she had a moment of instinctive terror. An arm went firmly around her waist and held her hard.

“Just coming into the harbor,” Charles Bennett said. His face was so close to hers she could feel on her cheek the warmth emanating from his flesh. He was staring straight ahead, but there was a rush of color under his brown skin.

“Do you always come into the harbor so violently?” she asked, and moved casually away from him. “Thanks for catching me. I haven't got my sea legs yet.”

“Tide rip right here,” he answered, still without looking at her, and went back to take the wheel from Fort. She was amused by his embarrassment.

The boat went along the inner side of the high, wooded point and headed toward the first wharf beyond the descent of the point. A man stood on the wharf watching them, and suddenly she knew it was Asanath Campion. In duck-billed cap, blue shirt and work pants, and rubber boots, he looked far taller than he had been in her sister's living room. There was a stack of new traps behind him as high as his head.

The engine was shut off, and in a sort of entranced silence the boat slid close to the green-slimed spilings. Asanath sat on his heels at the top of the ladder, smiling in the shade of the duck-bill. “Been a miserable long trip, hasn't it?”

“The last part was the best.” She looked around at the two boys. Charles was taking off his oil clothes, his head studiously bent, but Fort grinned.

“We ain't lettin' her land till you get the red carpet down, Asa.”

“Why son, it's been down for seven days hand-running, with me holding one end and Suze at the other. So start handing her up!”

Asanath's hard brown hands reached down to help her over the top of the ladder. She looked down at the boys in the boat. Charles was getting her luggage out of the cuddy.

“Thank you both,” she said. “I meant it, you know. The last part of the trip was the best.”

“Ma'am,” said Fort, sweeping off his cap and holding it over his stomach. Charles looked up and smiled.
How that face must excite the island girls
, she thought wryly.

“Any time,” he said. “It was a pleasure. But you'd better thank my uncle, she's his boat.”

“You thank him for me. Tell him she's a beautiful boat.”

“See, you're learnin' the lingo already,” said Fort. “You made a real good choice, Asa.”

“Of course I did,” Campion said benignly. He shook hands with Philippa. “Good to see you, Mis' Marshall. I'll hand you over to Suze while these hellions get your gear ashore.”

They went up the wharf between the walls of new traps, each with a clean blue and white buoy lying on a coiled warp inside. The planks seemed to lift under her feet, and she put her hand out to the weathered shingles of the fishhouse. Campion said, “Place'll be heaving under you for the rest of the day.”

Then the wharf gave way to the land, and the ground felt warm and firm through the soles of her shoes. She stopped and looked back at the harbor, beginning at the breakwater and the big wharf on the other side, and following the shore all around to the place where she stood. She knew she would soon become accustomed to the wharves rising out of the water and the houses that were so close to the shore they must shudder in their foundations whenever there was any great surf. But now everything had the high savor of strangeness. Here were the great winds and light and space. She thought of Justin; he used to say there were places that could exalt a man or beat him down to nothing. She knew in this moment that Bennett's Island was one of them.

The solitude of noon hung over the island. There was no one in sight but Asanath Campion, lighting his pipe as if he had all day to wait while she stood and stared, and the two boys in the boat heading out across the harbor toward the moorings. She had been expected, yet no one was out to see her arrive. It seemed like an instinctive delicacy on the part of the islanders, to go on with the regular details of their existence as if she were not a curiosity.

Then she saw someone after all, a young man coming along the shore path between clumps of bay and wild rose. His dungarees rode low on his lean hips, and the inevitable duck-billed cap shaded his face. He walked slowly, with his thumbs in his belt, as if his whole inner self-were far from the spot and there was no force to move him but the wind.

There were two houses besides Asanath's on this side of the harbor, the further one white-painted and with zinnias and dahlias a glitter of color in the dooryard, flowers that must have often felt spray from the rocks on the other side of the path. But the house between this one and the Campions' was boarded up and needed paint. The young man stopped and looked at it. He pushed back his cap, and Philippa saw the craggy profile of a Campion.