The Dawning of the Day (36 page)

“But suppose you're wrong—suppose that occurred to you just because I came along. It's always easier to focus on something tangible. Even I know that dreams can die for lack of nourishment. Then suppose that after we're married a letter comes one day. Or Vinnie herself steps off the mail boat. It's happened to other people. Why not to you?”

She was rewarded by the almost inimical contraction of his pupils. “What's possessed you, Philippa? You've never trotted Vinnie out before. Leave the poor kid in peace, and tell me what's really on your mind.”

“I've just told you,” she said airily. She moved away from him, loathing herself and wishing he would go.

“Is that all you intend to say?” he asked.

“There's nothing else.” She leaned over the lamp and adjusted the wick. She felt the force of his bewilderment and his losing struggle against anger filling the room.

“I guess you're right. There isn't anything more.” He reached for his windbreaker and put it on, and picked up his cap. He came toward her and stood waiting. She didn't look at him. There was a peculiar sensation in her lips. They wanted to tremble. “If you don't want to marry me,” he said, “why can't you say so? You don't have to tell me the reasons for it. You don't have to make up a story for yourself around Vinnie.”

“It's not a story. I haven't made it up.” Her voice rose a little. Suddenly she thought in the wild relief of self-pity, It's the truth; I've never really been sure that it's over between him and Vinnie, whether she's dead or alive. “If she should all at once appear—”

“I'm going to get a divorce, Phil, just in case,” he said patiently.

She shrugged. “What's a divorce? Would it end what you feel in your heart for her? No, if she should come and we were married, everything you felt for her back there in San Francisco would come alive again—because it's never really been dead. I can't take a chance on that, Steve.”

His skin had an odd pallor in the lamplight. “What about Justin?” he asked in a low voice. “I'm taking a chance on
him
.”

“We know Justin won't be back,” she said, looking at him steadily. It was like a nightmare, but there was no awakening from it. She had to go on talking. “I fought this at the first, Steve, and then I gave in because I thought it might be something real and wonderful. But I'm seeing the facts now. I've been an unqualified failure all around on this island, and tonight I know that I can't compete with Vinnie, whether she's alive or a memory.”

She thought in surprise, He looks actually ill. There was a fine film of sweat on his forehead. He was staring at her as if he, too, realized the nightmare and their helpless participation in it.

“Philippa—” He half whispered it.

She wanted to say to him, Steve, please go. I have to be alone to see things clear and rest my bruises. She knew that if she did say it, it would be all he needed; but this was part of the familiar mood, that she could be weeping and desolate inside and still show an arrogant indifference.

“Good night,” he said finally. The words dropped into the quiet with a cold separateness. He waited for a moment more and then went to the door. A passionate wish to stop him sprang up wildly in her; when he paused at the door, it might very well seize control and spin her toward him. She stared past the lamp at the window and waited in a light-headed expectancy to be overpowered.

He didn't pause at the door. It closed gently behind him and he went down the stairs. She turned and gazed at the door with a burning sensation in her face and eyes; she could hardly believe he had gone.

She lay awake for hours, dry-eyed and feverish; she tried to cry, but she could not. She heard the wash of water on the harbor shore, and the far-off rote, and saw the first gray light come around the edges of the shade. There was no quick, slick solution for the consequences of her behavior. A mature woman has no excuses. She could hear Justin saying it, in a level, impersonal voice. Human weakness he could condone, but not human pettiness. Even Justin had never understood what caused these moods in her. It was not the sort of thing one explains easily. She knew there had to be a certain emotional climate, and a particular conjunction of events like the meeting of tide and wind that made the violent rip tide outside the harbor mouth.

She slept finally, all through the early morning departure of the boats, and awoke just in time to get ready for school. As she walked through the village, for the first time she saw the winter look of the island; the houses seemed to huddle in dun-colored loneliness at the edge of the harbor, and the wind sliced through her clothing and into her flesh. She thought with longing of the snug shell of her rooms; she would have liked to remain there immobile all day, neither stirring nor thinking. Everything was finished between her and Steve, she was sure of it. It was her doing. The thing was preposterous, but it had happened. In time the ache would fade to dullness and perhaps disappear altogether, unless, she thought wryly, she felt it in certain weather, like an old scar: whenever she saw a sparkle like diamonds overlaying a blue sea, or tried to pick out Andromeda with a night wind blowing around her, or whenever she smelled a freshly ironed shirt.

The next few days went by as if nothing had happened, except that she saw Steve only at distances. From her kitchen window she might see him in the road; as she walked from school, she might see him at his mooring. Once when she went out to the well, she saw him going home with two pails of water. Linnea bobbed behind him like a puppy. She saw Philippa and called “Hi!” in her clear round voice, and Philippa answered, but Steve didn't turn.

In school there was peace. Sky was absorbed with his work, as if Philippa had never seen him sick and weeping behind a pile of traps, and Peggy went through her classes with a haughty indifference. Outside, everything looked the same. But it seemed to Philippa that there was a queer, invisible distortion, as if under their surface all things had changed their shapes. She had experienced the phenomenon before, in a much stronger degree, when Justin died.

She made some calls on parents, first Mrs. Percy and then Helmi Bennett. She tried the Webster door, but no one answered. People called on her; Joanna came upstairs for coffee and a chat. Ralph and Rob visited her early one evening. The young Percys and Ellie Goward came up and looked at everything with the frank, scientific interest of clerks making inventories. Helmi Bennett sent her a loaf of Finnish coffee bread. Philippa wondered when they would all realize that Steve was no longer coming to see her; perhaps they knew already, but they wouldn't mention it to her, of course. No doubt it had taken precedence over the Websters and Young Charles's traps and Perley's beating.

One afternoon as she came home from school, she saw Foss Campion's boat tied up at the head of the long wharf. It had been only a few weeks since he'd overhauled and repainted her. Now he stood on the wharf with Asanath and Randall Percy. Syd Goward sat on a lobster crate a little distance from them, his back against a pile of traps. He smiled vacantly into the pale warmth of the sun. There was no one else on the beach except Jude Webster, who was piling the last of his new traps onto his dory to take out and load on his boat. There had been no really bad weather since he'd started fishing his new string, and the children were coming to school with new shoes and more substantial clothing.

At least she could feel a twinge of satisfaction about that, she thought, but felt nothing. As she passed the men on the wharf, she said pleasantly, “Good afternoon.”

Asanath nodded. “Afternoon, Philippa.” Randall's round face, lacking the comic ease of his sons', puckered in his habitual grin. Foss looked down at the ground.

After she had gone by, Foss spoke up distinctly. “I lay it all to her. Neither father nor mother can hold a hand over their kids when there's one like her loose in the neighborhood.”

The words stopped her as effectively as a hand pulling her around. For a second she considered going on; here was something surely on which she could close a door. But for the first time in three days, she felt a violent response. She walked back to the men. Randall Percy was blushing and kicking at the stones, and Asanath watched her speculatively, but she kept her eyes on Foss.

“Was that remark intended for me, by any chance?” she asked pleasantly.

“If the shoe fits, wear it.” Foss spat on the stones.

“Hey, listen, Foss,” Randall said urgently. He pulled out a bandanna and mopped his freckled forehead.

“What is it that you lay to me?” Philippa asked.

Foss nodded his head toward his boat. “You know as well as I do. Warn't it planned up in your place to begin with?” His light eyes glinted in the shade of his duck-billed cap.

She looked at Asanath. “Will you please explain, Mr. Campion?”

“Why, certainly,” Asanath said. “Seems that when Foss here just got out of the harbor a little ways this morning, his engine died and he had to h'ist a distress signal. Nils Sorensen come by and towed him in.” He smiled amiably at Philippa. “Well, when Foss here got to looking at his engine real close, it turns out that somebody'd gone and dropped a hunk of lead down his exhaust pipe last night.”

“What does that do?” Philippa asked.

Foss spat again, and Randall fussed with his pipe.

“
Do
?” said Asanath. “Waal, my girl, when the engine gits to running, the lead melts, and it gets around in the engine and raises particular hell. In some cases, it costs a lot of money to fix an engine up afterward. It
always
costs a man more time than he'd ought to take from his pots this time of year.” He smiled again. “So you see, it's a real unkind prank.”

“And I'm supposed to be responsible for that.” Philippa smiled too.

Randall, obviously embarrassed by the talk, started to move away, toward Syd, and Foss called after him, “I got ten new pots needing to be headed, Randall. Why don't you go over in my shop and make a start on 'em?”

Randall looked around, blinking. “Why, sure, Foss,” he said eagerly. “Sure!” He hurried across the beach at an awkward trot. Foss turned back to Philippa, hostile again.

“You've made a serious accusation,” she said quietly. “Are you able to back it up?”

“As able as you are to back up the yarns you told about the kids.”

“You're very sure of your facts, aren't you? Even without proof, you're sure I put foul ideas in people's heads, and stir them up so they'll go out and drop lead in other people's exhaust pipes.”

“I'm damn sure of it. There was never any such actions before you came here. My wife's boy getting beat up in a dirty fight, and then this.”

She looked at him incredulously. He knew even as he challenged her that Perley had damaged Young Charles's gear, but perhaps he felt that was justified by the beating.

“Look, Mr. Campion,” she said gently, “I had nothing to do with the beating, and I had nothing to do with this. I admit I've been disturbed by Perley's behavior, because it affects all the other children on the island. And I've been angry—and still am—because you and Perley's mother choose to ignore the fact that the boy's heading in the wrong direction and might some day be in terrible trouble. Believe it or not, I have as much concern for Perley's problems as for any of the other children's.”

Foss' mouth twisted. “I've heard fine words before.”

“And you're not convinced, but at least I've had my say.”

“It's a free country,” said Foss. He jerked his head backward in an effort to cut himself free of her, and jumped down into the cockpit of his boat.

“Foss is all haired up about this,” Asanath explained kindly. “Can't blame him none. It was a dirty thing to do to a man. I couldn't do it to my worst enemy.” He shook his head. “It may have ruined his engine for good.”

“I suppose that
is
more of a tragedy than ruining a boy for good,” Philippa said. She walked past Syd Goward, whose small pinched face was as peaceful as a sleeping child's. He stirred and looked up at her, squinting because she stood between him and the sun.

“Yonder's a hard crew,” he murmured. “You get 'em stirred up, it's worse'n running afoul of a hornet's nest.”

“I'll manage,” Philippa said. He shut his eyes again, and she smiled and went on. From start to finish, the whole encounter had exhilarated rather than upset her. After the stagnation of a week she felt at least alive again. The accusation was ridiculous, she had no reason to brood. She resisted scrupulously the premise that whatever happened to Foss he deserved, although there was no possibility of there being anyone else but Young Charles to blame. Perhaps this was the end of the episode, if he felt he'd paid them back for the traps.

But to think
I
put it into his head! she thought, ready to laugh at the incongruity of it. Wait until I tell Steve!

Then she remembered, and her smile grew set on her face.

She went up the stairs to her own kitchen, and the darkness of the passage enclosed her like nightfall. If only it
were
nightfall, she thought tiredly. She came into the kitchen, aching in the final collapse of her defenses and yet grateful for the chance to let them collapse in secrecy. In the morning she would build them back again.

Kathie sprang up from a chair by the table, laughing. She had Philip-pa's field glasses in her hand. “What made Foss look so ugly?” she cried. “You said something that gave him an awful sour stomach!”

Philippa looked at the glasses. For once she could think of nothing to say. She put her books on the dresser and looked around the room in a camouflage of absent-mindedness, as if Kathie had interrupted some important mental process. Then she saw Rue sitting on the couch, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, staring at her with a timid intensity.