The Equations of Love (17 page)

She took pencil and a bit of paper and with easy deception she wrote:

She picked the money out of her purse, packed her poor things in her cheap valise and strapped it.

She put letter and money in an envelope, placed the envelope upon the dresser, gave a quick look round the room, and, the day now being reasonably light, left the house, carrying her valise. Lilly had never before taken a journey, alone or accompanied. Frightened and watchful as she was and aware of many fresh apprehensions, she bought a ticket to Nanaimo and then her money was nearly gone. No one seemed to notice this astounding and unprecedented deed. Lilly was just a tall pale innocent-eyed girl buying a ticket and walking onto the Nanaimo boat amongst all the other passengers.

She found a chair, pulled it to a secluded place and sat down with her valise close beside her. Not until the boat pulled out did Lilly’s strung nerves relax in a fatigue that was physically painful. Dazed now by the night’s quick events and with the unaccustomed freedom of sea and motion, she fell asleep.

When she awoke, the ship had reached the more landlocked approaches to Nanaimo and through her unaccustomed exhaustion there spread a new feeling of something light and oblivious, the consolation of sea and wind and strange wooded shores. She went to the ship’s rail and gave herself up to the wind that whipped her face and to the slapping and curling of the water against the side of the ship, looking around her and feeling sorry now that she had slept throughout the journey. Lilly had never in her young animal life looked below the surface of things as they occurred, nor had she looked within herself. She was not accustomed to plan; she had gone unresistingly with things as they arrived to her. Now, a little triumphant but still wary, she experienced an unfamiliar instinct to plan her future. When the boat docked just below the old tower, Lilly walked ashore with the other passengers. She did
not know whether Nanaimo was larger or smaller than Vancouver, and she did not know that it was a mining town. It was only a name. She easily found what appeared to be the small main street. She walked slowly, carrying her valise, down one side of the street and up the other. She explored a little the side streets. Then, satisfied, she walked quickly to a small café, went in, sat down and ordered breakfast.

She ate her breakfast slowly, observing the proprietor and the waitresses. Then, when she had finished and paid for her meal, she went to the proprietor and, with a timidity that was suddenly real, she asked him for a job.

The man looked Lilly up and down. He approved her carriage, her stillness, and her soft brown eyes.

“Had any experience?” he asked.

“Two years, on the prairies,” said Lilly.

“Willing to work four to twelve?”

Lilly nodded. “Sure,” she said, “any shift you say.”

“What’s your name?”

“May Bates,” said Lilly.

“Married?”

Lilly shook her head.

“Know any folks here?”

Again Lilly shook her head. “Just come in from the prairie right now, this morning,” she said.

“All right, you come along at four and we’ll see how you make out. Five dollars a week one meal a day and tips.”

Four nights later Lilly went home with a dark Welsh miner called Ranny Griffiths. It seemed the easiest thing to do.

T
he year that Lilly lived with Ranny and worked in the restaurant was her first year of comparative stability. She did not much care for Ranny; he cared for her a little but he cared more for comfort; her life with him was a convenience to both of them. Neither of them thought of it as permanent, yet neither thought of bringing it to a sudden stop. Three months before Lilly left him, even before the birth of the child, she had wanted to go; but the habit of precaution which could in a moment turn to fear kept her, for the time, in what seemed to her to be something like security. On the Welshman’s part there was no desire to hold Lilly. He would have broken with her at the first sign of possessiveness, child or no; and the time was coming when he would break with her, and be rid of her, before his wife should leave Swansea and join him in Nanaimo. But Lilly’s very indifference and biddableness made him put off from week to week the rupture that must come. Because he liked Lilly well enough, and, later, because his decency would be shamed and uncomfortable if he left her at that time, Ranny let things be.

It seemed, now, as if new elements in Lilly, the drifter, came into being, or, perhaps, coalesced and formed a purpose. As the birth of the baby came nearer, Lilly’s habitual wariness, which included a keeping of herself to herself, made her watch ful of habits and appearances. With the emergence from unawareness there came, gradually, an ambition, not for reinstatement, but for instatement. In the crude alembic of Lilly’s being, there was set up some clumsy distillation. She would be respectable. She did not use the word “respectable” in the discussions which she had begun to hold with herself, but the feeling for respectability and the desire to be “like folks” flickered and then grew strong within her. She became thrifty. She grew mean. She who had been used to spend her last cent on what she wanted, now scrimped and hoarded. She knew that she would leave Ranny after the birth of the child, but she did not intend to leave him without money in her pocket. She would demand a reasonable sum when she left, and Ranny would give it, for he would be glad to be rid of her. She deceived Ranny when necessary. She bought carefully, and lied about the price of food. She kept the place neat, she cooked tasty and economical suppers, watching and improving on the cooking of the Chinese cooks in the restaurant. Ranny had no complaints; he had never before been so comfortable. Day after day slipped away, and week after week, month after month. Lilly worked at the restaurant as long as she could, saving her pay, saving her tips, changing silver into bills, changing small bills into large, keeping her money in a stocking which was the only suitable place she had ever heard of. She thought sometimes of the Bank, but, through habit, she trusted no one. If I go to that Bank, she thought, and tell them I want them to keep my money, the man will ask me questions, all kinds of things, and I’ll get into Trouble; maybe
I’d never get my money out, or maybe if I wanted to flit, I couldn’t get it out quick. So she kept her bills in the stocking.

Sometimes, when Ranny gave her money for housekeeping and seemed churlish (thinking of his wife’s passage and becoming restive), Lilly was tricky. She would lie about her wages (her brown eyes soft and childish); she would buy a thick steak with her own money; she would make a treat, “
my
treat;” she would, indirectly, make Ranny aware that she was not spending his money on the coming baby; she would make Ranny very comfortable; she would demand nothing from him; she managed him well, and he fell again to being contented, and Lilly put away another dollar or two.

She had not long been in Nanaimo before changes induced by this spiritual chemistry acting mysteriously through trivial happenings and her own inner physical change and need made her at first dimly conscious of the world within and beyond her; and later, cognizant of and dissatisfied with herself as a person. Ranny had nothing to do with it. Ranny was only a kennel into which a homeless worthless bitch crawls away from the rain, and out of which she will crawl, and from which she will go away leaving the kennel empty and forgotten. In the meantime she is dry and warm in this kennel and seems to be safe from whatever it is that she vaguely fears.

She walked down the street one day, this friendless one, and entered the grocer’s shop which was occupied at that moment by the grocer and by two superior beings. Lilly closed the door with its cling-clang and stood aside and waited. The grocer continued to draw upon all his flattering attention and displayed it to two young girls who – as if the world with all time and perfection belonged to them, as they truly thought it did – smiled upon him and upon each other, and, laughing, conversed with Mr. Soal (who was a man as well as the family
grocer) in a flattering manner. Without consciously flattering Mr. Soal (for they practised their art almost by nature), they seemed to compliment him and his shop merely by being there, by being young and beautiful, and by having lately returned from school abroad. They talked to Mr. Soal, not about food but about London.

Lilly watched, at first with only a pallid curiosity, and then with new interest and admiration. In the small shops of Vancouver’s east end, where Lilly was accustomed to buy her bread and sausages, such beings as these did not appear. She knew, without the passage of the thought, that these were not fancy women. They were something else. They were only girls of her own age, but between Lilly and these two assured young girls who did not need to live with Ranny Griffiths there was a remove as of continents and centuries. It was unbridgeable. It was intrinsic in her life and theirs that they were different beings. The girls were vivacious but not noisy. Their new sailor hats were tilted upon their shining pompadoured hair. Their cloth Eton jackets and long pleated skirts which all but swept the ground were a kind of disguise which attempted to transform their brilliant youth into maturity. They knew themselves to be beautiful, admired, dressed with mid-morning chic, probably the most important persons in the whole world, and certainly the most important persons in Nanaimo. They accepted this without vainglory but as their due. Lilly could not even understand the language that these young beings spoke, although it was her own.

“Oh, Mr. Soal,” said one of the girls whose name seemed to be Eleanor, leaving London suddenly and coming to the matter in hand, “Mother asked me to ask you if you have any more of that Indian chutney. Daddy
adores
it. It simply
makes
a curry.”

Indian chutney. Daddy
adores
it. It simply
makes
a curry. What was she talking about? This was a language unknown to Lilly. She stood there silent, aware of the girls as completely as they were oblivious of her, worlds apart across the grocer’s store. She did not envy them exactly, but she was conscious of something bright and sure which these girls had and which she had not. She could not see what it was, nor touch it; but it was bright and sure, bright and sure. Lilly suddenly felt cheap and dusty.

Eleanor smiled engagingly at Mr. Soal. (I do believe she’d even practise on Old Soal, thought her cousin indulgently.) They said goodbye. Mr. Soal hastened to the door and opened it, bestowing his affable benedictions upon them. He had known their mothers for twenty years. Their bills were large and their credit was very good. He closed the door and returned to business. He seemed, now, to see the hitherto invisible Lilly. “And what can I do for you?” he asked in a modified manner.

Nothing, Lilly thought, can touch or hurt these two. No Trouble can come near them. Yet was she not wrong? Their smiles, their charms, London and Paris, could not protect them.

And now Lilly as she did her accustomed shopping watched for those two secure girls. She watched for their mother and their friends. They shopped only in the morning, it appeared. And what did they do with the rest of the twenty-four hours (which was also Lilly’s twenty-four hours) in that bright exciting world in which they kept themselves? In a fumbling way she wanted to become not so different from those bright and sure ones. She did not know what to do. She observed them. Oh, she thought, I could never talk like they talk and look like they do, and she did not try; but still she observed them and became dissatisfied with Lilly Waller.

As time advanced and Lilly’s condition became more apparent, her growing desire for this respectability made her now compare herself, as never before, with the young wives of the miners whom she saw – Mrs. Davies, Mrs. Hughes, Mrs. Jones. She saw these young wives doing their household shopping by day and sauntering through the garishly lit street in the evening, hanging upon their husbands’ arms with a kind of proud and weary satisfaction. Lilly never appeared with Ranny now, and she showed herself upon the street as little as she could. She bought carefully and, staying at home, she sewed. She did not want Ranny to marry her. She did not want a husband but she longed – and by this time she longed passionately – for respectability. She had never yet in her life looked forward far into time. Now for the first time she looked forward and she schemed. She did not yet think often about her baby – that consuming passion for her child came later. But the passion was being prepared each time that Lilly saw a young wife wheeling a perambulator whose respectability seemed now to have an absorbing significance to Lilly. She began to lay her plans with care. As soon as she was able she would take the baby away from Nanaimo. She would go up-country or up-island. She would take a position of complete respectability. She would become a new person. Day by day she studied the news papers. With her finger on her pale mouth Lilly pondered names and a name. She chose. She would become Mrs. Hughes … Mrs. Evan Hughes … Mrs. Will Hughes … Mrs. Walter Hughes … Mrs. Walter Hughes. … She savoured that name. It was a good name. But she loitered over the names for days. Then suddenly and without doubt she knew her name. It was hers and she seized it. I’d best get used to it by myself, she thought. She would become Mrs. Walter Hughes. In her pictures of the future, as she sat sewing, she
saw Mrs. Walter Hughes with her baby, at first unknown, then known, established and secure in some other place. As the child moved within her, Lilly lived two lives. She lived the physical life which rapidly advancing and changing days and nights brought with them; but, within, she lived the important life of Mrs. Walter Hughes who had by this time become the widow of Walter Hughes, as yet a shadowy figure.