The Mountain and the Valley (37 page)

Sometimes then he would get out the scribbler. He might put down, “The trickle of water corkscrewed its way down the ditch,” or “He looked as if he had taken his good face for everyday” …

If that seemed perfectly right, conviction would flood him: If he wanted to, he could do as much for everything in the world. Yet with it there was dismay at his neglect of all the things gone by. There was the thought of all the things he would never
see
, to know exactly. There’d be such a terror of failing in even one particular, that he couldn’t bear to tempt performance further.

Or maybe the only words that would come (though the perception was still there, exactly enough) were inapproximate as a pattern built with crooked sticks. He’d feel a tension nearer than anything he’d ever known to the limit of what can be borne without madness. He’d have to get up and dissipate it, sickly, guiltily, in movement.

Yet even
these
things left no impression that was permanent.

He brought the cabbage over now, on the wheelbarrow. He carried them, an armful at a time, down cellar. He came up into the kitchen and washed the earth from his hands.

“When are you going to get the cabbage in?” Ellen said.

“I got them in,” he said.

“That’s good,” she said. “This is Hallowe’en.”

“They never bother us,” he said.

Suddenly he had a picture of Old Herb Hennessey. He heard himself, as a child, saying, “Aw, let’s not bother Old Herb … he’s no fun.” They’d always called him Old Herb. Not because he was really old, but because he lived to himself.

For a second he felt a sudden panic. It reminded him of
once the day had seemed to grow late while he was working, though his watch said only three o’clock. Then when he looked at his watch later, it still said three o’clock. He saw, with a start, that it had been stopped.

But that too was transient. The texture of youth was still intact in him. No blow or defect or unhappiness is ever accepted as truth, so long as time can always be made to begin at the beginning again.

I must write to Anna tonight, he thought, and ask her why she can’t come home for a little visit. He had only to summon the thought of Anna, at any time, to feel warm and vital and safe again.

A
nna sat alone in the apartment. Toby had left her.

She might have known that if she started to hurt him … Anything that hurt him just turned strange. He just stepped over it, to where the going was smooth. If he hurt me like David used to sometimes, she thought:
knowing
that he did it, and exactly
how
, but with the same sore spot in in his heart afterward as I had in mine. The bond that she and David had, that helplessness not to inspect their feelings, separated them from the others but gave them a feeling of home in each other.

She stared at these small cramped rooms: the only quarters they could get in wartime Halifax.

They had never belonged to her except as they belonged to him and her together. She had always lived in a
house:
one her own father’s hands had built. And now Toby was gone, these rooms seemed to disown her; as if in vengeance for the strangeness she had dealt out to them.

She had tried to brighten their dinginess with needle and cloth. But she sewed clumsily. There was an odd pitifulness about the effect, as about a child’s bouquet.

The transformations she wrought pleased Toby, though (when she had drawn his attention to them), as much as if they had been done expertly. He had only a nomad’s interest in his surroundings, they had no claim on him. Only what happened while he was there mattered.

And after a while she began to imitate him in his carelessness of them, as she imitated him in everything else.

But, beneath her thought, the disregard bit her, even as she practised it. It grated against a hidden softness which, try as she might, she couldn’t quite deny: the sisterly custody of household things, things hard-won and valued, which she had learned in the house where she was born.

And now that Toby was gone, the unbelonging of these rooms struck at her through all the cloth she had patched over their surfaces to give them a face, with the bareness of bone. Relentlessly. It brought back the bareness of other features of life here which had assaulted her before now only fleetingly. The row of ashcans in the rain. The impersonal clink of milk bottles in the delivery boy’s basket. Hands held out, with the glance elsewhere (though she held out her own hand now as ritually as they), for the change from a clerk or the streetcar conductor. A foul word of adult knowingness from the mouth of a child in a narrow street. The laugh of a friend at some joke which had only a mechanical catchphrase humour in it. A little whirlwind drawing up the chewing-gum wrappers and scraps of newspaper from the sidewalk. The unembarrassed silence of the woman next door as they hung out their clothes from adjoining balconies. Some face which for an instant was all the faces about her—because of its absorption (without
respect for them) in things alone, with never a trace of wistfulness on it …

He was gone.

But I don’t care, she thought defiantly … (“I don’t care … I don’t care …” she’d said to David the night they asked him on the sleighing party, but not her.) Your face won’t hit me any more. I can step over things too. (“I don’t want to go anyway,” she’d said to David, “I got lots of other things to do …”)

And then (as sometimes when the rush of Christmas shoppers in the store would bleaken the cosiness of her own list and later, with strangers jostling her on the cobbled hill from the ferry where a dingy harbour breeze fingered the discarded wrappings of food and the rags of beer cartons and someone’s heavy foot scraped the patent leather off her new slipper so she swore aloud, but after that, when she was alone, thought, surgingly, Mother, Father, Chris, David … or as when David had said, “It’s not much fun, Anna. It’s not for girls”), then the first tearing tears came.

She let them come, as they would, for a few minutes. Then she dried her eyes. She sat staring at her feet, as a child does who arrests his crying in one great effort when someone comes into the room. She had that look on her face of the child; which, if there is anyone who loves him there to see it, gives to the toes of the shoes he stares at, or to any other part of his clothing that is anywhere worn, the most assaulting forlornness there is.

It had been perfect just before.

It was the day the first warning of autumn had struck in the air. Even in the city she could feel it. It always made her happiness sharper, if she were already happy. If she weren’t, her heart would feel away from home.

She had erased away the long morning with work, waiting for his convoy to come in. It must have come in while she dozed, in the afternoon. She went to the window the minute she awoke; and there he was. Walking up the sharp cobbled hill. The first sight of him on any day still jolted her breath.

He had something under his arm. When he came nearer, she saw what it was: an enormous French doll. He had carried it home to her, all the way from Newfoundland, not even wrapped. She didn’t know why, but
because
it wasn’t wrapped she felt like crying.

She hoped suddenly that no one had giggled at him. It would never occur to him that there was anything odd about carrying a thing like that under his arm along the street; but if anyone giggled, that instant crestfallen shadow would go over his face.

He had a bottle in his greatcoat pocket, and they each had a drink. A drink with him always gave her a smooth, ringing feeling … a nice soft sense of gaining speed … a spreading Christmas Eve happiness. She couldn’t drink with anyone else at all. Drinking didn’t affect
him
in any way; except to make him more than ever as he really was.

“What do you want to do,” she said after supper, “go to a show?”

“No?” He gave it the inflection of a query.

“For a walk?”

“No?”

“Uhhhhh … I know. Whist?” She tried to imitate the tack of his mood with a teasing in her own voice.

He shrugged his shoulders elaborately unattracted to whist.

He wasn’t silly when he clowned, he could really do it. She wanted to tell him that, but she couldn’t. He wouldn’t
understand what she was getting at and the thing would be spoiled.

The restraint made a little stiffness in her. She was afraid he’d mistake it for withholding. She felt like someone who joins the dance of glee at another’s good news. After a while the other may notice that each manoeuvre he instigates is being followed all right, but in imitation, not spontaneity. Toby had a child’s illogic in argument, but a child’s instinct for spotting the deviation of any mood from his own. And he wanted her to share any mood of his completely. He could never understand why anyone shouldn’t feel exactly the same way about anything as he did.

“Well, what
do
you want to do?” she said.

“Just sit here with you? What’s wrong with that?”

There wasn’t a thing wrong with that. It was wonderful.

He hadn’t asked her what
she
wanted to do, but she didn’t mind. Just so he didn’t want to
go
anywhere. She knew she absorbed him completely then, because he always said what he meant.

They sat there with something like the conspiratorial amusement of children between them—almost as if there were a joke about being grown-up and acting that way, seriously, that the other grown-ups didn’t know about at all. It didn’t seem possible that he could leave their way together sometimes as suddenly and completely as the shift in a dream.

But she was
conscious
of her happiness: he wasn’t.

And after a while she couldn’t help watching it, guarding it. Please don’t go away. Please don’t say something about someone else or some other time. She kept gauging the interplay of question and answer three or four speeches ahead; trying to keep them both on subjects that were safe, to pilot the conversation away from any dangerous tangents.

She said the wrong thing almost immediately.

“You crazy …” she said, smiling at him indulgently, “toting that doll to me all the way from Newfoundland!”

Suddenly he sat upright and began to chuckle. The way he chuckled (“ha, ha”) at some really wild hash of common sense in a movie comedy, or at any story he might be repeating which contained words like “rassle” or “kalonk.”

“That was quite a night,” he said. “They had this punch board there, and I guess I’d have been poking away at it yet to get that darn doll if this dame hadn’t made me let
her
try for me … High as a kite … and, what do you know, she got it the first punch!”

She tried to think of something to deflect him; but panic was racing through her like a flame.

“Where was that?” she said.

He didn’t notice anything in her voice.

“I don’t know,” he said, “some joint about six miles out of St. John’s … Some place Slim knew. We had Slim up leading the orchestra, and …”

While I was lying awake, she thought, thinking how cold the water would be. She felt suddenly like someone who has come to a party, glowing with the feel of her good dress, and all at once, inside the door, her dress turns shoddy and homemade.

He
never thinks of the water … he’s perfect for a war, she thought. He was really innocent of any belief in danger, but the danger-brightness lit up everything for him just the same. It made the strange faces as absorbing as the familiar, as if there were a drink in everyone and everything all the time: reflecting on
him
and lighting him too, though he knew nothing about that at all. He was exactly like the heroes in the silly magazine stories that no one really believed in—not a bit
of the danger he passed through rubbed off on him. She couldn’t bear to read those stories, because the
girls
in them were never like herself. He’s perfect for a war, she thought; and I’m no good for a war at all.

He was chuckling. “You should have seen us coming back to ship. Five o’clock … high as kites … lugging this great big doll …” He wouldn’t know why that shouldn’t amuse her too.

“What about the dame?” she said.

“Oh, hell, we ditched them!”

Them? It was a party, then. If he were only
trying
to make me jealous, she thought … I wouldn’t care about the girls, if you’d hide it; if I couldn’t just
see
you there, the way you’re telling it, so completely with them.

“What happened?” she said. “Did you get too fresh with them or something?”

He looked surprised. “Naah,” he said. “You know me.”

That’s it, she thought desperately. I don’t know you at all. I think I know you inside out, and then you’re a total stranger. You’re not like anyone else. When I’m not right there, I’m not with you at all.

“Was she a good dancer?” she said.

“Who? Oh. I dunno, I guess so. When did you get
that
outfit?” He glanced at her new clothes as if they were some new delightful feature he was just discovering in her.

He’d forgotten the other completely. But she couldn’t. His face came before her: some future day, with not even a shadow of her left in it, all in the present with someone absolutely new. He wouldn’t take a bit of her with him; he wouldn’t leave a bit of himself behind, any bit he’d miss.

Oh no, she thought foolishly, no … you won’t leave me first. I’ll leave you.

She got up and lit a cigarette. She riffled through the pages of a magazine on the ash stand, and put it down again.

“What time is it, dear?” she said, turning his wrist over so she could see his watch.

“Seven,” he said. “Right on the dot.”

“Is that all?” she said.

She turned the end of a yawn into a little smile. She picked up the magazine again.

The quiet between them sounded now. He knows it has changed between us, she thought … with that instinct of his … but he doesn’t know why.

“What’s the matter?” he said. “Don’t you like the doll?”

She saw him glance at her. He reminded her of a boy watching to see how he’s making out in an effort to win back someone’s pleasure.