The Mountain and the Valley (39 page)

The loneliness had become an unattended tune in his bloodstream and his mind-stream. It touched him only whitely, stilly, like an impression of the weather. Its wick was turned up only when the days would first begin to lengthen and the winter dusk would come down blue and distant on the white frozen fields, or when the trunks of the grey birches would darken just before it rained, or when he’d waken from a dream wherein the quality of some time gone by and of faces forgotten had been intimate beyond any power of the mind’s
deliberate remembering, or when he’d stand by the window and watch the headlights of the Saturday night cars increasing up the road to his house and then shining dimmer on their way to town without stopping.

But even then it was only the loneliness of a child for whom there’s an instant unpondered pulse skip in the beat of the day. It wasn’t what bends the hearts of people who have had something and now it is gone. It wasn’t unpleasant
at all
now. Hewing his life to fit his condition had come to have the tidy thrill of fitting together a small puzzle. It was like steady conversation with a partner inside himself, silent, but faithful beyond question.

It was only when he stepped off his own place that he’d feel really alone. Then a fluoroscopic bareness would denude him, as when a moving picture is stripped of all but its pale bones if the theatre doors are thrown open and the daylight let in. The loneliness would seem exposed. It would be somehow shameful in the presence of others who had company.

He stood by the mailbox now, with Anna’s letter open in his hand. She said that she and Toby were coming down to the farm for Toby’s leave. He felt for an instant as if the ground he stood on had threatened to give way.

For a moment, before he was glad, he felt a lost feeling, a regret at this sudden fracture of his mood of the morning. For a moment he wondered how he would be able to manage the noonday nap he counted on to make the rest of the day tolerable. For a moment the good way it had been yesterday flashed into his mind. He’d listened to the war news while he pulped the turnips for the cows, comfortable equally in the sub-consciousness that his health exempted him from any decision
whether or not to take active part in these far-off battles, and in the fact that he could listen to news of them without taking time out from his work.

The war had gone around David. It was like all the rest of the things that happened to the others.

He
had
tried to enlist. But the flush of will which had seemed to confute his physical limitations, on the way to town, had crumpled before them as soon as he was stripped in the examining room.

The busy-eyed young doctors glanced at the naked men as if they were an irritating accumulation of data to be sorted and filed. The other two men made clumsy jokes between themselves about their nakedness—for the doctors’ benefit. They tried to establish some sort of contact with the doctors on the basis of masculine humour. The doctors joked with each
other;
the men’s jokes they might not have heard.

One man glanced down at himself.

“I wonder,” he said, “if they could give a fuhlla anything to make this thing grow.”

“I wish they could,” David said. “In cold weather mine shrinks so I’m always getting it caught in the buttonhole of my drawers.”

In the laughter that followed he
joined
the other men. Even a doctor conceded him a millimetre of grin. But when his turn came to stand before the doctor, though the doctor was of slighter build than he, his assurance left him as if it were there in the corner with his clothes.

“How did you get that scar on your head?” the doctor asked.

David told him.

“Ever had any trouble with it since?”

“No,” David lied.

The doctor sounded his chest. “Ever have any trouble with your heart?”

“No.”

“Well, you better go see your own doctor about it when you go home … and forget about this,” the doctor said, half-concernedly. He was turning even as he spoke and pointing to one of the other men: “Williams? Are you Williams?”

He wondered now, if Anna had explained to Toby why he wasn’t in the war.

Sometimes on the bus he’d felt that the servicemen were looking at him and wondering why he wasn’t in uniform. He’d wish he had some gross external disfigurement as explanation. He wondered if he’d feel like that all the time with Toby. He wondered what conversation would be possible between them. Toby had been in the thick of the invasion, right there in the Channel the day of the big morning. Toby was free. Other people were free. When they were with you the routine you’d worked out alone seemed suddenly skimpy. You had to keep justifying it, or poking fun at it. They felt no such necessity to comment on
their
way at all.

II

Anna had said they’d arrive on Friday, but they came a day ahead.

David didn’t hear the bus stop. He had just finished his lunch at the corner of the table. He was putting away the mug and the spoon and the egg cup. He wasn’t thinking about them at all, when they eased the door open. They were both laughing; still tiptoeing in a mock-cautious way, to continue the spirit of the surprise.

If he’d been sitting watching for them, he couldn’t have helped the initial reaction of the one who stays to the one who
comes. He’d have felt a sudden emergent loyalty to his own circumstances, like a kind of fence. But caught unawares by the good sight of Anna’s face, he was taken up instantly into
their
mood.

Anna hugged him and kissed him. The sudden scent of woman’s garments and face powder and soft young hair thawed any restraint. She glanced about the kitchen.

“Why, Dave,” she exclaimed, “you’re clean as wax! Isn’t he, Toby?
Where’s
Gram?”

“She’s in Annapolis,” David said.

“Oh, is she? Well! With Mrs. Burchell? How
are
you, you old …?”

Toby too had started to speak; but he seemed to lose control of the greeting, with David and Anna isolated in each other. He just stood there, smiling nervously. He didn’t know whether to keep his hand held out or to withdraw it.

David thought: I’d forgotten he wasn’t one of the sure ones.

He hoped all of a sudden that Anna
hadn’t
told Toby about his illness. He knew it would never occur to Toby to wonder why anyone else wasn’t in the war. He wanted to have it the same with all three of them, with nothing about him they’d have to keep taking into account, that would put him outside. He didn’t feel any of the defensiveness he’d always felt with Toby before. Only that odd little constraint, as if each were waiting for the other. He never thought of the scar.

“Hi, Toby,” he said, taking his hand.

“Hi, Dave. How are you?”

“Fine. How are you?”

“Fine. How …?” In his fluster, Toby almost forgot he’d said that already.

“How long have you got?” David said, turning to Anna.

“Ten days.” They both answered together. “Starting
tomorrow.” Toby put his arm around Anna. They said it as if ten days were the same as thirty days or a year or forever, because it didn’t start till tomorrow.

There was a small silence. Toby looked as if he were embarrassed for having hugged his wife.

“Say,” he said quickly, “how about a little drink?”

Anna made a mock frown. “Before dinner, darling?”

“Sure,” Toby said. “This is an occasion or something, isn’t it?”

“All right then,” Anna said, “a little one.”

She went into the pantry and brought two tumblers out to the kitchen table. She waited for Toby to open the suitcases. “Is this new paper?” she said, looking about the room. “That’s a new couch cover too, isn’t it? What did you ever do with that old whatnot that used to be in there by the hall door, Dave?”

“It’s out in the shop somewhere,” David said.

Toby looked up from the suitcase. “Where’s the other glass?” he said. He was tumbling the clothes out every which way, searching for the bottle. “Dave’ll have a little drink with us, won’t you, Dave?”

“Darling,” Anna said, “Dave …” She puckered her lips and just barely shook her head at Toby.

“Sure,” David said quickly, “I’ll have one.”

He looked at Anna. She remembered how that same expression used to come over his face when he’d be going swimming with the other boys and his mother would say, before them, “Now you be careful, David, you know you’re not strong enough to swim in deep water.”

She brought out another tumbler and poured out for them all. She put the glasses side by side and added a little to this one, then to that one, so that they all had exactly the same.

After they’d eaten, Anna said to David, “Don’t you always have a nap after dinner, Dave?”

“No,” he said, “no.” (Please, Anna.)

“But Toby wouldn’t mind, would you, Toby?”

“No,” Toby said, “I wouldn’t mind. Go right ahead.” He wouldn’t mind, but he wouldn’t understand either. (Oh please, Anna.)

“I’m okay,” David said.

She began to ply him with questions then. One came so fast on the heels of the other that he had scarcely time for reply.

Was Steve married? Yes. Was Ben Fancy still alive? No. Did so-and-so still live in such-and-such a place? No, they’d moved to town. Did they still have salutings? Hardly ever. Who was
that
coming up the road? Keith Wallace, they were new people. Did Old Herb Hennessey still live there by himself? Yes. Did he remember the Hallowe’en they …? Yes, he remembered.

And every so often she’d break into her own questions with, “How
are
you, anyway?”—as if she couldn’t get over the wonder of them all being there together.

“All right,” he’d answer; closing up a little, even with her, when the question concerned himself. Keeping secret, even from her, what the doctor had hinted about his heart.

“What do you hear from Chris?”

It was a question she’d put off asking. Now she couldn’t bring it out easily.

“He’s all right,” David said. “It was only a foot wound. He’s somewhere out West, working in a factory. He only stayed here a week after they sent him home.”

“I don’t wonder—with those two.”

That was all they said. But he knew what they were both
thinking. They were thinking about the scar on his face, and about Chris, of all people, being cooped up in a factory. They were thinking about the Christmas Chris had got them imaginative gifts they’d never dreamed of expecting from
him
.

Toby had got up and begun to prowl about the house.

He lifted up this thing or that and set it down again: the little knickknacks on the mantel beside the eight-day clock; the carved wooden bowl that held the curled-up snapshots … He twirled the big wheel of the spinning wheel in the back room … He lifted the cheesecloth from the butter tray that lay on the ledge of the stone fireplace and traced the clover leaf pattern of the butter mould with his finger … He walked to one window and looked across the pasture of the dark spruce mountain, and then to another and looked beyond the ploughed land to the orchard and the marshes in the long cut of the valley and farther off, till it was only a silver thread, the winding river. Curiously, intently, as a child explores new surroundings.

“Toby!” Anna called. “Are you
ranging
again? Dave’ll think you’re rude, dear.”

She was only joking, but he came back into the kitchen, completely reduced. He would never get used to people saying something they didn’t mean, even in a joke.

“Go to it,” David laughed. “For heaven’s sake, Anna, I don’t care.”

Toby was as instantly reassured. He wrinkled his nose at Anna and went straight back.

“Say,” he called suddenly from the parlour, “Dave’s got an organ.”

Anna made a little gesture of helplessness. “He’s happy now, he’s found an
organ.”

Toby raced back to the kitchen. “Anna,” he said again, “there’s an organ in there!” It was Anna he addressed, but
David wasn’t excluded. It was the way they always spoke to each other: through her.

“I know,” Anna said. “Dave can
play
it too,” she added with mock slyness.

“Can you play it, Dave?” Toby said. “No kidding?”

That he could play the organ was one of the things David had always felt silly about with strangers. Somehow he didn’t mind admitting it to Toby now.

“Oh, I … I mean …” he said.

“Bup, bup, bup … now don’t mutter,” Anna said. “You know darn well you can.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Toby thrust his palms out flat. Then he grasped Anna and David each by an arm and hustled them into the parlour.

“If I play, you’ll have to sing,” David said.

“Don’t worry,” Anna said, laughing. “He’s dying to sing, aren’t you, dear? The minute he gets a drink he’s got to sing. And any other time I could coax him till …”

“Aw, Anna …” Toby said. He was completely reduced again.

“I
like
an organ,” he said to David quickly, earnestly; as if David might think he was just singing to show off. “I like to sing with an organ better than anything. It wouldn’t hurt to have a little tune,
would
it, Dave?”

“Sure,” David said.

He meant no, but it didn’t matter. The drinks were in them dissolvingly, joiningly, now: the smooth way it is when no one seems to notice if the answer fits the question only approximately. Even if you don’t answer at all it’s not like silence. The thoughts of the others are all swimming along, close against your own, behind the silence. The pain in his head was like a far-off tune hummed by someone else.

But it was when Toby actually began to sing that the drink, or whatever it was, really lifted in him.

The organ was old, but its tone was good and true; and suddenly Toby’s strong clean voice was singing with the organ, the same good clear way the organ sang. It was so really ringing and pure when the note went high that David felt a little chill trellis up his spine as if he’d struck his elbow.

He was sitting erect on the swivel stool. At first he felt stiff and silly. He could see his own face directly before him in the organ’s circular mirror. It demarcated him, abrogated the pleasant dissolution of the drink. But when Toby began to sing, the drink began to lift in him more dissolvingly than ever. He pressed out the volume flaps with both knees, held the keys down hard. It seemed as if he himself were singing, in the organ.