The Dawning of the Day (18 page)

Viola adjusted a hairpin with a sudden stabbing motion. She seemed peculiarly exhilarated, high color on her shiny cheekbones. “There were three schoolteachers rented a cottage on Brigport last summer. I guess they were out for their last fling, by the looks of some of their actions! One of 'em made a perfect fool of herself over Young Charles. A woman
her
age taking up with that boy!”

“How did they behave at the dances?” Philippa asked politely.

“I wasn't talking about that. They knew better than to act up in public. That's the best I can say of them.”

“Well, that's quite a lot,” said Philippa lightly. “Now as for me—why, I haven't been to a dance for so long I can't be sure how I'll react to all the excitement. It's like liquor, you know. Some people take just one drink and disgrace themselves.” Vi stared at her suspiciously. Philippa added, “You just can't tell, what with my being a schoolteacher and all.”

There was an instant of silence before Helen flung herself back in her chair, shrieking with laughter. Asanath chuckled; even Suze, looking at Viola's bleak face, smiled. When Helen's tumult had died down, Vi folded her hands tidily in her lap.

“Well, you're quite a joker, Mrs. Marshall. A real wit. I'm sure there's plenty on Bennett's Island who'll appreciate that in the teacher.” She turned squarely in her chair. “Have you tried that new heel yet, Suze? It wears like iron in Syd's socks, but maybe it's me more than the heel. I was never one to let him wear a pair of socks more than two days in those stinking old rubber boots.”

The light flashed on Suze's glasses. “Well,
I'm
not one to let Asa wear dirty socks either,” she answered with unusual determination.

O
n the night of the dance Steve came for Philippa. The afterglow had deepened to blue dusk, which became night with the clear starry stillness that precedes frost. Two boats came from Brigport; their engines were audible on Bennett's Island from the time they came around Tenpound.

Steve and Philippa were walking around the harbor when the boats came up Long Cove, and they could hear singing over the hum of the engines. It was the final touch; she felt deep within herself, like a young bird held carefully in the hand, a tremulous and youthful anticipation of the night ahead. The irony of it amused her. When she was fifteen or so and should have felt like this, she had approached such occasions with an aggressive blend of valor and antagonism. It was nice to have grown beyond all that. When you were young and yearned for the privileges of maturity, you could not guess what the best of the privileges would be.

“Security,” she said.

“What?” asked Steve. “Did I miss something?”

“No, I was thinking aloud. I was thinking about the security of being thirty, and all the things you can enjoy in a calm, unqualified way without trembling on the verge of ecstasy or woe.”

“Does that end when you're thirty?”

“It should, if a person is sufficiently mature.”

He didn't answer, and his silence piqued her.

“What's the matter?” she asked. “Don't you think it's possible to reach a state of calm after storm? Oh, I know I have a boy to raise, but I don't anticipate any more than the usual amount of confusion that goes with an ordinary child. And I hope I can take that as an adult should. Apart from him, I expect to do my work and live my life with no great heights and no great depths. I've had them all.”

Suddenly she felt as if she were talking too much. She hadn't planned on sounding so smug. My noble aunt, she thought, blushing. They were safely in the dark again, walking along the path by the well toward the lane that led to the clubhouse. She thought angrily, Why did I have to start this? It's quite possible that I've spoiled my evening.

“I wasn't sniping,” Steve said after a moment. “I was admiring you.”

“What about you?” she said quickly. “You've been to war and come back, you go quietly from one day to the next. You must have achieved some sort of compromise with life.”

“I have. But the trouble is, I don't know how long it will last.”

They turned into the lane. Ahead of them, light fell from the open door of the clubhouse; there were the sounds of scuffling and laughter from the porch, children shrieking as they ran around the building in a game made mysterious and terrifying by the dark. Above it all, the music floated in random, disembodied fragments—a liquid run on the clarinet, the thin unworldly merriment of a violin playing a phrase of a reel for the accordion to follow. There were people coming behind Philippa and Steve in the lane. The little Percys pounded by like foals. A flashlight bobbed across the field from Nils Sorensen's house. Philippa looked up at the black lances of the spruces reaching for Orion; she breathed the quiet cold of frost, sweet with the sad fragrance of dead leaves in the lane. She heard the voices ringing out like bells in the island night, and the scraps of music coming together suddenly into a tune.

“Sometimes we've had dances up here that have been wicked disappointments,” Joanna said to Philippa. “Sometimes there's a feeling—it's hard to describe—that everybody's been flung out to a different point of the compass, and even if we all gather up here, we might as well be perfect strangers because we can't get together in our minds. But when there's a
good
dance, it's like this. Everyone wants it to be good, and they've got it in them to make it a fine thing. It's another sort of feeling, an outgiving. For a little while, all the grievances are stowed out of sight.”

“I shouldn't think there were too many grievances on a place like this,” said Philippa.

Joanna gave her a dark, subtly mocking glance. “It's not Utopia.”

They were sitting out a dance not from lack of partners but from choice. With thirty couples or more to take part in “Lady of the Lake,” there was so much swinging that Philippa had been grateful to be on her feet at the end of the last one. The clubhouse had kept on whirling, and she clutched at her partner's arm. It was Nils Sorensen. He had laughed and led her back to her seat with his arm snugly around her waist.

“You've got no head,” he told her. “You'll have to do better than this. We had a schoolma'am once who could swing all the men off their feet.”

Philippa had been guided through the first of the dances by Steve, Young Charles, and Nils. After that her partners had been varied; Foss Campion, young Ralph Percy, Mark Bennett, Sky Campion and a Brig-port fisherman in lusty middle age. When she counted up the changes of partners in “Liberty Waltz,” she realized she had danced with almost everyone and had not found a poor dancer yet. Young boys and girls learned how to dance in the most natural manner possible. There was no artificial segregation of age groups; neither the young nor the old were embarrassed in one another's company.

Steve went out on the porch for a cigarette. Joanna went off down the hall to speak to a Brigport woman, and Philippa sat peacefully alone for a few minutes. She followed first one person and then another through the play of light and shadow under the hanging lamps. Now and then someone stood out against the involved pattern as if spotlighted. Once Kathie came toward her, her hair like an aureole under the lamps, and then was swung away. She saw Young Charles, bending in a courtly way to swing Clare Percy, whose small face was frozen with happiness. Helen Campion danced with Asanath; she was as light on her feet for her great size as she had claimed. Nils's partner was Suze. She still looked confused and indefinite, but she knew her way perfectly and didn't lag.

Fort stood propped against the cold stove and went from one tune to the other without a change of pace. She knew some of the more common ones: “Turkey in the Straw”; “Old Zip Coon”; “Golden Slippers”; “Little Brown Jug.” Joanna had given her more names: “The White Cockade”; “Stack of Barley”; “The Rakes of Mallow”; “My Love Is But a Lassie Yet”; “The Dawning of the Day.” She loved them; she would write them all to Eric, but how was she to tell about Fort with his fiddle snugged under his round chin, his red brush coppery in the lamplight, his eyes shut to slits, his thick fingers marvelously agile on the strings, and the bow dancing with its own wild, unearthly music?

Fort played alone at the moment. The accordionist, a Brigport boy, had gone out for a smoke and some of the beer his friends had hidden in the tall wet grass across the lane. Gregg had gone out too.

The whole island, except for the Websters, seemed to be represented, either in the hall or out on the porch. She had seen Perley standing in the doorway once, in the group that didn't take part but loitered outside, looking on. Terence had come in briefly, he had waltzed once with Kathie, and then he had gone out again.

Philippa wondered if the Webster children heard the music. Their house was the nearest to the clubhouse. They must have heard it jigging and ringing in the windless night. All this warmth and joy, and they were shut away from it by their fear; they were afraid even to come and peek in at the windows because someone might touch them in the dark. She knew their father by sight, a man who looked frail and awkward in the guise of a fisherman, as if it were an ill-fitting costume. She tried to picture the mother; what sort of fey creature was she?

She became aware suddenly that the music had stopped and the hall was emptying; it was a sort of breathing spell, with the men going out to the porch and the women moving around to visit with one another. Fort put his fiddle in the case and went out.

Young Charles leaned over her suddenly. “What are you dreaming about?” he murmured.

“Island life,” she said. “I like it.”

“Let's talk about it some. Let's go for a walk, down to Mark's wharf and back.” His eyes glistened. “It's some handsome out. Know anything about the stars? Andromeda, the Great Square of Pegasus?” He gave off an aura of ardent vitality, the way a spruce forest under a hot sun gives off an exciting resinous breath. If I were seventeen, thought Philippa, I should be thoroughly intoxicated by now.

She let him talk on and watched Viola Goward with Mrs. Percy; they sat directly opposite. Mrs. Percy was a small, sere woman with a wry face, as if her teeth were forever being set on edge. They were talking fiercely against the buzz of other voices and the noise of the children who kept lashing themselves awake by sliding on the dance floor. They were also watching Philippa. The shrewd glances flicked toward her and Charles at rhythmic intervals.

“Did you ever go rowing when the water was firing?” asked Charles. “Come on, Philippa.”

She said with amiable firmness, “No, Charles.”

His face tightened. He got up quickly and walked toward the open door. Philippa was sorry for him and at the same time annoyed. His self-assurance would have been crass in someone with less charm. She had liked him better when he had walked through the woods with her; then he had been a little shy, a little stricken with the newness of what he felt.

He passed Steve in the doorway without speaking to him. Steve turned his head and looked after him briefly. Then he came inside, and his gaze moved without apparent direction around the hall. He was thin and straight, with a way of holding his narrow, neat dark head that expressed an inherent self-command.

When he reached Philippa, his face changed. He came and sat down beside her. “Got your breath back? You'll need it.”

“Why? It isn't possible that there's another faster, more complicated dance, is it?”

“Gregg's got at the beer. They've been trying to steer him away from it, but he could smell it at forty fathoms.” His eyes puckered at the corners. “It was quite a thing. Everybody falling over everybody else in the dark, looking for him, and he was farming off down the lane with his arms full of beer cans. When the beer meets up with that sherry, there'll be some mighty interesting results.”

“And the boys worked so hard to keep him in shape,” Philippa said. Poor Charles, she thought. Something else to frustrate him.

“It's nothing unexpected. We could get along without him if he'd go home and stay. But he's had his beer and he's back again. They asked him to play for a dance, by crikey, and he'll play for a dance.”

A roar of laughter went up from the porch. Fort came in, moving rather rapidly, and picked up his fiddle. He winked at Philippa. Then Gregg appeared, flanked by Nils Sorensen and a lanky Brigport man. They were laughing still, but Gregg was solemn. He pulled himself free of them and tried to straighten his tie, which had got worked around under one ear. His faded eyes were wet with concentration, and his mouth was prim. He walked the length of the hall with short, precise steps. In spite of his pudginess and the tendency of his rumpled blue serge trousers to drop below his belly, he achieved a queer sort of dignity, perhaps because he was so intent.

The accordionist took his place, sank his chin moodily on his instrument, and waited with indifference for orders.

“Choose your partners for a waltz!” Charles shouted angrily from the doorway, and went out again. Fort began “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and the accordion joined in. Steve and Philippa went out onto the floor with the rest.

“Optimists,” said Steve.

“Perhaps he won't play,” said Philippa. “He looks sleepy.” But over Steve's shoulder she saw Gregg lift his clarinet.

There was a wild and intricate soaring of notes like the flight of a singing bird. For a few minutes the others plunged doggedly on, but Gregg was too close to them; they could hardly hear their own music. Fort gave up first, undone by his sense of humor. The accordionist played like a mechanical toy wound up until he saw that no one was dancing. Gregg played on, his eyes shut; he was lost in a world of his own making, starred with a glittering swarm of notes. He swam among them as effortlessly as a fish. It was, for Gregg, his moment of truth.