The Dawning of the Day (19 page)

The Brigport people who had never heard Gregg drunk gaped at him; the children roused from their sleepiness. Someone said loudly, “Well, I never! It's a disgrace, allowing that man inside the clubhouse! He's tight as a coot!”

Steve and Philippa were near the door. “Let's go out,” he said. “The dance is over. Gregg is all set for hours.”

“My coat—” she began.

“I'll get it.” When he came back, they went out through the knot of men listening at the door. When they were away from the chuckles and the crude jokes, the music sounded fiercely sweet in the night. Halfway down the lane, Philippa stopped to listen.

“He's good, Steve. No wonder he was so dignified. He knew.”

“Yes, he's good. He played in the Navy Band once. Funny what the spontaneous combustion of beer and sherry brings out, isn't it?”

“I wish they wouldn't laugh at him,” she said angrily. “Don't they realize what they're hearing? How many of them could get even one decent sound out of that clarinet?”

“That's why they laugh, to keep Gregg in his place as an old derelict. But he doesn't hear them. There's your security for you. All he hears is his music.”

“Poor Fort and Charles,” she said.

“It's spoiled their dance.” “It was almost over. They're lucky Gregg didn't smell the beer earlier.” His fingers tightened on her arm. “Where shall we go?”

“It's time for me to go home.” Her voice sounded shallow in her ears. To stand like this in the dark put her at a disadvantage. The place seemed completely unfamiliar to her; she might as well have been dropped from space onto a mountain peak.

Steve was a presence in the dark, disembodied except for fragments—a slow voice, fingers on her arm, the scent of a tweed jacket worn by a clean and orderly male who smoked. What was her own sum total as a presence? she wondered.

“It's a beautiful night on the water,” he said. “I have a little dory that goes like a gull feather before the wind.” He didn't release her arm. His voice brushed her in the shadow like the first warm airs of spring. “Now do you want to go home?”

It was a warm air, but she felt somehow cold. “No, I suppose not,” she said slowly. She wanted to keep talking, to ask bright vivacious questions about the dory, but she couldn't think of anything. When he moved, she wasn't surprised. He took her by the shoulders and kissed her. It was as gentle, and as positive, as all his movements were. Her mind tried frantically to right itself; her heartbeat seemed to shake the frail cage of her bones. She saw the pale powdering of the Milky Way going down toward the woods, and they were the same as they had been a minute before, but she had changed. Something had been liberated which she had barely known to exist. If only I had gone home! she kept thinking. The thought tolled like a bell. If only I had gone home.

He put his arms around her and kissed her temple and cheekbone. She felt a sadness, but at the same time her hands, moving independently, pressed against his hard lean sides under the tweed jacket, and she turned her mouth toward his. The dismay and rejoicing whirled together until she could not tell one from the other.

In a few moments they moved apart as naturally as they had come together. The sound of his breathing had a peculiar intimacy for her.

“Look,” she said. “They're coming.” She saw the flashlights on the far side of the field and heard the voices in the lane. Gregg was still playing, but the lamps in the clubhouse were being blown out one by one. She was looking across the black frosty space into another world which held no significance for her whatever. One flashlight bobbed toward them. They heard Joanna's strong, gay voice. “Good night, Ella! Good night, Vi!”

Steve took Philippa's hand. “Come on,” he whispered. “Through the windbreak.” They ran over the uneven ground, passing through a gap in the long row of Sorensen spruces, cutting across by the village well and down by the Binnacle to the shore.

They went into Nils's fishhouse and stood there hand in hand in the close darkness smelling pungently of marlin, spruce laths, and paint. The Foss Campions were going by. Helen broke into uninhibited laughter, and Philippa began to tremble. She felt as unpredictable as a cat before a storm. Steve put his arm around her shoulders.

“What's the matter?” he said close to her ear.

“I want to laugh,” she said helplessly, and turned her face against his jacket. He caressed the nape of her neck, rumpled her hair, and then smoothed it. Suddenly her eyes filled with tears.

“Come on,” Steve said at last. “They've gone. We'll go rowing now.”

P
hilippa had always been amazed at the way the human personality could make itself accept the irrevocable. She had come to realize that the power of acceptance was a partner of the will to survive. If you refused to agree, with your whole spirit, that certain catastrophic events had already occurred, you battered yourself to pieces eventually against the brutal wall of your dissent.

The thing happened; in a matter of minutes your life was altering its flow around and over the incident. In fifteen minutes or less Philippa had accepted this new circumstance. But with an instinct for self-defense, she was trying not to think about it until she felt calm enough to sort motives and emotions into their proper places.

She sat in the stern of the dory while Steve rowed down along the western side of the island. The land rose on her left, a long, massive black shape, saw-toothed against the gun-metal color of the sky and the pale glitter of stars. Tonight there were no coves or uneven projections of rocks. The shadow of the island lay on the water, and there was no telling where the water left off and the rocks began. It bore no relation to the sunny slopes where cranberries ripened, and ground sparrows flew up from tussocks, and the young spruces were brightly verdant at the edge of the woods. This was dream country, another planet.

She could see Steve clearly now in the starlight. He didn't talk to her but seemed to have gone into another mood entirely. The little dory slid over the water as fast as he had promised, the white water bubbling and hissing at her bow. The oars dipped up cold white fire; the blades were outlined with light and left luminous eddies behind. Once Steve said, “Look over the side. Don't move fast.”

The dory felt as airily unsubstantial as a mussel shell. She looked carefully over the side and saw a crowding, darting mass of silver arrows in the water all around and under the boat, “What is it?” she whispered.

“Herring.”

“Is that what you see when you go seining, then? Is that how you find them?” She hunted eagerly for questions. Herring made a safe subject.

“That's the way. You should see them in the seine. Then you'd know what molten silver means.”

“It's too bad to catch anything that can go as fast and look so beautiful.”

He didn't answer that, and she wasn't surprised. There was really no answer. He shipped the oars and got out his cigarettes. There was a swell, as quiet as the breath of a sleeper, and the dory was carried on it without a sound. From the end of the island came the low whisper of the rote. Steve's match flared; his skin showed ruddy. He was glancing downward, intently, at his cigarette. But just before he threw the match overboard, he looked at her. She felt as if he had touched her.

When the match had gone overboard, he didn't pick up the oars again. The dory moved quietly with the tide.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked. “Don't say herring. I know better.”

“I was thinking about you and me,” she said in a low voice. “I was wondering why it happened.”

“Do you have to wonder? Can't you just let it be?”

“I'm sorry,” she said humbly, “but I have to understand my part of it, at least. Didn't you ever do something that seemed so strange and unpredictable—for you—that you were bewildered?”

He looked up at the black mass of the island drifting by. After a moment he said, “Yes, I guess I have. There was one thing I couldn't figure out for a long time. It bothered me for about ten years, and then one day I let it go.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Why was it so easy to let go? Had it worn itself out in ten years, lost its importance? Or were you just tired of wondering?”

“I don't know. After ten years I was still having dreams about it that brought me awake all standing.” He turned his head toward her; she could see in the starlight that he was smiling. “But maybe the sting of it had gone. It was easy to let go, finally, because something had come along that there was no question about.”

She loosened her fingers consciously from the side of the seat. “What was it?”

“You.”

“When you say there was no question about it, what do you mean?”

“I mean I love you,” he said.

“But you
can't
!” she said, desperately. “Love—what I call love—isn't like that. It's not sudden, it's slow. It doesn't hit you like a bolt from the blue. And even if it did—well, I have no illusions, Steve. There's nothing about me to fascinate a man all in an instant—” She stopped, and Steve said mildly, “Go on.”

“I'm independent, I'm opinionated, I talk like a schoolma'am even out of hours.” Fleetingly she saw Young Charles glowering at her across the desk.

“You're a lot of other things,” he said. “You think they don't show, but they do. Mrs. Marshall's one person, but Philippa's another. She looks out sometimes, past the mother and the widow and the teacher.”

She didn't know what to say. His words enchanted her; she could not help a fierce and secret rejoicing that this was no dream, that this was actually happening to her.

“You can't doubt me, Philippa,” Steve said. “I'm thirty-eight. I'm not Young Charles. You know in your heart that I'm telling you the truth. It's yourself you're doubting.”

“Why shouldn't I?” He gave her no quarter; he was using honesty as a weapon against her. “My husband has been dead eight years. He was the sum and substance of everything I'd ever wanted. When I knew he was dead, I expected I would never be stirred by another man, that I'd never feel even the faintest sort of physical attraction. I thought that phase of my existence had died with Justin. I was wrong, I know that. I must have thought I was superhuman. But now—tonight—and it started before tonight, if you want to know—” she flung at him defiantly—“I've been shaken out of my common sense, and I don't know what I feel. I can't tell whether it's
you
who has done this to me or the smell of your clean shirt!”

Her laughter sounded a little wild to her. Steve said, “I wish this darn dory wasn't so tittle-ish, so I could move without drowning us both. What's that about the clean smell of my shirt?”

“I noticed it the first time I met you, outside your brother Mark's house. For a moment—well, it didn't exactly remind me of Justin, but of
something
, a mood or an atmosphere. It's deceptive, can't you see?”

His voice was tenderly amused. “What happens when other men wear clean shirts just scrubbed and ironed by their loving womenfolk?”

“Nothing,” she said unwillingly. She wished she could see him more clearly. The starlight was an aggravation.

“Listen, my darling,” Steve said, leaning toward her. “The world isn't going to end tonight. You've got plenty of time to find the facts. I'm not going to come down on you like Young What's-his-name out of the west and carry you off on my horse.” He took up the oars. The blades dipped with a whisper and stirred up fire. “We'll go back to the harbor. I've kept away from you too long.”

The village was quick at putting itself to bed after the dance. There were no lights anywhere when they came into the harbor; there was nothing to suggest that Gregg's music had once soared out over the island like a bird.

Philippa stood on the narrow strip of sand that appeared between Nils's and Sigurd's wharves when the tide was out, waiting while Steve put the dory on the haul-off. He came back to her then and put his hands lightly on either side of her waist inside her coat. She tensed instinctively, but without antagonism. “My clean shirt,” he murmured. “So that was it. I thought it was tweed and tobacco that was supposed to do it.”

“I was always different,” she whispered back. “Awfully homespun.”

“You don't feel homespun.” He put his arms around her all the way, under her coat, and held her close to him. As her arms went round his neck, she knew she must have wanted to do it the other time. He kissed her without violence but with a steadily deepening ardor, and her response came in a pure, free current.

He lifted his head and said, “That was Philippa.” The words were a little unsteady. She stared at him in the dimness without speaking, knowing the new, soft unsteadiness of her mouth, the whole new defenselessness that would be part of her now.

He turned her toward the little rocky path that led up between the fishhouses. They walked around the harbor in silence. Steve took her hand and laced his fingers through hers. There was something irrevocable about the entwining grip of bone and sinew, the warm contact of palms.
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss
, she thought; she knew that even if there should be no more, this night could be enough to break her heart.

At Asanath's back door they stood for a moment facing each other. An interrogative chirrup sounded in the darkness, and the firm, furry body of the yellow cat leaned against Philippa's legs. She said gratefully, “Here's Tom.”

“Good night, Philippa,” Steve said.

“Good night, Steve.”

He didn't offer to touch her, but said softly, “Don't go to bed and think. Dream. Maybe you'll dream what you want to know.” He walked away quickly. The cat went into the house with her.