Swamp Angel (11 page)

“I lived like this most of my life, and this is what I like,” said Maggie. “I’ll go and change if you’ll show me – and I’ll come back and we can talk … and you’ll tell me,” she added.

As she moved away to go with Vera Gunnarsen to the cabin, she turned again, and stood. Her look traveled over Three Loon Lake, sparkling, shimmering, melting, silent – over the lodgepine shores, over the low curves of the hills, knowledgeably to the little dock with the boats, over the log house and the small littered log cabins under the trees.

“Your place is grand, Mr. Gunnarsen,” she said. “We think so,” he said, and then thought My, she’s a lovely-looking woman! The women went on and Alan trailed them. Haldar resumed his slow sweeping. My
God
, wouldn’t it be a break! If we could swing it! If she’ll stay! If she’s really any good! Why ever would she come here! If she doesn’t want the earth!

A first meeting. A meeting in the desert, a meeting at sea, meeting in the city, meeting at night, meeting at a grave, meeting in the sunshine beside the forest, beside water. Human beings meet, yet the meetings are not the same. Meeting partakes in its very essence not only of the persons but of the place of meeting. And that essence of place remains, and colors, faintly, the association, perhaps forever.

“W
ell,” said Hilda to her mother, “have you made arrangements with Alberto? Can he come? I’ll have to empty a drawer and the cupboard for him in my room, hang him. I really
do
wish, Mother, that you’d have Mrs. Spink. She’s not so much fun, I know, but her breathing won’t kill you.”

“I’d rather have Alberto,” said Mrs. Severance.

“Very well,” and Hilda turned to go, then quickly turned again. She was suspicious of something in the air. “You
have
arranged with him?”

“I shall telephone him,” said Mrs. Severance evasively.

“You telephoned him yesterday!”

“Yes, but he had a very ‘leetle’ cold. It will be better.”

“Really Mother, you are aggravating! Do you think I can go away with a free mind with you nursing Alberto with a leetle cold? He’d adore it. You’d be bending over Alberto’s bed all day and him rolling his eyes up and blessing you and you working like a horse and living on the telephone explaining to the hotel that Mr. Cosco has a temperature. I shall telephone him myself.”

Mrs. Severance was delighted at Hilda’s concern about her, but did not say so.

Hilda spent some time at the telephone while Mrs. Severance sat still, looking amused.

“Your friend Alberto has a bad septic throat. His landlady seemed to think that he intended to come here just the same. I think she was disappointed…. Mrs. Spink will come and get dinner and stay and sleep here and get breakfast and clean up and then go to her family every day and come back again. It won’t be long and I’ll be satisfied.”

“Well … Really …” said Mrs. Severance who was both chagrined and pleased. She found Alberto amusing, and was sorry that he had a septic throat. She found Mrs. Spink diverting, but she preferred her own company and complete freedom in her small house to Mrs. Spink.

How I love Alberto, she thought. How inordinately he laughs! He laughs with his hair and his eyes and his teeth and his fists and his elbows. He shakes this house up like a cocktail. What the devil does he mean by having a septic throat. She resigned herself, and prepared a welcome
(deuxième classe)
for Mrs. Spink.

“Can you be trusted?” asked Hilda, carrying a small suitcase and a coat and a picnic basket through the room. “Mrs. Spink doesn’t need any cupboards and drawers. She’s not like Alberto. She can change the bed, too.”

“Yes, dear,” said Mrs. Severance primly.

She pulled herself up from the chair, walked out to the small veranda and watched Hilda putting the suitcase and the basket into the back of the absurd car, something like a bathtub, as Mrs. Severance had said.

Hilda ran up the steps and kissed her mother good-by. As Mrs. Severance watched her going back to the car, she beheld
her with new eyes. Not the customary Hilda coming in, but the traveler in a small clean car from – where? San Francisco perhaps? Toronto perhaps? She is very smart in that flannel suit, thought her mother. It’s quite perfect. Hilda’s face that could so easily storm over (“the black dog on her face,” Philip used to say when she was a child) was glowing. She would pick up her friend Margaret. She started the car, leaned out and waved to her mother, with the flash of a smile, and was away.

Mrs. Severance watched the little car until it vanished. She stood with her hands in her dressing-gown pockets. In one pocket was a packet of cigarettes, some matches, and a man’s handkerchief; in the other pocket was the little Swamp Angel which she fingered as she looked about her. The air was cool, nearly cold, fresh after rain. She turned back into the house, walked slowly about, and very much enjoyed an emptiness and freedom that seemed to be there.

The house was ugly and cramped and had been rushed up about fifteen years before. Its front was a botch of small pretentious and superfluous gables and fancy roof. The windows were both too plain and too fancy. A short flight of steps led up to a veranda almost too small for a chair but large enough to say good-by upon. A window looked partly onto the veranda, so that a person standing on the veranda, to the left of the door, could look into the room which Mrs. Severance chose to call the parlor, toward the fireplace which was on an outside wall. At night soft yellow curtains, drawn, gave a look of intimacy, even charm, to the objectionable little house on the thirty-foot lot. Mrs. Severance no longer observed the outside appearance of her house which had long been simply the structure that contained her chair, her table, her bed, and her kitchen.

I will go out, she thought. It’s quite nice to be alone. I
don’t really care for humanity … it gets between me and my desires which are very simple, but constant. I think that Hilda thinks I’m “peculiar.” Well, perhaps I am. And so, by revulsion, I have made her more conventional, and now she’s afraid of what the sight of me might do to this young man, and the other young men. (Mrs. Severance felt wounded, and yet she saw the reasonableness of this.) … Well, I can’t take to going out in coats and skirts and hats, even to oblige, and she fingered the Swamp Angel in her dressing-gown pocket absently. When Philip was alive we didn’t seem peculiar, he and I, not to ourselves anyway. I suppose we lived in peculiar places. I’ll brush my hair and put on my cape over this, and go to the end of the block and back. She used the old-fashioned phrase “to take the air.” She thought It is a long time since I’ve taken the air.

She brushed back her coarse gray hair and put on the long cape over her dressing gown. She took her heavy walking stick and went slowly down the steps. She felt that she had made every concession to what was correct, in order not to shame or annoy the absent Hilda.

A woman looking out between the curtains of the next house said “Oh come quick! Look, there’s that woman again! Isn’t she peculiar!”

Mrs. Severance, not feeling peculiar, walked slowly with much dignity along the sidewalk, looking about her but thinking of Albert Cousins. Her ingenious mind reached out this way and that. She wished to decoy Albert Cousins, and to convey innocently to him that nothing would induce her ever to live with a married daughter, nothing in the world, neither politeness nor persuasion. There are times (she knew) when things should be left alone, but still she thought about the absent unknown Albert Cousins and was aware of her chance.

Having reached the corner, she turned, and walked slowly back to the house. This is very pleasant, she thought, I must do this again. She then took a false step as she approached her gate, and fell heavily to the ground.

O
n the evening of her fall, Mrs. Severance lay in her huge bed with a strapped and aching ankle. Both her body and her mind were tired and sedated. She thought, and then her thoughts slid away. Then she awoke and thought again. Visions, with words, arose which had long occupied her mind; she had not cared to talk about them, except, as now, to herself.

All this nowadays of symbol symbol symbol … destroying reality … too much power, people worship symbol … obscures something … what … obscures … she drifted.

She woke. A shade that was Philip passed, and passed again. Where are we Philip, the storm came in bumps. She opened her eyes and saw her bedroom. She closed her eyes again … the Angel. The Angel must go … because it is a symbol and too dear … and some other reason … what other reason … she drifted.

In that terrible minute this afternoon when she had fallen, she had been helpless and – what was, for her, far far worse – she had lain exposed in her bulk and disarray to the gaze of a gathering crowd of (she thought) youths and a man,
some women, children, who had helped and pulled and talked, and not helped and stood and talked, outside her house and inside her house. She who was private had lost all privacy; she and her house had been exposed to curious eyes. The terror was not in the fall, but in that instant when she had heard the word “gun!” and had opened her eyes and had seen the Swamp Angel sprung from her loose pocket and lying just beyond her reach. She had with exquisite pain heaved herself toward the Angel and had grasped it before a rush of two boys descended. If it had been my bag, she said to herself, or my purse, anything but the Angel, I shouldn’t have minded. What’s a fall? Nothing. The poor old woman! She fell! Thank you, my dear, you’re very kind. Does it hurt, now? There then. The Angel was a gun. She had almost forgotten that the Angel was a gun, and therein lay some strange difference to the people at the gate. “Gosh it’s a gun! … She’s got a gun! … pleece will … better report it … registered firearms … see, she’s hid it … I seen it … it was laying right there … what’s she doing with a gun? … Lady, was that a gun? … Maybe someone’s shot her…. Maybe she shot somebody …”

Mrs. Severance pressed the hard shape of the revolver against her great thigh within the bed. It was not safe beyond her hand. She thought It will live longer than I shall … what will happen to it … I shall not keep the Swamp Angel any more … what shall I do? She drifted away.

She woke again. Through her numbed and dreamy state she heard, not three yards from her closed bedroom door, the shrill of voice of Mrs. Spink who was obeying instructions.

“I couldn’t say, I’m shaw,” said Mrs. Spink.

… …

“I reelly couldn’t say.”

… …

“Mrs. Severing is laying in her bed very sick. She might of broke her ankle. She had a Fall!” Mrs. Spink magnified the word until it nearly caught up with the fact.

… … …

“No, you couldn’t. The doctor said. The doctor wouldn’t allow. Not under any circumstances he wouldn’t allow.”

… …

“I don’t know nothing … I just work here … couldn’t say, I’m shaw.” This went on for some time.

Mrs. Severance heard the front door close. Printed words in an evening paper swam before her eyes.

“Aged woman wields gun,” “presence of revolver unexplained,” “understood police will investigate.” She groaned.

Poor Hilda. How she would hate this. She was aware that Hilda, for some reason, had never seemed to like the Swamp Angel. And Mrs. Severance, lying there, thought with anguish of the little gun that lay against her thigh, given to strangers, descending to a junk shop, bought by … I shall lose it and save it, she thought foggily. I shall feel clearer in the morning. And she slept.

In the morning she ached, and her ankle gave her pain, but she was in better humor. She pulled herself up in bed.

“Bring me that square rosewood box, the little desk,” she said.

“There was a young man last night but he didn’t get anything out of
me
. I told him to lay off. I said I didn’t know nothing…. I said to him …”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Severance soothingly. “You were so good, Mrs. Spink. You were wonderful! I heard you …” she was looking at some large sheets of writing paper. She held them to the light. “Get me two slices of dry bread. And the
telephone book.”

“Bread?”

“Yes, dry bread. And there’ll be a box or two in the broom cupboard … there’s a cardboard shoe box, I think. Bring the box, and some strong paper and string.”

“Okay,” said Mrs. Spink, thinking Dry Bread?

Mrs. Severance examined and compared a few sheets of heavy cream writing paper. The writing paper bore a crest. She made pellets of the bread and cleaned the paper thoroughly. She had kept these sheets of paper in the rosewood box – why she did not know – after a visit to the only relatives of Philip’s who had accepted and loved her – long since dead. She must be sparing of this paper which now, she thought, smiling a little, was to be an oblation to snobbery. Whose snobbery? Well, mine, at least, she admitted to herself.

She wrote a rough copy, and studied what she had written, smoking. In her fine large hand she transcribed what she had written onto the ancient paper, fulfilling itself, this September morning half a century on.