Swamp Angel (14 page)

One day, a few weeks after Maggie had come to the lodge she went up a grassy knoll from which she was able to see to the end of the lake and round, a little, into the dog’s leg. If the boats had begun their leisurely return down the lake – the rowers stopping to cast, taking the oars again, tempted by a rise, stopping to cast again – she could tell that it was time to start the dinner. How lovely was the sight, the lake so mild today, the skies bluely benign and clear. She saw that the boats seemed to have turned and she went down the hill. Walking with her light springing tread she made no noise when she reached the level places. Some distance to her right was the
trunk of a large fallen pine tree lying at an angle, with the thick end of the tree supported by another fallen log. Along the fallen tree Alan crawled on hands and knees. When he reached the end of the tree he rose and said “I’m a Mexican leopard!” and sprang to the ground. He picked himself up, ran back to the tree, prowled along the trunk, rose, and sprang. “I’m a Mexican leopard!” Maggie watched the Mexican leopard with fond smiling pleasure. The leopard prowled, spoke, and sprang again. In the leopard’s mind a joyful kaleidoscope of bright Mexico and dark Africa swirled and blended. Both were the same to him, and no less real in that place than himself. There came a cry “A-lan!” The leopard looked startled, jumped down, and slipped into the forest. Maggie walked on.

“Did you see Alan?” asked Vera with creased brows. “He hasn’t done his wood.”

“No,” said Maggie. She thought That’s not fair to Vera but it takes God himself to be fair to two different people at once. What she had seen was a leopard slipping secretly into the forest from which Alan would no doubt emerge.

M
aggie moved her bed out-of-doors onto the porch which ran the length of the small cabin. There was an overhang of roof. With what delight, when the day was done, she used to lie in her bed looking out at the dark lake, the pale lake, the dark and lighted sky. The excellent air breathed round her in the night. She heard small sounds but they did not alarm her. Lap … lap … went the lake after a windy afternoon. As she looked at the stars or at the white moon and its shining path, before her eyelids closed, she often heard the cry of the loon, more mysterious in the night. Listen to the melodious wail! Or is it a laugh. Is it a message to the creatures of the lake. Perhaps it announces change of weather. It is indeed mysterious in sound. It clatters and ceases. Owls chuckle melodiously and go silent. Her tormented nights of humiliations between four small walls and in the compass of a double bed were gone, washed away by this air, this freedom, this joy, this singleness and forgetfulness. One night she saw, north of the lake, a pale glow invade the sky. Maggie got up and pulled the blanket round her. The pale glow was greenish, no, a hot color rose up and quickly took possession. The color
changed. The vast sky moved as with banners. The sky was an intimation of something still vaster, and spiritual. For two hours Maggie watched enraptured the great folding, playing, flapping of these draperies of light in heaven, transient, unrepeated, sliding up and down the sky. After declaiming lavishly, the great Northern Lights faded with indifference as one who is bored and – deploring display – says I may come back but only if I choose; I do as I wish; I am powerful; I am gone but I am here. The orthodox stars, which had been washed away, returned palely. Night was resumed, and Maggie slept.

A faint light of dawn awoke her too early. Her eyes opened to the gray lake. Passing winds seemed to have left lanes of silver on the water but now the pointed trees beside the cabin had become still. The morning was yet gray and the movements of two phantoms on the rough grass in front of her cabin seemed to be part of sleeping, not of waking. Then she became aware and sat up very slowly. She stayed as still as a stone, filled with instant delight. About ten feet away was a young deer, so young that its pale dapples showed as almost transparent. It seemed more like a concentration of morning mist than a little fawn of flesh and blood. The deer’s slender legs were spraddled wide as it gazed down upon the tabby kitten who caracoled, bucked, cavorted and pounced kitten-wise at its feet. The kitten’s strong tabby markings showed dark in the pale morning. The kitten ignored the fawn, but the fawn stood, awkward and lovely, intent on the kitten alone. Maggie watched, entranced. The kitten, crouching, feinting, melting silently into kitten curves, darted in small rushes across the uneven piny ground, and the young deer followed, nose down to the kitten, with short deliberate bowing steps. Up and down in the gray morning went the two young things, the watcher and the watched one.

The kitten stopped flirting with herself. Indifferent to the attentive fawn, she moved like an adult serious cat to the cabin, jumped up lightly, and sat yawning beside the bed. The deer stepped delicately to the rustic rail, and, with neck outstretched, kept its limpid eyes on the kitten – large gentle eyes of beauty without meaning. Suddenly the kitten became a family house cat and leaped on the bed, warm with a night’s sleep. No longer feral, no longer incandescent, she curled into her comfortable curve and acknowledged Maggie with a pleased green blink. Warm, soft, round, and settled as for hours past and to come, the little cat closed her eyes with voluptuous languor, appeared to sleep, and began to purr. The purr rolled out from the furry little stomach upon the silent and surprised morning. This unnatural noise amazed the fawn which shot forward its large receptive ears, and still gazed upon the kitten. (This is a sight of perfect innocence; it is some enchantment, thought Maggie, and I cannot share it with anyone.) Soon, in the thicket close by, the first bird chirped, and the deer turned quickly at the sound which fell into the air with a tinkle as of glass.

The day was clearer now, and with the real dawn the birds awoke, so that little by little the callings of the birds to the morning filled the spacious air. Still stood the deer.

The kitten awoke, completely aware of birds in the woods. She jumped down and trotted along the veranda and onto the ground. Then, flattening herself, extending herself paw by predatory paw, she passed crouching into the forest. Close behind her stepped the fawn with its delicate bowing tread. The woods received them. Vanished were fawn and tiger.

Maggie did not see this sight again. The Northern Lights did not return. Nevertheless, at night she lay, alive to each sound and sight of the dark; she fell asleep too late and she
woke too early. This will not do with all that work ahead, she said to herself, and moved her bed indoors again.

A
t the busy time (and after a week or two every day was busy time) Maggie could not always have a swim. But sometimes, in the middle of the day, when the boats were up the lake and the bulk of her cooking was done and the lodge was in order, especially if Vera, who looked after the cabins, or Haldar were free to receive and settle-in any fishing people who might arrive, Maggie had a swim. There was this extra feeling about the swim: Maggie’s life had so long seemed stagnant that – now that she had moved forward and found her place with other people again, serving other people again, humoring other people, doing this herself, alone, as a swimmer swims this way or that way, self-directed or directed by circumstance – Maggie thought sometimes It’s like swimming; it is very good, it’s nice, she thought, this new life, serving other people as I did years ago with Father; but now I am alone and, like a swimmer, I have to make my way on my own power. Swimming is like living, it is done alone. She pushed away the knowledge that Vera was quick in liking, but quick in disliking, quickly resentful, quick to be kind, quick to find fault, sometimes sulky holding her resentment. What
should that matter, thought Maggie, because that is something I cannot help. I will swim past obstacles (Vera is sometimes an obstacle) because I am a strong swimmer.

I think I can go now…. “Is it all right, Vera, if I go for a swim? Do you need me? I won’t be long.”

“No. Go,” said Vera cordially. “Do go.”

Maggie stands on the dock and looks around her. She is contained by the sparkling surface of the lake and the pinetree shores and the low hills, and is covered by the sky. She dives off the dock, down into the lake. She rises, with bubbles, shakes her head vigorously, and strikes out.

Her avatar tells her that she is one with her brothers the seal and the porpoise who tumble and tumble in the salt waves; and as she splashes and cleaves through the fresh water she is one with them. But her avatar had better warn her that she is not really seal or porpoise – that is just a sortie into the past, made by the miracle of water – and in a few minutes she will be brought to earth, brought again to walk the earth where she lives and must stay. Who would not be a seal or a porpoise. They have a nice life, lived in the cool water with fun and passion, without human relations, Courtesy Week, or a flame thrower.

The water, that element that bears her up and impedes her and cleaves and flies away and falls as only water can, transforms her, because she can swim. If she could not swim, ah … then … it would no doubt kill her and think nothing of it. But, since she can swim, she swims strongly out into the lake, forgetting past and future, thrusting the pleasant water with arms and legs, and then, quite suddenly, she turns on her back and floats. She is contented. She is not a seal. She is a god floating there with the sun beating down on her face with fatal beneficent warmth, and the air is good. She averts her
eyes from the sun and drinks in the upper blue; and then she inclines her floating face toward the shore where the vertical pine trees make a compensation with the horizontal lake on which she lies so gloriously. She could never sink, she thinks (but she could). Maggie was the only moving thing on the lake, making a far-carried sound with her swimming; but now she lies still, and the shores and the water are quiet except for the loon who, down the lake, under the sun, lets loose her vacant musical cry. Turning like a seal, like a god, Maggie swims slowly back to the shore and climbs up the dock ladder. The drops of water rain off her and she feels very fine but she is not a god any more. She is earthbound and is Maggie Lloyd who must get the fire going and put the potatoes in the oven, and she must speak to Mr. and Mrs. Milliken and their two boys from the far cabin who are standing on the dock and are not gods either. They want to know how the water is. Maggie, shaking the wet hair from her face, says it is fine.

The god and the seal are out there in the water. Or perhaps they are not there unless the swimmer is there too. That is a point which philosophers cannot determine. In her cabin Maggie makes haste, and changes.

A
lbert Cousins proved very helpful in the matter of the police and the gun. The police were sensible. They seemed to think the complaint was frivolous. Mrs. Severance thought that Albert had handled the whole thing very neatly.

This was now the fourth visit that Albert Cousins had paid to Mrs. Severance. She sat with her bandaged foot upon a footstool.

“You’d better stay to supper,” she said. “I instructed Mrs. Spink how to make a huge dish of spaghetti and cheese and mushrooms and tomatoes and garlic last night and Alberto came but he had no appetite. I hadn’t the heart to gorge spaghetti of all things in front of Alberto – the way he looked – so I had an egg, which was nearly as bad. We didn’t open the wine, so we’ll have the wine if you’ll stay tonight, and the spaghetti hotted up.”

Albert Cousins said that he would be very glad to stay and have spaghetti and wine with Mrs. Severance, and then he told her about a very strange coincidence that had happened to him that day. He said what did she think about coincidence.

“Coincidence,” said Mrs. Severance, “seems to me to be what a Japanese friend of mine used to call ‘a series of combination of events’ which meet at a certain point of time or perhaps place. It is not as uncommon as people think, and the older I grew the more I believed in the fantastic likelihood – whether relevant or irrelevant – of coincidence, and I still believe in it. I’ll tell you a coincidence,” she continued (and thought Don’t people always), “and then I’ll tell you another.

“Once upon a time Philip and I went to New York. I had a friend who lived in New York and her name was Marietta Ward. She lived alone. Her husband had died a few years before and Marietta had never got over it. She never did. Her husband used to call her Peg. There were only two other people who called her Peg and I was one. I hadn’t seen her for – oh – years. I found her name in the book, on her street, and rang up, and a voice on the telephone said:

“‘Hello.’

“I said very eagerly ‘Hello Peg!’

“There was a pause and the voice said in an agitated way ‘What did you say? What did you call me?’

“So I said ‘Isn’t that Mrs. Robert Ward?’

“And the voice said ‘Yes.’

“And I said ‘Marietta Ward?’

“And the voice said – and still there seemed something strange – I heard her breathing – ‘Yes.’

“‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Peg, this is Nell Severance!’

“‘I don’t know you,’ she said.

“Well Albert, I didn’t hang up, thank goodness, although I’d begun to feel all queer. I began to say ‘Do listen. I have a friend Mrs. Robert Ward …’ and then I explained, and she began to cry. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I am Mrs. Robert Ward too, and I live alone, and Robert died in January and my name is
Marietta and he is the only one who ever called me Peg.’

“Then Mrs. Ward and I looked at the telephone book, each at our end of the line, and there were Mrs. Robert H. and Mrs. Robert L. on the same street, and I hadn’t noticed because it was the right street. And they were both widows (the other was my friend, of course), and were named Marietta, and their husbands had called them Peg. There’s no meaning in that … it’s just what happened.

“And I’ll tell you another,” continued Mrs. Severance to Albert Cousins. “When Philip and I lived in Burma we went in from Rangoon to where there were some temples. A priest said ‘There is a man here whom you must see,’ and there was a white man living in that village. So we went to the villager’s house where he lived, and his name was Philip Severance! He was an American and my Philip was an Englishman. It didn’t prove anything … it was just coincidence and it felt very strange indeed. Of course when you get into the higher flights, coincidence is sometimes called Providence – I mean when coincidence moves to the benefit of some people … or some situation.”