Swamp Angel (20 page)

The two cars left for the lake, and Maggie returned with Angus to pick up further supplies. The Chinese boy’s unawareness, his willingness, his youthful ingenuousness were consoling.

T
he three-time-a-day ever present English earthenware was only the outward cause of Vera’s fatal and persistent folly. Her jealousy devoured her – the worm that never dies, the worm consuming her, she was daily and nightly consumed. She sought aggravation.

“Alan,” called Maggie from the kitchen, “go to the root-house and fill this basket with potatoes and then find Angus and ask him to come here and have a look at the window it’s jammed or something and then come back and clear your things from the table, I need it. No … hurry … there’s a good boy … I want those potatoes now,” and Alan loped away obediently.

“You’re getting insufferable,” said a low voice behind her. Vera had come in with her madness on her. “You’re getting insufferable, giving your orders round here. Every day I hear you ordering my husband and my son about and I’ve kept silent. Ever since you got that china it’s gone to your head. You think you own the place. You’ve got beyond yourself.”

“Well …” said Maggie, turning to confront Vera whose face was dark and flushed with passion.

Maggie waited a moment and then she said coldly. “You are ridiculous and I will not argue with you. You make life impossible for your cook and if you can’t control yourself you’ll make life impossible for your husband and your child … and you will for Angus.” She leaned with seeming nonchalance on the dresser. “I will cook this dinner and then I shall go and pack up my things” (that won’t take long, she thought, and she saw the little yellow bowl). “Tomorrow Angus shall drive me to town, right in the middle of the season and you will do the best you can,” she said cruelly. “I shall not tell Haldar till tomorrow morning…. Now” (and Maggie’s coldness broke into fury) “get out of my kitchen, I’m busy and if you don’t shut the door, I will. Get out.”

“You’d
dare!
” exclaimed Vera.

“Yes, I’d dare. Get out,” said Maggie, advancing upon her, and Vera went, with sudden dismay.

Maggie closed the door and sat down at the kitchen table with her face in her hands. She heard, vaguely, Alan dumping the basket on the back steps and running away. Oh, she thought despairingly, after all this, I’ve failed. And now it will go to pieces and they will fall apart again. And Angus will be disillusioned by me and by the bickering that will follow, and he will go back home with his first little career over, or he will go from job to job in the upper country. Light fell on the faces of Joey and of his father who had trusted her on one short encounter. Her thought went first to others, not to herself. Her thought dwelt on Vera and the irretrievable muddle and misery that Vera and her jealousy – for it was jealousy – created. She thought of Haldar and Alan and of all that Three Loon Lake might have been to them. And then she thought of herself. For her own future, she was not afraid although she looked forward cheerlessly. It would, of course, be truly said
that Mrs. Lloyd left the Gunnarsens in mid season for a rich job in the East, and she would not defend herself. It was of the past that she thought. With all her fine thinking she had not been able to cope with one unhappy human being. Human relations. Human relations. I wish that Nell Severance were here with her acid good sense. Oh to be with old Nell where no one has to act or pretend or swim around. Human relations … how they defeat us. Yes, I am defeated. She did not know how long she sat with her head in her hands.

She heard Angus coming onto the porch and Alan’s running steps. She smoothed her face with her hands as if to obliterate something.

“Angus, this window … look,” she said.

“T
hen …
you …
did it,” said Haldar slowly.

“I did not!” stammered Vera. “I hardly said a T word and – and she told me to get out of my own kitchen! You should have heard her! Really now Haldar …” (I must sound reasonable, she thought, oh I must sound reasonable.) “Ever since she got that china …”

“You
did it,” said Haldar miserably, ignoring her words, “You make life impossible for me and now you make life impossible for Maggie.”

Maggie’s very name inflamed Vera. She cried “Those were her words! You two have been talking about me!” She was imprisoned between them.

Haldar gave her a long look and in that look were the years of frustration, of incomprehension, of joy decayed and done. He forgot – or did not know – that he had once cared for her and then had become cruel. He moved awkwardly and, without speaking, undressed. The sight of her husband moving awkwardly about the room frightened Vera. His motions seemed to menace her, and indeed she did not know how near he was to striking her.

“Haldar,” she said.

He did not answer.

“Haldar,” she cried.

He pulled back the bedclothes.

“Oh Haldar!” she cried again.

He blew out the light, turned on his good side in the bed, away from her, and did not answer.

“Oh Haldar do speak to me!”

But he did not. She saw the awkward hump of his body outlined in the bed against a pale light from the window. He might have been a rock, except that he was compact of misery and anger. She did not dare to touch him and it was well that she did not.

Lying motionless there, he did not know which way to turn within himself. All this damn nonsense, Vera’s nagging presence was intolerable to him. At that moment he hated her, but most he hated her presence near him. He began to be swept by a private tornado which, at one touch of his wife’s hand, would have torn him apart, raged around the room, and destroyed them both. That was the feeling in the room.

Vera went out, closing the door softly.

The night, and all doors shut, and her rejection, and her self-induced misery grown to devouring proportions took Vera and shook her and led her – where else could she go – toward her destruction and her release. They will see! she cried in her heart, they will see what they have done to me – they will be sorry oh will they be sorry. She would strike at everyone with her death. A dark kind of happiness, a black and stupid rejoicing swept over her and left her. Unworthy unworthy said a phantom among many phantoms. Alan, her little son, was among the phantoms but in her distraction she could not seize and hold him. See those two great planes of wall that
crowd down and cut off any escape. I am done! I will go to the lake … I must go … must go away …

The faint light that remained in the western sky did not penetrate the wood. Vera sought the path that lay on the right side of the lake. Trees met overhead, and branches, crossing the unfrequented path, struck at her. All was so dark under the trees that she could not see her way but had to find it with feet that felt and with hands that flinched against the branches. She whimpered as she went because the whimpering seemed to bear her company in the immense hostility of her world.

There is a place down the lake where the rough shores give way to a small beach of muddy sand; trees, less thick there, overhang the edge; the shore shelves rapidly. Vera did not say in her mind “I shall find oblivion there,” but dark images crowded her and impelled her to this place to find oblivion. Feeling with her hands, feeling with her feet, whimpering a little, she came to this place and stepped down onto the small muddy sand trip and without pause into the lake.

The first singing stinging clarifying wet cold of the now invisible lake smote Vera but she plunged in and on and the water rose to meet her. In two more steps, in one more plunging step, she would lose control, she would be beyond her depth, struggling then in the wet dark, lost, alone, forever, forever gone. There comes to each of us the moment of return or no return, choose or reject – that moment passes, and no power in heaven or earth can recall it … she could not, she could not. She turned, splashing, scrambling, falling, rising, sobbing in shame and fear, and made her way to shore and into the black abyss of the woods. She gained the trail which lay where she had left it (could it be possible that she still lived, that this trail, these woods, remained unchanged). Sodden with water she beat her way against the hostile invisible
branches, crying “Maggie! Maggie!” as if it were the only word she knew. The sound of this word steadied her, and then she went more quietly.

T
he bags were packed, and the yellow bowl was again in the haversack. Maggie lay in the dark despising the turmoil in which she found herself. She must sleep. In the morning she would get the breakfast for everyone as usual. She would tell Haldar, quite shortly, that she was going away. Angus would drive her to Kamloops and she would never come back to Three Loon Lake. Alan, of course, would hardly remember her in years to come.

A knock – was it – and then again. Knock … and knock … very quiet, very strange, in the dark. Maggie sat up, listening. Something is wrong, she thought, what sort of a knock was that. “Wait,” she called to the unknown someone who was standing outside. “I’m coming,” she said, and lighted the candle. She pulled on her warm dressing gown and tied the belt quickly. She slipped her feet into her bedroom slippers, took the candle in her hand and went to the door.

She opened the door, holding the candle high, and could not at first see by the flickering flame who or what was there. Vera fixed her eyes on Maggie and moved toward the light. She then stayed still and Maggie, hearing the drip and drip
of water dropping on the wooden floor of the veranda and looking on Vera’s ghostly face, knew with horror that Vera had tried to drown herself and had not been able.

A room lighted by a candle and in a silent and solitary place is a world within itself in which there is nothing urban or vulgar. It has a singularity. In this place Maggie and Vera stood, surrounded by the silent dark and lighted by the single candle, and Vera’s eyes were fixed with timid melancholy on Maggie’s face. Maggie came to herself. Without speaking, and with impassive face, she drew Vera into the cabin and shut the door.

“Oh … oh …” Vera said with a long shuddering sigh. Maggie, still not speaking, proceeded to strip Vera’s wet clothes from her. She took off her own dressing gown and put it upon Vera who continued to shudder. She pushed Vera into a chair, knelt before her and rubbed her legs roughly with a towel. Bending sideways she slipped off her bedroom slippers and put them on Vera’s small feet. “I’ll make a fire,” she said, rising and moving toward the door for wood.

“Don’t go! Don’t leave me!” cried Vera sharply but Maggie went outside to the wood box, returned and bent over the stove. Her face had not relented. Her spirit was very sore and sad within her, and still angry, and it seemed to her the least important thing that she should speak and make words, and the most important thing that a fire should burn and warm the cabin and then there would be, somehow, a humanity in the room when the fire was burning, and not just this insoluble misery that had come upon them all from little things, from nothings, really. The fire crackled and burned high in the stove. She stood, barefoot, in her crumpled and unshapely pajamas, looking down at Vera.

Vera seemed to be holding her face together with her two
hands, pressing upward over her cheekbones and temples and so tilting her eyes strangely up at the corners.

She said, in fear, with her sad gaze on Maggie “Am I going mad, d’you think?”

“Of course you are not going mad,” said Maggie urgently but with her heart failing her, “you’ll forget this … you’ll never do it again … you’re a happy woman with husband and child and a home. You are not going mad.”

“People do,” said Vera with dreadful simplicity. Maggie looked away.

“Don’t tell Haldar will you … don’t tell him, he’ll think I made you go away….”

“Well, so you did,” said Maggie shortly.

Vera fell upon her knees and clasped Maggie round the legs, looking up with her insignificant little face drained of color. “Maggie,” she cried, “don’t leave me! … oh I don’t know what’s going to happen to me … how can I live in this place but he will he will … you must stay with me … some days I can’t bear to see you … I hate you I love you I hate you Maggie I love you … speak to him for me … what shall I do … oh help me, you’re the only one that can … don’t ever leave me!”

Maggie, bending, drew Vera up and held her strongly and softly in her arms until the trembling and crying went quiet. She looked in front of her with troubled gaze, through the candlelight into the darkness and into whatever might be beyond the darkness. She could not think what to say to Vera. She did not know what words you use to exorcise the Evil One.

“There then,” she said with helpless compassion, patting Vera gently as she held her in her arms, “there then … there then …”

V
era lay in Maggie’s bed, the bedclothes pulled high so that only her little face showed. Her thin body lay flat. She looked at the ceiling.

Maggie sat by the stove. She had pulled her coat on over her pajamas. Sometimes it seemed to her that she dozed. She woke with a start and went over to the bed. She laid her hand on Vera’s forehead.

“Some cold water Vera?” she said.

Vera sipped obediently and resumed looking at the ceiling. Maggie went back to the stove and put a piece of wood in it. The cabin was wrapped in the dark and quiet of the woods. Maggie dozed and woke again. Vera was speaking.

“Surl,” said Vera (it sounded like “Surl”), “always me never Surl,” and then she began to talk rapidly.

In the very early morning Maggie dressed and went out. Halfway to Haldar’s room she met him. “I can’t find Vera,” he said in a glowering troubled way, “she didn’t come to bed last night. I woke and she wasn’t there.” He looked hunted, Maggie thought.

“She’s with me,” she said, choosing her words. “She’s ill,
Haldar, really ill. She felt ill and needed attention. She came to my cabin.”

Haldar’s face cleared a little. “What’s wrong?” he said uneasily, “what’s wrong?”

“She has a temperature, of that I’m sure,” said Maggie. “She’s wandering a bit. We’ll have to get her down to town, Haldar. Angus must go in and tell the doctor and get the ambulance out. She shouldn’t go in a car.”