Swamp Angel (6 page)

“I didn’t bring you here to talk about
why
this happened and to take sides,” said Mrs. Severance gently. “I am very sorry for you but that does not take away my license to be sorry for Maggie whose name we will not mention. I am going to bring you salvation if you want it.”

Edward Vardoe stared at her and she saw that his face was pasty and that his brown eyes were dark caverns, so that he was, as Hilda had said, both black and pasty.

“Are you eating well?”

“My stummick’s out,” mumbled Mr. Vardoe. Mrs. Severance winced and went on.

“Are you sleeping well?”

“Not so good,” said Edward Vardoe, with bags under his eyes.

“Do you face the day with a song? I mean how do you feel when you get up in the mornings?”

“Rotten.”

“You’re drinking more than you did, aren’t you?”

“Say what are you trying to get at!” he cried, jumping to his feet.

“Sit … down …” she commanded, and he sat. “Compose yourself, Mr. Vardoe, and I will do you good, but if you don’t compose yourself and listen, I shall spend no time on you.” (He hasn’t much control, has he, she thought.)

He blinked, looking at her, and she narrowed her eyes frighteningly. She blew smoke slowly and contemplated the tip of her cigarette.

“In the evening,” said Mrs. Severance, “when you get off the bus or out of your car or whatever it is and go into your house, you don’t want to go in. It feels dreadful and I grant you – it is. It looks messy and it is. You hate eating tinned things. The ashes are cold and days old in the grate … yes? … and the house is dead and after a bite to eat you sit down to read the paper and then you have a drink and then you have another but you cannot concentrate on the paper, and you begin your regular evening hate of her….” Mrs. Severance dropped her voice and said very softly, “And then you start
thinking revenge … and murder would be a pleasure….”

“Oh!” said Edward Vardoe. He clapped a hand to his mouth, but he did not contradict her.

“And then,” continued the soft voice of Mrs. Severance, “you have another drink, and you get to
wishing
murder, and if she came in at the door…. Listen. I know all about you.” (She does, thought Edward, with unhappy eyes.) “You’re sorry for yourself…. Be quiet! … self-pity is dynamite, you should know that at your age. It’s … what? a month and more since she went away. When two months to the day have gone, you must get in touch with my daughter Hilda, and she will come and help you pack every single thing that belongs to your wife. You can store it in our basement, or anywhere you like, or you can give it away or sell it, or burn it.”

“That’s right! Burn it!” said Edward Vardoe, leaning forward, seeing the flames licking up and up. “She walked out on me!”

“She forfeited it by going away.”

“That’s right, that’s right, sure, she forfeited it! That’s what she did by acting like that! She …”

“She forfeited it,” went on Mrs. Severance, and thought: It was cheap for her at that price. “Then you must empty the house, sell what you want, and keep what you want. I’d keep nothing, if I were you, except your clothes of course. Sell the house. Take a small bright flat – two rooms in the West End. Entertain at dinner once a week.”

“Who’ll I entertain?” asked Eddie Vardoe. Mrs. Severance found the question shocking in its simplicity and its need.

“Your partner and his wife – hasn’t he got a wife? – and some woman friend of theirs. I tell you, Vardoe, if you keep on as you’re going now, you’ll go down, and out of sight.”

Through the turmoil of Eddie’s mind the face of
Octavius Weller looked at him in a way that made him uneasy, and he knew that what this formidable woman said was true.

“And as to finding her and punishing her, which you know you’ve thought about, don’t be ridiculous. Even killing her wouldn’t hurt her … it would only hurt you … it wouldn’t touch her. She’s not that kind. She is punishing herself….” and Mrs. Severance paused for a long moment. “If,” she said slowly, “in a year’s time you need to marry again, come and talk to me about it.” Edward’s spaniel eyes swam with tears but he did not speak. “Now leave me.” He stood up. “You should wait out the two months so that you can always say to yourself ‘I waited.’ But between now and then you’d be wise to pack a bag and go to a hotel, any hotel, a boarding house, it’d be easier for you and you can find a flat and sell your house. Do as you like about that … and then telephone my daughter in two weeks’ time. You’ve got a new life ahead” (you poor fool, she thought), “if you’ll do as I say. Now go. You shouldn’t exhaust me like this. I’m old. There’s your hat. Don’t stand talking. I’m not strong, I tell you. I have to go to bed. All right. All right. Just slam it. It locks.”

She heaved herself out of her chair, the powerful willful old woman, and stood at the window watching Edward Vardoe getting into his new car. She smiled a faint smile but her face was not happy because she saw Edward in his helplessness and his meanness and his stupidity and she thought again that life is unfair. “It’s not fair … not fair,” she murmured, and then she went into the kitchen and made a tall pot of cocoa. She took the cocoa on a small tray to her bedroom. She put the tray on a table beside her bed and climbed heavily onto the bed. There she settled down, a little tired, and there her daughter found her when she came in.

“Well, Edward Vardoe was putty in the hand,” said Mrs.
Severance. “He’s an unpleasant object but worth salvation I suppose. I quite see it was the only thing that Maggie could do. It’s usually compassion of some kind that starts it in a case like that … I’ve known it before … if it weren’t for Maggie I wouldn’t have touched him … but I swear to you, Hilda, he was headed for murder if ever he found her. I made a good guess and he gave himself away. It’s self-pity, not love, that hurts him. But I opened vistas … vistas …” waving her little pointed hands vaguely. “This cocoa’s cold … hot it up or make some fresh.” She lighted a fresh cigarette from the stub of the old one. “You can bring me a cup while you’re about it. I’m exhausted I tell you. Saving souls. Very tiring.” And she settled on her pillows.

Hilda, so slim, so dark, looked at her mother and then she went and made a pot of tea regardless. She loved her mother dearly and hated her a little. People should not be so powerful. People should not always succeed, and so she made tea.

Hilda walked through the parlor and there she saw the handle of the Swamp Angel which lay in its accustomed place. The mood induced in Hilda when she saw her mother toying with the Angel was an emanation from the Angel and from many years. Memory often and often recalled had created for her round the Swamp Angel a mood which resembled memory inasmuch as it drew the past into the present. She could, if she wished, at any moment, see herself clearly at school again where she seemed to have lived throughout so much of her childhood while her parents went to strange places. She was aware of the outline of herself in a uniform from which head and arms and legs protruded, and within which was the person – herself – who looked at the girls whom she saw more clearly in the playground. This child who was herself said a little boastfully, “That’s nothing, my mother can do trick juggling
with real revolvers on a real stage!”

There was a movement among the girls. “And does your father juggle too?”

“No, my father’s not a juggler, he’s a gentleman – and my mother doesn’t juggle any more – not at the circus. But she juggles.”

Hilda saw the look pass from one to another and saw that the boast had tipped over and fallen on the wrong side. She could not tell why. She could see the girls, now, looking at her and talking together. The looks from one to another became smiles, and then “Her mother’s a juggler and her father’s a gentleman” … “Did you hear what Hilda Severance said – her mother’s on the stage, she juggles revolvers and her father’s a gentleman” … “What did she say? What did she say?” … “Her mother’s a juggler!” … “Her mother’s a
juggler?” …
“Isn’t it a scream, her mother’s a juggler!” And the words became her anguish, “Her mother’s a juggler!” Everyone seemed to think it was very funny, a joke, a scream, that Hilda Severance’s mother should be a juggler and that she had said “My father’s a gentleman!” “And she hasn’t got a real home!” said the girls. “Hush, dear,” said a teacher.

But in the holidays, then she and her father and mother were often together … oh in the holidays, what a rushing back, arriving a day or two late, joining the schoolgirl, bringing presents, enameled boxes, a little fan, and – later – pearls; leaving a day or two early, bringing, too, with the mother, an uneasy divided allegiance (there is no more uncomfortable feeling) to Philip who was impatient to be gone, and to Hilda who … well, what did Hilda want? She was only a child, and how could they take a child away from school to Troy to Ravenna (it was important, Philip had said, that they should go to Ravenna). The water was bad to drink; they kept strange
company; they lived like vagabonds; there were marshes; it would be unhealthy, quite unsuitable for a child; later, said Philip vaguely. So the mother excused herself to herself but did not convince herself. “Darling,” she said uneasily, “we’ll soon be back – you’ll see – and then we’ll have a wonderful time.”

“Yes,” said Hilda.

But the revolver went everywhere.

There, now, on the table, lay the Swamp Angel, the little survivor of three revolvers, which in her adolescence Hilda had grown to hate. By then the climate of her childhood had become the little-changed climate of her adolescence which now was an east wind in the climate of her womanhood. Something which was both proud and intuitive had prevented her from bursting into hurt and angry disclosure when she saw her mother habitually toying with the Swamp Angel, the little survivor. Her mother would have looked at Hilda in shocked surprise. She would have said nothing and she would have suffered for Hilda, too late, endlessly, all wasted now, and she would – without fuss but with remorse – have put the Angel out of sight. All its pleasure would have perished, and its company, its memory, would have been lost to her. So the Angel had been suffered to remain as the symbol of years of life gone away, and had so remained, and was, thus, Hilda’s unique gift to her mother, although her mother did not know that. And now – did Hilda really care much, any more? Perhaps not. Perhaps it was a source of pride that she held this gift voluntarily in an uneasy reserve of which her mother knew nothing. Yet Hilda could not ignore the Swamp Angel which was her mother’s habitual companion.

Having made the tea, she went to her mother’s bedroom, but Mrs. Severance had gone to sleep.

W
ell, just to think; to have been that boy in the store; and then the young man with fallen arches who could not go to the war; and so to have taken the load off old Macgregor and been, really, the store manager, knowing all the country people, and knowing Mr. Macdonald at the fishing lodge, who was such an educated man, and his daughter, who had gray eyes and cooked and ran the lodge and gave the big orders at the store. Up and up and up, the industrious apprentice. And then, in the tightening of everything as the war went on, the closing and loss of the lodge, and Mr. Macdonald ailing badly. His daughter had married Tom Lloyd who went off as a flyer, and Tom Lloyd was shot down. Things like that were happening all round the countryside, losses and tension. Eddie Vardoe had become pretty bossy and bumptious, people thought, running the store and saying No to people like that. It was too bad, Mrs. Lloyd’s little girl died when the polio came, and Mrs. Lloyd went about as if she were made of stone, and then Mr. Macdonald died too. It was very very hard to get help in the store, and Mrs. Lloyd, moving more like a machine than a person, came and worked in the
store and Eddie Vardoe was very respectful because she had been Miss Macdonald whose father was such an educated man, and then Mrs. Tom Lloyd….

And now look into this terrible gulf that had opened between the time that Mr. and Mrs. Edward Vardoe were married (to everyone’s surprise), and came west – and this very night when Eddie had sat in front of Mrs. Severance, and was now driving home from the show in terrified obedience just as, once, he used to retreat from a tongue-lashing from old Macgregor when he – Eddie Vardoe – was just the boy in the store; poor boy.

U
p in the hinterland of the North Thompson River far from the ordinary habitations of man was a place called Table Grande (like grandy). Table Grande consisted of a small flyblown store, some scattered shacks, and a name. It had no particular reason for existence. No one would choose to go to live there, and those who by misdirected choice had once gone there had not the energy to leave. It is probably derelict now.

On the outskirts of Table Grande (if Table Grande could be said to have outskirts) was a group of shacks that constituted the stump ranch of Mr. and Mrs. Mordy. Mr. Mordy was lazy and Mrs. Mordy was shrewish. The stumps that were still left unburned had stood uselessly in that cumbered stony soil for years; a stringy cow tried to find sustenance; some stringy fowls ran about; there was a poor vegetable patch and a root house in which the root vegetables were kept during the winter. Mrs. Mordy continually nagged at her husband to leave Table Grande and go to find work in Kamloops, or even in Cottonwood Flats or Barrière; but every time that Mr. Mordy found himself faced with moving his wife and two
children from the known discomfort and penury of Table Grande to the unknown future in Cottonwood Flats or Barrière or Kamloops, he slumped back and said “Aw quit nagging … we got all the winter’s wood in haven’t we? Wait till spring.”

The two children in this family were named Cyril and Vera. There was no school in Table Grande because there were not enough children to warrant the Provincial Government building a schoolhouse and providing a teacher. There were only the two little boys at the store, and Bill Ford’s wife who was going to have a baby any day God help her, and Cyril and Vera Mordy. If Mrs. Mordy had been a different kind of woman she would have written to the Department of Education in Victoria and received lessons by mail. These lessons would have been so well and easily planned that she could have educated Cyril and Vera fairly well; but she did not do this. The result was that Vera educated herself a very little with the help of some old schoolbooks, and that Cyril did not educate himself at all. He was called Surl, and when he had to write his name he spelled it S-u-r-l, so that ultimately he became Surl – Surl Mordy.