The Nymph and the Lamp (44 page)

“Well then we must get together again. Half an hour after I'm gone you'll be able to think of all the brilliant things you might have said. You must let me have the benefit of them. Shall I come here, or would you prefer to take me on one of those buggy rides of yours? Some fine evening—Thursday, say?”

“I'm not sure I want to talk to you again,” Isabel said.

“Ah, then you'd better give me at least another chance to offend you, so you can be sure. Say Thursday?”

“Very well. Thursday at seven.”

The door closed. Isabel blew out the parlor lamp and passed into the hall on her way to bed. At the foot of the stairs she noticed a light in the kitchen, and going there perceived Mrs. Hallett knitting by the stove.

“How did you get along with Mr. Brockhurst?” Mrs. Hallett said. “You sounded sometimes as if you were quarreling.”

“We were talking politics.”

“Oh dear! What is he, Liberal or Conservative?”

“I'd call him a Progressive-Impossible.”

Mrs. Hallett laid the knitting away in her sewing basket. “That,” she said with a sniff, “sounds like one of those fancy new parties in Upper Canada, or is it in the West?”

CHAPTER 31

The apple blossoms shivered and fell, and the fat white candles dripped away from the horse chestnuts. Mrs. Hallett's lilac and japonica bloomed and faded. The hayfields were speckled with buttercup and daisy and the clover patches put forth their sweet perfume and drew a swarm of bees. Schoolboys caught tadpoles in the ponds, and the first crop of young robins learned to fly. In the green shade of the alders the violets bloomed, and in the woods there were lady's-slippers to be gathered, and in boggy places the pitcher plants put forth their tall Morocco-leather flowers. The young poplars made silver patches against the dark masses of spruce and fir on the hillsides. Suddenly the strawberries were ripe. And at night when the lamps shone forth into the orchard a fusillade of June bugs pattered against the panes like gleaming brown bullets.

July was a month of burning heat in which the wine-stream shrank in the river bed and many of the smaller brooks dried up. For days and nights on end there was not a stir of wind, not the whisper of a leaf. The air over miles of lush farmland quivered and the long ranges of hills to the north and south wavered gently in the sunshine as if stirred by the breath of Glooskap, the ancient Indian god whose habitat they were. Thunderstorms rolled up and down the valley, usually at night, sometimes with only a passing mutter in the sky and an occasional flash that tingled all the telephone bells and let it go at that, sometimes with drenching showers that set the hillsides streaming and brought the brooks to temporary life, with continuous eruptions of blue light that seemed to spring up from the earth instead of down from the sky, and a sound of powerful artillery rolling and echoing along the mountain slopes.

Farmers complained that the rains always came when they were haying, as they had complained ever since there were farms in the valley; but the crops grew tall and green and fat, and the apples formed well on the trees. The cherries ripened early and (as if there were not enough fruit in the valley) boys and girls went up on the ridges to pick wild raspberries and blueberries in the old burns that showed like pale scars in the green flank of the forest.

The potatoes blossomed, and roses and dahlias and sweet peas bloomed in the posy gardens, and ramblers, white and crimson, hung their bunched finery over the verandas and the trellises. August brought a dry heat, more comfortable than the humidity of July, and now there were southwesterly winds blowing steadily along the valley and whirling clouds of red dust along the roads. The great tourist pilgrimage went on. The dining room of the Boston House rang with the gay accents of New England, of New York and Pennsylvania. Sometimes there were cars from as far away as Ontario or Illinois or Ohio; and once or twice there was a car with a California number plate, and when it stopped for gasoline the small boys gathered quickly, and the war veterans came out of their clubroom, and girls peered from the shop doors, because no one had ever known a car to come so far.

The corn ripened. The oats ripened and were mowed, and flocks of sparrows fed and chattered in the stubble, rising together at every petty alarm and settling down again. The apples ripened and the branches bent under their weight. Goldenrod began to bloom along the roadsides, the first hint of autumn. The swallows began to leave for the south. By the end of August they were gone, and the nighthawks followed them. In the swamps the blue petals of the iris had long since withered and gone, and now the seed pods stood on the stalks like small green sausages.

Isabel noted this passing show as she drove about the countryside on Markham's errands, on Sundays as she strolled with the Halletts to church, and on those precious weekly half days when she retired to her lair in the woods and lay naked to the sun. The doctors at the hospital had recommended sun-bathing and she had undertaken it as a rather embarrassing chore, but she soon came to look upon it with the utmost pleasure, an interlude of utter freedom in which she could give herself up to the golden light and the warm fir-scented air like a nymph enjoying the caresses of a sky-god—not here, not within a few miles of Kingsbridge and its prim society, but in some Mediterranean land where there were olive trees, and white temples hidden in cypress groves, and placid blue glimpses of the sea.

Actually her sunning place was a small patch of wild grass with a fringe of alders and then a dense mass of second-growth firs, and it was reached by the winding disused log road that she had known in her childhood. A stream rattled down the hillside past the ruins of a small sawmill, abandoned so long ago that the once tall heap of sawdust had rotted and shrunk to a gray scab on the turf. The haul-up chute had dropped into the grass and gone completely except for a few rusty bolts. The mill itself, no bigger than a country blacksmith's shop, tottered drunkenly over the dam, a crazy mass of weathered gray timber afflicted with sores of bright orange fungus; and the old wooden water gate had been carried away by a flood long since, so that the dam held only a shallow pool.

Here for hours she sat or lay, glistening with a protective lotion as if she had just arisen from that thin bright water, and watching the smoke of her cigarettes drifting in the sunshine. By mid August her entire skin had acquired the “nice genteel tan” that Skane had remarked on her face at Marina, and she took a sunworshiper's satisfaction in the new feel and appearance of her person, putting on her clothes with reluctance at the afternoon's end, and moving about afterwards with a sensation of confinement inside an uncomfortable husk.

Brockhurst called irregularly at the Hallett house. Sometimes he came every evening that she was free from business. Sometimes she did not see him for a fortnight. He had chosen to spend his summer holidays at Kingsbridge, making excursions about the valley on his motorcycle. When he called they spent the evening chatting on the veranda or wandering about the byroads in the Hallett buggy. Mrs. Hallett and most of Kingsbridge were convinced that it was a match.

Markham in his characteristic way demanded, “This Brockhurst—anything serious?”

“No.”

“Odd sort of feller. What d'you find to talk about?”

“He does most of the talking,” she answered lightly. “Oh, we talk about books, education, economics—mostly economics it seems to me.”

“Sounds mighty dull. Like him?”—with one of his quick shrewd looks.

Isabel hesitated. “I don't know quite what to make of him, to tell you the truth. He's so very argumentative and so positive in all his statements that a good deal of the time he irritates me. But he's never a bore, I must admit. He can talk well about almost anything. When I went to school I found geology the dullest of subjects; but Brock can scratch up a handful of gravel and go on for an hour about the various kinds of stone and be quite fascinating. I think he must be a very good teacher.”

“Umph. ‘Brock.' Well, if you must ride about the countryside talking stuff like that why don't you take my car and do it comfortably? I've told you to take the car whenever you want it.”

“For pleasure I prefer the horse and buggy. It's more leisurely.”

“Ah!”

“And it reminds me of my childhood on the farm.”

“I see. And do you remind yourself of your childhood when you go off alone once a week towards Scotch Springs? Or is that none of my business?”

Isabel gave him a level gray look and shrugged. She put it delicately. “It's just my weekly relief from business, Mr. Markham. I rather like to be alone sometimes.”

“Um. Sure you're happy?”

“Oh yes, very.”

“My wife says we should have you to tea more often. But I have a notion you don't care much for that kind of thing.”

“I don't,” Isabel said frankly.

The Markham household consisted of himself, his small myopic wife, and their daughter, a shriveled spinster who looked and talked exactly like her mother. Like Markham the two women were extremely pious but they lived a much more cloistered life. Isabel was horrified at their dull and sapless existence. Markham's drive for money seemed to her a reaction from the deadly monotony of his home, and she did not know whether to pity or despise the women who spent such drab lives almost entirely within the four walls of the Markham house, even in summer, having no outlet for their emotions but the religious ecstasies of the Sabbath.

“Um. Well, my dear, I must say you look a lot better than when you came. Nothing like the country air after being shut up in a city office for eight years. Enjoy yourself while you can. Harvest's almost upon us. Lot of work coming up—the apple crop to be gathered and barreled and shipped, and the cannery pack and so on. The Exhibition's coming up too. Have to drive you hard the next two months. Mind?”

“Not a bit.”

She mentioned the first part of this conversation on her next evening ride with Brockhurst, and he grinned. He had a small black mustache of the sort developed by army officers during the war and when his mouth spread in a smile the mustache looked a mere pencil mark along his upper lip. His dark eyes twinkled behind the glasses.

“The old boy's terribly afraid of losing his new right hand,” he observed. “Can't say I blame him, from a business point of view. You were the goddess from the machine. Just when his affairs were spreading like a grass fire in a gale you came along with your city-office experience and your knowledge of the local scene, and actually looking for a job. I bet he got you at a bargain, too. He wouldn't miss an opportunity like that. He's never missed an opportunity in his life and they've all come to his hands at exactly the right moment, just as you did. It's all right to talk about Markham's energy and brains—and his honesty if you insist—but what's pushed him so far on the road towards a million dollars is what pushes all men who make money in big chunks, the ability to cash in on his luck.”

“You're spurring your hobbyhorse again,” she said calmly. “I can tell you that Mr. Markham hasn't got anything like a million, even in property, and as for money in big chunks, that's nonsense. This is Kingsbridge, not New York or Montreal. But I've said all that before.”

“So you have. And you've been properly reticent about the figures, as a confidential secretary should. Nevertheless I'm still mighty curious about your boss. He interests me as a sample of his type, the only one within my orbit, so to speak. Everywhere I've rambled this summer, talking to veterans here and there, I've come across Markham's trail. Apart from his pulpwood and cannery interests, and of course the store in Kingsbridge, he's been buying outright or buying options on farms all along the valley. The postwar boom is still shoving the price of farmland into the sky like everything else, and in another year or two at the present rate he'll be able to cash in for a very pretty sum. In the meantime the possession of so many orchards puts him into the apple business right up to his neck.”

“Well, what's wrong with that?”

“As a student of history and economics—at ground level, so to speak—it seems to me there's plenty wrong. After all wars are old stuff in this world and the economic results are pretty much of a pattern. There's always inflation, which reaches its height, not at the end of the war as the ignorant expect, but a few years afterwards, depending on the length of the war and the money that's been printed to keep it going. Anyone in Europe could tell you that; but here in Canada and to a considerable extent the U.S. it's a new experience. In Europe they're pulling their horns in fast. Over here everyone, even canny people like Markham, have got the idea that the boom's permanent. There's a lot of nonsense being talked about ‘the infinite resources of a new land,' and a ‘permanent upward trend of development.'”

“You're such a pessimist,” she said. “Haven't you any faith in Canada?”

“Of course I have. But new countries have to obey the law of economics the same as everyone else, and you can't pay for a war with a lot of undeveloped resources, however rich they may be. What counts is the cash you can put down on the barrelhead. In the case of this valley it's an apple barrelhead. And all those apples have to be sold across the sea in Britain because the home market's too small to absorb 'em. That's where the cash has to come from, finally. It's the same with Canadian wheat and a lot of other things. Call it a colonial economy if you like and you'd be pretty well right. It's been forced upon us by circumstances over which so far we've had no control. We can't sell to the U.S. because the Americans produce the same things. Agreed?”