Cold Pastoral (16 page)

“Will you be married, Tim?” she asked, unconcerned about his death. “She said I'd be married and not married.”

“Sounds silly to me.”

“Me, too,” he admitted, adding with a grin, “You don't look very silly, although lots of people said you were for running away to the woods.”

The candour of her school-friends had revealed the same attitude. With yellow eyes fixed on his face she said blandly, “They could say the same thing about you, Tim, for climbing a tree and playing your whistle.”

“Sure,” he admitted, surprised and looking more interested. “Did you go off to the woods for the same reason?”

“Another reason. I know the woods. I've known them all my life and I had fun with the Little People. Do you believe in the Little People, Tim?”

Sitting side by side on the branch, she waited with some tenseness.

“I believe in anything I hear in music, and the fairies run through lots of it; little tunes in the treble, dropping off like a leaf. I make stories on the piano! When I leave the house I play the gate, the honk of horns and the rattle of a tram. Then there's confusion with no special theme,
but
suppose I see a park and go in and walk into woods—”

“Yes, yes, yes,” she said breathlessly, “go on.”

“Then I play the woods like a nocturne—”

“What's that?”

“Night-piece! You play it with its secrets, and that, of course, brings in the fairies.”

This was companionship surpassing all others. It was youth, gaiety and kinship with herself. She sighed in a rich joy. It was not long before Tim knew a great deal about her. On her demand that she would like to play his mouth-organ he handed it over, first wiping it with a crumpled handkerchief.

“Thank you,” she said gravely, putting it to her mouth. “Can you play it?” he asked.

“I don't know. Is it hard?”

“Not if you've got a sense of pitch. Have you?”

“I don't know,” she said, frowning. Surely there could be nothing beyond her! Searching her mind for a tune, she realised she knew very little music.

“Go on,” he commanded; “any tune will do.”

“Sure, I don't know many. I'll play ‘Adeste'.”

“What's that?” he asked doubtfully.

Ignoring him she sang softly to herself.

    “Adeste fideles
    Laeti triumphantes.”

“Gee!” he interrupted. “You know Latin.”

“Sure,” she said. “Father Melchior taught me. Mom loved it. She had two books, the Manual of Prayers and the cook-book.”

“It's not classical Latin, anyway. I'm learning classical Latin. Church Latin is not right.”

“Church Latin must be right Latin,” she said inflexibly.

“O.K.,” he said peaceably; “play it, can't you.”

She couldn't. Try as she would, the notes were always wrong.

“You do it,” she said, feeling sure he must fail.

Without hesitation he put the mouth-organ between his lips and played the Christmas hymn in perfect tune.

“Tim,” she said, shaking her head, “I'm not a musician. Queer, isn't it, when it makes me feel so wonderful? But it's beautiful when you play it.”

“Yes, it is queer,” he admitted; “and your hands are so musical. Can I look at them?”

“Yes, if you want to.”

Holding out her slender hands he received them on his open palms. Examining them carefully, he exclaimed in wonder, “Gee, your nails are perfect! Such long fingers! You ought to have a cantabile touch.”

“Well, I haven't, whatever it is. Gracious, I must go! Give me your hand while I get down.”

She was out of the fork and on a lower branch in the space of a second.

“Will you come again? I'm always here between four and six, and often between seven and eight.”

Looking up into his blue eyes she knew she would come again, but she said reproachfully, “No, Tim. Things are not the same when they're arranged. When they happen it's different, and sins are not sins when they're on you before you know they're around.”

“I see,” he said with an understanding grin; “it's the difference between murder and manslaughter. Do you read mystery stories?”

“Yes, I read everything. Tim, I must go. It's been fun.”

“Fun, more than fun. I'll be looking for you. Now I'll pipe you across the garden.”

“Like
The Drums of the Fore and Aft
?”

“Do you know that? Gosh, you're swell.”

A lithe slide and a jump landed her on the soft earth in the garden. Pulling down her sleeves and adjusting her dress she walked to the house with great unconcern. As she passed the corner of the privet hedge she thought she saw Hannah's white pompadour from one of the attic windows. It was no more than a shadow, gone before she was sure anything actual had touched her vision. Perhaps she had been mistaken! Surely Hannah wouldn't climb all those stairs just to see what she was doing? The top flat of the Place was never used and held two rows of dusty rooms with slanting sides from the mansard roof.

Walking, her blood danced to a little tune. Light and gay, it made her hold up her head. As she went into the house it expired on a long, dying note.

Four and six, seven and eight! They were nice hours and included a bit of her leisure!

Virtuously she sat on the piano-stool and played the scale of G major. By playing it several times very loudly, she tried to convince herself she had been practising a long time.

“DEAR FILIAL HUMBUG.”

T
he house was being painted. Every morning she woke to slap of brushes and the creaking of scaffolding. Intimately near her window painters talked while she dressed. Except for the disused tennis court every spot was reduced to order. Inside, Hannah polished with a certain venom in her cloth, while Lilas climbed a step-ladder and dusted walls in David's room. Bending to the weight of a bucket, she seemed more concave than ever. By this time Mary Immaculate knew more about her. Restless, one moonlight night she had watched the maid's return from number one barracks. Her findings were that Lilas must have grown to love the boy she hooked up to! Seeing two figures become one and the bag that held the bonnet make a pale blur against a back, she concluded no girl could kiss like that, because someone was better than no one!

Philip was out early watching dirty wood being painted under. He was extremely busy, seeming to come and go at the imperative ring of the telephone. There were emergencies, and occasionally Mary Immaculate woke in the night to hear his muted step past the gallery in the hall. Then in the morning his hair and eyes would look blacker against his face. Watching day by day, she learned to read his symbols. So little of Philip's routine went into words that it was necessary to make her own interpretations. With the knowledge derived from the hospital, she could visualise his clinical world. When he was abstracted striding towards his car, he was anticipating a difficult day. If he returned with his nose a prow and his black curls standing away from his head, the day had held disasters. If he retired to his father's library and sat with his hands under his chin, he was thinking out a diagnosis. If he took the same position with a droop, a patient had died. Once, surprising him like that, his mute dejection made her lay her face against his hair. Confronted by professional anxieties she could not encompass, she strove to return the kindness he gave herself. Somewhat surprised, she found herself giving vent to Josephine's formula. She did not know whether Philip found it soothing to learn about the will of God, but she learned a way to his replenishment. Strain went out of him when his long arm took her in. He seemed to have little time for anticipation of David's arrival. He was attending a medical convention, with lunches and dinners, where doctors debated and lectured. With the many things on his mind he included an intense preoccupation with mastoids. Philip was going to specialise!

Everyone was busy! It left her leisure unquestioned. Tim was always near for those hours in the tree or, greatly daring, in the shade of the privet hedge. Those sessions were more thrilling for their danger. Coming to find her one evening Hannah stabbed the garden with her eyes.

“I heard you talking,” she accused.

With the hairbreadth chuckle of Tim's flight in her ears Mary Immaculate ran wildly across the grass.

“Yes, I was talking, Hannah. I do that sometimes. I'm cracked, so they say in town, because I got held in the woods. I'm a changeling, something the fairies left…”

“I'll changeling you,” muttered the old woman to her back.

It never crossed her mind to explain Tim, any more than she could explain the games she had played with the Little People. Their contacts were old while yet they were new. Looking back, it was difficult to picture a day that did not include something they had shared. They became to each other the something mislaid from life. Mutiny would not come again when she saw children in spring returning from the hills. Tim could direct her to richer wayfaring. There was a whole world of him that demanded elucidation from books. She was a most obliging friend. He had only to say he was reading the lives of Schumann and Schubert to make her do the same thing. Reading about music encouraged her to bring it forth from radio and from a gramophone she found in David's rooms. In it she found the transposition of all that she knew from the earth. It held the wind and the sea, their torment and calm. It held the whimper of low sad days and the sudden ache of beauty. It held the range of all people. Surprised at the many mediums for the interpretation of life, she wanted to embrace them all. As yet she had no selection and did not know what to discard. Tim helped her. His way was more formed and he had the courage of definite tastes. As the replacement of her lost vagabondage she was his substitution for music. Without knowledge of the fact, they were more satisfactory to their elders because of each other. He called her Gretel! Colouring her own world, he could colour it more vividly. Quite solemnly he told her she had been saved by seven pairs of angels walking down the cloud stairs to guard her while she slept. What she knew from Grimm he knew from Humperdinck. Winding their way to a gingerbread house, as yet there was no witch or witches' oven to burn them.

Then she became Isolde, and the tennis court was the yard of an ancestral castle. Waiting for a ship to come in with a white or black flag, he was Tristan, under a lime tree that was a beech. The heap of David's records was culled for Isolde's love-death. She played it until it scratched, and knew a wild irritation because she couldn't sing the torment and exultation of grand heroic women. Tim told her the first lovers of the legend were buried in a common grave from which sprang a rose bush and a vine that could never be separated. When she said she'd be the rose bush he was firm and made her be the vine. Fighting without venom she capitulated. Tim seemed to think it mattered. In view of his heavy-lidded eyes asking a concession, she graciously submitted to being the vine. Drinking a fateful love-philtre of ginger ale, Tim took it very seriously.

Tim was the only son of his mother, his father having been killed three years before by a premature blast from a mine. In telling her about his home he spoke with a pucker on his brow.

“I liked him. He knew about music, only he thought it should be a hobby. Whenever he was home he used to sing in cantatas and he thought oratorio was the last word. It was so funny when he died. I wanted to see him, but they sent me to my uncle's and my aunt kept giving me Marie biscuits! She thought because Father was dead I must be hungry all day. I was just cold and not a bit hungry. They were shocked because I played Chopin's Funeral March. Then Auntie Minnie came to live with us, and Mother went back to being like her instead of Father. Now they both cook for me and make sweaters when I like machine-knit ones best. People are queer, aren't they?”

“Don't you have maids, Tim?” she asked from a world that seemed impossible without them.

“Sure,” he said with a grin; “Auntie Minnie wouldn't have anything to talk about if we didn't.”

Without confirmation she knew Tim loved to be with her. Conversation could be suspended while he reached for her hand or drew a finger down her cheek. Quite uncloying, his gestures were gentle, made on a sudden impulse of intensified sight. His appreciation of her was expressed in musical form. He said she had rhythm and her life was a theme for an opera. Other times he would let her talk, becoming dreamy and heavy-lidded behind a smile lingering on his lips. Puzzling over the quality of the smile, she satisfied herself with its simile. Often in the tranquillity of a summer evening she had watched their grey hen settling over her chicks. The commodious ruffle of the feathers had spoken of warmth, sleep and places where it was quiet to go. At moments like that Tim's smile seemed to take her like the hen took its chicks.

All his life Tim had wanted something for himself. From childhood he had known glimpses of melancholy, like the double-bass notes of the spirit. Some of it was inborn, encouraged by the position of an only child. The gods that presided at his birth deputed that his predispositions should increase. Disharmony helped, unshared joys and unchildish shivers over musical moods. His soul went to brinks and looked over. His compensations with vital things had been unlucky, leaving scars of self-blame. The softness of a kitten had been squeezed to death by overt raptures. His dog had died trying to follow him over a paling-fence. The dog had slipped and a paling had gone through its neck. He developed a sense of fatality in affection and grew troubled over the mortality of lovable things.

Mary Immaculate was more robust in spirit. She could grieve but she could not prolong. The knowledge that certain things were the will of God must have had an unconscious effect on her mind. If a dog shook a kitten to death she could grieve for the kitten without hating the dog. Other things called, permitting her to continue light-footed and light-hearted. Free of her body nothing was irksome. Good minds directed her, affection was less critical because it was not bound with her own blood. There was no flaw in her life after Tim's substitution for sylvan independence. Days could be eaten up, and she could sigh with fulfilment and drop into night. That rare thing, a perfectly happy person, she knew the scope of a heart when it widened to include David.