Swamp Angel (2 page)

“Take a look at that, woodja,” he said with a smile of triumph. “‘E. Thompson Vardoe’ – sounds all right, doesn’t it!”

“Just a minute till I put the roast on the table,” she said, picking up the hot platter.

He turned and followed her into the room. “Well,” he said aggrieved, “I’d think you’d be innerested in your husband starting in business for himself!”

She went with her usual light deliberation into the
kitchen again, brought in the vegetables, gravy, and plates, took off her apron and sat down at the table.

“Let me see it,” she said.

Mr. Vardoe, sitting down in his shirt sleeves before the roast, passed her a piece of paper with a printed heading. She read aloud “Weller and Vardoe – Real Estate – Specialists in Homes – West End, Point Gray and Southern Slope – Octavius Weller, E. Thompson Vardoe.”

“Oh it does look nice! I hope that …”

“Say!
” said Mr. Vardoe in an affronted tone, holding the carving knife and fork above the roast of beef. “Whatever got into you, buying this size roast for two people! Must be all of six pounds! Is it six pounds?”

“No,” said Mrs. Vardoe with her wide gentle look upon the roast, “but it’s all of five pounds.”

“And solid meat!” said Mr. Vardoe, striking the roast with the carving knife. His voice rose shrill with anger. “You buying six-pound roasts when I gotta get a new car and get started in a new business! Bet it wasn’t far off a dollar a pound!”

“No, it wasn’t,” admitted Mrs. Vardoe. She gave a quick look down at her watch. The time was twenty minutes past six. It seemed to her that time stood still, or had died.

“It’ll be nice cold,” she said, without self-defense.

“Nice
cold!
” he echoed. “Who wants to eat cold meat that cost the earth for a week!”

If you only knew it,
you
will, thought Mrs. Vardoe.

Edward Vardoe gave her one more glare. In annoyed silence he began to carve the roast.

As Mrs. Vardoe put vegetables onto the two plates she dared to give another downward glance. Twenty-five minutes past six. The roast was delicious. When Edward Vardoe had shown enough displeasure and had satisfied himself that his
wife had felt his displeasure he began eating and talking of his partner Octavius Weller, a man experienced – he said – in the real estate business.

“Octavius’s smart all right,” he said with satisfaction and his mouth full. “Anyone have to get up pooty early to fool Octavius. I guess we’ll be a good team, me and O.W.” He at last pushed his plate aside. He continued to talk.

Mrs. Vardoe got up and took away the meat course and brought in a pudding. Her husband looked at her strangely. He took his time to speak.

“Well, say,” he said at last, “you got your good tweed suit on!”

“Yes, I have,” she said, looking down at it. The time was twenty minutes to seven. She had to control a trembling in her whole body.

“Cooking a dinner in your good suit!”

“I had my apron.”

“Well, what you got it
on
for! You never sit down in your good suit like that before! Wearing that suit around the house!”

She could conceal – how well she could conceal! – but she could not deceive and she did not need to deceive.

“I wanted to see Hilda and her mother. I went there and they weren’t in. So I walked around for a bit and went back there and they weren’t in, so I came home.”

“And
never took that suit off, and went and cooked dinner in that suit!” (That suit, that suit, that suit.)

Yes, but, her mind said, if I didn’t wear my suit I hadn’t room to pack it. That was all arranged. Long ago that was arranged, arranged by night, arranged by day. I won’t tell him any lies. I can stay quiet a little longer whatever he says. She ate her pudding mechanically, hardly knowing what she did or
what he said. It all depends on me, now, she thought. If I can manage the next quarter of an hour? Oh God help me. Just this quarter of an hour. Time could kill a person, standing still like this. A person could die.

“Any more pudding?” she said.

He shook his head. Ill temper made his face peevish.

“Gimme the paper,” he said sourly.

“It’s here.” She passed it to him and her heart beat like a clock.

He turned himself from the table and seemed to settle to the paper. A weight lifted a little from her. She took out the plates, cleared the table, and went into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. She ran the water into the dishpan. Water makes more noise than anything but crumpling paper, doesn’t it, she thought. I must have things quiet, so that I can listen both ways. She piled the dishes, one on one, very quietly. It was seven o’clock. She began to wash the dishes, silently enough. The moments became intolerable. A person could die, waiting for a minute to come. She could not bear it. She dried her hands on her apron and threw off the apron. It dropped to the floor. She snatched the raincoat off the peg by the door. She slipped her arms into the raincoat and went out into the dark. If it’s not here, she thought in her fluttering mind, what shall I do. If he comes into the kitchen and I have to go back in, what’ll I do. The taxi might be two or three minutes early. It
might
. She walked quickly down the little back garden path to the lane where the woodshed stood. The air, cool and fresh and dark after the warm lighted kitchen, blew upon her face. She saw up the dark lane a car standing, its engine running. The absurd fear nearly choked her that this might not, after all, be her car. Some other car might be standing there. Ducking into the woodshed, she picked up the two bags and the thin
fishing rod in the case, slung the haversack over her shoulder, and began to run. She reached the taxi and looked eagerly in. She saw the Chinese face. Before the driver could reach the door handle, she wrenched the door open, sprang in and closed it.

“Drive,” she said, and leaned back in the car with a relief that made her for a moment dizzy.

Y
ou can drive from Vancouver to New Westminster along a highway bright with motor hotels, large motorcar parks, small shops, factories of various sizes. At night everything is bright with lights and neon dazzle. In the daytime you will see that some of these motor hotels are set in old orchards, and among the rows of neat homogeneous dwellings stand old cherry trees, sprawling and frothing with white blossoms in the spring. Later, when the blossoms fall, the gnarled trees in their ingenuous beauty remind the urbanites and suburbanites, speeding past, of another kind of place. The delicate impression is crowded out and vanishes, obliterated by every modern convenience.

There is a second way that lies between Vancouver and New Westminster. It is called the river road. The river is the Fraser River, never far distant from the road. On the high north side of the road there is still some forest or large bush, and there is the agreeable illusion that the few pleasant and rustic small houses that stand alone amongst the trees above the road are really permanent in their aloneness, so that the road will keep its intrinsic quality of appearing to be far
removed from a city. But over the ridge that descends to the road the city of Vancouver is crawling on. Bulldozers are leveling the small trees and laying bare a pale and stony soil. The landscape is being despoiled, as it must, on behalf of groups of small houses, a golf course, schools, a cemetery all the amenities of living, learning, playing, and dying. The north side of the river road has no intrinsic quality of permanence after all, we see, and will soon be just another road, but the river flows below the south side and commands the scene.

The Chinese taxi in which Mrs. Lloyd escaped from her discarded but still lawful husband E. Thompson Vardoe followed neither of these roads. The Chinese boy drove along secondary roads which were very dark, being lighted at intervals only by lamps shining in the windows of small frame houses built in clearings by the roadside. He turned south toward a third highway leading to New Westminster which was the nearest main road to the home of his passenger and which had no special characteristics. It was simply a road built through an undulating country, sparsely settled. This countryside will, however, soon be thickly populated, as it is the only direction in which Vancouver can expand. Vancouver lies on a tongue of land, a promontory, and cannot expand to the north, for there is Burrard Inlet and the mountains; it cannot expand to the west, because there is the Gulf of Georgia; it cannot expand to the south, for there is the Fraser River, and the delta islands with airport and farms. So it will have to expand to the east, meeting eventually with the town of New Westminster. It was toward this highway that the Chinese taxi was headed when the passenger called suddenly “Stop.”

The young Chinese taxi driver made an abrupt movement and stopped the car. He turned a startled earnest face.

“Are we still inside the city limits?” asked his passenger.

He considered. “No,” he said.

“Turn back till we’re just inside the city limits, mail this letter, turn round and keep on going to New Westminster – but keep away from where you picked me up.”

He looked at her curiously and took the letter.

“Okay,” he said.

The passenger seemed to sit stiff and erect until the boy had drawn up by a dim roadside, mailed the letter, slipped back into the car, turned around and proceeded on his way.

Then she relaxed, sighing.

T
he forward movement of the taxi through the dark was separating Mrs. Lloyd as did every moment of passing time from the house that had been called her home. Time slid behind her – she could feel it and count it – and the road slid behind her, and the fixed point of the house which still contained Edward Vardoe became more irrevocably far away. Each approaching and passing car whose lights grew, blazed, passed and were no more, each house whose faintly lighted bulk neared and vanished, each distantly spaced and passed country light, the continuous noise of the engine of the taxi – all these innocent accompaniments of travel through the night were full of meaning and assumed their places as elements on her side in her flight from Edward Vardoe. Just as, if the Chinese driver had turned his car again and for some reason had performed the easy physical feat of driving back to the house where he had picked her up, each of these elements would have contributed to her calamity.

Before this moment she had had on her side only her own private determination and her outraged endurance of the nights’ hateful assaults and the days’ wakings in a passing
of time where daily and nightly repetition marked no passing of time. Only the calendar, watched often enough, could mark it, and the small pile of bills, the earned secret money which grew slowly and grew until changed for larger bills, and then grew again. But now each new minute in the taxicab was as jubilant as the cry of a trumpet. Everything was on her side. She exulted in each small sight and sound, in new time, in new space, because now she had got free.

Mrs. Lloyd, sitting gloriously alone in the back seat of the car, regarded the dark shape of the young driver in front of her. Even the choice of the Chinese taxi had contributed to her security. If, that night, less than half an hour ago and a lifetime away, she had found what she called a “white” taxi waiting in the lane, minutes might have been lost in argument, for some other car might by coincidence have been waiting there. But when she had seen in the fragmented light the slant face of the Chinese boy, she did not need to ask; she knew that her plan was falling into its place, and she and the taxi moved quickly away from Edward Vardoe, according to plan.

Her face took on its generous easy curves in the dark in contemplation of the day a few weeks ago when she had first seen the young Chinaman who now sat in front of her. The day had been wet. Rain had fallen steadily and the east end of Vancouver bore its own look of drenched sameness. Mrs. Lloyd, wearing the blue belted raincoat which now she wore in the moving taxi, with the hood pulled over her head, had walked briskly with her hands in her pockets, facing west on Pender Street, facing – that is – toward that section of Pender Street which shows you by the kind of buildings which you pass and by the monosyllabic names on these buildings that, unmistakably, you are approaching Chinatown. Chinatown intensifies and becomes its true self – and none other - just
after you cross Main Street as you journey west. A short few blocks, and Chinatown ceases abruptly as if it had never been, the vestiges of Shanghai Alley are left behind, the city takes over again, regardless.

Mrs. Lloyd remembered looking to right and left of her as she walked. She remembered savoring the names above the small shops, the discreet shabby places of business, and the little live-poultry markets. Her pleasures were few, and were not communicable, and she had long formed the habit of seeking and finding, where she could, private enjoyment of the sort that costs nothing but an extension of the imagination. So when she saw the names Gum Yuen, Foo Moy, Jim Sing, Hop Wong, Shu Leong, which now came vaguely into her mind again as in a picture taken up and put down, those syllables ravished her as with scents and sounds of unknown lives and far places. Hemmed in between two squat and aged gray wooden houses was a small shabby building not unlike a church, whose open door showed, so early, a small bulb of light in a dark hall within. A shriveled Chinaman, leaning on a stick, walked along a duck-board approach, took his immortal soul inside, and vanished. Mrs. Lloyd paused to read a tablet on the church wall. Black words turning gray on a weatherworn board announced Christ’s Chinese Church in Canada. Mrs. Lloyd’s imagination followed the old Chinaman into the low building, back to his crowded home perhaps two streets away, and again into the church. What called him there? What were his thoughts? Who were his friends? How did he live? What were his hopes? When the church members gathered in that dingy building, what Christ did they see before them? Was Christ a Chinaman, a Jew, a Christian? He was still Christ. All this and much more she passionately longed to know, but her mind could not follow these minds in their dark
directions. She paused, too, at a live-poultry market. Quite secret – from her – were the faces of those who bought and those who sold. She considered these enigma faces but, although she thought that she could read easily the faces of her own race (but she could not), these others were sealed from her.