The Long Valley (7 page)

Mary went to sit on his lap for a moment. “Not so awfully sure. You don’t know, and I’m glad you don’t.”

One night when Harry was reading his paper under the lamp, Mary jumped up. “I left my garden scissors outside,” she said. “The dew will rust them.”

Harry looked over his paper. “Can’t I get them for you?”

“No, I’ll go. You couldn’t find them.” She went out into the garden and found the shears, and then she looked in the window, into the living room. Harry was still reading his paper. The room was clear, like a picture, like the set of a play that was about to start. A curtain of fire waved up in the fireplace. Mary stood still and looked. There was the big, deep chair she had been sitting in a minute ago. What would she be doing if she hadn’t come outside? Suppose only essence, only mind and sight had come, leaving Mary in the chair? She could almost see herself sitting there. Her round arms and long fingers were resting on the chair. Her delicate, sensitive face was in profile, looking reflectively into the firelight. “What is she thinking about?” Mary whispered. “I wonder what’s going on in her mind. Will she get up? No, she’s just sitting there. The neck of that dress is too wide, see how it slips sideways over the shoulder. But that’s rather pretty. It looks careless, but neat and pretty. Now—she’s smiling. She must be thinking something nice.”

Suddenly Mary came to herself and realized what she had been doing. She was delighted. “There were two me’s,” she thought. “It was like having two lives, being able to see myself. That’s wonderful. I wonder whether I can see it whenever I want to. I saw just what other people see when they look at me. I must tell Harry about that.” But then a new picture formed; she saw herself explaining, trying to describe what had happened. She saw him looking over his paper with an intent, puzzled, almost pained look in his eyes. He tried so hard to understand when she told him things. He wanted to understand, and he never quite succeeded. If she told him about this vision tonight, he would ask questions. He would turn the thing over and over, trying to understand it, until finally he ruined it. He didn’t want to spoil the things she told him, but he just couldn’t help it. He needed too much light on things that light shriveled. No, she wouldn’t tell him. She would want to come out and do it again, and she couldn’t if he spoiled it for her.

Through the window she saw Harry put his paper down on his knee and look up at the door. She hurried in, showing him the shears to prove what she had gone for. “See, the rust was forming already. They’d’ve been all brown and nasty by morning.”

He nodded and smiled at her. “It says in the paper we’re going to have more trouble with that new loan bill. They put a lot of difficulties in our way. Somebody has to loan money when people want to borrow.”

“I don’t understand loans,” she said. “Somebody told me your company had title to nearly every automobile in town.”

He laughed. “Well, not all, but a good many of them, anyway. When times are a little bit hard, we make money.”

“It sounds terrible,” she observed. “It sounds like taking unfair advantage.”

He folded the paper and put it on the table beside his chair. “No, I don’t think it’s unfair,” he said. “The people must have the money, and we supply it. The law regulates the interest rate. We haven’t anything to do with that.”

She stretched her pretty arms and fingers on the chair, as she had seen them through the window. “I suppose it really isn’t unfair,” she said. “It just sounds as though you took advantage of people when they were down.”

Harry looked seriously into the fire for a long time. Mary could see him, and she knew he was worrying about what she said. Well, it would do him no harm to see what business really was like. Things seemed righter when you did them than when you thought about them. A little mental housecleaning mightn’t be a bad thing for Harry.

After a little, he looked over at her. “Dear, you don’t think it’s unfair practice, do you?”

“Why, I don’t know anything about loans. How can I tell what is fair?”

Harry insisted, “But do you
feel
it’s unfair? Are you ashamed of my business? I wouldn’t like it if you were.”

Suddenly Mary felt very glad and pleased. “I’m not ashamed, silly. Every one has a right to make a living. You do what you do well.”

“You’re sure, now?”

“Of course I’m sure, silly.”

After she was in bed in her own little bedroom she heard a faint click and saw the door knob turn, and then turn slowly back. The door was locked. It was a signal; there were things Mary didn’t like to talk about. The lock was an answer to a question, a clean, quick, decisive answer. It was peculiar about Harry, though. He always tried the door silently. It seemed as though he didn’t want her to know he had tried it. But she always did know. He was sweet and gentle. It seemed to make him ashamed when he turned the knob and found the door locked.

Mary pulled the light chain, and when her eyes had become accustomed to the dark, she looked out the window at her garden in the half moonlight. Harry was sweet, and understanding, too. That time about the dog. He had come running into the house, really running. His face was so red and excited that Mary had a nasty shock. She thought there had been an accident. Later in the evening she had a headache from the shock. Harry had shouted, “Joe Adams—his Irish Terrier bitch had puppies. He’s going to give me one! Thoroughbred stock, red as strawberries!” He had really wanted one of the pups. It hurt Mary that he couldn’t have one. But she was proud of his quick understanding of the situation. When she explained how a dog would—do things on the plants of her garden, or even dig in her flower beds, how, worst of all, a dog would keep the birds away from the pool, Harry understood. He might have trouble with complicated things, like that vision from the garden, but he understood about the dog. Later in the evening, when her head ached, he soothed her and patted Florida Water on her head. That was the curse of imagination. Mary had seen, actually seen the dog in her garden, and the dug holes, and ruined plants. It was almost as bad as though it actually happened. Harry was ashamed, but really he couldn’t help it if she had such an imagination. Mary couldn’t blame him, how could he have known?

Late in the afternoon, when the sun had gone behind the hill, there was a time Mary called the really-garden-time. Then the high school girl was in from school and had taken charge of the kitchen. It was almost a sacred time. Mary walked out into the garden and across the lawn to a folding chair half behind one of the lawn oaks. She could watch the birds drinking in the pool from there. She could really
feel
the garden. When Harry came home from the office, he stayed in the house and read his paper until she came in from the garden, star-eyed. It made her unhappy to be disturbed.

The summer was just breaking. Mary looked into the kitchen and saw that everything was all right there. She went through the living room and lighted the laid fire, and then she was ready for the garden. The sun had just dropped behind the hill, and the blue gauze of the evening had settled among the oaks.

Mary thought, “It’s like millions of not quite invisible fairies coming into my garden. You can’t see one of them, but the millions change the color of the air.” She smiled to herself at the nice thought. The clipped lawn was damp and fresh with watering. The brilliant cinerarias threw little haloes of color into the air. The fuchsia trees were loaded with blooms. The buds, like little red Christmas tree ornaments, and the open blooms like ballet-skirted ladies. They were so
right,
the fuchsias, so absolutely right. And they discouraged the enemy on the other side, the brush and scrubby, untrimmed trees.

Mary walked across the lawn in the evening to her chair, and sat down. She could hear the birds gathering to come down to the pool. “Making up parties,” she thought, “coming to my garden in the evening. How they must love it! How I would like to come to my garden for the first time. If I could be two people—‘Good evening, come into the garden, Mary.’ ‘Oh, isn’t it lovely.’ ‘Yes, I like it, especially at this time. Quiet, now, Mary. Don’t frighten the birds.’ ” She sat as still as a mouse. Her lips were parted with expectancy. In the brush the quail twittered sharply. A yellowhammer dropped to the edge of the pool. Two little flycatchers flickered out over the water and stood still in the air, beating their wings. And then the quail ran out, with funny little steps. They stopped and cocked their heads, to see whether it was safe. Their leader, a big fellow with a crest like a black question mark, sounded the bugle-like “All clear” call, and the band came down to drink.

And then it happened, the wonderful thing. Out of the brush ran a white quail. Mary froze. Yes, it was a quail, no doubt of it, and white as snow. Oh, this was wonderful! A shiver of pleasure, a bursting of pleasure swelled in Mary’s breast. She held her breath. The dainty little white hen quail went to the other side of the pool, away from the ordinary quail. She paused and looked around, and then dipped her beak in the water.

“Why,” Mary cried to herself, “she’s like me!” A powerful ecstasy quivered in her body. “She’s like the essence of me, an essence boiled down to utter purity. She must be the queen of the quail. She makes every lovely thing that ever happened to me one thing.”

The white quail dipped her beak again and threw back her head to swallow.

The memories welled in Mary and filled her chest. Something sad, always something sad. The packages that came; untying the string was the ecstasy. The thing in the package was never quite—

The marvelous candy from Italy. “Don’t eat it, dear. It’s prettier than it’s good.” Mary never ate it, but looking at it was an ecstasy like this.

“What a pretty girl Mary is. She’s like a gentian, so quiet.” The hearing was an ecstasy like this.

“Mary dear, be very brave now. Your father has—passed away.” The first moment of loss was an ecstasy like this.

The white quail stretched a wing backward and smoothed down the feathers with her beak. “This is the me that was everything beautiful. This is the center of me, my heart.”

The blue air became purple in the garden. The fuchsia buds blazed like little candles. And then a gray shadow moved out of the brush. Mary’s mouth dropped open. She sat paralyzed with fear. A gray cat crept like death out of the brush, crept toward the pool and the drinking birds. Mary stared in horror. Her hand rose up to her tight throat. Then she broke the paralysis. She screamed terribly. The quail flew away on muttering wings. The cat bounded back into the brush. Still Mary screamed and screamed. Harry ran out of the house crying, “Mary! What is it; Mary?”

She shuddered when he touched her. She began to cry hysterically. He took her up in his arms and carried her into the house, and into her own room. She lay quivering on the bed. “What was it, dear? What frightened you?”

“It was a cat,” she moaned. “It was creeping up on the birds.” She sat up; her eyes blazed. “Harry, you must put out poison. Tonight you simply must put out some poison for that cat.”

“Lie back, dear. You’ve had a shock.”

“Promise me you’ll put out poison.” She looked closely at him and saw a rebellious light come into his eyes. “Promise.”

“Dear,” he apologized, “some dog might get it. Animals suffer terribly when they get poison.”

“I don’t care,” she cried. “I don’t want any animals in my garden, any kind.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t do that. No, I can’t do that. But I’ll get up early in the morning. I’ll take the new air gun and I’ll shoot that cat so he’ll never come back. The air gun shoots hard. It’ll make a hurt the cat won’t forget.”

It was the first thing he had ever refused. She didn’t know how to combat it; but her head ached, terribly. When it ached its worst he tried to make it up to her for refusing the poison. He kept a little pad soaked with Florida Water, and he patted it on her forehead. She wondered whether she should tell him about the white quail. He wouldn’t believe it. But maybe if he knew how important it was, he might poison the cat. She waited until her nerves were calm before she told him. “Dear, there was a white quail in the garden.”

“A white quail? Are you sure it wasn’t a pigeon?”

There it was. Right from the first he spoiled it. “I know quail,” she cried. “It was quite close to me. A white hen quail.”

“That would be a thing to see,” he said. “I never heard of one.”

“But I tell you I saw it.”

He dabbed at her forehead. “Well, I suppose it was an albino. No pigment in the feathers, something like that.”

She was growing hysterical again. “You don’t understand. That white quail was
me,
the secret me that no one can ever get at, the me that’s way inside.” Harry’s face was contorted with the struggle to understand. “Can’t you see, dear? The cat was after me. It was going to kill me. That’s why I want to poison it.” She studied his face. No, he didn’t understand, he couldn’t. Why had she told him? If she hadn’t been so upset she never would have told him.

“I’ll set my alarm clock,” he assured her. “Tomorrow morning I’ll give that cat something to remember.”

At ten o’clock he left her alone. And when he had gone Mary got up and locked the door.

His alarm-clock bell awakened Mary in the morning. It was still dark in her room, but she could see the gray light of morning through the window. She heard Harry dressing quietly. He tiptoed past her door and went outside, closing the door silently for fear of awakening her. He carried the new shining air gun in his hand. The fresh gray morning air made him throw back his shoulders and step lightly over the damp lawn. He walked to the comer of the garden and lay down on his stomach in the wet grass.

The garden grew lighter. Already the quail were twittering metallically. The little brown band came to the edge of the brush and cocked their heads. Then the big leader called, “All’s well,” and his charges ran with quick steps to the pool. A moment later the white quail followed them. She went to the other side of the pool and dipped her beak and threw back her head. Harry raised the gun. The white quail tipped her head and looked toward him. The air gun spat with a vicious whisper. The quail flew off into the brush. But the white quail fell over and shuddered a moment, and lay still on the lawn.