With the one coin for fee

By Helen R. Hull

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Title: With the one coin for fee

Author: Helen R. Hull


        
Release date: July 30, 2026 [eBook #79230]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Coward-McCann, 1940

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79230

Credits: Jens Sadowski. This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITH THE ONE COIN FOR FEE ***




                       With the One Coin for Fee


                             Helen R. Hull

   Experiment: Four short stories. Coward-McCann, New York (1940), pp.
                                 1-67.

   Crossing alone the nighted ferry
   With the one coin for fee.




Perhaps to understand the story, you need to understand the setting.
Certainly it contained, in concrete and tangible shape, the forces which
worked to produce the beginning of the story. And without this
particular setting, there never could have been this ending. Perhaps the
extraordinary, sweet, concentrated air which runs under the great dark
wings of a hurricane is in part responsible for the ending; at the very
heart of darkness and destruction is this breath of concentrated life,
burning out too rapidly sluggish blood, toxins of habit and hate and
age. It is exhilarating as any great fear may be, it gives a kind of
intoxication unlike the ordinary earthly forms in that the feeling of
release, of freedom and power, is not an illusion. It may be temporary,
but it is real while it lasts. And one good whiff may well make a man
believe, as it penetrates to cells which had never breathed before, that
the trouble with this world may be that it is keyed down to thin, dull
air.

All that is surmise, but the setting itself is real enough. Some changes
occurred on that day in late September, but up to that day not much had
changed for more than a hundred years. A town in southern New England,
touching the coast and stretching inland a few miles; the town itself
centered about the river, before it spread out to make the head of the
bay, bridges with turntables and draws for the vessels that came up to
the docks, with warehouses and ships’ chandlers’ shops along the docks,
with business streets, a few, at the foot of the hills, and residence
streets climbing the hills; with a mill or two, and factories farther
inland, along the river banks. North of the town lay farming country,
and south of it the widening bay and ocean. Out of the town ran the
shore road, and here macadam had replaced the original road where white
sand poured from the turning rims of wheels; some of the estates had
been cut into building lots for summer cottages; the tip of the western
side of the bay was Grady’s Amusement Park, with bathing pavilions, a
skating rink, a Ferris wheel, and concession stands around the parking
place for the cars which had produced this development.

A few miles out from town, where the shore thrust a finger into the bay,
so that you had the last of the river on one side, and what seemed to be
real ocean on the other, stood the old Lathrop place. The shore drive
cuts across the base of the finger, ceasing to be a shore drive for
several miles. When the drive was put through, there had been some
dickering through an agent with Mrs. Susan Lathrop Field, the last of
the Lathrops, who was abroad at the time, in London, on the Riviera, in
Cairo. She had no sentiment against selling the shore land for the
drive; on the contrary, she had a desire to make good money (which she
no doubt needed!) at the town’s expense. Finally the town council
overrode the one elderly alderman who still felt that the town owed a
great deal to the Lathrop family, and voted to confiscate a right of way
in a convenient straight line across the property, behind the barns and
stables, and through what had been a small training track old Lathrop
had used for his horses. People whizzing past in cars saw only the
weathering out-buildings. In the winter the square bulk of the house
showed through arching branches of the great elms and oaks, with dark
rust stains from hinges of the closed shutters staining the dingy
clapboards, and the two great chimneys, one at each end, standing like
patient lifted ears.

Across from the barns and sheds, and in its season, the house, lay the
rest of the bisected property, fields and woods, and what had originally
been the farmer’s house, a sturdy, story-and-a-half building, like those
you see in Maine and New Hampshire. It stood on a swelling mound of
land, a neat road winding past it to the garage, its paint smooth-white,
its opened shutters sleek and green, the meadow tamed into a lawn under
its charmingly curtained windows. _They_ said that Mrs. Field had had to
come down in her price, when there was no shore land left except that
around the old ark that no one wanted, and almost no one remembered that
Margaret Turner’s father had been the farmer on the Lathrop place. For
Margaret had bought the little house, and she was there, that fall of
nineteen hundred and thirty-eight.

She had spent her summer holidays there even before she bought the
house, and although she had never lied outright about the matter, she
had somehow created for her occasional guest the impression that these
were ancestral acres about her, their original glory damaged by the
wanton stroke of the road through them, by the change in the quality of
the residents along the western shore of the bay. Margaret had not set
about creating this impression. She had said, and it was true, “When my
father set out those trees,” and, “Once the lawns ran to the very edge
of the beach, you can’t imagine how beautiful it was then!” and, “It
would have broken my father’s heart if he had seen what changes—” Her
guests, a girl from the private school where Margaret taught
mathematics, motoring with her mother to their summer place on the Cape,
or two or three of her fellow teachers, skipping about the country in a
polished Ford, stopped on their journey to have tea in Margaret’s
charming living room, with its English chintzes, hooked rugs, pieces of
old mahogany and pine. As they drove away, the girl’s mother might say,
“You can tell that Miss Turner comes from a good family, I’m glad
there’s someone like that in your school,” and the girl might answer,
“Well, I sort of like her, although most of the girls are just
paralyzed! She’s terribly sarcastic.” And the teachers, some of the
younger members of the faculty, who had stopped to boast about their
trip around the Gaspé, would say, “Of course, if you had a place like
that, that had been in your family for generations, you would rather
spend your summer that way. She didn’t seem the least bit stuck up or
cold, did she, when you see her in her own setting?” And when Margaret
sighed as she said, “It would cost too much to put the big house in
shape, or to run it,” she was sighing in all sincerity at a dream of her
young girlhood; she didn’t intend to suggest a picture of herself as
brave and wise, settling into the cottage, earning the money for its
shingles and paint and a part-time handyman and gardener, never
complaining at lost elegance and leisure.

Probably Margaret Turner never examined too closely the impression she
had established about herself and the old Lathrop place. It mattered
little to anyone except herself, and for herself it was like a warm,
dark cloak within the folds of which she could hide the emptiness of her
hands or her heart, a cloak drawn around a self not quite symmetrical
nor firmly fleshed, a trifle warped and withered from meager fare, from
thwartings and overstrain. She hadn’t planned to weave a complete
garment, she had just sketched a line or two of it, she wasn’t entirely
to blame if in mild gossip, casual references, people clothed her thus.

Among the items which no one except Margaret knew were these: she had
spent every cent of her savings (they weren’t much, on her small salary)
including her one insurance policy which had matured when she was sixty,
in buying the house and furnishing it; there was still a small mortgage,
which she meant to pay off before she retired. She understood vaguely
that the school at which she taught did something for its teachers when
they were too old to be of further use. Surely enough to live on—taxes,
coal, a little food. But after 1929 there had been uneasiness among the
older teachers. The endowment of the school was small, the contributions
from alumnae diminished (married women couldn’t expect their husbands to
do much for their wives’ old school, not with the market the way it
was!) and in the need to reduce expenses, there began a weeding out
among the older members of the staff. Margaret Turner held her wiry
figure more erect, had her white hair waved more often, tried a little
rouge under her handsome dark eyes, and moved with an effect of great
vivacity about her work. “You have your own home,” some of them said to
her, “you don’t have to worry. Did you hear about poor old Simmsy? The
trustees cut her pension in half the other day, they don’t know how long
they can continue that pittance, Simmsy isn’t seventy yet and she says
all her folks live to be ninety at least.”

The trustees were sorry, but there was nothing in the bond about
pensions. In prosperous times they could make generous gestures, but
after all, women of intelligence, on regular salaries all those years,
should have some foresight about the future, and since retrenchment was
necessary, it was only fair to keep the younger teachers at work. There
had been a dinner last May, a dinner of farewell to two women who had
been longest with the school. They weren’t older than Margaret, but
their age was on the record because they had started early, and had been
less canny than Margaret. They’d let themselves go a little, too,
Margaret thought, as she sat at the dinner listening to pleasant
speeches from old girls about how much these women had meant to them.
Earmarked as elderly, too comfortable about figure and dress. If she was
careful, she might fool them into keeping her on for a few more years.
After the dinner, in the teachers’ cloak room, one of them, puffing as
she bent to pull on her galoshes, said: “You know, horses have a better
deal. They shoot ’em when they’re through with ’em.” The other, who was
plump and pink and whose good humor was not yet entirely deflated by the
sharp pricking point of fear, said, “There’s one thing sure, we’ll have
good company at the poorhouse. All the best people will be there!”

“Haven’t you relatives?” Margaret had asked. “You used to talk about
your sister’s children—”

“Distant relatives.” She chuckled. “That’s a good phrase. Very distant.
You know, in hard times there’s nothing so distant as a relative.
Self-protection, in case you wanted something. Don’t be funny. No, the
only useful relatives are the kind you have, nice ones who’ve passed on
and left you well fixed.”

She’d like to visit me this summer, thought Margaret; she saw the notion
in the change it made as it crossed the woman’s mind. Nothing so harsh
as calculation, more a quick child-wish, as if she pressed her face,
eyes round, mouth pursed a little, close to a windowpane beyond which
was something longed for. I couldn’t, thought Margaret; I couldn’t stand
having anyone around all the time, I don’t really know her, anyway I
couldn’t afford it, I’ve got to be careful. “Drop in, if you’re in my
neighborhood.” That was it, turn away quickly, you haven’t seen the
entreaty. “I’d be delighted to give you a cup of tea.”

“Well, I don’t know just where—” The porter had knocked on the door
then. Mrs. Montagu, one of the old girls, was waiting; she had her car,
she’d be glad to drive them home, it was raining. Margaret had bade them
good night, good-by, she wasn’t quite ready to go. She wasn’t ready to
be one of the elderly, discarded figures, with Mrs. Montagu, no doubt,
feeling a pleasant glow at her thoughtful kindness to them.

The first of June, Margaret had packed her trunk, and filled a box with
books and pictures, emptying the room in the residence hotel for women
of every sign of her tenancy. Usually she stored the box in the basement
until fall, but this year she sent it by express to her house at the
shore. No one noticed; there was a new management, and the chipper desk
clerk didn’t realize that Miss Turner had lived in the hotel since it
opened. He didn’t even ask if she wished the same room in the fall. At
least, thought Margaret, she wouldn’t regret leaving; the building had
run down. And she didn’t have to explain that she meant to look for a
cheaper room, one where she could prepare her own breakfast, and perhaps
supper. The lunches served at the school were really dinners. If she
could save a little more, if she could count on two more years—if only
they didn’t pare the salaries another ten per cent—

She spent June setting her house in order, waxing each piece of
furniture, watching the warm color, the subtle texture of wood shine out
as the bluish film of wax disappeared under her slow patient rubbing,
polishing the silver, cleaning the rugs. She no longer did much with
gardens, except for weeding around the few perennials. When she stooped
over, black spots moved crazily across her eyes, and the hollows in her
temples throbbed. For a few years after she bought the place, she had
hired a man to help her, but fifty cents an hour was much more than she
needed for her own living. She had a boy from the village come once a
week to cut the grass, and on pleasant days she attacked with clippers
the tufts he had left along the edge of the walk and drive, around the
trees, close to the granite blocks that made the foundation of the
house. In the long June evenings she crossed the highway, looking
carefully in each direction to make sure no car was about to rush at
her, with young voices shrieking or horns screaming; she walked past the
old Lathrop house, looking up at the discolored shutters, she looked
under the pines for lilies of the valley, she had picked them there when
she was a child, they still grew, small sheaths of green enclosing the
staff of tiny, cream bells. She kicked her toe against the unkempt grass
which thrust itself through the old graveled path, she frowned at the
lilac bushes with the straggle of dead branches at the center, with a
few brownish spikes among the heart-shaped leaves where blossoms had
grown neglected in May. It just shows, she said. It just shows! They had
everything to start with, everything, and I had nothing. Now Susan
Lathrop is a ruined old woman with no one to say a good word for her,
and I—her face set in bleak pride—no one has ever had a word to breathe
against me. No hint of the slightest scandal. Although it wasn’t easy,
always—

The grounds in front of the house looked green in the soft twilight,
with the pointed blades of June grass, but as she crossed them, her feet
sank into the matted grayish tangle of old, uncut growth. As Margaret
went toward the shore she thought, I’d like to see Susan Lathrop face to
face, I’d like to ask her—I’d say, how could you do this to yourself,
how could you fall so far? Look at the two of us now, think what you had
then, money, beauty, position, safety, love, oh, most of all, love!
Because of you my brother ran away, and died. He was going to make a
fortune for you in the copper mines, you couldn’t wait! And Lester Field
had begun to love me, when you came home that summer. I was nobody, and
you—you were Susan Lathrop. And now, people respect me! But they snicker
when they speak your name.

Sometime, surely, they would meet, and Margaret would speak out. She
could scarcely have bought her house for this one purpose, she could not
have said why she had such satisfaction in the small perfection of her
own place and the steady disintegration of the large house and its
grounds, but as she thought of Susan she drew in her full upper lip so
that her mouth was thin and hard, and her eyes, under the deep arched
lids, were black-brown, pupil and iris merged in hatred. When she
reached the edge of the land, she would shake herself, thrusting her
hands into the pockets of the leather jacket she wore against the
evening air, she would say, why do I bother with thoughts of her, here’s
this nice sea air to breathe, and even a little sunset left. Sometimes
she sat on the rickety steps of the old bath-house, watching the flat
sand run with opalescence as the tide came slowly, spreading the curving
edge of thin advancing water, withdrawing it, in rhythm which seemed so
hesitant that she was astonished when at last there was water at her
feet. The tide eddied in lines of color about the irregular dark piles
which marked the line of the long pier; the pier itself had cracked up
in winter ice, had been carried away piece by piece. Beyond the tip of
land the water of the outer bay was already darker, its movement shaking
off the reflection of lingering sunset color. Sometimes Margaret walked
through the stiff grass to the outer shore, but not often; the rocks
there scuffed her shoes, the air was colder, and well down the bay the
lights of the amusement park twinkled crazily, like a dissipated,
earthbound constellation. Always when she turned away from the water she
was surprised to find the land so dark, evening already caught around
the old house, under the trees. She would walk more quickly, feeling dew
from the long grass on her ankles, looking to right and left before she
crossed the highway, and sometimes as she waited, while a car roared
past, the glare of the headlights briefly on the great barn, on a bit of
broken paddock fence, she could see, before the thicker darkness settled
again, her brother standing there, his hand on the shining neck of a
restless mare, and beside him Susan Lathrop, her figure like an
hourglass in the dark riding habit of the early nineties, her reddish
gold hair curling under the stiff brim of her hat, her face vivid with
laughter. She was more alive than anyone I ever knew, thought Margaret.
Now she’s a raddled old woman. They say she dyes her hair and paints her
face. After all, I don’t want to see her. It’s been years—

But in July, when Margaret just missed seeing her, she was conscious for
days of her disappointment. It gnawed at her when she woke up at night,
when she lay waiting for seven o’clock to come, so that she had a reason
for getting up. If only she hadn’t been pampering herself, if she had
gone in to the village shopping, if she had been working around the
place, instead of staying in bed! She had caught cold, it had rained so
many days in July that she had grown careless about keeping her feet
dry, she had felt feverish, she had put herself to bed in a small panic.
She couldn’t afford to be sick, she had to keep herself well, she had to
go back to school in the fall. She had, from her ground-floor rear
bedroom, not heard any car drive along the grass-grown gravel road to
the Lathrop house. When her own doorbell had rung, she had lain very
still, waiting for whoever it was to go away. The next day the boy came
to cut the grass; the steady rains made it grow almost faster than he
could run the lawn mower. She listened to him for a while, following him
about the familiar ground by the variations in the noise he made. When
he reached the final square of grass behind the house, she got up,
feeling exactly like an old dishrag; she meant to dress, but the labor
seemed stupendous. She guessed it wouldn’t hurt the boy to see her in a
bathrobe, not after some of the sights he saw at Grady’s beach. But she
took off the net she had tied over her hair, and combed the waves
carefully into place. Even her hair looked sick, limp, flattened to her
small head. She made herself tea and toast, she wrote a list of supplies
for the chain grocery store in the village, they wouldn’t deliver unless
she ordered two dollars worth, but perhaps Sam could bring the things
out for her. Then, with her purse, she went to the kitchen door as Sam
ran the lawn mower into the shed.

“I thought I better cut it today,” he said, “looks like more rain.”
Sure, he’d bring out the groceries, he was going to the rink tonight
anyways. Then he added, “Too bad you wasn’t home yesterday. You sure
missed a treat.” He put the list in the pocket of his blue shirt, and
slid the four quarters into a trouser pocket. “I was at the garage when
she came back, see? They stopped for gas.”

“Who did?” (I’m glad I didn’t answer that doorbell, it must have been
one of the girls from the school.)

“Old Mrs. Field, you know, the one used to live out here. She asked Bill
did he know where you were, and he said he guessed you were home, you
always was. She said you must be dead if you was here, not to hear her
ring. She’s kinda deaf, you have to holler at her, or mebbe it’s her
earrings, they’re big as a traffic light. ‘Who’s living in the
farmhouse?’ she said, ‘and where are they?’ Bill said Miss Turner, and I
guess she’s home. She said, ‘Turner? Turner? I’ve heard that name
somewhere.’ She was sitting up front with the chauffeur, he was a dark
looking fellow, like a dago—”

“Is that all she said? What did she want?”

“The chauffeur said, we can’t hang around here any longer, and he let
the clutch in so hard the old dame bounced back with her hat over one
eye. Honest, Miss Turner, you oughta see her! Dolled up like a mo’om
picture star.”

“What did she want of me?” Margaret’s throat was dry.

“Gee, I don’t know. Bill says just as well you wasn’t home, you wouldn’t
want any truck with that piece of goods.” The boy was grinning a little,
his sandy, immature face touched with slyness, at the recollection of
some male ribaldry he wouldn’t repeat. Margaret could see it, in the way
he glanced at her under his lids, in the way he rubbed a finger against
a spot on his chin. She couldn’t say go on, tell me every word he said,
for all she was parched with thirst for more than this sip of news. She
nodded, her eagerness burning in her cheeks, her silence coaxed the boy.
“It wasn’t even the same fellow she had last time she stopped here. Bill
said he was a light-complected fellow, and anyway his picture was in the
papers, you know, when his wife chased ’em across the country and was
going to shoot him, only Mrs. Field gave her about twenty grand and she
divorced him instead. Bill says boy friends come kinda high at her age,
and what’s she going to do when her money gives out?”

(You shouldn’t stand here gossiping with a village boy! It’s horrid,
undignified.) Margaret could hear the rebuke faintly, as if her usual
decent self, the one she offered to public view, had withdrawn almost
beyond inner earshot. And then, at the queer smirk the boy’s face wore,
she had a quick revulsion, a protest of her sex against the bawdiness at
which she could only guess that must have shouted in Bill’s actual
remarks.

“She has to have a chauffeur,” she said, crisply. “You don’t know—”

“Huh, if you’d heard the way he spoke to her!” But Sam could take a
hint, if Miss Turner didn’t want any more it was okey with him. He stood
away from the door against which he had lounged, he said, “I’ll leave
the groceries when I come by after supper, you send word by the postman
if you want me before next week.” Then he had gone.

Margaret sat down at the table in her quiet kitchen. She poured a cup of
tea, but it had grown luke-warm, and she could not anywhere find energy
to rise, to light the gas under the kettle. Painted, bedizened Jezebel,
she thought. The village loafers making lewd sport of her. Well, Bill
and Sam weren’t exactly loafers, but the idea was the same. She thought
she’d heard the name Turner! Why, she must have lost her mind. Perhaps
that was the explanation. How could she have forgotten—Anger tightened
in Margaret. Perhaps Susan Lathrop had never known we had a family name!
An anger of her childhood, bitter, seeming when she first knew it
entirely futile, and yet serving as a drive through the hard years as
she had struggled upward. “It does you no good to kick against the
station in life you’re born to,” her father used to say to her. “Even
the prayer book tells you that!” Well, she was Miss Turner now to the
village, and Susan Lathrop had turned into _that piece of goods_. For
all Margaret’s father had been Rob, never Mr. Turner, and her brother
had been Bobby as he grew old enough to help his father with the gardens
and horses, and she herself had been Maggie, loathing the name. The
village men spoke of her with respect, she wouldn’t want any truck with
that piece of goods. And Susan, bright, beautiful, vivid Susan—Margaret
pushed her hair away from her forehead, she sat very straight in the
wooden chair. Susan Lathrop hadn’t lost her mind, she’d lost her
character.

Had she thought, because she moved so much about the earth, never
staying long in any place, never in any way settling down, that rumors
of her affairs would never reach as far as her home town? Or hadn’t she
cared, the headstrong, willful pride of the young Susan changed into the
base alloy of arrogance and indifference? But there was no safety in
distance any more, there was no distance any more. Any criminal must
have a harder time now, thought Margaret. Why, when I was a girl, Boston
seemed a long journey from here, or New York, people went there and the
miles between were a cloak behind which they could hide. No one knew
you. Rumor went on foot then, now it leaps at the turn of a dial, it
shouts from the front page of a tabloid almost before the deed shouted
has taken place. Margaret had saved the papers—more than a year ago, it
was—although she meant to burn them. Deserted wife pursues mate across
country, charges alienation of affection, says Mrs. Susan Lathrop Field
made gifts of jewelry and money to handsome young Bullett, tempted him.
Pictures of Susan, of Bullett, of deserted wife, of tiny tots weeping
for father to come home. “She lured him by luxury,” says wife, “until he
was no longer content with our humble home.” Pictures of Mrs. Field’s
villa at Cannes, of her twenty-two-room cottage at Bar Harbor. And
later, picture of injured wife, handkerchief to her eyes, check in her
hand. Fifty-thousand-dollar balm, said the headline. “Money does not
replace him, but I must think of my kiddies,” says wife. Twenty
thousand, they said in the village. Whatever it was, before the end of
the summer the village had the end of that story. George Carter, who ran
the village barber shop, and his wife Ella, who had the beauty parlor in
the room back of the barber shop, took a two weeks’ vacation touring the
East; George wanted to borrow his brother’s trailer, but Ella said no,
she wanted a real vacation, and they had stopped at over-night camps all
the way to Canada and back. Since George’s father and his grandfather
before him had worked in the Lathrop factory, where Susan’s money came
from, it was only natural for the Carters to make Bar Harbor one of
their stops. They drove past the twenty-two-room cottage, and Ella asked
which was the most exclusive beauty shop, and went there for a manicure.
She felt she owed it to her customers to pick up what hints about the
trade she could. She didn’t have her hair done, as they wouldn’t give
her a trade discount, even when she showed them one of her printed
cards. But a manicure gives a better chance for looking around and
talking. As soon as the operator found out she was from Eastbourne, she
opened right up. (Ella herself had opened up as she set the wave in
Margaret’s hair.) Susan Field was one of their steady customers.
Facials, mudpacks, henna rinses, everything! And next to her Maker, if
Miss Turner would pardon Ella for speaking right out, who knew more
about a woman than the operators in her beauty parlor? Ella always said
maybe the Lord made them, but she knew who made them over. And from what
the Bar Harbor girl said, there wasn’t much left of the original job on
Susan Lathrop Field.

As soon as I’m over this cold, thought Margaret, suddenly, I must make
an appointment with Ella Carter. I ought to get my hair back in shape
before school begins, I put too much blueing in when I wash it myself.
She didn’t finish her thought, that Ella might have heard something, or
George, something more than the boy Sam had reported. Instead, her mouth
a thin, scornful line, she turned over in her mind fragments of the
story Ella had repeated. Susan, waiting an hour or more in the beauty
parlor, peering up and down the busy resort street, nowhere among the
tourists’ dusty cars, the varnished station wagons with Maine license
plates, the gay sport cars, nowhere Susan’s imported town car, nowhere
the handsome Bullett. He’d come when he got ready, he’d been dating up
the cashier at the drug store, or a waitress at the café. He never kept
them waiting in the evening! When he did come, finally, Susan never
bawled him out a bit: she’d just say, oh, I got finished early, or did I
make a mistake again, I meant to say twelve o’clock, and he’d grin out
of one corner of his mouth. A terrible picture, of a woman terrified,
jealous, helpless. You couldn’t help liking her, the girl had said, for
all she acted like an old fool. They hadn’t heard about Bullett’s wife
until Ella told them, they thought that explained a good deal. Then
toward the end of the summer, just a year ago, Bullett went off with a
woman, someone who had a sportswear shop in Bar Harbor in the summer, in
Palm Beach winters. He went in a new coupe Susan had bought him, and she
set the police after him. But then Susan collapsed, two nurses, doctors,
and she must have called off the police, for no one heard another word.

“George’s father always said old Mr. Lathrop was a prince,” Ella had
finished. “It seems kinda too bad, doesn’t it, when you think of the
advantages she had and all? George says her father would turn over in
his grave. What I tell George is I can’t understand any woman not
getting her fill of men before she gets to that age! Why, the Bar Harbor
operator told me—” then Ella had stopped, with a clicking of her tongue,
and Margaret understood that her own condition of refined spinsterhood
made it impossible for Ella to tell her all she had heard, even when the
part withheld might well be the most—well, say, revealing. Margaret had
failed to find a phrase which would, with dignity and decorum, release
Ella’s tongue. So she had merely said, “Too bad? It’s horrible. You read
about such things, but you don’t believe them. But to hear them about a
woman you knew—No, I refuse to try to understand it.”

Margaret’s head ached, with her rehearsal of Ella’s story, with the way
her thoughts, like a flock of starlings, rushed at the news Sam had
brought, scattered in a rush at some impulse of her will. Why should she
care so much what Susan Field did? What if she had another—what had Sam
called them—another boy-friend? Grotesque and fascinating. And none of
your business, she told herself, getting to her feet. Only what had
Susan wanted of her, why had she rung her bell?

The rain had started again, making a small pricking noise against the
windowpanes. Margaret thought, I’ll catch more cold sitting here in the
damp, I must go back to bed. She moved softly, not to jar her head, and
shivered as she stretched herself flat and drew a blanket up to her
chin. If ever the sun came out again, she ought to air everything in the
house. For a few moments she kept her mind busy hanging out blankets,
emptying closets, even the cedar closet in the attic where she stored
her winter clothes. You had to watch out for mildew. Then Susan came
back, quite as if she brushed down all the dangling garments and
confronted Margaret. Only Margaret couldn’t see her clearly. The
pictures in the tabloids had been chiefly hat and summer fur, a great
collar of white fox. Not a trace of the Susan Margaret had known. When
she tried to construct an image out of what she had heard, she got the
face of Edna May Oliver. That was Sam’s remark, dolled up like a mo’om
pitcher star. Margaret had a picture of her, a stiff cardboard
photograph, huge puffed sleeves, lace collar wired up under the ears,
round eyes staring with innocence under a frontispiece of frizzed bangs.
It was in the tray of the Saratoga trunk, in the small package of
letters, receipts, account book, which had been sent home from Colorado
when Robert died. I’d like to show it to her, thought Margaret,
fiercely. I’d like to say, Look what you’ve done to yourself! Perhaps it
was as well no one had answered when Susan rang. Too much might have
been said.

The gray and rain-drenched twilight deepened until the pattern of the
flowered wall paper was lost, until the silver-backed brushes (a gift
from a senior class two years ago) ranged on the pine chest had no
reflection in the mirror above them, and the landscape painted at the
top of the mirror blurred into the rest of the grayness. It was the same
room where Margaret had slept as a child, with Robert in the room next,
and her father and mother in the front room, which she had made over
into her study. The darkness dissolved the pleasant changes she had
made, she might have been lying in the narrow iron bed, the painted
white commode in the corner, matting tacked over the floor. As a child,
excited because Susan Lathrop was coming home from the Select School for
Young Ladies, and Margaret, in a clean apron, her face scrubbed, her
hair slicked back in two pigtails, could play croquet with her, could
follow her about, somewhat dazzled at her bright daring. I’m not sure
it’s good for Maggie, she could remember her mother saying. She gets all
stirred up, she may get notions—And her father, Maggie’s got sense
enough to know she can’t have the things nor do the things Lathrop’s
daughter can. Even then Susan wanted Robert to play with them—and then
Robert wouldn’t play with girls. Later, excited again because Susan was
coming home, but a different Susan when she came, her skirts long, her
lovely hair tucked up at the back of her head, a Susan who didn’t want
to play with girls now, who wanted Robert to ride with her, who wanted
Lester Field! And Margaret had lain sleepless, her young body pressed
against the thin mattress so hard the springs of the old iron bed made
little ping-sounds all night, her mouth muffled against the pillow. And
now Susan had come home again, if only for a moment, and Margaret lay
sleepless. What was it like, at Susan’s age, not to be done with—ah, you
couldn’t call it love!

I must be feverish. Margaret sat up indignantly, snapped on the light on
the night table, shook two tablets from the aspirin bottle, swallowed
them with a sip of water, looked about her room, at the prints on the
walls, at the ruffled organdy curtains, at every sign of dignified
accomplishment which would fix her in the present. She left the light
burning, turning her face away from it, and presently slept. When she
woke, the lamp was pale in morning light, and she knew she had been
dreaming. Bits of the dreams stayed a moment, drifting on the waves of
waking before they were submerged and lost, Susan running ahead of her
over the rocky shore, laughing at something, Margaret hurrying after
her, slipping, falling, and Robert’s voice, or was it her father’s? Then
they were gone. Margaret snapped off the light. She couldn’t remember
any more of the dream. She could see the sky through the curtains,
mother-of-pearl and lustrous, the rain had ended, she felt better. It
was queer, how in dreams you never were any age, young, or middle-aged,
or old, you were just you, all of you at once, some secret essence of
you. Perhaps that was the way you ought to be, awake, only some foolish
notion about time and years lived got in between you and yourself; or
your waking memory was weak, holding today as the only real thing, while
all of you was really there, continuous, and in dreams the whole you
pressed through the barriers. But her thought was almost part of the
dream, and as she woke fully, sank with the dream under the surface of
her waking.

The next few days the sun shone coppery in a glazed sky, the breeze was
feather-light and southerly, there seemed no air to breathe, just the
warm mist which rose from the drenched earth. Margaret tried sunning her
blankets, and found them at the end of the day so damp she could not
fold them away. Her shoes, ranged neatly in shoe-rails on her closet
door, had a patina of mildew on heels and soles. There was through the
house the faint musty smell of fibers playing host to invisible and
multiplying fungi, wood, plaster, rugs, everything. Even the books had a
taint of this odor, and their covers bulged as if someone had left them
in the grass all night. If it’s like this in the tropics, thought
Margaret, I’m glad I never went there. She felt a little as if her bones
were mildewed, she couldn’t throw off a heaviness of body or of spirit
which her cold had left, she fretted against the weather as if it were a
private enemy using unfair weapons like poison gas against her and her
possessions. If it’s this bad in my house, with everything open to what
air there is, she thought, what must it be in the big house, all sealed
shut. Someone ought to go in, to see what’s happening. There had been
elegant things in that house, Margaret remembered the red velvet
portieres of the drawing room, the gold chairs with red velvet cushions,
the crystal chandelier. She might write to Susan. Dear Susan, Perhaps
you don’t realize this is the worst summer we’ve ever had at the shore,
no one ever saw anything like it, I don’t know of course what you’ve
left in your house, but it will certainly be ruined—Write her and be
laughed at for her trouble. Susan was old enough to look out for her own
things. But she never had looked out for things. Careless, generous.
Well, she never had to work for anything, why shouldn’t she be careless
and generous? Leaving her toys anywhere, tearing her dresses, giving
away anything—Margaret had forgotten—

That little gold necklace, like a fine rope, with the locket, its blue
enameled flower and a pearl for its center; Margaret had loved it. Susan
had let her wear it one day, had said, keep it, you can have it.
Margaret’s mother had sent her scampering back with it, crying, her hand
clutched over the locket as she climbed the steps to the kitchen door.
“They’d think you stole it, a valuable piece of jewelry like that! I
don’t care if Susan did give it to you, she shouldn’t have. Hurry up!”
The cook had been cross. Miss Susan was having her bath, the cook was
busy with dinner, hadn’t Maggie been playing with Miss Susan all day,
this was no time to be bothering people. Margaret had marched home, she
could keep the necklace over night, she could wear it under her
nightgown, she couldn’t see Susan before morning. But her mother had
taken it off, it had caught in her hair and tweaked it cruelly; she had
wrapped it in a bit of paper and sent Father straight off with it. “If
they should think you took it! They’d never let you play with her again,
they might not want us to stay here! You ought to know better, in our
position.” She had fairly flown at Father when he came back. “Well?” And
Father, “I saw Lathrop, he just laughed and said that girl of his would
give her head away if it wasn’t riveted on.” Susan had said she didn’t
see why Maggie’s mother made such a fuss, but she’d give it back at
Christmas. Only she had forgotten, by Christmas she was gone, just where
that year Margaret didn’t recall. You’ll learn, Margaret’s mother had
said, that it isn’t enough to know you are honest and right yourself,
you have to see to it that what you do looks that way to everyone else.
You can’t be too careful. Advice, Margaret knew now, wrung from a stem
that pricked with poverty and hard work and insecurity. Not that there
could have been any real threat that Rob Turner would lose his job;
always Lathrop’s projects, and he had new ones steadily, included Rob,
no matter how far they reached into the future. But Mary Turner,
Margaret’s mother, had gone out to service when she was not yet
thirteen, because her own mother had died, and her father, drawn as a
vague, good-natured, shiftless figure in the few comments Margaret had
ever heard, had taken one way of incompetents, and run away from the
problem of his family. Mary Turner had learned early that providence was
not to be trusted, and the rest of her life she forestalled any tricks
it might play by anticipating the worst. A hard worker, and a harder
worrier, Rob Turner used to say. Well, Margaret had remembered her
advice; she had been careful, and Susan hadn’t.

It was queer the way things kept coming back. Perhaps because she hadn’t
energy enough to stir around filling her hours with small tasks which
took the place of thought. She read the Boston paper every day, walking
slowly to the postbox for it after the mail truck passed. But China and
Spain were shadows into which her imagination did not venture, and labor
troubles were men who didn’t have sense enough to stick to jobs when
they had them, she might almost have been reading news about another
planet, not the one on which she lived. In a way, she was, for all the
portents of change had to do with a future world which could not trouble
her for long. What she read had less substance than what she remembered.
Perhaps the fact that Susan had rung her doorbell and gone away, her
errand unexplained, perhaps that ringing of the bell had set in
vibration, had waked echoes of Susan. If only I could get in town,
thought Margaret, and see Ella; she might have heard more than Sam had
reported. While this spell of weather lasted, she couldn’t risk it,
waiting at the roadside for a crowded bus, sitting in Ella’s back room
with the saturated air weighted still more with scented lotions. She
could see her name in the list of heat prostrations.

At the end of the week, at the end of a day which seemed worse than the
preceding days, intolerable because it was another of the same kind, the
wind changed. Margaret was sitting in a canvas chair on the terrace at
the side of her house, head back against the gay green and yellow
stripes, eyes closed, hands listless. She had been thinking, I ought to
go in and get some supper, I can’t lie here forever. She heard the wind
before she felt it, heard it in the treetops between her and the distant
shore. She listened, it was almost like rain, the little swishing noise
of leaves turning quickly against each other. She opened her eyes, the
treetops, maples and oaks, were in motion, clouds had gathered behind
them, the setting sun glinted through clouds, catching the pale under
side of leaves as the wind ruffled them. Then she could smell it, an
east wind strong with the odor of the salty water, the flats over which
it blew. A change of wind, coming in with the tide. She sniffed it
eagerly, she stood up to let it blow her thin silk skirt about her. It
meant rain, but cooler weather, too. She might walk to the shore, it
would be good to see something besides the flat, glassy sea of the past
week. Ordinarily she disliked being blown upon, but this evening she
stretched into the wind, she walked more springily into it, her usual
crisp, rather prim step lengthening. There was no surf as yet, even on
the rocky outer shore of the point; the surface of the bay was in
motion, long ripples across its gray, and the tide spoke in hurried
splashes about the rocks, its usual rhythm of withdrawal and approach
lost in the wind’s drive. Margaret watched, and as the first large drops
of rain fell startling and cold on her head and face, she turned back.
She had to run for her house, past the dark sealed Lathrop house, under
the uneasy trees, and as she ran, Susan was running beside her, her
flying bright hair darkening as the rain drenched them both. Margaret
reached her door, stopped, leaning against it until her heart stopped
its thumping; when had she and Susan run through the rain? Susan, with
something in her arms, drabbled, dirty-white, blood-smeared, held firmly
against Susan’s white dress, a nondescript little dog, its side torn,
one leg dangling limp. It tried feebly to lick its side, Susan panted,
“I can’t run any more, I jiggle it too much.” Margaret had seen it
first, cowering under a rock in the corner of the field, just the
briefest glance had shown her its terrified and pain-glazed eyes, she
had looked away, hastily, wanting not to see it, not to have to know
what it was, and called out to Susan, “I’ll race you to the road.” But
Susan had seen it, had flung herself down beside it, dropping the rope
of daisies and sweet clover the two of them had braided, had made soft,
compassionate noises in her throat, stretching her hands out slowly, and
the dog’s lip had curled back from its teeth. “Leave it alone, Susan!
He’ll bite you! He’s dreadful, you mustn’t touch him!” Susan had not
even heard her, after a moment she had one hand on his head, smoothing
the dirty skin over the patient, rounded skull, and then she was
hoisting herself to her feet, the animal clasped against her body. “He’s
been hurt,” she said, in a whisper, as if she didn’t want the dog to
hear. “Oh, let’s hurry! Your father will know what to do, Maggie.” Then
the rain, the threat of which had started them homeward, had begun to
fall, and they had run, Margaret gulping the bitter lump of shame she
would not admit, telling herself, I didn’t know it was hurt, not really,
anyway it isn’t safe, he might bite, look at her pretty dress—Susan had
never said once, didn’t you see him lying there? Margaret’s father had
dressed the wound, had put a splint on the leg. “He must of had a fight,
dogs, or maybe a bobcat.” Presently he was hobbling after Susan, his
long cur tail flailing the air. He wouldn’t come near Margaret, he
rolled his yellowish hound-dog eyes, showing the whites, when he saw
her. It was too much as if he said, if Susan knew what I know, she
wouldn’t think much of you! After Susan had left that fall, the dog had
disappeared. “He had the makings of a good hunting dog,” said Margaret’s
father, “but he had a roving foot.”

Margaret hadn’t thought of that dog for years, it couldn’t be guilt now
which felt so dry in her throat, she’d just lost her breath, running.
She didn’t worry now what Susan Lathrop Field thought of her! She must
take off her dress, lucky she’d had on this old wash-silk. She could
light a small fire in the fireplace, it would be pleasant with the rain
outside.

When, at the end of the next week, Margaret rode in to the village on
the bus, she found George Carter’s assistant in charge of the barber
shop, and the door to Ella’s beauty parlor closed, with a sign, “Back in
two weeks.” “They just jumped in the car the minute they saw the sun,”
explained the strange young man.

“I should think Ella might have let her customers know.” Margaret was
resentful. “Here I came way in on purpose—”

“She talked some of putting in a girl while she was gone, but she said
she just lost money when she did, you ladies wouldn’t have anyone but
her. Now with men it’s different, a shave’s a shave and you gotta have
it when you gotta have it.” He bulged comfortably under his white cotton
jacket, but his enjoyment of his own comment did not soften Margaret’s
little scowl of disappointment. “They’ve gone to see her folks,” he
added. “Her mother’s poorly, that’s one reason she was in a hustle to
get away.”

Then Ella would have no news when she came back. Margaret edged away
from the door; she oughtn’t to be standing looking into a men’s barber
shop. The young fellow didn’t look after her as she went along the
street, stepping precisely in her carefully whitened canvas oxfords, the
bright sun bringing out a faint odor of cleaning fluid from the white
front of her figured blue silk dress. Two hours until a bus left for
Grady’s Amusement Park, the bus which ran past her door. She prolonged
her few errands, crossing off each item from her list as she bought it,
a spool of darning cotton, toilet soap (she was firm with herself about
that, she liked good soap, scented, Yardley’s or Houbigant’s, she
mustn’t be extravagant, after all she’d practically wasted her bus fare
today). The drugstore clerk said, “Nice to see the sun again,” and she
agreed. In the grocery store she removed her white cotton gloves to
pinch the lettuce heads, the clerk said, “Nice to see the sun again,”
and she agreed, selecting the firmest head.

There were so many strangers in town in the summer, she really didn’t
know anyone in the village now. When she’d gone away to college, those
long years of hard work, teaching in a country school, a year at a
normal, another year of teaching, steady up-climb, she’d lost touch with
people here. All her friends now were in the city, she told herself, why
should this feeling, like a vague homesickness, pull at her eyelids, at
the corners of her mouth? Just because she had to wait for the bus,
feeling sorry for herself that there was nowhere in the village a door
where she might present herself, where someone would say, “Why, Margaret
Turner, come in! How are you? How nice to see you!” Some of the girls
she had known in school had married and settled here, she wouldn’t know
them if she met them, grandmothers now, or dead, some of them. There
weren’t any of them I cared about, she thought; they were all dull—after
Susan. And my life was different, I made it different. She straightened
her shoulders, she thanked the clerk for the neat heavy paper bag with
string handles into which she could drop all her small purchases. When
he said, “I suppose you won’t be here much longer, Miss Turner? You’ll
be getting back to the city?” she almost thanked him again, he had in a
phrase restored her.

“I’ll be here the rest of August, at least,” she said. “I’m not sure
just when I have to leave. September’s such a lovely month at the
shore.”

He waited politely for her to finish, ignoring for the moment the
Italian woman, her uncovered dark hair in a loose knot in the plump
ridge of her neck, who was shaking a banana at him and saying how mucha,
how mucha; he was a nice young man, thought Margaret, as she stepped
crisply out of the store.

She walked to the garage, to leave word for Sam. Tomorrow was his
regular day, he might have come anyway, but leaving word was one more
errand. Bill, in boots and rubber apron, had a car on the washing stand.
He held the hose away from Margaret, touched his green eye shade with
wet fingers. “You don’t want a taxi yet, Miss Turner?”

“Not just yet.” Bill made it sound like a friendly joke; he drove her to
the station with her trunk and bags, when she left in the fall, he drove
her home again in the spring, but he always mentioned the taxi, quite as
if she might recklessly order one out at any time. She explained about
Sam, and Bill thought he’d probably see the kid, he hung around a lot.

She could see the mouth of the river through the rear door of the
garage, with a coal barge drawn up along the dock. “Nice to see the sun
again,” said Bill, as she walked away. She thought of Susan’s shining
car standing near the red gasoline pump, and Bill beside it, his shrewd,
homely, grimy face puckered with that expression she had seen in Sam’s
eyes. If Susan didn’t know how they—yes, leer was the word for it!—how
they all leered at her very name, it was high time someone told her.

Still an hour to wait before the bus came. Margaret went slowly along
the narrow street which edged the river, the old docks and piers on one
side, a row of one-story wooden buildings on the other, half of them
closed, tattered advertisements of beer or tobacco tacked on the boards
nailed over the old windows. When she was a child, this was the busiest
street in town, with saloons, The Sailors’ Snug Harbor, The Oasis, with
lunch places, shops smelling of tarred rope and metal; no nice girl ever
walked down it alone, even to look at the lumber schooners, the fishing
sloops, which lay along the wharves, the girls who did walk there didn’t
go to look at the ships. Behind one dusty window was a pile of slickers,
straddled by a pair of black fisherman’s boots, farther along a sign
above a door said BEER, but for the most part the street was abandoned,
as were the docks. Almost, thought Margaret, as if the sea had retired
from business. Motor vans boomed along highways with the freight now,
the sons and grandsons of the sailors and fishermen worked in the
factories back from the waterfront, or didn’t work on W.P.A. projects.
She walked, placing her white shoes with caution on worn planks, out to
the end of the longest pier, the one from which the excursion steamer
used to run. When they’d opened Grady’s Amusement Park, they had painted
the little steamer shining white, and advertised moonlight sails to the
Park. But who wanted a slow boat, a crowd of people? Margaret had heard
stories of what went on in the cars parked along the beaches. She looked
at the ticket office, the locked turnstile, the blank window, and then
seated herself on the wooden bench.

Her father had taken them on a Sunday excursion once; she must have been
very young, for she could remember her brother Robby in a round straw
hat and a sailor collar. She had been seasick, she could smell now the
dust-stuffy, pricky smell of the green plush on the seat in the ladies’
cabin where she had lain miserably, her mother sitting beside her. Why,
that was the real reason—She stared at the water, dark, an oily
iridescence in the eddies it made around the end piles of the pier—That
time Lester Field had asked her to go—if she had gone, her whole life
would have been different. She couldn’t exactly see his face, not as he
had been then; superimposed upon the young face was the face of the
older Lester as she had seen him just once, twenty years later, a face
of heavy whitish flesh, like wax, with irresolute mouth and dull eyes,
the underlids sagging. He had been killed hunting, that fall. Drunk,
they said. Well, he married Susan for her money and she gave him a run
for it. The village talked thus about Susan even then, almost thirty
years ago.

All Margaret could catch now of the young face was the heavy stroke the
eyebrows made, the imperious stare of the dark eyes, the assurance of
his smile. He had finished law school, he had come back to town to spend
the summer in his father’s office, he had come out to the farm with some
papers for her father to sign, he had seen Margaret, he had come back,
often. “He’s hanging around too much,” her mother had said. “I don’t
like it. I wouldn’t like him anyway, and you have to face the fact he’s
not the same class, and that just means trouble.” Margaret couldn’t
listen to her. (What a sweet baby you are, Margie! Kiss me! What’s the
harm?) Where, in her staid, neat body lingered the echo of that ecstasy?
Lester had planned the whole thing. A friend of his, and his girl.
Margaret could tell her mother she was spending the night with her—and
now she couldn’t remember the girl’s name! There was a full moon. Lots
of good places on the old boat where no one can see us, just you and me,
Margie, and the moon and the water! Margaret had refused. I couldn’t,
Lester. It wouldn’t be right. She had been faint with longing to go, she
had consoled herself in bitter days afterwards that at least she had
resisted temptation, she had lived up to her standards. A gull circled
over her, so near she saw its round bright eye, and its cry as it
swooped away was like a derisive laugh. _Aorr_, he screamed, that’s how
you kept your virtue, afraid you would be seasick! Had that been the
reason, or was this only an ironic trick of her nerves, this lonely
afternoon? Lester had been angry; before Margaret saw him again, Susan
had come home from abroad. If I had gone with him that night, he was
angry because he thought I did not care enough for him—He had begun to
love me—I could have held him, in spite of Susan.

Margaret got to her feet, her paper bag crackled against her knee, she
set her mouth firmly, what possessed her, harking back to all these old,
long-lived-past moments? She was like those gulls, walking with their
stiff ungraceful balance at the edge of the receding tide, under the
shored-up bank from which the pier ran out, pecking over the marginal
debris. The odor of the water was strong in her nostrils, brackish,
fishy, town-tainted, unlike the clean salt pungency of her own shore.
She wouldn’t come in town again unless she had to; she didn’t like it.

Nor did she care much for the bus ride to her door. She stared out of
the rattling, half-opened window, trying not to be in any way a part of
the company in which she rode, women in flowered beach pajamas, in
slacks, their rotundities bulging comfortably, bandanas, not too clean,
tied under their chins, the ends wagging with gum-chewing and shrill
talk, grubby children scrabbling all over the seats, half naked,
scratches on their sunburned legs. Too early for the night crowd at
Grady’s, these were part of the colony this side of Grady’s Park, summer
cottages to rent by week or month, they rode in to the village movies as
often as the bill changed. Riff-raff. Margaret hadn’t been along the
shore as far as the cottages since they were first built; she’d heard
they were run down, rents had been reduced, the owner couldn’t half fill
the places, families didn’t take vacations any more. A shame they’d let
people like that in, lowering the tone of the place. That was the first
property Susan’s agent had sold, Susan had pocketed the money without
the least concern what happened to the land. There was distance enough
between Margaret’s house and the cottages so that she seldom saw the
inhabitants, except on such a bus ride. But she thought how nice it
would have been to have two or three pleasant summer homes along the
shore, with what she called desirable people; she could have called on
them, they could have dropped in to see her. One of the children stopped
beside her seat, a scrawny little girl, the scanty front of her playsuit
sagging away from her flounder-flat front. She was working on an
ice-cream cone, boring a hole with her tongue in the melting chocolaty
mound, she stared with shrewd, pale eyes under wisps of sun-bleached
hair at Margaret. The bus bounced off the edge of the pavement, passing
a car, and back again, the child fell in against Margaret’s knee,
Margaret’s quick hand pushed child and dripping cone away, they were a
heap at her feet, sticky cone planted on her ankle, a startled _awk_
from the child. Margaret contracted, a violent physical withdrawal, at
this violation of her privacy, her isolation, her very cleanliness.
“Look what you’ve done, you bad little girl!” she said, fiercely. The
child was hoisting her pointed stern, a gurgle of despair coming from
near the dirty bus floor. She couldn’t make it, what with the narrow
space, the jerking of the bus. Margaret leaned forward, she had to do
something, she slid her hands along the thin, smooth back, she pulled
the child up. Amazingly, the child settled on the seat beside her,
leaning against Margaret’s arm, wedging what was left of the ice cream
into the cone again with dirty fingers, proceeding solemnly to lap it
with her pointed tongue. I had forgotten how small a child’s arm feels,
how small and hard a child’s body, light, warm, like a little
unfeathered bird—

“Ardelia, you come here, stop bothering the lady, you come here, I say!”

Ardelia slid to the floor, her eyes holding to Margaret’s face for a
moment, with that shrewd, unblinking stare, almost as if she measured
the confusion Margaret felt. What nonsense, thought Margaret, dabbing
with a Kleenex at the smudge on her ankle, then jerking at the bell
cord. The bus driver watched her in his mirror, he pulled to a stop, and
she climbed stiffly down, not looking once at anyone in the bus as she
left. She was a dirty little thing, thought Margaret, angrily. Her arm
still kept that pressure, warm, light, those small, smooth bones. Lucky
that mess didn’t land on my dress, I’ll have to change my stockings.
What was the matter today, that loneliness should take so many forms to
trip her? Her house waited for her, charming, quiet, its own shadow from
the low sun stretching dark across the lawn almost to her feet. The tin
flag on her postbox was down, she opened the front and took out not only
the daily paper, but two letters. One had the school address smartly
printed on the flap. She didn’t recognize the writing on the other. As
she fitted her key into the lock, she told herself firmly, your holiday
is almost over, you should be enjoying it instead of having such
megrims. She had heard somewhere that these summer colds left you
depressed, a kind of poison in the system. Maybe she should get a tonic.
She put away her purchases methodically, she set her hat on the padded
hat-tree in the hall closet, and then she went into the living room with
paper and letters. Her reading glasses were in a drawer of the desk; she
seated herself in the armchair near a window, and waited a moment,
hoping for the surge of comfort which homecoming should bring, a moment
to feel that warm recognition that she, Margaret Turner, had done this
for herself, gained for herself this setting, this position. But today
she was uneasy. She turned the letter from the school in her fingers,
she found it lightly sealed, and ran her thumb under the flap. Just a
note, she thought, about which day she should appear for conferences
with parents.

She read the letter twice, with no shock, rather with feeling that she
had read it before, that she had known all day, all summer, that it
would lie in her postbox, awaiting her. The Head Mistress of the school
knew that Margaret would understand, she was sorry to write so late, but
probably Margaret would be relieved that she could now stay in her
charming home, in the spring she had thought the budget for salaries was
properly balanced, but one or two bad investments, if any investments
nowadays were anything but bad, and so forth. The point being, at the
end of the third page, that Lucy Alder, the assistant, could handle all
the classes in mathematics, and Margaret needn’t come back. Be sure to
keep in touch with us, with deep appreciation of your splendid service.

Margaret folded the letter along the creases, but she couldn’t get it to
slide into the envelope, it crackled and would not go in. She laid it
beside her on the table, moving her hand cautiously, as if something
slept here in the house which a sudden movement, a noise, might waken.
Still quietly she opened the second letter, and looked at the printed
circular which the non-revealing envelope contained, her face creasing
wrily. Strictly confidential, to teachers, loans arranged, no other
security required, no signatures except your own, absolute privacy.
Teachers were all hard up, then. Or they were easy marks. But she wasn’t
a teacher any more, didn’t they understand? Then she unfolded the
newspaper, spread it on her knees. The words were there under her eyes,
but they were only marks, signifying nothing. So she sat still, her
hands lying on the paper, open, empty, inert. The light in the room
changed, as the sun dropped under the horizon. A soft afterglow made
amber highlights on polished surfaces of wood, tinted the pale ground of
the chintz curtains, lay for a moment across Margaret’s hands.

I might as well get my supper, she said, presently. I can’t do anything
about it, not tonight, anyway. If she moved softly, she wouldn’t rouse
the thing that slept, she knew its shape, but she could pretend she
didn’t know it was there at all. It stirred as she went into the
kitchen, with her thought: I can make the payment on the mortgage this
fall, the tax bill at the end of September, but then what do I eat, what
do I burn for warmth? Oh, not tonight! I have time enough to plan, to
figure out a way—Time? She stumbled, and her hand clung against the
paneling of the door.

                   *       *       *       *       *

By the middle of September Margaret had reached a cessation of worry. At
least, the part of her mind that tried to look ahead, to plan, had
stopped its endless fumbling search for a way out, after it had worn
smooth the walls of the dark and narrow shaft into which she had been
plunged, and found no crack. She had tried several things. She had made
a package of the few bits of jewelry she owned, an old watch of her
father’s in a hunting case, earrings of her mother’s, a diamond
stick-pin that had come with the letters and photograph from Robert’s
landlady; she had taken the train one wet day early in September to the
city, and after walking past the doorway three times, had forced herself
into the pawnbroker’s shop, past the counters of revolvers, musical
instruments, clocks and candlesticks, to the dusty, railed office at the
rear. The proprietor, like a queer beetle with his magnifying lens for
an eye, offered her four dollars for the lot, and that’s more than
they’re worth. Without a word she had wrapped them again in tissue paper
and walked out. She had then written to Martha Miller, the plump
ex-teacher who had wanted to visit her in the summer, suggesting that if
Martha hadn’t found a place to spend the winter, she might like to stay
with Margaret. If I furnish the house, and you pay for the food—She sent
the letter in care of the school, and two days later it came back, with
a note from the secretary. Dear Miss Turner, No one seems to have Miss
Miller’s address, if I hear I’ll let you know.

She had thought she might get some teaching to do in the village
schools. Not full time, she’d retired because she didn’t wish to go back
to the city, but a class in algebra, perhaps, or tutoring, a few hours a
week. She was sorry she had made the inquiry, she dwindled and aged so
under the apathetic stare of the superintendent, a youngish man with
large hands from which the coat sleeves rode up. “Just a sort of bus
man’s holiday,” she had said, brightly. “After so many years—” They had
a waiting list, girls from Normal School; he didn’t know whether they
could even keep the schools open all winter, he’d heard rumors—

She had finally, with a fluttering desperation which made her talk too
fast and give breathless little laughs, gone to the real estate office
in the village. She had retired, she explained, to the portly man with
ashes on his vest, who had laid down his cigar, taken off his hat, and
tipped his chair forward at her entrance. She thought she might like to
spend the winter in town, at a good boarding house, did he think he
could rent her house, he knew it, very desirable, of course she wouldn’t
want a family, a large family—He had picked up his unlighted cigar,
poked it into a corner of his mouth, and tipped his chair back. How much
did she expect? Nobody would want to go out there for the winter, he
didn’t know as they would even in the summer, he’d put it on the list,
property out that way wasn’t worth much, folks just wanted a bed and a
bath-house. He chewed reflectively, rubbing a finger over the crease in
his bald forehead. “I tell you, Mrs. Turner,” he said, “the trouble is,
they ain’t no money now, folks haven’t found what to use _for_ money.”

When Margaret opened the door of her house that evening, she felt
apologetic; she had offered it to vandals, and even that had been of no
use. When she wrote the check for the mortgage payment, she folded the
checkbook hastily and shut it away in a drawer, before her eye, so used
to figures, could give her the balance left.

The Labor Day week end ended the season for Grady’s Park. The fireworks
woke Margaret from a light, uneasy sleep, she heard cars passing all
night. After that, the families moved away from the shore, driving past
in laden sedans, mattresses rolled and tied on top, baby carriages and
chairs wobbling at the side. School had opened, summer was over,
everyone had a place to go, had to go, except Margaret. She was
restless, the thin, high, valiant call of migrant birds flying under the
night sky, which she heard in her wakeful hours, was like the voice of
her own need to be off, to be fitted again into the routine of work. She
told herself she was glad she didn’t have to walk through those
chattering crowds of girls, to try to keep order in study period, to
explain the square of _a_ plus _b_, or what _x_ equals to young things
for whom _x_ equalled only swing music and a movie hero and love. If she
could remember how wretched she had always been just at this time in
September, when she had set the house in order and closed it for the
winter! For a day or so she waited eagerly for the postman. Perhaps the
Head Mistress would write saying that after all she needed Margaret,
Lucy Alder had been taken sick, or married, or registration was so
heavy. But never did Margaret think of writing to the school, Look, I’ve
worked all these years for you, I don’t know where to turn—She couldn’t
destroy the pleasant picture of Margaret Turner, gentlewoman, with
background, home, enviable, independent. She was detached now, floating
in unreality, but if she destroyed that picture she had allowed them to
construct of her, what would she be? She knew exactly how they would
shove her into oblivion. No one could afford sympathy in these days; if
you seemed an object for—not even sympathy, just reasonable
assistance—the technique was to turn upon you, accusingly. You should
have known better, you should have made provision; they tied the guilt
about your neck like a flat-iron, and pushed you out of sight. That way
you no longer troubled them. Look at Martha Miller, they didn’t even
know where she was! And Simmsy, and the others. At least, thought
Margaret, I can keep my pride.

She found it hard to keep the picture of herself clear. She missed the
casual inquiries, did you have a pleasant summer, you must have, of
course, in that sweet house of yours, I suppose you just hated to come
away, back to the same old grind. She said, I’m just restless because
I’ve had to get to work so many years, when I get used to it—Sometimes
her head felt curiously light, as if indeed she floated, the pull of
gravity gone, as if she were in fact detached from the earth. Perhaps
she wasn’t eating enough, although she thought, I must keep up my
strength, I mustn’t get sick. She told Sam he needn’t come again, grass
didn’t have to be cut in September, and then the persistent rains made
the lawns as lush and green as in June. She pushed the lawn mower
herself, leaning against the wooden handle, her heart whirring like the
blades. The thick foliage of the wet summer still clung green to all the
trees, almost as if the change of season had failed for them as well as
for Margaret. No use worrying, she thought, woman or tree; there is
nothing to be done about it. Nothing.

Her subscription to the newspaper expired on the eighteenth and she
didn’t renew it. Extraordinary, how many things she had spent money for
which she didn’t need. With no paper, she could omit that trip to the
postbox, trailing through the incessant rain, feeling the sodden ground
suck at her feet, the gusty wind pluck at her umbrella. They should have
a spell of bright, warm weather after the deluge. She didn’t like to
start making fires yet, if she was careful, she could get along for
weeks and weeks on the wood stacked in the wood-shed. She could bring up
driftwood for the fireplace, if ever it dried out.

She hadn’t thought of Susan Lathrop Field since the letter from the
school. For one thing, the rain had kept her from walking past the old
house to the shore; for another, the letter had for a time wrenched her
out of the past, even out of the present, had knocked her flat against
the solid, crackless future. But when she woke Wednesday morning, she
knew she had been dreaming again of Susan. A young Susan, saying,
“You’re so smart, Margaret, only you’re scared of things.” Had she ever
said that, or had the dream only remembered some impatient moment when
Susan tried to urge the child Maggie into action? I’m not scared any
more, thought Margaret, surprised. She could move her mind into the
place where fear had dwelt, and feel its emptiness, much as she might
run her tongue into the gap where an aching tooth had been drawn. I wish
I could see Susan, before—She stopped again, not defining that _before_.
There was no rain against the windows, but the light within the room had
an irregular pulsing change, from dull shadow to a quick pearl-gray,
almost a hint of sun, and then to shadow again. Margaret stood at a
window, tying her bathrobe cord. The vault of the sky had an uneasy
counterpoint, high, thin dark clouds sweeping northward, like strokes
from a fine brush, lower, cottony masses of clouds drifting more lazily
toward the south, and from the rocky shore the pounding of waves.
Perhaps the rainy spell was breaking up, she thought, she might walk
down to see the surf.

She bathed and dressed quickly; she couldn’t dally in the morning, she’d
had too many years of training. It seemed warm enough for a summer
frock, recklessly she took from her neat closet a white linen dress,
recklessly because she would have to launder it herself. But she liked
to iron; there was a simple pleasure in subduing wrinkled cloth to
perfect smoothness. The whiff of heated cotton, of starch, of bees-wax
in the scorched pad, was in her nostrils, she remembered it as the smell
of pride itself, the day she had been promoted from sheets and towels,
her mother had allowed her to iron one of Father’s shirts, white, with
tucked bosom, she had stood on a box beside the ironing board, she could
hear the _szz_ with which the iron spat at her moistened finger-tip.
Later moments of achievement had never surpassed that one.

The green belt was loose about her waist; that was good. She’d always
put on weight in the fall, eating those elaborate luncheons in the
school dining room. The final glimpse of herself in the mirror—even her
hair looked better this morning, shining-white, the ends tucked under
and pinned, she was getting so she did it pretty well herself—gave her
an unexplained feeling of anticipation. There’s nothing that can happen,
she thought. Nothing left to happen to me. But she moved more lightly
than she had for days, setting her bedroom in order, turning back sheets
and blankets over a chair to air, preparing tea and toast for her
breakfast. Whenever she listened, she could hear the waves down on the
shore, but she postponed the walk she had promised herself, saying,
first I will do this, and that. Be a good girl and finish your work
first, then you can go and play. She smiled, hearing the words from her
childhood. She had neglected her house lately, running around on
footless errands. Not that anything was dusty; the rains had prevented
that. But this morning every polished surface had a dulling over it, as
if the day had laid a warm mouth close and blown upon it. Margaret
rubbed tables and chairs and floors bright again, she wiped off the
inside of the small-paned windows. Once or twice the sun shone out,
several times the rain started again, an onslaught of long, slanting
lines which stopped abruptly. When Margaret had finished the stint she
had set herself, well past noon, the rain seemed to have ceased, and as
she stood at her front door, the raincoat over her arm beating in the
wind, she saw how shadows of torn clouds moved swiftly over the sun-lit
landscape, like waves of an advancing tide of night. She hesitated a
moment, because the wind was strong, but the surf pounded loud, and she
thought, I ought to see it, I don’t remember ever hearing it so loud.

She had to step back inside the hall to get her arms into the sleeves of
the raincoat, she tied a scarf over her head, she locked her door and
hid the key under one of the stones that bordered the row of tattered
perennial stalks, glancing first up and down the deserted highway to
make sure no one watched. Then she pushed herself into the wind, she
leaned against it, she climbed against it, breathing hurt, it was a
great hand laid against her chest, pressing it back against her spine.
She reached the shelter of the old barn, and stopped, gasping. She could
breathe there, and the air tingled to the tips of her fingers. She
wouldn’t be beaten by a few gusts, she meant to look at the water. The
ground was littered with leaves, they ran on the wind, not single and
brown as in the fall, but torn clumps, branches of green leaves. Behind
her the wind scooped at the barn roof, and old gray shingles flew off,
no noisier than the leaves. Presently she went on, turning sidewise,
ducking her head. The house afforded another lee, as she passed it, she
walked close to it, liking the space of silence under the walls, the
noise and the wind came over the roof like a wave, not touching her,
breaking farther out in the great trees. She ducked her head again,
wading through the long wet grass toward the shore, and suddenly,
although the sun shone now, her face was wet, her lashes were beaded.
She tasted salt on her lips, and saw the spray break above the rocks.
Queer, because the tide was low now, she had looked it up in her almanac
that morning, she had thought the rain had stopped as the tide ebbed.
Instead, even on the sheltered shore where the bath-house stood, the
waves broke higher than the top step, the air was full of salt spray,
stinging her eyelids so that she could scarcely see the craziness of the
water beyond the point. That’s very queer, she thought. I must have made
a mistake, it’s high tide now. She rubbed her eyelids dry. The reef
which made the extension of the rocky shore beyond the point, and
protected the harbor side, was now so submerged it had no line of
breakers, and as Margaret stared, one wave—a seventh wave, she thought,
remembering a bit of child lore—rushed up, a splendid smooth wall of
green, over the rocks, broke into white over the grass, and crawled back
as if discomfited at that strange contact. Then, without a sound above
the wind and water, the old bath-house rose slowly, a foot or two, and
lurched forward, flattening like a cardboard box, sliding out
uncertainly as the beach was sucked bare between waves. A huge cloud
shadow moved over the water, dimming the brilliant green and white to
gray, almost to black, it covered the land, too, and Margaret turned
inland. If it meant to rain again, she had better hurry back to her
house. It would be less lonely inside a house; the curious excitement of
anticipation which had carried her since waking, like a wave, had broken
all about her feet into complete solitude. She had just taxed herself
too much, fighting the wind. It was behind her now, she went quickly
with it, head down, she felt flat as paper, the wind carrying her along.
When she reached the old house, she would stop for a moment on the
kitchen porch, to rest.

She saw, not believing, that the long weathered green shutters of the
drawing room at the corner of the house were open. Had the wind—Then she
saw that the inner blinds were folded back, a figure moved within the
room. The wind swept her on, in spite of her desire to stand there,
staring, around the corner of the house. The side door, under the
porte-cochere, was open, a man stood there, poised in haste to be off, a
youngish stocky man with a brimmed cap pushed back on his head. Margaret
had a good look at him, square forehead, handsome eyes under full lids,
a young mouth twisted impatiently, a short, round chin that jutted well
forward.

“What do you want to stay here for?” he was saying. “Come along with me
now, and save me the trip back.”

“It won’t take you ten minutes to drive out for me.” The voice came from
within the hall, and at its sound, full, rich, amused, Margaret lifted
her head, moved a step nearer, leaning stiffly against the push of the
wind. “Run along, darling?”

“You’re crazy! A day like this—”

“It’s a nice day, Eddie. Exciting, here at the shore. I won’t go sit in
that garage while you tinker over the car. I’ll look for that box I told
you about. Why, maybe I won’t go with you when you come back!”

Eddie’s face changed, it was impudent and cajoling. “You promised!”

“Before I came back here, came—home. I had forgotten—” The voice drew
Margaret to the edge of the steps. Eddie shrugged, he flung up one hand
as the elm behind him bent in the wind and straightened again, with a
noise through all its wet leaves like the tearing of paper.

“Listen to that! I don’t like it!” he cried out, “I don’t like leaving
you!” Then he saw Margaret. As he stared, a figure moved through the
doorway to stand on the narrow porch, a plump figure stepping briskly on
small feet in high-heeled wine-colored sandals, a wine-colored coat
fluttering as the wind caught it, the long bands of golden lynx
flattening in the wind, the chiffon veil which tied on the brimmed hat
moving, and there, above the fur, under the hat, a small face, pointed,
wrinkled, with an astonishing russet rim of curled hair, with eyes green
and alive and laughing under penciled brows and darkened lashes, there
stood Susan herself.

“You’re just a poor little city fellow,” she was saying. “Any weather
makes you nervous as a kite. Who’s that?” One hand, with a flash of
maroon-lacquered cusps, dove into the softly moving lynx over the deep,
full bosom, came out with a sparkling lorgnette, and through it Susan
looked at Margaret. “No, don’t tell me! Let me guess!” She came forward,
stepping like a pigeon on her stilted sandals, peering down, and
Margaret braced herself, her hands hard against the rough surface of the
granite step, her heart beating in her palms. “It is—” (How had she
forgotten that voice of Susan’s, the way it made each word round and
separate and charged with meaning, not the dull words that other people
spoke, but sound made of feeling itself, like notes plucked softly on a
violin, or like the speech of birds.) “It’s Maggie! Those eyes! It is
Maggie!” She made a gay, grasping gesture with her hands, the lorgnette
swinging on its chain. “Come up here where I can see you!”

Margaret moved up the steps, past the young man, who eyed her without
curiosity, chewing his lip, impatient at the interruption; she was
pinned for a moment against lynx and soft bosom, scent of perfume and
powder pricking through the warm salt wet odor of the wind, Susan was
kissing her with lips powdery and dry under the lipstick, her mouth had
changed, the upper lip was thin and fine in spite of paint, the under
lip had transverse creases in its fullness. “Darling little Maggie! This
is perfect!” Susan had Margaret’s cold fingers between the soft palms of
her two hands. “You can stay with me while Eddie mends the car. This is
an old friend, Eddie. When I was a little girl—” Susan stopped, her head
a little at an angle, her lively eyes inspecting Margaret, her smile
quick and sly. “Maggie was very good to me, she was lots older, but she
let me tag her around, didn’t you? Run along, Eddie, darling! I don’t
care if you never come back!”

“You’ll get your fill of this before I’m back,” said Eddie, firmly, and
Margaret pulled her fingers out of Susan’s grasp, she stood stiff, her
knees quivering, she opened her mouth to speak. But Eddie, with a quick
salute, was running along the driveway, the two women watching him,
through the brandishing branches of trees there was a glimpse of the
car, long and cream-colored and shining, pointed in from the highway.
“He didn’t dare drive in, this old lane is soft,” said Susan. The wind
carried away all sound, they saw the car back away, vanish, silent as a
dream. Susan sighed. “He’s crazy about that car, we practically drowned
it this morning, where was it, I don’t remember, the roads were rivers,
just rivers, Maggie! You’d never believe it. So we turned back, to try
this route, and the motor began to spit. There we were, at Eastbourne. I
said, Eddie, you better drive straight on to New York, I warn you! But
would Eddie? No. I tell him if he’d treat a woman as he does that car!”
Susan laughed. “So then I came here.” Something fey leaped in her green
eyes, drifted across her pointed face. “The wind shouted at me, come
home, Susan, before it is too late! And here you are!”

Margaret held her hands down against the flutter of her raincoat, she
said, stiffly, “I’m not older than you!”

Susan blinked at her, and then laughed. “I just said that, you know how
men are! I thought you were, I really did! You _have_ kept your figger,
but you’ve let your hair go white. Um-um. Let’s go inside, I can’t hear
in this wind, I don’t like standing around, my feet are too small.” She
slid her hand under Margaret’s arm, she trotted her along into the
house, it was a dive into stillness, into an absence of buffeting which
bewildered Margaret, she was a child, following Susan’s bidding, all her
protests, her planned upbraiding whisked away like the leaves which
filled the air around the house. The hall was dim, but the drawing room
had light from the long windows where the shutters had been opened, dust
covers shrouded the chairs, the divan, even the crystal chandelier,
everything was muted to gray, a gray film of dust over the squares of
the parquetry floor, beyond the windows a film of gray, not dust, over
the sky. Green-gray mildew made queer patterns, a geography of decay,
over the wall paper with its gold and satin stripes. The cool, fusty air
within the house was sucked out through the opened door, the warm breath
of the wind flowed in around them.

“It’s a good deal like a tomb,” said Susan. “But Eddie had to close the
windows again, that wind would blow the paper off the wall! Maggie, it’s
wonderful to see you! Take that thing off your head. Your hair is
pretty, just as heavy as ever, isn’t it? Do you think white hair softens
a face? I’ve wondered sometimes—but a man never likes white hair, you
know, he sees that first—Ah, you’re really the same Maggie, I always
liked white on you, proud and quiet—You sit here by the window, I have
to find something, a box of trinkets. I think I can lay my hand right on
it. Then you must tell me everything you’ve done—”

Margaret stood there in the middle of the room where Susan left her,
listening to the quick tap of heels across the hall. On the wide stairs
the velvet-padded stair-runner absorbed the sound, but presently it came
again overhead, little flurries of taps, like a Morse code of a search
for a box of trinkets. She thought, now is my chance to say the things
I’ve wanted to, so long; but she thought it doubtfully and in confusion,
her heart beat too rapid. So long—since anyone had called her Maggie,
had, in a glance, looked past her neat and formal outer self, had—oh,
however lightly, gaily!—looked at her with human warmth. It’s just her
voice, thought Margaret, sounding as if she cared more than she does.
Look at her, decked out like a girl, traipsing about with that—that
Eddie, shameless—She listened to the faint sounds overhead, she thought,
I don’t have to stay here, I can go on to my own house, and she wished,
instead, to follow Susan upstairs, because the drawing room without her
was high and gray and empty, and the air that blew in warm puffs through
the open door was the breath of restlessness.

The footsteps overhead had stopped, and Margaret moved to one of the
long windows. She didn’t want Susan thinking she’d been struck dumb and
immovable by her! The window was recessed, the blinds folded back on
each side, and from the narrow, closed slats there rose a fine dust,
flecks of dried enamel, circling in spirals up the window edges. I never
saw wind do that, thought Margaret. Holding her hands out toward the
glass, she felt it, a strong suction against the palms. A branch struck
the window, startling her, leaves crumpled and torn, clung to the glass
as the branch fell away. Rain had started again, fine slanting rain,
which obscured the water, she was not sure whether she really saw gray
waves running over the grass, well in beyond the rocky shore, as if the
ocean were moving inland, or whether she saw only the rain. Even within
the house now she could hear the water, loudly enough so that she was
again not sure what she had heard in the hall. But she went quickly
across the room. Something small and hard slid under the ball of her
foot as she stepped into the hall, on the bottom step of the wide stairs
was a heap of lynx fur and wine-colored coat, the hat knocked forward,
hiding the face.

“Don’t step on them, they’re all over the place!” Susan pushed back her
hat, thrust her feet out straight in front. “Damn that stair carpet!”

“Did you fall? Have you hurt yourself?” Margaret ran across to the
stairs on tiptoe, skirting the small red velvet box which lay there, its
cover bent open, its contents scattered. “Susan!”

“I damned near took a header.” Susan hitched herself upright, she
wriggled first one toe, then the other. “Don’t you pull me up, not yet.
Pick up that stuff for me while I get my breath.” She threw aside her
hat, her hair, an astonishing brick color in the dim hall, stood up over
her small head in wisps and curls.

“Those heels are enough to kill anybody,” said Margaret, as she bent to
gather up the box and its contents.

“Nonsense.” Susan drew in her feet, her skirts sliding above her knees,
she laid a hand around each slim ankle. “I was hurrying, that’s all. I
wanted to see you before Eddie gets back.”

“This is the box you had—” Margaret drew a finger over the velvet. “I
remember it.” White satin lining, yellowed with age, gold clasp, the
cover dangling by one hinge. Most of the contents lay where the box had
fallen, rings, a child’s bracelet of gold, a brooch of garnets, a gold
necklace with a locket, a pearl in the center of a blue enameled flower.
Margaret stood erect, her temples throbbing, the necklace hanging from
her finger.

“It was my first jewel case,” said Susan. “I had forgotten it, it was in
the little wall safe in the bedroom, the one I open with my initials. I
thought there were some pearls in it. I told Eddie I’d have them made
into studs.” She giggled. “He’s never had a dress suit, he’s going to
get one.”

“You gave me this, once,” said Margaret.

“What is it?” Susan squinted toward her. “Oh, that. How’d it get in the
box, then?”

Margaret set the box on Susan’s knee, she let the necklace fall into the
satin bed. “You forgot to give it back.”

“Did I! Oh, Maggie! And you felt bad! Oh, darling, do you want it now?”

“No.” Margaret went on with her search. A string of amber had broken,
the beads had rolled everywhere, at the threshold they gleamed like eyes
of a cat, elsewhere they were hard to find, she gathered them cool and
hard in her fingers. She found a small irregular nugget of gold, and
laid it in Susan’s hand. Susan turned it in her painted finger-tips.

“Why, that’s the very nugget Rob sent me.” She looked up at Margaret,
her eyes like the amber. “Your brother! His first gold, he said.”

“And his last,” said Margaret. Ah, it was coming, now, her chance to
tell Susan—

But Susan said, softly, “If he hadn’t gone away!” The nugget dropped
from her fingers into the box. “That always happens when I come back to
this house!” She raised her voice against a gust of wind, the rain blew
in across the hall. “I go soft as jelly—like an old woman! Shut the
door, Maggie, we don’t want to drown! And give me a hand.”

Margaret tugged at the door, she edged behind it and pushed, both hands
laid against the wooden panels, it seemed almost to bend, as if it would
fold over her head, and then, so abruptly that she staggered and
followed it for an awkward step, it was snatched away from her and
whanged shut. She righted herself indignantly, disliking the large and
impersonal rudeness of the day. “It must be blowing harder,” she said.
“I should think it had blown long enough!”

Susan laughed, a low, delighted laugh, extending her hands to Margaret.

“You never did like storms.” She heaved her soft flesh up, dragging hard
on Margaret’s hands. “I remember. They blew up your skirts and ruffled
your hair and you couldn’t manage them. Pick up the box, Maggie, it’s on
the step there. I don’t see where those pearls are, they were earrings,
three little dangling pearls for each ear. Maybe I lost them.”

“You did hurt yourself! When you fell—” Margaret felt Susan’s weight
pull at her shoulder, she saw the stiff dragging forward of one foot.

“I just sat down too hard. I’ll be all right in a minute. Help me across
to a chair, that’s a good Maggie. That divan’s nearer—”

Margaret got her to the divan, stood above her in dismay. But Susan
leaned back, her wry mouth changing into a quick smile. “I’m too fat, I
might as well admit it!”

“Where is it, Susan? Your foot? Ankle? Let me take off your shoe—”

Susan crossed one ankle over the other. “No, you don’t! I’d never get it
back on. Leave it alone. In ten minutes I’ll be all right, I always am.”

“I could run over to my house and get you something—”

“All you’d get would be a soaking! Why, look—” The two women looked, at
one window and then at the other. Outside the house the rain made a
solid wall, over the inner surface of the glass the rain poured, falling
against the wide sill, falling against the floor, it was as if the glass
had lost its essential quality and was no longer impermeable, as if the
rain drove through it, piercing it like light. Margaret stared,
bewilderment tasted dry in her mouth, not the sharp taste of fear.

“It must be getting in around the edges of the panes,” said Susan,
slowly. “That old putty—”

“I ought to wipe it up,” said Margaret. “I haven’t anything to wipe it
up with—”

“What harm can it do?” Susan turned away from the windows, she threw her
coat back from her shoulders, her throat, above the low V of the dull
red frock, was white and full. “Unless it gets our feet wet. Sit down,
Maggie, there are so many things to say. Eddie’ll be back any moment, he
hates this, he’ll want to get on to New York.”

Margaret looked again at the windows; if she watched, she would be
frightened. The dust cover on the divan stretched taut from Susan’s bulk
to the arms, there wasn’t room there. She brought one of the hooded
small chairs and set it with its back toward the windows, rather near
Susan, and seated herself.

“Where’s your house?” asked Susan. “Near here?”

“It’s the farmhouse. I bought it.”

“You did?” Susan’s face was alert, admiring.

“We should have gone there, instead of staying here. I’ve made a
charming place of it, it’s not like this.” She glanced toward that
appalling wetness. “I ought to be there now! Something might happen.”

“It will be all right. Nothing can happen to your house, Maggie. You
always could worry. I noticed someone lived there, someone—It’s funny,
your coming back here! You know, I’ve always thought someday I would
come back. To stay. When we drive anywhere near here, I have to come.
But I didn’t want to stay—yet. I—I’m not happy when I’m here.”

Margaret laid her hands together in her lap, her cold fingers hooked,
she hugged her elbows against her sides, she felt herself spare, hard,
her white dress limp now, drabbled, and anger began to shrill in her
head, like the highest note in which the wind now spoke, anger at the
difference between herself and this soft woman on the couch, a heap of
silk and furs and jewels, her painted mouth beguiling Margaret with her
Maggie this and that.

“You see”—again that fey look, a shadow over Susan’s gaiety—“I’ll tell
you—it was strange, my landing here just today. Yes, I’ll tell you. Did
you wonder why we were so crazy, driving to New York in such weather?
You’d never guess. Eddie’s going to school, he’s going to be an
engineer, he’s not really a chauffeur. But he’s very proud, he didn’t
want me to help him at first. And I thought I’d like to settle down, I’d
like to be sure I had somebody. We were going to get married. I haven’t
been married for a long time. He’s younger, but he’s quite old for his
years, he’s always had to look out for himself.” She lifted her
lorgnette, it shimmered in unsteady fingers as she held it to her eyes.
“Aren’t you ever afraid of being alone? When you get older, you don’t
want to be alone. But the minute I stepped in this house, I knew. I’d be
lonelier with him—Who lives in your house with you?”

“I am alone,” said Margaret. Her anger was a rod now, stiffening her
back. “But thank God, I’m respectable!”

Susan blinked through her lorgnette, she let it fly down against her
full bosom, she tipped back her head with its ragged petals of hair, and
laughed. “Oh, Maggie! Maggie, darling!” Her laughter was warm and round
in the strange gray room. “What good does that do you?”

“You wouldn’t understand, you’re shameless and dreadful, your name is a
byword, men leer after you—” Margaret had to stop, her anger was a tight
band around her chest, her heart strained madly against it.

Susan stopped laughing, she leaned forward a little, holding out her
hands, fingers spread, soft white palms with deep creases turned up, as
if she held Margaret’s words away from her ears. “Why, Maggie, you—you
don’t like me?” Her eyes were incredulous, her mouth sagged a trifle.

Margaret stumbled to her feet, she pushed away the chair, and before she
could make a word in her parched throat the hall door crashed open, wind
tore into the house, bellying the covers on the furniture, and with it
the boy Sam, water running from his cap, from his yellow slicker, so
that he stood in a pool there at the entrance to the drawing room.

“Geeze!” His voice was faint, a gasp, and gathered force as he caught
his breath. “Hurry up! Eddie sent me—I had to leave the car—they’s a
tree down—you’ll have to walk out to it—Come along, I say! We ain’t got
a minute!”

Susan looked at him, she tucked her feet farther under the edge of the
couch. “Where’s Eddie?” she asked.

“Working on your car, him and Bill. Water in the base.” His sandy face
was blanched with rain and excitement, he wriggled inside his slicker,
wanting to be off. “You gotta hustle, I tell you! Geeze, I never seen
nothing like it! The tide didn’t go down, Bill says when it’s high tide
again, the road’ll be under water, we got an hour to make it.”

“Where’s the car?” asked Margaret. “Can’t you bring it—”

“I can’t climb over a tree with it!” Sam shrieked above the wind, he
swung his arms. “Can’t you get a move on you? You can walk a few steps,
can’t you?”

Margaret listened. There was a new note in the wind, one she had never
heard before in all her life, a strange, shrill, high note: it hurt her
eardrums, it went spinning into hollow places under her skull, almost
obscenely, a note beyond the range of hearing. She scurried across the
room toward Sam, picking up her raincoat, thrusting her arms into the
sleeves.

“Come on, you!” yelled Sam, jerking his hand at Susan.

Margaret’s fingers were clumsy, tying the scarf over her head, she stood
at the doorway, the rain struck her face, she drew one long breath, and
held it, aching-endlessly, dashing a hand against her wet eyelids that
she might see. One of the two great elms which stood each side the
porte-cochere, the one farther from the house, toward the road, without
a sound that she could hear above the wind, with slow and appalling
dignity, swayed, bent, twisted its leafy bulk as if it turned to look at
the enemy that struck it down, and fell, carrying with it a great round
slab of yellowish earth, a mat of roots and wet soil as high as the roof
of the carriage entrance. Sam whimpered with excitement.

“Now you see! My God, ain’t this something! Get her started, will you?”

Margaret heard Susan’s voice, it made a quiet place in all this tumult,
for a moment she did not hear the separate words, speech seemed to have
no meaning, she had to shape them again in her own throat before she
understood what Susan had said. “I won’t stir a step in this downpour.
I’d be drenched to the skin.”

Sam seized Margaret’s wrist, jerked it. His young mouth twisted in
grotesque attempt to be strong and male, rescuing women. “I can’t drag
her,” he cried. “We gotta go, you come, Miss Turner, you ain’t such a
fool!”

Margaret dragged her raincoat together with her free hand, for an
instant she felt herself plunge forward with the boy, his strength
running beside her, carrying her to safety. Then she wrenched her wrist
out of his grasp and took a quick step toward the drawing room, and her
voice was strange in her ears as she cried out, “Susan—”

Susan waved her hand, a careless farewell, she pushed herself to her
feet, her coat sliding in a soft mound around her on the floor, her face
impertinent, mocking.

Swifter than thought, Margaret knew. “Run along, Sammy.” She made her
stiff face smile. “Tell—tell Eddie we’re all right here. Tell him Mrs.
Field can’t—”

“Run along yourself, Maggie! What you waiting for?” Susan was
imperative, silencing her. “I don’t want your company! You’re too
respectable! The house won’t blow down.”

Margaret pushed at Sam, who hung in the doorway, tormented. “For
Heaven’s sake, Sam, get out! I don’t intend to drown myself in that
rain! Why should I want to go to town? Pull that door shut after you—”
She laid herself against the door, his desire to be off and her will
together shut it, and water curled swiftly under it, over the floor.

She hesitated, taking a few steps into the drawing room. Susan had
dropped back on the couch, she was pulling her coat from under her feet,
her eyes angry, green, as she looked at Margaret.

“You’re a fool, Maggie!”

“You can’t even stand on that foot, can you?”

“What’s that to do with you?”

“Why didn’t you let me tell him?” Margaret moved nearer, step by step,
her hands twisting together at her breast. “Were you afraid your Eddie
would risk his life, trying to get you?”

Susan laid her coat over her knees, her hands smoothing the fur, the
fingers disappearing in the long tawny hairs, she was silent a moment;
when she looked up her face was somber, on each side of her mouth lower
than the rouged cheek-bones was a dull red streak. “No, Maggie. If you
must know, I was afraid he wouldn’t. I’d rather not know. Think how
embarrassed I’d be if I called for help—and no one came! This way—” She
turned her head, listening; the arrows of the wind whistled over the
house. “There’s a queer smell to the air,” she said. “It’s like some
strange drug, you take a sniff and you don’t go on fooling yourself.”
Her somberness was gone, in a little flashing smile. “Why did you stay,
Maggie? You’re scared to death, you know you are, that nice boy would
have taken you—”

“You let me see your foot, Susan Lathrop,” said Margaret, sternly. She
knelt stiffly in front of Susan, she pushed the folds of coat away from
Susan’s knees, and laid her hands on the pointed toes of the sandals,
pulling both feet toward her. Then she sat back, her fingers touching
the swollen ankle, puffy and discolored through the chiffon stocking.
“Your poor foot!” she said. Susan leaned forward, eyeing both extended
feet. “I have such nice ankles, too,” she said, gaily. Then, “Why,
Maggie! You’re crying!”

“You would have stayed here—”

Susan stretched one hand out, pushed the scarf back from Margaret’s
hair, smoothed the hair softly, and laughed. “And so you stayed. With a
shameless, dreadful—Maggie, what do people say about me?” Her finger-tip
touched Margaret’s forehead, brushed over her eyelids.

Margaret got to her feet, with an abrupt movement. The iron band, the
iron rod of her anger had gone, she did not know what the feeling was
which inundated her, it was like the rain, finding its way past barriers
of glass and wood, it was like the wave curling over grass, receding,
advancing again.

“It’s not raining so hard,” she said. “Look, it’s stopping!” The wind
had no shrillness now, through the window they could see the water,
breaking in long streamers of white. “I’m going to run over to my house,
to get some things for that ankle. It’s just a little way.”

Susan reached for her skirt, but Margaret moved with her quick, light
step toward the hall. “Don’t go, Maggie! Suppose you couldn’t get back!”

“I’ll get back!” Margaret chose the one argument to silence Susan. “I
ought to see that everything’s all right in my house, if the rain got in
there—”

“Leave the door open,” called Susan. “It’s too warm—”

The door opened so readily, swinging inward, that Margaret thought
someone must stand there, someone who had come for them, Sam, or Eddie.
No one. There was a yellow lake where the elm-tree had torn up the great
slab of soil, with a ragged fringe of turf, and water rippled along the
driveway. But the rain had stopped; the mist which filled the air was
salty on her mouth. She would get her feet soaked, but it was so warm
she wouldn’t catch cold; she could get bandage stuff, rubbing alcohol,
perhaps pack a basket with food, it might be several hours before anyone
could reach the house. The water was only ankle-deep, she splashed
ahead, had the wind changed? It seemed running to meet her, in warm
little puffs, coming over the land. She rounded the rear corner of the
house and stopped. Ahead of her rose a great mass of green, a tree,
hiding the sky, filling the space ahead of her; she thought, amazed,
why, that’s the way a bird sees a tree, looking into it, and then,
hastily, moved out around its bulk, her feet heavy in the tangled grass
and sodden ground. It was a long way past a fallen tree, its roots stood
up above her, she could not tell just where she had come, and she
stopped. Something was wrong, like looking at a familiar face and
finding it had no eyes, no mouth—The barns! Where were they? She began
to run, laboring, her breath catching, there were other trees down, but
already her eyes had accustomed themselves to that form of disaster, she
could see ahead of her under the mottled sky the rising land on which
her house stood, she could see the house itself, its white paint
shining, the only clear tone in all the landscape; it had been built to
weather storms, she thought, its low, sturdy shape settled against the
land. The old apple tree at one side sprawled askew. Margaret stumbled
against something, a log, no, a timber, gray, with marks of the ax like
ripples of water, a beam from the barn. The water was deeper here,
halfway to her knees, and ahead of her, ridiculously, as if it walked
over the field, moved a splintered door, she could see the hasp where a
padlock had hung. She took another step, and stopped, trembling.

The door was floating more quickly now, oscillating. Those green clumps
must be the tops of the lilac bushes, and lilacs stood higher than her
head. If she hurried, plunging forward, she could still cross. She
stared, turning her head slowly in a half circle. The ocean was moving
inland, breaking through at the low bit of shingle where the wall of
rocks began to merge into the long sandy beach, cutting across, gouging
across, the sod under her feet broke under her weight, eaten by the
water, and she braced herself, feeling water move against her legs. The
thought of her house was a voice shouting at her, hurry, you can still
reach me! Safety, shelter, her house, in a way her life, her love, all
that she had! She was strong, the current could not yet be swift, she
could swim. The muddy water eddied around the lilac clumps, she saw it
close over one of them. She could reach her house, and stay there, she
could not return. What claim had Susan on her, like that of her house?
_Don’t go, Maggie!_ She set her teeth into her lower lip, she thought,
in a kind of dull incredulity, Why, no tide ever rose as fast as this,
and slowly, without another glance at water, hill, or house, she turned
back. As she went she thought the water followed at her heels, and when
at last she reached the stone steps she was not surprised that the pool
beneath the elm-tree roots had merged into a larger flood, and that
little waves beat up against the disk of mud. We’re on an island, now.
Cut off.

Her side hurt, and she stood, pressing her hand against it, before she
went into the house. She closed the door, and the squelch of her shoes
was loud in what seemed, after the outer tumult, like silence. Susan was
sitting just where Margaret had left her, and her breast rose and fell
in one long sigh. Margaret hung her raincoat over the newel post, she
rubbed a handkerchief over her face, her eyes burned; she wrung the
bottom of her skirt, and tried to pat it smooth.

“I couldn’t get anything for your ankle,” she said. “It was so wet—”

Susan beckoned her nearer. “Are you all right? I thought once I heard
you cry out! I started after you, but I can’t hop on one foot. Not far.
I told you you’d just get drenched. You—you didn’t see anyone—coming?”

“No, I didn’t.” Margaret sank down on the chair, she couldn’t yet draw a
full breath, her toes curled inside her wet shoes. Irritation jingled
through her weariness. How could anybody come? She opened her mouth to
tell Susan what she had seen, and said, instead, “Does it hurt much?”

“It hurt like hell while you were gone.” Susan grimaced. “You know, the
way everything’s worse when you’re by yourself. Wind, rain, aches,
anything. I don’t mind it now. I tell you, if I stuck it up—” She swung
around sidewise on the divan, and with both hands under her plump knee,
hoisted it up. A scarlet garter made a cushion of the soft flesh above
the knee. Susan patted it, hoisted the other leg, and leaned back
against the arm of the divan. “That’s better. Now you pull your chair
around, and we’ll talk. I think the storm is over, the sky is lighter,
see?”

Lighter, yes, with a sullen yellowish tinge under the dull clouds. Susan
held one wrist near her eyes, squinting at the tiny jeweled watch, the
sleeve slipping back from the plump white arm, creased at the wrist like
a baby’s. “It’s stopped,” she said. “I must have hit it when I took that
tumble. Now we don’t even know what time it is!” She eased herself a
little into place, her hands looked small, lying against the maroon silk
which strained over her wide soft thighs. “Well, I never did know the
time! You always did, Maggie! Remember how it worried you, being on
time?” She laughed. “Well, we’ve no date to keep today, have we? It’s
nice, having you here. It took a storm, didn’t it, to make you put up
with me?” Her smile was sly. “You don’t really think I’m all those names
you were calling me, do you? Anyway, you stayed with me. You know, when
you started for your house, I thought maybe you were clearing out.”

Margaret hitched her chair over the floor, nearer the couch. “I wanted
to,” she said, her mouth grim. “I don’t know why I came back.” She
thought, all these things are true about Susan, disgraceful, disgusting,
and yet I’m sitting here—I don’t mind being wet, or frightened—She
lifted her head as the whole house shivered, she heard the wind after it
had passed the house, and then a rumbling clatter, an avalanche of dull
noise.

“Is it raining stones now?” said Susan.

“I know. The chimney!” Margaret glanced behind her at the marble and
onyx face of the fireplace, she thought the sheet of metal which covered
the opening bulged outward, she saw a dark lip of sooty water along the
lower edge, creeping out over the hearth.

“What’s a chimney more or less?” Susan relaxed again, but she laid a
hand on Margaret’s knee. “I was thinking—while you were gone—that’s what
this damned house always does to me, sets me thinking. You never
married, Maggie? Have you been happy?”

Margaret sat very still, the queer sweet smell of the air perplexed her,
it was like morning, not like any morning she had known, but some
morning in a dream. She tried to gather around her the tatters of the
Margaret Turner she had meant to show to Susan, to confound Susan, a
proud, righteous, worthy woman, and she couldn’t find even a tatter.

“You should have married Lester Field,” said Susan. “If he’d had you
admiring him, looking up to him—if he’d had to work—”

“But you took him, you ruined him.”

“You might have put up a fight for him. I didn’t know he’d ever seen
you! Oh, I heard, afterwards. He was a snob, Maggie, a lazy, selfish
snob. You were the farmer’s daughter, and do you know what I was? I was
a good marriage. Making a good marriage and sleeping with it aren’t the
same thing! I was glad when he took that header off his horse, it takes
too long to die of drink. When I come back here I think about him—and
Robert. It’s funny, isn’t it, how you see the ends of stories, as you
grow older. When you’re young, you never think that anything will end,
you will love forever, you’ll suffer forever, you’re sewed up tight in
what you feel right now—” Her mouth trembled a little, the lipstick on
the under lip had smeared thin, leaving a fine line of red below the
outline of the lip. “Now I know all the endings. I know how things come
out. Oh, I pretend I don’t, that’s the only way to have any fun—” Her
fingers pressed on Margaret’s knee, and the two looked steadily at each
other—are you frightened, uneasy?—as the whole house strained under the
wind, timbers sliding behind plaster, like the sound of movement in wood
and metal of a ship.

It’s true, thought Margaret; you begin to see the pattern that a whole
life makes, you do know the ends of stories. I have been troubled about
my own, it was coming in a circle back to all its beginnings. She laid
one hand over Susan’s, she felt a lightness in her blood, an ease, it
was like a dream to sit there, with hatred and envy gone.

“Look,” said Susan, “it is raining again.” She turned to glance over the
back of the divan toward the windows, they saw the way the water had
covered the floor, running under the door, down from the window ledges,
out from the fireplace, until it made a streaked covering, reflecting
oddly the shapes of the chairs, the angle of the walls, reaching the
carved feet of the divan.

“If you could walk—” Margaret was bewildered. “Could you get upstairs,
if I helped?”

“I can’t, not without crawling.” Susan lifted her coat away from the
floor. “I’m comfortable right here. You aren’t scared, Maggie? Rain
can’t wash this house away.”

“I don’t know what I am,” said Margaret, a little pettishly.

“I must look a sight,” said Susan. “Where’s my handbag? I had it when we
came in. There it is, on the mantel, get it for me, Maggie, dear.”

Margaret took the few steps to the mantel, she thought the tesselated
floor moved under her feet, she thought as she looked down that water
crept up along the lines of the patterned oak, how could it? Was there a
new sound in the house, a gurgle of water under the floor, a steady
slap-slap?

“You know, Eddie reminds me a lot of Robert,” Susan was saying, as
Margaret handed her the bag. She poked a finger under the rhinestone
clasp and spread the bag open. “I hadn’t thought of it before. What
happened to Robert, Maggie?”

“He died. He got typhoid in that mining camp.” (Where he went because of
you: tell her!) Margaret stood close to the couch.

“Dead?” Susan looked up, a vanity case snapped open in one hand. “I
didn’t know.” There was a crease between her plucked, accented brows.
“He would be an old man now, wouldn’t he? He was older than you—or me—I
never thought of that before.” She shrugged. “I don’t like elderly men,
they fuss so—diet, liver—they have hairs in their ears and their teeth
clack! Robert—ah, he didn’t have to grow old! He was beautiful. Eddie
isn’t really like him. Why, I remember the row they made about Robert,
right here in this room! Father and Mother—about Susan Lathrop and her
groom! I didn’t care, I loved him. But he cared, he was furious. He went
away, west. I would have waited forever—at least I thought so.” She
began to pat powder over her face, the scent strong for a moment. “But I
couldn’t stand his taking the money.”

“What money?” Margaret leaned closer, her hands clasped; Susan’s voice
had dropped; it was an unhappy whisper against the background of steady
noise around them. Susan set her lips together and dusted her chin.
“What money?” urged Margaret.

“The money my father gave him, if he’d go off. I—I suppose he was poor—”

“Is that what they told you?” Margaret’s scorn brought Susan’s eyes up
from the mirror. “You might have known it was a lie! Robert never took a
cent, except his wages. Why, I sent him money that year, when I began to
teach, money for food!”

“I might have known,” said Susan, slowly. “I wasn’t as smart then. Why,
Maggie, it’s like a present! Everything was criss-cross, and we’re
laying it all straight.”

“When he died, his landlady sent me his things,” said Margaret. “His
account book, and a picture of you—and a letter. I would never give you
the letter.”

“I don’t want to see the picture!” Susan peered again into the little
mirror, she fished a lipstick out of the bag. She made a stroke with the
pencil, but her hand wavered, and the crimson was a clown’s mouth.
Angrily she dabbed at it with a handkerchief, sticking out the point of
her tongue to moisten a corner. “I don’t care how I look,” she said. She
dropped the lipstick, mirror, handkerchief, into the purse, and pinched
the rhinestones shut. “I’ve been a fool, haven’t I? But you have to have
somebody to love as long as you live, don’t you?” Her voice was warm
again, and clear. “Whatever they’ve been, I’ve had the loving of them.
Nobody can take that away!”

Margaret had drawn away from the divan, her shoulders hunched, her hands
doubled into fists. She wanted to listen to Susan, but something,
_something_ was moving past the windows at the end of the room, was
looking in. She walked toward the windows, slowly, not to frighten
Susan, her feet slipping in the water, inches deep, which covered the
floor, not quiet water, but water that swung as if the whole house
rocked a little. The room was darker, and she stared at the peaked roof
of a house outside the windows, cutting off all light, all glimpse of
ocean, a jagged hole where there had been a chimney; and it floated
higher than the upper ledges of the windows. Margaret looked at it
without great concern; she had lost her standard by which she measured
what happened, nothing now was astonishing. The dark, slanting roof
moved toward the house, as if it meant to climb in through the windows,
and then was sucked away. Margaret saw the ocean, it had come above the
window sills, a wave climbed up the sash, and its spray stung her face
there inside the house. She looked out, across the gray-green rollers,
not surprised that all the land was gone, every tree was gone, and the
house itself was islanded. She saw, between her and the sky, one great
wall, like fog turned into solid matter, high as the sky, advancing
without haste, with dignity. When that breaks, she thought, and turned
away from the window. She could run, she could climb the stairs, the
attic of the house was high, she would be safe there!

“What you looking at?” asked Susan.

“A wave,” said Margaret. She started across the floor, her feet begged
her to run, they were separate, alive, insisting upon flight, she
couldn’t save Susan, too, there was no time—no time. At the edge of the
couch she stopped, her hand reached for Susan’s, she slipped to the
floor, shutting her eyes, laying her face against Susan’s soft breast.
“Hang on,” she whispered, “hang on tight to me! I’m not afraid any more,
with you.”

“Why, Maggie!” said Susan, and under Margaret’s ear her heart,
undefeated, quickened its beat. For an instant, in the great blackness
which filled the room, a whirling blackness under the wall of water,
Margaret thought that they were children again, running ahead of the
storm, she with her hand in Susan’s. “We’ll stick together!” cried
Susan, and her voice had the golden curl of a trumpet. “Till we die!” If
it was fear that Margaret felt, it had, at the last, the strong sweet
taste of great elation. The wave walked over the house, the wind pried
at the walls, the front wall yielded first, falling outward, with a
soughing soft note, and the water swept through.




                          Transcriber’s Notes


Transcribed from Experiment: Four short stories. Coward-McCann, New York
(1940), pp. 1-67.

This is the uncut, longer version of the previously published Last
September (Good Housekeeping, vol. 109, July 1939, pp. 24-25, 116-129.).

The original spelling and punctuation were mostly preserved. Minor
typesetting mistakes were silently corrected. All other changes
(before/after) are listed here:

   [p. 66]:
   ... she saw she stared at the peaked roof of a house outside the ...
   ... she stared at the peaked roof of a house outside the ...






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