The Nymph and the Lamp (46 page)
Isabel gave him a startled look. For several moments she was speechless. It was the last thing she had expected to hear him say. And far from being mollified she was outraged by this calm confession. She was disturbed by the news of Skane's return, by all those poignant memories of Marina, and with her thoughts so full of the two men who had loved her this voice of a prospective third seemed utterly indecent. She drew away as if from some lewd proposal.
“Brock,” she said in a rapid and breathless voice, “you're mad. What right have you to say such a thing to me?” And with that she drove off. Brockhurst stood on the edge of the sidewalk and watched the buggy flit away into the dusk.
She went no more to the old mill. She told herself that the sun had lost its value now that September was far gone, that the cool winds had begun to blow, that in any case there was too much work to do. There was some truth in all this, but she would not admit that she was afraid to give herself a chance to think of Skane, and of that future which had seemed so peaceful and so satisfying and was now so empty and so bleak. Even in her few leisure evenings she fixed her mind on the past day's business and the problems of tomorrow with all the fervor of Markham himself.
There was much to ponder. The inquisitive Brockhurst had been right. The market for pulpwood had collapsed, and Markham was left with nearly one hundred thousand dollars stacked in neat wooden heaps along the valley slopes. Most of the wood had been cut during the previous winter. The autumn rains would soon begin, and then would come another winter's frost and snow. When the hot sun of another springtime fell upon the sodden stuff it would ferment and rot. The woodsmen had an old English word for it, handed down from colonial times. Unless Markham got rid of his wood before another winter, they said, the damned stuff would
dote.
Markham knew it as well as they. He was making desperate efforts to sell it, offering bargain prices by wire to every pulp mill on the seaboard and hunting up the owners of small lath and stave mills all along the valley. But now another problem loomed. The apple market was going the same way. Through his speculations in farmland the old man had the crops of twenty-eight orchards on his handsâcrops on which he had advanced money for spraying and general nurture through the year. AIready the bank had called him into agitated conference. There were conferences with other growers and shippers; and twice in a month he joined a deputation to the government at Halifax.
It must have gratified the sardonic Brockhurst to see how far his guess had been correct; but it would have surprised him to see how old Dollars-and-Deuteronomy was taking it. The man who worshiped money only a little less than God met the prospect of ruin with all the cool philosophy of those sinful men who play for big stakes with cards. And with a stubborn courage that Isabel admired he persisted in running the cannery at full production, finding somehow the money to pay his hands for their labor and the farmers for their fruit and vegetables.
“The bank calls this a âdubious experiment,'” he told her with a thin smile. “So it is, I suppose. But it looks to me the only real solution of the market problem in the valley, done on a proper scale. Don't expect I'll live long enough to see a cannery or a jam factory in every town and village but at least I've made a start. Hate to see it shut before it has a chance to prove itself. Trouble is, I'm living thirty years ahead of my time. They call me old. Good gracious, I'm too young for my boots.”
“Things look very bad, don't they?” Isabel said.
“'Course they do. They'll look a lot worse by-and-by, the way the world's going. But it's natural, mind you. Progress ain't a thing that goes straight up like a flight of stairs. Got to be dips and hollers and thank-ye-ma'ams along the way. This is one. Well come out of it all right unless every tomfool loses his head. What worries me is that later on, when we've pulled out of this one, the valley'll go on in the same old way, packing apples in barrels when everyone else is using fancy boxes, growing special types for the English market instead of shifting, gradual of course, to kinds that'll sell here at home with a bit of push; and then some day there'll come another flop that'll really knock it flat. Thank Godâand I say it in all reverence, Miss JardineâI won't be living then. All I hope is that someone then will remember old Jase Markham and say, By gosh, the old boy showed us where the bear crossed the brook.”
The valley had never yielded such a harvest as it did in that golden autumn of '21. For a hundred miles the orchards bent under the weight of gleaming fruit. There was never such a crop of corn, of potatoes, of turnips and beets. The pumpkins had never been so fat or such a deep golden hue. The plums were never so juicy nor the pears so firm and sweet. The weather held fine. The west wind trailed white mares'-tails across the lightest of blue skies, blew thistledown across the fields, waved the tassels of the corn stalks, flapped the Union Jack on the post office and the Stars and Stripes over the porch of the Boston House, set up dizzy whirls and capers in the dust of Main Street and blew away the last brown rags of the rambler roses.
Cattle moved slowly by the river in the rich green aftergrass of the hayfields. In the orchards an army of men and larking boys and giggling girls moved among the branches, picking the fruit into baskets and turning each basketful with care into the waiting barrels. The barrels were new and clean, the pale yellow staves gleamed in the sun, and they stood in orderly ranks along the roadsides and were posted like sentinels among the trees. Frequently along the highways came a hay wagon filled and piled high with barrels fresh from the cooperage and drawn by a pair of immense oxen. The oxen wore a heavy yoke strapped to their horns, and the yoke was painted a bright red or blue, and studded with brass ornaments. The last wandering tourists swung their cars aside to let them pass, and smiled and said how quaint it was to find such things in Canada in the twentieth century, and the ox-bells tinkled and the cameras clicked.
Along the lanes and beside the paths and ditches through the fields the goldenrod blazed like a fire in grass, and the celandine was butter-yellow and the Michaelmas daisies came to the knee, and the wild white asters were tall. By the pasture walls the red hips of the wild rose gleamed like cherries, and the withe-rod berries hung in their clusters pink and black. On the hardwood ridges a few red maples had put on their autumn dress before the rest and made rich spots of color in the green. Underneath the trees the ferns already had turned the tint of rust and made a dry swish against the legs of the partridge hunters, and the huckleberry leaves were freckled with the bright fall stain that soon would turn them all to blood.
The noons were hot. A blue haze transformed the more distant ridges of South Mountain to waves of a giant sea that heaved in the warm shimmer off the valley floor. But the evenings, as the farm folk said, were drawing in. By the end of September they found the sun going down as they sat down to the evening meal; and by the time the dishes were washed and put away the twilight was getting dim. The nights were chill and sometimes in the starlight the heavy dewfall looked like frost. For some time now the northern lights had been making experimental flickers in the sky, and by the end of the month they were putting on their autumn show with sheaves of glittering spears, with single beams that crept sometimes to the zenith and then fell back, with sheets of pale fire that shivered, that ran in ripples along the top of North Mountain as if twitched by the frost giants of the Micmac tales.
The first week in October brought to full tide that change of color in the autumn leaves which is the special miracle of North America and is seen at its best in New England and the Maritime Provinces of Canada. Between the long hills the valley unrolled its length in a quilt of patches, green and brown, very square and exact when you looked upon them from a height; and the river, the wine-stream, wandered through the pattern in lazy curves as if in contempt of such old-maidery. When you stood in the valley the fields and orchards on either hand ran flat or in mild undulations to the edge of the hills, and there the modest tints of the farmland gave way abruptly to a riot of gaudy forest rising sheer toward the sky and extending its length as far as the eye could reach. If you had an eye for trees you could pick out the bright scarlet, the salmon pink and the delicate yellow of the maple clumps, the purple of the ash, the yellow torches of the poplars flaming in the breeze along the slope, the gold of beech and birch, the wine of the young oaks, the clearings where huckleberry bushes made a solid red like a dress parade of the Royal Mounted, and the somber green of pine and spruce and fir that served for contrast and background to the rest.
One night in mid-October Isabel lay awake and heard a familiar cry far up in the dark, the honking of wild geese on their way south. It was the old warning of winter on the way. But it was also the old Indian promise that before the real snows there would come a spell of summer, one last glow of warmth before the cold. She smiled in the darkness. It was the best time of year. All the months led up to October, and afterwards there was only a waiting for the miracle to come again. And again she told herself, These are the things that matter. All these lovely things that I've missed so long. Nothing else. Nothing!
The great public event of autumn in Kingsbridge was the County Exhibition, held in what were known as the Fair Grounds at the western edge of the town. Like all fall fairs in country towns it was a simple affair that brought everyone together, for the space of a week, in a holiday atmosphere in which they could gaze upon the champion cattle, horses, swine and poultry, the prize fruits and grain and vegetables, the finest homemade pickles and jams of their own district. The exhibits were housed in four long barrack-like structures of wood, arranged about an open rectangular space, and the whole surrounded by a fence of tall weatherbeaten boards so that everyone but active and impecunious small boys must buy a ticket at the central gate before passing inside.
The Exhibition was arranged and governed by a committee of farmers and merchants, of whom Mr. Markham had been Director as long as anyone could remember. This meant that Markham undertook the whole burden of the Fair, without remuneration or thanks, year after year, and was blamed for everything that went wrong, from the theft of Mrs. Hodge's prize mustard pickles to the leaky roof on the pig shed.
All through the summer there had been a desultory correspondence in connection with the Fair; and from the first of September onward Isabel waded in a rising stream of letters, manufacturers' pamphlets, telephone calls and visitors, all with the one object in view. Her employer had thrown himself and his secretary into the Fair with all the ruthless energy and thoroughness that he gave to his own affairs. Indeed Isabel found that the month of October was devoted to the Fair as if there were nothing else to do, as if the shadow of bankruptcy were not blackening the old man's mental sky with the speed of a thunderstorm rolling over the mountain from the Bay of Fundy.
As October drew toward a close the rickety sheds in the Fair Grounds received their annual coat of whitewash, the interior walls were lined and draped with faded bunting stowed away last year; and then the exhibits began to arrive in trucks, in carts, or pattering along on four feet. The horse shed resounded with stampings and neighings, the cowshed with indignant moos and the clangor of bells, the poultry shed with cluckings and crowings, the pig shed with its customary squeals and grunts.
The concessionaire of Faker's Row appeared by rail with his mysterious punctuality and his raucous men and women; the Ferris wheel appeared overnight like an enormous metal fungus strung with electric lights; the merry-go-round set up its calliope and its worn but spirited steeds; and along the rest of the central space appeared the brown tents and booths of the wheels of fortune, the housie-housie games, the ring games, the shooting gallery, Jo-Jo the Dogfaced Boy, and the hootchy-kootchy dancing girls.
Isabel found a little comedy in the inner workings of this show. There was a sheepish and comical air of custom in the debate of the committee, which she attended as Markham's secretary, regarding certain features of the Row. It was pointed out that the gambling devices were highly immoral, and what was of more importance they took a great sum of money out of the town. As for the dancing girls, there was sure to be complaint from the church elders, and the Reverend Palliser would certainly devote a scathing sermon to the subject on the Sunday following Fair Week. When all the other committee voices had been heard, together with an almost audible tucking of tongues into cheeks, Mr. Markham said the final word.
He did not approve of things like this himself. As a deacon of the church he was opposed to all such vanities. But, he went on dryly, as Director of the Fair he was bound to point out the business side of it. It was true that Faker's Row took a lot of money away, but it paid a big fee for the privilege and most of the Exhibition prize money came from that fee. Without cash prizes, friends, what sort of Exhibition could you have? Apart from that there was no use denying that the people liked the fun of Faker's Row. It gave 'em a bit of excitement after the toils of harvest time. The young men and women had to be considered. They were not like us folk who were brought up in the good oldtime religion. They wanted a little fling. And that applied also, he regretted to say, to the matter of the dancing girls. He had observed (still more dryly) that the young ladies in the grass skirts never seemed to have any difficulty in filling their tent. And there seemed to be a surprising number of the older farmers and other good church members in the throng. It was the most profitable side show in Faker's Row and the concessionaire stressed that point when the annual fee was being discussed. Well, gentlemen, the matter had been threshed out in former years, and it had been found that the best procedure was to let the dancing show stay open for the first three days and nights and then to inform the concessionaire sternly that the thing was immoral and must be closed and removed. It was, he admitted, a compromise, and as the Reverend Palliser pointed out a compromise with the Devil was a sin committed; but you had to be practical, it was a worldly age, especially since the young men got back from the war, and it was the only way to please the farmers and satisfy the concessionaire. He hoped there would be no difficulty on that point.
