Balancing her letters to Triffie and conversations with Ben allows her to be, on average, tolerably honest: she can talk about the pleasures of her life with Ben, and the hardships with Triffie. To her mother she composes tidy little screeds that indicate that she is healthy, eating well, studying hard enough to get good marks and keep her scholarship, but not hard enough to tax her brains and lose her looks. She assures her parents she is cleaning her teeth and moving her bowels regularly, since her mother asks about these things.
She lives in a boarding house. Her life since leaving home thus far has been marked by boarding houses: first the eerie quiet of Cousin Ethel’s home in St. John’s, where she lived out her nun-like existence at Spencer and seldom had a conversation above a whisper. Then came her hard-working stint as Mrs. Chaulk’s boarder and servant girl in Elliston. In both those cases Kit was the sole boarder; here in Halifax she is one of four young ladies renting rooms from a Mrs. Peabody, who takes in young women students although she makes it very clear she does not approve of higher education for women.
“I’m only trying to do what your poor mothers would do if they were here,” she told the girls around her dining room table on the night Kit arrived. “If all was as it should be, you would be home with them, or married already, but in this day and age when young girls go wandering so far from home, as Eve wandered from Adam’s side in the garden of Eden, I can only hope to shield you from the worst of temptation.”
“She seems very determined we won’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge, anyway,” Maggie Campbell says to Kit later, recalling the Adam-and-Eve lecture. Mrs. Peabody’s rules preclude staying up past ten o’clock, even in your own room making no noise: if she notices the lamp burning she raps sharply on the door. This is meant to save both lamp oil and their health, for it is not good, Mrs. Peabody assures them, for young ladies to sit up too late.
Maggie, a farm girl from Prince Edward Island, is Kit’s closest friend among her fellow co-eds. She is a hearty, buxom redhead with a broad freckled face. Maggie and Kit formed an alliance in their first days at Mrs. Peabody’s, recognizing their similarity in background and a shared sense of humour. The other two girls in the house are prime examples of the society daughters who so annoy Kit. Louisa Arthur is the daughter of a doctor in Saint John, while Felicity MacTavish’s father owns a shipyard in Lunenberg.
Neither is empty-headed, Kit is forced to admit; Felicity is, in fact, quite brilliant, and Louisa is clever enough. Neither of them would have gotten to university if she were stupid. But the academic aspect of college life is clearly secondary to the social, in their minds. Serving on committees, meeting the right people and getting invited to various dances and teas by the right young men are their preoccupations. Louisa and Felicity dominate dinner conversation with their gossip and flirtations, while Kit and Maggie roll their eyes at each other.
Kit excuses herself from such dinners as quickly as possible and goes to her room to study. Sometimes she and Maggie study together, but Mrs. Peabody disapproves of girls gathering in their rooms and talking, even to study.
They have to be in the house by nine, which means if they want to go the library, they have to leave immediately after supper. Often, Kit will go, by herself or with Maggie, to meet Ben in the library for a few hours’ study before curfew.
Despite the snobbish society girls, despite the long hours of work and the landlady who seems determined to make those hours as difficult as possible, Kit is having a wonderful time. Better than she would ever want to admit to Triffie, or to her mother. Only to Ben, in their rare moments alone, can she say, “Thank you. This is what I wanted…this is where I wanted to be.”
“I know,” he says into her hair, his lips tracing a path from her temple, down the line of her jaw. His fingers move as lightly, from her shoulders to her waist, pulling her closer to him.
This particular moment is being stolen in a dusty corner of the library, between tall stacks of books. Ben’s courses keep him studying around the clock, and he warns her things will be even worse when he’s in law school. He has promised his parents, and the great-uncle who is helping with his tuition, that he won’t get married until he has his law degree.
Sometimes, Kit is grateful for this promise. She wants to finish her own degree, to teach a few more years, in some place bigger and more cosmopolitan than Missing Point or Elliston. She pictures herself as a mistress in a girl’s school somewhere – not Spencer, perhaps – not yet – but she knows her teaching career will end when she marries Ben. She is enjoying this stage of life, is usually in no hurry to move onto the next.
Then he pulls her close, touches her, breathes against her skin, and she wonders how they can wait even a day, much less four or five years.
There is a way around this, of course – a way to have the delicious bliss of Ben’s touch without the responsibilities of married life, just yet. But whatever might have happened in the past, Kit has no intentions of making that suggestion to Ben. He is a modern man in many ways – approving of education for women, wanting her to have her own career in the years until she’s ready to be a lawyer’s wife. But she suspects his morals are very traditional in most important ways. If he were to dally before marriage, it would be with some lower-class girl, some bit of fluff who meant nothing to him. Not with the woman he sees as an equal, the woman he intends to marry.
Unless she’s wrong about him. Sometimes, Kit hopes she’s wrong.
But it’s not as if they’d have much opportunity to find out, with Kit living under the keen eye of Mrs. Peabody. College women are closely watched, and not just by their landladies, for the slightest hint of improper behavior. Some people still feel that having women in the university lowers the tone, makes immorality more likely. Modern women who seek to step out of their proper roles seem to be inherently suspect, their morals loose.
Maggie not only recognizes this stereotype but relishes it. Not that she’s immoral; she’s a true innocent, in many ways, Kit thinks, and certainly a virgin. But she plans to be a journalist after she gets her B.A. – “and everyone knows newspaper women are round-heeled,” Maggie giggles.
“So when do you plan to start? Being round-heeled?” Kit teases.
“Oh, not till I’ve got a job with a real newspaper. Then I’ll start having affairs with editors and politicians, sleeping my way to the top,” Maggie laughs. The contrast between Maggie’s apple-cheeked innocence and her brazen talk entertains Kit, but she is too cautious to join in such joking. Some jokes cut too close to the bone.
One evening, Kit and Maggie are studying in the parlour – a cold, formal and unwelcoming room, but one where Mrs. Peabody has grudgingly given the girls permission to work. Kit is writing a theme for her English class on “My Favourite Place,” trying to find words that will paint a picture of the Long Beach in Missing Point for the eyes of those who have never been there. When she tries to describe the place to Maggie, whose concept of beauty has been trained by the red fields and sandy shores of another island, Kit can see she’s not getting it across properly. “Rocky beaches!” Maggie shakes her head. “It all sounds so bleak – as if the sun never shines there!”
The sun does shine there – it shines in Kit’s memories of the Long Beach, though she hasn’t managed to convey this in words, either speaking to Maggie or writing her theme. In her mind’s eye the sun sparkles on the water of the bay, the long reach of water surrounded by the encircling green arms of the Point on one side and Bareneed on the other. The round beach rocks at her feet are washed by salt water till they gleam like polished gems, and rather than the uniform grey Maggie imagines, they are each a subtly different colour, hues of red and brown and slate and pearl revealed when the waves peel back to uncover the treasure beneath.
That’s what she wants to say – something that will capture the beauty of the place she was so glad to leave, something that will explain how it haunts her still.
She rereads the three paragraphs already in her composition book. Not
hing she’s written comes close to what she hopes to say.
Fortunately, she is spared further mental effort by the arrival of Louisa and Felicity, who blow into the room like leaves on an autumn breeze, as gaily coloured and noisy.
“Oh, working again, are you two? Do you ever stop?” Louisa has obviously practiced her laugh to make it sound like a merry tinkle, though the effect is sometimes a little shrill.
“Oh, darling, but that’s unkind,” Felicity says. “You know they must study, it’s different when you have to keep up a scholarship, isn’t it, my sweethearts? You keep right on burying your pretty little heads in the books. You’ll make all the folks back home proud, won’t you?” Nobody, even after years of practice, would ever describe Felicity’s laugh as a tinkle; it barely escapes sounding like a donkey’s bray, an effect unfortunately magnified by her rather long face.
“Where have you two butterflies alighted this evening, then?” Kit asks, trying to keep her own tone as light as theirs. Maggie has a nasty temper and hates being patronized, and no good can come of starting a fight. It’s Kit’s job, as she sees it, to steer things into smoother waters.
“Oh, we’ve been to a little dinner party – just a few people, quite intimate – at Judge Gordon’s house. You know, Bill’s father, the judge?”
“Oh, is Bill’s father a judge? Really?” Maggie says, the picture of wide-eyed innocence. Louisa is normally immune to sarcasm, but this is so broad even she can’t ignore it, and she shoots Maggie a withering look.
While Felicity juggles half a dozen beaus and tries to decide which she likes best, Louisa settled early in the academic year on a young law student by the name of William Gordon. They have been keeping company steadily for a few months now, and while Louisa occasionally comments on Bill’s fine personal qualities, she is far more likely to mention the fact that his father is a judge.
“Still, she must care about him at least a little, mustn’t she?” Kit poses the question to Maggie afterwards, when Maggie creeps into Kit’s room to gossip under cover of darkness.
“What, Louisa? Love Judge Gordon’s son? I’m surprised she even remembers his name is Bill. I’m sure she thinks of him entirely as Judge Gordon’s son, the future Judge Gordon. Which would make her, of course, the future Mrs. Judge Gordon.”
“Ah well, she’s the ice maiden, I suppose. No passionate affairs for Louisa.”
Maggie chuckles again, a low throaty sound. “That’s what she’d like you to think, but I know different. There’s plenty of fire in our Louisa, just not for Judge Gordon Junior.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s got a secret. A secret beau,” Maggie clarifies, in case Kit has missed the point.
According to Maggie, there’s a boy from the Island, a second cousin of Maggie’s uncle’s new wife, named Roddy MacCallum. He’s in college on a scholarship, a hard-working farm boy studying to be an engineer. He’s handsome and charming, but poorer even than Maggie or Kit.
“And he’s crazy about Louisa, it seems, and too sweet to realize she’s just stringing him along while she waits for Judge Gordon Junior to propose.” Maggie finishes recounting the tale she has heard through Islander gossip. “They’ve been meeting in secret, going for walks in Point Pleasant Park when she’s supposedly studying at the library.”
“Roddy’s not very good at carrying on secret affairs, is he?”
There’s a certain pleasure in knowing something naughty about Louisa, and Kit can’t resist occasionally dropping a hint that she knows about Roddy – like smiling when Louisa takes a baked potato at the dinner table and saying, “Louisa’s fond of potatoes, isn’t she, Maggie? Do you think she likes potato farmers as well?”
“No, she likes lawyers. Who are going to grow up to judges, and be very, very wealthy. Isn’t that right, Louisa?” Maggie’s not entirely pleased to have let Kit in on a secret previously known only to a group of loosely related people from Prince Edward Island’s North Shore, and gets cross when Kit drops hints about it.
Kit and Maggie become no closer friends with Louisa and Felicity as the winter term wears on, and no fonder of their boarding house and its landlady, but apart from that Kit enjoys Dalhousie. She does well enough in her classes to hope for a scholarship that will help with next year’s tuition. She joins Delta Gamma and the Philomathic Society; she makes friends. Even the four residents of Mrs. Peabody’s boarding house are bonded, to a degree, by the avalanche of work that descends upon them in mid-March as they write final papers and study for examinations.
“Rotten luck for poor Louisa, getting pneumonia so close to finals,” Kit says as she and Maggie study French together.
Maggie grins a smile quite devoid of sympathy. “Tant pis! ” she says. Her schoolbook French is sometimes peppered with expressions not found in the textbook, picked up from the French villagers back home. As for Kit, her own language is becoming peppered with expressions like “rotten luck” which sound like they were stolen from English novels, and would be considered putting on airs if she used them back on the Point. What traces of her accent were not ironed out at Spencer are being smoothed away now.
“You don’t feel sorry for her? You are hard-hearted.”
“I don’t feel sorry for her, and I don’t believe she has pneumonia. I think our Louisa is in an embarrassing predicament.”
“She’s in…a what?” It takes Kit a moment to understand. “You don’t mean…”
“I do mean.”
“How do you know?”
Maggie smiles and lays a finger next to her nose, a gesture Kit has never actually seen someone do before.
“No, you have to tell me. Are you sure about this?”
“Very sure. Roddy told me himself. And that’s a complete secret, not to be breathed to anyone.”
It doesn’t matter. After Louisa spends several days alone in her room with consultations from a doctor and tearful visits from Felicity, her parents sweep down upon the boarding house and carry Louisa away. Felicity goes around the house weeping and says she doesn’t know if she can write her exams, she’s so upset.
“Why?” Kit probes. “Has Louisa got something more serious than pneumonia? Is she going to die?”
“Of course she’s not going to die!” Felicity snaps. “Oh, I wouldn’t expect you to understand!”
By the time finals come around the news is all over Halifax. Louisa Arthur will not be writing her examinations, nor will she be marrying William Gordon. She also will not be marrying Roddy MacCallum, though Maggie says Roddy has offered. Everything is hushed up, yet somehow everyone knows that she has gone home for a period of nine months or so, and that once that period is over some tiny waif will be dispatched to an orphanage. Louisa’s life will then continue on a different course, one plotted not by Louisa but by Destiny, if one believes in that sort of thing.
“What a little fool she must have been,” Ben says one soft April evening as he and Kit walk in Point Pleasant Park and she tells him all she’s heard about the sad tale of Louisa. “Going around with one fellow when she was supposed to be keeping company with another.”
“Are you using ‘fool’ because there’s a less polite word you won’t use in front of a lady friend?”
“Maybe. But whatever else she was, she was a fool too, to think she’d get away with it.”
It’s the very sort of thing, of course, that sets tongues wagging, fodder for those – like Mrs. Peabody – who think that educating girls lowers the moral tone of society, not to mention the moral tone of the girls themselves. But as Ben pulls her behind a leafy willow and draws her into his arms, Kit finds it hard to discern exactly what lesson Louisa’s tale might have for her.
Triffie
THE STEAMER IS called Home, but for the first time it’s taking her away from home. Trif feels no sorrow over that. The Point is the place where she was born, where she has lived out nineteen years of life, but it’s also the place she dreams of leaving. Standing on the deck of a steamer watching the
place disappear behind her has been a favourite fantasy since childhood. It’s just fate’s usual cruelty that decrees that the steamer in question will be taking her to the one place she’s sure she’ll like even less: Labrador.
Back in the fall it had never occurred to Triffie that along with all the other burdens of marriage she was taking on a commitment to the Labrador summer fishery. More than half the men on the Point fish on the Labrador every summer; some men ship off on schooners, as her Uncle Albert always did, leaving the women and children behind from June till October. Other men take their wives along, even bring their young children, as the whole family goes north to live in a tilt for the summer, catching and making fish.
Triffie knew that Jacob John’s family went to Labrador every year, until his father drowned when Jacob John was fourteen. By the time Jacob John began courting Triffie, he was well entrenched in the men’s routine of summers on the Labrador, so Triffie was shocked when, during the winter, he began talking about “when we goes down on the Labrador in June.”
“What do you mean, we goes? I’m not going to no Labrador.”
“Of course you’re coming, maid,” Jacob John says, sounding mildly hurt. “A man can do a lot better for himself over a summer’s fishing if he got a wife onshore to make the fish.”
“I don’t know nothing about making fish. Aunt Rachel never went to Labrador – I don’t think any of our family ever done it that way. ’Tis always been just the men going off and the women biding home.”
“Well, you’re in a different family now,” Jacob John points out. They are having this conversation in the kitchen on a bitter February evening, huddled close by the stove for warmth. Jacob John patches the soles of his boots while Triffie knits him a new pair of vamps. “Mother always went down on the Labrador with Father, sure us youngsters grew up going down there for the summer. I didn’t go out in boat till I was eleven but I was working at the fish nearly as soon as I could walk. And it’s a great life up there in the summer – the long evenings, the Northern Lights – sure, you’ll love it, maid.”
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