The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan: Volume One

by Morley Callaghan

  The maid had prepared lunch for them and Mrs. Beddoes, clean and tidy and fresh-faced, came into the dining room to sit down with him. All the morning she had been working on the wood in her workshop, small pieces of sculpture she never showed to anyone. Beddoes, without curiosity, did not ask her about her work. Later on, in a week or so, he too would be carving, but their interest was not in each other’s work, just in the immediate personal emotion in the work alone. They sat on the veranda after lunch, looking out over the lake, talking rapidly, another definite but always delightful hour of the day for them. The small, alert woman made many birdlike motions of her head, intending everything she said to be hard and practical, though the effort sometimes seemed to exhaust her, leaving her a little tired and breathless. The intense noonday heat was beginning. Flies droned around the corner of the veranda; the bare rocks on the beach and water-soaked logs baked in the sun; rays of light, falling perpendicularly from the sun, glinted dazzlingly on the white wave crests. Swarms of black flies were in the cooler bushes. Farmers, working in the rocky pebbled fields, went into the houses for an hour’s rest.

  “I think the farmers on the hill laugh easily at us,” she said. “I felt it the other day when I saw two women darning on the stoop of a farmhouse at early twilight.”

  “Let them laugh, they never feel, nor think, they’re part of a hard rocky soil that’s only good for timber.”

  “They laugh easily because we’re here doing nothing.”

  “But we’re happy. Consciously happy, emotionally happy.”

  “That’s the beauty of it, I suppose,” she said. “We have a steady reasoned happiness. But look at the sun on the face of the rock. I love the way it shines on the hard rock and streaks it with red and green and thin patches of purple. In the wintertime at home in the city I think of the rock in the nighttime when I can’t sleep. It’s like . . . what’s it like, Bert?”

  “It’s like an old woman leaning on . . .”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s not like an old woman at all. It’s too hard and steady and urgent. I’m not sure it’s like an old man even. The time we paddled by the base in the shadow on the dark water and it hanging out over us, it drove all the feeling out of me. I was a little terrified and sure I could never have any strong feelings.”

  “Well, it calms me.”

  “It calms me, it’s got into us. I’m even happiest, sitting here looking out over the water at it.”

  It was time to get the car from the garage on the hilltop and drive into town to meet Jean, and all the way over the hilly road, sometimes passing over a long stretch of exposed bare rock on the road, radiating heat, they talked about her, wondering what she had seen in Europe and in Haiti, anticipating the stories she would tell. They were having a steadier more satisfying emotion, thinking about these untold tales, than they had ever got in their own years in Europe and Mexico, trying so earnestly to find a long excitement, till they returned finally to the north country. Some parts of Jean’s life they knew only vaguely. Two years ago she had left her husband. He had never tried to divorce her and had gone on providing her with money so she could follow the races and gamble as it pleased her.

  “I’m so damn glad to see you,” Jean said, kissing them both eagerly. “I’m fed up with traveling, and this is such a hell of a beautiful country.”

  “But wait till you see the lake and the rock,” they said.

  She had so much exuberance she made Mr. and Mrs. Beddoes feel awkwardly embarrassed, or conscious of trying to keep up with her in a spontaneous elation, finding herself looking out over the water at the primeval rock with friends she loved and hadn’t seen for a long time. She had on a little red felt Peter Pan hat, her dark hair, prematurely gray, curling out from under it and intensifying so much life and energy in the quickly changing expressions of her face. Mrs. Beddoes, without even thinking about it, threw her arms around her, hugging the rounded firm body, and said, “You lovely wild bird, you belong in this part of the woods.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Beddoes were especially happy when Jean, the Peter Pan felt hat tilted far over on one side of her head, began to clown for them, doing a Grecian dance with her stiff jerky wooden movements as though someone were pulling her legs and flapping her arms with a string, and her round breasts, held high by the high waistline of her dress, swung with every jerky movement of her body. Mrs. Beddoes held her husband’s hand tightly.

  In the clear sunlit hour of the early afternoon when the wood hills and the jagged rocks had their most brilliant coloring, they sat on the bench in the shade of the cottage talking of Haiti, voodooism, witch doctors and black magic, while Mrs. Beddoes followed each lively expression on Jean’s face. The Beddoes, by their alertness and easy response, were sensitive to every emotion Jean had. They were sitting, one on each side of her, leaning their heads over in front of her, helping her to talk. They were sure there was nothing they did not understand or feel, and nodded their heads rapidly, as soon as she began to describe a witch doctor. She had simply suggested the outline, but they had actually believed they had lived through the entire exotic experience. First she was amused, smiling at them, then felt it would have been silly to have stopped suddenly and said, “Do you know what I mean?” asking them to go on with the story. She herself, she knew would have been the foolish one, for the Beddoes had simply established a mysterious sensitive communion with her and the laughter all went out of her eyes; she was holding them but they had really, for the moment become one with her.

  When Jean and Mrs. Beddoes went for a walk through the trees, he followed them with his eyes from the porch, the rounded full feminine figure and the thin nervous alert body of his wife going together through the trees. He felt happy, sitting in the shade, thinking, looking out over the still waters of the lake, that he would take Jean over to the rock in the canoe in an hour, in the cooler, better part of the afternoon, and climb up the path with her to the highest peak. The thought vaguely disturbed the calmness that belonged to his life at the cottage but he did not mind sitting a little further back in the shade.

  From the canoe they called to Mrs. Beddoes that they would be back in time for dinner, and he began to paddle easily out over the lake. At first in the sunshine and blue water they talked gaily, then in the dark metallic water in the rock’s shadow, he smiled, for they were silent.

  “The color of the water and the dark shadow and the great rock looming overhead makes me feel a little nervous,” she said.

  He had been waiting for her to give such an explanation.

  Steps led up a path to the top of the rock but places were broken and they stopped at the entrance of a small grotto while he showed rough carvings made by Indians on the walls. “The Algonquins were here,” he said, as they sat down in a small cleft, moss-lined, between two jagged boulders. The sun was shining on them but they could not see the lake, and watching her stretching, relaxing, he wondered if she were having any of his thoughts. Under her skirts, pulled up carelessly above her knees, he saw faintly the whiteness of her thighs. Her eyes were closed. Beddoes had no thoughts at all. Though he did not want to make a mistake, the two of them were alone in the cleft in the rock and the feeling in her was not of the country at all. The beauty of her body, her exuberance and wild vivacity, was like the surface of the wild hard country; but the land was rocky and sterile underneath. He was ready to touch her tentatively when she opened her eyes and he knew she hadn’t been thinking of him at all; her thoughts far away, eyes turned up to the sky. She said, “You and Teresa seem to belong entirely to this little part of the country with its calm lake and its big rock and the few farmers moving silently in the fields.”

  “You mean moving a little droopily in the fields.”

  “But they’re not detached from it like you are.”

  “Yes, it does hold you down, but when you accept it, when you’re ready for it, then it’s rather beautiful. There’s a hardness that becomes a calmness.”

  “Teresa seems happy. She was once so s
hy and rather timid. But why does she move so nervously, holding on to herself?”

  “I don’t think she does. It is an orderly satisfactory life.”

  “She’s lovely. I like her bright metallic hardness. I love it.”

  On top of the rocks, the wide flat plateau, stretching back for miles, was cleared of timber. All the lake was spread out below, and the hills green, and one low hill near the end of the lake a dark bluebottle-green of first uncut pines. “The only first growth pines around here,” he said eagerly, pointing over the water, “and they’re not going to be cut. I own them as far down as that hill.”

  “It’s lovely,” she said, “but why are the people so stunted and warped? The country is slashed with magnificent color. The farmers are depressing. It’s a wild rough hard country of many colors and there’s no sap in the people.”

  “It’s all rock underneath, and the people are like the things they try to grow. They can hardly grow anything. The bright ones have all moved away. I’ll tell you — you’re like the surface, the color of the country,” he said.

  She began to clown again, laughing our loud going on ahead down the path, and he thought of her as wildly passionate, almost glad he hadn’t touched her for fear she might have disturbed him too long a time. “The main thing is not to be at all disturbed.”

  “What’s that?” she called back.

  “I’m just reflecting that I like the place here,” he said.

  After dinner the Beddoes insisted they go down to the lake, so Jean could see the setting sun hitting the rock. Both Mr. and Mrs. Beddoes intimated enthusiastically that the sunset was always the most satisfactory part of the whole day for them. Beddoes was blandly polite, though they were both so intensely appreciative Jean was a little embarrassed and eager to do anything that would appear to be a fulfillment of their excitement. So they walked up and down by the water’s edge, watching the changing shades and the metallic hues on the face of the rock, and the blending of all the dark heavy oily primal colors on the lake slowly arranging themselves in ribands till the sun went down behind the hills. All afternoon the sky had been cloudless, but for the sunset there were narrow dark clouds streaking across the skyline. Jean wanted her genuine enthusiasm to be noticed, but the Beddoes did not talk about it at all, shrugging their shoulders, a simple explanation that there was nothing to say after one of the most beautiful sunsets in the world.

  The maid had lit the oil lamps in the cottage. Momentarily there was nothing to say, nothing to do; the three of them were sitting at the table in the dining room.

  “Do you remember,” said Jean, “how we used to gamble in the evenings in the city years ago, before I got married?”

  Smiling, Beddoes went into his bedroom and returned with a pair of dice which he tossed on the table. “Let’s go,” he said. “What do you say, Jean?”

  Idly she rolled the dice on the table. “The three of us will play,” she said. “Craps, a simple game of craps.”

  “Just the two of you play,” Mrs. Beddoes said.

  “Heaven’s no, Teresa. It’s more fun with three.” Jean got up to find her purse and pulled out fifty dollars. “That’s all I have, let’s hope I double it.”

  “Oh, we oughtn’t to play for money,” Bert said. “I’d be a fine one, turning you out at the end of the week without a cent in your purse.” Now he was bland and smiling, courteous, sure of himself in a situation familiar to him.

  “I’ll get no bit of excitement at all unless we’re playing for money,” she said.

  So they rolled the dice and Jean began to lose steadily. Mrs. Beddoes, watching them from the end of the table, her chin cupped in her hands, supported by her thin wrists, smiled and felt a little lonesome, envying them an excitement in the game that could not matter to her at all. In Beddoes there was a strong gambling excitement and an eagerness to win. He was muttering to himself, throwing the dice which rolled noisily along the hard surface of the table. Though Jean was losing steadily it seemed to have no meaning for her, for each time she lost she felt closer to the time when she would win, as though there were a necessary number of losses before she would inevitably win. Finally, with only two ten-dollar bills left she leaned back, smiling, fingering her bills. Beddoes smiled back at her. Because there was a break in the game, Mrs. Beddoes, eager to be sociable, smiled too.

  “Do you hear the wind on the water?” she said. “The wind comes up quickly in the hills and the small lake is stirred easily and the waters run up on the shore.”

  “I hear it. Yes, I hear it,” Jean said, looking at Mrs. Beddoes, as though she had forgotten all about her. Beddoes, too, looked at his wife and was suddenly sorry for her, with almost a new sympathy.

  “What are you going to do, young lady?” he said to Jean.

  “Put the twenty down if you’ll cover it.”

  “What a shame, what a shame,” he said smoothly and politely, happily covering the twenty dollars.

  He had the dice, rolled a seven and drew the money. Ashamed of himself, he looked at his wife, who shook her head reproachfully. So he smiled again and said generously, “Twenty dollars against that Peter Pan felt hat of yours. Is it a go, Jean?”

  “It’s worth about five dollars but go ahead.”

  He rolled the dice again and an eight appeared and rolling three more times eight appeared again and he had made his point. Now the three of them were sure he could not go on winning. It was time for him to lose. Beddoes felt honestly that he would lose; really he wanted to lose; but since Jean, flushed and nervous, was leaning forward over the table and he caught a glimpse of the crease of her breasts, he gratified himself slightly, remembering a picture of her in the afternoon stretched out in the cleft of the rock, saying, “All right. Here, fifty dollars, young lady, against your virtue.”

  “What a poor thing for fifty dollars,” she said gaily.

  “Fifty dollars against sleeping with you tonight,” he said.

  They both looked at Mrs. Beddoes who nodded approvingly, very quickly. It was a moment when she was definitely able to assert the extent of her calmness and her aloofness from conventional restraint. Besides, she knew her husband really wanted Jean to win, and liked the gesture. She liked, too, the worldly notion behind the stake.

  “It’s nice of you,” Jean said. “My poor virtue’s not worth a tinker’s damn. But if you want to take a chance on it — happy days for you.”

  So he threw the dice and a nine appeared and he had to throw ten times before a nine appeared again. “There you are, I’ve won,” he said, looking at Jean and his wife reproachfully.

  “I sleep with you tonight,” Jean said coolly, getting up from the table.

  They were deliberately gay and cheerful having a cup of tea. It was ten o’clock in the evening and the maid was going to bed. The three of them were trying to be decently indifferent to a situation that had developed beyond control. Beddoes began to make conversation about an entirely different matter and stopping suddenly, laughing out loud, suggested nervously that Jean ought not to take the game of craps so seriously. Again he began talking vaguely, for he remembered that her notion of being a “good sport” had always been important to her. Watching her sitting there, a puzzled expression on her face, some thought of solution eluding her, he got more excited and nervous, knowing he wanted to sleep with her. It was not necessary to think of his wife; the feeling between them was beyond a trifling emotion. Suddenly he resented Jean’s dejection, remembering she had left her husband and had probably had many lovers.

  “We’re sitting around the table so sadly, it seems a shame to break the mood,” he said.

  “I’m merely listening to the waters on the shore. Your wife called my attention to it,” Jean said.

  Mrs. Beddoes, who had walked slowly into her bedroom, called her husband.

  “This is impossible,” he said quickly.

  “But you’ll simply have to go ahead with it.”

  “But I can’t. I don’t feel like it. You ought to
tell me not to.”

  “But I’d rather you would. In itself the thing is of no importance, so go ahead. She’ll insist on it anyway. Try and amuse her. Why not drive her into town.”

  So he said, “Will we go into town, Jean, and dance?”

  “I’d like that, if it’s not too late.”

  He was glad she was gay again, asking him to loan her the hat for the drive along the road.

  They went up the hill to the garage together, but he returned to the house to put a small bottle of whiskey into his pocket. A last time he looked at his wife standing coolly by the window and wished uneasily she wouldn’t so insistently treat it as a sporting affair and a matter of honor, and on the way up the hill-path again, tripping twice on exposed rocks, he remembered that they hadn’t taken their customary walk at twilight. Usually they went down the road together, as they had done last night, looking occasionally at the doors of small farmhouses, though hardly ever expressing it to each other that the farmers thought them foolish ones who ought to have remained in the city. Last night it was a little darker walking in a side lane and the grass was all wet and their feet damp, and the long shadows from the tall trees were across the path. They saw a light in the cottage almost at the roadside, the light in a window, and heard an old woman in a cracked voice croaking a song to two children. Through the window they saw two boys looking solemnly at the old woman. The father and mother were sitting on the stoop at the front of the house and the man took off his hat to Mrs. Beddoes. All the way back to their own cabin they had talked excitedly about the old woman singing and the solemn children listening, the one picture that the evening gave them. Every evening they selected only one or two pictures from the rock country and talked excitedly and carefully, making the picture last most of the evening.