Cold Pastoral

by Margaret Duley

  Later the room became filled with people, depleting her with their volume. First came a tall dark man, followed by two women in white and another bearing a tray stacked with packages. What were they going to do with her? Panic glazed her eyes and made her mouth dry as dust. The tall man made an easy approach to her bed and slipped his hand round one of her wrists. The four throbs in her body were centralised in her heart. Some motion sent the women away and made her own pretty nurse turn her back and gaze out of the window.

  From a dark six-foot height Philip Fitz Henry smiled at his patient.

  “How are you?” he asked in the voice of the previous night.

  A dry tongue went over her lips.

  “Sit down, please,” she whispered. “You’re so big.”

  His hair was shining and black and inclined to curl on the top of a neat head. His brow was high, white, making a shelf over thoughtful brown eyes. A chiselled nose made a classical profile, ending in nostrils arching in a decided curve. Underneath the nose, which was the feature of the face, a straight mouth defied its curves by shutting itself in a thin line. The chin held a cleft rather than a dimple.

  “I know how you feel,” he said, watching his patient with cool brown eyes. “Because I’m tall and well you feel smaller and weaker.”

  “Yes,” she said, surprised. “How did you know? Do you always know how people feel inside?”

  He shook his head, and she began to admire his face.

  “I’m afraid not,” he said, gravely. “But I understand feelings from a professional standpoint.”

  Habit was strong. “What’s that?” she asked instantly.

  “Being a doctor,” he explained, “and trying to find out what makes people miserable.”

  “Oh,” she said, losing some of her throbs. “I’ve never had a doctor before.”

  “Not even when you were born, I suppose?”

  “Of course not. I was born in a boat, and those that weren’t have Mrs. Whelan. She goes round with an axe and puts it under the bed to cut the pains in two.”

  A very long hand went across the doctor’s mouth.

  “I see,” he said gravely. “Haven’t you ever been ill yourself, Mary? I’d like to know how strong you are. Have you had measles, scarlet-fever—”

  “I’ve had nothing,” she said, frowning over her inexperience. “Once I had a bit of whooping-cough, but Pop cured me. It went, overnight.”

  “That was quick for whooping-cough,’’ he smiled, as if he had all the time in the world. “What did your father do?”

  The doctor knew she was calm again. She was looking at him with acute sight, and taking an interest in her story.

  “Pop caught a little trout, alive, and brought him home in a bucket. Then he made me open my mouth wide, and he held the trout down my throat. That was all. Then he put the little trout back in the river, and it swam away with the whooping-cough.’’

  Her eyes explored the effect of her story as if doubting its efficacy in this world of bottles and bandages. There was a choke from the window. Her nurse was trying not to laugh.

  “Did you like that cure, Mary?” asked the doctor. “It seems mean.”

  “Yes,” she sighed. “It wasn’t my fault. I often thought of the little trout whoopin’ in the river.”

  He leant towards her bed, and she noticed that his arched nostrils moved very slightly. He seemed to be saying some thing with his nose. Above, his eyes looked warm, as if he found her nice to look at. She wondered why she had been afraid.

  “Mary…”

  She was beginning to like the way he said it, and the long value of each syllable. Her name sounded nice in her own ears.

  “Mary,” he asked, “may I have the nurses back now? We want to dress your hands and feet.”

  “Oh, is that what they’re for? Sure it takes a lot of them for such a little job.”

  He laughed, making a sign to the nurse at the window.

  The crowd would be back again.

  “Doctor?” she asked hurriedly.

  “Just a minute, Miss New.” The nurse came to rest by the door.

  Mary Immaculate was frowning, looking at the lumps representing her hands. From them she looked at her doctor. Very gravely they stared into each other’s eyes.

  The child had listened all her life—to the wind, the sea, the waterfall and the lap of quiet ponds. By placing her ear to the ground she had heard the Little People. By easing into silence and darkness she could tell when they were friendly. By finding the mute voice of Molly Conway in her eyes she had earned a rescuer. Now she listened to the silence of Philip Fitz Henry. She could hear him—as trust, sense, protection, and a reassurance of every day.

  In his turn he saw a regrettable depletion of life, a stripping of flesh revealing anatomical perfection, the dulling of hair and eyes that must shine golden in health. The child had been flung to him, like a frozen ghost, mute in her call for rehabilitation. She was the colour of a life he did not know, the beat of the natural earth and an unquenchable spirit surviving unusual ordeal. Not a word of fear had been uttered in memory of the white loneliness that must have been hers in the icy forests. Was she so much part of them that she could outstrip their hostility?

  “What is it?” he asked encouragingly. “Anything I can do?…”

  “Would you please write to my mother? Tell her…”

  Her eyes explored him again.

  “Yes?” he asked, taking a pad from his pocket and unscrewing the top of a fountain pen. “I’m to tell your mother—”

  “Tell her,” she said, taking the plunge, “that I didn’t make the ceremony at the door, and not to blame the Sacred Heart for my foolishness. Tell her the fairies came up to my feet and danced all round. Tell her the slice of bread was fine. Not one of them could get me.”

  The doctor was frowning, but writing carefully.

  “There were no fairies, of course, Mary. You were lightheaded from hunger.” His voice was conversational, but extinguished life in the fairies.

  “The slice of bread saved me,” she contradicted flatly.

  “Very well,” agreed the doctor. “Anything else?”

  “Ask her to give something to Molly Conway. That’s all.”

  She closed her eyes, feeling as if she’d been to Confession.

  “Quite enough,” said the doctor. “Will you obey me, and rest now, for the whole morning?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m that tired.”

  The dressings were accepted with fortitude. All the time the doctor was tending her hands and feet she was wondering why anyone so nice did not believe in fairies. Something told her they might return when she felt well again.

  SIX

  “NO HOUSE WITHOUT MOUSE, NO THRONE WITHOUT THORN.”

  The square of her window was blue, underlined with yellow. Through the raised sash the wind blew, warmed with sun. Pendent in the air, spring swung like a censer burning winter away. It was a morning when the mind jumped out of bed before the body.

  Mary Immaculate woke with a bounce. For the first time since leaving the Cove she felt impelled to explore the outside world. With dangling legs she was held by the thought of her doctor. His voice demanded obedience and his hands suggested restraint. Could she heed him when her ears heard a challenge of daring? What was his world like? At least she could look. There was no one to stop her. The night nurse had been dismissed, and Miss New came with a rich peal of bells ringing eight o’clock. With bandaged feet skimming the floor she craned her neck for a view of the town. She could see it was tall, with four hill-drops to the sea, but which clump of trees concealed the doctor’s barracks?

  FitzHenry Place was old, in a town with hills barely parted to make an exit to the sea. It was a wooden city with little architectural beauty. Four times in a century fire had been a scourge. Newfoundland was a country where wind and fire could travel as one fury. Buildings kept rising from ashes, like a phoenix growing plainer with each revival. On the outskirts of the town the Place stoo
d in two acres of ground, with its shabby paint screened by sprawling trees. Peering through, the outside world had its own way of ascertaining Fitz Henry fortunes. A great name in the history of the country, general prosperity could be estimated by the state of their paint.

  The wealth of Newfoundland was subject to the caprice of weather and the varied richness of its waters. The wind could disperse the cod and seal and blow them together another year. Prosperity fluctuated. The sea and ice-fields could be fruitful, and fortune sure. Then the foreign markets might decline, leaving products rotting in their sheds. The country existed with its mind on the state of Spain, Greece, Portugal, the West Indies and South America.

  It was 1931 when Mary Immaculate became the patient of Philip Fitz Henry. Then the paint of the Place was shabby, and Lady Fitz Henry lived inside blistered walls. Diminution of wealth was little compared to the desolation of her heart. Change had come with shattering death, and when her life was cut in half she became recluse from social life. The Place felt for her, knowing nothing but Fitz Henry joys and sorrows. It gave back the voices of its own, rich with the recollection of happier days. The trees bent over her, shadowing her sombre walk. When the wind blew its frequent melancholy she accepted it as the bite of her adopted country. Entwining herself in its roots, she lived to nurture the Place for her youngest son.

  Reared to five stories in 1846, it was a tall house with a mansard roof. Discouraged by holocausts, people built without beauty. Barely completed, a fire razed all before it on its way to the Place. Dazed crowds left their ashes to see the largest sacrifice of all. Inside were the reputed treasures of wealth: mahogany imported on a sailing-vessel from England; carpets, pictures, china, crystal chandeliers: and the whole wonder of a Regency drawing-room transplanted from a London house. Flankers flew ahead to threaten all that, while heat blistered the new white paint. Destruction seemed inevitable, and the house was looted of everything light enough to carry away. When heat was scorching the young trees wind became capricious, distracting its mate over the hills. The Place stood its first assault. Later in the same year a gale tried to tear it up by its roots, but it endured with the loss of two chimneys, four windows and thirty-two trees. Years passed before its second fire-peril, coming a year after the last owner of Fitz Henry and Sons, shipowners and fish exporters, brought a bride out from England. She had been born in Quetta, of parents with Colonial experience. Accustomed to adaptation, the windswept Colony did not defeat her. In 1892 her first-born was delivered during the fourth holocaust of a century. Aloof in her bed she breathed smoke, seeing her room turn crimson. The faces of people around her were blood-red when she saw her son wriggle like a salamander in a core of heat. When the Place seemed doomed she permitted herself to be carried downstairs, preceded by her maid, making a witless exit with a pillow. With her son and her jewel-case beside her, Mrs. Fitz Henry lay as detached as an aristocrat in a tumbril, but when she passed the dining room she bade Hannah drop her pillow and fetch the tea service saved from the fire of ’46. Arranging her salvage, she was carried to the farthest corner of the garden. As far as he could, her husband guarded her from intrusion, but crowds seethed round, lost to all sense of privacy. All held the spoil of snatching hands. She remembered women with washboards, men with flower-pots and one unforgettable boy holding a hen relentlessly to his side. Fitz Henry Place was looted again. Useless to protest. She lay supine while Hannah held wet clothes to her baby’s nose. Once again the wind saved the Place, but it was in the imperviousness of her husband to a vanishing background that she began to understand his country better. From that day she became a one-minded woman nurturing a love fanned by fire. His interests became hers, embracing even the faint touch of flamboyance distinguishing him from any successful Englishman. During their frequent Atlantic crossings and in England she noticed his relaxation, but when they steamed in his own harbour he became taut as if bracing himself for bolder living. A great figure in the financial life of the country, he was knighted early in the new century, and his wife became Lady Fitz Henry with the ease of a woman who had always been gracious. It was inevitable she should develop a reputation for exclusiveness and local snobbery. Preoccupation with her family made her emerge merely for spacious events like the Navy, Government House or eminent visitors. Four sons were born to her, David, Arthur, John and, after an interval of five years, her youngest son, Philip.

  David, born on the day of the fire, did not shape towards the family traditions. He disdained business and could not understand the difference in fish-tails. Cures were a foreign language to him, and ships means of transportation to enjoy the surface of the sea. What swam under did not concern him. His father had to accept it in view of his affable repudiation of such knowledge. The fruit of the ice-fields brought the same reaction. The killing of the seals distressed him, and when one of his father’s captains told him they wept real tears, he no longer went to the wharves when the laden ships came in. His brothers, Arthur and John, had no such repugnance. They could transform the nursery floor into ice-fields and dash at cushions and mats with gaffs and scalping-knives. Whooping like Indians, they would pile up pans, topping them with their father’s flag. Their dearest possession was a white-coat with the tears in its eyes reduced to shining glass. They were the promise of Fitz Henry and Sons, the product of their father’s line. When Philip was a little boy tumbling round the floor in awe of his magnificent brothers, it was David who always picked him up. Similar in appearance David and Philip were their mother’s sons, with her pale face, black hair, prowlike nose with nostrils arched in delicate disdain.

  August 1914 found David a dilettante with enough money from a maiden aunt to keep him in comfort for life. Arthur and John were assimilating the ramifications of Fitz Henry and Sons. Philip was on the Atlantic, returning from his first year of English school. He was thirteen, with a fixed determination to be a doctor. He landed to find his brothers on the eve of volunteering and his father grim with worry. Cargoes with war risks, the Mediterranean ports closing, fishermen leaving their bays and coves—it was a little more than fluctuation. As if to pursue the down-curve of his fortunes, two bad fisheries ensued, and later an appalling sealing disaster. Steaming in like a hearse garlanded with ice, one of his ships unloaded a crew of frozen men. With the memory of their stark bodies in his mind, Philip Fitz Henry heard of the toll of Beaumont Hamel. In the harvest of one day Arthur was killed instantly, John blown to pieces and David severely wounded.

  Resilience was almost spent, and house and heart felt the same impoverishment. Paint dulled, grass became overgrown, dust settled on the unused rooms. The Place mourned for its gallant sons, feeling the drag of springless feet. Hannah crept round after her mistress, trying to perform three people’s work. The sons had been her children!

  In England Philip waited for David to be transported from France. During that period he received his last letter from his father.

  My Dear Son,

  Your mother and I speak of you particularly, realising your desolation from the loss of your brothers.It seems incredible that they are dead. We could be convinced of it more if they had lain for a while in the Place. I seem to require that much evidence. We are glad you did not risk coming out. Lonely as it is for you, it is a comfort to know one of us will be there when David gets to England. His report said wounds multiple, and he appears to be full of shrapnel. Much of it is innocuous, but a large piece in the knee makes him unfit for further service. I enclose his letter. It explains certain things and the fact that he is married. Your mother took it with great understanding, and we have heard from the girl’s people. They seem to be solid financially if a trifle eccentric. As you know, the firm is hard hit and, with Arthur and John gone, its continuity in our name seems impossible. Neither you nor David are business men. It is useless to regret such things when there are greater losses to consider. Perhaps you are wondering why I talk so finally, when I might carry on myself. The fact is, my days are numbered. I have had two heart attacks with
excessive pain in the arms and chest. I know it is angina and the word is a knell to worry and action. The first attack I kept from your mother, as it occurred in my office; but now she is aware of my condition. A magnificent woman, the sort that makes a man regret his hour has struck. This is the year of our Silver Jubilee. We intended it to be such an occasion, with all of you home. However, our tradition has trained us to accept acts of God without the waste of rebellion.

  With regard to the Place. Two years ago I made it over to your mother. For her security I have always carried a hundred thousand life insurance, which will be hers entirely and yours after her death. There will be nothing from the business. Your education is assured. That sum I set aside in good years. I suggest you finish your English school and enter a Canadian University. It will keep you closer to your mother, and make your return easier should she need you. Further, a combination of that kind equips a man better for life on this side of the water. I am writing to David of this. Some of it is his own suggestion. He has acquitted himself most creditably, and we are very proud of him. With his temperament he hated war more than most men. I hope he will get invalided home and bring his wife out.

  To you I commend your mother and the Place. Four generations of continuity in this country is a great deal. It is a life so many leave when fortune is made. Age makes one conscious of the long springs and the bitter winds. It is foolish of a man to wish to dispose of property beyond one generation, but in spite of that I wish the Place could stay in our name. Your mother’s income cannot support it, but in time a successful practice will give you the augmentation. Your ability and our name will help towards that end. David will come and go, and I trust keep his rooms in the Place. From this moment I feel I am passing you a great responsibility, and it means the curtailment of youth and all its privileges. Your brothers were brought up more spaciously, with everything we could give them. Acts of God, my son! I try to dwell on that. We have been subject so often to the winds and the waves.