“You better rinse yourself at the spring,” suggested June, leading the way through the woods.

Ronny followed without a word and, crouching near the water, dipped his arms in its small, fresh flow. June plucked a stem of silver-weed and trailed it in the stream. The forest sounds closed about them but they could still hear the seagulls mewing over the bay.

When Ronny was quite clean he rose and, with a wistful movement, came near June and leaned against her.

CHAPTER SIX

Old Mrs. Grey sat out on the porch, knitting. As evening came on, the fireflies began to flash around her and, above, the first star of evening stared down surrounded by the fathomless azure of the sky. Mrs. Grey’s fingers slackened. She recalled how as a girl she had wished upon that star—Star light, star bright—Wishing gave such a lift to the heart. One believed at each moment of wishing that one’s desire would come to pass. How many desires she had had! How many wishes! And now they were done.

Mrs. Grey moved a little in her rocking chair so that it swayed gently. She was dressed all in white; a white silk dress with long sleeves, and white stockings and shoes. Her shoes had old-fashioned heels, thin as a man’s finger and curved in under her foot. They were pointed and small and she had worn them for years. Mrs. Grey, even in old age and with her cane, walked so haughtily that she never wore out a pair of shoes. The only untidy thing about her was her hair; of a harsh, grey colour which refused to turn white, it grew in wispy strands which escaped from her bun. She was forever raising a hand to tuck it in place.

‘I wonder,’ she thought, looking up once again at the evening star, ‘if I would go through it all a second time were I given the chance.’ Yet Mrs. Grey’s life had been a happy and successful one. She had been wealthy and loved, the mother of sons, the friend of great men. Since the death of her husband, however, a sort of refining process had begun. She had gradually shed, so to speak, the fat of life from her soul. Despite the petty habits and quirks of age she was gazing now austerely in the direction of God.

Her son John would sometimes tell his wife: “It’s really so nice for Mother to have us here in vacation time. How lonely she must be when we’re away.” But it was only the kind of thing people say to convince themselves, to make themselves believe they are wanted and necessary. Mrs. Grey was quite happy to be alone.

Now behind her the lower windows of the house were turned to a pale gold—Catherine, lighting the lamps. It would be supper time soon. Then Mrs. Grey saw June coming slowly through the dusk.

‘She might be me long ago,’ thought the old woman, and she wondered if June had yet noticed that the stars were for wishing and whether her breast were yet troubled by the wars of sensuality and soul.

June’s voice had a strained note as she greeted her grandmother. “Am I late?” she asked.

“Not yet, my dear,” said Mrs. Grey. “Come and hold my wool for me, if you please.”

June obediently pulled up a chair and held out her arms. Winding steadily, Mrs. Grey said: “Mr. Stevens was here today and arranged for you to have your first lesson tomorrow.”

“Do you like him, Grandmother?” asked June.

“He seemed a perfectly adequate young man,” said Mrs. Grey, “although ‘like’ is a strong word.”

“I mean did you think I would like him?”

“You must know,” replied Mrs. Grey, “since you have met him.”

“Did he say that?” June was not sure why she pursued the conversation.

“Yes, he did,” Mrs. Grey said, and then after a pause went on: “I think it is nice that you have found a companion near your own age and within walking distance.”

“Well, Ronny’s not really near my age,” said June as though she were giving the devil his due. “He’s only eleven and I’m fifteen.” As she said this June realized that her birthday had come and gone without mention. Suddenly her arms felt heavy inside their woolen chain. The darkness made her and her grandmother pale blurs to one another and the wool loosened and sped away in the night. It twined from her wrists like the magic skeins of old which led through labyrinths—as though her grandmother could, if she wished, teach her to avoid the central monster.

Catherine came and called them to eat.

The following morning at ten James Stevens was at the door. He wore a tweed jacket from which his thin, hairy wrists protruded, and grey flannels. He carried books in a dark green felt bag of which he was very proud, for it meant he had been to Harvard University. Actually he had only taken a summer course there.

During the lesson Stevens sat with his pupil at a big polished desk beside the library window. From there they could look out at the moss-covered lawns and into the forest.

June found the lesson tedious. She was in any case only a very moderate scholar. In her disorganized brain facts, fantasies, poetry and dreams were thrown pell-mell to sort themselves out as best they could. Stevens recognized at once that in some ways she was as advanced as he. In other circumstances it might have amused him to try to set in order the curious mixture of her knowledge. Her mind was supple and fresh, held at bay by her sickness and excited by long, feverish hours of reading. But she was at an age which he disliked in girls and he had always tried to avoid them in this stage of development. From his point of view they were ridiculous, almost nauseating. Nothing could be worse, he told himself, than a raw female who giggled and blushed and had spots on her face. Now as he sat beside June he thought she gave out a musky odor. It was not really true perhaps, but the idea of her girlish body, ill-cared for as a child’s, unperfumed and unrecognized, made him almost unable to face her way.

When the clock struck twelve, June stood up with open relief. Stevens rose. “Well that’s all for today,” he said, and continued with a touch of malice: “I suppose it’s near your lunch time, and as for me I’ve been asked to lunch with your friend Ronny, so I must hurry.”

June was puzzled at the tone of his voice, but a feminine instinct made her answer: “Oh, Grandmother never eats this early!” Having indicated thus Stevens’ lack of worldly hours, she went on: “Besides, I told Ronny I’d be down for a swim.” She lifted her head defiantly and her face, too dramatic and positive for her age, jarred his nerves.

“You’re not very good for him, you know,” he said.

“Is he good for me?” asked June, her voice troubled with anger, surprise and shyness.

“You know that’s not the point,” retorted Stevens in the manner of a person really saying: ‘Who cares about you!’ He went on to explain with conscious patience: “Ronny is very high-strung. He is an extremely sensitive child and I want him to have every chance.”

“I’m sensitive too, Mr. Stevens,” said June in a dreamy voice, looking out at the woods as though at a far-off land. ‘Now why did I say that?’ she wondered. ‘What is all this talk about?’ At once her inner brain muttered a few stubborn words of reply that she could not quite catch.

‘How ugly she is!’ reflected Stevens, comforting himself with the disproportion of her head. Then he looked down at her hand which was doubled up on the desk. It was square, almost gnarled in places, and the knuckles were badly in need of scrubbing. Yet this unfeminine fist melted upwards softly and the skin above her elbow gleamed like thick brown satin as it disappeared into her sleeve. He was brought to a standstill by these contradictions and said with a faint smile: “Well, since you and I are bound in the same direction we might as well go together in my car.”

June, surprised into being grateful, thanked him awkwardly. Looking back from the car window, she could see the head and shoulders of her grandmother, sitting in her study, writing. June waved but Mrs. Grey did not look up. She was answering letters no doubt, and June pictured the receivers: old men with white beards, exchanging in envelopes the sum of their life’s thoughts. Could that be better, she wondered, than swimming in the ocean?

The beach had to be reached by a long, rickety and even dangerous bridge over the marsh. It was a sort of plank path held up by wooden supports sunk into the mud. Some of these had settled further than the rest, so that the bridge went up and down as though over hillocks. Many of the planks were rotted and both on them and on the broken railing could be seen the curious scrolls made by termites. Since the death of old Mr. Grey, before June’s birth, no one had ever bothered to repair this bridge, but June, who was walking ahead, knew its every pitfall without looking down. Her feet sought out the firm crossboards automatically and she touched the railing in quick, light snatches lest the splinters run into her palms. A sensation high upon her back let her know that Stevens was nervous, afraid of falling into the marsh ten feet below. By jumping as she walked, June made the whole structure quiver.

There was a bath hut beyond, on the sand ridge, and from the marsh this hut looked terribly forlorn. Unpainted and blackened by the elements, it leaned sideways as though it longed to lie down and rest. A sort of lawn grew around it; reed grass that sprouted coarsely from the sand and was sharp as a knife. One had only to touch it to be wounded. Above, the seagulls mewed constantly, hovering over the tide lines in search of stranded sea creatures.

Ronny was already there when they arrived. He was astonished to see Stevens and would not speak to June.

“I thought I would join you for a swim,” said the tutor, “since I am coming to lunch afterwards.”

“Are you?” asked Ronny with polite interest, and then: “Is she coming too?”

“Now Ronny, you know, this won’t do,” said Stevens. “You must recall asking me yesterday afternoon when we had our lesson.” This was only true in reverse so he hurried on: “We discussed it with Mary later. June, I presume, is lunching with her grandmother.”

Ronny said nothing further and June, going into the hut, changed hastily into her bathing suit. When she came out Stevens entered in turn and found an old pair of trunks belonging to June’s father. Ronny, who was already undressed, looked at June reproachfully and walked ahead of her to the water’s edge.

“Well it wasn’t my fault,” said June. “He just came.”

Ronny, judging from his back, seemed to accept this explanation and they waded out into the water together. Turning out of depth, they saw Stevens hobbling painfully over the stony sand. As he drew nearer they noticed to their delight that the hair on his chest, although sparse, was as long and wavy as feathers. It made up for everything.

CHAPTER SEVEN

June and Ronny were hardly aware of the village that lay not five miles away because they could not see Star Harbour from their windows or from the beach. It was tucked in the curve of the peninsula and hidden by hills. Star Harbour had once been a thriving whaling town, but now its main industry was oysters, and many of its inhabitants commuted to bigger towns or even to New York. Aside from its port, it had like any other town its schools and its clubs, its residential section, its churches and its slums.

James Stevens had been born and raised in Star Harbour. He came from a good family, as measured by local standards, and although his father had died when he was young, his mother had given him a careful education. It was the kind of upbringing some mothers give to a son when they have lost or been disappointed in their husbands; the son must repair for them their lack. They sacrifice for him, work and worry on his account, and fret away the remains of their youth. And for each thing they do or renounce doing, they demand a counterweight from that young life.

Stevens sometimes reflected that he had obeyed his mother’s every wish so far: school, college, his teacher’s degree, even Harvard—almost. Each achievement had seemed at the time worthy of effort. Only now that they were accomplished, he sometimes had a flat taste in his mouth. Perhaps, had Mrs. Stevens still been alive, she would have found some further hurdle for him to leap. It was a last example of her will power that had placed him as master in the renowned St. John’s after four years in an inferior and smaller school. Then she had died and he had come home to an empty house to wind up her affairs during his long vacation. It was Stevens’ house now, standing a little away from the road, fringed modestly with trees and flowering shrubs. Inside it Stevens’ taste had gradually supplanted that of his father, just as Stevens himself had supplanted his sire in his mother’s heart. Nonetheless, a few relics remained to clash with the subdued walls and the uncluttered rooms.

Stevens had very little in common with Star Harbour because his whole life to date had been one of straining to get ahead of his environment. As a child, his friendship with most of the other children had been discouraged and those chosen few with whom he had been urged to play had not responded. They had had other pursuits: horseback riding, for instance, or sailing on the sound. In any event, he would have been lonely. His slender blondness, called aristocratic by his mother, was thought merely scrawniness by his fellows, and the faint accent with which his mother took such pains was ridiculed, even imitated, behind his back. None of these things had bothered him when his mother was alive. On the contrary it had made them feel superior and closer to one another than ever. He felt at her death as a plant must feel whose main, great, strong root has been cut away.

Yet the villagers, although they had no particular understanding or sympathy with him, tried to be kind to Stevens and respected his loss. The chance was held out to him of joining this or that committee and of making himself a part of them. His next door neighbour, in particular, had taken pains to solace him, orphaned as he now was. Lucy Philmore ran the village gift shop and had been, Stevens knew, very good to his mother during her last illness. It was Lucy, in fact, who had arisen from her bed one night to close his mother’s eyes, and Stevens was grateful to her although at times her plain, thirty-year-old face depressed him.

It was due to Lucy that Stevens had accepted the Junior Scout outing class once a week. Of course he had been a scout master before; it had been almost compulsory in the teachers’ college to which he had gone. Since completing his education, however, Stevens had preferred to spend the summer following courses or taking his mother on trips. Now he brushed up on his wood lore, breaking his nails on complicated knots and even succeeding in lighting a fire without a match. After his first outing Stevens had come home almost elated because it had gone so well and the children had seemed to like him. Tutoring jobs, too, helped fill in his time, although he never would have taken on June Grey if it had not been for his mother.

Even after her death he had been able to hear his mother’s even, slightly flat voice telling him that it was impossible to refuse a service to old Mrs. Grey. Later Stevens did not know whether or not to regret taking this ghostly advice. After only a fortnight of their acquaintance he found his two pupils on the peninsula, or Grey’s Neck as it was commonly called, occupying a strange place in his mind. The fact that he must think of them jointly exasperated him in particular. He became possessed by a desire to separate these two creatures, to sever them permanently and, having always considered himself aloof, even high-souled, he was humiliated by the pettiness of his actions. Yet June was like a seasoning without which his hours with Ronny would have had less taste, a constant irritant that excited his temper.

Being alone and introspective, Stevens had asked himself at once the meaning of his emotions and the answer was plain: duty. Mrs. Grey, acting indirectly for Mrs. Villars, had given him to understand that the boy was nervous, high-strung and overstrained. Surely there was nothing worse for a child in this condition than the company of an older girl, herself unhealthy and torn already by the struggles of puberty. June stimulated Ronny’s imagination, Stevens told himself angrily, overpowered the boy with her difference in age and sex. One might almost say that she possessed him. Finally Stevens decided to be active in the matter. He told Ronny to come to his next scout meeting, ordered him as master to pupil. He planned to pick Ronny up by car early in the afternoon.