‘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.
It started to rain on the morning of the meeting—those big, warm drops that fall in summer and drain the air or breath. From every street and alley in Star Harbour the water flowed downwards towards the docks. The trees drooped and on the ground the slugs came out to bloat their bodies with moisture. In bad weather such as this the scouts met in an empty gym which served at night as a sort of men’s club. Here the scouts would spend the afternoon playing games, practicing their lore, and trying to look easy in their uniforms.
Stevens drove through the boathouse gate a little before three. Jeremy let him in, standing quietly in the rain while the car passed. Stevens saluted Jeremy with his hand, but the caretaker made no response. This was the sort of thing that happened to Stevens sometimes, and so now he tried to pretend that he had merely been smoothing his hair with his palm. He stopped in front of the house and blew his horn. Ronny emerged at once, clad in tight shorts which almost cut his upper thigh and with a woman’s red silk scarf around his neck.
“Do I look like a scout?” he demanded in his shrill voice. “Do I?”
Something tense in his expression made Stevens say quickly as he opened the door beside him: “Don’t worry, no one will care. You’ll have fun, wait and see if you don’t.”
“I’ve had these shorts for three years,” said Ronny. “They used to come all the way to my knees.”
“They look fine.” It made Stevens happy to be reassuring Ronny, to be handling him at last in a real, authoritative way.
Ronny leaned forward to wave to Jeremy at the gate. “Goodbye, Jeremy. So long.” After a moment the boy spoke again without taking his eyes from the window: “Say, Mr. Stevens, we have to go to the Greys and get June.”
“June!” exclaimed Stevens. “Really Ronny, you know these scout meetings are only for boys!”
“Oh she won’t come there,” said Ronny. “But her grandmother has some errands she wants done or something, so June can come and then go back when I do.”
Stevens could not go against Mrs. Grey and with grating nerves he drove up the hill to where June was already on the porch stoop.
Holding a broken lamp in her hand, June looked today, with her locks of hair, her shirt open at the throat, like an archangel slightly out of drawing. She came down the steps and Stevens, piercing her with his cold, grey glance, reached behind Ronny and opened the rear door for her without a word. June climbed in rather clumsily, and just as Stevens pressed the starter he saw Mrs. Grey standing inside the open front door. The schoolmaster flushed. He felt that in his curtness, the rudeness of making the young girl sit alone in back, he had given himself away. Surely Mrs. Grey had noticed and was now judging him wryly, with an austere tolerance that made him squirm.
All three of them were silent as they skirted the water and drove off the peninsula. Presently, along the road’s edge, the houses gathered nearer one another and turned the highway into Main Street. Stevens had meant to point out his house to Ronny as they passed it. Now with the girl in the car this pleasure was denied him. Also he found as he flicked his eyes sideways that the contours of his home displeased him. Under the rain it looked fussy and dark. He was ashamed, too, of the stones bordering the short drive. He had whitewashed them a few days ago. Now he hoped the rain would soon cleanse them. Was he never to rid himself, he wondered irritably, of these small-town tastes? The windshield in front of him clicked back and forth as though giving a negative answer.
Presently they reached the center of Star Harbour and turned down a side street to stop in front of a dingy building. A few boys dressed in scout shorts and neckerchiefs were on their way in.
“Be back here in two hours if you want a ride home,” said Stevens to June.
“Yes sir,” said June, and Stevens could not tell if the ‘sir’ was in earnest or if there had been a hint of mockery in her tone. He was angry because despite himself the address pleased him.
“Did you hear, she called you sir!” said Ronny. “Rise, Sir Stevens, I have dubbed thee knight!” Now the boy’s voice was filled with an emotion which Stevens could not define. Nudging him to make him get out of the car, Stevens felt that the boy’s hand was icy cold.
‘He’s afraid!’ thought Stevens.
Stevens was right. Ronny was afraid of the boys he was to meet. Nervousness and fear made his fingers clammy and vague cramps squeezed his bowels as he tried to picture the games they would play. They had grown worse when he had been able to compare the real scout costume to his own. He dragged himself out of the car. June was already on the sidewalk, looking at the lamp she held with one of those vague, slightly surprised expressions that young people wear when they have been given something to do for their elders. Now that she was in the village, she could not imagine why she had come or what she would do with two whole hours. The rain fell upon her head in great drops and wet her white shirt. She started forlornly up the street and Ronny, although acutely aware of her going, bade her no word of adieu. To him, her aimless walk beneath the rain, her seeming lack of destination, was a freedom to be envied. She was not forced to enter into that drab building and to meet a score of unknown monsters.
Stevens said: “Come along, old boy. You’ll like them you know, and they’ll like you. Besides, we’re going to play touch football. I’m sure you’re good at it.”
Immediately the picture of two boys rose up in front of Ronny’s eyes: team captains choosing sides. They cracked names out of their mouths like bullets and, as they spoke, boy after boy detached himself proudly from the mass to stand with his team. Finally only one boy was left, alone and ridiculous in childish, striped shorts and his mother’s old silk scarf around his neck.
