Читать книгу The White Reef - Martha Ostenso - Страница 3

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Flanking the sunset were the black cameos of the islands, the Inlet running its copper tide between them into the Pacific. The sentinel cliff at the south was not grim stone now but, soaring in brilliance, had become the immaterial and rosy headland of a dream. A single gull’s wing cutting the flawless evening nacre of the middle sky was almost audible, so blandly still was this end of a June sea-day. The tide was cat-footing it out, and only a very aware ear could detect the sussurating of the White Reef, that sinister barrier that lay between Heartbreak Cove and the open Pacific.

In the Dragon’s Eye, the Cove’s only tavern, a swaybacked frame establishment whose feet, the piles that supported its rotting porch, stood in water, Gil Patterson and his fellow-trawler, Fred Malcolm, sat at a greasy oak table over their after-supper beer. For them the rest season, between the salmon and the herring runs, had set in. Their wives, and all the other wives in the Cove, were busy with their gardens, their goats, and their recently freshened Jersey cows. Day and evening. It was a splendid time for the fishermen, a time for Beer and Gossip.

And Gossip, as luck would have it, was not niggardly just now. There was Nona Darnell, Silas’s high-and-mighty daughter who had got her schooling down at Alberni and thought herself a little too good for Heartbreak Cove, who had run off pert as you please with Quentin Wingate in that swank white yacht of his, only five days ago.

The men of Heartbreak Cove, during the fishing season, have to be more than men; they have to pull out of their blood a steel to match and better the steel of the sea. But when the season is over, in sheer exhaustion they become less than women. They sit, big and tremulous, over their beer and think of the girls they might have married, who would have some purpose for late June evenings other than tending gardens and milking goats. They become sentimental, sad-eyed, happy and scandal-mongering. Their wives from this time forward flaunt for a spell the half-male dignity of Diana and Aurora. The fishermen, the valiants of the deep, are of small importance in this season.

“Looks like Silas is takin’ it awful hard,” said Gil Patterson as he wiped the foam from a mustache that had been a handsome drooping crescent thirty years ago.

“The girl has been the apple of his eye, ever since her mother died,” Fred Malcolm remarked dreamily.

“I saw Silas up to Bjork’s this morning,” Gil went on. “Thought I’d try joshin’ him a bit. I said, ‘Well, Nona’s done herself proud, grabbin’ off a good-lookin’ young eagle like Quent Wingate.’ But I guess I shouldn’t o’ done it. He gave me a look—sour as turned milk—so I offered him a chew, thinkin’ to square it. Poor old Silas just hunkered up and went out o’ the store without speakin’. Bjork told me I ought to mind my own business.”

“Bjork’s a rare one,” Fred chuckled. “If he wasn’t a damn square-head he’d o’ been run out o’ here long ago for tellin’ people off when he feels like it.

“But straight as a poker. Wouldn’t cheat you on a coffee bean. Here, Trippy! Two more beers.” He fished in his pocket for the silver his wife had doled out to him that morning.

Fred Malcolm squinted uneasily. “When it comes to cheatin’, it takes the smart ones like old Wingate and Sheel to come into the Cove and do it right. Do you think anything is goin’ to come of that dock proposition, Gil?”

“Not a whistle. But what are you worryin’ about? You didn’t give ’em any of your money, did you?”

A guilty blush seemed to embrace all of Fred Malcolm’s squat, sea-built frame. “No-o—not for the docks. I did put a hundred dollars into that summer resort scheme for South Beach.”

Gil Patterson gaped at his old friend. “A hun—Where did you ever get hold of a hundred loose dollars to throw away like that?”

Fred’s eyes watered into his beer. “I was savin’ it to send Maggie out to the school in Alberni. She’ll be fifteen next year. It was goin’ to be a surprise to her and her ma. But when Sheel comes along last fall and tells me I can double my money on this pleasure beach proposition—with tourists and all—well, I thought it was a good—”

“You didn’t tell me anything about it!”

“You’re so darn leery on takin’ a chance,” Fred argued in his own defense. “You don’t think Wingate and Sheel have walked out on us, do you?”

“Walked? They—” Gil Patterson was eloquently inarticulate. “Hey, Trippy, bring us two more!” He looked at Fred with mingled pity and contempt. “Walked? They ran out on us, that’s what!”

But Fred was stubborn. “No—I won’t believe it—not until—”

“Man,” Gil resumed with a large gesture toward the smoke-and-mildew mottled rafters, “when young Wingate hove out o’ here five days ago in that white yacht—takin’ Nona Darnell with him—the Cove saw the last o’ the Wingates. If you’d been here instead of back in the mountains lookin’ for trout, you’d of heard about it before this.”

Fred’s heavily veined hand shook as he gulped down his beer. Immediately, then, he assumed the magnificent and touching nonchalance of a man whose failure is too vast for reckoning.

“Gone like dust before the wind, like foam from off the wave!” he declaimed to the startled Trippy, who was conscientiously wiping the table. “And all because a couple o’ sons o’—”

“Not a couple,” Gil interrupted judiciously. “I think old man Wingate would do the right thing if he could. They tell me he got caught in the market and just couldn’t cough up any more cash to carry on with here. But Sheel—he’s the crook! He’s cleared out good! Gone east, they say, but nobody knows where.”

Fred’s red-rimmed eyes narrowed with unwonted shrewdness. “What they did, they did together—that’s the way the Cove will figure it. There ain’t hardly a man of us but you and old Entwhistle and them Darnells that didn’t put money into their schemes. And we’ll look to Wingate to make good.”

Gil shook his head regretfully and drank pointedly out of an empty glass. “Yeh—if he has anything to make good on. The lodge over there on the island is in his wife’s name—and the yacht belonged to his daughter—and the packing plant on the north shore is in his son’s name. How are you goin’ to get anything out o’ the old man? You should of talked to me first, Fred!”

Fred sought desperately for some crumb of consolation. “Well, if Nona Darnell’s gone and married that Quentin Wingate, she won’t dare show her face round here again, that’s certain!”

Gil laid a ponderous hand on Fred’s shoulder. “Nona Darnell!” he scoffed. “If she felt like it she’d marry six Chinee belly-cutters and keep ’em—right here in the Cove. And she’d make ’em do more than cut the bellies out o’ herrin’, too!”

There was a shuffling sound at the door and the two men, glancing down the narrow taproom, saw there an oddly assembled figure familiar and yet forever strange to both of them. Clad, on this warm June evening, in a long bag of a coat that was the color of rust and reached to his knees, a plaid cap on his head and a brightly dirty scarf about his throat, Ethan Ashe shambled into the pupil of the Dragon’s Eye.

“Howdy, Ethan!” said Fred Malcolm, and crossed his fingers, a habit out of a Cove childhood.

“Have a beer, Mr. Ashe,” said Gil very soberly, winking aside to the marble-eyed Trippy.

Ethan Ashe approached and fixed a black, cool eye upon Fred Malcolm, ignoring Gil’s proffered refreshment. One lock of snow-white hair fell like a cataract down his forehead between the ebon wisps on either side. They said Ethan Ashe was half Indian, from the north end of the island, but nobody really knew.

“ ’T will be a hard day for you—and the likes of you,” Ethan intoned.

“There’ll be no change in that,” Gil Patterson said with a grin. “We’re used to hard days.”

But Ethan Ashe was not to be put off. “The Wingates have gone! They came to plunder—but none may plunder the Cove but the Spanish ghosts from beyond the Reef. Last night, with half a moon on the tide, I saw them. At ebb tide the ribs and the prow of the Santa Ines were white in the moon. And the captain and the sailors, with gold rings in their ears and red kerchiefs ’bout their heads, danced round the hull in their thigh-boots, swinging their cutlasses.”

“Have a beer, Mr. Ashe,” Gil persisted, and felt his skin ripple as he spoke. “We laid them Spanish ghosts three hundred years ago.”

Ethan Ashe slid like an animate sack down upon a chair at a table near by. Trippy brought him a foaming glass and withdrew with quick fastidiousness.

Even when he ate or drank in public, Ethan was never actually seen to do so. He performed these functions with what might be regarded as sleight of hand; as now, although the beer vanished out of his glass, neither Gil nor Fred saw it, so to speak, in transit.

Fascinated, Fred blinked across at Ethan. Then, although the Cove superstition was as familiar to him as his own heart-beat, he spoke up loudly and ingenuously.

“Spaniards, you say, Ethan? And what have they to do with us, or the Wingates for that matter?”

Mistrust flicked Ethan’s face like a whip and Fred at once ordered him another draught of beer. Suddenly a winning sweetness lightened Ethan’s ascetic features; twenty years ago, in his young manhood, his had been the almost feminine grace and beauty of a Castilian matador. There were people who vividly remembered his coming down from the north of the island, in a canoe, as though out of space, and marrying Marie Trumbull, the Scotch trader’s girl. Marie had disappeared last year, alive or dead nobody knew, and since then it was a question in Cove minds as to whether or not Ethan had once changed his clothes.

“Well enough you know what they have to do with you, Fred Malcolm,” Ethan said with a fierce inner glow, “or anybody in the Cove who has dealings with pilferers from the cities.” People said that in his time Ethan had mysteriously been a great reader of books and that this accounted for his high-flown language. The lazy dramatist who had spent a summer in the Cove once—looking, as he had said, for a “play,” and not getting up until nine of a morning to look for anything—had observed that Ethan Ashe was probably a “throw-back,” and Fred Malcolm had wondered audibly if he had meant a fish. “Two years have gone since Edmund Wingate built his lodge over there on the island. That was the beginning. But not the end. If they had not come, with their grandeur and their show of wealth, my Marie would be with me today. That’s how the Spaniards work. When they see strangers trespassing on their sacred region, they bring a madness among us. There will be no coming in or going out. They have said it. Disaster comes to them who enter here for gain—and follows them who go out for gain. In my twenty years here I have seen it. Before I came here I heard of it, all up and down the coast. You think I’m mad. Wait and see. There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, because the Wingates came to the Cove. I saw the Spaniards last night and I know—I know!”

The outer light had fallen to a sooty red; the inner light was not yet in being because Trippy had been leaning open-mouthed across his bar listening to the musical descent and lift of Ethan’s voice.

“Aw, shucks!” Gil laughed, and shook himself as though hail had fallen on him. “Bring us some more beer, Trippy!”

“Thank you, I must go,” Ethan announced, and before they knew it the taproom was empty but for themselves.

Primly belying its lusty origin at the doorstep of the Dragon’s Eye among the piers and warehouses, the main thoroughfare of Heartbreak Cove steered in cobblestoned rectitude up a gradual slope along the south shore of the Inlet. Not far inland from it, Quilchina Road staggered upward like a drunken sailor through deep glades of red cedar and white birch close-set as a picket fence, and emerged at last on the seaward-looking summit of the cliff at Sleeping Chief Rock. But Thimble Street, so named after the first missionary in the Cove, ran straight as a die and would have kept on going, probably, all the way across the island as a matter of principle, had it not been for the little Anglican church of Saint Columba which intercepted its progress at the top of the hill.

From Bjork’s store upward, Thimble Street was an orderly phalanx of weathered cottages with hollyhock or privet borders in front, small vegetable gardens, outhouses and stables behind. Intersecting lanes of reddish gravel led southward to common pasturage inland from the Quilchina cliff. Above Bjork’s the street was unlighted at night save by cottage lamp glow. The dwellings on the north side of the street tumbled their backyards toward the Inlet, and the two farthest inland, just before the snug knoll dominated by Saint Columba, were situated on capricious ground indeed.

There was first the Darnell place, built upon a miniature crag that might have done for an inlet beacon, and so tangled about with English ivy and sumac and evergreens that you might pass the house without knowing it was there. Then, just before Saint Columba’s eminence, old Timothy Entwhistle maintained his estate-in-little of an English country gentleman, an English soldier come to the upper years with glory but without gain. Here Timothy lived on his small pension, and grew his flowers for his own pleasure, tulip and jonquil, peony, rose and delphinium, and above all the dahlia, a time for each.

Lower down Thimble Street, on this evening in late June, two women greeted each other across the hedge that separated their backyards.

“Nice evening, Hesper,” said Mrs. Fred Malcolm to Mrs. Thorpe. “How many eggs did you get today?”

“Fourteen—and two double yolks,” Hesper replied with a worried look. “Leghorns are too darn good. One of them that keeps on laying the double yolks we’ve got to kill. Her insides are coming out. It’s a shame. I said to Clem last night, I said, ‘Ain’t that just like a woman? Goes and does more’n her share, and then they kill her!’ And what do you s’pose he had the nerve to say?” Hesper’s nostrils grew taut.

Kate Malcolm put her hands on her hips and waited, smiling in anticipation.

“He said, ‘Females like to brag if they’re anyways half good at their job. That’s why some of ’em wind up trollops and then when they find their lives cut short they blame the men for it.’ ”

Kate laughed heartily. “That reminds me,” she remarked suddenly, her broad, good-natured face becoming sober, “there’s been no word of Nona Darnell yet, has there?”

“I was just going to ask you the same,” said Hesper, slapping a mosquito on her bony forearm. Her mouth drew into a tight crease of outraged propriety. “But it ain’t likely they’ve heard a chirp from her. If there’d been a telegram, Abner Clough would of told us.”

“Well, the Princess will be in tonight and like as not there’ll be a letter from her. She was awful fond of her father—it sure surprised me when they told me what she’d done. If it had been one of our own boys, people would of thought it was just kind of romantic. But that stuck-up young Wingate! Guess she must of done it on the spur of the moment, like, without thinking. Or maybe that grand yacht of theirs and everything turned her head.”

Hesper Thorpe laughed shortly with the contempt of one in possession of the facts. “Spur of the moment, nothing!”

The two women, as well as everyone else in the Cove, had repeatedly raked the embers Nona Darnell had left in her flight, but they had not yet tired of searching for a new, shamefully red glow.

“She had it all thought out, never fear,” Hesper pursued. “I saw Prissy Totten this afternoon in Bjork’s. She told me she’d been watching Nona Darnell row over to the Wingate Island afternoon and evening for days before she finally went off with him. Well, she thought she was getting something good, I guess, but now the laugh’s on her, if it’s true what they’re saying.”

“You mean about the Wingate plant shutting down?” Kate asked, frowning anxiously. Her interest in the affairs of others was kindly, though explorative.

“Not only that,” Hesper replied triumphantly. “Clem says the Wingate foreman told him the whole Wingate fortune has gone up in smoke. And that man Sheel has dropped out of sight with the money people invested in those big schemes of his and Wingate’s.”

“You don’t say!” Kate clicked her tongue in awe. “And imagine Nona running off with a man whose father might end up in jail! I guess they could jail old Edmund for it, couldn’t they?”

The needles of reluctant dubiousness knit Hesper’s brow. “I don’t know about that. They can’t prove that he was the guilty one, I understand. Besides, there’s news that old Wingate’s had a stroke, just last week. Maybe he’s dead by this. But if I hadn’t hog-tied Clem last fall after that good herring run he would of mortgaged the house for money to put into that hare-brained beach idea of theirs. You folks didn’t have anything in it, did you?” Her eyes narrowed in a hope for the sensational worst.

Kate shook her head vigorously. “Land, no! It’s all we can do to keep our six young ones in shoes. If we had the odd dollar, it’d go to sending Maggie down to Alberni to school next year. She’s that set on going!” She sighed helplessly. “Brains can be an awful drawback when you haven’t the money to give them a chance. Maggie wants to be a teacher. I tell her, when I was her age I knew all I wanted was a husband and kids.”

“The brains won’t hurt her any,” Hesper observed, “but she’s just as well off she hasn’t both brains and beauty.”

“Well, Maggie ain’t what you’d call beautiful, I suppose,” Kate admitted grudgingly, “but Nona Darnell, now, had both brains and beauty and, as you say, what has it brought her?”

Hesper Thorpe’s eyes puckered resentfully. “I was never one to think much of Nona’s looks. My own Lydie is only fifteen, and though she’s my own child and I shouldn’t say it, perhaps, I think she’s better looking than Nona already, and she’s nineteen. I always thought Nona was a little coarse looking. Her mouth was too big and it was always that red it looked painted. And then the sweaters she wore—and the way she never cared what her hair looked like!”

“It was bonny Irish black hair, though, as my father used to say,” Kate observed wistfully, “even if her mother was a white-haired Norwegian. And the color of my own cheeks was like that till it leaked out all over my face.”

It did not occur to either of them that they had spoken of Nona Darnell as though she were dead.

“Well, it matters little enough now what she looked like,” Hesper concluded tartly. “She brought disgrace on her family and broke her father’s heart by running off with that young upstart. And she’ll like as not wind up in the street, like Julie Cartaret. You can’t tell me Quentin Wingate intended to marry her. If he did, why didn’t he marry her before he took her away from here? What would a young buck like him, in his white flannels and all, want with a Cove girl!” Hesper laughed with thin scorn. “You know as well as I do.”

The two gardens were shouldering into each other in the violet-red afterglow; cicadas clattered their castanets and crickets chirped disdainfully out of time. Evening smells came up sweet and sad from the fallen dew. Kate Malcolm, thinking with trembling guilt of Nona Darnell until she almost felt nineteen again, sighed with relief when she heard her front gate swing creakingly inward.

“My sakes!” she cried. “Here I’ve been talking all this time, with a cake in the oven! And there’s Fred—with half the Dragon’s Eye in him, I’ll bet! Good night, Hesper.”

“Good night, Kate. Land alive!” One of Hesper’s goats was feeding serenely on the young lettuce at the far end of the garden. She ran as though on stilts to drive the animal back into his pen. The goat, his feet apart and his head down, gazed up at her with yellow eyes full of oblique and lustful twilight laughter.

Hesper shivered. “They say those darn Spaniards had goats on the Santa Ines,” she thought, and shivered again as she thwacked the goat’s sleek rump.