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“Elevator.” The brakeman had been through earlier and turned down all the lights except the one at the far end of the car. The conductor’s face was ghostly, like the voice he had solicitously lowered for the benefit of the sleeping children. “Elevator,” the conductor said again, reaching across and removing the ticket stubs from behind the metal catch of the window blind.

It was not an outright question, but it was plain that the conductor would be disappointed if he did not receive an answer.

“We have friends there,” Mrs. Sondern said.

“Oh yes.”

She perceived at once that she had said a silly thing. This must be the Mr. Chatsworth who had been traveling up and down the line so long that he was known as CPR Chatsworth in every one of its twenty-odd villages and hamlets and in the two full-fledged towns at its terminals. “I’m Mrs. Sondern,” she said quickly, as though to forestall an accusation. She could think of no way to retrieve the untruth about the friends in Elevator and yet so long as it lay between them, she recognized that it might be difficult for him not to feel sorry for her.

“Of course,” she said, prompted by a small inspiration, “we probably won’t stay with them. I imagine we’ll stay at the hotel. I hear it’s very comfortable.”

“Yes,” the conductor said sadly.

“We’re really only stopping over long enough to do some shopping,” she plunged on firmly, hoping that he would go away.

“Yes.” His sorrow for them had become almost unbearable.

She went on, comforting him. “We’re actually going to the Peace River Country.”

He stifled a sigh. “I used to know your husband,” he said.

“He’s coming on later,” she said. “He’s staying in Dobie for a few days”—the phrase settled snugly into place—“winding up our affairs.”

“Yes.”

It was an effort not to reach out and pat the kind, melancholy man on the arm. “Well,” he groaned, “I’m sure they’ll miss you folks in Dobie.”

“We’ll miss Dobie too,” she said. She meant it thoroughly. She had never known anything but happiness there.

There had been, perhaps, a feeling of uneasiness between them and the village. But never more than that. They had moved there when Kally was going on six and Harold was going on seven, the day after New Year’s, 1933, the day after she had decided that they must leave Regina.

Mr. Sondern had once clerked in the bank in Dobie and during the last few years he had often spoken of the village with a befuddled repining not unnatural to his natural state. Mrs. Sondern couldn’t think of a better place to move to.

Mr. Sondern had made no great impact there himself, but when the story got back to the village, as it inevitably did in spite of his wife’s staunch evasions, that he had become one of Regina’s most indefatigable alcoholics, the village began to utter his name with a certain reverence. A village drunk is an object of pity or ridicule; but a city drunk, a man who is such a spectacular drunk that a provincial capital concedes his fame and his entitlement to be exclaimed over and deplored—this latter drunk, this city drunk, acquires something near to majesty. Although it was agreed in Dobie that Chris Sondern had done a disreputable thing, there was also something large and exotic about it. In time his memory achieved a minor canonization. “Poor Sondern, he was a brilliant man,” the bank manager, Mr. Dobbs, used to say, with more respect for dramatic effect than for the demonstrable facts. The legend that Chris Sondern might have been a great man if only he hadn’t taken to drink germinated and took root, and this gave his family the complicated problem of both living up to his memory and living it down when they went back to live among his old neighbors.

They had been, at any rate, legitimate objects of curiosity. Occasionally Mrs. Sondern conceded secretly that they might be causing embarrassment to the village. She fully understood that it might have been embarrassing the way they moved at first into a cottage by the river and insisted on staying there until the first blizzards came and froze them out. She fully understood that she might have caused embarrassment, after they moved into the town house, through her insistence on paying rent every month, particularly during those months when the first of the month arrived and she didn’t have the rent. But she had the children’s feelings to consider first, and on the whole she couldn’t have asked for better neighbors.

She knew in her heart of hearts that she was not good at doing laundry and from the first she had clear inner intimations that her laundry service tyrannized and disrupted the village in a rather regrettable degree. Not that she ever did less than her best. For the first year she was there, almost everybody who sent washing out sent it to her, and she attacked each wash with happy, optimistic ferocity, hurling socks, towels, table linen and colored shirts and dresses into a foaming bath of suds and then beating the whole mixture into a pulpy mash with a broomstick handle. Little evil-smelling blobs of wool floated through it and became imbedded in the fabric of unaffiliated underclothing. Colors ran and realigned themselves in sensationally incompatible combinations. Woolen socks shrank and hardened vilely, and lesser fabrics slowly disintegrated under the assault of strong lye soap and physical violence. Sometimes, late at night, when the children were asleep, she found herself in tears for her customers’ underthings and for the beauty of spirit which prompted them to suffer, and suffer again, without reproach.

In time she improved. But she was not in the least surprised by the lack of public consternation which greeted her announcement that she wouldn’t have time to do any more laundry. Harold was fond of answering advertisements, and it was an advertisement for a home knitting machine that induced her to abandon her laundry clients.

She obtained the knitting machine on credit. According to the literature of the company which sold it to her, the profits would pay for it within three months and leave her a minimum profit of seven dollars a week for the rest of the foreseeable future. Kally amended this figure sharply upward. “If we all pitch in, we can keep the machine going all day instead of the few easy hours a week they talk about.” Even Harold put more stock in the knitting machine than he had put in the washing and was sufficiently encouraged to speak of a Mickey Cochrane catcher’s mitt for his birthday. Kally planned a new suit for Easter.

Mrs. Sondern assaulted the knitting machine with the same gallant savagery she had brought to bear on the washtub. Although it had been represented to her in the directions that the knitting of socks by machine was a simple mathematical process, the socks which Mrs. Sondern knitted were a challenge and an affront to mathematics. They had no visible connection with mathematics at all. There was no rote or consistency to them; they emerged from the machine with staggering qualities of individualness, some shaped like crescents, some like thumbless mittens, some like square lengths of stovepipe, some lean and close-grained in texture, some obese and tired, some unkempt and tufted, like the morning hair of small mole-colored boys. However, she had followed the directions very carefully and she assured herself that there could be nothing fundamentally wrong.

Before she shipped away the first half dozen sets of two she conferred briefly with the children.

“They don’t seem to be all the same size,” Harold suggested. At this time Harold was eight and, although fiercely loyal, he had begun to develop a nervous streak of practicalness.

“Of course they’re not all the same size,” Kally sniffed. “You suppose all feet are the same size?”

Mrs. Sondern’s confidence rallied. She smiled wisely. “Machine socks never look right until they’re washed,” she told Harold.

“You gonna wash them before you send them?” Harold asked hopefully.

“No,” Mrs. Sondern said. She added, “The instructions don’t say to wash them. I think they’ve got some special kind of machine at the factory. It makes them come out nicer.”

There followed three weeks of waiting. An exciting cloud-head of suspense built up above the town house—all the more exciting because, by tacit understanding, its existence was denied formal recognition. The admission of suspense would have been an admission of doubt. Kally and her mother were too proud to doubt and even Harold seemed to realize doubt was now a dangerous luxury.

The socks were never mentioned by name. The gaunt, Goldbergish knitting machine, temporarily without wool to feed it, was retired to a remote corner of the living-room table. Such references as it was found necessary to make about the waiting were carefully oblique.

“Any mail tonight?” Mrs. Sondern would manage a stifled yawn when Kally or Harold, whosever turn it was, came back from meeting the train from the East.

“Only one bag for the whole town.”

“I kind of thought Aunt Virgie might be writing.”

And then, abruptly and insultingly, the socks were there again, dispersed across the foothills of the sway-backed living-room table amid a thicket of hurriedly torn wrapping paper and string, a gray unwanted effluvium.

“Regret ... do not meet our specifications.” Mrs. Sondern read the letter with rising indignation.

Kally’s voice was shrill. “They’re just trying to get out of paying!”

She picked up one of the socks. “Look!” she said triumphantly. “They never even put it through the washing machine. It’s just the same as it was before.”

“That proves it!” Harold spoke with less conviction, but he was in the spirit of it. “That proves it. They’re just trying to get out of paying.”

They sat for a while in an odd strained silence, alternately inspecting the rejected socks and the letter, each taking a secret satisfaction from the world’s corruption and each balancing this satisfaction against a secret melancholy. Their sense of outrage and injustice, at first so sure and exhilarating, suddenly went sodden and shapeless, like the worst of the socks themselves. Curiously enough it was Harold, the least resilient normally, who was the first to react. He began to hum one of their finest hymns, softly and absently, as though the impulse were subconscious.

Then they were all singing, robustly and splendidly, not singing for religion but, as they always did, for recreation, not singing to any identifiable God but singing to each other.

“When the roll ...

When the roll ...

When the roll is called up yonder,

When the roll is called up yonder,

I’ll be there.”

They sang the hymn over several times, and then they sang “Jesus Lover,” “What A Friend,” “Rock of Ages,” and half a dozen others. In the final silence Mrs. Sondern panted glowingly. “Well! Singing always tuckers me right out. I think I’ll go and make us all a nice cup of cocoa.”

A little later she called from the kitchen: “Clear a place, will you, Harold?”

Harold shoved his stuff a little way down one of the warped slopes of the table and rearranged Kally’s crayons in an adjoining valley. Then, without really looking at it, as though this were only an afterthought, he picked up the knitting machine and took it into the bedroom. Mrs. Sondern heard a muffled scraping as he made gangway for it in the back of the clothes closet. They never spoke of it again.

Mr. Chatsworth’s hand, plucking at her arm, was as gentle and far away as the rhythm of the train.

“Would you like some hot cocoa?” His sad, heavy face was florid under the streaks of dawn. She blinked from him to the faces of the sleeping children. “I mean, would you all like some cocoa?” he asked.

“It’s very good of you.” She shivered drowsily.

“We have a caboose on tonight,” he said quickly. “It will just go to waste. There are a few sandwiches too and I thought the children ...”

“What time will we be in?” she asked uncertainly. “I wouldn’t want to spoil their breakfast.”

“About fifty minutes.”

“Well, then, thank you very much, but ...” Then she remembered that she had gone to sleep thinking about breakfast for the children. She was anticipating no difficulty about it, really; still—“Well, if you’re sure it won’t be used.”

“I’ll bring it up here,” he said, and lumbered off down the aisle.

Mrs. Sondern sat up and rotated her neck, then leaned back against the dusty plush back of the seat, studying the thin sunrise at rest on the faces of the children.

She had meant to have a lot of children, and it was remarkable that she had managed to stop at two. Harold was born at the end of the first year of her marriage. Kathleen was born thirteen months later, when Mr. Sondern was entering his second year of sickness.

Mrs. Sondern had decided she hadn’t better have any more children until her husband felt better. She never referred to his condition, or often thought of it, in terms more pessimistic than these, but just the same she stopped having children.

It was a hard thing for her to do. She had a strong instinct for motherhood, and she bore children easily. For all except a few slate-gray minutes she had been fully conscious each time; and when the midwife—the Regina doctors were asking twenty-five dollars a confinement—had said, for Harold, “It’s a boy,” and, for Kally, “A girl,” Mrs. Sondern had been able to speak out the name, clear and strong.

The bedroom was a narrow shoe box above a boarding-house garage, but there was a window on each side with a Manitoba maple chinning itself on the lower sill. In the instant that she first saw each of her children, she also saw the sky—sunset for Harold, sunrise for Kally, a fine fall day for each, with the summer dust storms past and the snow not yet arrived.

Long afterward, when the children were out playing or meeting the train, she sat alone in the house in Dobie beside the west window, watching the sun go down and keeping tryst with the ghosts of other Harolds. More rarely, long before anyone else was up, she would start to wakefulness at dawn—suddenly, as though roused by a muffled cry—pull her decayed kimono around her goose-pimpled shoulders, slip past Harold’s bed in the front room and stand bare-footed at the little square of glass in the kitchen door, looking silently across the roof of the cowshed to where the first color of morning spilled upward on the heaped leftover clouds of the night before. Then she would think of other Kallys.

Sunset for Harold, sunrise for Kally. The thought was mysterious and thrilling and, of course, a little sad. Sometimes, reflecting in this vein, she felt that she was reliving the distant physical adventures over again, down to their most elusive and debatable details; the small, symbolic rustling she still thought she’d seen among the maple trees just before the door whispered open from the kitchen and she turned her eyes from the window to look toward the woman; the ticking of the alarm clock on the dresser, sounding louder than it had for some hours, and more relieved; the thin smell of steam, unreasonably self-assertive above the pungency of antiseptics; and finally the first timid feel of her fingers on new flesh, her flesh ... yes, God’s flesh, so soft and tender that she shuddered with the sacred wonder of it.

Remembering this way, it was always an effort to shut out the other part. Depending on whether it was morning or night, she would turn away from the window right in the middle of the memory and hurry to the stove to light the fire or drive herself stoically back to the unfinished ironing on the living-room table. But the other part always intruded, the part that said solemnly: Two aren’t enough. They’ll grow up. Two aren’t enough. They’ll grow up and leave you.

These eddies of terror were never more than eddies. It was never very long before she was able to lose them in the reassuring luxury of finding Kally’s other stocking for her, or of coaxing Harold to take his cascara. And, of course, in the more rational hours between dawn and dusk their falsity couldn’t even stand up against ordinary logic.

Mrs. Sondern would have been the last to say, as she often said, that her children were any different than anybody else’s. But surely, leaving every distinction of human quality out of it, it was still apparent that the more dependent people were on each other to begin with, the more dependent on each other they must always remain. When you had sense enough to be logical about it, the very size of their family—three—had special and demonstrable properties of unity. If you were more than three, you spread out too much, nothing could be shared perfectly, there were too many experiences that someone would miss through the laws of chance alone. And if you were only two, there was only the one bond; no matter how strong it was, there was no other, and if it weakened everything weakened. But with three, there were three bonds, all reinforcing each other and drawing in the same direction.

Sunset for Harold, sunrise for Kally. But what for Chris? For him time needed another shape, faceless, indistinct, withholding. Why Chris, the most needful, more needful even than Harold, who had been the one that had to be shut out? Why the lover cut off from love, the father exiled from fatherhood?

The train plunged through the winter morning and for the woman gazing out the window each swift cold click its wheels made against the separations in the rails was a cry of protest. Bea! Bea! Bea! The wheels called her name with the stifled, frozen urgency of a voice crying into darkness.

“I should have left him a note,” she said, half aloud. “Not to tell him where we’re going, not to say anything that would make him feel worse. I just should have left him a note to say where he could find things. Things to eat and that.”

Bea! Bea! Bea! the wheels called to her. Yes, Chris, I hear. I’ve always heard. Always, always heard.

It could not be otherwise. It would not ever be. He was a part of everything here—of the perky, radiant half-belligerent look on Kally’s sleeping face, of the dark, sober thinking set to Harold’s tightened mouth.

Chris had a part in the mystery and excitement of this night on the moving train. Whether it was as exalted as lying still in bed or as homely as sprinkling brown sugar over a bowl of porridge, or as anxious as counting up the money for the rent, the spectrum of living held no shade whose study had not been shared with him. When you married you did not just marry a person, you married a universe, a whole new set of meanings.

Even God changed. In His own good time, God would reunite her with the dark, unfathomed man she had sworn and never ceased to love and honor; any other thought was unbearable. You had to keep this ultimate hope at all costs, but in the meantime it was necessary to recast the old ideas of a God who distributed justice and mercy with an easy unfailing generosity. You had to be prepared to hoe a long and complicated row; depending on hope as much as you could, but not too much, in your passing day-to-day affairs.

Counting on things too much was never safe. But counting too little was just as bad. Once, long before their parting, she had thought Chris was gone forever. She had been very sick, with a disease really meant for children, scarlet fever. Kally had had it first and just at the end of nursing her through, Bea herself had had to go to bed, delirious and chased by shadows of guilt and disaster. While she was sickest Chris had stayed near. Each night he sat beside her on a wooden chair and held her hand, sipping only as often as he had to from a bottle of loganberry wine. Each morning he phoned the place where he held a bad job by a slender thread and told a new lie or elaborated on an old lie about why he would not be able to come to work. He had lost the right to tell the truth, alas. He had already called so often to mumble that his wife was ill, or had Bea call to say that he was ill, that when illness really was upon them there was nothing left but to say there had been a fire in the basement. He kept explaining that immense, half-specified complications concerning plumbing, heating, sanitation and public safety forced him to remain at home and wait upon the inspectors. It was fairly well understood, of course, that Chris’s superior did not believe any of this. But there was enough novelty behind it so that he did not have to feel his intelligence was being insulted. The people at the office pretended to accept Chris’s excuses during the three worst days of Bea’s illness. On the fourth day they told him not to come back at all.

Bea was much better by then. She was sitting up and Aunt Virgie had been able to come over for a day or two to help with the children’s meals. Chris came into the bedroom and put his hand on Bea’s forehead.

“You’re cool and sweet as could be,” he said.

“I feel fine.” Bea reached up and squeezed his slender hand.

“I think I’ll go out for a while,” Chris said to her.

“It’s time you got some fresh air,” Bea answered softly. She was not sure that she would ever see him again. But she was not clever enough to know a better way of expressing all the wispy unfinished thoughts that drift above the no man’s land of love, thickening and suddenly vanishing like the tag ends of a fog. “It’s time you got some fresh air.”

“Well, then——”

It did not pay to give up on hope. Two days afterward Chris came back. He was pale and bearded and nearly spent. In one hand he held out a quart bottle of chocolate milk, a rare thing in those earlier times.

“I thought I’d get you this,” he said. “You could have some and so could the children.”

“We’ll all like it so much,” Bea answered.

“What is it, Mother?” Harold’s dark eyes had opened and he was studying her face with uneasy concern. “What are you worrying about?”

“Worrying, dear? Oh, I wasn’t exactly worrying. I was just doing some mental arithmetic. You know, if it takes on, I believe the needlepoint will be an even better thing than we’ve been figuring.”

The door at the end of the coach belched open and the conductor swept down the aisle behind a gust of fresh morning air.

“Here it is.” He placed a tin tray of sandwiches and mugs filled with cocoa on the seat beside Kally. Then he hurried away again. Mrs. Sondern shook the girl quietly but insistently to wakefulness.

“First call for breakfast,” she said with an unobtrusive gaiety suitable to the hour. “Next stop Elevator, Sask. All change.”