Читать книгу Peace River Country - Ralph Allen - Страница 6

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Mrs. Sondern’s faith was of that dogged kind which, meeting many assaults and rebuffs, builds immunities. She had sensed, long ago, that to allow her faith to waver was a luxury she could not afford. She had developed, quite unconsciously, a technique for isolating the separate incursions against her faith and dealing with them one by one. No one problem had anything to do with any other problem, no one year had anything to do with any other year and no one hour had anything to do with another hour. Everything, either in terms of time or of problems, was parceled into compartments. The closer she could bring herself to admitting that things were not going well in any one compartment, the more certain she was that things were going well, or would go well, in the adjoining compartments.

Now as she stood on the station platform at Elevator, there were three compartments to consider. In one lay the problem of finding a place for them to live; in another the need of keeping the children apart from their father; in a third the need of pressing on.

“My, smell that sky,” she invited the children. “Just smell that sky.”

Harold, impervious to the crystal beauty of the new winter day, was blowing on his fingers through his mitts. There was nothing left of the brief exaltation he had known a few hours before. He surveyed the platform glumly and sheepishly, a dupe of the scented night mocked by an unbeguiling morning. “Where are we going to go?” he muttered.

Kally was rolling a snowball. A small boy, the only other person left on the platform, had approached to within a few steps and was studying them with hostility and suspicion. Kally threw the snowball at him. He crept away. “Now, Kally,” Mrs. Sondern admonished.

“Where are we going to go?” Harold repeated.

“Why we’re going to stay right here for a while,” Mrs. Sondern said. “It’s such a long trip that we’d better stay right here for a while.”

“To recroup our modest fortune,” Kally said, and giggled good-naturedly.

Harold stared bitterly at his sister. “But where, Mother?”

Mrs. Sondern patted his red cheek. “Old Mr. Worry Wart,” she said affectionately. “I think we’d better just step into the waiting room and sit for a while.”

“And plan our straddegy,” Kally said importantly.

Mrs. Sondern picked up the scuffed black club bag. Kally took the handle of the wicker suitcase and jiggled it impatiently until Harold, deep in anger for her flightiness, thrust one hand beneath the rope which encircled its bulging middle, and began half dragging and half carrying it toward the nearby depot door. A wave of heat enveloped them as they entered the big square high-ceilinged room, bare of furniture except for a U of slatted yellow benches arranged against three of its walls. The station agent, working behind a wicket leading to the inner office, looked up briefly and returned to a stack of papers. Instinctively they shuffled to the furthest, most secret corner of the empty room.

“Well!” Mrs. Sondern said. She had spoken quietly enough, but the word vaulted into the high bare room with the naked abruptness of an infidel’s oath shouted in a cathedral. “Well!” She apologized by repeating the word in a whisper and smiling weakly at the man behind the wicket.

“Why don’t we go back to Dobie?” Harold whispered.

“Now, Harold, that’s silly,” his mother whispered back. “We’re nearly a hundred miles closer right now than we were this time yesterday. Even if we wanted to go back, it would be a terrible waste of money.”

“We’ll never get there,” Harold mumbled.

“Oh, Harold!” Kally sniffed. “You make me sick.”

“Sure!” he hissed with the beginnings of anger. Then on a wild, savage impulse, he leaped from the bench and ran across the room to the ticket wicket. His voice trembling before his own unprecedented daring, he shouted through the wicket at the station agent: “Please, mister, can you tell me how far it is to Grande Prairie, Alberta?”

The man looked up, mildly startled, but in a not unfriendly way. “Lessee now,” he said. “That’d be on the Northern Alberta out of Edmonton. Quite a few people from around here went up there two, three years ago. A cousin of mine, he did real well. Well now, lessee. You’d get out of here to Moose Jaw. Moose Jaw to Calgary. Calgary to Edmonton. And then maybe another five, six hundred miles. Just a minute. I’d say—oh, about seventeen, eighteen hundred miles.”

“And what would the fare be?” Harold shouted, almost weeping with triumph and despair. “What would the fare be for three people?”

His mother, at first as stunned by his wild self-assertiveness as Harold himself, had crossed the room and grasped him by the elbow. “Please don’t bother,” she smiled to the station agent. “We can find out again.” Harold did not protest. He went uncomplainingly back to the corner, limp with the relieved bravado of one who has asked, fair and square, to hear the worst and has not been told it.

“They have excursions, you know,” Mrs. Sondern whispered. “And half fares. It won’t cost nearly as much as a person might think.”

“Of course not!” Kally hissed.

Harold stared at a disk of melting snow on one of his dubbined shoepacks. “But what are we going to do in the meantime?” he demanded stubbornly.

“Well, that’s better! That’s much better. One thing at a time is what I say.”

“Let’s go to the hotel,” Kally urged.

“Now that’s a very good suggestion, Kally,” Mrs. Sondern announced. “Of course, you can’t be too sure about hotels. Sometimes they have bedbugs.” She was still not in the least doubtful of her ability to solve the immediate problem, once she got a fair chance to think about it.

Just then the doorway to the platform gulped open. CPR Chatsworth, the conductor on the train which had brought them, paused in the entrance, pressing on the door with his back until it overcame the resistance of its hydraulic hinge and wheezed shut again. He had changed his peaked conductor’s cap for a black Persian lamb astrakhan. He wore a long black overcoat and carried a small black valise. His long heavy-featured face was now even more doleful. He approached them with the soft hushed steps of a doctor entering a sickroom.

“I just thought,” he sighed, and let the sentence lie there. He unbuttoned his coat and took an immense yellow Waltham watch from the pocket of his vest. He studied the watch. “I just thought as long as I was going uptown I might give you a hand with your bags.”

“That’s very kind,” Mrs. Sondern said. “We were just sort of ...”

“I didn’t want to mention it before,” Mr. Chatsworth said, turning the watch over in his big hand, “but I thought if you hadn’t made up your minds about where you were going to stay ...”

“That’s very kind.”

“I mean we’ve got a couple of extra rooms. Just the wife and I and we’ve got these rooms.”

“We’d more or less made up our minds to stay at the hotel for a few days. Only until my husband comes, of course.”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s just that with a big house to heat and coal what it is.”

“That is a point,” Mrs. Sondern agreed.

“You could try it for a few days,” he suggested. “And if you didn’t like it, it wouldn’t need to cost anybody anything.”

The poor, poor man, Mrs. Sondern thought. Why, he’s worried sick.

“I couldn’t hear of it,” she said in her friendliest way.

“Well ...” Mr. Chatsworth said abjectly.

“Oh, my goodness.” Her beam of impetuous, faintly impatient magnanimity embraced them all. She rose. With the forlorn eagerness of an old Saint Bernard dog investigating a strange and faintly belligerent cat, Mr. Chatsworth approached the wicker suitcase, made two or three feints at it with his large red hands and finally found a satisfactory grip beneath its rope girdle. He handed his own small bag to Harold. Mrs. Sondern picked up the black club bag. They went out the door in that order, Kally bringing up the rear empty-handed.

They walked in silent procession to the end of the station platform and then turned up the main street, still in procession to take advantage of the narrow path beaten by a few earlier risers in the fresh snow. The new town differed from the town they had left the night before chiefly in details as minor and easily adjusted to as the snow itself. The square red-brick hotel standing on the corner had a wooden sign in front that read The Manor Rooms $1.50 Up Best Quality Meals. Back in Dobie the hotel’s name had been The Palace Rooms $1.50 Up First Quality Meals. Here the equally square and equally red brick building across the street was named not Barber and Billiards No Minors, but Barber and Pool Minors Keep Out. The restaurant was The Carlton J. Wong Prop, rather than The Strand Prop G. Kee. The stores were Baker’s General, Red and White, and Karpuck’s Groceries and Dry Goods, in default of Dalyrymple’s General, Red and White, and Wilston’s Dry Goods and Groceries. The other half of the post office was occupied not by Bank of Montreal Est. 1817 but by Royal Bank of Canada Est. 1869.

There were no other significant variations between this town and the other; brown wooden false fronts on the stores, canned soups, boys’ sweaters, calico dresses, Lowney’s Nut-Milk Bars and Fels Naptha Soap lurking beneath the green partly drawn blinds; the yellow steeple of the United Church poking skyward at the top of the street; further on, the high board fence guarding the fair grounds and after that the prairie, clean shining snow and winter-blackened poplar bluffs. It was the small town of Saskatchewan, a town much idealized by those who have never lived there, much moved-away-from by those who have, and much mourned by people of both kinds. Before she was halfway up the street Mrs. Sondern felt the town settling around her plump person as easily and familiarly as an old girdle. “My, what a lovely place!” she said.

The difficulties of orienting to their new home proved mechanical, rather than spiritual. The front vestibule of Mr. Chatsworth’s house, like the wooden two-story dwelling itself, was a good deal larger than the average of the similar dwellings around it and they all crowded into it behind Mr. Chatsworth, banging their snow-covered feet and awaiting their turns with the worn V-headed snow broom which stood just inside the entrance. While Mr. Chatsworth was bent over the bags, arranging them near the inner door leading into the house, the face of a woman appeared on the other side of the door, visible only in its outlines through a pane of purple glass. Mrs. Sondern perceived instantly that Mr. Chatsworth could not be seen by the purple woman on the other side of the door; she saw the need of directing the woman’s attention somehow to his presence and his sponsorship. “Harold!” she said, in a voice which she tried to make casual and informal and still hearty enough to penetrate to the other side of the door, “Give Mr. Chatsworth a hand with the bags.” Harold was more than willing. To him, the surprised lavender gape of the woman inside was belittling and accusing, and in his haste to disengage himself from it he flew to Mr. Chatsworth’s aid as though flung from a catapult. “Let me!” he croaked at Mr. Chatsworth’s hunched-over back. He shot a determined fist under the man’s nearest armpit and began clawing gallantly for possession of the wicker suitcase. Mr. Chatsworth had by now almost succeeded in balancing the suitcase on one of its rounded, overstuffed ends. But under Harold’s anxious assault he and it fell in opposite directions, each with a thump. In the same instant Kally, who had been occupied with the snow broom, caught her first glimpse of the purple visage behind the door, now frozen in a mask of bewilderment. “Look out!” Kally screamed. “There’s a face in there!”

Altogether, the situation took a fair amount of sorting out and explaining. It turned out, fortunately, that Mrs. Chatsworth, although plainly outraged by the whole proceedings, had one of those thirsty but unassimilative minds which never pause to catch up with themselves. Her curiosity kept galloping ahead of her emotions; it no sooner supplied her with a cause for disbelief or indignation than it caught the spoor of a cause for suspicion or resentment and went view-hallooing in another direction. If Mr. Chatsworth intended bringing visitors, why couldn’t he have telephoned from the station? Oh, boarders, but they hadn’t had boarders for—— Why, at least, hadn’t he rung the bell or opened the door before banging and plunging around like that and scaring everybody half to—— What was wrong with that railroad anyway, three hours late last trip, nearly seven hours this trip, you’d think they’d—— If Mrs. Sondern and the kiddies were going on to Alberta anyway, not that they weren’t perfectly welcome, but the one-fifteen to Moose Jaw—— No wonder the poor child started screaming; she must have had the impression the house was supposed to be empty, but how in the world did he ever succeed in giving her that idea—— Well, yes, if it was just a matter of a few days until the gentleman came on from Dobie, they would probably find it comfortable enough; although even with the back upstairs more or less self-contained, two children and two adults might find it just a little——

Mrs. Chatsworth stood in the inner hallway, a small gray study in frustration, a woman so much put upon that her wrongs defied articulation. Her husband towered gloomily above her, turning his watch over and over in his hand and speaking to her, when required or permitted, in tones of soothing melancholy. At last she said helplessly: “Well, I expect you’ll want to go up.” She led Mrs. Sondern and the children through a large clean kitchen to a back stairway which led to a small self-contained apartment on the second floor. “Bedroom sleeps two,” she said. “One can use the couch. Kitchenette’s back here. Septic in the basement. I’ll bring up bedding later. I hope you’ll be comfortable.”

“It’s just real nice, thank you,” Mrs. Sondern said. After Mrs. Chatsworth had left, she repeated it. “It’s just real, real nice.”

After they had unpacked, Kally went back down the main street to the Red and White store and bought some tinned beans, a loaf of bread, and a tin of cocoa for their lunch. They lingered over their seconds of cocoa and conferred. It was agreed, unanimously, that their new home was so fine they need feel in no urgent haste to move further onward. To this a rider was attached, also unanimous, that their ultimate purpose and ultimate destination remain unchanged. Motion passed, Harold dissenting, that there was no reason why Mrs. Sondern shouldn’t help some of the ladies of the town with their washing if such help was needed. Motion passed, Harold abstaining, that the local possibilities of the needlepoint industry should be investigated as soon as feasible. Motion passed, unanimously, that Mr. Chatsworth was a real nice man. Motion passed, Kally dissenting, that Mrs. Chatsworth was a nice woman. Meeting adjourned with singing, sotto voce but vivaciously, Harold abstaining, of “When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder.”