Life as an endless suite of "variations on a given theme." This notion had filtered into the precocious imagination of Paul Minas, boy organist of the Baptist church in Hale's Turning, Nova Scotia, and dyed his mind as he played on and on through a favourite Bach prelude which luckily suited the mood of the "collection" interval. Solo performances rescued him from the chaos of the external world, bringing him into a mysterious intimacy with life itself. For the moment he was the melody. He felt the music as intrinsically as he felt the warmth in his body, yet his relation to it was romantically tinged with a dormant consciousness of the fact that Phœbe Meddar, seated in the pew with her mother and brother, was, perforce, listening.
The metaphor had not presented itself to him in words. His vocabulary, though fuller than that of Walter Dreer and Mark Laval, was a meagre wardrobe for the variety of rôles he was capable of performing. From a magnanimous prince to a starving poet, from Thaddeus of Warsaw to the Lazarillo de Tormes, he became metamorphosed with amazing facility. The notion of life as music had, without the agency of words, stolen into mind as he gave utterance by means of manuals, pedals and stops, to the voices which kept rising and falling, alternating and intermingling, intoning his theme in varying keys and modes, with varying degrees of passion, longing, doubt and conviction.
Each successive variation enounced the theme with accretions of character. With each recurrence, though undeniably the same entity, it was less naïve, more experienced. "Like the same person a year later," Paul might have stated it. He was far too engrossed in the sombre joy of performing to decipher whatever thoughts may have been flickering across the screen of consciousness, and it was only when a discreet "Psst!" smote his ear—thanks to Mr. Silva, the grizzled basso—that he emerged from his absorption. Then, with a surge of discomfiture, he realized he had played beyond the time limit. In the mirror above the manuals he saw that the ushers were standing with bowed heads, while the minister frowningly awaited his cue to murmur over the upraised plates a formula of thanks and consecration. With a hastily improvised modulation Paul brought the interlude to an end.
His feelings were hurt, for he had been playing with an exalted faith in the divine purport of the music and resented the anticlimax. Moreover, he imagined Gritty Kestrell and Walter Dreer tittering, and blushed—felt his neck and ears getting all red for the congregation to see.
He had been disconcerted more by the intrusion upon his private engrossment in the music than by a fear that his pride in "being organist" might have made him appear to be prolonging the offertory merely to show off. For having kept the minister waiting, he felt little or no compunction. The minister was only a prosy man with unpleasant thumbs and bad manners. As for the ushers, Paul objected to their pompousness when they made their rounds with the mahogany, baize-lined plates. They looked forward to that moment as the culminating point of the service, indeed of the whole week, for it gave them an opportunity of being conspicuous. This he guessed with an intuition sharpened by rivalry, for he himself looked forward to the same moment, for the same reason.
And he had an artist's horror of the noise made by pennies and dimes when the whole attention of the congregation should be focussed on the music with which he so fervently filled the interval. They chinked loudest of all when one reached the part that called for a hushed, "Æolian harp" effect. If he stopped to chide himself for an illicit desire to be conspicuous in the consciousness of Phœbe and Gritty and Walter—chiefly Phœbe, whose image was always before him during the tedious weekday hours of practice—he quickly came to his own defence with the reflection that, after all, he, a boy of eleven, perched on that bench, stretching down to pedals which had to be built up with pieces of board—he was obviously more important than four old men in shiny coats. Anybody could be an usher!
Those petty coins! He knew a naughty rhyme about them. Walter Dreer had whispered it to him in Sunday-school:
Hear the pennies fall;
Every one for Jesus,
He will get them all!"
At dinner, in the kitchen of the big cold house, Paul hesitated to tell Aunt Verona of the contretemps during the offertory. Much as he venerated Aunt Verona, much as he loved her in a repressed way, he was cautious with her. For, although Aunt Verona was kind and refrained from scolding or punishing, she had a habit, when he reported his lapses or when she caught him in a misdemeanour, of making remarks to herself. The remarks were often unintelligible, yet Paul dreaded them more than he would have dreaded a reprimand. They seemed to imply that some melody had gone off-key, that he had been guilty of a moral discord. And there was something haunting about her countenance when she was disappointed—all the more so in that her prescription of well-doing was never specifically set forth: one could only surmise its nature by means of the awful, muttering suspension of relations that followed any default. Yet despite its nonspecific quality, despite the fact that Aunt Verona never said "Do this" nor "Don't do that," as other grown-ups were for ever saying, there was something singularly consistent about her negative code. It became more intricate as you learned new facts, but it never contradicted itself. There were blind alleys in Aunt Verona's ethics, and she would often say, "Wait till you're a little older, child, then you'll see what I mean." But he was certain her prophecy would come true, for experience proved that the blank walls which had seemed to bar progress were in reality quite scalable fences beyond which lay inviting new fields. Growing up was largely a matter of discovering that Aunt Verona had been right about all the problems which had baffled one; consequently Paul paid blind homage to her wisdom and writhed whenever he was clumsy enough to bring a shadow across her face—whenever, as it were, he flatted.
He knew, of course, that Aunt Verona would ply him with questions about the morning service, and she was the one person in the world who was never bored when he talked about his experiments with new combinations of stops. If he told her in detail how Miss Todd had sung her solo, he did so merely because that implied a right to explain at equal length how he had played his prelude and interlude and postlude, and Aunt Verona at times fairly gloated, though she usually concluded with some such comment as, "Ah, but wait till you've mastered the new octave studies. It doesn't do to be easily satisfied. Nothing's so deadly as that."
One idiosyncrasy of Aunt Verona's puzzled him more than all the others. Ever since he had been considered big enough to march off to church she had exacted that he should memorize the text of the sermon, which she promptly wrote down on a ragged piece of brown paper and stuffed into a drawer of a cabinet on the kitchen dresser. What she meant to do with the texts, or why she collected them, Paul could not, after considerable straining of mind, imagine. Often, on Sunday afternoons, he had caught her bursting into a thin laugh and repeating one or two words of the morning text, and this day was no exception, for as she went to the stove to get the coffee he heard her muttering, with a nameless sort of relish, "Toil not—to be sure . . . spin . . . Heaven protect my wits!"
Not for worlds would Paul have ventured to inquire why Aunt Verona persisted in this rite, yet he would no more have dared forget the text than neglect saying his prayers, for if he did he knew that one of those blank expressions would come into Aunt Verona's face and she would go off to the playroom and sit for hours looking out of the window at the cherry tree, whilst he suffered inconsolable miseries of guilt at having been careless enough to let the pattern of life go "crookedy," to play a false note, as it were. Once he had forgotten, and on the spur of the moment invented a substitute, an old Sunday-school "golden" text that had leapt to his tongue as a very present help, and she had unsuspectingly written it down and stuffed it into the drawer. That had made him feel a cad all day. Even if she did nothing with the texts, it was a torture for him to know that there was one spurious text among all the genuine.
Every Sunday morning, immediately after breakfast, Aunt Verona took him to the playroom and gave him a final drill in the anthems and solos for the day, correcting him when he played too fast, and keeping a kind but uncannily vigilant eye on his fourth finger, which, for all the special exercises she had devised, persisted in being weaker than the others—a weakness which made for unsteady trills. Sometimes when he was practising alone she would call out from the kitchen in the middle of an étude, "Paul, Paul, go back two bars. You've left out an A-flat in the bass," and he never ceased wondering how she could unerringly name the note.
He had known for a long while that Aunt Verona was unlike every other creature in Hale's Turning, but he had taken her major oddities for granted. As he grew older he marvelled more and more. He wondered, for instance, why she never went to church, since she took such an interest in its affairs. He had been less offhand in his reports since the day, years ago, when, in reply to her query as to what the Sunday-school teacher had talked about, he had said, "Oh, about Jesus and God and all those!" For on that occasion Aunt Verona had laughed till she cried. He shrank from questioning her about herself, both because he was shy and because he knew she disliked personal questions, which she either evaded or dismissed with a peremptory "I'll tell you some day." In daylight she never ventured farther than the well, and as far back as Paul could remember there had been only three or four occasions, at dead of night, when she had passed through the gate into the street. These ominous sorties had been preceded by long fits of depression. Then Aunt Verona had gone to one of the unused rooms upstairs, put on a veil and some appallingly old-fashioned clothes, installed him before the kitchen stove with a book and an apple, and stolen out for an hour or two.
He had suffered mental agony during her absences, for he had guessed that she had been at the doctor's and the association of the ideas of doctor and night-time awakened in his mind a tragic memory. He saw himself again as a boy of three in Aunt Verona's arms wriggling, imploring his mother not to go away. He saw his mother run back into the room, kneel to kiss him, the tears streaming down her cheeks, then wrench herself away, heedless of his din, to go to a fiendish place she called the "sanatorium." At that point the picture became blurred, for she had never come back.
The terror bred in him by that dim tragedy had come stealing back like a ghost on the few occasions when Aunt Verona had gone out, steadfastly refusing to let him accompany her. He would rather have faced a legion of doctors with her than be left at the mercy of weird shadows, but nothing would have induced him to say "Yes" when Aunt Verona enjoined, in parting, "You won't be afraid, child, will you?" Ashamed of his fears, he sat with his book until the outer door closed, then retreated to a corner of the room, pressed his back against the protective wall and waited, tense and wide-eyed.
He wondered, too, why he should have to go on to Miss Todd's for choir rehearsal, when the choir might much more conveniently have come to Aunt Verona's. Miss Todd had only a tinny upright piano and her house was on the hill beyond the church, whereas Aunt Verona had a concert piano that had been brought on his father's ship all the way from Hamburg in Germany, the best piano in the whole province, and the harmonium which had belonged to his mother was almost as good as a pipe organ. Yet it was somehow unthinkable that the choir should come to Aunt Verona's house. For that matter nobody came but Dr. Wilcove, Mr. Silva, the chore-man, and Becky States, the coloured washerwoman, who wore long glass earrings which she had abstracted from a broken lamp-shade in the parlour. Gritty Kestrell and Walter Dreer and Mark Laval didn't count, for they were children and never came indoors unless it was stormy. Paul was ill at ease when he brought them into the bare house, because it was so different from the noisy, cheerful interiors of other houses. Yet he secretly noted that when Aunt Verona sat them down to a table in the playroom and served them with milk and bread and butter and jam and cookies, there was a vague distinction about the occasion that subdued Gritty and reduced the elegant Walter to whispers—Walter whose mother made entrancing frosted walnut cakes!
If people knocked at the door Paul answered. Unless the caller were a tramp, a gipsy woman or a pedlar, it was his duty to say, "My aunt's not at home," though every one in Hale's Turning knew the contrary. At first, when he had protested against this fib, Aunt Verona had said, "Certain fibs have to be told, child, in the interest of truth as a whole. Little negatives are sometimes comprised in a positive total. You'll understand one day. Besides, in Milieux, where people are less literal-minded, it's simply a way of saying 'She doesn't wish to receive visitors to-day.'" She had seemed unusually serious and had sat looking out the playroom window, her eyes on some remote horizon of thought. Paul, drawing a picture of a locomotive on the blackboard, had kept as quiet as a mouse. Then, speaking to herself, Aunt Verona had blurted out, "God, what a labyrinth, labyrinth, labyrinth!"
Her cryptic manner and the strange word had abashed him, and he had put down his chalk preparing to steal away. With a start Aunt Verona had remembered his existence and fixed him with a stern eye, modified by her extraordinary, serious smile. "You, child, must never say that. I can, but you mustn't. Promise."
He had promised readily enough and run out of doors. But at supper he couldn't resist asking a question which had been tormenting him. "Why mustn't I say 'labyrinth,' Aunt Verona?" he had finally ventured. Aunt Verona had been puzzled a long while, then broke into one of her rare, kind laughs. "It was the other word, child, that Aunt Verona wished you not to say—the first word."
"Oh, 'God?'"
"Yes . . . Except in your prayers."
From Aunt Verona's change of expression he had known he mustn't pursue the subject, and alone in bed he had got himself involved in an intricate piece of casuistry, trying to define the legitimate use and vain misuse of the name of the Deity. Intricate, because it had all to be negotiated without implying that Aunt Verona was a breaker of the commandments. The dire consequences of taking the name of the Lord in vain were minutely known to him. Hell was redder and hotter than the coals over which Aunt Verona baked onions when he had a cold, and it was obvious that one's own aunt would not go to such a place when she died. Besides, he took it for granted that Aunt Verona had been "saved." It was certainly lucky that his mother had been saved before she entered that fatal sanatorium!
Mark Laval, who attended Mass in the heathenish church across the river where the French-Canadian lumberjacks lived, had told him that only Catholics got to heaven, and Paul had run home terrified at the thought that his mother might be baking like an onion, till Mr. Silva, who was chopping wood in the yard, had reassured him. Mr. Silva—whom the people of Hale's Turning called "Mr. Silver" unaware that Silva meant "woods"—said that the Catholics invented such stories in the hope of converting you, and that night Paul had dreamt he was running for dear life down an endless corridor pursued by priests in black robes who were breathing hard and trying to lasso him with objects like bicycle tyres. He had stumbled and wakened just in time, but hadn't dared go to Aunt Verona's door and ask her to let him crawl into her bed, for he was a big boy of seven.
Mr. Silva was continually throwing off remarks which were as unusual in their way as were the objects he whittled out of pieces of board. When the sap was running in the alders he could make better whistles and slingshots than Mark Laval. Mark was clever with his blunt fingers, but you couldn't be sure that his whistles would blow or that the bark wouldn't split, whereas Mr. Silva was infallible.
One day when Paul came in from school to practise, Mr. Silva was replacing the heavy lid of the piano; the piano à queue, as Aunt Verona had called it on one of their French-speaking days, and the phrase had made Paul giggle.
On a newly-tuned instrument old pieces revived, like wilting flowers when put into water, and Paul played with extra zest. Mr. Silva lingered in the room, and Paul guessed that Aunt Verona suffered him to remain because his ideas stimulated her, as did those of the tramps and gipsies. Paul shared her contempt for the general mentality of the village and her respect for the Portuguese Jack of all trades whom the village dismissed as "odd." He had asked Aunt Verona why Mr. Silva was contented to do chores for a living rather than return to Oporto where there were palm trees or go to Halifax where there were hundreds of pianos to tune, but it had been difficult to get all his questions formulated in German, which Aunt Verona made him speak on Mondays and Wednesdays, and she had merely replied, "Ohne Zweifel, weil er gefunden hat, dass er hier glücklicher ist, als irgendwo anders."
After Paul had tested the piano, he turned to Mr. Silva, who was standing in the doorway fingering his cap and beaming with a sort of wistful pleasure. "Ah," said the old man, "music is the universal language. If every one had an aunt like yours to teach them, there would be no more wars. The nations would take the yoke of Beethoven and Bach upon them and learn of them. When you grow up you will write noble music too, and people of all countries will play it, spreading love and truth throughout the world."
From Mr. Silva's speech Paul drew two overwhelming deductions. First, people wrote music! He had assumed that all music, the world's fixed répertoire, was comprised in the volumes and sheets which were kept in a trunk upstairs and brought forth one at a time, to be mastered in succession—a series which had commenced when he was five years old with "The Merry Peasant" and which was to culminate in a certain redoubtable Liszt Sonata for the satisfactory performance of which, when he had grown up to its measure, Aunt Verona was pledged to hand over to him the watch which the Queen of Holland had given his father for rescuing nineteen Dutch sailors from a burning ship. It had never occurred to him that Beethoven and Bach had once been boys, then grown up and made music out of their heads.
The second deduction was that German and Dutch and Spanish and perhaps even Chinese boys liked music too—the very pieces Canadian boys liked! He had, without stopping to think about it, assumed that music was English, like spelling and geography. He had always realized that one would have to talk German to a German boy, and one wouldn't have anything to say to a Chinese boy—except "Muckahighlo," which Mr. Silva said was swearing—but now he realized that, no matter "what nation of a boy" he might meet, he could always, in a sense, get on terms with the stranger by playing the piano. This rich thought coloured his hours of practice for many days. The following Sunday in church he pretended that the congregation was composed of delegates from every nation under the sun, quite without means of making themselves understood to one another until the moment when he climbed on his bench and old Silas out in the vestry turned on the water power that pumped the organ. And, before the choir straggled in, he gave himself the illusion that the congregation were sighing in relief and listening eagerly, that their minds, concentrated on the œcumenical strains of the voluntary—especially chosen for the occasion and sweetly condescending in spirit—were flowing into a single stream of intelligence, that the world was being flooded with good tidings. Phœbe Meddar—whose mother's hat was the only sign of the enchanted family that came within range of the organ mirror—was a delegate from Alcantara, a princess who knew not a word of any human language, but to whose ears every vibration of sound in the gilded Pipes revealed sweet secrets. Walter Dreer was a swashbuckling Don, secretly in love with the Princess, but unable to declare himself inasmuch as he couldn't even play "I love coffee, I love tea" on the black notes.
For days, as he sailed boats in the river with Mark Laval or whittled arrows and swords in the shop where Gritty Kestrell's father made coffins, he kept coming back to Mr. Silva's notion of music reaching out over the world as a healing and teaching influence. One afternoon, as he sat swinging on the gate in front of Aunt Verona's empty house, where tiger lilies grew rank among the long grass, he dreamed that Queen Victoria had sent for him and after touching his shoulder with a shining Excalibur, commanded him to go out to South Africa and play the Moonlight Sonata to the angry Boers—on a vast organ with pipes that stretched like a golden bridge to heaven.
Paul and Gritty sometimes played "ship" among the impressive boxes which Gritty's mother forbade her to mention by name. Once Gritty had occasion to write the word, and she spelt it "coughin." In a small showroom were even more mysterious boxes, shiny and trimmed with metal. They had arrived ready-made from Halifax, wrapped in blue tissue paper which Gritty and Paul tore off and soaked in their school bottles, for it was a point of taste at school to have "coloured water" with which to wash one's slate, just as it was a point of respectability to have a slice of cake and an apple to top off one's sandwich luncheons on stormy days.
On his fifth birthday Paul had commenced school, for, although it was a Thursday and the middle of a term, Aunt Verona had had no choice but to fulfil a promise that he should be allowed to attend "when he got five." As Aunt Verona never appeared in public, it had fallen to the lot of Mr. Silva to escort Paul to Miss Ranston with an explanatory note.
His clean face and jaunty person were offensive to the big boys who played leap-frog in the angle of the school steps, and on the second day their sense of injury expressed itself in a concerted attack. He found himself enclosed in a ring of howling red Indians. Before his eyes were dancing legs and visions of lifelong humiliation; but he was armed with presence of mind and an umbrella. Deliberately he selected the ringleader and administered a jab with the umbrella point which in the confusion went to his assailant's eye and pierced it.
"Serves you right," Paul piped, as the others, scared at the sight of blood, fell back. That is what he said, and mounted the high steps, intact as a god, clutching his umbrella. Out of the enemy's reach he collapsed, and in sickness and horror clung to the caressing Miss Ranston, explaining to her what he had disdained to explain to the beastly others, that he had aimed at Bean-Oh's stomach, but some one had pushed his elbow.
He had, however, described a charmed circle about himself, even though his victim, who squinted ever after, was a torturing reminder of his first experience of meaningless hostility, his first battle for freedom.
His next epoch-making exploit, two years later, was to become enamoured of a little girl whose surname began, romantically, with the same letter as his own, and who consequently stood next him in the Friday afternoon spelling matches, To that little girl, Leila Meddar, there clung a most ethereal odour of coco-nut cookies. Night after night Paul lay awake composing dialogues designed for every conceivable contingency whereby they might find themselves together—they two and nobody else. He hoarded bits of tissue paper and rummaged in Aunt Verona's attic for choice rags, that Leila might one day have the prettiest bottle of coloured water in the class. He spent afternoons in the fields looking for new "secrets," a word which in the code of the undertaker's daughter and himself signified "flowering mosses." Whenever the time was ripe, Leila should be brought to see and admire them. To no living soul—not even to Gritty, who was a tomboy and a fairly safe confidante—did he breathe a hint of his ardours.
One Monday he was appointed monitor for the boys, and Leila Meddar, in automatic accordance with a romantic alphabet, was appointed for the girls. This meant that for five precious days it would be their joint duty to dust the blackboards and gather hats and coats for distribution at dismissal time. Daily he rehearsed a declaration for the cloakroom, but daily it adhered to his tongue. He could merely swoon in the sweet, pervasive odour of cookies.
One morning Leila was absent, and the world grew grey. Day after day her seat remained vacant, and Paul took to walking by the river, casting furtive glances at the windows of the white cottage on the bluff where Leila lived. There was no sign of her and he would go back to the fields behind Aunt Verona's house and say comforting things to his patient "secrets." Then one day Miss Ranston, in a queer voice, told them that Leila Meddar would never come back to school, for she had been ill and God had taken her up into heaven where she would not have to suffer any more.
He walked from the schoolhouse in a daze, his thoughts floating high like balloons, trying to find some resting-place in his clouded knowledge concerning the other world. He took it for granted that Leila was "saved" and would go—perhaps had gone, even before the funeral—to the region of pearl and jasper which his mother and father and Uncle Isaiah and Becky States's little black boy inhabited. The light of his love for Leila was absorbed into the refulgence of this new experience, so palpitatingly mysterious, so gloriously awful. For a while he picked clover and buttercups and daisies, on a nameless urge, and wandered from secret to secret, as if to cull the images of Leila and rebreathe the ethereal odour of cookies. With flowers still in his hand he walked across the meadow and down the road toward Gritty Kestrell's brown house, over which clambered spreading vines of blue clematis. Gritty was not in sight, but in front of the carpenter shop, at the foot of the silvery, creaking windmill, Mr. Kestrell was planing a board in an intent manner which made Paul sure that his activity was in some way associated with Leila.
After supper Aunt Verona said illuminating things about sickness and dying, then accompanied him to his bedroom, as she had done in the days before he was a big boy of seven. But she did not explain how such a little girl, no older than himself, could so unexpectedly stop living. Nor could Aunt Verona in any way bridge the yawning gap between Leila's existence as a girl who stood in spelling matches, who ate sandwiches and played tag, and her transfiguration into something divine, impersonal and infinitely far-away, like the people in the Bible. In bed Paul tried to picture heaven, as he had done on the occasion of a funeral procession across the river. Suddenly he was confronted with the thought that French-Canadians went to the same heaven as Leila, for Mr. Silva maintained that even Catholics went there when they were sincerely good. He wondered if God spoke French to them, or if He had some arrangement like Aunt Verona's, speaking different languages on different days. Perhaps everybody in heaven had to learn English. Very likely, for the Bible was in English. He fell asleep at last, and next day Aunt Verona gave him ten cents to take to Miss Ranston as his contribution towards the wreath which the school was to present. The flowers he had picked in the meadow were still lying on his window sill. Without knowing why he did so, he emptied the treasures out of his cracked lacquer box, placed the flowers in it, gently closed the lid and locked it, then took it to the bureau and placed it far back in the corner of an empty drawer.
On the day of the funeral a half-holiday was declared, an event which exalted the otherwise undistinguished little Leila upon a plane with the Prime Minister. Walter Dreer lowered the flag, and all the children marched to the cemetery. On the way up the long hill, Bean-Oh, who since the distant occasion when Paul had nearly blinded him had been particularly amicable, confided that Leila had perished of a simultaneous indulgence in milk and cucumbers. Gritty Kestrell denied this and swore it was bad drains. Paul could only shrink, and marvel. As though in a trance he still saw a waxen face surrounded by lilies; still felt the tightness of chest and the nameless awe; and with a terrible, child's accuracy of perception he retained the impression of freckles—five or six—brown, brown, brown, left stranded on a tiny white nose by the ebbing of life.
In those days he was an ardent Christian; a defender of the faith. He dwelt in Abram's bosom; he went nightly "to Jesus"; he won Sunday-school "mottoes" and celluloid buttons; he lived through the week in the ecstatic anticipation of the Sabbath; he believed in and communed with the heavenly hosts. And that waxen face, incongruously befreckled, hovered over him night and day, being especially present when he was in the attic thieving lumps of sugar from the box which had been sent to Aunt Verona in return for Sunlight Soap wrappers, or when he was pouring purloined milk into the batter of Gritty's mud-cakes. How often, before doing perfectly legitimate things—things a little boy must do every day—did he hesitate in painful embarrassment at the thought of a little girl angel looking on!
Romantic love for Leila had been so completely diffused in the wonderment which Paul continued to experience after she had been taken up to God, that it ceased to exist as a separate emotion, and gradually he made the discovery that girls bored him. He decided that when he grew up he would marry Miss Todd, and thus dismissed the whole issue of sex from his mind—always with an exception in favour of Gritty Kestrell, who was a tomboy. Gritty was two months older than himself and could climb trees and skate figure eights and run races with any boy in Hale's Turning. She had the added advantages of being able to do up sore fingers and hold her own with girls, to outwit or champion them as the eternal ends of justice might decree. Gritty could umpire a boy's lacrosse match, or substitute if any member of either team were disabled. She scorned handicaps. She hadn't much patience with dolls, and tore off the wig of Myrtle Wilcove's doll from Halifax in order that its attack of scarlet fever should seem more realistic. But, overwhelmed by Myrtle's even more realistic grief, Gritty had promptly readjusted the wig with glue "swiped" from her father's workshop. When it came to sailing boats, Gritty would never learn how to trim the sails and point the rudder to the requirements of the breeze; but, if your boat got stuck in the reeds of the marsh pond, nobody was more resourceful than she in getting it back for you, and she would wade in up to her middle at a pinch. She was the only girl who had ever "shinned up" to the top of the school flagpole. Once she had eaten a grasshopper on a dare, and next day had blackened Bob Meddar's eye for calling her "Bugs."
As a matter of fact, boys also, except in the case of a very few individuals, bored Paul. Among them he was never quite free from the dread that he was out of the picture, that the slightest expression of his really-truly opinion, as distinct from a sort of feigned community opinion, would at once let him in for a repetition of the hostile manifestation that had ended so disastrously on his second day of school, Indeed, the umbrella exploit had been re-enacted many times in terms of mordant words.
Before his ninth birthday he had discovered himself out of step with boys who did not live in a bare, mysterious house with an eccentric aunt. Privately he endured tortures of doubt at his own unclassifiability, and the pain was made more poignant by a conviction that he, and certainly Aunt Verona, were for some inexplicable reason more entitled to deference than the Dreers and Wilcoves, for all their frosted cakes and rubber-tyred carriages. There was scant balm in the knowledge that Aunt Verona had the finest piano in the province, for no one came to see it, and unless the windows were open and you played fortissimo it couldn't be heard from the street. Moreover, there was something absurd about his clothes. In summer-time the blouses which Aunt Verona made for him were considered girlish, and in winter-time his mittens and cap were too obviously hand-knitted. If he repeated stories which he had read in Aunt Verona's books—Oliver Twist and Kenilworth and Paul et Virginie—he was rated as "stuck-up." If he recited fables like "Un mal qui répand la terreur" or sang ditties like "Es klappert die Mühle," he was accused of showing off.
On the other hand if he merely remained on the edge of the circle trying to enter into the spirit of a discussion or a game, his self-consciousness condemned him to a subsidiary function. He merely held things, while others performed feats. Although he might efface himself for a time, his nature was such that he preferred solitude to being a nonentity. In his own yard he was more despotic. But Mark Laval and Walter Dreer and Gritty Kestrell were the only playmates who ever came to his yard, and of these only Mark Laval, the humblest, could be counted on to remain when more exciting games were elsewhere afoot.
To avoid mockery he tried concealing his eccentricities, but that involved a cultivation of false enthusiasms from which his nature recoiled more inexorably than it shrank from ridicule. Often enough he faithfully chased a ball or a puck in the hope that by so doing he might win from his playmates a reciprocal wisp of goodwill and understanding regarding his mental games—the images and ideas which his mind kept pursuing night and day. But whenever he invited others to share his images he was met with incomprehension or jeers. Only Mark and Walter showed an interest in his ideas, and the latter had a way of steering them into dubious channels.
Meanwhile Paul was continually being put off the field for "fumbling the ball" or lack of team sense. His most familiar sensation came to be that of yearning, followed by retaliatory moods given over to the building of a wall of indifference, moods coloured by music and stories. Loneliness, fear, doubt were his familiars, and his confidante was an aunt who, if one were not infinitely tactful, would glide away and sit for hours looking out of the window at nothing. More and more he resorted to silence, and, where necessary—as in the case of clothes—defiance of public opinion, but there was a heavy mental and emotional price to pay for silence and defiance, and his shoulders were never free of the burden of anomaly. This gave a tentative quality even to his most spontaneous smiles and made him inordinately diffident.
One of the few beings with whom there was no need for play-acting was the sympathetic old Portuguese, and, in the twilight of summer evenings when Paul went off to the pasture to help drive home the cow from which Mr. Silva derived part of his small income, there was a blessed sense of security in the companionship. He had not been able to tell Mr. Silva about Leila, for there were no words for his feeling, but he had told him about the afternoon when he and Wilfrid Fraser had gone with empty tomato tins and an axe into the summer woods to hunt for maple sugar and by force of talking about the possibility of a bull appearing on the scene had turned and run for their lives, though there wasn't a bull within a mile. Mr. Silva had gently explained that maple sugar could be drawn only in the first months of the year when the snow was still on the ground. Anyone else would have mocked him for being so ignorant and timid.
Mr. Silva had once been carpenter on a ship of which Paul's father had been captain, and could tell priceless tales of his father's exploits. For Mr. Silva as well as for the boy, Captain Andrew Minas was a demigod.
There were long periods during which Paul yearned to be friendly with boys who knew how to make capital of his affection. And, although he learned to discriminate, he couldn't resist overtures. Those boys got his tops and marbles at scandalous bargains. But there was a definite limit to Paul's compliance and their knowledge of that fact created a margin of deference, even while they chafed under an authoritativeness they couldn't analyze. When the limit was exceeded Paul resorted to the umbrella expedient. How many times did he allow his feelings to be buffeted until, wounded to the quick by a heedless remark, he turned and pierced his victim with sharp words aimed at his betrayer's most secret weakness! An accomplishment that caused the victim momentary pain, dying away into vague spite, and Paul prolonged tortures of penitence.
His most reliable friend was Mark Laval, who was tabooed by most of the others. If Paul was freakish, he at least toed the mark in respect of manners and clean handkerchiefs, but his friend, two years older, was a ragamuffin with a shock of dusty hair, a great toothy mouth in an ugly face, and only a dog-like fidelity to commend him. Although Paul had always been conscious of Mark Laval as a sympathetic figure in his background, their friendship dated from a certain afternoon in his tenth year, when, on getting up from the piano he saw Mark seated under the cherry tree, chewing grass-stalks and dreaming. Strangely elated, Paul stole back to play his showiest solo, after which, on finding Mark in the same pensive attitude, he opened the door as casually as though he knew nothing of the other's presence.
Mark ceased pulling at the grass and looked up bashfully. As a means of breaking the ice, Paul slid down the rounded surface of the wall at the side of the doorstep.
"Seen Uncle Tom's Cabin?" Mark asked.
Paul had no idea what Uncle Tom's Cabin was, and Mark explained that he had walked nine miles to see it performed in Dominion Hall at Bridgetown. He had paid ten cents for a seat. A man had given him the dime for carrying a bag.
Paul's Sunday-school teacher had impressed upon him the evil of theatres, her clinching argument being that a former President of the United States had been shot in one! He maintained a patronizing silence.
"I could show you what it's like, with little Eva and Legree and the bloodhounds," Mark offered, "if I had a pencil and some paper."
Paul glanced doubtfully at Mark's muddy boots, but in the end invited him to go round to the back porch, where he would meet him with pencils and paper and wax crayons, and they suddenly dashed off.
On the back porch Mark showed Paul what little Eva "was like." He also showed him what Julius Cæsar was like, and Boadicea and Napoleon and the boy on the burning deck. He gave them all Roman noses and crimson-lake lips, and portrayed them "eyes-right," with turrets and ramparts in the background. But they were very real to Paul by dint of their creator's intense, life-endowing belief in them, just as Paul's music had been very real to Mark Laval for a similar reason. On the strength of that common interest Paul suddenly realized that Mark was his friend. Simultaneously he was penetrated with a sense of the French boy's forlornness.
Mark had a father who came down from the lumber camps for whisky and vowed to kick all the nonsense out of his son. He was at school only because the authorities insisted on it. As soon as the law allowed, Mark's father planned to take him into the woods. With this destiny before his eyes, Mark clung to the few bright opportunities that remained. Paul thought of his friend as a boy doomed to look at life through a window, a wild boy infinitely crude, yet infinitely gentle, his eyes reflecting passionate, wistful, vain enthusiasms.
Looking back on that friendship Paul was to recognize in Mark Laval the first person who set for him an example of the vigorous individuality of thought and expression that is unaware of what other people may be thinking and saying; his own furtive defiance seemed ignoble by contrast. With a Philistinism hard to conquer, he contemplated Mark's ragged clothes and thought of his squalid home, then, in an access of contrition, invited Mark to stay to tea. Aunt Verona made no objection, and Mark, after dutifully scraping his boots, found himself confronted by a mysterious array of china while his host mumbled a mysterious incantation ending in "Amen." He was abashed by his own mishandling of the spoons, yet so eager not to offend Paul and Aunt Verona that he seemed to be apologizing to them for the daintiness of Aunt Verona's taste, and she talked rather brightly to put him at his ease. When he had gone, Paul, for the first time in years, ventured to hug Aunt Verona without invitation.
Next morning, as he was leaving the house, he found on the doorstep a smudged, paper-bound copy of Ruy Blas. In the margins were sketches and annotations. On one page he read: "This ought to be sung." And Paul's mind danced for glee at the discovery that there were lyrics in the world which might be set to music. He had thought of songs as having always existed in an inextricable alliance with their music, like hymns. Trust old Mark to open his eyes!
On the title-page was this inscription: "For you to read and keep Paul. I'll never forget yestiddy." For a second Paul shrank. The Puritanism of countless forbears was responsible for a slight stiffening of spine at this friendly demonstration. His pendantism was revolted by the fault in spelling. Nevertheless he skipped off to school with more kindliness in his heart than ever before.
His alternative chum of this period was a boy of a conventionalized stamp. Walter Dreer's easy assurance reflected a definite social status which was substantiated by his father's victories at the local polls, and by the frosted walnut cakes that topped off his mother's Sunday-evening suppers. Everything about Walter was comfortably and infallibly bourgeois but his private thoughts, and these, as Paul later came to realize, verged on the lurid. Walter's prurience was an undercurrent against which Paul instinctively swam, cultivating Walter for his amiable laughter at one's whims and fancies, for his resourcefulness, his flexibility, his boundless information, and (since Paul was so generally isolated) for his popularity, which was in Paul's eyes a supreme distinction. Walter, mirabile dictu, approved of him, or seemed to, whereas he had always expected conventional people to disapprove or at the most approve with definite reservations. Above all, Walter constituted him the privileged audience for his best capers cut, as it were, for Paul's private amusement and in confident anticipation of Paul's rapturous applause—Walter, who had the whole village to choose from! Paul worshipped him.
Walter's cardinal deficiency was that he snubbed Mark Laval. Though Paul felt this to be unjust, he couldn't help being influenced by Walter's contemptuous opinion, and was guilty of treating Mark with less generosity than his instinct prompted. Moreover, in order to win Walter's fuller approval, he was at some pains to conceal his own more glaring oddities, lest Walter might one day dismiss him too as a "freak."
For a year or two this comradeship was very close, being fostered by the fact that Walter, unlike Mark Laval, attended Paul's Sunday-school, which in a clannish community constituted an alliance. Then came a dark winter's day when Paul found Walter deep in the confidence of an enemy, John Ashmill, the son of Dave Ashmill who owned forests and gypsum mines, John Ashmill who had given Paul the nickname of "Polly" and always sang out, "Polly want a cracker?" when he hove into view. Walter was aware of the feud, and Paul was obliged to conclude that his chum was cultivating his enemy for the sake of the latter's liberal allowance and his superior sleds and skates.
It was a Saturday morning, a school holiday, and Paul had set off to find Walter, when he encountered him in company with his new playmate, a ribald despot with whom Paul supposed it was his duty to "mix," but on account of whose physical sense of humour he was carrying a scar on his temple, as well as more dire wounds that couldn't be seen. Paul greeted them without stopping, walking briskly towards nowhere. A solitary day lay before him, for Mark Laval had been taken off to the woods by his father, and Gritty was, after all, only half boy, and he had forsworn girls.
Then, at the corner, a malicious snowball burst upon his cap and penetrated freezingly into a corner of a stubborn young heart.
For six months after that he refused to speak to Walter Dreer, though they continued to meet in the street, and to sit in the same classroom. It was a bitterly unhappy winter and he suffered for the sake of a principle which he secretly felt to be distorted. He was flatting and discording. Instinct told him that an uncompromising attitude always failed to prove itself justified. Yet he was powerless in the grip of his stubbornness. Often he thought of confiding in Aunt Verona but another precocious instinct warned him that Aunt Verona herself was a victim of some similar fate. At night he wrestled long hours with his angel rehearsing conciliatory speeches, yet day after day he passed Walter without a sign, and became almost mechanically oblivious of his friend's existence, all the while mourning his loss.
During the first days of spring, in Paul's eleventh year, Dr. Wilcove took him for a drive to Bridgetown, where he had to attend a patient. This was an ecstatic occasion. Aunt Verona gave him twenty-five cents to buy whatever he chose and Dr. Wilcove added a "quarter" for candy. Fifty cents! Gee-rusalem! It was more than he had ever had to spend, even on Firsts of July. While Dr. Wilcove paid his call, Paul wandered through the river town inspecting the shops, and finally selected a green top, a dozen striped glass marbles, and a "real agate" shooter. With the candy quarter he bought a mouth-organ and a "souvenir" pen-wiper to present to Aunt Verona, whereupon Dr. Wilcove himself went into another shop and returned with a bag of sweets, which capped the glories of the expedition.
The return drive, past purple furrows and groves of shimmering green hazel, was an uninterrupted delight. The little mare knew she was homeward bound and ran cheerfully all the way. Dr. Wilcove let Paul hold the reins, and told him stories about the deserted farmhouses on his route, thrilling him when he pointed out the house in which his mother and Aunt Verona had been born. Then Dr. Wilcove, in that incorrigible grown-up manner, shook his head sadly and remarked, "It might have been as famous a house as Sam Slick's in its way!" Paul was too diffident to ask for an explanation, and the doctor's next remark, about "throwing away a career," got mixed up with a clucking noise destined for the ears of the little mare.
The afternoon was drenched as in a deep golden dew when they reached the brow of the hill over-looking Hale's Turning. Miss Todd's house came first into sight. Beneath it was the white Baptist church; opposite, the extensive acres of Dave Ashmill, bounded by a straggling cedar hedge. Farther on, the maples and elms and fruit trees of the village seemed to be growing in profusion out of a huge basket. The river lay beyond the roofs, mud-red, streaked with silver, broadening out toward the Basin. A wooden barque, her yards all criss-cross, rode at anchor near the mill. There were green stretches of marsh and pink mud flats too, and a shabby little train went rambling and rumbling across a trestle towards the long abandoned shipyard and rotting wharves that had been constructed by Paul's grandfather in the days when all vessels were made of wood.
As they descended the hill, with the warm sun in their faces, Paul had a strange sensation of ownership in this little village, so much more cosy and likeable than the bewildering Bridgetown for all its town hall built of stone, its brick schoolhouse, and a whole street full of shops. Bridgetown was vast and alien and unknowable, whereas Hale's Turning was almost his very own; he knew and for the moment loved every square foot of it. He knew and loved, as never before, every creature that dwelt in it. As they drove past the cedar hedge at the foot of the hill he felt he could almost have been friendly with John Ashmill, the bully who lived in such grandeur behind it. If only the little mare wouldn't trot so fast now!
Mr. Kestrell's windmill flashed in the sun. As they drove past the brown house, Paul caught a glimpse of Walter Dreer, walking along the muddy foot-path. His contentment took a more personal turn, leapt to a high pitch. That Walter should see him driving in the doctor's rubber-tyred buggy was gratifying in the extreme. From the tail of his eye he tried to detect Walter's envy. Then they reached the big bare house, and it was time to thank Dr. Wilcove and say good-bye. Aunt Verona had rehearsed him in this final speech, and according to instructions he added, "Won't you come in, Dr. Wilcove, and have a cup of tea with us?" The doctor declined, patted him on the back in a way which made Paul suddenly wish he had a father, and drove off.
Paul lingered at the gate. He was still suffused in his sense of contentment, and his heart was beating strangely. He felt sure that Walter was walking faster now than when they had passed him. In a few seconds Walter would reach the gate. Paul pushed it, but as usual it stuck. The rusty hinges were as neglected as the garden. He gave a harder shove and dropped his bag of marbles. If he had been in a hurry he could have picked them up before Walter arrived. As it was, the shooter remained on the ground. Walter handed it to him with a curious, cajoling light in his brown eyes. The sun, shining on his eyes, gave them a resemblance to the shooter he was holding.
"Is it an agate?" he ventured, as Paul put it into the bag with the others.
Paul nodded.
"Get it in Bridgetown?"
"Yes," said Paul, and his sense of history in the making almost made him choke over the word—the first he had addressed to Walter in six months.
"Got any more?" Walter went on, swinging a jug which he was carrying to Mrs. Barker's for yeast.
"Only glassies," Paul replied.
"Let me see 'em?"
Walter praised the selection, and tried the green top, but the ground was too muddy for a successful spin. He also ate a piece of candy, and smiled again. Paul was in the grip of emotions which made speech precarious.
"I'll play you allies after supper," Walter proposed. "For lends—not keeps."
"Got to practise. Been away all day."
"To-morrow, then."
"To-morrow's Sunday."
"We can play after Sunday-school, behind the schoolhouse. Nobody'll see."
Paul agreed and turned toward the house. Walter called him back.
"I'm sorry I chucked that snowball," he said. His eyes and his smile were evidence that it cost him little to apologize.
Paul stiffened. "What snowball?" he inquired. He knew the dissembling was lost on Walter, but he also knew that Walter would handle his pride with tact. Walter's tact in the old days had been one of the virtues that had made their relation possible.
"That day I was playing with John," he explained.
"What difference does it make to me how much you play with John?"
"He's awful stupid," Walter pursued. "I like you best."
"Then what did you put red ink on my sandwiches for?" Paul cried, with a hint of pent-up anguish, whereupon Walter again smiled his penitence.
"See you to-morrow, eh?"
Again Paul nodded and hurried down the unkempt path toward the house. Gee-rusalem!
There was much to tell Aunt Verona about Bridgetown and the little mare, and supper in the kitchen was a heart-warming meal. Aunt Verona listened kindly and was pleased with the pen-wiper. But she was dismayed when he put down his knife and fork in the middle of supper and broke into uncontrollable sobs. He tried to explain, but failed. Then Aunt Verona's hands jerked, her face went white, and she made a remark which, by intriguing him, restored his self-control. "Happiness is such a rare visitor," she said, "that when it comes it finds us unprepared, It's good to be able to weep."