The Whirlpool

by Jane Urquhart

  At six a.m., after playing the hymn “Unto the Hills” for the ninth time, Maud abruptly left the piano, washed her face, ran a comb hastily through her hair, and descended the staircase that led to the world. Soon she was at Sam the embalmer’s door, offering him a substantial raise in pay and a position as manager of the business. From there she went to the housekeeper’s, to Jas the carpenter, and to the home of the man her father-in-law had hired to help in the garden and in the stables. Her conversations with these individuals were terse, perfunctory. Everyone was dead, she said, except for her and the child. She intended to survive, and it was her wish that the business should continue as usual. If they did not want to retain their positions they should tell her now so that she could replace them. If, however, they wished to stay on they should report for work in exactly one hour.

  The house looked entirely different to her when she returned, as if the colours of the upholstered furniture had deepened, as if the patterns in the wallpaper had become more pronounced during her short absence. When she entered the child’s room, vivid colour lithographs of harmless lambs and ponies seemed to leap at her from the walls in a menacing fashion. The child’s own little face among the bedclothes was so startlingly beautiful, so vehemently alive, even in sleep, that, for a minute or so, Maud was afraid to waken him. By seven-thirty, however, she had him dressed and in the kitchen. There she quickly located the utensils which, until that moment, had been touched only by the housekeeper. While the child attacked a plateful of toast and jam and swallowed mugfuls of milk, Maud fixed herself a cup of strong coffee.

  Half an hour later she was walking down the long, dark hall, past the three separate doors, into the brightness of the sunroom. She situated herself at Charles’ desk in front of the open ledger. She flipped up the silver lid of his inkwell and lifted his pen in her hand.

  When at the end of the morning she heard the men climb the stairs with their canvas stretchers, she leaned back exhausted in her husband’s chair and surveyed her labours. She was amazed to see that she had brought the account book almost entirely up to date.

  Today, exactly two years after the fatal date, was her first of half-mourning. Maud was able, therefore, to dress herself in a black and white cotton stripe, with long sleeves and a high neck, not neglecting, of course, the special brooch. She sat now in the sunroom, surrounded by the pungent aroma of the tartar and oxalic acid, which she had been scrubbing into her skin for most of the morning. The results had not been entirely satisfactory but she had succeeded, at last, in turning her upper torso from mottled black to spotty grey. Short of removing two layers of skin, she knew she would have to stop there for the time being.

  She leaned back in the chair and felt the uncorseted part of her back respond to the cool cotton. Her greatest joy would come in the afternoon when, veilless, she would venture into the streets to do a few errands. For the past two years she had looked at the world beyond her walls through the permanent cloud of her black veil, occasionally latticed, when the wind blew them to the front, by the black ribbons, or weepers, from her oppressive bonnet. Not that she had gone far. Crape was not made for strolling about in. It clung to her black-stockinged thighs (her petticoat was made of the same fabric), while the weepers stuck to the material around her shoulders, making it impossible for her to move her head. This, combined with the partial blindness caused by the veil, had led her, more than once, into the path of an oncoming streetcar or carriage. Had it not been for her acute sense of hearing she might have joined her husband in Drummond Hill Cemetery months ago.

  Just as she had done for the past two years, she was spending the morning working on accounts. But now she held the pen as easily as a teaspoon in her hand, and the scratch, scratch of the nib was as familiar as the sound of her own breathing. The dreams had subsided; Charles visiting her bedroom, now, only once or twice a month. It was as though he was forgetting her, she thought, rather irrationally, for, in truth, she was forgetting him. Not their time together but his physical actuality. She could no longer bring his face clearly into her mind. As time went by, in fact, Maud found it more and more difficult to believe that she had ever been married at all, more and more difficult to believe that the pen she held in her hand had not always been her own.

  Disaster had not disappeared, but it had diminished in size, had become, in a sense, manageable; no larger than the words one might use to describe it.

  Once she had settled herself in the streetcar, Fleda knew it would only be fifteen minutes or so until she was there. In her basket she had the makings of high tea; muffins, blueberry jam, sweet fresh butter, some mild cheese and the tea itself – a good Ceylonese blend. Under her arm, near her heart, she cradled a copy of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning, and Patmore’s Angel in the House. She had brought the books along in order to read them in a suitable setting; a setting that she hoped was about to cause the spiritual marriage of romance and domesticity in her life.

  The wheels of the trolley clattered under the boards at her feet. The vehicle had been scrubbed and polished, as if to celebrate the advent of the blossom season, and light bounced from brass fittings, glowed in the warmth of the wood at the top of the seats, and shone through the windows from which the glass had been removed. It was possible, in this slow-moving car, to lean out from open rectangles in order to pick blossoms from the trees that bordered the route. But Fleda’s mind was in another location and she hardly noticed the lilacs, the cherry blossoms. An offensive man at the front of the car had twisted his thick torso at the waist so that he might eye her unashamedly while he breathed lungfuls of cigar smoke into the open air of the car. To her left, a very young couple was giggling over a photograph of themselves in front of a very bad reproduction of the waterfall. The beginning of the massive summer invasion. Fleda’s thoughts turned to the whirlpool and an acre of land that rose from it. She was, at this moment, a woman on a streetcar with a whirlpool on her mind.

  She was often, mentally, one or two steps ahead of her activities, her location. In the dark rooms that she had left behind in town she had anticipated the journey on the streetcar. Now, seated in the vehicle, she anticipated the arrival at her destination. After arrival, and a few brief moments of appreciation, anticipation would move swiftly into reflection. She kept a diary, and this, combined with her compulsive reading, had proved to be the perfect device for distancing synchronized response.

  She checked her basket for this volume now, terrified for the moment that it might have been left behind. It was there, however, wedged between the muffins and the cheese. Relaxing, she turned at last to the window. The car had passed the city limits and was moving steadily down River Road into a rougher geography. If you avoided looking at the factories on the American side, you could almost believe you were in the wilderness. The tough old rocks of the escarpment were in evidence everywhere, varying in size from the jagged edges along the road to the cliffs that dropped down to the river. They poked, at times, through small patches of sumac or reared unexpectedly from clumps of long grass. The hill country of England, as Fleda imagined it, or gentle undulations of the Tuscan countryside, had nothing to do with this, nothing to do with this river side of the road. If she turned and looked through the windows on the opposite side of the car, however, she would see nothing but acres of rigidly planned, severely trimmed orchards. It was a geography of fierce opposites. Order on one side and, nearer the water, sublime geological chaos.

  A cloud of cigar smoke passed between Fleda and the scenery and escaped from the open window. She stood, pulled the wire for the bell, and walked towards the door, feeling, as she adjusted her body to the rocking of the car, the man’s gaze at the back of her neck burning its way down her spine.

  When the vehicle came to a halt Fleda stepped lightly to the ground and began, at once, to enter the woods in front of her. While she walked, she admired the carpet of trilliums that stretched out around her in all directions. The slow, quiet sound of t
he whirlpool began to reach her through the uniformly grey trunks of poplar and maple and ash which stood between her and the river. She dropped her belongings near the remains of an old dead fire, a relic of the previous summer’s final event, and moved to the spot where the land began to tilt sharply downwards, a drop of three hundred feet. And even though the June foliage had thickened in earnest, she could see it clearly: the giant whirlpool – a cumbersome, magnificent merry-go-round on which a few large logs were seemingly permanent passengers. The awkward, ceaseless motion of going nowhere, the peace of it seen from above. Fleda stared down at the water for a good ten minutes then, shaking her head as if to throw off a trance, she returned to the place where she had left her basket. She placed her notebook and pencil on top of the three books she had brought with her and began, methodically, to gather twigs to make a fire for the tea.

  Soon she had constructed a small, lopsided, teepee-like structure out of the delicate dead branches which were to be found everywhere on the ground around her. Then, after pausing for a moment, she rearranged them into a square formation, into what her husband called the log cabin method of building a fire. A tiny house, a doll’s house; one that she would shortly have the pleasure of burning to the ground. She added some birch bark for a roof and, after a few frantic moments, when she believed she had forgotten her matches, she lit her miniature home. Her kettle hung from a pole suspended between two sticks which were planted in the ground and had survived the winter wonderfully well, buried, as they must have been, in the deep snow. She filled the kettle with rain water which had collected in a barrel situated several yards to her right, returned it to the pole overtop the flaming cabin, and began to search for the teapot. A few wooden crates were arranged neatly near the spot where she stood and under the third she uncovered four spoons, a small frying pan, and an earthenware pot. The other two boxes protected plates, cups, saucers, knives, forks, a spatula and a flower vase, all clean and ready for use, just as she had left them in September. Satisfied that her equipment was intact, she settled herself into a chair that had been hewn from a large stump, and waited for her kettle to boil.

  While she waited she thought, with great pleasure, of the books she had brought with her; especially of the Browning, which she already knew well enough to look forward to. The Patmore, a small white volume with an embossed gold title, David had given to her that morning in their rooms, knowing she would want something to read while she waited for him, and feeling the subject suitable to the season when the house would be built. Fleda reached for this now and, flipping past the title page, turned to a reproduction of a portrait of the poet’s wife by Rossetti. The Angel that had inhabited the House did not fare well under the harsh lines of the steel engraving, and Fleda secretly felt she looked more like a siren than an angel. She had constructed her own private, imaginary version of the woman’s appearance and decided to hold to that now, despite this other, more ordinary evidence.

  Fleda was deeply interested in this book, interested in the poet’s perception of the perfect wife, his belief in matrimony as the heavenly ideal. Like a voyeur at the threshold of a fascinating window, her veins tingled with expectancy. By the time the tea was satisfactorily made, however, her mood had abruptly changed. A robin had settled briefly at her feet and then, surprised at what he found there, had quickly taken his leave. Intermittent clouds had begun to mask the sun and a breeze had turned the leaves of the poplars back, changing them from green to silver. Fleda walked a second time to the bank and looked down, through the network of branches, to the whirlpool. She could see a pillar of smoke ascending from the beach far below. Boys, who should be in school, fishing probably, cooking their catch. For a moment or two she thought of descending the bank, but remembered the previous weeks of rain, the mud on the path, and the fact that her yellow skirt and white boots were relatively new.

  She returned to the fire, which was blazing nicely, and reached for her notebook and pencil. Turning to a fresh page she smoothed the spine of the book with her palm and wrote the date: 7 June 1889. She looked around her solemnly for a few moments, then she began to write.

  In my twenty-seventh year and in good health I return to the Heights for the first time this year, and I begin again my summer diary.

  D. has given me another book to read just this morning – Angel in the House by Patmore. A tribute to the poet’s wife and her domestic demeanour. Just the ticket, D. says, since he thinks I am dangerously infatuated with the strange passions of Mr. Browning. Which, I suppose, I am.

  By the end of the summer D. has promised (once again) that I shall have my own house here. The Patmore, I believe, was given to me as a sort of guarantee. I know, however, that he prefers the rooms in Kick’s Hotel, since they are just across the street from the most cherished of his battlefields – Lundy’s Lane. We’ll see. I have already planned the views from each of the windows. The most wonderful collection of young birches, for instance, will lie just ten feet or so from the library windows.

  This will be large enough to let me read on winter days without the aid of artificial light. We will not, of course, be able to see the whirlpool anywhere, at any time from the house, but we shall always feel its influence, and, depending on the wind and the season, we shall be able at times to hear its cosmic music. D. does not believe that even when I am unable to hear the whirlpool because of wind and rain, I can still feel its music in the atmosphere. He claims that I have become deranged by reading too much of Mr. Browning and quotes some nonsense about angels beating their wings at the edge of the whirlpool in vain. I sincerely hope that D.․s ability as an historian is of a higher quality than his ability as a critic. It is Shelley’s beating wings he is thinking of, not Browning’s.

  I note that Cedar Grove is unchanged, as dark and mysterious as ever. I regret now that I did not come to see it in the winter when the contrast of its branches against the white snow would have made a picture indeed. I feel sometimes that my own special group of cedars is trying desperately to become cosmopolitan, to resemble their Italian cousin, the Cyprus, and it makes me glad since I believe it to be unlikely that I should ever be fortunate enough to travel to that enchanted land. Perhaps I should speak to the Scotch pines about umbrella pines in hopes they might take the suggestion. The Haunted Poplars, on the other hand, look strange with their new leaves just beginning. They seem much less haunted at this stage and do not produce, yet, the curious sound of a long dead court lady’s skirts moving across a parquet floor.

  I write this on my lap as I can see that the little desk which D. constructed for me at the edge of the bank on Lookout Point has toppled some time during the winter, probably under the weight of snow. But such a spot it is! If I lean to the left when I am sitting there I can see a good portion of the whirlpool through the trees, even when they are in full leaf. It is wonderful to sit there and read Browning… feeling as close to him as if he were a friend about to drop in for tea.

  The winter was worse than usual. D. spent endless hours worrying about his research concerning the Siege of Fort Erie, so didn’t mind the weather. I, on the other hand, unwilling to drink whiskey on the ice bridge with the tourists, spent my days trapped in that stuffy hotel, dreaming of the Heights and worrying about the birds here who were, no doubt, quite happy. Once or twice I took the streetcar to Queenston and realized, as I passed by, that this spot will be miraculously beautiful in winter… once I have my house.

  “Shall I sonnet-sing you about myself?

  Do I live in a house you would like to see?

  Is it scant of gear, has it store or pelf?

  Unlock my heart with a sonnet key”

  R.B. House

  In any case, I can almost count myself an ex-prisoner of the hotel. D. has decided that this season we shall live here most of the time in a tent which he will borrow from the Camp at Niagara. It will be quite large since normally it houses ten soldiers and it will have a wooden floor. He intends to put it up this afternoon with the help of some of h
is men. Even if I do feel somewhat like a gypsy it will be better than suffering through another summer in town. It will not be habitable for a few days. D. intends to install a small stove with piping to help us through the chilly evenings. We will cook, of course, outside.

  At this point, hearing horses, Fleda stopped writing. Her husband appeared at the end of the path that led to the road, mounted on a handsome stallion and looking proud and slightly pugnacious in his military attire. His face, however, carried an expression of warmth and tenderness, the object of which was his horse to whom he was speaking quietly. Behind him two of his men drove a wagon which carried a large canvas bundle and some lumber.

  Fleda flung her notebook down to the ground and ran through the woods to greet them. She hadn’t noticed that, while she was writing, her kettle had once again boiled, steamed ferociously, and cooled. The little house underneath it was now nothing more than a pile of ash.

  That’s the way it was with Patrick. His response to stimuli was so finely tuned that even a change in geography might disorient him. The act of walking in the woods was made of a texture so different from the act of walking in the orchards that he knew some minutes would have to pass before he could relax enough to observe the birds he had come there to see, to collect wildflowers for his album.

  He had walked out of the bright blaze of the orchard, across the road and the streetcar tracks, into the dark, cool forest. He was alone. His mind was adjusting to the change of light in the same way that the retinae of his eyes adjusted. Lenses opening in shadow.

  Eventually he began to use the fieldglasses again as he had in the orchards, to follow the flights of birds. Moving the circular image across the trees in pursuit of a thrush, his vision brushed against a woman’s face and it took several moments for him to accept what he had seen. He simply could not believe that she was real, could not, at first, cope with the fact of her being there. He refocused the instrument and moved it carefully back to the spot where her pale face had flickered. But by then she had disappeared. Finally, he spotted a portion of her blue dress, barely visible through the trees, and another piece of fabric of a tartan-like nature.