“Yes, you feel you could sail on it. You feel you could trap it in your hand.” He took one hand away from her and snapped his fingers closed. “Though you’d have no need, young woman, you’ve trapped it in your hair. How do you like being a mist blonde, Miss Staples? You’re so fair now Ginny would have her nose out of joint.”
“Incidentally,” asked Terese, getting beside the driver’s seat again, “how did you come down?”
“Walked.”
“But how did you know?”
“Jill phoned. Oh, it was my private number, if that worries you, no one else in Backdown will know. She was concerned—and that reminds me, in her present state, before we go up, perhaps we’d better put her mind at rest.”
He started the engine and the van began moving once again. “If the cabin is in darkness, we’ll just go on,” Arn said as he went slowly in the Wilsons’ direction, though how he found his way Terese could not think. “If they’ve left on a lamp I’ll give a soft blast of the siren to let them know that everything’s all right.”
“And what if the place is a blaze of lights?” asked Terese, as the van inched around a bend, and even through the swirling mist they could see the Wilson cabin fully lit.
“That can only mean one thing,” answered Arn Dawson. “So she’s beaten me after all, that young woman!”
“The baby!” breathed Terese. She was out of the truck almost before it stopped.
With all her quick getaway, though, he was at the cabin before her, he was even coming out of the door to return to the truck again before she could climb the steep steps.
“Is it...”
“Yes, it’s on its way. I’ll run down to the camp to send a message for Pete to bring a doctor across at first light, and then I’ll go up and get Ginny.”
“Ginny—” she echoed.
For a moment he looked down at her, and Terese felt there was a small, faintly contemptuous pity in the kindly glance he gave her. “Ginny is farm material,” he smiled. That was all he said, but as clear as if he had spoken it came two more words: “You’re not.” He asked, “Are you coming with me?”
“Of course not, I can be of help here.”
“Please yourself,” he shrugged, “perhaps Ted would like a woman around, if just for company.” He wheeled away and ran down to the truck.
“Take care!” she called impulsively, for the mist seemed to be wreathing in again.
Jill was quite cheerful. “Now I won’t be going into Glen Ingle,” she purred.
“You may be; the doctor may still send you.”
“By the time he gets in tomorrow, which will be the very earliest and you know it, my child will be a night and a morning old. Oh, I knew you’d be helping me, Terese.”
“You know too much,” scolded Terese. “When I said what I did about women in Drayhill I certainly didn’t mean...”
Jill gave a grunt, and Terese stopped scolding.
She sat on the bed beside the girl, Ted running in every now and then with hot water. She felt like telling him that even twins would not require that much hot water, but at least it gave him something to do. When the room was becoming cluttered, she suggested tactfully that instead he keep a kettle on the boil, and grateful for a direction, he ran out.
“Poor dope,” smiled Jill. She looked at Terese. “I’ll help as much as I can, and I’m feeling fine. What about you?”
“I could do with more knowledge, Jill. I only know the elementary things like umbilical cords and inclining the baby back if he doesn’t cry and wrapping him up and all that. The usual run-of-the-mill things.”
“I’ll be very run-of-the mill,” Jill promised.
They talked for a while, Jill still bright and only grunting now and then.
There was the sound of the truck once more, and presently Ginny entered the room. She looked very uneasy and said that Arn had gone down to the camp to radio a hurry-up to the doctor.
“He’s wasting his time,” said Jill equably. She added, as she had of her husband, “Poor dope.”
But it was not only the men who won her pity. Ginny did, too. Soon afterward she gave a sharper grunt, then said, “Please, Ginny, will you make some tea?” She gave Terese a rather wobbly smile as Ginny went thankfully out.
“Now,” she said, “we can get down to business, you and I.” Which was what they did.
It was not as run-of-the-mill as Terese had hoped, though, but thank heaven in a small, intimate village like Drayhill she had emerged not entirely ignorant of such things. The baby was born in membranes and the caul had to be torn apart to allow the child to breathe. Yet even when the baby was tilted and slapped, no sound came from its lips and Terese frantically began artificial respiration.
Kneeling with the little thing in her arms, Terese blew gently and rhythmically. Then she heard a little movement, a whisper of a breath, and she knew it would be all right.
“Only next time,” were her first exhausted words to the new mother, “Glen Ingle for you.”
“Yes,” agreed Jill, not so confident as before.
Ginny came in and helped with the washing and fixing; she still looked very uneasy.
Ted burst in and said, “Let me see my daughter.”
“It’s a son.”
“Not another lumberjack!”
“What’s wrong with lumberjacks?” asked Jill weakly but loyally.
“Nothing, if you say so, darling," Ted beamed.
“It’ll be a girl next time,” Jill promised.
“At Glen Ingle,” Terese was careful to add.
Soon afterward Arn Dawson returned, and it was arranged that Ginny stop on at the cabin and Terese go with him back to Pickpocket in the van.
“Thank heaven for Ginny,” Arn said as the truck mounted to the plateau. “What would we have done without our land girl tonight?”
Terese did not reply.
When he put her off at the farm she nodded rather bleakly, then ran inside. Joe was up and wanting to know all about things.
“Left Ginny down there,” he expostulated when Terese told him, “but it looks like Plush is starting, too. Oh, well”—shrewdly—“I doubt if she’d be as good as she thinks she is.” He picked up one of Terese’s library volumes, the one Ginny had been studying, “Or should it be hopes she is?” he grinned.
Terese did not wait to discuss that, she went wearily off to bed, only hoping that she had done with births for the night.
She had—for the night, but Plush’s time came in the morning, and Ginny, back again now, a nurse established in the cabin, the doctor satisfied all was well and duly returned to Glen Ingle, was not just nervous, she was a very frightened girl.
“Terese, will you help me?”
“When I offered help before you said...”
“Yes, I know. Can I un-say it now?” Ginny’s teeth were actually chattering.
Terese had felt a little piqued last night. It had not been easy for her, and when Arn had said what he had it had been all she could do not to turn and tell him the truth. But now, looking at Ginny, she knew she could not let her down. Or Plush. For by the time the pair of them reached the barn it was the cow, not Ginny, Terese was thinking of. Plush was unmistakably very near.
Terese squatted down beside the cow.
“It’ll be all right,” she called comfortingly to Ginny, “it’s just that she’s a small cow and going to have a large calf, poor dear.” But she spoke to thin air. Ginny had fled.
The little feet were protruding now, and manipulating and soothing at the same time, Terese said, “Co-operate, Plush, and get this baby over, there’s a good girl. And mind you, none of those un-run-of-the-mill things like I got last night. After all, there’s a limit...”
“Though I haven’t seen yours yet,” said a quiet voice beside her, and Arn Dawson squatted down as well.
“Ginny just told me,” he said briefly as he took over from Terese. “I should read a paean of praise, or at least apologize for taking your part in last night’s a
ctivities for granted as I did ... Ted would like a woman around if just for company was what I said, I believe ... but in place of that paean of praise how’s this for a reward?”
Then Terese saw the calf on the ground, a little thing with pansy eyes and an astonished expression. Plush was breathing very deeply and taking little notice, then at last she saw the small bundle that was shaking its head and flopping its wet ears, and she was mooing and licking her calf’s face.
“It’s all I’d ask,” breathed Terese, as proud herself, “except that it’s Plush’s reward.”
“Then this,” said Arn Dawson spontaneously, and he kissed her, and it was just not a kiss of elation and a thing well done, it was deep and reaching and very warm.
“Remember that bone I couldn’t take from a dog,” he said a little huskily.
“Me?” she interpreted simply.
“The bone stops.” He added, “Terese.”
“Thank you.” She paused, then added, “Arn.”
Plush was still licking her calf’s face, taking no notice at all.
CHAPTER SIX
It was a happy week for Terese. Her sense of deep satisfaction over Jill, over Plush, over her acceptance at last by Arn was not marred, as she rather had feared, by Ginny. Instead, Virginia had turned a bright face to her and said, “You’ve made your point, Terese, you win, note the gracefulness with which I bow out.”
“From where, Ginny?”
“From Homeward Bound, of course. After Plush’s episode I don’t think Arn would want me, anyhow. Terese, he’s all yours.”
“Don’t be absurd!” Terese had said a little sharply. She had never pried about Arn’s wife, whether Arn was actually free, or waiting for freedom, but even if the way was clear, as Ginny implied, there was somebody that Ginny knew nothing about and she did, a girl who had sheltered tenderly in Arn Dawson’s arms. Anyway, the whole thing, as she had remonstrated with Ginny, was quite silly, she meant nothing save an employee who had pleased him to Arn Dawson, while he meant...
Terese had not finished those thoughts; for some reason she had found that she was unable to sort them out.
“So now,” Ginny had shrugged, “I go back to selling myself to Joe again. Mercenary piece, aren’t I?”
“You like to think you are,” Terese smiled.
Down in the camp a kentucky had been taken up for the first Backdown baby in years, and Terese had been chosen to cross to Glen Ingle to select the gift.
Because nobody else was flying over she sat beside Pete. Once again the deep vast valleys pushing skyward, the jutting pinnacles straining up had caught at her heart with their sheer beauty, and only when they were approaching Glen Ingle with its homesteads giving way to cottages and its lanes giving way to streets did she speak.
“It’s so glorious,” she murmured.
When he did not answer, she asked, “Don’t you find it so, or does familiarity dull the scene?”
“It’s not dullness down there I’d worry about, it’s up here. I’m stagnating, Terese. I’m getting nowhere. ‘Who with a little cannot be content... ’ ”
“ ‘Deserves an everlasting punishment,’ ” finished Terese for Pete. “You mean...”
“I mean this job is too little; I’m not content.”
“And the punishment?”
“Well, looking at me would you say I was a rewarded man? No, I’ve started my everlasting punishment.”
“Pete, so gloomy!”
“I should get out, Terese, give Ginny away ... you knew it was Ginny, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“But I can’t. At least, I haven’t got to it yet. But I will one day.” His lip pushed out.
“Pete...” she began tentatively, but he was absorbed now in putting the Cessna down on the strip.
“Two hours,” he allotted. “By the time I return you, then get back myself, my safety margin will be narrowing.”
It was pleasant to go into shops again, take tea in a smart arcade nook. Glen Ingle was a modern town, and the problem was not what to buy for the baby but what, reluctantly, not to buy. She came to a decision at last, something charming and quite unnecessary, for she was wise enough to know that when you live with necessary things you do not hanker after the useful.
She bought a present for Jill as well, something from herself for Ginny, then strolled along the pleasant New England street to where she was to meet Pete and return again to the strip.
She glanced at the store windows as she walked along and stopped for a moment to admire a particularly clever window display.
One moment Terese was looking amusedly at a windowed family evidently arguing whether they would go up town, or down, but the next moment her amusement vanished.
In the glass, reflected as clearly as he had been that day he had walked into the library in London and made her heart sing, was Jeff.
Still standing there with her back to the street, and to the opposite side, Terese said silently, “It couldn’t be Jeff, he’s in Canada, at the very least he couldn’t be here. Sydney, yes, but not a remote town in northern New South Wales. It’s like him ... the same height, coloring, stance. But it’s not Jeff.”
“Ready, Terese?” It was Pete again, the door of the borrowed airfield car open in readiness. She fairly leaped across, and Pete grinned, “Backdown’s got you that much, has it? Can’t get back quick enough!”
She murmured something and pretended absorption in her handbag. But from the corner of her eye she watched that figure on the opposite side, not even looking in her direction, thank heaven, and—yes, it was Jeff.
“I suppose—I suppose Glen Ingle gets travelers,” she said presently to the pilot.
“You mean people traveling through?”
“No—agents selling things.” That would be Jeff, she thought, some kind of salesman.
“Oh, yes, it’s a prosperous center, the town’s always filled.”
“But none of them would come to Backdown?”
“No. Backdown goes to them. Didn’t you have to fly over for a rattle.”
“Yes, but it’s not a rattle, it’s a...”
“Clouds coming up, we’ll have to step on it,” Pete observed, and he did.
All the way back to the plateau, Terese thought of Jeff, not wistfully, nor even indignantly, but with humiliation—and unease. But why be uneasy? He would never come here.
She succeeded in forgetting the incident in the fun of laying the present in the baby’s soft little arms, in enjoying Jill’s enjoyment. When Arn Dawson asked her to come grubbing down the creek after her last library call the next afternoon that reflection in a shop window was a long, unimportant way back in her mind. “It’s a day for sapphires,” Arn told her.
“Are there special days?”
“Clear days would naturally highlight them better. No, I suppose there’s no special day, but seeing I’m free and it’s the one thing so far you haven’t seen...”
I haven’t seen Flack’s camp. She wondered why that thought came to her mind. She did not utter it, of course.
It had rained in the morning, but now the sun was shining and the air crystal clear. A sapphire day.
“Don’t have illusions about this being easy,” Arn told her when they had left the Land-Rover and begun pushing through the bush to the creek. “It’s not just a matter of walking around and picking up stones ... though that can happen, as Joe and my father proved ... it’s more a case of a lot of tracking down.”
From an overhanging bush by the creek he took a pan. “I leave it here to save carrying it down each time. All the grubbers do.”
“Ginny says it’s a weekend pastime.”
“Yes, you want to watch one Sunday, all the lumber boys trying to grub rhodinite or blue agate or carnelian to send to their girls.”
“Not sapphires?”
“You hope for those,” he grinned.
He showed her how to sift a pan of dirt, standing up to the knees in water, tipping it out and raking over the re
mains. Terese found a few pretty worthless chips that Arn said could be polished and used as shoulders of rings.
They stopped when their backs were aching, and as she sank down on a rock Terese cried out at what Arn smilingly admitted was only a grass stone, pretty as a trinket, perhaps, and only found in Australia and Chile, but of no commercial value.
“It’s really rutilated quartz, but grass stone is easier.”
“It’s beautiful!” Terese was delighted with her delicate find.
“If you like I’ll have it polished and set for you in Sydney, I’m going down tomorrow.”
“Would it cost much?”
He did not answer at once.
“Look,” he said presently, “you did a grand job the other night, it was good for Backdown to have that happen, even if I would see to it that I got the next mother-to-be out quick smart. It was still fine, Terese, and I appreciated what you did. Now let this setting be my reward.”
“But you rewarded me,” she reminded him. “One floppy little calf.”
He reminded her in his turn, “Which you pointed out was Plush’s reward.”
“But then you...” She stopped short, feeling, to her annoyance, her cheeks going crimson.
“Yes.” That was all he said.
A silence fell between them. In it the creek’s soft murmur seemed to grow to a noisy chatter. Terese had the feeling that if she wanted to speak above it she would have to cry out loud. Arn must have felt that, too, for he seemed to be getting ready to say something, she saw him wet his lips. But he didn’t say it, and she supposed she must have only thought there were words there.
Presently they got up as if by agreement and climbed back through the bush to the Land-Rover.
“How long will you be away?” she asked casually.
He shrugged. “Say a week.” As the Land-Rover labored up the mountain he said lightly, “Don’t go getting into any mischief, Terese.”
“Such as?”
“Adding more population, or grubbing a sapphire, or... ” He negotiated a hairpin bend and the final caution was lost.
He might have warned, Terese thought uneasily several days later, “Or calling on Flack.”
The Man From the Valley Page 9
