The trouble in Thor

by Armstrong Charlotte

  He seemed to be a shy boy. He did not put himself forward in the group to be their leader or anyone of special importance. But just the same, the rowdies, the rough young egos, the bursting pushing young men deferred to this one. In a half-furtive way they watched his reaction. They did not court his attention quite openly. They almost—but not

  quite—showed off before him; not because he was clever or strong or admirable in their eyes, but because in some mysterious way he simply charmed them.

  His name was Wesley Trezona and now, silent in the shuffling group, he turned his head and looked at Cyril Varker.

  And Cyril Varker, silent in his corner of the post office, sent an eye-beam back. It was private, secret, and threatening. It went over other heads to its mark, to warn and remind. In Cyril's concave breast rose a sweet rage of power, his own, his personal power. He felt, crackling in his head like kindling catching fire, the impulse to smash. So his glance was cold, vicious, unmerciful. It took effect in a convulsion of the young man's throat and a rapid shift of his eyes.

  Cyril was pleased. It pleased him very much to have frightened Wesley Trezona.

  Mrs. Dr. Hodge came in holding, as usual, her head so high that she could not possibly have seen past her jutting bosom to where her feet were falling. She gave Cyril a medium-grade nod and sailed up to Mrs. Gilchrist. The ladies fell to conversing in genteel voices punctuated with the high hooting that was not really laughter at all. It was the same sound that used to rise out of a ladies' club afternoon and paralyze whatever male was the husband of that Wednesday's hostess, who had to come home to supper to find his house swarming with furs and feathers and all the best china salad-smeared, who must suffer himself to be hooted at by each departing lady and then eat in lonesome heartiness beside an exhausted wife who picked at her food, pale with her memories.

  No, the sound was not laughter. 1 here was no mirth in it. Cyril, listening, decided that it must be a social signal of some kind, and what it signaled he struggled to define in his mind. He noted that the shufflers in the corner were pretending to just miss resisting the temptation to hoot, too. Pretending because they never would hoot where the ladies could hear them, even though, were they to do so, the ladies would never admit to having heard them at all.

  lO

  Cyril's mouth twisted. In what weird mixture of contempt and respect did human beings hold each other? No two classes, mused Cyril, could be much farther apart in their total conception of what life is than these young rowdies and those matrons.

  The boys in the corner became as quiet as mice.

  Cyril gnawed his lip. His sister, Madeline, had come into the post office.

  Her hand sent him a little flip of recognition and he blinked his pale eyes. Cyril hid his sigh. He watched her walk to the zone proper for her. He noted the quality of the nod she drew from Mrs. Dr. Hodge . . . gracious, condescending . . , from Mrs. Gilchrist . . . aloof and slyly interested. He noted the quality of the greeting she drew from the other women and girls—quick smiles put on and snatched off the faces.

  He watched his sister Madeline compose herself to wait meekly, dressed in a decent dark dress, not running over for the mail in a house-dress as some had, but hatless, and ungloved—as Mrs. Hodge and Mrs. Gilchrist were not.

  He thought bitterly, she'll never make it. Never.

  It was not because her husband, Arthur Cole, worked underground. Arthur was an uncertain quantity. Anything could become of him. He was not Catholic, not foreign-born, and he had some education, and he was restless. He had a drive. Arthur might one day acquire rank or even become eligible without it. But Madeline never.

  And yet she was educated and quite well, too. Cyril had seen to that himself. And she had been a schoolteacher, which in those days was a respected profession and conferred prestige. Nor was her beauty the flaw, for Marianne Gilchrist herself was a handsome woman, dark-haired, blue-eyed, with a narrow oval face, good nose, fine figure, and she ranked.

  But Madeline's figure, cun'ed and compact, poised beautifully on her beautiful legs, was designed for one thing only. The whole post office knew it. Madeline's pretty fragrant torso was made to fit in a man's arms. And had. And would, if it could.

  The males in their corner knew this. Mrs. Gilchrist knew this. Mrs. Dr. Hodge knew this.

  I know it, thought Cyril. He used to tease his httle sister, saying he got the best of the brains and she the best of the bodies out of the mating of their two parents. Yet Madehne wasn't stupid. Her eyes were particularly fine, large and gray, set well in the creamy skin of her lovely face. Madeline was —CvTil ground his teeth—not stupid, but a little fool, just the same.

  He didn't love her, not he. But she was his charge, for their parents were long dead, and he was annoyed with her, as usual, and for her, too. It annoyed him now to see the ladies' backs edge around.

  He thought angrily, she has personal power and her kind they can't abide. They are afraid of her so they won't let her in. Let her stand as meek as she may, she'll never make it. And all the while his knowledge persisted; she was not meek; she no more sought a meek place in the pattern than he did.

  The males in the corner began to mill and move again, and their eyes moved, but not far away from Madeline Cole. It was twenty minutes of twelve. Some difference in the bustle behind the mailbox barrier made it plain to those waiting that the mail was nearly all sorted. Out of the quite considerable crowd that had accumulated, the women began to form a tentative line before the window.

  Outside, Henry Duncane drove his Stearns-Knight into the plaza, set the brakes, killed the engine, opened the door, and was out and up the post office steps, as if this was all one rhythmic motion. He was new in Thor—having been the Company's chief engineer for less than a year—and he was young. He came into the post office as he did ever}'thing else, decisively, with a verve. His solid footsteps rang on the floor. One gulp of the atmosphere told him that the mail was all sorted except the second class matter, and everyone in the post office knew at once that he did not intend to wait for that. He crossed the crowded room in a straight line, finding no one that he needed to dodge, for people melted out of his path. Mrs. Dr. Hodge smiled sunnily and Mrs. Gilchrist's neck took a swanlike arching. Madeline, too, altered the angle of her head.

  Henry Duncane said "Good morning," once for them all,

  in his uniquely clear voice. He said, "Varker," to Cyril, and Cyril responded, "Mr. Duncane."

  Henry's hand flipped open mailbox two-six-six, which he never bothered to lock, clearheadedly knowing that the combinations were not really secret, and never would be. He took out his letters and began to examine them, slipping each behind the rest rapidly.

  Mrs. Gilchrist stepped near him and put her gloves sweetly on his arm.

  "And how's dear Elizabeth today?" she said in a discreetly lowered voice.

  Duncane did not look up, but he answered, "Elizabeth's well, thank you." Such was the carrying quality of his voice that everyone else in the post office seemed to have been speaking all this while with mush in his mouth.

  Mrs. Gilchrist mumbled something, and Duncane in his turn said, "She would be glad to see you."

  Only now, having slipped the last letter to the bottom of his pile, he looked up and smiled at her.

  But this was all the smiling and all the chitchat there was going to be. He put his mail in his pocket, touched his hat, and turned and walked out, finding his way cleared as before, having accomplished what he came for with such neatness and dispatch that all tlie others seemed to be drifting dolts, shabbily at the mercy of outside forces, as if only Henry Duncane had control of the world he lived in.

  Now the window crashed open—for Mrs. Fielding put a certain amount of dramatic feeling into her work—and the line shuffled obediently into position. The ladies' gloved hands began to fiddle with combinations on their private boxes. Something touched Cyril's sleeve, and he turned to receive from pink Maude Fielding a beaming smile and his mail bag, kept by the timing of t
his event from observing what he wished to observe.

  He took the full bag and surrendered the empty.

  He walked out of the post office, dodging around the end of the line which did not shift quite quickly enough out of his path. Nevertheless he heard and resented, in his own footsteps, a mere echoing, a feebler and somewhat degrading imitation of Henry Duncane,

  CHAPTER TWO

  Elizabeth Meadows Duncane stood in the dining room, looking at her table as it was set for a noon dinner. It was all wrong. She thought: There's no use, there is no use.

  Her lower lip had developed, lately, a little nervous quiver not in her control. It quivered now. She put her hands on the back of a chair and rested her weight against them to relieve the aching of her back. She thought: What a hag I feel, what an old, old, old woman, aching and dragging, and now this silly twitching at the mouth. I must remember I am only twenty-four, and I'm healthy. I am healthy. All that ails me is the baby. It's natural. It is natural.

  These incantations did not help much. She wished it were safely over.

  Then she braced her back. "That will do, Libby," she said to herself in her mother's voice, and she looked again at the dining-room table through her mother's eyes.

  The white cloth was old and mended. It had been given to Libby as old linen to be put away and used for fine rags. How in the world had that girl dug it out? The silver was not Libby's wedding-present best, but a mixture of three patterns, which was all right for everyday, but it needn't have been thrown on sloppily with the forks pointing in and the knives out. The two napkins were not even alike and the flowers in the center bowl needed changing.

  Libby could imagine her mother's quick eyes noting all this, and her mother's quick hands transforming the table and the whole big room into something neat and cozy, orderly and charming, with the swift magic of her experience. For it wasn't a question of money—it wasn't because she

  H

  and Henry didn't have tilings. It was a question of skill, of an art, really.

  She began to straighten a fork and then she took her hand away. "Celestina," she called.

  Celestina answered from the kitchen. "Yeh?" She would not say "Yes, ma'am." She would not even say "Yes." The "s" was always lost and left off.

  "Will you come here, please." Libby's voice promised sharpness.

  Celestina came through the door with a big spoon in her hand. Her heavy black hair made an insubordinate mass of curls around her gypsy face. "I'm fixing gravy," she said defensively, her amber eyes dull. Libby already knew that when Celestina's eyes looked as if they were dusty and did not shine, Celestina was in no mood to listen to instruction.

  "Well, you'd better keep an eye on it, then," Libby was forced to say. "Don't . . ." But she didn't continue. No use. The gravy would be greasy and have white lumps in it.

  The worst of it was that Libby herself did not know how to avoid this. Celestina was a terrible cook, but Libby was not much of a cook either. The difference between us, thought Libby, is just that I at least.know what food ought to be. She tried to lift the weight of her discouragement by being fair. How could Celestina know, after all? Libby reminded herself. An ignorant little Italian girl only sixteen years old. You have to train them. Everybody says so. When mother comes, I'll make her teach me. Then I can teach Celestina when this is over, safely over.

  She held her lip steady with her teeth, put the table silver neatly parallel, and nipped out some of the shabbier blossoms from the centerpiece. She narrowed her eyes and, pumping hard with her imagination, she decided it would do. It would have to do.

  She went into the sitting room, but she did not sit down. Flenry would be home soon and it was difficult to struggle up again. So she leaned against the wall and pushed wearily at her fair hair. Very fair, very fine hair she had. Somebody had once called it white gold. A boy, a date, long ago, before Henry Duncane (who was not a boy, but an exciting man)

  had appeared and swept her off all breathless with her sudden bridehood, to this far place.

  Ah, but it was far! She came from Connecticut, from a long line of quiet people who had never aspired to be anything but simple and decent but who had, in the course of three hundred years, become perhaps less simple than they imagined. Libby was late-flowering. In some ways, at twenty-four, she was younger than young Celestina. And, in some ways, Celestina would never be as mature as Libby was already.

  For Libby had enough detachment to know that she was being harmfully sorry for herself, and she had insight into some of the causes. In those days a pregnant woman did not run around town in a cute pair of specially designed slacks and a gaudy smock. Libby had been secluded in the big house for months. This was only decent. She didn't question her imprisonment. But she did know it hadn't done her morale much good.

  Shouldn't have happened so soon, she was thinking. I should have had time to learn to be married to Henry and keeping a house. I should have had a longer chance to fit into this place, to meet all the people and settle myself. This queer little town ... I don't pertain to it or anyone in it but Henry. Alone. Who is there, now, I could go to for any real thing? There isn't a woman. There's the doctor. This backwoods doctor. Maybe he's ignorant, how can I know? Her mouth trembled.

  Come, Libby, stop it. Stop scaring yourself. Other women . . .

  The incantation did not help. Across her mind came that haunting phrase, the silly phrase that now obsessed her. She'd read it in some sentimental journal. "And so," it declaimed, "the woman went now for her child, down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death." Libby knew, with her perfectly good mind, that it was sententious and silly, a piece of purple writing, a fairly ridiculous way to say that women had been known to die in childbirth. All the same, her smoke-blue eyes grew round and bright. Her lip shook and she caught it in her fine teeth. She sent out of her brain a

  frantic call across a thousand miles. "Mother, please come. Oh, please come, mother."

  If you went west from the town hall of 'I'hor past the Methodist Church, and did not bear to your right up the long hill out of town, you could continue westward on a gentler slope for one long block. At the top of it you would come to a pair of iron gates and see through them the long sweep of a driveway edged by fine lavTis, and the portico of the superintendent's house, the biggest and finest house in Thor. Below it, all along this block to your left, were the next biggest and finest houses set in the next biggest plots of land that ran deep behind them. These houses would have been on the lake shore had it not been for the railroad tracks. As it was, since the tracks ran below a considerable embankment, the trains were heard but not seen, and the upper windows of the houses had, at least, glimpses of the shy water.

  The white clapboard of Duncane's house, which was the second one up in this elegant row, did not suggest New England, for the style was midwestern instead, box}', set a bit too high off the ground with a smattering of wooden scrollwork on the porches. It was a big house with big rooms. They were rather bare.

  Libby Duncane, teetering back from the edge of panic, shook off her fit of nerves. She heard Henry's car. She touched her hair.

  She thought, to be fair, that Henry was after all as much a bridegroom as she was a bride, and probably he had not looked forward to this exactly. He would not have expected that after nearly a whole year he would still come home to so bleak a dwelling. She hadn't got around to covering the dining-room chair seats in blue as she had planned. She hadn't been able to make the sitting-room draperies or accomplish the colors in here, the browns and yellows she wanted. She had been warned not to try to paint the shelves. They would have been cream, had she been able. But it must all wait now. And she and Henry must keep on using the downstairs bedroom which Libby was bound she'd make into a librar}' one day ... for the big rooms upstairs were

  as good as untouched, and she couldn't chmb any more now, or sew on the machine, or scrape and paint furniture, or even get the easier flowers to grow in the shabby garden.

  Poor Henry, thou
ght Libby ruefully, must be a little less than delighted to come home and find not the dainty vivacious girl he'd married, but this clumsy hag. (Henry was just the same. His body was as supple and lean, his eyes as clear, his hair, except for the high, bare temples, as thick and shining as ever.)

  She heard him coming in through the kitchen and heard him say, ''Chicken, eh?" One could always hear what Henry said. There would be, she knew, a most humble murmur out of Celestina, who acted in what Libby supposed to be a hangover of a European idea, as if man were master and woman his slave forevermore. She wiggled a little irritable tension out of her shoulders.

  Henry always did come in through the kitchen past the steaming pots, past the smells and the debris of preparation, and so he always knew what he was about to be fed.

  Libby thought of her father—who never came home at noon but stayed decently downtown all day—coming in gently at the front door as the day faded, and being received as the master of his house, but graciously by the mistress of it, and sitting genteelly in the parlor with perhaps a sip of sherry beside him. He moved decorously, in due time, to a table which, within their means, would be exquisitely appointed, shaking his white napkin out, smiling about him in the faint, pleasurable suspense before he was served what would always be, for him, a delicious surprise.

  But, of course, Henry drove a car, as her father did not, and the garage was beside the kitchen door. And that was that.

  Henr}' wasn't going to walk around the house to come in. Henry would always be home for dinner at noon. That she could not get used to.

  There were no restaurants, no luncheon places in Thor.

  Libby put mind over matter. She made herself radiant. Henry kissed her on the cheek and put his arm around her briefly. The slight pull off her own balance hurt the weak spot in her spine. ''How's Libby?"