A Sudden Sun Page 20

  Mrs. Withycombe’s voice was clear and carrying. In the seat beside Lily, Mrs. Ohman stirred. Behind her fan she said in Lily’s ear, “If poor women were given fair wages for their work and protected from husbands who beat them, they would never turn to drink.”

  Mrs. Withycombe heard the interruption, and glanced in their direction, but then turned her steely gaze back out at the WCTU ladies gathered before her who listened without arguing. She continued with her speech about the shocking spectacle of the drunken woman. Lily had noticed that few of the ladies argued directly with Mrs. Ohman these days. It was more common for her to raise a protest and everyone else to continue the discussion as if she had never spoken.

  “Until the problems that cause drunkenness are addressed, railing at women for getting drunk does no good!” Mrs. Ohman piped, half-rising from her seat.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Ohman, your views are well known,” said Mrs. Withycombe. “Most of us are realists enough to know that we cannot reform society from the ground up. We can only address those areas to which we are called to relieve suffering.”

  “If we had the vote we’d be able to reform society from the ground up!” This time it was a bit louder than a whisper but not as loud as an interruption. She could easily be heard by women for the next two rows around her, but Mrs. Withycombe could ignore her if she chose to.

  “Imagine the plight of this wretched creature, who knows in her heart that her duty is to her family, who day after day resolves that she will care for them, but who is lured away by temptation, time after time. Night-time finds her insensible in the gutter while her little ones cry at home, their bellies empty. Such is the curse of the demon drink, and women as well as men can fall into its chains! And it is our duty—nay, our calling, our vocation—to rescue such creatures where rescue is possible, to care for the abandoned children, and to end the ravages of the liquor trade once and for all!”

  Hearty applause from most of the women. Lily’s attention was caught by the tragic image of the woman who struggled to live up to her duty but was waylaid time and again by temptation, for Lily felt that she was that woman. Only she was tempted not by gin or rum, but by a man’s caresses. She, too, made resolutions to reform, told herself over and over that she would never let it happen again. And, over and over, she tossed aside all her resolutions and ran to her lover’s embrace.

  “I have simply had enough,” said Mrs. Ohman, standing up. Mrs. Withycombe, still in the full flower of her speech, hesitated, glanced at Mrs. Ohman, but went on speaking. So did Mrs. Ohman, not quite at the pitch to carry to the whole hall but certainly clearly enough that anyone who wanted to listen could hear. “A full year since our bill was defeated in the House and we are farther than ever from achieving our goals, farther than ever from making a real change. How long are we going to muddle about being—ladylike?”

  “Mrs. Ohman!” Mrs. Withycombe broke off her speech. “If you have something to say, please save it for the discussion afterwards. You are out of order!”

  “Order! The things we submit to, in the blessed name of order!” Mrs. Ohman said, and shuffled past the seated ladies to the end of the row. “I’ve tried to preserve order all my life and where has it gotten me? Nowhere! Perhaps the time has come, after all, for a little disorder!”

  The hall was far more silent than it had been for Mrs. Withycombe’s speech. Every eye was on Mrs. Ohman, waiting to see what kind of disorder might be about to break forth. But all that lady did was turn with a swish of her skirts and stride out the back entrance.

  Silence hung in the air for a moment after the heavy doors banged shut behind her. Lily wondered whether she ought to leave in solidarity with Mrs. Ohman. But that would attract attention. She had finally wrangled from her father permission to begin attending WCTU meetings again after months of apparent good behaviour. Everyone in town would know by morning that Mrs. Ohman had made a scene and stormed out of the meeting. If Lily got up and left with her, Papa would find out.

  Mrs. Withycombe cleared her throat. “Ladies, just because some among us choose to forget their womanly natures and attempt to create the kind of scandal and uproar we associate with men at political gatherings, does not mean the rest of us should follow suit.”

  “Hear, hear!” shouted Mrs. Peters, then subsided, perhaps realizing that she was behaving a little like a man at a political meeting herself.

  “We are women, and not politicians, nor agitators. We are here to do the simple and humble work to which God has called us, lifting up the downtrodden, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and comforting the afflicted.”

  Her choice of words was perhaps unfortunate, since Lily vividly remembered Mrs. Ohman’s favourite saying about afflicting the comfortable and thought other ladies might recall it too. Mrs. Withycombe was doing all she could to make clear that the WCTU was not in the business of afflicting the comfortable.

  Lily had no time to stop and chat with anyone during the chaotic tea-time after the meeting, for Papa’s condition upon letting her attend the meeting was that Evans drive her to the front door of the Temperance Hall and collect her there exactly two hours later. Papa was still keeping a very close eye on what kind of meetings Lily attended, never suspecting that under the cover of Sunday afternoon visits with Abby she had managed four times to slip away and spend an hour alone with David at his rooming house.

  It had to be Sunday: her sin was compounded by committing it on the Lord’s Day. Only on Sunday was David likely to be free all afternoon. Papa, of course, was also off work on Sunday, and in the cold winter months she could not plausibly claim to be going for a walk in the park. But she had established a habit of going visiting to Abby’s house, and often from there paying calls on others. If the odd time she managed to slip away and go to a rooming house on New Gower Street, she had not yet aroused her father’s suspicion.

  All this subterfuge was made more difficult by the fact that Lily kept promising herself she would never be alone in a private place with David again. And since public places carried the greatest risk of discovery, this meant in practice that she rarely met him at all—once or twice a month, at most, ever since that fateful day back in October when she had yielded up her virtue to him.

  If only they could have courted openly, as Abby courted her many beaux, going to concerts and lectures together. But that kind of courtship was reserved entirely for Obadiah Collins’s spring visit. If only the hours spent with Reverend Collins could have been with David instead, Lily thought. Hearing the Methodist College orchestra saw its way through a Mozart symphony, listening to a debate on “Has the Human Condition Deteriorated Since the Days of Our Ancestors?” or even sitting on the velveteen settee in her family’s parlour, would have been bliss with David. They could have talked, then, long and freely, of all the subjects they wrangled over in their stolen moments together. In the privacy of the parlour with David she could have properly taken all his objections to organized religion, even his questions about the very existence of God, and answered them, one by one, in a rational fashion.

  And in her parents’ parlour, she would not have been tempted to illicit embraces. There, he could have seen her for the pure and virtuous girl she had once been. Her godly example, coupled with the power of her arguments, would have won him over to sign the temperance pledge and take his place beside her in the church pew. Lily often went back and read over Mrs. Ohman’s lovely story of Alida in those old issues of the Water Lily, and knew that she could have been an influence for good over David just as Alida had been over James. If only they had been able to meet freely and respectably, to talk, not forced to set up secret trysts and hide in corners. If only.

  It was a lovely image, that idea of herself keeping company with David openly, gradually winning him to the light. So different from the stilted conversations she had had with Reverend Collins when he visited, when most of her effort had been directed towards steering the conversation away from personal matters so he would not propose to her. So di
fferent, too, from her real relations with David, to which, when she thought about them, she could only attach the adjective “sordid.” It had been all very well in summer when they could walk about the streets or lanes, but in winter they could only be outside for a quarter hour at most before David would suggest his rooming house. “We can talk there. I can bring you up a cup of tea.” Lady callers were, of course, not permitted, but the landlady was famous for turning a blind eye.

  They had been there again just this Sunday past, and Lily had insisted, even as they passed through the door of the room, even as she sat down on a hard-backed chair and tried to ignore the bed that took up most of the room, that they were only there to talk. He was not forceful. Yet somehow they were never in that room more than a quarter of an hour before they were in each other’s arms, arguments and debate forgotten, all Lily’s resolutions heaped around her in as crumpled a pile as her petticoats on the floor.

  She never told David how ashamed she was, how bitterly she prayed for forgiveness. The sin and repentance was all between her and God, nothing to do with him: in David’s eyes what they did was not even a sin.

  Five times. Five times, now, from October ’til May, she had had relations with him. Jesus had said to forgive the sinner seventy times seven and presumably He would do the same, but what if all the sinner’s promises to mend her ways were a hollow sham?

  The carriage pulled up in front of the house and Evans helped Lily down. It was May now, but unlike the blooming warmth of last May when she’d gone with Mrs. Ohman and the others to the House to hear their bill being defeated, this was a raw, chilly May—there hadn’t yet been a warm day that felt like spring. Leaves on the trees were still clenched into buds, weeks away from opening. Though it didn’t get dark now ’til nearly seven in the evening, the sky above remained a uniform white, the clouds rarely pierced by sunshine. Last year’s May had been a hopeful one, full of possibility: this one was grim, locked tight as a fist. Lily wondered if people in other places were always confident that summer would come, year after year. She herself always hid a tiny seed of doubt: perhaps this would be the year summer would bypass Newfoundland entirely, and they would slide straight from one winter to another without even a few short weeks of relief.

  The house echoed with emptiness, as it always did. If she stood in the hall and listened for a minute she could hear sounds behind the emptiness: the ticking of the grandfather clock, the muffled thuds and clangs as Sally prepared the dining room for dinner, the creak of a chair in the study above that proclaimed Papa was home from work. She listened for a sound that indicated her mother, but there was none. Silence was Eleanor’s signature note.

  A note from David came after supper, delivered by one of their trusted street-urchins as Lily went out in the garden. There was no great pleasure in walking in the garden with the weather they were having now, no flower beds to check on although the daffodils had bloomed and gone in a sudden burst of optimism a week earlier. The boy’s name was Johnny. He looked about ten years old and had ears that stuck out under a cap two sizes too big. He ran down the lane behind their garden and passed an envelope, much creased and folded as if he’d been carrying it for days, through the fence palings. Once he had left it for her stuck into a crack in the palings. The next time she saw him after that, Lily had rapped him on the head with her knuckles and refused him a penny. It was too dangerous, she told him, to leave letters lying about.

  “When did the gentleman give you this?” she asked now.

  The boy shrugged. “Dunno. Yesterday, day before.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that to earn your penny.”

  “He already give me two.”

  “Yes, but you expect another one from me, don’t you?”

  Johnny shoved his hands deep in his pockets. His cap slipped down over his eyes as he screwed up his forehead with concentration.

  “Today’s Thursday, ennit? So it was Tuesday he give it me. I seen ’em outside the Colonial Building after all the bigwigs come out, and then I come by two, three times last night but you wasn’t out here. So, Tuesday. Day ’fore yesterday. I don’t mess around, Miss. He gives me a note, I comes and gives it to you first chance I gets.”

  “I know, I know,” Lily said, handing over the penny. She wasn’t sure why she felt the need to grill the boy, only that when she held the note in her hands and read David’s words she wanted to imagine him writing it, to know what day it was and what he was thinking when he’d penned them.

  Lilith—Been thinking of you since Sunday afternoon, wishing it were still Sunday afternoon. O that all of life could be one endless Sabbath day, as the hymn-writer says of heaven, though no doubt he was planning different activities. Forgive me again—do I ever speak to you, or write a letter, without running up an endless bill of impertinence, of idle words for which I will be held account at the judgement? But you know the only judgement I fear is yours—and I count on clemency, I gamble on grace. When, oh when will I see you again?

  Write when you can. The faithful Johnny is more than eager to earn his pennies. He is as trustworthy as God, for I have told himself myself that if he betrays us, I will hang a millstone about his neck and throw him into the harbour. I told him it was in Scripture and he believed me, for he’d heard something to that effect in Sunday School once when forced to go. Do you see what foolish prattle you’ve reduced me to? To which you have reduced me. Forgive the preposition—it’s out of place, as I am when from you I am apart. With foolish yearning…

  – D (as in Desire).

  She read it over and over. She loved his letters, even the hastily scrawled notes. She wished she could lock them in a secret drawer and read them over and over. Her actual time with him was so short and his notes were like being with him for the few moments they took to read. But while she had kept a few—the most noncommittal ones she could find, in which no eyes but her own would ever see anything compromising—she burned almost everything he sent. What if Papa were to find this—or, more likely, Sally, who could not read, found it and felt duty-bound to turn it over to Papa on the strength of the fact that it looked like a man’s writing? The signature alone would damn her. D as in Desire! Lily knew desire was a word she should not even think, nor should anyone think it in connection with her. “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you,” God had told Eve in the garden. No husband, no desire. Unruled and unruly desire was a dangerous thing, and it flamed through her like the tongues of fire that licked and consumed David’s note as she burned it in the grate before bedtime.

  Lily

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  IF I SIT on the lid of the trunk, do you think it will close?” Abby “ wondered. “No. I’m too delicate, aren’t I? Maybe I’ll call Wilson up and have him sit on the lid. That would work. He’s quite hefty.”

  “Or you could just pack fewer things,” Lily suggested.

  “Oh, you are adorable. Although, now that you mention it, I suppose it’s a bit silly to pack gowns from St. John’s to wear in New York. I’ll probably toss them all on the fire my first week in the city.”

  Abby was off to New York in the height of summer. “Hot and dirty, but better than cold and dirty, which it will be if I stay here,” she pointed out. She was staying until at least Christmas, “If not forever,” she told Lily. “I fully intend to find a millionaire and marry him. Aunt Sarah has half a dozen picked out for me to sample.” Two years of flirting and coquetry among the well-off young Methodists of St. John’s had earned her proposals from Frank Ayre, Norman Winsor, and two others so inconsequential Lily couldn’t even remember their names. But Abby had rejected them all.

  “What will I do here alone? Without you?”

  “Poor thing. You’ll pal around with Martha Withycombe ’til you expire of boredom, I suppose. But soon I’ll be married and in an apartment of my own, and you could come to stay. You will come, won’t you? When I’m married? If you’re not married yourself by then?”

  �
�I can’t see how I will be,” Lily said.

  Abby stopped flitting around the room, sat down on the still-unclosed trunk lid, and took Lily’s hand. “Darling, you know I never speak seriously because I believe serious talk is a kind of death. Don’t contradict me: it is. But I will, just this once, because I’m going away tomorrow and I don’t know when I’ll see you again. You must give this up—this thing with David Reid. You know it can’t go anywhere, and as long as it goes on you won’t even look at any other perfectly suitable man. And there are other men, not just the Reverend. Remember, wherever there’s a Mr. Collins, there’s a Mr. Darcy lurking somewhere near by.”

  “And you mean to tell me David Reid is no Darcy.”

  “Darling, I’m afraid he’s more of a Wickham, and meanwhile there are perfectly nice boys from good families who would love to court you. We’re twenty years old, Lily. The future is upon us.”

  “It all sounds very easy and practical when you put it like that.”

  “It is easy and practical. Everything is. You just have to put aside your feelings, or pretend you don’t have any.”

  Papa still suspected nothing. All his parental wrath was focused upon Mrs. Ohman and the spectre of women’s rights agitators. As Lily had expected, he heard about Mrs. Ohman’s stalking out of the WCTU and chastised Lily for going even though he had given her permission. Mrs. Ohman’s attempts to start a Suffrage League had failed over and over. Bookings for halls were refused, ladies failed to show up when a hall was booked, and no new copies of the Water Lily had been printed since November of last year. Meanwhile, Lily had managed two more secret meetings with David—once to the boarding house where, again, she proved unable to resist temptation, and once just to walk about by Rennie’s River on a chilly grey day. That had been the previous Sunday, and she was sure everything would be better if they stayed clear away from the possibility of transgression. But instead they’d had a terrible argument—she had actually shouted at him—and though they both apologized, she had been in tears when they parted.