The Man From the Valley Read online

  Cliffs, peaks, slopes ending in shining gullies, huge isolated rocks, waterfalls splaying out silver mists, farther down in the gorge a darkness that would be the eternal twilight that Ginny had spoken of, the twilight of growth so thick that it formed a roof of its own, but higher up and climbing right to a few feet beneath where she stood, an almost emerald explosion of skyward thrusting trees.

  “Sassafras, gum...” she said softly.

  “Silky oak, black walnut, silver ash.” Ginny must have followed her and in her absorption she had not heard.

  “That festoon is parasitic fig. We call that lichen Old Man’s Beard. If we wait a few moments the curtain will descend.”

  “Curtain?”

  “A mist envelopes the valley every night. Look, it’s coming up now. You must remember not to be caught in it when you start the books, Terese.”

  Terese did not answer. She couldn’t. All at once from a small first tatter of mist a sea of cloud had spread over the entire valley, and standing on the point was like standing on the prow of a ship setting sail on an ethereal ocean.

  “It's perfect!” she whispered.

  “It's pretty enough.” Ginny shrugged. “In the west there are never mists, in the west...” She remembered and closed her lips.

  “Still, this is land, isn’t it, Ginny, a lot of land.” Terese could not resist that. She could not resist adding, “Land within your reach.” She turned away from the ethereal sea and followed a now silent girl back to the jeep.

  First thing in the morning, as Joe had promised, Bill arrived to give Terese her lesson. He came in the future bookmobile, but either because the engine was new and silent or the offshoot track soft and sanded, there was no sound at all to herald his arrival until the siren shrilled.

  Terese jumped instinctively, but Ginny and Joe only laughed. At her bewildered look, for the last noise in the world she could have expected to hear up here was a siren, Ginny explained, “Round our mountain bends where you’ll be going a horn wouldn’t be good enough, so Arn applied and was permitted a siren instead. Ginny, this is Bill. Bill ... Terese.” Ginny indicated a young blond giant who now waited at the door. He was all of six feet four, iron-hard for all his fair coloring, which, because he lived in the valley, had not deepened or bronzed.

  “When you’re ready.” Bill smiled at Terese as she gathered her things. His casual, unhurried voice helped her to climb behind the wheel, and after that her fears disappeared.

  “When do I time my library stops?” Terese asked over tea. “I’d like to rehearse them before I fill in my shelves. I think it would be wiser in case I don’t manoeuvre smoothly at first and disarrange all I’ve fixed.”

  Ginny did not answer, and in the way that Terese, by now, had come to sense the girl’s moods, she sensed a mood now.

  Joe, unaware of any currents, said, “Arn was all for a librarian doing a day at Binaboo with their bookmobile to get the feel of the thing before starting here. I’ve spoken to Pete, and he’ll be over in the Cessna first thing in the morning to fly you across.”

  “But that’s wonderful!”

  Ginny barely concealed a snort.

  She drove Terese to the strip the next day, but was gone again before the little Cessna put down to collect its passenger.

  “I’ve lots to do, as you know,” she excused herself rather lamely.

  Pete hopped out of the small craft as Terese ran along the strip. “Pleased to meet you again.” He smiled in the friendly fashion she had noticed at their first meeting. “Your chauffeur didn’t wait, I see.”

  “It was a chauffeuse.”

  “I knew that when I saw the jeep beetling off. I knew it would be Ginny.”

  For a moment they looked at each other, Pete wetting his lips as though to say something, Terese waiting to hear something.

  Then Pete shrugged as though shrugging the matter off, and helped Terese into the plane.

  Instead of the direction he usually took, which Terese had learned, was north-east, Glen Ingle lying north-east of Backdown, he turned due west ... or at least Pete shouted it was west in Terese’s ear.

  For some minutes the deep valleys and clefts followed the pattern of Backdown, then the smaller hills took over, the slopes, the tablelands, at last the plains. The shadow of their tiny craft sailed beneath them, but instead of blue sky flecked with white cloud it was green grass flecked with dandelion and red pea. Often the grass was faded and sparse, but always the sun found something to highlight, wattles, purple patches of Paterson’s Curse, the blood-red tips on a huddle of gums. Presently the engine changed its tune, and Terese saw that they were preparing to put down on a field about the same size of Backdown’s, but boasting as well a little hangar and a small cottage.

  Beside the cottage a van was parked, and when the plane stopped it came out to collect them. The girl behind the wheel smiled at Terese and put out her hand. “As you won’t be here long I decided to waste no time. I’m Alison, Terese ... yes, I’ve been told all about you ... the traveling librarian for Binaboo. Hop in as far as the cottage, Peter, and expect us back for afternoon tea. Tim will keep you company. Tim,” she explained after Pete had alighted, “caretakes here. We’re a little more civilized than Backdown.”

  Alison turned out of the small drome and started along a dirt road edged with bramble and sloe.

  “This is Ashleigh coming up now,” announced Alison. “Besides the Ash family, there will be the Butterfields, the J. Smolletts and the S. Smolletts, the Vosses, the Whites, all within a ten-mile radius.”

  “How do you pick on a stopping point?”

  “I try to choose a central position, or at least one that suits everybody.” Alison put her finger on the horn ... a horn, not a siren, noted Terese, feeling superior... and the little crowd barely visible in the haze of the plains waved.

  One by one they trooped into the van, exchanged their books, had a few words with Alison, then climbed out again. The whole procedure took fifteen minutes... “I stretch it to twenty minutes sometimes, but never any longer, else I’d never get away” ... and then Alison was starting up again, the borrowers were waving and the bookmobile was headed for the next stop.

  At Binnie Binnie they had thermos tea. “I daren’t accept one invitation, or I’d be drowned in tea,” Alison confided. She poured, asking, “Think you’ll like it, Terese?”

  “I’ll love it.”

  “Of course, it’s quite different at Backdown.”

  “Another world, a very beautiful world, although Ginny...”

  “Virginia Preston?”

  “Yes.”

  “She came from here, didn’t she?” said Alison. “It would be before my time, but one picks up things on a job like this. I heard she was left out in the cold when her uncle died. From what people have said it was a darn shame.”

  “It was. She loves the land.” That, Terese knew, was an understatement; Ginny was obsessed with the land.

  “I heard that, too. But, after all, what you can’t alter you have to put up with.”

  “Or substitute,” murmured Terese more to herself.

  Alison heard it, however, and raised her brows on Terese. “That way, is it?” she deduced. “Poor Peter!”

  “Peter?”

  “But of course, he was the crop-duster who ... But now I’m gossiping, and obviously you don’t know a word of what I’m talking about. If you’ve finished we’ll start up again and do Elliotts and Redfield. Then we’ll make back for the strip.”

  “Yes,” agreed Terese a little absently ... Peter, she was thinking, Pete. That was why Ginny had hurried away this morning, why she became moody every time Joe mentioned the young pilot, even when she heard the whirr of the Cessna’s engines, that was why she had been so rude on the first afternoon of their arrival. It explained her odd lapses ... but it didn’t quite explain Peter. To be a crop-duster you had to be a good pilot, and from what Joe had told her Pete was being financed now by the Backdown community chest, a chest that certainly did n
ot “ring”; in other words, he wasn’t making much of his talents, not, anyway, from the money angle. It appeared that if Ginny was finished with Pete, he was not finished with her.

  “Just as in ordinary library work, book tastes differ,” Alison was saying. “You can never really anticipate what people want. Mr. Elliott, you’d feel sure, would go for spy stuff, but he takes out poetry, while his wife, a home body if ever I saw one, was appalled at the new Cooking shelf I put in and went smartly past it to Cricket. Well, that’s life, library life, and the best of luck to you.” The last few words were repeated as the Cessna put off at the end of the day back to Backdown again.

  The next day she went out again with Bill and was pronounced by him as quite ready to take over. She did this for two more days on her own, then the next few days concentrated on compiling a timetable of her stops, based on what Alison had shown her—so much time for the valley, so much time for the plateau, ten to twenty minutes book browsing according to the number of borrowers waiting at the arranged places.

  The rest of the week, aided by Ginny, she placed the books in the shelves, the adults’ section above, the children’s below, a pull-out table for reference, a small pull-out for magazines.

  Then, with Joe beaming so widely that Ginny said his face would split, the morning arrived for the initial round of the Backdown Bookmobile. Ginny had offered to accompany Terese. Joe had, too, but Terese felt she should stand on her own feet.

  She had made a first-day timetable of four plateau and four valley stops, had practised these stops, and now, to her delight, they worked even more smoothly than she had dared hope. The little gathering of people at Lumsdaines raised a cheer as the mountain-blue van approached. Avonset, a second stop, had a round of applause.

  The work was delightful; she always had loved books, loved issuing them, but dealing them out in these conditions, her own perfect small library on wheels, borrowers, because of their inaccessibility to books so much more eager and appreciative, was sheer joy.

  Until...

  The next stop she had rehearsed was Dawson’s, not the plateau where the van was garaged but the valley front gate. She had decided on Dawson’s because not only did it appear central for others situated around Homeward Bound but because this whole thing was Dawson’s brain-child, and that as its father Mr. Arn Dawson must be allotted his full dues.

  She put her finger on the siren to make sure there was no vehicle approaching from the opposite direction as much as to announce to the borrowers that the bookmobile was upon them.

  She rounded the corner.

  There was the same little collection of people she had had all day, the same smiles, same bright-eyed anticipation, same hum of eagerness.

  Only something was different, and as Terese, having pulled up the van, crawled behind the wheel to unlatch the back door and release the small steps, she knew she had expected ... no, not expected but actually awaited ... this ever since she had come here. She had not known just what it was, she had simply waited...

  And there, a little behind the crowd, flanked on either side by two small girls, by Janet and Jalna, a man waited. It would be their Da. It would be Joe’s Arn. It would be Bill’s, and all the rest of Backdown’s Dawson. But to Terese it was more than the Man from the Valley.

  It was someone with eyes—and she remembered them now and wondered why she had not pinpointed Janet and Jalna at once—of unforgettable directness.

  Only the background and the company of the meeting was different, over there in London outside a railway station, here beneath soaring trees, there with a woman with her face pressed to his shoulder, here with a little girl’s hand in each of his.

  They, she thought painfully, were the sole differences. The intense blue eyes remained the same. Cool. Disliking. Dismissing. Estimating. They had been the hardest eyes she had encountered in all her life.

  Now those hard eyes looked back at her again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The little people were attended to first. That was the rule in most things, and certainly the rule for a brand-new book van with its lower shelves crammed full of old, tried favorites rubbing covers with new, promising prospects. Even had it not been her custom to appease the young before the old, Terese would have relented now, with ten eager faces, two of the faces belonging to the Homeward Bound children, only lacking a window between them and the books to produce the traditional small noses flattened in yearning.

  “Come in, darlings,” she beamed.

  She loved children; she spoke their language. Only this time her interchanges were not so fluid as usual; she was burningly conscious of the man waiting at the rear of the adult group.

  Janet and Jalna climbed the little steps in their turn. Janet wanted a Heidi book. Did Tree have Heidi? Terese did ... and also Alice in Wonderland for Jalna in spite of the fact that Jalna clamored for the Brothers Grimm instead. “Or something, Tree, with blood.” Alice, decided Terese, would be better reading for a tiny, and she stamped it for the smaller girl.

  “We told Da about you,” confided Janet. “He laughed at Tree and said it should be Trees, but I don’t know how you could be two when you’re only one.”

  “I’m six,” Jalna informed her, “six years of old.”

  Her sister gave her a withering look. “Tree and I were not talking of old, we were talking of how many she is.”

  Terese allowed the children their time to browse, to turn over the junior magazines, then rang a little bell.

  “Grown-ups now. I’ll see you on my next round. Remember, no grubby fingers, no pencil marks, and books hate to have dog ears.” As they filed out Terese heard Jalna calling, “Da, how can a book have a dog ear?”

  The adults entered then, making beelines for their favorite reading. As usual, taste was unpredictable. Accustomed by now for a burly lumberman to ask for a book on raffia work, or, as at Avonset this morning, cake decoration, Terese put all surprise aside as big Jim Roberts, a timber dragger, searched for a book on—timber! She stamped it, and turned to the next borrower. Arn Dawson stood there.

  The children had receded, and beyond the bulk of the man blotting out almost all of the space at the door Terese could see them clustered together under a tree, eagerly comparing volumes. The adults were taking the opportunity to talk together; probably their chances for social mingling were so intermittent that they didn’t intend to waste one moment. At any rate, they were self-absorbed; they paid no attention to the librarian and her final borrower.

  But it soon appeared that Arn Dawson was not borrowing. He simply stood blotting out the light, except for a slat each side where his bulk did not reach, arms folded, eyes narrowed, the hat he had not removed well back on his dark head.

  It seemed an interminable time that he stood there, and though she did not want to speak first, eventually Terese had to; she could not bear any longer that clear-eyed, unwavering regard.

  “Mr. Dawson?”

  “You’re right.”

  For all the clear-cut of him, the impression of definite no-nonsense, he spoke in a decided drawl.

  It was curious how a slow drawl could have such a sharp impact. She watched dumbly as the big man moved farther into the van, his size reducing its size. Her eyes followed his eyes as they roved slowly over the shelves. He took his time in his examination, nothing appeared to miss him. At last, unable to wait any longer, Terese again spoke first.

  “It’s how you would have arranged them?”

  “Could be.”

  “If you have any alterations to suggest, I’m sure I’ll be glad to—to...” Boot-licking, she thought disgustedly of herself, and yet it’s what I would have done that awful night had I only been afforded the chance, I would have begged his forgiveness for my ugly behaviour.

  Yet perhaps the man did not remember her as she had remembered him. Apart from his stony gaze there was nothing to suggest any recollection, and stoniness, she judged, would be the salient trait in this valley king.

  But no ... D
awson was speaking again in that slow drawl, and Terese knew her answer.

  “No suggestions—but a note of surprise.”

  “Mr. Dawson?” she queried.

  “Your humor section is not so abundant as I would have thought. You seemed most amused the last time I saw you.”

  “You—you remember...” She barely breathed it.

  “Of course.”

  Still the children were comparing books, the adults gossiping. Between the bursts of laughter, the rise and fall of voices, that sough of the trees that never stopped in the valley, the distant ring of an axe and whine of a saw, Terese edged in desperately, “I can explain.”

  In reply he drawled, “Cliff-hangers always can.”

  “Cliff-hangers?”

  “Your job,” he reminded her, still in the unhurried voice. “It’s teetering on the edge, isn’t it?” He had pushed the hat farther back on his head, and the clear eyes looked diamond-hard into hers.

  “You—you mean you would hold that incident against me?”

  “I would.” He was rolling a cigarette and taking his time in doing it.

  “But why? How?”

  He put the cigarette in his mouth and lit it before he answered. If he intended the deliberation for torture, he knew the right brand.

  “Because all this was a dream,” he said at length. He waved his arm round at the encircling shelves of books, at the van itself. “Because you are not the right one for that dream.”

  “How could one man...” she began, then her voice trailed off. She had started to challenge the control of one person only, then she remembered. One man could say yes or no, this man could. “Arn says...” Joe had repeated often to her. “It all depends on Arn,” he had stated.

  “Yes.” Arn Dawson’s voice was almost lazy. “One man can. I have the yea and nay, and so I should have, I all but financed this thing. You could say”—the smoke wreathed spirally up from the rolled cigarette—“I’m a monopoly.”