Chapter Nineteen—Storms Inside and Out
" 'There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood/Touch of manner, hint of mood…The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry/Of bugles going by'—Una, are P. E. Island autumns as colorful as they once were, or are they merely magnified in my memory?" Walter asked, leaning against the rail of the Queen Anne and gazing unseeing at the ocean below. "Carman had a knack for describing things…I've found myself reciting that poem more times than I can remember over the past years, remembering the trees in Rainbow Valley." He sighed. "Do you think my family will ever understand?"
Now it was Una's turn to sigh. This conversation, or a variance of it, was continually reoccurring. She kept trying to reassure Walter that his family would understand, but he didn't seem to believe her. "The trees are always beautiful in the fall, but I think I prefer Rainbow Valley in the spring, when all the mayflowers are hidden away in the corners and crevices, waiting for someone to discover them."
"Does Jem still bring Mother the first mayflowers?"
"Only if he can find them before his eldest son. Ever since Dr. Blythe told him of the tradition, Walter always tries to find them for Faith. Last year, both Jem and Walter spent days combing the valley, studiously ignoring the other searching mere yards away."
"Has Shirley brought you mayflowers?" Walter asked in jest, his eyes twinkling.
Una blushed, inwardly writhing as she did so. For mercy's sakes, she was going to marry Shirley! If she turned scarlet every time his name was mentioned, she might as well spend the rest of her days with a sack over her head. "His proposal came after the first mayflowers, and I didn't accept him until I was in Europe," she said primly. "There has not been an opportunity."
"I'll have to give him some brotherly advice, then. Does he know what sort of a jewel of a woman he's getting? Tenacious, gentle, feisty…and my deliverer. How can he ever deserve you?" Walter grinned.
"I think it's more of a question of how can I ever deserve him," Una said rather ruefully. Shirley was the most patient man she knew, willing to wait for her to have her trip of her lifetime before they made any definite plans for their future. Perhaps, she wondered, he had hoped that absence would, indeed, make the heart grow fonder. His letters were slowly penetrating her heart, closed for so long, and if she was reading them correctly, hers had already won his. But all that had been before the storm at Courcelette…Una closed her eyes, trying to analyze her emotions since that episode. The Walter she had found was not the boy she had loved in secret, but a man, scarred and embittered. She didn't want to know if the love she had left with the flowers at his supposed grave was truly gone—that part of her life was over. It was time to move on, to marry Shirley and make a new life for her self. She and Walter would be brother-and-sister-in-laws, nothing more.
"We should go in to dinner now. It looks like a storm coming up," Una said abruptly, shaking loose tendrils of hair out of her face. Walter followed her, watching her stiff back. Something in the mention of Shirley had touched a nerve, but he wasn't sure what.
**************
Walter Blythe sat by the porthole in his cabin, watching the waves toss up and down. There's no stability left in life, not even in nature, he thought to himself. Ever since Dr. Schwartz's betrayal had been discovered, he had felt like his legs were knocked out from under him.
Frankly, he was terrified at the thought of going home. Home…did such a place even exist anymore? Was it true that his family hadn't truly rejected him? Walter found it hard to fathom—for years, he'd considered himself to be cast off by those he loved the most. Instead, the person he'd trusted the most in the world had been the one who'd been lying to him.
Una was the only dependable anchor to his life at the moment; the only link between his childhood and the cottage at Courcelette. He had spoken truly earlier—Shirley was a fortunate man to be marrying this woman. A man…he had a hard time thinking of his little brother, an awkward, reticent adolescent when he last saw him, as a man in his thirties, engaged to be married. Walter nodded to himself; Shirley and Una would suit each other well. There was a look in Una's eyes he had seen several times over the last week, a wistful look that spoke of sorrow and dashed hopes. But then Una's eyes had always been wistful. Perhaps she had lost someone in the War—at any rate, Shirley would love her like she deserved and drive the shadows away.
Una knocked at the connecting door between their cabins. "May I come visit for a while? I'd prefer some company with the storm going on."
"By all means, come in," Walter said, giving her the chair. He sat down on the edge of the bunk, trying to come up with a topic to shut out the storm outside. "Let me see if I have all my nieces and nephews straight. Jerry and Nan married, and their children are Dianne, Blythe, and John. Rilla and Ken married, and they have four children?"
"Five. Gilbert, for your father; Gertrude—they call her Trudy—for Miss Oliver; Willis, after your maternal grandmother's last name; Cornelia Susan; and Owen. And there should be a sixth one by Christmas…I don't know what they'll name him or her."
"The family does seem to reuse names over and over."
"Yes, somehow we ended up with a Blythe Meredith and a Meredith Blythe," Una laughed.
"Is Meredith much like her mother?" Walter asked quietly.
"The spitting image, both in personality and looks. She and her brothers always have the Glen in an uproar over their peccadilloes, just as we always did."
"I can't think of anything too dreadful that you ever did," Walter said, "but I know that Faith managed to cause a sensation wherever she went. She even dared me to ride a pig once."
"And you did, didn't you?" Una asked, smiling at the memory.
"I think if she'd asked me to chop off my head, I would have done it," Walter said seriously. Una didn't notice the look on his face.
"And you fought Dan Reese for her honour, because he'd called her 'pig-girl' and 'rooster-girl'…"
"I think that was when I fell in love with her," Walter said, almost to himself. Una, who had been lost in reverie, sat bolt upright. She supposed she should be surprised at this revelation, but somehow she wasn't. Faith had always been bright and beautiful, even at twelve.
"You loved Faith? I never knew that."
"No one ever did…I made sure of that. After the fight with Dan, I dreamed of all the opportunities I might have to be her knight again. I saved the blue hair ribbon she'd let me wear around my arm until I lost it in the prison camps. Nothing would ever come of it, I knew—I don't think there was ever anyone but Jem for her."
Una nodded. There hadn't been anyone but Jem for Faith, ever since her first glimpse of him at the Glen St. Mary's train station.
"I wrote her sonnets but never gave them to her; I dreamed about her, waking and sleeping. Una, did you ever love someone like that?"
Una decided that silence was the better part of discretion. Walter, construing her silence as a negative response, continued.
"I always hoped that someday—maybe—somehow, she'd forget Jem and fall in love with me. The first year of the War, when Jem and Jerry had enlisted and she and I were still at Redmond, we spent a lot of our time together, talking over the days ere the world turned upside down. I didn't want anything to happen to Jem—he had always been my closest companion, different as we were—but sometimes I would pretend he didn't exist. Those were golden hours, but like all golden hours, they came to an end." He stood up, pacing back and forth across the small cabin, sure of his footing even with the rocking of the ship.
"When I was sent the white feather, Faith was more indignant than everyone. How dare people make fun of me like that? But one night, going to visit her and Nan and Di at their boarding house, I overheard her say to them that while she understood that typhoid had made it impossible for me to be in the War, she was glad that her beau was the brother who was a soldier." Pain flickered over Walter's face at the memory of almost twenty years before.
"Faith never was the most tactful person," Una murmured. There seemed to be nothing else to say.
"You're a comfort, Una," Walter told her. "Do you know I've never told another living person all of this? What is it about you, you strange, odd creature, that I can tell you things from the deepest recesses of my soul?"
Una smiled wanly. "I'm glad. But I'm tired now and must head for bed. Good night."
"Good night."
Una stood up and started to walk across the small cabin to her door when a larger wave than the rest rocked the ship, causing her to lose her balance. Walter stepped in to catch her, holding her upright. They were so close that she could see a faint scar on his cheek, a memento of Courcelette. Una suddenly felt as if her knees had given out—what was going on here?—and then, somehow, Walter's lips were on hers and she was kissing him back. It was as if the entire universe was spinning and she was at its still center, the eye of the hurricane.
She went to slip her arms around his neck, but something on her finger was rubbing uncomfortably. Realizing with a jolt that it was Shirley's ring, Una jerked herself away. Aghast at her brazenness, she stared white-faced at Walter for several seconds, then practically ran through the connecting door between their cabins, slammed and locked it, flung herself down on her narrow bunk, and wept bitterly.
Author's Note: Thanks so much for all your reviews! The poem quoted by Walter at the beginning of the chapter is "A Vagabond Song" by Bliss Carman. Pat Gardiner also quotes from it in Mistress Pat.