The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler

Author:Ernest Buckler [Buckler, Ernest & Gibbs, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Classics, Girls & Women, Canadian, Juvenile Fiction, Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781551995083
Publisher: New Canadian Library
Published: 1954-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXV

David ran past Ellen in the kitchen, and upstairs.

His mother heard him tearing up to the attic. “David,” she called, “did you clean off your boots?”

He didn’t answer.

His dishevelled face showed in the new mirror. It was as shockingly bright as a face feeding on a forbidden book. He tore off his old clothes. He put on his new suit and got his twenty dollars from the matchbox in the bureau drawer. He didn’t take anything else. The lettering on his calculus text caught in his eyes like something dead lying there with its face uncovered. He didn’t look back as he went out the door.

“David,” Martha called again as she heard him coming down, “now look at that mud. And I just scrubbed them stairs!” He didn’t answer.

He didn’t feel his fatigue as he ran down the road. He ran down the long hill, and along the spring-cool road to town. The propulsion of the anger transcended the physical process of tiring. He had one complete thought amongst the tumbling phrases of feeling: I’m going to Halifax, where Toby and Anna are. The things he passed had no familiar voice. They were like objects seen from a train window.

He stopped running, to wash his face and hands in the brook. When he started on again he walked.

And then time stopped running with him and settled back into its own pace. The clamour of the anger began to drop too, and its suspension of all other voices. The trees and the road settled back into their familiar places, as the earth becomes familiar again, and solid, after stepping off a boat. The water-weakness in his knees crept back, stealthily, as if it had been waiting its chance.

The clauses of his thoughts tumbled slower in his mind, like the final revolutions of the barrel churn after the foot had been taken from the pedal. The fragments that belonged together joined, as kernels of butter precipitate and gather: It was sixteen miles to town. It was four o’clock. There would be no train until tomorrow. Where would he stay tonight? He had nothing but his good suit and twenty dollars. What would he tell Anna? It would be hard to tell Anna he was never going to write home. It would be hard to ask her never to mention his name to them again …

The anger settled slowly in his limbs. It felt quiet and sore.

He kept walking ahead, but doggedly. His legs had to depend on their own power. The familiarity of each tree seemed to obstruct his forward movement. It was like walking through a thicket of cobwebs. Determination, not the self-fuelling anger, was the only impulse now. He kept on now because, having started, there was nothing else to do. His mouth looked like the mouth of a child who doesn’t dare to cry.

He didn’t hear the car until the horn blew, right behind him. He started. The glance of the strange faces seemed to precipitate his own face suddenly, reassemble it.

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