James Stevens had been born and raised in Star Harbour. He came from a good family, as measured by local standards, and although his father had died when he was young, his mother had given him a careful education. It was the kind of upbringing some mothers give to a son when they have lost or been disappointed in their husbands; the son must repair for them their lack. They sacrifice for him, work and worry on his account, and fret away the remains of their youth. And for each thing they do or renounce doing, they demand a counterweight from that young life.
Stevens sometimes reflected that he had obeyed his mother’s every wish so far: school, college, his teacher’s degree, even Harvard—almost. Each achievement had seemed at the time worthy of effort. Only now that they were accomplished, he sometimes had a flat taste in his mouth. Perhaps, had Mrs. Stevens still been alive, she would have found some further hurdle for him to leap. It was a last example of her will power that had placed him as master in the renowned St. John’s after four years in an inferior and smaller school. Then she had died and he had come home to an empty house to wind up her affairs during his long vacation. It was Stevens’ house now, standing a little away from the road, fringed modestly with trees and flowering shrubs. Inside it Stevens’ taste had gradually supplanted that of his father, just as Stevens himself had supplanted his sire in his mother’s heart. Nonetheless, a few relics remained to clash with the subdued walls and the uncluttered rooms.
Stevens had very little in common with Star Harbour because his whole life to date had been one of straining to get ahead of his environment. As a child, his friendship with most of the other children had been discouraged and those chosen few with whom he had been urged to play had not responded. They had had other pursuits: horseback riding, for instance, or sailing on the sound. In any event, he would have been lonely. His slender blondness, called aristocratic by his mother, was thought merely scrawniness by his fellows, and the faint accent with which his mother took such pains was ridiculed, even imitated, behind his back. None of these things had bothered him when his mother was alive. On the contrary it had made them feel superior and closer to one another than ever. He felt at her death as a plant must feel whose main, great, strong root has been cut away.
Yet the villagers, although they had no particular understanding or sympathy with him, tried to be kind to Stevens and respected his loss. The chance was held out to him of joining this or that committee and of making himself a part of them. His next door neighbour, in particular, had taken pains to solace him, orphaned as he now was. Lucy Philmore ran the village gift shop and had been, Stevens knew, very good to his mother during her last illness. It was Lucy, in fact, who had arisen from her bed one night to close his mother’s eyes, and Stevens was grateful to her although at times her plain, thirty-year-old face depressed him.
It was due to Lucy that Stevens had accepted the Junior Scout outing class once a week. Of course he had been a scout master before; it had been almost compulsory in the teachers’ college to which he had gone. Since completing his education, however, Stevens had preferred to spend the summer following courses or taking his mother on trips. Now he brushed up on his wood lore, breaking his nails on complicated knots and even succeeding in lighting a fire without a match. After his first outing Stevens had come home almost elated because it had gone so well and the children had seemed to like him. Tutoring jobs, too, helped fill in his time, although he never would have taken on June Grey if it had not been for his mother.
Even after her death he had been able to hear his mother’s even, slightly flat voice telling him that it was impossible to refuse a service to old Mrs. Grey. Later Stevens did not know whether or not to regret taking this ghostly advice. After only a fortnight of their acquaintance he found his two pupils on the peninsula, or Grey’s Neck as it was commonly called, occupying a strange place in his mind. The fact that he must think of them jointly exasperated him in particular. He became possessed by a desire to separate these two creatures, to sever them permanently and, having always considered himself aloof, even high-souled, he was humiliated by the pettiness of his actions. Yet June was like a seasoning without which his hours with Ronny would have had less taste, a constant irritant that excited his temper.
Being alone and introspective, Stevens had asked himself at once the meaning of his emotions and the answer was plain: duty. Mrs. Grey, acting indirectly for Mrs. Villars, had given him to understand that the boy was nervous, high-strung and overstrained. Surely there was nothing worse for a child in this condition than the company of an older girl, herself unhealthy and torn already by the struggles of puberty. June stimulated Ronny’s imagination, Stevens told himself angrily, overpowered the boy with her difference in age and sex. One might almost say that she possessed him. Finally Stevens decided to be active in the matter. He told Ronny to come to his next scout meeting, ordered him as master to pupil. He planned to pick Ronny up by car early in the afternoon.
It started to rain on the morning of the meeting—those big, warm drops that fall in summer and drain the air or breath. From every street and alley in Star Harbour the water flowed downwards towards the docks. The trees drooped and on the ground the slugs came out to bloat their bodies with moisture. In bad weather such as this the scouts met in an empty gym which served at night as a sort of men’s club. Here the scouts would spend the afternoon playing games, practicing their lore, and trying to look easy in their uniforms.
Stevens drove through the boathouse gate a little before three. Jeremy let him in, standing quietly in the rain while the car passed. Stevens saluted Jeremy with his hand, but the caretaker made no response. This was the sort of thing that happened to Stevens sometimes, and so now he tried to pretend that he had merely been smoothing his hair with his palm. He stopped in front of the house and blew his horn. Ronny emerged at once, clad in tight shorts which almost cut his upper thigh and with a woman’s red silk scarf around his neck.
“Do I look like a scout?” he demanded in his shrill voice. “Do I?”
Something tense in his expression made Stevens say quickly as he opened the door beside him: “Don’t worry, no one will care. You’ll have fun, wait and see if you don’t.”
“I’ve had these shorts for three years,” said Ronny. “They used to come all the way to my knees.”
“They look fine.” It made Stevens happy to be reassuring Ronny, to be handling him at last in a real, authoritative way.
Ronny leaned forward to wave to Jeremy at the gate. “Goodbye, Jeremy. So long.” After a moment the boy spoke again without taking his eyes from the window: “Say, Mr. Stevens, we have to go to the Greys and get June.”
“June!” exclaimed Stevens. “Really Ronny, you know these scout meetings are only for boys!”
“Oh she won’t come there,” said Ronny. “But her grandmother has some errands she wants done or something, so June can come and then go back when I do.”
Stevens could not go against Mrs. Grey and with grating nerves he drove up the hill to where June was already on the porch stoop.
Holding a broken lamp in her hand, June looked today, with her locks of hair, her shirt open at the throat, like an archangel slightly out of drawing. She came down the steps and Stevens, piercing her with his cold, grey glance, reached behind Ronny and opened the rear door for her without a word. June climbed in rather clumsily, and just as Stevens pressed the starter he saw Mrs. Grey standing inside the open front door. The schoolmaster flushed. He felt that in his curtness, the rudeness of making the young girl sit alone in back, he had given himself away. Surely Mrs. Grey had noticed and was now judging him wryly, with an austere tolerance that made him squirm.
All three of them were silent as they skirted the water and drove off the peninsula. Presently, along the road’s edge, the houses gathered nearer one another and turned the highway into Main Street. Stevens had meant to point out his house