Margaret Millar - Fire Will Freeze

Miss Isobel Seton settled her chin into the collar of her sable coat and, as was her custom in moments of stress, mentally composed an abusive letter. Her lips moved gently as she groped for a good strong beginning.

Messrs. Abercrombie & Fitch, Sirs:

I have been mercilessly swindled by your allegedly reputable firm. Last week I purchased a pair of skis at your store for the sum of seventy-five dollars. I intimated to the man in charge that I had never been on skis before. He assured me that it was all a matter of keeping your knees bent. If this man is an example of your staff, well, all I can say is I’d like to bend his knees for him...

“Too personal,” Miss Seton murmured critically into her collar. “I shall have to be more curt.”

Sirs:

I am returning to you, via dog-sled, a pair of skis for which I foolishly paid you seventy-five dollars on January the fourteenth. I feel your staff should have more responsibility to the general public than to sell skis to anyone simply for the asking. I do not mind being mercilessly swindled, having lived in New York for ten years, but I object strongly to lack of civic responsibility.

“Because one of your irresponsible clerks did not prevent me from buying a pair of skis, I am sitting here in what these damned Canadians call a Sno-bus, which means a bus that meets a Sno-train and conveys one to a Sno-lodge. I am marooned in the wilds of Quebec in a raging Sno-storm. My nose is red. I am thirty-five, which is not an age for adjustments. I am hungry. The bus driver has pimples at the back of his neck. The windows are frozen and I am cooped up with several other unfortunates, none of whom had even the foresight to bring along stimulants...

“Oh, dear,” Miss Seton muttered. “I will get personal.”

In the seat behind, the honeymoon couple resumed the argument they had begun in the station at Montreal. The woman’s voice was loud and tearful.

“A honeymoon on skis! Why not a motorcycle? Or a submarine?”

“Now, angel,” the man said. “Now, Maudie.”

“Angel be damned,” Maudie said.

“Now...”

“You be damned, too.”

Miss Seton, in the act of some wholesale damnation herself, felt a twinge of sympathy. She moved her ear a fraction of an inch closer to the top of the seat.

“This is the worst honeymoon I ever had, Herbert,” Maudie said. “Just look at the class of people I’ve got to associate with. Just look around, Herbert.”

Miss Seton shrank into her sables while Herbert presumably looked around.

“Outdoor types,” Maudie continued. “I bet they can hardly wait for their vitamins.”

“Vitamins,” Herbert said cautiously, “are all right.”

“The Riviera with Tom, Bermuda with poor Jack, and a snow bus with you, Herbert. Well, I won’t say anymore. It speaks for itself.”

Under pretext of moving into a more comfortable position, Miss Seton maneuvered her head until her eyes were on a level with the top of the seat.

Herbert was studiously pretending to be admiring the scenery though the windows were completely opaque. Even in anguish his face bore the stamp of good nature. It was fat and pink and scrubbed-looking and seemed uncertain whether to cry or laugh. He wore a corduroy visored ski-cap which covered his head and ears.

“I’ll bet he’s as bald as an egg,” Miss Seton thought, and turned her attention to Maudie.

Maudie was sniffling into a damp half-frozen handkerchief. Miss Seton had a glimpse of a tiny tear-drenched face, large mournful blue eyes and wisps of pale gold hair straggling from beneath a white fur parka. Apparently at some time in the past Maudie had not been averse to a ski honeymoon for she had gone to some trouble to trick herself out as elegantly as possible. Her ski-suit was pale blue suede sprouting white fur.

Deeply ashamed of her sable coat and Sally Victor hat, Miss Seton smiled apologetically at Herbert and ducked her head. Above the howling of the wind she heard Herbert’s voice saying hopefully:

“See, Maudie? I bet she’s not full of vitamins.”

“She’s full of prunes,” Maudie said distinctly.

Miss Seton was moved by this injustice. “I haven’t eaten a prune since I left boarding school fifteen years ago,” she murmured. “Fifteen years. Oh, dear.”

She was so dispirited by this thought that she changed position again, this time moving well forward in her seat. It was much more difficult to catch anything the couple in front of her said. When they talked at all it was in whispers. Usually it was the man who talked and the girl did not look at him but sat fumbling with her purse or pushing her hands in and out of the pockets of her jacket.

Her nervous movements did not fit in with the calm, poised expression on her face or the easy way she wore her well-used ski-suit. She had pushed her hood back on her head and the bright red cloth made her hair seem blue-black and her skin too dead white.

“I wonder why she’s so pale,” Miss Seton thought, and moved her head again to look up at the rack where the girl’s skis were placed. The skis, like the ski-suit, were well-used, and had once been, Miss Seton decided, expensive. On the rack beside the skis lay the girl’s bag, and that too seemed out of place. It was very new and very cheap.

Her name was Paula, Miss Seton knew. The man said the name often, as if the name itself fascinated him, quite apart from the fact that it belonged to the girl. Even though he spoke in whispers he sounded angry.

“... regret it, Paula.”

The girl shrugged and said nothing. Miss Seton hurriedly twitched the veil away from her ears and bent forward a little more. But the wind had risen again and was rattling the window panes. By the time it had abated, the man was talking about christianias and stem turns. His voice was louder now and he turned his head around and gave Miss Seton a long cold stare. Miss Seton blushed and bent over to examine an imaginary run in her stocking.

“What a savage-looking creature,” she said to herself. “Probably suckled by werewolves.”

She studied his profile with renewed interest. It was a rugged profile topped by a thatch of red hair clipped very short. The only non-rugged thing about the young man was his eyelashes, which were long and curly, and of which, Miss Seton judged from the furious way he blinked them, he was very much ashamed.

Miss Seton withdrew into her collar and wrote him a letter.

Dear Werewolf:

I haven’t eaten a prune since I left boarding school fifteen years ago. This may seem irrelevant, but I wanted to give you some idea of my state of mind. I have just been looking at your eyelashes and find them entrancing. Are you married, by the way? I’m not so bad. I have brown hair and brown eyes. I’m thirty-five and I have a modest income...

“No, I mustn’t propose,” Miss Seton murmured dreamily.

The werewolf was far too young anyway and probably on the verge of marrying or the verge of divorcing Paula. Nothing else could account for the intensity of his gaze, Miss Seton decided, unless he was a communist! Or perhaps he merely belonged to the intense type of youth, as opposed to the bored-since-birth variety like the girl across the aisle.

This other girl’s luggage was conspicuously new, conspicuously expensive and conspicuously labeled: Miss Joyce Hunter, Westmount, Quebec. Like the tearful Maudie and the poised Paula, Joyce Hunter was dressed for skiing. She wore a suit of white Grenfell cloth and from the edge of her parka grew three black shiny curls as bored and perfect as Joyce herself.