Blue Fire

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  There was still a strangeness about Dirk. Susan wanted to cry, “We’re here!” and go straight into his arms the moment the boy had gone. But now he kept his distance and made an effort at casual conversation that held her away.

  “I’m fond of this hotel,” he said. “They go in for old-fashioned British comfort of the sort that used to be demanded by officers who served in India and spent their holidays in Cape Town. There was no nonsense about those old boys when they wanted something.”

  He was still much too keyed up and clearly as afraid of silence as Mara had seemed to be in the car. But Susan could hold herself away from him no longer, and slipped her arms about his neck.

  “What is it?” she asked, her cheek against his. “Ever since the plane started down you’ve been waiting—as if you expected something unpleasant to happen.”

  “It has happened,” he told her. He held her to him briefly and kissed her cheek, but the evidence of being wound up did not leave him. He had withdrawn from her in some strange way and instinct warned her not to push him when such a mood was upon him. Whatever was wrong, he would not talk to her now. And for the moment, in spite of her disappointment in this entire homecoming, she was almost too weary to care.

  It was wonderful to get out of her clothes and into the white-tiled bathroom. She turned on the oversized taps in the enormous English tub, dropped in the big chained plug, and gave herself up to the luxury of steaming hot water. Afterwards she crept between sheets warmed by a hot-water bottle, and pulled the blankets and slippery satin puff over her. She was sound asleep by the time Dirk came to bed, and she slept longer than he did the next morning.

  She awakened lazily to the waiter’s knock and watched him bring in a breakfast tray with covered silver dishes and a coffee pot. He set up a table in discreet silence and bowed himself away. Dirk was up and already shaved, his fair hair sleek and darkened from the water, his skin glowing above the towel wrapped around the neck of his terry-cloth robe. Susan lay watching him through half-closed eyes, savoring the novelty of wifehood, wishing he would forget about breakfast and come to tell her how much he loved her. His manner, however, was brisk and impersonal.

  When the waiter had gone, he poured a cup of coffee, weakened it with the usual English touch of hot milk, sugared it too generously, and brought it to her.

  “This will wake you up,” he said, plumping her pillow so that she could sit up in bed. “I ordered breakfast up here so we could make an early start. How are you feeling this morning?”

  She wasn’t sure as yet, but she tried to answer cheerfully that she was fine. The diluted coffee was a little sickening to her taste, but she did not want to offend him by pouring it out and starting over with a strong black cup that would shock her awake. Somehow he could never believe that she liked her coffee black or that she preferred to get up and wash and dress before she had anything at all.

  He turned to the window to fling draperies open to the daylight, and she watched hopefully. If the day was bright and sunny, perhaps her spirits would rise correspondingly. But from the bed she could see now that the sky was white with solid clouds, the early morning gray and drab.

  When she slipped from under the covers and went to the window, she found that their room faced the bay, with the mountain out of sight behind. To her left the Lion’s Head was hidden by clouds—an omen of continued bad weather, she remembered—and mist curled along the flank that stretched toward the bay and was known as Signal Hill. The red roofs and white houses of Cape Town lay spread beneath the window, with the big buildings of the downtown section making an island in themselves near the shore of Table Bay. But there was no bright color in the scene today, no sunshine to cheer her, no lifting of her spirits. And no sense at all of recognition, of coming home. Shivering, she turned back to the electric heater.

  Dirk was serving a portion of omelet onto her plate, offering toast in the silver rack that assured its arriving cold.

  “Let’s hurry a bit,” he said, the touch of impatience in his manner no longer hidden. “I’d like enough time to get you over to the house and settled before I go to see your father.”

  She sat down obediently and tried to eat. But the sense of things going wrong made a lump of discouragement in her throat and it was hard to swallow.

  At least Dirk had made no suggestion that she go with him to see Niklaas van Pelt, and she was grateful for that.

  While she was dressing in a gray-wool suit against the chill that the electric heater did not entirely dispel, the telephone rang and Dirk answered it. Miss Bellman was waiting for them downstairs with the car and the news gave no lift to Susan’s spirits.

  As they went down and out to the car, she felt increasingly depressed. Nothing seemed auspicious for the beginning of their married life together in Cape Town. Nothing was going right or turning out as she had hoped it would.

  This morning Mara was alone and at the wheel of the long gray Mercedes. Susan and Dirk joined her in the front seat and once more Susan was aware of the girl’s vital beauty, her assurance and air of efficiency. She seemed enormously alive, and by contrast Susan felt drained of vitality.

  “Your car’s ready for you whenever you want to come to Protea Hill to drive it away,” Mara told Dirk. “I suppose you’ll pick it up this morning when you come to see Mr. van Pelt?”

  Dirk nodded. “I’ll be glad to have it back. Susan, unfortunately, doesn’t drive. Her education has been neglected.”

  Susan smiled weakly and gave her attention to this old section of Cape Town through which they were driving. The streets were narrow and took unexpected turns up and down steep hills. White cottages, built in the old Dutch style with gabled fronts, were visible on every hand, and there were glimpses of lacy wrought-iron balconies and fences that suggested Spain more than Holland. Rain drizzled across the windshield and mist still shrouded the mountain. Everywhere people were hurrying to work and there were many dark faces among the light. In their dress the people on the sidewalks and in the double-decker buses looked like those one saw in New York or Chicago. This might have been a rainy day anywhere, except for an occasional native blanket or Moslem veil. Whatever lay behind headlines which had been shouted across the world was not visible on the surface this morning in Cape Town.

  The car was taking a general uphill course in the direction of the Lion’s Head and at length it pulled up before a two-story stucco house with Spanish arched windows and a red-tiled roof.

  “I’ve found a cookie for you,” Mara said as they got out of the car, and Susan remembered the familiar name used for cooks. “And a Bantu boy for the yard. By tomorrow I’ll have your housemaid and I’ll bring her up myself. Hope you can make do till then.”

  They would barely be able to endure, Susan thought wryly, and reminded herself at once that these were different ways and she must be grateful for all that Mara was doing to make them comfortable.

  “You’ve been efficient, as always,” Dirk said pleasantly, covering Susan’s silence.

  Mara got out of the car in her brisk way, slamming the door after her. She seemed displeased as she went ahead of them through a gate of iron grillwork set in a white stone wall. Following her, while Dirk watched the Bantu boy unloading the bags, Susan noted a small bricked courtyard with a delphinium border. The steps to the arched door were shallow and at the top she walked directly into a wide hall with a darkly polished floor, its gleam unhidden by rugs. At the rear a staircase railed in iron grillwork turned at right angles and disappeared toward the floor above.

  Mara ran ahead up the stairs to fling open doors in the upper hall. Moving after her more slowly, Susan had the increasing sense that this was wrong as a homecoming. Dirk was not even at her side. Another woman showed the way, another woman had made all the preparations of welcome, had arranged both flowers and furnishings. She tried to brush such unreasonable resentment aside. Later there would be time to acquaint herself with the house and make it her own and Dirk’s.

  Upstairs Mara h
ad chosen a room for them and furnished it with linens and freshly hung curtains and draperies. Her high heels clicked across the polished wood of the floors as she explained this and that, and called orders to the Bantu boy to bring up the bags.

  “You may have a little trouble getting him to understand,” Mara said, speaking to the boy in Afrikaans. “But Cookie is one of our coloreds and she knows English, so you can get her to translate. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll run down and show Dirk his office.”

  Susan thanked the native boy as he set the bags down in obedience to her gesture, and he went away, moving quietly on bare black feet.

  The bedroom was pleasantly spacious, but undistinctive, with twin beds, dressing table and bureau, a wardrobe closet. Like fashions in clothes, furniture also pulled the hemispheres together, making it easier to forget other differences. Only the wardrobe closet—a wide armoire—set this room apart. Yet there was, Susan felt, a wrong note about the whole. The over-flowered draperies did not quite harmonize with the spreads. The furniture seemed placed without thought for balance. It was as though an unfriendly hand had arranged everything on a purposely jarring key.

  There were windows on two sides, so at least there should be a fine view on a clear day. Now they overlooked a world of mist. Leaning on the sill of a window on the garden side, Susan found that the house was perched high on the lip of what appeared to be a dry, woodsy ravine. Beneath her window stretched lawn and garden, with a retaining wall at the back. Beyond, the hill dropped steeply away to the deep recesses of the ravine. There mist wreathed the flat, parasol tops of a thick stand of Mediterranean pines. Some distance below were other houses on the far side where the hill climbed up from the slit of the ravine. “Aerie” might not be a very original name, but Susan could see that for this house it was appropriate.

  She pulled off the small soft hat she had traveled in and ran a comb through her russet hair. Then she went out of the bedroom and down the stairs.

  Mara and Dirk stood near the front door, engaged in earnest conversation, speaking softly as if what they discussed was private. Some instinct of warning halted her on the stairs. She remembered Mara’s forced volubility in the car yesterday and Dirk’s rising uneasiness as the plane came in to land. Then too there was Mara’s almost officious manner of taking over the preparations in this house, and the jarring touches Susan had sensed in the bedroom. The work perhaps of a woman whose intent was not wholly amiable? Disturbed and alert now to anything that might lie beneath the surface, Susan went down the stairs.

  Mara heard her step and looked up, her lovely face blank of any emotion. Whatever her words had been with Dirk, their import was not visible in her expression.

  “Mr. van Pelt expects to see you tomorrow, Mrs. Hohenfield,” she said matter-of-factly. “Suppose I call for you in the car right after lunch?”

  The tide of warning did not subside in Susan. This was too sudden, too soon. She would not be managed like this against her will and she did not believe a visit to her father had been the entire subject of this whispered conversation.

  Before she could object, however, Dirk spoke quickly. “That will be fine, Mara. My wife will be ready.”

  The other woman gave Susan a bright, slightly vacant smile and went to the door. “I’ll leave you then. You won’t need the car to get over this morning, Dirk?”

  “I know the way on foot,” Dirk said, his voice dry.

  Mara ran down the flagged walk and got into the car. With a careless wave of her hand she pulled away from the curb.

  “I will not be ready,” Susan told Dirk in a low, indignant voice. “You had no right to arrange this without consulting me. I’m not ready to see my father.”

  Dirk closed the door upon the damp mists. He put a hand beneath her small stubborn chin and tilted it upward.

  “I’m sorry, darling. This has been a bleak homecoming for you, hasn’t it? I know you didn’t mean to see your father so quickly. But it’s better to get it over with and put it behind you. He expects you.”

  She refused to be appeased. “I don’t like that woman! I don’t like it a bit that she has arranged everything in this house to please herself. And now she’s trying to manage me!”

  To Susan’s surprise Dirk put his head back and laughed. “I do believe you’re jealous,” he said.

  She stared at him angrily, realizing that she was off on the wrong foot but not knowing how to make a graceful recovery.

  He put an arm about her and drew her to him as they started upstairs. “You have my permission to put her down all you like,” he said. “She’s a bossy piece, and if you don’t care for her arrangements in this house you have only to change them. Otherwise, don’t give her a thought.”

  The relief that flowed through her washed away her anger. If he felt like this, then Mara didn’t matter at all.

  Upstairs in the bedroom Dirk returned to the subject of her father. “Don’t forget that this meeting will be as much of an ordeal for your father as for you. Especially since he won’t be able to see you.”

  Susan turned from arranging her toilet articles on the dressing table. “Not see me? What do you mean?”

  “You know that he’s blind,” Dirk said.

  “Blind? Of course I didn’t know!” Susan stared at him in dismay. “You never mentioned it. You never told me—”

  “How could I, when you always stopped me from talking about your father? Besides, I’d supposed—”

  She walked away from him and stood at the window that overlooked the ravine and the parasol tops of the pine trees. But she saw nothing of the view before her. As though a curtain had been rolled up, her father’s face had flashed back into her mind more clearly than at any time since Dirk had found her in Chicago and wakened long-suppressed thoughts of Niklaas van Pelt. Her father’s eyes had been gray, with a direct, penetrating look about them. They were eyes that could see through you quite clearly—or so she had believed as a child. It had always been difficult to keep a secret from him or to deceive him in any way. Her mother saw only what she chose to see, but Niklaas van Pelt saw the truth. And with every child that was sometimes a thing to be hidden. It seemed unbelievable that so clear and vigorous a look was now quenched forever. She would need to fear his eyes no longer. She had been fearing them, she realized. Yet the thought brought her no relief, only a sad stabbing of pain.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve shocked you,” Dirk said gently. “I had no idea that you didn’t know. After all, he’s quite an old man now, and he has been accustomed to being blind for many years. It hasn’t changed him, except that sometimes he must be more dependent than he likes to be. But that is what I am for—and Mara too.”

  As he spoke he moved in and out of the adjoining bathroom, putting his shaving things in the cupboard over the washbasin, setting a bottle of shaving lotion on a shelf. Susan followed him into the room that was so much larger than most American bathrooms, and reached for a glass. Shock had left her a little sick, though she was not sure why. Long ago her father had been dismissed from her life, from her affection and her fears. Why should it matter now to learn suddenly that an old man whom she no longer knew, who was nothing to her in a personal way, had long been without his sight? Why should the knowledge give her this feeling of faintness?

  She reached for the cold-water faucet to fill the glass, but somehow her grip was insecure and the glass flew out of her hand, struck a corner of the wash basin, shattering on the floor. She stared at the debris with a sense of horror that was out of proportion to the damage done.

  “No harm,” Dirk said. “The glass doesn’t matter. But perhaps you’d better sweep it up so we won’t step on it later.”

  Awkwardly she obeyed. There was a hand brush in a cabinet and she knelt on the floor, sweeping the bits of glass into a pile. Her fingers were shaking ridiculously, though she tried to hide their trembling from Dirk. Her tendency to drop things and then be upset out of all proportion to the damage was a senseless weakness of which she was ashamed, a
nd she was glad that Dirk was preoccupied and did not seem to notice.

  When he was ready to leave for her father’s, she went with him to the door and he kissed her, tweaked her ear affectionately, and went off down the street. She watched him out of sight, not altogether reassured. In more ways than one she had behaved badly this morning and the knowledge depressed her.

  The cook, a small, brown-skinned woman with a doek about her head—the white kerchief draped in the special manner of South Africa—came in to ask about lunch. Susan tried to be friendly, but the woman seemed uncertain of a strange American, and ill at ease. She must fix whatever she liked, Susan told her. Whatever was available. Such vagueness in an employer was clearly unfamiliar to the woman and again Susan felt inadequate. How could she manage to cope with the duties this house would demand when she was at a loss when it came to so small a task as giving directions to the cook?

  When the woman had gone doubtfully back to her kitchen, Susan began to look about the downstairs portion of the house. The dining room seemed dark on this gray day and she spent no time there, but went on to the living room. This promised to be cheerful and attractive. A big bay window with a cushioned seat beneath it overlooked Cape Town. There was a higher, wider view to be had here than she had seen this morning from her hotel window. The room possessed a small fireplace too and, while the furnishings were undistinctive and lacking in color, a good deal could be done with personal touches.

  Pictures always helped bare and characterless walls. This, at least, was a start she might make in the right direction. There were a few of her mounted photographs in her bag upstairs. Dirk had objected to their weight but she had wanted them with her. They would help to make her feel at home. Glad of a purpose to occupy her, she ran up to the bedroom and got the photographs from her bag.