Blue Fire

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  The old man seemed to have heard enough. He put his hand upon the sun-warmed rock of the lookout point with an air of authority. “Enough of this talk for now, or I’m afraid our trip will be spoiled. Susan, I’ve been in this place before too. More than once with your mother. She used to enjoy the drive around the Cape.”

  Susan said nothing, refusing to be softened by this reference to her mother. He must have sensed the resistance in her, for when he went on the chill had returned to his voice.

  “John has told me that you remember seeing Claire with a stone that must have been the Kimberley. That you were playing with the stone and she took it away from you. Have you recalled anything more about that occasion?”

  She answered him shortly. “Nothing more. I don’t know what she did with it after she hid it in the powder bowl.”

  She expected him to urge her to recall the rest, as Dirk had urged her, but he did not.

  “Perhaps it’s better to let it stay forgotten,” he advised. “Better not try to remember. Shall we go on now?”

  Once such advice from him would have reassured her. It did not now. She could only remember how important all concealment must be to him. Perhaps of the past as well as the present.

  They returned to the car and followed the intricate curves of the coastline down the Cape Peninsula. The scenes were varied: small beaches of white sand and little fishing villages; breaks in the mountain rampart through which green inland valleys cupped by hills were visible. Then the road took a center course as the land flattened toward the farthest tip of the Cape. But not, John said, the farthest tip of Africa. Oddly enough, Cape of Good Hope was not the end of Africa. Cape Agulhas across False Bay stretched farther south. Yet it was the Cape of Good Hope—the Cape of Storms—a sailor sought to round, and warmer currents were met when the point was passed, even though the Indian Ocean began technically around the farther cape.

  They had entered the nature reserve now and Susan began to watch for animals. While none of the larger beasts were to be found here, many smaller varieties roamed free under protection. She remembered from her childhood the exciting watch for the wild creatures that blended so well with rocks and vegetation that one had to look long to see them. Once, close beside the road, they came upon an elderly baboon. He remained where he was, staring them haughtily out of countenance. Several of his female companions ran skittishly off to hide themselves in a pile of rocks, but the male posed with great self-possession while Susan took his picture.

  As they moved on, the Cape narrowed and grew rock-bound as it pointed into the sea. On either side of the paved road wildflowers grew in profusion. Cormorants perched on the sea rocks, and the dassies—those small-eared rock rabbits of South Africa—lay sunning themselves on landward outcroppings.

  A rocky hill rising ahead was Cape Point itself. The car could go no farther.

  John found a place to park and carried the basket lunch, while Niklaas took Susan’s arm. They followed the lower road along the False Bay side, moving toward the new lighthouse. Above, on the peak of rock, was the older lighthouse, which had not been wholly successful, since ships had still wrecked themselves on the extending toe of rock below.

  Here the sun was warm and pleasant and they were shielded from the Atlantic breeze. John found a big flat rock below the road and Susan helped him spread out blankets and cushions upon it. Soberly, with a distinct lack of picnic gaiety, she began to unpack the lunch.

  Of the three, only Niklaas seemed contented and for the moment amiably disposed. He had remained unruffled by their earlier discussion, and while, as always, he seemed a little remote, he had clearly come on this trip to enjoy himself. They ate egg and sardine and watercress sandwiches, and nibbled sticky plum tarts.

  In the distance the dim outline of Table Mountain was visible, and John nodded in its direction.

  “From the top of the table you can see the entire Cape on a clear day,” he told Susan. “Have you been up there yet?”

  She shook her head. “Dirk has promised to take me up when he gets back from his trip.”

  “I’d planned to take you climbing up there by the time you were eight or nine,” her father said. “Your mother disliked heights and would never go up the mountain. In the beginning when I was in prison I used to think about the time when I would be free again and you and your mother would return to South Africa. Then you and I would go up the mountain together.”

  Susan glanced at him uncomfortably. “But you never wanted us back. You never wrote.”

  He was quiet for a time. With one hand he reached out toward a scrubby bush beside the rock and plucked absently at its tough green spikes.

  “I wrote,” he said at length. “I wrote while I was in prison—to you as well as to your mother. And I wrote again when I was free.”

  Susan heard him in disbelief. “But there were no letters! Mother told me there were no letters.”

  He went on, paying no attention to her words. “When I sold the Johannesburg house and moved to Cape Town, I kept your room as it was in the hope that you would at least return for a visit. I suppose I kept it as a sort of hostage to fate. By that time I knew Claire would never return, but you still might if I kept it ready for you. I couldn’t blame Claire. She was not one to be tied to a blind man.”

  “But she didn’t know you were blind!” Susan cried. “Of course she never knew.”

  “She knew,” Niklaas said quietly.

  Susan stared at him, stricken. “But she never told me. She never said a word.”

  “Perhaps that was the kinder way, as far as you were concerned.”

  His tone was as cool and detached as though he spoke of some stranger whose wounds he could not feel, and Susan could not bear to hear him. She could not bear to be so torn herself. Torn between what she knew of him so recently and the anguish rising in her for what he had suffered in the past. How could she condemn him for what he was doing now when so much that was cruel had been done to him?

  She had lost what appetite she had and now got up restlessly and sprang from the rock to the road. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll climb to the old lighthouse. I’d like to take a few pictures.”

  “You were always snapping pictures as a little thing, too,” Niklaas said. “I can remember how you treasured the small camera I gave you. And how devastated you were when you broke it.”

  Susan stood uncertain on the path, puzzled by his words. “But I never told you I had broken it,” she said. “I can remember how frightened I was of letting you know. You always hated it when I broke anything and when you lost your temper I was terrified. So I never told you I’d broken it at all.”

  “Of course you told me,” her father said. “You even brought it to me one day in my study to show me the damage.”

  She continued to watch him uneasily, though she did not know what it was she tried to read in his face. How could she have been so convinced all these years that she had never shown him the broken camera? Something stirred vaguely in the dim reaches of the past. Something frightening, something shattering. In memory angry voices sounded again in rising fury and there was the shrillness of a telephone that rang and rang. She covered her face with her hands, swaying a little.

  “Are you all right, Susan?” John called to her. He jumped down to the path and took her arm, steadying her.

  The mists receded. “It’s nothing,” she said. “A moment’s dizziness. Will you walk with me to the top?”

  “Go with her,” Niklaas said. “I shall be content here.” He had taken a cigar from his pocket to clip and light, and they left him smoking peacefully.

  John and Susan walked back to the place where a steep concrete pavement led straight to the top of the rocky hill. The road was closed to general traffic, but open to pedestrians and the jeeps that served the houses clustered at the top. Far above two slim radio towers pointed toward the sky.

  When they had climbed to the enclosure around the old lighthouse, John drew her to a place where she cou
ld lean on the wall and follow with her eyes the sweep of the Cape around the wide curve of False Bay. The Hottentots Holland range was misty blue in the distance. John’s thoughts, however, were not on the view.

  “Something has happened, hasn’t it?” he asked. “I knew the moment I saw you this morning that something was wrong.”

  She had been waiting for an opportunity to tell him what she had seen in the flower market yesterday. Yet now she held back the words, reluctant to speak. What good would it do to involve the lost, saddened man who was her father? How could she lift a finger to injure him further, no matter what he might be doing now?

  “I can’t tell you,” she said. “I must think first. I need more time to think.”

  “I won’t press you,” he said. “But, Susan—” the concern in his voice deepened—“don’t put yourself in some dangerous position.”

  “Dangerous?” She glanced at him quickly. “What danger could there be?”

  “Knowledge can be dangerous if it puts someone else in jeopardy. Are you sure this isn’t something you ought to share for your own safety? Remember, there’s been one attack upon you and there’s someone still wondering whether you found those stones.”

  She shook her head, afraid to think of the stones, afraid to know the face of her assailant. John’s eyes were kind and his mouth had lost its sober lines.

  “Courage is something I admire,” he said gently. “It’s a quality I’ve sensed in you from the first. But don’t let it carry you too far. Ask for help if you need it.”

  She looked into his face and saw more than kindness there, saw in him a hint of tenderness, as if she had been a very young person whom he wanted to protect. Did he mean the courage to hurt her father? she wondered. Or was there something else in his mind—something still more devastating?

  “I don’t know how much courage of any sort I have,” she said. “All I know is that I’m confused. I’m not sure of my directions. I don’t know yet which way I must turn.”

  Unexpectedly he put his hand beneath her chin and tilted her head so that his eyes held hers. What she saw in their depths made her a little afraid. More and more this man was coming to be a safe harbor—the one person to whom she could turn with confidence and trust. But this would not do. His face must not come between her and Dirk. She needed no such harbor. She turned abruptly from his touch, Dirk’s image sharp and clear in her mind, and at once John drew back as if he too were aware of a barrier he must not pass.

  She walked about the base of the lighthouse, peeered down the rocky cliffs, made a great show of being interested in their surroundings, and John Cornish watched her in silence. When he spoke again his words startled her.

  “Why do you have a sjambok on the wall of your living room?” he asked.

  The suddenness of the question took her aback and she stammered a little in answering, not wanting him to know how much she hated the whip that Dirk had hung upon the wall.

  “It—it belonged to Dirk’s father, I believe. It was a—a whim of Dirk’s to hang it on the wall. I’m not sure why.”

  “There are initials cut into the handle?” John asked. “The letters of his father’s name?”

  Susan’s hands were still on the strap of her camera. “How did you know?”

  “I’ve held the whip in my hands,” John said. “I remember it very well. This morning I saw it again on the wall of your living room.”

  There was something in his tone that caught her sensitive ear. “You know the story behind the whip? Will you tell me, please? Tell me what happened.”

  He made no attempt at evasion. “You and your mother were still in South Africa at the time, though you weren’t at the farm in the veld when it happened. Janet and I had been recently married. We went there for a visit. One day your father used that whip in a flogging. I stopped him and took the whip away from him.”

  “But why would my father do such a thing?” Susan asked in dismay.

  “He was capable of great anger when he was aroused. Life hadn’t chastened him then. Once he was a strong and rather violent man. It’s sad to see the fire burned out so that nothing rouses him now.”

  “Who was it he flogged?” Susan asked. “Someone who worked for him on the farm?”

  John looked down toward the surf curling below the steep rocks of the point. He spoke without looking at her. “It was Dirk Hohenfield he whipped that day. Later your father thanked me for stopping him. For all his rage, he would never have injured Dirk when he was in his right senses.”

  Something turned painfully within Susan. “But what had Dirk done to cause my father to fly into a rage?”

  John shook his head. “I never knew the reason. I didn’t ask. I simply got the whip away from him and went into the house until everyone could cool off. I didn’t see Dirk again before Janet and I left, and your father never mentioned the cause of what happened.”

  The surf far below had a chill sound as it broke about the rocks of the point. The South Atlantic held a steely glitter beneath the sun and the breeze had turned cold.

  Susan could bear to hear no more. All feeling in her seemed drawn to a taut, thin strand that might snap at any minute.

  “Remember that all this happened a very long time ago,” John said. “Dirk was only a boy. Everyone has forgotten it by this time.”

  Dirk had not forgotten, she thought as they started down the steep roadway. Not with that whip upon the wall. But she did not want to think of that now. She wanted only to put the ugly memory of the whip from her mind.

  Casually John caught her hand as they went down the walk and she found the pressure of his fingers comforting. Had he come here with Janet too? she wondered, and felt a sudden pity for his loss and his loneliness.

  “I’m sorry about your wife,” she said softly.

  “This trip has brought her back,” John admitted. “I’ve been thinking of her a good deal ever since we left Cape Town. But all that belongs to another lifetime. Not to the one I’m living now.”

  She understood what he meant. All lives seemed to break into segments. Her own too. The segment of her childhood in South Africa. The growing-up years in Chicago. The new world of the newspaper and all that pertained to it. Then the world of Dirk that she was living now. She pressed John’s fingers gently and slipped her hand from his.

  They found the old man as they had left him, his cigar smoked to a stub, his attitude one of listening, as if he waited for their coming, ready to start home.

  The three of them had little to say on the drive up the opposite side of the Cape. Susan curled herself in the front seat, watching the clean little towns and villages slip past. But her thoughts were not upon them. She was remembering what her father had told her of the day she had brought her broken camera to him. A day she had buried carefully in the past—for what reason she did not know. This time she would not try to shut the door.

  Let it open—let it open fully! She was ready for the answer now. A purpose began to come clear in her mind. She knew very well what must be done. A new impatience seized her to reach home and be off on her own private mission as soon as possible.

  21

  When Niklaas said he had some errands downtown and asked John to drive him there, Susan felt an enormous relief. She did not request them to drop her at her true destination, preferring to let her purpose remain secret for the moment. When they left her at the Aerie and drove away, she went into the house only long enough to rid herself of her camera equipment. Then, still wearing her coat and with her big leather handbag slung over her shoulder, she set off for Protea Hill. The key to her old room was in her bag and she was sure now of the one object that would bring memory flooding back.

  Somewhere she had built up a block against what had happened, but there would be a way to level the barrier, to remember fully. She must finish this before Dirk came home. Then she would know whether or not she must tell him what she had discovered about her father.

  The maid was long in answering her ring. S
usan greeted her a little breathlessly. Asking no permission, she ran past her up the stairs and down the hall. She hoped Mara would not be about today. This was something she wanted to achieve quickly without her knowledge.

  To her surprise, the door of her childhood room stood open and a breeze blew into the hall from the windows. She paused in dismay in the doorway to see that the promised spring cleaning was under way and that the housemaid was working here under the supervision of Mara Bellman. Mara herself knelt on a cushion beside the toy chest, with articles from the big kist heaped on the floor beside her. In her hands she held the small box camera and she opened the back to peer into it as Susan came indignantly into the room.

  For a breathless moment the two stared at each other in open antagonism. All the pent-up resentment and distrust and jealousy Susan had felt toward this woman surged up in an angry wave of feeling.

  “What are you doing here?” she cried. “I haven’t given you permission to go through my things!”

  A flush tinted Mara’s fair skin, but she did not rise from her position on the floor.

  “It’s a job long overdue,” she said, waving a scornful hand at the toys she had heaped on the floor. “All this seems to be trash and I was sure you’d be willing to let us get rid of it.”

  “I’m not willing!” Susan spoke sharply. “My father has left everything in this room in my hands and I want it left alone. Will you go, please?”

  Mara made no move to comply. She still held the camera with its back open and again she looked into the small black box curiously. She shook it as if she half expected something to rattle or fall out. Susan watched her in an agony of impatience, wondering what she would do if Mara chose to oppose her. But the other woman shrugged in elaborate indifference, set the camera back in the chest, and got slowly to her feet.

  “As you like,” she said, and nodded to the maid to come with her out of the room.