by Craig Rice
Looking out through the fog, for a moment David wished it might lift, if only long enough for him to catch one glimpse of the mainland, and the house of the Reverend Arthur Stone. On clear days he could easily see the little house across the inlet, now and then he could see the minister or his daughter walking in their garden, and at night he could see the lights of their windows across the water, reminding him that there was still a world beyond the guarded shores of Telefair. But the house was hidden from him now, the house and the mainland and even the inlet itself.
It was in that moment that a voice spoke to him suddenly through the fog.
“I’d hardly call this a day to be enjoying the scenery.”
He recognized it as Edmund’s voice, coming from somewhere in the impenetrable mist. Edmund himself could not be seen.
“Still,” Edmund’s voice went on, “if you’re looking for a quiet place in which to do a little solitary meditating, I should say this would be ideal—though how anyone could ask for a more solitary place than this whole infernal island, I don’t know.”
David found himself glad, wonderfully glad and somehow a little relieved, that Edmund was there. Curiously, he realized that he was glad it was Edmund and no one else. It was curious because of all the people who lived on Telefair Island, he knew Edmund the least of all.
There had been a few long, amiable talks with Doctor von Berger about music, politics, heredity, books, philosophy and philosophers; talk about any number of things except Doctor von Berger himself. There had been marvelous hours spent with his great-uncle, listening to stories of Telefair, strolling about the Island arm in arm, or just sitting and smiling at each other. He even felt a certain closeness to Edris, from the mere reason of her enmity for him. But the tall cripple always remained a visitor, almost like one from another world. It seemed strange to David that he was glad of his presence now.
“But if you did come here to be solitary …” Edmund’s voice began.
“I’m glad to see you,” David said quickly, meaning it with all his heart. “I mean, I’m glad to hear you. I can’t see you at all, really. But I was feeling lonely, here by myself in the fog.”
“Not surprising,” Edmund said, his voice coming nearer as he spoke. Suddenly David could almost see him; at least it was possible to see where he was. Edmund appeared not so much the figure of a man as a dark and formless shadow on the mist. The shadow might be Edmund, it might be anyone, it might be anything.
“Nothing lonelier than being in a fog like this,” Edmund said agreeably, his voice sounding as though he were nodding his head as he spoke.
The brief phrase seemed to cover everything David had thought and felt since his first waking that morning.
“Luckily these fogs are infrequent, at least at this time of year, or Telefair would be unbearable,” Edmund said. “Lucky for you, anyway, since you have to live here.” He seemed to go on almost too hastily to other things. “Now at Claire, you scarcely ever see a fog. Oh, once in a great while, perhaps. But Claire is on high ground; it overlooks most of the countryside. Sometimes there’s mist below it, but seldom around it.” He went on, talking casually of Claire, his home, and of the country around it, speaking somehow as though it mattered not at all whether David listened. And listening, little by little, David forgot Telefair as a picture of that other house began to form in his mind, a broad, low, comfortable country dwelling, white and classic-pillared, its walls embroidered with vines; a house set among flowering orchards, ancient gardens, and well-tended fields, a house that had remained sunlit and joyous and friendly through its more than two hundred years, growing beautiful with age, while Telefair became aloof and haunted and scornful on its island.
“And the hunting dogs,” Edmund went on, his voice growing warmer and more enthusiastic, and less conscious of David’s presence, the voice of one who carried himself back to some beloved place by the speaking of it. “They’re magnificent.” He spoke of the fine strain that had been brought from England in the old days and how it had been improved through the years, went on to tell of the horses, the stables, the hunts held at Claire. “Don’t really care about hunting though,” he said suddenly. “Always makes me feel silly to kill the little beasts.” His voice became self-consciously apologetic all at once. He laughed. “I must sound like the Telefair—father of the one who was hanged, by the way—who wrote in his diary that his greatest fault was his soft-heartedness: it always made him weep to beat his horse.” As though he had immediately forgotten what he had said, he added, “How the devil can a man beat a horse? I’d as soon beat a child.” He went on talking about Claire.
Unable to see Edmund’s gaunt, homely face with its one-sided, mocking smile, and Edmund’s twisted, crippled leg, David became conscious for the first time of the surprising beauty of Edmund’s voice. It was a deep-pitched voice, vibrant and almost musical, and unexpectedly gentle. Listening to it, David found it difficult to remember how Edmund looked. There was no bitterness in the voice, no contempt, no mockery, nor dislike of any other being, whether animal or human. Yet it was not a happy voice; bitter sorrow was there, and suffering, and deep loneliness. It was the voice of a man who was desperately and incurably lonely, not by choice.
Listening to Edmund as he talked of his home, David found himself wondering why he had disliked the man so intensely at first knowing. Had it been an instinctive defense of Philip Telefair, in that moment when he had seen what was close to hatred for the old man looking out from the cripple’s saturnine eyes? Or had it been his sensing that Edmund did not belong to Telefair as he himself had belonged to it from the instant his boat had touched the shore? He could not tell. He knew only that Edmund had seemed an enemy in that first meeting, and that he was not an enemy now.
“I should think you’d be homesick, away from Claire,” David said suddenly, and almost boldly.
Edmund’s silence in the fog was like a nodding of the head.
“I should think that you’d go back there; that you’d want to be there always,” David went on, and then stopped suddenly with an uncomfortable feeling that he had said too much.
“I imagine that I shall go back there, before very long,” Edmund said quietly; “go back there, and very likely stay.”
There was a long moment of silence, and in it David suddenly found himself close to asking the tall cripple why he stayed on at Telefair when he disliked the place so much, and all but hated Philip Telefair; why he stayed at Telefair and what he was watching for, was on guard for, what he expected to happen at Telefair and why he believed it would happen soon, so that he could go back to his own home before very long. David suddenly realized that Edmund was the one person he could safely question about the Island, and Telefair. He could ask Edmund all that he had so desperately longed, and not dared, to ask Great-Uncle Philip, Edris, Doctor von Berger, even the housekeeper, Zenobie.
To ask Edmund why he was here would be to ask for the whole story of the Island. The words began to form in his mind, when suddenly Edmund spoke again, interrupting his thoughts.
“We’ve one thing in common,” Edmund was saying. “I was an orphaned child, too. Oh, I was a little bit older than you. Between six and seven, to be exact about it. Lost both parents at one blow, a sailing accident out in the bay.” He went on without even the barest breath of a pause. “Tragic, of course, from one way of looking at it. They were young, and in love; they’d been married less than ten years. I don’t know, though. It’s not so tragic to die when you’re too young to have had anything very terrible happen to you.” He said it thoughtfully, with no trace of bitterness or of complaint. “But I wasn’t put in schools, as you were, because I was a cripple, born one.” This time he did pause, but very briefly, as though only to draw his breath. “They say being crippled doesn’t make a difference, that actually you can live like any other, normal person. It isn’t so. It isn’t just because of the few things a cripple isn’t able to do that other people can do. It’s because you’re eternally differe
nt from everybody else in your world. It’s that the people around you, all of them with two, straight healthy legs, are forever on one side of an invisible line, and you’re forever by yourself, on the other side.”
His voice was very calm and very steady, without emotion; he might have been describing riding to hounds over the Virginia countryside. Yet David knew, without being told, that it was the first time Edmund had ever spoken in such a manner about himself, and that it would very likely be the last.
“I had a tutor,” Edmund went on, as though he was answering questions about himself, “and I spent a good deal of my time here at Telefair. Never liked it. Went home whenever I could. Result is that I’ve no more education than a good field hand, though I can’t say that I care. Whenever I’ve wanted badly to learn anything, I’ve always managed all right by myself. Never knew very many people as a child, particularly other children. Always was just the wrong age, just in between people. I was about as much younger than your father as you are younger than I. Your father,” he said unexpectedly, “your father, though I only knew him for a little while, was a close friend. I’ve never had many.”
Once again there was a moment like that one in the Reverend Arthur Stone’s pleasant study, when for an indivisible fragment of time some secret that must be told and still could not be told hung perilously balanced between telling and not telling. David knew that they both were aware of it, and that both were silent in the realization that the next words spoken might bring the secret thing, whatever it was, out of the shadows. He knew too that the instant of indecision, with the words already in Edmund’s mind, was the time when his questioning was all that was needed to bring them forth.
A flood of questions rose to his mind at once, everything that had mystified him since his arrival on the Island: the seclusion, the dogs chained by the boat landing, the presence of Doctor von Berger, the sound of a woman crying somewhere in the night, the attempts Edris and Zenobie had made to drive him away. Yet there was one question that came ahead of them all, the thing he had wanted most to know since he first came to Telefair, indeed, since his childhood, the one question he had feared would never be answered. He felt, even while he could not understand the reason, that the answer to it would be the answer to everything else, and he felt too that if he asked it now, he would be told.
Yet before he could speak, there was a sudden sound in the fog, a sound that froze the words on their lips. The dogs that had been howling a few minutes past were snarling now, snarling and growling savagely and fiercely, and over and above their angry voices came another and even more terrible sound, a man’s screams.
There was a muttered exclamation from Edmund and the noise of rocks scraping together as the cripple leaped to his feet and ran along the shore in the direction of the sound. In spite of his twisted foot, he moved amazingly fast. David ran after him as best he could, stumbling over rocks and boulders, guessing his way through the mist that still hid the water’s edge, but in a moment the dark shadow that he knew was Edmund was out of sight in the fog. He ran on blindly, not knowing where he was going, not knowing what he would be able to do, only aware that someone was in danger, and that he was running toward him. As he ran he realized that the fog had thinned a little in the time he and Edmund had been talking on the shore and was still slowly melting; he could see the vague outlines of objects now like fantastic creations in a misted dream; he could see a delicate line of separation on the ground beneath him that he knew was where the water ended and the land began; he could see a faint glow overhead that must surely be the sunlight somewhere above the fog; and by the time he had come near to the boat landing, from where the screams had issued, he could see Edmund.
The cripple was standing perilously on the very edge of the breakwater, his stick in his hand, beating back the great beasts that were slowly giving ground. Behind him, creeping cautiously toward the landing wharf, was a small man, the man who had been screaming. In that first quick glance, through the dissolving fog, David could see what had happened; the small man had fastened his boat to the wharf and come up to the shore, where the hounds had attacked him. He was trying to make his way back now while Edmund drove them off. In another moment, David saw, the small man, caught there on the breakwater, would have been at the mercy of the hounds.
At the instant when the stranger reached the safety of his boat and shoved it away from the landing, Edmund, with a last blow from his heavy cane, sent the dogs cowering back, still snapping and snarling, and leaped to safety, beyond their reach. Then he turned toward the boat, with an angry gesture.
“What’s the matter with you? Didn’t you know where you were?”
“I do now,” the stranger said. His voice was thin and shaken, and more than a little resentful.
“What happened to you?” Edmund asked crossly, almost irritably.
“Lost in the fog,” the man mumbled. “Thought I was on the other side.” He began to row away.
“Be careful you don’t do it again,” Edmund called after him. He wheeled about and began retracing his steps along the shore. David caught up with him and walked beside him; the air was clear enough now for the cripple’s face to be visible, and David could see how pale it was. He started to speak, started to explain that he had tried to arrive sooner on the scene of action, but the fog had held him back; he started to say something about the dogs, about the stranger in the boat and Edmund’s rescue of him; then he took another glance at Edmund’s face and decided not to speak.
They passed the rocks where they had been sitting and turned up the path that led past the old graveyard to the gardens of Telefair.
“Those dogs would tear a man to pieces,” Edmund said unexpectedly, “would probably have eaten that poor devil alive, in another minute. Jonas keeps them half starved de liberately. There was a mulatto boy landed here four or five years ago, by the same kind of accident—” He interrupted himself and was silent for an instant. “I think it would be better if you didn’t speak of this to Philip Telefair.”
David refrained from asking why.
They paused by the little fountain, visible now, yet still delicately veiled. Ahead of them David could see the old house, Telefair, spectral and pale in what remained of the thinning mist, half seen and half hidden, its edges dimly blurred. It was as though he saw it in a frosted mirror.
Suddenly he felt Edmund’s hand resting on his arm.
“Sometimes there are things that have to be told,” the cripple said, “and that still cannot be told. Promises and bonds of silence are not to be lightly broken, even promises made without any comprehension of their meaning, by a child. Only in times of desperate need can they be broken.”
He withdrew his hand as suddenly as he had placed it there.
“If ever you need help of any kind,” Edmund told him, “remember that I am here, or near here.”
There was nothing more that could be said. They walked silently toward the house.
As they reached the terrace, old Philip Telefair came out through the door, the faint air of distraction he had shown at breakfast completely gone now, a thin, dark cigar held lightly in his long pale fingers.
“I thought I heard the dogs,” he said very casually. “You don’t happen to know what was the matter with them, do you?”
“Nothing was the matter with them,” Edmund answered just as casually, “unless they saw a ghost.”
He went on into the house without another word.
The fog had lightened a little, but the day was still dark. During luncheon, in the dining room of Telefair, the candlelight seemed dim and clouded. The semi-darkness was like a heavy, oppressive shadow; it was impossible not to be aware of it.
Remembering his meeting with Edmund in the fog, David had a curious fancy that here again, at the luncheon table, faces were hidden from him, and that the others in the room came to him only as voices heard through a mist. There was the voice of Doctor von Berger: he noted its singular purring quality for the first time, guttur
al and deep, yet somehow soft; he found himself studying carefully and with close attention the little details of Doctor von Berger’s accent: the muted snare-drum roll of the r’s, the emphasis on the long e’s, the manner in which the s’s always seemed on the verge of becoming z’s, but never quite did. For the first time he observed, not conscious of Doctor von Berger’s round face, the curiously uncomfortable strain in Doctor von. Berger’s laughter. Once during the meal, hearing the doctor laugh at some trifle, he glanced up quickly from his plate, so that for an instant the self-created fog melted away and he saw Doctor von Berger’s eyes peering at him, shiny and protuberant and pale blue. For a moment he wondered again, thinking and yet somehow not thinking, why so often he found the little German doctor staring at him, and he wondered too, why it seemed to be an almost pitying stare.
He was not looking at Philip Telefair’s face, not aware of the graceful movements of the slender, delicate, milk-pale hands, but the beauty of the old man’s voice arrested the processes of his mind just as it always made the breath catch in his throat. He imagined the tones of the voice as being round—great, globular drops of sound. Yet in some way those separate globes were linked together by a smooth and delicate thread of sound, as the individual notes heard from a cello are caught together by the faintest breath of music, a music that is there and still not there, and that can not be heard by the ear alone. Suddenly it seemed to David that, hearing Philip Telefair’s smooth and beautiful voice, he always considered it as a thing of itself, and never associated it with the man who spoke with it. It was almost as though Philip Telefair played on his voice as a musician might play on an instrument, and to consider the sound of it was not necessarily to consider the speaker.