The Stone Bull

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  But this was ridiculous, and I shook myself angrily. No one else knew about that phone call. Not even my mother. It was my own guilty conscience causing the sort of stab I would probably experience for the rest of my life. If this sheet was not for me, however, then it must be intended for Brendon, and that was somehow far more frightening. I didn’t like to think of such malice being directed toward my husband.

  Quickly I unlocked the door and looked into the corridor. The long tunnel of the hallway was empty; the eerie stillness and sense of emptiness were still there. The alcove that housed the stairs to the roof was a shadowed cave. Once this section had been a main part of the hotel and had echoed to the voices and footsteps of guests. Now no one but Brendon and I and the hotel help would come here. Yet someone had come. Someone who had slipped this sheet of paper under the door, and it could hardly be considered a message from the desk.

  Never mind. It would have to wait until Brendon came up to bed, I decided, and placed the sheet beside the lamp, wondering where the quotation had come from and what it could possibly mean. Brendon would know and explain it all away.

  To comfort myself, I opened the box that contained my water colors and acrylic paints, and leafed through the sketchbook I’d brought with me. In New Jersey I had worked on my collection of wild-flower paintings, and it distracted me now to look through them. I smiled over my careful representation of the lowly skunk cabbage—Symplocarpus foetidus. I’d thought it a fascinating plant in the way it uncurled into bloom in the early spring, with great green leaves and the curious, purple-streaked hood that was its flower. The aroma one could ignore.

  My drawings were exact in every detail, since I liked to be meticulous, and I sometimes felt they might almost be picked from the page. That satisfied my striving to make them as flawless as I possibly could.

  The room was beginning to feel cold, and I put my sketch things away and went to close the balcony doors against a rising wind that rushed through the forest Heat had started to gurgle in the radiators, and I was glad to close the doors, because entry from that direction would be all too easy by way of connecting balconies. Probably a foolish thought here in this peaceful place. Then I went into the adjoining bedroom and lighted all the lamps. I have been sitting here ever since, waiting and thinking. Always listening, while my uneasiness grows.

  But I knew this was getting me nowhere and eventually I undressed and put on the bright fleece dressing gown of Chinese red that Brendon had not yet seen me wear. A full-length mirror on the bathroom door told me that I looked dramatically beautiful—and quite unlike myself. The robe had belonged to Ariel and Mother had insisted that I take it with me. “I can’t bear to give all her beautiful things away to strangers,” she’d said. “Keep this at least, Jenny, to remember her by.”

  I needed nothing more to remind me sorely of Ariel, and the gown wasn’t right for me. When I had a chance, I would replace it. I bound my hair into a long braid and let it hang over my shoulder in a dark rope against the red fabric. Perhaps he would like me to be dramatic once in a while, and dressing up made me feel more courageous and less apprehensive about that sheet of paper on the desk.

  When I was ready I got into bed with a book to read. But I was more weary than I knew and I fell sound asleep quickly, with all the lights left burning around me.

  3

  This is another night and I walk the path on the far side of the lake and watch the stars flickering in the water. Against the dark sky the steepled roofs of the Mountain House make a still darker silhouette. What is it like up there among those fantastic towers? What a view it must command. But I have no heart for such exploration now.

  No one knows I am out here, but I need to be alone so I can think. I’m not sure I will ever know what to make of this strange day I have somehow lived through, with its isolated and shocking occurrences that all seem to be building toward some inevitable climax that I am afraid to reach.

  It began last night, really, with a knocking on the door that roused me from deep sleep, penetrating my vanishing dreams. I sprang up from the bed, startled, remembering the bolt that was keeping Brendon out.

  “Coming!” I called and ran in bare feet across the carpet.

  The bolt slid back with a clatter and I pulled open the door. I had never seen him look so tired and there was a lingering of anger in his face that I knew was the residue of his long session with Loring Grant. His eyes didn’t light at the sight of me as they usually did, and when I tried to fling my arms about his neck he held me off.

  “Don’t ever wear red,” he said. “It doesn’t become you,” and he strode past me into the room.

  I was left to stare after him in astonishment and distress. “I—I’m sorry you don’t like the gown. It belonged to my sister and Mother wanted me to have it.”

  “Take it off,” he told me, “and go back to bed.”

  He had never spoken to me in that tone before, and I felt both shock and resentment. As I unzipped myself from the lounging robe and got into bed, he gathered up his night things and went off to the bathroom, leaving me to fume. But my pique didn’t last for long because I was trying hard to be an understanding wife. Brendon had undoubtedly come from a difficult time with Loring and he was worried about things that had nothing to do with me. His annoyance had spilled over because I was there, and that was all it meant. I must be quiet and not add fuel to an already angry blaze. What had happened was simply a new fact that I had learned about my husband—that he didn’t like red—and I would add this to my growing fund of knowledge. Adjustments were what marriage was all about, and it couldn’t be easy for a man of thirty-six to suddenly get used to a new wife who knew so little about him.

  By this time I’d begun to feel virtuous and self-approving of my calm and tolerant reasoning. The red fleece gown lay discarded on the carpet, and tomorrow I would give it to Irene to dispose of.

  Brendon came back into the room, set the balcony doors ajar and went about turning off the lights I had set burning. I watched him over the top of the covers and saw that the strain had lessened a little in his face and in the muscular lines of his body above his pajama pants. I loved the way he looked—lean and strong, with never a hint of fat.

  “There’s an energy shortage, remember?” he said, moving toward another light.

  I thought of the note and the reason for my wanting as much light for company as possible, but in the same breath I told myself that it could wait until morning. I didn’t want to upset him any more now. So I watched and was silent.

  With an air of deliberate avoidance, he stepped around the puddle of red the robe made upon the floor and went to turn out the Chinese lamp on the desk. There he saw the sheet of paper and picked it up, moving toward the bed.

  “What’s this?”

  I had to answer. “I don’t really know. Someone pushed it under the door after I came back to the room tonight. I thought you might understand what it means.”

  If he knew he wasn’t going to tell me and I noted in dismay his violence as he ripped the paper across and across and let the pieces flutter toward the wastebasket. When he had turned out the last lights, he came to lie beside me on the bed, not touching me, but stiff and unrelaxed, as though he couldn’t bear my nearness.

  I was really frightened now. “What is it, Brendon? Tell me what’s wrong.”

  The groan that seemed to be torn from him had a despairing ring, but at least he turned on his side and drew me close, held my own trembling close to him until I quieted against his warm body, reassured about nothing except that his arms were around me and that he loved me still. While he explained nothing, his love convinced me of what I needed to know.

  I slept all night in his arms, and I think we both slept deeply out of weariness. It was I who awakened first and raised on an elbow to watch the still marvelous novelty of finding him asleep beside me. The lines of worry were swept away from forehead and mouth, and he looked rather young and boyish. A dark smudging of beard showed across t
he firm chin that I had come to love, and long lashes lay upon his cheeks, hiding the bright blue of his eyes. He wouldn’t have liked it if I’d told him, but I thought he was a beautiful man.

  Beyond our balcony windows the sun was shining and I got quietly out of bed, stretching widely. The scarlet pool of Ariel’s robe still lay on the carpet and I scooped it into a bundle that I thrust far back on the floor at my end of the closet. If some association with red disturbed my husband, then I would take care that he not be annoyed by it again.

  Nevertheless, this morning, I didn’t feel like letting the matter go entirely. Last night something had turned him from me, however briefly, and unless I was to stumble again in the future, I needed to understand why this had happened. It would be too difficult to live with someone whose nerves might turn raw at any moment that I unknowingly irritated him. We couldn’t live like that, and today I would find a time to ask him openly what had been the matter last night, and why he had torn up that note so savagely. Whatever happened to him from now on, I was a part of his life, and I had to understand.

  When I had bathed and dressed in brown slacks and a rust-colored shirt, Brendon wakened and smiled at me sleepily. “You’re up too early. What’s the rush?”

  “It’s such a beautiful day that I couldn’t go back to sleep. Laurel is waiting for us out there. Will you show me everything today?”

  His look was loving and there was none of that brief rejection I’d glimpsed in him last night. “At least we can begin. The dining room opens at seven-thirty and I’ll be ready.”

  I carried my jacket when I went downstairs, and took along my sketching things as well. We breakfasted alone at a table near the windows, since the others had their first meal of the day at their house. I watched cloud shadows chase themselves across the sunny valley, painting shapes of dark and light on distant mountain slopes.

  As we ate he told me more about the McClain family and the long years of custom and tradition that had gone into the building of the Mountain House. The main stem of the family, the inheriting branch, as far as Laurel was concerned, were all here at the hotel. The entire property had been left in equal parts by Brendon’s father, Bruce McClain, to Irene, his wife, Naomi, his sister, and to his son, Brendon.

  “So we are the board that runs things,” he explained.

  “Then Loring comes into it only through Irene?” I asked.

  Brendon dabbed dark honey on his toast. “‘Only’ isn’t the right word. He has come to have a very strong influence upon my mother in the six years of their marriage, and sometimes she sides with him against me. Naomi is devoted to Laurel, but she can blow with the wind, so it’s a rather sticky situation. I set down my opposition very clearly last night to the things he wants to do. He’s already set some of them in motion, and that makes for complications.”

  “But isn’t it hard to keep going these days? Why don’t you want that oil company conference coming in?”

  “Tradition again, I suppose. We like to attract a different type of conference from the commercial hotels, and we’ve been doing very well with them. In a few weeks there will be the annual gathering of old carriages here. You’ll be surprised at the horse-drawn rigs that will turn up. We have a number here in our own collection down at the Red Barn. That’s a place you’ll have to see. Much of it is a museum now. Then we’re having a gathering of organic gardeners and natural-food people coming next month. We’re interested in organic gardening ourselves. We go in for writers’ and artists’ conferences too. There’s a group of mystery-story fans coming this winter. Maybe none of this is in a class with oil magnates, but these affairs pay our bills and serve our purpose, in that we’re interested in conservation and health matters that concern pollution, and we like to encourage groups interested in any of the arts.”

  “It sounds wonderful,” I said. “Worth doing.”

  “We think so. We’ve never wanted to go commercial and attract big business. We don’t want to be exploiters or hucksters. In fact, we’re content to be a modest business ourselves. Though I’m afraid that’s not what Loring wants. To give him credit, he has a good deal of managerial ability and he used to work for the Hilton chain. But he’s more ambitious for the Mountain House than I like to see. Part of our charm is not being commercial on a big scale.”

  “What about your aunt, whom I met in New York? Doesn’t she have any vote in what happens?”

  “She’s not on the McClain side of the family and she has never taken any interest in what we’re doing. When her husband died he left her well off, so she doesn’t need any help.”

  When breakfast was over and we were leaving the dining room, we met Naomi, again dressed in jeans and bandanna, ready for working outdoors. She smiled at Brendon and once more ignored me. Sooner or later I would have to come to some sort of understanding with Naomi McClain, but Brendon didn’t seem to notice, and when he’d helped me on with the jacket I’d brought downstairs, we went outdoors, my sketch kit under my arm.

  In the cool, bracing air the morning sparkled with sunlight and the lake shone, its surface crinkling in the breeze that blew toward the hotel. Brendon led the way to a path that started up the mountain.

  “We’ll take the short way up,” he said. “The longer road around is easier, but you’ve told me you like to climb.”

  Underfoot, the trail was a mingling of earth and fine black gravel, and the footing was springy with occasional patches of pine needles and dead leaves. Here in the woods, under the lee of the mountain, the sun had vanished and it was cool and shadowy. Leaves were turning bright to a greater extent, and we passed a golden locust, and several maples burning into flame.

  It would take about half an hour to get to the top, Brendon said, and then I would be rewarded with a spectacular view.

  As we climbed I set myself a private goal. When we reached the top and were resting there, I would talk to my husband about what happened last night. It would be harder to quarrel—if there was to be a quarrel—out here in these beautiful surroundings.

  When we had followed the trail a little way up, he led me over a rocky side path to one of the small summer-houses above the lake. It was built with a thatched roof and open sides, and a rough floor made of split logs, and it seemed to grow out of the great boulder on which it perched. I stepped into the shelter gingerly and Brendon reassured me.

  “Don’t worry. These rest houses are anchored into the rock and we test them constantly to make sure floors and railings are safe.”

  As I sat down on a rough bench, I realized that the rock on which the little house was built was one of those great tumbled boulders that had poured down the mountainside during some upheaval in the prehistoric past. All was not entirely safe, however, since a woman had died among those very stones below our perch.

  Looking down upon the broken pile, I caught movement far below and saw the tiny figure of a man climbing through the Lair. He was dwarfed to matchstick size by the great boulders all around him and I pointed him out to Brendon.

  “I thought the Lair was closed.”

  “It is,” he said, and leaned above the rail. “Hello!” he called. “You, down there!”

  The man looked up and waved.

  “You aren’t supposed to be in there,” Brendon shouted. “You’d better turn back toward the lake. Some of the rocks may be loose and there’s a sign at the entrance telling you to keep out.”

  The man below us called back that he had climbed down from the rocks near where we were, and he would find his way out.

  Brendon watched until he had disappeared behind a boulder. “He’s probably safe enough, and perhaps Keir will consent to open the trail again before long. There isn’t anything loose now. In fact, Keir says there wasn’t anything loose there to start with. He’s just being cautious.”

  I stared at him. “But then how—”

  “We don’t know,” Brendon said shortly, and I knew he had shut me out again.

  Across the lake the massive structure of th
e hotel spread along the rock bank of the far shore, and its red roofs and pointed towers were beautiful in bright sunlight. Now I could pick out the Stone Section—that tower where we had our rooms.

  “I’ll never tire of looking at it,” I said, as we left the summerhouse and went on up the trail, climbing now above the huge boulders of the Lair that lined this part of the shore and dropped away on our right.

  “I’ve never tired of it in all the years I’ve lived here,” Brendon said and put his arm about me as we walked.

  We met only one or two people on our way, as the morning was still early, and most of the hikers weren’t up and about as yet.

  When we stood at another lookout point above the Lair, I ventured a question. “Where was it that the rock fell?”

  After a brief hesitation, Brendon pointed. I could see the depression in the earth where a great boulder had once rested, see the scars of its fall as it had struck rocks on either side before crashing into the wide crevice below. The pit of my stomach quivered and I could almost hear the shattering sound of that fall, almost hear the screams of a woman trapped.

  “There’s something wrong about it, isn’t there?” I said. “Something you haven’t told me?”

  “Come along,” he said curtly and pulled me back from the sheer drop of the precipice.

  He didn’t put his arm about me again, nor did we walk companionably hand-in-hand as we had done yesterday in the woods, and I felt the loss sadly. I was discovering that Brendon was more a man of moods here at Laurel Mountain than he had been in the city, and today was not so propitious as yesterday for intimacy. Something had happened to separate him from me, though I didn’t know what it was. More than ever, I felt determined to find out, and when we reached the top I would summon my courage and open the subject in a way that he couldn’t turn aside.

  For now, as we climbed, I interested myself in the things I knew best, identifying trees along the way, enjoying the clusters of white snakeroot flowers that grew in great profusion beside the path. I didn’t want to stop now, but another time I would come back and make a few drawings.