Blue Fire

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  She did mind, but as always there seemed no way to escape him.

  “If you like,” she said carelessly and they left the house together, following the street and the longer way home.

  “I’ve wanted a chance to talk to you,” he said when they were away from the house. “Yesterday your father showed me the letter your mother sent him shortly before her death.”

  So now, Susan thought, John Cornish too meant to sound her out about that letter. She was silent, ready to resist whatever he might urge.

  “It opens all sorts of strange possibilities, doesn’t it?” he went on. “If your mother didn’t take the diamond out of the country herself, it may long since be in other hands.”

  “Of course,” she agreed a bit dryly. “I’ve thought so all along. Though I’ve wondered how such a famous stone could be disposed of. Wouldn’t it be identified if it appeared on the market?”

  “It would be, providing it reached a legitimate dealer’s hands before anyone tampered with it. But an expert cutter can change any stone, disguise it, as it were, so that it wouldn’t be recognized. Though if it went into black market channels, that might not be necessary. There are world powers eager for diamonds. And private collectors and dealers who are unscrupulous.”

  His words were taking an unexpected turn. He was not urging remembrance upon her, as others had done, but seemed to be deliberately opening another door, a door of escape from some of her worry.

  “By a world power I suppose you mean Russia?” she asked. “But I thought Russia possessed treasures of cut stones herself.”

  “You’re thinking of Czarist Russia. After the revolution diamonds poured out of the country in the hands of escaping nobility and were sold in a flood that dropped the price of diamonds everywhere until the outpouring ended and the price could be brought under De Beers control again. Now Russia occasionally sends out stones for sale, but for the most part she seems to be snapping them up in the illicit markets. Especially in the field of industrial diamonds.”

  Susan glanced at him hopefully. “If you think this is what may have happened to the Kimberley, then you won’t have to write about my mother at all in your book.”

  “There are still the other diamonds,” he said, not ungently. “Those found in your father’s house—the ones that sent him to prison.”

  She did not want to think about those stones at the moment and returned quickly to the safer subject of the big stone. If one side of the problem could be cleared up, then she would face the other side.

  “One thing I’ve never understood about the Kimberley is why one man would give it so casually into the keeping of a friend to take from one city to another. You’d think something that valuable would be sent with an armed guard.”

  Cornish smiled. “You don’t know South Africans. I’ve seen fortunes carried about wrapped in bits of paper. After all, that’s the safest way to carry diamonds—unobtrusively. At any rate, your father had the big diamond in his possession. He brought it to Cape Town and after that what happened to it is anybody’s guess. Though the letter from your mother opens a new possibility.”

  This was what he was leading up to, of course. Now he would do as the others had done. He would put the weight of remembering upon her shoulders and urge her to start thinking back into the past. Her resistance against him stiffened.

  “You needn’t ask me what I remember. I don’t remember anything. And I hate to have everyone prodding me. Just now Mara Bellman came up to the room I had as a child and stood watching me as though she expected me to produce the Kimberley diamond at any minute.”

  “If I were you, I’d pay no attention,” he said quietly.

  “To Mara, you mean?”

  “To anyone who tries to push you into remembering,” he said. There was a sudden grave urgency in his voice that surprised her. “Don’t try to remember, Susan. Don’t let anyone force you back into the past.”

  His words astonished her. John Cornish had been the truth seeker, the one who had told her that she must face the truth, whatever it might be. She stole a look at him as he walked along beside her, and noted the craggy look of his head in profile, the stern set of his chin, the unsmiling mouth.

  “That day in the Public Gardens you were the one who said that truth was to be respected for itself,” she reminded him. “You said I ought to seek it out, no matter how involved I was emotionally.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” he said.

  Somehow this unexpected reversal left her puzzled and disturbed. “But why? What has happened to make you change your course?”

  They had reached a corner that brought the Aerie into sight a block or so away and John took her arm, drawing her to a halt on the sidewalk.

  “Not my course—yours. This is difficult to put into words, and that’s unlike me.” He smiled ruefully. “There’s a feeling about that house—Protea Hill—that I don’t like and can’t quite put my finger on.”

  “But what has that to do with me? What has it to do with whether or not I remember what might have happened years ago?”

  “Perhaps nothing,” he said. “But I have a strong feeling that it’s wiser to let the matter rest. Perhaps, like a good many journalists, I play my hunches. Take care of yourself, Susan. Be very careful, won’t you?”

  Startled, she looked into his eyes, trying to read there the things he had not told her. “I—I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I’m putting it badly. But will you promise me one thing. If you remember something, if you find the road back, will you make one move before any other?”

  She could only stare at him blankly.

  He spoke more gently, as if he wanted to soften the effect of his words, and there was a kindness of manner that she had seen in him before only in the presence of her father.

  “If you remember anything that seems to be significant, go first of all to someone you can trust. And I mean someone you trust wholeheartedly. If there’s no one near enough, then take what you know to the police.” He touched her lightly on the shoulder, perhaps in admonishment. “I won’t take you clear home and embarrass you with Dirk. I’ve done enough of that. Rather blindly, I’m afraid. Good-by, Susan. And think about what I’ve said.”

  This time he waited for no answer but went off, moving rapidly in spite of his limp. Both disturbed and astonished, she watched him out of sight before she turned toward home.

  She did not understand any of this. Someone she could trust? Dirk? Her father? John Cornish himself? It was a chilling thing that she could give no confident assent to any of these.

  Cornish she had trusted least of all. For the most part she had disliked and resented him, and yet as she walked the last block toward home the reluctant feeling of having found someone to depend on began to possess her. It was as if she had come up against a rock wall that was cold to the touch and would lacerate her flesh if she brushed against it, yet which stood there, unalterable, for her to lean against if she were at bay.

  At bay? What a strange thought to cross her mind. Nothing threatened her—this was nonsense.

  How strange too that he had urged her not to remember even if she could. This was no longer advice she could take. Dirk was her husband. It was he who must guide her. It was he who was trying to save her father from further pain. Besides, once the door of memory had started to open, it was unlikely that one could ever again keep it shut. This afternoon memories had begun to stir vaguely in the background of her mind. There had been that moment when she had stood, shaken, on the threshold of her mother’s room, on the verge, it seemed, of some knowledge. The snapshot album that she had brought home with her might well open the door completely.

  Nevertheless, when she reached the house she put the album down in the living room and left it there without turning so much as a page. John’s words had made her hesitate.

  She went next to the darkroom to see if the strip of film was dry. There was still time to make prints before dinner and she wanted to be busy. The film,
however, was not where she usually hung it, and she looked around to see whether she could have put it absent-mindedly in some different place.

  She even went into the dining room and the living room to see if she could have laid it down somewhere, having been called from what she was doing. But no amount of searching revealed the strip of film downstairs. She was about to go upstairs to look for it when she noticed a basket of sewing she had left on the coffee table. Her sewing scissors lay beside the work. As she picked up the scissors and basket to carry them upstairs something on the carpet caught her eye. She bent and picked up a stiff, transparent sliver with shadings of light and dark in it. When she held the sliver up to the light, it was easily recognized as a tiny strip that might have been snipped from a piece of film.

  Increasingly puzzled, she put the sewing things down and looked into a wastebasket, finding nothing of any significance. Then she went out to the kitchen and searched the garbage container, much to the cook’s astonishment. No, missus, Cookie said, she had not seen any picture-taking materials.

  There was a large outdoor container in the yard and Susan, possessed now by a hunch, hurried out to it. Hidden beneath a heap of damp potato peelings she found what she was looking for. Someone had deliberately cut her strip of film into tiny slivers and hidden them in this waste from the kitchen. More puzzled and shocked than angry, she fished out the mess of cut-up bits and wrapped them in a sheet of newspaper. Then she went into the house and rang for Willi.

  The girl came from her room looking a little sleepy as though she had been taking a nap. In the living room Susan gestured toward the scraps of film on the paper.

  “Do you know how this happened, Willi?” she asked.

  The girl stared at the slivers with eyes that were expressionless.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Susan told her of looking for the length of film she had hung up to dry, of finding the clue of a bit of film not far from scissors that might have been used to cut it off, and of hunting down the rest.

  Willi shook her head. She had seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing.

  “Why would anyone do such a thing?” Susan cried. “I’d taken some really good pictures of my father and I was anxious for them to turn out well. Are you sure, Willi, that no one might have come into the house while you were in your room?”

  “Not unless someone entered through a window, Mrs. Hohenfield,” Willi said. “The front door is locked, and the cook has been out in the kitchen all the time. The only person who has entered the house is Mr. Hohenfield.”

  “You mean he came home early?” Susan asked in surprise.

  Willi nodded. “He said he wasn’t feeling well, and he went upstairs to lie down. I don’t believe he has left.”

  She thanked the girl and let her go. Then she went upstairs to the bedroom door. Dirk must have heard her step for he called out to her.

  “Come in, darling. I’m awake.”

  She opened the door to find him lying on his bed, wrapped in a maroon robe, his shoes off.

  “Is anything the matter?” she asked quickly.

  He shook his head. “Nothing to worry about. I had a rugged day and felt a bit seedy, so I chucked it and came home early. What’s happened to you? You look as though you’d met a ghost.”

  Susan carried the newspaper over to his bedside and set it down. The paper curled open, revealing its soggy contents.

  “What on earth?” Dirk said, and there seemed to be genuine surprise in his voice.

  “I finished a roll of pictures this morning,” she said, “and developed them before lunch. Then I went out for a while this afternoon. When I came home, my film was missing and I found it cut to bits and hidden under rubbish in the yard.”

  Dirk lay silent, his eyes closed for a moment as if he fought the return of a headache. “I suppose I’ll have to give Willi and the cook a talking-to,” he said.

  “I’ve already questioned them. Neither one knows anything about it.”

  “Of course they’d lie if they did know,” Dirk said. “These people always lie when they’re trying to save their own skins.”

  Always before when Dirk had made derogatory remarks about the dark races she had either argued with him gently or tried to make allowances for his very different upbringing. There was always the hope that she could gradually get him to see these matters with a less prejudiced eye. But now outrage sprang up in her at his words and she made no effort to check it.

  “That’s a dreadful thing to say! There isn’t any such thing as ‘these people.’ We’re only considering Willi and the cook and I expect they are as honest as we are.”

  Dirk looked at her with an air of pained distaste and sat up on the edge of the bed. “Listen to me, Susan. This entire racial situation is dynamite. I’ve hoped you would stay out of it. You haven’t lived in South Africa since you were a child and you don’t know one thing about it. The romantic idea of equality between black and white, or even colored and white, is a dangerous one. If we give them too much, we are the ones who’ll be thrown out. Look at the Congo. Leave Willi and the cook to me. What sort of picture did you take on that strip of film?”

  She could see the futility of arguing with him further now, but the resentment his words had aroused did not die out. She was beginning to be sorry that she had told him what had happened. But there was nothing to do except try to remember the pictures she had taken.

  “Nothing of any consequence, I’m sure,” she said limply. “A few shots around Cape Town. A picture of the van Riebeeck statue at the foot of Adderley Street. Several pictures of my father.”

  “You’ve seen him today?”

  “I saw him this morning in that little garden for the blind, just off the Avenue. I took a picture of him there and then one or two more in the flower market.”

  He seemed to consider her words as he moved slowly toward the door, tying the cord of his robe around his waist. “And that was all?”

  It didn’t seem quite all. There were some scenes she couldn’t recall, but nothing surely that was significant. Anyway, she no longer cared. She was too upset about Dirk to care.

  “This sounds like malicious mischief,” he said. “I’ll have a talk with the servants now.”

  She did not go with him, but remained upstairs where she would not hear what he said. Restlessly she moved about the room, fighting the turmoil within herself. Dirk was set wholly in opposition to something she believed in with spirited conviction—and this diverging of viewpoints could hardly be ignored in South Africa. His own attitude hurt and grieved her and it promised continued friction between them unless some compromise could be reached. Yet this was a subject on which she could not compromise and still retain a sense of self-respect.

  Idly she picked up the little carved impala she had brought from Chicago and smoothed the satiny wood, searching out the whorls of the carving. The diamond on her finger blinked as she moved her hand and she stared at it unhappily. The ring stood for happiness, marriage, the security of the love that she had believed existed between herself and Dirk. The impala seemed to stand in contrast to all this. It represented Africa and the dark strong heartbeat of its rising peoples. It stood for what was right—for the idea of freedom in which she believed so strongly.

  She put the impala down and turned toward the window beside her. Must a choice between the two be necessary? Perhaps she could find a way. No man and woman were ever in agreement on every aspect of their lives in a marriage. Divergent viewpoints, even though fundamental, did not always destroy love and loyalty.

  Thinking of compromise, of giving somewhere in her own stand, she began to consider Willi.

  The girl had been brought here by Mara Bellman. Not even Niklaas had known that she was coming here to work. Might that mean that Mara held her under some obligation which Willi could not escape? Was it possible that Willi would feel bound to let Mara into the house and would keep the secret of her entry? Mara was fully capable of malicious mischief, especia
lly if it might disturb Dirk’s wife.

  This afternoon at Niklaas’s house Mara had not appeared until that moment upstairs when the toy chest had been opened. Could she have come to the Aerie during that earlier interval? Or perhaps by the short cut while Susan and John Cornish were walking slowly the long way home?

  Dirk’s step sounded on the stair and she stiffened as he came into the room, offering him no inquiry, continuing to stare out the window.

  He came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “You can relax, darling. I gave them a very small talking-to and made no accusations at all. You’d have been pleased with me.”

  Relief flooded through her and she turned to him quickly. He was trying too; she didn’t have to bridge this gulf alone after all. And if only he would try, she would make all the more effort to understand his viewpoint, even if she could not accept it for herself.

  By nighttime the troublesome happenings of the day had receded to some extent. When she went to bed the load on her shoulders felt considerably lighter. Yet when her conscious mind slept, what lay beneath could roam as it pleased. During the early-morning hours she awakened once more with the sweat of terror upon her body and the flash of blue fire all about her. A cold fire that cut through her flesh with an icy thrust that seemed about to destroy her. She awoke struggling, fighting against something utterly fearful and shattering, to find Dirk holding her, gently shaking her awake, his voice coaxing her back to consciousness.

  “You’re all right, darling. It was that beastly nightmare again. It’s over now. You’re safe and I won’t let anything come near to hurt you.”

  She clung to him, the terror still upon her, and it was a long time before she would let him go. The dream seemed a forewarning of the door that was slowly pushing open somewhere in her consciousness. A door with all the force of long-suppressed memories behind it. And there were no means by which she could prevent its opening. Nor did she really want to. Whatever was fearful and hidden must be faced, exorcised. Only then would she be free of it. Only then would the nightmare cease to recur.