by Craig Rice
But that was not so of Edmund Telefair. David was again conscious of what he had discovered earlier in the day, that only by hearing the voice of Edmund without seeing or remembering his face was it possible to catch the undertone of bitter sorrow, of suffering, and deep, everlasting loneliness. Watching Edmund as he spoke, catching the changes of light and shadow on his big-boned face, seeing the curious smile that moved only one side of his mouth, it was impossible to hear the sound that was below the outward sound of his voice, only the deep-pitched vibrancy and the unexpected gentleness. But David had spoken with Edmund in the deepest of the morning’s fog, he knew now that the undertone was there, he found himself listening for it as Edmund spoke of trivialities at luncheon, and he would not forget it again.
Sitting there listening to the sound of the three men’s voices, staring at his plate and speaking as little as possible himself, he heard a fourth voice, altogether unlike the others. It almost startled him, it was as though he heard it for the first time. As he listened to it, he remembered the singular quality the endless little song of the fountain had seemed to have that morning in the gauzy mist, a gentle, continuous little sound that might have been some strange phenomenon of rainfall on the clouds, no more than the faintest and softest of whispering as drops of water slipped into the quiet pool. It was a silvery sound, so delicate and so fragile that the merest breath would have shattered it into a shower of sparkling and almost indistinguishable sounds, as a drop of quicksilver might shatter into a thousand glimmering, disconnected sparkles. The phrase that was spoken was very brief, indeed it was lost in the deeper voices of the room, and David had not the faintest notion of what words were said. It slipped into the conversation as one momentary flicker of light might appear in the deep shadows of a curtained room, a slender, exquisite, radiant and yet evanescent beam. He heard the voice as a spangled spray of opalescent drops of water falling through a mist. It was the voice of Edris.
6
In the evening the fog had vanished, and the moon, almost full, shone on Telefair, yet there was still enough mist in the air to give its light a translucent, almost pearly shade. David leaned on his window sill and gazed out across the gardens of Telefair, with a feeling that he might be seeing the Island through water. The outlines of trees and hedges blurred and wavered in the peculiar light, taking on an iridescent quality of their own, as though they moved and swayed beyond shadowy and shadowed water; the pale stones in the old Telefair graveyard shone with an unearthly glow like stones long lying underneath the sea. Looking at the gardens, David imagined strange, deep-water foliage reaching up sinuous, floating tendrils, and obscene, gigantic blooms never seen on the surface of the earth.
The curious fantasy seized him again that Telefair was an island which sank slowly into the sea after nightfall, its flowers becoming monstrous, sickly, undersea blossoms, its clipped hedges becoming banks of poisonous weed, its trees becoming enormous underwater plants, and all seen in the hazy twilight of deep water under the moon. In the morning he knew it would rise again, bright, glistening, bringing with it the dense mist that would cling to it until long after the sun rose, to resume its daytime life, the life that was spent, incongruously, in the sun and air.
All save the little fountain. David watched it sending its delicate, spangled spray out to catch the moonlight as it fell, changing shape from moment to moment in the light wind that came in from the inlet. As he watched it, he suddenly felt a sense of almost overwhelming oppression in his room, as though its walls were too close to him, its draperies too heavy, its ceiling a falling sky that might crush him in the next instant. It was like being buried underground. Everything in it seemed terrible and alien, the chairs, the ornaments, even the few coals that still glowed faintly in the grate.
He decided to go down into the garden.
The house was very still and dark, only the lamp that always burned all night in the great hall showed his way down the great, wide stairs that seemed to float on the shadows of the room below. He paused a moment at the outer door, struggling with its bolt, half eager and half hesitant, as though he were poised at the doorstep of another world, or at that instant which lies between night and sleep, between the dream world and the dream.
At last he opened it and went out onto the broad terrace, feeling the sudden cool moisture of the night air on his face, seeing his hands turn pale as the moonlight touched them. The sound of the fountain was nearer now, the gentle, continual whispering, a soft, silvery, endless little song. David walked slowly across the terrace and down its broad, low steps, pushing his way through the moon mist as he might have pushed his way through flowing water.
There was a wide ledge around the fountain; he sat down on the edge of it and looked into the pool. The water was shadow-colored, not any color that he had ever seen before, not black, but deeper than black, not purple nor blue nor gray, but with shadowings of all three. The lights that moved here and there on its surface seemed to come from under the water itself, and not from the moon. For that one moment the night wind was carrying the delicate spray to the other side of the fountain, and before him a pool of light appeared on the pool of water, like quicksilver, seemingly not a reflected glow, but a fluid substance that seemed to float on the water’s surface.
David stared at it, fascinated, as it slowly appeared to spread over the motionless fluid, in a moving, formless splash. Suddenly, almost without knowing what he did, he thrust his hand into the center of it, with a swift destructive motion that shattered the silver pool into a thousand, glimmering, disconnected sparkles fleeing over the water, moving and changing and moving, separating and reuniting. But even as he watched, a shift in the wind brought the fine spray of the fountain around to his side, the spangled drops falling softly into the water, each one seeming to create a new center of flickering light that appeared and vanished all in the same instant. For a moment a mood of the wind carried the spray of water against his cheek, like a quick caress, cool as only falling water is cool.
The same breeze carried the spray for an instant over the edge of the pool, blowing it over the garden path and the tiny rosebushes that circled the fountain. Then it whisked away again, but one iridescent drop seemed to remain, sparkling, giving off a pale light of its own. David watched it, waiting for it to vanish, leaving no trace of itself, yet it remained as though that one drop of water from the spray of the fountain had crystallized there on the ground, ready for anyone who would to pick it up.
The illusion was so sure that at last he felt it could not be an illusion, and reaching out his hand, found that what had seemed to be a drop of water from the fountain was, indeed, a glittering, quartzlike pebble that, like the silver on the pool, seemed to give off not a reflected light, but one that came from within itself, from its very center.
David wanted to carry it away with him. For a few minutes he tried to pry it loose with his fingers. That failing, the knowledge that more of the stone was hidden underneath the ground made it even more desirable; he tugged at it desperately, at last took a penknife from his pocket and pried at it as he might have pried at a precious stone embedded somewhere deep in an underground cave.
He had entirely forgotten the fountain, the light on the pool, and even the gardens of Telefair, when the stone finally came away in his hand. It was not until he held it close to look at it that he realized the same knife-thrust that dislodged his prize had cut a long gash in his hand.
David seemed to feel no pain. As he had watched the light on the water a moment past, now he watched the slow drip of his blood as it stained the pebble he still held between his fingers, splashed off the marble edge of the pool and ran down into the water itself, spreading a new darkness there. In the peculiar light, the blood seemed not to be red, but black, and as he sat watching it merge with the waters of the little fountain, he felt a sudden lightness, a detachment from the world that seemed to carry him away from it and from Telefair, a moment of happiness that was like an opalescent bubble forming on
the surface of the pool itself. He did not want to stir from the spot, nor attempt to stop the flow of blood that dripped down into the water like a new fountain; he wanted only to remain there as though he might pour himself, drop by drop, into the pool.
It was in that moment that the moon became hidden behind one of the tall Italian cypress trees, and in an instant the surface of the pool became dark, the colors and lights vanished from the spray of the little fountain. For a moment David had a strange illusion that his blood had entirely darkened the pool and in some incomprehensible manner destroyed the very life of the fountain; then suddenly he became conscious of the movement of the moon and, too, aware of the pain in his hand and of the chill in the night air.
He dropped the pebble of quartz into his jacket pocket, found a handkerchief and bound it around his bleeding hand, and started back to the house. So absorbed was he in his own thought that not until he reached the terrace itself did he notice the small dark figure, the figure of a man who had been standing there watching him.
“You have cut your hand!” said Doctor von Berger in a tone of deep concern. “You must let me bind it up for you!”
Silently, and almost unthinkingly, David followed the doctor into the house.
David had never seen Doctor von Berger’s room before. Now as he stared around him it seemed like an island in a sea of Telefair. No handmade and exquisite papers covered these walls; they were painted a cold, severe, whitish gray. None of the exquisite old furniture of Telefair stood in Doctor von Berger’s room; none of the fine old paintings hung there. There was a narrow bed that might have been an army cot, two straight chairs, a great, bare desk, and that was all.
Later, when he remembered and looked back, it seemed curious to David that Doctor von Berger seemed to have no personal possessions of his own, no photographs of kinsfolk in silver frames, no well-worn books, no favorite pipes waiting in their trays. He remembered, later, that it had not seemed like a room where some person lived, but rather like a room where someone had come to stay for a very little while, soon to go away again.
At the time of his visit to the little German doctor’s room, he noticed nothing of the sort.
The wound in his hand was not deep, nor severe, only a long, ugly, now rather painful cut. The doctor directed him to sit down in one of the straight-backed chairs, took his hand, examined it, bathed it with some powerful solution, probed it, and finally bandaged it.
What David did notice was that, at the delicate and painful moments in dressing the wound, it was the little German doctor who winced, not he himself.
He all but forgot the discomfort of his injury in watching the suffering on Doctor von Berger’s face, the actual moisture in Doctor von Berger’s pale blue eyes as he poured biting liquids on the edges of the cut.
When it was done, the doctor straightened up and said coldly, “It was always my greatest fault to have too much sympathy with my patients. That is not right. There should not be sympathy with pain, since pain is from God.”
He lighted a cigarette and handed it to David, and sat down in the other straight-backed chair, the light from his lamp turning his eyeglasses into two great moons. The glow, falling squarely on his face, gave a sharp line to his features and the shadows they cast, accentuating the almost globular shape of his nose and chin, turning his egg-shaped, half-bald forehead into a shining sphere. Yet at the same time that the glow entirely obscured the doctor’s peering, protuberant eyes, David felt that those inquisitive eyes could see clearly, while they could not be seen.
“I have little opportunity to practice my profession here,” Doctor von Berger said, smiling. “It was not always so.”
While David sat there, half listening, he went on to speak of days in clinics and surgeries, days of dealing with illness, injury, and death. Little by little what he was saying became clearer to the young man, as though the talk of the little German doctor were emerging, slowly, from some dense fog and becoming comprehensible, and as David began to listen intently and to understand, he realized that the talk appeared to come up to one certain point in the doctor’s life and stop there, turning back upon itself as though it had suddenly reached a barrier past which there was no possible going.
He never spoke, for instance, of how he had come to meet old Philip Telefair (had it been young Philip Telefair then?), of how he came to leave the Europe of his early life and come to Telefair Island, or why he had remained there. He never spoke of his own self, of where he had been born, whom he had loved, if he had loved at all, what he had longed for as a child and striven for as a youth, nothing, in short, of any of the things that actually pertained to Doctor von Berger.
He stopped talking of himself at last and, for one moment, turned so that his eyeballs became visible through his glasses, light-colored, like the eyes of a fish, almost hypnotic. In the next moment the reflection from the lamp had hidden those eyes again, turning the thick curved lenses of his glasses into screening mirrors.
“You have been here a long time?” David asked boldly.
Doctor von Berger nodded slowly. “A very long time. I brought Edris into the world. I was here before then, and I have been here ever since.”
Somewhere in the breath leading up to that sentence was the barrier beyond which he could not make himself go. David sensed it and, seeing the barrier from its other side, held back the questions that flooded his mind.
Suddenly, without consciousness of what brought such a thing about, he found himself talking to Doctor von Berger of his own life. He found that all at once he was dreamy, half aware, even as he had been when he sat beside the fountain, save that then he had longed to pour himself into the dark pool of the fountain with the blood that dripped from the wound in his hand, and now he longed to pour the memories of his childhood and youth into Doctor von Berger’s listening mind.
The stiffly rustling silks worn by that half-forgotten female relative of his mother, the dank mustiness of the school parlor, the teachers and tutors who had always somehow treated him as though he were but recently a newcomer, soon to go away, the eternal changing from school to school so that his classmates were forever strangers to him, the feeling, never lost, that the moments of his life were of no importance in themselves, but were lived through solely to bring him to some moment which would be of great importance when it did come, the moment he had waited for through all his childhood and youth without knowing when it would come nor what it would be. He spoke of his life as though he remembered it from some dream, and, speaking of it, remembered that it had appeared at the time as a dream, half real, of no consequence.
It was not until he had finished speaking of himself to Doctor von Berger that he realized for the first time how lonely that life had been.
He could see it now, but he had not known that it was lonely while he was living it.
At the point where the letter had come asking him to come to Telefair, he stopped, even as Doctor von Berger had stopped whenever he came near that unknown barrier.
There was a long silence in the bare little room before the doctor said, “And now it is that everything lies ahead of you, everything that was intended.”
He rose suddenly, and the motion altered the position of the lamplight on his face again, so that now shadows appeared where the light had been, so that the reflecting screen vanished from his thick glasses and his eyes reappeared, in fact, so that they were all that seemed to show in the mass of spherical shadows and half-lights that was his face.
“Remember,” said the little German doctor suddenly, “in the extremity, I am your friend.”
David realized again that Doctor von Berger was still a stranger to him, as he would always be, as he would always be a stranger to everyone, whoever and whatever he might be, and under whatever circumstances. He realized that for all the intimate talk of the past hour, he knew nothing whatever of the doctor himself; the doctor was a stranger and would remain so to the end. At the very moment of that realization the words “What ex
tremity?” came rushing to his lips and stopped there, dying unsaid. It was not a question that could be asked of a man who would be forever a stranger.
But there was still one question that would not be held back, and with the first breath David drew he cried out suddenly, “Why are you here? Why have you remained here so long?”
There was a silence that fell like a curtain between them and hung there, obscuring their faces from each other, until at last the little German doctor drew it aside with his words.
“I am here,” he said slowly, and in a very quiet tone, “I remain here, to wipe away the great wrong I have done.”
They were almost the same words Zenobie had used.
“Come,” said Doctor von Berger abruptly, in an altered tone. “We have talked the night through. It is dawn.”
There was a silvered light showing faintly through the window blinds. Doctor von Berger walked to the window and drew the blinds aside, and David could see through the glass the mist that sometimes rose in the early morning on Telefair Island come up from the inlet to wrap itself around the old house, pallid, grayish, shadowy, mysterious, and impenetrable.
7
The day was clear. From his window David could see Telefair Island splendid in sunlight, brilliant, almost lustrous, under an unclouded sky. While he slept, the mist had lifted, the last pale vestiges of it had melted under the trees, and now there appeared to be a warm, golden clarity to the atmosphere, filling the garden with blazing colors, turning the inlet to a motionless, fairly glowing blue. The little fountain flickered and sparkled in the sunlight, spangled with iridescent drops, sending tiny feathers of glistening water down to the glinted pool.
Though he had not had more than two hours’ sleep, David was not conscious of any fatigue—rather, of a sense of exhilaration. He felt singularly numb to his surroundings, unaware of them; for all the bright radiance that stretched below his window, he felt somehow detached from it, almost as though he looked out from a different world.
