by Craig Rice
In the confusion of his mind, he had no thought of where he was going, or of what he intended to do. Much later, when he looked back on that evening, he remembered every word that had been spoken to him, and realized that he must have heard them and even grasped their meaning, at the time. But now, as he rushed blindly through the white mist, he did not remember, was not even aware that anyone had spoken to him at all.
Suddenly the pale vapor seemed to open and fall away from him, leaving a space in which only a faint haze remained, and in the center of it he could see the little fountain, almost invisible in the dim, curious light, like the very ghost of a waterfall. Its sound was still a roaring in his ears, almost thunderous, and yet not unfriendly, welcoming, rather.
David threw himself down on the ledge that encircled the pool and gazed down into the quiet water whose smooth surface seemed to reflect the mist, his hot face resting on his hands.
He knew, and still he did not know; he guessed, but he did not understand. In that moment it seemed to him that everything had been taken from him—Edris, the dream he had had as a child, his love for Philip Telefair who had been so kind to him: the confused bewilderment and the savage anger fought for possession of his mind.
“Old Philip Telefair is very kind to the child.” There had been the beautiful voice in the darkness, welcoming him to the Island, and his heart had swelled for joy and affection till he had thought it would burst. The marvelous house seen across the broad lawn, splendid, flawless, moon-colored. Philip Telefair, seen in the light of the great hall, with his pale, delicate, and incredibly graceful hands. The fountain, the little fountain in the moonlight, the gardens, and the whispering old grove, Edris, her fine, silver-gold hair rippling and flowing over the pillow, like a spray of falling water. The white fog closed down and again the memory of the woman in Marseilles.
His love for old Philip Telefair was as nothing beside the fear David felt for him now. His love for the Island was nothing beside his desire to escape from it.
Edmund had said, “There is only one way for a man imprisoned on an island to leave it.”
But it was not death that he desired now.
A few days before one of the gardeners had transplanted small rosebushes in a circle around the pool. Now the delicate buds had opened and already passed their bloom, becoming great, white flowers beginning to perish of their own weight. One of them grew at David’s feet, and he found himself staring at its blossom, a gigantic, fairly monstrous white rose, almost silvery in the pale light. Its fragrance seemed to envelop him like a cloud, heavy, overpowering, and as he watched, one petal detached itself from the others, floated toward the earth, was caught by a vagrant current of air and carried into the pool, and now drifted on the surface of the water, swept under its surface at last by the spray of the fountain.
Without knowing what he did, not understanding the impulse that seized him, David caught savagely at the flower, ripping it forcibly from its stem. The sturdy stem broke apart, he felt a sudden sharp pain in his hand, and then the rose lay on his palm, frosty white as the great house, as Edris’ small face. He crushed it in his hand, the petals cool as falling water, smooth to his touch. Then he opened his fingers and saw that it was unfolding again, saw too that his hand had been torn by the thorns of the little bush and was bleeding, that it was staining the flower he held with great dark drops, blood on the pale rose.
Rising to his feet, he let it fall from his hand into the pool. For a moment it seemed to sail idly about; then a little current carried it out to the center where it fell apart under the gentle impact of the spray, its petals floating off in every direction, some still stained.
The mist changed from moment to moment, now thick and mysterious and all-enveloping, now thinning away to become almost transparent, more like a pale glow cast from some curious light than drifting vapor. Now it encircled David in a white blindness, so that for an instant he was confused, almost lost; in the next instant it fell away from him again, and he saw the dark trees of the old grove before him.
As the destroyed flower had fallen from his hand, the convulsive fury had begun to emerge from the chaos in his brain. He moved in a kind of frenzy now. Thoughts ran through his distracted mind one after another; before he could understand what they meant, they were gone. Why had old Philip Telefair hated him, all his life, hated him even when he was a very young child starting to go to school? “It isn’t you that he hates.” None of this was real; he was dreaming it all. He would wake, and it would be day again, and in time he and old Philip Telefair’s daughter would be married splendidly at Telefair, with Great-Uncle Philip nodding and smiling beneficently in the background. “Can’t you see what he intends you to do?” His whole life had been lived for some one purpose, to bring him to some one deed; and though he still did not know what it was, David knew, in his turmoil, that he was moving toward it now.
In the old grove, the mist hung low under the trees, close to the ground; above it, the Italian cypress and poplars were tall and dark and curiously menacing. David could see the moon faintly through the mist now, encircled with a glowing veil like white fire, hovering over the top of the tallest tree. As he walked, the light breeze carried the gauzy substance this way and that, trees emerged from it and were hidden again, the pale stones over the old Telefair graves appeared and vanished and reappeared, seeming almost phosphorescent in the strange light. David had no knowledge of what had brought him to the grove or of why he walked in it now, but through the fog he could hear the sound of the little fountain playing, and it seemed to him that he fled from it.
Then he saw her, Edris, through an opening in the vapor, her white muslin dress seeming to be part of it, her frail hands and her small face taking its pearly color. For a moment he stared at her, half expecting to see her evaporate and disappear before his eyes, half doubting that she was there at all. She was an illusion created by the moonlight and the mist, of some strange, fluid substance, colorless, delicate and ethereal; in another moment the breeze would change and she would be gone.
A spasm of grief seized him—he heard his own voice crying out, hoarse and strange—grief and a cruel, merciless rage. David flung himself through the fog as he would have plunged into a pool, catching her shoulders in hands that suddenly burned to dig into her soft flesh, to tear it from the bones. Her skin was silky, and very cool, a soft coolness that maddened him; the vagrant breeze suddenly brushed a strand of her fine hair against his face. She gave one little frightened moan and he thrust one hand over her mouth as with the other he tore at the filmy stuff of her dress, ripping and shredding it between his fingers. Her body was pale as the mist and very delicate and frail. With an anguished gasp that was almost a sob he threw her to the ground, falling with her, ruthlessly beating down her faintly struggling hands.
It was not so much desire as tormented grief, not so much passion as a pitiless rage. Even as he clung to her, ravenous, insatiable, he struck savagely at her chalk-white face, her fragile arms, her delicate shoulders, not so much to possess as to destroy her. Then as her feeble, helpless struggles ceased altogether and she lay quiet as death in his rough and desperate grasp, he saw that a few drops of blood from the wound on his hand had fallen on her colorless cheek, and a new delirium overcame him, a paroxysm of sorrow.
He knew nothing but the soft whisperings of the cypress overhead, and some far-off, almost indistinguishable sound that he could not recognize and scarcely heard. His eyes closed; he strained to bring back the darkness before their lids, but saw only a spangled, iridescent spray feathering into mist; he strained his ears to recall the silence, but there was still the faint stir of the trees and a sound like rainfall in the clouds, faint, melodious, tinkling.
Then ahead of him was the vast and circular enclosure, the darkness that filled the enormous cave as water might fill a deep pool, suffocating darkness that strangled and destroyed, darkness in which he would be submerged without hope of rising again at dawn as the Island rose from the depth of
the sea. He only knew that at last the immense space opened before him and he entered it, while above him, shutting off all sound, the blackness closed like a trap.
When he opened his eyes, Edris was gone. The mist and the dark had become one, not white, not black, and he found himself wondering if blindness was like this—being unable to see, and yet unconscious of darkness.
He could feel the grass beneath him, soft, and moist and cool. Small blades of it reached up to touch his face gently; the heady odor of damp earth rose to his nostrils.
For a moment he wondered where he was, why there was grass and earth beneath his face. Then one hand reached out over his head and encountered a hard, cold, incredibly smooth substance; his fingers moved over it slowly and realized that it was a stone, moved a trifle more and discovered that it was carved. Little by little, hardly conscious of what he did, he guided his fingers to the first letter of the carving, felt its edges and its depth, and formed it in his mind, an unadorned and simple letter “E.” Then while his mind emerged slowly from its daze, he let his fingers spell out the rest of the name, and the dates below.
EUGENE TELEFAIR
b 1902 d 1924
David knew, then, it was his father’s grave on which he lay.
18
It had been very long ago, but David could remember now. He’d still been a little boy, surely not more than eight or nine, perhaps even only seven, when he’d gone to the headmaster to ask him, “Sir, what does it mean, being an orphan?”
He could recall very little of the headmaster, not even his name, only that he was a small man, with sandy hair and sober, light gray eyes. But he did remember being told, “It means that your father and mother are dead.”
David had accepted it gravely, as he accepted everything as a child. He’d been ready to go, asking no other questions, when the headmaster had added, “Your mother died when you were born. It happens sometimes.”
“And my father, sir?”
But the headmaster hadn’t known—only that David’s father had been very young when he died.
Perhaps that had been when he’d first begun to wonder.
Now as he lay there, limp on the grass, his fingers clutching at it, half-remembered phrases came back into his mind. “I lied to you,” the Revered Arthur Stone had said. “I did know your father.” The trees in the old grove had been sighing quietly like this the day he first visited them with Philip Telefair. “How did my father die?” “By accident.” And Edmund had said: “Tragic, your father’s death.”
A motion of the wind carried the sound of the little fountain to his ears, sweet, gentle, ineffably melancholy.
“I can remember,” Philip Telefair had whispered, “love in this same garden …”
Small blades of grass broke away in David’s fingers and clung to them, moist and cool.
“All things are permitted to those who love … even murder.”
There had been the fountain, the little fountain in the moonlight, the mists rising over Telefair. David could see them now, both of them so young, so very young. His father—had he been dark, and slender, and smiling?—and Angeline, “a little thing, delicate and fragile, and very pale …”
He knew now what had been the crime, what had been the great wrong that was done.
For a long time David had been lying almost motionless on the grass, letting his mind wander as it would. Now a great handful of the moist sod came away in his tightening hands; his painfully sharpened ears could catch the faint sound as the grass roots broke and tore apart in his clutching fingers. He could feel the soft damp earth cool against his finger tips.
It was in the dark, obscure places underground that he would find the answer to all his unspoken questions, all his wonderings.
And he had to know.
“I must find my father,” he whispered, or did he imagine that he whispered it?
He had dreamed, not once, but again and again, of entering that secret world under the ground, in the dream the earth had opened for him, magically. Here he must tear it away for himself, the cool, moist earth, one agonizing handful at a time. But it had been his own grave he’d tried to enter in the dream; this was another one.
Above the surface of the earth, the thin line where the drifting sand and soil met the air, there could be only the shadow and the dream of fear. It was underground where the indescribable terrors hid—the strange, secret underground world. They would be waiting for him as he tunneled into their domain, seeking not the end of the journey in his dream, but the hard smooth surface of a coffin, if there had been one, or a rough and corroded bit of bone that no one else could identify, but that he would know as his father who was dead, and had surely been murdered.
Had it been, indeed, in the dead of night, with the cold rains falling? With only the help of a Negro servant—old Jonas, perhaps—to dig the grave? “The old chapel … it has not been entered … since the burial of my father and that was many years ago.…” But that had been Philip Telefair’s father, not his own. For his own father there had been no candles in the old chapel—only the hasty movements of a spade in the wet earth, and old Philip Telefair holding the lantern.
Surely the earth should have come away more easily than now, tossed carelessly aside with a spade, not torn up with wounded, painful hands, deathly cold to their touch.
But it was deep, his father’s grave; he was lost in the hideous depths of the earth, still not knowing what he would find at the end of his desperate quest. He was lost in the dark that bordered him on every side, the frightful darkness that lay under the earth, and he could never find his way. He heard a voice, that seemed to be far above him, cry out, “Laurel, Laurel!” and realized that it was his own, but how he had come to hear it, now underground, he could not tell, nor why, in the blindness he was digging for himself, he could still call out for her.
It was the body of a man who had been murdered that he sought now, his father, and when he found him at last he would have nothing to say to him, nor would he ever receive an answer. He would know, though, how it had been. His hands tore at the earth; they bled and stained the dark soil as they had stained the pale rose … His father, Angeline, Edris … the secret grave dug in the dead of night … “I do this to wipe out the great wrong I have done” … but it is a dream after all, and it does not matter what one does in a dream.…
And then suddenly he did not need to burrow into the earth; he knew.
It was not the murdered body of his father that he found; it was his great-uncle, old Philip Telefair.
Tall? The old man was more than tall; his black cape flowed into the darkness at his feet; his beautiful face was so pale as to be almost glowing; on his slender, graceful and delicate hand shone the great yellow sapphire, a faint reflected flicker of light.
“How did you kill him?” David asked.
Old Philip Telefair answered, “With the little knife.”
This was the moment toward which every step of his life had been directed, the reason behind every previous action of it: the rustling silks of his mother’s female relative; the sandy-haired headmaster; the schools where he was forever a stranger and the tutors who changed from year to year; the glassy stillness of the inlet and the feeling that he had crossed it innumerable times before; the howling of the dogs across the water; the great house, indescribably pale and marvelous under the moon; the eyes watching him; the fountain, the little fountain in the moonlight and its sweet, tinkling, gentle sound; Edris, her skin cool as only falling water is cool; and the descent into the earth. He knew it now, that it had all been lived through only to bring him to this deed, to this moment when he would kill Philip Telefair, who had been so kind to him, and as he struck, with a sense of joyous release, of long awaited fulfilment, it seemed to him that Philip Telefair had not a look of fear, but of triumph on his beautiful face, and that Philip Telefair did not so much fall before him, dead at his feet, as disappear in front of his eyes, a creation of the moon and the shadows, leaving behind on
ly a great pit of darkness to mark where he had been.
19
The garden space between David and the old house had become a lake of fog, as though it had collected there from everywhere on the Island—for the space beyond the trees seemed almost clear from where he stood. It was a low-lying mist, milky and impenetrable, looking as though one could swim in it, yet rising no higher than the tops of the curiously clipped hedges. Indeed, he could see over it, observe its surface, as though he looked down into a pool.
Strange-shaped, dark trees rose from it here and there. At one point it was broken by the fountain that seemed, now, to have no other source, a frail spray of water, glistening in the hazy moonlight, that rose from the cloudy vapor and returned to it again in a myriad of crystal drops. Beyond the little fountain the old house, Telefair, emerged from the mist, marvelously white and beautiful, with its base in the nebulous, almost phosphorescent fog. It was, indeed, impossible to tell where the whiteness ceased to be fog and became house, or whether the house itself was built of the mist in which it swam. By some curious phenomenon of the moonlight, the windows appeared to be lighted with a pale fire, even those in the old, unused wing, and for a moment David stared at them, startled, wondering if every window in the house was truly lighted to welcome him, heir to Telefair.
“After all—you are heir to Telefair—”
David could not tell how he had reached the edge of the gardens; he only knew that he was there, nor could he remember, save dimly, obscurely, what lay behind him in the shadowy and haunted grove. He stared at his hands in the moonlight, thinking to find them bruised and discolored, the nails half torn away, black with wet earth and stained with blood. Yet it was almost without surprise that he saw that they were not, that only a few dark grass stains showed at the tips of his fingers, that the only drops of blood there were his own, dried and blackened now, left there by the destroyed rose.
