Shadows Waiting

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Part One

“Do you see this jonquil, Kate?” Haeckla stopped for a moment in the doorway and waved the flower under Kate’s nose. She couldn’t remember the time when Kate’s nose had not had a slight upward tilt of superiority, and she liked accentuating its native slant.

“I’m not blind, Miss Haeckla.” Kate always preferred answering questions with a negative statement. It was part of her philosophy never to give an unnecessary affirmation. “‘Mother’s only disciple,” Haeckla thought, swiftly, and then spoke aloud:

“If you’re not blind,” she said, “do you see what an important Jonquil this is?”

Kate blinked rapidly.

“T can’t help seeing you come in the house like a whole parade,” she answered, “‘and I’m not sorry you’ve done moping. Three days now you’ve been that queer I didn’t know what to think.”

“Kate,” Haeckla lowered her voice to a mysterious whisper, “‘Kate, this Jonquil has revolutionized my life. I’m going to save it and have it buried with me. Remind me to add that to my last will and testament. You’re quite right; I went into the garden moping—running away from something—and I’ve come back ‘like a parade,’ looking for it.”

“Running away from something? Now, whatever is there to be afraid of, with me here looking after you?”

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''"'“Ok,'something too trivial to talk about—and too important.”

“I didn’t think otherwise.” Kate, relieved of her momentary suspicion of tramps and burglars, turned again to dusting the stairs. “Like father, like daughter,” she continued, half to herself. “Mr. Bayard was always talking, talking, about nothing at all.”

Haeckla, on her way to the brary, stopped. “I don’t ae she said, “that his talk was about nothing at all.”

“It was,” Kate said, firmly, and Haeckla lingered, marveling at her unusual loquacity. “When his best horse was stolen from under his nose, what did he do? a to the police, or put a notice in the papers? No, he began making a rhyme about it.”

“T remember. ‘Farewell to Saint Francis.’ ”

“That was the animal’s name. I don’t hold with saints but I don’t hold any more with calling beasts after them. Used to call him ‘my little brother’ and that was a joke.”

“So it was.”

“I don’t see it’s so funny. The only way I knew your father was joking was by his laughing and even then I couldn’t always be sure. But that poem, now, about the horse. He threw a fit until he found a rhyme for Saint Francis. Stamped up and down the room, calling on heathen gods to help him.”

“**Faint prances,”” Haeckla prompted. “He said he’d hear them in his dreams. I remember it:

““Oh, that my wife’s sweet hope, divorce, Should have galloped away with my stolen horse. . .

“Divorce, indeed! If there waseveralady who .. . but your father was like that—no reverence.”

“Oh, Kate! Father died of reverence.”

Kate understood, and pursed her lips over her work. That meant, with Kate, that the conversation was over so far as her contributions were concerned, so Haeckla went on to the library, twirling the jonquil idly in her hand. Of course, Kate wasn’t the kind of person who could appreciate the importance of little things. Kate, (lucky woman!) was always occupied with vital matters. She read the newspapers, carefully, from the headlines to the advertisements, in deference to cosmic significance. The most important things, to Kate, were those that involved the largest number of people. Although, Haeckla corrected herself, that wasn’t true. Kate would be pleasantly stirred by a distant war, and acutely miserable 1f she, Haeckla, had a headache. On the other hand, she wouldn’t, with any amount of explanation, understand why Haeckla had run away from Dennis’ novel, nor why she had come back to it, still frightened, but no longer a coward.

She had hidden the manuscript away when it arrived —and no one except herself, not even Dennis, could understand that; could know her terror of that story, in which some monstrous secret might be lurking, ready to spring with deadly intent at her very being. She had not even unwrapped the flat brown package; she had simply slid it into a drawer in the desk, locked it away, and then tried to forget about it. Forgetting about it was what Kate called moping; what she herself called spreading her dark wings. Wings were for escaping. Sometimes they were wide, sun-feathered; you spread them for bold flights into ecstasy. Sometimes they were dark, bat-webby things; they couldn’t lift you above reality: they only hovered over you, and you bore their stir above your head because they hid something you didn’t want to see. Then, finally, when you couldn’t bear them any longer, you beat them off and found the thing you had feared to see pleasant by contrast.

What she had done, really, was to fail Dennis. If Dennis loved his book better than he loved her—and perhaps he did—she would ignore his impatience, his desire for her approval, and refuse to read his story. But in her hurry to keep him waiting a long time, she had let herself drift into a strange, emotional state in which time didn’t count; in which minutes were hours, and hours were days. Kate would have said, “Not but what there aren’t clocks in almost every room.”

And then, just now, she had gone into the garden and stood there wondering, in a quite wordless fashion, that the jonquils had lasted so long. That flower over there, for example—that tilted cup of yellow, strayed so far from the carefully-patterned group—that had been there, surely, the day Dennis’ manuscript arrived; that, or another in exactly the same place. And, then, suddenly, the black wings had whirred away, and she had seen her self-deception. The jonquil had been a bud when the package came—a tight little wreath of stiff leaves, showing yellow in star-points. And to-day was only the twentieth of April, so, if she hurried, she might still read the novel and get a letter off to Dennis before he could feel hurt at the delay.

She had stood quite still for a moment, with her hands cupping the sunlight, feeling very strong and far-seeing.

And then, suddenly, she had laughed. It was funny, she thought, as she plucked her calendar and strolled into the house, that she should feel even for a moment like a combined Titan and Sybil, just because she had remembered the day of the month.

It was quite easy, now, to take out the manuscript, tear off the wrapping, and marvel at its neatness. Dennis must have loved every word of it, she realized with a swift pang, to have sheathed it so carefully, and printed the title sHADows WAITING, on the cover in such finelyshaded letters. She flicked over the pages, and saw that the whole story was hand-printed. It must have taken Dennis weeks to do it. She could see him, almost, laboring with India ink and a fine pen. He was hopelessly _ untidy about most things; and so unnecessarily meticu-

lous when his emotions were involved. He hated typewriters. “What!” he had said once, when she had suggested a remedy for the stupidity of copyists: “What! I use one of those thing? Click instead of scratch? ‘Click’ is machinery, and ‘scratch’ is humanity. Click means that something arbitrary is between you and your work. It means you’ve none of the pleasure of shaping with your hands, with your own fingers, the shapeless beginnings of ideas. No,” and he had slumped down in a chair, “pushing a button and having something come pat, makes me nervous. It makes me suspicious, in an unreasoning sort of way, that perhaps the thing I’m trying to say 1s only another arbitrary little pattern that my mind stamps on the surface of things.

. « ‘Click!’—like that.”

Certainly nothing had clicked to produce this script she held, and she became almost afraid again, realizing as she did that the effort expended in making an unstereotyped format for the story proved, more than his wearily triumphant letters, that Dennis knew he had done it at last. He had written the story he wanted to write—what he wanted so much to say that he had become fanatic for retirement and turned hermit. And realizing this she drew a deep breath for courage, and knew that Dennis’ future, and hers thereby, lay unread in this manuscript.

A single sheet of paper that had been lying flat between the pages fluttered out.

“Here is my dearest child,” Dennis had written on it. “Let me know soon if she is as lovely as I find her, or if she 1s too like her father to impress you. I'm simply lost in the mists and shades, and shan’t see the thing clearly until you've turned tt over in the sunlight and said ‘Yes’ or‘ No.’ Tell me quickly. Father would have liked it, I’m sure, and at least the critics can’t say its autobiographical, the goddamned fools!

“Flowers out, Haeckla—violets in my haunted wood, the color scared out of most of them. I told them over and over again that tt really was a kindly place—no one would pick them and, besides, * Death for us all, and his own life for each” . . . A lot of very savage scarlet things. What are they called? The trees are looking quite new and important, but not so important as I feel. There's nothing quite so pleased and lonely and restless as I.

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“So he is feeling important,” was her first thought, and her second: “If you’re lonely and restless it’s your own fault,” she spoke aloud, because she would have said it had he been there, and his presence had been strongly invoked by the few words she held in her hand —words that charged across the paper with the crowded, impetuous authenticity of his voice. Of course she knew that it was his “fault” only in that someone had once invented the word as a short-cut to obscure meanings. If a deep and most fundamental part of Dennis preferred the macabre satisfaction of loneliness to the apparent stability of a normal life, certainly this desire fought bitter battles with the rest of his nature. The fact that two years before, when he had been faced with the human treadmill of marriage and a more or less social life, he had succumbed to restlessness and discontent, did not in the least rule out the possibilities of

resent unhappiness. It was not really his fault that he had tried to do an impossible thing—escape himself; nor that he had, as was usual in such attempts, succeeded only in accentuating himself; underscoring his ego.

She looked at his “‘dearest child,” dressed in green cardboard. “Like her father, perhaps, but not autobiographical.” A strange little monster, 1f that were true, and of no use to her in her problem. She wondered if Dennis had remembered his words to her nearly three years before, when the nucleus of the story formed in his mind. He had rushed over to see her after, as he described it, a “beautifully wide-awake night”; had been told by Kate that she was in her bath; had been invited to stay to breakfast.

“Oh,” he had said, “and how long has she been in the tub?”

“Only a minute, Mr. Dennis. And if you want the morning paper. . . .”

He had skilfully combined a patronizing pat on the shoulder with an unmistakable shove, and taken the stairs three at a time. The first Haeckla heard of it was a kick on the door and Dennis’ excited voice: “‘Haeckla! I’m going to have a book. Hurry out!”

She stopped splashing.

“Have a what?”

“‘A book—a masterpiece! Now don’t soak for an hour out of jealousy.”

She hated being disturbed at her leisurely morning ritual, so she had assumed a dignity not quite in keeping with the circumstances.

“Do you require a midwife?”

“Crude child! No! A sympathetic listener. I'll be downstairs, biting my nails.”

She had grumbled and hurried. When she went into the dining-room he was sitting at the table talking to Kate, who stood near his chair, pretending to listen to him but keeping a watchful eye on his gesticulations with a cup of coffee.

“Hello,” he said as she came in—jumping up too hastily. Kate rescued the cup. “I told you you'd spill it,” she said, resignedly, and went into the kitchen for a cloth.

“Tsn’t it beautiful, darling?’ Dennis had asked her.

“Very neat,” she admitted, eyeing the darkening stain on her rug.

“You know what I mean. Aren’t you happy?”

“Yes. Tell me about it.”

And as she sipped orange-juice, Dennis tried to tell her.

“Mist and moonlight,” he said, teasingly, “‘and star-

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crossed lovers. That’s all, so far, except a lot of incongruous pictures—places I see. . . . I’m awfully sorry, Kate. You know it would come up better if you’d use blotting-paper.”

“Mist and moonlight sound unwholesome enough,” Haeckla said, “but what do you know about star-crossed lovers?” :

She had asked the question only to drive Dennis into something specific, and she was answered by a curious change in his face—one that she knew well and dreaded. When he was contented, and wrestling with superficial problems, Dennis had an astoundingly varied set of facial expressions—one for every moment and all of them charming. That, she had always supposed, was one of his outstanding Celtic qualities—his vividness, his naive histrionic ability to put capital letters to all his ideas; set them off with a magnetism that was purely physical, and never repetitious. But Dennis was not much concerned with the superficial, to which category he relegated many of the so-called serious aspects of life. To the few shrines, however, at which he worshipped, he took a different face—an inscrutable, tightened mask, in which his deep-sea eyes became dark slits for hiding him, for spying on a hostile world; in which his pleasant and quite healthy leanness became hollow-cheeked and hollow-templed. It was a face entirely lacking in humor; and deep pondering on what in him it represented, or cloaked, once led her to admit grudgingly that Dennis had no real sense of humor. She had propounded this theory to him, and he had tried, of course, to demolish it with dnnoyed nonsense.

“See here, Haeckla,” he had said at last, “I can see

II humor in the statement that I haven’t any. Doesn’t that prove that I have?”

“No, because a sense of humor—a native one, I mean—inborn—s like the little shadow that goes in and out with you. There isn’t a spot it won’t penetrate, and there isn’t another emotion it’s afraid to associate with.”

“But I’ve got an emotion of anger with you, because you don’t appreciate me, and yet I think it’s amusing, too.”

“Vanity.”

“No, it isn’t. When the person I love best in the world, the person I’m most congenial with—you know, darling—denies me any claim to one of our common stamping-grounds, don’t you think I have a right to complain?”

The upshot of the argument was, of course, a deadlock, but she had finally granted him all the important concomitants of humor, because, after all, as Dennis said, any argument about The Sense of Humor always ended in an elaborate discussion of One’s Own. She hadn’t been able to make him see that he lost all sense of proportion when an issue vital to his soul came uppermost, nor that the reason this trait was so little noticeable was due to the esoteric quality and consequent rare occurrence of such issues. And this, after all, was all she had meant.

So, as she had watched Dennis’ face contract to a harsh, unhappy secretiveness, on hearing her frivolous question about star-crossed lovers, some recent doubts as to his content with her had returned with sickening suddenness.

“Don’t look like that,” she wailed.

Dennis jumped.

“Like what?” he asked, and the mask loosened, slipped away. His eyes smoldered blue again and he smiled.

Relief made her silly.

“Like that, like Mr. Hyde!” she stormed at him. “Like the serpent when Eve turned her back for a minute. Like God when we pray to see Him. Like—like Geraldine, ‘Couching her head upon her breast, and looking askance at Christabel. Jesu Maria shield me well,’ indeed! How dare you get bewitched so early in the morning?”

Dennis followed her lead, and took refuge from emotion in hyperbole.

“I was musing,” he said, “‘on your stupidity. What do I know of star-crossed lovers? What don’t I—what doesn’t anyone? We’re born knowing all about them because they’re a universal ideal. You see, my dear,—or you would see if you hadn’t such optimistic hair,—all love is like all life—bound to be unsatisfactory. Either it’s never so fine and rapturous as we want it to be, or it’s too fine and rapturous to stand rough handling and everyday use for a lifetime. So most people are fated to grow old knowing only that they have the tattered remnants of a burning joy and a consuming misery, laid away like old clothes in a trunk in the attic. But star-crossed lovers—Tristan and Iseult, Paolo and Francesca, and all the glorious couples you can find in any college magazine sonnets, as well as in more suitable places—they were all dead while love was still looking forward; they’re the perfected patterns of our threadbare experiences. We have to see all our young fervors drying up, ignominiously and furtively, in dark corners; their young fervors still blaze in the sunlight and are never consumed. We see our hopes take off their masks and live with us as strangers; but the star-crossed lovers never know—never know that . . . that. . .”

Dennis’ eloquence suddenly gave out. “‘You’ll see,”’ he finished lamely, ‘“‘when you read my book.” But she had known suddenly, in a miserable flash of conviction, that she would see long before that.

Haeckla reflected, now, that she had been only half right in her conviction. She had found out, soon enough, that she and Dennis, who had grown up, it seemed, being happy in each other and in planning to continue so—that they, too, were star-crossed. But as to why this should have been so, only Dennis could tell her; and Dennis, probably, would never know, because he was so sure that the reasons were all of a surface obviousness. And, of course, the real reasons were obscure, hidden; buried deep in themselves.

This “child” of his, now—Haeckla looked at it, her dark eyes very somber. If only Dennis were there to reassure her. He could have made the reading of this story such a simple matter. He could have laughed at her fear, and prologued his writing so charmingly that she would have been floated into the middle of it almost without realizing what was happening; instead of which she would have to pluck up her courage and dive. “As you value your honor, Sir,” she found herself saying to an invoked Dennis, ‘‘am I the mother of this child?” and then reflected that it was strange how serious even the silliest jokes were if no one overheard them. Because, of course, if she were not the mother of this child of Dennis’

warmest fancy—if it belonged to him and to him alone, or if he had conceived it on some rival love in which she had no share—then this lingering hope of hers that the stars would relent and send Dennis back to her, was an illusion; an insidious weed that must be rooted out at once, and not indulged from day to day because it had a false beauty.

This book represented the best of Dennis during the two long years of their separation—all that part of him that didn’t get into his letters, except in scanty suggestions. And it would contain, if it were as good as he evidently considered it, the essence, the distillation of Dennis’ life, in which she had figured so largely that she could not disentangle from their common store of memories those aspects that had been independent of her. She would be able to trace through his story, perhaps, the vivid pattern of that part of his youth which had led so inevitably, with so subterranean a finality, to his selfimposed exile. For if Dennis had left her, his beloved, with a specious excuse masking his more positive and less comprehensible reason—if he had left her and his old life to lose himself in solitude and find himself in words, the cause, surely, would be implicit in the result.

With sudden impatience at herself, Haeckla took the manuscript upstairs and left it on the table beside her bed. She had no intention of risking interruption by starting it at once, and besides, she thought, one could see more clearly at night when there was less to see. As she closed the door of her room behind her she told herself, firmly, that she had placed beside the book all the emotions connected with it. She pictured them as little black, squirming things with enthusiastic legs, and wondered if they would bite Kate when she turned down the bed in the evening.

x

She knew a little that day, she thought, how people felt under sentence of death. They went about the routine of everyday life; a little more fervidly, probably, because the realization that a great change approached would sharpen the significance of things blunted by too much familiarity. They would not think—just as she would not—but their minds would be rushing torrents under the calm consideration of immediate problems. She and Kate, for example, discussed the menu for dinner, waxing a trifle warm over the respective merits of steak and lamb roast. Kate held out for lamb; this was the time of year for it, wasn’t it; and besides, Miss Haeckla would insist on eating steak, and it always disa-

eed with her. Haeckla said that nothing made her feel

etter than steak; that lambs looked better in the fields than on a platter, and that she had never cared what happened to cows—almost unaware, at the time, of the variations her mind was playing on the theme: Dennis liked steaks but he didn’t like mushrooms; “I won’t marry you, Haeckla, unless you promise to give me steak and onions every day in the year except Shrove Tuesday.” She had promised, but he hadn’t married © her. Steaks were messy on picnics, and the smoke got in — your eyes. They always buried the frying-pans, because you couldn’t get them clean, and that nice friend of Dennis’—what was his name?—had once said they would be responsible for overrunning the country with cowslips and Dennis had never felt the same toward him afterwards, though the poor boy had been sorry the minute he’d said it. Such queer little things affected Dennis. “All right, Kate, I don’t care, really. We'll have lamb.”

The afternoon was very warm, but Haeckla could not rest in the cool, shadowy rooms. She wandered from one to the other, in search of something that might absorb her attention and keep it pleasantly diverted from the table upstairs beside her bed. Had the house been a new acquisition, she thought, she might have succeeded, but the high ceilings had arched over her great-grandfather’s head; the thick walls, interminably paneled, had bounded her parents’ uneventful but disturbed life together; the dark poltshed floors, lacquered with streaks of sunlight, still showed the honorable scars inflicted by growing children—she and Dennis had once practiced ice-skating indoors. A house that had seen four genera- | tions of Bayards, she thought, had no fresh distractions to offer to the last of the line. Every doorway opened into the past; there was no future, any longer, beyond the windows. She paused at the threshold of a small study—‘‘Father’s room.” Some perverse instinct held her there. Surely of all the rooms in the house, this was the last to which she should come in search of the Present. The Past, here, was not even dead; it was alive, in the distressing fashion of a very old person who is kept in a mechanical state of animation by forceful skill. When her father had died, her mother had locked the door of this room, and allowed no one to go inside except herself. She used to sit in here for hours, without ever impressing on it in the least her own personality.

It was still expressive of Haeckla’s father. Had it not been, her mother would have stopped visiting it.

Haeckla often wondered how her mother could have been so desperately sentimental in her heart, and so terse, so practical in her manner. This room, for instance. What had she done in here, all alone? Impossible that she could cry, or talk to her dead husband in the belief that he might come back and listen to her. She had never seen her mother cry, and knew that whatever secret pleasures she might cherish would have nothing to do with talking. Even when her father was alive, her mother had, on the whole, been a silent woman. He had called her “‘Tacita,” always—except when affectionate satire had turned it occasionally to “Chatterbox.” Nor would her mother ever have indulged herself in the belief that her husband might come back to his study, a disembodied spirit in search of the familiar things he had loved on earth. Of course he had loved his wife and child, in a curious fashion. He had liked his work, as he termed the pleasure in which he conscientiously indulged himself at regular hours during the day. But no one knew better than her mother, Haeckla thought, that her father’s spirit—granting, as no one had, the return of such a thing—would not haunt the Bayard side of the two walled-in estates. If he should come back in quest of earthly joy, he would surely go to the Ardley house. Haeckla, wondering, long ago, about these things, had asked Dennis if he had ever seen her father’s ghost. Dennis had found the very question uncomfortable.

No, her mother hadn’t wept or communed with a spirit in this room. Haeckla smiled and thought that probably she had dusted—very carefully, so as not to change anything from its original position, and then had sat down at the big desk to read in her father’s notebooks. There were enough of them, as she knew, now that her mother was dead and the door left open, to occupy the leisure hours of a considerable number of years. Her father had been an indefatigable notetaker. He was a collector of curious facts, useless knowledge, and neglected books. So far as her own investigation had gone, she could not see that he had scorned any bypath or footnote. Anything of an exotic nature was nourishment, and fattened his active brain. One of the sweetest things about him, Haeckla had always thought, was that he never intruded upon anyone all this burden of research. He threw out, of course, fleeting references to things in which he was most interested, but he never followed up with page and line, and never took advantage of a casual question by telling you more than you had wanted to know. This accumulation of fact constituted the only work his diseased heart permitted, and his strenuous energy made it one of his deepest pleasures. That was why, probably, her mother had later found such comfort in this little room, untouched as it had been by his emotional life. She had always come out of it refreshed, her firm-set lips relaxed into the serene beginnings of asmile, her step mysteriously purean as ever, her eyes preoccupied but very gentle.

atever it was in here that she did, or felt, or thought about, it was pleasant and comforting, and if any spirit might wish to haunt the place—and it was a charming room, with high, leaded windows that spilled sunlight down to the floor—it would be her mother’s rather than her father’s. But on the whole neither of them was of the haunting kind. Her mother would always be too busy, under any conditions of existence, for such an idle pursuit. Haeckla often thought of her mother, lying in a narrow grave, with her hands folded, and of how oe would hate the enforced idleness, could she know oF 1¢.

Haeckla stood silently on the threshold, one spear of sunlight cutting a red-gold track through her hair, and then crossed to the windows. She was tall but she could just rest her chin on the ledge. Her mother had had to tiptoe in order to see out, and even her father had been barely able to fold his arms on the sill, and look across the flower-beds to the thick underbrush that separated the garden from the woods at the back of the house. To-day, the early flowers blazed in the sunlight. The silksheened tulips bent acquiescent heads on their long, slim stems. The daffodils were a riotous treasury of gold; the crocus-bordered paths an untidy stream of winding color. Far off, at the edge of the woods, a tree stirred its new leaves above a blue pool of violets, and beyond it the thick tree-tops were a yellow-green mist, mapped with the copper-colored buds of the beeches. “Our woods,” Haeckla thought. “Dennis’ and mine.” Her father had once called this two miles of dense trees a “half-hearted forest,” but she and Dennis had felt no truth in the description. In all the years they had made it their playground, it had never, despite their appropriative title and possessive feeling, really belonged to them. Of course her grandfather had bought it, long ago, but that made no difference to the woods. It had a secret self-possession; a mystery of aloofness that withstood constantly, with an awe-full firmness, the shifting emphasis of the seasons. They had known its aspects as they knew each other’s faces: the confiding expansiveness of spring; the brooding, half-awake stillness of summer; the sacrificial fervor of autumn; the tense expectancy of winter. But none of these aspects had affected the soul of the place. It was always there, intent on its hidden purpose, tolerant and kindly, but rather indifferent to their enthusiasm; never fearing, as the years smoothed to bare paths their first hesitant tracks through its solitude, that they might track an entrance to its invisible shrine.