So Dies the Dreamer
half-blinded herself by her hair, and caught at his arm so suddenly that they both staggered.And that was all there was to it: a freakish current of air, a second of lost footing. Charles wanted to know, laughing, if she thought this was Lover’s Leap, and Sarah got her hair tied down and looked somewhat shakenly over the edge. It was still a very respectable bluff, the leafy drop perhaps twenty-five feet to what, from a glimpse of rocks at the bottom, had once been a brook bed.
To anyone who fell, it wouldn’t have presented any mortal danger. But to someone who was pushed with force and went outward, with no tough wiry bushes to check his plunge . . .
After a while, as stiff and strange to her own living room as though she had actually been to Preston and back, Sarah went out to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and gazed blankly at the lamb chops she had, as usual, forgotten to thaw. She had tried not to slip into the canned-soup routine of women suddenly left alone, but somehow she often ended up that way. Tonight the alternative was two eggs and a stranded-looking piece of cheddar cheese. She shredded the cheese for omelette and made herself a drink while she waited for the pan to heat.
Memory did not let go cleanly. There were other wisps of that gray afternoon: Evelyn running to the field to meet them, her face red with effort and irritation, crying distractedly, “Sarah, that dreadful child insists that you have her bracelet.”
Charles said, “You don’t mean to say they’re still here!” and Sarah, remembering, drew out the bracelet she had pocketed somewhat briskly after having it tobogganed from the crown of her head into her lap several dozen times.
“They’re out in the car; they’re going,” panted Evelyn over her shoulder, and ran off.
The pheasants were still agitated by the unaccustomed invasion of pounding feet, bursts of giggling, and sticks thrust curiously into their pens. Some had taken refuge in piled fir boughs, others were pacing about with short darting steps, heads tipped vigilantly. A Silver cock, black crest erect above his proud red-felt face, gave loud grunting cries of rage while Bess Gideon tried to soothe him with pieces of tomato.
When they went inside, Milo was vainly trying to cheer up his depressed crow.
Sarah was secretly relieved that Hunter Gideon was not there for dinner; she always had a nervous notion that he might bark a military command at her without warning, which she would obey before she thought. She and Charles went for a drive later, ending up at a roadhouse for a drink, and Charles said, smiling at her across the table, “This time next week . . .”
Whatever he might have thought later, whatever curious twist his mind had taken, he had not thought then that Sarah had tried to push him over the bluff; he had not even remembered the incident. Sarah was sure of that. Something had nudged it into his mind after they were married, distorted it, given it credence.
Or some other secret thing had gnawed away at Charles until his reason was actually clouded, and he turned blindly on the nearest scapegoat.
How appalling to think that she had lived with Charles and never known that this was going on; how wincing the memory of waking him, hand on his shoulder—her hand— from that racking dream of the height, the something blue over his eyes, the gathering push.
Had her scarf been blue? It must have been.
So had the thread of curtain caught under Charles’s fingernail.
Sarah felt abruptly and physically sick. She forced herself to eat a little of the omelette which had burned on the bottom, and do the few dishes. She retreated to the living room with her coffee and picked up her face-down book, hating Dr. Vollmer for having led her to this depth, almost hating Charles, the stranger to whom she had betrayed herself so unknowingly.
The next morning, considerately out of uniform, Lieutenant Welk paid her a visit.
v
SARAH REMEMBERED the lieutenant from that otherwise lost night when Charles had died: a compact, lightfooted man with the most interested gaze she had ever seen. Even while his voice said soothingly, “Now, Mrs. Trafton . . ” his fascinated glance had been examining the ceiling, the few pictures on the walls, the cut of her suit, the titles in the nearest bookcase.
What was it Vollmer had said as he left? “I thought you might best be prepared.”
Sarah had not slept very much and looked it. She greeted Lieutenant Welk with a flicker of nervousness and, as her own third cup stood noticeably on the table in front of the couch, offered him coffee. Welk interrupted a piercing study of her narcissus shoots to say yes, if it wasn’t a nuisance. She was on her way out to the kitchen when the telephone rang.
It was unfortunate that it should have been Mr. Eigel, of Daintease, who needed some rush copy for a trade paper ad and insisted upon having his girdle notes read back to him. Sarah tried circumspection, had to abandon it, and wondered rather wildly what the lieutenant was making of all this. She turned her head a little and saw him studying an old hunting print with such concentration that he would certainly have been able to pick up any of those choleric-looking gentlemen, pink coats or not, if he should find them in the neighborhood.
She was able to hang up at last. Lieutenant Welk, supplied with his coffee, tore himself from Sarah’s book, which he had picked up and commenced reading, and said mildly that they had had a visit from a Dr. Vollmer, Mr. Trafton’s psychiatrist.
Sarah said nothing. Her heart thudded.
“Interesting,” said the lieutenant, “and, in a way, satisfactory from our point of view.” He gave her an apologetic glance and got up for another look at the hunting print—to memorize the fox this time? “When a man like