So Dies the Dreamer
released from a shadow burden, said simply, “How ghastly . . . Someone in the woods, do you suppose?”Charles shook his head again, blankly, and they went through the stable, converted to pheasant pens, and into the barn, hung with old harnesses, bridles, horseshoes. A blue-painted door opened onto the passageway that led into the kitchen; when Charles opened it a busy pattern of voices filtered through. His face lit; he said to Sarah, “Harry Brendan was going to try and come tonight. I hope he’s here. He’s the one person I’m most anxious for you to meet.”
. . . Harry Brendan.
ii
FOR SARAH, the same instinct that had recognized Kate Clemence was on the alert for Harry Brendan. She knew that she was going to marry Charles, and something in her resented this unseen man whose approval Charles wanted, and to whom he unconsciously deferred. Buttonholed by the allergic Evelyn, aware of Milo’s pseudo-scholarly malice on the fringe of the conversation, she watched the door.
A number of people came in, were introduced to Sarah, and drifted about Bess Gideon’s long, vivid living room with the two sweeping pheasant feathers poised with an air of significance over the doorway. There was an old bull’s-eye mirror over the fireplace, its gilt framed inside with a circle of black, and after a while Sarah watched all their expertly reduced figures in that. It was something of a shock to meet the reflected gaze of a man who, from his entrenchment in a corner and the drink in his hand, had obviously been there for some time.
He was Harry Brendan, Sarah knew that at once. He must have come in very quietly, with someone else, and something about the steady quality of his gaze suggested that he had been observing Sarah at his leisure. She glanced away without hurry, feeling her face grow hot for no reason, and then, disastrously, she glanced back.
As he must have known she would; his waiting eyes made it like a door re-opened, an appointment kept. Later she knew it for one of those freakish exchanges between strangers, the second of perfect contact that can happen in a crowded restaurant or a milling railroad station; at the moment she was conscious only of resentment and an obscure feeling of disloyalty to Charles.
By the time Charles introduced them, the moment was gone and she could wonder that it had ever existed. Harry Brendan had lost his magic; he was only Charles’s friend, a few years older than Charles, darker, leaner, fractionally less tall. Sarah smiled and said how nice it was to meet him; Harry Brendan smiled back and said did she know Skitter Schofield, who was the account executive on Supersheen?
Later, Charles said anxiously, “How did you like Harry? Of course you didn’t really get a chance to talk to him.”
“He seemed very nice,” said Sarah.
That was the first of several weekends at the farm. She and Charles were married in October. Harry Brendan was to have been best man, but at the last moment he sent word that he had come down with something indefinable and a man named Tom Proctor, whom Sarah had never seen before and never saw again, took his place.
She could have coped with or at least understood Charles’s drinking. What left her weaponless was the inner and deeper change in him, the darkening of the sunniness she had fallen in love with, the sharp new cynicism. It was a little indecent, as though she had married one man and was now living with another.
She said one day in November, with the quiet of desperation, “Charles, if you’d only tell me.”
“Tell you what?” asked Charles with the edge of his fourth cocktail. “The time? A story?”
She must keep her temper at all costs. “What’s worrying you. What wakes you up at night—and me too—with those horrible nightmares.”
Charles stared meditatively into his drink and then up at her. He said with distinctness, “Do you know, I think you’re the last person I’d tell?”
“Thank you,” said Sarah, white, but in the pause it took her to get that out, Charles was on his feet, holding her, saying inarticulately over her head, “Sarah, I didn’t mean— I don’t know what made me— Look, I’ll go see what’s-his-name, on the first floor, tomorrow. You’ll see, all I need is Vitamin P or something. He’ll make a new man of me and we’ll have to get married again. Sarah?”
She managed to smile at him; she told herself that she had forgotten the clear considered rejection of a moment ago.
And he did go to see the doctor this time, and came back with a small bottle of white tablets which he displayed with an air of triumph. “Snakeroot,” he said cheerfully. “I take one before retiring, and when I start to hiss and dart my tongue at people I discontinue the prescription.”
Sarah was not quite satisfied; when he had gone to his office she called the doctor. He told her, after some preliminary confusion with the file of a man who had gallstones, that her husband was in very good shape physically, pulse a little fast, blood pressure a little high, perhaps, but those were quite usual reactions in people who were worried about a visit to the doctor. For the trouble in sleeping, he had prescribed a mild sedative which ought to establish a sleep pattern—
“But the nightmares,” said Sarah. “If they haven’t a physical cause . . .”
“Nightmares?” said the doctor blankly.
Charles took his pills, or said he took them, and for the first few nights he did not cry out but thrashed about a good deal and took gaspingly deep breaths which were almost as frightening to listen to. It was as though his private demon had been muzzled and might break free in some new revengeful form.
There was a brief surcease the week before Thanksgiving. Sarah was walking down Fifth Avenue in the late, cold afternoon when she paused, looked again