I watched a yellow warbler preening itself on a swinging bough of a tamarack. “It is easier to have no thought forward—perhaps,” I said slowly after a pause.
“You think so, too? I am sure of it. The past is an insistent thing—a ghoulish thing—waving shrouded arms over the present. To forget!—ah, there’s the rub.”
She spoke precipitately, turning her head restlessly this way and that on the rough cushion. The line of her throat, the tiny fluffy ringlets at the roots of her hair, the curve of her lovely cheek, stirred my blood strangely.
“Tell me something more of yourself,” I blurted out abruptly.
She started. Her eyes grew bleak, worn with memories, it seemed; her face that had shone warmly pale, changed and stiffened to marble. She answered in a cold, slight voice: “There is so little to tell.” After awhile she added: “Perhaps some day you will tell me your story.”
I sat and watched the yellow warbler, reflecting on the strange relief it would be to recite to sympathetic ears my pent-up dreary tale, my baleful tale of a scourging past, of present loneliness and hard plain living. It was the sort of tale that is never told—unless the teller be a driveller. I laughed cheerlessly, and someway the brightness of the hour was clouded by the phantom of the past that Haidee’s words had invoked. And the phantom dared to stand even at the gate of the future and demand toll, so that neither past, present nor future was a thing to rejoice in.
My face must have grown grim. I clenched and unclenched my hand on my knee. Haidee’s voice continued: “But in the meantime you don’t know me—the real every day me—and I don’t know you—the real you; and it’s interesting, rather, to speak to each other, like sliding wraith-like ships that pass to opposite ports. We fling our voices out—then darkness again—and a silence.”
“I am what I am,” I answered quickly.
She nodded concurrence. “Dear me! Of course. But you were not always what you are now. That’s the point. And, some day, I shall persuade you to tell me all.”
I answered pointedly: “In the words of Olivia, ‘you might do much.’”