The Weak-Eyed Bat

Chapter One

It was, thought professor Henry Frost, a pitiable state of affairs that he, a gentleman and a scholar, author of an authoritative work on the Ionic dialect in Homer, should have sired two such oddities as the Misses Joan and Susan Frost. In Joan's case his paternity was open to doubt, since the second Mrs. Frost had been notoriously liberal-minded along certain lines; but Susan was undoubtedly his own flesh and blood.

“A poor thing,” said Professor Frost over his bacon and eggs, “but mine own.”

Susan was, as usual, picking listlessly at her food in the faint hope that someone would comment on her lack of appetite. She raised her large doleful brown eyes at her father’s remark.

“What did you say, Father?” she asked in a voice which left no doubt that she was using up her last few pitiful ergs in an effort to be polite.

“I said,” Professor Frost said mildly, “that the bacon is delicious this morning.”

Susan blushed. “Really? How nice! I had it made especially for you, Father. It was especially—”

“She raised the pig herself in an incubator,” Joan remarked, “especially for you, Papa, because you are such a dear good papa, the hell you are.”

“Joan!” Susan said in mechanical shock.

Professor Frost regarded them both with distaste, but since Joan had resumed reading her letters, his distaste began to distill like dew on his elder daughter, Susan.

Certainly no one could say that he was not a man of kindly disposition and infinite patience, but Susan’s ability to strain one’s patience went far beyond infinity. Nobility on a large scale was Susan’s forte, he reflected. When a neighbor fell sick it was Susan who sat at the bedside shedding cheer with a false vivacity that was horrible even to contemplate. It was to this habit of Susan’s that Professor Frost attributed his unfailing good health. Far better to die in one’s boots, he thought.

“Isn’t it a beautiful morning?” Susan said sadly. “Muskoka has such a lovely climate.”

She waited for a reply to this conversational tidbit but none came, so she chewed with faint sorrow on a piece of toast.

Hattie Brown, a local girl hired for the summer, shuffled into the dining room and set the coffee percolator in front of Susan. Susan began to pour.

Joan thumped her last letter on the table and yawned audibly, stretching her brown arms over her head.

“You have quite a range of pretty noises,” her father said, “but it’s hardly necessary to display them at the breakfast table.”

“I agree,” Susan said automatically.

“Oh, dry up.” Joan reached for her coffee. “You’re both very boring. Such a perfect gentleman and such a perfect lady making such polite conversation.”

Yes, Professor Frost reflected, when one contemplated Joan, one was forced to admit the virtues of Susan. Whereas one could and often did ignore Susan, one had Joan thrust upon one.

One could only describe Joan as violent — violently blonde, violently eighteen, and violently female. A large, handsome Amazon with a loud laugh, Joan was as uninhibited as a tornado.

People were likely to miss small sums of money or pieces of jewelry after a visit from Joan. No charge had ever been laid against her, but doors were locked and husbands put out on leashes by vigilant wives.

She pushed her coffee cup away and lit a cigarette. “Got a hundred?” she asked casually.

Her father frowned at her across the table. “A hundred what?”

“Dollars, dear Papa.”

“What for?”

“For dear Mamma. One of my letters is from Mamma. She’s in Mexico and needs a hundred dollars, and after all you were married to her.”

“Let me see the letter,” Professor Frost said.

“The hell I will! Don’t you believe me?”

“No.”

“All right. I’ll settle for fifty.”

It promised to be an uncomfortable scene and Susan said quickly: “I see Dr. Prye arrived last night.”

Joan’s interest was immediately diverted. Her pale blue eyes began to gleam and Professor Frost sighed.

For Joan all Gaul was divided into two parts, male and female. It was an eminently simple division and it was only natural and just that Joan, who had an eminently simple mind, should accept it. But still it disheartened the author of a book on the Ionic dialect in Homer. Perhaps there were places where one sent girls like Joan, a kind of combined finishing school and reformatory. He must ask Prye. Prye would know what to do.

Restored once more to his scholastic calm, Professor Frost excused himself and went up to his study. Joan stared after him, looking unusually thoughtful.

“The lousy bastard,” she said.

Susan jumped to her feet, her small thin hands clenched at her sides. “Don’t you dare!” she shouted. “Don’t you dare to say that word. You of all people!”

Joan threw back her head and began to laugh, a brittle, unpleasant laugh that shattered against the walls.

“God, you’re funny.” She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in Susan’s face. “What are you trying to do, insult me? Do you think I’d waste my anger on a poor anemic sniveling little hypocrite like you? Get out.”

Susan pointed a shaking finger at her.

“You’re a bad woman,” she hissed. “You and Tom Little. Don’t you suppose that everyone—”

“Oh, get out.”

Susan collapsed into a damp trembling bundle.

Although such scenes were not uncommon in the Frost household, Miss Hattie Brown found them freshly interesting each time. Via Hattie, the residents of the six cottages and the surrounding countryside were apprised of the situation in the Frost family play by play.

In her bedroom in the huge white house which was the only year-round residence in the community, Miss Emily Bonner was sitting in her wheelchair by the window. She had an excellent view of the other five houses, and with the aid of a pair of field glasses she was enjoying it.

The leather on her field glasses was well worn, a fact which would have alarmed her neighbors had they known it. But Emily’s love for voluminous clothing was not without its advantages. Even so bulky an article as a pair of field glasses could be popped up a large sleeve or down a well-padded bosom. And surely a poor old crippled woman had a right to some pleasure.

Miss Bonner’s age increased by unmathematical leaps and bounds. While lesser women were subtly subtracting a year here and a year there, Miss Bonner did not hesitate to add ten years when the spirit moved her. After all, if one couldn’t retain the privileges of extreme youth one might as well claim those of extreme age. The result was that at the age of sixty-five Miss Bonner was variously credited with seventy to eighty-five years, and people agreed that she was remarkably well preserved.

On occasions her nephew and heir, Ralph Bonner, had been tactless enough to question her antiquity. Although he was not astute, Ralph calculated that since his late father had been only a few years younger than his aunt Emily she could not be over sixty-five. Miss Bonner took a firm stand over this heresy: either she was seventy-five, as currently claimed, or she would leave her money to a home for poor old crippled women like herself.

Ralph made few such excursions into the realm of logic. There were already other more important points of disagreement between himself and his aunt. The chief of these was his residence in the Muskoka house. There was no amusement for a young man of twenty-three living all year round in a lonely country house in northern Ontario with only an aged aunt and a staff of servants for company. Ralph wanted to go out into the world, to meet life face to face.

“Oh, nonsense!” was Miss Bonner’s retort to these ravings. “I find it much more strategic to avoid a personal encounter with life.”

“But I—”

“Nonsense!”

The interviews always ended on the same note, and Ralph was still in Muskoka.

There were compensations, however. In the winter there was skiing and in the summer there was Joan Frost. Every June, July, and August Ralph, as the nearest male, was favored with Joan’s rather spasmodic attentions. Early this summer he had proposed, and Joan, after weighing Ralph’s assets — he was good-looking and had a substantial allowance — and his defects — he was a poor fish — had consented to marry him. In return Joan got a square-cut emerald ring and the satisfaction of seeing Miss Emily Bonner riled.

Miss Bonner did not like Joan. Her vocabulary, always vigorous, broke all records when Ralph stammered out the news of his engagement.

“A slut!” she shouted. “A hussy! A thief! The worthless offspring of a degenerate mother and an inept, pettifogging, embalmed old fossil of a father!”

Satisfied with this piece of rhetoric, Miss Bonner passed into a coma for the rest of the day. The next morning, greatly refreshed, she interviewed Joan Frost.

The results of that interview were not made public but close observers stated that old Emily was never the same from that day on. Her subsequent tirades lacked the old fire, and she was overheard telling the pastor of the Methodist Church in Clayton that she would be ninety come September.

In the house which adjoined Miss Bonner’s and was connected with it by the narrow lane running in from the main road Tom Little was talking on the telephone. The telephone was in the sitting room and Mary Little was in the dining room, so his remarks to Joan Frost were necessarily vague. He replaced the receiver with a sigh of relief and went back to his breakfast.

“Who was that, dear?” Mary asked in a sweet voice with just a trace of a whine.

“Some insurance agent,” Tom said with practiced ease. “Wanted to come out and see me about a policy. I said he could come but I wasn’t having any.”

“I heard what you said, dear.”

It was, Mary thought, getting more and more difficult to believe the best of Tom.

Tom’s thoughts were more specific: damn that gentle way she has of calling me a liar!

They had been married for ten years. At twenty-five Mary had been a tall, thin, plain-looking girl with a sizable fortune and a zeal for reform. At twenty-four Tom had been ripe for reform and in need of money. Dark, handsome, and rather dissipated, Tom was always attractive to women and it required more than marriage vows to dull his eye for a pretty face. There had been a procession of ladies, each one followed by a brief period of repentance. The latest was Joan Frost.

“Poor Tom,” Mary frequently said to the sinner, “you’re not really bad, you’re just weak.”

It was a charitable diagnosis and Tom accepted it eagerly and promised to become strong. But Tom at thirty-four was the same as Tom at twenty-four except for a slight paunch, a set of wrinkles, and a new method of parting his hair to hide the thin spots.

At present, the first of August, relations between the Littles were good. Tom was confident that he and Joan had been very discreet, and Mary was confident that Tom’s feelings for the young Frost girl were so far paternal.

“We have a new neighbor, Tom,” Mary said. “Some doctor from Detroit, I think Jennie said.”

Jennie Harris was the Littles’ general maid and a fund of information. She was nearly sixty, and probably one of the pioneers in the difficult art of listening in on six-party country telephone lines. Thus her range of knowledge was even greater than Hattie Brown’s since Hattie’s adenoids gave her away every time she lifted the receiver.

“Yes, I saw him,” Tom said absently.

“He only came last night, dear. When did you see him?”

“Last night.”

“Really? I didn’t know you were out last night.”

“I took a walk. Can’t I take a walk if I want to?”

“Why, of course, dear! I just wondered.”

Throughout the grapefruit there was silence. Tom did not like silences. He had learned from experience that they were hostile to him.

“A lot of Americans around this year,” he said. It was the best he could do but it elicited no response. “Funny they come all the way up here.”

Mary looked up reproachfully. “Funny! Why, I thought you loved it up here, dear. The only reason we took this place for the summer was because—”

“I like it,” Tom said hastily. “Mad about it. Lots of nice swells and things. Besides, it will be good for your heart.”

“But, Tom! We didn’t come here for me, we came here for you.”

“All right.”

“I thought you’d like it.”

“I do like it. What are you arguing about?”

“Dear, I’m not arguing. You know I can’t argue on account of my heart!”

Miss Nora Shane, the occupant of the fifth cottage along the lane, was facing the east. In order to paint a sunrise she had struggled out of bed at five o’clock, missed her breakfast, fought off the hordes of mosquitoes and black flies who mistook her paints for something edible, and acquired a patch of sunburn on the tip of her nose. As an added humiliation the dispirited sun on her easel looked exactly like the dispirited sun that had risen out of the lake.

“Photographic,” Miss Shane said bitterly. “Hellish.”

She rubbed a paint-smeared hand absently along her nose. It was a good nose, small and straight beneath its redness. Everything about Miss Shane, except the frown on her forehead, was good. She had sharp blue eyes and a curved red mouth. Her hair, hanging down her back in two thick plaits, was as straight and black and smooth as an Indian’s. She was tall and slim, and even when she was stripping a sunrise from its moorings her movements were graceful. “Lousy,” said Miss Shane, sternly self-critical. “Photographic.”

For three full months Mr. Smith, who lived in the last cottage in the community, had eluded the efforts of all those who sought to penetrate his mystery. Since he rarely used the telephone Jennie Harris, the Littles’ general maid, could contribute nothing of interest about him. Since he had resisted the onslaught of Joan Frost, Hattie Brown was equally without knowledge. Even Miss Bonner’s field glasses merely revealed the fact that he went for a swim every morning at ten o’clock and was kind to his dog.

It was generally assumed, of course, that Smith was not his real name and that his horn-rimmed spectacles and his small black mustache were a disguise.

Although some of the residents resented the mystery, others, like Miss Emily Bonner, were grateful for the opportunity to speculate without fear of being contradicted by fact. Miss Bonner’s current opinion was that Mr. Smith was evading the police and that his dog had been stolen from an American millionaire and was being held for ransom. This belief was rapidly gaining on the “mad-scientist” theory of Miss Hattie Brown.

On the first of August Mr. Smith’s fortress remained unstormed, and he ate his breakfast in the exquisite privacy which he deserved.