Chapters (10)
JAMES: I just wanted to give her this. Good night, Mother.
MRS. CALLIFER: Good night. James.
He passes Dr. Kreuzer in the doorway.
JAMES: Good night, Dr. Kreuzer.
KREUZER: I’m just leaving. Good-bye, Callifer.
JAMES: We’ll be seeing each other soon? Nottingham or elsewhere?
KREUZER: I don’t give up a friend any more than a patient.
James leaves.
KREUZER: Is your daughter ready?
MRS. CALLIFER: Sara won’t be leaving with you, Dr. Kreuzer.
KREUZER: I’m glad. Just now, waiting for her in the dining room, I heard you come in from outside?
MRS. CALLIFER: I’ve been in the garden.
KREUZER: Wasn’t it cold?
MRS. CALLIFER: I went down to the potting shed. And suddenly I wasn’t frightened. There was nothing ghostly there. The ground wasn’t holy. There were no voices and whispers and messages. Only the boxes of seeds and the gardening tools, and I thought perhaps even miracles are ordinary. There was a girl in the village once they thought had died—do you think perhaps things like that are happening all the time everywhere?
KREUZER: I don’t know. I don’t much mind one way or the other.
MRS. CALLIFER: I thought you wanted the truth. You are a scientist.
KREUZER: I only want a relative truth to make life tolerable.
MRS. CALLIFER: That’s not very brave, is it?
KREUZER: Courage can be a very difficult neurosis.
James enters.
JAMES: Anne isn’t in her room.
MRS. CALLIFER: Perhaps the bathroom.
JAMES: I’ve looked everywhere upstairs.
MRS. CALLIFER: The pantry.
JAMES: It was the first place I thought of.
He is looking at the curtains of the window seat. He draws back the curtains. In the window seat Anne lies asleep with the window open behind her.
MRS. CALLIFER: She must have got through the window. The detective asleep at her post.
ANNE (stretching and yawning): Oh, I’ve had such a funny dream. I was going down the path to the potting shed, and there was an enormous lion there fast asleep.
JAMES: What did you do?
ANNE: I woke it up.
MRS. CALLIFER: Did it eat you?
ANNE: No, it only licked my hand.
CURTAIN
