The Weak-Eyed Bat

“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!