Waltz Into Darkness (19 page)

"I
want to ask you something. See if you can remember. Did you ever come
to one of your ladies' cabins, of a morning, and find the bunk
undisturbed, no one had been in it?"

She
nodded readily. "Sho', lots times. We ain't full up every trip.
Sometime' mo'n half my cabin' plumb empty."

"No,
I'll have to ask it another way, then. Did you ever come to one of
your ladies' cabins which had had someone in it first, and then find
the bunk untouched ?"

It
seemed to present difficulties to her. "You mean nobody slep' in
it, but somebody done tuk it just the same?"

"That's
it; that's about it."

She
wasn't sure; she scratched and strove, but she wasn't sure.

He
tried to help her. "With somebody's clothes in it, perhaps. With
somebody's belongings there for you to see. Surely you could tell by
that. But no one had lain in the bunk."

She
still wasn't sure.

He
tried his trump card. "With a birdcage in it, perhaps."

She
ignited into recollection, like tinder when the spark strikes it
square. "Tha's right, tha's how it was! How you know that? Cab'n
with a birdcage in it, and I didn't have to tech the bunk nohow--"

He
nodded darkly. "No one had lain in it the night before."

She
drew up short. "I di'n say that. The lady fix up her berth
herseff befo' I get there; she kine of tidy that way, and used to
doing things with her own han's 'thout waiting fo' nobody."

"Who
told you that, how do you kn--?"

"She
in there when I come in. The pretties' little lady I ever done see;
blon' like an angel and li'l like a chile."

In
the dining saloon, Durand saw, Downs had held back one of his plates
even after he had finished with it. At the end of the meal, when all
others but the two of them had left the single, long table, Downs
called the waiter over and said to him simply: "Watch this.
Watch me do this a minute."

Then
he took out a pocket handkerchief, spread it flat on the table top.
Into it he put a small scrap of lettuce that had decorated his plate
as a garnish, folded the corners of the handkerchief over toward the
center, like a magician about to cause something to disappear.

"Did
you ever see anyone do that, at the end of a meal? Did you?"

"You
mean fold up their napkin like-?"

"No,
no." Downs had to reopen it to show him the lettuce, then start
the process over. "Put a leaf of lettuce in first, to carry
away. It's a handkerchief. Think of it as a smaller one, far smaller,
a little wisp--"

The
waiter nodded now. "I seen a lady do that, one trip. I wondered
what she-- It wasn't meat or nothin', just a little old--"

Downs
held up his finger in admonition. "Now listen carefully. Think
well. How many times can you remember seeing her do that? After how
many meals ?"

"Just
once. On'y once. After on'y one meal. That was the on'y time I ever
seen her, just at that one meal."

"I
can't get the two of them together," Downs said to Durand under
his breath afterward. "One ends before the other begins. But it
happened sometime during the first night. At suppertime the waiter
saw the real one filch a scrap of lettuce for her bird. At eight in
the morning the stewardess found a blonde 'like an angel' had already
made up her own bunk, in that cabin where the birdcage was."

The
first stop, at eight the following morning, Durand found Downs
already making his preparations for departure.

"You're
getting off here?" he queried in surprise. "So soon?
Already?"

Downs
nodded. "That boat's first stop this time was the boat's first
stop that time too. The same schedule is held to. She was already
hours dead and hours in the water by this moment. To go on past here
only carries me farther away at every turn of the paddles. Come, walk
me to the landing plank."

"If
she is anywhere," he said, lowering his voice as they went out
on the misty early-morning deck together, "she is back there
somewhere, along the stretch we have covered this past night. If she
ever floats ashore--or has already, unrecognized or maybe even
unseen--it will be back there somewhere. I will go back along the
shoreline, hamlet by hamlet, yard by yard, inch by inch; on foot if
necessary. First on this side, then on the opposite. And if she is
not ashore already, I will wait until she comes ashore."

His
face was that of a fanatic, with whom there is no reasoning.

"Back
there she is, on the river bottom, in the great wide eddy below Cape
Girardeau, and back there I will wait for her."

Durand's
blood ran a little cold at the turn of speech.

Downs
held out his hand.

"Good
luck to you," Durand said, half frightened of the man now.

"And
to you," Downs answered. "You will see me again some day,
sooner or later. I can't say when, but you will surely see me again
some day."

He
went down the gangplank. Durand watched his head sink from sight.
Then he turned away with an involuntary shiver, the last thing he had
heard the other man say repeating itself strangely in his mind:

You
will see me again some day. You will surely see me again some day.

30

The
death of a man is a sad enough thing to watch, but he goes by
himself, taking nothing else with him. The death of a house is a
sadder thing by far to watch. For so much more goes with it.

On
that last day, Durand moved slowly from room to room of the St. Louis
Street house. It was already dying before his very eyes; the
furniture dismantled, rugs stripped from its floor boards, curtains
from its windows, closet doors left gapingly ajar with nothing behind
them any more. Its skeleton was peering through. The skeleton that
stays on after death, just as in a man's case.

And
yet, he realized, he was not so much leaving this place as leaving a
part of himself behind in a common grave with it. A part that he
could never regain, never recall. He could never hope again as he'd
once hoped here. There was nothing to hope for. He could never be as
young again as he'd once been here, even though it was a youngness
late in coming, at thirty-seven; late in coming and swift in going,
just a few brief weeks. He could never love again-- not only not as
he'd once loved here, but to any degree at all. And that is a form of
death in itself. His broken dreams were lying all around; he could
almost hear them crunch, like spilled sugar, each time he moved his
foot.

He
was standing in the doorway of what- had been their bedroom, looking
across at the wallpaper. The wallpaper that had come from New
York--"pink, but not too bright a pink, with small blue flowers,
like forget-me-nots"--put up for a bride to see, a bride who had
never lived to see it, nor lived even to be a bride.

He
closed the door. For no particular reason, for there was nothing to
be kept in there any longer. Perhaps the more quickly to shut the
room from sight.

And
as it closed, a voice seemed to speak through it for a moment, with
sudden lifelike clarity in his ears:

"Who
is it knocks? . . . Tell him he may."

Then
was gone, stilled forever.

He
went slowly down the stairs, his knees bending reluctantly over each
step, as if they were rusted.

The
front door was standing open, and there was a mule and two-wheeled
cart out before it, piled high with the effluvia he had donated to
Aunt Sarah. She went hurrying past from the back just then, a
dented-in gilt birdcage swinging from one hand, a bulky mantel clock
hugged in her other. Then, seeing him, and still incredulous of his
largesse, she stopped short to ask for additional assurance.

"This
too? This yere clock ?"

"I
told you, everything," he answered impatiently. "Everything
but the heavy pieces with four legs. Take it all! Get it out of my
sight!"

"I'm
sure going to have the grandest cabin in Shrevepo't when I gets back
home there."

He
looked at her grimly for a moment, but his grimness was not for her.

"That
band's not playing today, I notice," he blurted out accusingly.

She
understood the reference, remembered it with surprising immediacy.

"Hush,
Mr. Lou. Anyone can make a mistake. That was the devil's music."

She
went on out to the cart, where a gangling youth, a nephew by remote
attribute, loitered in charge of the booty.

"Got
everything you want now?" Durand called out after her. "Then
I'll lock up."

"Yes
sir! Yes sir! Couldn't ask for no more." And, apparently,
secretly a little dubious, to the end, that Durand might yet change
his mind and retract, added in a hasty aside: "Come on, boy! Get
this mule started up. What you lingering for?" She clambered up
beside him and the cart waddled off. "God bless you, Mr. Lou!
God keep you safe!"

"It's
a little late for that," thought Durand morosely.

He
turned back to the hall for a moment, to retrieve his own hat from
the pronged, high-backed rack where he had slung it. And as he
detached it, something fell out sideward to the floor from behind it
with a little clap. Something that must have been thrust out of sight
behind there long ago, and forgotten.

He
picked up the slender little stick, and withdrew it, and a little
swath of bunched heliotrope came with it at the other end. Limp,
bedraggled, but still giving a momentary splash of color to the
denuded hall.

Her
parasol.

He
took it by both ends, and arched his knee to it, and splintered it
explosively, not once but again and again, with an inordinate
violence that its fragility didn't warrant. Then flung the wisps and
splinters away from him with full arm's strength, as far as they
would go.

"Get
to hell, after your owner," he mumbled savagely. "She's
waiting for you to shade her there!"

And
slammed the door.

The
house was dead. Love was dead. The story was through.

31

May
again. May that keeps coming around, May that never gets any older,
May that's just as fair each time. Men grow old and lose their loves,
and have no further hope of any new love, but May keeps coming back
again. There are always others waiting for it, whose turn is still to
come.

May
again. May of '81 now. A year since the marriage.

The
train from New Orleans came into Biloxi late in the afternoon. The sky
was porcelain fresh from the kiln; a little wisp of steam seeping
from it here and there, those were clouds. The tree tops were
shimmering with delicate new leaf. And in the distance, like a
deposit of sapphires, the waters of the Gulf. It was a lovely place
to come to, a lovely sight to behold. And he was old and bitter now,
too old to care.

He
was the last one down from the steps of the railroad coach. He
climbed down leadenly, grudgingly, as though it were all one to him
whether he alighted here or continued on to the next place. It was.
To rest, to forget awhile, that was all he wanted. To let the healing
process continue, the scars harden into their ugly crust. New Orleans
still reminded him too much. It always would.

A
romantic takes his losses hard, and he was a romantic. Only a
romantic could have played the role he had, played the fool so
letterperfect. He was one of those men who are born to be the natural
prey of women, he was beginning to realize it himself by now; if it
hadn't been she, it would have been someone else. If it hadn't been a
bad woman, then it would have been what they called a "good"
woman. Even one of those would have had him in her power in no time
at all. And though the results might have been less catastrophic,
that was no consolation to his own innermost pride. His only defense
was to stay away from them.

Now
that the horse was stolen, the lock was on the stable door. The lock
was on, and the key was thrown away, for good and all. But there was
nothing it opened to any more.

Amidst
all the bustle of holidaymakers down here from the hinterland for a
week or two's sojourn, the prattle, the commotion as they formed into
little groups, joining with the friends who had come to train side to
meet them, he stood there solitary, apart, his bag at his feet.