Waltz Into Darkness (20 page)

The
eyes of more than one marriageable young damsel in the groups near by
were cast speculatively toward him over the shoulder of some relative
or friend, probably wondering if he were eligible to be sketched into
plans for the immediate future, for what is a holiday without a lot
of beaux? Yet whenever they happened to meet his own eyes they
hurriedly withdrew again, and not wholly for the sake of seemliness
either. It left them with a rather disconcerting sensation, like
looking at something you think to be alive and finding out it is
inanimate after all. It was like flirting with a fence post or water
pump until you found out your mistake.

The
platform slowly cleared, and he still stood there. The train from New
Orleans started on again, and he half turned, as if to reenter and
ride on with it to wherever the next place was. But he faced forward
again and let the cars go ticking off behind his back, on their way
down the track.

32

He
soon fell into the habit of dropping into the bar of one of the
adjacent hotels, the Belleview House, at or around seven each evening
for a slowly drunk whiskey punch. Or at most two of them, never more;
for it wasn't the liquor that attracted him, but the lack of anything
to do until it was time for the evening meal. He chose this
particular place because his own hotel had no such establishment, and
it was the nearest at hand and the largest of those that had.

It
was a cheery, bustling, buzzing place, this, characteristic of its
kind and of the period. A gentleman's drinking place. And like all
others of its nature, while it was strictly a male preserve, women
were never so pervasively present in thought, spirit, implication and
conversation, as here where they were physically absent. They
permeated the air; they were in every double entendre, and wink, and
toast, and bragging innuendo. And here they were as men wishfully
wanted them to be, and as they so seldom were beyond these portals:
uncommonly accommodating. At all times and in every reminiscence.

Even
in allegory they presided. Upon the wall facing the horseshoeshaped
mahogany counter, cheery lights blinking at either side of it--like
glass-belied altar lights at the shrine of woman incarnate-- extended
a tremendous oil painting of a reclining feminine form, presumably a
goddess. Attended at its head by two winged cupids flying in rotary
course, at its feet a cornucopia spilling fruits and flowers. Purple
drapery was present, but more in discard than in application; one
skein straggling downward across the figure's shoulder, another wisp
stretching across its middle. In the background, and never noted by
an onlooker since the canvas had first been hung, was an azure sky
with puffballs of cottony clouds.

Dominating
the place as it did, and shrewdly intended to, it was as a matter of
fact the means of Durand's striking up his first acquaintanceship
since arriving in Biloxi. The man nearest to him, on the occasion of
his second successive visit to the place, alone as he was, was
standing there with his eyes raptly fixed on it, and almost humid
with a sort of silly, faraway greediness, when Durand happened to
idly glance that way and catch the expression.

Durand
couldn't resist smiling slightly, but to himself and not the devotee;
but the other man, catching the half-formed smile just as it was
about to turn away, mistook it for one of esoteric kinship of
thought, and promptly returned it, but with an increment of friendly
gregariousness that had been lacking in the original.

"Bless
'em!" he remarked fervently, and hoisted his glass toward the
composition for Durand to see.

Durand
nodded in temperate accord.

Emboldened,
the other man raised his voice and invited over the three or four
yards that separated them: "Will you join me, sir?"

Durand
had no desire to, but to have refused would have been unwarrantedly
boorish, so he moved accommodatingly toward his neighbor, and the
latter made up the difference from his side.

Their
orders were renewed, they saluted one another with them, and
swallowed: thus completing the preliminary little ritual.

The
other man was in his mid-forties, as far as Durand could judge. He
had a good-looking, but rather weak and dissipated face; lines of
looseness, rather than age, printed on it, particularly across the
forehead. His complexion was extremely pallid; his hair dark, but
possibly kept so with the aid of a little shoeblacking here and
there; this, however, could only be a matter of conjecture. He was of
lesser height than Durand, but of greater girth, albeit in a pillowy,
less compact way.

"You
alone here, sir?" he demanded.

"Quite
alone," Durand answered.

"Shame!"
he said explosively. "First time here, then, I take it ?"

It
was, Durand admitted laconically.

"You'll
like it, soon as you get to know the ropes," he promised. "Takes
a man a few days, I don't care where it is."

It
did, Durand agreed tepidly.

"You
stopping at this hotel here ?" He cast his thumb joint toward
the inner doors leading into the building itself. "I am."

"No,
I'm over at the Rogers."

"Should
have come to this one. Best one in the place. Kind of slow over there
where you are, isn't it ?"

He
hadn't noticed, Durand said. He didn't expect to remain for very
long, anyway.

"Well,
maybe you'll change your mind," the Other suggested breezily.
"Maybe we can get you to change your mind about that," he
added, as though vested with a proprietary interest in the resort.

"Maybe,"
Durand assented, without overmuch enthusiasm. "Now join me,"
he invited dutifully, noting that his companion's drink was near
bottom.

"Honored,"
said the other man zestfully, making quick to complete its
disappearance.

Just
as Durand was about to give the order, one of the hotel page boys
came through the blown-glass doors leading from the hotel proper,
looked about for a moment, then, marking Durand's partner, came up to
him, excused himself, and said a word in his ear which Durand failed
to catch. Particularly since he did not try to.

"Oh,
already?" the other man said. "Glad you told me," and
handed the boy a coin. "Be right there."

He
turned back to Durand. "I'm called," he said cheerfully.
"We'll have to resume this where we left off, some other
evening." He preened himself, touching at his tie, his hair, the
fit of his coat shoulders. "Mustn't keep a lady waiting, you
know," he added, unable to resist letting Durand know of what
nature the summons was.

"By
no means," Durand conceded.

"Good
evening to you, sir."

"Good
evening."

He
watched him go. His face was anything but leisurely, even while still
in full sight, and at the end he flung apart the doors quite
violently, so anxious was he not to be delinquent.

Durand
smiled a little to himself, half contemptuously, half in pity, and
went back to his drink alone.

33

The
following evening they met again, he and the other man. The other was
already there when Durand entered from the street, so Durand joined
him without ceremony, since the etiquette of the bar prescribed that
he owed the other a drink, and to have shunned him--as he would have
preferred to do--might have seemed on his part an attempt to avoid
the obligation.

"Still
alone, I see," he greeted Durand.

"Still,"
Durand said cryptically.

"Well,
man, you're slow," he observed critically. "What's
hindering you? I should think by this time you'd have any number
of--" He didn't complete the phrase, but allowed a soggy wink to
do so for him.

Durand
smiled wanly and gave their order.

They
saluted, they swallowed.

"By
the way, let me introduce myself," the other said heartily. "I'm
Colonel Harry Worth, late of the Army." The way he said it
showed which army he meant; or rather that there was only one to be
meant.

"I'm
Louis Durand," Durand said.

They
gripped hands, at the other's initiative.

"Where
you from, Durand?"

"New
Orleans."

"Oh,"
nodded the colonel approvingly. "Good place. I've been there
some."

Durand
didn't ask where he was from. He didn't, his own train of thoughts
phrased it to himself, give a damn.

They
talked of this and that. Of business conditions (together). Of a
little girl in Natchez (the colonel). Of the current administration
(together, and with bitterness, as if it were some sort of foreign
yoke). Of a little girl in Louisville (the colonel). Of recipes oT
drinks (together). Of horses, and their breeding and their racing
(together). Of a "yellow" girl in Memphis (the colonel,
with a resounding slap against his own thigh).

Then
just as Worth was about to reorder, again the page came in, accosted
him, said that word into his ear.

"Time's
up," he said to Durand. He offered him his hand. "A
pleasure, Mr. Randall. Be looking forward to the next time."

"Durand,"
Durand said.

The
colonel recoiled with dramatic exaggeration, apologized profusely.
"That's right; forgive me. There I go again. Got the worstall
head for names."

"No
harm," said Durand indifferently. He had an idea the mistake
would continue to repeat itself for as long as their acquaintanceship
lasted; a name that is not got right the second time, is not likely
to be got right the fourth or the tenth time either. But it mattered
to him not the slightest whether this man miscalled him or not, for
the man himself mattered even less.

Worth
renewed their handclasp, this time under the authentic auspices. Then
as he turned to go, he reached downward to the counter, popped a
clove into his mouth.

"That's
just in case," he said roguishly.

He
left rearward, into the hotel. Durand, was standing near the outside
of the café, toward the street. Several minutes later, turning
his head disinterestedly, he was just in time to catch the colonel's
passage across the thick, soapy greenish plate glass that fronted the
place and bulged convexly somewhat like a bay window.

The
thickness of the medium they passed through blurred his outlines
somewhat, but Durand could tell it was he. On the far side of him
three detached excrescences, over and above those pertaining to his
own person, were all that revealed he was escorting a woman. At the
height of his shoulder blades the tip of a glycerined feather
projected, from a hidden woman's bonnet on the outside, as though a
quill or bright-tipped dart were sticking into him.

Then
at the small of his back, and extending far beyond his own modest
contours, a bustle fluctuated both voluptuously and yet somehow
genteelly, ballooning along as its hidden wearer walked at his side.
And lastly, down at his heels, as though one of the colonel's socks
had loosened and were dragging, a small triangular wedge of skirt
hem, an evening train, fluttered along the ground, switching
erratically from side to side as it went.

But
Durand didn't even allow his tepid glance to linger, to follow them
long enough until they had drawn away into perspective sufficient to
separate into two persons, instead of the one composite one,
superimposed, they now formed.

Again
he gave that wearied smile as on the night before. This time his
brows went up, much as to say: Each man to his taste..

34

The
page was later tonight in putting in an appearance. The colonel,
therefore, had had one drink more than on their former evenings. This
showed itself only in the added warmth of his friendliness, and in a
tendency to clap and grip Durand on the upper arm at frequent
intervals, in punctuation of almost every second remark he made.
Otherwise Worth's speech was clear enough and his train of thought
coherent enough.

"My
fiancée is a lovely girl, Randall, a lovely girl," he
reiterated solemnly, as though unable to impress it sufficiently upon
his hearer.

"I'm
sure she is," Durand said, as he had twice already. "I'm
sure." Having corrected the mistake in nomenclature once for the
evening, he no longer took the trouble after that, let Worth have his
way about it.