Waltz Into Darkness (3 page)

"What?"
he caught her up, horrified.

She
prudently refrained from repetition.

He
departed once more. Once more he returned. This time all the way from
the foot of the stairs.

"And
be sure to leave all the lamps on when you go. I want the place
bright and cheery when she first sees it."

"You
keep peggin' at me every secon' like that," she chided, but
without undue resentment, "and I won't git nothing done. Now go
on, scat," she ordered, shaking her apron at him with
contemptuous familiarity as though he were seven or seventeen, not
thirty-seven. "Ain't nothing git in your way more than a man
when he think he helping you fix up a place for somebody."

He
gave her a rather hurt look, but he went below again. This time, at
last, he didn't come back.

Yet
when she descended herself, some full five minutes later, he was
still there.

His
back was to her. He stood before a table, simply because it happened
to be there in the way. His hands were planted flat upon it at each
side, and he was leaning slightly forward over it. As if peering
intently into vistas of the future, that no one but he could see. As
if in contemplation of some small-sized figure coming toward him
through its rotary swirls, coming nearer, nearer, growing larger as
it neared him, growing toward life-size--

He
didn't hear Aunt Sarah come down. He only tore himself away from the
entranced prospect, turned, at the first sound of her voice.

"You
still here, Mr. Lou? I might have knowed it." She planted her
arms akimbo, and surveyed him indulgently. "Just look at that.
You sure happy, ain't you? I ain't never seen such a look on nobody's
face before."

He
sheepishly passed his hand across the lower part of his face, as if
it were something external she had reference to. "Does it show
that much ?" He looked around him uncertainly, as if he still
couldn't fully believe that the surroundings were actually there as
he saw them. "My own house--" he murmured half-audibly. "My
own wife--"

"A
man without a wife, 'he ain't a whole man at all, he's just a shadow
walking around without no one to cast him."

His
hand rose briefly to his shirt front, touched it questioningly,
dropped again. "I keep hearing music. Is there a band playing on
the streets somewhere around here ?"

"There's
a band playing, sure enough," she confirmed, unsmiling. "A
special kind of band, for just one person at a time to hear. For just
one day. I heard it once. Today's your day for hearing it."

"I'd
better be on my way!" He bolted for the door, flung it open,
chased down the walk and gave a vault into the waiting carriage that
rocked it on its springs.

"To
the Canal Street Pier," he sighed with blissful anticipation,
"to meet the boat from St. Louis."

3

The
river was empty, the sky was clear. Both were mirrored in his
anxious, waiting eyes. Then a little twirl of smudge appeared, no
bigger than if stroked by a man-sized finger against the God-sized
sky. It came from where there seemed to be no river, only an
embankment; it seemed to hover over dry land, for it was around a
turn the river made, before straightening to flow toward New Orleans
and the pier. And those assembled on it.

He
stood there waiting, others like himself about him. Some so close
their elbows all but grazed him. Strangers, men he did not know, had
never seen before, would never see again, drawn together for a moment
by the arrival of a boat.

He
had picked for his standing place a pilehead that protruded above the
pier-deck; that was his marker, he stood close beside that, and
wouldn't let others preempt it from him, knowing it would play its
part in securing the craft. For a while he stood with one leg raised,
foot planted squarely upon it. Then he leaned bodily forward over it
in anticipation, both hands flattened on it. At one time, briefly, he
even sat upon it, but got up again' fairly soon, as if with some idea
that by remaining on his feet he would hasten the vessel's approach.

The
smoke had climbed now, was high in the sky, like dingy black ostrich
plumes massed together and struggling to escape from one another.
Under its profusion a black that was solid substance, a slender cone,
began to rise; a smokestack. Then a second.

"There
she is," a roustabout shouted, and the needless, overdue
declaration was immediately taken up and repeated by two or three of
those about him.

"Yes
sir, there she is," they echoed two or three times after him.
"There she is, all right."

"There
she is," Durand's heart told him softly. But it meant a
different she.

The
smokestack, like a blunted knife slicing through the earth, cleared
the embankment and came out upon the open water bed. A tawny
superstructure, that seemed to be indented with a myriad tiny niches
in two long even rows, was beneath it, and beneath that, only a thin
line at this distance, was the ungainly black hull. The paddles were
going, slats turning over as they reached the top of the wheel and
fell, shaking off spray into the turgid brown water below that they
kept beating upon.

She
made the turn and grew larger, prow forward. She was lifesized now,
coursing down on the pier as if she meant to smash it asunder. A
shrill falsetto wail, infinitely mournful, like the cry of a lost
soul in torment, knifed from her, and a plume of white circled the
smokestack and vanished to the rear. The City of New Orleans, out
of St. Louis three days before, was back home again at its
namesake-port, its mother-haven.

The
sidewheels stopped, and it began to glide, like a paper boat, like a
ghost over the water. It turned broadside to the pier, and ran along
beside it, its speed seeming swifter now, that it was lengthwise,
than it had been before, when it was coming head-on, though the
reverse was the truth.

The
notched indentations went by like a picket fence, then slower,
slower; then stopped at last, then even reversed a little and seemed
to lose ground. The water, caught between the hull and pier, went
crazy with torment; squirmed and slashed and choked, trying to find
its way out. Thinned at last to a crevicelike canal.

No
more river, no more sky, nothing but towering superstructure blotting
them both out. Someone idling against the upper deck rail waved
desultorily. Not to Durand, for it was a man. Not to anyone else in
particular, either, most likely. Just a friendly wave of arrival. One
of them on the pier took it upon himself to answer it with a like
wave, proxying for the rest.

A
rope was thrown, and several of the small crowd stepped back to avoid
being struck by it. Dockworkers came forward for their brief moment
of glory, claimed the rope, deftly lashed it about the pile top
directly before Durand. At the opposite end they were doing the same
thing. She was in, she was fast.

A
trestled gangway was rolled forward, a brief section of lowerdeck
rail was detached, leaving an opening. The gap between was bridged. A
ship's officer came down, almost before it was fixed in place, took
up position close at hand below, to supervise the discharge. The
passengers were funnelling along the deck from both directions into
and down through the single-file descent-trough.

Durand
moved up close beside it until he could rest his hand upon it, as if
in mute claim; peered up anxiously into each imminent face as it
coursed swiftly downward and past, only inches from his own.

The
first passenger off was a man, striding, sample cases in both his
hands, some business traveler in haste to leave. A woman next, more
slowly, picking her way with care. Gray-haired and spectacled; not
she. Another woman next. Not she again; her husband a step behind
her, guiding her with hand to her elbow. An entire family next, in
hierarchal order of importance.

Then
more men, two or three of them in succession this time. Faces just
pale ciphers to him, quickly passed over. Then a woman, and for a
moment-- No, not she; different eyes, a different nose, a different
face. A stranger's curt glance, meeting his, then quickly rebuffing
it. Another man. Another woman. Red-haired and sandybrowed; not she.

A
space then, a pause, a wait.

His
heart took premature fright, then recovered. A tapping run along the
deck planks, as some laggard made haste to overtake the others. A
woman by the small, quick sound of her feet. A flounce of skirts, a
face- Not she. A whiff of lilac water, a snub from eyes that had no
concern for him, as his had for them, no quest in them, no knowledge.
Not she.

And
then no more. The gangplank empty. A lull, as when a thing is over.

He
stared up, and his face died.

He
was gripping the edges of the gangplank with both hands now. He
released it at last, crossed around to the other side of it, accosted
the officer loitering there, clutched at him anxiously by the sleeve.
"No one else ?"

The
officer turned and relayed the question upward toward the deck in
booming hand-cupped shout. "Anyone else ?"

Another
of the ship's company, perhaps the captain, came to the rail and
peered down overside. "All ashore," he called down.

It
was like a knell. Durand seemed to find himself alone, in a pool of
sudden silence, following it; though all about him there was as much
noise going on as ever. But for him, silence. Stunning finality.

"But
there must be-- There has to--"

"No
one else," the captain answered jocularly. "Come up and see
for yourself."

Then
he turned and left the rail.

Baggage
was coming down now.

He
waited, hoping against hope.

No
one else. Only baggage, the inanimate dregs of the cargo. And at last
not even that.

He
turned aside at last and drifted back along the pier-length and off
it to the solid ground beyond, and on a little while. His face
stiffly averted, as if there were greater pain to be found on one
side of him than on the other, though that was not true, it was equal
all around.

And
when he stopped, he didn't know it, nor why he had just when he did.
Nor what reason he had for lingering on there at all. The boat had
nothing for him, the river had nothing for him. There was nothing
there for him. There or anywhere else, now.

Tears
filled his eyes, and though there was no one near him, no one to
notice, he slowly lowered his head to keep them from being detected.

He
stood Thus, head lowered, somewhat like a muted mourner at a bier. A
bier that no one but he could see.

The
ground before his unseeing eyes was blank; biscuit-colored earth
basking in the sun. As blank, perhaps, as his life would be from now
on.

Then
without a sound of approach, the rounded shadow of a small head
advanced timorously across it; cast from somewhere behind him, rising
upward from below. A neck, two shoulders, followed it. Then the
graceful indentation of a waist. Then the whole pattern stopped
flowing, stood still.

His
dulled eyes took no note of the phenomenon. They were not seeing the
ground, nor anything imprinted upon it; they were seeing the St.
Louis Street house. They were saying farewell to it. He'd never enter
it again, he'd never go back there. He'd turn it over to an agent,
and have him sell--

There
was the light touch of a hand upon his shoulder. No exacting weight,
no compulsive stroke; velvety and gossamer as the alighting of a
butterfly. The shadow on the ground had raised a shadow-arm to
another shadow--his--linking them for a moment, then dropping it
again.

His
head came up slowly. Then equally slowly he turned it toward the side
from which the touch had come.

A
figure swept around before him, as on a turntable, pivoting to claim
the center of his eyes; though it was he and not the background that
had shifted.

It
was diminutive, and yet so perfectly proportioned within its own
lesser measurements that, but for the yardstick of comparison offered
when the eye deliberately sought out others and placed them against
it, it could have seemed of any height at all: of the grandeur of a
classical statue or of the minuteness of an exquisite doll.

Her
limpid brown eyes came up to the turn of Durand's shoulder. Her face
held an exquisite beauty he had never before seen, the beauty of
porcelain, but without its cold stillness, and a crumpled rose petal
of a mouth.