Waltz Into Darkness (37 page)

She
was standing on the stairs, triumphantly counting over the
cabbagehead of money she held bunched in her hand.

"Ah,
but he didn't know; and that's where the difference lay. You never
played poker, did you, Lou?"

49

She
led the way down the railroad car aisle, he following, the railroad
porter struggling along in the rear with their hand baggage, three or
four pieces on each arm. She had the jaunty little stride of one who
has been on trains a great deal, enjoys traveling, and knows just how
to go about getting the most out of it.

"No,
not there," she called back, when Durand had stopped tentatively
beside one of the padded green-plush double seats. "Down here,
on this side. You'll get the sun on you, on that side."

They
moved on obediently to her bidding.

She
stood by, supervising with attentive look, piece by piece, the
disposing of their luggage to the rack overhead. Intervening once to
counsel: "Put that lighter one on top of the other; the other
one will crush it if you don't."

Then
when he had finished: "Draw up the shade a little higher."

Durand
gave her a quickly cautioning glance over the porter's bent back,
implying they should not make themselves too conspicuous.

"Nonsense,"
she answered it aloud. "Draw it up a little more, porter. There,
that will do." Then gestured benevolently toward Durand, to have
him tip the man for his trouble.

She
sidled into the seat, when it had been sufficiently readied, drawing
out her skirts sideward and settling them about her comfortably.
Durand inserted himself beside her, his face pale and strained, as
though he were sitting on spikes.

She
turned her head and began to survey the scene outside the window with
enjoyable interest, bending the back of her hand to support her chin.

"How
soon do they start?" she asked presently.

He
didn't answer.

She
must have been able to view his reflection on the pane of glass.
Without turning her head, she said slurringly out of the corner of
her mouth: "Don't take on so. People will think you are ill."

"I
am," he shuddered, blowing into his hands as if to warm them. "I
am."

Her
little lace-mittened hand suddenly reached across his body, below
cover of the seat top before them. "Take my hand, hold it for a
moment. We'll be out of here before you know."

"Merciful
God," he whispered, with furtively downcast eyes, "why
don't they start, what are they waiting for ?"

"Read
something," she suggested in a low voice, "take your mind
off it."

Read
something, he thought despairingly, read something! He could not have
joined the letters of a single word together to make sense.

A
locomotive bell began to peal, somewhere up front, and then a steam
whistle blew in shrill warning.

"There,"
she said reassuringly. "Now!"

There
was a sudden preliminary jar, that set aquiver the row of oil lamps
dangling from the deep-set trough bisecting the car ceiling, then a
secondary, lesser one; then the train stuttered into creaking motion.
The fixed scene outside became fluid, began to slip slowly onward
past the limits of their window pane, while a new one continually
flowed into it, without a break, at the opposite side. She released
his hand, turned her full attention to it, as enthralled as a child.

"I
love to be on the go," she remarked. "Anywhere, I don't
care where it is."

A
butcher made his way slowly down the aisle, basket over arm, crying
his wares to add to the noisy confusion of grinding wheels, creaking
woodwork, and hum of blended voices that filled the car.

"Here
you are, ladies and gentlemen. Mineral water, fresh fruit, all kinds
of delicious sweets for yourselves or your children. Caramellos,
gumdrops, licorice lozenges. It'll be a long, dusty ride. Here you
are. Here you are."

She
suddenly whisked her head around from the window that had absorbed
her until now. "Lou," she said vivaciously, "buy me an
orange, I'm thirsty. I love to suck an orange whenever I'm riding on
a train."

The
vendor stopped at his reluctant signal.

She
leaned across him, pawing, rummaging, in the basket. "No, that
one over there. It's plumper."

Durand
hoisted himself sideward on the seat, to be able to reach into his
pocket and draw up some coins.

The
butcher took one and moved on.

Suddenly
he stared, stricken, at the residue he had been left holding. Downs's
collar button lay within the palm of his hand.

"Oh,
God!" he moaned, and cast it furtively under the seat they were
on.

50

Another
hotel room, in another place. And yet the same. The hotel had a
different name, that was all. The scene its windows looked out upon
had a different name, that was all.

But
they were the same two, in the same hotel room. The same two people,
the same two runaways.

This,
he realized, watching her broodingly, was what their life was going
to be like from now on. Another hotel room, and then another, and
still another. But always the same. Another town, and then another,
and still another. Onward, and onward, and onward-- to nowhere. Until
some day they would come to their last hotel room, in their last
town. And then--

A
short life and an exciting one, she had toasted that night back in
Mobile. She had it wrong. A short life and a dull one, she should
have said. No pattern of security can ever be so wearyingly
repetitious as the pattern of the refugee without a refuge. No
monotony of law-abidance can ever compare to the monotony of crime.
He had found that out by now.

She
was sitting there in a square of orange-gold sunlight by the window,
one leg crossed atop the other, head bent intently to her task. Which
was that of tapering her nails with an emery board. Her arms were
bare to the shoulders, and the numerous all-white garments she wore
were not meant to be seen by other eyes than his. The moulded cuirass
of the corset was visible in its entirety, from underarms to well
below the hips. And over this only the thinnest film of cambric, an
in-between garment, neither under- nor over-, known as the
"corset-cover" (he had learned), fell short at the unwonted
height of her lower calf.

Her
hair was unbound and fell loose, clothing her back in rippling
finespun tawny-gold, but at the same time giving the top of her head
an oddly flat aspect, ordinarily seen only on young schoolgirls. The
bangs alone remained in evidence, of the customary coiffure.

One
of the spikelike cigars was burning untouched on the dresser edge
near her.

She
felt his long-maintained, speculative look, and raised her eyes, and
gave him that compressed, heart-shaped smile that was the only design
her lips could fall into when expressing a smile.

"Cheer
up, Lou," she said. "Cheer up, lovey."

She
hitched her head pertly to indicate the scene beyond the sunflooded
window. "I like it here. It's pretty here. And they dress up to
kill. I'm glad we came."

"Don't
sit so close to the window. You can be seen."

She
gave him an incredulous look. "Why, no one knows us here."

"I
don't mean that. You're in your underthings."

"Oh,"
she said. Then, as if still not wholly able to comprehend his
punctiliousness on this point, "But they can only see my back.
Not one can see my face, tell whose back it is." She moved her
chair a trifle, condescendingly, with a smile as if she were doing it
simply to please him.

She
went back to her nails for a complacent stroke or two.

"Don't
you--think of it sometimes?" he couldn't resist blurting out.
"Doesn't it weigh upon you ?"

"What?"
she said blankly, again looking up. "Oh--that, back there."

"That's
what I mean," he said. "If I could only forget it, as you
do."

"I
don't forget it. It's just that I don't brood about it."

"But
the very act of remembering at all, isn't that the same as brooding?"

"No,"
she said, flipping her hands outward in surprise. "Let me show
you." She tapped the rim of her teeth, as if in search of an
illustration. "Say I buy a new hat. Well, once it's bought, it's
bought, and there's no more to it. I remember I bought the hat;
it's not that I forget I've bought it. But I don't necessarily brood
about it, dwell on it, every minute of the live-long day." She
pounded one clenched hand into the hollow of the other. "I don't
keep saying over and over: 'I've bought a hat,' 'I've bought a hat,'
'I've bought a hat.' Do you see?"

He
was looking at her with a stunned expression. "You--you compare
what happened that day at Mobile with buying a new hat?" he
stammered.

She
laughed. "No. Now you're twisting it around; making me out worse
than I am. I know it's not punishable to buy a new hat, and the other
thing is. I know you don't have to be afraid of anyone finding out
you've bought a new hat, and you do of anyone finding out you've done
the other thing. But that was just given for an example. You can
remember a thing perfectly well, but you don't have to worry about it
all the time, let it darken your life. That's all I mean."

But
he was speechless; he still couldn't get past that horrendous
illustration of hers.

She
rose and moved over toward him slowly; stood at last, and looked
down, and let her hand come to rest on his shoulder, with almost a
patronizing air. Certainly not one of overweening admiration.

"Do
you want to know what the trouble is, Lou? I'll tell you. The
difference between you and me is not that I'm any less afraid than
you of its being found out; I'm just as afraid. It's that you let
your conscience bully you about it, and I don't. You make it a matter
of good or bad, wrong or right; you know, like children's Sunday
school lessons: going to heaven or going to hell. With me it's just
something that happened, and there's no more to be said. You keep
wishing you could go back and have it over again, so that you
wouldn't have done it. That's where the trouble comes in. It's that
your own conscience is nagging you. That's what's ailing you."

She
saw that she'd shocked him. She shrugged a little, and turned away.
She took up a muslin petticoat that lay in wait folded over the side
of the bed, flung it out so that its folds opened circularly, stepped
into it, and fastened it about her waist. The grotesque shortness of
her attire disappeared, and her extremities were once more normally
covered to the floor.

"Take
my advice, and learn to look at it my way, Lou," she went on.
"You'll find it a lot simpler. It's not something good, and it's
not something bad; it's--" here she made him the concession of
dropping her voice a trifle, "--just something you have to be
careful about, that's all."

She
took up a second petticoat, this one of taffeta bordered with lace,
and donned that over the first.

He
was appalled at the slow, frightening discovery he was in the process
of making: which was that she had no moral sense at all.s She was, in a
very actual meaning of the word, a complete savage.

"Shall
we go for a little stroll ?" she suggested. "It's an ideal
day for it."

He
nodded, lips parted, unable to articulate.

She
was now turning this way and that before the glass, holding up a
succession of outer costumes at shoulder level to judge of their
desirability. "Which shall I wear? The blue? The fawn? Or this
plaid?" She made a little pouting grimace. "I've worn them
all two or three times now apiece. People will begin to know them.
Lou, fetch out that money box of yours before we go, that's a good
boy. I really think it's time you were buying me a new dress."

No
moral sense at all.

51

The
discovery was catastrophically sudden, though it shouldn't have been.
One moment, they were affluent, he could afford to give her anything
she wanted. The next, they were destitute, they could scarcely meet
the cost of the immediate evening's pleasure they had contemplated.

It
shouldn't have been as unforeseen as all that, he had to admit to
himself; shouldn't have taken them unaware like that. There had been
no theft, save at his own hands; nothing like that. But there had
been no replenishment either. A vanishing point was bound to be
reached eventually. It had been imminent for some time, if he'd only
taken the trouble to make inventory. But he hadn't; perhaps he'd been
afraid to, afraid in his own mind of the too-exact knowledge that he
would have derived from such a summing up: the certainty of
termination. Afraid of the chill that would have been cast upon their
feasting, the shadow that would have dimmed their wine. There was
always tomorrow, tomorrow, to make reckoning. And tomorrow, there was
always tomorrow still. And meanwhile the music swelled, and the waltz
whirled ever faster, giving no pause for breath.