Fright

1

He was twenty-five that year, 1915, and his name was Prescott Marshall. He had already been living in New York for three years, and for one of those, now, he had known Marjorie Worth. And for a good part of that one, now, he had loved her. He worked in a stock brokerage office at Number Two, Wall Street, and he didn’t make very much money. But he was young, he presented a good appearance, he had a certain indefinable appeal for wealthy elderly ladies who were clients of his firm, and that would take care of itself in due course. The fact that he didn’t make very much money as yet.

He had obtained the position through a girl he had known the first year he was in New York. She had spoken of the opening, she had told him whom to see, she had spoken to whom he was to see before he did. She was gone from his life now, but the position remained. Providing a rather illuminating commentary on the relative staying powers of physical attraction as against self-advancement in the average life.

This first foothold, this niche that he had secured, that he still clung to so precariously, would broaden, would expand with the passage of years, would become a platform of security, and at last a pedestal of success. But he needed her help to make it that: Marjorie. For she would bring to him the very things he needed most in this particular, highly selective career he had chosen for himself. She had money and money attracts other money; she had impeccable social standing, and social standing attracts confidence; she had friends who had money and social standing, and through being her friends they would eventually and in due course become his clients; through being his clients, they would attract friends of their own. It was an ever-widening circle, working to his advantage.

And so he was going to ask her to marry him. And waiting to do so until he was sure that she would consent, for he wasn’t a gambler. He didn’t believe in gambling with his own future, he didn’t believe in staking his own chances on a premature spin of the wheel.

He was ready, but he wanted to give her plenty of time to be ready too. He only bet on a sure thing.

Her beauty was what had first attracted him, tangoing at tea-time at the Plaza in a long slit skirt, and made him ask them who she was, and made him urge, “Take me over there, I’ve got to meet her.” She had a lot of it. That had held him fast past the original introduction and the first few chance meetings after. She was an extremely lovely brunette, tall and graceful of carriage. The styles were lovely that year, they seemed to have been invented just for her. They were dressing like ladies for almost the last time. He soon enough found that she was what a later generation would have called good publicity. She was prestige-enhancing to take out. She wore well on the arm. She made heads turn, and when they turned, he was the man who was with her. The boy from a New Hampshire hamlet was on his way in the big city.

Then later, when the impetus that had carried him this far might have begun to slow, had come the insight into her family’s wealth and social position to dazzle him, sweep him up again, just as he was about to drop off and let her go by. She was Money, she was Family.

His original interest had by now kindled a reciprocal interest on her part. She was a stage behind him all the way, but following the same path he was.

Then had come his self-taken decision to marry her.

All that remained now was the asking.

2

Her boxed corsage, violets ringing a gardenia, had been duly sent off. The tickets were in his pocket. They were for Madge Kennedy in Fair and Warmer at the Eltinge. And quite expensive too as tickets went those days; two-fifty apiece for seats in the orchestra.

He was sitting waiting in the fabulous corridor that ran through the Waldorf-Astoria, from Thirty-fourth to Thirty-third Street, “Peacock Alley.”

There were two places that were de rigueur for meeting anyone, in New York in the Nineteen Teens. If you were meeting a man, you made it the Knickerbocker Bar, on Forty-second. If you were meeting a lady — Peacock Alley.

“Paging Mr. Marshall.”

He failed to connect the name to himself the first time he heard it. He wasn’t used to being paged at the Waldorf-Astoria.

“Paging Mr. Prescott Marshall.”

He sat up straighter, beckoned, and the boy came over.

“There’s a lady on the telephone, sir. I’ll show you the way.”

He wasn’t sure if you were supposed to give them something for that. He hesitated, finally gave the boy a dime. The hesitation had spoiled it, though. The boy thanked him, but with constraint.

It was she, of course. She was the only lady in his life.

“Press,” she said, “we’ve just had bad news up here.”

Although she wasn’t crying, there was a tearful tinge to her voice, a melancholy undertone, that he’d never heard before.

“What...?” he said with bated quickness.

“They’re both gone. We just received word from the American consul at Queenstown. The cablegram got here about fifteen minutes ago. I was all dressed and ready to leave when it arrived.” She stopped a moment, then she went on, “It’s an official confirmation. The bodies have been recovered and identified.”

“Good God,” he breathed. “Your Uncle Ben and your Aunt Nelly, both.”

The Lusitania. Her mother’s only sister and the latter’s husband had been on it when it had gone down, at two o’clock Greenwich time the afternoon before, to a worldwide gasp of horror and incredulity.

He didn’t know what to say. What was there you could say, at such a time, to such a thing? He never was very good at emergencies, anyway. In the end, she was the one who had to go on talking.

“I can’t leave Mother right now,” she said wanly. “You understand, don’t you, Press?”

“Don’t think of it,” he urged. “Of course I understand. Will you give your mother my deepest sympathy?”

“Thank you, Press,” she said gratefully. “I will.”

“And I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He left the hotel by the Thirty-fourth Street side, and walked over to Herald Square, past the watchful bronze guardian-owls along the cornice of James Gordon Bennett’s wedge-of-pie-shaped Herald Building, and then on up Broadway; the entire evening was now disappointingly back on his hands, before it had even had a chance to begin, and with no one or nothing to help him pass it.

Which at twenty-five can be not only a major dislocation but even a considerable danger.

3

He’d been drunk for some time now, and steadily getting drunker. It had happened more by accident than deliberately. He’d just incautiously gone past the point of being able to stop any more, before realizing it himself.

The lights kept spinning, spinning, like the exposed magnified works inside a jeweled watch. Sometimes a crazy alphabet of letters seemed to shoot out from them, like sparks, and form signs all around him, and at all angles, against the sky. New Amsterdam — Watch Your Step; Liberty — The Birth of a Nation — Mae Marsh; Geo. M. Cohan Theatre — It Pays to Advertise; Globe — Montgomery and Stone in Chin Chin; Shanley’s; Hippodrome — Strand —

Sometimes they were like pinwheels, revolving around a single colored center. The bright red cherry of a Manhattan. He must have been looking straight down into his own glass when that happened. He was on Manhattans.

He’d never been so drunk at any time before in his whole life.

All at once there was a woman with him. She’d been with him for just a few minutes, she’d been with him for long, endless nights at a time. She kept changing her dress at intervals. And even her hair and face to go with it. First she was in pink. Then suddenly she was in light green. As though a gelatin slide had revolved and cast a different tint over her.

“You changed your dress,” he accused her.

Interlude of more coruscating pinwheels, again like the oversized works of a watch, all flashing and tinseled and rotating at once, but in counter directions.

This time she was in yellow.

“Can’t you stay in one dress?” he complained querulously.

The bars were very unreliable tonight. They looked nice and steady, but he’d lean on them too heavily, or something. They’d tilt way up on one side, and slope all the way down on the other. It was like trying to drink from off the top of a see-saw.

The pinwheels were dimming now, they weren’t nearly so bright.

The bars gave place to a sidewalk. A sidewalk that was straight up and down in front of his face, like a rule measure held to his nose.

The toecaps of shoes made patterns on the surface of it. Sometimes they’d stand around formed into a semicircle. Then this would break up, they’d all resume going this way and that once more. Then a new semicircle would form, adding to itself pair by pair, until it was all ranged around him again complete.

Presently a couple of diminutive pointed vamps ventured forth out of this background row of shoes and poised themselves tentatively close up alongside him.

He split in two at this point. He went on, but memory stopped where it was, didn’t accompany him any further.

4

And now the time had come, the night had come. For asking her.

She had caught up with him. There was nothing further to wait for. In fact, delay might even have been dangerous. She must be caught where she was, at the outskirts, and drawn all the way into love. Bound to him by a formal declaration. Otherwise, a reverse current might set in that would carry her away from him.

You could not stand still in love. It was a moving stream. You floated together, or you drifted apart. It had to be one or the other. There was no such thing as a fixed position. There were no life rafts on these tricky seas.

And so, this never-to-be-forgotten night in both their lives, when “both their lives” became “their lives”; this fateful date, this turning point, this Saturday of May in Nineteen Fifteen.

She was in pale blue satin, the pale blue that lies within the depths of ice, or when moonlight strikes on burnished steel. And at her waist she wore pink roses, his pink roses. And long afterwards, looking back, he could remember her as she was this night. As a man should.

It was so easy to be in love with her, so easy to want to make her your own. Even if she’d been poor, even if her family had lacked all standing, he still would have wanted her, the way she was tonight. She was too much for him, she gave his poor heart amorous indigestion.

An intermission came on, and they left their seats and went out to the foyer.

“I have something to say to you,” he said out there.

“And I can’t hold it back any longer. I’ve tried, and I can’t.”

She smiled. I know, that said, I understand.

“And if we go back in there again, I’m afraid I’ll come out with it right there, with people sitting all around us hearing every word.”

She nodded. I know, that said, I understand.

“Shall we clear out of here?”

She didn’t have to smile or nod or anything else; he knew, he understood.

They never went back to their seats again. They got into a carriage there at the theatre entrance and were driven uptown and into the park at Fifty-ninth Street. There they slowly coursed along the driveway, now a silver-plated lake beside them, now an arbor of trees in lush new leaf closing over their heads for awhile, now a twinkling line of apple-green gas lamps striking off along some walk; the drowsy clop-clop of their horse the only sound to break the magic stillness of the night. There he kissed her, and she met his kiss. There he told her what he had brought her there to say to her.

“Marjorie, I love you. Will you marry me and be my wife?”

The words that are the oldest in the world, the words that are always new again each time. The words that are so short in speaking, the words that last for so long.

“Yes,” she said quite simply, “I will.”

His arms and his lips thanked her.

“I’ll be a good husband, Marjorie, for the rest of my days.”

As simple as that. And as irrevocable.

They had joined their lives, from now on until death.

5

The next day was Sunday.

He always took it easy Sundays. Lazed around and read the papers. He was going up to Marjorie s house for supper later. That wouldn’t be until toward eight.

But then, sometime around five, just as he was applying the lather to his face, there was a knock on the door.

He wasn’t sure he’d heard it at first. He silenced the flow of water and listened a moment. It came again. He wiped his hands off and came out and stopped before the door and called, “Who is it?”

The answer was voiceless, a repetition of the knock.

The maneuver frustrated him, just as it might have been intended to. He opened the door, and he was face to face with an unknown young woman, a girl really, looking at him with a sort of demure insistency.

He recoiled an inch behind the shelter of the door, and said “Oh, excuse me.” In 1915 a man’s undershirt, if not shocking, was at least still reason enough for apology between the sexes.

She kept looking at him with that air of childlike fixity; he could find no other description for it in his own mind.

She was quite young; twenty-two or — four at the utmost. She was quite pretty, but in a run-of-the-mill sort of way. It was not a lifelong beauty of feature and formation such as Marjorie had; it was a transient coloration lent her by the fact of her youth alone, that would disappear with that again some day. She was slim and small; she looked as though she could not have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds. She was dressed neatly and with a sort of youthful freshness, that avoided being rakish.

She kept looking at him in such an innocently questioning way, as one who has had no previous experience at all with men, particularly at such close quarters, and whose eyes seem to say: “You wouldn’t hurt me, now, would you?”

He gave her a smile meant to be reassuring. “I guess you have the wrong door.”

“No, it’s you I want to see,” she said in a small, almost babyish voice.

He was taken back. “Me? About what? Are you sure?”

Her lips formed into a little smiling pout of rue. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

He simply looked at her blankly. “No, I— I—” Trying to place her, failing completely. Some long-forgotten friend from his old home town?

“I can see you don’t. Doesn’t my face come back to you at all?”

She took a step forward. He took a step back, to avoid having his undershirt and his lathered jowls brush against her. She took a second step forward. She was in now.

She touched the door lightly with her hand, and it closed. “There,” she said, with the elfin, nose-crinkling grin of a mischievous child.

“But do you think you should come here like this?” he expostulated.

“I was in here the other time,” she said, with a defiant little perk of her chin. She sat down primly, carefully tucking her skirt about her and removing one of his discarded news-sheets from behind her back. “Now do you remember?”

She drew a long pin out of her hat, took that off. “Try me now, this way.” She touched at the puff of hair that was worn over each ear, covering the entire ear.

She waited a moment. The effects must have been visible all over his face. “I see you do now,” she said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I thought surely you’d... Don’t you remember Leona Harris? I even gave you my name.”

That came back too now, at the sound of it.

“I didn’t really—” he said lamely.

“But it is my right name. Look, I’ll show you.” She opened a patent-leather pouch she had carried tucked under one arm.

He made a dissuading motion of his hand toward her. “It’s all right, I believe you.”

“And after all, I did come back here with you.” It was said inattentively. She was looking into her bag for something, and not at him, as she spoke.

He could feel a slight pull at the lining of both his cheeks, as though they had grown taut for a moment. “Oh, no,” he said quietly, “aren’t you mistaken about that?”

“But I did,” she said with innocent trustfulness, her eyes on him now almost reproachfully. “You know I did. Didn’t you find my hairpins on the dresser the next day? Didn’t you find my little stick of lip rouge lying around somewhere the next day? I know I must have left it here.”

“How did you know I’d find those things?” he asked her.

“Because I left them here. You’d have to find them; who else would if you didn’t?”

“Did you leave them purposely for me to...?” He checked himself. He rubbed the back of one hand against the hollow of the other, as though it troubled him a little, itched perhaps. Then belatedly he felt for the evaporating stickiness on his face. “Will you excuse me a second?”

He went into the bathroom and hurriedly wiped his face off on a towel. Then he put on his shirt and buttoned it and thrust it under his belt.

When he came out she was still sitting there, in a sort of amiable quiescence. Not looking toward the doorway through which he had gone. She was holding a cigarette in her hand now. A skein of silky smoke threaded its way upward, bisecting her face.

She saw the startled look he gave. “I have to steal the chance whenever I can get it,” she said apologetically. “We women haven’t as much freedom as you men.”

He went over and selected a tie and began to do it up before the glass. His hand wasn’t quite steady at it; he had to begin the knot over. “Well, it was nice of you to drop by,” he said.

“I don’t hold anything against anyone,” she said.

He picked up his watch and glanced at it as he did so. “It’s after six already,” he said.

She took a puff of her cigarette.

He ran a brush sketchily over his hair. He took his jacket out, and shook it a couple of times, and put it on. She took another puff of her cigarette. He turned toward her, prodding a fresh handkerchief down into his breast pocket. “Will you excuse me now? I’ve got to go out.”

“No.”

The flatness of it startled him, threw him off balance, out of key, for a moment.

She must have wanted that, that was why she’d toned it that way. A man off balance is a man easier to overthrow.

He stood there looking at her for a minute before he was able to bring out anything. Then finally, “What is it you want?” he blurted out.

She smiled again, in that demure, abashed way. “I’m glad you asked. I was hoping you’d ask me that. I’ve been waiting for it.”

“Well, now I have.”

There was something a little frightening about her protracted smile, Marshall thought, and he wondered what it was. But he couldn’t tell.

“And now I’m going to answer you,” she replied.

But she didn’t.

There was a silence, a lapse, while he stood looking at her expectantly. Nothing more came, only the smile was there. He found himself becoming uneasy, at a loss. The smile did something to his poise. She seemed to want it to, the way she prolonged it.

“You really can’t guess?” she asked.

“No, I can’t,” he said shortly.

“I want some money, for the other night.”

The smile hadn’t left her face, as she said it. It was only the text of the remark itself that was completely at variance with her attitude of friendly, quiescent ease; nothing else; neither the inflection of her voice, nor the expression of her eyes and face, nor the posture of her body. There was neither tautness nor hardness nor anything else; it was almost a wistful drawl.

“I don’t get you.”

She chose to take it literally; that he hadn’t heard her clearly, rather than that he didn’t understand. “I said I want some money, for the other night.”

“And I said I don’t get you.”

She was still smiling that way. That slow, sticky, glutinous way.

The smile was working at last, simply by dint of being worn so long. She wanted him to understand it.

“The other night, in the café?”

“The part after the café part.” She waited a moment, then she added: “The café part is paid up.”

The shock was cataclysmic. It was like having a basinful of filthy water flung unexpectedly into his face. It was like suddenly seeing worms crawl out of the eyes of a beautiful porcelain doll.

His mouth opened and he jarred a step back.

For a moment rage and disgust gave him back his self-possession, his command of the situation. Even if fleetingly.

“Why, you brazen little...! With an innocent face like yours, and to come out with such a thing!”

“I’m glad you used that word, innocent,” she mused.

“You little liar! Get out of here! Go on, get out of here before I...!”

She didn’t move. The smile had left her face, that was all. She looked up at him with the grave mien of a child, weathering an adult storm of temper without even knowing what it was about, content to sit it out.

“You know what that is, don’t you? Blackmail. Do you know that I could have you arrested for that?”

To his surprise, she nodded acquiescently. “Yes, I thought of that before I came up here. You could.” It threw him a little; he’d expected counterrecrimination, not assent.

“I told you to get out of here. Go on now, get out.”

She shook her head. “No, I won’t. You’ll have to pick me up and carry me out, if you want me to go.”

“Well, I can do that too!” He made a sudden lunge toward her with both arms extended, then stopped short.

“Don’t you think it’s better to keep the conversation in here, in your room, than to carry it outside, to the hall? Don’t you think it’s better to keep it just between ourselves?” She shrugged. “I don’t care. It’s up to you.”

“Well, I know the quickest way to settle this!” he said wrathfully. “I’m going to call the police.”

She nodded. “Go ahead. There’s the phone.”

He wrenched it up, then took the receiver off the hook. “Central, give me the Police Department, please.”

She crossed her legs. Then didn’t forget to modestly lower her skirt. She even let her torso sink down somewhat into a slumped position, as a person does who expects to have to wait for some time. She opened her purse and peered into it, presumably into a mirror berthed in it, for he saw her touch at her hair once or twice, in fastidious adjustment.

She closed the purse again, done with her primping. Her gaze roamed idly about the room, as if in search of entertainment to while away the time. The way people will pick up a magazine to leaf through while waiting in a doctors anteroom.

“That’s your fiancée’s picture over there, isn’t it?”

The phone came down an inch, from his lips and ear. “Take your eyes off that!”

“Her name is Marjorie Worth.”

The phone came down two inches more, both sections of it together.

“Shut up, I said.”

“She lives at Nineteen East Seventy-ninth Street.”

The phone dropped down to waist-level. He could feel the skin around the corners of his eyes drawn back tight, the way a cat’s ears are pulled flat when it’s at bay.

“Her telephone number is Regent 1200,” she said softly.

His breathing seemed to interfere with his speech.

She went ahead looking at the picture. She gestured with her cigarette. “Well, why don’t you finish your call?”

He didn’t answer.

“She’ll believe you,” she said reassuringly. “She’s bound to. She’s engaged to you. She won’t believe me. Is that what you’re worried about?”

He still didn’t answer, didn’t move.

“She’ll have to hear of it, of course,” she went on. “That’s something else again. You can’t have people arrested without... Is that what’s worrying you?”

He brought the phone up again, stopped a moment. Then he said into it, “I’m sorry Central. Never mind that call.” He bracketed it together and put it down.

“You don’t seem to know what you want to do. First it’s one thing, then the other.”

He came over toward her slowly. He stood over her. He put one hand out finally to the top of the chair she was sitting in.

“I’ve never hit a woman yet in my life, but if you don’t get up out of there and start over to that door...”

She didn’t even cringe or draw her head away.

“When you hit someone there are some screams and a commotion, the whole house’ll be attracted, and that brings us back again to where we were.”

She looked up at him. Her eyes never wavered, never blinked. They were those of a belle listening to compliments being directed toward her by a hovering admirer, on a settee at some dance.

“All I want is fifty dollars,” she said brightly.

“All you want is fifty dollars. Well, the answer is still get out.”

Suddenly, to his surprise, and when he least expected it, she had risen accommodatingly to her feet, was standing before him. “All right, I will. I’ve asked, and you’ve refused, and there’s nothing else to be done...”

She moved toward the door.

“Here,” she finished softly.

She opened the door, and stepped outside. Then and only then she turned and looked back at him, smiling again — now in affable farewell. It was as though a pleasant, though totally unimportant, little call were being concluded.

“What’d you mean just then?” he said sharply, still standing by the now-empty chair where she’d left him.

“Well, I have to get it somewhere,” she said disarmingly. “I can’t go to an absolute stranger for it. There are only three of us involved.” Her eyes flicked briefly toward the photograph, far offside within the room. She moved toward the head of the stairs, beyond, in the hall.

“You wouldn’t dare!” he exclaimed, ripples of shock spreading outward from the pit of his stomach as though somebody had lunged at him there.

She didn’t answer.

“You’ll be thrown out faster than—!”

He couldn’t see her any more from where he was.

“But not until at least they have heard what their reason is for throwing me out,” he heard her say.

He took a quick step after her. She had reached the head of the stairs, was about to descend.

“Do you think she’d take any stock in such a thing?” he said hoarsely.

“She won’t believe me. I don’t expect her to. But those little things are so hard to get out of your mind once they’re put in. It’ll stay with her. It’ll always be there, hiding away somewhere. She’ll always know it’s there. You’ll always know it’s there.”

His face was very white. “What good’ll that do you?”

“None. But what good will it do you, either?”

He came out to the banister rail and leaned across it. She was on the third step down from the top now, passing below him on a descending plane. His breath made his stomach go up and down against the rail that pressed into it.

“Why should a girl go to her with such a story, if it isn’t true?” she shrugged. “Why should a stranger look her up and tell her such a thing, out of a clear blue sky? About you, just you and no one else. How would the stranger know about you, know there was a you, in the first place?” She was halfway down the flight now.

He took a deep breath, inclined over the banister rail.

“Come back here, you,” he surrendered in a low, smothered growl.

She didn’t come back any faster than she’d gone. She sauntered up, just as she’d sauntered down, and then over to the doorway.

He motioned her into the room and closed the door, to bar their being overheard any further.

“I haven’t got that much in ready cash, but...”

“A check will do,” she said affably.

“What makes you think I—”

“You carry an account with the Colonial Bank, Fifty-fifth Street Branch. You’ve got eight hundred dollars in it and seventy-two cents.”

He looked at her with almost a sort of grudging awe.

“You sure have been busy.”

“I woke up earlier than you did that morning. I had nothing to do with myself. If things are left lying around...” She gave her wrist a little deprecatory twist.

She prodded a fingertip against the corner of her mouth in whimsical speculation. “What else, now? Let me see. You’re employed by a brokerage house called Ritter, Pease and Elliott. Customer-accounts man. Your departmental chief is a Mr. Bruce. They wouldn’t like it either, I suppose, if— Shall I go on?”

She didn’t have to. He’d uncapped a fountain pen, seemed to be drawing the ink that flowed through it from his own vein, the one that stood out like a blue rope down the center of his forehead.

“To—?”

She smiled at the ingenuousness of that. “Bearer.”

He gave the completed check a looped toss onto the table, without handing it directly to her. It seemed almost to fly up from there of its own accord and be sucked into her hand, so quickly did she grasp at it.

“Now get out of here!” he said wrathfully, from under an obscuring handkerchief that he was pressing tight to his brow.

But even that paltry dismissal was robbed of whatever salve it might have had for his smarting self-respect. She already had.

6

The street door of his house swung open and he flung in through it. Coming-home time. Outside, the street was gold-plated with the late sunset, and some of the precious substance seemed to have been poured into him, he was so alight and glowing. He was filled with anticipations of the party they were going to tonight. A special dinner party in their honor, his and hers. The engaged couple, everybody’s darlings these days.

He was in such exuberant haste he’d already doffed his topcoat in the short distance from taxi door to house entrance, and he was carrying it slung backward over one shoulder, the way a bather does a used towel. He had no time, no time for anything but joy. You were only young once. You were only in love once. You were only feted like this the once that you were both young and in love. He had to get all togged out — dolled up, that was the jaunty new expression for it they were beginning to use these days — and then he had to dash right on again from here, go over to her house and pick her up. The steps flew by, meanwhile, four and five at a time under his avid, scissoring legs, and he had to grab the banister rail tightly at each turn of the stairs and hold on as he swung around it, to keep himself from flying off his trajectory and into the wall.

And then suddenly, sweeping around like that, he floundered to an awkward, eddying stop, too short, that left him swaying and tipping almost face-downward with his own checked velocity.

She was sitting there on the topmost step. Just above him. Like an elfin small girl docilely waiting to be let in by one of her elders, since she is not of an age to be trusted with the key herself. Knees to chin, the way a child waits on a stair, skirts demurely tucked close about her ankles, arms in turn clasped about them to hold them in place.

“Hello,” she said brightly. “You’re home early tonight. I just got here myself.”

7

A sudden shower had come up, one of those violent almost tropical affairs that sometimes belt New York in the warm season of the year. The precipitation was rigidly vertical, and so thick it had the look of a sheet of warped glass standing static before one’s face. The lightning was so continuous it gave the darkness the effect of wearing spangles that kept coruscating.

The subway kiosk — they still had the enclosed domed kind later removed as traffic hazards — was like a little glass casket imprisoning a pack of tightly wedged upright corpses. Some kind of fluid running down all around outside it to preserve them. Their outlines peered swollen (as though decomposition had already set in) through the wire-meshed glass, lighted from within.

He stood there in the front rank, at the very lip of the orifice, toecaps of his shoes and forward brim of his hat just impinging on the watery curtain, but unable to edge back because of the bodies jammed behind him. He was umbrellaless and cursing himself for not having been on the train just ahead of the one that had brought him. It had still been dry when he’d boarded it at the Wall Street station.

A furled umbrella suddenly slanted outward over his shoulder from somewhere just behind, flared open with a comfortable cottony pop. Somebody wanted to get through. He tried to crush himself sideward to allow the person to pass.

Instead, a hand undulated edgewise under his arm. He thought for a moment it was an honestly accidental entanglement, that the hand, seeking an outlet, had become caught between his arm and body. He tried to lift his arm. Instead, it fastened on it, hooked curled about it, the hand.

He swung half about, in a sort of shocked impersonal outrage, as when some anonymous member of a crowd has trodden on you or jostled you unwarrantedly.

Her face was there, close, smiling into his. The next face to his, the nearest of all.

“Coming?” she suggested familiarly.

He turned outward to the rain again, as though he hadn’t seen or heard her. A moment later, no doubt because the continuing presence of her hand upon his arm interfered with this negation, he reached down, plucked it off, and cast it back where it belonged.

“No need to be standoffish about it,” she continued in a slightly risible tone. “I have an umbrella, and we’re both going the same way.”

“Are we?” he said through clenched teeth, continuing to face the rain.

“You know we are,” she answered indulgently. “Come on, be a good boy.”

Faces, he knew, without having to turn his own, were all turned now to look at the two of them. Faces, he knew, were smiling, were amused. She wanted that, she enjoyed it. It strengthened her position; it did the reverse for his.

“Come on, don’t be stubborn,” she coaxed. “I’m offering you my umbrella.”

Faces were grinning outright now; he could tell by the inchoate little sounds there were, still short of overt laughter, but that was on its way, and she was fanning it.

He extricated himself the way most men would have, being the unheroic creatures that they are, took a pull at his hatbrim to tighten his hat on his head, and suddenly plunged unprotected into the downpour, and away from her baiting.

He ran in sweeping strides, kicking up little silvery cuffs about his ankles. The rain drummed hollowly on the glass-studded pavement topping the subway in this immediate vicinity, for there was no fill below it, just the open track-well itself, but not loudly enough to drown the laughter of the crowd.

In a moment he became aware she was coming after him. “Hey, wait!” her voice came through the torrent, funneled to a foglike density.

He ran on full tilt, and around the corner, and into the side street that would lead him eventually to his own door, but only after a length of three maelstromlike blocks. The rain pellets seemed to be beating holes through his clothing, each one to let its successor a little further in turn.

He had to stop, paste his oozing shoulders up against a doorway finally. It was impossible to cover the entire distance in this; it was like running through upended surf, it was only a little less dense than actual surf would have been. No one was abroad, no one (and he was the one felt he would have liked to have help, not she).

He stood there, chest flickering wetly under a shirt soaked to the sheen of oil silk. His face was sweating raindrops, as though he were crying all over, from his crown down.

A moment later she had run into the shallow shelter after him, ranged herself there alongside him, shoulder to shoulder, facing outward as he was. She had not suffered so; it was a windless perpendicular rain, and the umbrella had let her retain a core of dryness.

“Get out of here,” he said, but too out of breath to put more than a whispered venom into it.

She ignored the imprecation, as if it were simply an understandable peevishness due to his uncomfortable bodily condition, and not his own real feelings toward her, that was speaking. “It’s so foolish for the two of us to stand here like this,” she argued comfortably. “What’s the good of my having the umbrella with me at all?”

“You’re even lucky in that, aren’t you!” he spat out bitterly. “How’d you happen to have that with you, when a lot of decent people were caught on the streets without one?”

“It’s been threatening since before five,” she answered as evenly as if it were a courteous question. “I brought it with me when I came out. You see, I didn’t know how long I might have to wait for you.”

“And you’ve been standing waiting for me at the top of those subway steps since five?”

“They’re the ones you use coming home every night,” she said with matter-of-fact simplicity. “What other ones would you use? The next station’s eight blocks too far up for you.”

He choked down his discomfiture by breaking from the doorway, running on again, in a long, gradual loop that brought him in at last to another doorway further down.

Within minutes she had done the same thing, was beside him again, breathing quickly in time to his own quick breathing.

He gave her a violent push out into the downpour. She staggered, but kept her footing. The umbrella, however, she lost for a moment, and it rolled circularly around on its own handle as an axis. She quickly retrieved it, backed up into the trough of dryness from which he had ejected her.

“I’m going to slap your head off, if you keep this up!” he threatened, his face pulled taut with rancor.

She smiled at her own thoughts. “You never slapped a woman in your life,” she told him, almost contemptuously. “You’re not the kind.” Almost as if to say. You would have long ago, if you were going to.

“Get away from me,” he said surlily, but already backing down from his own threat.

“You don’t own the doorway. I can stand in it as well as you.” He couldn’t seem to shatter her equanimity. She had the complete calmness of superiority. Or the superiority of complete calmness.

“Then I’ll get myself another.” He loped out again, ran the greater part of the remaining distance, crossed the final intersection, and took refuge one final time, now on the self-same street that held his own door, but still at an appreciable distance up from it, and unable to negotiate that without one last sodden halt.

She didn’t join him there. A sworl, a vaporized blur, hastening along on the opposite side of the street, showed she had not desisted and turned back, but she went on past him this time, and was blotted out in the borealislike conflagration of the rain. He knew that his own door was on that side. He knew that she did too.

A flash of the lightning, slackening now in its frequency, showed her to him ensconced in it, waiting for him. Like a black, mushroom-topped fungus, growing up from a crevice in it.

After awhile the rain petered out, came to an end. Pavements of spilled licorice, that caught every reflection and gave it back upside down, were left in its wake.

The two figures stood in the two doorways, on opposite sides of the street, watching each other. Almost detachedly gazing toward each other.

After awhile she collapsed her umbrella and took it down. There was no further need for it.

After another while, he lit a cigarette. The match flame was like a vivid poppy in front of his face for a minute, with his hands forming the petals.

Presently his waterlogged clothes had begun to feel clammy on him. He turned up the collar of his coat, around the back of his neck, held it tightly closed in front.

On he stood like that, for just a moment or two longer, beginning to quiver a little now with the dampness. All at once he flung his cigarette down, with a long overhand shoulder-roll that had in it both exasperation and final, wearied capitulation. Even the paper of the cigarette had been a little soggy, made it difficult to draw on it satisfactorily.

Abruptly he struck out from the doorway, started walking the long diagonal toward his own doorway — and the figure waiting in it so complacently, so sure that in the end he would have to do just this.

8

It was late, it was past twelve at night. The street was empty, charcoal brushed with gloom, only the pin-point lights of an upper window or two, like open pores, to mar the evenness of its texture.

The empty taxi drove up to the curb, stopped.

Suddenly Marshall, as though until now he had been part of the doorway sediment piled up by the darkness, detached himself from the entryway without the door having opened behind him, and ran over to the cab, hatless.

“Are you the party called for a cab to be sent around to this number?” the driver asked him.

“Wait here a minute,” Marshall said in a curiously bated voice, as though he were afraid of their being overheard. “I have two bags standing inside the door.”

He returned to the shadowy entrance, this time a doorlatch clicked open, then a moment later crunched closed, and he reappeared with a heavy bag weighing down each arm. He launched them into the back of the cab and got in after them.

“Where’ll I take you?” the driver asked him unhurriedly, without doing more than tip down his pennant.

“Don’t stand here,” Marshall hurried him. “I’ll give you the address in a minute. But start moving.”

He struck a match, cupped one hand around it, and with the other took out a newspaper folded to a one-column span. He ran the match down the edge of this, almost as though he were attempting to set fire to it. A perpendicular array of little fine-printed boxes lit up one after another, and then dimmed out again, as the thin yellow gleam went by. It stopped suddenly opposite one whose frame had been thickened at all four corners by diagonal pencil strokes. “Attractively furnished room, gentleman preferred—” That stayed in sight for a moment longer than its mates, then the match went out, and it was gone back into limbo.

“One-eight-four East Fifty-first,” he told the driver. A moment later he’d thrown the newspaper out the window of the cab.

They coursed on uninterruptedly for several minutes, with nothing to stop for even at lightless four-ply crossings. Then, “Oh — my hat!” Marshall exclaimed suddenly, clapping a hand to the top of his head.

“Want me to take you back for it?” the driver offered. “We’re only a couple blocks away yet.”

“No!” Marshall said sharply. “Never mind, let it go. I’ll do without it.”

“Well, I don’t suppose you need one this time of year,” the driver observed philosophically.

“Not that badly, anyway,” Marshall agreed grimly.

The new house was simply an east-side duplication of the one they had come from on the west side, just as one street was merely a numerical variant of the other. He paid the driver, carried his bags over to the door, found his new key and let himself in. Unchallenged, he carried them up the stairs to the door to his new room, found the key to that, and let himself in there.

He’d asked her, earlier in the day when he’d first called to inspect the room, if it would be all right for him to move in quite late that same night, instead of waiting for the daylight hours of the following day. “You see, I, er, have to work quite late, and it may be twelve or after before I can get my things together and bring them over here.”

His signed receipt was waiting for him on the table now, left there during the interim. “Rec’d of Mr. William Prince... $15... for two weeks’ rental,” and then the new landlady’s signature.

An admonishment she had given him during the course of their interview returned to him now.

“There’s only one thing I must ask. No girls, now.”

No, he agreed bitterly, you bet no girls!

He sprawled in a chair, lit a cigarette, and, as though savoring immunity for the first time in weeks, let his head loll back almost to a breakneck position and aimed the smoke from his nostrils ceilingward.

In a moment he had thought of something and was on his feet again. He took out a plain white card, such as they used down at the office, and with the same fountain pen that had written those various checks, printed out on it “Mr. William Prince.” Then he reopened his room door, went down the stairs, and in the entryway inserted the card into the slot that corresponded to his room.

He came upstairs again, closed the door once more, and turned and shook his fist at it with vindictive satisfaction.

“Now try it,” he said savagely, “you little tart!”

9

On his wedding morning he woke up late, after the bachelor party of the night before.

He opened his eyes, and they met her face, in a frame, on the dressertop, slanted so that it would look toward his bed. Just as in her house, probably, his own face was there to meet her eyes when they first opened of a morning. Paper replicas, the need for which would come to an end at five o’clock this evening.

At the bottom, where the shoulders paled into an impersonalized background, she had inscribed: “Forever, your Marjorie.”

“And forever, your Prescott,” he breathed in soft-voiced answer.

He got up, and the moment of contemplation ended. He set about his preparations for the day.

He went out for some coffee, and he called Lansing up from the place where he was drinking it, since there was no phone in the house where he was now rooming. Lansing was standing up for him as best man.

“How are you after last night?” Lansing asked him.

“Oh, boy,” Marshall groaned.

“Same here.”

“I’ve been packing for the trip. I’m about finished now.”

“I’ll be over and pick you up at about four-thirty,” Lansing said.

“Hadn’t you better make it a little earlier?” Marshall asked worriedly.

Lansing laughed. “I’ll get you there on time,” he promised. “The less time you have to spend hanging around waiting, the less you’ll suffer. I know those things. Just leave everything to me.”

“All right,” Marshall said gratefully. “See you later.”

“See you later.”

He went back to his room again. There he laid out his wedding clothes and got into them, dressing slowly and carefully. He caught himself whistling. The song of that season, the new song that everyone was taken with just then. “Peg o’ My Heart.”

He stopped a moment to shrug. I thought grooms were supposed to be nervous, or something. Funny; I don’t feel that way.

He went to work with his hairbrushes, stroking them on opposite sides of his head with as much meticulous care as though he were modeling something in moist clay between a pair of trowels.

He looked at his watch. A little past four. Lansing should have been here by now. He said he’d come earlier.

He had her picture still out, saving it to put away until the last. It stood on the table, ready to go into the valise. He stood still, to look at her.

When we were born, I didn’t know you. And you didn’t know me. Last year on this very same day, in June of Nineteen Fourteen, I still didn’t know you. You still didn’t know me. Now we come together, in the closest way two living people can. Then when we die, and we both must die someday, the one of us who is left a little while longer will go back to that before, to that without-the-other stage. And then again it will be: I don’t know you. And you don’t know me. What a strange thing marriage is.

He was all ready now, just for the dress-tie and the coat. He looked at his watch again, good-naturedly. What’s the matter with that Lansing? Am I going to have to send out a St. Bernard with a keg of brandy?

Then finally the summons came that he’d been expecting for so long. The buzzer sounded, as Lansing fingered the downstairs doorbell to his room. He released the latch to the downstairs door, to let him into the house, then stepped over to the room door and left it ajar for him, so that he wouldn’t have to go back to it a second time. Then he went back to his own immediate task: the tie. He dipped his knees slightly, in his absorption, as he stood there before the glass struggling with it. One wing kept stubbornly projecting a fraction of an inch beyond the complement above it.

He could hear Lansing’s tread coming up the outside stairs, now. He called out a raucously jovial greeting to him sight unseen from where he stood, without turning his head.

“You lazy hound! So you finally got here, did you? Well, it’s about time!”

There was a smothered chuckle, and Leona Harris was lounging against one side of the open doorway, her cheek pressed languidly against the frame.

He saw her in the mirror, before he’d had time to turn. Then, having seen her there, her reflection seemed to hold him fast, like some hypnotic apparition, so that he was no longer able to turn. He kept looking at her that way, by indirection.

His hands dropped away from his tie, as though they’d withered and died up there, and dangled lifeless at his sides, no longer volatile; dead things still fastened to him by their own tendons.

She peeled her cheek from the doorframe and came in a little further. A dainty, mincing step or two, like a dancer pointing a delicate toe before her, feeling her way in some difficult pas she is not yet sure she has mastered.

He hadn’t moved. He couldn’t.

“So you’re getting married today,” she said affably. “So today’s the great day. I thought I’d drop by and offer my congratulations.”

A cord at the side of his neck whipped up, and, as though it were a rusted hinge, he emitted a grating sound. “Get out of here.”

He was still looking into the mirror, frozen. The very position of his feet hadn’t shifted. A man staring into a looking glass.

“I haven’t got any present for you, but the least I can do is offer you my—”

The hinge jarred again. “How did you know?”

“It was in the papers. After all, she’s a society girl. It was in all the morning editions.”

“No. I mean how did you know...? My name isn’t downstairs.”

She nodded matter-of-factly. “I know. William Prince, isn’t it? That was on my account, I suppose.” She swung the loose end of a handkerchief about in one hand. “You moved in here on a Wednesday, I think, and I’ve known ever since the following Friday. After all, you do have to start home from the same place each night: Two Wall Street.”

He made a peculiar hissing sound under his breath, as when something hurts excruciatingly for an instant or two. His eyes shuttered themselves in accompaniment, then opened again.

She had moved closer to the table by now. Drifted, seemingly, without use of her feet at all. Now he wrenched himself from the glass at last, turned face-forward to her, sprang over there protectively. The table was between them.

She looked down at the train tickets. “Atlantic City,” she murmured idly.

Her hand moved on a little. It didn’t touch anything, just rode the surface of the table.

“Tiffany’s,” she mused. “It’s beautiful. I saw you the day you were in there buying it.”

“Get away from it!” he ordered harshly.

She withdrew her hand trailingly. Her fingertips left little steam-tracks on the polished surface which quickly cleared.

He was leaning toward her across the table, gripping it at its outer sides. His head was down, but the pupils of his eyes were sighted upward toward her, so that they were directed at her face instead of downward at the table, as they normally would have been given the tilt of his head.

“Look, I don’t want to use force.”

“I wouldn’t,” she said without inflection.

His fist crashed down on the table. “You’re not human at all!” he screamed sobbingly at her. “You’re a demon. I don’t know what you are. You look like a girl. You’ve got a face like a baby, but— Haven’t you ever slept with other men? Why don’t you hound one of them?”

She backed her hand to her mouth. “Press,” she said with shocked propriety. She went over to the door, softly closed it. “What things you say. They’ll hear you out there.”

He crashed his fist down on the table again. This time he didn’t say anything with it. His head went lower in accompaniment to the blow.

She ran two fingers back and forth across the frame of her handbag.

He was looking down, as if staring at his own reflection in the surface of the table. A tendril of his carefully brushed-back hair reversed itself and fell forward, down over his forehead, partially obscuring one eye.

“This is the last time. Press,” she said soothingly.

His mouth twisted at one extremity. “Each time it’s the last time. Then each time there’s another time that comes after it.”

They stayed motionless and silent for a moment after that, as if an unspoken contest of wills were taking place. They were not even looking at one another. His eyes were cast downward at the tabletop, sullenly immobile. Hers strayed, with an air of insouciant waiting; but never toward him.

“Press, why don’t you let me go?” she urged at last. “It’ll be over in a minute. It would have been over already by this time if you’d only...”

A drop of moisture peered through the hairs of his eyebrow, dammed there in its slow descent.

“Press, this is your wedding day,” she reminded him, in the tone of someone seeking to restore a spoilsport to good humor.

“And if I don’t, you’ll go there to the very church itself, won’t you?”

“I would like to see a real society wedding,” she said almost contritely.

He was shaking all over.

“How much this time?” he said simply. He tried to turn from the table, and had to hold it for a moment to support himself. Then he turned from it and went over to the dresser.

“The same as last. Two-fifty.”

He opened a drawer, looked in it, then closed it again, as if not seeing what he sought.

She pointed briefly. “It’s up there, on top,” she said.

He picked up the checkbook from the top of the dresser, and brought it over to the table. Then he turned and looked helplessly across his shoulder in search of something else. A slight impact on the tabletop brought his eyes back, and his fountain pen lay there uncapped, barrel toward him in readiness.

“It was clipped to your vest pocket, on the back of that chair over there,” she said. “I saw it from here.” She examined her fingers to make sure no trace of ink was on them.

His hand was shaking too much. The pen point regurgitated a great glossy blot, left it behind as it swept on.

He tore the check out of the folder, began again on the one below.

“Don’t be so nervous, Press.” There was a note of laughter in the observation, but it wasn’t unkind laughter; it was rather the good-natured, indulgent kind apt to be exchanged between two close friends at times.

He didn’t look up at her. He heard a match snap, and a thin panoply of smoke drifted horizontally past his nose.

He signed his name, and he had finished it.

He relaxed his thumb, and the pen slid from his hand and fell to the floor at his feet.

“It’s a good thing it’s not your rug,” she said.

She took the check and made sure it was dry by blowing her breath along it, passing it back and forth below her lips as she did so, as if it were a harmonica. Then she folded it carefully, opening the handbag, put it inside.

He was still standing where he’d written it, quavering hands to the edge of the table, as if incapable of releasing it.

“Now go to your wedding,” she said, with an inflection almost of fondness. She surveyed him with a sort of kindly interest. “You make a good-looking groom. Wait, your tie ends aren’t straight. I wonder why it is men can never— Do you want me to fix it for you before I go? That’ll be my wedding present to you, Press, a nice even tie.”

She set her cigarette down against the rim of the table, and came around it to his side.

Her hands reached toward his tie, and she was right before him for a maddening moment.

She shouldn’t have come so close to him.

He didn’t see what happened next. Missed seeing it as completely as if he were outside the room, on the other side of the closed door. There was a singeing flash of six weeks of accumulated hate, fear, and torment, as blinding to his senses as a literal combustive explosion would have been. She disappeared completely behind it. He didn’t feel anything, or know what any part of his body was doing. He heard a stifled scream come through from the other side of the sheet of fire, as though it were a visible thing that had shocked and seared her too, as well as himself.

Then it dimmed, and she peered through at him again. He could see her once more.

They were locked together in a serpentine double arm-clasp. Her throat was between his hands. They were turned inward, thumb-joint toward thumb-joint, pressing in upon the soft front part of it. Feeling it give, and circle, and try to swim away in ripples of flesh. While the firmer structure beneath held fast in columnar hollowness, a column that he was trying to cave in and crush closed.

He kept his face back beyond her reach. He had a longer arm-span than she, and her hands flickered helplessly upon his arms, like wriggling snakes trying to clamber up a pair of fallen tree trunks.

They were moving, but he couldn’t feel it. Taking little steps, this way, that way, now forward, now back, like a pair of drunken dancers. And as in a conventional dance his steps — the man’s — led, her steps — the woman’s — followed. Whichever way he stepped, she stepped a moment later.

One time they were very near the door. Her mouth opened abortively, and closed, frustrated; opened again, then closed once more; and he could feel a little straining lump or sac come up in her throat, under his thumbs, and he squeezed it flat again.

Then the door moved past along the wall, and she was gone to the far end of the room. And still the silent music played, and still they rocked to it.

The bedstead came nosing toward them diagonally, one corner of it forward like the prow of a ship. Then like a ship that suddenly changes course, it too veered aside. But not quickly enough. The back of her heel must have struck the bottommost part of its leg, where its caster nosed the floor. The jar coursed through both of them, passing from her arms to his, and from them into his body, just as though it were he himself had struck the obstacle. There was a hollow, tubular ring from the bedpost, as when a faulty anvil is struck. Then suddenly she began to lean acutely away from him, and pull him violently downward after her with her whole weight, and it was only after the act had been half completed that he realized it was a bodily fall, involuntary.

He couldn’t brace against it. The two of them went down together, still locked together at her neck. They fell crosswise, in the little clear space between the foot of the bed and the bulky steam radiator against the wall. She fell upon her back and he fell face forward. She fell uncushioned to the floor, and he fell partly upon her body, due to the overlap from their formerly vertical position. His face fell upon her breast, as if in amorous indolence.

And as the fall completed itself, again there was a hollow, knell-like ring, this time from the steam radiator. It ebbed and dwindled into silence, and they didn’t move.

She was completely supine, except for her head, and that was tilted a bare inch or two by the radiator behind it. It was as though she were trying to look down her own length at the top of his head, nestled on her breast.

Their eyes met, in a strange stillness. His hands had burst open with the fall, but they still formed an unclosed half-circle toward her neck, and lying within its compass, like an overripe fruit, lay her silent inert head. Like a giant seedling of death, that had just burst free from its pod.

A little blood twinkled at the seam of her lips, like a new kind of rouge applied from the inside out. But over-applied, for it ran over at last, at one corner, and started tremulously down her chin, then stopped again and ran no more.

He flung his arms wide in sudden, explosive gesture of riddance, and her own fell off them like disengaged tendrils, lay sodden on the floor.

He shook her at the shoulders, then, and her arms moved; but when he stopped, they stopped, were still again.

He made spasmic squirming motions backward away from her, and reared on the points of his knees, on the floor beside her.

“You can have the money,” he whispered. “Go ahead, take it, and get out of here.”

He shook her urgently, this time by one shoulder alone, and she seemed to say “No,” for her head went slightly from side to side.

“Come on, get up. Take the money, and get out.”

He pulled at her, tried to draw her up toward him.

“Cut it out, do you hear me? Get up, will you?”

Her head came erect, and then overbalanced itself, came forward against the white front of his shirt, as if in a smothered kiss. He quickly pried it away and held it at a distance. It went over to the side, and lay thus, as if cocked at him in macabre quizzical interrogation.

He could do with her what he willed, move her any way and she obeyed; and now that he could, he didn’t want to any more, he wanted her as she had been. And that was the one thing that he couldn’t do with her, make her as she had been.

Dead. They called this being dead. This was what it was when they said someone was dead. He’d never seen anyone like this before. He’d seen them dead in coffins, stylized, prepared, but not like this, just minutes after. And — done by himself.

Four whimpered words escaped from him into bated sound.

“Christ, I’ve killed her.”

It was very quiet, and he didn’t move. It was as though he was given that one precious, gratuitous minute to rest upon, to gather himself together upon as best he could, for there would be no more, for the rest of his life, for the rest of all time.

And then the knock came at the door. The knock he’d once been expecting, and now had forgotten to expect any more. Of his best man, come to take him to his wedding, come to take him to his bride.

10

The next few moments were living horror.

The knock had caught him on his knees, in a peculiar double penitential position, holding her partly uprighted form at arm’s length away from him. There was a blur. Then he was across the room, standing just inside the door. The bolt had just been drawn closed.

Another flurried blur. Like smoke swirling within a tumbler, unable to escape, repeating itself and repeating itself and repeating itself. He found himself by the door of his clothes closet now. The closet door stood wide. The row of clothes, on hangers, were all eddying a trifle in unison, as though something had been forced through their midst, parting them violently. On the floor, blatant, her legs stuck out, still projecting a little across the sill.

He dropped down, seized them both together by the one hand, and switched them over into a straight line that followed the back wall of the closet. She could not be seen from standing position now, but she could still be seen when the beholder was down low, as he was. He reared, and reached for a hanger, and swept its garment off it. It dropped deftly upon her, and covered up that section of her where her knees were. He swept another one off; that covered up her feet. Another; her waist. Two, three more, and her shoulders and her head went. There was just a pile of massed clothing now, strewn along the closet floor at the back, rising highest in the corner, for she had been propped sitting upright there, limp and dead.

He got the closet door closed.

He closed it not only with his hands and arms. He closed it agonizedly, expiringly, by pressing the side of his face against it as well. Letting his cheek lie flat upon it, exhaustedly, as though that would add to the security of its closure.

His heart was pounding on wood. No wonder it hurt, it was striking the door so hard, through his skin and shirt and all. Then he forced space between his breast and the panel, by stiffening his arms against it and thrusting himself back.

Talk to him, say something. Look around, make sure nothing of hers, left out.

Voice wouldn’t come. He had to cough first and break the rigor in his throat. Then it flowed through, hoarse and scratchy.

“All right, Lance. All right.”

Handbag exploded into his awareness, as though a small flashlight picture had just been taken of it, where it lay.

He went to it and got it, got it into a drawer, got the drawer closed.

A muffled voice came through; cheerful but remonstrative. Its effect for a moment was acute nervous shock, as though someone had spoken unexpectedly right into his ear.

“Come on, come on. That won’t save you. I’ve got you cornered. Open up. You can’t get out of it that easy.”

My God! he thought, and the edge of his hand flew up and struck him just above the eyes. Then: No, he doesn’t know, he can’t. That was just badinage.

One more thing: the check. She had put it into the handbag, he had seen her do it, but that only came back to him now.

Then he was at the door. Then the bolt had been drawn. Then the door was back. His aloneness had ended. He was looking into another man’s eyes. Accordingly, enemy eyes. The eyes of his best friend. Still — enemy eyes.

“Well, it’s about time,” Lansing expostulated, with a broad yet perplexed grin. “What were you doing in here, anyway?” He strode in, as one who has the right to uninvited. “Who is she?” he demanded ribaldly. “Where y’ got her?”

Marshall could feel his heart give a single pained afterbeat, like a postscript to the hurtful way it had been throbbing just now.

He tried to produce a disclaiming smile, but it wasn’t on secure foundations, it soon lost its hold and slipped off.

Imagine having killed someone, and then looking into your friend’s face like this, three or four minutes later, he thought wryly. If he knew.

“You’ve got the funniest expression,” Lansing chuckled. “I wish you could see yourself.”

“What’d you do, come over here to make it easier for me?” His smiles wouldn’t stay on long enough, there was too much quivering underneath.

“I’ve seen them nervous, but man you’ve got them all beat. I never saw them as nervous as you yet. You take the cake.”

“Here,” Marshall said casually, to get him off the subject. “This is for you.” He handed him the gift on the table.

“Well, that’s a peach, that’s dandy,” Lansing said enthusiastically. And then he threw in the current slang catchword for good measure. “That’s a bear.”

He began to open and close it repeated times, as people invariably do with such a sectional or hinged gift. It made little sharp clicks.

“It works, it works—” Marshall pleaded, harassed, and his hand went up toward his ear for an instant, although he never quite completed the silencing gesture.

Lansing stopped short, peered at him. “You need a drink. And I mean a drink. Where’s your liquor. Marsh?” Then he answered it for himself, out of old recollection. “Oh yes, in the closet.”

And he stepped over to it, and put his hand out, and grasped the knob. He was so springy, Marshall protested to himself, expiringly. He said, “No—” And then, “Wait a—” And then, “I’ll—” Without completing a phrase. And then finally got one out intact. “Here, let me. You get the glasses; there’s a couple of them in the bathroom.” And took a weaving step toward the door, to replace Lansing.

“Man, you act like you had a drink already,” Lansing remarked appraisingly.

But he took his hand off the knob and went into the bathroom.

“Rinse them out a minute,” Marshall called after him, to hold him in there a little longer.

“Particular,” he heard Lansing comment drily.

He got the door open — the way it opened it was a barrier between him and Lansing — and dropped down to his heels. He wormed his arm into the sediment of clothes. He had to reach behind her to get the bottle out. It had been in the corner, originally, and she was now propped up against it.

He had to spade his hand behind her, feeling her all the way, until he found the neck of the bottle; and then he had to wrench it bodily free, and yet hold her back with his other hand, so she wouldn’t come out along with it.

Bottle in hand, he got up on his feet again by clawing at the edge of the door. He let his forehead roll itself along the surface of the door, as though he had an intolerable headache and were seeking to ease it by such pressure.

Then he got the door closed, just as Lansing went striding by with the two glasses in his hand, saying jauntily, “Here we go!”

He followed Lansing over to the table, bringing the bottle.

Drinking this, he thought nauseatedly, Drinking this, after her body had been coddling it.

Lansing uncorked the bottle, and poured.

Lansing handed him his glass.

“Drink up, boy,” he invited. “Last drink as a free man.” Then he backed his head, drank. Then he righted it again, winked, saw fit to remark: “The condemned man drank hearty.”

Marshall didn’t think that was funny. “Condemned”; what a grisly expression to use. He contorted his face and emptied the liquor into his mouth.

Suddenly Lansing was holding a lighted cigarette in his hand; he hadn’t had one a moment ago, as far as Marshall could recall. He was offering it to Marshall, mouth-part foremost.

“This yours?”

“No, throw it away!” he said with sudden stridency. It had been there on the edge of the table the whole time. From... from before.

“Well, you don’t need to look so bilious about it.” Lansing was looking at him askance. Humorously askance, but still askance, and he saw that he’d made a slip there. “What do you mean, no? It’s here in the room with you. It’s got to be yours, who else’s could it be?”

“I meant... I meant, throw it away. I don’t want it after it’s been standing there on the edge of the table like that.”

“Aw, don’t be so fancy!” Lansing said with gruff raillery.

Before Marshall could guess the direction of his hand, it had speared forward, thrust the cigarette between his lips, left it there clinging to them of its own adhesion.

Fumes of death seemed to go up into his brain.

He retched violently, all but vomited. His hand flew to his stomach, to curb the inclination. The cigarette sprang to the floor, and he trapped it with his foot almost as though it were something alive, crushed it unmercifully.

“Well, for the love of...” the astounded Lansing cried, watching him incredulously.

“Caught my windpipe,” Marshall said, backing his hand to his forehead.

Suddenly he pulled himself together with an excess of nervous energy, bunched his shoulders defensively, began to edge Lansing before him toward the door.

“Come on, let’s go! Let’s get out of here, will you? We’ll be late. Let’s get started, let’s get over there.”

“We’re not late, we’ll make it,” Lansing tried to calm him. He gave him a whimsical look. “First you’re in no kind of a hurry at all, you keep me standing outside the door ten whole minutes before you even let me in. Then all of a sudden you’re in such a hurry you can’t get out of the place fast enough!” He chuckled. “They talk about the bride being nervous. I think they’ve got the wrong party.” He tried to dig his heels in, hold his ground against Marshall’s jerky propulsion, even at the threshold.

“Well, what about the ring? Don’t you think it’d be a good idea to take it with us, or are you going to leave it there on the table?”

Marshall turned back, scooped it up, came forward, jammed it into Lansing’s pocket. “Come on. Let’s go. Come on.”

They were both on the outside of the door by now. He’d maneuvered Lansing to the outside of the door at last. He clawed at it to bring it closed after them. Lansing, perhaps because he was in the nearer position, finally was the one to close it, with a good plump impact.

“Close it good,” Marshall pleaded harriedly. “Good and tight.”

Lansing smiled, gave the knob an extra twist to test it. “What, are you afraid somebody’ll get in?”

No, echoed Marshall in horror-stifled silence as he started down the stairs, I’m afraid somebody’ll get out.

11

He followed Lansing out of the vestry room. Moving close behind him, almost treading on his heels, the way some helpless, frightened, lost soul clings to the only familiar person, the only point of support, in a terrifying situation.

He even wanted to reach out and keep his hand firmly on Lansing’s shoulder as they moved along, but he refrained with an effort.

They were in the chapel now. All those people seated out there. All staring his way. Row upon row of faces.

Lansing took up his stance. Marshall stopped behind him, wanted to stand there protectedly behind him, sheltered. Lansing had to motion unobtrusively to him, where to stand. They’d rehearsed all this yesterday, positions and all. But yesterday he wasn’t a murderer.

He shifted over and stood there alongside Lansing.

Music swelled out. Hollowly, sepulchrally, he thought, echoing dismally within the cavernous interior of the church. It had never occurred to him before how similar the wedding march and the funeral march were. There was as much reason, today, for the one as for the other to be played. He winced at the horrid thought that this was a double ceremony, not just a single one.

Beautiful girls were coming down the aisle toward him, by twos, with slow, stately grace. Dwelling on each step, balancing on it a moment before taking the next. Almost as in those musical shows that were becoming popular, the Ziegfeld Follies and the Winter Garden Passing Shows.

The first pair in lilac, the second in pink, the last in azure. They fanned out and became motionless, in a graceful half-circle.

She was coming down the aisle now, on her father’s arm. A snatch of ghostly tune seemed to lace through the stately, sonorous music of actuality for an instant, that strain that Lansing had been whistling in the cab coming over, and he himself had been humming before that. “Come be my own, come make your home in my heart.” Then it whisked itself away again, like the interloper it was.

Satin white as new-fallen snow, a little girl behind her to bear her long train. Veiling gossamer as mist. Orange blossoms for purity, and a tiara of pearls no more lustrous than all the rest of her.

His heart was wrung. We don’t marry women, he thought; we marry angels, and in this moment or two of the marriage act, the scales fall from our eyes and we see them as they really are, perhaps never to glimpse it again.

How lovely she is, how unearthly lovely.

And I’m so unclean. I have blood on me.

A shudder coursed through him.

She’s coming toward a killer, step by step. She’s about to join herself in wedlock to a murderer. Oh, somebody warn her while there’s time, somebody stop her—

A knife-edged cry rang through the church.

“Marjorie! Don’t! Turn around and go the other way, quick!”

Who had screamed out like that? Who had cried that terrible warning? His eyes darted this way and that. But step by unmoved step, she came on, steadily on.

No one had. His heart had, but not his lips. No one but he had heard it.

Lansing nudged him slightly. He moved forward mechanically, took her fathers place at her side.

Those beautiful eyes, that even the veiling couldn’t quench. Like topazes burning through snow.

She cast them down. The sonorous words began, the stately age-old words, bringing peace, bringing God’s consent and blessing.

But they are not meant for me. I have no right to be here, let them be spoken over me. I killed a woman just now, but no one knows it but me. No one in the whole world knows it but me. But God knows it. I can fool my fellow men, but I can’t fool God. I have no right to accept this sacrament before Him.

Too late. She sank to her knees beside him. Lansing tugged at his sleeve. He sank to his, beside her.

The sign of the cross was made over them. It seemed to leave a trace of fire in the air, and almost he quailed, almost he cringed away from it.

The crucifix was being offered to him. And as his lips touched it, a burning sensation seemed to course through them and run down into his heart.

“—in the name of the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

It’s over, and she’s married to a murderer.

“You may kiss the bride, my son.”

The veil dissipated like morning haze lifting in the sunrise.

Her lips were so cool against his, he thought. So loyal. So trustful, more than anything else.

12

Now they were back at her house for the reception. Glittering electric lights in crystal chandeliers, women in evening dresses, a giddy hubbub of voices and laughter, the strains of the waltz and the hesitation played in an adjoining ballroom by a five-piece orchestra.

They were standing alone together for a moment, he and she. Alone in all that crowd. Champagne goblet in each one’s hand.

She extended hers toward him. He extended his toward her. Their goblets met, with little silvery clink.

“Mrs. Prescott Marshall,” she said softly, with grateful upraised eyes.

(“Mrs. Murderer,” he amended, unheard.)

Her eyes strayed to his bosom, suddenly stopped there.

“Ah, darling, you’ve hurt yourself. There’s a tiny speck of blood on your shirt front.”

His head went sharply downward, riveted.

“How was it? Where? Shaving?”

If she hadn’t been a girl, she would have realized before speaking that couldn’t have been; you shaved before, not after, your shirt was on. She would realize it in a moment anyway...

“Perhaps trimming my nails before,” he said, with lack of full breath. “I was in a hurry.” And defensively put one hand behind his back.

She kissed her own fingertip, then touched the place with it.

With sudden fierceness, he gulped down the rest of his champagne. His throat swelled with it as it forced its way down.

She slipped away a moment later, with a whispered, “I’m going up now. Nobody’s looking, this is a good opportunity.”

He stayed there by himself, where they’d been standing.

He stole a look down at it.

It was such a small speck, such a tiny one.

It was so bright, though. It shone so. You could see it all over the room.

His hand crept up to it, and stayed there, covering it.

But under his hand, he knew, it was still there.

13

Night scene, Atlantic City. Double life, on a honeymoon. Solitude, on a honeymoon. Secret thoughts.

In the bed, Marjorie sleeping, alone. Never so alone, not even before her marriage. For before their marriage, his thoughts at least were with her. Now she hasn’t even those. Sleeping alone, in innocence, in trust, in confidence.

And at the floor-length windows, open to the June night, the watcher. Not seeing what is there to see, but watching something that is not there to see. Something that no one can see but the eyes of fear. His eyes.

Beautiful night, beautiful scene. Wasted, unseen. Rustle of silk, that is the surf. As if some superhuman dry-goods merchant were continually rolling, then unrolling, a gigantic bolt of the precious stuff, trying to sell it all along the shore.

Licorice-black sea, with a meshed trellis of silver running up it to the horizon line, aiming toward an unseen moon somewhere high above. As if put there for someone to climb. And below, like fogged pearls, the lights of the boardwalk, like the double strands of a necklace spread out along the shore.

And under that still, interrupting it at one point, at the one point where the windows are, the motionless inked-in outline of a head and shoulders. A head that sometimes breathes a little moonlit smoke. A head that watches the night slowly spend itself and be no more. A head that thinks and fears, and has no one, knows no one, to turn to.

Night scene, Atlantic City. Double life, within the very bridal suite. Secret thoughts. Hidden knowledge. The sleeper and the watcher.

14

Daybreak, Atlantic City. Secret life, on a honeymoon. Life apart.

In the background the towering Moorish hotel turrets, scarcely a light in all their multiple perforations. Somewhere behind one of these dark niches, a girl, sleeping alone. Guileless, in love with a chimera; in love with something that vanishes as her eyes drop shut, that only reappears again as they reopen. Alone, and not even knowing her own aloneness.

Nearer at hand, the elevated trestle of the Boardwalk, lights out now. Nothing moving along it as far as the eye can see, from down by the Inlet to up toward Ventnor, save a little empty paper bag, stirring and skipping and stopping again, in the dawn breeze.

Tiger-striped sky of daybreak; yellow, and gray, and black stripes, rising up out of the somber lead-colored water.

And on the beach, a lone figure, sitting on its haunches, the only erect object for miles along the gray, deserted sand. Not seeing the sea, not seeing the sky, not seeing the day break. Head bowed between knees. As if mourning the irrevocable. Never stirring. Only a strand or two of his hair stirring now and again, lifted by the breeze. Live hair on a dead figure.

Beach scene, Atlantic City, dawn. Secret sorrows. Life apart.

15

He first met the other man on the hotel piazza, he coming in, the other man stationary by the rail.

He would have passed him by, but the other man spoke and claimed him. The other man was alone there, in all that long defile of regimented wicker chairs, and they were conspicuous to one another. It was six in the morning.

The other man was older than he, by a good deal, and he was benign, and no one to be wary of; he was just a little too prying, a little too observing, and — at the first only — a little boring. Then suddenly he wasn’t boring any more, he had become the most compelling factor in Marshall’s whole existence at the moment.

He was stoutish too, and he looked as such people usually do in their summer-vacation clothes. Which is to say, just a trifle too eager to appear jaunty.

“Good morning, there.”

“Morning,” Marshall said, without applying any adjective.

“Both of us early birds, I see.”

Marshall kept trying to walk on in through the hotel entrance. “Yes, we are.”

The man had extended his hand, as an invitation to shake with him, even from the distance at which they stood from one another. Then started to close it by moving over toward him. Marshall couldn’t continue walking on in any more, after that. He had to wait for the hand to reach his own. It wasn’t in him to be that ungracious. This would only take a moment, anyway.

“See you around. May as well get this over with. I’ve been trying to get around to it for several days now. Then we can go on from there. My name’s Ponds. We’re here from—” He mentioned some faraway town — “for a little rest, before the summer rush gets under way.”

“Marshall. New York.”

“That’s the place, all right. Last summer we went over to Europe. Never again — not after the time we had getting back from there! They were sleeping on the open decks on the trip home, and lucky just to be on the ship, I can tell you. It was a madhouse. Germans were thirty miles from Paris, night we left there. Just had to pick Fourteen to go nosing around over there. From now on I stay where I belong.”

He mopped his brow in recollection, even a year later.

“Not bad, this place down here, though. It’s our first time down. We usually don’t come this far east.”

“Ours too.”

“Honeymoon, right?”

Marshall nodded.

“We spotted that right away. So did everyone else, I guess. You know how it is. Everybody takes a proprietary interest, sort of. All the world loves a lover. Shouldn’t let it embarrass you. Lovely little lady you’ve got there with you.”

“I think so,” said Marshall demurely.

“Saw you from my window just now, when I was getting dressed. All alone on the beach. You’re not...?”

“Not what?”

“Nothing, none of my business.”

“No, go ahead. Not what?”

The other man rallied him briefly by the arm. “Don’t worry too much about — anything, son.”

Marshall flashed him a taut look.

“Oh, I know. I know. I was a groom myself once. We all go through that. What you’re going through right now. Every man jack of us. They don’t know. They’re not supposed to, anyway; wouldn’t be right if they did. That’s our part of the bargain. New responsibility, added expense. Wonders if he can make it. If his prospects are good already, wonders if they’re good enough. If they’re not so good, wonders how in the world he’s going to better them.”

Marshall let him think it was that. He nodded. The nod was one of relieved enlightenment, but he let it be taken for one of tacit confirmation: that the other man had correctly diagnosed what his trouble was.

“Look, son,” Ponds said, putting a paternal hand to his arm for a minute. “I like you. I’m quick that way. Maybe too quick. Mother always says. I like you: maybe because you’re newly married, and when I look at you I can see myself, just as I was twenty years ago. Or I dunno, maybe it’s because I’m just a soft-hearted slob anyway; Mother’s always telling me that too. But anyway, whatever it is, I’m going to make you a proposition here and now. Anytime you feel like coming out to—” he mentioned that faraway town again — “there’s a job waiting for you in my office. Clerical work. Forty-five a week.”

He was getting fifty in New York.

“Oh, I’m not risking anything,” Ponds excused himself, as if hastening to avert a charge of undiluted sentimentality, though no such charge had been made, except by himself, perhaps unheard. “You must be all right. A girl like you’ve got yourself there couldn’t have picked herself the wrong kind of a fellow. I’ve been watching her even more than I have you. You just take your time, think it over, and let me know before we leave here. Now go upstairs to her, where you belong. And just remember, from now on there’s no more call for you to sit brooding on the beach by yourself at crack of dawn.”

Forty-five a week, Marshall said to himself. In a faraway town. Far away from New York. Safe from New York.

He went in, noncommittal. But somehow, the other man had stopped being boring all at once.

16

“And not go back to New York?” she said.

There was something akin to fright in her voice. The first time he had ever heard it there. It must have been the first time, for it was he who had put it there.

“And not go back to New York,” he answered.

They had the room dark. He’d wanted it to be that way when he told her. It made it easier for him that way. He hadn’t wanted to see her face, see her eyes, when he told her. She was back there where the bed was, somewhere; standing by it, sitting on it. He was over here where the window was, looking the other way, looking out, keeping his back to her. Counting each wave below on the beach as it licked up onto the moon-gray sand. Counting, counting, to keep his mind from her, to keep his mind from giving in.

“But your job—”

“This is a better job. With this man I’ll be somebody. You met him tonight at dinner, you saw how he likes both of us. There I’ll just be a cipher, a blank.”

“But the flat that’s been picked out for us... the furniture that Father wanted to—”

“We’ll have a flat wherever we are. Furniture wherever we are. Of our own, that nobody has to give us.”

“But all my things... my wedding presents—”

“Wherever we are, they can be sent after us.”

“But not even for a day? So sudden. He didn’t say we had to do it that way. He said we could come on after.”

“After may be too late. He may change his mind.”

“But don’t we have to go back anyway, to take the train from there?”

“We can go straight from here, through Philadelphia instead.”

She’s taking a long time. Will I win? Or will I lose?

Wave number seventy, fresh from the silversmith’s, hammered and lustrous, delicately filigreed. Then, as he watched, already tarnishing into pewter dinginess, already crumbling and corroded and breaking into pieces all up and down the sand. That silversmith did poor work.

Wave number seventy-one, wave number seventy-two, wave number seventy-three.

“Is this the way you’d — rather do it?”

“This is the way I’d rather do it.”

Wave number eighty.

Wave number eighty-one.

Wave number eighty-two.

She is coming toward me now. I can’t hear it, but I can tell it; I know it without looking around.

I must have won, for she is coming toward me, I am not going toward her. Don’t turn my head yet; one moment more, and I have won. There...

Her arms crept down his shoulders from behind, and linked, and held him in placative embrace.

“Then this is the way I’d rather do it too. Then — there isn’t any other way than this. Whatever you want to do, that’s the way I’d rather do it. Wherever you want to go, that’s where I want to go too. Wherever you’d rather be, there is no other place in all this world for me to be. I am no other one, just you. I’m not even your wife, just you.”

And her kisses of submission were scarcely cool upon his lips, than, somehow, still holding her to him, he already had the phone in place between them.

“Give me Mr. Ponds’ room, please. He’s in four-o-five. I know it’s late, but he won’t mind. I have to reach him tonight, he’s leaving the first thing in the morning.”