Waltz Into Darkness

11

Her trunk was recalled to his mind one day by the very act of his own sitting on it. It was no longer recognizable at sight for a trunk, it had a gaily printed slip cover over it to disguise it, and stood there over against the wall.

It was a Sunday, and though they did not go to church, they never failed, in common with all other good citizens, to dress up in their Sunday finest and take their Sunday morning promenade; to see and be seen, to bow and nod and perhaps exchange a few amiable words with this one and that of their acquaintances in passing. It was an established custom, the Sunday morning promenade, in all the cities of the land.

He was waiting for her to be ready, and he had sat down upon this nondescript surface without looking to see what it was, satisfied merely that it was level and firm enough to take him.

She was slowed, at the last moment, by difficulties.

“I wore this last week, remember? They’ll see it again.”

She discarded it.

“And this — I don’t know about this—” She curled her lip slightly. “I’m not very taken with it.”

She discarded it as well.

“That looks attractive,” he offered cheerfully, pointing at random.

She shrugged off his ignorance. “But this is a weekday dress, not a Sunday one.”

He wondered privately, and with a soundless little chuckle, how one told the first from the second, but refrained from asking her.

She sat down now, still further delaying their start. “I don’t know what I’ll do. I haven’t a thing fit to be seen in.” This, taken in conjunction with the fact that the room was already littered with dresses, struck him as so funny that he could no longer control himself, but burst out laughing, and as he did so, swung his arm down against the surface he was sitting on, in a clap of emphasis. He felt, through the covering, the unmistakable shape of a pear-shaped metal trunk lock. And at that moment, he first realized it was her trunk he was sitting upon. The one she had brought from St. Louis. She had never, it suddenly struck him as well, opened it since her arrival.

“What about this?” he asked. And stood up and stripped the cover off. The initialled “J.R.,” just below the lock in blood-red paint, stood out conspicuously. “Haven’t you anything in here? I should think you would, a trunk this size.” And meaning only to be helpful to her, pasted his hand against the top of it in indication.

She was suddenly looking, with an almost taut scrutiny, at one of the dresses, holding it upraised before her. As closely, as arrestedly, as if she were nearsighted or were seeking to find some microscopic flaw in its texture.

“Oh no,” she said. “Nothing. Only rags.”

“How is it I’ve never seen you open it? You never have, have you?”

She continued to peer at this thing in her hands. “No,” she said. “I never have.”

“I should imagine you would unpack. You intend to stay, don’t you?” He was trying to be humorous, nothing more.

She didn’t answer this time. She blinked her eyes, at the second of the two phrases, but it might have had nothing to do with that; it might simply have occurred simultaneously to it.

“Why not?” he persisted. “Why haven’t you?” But with no intent whatever, simply to have an answer.

This time she took note of the question. “I... I can’t,” she said, somewhat unsurely.

She seemed to intend no further explanation, at least unsolicited, so he asked her: “Why?”

She waited a moment. “It’s the... key. It’s... ah, missing. I haven’t got it. I lost it on the boat.”

She had come over to the trunk while she was speaking, and was rather hastily trying to rearrange the slip cover over it, almost as if nettled because it had been disarrayed. Though this might have been an illusion due simply to the nervous quickness of her hands.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he protested heartily, thinking merely he was doing her a service. “I’ll have a locksmith come in and make you a new one. It won’t take any time at all. Wait a minute, let me look at it—”

He drew the slip cover partly back again, while she almost seemed to be trying to hold it in place in opposition. Again the vivid “J.R.” peered forth, but only momentarily.

He thumbed the pear-shaped brass plaque. “That should be easy enough. It’s a fairly simple type of lock.”

The slip cover, in her hands, swept across it like a curtain a moment later, blotting out lock and initials alike.

“I’ll go out and fetch one in right now,” he offered, and started forthwith for the door. “He can take the impression, and have the job done by the time we return from our—”

“You can’t,” she called after him with unexpected harshness of voice, that might simply have been due to the fact of her having to raise it slightly to reach him.

“Why not?” he asked, and stopped where he was.

She let her breath out audibly. “It’s Sunday.”

He turned in the doorway and came slowly back again, frustrated. “That’s true,” he admitted. “I forgot.”

“I did too, for a moment,” she said. And again exhaled deeply. In a way that, though it was probably no more than an expression of annoyance at the delay, might almost have been mistaken for unutterable relief, so misleadingly like it did it sound.