Waltz Into Darkness

12

The rite of the bath was in progress, or at least in preparation, somewhere in the background. He could tell by the sounds reaching him, though he was removed from any actual view of what was going on, being two rooms away, in the sitting room attached to their bedroom, engrossed in his newspaper. He could hear buckets of hot water, brought up in relays from the top of the kitchen stove downstairs by Aunt Sarah, being emptied into the tub with a hollow drumlike sound. Then a great stirring-up, so that it would blend properly with the cold water allowed to flow into it in its natural state from the tap. Then the testing, which was done with one carefully pointed foot, and usually followed by abrupt withdrawals and squeals of “Too cold!” or “Too hot!” as well as loud contradictions on the part of the assistant, Aunt Sarah: “No it ain’t! Don’t be such a baby! Leave it in a minute, how you going to tell, you snatch it back like that? Your husban’s sitting right out there; ain’t you ashamed to have him know what a scairdy-cat you is?”

“Well, he doesn’t have to get in it, I do,” came the plaintive answer.

Over and above this watery commotion, and cued by its semimusical tone, the canary, Dicky Bird, was singing jauntily, from the room midway between, the bedroom.

Aunt Sarah passed through the room where he sat, an empty water-bucket in each hand.

“She sure a pretty little thing,” she commented. “White as milk and soft as honey. Got a fo’m like — unh-umh!”

His face suddenly suffused with color. It took quite some time for the heightened tide to descend again. He pretended the remark had not been addressed to himself, took no note of it.

She went down the stairs.

The canary’s bravura efforts rose to a triumphant, sustained, almost earsplitting trill, then suddenly broke off short. That had been, even he had to admit to himself, quite a considerable amount of noise for so small a bird to emit, just then.

A strange, almost complete silence had succeeded it.

Then the rolling, somehow-undulating sound usually produced by total immersion in a body of water.

After that only an occasional watery ripple.

Aunt Sarah returned, stopped en route to shake out and inspect a fleecy towel, also warmed by courtesy of the kitchen stove, that she was taking in with her. She went on into the bedroom.

“Hullo there,” he heard her say, from in there. “How my bird? How my yallo baby?” Suddenly her voice deepened to strident urgency. “Mr. Lou! Mr. Lou!”

He went in running.

“He dead.”

“He can’t be. He was singing only a minute ago.”

“He dead, I tell you! Look here, see for yourself—” She had removed him from the cage, was holding him pillowed on the palm of her hand.

“Maybe he needs water and seed again, like that last—” But the two receptacles were filled; Aunt Sarah had made that her responsibility ever since then.

“It ain’t that.”

She gave the edge of her hand a slight dip.

Something dropped over the edge of it, hung there suspended, while the body of the bird remained in position.

“His neck’s done been broken.”

“Maybe he fell off the perch—” Durand tried to suggest inanely, for lack of any other explanation that came to mind.

She scowled at him belligerently.

“They don’t fall! What they got wings for?”

He repeated: “But he was singing only a few minutes ago—”

“What he was a few minutes ago and what he is now is two different things!”

“—and no one’s been in here. No one but you and Miss Julia—”

In the silence, and incredibly, Julia could be heard in the adjoining bathroom, lightly whistling a bar or two to herself.

Then, as though belatedly realizing how unladylike she was guilty of being, she checked herself, and the water gave a playful little splash for finale.