Waltz Into Darkness

30

The death of a man is a sad enough thing to watch, but he goes by himself, taking nothing else with him. The death of a house is a sadder thing by far to watch. For so much more goes with it.

On that last day, Durand moved slowly from room to room of the St. Louis Street house. It was already dying before his very eyes; the furniture dismantled, rugs stripped from its floor boards, curtains from its windows, closet doors left gapingly ajar with nothing behind them any more. Its skeleton was peering through. The skeleton that stays on after death, just as in a man’s case.

And yet, he realized, he was not so much leaving this place as leaving a part of himself behind in a common grave with it. A part that he could never regain, never recall. He could never hope again as he’d once hoped here. There was nothing to hope for. He could never be as young again as he’d once been here, even though it was a youngness late in coming, at thirty-seven; late in coming and swift in going, just a few brief weeks. He could never love again — not only not as he’d once loved here, but to any degree at all. And that is a form of death in itself. His broken dreams were lying all around; he could almost hear them crunch, like spilled sugar, each time he moved his foot.

He was standing in the doorway of what had been their bedroom, looking across at the wallpaper. The wallpaper that had come from New York — “pink, but not too bright a pink, with small blue flowers, like forget-me-nots” — put up for a bride to see, a bride who had never lived to see it, nor lived even to be a bride.

He closed the door. For no particular reason, for there was nothing to be kept in there any longer. Perhaps the more quickly to shut the room from sight.

And as it closed, a voice seemed to speak through it for a moment, with sudden lifelike clarity in his ears:

“Who is it knocks?... Tell him he may.”

Then was gone, stilled forever.

He went slowly down the stairs, his knees bending reluctantly over each step, as if they were rusted.

The front door was standing open, and there was a mule and two-wheeled cart out before it, piled high with the effluvia he had donated to Aunt Sarah. She went hurrying past from the back just then, a dented-in gilt birdcage swinging from one hand, a bulky mantel clock hugged in her other. Then, seeing him, and still incredulous of his largesse, she stopped short to ask for additional assurance.

“This too? This yere clock?”

“I told you, everything,” he answered impatiently. “Everything but the heavy pieces with four legs. Take it all! Get it out of my sight!”

“I’m sure going to have the grandest cabin in Shrevepo’t when I gets back home there.”

He looked at her grimly for a moment, but his grimness was not for her.

“That band’s not playing today, I notice,” he blurted out accusingly.

She understood the reference, remembered it with surprising immediacy.

“Hush, Mr. Lou. Anyone can make a mistake. That was the devil’s music.”

She went on out to the cart, where a gangling youth, a nephew by remote attribute, loitered in charge of the booty.

“Got everything you want now?” Durand called out after her. “Then I’ll lock up.”

“Yes sir! Yes sir! Couldn’t ask for no more.” And, apparently, secretly a little dubious, to the end, that Durand might yet change his mind and retract, added in a hasty aside: “Come on, boy! Get this mule started up. What you lingering for?” She clambered up beside him and the cart waddled off. “God bless you, Mr. Lou! God keep you safe!”

“It’s a little late for that,” thought Durand morosely.

He turned back to the hall for a moment, to retrieve his own hat from the pronged, high-backed rack where he had slung it. And as he detached it, something fell out sideward to the floor from behind it with a little clap. Something that must have been thrust out of sight behind there long ago, and forgotten.

He picked up the slender little stick, and withdrew it, and a little swath of bunched heliotrope came with it at the other end. Limp, bedraggled, but still giving a momentary splash of color to the denuded hall.

Her parasol.

He took it by both ends, and arched his knee to it, and splintered it explosively, not once but again and again, with an inordinate violence that its fragility didn’t warrant. Then flung the wisps and splinters away from him with full arm’s strength, as far as they would go.

“Get to hell, after your owner,” he mumbled savagely. “She’s waiting for you to shade her there!”

And slammed the door.

The house was dead. Love was dead. The story was through.