Waltz Into Darkness

33

The following evening they met again, he and the other man. The other was already there when Durand entered from the street, so Durand joined him without ceremony, since the etiquette of the bar prescribed that he owed the other a drink, and to have shunned him — as he would have preferred to do — might have seemed on his part an attempt to avoid the obligation.

“Still alone, I see,” he greeted Durand.

“Still,” Durand said cryptically.

“Well, man, you’re slow,” he observed critically. “What’s hindering you? I should think by this time you’d have any number of—” He didn’t complete the phrase, but allowed a soggy wink to do so for him.

Durand smiled wanly and gave their order.

They saluted, they swallowed.

“By the way, let me introduce myself,” the other said heartily. “I’m Colonel Harry Worth, late of the Army.” The way he said it showed which army he meant; or rather that there was only one to be meant.

“I’m Louis Durand,” Durand said.

They gripped hands, at the other’s initiative.

“Where you from, Durand?”

“New Orleans.”

“Oh,” nodded the colonel approvingly. “Good place. I’ve been there some.”

Durand didn’t ask where he was from. He didn’t, his own train of thoughts phrased it to himself, give a damn.

They talked of this and that. Of business conditions (together). Of a little girl in Natchez (the colonel). Of the current administration (together, and with bitterness, as if it were some sort of foreign yoke). Of a little girl in Louisville (the colonel). Of recipes of drinks (together). Of horses, and their breeding and their racing (together). Of a “yellow” girl in Memphis (the colonel, with a resounding slap against his own thigh).

Then just as Worth was about to reorder, again the page came in, accosted him, said that word into his ear.

“Time’s up,” he said to Durand. He offered him his hand. “A pleasure, Mr. Randall. Be looking forward to the next time.”

“Durand,” Durand said.

The colonel recoiled with dramatic exaggeration, apologized profusely. “That’s right; forgive me. There I go again. Got the worst-all head for names.”

“No harm,” said Durand indifferently. He had an idea the mistake would continue to repeat itself for as long as their acquaintanceship lasted; a name that is not got right the second time, is not likely to be got right the fourth or the tenth time either. But it mattered to him not the slightest whether this man miscalled him or not, for the man himself mattered even less.

Worth renewed their handclasp, this time under the authentic auspices. Then as he turned to go, he reached downward to the counter, popped a clove into his mouth.

“That’s just in case,” he said roguishly.

He left rearward, into the hotel. Durand, was standing near the outside of the cafe, toward the street. Several minutes later, turning his head disinterestedly, he was just in time to catch the colonel’s passage across the thick, soapy greenish plate glass that fronted the place and bulged convexly somewhat like a bay window.

The thickness of the medium they passed through blurred his outlines somewhat, but Durand could tell it was he. On the far side of him three detached excrescences, over and above those pertaining to his own person, were all that revealed he was escorting a woman. At the height of his shoulder blades the tip of a glycerined feather projected, from a hidden woman’s bonnet on the outside, as though a quill or bright-tipped dart were sticking into him.

Then at the small of his back, and extending far beyond his own modest contours, a bustle fluctuated both voluptuously and yet somehow genteelly, ballooning along as its hidden wearer walked at his side. And lastly, down at his heels, as though one of the colonel’s socks had loosened and were dragging, a small triangular wedge of skirt hem, an evening train, fluttered along the ground, switching erratically from side to side as it went.

But Durand didn’t even allow his tepid glance to linger, to follow them long enough until they had drawn away into perspective sufficient to separate into two persons, instead of the one composite one, superimposed, they now formed.

Again he gave that wearied smile as on the night before. This time his brows went up, much as to say: Each man to his taste.