Waltz Into Darkness

37

He went from there to his own room, unlocked his traveling bag, and took out the pistol. The same pistol that one night in New Orleans he’d told Aunt Sarah he would kill her with. And now, it seemed, the time was near, was very near. He cracked it open, though he knew already it was fully charged; and found that it was. Then he sheathed it in the inside pocket of his coat, which was deep and took it up to the turn of the butt and held it securely.

He looked down and noted the heliotrope scarf dangling from his side pocket, and in a sudden access of hate he ripped it out and flung it on the floor. Then he ground his heel into the middle of it, and kicked it away from him, like something unclean, unfit to touch. His face was putrefied with the hate that reeks from an unburied love.

He tweaked out the gaslight, and the greenish-yellow cast of the room turned to moonlight tarnished with lampblack. He stood there in it for a moment, half-man, half-shadow, as if gathering purpose. Then he moved, the half of him that was man became shadow, the half that was shadow became man, as the window beams rippled at his passage. There was a flicker of citron from the lighted hall outside, as he opened the door, closed it after him.

He went up the stairs to the second floor without meeting anybody, and the hubbub of voices from the several public parlors on the main floor grew fainter the farther he ascended. Until at last there was silence. He quitted the staircase at the second, and followed the corridor along which the page had led him before, with its flower-scrolled red carpeting and walnut-dark doors. Here for the first time he nearly met mischance. A lady coming out of her room caught him midway along it, too far advanced to turn back. Her eyes rested on him for an instant only, then she passed him with discreetly downcast gaze, as befitted their distinction of gender, and the rustle of her multi-layered skirts sighed its way along the passage. He gave her time to turn and pass from sight at the far end, stopping for a moment opposite a door that was not his destination, as if about to go in there. Then swiftly going on and making for the door he had in mind, he cast a quick precautionary look about him, seized the knob, gave it a rapid turn, and was in. He closed it after him.

There were the same low night lights burning as before, and she wasn’t back yet. Her presence was in the air, he thought, in faded sachet and in the warm, quilted voluptuousness the closed-for-hours room breathed. He couldn’t have come any nearer to her than this; only her person itself was absent. Her aura was in here with him, and seeming to twine ghost-arms about his neck from behind. He squared his shoulders, as if to free them, and twisted his neck within his collar.

He stood at the window for a while, safely slantwise out of sight, staring ugly-faced at the moonlight, his face pitted like a smallpox victim’s by the pores of the lacework curtain. Below him there was the sloping white shed of the veranda roof, like a tilted snowbank. Beyond that, the smooth black lawns of the hotel grounds. And off in the distance, coruscating like a swarm of fireflies, the waters of the inlet. Overhead the moon was round and hard as a medicinal lozenge. And, to him, as unpalatable.

Turning away abruptly at last, he retired deeper into the room, and selecting a chair at random, sank into it to wait. Shadow, the way he happened to be sitting, covered the upper part of his face, running across it in an even line, like a mask. A mask inscrutable and grim and without compunction.

He waited from then on without a move, and the night seemed to wait with him, like an abetting conspirator eager to see ill done.

Once toward the end he took out his watch and looked at it, dipping its face out into the moonlight. Nearly a quarter after twelve. He had been in here three full hours. They’d stayed the evening out without him at the supper pavilion. He clapped the watch closed, and it resounded bombastically there in the stillness.

Suddenly, as if in derisive answer, he heard her laugh, somewhere far in the distance. Perhaps coming up in the lift. He would have known it for hers even if he hadn’t seen her in the alcove at the restaurant earlier tonight. He would, he felt sure, have known it for hers even if he hadn’t known she was here in Biloxi at all. The heart remembers.