Waltz Into Darkness

39

A sound at the door awoke Durand. It was a delicate sort of tapping, a coaxing pit-pat, as if with one fingernail.

As his eyes opened he found himself in a room he had difficulty recalling from the night before. The cooling silvery-green of low-burning night lights was no longer there. Ladders of fuming Gulf Coast sunlight came slanting through the slits of the blinds, and formed a pattern of stripes across the bed and across the floor. And above this, there was a reflected brightness, as if everything had been newly whitewashed; a gleaming transparency.

It was simply that it was day in a place that he had last seen when it was night.

He thought he was alone at first. He backed a hand to his drugged eyes, to keep out some of the overacute brilliancy. “Where am I?”

Then he saw her. Her cloverleaf mouth smiled back at him, indirectly, via the surface of the mirror she sat before. Her hand sought her bosom, and she let it linger there a moment, one finger pointing upward, one inward as if toward her heart. “With me,” she answered. “Where you belong.”

There was something fragilely charming, he thought, in the evanescent little gesture while it lasted. And he watched it wistfully and hated to see it end, the hand drop back as it had been. It had been so unstudied. With me; finger unconsciously to her heart.

The stuttering little tap came again. There was something coy about it that irritated him. He turned his head and frowned over that way. “Who’s that?” he asked sternly, but of her, not the door.

She shaped her mouth to a soundless symbol of laughter; then she stilled it further, though it hadn’t come at all, by spoking her fingers over it, fanwise. “A suitor, I’m afraid. The colonel. I know him by his tap.”

Durand, his face growing blacker by the minute, was at the bedside now, struggling into trousers with a sort of cavorting hop, to and fro.

The tapping had accosted them a third time.

He cut his thumb slashingly backhand toward the door, in pantomime to have her answer it temporizingly while he got ready.

“Yes?” she said sweetly.

“It’s Harry, my dear,” came through the door. “Good morning. Am I too early.”

“No, too late,” growled Durand surlily. “I’ll attend to ‘Harry, my dear’ in a moment!” he vowed to her in an undertone.

She was in stitches by now, head prone on the dressing table, hands clasped across the back of her neck, palpitating with smothered laughter.

“In a minute,” she said half-strangled.

“Don’t hurry yourself, my dear,” the cooing answer came back. “You know I’ll wait all morning for you, if necessary. To wait outside your door for you to come out is the pleasantest thing I know of. There is only one thing pleasanter, and that would be—”

The door sliced back and he found himself confronted by Durand, feet unshod, hair awry, and in nothing but trousers and undershirt.

To make it worse, his face had been bearing down close against the door, to make himself the better heard. He found his nose almost pressed into Durand’s coarse-spun barley-colored underwear, at about the height of Durand’s chest.

His head went up a notch at a time, like something worked on a pulley, until it was level with Durand’s own. And for each notch he had a strangulated exclamation, like a winded grunt. Followed by a convulsive swallowing. “Unh—? Anh—? Unh—?”

“Well, sir?” Durand rapped out.

Worth’s hand executed helpless curlycues, little corkscrew waves, trying to point behind Durand but unable to do so.

“You’re — in there? You’re — not dressed?”

“Will you kindly mind your business, sir?” Durand said sternly.

The colonel raised both arms now overhead, fists clenched, in some sort of approaching denunciation. Then they faltered, froze that way, finally crumbled. His eyes were suddenly fixed on Durand’s right shoulder. They dilated until they threatened to pop from his head.

Durand could feel her arm glide caressingly downward over his shoulder, and then her hand tipped up to fondle his chin, while she herself remained out of sight behind him. He looked down to where Worth was staring at it, and it was the one with the wedding band, their old wedding band, on it.

It rose, was stroking and petting Durand’s cheek now, letting the puffy gold circlet flash and wink conspicuously. It gave the slack of his cheek a fond little pinch, then spread the two fingers that had just executed it wide apart, in what might have been construed as a jaunty salute.

“I... I... I didn’t know!” Worth managed to gasp out asthmatically, as if with his last breath.

“You do now, sir!” Durand said severely. “And what brings you to my wife’s door, may I ask?”

The colonel was backing away along the passage now, brushing the wall now at this side, now at that, but incapable apparently of turning around once and for all and tearing his eyes off the hypnotic spectacle of Durand and the affectionate straying hand.

“I... I beg your pardon!” he succeeded in panting at last, from a safe distance.

“I beg yours!” Durand rejoined with grim inflexibility.

The colonel turned at last and fled, or rather wallowed drunkenly, away.

The detached hand suddenly went up in air, bent its fingers inward, and flipped them once or twice.

“Ta ta,” her voice called out gaily, “lovey mine!”