Waltz Into Darkness

41

Mobile, then.

They went to the finest hotel there, and like the bride and groom they were in everything but count of time, they took its finest suite, its bridal suite. Chamber and sitting room, height of luxury, lace curtains over the windows, maroon drapes, Turkish carpeting thick on the floors, and even that seldom-met-with innovation, a private bath of their own that no one else had access to, complete with claw-legged tub enamelled in light green.

Bellhops danced attendance on them from morning to night, and all eyes were on them every time they came and went through the public rooms below. The petite blonde, always so dainty, so exquisitely dressed, with the tall dark man beside her, eyes for no one else. “That romantic pair from—” Nobody knew just where, but everybody knew who was meant.

More than one sigh of benevolent regret swept after them.

“I declare, it makes me feel a little younger just to look at them.”

“It makes me feel a little sad. Because we all know that it cain’t last. They’re bound to lose it ’fore long.”

“But they’ve had it.”

“Yes, they’ve had it.”

Every sprightly supper resort in town knew them, every gay and brightly lighted gathering place, every theatre, public ball, entertainment, minstrelsy. Every time the violins played, somewhere, anywhere, she was in his arms there, turning in the endless, fevered spirals of the waltz. Every time the moon was full, she was in his arms there, somewhere, in a halted carriage, heads close together, sweetness of magnolia all around, gazing up at it with dreamy, wondering eyes.

But they were right, the musers and the sighers and the cast-asides in the hotel lobby. It lasts such a short time. It comes but once, and goes, and then it never comes again. Even to the upright, to the blessed, it never comes again. And how much less likely, to the hunted and the doomed.

But this was their moment of it now, this was their time for it, their share: Durand and his Julia. (Julia, for love’s first thought is its lasting one, love’s first name for itself, is its true one.) The sunburst of their happiness. The brief blaze of their noon.

Mobile, then, in the flood tide of their romance; and all was rapture, all was love.