Waltz Into Darkness

50

Another hotel room, in another place. And yet the same. The hotel had a different name, that was all. The scene its windows looked out upon had a different name, that was all.

But they were the same two, in the same hotel room. The same two people, the same two runaways.

This, he realized, watching her broodingly, was what their life was going to be like from now on. Another hotel room, and then another, and still another. But always the same. Another town, and then another, and still another. Onward, and onward, and onward — to nowhere. Until some day they would come to their last hotel room, in their last town. And then—

A short life and an exciting one, she had toasted that night back in Mobile. She had it wrong. A short life and a dull one, she should have said. No pattern of security can ever be so wearyingly repetitious as the pattern of the refugee without a refuge. No monotony of law-abidance can ever compare to the monotony of crime. He had found that out by now.

She was sitting there in a square of orange-gold sunlight by the window, one leg crossed atop the other, head bent intently to her task. Which was that of tapering her nails with an emery board. Her arms were bare to the shoulders, and the numerous all-white garments she wore were not meant to be seen by other eyes than his. The moulded cuirass of the corset was visible in its entirety, from underarms to well below the hips. And over this only the thinnest film of cambric, an in-between garment, neither under- nor over-, known as the “corset-cover” (he had learned), fell short at the unwonted height of her lower calf.

Her hair was unbound and fell loose, clothing her back in rippling finespun tawny-gold, but at the same time giving the top of her head an oddly flat aspect, ordinarily seen only on young schoolgirls. The bangs alone remained in evidence, of the customary coiffure.

One of the spikelike cigars was burning untouched on the dresser edge near her.

She felt his long-maintained, speculative look, and raised her eyes, and gave him that compressed, heart-shaped smile that was the only design her lips could fall into when expressing a smile.

“Cheer up, Lou,” she said. “Cheer up, lovey.”

She hitched her head pertly to indicate the scene beyond the sun-flooded window. “I like it here. It’s pretty here. And they dress up to kill. I’m glad we came.”

“Don’t sit so close to the window. You can be seen.”

She gave him an incredulous look. “Why, no one knows us here.”

“I don’t mean that. You’re in your underthings.”

“Oh,” she said. Then, as if still not wholly able to comprehend his punctiliousness on this point, “But they can only see my back. Not one can see my face, tell whose back it is.” She moved her chair a trifle, condescendingly, with a smile as if she were doing it simply to please him.

She went back to her nails for a complacent stroke or two.

“Don’t you — think of it sometimes?” he couldn’t resist blurting out. “Doesn’t it weigh upon you?”

“What?” she said blankly, again looking up. “Oh — that, back there.”

“That’s what I mean,” he said. “If I could only forget it, as you do.”

“I don’t forget it. It’s just that I don’t brood about it.”

“But the very act of remembering at all, isn’t that the same as brooding?”

“No,” she said, flipping her hands outward in surprise. “Let me show you.” She tapped the rim of her teeth, as if in search of an illustration. “Say I buy a new hat. Well, once it’s bought, it’s bought, and there’s no more to it. I remember I bought the hat; it’s not that I forget I’ve bought it. But I don’t necessarily brood about it, dwell on it, every minute of the live-long day.” She pounded one clenched hand into the hollow of the other. “I don’t keep saying over and over: ‘I’ve bought a hat,’ ‘I’ve bought a hat,’ ‘I’ve bought a hat.’ Do you see?”

He was looking at her with a stunned expression. “You — you compare what happened that day at Mobile with buying a new hat?” he stammered.

She laughed. “No. Now you’re twisting it around; making me out worse than I am. I know it’s not punishable to buy a new hat, and the other thing is. I know you don’t have to be afraid of anyone finding out you’ve bought a new hat, and you do of anyone finding out you’ve done the other thing. But that was just given for an example. You can remember a thing perfectly well, but you don’t have to worry about it all the time, let it darken your life. That’s all I mean.”

But he was speechless; he still couldn’t get past that horrendous illustration of hers.

She rose and moved over toward him slowly; stood at last, and looked down, and let her hand come to rest on his shoulder, with almost a patronizing air. Certainly not one of overweening admiration.

“Do you want to know what the trouble is, Lou? I’ll tell you. The difference between you and me is not that I’m any less afraid than you of its being found out; I’m just as afraid. It’s that you let your conscience bully you about it, and I don’t. You make it a matter of good or bad, wrong or right; you know, like children’s Sunday school lessons: going to heaven or going to hell. With me it’s just something that happened, and there’s no more to be said. You keep wishing you could go back and have it over again, so that you wouldn’t have done it. That’s where the trouble comes in. It’s that your own conscience is nagging you. That’s what’s ailing you.”

She saw that she’d shocked him. She shrugged a little, and tamed away. She took up a muslin petticoat that lay in wait folded over the side of the bed, flung it out so that its folds opened circularly, stepped into it, and fastened it about her waist. The grotesque shortness of her attire disappeared, and her extremities were once more normally covered to the floor.

“Take my advice, and learn to look at it my way, Lou,” she went on. “You’ll find it a lot simpler. It’s not something good, and it’s not something bad; it’s—” here she made him the concession of dropping her voice a trifle, “—just something you have to be careful about, that’s all.”

She took up a second petticoat, this one of taffeta bordered with lace, and donned that over the first.

He was appalled at the slow, frightening discovery he was in the process of making: which was that she had no moral sense at all. She was, in a very actual meaning of the word, a complete savage.

“Shall we go for a little stroll?” she suggested. “It’s an ideal day for it.”

He nodded, lips parted, unable to articulate.

She was now turning this way and that before the glass, holding up a succession of outer costumes at shoulder level to judge of their desirability. “Which shall I wear? The blue? The fawn? Or this plaid?” She made a little pouting grimace. “I’ve worn them all two or three times now apiece. People will begin to know them. Lou, fetch out that money box of yours before we go, that’s a good boy. I really think it’s time you were buying me a new dress.”

No moral sense at all.