Waltz Into Darkness

52

Jardine lived on Esplanade Avenue. Durand remembered the house well. He’d had dinner with them there on many a Sunday night during his bachelor days, and been honorary “uncle” to Jardine’s little girl Marie.

The house had not changed. It was not houses that changed, he reflected ruefully, it was men. It was still honest, amiable, open of countenance. He might have been standing before it again back two or three years ago, with a little bag of bonbons in his hand for Marie. But he wasn’t.

He stood there after he’d knocked, and kept holding his handkerchief to his nose, as if he were suffering from a bad head cold. It was to hide as much of his features as possible, however. And even while doing so, it occurred to him how futile such precautions were. Anyone who knew him by sight at all, would know him as well from the back, without seeing his face.

Before the door had opened he had already given up the attempt, lowered and pocketed the handkerchief.

They still had the same colored woman he remembered, Nelly, to open their door.

At sight of him her face lit up and her palms backed to shoulders. “Well, look it who’s here! Well, I declare! Why, Mr. Lou! You sure a stranger!”

He smiled sheepishly, glanced uneasily down the street.

“Is Mr. Allan back from his office yet?”

“Why, no sir. But come in anyway. He’ll be along right smart. Miss Gusta, she’s home. And young Miss Marie. They’ll both be mighty pleased to see you, I know.”

He went in past the threshold, then faltered there. “Nelly, don’t — don’t tell them I’m calling — just yet; I have to see Mr. Allan on business first. Just let me wait down here somewhere until he comes home, without saying anything—” He caught himself winding the brim of his hat around in his hands, like a suppliant, and quickly stopped it.

Nelly’s face dropped reproachfully.

“You don’t want me to tell Miss Gusta you drap in?”

“Not just yet. I have to see Mr. Allan alone first.”

“Well, come in the parlor, sir, and make yourself comf’table. I light the lamp.” Her effusiveness was gone. She was a little cooler now. “Take your hat?”

“No, thanks; I’ll keep it.”

“You wants anything while you waiting, you just ring for me, Mr. Lou.”

“I’ll be all right.”

She gave him a backward glance from the doorway, then she went out.

He was on thin ice, he realized. Any one of them, even Jardine himself, might have heard about it, could denounce his presence here, effect his immediate arrest. He was at their mercy; he was putting his trust where he had no certainty it could be put. Friendship? Yes, for an ordinary man, of their own kind. But friendship for a man branded a murderer? Those were two different matters, not the same thing at all.

He could hear a well-remembered woman’s voice call down ringingly from somewhere above-stairs: “Who was that, Nelly?”

And at the momentary hesitation on Nelly’s part, he involuntarily tightened his grip on his still nervously circling hat brim, held it arrested a moment.

“Gentleman to see Mr. Jardine on business.”

“Did he wait?”

Nelly adroitly got around the problem of telling an outright lie. “I told him he not in yet.”

The upstairs voice, still audible but no longer in as high a key, as if now pitched to someone else on the same floor with her, was heard to remark: “How strange to come here instead of to your papa’s office.” After which it withdrew, and there was no further colloquy.

Durand sat there in the glowing effulgence of the parlor, staring as if spellbound at a small handpainted periwinkle on the surface of the lamp globe, which seemed to hang suspended between himself and the white sheen that came translucently through all around it.

This is home, he thought. Nothing ever happens here, nothing bad. You come home to it with impunity, you go out again with immunity, you turn your face openly toward the world. And murder — human death brought about by the act of human hands — that is something in the Bible, in the history books, something done by the captains and the kings of old. In the passages that you perhaps skip over, when you are reading aloud to your children. Cortez and the Borgias and the Medici; poinards and poisons, long ago and faraway. But not in the full light of nineteenth-century day, in your own personal life.

This should be my home, he thought. I mean, my home should be like this man’s. Why was I robbed of this? What did I do that was wrong?

Again the woman’s voice came, upstairs, calling with pleasant firmness from one room to the next: “Marie. Your hair, dear, and your hands. It’s getting near the time for Papa to come home.”

And a younger, higher voice in answer: “Yes, Mamma. Shall I wear a ribbon in my hair tonight? Papa likes me to.”

And below, sensuously drifting from the back somewhere, intermittent whiffs of rice and greens and savory frying fat.

This was all I wanted, he thought. Why have I lost it? Why was it taken from me? All other men have it. How did I offend? Who did I offend?

Jardine’s key clicked in the door, and he swung around alertly in his chair, to face the open doorway, to be ready when he should appear beyond it, on his way through.

There was the tap of his stick going down to rest, and a little drumlike thump as his hat found a prong on the rack.

Then he appeared, facing stairward toward his family, unbuttoning the thigh-length mustard-colored coat he wore.

“Allan,” Durand said in a circumspect voice, “I have to talk to you. Can you give me a few minutes? I mean before — before the family?”

Jardine turned abruptly, and saw him there for the first time. He came striding in, outstretched arm first, to shake his hand, but his face had already been sobered, made anxious, by Durand’s opening remark.

“What are you doing here like this? When did you come back? Does Auguste know you’re here? Why do they leave you sitting alone like this?”

“I asked Nelly not to say anything. I must talk to you alone first.”

Jardine pulled a velour tape ending in a thin brass ring. Then went back to the open doorway, looked out, and when she had come in answer to the summons, said with a bruffness that betokened his uneasiness: “Hold supper a few minutes, Nelly.”

“Yes sir. Only I hope you two gentlemen’ll bear in mind it don’t git no tastier with holding.”

Jardine spread out his arms and drew together the two sliding doors that sealed off the parlor. Then he came back and stood looking at Durand questioningly.

“Look, Allan, I don’t know how to begin—”

Jardine shook his head, as if in dissatisfaction at the condition he found him in. “Would a drink help, Lou?”

“Yes, I think it would.”

Jardine poured them, and they each drank.

Again he stood there, looking down at him in the chair.

“There’s something wrong, Lou.”

“Very much so.”

“Where did you go? Where’ve you been all this time? Not a word to me. I haven’t known whether you’re dead or alive—”

Durand stemmed the flow of questions with a half-hearted lift of his hand.

“I’m with her again,” he said after a moment. “I can’t come back to New Orleans. Don’t ask me why. That isn’t what I came here about.” Then he added, “Haven’t you seen anything in the papers, that would explain it to you?”

“No,” Jardine said, mystified. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Hasn’t he, Durand wondered. Doesn’t he really know? Is he telling the truth? Or is he too delicate, too considerate, to tell me—

Jardine consulted his glass, drained the last drop, said: “I don’t want to know anything you don’t want to tell me, Lou. Each man’s life is his own.”

Downs’s was his own too, passed through Durand’s mind; until I—

“Well, then we’ll come to the point that brings me here,” he said, with a briskness he was far from feeling. He turned around in the chair to face him once more. “Allan, how much would the business bring as it stands today? I mean, what would be a fair price for it, if someone were to come along and—”

Jardine’s face paled. “You’re thinking of selling, Lou?”

“I’m thinking of selling, Allan, yes. To you, if you’ll buy out my share from me. Will you? Can you?”

Jardine seemed incapable of answering immediately. He started walking slowly back and forth, on a short straight course beside the chair Durand sat in. He clasped his arms. Then presently he locked hands over his two rear pockets, and let the skirt of his coat flounce down over them.

“You may as well know this now, before we go any further,” Durand added. “I can’t sell to anyone else but you. I can’t put in an appearance to do so. I can’t approach anyone else. The lawyer will have to come here to your house. The whole thing will have to be done quietly.”

“At least wait a day or two,” Jardine urged. “Think it over—”

“I haven’t a day or two in which to wait!” Durand slowly wagged his head from side to side in exasperated impatience. “Can’t you understand? Must I tell you openly?”

In a moment more, he cautioned himself, it will be too late; once I have told him, I will be completely at his mercy. What I am asking him to buy from me, would go to him by default anyway; all he would have to do is step over to that bellpull over there—

But he went ahead and told him anyway, with scarcely the pause required by the warning thought to deliver its admonition.

“I’m a fugitive, Allan. I’m outside the law. I’ve lost all my rights of citizenship.”

Jardine stopped his pacing, stunned. “Great God!” he breathed slowly.

Durand slapped at his own thigh, with a sort of angry despair. “It’s got to be right tonight. Right now. It can’t wait. I can’t. I’m taking a risk even staying in the town that long—”

Jardine bent toward him, took him by the shoulders, gripped hard. “You’re throwing away your whole future, your whole life’s work — I can’t let you—”

“I have no future, Allan. Not a very long one. And my life’s work, I’m afraid, is behind me, anyway, whether I sell or not.”

He let his wrists dangle limp, down between his legs, in a cowed attitude. “What are we going to do, Allan?” he murmured abjectly. “Are you going to help me?”

There was a tapping at the door. Then a childish voice: “Papa. Mamma wants to know if you’re going to be much longer. The duck’s getting awfully dry. Nelly can’t do a thing with it.”

“Soon, dear, soon,” Jardine called over his shoulder.

“Go in to your family,” Durand urged. “I’m spoiling your supper. I’ll sit in here and wait.”

“I couldn’t eat with this on my mind,” Jardine said. He bent to him once more, as if in renewed effort to extract the confidence from him that he sought. “Look, Lou. We’ve known each other since you were twenty-three and I was twenty-eight. Since we were clerks together in the shipping department of old man Morel, perched on adjoining stools, slaving away. We got our promotions together. When he wanted to promote you, you spoke for me. When he wanted to promote me, I spoke for you. Finally, when we were ready, we pooled our resources and entered into business together. Our own import house. On a shoestring at first, even with the help of the money Auguste had brought to me in marriage. And you remember those early days.”

“I remember, Allan.”

“But we didn’t care. We said we’d rather work for ourselves, and fail, than work for another man, and prosper. And we worked for ourselves — and prospered. But there are things in this business of ours, today, that cannot be taken out again. There is sweat, and worry, and the high hopes of two young fellows, and the prime years of their lives. Now you come to me and want to buy these things from me, want me to sell them to you, as if they were sackfuls of our green beans from Colombia— How can I, even if I wanted to? How can I set a price?”

“You can tell what the business is worth, in cold cash, that is on our books. And give me half, in exchange for a quit-claim, a deed of sale, whatever the necessary paper is. Forget I am Durand. I am just anybody, I am a stranger who happens to have a fifty per cent interest. Give its approximate value back to me in money, that is all I ask you.” He gestured violently. “Don’t you see, Allan? I can no longer participate in the business, I can no longer play any part in it. I can’t be here to do so, I can’t stay here.”

“But why? There isn’t anything you can have done—”

“There is. There’s one thing.”

Jardine was waiting, looking at him fixedly.

“Once I tell you, Allan, I’m at your mercy. You needn’t give me a cent, and my half of the business goes to you, eventually, anyway — by default.”

But he was at his mercy anyway, he realized ruefully, whether he told him or not.

Jardine bridled a little, straightened up. “Lou, I don’t take that kindly. We’re friends—”

“Friendship stops short at what I’m about to tell you. There are no friends beyond a certain point. The law even forbids it, punishes it.”

The tapping came again. “Mamma’s getting put out. She says she’s going to sit down without you, Papa. It was a special duck—”

And on that homespun domestic note, Durand blurted out, as if already past the point at which he could any longer stop himself:

“Allan, I’ve done murder. I can’t stay here past tonight. I have to have money.”

And dropped his head into his upturned, sheltering hands, as though the hangman’s noose had already snapped his neck.

“Papa?” came questioningly through the door.

“Wait, child, wait,” Jardine said sickly, his face white as a sheet.

There was a ghastly silence.

“I knew it would come to this,” Jardine said at last, dropping his voice. “She was bad for you from the first. Auguste sensed it on the very day of your marriage, she told me so herself; women are quicker that way—”

He was pouring himself a drink, as though it were his crime. “You met her— You found her— You lost your head—” He brought one to Durand. “But you’re not to be blamed. Any man— Let me find you a good lawyer, Lou. There isn’t a court in the state—”

Durand looked up at him and gave a pathetic smile.

“You don’t understand, Allan. It isn’t — she. It’s the very man I engaged to find her and arrest her. He did find her, and to save her I—”

Jardine, doubly horrified now, for at least in his earlier concern there had been, noticeably, a glint of vengeful satisfaction, recoiled a step.

“I’m with her again,” Durand admitted. And in an almost inaudible whisper, as if he were telling it to his conscience and not to the other man in the room with him, “I love her more than my life itself.”

“Papa,” accosted them with frightening proximity, in a piping treble, “Mamma said I shouldn’t leave this door until you come out of there!” The doorknob twisted, then unwound.

Jardine stood for a long moment, looking not so much at his friend as at some scene he alone could see.

His arm reached out slowly at last and fell heavily, dejectedly, but with unspoken loyalty, upon Durand’s shoulder.

“I’ll see that you get your half of the business’ assets, Lou,” he said. “And now — we mustn’t keep Auguste waiting any longer. Keep a stiff upper lip. Come in and have supper with us.”

Durand rose and crushed Jardine’s hand almost shatteringly for a moment, between both of his. Then, as if ashamed of this involuntary display of emotion, hastily released it again.

Jardine opened the door, bent down to kiss someone who remained unseen, through the guarded opening. “Run in, dear. We’re coming.”

Durand braced himself for the ordeal to come, straightened his shoulders, jerked at the wings of his coat, adjusted his collar. Then he moved after his host.

“You won’t tell them, Allan?”

Jardine drew the door back and stood aside to let him go through first. “There are certain things a man doesn’t take in to his supper-table with him, Lou.” And he slung his arm about his friend’s shoulder and walked beside him, loyally beside him, in to where his family waited.