Waltz Into Darkness

3

The river was empty, the sky was clear. Both were mirrored in his anxious, waiting eyes. Then a little twirl of smudge appeared, no bigger than if stroked by a man-sized finger against the God-sized sky. It came from where there seemed to be no river, only an embankment; it seemed to hover over dry land, for it was around a turn the river made, before straightening to flow toward New Orleans and the pier. And those assembled on it.

He stood there waiting, others like himself about him. Some so close their elbows all but grazed him. Strangers, men he did not know, had never seen before, would never see again, drawn together for a moment by the arrival of a boat.

He had picked for his standing place a pilehead that protruded above the pier-deck; that was his marker, he stood close beside that, and wouldn’t let others preempt it from him, knowing it would play its part in securing the craft. For a while he stood with one leg raised, foot planted squarely upon it. Then he leaned bodily forward over it in anticipation, both hands flattened on it. At one time, briefly, he even sat upon it, but got up again fairly soon, as if with some idea that by remaining on his feet he would hasten the vessel’s approach.

The smoke had climbed now, was high in the sky, like dingy black ostrich plumes massed together and struggling to escape from one another. Under its profusion a black that was solid substance, a slender cone, began to rise; a smokestack. Then a second.

“There she is,” a roustabout shouted, and the needless, overdue declaration was immediately taken up and repeated by two or three of those about him.

“Yes sir, there she is,” they echoed two or three times after him. “There she is, all right.”

“There she is,” Durand’s heart told him softly. But it meant a different she.

The smokestack, like a blunted knife slicing through the earth, cleared the embankment and came out upon the open water bed. A tawny superstructure, that seemed to be indented with a myriad tiny niches in two long even rows, was beneath it, and beneath that, only a thin line at this distance, was the ungainly black hull. The paddles were going, slats turning over as they reached the top of the wheel and fell, shaking off spray into the turgid brown water below that they kept beating upon.

She made the turn and grew larger, prow forward. She was life-sized now, coursing down on the pier as if she meant to smash it asunder. A shrill falsetto wail, infinitely mournful, like the cry of a lost soul in torment, knifed from her, and a plume of white circled the smokestack and vanished to the rear. The City of New Orleans, out of St. Louis three days before, was back home again at its namesake-port, its mother-haven.

The sidewheels stopped, and it began to glide, like a paper boat, like a ghost over the water. It turned broadside to the pier, and ran along beside it, its speed seeming swifter now, that it was lengthwise, than it had been before, when it was coming head-on, though the reverse was the truth.

The notched indentations went by like a picket fence, then slower, slower; then stopped at last, then even reversed a little and seemed to lose ground. The water, caught between the hull and pier, went crazy with torment; squirmed and slashed and choked, trying to find its way out. Thinned at last to a crevice-like canal.

No more river, no more sky, nothing but towering superstructure blotting them both out. Someone idling against the upper deck rail waved desultorily. Not to Durand, for it was a man. Not to anyone else in particular, either, most likely. Just a friendly wave of arrival. One of them on the pier took it upon himself to answer it with a like wave, proxying for the rest.

A rope was thrown, and several of the small crowd stepped back to avoid being struck by it. Dockworkers came forward for their brief moment of glory, claimed the rope, deftly lashed it about the pile top directly before Durand. At the opposite end they were doing the same thing. She was in, she was fast.

A trestled gangway was rolled forward, a brief section of lower-deck rail was detached, leaving an opening. The gap between was bridged. A ship’s officer came, down, almost before it was fixed in place, took up position close at hand below, to supervise the discharge. The passengers were funnelling along the deck from both directions into and down through the single-file descent-trough.

Durand moved up close beside it until he could rest his hand upon it, as if in mute claim; peered up anxiously into each imminent face as it coursed swiftly downward and past, only inches from his own.

The first passenger off was a man, striding, sample cases in both his hands, some business traveler in haste to leave. A woman next, more slowly, picking her way with care. Gray-haired and spectacled; not she. Another woman next. Not she again; her husband a step behind her, guiding her with hand to her elbow. An entire family next, in hierarchal order of importance.

Then more men, two or three of them in succession this time. Faces just pale ciphers to him, quickly passed over. Then a woman, and for a moment— No, not she; different eyes, a different nose, a different face. A stranger’s curt glance, meeting his, then quickly rebuffing it. Another man. Another woman. Red-haired and sandy-browed; not she.

A space then, a pause, a wait.

His heart took premature fright, then recovered. A tapping run along the deck planks, as some laggard made haste to overtake the others. A woman by the small, quick sound of her feet. A flounce of skirts, a face— Not she. A whiff of lilac water, a snub from eyes that had no concern for him, as his had for them, no quest in them, no knowledge. Not she.

And then no more. The gangplank empty. A lull, as when a thing is over.

He stared up, and his face died.

He was gripping the edges of the gangplank with both hands now. He released it at last, crossed around to the other side of it, accosted the officer loitering there, clutched at him anxiously by the sleeve. “No one else?”

The officer turned and relayed the question upward toward the deck in booming hand-cupped shout. “Anyone else?”

Another of the ship’s company, perhaps the captain, came to the rail and peered down overside. “All ashore,” he called down.

It was like a knell. Durand seemed to find himself alone, in a pool of sudden silence, following it; though all about him there was as much noise going on as ever. But for him, silence. Stunning finality.

“But there must be— There has to—”

“No one else,” the captain answered jocularly. “Come up and see for yourself.”

Then he turned and left the rail.

Baggage was coming down now.

He waited, hoping against hope.

No one else. Only baggage, the inanimate dregs of the cargo. And at last not even that.

He turned aside at last and drifted back along the pier-length and off it to the solid ground beyond, and on a little while. His face stiffly averted, as if there were greater pain to be found on one side of him than on the other, though that was not true, it was equal all around.

And when he stopped, he didn’t know it, nor why he had just when he did. Nor what reason he had for lingering on there at all. The boat had nothing for him, the river had nothing for him. There was nothing there for him. There or anywhere else, now.

Tears filled his eyes, and though there was no one near him, no one to notice, he slowly lowered his head to keep them from being detected.

He stood thus, head lowered, somewhat like a muted mourner at a bier. A bier that no one but he could see.

The ground before his unseeing eyes was blank; biscuit-colored earth basking in the sun. As blank, perhaps, as his life would be from now on.

Then without a sound of approach, the rounded shadow of a small head advanced timorously across it; cast from somewhere behind him, rising upward from below. A neck, two shoulders, followed it. Then the graceful indentation of a waist. Then the whole pattern stopped flowing, stood still.

His dulled eyes took no note of the phenomenon. They were not seeing the ground, nor anything imprinted upon it; they were seeing the St. Louis Street house. They were saying farewell to it. He’d never enter it again, he’d never go back there. He’d turn it over to an agent, and have him sell—

There was the light touch of a hand upon his shoulder. No exacting weight, no compulsive stroke; velvety and gossamer as the alighting of a butterfly. The shadow on the ground had raised a shadow-arm to another shadow — his — linking them for a moment, then dropping it again.

His head came up slowly. Then equally slowly he turned it toward the side from which the touch had come.

A figure swept around before him, as on a turntable, pivoting to claim the center of his eyes; though it was he and not the background that had shifted.

It was diminutive, and yet so perfectly proportioned within its own lesser measurements that, but for the yardstick of comparison offered when the eye deliberately sought out others and placed them against it, it could have seemed of any height at all: of the grandeur of a classical statue or of the minuteness of an exquisite doll.

Her limpid brown eyes came up to the turn of Durand’s shoulder. Her face held an exquisite beauty he had never before seen, the beauty of porcelain, but without its cold stillness, and a crumpled rose petal of a mouth.

She was no more than in her early twenties, and though her size might have lent her added youth, the illusion had very little to subtract from the reality. Her skin was that of a young girl, and her eyes were the innocent, trustful eyes of a child.

Tight-spun golden curls clung to her head like a field of daisies, rebelling all but successfully at the conventional coiffure she tried to impose upon them. They took to the ubiquitous psyche-knot at the back only with the aid of forceful pins, and at the front resisted the forehead-fringe altogether, fuming about like topaz sea spray.

She held herself in that forward-inclination that was de rigueur, known as the “Grecian bend.” Her dress was of the fashion as it then was, and had been for some years. Fitting tightly as a sheath fits a furled umbrella, it had a center panel, drawn and gathered toward the back to give the appearance of an apron or a bib superimposed upon the rest, and at the back puffed into a swollen protuberance of bows and folds, artfully sustained by a wired foundation; this was the stylish bustle, without which a woman’s posterior would have appeared indecently sleek. As soon expose the insteps or — reckless thought! — the ankles as allow the sitting-part to remain flat.

A small hat of heliotrope straw, as flat as and no bigger than a man’s palm, perched atop the golden curls, roguishly trying to reach down toward one eyebrow, the left, without there being enough of it to do so and still stay atop her head.

Amethyst-splinters twinkled in the tiny holes pierced through the lobes of her miniature and completely uncovered ears, and a slender ribbon of heliotrope velvet girded her throat. A parasol of heliotrope organdy, of scarcely greater diameter than a soup plate and of the consistency of mist, hovered aloft at the end of an elongated stick, like an errant violet halo. Upon the ground to one side of her sat a small gilt birdcage, its lower portion swathed in a flannel cloth, the dome left open to expose its flitting bright-yellow occupant.

He looked at her hand, he looked at his own shoulder, so unsure was he the touch had come from her; so unsure was he as to the reason for such a touch. Slowly his hat came off, was held at questioning height above his scalp.

The compressed mouth curved in winsome smile. “You don’t know me, do you, Mr. Durand?”

He shook his head slightly.

The smile notched a dimple; rose to her eyes. “I’m Julia, Louis. May I call you Louis?”

His hat fell from his fingers to the ground, and rolled once about, for the length of half its brim. He bent and retrieved it, but only with his arm and shoulder; his face never once quited hers, as though held to it by an unbreakable magnetic current.

“But no— How can—?”

“Julia Russell,” she insisted, still smiling.

“But no— You can’t—” he kept dismembering words.

Her brows arched. The smile expired compassionately. “It was unkind of me to do this, wasn’t it?”

“But — the picture — dark hair—”

“That was my aunt’s I sent instead.” She shook her head in belated compunction. She lowered the parasol, closed it with a little plop. With the point of its stick she began to trace cabalistic designs in the dust. She dropped her eyes and watched what she was doing with an air of sadness. “Oh, I shouldn’t have, I know that now. But at the time, it didn’t seem to matter so much, we hadn’t become serious yet. I thought it was just a correspondence. Then many times since, I wanted to send the right one in its place, to tell you— And the longer I waited, the less courage I had. Fearing I’d... I’d lose you altogether in that way. It preyed on my mind more and more, and yet, the closer the time drew— At the very last moment, I was already aboard the boat, and I wanted to turn around and go back. Bertha prevailed upon me to — to continue down here. My sister, you know.”

“I know,” he nodded, still dazed.

“The last thing she said to me, just before I left, was, ‘He’ll forgive you. He’ll understand you meant no harm.’ But during the entire trip down, how bitterly I repented my — my frivolity.” Her head all but hung, and she caught at her mouth, gnawing at it with her small white teeth.

“I can’t believe... I can’t believe—” was all he could keep stammering.

She was an image of lovely penitence, tracing her parasol-stick about on the ground, shyly waiting for forgiveness.

“But so much younger—” he marveled. “So much lovelier even than—”

“That too entered into it,” she murmured. “So many men become smitten with just a pretty face. I wanted our feeling to go deeper than that. To last longer. To be more secure. I wanted you to care for me, if you did care, because of... well, the things I wrote you, the sort of mind I displayed, the sort of person I really was, rather than because of a flibbertigibbet’s photograph. I thought perhaps if I gave myself every possible disadvantage at the beginning, of appearance and age and so forth, then there would be that much less danger later, of its being just a passing fancy. In other words, I put the obstacles at the beginning, rather than have them at the end.”

How sensible she was, he discovered to himself, how level-minded, in addition to all her external attractions. Why, there were the components here of a paragon.

“How many times I tried to write you the truth, you’ll never know,” she went on contritely. “And each time my courage would fail. I was afraid I would only succeed in alienating you entirely, from a person who, by her own admission, had been guilty of falsehood. I couldn’t trust such a thing to cold paper.” She gestured charmingly with one hand. “And now you see me, and now you know. The worst.”

“The worst,” he protested strenuously. “But you,” he went on after a moment, still amazed, “but you, knowing all along what I did not know until now, that I was so much — well, considerably, older than you. And yet—”

She dropped her eyes, as if in additional confession. “Perhaps that may have been one of your principal attractions, who knows? I have, since as far back as I can remember, been capable of — shall I say, romantic feelings, the proper degree of emotion or admiration — only toward men older than myself. Boys of my own age have never interested me. I don’t know what to attribute it to. All the women in my family have been like that. My mother was married at fifteen, and my father was at the time well over forty. The mere fact that you were thirty-six, was what first—” With maidenly seemliness, she forebore to finish it.

He kept devouring her with his eyes, still incredulous.

“Are you disappointed?” she asked timidly.

“How can you ask that?” he exclaimed.

“Am I forgiven?” was the next faltering question.

“It was a lovely deception,” he said with warmth of feeling. “I don’t think there’s been a lovelier one ever committed.”

He smiled, and her smile, still somewhat abashed, answered his own.

“But now I will have to get used to you all over again. Grow to know you all over again. That was a false start,” he said cheerfully.

She turned her head aside and mutely half-hid it against her own shoulder. And yet even this gesture, which might have seemed maudlin or revoltingly saccharine in others, she managed to carry off successfully, making it appear no more than a playful parody while at the same time deftly conveying its original intent of rebuked coyness.

He grinned.

She turned her face toward him again. “Are your plans, your, er, intentions, altered?”

“Are yours?”

“I’m here,” she said with the utmost simplicity, grave now.

He studied her a moment longer, absorbing her charm. Then suddenly, with new-found daring, he came to a decision. “Would it make you feel better, would it ease your mind of any lingering discomfort,” he blurted out, “if I were to make a confession to you on my own part?”

“You?” she said surprised.

“I... I no more told you the entire truth than you told me,” he rushed on.

“But... but I see you quite as you said you were, quite as your picture described you—”

“It isn’t that, it’s something else. I too perhaps felt just as you did, that I wanted you to like me, to accept my offer, solely on the strength of the sort of man I was in myself. For myself alone, in other words.”

“But I see that, and I do,” she said blankly. “I don’t understand.”

“You will in a moment,” he promised her, almost eagerly. “Now I must confess to you that I’m not a clerk in a coffee-import house.”

Her face betrayed no sign other than politely interested incomprehension.

“That I haven’t a thousand dollars put aside, to... to start us off.”

No sign. No sign of crestfall or of frustrated avarice. He was watching her intently. A slow smile of indulgence, of absolution granted, overspread her features before he had spoken next. Well before he had spoken next. He gave it time.

“No, I own a coffee-import house, instead.”

No sign. Only that slightly forced smile, such as women give in listening to details of a man’s business, when it doesn’t interest them in the slightest but they are trying to be polite.

“No, I have closer to a hundred thousand dollars.”

He waited for her to say something. She didn’t. She, on the contrary, seemed to be waiting for him to continue. As if the subject had been so arid, and barren of import, to her, that she did not realize the climax had already been reached.

“Well, that’s my confession,” he said somewhat lamely.

“Oh,” she said, as if brought up short. “Oh, was that it? You mean—” She fluttered her hand with vague helplessness. “—about your business, and money matters—” She brought two fingers to her mouth, and crossed it with their tips. Stifling a yawn that, without the gesture of concealment, he would not have detected in the first place. “There are two things I have no head for,” she admitted. “One is politics, the other is business, money matters.”

“But you do forgive me?” he persisted. Conscious at the same time of a fierce inward joy, that was almost exultation; as when one has encountered a perfection of attitude, at long last, and almost by chance, that was scarcely to be hoped for.

She laughed outright this time, with a glint of mischief, as if he were giving her more credit than was due her. “If you must be forgiven, you’re forgiven,” she relented. “But since I paid no attention whatever to the passages in your letters that dealt with that, in the first place, why, you’re asking forgiveness for a fault I was not aware, until now, of your having committed. Take it, then, though I’m not sure what it’s for.”

He stared at her with a new intentness, that went deeper than before; as if finding her as utterly charming within as she was at first sight without.

Their shadows were growing longer, and they were all but alone now on the pier. He glanced around him as if reluctantly awakening to their surroundings. “It’s getting late, and I’m keeping you standing here,” he said in a reminder that was more dutiful than honest, for it might mean their separation, for all he knew.

“You make me forget the time,” she admitted, her eyes never leaving his face. “Is that a bad omen or a good? You even make me forget my predicament: half ashore and half still on the boat. I must soon become the one or the other.”

“That’s soon taken care of,” he said, leaning forward eagerly, “if I have your own consent.”

“Isn’t yours necessary too?” she said archly.

“It’s given, it’s given.” He was almost breathless with haste to convince her.

She was in no hurry, now that he was. “I don’t know,” she said, lifting the point of her parasol, then dropping it again, then lifting it once more, in an uncertainty that he found excruciating. “If you had not seemed satisfied, if you had looked askance at the deceiver that you found me to be, I intended going back onto the boat and remaining aboard till she set out on the return trip to St. Louis. Don’t you think that might still be the wiser—”

“No, don’t say that,” he urged, alarmed. “Satisfied? I’m the happiest man in New Orleans this evening — I’m the luckiest man in this town—”

She was not, it seemed, to be swayed so easily. “There is still time. Better now than later. Are you quite sure you wouldn’t rather have me do that? I won’t say a word, I won’t complain. I’ll understand your feelings perfectly—”

He was gripped by a sudden new fear of losing her. She, whom he hadn’t had at all until scarcely half an hour ago.

“But those aren’t my feelings! I beg you to believe me! My feelings are quite the opposite. What can I do to convince you? Do you want more time? Is it you? Is that what you are trying to say to me?” he insisted with growing anxiety.

She held him for a moment with her eyes, and they were kindly and candid and even, one might have said, somewhat tender. Then she shook her head, very slightly it is true, but with all the firmness of intention that a man might have given the gesture (if he could read it right), and not a girl’s facile undependable negation.

“My mind has been made up,” she told him, slowly and simply, “since I first stepped onto the boat at St. Louis. Since your letter of proposal came, as a matter of fact, and I wrote you my answer. And I do not lightly undo my mind, once it has been made up. You will find that once you know me better.” Then she qualified it: “If you do,” and let that find him out with a little unwelcome stab, as it promptly did.

“I’ll let this be my answer, then,” he said with tremulous impatience. “Here it is.” He opened his cardcase, took out the daguerreotype, the one of the other, older woman — her aunt’s — minced it with energetic fingers, then let it fall in trifling pieces downward all over the ground. Then showed her both his hands, empty.

“My mind is made up too.”

She smiled her acceptance. “Then—?”

“Then let’s be on our way. They’re waiting for us at the church the past quarter-hour or more. We’ve delayed here too long.”

He tilted his arm akimbo, offered it to her with a smile and a gallant inclination from the waist, that were perhaps, on the surface, meant to appear as badinage, merely a bantering parody, but were in reality more sincerely intended.

“Miss Julia?” he invited.

This was the moment of ultimate romance, its quintessence. The betrothal.

She shifted her parasol to the opposite shoulder. Her hand curled about his arm like a friendly sun-warmed tendril. She gathered up the bottom of her skirt to reticent walking-level.

“Mr. Durand,” she accepted, addressing him by surname only, in keeping with the seemly propriety of the still-unmarried young woman that made her drop her eyes fetchingly at the same time.