Waltz Into Darkness

61

Nothing more, then, for five days. No more visits to the post office. No more idle sittings beside a desk. No more letters sent, no more letters received. Whatever had been said was said, and only the inside of a fireplace knew what that had been.

For five days after that she did not even go out, she took no more walks. She loitered about the rooms, noncommunicative, self-assured. As if waiting for something. As if waiting for an appointed length of time to pass. Five days to pass.

Then on the fifth day, suddenly, without a word, the door of her room opened after long closure and he beheld her coming down the stairs arrayed for excursion. She was carefully dressed, far more carefully, far more exquisitely, than he had seen her for a long time past. She had taken a hot curling iron to her hair; ripples of artifice indented it. Her lips were frankly red, not merely covertly so. As if to meet a different standard than his own. Rouge that did not try to look like nature but tried to look like rouge. Her floral essence was strong to the point of headiness; again a different standard than his own.

She was going out. She made that plain, over and above his own powers of observation. As if she wanted no mistake about it, no hindrance. “I’m going out,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.”

He did not ask her where.

That was about three in the afternoon.

At five she was not back yet. At six. At seven.

It was dark, and he lit the lamps, and they burned their way toward eight. She wasn’t back yet

He knew she hadn’t left him; he knew she was coming back. Somehow that wasn’t his fear. Something about the way she had departed, the open, ostentatious bearing she had maintained, was enough to tell him that. She would have gone off quietly, or he would not have seen her go off at all, if she were never coming back.

Once he went to her bureau drawer, and from far in the back of it took out the little case, the casket of burned wood, she kept her adornments in. Her wedding band was in there, momentarily discarded. But so was the solitaire diamond ring he had given her in New Orleans the first day of her arrival.

No, she hadn’t left him; she was coming back. This was just an excursion without her wedding band.

On toward nine there was a sound at the door. Not so much an opening of it, as a fumbling incompletion of the matter of opening it.

He went out into the hall at last to see. To see why she did not finish coming in, for he knew already it was she.

She was half in, half out, and stopping there, her back sideward against the frame. Apparently resting. Or as if having given up the idea of entering the rest of the way as being too much trouble.

“Are you ill, Bonny?” he asked gravely, advancing toward her, but not hastily. Rather with a sort of reproachful dignity.

She laughed. A surreptitious, chuckling little sound, exchanged between herself and some alter ego, that excluded him. That was even at his expense.

“I knew you were going to ask me that.”

He had come close to her now.

The floral essence had changed, as if from long exposure fermented; there was an alcohol base to it now.

“No, I’m not ill,” she said defiantly.

“Come away from the door. Shall I help you?”

She brushed his offered arm away from her, advanced past him without it. There was a stiffness to her gait. It was even enough, but there was a self-consciousness to it. As if she were saying: “See how well I can walk.” She reminded him of a mechanical doll, wound up and striking out across the floor.

“I’m not drunk, either,” she said suddenly.

He closed the door, first looking out. There was no one out there. “I didn’t say you were.”

“No, but that’s what you’re thinking.”

She waited for him to reply to that, and he didn’t. Either answer, he could tell, would have been an equal irritant; whether he contradicted or admitted it. She wanted to quarrel with him; her mood was one of hostility. Whether implanted or native, he could not tell.

“I never get drunk,” she said, turning to face him from the sitting-room door. “I’ve never gotten drunk in my life.”

He didn’t answer. She went on into the sitting room.

When he entered it in turn, she was seated in the overstuffed chair, her head back a little, resting. Her eyes were open, but not on what she was doing; they were sighted remotely upward. She was stripping off her gloves, but not with the usual attentiveness he had seen her give to this. With an air of supine frivolity, allowing their empty fingers to dangle loosely and flutter about.

He stood and watched her for a moment.

“You’re late,” he said at last.

“I know I’m late. You don’t have to tell me that.”

She flung the gloves down on the table, jerked them from her with a little wrist-recoil of anger.

“Why don’t you ask me where I’ve been?”

“Would you tell me?” he retorted.

“Would you believe me?” she flung back at him.

She took off her hat next. Regarded it intently, and unfavorably; circling its brim, the while, about one supporting hand.

Then unexpectedly, he saw her, with her other hand, hook two fingers together and snap them open against it, striking it a little spanking blow with her nail, so to speak, of slangy depreciation. A moment later she had cast it from her, so that it fell to the floor a considerable distance across the room from her.

He made no move to get it. It was her hat, after all. He merely looked after it, to where it had fallen. “I thought you liked it. I thought it was your fondest rage.”

“Hoch,” she said with throaty disgust. “In New York they’re wearing bigger ones this season. These little things are out.”

Who told you that? He said to her in bitter silence. Who told you that you’re wasting yourself, buried down here, away from the big towns you used to know? He could hear the very words, almost as though he had been there when they were spoken.

“Can I get you anything?” he offered after awhile.

“You can’t get me anything.” She said it almost with a sneer. And he could read the unspoken remainder of the thought: I can get anything I want without you. Without your help.

He let her be. Some influence had turned her against him. Or rather had fanned to renewed heat the antagonism that was already latent there. It wasn’t the liquor. It was more than that. The liquor was merely the lubricant.

He came back in a few minutes bringing her a cup of coffee he had boiled. It was a simple operation, and the only one he was capable of in that department. He had watched her do it, and thus he knew: pour water in, dribble coffee in, and stand it over the open scuttle hole.

And yet where some others — some others he had never known — might have recognized the wistful charm there was, unconsciously, in the effort, she rebelled and was disgusted almost to the point of nausea.

“Ah, you’re so damned sweet it sickens me. Why don’t you be a man? Why don’t you give a woman a taste of your trouser belt once in a while? It might do the two of us a lot more good.”

“Is that what they used to—?” he started to say coldly. He didn’t finish it.

She drank the coffee down nevertheless. Nor thanked him for the trouble.

After a period of somnolent ingestion, it had its fortifying effect. She became voluble suddenly. As if seeking to undo whatever harmful impression her lack of inhibition had at first created. The antagonism disappeared, or at least submerged itself from sight.

“I had a drink,” she admitted. “And I’m afraid it was too much for me. They insisted.”

She waited to see if he would ask who “they” were. He didn’t.

“I had started on my way home, this was at five, hours ago, and I think my mistake was in deciding to walk the entire way, instead of taking a carriage. I may have overtaxed myself. Or I may have been laced too tightly. I don’t know. At any rate, as I was going along the street, I suddenly began to feel faint and everything swam before my eyes. I don’t know what would have happened, I think I should have fallen to the ground. But fortunately a refined woman happened to be just a few steps behind me, on the same walk. She caught me in her arms and she held me up, kept me from falling. As soon as I was able to use my feet again, she insisted on taking me into her home, so that I might rest before going on. She lived only a few doors from there; we were almost in front of her house when it happened.

“Her husband came soon afterward, and they wouldn’t hear of my leaving until they were sure I was fit. They gave me this drink, and it must have been stronger than I realized. They were really the kindest people. Their name is Jackson, I think she said. I’ll point out the house to you sometime. They have a lovely home.”

Warming to her recollection, she began describing it to him. “They took me into their front parlor and had me rest on the sofa. I wish you could see it. All kinds of money, you can tell. Oh, our place is nothing like it here. Louis XV furniture, gilded, you know, with mulberry upholstery. Full-length pier glasses on either side of the mantelpiece, and gas logs in the fireplace, iron logs that you can turn on or off—”

He could see in his mind’s eye, as she spoke, the shabby, secretive hotel room, hidden away in one of the byways down around the railroad station; the shade drawn against discovery from the street; the clandestine rendezvous, unwittingly prolonged beyond the bounds of prudence in forgetfulness lent by liquor. She and the man, whoever he was—

The flame of an old love rekindled, with alcohol for fuel; the renewal of old ties, the whispers and the sniggered laughter, the reminiscences shared together— He could see it all, he was all but there, looking over their shoulders.

The factor of her physical unfaithfulness wasn’t what shattered him the most. It was her mental treachery that desolated him; it was the far more irremediable of the two. She had betrayed him far more grievously with her mind and her heart, than she ever could have with her body. For he had always known he was not the first man to come into her life; but what he had always wanted, hoped and prayed for was to be the last.

It was easy, in retrospect, to trace the steps that had led to it. His lie about the money, a palliative that had only made things worse instead of bettering them. And then their bitter, brutal quarrel when he’d had to recant it at last, leaving her smarting and filled with spite and thirsting to requite the trick she felt he’d played on her. There must have been a letter North at about that time, and though he’d never seen it, he could guess what rancorous summons it contained: “Come get me; I can stand no more of this; take me out of it.” And then, five days ago, the answer; the mysterious letter to “Mabel Greene.”

She needn’t go to the post office any more, stealthily to appropriate them. There would be no more sent. The sender was here with her now, right in the same town.

Yes, he thought with saddened understanding, I too would travel from a distance of five days away — or twenty times five days away — to be with a woman like Bonny. What man wouldn’t? If the new love cannot provide for her, she has but to call back the old.

She saw by his face at last that he wasn’t listening to her any more. “I’m chattering too much,” she said lamely. “I’m afraid I’m palling on you.”

“That you never do,” he answered grimly. “You never pall on me, Bonny.” And it was true.

She stifled a yawn, thrusting her elbows back. “I guess I may as well go up to bed.”

“Yes,” he agreed dully. “That might be best.”

And as he heard her room door close upstairs, a moment after, his head sank slowly, inconsolably down into the refuge his bedded arms made for it upon the table top.