Waltz Into Darkness

62

He made no reference the following day to her liquored outing, much less the greater transgression that it had encased. He waited to see if she would attempt to repeat it (in his mind some half-formed intent of following her and killing the man when he found him), but she did not. If a succeeding appointment had been made, it was not for that next day.

She lay abed until late, leaving his needs to the tender care of the slovenly woman of all work who came in to clean and cook for them on alternate days, thrice a week. Even this disreputable malaise, which was purely and simply a “head,” as they called it, the result of her over-indulgence, he did not tax her with.

When she came down at last to supper with him, she was amiable enough in all conscience. It was as if (he told himself) she had two selves. Her sober self did not know or recall the instinctive animosity her drunken self had unwittingly revealed the night before. Or, if it did, was trying to make amends.

“Did Amelia go?” she asked. It was a needless question, put for the sake of striking up conversation. The stillness in the kitchen and the fact that no one came in to wait at table, gave its own answer.

“At about six,” he said. “She set our places, and left the food warming in there on the stove.”

“I’ll help you bring it in,” she said, seeing him start out to fetch it.

“Are you up to it?” he asked.

She dropped her eyes at the rebuke, as if admitting she deserved it.

They waited on themselves. She shyly offered the bread plate to him across-table. He pretended not to see it for a moment, than relented, took a piece, grunted: “Thanks.” Their eyes met.

“Are you very angry with me, Lou?” she purred.

“Have I reason to be? No one can answer that but yourself.”

She gave him a startled look for a moment, as if to say “How much do you know?”

He thought to himself, What other man would sit here like this, meekly holding his peace, knowing what I do? Then he remembered what he himself, had told Jardine on that visit to New Orleans: I must do as I must do. I can do no other.

“I was not very admirable,” she said softly.

“You did nothing so terrible,” he let her know, “once you were back here. You were a little sulky, that was all.”

“And I did even less,” she said instantly, “before I was back here. It was only here that I misbehaved.”

How well we understand one another, he thought. We are indeed wedded together.

She jumped up and came around behind his chair, and leaning over his shoulder, had kissed him before he could thwart her.

His heart, like gunpowder, instantly went up, a flash of flame in his breast, though there was no outward sign to show it had been set off. How cheaply I am bought off, he thought. How easily appeased. Is this love, or is this a crumbling of my very manhood?

He sat there wooden, unmoving, hands to table, keeping them resolutely off her.

His lips betrayed him, though he tried to curb them. “Again,” they said.

She lowered her face to his once more, and again she kissed him.

“Again,” he said.

His lips were trembling now.

Again she kissed him.

Suddenly he came to life. He had seized her with such violence, it was almost an attack rather than an embrace. He pulled her bodily downward into his lap, and buried his face against hers, hungrily devoured her lips, her throat, her shoulders.

“You don’t know what you do to me. You madden me. Oh, this is no love. This is a punishment, a curse. I’ll kill any man who tries to take you from me — I’ll kill you yourself. And I’ll go with you. There shall be nothing left.”

And as his lips repeatedly returned to find her, his only words of endearment, spaced each time with a kiss, were: “Damn you!... Damn you!... Damn you! No man should ever know you!”

When he released her at last, exhausted, she lay there limp, cradled in his arms. On her face the strangest, startled look. As though his very violence had done something to her she had not counted on.

She said, speaking trancelike, and slowly drawing her hand across her brow as if to restore some memory that was necessary to her, and that he had all but seared away, “Oh, Louis, you are not too safe to know yourself. Oh, darling, you almost make me forget—”

And then the crippled, staggering thought died unfinished.

“Forget whom?” he accused her. “Forget what?”

She looked at him dazed, as though not knowing she had spoken, herself. “Forget — myself,” she concluded limply.

That is not whom she meant, he told himself with melancholy wisdom. But that word is the true one, none the less. I have no real rival, but in her. It is only herself that stands in the way of allowing her to love me.

She did not go out of the house the next day. Again he waited, again he held his breath, but she remained dutifully at hand. The appointment, if there was to be another, still hung fire.

Nor the next, either. The cleaning woman came, and coming down the stairs, he caught sight of them standing close together in the hall, as if they had been secretively conferring together. He thought he saw Bonny hastily fumble with her bodice, as if concealing something she had just received.

She would have carried it off, perhaps, but the Negress made a poor conspirator, she started theatrically back from her mistress, at sight of him, and thus put the thought in his head that something had passed between them.

There are other ways of communicating than by the rendezvous direct, he reminded himself. Perhaps the appointment I have been dreading so has already been kept, right before my eyes, on a mere scrap of paper.

Toward the latter part of their evening meal, that same day, she became noticeably pensive. Again the woman, the go-between of treachery, had gone, again they were alone together.

Her casual remarks, such as any meal shared by any two people is seasoned with, grew more and more infrequent. Soon she was making none at all of her own volition, only answering the ones he made. Presently even this proportion had begun to diminish, he was carrying the entire burden of speech for the two of them. All he got now was absent nods and vague affirmatives, while her thoughts were obviously elsewhere.

Finally it even affected her eating, began to slow and diminish it, so great was her own contemplation of whatever it was that her mind saw before it. And it must have seen something, for the mind by its very nature cannot contemplate vacancy. Her fork would remain in position to detach a portion of food, yet not complete the act for several minutes. Or it would halt in air, midway to her mouth, and again remain that way.

Then, quite as insolubly as it had begun, it had ended again, this abstraction. It was over. Whatever byways her train of thought had wandered down, were now closed off; or else it had arrived at its destination.

Her eyes now saw him when they rested on him.

“Do you recall that night we quarrelled?” she said, speaking softly. “You said something then about that old insurance policy you once took out when we were living on St. Louis Street. Was that true? Do you really still have it? Or did you just make that up, as you did about there still being money left?”

“I still have it,” he said inattentively. “But it has lapsed, for lack of keeping up with the payments.”

She was now busily eating, as if to make up for the time she had wasted loitering over her food before. “Is it completely worthless, then?”

“No, if the back payments were made up it would come into effect again. Not too much time has passed, I think.”

“How much would be required?”

“Five hundred dollars,” he answered impatiently. “Have we got that much?”

“No,” she said docilely, “but is there any harm in asking?”

She pushed her plate back. She dropped her eyes, as if he had rebuffed her, and allowed them to rest on her clasped hands. Then, taking one finger in the others, she began slowly to twist and turnabout the diamond ring that had once been his wedding gift to her. She shifted it this way, that, speculatively, abstractedly.

Who could say whether she saw it or not, as she did so? Who could say what she saw? Who could say what her thoughts were? It told nothing. Just a woman’s restless gesture with her ring.

“How would one go about it? I mean if we did have the money. In what way is it done?”

“You simply send the money to New Orleans, to the insurance company. They credit the payments against the policy.”

“And then the policy comes into force again?”

“The policy comes into force again,” he said somewhat testily, annoyed by her persistence in clinging to the subject.

He had divined, of course, what her sudden interest was. She was entertaining a vague hope that they could borrow against it in some way, obtain money by that means.

“Could I see it?” she coaxed.

“Right now? It’s upstairs somewhere, among my old papers. But it’s of no value, I warn you; the payments have not been maintained.”

She did not press him further. She sat there meditatively fingering the diamond on her finger, shifting it a little bit this way, a little bit that, so that it gave off sparks of brilliance in the lamplight.

She did not ask him for it nor about it again, but remembering that she had, he set about looking for it on his own account. This was not immediately, but some two or three days later.

He couldn’t find it. He looked where he’d thought he had it, first, and it wasn’t there. Then he looked elsewhere, nor could he find it in any of the other places he looked, either.

It must have been lost, during their many hurried moves from place to place, in the course of hasty packing and unpacking. Or else it would perhaps yet turn up, in some unlikely place he had not yet thought of looking for it.

He desisted finally, with no great concern; with, if anything, a mental shrug. Since it was worthless and could not have been borrowed against (which he thought had been the motive behind her asking about it), there was no great loss, in any case.

He did not even mention to her that he could not locate it. There was no reason to, for she too seemed to have forgotten her earlier interest in it, as she sat there across the table from him, idly stroking and contemplating her ringless hands.

Within the week, the cook and cleaning woman (one and the same) whom they’d had until then, was suddenly gone, and they were alone now in the house.

He asked her about this, after two successive days without her, only noting her departure, man-like, after it had already taken place. “What’s become of Amelia?”

“I shipped her Tuesday,” she said shortly.

“But I thought we owed her three or four weeks back wages. How were you able to pay her?”

“I didn’t.”

“And she agreed to go none the less?”

“She had no choice, I ordered her to. She will get her money when we have it ourselves, she knows that.”

“Aren’t you getting anyone else?”

“No,” she said, “I can manage,” and added something under her breath that he didn’t hear quite clearly.

“What?” he asked in involuntary surprise. He thought she had said, “for the little time there is.”

“I said, for a little time, that is,” she repeated adroitly.

And manage she did, and far more successfully than in their Mobile days, when she had first tried keeping her own house, and he had had to take her back to the hotel for meals.

For one thing, she showed far more purpose than she had in those far-off, light-hearted days; there was less of frivolity in her efforts and a great deal more of determination. There was less laughter in the preparations, maybe, but there was less dismay in the results. She was not a child bride, now, playing at keeping house; she was a woman, bent on acquiring new skills, and not sparing herself in the endeavor.

For two full days she cooked, she washed the dishes, she swung a broom all up and down the stairs. Then on the second night of this apprenticeship—

He heard her scream out suddenly in the kitchen, and there was the crash of a dropped dish as it slipped her hands. She had gone in there to wash up after their meal, and he had remained behind browsing through the paper. Even the most enamored man did not offer to dry the dishes for a woman; it would have been as conventional as assisting at a childbirth.

He flung down his paper and darted in there. She was standing before the steaming washtub. “What is it, did you scald yourself?”

She was pointing, horrified.

“A rat,” she choked. “It ran straight between my feet as I stood here. Into there.” And with a sickened grimace, “Oh, the size of it! The horrid look!”

He took up a poker and tried to plunge it into the crevice at meeting-place of wall and floor that she had indicated. It balked. There was no depth to take it. It seemed a shallow rent in the plaster, no more.

“It could not have gone in there—”

Her fright turned to anger. “Do you call me a liar? Must it bite me and draw blood, for you to believe me?”

He dropped down now on all fours and began working the poker vigorously to and fro, in truth knocking out a hole if there had been none before.

She watched a moment. “What are you trying to do?” she said coldly.

“Why, kill it,” he panted.

“That is not the way to be rid of them!” Her foot gave a clout of impatience against the floor. “You kill one, and there are a dozen left.”

She flung down her apron, strode from the room and out to the front of the house. Sensing some purpose he could not divine, but disquieted by it, he put down the poker after a moment, struggled to his feet, and went after her. He found her in the hall, bonnetted and shawled, to his astonishment, in readiness to go out.

“Where are you going?”

“Since you don’t know enough to, I am going to the pharmacist myself, to have him give me something that will exterminate them,” she retorted ungraciously.

“Now? At this hour? Why, it’s past nine; he’ll be closed long ago.”

“There is another, on the other side of town, that stays open until ten; you know that as well as I do.” And she added with ill-humored decision, as though he were to blame for their presence in some way, “I will not go back into that kitchen and run the risk of being attacked. They will be running over our very bed, yet, while we sleep!”

“Very well, I’ll go myself,” he offered hastily. “No need for you to go, at this time of night.”

She relented somewhat. She took off her shawl, though still frowning a trifle that he had not seen his duty sooner. She took him to the door.

“Don’t go back in there,” he cautioned, “until I come back.”

“Nothing could prevail on me to,” she agreed fearfully.

She closed the door after him.

She reopened it to call him back for an instant.

“Don’t tell him who we are, what house it’s for,” she suggested in a lowered voice. “I would not like our neighbors to know we have rats in our house. It’s a reflection on me, on my cleanliness as a housekeeper—”

He laughed at this typically feminine anxiety, but promised and went on.

When he came back he found that she had returned to her task in the kitchen none the less, in spite of his admonition and her own fear; a bit of conscientious courage which he could not help but secretly admire. She had, however, taken the precaution of bringing in the table lamp with her and placing it on the floor close by her feet, as a sort of blazing protection.

“Did you see any more since I was gone?”

“I thought I saw it come back to that hole, but I threw something at it, and it did not come out again.”

He showed her what the druggist had given him. “This is to be spread around outside their holes and hiding places.”

“Did he ask any questions?” she asked somewhat irrelevantly.

“No, only whether or not we had any children about the house.”

“He did not ask which house it was?”

“No. He’s rather elderly and doddering, you know; he seemed anxious to be rid of me and close for the night.”

She half extended her hand.

“No, don’t touch it. I’ll do it for you.”

He stripped off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and squatting on his haunches before the offending orifice, shook out a little powdery trail of the substance here and there. “Are there any others?”

“One over there, just a little back of the coal stove.”

She watched, with housewifely approval.

“That will do. Not too much, or our feet will track it about.”

“It has to be renewed every two or three days,” he told her.

He put it on the shelf, at last, where the spice canisters were, but well over to the side.

“Make sure you wash your hands, now,” she cautioned him. He had been about to neglect doing so, until her reminder. She held the huck-towel for him to dry them on, when he was through.

It was the following night that his illness really began. She discovered it first.

He found her looking at him intently as he closed his book at their retiring-time. It was a kindly scrutiny, but closely maintained. It seemed to have been going on for several moments before he discovered it.

“What is it?” he said cheerfully.

“Louis.” She hesitated. “Are you sure you have been feeling well lately? I do not find you looking yourself. I do not like the way you—”

“I?” he exclaimed in astonishment. “Why, I never felt better in my life!”

She silenced him with tilt of hand. “That may well be, but your appearance belies it. More and more lately I have found you looking worn and haggard at times. I have not mentioned it before, because I didn’t want to alarm you, but it has been on my mind for some time now to do so. It’s very evident; I can see it quite plainly.”

“Nonsense,” he said, half laughing.

“I have an excellent remedy, if you will but let me give it to you. And I will join you in it myself, as an inducement.”

“What?” he asked, amused.

She jumped up. “Starting tonight, we are to take an eggnog, the two of us, each night before retiring. It is an excellent tonic, they assure me, for fortifying the system.”

“I am not an inval—” he tried to protest.

“Now, not another word, sir!” she ordered gaily. “I intend to prepare them right now, and you shall not hinder me. I have all the necessary ingredients right at hand, in there. Fresh-laid eggs, and the very best obtainable, at twelve cents a dozen, mind you! And the brandy we have in the house as well.”

He couldn’t help but smile indulgently at her, but he let her have her way. This was a new role for her; nursemaid to a nonexistent ailment. If it made her happy, why what was the harm?

Her mood was amiable, sanguine, all gentleness and contrition now. She even bent to kiss him atop the head in passing.

“Was I cross to you before? Forgive me, Lou dear. You know I wouldn’t want to be. A fright like that can make one into a harridan—” She went toward the kitchen, smiling back at him.

He could hear her cracking the eggs, somewhere beyond the open doorway, and crinkled his eyes appreciatively to himself.

Presently she had even begun to hum lightly as she moved about in there, she was enjoying her self-imposed task so much.

Soon the humming gained words, had become a full song.

He had never heard her sing before. Laughter until now had always been her expression of contentment, never song. Her voice was light but true. Not very lyrical, metallic was the word that occurred to him instead, but she stayed adroitly on key.

Suddenly the song stopped, as if at something she were doing that required complete concentration. Measuring the brandy, perhaps. Be that as it might, it never resumed again.

She came in, holding one glass in each hand. Their contents pale gold in color, creamy in substance.

“Here. One for you, one for me.” She offered them both. “Take whichever one you want.” Then when he had, she tasted tentatively at the one that remained in her hand. “I hope I didn’t put in too much sugar. Too much would sicken. May I try yours?”

“Of course.”

She took it back from him, tasted at it in turn. It left a little white trace on her upper lip.

While she stood thus, holding both together, she turned her head toward the kitchen door.

“What was that?”

“What? I didn’t hear anything.”

She went back in again for a moment. She was gone a moment only. Then she returned to him.

“I thought I heard a sound in there. I wanted to make sure I had fastened the door.”

She gave him back the one he had had in the first place, and which she had sampled.

“Since it has brandy in it,” she said, “I suppose we should precede it with a toast.” She nudged her glass to his. “To your better health.”

She drained hers to the bottom.

He took a deep draught of his. He found it quite velvety and pleasurable. The liquor in it; with which she had been unsparing, gave a mellow warming effect to the stomach after it had lain there some moments.

“I wish all tonics were this palatable, don’t you?” she remarked.

“It’s quite satisfactory,” he admitted, more to please her than because he saw any great virtue in it. It was after all, to his way of thinking, a bastard drink; neither honest liquor nor wholly medicine.

“You must drink it down to the bottom, that is the only way it will do you any good,” she urged gently. “See, as I did mine.”

To spare her feelings, after the trouble of having prepared it, he did so.

He tasted of his tongue, dubiously, after he had. “It is a little chalky, don’t you find. A little — astringent. It puckers.”

She took the glass from him. “That is because you are not used to milk. Have you never seen a baby’s mouth after it feeds, all clotted and curdled?”

“No,” he assured her with mock gravity, “you have not given me that pleasure.”

They laughed together for a moment, in close-knit intimacy.

“I’ll just rinse out the glasses,” she said, “and then we can go up.”

He slept soundly at first, feeling at the last the grateful glow the tonic had deposited in his stomach; albeit it seemed to confine itself to there, did not spread outward as in the case of unmixed liquor. But then after an hour or two he awakened into torment. The glow was no longer benign, it had a flaming bite to it. Sleep, once driven off, couldn’t come near him again, held back by a fiery sword turning and turning in his vitals.

The rest of that night was an agony, a Calvary. He called out to her, more than once, but she was not near enough to hear him. Helpless and cut off from her, he sank his teeth into his own lip at last, and kept silent after that. In the morning there was dried blood all down his chin.

Across the room, over in the far corner, miles away, stood a chair with his clothes upon it. An ebony wood chair, with apricot-plush seat and apricot-plush back. Never heeded much before, but now a symbol.

Miles away it stood, and he looked longingly across the miles, the immeasurable distance from illness to health, from helplessness to ability, from death to life.

All the way across the room, many miles away.

He must get over there, to that chair. It was far away, but he must get over there to it somehow. He looked at it so intently, so longingly, that the rest of the room seemed to fog out, and narrowing concentric circles of clarity seemed just to focus on that chair alone, so that it stood as in the center of a bright disk, a bull’s-eye, and all the rest was a blur.

He could not get out of bed legs upright, so he had to leave it head and shoulders first, in a slanting downward fall. Then there was a second, if less violent, fall as his hips and legs came down after the rest of him.

He began to sidle along the floor now, like some groveling thing, a worm or caterpillar, chin touching it at every other moment, hot striving breath stirring the nap of the carpet before him, like a wave spreading out from his face. Only, worms and caterpillars don’t hope so, haven’t such large hearts to agonize with.

Slowly, flowered pattern by flowered pattern. Each one like an island. And the plain-tinted background in between, each time like a channel or a chasm, leagues in width instead of inches. Some weaver somewhere, years ago, had never known his spaces would be counted so, with drops of human sweat and burning pain and tears of fortitude.

He was getting closer. The chair was no longer an entire chair; its top was too far up overhead now. The circle of vision, straight before him, level with the floor, showed its four legs, and the shoes under it, and part of the seat. The rest was lost in the blurred mists of height.

Then the seat went too, just the legs now remained, and he was getting very near. Perhaps near enough already to reach it with his arm, if he extended that full before him along the floor.

He tried it, and it just fell short. Not more than six inches remained between his straining fingertips and the one particular leg he was aiming them for. Six inches was so little to bridge.

He writhed, he wriggled. He gained an inch. The edge of the flower pattern told him that. But the chair, teasing him, tantalizing him, thefted the inch from him somehow. It still stood six inches away. He had gained one at one end, it had stolen it back at the other.

Again he gained an inch. Again the chair cheated him out of it, replaced it at the opposite end.

But this was madness, this was hallucination. It had begun to laugh at him, and chairs don’t laugh.

He strained his arm down to its uttermost sinews, from fingerpad all the way back to socket. He swallowed up the six inches, at the price of years of his life. And this time it jerked back, abruptly. And there was another six inches, a new six inches, still between them.

Then through his blinding tears, he saw at last that there were one pair of shoes too many. Four instead of two. His own, under the chair, and hers, off to the side, unnoticed until now. She must have opened the door so deftly that he had not heard it.

She was arched over above him, from the side. One hand holding her skirts clear, to keep them from betraying her presence until the last possible moment. The other hand, to the back of the chair, had been keeping that from him, unnoticeably, each time he’d thought he’d reached it.

The jest must have been good. Her laughter came out, full-bodied, irrepressible, above him. Then she tried to check it, bite it back, for decency’s sake, if nothing else.

“What did you want, your clothes? Why didn’t you ask me?” she said mockingly. “You can have no possible use for them, my dear. You’re not well enough.”

And taking the chair in hand more fully this time, before his broken-hearted eyes swept it all the way back against the wall, a whole yard or two at once this time, hopeless of attainment ever.

But the trousers bedded on the seat fell off somehow, and in falling were kinder to him than she was, they fell upon his extended hand and let themselves be gripped, caught fast by it.

Now she bent to take them from him, and a brief, unequal contest of strength locked the two of them for a moment.

“They are no good to you, my dear,” she said with the amusement one shows to a wilful child. “Come, let them be. What can you do with them?”

She drew them away from him little by little, plucked them from his bitterly clinging fingers by main strength at last.

Then when she had him back in bed again, she gave him a smile that burned, that seared, though it was only a sweet, harmless, solicitous thing, and the door closed after her.

Within its luminous halo the chair stood, ebony wood and apricot plush. All the way across the room, leagues away.