Waltz Into Darkness

63

She came in later in the day and sat by him, cool and crisp of attire, pretty as a picture, a veritable Florence Nightingale, soothing, comforting him, ministering to his wants in every way. In every way but one.

“Poor Lou. Do you suffer much?”

He resolutely refused to admit it. “I’ll be all right,” he panted. “I’ve never been ill a day in my life. This will pass.”

She dropped her eyes demurely. She sighed in comfortable agreement. “Yes, this will soon pass,” she conceded with equanimity.

The image of a contented kitten that has just had a saucer of milk crossed his mind for a moment, for some strange reason; disappeared again into the oblivion from which it had come.

She fanned him with a palm-leaf fan. She brought a basin, and with a moist cloth gently laved and cooled his agonized brow and his heaving chest, each silken stroke lighter than a butterfly’s wing.

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

He turned his head sharply aside, revolted.

“Would you like me to read to you? It may take your mind off your distress.”

She went below and brought up a book they had there, of poems, and in dulcet, lulling cadences read to him from Keats.

And stopped to innocently inquire: “What does that mean, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’? The sound is beautiful but the words have no sense. Are all poems like that?”

He put hands over ears and turned his head away, excruciated. “No more,” he pleaded. “I can stand no more. I beg you.”

She closed the book. She looked surprised. “I was only trying to entertain you.”

When water alone would no longer quench his ravening, ever-increasing thirst, she went out and with great difficulty obtained a pail of cracked ice at a fishmonger’s, and bringing it back, gave it to him piece by piece to chew and crunch between his teeth.

In every way she ministered to him. In every way but one.

“Get a doctor,” he besought her at last. “I cannot fight this out alone. I must have help.”

She kept her seat. “Shall we not wait another day? Is this my stouthearted Lou? Tomorrow, perhaps, you will be so much better that—”

He clawed at her garments in mute appeal, until she drew back a little, to keep them from being disarranged. His face formed in weazened lines of weeping. “Tomorrow I shall be dead. Oh, Bonny, I cannot face the night. This fire in my vitals— If you love me, if you love me — a doctor.”

She went at last. She was gone from the room a half-hour. She came back to it again, her shawl and bonnet on, and took them off. She was alone.

“You didn’t—?” He died a little.

“He cannot come before tomorrow. He is coming then. I described to him what your symptoms were. He said there is no cause for alarm. It is a form of — of colic, and it must run its course. He prescribed what we are to do until he sees you— Come, now, be calm—”

His eyes were on her, bright with fever and despair.

He whispered at last: “I did not hear the front door close after you.”

She gave him a quick look, but her answer flowed unimpeded.

“I left it ajar behind me, to save time when I returned. After all, I’d left you alone in the house. Surely—” Then she said, “You saw my bonnet on me just now, did you not?”

He didn’t answer further. All his ravaged mind could keep repeating was:

I didn’t hear the door close after her.

And then at last, slowly but at last, he knew.

Dawn, another dawn, a second one since this had begun, came creeping through the window, and with it a measure of tensile strength. Strength carefully hoarded a few grains at a time for this supreme effort that faced him now. Strength that was not as strength had used to be, of the body; strength that was of the spirit alone. The spirit, the will to live, to be saved; self-combustive, self-consuming, breathing purest oxygen of its own essence. And when that was gone, no more to replace it, ever.

Though nothing had moved yet but the lids of his eyes, this was the beginning of a journey. A long journey.

For a while he let his body lie inert, as it was. To begin it too soon would be to court interruption and discovery.

There; her step had sounded in the hall, she was coming out of her room. His lids dropped over his eyes, concealing them.

The door opened and he knew she was looking at him. His face wanted to cringe, but he held it steady.

What a long look. Would she never stop looking? What was she thinking? “You are such a long time dying?” Or, “My own love, are you not any better today?” Which was the true thought; which was the true she, and which his false dream of her?

She had entered the room. She was coming toward him.

She was bending over him now, in watchful attention. He could feel the warmth of her breath. He could smell the odor of the violet water she had sprinkled on herself only moments ago and which had scarcely yet dried. Above all, he could feel her eyes almost burning through his skin like a pair of sunray glasses held steady above shavings, to make them scorch and smoke and at last burst into flame. There was that concentration in their steady regard.

He must not stir, he must not flicker.

A sudden weight fell on his heart and nearly stopped it. It was her hand, coming to rest there, trying to see if it was still going. It fluttered like a bird caught under her outspread palm, and if she noted that, she must have thought it erratic and falteringly overexerted. Suddenly her hand left him and he felt her fingers go instead to his eye, to try the reflex of that, perhaps. They gave him warning of their direction, for they brushed the skin there, just below it, a moment too soon. He rolled his pupils upward in their sockets, and a moment later when she had raised one lid and peered, only the sightless white eyeball was revealed.

She took up his hand next and held it perpendicular, from elbow onward, her thumb pressed to its wrist. She was feeling his pulse.

She placed his hand back where she had drawn it from. And though she did not drop it, nor cast it down, yet to him there was somehow only too clearly expressed in the way she did it a fling of disappointment, a shortening of the gesture, as if in annoyance at finding him still alive, no matter by what test she applied.

Her garments whispered in withdrawal, fanned him softly in farewell. A moment later the door closed and she had gone from the room. The wooden stairs sounded off her descending tread, as if knuckles were lightly rapping on them step by step.

Now the flight back to life began.

Fortified by hoarded intensity, the earlier stages of it went well. He threw back the coverings, he forced his body slantingly sideward atop the bed, until it had dropped over the side.

He was now strewn prone on the floor at bedside; he had but to raise himself erect.

He rested a moment. Violent flickering pains, like low-burning log flames licking at the lining of his stomach, assailed him, went up his breathing passage as up a flue, and then died out again into the dull, aching torpor that was with him always and that was at least bearable.

He was on his feet now, and working his way alongside the bed down toward its foot. From there to the chair was an open space, with no support. He let go of the bed’s footrail with a defiant backward fling, cast off into the unsupported area. Two untrammeled steps, a lurch. Two steps more, a third, he was hastening into a fall now. But if he could reach the chair first— He raced the distance to the chair against it, and the chair won. He reached it, gripped it, rocked it; but he stayed up.

He donned his coat, buttoning it over without any shirt below. That was comparatively easy. Trousers too; he managed them by sitting on the chair and drawing them from the floor up.. But the shoes were an almost insuperable difficulty. To bend down to them in the ordinary way was an impossibility; the whole length of his body would have been excruciatingly curved.

He guided them, empty, first, by means of his feet, so that they stood perfectly straight, side by side. Then aimed each foot, one at a time, into the opening of its destined shoe, and wormed it in. But they gaped open, and it was impossible to proceed with them thus without imminent danger of being thrown from one step to the next.

He lay down on the floor, on his side. He scissored his legs, brought one up until he had caught his foot with both hands. There were five buttons on each shoe, but he chose only the topmost one, the most accessible, and forced it through its matching eyelet. Then changing legs, did it with the other.

Now he was erect again, accoutred to go, and there only remained lengthwise progress, over distance, to be accomplished. Only; he said the word over to himself with wistful irony.

Like a sleepwalker, taut at every joint; or like a mariner reeling across a storm-slanted deck, he crossed from chair to room door, and leaned inert there for a moment against its frame. Then softly took the knob in his grasp, and turned it, and held it after it was turned, so that it wouldn’t click in recoil.

The door was open. He stepped through.

An oval window was let into the center of the hallway’s frontal crosswall, to light the stairs and to give an outlook. A curtain of net was fastened taut across its pane.

He reached there, elbowing the wall for support, and put an eye to it, peering hungrily out into life. The curtain, brought so close to the eye’s retina, acted like a filter screen; it dismembered the scene outside into small detached squares, separated by thick corded frames, which were the threads of the curtain, magnified at that short distance.

One square contained a segment of the front walk below, nothing else; all evenly slate-colored it was. The one above, again the walk, but at a greater outward distance now, a triangle of the turf bordering it beginning to cut in at the top, in green. The one still above that, turf and walk in equal proportions, with the white-painted base of one of the gate posts beginning to impinge off in the upper corner. And so on, in tantalizing fragments; but never the world whole, intact.

I want to live again, his heart pleaded; I want to live again out there.

He turned, and let the makeshift be, the quicker to be down below and at the original; and the stairs lay there before him, dropping away like a chasm, a serried cliff. His courage quailed at the sight for a minute, for he knew what they were going to cost. And the distant scrape of her chair in the kitchen below just then, added point to his dismay.

But he could only go onward. To go back was death in itself, death in bed.

He’d reached their tip now, and his eye went down them, all the cascading miles to their bottom. Vertigo assailed him, but he held his ground resolutely, clutching at the newel post with double grip as though it were the staff of life itself.

He knew that he would not be able to go down them upright, as the well did. He would overbalance, topple headfirst for sheer lack of leg support. He therefore lowered his own distance from the ground, first of all. He sat down upon the top step, feet and legs over to the second. He dropped them to the third, then lowered his rump to the second, like a child who cannot walk yet.

As he descended he was drawing nearer, ever nearer to her. For she was down there where he was going.

She sounded so close to him now. Almost, he could see before his very eyes everything she was doing, by the mere sound of it alone.

A busy little tinkering, ending with a tap against a cup rim: that meant she was stirring sugar into her coffee.

A creak from the frame of a chair: that meant that she was leaning forward to drink it.

A second creak: that meant that she had settled back after taking the first swallow.

He could hear bread crust crackle, as she tore apart a roll.

Crumbs lodged in her throat and she coughed. Then leaned forward to clear it with another swallow of her coffee.

And if he could hear her so minutely, how — he asked himself — could she fail to hear him; this stealthy rustling he must be making on the stairs?

He was afraid even to breathe, and he had never needed breath so badly.

At last the bottom, and he could only lie there a minute, rumpled as an empty sack that had fallen down from above, even if it had meant she would come out upon him any instant.

From where he was now there was only a straight line to travel, to the front door. But he knew he could not gain it upright. He had exhausted himself too much by now, spent himself too much on the way. How then gain support? How get there?

Struggling upright, it came to him of its own accord. He rotated his shoulders along the wall, turning now outward, next inward, then outward again, then inward — he rolled himself along beside the wall, and the wall supported him, and thus he did not fall, and yet progressed.

Midway there was an obstacle, to break his alliance with the wall. It was an antlered coatrack, its lower part a seat that extended far out, its upper part a tall thin panel of wood, set with a mirror. It was unsteady by its very nature, its proportions were untrue, he was afraid he would bring it down with him.

He circled his body awkwardly out and around it, holding it steady, so to speak, and got to the other side. But letting it go in safety was harder than claiming its support had been, and for a second or two he was held in a horrid trap there, afraid to take his hands off it, lest the sudden release of weight cause it to back and sway in revealing disturbance.

He took his near hand off it first, still held it on its far side, and that equalized the removal of pressure. Then cautiously he let go of it in the remaining place, and it did nothing but waver soundlessly for a moment or two, and then stilled again.

Safely free of it, he let himself down at last into a submerged huddle, sheltered now by its projection. Out of prostration, out of sheer inability to go on one additional step, and not out of caution, and yet it was that alone that saved him.

For suddenly, without any warning whatever, she had stepped to the kitchen doorway to the hall and was peering upward along the stairs. She even came forward, clambered up a few inquiring steps until she was in a position from which she could hear better, assure herself all was quiet. Then, satisfied, she came down again, turned about rearward, and went back to where she had been.

He removed the mangled length of shirting he had crushed into his mouth to stifle the hard breath that he would otherwise have been incapable of controlling, and it came away a watery pink.

Within moments after that, his lips were pressed flat against the seam of the outer door, in what was not meant for a kiss, but surely was one just the same.

So little was left to be done now, that he felt sure, even if his heart had already stopped beating and his body were already dead and cooling about him, he would still somehow have gone ahead and done it. Not even the laws of Nature could have stopped him now, so close to his goal.

The latch-tongue sucked back softly, and he waited, head still but held forward, to see if that little sound had reached her, would bring her out again. It didn’t.

He pulled, and then, with a swimmingly uncertain motion, the door came away from its frame and an opening stood waiting.

He went through. He staggered forward and fell against the porch post outside, and stayed there inert, letting it hold him.

In a moment he had stumbled down the porch steps.

In another he had lurched the length of the walk, the gate post held him, as if he had fallen athwart it and been pierced through by it.

He was saved.

He was back in life again.

A curious odor filled his nostrils: open air.

A curious balm warmed his head, the nape of his neck: sunlight.

He was out on the public walk now. Swaying there in the white sunlight, his shadow on the ground swaying in accompaniment. Teetering master, teetering shadow. He marked for his own a tree growing at the roadside, a few short yards off.

He went toward it like an infant learning to walk; a grown infant. Short, stocky steps without bending the knees; kicking each foot up, in a stuttering prance; arms straight out before him to clasp the approaching objective. And then fell against its trunk, and embraced it, and clove there.

And then from there on to another tree.

And then another.

But there were no more trees after that. He was marooned.

Two women passed, market baskets over arms, and sodden there, he raised his hand to stay them, so that they might hear him long enough to give him help.

They swerved deftly to avoid him, tilted noses disdainfully in air, and swept on.

“Disgusting, at such an early hour!” he heard one say to the other.

“Time of day’ has no meaning for drunkards!” her companion replied sanctimoniously.

He fell down on one knee, but then got up again, circling about in one place like some sort of a broken-winged bird.

A man going by slowed momentarily, cast him a curious look, and Durand trapped his attention on that one look, took a tottering step toward him, again his hand raised in appeal.

“Will you help me, sir? I’m not well.”

The man’s slackening became a dead halt. “What is it, friend? What ails you?”

“Is there a doctor somewhere near here? I need to see one.”

“There’s one two blocks down that way, that I know of. I came past there just now myself.”

“Will you lend me an arm just down that far? I don’t think I can manage it alone—” The man split at times into two double outlines before his eyes, and then he would cohere again into just one.

The man consulted his pocket watch dubiously. “I’m late already,” he grimaced. “But I can’t refuse you on such a request.” He turned toward him decisively. “Put your weight against me. I’ll see that you get there.”

They trudged painfully along together, Durand leaning angularly against his escort.

Once, Durand peered up overhead momentarily, at what everyone else saw every day.

“How wonderful the world is!” he sighed. “The sun on everything — and yet still enough left to spare.”

The man looked at him strangely, but made no remark.

Presently he stopped, and they were there.

Out of all the houses in that town, or perhaps, out of all the doctors’ houses in that town, it and it alone was not entered at ground level but had its entrance up at second-floor height. A flight of steps, a stoop, ran up to this. This was a new style in dwellings, mushrooming up in all the larger cities in whole blocks at a time, all of chocolate colored stone, and with their slighted first floors no longer called that, but known as “American basements.”

Otherwise he could have been safely inside within a matter of moments after arriving before it.

But the good Samaritan, having brought him this far, at the cost of some ten minutes of his own time, drew a deep breath of private anxiety, took out his watch and scanned it once more, this time with every sign of furrowed apprehension. “I’d like to take you all the way up these,” he confessed, “but I’m a quarter of an hour behind in an appointment I’m to keep, as it is. I don’t suppose you can manage them by yourself— Wait, I’ll run up and sound the bell a moment. Then whoever comes out can help you up the rest of the way—”

He scrambled up, dented the pushbutton, and was down again in an instant.

“Will you be all right,” he said, “if I leave you now?”

“Thank you,” Durand breathed heavily, clinging to the ornamental plinth at bottom of the steps. “Thank you. I’m just resting.”

The man set off at a lumbering run down the street, back along the way they had just come, showing his lack of time to have been no idle excuse.

Durand, alone and helpless again, turned and looked upward toward the door. No one had yet come to open it. His eye traveled sideward to the nearest window, and in the lower corner of that was placed a placard both of them had neglected to read in its entirety.

The half-hour struck from some church belfry in the vicinity. The half-hour before eleven. Half-past ten.

Suddenly two white hands, two soft hands, cupped themselves gently, persuasively, to the slopes of his wasted shoulders, one on each side, from behind, and in a moment more she had insinuated herself around to the front of him, blocking him off from the house, blocking the house off from him.

“Lou! Lou, darling! What is it? What brings you here like this? What are you thinking of — I found the door standing open just now. I found you gone from your bed. I’ve been running through the streets — I saw you standing here, fortunately, from the block below — Lou, how could you do such a thing to me; how could you frighten me like this—?”

A door opened belatedly, somewhere near at hand, but her face was in the way, her face close to his blotted out the whole world.

“Yes?” a woman’s voice said. “Did you wish something?”

She turned her head scarcely at all, the merest inch, to answer: “No, nothing. It was a mistake.”

The door closed sharply, and life closed with it.

“Up,” he breathed. “Up there. Someone — who can help me.”

“Here,” she answered softly. “Here, before you — the only one who can help you.”

He moved weakly to one side to gain clearance, for an ascent he could never have made anyway.

She moved as he did, she stood before him yet.

He moved back again, waveringly.

She moved back again too, she stood before him always.

The waltz resumed, the slow and terrible waltz of death, there on those steps.

“Up,” he pleaded. “Let me go up. The door. Have mercy.”

Her voice was all compassion, she wept with honey. “Come back with me. My love. My poor dear. My husband.” Her eyes too. Her hands, staying him so gently, so gently, he scarcely knew it.

“Be content,” he wept weakly. “You’ve done enough. Give me this one last chance— Don’t take it from me—”

“Do you think I would hurt you? Do you trust a stranger more than you would me? Don’t you believe I love you, at all? Do you really doubt it that much?”

He shook his head bewilderedly. When the body’s strength is spent, the mind’s discernment dulls with it. Black is white and white is black, and the last voice that spoke is the true one.

“You do love me? You do, Bonny? In spite of all?”

“Can you ask that?” Her lips found his, there in broad daylight, in open street. Never was there a tenderer kiss, breathing such abnegation. Light as the wings of moths. “Ask your heart, now,” she whispered. “Ask your heart.”

“I’ve thought such terrible things. Bad dreams they must have been. But they seemed so real at the time. I thought you wanted me out of your way.”

“You thought I was the cause of — your being ill like this?” Gambler to the end. She drew a step aside, the step that he had wanted her to take before. “My arms are here. The door is there above you. Now go to whichever one of us you want the most.”

He took a swaying step toward her, where she now stood. His head fell upon her breast in ineffable surrender. “I am so tired, Bonny. Take me home with you.”

Her breath stirred his hair. “Bonny will take you home.”

She led him down the step, the one step toward salvation that was all he had been able to achieve.

Here and there, about them, the walks, the near one and the far, were dotted with a handful of curious passersby, halted in their tracks to watch the touching little scene, without knowing what it was about.

As he and she turned their way, these, their interest palling, set about resuming their various courses. But she called to one man, the nearest among them, before he could make good his departure.

“Sir! Would you try and find us a carriage? My husband is ill, I must get him home as soon as I can.”

She would have moved a heart of stone. He tipped his hat, he hastened off on his quest. In a moment or two a carriage had come spanking around the lower turn, her envoy riding upright on the outside step.

It drew up and he helped her, supporting Durand on the one side while she, strong for all her diminutive height, sustained him bravely on the other. Between them they led him gently to the carriage, saw him comfortably to rest upon its seat; the stranger having to step up and into it backward, to do this, and then descend again from its opposite side after he had relinquished his hold on him.

She, settling down beside Durand, reached out and placed her own hand briefly atop the back of her anonymous helper’s in accolade of tremulous gratitude. “Thank you, sir. Thank you. I do not know what I should have done without you.”

“No one could do less, madam.” He looked at her compassionately. “And may God be with the two of you.”

“I pray He will,” she answered devoutly as the carriage rolled off.

Behind it, on those same disputed steps, as it receded, a man now stood astraddle, a black bag in his hand, gazing after it with cursory interest, no more. He shrugged in incomprehension and completed his ascent, readying his key to put it to the door.

In the carriage on their brief run homeward no one could have been more solicitous.

“Lean down. Rest your head upon my lap, love. That will ease the jarring of the springs.”

And in a moment, or so it seemed, they were back again at their own door; his long Calvary was undone, gone for nothing. He felt no pang; so complete, so narcoticizing, was the illusion of her love.

The driver, now, was the one to help her getting him down. And then she left him for a moment in his charge at their gate. “Stay here a moment, dear; hold to the post, until I find money to pay him. I came out without my purse, I was in such a fright over you.” She ran in alone, the doorway stood empty for a brief while — (and he missed her, for that moment, he missed her) — then she came back again, still at full run, paid off the driver, took Durand into her sole charge.

Up onto the porch floor, a last receding flicker of the white sunlight draining off their backs, and in. A sweep of her arm, and the door was closed again behind him. Forever? For the last time?

Down the long dim hall, past the antlered hatrack, to the foot of the stairs. Every inch had once cost a drop of blood.

But love enfolded him, held him in its arms, and he didn’t care. Or perhaps it was death already; and at onset of death you don’t care either sometimes.

Then up the stairs a dragging step at a time. Her strength was superb, her will to help him indomitable.

At the landing, as the final turn began, he panted: “Stop here a moment.”

“What is it?”

“Let me look back a moment at our sitting room, before we go up higher. I may never see it again. I want to say goodbye to it.” He pointed with a wavering hand, out over the slanted rail. “See, there’s the table that we sat by, so many evenings, before — this came upon me. See, there’s the lamp, the very same lamp, that I always knew — when I was young and not yet married — would shine upon my wife’s pretty face, just across from me. And it’s shone on yours, Bonny. I thank it for that. Must it never shine on you for me again, Bonny?” His fingertips traced its outline, there against the empty distance that separated it from him. “The lamps of home, the lamps of love, are going out. For me they’ll never shine again. Goodbye—”

“Come,” she said faintly.

Back into the room again; the bier receiving back its dedicated dead.

She helped him to the bed, and eased him back upon it. Then drew up his feet after him. Took off his shoes, his coat, but nothing else. Then brought the covers slowly up and over him, sideward, like a winding sheet.

“Are you comfortable, Lou? Is your bed smooth enough?” She put hand to his brow. “This foolish foray of yours has cost you all your strength.”

His eyes were fixed on her with a strange, melting softness. Like the eyes of a wounded dog, begging its release.

She turned hers away, then irresistibly they were drawn back again. “Why are you looking at me like that, my dear? What are you trying to say?”

He motioned to her with one finger to bend closer.

She inclined her head a little the better to hear what he had to say.

He reached up falteringly and stroked the fringe, the silken blonde bangs that curved before her cool smooth forehead.

Then he struggled higher, onto an elbow, as if cast upward by the ebb tide that was leaving him behind so rapidly.

“I love you, Bonny,” he whispered fiercely. “No other one, no other love. From first to last, from start to finish. And beyond. Beyond, Bonny; do you hear me? Beyond. It will not end. I will, but it will not.”

Her face came nearer still, slowly, uncertainly; like that of one dipping toward a new experience, feeling her way. Something had happened to it, was happening to it; he had never seen it so soft before. It was as if he were seeing another face, never born, peering shyly through the mask that had stifled it all these years; the face that should have been hers, that might have been — but that never had. The face of the soul, before the blasts of the world had altered it beyond recognition.

It came close to his, falteringly, through strange new latitudes of emotion, never traveled before.

There were tears in her eyes. It was no illusion; he saw them.

“Will a little love do, Lou?”

“Any amount.”

“Then there was a moment in which I loved you. And this is it.”

And the kiss, unforced, unsolicited, had all the bitter sweetness, the unattainable yearning, of a love that might have been. And he knew, his heart knew, it was the first she had ever really given him.

“That was enough,” he smiled, content. “That was all I’ve ever wanted.”

Claiming her hand, holding it in his, he fell into an uneasy sleep, a fever oblivion, for a while.

When he awoke, the dregs of daylight were settling in the west, like a fine white ash; the day was past. Her hand was still in his, and she was sitting there, her face toward him. She seemed not to have moved in all those hours, to have endured it, this thing new to her — pain for someone else’s sake — without demur; to have kept her vigil with no company other than the sight of his deathbound face — and whatever thoughts that had brought her.

He released her hand. “Bonny,” he sighed, agonized. “Get me another of those tonics, now. I am ready for it. It’s better — that you do, I think—”

Involuntarily, she drew her head back sharply for a moment. Held her gaze to his. Then at last inclined it again to where it had been before.

“Why do you ask for it now? I haven’t offered it.”

“I’m in pain,” he said simply. “I can’t endure much more of it.” And turned a little this way, then turned a little that. “If not in kindness, then in charity—”

“Later,” she said evasively. “Don’t talk that way, don’t say such things.”

Sweat started out on his face. His breath hissed through his nostrils. “When I did not want them, you urged them on me— Now that I plead with you, you deny me—” He heaved his body upward, then allowed it to fall back again. “Now, Bonny, now; I can’t bear any more. This is as good a time as any. Why wait for the night to be further advanced? Oh, spare me the night, Bonny, spare me the night! It is so long — so dark — so lonely—”

She stood slowly, absently rubbing her frozen hand. Then with even greater slowness moved toward the door. She opened it, then stopped there to look back at him. Then went out.

He heard her going down the stairs. And twice he heard her stop, as though impulse had flagged; and then go on again, as she fanned it back to life once more.

She was gone about ten minutes in all. Ten minutes of hell, while flames licked at him all over.

Then presently the door opened and she had returned. She was carrying it in her hand. She came to him and set it down upon the stand, a little to the side of him, beyond easy reach.

“Don’t— Not yet—” she said in a stifled voice, when he tried to reach for it. “Let it wait a while. A little later will do.”

She lit the lamp, and then went over by the fireplace to fling the match away. Then she remained there by it, looking down into it. He knew she was not looking at anything there was there before her to see; she was in a revery that saw nothing.

His revery, on its part, saw everything. Everything again. Again he waltzed with her at Antoine’s on their wedding night — “A waltz in sunlight, love; in azure, white and gold.” Again her playful query sounded through their marriage door — “Who knocks” “Your husband.” Again she stood revealed against the lighted midnight entryway — “Come into your wife’s bedroom, Louis.” Again they walked the seafront promenade at Biloxi, arm in arm, and the breeze swept off his hat, and she laughed to see him chase it, herself a spinning cyclorama of windswept skirts. Again he raised his arms above her sleeping form to let hundred-dollar bills flutter down upon it. Again—

Again, again, again — for the last time.

The truly cruel part of death is not the end of the body; it is the expiration of all memories.

A bright light, like a hot, flickering, yellow star, burned through the ghostly mesh of his death dreams. He looked over and she was standing sideward to the fireplace, holding a burning brand out-thrust toward it in her hand. Yet not a stick or twig; it was a scroll of tightly furled paper. And as the flame slowly slanted upward toward her hand, she deftly reversed it, taking it now by the charred end that had already been consumed and allowing the other to burn.

Then threw it down at last, and thrusting out her foot, trod upon its remnants here and there and the next place with little pats of finality.

“What are you doing, Bonny?” he whispered feebly.

She did not turn her head, as if it were of no consequence to her whether or not he had seen. “Burning a paper.”

“What paper?”

Her voice had no tone. “A policy of insurance — upon your life — payable for twenty thousand dollars.”

“It was not worth the trouble. It lacked force, I told you that.”

“It was in force again just now. I pledged my ring and made up the payments.”

Suddenly he saw her cover her face with the flats of her hands as if, even after having burned it, she still could not bear the remembered aftersight of it.

He sighed, but without much emotion. “Poor Bonny. Did you want the money that badly? I would have—” He didn’t finish it.

He lay there for a moment or two after that, inert.

“I’d better drink this now,” he said softly, at last.

He strained until his arm could reach the glass. He clasped it, took it up.