Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

He only stopped a moment; you could hardly notice it. Then he didn’t go back over the first part again. He only said “—retiring.”

“I guess we better,” she assented.

He got off the arm of the chair.

Then he said, “I guess I better go downstairs a minute — first.” Somebody must have told him this was the considerate thing to do. Maybe his father, maybe one of his friends.

“All right,” she said tractably.

She had stood up, too, now.

He came close and he kissed her.

His face didn’t have the handsome regularity of a Greek statue. But a Greek statue couldn’t smile, couldn’t show light in its eyes.

He went nearly as far as the door, but not quite.

Then he touched his pockets exploratively. His wallet, with his — their — money in it.

“I don’t need this,” he said. “I’ll leave it up here.”

He went over and he put it on the dresser-top. Not too far from where the necktie was, tomorrow’s necktie.

Then he did go to the door, all the way this time.

And he turned and looked at her so tenderly, so softly, that the look was a caress in itself. With just a touch of rue in it.

“Are you afraid?” he said.

“You mean now, about your going downstairs awhile?”

“No, I mean after — when I come back again.”

She dropped her eyes only momentarily. Then she quickly raised them again, and they looked directly into his, candidly and confidently. “No, because I know you love me. And even if part of love is strange, if the rest of it is good, then all of it has to be good. And soon there are no different parts to it, it is all just one love. Those are the words my mother told me, when she kissed me good-bye.”

“I love you,” he said, as devoutly as when you’re in a church saying a prayer meant only for God and yourself to hear. “So don’t be afraid.” Then he said only one thing more. “I’ll be back in just a little bit.”

Then he closed the door. But for a minute or two his face seemed to glow there where it had been. Then it slowly wore thin, and the light it had made went away.

Like the illusion of love itself does.

In a prim little flurry now she started disrobing. Intent on having it complete before she should be interrupted.

At the moment of passing from chemise to nightrobe, quite instinctively and without knowing she did it, she briefly closed her eyes. Then as the gown rippled downward to the floor, she opened them again. It was not, she had learned or been cautioned when still quite a little girl, nice to scrutinize your own body when it was unclothed. The gown was batiste, a trousseau gown, with eyelet embroidery and a bertha — that is to say, an ample capelike flap covering both shoulders; it was bluish in the shadow’s where it fell hollowed, pink where her body touched against it, but its actual color was snowy-white.

She had always brushed her hair before retiring. She did it now, for there was something comforting about the sense of normalcy it gave to do it; it was like something familiar to cling to in an eddy of imminent strangeness. She counted each stroke to herself, up to fifty; she longed to go past there, up to a hundred, for it would have seemed to help to arrest time, not allow it to go forward, but she conscientiously curbed herself and refrained.

Then she gave a look around the room, inquiringly and still with that flurried intensity. There was nothing left to do now, no remaining detail unattended.

She went to the bed, turned her back to it, and entered it.

She drew the covers up tightly about one shoulder — the other was turned inward to the pillow.

She gave a little sigh, of finality, of satisfaction, of when there is utterly nothing left to do and one is content there isn’t.

Her eyes remained fixed on the door. Not in a hard stare, but in soft expectancy. Nothing tenderer in this world, the eyes of youth looking for its love.

It tires you to look too long at any one object, no matter how gently. Her eyes left the door at last, and went over to the window. That didn’t hold them nearly as long, for there was nothing to be expected of it. Love wouldn’t enter through there. Then they went to the chair. There she made a discovery that cried for immediate reparation. One lace-cuffed leg-opening of her foreshortened pantaloons was hanging down in full, indelicate sight, escaping perversely from under everything else. It must have freed itself later, for she had painstakingly folded that particular article scrupulously from sight; it was the one thing of all she wished to have remain unnoticed.

“Will I have time to get over there and back before—?” she asked herself, appalled.

But it couldn’t be allowed to remain that way; it was more than indelicate, it was almost brazen, rakish, the way it flaunted itself.

She suddenly braved the risk. The covers flew back, she gave a sprightly little vault out of the bed, reached the chair, interred the offending garment, and returned to the bed. The way a child steals from its bed for a moment and scrambles back again undetected by its parents.

Reinstated, again she watched the door.

Now this time it was her hands that tired first, and not her eyes. They tightened in their hold of one another. Soon they grew taut, almost strained; were crushing against one another. She straightened them out. Almost at once they crept toward one another again, crooked, interlocked; clung desperately together, as though each without the other would die.

At last she took them away from one another altogether, seeing she could do nothing with them. One sought out her hair, and nervously felt at it here and there to see if it was in order. It was left, for that matter, in less order than it had been at first. The other sought the shoulder of her gown and twisted that about a little.

Perhaps he was standing just outside the door, uncertain whether to come in. Perhaps young men had trepidations at such a delicate time as this, just as she — just as girls — did. Perhaps if she were to go to the door, open it, that would resolve his irresolution for him.

The decision to go to the door, open it and look out, far more daring than the sortie to the chair had been, grew on her for many minutes before she found the courage to carry it out. At last, pinning her underlip beneath her teeth as if to steel herself to the act, she emerged from the bed once more. Because this was a door, and outside was a public corridor, she put on her wrapper first and gathered it tight. Then she went over to it, the door, and stood there by it, summoning up fresh reserves of courage, sorely needed. She put her hand out gingerly toward the knob, the way you reach for something very hot that you’re afraid will bum you.

Then she hesitated there like that, hand on knob.

If he didn’t discover her in the act of doing this, she wouldn’t tell him — later — that she had done it. It smacked a little too much of boldness, or, what was equally as bad, impatience.

Now she touched the door with her other hand, and inclined her head closer toward it, as if trying not so much to listen but rather to divine by some other subtle sense whether he was present there on the other side of it — or not.

She opened the door and looked, and he wasn’t; it was empty there on the other side.

She sighed, and the attentive forward-lean her body had taken relapsed into a backward inert slump of disappointment.

Perhaps he was further down the corridor, walking to and—? She tightened further her already tightened wrapper, and like an aerialist walking on a single wire, advanced through the door-opening and out to the corridor proper, one foot keeping in a straight line behind the other.

It was empty from end to end. Just carpeting, and light bulbs looking so lonely against the wall, like forgotten little orphan suns. She remembered the hall from before, from when they’d first come in, but it hadn’t looked so lonely then. Maybe because she hadn’t been so lonely then either.