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

Then almost in mid-word — hers, not his own — his knees had uncoupled, he was on his feet taking leave of her, and the refreshing little flow of confidence had ended. Mouth still open on an unfinished sentence, she watched him go to the door and open it, with a soothing “Forgive me, my child; I must hurry. There’s an awful lot to do here today.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Lindsey,” she said forlornly, eyes hopeful to the end that he might change his mind and remain.

Just as he closed the door she heard him say, in a tactfully lowered voice to someone who must have remained out there waiting for him: “They must be sent for. She can’t remain here alone like this.”

He returned in about two hours’ time — or perhaps it was even three; her standards of time were all awry now — and now there was another man with him. He opened the door on the concluding words of something they had just finished discussing, and she caught the tail-end of it. “—might be better, as you say. The sight of it might frighten her.” He entered alone first; the second person lingered outside the door an additional moment or two. She had a vague impression, she didn’t know why, that he was disencumbering himself of something. She even glimpsed a stiffly outthrust arm for an instant, held as when one shucks a sleeve off it.

Then the other man came in at last. He was older than Mr. Lindsey. He could almost have been her Grandpa, if her Grandpa had still been alive. He came in smoothing down his mop of snowy-white hair, as if he had just finished removing something from his head. His attire was incomplete almost to the point of freakishness. She had never seen anyone dressed like that before, except in their own home. He had on dark-blue trousers, an undershirt with elbow-length sleeves, suspenders over this, and pinned to the undershirt as one would wear a medal, some sort of a shield or badge. Still, everything was so unreal to her now, so strange, that this one little bit of added strangeness held no meaning, glided by her almost unnoted.

He seated himself and promptly began to talk to her. Mr. Lindsey remained standing in the background, attentive but taking no part.

Like Mr. Lindsey, his whole conversation was in the form of questions. Unlike Mr. Lindsey, they were all about Johnny, not herself. About his family, about where he had come from, about how long she had known him. She found it very difficult to talk to him, mainly because the subject-matter held so much pain in it for her. It hadn’t been painful to talk about herself; it was painful to talk about Johnny. And some of the questions were so extremely private, that she could scarcely answer them at all. Questions such as only her own mother would have asked her — and even she had not. Did she know whether he had gone with girls at all before their engagement?

“I don’t know. I think he must have. All boys do.” And then, completely unsure of herself, she in turn transtormed it into a question. “Don’t they?”

Had she any way of knowing whether he had ever kissed any girl, before he had kissed her?

Her eyes pleaded with Mr. Lindsey over her interlocutor’s shoulder, and his in turn tried to reassure her.

Her face felt warm and her voice was low. “He told me — when we first did — he never had before.”

“Did he tell you why?”

He had to lean forward to catch the whispered thread of sound. “He said he never liked anyone — enough to — until he knew me.”

Then at last he let her be, and rose, and went and stood beside Mr. Lindsey, and they spoke together for a long while. She could hear some of it, but it held little meaning for her. It seemed to be on some general topic, rather than on herself and Johnny. One of those dry general topics, like politics, that grown-up men always seemed to discuss when they got together.

“Too little general education on the subject. Everything’s kept hushed up, in this day and age of ours—”

“But you can’t shout those things out loud,” protested Mr. Lindsey.

“The girls grow up knowing nothing, and half of the boys grow up and what little they know is wrong, all wrong. Then we throw them at each other’s heads, and many times this is what happens.”

“But I’m a married man myself,” she heard Mr. Lindsey tell him. “And I don’t think anyone knew less than I did when I got married, and yet my marriage has turned out very happily.”

“Don’t doubt it,” said the other man obdurately. “But it’s still blind luck. Other things enter into it too. If a boy is brought up in a strict, religious household, and trained to believe all that is sinful — then his conscience will trouble him about it later on. The more decent the boy, the more his conscience will trouble him. You can’t break away from your early training, you know. Never altogether. And I think something like that is what’s at the bottom of this. I think this boy ran away because he loved her, not because he didn’t love her. He wanted to keep himself from doing something that he thought was sinful to her—”

Now they were talking about Johnny himself, she could tell. “Johnny wouldn’t have done anything that was sinful to me,” she wanted to say, but she couldn’t, she was too ashamed. She covered up her reddened face with both her hands, and tried to hide it.

For the first time the other man turned and glanced over to her. “He certainly wasn’t waylaid, or it would have been reported to us by this time. The same if he’d been injured in an accident. That leaves just this, what we’ve been discussing, and one other possibility — which I don’t think is very likely at his age. A sudden complete loss of memory. I’m not a doctor, so I can’t think what they call it. But there is such a thing; very rare though. Anyway, if it were that, I think he would have come to us of his own accord for help by now. We’ll keep looking — and waiting — and I’m afraid that’s all we can do. What’d you say his name was, again?” He moved toward the dresser, where the billfold lay, and reached out a hand toward it.

She sprang up with a quickness they hadn’t known she was capable of, and lunged between him and the dresser like the sideward thrust of a knife, shielding it — the billfold — with her back. Or rather, shielding its exact position, for this was fetishism, though the word had not been born yet.

“No,” she pleaded wildly, “don’t touch it! Don’t move it! It’s right where his fingers left it, right in the exact place. If it stays there, then he’ll come back. If you move it, then he never will.”

The man gave Mr. Lindsey a look and withdrew his seeking hand.

She turned and let her own fingers hover lovingly above the article, without, however, touching it. “His hand was the last one touched it,” she said. “His hand put it down right here. It’s like a magic spell, and it mustn’t be broken.” She gestured as if patting the air above it. “It means that he’ll come back.”

“Did he go out without his tie too?” the man asked, noticing the necktie placed neatly folded beside it.

“No, that was the one he put out to wear for tomorrow.” She stopped a moment, thought about it, pensively stroking her cheek with just two fingers. “But now tomorrow’s yesterday.” She turned to him bewilderedly, as if seeking his help. “Oh, what happened to tomorrow? Who took it away?” And turned to look, as if seeking it about the four corners of the room. “Who took tomorrow away?” And even took him by the sleeve and tugged at it repeatedly, like a small child demanding an answer to its question. “It was there. It was to have come. It never did. Yet now it’s gone. Who took it? Who?”

A thin haze of grayish smoke seemed to begin rising all about, until she couldn’t see him clearly any longer, nor Mr. Lindsey, nor the room itself. It didn’t make her cough, though, like real smoke does. Just hampered her vision. The floor tipped up and nudged her knees. It didn’t hurt though. She put her palms against it, to keep it from her face.