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

I thought of the old Spanish saying, Aqui tiene usted su casa. My house is yours. And it probably was as little valid in the present circumstance as in the original flowery exaggeration.

“But you just came,” the Cipher said. He was only trying to be cordial, the poor benighted soul. He hadn’t stepped aside into that room with us.

Jean and I simply looked at each other. I could almost lip-read what she was about to say before it came out. “She hasn’t far to go.” I nearly died for a minute as I saw her lips give a preliminary flicker. Then she curbed herself. That would have been going too far. I breathed again.

She made her good nights lamely, and yet with a sort of surly defiance. As if to say, I may have lost this skirmish, but I haven’t even begun to fight yet. This was on ground of your choosing; wait till he’s without his allies, and must come looking for me on ground of my own choosing. We’ll see whose flag runs down then.

She even reached out and shook hands with him. Or at least, sought out his, took it up, then dropped it again, all the volition coming from hers.

Oh, really, I protested inwardly. You don’t do that from room to room.

She climbed the steps, she turned galleryward, she passed from view. Tall and voluptuous in her black summer dress, her head held high, her chin out. A little cigarette smoke that had emanated from her on the way lingered behind her for a moment or two. Then that dissolved, too.

And that’s all the trace you leave behind in this world, sometimes: a little cigarette smoke, quickly blown away.

Presently another figure passed the gallery opening, coming from farther back in the apartment, but going the same way she had. Handsome, well-dressed, almost unrecognizable for a moment in his tactfully cut suit and snap-brim hat. There wasn’t a garish detail of attire from head to foot. He would have passed without obtruding himself upon us, but Dwight turned his head.

“Going now?”

“Yes, sir. Good night.” He tipped his hat to the rest of us, and left.

This time you could hear the outside apartment door close after him. Not like the time before.

“Luthe goes home out to Long Island one night a week to visit his mother, and this is his night for it.” He shook his head. “He’s studying law. I wish I lived as quietly and as decently as he does.”

We left soon afterward ourselves.

As we moved down the gallery in leisurely deliberation, I looked ahead. That room that Jean and I had been in before was lighted now, not dark as we had left it. The door was partly ajar, and the light coming from it lay on the floor outside in a pale crosswise bar or stripe.

Then as we neared it, some unseen agency pushed it unobtrusively closed, from the inside. I could see the yellow outshine narrow and snuff out, well before we had reached it.

We were kept waiting for the elevator for some time. Finally, when it appeared, it was being run by a gnarled elderly individual in fireman’s overalls, quite declasse for this building. There was no night doorman on duty below when we got there, either.

“What happened?” Jean asked curiously. “Where’s all the brass?”

“Walked off,” he said. “Wildcat strike. The management fired one of the fellows, and so they all quit. Less’n ’n hour ago. They ain’t nobody at all to run the back elevator. I’m practic’ly running this whole building single-handed, right now. You’ll have to get your own taxi, folks. Can’t leave this car.”

“She stayed,” I breathed desolately, while the Cipher was off in quest of one.

“Just wait till he gets her alone, though,” Jean chuckled. “She’ll have a lot of explaining to do. I’d give anything to hear what’s going on between the two of them right now.”

He was waiting for me, the driver. I’d dropped them off first.

“I’ve lost something. Look, you’ll have to take a run back with me a minute.”

He meshed gears. “To where the other folks got out?”

“No, the first place. Where we all got in.”

I’d lost something. A door-key. Or pride. Or self-respect. Something like that.

“Want me to wait?” he said when we’d arrived.

“No, you’d better let me pay you. I don’t want you clocking me the whole time I’m in there.”

“You may have a wait for another, lady, at this hour.”

He looked me too straight in the eye, I thought. The remark didn’t warrant such a piercing gaze. And he had no need to crinkle the corners of his eyes like that; it gave his glance too familiarly knowing an aspect.

I dropped my own eyes primly. “Keep the rest.”

The same elderly pinch hitter was still servicing the building’s elevators singlehanded. “They ain’t nobody at all looking after the back one,” he complained unasked.

I felt like saying, “You said that before,” but I didn’t.

He took me up without announcing me. I got out and I knocked at Dwight’s door. The car went down and left me alone there.

No one came. I knocked again, more urgently, less tentatively. I tripped the Louis XVI gilt knocker, finally. That carried somewhat better, since it had a metal sounding board, not a wooden one.

Suddenly his voice said, “Who is it?” Too quickly for this last summons to have been the one that brought him; it must have been the first one after all, and he had been waiting there behind the door.

“Annie,” I whispered, as though there were someone else around to overhear.

The door opened, but very grudgingly. Little more than a crevice at first. Then at sight of me, it widened to more normal width. But not full width of passage, for he stood there in the way; simply full width enough to allow unhampered conversation.

He was in a lounging robe. His shirt was tieless above it, and the collar band was unfastened. It had a peculiar effect on me: not the robe nor the lack of tie, simply the undone collar band; it made me feel like a wife.

“Don’t look so stunned. Am I that frightening?” I couldn’t resist saying. “Didn’t you hear me give you my name through the door?”

“No,” he said, “I missed it.” Then he changed that to: “I thought I heard someone whisper, but I wasn’t sure.”

I didn’t quite believe him, somehow. If he’d heard the whisper, then he’d heard the name whispered, I felt sure. I didn’t resent the implication of a fib; quite the contrary. It was complimentary. It allowed me to believe — if I chose to, and I did — that my name effected the opening of the door, that another name would not have been able to. Castles in a foyer.

“Did I get you out of bed?” I said.

He smiled. It was a sort of vacant smile. The smile with which you wait for someone to go away. The smile that you give at a door when you are waiting to close it. Waiting to be allowed to close it, and held powerless by breeding. It had no real candlepower behind it, that smile. “No,” he said, “I was just getting ready, by easy stages.” His face looked very pale, I thought, unnaturally so. I hadn’t noticed it the first moment or two, but I gradually became aware of it now. I thought it must be the wretched foyer light, and I hoped I didn’t look as pale to him as he did to me. I take pallor easily from unsatisfactory lights. The thing to do was to get inside away from it. “It’s my outside door key,” I said. “I can’t get into my house.”

“It couldn’t have been up here,” he said. “I would have — I would have found it myself right after you left.” He gestured helplessly with one hand, in a sort of rotary way. “It must have been in the taxi. Did you look in the taxi?”

The light was the most uncomplimentary thing I’d ever seen. It made him look almost ghastly.

“It wasn’t in the taxi,” I insisted. “I looked and looked. We even picked up the seat cushions.” I waited for him to shift, but he didn’t. “Won’t you let me come in a moment and look?”