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

He was equally insistent. We were both strainedly civil but extremely insistent. “But it isn’t up here, I tell you. It couldn’t be, Annie, don’t you see? If it was, I would have come across it by now myself”

I sighed exasperatedly. “But did you look for it? Did you know it was lost, until I told you so myself just now, here at the door? Then if you didn’t look for it, how do you know it isn’t there?”

“Well, I— I went over the place, I—” He decided not to say that, whatever it was to have been.

“But if you didn’t know what it was that was lost, you couldn’t have had your eye out for it specifically,” I kept on, sugaring my stubbornness with reasonableness. “If you’d only let me step in for a moment and see for myself. ”

I waited.

He waited, for my waiting to end.

I tried another tack. “Oh,” I murmured deprecatingly, turning my head aside, as if to myself, as if in afterthought, “you’re not alone. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. ”

It worked. I saw a livid flash, like the glancing reflection from a sun-blotted mirror, sweep across his face. Just for an instant. If it was fear, and it must have been of a kind, it was a new fear at this point: fear of being misunderstood, and no longer fear of my entering. He stepped back like magic, drawing the door with him.

“You’re mistaken,” he said tersely. “Come in.”

And then as I did, and as he closed the door after me and pressed it sealed with his palm in one or two places, he added, and still quite tautly, “Whatever gave you that idea?” And turned to look the question at me, as well as ask it.

“After all,” I drawled reassuringly, “I’m not anyone’s grandmother.”

This point, however, was evidently of importance to him, for some intangible reason that escaped me. Certainly I’d never detected any trait of primness in him before. “I never was so alone in my life,” he said somewhat crossly. “Even Luthe went out home.”

“I know,” I reminded him. “He left while we were still here.”

I had been thinking mainly of somebody else, not Luthe.

We moved slowly down the gallery I preceding him.

She was gone, just as Jean had said she would be. The door that I had seen slyly closing before, shutting off its escaping beam of light, was standing starkly open now, and the room was dark. It looked gloomy in there, unutterably depressing, at that hour of the night.

“In here, maybe,” I suggested, wickedly. I wasn’t supposed to have been in there.

I heard him draw some sort of a crucial breath.

“No,” he said quite flatly. “You didn’t.”

“I may have, just the same.” I took a step as though to go in.

“No,” he said, tautly, almost shrilly, as though I were getting on his nerves. He reached out before me and drew the door closed in my face.

I glanced at him in mild surprise, at the use of such a sharp tone of voice for such a trifling matter. The look I caught on his face was even more surprising. For a moment, all his good looks were gone. He was ugly in mood and ugly of face.

Then, with an effort, he banished the puckered grimace, let his expression smooth out again. Even tried on a thin smile for size, but it didn’t fit very well and soon dropped off again.

Meanwhile, he’d withdrawn the key and the door was now locked fast.

“Why do you do that?” I asked mildly.

“I always keep it that way,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be left open. Luthe must have done that.”

But Luthe had gone home before we had.

“Well, won’t you let me go in and look at least?” I coaxed. I thought: I still love him, even when his face is all ugly and wizened like that. How strange; I thought it was largely his looks that had me smitten, and now I see that it isn’t.

“But you weren’t in there, so how could it get in there?”

“I was. I was in there once earlier tonight. I don’t know whether you knew it or not, but I strayed in there one time this evening.”

He looked at me, and he looked at the door. “Wasn’t that a breach of manners on your part?” he suggested stiffly.

“There are no manners between a man and woman,” I said. “There are only manners, good or bad, between a man and a man, or a woman and a woman.”

He gave the cryptic answer, “Oh?”

Why do I drive him like this? I wondered. To see how far I can go? To make him fully aware of my being here alone with him? I didn’t know, myself.

We stood and looked at each other for a moment, he waiting for me to make the next move.

“Well, I’ll have to get along without it,” I said. “My key, I mean.”

“Sorry.”

“He wants me to go,” I said, as though speaking ruefully to a third person. “He can’t wait until I do.”

What could he say then? What could anyone have said, except in overt offense? And that, you see, was why I’d said it. Though it was true, my saying so forced him to deny it, obliged him to act in contradiction to it. Though he didn’t want to, and I knew that he didn’t want to, and he knew that I knew that he didn’t want to.

“No,” he said deprecatingly. “No, not at all.” And then warmed gradually to his own insistence; picked up speed with it as he went along. “Come inside. Away from that door.” (As though my departure from a fixed point was now what he wanted to obtain, and if he could obtain it only by having me all the way in, rather than by having me leave, then he’d have me all the way in.) He motioned the way with his arm and he turned to accompany me. And kept up meanwhile the running fire of his invitation at a considerably accelerated tempo, until it ended up by being almost staccato. “Come inside and we’ll have a drink together. Just you and me. Just the two of us alone. As a matter of fact, I need company, this minute.”

On the rebound, I thought. On the rebound; I may get him that way. They say you do. Oh, what do I care how, if only I do.

I went down the steps, and he went down close beside me. His swinging arm grazed mine as we did so, and it did something to me. It was like sticking your elbow into an electrical outlet.

That drawing room of his had never looked vaster and more somber. There was something almost funereal about it, as though there were a corpse embalmed somewhere nearby, and we were about to sit up and keep vigil over it. There was only one lamp lighted, and it was the wrong one. It made great bat-wing shadows around the walls, from the upraised piano lid and other immovables, and now added our own two long, willowy emanations.

He saw me look at it, and said, “I’ll fix that.”

I let him turn on one more, just to take some of the curse off the gruesomeness, but then when I saw him go for the wall switch that would have turned on a blaze overhead I quickly interposed, “Not too many.” You don’t make very good love under a thousand-watt current.

I sat down on the sofa. He made our drinks for us, and then came over with them, and then sat down in the next state.

“No, here,” I said. “My eyesight isn’t that good.”

He grinned and brought his drink over, and we sat half-turned toward each other, like the arms of a parenthesis. A parenthesis that holds nothing in it but blank space.

I saw to it that it soon collapsed of its own emptiness, and one of the arms was tilted rakishly toward the other.

I tongued my drink.

“It was a pretty bad jolt,” I admitted thoughtfully.

“What was?”

“You don’t have to pretend with me.”

“Oh,” he said lamely.

“You’re still pretending,” I chided him. “You’re pretending that you haven’t thought of it, that I’m the one just now brought it back to your mind for the first time. When all along it hasn’t left your mind, not for a single moment since.”