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

“No it isn’t!” cried the countess fervently. She was beside the other woman now, crouched in her intensity, knees clipping toward the floor. She caught her hand with both her own, suddenly bent her head and pressed her lips to it. Then looked up again, her face ecstatic as that of a child expecting candy to drop into her mouth. “You have helped me after all, my clear friend,” she breathed rapturously. “You have helped me after all.”

All the consultant said, cynically, was, “Have I?”

No withdrawal-symptoms of any narcotic-addict could have exceeded what she was now enduring. The caged-beast paring back and forth the length of the room, that had been going on for hours. The walk to nowhere, the walk of the damned.

No going to the casino tonight, no playing tonight.

The mirror, as she passed it to and fro, gave her back a glimpse of the spreading white gown that she’d had on there last night. She had it on again tonight. It was about the only thing she had left, everything else had been sold. No use to go there in it. Everything belonging to her doomed her to failure, the mystic had said.

When it had been new and she had first bought it, the designer who had made it had proudly told her it was called “Adieu Sagesse.” It had been well-named, she said to herself bitterly; well-named, all tight.

Unable to stand it any longer, she picked up a shawl, gave it a twist about her shoulders, and, like a fever-patient with a burning skin, a panting thirst, left the room to seek out the cool dark of the open, the refreshing feel of wind coming off the sea.

The last belated lovers were strolling back arm in arm from the direction of the Rock of the Virgin when she came out on the esplanade. She turned that way herself, a forlorn figure walking slowly, morosely along, arms embracing one another as if warding something off. The night was blowy, and the moon, struggling through fast-running mist that streamed across it, was like a half-erased chalk-sworl on some gigantic blackboard. The sea was like a vast expanse of boiling tar. Each time the revolving eye of the lighthouse caught her in its revealing beam, the white of her dress blazed a spurious blue it had never been in daylight, only to die down into blurred grayness again a moment later.

The esplanade, curving around until nearly the whole town lay like a jewelled tiara at the water’s edge behind her, and rising steadily as it went along, reached a promontory and turned in again toward the left. Now one by one the lights dropped out of sight, until Biarritz lay hidden from her. There was a brief glimpse of it again as she passed the Place Sainte-Eugénie, with its empty concert-kiosk and its middle-income-class boarding-houses and sidewalk-cafés. From one of these, emitted through an amplifier above its stacked chairs and deserted tables, came the thin strains of “Adios Muchachos.”

She half-turned her head toward the sound, in oblique acknowledgement of its appropriateness to herself.

Along the deserted Boulevard des Tamaris then, with rows of tamarisk trees like gnarled old men lifting despairing, writhing arms to heaven, now on this side, now on that, as though praying over her as she walked along below. Over in the west a flash of sheet-lightning flooded the horizon for an instant. Unhesitatingly (for what had she to fear except the spinning wheels of chance?) she passed through the long black tunnel piercing the overhanging rock, and emerged again onto the round flat Esplanade de la Vierge, with its memorial to the half-forgotten dead of the all-forgotten war. That other one, the one before the last. To her left the coastline turned south again, to sweep past Guethary, Bidart, St. Jean de Luz, Hendaye, until at last it became Spain. That white pin-point of light far away down there, visible from here, was the lighthouse of San Sebastian. But before her, jutting straight out into the ocean, was a succession of large tortured rocks, the nearest one, the famous Rock of the Virgin, linked to the mainland by a slender white bridge that seemed to sway with each inrushing, white-scalloped wave below it. Toward this she turned her steps.

Another noiseless tinsel flash paled the sky, nearer this

The wind, seeking her out around the corner of the rock, whipped her white skirt around her as though it were trying to apply a tourniquet to her legs. When she had passed over the exposed bridge and gained the shelter of the forward rock, it stopped again as suddenly, and all was calm. She halted on the hollowed-out amphitheatre cut into one side of it, and looked up at the dim statue above her, the Virgin of the Rock, with an iron railing about its feet and streamers of fast-moving mist veiling its head.

Looked, but nothing more than that, for she had not come here to pray.

“Good evening, Holy Lady,” she greeted Her gravely in her mind. “Forgive me for intruding upon You. You wouldn’t understand what ails me.”

A momentary flood of silver revealed the serene stone eyes; they were directed, as she had somehow known they would be, out over her head, into a greater distance, missing her entirely. The splashing silver drained off into the churning sea below. The beat of a huge drum filled the air. A few heavy drops came down, then stopped again.

Something soft brushed against the side of her leg, lay motionless at her feet, as though it had rolled down the rock from the base of the statue. Her brief scream of nervous shock was lost in the pounding, droning air. Her foot, unaided, had identified it long before her eyes could. An article of clothing, someone’s discarded garment, adhering to her almost suctionally by wind-action alone. Her arm reached down to free it, draw it up. Another came down, smaller. And then another still.

Someone, something alive, was up there, perhaps on the seaward side of the rock, around at the statue’s back.

And then she saw her. A blinding flash, like quicksilver in the sun, revealed her. A woman, hair flying angrily, the pristine outlines of her body completely unaltered by any draped line, standing upright, on the rock but lower than the statue, facing the other way, outward to the sea, the night, and her own little private eternity. She had her arms up, desperately holding her head in her agony; turning it tormentedly first to one side, then to the other, then back again, as though there were no relief in any direction. Any direction but one.

She, below, could not have saved her even if she had tried. And she did not try. Each one must die. Each one must die in his own way. And above all, each one must die alone. In death, there are not two, there is only one.

The last thing she saw her do was make the sign of the cross. The darkness came down again. When another Hash from above had lit up the rock, there was no longer anyone on it. A distant scream, borne upward from below in all that surging and elemental noise, was only an echo of what had once been a life.

And then there were the clothes. Successive flashes showed her the remainder, still undislodged, neatly piled on the slope of the rock. She had but to go in closer, past the iron guard-tailing; had but to raise an arm, perhaps take one step upward on some supporting ledge, to achieve them. As she did this, she knew already why she did this, what her purpose was in doing it.

Her mind instructed: “To go back to the casino. It is still open. I’ll still have time. This is what she meant, not the other. This is being somebody else, intact, complete. The other was just buying scattered bits of clothing. It was still I doing the buying — for me.”

Suddenly, back curved to the rock, she was as completely divested as the woman above had been just now. No thought whatever of the outrageousness of what she was doing, stripping like some small child in a public place, even though it was late, and dark, and completely deserted.