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

The clothes still seemed warm as they enfolded her, in spite of the wind and the drops of rain, so recently had they been on another’s body. The aura was of other blood, other flesh; those were gone now, the aura still remained, trapped now a second time, mingling with her own, perhaps overcoming it.

In a few moments, walking very slowly but without a backward glance, she was recrossing the bridge. Then through the tunnel, straw-soled Basque sandals making no noise.

In the tunnel, her mind kept rehearsing its intentions, at first clearly defined, then gradually becoming less so, more and more blurred, indefinable, finally almost meaningless. Thus:

“I’m going straight back to the casino...

“I’m going back to...

“I’m going home to...

“Home to our place.” Chez nous.

The storm had evidently been an abortion. Or had been carried swiftly onward to burst somewhere else. No more drops fell. The sky-flashes became weaker, less frequent. The moon steadied to a greater clarity, ridding itself of the woolly mists that had soil-focussed it.

Under the tamarisks she stopped, and stood with her back to the stone parapet that began from that point on. Just stood there like that, ankles crossed, body sagging in an inert curve. “Just one more try,” something seemed to be saying to her. “One more try.” She opened a battered little mock-leather handbag that had been pressed under her armpit until now, and without looking down into it, took out a loose cigarette that she had known would be lying at the bottom of it. This had been about a quarter-consumed; one end was charred. She ignited it with a match, drew a single inhalation from it, then thriftily rubbed it out again against the stone of the parapet, and carefully deposited it back inside the handbag.

In a little while a man came along. He wore the loose blue smock of the Basques, a beret pulled low above his eyes, coiled net looped about his shoulder. A fisherman on his way to the Porte-Vieux to catch the early tide in his little boat.

She waited until he was directly opposite her. “Evening to you,” she piped in a squeaky sing-song, absolutely without inflection and as mechanically as when a phrase has been repeated so often it has lost all meaning.

He didn’t even turn his head to look. “Not to you,” he said curtly. “Clear out.”

She stayed on there after he had passed from sight. She took out the charred cigarette-stump once more, relit it, took a single frugal pull, then put it out and put it away again.

After a while another man came along; this one French, judging by the way he was dressed, not a Basquais. “Evening to you,” she sing-songed again.

He halted, looked at her inquiringly. “Oh, it’s you. We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

“Are you in a hurry?”

“I have a minute or two to spare, if you have,” he said patronizingly.

She detached herself from the parapet and joined him, and they went on together side by side. At the Place de I’Atalaye they turned off onto a sharply downgrade side-street and followed that back into the town. The town that lived there during all four seasons, and not just one. The town that worked hard and earned little. The town that had nothing to do with the casino.

She halted at the mouth of an alley, a mere crevice between two walls, and disappeared into it. On the wall alongside it the tattered remnants of a cinema-poster proclaimed fuzzily: Jeux Interdits.

The man who had walked here with her hesitated just long enough to reach into his hip-pocket for his billfold, transfer it with precautionary foresight to his inside coat-pocket, and button his coat down over it; then he too entered the cranny.

She came out again presently, and turned a heedless shoulder to the impotent warning, Jeux Interdits, still up there on the wall, and went on down the rest of the way, alone, without anyone, to the Rue Mazagran, the main shopping and business street. Behind her, footsteps died away in the opposite direction, but she did not turn her head.

Mazagran was still fully lighted, but there was no one on it and the corrugated iron shutters were down over all of the shop-windows. She turned toward the right, without hesitation, as though there were no other way for her to turn, and walked along rapidly now; the gait of someone who has a destination now, who no longer loiters and ambles.

Then suddenly she stopped short, and cringed defensively, and made a faltering move to turn and slink back the other way. There was a policeman watchfully ensconced against the buildings just a little ahead of her. It was too late, he had already seen her.

He knifed a peremptory finger at her. Then, standing his ground, made her come to him, instead of going to her himself.

“Keep off these main streets. I’ve told you girls that before. Do your hustling along the seafront-walks, where there aren’t so many lights.”

“I’ve knocked off. I’m on my way home now, that’s all, capitaine,” she said submissively.

She pointed. “Down there. Right past the next corner.”

“Yes,” he admitted thoughtfully, “that’s what you told me the last time too.” He gave an overarm pitch of the thumb. “All right, move on. If I catch you here again, I’ll run you in.”

She scuttled off with a breathlessly obsequious, “Much obliged, capitaine.” She didn’t look back. She knew he was watching her and she was afraid he might resent it, if she did, and cancel her reprieve.

When she came to the door, she knew it was the right one. She did not in fact even look at it to see which one it was, just knew it was the right one and went in. Quietly up wooden stairs, then, one flight, two, then three, until there weren’t any more. Past the doors of little flats, little lodgings, these doors all alike as well. Again she knew which one to go to, which ones not. Her eyes didn’t tell her this, it came from somewhere in her mind. Yesterday’s mind, and yesterday’s, and yesterday’s.

She opened the shabby bag, and knew there was a key in it, and there was. She took it out. Then she leaned her forehead against the door-frame, and pressed it there, and let it rest there. Not lack of breath from the stairs, not weariness from the long night behind her, but some kind of mournful penance, seeking to find alleviation, not knowing where to look for it.

At last she put the key quietly into the door. It belonged there, it turned the lock. She opened the door softly, and the room before her was dark. With her hand behind her back, she closed the door again. She stood there. The room was dark and the room was still, but somehow she waited to hear a voice.

It came. It breathed just one word. Sighed it, with inexpressible content. “At last.” Enfin. So small a sound, so short a word, to hold so much within it. A thousand hours of loneliness, a thousand hours of waiting, a thousand hours of being in the dark without a light. That was in it, all that.

She was cold, and it warmed her. She was unwanted, and it claimed her for its own. She was an outcast, and it gave her someone to belong to. For this the night had spent its terrible course. For this her feet had trudged the slime, her heart had rolled along the gutters. Just one word. Enfin. The compressed eloquence of love.

She too said just one word. “Back again.” Revenue. What more was there to say? It said so much already. The girl coming back to her man, that was in it. The woman coming back to her husband, that was in it. The mother coming back to her child, something of that was within it too.

He said, “You stood outside there a minute or two, before you came in. What was it?”

Even that he knew. The eyes of the heart, that can see so much more clearly than those of the head. “No, nothing,” She said. “The stairs. My breath.”