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

He said, “You’d better put up the light, for your own sake.”

When she turned the switch, he was smiling, even though he couldn’t see light.

“Is it late?” he asked her.

“Later than it should be,” she said contritely. “Even night they keep me overtime.”

“I know this clock by heart, I’m at it so much. I listen to it with my fingers every ten minutes. We talk to each other, the little clock and I. True. I say to it, ‘Will she be here soon?’ It answers me, ‘Tikk.’ That’s yes. I say to it, ‘Isn’t she perhaps already coming along the street down there?’ It answers me, ‘Tokk.’ That’s maybe. Those are the only two words it has, yes and maybe. It never says No. We’re great companions in the dark, we two. Or I say to it. ‘Are you lonely too, as I am?’ It answers me, ‘Tikk.’ Yes. That’s a great advantage; when two are lonely together, then each one is not as lonely as he would be separately. I say to it, ‘Is there a little girl-clock somewhere you too are waiting for?’ It says shyly, ‘Tokk.’ Maybe. But I put my finger to it and I can hear its little heart going inside, so I know the answer, it doesn’t have to tell me. Beating for someone else, like mine is.”

She knuckled the outside corner of her eye, and it shone there after her finger left. She picked the clock up in her turn. “It’s been kind to you,” she murmured. “I thank it for that, I love it for that.” She drew the short hand of the hours completely around the dial twice, then left it there two hours from where it had been. Two hours, stolen each night, put back again each day. “It’s been kind to you,” she said again. “I know that.” And put her lips briefly to the rounded rim of it, before she set it down again.

She took down from the shelf a small tin cannister and took off its lid. Then from her stocking-top she took out money, and put it in there.

He heard her. “They paid you tonight at the factory?”

“Yes,” she said softly, with a shudder.

“It was getting very empty in there, wasn’t it?” he told her commiseratingly.

“Very,” she said with a sort of dulled desolation. “Did you—?”

“Yes, I shook it once, when you were out of here. I knew you were worried. I had heard you pick it up and put it down, twice, but without opening it.”

She took out three buttons and a metal washer, hid them away before reclosing it and putting it back on the shelf. “It’s all right now,” she said quietly. “Bread, and the little sausages, a bottle of red with the meals, maybe even a pack of Caporals for you—” Her voice trailed off into melancholy silence.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me?” he said. He was leaning forward, his face held up, trying to find her. “That’s been part of the wait too. As much as the silence.”

She winced. “I will,” she promised. “In just a little minute. First let me—” She went to the wash-basin, poured a little water, dipped her hand into it. Then with the back of it she scoured her mouth, rubbing at it over, and over, and over again, as though there were not enough water in the whole world to ever get it clean again.

Then she went to him, got to her knees, and their lips blended together.

“Why are there drops on your cheeks like that?” he whispered after a while.

“That’s water from the basin. You heard me at it. My face gets grubby — from the factory.”

“But we have only cold water — and these are warm.”

“Is the loneliness over, now?”

“I can’t remember, what was it like?”

Kneeling there, her head inclined against the crook of his arm, at rest at last, while his fingers, each one a pair of lips that softly, devoutly kissed, lightly traced and stroked her hair. The terrible oneness of despair; yet the unalterable apartness — even of love.

“A cigarette?”

“We’re together now, we’re two: I don’t need any third thing, that’s for the empty hours.”

“Did the little boy from downstairs come and take you out as usual?”

“He found a nice bench for me, overlooking the Porte-Vieux. I sat there two hours in the sun. Then he came by and brought me home once more.”

“It’s kind of him.”

“He told me his older sister works at the same factory you do. She hasn’t seen you there in over a month.”

Her eyes closed. When she opened them, they held a secret trouble, like mist clouding a mirror.

“She works days,” she said quietly. “I’m on the night-shift. They transferred me about a month ago. You know that. Some they let out altogether, but I was lucky, I guess—” Her voice died, just the lips moved; “—I work nights now.”

His fingertips kissed the softness of her hair, over and over.

Her voice came back again, barely alive. “Don’t talk to the other people in the house. They may say something to hurt you. I don’t want them to hurt you.”

“No one exists for me but you. They’re just footsteps I pass on the stairs. Footsteps without faces.”

His fingers explored her face, like mirrors showing her to his heart. The forehead, the checks, the turn of her chin. After a while he said, “You haven’t changed. You’re still the same, as that last time I looked at you. Before it happened to me, before the light went out.”

“Everything changes. Everything must. Only one thing never changes, never does. Love. The love never changes that is all, but the one who loves — even she changes.”

“Not you. You’ll always be as you were in those happier days, in the beginning. When I was a brand-new husband, and you were a brand-new wife. When we had the little house. And I’d come back, and you’d meet me out in the garden, holding flowers in your arms. So fresh and clean-looking, so steadfast, so true.”

Her lips parted spasmodically, as when something suddenly hurts. “Not those words,” she begged almost inaudibly. “Some others — any others — gay, beautiful — not those.”

“But it was that about you, always that, more than anything else. You were not the most beautiful girl in the world. A red crayon at the mouth, a black one at the eyes, can make that. You were the freshest-looking, the most unspoiled — what other word can I use? — the cleanest thing that ever walked the earth. The truest. The—”

“Not that word,” she moaned. “Don’t—”

“Clean as sunlight on dew. Clean as a crystal waterfall cascading into a rock-pool. When you came into a room, the April breeze came in with you. Clover came in with you. So clean, so true, so honest — the girl my love was, the girl my love is.”

She didn’t move a muscle. Thrice-stricken, even the death-stroke caused no tremor as it penetrated, found and killed her. And yet he knew, he sensed. “What is it? There’s a tension I get all at once — you’re so still, almost you don’t breathe — vibrations of distress, pulsing at me, beating at me—” Ah, the heart is so smart. Smarter than books. Smarter than looks, and the eyes that can give them.

Suddenly she sidled downward to the floor, toppled, crumpled. As when a man has had a sack of meal propped against him, but neglected to clasp it tight enough to him, and it leans over of its own weight and then trundles downhill in an ebbing fluctuation. The coiled arm whose fingers had been prizing her hair was left with nothing to caress.

She was prone like a low-crouched animal, on knees and flats of hands, head bowed so that her hair touched the floor. Then with an awkward scuttling motion, like something maimed that cannot free its extremities, she turned and began to pull herself away from him, on padding palms and inching legs. The moribund do not rise, the dying do not walk on upright legs.