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

“My word of honor. Some car or other broke down and created a bottleneck right in the middle of—”

She turned her head aside as if to point up the fact that it wasn’t even worth listening to. Then turned back to him again. “There was no traffic once,” she said drily. “It is only now that there is traffic.”

They blended into the party together.

Presently they got together again, in a small lobby or lounge linking two of the larger rooms. He had seen her enter it, and, detaching himself, went in there after her.

“Aren’t you going to let me show you the little gift I brought you?” he asked as he joined her.

She unwrapped the tissue-paper, opened a small oblong box.

He had very good taste, she reflected, that was one thing about him. Taste; you either had it or you didn’t have it, it came with you, it couldn’t be acquired. And by the time he was Boniface’s age, he was going to be a vastly cultivated man.

And I too have good taste, her thoughts went on. I picked well. The one time there was to pick. She put it that way because she knew there would never be another choice made the rest of her life. This once and never again.

He was watching her. She was being purposely casual about it.

“It doesn’t please you,” he said quizzically.

“It pleases me—”

“But the donor doesn’t,” he finished for her.

She raised her brows at him coolly, as if to say: Should he? What does he expect?

“And how was Lyon?” she asked.

He gave a slight hitch to one shoulder. “It was a business-trip. You know how those things are.” He stopped very briefly, almost unnoticeably. Then he said, “It was Toulouse, not Lyon.”

“It is just as well to remember where one has said one was going in the first place,” she concurred. “Even if it takes a minute or two longer.”

He clapped himself dismayedly in the center of the forehead with the heel of his hand. “Oh, my God, Fab! Now you don’t even believe that.”

“Boniface and I were coming back from dinner at the Duprez’, one night well over a week ago, and we drove past your house.”

“And?” was all he said to that.

“The windows of your flat were lighted up.”

“Since when does my street lie along the shortest way home between the Duprez’ and your place?” he came back at her.

“It was I who suggested to Boniface we make a detour and go through there,” she admitted imperturbably.

“There it is,” was his comment to that. The almost-untranslatable “ voilà .”

“Boniface saw me looking up and said, ‘Gilles must have come back sooner than you expected him to.’ ” And she reproached him, with that complete objectivity only the French can bring to bear on matters of love, “Imagine how I felt, to be humiliated like that in front of my own husband! What must he have thought? ‘She can’t even hold on to her chosen friend.’ ”

“The concierge must have gone up there to clean. Or maybe to repair something.”

“At that hour of the night?” She uttered a laugh as cutting as a broken sliver of glass. “You’re not even plausible.”

The small but expert group of musicians she had engaged struck up an American dance-tune (but almost all dance-tunes were American, anyway) called “It’s All in the Game.” Like two people who in the middle of a dispute obey their motor-reflexes without realizing what they are doing, they fell into dance position and automatically moved out into the dancing-space.

A vocalist, obviously non-American, began to sing in suicidal English:

“Every time we meet now, it turns into one of these discussions,” he said aggrievedly.

“It’s a pity, is it not?” she retorted brittly.

“Yes, it’s a pity,” he said with a certain amount of heat.

And that ended the contention for the time being. A moment later they had stopped dancing as unpredictably as they had begun.

The party had ended now. There remained only Gilles and a very old but brilliant man with whom Boniface was having an interminable philosophical discussion over in a corner.

She and Gilles were in the entrance-hall near the front door, where the departure of the last guests had brought her, and where he had followed her, evidently with some idea in mind of going himself.

“They will go on for half the night yet, those two,” she said indulgently. “I think I’ve had enough. I’m going up now. Will you join me in a bénédictine? I still have some of that up there that you enjoyed so the last time.”

“I should leave now, Fab,” he said, ridging his forehead discontentedly.

She stopped short and turned around again; they stood looking at each other.

“The last to arrive and the first to go,” she said accusingly.

“Hardly,” he tried to point out. “There’s no one left any more but old Bertrand inside there.”

“Well, and is this a sacrifice?”

“I feel—” He gestured helplessly. “I don’t know how to say it, awkward about it.”

She almost laughed outright as his meaning, or what she took his meaning to be, struck her. “Surely you don’t mean because of Boniface? Don’t tell me that. Boniface has always known. And you yourself have always known he has. This is no betrayal, no cheap affair behind his back, no jealous husband sort of thing. Boniface and I have our own code for living, our entente; for me, he wants only what brings me the greatest happiness, he is still my husband by that much. He thinks and rightfully so that that designates you; therefore he approves of you, and that is all that matters. Don’t you remember the night he even came in and joined us for a while, and we had such an enjoyable time talking about love and life and sipping little liqueurs, the three of us?”

“What’s the good?” he said grimly. “Everything has to stop sooner or later, doesn’t it?”

“You wish it to, is that what you’re trying to say? Only because you wish it to, that is why it has to stop, not otherwise.”

He pointed to a clock standing behind them in the foyer. “Doesn’t this run down? Isn’t it natural for it to do so? Well—”

“I don’t care for such an illustration,” she said irritably. “A clock is mechanical, love isn’t.”

“A beautiful woman like you, you could have half of Paris. Why me?”

“That’s not the point. I made my choice when I first grew to know you, and my choice remains.”

He said something she didn’t quite hear.

“What?”

“But does your choice necessarily cover the two of us?”

“Ah, now it comes out!”

“You back me into a corner,” he gritted, shoving his hands deep down into his pockets as forcefully as if he were trying to dig up a garden-patch with them through his clothing and all. “You practically drag out of me the very thing you do not wish to hear and that I do not wish to say. And then you’re wounded, angry. Why not leave things unspoken? My esteem for you has not changed since the day we first met.”

“Esteem,” she said scornfully. She began to walk slowly back and forth, holding her hands clasped just below her chin. “What have I done? What is it you don’t like? Tell me and I’ll correct it.”

He shook his head hopelessly. “It isn’t a question of ‘What have I done?’ The thing is over, finished. Let’s just let it go, and not try to hold onto it, drag it out.”

She laughed bleakly. “For you that’s easy, yes. Because evidently you never did love me from the start. But with me it’s different. It’s a part of me, I can’t let it go.”

“I loved you very deeply and very sincerely, Fab. As much as any man ever loved a woman, never doubt that.”