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

“I’m not sure you boys old enough,” she told them. “Who sent you here?”

“Why, nobody,” said Warren, who seemed to have become the spokesman for the two of them.

“Then how come you come here?” she wanted to know. Then before he could answer, she added, “I think you better go ’long now,” and closed the door.

“What d’ya have to be, a hundred years old to get in there?” groused Warren as they came reluctantly down off the doorstep again.

But before they’d had time to move very far away, the door unexpectedly opened a second time, this time far less widely than the first, so that only a sliver of orange showed through, and an imperative hiss recalled them. It had to repeat itself before they knew enough to turn and go back. The same colored woman’s face was visible in the opening, though with its full width constricted now between door and door-frame.

“She say go ’round the back door, you can come in from there,” she whispered tersely when they stood before her once more.

“Huh?” said Warren stupidly.

“Go ’round the back, you be let in from there,” she repeated impatiently, and snuffed the door closed.

They went without any further discussion between themselves. They had to go down as far as the tree was, then turn and go along the side of the last house clown, then turn once more into an alley that ran along the backs of all these houses. It was dark and none too confidence-inspiring, and a cat, first staring at them with low-crouched phosphorescent green eyes, then skittering away before them for dear life, did nothing to buck up their courage. But they were side by side, shoulder to shoulder, and each one was held fast and kept from turning back by the other’s very presence.

They were guided by a parallelogram of light from a curtained back window that could not be looked into, and as they came up to it, a door opened alongside of it without waiting for their knock. In it stood this time, not the colored housemaid, but a middle-aged woman of a rather prim and even ascetic aspect. She reminded Bruce of the old-fashioned type of school-teacher (no longer to be met with), or of a maiden aunt they had in his family. Even down to the pince-nez glasses attached to a fine gold chain.

She smiled, but even her smile (he thought) was a little forbidding and severe. “Come inside quickly,” she said. “Don’t stand back. The sooner I can get this door shut, the better for all of us.” It was more of a curt reprimand than an invitation, the way it sounded to Bruce.

“Follow me,” she said briskly when she’d closed it, and went back across the room and out at the opposite side.

They crossed it after her, one behind the other, getting a glimpse as they went by of a sleek haired young man sitting in his shirt-sleeves beside a kitchen table, which was covered with a red-and-white checked oilcloth and held two mugs of coffee on it. A cigarette had been left burning over its edge, but seemed not to belong to the young man, as he already had one inserted at the extreme corner of his mouth, as far over as it could go.

He gave them an indecipherable glance as they passed. The colored woman, who was standing doing something at the stove, turned to look at them too. But in her expression Bruce thought he could detect a sort of thinly veiled contempt.

The lady of the house had halted in the front hall, at the foot of a staircase leading upward. The flight of stairs was long and carpeted, the carpet had big faded flowers all over it, and each step had a thin brass rod across it holding the carpet down.

“Mae. Rose. Somebody down here,” she called up musically.

A door opened above and a girl appeared on the stairs, but came only part way down them. A moment later a second one appeared at the head of them, but remained standing there without coming down at all.

The first girl glanced at them, then gave the lady of the house a sort of quizzical look that Bruce found it difficult to interpret. The lady shrugged slightly, and said to her: “Well, what’re y’ going to do? It’s been slow all night tonight, anyway. I let ’em in the back, and they can go out that way too.”

She turned to the two of them and said, very businesslike: “That’ll be five dollars each, boys. Pay me now, please, before you go up. You can tip the girls yourselves afterward.” And to the girls: “Don’t keep them too long, we’re closing up in a few minutes.”

Warren moved over toward him and conferred in a confidential undertone. “You’ll have to lend me three, one for the tip.”

The transfer was made, the lady of the house was paid, and they both started to go up. Warren, who was ahead of him on the stairs as he usually was in everything they did together, took the first girl, the one standing midway down them, along with him. The other one, waiting at the top, turned away before Bruce had reached her and went down the upper hall, saying to him: “Right this way.” An open door, when he had started down it himself, showed which room she had gone into. By the time he reached the door, she was already all prepared, with her head on the pillow.

As he came in toward her, she said scowlingly: “You want the door closed, don’t you?”

He turned and closed it after him.

He sat down next to her on the edge of the bed at first, embarrassed. Then presently, growing a little bolder, reclined alongside of her, but with his legs still on the floor. Then at last, as he became more confident, drew them up and lay there full length beside her. Both staring upward at the ceiling.

Wanting to say something, and not knowing what to say, he asked her: “You like it here?”

It wasn’t so bad, she said resignedly.

They talked a little then, she doing most of it. Until finally, excited more by the drift of her conversation than by her proximity, he began to make ultimate love to her, still without looking into her face.

She sighed at first with age-old professional boredom. Then, compassionately, she laughed a little. “I’ll show you. You’re a real young ’un, aren’t you! Wait, I’ll show you.”

Then it was already over, and he was sitting bent over on the edge of the bed retying the laces of his shoes, which were the only thing he had discarded. On the floor before his eyes, something glistened against the light. He picked it up, and she saw him do it and said instantly, “Whatch’ got there?” thinking perhaps it was a coin.

But it was only a cuff-link, and he showed it to her. There was a small light-red stone in the center of it, opaque not vitreous, on the order of a carnelian, and around it an oblong of perhaps silver, perhaps some lesser metal.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” she said admiringly.

“Wonder whose it is. Got any idea?” he asked her.

“Party just before you,” she answered laconically. “I noticed them on him.” She chuckled. “Must’ve torn off his shirt in too much of a hurry.”

She held out her hand for it, and he gave it to her.

“I’ll turn it over to Miss Norma when I go downstairs,” she said. “We have to do that with anything we find in the rooms, she’s very strict about it. She’ll hold it for him in case he comes back for it.” Then she added, as though this honesty on her part had its flexibility at times, “It’s no good to me, one half of a pair of cuff-links.”

He tipped her, she thanked him casually (“Much obliged, sonny”), then let him know point-blank that it was time for him to go. “You’d better leave now, or Miss Norma’ll start calling up the stairs. She blames us if a visitor overstays his time.”

He came down the stairs feeling much older than when he’d gone up them.

The sleek-haired young man was still beside the table, but the coffee mugs had disappeared. Opposite him now sat the lady of the house, shuffling a deck of cards in a very smooth way. Again a cigarette burned over the edge of the table, but this time it was indubitably his, for the lady of the house had one stuck into the extreme corner of her mouth, as far over as it could go. The colored woman was no longer in there.