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

“Your friend’s waiting for you outside,” she told Bruce when he came into the room. “You can let yourself out through here, only be sure to close the door quickly behind you.”

They laughed as he passed through the kitchen. Not to him, but to one another. He heard the young man remark, “First time out. Just the same, I wouldn’t mind being back there again myself.”

The lady said, “Ah, come on now, what’re you giving us?”, and freeing one hand momentarily from her card-deck, flung it toward him loosely.

The door closed behind him and he was out. And much as he’d wanted at first to go in, he was awfully glad to be outside again. A square of cobwebbed light from the lace-curtained pane in the lower half of the window settled across his head and shoulders like a dusting of ashes for a moment, and then as he moved on away, it fell flat on the gritty floor of the alley and lay there inert and out of true.

The red wink of a cigarette was Warren waiting for him at the end of the alley, and he was very glad to go leaving this place and starting home together side by side.

“What took you so long?” Warren wanted to know when he’d come up to him. “Did you go around twice?”

“Na. We were talking a little at first,” he answered glumly.

“Talking?” was all Warren said to that, taken back.

The lights of downtown were fewer now, and the people on the sidewalk were fewer too. There were still lights and there were still people, but the edge had been taken off the pristine dazzle of the earlier part of the evening. All three theatre-marquees were dark now, but the lobbies were still dimly lighted, and there were still audiences inside watching the last of the late showings.

Saturday night was about over.

They said hardly a thing the whole way back. They only spoke twice to one another, as a matter of fact. After they’d left Main Street behind and gone across the viaduct, Warren rebuked: “Don’t walk so fast, this is uphill.” Bruce had been unconsciously straining to get home as quickly as he could.

And a little while later Warren remarked: “I’ll get you back that three you lent me by the end of next week.” It was said as ungraciously as though Bruce had asked him for it.

“I know you will,” Bruce said. But he felt wearied and resentful, and that was the way it sounded when he said it: weariedly and resentfully.

Warren and he parted in a strained, almost painful silence. They parted at the corner of Hillside and Pomeroy, where they’d originally joined each other, and neither said a word as they turned away from each other. They were both oddly self-conscious now, for some inexplicable reason. Bruce was glad to get away from his friend. He didn’t know why. He’d had enough of him for one evening. Warren would have represented a continuation of his earlier mood, if he’d stayed with him, and it was over now. He was emotionally tired, drained. He’d always thought he’d be elated when this thing first happened to him. He wasn’t at all. He found he was depressed, instead. A sense of futility, of listlessness, seemed to hang over him. The melancholy of youth, its haunted wistfulness.

He could tell his father was home by the light shining under his parents’ bedroom-door, but he walked up the stairs quietly and didn’t make himself known to his father. His mother, of course, would be away still one more week at the bedside of her own ailing mother.

Even as he passed the door, the thread of light went out.

He went into his own room and closed the door softly. Sat on the edge of his bed, took off his shoes, and then remained there that way, morosely thinking about it, his hands dangling loosely down between the insides of his legs.

It was a disappointment in more ways than one, that was the sum of his thinking about it. It hadn’t been at all what he’d expected it to be. It was brief to the point of a mockery. Not much longer than a long-drawn sneeze. The instant after it was over, it could not be remembered any more. You were not sure you’d done it. You could remember it mentally, on the plane of the mind, but you could not remember it physically, on the plane of the senses. It was therefore a sleight-of-hand, a swindle, an illusion. And yet the whole world came back to be cheated, over and over again.

His eyes began to droop blurrily closed at last. Still sitting, without rising to his feet, he pulled himself out of his clothes, tucked both legs sidewise up onto the bed, and rolled over under the covers.

His father’s door was open when he came out in the morning and he stopped before it to say, “Up yet, Dad?”

“Morning,” his father’s voice answered, but he couldn’t see him there in the room anywhere.

He stepped inside in surprise, looking around, and then he saw his father down on hands and knees, in the space between the bureau and the bed.

“What’s matter?” he asked.

“I can’t find one of my cuff-links,” his father answered, crouching lower to peer under the bureau.

“Have you looked over here, on this side?” Bruce asked, stooping to help in the search.

“I’ve looked all over,” his father grumbled. “I might have dropped it in Ed’s car last night.”

Mrs. Stevens, the woman who kept house for them by the day while his mother was away, called up from downstairs: “Mr. Neil. Bruce. Breakfast is ready.”

His father straightened up and started toward the door, muttering something about having to put in another pair as he went past him. It was Sunday morning, and he always came down to the breakfast-table in semideshabille anyway.

Bruce saw it when he turned around to go after him. The mate to the one they’d been looking for. It was on the bureau. He’d had his back to it until then, looking around underneath on the floor.

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.

For a moment there was nothing. Just it, lying there; he, looking at it there. Some terrible thought was trying to overtake him. A hideous, nameless thought was hovering over him. Then it burst shatteringly, sent a shower of horror all over him. From last night came a voice, saying over and over: “The party before you. The party just before you. The party before you. Party just before you.”

One of his knees gave under him and he dipped down on it, clinging to the bureau-edge with both hands to keep from going all the way.

Mrs. Stevens called up a second time, more insistently: “Bruce! Your eggs are on the table.”

And his father joined his voice to hers. “Bruce! What’re you doing up there?”

He squirmed agonizedly erect, almost as though his faulty leg were in a cast, and took a tottering step. A sort of blindness fell on him, as though he were enmeshed in dirty, gray mosquito-netting. He lurched toward where he had last seen the door, and his outstretched arms must have guided him, for suddenly he knew he must be outside it, and suddenly he knew he must be on the stairs.

Then he was at the table, and his father’s face was opposite. He couldn’t look at it, turned his own face deeply downward, so that his chin almost lay upon his chest.

“The matter, Bruce? Don’t you feel well?” It was Mrs. Stevens who asked it, looking at him from the doorway.

He turned toward her, She he could look at. “I’m all right,” he mumbled indistinctly. Then he turned back, again lowered his head in pulsing, purpled shame.

“Bru.” He raised his eyes, but only to the level of the cloth on the table. His father must have been holding the bread-plate extended toward him like that, unnoticed, for the past moment or two. He took a slice, tried to chew and swallow. It felt as if it wouldn’t go down, as if he couldn’t even salivate. He had to raise his coffee-cup and take a drink from it, to get rid of it.