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

She didn’t even wait to see if it was he. There was no time to look at him, scan his face. It didn’t matter, her heart knew. Her arms went around him like the back-fling of a cracked whip. Her head was on his shoulder, her face was beside his face, and all she saw was blank wall opposite, but her heart knew him just the same.

His voice was low and cautioning in her ear, and a slight move his head made told her he had looked over his shoulder guardedly. “Not out here. Hurry up, let me get inside first!”

She reclosed the door after them. He went over to a chair, fixed the top of it with his hand first as if afraid it would get away from him, and then sank into it loose as a puddle of water. She thought she never had seen such exhaustion before. It was a collapse.

She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She moved first to one side of him, then to the other, then directly before him, slightly crouched, her hands to her knees. “I can’t believe it, I can’t, I can’t! When did you get out?”

He raised his head, which had sunk low almost to his chest with weariness, and looked at her. “I didn’t. I broke out.”

She gave a quick head-turn across the room, then back again. “God in heaven! You’re one of those three, on that broadcast I heard—? I never dreamed— They didn’t give any names.”

“They never do,” he said dully. “We’re just people without names. That’s so anyone on the outside who might know us, want to help us or hide us, won’t hear about it.”

“I didn’t even know where they’d sent you.”

“I didn’t want you mixed up in it at all. Did you get that note I smuggled out to you, after I was picked up and being held for trial?”

“A woman I didn’t know sat down next to me one night, at that little place I eat down the street. She folded her arms on the counter, and with the outside one slipped it to me underneath the one that was next to me. Then she got up and walked out without a word.”

“That was Malin’s wife,” he said without emotion. “He was the one killed a week ago Monday. Three little kids.”

“It wasn’t in your handwriting, but I knew it must be—”

“He passed her the message on from me, and had her write it down.”

“I can still remember every word of it by heart,” she said devoutly, like when you recite your rosary. “ ‘ Stay out of it. Keep away from the trial. And if I’m sent up don’t come down and try to say good-bye to me before I go. If they question you, you don’t know me .’

“I kept it for two whole days, and then I did away with it,” she said tenderly, as if she were speaking of a love-poem.

“That was the thing to do,” he approved.

Outside in the hall before, without looking at him at all, she had known him. Now, inside and looking at him, she almost didn’t know him anymore. The terrible changes the thing had brought to him. The dust of the wayside and the soot of the box-car that were no longer just surface grime anymore but gave the appearance of having gotten under his skin and made him look permanently dingy. The deep sweat-etched lines of intolerable strain and tiredness that would never quite go away again. The hunger of the indrawn cheeks and the out-staring eyes.

He’d been so young once and been so spruce and eye-pleasing. He wasn’t now. And strange is the way of the heart: She loved him now more than she ever had then.

She saw him dipping two fingers into the patch-pocket of the caked, bedraggled blue denim shirt he had on, trying to locate a cigarette. All he could find was a charred butt, put out short to save for the next time.

“Wait,” she said, and got hold of a box of them she had in the place there, took one out and lit it for him. Then she passed it to him from her own mouth.

“You didn’t used to smoke,” he remembered.

“I still don’t, much. I’ve had these, I don’t know how long. One of the girls at the place gave them to me once, in a fit of generosity. They weren’t her brand, or something.”

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked it over, and it seemed to suggest some other train of thought to him.

“You haven’t been going with anybody while I’ve been away?”

She looked him quietly and simply in the eye. “Is there anybody but you — to go with? I didn’t know, you’ll have to tell me.”

She thought of that man on the street and on the bus — and he already seemed so long ago and half-forgotten, like something in a last week’s dream — and she decided not to tell him about it. Men were a little peculiar about some things, even the best of them, you had to understand that. He might think, even if he didn’t come out with it, that she must have given him some slight encouragement in the very beginning to trigger the thing off like that, and she didn’t want him to. It was all over now, anyway. She wasn’t alone anymore.

“How’d you get into the house here? Did she see you, downstairs?”

“I’ve been in it since early this afternoon. I came along intending to take just a quick look and see if I could figure out from down below whether you still lived up here or not. Then I saw this junk-cart standing out at the door, and two men were unloading somebody’s furniture and taking it into the house—”

“That’s the flat on the floor below,” she explained. “The old lady there died last week. And it’s been rented over.”

“So on the spur of the moment, while they were inside, I picked up a chair from the sidewalk and went in after them. I walked right by her. She thought I was with them, I guess. Then when I got up to the floor they were on, I put it down outside the door while their backs were turned, and came on up here to your floor. I found a closet at the back of the hall for keeping rags and pails, and I crouched down inside it. She came to it once and tried to get the door open, but I held onto the inside of the knob with both hands, and she gave up finally and went away again mumbling something about getting a carpenter to come and plane it down.

“I knew if you still had your modeling-job, you wouldn’t be back until much later. Then when the people started coming home from work, I had to try to translate their footsteps on the stairs. A man came up first. Then a woman; I knew it wasn’t you, because I heard her call out to some kid on the inside, ‘Open the door for me, I have my arms full of bundles.’ Then I heard a young step, a girl’s step, and it seemed to go in right about where your door was, so I waited a couple minutes more and then I took a chance and came out.”

“When did you eat last?” she asked him.

“So long ago I can’t remember,” he said dully. “While I was still out in the open country, it was easier. Farm-women would give me handouts sometimes, if I was careful how I came up to them. But once I’d worked my way into the city, that stopped. In the city they don’t give you anything without money. And how could I stand still long enough to earn any? I snatched an orange, I think yesterday morning. I ate the skin and all.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, appalled.

“I have to get these things off,” he said, bending down to his ravaged shoes. “My feet are like hamburgers.”

Then when she saw the stains of the old blood that was already black and the newer blood that was still rusty-colored, “Oh those feet!” she moaned in unutterable compassion, clapping her hands together.

She got a basin of water and some cloths, and getting down on her knees before him gently tried to treat and soothe them. And when she had, wrapping a towel around one, held it up and pressed the side of her face against it. “Cut it out,” he said embarrassedly. “What am I, a baby?”