HOTEL ROOM

by CORNELL WOOLRICH

Other Novels by Cornell Woolrich

Cover Charge (1926)

Children of the Ritz (1927)

Times Square (1929)

A Young Man’s Heart (1930)

The Time of Her Life (1931)

Manhattan Love Song (1932)

The Bride Wore Black (1940)

The Black Curtain (1941)

Marihuana (1941, originally as William Irish)

The Black Alibi (1942)

The Black Angel (1943, based on his 1935 story Murder in Wax)

The Black Path of Fear (1944)

Deadline at Dawn (1944, originally as William Irish)

Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945, originally as George Hopley)

Waltz into Darkness (1947, originally as William Irish)

Rendezvous in Black (1948)

I Married a Dead Man (1948, originally as William Irish)

Savage Bride (1950)

Fright (1950, originally as George Hopley)

You’ll Never See Me Again (1951)

Strangler’s Serenade (1951, originally as William Irish)

Hotel Room (1958)

Death is My Dancing Partner (1959)

The Doom Stone (1960, previously serialized in Argosy 1939)

Woolrich also published over 200 short stories and various Novellas.

PRAISE FOR CORNELL WOOLRICH

"Along with Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich practically invented the genre of noir."

—New York Newsday

"Cornell Woolrich is the master of suspense. When he sets out to leave you panting, you can bet he will succeed."

—Isaac Asimov

"It is the pace that counts, not the logic or the plausibility . . . I happen to admire this kind of writing very much."

—Raymond Chandler

"Nothing beats a tale of fatalistic dread by the supreme master of suspense, Cornell Woolrich. His novels and hundreds of short stories define the essence of noir nihilism."

—The New York Times

"Woolrich's life was as twisted and compelling as his work, and that's saying something."

—Time

"He was the Poe of the twentieth century and the poet of its shadows. He was the Hitchcock of the written word."

—Francis M. Nevins

"The writing of Cornell Woolrich goes through you like a shriek in the night."

—Dorothy Salisbury Davis

"Woolrich could [pull] the reader into a night world of fatalistic doom."

—San Francisco Chronicle

"Woolrich [had an] exceptional gift for crafting claustrophobic situations and the shattered lives of the desperate."

—Publishers Weekly

"Cornell Woolrich can distill more terror, more excitement, more downright nail-biting suspense out of even the most commonplace happenings than nearly all his competitors."

—Ellery Queen

"[Woolrich] has, of course, the photographic eye. He also has a vitality of word and phrase; he has ingenuity and perception."

—Dorothy B. Hughes

"Woolrich [is] the great master of . . . the infinite terror of prosaic everyday detail."

—Anthony Boucher

"The most exciting experience in crime fiction this reviewer has had in some time."

—Hartford Courant

"If it doesn't freeze your blood, then you are immune to literary chills."

—Baltimore Sun

"No one has ever surpassed Cornell Woolrich for sheer suspense or equaled him for exciting entertainment."

—Robert Block

"One of the giants of mystery fiction . . . one of my earliest writing heroes."

—Harlan Ellison

"Packed with action and hurting with emotion."

—Saturday Review

"Possibly the finest mystery writer of the twentieth century."

—The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection

"Woolrich's books are essential for serious mystery fans."

—Library Journal

"Cornell Woolrich deserves to be discovered and rediscovered by each generation."

—Ray Bradbury

Published in collaboration with Renaissance Literary & Talent 

Post Office Box 17379 

Beverly Hills, California 90209
www.renaissancemgmt.net

Copyright © 2019 by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. as Trustee for 

The Claire Woolrich Memorial Scholarship Fund 

u/w of Cornell Woolrich R 671100, September 8, 1977 

Copyright © 1958 Cornell Woolrich

Copyright © 1986 Chase Manhattan Bank

ISBN: 978-1-950369-07-2

Cover art: Abigail Larson

www.abigaillarson.com

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

To Claire Attalie Woolrich

1874–1957

In Memoriam

This Book: Our Book

CONTENTS

1. THE NIGHT OF June 20th, 1896

2. THE NIGHT OF April 6th, 1917

3. THE NIGHT OF November 11th, 1918

4. THE NIGHT OF February 17th, 1924

5. THE NIGHT OF October 24th, 1929

6. THE NIGHT OF . . .

7. THE NIGHT OF September 30th, 1957

Author Bio

Publisher's Note

HOTEL ROOM

1. The Night of June 20th, 1896

THE LIGHTS WERE going on in the St. Anselm Hotel for the first time. The last mason had left a week ago. The last painter and carpenter had left two days ago. The last decorators were still busy, in some of the rooms on some of the floors, working overtime, working like mad, unrolling carpets, tacking up drapes, unpacking mirrors. Everyone was new at his job, from the manager down to the merest bellboy; everyone was confused, highly excited, uncertain just what was expected of him, and how to go about what was expected of him. Everyone was asking the personnel member just over him what to do and how to do it, and then getting it wrong because he'd been told wrong. The bellboys were asking the bell captain, the bell captain was asking the desk clerk, the desk clerk was asking the manager. It stopped there; the manager had no one higher than himself to ask. So he passed the blame in reverse direction, and it started down the line again: to desk clerk, to bell captain, to bellboy. Then, when it got there, it had to stop once more and start up-rank again. But everyone was making allowances, so there was no great harm done, except to nervous energy. Everyone knew no one could be expected to be letter-perfect. Everyone knew they'd do better in a day or so, or a week. Everyone knew things would calm down and straighten out.

This was opening day, and the hotel had been in business for exactly six hours, ever since high noon.

Now room by room the lights were going on. Window after window bloomed yellow, against the outer presummer darkness, as the rooms were taken. Not in direct order, one after the next, of course. Haphazardly; but still the desk clerk was working his registrations upward pretty much floor by floor, from lower to higher. It was simpler that way. The second and third had been all gone even days before the opening, by premature reservation. The fourth and fifth were sold out by midafternoon, and by nightfall he was already as high as the ninth, with just a scattering of back singles on the two immediately below. And a completely booked hotel in those days was no mean feat.

The carriage arrived a little before ten. Carriages had been arriving all day in unending succession, rolling up in an almost unbroken line, so no one gave it a second look. It was a hired carriage, not a private one. There were telltale grains of rice sprinkled on its black felt flooring. There was a fairly sizable amount of hand-luggage on the seat beside the driver. At the back some mischievous person had affixed a placard reading "Just Married." There was also an empty soup can and an old shoe trailing along behind it at the end of a string, and clattering considerably over the pavement.

A young man alighted, rather nervously. He had on a starched collar the height of his neck. He had on a dark-blue jacket, pinched-in at the back and secured by a half-belt that ended at the sides. He had on white duck trousers, this being the beginning of the warm season. A flower from some recent function decorated the buttonhole of his lapel. He was about twenty-four.

He looked at the blazing hotel entrance. He looked extremely frightened. Then he turned back toward the carriage, and removed the flat-crowned, rigidly stiff straw hat he wore. This had a tricolored band of blue, white and green around it, and was secured to one of the buttons of his jacket by a black cord. He held out his hand toward the carriage, and, rather strainedly, forced a smile of reassurance. A reassurance that it was obvious he didn't feel himself at the moment, much less being able to pass it on to someone else.

A smaller hand reached out to take his, and its owner followed him down.

She was about eighteen. Perhaps not even that. She had dark-brown hair, piled high atop her head and drawn back from her face in what was called a pompadour. She wore a hat that went high up on one side and far down on the other. It stayed that way through the aid of numbers of pins. It had willow plumes on the side that was up, it had roses and green leaves on the side that was down. A collar as high as his gripped her throat. However, it was not starched linen, but lace, stiffened with whalebone ribs. She held the bottom of her dress up from the ground with one hand. This was highly necessary, for it not only touched the ground, it lay over it for quite a few inches on all sides of her when at rest.

But in spite of all this she would have been beautiful in any generation.

They stood there terrified together, hand clasping hand low at their sides, as if trying to hide this bond from the world.

One of the peripatetic bellboys appeared. "Take your luggage in, sir?" he inquired.

The boy could only nod mutely, too stricken to speak. He paid and tipped the coachman, with considerable agitated fumbling of hands.

"Thank you kindly," the coachman said. "Lots of luck to the two of you." He touched whip to horse-flank. "And may all your troubles be little ones," he added.

"I wonder how he could tell about us so easy?" the girl whispered with a nervous titter.

"They like to tease a lot," he said soothingly. He curled her hand protectively about his arm. "Shall we go in?"

They went up the still-new entrance steps of the St. Anselm and into a marble-floored lobby that had, for the present occasion, been turned into almost a jungle of potted palms, ferns, and floral good-luck offerings. Most of these would be removed within a day or two, but at the moment it was almost like picking your way through a hothouse greenery.

"This way, sir, if you'd care to register," the bellboy called helpfully to them. He was visible only above the waist, where he stood, and their baggage, presumably on the floor, had disappeared completely.

They approached the desk.

"Mr. Graham, please!" the bellboy called, addressing banked flowers.

Mr. Graham, the desk clerk, peered out at them from one side of huge horseshoe of pink roses that partially screened his domain. They shifted over to the side he was on, since they had been erroneously standing over at the other side of the obstacle until then. Mr. Graham, however, had sought to adjust himself to them at the same moment as they did to him, so he had shifted back to the first side, by the time they left it and reached the second. Immediately, both parties corrected their mistake. Mr. Graham returned to the second side, his left; they returned to the first, their right.

Mr. Graham found a way of stopping the pendulum-like fluctuation at last, before it continued any further and died down of its own momentum. "Just stand there where you are now and wait for me," he suggested wearily. "I'll be right over."

"I made a reservation," the young man said timidly, when equipoise had been re-established. "John Compton." He corrected himself. "Mr. Compton," He corrected himself a second time, and far more all-embracingly. "Mr. and Mrs. John Compton."

The girl dropped her eyes for a moment at this point, both pleased and shy.

The young man leaned forward. "The—er—the special suite," he said diffidently.

"Oh, the bridal suite," blurted out the insensitive Mr. Graham. "Yes, of course. We received your reservation. I have it right here."

The girl picked at one of the marginal roses on the horseshoe as a cover for her self-consciousness.

"I'm terribly sorry," Mr. Graham said. "If we'd only known where to reach you in time—"

"Why? Is something wrong?" the young groom demanded tautly.

"There was a hitch," Mr. Graham apologized. "We've been doing everything we can to be ready on time, but those things will happen. Well, the fact of the matter is, Mr. Compton, it's not quite finished yet. I wouldn't feel right about putting you in there, on an—on an occasion such as this." He bestowed a glance on the dewy-eyed bride, which sent her back to rose-leaf plucking again in a hurry. "Won't you let me put you elsewhere just for tonight, and then I promise you the suite will be yours, without fail, tomorrow?"

The young pair looked at one another.

"Do you mind?" he murmured.

"Do you?" she breathed back.

The two deferring questions should have neutralized one another and brought them right back where they were, but he already seemed to be able to translate her meanings without any difficulty, inexperienced husband though he was. "Well, all right," he said, "if you're sure we can have the other tomorrow."

"I give you my word," Mr. Graham promised. He turned to the rack behind him. "I have a lovely room, up on the ninth. I'm sure you'll find it satisfactory." He handed a key to the bellboy. "Nine-twenty-three for Mr. and Mrs. Compton, Richard. Will you sign here, please, Mr. Compton?"

The groom bent over and wrote: "Mr. and Mrs. John T. Compton, Indiana." He looked at it tenderly when he'd finished, Then he looked at her lovingly. "First time together—on paper," he whispered.

She nodded eagerly, and clung closer to his arm, both her hands now clasped around it.

They went over and joined their waiting luggage and the bellboy in the brand-new elevator, its trellis-like ironwork still glistening with freshly applied gold-leaf.

The boy ushered them off at the ninth floor, stopped at a door, keyed and opened it, reached in. Some brand-new electric lights went on in bright welcome.

And at this point the story of Room 923 begins.

They followed him in and looked around.

"Oh, it's nice, isn't it?" she said.

"Yes, it is, isn't it?" he agreed.

The bellboy bustled around, trying to make unnecessary actions look like highly necessary ones. Then he retired to the door and came to the crux of the matter. "Will there be anything else, sir, for now?"

"No, thank you." Young Compton put something in his hand a little self-consciously.

The boy eyed it with widening eyes. "Thank you. Thank you very much, sir." He backed out, closed the door, and they were alone.

The slightest of pauses followed.

Then she asked, "Did he bring everything up?"

"Yes," he said. Then he contradicted himself by amending, "Wait, I'll count," and told off each separate piece with outpointed finger. "One, two, three—and that little one. Yes, he brought everything up."

Another sliver of pause came between them; under other circumstances it would have been scarcely noticeable as such, but now they were acutely aware of every momentary silence that occurred between them.

"Don't you want to take off your hat?" he suggested with an odd mixture of intimacy and abashed formality.

"Yes, I guess I may as well," she assented.

She crossed to the dressing-table and seated herself at the glass. He remained where he was, watching.

"Gee, I always did think you had such pretty hair!" he blurted out suddenly with boyish enthusiasm. "The very first time I met you, I noticed that about you."

She turned her head and smiled at him, equally girlish to his boyishness for an unguarded moment. "I remember, I'd just washed it that day. And Mamma had helped me put it up afterward. I told her that night how lucky it was we had."

She turned back to the glass and looked at it intently in there. "It must be terrible to grow old and have it turn gray. I can't picture that; the same hair, like it is now, should turn gray and still be on me."

"But everyone's does when they get old enough."

"Yes, other people's; but to have it happen to you!" She peered at herself more closely. "I can't imagine it ever happening to me. But when it does, it won't be me any more. It'll be somebody else." She touched her fingers to the sides of her face. "An old lady looking out of my eyes," she said wonderingly. "A stranger inside of me. She won't know me, and I won't know her."

"Then I'll be a stranger too," he said thoughtfully. "Two strangers, in a marriage that was begun by two somebody-elses."

For a moment they were both frightened by this thing their nervously keyed prattle had conjured up. Then they both laughed, and the imminent fright went away.

He went over to her and touched his lips to the piled hair on the top of her head. She acknowledged the caress by placing her hand atop his, where it rested lightly on her shoulder.

"Are you tired?" he murmured close to her ear.

"Yes. Not—too much, though. Just from all the excitement."

"Should we unpack our things?"

She welcomed the offered distraction. "All right, let's. Because tomorrow we'll be doing so much."

"Want me to help you?"

"No, I can manage. I know which key belongs to which."

He opened a door in the wall. "Look at the size of this closet."

She came over beside him to look. "I want a closet that big when we have our own place. I love the way they smell when they're new, don't you? All clean wood-shavings and cedar. Just think, our things will be the first that were ever hung up in it. We sort of christen it."

They smiled at each other. For a moment they were more like children playing house than two slightly bewildered, slightly frightened people about to enter on the most momentous stage of their personal lives.

"How'll we do it?" he asked. "Should I take half, and you half?"

"I guess that's what they—do," she concurred vaguely.

"Which side do you want?" he invited.

"It doesn't make any difference. I'll take from here over, and you take from there over."

He was already over at one of the valises, squatted down on his heels before it, applying himself perseveringly first to one lock, then the other. "My brother gave me this one," he said, in apology for its recalcitrance. "I never can quite get it the first time, as long as I've been using it. There it is." The lid went back and over.

She darted a quick glance of curiosity at the contents. "Oh, how many neckties! Does everybody have that many?"

"I've kept every one I ever owned, I guess," he admitted. "I've never thrown one away, from the very first one I wore when I first put on long pants."

"That's a pretty one there, on top. The one with the blue. Wear that one tomorrow. I'd like it on you."

"Ma gave me that on my birthday, when I was twenty-one. The last birthday—she was with us."

"Oh, well, then maybe—" she said with quick compunction.

"No, I like to wear it. I've worn it lots of times, since. That's what she wanted me to do. She bought it for me to wear." He extricated it from under the straps with a zigzag sawing motion. "I'll take it out now, and leave it on top here. So I'll remember in the morning."

He spread it flat along the top of the dresser. She stepped over after him and evened out, with her fingertips, a slight ripple that had remained in the topmost fold, as though the tie now belonged to the two of them alike, and must be cherished equally by both. "The bees are raised in it," she said with proprietary approval. "I like that."

They went back to their unpacking. They were not exactly with their backs to one another, but each with one shoulder given to the other, due to the position of the two pieces of luggage.

He glanced around after a moment. "It smells nice in there," he complimented her.

"Mamma put in two little bags of sachet, one in each corner, before I left."

Again they both returned to their unpacking.

With a double armful of fuming cambric layers, like someone holding newly trapped snow in her arms, she crossed to the dresser, opened the drawer, carefully put them in. She carried the fleecy articles turned toward the side, away from him, so that he wouldn't get too close a look at them. Within a day or two it wouldn't matter, they would be as one about such things, but at the moment modesty still claimed her, for these were articles of under-apparel.

When he in turn made a trip to the bureau with a double armful from his own receptacle, he likewise held it turned away from her to conceal it from view as much as possible.

Self-consciousness, which had more or less glazed the two of of them during those few moments, thawed away again now that that was done. Smiling across-shoulder at one another, he closed down his suitcase, she closed down hers. She brushed off her fingertips against their opposites, but to indicate completion rather than that the task had been dusty. "Well, that much is finished," she said with satisfaction.

"Yes," he agreed. "We won't have to do that now." Then he suggested, "Why don't you sit down? No sense standing."

She selected an armchair, deposited herself into it with a little bounce of possessiveness, due in part no doubt to the newness of the springs. She said again, as she had about the closet, "Oh, I'd love to have a chair like this when we have our own home."

He slung himself down beside her on one arm of the chair, and tucked his arm around her to her further shoulder, and feeling it there, she allowed her head to pillow back against it.

They were quiet for some moments, utterly, blissfully content. No need to talk, nor even to caress. Their being together like this, close like this, was in itself one big caress. He allowed his head to incline toward hers at last, that was the only thing, and remain there, cheek pressed to the top of her head.

Their eyes looked out straight ahead, into the distance, into the future, into a from-now-on, that was in the same place for the two of them. Golden future, peach-bloom future, impossible to capture, and even had it been possible to capture, impossible to hold. And even had it been possible to hold, impossible to bear, to endure. Not of this world at all, a future without a cloud, without a pain, without a spiteful word; without a wrinkle, without a gray hair, without a stiffening bone. A dream within a dream within a dream. The Great Shortchange practiced on youth since time immemorial. The boy, the girl, and the Great Untruth, blinding them all alike, two by two, down the countless generations. The bait that traps them together. A Christmas-tree bauble that, when they try to touch it, let alone hold onto it, crumples into a thousand tinseled fragments. And when they look, they hold nothing in their hands, only silvery dust. Like when you pinch a moth by the wings. But even the moth at least is there, for the moment you pinch it. This other thing isn't.

Once during his double revery she said softly, "I can't believe it even yet, can you?"

He understood the unexpressed thought. "No," he said. "Me either."

"That there was a time, only a little while ago, when there wasn't any you yet, just me. By myself, alone."

"And now there's you and me, both."

"It must be terrible to be alone."

"Like we were a couple months ago."

"I can't remember it any more, can you? But it must be terrible. To go through each day without any—you."

"But now we don't have to any more," he said. "From now on, each day has you in it."

He took out a watch. She'd seen it before. It had been given to him on his graduation from high school. He'd told her so. It was gold-plated. He'd told her so. It had a fob of two little pennants of black moiré ribbon. They hung from an inch-wide bar. That was gold-plated too. It was the only watch they had with them, but one was enough. They had no separate needs of time; there was no time apart from one another. There was only time together.

He opened the lid with a spunky little click. She loved to look at the lid. It was bright as a mirror. It had on it: "To John, from Mother and Dad."

He said, "I guess we better think about—" And then he stopped, because he hadn't been ready in time with the right last word. The sentence really called for the terminal phrase "—going to bed," but he didn't want to use that. She didn't want him to either.

He only stopped a moment; you could hardly notice it. Then he didn't go back over the first part again. He only said "—retiring."

"I guess we better," she assented.

He got off the arm of the chair.

Then he said, "I guess I better go downstairs a minute —first." Somebody must have told him this was the considerate thing to do. Maybe his father, maybe one of his friends.

"All right," she said tractably.

She had stood up, too, now.

He came close and he kissed her.

His face didn't have the handsome regularity of a Greek statue. But a Greek statue couldn't smile, couldn't show light in its eyes.

He went nearly as far as the door, but not quite.

Then he touched his pockets exploratively. His wallet, with his—their—money in it.

"I don't need this," he said. "I'll leave it up here."

He went over and he put it on the dresser-top. Not too far from where the necktie was, tomorrow's necktie.

Then he did go to the door, all the way this time.

And he turned and looked at her so tenderly, so softly, that the look was a caress in itself. With just a touch of rue in it.

"Are you afraid?" he said.

"You mean now, about your going downstairs awhile?"

"No, I mean after—when I come back again."

She dropped her eyes only momentarily. Then she quickly raised them again, and they looked directly into his, candidly and confidently. "No, because I know you love me. And even if part of love is strange, if the rest of it is good, then all of it has to be good. And soon there are no different parts to it, it is all just one love. Those are the words my mother told me, when she kissed me good-bye."

"I love you," he said, as devoutly as when you're in a church saying a prayer meant only for God and yourself to hear. "So don't be afraid." Then he said only one thing more. "I'll be back in just a little bit."

Then he closed the door. But for a minute or two his face seemed to glow there where it had been. Then it slowly wore thin, and the light it had made went away.

Like the illusion of love itself does.

In a prim little flurry now she started disrobing. Intent on having it complete before she should be interrupted.

At the moment of passing from chemise to nightrobe, quite instinctively and without knowing she did it, she briefly closed her eyes. Then as the gown rippled downward to the floor, she opened them again. It was not, she had learned or been cautioned when still quite a little girl, nice to scrutinize your own body when it was unclothed. The gown was batiste, a trousseau gown, with eyelet embroidery and a bertha—that is to say, an ample capelike flap covering both shoulders; it was bluish in the shadows where it fell hollowed, pink where her body touched against it, but its actual color was snowy-white.

She had always brushed her hair before retiring. She did it now, for there was something comforting about the sense of normalcy it gave to do it; it was like something familiar to cling to in an eddy of imminent strangeness. She counted each stroke to herself, up to fifty; she longed to go past there, up to a hundred, for it would have seemed to help to arrest time, not allow it to go forward, but she conscientiously curbed herself and refrained.

Then she gave a look around the room, inquiringly and still with that flurried intensity. There was nothing left to do now, no remaining detail unattended.

She went to the bed, turned her back to it, and entered it.

She drew the covers up tightly about one shoulder— the other was turned inward to the pillow.

She gave a little sigh, of finality, of satisfaction, of when there is utterly nothing left to do and one is content there isn't.

Her eyes remained fixed on the door. Not in a hard stare, but in soft expectancy. Nothing tenderer in this world, the eyes of youth looking for its love.

It tires you to look too long at any one object, no matter how gently. Her eyes left the door at last, and went over to the window. That didn't hold them nearly as long, for there was nothing to be expected of it. Love wouldn't enter through there. Then they went to the chair. There she made a discovery that cried for immediate reparation. One lace-cuffed leg-opening of her foreshortened pantaloons was hanging down in full, indelicate sight, escaping perversely from under everything else. It must have freed itself later, for she had painstakingly folded that particular article scrupulously from sight; it was the one thing of all she wished to have remain unnoticed.

"Will I have time to get over there and back before—?" she asked herself, appalled.

But it couldn't be allowed to remain that way; it was more than indelicate, it was almost brazen, rakish, the way it flaunted itself.

She suddenly braved the risk. The covers flew back, she gave a sprightly little vault out of the bed, reached the chair, interred the offending garment, and returned to the bed. The way a child steals from its bed for a moment and scrambles back again undetected by its parents.

Reinstated, again she watched the door.

Now this time it was her hands that tired first, and not her eyes. They tightened in their hold of one another. Soon they grew taut, almost strained; were crushing against one another. She straightened them out. Almost at once they crept toward one another again, crooked, interlocked; clung desperately together, as though each without the other would die.

At last she took them away from one another altogether, seeing she could do nothing with them. One sought out her hair, and nervously felt at it here and there to see if it was in order. It was left, for that matter, in less order than it had been at first. The other sought the shoulder of her gown and twisted that about a little.

Perhaps he was standing just outside the door, uncertain whether to come in. Perhaps young men had trepidations at such a delicate time as this, just as she—just as girls—did. Perhaps if she were to go to the door, open it, that would resolve his irresolution for him.

The decision to go to the door, open it and look out, far more daring than the sortie to the chair had been, grew on her for many minutes before she found the courage to carry it out. At last, pinning her underlip beneath her teeth as if to steel herself to the act, she emerged from the bed once more. Because this was a door, and outside was a public corridor, she put on her wrapper first and gathered it tight. Then she went over to it, the door, and stood there by it, summoning up fresh reserves of courage, sorely needed. She put her hand out gingerly toward the knob, the way you reach for something very hot that you're afraid will burn you.

Then she hesitated there like that, hand on knob.

If he didn't discover her in the act of doing this, she wouldn't tell him—later—that she had done it. It smacked a little too much of boldness, or, what was equally as bad, impatience.

Now she touched the door with her other hand, and inclined her head closer toward it, as if trying not so much to listen but rather to divine by some other subtle sense whether he was present there on the other side of it—or not.

She opened the door and looked, and he wasn't; it was empty there on the other side.

She sighed, and the attentive forward-lean her body had taken relapsed into a backward inert slump of disappointment.

Perhaps he was further down the corridor, walking to and—? She tightened further her already tightened wrapper, and like an aerialist walking on a single wire, advanced through the door-opening and out to the corridor proper, one foot keeping in a straight line behind the other.

It was empty from end to end. Just carpeting, and light bulbs looking so lonely against the wall, like forgotten little orphan suns. She remembered the hall from before, from when they'd first come in, but it hadn't looked so lonely then. Maybe because she hadn't been so lonely then either.

She stood there long, long moments. But nothing, no one, came into sight. The emptiness stayed as empty as before. She re-entered the room at last, closed the door, and mournfully inclined her head against it on the inside in a desolate sort of way. Then that ended too, presently, as all attitudes and postures must sooner or later.

She moved away from there and roamed the room, without a destination, deep in thought, absently touching things as she went, to guide herself. He could not mean to stay away this long. He had lost track of the time. That must be it. That must be the explanation, there could be no other.

Perhaps if she called down, he would understand. Yes, but what genteel way was there to convey the message? "Would you ask my husband to come up, please?" She shuddered at that. It was so unthinkable it made her squeeze her eyes tightly shut for a moment. No, she couldn't say anything like that. The man at the phone—

She tried out several other phrases in her mind, and rejected them as being almost as indelicate if not equally so. "Could you tell me what the time is, please? Our watch has stopped up here." But the mere fact that she was watching the watch; he'd read between the lines— "Could you please arrange to have us called at such-and-such an hour?" But that was unsatisfactory from another point of view; that was almost too neutral. The man down there might take the request literally, and while accepting it, fail entirely to convey it to her husband, in which case nothing would have been solved.

She had stopped meanwhile by one of the valises, her own, and this finally, as she glanced down and noticed it, gave her the sought-after inspiration. The perfect phrasing in which to imbed her unspoken message. Completely neutral, and yet personal enough to require his participation. She rehearsed it to herself, in order to have the wordage arranged right and not be caught faltering at the moment of pronouncing it. Then, letter-perfect, she went to the wall telephone and brought down the corded earpiece from it. She wound the little crank and the connection was established.

A man's voice, frighteningly immediate and immediately frightening, the gruffest voice a man had ever used in the whole world before, the harshest, the raspiest, said: "Yes, please? Can I be of service?"

She began too low, and had to start over at once.

"Beg pardon?"

"I said, I can't seem to open one of our suitcases. My husband—" She swallowed hard, and almost spoiled it, but recovered in time. "Would you ask him if he has the key with him, please?"

"I will without fail, madam, just as soon as I see him."

She'd had the same sensation once years before, when a small boy in a tree had dropped a soft splashy snowball on her as she passed below and it had struck and disintegrated at the nape of her neck.

"Oh, isn't he—? I thought he was—"

"He went out of the building, madam. I saw him as he went past."

"But are you sure it was—?"

"The night bellboy told me it was the young man from '23."

She didn't speak any further. She hadn't strength enough to hang up, she hadn't fortitude enough to continue listening.

He must have sensed an urgency she hadn't wanted to show. "Shall I send out and see if he's outside by the entrance?"

She didn't say anything. Her breath was too much in the way, rising up again before it had even finished going down, leaving no passage clear.

The wait was cruel and long. And this had nothing to do with measured time, for even had it been of no duration whatever, an immediate turnabout, it would have been no less cruel, no less long. The heart cannot measure, it can only feel; in a single instant it can feel as much as in a long slow hour, it cannot feel more than that.

There was a background murmur soon, as of tidings being brought, and then a clear-spoken address directly to her: "He doesn't seem to be out there right now, madam. He may have taken a short stroll away from the hotel. Just as soon as he returns I'll notify him that you—"

She heard him go, at the other end, and what was there to stay for anyway? But she stayed; just stayed there, on and on, through long slow minutes that never seemed to pass away.

At last she came away from there, a thin shining line down each cheek like silver threads unraveling from her eyes. She was cold suddenly, in mid-step, in mid-room, with a knife-like instantaneousness that temperature alone could never have brought about. Quivering spasmodically, with clenched teeth and rigidity of movement. Clutching for the warmest thing she could lay hands on, a woolen bathrobe, she encased herself in it like a cocoon, muscles too chill-bound to allow her to insert arms through sleeves. Covered up to her very eyes, she huddled in the chair they had once shared, feet folded up, a lumpy little woolen mound of misery.

The chill soon stopped. Only misery went on; whether warm blood or cold, the same misery. Her eyes stared hauntedly, fixedly, from just above the upended robe-collar; darkly shadowed now by long strain, perhaps darkly shadowed too by the fact that they were so recessed within the sheltering robe. Her mouth was hidden, and most of her nose. Only the eyes, like low-burning lamps of despair. Never wavering, scarcely blinking. Duller now than they had been before. Tearless too, for grief was past its early weeping stage; had become a deeper, unseen thing.

The night wore on, with a hush like funeral velvet draperies.

When she was a little girl, she had feared the night, as most small children do. Once, awakening too early and in the dark, she had cowered there uneasy and sent up a little plea: "Make the light come soon; make the night go away." Now, it was the day she feared, the coming of light. For while the night still lasted, it might yet return him. But when the day came, she would have lost him altogether. She knew that well, knew that well. It was in the night that he had gone, and if the night did not bring him back to her, the day never would. His absence would be sealed forever. So now she prayed for darkness, prayed for night, the punishing night, to last beyond its span.

"Don't let the day come. Don't let it come yet. Wait till he's back first. Then let it come."

But mercilessly the night thinned away, as if there were a giant unseen blackboard eraser at work, rubbing it out. And in the new light he didn't come, just as he hadn't in the former dark. Still her eyes stared out over the woolen folds, looking nowhere, seeing nothing now. Duller than dull, hopelessly opaque.

She must have slept, or dozed awake at least. Her head went over a little to the side at last, became more inert. The eyes never fully closed, but lost some of their haunted fixity. The lids did not drop over them the whole way, but sagged to a somnolent meridian.

The fidgeting of the knob must have been hours after. No hope came with its fluttering, somehow. Hope would not come back; it had been dead too long perhaps. It didn't even stir, strangely enough. Nor when the questioning tap came. Nor when it parted at the seams and a gap was made, empty the first few instants. Then an errant flounce of skirt peered momentarily, showing hope it had been right to lie there dead.

Above, a head looked cautiously in, everything else kept back.

The woman was in maid's headgarb, ruched cap atop a massive pillow of upturned red hair, kept walled in by barrettes. She was buxom, florid, maternal in every respect. Save perhaps the actuality.

"Did I come too soon, now?" she murmured softly.

The eyes just looked at her.

"They told me one of the rooms around here was a bride and groom, but sure it's the first day for all of us, and I would be getting mixed up like this."

The eyes just looked.

"Shall I step out and be coming back a little later then?"

A voice like the echo of far-off sound said: "It doesn't matter."

"Did the young man step out for a minute?"

The far-off voice said: "He's gone."

She advanced more fully into the room now, concerned. "What's the matter, darlin'? What ails—?"

The bunched-up robe suddenly exploded like an overstuffed pod, lay there flaccid, the chair was empty, and she was clinging to her, and being clung to. Someone of one's own kind, another woman. Someone like your mother, someone like your sister. Someone like—you.

The maid held her, and patted her, and coaxed her. "Sh, darlin'. Sure and he'll be back before you know it. Any minute now, through the door he'll be coming."

"He won't. He won't. He never will again."

"How lang ago did he leave? How lang is it he's gone?"

"At twelve. I think it was at twelve, But I don't know any more. I can't remember any more."

"But sure, darlin', it's only a little after two o'clock now."

"At twelve last night."

The ruddy face whitened. For a moment her eyes were frightened too, then she covered it up. She patted the girl some more, she held her to her. Then she left her briefly, saying she'd be back. The girl just stood there exactly where she'd left her, like someone deprived of her own powers of locomotion.

When the maid came back she held a thick crockery mug of steaming tea. She led her, like an automaton, to the chair and into it, and held the mug up to her lips.

"Come, now. This'll do you good. They have a little closet on each floor at the back of the hall, with a gas-ring in it, so we maids can brew ourselves a cup of tea at noon." She stroked her hair a little as the girl tasted of it. She finally left the mug in her hands altogether. Then she turned to make the bed, from habit that was already fixed by morning-long practice. When she saw she had no need to, she drew in her lips in unspoken commiseration, and quickly turned away again with an almost pirouette-like rapidity.

She sat down herself then, in solacing camaraderie, but on the very edge of the chair, to show that her stay was stolen and had to be a short one.

She asked what her name was, the girl's. This brought on pain again, but the mug was there to conceal the flickering her lips made. "It was to have been Compton."

The maid quickly spoke of her own, to snare her mind away. "Mine's Ann, spelt shart, without the e. I don't know why they left it aff, but as long as they did, I might as well keep it that way. Ye can write it quicker that way."

She rose soon and had to leave her, telling her she had half the floor still to do, but promising to look in on her a little later. "I'll be right out there somewhere. Cahll me if you want anything, and I'll drop the broom and dustpan and come to you in a minute. Don't you want to get a little rest now."

The girl averted her eyes from the bed almost in horror. "I couldn't get in there. I couldn't."

"Let me fix you in the chair, then." She put a pillow behind her head and, daring the official wrath, for all the bedding was new, slipped another to the floor underneath her feet. She took one of the blankets and deftly spread it over her. She stroked her hair soothingly, before turning to go. "Is there no one ye want me to tell, for you, now?"

The girl said plaintively, "There was only he. Who else could there be?"

She left as she had entered the first time, gradually; her face remaining to peer back after the rest of her was already hidden.

"Come back soon, Ann," the girl whispered.

A flirt of skirt in the door-seam, just like the first time, and she was gone.

She had left the chair when Ann next entered. This was quite some hours later, and she was crouched on the floor, head and shoulder supported upright against the dresser. One of the drawers peered open. Against her she held pressed a man's white shirt, still buttoned in a flat oblong. One empty papery sleeve she had drawn up around her own shoulder, as if seeking a phantom embrace. She was awake.

Ann said nothing, drew it subtly away from her, and it deftly vanished from sight. She got her back to the chair again. She had brought more tea, and this time slabs of buttered white bread. The tea she got her to take, the bread she couldn't.

"And is there no one you're going to tell about this, darlin'?" she breathed coaxingly.

"I have no one. Who is there?"

Then, belatedly, she noticed a change in her comforter's appearance. "You're going away. You're going to leave me."

Ann had on a short pinched-in jacket, a bell-shaped ground-trailing skirt, and on her head a flat saucer-like straw hat from which looped three cherries, one of them on a broken stem. "I have to, darlin'. Sure I finished up lang ago. I hung behind all I could. I even asked the housekeeper could I be staying with you in here tonight. 'An employee in one of the guest-rooms? Out of the question!' You know how they talk."

The girl wrung her hands, and bowed her forehead against them. "Oh, what'll do? All night in here, alone."

"I'll be here bright and early. I'll look in at you the first thing." She drew her from the chair, and tried to guide her across the room.

At the last minute the girl noticed the destination, shrank back. "I can't. Don't ask me to. I'll keep staring at the door, and the door'll keep staring at me. Like last night."

"Is it the door that bothers you, now?"

"All night long I'll watch it, waiting for it to open."

"If I cover it so ye can't see it, then will ye try to sleep?"

"But how can you?"

The purposeful Ann looked about, for a daring moment even eyed the drapes. Then, discarding such a job-risking choice, came to a heroic decision. Modestly she turned away from her protégée. Up, in bunchy awkwardness, went the ground-trailing skirt. Down, in sudden release, came a petticoat. Not new, not even whole perhaps, but her own, all she had to give. She stepped clear, the skirt subsided, and the diminution could not have been detected.

She picked it up, went to the door, and held it outspread against it in measurement. It was inadequate.

"Wait, now," she said determinedly, though nothing had been said.

Her arms came close together, widened with a rending noise, and the petticoat had opened from waist to hem into twice its former area.

"Oh, no!" the girl protested too late. "Your petticoat—How'll you get home?"

"Sure and many's the time I hadn't one to my name, and I still moved about. It's June."

She slipped out, came back with a palmful of thumbtacks filched from the supply room at the end of the hall. Using only the toil-toughened heel of her hand to drive them home, she obliterated the door for at least two-thirds of the way down with a sort of diagonal slipcover effect. The bottom third could not be seen from a prone position in the bed.

"There, darlin'," she said, "it won't hurt you anny more."

"Now when I look at it," the girl mused, "I'll think of you, not of—"

Ann was able now to lead her docilely to the bed, help her in, and prod and plump the covers about her. The girl lay with her head flat on the pillow, staring straight up at the ceiling overhead. Ann stood there by her a moment, placed her hand on her forehead in consolation; looked down considering, decided, and finally put her lips to the girl's forehead in a sisterly kiss of sympathy.

"Rest, now," she coaxed her. "Till the marning, darlin'. We've been told to get here by seven, but I'll make sure I'm here by six, so I can be with you a little bit." She moved on toward the door, the ex-petticoat bellied out hugely for a moment, there was a smothered latch-click, and she was gone.

The girl's eyes kept staring straight up at the ceiling overhead. Not right away, not soon even, but after a lengthy while they flickered closed, reopened briefly once or twice, and then at last she slept.

Her sleep was not without the continuing thoughts and images of her waking, however; its stresses and its longings kept on uninterrupted. And, as in most such dreams, there was a magic formula by which she could recover him, bring him back. Waiting there for her to use, if only she could. So easy that it tantalized, so simple that it tortured, made her twitch upon the bed. It was: just to speak his name, just to say it. That was all she had to do.

Other names like meteors flashed by, lighting up momentarily the black skies of her sleep, but always the wrong ones, "Arthur." "Wallace." And the strange name of a little boy she had once schooled with: "Ansel." While he waited patiently just out of sight to appear when she would have pronounced his own, the right one.

Faster and faster her head rolled to and fro on the pillow. She even arched her back clear of the bed time after time, to fall back again frustrated every time.

And suddenly, as she seized upon it at last, the effort of doing so shattered the dream like a dark-glass casing, too much violence for its fragile texture, and her eyes flew open and she awoke.

Saying it low first, then louder, louder still, then screaming it out, in vain effort to stay the dream and have it fulfill its promise. "Johnny! John-eee!"

But the dream wouldn't come back, and the magic formula was no good now.

Over and over she screamed it, hoping against hope that it would work. "John-eee! John-eee!" Then stopped at last only because she had no more breath to spend.

In a moment or so someone tapped tentatively on the other side of the door. She seized a corner of the pillow and stuffed it into her mouth, and closed her teeth on it, to keep from screaming any more.

Then the voice of a man said, speaking to someone beside him: "Nobody in there. It must have come from somewhere else, I guess." And they went away again.

She whimpered awhile, and lay awake awhile, in the silence of the coffin-like night.

Then again she slept, and then again she dreamed. But the new dream was less exacting, producing him without requiring of her any magic formula.

The petticoat vanished and the naked door was there again.

Then it opened, and she knew he was there, just back out of sight. Her heart could feel his presence salving its hurt.

Then his head appeared, timorously. She had to call out, to reassure him: "It's all right, Johnny. It's all right."

Then at last all of him, and there he was. The tie he'd worn, the suit. Even to his hat, thrown back upon his head, as she had seen him once do on the train, to relieve heat and haste.

He came all the way in, as far as the foot of the bed. As though he were staying now, as though he were staying now. He even rested both hands on the footrail of the bed. He was so near her now, and she to him. Almost she thought she could feel the warmth of his breath carried to her on the cold barren air. Almost she thought she could see those little glints of topaz, like spinning pinwheels, in his dark-brown eyes.

"I can explain," he said. "I can explain why I stayed so long."

"I know you can," she said docilely. "I know you can, Johnny."

"But only if I have time enough. If they don't give me time enough—"

"Hurry, Johnny! Hurry, while you still have time—!"

But just as he started to, it was already too late. Time, the mysterious enemy, overtook him. Three cherries sprouted from the top of his head, and dangled over sideward, one on a broken stem.

His face got redder than it had been, and broader, and he was Ann the chambermaid, leaning over the foot of the bed and crooning pleadingly: "Don't you know me, now? Don't you remember me from yesterday?"

The girl murmured softly, but wistfully rather than with resentment, "Now he'll never come. Now you've made him go away forever. And just when I almost had him."

Ann stayed with her awhile, and gave her tea again. Then she left, promising, "I'll be back soon, dear. As soon as ever I can."

When she came it was several hours later, and she had someone else with her. She stood back by the doorway in deference, and let the other come forward alone and take command of the visit. The newcomer was a woman.

She wore pince-nez glasses. She wore a dress of sleek bronze-colored bombazine, iridescent like the breast-feathers of a pouter pigeon, and at her waist a black alpaca apron with two pockets. In one was a writing-tablet, in the other a great mass of keys, resembling a porous chunk of ore that has been imperfectly smelted and failed to fuse properly. From her bosom hung an open-face gold watch, suspended upside-down so that it could be lifted and read with a single move of the hand. A lead pencil was thrust raffishly (but no doubt the raffishness was not intended) through one of the "rats" at the back of her hand.

She patted the girl's hand. It was meant kindly, but it was a perfunctory pat. She exuded no warmth, such as Ann breathed with every breath she drew. "Now, dear," she said, "what is it?"

"Nothing," the girl said. She could think of no other answer to make to a question like that.

"Now, dear," the housekeeper said again, "what do you want us to do?"

"Nothing," the girl said. She could think of no other answer to make to that question either.

"Is there nothing you would like us to do?"

This time the girl looked up at her with the plaintiveness of a sick child coaxing for a drink of water. "Can I have Ann back?"

The woman turned her head to where Ann stood. "Ann has her duties," she replied disapprovingly. "She must not stay away from them too long."

As though she understood the hint, Ann immediately slithered out the door and was gone.

The housekeeper gave the girl's hand one more perfunctory pat, turned to go herself. At the open door she said, "Mr. Lindsey will have to be notified. He will have to decide what is to be done." Then she closed the door after her.

The girl remained alone.

Some time after, a knock again interrupted her solitude. The knock did not wait for a response, but the door was opened immediately on its heels, and a dignified and well-dressed gentleman entered, with the air of someone who did not need to ask permission but was free to enter a room like this at any time he chose.

He was about her father's age, and dressed somewhat as she had seen her father dressed; but not at ordinary times, only on rare occasions, such as churchgoing on an Easter Sunday morning. He had a very heavy down-turned mustache, glistening with wax, and wore a small flower, she did not know its name, in the buttonhole of his swallowtail coat.

"My poor child," was his greeting to her. "I've come to see what can be done about this." Then, after having already seated himself, he asked, "May I sit down a moment and have a little chat with you?"

Her face flickered briefly as the sympathy in his voice revived her grief. She nodded mutely; he made her feel less lost and lonesome.

"I'm Mr. Lindsey, dear," he introduced himself; and though he didn't add that he was the manager, somehow she knew that he must be. He had too much of an air of habitual authority about him.

"Tell me about yourself," he said artlessly.

And, hesitantly and awkwardly at first, but soon without any self-consciousness whatever or even awareness that she was doing so, she was answering the sprinkling of guiding questions that he put to shape the course of her talk. She did not even know that they were questions, they were so deftly inserted. She did not even know, in telling him about their house at home, that she had told him what street it was on, or what its number was, or of course what town it was situated in. Sitting back at ease in his chair, one knee crossed above the other, nodding benignly, he skillfully slanted the conversation.

Then almost in mid-word—hers, not his own—his knees had uncoupled, he was on his feet taking leave of her, and the refreshing little flow of confidence had ended. Mouth still open on an unfinished sentence, she watched him go to the door and open it, with a soothing "Forgive me, my child; I must hurry. There's an awful lot to do here today."

"Good-bye, Mr. Lindsey," she said forlornly, eyes hopeful to the end that he might change his mind and remain.

Just as he closed the door she heard him say, in a tactfully lowered voice to someone who must have remained out there waiting for him: "They must be sent for. She can't remain here alone like this."

He returned in about two hours' time—or perhaps it was even three; her standards of time were all awry now —and now there was another man with him. He opened the door on the concluding words of something they had just finished discussing, and she caught the tail-end of it. "—might be better, as you say. The sight of it might frighten her." He entered alone first; the second person lingered outside the door an additional moment or two. She had a vague impression, she didn't know why, that he was disencumbering himself of something. She even glimpsed a stiffly outthrust arm for an instant, held as when one shucks a sleeve off it.

Then the other man came in at last. He was older than Mr. Lindsey. He could almost have been her Grandpa, if her Grandpa had still been alive. He came in smoothing down his mop of snowy-white hair, as if he had just finished removing something from his head. His attire was incomplete almost to the point of freakishness. She had never seen anyone dressed like that before, except in their own home. He had on dark-blue trousers, an undershirt with elbow-length sleeves, suspenders over this, and pinned to the undershirt as one would wear a medal, some sort of a shield or badge. Still, everything was so unreal to her now, so strange, that this one little bit of added strangeness held no meaning, glided by her almost unnoted.

He seated himself and promptly began to talk to her. Mr. Lindsey remained standing in the background, attentive but taking no part.

Like Mr. Lindsey, his whole conversation was in the form of questions. Unlike Mr. Lindsey, they were all about Johnny, not herself. About his family, about where he had come from, about how long she had known him. She found it very difficult to talk to him, mainly because the subject-matter held so much pain in it for her. It hadn't been painful to talk about herself; it was painful to talk about Johnny. And some of the questions were so extremely private, that she could scarcely answer them at all. Questions such as only her own mother would have asked her—and even she had not. Did she know whether he had gone with girls at all before their engagement?

"I don't know. I think he must have. All boys do." And then, completely unsure of herself, she in turn transformed it into a question. "Don't they?"

Had she any way of knowing whether he had ever kissed any girl, before he had kissed her?

Her eyes pleaded with Mr. Lindsey over her interlocutor's shoulder, and his in turn tried to reassure her.

Her face felt warm and her voice was low. "He told me —when WE first did—he never had before."

"Did he tell you why?"

He had to lean forward to catch the whispered thread of sound. "He said he never liked anyone—enough to— until he knew me."

Then at last he let her be, and rose, and went and stood beside Mr. Lindsey, and they spoke together for a long while. She could hear some of it, but it held little meaning for her. It seemed to be on some general topic, rather than on herself and Johnny. One of those dry general topics, like politics, that grown-up men always seemed to discuss when they got together.

"Too little general education on the subject. Everything's kept hushed up, in this day and age of ours—"

"But you can't shout those things out loud," protested Mr. Lindsey.

"The girls grow up knowing nothing, and half of the boys grow up and what little they know is wrong, all wrong. Then we throw them at each other's heads, and many times this is what happens."

"But I'm a married man myself," she heard Mr. Lindsey tell him. "And I don't think anyone knew less than I did when I got married, and yet my marriage has turned out very happily."

"Don't doubt it," said the other man obdurately. "But it's still blind luck. Other things enter into it too. If a boy is brought up in a strict, religious household, and trained to believe all that is sinful—then his conscience will trouble him about it later on. The more decent the boy, the more his conscience will trouble him. You can't break away from your early training, you know. Never altogether. And I think something like that is what's at the bottom of this. I think this boy ran away because he loved her, not because he didn't love her. He wanted to keep himself from doing something that he thought was sinful to her—"

Now they were talking about Johnny himself, she could tell. "Johnny wouldn't have done anything that was sinful to me," she wanted to say, but she couldn't, she was too ashamed. She covered up her reddened face with both her hands, and tried to hide it.

For the first time the other man turned and glanced over to her. "He certainly wasn't waylaid, or it would have been reported to us by this time. The same if he'd been injured in an accident. That leaves just this, what we've been discussing, and one other possibility—which I don't think is very likely at his age. A sudden complete loss of memory. I'm not a doctor, so I can't think what they call it. But there is such a thing; very rare though. Anyway, if it were that, I think he would have come to us of his own accord for help by now. We'll keep looking —and waiting—and I'm afraid that's all we can do. What'd you say his name was, again?" He moved toward the dresser, where the billfold lay, and reached out a hand toward it.

She sprang up with a quickness they hadn't known she was capable of, and lunged between him and the dresser like the sideward thrust of a knife, shielding it—the billfold—with her back. Or rather, shielding its exact position, for this was fetishism, though the word had not been born yet.

"No," she pleaded wildly, "don't touch it! Don't move it! It's right where his fingers left it, right in the exact place. If it stays there, then he'll come back. If you move it, then he never will."

The man gave Mr. Lindsey a look and withdrew his seeking hand.

She turned and let her own fingers hover lovingly above the article, without, however, touching it. "His hand was the last one touched it," she said. "His hand put it down right here. It's like a magic spell, and it mustn't be broken." She gestured as if patting the air above it. "It means that he'll come back."

"Did he go out without his tie too?" the man asked, noticing the necktie placed neatly folded beside it.

"No, that was the one he put out to wear for tomorrow." She stopped a moment, thought about it, pensively stroking her cheek with just two fingers. "But now tomorrow's yesterday." She turned to him bewilderedly, as if seeking his help. "Oh, what happened to tomorrow? Who took it away?" And turned to look, as if seeking it about the four corners of the room. "Who took tomorrow away?" And even took him by the sleeve and tugged at it repeatedly, like a small child demanding an answer to its question. "It was there. It was to have come. It never did. Yet now it's gone. Who took it? Who?"

A thin haze of grayish smoke seemed to begin rising all about, until she couldn't see him clearly any longer, nor Mr. Lindsey, nor the room itself. It didn't make her cough, though, like real smoke does. Just hampered her vision. The floor tipped up and nudged her knees. It didn't hurt though. She put her palms against it, to keep it from her face.

"You're the very one should know," she murmured. "You are a policeman. I understand that now; I didn't when you first came in— That's why you wear that little thing—there—" She toppled over on her side, and shielded her eyes with one best forearm. "Please Mr. Policeman. Catch them, make them give tomorrow back."

And then somebody's strong arms went around her and gently lifted and held her. The strong arms carried her and placed her on something soft that sank a little under her. And the gray smoke rolled in like a blanket and covered her all up. She could even feel it being tucked in around her chin.

When the haze that had misted her eyes had cleared away again, as at last it did, Papa was there in the room with her; he was the first one she saw. He was standing, back from the bed a little, beside a chair. In the chair sat Mamma, pressed close against him, his arm consolingly about her shoulder. Within her clenched hand, raised to just below her face, she held a tiny balled-up handkerchief, and from time to time would press it to her nose. But she was not crying now, though just previously she evidently had been. This was just the leftover corrective from when she had been crying. Both their faces were haunted with concern, their eyes were fixed troubledly on her, with a steadfastness which indicated they had been gazing at her like this for a long time past. They did not smile at her, seemed too deeply troubled to be able to, even when they saw that she recognized them. Papa's mustache even seemed to droop, for it was so heavy that it took whatever shape his mouth took under it, and his mouth therefore must have been turned deeply down.

Nearer at hand was someone else. She only noticed him last, for his head had been bent down low, listening to her breathing. She knew him to be a doctor, for she felt the tiny coolness his instrument made, moving here and there about her chest. She wasn't afraid; she had had doctors do this before with a stethoscope, for a bad cold in the chest, perhaps. This was home, a part of home; a part of being with Papa and Mamma, a part of being safe, of being cared for.

His face was wise and grave as a doctor's should be, as he righted his head at last. Glasses with a black cord at the side, and a trim, neat beard, not allowed to grow too long, and eyes that sympathized and gave you confidence.

"There, dear," he said, and patted her shoulder, and made a gesture to reclose the open neck of her gown, which, however, he did not complete. She did it herself, her attention attracted to it by his gesture.

He put away his stethoscope, and turned to them, to Mamma and Papa, and said, "She is sound physically. There is no need for worry on that score. But—" And then he didn't finish it.

Mamma's face tightened up even more than it was already. "What is it, Doctor?" she said in a whisper that was almost superstitiously fearful.

"She has suffered great shock," he said, and he rose now to finally face them in entirety, so that she could see only his back. He crossed the room before speaking further, and then, trickling water into a tumbler, said, "And those things sometimes take long to wear off." Then bringing the tumbler back to her side, he took from his bag which sat open on the floor a neat little oblong paper packet, and deftly unfolded it to make a little trough of it, and from this allowed a white powder to sift into the water and cloud it to the hue of diluted milk. "And sometimes never," he said, concluding at last his sentence.

Mamma gave a start and cried, "Oh, Doctor— Oh, no—!"

He stirred the dose by hand-motion alone, without the aid of any spoon, by giving his wrist a rotary motion. Then passed it to her and said, "Drink this, dear. Right down."

She knew the taste, she'd experienced it before. Calomel.

"Now lie back and rest," he said, when he'd taken the empty tumbler back from her, and gently placed his hand upon her forehead, again more as a gesture of what he wanted her to do than by exerting any actual pressure upon her.

She lay back and watched and listened, while he gave them his undivided attention at last.

Mamma said pleadingly, "What shall we do, Doctor? Doctor, what shall we do?"

"There is nothing you can do, except wait and see. Nothing I can do, nothing anyone can do. Except let time go by."

"Shall we take her back with us now, Doctor?" Mamma asked.

"Is it far?" he said.

She told him where it was, in Indiana. He closed his eyes briefly, as though he would have preferred it to be not that far. Then he said, "Yes, it's better if you do, even if the trip is a tiring one. The sooner you take her out of this terrible room and what it spells for her, the better off she'll be."

Mamma got up at once, and went forthwith to the bureau drawers, almost briskly, as though the mere act of starting preparations eased her distress somewhat.

Papa looked out into the hall and called to someone unseen: "Will you send the porter up?" Then came back and reached into his pocket for his billfold.

The doctor took up his hat, and went to shake hands with Papa. Mamma quickly let the drawer be momentarily, to go and join in the leave-taking.

Someone knocked on the door, and the doctor went to it and looked out. He stood there awhile, just his back showing, while someone spoke to him.

When he had closed the door again, he motioned them to come nearer. "They've found him," he breathed.

"Is he—?" Papa whispered.

"They found his body," the doctor said. "The pockets were all inside out. He didn't have his wallet with him. Maybe if he had had it on him, he wouldn't have been killed."

Mamma wrung her hands.

Papa looked down at the floor.

"I leave it up to you whether to tell her or not," the doctor said. He sighed and shook his head. "Keep her to yourselves a lot. All you can. Don't let people hurt her."

Mamma said, "Who would want to hurt her, Doctor? Our little girl."

"Nobody will want to. But everyone will. Every time she sees a boy holding a girl by the hand. Every time she sees a couple dancing. Every time she sees a baby roll by in its carriage— Keep her to yourselves a lot. All you can, all you can."

"But after we're gone, Doctor?"

"Maybe it won't matter any more by then. That would be the kindest thing, Hope for that, pray for that. Maybe it won't matter any more by then."

Then he patted Mamma on the shoulder, as one who tries to give solace where none can be given; then he shook Papa's hand. Then he was gone.

Mamma returned to her, and kissed her on the forehead, but dry-eyed and calm and wise and strong now, as she had always been when her girl was a little girl; her tears and fears no more to be seen. She helped her from the bed and stood her there before her, and dressed her as she used to when she was small. From the inside to the out, button by button, and hook-and-eye by hook-and-eye. The only difference was—she, Mamma, no longer needed to bend down on the point of her knee as she had when she was six or seven, for she was taller now, a full-grown height, not a child's height any more.

Papa in the meanwhile moved about in the background, his back to them; all the things were gone from the drawers. But on the top of the bureau his tie for tomorrow still lay, untouched, just where he had put it. She wanted to go over to it and stroke it, but Mamma, with a quick glance to see what drew her, turned her gently, ever so gently, the other way. So gently that she could not be resisted, for there was no force there to resist, only gentleness and that is stronger than force.

A porter came in and took the valises out, but she was only dimly aware of that, for Mamma was standing before her blocking her view.

Mamma put her hat on for her last of all, and adjusted it, and thrust the pins through it. The hat that went way up on one side, way down on the other.

Then Mamma placed an arm about her waist, and kissed her once again on the forehead, the kiss that she remembered so well from her childhood, the kiss of security, the kiss of consolation, the kiss of belonging to someone, of being a part of them; the kiss of home. And Mamma murmured gently beside her ear, "Come, our little girl is coming home with us."

Step by step, with her arm about her, she led her over to the door, then out past it to where Papa stood waiting, and reaching behind her, started to draw it tactfully closed after them.

But just as it was closing, the girl herself gave an abrupt turn, and pleading, "Just one moment—! Only one—!" stepped back to it and looked in once more, while Mamma's arm still held her around the waist.

And staring around at the emptiness, as if seeking him everywhere and finding him nowhere, she called out with whispered intensity: "Good-bye, Johnny! Good-bye! And good-bye to me too. For we both died in here the other night."

2. The Night of April 6th, 1917

BY SEVEN O'CLOCK that Good Friday evening the news was already six hours old. At exactly eleven minutes past one o'clock that afternoon President Wilson, he who had kept us out of war, had signed the declaration, with what can only be described as a cold, pedagogic ferocity, using a pen handed to him by Mrs. Wilson with no doubt an equal cold, pedagogic ferocity. By two o'clock the first extras had long since flamed into the streets around the Times Square district and excitement had already penetrated the remotest crannies and backwaters of the city. Isolated neighborhoods and insulated pockets that were usually days behind in the news, today were only hours behind, half-hours behind.

For this was not news, this was a cataclysm. This was the end of one world, the beginning of another. The nineteenth century, which had lingered on in the Western Hemisphere two and a half years longer than in the Eastern, had just come to an end, after lasting one hundred and seventeen years. More than that had ended; this was a millennial sunset. An Age of Light had ended, a new Dark Age, an interminable Night, had returned to the world.

But no one thought of that. They hung flags from their windows. They suddenly hated people they'd loved yesterday, and loved people they'd hated yesterday. They broke out in a rash of patriotism, like hives.

The taxi arrived outside the St. Anselm at 7:01. The man who got out was a boy. Or the boy who got out was a man. Depending upon the perspective from which you viewed him. Whether man or boy, though, the main thing was, he was a soldier. He was in uniform. He was in a state of high excitement, just as was everyone else. But in his case there was the added personal impetus, as well as the collective, communal one. His face was even flushed with it. He'd had a drink or two. Not more than that. Probably thrust on him by well-wishers as he made his way about the hysterical town. This was evidently the latest of a succession of stops, this one outside the St. Anselm.

"I'll try my luck in here," he told his driver. "Stick around, don't ditch me, now. I may still need you."

"Soldier, I'd wait for you all night!" the driver called after him fervently. "Swat the Kaiser!" he added, and made a fist, and swung it on an upcurve through the empty air.

The soldier turned, flashed him an understanding grin. "Swat the Kaiser!" he answered. He too made a fist, and swung it on an upcurve through the empty air.

He went inside, at a fast run.

He halted before the desk, with a settling rush.

"Got a room?" he said. "Just for tonight. I've got to have one. I'm staying in town."

The clerk had his back to him at the moment. He was inserting letters into the mailboxes. He shook his head. "We're sold out," he said. "Everything gone." He swept his arms out, dropped them again, heavily.

The applicant leaned sharply downward over the edge of the desk, in momentary frustration. Then he straightened again, hit it with the flat of his hand. "This is the sixth place I've tried!" He started to turn disconsolately away. "That's a fine thing," he protested. "My last night in New York!"

The clerk had turned around by now. He stared at the uniform. He came to life suddenly. "You're an enlisted man!" he exclaimed. "You're in the army!" His face became animated, almost dedicated. "Why didn't you say so before!" He too made a fist, though he didn't swing it through the air. He simply brought it down resolutely atop the hotel register. "Well, I guess we have a room for you! I just guess we have! You bet your bottom dollar! And if we haven't we'll just see that we get one! We're not going to turn away one of our boys, not today of all days!"

He opened the register, traced his finger down it. "Humph!" he said rather malevolently, bringing it to a halt at a certain name. His eyes took on a hard look, a patriotically hard look. One might almost say a merciless look. He clapped the register closed. He took up the house-phone. "Give me 923," he said to the operator.

"We've all got to do our bit," he said implacably. This to the young man facing him.

Then, "Mr. Schultz? Oh, I see. Is your husband in, madam? This is the desk clerk."

He lowered the phone slightly. "German-Americans," he hissed to the waiting young man. His face was bitter. His face was baleful. His face was full of hate.

He raised it again. "I'm sorry, Mr. Schultz. We find that we require that room. When? Immediately." His voice was flinty. "No, there is no other room that we can put you in. We have none available. Why didn't we let you know sooner? Because we didn't know sooner, we do know now!" He hung up with an impact.

"They'll be down in five minutes," he said truculently. "And if they're not—"

An elderly woman who had stopped in the background to eavesdrop piped up: "They cut off the hands of little children!"

"They used poison gas," growled the desk clerk savagely.

A bellboy who was standing there shielded his mouth with the edge of his hand, said guardedly for the benefit of the two men alone, "They—"

The desk clerk and the volunteer both nodded vigorously.

The elderly lady also nodded, just as vigorously, although she had not heard what the charge was.

The desk clerk set his jaw grimly. He took out his watch. "Four and a half minutes," he said remorselessly. "I don't even have to consult Mr. Perry about this. He'd back me up to the hilt. I know his feelings are the same as all the r—"

He brought up his watch again, with a heave. "Three and a half minutes," he said. He snapped it shut with a click that was almost like that of the trigger of a gun. And with the same implications of finality. "Bob, take this young man up there and put him into that room. And if you need any help doing it—"

"Here they are now," someone said.

The lighted car was slowly descending the shaft. It stopped. The grilled gate clashed back.

Everyone—and by now a considerable coterie of people had formed about the original two, the young man and the desk clerk—turned to face the two monsters of iniquity. There wasn't a relenting, a merciful eye in the group.

The foremost monster was a very frightened, a very bewildered, a very stout, and a very inoffensive-looking man. So stout, in fact, that he had to issue sideward instead of frontally through the elevator aperature. His hair was graying. He had a straw-colored mustache, the hair trained downward. His hat looked too small, perhaps because the back of his neck was too thick. He was encumbered with a number of coats and raincoats. Also an umbrella. The female monster, who came at his heels, was equally frightened, equally bewildered; only less stout, but even more inoffensive-looking, if such a thing were possible. She too was copiously encumbered with belongings. Her mild china-blue eyes were supiciously moist.

They wormed their way through the knot of inimical people, who forbore giving ground, as an indication of their defiance.

This caused the outcasts a degree of exertion that brought the lead-monster up to the desk puffing and heaving. He took out a handkerchief and passed it around his forehead.

"Pleass, mister. You do not giff us very much time. Ve haff novhere to go."

"Why don't you go back to Germany?" a voice in the background suggested.

"For fife years my vife and I ve haff been coming to your hotel now veneffer ve come to New York. You think this is right? You think such a vay iss to treat people?"

"Yeah, and how do they treat people in your country?" came another anonymous sound-effect from the rear. The logic of this was a little confused; the intent no doubt had been to ask how people in the occupied countries were treated. However, it was apparently clear enough to those present; there was a general nodding of heads.

The supplicant, tactfully, kept addressing himself to the clerk though his answer was to the last remark. "I am not Cherman. I am in Milvaukee born. I haff neffer been to Chermany."

His wife began to pluck him by the sleeve. "Come, Poppa, pleass. Pleass, Poppa. Don't argue with him. Not now. Poppa, Poppa, ve get in trroble."

"Hock the Kaiser," someone said bravely from the fringes.

"Hock the Kaiser," a second voice parroted.

"Bob," said the desk clerk, with the air of repugnance of a health inspector ordering premises to be fumigated, "take these people's luggage outside this hotel." He motioned. "Outside to the street."

Bob folded his arms. His chin went up a little. He adopted the heroic expression of a figure depicted on a recruiting poster. "Mr. Gray, I refuse to touch the luggage of any dirty Huns. They can carry it themselves. I may be only a bellboy, but I'm an American."

A round of vigorous applause sounded. A man came forward and clapped the bellhop warmly on the shoulder. "Good for you, son. Good boy." He thrust a coin into his palm. "And that's for not doing it."

The Untouchable had a certain streak of unsuspected courage in his fatty person. Or perhaps it was just foolhardy stubbornness. He made the mistake of trying to continue the futile discussion. He turned now, and for the first time addressed the half-circle of baiters instead of the clerk. "I vas born in Milvaukee in eighteen sigsty-seffen—" he protested. He raised the umbrella, but simply for emphasis, not in threat.

This, however, was the spark that was needed.

"Get 'em out of here! Throw them out!" voices railed.

"Throw their things out, and them after 'em!"

A man rushed forward, picked up one of the bags, and tossed it down the entrance steps. It rolled over and lay on its side. In a moment all the other pieces had followed it. One of the larger bags burst on the sidewalk, and a great many homely articles of attire were disclosed.

"You don't touch!" Schultz shouted excitedly, holding his umbrella straight up in the air and turning this way and that to ward off a possible personal onslaught. "You leaff off your hands, you hear?"

His wife kept pulling him sideward down the steps, by both lapels now, her pleas drowned out in the general hubbub.

The patriots came down in their wake, and ganged up into a solid wall along the steps, as if to keep them from getting back inside, had such been their intent.

"Remember poor little Belgium!" cackled an elderly female voice.

"Go on and do your spying somewhere else!"

They both tried to scuttle into the cab which had brought the young enlisted man to the entrance, and which was still standing there waiting, pulsing violently with the heart-throb of its own engine.

The cab driver thwarted them, reaching backward, clawing the already opened door away from them, and slamming it in their faces. "Get away from me, you Boches!" he railed. "I wouldn't soil my cab with yuh!"

Another round of applause broke from the thronged steps, like surf against rocks.

The barbarian's wife was openly crying now. "Come, Poppa," she kept whimpering. "Poppa, pleass, don't answer back. Ve valk instead."

They managed to gather up all the pieces of luggage between the two of them, tucking the surplus laterally under their arms, and stagger down the street. Two very fat, two very frightened people.

Someone threw a small chunk of coal after them but it fell short.

A farewell round of abusive couplets winged after them.

"Baby-killers!"—"Hock the Kaiser!"

"Remember the Lusitania!" snarled a hard-eyed, gravel-voiced individual of unprepossessing aspect. After he had given vent to the battle-cry two or three times, he rang in a variation, perhaps to relieve the monotony of it. "Remember the Titanic!"

A man next to him turned toward him. Not so much in positive contradiction, but as if he were trying to think it out for himself. He showed this by staring vacantly as if in retrospect, and blinking several times. Finally he said, with somewhat better historical accuracy than grammatical, "They didn't do that, did they? An iceberg done it."

Instantly the challenged patriot whirled on him, narrowing his eyes suspiciously to see if he could detect sabotage or propaganda. Those two new mystic words that were spreading among the population like fire through straw. "And who planted it there? They were trying to start a war even then. Them U-Boats of theirs were sneaking around already in those days, weren't they?"

"I never thought of it that way."

"Well, think of it that way now, Johnnie," he was advised drily.

The new convert even outdid his preceptor in zeal, as is often the way with new converts. "Remember the Morra-tania!" he shrilled.

This time it was the turn of the original to break off and eye him askance, to see if sarcasm were intended. "That hasn't been sunk yet."

"No, but it will be if they get the chance. Just let them get the chancel"

"You said it," agreed the other, conceding the point.

They both faced forward again, shoulder to shoulder, larynx to larynx, one hundred percent, unhyphenatedly integratedly American.

It was a good battle they were fighting. And they had the weapons for it. Big mouths.

The elderly female, religion somehow infiltrating into her patriotism, began to sing in a quavering, singsong voice. The others took up the refrain; it swelled out into a deep, full-bodied chorus, aggressive, antagonistic. A couple of small American flags kept waving to and fro in their midst, in time with the stanzas. They were not only taking up the cudgels for their country, they were taking up the cudgels for God:

"Glor-ry, glor-ry, halle-lu-jah,

Glor-ry, glor-ry, halle-lu-jah—!"

The original cause of it all, the young uniformed room-seeker, was riding up in the hotel elevator with the heroic Bob, meanwhile.

Bob led him down the hall to 923, keyed the door, swept it back for his approval. "Yes, sir," he invited, granting him a complimentary promotion even this early in his army career, before he had even been sent overseas, "yes, sir, General. Here you are."

The young man grinned appreciatively. But then, as he turned to survey the room, he grimaced, perhaps feeling that further indications of patriotic zeal were expected of him. "Open the windows," he said, pinching his nose for a moment. "Get the smell of those Heinies out of here."

The room, as a matter of fact, was exceptionally orderly and odorless. Probably no two people of any other race could have been dispossessed on such short notice and left the premises so neat and uncluttered in their wake. In fact, the only indications of recent human habitancy at all were an empty clothes-hanger, lying on the seat of a chair, and a snapshot of a fat little girl with flaxen pigtails, which had fallen to the floor and escaped detection in the haste of egress.

The virtuous Bob replaced the hanger in the closet. The snapshot, after a moment's repugnant regard, as at some loathsome reptile, he deliberately twitched out of the open window. "With the rest of the garbage," he muttered.

Only twenty-four hours before he would, had the same child been present in the same room, have patted the top of her head, or crouched down on his heels before her and talked coaxingly to her. Obviously, some powerful chemical change had occurred in those twenty-four hours, either in the top of the child's head or in himself. Or else in the very air around them. A change designated by the abstract formula: "Declaration of War."

He performed his ritual duties, which consisted of touching (but not otherwise altering) a number of unrelated points in the room: the loop at the bottom of the shade cord, the knob of the bathroom door, the top of a chair, and the light switch; having done nothing so far, he then asked paradoxically, "Will there be anything else, sir?"; was liberally tipped both for the doing-nothing and the asking if there was any further nothing to be done, and departed, beaming and with a further promotion of rank in the army of his esteem. "Thank you! Thank you, Commander!"

The young soldier, left alone, went over to the glass above the bureau and looked at his own face closely and steadily for a long moment, as if to see whether there was any change to be detected in it as yet, resulting from what he had done several hours ago. Apparently there was, if only to his own private eye, for he smiled and straightened his shoulders somewhat. He then brought his hand up, in what was evidently a practice salute. It needed more practice. Murmuring something that sounded like, "I'll get the hang of it pretty soon," he desisted.

He went over to the wall, took down the phone receiver from the oaken instrument box that was attached there (this hotel was already somewhat behind the times in its mechanical equipment, and steadily losing ground), and asked for a number. "Give me Cathedral 9,8,5,9."

There was a short wait, and then a female voice with a noticeable drawl answered. "Ya-a-as? Whut you want?"

"Is Jean there? Is Miss Nelson there?" he said.

The answer, though not addressed to him, was almost ear-shattering in its access of volume. "Miss Jean! You come heah get you own phone-tawks, you heah me! I cayn't be leaving that kitchen every single minute—"

There was a sound of rushing feet, like heavy rain approaching from a distance, ending with a sibilant skid over polished wood flooring.

Then a breathless voice, young and musical, said, "Hel-hello? Hel-hello?" as if it couldn't get the syllables out quickly enough, the caller was liable to go away before the short word could be finished.

"Jean!" he exulted. "I'm in! They took me!"

There was a catch of delighted incredulity in her voice. "Jimmy! They didn't! No! With your eyesight and all, and those glasses—?"

The catch, now, occurred in the flow of his own voice; it was, rather, a momentary and involuntary emptying of the diaphragm. He had to take a deep breath of replenishment before he could go ahead.

"Jean! This isn't 'Jimmy'! This is Ted Walters! Ted Walters from Tarrytown, I told you I was coming in today. Who'd you think it was, anyway?"

Her voice was perfectly self-possessed. She laughed, placatingly if a trifle thinly. "I knew it was you all the time, Ted. I was just trying to tease you."

"Yeah? You did that the other night too," he said accusingly. "Only then it was 'Bill.' Who's this 'Jimmy?' Do I know him?"

"Nobody," she said. "Forget it." The sigh that went with it was a threat of annoyance to come, if the catechism were prolonged.

His own momentous news swept aside the momentary hitch that had occurred. "Did you hear what I said to you?" he rushed on. "Did you hear me? I'm in! I'm in the Army!"

"Ted, how perfectly won-derful!" she gushed. "You're the very first one, out of all the boys I know, to enlist. You beat all the others to it." And, seeking to aggrandize the compliment, "And I know lots of boys."

"I know you do," he said ruefully, half under his breath. Then, at accelerated tempo again, "I'm going to see you tonight, aren't I? You'll come out with me tonight, won't you?"

There was a momentary drop in her voice, as though she had turned her head aside just then to see if anyone were about. "Ted, I can't. They told me they won't allow me to any more. You brought me in so late the last time. I never heard the end of it, the whole next day."

"You've got a date with somebody else," he said aggrievedly. "I know. That's what it is."

"Ted, I swear I haven't. I cross my heart. I hope to die—"

He cut the litany short. "Then prove it!" he said hotly.

She was beginning to waver a little. "But, Ted—"

"My last night in New York. And that's what you think of me."

"But, Ted, you know I—"

"I only did it for you. Who d'you suppose I did it for?"

She was mildly shocked. "Ted, you don't mean that. If I thought you did—"

"Well, you and—you and Uncle Sam," he admitted grudgingly.

"That's better," she said.

"Where are they now?"

"They haven't come home yet. Mamma went shopping down to Gimbels, and Papa hasn't come back from the office yet."

"Then now's your chance."

"I couldn't! I—" She was giving more ground all the time. "Where are you?"

"I'm at the St. Anselm. Why don't you come down and meet me here, and then we could go on from here?"

"I never went to a hotel to meet a boy, by myself—" But the idea seemed to hold an exotic attraction for her, the drawling way she lingered over it.

"People do it all the time," he assured her, with a newborn sophistication born of the day's momentous events. "What's wrong with it? It's better than meeting me on a street corner, isn't it? And I can't come right up to your door."

She had all but capitulated by now. "I could say I went over to Edna Lyons' house to spend the evening," she suggested. "But if I do, I'll have to call Edna and warn her not to call me while I'm out and give it away. She has a habit of calling me up sometimes for a chat. And I'll have to get home by eleven-thirty at the latest."

"Couldn't you say you're spending the wh—" He quickly decided against that. "I'll see that you do," he promised. "I'll bring you back in a taxi."

"A taxi?" she marveled, again attracted by the unusual.

"I've been riding around in one all day myself," he said vaingloriously.

A crisis had suddenly arrived at her end. Her voice quickened, became sibilantly breathless. "Here's Papa now! I hear his key in the door! Oh, Ted, now what'll we do? We shouldn't have stood talking it over so long—" ending with a warning "Sh-h-h!" She evidently forgot for a moment that his part of the conversation was audible only to herself in any case.

Before he could give her any advice in meeting this climactic situation, background noises had developed at her end, and her attention had temporarily been diverted from him.

There was a somewhat suctional impact that might have been translated as a homecoming kiss, and then he heard her say, somewhat off-center to the telephone: "Edna Lyons." Then two or three blurred remarks. Then a joyous, sharply defined "Oh, can I, Papa?"

Suddenly she was addressing him once more, but in a voice he had never been the recipient of before. It had an intimacy of age-similarity and gender to it, that made it thinner, clearer, more rapid, a good deal warmer, and also, to tell the truth, a good deal sweeter than any tones he had yet heard from her.

"All right, Edna," she gushed. "Papa says I can. I'll be over in a jiffy, dear. Papa sends his regards— Oh, wait a minute, Papa wants to talk to you—"

Then before the full implication of the remark could shock him into doing anything, she said, "Oh, she hung up."

And hung up herself.

He waited there by the phone an uneasy moment, half expecting it to ring back in catastrophic postscript, but it didn't.

Then he blew out his breath a little, lightly blotted his forehead with the palm of his hand, and turned away.

He returned to the telephone presently to order a safety razor and blades, also a stick of shaving cream. "Colgate's," he specified. "And a newspaper," he added. "The Evening Globe or The Evening Sun, it doesn't matter." This was for purposes of selecting a destination from the classified entertainment columns.

He could, he realized, have just as easily—and certainly just as quickly—have stepped downstairs and secured the articles himself. But this was his last night in New York, and he wanted the luxury of ordering things from his hotel room, the way people who lived in hotels all the time did. Or as he imagined they did.

There was a knock at the door in about twenty minutes, and Bob had arrived with the things. He and Bob were fast friends by now. Bob had even learned his name, from the register downstairs. He still bestowed his own honorary rank, in conjunction with it. "Here you are, General Walters. I suppose the general has a date coming up, with a pretty lady?"

"Sure thing I have!" Walters grinned.

"I took the liberty of bringing this too." He handed him a bottle of hair tonic, on its label a picture of a typical Frenchman, or at least a contemporary American's idea of a typical Frenchman: tiny needle-pointed mustache, lips pursed exquisitely, thumb and forefinger of one hand joined to form an "O" indicative of quintessent perfection, and alongside, the legend: "A blessing on your head."

"Great," Walters said, holding it up, shaking it, and scanning the light through it as he did so.

"They like it better when a man smells good. I found that out my own self."

Walters darted him a quickly questioning look, but didn't pursue this particular sidelight any further.

While he shaved he sang vigorously but in a miserable off-key:

"Everybody loves a baby and that's just why I love you,

Priddy baby! Priddy baby!"

Glowing, smelling "good" to meet Bob's most exacting standards, and uniform jacket rebuttoned up to the chin, he took up the paper Bob had left for him, folded it back to the entertainment page, and began scanning it.

It fairly made your head swim, so many things to do, so many places to go. And only one night to do it all in. He traced his finger slowly down the listings.

"Booth—William Gillette in A Successful Calamity; Morosco—Trixie Friganza in Canary Cottage; Longacre —William Collier in Nothing but the Truth; Cort—Upstairs and Down; Gaiety—Turn to the Right."

He couldn't make up his mind, there was such a wealth to choose from. A musical might be better, on a night like this. He concentrated on those, checking them off one by one.

"Century—Elsie Janis in The Century Girl; New Amsterdam—Miss Springtime; Princess—Oh Boy; Casino— You're in Love; Hippodrome—The Big Show, with Annette Kellerman and 200 water nymphs."

Still uncertain, he consulted his wallet dubiously. The trouble with those musicals, though, was, they ran high, you had to watch them. A two-dollar top wasn't at all uncommon among them.

And then his eye lighted on the perfect solution. Why hadn't he thought of that in the first place? The vaudeville show at the—

"Palace—1000 orchestra seats, $1.00

May Irwin

Savoy and Brennan

Joe Cook."

And with a picture thrown in for good measure. Irene Castle—she was billed chastely as "Mrs. Castle"—in Patria (twelfth episode). And you didn't even have to call up and reserve seats, for there. At two dollars, that would leave him—the wallet conscientiously came out again— Afterwards he'd have to take her in somewhere for a "bite," as it was called; he couldn't very well omit that. Not one of the bigger places. Nothing like Churchill's, Rector's, Shanley's, or Mouquin's. You couldn't go in and come out of one of those places for under three, four, sometimes up to five dollars.

He found that too Reisenweber's, on Columbus Circle. A whole special dinner for less than a dollar twenty-five, and in addition to that, Gus Edwards' Revue, "Round the Circle."

He curled up the paper into a stick, gave it a slap of exultation across his kneecap, and stood up. As the current saying went: "You can't keep a good man down." The evening was all set. And it had better be good, it had to last him for a long, long time. It might be the last New York would ever see him as he was tonight. And for that matter, he most certainly would never see New York again just as it was tonight.

He wheeled about toward the mirror and tried brushing up a little on his saluting. But it was unsatisfactory on several counts. First, he was a little too tall for the glass, the top of it cut off his eyes. His hand kept going up out of sight each time, so he couldn't really see how he was doing at it. Secondly, he wasn't sure he was militarily correct in greeting her thus anyway; he wasn't certain you saluted women. He wasn't even positive you greeted your fellow-soldiers of equal rank this way. Maybe you only did that for someone like Pershing, way up over you. And he wasn't expecting Pershing here in the room with him. And lastly, his thumb kept getting in the way. It stayed out, somehow. Each time the other four fingers went in neatly closed against the side of his head, the thumb was left over, either hanging down one way or sticking up the other. Then he'd try to tuck it in out of sight, but it was already too late, the salute had been messed up.

He gave the whole idea up finally.

The ringing of the phone had, for him, all the violence of a burst of shrapnel. But then his thoughts, perhaps, had been on shrapnel, and drums, and rockets, all along. He jumped two ways at once, perpendicularly, and then horizontally, over to it.

"There's a young lady down here to see you, sir," the desk man said.

He thought about it after he had hung up. This was a hotel bedroom after all, and she was a "nice" girl, as opposed to the other kind. There were only just those two kinds; the world was beautifully uncomplicated as yet. He should have had her wait downstairs for him. If there were hotel regulations on this point, as there probably were, they were being waived tonight for anyone like himself, who wore his country's uniform.

Just as he was about to call back again, to have them tell her he would be right down, her knock came on the door, and it was too late anyway. He just stood there and floundered for a moment, with a loose swiveling motion of the knees.

Her knock was a demure little thing, about as demure as she was. A velvety knock; if a knock could be called sweet, a sweet little knock. For the effect it had on him, it might have been a resounding crash.

First he tried getting around the chair on the wrong side, the long side. Then he checked himself, came around it on the short side. He even stumbled slightly getting over there. Caught the toe of one shoe against the heel of the other, improbable as it sounds. Executed a flurried quick-step, then recovered. These army shoes, he scowled down at them. Though after all, it was he who was giving them direction, they only moved as he moved them.

He opened the door, and she was standing there; to see him off, to see him to the war.

She was so fresh, so peach-pink, so dewy-new. She wore her hair the way young girls her age were permitted to wear it at that time. Half up and half down; up in front and at the sides, still down in back, in curly ringlets. It was chestnut, and the light from the room behind him gave it flickers of gold.

She had on her own coat, a young girl's coat of gray-blue with a very stinted collar of gray squirrel at the neck. But she pridefully swept it open at arm's width to show him she had an evening dress, somebody else's evening dress, on under it.

"Edna's," she whispered. "She lent it to me just for tonight, but I have to be awfully careful of it. They're beginning to let her wear them this season."

It was a young girl's evening dress, of old-rose taffeta.

"Jean," was all he could say.

"Ted," she breathed in answer, overcome by the excitement and their own daring.

They didn't kiss. It never occurred to them to kiss. Kissing is an acquired artifice that only becomes a necessity through experience, and they were both too newly out of childhood, too newly into experience, to have acquired the habit.

He led her in and closed the door. She stood there and drank in the admiration so blatantly expressed in his eyes which did not know how to conceal anything yet.

"I never saw you in one before," he said.

"I never was in one before," she rejoined.

"I didn't mean to have you come right up here," he apologized breathlessly. "I wanted to tell them to ask you to wait in the lobby, and I didn't get the chance."

"I think it's better," she said, somewhat to his surprise. "Somebody might have come along who knows Papa and seen me sitting down there."

He hadn't thought of that until now.

Now she in turn discovered his attire, or at least came to it, for it had been submerged until now by her feminine primary concern with her own. She took a long-drawn breath of rapture as a preliminary, and he found that his self-effacement up to this point, so contrary to what he had originally intended (but which had been wholly unconscious and genuine, nevertheless), was amply rewarded after all.

"Ted." She exhaled in breathless stupefaction. "I feel as though I'd never known you before, until tonight. You're like some wonderful stranger who's suddenly come into my life, all mysterious and tingly. Nothing familiar about him, nothing plain. Nothing you already know about him, from before. It's like starting out for the first time with someone. It's like when we girls tell each other the day after, 'Oh, I met the most wonderful new fellow last night for the first time; wait'll you hear!' Only we never have until now, any of us."

"I have it too," he admitted rapidly, as though if he didn't talk quickly enough the sensation would elude him. "With me it's like—I dunno—yesterday I knew about six girls, just friends, from growing up with, none of 'em very interesting, and you were one of them. And today I only know one girl, and she's not a friend, and she's through growing up, and there's something exciting about it. And it's you."

"Even your name sounds different when I say it to myself," she discovered. "Ted. Ted Walters. It has the same letters. But yesterday it was just a boy's name. Sort of flat and everyday. You just said it with your tongue. Today it runs down my spine and gives me little shivers on the way. Then it dies out slowly. And it's like magic."

He put his lips gently to hers. Took them away again.

They'd kissed before like that. Just a little kiss, a little make-believe, half-grownups imitating the real grownups, feeling nothing as yet.

But now she turned her eyes to him expiringly. They didn't rest on his face, they rested on the uniform.

"Ted," she whispered with an ecstatic shiver.

He brought his lips to hers again.

Her eyes dropped closed. Then they opened. They rested on the uniform again.

"Ted, I love you so. I love my country so. I don't know which is which, now—"

He left her side without a word. He didn't trip over his own feet now. He moved with all the firm grace, the sureness, of a full-grown man. When he'd reached the light switch he put his finger on it, and the room went dark.

And in that darkness as he found his way back to her, a gossamer breath guided him with:

"Oh, Ted, you're so wonderful. The war is so wonderful."

They had been talking it over in the dark for some time, in low-toned intimate voices.

"Don't you want to, don't you think we ought to?" he kept urging. "It's now or never."

"I guess we'd better," she finally admitted, "after what just happened."

The switch clicked, and the room lighted up again. He was over at the telephone on the wall, holding it.

She was standing beside him, encircled by his other arm, head nestling against him. Her eyes were like twin stars.

A voice inquired, and he answered with a headlong rush of words: "Will you help us out, please? I'd—we'd like to get married right away. It has to be right tonight, I have to report tomorrow, and my fiancée and I, we're up here in 923—"

Then he confirmed: "Yes, that's who I am. That's me. Yes, the fellow who just enli—"

Then he said, disappointedly, "Well, I thought you— Well, I thought hotel desks knew all about—all kinds of things like that. Then how do I—then who do I find out from? Yes, I know it's late, but we just now decided—" His eyes smiled at hers, and hers at his. A little constellation of melting happiness.

"Oh, gee, would you?" he said gratefully. "I'd appreciate—"

He hung up. "He's going to ask the manager," he relayed to her. "He says he'd know more about it than he does himself."

She nudged her mouth against the rim of his ear. "Maybe he'll get mad if they wake him up at this hour."

"He says he wouldn't take a chance doing it any other night but this," he quoted dutifully. "But he says tonight he'll take a chance and do it. He says he's very patriotic—"

"The manager?" She wanted to be clear on this point.

"Yes, the manager. He says he's just itching to do his bit. He says the last thing he said before he went to bed was, if there was only some way in which he could do his bit, instead of standing by watching."

It rang back.

Bemused, she kept looking at his uniform. Now pressing her cheek close against it for a moment, in utmost yearning, now smoothing it with her hand.

"Yes, sir, we would," he said.

He turned his head suddenly. "Have you got a pencil, he's telling us where—"

She jumped away from him suddenly. She ran around the room, looking for she knew not what; yet not stopping anywhere to make sure if what she was looking for was really there or not. "No— No— No—" she protested helplessly, like a whimpering child.

He in the meantime was striking at the outsides of all his pockets, with the random haste of someone who has discovered himself to be completely dust-laden.

"Never mind," he countermanded abruptly. "He's going to leave full instructions written out for us at the desk, to pick up when we go by. He knows someone— We have to go up to the Bronx from here, and then take the Post Road— It's over the state line, in Connecticut. We can't get it done in New York on such short notice. You have to have a license or something. This way you don't."

She used that word again. "Oh, how wonderful!" She'd crept back and was burrowing against him again. Against the uniform, rather. It was the fabric of that her fingertips silkily caressed, and not himself. He just happened to be on the other side of it.

"Thank you," he was concluding fervently. "Thank you. Oh, thank you!"

He hung up. He rendered him the greatest compliment that could be paid anyone, on this night of April sixth-to-seventh. "Gee, he's patriotic!" he sighed admiringly.

A moment of blissful vacuity, while he stared at the wall and saw battles muraled on it, noiseless, smokeless, bloodless battles; and she stared with vision foreshortened at the texture of his uniform, and saw, magnified, the crisscross threads of khaki that were its weave. Then both, this time, jumped away from one another. Both ran about the room, in frantic preparation for departure. He now hobbling on one shod foot, the other spared. She now with hands to hair, trying to bring back order to it, yet without the essential requisite of standing still before a glass.

He paused suddenly, inquiringly, in belated concession to a state of mind now gone forever. "Do you want me to turn my back a minute, while you put that on?"

"It doesn't seem to matter now," she said simply, reaching to pick up her dress.

The phone rang once more. He sat down to it, one foot still unshod, shoe held in hand.

The manager's patriotism had suddenly burst all bounds. Like the "rockets' red glare" in the anthem, it almost seemed to glow forth from the telephone mouthpiece, shining lurid into the auditor's face.

"He's—he's coming with us himself," he gasped to her, incredulous. "He's—he's going to take us up there in his own car. He's—he's going to smooth the way for us, and be our witness." His voice dropped in awe. "He was almost crying, he's so patriotic. I could hear it in his voice," he confided.

She clasped her hands briefly and mutedly, in homage to such sterling fervor. A gesture stolen from some final adjustment to her coat.

His voice became more matter-of-fact again, as when one descends from the heroic to the weaknesses of the more average run of mortals. "His wife wouldn't, though. He tried to get her to, but she doesn't feel up to it, he said. She was off in the back there, some place. I heard her say why don't we wait till after the war."

"That isn't the time!" she said, outraged. "This is the time, now!" She became patronizingly forgiving. "I guess she isn't as patriotic as he is."

He stamped his replaced shoe into final comfort. He rose.

"Ready?"

"Ready!"

He held out his hand to her. Her own came out to meet it, while with the other she swept her coat closed about her in final, defiant snugness.

Arms linked like that, at wide, swinging length, they converged toward the door, drawing unavoidably closer as they went. He swung it back. A split-second's pause.

She bunched her shoulders, on a sudden delicious upsurge of hysteria. "Oh, this wonderful, wonderful war! Oh, my wonderful, wonderful soldier! I'm going to have a soldier all my own! All the girls I know are going to be so jealous of me! Oh, I hate the Kaiser! Oh, I love you so!"

The door jumped closed after them with a reckless abandon.

Daylight was already beginning to sift in and pile up along the crevices and indentations about the room like white beach-sand when the door sprang inward as vigorously as it had closed hours before. A whole married life before.

It revealed him in a grotesque position on the other side of it, in the still electric-lighted hall. He was holding her clear of the ground in both his arms, in the traditional freightage of the bridegroom about to pass for the first time across his own threshold. But at the same time, in order to maintain balance, he had to take a staggering step backward, lift one foot slightly, and nudge at the door to get it more fully out of the way. Then he shifted her slightly to correct the sagging incline into which she had meanwhile descended, and strode aggressively if lumberingly into the room with her.

She had her arms wound tightly about his neck. She had a small cluster of sleepy-headed violets pinned to her shoulder, the only flowers they had been able to secure at that hour. A tendril of her hair hung down just aslant one eye, either from her sleeping posture against him during the long automobile ride back just now, or from her more recent elevation into his arms outside the door. Her face was a mixture of rhapsodic emotional inebriation—and drowsiness.

He released her legs first, and they pendulumed downward, swept the floor twice, teetered, held. Then he released her upper body, leaned it against him, and let her find her own support that way.

"Back," he said. "How does it feel?"

"Dawn," she said, glancing over his shoulder. "I've never been up this late before."

"Five o'clock," he said ruefully. "And I have to be at the train by six. I have to report to Upton tomor—this morning," He winced and put hand to cheek as though he had a toothache. "Gee, what a short marriage."

She gave a heartfelt sigh. "Oh, but so romantic! So romantic! In all my wildest dreams I never thought it was going to be anything like this. You in your first uniform, me in my first evening gown, the very first night the war's started— It's like one of those West Point things, where they come out of the church together under an archway of swords. And the hour, three o'clock in the morning. And that cute, cute white farmhouse with the green shutters, and the vines over the porch. And the lamplight. And the friendly old dog that came up sniffing around us right while we stood there getting married. I had all I could do to keep from breaking out laughing right then and there."

"I saw you."

They sat down side by side on the edge of the bed, with their hands held clasped down low between them resting atop the bed. Together they both gave a great deep sigh of completion, of utterly spent emotion.

"What should we do, should we tell them?"

She shivered in anticipation. "Oh, I wouldn't dare. Not yet. Let's wait awhile first."

"But then how am I going to see you, in case I do get leave?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "I suppose Edna would help us out. But then I don't like to do that. This was romantic, but too much of that would just be sneaky, underhanded. I don't want to keep meeting you in hotels either." She pondered for a while. Then her face lit up. "I have a better idea. Let's keep it to ourselves, let's keep it a secret, until the very last day of the war. That'll be just as romantic as the way we got married tonight. You're going to be away anyway. Let's meet in this very room here, the one we're in right now, on the exact day the war ends. Let's make a date right now, for the last day of the war, no matter what it is. Then you come here, and I'll come here, and whichever one of us gets here first will wait for the other."

"That may be ages—" he objected.

"Aren't you willing to wait? I am. It'll give us something to look forward to. It'll make the time pass that much more quickly."

"But suppose I'm sent over— Suppose something happens, and I can't get here—"

She was in such a state of romantic transfixion that even the idea of war-widowhood had its attractive side to her. "Then I'll wait alone in the room," she said raptly. "And when you finally don't come, I'll know what that means. I'll light a candle in your memory, and arrange some flowers, and—and—" She had evidently run out of funeral obsequies, for she didn't proceed.

He blinked his eyes several times in succession, as though these latter details, at least, held no appeal for him whatever. "Well," he admitted reluctantly, "if anything's going to happen to me I guess it'll happen to me anyway, whether we've told them or not."

"And they'll raise an awful fuss, you don't know them like I do. The first thing Papa's going to do is lose his temper. He always loses his temper, even about little things, much less finding out I got married without asking him. And Mamma will do a lot of crying. And oh, there'll be such an uproar, it'll take weeks to quiet them down again. And the first thing they'll do is try to keep me from seeing you, anyway," she predicted.

"Gee, I don't want to get into a big row about it," he said uncertainly. "Your father already is down on me because we stayed out so late the other night."

"I don't see what we have to gain by not waiting," she urged.

He was beginning to warm to the idea, little by little. "Maybe we better do it like you say," he conceded. "Meet here the day the war stops, and then break it to them."

"All right," she said.

"All right," he agreed. "That's a go, then."

"Now remember, we have a pledge to each other." She spanked the counterpane of the bed they were on. "It's got to be right in this selfsame room we're sitting in tonight, so we'll know where to find each other. We're not to try to get in touch with each other in the meantime, no matter how badly we want to. That'll make the anticipation even better." She bunched her shoulders esctatically. "It's like having a blind date with your own husband."

"And your own wife," he chimed in.

She hugged herself about the waist with overlapping arms, even rocked herself slightly to and fro. "Oh, what could be more romantic!"

He gave a sudden startled jump. "Gee, look at the time! I'll miss the recruit train."

She accompanied him to the door. They kissed there, lingeringly. And then again. And then again. She saw that, but for the fact that his time had run out, he would have recklessly returned to the room with her after all.

She pressed his uniform smooth over his chest and over his shoulders. "Good-bye, my soldier."

"Good-bye, my—" He didn't know what to call her. She was too young to be called wife, she was more like a child yet. "Good-bye, my war-doll."

The last thing she said, as she waved him down the hallway, was, "Don't forget our date."

The last thing he said was, "I'll be there." And he saluted. And the little god of love was kind, he got the salute right for a change. For once it came out perfect.

3. The Night of November 11th, 1918

THIS BEDLAM, this saturnalia, had exploded at exactly eleven A.M. (the eleventh hour, the eleventh day, the eleventh month), and rapidly engulfed the entire city. The false start of the previous Thursday, the seventh, far from exercising a restraining influence, seemed to have had the opposite effect.

It was as though everyone agreed that there could not be two mistakes like that in a row; it was against all probability. Hence everyone knew, instantly and instinctively, that this time it was the truth. It had to be. Even a second retraction, had there been one, would probably have no longer been able to quench the outburst, as it had the first time. It would have been like trying to put out a haystack fire by spitting at it. The official confirmation, when it belatedly came, simply was gasoline added to the conflagration.

At eight they were already burning a second straw Kaiser at the corner just below the St. Anselm. And already nobody was hating him as much as the first time, any more. It had become perfunctory. Besides, it wasn't a good night for long-sustained hatred. Everyone felt too good to hate very virulently. The war dance around the blazing dummy, this time, was only a token one, lacking in imprecation and the throwing of missiles. Everyone just wanted a good time.

The taxi swerved to avoid the coruscating obstacle. The girl in it looked out the window on that side, and the reflection lit up her face with a golden glow. She grinned. Some of the Indian-style war dancers waved at her, and she waved back.

A man came up to the window a little unsteadily and said, "H'lo, baby; c'mon out and join us."

She didn't draw her face back, at his proximity; she kept it there, inches away from his. "Can't. I've got a date to meet someone."

He kept teetering along beside the taxi door holding on with one hand while it was executing its painfully slow turn, practically nudging people out of the way with its front bumper. "So'ger or shivilian?" he leered.

"Soldier."

"We got some so'gers here. Lookit 'at one over there. C'mon out and meet them instead."

"Not the kind I'm going to meet, you haven't."

"What kind's jat?" he demanded lugubriously.

"My husband."

He opened his mouth and his eyes with ponderous understanding and approval. "O-oh! 'as different. 'As all right. Garr meet your husband, if he's so'ger." He swiveled his elbow around on the open mouth of a bottle he was carrying. "Here. Have a drink, baby."

She wasn't taken aback. She accepted the bottle quite matter-of-factly. She tilted it to her lips, quite matter-of-factly, She downed a moderate but quite perceptible amount of it, quite matter-of-factly. She coughed and strangled, momentarily—but quite matter-of-factly. She handed the bottle back to him, with a matter-of-fact nod.

"Not ushe' to it 'at way, are you, baby?" he tittered.

"No," she promised, "but I will be. I'm working on it day and night, and practice makes perfect, you know."

He waved her on, bottle aloft. "Give'm my regards," he brayed.

"All right," she acquiesced readily. "Who'll I say sends 'em?"

He scrubbed at his face with his free hand, looked mildly—but only mildly—vexed. "Wai' minute," he mumbled. He suddenly reached out and seized one of the nearby prancing figures by the shoulder. "Hey, you. Wass my name again? I gave it to you only li'l while ago."

"Whyn'tya hang onto it yourself?" was the snarling rejoinder.

The bottle-offerer looked extremely ill-treated. "I told ya to keep it for me!" he railed in rebuke. "Now look what ya went and done!"

The taxi sped on. The girl leaned her head far out and hooted back: "When you find out who you are, lemme know, and I'll remember you to him!"

She sank back onto the seat and chortled. The driver chortled in company with her.

"Some night," he said.

"This is history," she concurred.

He drew up outside the hotel entrance. He unlatched the door for her, backhand. She stepped down.

"How much do I owe you?"

He palmed his meter off with an indifferent slap, without looking at it. "Better not ask. I'd be ashamed to tell you, the way we crawled through those crowds! A-ah, what the hell, tonight's Armistice Night. Give us a kiss and we'll call it square." He pushed up his cap visor and thrust his face out toward her.

Her brows went up, but pertly, not affrontedly.

She leaned toward him and kissed him on the mouth. Quite heartily; his hands to her shoulders, hers to his. It may not have been the longest kiss ever partaken of, but it was far from the shortest.

"Happy peacetime," she wished him.

"Happy peacetime to you too, kid," he wished her back throatily.

He watched her go up the entrance steps.

"Hey, don't tell your husband you just kissed a stranger, now," he cautioned her jocularly.

She turned and executed a grotesque shrug and spread of her arms. "What do you want?" she argued. "He's more of a stranger to me than you are. At least I've been riding with you in the cab for the past half-hour!" She scurried in.

"Can I help you?" the desk man asked beamingly. Everybody felt good today.

"Now, wait a minute, just let me concentrate," she said flurriedly. "It was on the ninth floor, that much I can remember— Or was it the eighth? I was so excited that night."

"Are you picking up a reservation, is that it?"

"I want to know if one has been made, that's what I'm trying to find out. We arranged a long time ago to meet in this particular room, but darned if I can recall the number."

"We've had a great many reservations come in since the news broke. Out-of-towners who want to come in and celebrate, you know. What name would it be under? If you'll give me that, maybe I can tell you."

"Walters. Ted Walters."

"Here's one that came in about three this afternoon, for 'T. Walters and wife.' Would that be it?"

"Of course! That's it."

"It's for 923. Is that the room?"

"He has a better memory than I have," she admitted.

"Oh, he didn't remember it either," the man revealed. "He'd been here in April of last year, and he had us look up the previous registration, and we got the room number from that. It had already been engaged for tonight, but he insisted on having it, so we switched the other party to a different room."

"Can I have the key?" she said. "I'd like to go up awhile and wait for him."

"And you are—?"

"I'm the wife in question."

She laughed as she turned away.

In the room, her hat once off, a bizarre detail revealed itself about her. Her hair was cut to eartip-level, all around her head. This was called a "bob." You could see the reason for the appellation whenever she made any move at all. It stirred a little, swung about a little, with each shift of her head. It bobbed, so to speak. It was loose, open, unfettered; no net held it fast, as a net had held its predecessors. Not even any pins. Of course, the main thing about it was, it was cropped off short, it was amputated. To eyes unaccustomed to this, it was almost like a dismemberment in a woman. Part of her was gone. One of the main differentials.

Irene Castle was said to have first done it last year. The story was, her hairpins had scattered all over the dance floor and into the spectators' faces, as her partner whirled her about in some violent maneuver. Angry and embarrassed, she had gone straight to her dressing room, seized a pair of shears, and—the rest was a footnote to the history of the times. Very small, but one of those things that survive because of their piquancy. True or false, it was beginning to repeat itself here and there, within an extremely limited age-bracket so far.

She had had to do hers herself. There wasn't any place to go to have it done yet. Beauty parlors wouldn't do it for you yet, it did away with too many of their potential services at one blow. The only place was a man's barbershop. But you had to have a desperate kind of courage to go through that. One of her friends had gone into one and tried it. All the customers already in there swung their chairs around to watch. A crowd had collected outside the window. A policeman even came in to find out what the trouble was, and then remained to smirk and snicker with the rest. Little boys had shouted out things about a bearded lady getting herself shaved. And the pictures on the wall weren't any too reticent, although they were all anatomical studies of a familiar nature, being of her own kind. She had finally fled to a taxi outside, with tears in her eyes, and had herself driven home. She'd said it was terrible, something she would never undergo again.

She herself had done it in the kitchen, standing over newspapers. With her head held down to her knees and her hair swinging forward over her face.

So much for that.

Another odd thing became apparent when she slung herself down in a chair finally and prepared to wait. Her skirt was ankle-long, but in crossing her legs it foreshortened considerably. Her knees were bare. Her stockings were rolled down just below them, forming a little circular ridge around each leg, much like a miniature rubber tire.

She took out a small mirror and a gilt metal tube and traced red on her lips. Then she applied red to her cheeks in a round, Easter-egg effect, but this time from a small pad. She was beginning to do this several times a day now, even when the remains of the last application were still fully visible and there was no need for restoring them. It was by way of becoming something of a nervous habit or quirk, rather than an actual regard for appearance. A mass habit. Many others were doing it. In fact, she had got it from them. Actresses and fast women, who had held a monopoly on it until just recently, were being swamped and in process of disappearing in this sudden rising tide of amateurs.

Then she did one more of those strange new things that everyone seemed to be doing, everywhere and all at once. Women and girls, that is; men hadn't changed their behavior to any noticeable degree. She brought out a package of cigarettes.

She put one to her mouth.

Very awkwardly she struck a match, not holding the paper folder right, not holding the ignited match right, and not holding the cigarette right (withdrawing it and making the match come after it, instead of bringing the two of them toward one another).

But the match finally caught up, and she lit it, and inhaled deeply. There was nothing amateurish about that. It was already a deep-seated habit.

Comfortable now, and with nothing to do but wait, she began to hum, tapping one foot in time, and drumming the fingers of one hand on the chair-arm. Telltale indications of one who is demented about dancing, and cannot control it, even when she is alone and there is no partner and no music.

Words formed beneath her humming, rose to the surface of it:

"Ja-da Ja-da,

Ja-da ja-da jing-jing-jing."

This was the definitive lyric, though of what meaning and in what language, approximately fifty million Americans did not know and did not care.

A curious ripple, a squirm, ran across her bosom. One shoulder started it off, the other shoulder received it, reversed it, sent it back to the first one again. Then a second one came, then a third. Then the undulancy became so continuous she was practically in a state of flux, within a narrow zone covering only the breasts and the two shoulders. Completely immobile everywhere else. Doctors in a former age would have held an emergency consultation over her.

She was very good at it. The shimmy.

She looked down, to watch just how good she was, herself; as one who takes pride in an accomplishment.

There was a knock.

She stopped guiltily. "Come in," she said.

It had been a mistake after all. The door opened and some uniformed stranger, looking for somebody else, was standing out there uncertainly. Just one more soldier. You saw them everywhere, they were the universality of the male population. Same olive-drab outfit, same skin-tight leggings, same flat tin saucer-helmet.

He looked at her, then he looked around the room in search of someone else, then he looked at her again in conclusive rejection. Then he made a move to back out of the doorway, continue further down the line.

"Sorry," he said, tersely formal, "my mistake. I was looking for— They told me 923 downstairs. I guess they got it wrong."

She blinked uncertainly. "Wait a minute," she said, "I've seen you bef—" And didn't finish it, trying to recapture the recognition.

"Are you Jean?" he queried incredulously.

"Are you Ted?" she echoed unbelievingly.

"I am," he answered. "Are you?"

"I am too," she repeated. "Are you?"

"Ted!" she gasped.

"Jean!" he exclaimed.

They ran toward each other.

Then they stopped dead again, face to face, not knowing what to do next. Both smiling, both anxious to please, but frozen rigid with sudden self-consciousness.

He held out his hand at last, tentatively. She immediately accepted it.

"Well, hello!"

"Hello, there!"

"I didn't know you!"

"I didn't know you either."

"Gee, you look older, Ted."

"Gee, you look different, Jean."

That much said, they brought up short again.

"I guess I should kiss you, Jean."

"I guess so," she agreed, politely acquiescent.

He inclined his face toward hers, stretching his neck slightly to do so. She tilted hers toward his, to make it more easily accessible. They both fluttered their eyelids quite rapidly, the way two people do who are about to receive a sensation that they are afraid of ahead of time; such as, for instance, when a nurse is about to jab a needle into their arms. It turns out to be quite innocuous, but until it has occurred they can't help being nervous about it.

She finally stopped this lid-trembling by closing hers altogether. But it wasn't the smooth closure of relaxed enjoyment, of blissful absorption. It was a tight squint of strain, of endurance. Even down, her lids were pleated apprehensively.

He didn't close his. He sighted his eyes up over the top of her head (since she had sloped her face somewhat backward, this was feasible almost on a horizontal plane) and fastened them on a strip of molding that ran across the wall, and kept them on that with an intensity that almost amounted to desperation. The way people will stare at some detached object that is quite apart from what they are doing, in order to take their minds off what they are doing, and thus be able to get through what they are doing with the least discomfort.

Their feet, in this kiss, had not moved in any closer toward one another. Down there they were still at the same distance they had been before. Neither had their arms risen to go about one another. His held onto a couple of the loops securing his belt, thrusting a thumb through each, for support. Hers were thrust slightly backward from her in a rigid straight line, to help her maintain her eye-shut equilibrium unaltered.

It was a kiss of the unsupported lips alone. A kiss of the wills. A tour de force.

Throughout it they had held their breaths. Thus, unconsciously, each keeping a part of himself in reserve, away from the other.

It ended, and they breathed again; she opened her eyes and he stopped scrutinizing the molding.

She touched at her hair and he felt of his collar band.

He chuckled a little, with relief. "That wasn't so bad."

She tittered a little, with equal relief. "No, it wasn't."

But it sounded as though it were himself each one was reassuring on this point, and not the other.

That over with, again they didn't know what to do or say next.

He looked around him. "This isn't such a bad room, is it?"

She looked after him, passing the same objects in review that his eyes had an instant before. "No, it's not bad at all. It really isn't."

He explored his collar band again, this time with thumb and index finger. "Should we—should we stay here?" Then he hastily qualified it, "I mean, for the time being. I mean, for—tonight."

"I guess so," she said with a slight tinge of apprehension. "We've—we've already rented it. And everything," she added in an indistinct mumble.

"I have no other place to—to take us to," he said lamely, as though he would have welcomed any other solution, but could think of none. "I came straight up from the port of disembarkation."

"I haven't either. I've been at home, you know."

"Anyway, now that we're already here—" he said, spreading his palms. A gesture that could have been taken for helplessness, as well as for the logic it was meant to convey.

"Yes, now that we're already here—" she concurred sagely.

He blinked twice, once at the bed, once at the telephone; apparently rejecting the sight of the former, accepting that of the latter: since it was on the telephone that his eyes remained focused after the second blink had been completed. (They tried to return to the bed, but he held them locked fast.) "Well— All right if I send down for my bag then?" he said. "They're, they're holding it downstairs. I didn't know if I'd really find—" He didn't finish that.

"Oh, by all means! Go right ahead!" she said with an alacrity that was mostly hurried politeness. Overpoliteness, as when you have neglected to invite a caller to be seated, and your lack has forced him to put the request to you himself, and you try to make amends by the energy of your cordiality.

"It won't be in your way?"

"Oh, no!" she said with a heightened inflection. "Why should it?"

He went to the phone and requested, "Will you please send my bag up?"

The bag arrived in due time, was tipped for, and joined them in the room. They both seemed slightly afraid of it, now that it had come. As though its contents held an intimacy that bordered on the indecent.

They discussed it nervously.

"Got an awful lot in it," she opined.

"Well, everything," he admitted. "We have to carry everything, you know how it is, all in one place."

She cut the Gordian knot finally. "Would you like to, to take it in there with you, and—I'll stay out here?" she suggested.

He nodded quickly. He seemed to like the solution, now that it had been presented. He glanced with a fervency that was almost relief at the impersonal bath-door. "Yeah, that'd be fine! I would like to clean up. Is that all right with you?"

"Oh, sure. Go right ahead." Her eagerness—either for cleanliness on his part, or a temporary separation—was fully a match for his own.

He closed the door, and they were cut off from each other.

She sighed very lightly, under her breath. So lightly he would not have heard it even had he still been in the room with her. Very lightly: as when a strain has ended.

She opened her handbag and approached the glass, and put a little powder on her face. Her thoughts obviously were on neither the powder nor her face. An occasional glance from her eyes, perhaps, indicated better than anything else where they actually were.

When she glanced at the bath-door, her eyes took on a slightly wearied cast. Not very much, really. Perhaps not acute enough to be called anything in its own right. Perhaps only the negation of some opposite quality: not elated, or not anticipatory, might be the best way of putting it.

When she glanced at the outside door, her eyes brought back with them a longing cast, almost a wistfulness. As when a temptation has been refused; refused, but strongly experienced nevertheless. And with a feeling of regret that one is not unprincipled enough to succumb to it.

But when she glanced at the bed, her eyes revealed no cast at all, they shut so firmly and instantaneously and cataleptically. The thought that must have occurred to her had to go elsewhere, it couldn't get in her eyes, they refused it admittance.

Then the bath-door opened, and he appeared, and she turned to look over that way.

He had changed from uniform to civilian clothes.

He had perhaps bought the suit in a hurry, that much could be offered in extenuation. Moreover, a hiatus had taken place in men's styles, apparently. They were about to resume again at the exact place where they had broken off short a year and a half before. And this had not been a particularly happy place, along the long-winded, slow-moving road of male attire. In fact, it had been something of a low point.

Suits were worn skin-tight, insofar as sleeves and trousers and jacket-breasts were concerned. A sharply indented waistline pinched each coat. Worse still, this was not allowed to occur at the normal place, it was elevated invariably to a considerable height along the ribs. And then from there on down, the skirt of the coat, contradicting the rest of the garment, flared in loose, sweeping unrestraint.

Even when followed only in moderation, this silhouette gave an unpleasant dandified effect, bringing vaguely to mind a dapper habitué of poolrooms or a sleek-haired, sallow-skinned hanger-on at dance halls. And when carried out extremely, as his was, with the additional infliction of a very conspicuous white pencil-stripe over all, the effect achieved was not less than garishly vaudevillian. The impression was that of a performer buck-and-winging in a spotlight, who must take care that he can be seen from the last row of the balcony.

Moreover, from her point of view, there was the added psychological block that it was as though, for the second time within a brief half-hour, a total stranger had stepped into the room with her. A stranger now twice removed instead of just once.

"What do you think of me?" he said cheerfully.

He came over and looked at himself in the glass she had recently been pre-empting. "Some change, huh?" he exclaimed delightedly. He drew the already tight revers still tighter across his shoulders. "Oh, gee, it's wonderful. Colors in your necktie again!"

There very unmistakably were.

He turned to her once more, for confirmation. "You do like me better this way, don't you?"

"Yes—I guess so—" she said, not too convincingly.

He curled one hand around the nape of his neck and let it hang there; evidently in the belief this would stimulate his inventive powers. An ability, that is, to suggest what to do next. It did so only mildly, if at all.

"I'll order some food," he said.

He picked up the phone.

"Two dinners," he said.

She looked at her fingernails, lost interest in them.

"What do you like?" he said politely.

"Oh—I don't know. What do you like?"

He draped the stimulative hand around the nape of his neck once more.

"Chicken," was the result of this contract. "And green peas." And a number of other food-names. He hung up the phone.

"We never had a meal together before, that's why I wasn't sure," he apologized to her.

"Yes, we did. That night, didn't we?" The way she said "that night," it was like something better left undwelt-upon.

"Oh, yes, that's right. But I can't remember what you ate."

"I can't remember what I ate myself. It seems like—"

He finished it for her. "Yeah, it seems like a million years ago."

They both settled down to wait. The meal was one of the slowest to arrive that had ever been ordered from a hotel room; or so it seemed to the two of them. They didn't even look at each other any more, as though even the novelty of that had worn off. She looked slightly upward, on an ascendant perspective. He looked slightly downward, on a descendent one. Once she sighed, with a sort of calm fortitude. Once he scoured his knee with the palm of his hand, where the unaccustomed civilian worsted was too fuzzy for his skin.

Once he spoke to her. For the first time with a direct, if fleeting, interest. "How'd you come to cut off your hair, like that?"

"One of the girls on the block did it about a month ago, to hers. That decided me to do it to mine too. Now, last week, two more girls that I know have done it to theirs."

"Gee, pretty soon they'll all have their hair short like that. That'll look funny."

"No, it won't. It's just that you're not used to it yet. Once you're used to it, the other way'll look funny."

They stopped talking again.

The waiter knocked and the meal was brought in and arranged. Their spirits rose noticeably, as though they found in this a social armistice, an equivalent to the military one that the day itself was celebrating. He even drew up her chair for her. She unfurled her napkin gracefully. The waiter served and left.

"This chicken is good," she said.

"Yeah, isn't it?" he said with exaggerated enthusiasm. As when one agrees with a stranger.

Two peas rolled off her fork, and she seemed very happy to have to go to the trouble of recalling them again; it took up that much time.

"Chicken was all I used to be able to order, whenever I was on leave," he related. "One of my buddies told me how to say it, and that was all I could say. Poo-lay, is how you say it."

"Well, why didn't you learn another word?" she said, not oversympathetically.

"He didn't know any others himself, to teach me. And I couldn't just sit there and starve."

She lost some more peas, and this time she mashed them with the tines, as punishment. Or perhaps as a form of culinary doodling.

"Paris was good, though." He looked over at the bed. Then he looked quickly at her. Then he didn't go ahead.

She was making patterns on the peas now, with the tines' imprints. "So I've heard," she said pertly.

Suddenly he said, "Do you go out much?"

She looked at him searchingly, as if to determine whether the question were a social or a marital one. Then she said candidly, "Pretty much."

"Same one each time?" he ventured.

"Different one each time. Makes it more interesting that way."

"Oh. Then there isn't anyone special—"

"Oh yes, there always is. The rest are just fill-ins. Nobody stays home any more, since the war began."

"Do you tell any of them about—?"

"About you? I don't even tell them about who I was out with last Wednesday, so why should I go all the way back to a night eighteen months ago?"

He seemed to see her point. At any rate, he showed no resentment, nor wounded amour-propre.

She decided to take the offensive. "And how about you? Anyone?"

"Sure," he admitted matter-of-factly, now that the barriers were down.

"Anyone special?"

"Not over there; there couldn't be. But since I came back—"

He stopped, with sheepish awkwardness. But not with a very deep or uncomfortable embarrassment.

"I thought you just debarked today."

"When you're in the army you can't time your movements with clocklike precision, like that."

"I wondered about that." She wasn't unduly disturbed, though. No more than she would have been had a companion of the evening given her a false telephone number when they exchanged good nights.

"Matter of fact, I've been out since early this fall. Got hurt." He chuckled. "It wasn't even a war wound. I never even got up to the front, from first to last. I was on pier duty at Hovv. A big crate they were unloading slipped off its hook, landed on my toes, and smashed two of them. They had to be taken off, but you can't notice it now. I was sent back here and mustered out in August. But I tell all the girls I go out with I stepped on a land mine. You'd be surprised what it does for me."

"I know. Like I tell them it's the first time I've even been—" She reached for and selected a word euphemistically. "Kissed."

"I've been working in a war plant in Jersey, last few months—"

"Why didn't you ever look me up? I sure made a hit."

He answered the first part of it. "Oh, I don't know. I was afraid it would cramp my style, tie me down, I guess. I often thought of that dippy appointment of ours, though. Then today, when the word came in that it was official, and the plant sent everyone home, I beat it back to my room, got out the old uniform, and came on to town."

She gave a hint of a shrug, as if to indicate: it wouldn't have mattered to me if you hadn't. "And what about that night the war was first declared," she asked him. "Was that on the level, or was that a fake too? Were you already in?"

"It was partly on the level," he contended mildly. "I was already in, I'd signed up right that morning. But I hadn't been issued any uniform yet. It seemed a shame to spoil the grandstand play, so I borrowed one from a fellow who had gone in just ahead of me and already had his."

She laughed at the expense of a stranger: herself. "I sure was a naïve little thing in those days."

"All the girls still were. They're not now any more."

"You bet not," she said heartily.

"Did you ever tell your family about that—marriage thing of ours?" he asked curiously.

"Later on I did, not right away."

"How'd they take it?"

"By the time I did tell them, they were almost relieved about it. I guess they figured it was insurance against my marrying any of the bunch I was running around with every night."

"Do you still live at home?"

"I find it more satisfactory. Papa put me out twice in the beginning. But then when he found out that all the other fathers he knew were having the same kind of trouble, with their daughters running wild, he let me come back again. We have a sort of mutual understanding now: live and let live, no questions asked. It has one great advantage; when you're trying to break away from whoever you're out with, if you tell them you live at home, they drop you like a hot potato. If you tell them you live by yourself, they try to stick to you like flypaper."

"You like to fool them a lot, don't you?" he remarked, but without too much disapproval.

"They'd fool me, if they could, so I beat them to it and fool them first. I like having fun with them, but I don't like paying up for the fun I've had."

"Did you ever have to?"

"That's how I learned," she said matter-of-factly.

The conversation died. They were completely at ease with each other now, however. The silence was no longer oppressive. They were like two old friends, with completely mutual interests.

After a while he said, "You didn't finish your coffee."

"I never do, I only go in for it in the mornings."

"Shall we get this stuff out of the way?"

She got up from the table. He telephoned down. The waiter came up and removed the litter of the meal. He tipped him and closed the door.

She was putting out an incompleted cigarette. She'd gone to the window and come back again. Now she was sitting in a chair. He looked at her questioningly.

"What do you suggest we do?"

"I leave that to you." She looked back at him unhesitatingly. Both looks, however, suggested fencing rapiers, trying to parry one another, beat the other down. Flexible, but wiry.

He put his hand on the light switch.

Then he held it there. She hadn't blinked.

"Gee, your face looks funny. Half scared, and half—"

"Your face looks funny too. Sort of—like you wished you were a thousand miles away from here."

"Should I leave the light up? Should we just sit around —some more?"

There was no mistaking the alacrity with which she nodded.

He came away from the light switch, tumbled effortlessly into one of the other chairs, with a lumpy ripple like coal spilling from a sack.

"A fellow gets used to certain types," he said in attempted extenuation. "I mean, some types are his types and some types aren't his types. Just like, you can't strike a wet match, or make water run uphill."

"I know. A girl feels that way too."

"Should we just—forget about it?"

She looked hopeful. More than hopeful, avid. "For tonight, you mean—?"

"No, I mean—the whole thing. From now on."

"Let's," she drawled with inexpressible relief, as if the question scarcely needed answering, it was so rhetorical. "Papa'll be able to take care of it for us. His best friend is a lawyer."

The relief was equally evident on his part. He stretched languorously, extending his feet, letting his head loll back, looking upward in simmering contentment.

"Gee, I feel better," he admitted with utter candor.

"I feel relieved myself," she said, a trifle less floridly.

He seemed to feel he was under obligation to her, wanted to express his gratitude. "Have one of my cigarettes. Would you like me to send down for a drink?"

"I don't smoke much. Only to show off. I still don't like the taste."

"You're still in-between. When you do, that means you've got the habit."

"I don't want a drink either. Not right now. I feel just right, the way I am. I feel like I just had one."

"You won't be able to get one any more, after the sixteenth of January," he said, impersonally instructive.

"I know, I heard about that."

He looked at his watch. Then across-shoulder, over at the window. Then back again. "It's awfully early yet," he lamented. "And they're having so much fun out there. It seems a shame for us to stay cooped up up here."

"I was thinking that too," she said. "Listen. You can hear the car horns."

He straightened to the ready. "Would you like to go out?"

"Well—" she debated unenthusiastically, as if a relative had asked her.

"I don't mean with me. I mean with somebody else."

"Well, would that be all right with you?"

"Sure would. Because I'd like to too."

They both shot to their feet as though there were a single spring under the two of them. Their spirits came welling up and spilling over, like champagne from a just-uncorked bottle. They were laughing now. They were zestful. They were their rightful age again, not a frightened amateur married couple.

"Why didn't we find this out an hour ago?" he reveled. "Look at all the time we wasted."

"You want to use the phone first, before I do?"

"No, you go ahead and use it. I don't mind waiting. Ladies first."

"This is nineteen eighteen. That went out with the war. Go ahead, you're right over there by it. I want to powder my face a minute first, anyway."

He took out a vest-pocket-size black book, stroked a page across with his finger, called for a number.

"Hello. Lorraine?" he said tentatively, at first. Then, assured, "Hello, Lorry. Me, who else? I couldn't any sooner. I didn't think I'd be able to, until just this minute. I'll explain when I see you." He turned around and winked at her, fraternally. "You won't believe me, but I'll explain everything when I see you. How long'll it take you to get ready? All right, I'll pick you up in about half-an-hour. No, wait a minute, I was forgetting. Better make it three-quarters; the streets are jammed, you can't get through them any more."

She replaced him at the phone. She didn't need any book.

"Hello," she said, with almost tactile intimacy, "this is me. No, I didn't stand you up. I distinctly told you about tonight. I told you if I could, I would. No, it's all out of the way now. Yes, for the past couple of hours. I have been. No, he's right here in the room with me. Oh, don't be stupid, of course not! No, he's all right. He's wonderful. He turned out to be almost like a buddy to me. What're you going to do, spend the whole night on the phone being jealous? Well then, let's go. All right, our usual place. If I get there first, I'll keep that corner table for us."

He was waiting for her by the door. "How far are you going?"

"Forty-ninth. Churchill's."

"Can I drop you off? I'm going down that way."

They hesitated a split-second, then shook hands earnestly.

"You know, you're nice," she discovered. "I like everything about you. Except as a man, as a steady."

"You're great. I like you too. For a pal, for someone to kick around with, you can't be beat."

He held the door for her.

"Oh, just a minute." She stripped the ring off her finger. "Do you want this? You paid for it."

"Naa," he said disparagingly. "What good would it be to me?"

She threw it onto the bureau-top.

He put out the light.

The door closed blithely after the two of them.

4. The Night of February 17, 1924

THREE WOMEN CAME FIRST. One was a blonde, one a redhead, one a brunette. As though exemplifying the differing tastes of that many unseen men. They all had one thing in common; they were all extremely tall. As though that too had been a determining factor in their present status. Among others. They were dressed as the mode of the moment dictated: shorn hair (in the case of one, it was even shingled at the back of the neck like a man's); cocoon-like wraps, held closed by being interfolded across the body, with the arms kept on the inside, and pencil-straight skirts that fell almost to the tops of their shoes.*

Behind them walked a man. Very close behind them. Almost giving the impression of a watchful sheep dog, guiding his charges in his master's absence. Although his arms weren't extended out from his body, that was the feeling one had; that if these girls should stray a little too far over, either to one side or the other, he would corral them back to dead-center again.

Unlike women walking together as a rule, no matter how short the distance, they moved in prudent silence. As if having learned that the slightest word, no matter how harmlessly said, might be misconstrued and turned against the speaker at some later summing-up or betrayal, and it was safer therefore not to speak at all.

Close together and yet in this lonely sort of silence, they entered the elevator with their guard, and were carried up from sight. It came down again presently, but the girls were no longer on it, only the man was. He was dancing a key up and down in his hand. The sheep were in the fold and the shepherd's loyal helper had them safely locked in. He went out to the entrance and stood there on the topmost step, as if watching for someone's arrival.

Within moments after, the arrival had occurred. It was the looked-for event. The way the man blocking the entrance quickly took his hand from the doorway, stepped back to give clearance, showed that. It was both multiple and yet strangely compact. It was that of a phalanx of men. One man in the center, one at each side of him, one at his back. Their bodies all swung to the same walking-rhythm: brisk, staccato, purposeful.

The one in the center was rather short. The rest were all a half-head taller. Perhaps because of his shorter height, he gave an impression of plumpness that was not justified by his actual girth. Padding in the shoulders of his coat, almost as oblique as epaulettes, did its part as well.

He was surprisingly young-looking, thirty-three or -four at most. But even here there were qualifying factors. It was not the youthfulness of pre-maturity, when character lines have not yet become deeply enough indented to be permanent attributes of the countenance; it was rather a reverse process, an erasure, of lines and traces that had already been there. The face was becoming vapid, a cipher and tricked the eye at first into mistaking this for juvenility. It wasn't; it was decay, an immeasurably hastened senility. It was erosion, leading toward an ultimate idiocy.

The group compressed itself into the elevator. The man who had been waiting at the doorway entered last and took over the controls, motioning the regular operator out. The latter, taken by surprise, just stood there with his mouth open as the car went up. The impromptu operator overshot the correct floor. He had to check the car jarringly, reverse it with a jerk, and then again he overshot the mark slightly in the opposite direction. He finally adjusted the car-level to the correct height.

When they stepped off, one of them dropped behind long enough to warn the recent operator in an undertone: "What's the matter, you nervous? He didn't like that; I saw him look at you!"

"I never drove one of them before," protested the unhappy amateur.

"Well, you shoulda practiced. He likes everything to run smooth. Now take it down back where it come from."

Meanwhile, ghostly music that had been whispering along the corridor suddenly blared out as a door opened to admit them, and the blonde one of the three girls stood by it waiting to receive them. The hindmost one chucked her under the chin as they entered, and an incandescent smile immediately flashed on, as though he'd turned a switch just below her jaw.

The door was closed, but one of them remained by it, immovable. "Augie's still coming up," he explained. "I sent him down with the car."

Within a few moments a low-pitched voice said, "Augie," just outside; it was reopened briefly, and then it was closed and locked with a finality that meant all further ingress was at an end.

Nobody said anything for several minutes, although there were now eight people in the room. The short man who had been in the center of all of them spoke first. It was as though they had all been waiting to take their cue from him.

A baleful expression flickered across his face. "Who would've ever thought that Abbazzia would find himself holed up in a fleabag hotel like this with the last few of his guys?" he said, as though speaking about some third person of great consequence.

"It'll blow over," the one they called Carmine said.

Abbazzia went over and sank into an easy chair. "My mistake was waiting too long," he said. "I got careless. Now he's taken the town away from me."

"He won't have it long," Sal promised.

Abbazzia looked at him bleakly. "He's got it now, Salvatore, and it's the now that counts, in this deal. There ain't no more than now. There ain't no next time. Every speak from Tenth Avenue over to Third is paying its protection to him now, not us any more. Every truck that comes down from the border—" He put his hand to his eyes, shading them for a minute.

The redhead began sidling over on a careful diagonal, like someone who watches where she puts her foot at every step, her object evidently consolatory.

Augie caught sight of her and tactfully motioned her back. "He'll call you over when he wants you."

Abbazzia continued to direct his remarks to the men in the room, ignoring the girls. He showed them his open hand, to show them that it was empty. "Seven," he whined in lamentation. "Seven all at one time. Who've I got left? Where'm I gonna get that kind again? They don't come like them any more. Guys that started out with me in the old days."

"Did you read the papers, about how they found Ruffo?" Sal asked him, with a peculiar glitter in his coffee-bean eyes that might have been latent sadism as much as vengeful group-loyalty.

"How'm I gonna read the papers," Abbazzia answered impatiently. "I come away from there so fast, when the word come the heat was up—"

Sal moistened his lips. "He was on the top floor of this garage, when they found him. Him, he was the only one didn't have no shoes or socks on. So first they couldn't figure it. Then they noticed these razor blades lying there. The skin on the bottom of his feet was peeled off, real thin, like when you buy ham in a delicatessen. And then on the sea-ment floor was this big burnt place; you know, like when you pour a big puddle of crankcase oil and put a match to it. And then bloody footprints that kept going back and forth, back and forth, over it. I guess they held onto him tight and made him keep walking across it, over and over— Maybe with a couple of car engines turning over downstairs, to drown out his screams."

Abbazzia's expression didn't falter, his contemplative eyes never once left the speaker's face as he listened. "That's one I never thought of myself," he mused wistfully when it was over. "I wonder who got it up?"

"I wonder how long he lasted?" Carmine remarked idly.

Sal turned toward him scornfully. "What's the difference how long? He didn't make it, did he?"

"A lot of difference to him, I bet," Carmine pointed out, "if it was long or short." A chuckle clucked in his throat.

Abbazzia yawned, hitched his elbows back, straddled his legs still further apart. "I'm tired," he droned languidly. "Getting out of there in such a hurry, like that. My feet cramp me."

At once, as though an esoteric signal had been given her, the redhead sluiced forward from her position in the background, dropped deftly to her knees directly before his chair, began to pick busily at the lace of his shoe with her long magenta-lacquered nails. In a moment she had eased the shoe off. He lordily crossed one leg over the other, so that she could more easily reach the second one.

Having taken off the second shoe, she steadied his foot by placing her hand under the arch, lowered her head, and pressed her lips warmly to his instep.

"That's what I think of my Jakie!" she proclaimed, rearing her head again.

Abbazzia reached out and roughed her hair slightly, as one would playfully disarrange a dog's coat. "You stay with me tonight," he vouchsafed indulgently.

The two remaining girls exchanged a quick look of chagrin and frustration.

Whether due to the preceding little by-play or not, Abbazzia had now mellowed into a better humor. "Come on!" he ordered. "What're you guys standing around looking so glum about? There ain't nobody dead here. And when there is, it ain't going to be any of us. Let's liven it up a little!" He turned to Augie. "Got anything on you?"

"Sure, never travel without it." Augie produced a bottle.

"That ain't our own, is it?" Abbazzia cautioned mistrustfully.

"Naw. This is the regular stuff, uncut," was the answer.

The blonde was busily cranking the handle of a little flat-topped portable phonograph. She put a record on the mildly stirring turntable, lowered the needle-arm, and after a brief series of thin, piping discords, a tinny smothered voice began to whine:

"Whaddya do Sunday, Whaddya do Monday,

Mai——ry?"

"Dance with Augie," Abbazzia commanded, giving the nestling redhead a slight push to dislodge her from the chair-arm.

The redhead pouted. "I'd rather dance with you."

"Who're you that he should dance with you?" one of the men reminded her.

Abbazzia's eyelids lowered a trifle, dangerously. "I said dance with Augie. And you know how I mean. I get a kick just watching the two of you."

At the repetition of the order, the redhead rose to her feet with a swift immediacy that left no doubt of her intention to fully obey, gave her dress a downward pull, and opened her arms statically toward her enjoined partner.

He remained fixed where he was. "Well, come over where I am, if you want to danst with me," he said churlishly. "I ain't going to you."

She had to cross the better part of the room, until she was standing right up against him. Only then did he exert himself enough to put an arm about her waist.

They began to move together with tiny, almost minuscule steps that barely took them anywhere.

Abbazzia watched for a moment with eye-bulging intentness. Then, with querulous dissatisfaction, "That ain't hotsy enough. Do it like you did it up in my place the other night."

"It takes 'em a minute or two, they gotta get warmed up." Sal chuckled obscenely.

"The music's too slow," the redhead protested defensively, her voice smothered against her partner's shoulder. "You can't do anything with it."

"Here's a better one," the self-appointed custodian of the small phonograph announced, having shuffled a number of records hastily through her hands.

She interrupted the bleats coming from it, and after a brief hiatus, it resumed at a quicker tempo, with a sound like twigs being snapped coursing rhythmically through it.

"Doo wacka-doo, doo wacka-doo,

Doo wacka-doo-wacka-doo-wacka-doo."

The redhead's convolutions became almost serpentine. Her partner remained more rigid, though only by a matter of degrees. She was like a wind-walloping pennant flickering and buffeting back against its flagstaff. Neither moved their feet, except to shift weight upon them. Now Sal, crouching on his haunches, beat his hands together in accompaniment low above the floor, as if fanning the music underneath their feet. The blonde snapped her fingers in time, throwing her hand out first to one side of her, then to the other. She called out, "Hey-hey! Hey-hey!" while she did so.

Abbazzia picked up a shaded reading lamp standing on a small table near him, held it aloft, and tipped the shade, so that all the light flooded out at one side, none at the other. He aimed it so that it fell upon the girl's frenzied figure, making a luminous oval across the midsection, striking her directly in the posterior.

Apprised of this, perhaps from former occasions, the girl accommodatingly hiked her skirt up to a point at which it revealed the undersides of her thighs.

"Back up more," Abbazzia instructed the pair. "You're getting out of range." He adjusted the lamp meticulously as they did so, like a surveyor correcting his sights.

The girl, who had been snapping her fingers in time during the earlier stages, changed her jargon-calls now that a climax was being reached. She called out at intervals: "Charles-burg! Charles-burg!"

"Where'd you get that one?" the brunette squealed delightedly.

"There was an out-of-town guy at the club the other night," the other explained. "Every time he got up, he wanted to say 'Charleston!' and he couldn't get it straight, it wouldn't come out right."

"I like that," her companion proclaimed zestfully. "It's good."

"Help yourself," the first invited drily. "It's free."

They both chimed in together, parroting "Charles-burg! Charles-burg!" Then doubled over in risible appreciation of this newly coined bon mot.

The male participant in the exhibition, meanwhile, had suddenly begun to flag; moisture bedewed his pale face. His partner's gyrations continued without inhibition.

"Hold it a minute," he panted in an urgent, suppressed voice. "Get back from me, will ya?" He wrenched his companion's clutching hands off and thrust her back away from him, so that there was clearance between them for the first time.

He stood as though unable or unwilling to move for a moment, exactly as the last paroxysm of the dance had left him.

The other four men watching gave vent to a roar of spontaneous delight that had something as unclean about it as a geyser of mud.

The brunette commented in an undertone: "Get that. He wore out before she did."

The blonde said something to her in explanation behind the back of her hand.

"Oh," said the first one knowingly, now that she was enlightened. "I forgot to think about that."

"You what?" was the tart rebuttal. "How old are you anyway?"

The dancers separated and went their ways. Each in his own manner. She, to throw herself down in a chair, with head lolling back and fanning herself with one hand held limply, but otherwise composed, unconcerned. But he, slinking off with a suggestion of crouched maladroitness in his carriage, as though he were undergoing a private imbalance that she could not by nature be subject to. To seek a corner by himself, hook his fingers into his shirt collar, as if to ease an intolerable constriction, and sit there, head bowed, in a sort of male loneliness.

"That was good," Abbazzia summed it up. "That was the best yet. He ain't got no sense of humor, though," he regretted, dismissing the whole episode.

He yawned cavernously. "I'm beat," he said.

There were immediate preparations for departure by everyone in the room except the redhead. The brunette knuckled the closed bath-door glancingly in passing. "Come on," she said possessively over her shoulder. "Jake's getting sleepy."

Carmine turned and asked Sal, "Which side of him you taking?"

"I'll go over here," Sal decided with a pitch of his thumb at the blank wall behind him. "You get in there. Augie can go downstairs and stick by the switchboard, Nick can go out in the hall and keep the elevator covered."

"Go in there next door first and see if you can hear me," Abbazzia ordered, eyes glittering alertly with the instinct for self-preservation. "We don't want no slips. Both of you. Then come back and let me know."

They nodded, opened the door, went out into the hall, and closed it after them.

Abbazzia got up from the chair, rammed one fist deep down into his pocket, arm held stiffly at his side in tension. "They gotta get in here fast, in case I need them," he explained to the respectfully watching girls. He went over toward the wall on the left-hand side first, coiled his free hand, drew it back, and thumped loudly three times, at spaced intervals.

Within a matter of seconds, not minutes but seconds, the room-door burst backward and Carmine strode in, a snub-nosed revolver held springily down beside his hip-joint.

"Heard je," he said triumphantly. "How was that for speed?"

Abbazzia narrowed his eyes mistrustfully. "How many knocks 'dI give it?" he catechized.

"Three," Carmine answered. He reinserted his gun under his left armpit.

Abbazzia nodded approvingly. "You heard me," he admitted.

He turned to face the other way. "Now we'll try Sal's side." He pummeled the wall heavily. Then a second time. Then a third. "I'll give it four this time," he said, jaw clenched with effort. The impact of the blow coincided with the flaring-open of the door, with the latter just preceding it by some instants.

Sal's revolver was bedded within the side pocket of his coat, but reared perpendicularly so that the whole coat hem rose with it to a squat-nosed projection. "Clear as a bell!" he reported sanguinely.

Again Abbazzia's eyes squinted. "How many times 'dI sound off?" he growled truculently.

Sal looked slightly taken back. "I only caught two," he admitted.

Abbazzia's face twisted into a violent blob of rage, like unbaked dough squeezed between the hands of a pastry cook. "You lyin' !" he exploded virulently. "I done it four times! You're going to tell me it's twice, haa?"

He coiled a forearm far back of his own shoulder, swung rabidly with it, caught the bodyguard flat-handed on the side of the face with a sound like wet linen being pounded on a clothesline. Then again on a pendulum-like reverse swing. The third slap only missed contact because Sal veered his head acutely aside, without however moving his body back.

Hand poulticing his stricken cheek, his attitude was one of rueful, misunderstood loyalty. "Hold it, boss," he protested virtuously. "Hold it a minute."

"I don't like for nobody to lie to me, see?" Abbazzia shrilled.

"I caught the first one sitting in the chair, waiting for it to come. By the time the second one come, I was halfway through the door already. Naturally, I missed the last two because I wasn't in the room no more by that time. What should I do, sit there counting 'em off on my fingers? If them things was wrong-way bullets, four would be too many to wait for. While I'm waiting to count, you're—" He left it eloquently unfinished.

Abbazzia took a moment to consider this, crinkling his eyes speculatively first, then widening them in elated appreciation. "Yeah!" he concurred with enthusiasm. "That was the smart thing to do! It's the speed what counts when I'm sending for you, not the arithmetic." He turned his head a moment in oblique disparagement. "Whyd'n't you think of that, Carmine?" And to the rest of them, as though he had been the one taking Sal's part all along and they had been in opposite judgment: "See what a smart boy I got here? What're you trying to tell me, he ain't smart?" Again his hand went out toward Sal, but this time to clap him on the shoulder rewardingly, to squeeze his biceps affectionately. Even to pinch the point of his chin and wag it playfully to and fro.

He reached into his pocket, took out a billfold, took something out of that, prodded it down into Sal's breast pocket like a handkerchief. "Blow your nose on that," he instructed jovially.

"Now clear out and lemme get some sleep." He crossed his forearms, fanned them apart, in general room-wide dismissal. They went in pairs for the most part, Carmine with the blonde, Sal with the brunette, the other two to do night-long sentinel duty, one downstairs, one in the hall. No good nights were said. Perhaps good nights were for people who lived less dangerously; just to survive the night itself, that alone was sufficient well-being.

"Take good care of him for us," the blonde warned, with an undertone of jealousy.

"And I'm the girl that can do it," was the pert answer.

The door closed.

"Lock it up on the inside," Abbazzia ordered.

He looked at her from where he lay sprawled out in the chair. His look was lethargic, even somnolent. Not the somnolence caused by sleep, but the somnolence caused by the dregs of a spent passion that can no longer stir or vivify. His arms and legs seemed to fall away from him of their own accord, so that his sprawl became even looser.

"Undress me," he commanded in a monotone.

The girl quickly advanced, a smile starched on her face. She slid downward onto her knees before him, reached gingerly forward toward the topmost button of his jacket, as quiveringly as though she were afraid of getting an electric shock.

He allowed the lids to close over his eyes, the better to retain whatever distorted images this was about to bring him.

Just as her fingertips touched the button, and almost as though it were an effect generated by her touching of it, there was a single, low knock on the outside of the door.

Her hands scampered back to her own person, like two ashamed things seeking refuge. They all but tried to burrow inside her clothing and hide themselves.

His eyelids went up, furrowed with annoyance. "Go see what they want now," he told her. "One of 'em must have forgot something."

She unlocked the door, but her arm held out across it still blocked the way. A hand flung the arm contemptuously aside.

An old, old woman all in black was standing there. Short and stocky, like he was. Her face long-dead; only the eyes still alive. Bitterly alive.

This black wasn't the black of fashion, the black of Rome and New York, trim and just-so. This was the black the women of Catania wore, in the after-years of their lives, after they had lost their men. Homespun and shapeless, and with no intent to please. To show life was through, and that the wearer was through with life.

"Get out!" she commanded the girl stonily.

Stunned into alertness, his back reared from its supine position against the chair. "How'd you get here?" he breathed in amazement.

He became aware of the girl, still cringing there to one side of the two of them. "You heard her. Get out," he repeated. "Wait outside. I'll let you know when I want you back."

She slipped around one side of the door-frame and was gone from sight, as furtively as though she were afraid to come into line with those terrible eyes staring so fixedly into the room at him, like messengers of denunciation.

"Rifiuto!" the old woman said balefully. Garbage.

He demanded: "Whaddya doin' here like this? Don'tcha know it's risky to come here?"

She pitched her head interrogatively. "Che significa, 'risky'?"

"Pericoloso," he translated unwillingly, as though averse to following her into the language of his former days, the one learned at her lips.

"Pericoloso per chi?" She gave a snort of scorn-curdled laughter.

Risky for whom? Risky for you, maybe. Not for me. I have killed no one. I have robbed no one. I go unafraid.

"Now that you're here, whaddya want? Whadja come for? To say good-bye to me?"

She tossed her head impatiently, as when one is bored by having to return to an old subject that was closed long ago. " Ti dissi addio . . . "

I said good-bye to you ten long years ago, night after night in the dark, on my knees before the blessed image of Our Lady; drops of water falling from my eyes, drops of blood falling from my heart. She did not smile on me. It was too late then already for anything except good-bye. Then, it was finished. That was my good-bye.

"You're talkin' crazy," he said uncomfortably. He got up from the chair. "Then whaddya here for, to preach to me?"

She grappled beneath the seedy black garb that encased her. A sheaf of banded currency was in her hand when she brought it out again.

"A ridarti . . ."

To give back this . . .

She showed it to him first, lying in her palm. Then she spat violently into the middle of it, and flung it away from her. It landed anywhere, she did not look to see, she did not want to know.

"Danaro insanguinato . . ."

Money with blood on it! The dead cry out from this kind of money. Their voices are within it.

"You're a fool," he sneered. "You could have had everything in the world, and you live like a rat in a hole—"

"No, sei tu l'idiota . . ."

No, you are the fool, not II She struck her hand sharply against her chest.

"Io sono onesta . . ."

I am honest. I am a poor woman, but I am honest, clean. My husband worked hard all his life until he died worn-out, but he too was clean. We were not like you.

He strode toward her furiously, backed his arm in threat.

She didn't flinch. "Colpiscimi . . . " Hit me. It will not be the first time.

"You lying old bat!" This time his arm completed the threat, he struck her across the face.

She tottered, regained her balance, only smiled sleepily. The eyes that looked at him held no pity, no softness, not any kind of feeling at all. They were eyes of glass, of agate in a statue.

"Questo e' il momento . . ."

This is the hour I knew would come. I have waited for it many years. Now it is here. In my village there was a saying when I was a young girl. "God punishes without having to use hands or feet." I see the punishment before me now. I feel no pity for you. My heart is as dead as a stone. For, I am one of those you have killed. The first, perhaps. More slowly than some of the others, but just as completely. I walk around in the grave you have put me in. And in the grave there are not mothers, only corpses.

She turned away abruptly, in leave-taking without farewell.

"It will be finished soon, anyway," he heard her say stonily.

"They'll never get me!" he shouted toward her. "D'ye hear what I'm saying? They'll never—!"

She looked back briefly, nearer the door now. "They do not have to. You will go just as surely, without them. Your years are already days, your days are minutes. You have the Bad Sickness in you. The sickness that creeps like a worm, and once it is in, cannot be got out again. No man's hand needs to be raised against you . . ."

He stared at her in almost superstitious fright. "Even that you know—" he breathed in awe. "Who told you? Nobody knows that about me!" Mechanically, as if from some long-forgotten habit interred for years and now brought to the surface again by sudden instinctive fear, he made a sneaking, furtive sign of the cross. "What are you, a witch or something?"

She slitted her eyes at him in contempt. "Non v'era bisogno di dirlo . . ."

One does not have to be told. One knows. One sees the signs. This is nothing new. I saw it in my village, small as it was, when I was young. Even there it was not new. One crossed to the other side of the road in passing it by, that was all. I knew it had come into my house already when you were still only a boy of sixteen.

His breath hissed in stunned intake.

"La tazza, la forchetta . . ."

The cup you drank from, the fork you ate with, kept apart, hidden from the rest. They were always missing when I washed the things. Those were the signs that told me. You did not come to me for help. You went to the streets for help, instead. The streets where you already robbed the storekeepers, and roamed at night the leader of a pack, marauding with knives. And the streets gave you back what you had given to them. Now the mark is on you, and it is too late for help any more.

The arms and the legs die, and you cannot move any more. Then the tongue dies, and there are no more words, only sounds like the animals make. Childhood comes back, but going the other way, rushing toward you from the grave.

"Shut up!" he squalled, and cupped the heels of his hands tight against his ears.

She turned away with a flick of disgust. The door opened at her grip. He was watching her now with a mixture of disbelief and defiant bravado.

"You walking out on me this way? You too? My own mother? All right, go ahead! Who needs you? Vecchia. Just an old woman. You shut up all these years, though, didn't you, when things were going good?" he railed. "And now cuz you think they're going bad, you turn on me like all the rest."

She released a scoffing breath.

He changed suddenly, softened for a moment. "Close the door," he coaxed. "Come on back in. Stay with me awhile. I'm lonely. I ain't got nobody of my own. These others— D'you remember when I was a kid, and you used to make lasagne for Vito and me, and bring 'em hot to the table—?"

"Quella non ero io . . ."

That was not I, that was another woman, long gone now. A woman whose prayers were not answered.

"You're my mother, you can't change that," he told her, between a snicker and a derisive grin, like one who is certain he holds the upper hand.

"Io non sono piu' tua madre . . ." she whispered smolderingly.

Mother, no. Just a woman who bore a devil. The woman who once bore you says good-bye to you.

The door clapped closed and she was gone.

His mouth opened in a gape of disbelief, a disbelief such as one might feel if one stood back and watched one's own self betray one.

Then it clicked shut, and defiance spread over his face once more. He swept his arm out and around before him in contemptuous dismissal. "All right, let 'em all go!" he bellowed. "All of 'em! I don't need nobody! I'll make it alone! I come up by myself, and I'll stay up by myself!"

He went over and looked into the mirror, and straightened the hug of the padding that sloped upon his shoulders.

"It's me for me, all by myself, just like it's always been," he said aloud to the scowling reflection facing him. "If God ain't going to forgive you, if God ain't going to give you a break, then what good is God? They can have God. I'll take Abbazzia. What good is being good? You stay poor all your life, like her and eighty million others. You get run over by a car like my brother Vito did, and they let you lie there in the rain, newspapers from a trashcan spread over you. Then 'cause a priest comes and mumbles over you, that means you're going to heaven. Who wants to go to heaven in the rain, on an empty stomach, soaking newspapers thrown over you, without a dime in your pocket? The hell with heaven. He worked hard, he never stole, he never scrapped, he never pulled a knife on no one. He was good, and look what he got. I was smart, and look what I got—"

He flourished his own hand toward his reflection's hand, so that his reflection's eyes could see the explosively brilliant diamond on the little finger.

He picked up the money she had flung on the floor. "There ain't no good or bad, anyway," he grunted. "They just tell you that in the church when you're a kid, to keep you from getting wise that everyone else has something, and you ain't got nothing. There's only dumb and smart. And if you don't want to be the one, then you gotta be the other."

He riffled the money back into orderly shape, tucked it into his billfold, put it away.

He summed up his life, content with it, proud of it.

"Abbazzia picked smart for his."

Then he went over to the door, and opened it. He gave a curt summons, without looking. "Hey, you! You can come in now. Whaddya waiting for? Didn't you see her go?"

He turned away without waiting, and took out a cigarette and a pocket lighter. Then before he had brought the two of them together, he stopped again and glanced back at the door in angered disbelief. It was still open just as he had left it. No one had come in through it.

He flung the cigarette down, went over to it a second time, and looked out.

There was no one in sight. The hall was empty.

He stalked across the room to the telephone, wrenched the earpiece off the crotch that held it, and shouted harshly, "Hey, down there! Is that bi— Is that girl around? Tell her to get back up here, and make it snappy, or I'll—"

A man's voice, subdued, almost faint by comparison to the violence in his own, intercepted: "Yes, sir?"

"That girl—" he fairly shrieked. "I want her up here! I don't let nobody make me wait like this!"

"A—a red-headed young lady?" the man at the other end finally hazarded.

"Who remembers what they look like!" thundered Abbazzia. "Yeah! Red-headed."

"I'm sorry, sir. She left the building."

There was a moment of sudden stunned silence. "She what? What'd you just say?"

"She's not in the building any longer," the voice repeated, "I saw her leave by the front entrance."

A sudden blue bead of flame winked up from the incessantly manipulated pocket lighter in his free hand, and noticing for the first time what he had been doing with it, he flung it violently away from him, as though it, somehow, were to blame for this unprecedented affront, this laceration to his dignity, offered to boot not even by a subordinate but by a lower form of life altogether.

He picked up at long last the remaining part of the phone, the stem part. His voice was less raucous now, more bated. "That man I left down there. Put him on. Tell him I want to talk to him a minute."

"The man that was posted here by the switchboard?" the voice inquired, to make sure of correct identification.

"Him! Get a move on!"

"I'm sorry. He left with her."

The stunning impact of the news made Abbazzia take a step back on one leg, as though the telephone had suddenly pushed him away.

He was having trouble with his breathing now; it came too full one moment, too scant the next. He didn't answer; he closed off the connection almost furtively. As though afraid to leave even that small orifice leading into his room: an electrical impulse within a sheathed wire.

The pupils of his eyes moved too far over into one corner, then too far back into the opposite corner, then all the way back to the first again; never remaining at calm center. Like pools of quicksilver clinging to a ledge.

He darted a look at the lateral wall. "Wait'll I get Sal in here! Gotta get Sal in here—!"

He scurried toward it on the bias, giving a heedless shove to a chair that nearly overturned it, to get it out of the way rather than go around it, so intent was he on getting over there fast.

He struck at the wall, and it gave back a loud but flat-sounding throbbing, that raced around the room and died again into silence. Then he struck once more, and then once more. Silence came back again each time. He even turned around to face the door, waiting to witness Sal's headlong rush across the threshold, as at the rehearsal. He even took a precautionary step out of the way, to allow him plenty of clearance, so that they wouldn't collide.

Nothing occurred. The door remained lifeless.

This time his arm moved like a triphammer. Its motions blurred, they could no longer be identified individually, so fast it struck, so incessantly. So frightenedly, so despairingly. He even cried out his name: "Sal!" And then again: "Sal! Why don't you come in here?"

His arm suddenly dropped, and swung there fallow.

"Gone," he panted. "Him too."

Then he laced around with the swiftness of a top when a child whisks the wound-up guide cord out from under it, and flung himself at the opposite wall, across from the first. Both his arms were out, as when one runs forward to embrace someone or something, enclose it, draw it to you. Thus his whole body careened into the wall in that position; arms akimbo, hands overhead, chest pressed flat against it.

For a moment he lay that way, like a cardboard cutout of a man pasted flat against a wall-surface; every inert turn of his body expressing the one word "despair." Then his hands began to ripple, beating tattoo with their palms, like a drummer using the plaster for his drumhead. Faster and faster they went, frenzied, battering. And his voice-box, partly stopped up by the wall and made hollow-sounding against it, kept calling out in agonized repetition the second one's name, the one who was supposed to be behind there on this side. And broke and crumbled at last into pleadings and sobbings that could not have carried through to the other side even had somebody been there. "Carmine, come in, I need you! Carmine, you're there, ain't you? Carmine, I'll give you anything you want, only come in! It's empty all around me, I'm by myself in here!"

No one, nothing; no sign, no sound. The door stayed mute.

His hands fell still at last, couldn't strike any more. For a moment they stayed in place against the wall, then like five-pronged stains first one and then the other slowly coursed down it and dropped off.

His cheek remained flat against it, nuzzling it, as if he held it in some kind of crazed affection, because it had once meant protection, even if it didn't any more.

Then his head turned slowly, and he looked across his shoulder at the door, bulge-eyed, fearful.

Panic. Agoraphobia, with its limitless black horizons and chill, unimpeded death-winds. Nothing at hand to shield, to shelter, to cover one over. His voice whispered its terror. "I'm wide open. They can walk right in off the street and get me! There's nobody in-between any more!"

He flung himself against it, as he had the two walls, and the impact of his body tossed it closed with a violent clout. His hands, trembling, groped for and turned the lock. And then a last slap against the center of the panel, to hold that fast.

He turned and looked and saw the door of the clothes closet. He opened it, and backed in, and half-crouched there. And drew the door partly to in front of him. For a moment only the four tight-pressed tips of his fingers studded along its edge could be seen, and the brightness of his recessed eyes, glistening with watery animalistic sparkle. And his breath could be heard, against the cavernous echo-chamber that the closet became for it.

Briefly only, he stayed like this. It brought no palliation. Unreasoning agoraphobia wanted more: a hole in the ground, a burrow. Something tighter, closer overhead.

He came out again. And like a naked man who plunges into icy water, the open room caused him to draw shivering breaths.

He made for the bed, and dropped down against the edge of it, the way children do when they're about to say their prayers. But he had no gods, he was his own god, and therefore he had nothing to pray to. Then he lowered himself to the floor from there, all but his rump, and padding on the flats of his hands, like some odd, ungainly animal, drew his head and shoulders in under the bed. Then lolled over on his side, and switched his legs in after him, and then drew his knees up close against his stomach. And lay coiled like that, like some unborn foetus pulsing with premature breath.

His dilated eyes were sighted out along a two-dimensional garden patch of scuffed beige carpet-flowers that seemed to climb upward in their symmetrical rows, shutting out the whole rest of the world. Their perfume was dust, and they lay like dead, unstirring. The edge of the bed came down and cut them off short. They had no sedative effect for terror; they were the flowers of delirium, that come back at night in dreams if looked at too closely and too long.

Now swiftly, within the space of breath-choked minutes, his mania blew inside-out, like an umbrella in a gale. Or like a sleight-of-hand performer who draws a length of gauze through his fingers and causes it to change magically from one hue to the next. Confinement, craved just now, suddenly became the form of terror itself. Agoraphobia turned into claustrophobia. Both were still the same terror, with another name.

His hand pounded the floor beside him. "I can't stay here like a rat in a trap, waiting for 'em to come and get me! I gotta get out of here! Gotta get out of here fast!" He lashed his legs out into the open, then padded backward on the flats of his hands until his head was in the clear.

"Gotta get on the outside!" he kept muttering. "Gotta lose myself on the outside! That's the only thing'll save me."

He ran to where the suitcase was standing, tossed the lid up and over. His ravening fingers disemboweled its contents; neckties of tropical brilliance splashed up, like a neon-geyser, to fall back around him and stay that way, in static ripples. Shirts threw up their empty sleeves like struggling ghosts and expired lifeless on the floor.

He was still talking brokenly to his unseen companion: self-preservation. "Who needs neckties, when it's your neck itself you gotta save?"

Then a gun, bedded in layers of undergarments. He inserted it underneath his coat somewhere. "The only one you can trust, anyway; the one that's right on you." Then more money went into the already sausage-plump billfold.

He stood up and turned to go. "That's all you need," he said. "That's all, in this-here world. Money and a gun. A gun and money. Everything else, you can get with one or the other of them two." And leered with his own wisdom.

He went over to the closed door once more—for the last time, this was to be—and opened it sparingly to look out.

A man was standing down the hall, where the elevator-shaft door was. Not moving, not doing anything. Just standing motionless, head lowered attentively, newspaper spread open just across his breastbone. The brim of his hat kept the light from the upper part of his face, as though he were wearing an eyeshade.

He didn't turn at the sound of Abbazzia opening his door, though he must have heard it in all that stillness. He didn't even seem to be breathing, he was so still.

Abbazzia's fear-sensitized nerves jerked and recoiled throughout the length and width of his body. He knew. These were the lookouts, these who stood like this. He knew the ways of those who stalk to kill, he knew them well, they'd done his own errands for him too many a time. Sometimes he'd even watched them at a distance, from within the safe anonymity of a parked car. That rigor-mortis-immobility, the down-held head so that the eyes could not be seen to move, the sheltering hat-brim, the newspaper that provided the excuse. Then when the quarry had passed, they made the signal that doomed him. In many ways, in many different ways, they made it. They lowered the newspaper, or blew their nose on a handkerchief, or threw a cigarette away, so that it made a momentary red streak across the dark. All these were the messages of death. Who should know them better than he, he had prearranged so many of them himself.

The ribbon's-width of door-opening had already been effaced, instantly, at first glance. "The window—" came racing down the millway of his thoughts like a bright pebble. "There may be a fire ex-cape—get out through there." He'd first used the word at seven with an x; he'd used it that way ever since, and never known in all that time that it was wrong; no one had ever told him so. A wrong word used many times throughout a life; a wrong deed done many times throughout a life; wherein lies the difference?

He didn't draw the shade up, he simply slanted it aside, making a crevice to look through. He saw at once that under the ledge there was nothing, only a sheer drop all the way down to the street.

He was cut off, sealed up in here. The room that had been chosen for a sanctuary because of its inaccessibility, had turned for that very same reason into a tomb.

He lurched with sagging knee-joints back deeper into the room, pushing away an impeding table, propping himself in passing against the top of a chair. Then he stood there a moment, both hands inter-crossed and pressed flat against the center of his forehead. As if there were a pasty-colored star affixed there, with spreading fingers for its many rays.

"I'm finished!" he shuddered deeply. "I'll never get out of here by myself, alive!"

Silence at first, both of voice and of thought. Then that "by myself" began coming back, like an echo, like an afterthought. Louder, more insistent each time, as though he had shouted it out at the top of his voice just now (and he had barely given it breath).

"By myself—" "By myself—" "BY MYSELF—"

Ricocheting, playing back to him, glancing off the walls themselves in eerie polyphonic impetus.

His hand dropped from his forehead, suddenly tightened, as if it were grasping an idea, holding onto it for dear life.

"By myself, not a chance. But with somebody else I could make it!"

Then his hand opened a little, almost let the idea go. "Where's the somebody else for me, though? They've all run out. And it would have to be somebody that they're afraid of. Somebody bigger than them. Bigger than them and bigger than me, both—"

His hand tightened again. Far tighter than it had been the time before. The idea was caught fast now, had taken form, had taken body.

"Them!" he breathed, as if in amazement at the idea's simplicity, its logic; in fact, that it had not occurred any sooner than it had. He drove the clenched hand into its opposite now, like a mallet. "Sure! Them! Why not them? I've always laughed at them— They were for the chumps— For the little guys, not the big guys like me— They were for decoration. They turned their backs, when I passed the word. But always with a hand sticking up behind them, like a tail. All I had to do was put something in it, and then they were never around where I didn't want them to be at a certain time. Now I want them to be around, that's all. It worked that way, why shouldn't it work this way just as good?"

He hastened to the phone, caught it up.

"I got no bodyguard left?" he breathed above an hysterical, abortive chuckle. "I'll make a bodyguard out of them!"

Then he talked into the phone.

"Gimme the police," he ordered.

It was a commanding knock. A double one first, then a single one after. Urgent, demanding. As if to say: "We are the police, and we don't like being kept waiting."

He turned with a grin on his face. "Coming, boys!" he hallelujahed. "Ri-i-ight with you!"

The brassware under his fingers was like a caress, as he unfastened it. It was like gold, and he had always loved to touch gold. Just for its own sake alone.

This door that had kept death out all the long night through—he opened it now to let life in.

He saw their faces first. Life had three faces. There were three of them; one on each side of the opening, the third in mid-center. Oh, what beautiful faces they had; oh, what handsome guys they were; never such good-looking faces before. Next his eyes feasted on their uniforms, like moths that gorge themselves on fabric. The blue service-garb of the Police Department of the City of New York. The brass buttons, the visored caps, the pewter-looking badges affixed over the heart.

Their eyes regarded him, and that was all. Eyes that revealed nothing, other than that they saw him. They didn't speak, he was the one did.

"Gee, am I glad to see you fellows! I never was so glad to see anyone in my life before—!"

"You are?" one said, and that was all.

Beside himself, and scarcely knowing what he was doing, he even tried to press the hand of one of them. The man passively let him do so, without making any move of his own. His hand did not return the pressure, and when Abbazzia let it go, it fell back lifeless, boneless, to where it had been before. Thus, there was no handclasp exchanged, for it takes two to produce one.

Two of them came forward now into the room, one turning to the third as they did so and instructing, quiet-voiced: "You wait outside here by the door. We'll be right out."

The door was closed again, locked on the inside, crisply.

Abbazzia had been made almost antic by happiness. He cupped his hands together, leaving an orifice. He blew into it zestfully. He rubbed them together, in anticipation of imminent welcome activity.

"Now I'll get what I'm taking with me," he told them. "Won't take no time at all."

The second officer had crossed to the window, as if to draw the shade. Then seeing that Abbazzia already had it down, he modified his intention, simply stood there with his back to it, in a waiting attitude, hands behind him.

"You won't need that," the other one suggested helpfully to Abbazzia.

"No, I guess you're right," Abbazzia conceded. He cast aside the rejected garment, stooped again to his task.

"Y'got a gun?" the man asked him matter-of-factly.

"Yeah, sure."

"Better let us take it," the patrolman said quietly.

"Okay, if you think it's better that way," Abbazzia assented accommodatingly. He drew it out, offered it to him grip-first.

"Take his gun for him, Charlie," the first one instructed his fellow-patrolman without offering to touch it himself.

The second one uncoupled his hands, came over, accepted it from Abbazzia, and disposed of it somewhere within his uniform jacket, unbuttoning it, rebuttoning it again.

"Thanks a lot," said Abbazzia absently, bending once more.

"You're welcome," answered the first one tonelessly.

Abbazzia straightened again, about to insert something within his own clothing this time.

"You won't need that," he was told, as tonelessly as ever.

Abbazzia stopped long enough to give him a blank look. "Oh, this I will," he contradicted. "This time you're wrong. This is dough. You need that every place you go."

"There's one place you don't," the policeman said expressionlessly. "Not where you're going."

Abbazzia stopped to look at him more fully, more uncomprehendingly than the first time. His look became a stare. "What d'ya mean? I don't get you—"

The other one spoke unexpectedly, from behind them. "Let's get finished, shall we, Mike? This is no fun any more."

Abbazzia turned sharply to look at him. He had a gun held in his hand. Not the one Abbazzia had just handed over to him, but one that must have come out of his police-holster. He wasn't aiming it, it just lay idle in his hand, sidewise, as if he were testing its weight.

Abbazzia turned back in consternation to the first one. "What does he need that for?" he asked with quickening tension.

"I don't know," was the dispassionate answer. "Ask him."

But even as he answered, he was unlimbering one of his own.

Abbazzia's voice was beginning to throb. "Wait a minute—I don't get it—"

"You don't get it?" said the one before him, meticulously repetitive. "He don't get it," he said to the one behind.

"Something's wrong here—"

This time the policeman gave a slight head-shake. "Nothing's wrong. Everything's just the way it should be."

"No, it isn't! I feel peculiar. You're making me feel peculiar—the way you're looking at me—something about the way you're looking at me—" He could hardly breathe. Suddenly suspicion, seeping into the overheated crannies of his mind all this while like a combustible gas, ignited, exploded into a ghastly white flash of certainty.

"You ain't real cops—" His lower jaw dangled loosely, as though the mental detonation just now had unhinged it. He got it to cleave to its upper part long enough for utterance. "Barney—Maxwell—didn't—send you!"

"What d'ya know?" the one in front of him appraised the one behind him. "Barney Maxwell didn't send us."

The voice in back of Abbazzia said, "Who's Barney Maxwell?"

"Crooked police captain," the first one explained. "Must've been trying to make a deal with him, to get in out of the open."

At this, Abbazzia's eyes flickered closed in expiring confirmation.

The patrolman plucked briefly at his own coat sleeve to indicate it. "So the cop suits worked?" he leered at Abbazzia. "It's new. First time. And when a thing's still new, you can count on it paying off."

Abbazzia sank downward onto his knees between the two of them, into the little cranny their bodies made for him.

("That's smart," the rearward one said approvingly, "less distance for you to fall.")

His face was turned upward. He started to talk for his life. Only, lives can't be put into words. "Fellas. Fellas—"

"We are fellas," the face bending over him said.

"Fellas, my money— All my money, fellas— Much more than is in this room—"

"What d'ya think, we came here to rob you?" the face smiled. "We ain't thieves."

His voice came straight from his heart now. Every heartbeat swelled it, thinned it, and they were dynamo-quick. "Two minutes. Just give me two minutes. Two minutes, that ain't long to ask for. Just one minute. Don't give it to me cold. Just let me pull myself together, just let me get ready."

"You're ready now," the overhanging face said. And it said crisply to the other one, "Get a pillow. Use one of them."

He put his hand downward onto Abbazzia's shoulder; not heavily, but lightly, as if just to balance him there in place. As you hold some inanimate thing steady, keep it from toppling over, until you are ready to have to do with it—whatever it is you have to do with it.

Abbazzia made an infantile puking sound, as when a suckling infant regurgitates upon its mother's milk, and lurched sideward onto his shoulder and hip. Then like a bisected snake that still has reflexes of motion left to it, he tried to writhe in underneath the bed, to gain the shelter of its iron frame.

The man in the police uniform made a wide scooping motion with his foot, as when you sweep something back toward you that has eluded you, whether inert refuse or scurrying vermin it matters not; and Abbazzia had to avert his face from the scraping shoe. Then the man recoiled his foot, and drove his shoe into Abbazzia's lower face, along the floor.

There was dental pain, and bone pain, and a pale-blue flash, like shattered starlight on a disrupted millpond. Sluggish warmth backed against the seams of Abbazzia's mouth, and peered forth, emulsion-thick, a laggard bead at a time.

"Hang onto him a minute, be right with you," one of the voices recommended belatedly, as though its owner had only then just glanced around at what was taking place.

"Got him," the other assured.

Abbazzia's eyes, like circular mosaics embedded in the floor, stared upward, could see only the ceiling now: an edgeless expanse of white. It was like a burial ground suspended upside-down over him; a potter's field with a fill of white clay.

"A minute— Only a minute—" he whispered.

The sole of a shoe came down across his throat, full stamping-power withheld though, and kept him pinned there. He could not raise his head at the one side of it, he could not raise his trunk at the other. His fingers scratched the empty air, his arms jittered upward and back in opposing directions like someone flat on his back playing the strings of an invisible harp. Once his flexing fingertips caught onto trouser-leg fabric, at sheer random, and pulled it back, revealing gnarled pebble-white shank and a triangular banding of elastic garter.

Someone chuckled.

Now from opposite sides of the white ceiling-expanse their faces curved over toward him. There was a gusty impact, as when someone drives a blow into the plumpness of a pillow.

Abbazzia gave a choking whinny, and striving mortally managed to tilt the back of his head a little bit off the floor. At once the entire length of body under one of the faces came into perspective. The man was holding a pillow before his own midsection, the curve of one arm supporting it. With the other hand, clenched into a fist, he kept walloping the pillow, driving each successive blow deeper into it. Until he had driven a deep hollow into the inner side of it, opposite his own abdomen.

Then neatly and economically he inserted the gun into the pit he had punched within the pillow. His eyes scanned Abbazzia's form steadily for a moment, as though he were taking aim sight-unseen, by dint of finger-feeling alone. Without raising them, he remarked to his fellow-killer, "Get your foot outta the way, I don't want to nick you."

The waist of the shoe suddenly left Abbazzia's throat. His windpipe seemed to unfold, like a rubber tube that has been trodden flat and slowly fills out again.

The shots followed immediately afterward, without any further preliminary.

The pain came first, then the throbbing drumbeats of the sound. There were many pains, and many drumbeats, but they all came unvaryingly in that order. The pain, and then the stifled thumping sound, and then the pain again, and then the sound. Twice, thrice, four times, five, six.

The pain, each time, was like a rabid needle going into him, drawing after it a scarlet thread of fire. The withdrawal-stitch that followed each plunge of the needle into the fabric of his life was equally excruciating. And then it would plunge in again in a new place, to depths he'd never known he'd had until now, drawing its flaming, snaking thread after it, in sutures that never were over and done with. For the old place continued to hurt no less, while the new place quickly matched it in height of agony.

He moved very little, just rocked a little from side to side, with an ebbing motion, like something settling to rest. He didn't cry out. This pain was too deep to be voiced. It lacked the breathing spells in-between, in which to gather voice and eject it.

His eyesight fogged, as when someone breathes too closely on a glass, and then cleared again momentarily, but not to the full expanse it had had before; just a small clear patch in the center, with mist all around its edges.

He saw a feather come wafting sluggishly down, in zigzag graduated volplane glides from side to side, like something suspended on a hidden thread. It looked so enormous, like the lush tail-plume of an ostrich. It landed on his chest some place, was lost to sight.

High up above he saw a trace of smoke-haze. This went up the other way, as slowly as the feather had come down, erasing itself to nothingness as it went. First it was there, then it was gone.

His eyesight dimmed again, and was no more.

His hearing lingered on, futile, moribund.

An inquiring tap on wood sounded, and a voice answered it, "Yeah, we're through. We're coming."

The hard hub of a shoe pounded against his ribs, like a mallet swung underhand seeking to drive them apart. The pain this time was not of needles, but of splinters. They did not course in and out as the needles had, they remained in his side, crushed, fragmented. As though a huge burr were being held pressed tight up against him.

"Take that with you," a voice said way off in the distance. "That's Big Matt's regards."

A door-latch clicked, many rooms away it seemed.

And in that other, far-off room, that was the world now, that was life now, men exchanged a brief remark or two in passing one another, as he had once himself when he was still among them.

"How'd it sound?"

"Like a guy snapping his fingers at a crap game, that's about all."

And then someone laughed. That was the last time he heard laughter. Only the living can laugh, only the living can hear it. "That was the crap game of death, buster. We cleaned up in there."

Then momentarily a voice came again, "Close the door," it jeered. "Let him die in privacy."

A latch gave a single clocklike tick, and then there was nothing more of other men, their voices nor their stirrings nor the pain they gave. He was alone in a world of his own, a world between two other worlds, a blend of each: one of which he had always known, one of which he was still to know.

It was twilight in this world. A peculiar India-ink sort of twilight, in which long horizontal bands of dark, like brush-strokes on a Japanese print, kept ebbing slowly downward, with alternate bands of light between each one. As though somebody were endlessly unfolding a Venetian blind, a blind which never found bottom.

It was un dormetto, but a particular moment of un dormetto caught and held static, prolonged beyond time-reckoning. The moment just before full sleep comes, the moment just before awakening sets in. An empty echo-chamber of the things that were, or the things that were about to be. In each sleeping-time, passed through at a single moment; but in this death-sleep, stretched out into a lifetime of nothingness, the nothingness of a lifetime.

Because it was twilight, and once long ago she had used to call him at twilight, a memory came back from somewhere, and found its way into the emptiness.

She was calling him, from the high window of a six-story tenement. Patiently calling, over and over. Never answered, never even acknowledged by an upward turn of the head. Until at last the calling faltered, and wore out, and was gone, defeated until the next time, the next twilight, when it would be defeated again.

"Giacopo! Giacoppino! vieni a mangiare . . ."

Jake. Jakie. Come in and eat.

Over and over again, each twilight. Never answered, never obeyed. Until twilight ended, and it was night, and it was too late. Tired, defeated, the call came no more. Until all the twilights ended, and it was too late. Until boyhood ended, and it was forever night, the long dark night of wayward manhood, and it was too late.

"Giacopo! Giacoppino . . . .'" Fainter and fainter, going away now. Just a memory now, just an echo drifting through eternity.

He stirred restlessly, and his heart answered, muted, twenty years too late. His lips struggled to pronounce the answer, the answer she had waited for so long, and never had. His tongue peered forth, drew back. His whole head moved with striving. And then a sighing word stole forth. A single word.

"Vengo . . ."

One word, that would have changed his life, and changed his death, had it been given then instead of now.

An then the effort to obey set in, coursing slowly through him like some hypodermically introduced plasma. His struggles now were terrible to watch, they were so very small. A finger quirked, a foot twitched, an eyelid flickered as if the light of life still shone too strongly on it. In a moment, or in forty, one knee had switched up toward his body like a piston-rod, and then gone down again; switched up, and then at last stayed up. And then his trunk gave a half-turn over, and his hand caught in the bed-stuff above him, and clawed, and stayed.

Then in a little while the other hand was up there with it. But his head hung down between them of its own weight. He'd raise it, but it would go down again. Until a time came, in the blank space that now was time, when it too stayed up.

The night was getting late, and the supper was getting old, but he'd get there if it took him all eternity. For a spark within him said to heed her call.

The tenement stairs were steep and hard to climb— they always had been, even in those days—and he kept slipping back and slipping back, sometimes only a floor or two, sometimes all the way to the bottom, but without hurt, without bruising hardness.

Until at last he breasted them, he reached the top. There only remained the door now, the door to their tenement flat. He could see it over there from where he was, here.

He picked up his coat. He knew where to go for it. Strange, but he knew where to go for it. The sleeves were white-satin lined, but only before his arms had introduced themselves.

He'd been hurt in some kind of a street fight. It must have been a bad fight. It was starting to run down, now that he was perpendicular. He looked down at the floor, and there were dark polka dots all around him. Like splashes of Marsala wine.

Everything was so hard, even to get the buttons through the buttonholes. The buttons turned sticky after a while, and that made it even harder.

He even took the hat by the brim and gropingly settled it on his head. He had always been nattily dressed, impeccably so, these latter times of affluence and power. He still was, this last time of all. He didn't look in the mirror, though; that was the one thing he didn't do now.

He had difficulty with the door. Getting it open. His own leaning body kept pushing it back again each time. At last he got it to scrape past him all along one side, and that gave it clearance to swing free.

He saw it no more, knew of it no more; he was out in the hall now, up against the wall in the hall, standing very still, face inward, like a pupil being punished by being made to stand there face to wall. On the threshold where he'd just been, lay a moistly glittering star, still pulsing with his life-force. Then the pulsing went out of it. A sworl of ruddy shellac remained, like a brush-stroke left by a careless painter.

He began to inch along the wall now, the flats of his hands patting each new place to see if it was there first, then his feet shifting over with a dragging scrape.

Death, pretending to be alive.

Then after a while he'd reached the point at which he'd have to cross in openness, because the elevator was on the other side. Three times he tried it, and three times he came right back to the wall again, to stay up on his feet. And once he kissed it with his lips, as if pleading with it not to abandon him. It seemed to shed a garnet tear over his predicament, which ran down slowly right where he was standing, and then thickened to a stop.

At last he pushed rudely at it, cast it away from him, and on jumbled stiffly-scissoring legs tottered head-low, to come against the matching wall on the opposite side. Journey's end; no more groping, no more staggering, no more fears of leaving the wall. Thick satiny glass was there beside him, and a nubby little push button, easy to find. He pressed it with his thumb. Within moments warm yellow light climbed behind the glass, filled it to its top like a tank. There was a muffled unlatching, and the glass slid away and there was open space before Abbazzia's penitently down-hanging face.

A man was standing at the back of the car, his face down-turned too, a newspaper held open just below it as if to catch it should it fall off out of sheer weariness. And midway between the two of them, a youth with a pillbox cap, too somnolent to look closely at Abbazzia.

Three vagrant people, as unaware of each other as a moment before birth, or a moment after death. Or for that matter, a moment in mid-life.

"Going up?" the boy asked sleepily.

"No," Abbazzia whispered, "going down."

The panel slid closed, and darkness slowly came up in it, pushing the light up out of it.

And as it did so, Abbazzia in turn slowly went down, his palms trailing the glass, lingeringly, to the last.

Then he rolled over very briefly just once on the floor.

Then the spark went out.

And then there was death, the great know-nothing part of life. Or had life perhaps been only the brief know-something part of an endless all-encompassing death?

5. The Night of October 24th, 1929

A ROOM HAD BEEN reserved for "Mr. John Smith," by telephone, a little after three that afternoon. Three: the hour that the schools were let out. Three: also the hour that the stock exchange had formerly closed, until just the past few days. Technically, it still did, but the ticker was anywhere from three-quarters of an hour to an hour behind in its quotations nowadays; it was gorged with the debris flowing into it (like one of those torn-paper showers the declining twenties had become so fond of, at every public celebration; only, it wasn't telephone books this time that were being ripped to pieces); it couldn't catch up with itself.

The name had been given in a way that left no doubt it had quotation marks around it. Given with a dry laugh, that made no pretense at deception, that emphasized its fictitiousness. Given in a way that suggested the caller thought it was a good joke on someone. Not so much on the person who was taking the call as on the very caller himself.

It wasn't until nearly six hours later, going on nine, that a man appeared to take up the reservation for "John Smith." A man such as seldom stopped before that desk any more, these latter days of the establishment's slow decline and dotage. Authoritative, imposing. And yet it wasn't a crude, aggressive thing about him. It was mellowed, you might say. As if he had been used to authority for so many years now, that it wasn't the raw thing it might have been with a parvenu. There was a graciousness admixed with it; the graciousness that comes of having all but forgotten what it is to encounter opposition. The graciousness that can afford to be gracious.

And that, apparently, was the way he went through life. You could not think of him as waiting behind a velvet cord in a restaurant, to be given a table. He would walk right in without pause, way would be made for him, even though there were others already there waiting before him. And even though there had been no visible table available at all until that very moment, one would be brought, somehow, from somewhere, and set down before him then and there. One would be created.

"Well, young man," he said pleasantly, "have you that room for me, I engaged this afternoon?"

"What name was it, sir?" the clerk asked him respectfully.

He blinked momentarily upward, to achieve recollection. "I think I called myself John Smith." Then he added quite candidly, "That's not really my name"—he seemed to take the clerk into his confidence—"but it'll do, I guess. We'll have to let it go at that."

All the clerk could think of saying to this was a rather bewildered "Yes, sir?" on an interrogative inflection.

"Did I do it right?" Mr. Smith asked him, almost with a sort of hopeful pride.

The clerk had almost completely lost the entire thread of the conversation by this time. He knew it had some relation to the reservation of a room, at this hotel, by this man, and under a name not his own; but beyond that, he couldn't follow him.

"Sir?" was all he could say, helplessly, this time.

"Reserve the room, I mean. Did I go about it the right way? It's been years since I did anything like that for myself. You get so used to having things done for you, you almost forget how—how to go about it." He laughed a little, like a person who discovers he can still ride a bicycle after many years of not having been on one. Or skate on ice, or any other long-ago thing.

"I picked your hotel at random," he confided. "I'd never even heard of it before."

"We used to be better known than we are today," the clerk lamented.

"I opened a phone directory and put my finger down, like this"—he tamped his finger down on the desk-top, to show him—"on the first page it opened to. And it was your hotel."

He paused for a moment, as if expecting to be complimented on this, as a feat of dexterity or something. The clerk, apparently, saw nothing complimentary to the establishment in such a hit-or-miss method of selection; if anything, quite the opposite.

"We're a member of the American Hotel Association in good standing," he murmured, with just the slightest shade of reproof.

"So then I asked for an outside wire, and I called you, straight through from my own desk, without anyone else handling it." Mr. Smith glanced around him. "I've never been in a hotel like this before," he observed, but more for himself than his auditor. "Oh, not for a long time, anyway," he qualified it, as if trying to think back. And then concluded, on a completely cryptic note: "And that was another me."

"Are you going to be with us long?" the clerk asked him with professional courtesy.

Mr. Smith's wandering attention came back to him abruptly, almost with a snap of the eyes. He looked at him for a long, steady moment, with a gravity of mien that had been lacking until now. "No," he said rather slowly. "No, I'm not going to be with you long. Not long at all."

"I see," said the clerk with alacrity, glad to be on concrete ground at last and no longer lost in a maze of dialectics. "Then you'll be going tomorrow, perhaps?"

"I'll be gone tomorrow," said Mr. Smith, with something flinty in his eyes for a moment. "Definitely."

"Just staying with us overnight," said the clerk, dutifully jotting something down.

"Just staying overnight—and then checkout," said Mr. Smith, rather heavily. His fingers, resting on the desk, crossed together and executed an unnoticeable little snap of punctuation.

He looked up again, smiled fitfully. "And now, if you'll let me have my key, I'll go where I'm supposed to," he said with a charming sort of resignation, as though he himself had no will of his own in this matter.

He started after the bellboy toward the elevator. Then he stopped, took a step back toward the desk. He said the strangest thing that had ever yet been said across that desk. "Tell me," he said poignantly, "are you happy?"

All the clerk could do was masticate it with his loosely fluctuating jaw into crumbled syllables. "Ha, ha, happy?"

"Standing there; doing what you're doing," the man said with a touch of impatience that must have been habitual with him whenever he encountered the slower mental processes of others.

"I—I don't know. I never thought about it."

"Then why don't you think about it?" the man persisted. "You're not getting any younger. Think about it while there's still time. Don't wait until it's all over with, before you do."

All the clerk could do was stare after him open-mouthed. He only closed his mouth, probably, about the time the elevator had reached the check-in's floor.

He found himself asking it over of himself. "Am I happy?" Strange new question never asked before. Eliciting finally a strange new answer never known before.

No, he discovered. No, I'm not. I don't want to stand at this desk every day, and bid people "Good morning" and "Good evening," and give them their mail and give them their keys. Once, long ago, I wanted something else. But what it was, I can't remember any more, because it is so long ago, and because it is so long ago since I last wanted it. It's rusted away now from lack of use, from lack of having, so it's not there any more to want.

But once, I know, there was something I wanted, in the early morning of my life; something I dreamed would come, I'd have. And until it did, just for a day, just for a year, I stepped behind a desk, to give them their keys, to give them their mail, to give them "Good morning." That was twenty-three years ago. I'm still doing it. And I cannot stop doing it now, for what I thought was to come is not coming any more (how can it, when I do not remember what it was myself?), and that leaves me with only this. Good morning. Your mail. Good evening. Your key.

I have been short-changed somewhere along the way, but I don't know when and I don't know where. My life slipped out of its room and beat its bill, and there are no tracers anywhere that can find it and bring it back.

But no, strange man who asked me that strange question, I am not happy. And thank you for nothing! For I never knew it until today.

Upstairs in the room, Mr. Smith stood and watched while the bellboy performed all the little flourishes and furbelows that went with the act of ushering him in. Shifting a chair an inch, adjusting the levels of the window shades a half of an inch, pressing back the bathroom door a little, turning the light behind it on, then off again, but both processes executed so almost simultaneously that all it seemed to do was shed a spark for an instant, and then remain out as it had been before.

"Never mind, son," Mr. Smith said almost commiseratingly. "It's just a room. You can't make it any better by fussing around with it."

The bellboy looked at him askance for a moment, as if to say, "You guessed that very quickly, didn't you?" Then gave him a sickly smile that tacitly admitted him to be right.

"Do many people come to a room like this?"

"Oh, sure," the boy said readily. "All the time."

That seemed to surprise him. He looked around at it again, as if to make sure there wasn't something about it he'd missed seeing the first time. "What kind of people?"

"Oh, all kinds," the boy said vaguely.

This time he nodded, as if to himself. "Yes, I guess they do, at that," he murmured. "All kinds, huh? Good and bad, happy and—and not."

The boy smiled disclaimingly. "Oh, you can't tell that about them, sir," he quickly protested. "That's on the inside. You can only tell about them from the outside."

"That's true," agreed Mr. Smith thoughtfully. "Very true."

Flattered by the discovery that he seemed to have made an observation of some depth, the boy enlarged upon it slightly, undiscouraged by his auditor, who seemed to find the same interest in his views that he took in everything else. "Of course, sometimes it shows on the outside," he continued. "Then you can tell for sure. If they have a long face on them, well, then they're not happy. If they whistle, or hum-like, to themselves, then you can tell they're happy."

Mr. Smith looked at him searchingly. Then, deliberately, he began to whistle a few notes of "Singin' in the Rain." He was a good whistler, clear and true. Suddenly he demanded, "Now, what would you say I was?"

The boy wrinkled his nose in a grin. "Happy," he said. "That's an easy one. I could've told even without that, though."

It was now Mr. Smith who seemed to have made an arresting discovery. "Is that all it takes to be happy?" he marveled with a wistful contemplativeness. "Why didn't I find this out long ago?"

He tried it again, as if to convince himself. He whistled a considerably longer snatch, even more vigorously than the first time. He stopped again. "Yes," he confirmed decisively, "I am." And then, just a shade more softly, "I almost am."

And again whistling, with only interruptions for speech, he drew out a dollar bill and gave it to the boy. "Here, son," he said benevolently. "I've enjoyed this little talk with you."

"Gee, I have too, sir!" the boy exclaimed warmly. A warmth that might have been partially fanned by the amount of the tip, it is true, but that was at least fractionally spontaneous and disinterested. "I like talking to cheerful people."

Mr. Smith chuckled a little. "That's the nicest thing that's been said to me for some days past," he confided. He started the door on its swing to closure, and yet even this, though it obliterated the boy's lighted-up face before it had been quite ready to withdraw, he managed to do without rudeness or abruptness. "See you later."

He turned the key in the inside of the lock. The leftover smile was still glimmering on his face as he came away from the door. "Maybe that should go on my gravestone," he murmured, still chuckling slightly. " 'He was cheerful about it all, anyway.' "

He did nothing that a man who settles himself for a stay in a hotel room does not do, to start with. He loosened his collar, first of all, as he strayed away from the door. Then he disengaged his necktie from the collar completely, and took it off, but without disintegrating the knot. He simply slipped this downward a considerable distance to enlarge the loop, and then passed the spread loop, intact, over his head, and hung the still looped tie over one of the posts of the bed. Then he removed his jacket and folded it in half, lining outward, and placed it that way, with careful neatness, across the back of one of the chairs. Finally he seated himself and removed his shoes, and luxuriated for a moment or two in the access of comfort this seemed to bring his feet. The way his toes flexed themselves a number of times, up, then down, was a plain enough indication of this. He eyed the shoes where they lay, one flat and one kited upright on its side. His lips stirred slightly, in some almost voiceless remark to himself. "Nuisances. You come in without them, you go out without them. Why do you have to have them in-between?"

In his stocking feet he rose now, and went to the expensive leather briefcase he had brought in with him, and using a small key, unlocked it over at the extreme side, then stripped open a zipper-tongue that parted it into two halves. One he allowed to remain prone, the other he propped upright.

From behind a flap of the lining he withdrew a double photograph folder, of expensive workmanship like everything else that he seemed to have about him, Florentine leather and tooled gold and iridescent moiré, and took this to the dresser-top and stood it there, as many another had been stood there before this. On one side was the photograph of a woman, on the other that of almost the same woman, with a difference of thirty years between them. The same eyes that looked off somewhere else, the same hauteur expressed somehow about the chins (perhaps they were up just a shade too high), the same aristocratic little retroussé noses looking ready to tilt still further, the same willful compression of the upper lip. The same utter simplicity, almost starkness, of adornment that comes more often of having everything there is to have, rather than of not having the things you fail to display. Around the throat of the older woman a single strand of pearls, the size of chick peas. The photograph could not reveal whether they were real or simulated, but the photograph did not have to. Around the throat of the girl, nothing; artfully, as if to point out: See how unspoiled I am. I refrain from wearing jewels yet for a year or two, although of course I'll have plenty as soon as I'm old enough.

Uncanny, the similarity was. (But perhaps it came largely from knowing them both as he did, he reflected.)

The graying hair of the one was fastidiously marcelled; little rippling undulations all over it, so soignée, so chic. The dark hair of the other was allowed to fall in lank, glossy simplicity, in a schoolgirl bob, just short of the shoulders.

Even the inscriptions were dated alike. Both "1929." But the scripts were different, and the messages not the same. "Ever devotedly, Sylvia," read the woman's; "To Daddy from his loving Ruth," read the girl's. And there was something so polite about the two of them. Like greetings from a distance, from a thousand heartbeats away, from which all the warmth has escaped en route, they had so far to go.

He went back to the briefcase, and took out notepaper and envelopes, and from one of the pockets of his coat a gold fountain pen, and sat down to write, scorning the hotel stationery.

With a glance at the twin photos, he addressed one of the envelopes first. His writing flowed readily, assuredly, for this preliminary passage. It was only a memory test, after all. "Miss Ruth Townsend Sears, Ecole St. Julien, Lausanne, Switzerland."

And then, at the top of one of the sheets, already a little less assuredly, "My own dear little girl—"

And then stopped, and glanced at the photo again, almost quizzically, as if asking: But are you? Were you? Have you ever been?

His hand slowly crushed the paper, and with a fresh one in its place, he made a new try.

"My dearest daughter Ruth—"

Then stopped again. And laughed. Laughed the way one might at one's own inexcusable awkwardness, lack of know-how. Even gave himself a slight clout on the forehead with the heel of his hand, as if to knock some aptitude into his own skull. And lastly, let his hand winnow distractedly through his hair.

But nothing came, not another word.

He crumpled that sheet too, finally, and again his lips stirred in half-submerged speech. "I always found it hard to write to you—" And as he rose in defeat: "The easiest way was always this—"

He went back to his coat, took out a checkbook folder, brought that back with him and detached one of the paper pennants. Then, momentarily interrupting himself, he did some figuring, using one of the blank leaves of notepaper for a scratch sheet, the flyleaves of the checkbook for a source.

It was not very involved. It was almost wholly subtraction. Subtraction so swift and devastating it was to the point of extinction, very nearly. A shrinkage from six figures to three, within the span of a single twenty-four hours.

The final figure he arrived at, the bedrock remainder, was this one:

$725.40

He looked at it, and he laughed again. A little grimly, but he laughed. The bellboy would have been sure he was happy. The bellboy might have been right at that. He blew out his breath, and you blow out your breath as a rule when you're relieved, glad something is over. Which is a variation of happiness.

He filled out the check now, swiftly, decisively, with none of his recent uncertainty, as one who has returned to a more accustomed medium. He filled it out: "Ecole St. Julien, Lausanne— To be applied against half-yearly tuition—$725.00."

He held it up and looked at it a moment. Then he laughed, and took the pen and changed it slightly. Changed the amount slightly, so that it read: 725.40.

And with a flourish swept two crossed lines, an X, that defaced the succeeding blank check bedded in the checkbook.

"Daddy to the bitter end," he commented under his breath. And gave a deep sigh. Not a sigh of regret; a sigh of relief, of surcease.

He lolled back for a moment, doing nothing, luxuriating in some new feeling that he must have had. Perhaps a cessation of responsibility. Then taking a blank sheet, he folded it three times around the check as a protective enclosure, and slipped this into the envelope, and sealed the flap.

He applied himself once more to his writing tasks. He took a fresh sheet of paper. His glance this time was toward the right-hand panel of the photograph folder. Unconsciously, his brows rose slightly, momentarily giving his face an expression of cynical disillusion. As if to say, "For appearance's sake, if nothing else, I must do this. Although we both know better."

"This will be a lot easier," he promised himself aloud. "Almost like a business letter."

It was a long letter. It began "My dear." Not "My darling," not "My wife." Just "My dear." It used, not just one sheet, but two, three, part of a fourth. And yet there was very little actual script in its contents. Just a few short lines at the beginning. Then two long columns of figures side by side, running on for page after page, a brief word of explanation to accompany them here and there. They were both pyramidal, but they maintained an inverse proportion to one another, for one was like a pyramid with its base uppermost; as it dwindled, the adjoining column broadened. One was marked "Assets," the other "Debits." They both came out even, as a bookkeeper's ledger would or the financial statement of a bank. But (unlike those) they both came out nothing; the evenness of zero.

Then a few more short lines at the end. Summation, valedictory, perhaps. Then just his name. His given name. A simple name; the simple name of a simple man, who's done his task the best that he can.

He enclosed it, sealed it and addressed it. Then he got up, went over to the photograph folder, and closed it up smartly, extinguishing the two faces. As though that part of it were over too, for him; and what he had to do next, was his own concern, he had to do alone, without anyone else to share it with him. He left the folder lying flat upon the bureau-top.

He looked around him, as if realizing there were other things that were now waiting to claim his attention, but postponing them for a short while (apparently), went to the telephone instead, and when he'd received an inquiry, began: "This is Mr. Jones in 923. Send the boy up with a cup of coff—"

"Mr. Jones?" a startled voice gasped.

He snapped his fingers contritely, and in good-humored confusion, as though the whole thing were a big joke. "Mr. er—Smith, wasn't it? Yes, Mr. Smith! (Oh, don't be so damned technical!) Anyway, send me up a cup of coffee. No, nothing else, just coffee."

When the knock came on the door, he went to it whistling.

The boy grinned at him, and he smiled back at the boy. They were like old friends now.

"Well, how do I stack up now?" Mr. Smith asked him.

The boy remembered their previous conversation at once. "Happy," was his verdict. "I can tell you feel like a million dollars."

Mr. Smith winced grotesquely. "No," he corrected him. "I feel like after you've had a million dollars and it's gone."

"Gee, that wouldn't be being happy, would it?" the boy stuttered anxiously.

"Wouldn't it?" was all Mr. Smith said, drily. "Wouldn't it?"

The boy scratched his head. "Well, I'll never know, anyway," he finally extricated himself from this profundity.

"No, probably you won't," concurred Mr. Smith. "Probably you won't. So go on being certain about it; maybe it's better that way. Don't let anyone make you uncertain. At least you'll have that much to be sure of, if nothing else." He reached into his pocket.

"Oh, no, sir," the boy said quickly. "You took care of that last time. Hope you enjoy your coffee, sir," he added quickly.

"Oh, I will," Mr. Smith promised. He picked the cup up, removed the paper napkin that had been placed over it to keep it warm, and inhaled the steam that quickly rose. "Do you want to know something? This'll be my first cup in five years."

"Don't you like coffee, sir?" the boy asked ingenuously.

"Sure I like it," said Mr. Smith defiantly. "Of course I do. I'm fonder of it than anything else I know of, always have been. Damn fool doctors with their damn fool orders! Five years of decaffeinated substitutes. Like drinking brewed sawdust. Well, watch this. Here goes." He raised the cup and drank deeply of it. He closed his eyes while doing so, and when he'd stopped to rest a moment, he gave a sigh of heartfelt bliss.

"Oh, brother," he said, "was that good!"

"Gee, you sure enjoyed that, sir," the boy commented.

"Five years," said Mr. Smith pensively. "Five years, of saving myself for—this."

He glanced briefly around the room. "Here," he said to the boy. "Take these two letters down with you, put stamps on them and mail them for me."

"Sure, sir," the boy said, hastily backing toward the door. "If there's anything else you want, just ring. The night man will take care of you. I'm going off duty in half an hour. See you tomorrow."

Mr. Smith didn't answer that. He looked at him, but he didn't answer that part of it.

He went back to his coffee again, or what was left of it, and sat down to enjoy it more fully. When the cup was quite empty, he brought it close to his face, tilted it acutely so that it was almost upside-down, and extended his tongue beneath it. A single, final drop detached itself, and he caught it on his tongue, and savored it. Then and then only he finally relinquished the cup. A well-known advertising slogan must have occurred to him at this point, for he snickered a little and murmured something under his breath about "—the last drop."

He went back to the briefcase now and from a small toilet kit within it took out a safety-razor holder. Of gold, apparently, judging by its appearance. But not soap or brush or anything else that was meant to accompany it. He took this to the dresser, and opening it there, took out in turn the blade it held. Then retained this and discarded the holder itself.

He lifted his coat from the chair over which he had put it, and kneading it until he had caused the lining of its inside pocket to protrude, deftly nicked at that with the blade, until he had severed the identity label, which bore the name of the wearer as well as that of the tailor who had made it. And it had been made to order, and not just for anonymous sale, that was easy to see about it.

Dropping the coat back, he did the same thing to the hat he had brought in, although in this case he had to cut out a small section of the sweatband, for the initials were stamped bodily on that. He did it next to his topcoat, and then unbuttoning the upper part of his expensive lawn shirt, took the embroidered monogram off that by slashing away the entire breast-pocket. And lastly took a wallet from his back trouser pocket, and pared off the gold initials clamped to one corner of the pin seal.

He drew out the hotel's metal wastebasket, and stood it in the middle of the floor, and dropped all these small stigmata into it. Then he began to empty the briefcase of papers. There were great quantities of these, for the case was cleverly constructed to hold a great deal more than appeared to the eye.

Most of these papers he tore just once across, with economy of effort, without even glancing at them first. One or two he stopped and looked at for a second or two. All alike went into the wastebasket. When the white fill had already begun to peer out over the top of it, and there was nothing left, he carried the basket into the bathroom and set it down inside the porcelain-lined bathtub.

Then he bent over it for a moment. There was the silky sibilance of a match striking, and presently a pale apricot tint had begun to flicker undulantly across the curved rim of the tub. Soon this had deepened to vivid orange, and shone against his watchfully immobile face. A tip or two of flame-tongue darted momentarily just over the top of the tub, then crouched back again. A bluish haze of smoke began to thicken the air in the bathroom. He took the precaution of raising the window, set high in the wall above the tub, and let it escape through there as a vent.

After another moment or two, he turned one of the taps on. There was a virulent hiss, a puff of white steam, and then nothing further. He shut the tap off, and came back into the main room.

He looked at the wristwatch he had taken off and left upon the dresser. Like a man who has carried out everything he has set for himself to do (before some certain departure, say), so punctually and so efficiently, that he now finds he has more time on his hands than he expected to have. Or that he knows what to do with.

The way he stood there after having put the watch down, and let the fingers of both hands drum questioningly against the edge of the dresser-top, told that eloquently.

He discovered his own reflection in the mirror presently—standing that way vis-à-vis to it he was bound to eventually—and let his eyelids drop and shut it out, the way one snubs the sight of some failure or incompetent for whom one has only disgust.

As he turned from there, he glanced at the window. But only in passing, as it were. For he went over to the bed, next, and stood looking down at that. Then presently he had seated himself on the edge of it for a while, after thumping the top of it with his hand once or twice as if trying it out for softness.

He shook his head very slightly, as if dissatisfied. As if the thought had just occurred to him: Imagine having to sleep in this. Then shrugged in postscript, and from that the corollary thought could be guessed: Well, I'm not going to, so why trouble about it?

From here, again he looked at the window, with deceptive casualness. But his eyes didn't linger on it unduly, didn't stare. Just went to it, and then came back again.

He reached down and unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt sleeves. An ancestral gesture of the race, inherited through untold generations. A freeing of the arms to engage in combat. A freeing of the arms to perform healing or give succor. A freeing of the arms to embrace death.

He put his hand flat to his stomach for a moment, as if to draw in—and hold—all the air it was possible for it to contain. Then, holding himself like that, he rose from the side of the bed and went over to the window. That window that twice before had drawn his eyes.

He opened it, and leaning over its sill acutely, looked down. As if trying to judge its height. It was a terrible height. The lines of downward perspective seemed to rush together into a smallness, a sort of miniature street-plateau, that was a thousand miles away. It didn't instill in him the fear of striking it, it instilled rather the fear of falling forever and never getting to it. Of entering a state of permanent, agonizing downward velocity that would never come to an end.

He didn't recoil or draw back. He simply looked, and when he'd looked his fill, he straightened up, quite matter-of-factly, and closed the window again. The glass seemed to rush down like a curtain, and ward off—not death, not even fear, but some sort of strangeness. Like an extra dimension, that had been lurking about him all the while, but whose existence he had never suspected until just now. Just now, when he had accidentally opened a window onto it. It wasn't anything you inhaled, or felt, or saw. It was just a strangeness, a something else again.

He was behind glass now again. The glass behind which all life is supposed to be lived, to be allowed to run its course, unknowing—he knew now—of the strangeness on the other side. The glass that is not meant to be opened with one's own hands. The glass that, without that, shatters easily enough, soon enough, of its own fragility. Too soon, too easily, too inevitably.

He gave his head a slight shake.

He said something out loud. Snickered something, presumably at his own expense.

" 'Quick-decision Hartley.' They've even taken that away from me."

He went over and got the chair, and drew it across the room after him. He sat down by the window now. Sat facing it, looking out. Not down any more, but straight out, into the horizon. Into the night sky. The stars.

They sparked like little flints continually striking all over the sky.

"I used to know them all when I was a kid," he thought. "The Big Dipper. Orion. What's that one over there?"

He sighed ruefully.

"I know what General Motors was last Tuesday, but I don't know what that star is called up there. Ah, which is what we were meant to know, and which is not?"

Then, another time, he addressed them directly.

"What do you think about it all?"

And gave them the answer.

"Not much, I'll bet."

The night-hours toiled by. Sitting there, not moving, he traveled far. He traveled back along the road that had just now brought him here to where he was. Then turning, came forward along it once more. For every turn he'd once made, he took another. For every choice he once had taken, he took its contrary now. For every face that once had glimmered forth awhile, to fade again as he passed by, he chose some other face that had been there behind it. To let that fade instead as he went by. And yet the road brought him to exactly where it had the time before! To a chair, by a window, looking upward at the stars, on his last night on earth.

"Then if I had to come here anyway," he complained softly, "why did they have to fool me so before I did?"

The night-hours sifted by, like velvety black sand falling through the darkness.

He was out of cigarettes. He looked for a while at the twisted, foil-lined paper pack he had been holding for some time within his hand, like a wrung-out rag, before he got its meaning. He got up and went to the phone.

There was a long wait. The night desk man must have been dozing at his post. Then finally he droned a sleepy acknowledgment.

"Got anyone down there?"

"Y's-s-r-r," the voice said blurredly.

"Send a boy up with a pack of cigarettes. Oh, any kind; what difference does it make?"

The boy was someone else, even a shade younger, if anything, than the one before. He had the cigarettes and he had a newspaper rolled columnwise.

"They let you work the night shift at your age?" Mr. Smith said. "Kind of hard, isn't it?"

"Oh, I'm not young, sir," the boy said stoutly. "I'm nineteen."

"As long as you think you're not, you still are," Mr. Smith reflected aloud. "It's when you start thinking you are, that you're really not any more. I suppose that's how it works."

The boy just blinked, with sturdy incomprehension.

"The morning paper already? I didn't ask for that."

"It's complimentary to all our guests, sir. The six o'clock edition gets up here at around four."

It was now Mr. Smith who blinked with sturdy incomprehension. "That is one of the mysteries," he remarked, "that I still haven't been able to solve, in forty years: the naming and the timing of newspaper editions." He glanced over at the other wall of the room, where the window was. "And I don't think I'll be able to work it out now."

He began to make a neat little hole in one corner of the cigarette package. "About one of these is all I really wanted." He took one out. Then he took another out. That left eighteen in. He looked at it, as if calculating the length of time it would take to finish that many. He looked at the boy.

"Do you smoke when you're on duty?"

"I'm not supposed to, sir."

He understood his tone of voice. "But you sneak one now and then when no one's looking, that it?"

The boy smiled.

"And you'll be going off duty soon anyway. Here, finish these for me." He handed him the package. He put his hand into his pocket, brought out his billfold. "And here —finish this for me."

The boy looked at the ten-dollar bill, stunned. Held it stretched taut between both hands, he was so overawed.

Mr. Smith put his wallet away again, its bill compartment empty. He gave him a word of advice with it. "Don't thank me. Don't value it too highly. Don't try to hang onto it, son. Get something for it. No matter what it is, you get the best of it that way, you come out ahead."

The boy, still holding the bill taut between his two hands, in the very same way, perhaps, that Mr. Smith had only recently held ticker tape bearing market quotations between his own two hands, kept staring at it, then at his benefactor's face, then at it once more. He didn't know which one to look at more consistently, such was his excitement.

"Answer me one question, will you?" Mr. Smith went on. "What do you want most right now? Quick, now. No, don't stop to think; if you do that, then it's not the thing you really want, it's just the thing you think you should want. Come right out with it"—he snapped his fingers— "like that. No matter what it is. Forget I'm here."

The boy crushed his eyelids closed, with a sort of comic intensity, in the endeavor to carry out the injunction, forget that there was someone else standing there. Or the way small children do, when they express a wish out loud, hoping by their very powers of facial concentration to better its chances of mystic fulfillment, speed it on its way.

"There's a girl," he said in a hurried singsong, as if he were reciting a piece from memory, "she works down in the coffee shop. Days. She only comes on when I'm going off. But once a day we say 'hello' when we pass each other. That's all we've ever had a chance to say until now. But she looks back at me when we say it, and I look back at her. I asked somebody what her name is, and I heard she asked somebody what my name is. And I know we'd like each other a lot, if we only had the chance to get together. I'd like to take her out, but I never had enough money all at one time—until now—to have the nerve to ask her—"

The boy felt the weight of Mr. Smith's hand come to rest upon his shoulder. He opened his furrowed eyes.

"Promise me something," Mr. Smith enjoined.

"Yes, sir."

"Promise me that when you're bringing her home, you won't have a solitary nickel left over out of this. Not one red cent."

"Gee," the boy demurred apprehensively, "how can anyone spend that much, just between nine and twelve?"

"You'll know how, once you get started," Mr. Smith promised him. "A young fellow beginning to be in love, he'll find out how, he doesn't have to be told. It doesn't matter how or what you do. If you can't think of anything else, buy her flowers, then make her throw them away, and buy her more flowers over again. Will you give me your word? Not a penny's to be left in your pocket when you're saying good night at her door."

"Yes, sir," the boy said docilely.

Mr. Smith bound him to the pledge by shaking his hand. "They'll tell you it's foolish. I tell you it's smart, it's the smartest thing you could ever do. They can take this away from you, son. This greasy scrap of paper you're holding so tightly in your hand. But after you've had your three hours of fun with her, they can never again take that away from you afterwards. They can't make time go back and rub it out. Well, which is the real value and which is the fake?"

The boy's hand relaxed a little. It still held the ten-dollar bill, but more loosely now, more carelessly. He allowed his arm to drop limply to his side, instead of holding it taut before his face. He was looking only at Mr. Smith's face now, not at the bill itself any more.

"They'll tell you you'll never get anywhere doing that. I'll tell you"—Mr. Smith bent toward his ear and dropped his voice a little, in token of imparting something of the utmost confidence—"you'll never get anywhere anyway. It all comes out the same."

He began to usher him toward the door, arm slung about his shoulder now. "I'll tell you one more thing to say to them," he counseled. "When they warn you, all along the way, and they will, 'You'll never get somewhere,' you ask them this. You ask them: 'Have you seen the 'where' of this 'somewhere' that we're all supposed to get to? Have you been there and found out what it's really worth, what it amounts to?' And when they answer, 'No,' you tell them: 'Well, I spoke to a man one night who had. And he told me not to care if I never got there; that as long as I couldn't turn back altogether, the next best thing was to waste all the time I could getting there, in hopes of missing it entirely. That the only good part of it is along the way, getting there, but once you are there, once you've reached it, it's a great big Nothing, a hole in the world. It's the biggest gyp in all creation.' "

He opened the door and he slipped his hand from the boy's shoulder.

"Will you remember that, now?"

The boy murmured, with a strange, abstracted gravity, looking at him, yet far past him into some still-formless future of his own, as if he could see it beginning to take shape before his mind's eye: "I don't think I'll ever forget it . . . sir."

"Good morning, son," Mr. Smith said unassumingly. "And good luck to you." He closed the door between them.

He noticed that the room lights were on. He turned them out. The night leaped only falteringly into the breach; it was weakening, almost spent. Its full-bodiedness had thinned to only a heavy taupe overcast, and around the window even that mirrored the phantom-like reflection of an unseen oncoming light.

He went back toward the window. He lit the first of his two cigarettes. He sat down again on the straight-backed chair he'd been on before, this time turning it a little so that its back was not to the back of him but to the side of him, resting an arm along the top of that.

He inhaled enjoyably, and paused, and let the smoke find its own way out. Then paused a little longer, and inhaled once more. He was relaxed, comfortable.

He'd never timed the smoking of a cigarette before, never in his entire life; there must have been many that he'd smoked quickly, impatiently; there must have been many that he'd smoked calmly, slowly like this. But he didn't know what the average length of time was, the in-between length of time. Five minutes? Four? He wasn't in a hurry, but he wasn't anxious to unduly prolong it either. After all, he had somewhere to go after he finished with it, and he'd always been punctilious about his engagements.

It was coming down closer to his lips now, and the heat was beginning to be noticeable each time he drew on it.

He opened the window, and he threw it out. "Be right with you," he assured it as it vanished.

The second one he picked up and put into his mouth, but without lighting. "I'll take you with me as you are," he said to it. "Just to have something in my mouth on the way down. There wouldn't be time for a good full-sized puff anyway, so why spoil a good cigarette?"

He stood up, and moved the chair back out of the way. "Well," he said, as if in conclusion, "that's enough waiting. Waiting for nothing."

He turned sideways, slung one entire leg from the hip socket down, up onto the window sill, then supporting himself with his hand to the frame of the pane over his head, wheeled that one leg the rest of the way around, out and across the outward side of the ledge. Since this was not spacious enough to support the leg all the way out to its final extremity, the leg doubled at the knee and the lower part hung downward into space, naturally and without strain. He brought the second one up from floor to sill, and then from sill out and over, to hang beside the first.

"How awkward and cumbersome it is to enter into death," he mused, "when you're trying to enter it before you've been summoned. You have to peel open your wrists, or you have to lash your neck to a rafter, or you have to topple like a clod down onto a stone-surfaced street. Natural death, on the other hand, how graceful, how effortless, how modestly disclaiming it is. The eyes drop closed, the lips part, perhaps the head lapses over to one side, and that's all. Showing which was meant for us, and which wasn't."

Sitting erect from the waist up, he could see out to a great distance, but not directly downward under him. Once more supporting himself with hand to frame of pane, this time on the reverse side of it, he leaned downward over his own lap, and thus was able to see the street-pit that was immediately below.

His first impression was: it wasn't very frightening. His second: it wasn't very interesting. It was completely commonplace. Even the highly dramatic act of dropping down bodily on it from suicidal height wouldn't be able to make it any less commonplace, he realized unerringly. It was just for walking on, for ignoring as your feet traversed it, and you couldn't do anything more than that about it. It was a very dingy pewter-gray, and it was completely empty; not a thing on it was moving, human, animal or mechanical.

He straightened again, and looked out, at the surface-plane of the city and at the sky doming it, as being far more rewarding. Particularly for a last look.

It was almost the exact chronometric and chromatic moment of dawn. The sky to the east was an immaculate blue, clean as newly rinsed glass. A small cloud that had lingered too long in that vicinity had inadvertently become dyed apricot. There were already pulsings of light, like ripples over a transparency, colorless but eye-catching, marking the place where the sun's flame was nearing the top.

"I'll wait for the sun," he thought. "It'll only take about a minute more now for it."

He'd seen it before. Just now, under what circumstances, he couldn't exactly recall. Perhaps once or twice after some prolonged social function or restaurant fête. But better than that, further back, in boyhood, from the window of his bedroom. It had never, of course, had the implications it had now.

The moment of birth. The life-giving moment. The birth of the entire world, all at one time, and no matter how often repeated before, always new, always the first time all over again.

"Tomorrow again," he thought wistfully. "And tomorrow again. For all eternity. So much hope. Why can't I have a little of it?"

It blazed out now, in a glory that was intolerable. So bright that it seemed silvery, rather than the golden that second-hand report attributed to it (and few had ever looked at it as intently as he was looking now).

And brighter even than its focus were its rays, striking out like shafts of diamonds into every corner of the place below. Pouring light, pouring warmth, pouring hope, over everything. Everything but him.

It was like the eye of God, and it was disrespectful to stare back so steadily at it, and he had never been a man disrespectful of his God.

He dropped his eyes, and reverently lowered his head a trifle.

It was as though the rays, the beams, were wired for sound, and as they became hooked up with his heart and with his brain, they bore a voice-vibration along their glittering filaments.

"Don't you believe in God?"

"I always have, from a respectful distance," he said humbly.

"Why a distance?"

"Who am I to try to come too close to Him?"

"Then if you do believe, why are you doing this, with that life of His?"

His head dropped lower still. "I thought it was my own."

"Could you make yourself talk—alone, by yourself?"

"No, sir," he said inaudibly.

"Lift the little finger of your hand. Either one, it doesn't matter. Just twiddle it, stick it up and put it down again. Could you even do that much—alone, on your own?"

"No, sir," he murmured. "Sorry."

"All right, leave His life alone, leave your hands off it. If He was ready to take it back, you wouldn't have to go through all that rigmarole. A heart attack would drop you right where you stood. Or a stroke. A thousand doctors could stand around you and they wouldn't be able to save you from choking on a fishbone. In somebody else's throat, at that. How do you feel bodily, right now?"

"The same as always. No different."

"Then there are your orders, right there. See that you carry them out."

"Yes, sir," he said submissively. "Only—it's a little tough to go on."

"How can you tell what tough is, if you haven't known what soft is first? How can you know what light is, if you've never known what dark is? How can you know what ease is, if you've never known what pain is? How can you know what safety is, if you've never known what fear is? Everything in life comes by twos. You must know them both, the two of everything. You can't know one of anything without the other.

"These scales are never tampered with, be confident of that. You receive an equal measure of each. If you are afflicted today, then you will be blessed tomorrow. If you are blessed today, then surely you will be afflicted tomorrow.

"What're you trying to do, lead half a life?"

He folded his hands tractably in his lap. "No, sir. I thought I was getting it all. The works."

"Aren't you a man? Or have you been catalogued wrong? Are you a small child, entitled to be gone easy on? A flinching, soft-skinned woman, not built to take the full treatment?"

"A man," he answered simply. "And I've always been very appreciative for that. That was one favor, right from the beginning."

"Exactly. Then would a man want to spend his whole life through lying on a mattress of rose petals, fanned by ostrich plumes?"

"That would be very boring," he admitted dutifully. "I think that would drive me to—this even quicker than the other. I couldn't take more than forty-eight hours of it."

"You have all the right answers. Only, your actions don't live up to them. Isn't it the part of a man to go through life head up, not ducking, taking knocks and giving them back? Even when he's stretched out flat, all he's got to do is pick himself up again. And stretch the other fellow out flat in turn. What's so hard about that? Isn't that what he's got knuckles for, and biceps for, and a cushion at the small of his back? And don't they sell witch hazel for cuts over the eye in any drugstore? And when the cut is in your heart, there's a witch hazel for that too, if you look around you in the right places.

"Even when it gets so tough you think you can't stand it any more, remember you can always say, 'This is living!' And when it's all over, you can always say, 'I've lived!' And that's the reward, right there.

"Now get back in, before you get punished for fooling around, by being made to live thirty years more with your back broken in two places and unable to move even your little finger."

Alacrity is the only word for the way in which he scrambled in off there. And even diligently lowered the pane after him. Like a well-chastised schoolboy.

He took a minute or two to spruce himself up; regulated the knot of his necktie, smoothed back the hair at the sides of his head with his palms, put on his jacket, dusted off his hat by knocking it against his leg, then reshaped it and put it on.

Then he picked up the newspaper the boy had brought in to him before, folded it back to the Help Wanted— Male columns, took pencil in hand, and stood scanning them conscientiously.

"Dishwasher—no experience—

Draftsman—small salary to start—

Dyer—fine opportunity—

Electrician—industrial wiring—report with tools—

Furniture finisher—must be expert—"

He put the pencil away again without marking anything after all, tucked the newspaper under his arm folded over the way it was.

"What's the difference what it is," he said. "It'll be living! I'll do anything at all. I'll empty ashes, dig sewers, I'll mop the floor in a public men's room. I'll even work for nothing, just for my keep, I'll be so glad to be alive at all!"

He went over to the door and threw it open.

"This isn't the end. This is the beginning. There was a slight detour. A fifty-year detour. Now life begins.

"Some room!" he marveled, looking around at it with what almost amounted to admiring disbelief. "I only paid two dollars and a half for it, and I almost have a feeling I talked to God in here just now." Which places money at its true value in the scale of things.

He closed the door and he went downstairs.

The night-shift bellboy, the same one who had come up to his room before, was mopping the lobby floor. Mr. Smith went over to him, nudged him fraternally in the ribs with his elbow, and keeping his voice down so the desk man wouldn't be aware of what was going on, murmured confidently, "Give me back two of those cigarettes in the pack, will you? I'm going to have a little more time than I thought."

The desk clerk looked up just then, caught sight of him.

"Checking out, Mr. Smith?"

"No," grinned Mr. Smith, "only just checking in."

6. The Night of . . .

THEY CAME IN past mid-evening, in the ten-to-eleven hour. The day was a Saturday, and they were both of an age that supposedly prizes Saturdays, and especially Saturday nights, but they weren't dressed for an evening's outing or for entertainment-seeking. They both looked worn and bedraggled, as if they had neither slept nor changed their clothes in far too many hours than was good for them, and the small scuffed satchels they each carried pointed this up.

They had only one thing in common, really: their youngness. That and one other, they were both proportionately tall; he for a boy, she for a girl. But outside of that, in every physical aspect, they were diametrical opposites. She was fair-haired, as blond as corn syrup. He was dark-haired, hair black as brush-strokes of India ink traced on his scalp. Her skin was white, so very white it had to defend itself with little streaks of freckles, like pollen, just over each cheekbone and close in alongside her nose. His was copper-tan. This ruddiness, rather than sallowness, in conjunction with the tar-black hair, pronounced cheekbones, and a slightly hooked nose, kept him from looking like a so-called "Latin," suggested rather the popular conception of an American Indian.

There was every indication about her that, at times when she was not so cruelly drawn and spent as she was now, she was a porcelain-pretty girl. And that he, when less wearied and heavy-eyed, was a strikingly handsome boy.

She wore a little skimpy box-coat, without a collar, terra-cotta-colored, flimsy, squared-off at the shoulders as though she had epaulettes concealed under there, as the now-fading fashion had been not too very long ago. He wore an olive topcoat, equally flimsy, so papery in fact that it indented and shadowed with every move of his body underneath it. Neither one's head was covered.

In addition to everything else, they both looked chilled to the bone.

The two of them breasted the desk like a pair of long-distance swimmers whose strength has petered out. He took her little satchel from her and put it down to rest along with his own. Then she turned inward toward him, and put her face disconsolately against his shoulder. He circled her waist with his arm.

"Oh, that bus trip," she sighed. "It feels like we were on it for years."

"Rugged, wasn't it," he agreed sympathetically.

The desk man approached and said, "Help you?"

"Like a room, please," the boy said.

She raised her head now and looked around, and even managed a small smile, as the movement attracted him and he quickly glanced at her. It was very small and tired, the smile, but it was one of perfect contentment.

"Any preferences?" the desk man asked.

"No, just a room," the boy said. "Any room."

He took out some money and paid for it, and signed the register, and while he was signing, the desk man went and got his change and brought it back to him. Then they followed the bellboy into the elevator and upstairs.

When he'd shown them into the room and left them in it, they just stood there close together, and again she rested her face against his shoulder, in utter exhaustion. Utter but happy exhaustion.

"You're dead," he said, and gently nudged at the top of her head with his chin.

"Ken, are we really there?" she asked muffledly. "Did we get there at last? Is this really it?"

"New York," he said. "End of the line. No more running away."

She gave a tremendous sigh, but it was a sigh of accomplishment, completion, not of despair.

Then they just stood there like that for a very long time, out in mid-center of the room, clinging together entwined, content. Content not to move, not to talk, not to be two separate things, just one. Blond-haired girl, dark-haired boy, dream of love.

"Let me help you off with your things," he offered finally.

"I'm all right. I'm fine now." She took off the papery terra-cotta coat, spread it neatly around a hanger, hooked it up inside the closet.

"Feel like something to eat? Do you want me to go down and hustle up a couple of sandwiches?"

"No, what we had at the bus terminal will hold me until the morning."

He'd hung up his own topcoat now. Then he turned around and she heard him say, "Oh-oh. Something'll have to be done about that."

She looked over. There was just one large double bed in the room.

He gave her a comically pained look, as though this was something they'd been through before, and went over to the phone.

"I don't mind asking them to change it," he confided to her while he was waiting. "It's these long-winded explanations I have to go into each time that get me down."

Somebody had answered.

"I'm up in 923," he said. "My wife and I just checked in. Look, there's just one large bed in here. I hate to trouble you, but could I have a single cot put in, for myself? . . . What for? Why, for sleeping on, of course."

He rolled his eyes for her benefit. She gave him an elfin smile back.

"Certainly we're man and wife," he retorted. "What's that got to do with it? I just want an extra cot put in here."

This time he tugged at the knot of his necktie, spreading it wider open. "As far as I know, the bed may be very comfortable. I didn't say it wasn't. I haven't been on it, so how can I tell? It's just that I want a cot for myself. Is that so very hard to figure out? . . . Because I'm a very restless sleeper, that's why. I want her to get some rest, and if I'm beside her she won't be able to close her eyes all night. Satisfactory? Okay."

He hung up. "I tell you," he said, and blew out his breath, but good-naturedly. She joined him in laughing about it.

"I was afraid if I said I snored he'd come back at me like that guy did in Omaha the other night, and say, 'Well, you'll still be in the same room with her, even on a cot. How will that help?' Remember?

"It's a funny thing, isn't it?" he went on. "If we really were trying to get away with something; you know, check in together for the usual thing, they wouldn't ask us half as many questions. But that cot sure throws them, they can't make it out."

He sat down on the edge of the bed while he was waiting for them to bring the cot. She went over beside him and put her hand gently on his shoulder. "Ken," she said very softly, quietly. "It's up to you. There doesn't have to be any cot—if you don't want one. It's all right with me."

He caught up her hand and kissed it. "We talked this over in Fresno, remember, the night before we came away, before we'd even moved a step out of our home town. It's not that it's anything to be so ashamed of, I admit. We're going to be man and wife anyway. But— well, look, it's just a matter of maybe two days more, three at the most. And when we look back afterwards, and we will look back, wouldn't you rather have the record clean, no marks against it? So that we can hold our heads up and say, 'We did it the right way, in spite of all of them.' We waited this long, all this time we've known each other—when we had every excuse not to, both our families against us, and all that. What's two days, when we have all our lives ahead of us to belong to each other?"

She kissed the top of his head fervently. "That's why I love you, Ken," she said chokingly. "One of the many whys. So clean, so decent, so manly—"

"So doggone tired," he supplied with a grin, to lighten the little passage between them.

There was a knock, and a porter brought in a folding cot.

"Right there," Ken directed. "Even with the bed, but not right up against it."

The porter slung a mattress onto it, and placed a pile of folded bedding on a chair. "The night maid's gone off," he said.

"It's all right," the girl said. "I'll make up the cot for my husband." They exchanged a private little smile at the word.

Ken gave him something, and he thanked them and closed the door.

Later they sat there undressing, back to back, he on the edge of the cot, she on the edge of the bed. They were no longer self-conscious about undressing in the same room, they'd been doing it all the way across America; now they even left the light on.

She thought about the two of them, now that they were here at last. Went back to the very beginning, the very first day they'd met. Who would have ever believed, that day, she would find herself here in New York with him like this, tonight?

It started in such a small way, it was nothing at all. Just a dark-haired boy slipping quietly into a seat all the way across the classroom from her, the first day of her sophomore year. She didn't look at him twice.

And then for almost that whole first year, it was just "Hi!" and "Hello!" when they'd pass each other in the halls. Until that day when her books dropped all over the floor.

That blessed, beautiful, threadbare strap! She still had it at home in her bureau drawer, to this very day. Her notes and her notebooks had scattered all over the place, as though a snowstorm had hit them, and nobody around but him to give her a hand.

And then he walked her to her house, because she couldn't hold onto everything by herself without a strap any more. And then he walked her back the next day, and the next. And that was the start of it all.

She met others, plenty of others, at the school dances and around, but they couldn't stack up to him. She'd go out with each of them once or twice, but she always kept coming back to Ken again. She had to. He already had everything she knew she'd want in a man for later on. She could see it all there ahead of time. Gentle, and kind, and considerate—and yet not weak. Strong and firm, honest and clean-thinking. A real man. What they mean when they say the word "man." That bit with the cot that they'd laughed over so all the way across-country— it was all right to laugh, but who else would have been so fair-minded, so considerate about it? Who but Ken?

She said to herself, I love him so, my Ken. I'd die without him.

It was a funny thing about families, she thought with a sort of resignation. They forgot that maybe that was the way it had been with them once too. They forgot that they were young once themselves, and that love was just about all that counted then. The love of a fellow for his girl. The love of a girl for her fellow.

He'd told her how they had held a family conference about it at his house, and he was brought to the bar, so to speak. In his house his father was the Voice of Authority, just as it had always been in the old country. Ken's mother was present but she didn't say anything, she wasn't supposed to, just took it all in with her head bowed attentively.

His father had kept him standing there in the middle of the room. He started in very quietly and obliquely, he had that way about him, Ken told her.

"Who is the American girl you are constantly with?" Evidently it had been reported back to him, by one of the relatives or somebody.

"She's a schoolmate of mine, Pop," Ken had said to him. "Her name is—"

Ken's father had held up his hand. "I do not want to know. I cannot say American names, anyway."

"Well, you better learn to say this one, Pop," Ken had told him cheerfully. "She's the girl I'm going to marry."

His father drew in his breath, but he still talked very quietly. When you're the boss, and your word is law, you don't need to raise your voice in your own house. "When the time comes for you to have a bride, your family will make the arrangement for you. Your family and the family of the proposed bride. That is the way it has always been among us."

"But, Pop!" Ken had argued. "This isn't the old country, this is America. Besides, I love her, don't you understand?"

He had looked at Ken as though he actually didn't understand. Genuinely, didn't. "What is love?" he asked. "What has love got to do with marriage? Did I love, as you put it, the bride that was chosen for me? Did my father before me?"

"But I'm an American," Ken had insisted. "It's different here. Here there isn't any marriage without love, there's no such thing. That's their way, and that's my way. I'm one of them, I was born here."

Ken saw that he wouldn't give in, he himself couldn't do anything else but stand his ground. "She's the girl I'm going to marry, Pop," he had told his father as quietly and respectfully as he could. "No one but her."

His father didn't say anything for a long time. And then he still spoke quietly. As quietly as a judge passing a mandatory sentence. "Then I have no son. Let this house know you no more."

Ken's mother covered her eyes with her hands and bent her forehead way down low, but she still didn't say a word.

Ken just ducked his head in acceptance, and turned and walked out of the house. When he looked back from the corner, he told her, his father was even having some kind of a symbolic religious rite performed. He had Ken's mother out in the doorway, sweeping off the doorstep with a broom. "I suppose to remove all traces of me forever more," he said.

Ken had told her they could never go back. "He's inflexible. It's not only himself, but he has all these hundreds and hundreds of years of tradition behind him. It's too strong for him. It's got a grip like iron. It's impossible for him to break it. He couldn't even if he wanted to."

That had been days ago. Now Ken was saying, "Ready?" He put the light out.

They each clambered into their respective sleeping places. Their hands gropingly reached out to search for one another in the dark, met, and clasped. They both lay there awake in the darkness for a while, hands joined.

She resumed her lonely little reminiscing.

Over at her house it had been pretty much the same thing. Maybe not quite as dramatic. They didn't order her out of the house, but they ordered her to stop seeing Ken. And, of course, she told them she wouldn't do that. So then they tried to keep her from going out altogether. Twice, when she had a date with Ken, her father stopped her just as she was leaving, and forcibly turned her back. She wouldn't lie and say she was meeting someone else, which was all she had to do to make him let her go; she had too much regard for her own feelings toward Ken to be able to do that. Peculiar, upside-down sense of values they showed: for being open and above board, which most parents would want their daughter to be, she was kept in. If she'd stooped to lie about it, which nine girls out of ten would have done, she could have gone scotfree.

They were the ones who had turned it into a clandestine affair, not she and Ken. Secret meetings in dark places, when all he wanted to do was ring her doorbell, with flowers in his hand.

So that had brought on that thing with the pills.

The doctor had given them to her mother. "Take no more than one in each twenty-four hours," he said.

If she had been satisfied to take just half of them, they might have worked, and she wouldn't be here beside him tonight. But she had wanted to make sure, it hadn't been just an act with her, so she had swallowed the whole bottle. Bing! right back up again they came. Then she was kept under house-arrest for the next couple of weeks. But when she finally did get out, she had her mind made up, and she just kept walking and never went back again.

She would never need to do anything like that, with the pills, again, she thought confidently. Now they were together. Now there was no reason. Only if he were taken away from her, only if she were to lose him. Then, as sure as God, nothing would keep her from them. Because without him, she didn't want to live, she wouldn't, she couldn't. That was how deep it went with her.

He pressed her hand, and she could feel his cheek against it for a moment.

"Until tomorrow, sweetheart."

"Tomorrow, love," she murmured drowsily. "Beautiful golden tomorrow. The tomorrow of our dreams."

He fell asleep before she did; she could tell by the way his hand relaxed about hers, yet without letting go of it entirely. She stayed awake a moment or two longer, doing what she did every night: practicing saying her new name, her name that was to be, until she could be sure she had it down letter-perfect. "Mrs. Ken— No, wait a minute, start over. Mrs. Ken— That's it, now you've got it. Mrs. Kensuke Murakami."

Her eyes dropped blissfully closed, and she joined him in slumber, hand still linked to hand between the beds.

The Night of December 6th, 1941

7. The Night of September 30th, 1957

SHE ARRIVED AT about nine, that last night. That last night of the hotel. She came alone in a taxi. It had to take its place in what almost amounted to a conveyor-belt of taxis, each stopping in turn at the entrance, then drawing away again. There was this difference: hers was bringing its fare to the hotel, the rest were all taking theirs from it.

She was very frail and very old, and looked very small the way she sat there in the exact center of the broad rear seat. Her face looked unlined and peaceful, as though care had passed over it lightly.

The driver stopped at the entrance, his car grazing the one ahead as it drew away, the one just in back grazing his as it closed in to wait its turn.

She leaned forward a trifle and asked, "Is it that now?"

He looked at his watch and said, "Yes, ma'am, exactly that."

She nodded, gratified. "I wanted it to be that exactly."

"It's a hard thing to do," he said. "Let you out somewhere at an exact certain minute. I had to take you around the block three times. That made the meter climb up."

"I don't mind," she reassured him quickly. "I don't care." She paid him, and then when he turned in the seat to try and pass the change back to her, she put the flat of her hand up against it. "No, I don't want anything back," she said.

"But that was a five," he said.

"I know it was," she said imperturbably. "My sight is good." Then she added, as though that explained her generosity, "I don't ride in taxis very often."

He got out and opened the rear door for her and helped her down. She looked smaller than ever standing beside him there on the sidewalk and with two tremendous walls of baggage towering on both sides of her. He got her bag out. She only had one, a very small one, lightweight and old-fashioned. It too looked small, just as she did.

"The place is coming down, you know," he told her.

"I know it is," she said. "I can read the papers." But it wasn't said with asperity.

"They're putting up a twenty-six-story office building on the site."

"Twenty-eight," she corrected him. Then she gave a contemptuous sniff, presumably intended for office buildings in general and not just the difference of two floors.

She left him and went inside, carrying the bag herself. She stopped at the desk. "I have a reservation for Room 923," she said. "I engaged it several weeks ago."

He scanned some sort of a chart he had tacked up there off to one side. "I believe that floor's already been closed off," he said. "Won't one of the lower floors do?"

She was firm. "No. I specified that room, and my reservation was accepted. I had it confirmed. I won't take any other."

He went off and spoke to somebody about it. Then he came back and said, "You can have that room." He presented the register to her for her signature. It was open very far to the back, at the last few of its pages. She fingered the thick bulk of its preceding ones.

"How far back does this go?" she asked him.

He had to look at the opening page to find out. "Nineteen forty."

"And what happened to the old ones? There must have been others before this. What happened to the very first one of all?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," he admitted. "Probably done away with long ago. Thrown out."

"Thrown out!" she said with severity. "Things like that shouldn't be thrown out." She shook her head with disapproval. "Very well, I'll sign," she said. She wrote "Mrs. John Compton" in a wavering spidery hand, almost ghostly compared to some of the firm, fullbodied signatures that had gone before it.

He had to keep palming the bell repeatedly before he could attract any attention. The staff had already been skeletonized. Finally a harried bellboy appeared, picked up her bag, and mechanically started toward the street entrance with it. A sharp clang of the bell brought him around in his tracks.

"Show this lady to 923."

The bellboy showed undisguised astonishment for a minute. "You mean the lady's coming in? Now?"

"The lady's checking in, not out."

The elevator was empty on the up-trip, they and the operator were the only ones in it, though a moment before it had brought down fully twenty people.

He took her to the door of the room, opened it for her, put on the light.

She looked around, first from the threshold, then timorously step by step as she advanced further into it. "They changed it," she said ruefully.

"No, ma'am," he said. "It hasn't been changed in years. It's been like it is now ever since I can remember it."

She smiled knowingly, as if to herself, but didn't contradict him any further. "He said this floor was already shut off. Now see that I have everything."

"Oh, you'll be taken care of, ma'am," he assured her earnestly. "I'll send the maid from one of the lower floors right up to you. And don't be nervous, ma'am. You'll be safe. The building is still fully protected."

"It never even occurred to me," she said almost indifferently.

When he'd gone, the chair seemed to cause her some dissatisfaction. She kept giving it small nudges, until the sum total of them had altered its position very considerably, particularly as to the direction in which it faced.

"This was where it was," she declared contentedly when she'd done. She even gave it a pat of commendation, as if to show how much better pleased with it she now was.

A maid tapped and came into the room. She was elderly, but still held herself straight. Her hair had grayed only to an intermediate salt-and-pepper, and then refused to whiten any further. Her figure was spare, in spite of her age. Or possibly because of it. Her eyes were sprightly, and the blue was very little dulled, behind the old-fashioned metal-rimmed spectacles she wore. Only her fingers, over-large at the joints, spindly between, betrayed the lifetime of hard work.

"Good evening," she said.

"Good evening," the other old woman replied.

Then she looked at her and asked, "What's your name?"

"Ann," the maid said. "Spelt the short way, without the 'e.' "

"Well, it's just as good that way as the other way," the old lady told her.

"I've stayed with it this long, what would be the sense of changing it now?" the maid agreed.

They smiled at each other, the way two affable strangers do, who know they have never met before, and presume they will never meet again, but for the moment take a polite interest in their mutual conversation.

"Ann," the old lady said. "Could I ask you to do something for me?"

"Sure, if I can."

"This dresser. I don't want it over there. I want it over here. This wall." She went over and showed her.

"Well, it's just for one night—" the maid said doubtfully.

"Doesn't matter," the old lady declared flatly. "Here's where it belongs. Not there. I can't do it by myself, or I would."

"I'll do it for you," the maid relented good-naturedly. "All right, I'll do it." She trundled it about and over without too much difficulty. "That right?" she asked.

"There. Now. That's more like it." Again the old lady gave it a pat, as she had the chair before, as though its misplacement had been due to willfulness on its own part that it now repented of. "Now'd you bring me everything I need?" she asked.

"Everything. Towels, soap. I even brought you an extra blanket, although I don't suppose at this time of year—"

"At my age," said the old lady almost vaingloriously, "you feel chilly at any time of the year."

"That's right too," said the maid reflectively. "I've noticed that myself for some time now." She backed toward the door. "I'll look in on you in the morning, just before we're all dismissed for the last time. The few of us there's left."

The old lady eyed her piercingly, "You're not crying, are you?"

The maid gave a shamefaced little smile. "Well, after all, it's like losing an old friend. So many years of my life—"

"You mustn't cry in here," the old lady reprimanded her quite severely. "This is a room of happiness. No tears in here." And she even shook her finger at her to add emphasis.

"I won't," the maid promised. "Good night. Sleep well."

"I intend to. I know that I will," declared the old lady staunchly. "I'm sure of it."

And as she closed the door and turned away from it, she repeated what she had just said. "This is a room of happiness. This is a room of reunion."

She began to unpack her bag now. From it she took a wafer-flat oblong white cardboard box, fastened with white paper tape.

"He didn't even want to put it in a box for me. I told him it was for a gift," she complained aloud, as if at the memory of some recent disputation. "Nowadays everything's too much for them."

She removed the bow-tied tape and the lid, peeled open the two interlocking leaves of crisp tissue paper, and took out a necktie, bright and new. She went to the dresser-top with it and laid it down there, painstakingly choosing a certain exact spot to place it in, measuring it off almost, moving it a little, smoothing it a little, until she had attained the desired accuracy of position.

"Johnny, this is for you. For you to wear tomorrow. They lost your other one, that night. And I don't want my Johnny to be without a necktie."

Then she lowered her face, touched her lips to it, and said with old-fashioned formality, "Wear it in good health, dear."

She returned to the bag, and as she took from it still something else, turned her head once more toward the dresser, as if addressing an after-remark to someone standing there unseen. "Luckily I didn't have to buy you one of these. I don't know much about picking them out." She opened a packet of yellowed tissue and from it took a wallet, worn with much handling and giving at the seams. "I've kept it for you all these years. Just the way it was. Thirty-nine dollars and eighty-five cents. Perhaps the money will come in handy to you. You might want us to go sightseeing tomorrow, on our first day together."

She placed it close to the tie, in just a certain place upon the dresser, and adjusted it too as she had the tie, as if fitting it to some invisible guide lines.

Returning to the opened bag a third and final time, she took out a neatly folded nightgown, and holding it up at shoulder-height, allowed it to fall open of its own weight. It was old-fashioned yet not old-fashioned, for fashion had come full circle again and its voluminous width and full-length sleeves were newer than the scantiness of intervening decades. It was old rather than old-fashioned, of finest batiste, with eyelet embroidery and a bertha, all handwork, the way a bridal gown should be, but citron-color with long existence. And the ghosts of hundreds of successive little bags of sachet still clung to it, even though they were gone now.

She disrobed now and put it on. It took on bluish hollows where it fell away from her body, yellow opacity where it clung close. It detracted from her age. She did not look like a young girl in it. Not even like a young woman. She looked like a wizened child, parading around in one of its elder's garments.

She loosened and brushed her hair now, with a brush that came from the bag. And that done, she went to the light switch and darkened the room. Then she went to the bed and got into it, but not with a complete absence of any effort. Lying there, she stirred awhile until she had attained the desired comfort, and then lay there awhile longer after that, in repose, murmuring to herself. Aloud but softly. Just over her breath, as when one says a prayer.

"Good night, my Johnny. Good night, my love. We'll see each other tomorrow. And tomorrow will come. Oh, I know it will. I've never doubted that it will for a single moment.

"And thank you for so many things. So many, many things. As I've thanked you for them so many times before. Thank you for a perfect marriage. The most perfect a marriage could be. Never an angry word, never a sullen silence; never a quarrel, never a jealous stab, never a drunken stumble. Never the fright of illness, nor the ignominy of nursing and watching some of its more ignoble symptoms. Never the strife of lack of earning power, nor the bitter recriminations of failure and mistake and final ill-fortune. And above all, for not slowly aging before my eyes, as I would have slowly aged before yours, until finally neither of us was what the other had married, but somebody else entirely. Some unknown old man. Some unknown old woman. Thank you for staying young. And for letting me stay young along with you. A lifetime of youth. Eternal spring. Thank you for always being the bridegroom of our first night, romance blazing in your eyes. Thank you for all this. For all this, thank you forevermore. Good night, my beloved, my only, only love, my lifetime's love. Good night—the word I like to call you best of all: my husband. Your wife is wishing you good night."

In the morning, after her first discovery, the maid came back in a few minutes bringing the manager with her this time. They both looked at her, first, from where they stood. Then the manager went over closer to her and gently touched her forehead.

He turned around and said, "She's gone."

"I knew she was," the maid whispered. "I could tell even from the doorway."

He came back to where the maid was standing, and they both continued to look at her from there, the serene figure in the bed.

"That smile," he said under his breath. "Did you ever see anyone look so perfectly at rest, with such a peaceful, contented smile on their face?"

"She looks so happy," the maid concurred. "More like a—like a new bride than an old lady whose time has come to die."

"I guess she was one once," he mused. "Just like this room was brand-new once. And then they both got older —the two of them—slowly, slowly, over the years. A little bit at a time, and then they got—like they both are now. Done with. People are a lot like hotel rooms, when you come to think of it."

"And hotel rooms," amended the maid, "are a lot like people."

ENDNOTES

4. The Night of February 17, 1924

*N.B.—For a short period during the highly stylized twenties, a fact which is not generally recalled, women wore skirts almost to the insteps. This was a brief intermission, a sort of breathing spell, between the first onset of knee-length dresses, which had occurred in 1920, and the final capitulation to them, which rode the rest of the decade out. It coincided, roughly, with the years 1923–24.

CORNELL WOOLRICH

George Hopley-Woolrich (4 December 1903 – 25 September 1968) is one of America’s best crime and noir writers who sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. He’s often compared to other celebrated crime writers of his day, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler.

Born in New York City, his parents separated when he was young and he lived in Mexico for nearly a decade with his father before returning to New York City to live with his mother, Claire Attalie Woolrich.

He attended New York’s Columbia University but left school in 1926 without graduating when his first novel, “Cover Charge”, was published. “Cover Charge” was one of six of his novels that he credits as inspired by the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Woolrich soon turned to pulp and detective fiction, often published under his pseudonyms. His best known story today is his 1942 “It Had to be Murder” for the simple reason that it was adapted into the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie “Rear Window” starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly. It was remade as a television film by Christopher Reeve in 1998.

Woolrich was a homosexual but in 1930, while working as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, he married Violet Virginia Blackton (1910-65), daughter of silent film producer J. Stuart Blackton. They separated after three months and the marriage was annulled in 1933.

Woolrich returned to new York where he and his mother moved into the Hotel Marseilles (Broadway and West 102nd Street). He lived there until her death on October 6, 1957, which prompted his move to the Hotel Franconia (20 West 72nd Street). In later years he socialized on occasion in Manhattan but alcoholism and an amputated leg, caused by an infection from wearing a shoe too tight which he left untreated, turned him into a recluse. Thus, he did not attend the New York premiere of Truffaut’s film based on his novel “The Bride Wore Black” in 1968 and, shortly thereafter, died weighing only 89 pounds. He is interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.

Woolrich bequeathed his estate to Columbia University to endow scholarships in his mother’s memory for journalism students.

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