And down below, up flush against the lower, wood-opaque section of the door, in tortured crouch, Marshall’s back, and the back of his head, and the backs of his legs, one tightly compressed in folded support, the other spread out along the floor behind him in sort of dragging position. And the upturned soles of both his feet. And the backs of both his hands, opposite one another, one pressed flat against the door panel itself, the other flat against the door-frame, as though desperately trying to hold the two things closed. His immured face was where the keyhole was; that must have been directly before one eye.
And again, complete immobility. On both sides of the door alike.
Then suddenly the doorbell battery buzzed out angrily, like a split-open hive of hornets, stinging the stillness to death for a few moments. Then stopped again, wearied, as though it had done this many times before.
And again, complete immobility. The darkling puddle on the glass. The sprawled, half-prone figure crushed against the door.
Then, like dingy water running down off a surface too smooth to hold it, the glooming stain altered contour, swirled, evaporated and was gone. The glass became all an even twilight gray, a little lighter than it had been. A step sounded in withdrawal, giving strain to wood.
Then a tin slab chocked closed, out at a distance.
Then a car engine tried to revolve, and failed, and died again momentarily. Then tried once more, and this time exploded into successful operation, and pounded shatteringly away into the distance.
The inert figure slowly moved, a section at a time. First the leg that had been laid out far behind it drew in, to give it leverage. Then one of the supplicating palms crept up higher on the door. Then the other followed, over on its own side. Then the whole figure rose to its feet.
Then he turned, and staying sodden there in the crevice into which he had wedged himself, took out a handkerchief and calmed the saturation from his face.
When she returned some time later, paper bags crackling all about her, he was still standing there, like that, limply putting a handkerchief away into his back pocket.
Something snapped, and she’d suddenly drenched the two of them with an unbearably vivid silver-gilt glare, so that his eyes winced in repulsion for a moment. She only saw him then.
“Press!” she said. “Are you ill? You look so white. Why were you standing in the dark like that?”
“I had a headache,” he said. “I wanted to rest my eyes for a minute or two. I’m all right now.”
“Has anything happened here? You were standing there so strangely, when the lights first went on just now.”
“Nothing’s happened here,” he assured her, with a fervent gratitude for being able to say so that she could not have guessed. “Nothing. I was on my way to put on the lights myself, just as you came in, and for a minute I couldn’t find the switch in the gloom, that’s why I was standing there flat up against the wall like that.”
“I noticed the oddest thing, outside just now, as I was getting out my key,” she related, as though in the belief she had changed the subject. “Someone made a chalk mark on the stonework facing our door. A sort of round thing, like a bulls-eye, I don’t know what you’d call it. I’ll have to go out there and take a damp cloth to it afterwards, see if I can get it off. Some mischievous little boy or other, I suppose.”
Some mischievous little boy or other, he mused, with a quiet sardonic sort of horror.
4
The telephone rang two nights later. He got up as a matter of course and went to it to answer it. That was his privilege, his prerogative, as the man of the house, to answer the phone if it rang when he happened to be there; rather than hers. It was a mechanical instrument, it was an electrical thing, it was a thing of wires, it still fell more within the masculine domain than the feminine.
He took it up and he said, “Hello?”
There was no sound from it.
He said “Hello?” again.
There was still no sound.
He said “Hello! Hello! Hello!” his voice quickening in impatience.
No sound, no sound at all.
Irritated, he tapped the suspension hook repeatedly. “Hello!” he insisted. “Who is it? Who’s there?”
Then he listened intently.
Faintly, as if in far-off echo of the brusque clicks he had just perpetrated himself, there was a single, muffled, ghostly one somewhere at the other end of the line. He could barely catch it, but he did catch it, hard as it tried to dissemble itself.
He was gripping the instrument tautly now, staring at it frightenedly. Someone had been on there.
Suddenly he began manipulating the hook more feverishly than ever. “Central” got on.
“Central,” he said. “Was that a mistake? You just called me here. Was that a mistake?”
“No, sir,” Central answered soothingly. “A party asked for your number. I connected them with it just now. Didn’t you receive the call?”
He didn’t answer that. “Was it a — a man or a woman?”
“It was a man’s voice, sir,” Central told him.
He knew then. Knew as he quietly hung up. Knew all there was to know about this mystifying little occurrence. Knew what it was, and why it was, and who it was.
That was he.
He wanted to find out if I was here, first of all.
And now he has.
And now that he has, he’s coming over.
I have to get her out of here. I have to get her out of here first. He didn’t say to himself what was to follow that first. He didn’t have to.
Suddenly he’d gone to the closet, come away again. He was holding four things, all on one arm, all in one hand. His coat, and hers as well; his hat, and hers as well.
Where, though? Where could he take her? Where could he leave her? No friends, no relatives, no— They were so alone, so cut off, in this faraway place.
It came to him then. He fumbled in his change pocket. Two twenty-five-cent pieces. That was enough, more than enough. He dropped them back in again. Then he took his wallet out of his jacket inside pocket, and without looking to see how much was in it, deliberately drew open the top bureau drawer, tossed it in there, and closed the drawer on it.
Then he strode forward to rejoin her. He stopped just short of the doorway, for an instant only, before going in to her. His expression was taut and grim with impending purpose, and it didn’t suit the face he was about to show her. He put his free hand up to it, and drew his hand slowly downward across it. The way you do when you’re wiping something off. Only instead of wiping something off, his hand left something behind it.
A smile. A carefree, lighthearted, totally lying smile.
5
The screen became an inky black square, as it did at intervals of every two or three minutes. Four intercrossed white lines, pencil-thin, were superimposed upon this to form a frame just a little smaller than the screen itself. Interrupting the bottom one of these lines, in white lettering, intruded the trade-mark “Essanay.” Within the frame itself appeared two lines of white letters, upper case, beginning and ending with quotation marks.
“COME AWAY FROM HIM.
CAN YOU DOUBT THAT I LOVE YOU, DEAR?”
They, like the frame, like the trade-mark, vibrated slightly, but not enough to interfere with legibility.
A slight sibilance became audible as a minority of the audience, there was always such a minority, repeated the words to themselves, under their breaths, without realizing they were doing so. The elderly woman piano player, silhouetted against the lighted music rack buried deep down at foot of the screen, continued to play softly unobstrusive strains of “The Skaters Waltz.”