“Get away from me,” he said surlily, but already backing down from his own threat.
“You don’t own the doorway. I can stand in it as well as you.” He couldn’t seem to shatter her equanimity. She had the complete calmness of superiority. Or the superiority of complete calmness.
“Then I’ll get myself another.” He loped out again, ran the greater part of the remaining distance, crossed the final intersection, and took refuge one final time, now on the self-same street that held his own door, but still at an appreciable distance up from it, and unable to negotiate that without one last sodden halt.
She didn’t join him there. A sworl, a vaporized blur, hastening along on the opposite side of the street, showed she had not desisted and turned back, but she went on past him this time, and was blotted out in the borealislike conflagration of the rain. He knew that his own door was on that side. He knew that she did too.
A flash of the lightning, slackening now in its frequency, showed her to him ensconced in it, waiting for him. Like a black, mushroom-topped fungus, growing up from a crevice in it.
After awhile the rain petered out, came to an end. Pavements of spilled licorice, that caught every reflection and gave it back upside down, were left in its wake.
The two figures stood in the two doorways, on opposite sides of the street, watching each other. Almost detachedly gazing toward each other.
After awhile she collapsed her umbrella and took it down. There was no further need for it.
After another while, he lit a cigarette. The match flame was like a vivid poppy in front of his face for a minute, with his hands forming the petals.
Presently his waterlogged clothes had begun to feel clammy on him. He turned up the collar of his coat, around the back of his neck, held it tightly closed in front.
On he stood like that, for just a moment or two longer, beginning to quiver a little now with the dampness. All at once he flung his cigarette down, with a long overhand shoulder-roll that had in it both exasperation and final, wearied capitulation. Even the paper of the cigarette had been a little soggy, made it difficult to draw on it satisfactorily.
Abruptly he struck out from the doorway, started walking the long diagonal toward his own doorway — and the figure waiting in it so complacently, so sure that in the end he would have to do just this.
8
It was late, it was past twelve at night. The street was empty, charcoal brushed with gloom, only the pin-point lights of an upper window or two, like open pores, to mar the evenness of its texture.
The empty taxi drove up to the curb, stopped.
Suddenly Marshall, as though until now he had been part of the doorway sediment piled up by the darkness, detached himself from the entryway without the door having opened behind him, and ran over to the cab, hatless.
“Are you the party called for a cab to be sent around to this number?” the driver asked him.
“Wait here a minute,” Marshall said in a curiously bated voice, as though he were afraid of their being overheard. “I have two bags standing inside the door.”
He returned to the shadowy entrance, this time a doorlatch clicked open, then a moment later crunched closed, and he reappeared with a heavy bag weighing down each arm. He launched them into the back of the cab and got in after them.
“Where’ll I take you?” the driver asked him unhurriedly, without doing more than tip down his pennant.
“Don’t stand here,” Marshall hurried him. “I’ll give you the address in a minute. But start moving.”
He struck a match, cupped one hand around it, and with the other took out a newspaper folded to a one-column span. He ran the match down the edge of this, almost as though he were attempting to set fire to it. A perpendicular array of little fine-printed boxes lit up one after another, and then dimmed out again, as the thin yellow gleam went by. It stopped suddenly opposite one whose frame had been thickened at all four corners by diagonal pencil strokes. “Attractively furnished room, gentleman preferred—” That stayed in sight for a moment longer than its mates, then the match went out, and it was gone back into limbo.
“One-eight-four East Fifty-first,” he told the driver. A moment later he’d thrown the newspaper out the window of the cab.
They coursed on uninterruptedly for several minutes, with nothing to stop for even at lightless four-ply crossings. Then, “Oh — my hat!” Marshall exclaimed suddenly, clapping a hand to the top of his head.
“Want me to take you back for it?” the driver offered. “We’re only a couple blocks away yet.”
“No!” Marshall said sharply. “Never mind, let it go. I’ll do without it.”
“Well, I don’t suppose you need one this time of year,” the driver observed philosophically.
“Not that badly, anyway,” Marshall agreed grimly.
The new house was simply an east-side duplication of the one they had come from on the west side, just as one street was merely a numerical variant of the other. He paid the driver, carried his bags over to the door, found his new key and let himself in. Unchallenged, he carried them up the stairs to the door to his new room, found the key to that, and let himself in there.
He’d asked her, earlier in the day when he’d first called to inspect the room, if it would be all right for him to move in quite late that same night, instead of waiting for the daylight hours of the following day. “You see, I, er, have to work quite late, and it may be twelve or after before I can get my things together and bring them over here.”
His signed receipt was waiting for him on the table now, left there during the interim. “Rec’d of Mr. William Prince... $15... for two weeks’ rental,” and then the new landlady’s signature.
An admonishment she had given him during the course of their interview returned to him now.
“There’s only one thing I must ask. No girls, now.”
No, he agreed bitterly, you bet no girls!
He sprawled in a chair, lit a cigarette, and, as though savoring immunity for the first time in weeks, let his head loll back almost to a breakneck position and aimed the smoke from his nostrils ceilingward.
In a moment he had thought of something and was on his feet again. He took out a plain white card, such as they used down at the office, and with the same fountain pen that had written those various checks, printed out on it “Mr. William Prince.” Then he reopened his room door, went down the stairs, and in the entryway inserted the card into the slot that corresponded to his room.
He came upstairs again, closed the door once more, and turned and shook his fist at it with vindictive satisfaction.
“Now try it,” he said savagely, “you little tart!”
9
On his wedding morning he woke up late, after the bachelor party of the night before.
He opened his eyes, and they met her face, in a frame, on the dressertop, slanted so that it would look toward his bed. Just as in her house, probably, his own face was there to meet her eyes when they first opened of a morning. Paper replicas, the need for which would come to an end at five o’clock this evening.
At the bottom, where the shoulders paled into an impersonalized background, she had inscribed: “Forever, your Marjorie.”
“And forever, your Prescott,” he breathed in soft-voiced answer.
He got up, and the moment of contemplation ended. He set about his preparations for the day.
He went out for some coffee, and he called Lansing up from the place where he was drinking it, since there was no phone in the house where he was now rooming. Lansing was standing up for him as best man.