“How are you after last night?” Lansing asked him.
“Oh, boy,” Marshall groaned.
“Same here.”
“I’ve been packing for the trip. I’m about finished now.”
“I’ll be over and pick you up at about four-thirty,” Lansing said.
“Hadn’t you better make it a little earlier?” Marshall asked worriedly.
Lansing laughed. “I’ll get you there on time,” he promised. “The less time you have to spend hanging around waiting, the less you’ll suffer. I know those things. Just leave everything to me.”
“All right,” Marshall said gratefully. “See you later.”
“See you later.”
He went back to his room again. There he laid out his wedding clothes and got into them, dressing slowly and carefully. He caught himself whistling. The song of that season, the new song that everyone was taken with just then. “Peg o’ My Heart.”
He stopped a moment to shrug. I thought grooms were supposed to be nervous, or something. Funny; I don’t feel that way.
He went to work with his hairbrushes, stroking them on opposite sides of his head with as much meticulous care as though he were modeling something in moist clay between a pair of trowels.
He looked at his watch. A little past four. Lansing should have been here by now. He said he’d come earlier.
He had her picture still out, saving it to put away until the last. It stood on the table, ready to go into the valise. He stood still, to look at her.
When we were born, I didn’t know you. And you didn’t know me. Last year on this very same day, in June of Nineteen Fourteen, I still didn’t know you. You still didn’t know me. Now we come together, in the closest way two living people can. Then when we die, and we both must die someday, the one of us who is left a little while longer will go back to that before, to that without-the-other stage. And then again it will be: I don’t know you. And you don’t know me. What a strange thing marriage is.
He was all ready now, just for the dress-tie and the coat. He looked at his watch again, good-naturedly. What’s the matter with that Lansing? Am I going to have to send out a St. Bernard with a keg of brandy?
Then finally the summons came that he’d been expecting for so long. The buzzer sounded, as Lansing fingered the downstairs doorbell to his room. He released the latch to the downstairs door, to let him into the house, then stepped over to the room door and left it ajar for him, so that he wouldn’t have to go back to it a second time. Then he went back to his own immediate task: the tie. He dipped his knees slightly, in his absorption, as he stood there before the glass struggling with it. One wing kept stubbornly projecting a fraction of an inch beyond the complement above it.
He could hear Lansing’s tread coming up the outside stairs, now. He called out a raucously jovial greeting to him sight unseen from where he stood, without turning his head.
“You lazy hound! So you finally got here, did you? Well, it’s about time!”
There was a smothered chuckle, and Leona Harris was lounging against one side of the open doorway, her cheek pressed languidly against the frame.
He saw her in the mirror, before he’d had time to turn. Then, having seen her there, her reflection seemed to hold him fast, like some hypnotic apparition, so that he was no longer able to turn. He kept looking at her that way, by indirection.
His hands dropped away from his tie, as though they’d withered and died up there, and dangled lifeless at his sides, no longer volatile; dead things still fastened to him by their own tendons.
She peeled her cheek from the doorframe and came in a little further. A dainty, mincing step or two, like a dancer pointing a delicate toe before her, feeling her way in some difficult pas she is not yet sure she has mastered.
He hadn’t moved. He couldn’t.
“So you’re getting married today,” she said affably. “So today’s the great day. I thought I’d drop by and offer my congratulations.”
A cord at the side of his neck whipped up, and, as though it were a rusted hinge, he emitted a grating sound. “Get out of here.”
He was still looking into the mirror, frozen. The very position of his feet hadn’t shifted. A man staring into a looking glass.
“I haven’t got any present for you, but the least I can do is offer you my—”
The hinge jarred again. “How did you know?”
“It was in the papers. After all, she’s a society girl. It was in all the morning editions.”
“No. I mean how did you know...? My name isn’t downstairs.”
She nodded matter-of-factly. “I know. William Prince, isn’t it? That was on my account, I suppose.” She swung the loose end of a handkerchief about in one hand. “You moved in here on a Wednesday, I think, and I’ve known ever since the following Friday. After all, you do have to start home from the same place each night: Two Wall Street.”
He made a peculiar hissing sound under his breath, as when something hurts excruciatingly for an instant or two. His eyes shuttered themselves in accompaniment, then opened again.
She had moved closer to the table by now. Drifted, seemingly, without use of her feet at all. Now he wrenched himself from the glass at last, turned face-forward to her, sprang over there protectively. The table was between them.
She looked down at the train tickets. “Atlantic City,” she murmured idly.
Her hand moved on a little. It didn’t touch anything, just rode the surface of the table.
“Tiffany’s,” she mused. “It’s beautiful. I saw you the day you were in there buying it.”
“Get away from it!” he ordered harshly.
She withdrew her hand trailingly. Her fingertips left little steam-tracks on the polished surface which quickly cleared.
He was leaning toward her across the table, gripping it at its outer sides. His head was down, but the pupils of his eyes were sighted upward toward her, so that they were directed at her face instead of downward at the table, as they normally would have been given the tilt of his head.
“Look, I don’t want to use force.”
“I wouldn’t,” she said without inflection.
His fist crashed down on the table. “You’re not human at all!” he screamed sobbingly at her. “You’re a demon. I don’t know what you are. You look like a girl. You’ve got a face like a baby, but— Haven’t you ever slept with other men? Why don’t you hound one of them?”
She backed her hand to her mouth. “Press,” she said with shocked propriety. She went over to the door, softly closed it. “What things you say. They’ll hear you out there.”
He crashed his fist down on the table again. This time he didn’t say anything with it. His head went lower in accompaniment to the blow.
She ran two fingers back and forth across the frame of her handbag.
He was looking down, as if staring at his own reflection in the surface of the table. A tendril of his carefully brushed-back hair reversed itself and fell forward, down over his forehead, partially obscuring one eye.
“This is the last time. Press,” she said soothingly.
His mouth twisted at one extremity. “Each time it’s the last time. Then each time there’s another time that comes after it.”
They stayed motionless and silent for a moment after that, as if an unspoken contest of wills were taking place. They were not even looking at one another. His eyes were cast downward at the tabletop, sullenly immobile. Hers strayed, with an air of insouciant waiting; but never toward him.
“Press, why don’t you let me go?” she urged at last. “It’ll be over in a minute. It would have been over already by this time if you’d only...”
A drop of moisture peered through the hairs of his eyebrow, dammed there in its slow descent.