WALTZ INTO DARKNESS
by Cornell Woolrich
Copyright 1947 by William Irish
Copyright renewed 1974 by Chase Manhattan Bank as Executor
All rights reserved.
If one should love you with real love
(Such things have been,
Things your fair face knows nothing of
It seems, Faustine) . . .
-- Swineburne
CHARACTERS THAT APPEAR IN THE STORY
Louis Durand, the man in New Orleans
Tom, who works for him
Aunt Sarah, Tom's sister
Julia Russell, the woman who comes from St. Louis to marry him
Allan Jardine, his business partner
Simms, a bank manager
Commissioner of Police of New Orleans
Bertha Russell, sister of the woman who comes to marry Durand
Walter Downs, a private investigator of St. Louis
Colonel Harry Worth, late of the Confederate Army
Bonny, who was once Julia
CHARACTER THAT DOES NOT APPEAR IN THE STORY
"Billy," a name on a burned scrap of letter, an unseen figure watching a window, a stealthy knocking at a door.
The soundless music starts. The dancing figures appear,
slowly draw together. The waltz begins.
1
The sun was bright, the sky was blue, the time was May; New Orleans was heaven, and heaven must have been only another New Orleans, it couldn't have been any better.
In his bachelor quarters on St. Charles Street, Louis Durand was getting dressed. Not for the first time that day, for the sun was already high and he'd been up and about for hours; but for the great event of that day. This wasn't just a day, this was the day of all days. A day that comes just once to a man, and now had come to him. It had come late, but it had come. It was now. It was today.
He wasn't young any more. Others didn't tell him this, he told himself this. He wasn't old, as men go. But for such a thing as this, he wasn't too young any more. Thirty-seven.
On the wall there was a calendar, the first four leaves peeled back to bare the fifth. At top, center, this was inscribed May. Then on each side of this, in slanted, shadow-casting, heavily curlicued numerals, the year-date was gratuitously given the beholder: 1880. Below, within their little boxed squares, the first nineteen numerals had been stroked off with lead pencil. About the twentieth, this time in red crayon, a heavy circle, a bull's-eye, had been traced. Around and around, as though it could not be emphasized enough. And from there on, the numbers were blank; in the future.
He had put on the shirt with starched ruffles that Maman Alphonsine had so lovingly laundered for him, every frill a work of art. It was fastened at the cuffs with garnet studs backed with silver. In the flowing ascot tie that spread downward fanwise from his chin was thrust the customary stickpin that no well-dressed man was ever without, in this case a crescent of diamond splinters tipped by a ruby chip at each end.
A ponderous gold fob hung from his waistcoat pocket on the right side. Linking this to the adjoining pocket on the left, bulky with a massive slab of watch, was a chain of thick gold links, conspicuous across his middle, and meant to be so. For what was a man without a watch? And what was a watch without there being an indication of one?
His flowing, generous shirt, above this tightly encompassing waistcoat, gave him a pouter-pigeon aspect. But there was enough pride in his chest right now to have done that unaided, anyway.
On the bureau, before which he stood using his hairbrush, lay a packet of letters and a daguerreotype.
He put down his brush, and, pausing for a moment in his preparations, took them up one by one and hurriedly glanced through each. The first bore the letter-head: "The Friendly Correspondence Society of St. Louis, Mo.--an Association for Ladies and Gentlemen of High Character," and began in a fine masculine hand:
Dear Sir:
In reply to your inquiry we are pleased to forward to you the
name and address of one of our members, and if you will address
yourself to her in person, we feel sure a mutually satisfactory
correspondence may be engaged upon--
The next was in an even finer hand, this time feminine: "My dear Mr. Durand:--" And signed: "Y'rs most sincerely, Miss 3. Russell."
The next: "Dear Mr. Durand: . . . Sincerely, Miss Julia Russell."
The next: "Dear Louis Durand: . . . Your sincere friend, Julia Russell."
And then: "Dear Louis: . . . Your sincere friend, Julia."
And then: "Dear Louis: . . . Your sincere Julia."
And then: "Louis, dear: . . . Your Julia."
And finally: "Louis, my beloved: . . . Your own impatient Julia."
There was a postscript to this one: "Will Wednesday never come? I count the hours for the boat to sail !"
He put them in order again, patted them tenderly, fondly, into symmetry. He put them into his inside coat pocket, the one that went over his heart.
He took up, now, the small stiff-backed daguerreotype and looked at it long and raptly. The subject was not young. She was not an old woman, certainly, but she was equally certainly no longer a girl. Her features were sharply indented with the approaching emphases of alteration. There was an incisiveness to the mouth that was not yet, but would be presently, sharpness. There was a keen appearance to the eyes that heralded the onset of sunken creases and constrictions about them. Not yet, but presently. The groundwork was being laid. There was a curvature to the nose that presently would become a hook. There was a prominence to the chin that presently would become a jutting-out.
She was not beautiful. She could be called attractive, for she was attractive to him, and attractiveness lies in the eyes of the beholder.
Her dark hair was gathered at the back of the head in a psycheknot, and a smattering of it, coaxed the other way, fell over her forehead in a fringe, as the fashion had been for some considerable time now. So long a time, in fact, that it was already unnoticeably ceasing to be the fashion.
The only article of apparel allowed to be visible by the limitations of the pose was a black velvet ribbon clasped tightly about her throat, for immediately below that the portrait ended in smouldering brown clouds of photographic nebulae.
So this was the bargain he had made with love, taking what he could get, in sudden desperate haste, for fear of getting nothing at all, of having waited too long, after waiting fifteen years, steadfastly turning his back on it.
That early love, that first love (that he had sworn would be the last) was only a shadowy memory now, a half-remembered name from the past. Marguerite; he could say it and it had no meaning now. As dry and flat as a flower pressed for years between the pages of a book.
A name from someone else's past, not even his. For every seven years we change completely, they say, and there is nothing left of what we were. And so twice over he had become somebody else since then.
Twice-removed he was now from the boy of twenty-two--called Louis Durand as he was, and that their only link--who had knocked upon the house door of his bride-to-be the night before their wedding, stars in his eyes, flowers in his hand. To stand there first with his summons unanswered. And then to see it swing slowly open and two men come out, bearing something dead on a covered litter.
"Stand back. Yellow jack."
He saw the ring on her finger, trailing the ground.
He didn't cry out. He made no sound. He reached down and placed his courtship flowers gently on the death-stretcher as it went by. Then he turned and went away.
Away from love, for fifteen years.
Marguerite, a name. That was all he had left.