The young apprentice was at the door now, in the act of departing; turning over to Aunt Sarah the boxed parcel. "Tell Mrs. Durand I'm--I'm sorry to have misunderstood, and I'll come back tomorrow afternoon at the same time, if that's convenient."
"Run out and fetch me a locksmith!" he called out from midstairs, shattering their low-voiced parting interview like an explosive shell. The timid emissary whisked from sight, and Aunt Sarah tried to close the door on her with one hand and at the same time come away from it in fulfilment of his order.
Then he changed his mind again before she could carry out the errand. "No, wait! That would take too long. Bring me a hammer and a chisel. Have we those?"
"I reckon so." She scurried for the back.
When she'd handed them to him, he sped upward from sight again. He dropped to his knees, launched himself at the trunk with vicious energy, his mouth a white scar; he inserted the chisel in the crevice about the lock, began to pound at it mercilessly. In a moment or two the lock had sprung open, dangled there half-severed from its recent mounting.
The fall of the hammer and chisel made a dull dank in the new stillness of the room, like a funereal knell.
He plucked down the side-latchpieces, unbuckled the ancient leather strap that had bound it about the middle, rose and heaved as he rose, and the slightly domed lid came up and swung rearward with a shudder.
There was an exhalation of mothballs, as if an active breath had blown in his' face.
It was the trunk of a neat, a fastidious, a prissy person. Symmetrical stacks of belongings, each one not so much as a hairsbreadth out of line and the crevices between artfully stopped with handkerchiefs and such slighter articles, so that the various mounds could not become displaced in transit.
The top tray held only intimate undergarments, of both day- and night-wear; all of them utilitarian rather than beautiful. Yellow flannel nightrobes, flannel petticoats, thick woollen articles of covering with drawstrings whose nature he did not try to discover.
In a moment his hands had ravaged it beyond recognition.
He shifted the upper section aside, and found neatly spread layers of dresses beneath that. Of a more sober nature than any she had bought since coming here; browns and grays, with prim little rounded white collars, black alpacas, an occasional staid plaid of dark blue or green, no brighter hue.
He picked the topmost one out at random, then added a second one.
He stood there, full length like that, between them, helplessly holding one up in each hand, looking from one to the other.
Suddenly his gaze caught his own reflection, in the full-length mirrored panel facing her wardrobe door. He stepped out more fully from behind the trunk, looked again. Something struck his eye as being wrong. He couldn't tell what it was.
He drew a step back with the two trophies, to gain added perspective. Then suddenly, at the shift, it exploded into recognition. There was too much of each dress. He was holding his hands, the hands that held them, at his own shoulder level. They fell away straight to the floor, and, touching it, even folded over in excess.
In memory he saw her stand beside him again, in the mirror. She appeared there for a moment, in brief recapture. The top of her head just rising over the turn of his shoulder: when her hair was up.
He dropped the two wraithlike rags, almost in fright. Stepped to the wardrobe, flung both panels of it wide, with two hands at once. Empty; a naked wooden bar running barren across its upper part. A little puff of ghostly violet scent, and that was all.
This discovery was anticlimactic to the one that had just preceded it, somehow. His real fright lay in the dresses that were here, and not the dresses that were gone.
He ran out again to the stairs, and bending to be seen from below, called to Aunt Sarah, until she had come running in renewed terror. "Yes sir! Yes sir!"
"That girl. What did she leave here? Was that something of Mrs. Durand's?"
"New dress they running up for her."
"Bring it here. Hand it up to me, quick!"
He ran back to the room with it, burst the cardboard open, rifled it out. Gay, sprightly; heliotrope ribbons at its waist. His eye took no note of that.
He retrieved the one from the trunk he had dropped to the floor. He flattened it on the bed, smoothing it out like a paper pattern, spreading the sleeves, drawing down the skirt to its full length.
Then he superimposed the new one, the one just delivered, atop it. Then stood back and looked, already knowing.
At no point did the one match the other. The sleeves were longer, by a full cuff-length. The bosom was fuller, spilling out in an excess curve at either side when rendered two dimensional. The waist was almost half again as wide. The wearer of the one could not have entered the other. And most glaring of all the skirt of one reached in a wide band of continuation far below, broad inches below, where the other had ended.
There was only one length for all skirts, even he knew that; floorlength. There was no such thing as a skirt other than floor-length. Any variation in length was not due to fashion, it was due to the height of the wearer.
And in this undersized, topmost one there still twinkled the pins of her living measurements as he had known her, taken from her very body less than a week ago, waiting for the final sewing.
The clothes from St. Louis--
The color slowly drained from his face, and there was a strange sort of fear in his heart that he'd never known before. He'd already known when he came into this house, a while ago; but now, in this moment, he'd proved it, and there was no longer any escaping from the proof.
The clothes from St. Louis were the clothes of someone else.
18
It was dark now, the town had dropped into night. The town, the world, his mind, were hanging suspended in bottomless night. It was dark outside in the streets and it was dark in here in the room where he stood.
There was no eye to pierce the darkness where he stood; he was alone, unseen, unguessed-at. He was something motionless standing within a black-lined box. And if it breathed, that was a secret between God and itself. That, and the pain he felt in breathing, and a few other things.
Then at last pale light approached, rising from below, ascending the stairs outside. As it rose, it strengthened, until at last its focus came into view: a lighted lamp dancing restlessly from a wire hoop, held by Aunt Sarah as she climbed toward the upper floor. It paled her figure into a ghost. A ghost with a dark face, but with a sifting of flour outlining its seams.
She came up to the level at last, and turned toward his room; the lamp exploded into a permanent dazzle that filled the doorway, burgeoning in and finding him out.
She halted there and looked at him.
He was standing, utterly, devastatingly motionless. The light fell upon the pile of dresses strewed on the bed, tumbled to the floor. It flushed color into them as it revealed them, like a syringe filled with dye. Blue, green, maroon, dusty pink, they became. It flushed color into him too, the colors a waxen image has, dressed to the last detail like a live man. So clever it could almost fool you; the way those things are supposed to do in waxworks. Verisimilitude without animation.
He was like one struck dead. Upright on his feet, but dead. He could see her, for his eyes were on her face; gravely gazing on her face, that part of the body which the eye habitually seeks when it looks on someone. He could hear her, for when she whispered halffrightenedly: "Mr. Lou, what is it? What is it, Mr. Lou?"; he answered her, he spoke, his voice came.
"She's not coming back," he whispered in return.
"You been in here all this time like this, without a light ?"
"She's not coming back."
"How much longer I'm going to have to wait for supper? I can't keep that chicken much more."
"She's not coming back."
"Mr. Lou, you're not hearing me, you're not heeding."