Torches came with them, and kettle drums and cymbals. The Street lighted up again, as though it had caught fire. Wavering giant-size shadows slithered across the orange faces of the buildings. At once people came back to the windows again on either side of the way. Confetti once more began to snow down, turning rainbowhued as it drifted through varying zones of light; pink, lavender, pale green.
The central procession, the backbone, of dancers was flanked by detached auxiliaries on both sides, singly and in couples, trios, quartettes, who went along with it without being integrated into it. The chain was lengthening every moment, picking up strays, though no one could tell where it was going, and no one cared. Its head had already turned a second corner and passed from sight, before its tail had finished coming around the first. The original lockstep it had probably started with had long been discarded because of its unwieldy length, and now it 'Was a potpourri. Some were doing a cakewalk, prancing with knees raised high before them, others simply shuffling along barely raising feet from the ground, still others jigging, cavorting and kicking up their heels from side to side, like jack-in-the-boxes.
The false face kept switching feverishly, to and fro, forward and back, while the body beneath it remained fixed; centering its ogling eyes on each second successive figure as it passed, following that a moment or two, then dropping that to go back and take up the next but one. The women only, skipping over the clowns, the pirates, the Spanish smugglers, interspersed between.
Ogling, bulging, white-painted eyes, that promised buffoonery and horseplay, ludicrous flirtation and comic impassionment. Anything, but not latent death.
Many saw it, and some waved, and some dlled out in gay invitation, and one or two threw flowers that hit it on the nose. Roman empresses, harem beauties, gypsies, Crusaders' ladies in dunce caps. And a nursemaid in starched apron wheeling a full-grown man before her in a baby's perambulator, his hairy legs dragging out at the sides of it and occasionally taking steps of their own.
Then suddenly the comic popeyes remained fixed, the whole false face and the neck supporting it craned forward, unbearably intent, taut.
She wore a domino-suit, a shapeless bifurcated garb fastened only at the wrists, the ankles and the neck. A cowl covered her head. She wore an eye-mask of light blue silk, but beneath it her mouth was like an unopened bud.
She was no more than five feet two or three, and her step was dainty and graceful. She was not in the cavalcade, she was part of the footloose flotsam coursing along beside it. She was on the far side of it from him, it was between the two of them. She was passing from man to man, dancing a few steps in the arms of each, then quitting him and on to someone else. Thus progressing, with not a step, not a turn, wasted uncompanioned. She was a sprite of sheer gayety.
Just then her hood was dislodged, thrown back for a moment, and before she could recover and hastily return it, he had glimpsed the golden hair topping the blue mask.
He threw up his arm and shouted "Julia!" He launched himself from the door niche and three times dashed himself against the impeding chain, trying to get through to her side, and three times was thrown back by its unexpected resiliency.
"No one breaks through us," they told him mockingly. "Go all the way back to the end, and around, if you must cross over."
Suddenly she seemed to become aware of him. She halted for a moment and was looking straight across at him. Or seemed to be. He heard the high-pitched bleat of her laughter, in all that din, at sight of his comic face. She flung her arm out at him derisively. Then turned and went on again.
He plunged into the maelstrom, and like a drowning man trying to keep his head above water, was engulfed, swept every way but the way he wanted to go.
At last a Viking in a horned helmet, one of the links in the impeding chain, took pity on him.
"He sees someone he likes," he shouted jocularly. "It's Mardi Gras, after all. Let him through." And with brawny arms raised like a drawbridge for a moment, let him duck under them to the other side.
She was still intermittently in sight, but far down ahead. Like a light blue cork bobbing in a littered sea.
"Julia!"
She turned ful'y this time, but whether at sound of the name or simply because of the strength of his voice could not have been determined.
He saw her crouch slightly, as if taunting him to a mock chase. A chase in which there was no terror, only playfulness, coquetry, a deliberate incitement to pursuit. A moment later she had fled away deftly, slipping easily in and out because of her small size. But looking back every now and again.
It was obvious she didn't know who he was, but thought him simply an anonymous pursuer from out of the Mardi Gras, someone to have sport with. Once when he thought he had lost her altogether, and would have had she willed it so, for she purposely halted aside in a doorway and remained there waiting for him to single her out once more. Then when he had done so, and there could be no mistake, she drew out her clown-like suit wide at the sides, dipped him a mocking curtsey, and sped on again.
At last, with àne more backward look at him, as if to say: "Enough of this. I've set a high enough price on your approaching me. Now have your way with me, whatever it is to be," she turned aside from the main stream of the revelers and darted down a dimly lighted alley.
He reached its mouth in turn moments later, and could still see the paleness of her light blue garb running ahead in the gloom. He turned and went in. There were no more obstacles here, nothing to keep him back. In a minute or two he had overtaken her, and had her back against the wall, his raised arms, planted against it, a barrier on either side of her.
She couldn't speak. She was too winded. She leaned back against the wall, in expectation of dalliance, the fruits of the chase now to be enjoyed alike by both of them. He could make out the pale blue mask shimmering there before him in the dark.. The red and yellow glare of torches was kept to the mouth of this side street, this byway; it couldn't reach in to where they were. It was twilight dim. It was the very place for it--
He tried to lift the mask from her face and she warded him off, shunting her head aside. She tittered a little, and fanned herself limply with her own hand, to create additional air for breath.
"Julia," he panted full into her face. "Julia."
She tittered again.
"Now I've got you."
He looked around where the light was, where the crowd was still streaming by, as if in measurement.
Then his hand fumbled under his clothing and he took out the bone-handled pistol he'd carried with him throughout the Mardi Gras. She didn't see it for a moment, it was held low, below the level of their eyes.
Then he pulled at his own false face, and it fell to the ground.
"Now do you know me, Julia? Now do you see who I am?"
His elbow backed, and the gun went out away from her, to find room. It clicked as he thumbed back the hammerhead.
It came forward again. It found that empty place, where in others a heart was known to be.
Then he ripped ruthlessly at the eye-mask and pared it from her. The hood went back with it, and the blonde hair was revealed. She saw the gun at the same time that he saw her face fully.
"No, doan', mister, doan'--" she whimpered abjectly. "I din' mean no harm. I was jes foolin', jes foolin'--" She tried to grovel to the ground, but the taut closeness of his arms kept her up in spite of herself.
"Why, you're a--you're a--"
"Please, mister, I cain't help it if I doan' match up right--"
There was a sodden futile impact as the bone-handled gun fell beside him to the ground.
24
The room was a still life. Forget-me-nots on pink wallpaper in the background. In the foreground a table. On the table a reeking tumbler, an overturned bottle drained to its dregs, a prone head. Nothing moved. Nothing had feeling, or awareness.