On that last day, Durand moved slowly from room to room of the St. Louis Street house. It was already dying before his very eyes; the furniture dismantled, rugs stripped from its floor boards, curtains from its windows, closet doors left gapingly ajar with nothing behind them any more. Its skeleton was peering through. The skeleton that stays on after death, just as in a man's case.
And yet, he realized, he was not so much leaving this place as leaving a part of himself behind in a common grave with it. A part that he could never regain, never recall. He could never hope again as he'd once hoped here. There was nothing to hope for. He could never be as young again as he'd once been here, even though it was a youngness late in coming, at thirty-seven; late in coming and swift in going, just a few brief weeks. He could never love again-- not only not as he'd once loved here, but to any degree at all. And that is a form of death in itself. His broken dreams were lying all around; he could almost hear them crunch, like spilled sugar, each time he moved his foot.
He was standing in the doorway of what- had been their bedroom, looking across at the wallpaper. The wallpaper that had come from New York--"pink, but not too bright a pink, with small blue flowers, like forget-me-nots"--put up for a bride to see, a bride who had never lived to see it, nor lived even to be a bride.
He closed the door. For no particular reason, for there was nothing to be kept in there any longer. Perhaps the more quickly to shut the room from sight.
And as it closed, a voice seemed to speak through it for a moment, with sudden lifelike clarity in his ears:
"Who is it knocks? . . . Tell him he may."
Then was gone, stilled forever.
He went slowly down the stairs, his knees bending reluctantly over each step, as if they were rusted.
The front door was standing open, and there was a mule and two-wheeled cart out before it, piled high with the effluvia he had donated to Aunt Sarah. She went hurrying past from the back just then, a dented-in gilt birdcage swinging from one hand, a bulky mantel clock hugged in her other. Then, seeing him, and still incredulous of his largesse, she stopped short to ask for additional assurance.
"This too? This yere clock ?"
"I told you, everything," he answered impatiently. "Everything but the heavy pieces with four legs. Take it all! Get it out of my sight!"
"I'm sure going to have the grandest cabin in Shrevepo't when I gets back home there."
He looked at her grimly for a moment, but his grimness was not for her.
"That band's not playing today, I notice," he blurted out accusingly.
She understood the reference, remembered it with surprising immediacy.
"Hush, Mr. Lou. Anyone can make a mistake. That was the devil's music."
She went on out to the cart, where a gangling youth, a nephew by remote attribute, loitered in charge of the booty.
"Got everything you want now?" Durand called out after her. "Then I'll lock up."
"Yes sir! Yes sir! Couldn't ask for no more." And, apparently, secretly a little dubious, to the end, that Durand might yet change his mind and retract, added in a hasty aside: "Come on, boy! Get this mule started up. What you lingering for?" She clambered up beside him and the cart waddled off. "God bless you, Mr. Lou! God keep you safe!"
"It's a little late for that," thought Durand morosely.
He turned back to the hall for a moment, to retrieve his own hat from the pronged, high-backed rack where he had slung it. And as he detached it, something fell out sideward to the floor from behind it with a little clap. Something that must have been thrust out of sight behind there long ago, and forgotten.
He picked up the slender little stick, and withdrew it, and a little swath of bunched heliotrope came with it at the other end. Limp, bedraggled, but still giving a momentary splash of color to the denuded hall.
Her parasol.
He took it by both ends, and arched his knee to it, and splintered it explosively, not once but again and again, with an inordinate violence that its fragility didn't warrant. Then flung the wisps and splinters away from him with full arm's strength, as far as they would go.
"Get to hell, after your owner," he mumbled savagely. "She's waiting for you to shade her there!"
And slammed the door.
The house was dead. Love was dead. The story was through.
31
May again. May that keeps coming around, May that never gets any older, May that's just as fair each time. Men grow old and lose their loves, and have no further hope of any new love, but May keeps coming back again. There are always others waiting for it, whose turn is still to come.
May again. May of '81 now. A year since the marriage.
The train from New Orleans came into Biloxi late in the afternoon. The sky was porcelain fresh from the kiln; a little wisp of steam seeping from it here and there, those were clouds. The tree tops were shimmering with delicate new leaf. And in the distance, like a deposit of sapphires, the waters of the Gulf. It was a lovely place to come to, a lovely sight to behold. And he was old and bitter now, too old to care.
He was the last one down from the steps of the railroad coach. He climbed down leadenly, grudgingly, as though it were all one to him whether he alighted here or continued on to the next place. It was. To rest, to forget awhile, that was all he wanted. To let the healing process continue, the scars harden into their ugly crust. New Orleans still reminded him too much. It always would.
A romantic takes his losses hard, and he was a romantic. Only a romantic could have played the role he had, played the fool so letterperfect. He was one of those men who are born to be the natural prey of women, he was beginning to realize it himself by now; if it hadn't been she, it would have been someone else. If it hadn't been a bad woman, then it would have been what they called a "good" woman. Even one of those would have had him in her power in no time at all. And though the results might have been less catastrophic, that was no consolation to his own innermost pride. His only defense was to stay away from them.
Now that the horse was stolen, the lock was on the stable door. The lock was on, and the key was thrown away, for good and all. But there was nothing it opened to any more.
Amidst all the bustle of holidaymakers down here from the hinterland for a week or two's sojourn, the prattle, the commotion as they formed into little groups, joining with the friends who had come to train side to meet them, he stood there solitary, apart, his bag at his feet.
The eyes of more than one marriageable young damsel in the groups near by were cast speculatively toward him over the shoulder of some relative or friend, probably wondering if he were eligible to be sketched into plans for the immediate future, for what is a holiday without a lot of beaux? Yet whenever they happened to meet his own eyes they hurriedly withdrew again, and not wholly for the sake of seemliness either. It left them with a rather disconcerting sensation, like looking at something you think to be alive and finding out it is inanimate after all. It was like flirting with a fence post or water pump until you found out your mistake.
The platform slowly cleared, and he still stood there. The train from New Orleans started on again, and he half turned, as if to reenter and ride on with it to wherever the next place was. But he faced forward again and let the cars go ticking off behind his back, on their way down the track.
32
He soon fell into the habit of dropping into the bar of one of the adjacent hotels, the Belleview House, at or around seven each evening for a slowly drunk whiskey punch. Or at most two of them, never more; for it wasn't the liquor that attracted him, but the lack of anything to do until it was time for the evening meal. He chose this particular place because his own hotel had no such establishment, and it was the nearest at hand and the largest of those that had.