He took Downs by the arm all at once, pressing him. As insistent now as he had been reluctant a moment ago. "Come with me, anyway. Can I offer you a schooner of beer ?"
Downs glanced overhead. "The sun is warm," he accepted. "Your own face, for instance, is quite moist." There was something faintly satiric in the way he said it, Durand thought.
They walked along side by side. At every pace Durand told himself: I've drawn him a step farther away from her. She is that much safer.
"Here's a place; let's try this," he said presently.
"I was just going to suggest it myself," Downs observed. Again there was that overtone of satire to be detected.
They went in and seated themselves at a small wicker table.
"Two Pilseners," Durand told the mustachioed, striped-shirted waiter. Then before he could withdraw again. "Where is the closet ?"
"Straight back."
Durand rose. "Excuse me for a moment." Downs nodded, ironically it seemed to him.
Durand left him seated there, went out through the spring door. He found himself in a passage. Ignoring the intermediate door to the side, he followed it to the rear, let himself out at the back of the place. He began to run like one possessed. He was possessed; possessed with the thought of saving her.
45
He ran back and forth like mad between the gaping wardrobe and the uplidded trunk, empty-armed on each trip to, half-smothered under masses of her dresses on each trip fro. He dropped them into it in any old way, so that long before the potential capacity of trunk was exhausted, its actual capacity was filled and overflowing. This was no time for a painstaking job of packing. This was get out fast, run for their lives.
He heard her come in at the street door, and before she had even had time to quit the entryway, he called down to her sight-unseen from above, in wild urgency: "Bonny!" And then again, "Bonny! Come up here quick! Hurry! I have something to tell you!"
She delayed for some reason. Perhaps over the feminine trait of removing her bonnet or disposing of her parcels before doing anything further, even at a moment of crisis.
Half mad with his own haste, he rushed recklessly out of the room, ran down to get her. And then halfway to the bottom of the stairs he stopped short, as if 'his legs had been gripped by a brake; and stood still, stock still and yet trembling, and died a little.
The figure back to door, back to just-reclosed door, equally stock still, was Downs.
Neither of them moved. The discovery came, the discovery went, the discovery was long past. Just two icy still men endlessly looking at one another. From stairs to door. From door to stairs. One of them bleakly smiling now in ultimate vindication. One of them ashen-faced, stricken to death.
One of them sighed deeply at last. Then the other sighed too, as if in answer. Two sighs in the intense silence. Two different sighs. A sigh of despair, a sigh of completion.
"You called her just now," Downs said slowly. "You called her by name. Thinking it was her. So she is here with you."
Durand had turned partly sidewise, was gripping the rail with both hands and bent slightly over it, as if able to support himself by that means alone. He shook his head. First slowly. Then at each repetition, faster, faster; until he was beating the stubborn air with it. "No," he said. "No. No. No."
"Mr. Durand, I have good ears. I heard you."
Ostrichlike, terrified, craven, trying to hide his head in the sands of his own mesmeric denial. As though to keep saying No, if persisted in long enough, would ward off the danger. Using the word as a sort of talisman.
"No. No. No!"
"Mr. Durand, let's be men at least. You called her name, you hollered it down here."
"No. No." He took a toppling step, that brought him down a stair lower. Then another. But seeming to slide his body downward along the slanted rail rather than move his legs, so hard and fast did he ding to it. Like an inebriate; which he was. An inebriate of fright. "Someone else. Woman that comes in to do my cleaning. Her name sounds like that--" He didn't know what he was saying any more.
"Very well," Downs said drily. "I'll take the woman that comes in to do your cleaning, the woman whose name sounds so much the same. I'm not hard to please."
They were suddenly wary, watchful of one another; both pairs of eyes slanting first far over to this side, then far over to that, in a sort of synchronization of wordless guile. Physical movement followed, also in complete unison.
Durand broke from the stairs, Downs broke from the door-back. Their two diagonal rushes brought them together before the mirrored, antlered hatrack cabinet against the wall, with its armed seat that was also the lid of a storage box. Durand tried to hold it down, Downs to pry it up. Downs' arm treacherously thrust in and out again, came up with the two long heliotrope streamers depending from a straw garden hat. The tip of one had been protruding, caught fast by the lid on its last closing; a fleck of color, a fingernail's worth of color, in all that vast ground-floor area of house.
("But why do you like it so?" he had once asked her.
"I don't know. It's my color, and anyone who knows me knows it's my color. Wherever I am, there's bound to be some of it around.")'
Downs let it fall back again into the box. "The costume for the woman who comes here to do your work," he remarked. And then, looking his disgust and complete forfeiture of respect at Durand, he murmured something in a swallowed voice that sounded like, "God help you, in love with a--!"
"Downs, listen, I want to talk to you--!" The words tumbled over one another in their eagerness to be out. He was so breathless he could hardly articulate. He took him by the lapels, a hand to each, held him close in a sort of pleading stricture. "Come inside here, come in the next room, let me talk to you--!"
"You and I have nothing to talk about. All my talking is for--"
Durand moved insistently backward, drawing him after him by that close coat lock, until he had him in there past the threshold where he wanted him to be. Then let him go, and Downs stayed there where he'd brought him.
"Downs, listen-- Wait a minute, there's some brandy here, let me pour you a drink."
"I keep my drinking for saloons."
"Downs, listen-- She's not here, you're making a terrible mistake-" Then quickly stilling his presumed contradiction by a fanwise rotation of the hand; "--but that isn't what I want to talk to you about. It's simply this. I--I've changed my mind. I want to drop the matter. I want the proceedings to stop."
Downs repeated with ironic absence of inflection, "You want to drop the matter. You want the proceedings to stop."
"I have that right, I have that choice. It was my complaint originally."
"As a matter of fact, that's only partly true. You were cocomplainant along with Miss Bertha Russell. But let's say for the sake of argument, it was your sole complaint originally. Then what?" His brows went up. "And what?"
"But if I withdraw the complaint, if I cancel it--?"
"You have no control over me," Downs said stonily. He slung one hip astride the arm of a chair he was standing beside, settled himself as if to wait. "You can rescind your complaint. All well and good. You can cease payment of any further fees to me. And as a matter of fact, your original retainer to me expired months ago. But you can't compel me to quit the case. Is that plain enough to you? As the old saying goes, this is a free country. And I'm a free agent. If I happen to want to continue on my own account until I bring the assignment to a satisfactory conclusion--and it happens that I do--there's nothing you can do about it. I'm no longer working for you, I'm working for my own conscience."
Appalled, Durand began to tremble all over. "But that's persecution--" he quavered.
"That's being conscientious, I'd call it, though it's not for me to say so," Downs said with a frosty smile.
"But you're not a public police official-- You have no right--"