The Smart Set/Volume 22/Issue 3/In the Dark

by Inez Haynes Irwin

 

THE AMATEUR HOUSE-PARTY

By Inez Haynes Gillmore

As he stood outside his apartment it seemed to him that he heard a door within open softly. The sound made him pause. He listened. It seemed to him that, with even greater softness, he heard it shut. Who could be in there? Vance was in the Adirondacks. Nobody else could have entered the apartment that Summer.

His key grated in the lock even as these thoughts passed through his mind. He stepped from the dark hall into the black living-room. He made three steps forward and then he stopped as if he had been struck. He became conscious, in the pause that followed, of three things—an odor first; then, after an appreciable interval, a presence; then, an instant later, a voice.

The odor, delicately, charily, suffused the big living-room that he had expected would greet his nostrils with the stale smell of furniture long unaired and an atmosphere long devitalized. It was a wonderful odor, faint but subtle, provocative, deliciously compelling. It was compounded, it was easy to guess, of the personal aroma of some finely-flavored feminine substance and an oriental perfume, pursuing but uncloying.

The presence—he could not of course see it—but its emanations floated in the room, more miraculously permeating than even the odor. It was like a wonderful tropical flower that blooms unseen in the heat and the night, betrayed to the passer-by only by its exquisite breath. He could not see an outline. Yet, to his aroused intuition, the presence was as indubitably there as if every bit of furniture in the room were shrieking the fact to him. The situation arrested his uneasy imagination. It thrilled it to a thousand conjectures, surmises, speculations. The explanation came to him in another instant. Vance! But hadn't he written Vance that he was coming to their rooms that afternoon? For the life of him he could not remember.

And then the voice.

The voice did not make him forget the odor—it did not make him forget the presence. Rather if was the odor and the presence become audible. It was an extraordinary voice, and how it stood the test of the dark! It was low, fragile, almost fluty. It seemed a little “world-tired” was the melodramatic word that he presently found for it. Had the Mona Lisa spoken, those, he decided, would be her tones. But under the world-tire in it fluttered—a mere nuance—but it shadowed something dreadful. Horror? No. Terror? Perhaps. And well she might fear—ah, Vance!

“Please don't light the gas,” the voice pleaded.

He found his own voice after a while. It seemed when it did come to be unduly dry.

“I'll not light up, of course. I'll do whatever you wish.”

A little rill of laughter thrilled through the room—laughter that, he could not have said why, terrified him. It was cool, fine, ironic, exquisitely measured, balanced, attuned.

“I believe you're a blessed ghost,” he accused her.

“On the contrary!”

There was a crisp, silky rustle in his direction. The odor swept in faint, oncoming waves all over him. It broke with a little tingle on the nerves that the silence and dark seemed, gradually, to be exposing. Then a hand rested, in the instant of a bird's stay and flight on a swinging bough, against his wrist. The touch was of ivory coolness. It left a glow in its wake, however, as if electric currents had coursed slowly to the surface of her flesh and burned against his.

“Now,” she questioned triumphantly, “am I real?”

“You're a woman,” he apprised her ruefully.

“And now you're wondering what kind.” There was the sweetest possible amusement in her silvery tones. “Allons! You shall find out. I've come a long way just to see you.”

“To see me!” He laughed in his turn. “Oh, you're a woman,” he conceded handsomely.

“Sit down,” she coaxed. “I'm going to give you ten minutes of my time now—and I assure you at this moment my time is worth the traditional king's ransom. You'll not believe it—men never know that women are most sincere when they are most extravagant. It is true that every moment that I spend with you now is worth sixty ruby drops of my heart's best blood.”

“I shall believe anything. I shall believe nothing. I shall believe everything. Now are you satisfied?”

“Of course, if you'll sit down and talk with me.”

“I have sat down. Now——”

“Explanations! Goose! Oh, you're a man! Why not leave it all beautifully vague and misty—stardust, moonshine, spindrift and the stuff that dreams are made of? But no—you are a man. I pity your obviosities and inevitabilities, but I'll play up to them. Listen: I have always wanted to talk with you, but there are reasons why we should not know each other. I knew you were coming here today. And I came here to meet you. Could anything be simpler?” There were the traditional, feminine italics in her voice.

He roared. “But if nobody knew!” he interjected. “Not that I sha'n't hold you prisoner.”

“But there was one that knew.” She accused him. She coaxed. She wheedled.

“That's what I'm trying to remember,” he confessed ruefully. “Although, of course, from the very beginning, I knew that Vance came into it in some way.”

“Of course he does!” She brought it out triumphantly. “I had been waiting for months for just the right, perfect, inevitable moment. One word dropped and I managed to steal a key and here I am. But how did you connect me with Vance at first? Did you just guess?”

“Oh, your presence—your perfumes—your voice—everything about you shrieks of Vance.”

“I expect they do,” she said drily. “I expect they do.”

“* Now shall we have a light?”

“A light!” Her disgust was staccato. “Will you spoil all the wonder of it? Will you drag in the dregs of a hot, dull day? Why don't you send out for a newspaper? You'll be proposing picture post-cards or a can of beer from the corner before I know it.”

“I thought of nothing stronger than tea—upon my word.” He was contrite enough for her to become amiable.

“You're a humbug. You know it's gorgeous just as it is.”

“I know it's enough to make a man lose his head.”

“Lose it,” she insisted brightly. “I'm going to lose mine and tell you things presently. You can be gloriously frank—in the dark. As if you didn't know! I've read them all—you've written such delicious things—such perilously quotable things—oh, don't be afraid; I sha'n't quote them to you—of the romances and necromances of the first meeting. But confess you never had such a first meeting as this.”

“Oh, I'll admit that.”

“Would you tell me a great many things?”

“Yes.”

“Would you ask a great many things?”

“Yes.”

She clapped her hands. Her laughter tinkled into every corner of the room. “Then the meeting is justified, isn't it?”

“I'll prove your willingness to answer the great many things,” he said leisurely. “Did you perhaps do me the honor of exploring my rooms?”

There was a silence, out of which, in much apparent embarrassment, she presently groped. “Of course I did.” Her tone quite took the bull by the horns. “Didn't you yourself say I was a woman? But I assure you I found nothing compromising,” she ended with an archness.

There came a pause and, into it—the drip—drip—drip, irritatingly practical—of the faucet in the bathroom.

He spoke hastily. “You are dark,” he said, “slender, tall.”

“I am little, dumpy, blonde.”

“You are full of temperament, personality, charm,” he said. “You are 'instinct with,' 'alive with'—oh, you know—all those things—you know what people say—to your finger-tips.”

“I am intellectual, cold, almost sterilized of emotion, atmosphere, aura.”

“You are young, eager, enthusiastic,” he said.

“I am old, stale and uninspired. But there was a time when I would have been all the things you so gallantly accord me—when I could have responded with every note in the scale, every color in the spectrum, if you had asked for it. But that was before a great many things.”

“I suppose you mean a man?” he hazarded.

“I suppose I do.”

“Is it one of the things you are going to tell me? Remember, this is a first meeting.”

“Not today—although, curiously, it burns on my lips to tell you now. Oh, I'm suddenly full of my wrongs and hatreds and revenges.”

“Tell me now.”

“Oh, I'll tell you—I will. When he came I was—can you imagine a slim alabaster vase, full of a fiery, rose-colored liquor, so brilliant that it shone through?—I was a woman like that. And then, he just drank me down and left me denuded, empty, vacant, pale—a forgotten, old bit of bric-à-brac that people put away in the garret. Now tell me, what do you think he deserved?”

“Death!” It came deliberately after an interval of thought. The word fell from his lips, hollow, dreadful. It seemed to echo and reëcho in the hushed stillness that followed. “The people who give such wounds—” He did not finish.

“I agree,” she said after awhile. “Death!” She dropped the word like a bullet. It seemed to go down, down, down with a perpetual reverberation among his thoughts. “Now you'll say I'm hard.”

“I'll say you're wonderful.”

“Once I had a dream of him.” Her voice seemed tired. “It was after a long time when I had not slept. You know how you don't sleep when all the couleur-de-rose has gone out of life?”

He felt that the small hands were making an appealing gesture to him in the dark. He replied at once, and his voice vibrated. “Oh,I know—I know.”

“Do women ever make men suffer like that?” she asked in a kind of awe.

“They are singularly clever at it.”

“My dream was—I saw him in an old garden. There were a great many vases there—rose-colored from what glowed from within through their alabaster sides. And I saw him go from one to another around the entire garden and drink them all up.”

He made no comment.

“And now I must go. My ten minutes are more than up.”

“But where and when shall we meet again?”

“Ah, we'll have to leave that to chance.”

“But the chances are so few in this crowded world. It's only when you meet your brother-in-law's cousin in Tangier that the world seems small as an orange. You know how big it grows when you're hunting for somebody.”

“I think you'll find me sometime. But then you'll not care. That will be a meeting, if you like.”

“I—” But, finally, he only laughed.

“Will you give me a half-hour before you move out of this room?” Her voice was liquid with entreaty.

“Yes.”

“And will you stay just where you are—in the dark?”

“Yes.”

“Good-bye, then.” A touch like a feather fell on his hand. It left a delicate moisture there—he knew it was from her lips. Then the door shut gently.

The odor still lingered. But the presence and the voice were gone.

In the interval he thought hard, hand on brow. The clamor of his sense died down after a while. Even his nerves stilled. Presently he grew dull,

And then the drip—drip—drip from the bathroom had full possession of a room, faery a moment ago with mystery, with beauty. He began to hate the thud of its soft clamor.

The half-hour struck and passed.

He arose slowly and groped into his bedroom. He switched on the light there.

And then he turned.

A man, naked to the waist, was lying over the edge of the bed. He was on his back, but the head was doubled under the neck. Just above his heart was a splotchy, dripping red spot. A limp hand trailed in a pool of blood on the floor.

He turned the man's face up.

It came to him in the instant that he bent over and listened at his heart that it must have been only a few moments since Vance died.