Waltz Into Darkness Read Free Page A

up, don't you think?"
    "Right
pretty," she agreed.
    "It
was the closest I could get. They had to send all the way to New York
for it. See I asked her what her favorite kind was, without telling
her why I wanted to know." He fumbled in his pocket, took out a
letter, and scanned it carefully. He finally located the passage he
wanted, underscored it with his finger. "--and for a bedroom I
like pink, but not too bright a pink, with small blue flowers like
forget-me-nots." He refolded the letter triumphantly, cocked his
head at the walls.
    Aunt
Sarah was giving only' a perfunctory ear. "I got a passel of
work to do yet. If you'll 'scuse me, Mr. Lou, I wish you'd get out
the way. I got make this bed up first of all." She chuckled
again.
    "Why
do you keep laughing all the time ?" he protested. "Don't
you do that once she gets here."
    "Shucks,
no. I got better sense than that, Mr. Lou. Don't you fret your head
about it."
    He
left the room, only to return to the doorway again a moment later.
"Think you can get the downstairs curtains up before she gets
here? Windows look mighty bare the way they are."
    "Just
you fetch her, and I have the house ready," the bustling old
woman promised, casting up a billowing white sheet like a sail in the
wind.
    He
left again. He came back once more, this time from mid-stairs.
    "Oh,
and it'd be nice if you could find some flowers, arrange them here
and there. Maybe in the parlor, to greet her when she comes in."
    She
muttered something that sounded suspiciously like: "She ain't
going have much time spend smelling flowers."
    "What?"
he caught her up, horrified.
    She
prudently refrained from repetition.
    He
departed once more. Once more he returned. This time all the way from
the foot of the stairs.
    "And
be sure to leave all the lamps on when you go. I want the place
bright and cheery when she first sees it."
    "You
keep peggin' at me every secon' like that," she chided, but
without undue resentment, "and I won't git nothing done. Now go
on, scat," she ordered, shaking her apron at him with
contemptuous familiarity as though he were seven or seventeen, not
thirty-seven. "Ain't nothing git in your way more than a man
when he think he helping you fix up a place for somebody."
    He
gave her a rather hurt look, but he went below again. This time, at
last, he didn't come back.
    Yet
when she descended herself, some full five minutes later, he was
still there.
    His
back was to her. He stood before a table, simply because it happened
to be there in the way. His hands were planted flat upon it at each
side, and he was leaning slightly forward over it. As if peering
intently into vistas of the future, that no one but he could see. As
if in contemplation of some small-sized figure coming toward him
through its rotary swirls, coming nearer, nearer, growing larger as
it neared him, growing toward life-size--
    He
didn't hear Aunt Sarah come down. He only tore himself away from the
entranced prospect, turned, at the first sound of her voice.
    "You
still here, Mr. Lou? I might have knowed it." She planted her
arms akimbo, and surveyed him indulgently. "Just look at that.
You sure happy, ain't you? I ain't never seen such a look on nobody's
face before."
    He
sheepishly passed his hand across the lower part of his face, as if
it were something external she had reference to. "Does it show
that much ?" He looked around him uncertainly, as if he still
couldn't fully believe that the surroundings were actually there as
he saw them. "My own house--" he murmured half-audibly. "My
own wife--"
    "A
man without a wife, 'he ain't a whole man at all, he's just a shadow
walking around without no one to cast him."
    His
hand rose briefly to his shirt front, touched it questioningly,
dropped again. "I keep hearing music. Is there a band playing on
the streets somewhere around here ?"
    "There's
a band playing, sure enough," she confirmed, unsmiling. "A
special kind of band, for just one person at a time to hear. For just
one day. I heard it