It was in the dark hall that she told him she would leave her door open. He was not quite sure of what she said, but the welcome which his lips and hands received reassured him.
Nor was his assurance shaken when he met Maria at the head of the stairs. But he was puzzled. Even his slight knowledge of Italian sufficed to make clear that she was delivering a physical warning, not a moral reprimand. The morals of her lodgers were none of her affair, she kept saying; or were the repetitions merely within his brain? That was nonsense, but it was what she said. At least he thought so; la morta was “death,” wasn’t it?
He was still puzzled when she went away, and looked curiously at the little gold cross which she had pressed into his hand with such urgent instructions.
Giuseppe and Maria were not puzzled when Mr. Hancock’s companion was not in her room the next morning. She was, in fact, nowhere in the pension; and Giuseppe advanced the theory, with which Maria agreed, that she was nowhere in Italy.
They were only slightly puzzled when they found Mr. Hancock’s body on her bed. There were no clothes outside his flesh, and no blood inside. Nor was there a trace of blood anywhere in the room.
Although they jointly resolved that even her liberal payments could not induce them to accept Mr. Hancock’s companion as a guest again, Maria’s conscience felt clear when she found the small gold cross in the hall where Mr. Hancock had obviously tossed it in scorn.
You see, he was not superstitious.
The Tenderizers
It was the Pernod, of course. It must have been the Pernod.
Much though I have come to love that greenish-milky potable gold, I am forced to put the responsibility upon the Pernod, or to believe.
Let me first make it clear (to myself) that I am not writing this to tell it to anyone, and above all not for sale and publication. I am simply setting this down to make it all clear to myself (hypocrite lecteur) and above all to convince myself that it was the Pernod.
Not when I was drinking the Pernod, certainly. Not there in the bright promenade deck bar with the colored lights behind the bottles and the bartenders playing cribbage with each other between orders and a ship’s officer and a girl trying to pick out singable show tunes on the piano. But the Pernod was (well, then, the Pernods were) in me later on that isolated deck in the thick fog when the voice that I should not have recognized.
To be sure, there had been queer moments before on the trip—that trip so nicely combining tourism with occasional business with editors and publishers in such a manner as to satisfy the Internal Revenue Service.
There was that room far down in the Paris Opera—Charles Garnier’s masterpiece—which so surpasses in opulence and eeriness even The Phantom of the Opera. A room that I stumbled on, that nobody seemed to visit during intermissions, a big small room that would have seemed a ballroom in a lesser edifice, where some of the walls were walls and some were mirrors. And I walked toward a mirror and saw myself advancing toward myself and then realized that this could be no mirror. The advancing man resembled me strongly; but I was in a tourist’s ordinary best dark suit and he was in white tie and tails, with a suggestion of the past (la belle epoque? Garnier’s Second Empire?) in his ruffled shirt and elegant sash. I moved toward him, smiling to acknowledge our odd resemblance; and then I was facing myself and it was a mirror and the bell rang and in the second intermission I could not find that room.
And there was that moment in the Wakefield Tower, that part of the Tower of London which houses the Regalia of the Kings and Queens of England. I was marveling at the Stars of Africa and realizing for the first time the true magic of diamonds (which exists in those that only potentates may own) when I felt the beads of a rosary gliding between my fingers. I knew a piercing pain, and as I all but lost consciousness, I heard a grating croak of which I could make out only the words . aspiring blood . . .” Then I was calmly looking at diamonds again and stepping back to read the plaque stating that tradition says that here the devout Henry VI was slain at his orisons in fourteen blankty-blank. With my ears still feeling the rasp of the words which Shakespeare attributed to his murderer, I prayed for his gentle soul.
And these episodes were without Pernod (brandy at the Opera, tea at the Tower), but there is no denying the Pernod (the Pernods) when I visited, late at night, the sports deck of R.M.S. Queen Anne in mid-Atlantic.
The deck was deserted. I like the open decks at night, in any weather save the most drenching; but the average passenger (wisely? I now wonder) huddles by the bar or the dance orchestra or the coffee-and-sandwiches or the bingo.
The deck and I were the nucleus of a cocoon of fog, opaque and almost colorless—white, one might say, in contrast to the soiled fog/smog of a city, but more of an intensely dense absence of color. Absence of form, absence of movement—a nothing that tightly enswathed.
We could be in the midst of a story by William Hope Hodgson, I thought, recalling with a pleasant shudder some of the tales by that master of horror of the sea.
I settled myself in a deck chair. Even with my eyes closed I could
