A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

His little Dauphine, as small as a youngster’s play-automobile, had been facing the wrong way, just as he had left it when he arrived. She heard the door slap after him as he got in, and then it came backwards toward her a little, then shifted and gushed forward into a sweeping street-wide turn, and lurched away in the opposite direction. She just stood rooted there at the bottom of the apron-like entrance-steps, under the glass-and-iron door-canopy, staring into the empty space it had left behind it. Around her in the stillness a disembodied cry still seemed to linger, like an echo, like the ghost of dead love, faint and far-away. “I love you—” Above her, facile and fickle and having no heart, the glitter of stars that had seen too many loves die in this town to care about one more.

Boniface was putting on his things to go out, when she turned and went back inside again.

“It didn’t go well?” was all he said to her, in an understanding undertone.

Her face gave the answer.

“There is always the next time,” he tried to console her.

She answered dully, more to herself than to him: “There will be no next. This was the first time. This is the last.”

“I’ll probably go directly to the office in the morning,” he told her. He probably had a complete wardrobe of clothes — wherever love was. And why not? she asked herself. It made more sense than to have it here. “See you at dinner tomorrow night.” And he chucked her under the chin, much as one would a little girl who one suspects will be up to all kinds of mischief the minute one’s back is turned. “Bonne chance.” Good luck.

Boniface had a gun. He’d gone and she was in his room now. She looked at it as she took it out of the desk-drawer. He’d had it ever since the Liberation, that was when she first had seen it. The counter-breakthrough in the Ardennes had just taken place, and for a few breathless weeks it seemed likely that Paris might be occupied all over again. Which would have brought on a panic-exodus even worse than the one in 1940. Because now people knew what to expect. And in 1940 she had been robbed of all her jewels on the clogged, impassable roads, literally had had them taken from her at gun-point by her absconding chauffeur in full view of scores of people, too indifferent to care about this trifling personal misfortune in the midst of the whole world’s collapse.

“In case those gentlemen should come back, I want to show you how to use this,” he’d said. And he had shown her. During the Occupation, in conversations among themselves the French had a habit of referring to the enemy as “ces messieurs,” those gentlemen, in order to keep the topic more or less under wraps.

Boniface, then, had a gun. She stood looking at it now as she held it in her hand. So this was the thing you killed a man with.

She turned and left the room, and went down the stairs and outside to the street, swaying as if she were intoxicated. And she was intoxicated, but not with alcohol, with being rejected and jealousy and the will to revenge. Not crying out “I love you!” this time.

When the complex of emotions that make up the nerve-center known as love are inflamed adversely beyond a certain point, there is only one release, one outlet, one cure for them: anything else would fall short. And this is: the killing of the culpable loved one. In other words, love turns into death.

And in every case where the woman is the avenger, bringing this retribution, it is always the man she directs it against, never the other woman. There are valid psychological reasons for this. He was the one she loved, not the woman. He had the power of choice, of decision, not the woman. (The wish must come from him, or else there is nothing. Unless he wishes her to have him, she cannot have him.) And finally, the other woman is herself, acting as she herself might very well do, barring a few minor variations in ethics or in circumstances. What one woman does in love, all other women are capable of doing as well; all that prevents them is the lack of necessity for it.

So the death-wish and the death-act go out to him, and him alone. And rightly so, justly so, according to all the statutes of love. The injury has come from him, not the other woman. She merely has profited by it. She has simply stepped into the vacuum that his defection left there.

She went along the street until she reached a lamppost, and stopped by it and stood waiting there in its light (in order to make herself more easily distinguishable) for a taxi to come along. Like a loitering vendeuse, only not one selling love.

When one finally stopped for her, a few yards along, she ran down to where it was standing and got in. breathing fast with the effort, and gave him Gilles’ address, on Boulevard Suchet.

“Yes, madame,” he said tractably, and started off with her.