Into the Night

No further doubt was needed, no question remained about that. He had loved her with the true eyes of love, which for each man see one thing, one thing only, and pass by all the rest and all the others.

She took that home with her and thought about it. Whatever it was he had done to her, it hadn’t been done from lack of love, but in the fullness of love.

Returning home one night after she had been out with him — their evenings spent together numbered upwards of six or eight by this time — she took off her things, put a wrap over her, and sat down at the desk to think things out, to analyze what she had of him so far.

She knew the externals of his life by now almost as well as one person can ever know those of another. Even had he been her husband. His boyhood hobby with the camera, his early knocking around before he found himself, his final success and fulfillment in his chosen work, he had told her all about that. But the injury to Starr lay somewhere in the inner, private life that he had not told her about.

Whatever it had been, it had been within the framework of his love for her, of that there could be no doubt. It had been an offense, an outrage, of love, and not of hatred or ill-will. This should have simplified it greatly. How innumerable are the harmful acts you can commit against someone you dislike; how few those against someone you love. But it didn’t.

She picked up a pencil, finally, and a piece of paper, and tried to draw up a list of possibilities, to help her thinking powers along. She had a great predilection for using a pencil to help crystallize her thinking. She would have made a good draftsman.

Alcohol: Completely ruled out. He had none of the telltale signs about him, which are so easy to read. He drank even more slowly than she did herself. He invariably left the bottom of his glass still holding liquor in it. He hadn’t attained the status of even moderate social drinking. He was an occasional social drinker, the first stage above complete abstention.

Narcotics: There she was on obscure ground. He had none of the traces, but she was no expert at divining them, either. She thought momentarily of the play he had taken her to see. Was there some sort of an inkling there? But then she dismissed it as unfair, it had been simply a coincidence. Or rather, since there was nothing for it to coincide with, a random occurrence. In any case, arguing that he had been an addict himself, what then would have been the attraction in going to see such a play? He would have known the life so well, why go to see a reproduction of it? He would have been more likely to shy away from it, if only to spare his own guilty conscience. Finally, she recalled, he had seemed as unfamiliar with the specialized slang used in the play as she was herself. And there was no reason to think this was an act.

A criminal record, or some past criminal offense: This didn’t seem to fit him at all. True, she wasn’t naive enough to expect criminals or lawbreakers to go around looking like criminals, or to carry a sandwich board on their chests reading: “I am a criminal.” And true again, she had heard it said that often as not some of the worst people in this category were, at home with their families, gentle, devoted, considerate, even more so than the average run of husbands and fathers. But when all this had been duly allowed for, the fact remained he didn’t fit into the picture at all and the picture didn’t fit him.

The simple, tightly knitted little story of his life he had told her need not have been true, of course. He could not have been expected to reveal some serious criminal act or criminal way of life to her on such short notice. But it was so plausible, so artless, so uncontrived from beginning to end that it didn’t seem likely he had left anything out. In other words, it was too monotonous to be anything but true. If it had been rigged, it would have at least been more colorful. And there wasn’t a chink, a gap in it, in which to insert, to wedge, some major off-law experience. Almost, you might say, there was no room in it. It was as though every day, pretty nearly every minute, had been accounted for in that brief, unmemorable, but somehow simpático saga of his thirty years that he had given her.

She knew this man pretty well by now. There wasn’t violence in him or she would already have glimpsed it, no matter how hard he tried to keep it from showing. That is to say, violence on the grand scale, beyond a mere swear word and punch of a fist. He’d never lived by violence, and he’d never done violence. And above all else, he lacked that sharp acuteness that is needful to criminality. He was a simple man. He was good at his work, but personally he was simple, uninvolved, uncomplicated. Just a run-of-the-mill Joe, with camera fingers, loaded with good nature and goodwill and deathlessly loyal in his love.