Read Online A Young Man's Heart by Cornell Woolrich - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Cornell Woolrich
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used to return on. In Blair’s horrified sight they resembled chains, bonds of exile. Giraldy, never dreaming that anything so commonplace as these tickets could inspire thoughts so tragic in anyone, wound them up and returned them to his pocket.
He had not mentioned the date of their departure. Blair began to dread the evenings and the dinner-hours, never knowing which one would call forth the implacable mandate, fearing each of them in turn was to be the last, only breathing again when the hour for the train had come and gone with Giraldy’s after-dinner cigarette. He became almost animal-like in the way he watched every move on his father’s part until the leisurely sifting of shadows over the face of the world made another day’s respite a certainty. Each turn of a fork, each movement of the lips, that might betoken a phrase about to be spoken, loomed significant, then wavered, ebbed away, to be followed by the next, leaving him no time to steel himself, no time to emerge from the slough of masochistic misery into which he had somehow plunged. He was in a constant panic, eating without recognizing the food he touched, directing furtive prayers along each visible sunbeam, like so many pneumatic tubes, until it seemed that the vacillating sun sank through sheer weight of his importunities. Then the sense of reprieve that came with the violet of twilight, knowing that the lighted evening train was already hurrying down to the coast by now and there was nothing more to fear from it. At least another day’s security had been granted him. Another radiant morning, another silvery noon.
He would escape as quickly as possible from the table, scene of so much unguessed misery the past quarter of an hour, and go to his room, to hug his victory to himself. People came to the house or Giraldy went out, but Blair remained in his room, satisfied with the little that had been granted, content to be alone. He went to bed at the earliest possible moment, as though to hurry the new day forward, overlooking the fact that in its train, inseparable, would come evening again, and a renewal of the microscopic agonies. Once he took a pencil and wrote in English on the wall, “I was so happy here,” behind the head of the bed, where it could not be noticed.
The end of the month drew near, and as he counted the days off on his fingers, until only the fingers of one hand remained, then four, then three, then two, he was lulled into a false sense of security. So many evenings had now gone by, dreaded in anticipation, harmless in realization, without any edict of departure coming from Giraldy, that gradually the whole affair began to assume an aspect of the mythical. It had been so long in happening that presently it seemed it would never happen. Even the occasional presence of Mile. Reynaud, familiarizing herself with the house, added nothing to his worry. The very railway tickets themselves, though he knew them to be already purchased, had no place in Blair’s new scheme of complacency. Besides, were they not kilometrics, as good next month as this, or for that matter, a year from now?
Then when he least expected it, on the next to the last day of the month, his father stopped in his room before leaving the house in the morning to awaken him with a hand on his shoulder and say, “Blair, have your things together when I get home, we’re taking the train to-night.” Blair sat up after he had gone and clasped his reared knees, and somehow there was none of the dismay he had expected to feel.
The pitch of anxiety had been reached and passed, the event no longer held the same sting in it for him it might have had had it come sooner. It was like an actor, shorn of its dramatic entrance because it had missed its proper cue.
He dressed slowly, making a rite of it, telling himself over and over this was his last day here. And when he reached the point of tying his necktie, and had already matched its two ends and tied it, he deliberately
He had not mentioned the date of their departure. Blair began to dread the evenings and the dinner-hours, never knowing which one would call forth the implacable mandate, fearing each of them in turn was to be the last, only breathing again when the hour for the train had come and gone with Giraldy’s after-dinner cigarette. He became almost animal-like in the way he watched every move on his father’s part until the leisurely sifting of shadows over the face of the world made another day’s respite a certainty. Each turn of a fork, each movement of the lips, that might betoken a phrase about to be spoken, loomed significant, then wavered, ebbed away, to be followed by the next, leaving him no time to steel himself, no time to emerge from the slough of masochistic misery into which he had somehow plunged. He was in a constant panic, eating without recognizing the food he touched, directing furtive prayers along each visible sunbeam, like so many pneumatic tubes, until it seemed that the vacillating sun sank through sheer weight of his importunities. Then the sense of reprieve that came with the violet of twilight, knowing that the lighted evening train was already hurrying down to the coast by now and there was nothing more to fear from it. At least another day’s security had been granted him. Another radiant morning, another silvery noon.
He would escape as quickly as possible from the table, scene of so much unguessed misery the past quarter of an hour, and go to his room, to hug his victory to himself. People came to the house or Giraldy went out, but Blair remained in his room, satisfied with the little that had been granted, content to be alone. He went to bed at the earliest possible moment, as though to hurry the new day forward, overlooking the fact that in its train, inseparable, would come evening again, and a renewal of the microscopic agonies. Once he took a pencil and wrote in English on the wall, “I was so happy here,” behind the head of the bed, where it could not be noticed.
The end of the month drew near, and as he counted the days off on his fingers, until only the fingers of one hand remained, then four, then three, then two, he was lulled into a false sense of security. So many evenings had now gone by, dreaded in anticipation, harmless in realization, without any edict of departure coming from Giraldy, that gradually the whole affair began to assume an aspect of the mythical. It had been so long in happening that presently it seemed it would never happen. Even the occasional presence of Mile. Reynaud, familiarizing herself with the house, added nothing to his worry. The very railway tickets themselves, though he knew them to be already purchased, had no place in Blair’s new scheme of complacency. Besides, were they not kilometrics, as good next month as this, or for that matter, a year from now?
Then when he least expected it, on the next to the last day of the month, his father stopped in his room before leaving the house in the morning to awaken him with a hand on his shoulder and say, “Blair, have your things together when I get home, we’re taking the train to-night.” Blair sat up after he had gone and clasped his reared knees, and somehow there was none of the dismay he had expected to feel.
The pitch of anxiety had been reached and passed, the event no longer held the same sting in it for him it might have had had it come sooner. It was like an actor, shorn of its dramatic entrance because it had missed its proper cue.
He dressed slowly, making a rite of it, telling himself over and over this was his last day here. And when he reached the point of tying his necktie, and had already matched its two ends and tied it, he deliberately
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