Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 5 (1925-11).djvu/66

640 times party', and they were exactly like this woman's clothes; the same sleeves, shirred in two places and with a wide lace ruffle at the elbow, and the skirts gathered all the way around the waist, and the same bolero jacket effects, and little ruffly things; and she wore her hair in the same little smooth waves like Auntie’s pictures; and her face was small and sweet, and she spoke in a soft, thin, rustly little voice; and little things were so important. I remember she had some spots on the shoulder of her gray traveling suit—there, you can see them in the picture, that carnation lei doesn’t quite cover them;—and she wouldn’t send it to the cleaner’s for fear he would spoil the dress; but she must wait until she got home, so that she could take them out with some sort of a cleaning fluid that her grandmother had given her the recipe for. And the spots worried her so; she kept dabbing at them with her handkerchief as if she could wipe them off."

The man shifted his position. The woman was again dropping scarlet seeds one by one, through her fingers into the scarlet pool on her dress. The man watched them, strangely. Then he covered his eyes with his hand. "Go on," he said.

"She wasn’t young—thirty-four or thirty-five, I should think; and for all that her face was sweet and happy, yet she always had an expression of— of—." The woman hesitated.

"Of waiting!" said the man.

"Yes," said the woman; "that was it, always an expression of waiting—patiently, not anxiously,—just waiting, as if it had grown to be a habit. I think that is all there is to tell. I talked to her now and then, and she was always ready to talk, in her quiet, quaint little way; and sometimes she would be a bit embarrassed and her thin, white little hand would go up to her coral necklace; such an odd, old-fashioned necklace made of festoons of tiny red coral blocks caught together here and there to hold the many strands in place, and a curious large pendant of overlapping coral leaves. It must have been very old. She said it had belonged to her grandmother."

"You talked to her often?" asked the man. "What did she talk about?"

"Oh, I don't remember. She was the kind of woman who never says anything to be remembered. We just talked."

"And the man?"

The woman tossed a handful of scarlet seeds into the air, to fall back and slide down among the others. "Of just the same period," she said. "Twenty years back. He had a sort of drooping mustache and wore his hair brushed up like Uncle's when he was married. And his trousers were too short and too tight, and the toes of his shoes were thin, and his neckties were—funny."

"Did they tell you where they came from?" asked the man.

"Why, yes, from the Orient, I told you. They had been around the world."

"I mean, what was their home town?"

"Oh, I don't remember. I don't know that they ever said;—but I think that it was a small Middle West town somewhere in—Ohio—Illinois—I don’t know."

The man sat still with his eyes shaded. The woman arranged the scarlet seeds in patterns on her dress where it drew smoothly over the knee. The surf washed softly up the sand and slid silently back. The little children had gone away and the shadows of the coconut fronds were long and very quiet.

Presently the woman spoke. "Well?" she said.

The man was silent for a few minutes longer; then, without lifting his shading fingers, he began.