I HAVE NOTHING to say about this story other than that it is a kind of masterpiece and that I wish I could have written it…
but only a Fritz Leiber is equal to this material.
Of the many mysteries surrounding the supreme narrator of mysteries, two stand out. The first concerns his works; the second, his life, or rather its last days. (1) Were the tales of Edgar Allen Poe only freakish fantasies, at best brilliant trips into psychopathic areas of the mind, almost completely unrelated to his cultural milieu and the America of his times? — as many American critics have asserted. Or did they have profounder meanings? — as European critics, who rate Poe and Mark Twain as America’s two outstanding literary geniuses, have suggested, in particular Poe’s French disciple Charles Baudelaire, who first discovered Poe’s writings in January, 1847. (2) On September 27 1849, Poe left Richmond, Virginia, capitol-to-be of the Confederacy, for a short visit to New York, going by way of Baltimore and Philadelphia, in which latter city he had some literay business. On October 3 a friend who was a physician discovered him intoxicated and mortally ill in a Baltimore tavern, hence he was taken to Washington Hospital, where he died after four days of delirium from which no account emerged of the missing five days. What happened and why?
Gaslight flared on white washed brick filmed with soot. Skirts swished against gritty slate sidewalks. There was the small skip-skop of heels, the occasional rap of a cane’s furrule, and the large klep-klep on cobbles of the iron-shod hooves of horses dragging creaking carriages. Everyone was hurrying a little. There was a hint of autumn chill in the air. And a feeling of aggressive pride and self-confidence. Bracing. Quickening.
The woman looked younger than she was, though queenly. At first sight you might have taken her for a tall slim schoolgirl, no older than the Carlotta of Belgium who would marry the ill-starred Maximilian of Austria, lose her Mexican empire and husband and sanity all at once and live on for 60 more years. But then you would have noticed the woman's slender maturity. She was dressed in gleaming black rep from neck to wrists and toes, yet she showed a gray silk ankle as she walked. She wore gloves of black lace. Her face was very pale, but gay, yet her large dark eyes had a strange dispassionate distance in them. Her glistening black hair was centrally parted in the style of the times, but flared out into the suggestion of a raven’s wings.
The man looked older than he was, at least as years are reckoned by an insurance agent. He too was pale and darkly clad, wearing a black alpaca coat. His sunken eyes looked permanently but rather beautifully blacked by the invisible punches of life. Yet there was a jaundness to him, a power of romance, however desperate. He wore a white shirt and black string tie, and across his upper lip a modest straight mustache.
As they hastened along, not with but near each other, the man sighed very softly yet shuddering and gently grasped the woman’s elbow and said, “Madamoiselle, may I have the honor of buying you a drink?”
She jerked, but chiefly with her chin as she turned her face toward him. With a marked French accent she said, “Sir! You startled me! I did not hear your footsteps.”
“Nor I yours. At first I thought you were a spirit.”
“And you dared accost me! But see, sir, it is only that I wear caoutchouc over-slippers, as I now perceive you do yourself.”
“Madamoiselle has answered one question brilliantly. Now the other. My invitation.”
“Six! You are very forward.”
He stared at her with a gloomy smile, not quite apologetic, and answered, “I don’t believe I’ve ever been forward in my life, not even with my late wife. You remind me of her — Virginia was very young — and also of the heroine of my story Ligeia, where a beloved wife returns from the dead.”
Her nostrils flared, but her expression was still merry. “You Americans are all very forward. And you cry your own wares.”
“I’m a mere hack, a pen-pusher,” he replied with a slight shrug. “A scribbler of stories which my critics tell me are too strained and trilling, too fantastical, to bear rereading or warrant imitation. But it’s true we Americans are supposed to be forward — great hustlers and good at diddling.”
“What is that, pray?”
“The art of out-sharping the other man when money is at stake. I once wrote an article on the topic.” “Then I suppose you are very expert at the practice yourself.”
He shook his head, the barest swing of his gaunt cheeks. “My parents were actors and so presumably fakers and good diddlers. Yet I don’t recall that I ever did a successful diddle myself in my whole life. I work for such pittances as magazines and lecture-goers disburse.”
Hard French practicality showed for a moment in the woman’s gaze. She said, “As for making money, I see no harm in that, but merit.” The other smiled, showing dark teeth a little, and lifted a sardonic left eyebrow. “Ah, but suppose a whole nation were bitten by a gold bug. There might be danger then, a sort of fever, a dancing madness.” “You are refering, sir, to the recent gold discoveries in California?”
“No, madamoiselle, only to another story I wrote.”
“Pen-pusher! Scribbler!”
“As you say, and as I said before you. But I perceive across the street the lamps of the family entrance of what is a reputable tavern. Not Sadler’s, but sufficient.”
As they crossed, there came ponderously dashing around the corner ahead, through the gas-fumey murk, a great dray drawn by two huge black horses. Its wheels creaked thunderously on the cobbles, the heavy empty barrels added their gloomy note, while from the whip of the dark, big-shouldered drayman there came a series of loud cracks.
The last crack came quite close to them as they gained the opposite curb, and the woman lifted a hand protectively, though since she did not flinch, the gesture had the appearance of a command.
She said, as soon as the great noise had passed, “What is it, sir? You are shaking, you have grown pale as death. Yet the dray missed us by several yards. Did it perhaps remind you of some dreadful experience in battle? The sounds were indeed somewhat like distant cannonading and nearby musketry.”
“No, madamoiselle,” he began shudderingly, speaking on the indrawn breath. “True, I was once enrolled at the U. S. Military Academy, but expelled because I deliberately absented myself from call. But ever since, beginning faintly even at West Point,” and here his white face took on an agonized look, “I have heard that sound of incessant cannonading. Now faint, now thundering close. I have heard it with the inner ear in Baltimore, Washington, Fredericksburg, New York, Providence, Philadelphia, and this Richmond. I have seen faces red-lit and blood-streaked by broad daylight on peacefull-seeming streets. I have seen them grinning with hate where others perceived only smiles. I have flinched from the imagined, dreadfully real flash of bayonets and rifle-fire. I have heard the screams of the wounded, the jeers of the conquerors, the snarls of the vanquished, the groaning of caissons, the roaring of fires comsuming cities. And always, faint and far though near in nightmares by day and night, that endless cannonading.”
Now sweat dripped down his face, his cheeks twitched, his eyes blinked incessantly, while the palsied trembling of his hands if anything increased, as if he were about to have an epileptic seizure. The woman moved to sooth and restrain him, but was held paralyzed by his hypnotic glare. Without pause he continued, “Oh, and I have written stories about it, I have pushed my pen on many dreadful journies. Metzengerstein, the apotheosis of a great cavalry charge into a flaming hell. The Masque of the Red Death, where a dire sickness of blood, of streaming wounds, stalks a nation and resistlessly enters the highest homes and stills the most riotous gayety. The Tell-Tale Heart, where the cannonading becomes the ticking of a tortured heart that will not die in the body of a floored-up murdered man. William Wilson, in which brother pursues with relentless secret hate and stabs down one closer than brother. The Cask of Amontillado, wherein supposed friend walls up friend alive and the cannonading sinks to the soft thud of brick into mortar. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, where an undiscoverable giant anthropoid wrecks horrid and senseless destruction on the innocent. And The Pit and the Pendulum, all fiery iron and flashing, hissing, inescapable steel.”
His speech broke off into gasps which swiftly diminished in volume. His trembling gradually moderated, his cheeks and eyelids grew still, and his eyes lost most of their glare.
“Oh alas, sir,” the woman said with feeling, “you are cursed with a sensitivity like my poor brother’s. Perhaps you have the dreadful gift of premonition. These horrible phantasms of war which haunt you may refer to an impending conflict. Is it possible that the Mexicans, though beaten last year, may attack your land and this time successfully?” “No, something closer.” He shivered slightly and blinked his eyes, now as one who returns somewhat wondering to reality. Then he frowned. “But I fear you are correct that is premonition. There are preternatural sensitivities which we wish were madness, but are not.”
“But what nation, if not Mexico?” the woman pressed. “Surely you do not suggest that the British would attempt to reconquer their great colony more than a quarter century since they burnt Washington?”
“Something closer, I said.” The glare increased again in his eyes and he struck his stiffly white-fronted bosom. He whispered, “As close as my heart. Look deeply as I have into the gas-lit faces in the streets around us, in the streets of any American city, and you will see a carefully disembled maniacal hatred, a hooded yet furnace-red glare…”
He broke off. As if in obedience to a mesmerist’s command, the woman had begun to look with blank eyes into the various shadowed and high-lit faces of the throng eddying around the island-of-two which they constituted. This grotesque and theatrical action seemed to recall him fully to reality. The visionary glare ebbed entirely from his dark-circled eyes, a comic light momentarily flooded them, his gaunt features assumed a courtly and attentive demeanor, he pressed the woman’s elbow, and said. “Your pardon. In pursuing my wild and witless fantasies, I churlishly allowed hospitality to be chased from my mind. It is time and more that we partook of the refreshment which I suggested.” And he steered them toward the doubly lamp-lit white doorway decorated with faint arabesques of gilt.
“But sir, will your strength permit it?” the girl protested anxiously. “Your pallor. Your shivering. I had begun to fear you were suffering with some fever or other malady requiring the attention of a physician.”
“No disease which a drink will not cure,” he assured her with a quirking smile and ushered her through the doorway which had meanwhile been open by a bobbing and upward-grinning Negro dressed in red jacket and dark trousers that came to mid-calf. “While life itself is a fever.”
“My brother champions the same theory,” she murmured somewhat puzzledly as other drak faces preceded them with obsequious and fawning smiles to two chairs upholstered with red plush and facing each other across a small round table draped with snowly linen.
The man looked around at walls papered in dark red, trimmed with gilt, topped with a red fringe, and mellowly candle-lit.
“No mirrors. Good,” he said with a sharp nod, then explained, “I detest looking at my own face, especially when I have a companion with features fair as yours to gaze upon.” Then, as the woman bent her raven-tressed head and demurely lowered her long-lashed, faintly blue-veined eyelids, his voice became very businesslike. “And now may I suggest a sherry flip? I have discovered that an egg mixed with liquor or wine moderates its intoxicating fire while adding desirable nutriment.”
“Yes, you may, sir,” she said, looking up with a pleased smile. “Oh, you are most wise, sir. My poor brother, though no older than I, has already a frightening affinity for one of the most maddening of liquors. You will yourself partake of a sherry flip?”
Changing neither expression nor tone of voice, he said, “No. Blackberry brandy,” then added somewhat more loudly but without looking toward the departing waiter, “in a claret glass.”
Then for a while he gazed quizzically, almost teasingly at her saddened features. He asked, “You find me something of a paradox? — a Sphinx, an Angel of the Odd, an Imp of the Perverse?”
“A little perhaps, sir,” she confessed gravely. “But what are those last two?”
“Titles I have scribbled above stories,” he replied, brushing his mustache with a thumbnail. “Last three.”
She smiled as if against her will, shaking her head slightly and raising for a moment her hands clad in black lace, as if to say, “You are too much for me, sir.” But then her features grew grave again. She leaned forward. Her eyes moved from his toward the doorway by which they had entered, then back again, and she said softly, “What you said about the people in the streets. To me they seemed sane, alert, amiable, even if — your pardon, sir — somewhat uncouth by Gallic standards.”
He did not seem to hear her. He was frowning at the doorway by which the waiter had departed and now he drummed the table impatiently with his thin knuckles.
“Oh sir, do you even remember what you said?” she asked concernedly.
“Alert is the significant word,” he pronounced. “Alert for any morbid sensation. Sniffing for accidents, altercations, murder, horror. Some of them, I assure you, do nothing else, night and day. Consult my The Man of the Crowd, though that in part describes London.”
“But what you said of brother battling brother and friend betraying friend. It is hard for me to believe that could ever happen here, where even bloody revolution took a more moderate, prudent course than in my fierce-minded motherland. During the three quarters of a century of its existence, your new nation has increasingly demonstrated its solidarity, the indissoluble union of its states.”
“There is another story I have written,” he replied, his eyes still on the doorway, his knuckles still lightly drumming. “ The Fall of the House of Usher, wherein a vast, seemingly eternal structure — a veritable stone nation — cracks asunder. Note that Usher begins with the letters U.S. and ends with the feminine pronoun accusative. Alas, madamoiselle, and all appearances to the contrary, this country is moribund, like the man kept alive after death by hypnotism and instantly collapsing into loathesome putrescence when wakened. My story Valdemar. And none of us will escape the terror when it comes — no, not even if we could fly to the moon with my Hans Pfaall. For the madmen run this particular lunatic asylum — my benign Doctor Tarr and kindly Professor Fether.”
“Oh sir, you have written a story for everything,” she told him with laughing resignation lightly touched by mockery.
The waiter had meanwhile trotted prancingly in and placed their drinks before them. Once the man's fingertips grasped the stem of his darkly-filled wineglass, his impatience left him.
“Not a story for the secret of the universe,” he said with a jocularly rueful smile. “Once, after inhaling ether, I thought I glimpsed even that. ‘Eureka!’ I cried out. ‘I have found it!’ And I did make a lecture of it,” he admitted. “But now I doubt the vision. Oh madamoiselle, I am bombarded or bewhirlwinded by scraps and rags and threads of visions, come from I know not where. I weave them into my flimsy word-tapestries. Rarely I know their meanings. Chiefly I conjecture. And I am certain they have millions of meanings I have never dreamt. That poppinjay of a darky who served us this refreshment, it occurs to me now I may have written about him and all his race.”
“That Negro, sir?”
“Yes, that Negro. In another walled-up dead-and-alive story, The Black Cat. And the cat has his ultimate revenge, though it may take a hundred years and more. But away with gloom!” He lifted his glass and said to her over it, gazing at her with admiring, inquiring eyes, “To…?”
She said evenly, “My name is Berenice.”
He lowered his glass an inch. ‘Truly the Angel of the Odd is amongst us tonight. I have written a story Berenice about — But I promised you no more gloom.”
“Oh do tell me, sir, you must. You have ignited my curiosity. And one always desires to hear about one's self.”
“Namesake only, it had better be — about a girl who is visited in her flower-fresh tomb by her lover, who pulls out all her teeth.”
“Faugh! You have an odious mind, sir. Were I that Berenice, I would buy me sharp false teeth and come back from the grave to bite you. I respectfully suggest that your tales are dark and perverse because you attribute your own morbid thoughts to the persons and scenes around you.”
“You have solved my riddle. But recollect, I warned you not to look into that closet, Madam Bluebeard. Once more, away with bloom! To Berenice! To the Berenice across the table!”
She modestly lowered her countenance and then merrily raised her eyes. They took a moderate sip of their drinks, he his dark purple, she her dark yellow one. He had almost returned his wineglass to he table when the muscles of his wrist stiffened, his face grew stern, he returned the glass to his lips and drained it, set it down, rapped out an imperious tattoo, and instantly began to talk animatedly to his companion, his face rapidly flushing and the words rushing out as if he knew he had only a limited time in which to speak them.
“Enchantment rules Richmond tonight. This chamber is the Red Palace and you its queen. Mysterious madamoiselle, saintly Berenice, you are the most beautiful woman I have even known. The Marchesa Aphrodite Mentoni of my tale The Assignation. Sipping not poison, but sherry flip. And I am the most blessed of men, privileged to share your divine company, rather than sup my poison in some lonely red-litten palace of my own. Another blackberry brandy, boy! Wineglass! On the run! Your features are finer than classic, Berenice. Your hair like a raven's wings. I once wrote a poen called The Raven. Popular success. But the critics saw only an exercise in intricate stanzas and far-fetched rhymes. Like my Ulalume, or my Bells. Emerson calls me the Jingle Man. But I diddled them. I said what my critics said before they did! Took the wind out of their sails. But tonight it comes to me — Thank you, boy. Fetch another, straight off. Oh blessed, grape-dark anodyne! It nourishes the nerves, Berenice. Makes sensitivity endurable. Blackberry for black moods. But tonight it comes to me that my Raven is Sam Houston. They call him that, you know. Literal translation of his Cherokee name Colonneh. He had a young bride. As I did. Ran away from her, no one knows why, to live with the Cherokees again. Resigned the governorship of Tennessee to do it. Made Texas a nation. Freed her from the Mexicans. Licked Santa Anna when no one else could. President Lone Star Republic. Fought corruption, fought the Gold Bug. Helped join Texas to the Union three years ago. Believes in Union. Sees what's coming to the South and'll do his best to stop it. Watching, watching, watching. Palladius of Pallas — some state capitol building. Houston's shadow on me, demon eyes too, beak in my heart so I won't forget my guilt — I’m America in that poem. Tell Emerson that! Bet he can't work out a compensation. Tell Lowell too! Put some brandy in his skim milk. Thinks my Raven’s a diddle-bird, the ranting abolitionist! Thanks, boy. Just a sip now, to hold my level. What’s coming to the South? What I told you when we met, beloved Berenice. Wrote a poem about it too. The City in the Sea. And down in the West too. Death enthroned on high. The South is building that city. Own universities, own factories, own everything. But the city'll sink in the iron-and-fire Maelstrom and it’ll all end in death, Berenice. Death! Death fascinates me, you know.”
“Oh sir, sir, sir!” the woman interrupted excitedly. Ever since he had mentioned The Raven she had been trying to break into his monologue, unmindful of his rapid potations and threatening incoherence. “You must be the poet Edgar Poe whom my twin brother Charles admires, nay, adores, ever since he first encountered your writings two years ago. How he envied me my voyage from our native France to this land — he is madly desirous of meeting you. He never showed me your stories. He said they might offend me. But your verse I knew at once. That Raven — his emblem, his obsession. Oh sir, my brother has vowed to devote his life to widening and perpetuating your frame by translating your works and by writing in your manner, so that it will forever be: Edgar Poe, the Master, and the Acolyte, Charles Baudelaire!”
The effect of that last name on the man was extraordinary. He started, he winced as if struck across the face by a whip, then he took control of himself and his speech, so that the three-quarters-filled wine glass stood steady in his forcibly relaxed fingers and his babbling became once more connected discourse. It appeared to require an almost superhuman effort, but he triumphed.
“Yes, I am Edgar Poe, Madamoiselle Berenice. And I am deeply moved that someone of poetic sensitivity in France should find some merit in my poor writings. You are this Charles Baudelaire's sister, you say?” He watched her narrowly.
A rapid nod. “His twin.”
“You sailed here from France?” “Yes, and am shortly to return, taking ship in New YorkCity.”
He nodded slowly and started the wineglass toward his lips, became aware of what he was doing, and returned it until it was once more poised an inch or so above the table. Forming his words with care, he said, “You mentioned a liquor for which your brother has a predeliction. May I ask its name?” “Absinthe, sir. It contains oil of wormwood.”
“Yes. The Conqueror Worm.”
“Also sir, he is, alas, a devotee — he would wish me to tell you this — of laudanum and morphine and their parent, opium.”
Another slow nod. “So true poets and fantasists in France as well as America and England must seek the patronage and protecion of that wondrous and terrible family. I should have known.” An almost cunning look came into his still-watchful eyes. “Tell your brother they are not reliable overlords in adversity.” His countenance, grown pale again, filled with misery. “The princely opium genii whirl the rag-tag visions to us from the ends of the universe, but after a while they whirl them past us so fast we cannot quite glimpse them to remember, and in the end they whirl them away.
“Oh sir, I too admire you deeply and your unhappiness tears at my heart,” the woman said softly yet urgendy, leaning forward and gliding her narrow hand a short way across the table. “Can I not help you?”
He lifted his dark eyes as if seeing her for the first time. His countenance became radiant. “Oh, Berenice, the opiates are sorry, tattered emalion phantoms when matched against the face and form of a supremely beautiful woman and the blessed touch of her fingers.” He laid his free hand on hers. She started gently to withdraw it, he increased the pressure of his, gulped the three-quarters-full wineglass of dark brandy, set down the glass so rapidly it fell over, captured her hand in both o his, and drew it across the table to his lips. “Oh, Berenice.”
The wineglass slowly rolled in a curve across the white linen to the edge of the small table and stopped there.
The man's face had flushed again and when he spoke his voice was almost maudlin. “Beloved Berenice,” he crooned, fondling her hand close to his lips. “Bernice with the raven's hair and the little white teeth. Little Bernice.”
With a strong movement which nevertheless revealed nothing of a jerk, she withdrew her hand from his and quietly stood up. He started to snatch at her departing fingers, broke off that movement almost at once, and tried to stand up himself. He was not equal to it. His ankles twisted together. He started to whirl and fall. He caught hold of the edge of the table and the back of his chair, turning the latter sideways. He managed to get a knee on the seat of the chair and half crouched there, still holding on with both hands and swaying slightly.
The wineglass fell to the floor and shattered, but neither he nor the woman appeared to notice it. The few people at the other tables looked at them. The darkies peered from the doorways.
“Berenice, Im no good tonight,” he said hoarsely, drawing rapid breths. “Can’t take you home. Disgraceful. Wretch. Profound apologies. But I must see you again. Tomorrow. Most wonderful woman in the world. Beauty, wit, laughter, youth, understanding. Come when all hope gone. Tomorrow. I must.”
“Alas, sir, I depart from Richmond tonight on the first stage of my journey back to my brother.” Glass crunched faintly under her black caoutchouc over-slippers as she walked around the table toward the doorway. Her face was very grave. “I thank you, sir, for your entertainment.”
He reached out to catch her elbow as she passed him and he almost fell again. “Wait. Wait,” he called after her, and when she did not, he cried out with a note of spite, “I know one thing about you. You’re not Berenice Baudelaire. That’s a lie. Profound apologies. But you’re a diddler. Charles Baudelaire hasn’t got a full sister or brother. Let alone a twin.”
She turned slowly and faced him. “How can you know that, sir?”
He winced again as he had when she had first spoken the name Baudelaire. Finally he said in a husky, ashamed voice, “Because I got three letters from Charles Baudelaire about a year ago and never answered them. Told me all about his life. Only child. Praised my works. Understood better than anybody. But I never answered them.” A tear ran down his cheek. “Lunatic vanity or resentment. Imp of the Perverse. I kept them in my coat pocket for months. Get all creased and dirty. Lost them in some tavern. Probably reading them aloud to somebody.” His voice became accusing. “That’s how I know you’re not Berenice Baudelaire.”
She returned a few steps. She said to him, “Nevertheless, Charles Baudelaire did have a twin sister, whose existence was kept a strict secret for reasons which I may not divulge, but which concern the Due de Choiseul Praslin, patron of Charles’ father.”
He turned completely toward her, both hands gripping the back of his chair now and his knee still on it, with the effect of a stump. Whenever he tried to put down that foot, he’d start to fall, and he was swaying more now despite his support.
“Lies. All lies,” he said, but when she started to turn away again, he quickly added, “But I don’t care. I forgive you, Ber’nice. Makes you more mysterious and wonderful. Ber’nice, I must see you tomorrow.”
She said without smiling, without frowning, “Alas, sir, I must tonight begin my return to France.”
He stumped forward a step like a cripple, sliding his chair and once more almost falling, swaying worse than ever, and said, “But you're sailing from New York. Couple days I’m going to New York City myself. By way of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Going to New York to close my cottage and bring back Muddie, who’s my aunt and poor Virginia’s mother Mrs. Clemm, so she can — ” He hesitated, his eyes blearing, and then poured out, ‘Tell you everything. — so she can be here at my wedding with Myra. Myra Royster. Mrs. Shelton. Childhood sweetheart. Old woman, old as I am. Doesn’t mean anything. Only you, Bernice. We can meet in New York. What hotel you be staying at?”
She said to him gravely, “But sir, you do not know me. We met less than an hour ago. How can you be certain that on another day and perhaps in another mood, you will desire my closer acquaintance? Or that you will care for me at all when you know me better?”
“I know I will. Only you.” His eyes were glazing as he implored, “Tell me who you really are, where you’ll be. Or don’t tell me, I’ll forget. Write it down, then I’ll remember. Write down your real name, the hotel you’ll be staying at in New York.”
She looked at him compassionately, a lovely figure in her black rep that glinted in the candlelight, which also glistened on her swellingly-parted raven’s-wing hair and made mysterious her more slim than classical pale face and her great dark eyes with the forbidding yet alluring, distance in them, those eyes that while giving absolute attention to the man, still seemed to look at all the world.
Then she turned, saying, “Alas, sir, I cannot meet you in New York City,” and walked glidingly and silently toward the outer door.
Slipping to his knees on the floor, but still clinging to the chair, the man cried piteously after her, “Tell me your name and where. Who really are you, Bernice? Virginia come back? Sarah Whitman lost your curls? Mrs. Osgood in your Violet Vane dress? Annabel Lee? Madeline Usher? Aphrodite Mentoni? Morelia? Ligeia? Eleanora? Lenore? My Ber’nice? Really Ber’nice Baud’laire? Don’t leave me. Plea’ don’ lea’ me — ”
She turned again, and as she faded back through the doorway, which the bobbing darkie opened and closed, her lips shaped themselves in an infinitely tender, utterly infatuated, truly loving smile and she called out clearly, “Never fear, my dear. I will meet you once again, sir. In Baltimore.”