A Young Man's Heart by Cornell Woolrich Read Free Book Online Page A

as the flash of lightning that appeared to have precipitated if all? One slept where one had always slept, for months, for years. And then suddenly Giraldy, dispossessing him in the middle of night to make room for Estelle. And Estelle, in turn, intruded upon by Giraldy, to be coerced into a return. It was like a child’s game, that even he and Mariquita would have scorned at their present stage of growth. And yet he was not so utterly naive as to take all this at its face value and not sense an implication of indecency lurking somewhere about it. Giraldy’s facein the doorway just now had been too youthful, the eyes too bright and liquid. For a little while the air had throbbed with magnetism, with a secretive excitement, instinctively recognized as unbenign, that had touched Blair without enabling him to grasp the meaning of it. There was a game for Greater Children going on about him, and he could not discover what it was.
    “He doesn’t understand,” Estelle was saying. “I couldn’t go back—now. Why does he think I left him two nights ago, Blair?” she said confidentially, yet speaking as though he were not there at all, eyes staring at the wall above his head. “I was sitting there by the window, and the rain came on”—she described what she had seen to him— “above that pink wall facing us, the one you and the girl know so well, the lightning seemed to run along the top of it. Oh, it was so bright I thought it would put my eyes out. And some of it came down the side and ran into the ground. It made a cross. It stood there for a moment. I saw it.”
    He believed she had seen it; uncompromisingly, enthusiastically believed she had seen it. And, uninitiated into the art of splitting hairs, because he believed she had seen it, he believed it had been there to see.
    “When you see a cross like that, what does it mean?” he asked.
    She smiled in a dreamy, far-off way, ineffably indulgent toward him, toward herself, and toward all others. “It means you have found out more about yourself in one minute than in all the years of your life before.”
    He pondered this and, unable to assimilate it, relegated it to the cryptic. He realized, too, that the old woman could have given him a much more meaty explanation. She was well versed in all the branches of symbolic lore: dreams, shooting stars, coffee grounds, tea leaves, etc. “There is going to be a death,” she would have said. “There is going to be a birth.” “There is going to be an illness.” Or something of that sort. Something definite and practical, at least. Blair was disappointed in Estelle for neglecting so rare an opportunity in divination.
    “He can’t be expected to understand,” she said. “I’ve already broken up his home once. Now, it seems, I am doing it again.”
    Blair visualized overturned chairs and shattered crockery, dismembered bedding and curtains torn from their racks.
    “When did you?” he said interestedly, “when did you break it?”
    “When your mother left,” she said.
    “When you got married and came here with us?”
    “Sasha is still your father’s wife, Blair,” she said slowly, “we weren’t married.”
    Extravagant disappointment was all he could feel at first. A terrific sense of anti-climax took hold of him. The Children’s Game stood revealed—and took a paltry aspect. It was no more than like entering a forbidden room, than like stealing jam from a pantry behind someone’s back. Was this what they had occupied themselves with? Only this— where he would have liked to unearth mysteries, plots, gallant stakes, heroic roles? Grownups seemed unworthy of their estate.
    “Then you’re only our friend?” he added disappointedly.
    “I’ve been no one’s friend, least of all my own,” she said. “Enough harm has been done—a little good won’t be amiss.”
    When next he opened his eyes, she was still sitting there in the kitchen, drinking a cup of chocolate the old woman had just prepared for