XIX
Blake did not look up as he heard the door open and the woman step into the room. There was an echo of his old-time theatricalism in that dissimulation of stolid indifference. But the old-time stage-setting, he knew, was no longer there. Instead of sitting behind an oak desk at Headquarters, he was staring down at a beer-stained card-table in the dingy back room of a dingy downtown hotel.
He knew the woman had closed the door and crossed the room to the other side of the card-table, but still he did not look up at her. The silence lengthened until it became acute, epochal, climactic.
“You sent for me?” his visitor finally said. And as Elsie Verriner uttered the words he was teased by a vague sense that the scene had happened before, that somewhere before in their lives it had been duplicated, word by word and move by move.
“Sit down,” he said with an effort at the gruffness of assured authority. But the young woman did not do as he commanded. She remained still standing, and still staring down at the face of the man in front of her.
So prolonged was this stare that Blake began to be embarrassingly conscious of it, to fidget under it. When he looked up he did so circuitously, pretending to peer beyond the white face and the staring eyes of the young woman confronting him. Yet she ultimately coerced his unsteady gaze, even against his own will. And as he had expected, he saw written on her face something akin to horror.
As he, in turn, stared back at her, and in her eyes saw first incredulity, and then, what stung him more, open pity itself, it came home to him that he must indeed have altered for the worse, that his face and figure must have changed. For the first time it flashed over him: he was only the wreck of the man he had once been. Yet at the core of that wreck burned the old passion for power, the ineradicable appetite for authority. He resented the fact that she should feel sorry for him. He inwardly resolved to make her suffer for that pity, to enlighten her as to what life was still left in the battered old carcass which she could so openly sorrow over.
“Well, I’m back,” he announced in his guttural bass, as though to bridge a silence that was becoming abysmal.
“Yes, you’re back!” echoed Elsie Verriner. She spoke absently, as though her mind were preoccupied with a problem that seemed inexplicable.
“And a little the worse for wear,” he pursued, with his mirthless croak of a laugh. Then he flashed up at her a quick look of resentment, a look which he found himself unable to repress. “While you’re all dolled up,” he said with a snort, as though bent on wounding her, “dolled up like a lobster palace floater!”