124
PARTISAN REVIEW
More drinks. Another assault-though Lutz was gentler. For Ida
O'Shey was weakening. Lutz allowed his hands to be stayed with mere
gestures.
And it had been at about that time, as Lutz helped her from the
room, with her leaning on him and wheezing most piteously, that the
faintest glimmer of a realization shone through to me, a realization
which Lutz missed completely at the time and even now, as his words
knocked about the room, whapping the walls and ceiling like great
. bats, while the dog suited individual sat staring off, obviously no
longer listening. Lutz's words slowed and at last ceased. Abbott and I
stared at each other.
"It's your fault. You should have told me she was coming. Why
did you have to
trick
me? Don't you see that this calls for more than
damned literary trickery and ... "
He was already speaking. "Why were you so rude-and so damned
cruel? "
"Because I thought she was you."
"What? You thought I .. . ?"
"In disguise-you! But worse still, you didn't warn me that she is
dying."
Abbott came across the room. I thought he was going to put the
bite on me again. I was too done in to resist. But he reared up with his
forefeet on my chest and panting his dog breath in my face (a gruesome
meaty smell, with cigars, liquor, and onions) he said, "Dying? Speak
up. Now's no time for mumbling. Dying?"
"There's no doubt about it. She's dying. It's a certainty."
He dropped to all fours . "I didn't know. How could I have
known?-she didn't mention it in her letters."
"Just as in your letters you failed
to
warn her that she should
expect
to
find a fellow in a... ." But I trailed off.
Abbott slowly crossed the room and sat by a chair. Remembering
himself, he jumped up into it and sat staring down. His mouth opened
in that wide awful grin.
"I. ... "
His voice cracked. "I don ' t know.... "
When he tried again he uttered a strange thin sound, not the whine of a
dog, though I suppose to an outsider it would have sounded like a
fairly normal dog whine, but a nasal
iieeee
drawn out until, rising, it
grew looser, plaintive, undeniably canine. He slumped out of the chair
and, lifting his head, his mouth no longer hanging open in that
panting grin but drawn down the muzzle in a pucker, he howled, and
so convincingly, so awfully, that in spite of myself I shuddered and felt
a prickle up the back of my neck as the howl echoed down the halls and
through the empty rooms.
