Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“Look, cake, how about this one? I thought it up on my way to work this morning.”

“Show us it.”

“Tum tum, te ta ta,” said Carfare Connie with great gusto.

“Yeah,” he said, “I see what you’re driving at. Only look — tum tum, te ta ta — doesn’t that work out better?” Giving his version of it.

“Yeah, you’ve got it ezactly; that’s ezactly what I meant.” And a girl has to care a good deal for someone before she’ll let him change her pet ideas to suit himself.

Now there were six Lucilles all in a row until one was sent out on the road and there were only five. Lucille was one of those musical comedy heroines who have to wear gingham and tickle dust-mops and scrub floors in the first act, but then in the second act they bob up all covered with sequins and grab the nearest millionaire’s son and sing a song all about a platinum lining. And everybody goes home happy.

In this case everyone went home happy except poor Lucille herself. Lucille hated being sent on the road. It put her in bad humor for weeks and weeks at a time. She missed her gorgeous roof bungalow with its mirrored bath, she missed her Hispano-Fiat with its little green baize card table. She missed her borzoi with its concave stomach. Lucille in this instance was Mimi Travers of New York and Philadelphia, but decidedly not of points west. The whole trouble was the producers seemed to think otherwise. All day long on the train she said things about them not meant for little children to hear; and when night came she sat in her dressing-room with shoes scattered all about her and delayed getting dressed for the performance until the curtain of that particular theater was three quarters of an hour late and the stage manager threatened to wire New York. Then she slapped on a make-up helter skelter at the last possible moment and made them omit the “Primrose Path” number from the second act, saying she was fed up on it and didn’t give a damn.

And it was this same evening that Wally Walters came north along River Street looking like a million dollars going somewhere to get itself squandered. A brand new electric sign caught his eye and he paused to reflect upon it, giving the dimes, quarters, and halves in his pocket a vigorous shaking up.

The lights went on and off, on and off. There was something fascinating in the arrangement of the letters. Lucille, the Hit of Hits. Lucille. What a pretty name. He stood in line to buy a ticket, the six brass buttons on his powder-blue Norfolk gleaming in the light of the lobby — that powder-blue Norfolk that was the pride of his silly, disordered life, that he always wore to the Rainbow on Saturday nights and to the chop suey palaces. And though he wasn’t exactly thinking about her just then, there was always this girl in a castle of dreams and bubbles in his heart — which was a good heart as hearts go but all smothered with confetti.

He walked down the aisle to his seat just as the overture was getting under way. A girl in an upper box smiled when she caught sight of him and made some comment to an older woman beside her. He imagined she wanted to flirt with him, so he treated her to one of his studied gazes of approval and smiled wickedly out of the corners of his mouth. For a few seconds she returned his look with impudent disdain; then she and the older woman both laughed in his face. The lights went out like a whip and he sat down, wondering what had been the matter with those two.

The curtain went up on a sea of legs — the musical comedy had begun. Five minutes, ten minutes, twelve minutes passed. It progressed well beyond the first half of the first act with still no sign of Lucille. Who was she anyway, Wally wondered. What was she waiting for, what was it all about?

Up on the stage a garden party was in progress. A bevy of girls with parasols and aigrets and lorgnettes and feather fans made shadows play up and down their legs. They stood in battalions and fluttered their fingers from their feet up over their heads. Then all at once he saw her.

She was in the midst of them. The spotlight picked her out. She was like a guinea-pig among peacocks and flamingoes. Her hair was drawn back into a knot at the top of her head, the way they draw them in the comic strips, and there was a ridiculous little hat perched on top, stabbed with a long pin. Her stockings were red and white wool, striped like sticks of peppermint candy. She had on impossible shoes that buttoned half way up her calves — yellow shoes. She had a little old Irish terrier under her arm; it had been trained to try and get away from her and she had to struggle with it to hold it. The people screamed with laughter. The auditorium fairly rocked with it. It dashed itself against the footlights like spray, wave after wave of it. In the balconies people were standing up to get a better view of her.

But Wally Walters never cracked a smile. He sat there staring out at Lucille’s pitiful talcumed face, her clownish face with its blued-in eyes and its blacked lips. The stage beauties circled about her, gorgeous with Titian hair and peach bloom make-up. They studied her through lorgnettes and flicked her with their fans and turned their shoulders on her in contempt. They drew back, leaving her standing alone. Even the little terrier had abandoned her at the first opportunity. There was a hush. A thick shaft of very white light fell on her, powdering her ridiculous padded leg-of-mutton shoulders. She began to sing. She sang about a castle of dreams and how it had come tumbling down. And there was nothing left, she said, nothing; she spread her hands and let them fall sidewise with a slap and sobbed drily deep down in her throat. Then she went shuffling off in her absurd shoes and striped stockings, and on her way out she pretended to trip over something. That brought the entire house down again.

But Wally couldn’t laugh, somehow. He knew how it felt; you bet he knew how it felt. His eyes were stinging him. He pulled his hat from beneath the seat and went trudging up the aisle. People wondered why he was leaving so early. Once he looked back over his shoulder. She hadn’t come out again. They were doing a Charleston to the little tune she had sung so wistfully; they were clodhopping among the ruins of her dream castle. It didn’t matter to him that she was to come back later with a diadem in her hair and paradise tufts on her shoes. He knew how it was when you felt that way. Who would know better than he, always hungering for something out of reach — and not cake either. He stood out in front of the theater, looking aimlessly up the street without seeing anything. He lit a cigaret and tried to pretend that it was the smoke getting in his throat that made it so dry.

He went home to his room — the “budwa” he called it — and lay on the bed, shoes and all. It was a true image of his life, that small room. Disarranged, meaningless, pitiful, choked with trifles, trying hard to be gay but sad at heart. There was a picture of a motion picture actress, Clara Bow, clipped from a magazine and pasted to the wall. There was a tambourine hanging on a nail and a gilt false-face hanging from its elastic on another. There were girls’ telephone numbers scribbled everywhere although the landlady was furious about it. On the dresser there was a ten cent store doll with blue cotton batting for hair; someone had penciled a mustache along its upper lip. There was in addition a nickel-plated pocket flask lying on its side, a feathered bamboo tickler from one of the Chinese restaurants, several menus, a bottle with a little hair grease turned rancid in the bottom of it, and the remains of a package of cigarets. Also a copper ash-tray with chewing gum stuck to it, and one of orange clay with collar buttons and a toothbrush in it.