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

That was enough dialogue for a few pages — he had to get into some fast, red-hot action.

There weren’t any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet. The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower. The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thin gray ghosts, in a good cause; the mortality rate was terrible.

His train of thought, the story’s lifeline, beer-lubricated but no whit impeded, flashed and sputtered and coursed ahead like lightning in a topaz mist, and the loose fingers and hiccuping keys followed as fast as they could. Only once more, just before the end, was there a near hitch, and that wasn’t in the sense of a stoppage of thought, but rather of an error in memory — what he mistakenly took to be a duplication. The line:

Hands clutching her throat, Pearl tore down the street in her violet evening dress streamed off the keys, and he came to a lumbering, uneasy halt.

Wait a minute, I had that in in the beginning. She can’t keep running down the street all the time in a violet evening dress; the readers’ll get fed up. How’d she get into a violet evening dress anyway? A minute ago the guy tore her white blouse and revealed her quivering white shoulder .

He half turned in the chair (and none too steadily), about to essay the almost hopeless task of winnowing through the blanket of white pages that lay all around him on the floor, and then recollection came to his aid in the nick of time.

I remember now! I moved the beginning around to the middle, and began with the package at the door instead. (It seemed like a long, long time ago, even to him, that the package had arrived at the door; weeks and weeks ago; another story ago.) This is the first time she’s run down the street in a violet evening dress, she hasn’t done it before. Okay, let her run.

However, logically enough, in order to get her into it in the first place, he X-ed out the line anyway, and put in for groundwork:

“If it hadn’t been for your quick thinking, that guy would have got me sure. I’m taking you to dinner tonight, and that’s an order.”

“I’ll run home and change. I’ve got a new dress I’m dying to break in.”

And that took care of that.

Ten minutes later (according to story time, not his), due to the unfortunate contretemps of having arrived at the wrong café at the wrong time, the line reappeared, now legitimatized, and she was duly tearing down the street, screaming, clutching her throat with her violet evening dress . (The “with” he had intended for an “in.”) The line had even gained something by waiting. This time she was screaming as well, which she hadn’t been doing the first time.

And then finally, somewhere in the malt-drenched mists ahead, maybe an hour or maybe two hours, maybe a dozen cigarettes or maybe a pack and a half, maybe two bottles of beer or maybe four, a page popped up out of the roller onto which he had just ground the words The End , and the story was done.

He blew out a deep breath, a vacuum-cleaner-deep breath. He let his head go over and rest for a few moments against the edge of the table. Then he got up from the chair, very unsteadily, and wavered over toward the bed, treading on the litter of fallen pages. But he had his shoes off, so that didn’t hurt them much.

He didn’t hear the springs creak as he flattened out. His ears were already asleep...

Sometime in the early morning, the very early early-morning (just like at home), that six-year-old of the neighbors started with that velocipede of his, racing it up and down in front of the house and trilling the bell incessantly. He stirred and mumbled disconsolately to his wife, “Can’t you call out the window and make that brat stay in front of his own house with that damn contraption?”

Moody struggled up tormentedly on one elbow, and at that point the kid characteristically went back into the house for good, and the ringing stopped. But when Moody opened his blurred eyes, he wasn’t sitting up at home at all; he was in a hotel room.

“Take your time,” a voice said sarcastically. “I’ve got all day.”

Moody swiveled his head, stunned, and Joe was holding the room door open to permit Tartell, his magazine editor, to glare in at him. Tartell was short, but impressive. He was of a great age, as Moody’s measurements of time went, a redwood-tree age, around forty-five or forty-eight or somewhere up there. And right now Tartell wasn’t in good humor.

“Twice the printers have called,” he barked, “asking if they get that story today or not!”

Moody’s body gave a convulsive jerk and his heels braked against the floor. “Gee, is it that late—?”

“No, not at all!” Tartell shouted. “The magazine can come out anytime! Don’t let a little thing like that worry you! If Cora hadn’t had the presence of mind to call me at my house before I left for the office, I wouldn’t have stopped by here like this, and we’d all be waiting around another hour down at the office. Now where is it? Let me have it. I’ll take it down with me.”

Moody gestured helplessly toward the floor, which looked as though a political rally, with pamphlets, had taken place on it the night before.

“Very systematic,” Tartell commented acridly. He surged forward into the room, doubling over into a sort of cushiony right-angle as he did so, and began to zigzag, picking up papers without let-up, like a diligent, near-sighted park attendant spearing leaves at close range. “This is fine right after a heavy breakfast,” he added. “The best thing I could do!”

Joe looked pained, but on Moody’s behalf, not Tartell’s. “I’ll help you, sir,” he offered placatingly, and started bobbing in turn.

Tartell stopped suddenly, and without rising, seemed to be trying to read, from the unconventional position of looking straight down from up above. “They’re blank,” he accused. “Where does it begin?”

“Turn them over,” Moody said, wearied with so much fussiness. “They must have fallen on their faces.”

“They’re that way on both sides, Mr. Moody,” Joe faltered.

“What’ve you been doing?” Tartell demanded wrathfully. “Wait a minute—!” His head came up to full height, he swerved, went over to Gertie, and examined the unlidded machine closely.

Then he brought both fists up in the air, each still clutching pinwheels of the sterile pages, and pounded them down with maniacal fury on both ends of the writing table. The noise of the concussion was only less than the noise of his unbridled voice.

“You damn-fool idiot!” he roared insanely, looking up at the ceiling as if in quest of aid with which to curb his assault-tempted emotions. “You’ve been pounding thin air all night! You’ve been beating the hell out of blank paper! You forgot to put a ribbon in your typewriter!”

Joe, looking beyond Tartell, took a quick step forward, arms raised in support of somebody or something.

Tartell slashed his hand at him forbiddingly, keeping him where he was. “Don’t catch him, let him land,” he ordered, wormwood-bitter. “Maybe a good clunk against the floor will knock some sense into his stupid — talented — head.”

She used to come into the casino every evening at the same hour to play. And every evening she lost. She was said to be a countess, but nobody seemed to know her name. She was always followed by her maid, carrying a knitting-bag stuffed with upper-bracket banknotes and a little book in which to enter the evening’s results. Which were always the same, anyway.