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

He made some mention about sending there for references, but in the meantime Marie went right to work. The references never appeared. Either the store had gone out of business long before, or the inquiry never reached it, or the answering letter became sidetracked somewhere in the piled-up files of the huge organization and just lay there inert. Marie stayed on.

After she’d been with them about seven months, the woman she was working under, who had been married the statutory number of months before, took a temporary leave of absence because of climactic pregnancy, and Marie was moved up into her place in the interim. The former manager never returned — either she gave up work or was sent to manage some other store — and Marie kept the job permanently.

So that all within the space of less than a year-and-a-half she had obtained a small but responsible managerial job, was working in surroundings that were pleasant and predominantly feminine (an important point in her case), had an attractive small-apartment unit of her own, and was leading the secure, conventional — and colorless — existence of the typical big-city bachelorette. Which was pretty good advancement, she told herself whenever she felt downhearted or whenever she felt lonely, for a girl who had come up literally from the bottom.

Such were the main facets of her outer, day-by-day life, its canons, scope, and practice. As for her inner one, her dreams and hopes and aspirations — ah, therein lay the gist of the matter. She was a romanticist, an idealist, she lived in a world of illusion. For her, a straight line ran down the middle of the world. On one side all was black, on the other all was white. She thought perfection existed in this world. In love. She thought it could be found, could be had, even by such as she. A story-book love was waiting for her somewhere along the way. A story-book love with a story-book ending. And she was so naive, so unversed in non commercial love, she refused to compromise, to make any allowances. It must come to her letter-perfect, freshly minted, and go on like that unchanged. “They lived happily ever after.” It had never occurred to her what unhappiness, boredom, and misery could result from that.

Then one night she met a man. The man.

Her life had fallen into a pattern, as all lives do. Every evening she left the candy-store at six, and took a bus over toward where she lived. But the bus didn’t actually pass by there, and so she was left with a gap she had to walk. Close by the bus-stop there was a restaurant, and she usually stopped in there first and had her meal before continuing on her way. Then from there, when she’d finished, she’d walk the rest of the way home. Along this final stretch however there was a neighborhood picture-house, a very nice picture-house really. Not too expensive, and it showed quite good pictures at times, even though it was merely second-run.

One Thursday, which was the day the weekly change of program took effect, she stopped when she got to it and started to scan the stills displayed out front, to try to ascertain whether or not it was something she might care for. The title was noncommittal, and though the people in it were good, you couldn’t always go by that either, she realized. She disliked mysteries, Westerns, and gangster-pictures, and on the other hand was fond of musicals and romances, the more saccharine the better.

As she bent forward peering intently, trying to judge from the scenic details in the background what type of picture it was, a voice quite close to her said:

“It’s good. I seen it.”

Caught off-guard, she turned around in surprise before she could prevent herself from doing so.

The man’s face had all the anonymity of the crowd in it; she couldn’t have described him even right while she was looking at him. He was standing almost close enough to touch her, but with his back to the stills, facing toward the sidewalk, while she was turned the opposite way.

There was something clandestine about their reversed positions, but he was the one imparted it.

She turned her head away instantly, but the damaging acknowledgement of awareness had already been made.

“I think I seen you before someplace,” he said. Haven’t I?”

This time she rigidly kept from looking at him. By now all thoughts of entering the theatre had left her. She was afraid he might follow her into the darkness inside, and she would be worse off than out here on the open street. She had heard of cases of people being knifed in places like that.

Her onward way, however, lay toward him, not away from him. She backed away from the ill-omened stills, therefore, and circled around him, keeping at as wide a distance as possible. But he moved out in turn and once more blocked her way.

He peered intently square into her face.

“Sure I have,” he said with grim satisfaction. “And I know where now too.”

Her voice wouldn’t come at first. She kept shaking her head frightenedly, without any voice.

“Don’t tell me I haven’t,” he insisted. “I used to visit that place reg’larly once a week for almost a whole year. I seen you up there plenty. Often enough to remember you. Maybe you don’t remember. All them faces every night. But I do.”

Something cold went through her. Cold and clammy. She supposed it was fear. It was a sick kind of fear, though. A curdling kind of fear. She had never felt anything like it before. The past seemed to come rolling back over her, like a surge of dirty water.

Her voice finally came. But fright throttled it to a half-whisper, a half-moan. All she could say was, “No. No. No.”

The fright showed on her face, and he knew he had command of her.

He seized her by the arm, and she tried to pull away, but all her own efforts were able to do was to make her swing loosely, first over to one side, then over to the other, in what could almost have been taken for some kind of a crazy dance-step.

Then she crumpled altogether. Not physically, but emotionally. The cowardice of the guilty conscience. “Please. Leave me alone. Please. I’ve never done anything to you.”

A few of the people passing by hesitated in their stride. Others just looked back. Then a woman, bolder than any of the men, perhaps because she realized her own immunity as a woman, spoke out. “What is it? What’s it about?”

The man tangling with Marie answered: “She’s a pro. She tried to hustle me just now as I come out of the pitcher. I got a connection with the vice squad.”

Even in the midst of her own stress, Marie could clearly read the two conflicting expressions that appeared on the woman’s face. First there was the natural impulse to go to the aid of a fellow-woman against their common enemy, the male molester. Over and against this there was the instinctive feminine distrust, the willingness to believe the worst of some other woman. As if to say, he wouldn’t dare make such an accusation, unless it were true. The latter prevailed.

She moved away. Respectability turning its back on the tramp.

A man’s voice intruded next. He must have just come upon the scene. She couldn’t see him at first, because her aggressor had her turned so that he was between the two of them, she could only hear what he said.

“What’s the matter, miss, he bothering you?”

The question was inane to the point of silliness, it was self-evident that he was, and yet in what other way could it have been put?

She grasped eagerly at the support, which was the first she had been offered so far. “Yes! Oh, yes, he is! Make him get away from me.”

“All right,” the newcomer said. She could tell this was addressed to the other man, not herself. It was couched as a gruff order, not an affirmation.

“You keep out of this, bud,” the one holding her growled truculently.