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

Heads turned all over the room, but since Don couldn’t be seen by most of them from where they were, they thought the girl was the solo participant in the accident and they went back to their own concerns.

The girl was the first one to pick herself up. Too fearful of the anger and recrimination that she was sure were coming to show any anger herself, she scrabbled about on the floor re-collecting the schooners. She stood them aside. Then she began to apologize and placate Don even before he was well out of his unlucky lair.

“Och, gentleman, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t help. I didn’t see you down there, was under my face the tray.” And all the while, though no beer had been spilled, she kept making little half-furtive, half-ingratiating dabs and passes at him, as though to dry him off.

He rose to his feet very slowly, unnaturally so. Absently, in a far-away manner, as though his thoughts were on some other time and place.

His face was shockingly pale, almost livid, Marie saw. Then, as she watched it, the color began to come back, rising in almost visible gradations like something seen under a slide, until he was the hue of a red plum. At first she thought it was slowly mounting anger, and couldn’t understand why it should reach such intensity because of what had after all been only a grotesque but not too grievous accident. But the dark, taut lines of anger weren’t on his face, so she knew it wasn’t that. Then she thought it must be embarrassment, deep mortification, at being made a spectacle of in front of a whole roomful of people. But the wavering, hangdog look of that wasn’t there either. Then suddenly she recognized it for what it was. She didn’t want to believe it even then, but there was nothing else for her to do but believe it.

He was excited. He had been stimulated beyond the point of reticence, or secrecy, or even of control.

He looked at the girl, looked at her thick blonde braids.

Then he picked up the tray from where she’d set it aside, and he thrust it toward her, to try to force her to take hold of it. “Again!” he said with a sort of quiet fierceness. “Again!” But she backed away a step, fearful and misunderstanding. She thought he was threatening her, challenging her, as if saying: Do that again and see what happens to you. Try that again and I’ll get you fired. All she could do was stand there and keep shaking her head from side to side, mutely and helplessly.

Once more he stepped closer, once more offered the tray. “Again, I say. Again, hear me?”

But the girl had reached the breaking point, couldn’t take any more. She backed her hand against her open mouth in a sort of terrified awe. “He must be crazy!” she said to no one in particular. Then she turned and fled stompingly down the aisle, sobbing loudly and looking back at him first over the one shoulder and then a second time over the other.

Marie had risen to her feet. “Don!” she said, in a sickened, choking voice.

He didn’t hear her. He saw a blonde silting with a man in the booth immediately adjoining the one he and Marie had been in, and he launched himself toward her. “Then you!” he importuned her desperately. “Come on, then you!” She squealed, half in alarm but half equally in hilarity, and edged away along the seat until her back was against the wall. The man with her aimed his leg at Don and tried to kick him with it. “Get away from here, you bum!” he growled. “Whatta you been drinking?”

Across the aisle there was a brunette. On her his eye rested only briefly, then passed her by. He made his way toward another blonde farther along the row of booths.

The place was in an uproar by this time. People started throwing things at him, crusts of roll and empty cardboard cigarette-boxes and rolled-up napkins, the way you bait a stray dog. Several women across the room stood up on their chairs to be able to see what was going on over the heads of others. And intermittently the tray clanged out, as someone, beery and cruel, entered into the spirit of the thing.

Marie by this time was running for dear life to get out of the place, but even so she wasn’t granted the mercy of a fast exit, for he and the milling people around him were blocking the near aisle, and she had to cross the room and run down the aisle on that side, seeing it and hearing it and living through it that much longer. She had no pity, had no compunction, but still as she ran the anguished thought flitted through her head: “Oh, the poor tortured clown! His agony making others laugh.”

She ran up the entrance-steps and onto the sidewalk, and turned, which way it didn’t matter, and kept on running, until at last she had to stop to get her breath back. And with her panting breaths came sobs — the death-rattle of what had once been love.

Behind her somewhere there was a momentary upsurge of hubbub as a door opened and then crashed closed, and when she turned to look he was lying sprawled across the sidewalk.

He got up on one knee and called out to her, “Marie! Wait! Don’t run out on me! Don’t leave me!”

“Geddaway from me!” she shrilled back rabidly. “You’re queer for paddywhacks!” And again she ran, ran until he was out of her sight and out of her life.

At last when she couldn’t run any more she slowed to a stumbling walk, and then came to a halt altogether, her shoulders hunched defensively against a wall. After a while she took out a cigarette and lit it.

Presently she moved on from there. Her cigarette was gone now, and her happy ending was gone now. And her trust in God’s plan was gone too.

She didn’t know where she was, but that didn’t matter, she wasn’t lost in that way, only the other. She didn’t want her job any more and she didn’t want her room any more, they’d both become too closely associated with him. He already had some of his clothes in the latter. A great blanket of hopelessness, twilight-gray and clammy-cold, settled down over her, blotting out every light in the world.

She came to a halt again, like something that has run down, and just stood there numbed, gazing down at the sidewalk before her.

In a little while footsteps passed her, but she didn’t raise her eyes. They slackened, then they stopped.

“Hello, sister,” a man’s voice said with a soft slur.

“Hello, mister,” she answered dully, and kept on looking down at the ground, waiting for him to come alongside her.

Nothing moved but the laced strings, like yarn, toiling above the two cigarettes left pointing together tip-to-tip, like a smouldering kiss, from opposite rims of the little clay dish. Nothing moved but a carbonated bead, hindmost of the long procession, straggling upward in the residue in one of the glasses, to find the surface and its own extinction.

Then she put the arrested comb back, into the hand-bag where she’d found it. Then she took the lipstick out, made just two strokes, once to, once fro. Then she put the lipstick back.

Her hand stayed on a moment, hidden down there. Finding nothing.

She just glanced at me for a moment in quizzical inquiry. Unreproachful, accepting the fact, but merely wondering about it with her eyes.

I answered her in kind. Shook my head slightly.

“Not that way, any more,” I said quietly. “You see, I’m starting to fall in love with you, myself.”

Why he wanted to kill him need not be brought within the compass of this story. It would drag it too far back — through too many long, brooding, rancorous, and sick-minded years for it to be cohesive. And a story must have a concise starting point, otherwise it becomes just a formless loose-leafed casebook. All that need be said is that he wanted to kill him, he did kill him, and he botched it — and now let the story begin.