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

This was when I first looked at her across the table. Candlelight. I’d seen her first in the other room in the glare of bulbs, but there’s a certain dim witchery in Dickering.

She frowned slightly. A little frown of annoyance. She drummed a couple of fingers on the table edge, as if marking time. She smiled awkwardly. Then she started to speak of something else. Her music. Or the time. Something.

“She hates that,” he said matter of factly, when she left us to prepare for the party. “Say it to me about her all you want and I’ll never fight you, but never say it directly to her. Never.” His glance was serious.

“She doesn’t want to be told she’s beautiful,” I said,

“It’s all she’s heard, all of her life,” he said, motioning above us at the sounds she made through the ceiling. “She’s heard it and heard it; do you wonder she’s taken a haired to the phrase? Sure she’s beautiful but give her a rest!

“Tell the truth,” he said, “didn’t you ever wonder how a man like me came to capture her?”

He was right. I am his friend. But he is not a handsome man.

“Sometimes,” I said.

He caught it. “I know,” he agreed. “I wasn’t a tackle like Harding. And I couldn’t talk like Blair could. And l wasn’t tall. I couldn’t even ride horses. I’ll tell you,” he said confidentially, almost paranoiacally, darting a look at the door, “no one was more surprised than I at the Him things suddenly took for me with her. It’s like shooting a gun in the night and finding a bird at your feet. What I did was to say the wrong thing at the right time.”

He enjoyed my puzzlement. “I’d met her half-a-dozen times,” he said unhurriedly, “but I don’t think we said anything to each other at all, not even sounds. To find myself in the room with her was a total loss. Took root in the Door and froze and all that business. And then, this one night I’m speaking of, my luck changed, I was torn from the others, prized like a jewel, and I never understood how it came about myself.”

“The thing yon said,” I reminded him. “You said it was something you said.”

“Yeah,” he replied. “It wasn’t even to her; she wasn’t supposed to hear it at all. This was a party one night, given by Blair’s sister. I would have liked to have taken her there. But every other man in the room say twenty of them was taking her instead. I got there and she was surrounded, and I was paralyzed, as usual. Taxidermy, you know. I moped around there on the edges, wondering why I was there at all and why I didn’t find an ugly girl and take her home.

“Then, the resentment came over me. The unfairness of fate, and all that. I got mad at my own fear. And I got angry at her. It was the sulks sour grapes. I shoved my hands in my pockets, and I turned my back on all of it.”

“The remark, now. It must have been something.”

“No. That’s the whole point. It wasn’t. It was uncalled for, ungallant, and a perfect lie, but” — he rapped the table with his fist — “it did the trick. What l said, loud and disparaging, to another outcast next to me was, ‘Ah, what’s so wonderful about her? I’ve seen better looks on rag dolls!’

“There was a silence. He didn’t believe me. Suddenly, she had thrust her way through all of them and was coming toward me. She was coming to me. Smiling like an angel.

“ ‘You interest me.’ she said. ‘We should know each other.’

“Four months later, we were married.”

But how long. I wondered, could the glamor of insult last? One insult in a lifetime of adoration. They had been married over four years. “And now?”

“The smart man makes his courtship the bedrock of his marriage. If the coinage has been flattery, then he must never falter. If, in my case it happens to be the opposite, so then I must never lose interest; never fail her with some caustic little comment that will reach her heart. It is one’s duty as the man who loves her.

“So, now, even when my knees are weak at her sight. I manage to say, ‘You’ll do, but then you cannot be expected to look much better than that, the weather is so miserable tonight.” Or, ‘Yes, it is a pretty dress but I’ve seen others in it I like better.’ I shrug. I scratch my nose, I turn away indifferently. And then she comes quickly after me and kisses me in sheer delight. ‘Oh, how original you are.’ she says, ‘how unique, how different from all the others I used to know. I have the one husband in the world who can make me truly happy!’

“You have to keep them interested. You must remember the little things they like so well.”

And he solemnly dropped one eyelid at me in the wink of a knowledgeable husband.

“It’s hopeless. Christine,” he called up to her. “The material isn’t there. So just come on down, will you? You’re making us late.”

And he winked and winked again.

I’d hardly made a cent that whole year. Or for that matter the one before, or the one before that. The Depression had become stabilized by this time. It was now accepted as a permanent condition. The sharp downgrade had come to an end, and it had leveled off, but with that had also ended all the earlier hopes of an upturn, of a magic-wand dismissal, of a just-around-the-corner mirage of a picture-postcard goddess called Prosperity spilling roses and gold pieces indiscriminately out of a brimming cornucopia. People had given up hoping. It was now a part of everyday existence, and everyday existence is the most difficult thing of all to change; all the emperors, kings and conquerors have found that out. It was the Present, it was the Thirties, you couldn’t have one without the other. Even the songs were tinged with it. “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”; “I’ll never be the same, Stars have lost their meaning for me—”; “No more money in the bank—”; “Potatoes are cheaper, tomatoes are cheaper — For the first time, love, in this context, ran a poor second.

As the new decade plodded dejectedly on, holding an apple for sale in one hand, an upturned hat in the other, it became hard even to remember the time when there hadn’t been a depression. That time was legend, not reality anymore. There’d been a time when there’d been Indians and colonists. There’d been a time when the states warred against each other.

So too had there been a time when you went to parties and speakeasies. And the only thing that mattered, if you were a girl then, was to wear the shortest possible haircut and the shortest possible skirts. And if you were a young man, to know the greatest number of speakeasies so long and so well that you were called by your first name there and admitted on sight when the small grille first opened and an eye looked out at you, without having to present one of those meaningless, ubiquitous little cards that seemed to be floating around by the thousands and said, “Charlie sent me,” or “John,” or “Joe”; only the uninitiated had to do that any longer, by the time the period reached its crest. That was for visitors, out-of-towners, strangers, and even they were seldom refused. Even a policeman would now and then drop in, not for purposes of inspection — for he was on their payroll, so to speak — but to have a friendly drink; and on one occasion at least, at which I was present, to sing “Silver Threads Among the Gold” in a beautiful baritone for the entertainment of the other customers, who then passed around the hat.

During the twenties, there was always money around somewhere near at hand, somehow. If not right in your pocket, then over in your room, or your apartment. If not in your apartment, then around at the bank. If not around at the bank, then in some friend’s pocket, until there was once more some around at the bank. Never a matter of more than a few days or a week at the most.