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

Of course it didn’t just grow on trees, no. You worked for it. But the work was so easy and the pay was so large. And the working part of the day seemed so short and inconsequential compared to the long, delectable speakeasy nights and dawnings. And if you were dissatisfied with the work (and it was the worker who was dissatisfied more often than those he worked for) you simply went on to another place where the pay was even larger. Only absolute ineptitude or a personal feud with a superior seemed able to cost anyone his job against his own volition. And if you were a writer, or at least an entertainment-writer, such as I had started out to be, you shared in this general run of things. The work was easy and the pay was large.

Those were marvelous times. Not even the time before the French Revolution equaled them in splurge and squander: For then the poor had been discontented. Now there were no poor at all. (Until the bottom fell out of the whole world, and everyone was poor together.)

But all that was long ago, dimmed by the mists of time. Those days had been whisked backward out of the memory as though they had been forty years before and not just four.

And now, it was no time in which to be a writer. Food and shelter were the essentials. They could no longer be just taken for granted, they had to be struggled for now. And thousands had even lost them altogether. Whole families had broken up. The wives and children, because women are less fit for a nomadic life, went back under their parents’ roofs, if they were lucky enough to have parents who still had roofs. To live it out somehow, to bide their time, until the dreadful thing should pass, if it ever did pass. The men built colonies of shacks, of cartons and of packing cases and gasoline drums and whatever they could get their hands on, and drew their drinking water from the nearest comfort station (because they could be sure at least it was sterile there) and got their food standing in endless, dejected lines outside of public soup kitchens and other charitable hand-out places.

These shacks along the river banks, and whatever other public unrestricted ground they were allowed to trespass upon, were commonly called Hoovervilles, in unjust deprecation of the man who had not at all caused the situation but simply inherited it.

No, it was no time in which to be a writer. Magazines were expiring all over, dropping off like autumn leaves falling from trees. Who had time for books, for magazines? Who had the money to waste on fairy tales of a world that had vanished? The two great mutually antipathetic forces in this life have never been love and death, but love and hunger. Whichever gains the ascendancy, the other suffers by it.

No one cared who got the girl in the story anymore. They knew he couldn’t keep her very long, nowadays.

On the other hand, the new times were too new to be written about yet. Those who would write about them a little later on were still busy living them now.

I had given my situation as a writer in these indigent times much thought. I had had to. There was no money coming in anymore, absolutely not a single penny. My last sale had been late in 1932, already nearly half a year back by this time (counting from the check and not the acceptance date, which were not the same thing by any means), to a magazine called Illustrated Love Stories, which had had the great advantage, if nothing else, of being displayed and sold throughout the widespread and popular Woolworth five-and-ten-cent store chain. But even that money by now had fallen by the wayside and was no more.

At the time of the memorable bank closure of February 1933 I had had exactly sixty-one dollars to my name in one of the locked-up banks. This amount I can stake my word on, because I distinctly recall a friend of mine saying he envied me having even that much, as he himself had had only sixteen left in, and then we both noticed that the figures were reversible, that is, interchangeable if turned around. When the banks reopened I quickly took the sixty-one out, mainly because I’d already pledged a good part of it toward my daily needs, and the remainder because I was apprehensive, as many others were, that the banks might reclose again any day as unexpectedly as they had the first time, and I wanted the few dollars out in the open where I could put my hands on them.

By now, about two months later, this sixty-one dollars was all gone, but I’d found various ways of tiding myself over in the interim. There was a beautiful gold watch my father’s younger brother had left me. This was constructed in such a way that I managed to live off it for some time, in the way that you eat an artichoke, leaf by leaf It had two thick outer casings, one on each side, and then two somewhat thinner ones inside, making four altogether. All of the finest purest gold. Its works were heavily jeweled, and then a massive gold fob went with it, such as they had worn in those days.

At intervals which I spaced as widely as I could, I used to take it downtown, near the foot of Wall Street, over toward the river, to an assay office that bought precious metals, and have them carefully pry off one lid, so that the rest wouldn’t be damaged, and have that weighed and sell it to them. I got surprisingly liberal amounts each time, too; when the nineties made something of gold, they weren’t stingy with the gold. Still, I felt bad each time I had to part with some more of it — nostalgic, wistful, penitent — and surprisingly, considering that it was the gift of a man whom I hadn’t seen since my early boyhood.

When the last of it was all gone finally, and only a scrap of black grosgrain ribbon was left to show what it had been, I started in on my books and sold them piecemeal as well. I had a considerable number of limited editions given to me as gifts at Christmastime by the publishers themselves, during the course of the years, all numbered, inscribed, rag-papered, gilt-edged, and beautifully bound.

I used to get a miserable couple of dollars for one of them each time: for a thing which could not have been obtained on the open market at any price. I had a little red-and-black tiered bookcase in my room, and the increasing gaps in its various compartments used to stare out at me accusingly, like wide-open eyes, and I’d want to turn my head away.

Then one night, right after I’d parted with a costly deluxe edition of The Life of Isadora Duncan, I happened to go by a bar. It was one of those bland, springlike evenings that always seemed to stir a longing for recreation even more than at other times. The lights looked inviting, and there was the pulse-beat of music coming from inside. So I went in, and bought a beer, and stood there with it for a while.

Then just as I was about to order a second one, the thought suddenly came to me: This is someone’s life you’re drinking down. Her glories and her triumphs, her aspirations and her strivings, her heartaches and her happiness. Should this be the end result of all that? Is this all she lived for? Is this all the transmutation her life deserves? Cheap rank-smelling beer going down some brash young guy’s gullet? And afterward maybe, in some foul washroom, to turn into something even worse.

How would you like it if, someday after you’re gone, and have left behind you (if you do) just one worthwhile book, one thing you put everything into, one thing to live on after you, one thing to show you’d ever been around in the first place; then how would you like it if some young fellow who never had heard of you, and wouldn’t have cared if he had, stood up one night and did that to your life’s work?

I winced, and put down my glass, and got out of there fast, and I never repeated that again. Not on the proceeds of anyone else’s book, anyone else’s lifeblood, at least.