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

There were also a couple of subplots to help fill the thing out, in a more or less comic vein. A rich fat maharajah becomes enamored of the girl, though he already has a retinue of vivacious young Parisiennes who follow him around all over, and a middle-aged American lady tourist from the Middle West, also well-to-do and speaking hilarious (I hoped) broken French, mistakes the young man for a gigolo and pursues him almost to distraction.

If all this sounds pretty bad, all I can say is it was. But we are always so much wiser in retrospect, all of us. I would have died to defend its merits then. At least it was no worse than anything else that was to be seen on the screen those days.

The format in which to present it had to be considered. I decided that a shortcut, simply to save myself work, wouldn’t be advisable, would lessen its chances. That a synopsis or outline, what they called a short “treatment,” wouldn’t do any good. I felt it might be pigeonholed and forgotten, as they received literally thousands of such things. Moreover, to avoid later accusations of plagiarism, many of the studios, it was my understanding, refused to accept them, returning them unopened. Therefore, the only sensible thing to do would be to complete it first as a book, to write it out at full, toilsome length no matter how much labor was involved, to try to get it published by a book firm to start with, to give it that much more prestige, attract that much more attention to it, and then to immediately try to sell it from there, perhaps from the galley-proofs alone, without even waiting for formal publication.

This meant, and I knew it well, anywhere from six weeks to two months of the most driving, uninterrupted drudgery, amounting almost to self-immolation. To give up everything else, all thought of recreation. And to continue living in the meantime as I had been doing all the while: scraping along tooth and nail almost without any money to speak of, only nickels and dimes in my pocket. When you look back toward a certain age, two months isn’t long. But when you are that certain age, two months is eternity.

It was a gamble, and a very great one. All or nothing. But I decided to take it. If I didn’t try it, I still had nothing. But if I did try it, and I succeeded, then I had just about everything. The money problem would be over, for years to come. What other choice was there for me anyhow? I asked myself. I wasn’t equipped for anything else. To wait on customers, sell things over a counter, either in a haberdashery or a grocery? There were thousands who could do it much better than I, and they couldn’t get those jobs themselves, jobs like that weren’t to be had. This was the only thing I knew how to do. So I tightened my belt, took a last regretful look at the coruscating, titillating world around me, and sat down and grimly bent to work.

As far as the book-publishing stage of it was concerned, that didn’t worry me too much. I had a promising opening, or at least potential opening, waiting for me there. A man in the editorial field whom I’d dealt with in the past had, just shortly before this, been taken on at one of the smaller publishing houses — probably displacing somebody else, which was the only way it was done at this time. I’d known him in the halcyon days of four or five years before, and then lost track of him until now. I’ll call him Irwin, since I’ve never been sure exactly what part he played in what happened later on, and have no wish even at this late date to do him an injustice. His own first name began with the same capital letter, at any rate.

I’d noticed a little squib about his new alignment in the book notes which the Times habitually ran on its daily book page, and I promptly got in touch with him and told him I’d started working on something. He sounded very encouraging and hospitable, and urged me to let him see it as soon as I’d finished doing it. This of course might have been no more than the ordinary professional courtesy he would have extended to any published author, but I took a sanguine view of it.

There was of course no question of an advance before its completion, and I knew enough not to ask him for one, although it would have solved all my problems beautifully. If the thing was no good, I would have had no way of repaying it, and we both realized it. Publishers weren’t using their money to speculate on anything sight unseen in those parlous days, except in the case of a big name, perhaps, and I was a writer of too dubious a stature to warrant it. I was fairly well known, but on the strength of fairly little accomplished. I wasn’t by any means what could have been called a good risk at the time.

I had everything lined up now, and the rest was up to me. I worked, and I worked, and I worked. I worked in the morning, I worked in the afternoon, I worked at night. I don’t think typewriter keys ever took such a hammering before. Perhaps stenographically, but never creatively.

The spring was advancing, and tantalizingly beautiful days came; there seemed to be an endless succession of them, as if purposely sent to plague me. New York may not be notable for its weather, but when it does turn out a fine day, no place else can top it. And just enough of that first delicate, immaculate green showed through its concrete crevices here and there to put nature’s official seal on the season, adding a decorative touch, like the parsley on the omelette or the mint sprig in the lemonade. Each day had the effect on me of a champagne cocktail: golden and tingling and heady. And I couldn’t even touch it, had to pass it by.

The nights were even more excruciating. To me those long lines of lights that flamed along the avenues as far as the eye could see were never garish (as they probably were) but glamorous, seeming to hold out a promise of wonderment and magic, and I wanted to be out where they were. Everyone else was, in droves; I could see them passing the corner, from my window, in two continuous opposite-moving streams, and there I sat, in a solitary room, locked in the lonely pool of light cast by a desk lamp.

But I wouldn’t leave the desk. I almost had to grab it with both hands and hang onto it for dear life, almost had to hook my ankles around its legs to stay on the chair, but I wouldn’t leave it, no I wouldn’t leave it. Consummation had to come first.

During this whole time I was having a great deal of difficulty with the hotel manager, Mr. Drew. Difficulty avoiding him, I mean. I was chronically anywhere from a month to a month and a half behind in my room rent, and though I paid installments on it as often as I could, the gap was so great that I never could seem to bridge it and bring myself up to date. It was like a sort of hopeless treadmill. By the time I finished up one month, a new one would be over already.

Mr. Drew was a corpulent, apoplectic man and, in my case at least, a great believer in the personal appeal as far as rent-lag was concerned, always accompanied by numerous histrionic gestures such as clapping his forehead and flapping his hands about in a woebegone way. I suppose he had learned by now that all the standard methods, such as reminders from clerks, notations at the foot of bills, and even telephone calls, were of no avail in my case; they weren’t, because there was nothing I could do to remedy the situation myself. He had come up through the ranks in the hotel business, starting first as a waiter, then maitre de, and so on, and I think basically we liked each other, but if we did, no two people who liked each other ever had such a scrappy, turbulent relationship as we.

The hotel had an elevator that used to continue on down below the lobby floor, where the desk was, and bring you out at the back of a drugstore that the building housed. From there you could gain the street, without having to pass the front desk and Mr. Drew’s watchful eye.