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

I used this means of escape with great frequency until, as Drew became familiar with the tactic, its usefulness began to wane. For the elevator, unfortunately, had an old-fashioned lattice-work draw-gate securing it, which could be looked through, and when he would spot me in the interior of the car, trying to make myself as inconspicuous as possible as I continued on down below, he would dash out from around in back of the desk, chase down the entrance-steps, out the main entrance, and around the corner to the drugstore doorway, and I would walk right into his arms, so to speak, when I came quick-stepping out a minute later.

After several of these half-supplicating, half-stormy sidewalk fracases, I gave up coming out the side entrance, as an expedient that had outlived its usefulness. I couldn’t give him his money, because I didn’t have it to give in the first place, but I stopped trying to evade him, and he had to fall back on his original (and wholly unproductive) technique of bombarding me with countless bills, all with lurid crimson-ink “Past Due” stamps on them, and calling me in my room on the phone at varied hours of the day and night, ranging from eight in the morning until midnight. He only stopped then because he went to bed around that hour himself, I suppose. I did more angrily severe banging up of the telephone receiver in those days than I have ever done in my life, before or since.

Thus we stalemated one another, and finally relapsed into a state of sullen, armed truce.

One night there was a knock at my door around nine or so, and when I took my hands off the keys and went over and opened it, Drew was standing there.

I raised my arms and slapped my hands against my sides fumingly. “For the love of Pete,” I burst out. “You’re not going to start in at this hour of the night, are you? I’ve told you over and over, as soon as I get something I’ll give it to you. Can’t you let up for one day at least?”

“Now wait a minute, wait a minute, don’t get your back up,” he tried to calm me. “D’you want to go to the movies?”

“What d’you mean, do I want to go to the movies?” I asked suspiciously.

He took a slip of paper out of his pocket. “I have a pass here for the R.K.O. Eighty-first Street. They send me one each week for letting them display their advertising down at the desk.”

“It’s for two,” I said, glancing at it. “Are you coming with me?”

“I can’t leave the hotel,” he said. “My boss might take it into his head to call up or even drop around, and it would look bad if I weren’t on the job. Take someone else with you. Take some girl.”

“I can’t take a girl,” I said inflexibly. “It means an orangeade or a soda afterwards, that’s the least you can do, and I can’t even afford that much right now. It’s too late to call anyone up at the last minute like this, anyway.”

“Go by yourself then,” he urged. “It’ll do you good, relax you, take your mind off. You’re leading an old man’s life, C’nell, shut up in here day and night, night and day. You’re only young once, mark my word, you’ll regret it someday.”

“No I won’t,” I contradicted him. “I’ve figured it all out. It’s got to be now or later. I’d rather have it now and over with, and do my playing later.”

But I took the pass from him and closed the door.

I buttoned up my shirt collar, put on a tie, slung my jacket across my arm, and went out — for the first time (except for just a hurried meal) in I don’t know how many weeks.

I got as far as the corner, and then my feet seemed to lock themselves rigid on the pavement, wouldn’t go on any further. I couldn’t do it. I longed to see the show, as much as any school kid ever did who’s only allowed to go once a week to a Saturday matinee — longed for a little fun and recreation, was almost famished for it — but I couldn’t do it. My conscientiousness about first finishing the work I was doing was as rigid as an iron poker; I couldn’t seem to bend it in the slightest.

I turned around and went back inside the hotel again and up to my room.

The door of the lady who lived on the other side of the hall from me was slightly ajar, and I could hear Drew’s voice in there talking to her, as I came off the elevator.

He was taking his leave, and as he slowly came out backward, he didn’t see me.

“—never lets up,” she was complaining in a low, mournful voice. “Starts in at nine in the morning, and goes on all day long, sometimes until after twelve o’clock at night. I get the most splitting headaches from it. I’ve called down until I’m blue in the face, and it doesn’t seem to do any good.”

“Well, you won’t have to listen to it tonight, at least,” he promised her in a soothing voice. “I got rid of him for one night, anyway, by giving him a pass to a movie. Wish I’d have thought of it sooner.”

“That’s what you think!” I called out stridently.

He jumped almost a half-foot off the floor, and whirled around, and his normally ruddy face got almost the color of a raspberry.

I shied the pass across the hall in his direction, keyed open my door, slammed it shut behind me, and went back to the typewriter keys again, with the renewed vigor of rancor now added to everything else.

Then suddenly one day there was a mystifying change in Mr. Drew’s attitude. He beamed, his expression was cherubic, as we came unexpectedly face to face. He clapped my shoulder, he asked how I was, he winked at me to show a special geniality.

When I saw his extended hand, waiting for mine, I said with overemphasized weariness, “Now, please. Don’t start that again. I’ve told you over and over: when I can, as soon as I can.”

He looked hurt that I should misconstrue his friendliness. He creased his forehead ruefully. “C’nell, I haven’t said a word. C’nell, have I said a word? Why do you jump on me like this?”

“No, but you’re going to,” I said skeptically.

“All I wanted to say was, now that you’re caught up, try to stay that way. Don’t let it run so far behind the next time.”

“Next time?” I said dumbfounded. “What happened to this time?”

“Don’t worry about it—” he started to say blandly.

“Don’t worry about it?” I flared. “Now I am going to worry about it more than ever, because it’s not like you to be so easygoing. There’s something up. You’re just trying to put me off my guard. I’ll probably find my door plugged up when I come back.”

“C’nell,” he protested, horrified, raising a sanctimonious pudgy pink palm. Then he asked me, “Have you gotten a bill, all this week? Tell the truth now, have you?”

I suddenly realized I hadn’t; they’d stopped. I was so used to ignoring them anyway, I hadn’t noticed the difference.

“There you are,” he went on. “You’re in the clear. All paid up. Forget about it.”

“Paid up?” I called after him loudly. “How can I be? Since when? Aren’t you always dinning it into my ears that you don’t know what you’ll tell the owner when he comes around to collect his rents, that you don’t know how you’ll face him?”

But he was now, I could see, in as much of a hurry to get away from me as he had been before to approach me. I followed him a few steps, but I couldn’t get another word out of him.

I couldn’t make head nor tail out of this wholly improbable turn of events. I knew he was too good a hotel man to have mixed my account up with somebody else’s, although for a moment that gratifying thought did cross my mind. I decided there was only one way to find out for sure, and that was to get a look at the hotel’s bookkeeping ledger with my own eyes.

I knew that neither of the two daytime clerks would be likely to allow me to do that. They were too much under Drew’s thumb. But the midnight-to-morning desk-man, Mr. Mack, was a far more unfettered spirit where Drew was concerned, since their hours did not coincide and they rarely saw one another. I might just possibly get him to do it if I went about it in the right way.