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

So late that night, shortly after he’d come on duty, I approached the desk, leaned negligently on my elbow and chatted with him for a while. Then after I’d offered him a cigarette, I asked casually, “By the way, how does my bill stand? Do I still owe anything on it?”

He got out the bulky ledger, thumbed its pages over, scanned one, and then looked up at me. “You’re paid up until the thirtieth of this month,” he said.

“Let me see that,” I exclaimed.

Caught off guard, just as I’d hoped, he let me turn it around my way without protest and trace my finger along the page. The entry was there as clear as day; the entire amount outstanding against me had been paid up, a matter of some five or six days earlier.

I didn’t say anything more to him. I turned around and went back up to my room, almost in a daze.

I sat down and tried to think the thing out logically in my mind. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became there was only one possible explanation, until finally I was sure I must be right.

Late the next afternoon, after I’d finished my daytime stint and before beginning my evening one, I went over to my mother’s house to see her. I shouldn’t actually call it her house; it had belonged to my grandfather, who had died six or seven years before, and his daughters had stayed on in it after that, both having lost their husbands. My mother was the older, and (I suppose) the titular head of the small establishment.

The chow dog they kept in the house, Blong (or “Blong Mei,” pidgin for “Belongs to Me,” the name on his pedigree papers), always rushed clamoring against the door at anyone’s ring, and then, when he’d hear my voice, would subside. But I always got the impression it was in a miffed sort of way, as though he felt cheated of having a chance to show his valor off before the two ladies who were in his charge.

“Are you going to have something with us?” was the first thing my mother asked after we’d kissed.

“No, I have to get right back,” I told her. “You know I’m working on that thing.”

“You’re working too hard. You’ll kill yourself. You’ve got to eat better.”

And my aunt, tilting her head sideward to study me, concurred (as usual) with a plaintive “You don’t look good. You looked better the last time you were here.”

“Oh,” I said impatiently, “I’ll have all the rest of my life to eat in.

The work comes first right now.” Then I said to my mother, “I came over because I wanted to talk to you about something.”

As soon as we were alone together in the other room, I told her: “I found out what you did.”

A momentary flicker of guilt showed on her face, reminding me of the expression on a little girl’s face when she has been found out doing something she knows she shouldn’t. Then a look of quiet hurt took its place.

“That just shows you how reliable Mr. Drew is. He promised he wouldn’t say anything.”

“Drew didn’t tell me,” I said, and found myself for once in the odd position of defending my arch-enemy. “I got the night man to show me the ledger.”

She didn’t say anything to that.

“You don’t carry that much around with you in your handbag at one time,” I added. “You must have taken it out of your savings account.”

“I went down to the bank the next day, after he’d spoken to me the last time I was over to see you, and I stopped off with it on my way home.”

But I could only see it from my own point of view, no other. “I don’t want to be helped,” I insisted. “Don’t you understand? I want to do this all on my own, prove to myself that I can do it, without any help from anyone. If you help me now, and I succeed afterward, then you’ve taken that much away from my success, made it that much less. I want it to be all mine. That’s the only way I can really enjoy it if it comes.” And I added with all that sublime, ridiculous cocksureness of one’s young years, “I’m not going to sponge off anyone — not even my own mother.”

I saw tears form in her eyes, but she kept them back.

“I don’t understand you, the way you talk sometimes,” she said quietly. “I only did it because I thought I would be helping you keep up your morale that way.”

“But it’s just the opposite; it’s bad for my morale, instead of being good for it. Don’t you have confidence in me?”

She came to me, put her arms around me, and pressed me fervently to her. “Every confidence!” she breathed. “You’ve got too much in you not to be recognized someday. I only hope I live to see it, that’s my one prayer.”

“I know I’ll make it,” I chanted raptly. “I’m going to, and I will. I know this thing will work out right. It’s got to.” Then I said in a softer voice, “Promise me you won’t do anything like that again.”

“I won’t, if you don’t want me to,” she said submissively. “But will you be all right?” she added with a touch of anxiety.

“Sure I will. I’m not afraid of Drew,” I scoffed. “He’s a great big coward, fat as he is.”

“But he did turn the lights in your room off once, you told me.”

“He won’t try that again in a hurry,” I assured her. “You should have seen me chase him all around the desk, in front of everybody standing there, until he sent the mechanic up and had him put the fuse back in again. It was like slapstick comedy; I’d go running in at one end and he’d come running out at the other, then he’d go running in again at the opposite end as I came out once more at the first one.”

In retrospect, I can tell she didn’t see the humor in it that I did. “I don’t like you to be bad friends with him” was all she said, demurely.

Now that I’d gained my way in the major matter, I gave in on the minor one, not an uncommon trait in human nature. I stayed and had my meal with them, and they waited on me and handed me things at the table and made a lot of fuss over me, as they always did, and made me feel altogether like a king. Or at least like the lord of a manor visiting among his loyal and devoted tenantry.

But late that night when I was back in my own room, and through with my work, and going to bed, I thought again of what she, my mother, had done, and saw it in a different, truer perspective than I had at first, and the tears came to my own eyes for a moment, just as they had to hers.

I understood always, my whole life through, how much she loved me. And I think she understood, surely must have, how very much the same I felt about her.

On the night I finally came to the end of it, it was well on into the early morning hours. It seemed so quiet all at once, so smotheringly, stiflingly still, after all those days and nights and weeks of cricketlike chattering of the keys. Almost as though a thick eiderdown quilt had fallen down all over me, muffling everything. My ears couldn’t seem to get used to it. They felt stunned, they almost seemed to be ringing with the emptiness. I’d stopped many times before this of course, stopped each night, and several times each day. But that was different, because then I knew I’d have to go on again each time. Now there was nothing more to come, the last keys had been struck, “The End” was lettered at the bottom of the final page, it was over. That’s why, I suppose, I noticed the silence so much more than I had those other times. It was a psychological silence as much as an auditory one.

The hotel was asleep all around me. It was a quiet, drowsy sort of place anyway, most of the time. And even the street outside, which in that part of New York was, as a rule, never still, day or night, this night seemed to be so too, as if to blend itself in with my mood, just an occasional taxi-horn barking somewhere a block or so off. And the muffled surge of a lonely, passing subway train would now and then come up through the ventilating grids on the sidewalk and be plainly heard in the stillness of the streets above.