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

I turned the light out first, to cool my poor overworked eyes. It had been on so long, so steadily, that the heat of the glowing bulb extended all the way down the chain-pull to its very tip. When I touched that, it was hot enough to make me quickly take my fingers away. I sat there slumped before the desk in the dark for a while, too tired even to get up and leave the chair. Then after a while I made room by pushing things aside, and I laid my head down on the desktop, forehead first. I must have jarred the typewriter carriage slightly, and the little bell that always signaled the end of a line tinkled faintly. I remember. I thought it was a fitting coda to the whole thing. Ping, like that: and then unbroken silence.

I wanted desperately to go to sleep, and yet I was too keyed up, my nerves were too taut from the last long stint I’d put in, for me to be able to. Then suddenly hunger came. It struck me like a blow, almost. One moment there was no thought of food in my head, the next I was ravening.

I’d never felt hunger so strong, I’d never known it could be. It couldn’t wait another moment, sleep was an impossibility until it was fed. It was agonizing. It was the actual pang I’d so often read of, but that I had never fully realized the meaning of before. It was like the teeth of an animal caught into you and refusing to let go their hold.

I dug into the linings of my pockets, quite unnecessarily. I’d already known I had no money. I had none. But this is not poetic license or retouching of a fact simply to point up, play up, a plight. This was literal: I had not one single, solitary penny of money on me, or in the room about me, or anywhere in the world, at that moment. The next day there would be some way of getting a little, there always was. But hunger couldn’t wait until the next day. This wasn’t one night’s hunger, this was two months’. Even more, for that matter. I hadn’t been eating well, even long before I’d first begun the book.

Now I thought of the poor strays who had come up to me on the street occasionally and asked me for enough money to get something to eat, and I was glad of the few times I’d been able to give it and sorry for the many times I’d had to refuse. But like most New Yorkers I’d been cynical, and thought they just wanted it for a drink. Tonight I knew better; there must have been some of them at least who felt like I did now.

I got up, left the room, and closed the door behind me, about to do very much the same thing they had myself. Not on the streets, perhaps, but right here in the hotel itself — that was about the only difference. I went up to Drew’s floor, two floors above my own, stood there for a moment mustering my courage, and then knocked on his door. I don’t know yet — even as I stood there at the time I didn’t — where I got the amazing gall, the effrontery, to single him out, of all people. Beneath all our squabbling and differences, there must have been some sense of empathy there.

It required quite some knocking, and of a steadily increasing caliber, before anything happened. Finally I heard his voice ask blurredly on the inside: “Who is it?”

For some indefinable reason, possibly a feeling of embarrassment, I couldn’t bring myself to give my name, I just repeated my knock.

He opened the door and looked out at me, face puffed up, rounded more than ever with the swellings of sleep, eyes closed into slits, and in a dingy bathrobe.

“Help me out, will you?” I burst out impetuously. “I’ve got to have something to eat, I can’t stand it — and I haven’t got a cent. Lend me something, and I’ll give it back to you. Even fifty cents. Anything.”

He looked at me as though he thought he hadn’t heard me right. “C’nell, are you crazy?” he gasped.

“Not crazy,” I said, glowering at him. “Hungry. I’m crazed with hunger, yes.”

He looked searchingly into my face, and I think he must have detected that I was practically drooling with the need for food. If my chin wasn’t actually wet, the inside of my mouth kept filling with a saliva that I couldn’t seem to dispose of.

Suddenly his wife called out from within their bedroom, “Charlie, who is that?”

“C’nell,” he said, turning his head aside.

He tactfully didn’t answer that. The two of us looked at each other with a sort of telepathic understanding. Husbandlike, he must have given her a faithful transcription of all our difficulties and all my derogations of him, and she could hardly have been a great admirer of mine.

Not getting any answer to her question, and not realizing that I could hear her where I was, or perhaps not caring, she called out, annoyed: “Tell him to go to grass!”

He made an inscrutable sign to me, and muffled his voice in precaution. “Too bad you woke her up. Wait here a minute. I’ll see if I can get you something without letting her see me.”

I stood there by the half-open door, and he went back toward the bedroom.

I heard her ask suddenly, as distinctly as ever, “Charlie, what are you doing over there?”

I quailed for a moment, as I know he too must have.

“I’m looking for my cigarettes, Cass,” I heard him say to her.

Then he came back to the door again and, with his head turned watchfully in her direction, put a dollar bill into my hand.

I didn’t know what to say to him. “I’m sorry” was all I could think of. “I’m sorry about all the times I’ve rowed with you and insulted you. It won’t happen anymore, after this.”

“Forget about it, boy,” he said, and he gave me one of the usual claps on the shoulder, but at the same time I saw him shaking his head to himself. “I didn’t realize. You really are hard up, aren’t you?”

Her final voicing aloud put an end to our bathos-redolent reconciliation scene. “Charlie, come back to bed!” she called out in no uncertain terms.

He quickly closed the door, and I as quickly went away from it.

I went up the street one block and across, where there was a cafeteria that stayed open all night. I ordered scrambled eggs and coffee and sat down to them, moaning under my breath with a peculiar mixture of pain and pleasure. The tabletops were white glazed, and stained with unwiped food marks. The sugar was caked in the sugar sifters. The coffee had been reboiled a hundred times. Still, I’d eaten a thousand times before then, and I’ve eaten a thousand times since then, but no food I’ve ever had tasted as good as the coffee in that inch-thick mug and the eggs on that greasy cracked plate that I ate in that cheap cafeteria at three or four o’clock that morning. It tasted the way food should taste. I almost wanted to cry with gratitude, it tasted so good.

Then I went back to my room and fell into the bottomless, prostrated sleep of release from months of accumulated fatigue and overwork.

I took the book downtown the next day and turned it over to Irwin, and the rest was only to wait.

I found the waiting harder than the working almost. For my life hadn’t changed; the same scrimping, scraping, cutting down on meals to save a penny went on as before. Never any money, at least not enough all at a time to do anything with. And now that the solar plexus of the book had been taken out of my life, there was a great big hole left in the middle of it. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t start working on something else because there wasn’t the remotest possibility of selling anything else right then, and even if there had been, I still couldn’t have; I was too drained by the effort I had just put in, I needed a breathing spell first.

Every night I would go out walking, killing time, merged in the drifting crowd I used to glimpse so longingly from my window. Yes, people still strolled the avenues in the Depression evenings, even if they couldn’t do anything else. The lights were as gay as ever, the voices as animated, the smiles as ready, even if the hearts weren’t quite as light anymore. The lights would be rippling on the picture-theater marquees like sprays of colored water, glinting in furriers’ show-windows, which were coated with amber-tinted cellophane (a new decorative device then). The lights would be sizzling on casefuls of zircons and rhinestones like glassed-in fireworks displays. The lights would be shining from below upward, like submerged crocuses, at the feet of posturing mannequins garbed in the by-now universal silhouette of the new day: skirts to the shin and shoulders squared off and padded like those of a football player’s uniform. And hair brushed flat from side to side across the top like that of a little girl of seven.