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

I stayed there as I was for some time afterward, too limp to move, and I noticed that there were beads of perspiration on my forehead, and I felt moist under the arms.

After a while I passed my sleeve across my forehead and dried it off, and got stiffly and clumsily back to a sitting position. I say again, I meant that prayer with all my heart and all my soul.

Finally, as the pressures of the outside world began to circle closer around me again, and particularly as the imminence and importance of my appointment with Irwin came back to mind, I got to my feet and moved haltingly backward out of the space between the seats. Why backward, I haven’t any idea. Possibly I thought it was the proper etiquette.

I went up the aisle and outside into the streets, and the sudden onset of their life-noises was almost like being buffeted by a howling storm, the first few minutes, after the unearthly silence inside there.

The effect (not of the noise but of the emotion spent) hadn’t altogether worn off yet even by the time I reached Irwin’s office. I could tell that by the meek, almost limp way I went in, when the girl ushered me, and shook hands and submissively sat down opposite him, instead of rushing in with all sorts of questions popping from my lips as I ordinarily would have.

He came directly to the point, now that he had me in front of him. (And I have never been able to understand that telephonic indirectness, evasiveness, of his, then or since.)

“Cornell,” he said, “I wish I had something good to tell you. It’s back. It came in this morning.”

“Oh,” I said almost inaudibly. “It’s turned down.”

“Turned down,” he repeated. And then he went on to discuss their viewpoint briefly. The post-mortem was of no value even then, and still less now, so there is no point in repeating it.

Finally he said, “I want to show you that I’m trying to be fair about this,” and he took out the single sheet of paper granting him half-share of the rights which I had signed the previous time, had me glance at it, then tore it into four pieces and dropped them into his wastebasket.

I think this only made me feel worse, instead of reassuring me as he had probably intended it to, for it only pointed up to my mind how hopeless from a sales angle he must consider the thing to be, to do that.

True, the grant had been valid only in this one instance, but I was in no mood to derive any comfort from that. If he had thought there was any further chance, he wouldn’t have relinquished it so easily.

“It was a one-shot,” he pointed out. “And when a one-shot goes wrong, it goes wrong, and that’s all there is.”

“Yeah,” I assented bitterly.

The thing was beginning to sink slowly in, and I could feel myself hardening up. I realized the best thing I could do was get out of there, before I started taking it out on him. He actually hadn’t done anything wrong, I kept reminding myself, only what I had intended doing myself from the beginning; if anything, he’d expedited it.

The last thing I recall saying to him was: “I even went into a church and prayed I’d have luck with it.”

I’ve never forgotten what he answered to that. “You must have picked the wrong church,” he smiled cynically.

So I left there, as the defeated always leave the place of their defeat: heavy-hearted, leaden-footed, the world all black and stormy around me, not a ray of light in it anywhere.

All that hard work for nothing. All those wearisome drudging weeks. A whole big chunk taken out of my life and thrown away, wasted. But far worse than the disappointment itself was the timing of it. My instinct told me very surely that this marked the ending of something or other in me. Call it being young, call it being completely carefree. Call it being wholeheartedly foolish, even; that has its place in life, too. And I knew that that was the real reason why I’d prayed. Not just for the money itself, for its own sake. (That would have been too presuming even for my non-theological turn of mind.) But to be given the money now, when every penny would have brought a dollar’s worth of zest and enjoyment, and not later, when every dollar would bring only a penny’s worth, maybe not even that much.

I noticed an ashcan standing by the curb as I came out of the building and made my downcast way along the street. I opened the clasp-envelope he had so bountifully given me and took my manuscript out of it.

I took the title page, which had my name on it, off it first, and crumpled that into a ball and jammed it down into my pocket. Then I dropped the rest of it, just as it was, bodily into the ashcan.

Then I scooped some of the powdery white ash over it and covered it up. Buried it, as it were.

Then I went on without it, but I felt heavier, not lighter, than when I’d been carrying it.

I came across a bar, and I went in. What more natural place to go, at such a time and in such a frame of mind? But I couldn’t even drown my sorrows adequately. I had just enough for one beer on me, plus the nickel required for the long subway trip up to the hotel.

There was no one else in the place at that hour of the afternoon, and the bartender must have unnoticeably taken in my dismal expression as I lingered there, head bowed numbly over the lone beer until it was gone. I suppose he guessed my dejection had to do with money in one way or another. Everyone’s did in those days.

When he saw me start to sidle off the stool about to go, he called over from where he was standing: “Have another.”

“I can’t,” I said. “That’s all I have enough for.”

“Have one on me, then,” he invited, and I glimpsed a rueful cast of compassion on his face for just a moment as he brought it over and set it down before me. That told me it wasn’t just business goodwill that prompted him, it was human sympathy. Sympathy for a kid, of an older man who’s gone through the same thing himself and knows what it’s like. Nothing further was said by either one of us. When I finished it, I nodded to him and went out. But the trifling little act of human fellowship had made me feel better.

Not much, just an infinitesimal bit better. Like when your leg is broken, and you’re lying there, and somebody pats his handkerchief to your moist forehead. It doesn’t make the pain any less, but at least you’re not alone in the pain.

A moment after, I turned around and went back to the place again.

I flung the door forcefully inward without, however, releasing my hold on it, not wanting it to strike back and break his glass.

“Y’know something, mister?” I called in to him.

He turned, startled slack-jawed.

“No, wh-what?” he quavered, half-frightened, I could tell, by my unexpected vehemence.

“You’re better, even, than God. Because God didn’t give me a ten-cent glass of beer free. But you did!”

And I reclosed the door and went on my bitter, beaten, homeward way, freed forever of any further religious beliefs.

There is a brief postscript to this story. Somewhat under a year later, which would bring it up to about 1934, a new picture opened in one of the first-run picture houses downtown. It had the word “Paris” somewhere in its title, that much I can recall. But that was nothing; the important thing about it was the reviews, which I read the next day just as I always did after any new opening. They were not overly enthusiastic about it, but they all alike mentioned that at least one thing in its favor, if not the only one, was that it brought a fresh and hitherto untouched period to the screen: the 1912 epoch.

I immediately went down there to see it. There were variations in it here and there, of course; there always are in any film derivation, even when its source has been bought and paid for. But its two leading characters were still a pair of ballroom dancers, and they still danced their highlight number to the rhythm of Ravel’s “Bolero” just as I had specified in my script. As for the dialogue, much of that had been transposed almost verbatim. Not just a few random remarks, but whole stretches, especially in the key scenes. I couldn’t fail to recognize it. I had worked too hard to try to make it witty, scintillating, brittle. It came out now sounding flat and dull to my discouraged ears, but it was still my dialogue, superimposed upon a very close approximation of my plot, set in the Paris of, not the year 1911, not the year 1913, but 1912. In fact, throughout it bore such an unabashed verisimilitude to my piece that it almost looked as though somebody had been paid for it. But it certainly hadn’t been I.