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

“You’d better take it now,” he said. “There’s no telling—” When the door upstairs had closed upon them and they were alone, they flew into each other’s arms like two wild birds in a storm. Stolen time! Every moment was stolen time. Every minute might be the last. That perhaps saved the situation from cheapness, tawdriness; that made it more than just a one-night stand in a country hotel with Mr. and Mrs. Smith on the register. Though she was inexperienced as far as those things went, Ivy somehow knew the difference just as any woman would have. He wasn’t just playing with her; whatever his past had been, he was as sincere tonight as she was. No one could have feigned the real admiration, the basic respect, that showed amidst all the wildness of his kisses. The broken inchoate murmurs he poured into her ears came from the heart; they lacked the smoothness of hypocrisy.

“My kind of a girl, found my kind of a girl at last! You’re not afraid of me, are you?”

“No — all my life I’ve been waiting — you don’t know what this means, do you? If you put your head on my shoulder tonight in this room, it means forever, for always. If not, say so now.”

“From now on is the word,” he said. “It may end in five minutes — it may last for fifty years.”

“With this kiss,” she breathed, “I thee wed.” Darkness suddenly flooded the room. Strangest of wedding-nights, a revolver in a holster slung across the foot of their marriage bed, neither of them daring to undress, every footfall in the corridor past their door a sudden menace.

When it finally came, just before dawn, there was no warning, not even a stealthy footfall outside. A sudden surging rush of many bodies that buckled their door and almost burst it in. The chest of drawers barricading it alone kept it in place. And then the thundering summons that Ivy heard now for the first time and the last. “Open in the name of the law!” They had leaped spasmodically apart, torn from each other’s arms like a pair of puppets dangling on strings. The gun was already in his hand, aimed at the door, ready, as he swept her toward the wall with one arm.

“Into the closet, sweet, and flat on the floor! Hell’s going to break!”

“We know you’re in there, Eddinger; open or we’ll shoot!”

Vainly she clawed at the knob of the closet-door. “It’s locked, Ed. I can’t get in!” He took a single step toward it, swerved his gun for a minute toward the keyhole, and fired. It shattered into a dozen metal fragments and the door was open.

“Get in and keep it shut!” Then he dropped flat on his stomach and was smiling as the first thundering volley came crashing through the room door from outside.

That was the last thing she saw — his smile in the face of death. She shrank back into the closet and pulled the door shut after her. Then suddenly she found that there was no wall at her back. It was not a closet at all, it was the next room — that had been the connecting door between that he had blasted open for her. The noise from the room she had just left was deafening for a minute, and then the silence that followed was even more deafening.

“Got him, I guess,” said a voice from out in the hall in the midst of the sudden stillness. And a moan escaped from her:

“No — oh, no!”

There was a sudden crash and they had broken in the door. Her heart had stopped beating as she put her ear to the connecting door.

“Got him all right,” said the same voice. “Full of holes as a Swiss cheese.”

She turned and staggered blindly out into the hall from the room where she had taken refuge and found other guests creeping out of their rooms one by one and no one noticed her in the crowd. As she stumbled downstairs and out into the night, all she could see before her was a smile — his smile in the face of death.

Half an hour later and a mile away, a big milk truck lumbering toward New York came to a stop beside her.

“Want a lift?” offered the driver. “Something happen to you? Been hurt?”

The girl who had been stumbling along the side of the darkened road took his hand and climbed in next to him.

“Yes, I have,” she answered in a quiet voice. “Right here.” And she placed her hand over her heart for a moment.

Her roommate said: “Oh, you had me frightened! I didn’t know what had happened to you! You look as though you’ve been out in a storm. Your hair’s all—”

“Yes,” said Ivy. “A strong wind caught me up, a wind called life, for just an hour or so. Then it passed on and left a dead calm.”

Her roommate wasn’t much on riddles; she changed the subject.

“I see they finally killed that awful Eddinger,” she said. “It’s in all the papers. I’m certainly glad they did, too!”

“Some women,” said Ivy with the ghost of a smile, “would stick to a man like that to the bitter end.”

“By the way, Walter dropped around to see you last night. He waited hours for you to come home. He left a message for you. He told me to tell you he made the first payment on a ring yesterday. He said you’d know what that meant.”

“I do,” said Ivy bleakly.

“But,” protested her friend, “why are you so downcast about it? You should consider yourself lucky. A steady, reliable fellow who thinks the world of you, wants to settle down. You have no kick coming.”

“You’re right,” agreed Ivy dismally. “I certainly have no kick coming.” But she didn’t mean it in quite the same way.

Every evening at half-past eight she climbed a long flight of stairs on Broadway. Not on one of the side-streets, but right on Broadway itself. When she got to the top, she always said, “Hello, big boy!” She had learned that expression. “Big boy” was usually leaning an elbow on the shelf of the ticket-seller’s window, with one eye on his watch and one on the stairs. He was the manager. As a rule he condescended to nod when she said this. Once or twice he had even gone so far as to grunt in reply. She had gone in by now, anyway; through a pair of swinging glass doors that flashed closed after her. There was a big empty room before her, with a dark shiny floor and a row of windows curtained in pink and a platform for the musicians. She didn’t stop to look at any of this; it was nothing to her. She walked toward a curtained alcove at the back, and as she walked she was already stripping off her hat and coat for action. Sometimes when she felt particularly good and some other girl was there to watch her, and there weren’t any men around, she would push her hat far to the back of her head and let her coat slip down her back to her elbows and give a comical shuffle across the floor with her feet spread out. This was supposed to be an imitation of Chaplin. When she hadn’t felt so good, she had entered trailing her coat along the floor after her, just like a child with a broken kite.

In the curtained alcove there were a mirror and some chairs, and there were hooks for coats and hats. No hangers, but just hooks fastened to a board. Hers was the one on the end, and she’d penciled her name under it— Faith. As she was hanging up her things, the brisk tap-tap of high heels sounded across the polished floor outside, punctuated by the swish of the swinging glass doors. She smiled faintly. She knew that walk.

A few moments later the curtain was tossed back and her friend Trixie entered the alcove. With Trixie came a large quantity of red hair, a smaller quantity of Chypre, rebottled at the five-and-ten, a fair share of the town’s good looks, and an encouraging feeling that the world wasn’t such a bad place to live in, after all.