Short Fiction

money, but she had refused.

In the days when Tod had dressed well and taken care of himself, he had been a much better-looking man than Dave. But poverty and a steady diet of gin had made him careless of his appearance and now no woman, except, perhaps, the easygoing Miss Butler, could possibly consider him attractive.

Dave had come back to town in October. He had intended spending a week, but had left after one day. He had called on Tod and Clara and talked pleasantly about old times.

The years had not made him handsome. But he dressed so well and looked so clean. He had romped with Myrtle and she cried when he left, though he hadn’t brought her any candy. And another thing, he was an orphan.

Second-Act Curtain

They were trying out a play in Newark. The play was to open in New York the following week. Washington had liked it pretty well and business had been picking up in the big New Jersey metropolis until a full house at a rainy Wednesday matinée had just about convinced the authors and the manager that they had something.

The three were standing in the lobby before the evening performance.

“We’d be all set,” said Mr. Rose, the manager, “if we just had a curtain for the second act.”

The authors, Mr. Chambers and Mr. Booth, walked away from him as fast as they could go. Neither of them wanted the blood, even of a manager, on his hands; and they had been told so often⁠—by the manager, the company manager, various house managers, the entire office staff, every member of the cast and the citizens of New Jersey and the District of Columbia⁠—that they lacked a second-act curtain (just as if it were news to them), that both had spent most of their prospective profits on scimitars, stiletti, grenades and sawed-off shotguns, and it was only a question of time before some of these trinkets would be brought into play.

After a while the good folks from the Oranges and Montclair began looming up in such numbers that Chambers and Booth thought Mr. Rose’s mind might be on some other subject and they ventured back into the lobby. “Boys,” said Mr. Rose, “we’ve got a hit. If we only⁠—”

Chambers grabbed Booth by the arm.

“Come here a minute,” he commanded, and Booth obeyed.

“Now, listen,” said Chambers, “we’re not going to find a second-act curtain by watching another performance of this clambake. Let’s leave it flat for tonight and go to our respective homes and do a little real thinking.”

Chambers’ respective home was a mansion in the lower sixties. Booth’s was a hotel room in which he had spent nearly all of the summer working, because he found it impossible to work out on Long Island where everybody else was having a good time. The collaborators parted at the Thirty-third Street terminal of the Hudson Tube and Booth went first to a speakeasy to buy himself some thinking powders and then to his room⁠—the number doesn’t make any difference because each is equipped with radio, and all you have to do to avoid it is not open the drawer of the table by the bed.

Booth’s room was not an expensive room. It was a $4.00 room and opened on a court, and the people in the other rooms opening on the court were nice and friendly and hardly ever pulled down their window shades, no matter what they were doing. For three days the room right across the court from Booth’s had been occupied by a comely and frank lady of about twenty-six, so Booth took a powder before settling down to real thinking. The room across the court was dark. Booth got into his thinking costume, consisting of pajamas, slippers and bathrobe, had another powder and decided he had better eat something.

Enter the Heroine

While waiting for the food, he began a letter to somebody at Syracuse University who didn’t know him and wanted him to make a speech. He discovered that the I key on the typewriter had gone blooey from overwork, rendering him mute. The food came and he sat on the bed to eat it. There was a knock at the door and in scampered a chambermaid not a day over fifty.

“Are you sick?” she said.

“No,” said Booth. “Why?”

“Well,” said the chambermaid, “there was a woman sick in this room a couple of weeks ago and I thought maybe she was still here.”

“You’re the only woman in this room,” said Booth, “and I hope you’re not too sick to leave.”

“It’s a funny thing,” said the chambermaid, “but I came in a room along this hall one time, it must have been last spring, and there was a man and a woman both in there, both sick. And they knew me because I worked in a hospital once and they were both there, too.”

“Marriage might regain something of its former sanctity,” observed Booth, “if husbands and wives were always both sick together.”

“I’ll just turn down your bed.”

“No. Let it alone. I’ll fix it when I get ready.”

“Well, I wouldn’t sit around like that or you’ll catch cold.”

“Good night.”

Booth finished eating and looked around the room for reading matter.

There were three books⁠—Heart Throbs, a collection, by Joe Mitchell Chapple of Boston, of favorite bits of verse or prose of well-known Americans; Holy Bible, anonymous, but a palpable steal of Gideon’s novel of the same name, and the Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, by Sax Rohmer. Booth had seen them on the desk all summer, but had been too busy to read when the I key was working.

He took another powder and started in on the insidious Chink, but the author’s quaint method of handling direct discourse (“Too small by inches!” he jerked; “The pigtail again!” rapped Weymouth; “Is ‘Parson Dan’?” rapped Smith; “But,” rapped Smith; “Got any theory?” he jerked) was a little too much for frayed nerves. “It is all right,” he rapped to himself,