by Jerry
The old woman rubbed her hands raspingly: “You can have marriage within—a week.” Her gray, wrinkled lips pursed, as if she was considering some dark, preliminary step. Then she nodded: “Yes, one week.”
Lola’s eyes glistened. The last tendril of her depression faded away. She sat in a cozy glow. Marriage to John Craig meant, automatically, wealth, a life of leisure, victory over the ghoulish office crew and—her teeth snapped tight—what did she care if he had no affection for her, though how—
She looked up quickly. “How would you work it?” she demanded.
The ancient hulk grimaced in silent, hideous laughter. “Smart as ever, my dear, aren’t you?”
Her voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper: “Hoskins, Craig & Co. have government contracts as well as an important contract from an old customer, whose orders they are anxious to fill, but they can’t obtain the necessary supplies from the priority board, isn’t that so?”
“You mean, the Diamond Co. But how—”
“I’ll see to it that the priorities board makes an error, and sends enough extra material to build the new place for the private firm; then I’ll get the senior partner, Hoskins, out of the way for six months with a stroke; and Craig, who is a personal friend of the Diamonds, will take advantage of the government error, and start to build for his friends. Do you see?”
Lola frowned, her pasty face splotchy dark with puzzlement. “No!” she said at last.
The beady eyes snapped at her. “You’re not very smart, are you?”
The creature’s rage died almost instantly; she snickered: “It’s not as complicated as it sounds. You simply confront him, threaten to expose him. He knows that the government is getting tougher every day; he’ll be frightened, and he’ll marry you.”
Lola sat very quiet, her brows lined, examining the picture—and finding it good. A tiny amazement came that she felt no qualms about her capabilities for her share of the job, no sense of doubt, nothing but a cold, satisfying conviction that she could carry it through.
Above her, the old woman chuckled: “I guess you can see yourself that getting you married is no soft job for anyone. I can only work with the material I’ve got, and it all has to be natural.”
“Forget it,” Lola said curtly. “I can see the difficulties, and I’m prepared to face them.”
“Then it’s marriage?”
“Before I say yes,” said Lola slowly, “I want to get everything clear. This will get me married to John Russell Craig, the man here in this room?”
“I guarantee it.” The old woman nodded with a monstrous solemnity. “Only marriage, of course. Nothing else; you know that.”
“Eh? I don’t understand.”
“Naturally, you can only have one wish. You can have neither love nor wealth nor satisfied revenge, nor can you stop the natural forces that have been set in motion.”
Lola’s body constricted with a nameless fear. “John Craig,” she said carefully, as if she was reasoning every word, “is worth tens of thousands of dollars. No matter what happens, I’ll have a legal right to the wife’s share.”
The old woman shrugged. “There won’t be anything left after the government gets through with him. I can only stop the forces of law long enough to get you two married. That’s all I promised—marriage—one wish.”
“You mean the firm will be fined out of existence?”
“Not exactly. But he’ll be out.”
Lola’s lips tightened; her muscles grew slowly taut. She shook her head defiantly. “I don’t care. He’s a good businessman. He’ll get started again.”
“A man can’t do much when he’s serving a ten-year jail sentence,” was the cool reply; and Lola sat, hunched as if for warmth, shivering in that icy blast of defeat.
At last, she said dismally: “Isn’t there some wish that would cover everything, sort of ultimate?”
It was a half thought, spoken out loud; and it was not until afterward that she remembered the old woman had not answered, had remained silent.
Lola finished: “I’ll have to think it over.”
“No hurry, my dear,” the other said smoothly. “You’ve got until six o’clock. Take your time,” she ended—and was gone!
Lola spent the morning in a haze of dismissed doubts and gathering hopes, parading wishes before her mind. She was like a reader of light novels limping distractedly through a library where a million such novels lured her aimless, disordered taste.
She was eating lunch with a grim intentness on her problem when—
She jumped, then frowned. “You gave me a shock,” she said. “I didn’t exactly want you. I just—”
“Your call was strong enough for me,” retorted the gray, gnomeish thing that stood beside her table. “So it’s money, eh?”
“Y-yes!” She spoke grudgingly. There was a thought in the back of her mind that she didn’t quite want to bring out. She began: “Money can buy anything, can’t it?”
“No!” The creature leered at her, as if understanding what she was thinking. “Money is good only if the buyer and seller can get together. And where,” asked the thing with a pointedness that reached into the dark corners of her mind, and hauled up the writhing thought that was there—“where would you find the man who would take money for marrying you? Would you go up to someone in the street? Or what?”
Repelled, Lola shrank back. She stared at the gnome as at something loathsome; and then, abashed by its leer, but actually relieved that her thought had been put into blunt words, she said: “Buying and selling in marriage is done in the highest circles. Isn’t there some way it could be managed?”
“That’s a separate wish,” the gnome said matter-of-factly. “I can endow you with the ability to recognize at a glance men you could pay to marry you, and of course I’d give you the courage to speak to them.”
“What about money?”
The monster shrugged. “You’ve got savings, only eight hundred dollars, but there are men who’d marry you for that.”
Lola stared at the creature disconsolately. “What about money? How would you make me rich?”
“You understand that there’s a limit to the wealth I can give you,” began her companion; and the girl jerked with dismayed alarm.
“W-what?” Her round, pasty face grew bitter. She said: “Everything you’ve got is full of conditions. How much?”
“About a hundred thousand dollars. When we were first granted the power of bestowing wealth, a hundred thousand dollars was beyond the dreams of avarice. Our powers have not been increased with the development of . . . er . . . civilization.”
“Oh!” She felt better, the return of glowing assurance. “A hundred thousand isn’t so bad. And I suppose, maybe, that’s what I’d better take. With money I could. . . perhaps I could meet somebody through a lonely-heart club.”
The gnome was silent; and she looked at it sharply. “Could I?”
“That’s another wish,” the thing responded. “I might as well tell you that you’re wasting your time trying to get two things with one wish. These lonely-heart clubs have two kinds of men in them—those who want companionship and those who want money. You’ll get one of the latter, but you’ll lose your money in the exchange.”
The thing finished: “But all in all I think money is the best wish for you. You haven’t any rich relatives whom I can kill off and so make an heir of you; so you go out and buy a sweepstake ticket, and I’ll see that you win the first prize. O.K.?”
She felt torn. To commit herself definitely, with so many doubts, so many burning urges unsatiated—
“What time is it?” she asked finally.
“Same time as when we started talking: quarter to one.”
“And I’ve got till six!” It was more a statement than a question, more a spoken thought than a statement. The gnome nodded:
“Is that all for now?”
“Yes—No, wait!”
The fading shape grew solid again; the gnome snarled at her:
/> “Make up your mind. In another instant, I would have been gone just far enough to make a change of shape necessary. What do you want?”
She hesitated, frowning; then slowly: “I asked you a question before that you didn’t answer. I asked you whether there was an . . . an ultimate wish. Is there?”
The creature stared at her with a strange intentness. “Yes,” it said, “there is. Do you want it?”
“What is it?”
“It has to be made blind,” the creature answered—and vanished.
Across the street from the restaurant, Lola stopped abruptly before the gleaming window; and her eyes, weakly blue behind the owlish spectacles, peered with abrupt covetousness at a slinky black gown that draped a lean Judy against a background of fine furniture.
For a long, trembling moment, it was enough that the gown itself was a sheeny, lovely creation that she could own at the snap of a finger; and then, as the sun burst from a bed of clouds above, its brilliance emphasizing the shadows inside the window, and starkly reflecting the slight, crooked image of her body—she shuddered.
“Beauty,” she thought with a pang that stabbed along her nerves. “If I had beauty—”
“Ah, beauty,” said a twangy young woman’s voice beside her; and Lola turned sharply.
She stared doubtfully at the blond, rather slovenly looking, bold-faced young woman who stood there. She said:
“Are you—”
“That’s me, dearie,” said the other cheerfully. “Is beauty what you want? You shall have it.” A faint edge of color crept into the blotched cheeks. A sudden picture of herself as a darkhaired, voluptuous creature brought abrupt, stark eagerness.
“Could I really be beautiful—beautiful enough to—”
“Beauty isn’t the only essential for that!” was the slightly contemptuous answer.
Lola’s color grew brighter. She rapped: “Why wouldn’t beauty bring me a husband? Any good-looking girl can get married. Why, if I could just get rid of this . . . this—”
She couldn’t utter the immeasurably distasteful word; but the straw blonde was not so shrinking. “I can take the hump away, and straighten your leg, and take off those pimples, and you won’t need glasses—I can do all that but—”
“But, but, but!” raged Lola. “If I were beautiful, why couldn’t I get married?”
The young woman shrugged. “There are thousands of good-looking girls within half a mile of us who’ll never get married, some because they’re shy; others are too sensitive; still others can attract men to the point of a meeting, and then repel them utterly—it’s a matter of character, dearie,” said the woman; and she laughed, a strangely wild laugh that gurgled oddly into silence.
Her eyes stared at Lola; and the girl shivered involuntarily. She hadn’t noticed the creature’s eyes before. They were as cold as ice, and fathomless.
“So I’d repel men, would I?” she said hoarsely. “Well, I’ll change my character. I know just the method. My beauty would attract them, and then I’d just play dumb and—”
The young woman was indifferent, cool. “It’s all right with me, sweetheart. Is it beauty you want?”
Lola looked at her sullenly. The very humanness of the demon’s shape brought the strongest resentment she had yet experienced. There was a vague thought in her, that yesterday she had had nothing, no hope, no chance at anything but a lifetime of drudgery and abnormality; and now, here was a glittering, unheard-of opportunity to satisfy at least one of her deadly cravings and—The thought faded into nothingness before the violence of the emotional storm that swept her.
“What’s wrong?” she railed. “Why can’t I take the beauty or the hundred thousand dollars, and so get everything?”
“What you don’t understand, dearie,” said the woman in a curious, precise voice, “is that, when a wish is granted, a change is wrought in the structure of things as they are and as they would normally continue to be. Everything else but that change would carry on, as if it had not occurred, by a sort of cosmic momentum. No single human being can break through such ponderous forces. Is that clear enough?”
Lola stood stolid. Hope made a twisting path in her brain, down, down, like a bird struck dead in midflight, fluttering to the dark earth.
“I suppose so,” she said at last, dully.
“Well, then, is it beauty?”
Lola sighed heavily, parted her lips to speak the affirmative; then her mind tightened convulsively on a thought:
“How would you do it?”
The woman laughed, raucously. “I thought you’d be coming to that. An accident, of course.”
“Accident!”
“Yes, a car or a train or something hard and strong enough to break the hump bone, the leg bone and your face.”
The witch finished: “The doctors and I would do the rest in putting you together.”
With a hissing gasp, Lola emerged from her paralysis. She flared: “You miserable creature! And you nearly let me go through with a thing like that. Bones broken . . . hit by a train—”
A wave of sheerest physical faintness surged through her. She swayed and had to catch at the window to stay on her feet.
The whole world of her dreams lay in a shattered pile at the bottom of her mind.
The nausea trickled slowly out of her stunned system. She straightened, and stickily blinked some of the blur from her vision. The combination of actions brought a glimpse of malformed human image in the window—and, slowly, a tense calm fell upon her.
She stood, hypnotized by her reflection in the glass, forcing herself to look at the contours, every hideous curve, every unnatural line; and abruptly the ravenous hunger for beauty—at any price—came alive again within her.
“The doctors,” she said finally, “how would you pay them?”
“I said nothing about that,” was the cool reply. “That’s something else again.”
She had thought herself beyond emotion, but the words with their startling implications brought a surge of vertigo. “You mean,” she said thickly, “my savings—”
“It would take more than that,” said the woman indifferently. “Beauty for you isn’t cheap. You’d have to go on paying for years.”
A brief light of hope pierced the Stygian gloom in Lola’s mind. “What,” she asked sharply, “is to prevent me from getting the hundred thousand, and having the doctors break my bones, and reset them painlessly, under chloroform?”
“Human doctors!” said the woman contemptuously. “How would they know just where to break the bones? No, no, dearie, one wish, one wish, only one, one, one. Nothing else, nothing, nothing.”
Lola stared morosely into vacancy. Her mind was a dim world of flitting passions, desire for money, good looks, marriage, revenge, love—each unsatisfactory by itself, each needing complementation to satiate the hundred fires that burned at white heat in her frail body.
For a bare moment, painful understanding came to her, a sense of the dark limitations of human hopes and aspirations. Abruptly, her immense frustration brought a furious anger.
“You miserable creature!” she raged. “What did you come into my life for, you—” She stopped, frowning. “What did make you do it? You said something about a bet. What kind of bet?”
The young woman shrugged. “Remember that little old woman you met on the street Tuesday night?”
Lola’s face twisted; then she nodded with a curt sullenness; the other went on:
“My friend bet me no human being was low enough to do it. I said there was at least one.” The witch laughed gleefully. “Naturally, when you helped me win that bet, I had to compensate you, according to the law governing such matters.”
Lola stared at the woman, her eyes blazing with a pallid blue hatred. “You make me sick!” she said finally with utter malevolence. “What do I owe the world? Was I ever treated fairly? I hate them all, all, do you hear—the whole human race with their miserable hypocrisy. If you think I’m going to spend my life thinking sweet thoug
hts and doing good, you’re—”
“Dearie!” The steady eyes glittered at her. “Your morality is your own, nor was morality at issue in my little bet. We had had a lecture by him on human nature, and. we were discussing—
“But never mind that! Is it revenge you would like? Revenge on the twelve people you hate the most. Mind you, as I said before, twelve is the limit.
“Think of what I can do to them: That office boy who calls you Pimples; I can have him live in a sweat of his own pimples from now on. That telephone girl who giggles and sticks her tongue at you behind your back—many’s the time you’ve caught her doing it—I can make her tongue twice, three times as big as it is, so that she’ll practically have to keep it hanging out.
“And that clerk who calls you Humpy when he wants you to do work for him—I’ll put a hump on his back the size of a camel’s. As for that fool who’s always talking about your big bank account, I’ll make him so tight with his money that he’ll wear his clothes till they fall off; and he’ll slowly starve himself into tuberculosis. Well?”
“No!” said Lola. She flashed on bitterly: “I’d like nothing better than to have that miserable bunch punished, but what good would it do? Twelve people out of a hundred million. Any other twelve would treat me the same; and if you think I’m going to cut off my nose to spite my face, you’re—”
“Well, then,” shrugged the young witch, “what about the opposite of revenge: Remember, you are one of Nature’s botches, one of Nature’s attempts at something different and better. No one is to blame. Your best wish, therefore, would perhaps be one that would make you contented with your lot. Would you like that?”
“Contented—with being as I am!”
The other was cool, practical. “Many afflicted people strike such a balance all by themselves, and manage to make something of their lives.”
“Contentment!” said Lola; and all the discontent of all her years was in that one scathingly uttered word. A thought, sharp and startling, penetrated her mind.
“Look,” she said, “that ultimate wish I’ve asked you about. It’s not something stupid like . . . like contentment!”
