The Dashiell Hammett Megapack: 20 Classic Stories
Page 37
We ordered drinks. We talked too fast. We made jokes and laughed too readily at them. We asked questions—about the name of the perfume she used was one—and paid too much or no attention to the answers. And Toots looked glumly at us from behind the bar when he thought we were not looking at him. It was all pretty bad.
We had another drink, and I said, “Well, let’s slide along.”
She was nice about seeming neither too anxious to go nor to stay. The ends of her pale blond hair curled up over the edge of her hat in back.
At the door, I said, “Listen, there’s a taxi-stand around the corner. You won’t mind if I don’t take you home?”
She put a hand on my arm. “I do mind. Please—” The street was badly lighted. Her face was like a child’s. She took her hand off my arm. “But if you’d rather…”
“I think I’d rather.”
She said slowly, “I like you, Jack Bye, and I’m awfully grateful for—”
I said, “Aw, that’s all right,” and we shook hands, and I went back into the speakeasy.
Toots was still behind the bar. He came up to where I stood. “You oughtn’t to do that to me,” he said, shaking his head mournfully.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You oughtn’t to do it to yourself,” he went on just as sadly. “This ain’t Harlem, boy, and if old Judge Warner finds out his daughter’s running around with you and coming in here, he can make it plenty tough for both of us. I like you, boy, but you got to remember it don’t make no difference how light your skin is or how many colleges you went to, you’re still a nigger.”
I said, “Well, what do you suppose I want to be? A Chinaman?”
THE PARTHIAN SHOT
When the boy was six months old Paulette Key acknowledged that her hopes and efforts had been futile, that the baby was indubitably and irredeemably a replica of its father. She could have endured the physical resemblance, but the duplication of Harold Key’s stupid obstinacy—unmistakable in the fixity of the child’s inarticulate demands for its food, its toys—was too much for Paulette. She knew she could not go on living with two such natures! A year and a half of Harold’s domination had not subdued her entirely. She took the little boy to church, had him christened Don, sent him home by his nurse, and boarded a train for the West.
IMMORTALITY
Published under the pseudonym “Daghull Hammett”
I know little of science or art or finance or adventure. I have never written anything except brief and infrequent letters to my sister in Sacramento. My name, were it not painted on the windows of my shop, would be unknown to even the Polish family that lives and has many children across the street. Yet I shall live in the memories of men when those names are on every one’s lips now are forgotten, and when the events of today are dim. I do not know whether I shall be remembered as a great wit, a dreamer of strange dreams, a great thinker, or a philosopher; but I do know that I, Oscar Blichy, the grocer, shall be an immortal. I have saved nearly seventeen thousand dollars from the profits of my shop during the last twenty years. I shall add to this amount as much as I can until the day of my death, and then it is to go to the writer of the best biography of me!
CURSE IN THE OLD MANNER
A plague on these women who, lengthily wooed,
Are not to be won till one’s out of the mood,
And who then discerning one’s temperateness
Accuse one of cooling because they said yes!