L sprague de camp, p.1
L Sprague De Camp, page 1
None But Lucifer
(1939)
L. Sprague de Camp & H. L. Gold
Chapter I
Hale had plenty of reason for panic. Most men, lying sick, broke, and alone in a cheap, filthy rooming house, would have been terrified. But Hale wasn't. He was sick, broke, and alone, all right — only that was exactly how he wanted to be. A long time ago he had planned it. Having achieved what superficially appears to be an easy goal, he felt rather successful. He waited impatiently for the next step in his campaign.
He listened to the stairs. He had been listening since early morning. His hungry, wan face brightened. They were creaking, in the exact manner he had anticipated.
The two pairs of feet plodded irresolutely toward his door. Then they halted. Hale listened impatiently for the creaking to resume. Instead he heard muffled, excited whispering.
He fought down his exasperation. If he had dared to expose his eagerness, he would have cried: "I know it's you and your wife, Burke, coming to dispossess men, if you can get me out while you put a slug in my lock. Don't worry about that. Don't waste time thinking up clever schemes to lure me out. I've waited for years for the courage to put myself in this position. You're not going to fail me because of a little pity, are you? Please, man ... my destiny's getting restless."
Naturally, he kept silent. He knew the vigilance of his oppressor too well; he had spent years coaching himself against such revealing outbursts. But in spite of himself he dragged his head off the hot pillow. "Come on!" he wished feverishly. "Don't make me wait!"
He glared at the door, as if that would make it open sooner. What was keeping them? — he ranted to himself. Was it their business that he had to be dispossessed? They were only janitors. They'd had to do it before.
They wouldn't have to trick him out. He'd just get up, dress, and leave. Perhaps he should make some feeble protest, for the sake of appearance. That was all. And he'd be on the street, penniless with no idea of what to do next — just as he'd planned so minutely — just as he wanted so whole-heartedly that he could hardly keep still.
The stairs creaked again. "Come on, come on," he willed furiously. "Don't stop. Please don't stop —"
Mrs. Burke was fumbling through her apron pockets for the keys. Hale could hear the rustle of enamel-stiff starch, the strangled clink of the keys, and Mr. Burke's hoarse, adenoidal mouth-breathing. The grim janitress searched the ring for the exact key. Hale suspected that a toothpick would have worked as well. The owner of the house spent damned little time worrying about his tenants' possessions, and less money on locks.
Eager as he was to be put out, Hale was flattered by the janitors' reluctance. It couldn't be habitual with them, or they wouldn't have been superintendents for twenty-five years. It meant that they liked and pitied him. He could have enjoyed the sensation of being liked, except that it was hindering instead of helping him just now.
"Stop fumbling!" he hissed under his breath.
The lock clicked boldly, as if it actually served to hold the door closed, and then the door was swinging back on its own flimsy weight. Like two pall-bearers who had embarrassingly arrived before the patient was dead, the Burkes edged into the dark little room.
"How ... gh —" Mrs. Burke gulped. "How are you, sir?"
"I'm fine, but what's the matter with you?" Hale's thin voice rose to feeble irascibility. "You could have been here hours ago."
Burke closed his perpetually dry mouth for a much-needed swallow. "It's hanged I'll be if I can make you out, Mr. Hale. You're sick as a dog. By rights you ought to be in a hospital —"
"Edgar!" his wife broke in.
"I know it ain't a nice thing to say. All the same, I want you to let me call an ambulance. It won't cost you anything, Mr. Hale. You'll go in the charity ward."
Mrs. Burke nodded. "We can't throw you out on the street right at the beginning of February. You come from a good family and you ain't used to the cold. Besides, you're real sick."
"Just a little flu," said Hale. "Please help me get my feet out of bed. They're rather heavy."
"Why don't you be reasonable, Mr. Hale?" Burke pleaded. "Molly here don't mind taking care of you, but, hell, she can't do it like a hospital can. In no time you'll be —"
"Will you help me get my feet out, or shall I do it myself?"
"Oh, nuts!" Burke grunted helplessly. "I got an idea you really want to be thrown out." He lifted Hale's legs around.
Hale froze in a sitting position. Was he being obvious? If Burke could suspect his impatience, his enemy certainly could.
"You're wrong," he said with deliberate primness. "I was brought up to believe in paying my way. I can't pay my rent, so I don't deserve to stay. And I won't take charity."
He was relieved to see that his logic stopped them temporarily. As firmly as he could, he stood up. The blood swooped down from his head and his knees sagged. He caught Burke's shoulder.
"Aw, don't be a fool," Burke implored.
Hale managed to shake his head. The temptation was enormous. He knew he needed a soft, clean bed, decent food, and medical attention. He wanted them so much.
He pushed himself erect. "I'm all right now." He took off his pajama jacket and let it slide to the floor. Mrs. Burke stood by uncertainly. When Hale reached for the pants tape, she went outside.
"Where you going when you get out of here?" Burke pursued doggedly.
Hale shrugged. "I have plans."
Gently, Burke helped him pull his underwear jersey over his head. "Yeah? What kind?"
"Business plans. I don't think it would be good luck to talk about them."
"I think you're nuts. It's delirious you are."
Bending over his shoes, Hale stopped short. That was a possibility, he had to admit.
Then he grinned up at Burke and went on tying his laces. Ridiculous! He went back over his recent past. Methodically, he had outlined a course of action. Following it scrupulously, he had given up a forty-a-week job-a very secure one, with the chance of rising to sixty and retiring eventually on half pay. His fiancée had been outraged, naturally. Even so, she trusted his judgment and had hung on.
Did he love her? Well, he had once. At least, she had appealed to him. She was pretty. And she was nice. Maybe that was the trouble. Too nice. Girls like that came in droves. For a nice fellow, a nice girl, a nice job, a nice future, a nice home, nice children.
But Hale couldn't be content with these nice things. He couldn't cut the coat of his ambition to fit his abilities.
So he had conceived his bizarre plan. He had carefully taken his savings and bought the most worthless stocks he could find. For a while he had feared being duped into making a profit. But his plan had worked, and he had succeeded in selling out just before the stocks in question went up. The memory of that nervous time still made him sweat. But playing the market had accomplished two major objectives: his embarrassing savings were gone, and Loretta with them. It had been worth the anxiety.
"All right?" Mrs. Burke called through the door.
"Yep. Come on in," Hale answered cheerfully.
She watched him writhe into his overcoat with obvious disapproval. Before he put his hat on, she looked encouragingly at her husband.
"See here, Mr. Hale," Burke suddenly blurted, "we ain't exactly millionaires, but we got hearts." He held out a five-dollar bill.
It was a tough moment for Hale. Instead of virtuously protesting, however, he drew several coins out of his own pocket, removed the single penny, and held out three quarters to Mrs. Burke.
"I know it doesn't repay you for the way you've taken care of me," he said clumsily, "but when I'm in a better position I'll really make it up to you. Please take it."
Mrs. Burke began to cry into her apron. "He's crazy!" she wailed. "Seventy-six cents is all he's got in the world. I know, because that's the change I brought him when I got his medicine. And he wants to keep a penny and give me seventy-five cents!"
Burke, looking shocked, moved determinedly toward Hale. "Take this! You're not leaving the house without it!"
"Please don't excite me," Hale gasped, retreating. "I can't take it. It would make me unhappy."
His agitation persuaded Mrs. Burke to call off her husband. His goggling horror of being forced to take the money was real enough to have convinced anyone.
Burke regretfully put the bill away. They stood around awkwardly. Hale, for all his peculiarities, lacked the consummate heartlessness to dash away abruptly, much as he wanted to be off.
"What about your luggage?" Mrs. Burke asked huskily.
"Why ... you're going to keep them, of course. I haven't paid my rent —"
Burke snapped his mouth closed. For several seconds he looked quite fierce, glowering with wounded pride at Hale. In the end, naturally, he was forced to open his mouth again to breathe. "None of that, now," he threatened.
"But it's your right to hold them," Hale protested.
"I don't care if it is. I won't."
Hale thought quickly. Perhaps the idea of getting sick hadn't been so good. It raised too many unforeseen problems, like this one. He had counted on having the superintendent of whatever rooming house he landed in confiscate his belongings.
"Well," he said hopefully, "how about keeping them until I can redeem them?"
"Not a chance!"
"Then until I call for them," Hale amended despairingly. "I'm not strong enough to carry them around."
Suspecting a trap, the Burkes hesitated, but at last agreed. "But no nonsense now!" said Mrs. Burke. "When you need anything, you come right here and get it."
"Certainly. You bet. It's awfully nice of you —" He moved toward the door.
Burke said, "You can't go looking for a job like that." He took Hale's feeble arm and guided him to the tiny square of mirror hanging over the unsteady chest of drawers. "It's like hell, you look. See?"
Hale had to smile triumphantly. His face was even better than he had hoped: thin, haggard cheeks; feverishly bright dark eyes; the skin of his high forehead stretched tautly over his skull; his large broken nose jutting out of a tangle of black whiskers; his dry, thin hair standing up. He nodded at the reflection. Excellent, he thought.
"You can use my razor," Burke offered.
Hale winced involuntarily. His stubble of beard was something to be observed at all costs. "No, thanks," he choked out.
He couldn't risk more offers of help by waiting around. Mrs. Burke's mouth was trembling with some suggestion. Before it could come out, Hale squeezed Burke's shoulder, kissed Mrs. Burke's large cheek, and fled.
On the street, he could feel really successful. The bitter wind slashed at him; he had only seventy-six cents and no place to sleep. He was getting somewhere!
-
Chapter II
Hale didn't stand indecisively on the cold street. It was not yet noon, and before nightfall he had a fairly rigid course of action to follow.
His brown sport shoes felt like ton weights, he had been out of them for so long; and his overcoat dragged his shoulders down. He knew his temperature was over a hundred, but it did not affect his sharp reasoning. He felt the sheathed hunter's knife and the pistol in his overcoat pockets, and he smiled with amused anticipation.
They were important. At the start of his campaign he had selected them with care. But they would not be useful for several days, and then only to prove a point that might be debated.
He walked over to Sixth Avenue and turned downtown. At Fifty-ninth Street he met the first cluster of men. He squeezed in among them.
"I don't feel despondent enough," he thought analytically. "I don't have the look of defeat."
Not all the men in front of the employment agency were shabby. Some had been thrust down only recently. They glanced almost furtively at the job notices, as if they were merely curious. But there were others, whom Hale studied like an actor learning a role. They were the habitual prowlers of the agencies, ragged, filthy, too close to starvation to be hungry, shuffling mechanically from hopelessness to indifference. Hale coveted that attitude. He thoughtfully set out to make himself despondent.
How long would his seventy-six cents keep him? A dime for breakfast, fifteen cents for lunch, a quarter for supper — fifty cents for one day. A quarter for a cheap hotel cot. He could live for one day and have a penny left over. Then what? He had to eat and sleep, and one night on the subway would turn his deep-seated cold into pneumonia. A surge of desperation, which he stealthily enjoyed, gripped him.
He elbowed through the circle of men, and his eyes jumped from one job to another.
Nothing. Industrial jobs: third engineers, Diesel men, oilers, little-way stitchers, plant and factory jobs. He shuffled wearily to the next agency. Restaurant help: countermen, $18. Too high. Dishwashers, colored, $10. Soda dispensers, exp., $18-22.50.
He climbed the narrow, dark stairs to the huge bare room with its hard, shaky benches around three walls and its stench of wet rot and stale smoke. Nothing could fight down that combination. He felt the remnant of his cheeriness strangle.
Timidly, he approached the girl behind the railing.
"What job?" she asked casually.
"The dishwasher."
She glanced at the list. "Colored?"
"N-no. But I can wash just as well as —"
"Sorry. They want colored washers." And she turned away.
"I can make sodas," he blurted hoarsely. "I'm not so good, but —"
"Sorry," she said, her voice remote. "All filled."
He buttoned his coat, left, and trudged down to the next agency.
White chalk on a black slate. Each one, unseen, a block away, was the job, the means of feeding and sheltering himself. But it never was.
There was the application that he made out for a night porter, $12. The girl read it.
"Six dollars in advance, please," she said, quite businesslike.
Hale stopped breathing. "Six dollars! What for?"
"Half our fee. You pay the other half when you get your salary."
"But," he protested, "I haven't got six dollars —"
Without glancing at him, she tossed his application into the basket and turned to the next client. He clung to the railing, stunned. The other unemployed looked disinterestedly at him. Didn't they understand, damn them, that he could work and pay his way, six dollars or no six dollars? Why didn't they smash —
But, of course, he said nothing. No one ever does. You stand for a moment while they ignore you; then you trudge slowly out without feeling, unconscious of the stairs under your feet and the employment-agency smell — as Hale did.
In the afternoon, Hale did wangle a try-out at an eight-dollar-a-week job as an upholsterer's apprentice from an agency without the advance payment. The upholsterer was far from enthusiastic when he learned Hale's age — thirty-one — and his lack of experience at manual work. He watched with suppressed exasperation Hale's bungling efforts to adapt his stiff muscles to the unaccustomed craft. When Hale tried to borrow five dollars, he turned him down cold.
Hale quit. There was nothing else he could do. The agency would get his first week's salary. To keep alive for the first two weeks would require at least twelve dollars, and he had seventy-one cents. The upholsterer shrugged. "Maybe it's best this way. You wouldn't learn so fast. Not your fault — just too old."
-
HALE decided that he had gone about far enough. He'd finish off with a night in a Bowery flophouse. He could have had a quarter bed around Sixth Avenue, but the flophouse sounded more dramatic.
He chose a hammock instead of a cot. Squalor was an essential part of his plan, but vermin weren't. He stripped the case off the pillow, which made it only slightly cleaner, and threw the blankets on the floor under the hammock. They were slick and faintly stiff with grease, and had a gamy smell. If Washington had used those blankets, they hadn't been aired out since.
That allowed him to sleep in his clothes, shoes and all. He was dissatisfied with the way his tweeds had retained the remnant of a crease.
He woke late, exhausted and stiff. Most of the men had already left. Hale wondered whether he should immediately go on with his plan. He decided against it, mainly because he still had forty-six cents. Spending it all on meals that day would be too obvious. He must seem to be trying to make it last.
He soaked his head under the single cold-water faucet. He forebore using the large block of cheap soap; it would have been like lathering himself with a cornerstone. And when he put out his hand for one of the five loathsome towels that had been provided for at least sixty men, he drew back, preferring to let himself dry by evaporation.
