A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

As she bent forward peering intently, trying to judge from the scenic details in the background what type of picture it was, a voice quite close to her said:

“It’s good. I seen it.”

Caught off-guard, she turned around in surprise before she could prevent herself from doing so.

The man’s face had all the anonymity of the crowd in it; she couldn’t have described him even right while she was looking at him. He was standing almost close enough to touch her, but with his back to the stills, facing toward the sidewalk, while she was turned the opposite way.

There was something clandestine about their reversed positions, but he was the one imparted it.

She turned her head away instantly, but the damaging acknowledgement of awareness had already been made.

“I think I seen you before someplace,” he said. Haven’t I?”

This time she rigidly kept from looking at him. By now all thoughts of entering the theatre had left her. She was afraid he might follow her into the darkness inside, and she would be worse off than out here on the open street. She had heard of cases of people being knifed in places like that.

Her onward way, however, lay toward him, not away from him. She backed away from the ill-omened stills, therefore, and circled around him, keeping at as wide a distance as possible. But he moved out in turn and once more blocked her way.

He peered intently square into her face.

“Sure I have,” he said with grim satisfaction. “And I know where now too.”

Her voice wouldn’t come at first. She kept shaking her head frightenedly, without any voice.

“Don’t tell me I haven’t,” he insisted. “I used to visit that place reg’larly once a week for almost a whole year. I seen you up there plenty. Often enough to remember you. Maybe you don’t remember. All them faces every night. But I do.”

Something cold went through her. Cold and clammy. She supposed it was fear. It was a sick kind of fear, though. A curdling kind of fear. She had never felt anything like it before. The past seemed to come rolling back over her, like a surge of dirty water.

Her voice finally came. But fright throttled it to a half-whisper, a half-moan. All she could say was, “No. No. No.”

The fright showed on her face, and he knew he had command of her.

He seized her by the arm, and she tried to pull away, but all her own efforts were able to do was to make her swing loosely, first over to one side, then over to the other, in what could almost have been taken for some kind of a crazy dance-step.

Then she crumpled altogether. Not physically, but emotionally. The cowardice of the guilty conscience. “Please. Leave me alone. Please. I’ve never done anything to you.”

A few of the people passing by hesitated in their stride. Others just looked back. Then a woman, bolder than any of the men, perhaps because she realized her own immunity as a woman, spoke out. “What is it? What’s it about?”

The man tangling with Marie answered: “She’s a pro. She tried to hustle me just now as I come out of the pitcher. I got a connection with the vice squad.”

Even in the midst of her own stress, Marie could clearly read the two conflicting expressions that appeared on the woman’s face. First there was the natural impulse to go to the aid of a fellow-woman against their common enemy, the male molester. Over and against this there was the instinctive feminine distrust, the willingness to believe the worst of some other woman. As if to say, he wouldn’t dare make such an accusation, unless it were true. The latter prevailed.

She moved away. Respectability turning its back on the tramp.

A man’s voice intruded next. He must have just come upon the scene. She couldn’t see him at first, because her aggressor had her turned so that he was between the two of them, she could only hear what he said.

“What’s the matter, miss, he bothering you?”

The question was inane to the point of silliness, it was self-evident that he was, and yet in what other way could it have been put?

She grasped eagerly at the support, which was the first she had been offered so far. “Yes! Oh, yes, he is! Make him get away from me.”

“All right,” the newcomer said. She could tell this was addressed to the other man, not herself. It was couched as a gruff order, not an affirmation.

“You keep out of this, bud,” the one holding her growled truculently.

“No, bud isn’t going to keep out of this,” the first one told him.

She sensed the blow rather than saw it. A swift rush of air, and then she felt the jar, the impact, at secondhand as the bully’s body jolted. His hold on her arm disintegrated, and he kited back against the wall in an upright sprawl, his arms spread out and his legs spread out. He didn’t have a counterblow in him. He scuttled crabwise farther along the wall a yard or two, to widen the distance between himself and any possible second blow. Then he called out vengefully: “You know what she is, don’t you!”

“No, but I know what you are!” growled the other man, and he took an ominous step toward him.