The Collected Dashiell Hammett

Ester Entertains

Brief Stories, February 1924

He shouldn’t (he thought) have come. These four hours, if so applied, would have disposed all the incidentals to his departure tomorrow, sending him away with no loose ends to be taken care of later. But her voice had come over the wire so alluringly; and no doubt she really had missed him, not seeing him for two weeks. And to have excused himself tonight would have been to prolong that fortnight to nearly two months, since his trip would cover six weeks at the least. Perhaps he could leave an hour early, get away at eleven-thirty or forty-five without seeming anxious to go.

“You know I did, dear. If you had waited another ten minutes, or fifteen at the outside, I’d have been calling you up.”

He had almost called her “honey”: an endearment for which she professed aversion, finding it reminiscent, possibly, of some former lover who had been disappointing. Southerners, he believed, were addicted to the word; and she came from somewhere in the Carolinas.

“Not a thing except work.”

She didn’t look so well tonight. Her gown was less than becoming; and her hair, dressed in this new manner, was also at fault, accentuating the slenderness of her throat: a slenderness that was on the point of aging into scrawniness. She must be getting along in years. Even in this light, diluted and tinted to friendliness, she failed to appear quite young. Her figure, too, was less youthfully slim now than merely thin. Her eyes were good, though, and they saved her: she would never be unattractive while they held their beauty. If only she wouldn’t maneuver them with so little subtlety, with so obvious a consciousness: pulling them around like fat blue puppets beneath the heavy dark fringe of her lashes: lashes edging lids that slid down and up on occasion with all the smooth precision of well-handled drop-curtains.

“Sit still, baby, ill get them.”

If he didn’t light his cigarette, she would, and pass it to him limp and hot from the excessive draught she had applied, its end sodden with saliva, and he would have to smoke it with a pretense of extra enjoyment. Of course, that would happen once or twice before the evening was over; but by exercising a reasonable amount of alertness, and keeping the cigarettes near him, he could prevent its too frequent occurrence.

“I did. You know, or you should, without my telling you.”

It was peculiar, how he was invariably disappointed in her. It wasn’t, either, that he had any illusions. He would leave tonight — as he had left the last time and the several times before that — to hardly think of her again until he had an evening whose emptiness promised to be irksome, or until he heard from her. Such vagrant thoughts as came to him meanwhile would not draw him toward her. Yet, between the time when his engagements were made and the time for their keeping, he was somehow filled with inflated notions of her charm and appeal — an anticipation of vague ecstacies. Not consciously; but that he always experienced this disappointment testified to the existence of some such process of delusion.

“Yes, much nicer.”

It was nicer. The light at their feet, a mellow glow, tilted upward the shadows on her face, softened the texture of her skin, lent her an appearance of girlishness — almost. She was, for that matter, girlish, in a way. Arrested development you could call it if you liked, but it went well with her smallness; and, now that the only illumination came slanting up from the gas log, you could believe in her youngness, or very nearly.

“Utterly.”

He would be utterly comfortable if only she wouldn’t fidget so much, tickling his face with her hair; and if she wouldn’t call him “dearest” or that ridiculous “most beloved boy.” Superlatives were weak, almost cheap. Furthermore, superlatives carried with them the postulant that there were others in the speaker’s mind. To call him dearest was to think of one who was dear and another who was dearer; though it was unlikely that it worked out that way — that she had anyone else in her mind at the time. But the inference, the suggestion, was there. Not that he cared, really, how many others there might he; but it was nevertheless faulty technic. The pleasurableness of these evenings depended upon the maintenance of certain illusions whose very high artificiality made them delicate and all the more vulnerable to the least discordance.

“I wasn’t thinking at all. I don’t when I am with you. There’s nothing to think about. It’s all here. This afternoon there may have been a world — I’m not quite sure. Tomorrow there may be another, or even a continuation of the same one; with business and things in it, and scheming and conniving to he done. But now there’s nothing anywhere but you and me, and the aim of existence is to sit still, like this, close to you, doing nothing, neither remembering nor imagining — just sitting still with you.”

More than a hit silly, but it would at least keep her from jumping up and turning on that damned talking machine for a while. She needn’t, however, have received it with so much rapture. The Lord knew he had made the same speech, or one of its variants, often enough before. She would know by now that it didn’t have any particular meaning, that it was just one of the things you say. She did know it, of course, but she should also know that he was aware of her knowledge. Her antics threw a spotlight on the speech, gave it a prominence that was never meant for it and that made it seem sillier than ever. And why did women always want to know what you were thinking about? And if, as was probable, they didn’t, why did they ask? The sort of answers they got would become monotonous after a while.

...It was easier to kiss than to talk, and more satisfying. She did kiss well. Even the solemnity, with its insistence upon an equal seriousness on his part, which she brought to the business failed to mar it; though it would have been more thoroughly enjoyable without this alien reverence. She surely didn’t expect him to believe that she held these kisses, embraces, caresses, so sacred as she pretended. That was the worst side of her: she not only invested her amours with all the trappings of the theater, but she went to the amateur theater for her properties.

...There it was again. It was as if there were hidden and not very sophisticated spectators to be satisfied. A kiss wasn’t, properly, a sacrament; nor was she any more deeply stirred than he, for instance, himself. It could all have been done just as neatly and a whole lot more enjoyably without the burning glances, the shivers and sighs, the devout emotion with which she embellished it — sometimes caricatured it. He must be careful not to smile, though, not even when she reached her highest histrionic altitude; or she would sulk, and that was a nuisance. True enough, her sulkiness seldom endured for longer than it took him to light a cigarette, hut even that was sufficient to irritate him and make him feel rather sullen himself. Now and then, when a smile wouldn’t be repressed, he could hit upon the right thing to say — something without flippancy but at the same time whimsical — and pass it off; but she didn’t as a rule like trivialities of any sort when her emotions were rampant.

...That was safer: a smile before it had twisted itself into view could he buried beneath another kiss. And she did kiss well; she was undeniably delectable in spite of her gestures, her dramatics, and her italicized fervors. After all, the difference between her acting and his was only one of degree. But that made the flaw a matter of crudity, which was bad. Still—

...Funny — the similarity of women’s faces remembered in dim lights on nights like this: the same leanness of cheek, the same shininess of eye, the same deepened lines spreading from between the eyes down and out around the mouth. It was as if something — some same thing behind all of them — was looking out through their faces: some aboriginal — but that was fantastic!

...If only for a little while she would put away that posturing. This wasn’t a mass. If only— But it was possible that he was being hypercritical; it was possible that she wasn’t exaggerating so much as he thought. She was an impulsive, high-keyed little thing: she might be nearly in earnest — or even quite. Sincere or affected, she was devilishly fascinating, nevertheless.

...If only she—

...By Jove, she was glorious!