The Collected Dashiell Hammett

Holiday

The New Pearsons, July 1923

Paul left the post-office carrying his monthly compensation cheque in its unmistakable narrow manila envelope with the mocking bold-faced instructions to postmasters should the addressee have died meanwhile, and hurried hack along the wooden walk to his ward, intent upon catching the physician in charge before he left for the morning. The ward surgeon, a delicately plump man in khaki, with a mouth permanently puckered, perhaps by its habit of framing a mild, prolonged “oh” whenever, as not infrequently happened, he could not find the exactly adequate words, was just leaving his office.

“I’d like to go to town this afternoon,” Paul said.

The doctor went hack to his desk and reached for a pad of pass blanks. This was a matter of routine; suitable words came easily. “Have you been out this week?”

“No, sir.”

The physicians pen scratched across paper and Paul turned away waving in the air — to dry the ink, there never was a blotter at hand — the slip which permitted Hetherwick, Paul, to be absent from the United States Public Health Service Hospital No. 64 from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. for the purpose of going to San Diego.

In the city he went first to a bank and exchanged the cheque for eight ten-dollar hills; then he filled his pockets with cigarettes and cigars and bought a racing program, studying it carefully, together with some figures in a memorandum book, while he ate luncheon.

He rode to Tijuana on the rear scat of an automobile stage, tightly wedged between a hatchet-faced tout who chewed gum unrestingly all the way and a large, perspiring, too-pink-and-yellow woman under a wide, limp hat. For a brief moment just beyond National City the savory fragrance of citrous fruits came into the car; for the rest of the trip his nostrils were busy with the unblending odors of spearmint, a heavy strawberry-like perfume from the woman beside him, burning oil, and the hot dust that scorched his throat and lungs and kept him coughing his sharp, barking cough.

He hurried through the gate at the race track and reached the betting ring just in time to place his bets on the first race: five dollars on “Step At a Time” to win and five to place. He watched the race from the rail in front of the paddock, leaning forward to peer nearsightedly at the horses. “Step At a Time” won easily and at the paying booths Paul received thirty-six dollars and some silver for his two colored tickets. He had not been especially stirred by either the race or the result: he had thought the horse would win without difficulty.

At the grandstand bar he drank a glass of whisky, then, consulting the penciled notes on his program, he bet ten dollars on Beauvis to win the second race. Beauvis finished second. Paul was not disappointed; that had been pretty close. His selection in the third race finished far in the rear; he won twenty-some dollars on the fourth, won again on the fifth, plunged a little on the sixth and lost. Between races he drank whisky at the grandstand bar, being served liquor of the same quality that was procurable north of the border and paying the same prices.

He had fourteen dollars in his pockets when he left the race track. The Casino was closed; he got into a dusty jitney and was driven to the Old Town.

He walked the length of the dingy street — a street that no mood of esthetic yea-saying could ever gild — and entered a saloon far down on the left-hand side, one that he had never visited before. A large, heavily muscled woman — she could easily, he thought, have been a blood relative of the woman in the automobile — broke off the song she was shouting to the nearly empty bar, linked a powerful arm through one of his, and said, “Come on over and sit down with me, honey; I want to talk to you.”

He let her lead him to a booth — feeling a perverse delight in her utter coarseness — where she sat leaning heavily against him, one hand on his knee. He wondered what it would be like to lie in the arms of such a monster: middle-aged, bull-throated, grotesquely masked even under her tawdry garniture, manifestly without sex.

“You stick with me, dearie,” she was saying, the words rolling out with a mechanical volubility and an absence of any attempt at glibness that testified to their too-frequent employment, “and I’ll treat you right. You’ll be a lot better off than you’d be fooling around with some of them sluts up the road.”

He smiled and nodded politely. A sub-harlot, he decided, holding out false promises of her monstrous body to bring about that stimulation of traffic in liquor for which she was employed: a paradox, a sort of burlesque perhaps on a more familiar feminine attitude. The liquor he had drunk had fuddled him pleasantly, had clouded his never keen sight — though his eyes glowed brighter than usual — and had softened his speech. He bought several more drinks, amused by the keenness with which she watched the waiter, making sure that she received her metal tokens — upon which her commission was computed — for each order of drinks, and the naked greed with which she seized whatever change the waiter laid on the table.

He wondered after a while how much money he had left; it couldn’t be much, and he must save from this enormity sufficient to buy a drink or two for the girl with the amazing red hair at the Palace. He motioned the waiter away.

“I’m flat,” he told the woman. “They took me down the line at the track.”

“Tough luck,” she said, with facial sympathy, and began to grow restless.

“Run along and let me finish my drink,” he suggested.

She grew confidential. “I’d like to, but once we girls start drinking with a man the boss makes us stay with him until he leaves.”

He chuckled with joyful appreciation — he called that a neat arrangement — and got just a little unsteadily to his feet. She went to the door with him. “Be sure and come see me next time.” He chuckled again at that, and then he felt an obscure shame: not at having squandered his few remaining dollars upon her, hut at letting her think him so easily taken in.

“You’ve got me all wrong,” he assured her, seriously. “I don’t mind letting you take me for a ten or so when it’s all I’ve got. Ten isn’t much money one way or the other. But don’t think I’m coming down here with a roll to let you—” Suddenly he saw himself standing in the doorway trying to justify himself to this monstrosity. He broke off with a clear, ringing laugh and walked away.

The girl with the red hair was dancing with a fat youth in tweeds to the achievements of a ferocious three-man orchestra when Paul entered the Palace. He waited, buying a drink for himself and one for a girl in soiled brown silk who had come over to his side and who kept saying over and over: “This is too good to be true! I been here a week and I can’t believe it yet. Think of all this!” Her arm took in all the bottles behind which one wall was hidden.

The fat youth in tweeds disappeared presently and the girl with the red hair saw Paul, waited for his beckoning nod, and joined him.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

They drank and he motioned toward the change the bartender had put before him. She took it with a casual thanks.

“How’s the game go?” he asked.

“Pretty soft! And with you?”

“Not so good,” he cheerfully complained. “The track knocked me over for most of what I had this afternoon.”

She smiled sympathetically and they stood drinking slowly, close together but not touching, not talking very much, but smiling now and then with a certain definite delight each into the other’s face. The clamor of the place, its garishness, were softened, nearly shut off from him by the pinkish alcoholic haze through which he regarded the world. But the girl’s face, hair, figure, were clear enough to him.

He was filled with a strange affection for her: an affection that, though it was personal enough, had nothing of desire in it. Drunk as he undoubtedly was he did not want her physically. For all her beauty and pull upon his heart she was a girl who “hustled drinks” in a border town. That she might be a virgin — there wasn’t anything impossible about that unlikely hypothesis: her profession didn’t preclude it, even compelled continence during working hours — made no difference. It wasn’t even so much that she was tainted by the pawing of strange hands — she had a freshness that had withstood that — as that in some obscure way the desires of too many men had rendered her no longer quite desirable. If he ever turned to a woman of this particularly sordid world it would be to some such monster as the one down the street. Given a certain turn of temper, there would be a savage, ghoulish joy in her.

He signalled the bartender again. They emptied their glasses, and he told her, “Well, I’m going to run along. I’ve got just about the price of a meal left.”

“Won’t you dance with me before you go?”

“No,” he said, a warm feeling of renunciation flooding him, “you run along and get a live one.”

“I don’t care whether you’ve got any money or not,” she said gravely. And then, resting one hand lightly on his sleeve, “Let me lend—”

He backed away shaking his head. “So long!” He turned toward the door.

The girl in soiled brown silk called out to him as he passed the end of the bar where she stood drinking with two men, “It’s too good to be true!” He smiled courteous agreement and went out into the street.

He stood for a moment beside the door, leaning against the wall, looking at the hazy figures around him — servicemen from San Diego in the uniforms of three branches, tourists, thieves, people who defied classification, the Mexicans (special policemen, all of them, rumor said) standing along the curb, the dogs — tasting a melancholy disgust at the tawdriness of this place which he thought could so easily be a gay play-spot.

From the doorway of the saloon he had just left, a pale girl spoke listlessly: “Come on in and get happy.”

He raised an arm in a doubtful gesture. “Look at ’em,” he ordered sadly, “a flock of—” He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and walked down the street grinning. He’d make a damned fool of himself yet!

A rack of picture post cards in the window of a curio shop caught his eye. He went in and bought half a dozen. Five of them he sent to friends in Philadelphia and New York. Over the sixth he pondered for some time: he could think of lots of people to send it to but he couldn’t remember their addresses. Finally he sent it to a former casual acquaintance whom he hadn’t seen since before the war but whose address he remembered because it was 444 Fourth Avenue. He penciled the same message on all six cards. “They tell me the States have gone dry.”

In the street again he searched his pockets and counted his resources: eighty-five cents in silver and two return tickets: one from Tijuana to San Diego and the other from there to the hospital.

A husky voice whined at his elbow: “Say, buddy, can you give me the price of a cup of coffee?”

Paul laughed. “Fifty-fifty.” he cried. “I got eighty-five cents. You get forty and we match for the odd nickel.” He spun a coin in the air and was elated to find he had won. In an alley entrance across the street a San Diego stage was loading: he went over to it and sat beside the driver. He slumped down in the scat, half dozing through the ride back to the city, while behind him a girl with an undeveloped body and too-finely-drawn features sang a popular song in a thin, plaintive voice, and her companions — two sailors from the Pacific fleet — argued loudly some question having to do with gun-pointing.

Leaving the stage at its terminus, Paul walked up the side of the plaza to Broadway and turned toward a lunchroom where his forty-five cents would buy him a meal of sorts. Passing the entrance of the Grant Hotel he found himself in the center of a cluster of people and looking into the most beautiful face he had ever seen. He did not know he was staring until the beautiful face’s escort in the uniform of a petty officer whispered to him, with peculiar, threatening emphasis: “Like her looks?”

Paul went on down the street slowly, turning the query over in his mind, wondering just what would be the mental processes of a man who under those conditions would ask that question in just that tone. He thought of turning around, finding the couple, and staring at the woman again to see what the petty officer would say then. But, looking hack, he could not see them, so he went on to the lunch-room.

He found a cigar in his pocket after he had eaten, and smoked it during the ride back to the hospital. The fog-laden air rushing into the automobile chilled him and kept him coughing almost continuously. He wished he had brought an overcoat.