The Ultimate Egoist (21 page)

And one was about a boy named Benny—Benjamin. When he grew up he was a very great man. He was a scientist, and he discovered that lightning was electricity. He was a great statesman and a diplomat. That’s what he did for his country.

And then she turned to George and told a story about a boy named George who grew up to be a general—the kind of general who would fight like a private and suffer with his men when they suffered. Valley Forge—Trenton—and a man named Cornwallis.

Three stories about three people—patriotism, brains, and force. Three stories about a country and a Day of Independence, and what it meant.

And then she led them out into the back garden. There were piles of punk and torpedoes and crackers there, and big tin cans to make them loud. The three ran out laughing, and Mrs. Mulligan stayed at the door and laughed too. She may not live in your neighborhood, or in yours. But remember, on the Fourth, what she told those three. So many never think …

S
HE WAS A
deb and he was a taxi driver and they met in the big city where things like this happen.

She was Estelle Rudd and she had seven million dollars and some odd cents in her own name and a dollar or two coming to her, which would be in two years now, so you can see that she was only nineteen. And because she was only nineteen, and in spite of her gilt edge pedigree a very normal girl, she was doing something crazy. She was riding in a taxicab and the taxicab was going downtown, farther and farther away from the deluxe suburb where she had been incarcerated in Mrs. Van Kurp’s Finishing School. She figured she was finished but not what Mrs. Van Kurp meant by “finished.” Estelle was finished with being finished, if you see what I mean, which is that she was rebelling because she did not like it out there.

She had thrown her thesies and thosies into a suitcase and had dropped silently out her window. She had $300 and lots of mistaken ideas about making a career for herself and laughing in the faces of her relatives, who really knew what was best for her. She was going to do the kind of disappearing act known as a blackout, which was very selfish of her. But she had cried and pleaded because she did not like Mrs. Van Kurp’s Finishing School, and nobody had paid any attention and so she was convinced that nobody loved her, which was not true, but which gave her a good excuse to do something violent.

So, here she was, bumping comfortably toward her newer and freer life in a great big taxicab, feeling very small and brave and admirable because she was nineteen and thought she was very clever. But after a half hour of that she began to feel lonesome. She needed someone to tell her that she was small and brave and admirable, and there was no one around but the taxi driver. She began to talk to him.

He was used to it, because he didn’t do anything but grunt. She thought that a man who could only grunt could not have very much intelligence, so she began to expand her tale. She lay back in the cab and talked and talked and did not watch where the cab was going. The more she talked the prouder she grew, and before she knew it she had told him who she was and exactly what she was doing. She made it all very involved, and because he did not say anything she wound up asking, “And what do you think of me now?” She was a little hysterical.

The cab stopped and the driver got out and took her bag and opened the door. “I think you’re a headstrong little brat,” he told her, and pulled her forcibly out of his cab. She was so astonished that she did not notice anything for a while except that the driver was young and had the bluest eyes on earth, and that the eyes were amused and a little angry but not at all disgusted, which was something.

And then, as she caught her breath, she realized that the cab was standing beneath the pillared marquee of Mrs. Van Kurp’s Finishing School. Estelle was very angry, of course, but what good did it do her? The cab driver smiled a very nice smile and demanded his fare, which was a large one because Estelle had been talking a long time before the young man began listening and decided to take matters into his own hands. Estelle thrust a bill at him and hurried into the building without waiting for her change. The driver laughed and drove off, and Estelle went to bed where she should have been in the first place. She was surprised to find that she was glad to be back.

Now I will jump two years in my story, because nothing much happened for two years except that Estelle was graduated and became a very wise and popular young lady. This was because she was tempted to do many foolish things, and every time she was tempted she would say to herself, “I think you’re a headstrong little brat,” and she would imagine the bluest eyes in the world smiling angrily down at her; and then she would not do what she was tempted to. It may seem odd, but it is true.

Well, one night at a party two years later, she was standing at the window alone for the first time that evening, looking out the window
at the boulevard and the taxicabs, and thinking. And all of a sudden she was swung around by a strong hand and there were the blue eyes again, just like that. Only this time the taxi driver was in a white tie and tails, and he was no waiter, either.

“Hey,” he said, which is no way to talk to a lady, “I want to talk to you.” She was quite cold to him but he didn’t mind. He took her out on the floor and danced, and he danced beautifully. She did not say anything because her heart was beating so wildly. Then he said, “This belongs to you.” He took something out of his pocket and pressed it into her hand. It was a quarter. “Your change,” he explained. She laughed and then blushed very prettily.

And so they were married. Not right away, but after they had been around some time together. The taxi driver? That was Raoul Bettered, the one the columnists call “the social author.” He had been driving a taxicab for local color—and boy, did he get it!

I
T WAS
“The Seashell.” It
would
have to be “The Seashell.” I wrote it first as a short story, and it was turned down. Then I made a novelette out of it, and then a novel. Then a short short. Then a three-line gag. And it still wouldn’t sell. It got to be a fetish with me, rewriting that “Seashell.” After a while editors got so used to it that they turned it down on sight. I had enough rejection slips from that number alone to paper every room in the house of tomorrow. So when it sold—well, it was like the death of a friend. It hit me. I hated to see it go.

It was a play by that time, but I hadn’t changed it much. Still the same pastel, froo-froo old “Seashell” story, about two children who grew up and met each other only three times as the years went on, and a little seashell that changed hands each time they met. The plot, if any, doesn’t matter. The dialogue was—well, pastel. Naive. Unsophisticated. Very pretty, and practically salesproof. But it just happened to ring the bell with an earnest young reader for Associated Television, Inc., who was looking for something about that length that could be dubbed “artistic”; something that would not require too much cerebration on the part of an audience, so that said audience could relax and appreciate the new polychrome technique of television transmission. You know: pastel.

As I leaned back in my old relic of an armchair that night, and watched the streamlined version of my slow-moving brainchild, I had to admire the way they put it over. In spots it was almost good, that “Seashell.” Well suited for the occasion, too. It was a full-hour program given free to a perfume house by Associated, to try out the new color transmission as an advertising medium. I liked the first two acts, if I do say so as shouldn’t. It was at the half hour mark that I got my first kick on the chin. It was a two-minute skit for the advertising plug.

A tall and elegant couple were seen standing on marble steps in an elaborate theater lobby. Says she to he:

“And how do you like the play, Mr. Robinson?”

Says he to she: “It stinks.”

Just like that. Like any radio-television listener, I was used to paying little, if any, attention to a plug. That certainly snapped me up in my chair. After all, it was my play, even if it was “The Seashell.” They couldn’t do that to me.

But the girl smiling archly out of my television set didn’t seem to mind. She said sweetly, “I think so, too.”

He was looking slushily down into her eyes. He said: “That goes for you, too, my dear. What
is
that perfume you are using?”

“Berbelot’s
Doux Rêves
. What do you think of it?”

He said, “You heard what I said about the play.”

I didn’t wait for the rest of the plug, the station identification, and act three. I headed for my visiphone and dialed Associated. I was burning up. When their pert-faced switchboard girl flashed on my screen I snapped: “Get me Griff. Snap it up!”

“Mr. Griff’s line is busy, Mr. Hamilton,” she sang to me. “Will you hold the wire, or shall I call you back?”

“None of that, Dorothe,” I roared. Dorothe and I had gone to high school together; as a matter of fact I had got her the job with Griff, who was Associated’s head script man. “I don’t care who’s talking to Griff. Cut him off and put me through. He can’t do that to me. I’ll sue, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll break the company. I’ll—”

“Take it easy, Ted,” she said. “What’s the matter with everyone all of a sudden, anyway? If you must know, the man gabbing with Griff now is old Berbelot himself. Seems he wants to sue Associated, too. What’s up?”

By this time I was practically incoherent. “Berbelot, hey? I’ll sue him, too. The rat! The dirty— What are you laughing at?”

“He wants to sue you!” she giggled. “And I’ll bet Griff will, too, to shut Berbelot up. You know, this might turn out to be really funny!” Before I could swallow that she switched me over to Griff.

As he answered he was wiping his heavy jowls with a handkerchief. “Well?” he asked in a shaken voice.

“What are you, a wise guy?” I bellowed. “What kind of a stunt is that you pulled on the commercial plug on my play? Whose idea was that, anyway? Berbelot’s? What the—”

“Now, Hamilton,” Griff said easily, “don’t excite yourself this way.” I could see his hands trembling—evidently old Berbelot had laid it on thick. “Nothing untoward has occurred. You must be mistaken. I assure you—”

“You pompous old,” I growled, waiving a swell two-dollar word on him, “don’t call me a liar. I’ve been listening to that program and I know what I heard. I’m going to sue you. And Berbelot. And if you try to pass the buck onto the actors in that plug skit, I’ll sue them, too. And if you make any more cracks about me being mistaken, I’m going to come up there and feed you your teeth. Then I’ll sue you personally as well as Associated.”

I dialed out and went back to my television set, fuming. The program was going on as if nothing had happened. As I cooled—and I cool slowly—I began to see that the last half of “The Seashell” was even better than the first. You know, it’s poison for a writer to fall in love with his own stuff; but, by golly, sometimes you turn out a piece that really has something. You try to be critical, and you can’t be. The Ponta Delgada sequence in “The Seashell” was like that.

The girl was on a cruise and the boy was on a training ship. They met in the Azores Islands. Very touching. The last time they saw each other was before they were in their teens, but in the meantime they had had their dreams. Get the idea of the thing? Very pastel. And they did do it nicely. The shots of Ponta Delgada and the scenery of the Azores were swell. Came the moment, after four minutes of icky dialogue, when he gazed at her, the light of true, mature love dawning on his young face.

She said shyly, “Well—”

Now, his lines, as written—and I should know!—went:

“Rosalind … it
is
you, then, isn’t it? Oh, I’m afraid”—he grasps her shoulders—“afraid that it can’t be real. So many times I’ve seen someone who might be you, and it has never been … Rosalind, Rosalind, guardian angel, reason for living, beloved … beloved—” Clinch.

Now, as I say, it went off as written, up to and including the clinch. But then came the payoff. He took his lips from hers, buried his face in her hair and said clearly: “I hate your _____ guts.” And that “_____” was the most perfectly enunciated present participle of a four-letter verb I have ever heard.

Just what happened after that I couldn’t tell you. I went haywire, I guess. I scattered two hundred and twenty dollars’ worth of television set over all three rooms of my apartment. Next thing I knew I was in a ’press tube, hurtling toward the three-hundred-story skyscraper that housed Associated Television. Never have I seen one of those ’press cars, forced by compressed air through tubes under the city, move so slowly, but it might have been my imagination. If I had anything to do with it, there was going to be one dead script boss up there.

And whom should I run into on the 229th floor but old Berbelot himself? The perfume king had blood in his eye. Through the haze of anger that surrounded me, I began to realize that things were about to be very tough on Griff. And I was quite ready to help out all I could.

Berbelot saw me at the same instant, and seemed to read my thought. “Come on,” he said briefly, and together we ran the gantlet of secretaries and assistants and burst into Griff’s office.

Griff rose to his feet and tried to look dignified, with little success. I leaped over his glass desk and pulled the wings of his stylish open-necked collar together until he began squeaking.

Berbelot seemed to be enjoying it. “Don’t kill him, Hamilton,” he said after a bit. “I want to.”

I let the script man go. He sank down to the floor, gasping. He was like a scared kid, in more ways than one. It was funny.

We let him get his breath. He climbed to his feet, sat down at his desk, and reached out toward a battery of push buttons. Berbelot snatched up a Dow-metal knife and hacked viciously at the chubby hand. It retreated.

“Might I ask,” said Griff heavily, “the reason for this unprovoked rowdiness?”

Berbelot cocked an eye at me. “Might he?”

“He might tell us what this monkey business is all about,” I said.

Griff cleared his throat painfuIly. “I told both you … er … gentlemen over the phone that, as far as I know, there was nothing amiss in our interpretation of your play, Mr. Hamilton, nor in the commercial section of the broadcast, Mr. Berbelot. After your protests over the wire, I made it a point to see the second half of the broadcast myself. Nothing was wrong. And as this is the first commercial color broadcast, it has been recorded. If you are not satisfied with my statements, you are welcome to see the recording yourselves, immediately.”