The Best of Mystery by Alfred Hitchcock

Author:Alfred Hitchcock [Hitchcock, Alfred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0883656442
Publisher: Galahad Books
Published: 2004-03-27T21:00:00+00:00

LAWRENCE BLOCK

With a Smile for the Ending

I had one degree from Trinity, and one was enough, and I’d had enough of Dublin, too. It is a fine city, a perfect city, but there are only certain persons that can live there. An artist will love the town, a priest will bless it, and a clerk will live in it as well as elsewhere. But I had too little of faith and of talent and too much of a hunger for the world to be priest or artist or pen warden. I might have become a drunkard, for Dublin’s a right city for a drinking man, but I’ve no more talent for drinking than for deception—yet another lesson I learned at Trinity, and equally a bargain. (Tell your story, Joseph Cameron Bane would say. Clear your throat and get on with it.)

I had family in Boston. They welcomed me cautiously and pointed me toward New York. A small but pretentious publishing house hired me; they leaned toward foreign editors and needed someone to balance off their flock of Englishmen. Four months was enough, of the job and of the city. A good place for a young man on the way up, but no town at all for a pilgrim.

He advertised for a companion. I answered his ad and half a dozen others, and when he replied I saw his name and took the job at once. I had lived with his books for years: The Wind At Morning, Cabot’s House, Ruthpen Hallburton, Lips That Could Kiss, others, others. I had loved his words when I was a boy in Ennis, knowing no more than to read what reached me, and I loved them still at Trinity where one was supposed to care only for more fashionable authors. He had written a great many books over a great many years, all of them set in the same small American town. Ten years ago he’d stopped writing and never said why. When I read his name at the bottom of the letter I realized, though it had never occurred to me before, that I had somehow assumed him dead for some years.

We traded letters. I went to his home for an interview, rode the train there and watched the scenery change until I was in the country he had written about. I walked from the railway station carrying both suitcases, having gambled he’d want me to stay. His housekeeper met me at the door. I stepped inside, feeling as though I’d dreamed the room, the house. The woman took me to him, and I saw that he was older than I’d supposed him, and next saw that he was not. He appeared older because he was dying. “You’re Riordan,” he said. “How’d you come up? Train?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pete run you up?” I looked blank, I’m sure. He said that Pete was the town’s cab driver, and I explained that I’d walked.

“Oh? Could have taken a taxi.”

“I like to walk.”

“Mmmmm,” he said. He offered me a drink.

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