‘You’re such a nice man,’ she said. She was studying me as I opened an ink bottle. ‘I could tell by your story.’

‘I’m not a man,’ I said. ‘I’m not much older than you, Judy.’ I didn’t want to be old before her. I wanted to cut it down as much as possible. ‘I’m only eighteen,’ I lied.

‘Is that all?’ She was astonished.

‘Be nineteen in a couple of months.’

I wrote something special in both the magazines. I don’t remember the words but it was good, what I wrote, it came from my heart because I was so grateful. But I wanted more, to hear her voice that was so small and breathless, to keep her there in my room as long as I could.

‘You would do me a great honour,’ I said. ‘You would make me terribly happy, Judy, if you’d read my story out loud to me. It’s never happened, and I’d like to hear it.’

‘I’d love to read it!’ she said, and she sat erect, rigid with eagerness. I threw myself on the bed, buried my face in the pillow, and the little girl read my story with a soft sweet voice that had me weeping at the first hundred words. It was like a dream, the voice of an angel filling the room, and in a little while she was sobbing too, interrupting her reading now and then with gulps and chokes, and protesting. ‘I can’t read anymore,’ she would say, ‘I can’t.’ And I would turn over and beseech her: ‘But you’ve got to, Judy. Oh, you got to!’

As we reached the high point of our emotion, a tall, bitter-mouthed woman suddenly entered the room without knocking. I knew it was Judy’s mother. Her fierce eyes studied me, and then Judy. Without a word she took Judy’s hand and led her away. The little girl clutched the magazines to her thin breast, and over her shoulder she blinked a tearful goodbye. She had come and gone as quickly as that, and I never saw her again. It was a mystery to the landlady too, for they had arrived and departed that very day, not even staying overnight.

Chapter Eight

There was a letter from Hackmuth in my box. I knew it was from Hackmuth. I could tell a Hackmuth letter a mile away. I could feel a Hackmuth letter, and it felt like an icicle sliding down my spine. Mrs Hargraves handed the letter to me. I grabbed it out of her hand.

‘Good news?’ she said, because I owed her so much rent. ‘You never can tell,’ I said. ‘But it’s from a great man. He could send blank pages, and it would be good news to me.’

But I knew it wasn’t good news in that sense that Mrs Hargraves meant it, for I hadn’t sent mighty Hackmuth a story. This was merely the answer to my long letter of a few days ago. He was very prompt, that Hackmuth. He dazzled you with his speed. You no sooner dropped a letter in the mail box down on the corner, and when you got back to the hotel, there was an answer. Ah me, but his letters were so brief. A forty page letter, and he replied in one small paragraph. But that was fine in its way, because his replies were easier to memorize and know by heart. He had a way, that Hackmuth; he had a style; he had so much to give, even his commas and semi-colons had a way of dancing up and down. I used to tear the stamps off his envelopes, peel them off gently, to see what was under them.