“I can’t; haven’t I been telling you that? I can’t make it by myself. The city’s too strong for me. I’d only get off at the first Jersey stop and come back again. I can’t make it without you, just like you probably can’t any more without someone like me. It’ll take our combined strength. You’re my last straw, and I’m yours; we’ve met, and we know that now. Don’t let’s throw this chance away. It’s like dying when you’re still alive—” Her face was puckered in desperate appeal, her eyes holding his by their intensity.
“They’ll only be there waiting for me, I know what I’m saying. They’ll collar me before my foot’s even off the steps—”
“Not if nothing’s missing, if nothing’s been taken. What would there be to arrest you for then?”
“But something has. It’s right here in front of us.”
“I know, but there’s still time to undo it, that’s what my proposition is. Not to go with that, not to take that with you. What would there be to run away from then? We’d be bringing the badness of the city back home with us.”
“You mean you think I could—?” A scared look was peering from his face, as if he was longing to hope but scared to let himself.
“You said he’s there alone in the house. You said he went out all dressed up and won’t be back until late. You said you didn’t think he’d find out until he gets up in the morning—” She was speaking without pause for breath. “Have you still got the key, the key to get in with?”
His hands went to his pockets, darting from one to the other quickly now, as quickly as she had spoken. The tempo of hope was accelerating. “I don’t remember throwing— Unless I left it in the door—” He rose from his chair to gain better clearance for his movements. Suddenly a terse breath gushed from him, signalling the finding of the key before it had itself appeared to view. “I’ve got it.” Then he brought it out. “Here. Here it is, here.”
They marvelled over the fact of its presence for a brief moment.
“It’s funny I should hang onto it like this, isn’t it? It’s like a... a— Some sort of a—”
“Yeah, it is.” She knew what he meant, though not the word they both needed.
He repocketed it. She jumped to her feet in him. “Now if you can get back there before he comes home— Just in and out, long enough to put it back where you got it, that’s all you need to do. Nobody’s going to come after you just for chopping a hole in the wall, as long as nothing’s been taken out—”
She was hastily gathering up the scattered packets, evening them together into one cube to give to him. The same thought struck them both at once, and they stopped to look at one another in dismay. “How much have you blown already? How much have you taken out?”
He pasted the flat of his hand to his forehead for a moment. “I don’t know. Wait a minute, see if I can— Five dollars for that meal I didn’t eat. And I must have bought about fifteen dollars’ worth of those tickets up at your place— Twenty, altogether. Twenty bucks. It can’t be more than that.”
“Wait a minute, I’ve got it here,” she said crisply. “I’ll put it back in for you.”
She jumped up, ran over to the cot, dismantled it by pulling up the bedding at the side. Then she tilted the mattress along its edge, thrust her hand into some unsuspected slit lurking along its underside, extracted a small quantity of paper money bedded there in tortured shape, like some sort of a flower pressed flat within an album.
“Oh, no,” he started to protest. “I don’t want — I can’t let you do that. It’s my worry, why should you make good the difference?”
She put on her best dance-hall armor, cut her hand at him frontally. “Now listen, I’m doing this, and I don’t want to hear any arguments. All of it has got to go back; if there’s even a dollar still out, it’s technically a theft and you’re open to arrest. Besides, what’s the difference? Call it a loan, if it’ll make you any happier. You can pay me back after we get home and you’ve started working again. I’ve still got enough left here to take care of both our bus tickets. You can square that up too, later on, if you want to.” She thrust it into his hand. “Here, you hang onto it for us. It’s our bankroll now, yours and mine.”
He gave her a look that was like a pause in the flurry of their preparations for departure. “Gee, I don’t know what to say—”
“Don’t say anything.” She flung herself back into the chair she’d originally sought out when she first entered the room. “The main thing is to make sure we both get out of this town tonight. Wait for me a minute, till I get my shoes on — throw a few things into my bag — there isn’t much to take—” Then as she saw him make a tentative move toward the door and look at her inquiringly, “No, stay right in here with me, don’t even wait outside — I’m afraid I’ll lose you, and you’re my one chance of getting home tonight—”
“You won’t lose me,” he promised almost inaudibly.
She jumped up again, settled her feet into their gear with a slight downward stamp of each one. “It’s funny, but I’m not tired any more—”
He watched her throw things headlong into a battered suitcase she had hauled out from under the cot. “Suppose he’s back by the time I get over there?”
“He won’t be. We’ve got to keep saying that, praying it. It’s the only way. You weren’t caught when you went there to take it, why should you be caught when you go there to put it back? He’s stepping out some place with that girl you saw leave with him — there’s an even chance he won’t get back till half-past three or four; till he sees her home to wherever she lives herself and—”
She went over to the window, raised it and leaned out. Not in the center of it, but slantwise, over in the far corner, looking off at an angle. “Look, we’ve still got time. You can still make it, you’ve still got a fighting chance.”
“What’s that out there you’re looking at?”
She drew her head in again. “That’s the only decent thing in this whole town. Every night it let me off when I thought I couldn’t hold out another minute. It never tricked me, never gypped me, and I know it won’t tonight. It’s the only friend I’ve got, the only one I’ve ever had since I first came here. It won’t let us down. It’s the clock on the Paramount Building, all the way over; you can see it from here, if you look the right way, where there’s a chunk cut out between two of the buildings— Come on, Quinn, it says we still can; and it never steered me wrong yet.”
She latched down the lid of the valise. He reached for it, and she passed it to him. He held the door wide for her a moment, after she’d already passed through to the hall. “Got everything? Sure there’s nothing else?”
“Close the door,” she said wearily. “I don’t want to look at it again. Leave the key in it, I won’t be needing it any more.”
They went down the rickety stairs one behind the other, he with her weather-beaten valise in his hand. It didn’t weigh much; it had hardly anything in it — just busted hopes. They trod softly, not so much in fear of inmates around them as with the instinctive hush that goes with night-departure.