With a rush of comfort and joy I realized that I was in my recliner in the den and the angelic choir was Joyce and the kids coming home from Midnight Mass, strewing vocal tinsel through the dark world as they came.
I stumbled to my feet, groping for a light switch. I must turn the decorations on again before they got back. I had suddenly lost all desire to be mistaken for Scrooge. I felt along the wall, falling into bookcases and knocking over bric-a-brac. The singing was coming closer.
My hand was on the knob, and I pulled the door open. Light, brilliant, festive, many-colored, twinkling, clashing, gaudy Christmas light filled the living room and glowed from the porch. The lights had come on, how or why I did not know, but I thanked the Ghost of Christmas Present, who surely must have been.
The front door burst open, and there were my wife and children, bright and glowing in the light of the outdoor decorations. And I was glad to see them.
Standing like a young orator on the hall carpet, shaking off snow like tinsel, Mark spread out his arms and crowed.
“God bless us every one!”
“Amen say I to that,” I answered, turning back to the den just long enough to pick up and carefully close the book that lay on the floor still open to the picture of Marley’s Ghost, before I joined the family around the misplaced, overburdened tree in the living room.
“Shall I light the candles?” Joyce asked.
“No, no,” I said. “Don’t do that.”
“There’s light enough already, light enough.”
And I kissed her quickly, under the mistletoe.
Mystery for Christmas
by Anthony Boucher
That was why the Benson jewel robbery was solved — because Aram Melekian was too much for Mr. Quilter’s temper.
His almost invisible eyebrows soared, and the scalp of his close-cropped head twitched angrily. “Damme!” said Mr. Quilter, and in that mild and archaic oath there was more compressed fury than in paragraphs of uncensored profanity. “So you, sir, are the untrammeled creative artist, and I am a drudging, hampering hack!”
Aram Melekian tilted his hat a trifle more jauntily. “That’s the size of it, brother. And if you hamper this untrammeled opus any more, Metropolis Pictures is going to be sueing its youngest genius for breach of contract.”
Mr. Quilter rose to his full lean height. “I’ve seen them come and go,” he announced; “and there hasn’t been a one of them, sir, who failed to learn something from me. What is so creative about pouring out the full vigor of your young life? The creative task is mine, molding that vigor, shaping it to some end.”
“Go play with your blue pencil,” Melekian suggested. “I’ve got a dream coming on.”
“Because I have never produced anything myself, you young men jeer at me. You never see that your successful screen plays are more my effort than your inspiration.” Mr. Quilter’s thin frame was aquiver.
“Then what do you need us for?”
“What— Damme, sir, what indeed? Ha!” said Mr. Quilter loudly. “HI show you. I’ll pick the first man off the street that has life and a story in him. What more do you contribute? And through me hell turn out a job that will sell. If I do this, sir, then will you consent to the revisions I’ve asked of you?”
“Go lay an egg,” said Aram Melekian. “And I’ve no doubt you will.”
Mr. Quilter stalked out of the studio with high dreams. He saw the horny-handed son of toil out of whom he had coaxed a masterpiece signing a contract with F.X. He saw a discomfited Armenian genius in the background busily devouring his own words. He saw himself freed of his own sense of frustration, proving at last that his was the significant part of writing.
He felt a bumping shock and the squealing of brakes. The next thing he saw was the asphalt paving.
Mr. Quilter rose to his feet undecided whether to curse the driver for knocking him down or bless him for stopping so miraculously short of danger. The young man in the brown suit was so disarmingly concerned that the latter choice was inevitable.
“I’m awfully sorry,” the young man blurted. “Are you hurt? It’s this bad wing of mine, I guess.” His left arm was in a sling.
“Nothing at all, sir. My fault. I was preoccupied...”
They stood awkwardly for a moment, each striving for a phrase that was not mere politeness. Then they both spoke at once.
“You came out of that studio,” the young man said. “Do you” (his tone was awed) “do you work there?”
And Mr. Quilter had spotted a sheaf of eight and a half by eleven paper protruding from the young man’s pocket. “Are you a writer, sir? Is that a manuscript?”
The young man shuffled and came near blushing. “Naw. I’m not a writer. I’m a policeman. But I’m going to be a writer. This is a story I was trying to tell about what happened to me — But are you a writer? In there?”
Mr. Quilter’s eyes were aglow under their invisible brows. “I, sir,” he announced proudly, “am what makes writers tick. Are you interested?”
He was also, he might have added, what makes detectives tick. But he did not know that yet.
The Christmas trees were lighting up in front yards and in windows as Officer Tom Smith turned his rickety Model A onto the side street where Mr. Quilter lived. Hollywood is full of these quiet streets, where ordinary people live and move and have their being, and are happy or unhappy as chance wills, but both in a normal and unspectacular way. This is really Hollywood — the Hollywood that patronizes the twenty-cent fourth-run houses and crowds the stores on the Boulevard on Dollar Day.
To Mr. Quilter, saturated at the studio with the other Hollywood, this was always a relief. Kids were playing ball in the evening sun, radios were tuning in to Amos and Andy, and from the small houses came either the smell of cooking or the clatter of dish-washing.
And the Christmas trees, he knew, had been decorated not for the benefit of the photographers from the fan magazines, but because the children liked them and they looked warm and friendly from the street.
“Gosh, Mr. Quilter,” Tom Smith was saying, “this is sure a swell break for me. You know, I’m a good copper. But to be honest I don’t know as I’m very bright. And that’s why I want to write, because maybe that way I can train myself to be and then I won’t be a plain patrolman all my life. And besides, this writing, it kind of itches-like inside you.”
“Cacoëthes scribendi,” observed Mr. Quilter, not unkindly. “You see, sir, you have hit, in your fumbling way, on one of the classic expressions for your condition.”
“Now that’s what I mean. You know what I mean even when I don’t say it. Between us, Mr. Quilter...”
Mr. Quilter, his long thin legs outdistancing even the policeman’s, led the way into his bungalow and on down the hall to a room which at first glance contained nothing but thousands of books. Mr. Quilter waved at them. “Here, sir, is assembled every helpful fact that mortal need know. But I cannot breathe life into these dry bones. Books are not written from books. But I can provide bones, and correctly articulated, for the life which you, sir — But here is a chair. And a reading lamp. Now, sir, let me hear your story.”