Some Came Running Read Online Free

check and a twenty-dollar bill. “Instead of whiskey, why don’t you get me a fifth of Gordon’s gin and a bottle of Noilly Prat vermouth.”
    “I doubt if anybody’ll have that kind.”
    “Okay, then just get the whiskey. Any good blend.”
    The clerk nodded. “That’s a lot of money to trust a stranger with,” he said.
    “I know, can’t you see how worried I look?”
    The clerk grinned, a little, a lopsided weird grin because his left eye did not join in and grin with the rest of him.
    “You said the Second National, didn’t you?” he asked. “A checking account?”
    “That’s right. Don’t you want another drink?”
    “Yes. I’ll take one.” He picked the bottle up off the table. “Your brother Frank is a member of the board at the other bank, isn’t he?” he said. “At the Cray County Bank?”
    “I believe he is,” Dave said. The young clerk drank the raw whiskey easily. Then he folded the check and bill and put them in his jacket pocket. When he got up, the expression of his good eye was as veiled as that of the glass one. “I’ll get this done for you right away, Mr Hirsh.”
    “Have another drink before you go if you want,” Dave said.
    “If I have another drink, I’ll wind up spendin’ the afternoon here,” the clerk said. There was no humor in his face. He went to the door.
    “I’ll bring you back a deposit slip,” he said.
    Dave sat still a moment or two, thinking about the clerk. He liked him. But then he liked most everybody. But he hadn’t handled him right. He got up and walked over to the window, taking the bottle with him. But he did not drink, and a big arrogant grin spread over his face. He was thinking about the faces of the people in the bank, when they saw his name on that check. And he was thinking about his brother Frank’s face, when he heard about it, which he would soon enough.
    Down below him Freddy came out from under the hotel marquee in a topcoat now but bareheaded in the spitting snow. Dave watched him cross the street diagonally and go up the other side to the square.
    Standing at the window, for a moment he forgot the town. He seemed to go back into the Army. You didn’t get over it all at once. And the one-eyed clerk had brought out a singularly strong emotion in him. He had just finished spending four years of his life with boys like that. They called him Pop. And they brought their troubles to him. They believed that, being nearly thirty-five, he by rights ought to know more about life than they did. He had wound up as a sort of elected father of the outfit, and now he missed that. Wherever they were now. All scattered out. A lot of them dead. And a lot of them crippled, too, like Freddy.
    It seemed that in the last few years the cripples had become a normal part of everyday life, a steady stream of them, rolling back from over both seas, hardly anyone even noticed them anymore. He was suddenly reminded of Falstaff’s speech about the maimed and crippled rabble, that had come home with him, from the Continental Wars.
    It must have been a lot like this in Rome, too, during her great days of world leadership. Except now the government bought them cars which the taxpayers paid for. Well, civilization had advanced a lot. The only thing was he, Dave, had about got to the place where he didn’t much give a damn about civilization anymore. Except, of course, for the comforts. That’s what kept us all going wasn’t it: the comforts.
    Sometimes, and increasingly the past year and a half that he’d served with the Occupation Army in Germany, Dave got the feeling he was living in a dying age. It was the same feeling he got when he listened to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, a picture not of the birth of the world but the death, and the now primitive tribes that sang hauntingly of the former greatness of their people and put the rusted gun and the wrecked auto upon their stone altars and worshipped them as gods because they no longer knew how to operate