Now I am not trying to pose a moral issue. For under the deft fingers of Pascal Halmer, I had, for the first time in my life, the feeling of creativeness, of originality of thought, aim and purpose.
Of course I too was a fraud. But, I told myself, nobody knew our secret. And we entertained just as many readers as the more creative writers in the business. All my life, I had been a hopeless drudge, used by bored typists in a little office where I was limited to legal papers, stencils for invoices and such.
Now I contributed to the pleasure of thousands of eager readers of escape fiction. Late in middle age I had found my niche in the creative world.
Thus it was that my personality began to undergo a change. I came to think of myself as a colleague of Pascal Halmer. And as his friend, his confidant, did I not acquire certain proprietary rights?
You can understand then, how shocked I became when Halmer first began to neglect me. Little things, but they hurt. An instance was the afternoon when he came home with a brand-new FM radio receiver.
Before long he became so absorbed in his recorded classics that he forgot to oil me, to change my ribbon, to put on my cover when he'd typed out "30" at the end of a story.
I sulked. My keys began to stick. My ribbon grew smudgy and faded. But Halmer paid me no heed until he received a humorous little note from an editor one day.
"Your yarns are tops," he read aloud, "but reading them has made me wear trifocals!"
With a muttered oath Halmer left our attic studio, returned with typewriter oil, a type brush, a new ribbon. But he didn't do this for love of me! He did it only to keep his editor happy. And that hurt.
Naturally my morale was affected. My keys began to rattle. My warning bell, to signal a line's end, became so inhibited that Halmer would curse when I failed to ring. And my platen began to crack.