“Anastasia,” I said one day, as I was about half through with my revision, “you’re always asking if there’s no way you can help me. I can suggest one.”
“Oh, good! What is it?”
“Well, I know where I can hire a typewriter for a month very cheaply. You might try your hand at punching out this wonderful work of fiction on it.”
“Oh, that please me very much.”
“All right. I’ll fetch the instrument of torture.”
It was a very old machine, of eccentric mechanism and uncouth appearance. With fumbling hesitation she began. About a word a minute was her average, and that word a mistake; but rapidly she progressed. Sometimes I would hear a vigorous: “Nom d’un Chien!” and would find that she had gone over the same line twice. Then again, she would get her carbon paper wrong, and the duplicate would come out on the back of the original. At other times it was only that she had run over the edge of the paper.
The typewriter, too, was somewhat lethargic in action. It seemed to say: “I’m so old in service, and my joints are so stiff—surely I might be allowed to take my own time. If you try to hurry me I’ll get my fingers tangled, or I’ll jam my riband, or I’ll make all kinds of mistakes. Really, it’s time I was superannuated.” No beginner, even in a Business School, ever tackled a more decrepit and cantankerous machine, and it said much for her patience that she turned out such good copy.
So passed August and most of September—day after day of grinding work in sweltering heat; I, pruning, piecing, chopping, changing; she pounding patiently at that malcontent machine. Then at last, after a long, hard day it was done. The sunshine was mellow on the roofs as I watched her write the closing words. She handed the page to me, and, regarding the sunlight almost sorrowfully, she folded her tired hands.
Two tears stole down her pale cheeks.
All at once I saw how worn and weary she was. Thin, gentle, sad—more than ever like a child she looked, with her exquisite profile, and the heaped-up masses of her dark hair; more than ever like a child with her shrinking figure and her delicate pallor: yet she would soon be nineteen. The idea came to me that in my passion of creative egotism I had given little thought to her.