Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty

Chapter 5. That Wonderful Year

CHAPTER 5 77 In 1933, Cosmopolitan published Night Bus, reprinted the following year as a Dell 10-cent “vestpocket” in a series that already included Mary Roberts Rinehart’s Locked Doors, W. Somerset Maugham’s Rain, and Pearl Buck’s Journey for Life. The author was Samuel Hopkins Adams, an investigative reporter who later became a successful writer of fiction. Adams’s dialogue was realistically pithy, but when he had to rely on narration and especially description, the man of letters took over and the spindly language became quaintly literary—the kind that pulp writers use when they want to remind themselves and their readers that they are, first and foremost, writers and, second, writers for hire. Take, for example, the opening sentence of Night Bus: “Through the resonant cave of the terminal, a perfunctory voice boomed out something about Jacksonville, points north, and New York.” Translation: the Miami—New York bus was ready for boarding. On board are a man and a woman whose chance meeting sets the plot in motion. The man, Peter Warne, is far from handsome (“his physiognomy was blunt, rough, and smudgy with bristles”). His occupation is even less attractive: manufacturing pine tar, which obviously would have That Wonderful Year to be changed, along with Warne’s physiognomy, if Night Bus were to become a movie. The woman’s name is not revealed immediately; she is unaccustomed to bus travel, much less to someone like Peter, who, when he finds bundles of newspapers occupying the only available seat, heaves them out the window. Eventually, she reveals her first name, Elspeth, but claims she is the wife of the fabulously wealthy Corcoran Andrews. It was not a total lie: Corcoran was her brother’s name; Andrews, their surname; and both are the spoiled children of a Park Avenue millionaire. It turns out to be a small world: Corcoran and Warne were in college together. Elspeth’s inattentiveness results in the theft of her suitcase, causing her to become increasingly dependent on Warne, who becomes increasingly interested in her—so much so that when Elspeth uses the rest stop to bathe and discovers that the bus has left without her, she finds that Warne, in a gesture of sheer gallantry, has remained behind. A bridge washout forces them to spend the night in a tourist camp, where they register as a married couple. Ever the gentleman, Warne strings a blanket between their twin beds, declaring it the walls of Jericho. Almost imperceptibly, Adams turns the trip into one of mutual discovery, until the walls of class, like those of Jericho, collapse. Adams’s thirty-page narrative is so economically written that it could serve as the template for a movie version. Just when the action seems to be winding down, Adams extends the plot, adding further complications. Although we assume that Elspeth and Warne will surmount whatever obstacles are thrown in their way, it is the nature of those obstacles that sustains our interest. First, there is the news that Elspeth’s father has offered $10,000 for information leading to her whereabouts. When Warne hears that one of the passengers, the smarmy Horace Shapley, has figured out who Elspeth is and plans to collect the reward, the two have no other choice but to leave the bus and proceed on foot and by boat, until they are reduced to hitchhiking. A seemingly benign driver picks them up and then takes off with Warne’s suitcase. But the resourceful Warne not only retrieves the suitcase but commandeers the car as well, so that, after a few more narrative detours, he can deposit Elspeth at her Park Avenue home. 78 THAT WONDERFUL YEAR When Warne contacts Mr. Andrews, Elspeth and her father assume it is to collect the reward. But all he wants is to be reimbursed for what he had spent on Elspeth: $18.56. Differences resolved and marriage implied, the two spend their honeymoon at the tourist camp where Warne had erected the walls of Jericho. This time Warne blows a toy trumpet, and the walls come tumbling down, a disarmingly innocent ending, and one that would—and did—make a memorable fadeout: toot of trumpet, falling blanket, THE END. The same year that the Night Bus vestpocket came out, Columbia Pictures released the movie version, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, which went on to become one of the world’s most...