The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope

by C. W. Grafton

  “Anything the matter?” she asked.

  “No more than if I were sitting on a time bomb listening to it tick.”

  “Cold feet?”

  “About up to here,” I said, pointing to my knees.

  “Quitting?”

  I didn’t look at her. I said:

  “Could be. It all depends.”

  She was rattling pans without really doing anything with them, and although I was close enough to touch her she might have been in the Smithsonian Institute, she was so far away.

  “Better run along home,” she said between her teeth. “Might get your little tail spanked.”

  “Maybe so. I’m allergic to spankings.”

  The dishes got noisier and noisier, and one of them fell on the floor and broke with a deafening crash. She had another one in her hand, and she suddenly threw it on the floor with another crash and ran blindly out through the living-room door, and I could hear the door of her bedroom shut with a bang. I walked the same way but stopped with my hand almost on the knob of the door, and spent the next five or ten minutes walking around the living room and sitting down and getting up and walking around some more.

  The telephone sounded like the crack of doom, and I knew that was just exactly what it was. I went over and sat in front of it while it rang two more times, and then I forced myself to take the receiver off the hook, and to my surprise it didn’t hurt a bit.

  There was no mistaking the voice of Mr. Jim Mead in one of its more formidable moments.

  “Henry.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m at Harper Products Company. Have you got a car there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get out here right away.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The receiver went up with a bang at the other end of the line, and after a while I remembered I still had something in my hand and I hung it up too. I went over and knocked on Ruth’s door and then tried it, but it was locked, so I found my hat and drove on out to the company’s office.

  Mr. William Jasper Harper was enthroned behind his big desk as pleased as an umpire who has just said, “Strike three!” Mr. James Mead was very erect and he kept me under observation as if he were trying to pick out the best place for the knife to go in. Another man with a big shiny star on his coat was smoking a cigar and, of all things in the world, I had to wonder whether he was going to let the ashes drop on the floor.

  There was a great big silence, slightly bluish in color, and I stood as still as the Tropic of Capricorn, which is just a line on the map and very still indeed.

  The man with the star crossed his legs and two inches of ash fell right smack on the rug. He said:

  “Should I arrest him now?”

  Mr. William Jasper Harper spread his hands contentedly on the big desk in front of him, and the light glinted off his polished fingernails.

  “Perhaps it won’t be necessary, Mr. Sheriff,” he said, and cleared his throat significantly, “I think if you will just wait in the outer office, perhaps Mr. Mead and I had better have a little talk with the young man.”

  The sheriff shrugged his shoulders and went out, and I wondered what would happen if I walked out behind him, but I thought it would probably be better if I didn’t do it.

  It was Mr. James Mead’s turn to clear his throat, and he did it magnificently.

  “I think, Gilmore, you have probably been reading too many books. Just what sort of insanity is this?”

  “Oh, come now, Jim,” said William Jasper Harper in his best after-dinner manner. “Perhaps I have been a bit precipitous and hot-tempered. If he realizes the absurdity of his conduct, perhaps a little trip somewhere would take his mind off of fantastic things and make him, shall we say, a useful servant of the law once more.”

  Mr. James Mead looked at me severely.

  “What do you say to that, Gilmore?”

  Well, I really had to say something, so I said:

  “Yes, sir,” pretty meekly, and then I said, “I’m sure I can’t be all bad, Mr. Mead.”

  “Then it’s settled,” said Mr. Harper. He swooped up the French phone13 from its cradle, and then put it back and pressed a lever on his talk box, and said loudly:

  “When is the next train, Miss Spindle?” The box croaked something that must have been, “Where to, Mr. Harper?” because he looked up and said, “Oh yes, where would you like to go?”

  I knew just where he wanted me to go, but I didn’t think it would be dignified to put it in words. I was standing in front of the desk, and when I glanced down I saw an audit report marked, “Harper Products Company—Report of Audit as of December 31, 1940.” It was pretty nifty looking, all bound up with a fancy cover, and down at the bottom I saw “Yoland & Jolley, Certified Public Accountants, Louisville, Kentucky.” I said:

  “Any place will do. I think Louisville, Kentucky, would be nice.”

  There was considerable croaking over the little brown box and there was every evidence of Harperian displeasure like a thunder cloud on Mt. Olympus.

  “It’s too late for the morning train to Louisville. You’ll have to go somewhere else.”

  I tried to look crestfallen. “I’m very fond of Louisville, sir,” I said respectfully. “If I’ve got to go some place, that’s where I’d like to go. Isn’t there a later train?”

  “Not till ten or eleven o’clock tonight,” said James Mead. There was nothing friendly about the way he was looking at me. He looked like Life with Father.14

  Harper consulted the little box on his desk again. “There’s a train going south around 12:30. You can take that and go as far as you please. The farther the better. Or you can be arrested on suspicion and released from the County jail in time to catch the evening train for Louisville. Take your choice.”

  I wished I were like these movie actresses who can turn their tears on and off like a radio. I looked down at my feet and did my best to squeeze out at least one little tear but I didn’t have any luck and had to fall back on a very poor imitation of a sniffle, followed by a heavy blow of the nose. When I looked up at Harper again he didn’t look quite so much like the president of the Flint National Bank refusing to make a $10.00 loan. He looked more like the vice president refusing to make a $5.00 loan. There wasn’t much change but I was slightly encouraged and said, “Please, sir, I really would like to go to Louisville, but if my poor old mother should hear that I had been in jail like a common criminal she could never hold up her head again at the Tuesday Afternoon Book Club and would probably have to resign as Chairwoman of Circle Number Six of the Women’s Auxiliary.” I damn near overdid the thing but I lowered my eyes at the proper time and blew my nose loudly again and the pompous old ass swallowed it. Out of the corner of my eye I got a glimpse of Mead opening his mouth with considerable indignation, but he evidently thought better of it and set his lips in a stern, straight line. If he had told Harper that my mother had been dead for fifteen years, I probably would have been put in solitary confinement without any more preliminaries.

  William Jasper Harper was visibly weakening. He said: “Of course I don’t want to be unduly severe now that we have an agreement in principle. Perhaps we could leave out the arrest and jail part of it if you have had a sincere change of heart and will promise to behave yourself. For example, Mr. Henry, don’t you think that the affairs of the McClures would be better off under the supervision of a, shall we say, more mature mind?”

  I said, “Yes, sir.”

  He swooped up the phone again and then put it down and there was more conference with the little box and Miss Spindle. They eyed me and I eyed the ashes on the rug, and in almost no time at all a buzzer went off and Mr. Harper picked up the phone and said, “Hello,” almost musically, and then, “Miss McClure,” and then, “Just a moment, please. Mr. Henry would like to speak to you.” He held the thing out at me, and then there
was still some talk coming through it, so he put it back to his ear again and said, “What?” and then after a moment, “Well, perhaps it is just as well. He just wanted you to get the message that he is leaving on the ten-forty train and is sorry that the pressure of other business makes it necessary for him to ask that you seek other counsel.”

  The noise of the receiver being replaced in the living room of the McClure home reverberated clearly through the office of Mr. William Jasper Harper. He looked up at me.

  “Wouldn’t talk to you, she said. It would seem that your usefulness here is definitely at an end, no matter how you look at it.” He went to the door, summoned the sheriff, took a paper out of his pocket, tore it up, and deposited it in the wastebasket. I picked up my hat without looking at Mr. James Mead and walked out into a very unfriendly world.

  13 A telephone with a long straight handle, with a pipe-bowl-shaped speaking-tube at one end and a round earpiece at the other, common in the earliest phone models.

  14 The 1935 novel by Clarence Day about a benevolent curmudgeon, made into a very successful stage play in 1939 by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (and a classic film in 1947, starring William Powell and Irene Dunne).

  17

  I walked slowly and did not walk very far. When I had given Harper enough time to go back into his office and close the door I turned around and went back into the building and told ancient Miss Spindle that I wanted to see Tim McClure. She made no secret of the fact that I was a trifle less welcome than something you would scrape off the bottom of your shoe, but she informed me that I should go back to the plant itself and look in the first door to the right of the main entrance.

  I found Tim with his big frame hunched over a desk covered with a collection of metallic objects and gadgets which he was measuring with a set of calipers. There could be no doubt that these were the products from which the Harper Company got its name.

  The reception I got could hardly be called a reception at all. As a persona I was clearly non grata. If Dale Carnegie had spent the morning with me in Harpersville, Kentucky,15 he would never have picked up any pointers on How to Win Friends and Influence People.16

  “All right,” Tim growled at me, “what now?”

  Even as disagreeable as he was, there could be no doubt that he had not heard from Ruth in the last hour or so, for in that event I was sure he would have been downright vicious. Instead of answering him, I stuck my head out of the door of his office and looked back into the plant. Except for a couple of small offices near the entrance, the whole first floor was one big room full of complicated machines that chopped things up and punched holes in them and made things round or flat. There wasn’t an idle man or machine in sight and from the way the building rumbled and trembled, it was apparent that the floors above were equally as active. I looked back at Tim and said, “Seems busy enough to me.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Nothing,” I said innocently, “nothing at all. Just passing the time of day.”

  “Who says it isn’t busy?”

  “Nobody. Nobody at all. It just doesn’t look like a corporation whose stock is selling for twenty-three dollars a share.”

  Tim walked to the door and took a look for himself as if he had never seen it before. He ran his hand through his hair and said, “No, it doesn’t, for a fact.”

  I let that soak for a while. “If you’re losing money, you’re doing it more energetically than anybody I ever saw.” I pointed to the gadgets on the table. “War stuff?”

  Instead of giving me a direct answer, he looked hostile and said: “I don’t like messy little birds who shoot off their mouths all the time. Every time you say a word you insinuate something and it’s always trouble. We’re getting along all right. Now scram out of here and if you have any more questions, ask yourself and see what bright answers you get. Our contracts with the Government are at a fixed price but the cost of the materials is giving us the pinch and taxes just about take the rest. To hear you talk, you’d think everybody is a crook and the whole world is a nasty place. Now scram. Beat it.”

  The telephone on his desk rang and he picked it up. I heard him say in a very different kind of voice, “Oh, hello, Ruth,” and I walked away quickly. I wasn’t retreating, of course, but left because I had other things to do.

  15 This is the first mention that Harpersville is in Kentucky.

  16 Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) was the author and lecturer behind a very popular series of self-help courses that continue today. His most famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, was first published in 1936 and remains a steady seller.

  18

  I still had Tim’s car. I drove around town until I found the office of the newspaper. The place of business of the Harpersville Gazette did not remind me of the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune. The windows were dirty. In the front room there were some cases with samples of stationery displayed in them, together with cards for every occasion, including exhortations to get well quick, thank you for the wedding presents and coy ways to announce the birth of a child. There was a railing over at one side and behind that was a safe, a potbellied iron stove and a couple of desks covered with galley proofs, paste pots and stuff. A newspaper from the city was spread out on one of the desks and a man with a green eyeshade was clipping items out of it which could be reprinted in Harpersville without giving credit.

  I asked if it would be all right for me to see some back numbers and he seemed to think it would not hurt anything. He pointed through a door and I went back into a big gloomy room where there was a medium-size press that the local sheet was evidently printed on and several small job presses that were being fed by hand. Over in the corner a shaded light bulb hung down on a long cord from the ceiling and under it a man sat before a linotype machine with a cigarette drooping from his lips.

  Getting the issue that carried the story on John McClure’s death was easy and when I had read the thing I didn’t know any more than I knew before. He just had an automobile accident and died and was buried like other people and there was a picture and he was a Deacon in the Crescent Avenue Presbyterian Church and a member of the Kiwanis Club. He was the oldest employee of Harper Products Company in point of continuous service and William Jasper Harper himself was quoted as saying that it would be difficult to replace him. I thought about $35.00 a week and was pretty skeptical.

  I then suggested that I would like to see the back numbers for a month or two around August, 1909, and the man at the linotype machine said that anybody who would want to read the Harpersville Gazette that far back was a fool, but I could go upstairs and look if it would make me happier.

  They didn’t have much system about keeping their back numbers and I spent a couple of hours fooling with bundles of the dirtiest paper I have even seen in my life. I finally found what I was looking for but I would have been better off if I had never thought about it. There wasn’t one line in any of the papers that had any bearing on what I was interested in. When I was through, I looked like a chimneysweep and I was not sure that my new suit would ever be the same.

  19

  I went down to the men’s washroom at the Hotel Harper and scrubbed all visible parts of my anatomy with soap and water that was practically boiling. Then I got the Negro boy and gave him a quarter to brush me off. You would have thought he was beating a rug and so did I, but he got plenty of dust out of me and it was worth it. When he had finished I had to wash all over again but I was more or less respectable.

  I had a good deal of curiosity about this Murdoch woman who was mentioned in the adoption papers, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that she must have had her origin in Harpersville or somewhere close by. I spent the largest part of the afternoon trying to find a trace of her but twenty-five or twenty-six years is a long time whether you are absent, in jail, or simply trying to make enough to pay your taxes. I went into the post office, both banks, and a flock
of grocery stores and drug stores but if Phoebe Murdoch ever lived in the town of Harpersville she had been a most inconspicuous little rabbit or had learned the secret of invisibility.

  About 5:30 I gave up. I had been pounding the pavements and was pretty tired but I thought of one more blind alley I could walk into before knocking off for the day. I called the police station without saying who I was and got the information that Mr. Mead’s car had been taken to Harbison’s Garage. Apparently there was a deal between the garage and the police because they knew where the car had been taken without even looking it up.

  As you might suspect, Harbison’s Garage was operated by a Mr. Harbison, a garrulous man with a scrawny neck who wore a celluloid collar much too big for him.17 His neck looked like an electric wire with a porcelain insulator around it. I told him I represented an insurance company and he let me see the car without any argument. Like John McClure’s buggy, it was junk and a very low grade of junk at that. I told him who owned the thing, borrowed a piece of paper and scribbled a note to Jim Mead reminding him to report the accident in a formal way so that he could recover on his collision insurance. I gave Harbison the idea that possibly his testimony as to the value of the car after the accident might be material and he pricked up his ears. You could tell that he could smell a counterfeit penny edgeways at a hundred paces.

  While I was there, I maneuvered him over to the McClure car and we almost got into a discussion of what could have happened to the left rear wheel but about that time I had a prickly sensation in the back of my head and when I looked up there was a bright nickel-plated star and the sheriff was wearing it. He looked at me with a high degree of disapproval and said: “I thought you were going to behave yourself. Mr. Harper won’t like it.”

  I opened my eyes wide and looked injured. “What am I doing?” I asked plaintively.