He chuckled in a satisfied way.
Presently Linn came out of the hotel, in a tan rep bath-robe that hung around his heels. Close behind him came Mrs. Rainey. She caught up with him and began talking to him, walking close to his side. Linn spoke stiffly to her as they came down the pebble walk to the pier. It was plain that she was still trying to persuade him to call the experiment off, and that her interest in it embarrassed him.
I looked at her husband. He was smiling jovially toward the approaching pair, but his blue eyes weren’t as jolly as his mouth.
Linn and the woman came up to us. Linn’s face was wan, with lines from nose-corners past mouth corners. His mouth was thin and so were his eyes. He kept his eyes on the pier in front of him, never letting them look either right or left, where he might see the water.
“All set?” Rainey greeted him in a loud, too hearty voice.
Linn said: “Yes.”
Rainey took off his coat and handed it to Metcalf. In the red swimming suit he seemed larger than ever, a big sun-brown athlete. He had a little too much meat on him everywhere, but under that outer soft covering of flesh he had plenty of muscles everywhere.
Linn dropped his bath-robe on the pier. The suit he wore was a little too loose around the waist and beside Rainey’s ruddy bulk he looked almost puny. Nevertheless he was compact and wiry, better set up than he had seemed in his clothes.
Rainey went down first to the boat tethered at the foot of a landing ladder.
“Come on,” he called heartily.
That wasn’t necessary, because Linn was already following him, but that was like Rainey.
Linn went down the ladder slowly. His knuckles showed tight and white on each rung. His eyes were open very little if at all. His lips moved in and out with his breathing. His face was sallow and damp.
Rainey took the oars. Linn sat in the stern facing him. When Rainey pulled the boat clear of the pier I saw Linn’s ghastly frightened face bent toward the bottom of the boat. His eyes were screwed tight.
Rainey rowed the boat farther from the pier than was necessary, building up his act, of course. Linn did not once raise his head. His back was bent, tense, and small in comparison with the rowing promoter’s bulk.
Mrs. Rainey was standing beside me, shivering. Twice she muttered something. The second time I thought it polite to say: “I beg your pardon?”
She laughed nervously.
“Talking to myself,” she said. “Oh, I wish—”
She didn’t finish her wish. She was staring with desperate eyes at the men in the boat, working her fingers together with a force that made one of her knuckles crack sharply.
The others of the audience had been standing around cracking jokes, trying to guess whether the experiment would be a success or not. The postmaster’s son—a fidgety slim youth with a bright-eyed, cheerful, pimply face—had bet one of his companions a dollar that Linn would have to be dragged out of the lake. Nobody took the affair very seriously until it became apparent that Mrs. Rainey was so highly wrought up over it. Then the others began to catch her nervousness, so that by the time the boat stopped we were all quite tense.
Rainey shipped his oars and stood up. He looked like a living statue against the dark trees that bounded the lake on the other side, and I suppose he knew it. The lake was smooth and shiny.
Rainey said something to Linn. The smaller man stood up, facing the pier. His eyes were still shut, with a tightness that drew his brows down and wrinkled his forehead.
Rainey spoke again.
Linn nodded but did not move otherwise.
Rainey laughed and went on talking.
No sound of this came to us. All I could hear was the lapping of the water against the pier, the shuffling of feet among the audience, and Mrs. Rainey’s breathing.
Linn bent forward quickly, and as quickly straightened himself again. His knees didn’t look very steady.
He put his hands together in front of his chest, rubbing the back of his left nervously with the palm of his right. His eyes were clenched shut.
Rainey spoke again.
Linn nodded emphatically.
Rainey came up behind Lynn, and, in a confusion of flailing arms and legs, the smaller man went out over the side of the boat into the lake.
Mrs. Rainey screamed.
Standing with his legs far apart, Rainey steadied the violently rocking boat and looked down at the turmoil Linn was making in the lake.
The man in the water seemed to have a dozen arms and legs, and all of them working, beating the lake into white froth.
The man in the boat called some laughing thing down to the man in the water.
Linn’s head, wet and black as a seal’s, came up high out of the water and went down again in an upflung shower of white drops. His arms beat the lake into a whirlpool.
The man in the boat stopped laughing and called sharply to him, the words head down coming clear to us on the pier.
Mrs. Rainey had begun to pace up and down the edge of the pier, muttering to herself again. I heard her say something with the name of God in it.
Rainey called again into the lake, but with no effect on the boiling confusion there.
Linn’s head came up high again, and he seemed to be trying to climb up into the air.
Then he plunged down and the water closed over him.
Mrs. Rainey had stopped running up and down the edge of the pier. She was standing beside me. Her fingers were digging into my arm. She was saying, “Oh, Oh, Oh!” softly and foolishly.
The black head of the man in the lake showed on the surface like the snout of a fish, and vanished, his white face not showing at all.
Rainey went out of the boat, into the lake in a short clean arc, as smoothly as if he had been poured into the water.
The next few seconds seemed like a lot of minutes—before the two heads came to the surface again.
They came up side by side.
Linn’s arms came out of the water, flailing, beating the lake as if it was something he was fighting. They knocked spume high over his head.
Rainey caught Linn, let him go, caught him, let him go again.
They maneuvered around in the water, one smoothly, skillfully, the other crazily, violently.
Rainey was trying to get behind Linn, and failing.
Twice it looked as if Rainey had tried to hit Linn with a fist, to quiet him. Linn was twisting and turning and beating up too much water for the blows to be clearly seen, but if they landed they didn’t do much good.
Linn was fighting now for a hold on Rainey.
Rainey’s attempts to get a safe hold on Linn failed.
Rainey seemed to be tiring, moving slower around Linn now.
Mrs. Rainey’s digging fingers had my arm sore by now. She was babbling excitedly, incoherently.
I turned my head to the others and asked: “Hadn’t somebody better go help him?”
The postmaster’s son jumped across the pier and disappeared down a ladder. Others, including Metcalf, followed him.
I remained with Mrs. Rainey, watching the two men in the water.
There was less confusion there now, and their heads were close together, but it didn’t look as if Rainey had secured a very good safe-hold on Linn. However they were moving, if very slowly, in the direction of the empty boat.
The roar of a motor broke out below us, and a blunt boat carrying the postmaster’s son, Metcalf, and two other men dashed away from the pier.
Mrs. Rainey screamed again and her fingers ground painfully into the bone of my arm. I looked quickly from the motor boat to where the men had been struggling in the water.
Neither Rainey nor Linn could be seen. The surface of the lake was smooth and shiny except where the motor boat cut it.
Then, after what seemed too many minutes to justify any guess except that both men had gone under for good, the water was broken close to the deserted boat, almost in the path of the motor boat. It was just a queer hump in the surface, as if
something had struggled up almost to the top.
The motor boat sheered off. Men leaned over the side of it where the hump had showed. The boat and the men hid the spot from us.
The boat twisted again, slowing up, and bumped into the empty boat, lying far over into the water under the weight of the leaning men.
Presently we could see that they were lifting Linn aboard.
Rainey did not appear.
Metcalf took off his coat and shoes and went overboard, came up after a while, rested for a moment with one arm on the gunwale of the rowboat, and dived again.
One of the other men began diving.
The postmaster’s son brought Linn to the pier in the motorboat. The others stayed in the rowboat, taking turns diving. Men from the pier in other boats joined them out there.
Linn was carried up to the hotel, and a doctor was called.
I took Mrs. Rainey up to the hotel and got rid of her by turning her over to the proprietor’s wife. My arm was sore as hell.
Three-quarters of an hour later, when Linn had been drained of water, restored to semi-consciousness, and put to bed, the divers brought Rainey’s body.
Nothing the doctors knew could bring him to life again.
He was dead.
MEN AND WOMEN
COMMENTARY
The stories in this section treat what Hammett called “the relation between the sexes,” a topic of particular interest to him throughout his writing career. In these stories, all told in the third person, his sympathies generally seemed to lie with women, whose emotional intelligence most often surpassed that of the men in their lives, who were often self-consumed and boastful in the early stories, independent and unwilling to commit to a permanent relationship in the later ones. In summer 1924, Hammett engaged in a debate on the merits of what he called the “sex story” with H. Bedford-Jones, a popular and prolific Canadian writer of adventure stories and science fiction, who wrote some ninety novels in addition to earning the title King of the Wood Pulps from Erle Stanley Gardner. Bedford-Jones wrote to Writer’s Digest complaining about those authors who used sex to sell their stories. Hammett replied that he had written “altogether three stories that are what is sometimes called ‘sex stuff’ and two—or possibly three—that might be so-called if you stretched the term a bit.” He refused to be cowed by Bedford-Jones’s moralizing: “If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors, or mounted policemen.”
“Seven Pages” exists in at least two original typescripts, one at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and the other in the private collection of the family of a Hammett girlfriend whom he worked with at Albert Samuels Jewelers from March to July 1926 and to whom he gave an early draft. The form of this apparently autobiographical piece is like that of two of his publications in the Smart Set—“The Great Lovers” (November 1922) and “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective” (March 1923)—seemingly disconnected vignettes. The references are to Hammett’s adolescence in and around Baltimore in vignettes 3, 4, and 7; his days in 1920 as a detective in the Northwest in vignette 6; his early days in San Francisco, circa 1922, in vignettes 1 and 2. The woman in vignette 5 is a mystery.
“The Breech Born” also has all the characteristics of one of Hammett’s Smart Set pieces from the early 1920s, but there is some evidence that it may have been written a couple of years later. The two-page typescript has crumbled at the top edges, so a few words, supplied here in brackets, are missing from the end of the story, and there is no return address. On the back of the typescript are pages from a heavily edited working draft of “The Big Knockover,” published in Black Mask in February 1927. “The Breech Born” features a goofy self-absorbed poet not unlike Robin Thin, the amusingly sensitive poet-detective who appeared in two Hammett stories, “The Nails in Mr. Cayterer” (Black Mask, January 1926) and “A Man Named Thin,” apparently written about the same time but not published until March 1961, after Hammett’s death. Hammett himself tried his hand at light verse. Three of his poems were published, first in the Lariat in November 1925 and later in The Stratford Review in March and June 1927.
Both “The Lovely Strangers,” and “Week--End,” which follows, seem to have been written for the slick-paper magazine market. Hammett’s standard caption at the top for the pulps “First American Serial Rights Offered” has been crossed out in both instances. “The Lovely Strangers” is a rare attempt by Hammett to write the sort of romance comedy associated with the Saturday Evening Post. The characters are more or less sophisticated, and the plot, at least as old as Shakespeare, involves a couple of destined but reluctant lovers, he a news reporter and she a wealthy industrialist, who spar verbally to mask their feelings toward one another. Love outs, true to formula, as the reporter saves his lady from a predator interested only in her money.
“Week--End,” which dates from late 1926, features a young unmarried woman traveling to San Francisco to meet and share a room with her boyfriend, who treats the situation with disturbing familiarity. The subject matter would have been considered daring at the time. In the typescript the title words are suggestively separated by two hyphens, providing added weight to the word “End.” It is the type of story associated with Hemingway, with much of the narrative implied rather than explicitly stated, though it predates “Hills Like White Elephants,” for example, by a year. Like most of Hammett’s “sex stories” his sympathies are with the woman, though his depiction of Harry as a man unwilling to commit to a typical domestic relationship is characteristic.
“On the Way” is one of two stories in this collection published during Hammett’s lifetime (the other is “The Diamond Wager”), and it is one of his most poignant. Set in Hollywood among the moviemaking community, where Hammett was spending much of his time in the early 1930s, “On the Way” is about a man who realizes that relationships are impermanent, especially in Hollywood, and who is strong enough to face the truth of his situation. It can be paired with “This Little Pig” (Collier’s, 1934), his only other story about Hollywood moviemakers.
SEVEN PAGES
One
She was one of the rare red-haired women whose skins are without blemish: she was marble, to the eye. I used to quote truthfully to her, “Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.” She was utterly unpractical. One otherwise dreary afternoon she lay with her bright head on my knee while I read Don Marquis’ Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady to her. When I had finished she made a little purring noise and stared dreamily distant-eyed past me. “Tell me about this Don Marquis,” she said. “Do you know him?”
Two
I sat in the lobby of the Plaza, in San Francisco. It was the day before the opening of the second absurd attempt to convict Roscoe Arbuckle of something. He came into the lobby. He looked at me and I at him. His eyes were the eyes of a man who expected to be regarded as a monster but was not yet inured to it. I made my gaze as contemptuous as I could. He glared at me, went on to the elevator still glaring. It was amusing. I was working for his attorneys at the time, gathering information for his defense.
Three
We would leave the buildings in early darkness, walk a little way across the desert, and go down into a small canyon where four trees grouped around a level spot. The night-dampness settling on earth that had cooked since morning would loose the fragrance of ground and plant around us. We would lie there until late in the night, our nostrils full of world-smell, the trees making irregular map-boundary divisions among the stars. Our love seemed dependent on not being phrased. It seemed if one of us had said, “I love you,” the next instant it would have been a lie. So we loved and cursed one another merrily, ribaldly, she usually stopping her ears in the end because I knew more words.
Four
He came into the room in brown stocking-feet, blue policeman’s pants, and gray woolen undershirt. “Who the hell moved that pi-ano?” he dema
nded, and grunted and cursed while wheeling it back into the inconvenient corner from which we had dragged it. “It’s my pi-ano, and it stays where I put it, see,” he assured us before he went out again. His daughters were quite embarrassed, since Jack and I had bought the whisky that was in him, so they didn’t object when, just before we left, we took all the pictures down from the walls and stacked them behind the pi-ano. That was in the part of Baltimore called Pig Town, a few blocks from another house where we had found one night two in the company who would not drink alcohol. We gave them root beer into which had been put liberal doses of aromatic cascara.
Five
I talked to her four times. Each time she complained of her husband. He was ruining her health, he was after her all the time, this supergoat, he simply would not let her alone. I supposed he was nearly, if not altogether, impotent.
Six
The fat cook and I huddled to the fire that had thawed him out of his vomiting blue cold-sickness. Behind us the Coeur d’Alene mountains rose toward Montana, down below us a handful of yellow lights marked a railway stop. Perhaps it was Murray: I’ve forgotten. “You’re crazier than hell, that’s what!” the fat cook said. “Any lousy bastard that says Cabell ain’t a romantycist is crazier than hell!” “He’s not,” I insisted. “He’s anti-romanticist: all he’s ever done for romance is take off its clothes and laugh at it. He’s a romanticist just like Mencken’s a Tory, which is just like the wooden horse was a Trojan.” The fat cook bunched his lips and spat brownly at the fire. “Grease us twice, Slim!” he complained. “If you ain’t a son-of-a-gun for damn-fool arguments!”
Seven
In Washington, D.C., I worked for a while in a freight depot. On my platform were two men who worked together, sweeping out cars, repairing broken crates, sealing doors. One of them was a man of fifty-something with close-clipped gray hair on a very round head. He was a small man but compact. He boasted of the hardness of his skull and told stories of butting duels, head-top crashed against head-top until blood came from noses, mouths, ears. His mate told me privately he thought these combats degrading. “It’s being no better than animals,” he said. This mate of the butter was a younger man, a country-man, brown-skinned and awkward. He who boasted the hard gray head told me this country-man had a fly tattooed on his penis. Gray-head thought this disgusting. “I’d think it’d make his wife sick to her stomach,” he said.
The Hunter and Other Stories Page 14
