THE BREECH-BORN
He came backward out of the womb, causing a great deal of trouble to himself, his mother and the attending medical craftsmen. And that was the curse on him, not, as his father, a barber eternally irritated because in the twenty years of barbering he had learned no practicable way of keeping short hairends from sifting through his clothes, said, his becoming a poet. This was merely a manifestation of it. He toiled conscientiously at his verse, sitting day and night over dictionary, thesaurus, rhyming dictionary—that invaluable book in which one finds so readily that there is no acceptable rhyme for the word one has in mind. His poetry was not bad poetry, nor was it good—and that of course is the sort of poetry that makes most trouble for everyone, especially for the poet. After the first of it was published he left his home, thoughtlessly, and went to New York.
There, in keeping with the curse on him, he met a girl. He loved her quite passionately, and wrote her long and fervent poems, which painted her in such gay colors that she resigned herself to holding his admiration by never letting him become intimate enough to know that she wasn’t quite all he said. After some months of this self-defeating courtship, he sat down to write her a letter which should quite overwhelm her. He worked on the letter for eight days, though it was not a lengthy letter. He polished each phrase until it was perfect. The letter was so good that reading it he was tempted to narcissism.
Not having heard from him for eight days, the girl’s love for him overcame her liking for his admiration, and she determined to go to his room one night, even if she had to break an engagement with her employer, an extremely wealthy hat manufacturer of no matrimonial connections or intentions. But that afternoon the poet’s letter arrived. Reading it, she saw herself as something greater than she had ever supposed. Her already adequate beauty heightened by this letter, her confidence upholstered, she went forth to the engagement with the affluent employer, and not only convinced him that she had thought his intentions honorable, but convinced him that they might well be.
For a week the poet waited, for an answer to his letter, while what little money he had left dwindled. That week the girl was too busy accumulating a trousseau, though, to write the poet, which she finally did, inviting him to the house, meaning to thank him for the help he had given her. He walked the streets for that week, unable to write poetry because everything in him had gone in the letter. [He went] without food all day [spending] his last money [on a bouquet of flowers for her. The] emptiness of his stomach brought on hiccoughs as he entered [into her] presence. The fervent speeches with which he customarily greeted her were thus jumbled, so that he gave up talking as hopeless, presented his flowers, and knelt to kiss the toe of her shoe. Somewhat startled, thinking because of his hiccoughs that he was probably drunk, she jerked her foot in surprise, kicking his mouth, breaking out two front teeth, which, entangled in a hiccough, lodged in the neighborhood of his larynx and choked him quite to death. In falling he managed to upset the goldfish and to mash the flowers into the carpet.
THE LOVELY STRANGERS
They ran into one another in front of Parson’s drug store, literally, with a violence that brought grunts from both of them and scattered every which way the photographs at which she had been looking as she stepped into the street.
“Good Lord, Joan!” Thus the young man exclaimed, putting his hat straight above a jovial round face, “if you can’t look where you’re walking, why don’t you walk where you’re looking?”
The young woman’s green-brown eyes were of a height with his light ones. Her eyes were not in any way jovial.
“Oughtn’t we dance now? Or sing a song?” she asked unpleasantly. “Tom Ware, I’ve heard that line at least a dozen times in vaudeville shows!”
“Uh-huh, that’s where I got it. It would fit better if you were cockeyed, but it went pretty good at that, didn’t it?”
The young woman looked at his cheerful pink face with that special feminine look whose synonyms are a slight sidewise shaking of the head or a heavily breathed “Such a man!” Then she shrugged and turned to the photographs on the street. He stooped to help her, but in his assistance there was a noticeable unwillingness to take unfair competitive advantage of her sex. When they straightened together from their task the damp and gritty pictures—for a twilight shower and tracking feet had begrimed the sidewalk—were quite equitably divided between them.
She frowned at her share, and of the seven clicks known to phoneticians the one she made with tongue and teeth was most eloquent of disapproval.
“The only picture I’ve ever been able to get of him!” she complained, holding up a print whose back and edges were stained with mud which, in the red glow from the druggist’s window, had the complexion of half-dried blood. “And all the trouble I had getting it! And now, just because you’re so clumsy—look at it!”
With that easy-going tolerance of feminine displeasure attained completely only by him who has had sisters of his own, the young man ignored all but the last three of her words, and took the photograph from her hand.
It was a snapshot of a personable dark man of forty-something, slender in loose tweeds, posed against a tree. He was looking down, this tall and graceful man, into the raised bright face of a small girl of perhaps eighteen who sat on a knobbed root at his feet.
“Ah, the handsome fiancé and his daughter!”
“Of course Maud had to tell you!” The young woman was irritable. “But didn’t she tell you it wasn’t to be bellowed out on street corners?”
The young man could have replied truthfully that he hadn’t bellowed, but he seemed, despite his grinning amiability, not at all pacifically inclined.
What he said was: “If you’re ashamed of it what are you engaged to him for?” And: “You needn’t think you can mother-in-law me, even if you are going to marry him. I’m not in the Hannibal family.”
“No?” It was not a question. “One might think you were, from the frequency with which one hears of your being up there.”
“Oh, does one? Well, one might put another tally on one’s list, because one is on one’s way up there now. I’m like you, Joan: the home talent is nice enough in its way, but when lovely strangers come, then’s when I polish the curling iron and reach for the beauty clay.”
The young woman’s eyebrows raised indifferent arcs over her decidedly not interested eyes. She put out a hand for the photographs he held. He grinned at her eyebrows and avoided her hand.
“The negatives are all right.” He held up the yellow envelope that had protected its contents from the street. “I’ll have fresh copies made for you.”
“Thanks, but I’d rather you didn’t. I’d rather be sure that none of them gets into your precious Weekly Leader under one of your quaint—is that the word?—captions.”
“My Leader! Old Ahearn will tell you whose Leader it is! And he’ll tell you what a fat chance you’ve got of ever seeing your picture in it as long as your brick plant, or whatever it is, has its printing done out of town!”
“The policy of the Robson Portland Cement Corporation has nothing—”
“Now don’t make a speech! Old Ahearn wouldn’t print it, even if I had a pencil. The trouble is, Joan”—the young man’s voice sank into kindly, brotherly, key—“as I used to tell you when you were a kid whose stockings were always coming down and always trying to get into a ball game and making a nuisance of yourself generally just because you were a Robson of the Robson furniture factory, or whatever it is—the trouble is you’re pig-headed! You think everybody ought to give you your own way all the time, and that’s not good for you.
“Now I’m a poor boy who’ll have to hock his etiquette guide and maybe miss a lunch to pay for these photos, but I’m going to do it. I don’t care how many fertilizer works, or whatever they are, your father left you. No she-millionaire can jump me through hoops just because she—”
The majority stockholder of the Robson Portland Cement Corporation achieved the emphatic perpendiculari
ty of a brown rep exclamation mark.
“Really, I didn’t mean to provoke all this,” she said into the middle —or, since he seemed in full course, perhaps only the beginning—of the young man’s harangue. “You may do as you wish.”
She smiled at him, a thin formal smile of parting, smiled across the street at Judge Eastwood raising his hat, and walked away from the young man. Watching her walk away, putting his half of the soiled photographs in his pocket, going into the drug store to leave the negatives, he carried himself as one who has no cause for dissatisfaction.
The Hannibal residence—too newly the Hannibal residence not to be still the Magruder place in local geography—occupied the top of China Hill. The house was large, of red brick. Its roof pitched sharply here, gently there, but each divergent green-slated plane ran finally into smooth agreement with the massed trees and bushes that gave house and grounds the British air of seclusion frequently found in California.
From the top of China Hill, in daytime, a river could be seen joining San Francisco Bay. At night, a cloudy night—with the moon a vague light hint among clouds that lagged behind the earlier shower—such as this one on which the young man who had so enjoyed an encounter in front of a drug store climbed the hill, nothing five feet away could be seen.
So when the young man was suddenly booed at from a bush, he jumped straight up off the clayey road, made an inarticulate sound, and flung both arms at the boo. A girl came laughing into his arms.
“That’s one time you thought the devil had you, Mr. Thomas Ware!”
He found her face in the darkness, tilted it, kissed it, asked it: “Didn’t she?”
A tap came out of the night to settle on his cheek, a laugh with it.
“Impudent!”
They went on up the hill together, locked hands swinging between them, toward the cluster of jagged bright gold scraps that blind and trees made out of a window’s light. Before they had reached the house she bore off to the left, leading him through a gap in the hedge.
“We’re dodging the Papa tonight.”
“What’s the matter with him now?” There was no especial curiosity in the young man’s voice, and what stress was there was on the “now.”
“He’s taking a fatherly interest in me again.” Her tone deepened into mimicry of a precise male voice. “There was no point to our coming here, Maud, if you are not going to do your part. The climate alone will do little. If you are going to get no more rest, keep no earlier hours, we might as well have staid in Europe. Look out for the step,” she added in her own voice.
The dim cube into which she led him materialized as a small summer house.
“That’s nothing to what you’ll be in for when your new step-mother is installed,” he predicted genially as they sat down.
“The model Joan.” The words were low-spoken, indecisively critical. “I don’t know how I’m going to like her as a member of the family. She seems nice enough, but— Do you think we’ll hit it off together, Tom?”
“I guess so. She’s not a bad sort, considering. Spoiled, all right, but under that she’s not so bad, I guess.”
“Pretty, too,” Maud suggested. “May I have a cigarette?”
The match he struck brought her out of the night: a small girl in rough tan sweater, dark eyes incredibly older than the dark face in which they glowed: the girl who had sat on the knobbed root in the snapshot.
The light went out, leaving only their voices and the metallic-red discs of their cigarettes.
“How is it you’ve never been in love with her, Tom? Or have you?”
The end of his cigarette burned bright under his laugh.
“You’ve never seen us together except in company where we had to behave. Joan and I fight fine—always did.”
“That doesn’t necessarily—”
A vibrant baritone called from the direction of the house: “Maud!”
Her cigarette raised a transitory tuft of small stars as it hit the floor, and was blotted out by her foot.
“Papa!” she whispered. “Now I’ll catch it! I’ll head him off, go up to my room, and sneak out again. Wait for me!”
“Maud!” The calling voice was nearer.
She was a shadow in the door and then only a crunching of gravel on the walk. The young man darkened his cigarette under his foot and sat still.
“Oh!” The syllable was sharp, startled. Then, glibly: “I was just coming in.”
“I thought you had gone to your room, honey.” The man’s words were thick, tremulous with an excitement out of all reasonable proportion to their import. “But you weren’t there when I went up, and. . . .”
His words ran down into a muttered crooning.
Above the crooning Maud cried out: “No! No!”
The young man in the summer house got up and went to the door. The moon eluded the last lingering cloud-fringe and spread down on China Hill a pallor that was as the light of noonday after the night’s darkness.
A dozen feet from the door Hannibal held Maud to him with tight arms and beat kisses down on her whitely furious face and throat. Her fists pummeled his shoulders.
“Tom’s there!” she screamed into his distorted face. “Tom’s there, you fool!”
It was late morning in the Weekly Leader office. Tom Ware was condensing a National Geographic Society bulletin on the distinctions between, and proper uses of, coca, cacao, cocoa, and coco into an informative paragraph that would fill out an otherwise incomplete column in some future issue. The typewriter clicked irregularly under his fingers: his right hand was encumbered by a crisscross of adhesive tape. On the other side of the room, old Ahearn—stringy and colorless, even to the eyes that distrusted everything through spectacle lenses hardly larger than dimes—worked with scissors and paste-pot on a pile of the Leader’s contemporaries.
The street door opened and two strangers came in. One of them carried a camera, the other an overcoat.
“We want,” this second one said without preliminary, “more dope on the prince—something to spread over a couple of pages in the Saturday magazine section.”
The proprietor of the Robson Weekly Leader examined his visitors carefully, and when he spoke it was in the manner of one who engages a burglar in conversation while his fingers search under his pillow for the police whistle.
“The prince? H-m-m. What prince? Be definite.”
“What prince?” the man with the overcoat repeated blankly. “Why the Russian—the one you sent in the story about.”
He pulled a newspaper from his pocket—a San Francisco afternoon paper’s early edition—and spread it on the desk, thumping a certain part of it with his forefinger.
“If you’re drunk,” old Ahearn threatened, “I’ll see that your city editor hears about it.”
He stabbed his paste brush into the inkwell, adjusted his too-small glasses to the indicated news item, and read it slowly and thoroughly.
“H-m-m,” he said when he was through. “And I sent that in?”
“Absolutely!”
Old Ahearn said, “H-m-m,” again, and his chair squeaked as he twisted around to look at the young man who was applying himself to his work just now with ostentatious devotion.
“Mr. Ware, can I take you from your work for a moment?”
The young man rattled his typewriter irregularly to the end of the immediate sentence, tapped the period smartly in place, and got up saying, “Certainly, Mr. Ahearn,” with all the urbanity befitting one who for the first time had been mistered by his superior.
“Read this,” old Ahearn commanded, thrusting the newspaper at him.
Tom Ware read the newspaper with as wholehearted an attention as had his employer, and with some additional thing that might have been fondness in his eyes.
The newspaper told of Prince Grigori Rostopchin, cousin to no less a personage than that Grand Duke Kyrill, or Cyril, who claimed the vacant czardom, or tsardom, of Russia. It told of Prince Grigori’s separation from his cousin’s court in
Coburg and of his coming to America, to Robson, intent on using his considerable remaining millions to create in the new world an estate that would be so far as humanly possible a duplicate of the ones he had lost in the old. It told of the many acres he had bought and was buying, of the game he had imported to stock his forests, of the castle he was building. It told of the twenty Russian peasants who had arrived in Robson the previous day, forerunners of many more to come as speedily as the United States immigration restrictions would permit.
There was no photograph of the faithful muzhiks who had followed their hereditary lord to his new home, but there was one—apparently an enlarged snapshot—of Prince Grigori Rostopchin and his daughter. He was a tall man slenderly erect against a tree. She was a small girl who sat on a knobbed root at his feet.
“Pretty nice,” Tom said as he returned the paper to his employer. “You get tired of all the time reading about dukes sweeping streets and countesses working in laundries.”
Old Ahearn smiled the smile of a Borgia out of Dumas.
“Then you like it, Mr. Ware?”
The young man’s face was bland. He gestured depreciatively with his bandaged hand.
“Of course, modesty— But I really don’t think it’s so awfully bad.”
“A fake, huh?” the man with the overcoat demanded. “There isn’t any prince?”
“I got the last name out of the back of the dictionary,” Tom confessed. “He wasn’t a prince, and anyway he’s dead.”
“And the picture?” the man with the overcoat went to the bottom of the hoax.
The Hunter and Other Stories Page 15
