The Hunter and Other Stories Part 11

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 G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+ny 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 b.u.mped 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 h.e.l.l.

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 s.e.xes," 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 surpa.s.sed 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 relations.h.i.+p in the later ones. In summer 1924, Hammett engaged in a debate on the merits of what he called the "s.e.x 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 t.i.tle King of the Wood Pulps from Erle Stanley Gardner. Bedford-Jones wrote to Writer's Digest complaining about those authors who used s.e.x to sell their stories. Hammett replied that he had written "altogether three stories that are what is sometimes called 's.e.x 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 s.e.x, 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 a.s.sociated with the Sat.u.r.day 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 t.i.tle words are suggestively separated by two hyphens, providing added weight to the word "End." It is the type of story a.s.sociated 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 "s.e.x stories" his sympathies are with the woman, though his depiction of Harry as a man unwilling to commit to a typical domestic relations.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 unders.h.i.+rt. "Who the h.e.l.l moved that pi-ano?" he demanded, 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 a.s.sured us before he went out again. His daughters were quite embarra.s.sed, 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 h.e.l.l, that's what!" the fat cook said. "Any lousy b.a.s.t.a.r.d that says Cabell ain't a romantycist is crazier than h.e.l.l!" "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 d.a.m.n-fool arguments!"

Seven.

In Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 b.u.t.ting 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 b.u.t.ter 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 p.e.n.i.s. Gray-head thought this disgusting. "I'd think it'd make his wife sick to her stomach," he said.

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 pa.s.sionately, 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 courts.h.i.+p, 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 acc.u.mulating 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.