“I want,” he said, “a job. Any kind of job you’ve got, if only it’ll get me away from town before the morning papers come out.”
NELSON REDLINE
Nelson Redline was as ruddy and as plump as our employer, but more pompous than sleek—not sleek at all, in fact—and his cuffs, flamboyantly exposed to half their lengths on Mondays, day by day crept back into the sleeves of his coat until, by Friday, not even their edges could be seen.
Martin Karbo was without annoying peculiarity and therefore, in such a company as ours, colorless; and he drew pictures at night.
Myself: two months before, I had ceased being associated with a workers’ paper that had killed itself by a shortsighted policy of specialization upon the case of the unemployed, who couldn’t give it the material support it needed.
Such we were. Irene Vickery’s shoes were comparatively new; Karbo’s brown hat was still undeniably glossy. Those were our show pieces. Beyond them we were shabby, and patched where we weren’t frayed. And our jobs were good for exactly one month, Thurner having divided the work into thirty precisely proportioned lots. And he saw to it that each day’s quota was accomplished to the final syllable. But his mathematics had this to our advantage: it was a rigid thing, and each day’s task equaled each other day’s task, with no allowance for our becoming more expert with practice, so that toward the end of our term, by carefully concealing our increased proficiency, we had rather an easy time of it.
We were established on the top floor of a ramshackle building far down on Garden Street; a building that had been—according to the wit who tended the one tired elevator—the first four-story structure erected in the city, and owed its ricketiness in large measure to its builders’ fears that so dare-devil a venture would fail, and to their desire that not too much valuable material be involved in the failure. Our particular room still had the air of a bedroom, in spite of the buff paint that years before had replaced the roses with which the walls must once have been papered, and in spite of the scant and battered office equipment Thurner had provided us with.
But our month was up on a Wednesday, and by the Monday of that last week we thought this erstwhile bed-chamber, with its rented desks, chairs, typewriters, and table, not a bad sort of place at all.
We were sitting idle late that afternoon, the day’s assignments completed, except for the bits we habitually saved so that we might have something to be busy with when Thurner arrived. Karbo was studying the Help Wanted Male columns of an evening paper. Irene Vickery and I were listening to Redline, who, with his usual malapropos quotations from political speeches—for which he had a remarkable memory—was elaborating fancifully upon an already fanciful theory that he had come upon somewhere with wholehearted acceptance, whereby the elimination of all international differences was to be brought about by an interchange of children—only orphans, I think, until the system was perfected—between neighboring nations for periods of ten or fifteen years.
In the middle of this the door opened and the elevator man said: “You people better get out. It’s burning pretty bad downstairs.”
He said it calmly, even flatly, with no emphasis anywhere: an unnatural diction, under the circumstances, what could be accounted for only by supposing that he had rehearsed it. But, delivered thus, it was undoubtedly more impressive than any stressing could have made it.
Karbo, across the desk from me, was nearest the door. With a single revolving motion he whirled himself around in his chair, to his feet, past the elevator man, and through the door. His feet sounded noisily on the wooden floor of the corridor, the elevator door slammed, and the elevator groaned downward.
It was Monday. Redline’s cuff showed broad and white as he ruffled his mustache with the back of a forefinger, a little theatrically.
“The damned coward!” he said, also a little theatrically.
Irene Vickery and I were for the next little while only slightly less stagy than Redline. The elevator man had gone. We three, with elaborate courtesy and consideration each toward the others, and a great display of leisureliness, gathered our belongings—pointedly and a little childishly ignoring Karbo’s still glossy hat on its nail—and walked down the stairs. The other compartments on our floor were used only for storing goods, and the people below had already left the building, so the dignity of our procession was undisturbed by alien influence. Even when the smoke became thicker and more pungent we quickened our steps but slightly.
Out in the street we saw Karbo immediately. He was standing in the front rank of onlookers on the opposite sidewalk, watching the lazy curls of smoke that wound out of the second-story windows; and I couldn’t see wherein his face differed in expression from the faces around him.
Straight across to him Redline marched, with Irene Vickery and me—still held by the parts we were playing—at his heels.
“Never, sir, have I seen such a contemptible action!” Redline hurled at Karbo; and heretofore Redline’s “sirs” had been reserved for our employer. “You are a dirty cur!”
Karbo’s muddy eyes widened questioningly. Then he shrugged with slight impatience and returned his attention to the upper windows of the building we had just left, where firemen were visible now. But Redline’s denunciation hadn’t been low-voiced; and the people around us were forming a circle, turning away from the fire—manifestly a failure as a spectacle—toward this more promising and more intimately displayed show. Redline wasn’t a man to disappoint an audience. He struck an attitude and cleared his throat; and I, feeling foolish and uncomfortable, pushed through the crowd and went for a walk around the block.
I walked around several blocks, thinking of Karbo and his dash for the elevator that had left us on the fourth floor of a supposedly blazing building with only a winding wooden stairway to get out by. I had liked Karbo, in a casual way. Undersized, frail, with a pale pinched face that had not one significant feature, he was, by virtue of an utter simplicity and never-varying unobtrusiveness, decidedly agreeable to work with, especially when viewed in contrast with the pompous Redline and the ridiculous Vickery.
We happened to luncheon together occasionally. He was not very articulate, but neither reticent nor garrulous. He told me that he drew pen-and-ink pictures; just simply that. I didn’t know whether he attached any importance to them or not. He had spent two years in the army during the war: first in a Maryland training camp and then in an English one. The uniform, except for the blouse, was the most comfortable sort of clothing he had ever worn. That was the war to him. He was as simple throughout. After his discharge from the army he had not gone back to the poverty-ridden family that had bred him in a West Virginia mining town. There seemed to have been no particular reason for it. He was now about thirty years old, and only once had he ever received a salary of more than thirty dollars a week, and that for but a short while. Except when he was discharged from the army he had never had so much as two hundred dollars at one time. He was neither humble nor resentful. Life, as he knew it, was like that.
For him to have shown the sort of cowardice that makes self-preservation a thing to be accomplished at all costs wouldn’t have been, then, either surprising or especially blameworthy. Such courage as poverty breeds is usually the courage that faces danger for the sake of large reward: not—except in unusual cases, and only then when other factors are present—that which makes for sacrifice of life for another. And it couldn’t very well be otherwise. A man who throughout his whole life is face to face with the threat of starvation, whose life hangs always insecurely upon the thread of his own none-too-productive day-by-day efforts, whose whole life, in short, is devoted to the business of preserving itself, can’t be expected to fling it aside on some sudden chance occasion. That sort of thing is all very well for the comparatively well-to-do, for the man whose condition has permitted him to cultivate other habits than one of the struggling for his life. . . .
But this was beside the point. Karbo hadn’t been afraid—not desperately. He had believed, of co
urse, that he was in very real danger. But his face and manner in the street a few minutes later had certainly not been those of a man who had recently experienced a great fear.
Then what? I wondered, finding no answer, and coming back by this time to Garden Street, now empty of crowd and firemen.
Redline and Irene Vickery were up in the office, with Karbo’s hat still upon its nail. He had not returned, and Redline was of the opinion that we would not see him again. The affair in the street had been even worse than I had feared. After being subjected to an onslaught of Redline’s oratory—in which, more likely than not, the women and children, and perhaps the flag, had been featured prominently—Karbo had been knocked about by the orator and volunteers from the audience, until the police had broken up the game. Irene Vickery had refrained from participating in the assault as she now refrained from echoing the vituperation that Redline still spouted—chiefly, I imagined, because she didn’t wish to be suspected of thinking her sex had entitled her to preference in time of danger.
Redline was wrong about not seeing Karbo again. He was at his desk when I came down the next morning. Around one eye his face was swollen and dark; his nose was buried under adhesive tape and more tape lay in little squares on forehead and cheek; one wrist was bandaged; and one of his coat’s shoulder-seams was puckered with amateur tailoring.
Irene Vickery and Redline were already there, so I missed the meeting. But, in view of the totality with which they ignored him all that day and the next—when our association ended—I came to believe that his entrance had struck them surprisedly dumb, and that, in lieu of a more satisfactory weapon, they had nursed that momentary speechlessness into deliberate ostracism. Fortunately, Karbo’s work and mine were linked together and did not touch that of the other two, and so the rift made no difference in a business way. Then, too, Karbo had never shown much interest in what either of them said or did, and so this new situation was not obtrusively noticeable. He seemed to accept it as a matter of unimportant fact.
Thus we worked through the last two days of our employment. Thurner was with us all of the final day, having taken the day off from his place of employment to supervise the winding up of the work. We finished in mid-afternoon, left our addresses with Thurner—in case he should succeed in filching another contract—and went our separate ways.
At least, I thought our ways were separate until, at the corner below, I found Karbo at my elbow.
“Have you got an hour to spare?” he asked.
I don’t know exactly why I went to his room with him. I knew it was going to be an uncomfortable, even a painful, hour—that he was going to say things that having to listen to would embarrass me. But I went with him. Perhaps I thought it the part of fairness that I should give him an opportunity to explain, to defend himself. My former casual liking for him had, I think, nothing to do with it. That was gone now. I felt sorry for him, in a vague way that made me try to conceal from him my present repugnance. Perhaps that is why I went. . . . There had been nothing in his manner since the fire to indicate that he regretted his actions; and it could easily be that he had sufficient, or even excellent, reasons for so behaving that day. Then, too, there was the undeniable fact that all philosophic justification is with him who runs. So, in justice, I couldn’t condemn him. But that sort of thing—if you could live up to it—would complicate life beyond reasonable bounds. These men who refuse to—or for one reason or another are unable to—conduct themselves in accordance with the accepted rules—no matter how strong their justification may be, or how foolish the rules—have to be put outside. You don’t know approximately what they will do under any given set of circumstances, and so they are sources of uneasiness and confusion. You can’t count on them. They make you uncomfortable. . . .
His room was what is known as a housekeeping room. Besides the bed with its iron peeping out through chipped enamel, the yellow bureau, the table, and the chairs, there were, huddled in one corner, a sink, a two-burner gas stove, and some shelves of pans and dishes.
Leaving me to close the door, he went immediately to the bureau and took out an armful of paper, which he put on the bed. Then he motioned me toward it. I looked at the drawings while he stood silently beside me. I don’t know whether there was anything in them or not. Figures, mostly, more men than women, and the hands. . . . But I don’t know enough about that sort of thing to pass judgment. They were all simple lines.
He spoke after I had looked through about half the pile.
“You’ve seen enough to know what they’re like. They don’t count. Nothing I’ve done so far does. But I wanted you to see them before I— It’s about the fire I wanted to talk.”
I continued looking at the pictures to avoid his eyes: a glance had shown them appealing, childishly.
“You weren’t nasty about it,” he went on, his voice husky and uneven. “You weren’t nasty like Redline and that Vickery woman; but I know you got a pretty low opinion of me out of it, and you can’t be blamed for that. About them and what they think I don’t care. They’re—they don’t matter. But you’re—you’re more of—you’re different. And I wouldn’t want you to— I’d want to be sure that you understood, if I can make it plain.”
I was fidgeting by this time, and I knew my face was blazing. He kept on talking, his voice more broken, trying to look into my eyes; and I had my eyes desperately fixed upon the drawings that I couldn’t see clearly, and upon whose margins my hands were leaving sweaty marks.
“I tried to make myself think that I didn’t care what anybody thought. But a man’s got to have some—I’ve always been a lonely kind, and you’re the first— This was my last chance. If I didn’t get hold of you today I’d probably never see you again. And I didn’t want to— Those things you are looking at: they aren’t anything. Nothing I’ve done is. But I’ve got it inside me and some day— A man can’t be wrong on a thing like that. I know. I’ve got it in me. I know. It isn’t a thing that can be argued about or proved, but it’s a fact. It’s a fact, all right. And, knowing that, I can’t afford to—”
He had stopped and was waiting for me to say something. But what could I say? Suddenly he went on, talking faster.
“It’s not myself. If I could do them now I’d be willing to die tomorrow. But I can’t. Tomorrow, maybe, or next month, or next year. But I can’t do them now. I’m not equipped. But I will be. I’ve got the things in me. I can’t die with them undone. It’s more important than people, or obligations to people. A thing like that can’t be killed for— Listen! I haven’t been on a boat or a train or a street car or even an automobile for a year—not since I learned this. I don’t go out at night: anything can happen to a man at night! I haven’t done a thing that had the slightest danger attached to it. And I’m not a coward. I swear I’m not! You saw me after the fire. Was I scared? Trembling? No. I’m not a coward. It isn’t for my own sake. This thing isn’t me—isn’t even a part of me—it’s just something that I’m guardian of. I can’t—just can’t until the things are done! I wanted to tell you. I wanted you to understand, if you could, but—”
I don’t like to think of the next five minutes. They were like nothing I had ever gone through before; and what wasn’t too hazy for remembrance was indescribably unpleasant. My feelings: irritation, contempt, pity, but dominated by an agony of unreasonable self-consciousness. My arm for a while, I know, was around his shoulders. I gave him promises, assurances. And when I stumbled down the stairs there were dark spots of moisture on my coat where he had leaned his head.
I saw him once after that, on the street, and went into a cigar store until he had passed.
MONK AND JOHNNY FOX
I was pretty tired. When Monk came over to my table I didn’t see him until he put a hand on my shoulder, and then his face was fuzzy. He said, “I’m sliding, Kid. Why don’t you?”
“Listen, Monk,” I said, “I only had three drinks. I’m all right.”
He smiled along one side of his mouth. “Sure, Kid sure, I
know. It ain’t that. But use a little sense. You’re walking on your heels right now. I’m not trying to pull you out. All I’m asking is don’t make it all night.”
I said, “All right, all right,” and he went away.
The blonde on my right asked, “What’s the matter with that guy?”
“There’s nothing the matter with that guy,” I explained carefully. “He’s a swell guy. He don’t give a damn for you and he don’t give a damn for me and he don’t give a damn for anybody but himself. He’s a swell guy.”
“I don’t see anything swell about that,” she said.
“Sometimes I don’t either,” I said, “but it’s there. Listen, let’s scram out of here, let’s go some place where we can talk, take a ride or something.”
She said, “I don’t know about the fellow I’m with.”
“All right. Forget it.”
“Don’t be like that,” she said. “Wait till I see what I can do.” She got up and went around the table.
Johnny Fox came over from the bar to shake hands with me. “What a fight, Kid!” he said. “Did you walk to and fro through that mug!”
I said I was glad he liked it, or something like that. If he—if none of them but Monk and me—didn’t know it wasn’t a good fight I wasn’t going to argue.
I introduced Johnny to the others, waving a hand at the ones whose names I couldn’t remember, and he said he would like to buy a drink.
The blonde came back to her chair, saying, “Yes, sir,” to me as she sat down.
I said, “Swell. We’ll break away after this drink.”
We had to wait a little longer than that because Johnny was telling me a long story about something and then everybody said it was still early, but I told them I was all in—“Those pokes I stopped with my chin didn’t harden me up any”—and we finally got away.
The Hunter and Other Stories Page 12