Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  She was quite excited, she said, when the invitation came, for she had seen Gilbert Ware only a few times and, though she had done her very best, she had not been sure that he noticed her. Now she put her mind thoroughly upon the future, as she laid out the things for her maid to pack. She hesitated particularly over the jewels for, if she took none, she might seem dull, and too many might be pretentious. At last she hit on a diamond bracelet — a mere thread of light — and a little ruby pendant of the finest pigeon’s blood. The two together might be worth some thirty-five hundred or four-thousand dollars. (Adrienne is very good at figures.)

  Long before her packing was finished or her thoughts arranged, young Harry Strode stopped by to drive her down to the country. She permitted this service from him, but not with pleasure. She had been quite fond of Strode at one time and, during an extremely dull evening, she had permitted herself to tell him so. But, since Adrienne cannot endure sulky men with long memories, her liking afterwards had turned the other way.

  Once in the car, she was as pleasant as possible. However, this was a dark afternoon with such a roar and rushing of rain that conversation meant straining the voice. She had intended to be kind to Harry, but not in the face of such difficulties. Adrienne, who has more than one of the talents of a cat, found herself, while considering the next subject for talk, so comfortable that presently she was asleep.

  She roused when Harry paused to take a hitchhiker in out of the downpour. He was a pale man of about my age, she said, with his head thrust forward at the end of a long neck like a caricature of all the bookkeepers in the world. A certain restless hunger in his eyes intrigued her for a moment, but then, in spite of the best intentions, she was asleep again; and the fellow sat quietly in the back seat.

  At the entrance to Ware’s driveway, Strode let out his extra passenger — the lights of a town were only a short distance down the road — and Adrienne remembers how the poor fellow stood in the rain with his hat in his hand, thanking them and waiting for the car to pass on. This roused her so that she was wide awake when they entered the house.

  The place was quite a disappointment to her for it combined two faults: it was both baronial and new. Yet she could understand that a man like Ware might simply pick the best of architects and say to him, “Here is the land. Select a proper site and build me an appropriate country house. Suppose you take a year to do it, gardens and all.” But the moment she went into the living room she was warmed by the realization that Ware was giving the party entirely for her. Every one of the dozen or more house guests had been chosen from among her younger friends. It was only a pity, said Adrienne, that he had not included some of the older ones. Saying this, she smiled at me.

  In the great living room, huge as a Tudor hall, tea was being served in delicate porcelain with faint chimings of silver; and there was Gilbert Ware, as ingratiating and observant a host as though he were by no means the catch of a continent. Adrienne made up her mind to have him. Her tactics were to strike at once and to keep on striking.

  When Ware asked her about the trip down, she said, “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “No — please! It was only a hitchhiker we picked up, and I simply started imagining things about him.”

  “Something is bothering you,” said Gilbert Ware, “so let’s have it out.” He had a doctor’s air, attentive for humane reasons even to foolish stories.

  “It was like something you’re afraid of seeing by night,” said Adrienne.

  The storm jumped suddenly at the house and set the tall windows trembling. Since it was only twilight, the curtains had not been drawn, and she looked out over a shimmer of lawn into the green gloom.

  “Harry had his eyes glued to the road,” she said. “He’s such a careful driver, but it seemed to me that he must have known what I was seeing as I sat there, pretending to be asleep. In the mirror I could see the man’s face; I think I’ll always see it.”

  “The hitchhiker’s?”

  “It was so pale,” said Adrienne. “It was so long and dead and white... Please don’t make me remember.”

  “Don’t talk about it; you look sick,” said Ware.

  “I’ll be all right. It was only a dream. There wasn’t any reality about it. Nothing so evil could be real. You know, the sort of horror that smiles at you in the dark?”

  Ware was listening to her but with plenty of reservation in those raised eighteenth-century eyebrows. She realized then that, if she married him, she might find herself playing a part forever. The thought excited her as she went on with the embroideries of her little story. Actually there had been something strange about the hitchhiker. Now she enlarged upon him.

  She said she had seen the devil wake up in the eyes of the man when, as she raised her hand to her hat, her sleeve fell back and showed the diamond bracelet; she had seen the beast of prey in him appear like some grisly shape that floats up under water, never clearly seen. It wasn’t the thought of mere robbery and loss that troubled her but that brooding sense of a monstrous presence.

  Gradually the man leaned forward in his seat, preparing to act. She was trying desperately to convey a warning to Harry Strode. If it were too overt, the signal would bring the attack on them instantly. She tried to signal with her eyes, with her hand. She slipped her foot over and touched Strode’s. But he remained impervious, simply fixing his eyes on the road and singing a song, said Adrienne, which declared that for alma mater he would stand like a wall and never, never fall; also, when he took the field, he would never yield.

  When she talked about the college hymn, something melted in Ware’s eyes. A barrier fell, admitting her, and whether or not he believed all the tale, plainly he enjoyed the art of it.

  She made a quick ending. A police car, she said, suddenly came up behind them, used its siren, and went by. This was enough to make the hitchhiker change his mind. Perhaps the sight of the uniforms recalled to him certain unforgettable years of punishment. He relaxed in his seat, and a moment later they were letting him out at the entrance to the Ware place. She never would forget him standing in the rain with that faint white mockery of a smile, thanking them for the ride. She had reached the house still half sick, but what saved the day for her was a desire to laugh, because Harry Strode had gone through it all aware of nothing but a desire to rally around a banner and, with a heart so true, die for the red and blue.

  Ware chuckled at this. Then he said that the guest rooms of his place were cottages scattered through the grounds but, if she were nervous after her experience, she should have a place in the main building.

  “No, no!” said Adrienne. “I’ve talked it all out now, and I won’t think of it again. You were so right to make me tell you everything. I didn’t want to say anything about it before the rest of them; there’s something so ugly about that kind of a story, don’t you think?”

  Ware’s eyes dwelt on her for a moment before he agreed; then he let the general conversation flow in upon them, and Adrienne found the eyes of the other girls fixed on her a little grimly. They took it for granted that she merely had succeeded in putting herself on trial, but her resolution was hardening every instant. She would take this man, to have and to hold; she would take him — if for no other reason — because he was hard to get.

  Everyone went to change, and Adrienne was shown to her cottage. There were a number of these cabins, each tucked into a special environment: one by a pool, another drenched in vines, one lost in towering woods, and a fourth sunning itself on a little green hilltop, though there was only rain streaming down when Adrienne was taken to it. It was built snug and tight as a ship’s cabin, but it was a complete job even to a sunken pool in the bathroom.

  When she had dressed — in black, she said, with only her ruby pendant — she put on overshoes and a featherweight cellophane slicker which were provided and went back to the house with a flashlight. There was only a misting rain, by this time, but the trees still looked a little wild from the sto
rm.

  A few moments after her return to the house, dinner was announced. When they went in, she found herself at the right hand of Ware and felt that the game was half won. Yet he made no particular effort at the table; he preferred to watch her and smile.

  She was surprised when suddenly he asked her what she thought of the house.

  “Doesn’t it need something?”

  “Does it? What would you say? More color?”

  “No, but more time.”

  This seemed to please him. For an instant he came out of the distance and sat within touch of her, his eyes clear and keen, but after that she felt that he had drawn away again. She did not feel that she had failed but that he needed more leisure to make up his mind. She determined to give it to him, so she pleaded a frightful headache and went off to bed early.

  By this time the storm had slid away down the sky and out of sight, but a few clouds were flying. The moon hit one of them and dashed the whole weight of it into a shining spray like a bow wave. Adrienne enjoyed these things. She knew that she was on trial — for fifty million, so to speak — but her eye was turned confidently to the future.

  She decided, as she lay stretched on her bed in the cottage, looking at the apple-green ceiling, that Gilbert Ware probably wanted a restful creature for a wife. He was an unhurried sight-seer in life, determined to take nothing but the best. She, with her imaginings and her acting, had amused him for a time. She should have adopted an entirely different role and made herself, like him, a quiet observer, a little tired by the game. Adrienne decided that in the morning she would show him a change of pace.

  The moment she reached this intelligent conclusion she grew sleepy, but as she yawned, her arms wide open to welcome the aching drowsiness, she heard a slight sound and observed that the knob of her door was turning. She had locked the door, but a thrill of horror froze her heart. Not since she was a child and ghosts had haunted her in dark corridors had she felt such a thoroughly sufficient chill. She reached for the telephone and turned the dial. The bell in the main house began to buzz with a deep, soft voice. The buzzing continued, a far-away sound on the wire and a hollow echoing in Adrienne. Then not a servant but Ware himself spoke.

  “It’s Adrienne Lester,” she whispered. “Someone is trying to get into my cottage!”

  He said, with his eternal calm, “Someone with a long, white, evil face, no doubt?” He laughed and rang off.

  She could not believe it, but there it was. Her play-acting had been perfectly patent to him.

  The doorknob no longer was turning. Instead, there was a very discreet sound of metal scratching on metal. She remembered now not the sins of her past but the old fable about the little boy who had called “Wolf! Wolf!” once too often. For an instant she thought of being merely beautiful and helpless; instead, she got up and seized the heavy poker which stood in the brass bucket beside the fire. At the same time the door opened.

  A gust of night air came in along with her hitchhiker who looked “like a caricature of all the bookkeepers in the world.” He closed the door with his foot and pushed his hands into his coat pockets. He was very wet. When he moved, his feet made squashy sounds in his shoes. The rim of his hat, which he did not remove, hung down around his long, pallid face. A thin purple dye, which soaked out of his coat, had streaked the white of his shirt and, since the coat collar was turned up, had left a mark like a cut across his throat. He looked at Adrienne and at the poker she held, then turned his back on her and went to the bedside table where her jewels were lying. He dropped them into a coat pocket.

  He was quite hunched and so thin that she could almost count the vertebrae through his coat, but in spite of his apparent weakness she put the poker back into the brass bucket. She was young, swift, strong, but only as a woman. And, though he was by no means a big man, she knew that he could pluck the weapon out of her hands with ease. The knowledge sickened her a little; for the first time she was insufficient in an emergency. My Adrienne slipped quietly toward the door.

  “No,” said the hitchhiker, and shook his head at her.

  She turned for an instant toward the blackness of the outer night, but she dared not flee because of the nightmare that might pursue her. She went back to the fire.

  A small pool was collecting around the man’s feet; she watched the growth of it on the Chinese rug across the tongue and lower jaw of a little dragon.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “I’m all right,” said Adrienne.

  “You’re not afraid?”

  “I was, terribly. But it’s better now that you’re talking,” she said.

  She thought that it was a pleasant remark, and she made it with a smile, but all the time the sickness of the fear was deepening in her, thickening like a new taste, because the hitchhiker was aware of her from head to foot and from foot to head. It was only for a moment that his eyes touched her in this fashion, but the screaming muscles began to tremble in her throat.

  He kept nodding his head up and down in understanding. He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips. “It always makes me kind of laugh,” he said, “the way you people get scared. Once I got into a place and in the first bedroom, where I didn’t expect it, there was a young fellow lying reading. He’d heard something. He knew I was inside the room, but he didn’t dare to turn his head. I stood there and watched. The magazine was resting on his chest, and his heart was thumping so hard that it made the pages keep stirring like leaves in a wind. He was young, and he was twice as big as me; but nothing is as big as the things that come out of the night.”

  “What happened, then? What did you do?” asked Adrienne.

  “Don’t scream or nothing,” said the thief. “I’m gonna turn out the light.”

  He turned out the light so that there was only the fire to send his shadow and hers up the wall and over the ceiling in waves and tremblings.

  Adrienne picked up the poker again.

  “Yeah, you’d fight, wouldn’t you?” he said, and laughed a little. “Got anything to drink in here?”

  “No,” said Adrienne.

  “What’s over here?” and he pulled open a small door set into the wall.

  Two flasks of cut glass glimmered inside the niche. He sniffed at them.

  “Brandy and Scotch. Funny how you people never know that bourbon is better than Scotch... Have some?”

  “No,” said Adrienne.

  “Here’s down the hatch!”

  “Don’t drink it!” cried Adrienne.

  “Why not?”

  “Please don’t drink it!” she begged.

  “Ah, that’s what you think, is it? Well, here’s down the hatch!”

  He took a good swallow, and while his head was back, his eyes half closed, she freshened her grip on the poker, but still she could not act. She put the poker back in place for the second time, because it came to her that all the danger she dreaded was, in fact, closed in the room with her and that she would have to meet it with a different kind of force.

  He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, which made a smear across his face, and then he sat down beside the fire. Adrienne sank into the opposite chair.

  “They spent some money on you all right,” he said. “I remember hearing a rich feller say, once... I used to be a plumber, and plumbers hear what people say, but a length of cast-iron pipe rolled on me, and it gave me a kind of a twist in the back, so I wasn’t any good, after that. I had to use the old bean, so I used it...” He seemed to have lost his place in the conversation. “Where was I at?” He took another drink.

  “You were about to say how much money is spent on us.”

  “This feller was saying that his girl cost ten thousand a year from twelve years up. Travel, governess, maid, school — he said ten thousand wouldn’t cover it. Ten thousand for ten years. That’s a hundred grand. How many languages you got?”

  “French and Italian, a little. And a bit of German.”

  “You don’t look like you would know any Germ
an.”

  “They sent me to Vienna for a year. To study singing.”

  “I guess you can do that pretty good.”

  “Not very.”

  “Sing ‘Home on the Range,’ dead soft.”

  She sang “Home on the Range” softly. He finished the flask of Scotch while he listened. He hummed the last part of it in unison with her.

  “I never was West,” he said, “but I like that song. It’s kind of American. It reminds me how big we are... I’ve heard plenty sing it better than you.”

  “Of course you have.” She managed to smile again.

  He stared hard watching for the end of the smile, but she kept it, after a fashion, in the corners of her mouth and in her eyes.

  “There ain’t hardly a good swallow in one of these flasks. Go fetch me the other one, will you?”

  “Certainly,” said my Adrienne.

  She rose and went to the little cupboard. As she turned with the flask of brandy in her hand, she saw that the plumber sat a little higher in his chair, and then she was aware that his body was rigid as she came up behind him. He was waiting, tense and set, for whatever she might attempt to do, but he would not turn his head an inch toward her. She went slowly by him and gave him the flask — and her smile.

  He relaxed in his chair. “You feel better, don’t you?”

  “A lot better,” she said.

  “I guess you been scrubbed clean every day of your life. I guess you never wear anything but silk?”

  “Oh, yes. Oh, lots of other things,” she said.

  “You don’t mind me now if I drink this?”

  “I don’t mind at all.”

  “Look,” he said.

  “Yes,” said my Adrienne.

  “Maybe there’s better singers, but I never heard nobody talk so good. You bet I never heard anybody talk so good.” He stood up. “You been pretty all right, and I sort of hate taking your stuff. You know?”

  For the first time, in a way that was strange to Adrienne, he opened his eyes and looked at her with an appeal for understanding. He was apparently about to go, and she would not have to keep on smiling. She felt she had done enough acting in those few minutes to last her the rest of her life.