The Hunter and Other Stories Page 11

  In the street again, someone took the child. He was faintly giddy from the smoke, the effort of groping his way down with the child, and the excitement that had grown in him as he descended—the nervousness that is inseparable from even the most orderly of retreats. He stood very erect, avoiding curious stares. The eyes of the seven men who had crossed the street with him reproached him from twenty paces.

  He walked away, down the street with a stiff affectation of nonchalance: a short, sturdy man of thirty or so in a stiffly pressed double-breasted coat that made him as rectangular as a shoe-box standing on end.

  At his desk the next morning Earl Parish searched the day’s papers. In the Morning Post he found an inch and a half of simple news that a fire of unknown origin had been subdued with slight damage after a child had been carried to safety by Earl Parish. He folded the account into the center of the newspaper and put it out of sight.

  Between the departure of No. 131, southbound, and the arrival of No. 22, a train announcer came to Earl Parish’s window and grinned at him over the sign that said, INFORMATION.

  “Where’s the medal?” the train announcer asked.

  Earl Parish grinned foolishly back, blood came into his face, he perspired.

  The news went around the station: Earl Parish had rescued a child from a blazing building—two children. The station employees with whom he was intimate joked about his deed. The more important employees—baggage master, stationmaster, chief dispatcher—congratulated him solemnly, as if on behalf of the company. At noon, the general passenger agent himself, on his way to a convention in St. Louis, stopped to commend Earl Parish’s bravery. Earl Parish listened to his words, answered his questions, kept his gaze fixed on the general passenger agent’s watch chain, and perspired. The general passenger agent’s train was finally announced. He shook Earl Parish’s hand and went away.

  Earl Parish did his day’s work in an emotional muddle, avoiding eyes, mopping his moist face incessantly with his handkerchief. Looking up to find the most casual glance turned in his direction, his face would go crimson, and a desire to drop on his knees out of sight below the window would come to him. Between the necessary contacts with fellow employees and inquiring travelers he pretended business with guidebooks and folders in the rear of his cubbyhole, and there was exaltation in him.

  That night he lay for a long while across his bed, studying the printed inch and a half he had cut from the Morning Post. There had been nothing heroic—except perhaps in a negative way—about his going into the smoking building: he had brought the child down not as one would snatch it from peril, but as one would protect it from awareness of peril. Nevertheless, it was pleasant to lie across his bed knowing that people throughout the city had read of what he had done, that his acquaintances thought him a man of courage and perhaps were mildly boasting that they knew this Earl Parish.

  Lying across the bed, these things he found pleasant. To listen to praise, even if thickly overlaid with banter, was not pleasant. It was embarrassing to be studied by eyes that tried to estimate the familiar Earl Parish in terms of the new development. But that was his self-consciousness, his shyness, and would pass. It was a transient annoyance. The joy that had come to him out of this affair would not wear away, however: that was a fixed thing in him.

  He went rosy-faced to work the next morning, creeping out of the house to avoid his suddenly too-tender landlady. The day was less uncomfortable than the previous one. To the same extent that he was becoming accustomed to his new position among his fellows he was drifting back to last week’s position. The ticket sellers, opposite his window, still threw jests through their grilles: “The next time you save any women and children, save me a blonde!” But now he could smile back at them without perspiring.

  Occasionally he met acquaintances who had seen the Post’s story and spoke of it. He blushed and was uncomfortable at these times, but he enjoyed the later thoughts of them. He never went into the street without a wish for one of these meetings. The next issue of the railroad company’s Employees’ Magazine contained his photograph and an elaborated account of his feat.

  Then the fire was as if it had never happened.

  No one ever mentioned it. He brought it casually into his talk once or twice, but no one showed any interest. At first he thought this coldness sprang from boredom. Later he decided envy was truly responsible.

  He began to keep to himself. After all, what had he in common with the people around him? An uninteresting lot: the lesser inhabitants of the world, unimportant cogs in not especially important machines. He himself was a cog, true enough, but with the difference that on occasion he could be an identity. The last drop of ancestral venturesomeness had not been distilled from his blood. He experimented with this thought, evolving a sentence he liked: “All their ancestral courage distilled by industrialism out of their veins.” He would look at the world over his sign that said, “Information,” and repeat the sentence to himself.

  People who passed his window or brought their questions to it were sorted. Did they retain some part of their ancestral courage? Or did they not? The first class was small.

  Complaints went uptown to the general offices: the man at the information window had been unobliging, had been rude, had been insulting. Earl Parish received a formal letter, calling his attention to a number of these complaints and to the purple slogan on the company’s advertising matter: Courtesy All-Ways. Such important departments as the information bureau, the letter insisted, had great influence on the public’s attitude toward the company, and on that attitude depended not only the road’s income but also its success in securing favorable legislation.

  Earl Parish did not like this letter. With a pencil and a pad of paper he began framing a reply, not such a reply as might be expected of a cog. A testy old man came to his window with an unanswerable question. The Earl Parish of a while ago would have led the old man around to a point where the answer to an altogether different question would have satisfied him. The Earl Parish who was busy with the draft of his reply to the general offices told the old man point-blank that his question was silly. The testy old man was a personage of some sort. The next day Earl Parish was given two weeks’ notice. He left within ten minutes.

  Ten days later he found a place in a steamship agency. A month later he was looking for work again. He had sat dreaming over his desk one afternoon and his employer, a little fat man with a fat sneering mouth, had asked him if he was afraid of work. Had asked him—a little fat man who would have buried his face in his arms at the first sign of danger. He had told the little fat man exactly what he was afraid of and exactly what not, and in the end had found himself walking down the street with his wages in his pocket.

  His next position was in the basement of a wholesale drug house, but he quit this place after two weeks. He was done with working at a desk. He had reasoned things out. Desk jobs were well enough for a man who could not rise above them. But nowadays there was a scarcity of—hence must be a demand for—men whose ancestral courage had not been distilled out of their veins. He meant to find and fill such an opening.

  Three months of searching exhausted his savings and persuaded him he had been mistaken. It seemed there was no place for venturesomeness in the modern world. Courage was the one thing for which business had no use—not only could not use it, but did not want to have it around. If your employer learned you were not a sheep or a worm—a timid, docile sheep or worm—he immediately got rid of you.

  Earl Parish was working temporarily in a soap factory when he read one day in a newspaper that the city fire department was dangerously undermanned. He deserted the soap factory at once, amazed that he needed the newspaper to point out his path: the city fire department was so obviously the one place in the world for him!

  He submitted his application and a doctor surveyed his body. Days passed, and he was told he had failed the physical examination—a matter of defective kidneys. In the office of a fire commissioner that same afternoo
n Earl Parish created a diversion. An inch and a half of cut newspaper was brandished before the commissioner’s eyes. The commissioner was called an old fool. Presently Earl Parish was hustled to the sidewalk.

  He went then to the offices of the Morning Post, where he found someone to listen to his story. The Post happened to be an opposition paper at the time. It gave half a column to the tale of the man who once had “dashed into a blazing building to rescue a little child,” and who now, unable to find other employment, was barred from the Fire Department by “the same red tape which is responsible for the department’s inability to get and keep an adequate force.”

  Out of this advertisement Earl Parish got—besides a new clipping —employment as night watchman in a packing plant. He was paid four dollars a night and soon learned that two men who had divided the work had been discharged to make a place for him. It was the watchman’s duty to make a tour of the building once an hour, registering at fifteen little boxes hung on the walls. After the first week Earl Parish began to skip boxes, those in distant corners. There were complaints, of course, but he ignored them. He had been hired, he reasoned, because of his known courage, and he trusted that to overbalance minor irregularities. He was mistaken. He was discharged at the end of the third week.

  Returning to the Post, he could find no one to listen to his story. The other papers were as indifferent. He found several positions within the next few months. Sometimes he resigned, sometimes he was discharged. He earned enough to pay for meals and a place to sleep. He spent much time in a public square just out of the business district. Sitting on a bench, or sprawling on the grass, he would sort passersby according to his habit. Fewer and fewer were those whose ancestral courage had not been distilled by industrialism out of their veins. Now and then, he would write a letter to the Post’s Open Forum, commenting bitterly on this failing of the race.

  Sometimes he would go down to the waterfront, pretending he was going to make his way to some virile land where the courageous still prospered and sheep were eaten. He never put his foot on a deck, never asked a question that could lead to a place aboard a boat. The periods of halfhearted search for work grew longer. The intervals of employment shrank. Some days he was hungry.

  One of these days he went to the house from which he had carried the child. The child’s family had moved from the neighborhood to nobody knew where. Another morning when hunger was a hard lump in his stomach he walked the streets studying the faces of the people he passed, classifying them, but not in his familiar fashion. He sought now to pick out the probably liberal from the probably not liberal.

  Three times, he approached faces that bespoke generosity. Three times, last-minute timidity and the too-near presence of others in the street kept him silent, sent him hurrying on as if a pressing engagement awaited him at the end of the street. The fourth face that attracted him was very old, and years had washed it clean of all color, of all expression save a meek friendliness. Its owner walked alone and slowly with the help of a silver-knobbed cane. His shoes were black mirrors.

  Earl Parish turned around and followed the old man. Other pedestrians passed and repassed them. Earl Parish kept half a block behind his man, and as he walked he took his three finger-worn clippings out of their envelope and put them loose in his pocket, where they would be readily available if his request for “a dime or so” needed documentary bolstering.

  Presently the old man turned into a street where people were few. Earl Parish quickened his pace and the distance between them shrank. Hurrying thus, he came to a corner where a bareheaded man was breaking the glass front of a fire-alarm box with a fist wrapped in a handkerchief.

  Earl Parish forgot his kindly faced quarry.

  “Where is it?” he asked the bareheaded man in a curt professional tone.

  “Around in the back street.”

  Earl Parish ran around the corner. Three men were converging on the opening of a narrow street that split the block. He hurried after them. From a red-and-white house in the middle of the block spongy smoke rolled out to gray the street.

  In front of the house a man tried to grab Earl Parish’s arm. He struck aside the interfering hand and sprang up the front steps.

  “Hey! Come out o’ there, you!” the man called after him.

  Earl Parish pushed open the front door and plunged into the murky interior. A blow on his chest stopped him, jarred him back on his heels, emptied his lungs of the clean air they had carried in from the street. Smoke stung his throat, chest. His hands found the thing that had struck him—a newel. He clung to it while he closed his eyes against the scorching smoke and coughed.

  A foot found the bottom of a flight of steps. He went up, one hand fumbling along the railing, the other clenched over nose and mouth. The platform of an interfloor landing came under his feet. His hand on the rail guided him around the turning in the stairs. He started to climb again.

  A boiling hiss, the beat of hotness on his face jerked his eyes open. In front of him nimble red blades of fire poked up at the ceiling.

  Earl Parish cried out—a smoke-garbled protest against this trickery, this betrayal. In that other house had been no visible fire. Nothing had been there but smoke, and a child to be carried out. Here was live flame and—he was a fool!—perhaps nobody to be carried out. How did he know anyone was upstairs? Was it likely?

  A limber bright sword bent down at him. He turned and scurried down the stairs. The landing tripped him with its break in the step-after-step descent, tumbled him down on hands and knees. Red light sizzled down the rail after him. Its flare was mauve on a small piece of paper that lay close under his nose as he huddled there.

  He stared at the paper with curious intentness. It was somehow familiar, this small rectangle of soiled wood pulp, so altogether unimportant, so trivial a thing here in a burning house. And when he recognized the paper he continued to stare, seeing now for the first time in its true size his cherished clipping from last year’s Post: an inch and a half of simple news that a fire of unknown origin had been subdued with slight damage after a child had been carried to safety by Earl Parish.

  Seeing the clipping truly, he saw its significance, and he saw other things: he saw himself with a clearness that mottled his face beyond power of smoke and fire. He stood up on the landing and faced upstairs with the bit of paper crunched in his fist.

  “I had my fun, you—” he personified the clipping in a compound invective and flung the clipping to the fire. “Now I’m going to earn it!”

  Smoke swirled in the stairs, red light sizzled, and living flame blades poked up at the ceiling. Earl Parish went through them to the second floor. Not all of him went through. Some hair, a patch of one hand’s skin, parts of his clothing that were frayed into ready kindling disappeared. The rest of Earl Parish gained the second story, slammed a door between him and the stairs, and beat out the points of light that dotted his clothes.

  On the other side of the door fire seethed and crackled. He laughed at the noise as well as he could with smoke strangling him, and began to explore the fumid gloom.

  He found no one in the room with him, nor in the other rooms that made up the house’s top story. He swayed as he walked back to the first room. His head was hollow and buoyant, and he breathed in choking gulps. He staggered toward the front window.

  A small sneeze came out of a corner.

  Earl Parish dropped down on hands and knees and peered under the chair there. A cinnamon kitten stopped rubbing paws on nose to sneeze again. Earl Parish laughed hoarsely as he scooped the kitten out of its retreat and stuffed it into a coat pocket.

  He had trouble in getting himself erect again, but managed it finally. The window slid up easily, to create a draft that swung open the room’s door and swept in flame bulky out of all semblance to sword blades.

  Earl Parish clambered up on the windowsill and looked into the upturned faces down in the street.

  A policeman waved an arm.

  “Stick it out, brother,”
he called. “Here’s the wagons now!”

  “Look out!” Earl Parish yelled back, and jumped.

  There was a shock, but not of the expected hard pavement. He was on a sort of blue cushion: the policeman had run to stand under him. Men dragged them out of the arriving firemen’s way, helped them to their feet. The policeman’s face was bleeding.

  “You’re a lunatic!” he said.

  Earl Parish was busy with his coat pocket, disentangling the cinnamon kitten from the torn lining. Someone took the kitten. Voices said things, asked things. One of the questions had to do with Earl Parish’s name and address.

  “Earl—” He coughed violently to cover up the halt, and repeated: “Earl—John W. Earl,” and gave a street and number, hoping they didn’t belong to any of the people around him.

  He was insisting that he was all right, that he didn’t need medical attention. He was sneaking through the crowd. He was hurrying away from the fire, down an alley. He turned three corners before he stopped. Out of his pocket he took two clippings—from a railroad employees’ magazine, the other from a newspaper.

  He tore them into very small bits and tossed them up in a flurry of artificial snow.

  In Howard Street, sandwiched between a secondhand clothing store and a lunch counter, there is an establishment whose large front room is bare and unfurnished except for shabby desk, chair, table behind a battered counter in the rear and a blackboard that occupies one sidewall. You will find listed in chalk on this board such items as “Laborers, company, country, $3.75; Wood Choppers, 4 ft. and stove wood, $2.50–4.50 cord; Choremen, country, $45–65, fd.; Lead Burner, company, $8.” Beneath some of these items “Fare paid” will appear.

  Into this establishment one afternoon came a short sturdy man of thirty or so, inordinately dirty-faced and shabby. He had no hat, and some of his hair seemed to have been eaten off. A smudge was where one eyebrow should have been. He walked unsteadily. His red eyes had the inward hilarity of a drunken philosopher. But he did not smell of alcohol—rather of fresh wood smoke. He learned over the battered counter and grinned jovially at the establishment’s proprietor.