The Hunter and Other Stories Read online

  “A young fellow to see Miss Newbrith,” he shouted merrily, bowing low with an absurd outflinging of his arms. When he straightened up he added, “Ha-ha-ha!”

  Hesitantly Trate advanced into the room wherein was nothing to set him immediately at ease. It was a drawing-room in gold and white, quite long, elaborate with the carved, inlaid, and stuccoed richness of the fourteenth Louis’ day. Opaque blinds and heavy curtains hid the windows. A glittering chandelier lighted the room. From the farther end a dozen faces looked at Trate with indefinite expectancy.

  The owners of these faces had divided themselves into two groups. The larger numbered eight. They, no matter how comfortably established on chairs in this gold and white room, were unmistakably servants. Across the floor from them the smaller group occupied more space. The eldest of these four sat upright in the middle of a sofa. He was small, slight, old, and well preserved except that his mustache, white as his hair, was ragged at one end with recent gnawing. To his right a full-bodied woman of forty-something in a magenta frock leaned forward on her gilded chair and held a champlevé vial near her thin nose. Beside her a middle-aged man sat in a similar chair. He resembled—in younger, plumper mould—the man on the sofa, but was paler, more tired than the elder.

  The fourth member of the group stood up when Hugh came in. She derived from both the sitting men: a girl of less than twenty, small with a daintiness of bone-structure and fleshing which, however delicate, had nothing to do with fragility. Her face was saved from the flat prettiness of mathematically proportioned features by her mouth: it was red, too narrow, full and curiously creased. She took four steps toward Trate, stopped, looked past him at the door through which he had come, and at him again. “Oh, Mr. Trate, it was nice of you to come so quickly!” she said.

  The young man, still a dozen paces away, approached smiling somewhat stiffly, a little pink, looking at her with brown eyes that seemed uneasily aware of the concerted stare of the eleven other persons watching him with ambiguous hopefulness. He made a guttural gargling sound, in no way intelligible, but manifestly polite in intention. The girl took his hand, then his hat and overcoat, and turned with him to face the others.

  “Grandad,” she said to the old man on the sofa, “this is Mr. Trate. He—” She stopped, indicated something behind her by a swift sidewise jerk of her eyes, and nodded significantly.

  “Say no more.” The old man’s glance darted for a fleeting instant past Trate. A dry whisper crept from behind his white mustache. “We are in your hands.”

  Trate said something like, “Uh,” and shifted his feet uncertainly.

  The girl told him that the tired man and the woman in magenta were her parents, and now the woman spoke, her voice nasally querulous. “The stout man is by far the most odious and I do wish you would secure him first.” She gestured with the champlevé vial toward the door.

  Two men stood in that end of the room. One was the stolid man who had opened the door. He nodded and grinned amiably at Trate. His companion scowled. The companion was a short man in shabby brown, with arms too long hanging from shoulders too broad. Red-brown eyes peered malignantly from beneath the pulled-down visor of his cap. His face was dark, with a broad nose flat on his long and prominent upper lip above an outthrust chin.

  Trate looked from one Newbrith to another. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

  “It’s nothing,” the old man assured him. “Your own way.”

  Trate frowned questioning puzzlement at the girl.

  She laughed, the creases in her red mouth multiplying its curves. “We must explain it to Mr. Trate. We can’t expect him to guess the situation.”

  Old Newbrith’s ragged mustache blew out from his mouth in a great blast of air.

  “Explain! Didn’t you—?”

  “There was no time,” said the girl. “It took me nearly five minutes to get Mr. Trate on the wire, and by then they were hunting for me.”

  The old man leaned forward with bulging eyes. “And you’ve no assistance? No men outside?”

  “No, sir,” Trate said.

  The elder Newbrith looked at the girl’s father and the girl’s father looked at him, each looking as if he found the sight of the other amazing. But the amazement with which they regarded one another was nothing to that with which they looked at the girl. The old man’s small fingers crushed invisible things on the sofa beside his legs.

  “Precisely what did you tell Mr. Trate, Brenda?” he asked.

  “Why, I simply told him who I was, reminded him I had met him at the Shermans’, and asked him if he could run up here immediately. That was all. There wasn’t time for anything else, Grandad. They were already hunting for me.”

  “Yes, they would be,” said the old man, softer of voice, his face angrier. “So instead of giving the alarm to the first voice you heard, you wasted five minutes getting this—ah—young gentleman on the wire, and then hadn’t time to do more than—ah—casually invite him to join us?”

  “Oh, but really,” his granddaughter protested, “Mr. Trate is very clever. And I thought this would be such a wonderful chance for him to make a reputation at the very beginning of his career.”

  “Ah!” the old man cooed while wild lights twinkled in his eyes, “so our young friend is at the very beginning of his career, is he?”

  “Yes. I met him at the Shermans’ reception. He was guarding the presents, and he told me that was his first case. He had only been a detective for three days then. Wasn’t that it, Mr. Trate?”

  Mr. Trate said, “Uh—yes,” without taking his eyes from the old man’s face.

  “So then our Mr. Trate has had by this time”—Newbrith was lisping with sweetness now—“no less than ten days experience?”

  “Eleven,” Trate said, blushing a little.

  Old Newbrith said, “Ah, eleven, to be sure!” and stood up. He smiled and his face was swollen and purple. He plucked two buttons from his coat and threw them away. He found a yellow scarf to tear into strips and a handful of cigars to crunch into brown flakes. He took the champlevé vial from his daughter-in-law’s hand and ground it under his heel. While thus engaged he screamed that his granddaughter was an idiot, a fool, a loon , a moron, a dolt, an ass, a lunatic, a goose, a simpleton, a booby, a numbskull, an imbecile, and a halfwit. Then he relapsed on the sofa, eyes closed, legs out, while daughter-in-law and granddaughter strove with loosening, fanning, chaffing hands to stop the bubbling in his upturned open mouth.

  “What’s the old boy up to now?” a very thin squeaky voice asked. Its owner stood with the two men by the door. He was ridiculous. Well over six feet in height, he was a hill of flesh, a live sphere in loose gray clothes. His features were babyish—little round blue eyes, little lumpy nose, little soft mouth—all babyishly disposed, huddled together in the center of a great round face, between cheeks like melons, with smooth pink surfaces that seemed never have needed shaving. Out of this childish mountain more piping words came: “You oughtn’t to let him carry on like that, Tom. First thing you know he’ll be busting something and dying on us before we’re through with him.”

  “The young fellow did it,” replied the cheerful man in the footman’s ill-fitting dress. “Seems like he’s a detective.”

  “A detective!” The fat man’s features gathered closer together in a juvenile pout, blue eyes staring glassily at Trate. “Well, what does he come here for? We mustn’t have detectives!”

  The long-armed brutish man in brown took a shuffling step forward. “I’ll bust him one,” he suggested.

  “No, no, Bill!” the fat man squeaked impatiently, still staring at Trate. “That wouldn’t help. He’d still be a detective.”

  “Oh, he ain’t so much a one that we got to worry about him,” the cheerful man said. “Seems like he ain’t been at it only for eleven days, and he comes in not knowing no what’s what than the man in the moon.”

  But fat pink fingers continued to pluck at the puckered baby’s mouth, and the porcelain eyes neither blinke
d nor wavered from the young man’s face. “That’s all right,” the fat man squeaked, “but what’s he doing here? That’s what I want to know.”

  “Seems like the kid got to the phone that time she slipped away from us in the mixup before we brought ’em down here, and she gives this young fellow a rumble, but she’s too rattlebrained to smart him up. He don’t know nothing until he gets in.”

  The mountainous man’s distress lessened to a degree permitting the removal of his stare from Trate, and he turned to the door. “Well, maybe it’s all right,” his treble came over one of the thick pillows that were his shoulders, “but you tell him that he’s got to behave himself.”

  He lumbered out, leaving the cheerful man and the malevolent man standing side by side looking at Trate cheerfully and malevolently. The young man put his back to those parallel but unlike gazes and found himself facing old Newbrith, who was sitting up on his sofa again, his eyes open, waving away his ministering womenfolk.

  Looking at Trate, the old man repeated the burden of his recently screamed complaint, but now in the milder tone of incomplete resignation: “If she had to pick out one detective and bring him here blindfolded, why must she pick an amateur?”

  No one had a direct reply to that. Trate mumbled an obvious something about everybody’s having been a novice at one time. The old man readily, if somewhat nastily, conceded the truth of that, but God knew he had troubles enough without being made Lesson II in a How To Be A Detective course.

  “Now, Grandad, don’t be unreasonable,” Brenda Newbrith remonstrated. “You’ve no idea how clever Mr. Trate really is! He—” She smiled up at the young man. “What was that awfully clever thing you said at the Shermans’ about democracy being government with the deuces wild?”

  The young man cleared his throat and smiled uncomfortably, and beyond that said nothing.

  The girl’s father opened his tired eyes and became barely audible. “Good Lord!” he murmured. “A detective who amuses the guests with epigrams to keep them from making off with the wedding presents!”

  “You just wait!” the girl said. “You’ll see! Won’t they, Mr. Trate?”

  Mr. Trate said, “Yes. That is— Well—”

  Mrs. Newbrith, raising her eyes from the ruins of her vial on the floor, said, “I don’t understand what all this pother is about. If the young man is really a detective, he will arrest these criminals at once. If he isn’t, he isn’t, and that’s the end of it, though I grant that Brenda might have exercised greater judgment when she—”

  “Go ahead, young fellow,” Tom called encouragingly from the other end of the room, “detect something for the lady!”

  The man with the brutish muzzle also spoke. “I wish Joe would leave me take a poke at him,” he grumbled.

  “You can save us, can’t you, Mr. Trate?” the girl asked pointblank, looking up at him with blue eyes in which doubt was becoming faintly discernible.

  Trate flushed, cleared his throat. “I’m not a policeman, Miss Newbrith, and I have no reason to believe that Mr. Newbrith wishes to engage my services.”

  “None at all,” the old man agreed.

  The girl was not easily put aside.

  “I engage you,” she told him.

  “I’m sorry,” Trate said, “but it would have to be Mr. Newbrith.”

  “That’s silly! And besides, if you succeeded in doing something, you know Grandad would reward you.”

  Trate shook his head again.

  “Ethical detectives do not operate on contingent fees,” said he as if reciting a recently studied lesson.

  “Do you mean to do nothing? Are you trying to make me ridiculous? After I thought it would be such a wonderful opportunity for you, and gave you a chance any other man would jump at!”

  Before Trate could reply to this, the fat man’s treble was quivering in the room again. “Didn’t I tell you you’d have to make him behave himself?” he asked his henchmen.

  “He’s just arguing,” the stolid Tom defended Hugh. “There ain’t no harm in the boy.”

  “Well, make him sit down and keep quiet.”

  The brutish Bill shuffled forward. “He’ll sit down or I’ll slap him down,” he promised.

  Hugh found a vacant gilt chair in a corner half behind the elder Newbrith’s sofa. Bill said, “Ar-r-r!” hesitated, looked back at the fat man and returned to his post by the door.

  The mountain of flesh turned its child’s eyes on old Newbrith, raised a hand like an obese pink star, and beckoned with a finger that curved rather than crooked, so cased in flesh were its joints.

  Old Newbrith caught the unchewed end of his mustache in his mouth, but he did not get up from his sofa.

  “You’ve got everything,” he protested. “I haven’t another thing that—”

  “You oughtn’t to lie to me like that,” the fat man reproved him. “How about that piece of property on Temple Street?”

  “But you can’t sell that kind of real estate by phone like stocks and bonds,” Newbrith objected. “Not for immediate cash!”

  “You can,” the fat man insisted, “especially if you’re willing to let it go for half of what it’s worth, like you are. Maybe nobody else could, but you can. Everybody knows you’re crazy, and anything you do won’t surprise them.”

  Newbrith held his seat, stubbornly looking at the floor.

  The fat man piped, “Bill!”

  The brutish man shuffled toward the sofa.

  Newbrith cursed into his mustache, got up, and followed the waddling mountain into the hall.

  There was silence in the drawing-room. Bill and Tom held the door. The servants sat along their wall, variously regarding one another, the men at the door, and the four on the other side of the room. Mrs. Newbrith fidgeted in her chair, looking regretfully at the fragments of her vial, and picked at her magenta frock with round-tipped fingers that were pinkly striped with the marks of rings not long removed. Her husband rested wearily beside her, a cigar smoldering in his pale mouth. Their daughter sat a little away from them, looking stony defiance from face to face. Hugh Trate, back in his corner, had lighted a cigarette, and sat staring through smoke at his outstretched crossed legs. His face, every line of his pose, affected an introspective preoccupation with his own affairs that was flawed by an unmistakable air of sulkiness.

  Twenty minutes later the elder Newbrith rejoined his family. His face was purple again. His hair was rumpled. The right corner of his mustache had vanished completely. The fat man, stopping beside his associates at the door, was forcing a thick black pistol into a tight pocket.

  “You!” the old man barked at Trate before sitting on his sofa again. “You’re hired!”

  “Very well, sir,” the young man said with so little enthusiasm that the words seemed almost an acceptance of defeat.

  The fat man departed. The red-faced man grinned at Hugh and called to him with large friendliness, “I hope you ain’t going to be too hard on us, young fellow.”

  The brutish man glowered and snarled, “I’m gonna smack that punk yet!”

  After that there was silence again in the gold and white room, though the occasional sound of a closing door, of striding, waddling, dragging foot-falls, came from other parts of the house, and once a telephone bell rang thinly. Hugh Trate lit another cigarette, and did not restore the box of safety matches to his pocket.

  Presently Mrs. Newbrith coughed. Old Newbrith cleared his throat. A vague stuffiness came into the room.

  Trate leaned forward until his mouth was not far from the white head of the old man on the sofa. “Sit still, sir,” the young detective whispered through immobile lips. “I’ve just set fire to the sofa.”

  Old Newbrith left the burning sofa with a promptness that caught his legs unprepared, scrambled out into the middle of the floor on hands and knees. His torn mustache quivered and fluttered and tossed in gusts of bellowed turmoil. “Help! Fire! Damn your idiocy! Michael! Battey! Water! Fire! You young idiot! Michael! Battey! It’s arson, th
at’s what it is!” were some of the things he could be understood to shout, and the things that were understood were but a fraction of the things he shouted.

  Tumult—after a moment of paralysis at the spectacle of the master of the house of Newbrith yammering on all fours—took the drawing-room. Mrs. Newbrith screamed. The line between servants and served disappeared as the larger group came to the smaller’s assistance. Flames leaped into view, red tongues licking the arm of the sofa, quick red fingers catching at drapes, yellow smoke like blonde ghosts’ hair growing out of brocaded upholstery.

  A thin youth in a chauffeur’s livery started for the door, crying, “Water! We’ve got to have water!”

  Stolid Tom waved him back with a pair of automatic pistols produced expertly from the bosom of his ill-fitting garments. “Go back to your bonfire, my lad,” he ordered with friendly firmness, while the brute called Bill slid a limber dark blackjack from a hip pocket and moved toward the chauffeur. The chauffeur hurriedly retreated into the group fighting the fire.

  The younger Newbrith and a servant had twisted a thick rug over the sofa’s arm and back, and were patting it sharply with their hands. Two servants had torn down the burning drape, trampling it into shredded black harmlessness under their feet. The elder Newbrith beat a smoldering cushion against the top of a table, sparks riding away on escaping feathers. While the old man beat he talked, but nothing could be made of his words. Mrs. Newbrith was laughing with noisy hysteria beside him. Around these principals the others were grouped: servants unable to find a place to serve, Brenda Newbrith looking at Hugh Trate as if undecided how she should look at him, and the young man himself frowning at the charred corpse of his fire with undisguised resentment.

  “What in the world’s the matter now?” the fat man asked from the door.

  “The young fellow’s been cutting up,” Tom explained. “He touched off a box of matches and stuck ’em under a pillow in a corner of the sofa. Seemed like a harmless kind of joke, so I left him alone.”

  The brutish man raised a transformed face, almost without brutality in its eager hopefulness. “Now you’ll leave me sock him, Joe,” he pleaded.