The Hunter and Other Stories Page 9

  Straït’s face was bleak and Straït’s eyes were hard and Straït’s knuckles were white on rod and sword hilt.

  “So?” he said softly, and softness went out of his voice. The third conjuration was a brazen song that beat the velvet walls, beat back on itself, beat the candle-flames to dim sparks, beat dark dampness out on the linen garments of the kneeling apprentices from armpit to hip. Besides the Names he had already invoked, Straït now called on Eye and Saray, and the Name Primematum, and others.

  When he had done that, something was in the room without having come there in any manner: a soldier in russet, a narrow band of yellow metal around his brows, sat a sorrel horse between brazier and west window. If you chose to think he had materialized there, or had whisked himself there from another place, you were welcome, but it was certain you could not say when.

  Straït’s lids crept closer around his mad eyes, and there was no favor in the face with which he faced the soldier.

  “O Spirït Berith, transmuter of metals, revealer of the past and the present and the future, giver of dignities, liar: because I have not called you, do you at once depart, without injury to man or beast. Depart, I command you and be you. . . .”

  Here the soldier Berith, fingers toying with red mane, leaned over his charger’s neck and sought to stem the dismissal. His scarred face was bland, and his harsh voice counterfeited bluff friendliness.

  “But since I am here, Straït, you may as well make use of me.”

  “. . . ready to come whensoever, and only when, duly exorcised and conjured,” the magician’s voice went heedless on. “I command you to withdraw peaceably. . . .”

  The soldier urged the sorrel nearer, and leaned farther over its neck.

  “But, Straït, what is the—?”

  With “and quietly, and may the peace of God continue forever between me and you,” Straït had finished, and the russet soldier was no more in the room than his russet mount.

  The magician rubbed the back of one hand over his forehead that was wet and shiny, and with camphor and brandy he revivified the brazier’s weakening flame, while the apprentices shifted their knees on the floor behind him and breathed with unguarded noisiness through open mouths.

  The charcoal burning afresh, Straït put away his vials, braced himself on his short legs, lifted his face once more to the west, and became an iron horn through which thunder trumpeted the invocation of King Corson of the West. That invocation completed to no effect save the shivering of the two behind him, Straït hunched his shoulders, smiled a basilisk’s smile, and the Chain Curse came cruelly out of his mouth. The dumb boy tried to stop his ears with his fingers, but Simon struck his arm down.

  When the last hard black word of the Chain Curse had been uttered, and no thing had come into the room, Straït took a small black box from under his robe, and held his other hand behind him. Into that hand the talmid put the virgin parchment inked with Dantalian’s seal. Into the box, among the assafetida and brimstone that was there, went the parchment, the lid closed, iron wire went thrice around the box, Straït’s sword found purchase in a loop of the wire, and the box dangled down in the charcoal’s flame.

  The jagged, crackling phrases of the Fire Curse dulled the walls’ embroidery into colorlessness, made a cringing small heap of the boy, painted the talmid’s chin with blood beneath the sob-checking cut of his teeth. Straït’s face was a cold, dry, white blur as the box slid off his sword and nestled among the hot coals.

  Between fire and window stood a man-shape. The face atop his neck was not ugly even in its sullen endurance of agony. Some of his other faces grimaced hideously in their pain. The faces that were his right hand’s finger-tips were smeared into shapelessness by the book they held.

  Straït plucked the box from the fire, dropping in its stead a pinch of incense that clouded the room with pungent sweetness. He spoke politely to the man by the window, but he held aside the fold of his robe that bared the Seal of Solomon until that man had come into the part of the drawn triangle which lay outside the circle.

  “I am here, Straït,” that one said meekly enough, however confusing it was to have each word in turn come from another of his faces. “Command me.”

  The magician wasted no time in recrimination, in railing against the obstinacy the spirit had shown. Into the hand Straït held behind him Simon put two written slips of paper. From the first of these Straït looked up at the demon.

  “There is a man Eton who had some ships with another man Dirk. A while ago they divided their ships and each took his portion to himself. Now I must know does Dirk prosper more than Eton, who seems to prosper little?”

  Dantalian raised the book in his right hand while his finger-tip faces turned the leaves with their tiny white teeth. Dantalian nodded with all his faces.

  “Dirk prospers more,” three of his mouths affirmed.

  “So? Now you will put it in Dirk’s mind that he should return to Eton, that they should pool their boats again, share and share alike.”

  The woman’s face on Dantalian’s left shoulder smiled slowly and heavily through her weight of seductiveness, and took the answering from the other heads:

  “Will it serve to put the idea first into the head of Dirk’s wife?”

  Straït shrugged his linened shoulders.

  “I have heard the gossip. So the matter is arranged, you may suit yourself how. Now there is another thing; there is a jeweler Buclip who wants the love of a woman”—Straït bent his head to the second slip in his hand and clicked his teeth together—“named Bella Chara. You will—”

  “Wait!” Dantalian called deafening, discordantly, with all his mouths at once. “Don’t do this foolish thing!”

  Though there was nothing yielding in his cold eyes, Straït withheld his words and looked at the demon.

  “Why should you do this foolish thing?” the vocal change-ringing went on. “You have—”

  Now Straït checked the demon’s words with upraised rod in the hand on which the demon’s seal glowed, looking meanwhile for an uneasy instant over his shoulders at his kneeling assistants.

  “We will take all that for granted,” he said. “You and I know what we know. Let us only say what needs to be said from that point, if anything.”

  “Then why should you give her away?” some of Dantalian’s voices were asking while the courtesan’s head on his shoulder leered knowingly. “Is it any fairer to herself than to you to bind her by these means in a place she has not gone of her accord? She is yours—keep her.”

  “What of the jeweler’s gifts?”

  The courtesan sniggered, but a fair face elsewhere on Dantalian spoke softly:“Weren’t you away for weeks at a time with your abstinences and your fastings? Was she, knowing nothing, to sit in her house and twiddle her fingers and wait for you to find time to visit her? And what of the jewelry? Does not Buclip’s coming to you show that he needs more than jewelry?”

  Straït frowned and said, “I made a bargain. I set my theurgy to do a thing. You will—”

  “Wait!” Dantalian cried again, and tried scoffery. “You made a bargain, yes. But what of your bargain with her? That, of course, is nothing where your silly vanity is concerned! That is not enough to balance the fear that this dolt Buclip might tell his neighbor Straït’s sorcery failed him. Are you a child, Straït, to toss away that which you value for the sake of a traffic in which you have no belief? Does being pointed out as Straït the magician mean that much to you?”

  Scowling, Straït replied, “You will give—” and he stopped to look at the book whose pages spun swiftly to the click of Dantalian’s snapping finger-mouths. The white whir of the leaves became less a whir, less a book, and into the demon’s hand came a woman’s face.

  This face was the first thing to come eerily into the room. For a demon to materialize, however abruptly, however trickily, can be nowise genuinely weird, for such is the nature of spirits. But the matter is different when a face of ripe pink flesh comes out of a book, a
warm oval of compact meatiness and creased lips and merry eyes that so awfully do not belong apart from a soft pulsing body.

  “This is what you will pay for the privilege of showing off,” Dantalian accused the magician. “This is what, in your empty vanity, you will throw to a baldly grey jeweler.”

  Straït swallowed and wet his lips and looked away from the delectable face held up in a hand whose finger-ends were tiny faces that kissed and ran red tongues over the round throat they held. Straït looked at the floor and wrinkled his forehead under his linen cap and seemed in every way ashamed.

  And Straït said, “You will give the jeweler Buclip the love of this woman so she will never see any other man with love.”

  Dantalian was a pandemonium of voices that barked and growled and screamed, a horrible gallery of rage-masks that snarled and spat.

  Straït said, “O Spirit Dantalian, because you have diligently answered my demands, I do hereby license you to depart, without injury to man or beast. Depart, I say, and be you willing and ready to come, whensoever duly exorcised and conjured. I conjure you to withdraw peaceably and quietly, and may the peace of God continue forever between me and you.”

  Straït flourished sword and rod and copper ring, and there was not anything in the room but the magician and his paraphernalia, and white Simon swaying up from his knees, and the boy fainting across the floor, his face all smudged by the charcoal with which the mystic circle had been drawn.

  Simon the talmid touched his master’s sleeve.

  “Oh, Master, if I had only known when the jeweler gave me her name!”

  Straït said that was nonsense. He said it did not matter; Dantalian had made much of little. He said he was a middle-aged man who should not be trifling with love.

  “But, Master, isn’t the jeweler at least ten years older than you? And she herself—she’s twenty-five if she’s a day!”

  Straït smiled sidewise then into the talmid’s pale face, and asked if Simon had considered her ancient hag’s face not at all desirable.

  Simon blushed contritely and tried to wipe out the slight.

  “No, Master!” he protested. “She was—if she had been mine, I would never have—” and there he floundered, for that way lay another slight.

  But Straït did not seem to mind. He confessed he had not played the man’s part. He said Simon would understand, when his day came, that to the extent one becomes a magician one ceases to be a man. And he added that this same thing might hold true of sailors and jewelers and bankers, and the boy seemed to be stirring, and Simon might let the cleaning of the room wait while he went out to market for a fat goose and whatever else they would need for the evening meal, now the fasting was over.

  FAITH

  Sprawled in a loose evening group on the river bank, the fifty-odd occupants of the clapboard barrack that was the American bunk-house listened to Morphy damn the canning-factory, its superintendent, its equipment, and its pay. They were migratory workingmen, these listeners, simple men, and they listened with that especial gravity which the simple man—North American Indian, Zulu, or hobo—affects.

  But when Morphy had finished one of them chuckled.

  Without conventions any sort of group life is impossible, and no division of society is without its canons. The laws of the jungles are not the laws of the drawing-room, but they are as certainly existent, and as important to their subjects. If you are a migratory workingman you may pick your teeth wherever and with whatever tool you like, but you may not either by word or act publicly express satisfaction with your present employment; nor may you disagree with any who denounce the conditions of that employment. Like most conventions, this is not altogether without foundation in reason.

  So now the fifty-odd men on the bank looked at him who had chuckled, turned upon him the stare that is the social lawbreaker’s lot everywhere: their faces held antagonism suspended in expectancy of worse to come, physically a matter of raised brows over blank eyes, and teeth a little apart behind closed lips.

  “What’s eatin’ you?” Morphy—a big-bodied dark man who said “the proletariat” as one would say “the seraphim”—demanded. “You think this is a good dump?”

  The chuckler wriggled, scratching his back voluptuously against a prong of the uptorn stump that was his bolster, and withheld his answer until it seemed he had none. He was a newcomer to the Bush River cannery, one of the men hurried up from Baltimore that day: the tomatoes, after an unaccountable delay in ripening, had threatened to overwhelm the normal packing force.

  “I’ve saw worse,” the newcomer said at last, with the true barbarian’s lack of discomfiture in the face of social disapproval. “And I expect to see worse.”

  “Meanin’ what?”

  “Oh, I ain’t saying!” The words were light-flung, airy. “But I know a few things. Stick around and you’ll see.”

  No one could make anything of that. Simple men are not ready questioners. Someone spoke of something else.

  The man who had chuckled went to work in the process-room, where half a dozen Americans and as many Polacks cooked the fresh-canned tomatoes in big iron kettles. He was a small man, compactly plump, with round maroon eyes above round cheeks whose original ruddiness had been tinted by sunburn to a definite orange. His nose was small and merrily pointed, and a snuff-user’s pouch in his lower lip, exaggerating the lift of his mouth at the corners, gave him a perpetual grin. He held himself erect, his chest arched out, and bobbed when he walked, rising on the ball of the propelling foot midway each step. A man of forty-five or so, who answered to the name Feach and hummed through his nose while he guided the steel-slatted baskets from truck, to kettle, to truck.

  After he had gone, the men remembered that from the first there had been a queerness about Feach, but not even Morphy tried to define that queerness. “A nut,” Morphy said, but that was indefinite.

  What Feach had was a secret. Evidence of it was not in his words only: they were neither many nor especially noteworthy, and his silence held as much ambiguity as his speech. There was in his whole air—the cock of his round, boy’s head, in the sparkle of his red-brown eyes, in the nasal timbre of his voice, in his trick of puffing out his cheeks when he smiled—a sardonic knowingness that seemed to mock whatever business was at hand. He had for his work and for the men’s interests the absent-minded, bantering sort of false-seriousness that a busy parent has for its child’s affairs. His every word, gesture, attention, seemed thinly to mask preoccupation with some altogether different thing that would presently appear: a man waiting for a practical joke to blossom.

  He and Morphy worked side by side. Between them the first night had put a hostility which neither of them tried to remove. Three days later they increased it.

  It was early evening. The men, as usual, were idling between their quarters and the river, waiting for bed-time. Feach had gone indoors to get a can of snuff from his bedding. When he came out Morphy was speaking.

  “Of course not,” he was saying. “You don’t think a God big enough to make all this would be crazy enough to do it, do you? What for? What would it get Him?”

  A freckled ex-sailor, known to his fellows as Sandwich, was frowning with vast ponderance over the cigarette he was making, and when he spoke the deliberation in his voice was vast.

  “Well, you can’t always say for certain. Sometimes a thing looks one way, and when you come to find out, is another. It don’t look like there’s a God. I’ll say that. But—”

  Feach, tamping snuff into the considerable space between his lower teeth and lip, grinned around his fingers, and managed to get derision into the snapping of the round tin lid down on the snuff-can.

  “So you’re one of them guys?” he challenged Morphy.

  “Uh-huh.” The big man’s voice was that of one who, confident of his position’s impregnability, uses temperateness to provoke an assault. “If somebody’d show me there was a God, it’d be different. But I never been showed.”

  “I’ve saw wi
se guys like you before!” The jovial ambiguity was suddenly gone from Feach; he was earnest, and indignant. “You want what you call proof before you’ll believe anything. Well, you wait—you’ll get your proof this time, and plenty of it.”

  “That’s what I’d like to have. You ain’t got none of this proof on you, have you?”

  Feach sputtered.

  Morphy rolled over on his back and began to roar out a song to the Maryland sky, a mocking song that Wobblies sing to the tune of “When the bugle calls up yonder I’ll be there.”

  You will eat, by and by,

  In that glorious land they call the sky—

  ’Way up high!

  Work and pray,

  You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

  Feach snorted and turned away, walking down the river bank. The singer’s booming notes followed him until he had reached the pines beyond the two rows of frame huts that were the Polacks’ quarters.

  By morning the little man had recovered his poise. For two weeks he held it—going jauntily around with his cargo of doubleness and his bobbing walk, smiling with puffed cheeks when Morphy called him “Parson”—and then it began to slip away from him. For a while he still smiled, and still said one thing while patently thinking of another; but his eyes were no longer jovially occupied with those other things: they were worried.

  He took on the look of one who is kept waiting at a rendezvous, and tries to convince himself that he will not be disappointed. His nights became restless; the least creaking of the clapboard barrack or the stirring of a sleeping man would bring him erect in bed.

  One afternoon the boiler of a small hoisting engine exploded. A hole was blown in the store-house wall, but no one was hurt. Feach raced the others to the spot and stood grinning across the wreckage at Morphy. Carey, the superintendent, came up.