Дэшил Хэммет - The Collected Dashiell Hammett

“Does Mr. Cayterer know what you are doing, Miss Brenham?”

“Not yet.”

“Do you think he will approve?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t care whether he does. I hope he doesn’t! I’m not going back there again — not ever. I’m going with Ford. Thank God I don’t have to go back — there again!”

“Come, Miss Brenham,” I remonstrated, for she had become surprisingly vehement, “it couldn’t have been so bad as all that — being in Mr. Cayterer’s employ.”

“It was worse than all that You’ve no idea, Mr. Thin! You’ve — you’ve heard how hard it was for him to keep a secretary, how none of them staid for longer than a few weeks, before I came?”

“Yes, Miss Brenham, I have heard that.”

“And you have your opinion of the reason?”

“No, Miss Brenham,” I said, “I have no opinion.”

“Well, you’ve heard other opinions, I guess. And it would have been better if they were right, but they weren’t. There wasn’t any — any social relations between Mr. Cayterer and his secretaries. To him a secretary was... was an audience, or, as Ford says, somebody to strut in front of. That was why they never staid long. A girl was bound to see through him before long, and if she let him see it — and he was sharp enough — then he got rid of her.”

“Really, now, Miss Brenham, Mr. Cayterer does not—”

“I know t He isn’t completely a fool by any means. But that’s what makes it so sickening. He can — he does do really remarkable things, big things. But you should see him preparing to do them I Indecision, timidity hiding behind casualness at first And then he begins to talk, to boast, to pose, jokingly at first, so he won’t be tied to anything if he doesn’t muster up enough courage to carry it through.

“And that’s where his secretary’s part comes in. She must look big-eyed and amazed at him. And then he begins to outline a possible plan, designed principally, it would seem, to make his secretary gasp. And every time she gasps, he sticks his chest farther out and adds a more daring detail, until at last he’s got a plan that is really a marvel of audacity, and, what is more, he has got himself into a frame of mind that enables him to carry it out.

“And all the time his secretary knows that the least let-up in her worship would spoil the whole thing, because he isn’t a man who can be goaded into accomplishment He must be nursed. There must be someone beside him to exclaim and purr and flatter. And the fact that under that influence he can do tremendous things, overcome immense obstacles, somehow only makes it all the more sickening.

“And because I understood this almost from the very first is why I have staid with him so much longer than the others. I understood what it was he really wanted of me, what he was really paying for, and I considered! it as much a part of my duty as if he had put it in. words. It wasn’t dishonest of me to fawn on him and flatter him, because that’s what he was paying me for; but it was — well, sickening is the word that keeps coming to me. And after Ford came, it wasn’t — I couldn’t stand it any longer.”

She stopped and looked down at the glove she was twisting, and then up. at me, who was looking at the taximeter.

“You think I am exaggerating, don’t you, Mr. Thin? You think I am making up an extravagant theory out of perhaps a few very ordinary facts?”

I did indeed think so, but I didn’t like to say so, and neither did I like to lie about it. While I hesitated she began to talk again.

“Here, I can show you what I mean. These Throgmorton letters — Mr. Cayterer did not tell me about either of the first two until after he had sent the drafts. He didn’t tell me about them, in fact, until I had stumbled on them, or on the third of them anyway. What he had done was what was his natural course — he had submitted to those ridiculous demands, had actually thrown away thirty-five thousand dollars because he hadn’t the backbone not to submit. Half an hour after I had found out about them and had let him talk about them, and about what he was going to do about them, he had sent for you and your father and had determined not to pay any more. As truly as I’m sitting here, Mr. Thin, I could—”

“The story of your young life?” Nugent asked, assisting an extremely thin young woman in an extremely short skirt into the taxicab.

“Almost,” Miss Brenham said, flushing. “I was telling him about Mr. Cayterer.”

Then she fell to exchanging kisses and salutatory incoherencies with the thin young woman, whose name I learned when introduced was Betty (Elizabeth, I assumed) Bartworthy.

The house in front of which the taxicab presently disgorged us was a parsonage, where Nugent and Miss Brenham were married. From the parsonage, in the same taxicab, we went to the bride’s residence, a small house on Fourteenth Street Miss Bartworthy and I remained in the taxicab while the newly married couple went indoors.

“I knew she’d land him,” Miss Bartworthy said when the door had closed behind them.

“He’s a very fortunate young man, I’m sure,” I politely volunteered.

Deliberately, Miss Bartworthy made a most repulsive face at me — a quite horrible distortion of her features.

“My dear young lady!” I exclaimed.

She laughed and looked away from me, out of the window at the opposite sidewalk, her thin fingers nervously fondling the spiny surface of a silver-dipped seahorse suspended on a black ribbon.

I could make nothing of her actions, and though she did not speak again — did not even look at me again — I felt relief when the Nugents joined us, running down the steps and across the sidewalk, his arms full of bags, her hand waving at a large-bodied woman who stood on the house’s top step either laughing or crying.

We got in motion again, toward the pier, with little time to spare.

“Don’t you think,” I suggested as we adjusted ourselves to the small space at our disposal, “that since you’re going to be in a hurry when you reach the pier you might as well tell me now what you have promised?”

“There’s no hurry. I can tell you in — let’s see — five words.”

“Oh, very well.”

At the pier there was precious little or no time to spare. We had to run for it, with the two young women going ahead, while Nugent and I struggled with the bags. Beside the boat, Nugent shook my hand up and down while his wife and Miss Bartworthy were disarranging one another’s hats.

“That dope I promised you: neither Alma nor I had anything to do with it!”

“I didn’t expect much,” I called after him as he hurried aboard, “but I did hope for the truth, and you haven’t given it to me.”

His dark face, turned back over his shoulder as he climbed, was expressive of obviously sincere puzzlement.

“If you’ll drop me at the Palace,” Miss Bartworthy said as we went back to the taxicab, “I’ll promise not to frighten you with any more faces en route.”

“I was more bewildered than frightened,” I protested.

“Well, that’s good for you.”

Nothing else was said on the subject: she was, certainly, an extremely peculiar young woman as well as an extremely thin one.

“What now?” Papa asked when I came into his office. “Smitts says you went away with a man and a girl.”

“Nugent and Miss Brenham have been married and are on their way to China.”

“China?”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Cayterer told me this morning he had decided to send Nugent over. The wedding and so forth must have been planned some time ago, since, apparently, the license and passports were ready.”

“So,” Papa said. “Serves Cayterer right — so he decided to get rid of the boy after you told him what you’d seen? He ought to—”