Дэшил Хэммет - The Hunter and Other Stories

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, that’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.

But the fat man shook his head.

Mrs. Newbrith stopped laughing to cough. The elder Newbrith was coughing, his eyes red, tears on his wrinkled cheeks. A cushion case was limp and empty in his fingers: it had burst under his violent handling and its contents had puffed out to scatter in the air, thickening in an atmosphere already heavy with the smoke and stench of burnt hair and fabric.

“Can’t we open a window for a second?” the younger Newbrith called through this cloud. “Just enough to clear the air?”

“Now you oughtn’t to ask me a thing like that,” fat Joe complained petulantly. “You ought to have sense enough to know we can’t do a thing like that.”

Old Newbrith spread his empty cushion cover out with both hands and began to wave it in the air, fanning a relatively clear space in front of him. Servants seized rugs and followed his example. Smoke swirled away, thinning toward the ceiling. White curls of fleece eddied about, were wafted to distant parts of the room. The three men at the door watched without comment.

“I’m afraid this young man is going to make a nuisance of himself,” the fat man squeaked after a little while. “You’ll have to do something with him, Tom.”

“Aw, leave the young fellow alone,” said Tom. “He’s all—”

A white feather, fluttering lazily down, came to hang for a moment against the tip of Tom’s red nose. He dabbed at it with the back of one of the hands that held his pistols. The feather floated up in the air-current generated by the hand’s motion, but immediately returned to the nose-tip again. Tom’s hand dabbed at it once more and his face puffed out redly. The feather eluded his hand, nestling between nose and upper lip. His face became grotesquely inflated. He sneezed furiously. The gun in the dabbing hand roared. Old Newbrith’s empty cushion case was whisked out of his hands. A hole like a smooth dime appeared in the blind down across a window behind him.

“Tch! Tch!” exclaimed the fat man. “You ought to be carefuller, Tom. You might hurt somebody that way.”

Tom sneezed again, but with precautions now, holding his pistols down, holding his forefingers stiffly away from the triggers. He sneezed a third time, rubbed his nose with the back of a hand, put his weapons out of sight under his coat, and brought out a handkerchief.

“I might of for a fact,” he admitted good naturedly, blowing his nose and wiping his eyes. “Remember that time Snohomish Whitey gunned that bank messenger without meaning to, all on account of being ticklish and having a button bust off his undershirt and slide down on the inside?”

“Yes,” fat Joe remembered, “but Snohomish was always kind of flighty.”

“You can say what you want about Snohomish,” the brutish man said, rubbing his chin reflectively with the blackjack, “but he packs a good wallop in his left, and don’t think he don’t. That time me and him went round and round in the jungle at Sac he made me like it, even if I did take him, and don’t think he didn’t.”

“That’s right enough,” the fat man admitted, “but still and all, I never take much stock in a man that can’t take a draw on your cigarette without getting it all wet. Well, don’t let these folks do any more cutting up on you,” and he waddled away.

Hugh Trate, surrounded by disapproval, sat and stared at the floor for fifteen minutes. Then his face began to redden slowly. When it was quite red he lifted it and looked into the elder Newbrith’s bitter eyes.

“Do you think I started it because I was chilly?” he asked angrily. “Wouldn’t it have smoked these crooks out? Wouldn’t it have brought firemen, police?”

The old man glared at him. “Don’t you think it’s bad enough to be robbed without being cremated? Do you think the insurance company would have paid me a nickel for the house? Do you—?”