The Hunter and Other Stories Part 5

FRAGMENTS OF JUSTICE.

I.

When his stiffening legs began to propel the lawnmower so waveringly that the lawns were often irregularly marked by thin curving lines of unclipped gra.s.s-like raw recruits in their first "company front"-and the hedges often went untrimmed for days while he waited for weather favorable to the wrapping of his fingers around the handle of the pruning-shears, the Park Board pensioned Tim Gurley. His pension was just large enough to pay for meals and a bed at a very modest boarding-house, with a little left over for tobacco. Some day he would need clothes, but not many, and not for some months. His failing sight and hearing obviated the necessity of any expenditures for amus.e.m.e.nts.

Within a week Tim Gurley had settled into the habits of his new life. He would get out of bed at six or six-thirty in the morning, and putter around his room until seven-thirty, when breakfast was ready. After the meal he would leave the house for the public square-two blocks away-that had been his charge until now. There, he would sit on a bench-preferably one facing the sun; or, on very warm days, he would sit on the gra.s.s itself-sometimes talking to other old men who were almost indistinguishable from him both in appearance and history, but more often sitting silent and alone, neither wholly awake nor wholly asleep. On cool days he would leave the square for the ledge that ran around the Public Library, where he could sit on the sunny side, with the broad building behind him fending off the wind. When it rained, he stayed at home.

One day when he returned to his boarding-house for dinner, he found a summons to jury duty there. After that life was different.

He served on many juries; he liked serving. There was the two dollars a day-later raised to three-that it brought in; and two dollars would buy a lot of tobacco and of the sticky taffy he was beginning to enjoy so much despite its malignant effect upon his remaining teeth. But the money wasn't the only consideration, nor even the most potent one. He liked the feeling of importance that came to him in the jury-box, the knowledge that all these attorneys and their clients and their witnesses were here for but one purpose: to convince him, Tim Gurley, of the justice of their cases; that he was having a hand in the world's graver work, helping make weighty and important decisions, doing justice.

Neither his eyes nor his ears were very responsive now, and at first he found himself frequently being excused from service after the attorneys' preliminary questions; but he soon learned what was expected of him. By straining his attention to the utmost he could catch the substance of the lawyers' queries-sufficient to tell him whether a yes or a no was expected of him.

He would have liked to have heard more clearly the testimony of some of the witnesses, especially when he could see that the other jurymen were leaning forward in their chairs with attentive expressions upon their faces; but a man can't have everything, and now and then a witness would take the stand and speak clearly enough for Tim Gurley to hear every word he said. But, even at the worst, Tim Gurley was never wholly at loss for knowledge of what was going on: the attorneys, while delivering their closing arguments, almost invariably stood close to the jury-box and reviewed the salient points of their cases in language that was loud and impa.s.sioned and easily audible.

II.

Born into a family whose adherence to the principles of the Democratic Party dated from the 1830s, Elton Bemis, by shunning all political doctrine that did not spring from Democratic sources, had kept his heritage unsullied. His reading was confined to two Democratic newspapers-one in the morning and one in the evening-and, while professing a worldly skepticism, he really believed everything he read therein; not excepting the vague, but nonetheless stirring, stories of abductions by gaudy villains and incarcerations in unknown prisons told by young women who return to their families after protracted absences. He had, on the strength of their representative war records as advertised in the same papers, bet $10 on Carpentier to defeat Dempsey; he had denounced the acquittal of Roscoe Arbuckle as a flagrant miscarriage of justice; and he never trusted a man who parted his hair in the middle.

He had forbidden his daughter to see or communicate with the young man of her choice on the grounds that, although otherwise unexceptionable, the young man was a Roman Catholic; and had he known that his daughter had cultivated a mild appet.i.te for Egyptian tobacco it is quite likely that he would have put her out of the house, though he himself burned black tobacco in a black pipe to the stimulation of his salivary glands.

In his youth he had resigned from a pleasure and social club upon the admittance of a Jew to its membership; and notwithstanding that economic expediency had induced him to a.s.sume a less rigorous att.i.tude in later years, he still got a definite pleasure from the memory of that act. He firmly believed that his country could, in either one pitched battle or a campaign of any length whatsoever, defeat the other nations of the world all together; and he had nothing but contempt for all foreigners, were they Swedes, Limies, Harps, Heinies, Bohunks, or any of the dozen or more varieties of Dagoes. He admitted, with suitable reservations, the existence in the Negro of a soul.

One day Elton Bemis sat in the jury-box, in Department 4 of the Superior Court, and counsel for the plaintiff asked him: "If you are selected to serve on this jury, Mr. Bemis, do you think that you can give both parties to this action a fair and impartial hearing? Will you be guided by the evidence submitted and the instructions of the Court, and not allow your mind to be influenced by personal feelings or prejudices?"

And Elton Bemis replied: "Yes, sir!"

III.

He was undersized and faded and with the face of an unhealthy rodent. From the corners of a thin-lipped and colorless mouth whose looseness had erased everything of expression but a pusillanimous cruelty, lines, deep but nevertheless not clearly defined, ran up to a little crafty, twitching nose. His forehead and chin were negligible: twin slantings away into soiled collar and unkempt hair. Furtive eyes of a dark and dull opacity were set as close together as the sunken bridge of his nose would permit; the eyes moved with an uneasy jerkiness and were seldom focused upon anything higher than a man's shoulder. His dirty fingers, with their chewed nails, scratched nervously at each other, his face, his legs.

He sat slumped down in his chair, listening with manifest disgust to the arguments with which his fellow jurors had been engrossed since the bailiff had locked them in the jury-room. Presently there came a lull in the discussion.

He spat inaccurately at a distant cuspidor, and spoke with whining plaintiveness: "What's the use of arguing? That guy's guilty: you can look at him and see he's a crook!"

A THRONE FOR THE WORM.

"Are you going to be all morning? Your breakfast is on the table?"

"I'll be down in a minute now."

Elmer Kipp's reedy voice wavered like an uncertain ghost down the stairs that had resounded to his wife's ululant contralto. Hastily finishing his shaving, he got into the rest of his clothes while descending to the dining-room, where his wife and daughter were eating, and where his own meal was cooling on a cold plate.

"Good morning," the head of the Kipp family said indistinctly.

His wife said nothing; Doris' inattention was even more deliberate, and when she spoke presently to her mother she spoke as one who complains without hope of relief-for the purpose of having the records show that an objection has been made, as the lawyers say.

"I do wish papa would use a little judgment. He came in the parlor last night, and I thought he was never going to bed. He staid until almost time for Lloyd to go. I should think a girl who earns her own living and pays her own board might be allowed to entertain her own company."

Kipp looked at his daughter without raising his head: a turning up of faded eyes that made him resemble not so much an abject man as a cartoon of an abject man.

"I didn't think that- We got talking and-" He brightened with foolish guile. "That Lloyd is a mighty clever young fellow."

Doris did not seem to have heard her father.

"Just because Lloyd has to be polite, papa seems to think Lloyd comes to see him."

Mrs. Kipp sighed with exaggerated resignation.

"Your father will never be any different. I never knew such a man for not considering other people. I've talked to him enough, goodness knows. But you can't do anything with him."

At the office Kipp found something wrong with his chair. When he attempted to lean back in it the superstructure came out of its socket and slid him off to the floor. An examination convinced him that this was not his chair at all, that his chair now served Harry Terns. But the chairs were all of the same model and age; and for the recovery of his own chair conclusive proof of proprietorship, as well as some skill in repartee, would be essential. So Kipp merely called the chief clerk's attention to the broken one, and brought in a straight-backed chair from the outer office.

For half an hour Kipp's world was six sheets of paper, each divided into little squares that either held inked numerals or yawned for them. Then a gust of air flung the sheets into swirling anarchy. He closed the window beside his desk and rearranged his world.

"Good gracious, Mr. Kipp!" Miss Propson's syllables clicked as monotonously from between her thin lips as the keys of her typewriter clicked under her thin fingers. "Don't you think we should have some ventilation?"

From their desks farther away Eells and Bowne looked up with annoyance, and the rustling of papers in the chief clerk's hands stopped.

"A little fresh air won't kill you," Harry Terns said.

Just as this window was beside Kipp's desk, there were windows beside Eells and the chief clerk, and they were closed. But Kipp did not denounce the manifest injustice of this; he capitulated before the unanimity of his colaborers' protests, and disposed his two paperweights, a box of pins, a metal ruler, and an extra inkwell so that his papers were not blown around enough to prevent his working.

An hour pa.s.sed, and a harsh buzzing broke out: the signal that summoned Kipp to his employer's office. Lucian Dovenmichle was fat beyond the fatness that gives a body many curves. His curves were few, but gigantic in sweep. Kipp came softly into this mountainous presence.

"Finish the National accounts?" The Dovenmichle voice was fat with a husky pinguidness.

"Yes, sir. That is, the recapitulation will be ready by noon."

"All right."

Then, Kipp's hand on the door-k.n.o.b.

"My shoe-lace is undone. Can't tie it with all these d.a.m.ned clothes on. Tie it, will you?"

Kipp bent deferentially over the Dovenmichle foot-a leather-enveloped thing as large as a healthy baby-and tugged at the ends of the inadequate black strings. The Dovenmichle leg jerked in what was nearly a kick.

"d.a.m.n it, Kipp, are you trying to choke me?"

Kipp got the lace knotted in place and went back to his desk.

With eleven o'clock, this being the fifteenth of the month, came the chief clerk with Kipp's salary. After that Kipp worked erratically, with a trembling of the pen in his fingers, a feverish lip-licking trick of tongue, and a careless spattering of ink about the mouth of his inkwell. When the noon gong sounded he was the first man through the Dovenmichle door.

Ignoring the establishment where he usually ate, he plunged through the mid-block traffic to where a barber's sign revolved brilliantly against a white building front.

Very leisurely-while four barbers stood at attention behind their chairs and a negro held ready hands for each garment-Kipp removed his coat, his vest, his collar and tie, and last of all his hat. His face now was not the one with which his familiars were acquainted. His jaw had advanced, his lips had reared up, his sallow skin had acquired pinkness, his shoulders were almost straight, and what chest had survived twenty years of crouching over desks did its best to arch. The unhurried disrobing completed, he turned-very deliberately-and strutted to the farthest vacant chair.

"Fairly close. Not too high with the clippers."

His voice achieved depth with unostentatious authority. The first Napoleon, ordering a brigade or two of dragoons forward, may have spoken thus.

A nod summoned a bootblack. Another a manicure. With two men and a woman hovering attentively, obsequiously, over his head, his feet, his hands, Elmer Kipp sat looking with rapt eyes at the picture he made in the wall mirror opposite.

M A G I C.

It was late on the ninth day of Strait's fasting that Simon, his talmid, brought the jeweler Buclip into the room where the magician sat reading a tattered ma.n.u.script t.i.tled, adequately enough, The Black Pullet, or the Hen with the Golden Eggs, comprising the Science of Magic Talismans and Rings, the Art of Necromancy and of the Kabalah, for the Conjuration of aerial and Infernal Spirits, of Sylphs, Undines and Gnomes, serviceable for the acquisition of the Secret Sciences, for the Discovery of Treasures, for obtaining power to command all beings and to unmask all Sciences and Bewitchments. The whole following the Doctrines of Socrates, Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Son of the Grand Aromasis, and other philosophers whose works in MS escaped the conflagration of the Library of Ptolemy. Translated from the Language of the Magi and that of the Hieroglyphs by the Doctors Mizzaboula-Jabama, Danhuzerus, Judahim and Eliaeb.

The room was large, white-floored, its tall walls hidden behind dark velvet glitteringly embroidered with occult insignia. In a corner the boy who had not yet got back the speech lost in awe at being apprenticed to the magician, some two months ago, squatted on his heels, and with a rumpled square of silk polished the silver ring of Raum, graved with his seal that was like the deck-plan of an eccentric small boat.

Strait was a plump man who may have been forty years old, though with magicians you cannot tell. His shrewd face was transparent of skin and sagging of mouth-corner, for this was the ninth day of his fasting. When he marked his place with a clean pudgy finger and raised his face to Simon, a reversed five-pointed star in a Hebraic-legended circle on the velvet behind him made a gay nimbus for his round pink head.

For a fidgeting moment the jeweler Buclip tried to catch the magician's gaze, then he too looked at Simon, waiting for him to speak. But when the talmid would have spoken Buclip burst into sudden babblement.

"It's- I want- If you can-I know you can," he tumbled his incoherence at the magician, "if you will. I want-" His words degenerated further into unintelligible low sounds directed at the limp hat his hands worried.

Above these low sounds Simon said, "He wants the love of a woman, Master."

The jeweler Buclip shuffled his feet and cracked his knuckles and looked at nothing, but he nodded manfully. He was a large nervous man whose naked head was as grey as grey hair could have made it.

"An especial woman?" Strait's brown eyes that were tired from abstinence turned to the jeweler for the first time. "Or any woman?"

Buclip shook his head until his collar creaked.

"An especial one!"

"Is she wife or maid?"

"Mai- She is not married."

"And there's no trinket in your shop to catch her with?"

"I've got the finest stock in the city!" The jeweler's mercantile glibness died with a gulp in his burly throat. "My gifts don't seem to make her any more-don't seem to give her any more-" Anxiety succeeded shame between the grey pads encompa.s.sing his eyes. "You'll help me? You'll help me again?"

Elbows on table beside the ma.n.u.script of The Black Pullet, face in hands, Strait rolled flaccid cheeks in cushioned palms and made the jeweler wait while the only sound in the room was the whisper of silk to silver in the hands of the squatting boy.

"You shall have her," the magician said when the jeweler's twisting fingers had spotted his hat with damp prints. "You will tell Simon what we need to know."

Buclip stepped jubilantly forward.

"You will-?"

Simon caught his arm, sh-h-hed in his ear, led him out.

"Always," said Strait, leaning back in his chair, when the talmid had returned to put a handful of gold coins and a written paper beside his master. "Always," Strait the magician complained when he had swept them over the edge into an open drawer, "it is love and wealth they want, no matter which variety of those things may be popular for a while. Twice perhaps in twenty years I have been asked for wisdom, twice it may be for happiness, once I can remember for beauty. For the rest, come fad, go fashion, there is love and there is wealth. Train your mountebankery on those targets, my Simon, and you need never want clients."

"Mountebankery?"

"Charlatanism."

The talmid chewed his red mouth and fear hara.s.sed his eyebrows crookedly.

"I will not get beyond that?"

When Strait had shaken his head, muscles writhed dismally in the talmid's white young face, and the working of his mouth was out of all proportion to the volume of sound that came out, but he held his master's gaze, however forlornly.

"I am too stupid, then," he achieved, "to really learn the Art?"

Strait puffed his cheeks out, blew them empty, and reproached his pupil.

"Tch! Tch! What I meant was I have nothing else to teach."

"Master! The things you do!"

"Yes," Strait confessed with an indifferent shrug. "I grant you the queer monsters riding wolves I bring out of nowhere or h.e.l.l, as the case may be, and the wolves riding queerer monsters, and the bulls with men's heads, and the men with snakes' heads. I grant you all those, if they mean anything. What with all the nonsense I go through, what with fasting and poring over weird rituals and smelling unlikely odors, what with confusing my eyes with intricate symbols and chanting complicated conjurations, wouldn't it be funny, Simon, if I didn't see the things, however monstrous, I point my bewildered mind at?"

Simon was respectful, but Simon was triumphant.

"But I have seen those things too, Master, and the boy!"

"You have?" The magician's tired brown eyes taunted the talmid with his youth. "And why shouldn't you? Because I am a mountebank must I be an altogether incompetent one? Is it so great a trick to make you see and hear and smell phantasmata? Must I be less adept than politicians and recruiting sergeants and the greenest of girls?"

Simon, thus taken in conceit, flushed and looked down. Nevertheless he shook his head confidently.

"But the things you have done! The Wengel girl, the General, Madame Reer! And all the others, and all the things you have done for them!"

Strait snorted at the idea that the authenticity of his work was to be measured by its consequences.