Pearl looked up in surprise from the laundering of some silk things at Louis’ entrance.
“Where were you night before last?” Mis voice was calm and steady.
“At the movies.” Pearl’s voice was too casual. The casual was not the note she should have selected — but she knew what was coming anyway.
“Who with?”
Recognizing the futility of any attempt at deception. Pearl fell back upon the desire to score upon the other at any cost — the motive underlying all their relations since the early glamour of mating had worn off.
“With a man! I went there to meet him. I’ve met him places before. He wants me to go away with him. lie reads things besides the sporting-page. He doesn’t go to prizefights. He likes the movies. He doesn’t like burlesque shows. He inhales cigarette smoke. He doesn’t think muscle’s everything a man ought to have.” Her voice rose high and shrill, with a hysterical note.
Louis cut into her tirade with a question. He was surprised by her outburst, but he was not a man to be unduly excited by his wife’s display of nerves.
“No, not yet. but if I want to I will,” Pearl answered the question with scarcely a break in her high-pitched chant. “And if I want to. I’ll go away with him. He doesn’t want beef for every meal. Me doesn’t take cold baths. He can appreciate tilings that aren’t just brutal. Me doesn’t worship his body. He—”
As Louis closed the door behind him he heard his wife’s shrill voice still singing her wooer’s qualities.
“Is Mr. Becker in?” Louis asked the undersized boy behind a railing in the sales-office of Litz. & Aulitz.
“That’s him at the desk back in the corner.”
Louis opened the gate and walked down the long office between two rows of mathematically arranged desks — two flat desks, a typist, two flat desks, a typist. A rattle of typewriters, a rustling of papers, a drone of voices dictating: “Your favor of... our Mr. Hassis... would say...” Walking with his consciously buoyant step, Louis studied the man in the corner. Built well enough, but probably flabby and unable to stand up against body blows.
He stopped before Beckers desk and the younger man looked up at Louis through pale, harassed eyes.
“Is this Mr. Becker?”
“Yes, sir. Won’t you have a seat?”
“No,” Louis said evenly, “what I’m going to say ought to be said standing up” He appreciated the bewilderment in the salesman’s eyes. “I’m Louis Slender!”
“Oh! yes,” said Becker. Obviously he could think of nothing else to say. He reached for an order blank, but with it in his hand he was still at sea.
“I’m going to teach you,” Louis said, “not to fool around with other men’s wives.”
Beckers look of habitual harassment deepened. Something foolish was going to happen. One could see he had a great dread of being made ridiculous, and yet knew that was what this would amount to.
“Oh! I say!” he ventured.
“Will you get up?” Louis was unbuttoning his coat.
In the absence of an excuse for remaining seated, Becker got vaguely to his feet. Louis stepped around the corner of the desk and faced the salesman.
“I’m giving you an even break,” Louis said, shoulders stiffened. left foot advanced, eyes steady on the embarrassed ones before him.
Becker nodded politely.
The barber shifted his weight from right to left leg and struck the younger man on the mouth, knocking him back against the wall. The confusion in Becker’s face changed to anger. So this was what it was to be! He rushed at Louis, to be met by blows that shook him, forced him back, battered him down. Blindly he tried to hold the barbers arms, but the arms writhed free and the fists crashed into his face and body again and again. Becker hadn’t walked twenty blocks in twenty minutes, hadn’t breathed deeply at open windows, hadn’t twisted and lowered and raised and bent his body morning after morning, hadn’t spent hours in gymnasiums building up sinew. Such an emergency found him wanting.
Men crowded around the combatants, separating them, holding them apart, supporting Becker, whose legs were sagging.
Louis was breathing easily. He regarded the salesman’s bloody face with calm eyes, and said: “After this I guess you won’t bother my wife any. If I ever hear of you even saying ‘how do’ to her again I’ll come back and finish the job. Get me?”
Becker nodded dumbly.
Louis adjusted his necktie and left the office.
The matter was cleanly and effectually disposed of. No losing his wife, no running into divorce courts, no shooting or similar cheap melodrama, and above all, no getting into the newspapers as a deceived husband — but a sensible, manly solution of the problem.
He would cat downtown tonight and go to a burlesque show afterward, and Pearl’s attack of nerves would have subsided by the time he got home. He would never mention the events of this day, unless some extraordinary emergency made it advisable, but his wife would know that it was always in his mind, and that he had demonstrated his ability to protect what was his.
He telephoned Pearl. Her voice came quietly over the wire. The hysteria had run its course, then. She asked no questions and made no comment upon his intention of remaining downtown for the evening meal.
It was long after midnight when he arrived home. After the show he had met “Dutch” Spreel, the manager of “Oakland Kid McCoy, the most promising lightweight since the days of Young Terry Sullivan,” and had spent several hours in a lunchroom listening to Spreel’s condemnation of the guile whereby the Kid had been robbed of victory in his last battle — a victory to which the honest world unanimously conceded his right.
Louis let himself into the apartment quietly and switched on the light in the vestibule. Through the open bed-room door he saw that the bed was unoccupied and its surface unruffled. Where was Pearl, then? he thought; surely she wasn’t sitting up in the dark. He went through the rooms, switching on the lights.
On the dining-room table he found a note.
I never want to see you again, you brute! It was just like you — as if beating Norman would do any good. I have gone away with him.
Louis leaned against the table while his calm certitude ran out of him. So this was the world! He had given Becker his chance; hadn’t taken the advantage of him to which he had been entitled; had beaten him severely — and this was the way it turned out. Why, a man might just as well be a weakling!
The Road Home
Black Mask, December 1922, as Peter Collinson
“You’re a fool to pass it up! You’ll get just as much credit and reward for taking back proof of my death as you will for taking me back. And I got papers and stuff buried back near the Yunnan[1] border that you can have to back up your story; and you needn’t be afraid that I’ll ever show up to spoil your play.”
The gaunt man in faded khaki frowned with patient annoyance and looked away from the blood-shot brown eyes in front of him, over the teak side of the jahaz to where the wrinkled snout of a muggar broke the surface of the river. When the small crocodile submerged again, Hagedom’s gray eyes came back to the pleading ones before him, and he spoke wearily, as one who has been answering the same arguments again and again.
“I can’t do it, Barnes. I left New York two years ago to get you, and for two years I’ve been in this damned country — here and in Yunnan — hunting you. I promised my people I’d stay until I found you, and I kept my word. Lord! man,” with a touch of exasperation, “after all I’ve gone through you don’t expect me to throw them down now — now that the job’s as good as done!”