Strange Fugitive Read online

  Tom said patiently it was a foolish notion because a pillar wasn’t a stone. Harry, deliberately polite, asked if he couldn’t take his tools and taper an end for the top, leaving most of the fourteen feet rough-hewn, different from all other stones, and quickly he took out fifty dollars, offering it as an advance, with his own final price later. Tom, slightly flustered, said the cemetery authorities mightn’t stand for it. “Promise them anything,” Harry said.

  “It would take at least two weeks,” Tom said.

  “I want it tomorrow afternoon.”

  “My lord, man, it’d take half a dozen men to get it to the cemetery, and I got to do work on it too.”

  “Hire a regiment, but get it there tomorrow and then send a man down to the hotel for me when I can see it.”

  The stone cutter scratched his head then remembered there ought to be an inscription, which would cost a little more, and would have to be done later anyway. He agreed to taper an end and have it propped over the grave by tomorrow, but suggested respectfully that he ought to have some money to pay for help. They shook hands, very friendly. On the way back to the hotel Harry whistled cheerfully.

  He had an early supper and afterward sat on the veranda, smoking cigarettes, his feet on the rail, and tilting back in the rocking chair. Three men were on the veranda but he didn’t bother talking to them. After seven o’clock three young fellows and two girls, walking slowly, passed the hotel. One of the girls was pretty. The young men were dressed carefully, their faces very clean. It was getting dark, the corner light was brighter now. A tall man on a bicycle, peddling slowly, came down the road. Harry heard someone laughing, a girl giggling, and leaning forward, he tried to see her. She laughed again and he jerked his head, staring across the road at the thick trunk of a tree, sure the girl and fellow were there. He smiled happily, positive that he understood everything that was bothering the boy and girl; he was in his own town; a silly notion for he wasn’t at home at all but a stranger, and he wondered why he had come to Maydale. He had come because of his mother, but now he didn’t remember her very well. A long time ago she used to get excited easily and her voice was harsh and she spoke fiercely, then became nervous and started to cry. She had many arguments with his father, but soon became friendly and tried to pamper the old man till he was good-humoured again. She bought furniture slowly and carefully and the selection of wallpaper always bothered her. When they decided to repaper a room she brought home five or six sample rolls of paper and pinned the sample on the wall, comparing the colours and patterns a long time till satisfied she had selected the finest pattern. She was critical of other people and, of course, Harry realized it for the first time, she would have liked Vera, who was always so neat and tidy around the house, never deceitful, and whose clothes fitted her nicely. He closed his eyes, taking pleasure in an imaginary meeting of Vera and his mother, watching them getting interested in each other gradually, each one coming to him in turn, assuring him of splendid qualities in the other.

  Holding this agreeable thought, he got up, left the veranda and walked slowly down the street to a soda parlour for a root beer. Young people were sitting at the wire-legged round tables. He asked the Greek for a root beer, drank it slowly, then walked back to the hotel, thinking comfortably of getting into bed early, stretching leisurely under clean sheets, and reading a mystery story for hours till he dropped off to sleep.

  In the early afternoon next day, the stone cutter came to the hotel and asked Harry to go to the cemetery. They walked there together and from a hundred yards away Harry saw a small crowd, and in the centre of the crowd a huge pillar of granite tapered to a point, held up by scantling props. Everybody watched him come along the cemetery path, and he was embarrassed for some of them were smiling openly and others looked at him curiously, whispering among themselves.

  The stone cutter leaned against a prop. “The mortar’s not dry yet but I guess we can just about take the props down now,” he said. “Does it look like what you wanted?”

  Harry, forgetting the crowd, concentrated on the pillar of granite, a solid cenotaph among smaller stones, its rugged massiveness pleasing him, and he was ready to enjoy all the sensations he had looked forward to. Deliberately he thought of his mother, groping for the old feeling as he stood there, his hat off, looking at the pillar’s peak, but he became very conscious of people watching him curiously. He turned to the stone cutter and said, “Send these hicks away,” and Tom said, “It can’t be done, sir. They seen me putting this stone up and they’ve been here an hour.”

  So he closed his eyes but the dream was broken and he said to Tom: “Well, let’s get out of here. Walk down a road a piece. This looks all right to me.” A few people followed them from the cemetery but most of the crowd remained before the pillar.

  Speaking casually, Harry told the man to put an inscription on the stone as soon as possible, copying it from the small stone. Tom asked: “Just the lady, or the husband too?”

  “Oh both, certainly,” Harry said.

  He paid him generously, asking him to have a photograph taken of the stone and the inscription and flowers heaped around the base. He gave him a city address. They shook hands and Harry walked away.

  Out of sight of the cemetery he was happy, not thinking of anything in particular, but content from having done something that had been absolutely necessary for his own good. At the hotel he learned that a train left Stouffville Junction at eight o’clock, so he had an early supper, and afterward went down to the livery-stable to have the horse hitched to the buggy. The liveryman offered to have a boy drive him to the Junction but he preferred to go alone. He drove away from Maydale in the late afternoon when the streets were quiet, a few women on the verandas, and some families having early supper. The horse was going briskly, he held the reins tightly, sitting erect till he got on the road to Stouffville. Well away from the town, he started to sing out loud, then talked cheerfully to the horse, making strange clicking noises with his tongue and lips. The road was good, the wire fences new in this district, and farmhouses clean and of a prosperous appearance. At sundown the sky was red in the west, and stopping the horse he watched for a long time the sun becoming larger and redder, and felt solemn and alone. He listened for some sound to arouse him, and heard faintly a chirping sparrow. He jerked the reins, the horse jogged along.

  He leaned back, the horse taking its own time. Someday he might get a place in the country. “That would probably appeal to Vera very much,” he thought. He urged the horse along, eager to be back in the city, and thinking pleasantly of Vera now, on the way home. For days his thoughts had been drifting toward her, and he was taking it for granted that he was going back to the city to have a long talk with her. Then he remembered that party he had planned and seriously he thought of Cosantino’s friend, Simon Asche, who couldn’t worry him except that he was a friend of O’Reilly. “Oh well,” he thought, “there are some things that simply have to get cleared away first, then I’ll fix it up with Vera.”

  He had to wait twenty-five minutes for the train to the city.

  2

  His neck felt uncomfortable in the stiff collar and dinner jacket. He drove Anna down to the hotel, intending to get there half an hour before guests arrived. They drove in the open car, the weather was good, a spring breeze blowing from the lake.

  They saw the chef first. On the way down, Harry had told her about the dinner, the cooking, the month-and-a-half spent in preparation, the liqueurs, wines, cases of champagne. He had wanted a whole roast pig and venison, barbecue style, for the hundred guests, but the chef, a silent, sad little man, had objected because his kitchens and ovens were not big enough for the venison. A whole pig, he said, was very tough, and did not look nice, but a suckling, twenty sucklings would be just the thing. The chef went with them to the ballroom. He was polite. They stood at the doorway, looking down long tables, and the chef apologized for being able to get only two bottles of real green Chartreuse, fifty dollars a bottle, forty years old. T
he chef went away. Harry looked at his image in a long mirror. He straightened his shoulders, waving his hand at himself, “You’re there, kid,” he thought. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Anna smiling. Turning quickly, he kissed her, shaking her and getting powder from her shoulders on his jacket.

  Then he was aware of being practically alone in the big ballroom. He looked around, wanting people to come. For the moment, the idea, the party, the food seemed unimportant, and he wondered how it had come that he was standing there looking at himself in the mirror.

  He heard laughing and talking in the corridor, the Negro orchestra getting off the elevator. Grinning, they came over the carpeted floor of the blue room to the ballroom. Then Jimmie and Eva, arm in arm, came along from the corridor and bowed to Harry.

  “Great King Harry,” he said.

  “Damn glad to see you, Jimmie.”

  “Great King Harry.”

  “Lay off.”

  “Good King Harry.”

  “You two have a head start,” Anna said. Eva’s eyes were shining too brightly. Her dress was cut low, just a band around her breasts. She laughed happily, patting her hair, pouting her lips at Jimmie, who insisted upon being soberly serious.

  “Will O’Reilly come?” Harry asked.

  “Said he would, didn’t he?”

  “I know he did, only that don’t mean nothing.”

  Harry turned to shake hands eagerly with Johnston, who was standing with Collins, the alderman in Ward Three, his hands behind his back. He wanted to impress Johnston, an old-timer in politics, a party man, strong on the stump and in a convention. They shook hands. Johnston was friendly, and made some jokes, suggesting he had a long thirst. Collins and Johnston were interested in some hot-looking babes in the blue room, they said. “He’s a nice guy,” Harry thought, and feeling happy, put his arm around Johnston’s shoulder to lead him over to Anna and Eva and Jimmie.

  He talked with Johnston till he saw O’Reilly standing a few feet away, grinning at Johnston. Harry was uncomfortable. He waved his hand. O’Reilly was enormous in a dinner jacket. It was early in the evening but he was hot already, wiping his forehead with a big silk handkerchief. O’Reilly was stroking the end of his nose, which had been pulled out of shape. He laughed, his fat belly bobbing up and down. “It looks as if you’re throwing a swell feed,” he said to Harry. Whenever Harry talked to O’Reilly he felt apprehensive because he was so much aware of him, his personality, his fat face, the easy money that went his way. Ten years ago O’Reilly had been a bartender out of a job. He had taken a temporary job for two weeks running a hotel for a woman whose bartender was away on holidays. In two weeks O’Reilly impressed the woman so much that she married him, and when her bartender came back there was no job for him. That was the year before prohibition. He got in a big stock of liquor and did well the first year and had been doing better ever since. His son was on the police force, a sergeant at a downtown station. His brother was vice-president of a local political association.

  The orchestra played lively jazz, the ballroom and the blue room coming alive with chatter of many voices. Girls dragged fellows out on the floor to dance. Some men had their own girls, but twenty girls, unaccompanied, loafed around, ready to become sociable. Watching a strapping hussy with broad bare shoulders and wonderful long legs leaning indolently against a table, Harry thought, “The swellest women in town, twenty-four carat blondes, I’ve got them here.” He rubbed his hands together, smiling at whoever was looking at him. The friendly, pretty women amused him. He closed his eyes, his thoughts alive with women — blond heads, dark heads, almost bare bodies, dancing happily. “Wait till things get really going,” he thought.

  The party sat down to eat, Harry and Anna at the end of the long table. He looked the length of the table. He smiled at Anna. Every time he glanced around the room he couldn’t help smiling.

  He looked at the real white Czarist caviar he had never tasted before. “It used to be very hard to get,” he said to Mr. Johnston, who was sitting three plates away. “Indeed,” Johnston said. Harry wanted to tell him the chef’s story of Czarist caviar but decided not to. “That would be putting on the dog too much,” he thought. Everybody was eating the caviar but Harry didn’t like it.

  Honest green turtle soup, imported from England, and sherry wine. Bottles of old port wine in the hands of many waiters.

  “I had to get the caviar from Paris,” he said to Anna.

  “I don’t like it much,” she said.

  “Neither did I, only that ain’t important. See what I mean?”

  “I’d like it if I could swill it,” Jimmie said.

  Harry drank eagerly the old port wine. He was friendly, anxious to encourage everybody. Sitting down at the head of the table at first he had been embarrassed, now he wanted to laugh out happily. He tried to think of a good joke, something hot to shock the troops, but couldn’t do it. The soup was fine. “That chef’s a peach,” he said to Jimmie. The wine was good. Thinking of wine confused him. Names of old vintages, bottles appearing, glasses clinking, swell names, green Chartreuse — very rare, ladies and gentlemen, very rare, fifty bucks a bottle, forty years old — five cases of Chambertin, all to go on the table, ten cases of Château Yquem and that Italian wine the chef had called “Tears of Jesus,” the kind of a name to interest and please Vera. She would say, “What a lovely sad name.” It was a rotten time to think of Vera. He looked at Anna. She had a nice face. She was just finishing the soup. Her neck and shoulders were the best in the world.

  The ballroom door opened and a line of waiters in single file appeared, each one carrying a platter and a young pig, skinned, roasted, a whole apple in the mouth, jelly in the eyes, lying in a sea of jelly. Twenty waiters served the young roast pig. For those who did not like pork there was planked steak, the meat on ice for three months to give it flavour.

  “It’s all so splendid,” Anna said to him.

  “It’s nothing. Wait till next time,” he said.

  “You’re wonderful, Harry.”

  “Boy, this is a feed,” Jimmie said.

  “What’s O’Reilly thinking?” Harry said to Jimmie. They looked at O’Reilly. He was eating slowly without paying attention to the girl beside him. He was eating too attentively. “That guy bothers me,” Harry said.

  “Why did you ask him along?”

  “You know what I was after, Jimmie. I wanted him to see everything was all right with me. It’s a thing you get to do with a guy like O’Reilly.”

  “Well, don’t let him crab the party for you.”

  “He hasn’t got a chance to crab my party, only he’s got something on his mind.”

  “Maybe he’ll go home early.”

  “Go home or get drunk, I wish.”

  Everybody was happy. Everybody was drinking. O’Reilly smiled blandly at the eager girl. Harry forgot O’Reilly and ate hungrily until it wasn’t safe to eat any more. He drank two glasses of wine, then asked the waiter for a highball. Mr. Johnston had a highball with him. Then Mr. Johnston had another highball, a good sort Mr. Johnston when he got really going. The Negro orchestra played a blues number and Harry had taken just enough liquor to make him feel sad. The woeful weary niggers sang a blues that got inside him and made him sad. The dinner was no longer important. Looking along tables, listening to girls squealing and men eating, he felt it had all become unimportant. He was missing something. He wanted suddenly to be alone, far away from music in an absolutely silent world, loafing in the shade and having idle thoughts, and looking at Vera sprawled on her belly. He took another drink. He became much more buoyant. He laughed out loud. He wiped his neck behind the collar with a silk handkerchief. “I’ll be the biggest guy in town,” he thought.

  People, getting up from the tables, started to dance, at first gracefully but becoming careless of the rhythm they danced sloppily. O’Reilly came to the end of the table and asked Anna to dance. Harry watched them on the floor. O’Reilly was not a good dancer. He was pleased to think O’R
eilly was such a poor dancer.

  Harry danced with a slim, supple-bodied bleached blonde, her hair dark at the roots. They danced slowly, the blonde brushing lazy limbs against him, her head drooping back from the arched throat and her breast pressed forward. He tried to dance faster but gradually relaxed lazily into the slow time. Then he opened his eyes and watched O’Reilly bear-hugging Anna. He stopped dancing and walked off the floor to get a drink.

  Jimmie and Eva were having a drink. Eva was quite drunk but in a contained, hilariously dignified way.

  “I was talking to O’Reilly,” Jimmie said.

  “What’s eating him?”

  “Nothing’s eating him only he wants to talk to you.”

  “Sure, I’d like to talk to him. What’s eatin’ him anyway?”

  “Nothing I tellya, only he thinks it’s important.”

  “Well?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Listen, Jimmie.”

  “What?”

  “I’m a bigger guy than O’Reilly. I can knock hell out of him. If things go right I’ll soon be able to knock hell out of everybody. Now if that guy’s got anything to say and I don’t like it, I’ll tell him off, see?”

  “Suit yourself, only there’s no harm in listening.”

  “Forget him, Jimmie. Watch the waiters pile the stuff up.”

  Waiters were carrying cases of champagne to an improvised bar in a corner near the door. People stopped dancing, crowding near the corner, counting cases. Cases were opened rapidly. Ten waiters kept coming in, carrying cases. Some women laughed happily and men cheered. The cases were piled up. Three waiters could not fill glasses rapidly enough. Everybody linked arms, cheering when the cases counted up to a hundred. They would never drink it all but went at the bottles placed on the long bar.

  It was only half-past one but some girls were being attended to by waiters who carried them to rooms where waitresses worked on them. Later on the girls came back and couldn’t smile easily and make-up stood out in blotches on their faces. They kept going just the same.