Career in C Major and Other Fiction

Introduction

From that day in 1932 when he was laid off by Paramount Studios after his first effort to become a screenwriter, Cain considered himself a free-lance writer, although he would work intermittently for the studios and eventually earn considerable money doing it. But during his years in Hollywood (1931–1948) he supported himself as a writer, and naturally he wrote a lot of what they used to call “commercial fiction,” much of it humorous.

In 1932, after he had written his eminently successful story, “Baby in the Icebox,” for Mencken and The American Mercury, he also wrote two short stories — “The Whale, the Cluck and the Diving Venus” and “Come-Back” — which his agent tried to sell to magazines but could not. “The Whale” is about an Eastern Shore carnival hustler who manages to get a whale into a swimming pool, and then his troubles really begin; “Come-Back” is about a fading Hollywood cowboy who tries to make a comeback after his silver horse dies. Both are light, amusing, and written in the inimitable Cain style.

In 1934, after The Postman Always Rings Twice was published and he was suddenly the hottest writer in the country, every editor wanted something by James M. Gain. In addition to Knopf, three other publishing houses were asking him to write another novel; The New York Herald Tribune and American magazines wanted a serial; Liberty, Redbook, and The New Yorker wanted short stories. “Please don’t go for articles at this point,” wrote his New York editor, Edith Haggard. “Editors are crying for short stories.”

But Cain wrote neither. After the sale of “Baby” to the movies, he felt the time was right for breaking in as a screenwriter; then, suddenly, he was offered a studio job with MGM. When that fizzled out, as did most of Cain’s studio jobs, he went back to his typewriter and was soon “working like a wildman,” he wrote Mrs. Haggard, but on everything except the short stories she wanted — food articles, his Hearst column, speculative movie scripts, and an idea for a serial about an insurance agent who conspires with a rich man’s wife to murder her husband. But to satisfy Mrs. Haggard, he revived “The Whale” and “Come-Back,” and they quickly sold to Redbook.

Cain always felt that hardcover books were the only things that counted, and he did not really consider his magazine articles, even his original paperback books, serious work. After Postman, Double Indemnity, and then Serenade were published, whenever he was not employed by a studio, he was usually working on a novel. But Mrs. Haggard continued her pressure for short stories, and occasionally he responded. In 1936, while working on a movie, “Dr. Socrates,” for Paramount, he found time at night to dictate another Hollywood story about an attempted Hollywood comeback; this one was about a bit player who imagined himself riding a hippopotamus in a big movie. He called it “Hip, Hip, The Hippo,” and Edwin Balmer, editor of Redbook, thought it was very amusing. But he wanted a new ending, which Cain agreed to provide. The revision, however, took longer than Cain expected, and he wrote Mrs. Haggard: “I never had such a hell of a time with a story in my life.” When he sent it to his agent, he said that if Balmer rejected it, he would personally come to New York and shoot him. Balmer bought it with the new ending. About this time he also wrote another short story for Mrs. Haggard, who sold it to Liberty. This one, called “Everything But the Truth,” is set in Annapolis and is about the trouble a young boy gets into as a result of his masculine boasting, one of Cain’s favorite themes.

The final story in this section was written much later, in Cain’s Hyattsville (Maryland) years, when he was no longer in vogue and needed the money almost as desperately as he did in the early 1930s when he was free-lancing in Hollywood. “The Visitor,” as Cain wrote to one of his Hyattsville friends, grew out of an editorial he wrote for The New York World in the 1920s. The editorial asked what one did when you met a man-eating tiger, which prompted a reply from a Dr. Singh, an Indian, who said what you do is climb a tree as fast as you can. Cain’s story was about a man who woke one morning to find a tiger by his bed and, with no tree around, did what he had to do to save himself. “It is one of the few things I ever wrote,” said Cain, “that I’m stuck on. It came out in Esquire and was never reprinted, I have no idea why.”

I hope this resurrection of his “Visitor” does not go unnoticed by Cain, wherever he is.

The Whale, the Cluck and the Diving Venus

“Sister,” says Mort, “the pool will be full when it’s full; that’s all I can tell you. So suppose you go roll your hoop, or your marbles, or whatever you’ve got, and leave me alone. I’m busy.”

It was the day before the Fourth of July, and we were sitting on the edge of the pool with our feet hanging over the gutter, about as busy as a pair of lizards on a warm brick. I saw the girl turn white clear down to the neck of her bathing-suit. “I can’t very well dive into a pool with no water in it,” she said.

“And who cares?” says Mort. “If you were a trouper, ’stead of a punk amateur trying to chisel in on something you don’t know anything about, you’d be glad to get the morning off. ’Stead of that, all you do is hang around and ask questions.”

She walked away, and began testing the high ladder she used for her dive. “That’s a nice way to talk,” I said. “And specially to her.”

“What’s the matter? You stuck on her?”

“No, I’m not stuck on her. But she’s a nice girl, and the least you could do is to treat her decent, and call her by her name. Sister! If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a guy that calls a woman ‘sister.’”

“Sure she’s a nice girl, and she gives me a pain in the neck. It’s no racket for a nice girl. It’s for bums that can take it on the chin, and maybe cuss you out if you get too tough. Her doing a dive act, that’s just a pest.”

“Well, you need whatever trade she draws.”

“What’s that, a crack?”

“Yeah, it’s a crack. Why didn’t you stick to the Wild West show, and things you could understand? But no. You had to have a pool. Right in the middle of a resort that has an ocean for a front yard, and a bay for a back yard, you had to have an open-air salt-water swimming-pool. Why didn’t you buy some fur coats and try to sell them in Florida?”

“Give it time. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“No, but it was built in the right place. And then, when a girl comes along with something that might put it over, you treat her like smallpox. If you ask me, you’re a pretty dumb cluck.”

“Nobody’s asking you. And lay off the dumb part. I know what I’m doing.”

“All right, then. Just a cluck.”

She came over again. “The pool will be full at twelve, Miss Dixon,” I said. “I’m starting the pump now, and it takes two hours.”

“I was afraid something was out of order,” she said.

“Everything is O. K. We have to drain it once a week to sluice it out with the hose.”

“Oh.”

She stood there, and looked around like she had lost something. All of a sudden Mort picked it up, and handed it to her. It was a lipstick.

“Thank you,” she said, and left us again.

“Well,” I said, soon as I had started the pump, “that was a little better. You treat her like a lady once, maybe she won’t give you such a big pain in the neck.”

But he wasn’t listening. He was looking out to sea. I looked, and then I saw there were a lot of people running down to the beach. We ran too, and when we got there, we saw a little fishing steamer about two hundred yards out, towing something in the water.

“What you got there?” somebody sang out.

“We got a whale,” came the call from the boat. “He got tangled up in the net, and we ketched him alive.”

“Come on, Dave,” says Mort. “We’re going out there.”

We pushed a lifeguard’s skiff through the surf and rowed out. “Give you a hundred dollars for your whale,” Mort yelled out as soon as we got close enough to talk.

“Ha-ha-ha!” says the Captain. “That just makes me laugh.” It sure did that, all right. You could hear him to Henlopen Light.

“All right,” says Mort. “No harm asking, though. By the way, what you going to do with him?”

That stopped the laughing pretty quick. The Captain went into a huddle with his crew, and then came back to the rail. “Five hundred,” he says.

Mort began to beat him down, and pretty soon offered two hundred and fifty dollars.

“Sold,” says the Captain. “Come get your whale.”

We swung in closer, but then I began to back water on the oars. Because that whale, anybody could see he was alive, all right. He wasn’t a big whale — just a young whale, about twenty feet long and four feet thick; but he was plenty big enough. When he began to buck, and blow, and hit the water with his tail so it sounded like a cannon-shot, our skiff, that had seemed almost as big as a washtub when we started out, all of a sudden wasn’t any bigger than a soap-dish.

“Cluck!” I says. “You’re not even a cluck; you’re just plain balmy. Take your paw off my knee. I’m going home.”

But he just shook his head, where he was scrawling a check with my knee for a desk; and about that time the whale yawed the steamer around so it was almost on top of us. Mort passed the check up to the Captain, then shoved his watch, fountain-pen, checkbook and pocketbook into my hand, and kicked off his shoes. “All right, Dave,” he said. “Now all you got to do is get the whale into the pool.” And with that he went overboard and cut for shore.

Did you ever try to move a whale? I sat in that skiff and got so mad I had to screw my eyes shut to keep from crying. The crowd on shore began to give me a razz, and the crew of the fishing-boat kept yelling: “Where you want this whale put? You don’t say something pretty soon, we’re going off and leave him.” I was just getting ready to tell them they could take their whale and boil him for glue, if they wanted to, but when I opened my eyes I didn’t say it. Because I was looking square at a way to get the whale into the pool, and it came to me I would get more satisfaction out of it, when I finally got a chance to cuss out Mort, if he couldn’t say the job had got my goat. It wasn’t anything but a tramp steamer, tied up to the steel pier about a mile away, but I knew it must have a winch on it, and it gave me an idea I thought might work.

“You take that whale,” I said, “and tow him to the pier. Lay near the steamer, and I’ll be there and tell you what to do next.”

They wanted twenty-five extra for that, and I paid them and went ashore. I called up a guy that had a truck with a big trailer on it, that he used to haul lumber, and told him to go down to the pier with it. I bought me a couple hundred feet of two-inch hemp hawser, and a couple rolls of one-inch rope, and I sent them down. I rounded up ten bums that didn’t have any more sense, and I sent them down. Then I got into a cab and went down myself to look things over.

There was plenty to look at, all right. My ten bums were there, and my truck and trailer, and my hawser and rope, and about two thousand people, and the Boy Scout band, that had been practicing for Fourth of July, and did one good deed anyhow when they quit blowing their horns and went down to see the whale. He was just coming in under the bows of the ship; and when I saw him, I knew I better get a move on. Because the net, that had been all around him before, had worked up on him like a nightshirt does on a fat man, until all that was holding him was big bunches around the head and flukes.

But Captain Jennings, the skipper, snapped into it pretty quick to help me out, and in a few minutes he and his Finns had made a running noose out of my hawser, and we had two boats over, he in the bow of one and I in the bow of the other, and we were creeping up on the whale. He had a chain link on the noose, to spread it under water, and a float on the free end, just in case we lost it overboard — and it looked like we might make it. The Finns had shipped their oars and were using them as paddles, and we weren’t making a sound. We got to within twenty feet of him, to ten feet, to five feet; then we were up even, and the noose was just going past his tail.

Then I saw Captain Jennings look up. There were a bunch of people in boats, by that time, watching the show, and one of them, a guy in an old clinker-built launch, had drifted within a couple of feet of my boat, and in a second we would hit. He had a camera and was taking pictures. I found out afterward he was a newspaper photographer. I looked at the Captain, and the Captain looked at me. We were afraid to speak, on account of the whale. And when the guy seemed to wake up he was in a pretty bad spot himself. He reached out, caught the stern of my boat, and pushed himself back. The Captain yelled, but it was too late. Because half of that push sent him back, and the other half sent me ahead, and that meant right into the whale.

If he had thrown a spike into a buzz-saw, he couldn’t have stirred things up quicker. Next thing I knew, I was in the water, and I thought it was Niagara Falls, the way it was churning around. I came up, saw a big tail swirling over me, and ducked under. Something hit the water so hard I thought my ears would pop. I came up again, saw the boat bottom-up about three feet away, grabbed for it, missed, and went under again. Something hit my leg an awful wallop. It stood me on my ear so bad I didn’t know which was up and which was down and I began to grab wild. I felt something in my hand, and held on. It was a bumper the crew of the fishing boat had thrown out. They pulled me in, and I stood on deck and looked around.

It was a shambles, all right. Both boats were floating bottom-up, and around them were oars, lifeboats and seats. Finns were climbing out on both sides of the fishing-boat. But what broke your heart was the whale. That last flurry was all he needed. The net was hardly holding him at all now, and he seemed to feel he was pretty near loose, because he kept jerking and fighting, and you could see it was just a matter of minutes.

Captain Jennings stepped up beside me, all wet, and it did my heart good to hear that man cuss. But then he began to yell at another boat the ship had put out to gather up the wreckage. “Look,” he says to me. “It’s got him! The hawser is on his tail!”

I looked, and our float, on the end of the noose, bobbed up for a second and then went under. We jumped in the boat and began to grab for it. It was like trying to catch a frog in a slippery bathtub. Every time we would get to where it was, it would come whip under again, and we wouldn’t have any idea where it would come up. And all the time they were yelling from the pier, and the fishing-boat, and everywhere, that the net was almost gone and he was going to break loose.

We didn’t get it. We never would have got it. But then something flashed down from the pier and cut the water not five feet from the boat. It was this girl, this Mabel Dixon that did the live act in the pool. She was up there with the rest, saw it was an under-water job, and went right over. In a second or two, there was the float, about five feet under, and her red cap beside it, where she was wrestling the hawser. We pulled it in, and her with it.

“He’s loose! The net is gone!”

We went boiling out to sea about fifty miles an hour, then slammed down on the seats and stopped with a jerk, because they had kept the falls swinging over us all the time, and Captain Jennings had thrown the hawser over the hook. There was just enough slack to bend it and catch the end under, and then, thank god, I heard the steam go in the winch.

The first pull left him half in and half out of the water, because our hawser was so long that was as far as the boom could lift. But we got another loop on him, a short one, and they dropped another falls to finish the job. Captain Jennings gave the word, and up he went, across the deck, his blow-hole going like the pop-valve of a locomotive, and both flukes fanning the air like propeller-blades. The crowd cheered, and it was a sight to see, all right; but I didn’t have time to look at it.

I scrambled across the ship to the pier, backed my trailer in, and had them let him down until his head was just touching. Then I had them lower him an inch at a time, and as he came down, I had my ten bums rope him. It was ticklish work, because those flukes were nothing to monkey with. But we got done pretty quick, all except his tail, and I had to let that hang down because the trailer was too short and I had nothing to rope it to. So we started out. First came the Boy Scout band, that came to life and began to play “Shine, Little Glow Worm.” Then came me. Then came the truck, going slow and backfiring about every six feet. Then came the whale, blowing like he would explode, and smashing the ground with his tail. Then came my ten bums. Then came the two thousand people. We were a hot-looking parade, and sounded like a reunion of the field artillery.

When we got to the pool, things were going on pretty lively. Out back was a truck, putting up a strip of canvas all around, that had been around the Wild West show. Out front were a couple of roustabouts from the Wild West show, and a bunch of cops, yelling at a big crowd of people, trying to make them get in line. And up top was another pair, hoisting up a big sign that read like this:

I headed for the shallow end, unhooked the trailer, rolled it into the pool on some planks, sent my bums in, and cut the whale loose, all except a little piece of net that was hanging to his tail — and there didn’t seem to be much to do about that after he jerked free and began swimming around. And then, while I was hauling the trailer up and fishing out the ropes, I heard somebody yell. I looked just in time to see this truck, the one that was putting the canvas out, back into one of the guy-wires of the ladder the girl used for her dive. You could only see that guy about a mile, on account it was all strung with flags for the Fourth of July, but of course this truck, it would have to back into it. It snapped, and the ladder began to lean, from the pull of the other guy. I just had time to yank one of my bums out from under it, and then it hit with a crash you could hear ten blocks.

I had lost track of the girl at the pier, but she must have got to the pool ahead of me, because she came running over, and Mort was right behind her.

“Gee,” he says, “that sure is tough.”

They went over to where the ladder was lying, all smashed to kindling-wood, and Mort kept mumbling how tough it was. “But I got nothing to do with it,” he says pretty soon. “It’s right there in the agreement. Not responsible for anything that happens to you or your equipment; so that lets me out. Don’t it?”

She didn’t say anything, and he went off.

“So he’s got nothing to do with it, hey?” I said, as soon as I could get to her. “First he’s got nothing to do with the whale, and then he’s got nothing to do with the ladder. He’ll find out. Come on.”

She just stood there, looking at the ladder.

“Say, didn’t you hear what I said?” I asked. “Let’s go. You’re going to hear something.”

“And what am I going to hear?” she snapped. “We go in there, and you bawl him out. He says he’s busy, and then we come out again. No, thanks. I do this my way.”

“Yeah? And how do you do it?”

“Do you really mean it? Do you want to get even, or are you just talking?”

“Mean it? I mean it so hard I could sing it.”

“Then it’s our whale too, isn’t it? Didn’t we catch it? We’re going to claim our part of it. We’ll fix that young man. And we’ll fix him in the pocketbook, where it hurts.”

“Well, now say! He bought this whale.”

“I thought so. You don’t mean it.”

“I know, but I work for this guy — see.”

“Say it. Yes or no. Because I’m going to.”

The first customers had come through by then, and the roustabouts were dumping herrings into the pool for the whale to eat, and they were gaping at us, and I would have said anything to make her shut up.

“All right, then. Yes.”

“Then you keep your mouth shut, and I’m going to find a lawyer. And don’t make any mistakes. I mean business.”

She went, and I changed my clothes and kind of took charge of things, and didn’t say anything to Mort. But then I began to get worried. I wasn’t so sure I wanted a piece of this whale. You see, he didn’t seem to like herrings very well. By three o’clock he hadn’t touched a one, Mort sent the truck down for a load of seaweed. Well, he didn’t seem to like that either. So Mort sent to the packinghouse for a side of beef, and dumped that in. He didn’t seem to like that very well, either. So by sundown the pool was the worst mess of herrings, seaweed and beef you ever saw in your life, and had an aroma about like you would imagine. The crowd couldn’t stand it. They had been fighting to get in, but little by little they melted away until there was nobody coming through at all. Even the whale couldn’t stand it. At first he had nosed around in that stuff, looking for a clean place to blow, but now he didn’t even do that. He just lay there, and it didn’t take any fish doctor to see it was just a question of how long he could last.

About nine o’clock Mort came back to where I was, on the far end of the pool. “I think I’ll take a little run out of the city tomorrow, Dave,” he said. “I feel awful tired. You can keep things going.”

“Out of town? The Fourth? And you with a whale?”

“He’s run me ragged. I’ve got to rest.”

“You mean he’s run me ragged.”

“I mean he’s broke my heart. I’ve give him fish, Dave. I’ve give him grass. I’ve give him beef. I’ve give him the best that money can buy, and still he won’t eat. I don’t know what else to do.”

“And what do I give him?”

“Nothing. Just keep an eye on him. Of course, if anything happens, use your judgment. Just use your judgment.”

“Oh. Now I get it. First I got to move a live whale, and then I got to move a dead whale. And you, you dirty double-crossing heel, you know if you’ve got a dead whale in that pool tomorrow, they’ll Ku Klux you out of town, and that’s why you’re running away. Two hundred thousand people due here, worth a couple million dollars to the town, and watch them leave when the sun hits that thing. Well, I don’t bite, see? You can find another fall guy.”

“You got to do it for me, Dave. It’s got me scared blue.”

Then I let him have it. I let him have it about everything, especially the ladder. “Think of that! She even catches your whale for you. You take in all this dough. And then you’re too measly cheap even to pay for her ladder that broke up.”

He thought that over a long time. “Well, I won’t pay for it, see? And it’s not because I’m too cheap.”

“And why is it?”

“Never mind, I gotta reason.”

“The reason is money, like it generally is and that’s all I want to know. Listen, you made a mistake. It’s not you that’s taking a run-out tomorrow. It’s me.”

I went to where she was staying, and took her to a little restaurant, and told her everything that had happened. She listened, and when I got to the part where he had some reason for not coughing up she looked at me kind of queer, but didn’t say anything. “Oh, he’s all right,” I says. “He’ll come through, after he’s made everybody so sore they could kill him. That’s how he is. The main thing is we’re out from under the whale.”

“I suppose so.”

“Say, you didn’t start anything, did you?” I asks.

“I got a lawyer, but he can’t do anything until day after tomorrow. Judge Evarts went fishing over the Fourth. He’s down on the banks.”

“Then that’s all right. Day after tomorrow that whale will be history. If you really want to get even with that guy, you stick around till tomorrow and watch what happens. If that don’t hand you a laugh, nothing will.”

She walked back to the pool with me to get some things she left. When we got there, Mort was in the office with Mike Halligan, the Chief of Police, and Dr. Kruger, the Health Commissioner, and a guy named Ed Ayres, that’s executive secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. When we opened the door, Ayres was pounding the desk with his fist, and we started to back out, but Mort grabbed us and pulled us in. “Just the ones I wanted to see,” he says, and introduced us all around. “Miss Dixon is my diver,” he says. “I wouldn’t be keeping her if I was to have a whale in the pool tomorrow, would I?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Morton,” she says. “I’ll have to cancel the rest of my engagement, I’m afraid; my ladder got broken today, and I can’t work without it.”

“Oh, we can get you a new ladder.”

“Keep talking, Morton,” says Ayres. “We’re listening.”

Then Mort turned to me. “Dave, these guys don’t seem to believe me when I tell them we’re pulling the whale out tonight. Maybe if you’ll tell them, they’ll feel better. I guess you’re about ready to start, aren’t you?” And he kept giving me the wink.

He might just as well have winked at a stone. “I told you, Mort. I’m through with whales.”

“Just what I thought,” says Ayres. “You’ve been stringing us all the time.”

But Dr. Kruger shut him off. “Now get this, Morton,” he says; “the minute that whale dies, I’m going to act, and I’m going to act quick. I could act now on the basis of that mess you’ve got back there, but you say you’re going to clean that up, so we’ll give you a chance. But the minute he dies, I act, and my advice to you is: put him out of the way and get him out of there first.”

“But how do I get him out of there? It took a whole ship’s derrick to get him in and I’ve got no derrick. I don’t know how to move a whale.”

“Neither do I. You should have thought of that when you brought him in there. But I know how to bury a whale, and if I have to put a steam shovel in and bury him right in your pool, that’s just what I’m going to do. And how much you can collect from the city, — if anything, — I wouldn’t like to say.”

Mort turned to me once more, and he had tears in his eyes. “Dave! You’re the only one can do it when nobody can do it.”

“I told you, Mort.”

“Ha, ha, ha, ha!” says the girl, so loud everybody jumped. “Isn’t this charming!”

They all stood up. Then there came a knock on the door, and in stepped a young guy with a grin on his face. “Mr. William K. Morton?”

Nobody said anything.

“I found him,” he says to the girl. “I had to run clear out to the Banks, but I found the Judge. Some speedboat I got.”

Still nobody said anything. He seemed to think I was the one he was looking for, because he came over to me with a legal paper that had a dollar bill folded in it. I could see her name and mine at the top of it. Mort grabbed. “So,” he says, as he saw what it was, “you stabbed me in the back, the both of you! I’m on the spot, and you stabbed me in the back.”

I felt pretty bad. I knew Mort always gave himself the best of everything, and I hadn’t meant to stab him in the back, but he was on the spot, all right, and I didn’t like how I looked. But before I could say anything, he jumped up and began to wave the paper around. “Nolo contendere!” he yells at the top of his lungs. “Nolo contendere!”

“What?” says the boy.

“You’re claiming a share of the whale for them, aren’t you? I got to show cause in court, haven’t I? Well, I don’t do it, see? I don’t defend this. It’s their whale and they do what they please with it!”

“Oh, no, you don’t!” says the girl, and grabs for the paper.

“Oh, yes, I do!”

He ran over to the window-sill, wrote something on the paper, signed it, ran back to the boy and shoved it in his pocket. “There you are, Mr. Lawyer Man with the fast speedboat. There it is, in writing. The whale is all theirs.”

He put on his hat and opened the door. “So long, everybody. So long, Mr. Commissioner. Dave’ll move your whale for you. So long, Dave — hope you have a nice time over the Fourth.”

He was almost out, but he turned and tipped his hat to her. “Har, har, har!” he says. “Isn’t this charming!”

They pinned it on me, and after they all left, I tore into her so hard I almost socked her. I think I would have socked her, only she cracked up and burst out crying. And then, so dog-tired I could hardly lift one foot after the other, I started out on my heavy night’s work. I heard of paying for a dead horse; but believe me, a dead horse is nothing compared with a dead whale. I had to find the roustabouts. I had to start them cleaning out that mess in the pool. I had to find my guy with the trailer. I had to get more rope, and more planks, to loll the trailer down in the pool with, so I could float the whale again. I had to get dynamite to kill the whale with. You can’t get dynamite without a permit, and I had to go get a permit. I had to dig up six beer-kegs, to float the whale with when we started out to sea, because a whale don’t float when he dies; he sinks. I had to find a guy with a power-boat, to tow him with. Every one of those people had to be routed out of bed, and the money they wanted was awful and I was writing checks till it made me sick — and my money this time, not Mort’s. It was a gray, gray dawn when I finally loaded my gang on the trailer, and started down to the pool with them.

When I got inside, the girl was lying on the side of the pool, in a bathing-suit, smoking a cigarette and watching the sun come up.

“Well,” I says, “is he dead yet?”

“Oh, no. I fed him.”

“You what?”

“I fed him.”

I went over and looked in the pool, then, and it was only about a third full, but there was the whale, hanging over the intake, letting it tickle his belly where it was coming in, and showing more pep than he had since we got him.

“Are you trying to kid me?”

“No. I ran the water out, and then when he stranded down here under the springboard, I made a little dam of sand and canvas around him, and fed him.”

“What did you feed him? If you don’t mind my asking!”

“Milk.”

She waved her hand, and I saw there were fifty or sixty milk-cans piled up at one side. “You mean to say that thing drinks milk?”

“Anybody but an ignoramus would know a baby whale drinks milk. It took all the money I had, and I had an awful time getting it, but he took it. He gurgled and made a lot of noise, and had a fine time.”

“And you mean he’s not going to die?”

“Of course not. Look at him. Isn’t he cute? I just love him.”

I went out, sent my gang home, came back, and sat down. I thought of Mort. I thought of all those thousands of people that were due that day. I thought of the paper that said he was all ours. I could feel the grin spreading all over my face. I went over and held out my hand.

“Mabel, I guess we got a whale.”

“I guess we have — and a certain young man gets what’s coming to him at last.”

Well, he was a wow. When Ayres got it through his head the whale wasn’t going to die, he rushed posters to all Eastern cities by plane, and the morning papers were full of how we caught him; and by afternoon we had a mob. We had to rope off a place and run them through in batches. It was the only way we could clear the pool, else they would have stayed and looked at him all day. Then at night, she thought of a stunt that made him a bigger draw than ever. She cut the overhead lights, and turned on the underwater lights, and he was a sight to see. The only trouble was, the lights scared him to death, and he wore himself out running around the pool and bumping the sides, so the way we did was turn the lights on for one minute every fifteen minutes. That way we would clear a batch out, give the whale a rest, and then turn on the lights when another batch was in.

Midnight we closed down, turned off all lights, and counted up. We had taken in $48,384, and if there had been any way to handle the people, we would have taken in a lot more. About one o’clock, after we had shaken hands about twenty times, and started to run the water out to have him ready when the milk-train got in, we looked around, and there was Mort, standing there looking at him.

“He didn’t die,” I says. “Mabel fed him.”

“So I see.”

I went over and cut on the lights. All of a sudden that little gray lump out there in the water was a great blue shadow, and then it began to move. It would flit this way and that way, not like anything swimming, but like some big bat that was flying. Pretty soon it went up to the far end, turned, and came straight down the pool. And boy, if you ever saw a man’s eyes pop out, Mort’s did when that big train came at him, hit the end of the pool so hard you could feel the ground shake, washed a big wave of water over the gutter, then turned and began to flit around again.

I cut the lights. “Funny thing about that whale,” I says, and sat down beside her on one of the benches and nudged her. “He was a gift. We got a paper that says he’s all ours. We sure do appreciate that.”

He sat down on another bench, and I kept it up. I harpooned him with some of the best cracks I ever thought up, if I do say it myself. “Yeah,” he said after a while, “he’s all yours, and I wish you both good luck. I hope you’re happy, and get all the breaks.”

“Would you mind telling me what you mean by that?” she says in a strained kind of voice.

“Oh, it’s easy enough to see what’s been going on. I didn’t get it at first, but I do now. You and Dave, you make a team. You get along all right. Well, you got my whale. You got each other. It’s all right. I wish you luck.”

“Oh.”

“A shill in an amusement park! A bally for a swimming-pool. A diving Venus.” He stood up so he was sneering down at her. “And then that wasn’t enough for you. You had to get yourself a whale. Believe me, if you weren’t plenty low before, you’re plenty low now.”

“I think you better take your whale back.” She stood up and tried to go past him. He wouldn’t let her.

“Oh, no. I don’t take him back.”

“Let me go. You’ve been nagging me all week because I wasn’t a trouper — because I was a punk amateur. And then, when I try to be a trouper, when I save your whale for you — Let me go!”

“Yeah? Well, now you’re going to hear some more. I had them break that guy for you. I smashed your ladder on purpose. If I had a whale in my pool, you weren’t going to dive in any other pool, see? Well, that was yesterday. Now you can dive in any pool you want. You and Dave, you can go get yourself a flea circus. Or maybe a boxing kangaroo—”

I clipped him on the jaw then, and that stopped it. But before he could even pick himself up, where he went down, she ran to the pool. “Something’s wrong,” she says. “He hasn’t been up!”

I jumped for the lights. The whale was down there with one fluke over the outlet, where it was running out, held there by suction, and fighting like mad to get clear.

“Quick, close it!”

I screwed down the valve, but it didn’t clear him. There was a vacuum there, and it held him, like he was riveted. “Oh, he’s drowning,” she says, and grabbed the bar we used to turn the valves with. She went right overboard in her white dress and let the bar pull her down, head-first. She stuck it under his fluke, gave it a kick with her feet to drive it in, then pulled her feet down and lifted. Up he came, and began to blow like a drowning man would.

She let the bar go, came up, and began to talk to him. “Poor little thing,” she says. “Away from his mamma, and nobody to play with, and in a terrible place where awful things happen to him. I wish we could take him back where he came from, so he could be happy once more.”

“Let’s do it,” I says to her. “I believe I can do it.”

“Would you, Dave?” she says.

And then it happened, like a slow movie. The whale was in the corner all the time, watching her in the middle of the pool. He didn’t seem to mind her much, but then he dived and started to go past her. She opened her legs for a scissors kick that would take her out of the way. He changed his mind and turned back, and his tail came up slow. She kicked slow. And she kicked right into this piece of net that was still hanging on his tail. She was flung up in the air, and whirled down under, and it made you sick to think what she would look like if she got slammed against the side.

Mort started to run almost before it happened. He grabbed a fire-ax. He smashed the underwater lights in one corner, and about ten of them went out. The whale made for the dark place, and he and the ax hit at the same time. Mort drove the spike into his head up to the wood, and he never even moved. I went overboard and pulled her clear, and Mort lifted her out.

“I didn’t mean it,” he says. “I didn’t mean any of it. If only you’re not killed!”

“I’m all right,” she says. “Did you kill him?”

“I had to.”

She pulled him down and kissed him, and then looked in the pool. We all looked. And then, brother, we saw death. The big blue shadow was there, perfectly still. Then it began to tip. One fluke went down. It began to sink, in a kind of a slow circle. And then, when it got below the lights, it turned from blue to gray, and settled, awfully small, on the bottom. It was like we had seen his soul pass out of him...

The sun was coming up when we got the kegs loose and watched the waves close over him.

“Some whale,” says Mort.

“Yeah,” I says, “some whale.”

She just put her head on Mort’s shoulder and began to cry.

(Redbook, April 1934)

Come-Back

This is how Kennelly came back; and if I don’t tell it the way he tells it, all I got to say is that he don’t tell it. He is always so busy explaining how dumb Hapgood was, that he never gets to the lion part; but the lion had a lot more to do with it than Hapgood had, so why talk about a heel that it would be better all around if you could just forget him? I will put in about the lion, and not say any more about Happy than I have to. Maybe you read about the lion in the papers, but they got it all mixed up, so it will not hurt any if I tell the straight of it, once for all; and then you will know why you haven’t got a Silver-throated Cowboy any more, but have Mowgli the Untamed; and if I’ve got to take one or the other, I’ll take Mowgli at that, because he is not all the time singing about love among the cows.

Kennelly hit the skids when Silver died. He was all right up until then. He had plenty of work in straight Westerns, singing his songs in between the shooting, and he had a bank-account, a ranch and a future. But then Happy figured they better bury the horse in a big way. Happy is Kennelly’s agent. He is the worst agent in Hollywood; and brother, to be the worst agent in Hollywood, you’ve got to be bad. I mean you’ve got to be so bad that no man in his sober senses could really believe it. So he bought a lot in a cemetery, got a permit from the Health Department, dressed twelve bums up as cowgirls, and had them throw roses in the grave, had Kennelly sing “Home on the Range,” and a bugler blow taps. The papers took plenty of it, and so did the news-reels; and by the end of the week Silver was the deadest horse this side of Tombstone, Arizona.

And then they woke up that the burial was Silver’s but the funeral was Kennelly’s. The kids had loved Silver, and they cried plenty over all that stuff that Happy thought up; but after it was over, they wouldn’t have any horse in his place, and they wouldn’t have Kennelly. When they saw how his great heart was broke over Silver, they couldn’t understand why it didn’t stay broke; and there didn’t seem to be any way to tell them that even if his heart was broke, he had to eat. They just wouldn’t have any more to do with him. If Silver had died quiet, and another white horse named Silver had trotted out in his place, they would never have known the difference, and Silver would have stayed young like Chester Gump does — and fact of the matter like any other white horse in Hollywood does.

But trust Happy on a thing like that. Happy is the boy that one time invited eight big shots, from all the main studios, to fly down to Caliente with him and see the races, and then when they were in the plane, he phoned the airport he couldn’t come, so they had to ante up for the plane themselves; and then come to find out, the pilot didn’t have a border permit, so he set them down in San Diego, and they spent the afternoon watching the gobs paint the anchor of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lexington. A guy that can get himself in Dutch with every studio in town, all at one crack, has got talent, you’ve got to hand him that; and a little thing like a horse, he can handle that with one hand and light a cigarette with the other.

Well, by the end of a year Kennelly was through. He didn’t have any bank-account; he didn’t have any ranch; and he didn’t have any future. He wasn’t but twenty-seven years old, but he was already just a fragrant memory.

So then was when Happy got the idea for the party. What a party has got to do with a comeback, is something I can’t figure out; but any agent can figure it out, and it has got so now that all the big blow-outs are given by agents, and you can’t tell whether the agents are running the business or the business is running the agents; and whichever one wins, it is probably no great loss. So Happy put out bids for the party, and it was to be at his place up near Malibu — of course not right at Malibu Beach, you understand. Malibu Beach is run by a guy by the name of Art A. Jones, that gets the money the first of every month — and he gets it, don’t make any mistake about that. So of course that wouldn’t suit Happy very well, and his place is in the hills right above Malibu, so he can get his mail at Malibu and say he lives there. It was to be one of those Sunday night things they put in the fan magazines, and the stars were to be there, and the shots — and not having any other word for it, we can call it entertainment.

“Wait till Fanchon and Marco see it,” Happy tells Kennelly. “Will they be sore, or will they be sore? Listen, Tim, how we do it. First we put on a hold-up, see?... No, you got me wrong. That’d be swell, wouldn’t it, to have a goat-getter there, taking guys’ pocketbooks? Pay Vincent Barnett fifty bucks to make everybody sore! You got me wrong. We put on a real old-time Western hold-up, stagecoach and all, a regular high-class up-to-date job, that takes people back. You get it, Timmy? That gives them romance. That gives them real romance.”

“Yeah,” says Kennelly, “but where do I come in?” An actor can’t listen long if he don’t see where he comes in.

“Wait.”

Happy walked around Kennelly and burned him with his flashing eye. “Wait. You got that, Tim? Wait. They’re all there. They haven’t seen you yet. It’s your party, and it’s getting late, and they’re all asking where is Kennelly. They’re crazy to see you, and what do we do? Wemake ’em wait. We make ’em wait. Because look at Fields! After all, Tim, what makes him what he is? Ain’t that all there is to it? He can make ’em wait. He can make ’em wait till he’s ready to shoot it.”

“Yeah, but—”

“You ride in! On Silver Heels, you ride in! Remind me to tell you about that horse, Timmy. I got him for a hundred and fifty bucks, and if I ever saw personality on four feet, that horse has got it. You ride in! You rope those bad men! You rescue the stagecoach! They’re for you! It’s the first they’ve seen of you, and they’re crazy about you! You take it on the gallop; the band goes into ‘The Lone Cowboy,’ and you give it to ’em while they’re hot! You sing to ’em, right while they’re cheering for you!.. Wait a minute — I’ve got to make a call.”

Every agent, if he don’t do anything else all day long, he makes calls. So Happy dialed a number, and said where you been — I thought you were going to tip me off how that deal is going — well, I want to see you soon — we’re working on our end of it every minute. And while he talked, Kennelly thought it over.

“That kind of hits me a little bit,” says Kennelly, soon as Happy hung up.

“You get it, Tim? Out of the black. That’s you from now on. Out of the black. Because look! We’ve made some mistakes, but I hope there’s one mistake we never make. Those kids are never wrong. They know. You know what I mean, Tim? They know. From now on, that’s you. The man of sorrows. Out of the black, into the dawn. In with the sunset, off with the rising sun. And in the end, in the end, Timmy, what do we see? A cloud of dust along the ridge, a lone rider against the sky — fade, cut, and that’s all.”

“Yeah,” says Kennelly. “You know what I mean? There’s something to it.”

“Out of the black.”

“That’s it. And off with the dawn. After all, that’s me, isn’t it?”

“They know, Timmy. They know.”

I guess I don’t have to tell you it laid an egg. First off, those guys on the stagecoach swung in too far on the lawn, and broke a whole circuit of Japanese lanterns where the mob was sitting. Then Kennelly’s horse, the new one with personality plus, began to squeal where Kennelly and Happy had him hid out back, and that wasn’t so good, because there was some tip-toe stuff in the stagecoach part, and every time the horse would squeal, the mob would laugh. So they were right back of the stables of the place next to Happy’s, or anyway what looked like stables, and Happy yanked open the door of one, and began whispering at Kennelly.

“Shove him in here!” he says. “Quick, before he ruins it!”

If Kennelly had thought about it, he would have known that a horse don’t squeal for nothing, and been a little careful how he let Happy go opening doors. But just then the guys on the hold-up began yipping his cue, and he jumped on and went riding out of the black, and Happy ran around to where the mob was, to catch how things were going.

Well, of course they had gave the wrong cue, and he had to go riding out of the black again, because the hold-up part hadn’t even started yet, and that was a laugh. And then, when he finally did get all the bad men roped, and went into his number, all the horses began to squeal, and that was a laugh, so it all went pretty sour.

“Where’s Thalberg?” says Kennelly, soon as he had got rid of his horse. “I got to tell him how it was those horses that busted it up.”

“Thalberg couldn’t get here,” says Happy. “They’re cutting a picture over there tonight, and he couldn’t make it.”

“Where’s Laemmle?”

“He had to go out of town.”

“I want to see Harry Cohn, too. No need to tell him, though. He was a singer. He knows.”

“I don’t know what’s keeping him,” says Happy. “He swore up and down he would be here, and he hasn’t showed.”

So then Kennelly knew he was sunk. He had been looking them over while they were talking, and there wasn’t anybody there but a lot of third-rate hams and fourth assistant cameramen, that Happy must have pulled in off the Mojave Desert, the thirst they had. He didn’t wait to hear any more. He didn’t go back to the house, where they had all scrammed after the show was over, to get next to the liquor. He didn’t even go upstairs to change from his cow suit into his evening clothes, like he had intended to. He felt sick to his stomach, and went right out to his car, and began sliding down the drive. But he had to stop at the Malibu Inn to get some gas, and that was where he ran into Burton Silbro.

Silbro is a little independent that used to be a parachute-jumper, and Jack Hornison had invited him to Malibu Beach for the week-end, to use his cottage while he and the family was away. It cost eighty thousand dollars, and is more like a duke’s palace than a cottage; so of course Silbro, with a set like that that wasn’t costing him anything, he no sooner got there on Saturday afternoon, than he brought in a whole truckload of cameras and punks, and began shooting a lousy short called “Malibu Nights,” working both nights and all day Sunday to get it done before Hornison would get back on Monday. When he saw Kennelly, he grabbed him around the neck like he was a long-lost brother.

“Tim!” he says. “The very one I was looking for! I was beating it into Hollywood after you, and ain’t that a break I ran into you here!” It was a break, all right, but he hadn’t thought of Kennelly until just that second. He was beating it into Hollywood for anybody he could pull out of a night-club, after what had happened — but when he saw Kennelly, why, Kennelly was the one he was looking for.

“Yeah?” says Kennelly. “What’s on your mind?”

“Tim,” says Silbro, “would you do something for me? Would you lead me a number? Just one number, that was made to order for you, and actually written for you, and if you don’t believe me you can ask Manny Roberts, that put it up for me, and he’ll tell you the same.”

“I don’t know,” says Kennelly. “I’m pretty busy right now.”

An actor, if he hadn’t had a meal for a week, and you told him you were doing “Macbeth,” and wanted some real eating in the banquet-scene, and would he eat the chow while the rest of them were speaking their pieces, he would have to say he couldn’t consider anything but Banquo’s ghost, because of course a ghost is the one part in show business that don’t eat.

“But get a load of it, Tim!” Silbro urged. “Listen how it goes.”

“I’ll think about it. See me tomorrow.”

“But Tim! I mean now! The cameras are waiting for you! I’m sunk if I don’t finish up tonight, and Buddy Sadler has broke a leg! He went swimming this afternoon, and now he’s got the pip! He can’t sing! You got to do it for me!”

“I thought you said it was written for me.”

“It was wrote for you, but we didn’t know where you was. We had to take Buddy, and now he has laid down and died. Tim, five hundred for the job, and feature billing.”

“Not tonight, Silbro. Not tired like I am. Look at me. I just came off the set.”

“Tim, I’ll give you a grand, and star billing. Don’t you get it? I got to finish tonight, or I’m sunk!”

You understand how this was. Kennelly had three bucks in his pants, and maybe two more in the bank. He wanted it the worst way, but the great soul of the actor just wouldn’t let him say yes. He’d have been shaking his head yet if this girl, this Polly Dukas you read about in the papers, hadn’t put her head out of Silbro’s car. She was driving him to Hollywood, because he was so shot he couldn’t even find the gear-shift.

“Please, Mr. Kennelly,” she says. “I’ve been wishing all this time, just to work in a picture with you. Won’t you do it? Just for me?”

“Are you in it?” says Kennelly.

“I do the tap-dance,” she says.

Well, of course that was different. They fixed it up pretty quick; then Silbro, he didn’t mean that Kennelly should get away from him, so he sent Polly with him while he went up to get his evening clothes, where he had left them at Happy’s. Everybody brings their own clothes when they work for Silbro.

“You don’t know what you’ve done for me,” she says as they drove up the drive. “It’s my first chance in pictures.”

“O. K.,” says Kennelly. “Glad to do it for you.”

“Of course I know it doesn’t mean anything to you. But it does to me. I just wanted you to know how grateful I am.”

“I wouldn’t say that. Of course in one way it’s just another picture. But an actor ought never be ashamed to do his best. It ought to be new to him. Just a little bit.”

“I’ll always remember that, Mr. Kennelly.”

“What’s your name?”

“Polly. Polly Dukas.”

“Well, Polly, if I go in there, I’ve got to do a lot of handshaking that’ll take all night. It’s a little party in my honor, and I walked out on it. So suppose I park out back here, and you slide in and get the grip. Then we can blow quick. O. K.?”

“That’s funny.”

“What’s funny?”

“That you can just walk out on a party in your honor. I hope I get that famous.”

“After you’ve been a star awhile, you get a little fed up on parties in your honor.”

“I don’t think I ever would.”

“Just tell Happy you’ve come for my grip. And for the love of Pete, don’t get him out here or we’ll never get away.”

“I won’t.”

He parked and cut his lights, and she slipped in the house, where the party was just getting good. He lit a cigarette, and sat there watching the limb of a tree, where it was waving at him in the wind. He was feeling all excited, because even if it was only a lousy short, it gave him the chance he had been praying for. But then all of a sudden a funny feeling began to go over him. The smoke from his cigarette was going straight up, so there wasn’t any wind. The limb was thick as your arm, but it was limber in the middle. It didn’t have any leaves on the end of it, but had a tassel. Then it popped in his mind that he had heard somewhere that a guy up near Happy had a private zoo. Then it popped in his mind about those horses squealing. Then he remembered about that door, and he knew what he was looking at.

The car was an open roadster, and he was afraid to step on the starter, and he knew he didn’t dare sit in it. He opened the door easy, and slid out.

Just then Polly came back, with the grip. “I didn’t even see him,” she says. “I got one of the servants to get it for me.”

He took hold of her. “Don’t run and don’t yell,” he whispered. “But we got to get in the house quick. There’s a lion on that wall.”

She didn’t make a sound, and they started out. But the lion saw what they were up to, jumped down and slid around between them and the house. They backed away, and he came on. He came on two or three steps at a time, and in between he would crouch down on his belly. One of those times Kennelly grabbed Polly up, turned, and lined for the swimming-pool. It was about twenty feet away. The lion sprang, but they fell into the water a few inches ahead of him, and he skidded to a stop on the edge. Lions don’t like water much.

They stood up and waded out to the middle, in water about up to their waists. The lion began pacing up and down, at the side of the pool. Inside, they could hear the party going on, the jazz band playing, guys singing, women laughing.

“I’m going to call for help,” she says after a minute.

“No, you’ll get all those people out here, and it’ll be murder.”

“But they’re waiting for us.”

“They’ll have to wait.”

“We’ve got to do something. We can’t just stand here.”

“Somebody’ll come out in a minute. We’ll tell them quiet what it is, and get them to call the police.”

But then the buzz in the house stopped like a director had yelled “Cut!” The lion was getting a little peeved by now, and he began to tell the world what he thought of it. I don’t know if you ever heard that sound. The cough that a lion gets off inside, like in a circus, is nothing like it. Outside, at night, he puts his head to the ground and cuts loose, and it’s like what you read in the books, a roar. It’s an awful thing to hear. You can’t tell where it’s coming from, in the first place, and it shakes the earth, in the second place, and it shakes your heart, in the third place. Even a drunk can understand it. Those people looked at each other, and tried to get the comical talk going again, but it wasn’t quite so comical any more, and yet none of them was so very hot to go out and see what it was.

But of course Happy, after the lion had let three or four of them go, he was a big masterful guy, and he went out to see about it, the cocktail shaker still in his hand, with a towel around it, where he was shaking it. He was stepping a little high.in the feet, but he got there, and when he saw what it was, he went crazy. “’S a grea’ gag,” he says to Kennelly. “Jus’ hol’ ’m there, ri’ like he is, till I ge’m all ou’ here.”

“Happy!” says Kennelly. “It’s not a gag! He’s real, and he’s a killer! Call the police, or do something, but for God’s sake don’t get those people out here!”

“Wha y’ mean, ’s not a gag?” says Happy. “’S grea’s gag ev’ pulled. Shows y’ can do com’dy, get it? Y’r las’ chance. ’S all y’ go’ lef.”

“Happy! Will you—”

But the lion saved him the breath it would take to make Happy understand anything. He must have been getting sick of it himself, because he charged at Happy, and would have got him, only Happy dropped the cocktail shaker when he ran. The lion jumped on the towel, started tearing it to pieces, and Happy reached the house and began calling up the police, yelling at the mob that there was a lion loose out there, and starting a panic. They fell all over themselves getting upstairs, and then some of them climbed out on the portico roof to look; and that was swell, because that lion could take the portico roof at one jump, and still have a couple of feet to spare.

“Come on!” says Kennelly, when the lion started into the towel. “Now’s our chance!”

But those roars, and that charge at Happy, had got Polly. She just stood there, holding on to Kennelly and swallowing; and then the lion left the towel and began running around the pool again, and saw the springboard, and came out to the end of it, and stood there snarling at them, where they were standing in the water twenty or thirty feet away.

“What did he mean when he said it was your last chance?” says Polly, then.

“He meant I’m through,” says Kennelly. “If I don’t get on that set tonight, I can sing ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime!’”

“Oh!”

“I been handing you a line. Now you know the truth.”

“If I’d only run when you said!”

“You were right. He’d have got us.”

“Your last chance and my first. We’ll get there, Tim.”

“Yeah, but how? It would be just my luck to have a crazy lion—”

“Tim!”

“Yes?”

“Could you rope him? Is that your rope in the car?”

When she said that, Kennelly knew she had thought of something. “You bet I can rope him,” he says. “You hold him here, while I get the rope. If he moves off the board, yell.”

He started to sneak back out of the pool, but he didn’t have a chance. Soon as he was three feet away from Polly, the lion ran around to cut him off.

“Get him back there!” says Polly. “I know a way. I’ll get it!”

They splashed water at him, and got him back on the board. They had a tough time doing it, because the drunks on the roof kept yelling how they should stay in the water, and not come out, and a couple of times the lion looked their way, and wouldn’t pay any attention to the water. But they got him out there after a minute, and then Polly stooped down, braced against Kennelly, and shot away for the far end of the pool, swimming under water. The lion stopped snarling and blinked. First there had been two of them there; now there was only one. But Kennelly kept the water going, to keep him interested, and he started snarling again. Then Polly was back with the rope, holding it high to keep it from getting wet, and Kennelly went to work.

He had about the toughest roping job ever. But Kennelly could rope standing on his head if he had to, and it wasn’t long before he had it going right, and shot it. The lion saw it coming and made a swipe at it, but it settled on him pretty, over his head and one shoulder, where his paw struck into it.

Then Kennelly began to move fast. He didn’t brace back and start a tug-of-war with the lion. He slewed over to the side quick, so that when the lion fought the rope he had to do it crosswise of the board, and he was so big he couldn’t get his feet planted right, and couldn’t make use of his weight to pull Kennelly over. Soon as he got to the side, Kennelly hooked his fingers in the gutter, and held there while Polly got out and held while he jumped out. Then they both grabbed the rope and pulled. They couldn’t budge the lion. But then they pulled steady for a second, and eased off quick, and he went toppling into the pool backwards.

He swam to the edge in a second, but every time he would throw a paw over the gutter, Kennelly would jerk on the rope and pull him back in; and while he was doing that, he was edging around until he was on the end of the springboard himself. Then he reeled in his fish. When he had the lion up short down under the end of the board where he couldn’t reach the side of the pool any more, he had him right where he wanted him, and kneeled down to give the rope a couple of hitches around the board so he couldn’t give any more trouble.

But that was where Happy got in it again. You see, when he went back in the house, he didn’t stop at just phoning the police and starting a panic. He kept right on, out front and down the drive, to where the cow-outfit were loading their stagecoach and horses on their truck, getting ready to go home.

“Come on, boys, quick!” he yelled at them, and grabbed one of their pistols out of the holster, and legged it back to the pool. He got there just as Kennelly was winding the rope around the end of the board, and he cut loose at the lion with the gun.

Well, when you begin shooting blanks at a lion, you don’t hurt the lion much, but you are liable to pull yourself off balance with the big recoil that a blank cartridge has, and that was what happened to Happy. The gun went up at the first shot, and jerked him right head-first into the pool, and he began to gulp, gurgle and sink. So Polly tumbled he couldn’t swim, and went in after him. So of course Happy gave her the drowning man’s grip, and the next Kennelly heard was her scream for help. He dived without waiting for more; and for a minute that pool was like you had tried to boil a live alley cat and a couple of Maine lobsters in a three-gallon wash-boiler; and then — all was still.

They got Happy out. They got out themselves. Then they stood there, holding on to each other, waiting for the lion to jump. Nothing happened. They would have run, then, but there was Happy, lying at the side of the pool, and they couldn’t leave him to the lion.

“Blow!” Kennelly says to her, after they had looked this way and that, and nothing had happened.

“And leave you here with this man and that awful animal?” she says.

“I said blow! Now’s your chance!”

“I won’t!”

“The lion’s dead! He’s in the bottom of the pool! He’s drowned!”

She walked over to the light-switch and snapped a button. It was the underwater lights. The lion wasn’t down there. She snapped another one. It was the flood-lights. He wasn’t up in the trees.

“Tim!”

He ducked, but it wasn’t the lion she was looking at. It was his face, where she could see it, in the light. “You’re all scratched up! You’re all blood! You can’t work!”

He felt his face, and looked at the blood on his hands. “Well, then?” he says. “I told you to blow, didn’t I? The key’s in the car. Tell Silbro I’m sorry.”

She stooped down over Happy. “Come on,” she says. “We’ve got to get him in the house.”

He went to help her, and then all hell broke loose. You see a lion, when things get too hot for him, he does just what any other cat does. He goes and crawls under something, and he starts to think. So that’s what this lion had done. He went and crawled under the filter-tank beside the pool, but when he started to think, he didn’t think about butterflies, or “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” or any of the stuff you might think about if you crawled under something. He thought about horse. That was what he’d started out to get when Happy left the door open, and that was what he was stalking before all this mess started. And pretty soon he saw it, not five feet from his nose.

Because count on a bunch of cow actors. They never got a cue right yet, and when Happy came out there, and grabbed a gun, and told them to come on quick, they figured the show was about to start again, and began jamming the horses back in the stagecoach and throwing on saddles. When they heard the shots, and then saw the lights go on, they were sure of it; so in a minute here they came, prancing up under the lights in magnificent array. They didn’t stay magnificent long. The lion came out from under that filter-tank like he was shot out of a cannon, sank his teeth in the back of the wheeler of the stagecoach.

But there were four horses on the coach, and when the wheeler plunged, the leaders and the off-wheeler jumped, and went right into the pool, with coach, men and lion. Nobody ever did know just what happened right after that. The lion was out of the pool almost as soon as he was in, and he must have gone after more horses, because a couple of them were ripped. But those horses had riders on them, and the riders seemed to wake up that water was a pretty good thing to be in about that time; so they put their horses right in the pool, and in a couple of seconds there they all were, men, horses and stagecoach, in the middle of the pool, the horses trying to keep their feet on the slippery tile bottom, and squealing as loud as they could; the men cussing and trying to handle them, and in between shooting blanks at the lion; the mob on the roof yelling in a regular panic now, and the lion charging up and down beside the pool, raising holy hell.

Kennelly was trying to get Happy up, working like mad, and soon as the lion was balked on the horses, he went for him. But he still had the rope hanging to him, and Polly grabbed it. He wheeled, and bit at the rope, but that was enough for Kennelly to grab it away from her, and run off to one side with it. He snubbed it around a tree, and the lion wheeled again. Kennelly pulled on the rope, and that brought him face to face with the lion. That cat just murdered him. He ripped every stitch of clothes off him, and slashed him on the shoulders and chest, until Kennelly looked more like something in a slaughterhouse than a man.

But he kept heaving on the rope, and at last he got the lion up tight against the tree, and wound the rope around him. He was just finishing up when the State police and a carload of newspaper reporters came around the bend, all sirens going and both feet on the gas. And then Happy got in it again. He had staggered up, from where he had been coughing water out of his lungs, and now he pointed at Kennelly.

“Tozzan!” he yells at the newspaper guys. “Y’ got the gag, boys? Tozzan o’ th’ Apes! Tozzan th’ ape man? Tozz—”

Kennelly sat down beside the lion then and began to bawl like a kid. “Tarzan,” he says. “Tarzan the Ape Man, a great gag! Yeah, a great gag two years ago when they thought it up for Weissmuller. Yeah, I’ll say it’s great.”

They got him to bed after a while, and the doctors plastered him up, and they finally got a couple of guys from Goebels to come and get the lion, and take him back where he belonged; and even the rest of it was what you call a wild night. But next day Kennelly was smeared over every front page in town, with pictures of him weeping there beside the lion, and all the studios were ringing the telephone; and after a while they fixed it up that Hornison was to get it, on account that way Kennelly could fix it so Silbro could finish the picture. Hornison was pretty sore at Silbro, but he stood for it. And the new Kennelly picture was to be called “Mowgli,” and come to find out, that was Polly’s gag.

“How did you come to think of that one?” Kennelly says to her, where they were holding hands over the side of the bed.

“Oh, I read a book once,” she says.

“You hear that, Happy?”

“But Timmy,” says Happy, where he was cutting out clippings, stamping them “Management the Hapgood Agency, Inc.” and putting them in an envelope for a secretary to file. “But Timmy, I said it all along. Out of the black. I been trying to make you see it.”

“Well, Polly,” says Kennelly, “I don’t know what the love-interest is, but it’s you, or they can strike the set.”

She held onto his hand, and Hapgood began to walk around the room. “Timmy,” he says, “you got to hand it to me on that one. Out of the black. You can’t beat it.”

(Redbook, June 1934)

Hip, Hip, The Hippo

This stuff the papers had about what happened up to Lake Sherwood, they didn’t get the half of it; then what they did get, they balled it all up. So here is the low-down on it, once and for all:

I think I told you how Kennelly came to be Kowgli, the Wolf Man. He used to be the Singing Cowboy, but thanks to some smart work by Hapgood — that’s his agent, — he hit the skids for a wipe-off, and Hollywood couldn’t seem to remember who he was any more. He tried a come-back, and it went sour when a lion chased him into a swimming-pool; but he roped the lion, and that made him Kowgli. He was to be Kowgli the Untamed, but they changed it to Kowgli the Wolf Man, and maybe it’s Kowgli the Sweet Singer of Bagdad by now; you couldn’t prove it by me. Bagdad — it’s not in India; but none of the rest of it was either, so they can’t go by what they put in it.

Anyway, they started work on it after a while, and at last Kennelly could eat. He figured on five hundred dollars a week, eight weeks guaranteed, on account it takes plenty of time to shoot an animal picture, and full time for retakes. That is, he and this Polly Dukas figured on that between them. She was the girl that helped him rope the lion, and they had gone for each other pretty heavy, so they made it a team. But trust Hapgood to put the spot on it.

“Listen,” he says to Hornison, when they met to close the deal. “I’m telling you what you’ve got to pay.”

“O. K.,” says Hornison. “Anything you say.”

“What?”

“I don’t even want to talk about it. I got a sick polo-pony home, Hap, and it’s got me so I can’t even think. I love that mare, and you know how I am when I really take something to heart.”

“Which one? Sugar?”

“Sugar.”

“Say, that’s tough.”

“Write your own contracts, Hap. Send them over, and if it’s anything in reason, there won’t be any trouble over it. In the meantime have that pair on the lot tomorrow morning nine o’clock, ready for work and packed for location.”

“They’ll be there.”

“O. K., then.”

Hapgood, just to show he really meant it about Sugar, made the contracts out for one thousand dollars a week, ’stead of five hundred dollars, and all Kennelly had to do for that was ride a hippopotamus down the Ganges River. They never found out there’s no hip’s on the Ganges, but they did find out some things about hip’s they never knew before. Like when you try to work one in a warm lake, that’s where you’re going to have trouble. When you push him in, the first thing he does is go down under and stay down under till he feels like coming up, and maybe that’s in five minutes, and maybe it’s ten, and time going by all the time. And another thing they found out was, even when he does come up, a hip’ is so slippery you can’t ride him. That, and a lot of dirty tricks he knows, because he don’t want to be rode, and he’s not going to be, if he can help it.

So the hip’ sweat blood, and Kennelly sweat blood; and at the end of a week, where they were at was nowhere. Hornison watched it from the bank, and then one morning he went off by himself and sitting on a stump, began chewing grass.

“Tim,” says Polly, “I don’t like how he looks, sitting over there by himself.”

“What do you mean?” says Kennelly.

“I mean, you better ride this hip’.”

“How? Will you tell me that?”

“You better ride him.”

“If he had hair, or a hump, or a horn, or anything I could hang on to—”

“Come on. I’ve got an idea.”

They were in bathing-suits, so they went out in the canoe and found the hip’, on bottom, where he generally was. They could see him down there, eating lilies, and they hung over him, and Polly shipped her paddle and swung her feet over the side.

“Hey, what is this?”

“You’ll find out.”

“You’re not going in the water with that thing. Maybe I didn’t tell you that. He’s dangerous.”

“Is he?”

“You tell me what this idea is, and I’ll be the one—”

But right then the hip’ broke water, and Polly went over. The bow of the canoe shot up in the air, and it spun around, so Kennelly was almost on top of what happened. Polly grabbed for the hip’s ear, and got it. He squealed and jerked around so fast the water turned to foam. He squealed again, jerked again, and went under again. That was all. Polly went down, sucked up about a gallon of water and came up, a pretty scared girl. Kennelly went over, hauled her out on the bank, then went out and got the canoe.

“I guess that’ll learn you.”

“I’m sorry, Tim. It didn’t work.”

“Bigger than he looks, isn’t he?”

“I was scared to death.”

“I told you.”

“I thought I could ride him by the ears.”

“He can wriggle pretty lively too.”

“I thought a locomotive had hit me.”

“All right, then? You going to be good? I’ll tell you something.”

“I’ll be good.”

“You did it.”

“Did what?”

“What we’ve been after. You showed me how to ride him. I’ve been looking at those ears for a week, and it never once entered my head I could hang on to them.”

“It won’t work.”

“Oh, yes, it will. You watch. Now we start.”

So after lunch Kennelly went to work. He took Polly and the Bohunk that owned the hip’ and had them run him out on the bank. Then he roped the hip’ — jumped in and slipped a rope on each front foot, and gave one rope to Polly and the other to the Bohunk, and had them run him back in the lake. When he got out where it was deep, he went down, and Kennelly had to yell quick to keep them from pulling him over on his nose. When he was down, they had to turn him around so he was pointed for shore and the ropes wouldn’t get twisted. Kennelly swam out and around with one rope, and had the Bohunk keep up a steady pull on the other, and that did it. Polly checked up how he was lying by going out in the canoe.

Next was to do it so it would look like something in pictures. There was no cameras on it yet, you understand. Hornison wasn’t spending money on them till he found out how the gag worked. Just the same, it had to be in shape to shoot. Kennelly waded in up to his chest, began to beat the water with his hands, so it would look like a signal, then told Polly and the Bohunk to up with him. They heaved on the ropes; up came the hip’; Kennelly went aboard him like he was a range colt, grabbed his ears, and came riding in fine. The ropes were O. K., because they were under water and the camera wouldn’t get them, so they were off to a good start.

Kennelly kept at it, and at the end of two hours he had that hip’ where he wanted him. The only thing that was giving trouble was how to get off, once he got on. In pictures, when you shoot a start, you got to shoot a stop, and there didn’t seem to be any. They were all right on the start, but the stop had them...

Then they noticed a tree that was hanging down over the lake, and that gave Kennelly an idea. He had them slew him under the tree, and as he went by, he stood up, gave a jump, and caught the lowest limb, and it was a honey. I mean, they got something they didn’t expect. When Kennelly jumped, that socked the hip’ way down under, and when he came up, he had the most surprised look on his face you ever saw in your life, and looked up at Kennelly like he couldn’t understand how he would play him such a dirty trick. That made it great. Kennelly kissed his hand at him, and it was a sure laugh, worth plenty at the box-office.

When they had that, they knew they were through, and started up to the clubhouse looking for Hornison.

“Well,” says Kennelly, “we did it.”

“And how!” says Polly.

“And how. That’s the main part. That gag’s ready for the cameras right now.”

“And who thought it up?”

“You did.”

“You love me?”

“What do you think?”

But when they got to the clubhouse, who was waiting for them was Hapgood, not Hornison. “Hello,” he says.

“Hello,” says Kennelly. “When did you come up?”

“Just now.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Fact of the matter, I got a little bad news.”

“What kind of bad news?” says Polly.

“Now don’t go off the handle,” says Hapgood. “I can place you any time I want; give me two or three days and I can have another job for you just as good as this one, so it don’t worry me a minute. Folks, we been flimflammed.”

“Come on,” says Kennelly. “Get to it.”

“He’s closed out the hip’,” says Hapgood then.

“Who?”

“Hornison. The Bohunk’s notice is in his letter-box waiting for him right now.”

“Oh, my!” says Polly. “And right when Tim can ride him.”

“Well,” says Kennelly, “if he’s closed out the hip’, that’s his loss. I can put on a show with him right now that’s a knockout; but if he don’t want it, it’s got nothing to do with us. We got our guarantee.”

“No. That’s the bad part.”

“What do you mean, bad part? We got it. He’s got to make good on it.”

“I told you already. We been flimflammed. You know those contracts? Letting me draw them up — that’s where he’s got us. That’s why he’s been up at this lake, ’stead of back in his office, where he belonged. Because look: I sent the contracts right over. But he hasn’t read them yet. That secretary of his, she’s been calling up every day to tell me how busy he is at the lake, and how she’s going to send them up to him as soon as she makes the two extra copies she’s got to have, and a couple of more stalls she thought up; but it all adds up to the same. He hasn’t signed them, and he hasn’t even read them.”

“All right. He gave his word.”

“Oh, no, he didn’t. He made it sound like he gave his word, but he didn’t.”

“Where is he?”

“Oh, I forgot that. The secretary, she tipped him I was on my way up here. So of course he took a run-out. He beat it right back to Hollywood, so he can still say he never had one word with me about the deal.”

“Well, what’s it all about, anyway?” says Polly. “Can you tell me that? It’s the craziest thing I ever heard of. Here we’ve been here a whole week. Not one camera has been set up, not one piece of scenery, not anything, except me, and Tim, and the hip’, and this lake. Does it make sense? What’s he trying to do? Kid us?”

“I’ll tell you what it’s about,” says Hapgood. “In the first place, it’s an animal picture. Well, they’re made in the cutting-room, but you got to have one gag. Like in ‘Congorilla’ it was the gorillas, and in ‘Chang’ it was the elephant stampede, and in ‘Bring ’Em Back Alive’ it was the snake and the tiger; you got to have a gag. So that’s where Hornison played smart. That gag, you generally got to send Martin Johnson or Frank Buck or Clyde Ellicott or somebody down to the South Seas to get it, and that costs money. That knocks out fifty grand before you even know it. So Hornison, he figured out a gag he could do right here in this lake, and do it so cheap it’s a crime. It’s the jungle ferryboat, see? I mean the hip’. And this here Kowgli — that’s Kennelly — he gets caught in a river full of crocodiles—”

“Crocodiles!” says Polly. “First a lion, then a hip’, and now crocodiles! It’s out! It’s—”

“The crocodiles,” says Hapgood, “they do them in a tank with a dummy soaked in horse blood. That’s another thing. Ever since this here Jo Metcalf figured how to run hot water into the tank and make the crocodiles come to life like a lot of crabs in a steam boiler, why they been hell on croc’s. So then when he gets caught by the croc’s, his old pal the hip’ comes along and saves him.”

“Swell,” says Kennelly.

“But get how the cheap louse saved his money and left us holding the bag. It’s good. If he could get the gag in, then he had our name on the contracts; and even if it was a grand a week, with a gag like that, it was cheap. If he couldn’t, it cost him just about what it would cost to make one screen test on his own lot. Overhead? Not a dime. That lake’s free. Camera-crews? He didn’t bring any. Guarantee? He hasn’t even read the contracts. Thirty bucks a day for the hip’, and whatever he wants to pay us. He don’t even have to stable the hip’. That secretary’s been gagging to me how the hip’ goes down under every night and stays there—”

“We know,” says Polly.

“We heard about it,” says Kennelly.

“Maybe five hundred bucks, over all, not a cent more. He’s sitting pretty. The gag’s a flop, but—”

“The gag’s not a flop,” says Polly.

“That’s what makes it nice,” says Kennelly.

“What do you mean, it’s not a flop?”

“We pulled it off. We’re ready to shoot.”

“You’re too late. That just makes it perfect.”

“How do you know we’re too late? Can’t you call him up?”

“I don’t even want to talk to the louse.”

“Then I’ll talk to him,” says Kennelly. “That’s better than the three of us talking to each other.”

“You better not let me talk to him,” says Polly, after Kennelly went inside to the phone. “I might say something we would all be sorry for.”

She jumped and ran inside. The little country exchange out there by the lake was slow, and Kennelly hadn’t got through to the studio yet. She grabbed the receiver and slammed it on the hook. “Did you get him?”

“No. Hey, how can I get him if—”

“Thank God! Now listen, Tim. It’s my turn to talk. — Hap! Come in here.”

Hap came in, and she started off. “All right,” she says. “He took us for a ride, didn’t he? Then we’re going to take him for a ride, and he’ll remember it for a while. Hap, call that girl at your office and tell her to go over and pick up those checks right away.”

“Checks?”

“So we’re closed out! Tell her to get the checks and contracts. So we’re closed out, and there’s no question about it.”

“But that’s just what we’re trying to head off!”

“Sure, and we’re all so dumb we ought to be shot. Can’t you see it? If we can ever get closed out, and get those contracts back, it’s a new deal. It’s a new deal all around, and he’ll have to pay us two thousand a week, on a ten-week guarantee—”

“You’re crazy,” says Hapgood.

“Am I? Crocodiles, my eye! Why, this gag is going to be famous before we’re done. That hip’ is going to carry Tim up and down the river, carry messages all over the jungle, save the monkey from the big bad tiger, get his back scratched by the pretty tick-bird — and then when he saves Tim from the crocodiles, those kids are going to stand up and cheer. I’m telling you. It’s our gag. I know what it’s worth, and after I get done, so will Hornison.”

“She’s not crazy,” says Kennelly. “Call your office.”

Of course it wouldn’t be Hapgood’s office if there was somebody in it. “It’s too late,” he says. “She must have gone. Say, I don’t think much of this.”

“All right, then,” says Polly. “I’m going to spend tonight in Hollywood. The very first thing in the morning I go get the checks and contracts, and then I start in on Hornison. And what you two are going to do is stay here and see that the Bohunk doesn’t move that hip’.”

When Polly hit the Brown Derby, that night around nine o’clock, who should be there but Hornison. He was across the room, and he didn’t see her. She figured that meant he saw her first, and it suited her all right, so she stayed where she was and ordered their seventy-five-cent Chinese dinner.

Pretty soon Polly could hear a mumble, and she didn’t pay any attention to it till she noticed Hornison had a phone plugged in at his table and was talking into it. Then she snapped out of it and listened. “That’s right,” he was saying. “One reservation on your train to San Francisco, leaving tonight. Hold it in my name, J. P. Hornison. I’ll pick it up by eleven forty.”

That knocked everything haywire, and meant she had to move fast. She walked down to his table like nothing had happened at all, lit one of his cigarettes, and sat down nice and friendly. “Hello,” he says. “I thought you were working.”

“I’m going back in the morning. Just ran down to look at the bright lights.”

“Tim with you?”

“No, he needed sleep. He’s been working the hip’ all day.”

Then she let him have it, and especially all the cute angles on the gag he hadn’t even thought of. She knew it was risky, because if he called off the trip, he might call off the checks too. But she figured he didn’t know what she was up to, and she could probably beat him to it at the studio in the morning before he woke up. “O. K.,” he says after a while. “I’ll run up and have a look at it.”

“I’ll run you up in the morning.”

“The morning? I mean tonight.”

“Oh.”

She thought fast some more, then figured it might even be better that way, because if they could keep Hornison out on the lake they could shoot Hapgood’s girl over, and still put the deal over. “All right,” she says. “Fine.”

“You got your car? I left mine home.”

“Right in the Derby park.”

“Then drive me up.”

They topped a hill, and the San Fernando Valley lay below, under the stars. “Gee, that’s pretty,” he says. “Hold it a minute. Pull over. Let’s look at it. You don’t see something like that often.”

She stopped, and he looked at it. “Great, isn’t it?” he says.

“Just lovely.”

“You’ve got a funny look in your eye tonight, Polly. I wonder if you’re thinking what I’m thinking.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Up at the lake, they think you’re in Hollywood.”

“Yes.”

“And down in Hollywood, they think I’m in Frisco. Does that put ideas in your head? It does in mine.”

“I never knew you thought about me that way.”

“I think about you that way plenty.”

“Well — what do you mean?”

“I mean how about you and me slipping off to Santa Barbara tonight? A little stroll by the sea, a nice late supper, and then when we show up at the lake in the morning, we just happened to bump into each other and you ran me up. How’s that hit you?”

“It’s an awful temptation,” she says.

“Sure, that’s what we’ll do.”

“Can we stop at the lake so I can get a few things?”

“Holy smoke, no! Listen, baby, I don’t want any trouble with that Irishman. This has got to be quiet. Get that right now.”

“I’ll have to have some things. I’ll slip in back, quiet, so nobody’ll ever know. They’re all asleep anyway.”

“You sure you can get away with it?”

“Easy.”

When they got to the lake, she cut the lights and they coasted in back. She got out and sneaked into the clubhouse. It was all dark. She was afraid to call Kennelly for fear Hornison would hear, so she felt her way to the front porch. She thought Kennelly might be there. He wasn’t, but his voice was. It was floating up from the lake, doing a nice croon number on “Home on the Range.” And mixed in with it, doing a swell barber-shop second, was a woman’s voice.

“Home, home on the range,” sang Kennelly, “where the deer and the antelope play—”

“Home, home, home,” sang the woman, “home, home, ho-me.”

It was a knife in Polly’s heart, after all she had been doing for Kennelly, and she didn’t wait to hear more. She went straight back to Hornison.

“I’m all ready,” she says. “My, isn’t it a pretty night.”

But Hornison, he had heard the singing too. “Something funny about this,” he says. “Wait a minute.”

He tiptoed around to the front of the clubhouse. She got in the car and sat there. The longer she sat, the madder she got. After a couple of minutes she jumped out and ran down to the canoe-landing. The singing stopped, and there wasn’t a sound. She called Kennelly. No answer. She called again. Still no answer. Then she went off the handle right. She began to bawl out Kennelly across the water, and while she was doing that, she was peeling off her clothes, anyway down to the silk. She meant to swim out there and make a free-for-all fight of it and it was Hornison that stopped her. He ran down and grabbed her as she was about to dive in.

“Polly!” he says. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to kill him!”

“You can’t pull stuff like that!”

“Oh, can’t I! I’ll kill him, and I’ll kill her!”

“Cut it out! You’re off your nut!”

“Would you mind telling me what you’re doing there, in that attire, with Jack Hornison, at this hour of night?” It was Kennelly alone, about twenty feet offshore, in the canoe, and talking in that quiet tone of voice an actor puts on when he wants to sound like a grand duke.

“Oh!” says Polly. “There you are!”

“And there are you. And I’d like an explanation of it.”

“Explanation! Where is she? Give your own explanations!”

“One thing at a time,” says Kennelly. “Begin. Now.”

“Can I put in a word, Tim?” says Hornison. He was getting a little nervous, because he didn’t know what Polly might pop out with. “Polly and I just drove out together, that’s all. And then she kind of got a little sore about something just now, and she was going to swim out to you. I stopped her. That’s all.”

“Oh, thank you, Jack. That clears that up.”

“Did you hear me?” says Polly. “Where’s that woman?”

“What woman?” Kennelly asks.

“The woman you were singing with.”

“I don’t know, I’m sure. Some woman on shore.”

“And you just sang duets with her?”

“Why not? I didn’t know where she was, but I kind of liked it. Sure I sang duets with her. A thing like that don’t happen every night.”

“Do you expect me to believe that?”

“Do you see any woman?”

“No.”

“That’s it,” says Hornison. “We don’t want any trouble.”

“All right. If you’ll put your clothes on, I’ll be coming ashore.”

He dipped in his paddle. In about two seconds he would have won in a walk. But he didn’t quite make it. You see, Kennelly wasn’t alone in the canoe at all, and Polly would have known it if she had noticed how the bow wasn’t riding high the way it would if only one person was in it. And how that came about was that Polly wasn’t the only one that was pulling some fast work that night. Hornison’s secretary, after he called up he was going to San Francisco, saw a chance to blow herself to a day off. But she had the checks and contracts still to get rid of, so she thought she’d take a little run up to the lake and hand them over that night, and next day she would be all clear.

So that was what she did, except that when she got there and found Kennelly singing to himself out on the porch, she kind of got to feeling romantic, and a little sorry for him besides, and that was how she happened to be out there on the lake, doing the second part with him eleven o’clock at night. She still hadn’t handed over the checks or the contracts, or even said anything about them, and that was when Hornison showed up. She knew it was Hornison up there on the porch because he lit a cigarette just after he left Polly, and she could tell it was him by the way he kept waving the match around after he got his light.

And then she made her big mistake. She knew Hornison would raise hell about her being up there, just because he always raised hell about everything, so she did some quick whispering to Kennelly, and got him to hide her. She was pretty small, so she curled down in the bow of the canoe with the robe over her, and they were going to let Kennelly step out, accidentally on purpose let the canoe slide out in the lake, and then she would paddle off to another spot and slip home before Hornison could find out. At that, they would have got away with it, if they didn’t have some tough luck.

What happened after that hip’ came off bottom with the canoe on his back took about half a minute, near as I can figure out, but I’ve got to take it one thing at a time, or you’ll never get it straight. First off, the air was split by the worst shriek that ever was heard this side of kingdom come. Of course, that was the secretary. When she felt that hip’ rub his snout on the canvas, she knew it wasn’t any bullfrog, and even her first yip, the State cop heard it on the main road, and that was a mile away. Her other yips, I think they heard them in China, with a war going on.

Next off, both she and Kennelly were in the water, because the canoe slid off gunwale first, and filled before you could see it go down. Next off, all hell broke loose. The hip’, maybe he wanted to get back for what he had to stand for earlier in the day. Anyway, he began to bump Kennelly and bump the girl, and he meant business.

“Polly!” yells Kennelly. “For God’s sake, help me get her out! He’ll kill her!”

And Polly? What did she do? She folded up on the float, and laughed like it was the funniest thing she ever saw in her life. “Ride him, cowboy!” she yells, and kicked up her heels in the air.

“But Polly! It’s no joke! He’s got us!”

“Grab him by the ears! Ride him! Ha-ha, ha-ha!”

And Hornison, what did that big-hearted guy do? Soon as he saw who was in the water, he ran down to the edge of the float and began to bawl the girl out. “I knew it was you!” he says. “I knew it was you, soon as I heard the singing. What are you doing here? Who told you to come up here?”

“Mr. Hornison! Save me!”

“I can’t swim; and if I could, I wouldn’t save you!”

“Mr. Hornison! If you won’t save me, save your contracts!”

Soon as he heard “contracts,” it seemed that Hornison could swim after all, if he really put his mind on it. He jumped in, and Polly was right after him. “Contracts” seemed to do something to her too. But it was the hip’s show, and he didn’t mean anybody to bust it up. He began to bump all of them, and it was getting a little serious. Who do you think saved them? It was Hapgood. None other than Hapgood, the boy they all forgot!

Of course, he didn’t exactly figure out anything bright. When he heard the noise, he jumped out of bed and ran down there in his pajamas, and began throwing things in, so they could grab them and be saved from drowning. He threw in a couple of spare paddles that were standing there, and some cushions, and a couple of recliners, things like that. But the iron anchor he threw in hit the hip’ between the eyes, and that ended it. The State cops got there about that time, and hauled them out, and then they all sat on the float and told each other what they thought of them. The sergeant had to give them a call...

Well, it looked like everybody had lost. Of course after they fished her out, the girl didn’t have any checks or contracts or anything else. They were in her handbag, and they didn’t get that. So Hornison didn’t know where he was on his double-cross, and Polly didn’t know where she was on her double-cross, and Kennelly didn’t know where he was about Polly, and the girl didn’t know where she was about Hornison. All they knew was they hated each other with a hate supreme. After the others had gone back to the clubhouse, Polly polished off Kennelly. “I’m through, Tim! To think it was right in our hand — we were in the money at last, and you had to throw it away for the first girl that came along when my back was turned! I’d never be able to forget it. Good-by, Tim.”

“You feel like a swim?”

“So you think a little swim under the stars would fix it all up. I’m sorry. I don’t feel like a swim.”

“When he takes a girl out in a tippy boat, a guy takes some precautions. That is, if he’s got any sense.”

“What?”

“Like looping a handkerchief through her handbag and slipping it over the strut. If we were to tread water a little bit, we might get our feet on that canoe.”

“Do you think I would really tread water for it with a conceited ham that thinks every woman is nuts about him that ever looks at him?”

“Yeah, that’s just what I think.”

“Well, that’s just what I’m going to do. Come here, you sap! Put your arms around me and kiss me.”

The checks and contracts were a little waterlogged, but they did the work. When they proved that he had tried to shortchange them to the tune of three hundred and seventy-five dollars a week, Hornison settled and settled quick. They got their two grand and it took nine weeks of shooting. But don’t blame me if you don’t like the picture. Me, I’m not so keen on the animal stuff.

(Redbook, March 1936)

Everything But the Truth

It would be idle to deny that when Edwin Hope moved from Annapolis to Fullerton he definitely promoted himself. Around Annapolis he had been in no way unusual. But when his father got the big estate to manage, and decided to transfer his legal practice to Fullerton, and then moved the whole family there, Edwin’s status underwent a rapid and altogether startling change.

It started innocently enough. Among these boys in Fullerton he detected great curiosity about the more cosmopolitan town he had left, and particularly about that seat of learning, the United States Naval Academy. So he recited the main facts, not once but repeatedly: the puissance of the football team, the excellence of the band, the beauty of the regiment when reviewed by an admiral of the fleet, the prodigiousness of the feats performed at the annual gymkhana, the rationale of the sword ceremony as conducted in June Week. When skepticism reared its ugly head, he scotched it with a citation from the statutes: “Let me in? Sure they let me in. Let me in free. They gotta let me in, any time I want to go... Gov-ment propity.”

But by the end of a week the temptation became almost irresistible to cheat a little; to share, in some reflected degree, the glories he recounted. His audience was not entirely male. Sitting with him on the back stoop of the handsome house his father had taken, there was first of all a pulchritudinous creature by the name of Phyllis, who was about his own age, which was twelve, and certainly not bored by his company. Then there was a red-haired boy by the name of Roger, who had assumed Phyllis to be his own chattel. The others were of both sexes and divided into two factions: the scoffers, headed by Roger; and the true believers, headed by Phyllis, who heard each new tale with gasps and gurgles of appreciation. The males were almost solidly scoffers. It was from the females that Edwin got real support.

His first lapse from truth came as a slip. He had been expounding the might of the navy crew — its size, its stamina, its speed. And then he added: “Boy, I’ll say they’re fast. I’ll say they can lift that old shell through the water! Believe me, you part your hair in the middle when you ride in that thing!”

Roger bristled. “What do you mean, you? When did you ever ride in a shell?”

There could be only one answer: “Plenty of times.”

“When?”

“You heard me. Plenty of times.”

“You’re a liar. You never been in one! Part your hair in the middle — don’t you know they ride backwards in a shell?”

“You’re telling me?”

“Them seats are on rollers: there’s no place to sit! No place for anybody except them crew men. Yah, you never been in a shell! Where did you sit? Tell us that!”

“Cox.”

“What?”

Roger said it before he realized his error. But he said it. He betrayed he didn’t know what a cox was. The others laughed. Edwin smiled pityingly. “Cox. Coxswain. The guy that steers.”

“You steered the navy crew?”

“Not regular. They use a cadet for that. But sometimes they want a little warm-up before the coach shows up, and they got to have a cox. A cox, he’s got to be light. I suppose maybe that’s why they picked me. The cox, he rides frontwards, so he can see where he’s going... ‘Stroke!.. Stroke!.. Stroke!’”

He imitated the bark of a coxswain, illustrating with his hands the technique of the tiller ropes, and let the echo die in the back yard before he yawned and added: “That’s why he parts his hair in the middle.”

His exploits as a coxswain, it need hardly be added, were completely imaginary. Yet it was but a step to equally imaginary exploits as a diver. He spoke feelingly one time of the fine satisfaction to be felt when one came in after a spin with the crew, plunged from the boathouse roof, swam briefly in the Severn, and then cool, clean, and refreshed, went home to a gigantic dinner. This provoked such a storm of protest and involved him in such a grueling quiz about the navy boathouse that he had to shift his ground. He did not yield one inch on the dive, but he did think it well to move the fable into a locale where a certain vagueness might be permissible.

“The boathouse — heck, that wasn’t nothing! All that stuff, that was in the spring. They go away on their cruise in June. Guy don’t hardly get warmed up by then — don’t really feel like diving. But in the summertime — say, that Annapolis gang really gets going then!”

“Yeah, and what do they do?”

“I’m telling you. They dive.”

“Off the boathouse roof, hey?”

“The boathouse roof? Say, that wouldn’t interest that gang. Off whatever they can find, so it’s high. Steamboat — right off her pilothouse. Schooner — off her cross-trees. Anywheres. They don’t care.”

“What schooner?”

“Any schooner.”

“What’s the name of the schooner?” they persisted.

“Boys, you got me there. There’s so many boats in Annapolis harbor I couldn’t tell you the names of them. Schooners, sloops, canoes, bug-eyes, destroyers, battleships — anything you want. They even got seaplanes.”

“And you dove off a seaplane too, did you?”

Surfeited with success, he let opponent take a trick, merely to be merciful. “No, I never did. Those things, they only draw about six inches of water, and they generally anchor them over on the flats. You dive off them, you’re li’ble to break your neck.”

He puckered his mouth in what he conceived to be a look of vast wisdom. “Believe me, when you’re up high you gotta be sure what’s down there. That’s one thing you guys better remember if you ever expect to do any diving. It better be deep.”

Then in a day or two, as a fine surprise, his mother announced that Wally Bowman was coming to visit him. Wally had been his own particular freckle-faced pal back in Annapolis. But here, after being met at the steamboat, fed ice cream, and lodged regally in the spare bed, Wally developed ratlike yellow-bellied tendencies. Admitted to the society of the back stoop, he at once formed a hot treasonable friendship with Roger, and betrayed the stark and bitter truth.

“Wally, he says you never been in a shell.”

“Yah, what does he know? His mother never let him out of the yard for fear the dogs would bite him.”

“Wally, he says every time you went near the navy boathouse they chased you away.”

“Chased him away, you mean.”

“Wally, he says you can’t even dive at all.”

“How would he know? That Annapolis gang, the real Annapolis gang, they wouldn’t even let him come along! He’s nothing but a sissy!”

“Wally, he says—”

“Sissy! Sissy! Sissy!”

Even the girls wavered in their allegiance, for Wally knew the sailors’ hornpipe. The whole back yard became a sort of Pinafore deck, with dresses, curls, and ribbons flouncing to the siren measure. Only Phyllis, lovely Phyllis, remained stanch. But one time, when he retired in a rage and then returned unexpectedly, even she was out there, her shoes off, kicking about in socklets and pulling foolishly on imaginary halyards.

School opened, and the weather turned bright and hot. Wally stayed on, partly because the Annapolis schools didn’t open until a week later. Edwin took advantage of the change in weather to make a dramatic entrance into the new school and thus calk his leaking prestige. That is, he wore his “work suit.” This was a white gob’s uniform, very popular with the boys around Annapolis, and still more popular with their mothers, since it could be bought cheaply in any navy-supply store. The effect was a knockout. There were gibes from Roger, but they quickly died. Phyllis admired it loudly, and so did the rest of the female contingent.

But when, after the morning session, Edwin repaired to the drugstore, flushed and triumphant, for a cooling drink, who should be sitting there but Wally in his work suit. It was too much to be borne. He pushed Wally from the stool. Wally retorted with a sock in the eye. He retorted with a butt in the stomach. Mr. Nevers, the druggist, retorted with a clip on the ear for them both and a lecture on how to behave. Edwin climbed on a stool and sullenly ordered his drink. Roger came in with several boys, detected the tension, and tried to get an account of the fracas from Wally. Phyllis came in with some girls, and there was excited twittering. Several grown-ups came in, among them Mr. Charlie Hand with Miss Ruth Downey. Edwin paid no attention to anything until Phyllis asked him excitedly if he wanted to go swimming.

“No!”

“But we’re going down to Mortimer’s! Mr. Charlie Hand is going to take us down, he and Ruth Downey! Aw, come on, Edwin! It’s so hot, and you’ll love it!”

He had answered her out of the choler of his mood; but now sober judgment spoke and told him that, in view of his boasts and claims, about the last thing he should do was go swimming.

“Water’s too cold.”

“Aw, it’s not cold! Look what a hot day it is!”

“After all that rain, be colder than ice.”

“Aw, Edwin, come on! We’re going right after lunch.”

“Anyway, it’s too late in the year. Swimming’s over.”

“Gee, Edwin, I think you’re mean!”

He glanced in the direction of Wally and delivered what he intended to be his final shot: “Me go swimming? Say, that’s funny. With that thing on my hands? Could I ask you to take him along? That dose of poison ivy? Me go swimming — a fat chance!”

Phyllis babbled excitedly that of course they could take Wally along. But Wally cut her off: “Count me out, Phyllis, I wouldn’t go swimming. Not in the same river with him. I don’t want to catch no smallpox. Oh, no. Not me!”

This abnegation was so unlike Wally that Edwin was astonished. So was Roger, and he set up a noisy caveat. But Wally was not to be swayed. “No, I’m out. Just have your swim without me. And anyway, me and Roger has got something on today a whole lot more important than swimming.” Roger suddenly subsided, and Edwin had a sweet vision of the romantic afternoon he could have with Phyllis, once his two tormentors were out of the way.

“Well, in that case, Phyllis — O. K. Glad to go.”

Mortimer’s turned out to be a big farmhouse three or four miles below the town. A housekeeper appeared, waved a hand vaguely toward the rear, and they all scrambled back there, the girls into one shed, the boys into another. Edwin, with a disk harrow for a locker, was the last one out, and found Phyllis waiting for him. In a red swimming suit, he thought she looked enchantingly beautiful, and he felt an impulse to dawdle, to take her hand, to run off and chase butterflies. So, apparently, did she; but at the end of thirty seconds of dawdling they found themselves strolling slowly to the beach.

As they stepped from the trees to the sand, Edwin’s heart skipped a beat. There, lying on their sides, were two bicycles, one his own, the other Roger’s. And there, beside the bicycles, and not in swimming suits, were Wally and Roger, shark grins on their faces. One glance at the river told him the reason for the grins. Not a hundred yards away, tied up at the Mortimer private wharf and busily discharging fertilizer, was a schooner. She was the most nauseating schooner Edwin had ever seen. Pink dust covered her deck, from the fertilizer. Her three masts rose out of a hull devoid of shape, and her topmasts were missing. Her bowsprit was a makeshift, obviously a replacement for the original member. It consisted of one long round timber, squared off at the end, and held in place, at a crazy uptilted angle, by iron collars to which were attached wire cables that ran back to the foremast. Accustomed to the trim craft of Annapolis harbor, Edwin sickened at the sight of her, and yet he knew full well her import. She was, presumably, his favorite take-off for diving. He had been sucked into a neat, deliberate, and horrible trap, and he needed but one guess as to the designer of it. It was Wally, who had come up-river on the steamboat; Wally, who knew that schooner was lying there; Wally, who had declined the swimming invitation and thus enticed him to his doom.

They didn’t challenge him at once. They jumped on their bicycles and began riding around the wet sand, whooping. Mr. Charlie Hand rebuked them; but they replied they hadn’t come down with him, that it was a free country and they would do as they pleased. Mr. Hand, powerless to do anything about it, walked up the beach with Miss Downey, and at that point Edwin was so ill-advised as to start for the water. This brought action. They wheeled around, cut him off, and got off their bicycles. “Oh, no, you don’t.”

“What do you mean, ‘No, I don’t’?”

“You see her, don’t you? The schooner?”

“Well?”

“Well? You going to dive off her or not?”

He looked at the schooner, gulped, grimly maintained his brave front. “Why, sure — if that’s all that’s bothering you.”

He gained a brief respite when the black foreman of stevedores chased them away. But it was very brief. In a half hour, just when he had eluded them by jerking the handle bar of one bicycle and joined Phyllis in the water, there came a loud put-put-put, and the schooner’s kicker boat hove into view, the captain at the tiller, the mate in the bow, and the Negro stevedores squatting comfortably on her sides, headed for the town. The unloading was over. The schooner was deserted.

“Come on!”

The reckoning had come, and he knew it. He left the water with a fine show of contempt, and headed for the wharf. Behind him, incredulous, the other children strung out in a little procession, the girls whispering, “Is he really going to do it?” This was so flattering that he felt a wild lunge of hope: perhaps, by some chance, he could shut his eyes and get off headfirst. But his legs felt stiff and queer, and he felt a hysterical impulse to kick at the two bicycles which wheeled relentlessly along, one on one side of him, one on the other.

“And off the bowsprit, see? Because it’s high. You remember that, don’t you? You like it high.”

He walked down the wharf, boarded the ugly hulk. The fertilizer scratched his feet and proved to have an unexpected stench. He made his way past rusty gear to the bow, stepped up and out on the bowsprit. But the angle at which it was tilted made climbing difficult, and he had to pull himself along by the cables. The little group on shore waded down beside the wharf, the better to see. He got his fingers around the last cable, the one that held the end of the timber, and then for the first time he looked down. His stomach contracted violently. The water seemed cruelly remote, as though it were part of another world. He knew that by no conceivable effort of will could he dive off, even jump off. Quickly he sat down, lest he fall, and straddled the timber with his legs. At once he slid backward, to fetch up with a sickening squoosh against the next cable.

He held on, flogged desperate wits. And then he hit on a plan. Up the beach were Mr. Hand and Miss Downey, sitting in the sand. If he started a jawing match, that might cause such a ruckus that Mr. Hand would have to step in and order him down. Roger gave him an opening: “Well? What’s the matter? Why don’t you dive?”

“I dive when I feel like it.”

“You can’t dive — that’s why.”

“Aw! Suppose you come out and make me dive! I dare you to do it! Le’s see you do it!”

Roger hesitated. The bowsprit looked as high to him as it did to Edwin. But Wally nodded coldly, and he started out, Wally just behind him. He passed the first cable, then the second. He grasped the third, the one that braced Edwin, who — placed disadvantageously with his back to the enemy — cast an anxious glance toward Charlie Hand. Roger saw it.

“Yah! Hoping Charlie Hand will make you come down! Look at momma’s boy, scared to jump off!”

“Yah! Yah! Yah! Le’s see you make me dive!”

Edwin yelled it at the top of his lungs, and still the enamored Mr. Hand didn’t move. Roger, clinging to the cable, eased himself down, preparatory to shoving the poltroon in front of him into the water. Then, not being barefooted as Edwin was, he slipped. He toppled off the bowsprit. But he hung there; for his hand had slid down the cable as he fell, and now held him fast, jammed against the collar. He screamed. Wally screamed. All the children screamed.

“Drop! Drop! It won’t hurt you!”

“I can’t drop! My hand’s caught!”

Edwin knew it was caught, for there was that horrible sound in Roger’s voice, and there was Mr. Hand sprinting down the beach, and there was the hand wriggling against him. Wally yelled at him in a frenzy: “Pull up! Pull up! Move! Can’t you give the guy a chance?” But pull up he could not. He was wedged there, could reach nothing to pull up by, could only tremble and feel sick.

Wally reached for Roger’s hand, and then he slipped. But as he fell he clutched and for one instant caught Roger’s foot. The added weight pulled the tortured hand clear, and the two of them plunged into the water. Involuntarily Edwin looked, and then felt the bowsprit turning under him. He hung upside down above the water, clasping the bowsprit with his legs, and then he too plunged down, down, down through miles of sunlight.

Next thing he knew, there was green before his eyes, then dark green, then green-black, and his shoulder was numb from some terrible blow. Then the green appeared again; he was coming up. When he broke water, Wally was beside him, yelling. All the bitterness of the last few days rose up within him. He hit Wally as hard as he could in the mouth. Unexpectedly, he could get no force in the blow, there in the water. He seized Wally and pushed him under. Then he treated him to a compound duck, a feat learned in Annapolis. That is to say, he pulled up his feet, placed them on Wally’s shoulders, and drove down — hard. He looked around for Roger. Roger was nowhere to be seen. He turned toward shore.

It was the look of horror on Mr. Charlie Hand’s face that woke him up to what had really happened — what Wally had been yelling before he was ducked. Roger was drowning. That blow on the shoulder — he got that when he fell on Roger, and Roger was knocked out — and was drowning!

He turned, tried to remember what you did when people were drowning. He saw something red, grabbed it. It was Roger’s hair. His other hand touched something; he grabbed that too. It was the collar of Wally’s work suit. Wally came up, coughing with a dreadful whooping sound, then went under again. Terror seized Edwin. As a result of that duck, now Wally was drowning too. He shifted his grip on Roger, so he had him by the shirt. He held on desperately to Wally. Then he flattened out on his back and began driving with his legs for shore. Water slipped over his face, and he began to gasp. Still he held on. The water that slipped over his face wasn’t white now — it was green; he was going under at least six inches with every kick. Then something jerked his shoulder. It was Charlie Hand. “All right, Edwin — I’ve got them!”

The events of the next few hours were very confused in Edwin’s mind. There was his own collapse on the beach, the farm hands working furiously over himself, Wally, and Roger; the mad dash to the hospital in Mr. Charlie Hand’s car; the nurses, the doctors, the fire department inhalator, the shrill telephoning between mothers. It wasn’t until the three of them were lodged wanly in a special room, and a nurse came in, around six o’clock with the afternoon paper, that life again began to assume a semblance of order. For there was his picture, squarely on page one, and there was an account of the episode, circumstantial and complete:

...Then, seeing the plight of his companions, young Hope dived to their assistance. Breaking the drowning grip of one boy with a blow in the face, he seized both of them and swam with them to the shore. Rushed to the hospital by Charles Hand, local law student who is spending the vacation with his parents, they are now out of danger thanks to...

The paper passed from bed to bed. Each of them read, and silence followed. It was not broken until Phyllis arrived carrying three bunches of flowers. Then it was Roger who spoke, and he spoke grimly:

“Did he dive?”

Phyllis was indignant. “Oh, my, Roger, don’t you see it in the paper? Of course he dived.”

“I was under water myself. I never seen it.”

“I saw it. It was a beautiful dive.”

Wally nodded with large and genuine magnanimity. “O. K. That’s all we want to know. If he dived — O. K.”

Phyllis beamed. “Oh, my, Edwin! Don’t you feel grand?”

Edwin indeed felt grand. Such is the faith of twelve that he believed every word of it. His soul was at peace.

(Liberty, July 17, 1937)

The Visitor

Looking back at it, sorting his recollections into something resembling order, Greg Hayes is sure now that the first warning he had, of a presence there in the room, was a smell — a pungent, exotic reek that was strange, yet oddly familiar. He remembers knowing, though not yet fully awake, that this could not be a dream, as some article had once informed him that “While visual images are constantly reproduced in sleep, olfactory sensations never are, unless caused by external stimulus.” At this point, wondering about the stimulus, he thinks he opened his eyes. But then came a blank in consciousness, followed by an interval of staring at two beautiful, lambent orbs; and he suspects that this was produced by hypnotic narcosis, during which sight functioned, but thought was wholly suspended. Then music sounded, some distance off, in the night, unlocking his mind, somehow, so he regained control of his will. With an effort, he shifted his gaze from these twin luminescences, with their lovely, shifting colors, so suggestive of northern lights, to probe the half-dark of the room. So doing, he became aware of a face, an expression of deep perplexity, and an unmistakable pattern of stripes, which zigged and zagged and tapered to fine points. Only then, at last, did he realize that facing him was a tiger.

Even then, he has no memory of panic, or even of undue alarm. He knew, of course, how the tiger got in: it was through the open window, where he hadn’t put in the screen. He had taken the storm windows off after Easter, as always, but when it came to the screens, he had clownishly said he was “bushed” — “Yah, yah, yah, they can wait till tomorrow, can’t they? Flies don’t come out in the spring.” But when tomorrow came, so also did a prospect, to whom he showed a house, for Bridleway Downs, Inc., of which he was general manager. Other tomorrows brought still other prospects, and he kept postponing the screens. And he knew where the tiger came from: the Biedermann-Rossi Circus, whose band even now was playing the music he’d heard, The Skaters’ Waltz, actually, which was the cue for the flying trapeze act that wound up the main performance, proving the night was wearing on. He himself was responsible for the show’s being there, as for $1,000 he had rented them their lot, earning his directors’ thanks, but the neighbors’ deep resentment. They regarded the invasion as vulgar, an infringement on “exclusiveness.” Rita, his wife, went quite a lot further, denouncing it as a “damned nuisance.” Having slept not at all the preceding night on account of the bellowing, neighing, squealing, roaring, and trumpeting that had gone on until dawn, she had moved, “for the duration,” into the children’s room, which was in the same wing, but in the front part of the house — which explained why he was here alone. Thus, all antecedents of the case, its causative factors, so to speak, wore the color of chickens, his own ugly brood, coming home to roost. And yet he insists that at this time he felt no sense of guilt, of remorse, or of responsibility for what had happened.

Instead, he felt stimulated, full of a faith in God, in the nice way things turn out if you just give them a chance, in Kipling’s If—. So, proudly keeping his head when all about him would unquestionably have been losing theirs and blaming it on him, he hitched up on one elbow, said: “Haya?” His voice seeming firm, his visitor pleased, he elaborated: “How they treating you, fellow? What you doing in here?” The tiger, relaxing his baffled look, advanced. He was already between the beds, no more than a foot away, but now he moved closer, exploring Greg with his nose. Reaching out, Greg gave the great head a pat. He was astonished at its warmth, its silky softness, its sociability. It pushed against his hand, turned its jowl for a scratch. He obliged. Then casually, not hurrying, he slid a foot from under the cover, on the other side of the bed, and got up. The tiger, surprised, cocked two small ears at him. “Okay, Big Boy,” said Greg. “Stay right where you are — and we’ll have your friends up here to take you home in the fractional part of a jiffy.” So saying he stepped to the door, remembering with relief that it opened inwards, so that once he closed it after him there was nothing the tiger could do, short of battering it apart, to open it. He got a hand on the knob, pulled, and knifed through. But the tiger, in the fractional part of a jiffy, hopped over the bed to follow. “My God,” says Greg, awestruck in retrospect, “you got no idea what it was like. You couldn’t believe it — not if you saw it you couldn’t — when he went up in the air and came sailing at me. It was like some genie, rising out of a bottle, in one of the Eastern fables.” Quickly he closed the door, gasped when it creaked from a heavy bump. He waited, had a moment of fear when the knob began to clack, apparently from an inquisitive paw. When that subsided, he went to call the police.

The hall extension was just a few steps away, and it wasn’t until he lifted the receiver that he felt his first qualm — of retributive justice, of punishment, richly deserved and rapidly closing in. For he had a two-party phone, taken for reasons that were slightly too smart. “I happen to know,” he had told Rita, “that the Milsteads are next on the list to share a line, and with loud-speakers like them listening in, who needs advertising?” She hadn’t liked it, but he had gone ahead anyway, and the idea had paid off, handsomely. Whenever a deal was tight, he simply called his office and, when he heard a click, began telling his girl about “that other prospect we have, you know, the one offering a bonus — personal slipperoo to me, cumsha payola cum louder I can’t quite hear you yet — if I’ll swing this thing to him. So ring him, will you? He’s not quite the type we want, but if he raises the ante a little, who am I to pass judgment?” Time after time, after some such phony dialogue, overheard by Mrs. Milstead and broadcast to all and sundry, he had closed a sale to advantage, and had come to regard the arrangement as one of his minor triumphs. It had one slight flaw: little Shelley Milstead visited on the phone, and had formed the unfortunate habit of leaving the receiver off. It was off now, as the mocking yelps of the “howler” at once informed him.

Or was it? There was a chance, before he charged outside in his pajamas, barefoot, that the receiver was off here, and he raced to check the kitchen extension. It was in the other wing of the one-story house, but he reached it in seconds, his heart pounding now, partly from a dawning sense of guilt, partly from concern at noises he could hear: the crash of something heavy, later identified as a floor lamp joggled by passing stripes, and an intermittent whining. It crossed his mind that the tiger sounded like Lassie, a most surprising thing, but this was a fleeting impression, instantly dispelled by a jolting fact: the kitchen receiver was on. After listening once more, hoping the howler had stopped, he clapped the receiver in place again and started fast for the front door. He was scampering across the living room when that terrible scream reached him, followed by snarls that shook the house. He knew then that Rita had gone to the bedroom to see what was going on. And he knew his moment had come.

Plunging back there somehow, he found her with her back to the door, in red kimono, her hands clutched to her face in horror, the tiger at her feet. He was stretched on his belly, obviously ready to spring. Greg doesn’t remember thinking, or grasping the portent of what he saw. All in one frantic heave, he flung Rita out in the hall, slammed the door shut, and ducked — as the tiger went through the air. The crash split the door — Greg swears he saw the thready white line of raw wood. It was followed by savage barks, rising to a roar, as a paw smashed at the knob. Outside, in the hall, Rita let go with a scream that wrung his heart and at the same time made him angry, as it balked his effort to communicate — “And matter of fact,” he says, “when the children got in it, soon as her screeching touched off their screeching, and the tiger opened his cutout, you couldn’t hear yourself think.” He kept yelling, “Rita! Rita! Will you for Pete’s sake shut up? Will you listen to what I’m saying? Quit it, cut it out!”

“Greg,” she sobbed at last. “There’s a tiger in that room! Come out of there! Come out this very minute!”

“I know there’s a tiger in here!” he bellowed. “I can see the tiger, I don’t have to be told! And if I was blind and couldn’t see, I could hear yet. I’m not deaf. He’s got me blocked. Rita, do you hear me? I can’t come out! Now will you knock off with that chatter and do what I tell you to?”

“I’m going to call the police!”

“You can’t call, you got to go! Shelley—”

But he heard the dial rattle, and then came her despairing wail; “Greg! The receiver’s off! That Shelley Milstead—”

“I been telling you! Go get the cops, Rita!”

“I will, soon as I—”

“Now! And take the children out!”

“Yes, Greg! I’m on my way!”

He wasn’t at all nice to her, losing his temper in spite of himself, and he felt miserably ashamed. But in retrospect, he thinks his churlishness saved his life. For the tiger was focused on her with a bloodcurdling single-mindedness, taking her scream as a personal affront, and apparently concluding, from the angry shouts in his ear, that he had here an ally who shared his feeling about her. So instead of turning on Greg, he kept appealing for his help with little impatient barks, in between his blows at the knob. He wanted out the door, that much was clear, but Greg saw his chance to make use of this blazing obsession and take himself out the window. Keeping well to the rear, he sprang silently on the radiator, hooked his fingers on the window so he could pull it shut after him as he stepped out on the sill, before jumping down to the grass. There was a risk that the paws would smash it, but just possibly its metal frames, to eyes used to a cage, would make a psychological barrier. At any rate, it was better than nothing, and might serve temporarily. But as he lifted his foot to go through, Rita’s voice drifted in from the back yard: “Come, Lou! Annette! Hurry!”

The tiger heard, and Greg barely had time to snap the window shut and jump down out of the way. The tiger, in mid-charge, came to a sliding stop, and put out a probing paw. Touching glass, he wheeled on his ally. Greg has never been sure why jaws aimed at his face should have clamped down on his leg, but thinks the rug, shooting out from under the spring, may have been the reason, or perhaps his own backward spring may have had something to do with it. At any rate, when the fangs sank, it was in his thigh above the knee, and it was so horrible he screamed at the top of his lungs. “But,” he recalls, “it wasn’t exactly from pain. That must have been bad, but I don’t rightly remember it. What got me was this senseless, seething rage — over nothing, because I’d done no harm. I hit him, I did. With my fist, right on the end of his nose.” He doubts if these blows had much effect, but one of them, on rebound, banged the light switch, and the wall bracket lights came on. The tiger, terrified, let go, springing back to face them. Greg, having managed to hold his feet, headed for the door. But his leg, numb from the mauling it had taken, didn’t function. He collapsed against the wall, and then, half-hopping, half-staggering, made the bed and fell over it.

He lay for some moments supine, while the tiger roared at the lights, loudly proclaiming his defiance, but keeping his distance. They flanked the door, one pair on each side, so to face them he had to face it. Yet, with all the windows now closed, it was Greg’s only chance, and he racked his brain for a way to reach it. Growing sick from the wet blood on his pajama leg, he suddenly remembered a skit on TV, in which a tramp chased by a lion gained a few moments by comically undressing in flight and flinging his clothes at his pursuer, who dallied briefly to bite them. Greg threw the bedding, so that the whole roll — sheet, blanket, and spread — caught the tiger in the face and had the hoped-for effect. A striped whirlwind tore at the cloth, especially the blanket, ripping it to shreds. Greg jumped up, caught the chest of drawers, balanced against it, then slid along the wall by a series of one-legged hops and grabbed the knob. Weak, no doubt, from the battering, it came off in his hand.

Trapped, “I wrote off my misspent life,” is the way he remembers it now. “I called it a total loss, but just for the hell of it, as salvage, I meant to sell it for all I could get. I hadn’t forgotten that bite, or all that rotten guff, so uncalled for.” He assumed, perhaps correctly, that the next assault would come at the locus of blood, and as he steeled himself for the bite, determined “to let him have it on the nose or ears or what-have-you, but somewhere.” He was leaning against the chest, when he happened to think of his scissors, the utility pair he kept in it. With them, he “could let him have it in the eyes, maybe blinding him, so I’d have it evened up.” Not taking his gaze off his foe, he opened the top drawer and slipped his hand in. But his fingers probed helplessly, on account of the plastic bags that came on his suits from the cleaners. These, after what he had read in the papers about children being smothered by them, he had folded and tucked away, in this same drawer, meaning from time to time to burn them. But, as with the screens, the time hadn’t come, and they now stuffed the drawer so that no scissors or anything could be rooted out from under them — except by thorough search. Frantic, overwhelmed now by a stifling sense of guilt, he began yanking them out in handfuls and pitching them on the bed. And then he had a hellish idea.

He picked one up, spread it by the corners, held it out, said: “Hey! Hey — you!” The tiger, still worrying the scraps of blanket, looked up, then advanced on this shimmering thing, so new to his experience. He put out a paw, touched it, backed off from its limp softness. Then, as Greg, remembering those sniffs at first, made himself hold steady and continued to offer the lure, he pushed out a curious nose. “It was black,” says Greg, “and wet.” And what he prayed for happened: an inhalation, and two dimples in the plastic, over the black nostrils. They vanished, and the tiger snorted. But as the nose pushed out again, they reappeared. And this time, instead of a snort, there came a flabby report. “It was like the noise a toy balloon makes,” Greg remembers, “except that instead of a pop it was more like a plop — of the plastic, going down his throat.” Next thing Greg saw was a white belly in front of his eyes, as the tiger reared straight up, and his head hit the ceiling — “that’s right, I heard it bump.” Then five hundred pounds of cat crashed to the floor, coughing, scratching at the plastic, writhing in frantic contortions to get rid of the choking stuff. Greg turned into a wild thing himself, fighting to hold his gain. Grabbing up more plastic, he shook out another bag, watched his chance and slapped it over the terrible jaws, now gaping in strangled agony, the red tongue bulging out. The kicking, scratching and writhing went on, and so did he. At one point, he swears, “I put a hammer lock on — grabbed him from behind, with a nelson on his neck, while I jammed more plastic in.” He got ripped unmercifully, but paid no need, though bloody from head to foot. “I was afraid, but not yellowed-out,” he says. “Actually, I think my belly came back to life some minutes before, when I punched him in the snoot.”

How long this went on has been figured: scientists doubt if the tiger, his respiration shut off, could have lasted more than a minute before beginning to weaken. At the end of some such period, though to Greg it seemed much longer, the writhing subsided to jerks, the jerks to feeble twitches, as the eyes started to glaze, the tongue to turn white, and the paws to die off to weak little slaps. Greg, watching, wiped himself off on the sheet, which the tiger was lying on. He felt no elation, he would like to make clear, only compassion, and a surge of the same affection he had felt at the outset, when the inquisitive nose explored him. He watched the striped flank, still pulsating in its futile surge for air, and drew the sheet over the chest, so its corners met back of the shoulders. He twisted them into a knot and tugged convulsively. An inch or two at a time, he dragged the tiger over, and having just enough sheet left, tied him up to the radiator pipe, where it entered the floor.

As he leaned back to pant from this exertion, a voice called from outside: “Mr. Hayes? Are you there, Mr. Hayes?”

“Yeah,” he quavered. “I’m here.”

“You all right, Mr. Hayes? Police talking.”

“Oh, I’m fine,” he said. “Yeah, I’m all right.”

“How about that tiger, sir?”

“Tiger’s fine too.”

“Then open the window, please. We got a rifle—”

But at that, from half-stupor, Greg came to life with a rush. Lurching to his knees, he flung open the window, seeing for the first time the lights of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances, to say nothing of a throng of people that was rapidly becoming a mob. But disregarding all that, he yelled: “Lay off with that gun! Don’t shoot into this room!”

“Mr. Hayes, it’s the city police!”

“I don’t care, I said lay off! You keep away till I tell you to come! Is Mr. Biedermann there?”

“Here! Here, Mr. Hayes. Right here!”

“I got your tiger tied up.”

“You... what?”

“I say I got him tied!”

“Are you kidding, are you nuts?”

“I’m not kidding, and if I’m nuts I still got him tied! Get some men, get some rope, get a pole, but make it quick! He’s dying. I had to choke him, but he might still be saved — if you cut out the talk and step on it!”

“Hold everything, Mr. Hayes!”

At this point, he heard Rita call, and reassured her with a shout. Then he foundered to the closet to put a robe on. Now, it strikes him as ironical that he could have saved himself all along by ducking in there in the first place and shutting himself in. “But what you didn’t think of in time doesn’t do you much good later.” As soon as his bloody garb was covered, the door of the room burst open, and the police were there, with Mr. Biedermann, a trainer, a keeper, a dozen circus roustabouts, and a swarm of press photographers. He took charge himself, urging Mr. Biedermann, “Tie him up — get hitches over his feet, then slip your pole through — and out with him, to his cage. Soon as he’s in there I’ll do what I can to save him.” It was done quicker than he thought possible — the keeper winding the rope on, Mr. Biedermann slipping the pole through, one of those used on the tent, and grabbing a pillow case, which he slipped over the lolling head, to protect the men who, with quick, half-running strides, hustled their burden out, to a cage that had been backed up to the yard by hand. They flung the tiger in, and Mr. Biedermann threw off the ropes and snatched off the pillow case.

Then Greg, still having had no chance to explain what had happened, climbed in the cage alone. On the floor was a piece of bone, the remnants of a knuckle, lovingly licked to the size of a tennis ball. He seized it, jammed it between the jaws, well back so they couldn’t close. Then, grabbing the tongue with one hand and pulling it out, he shoved the other hand down the rough throat and began pulling out plastic. He got several pieces, threw them aside. Then at last he touched what he wanted: the first piece he had used, that had popped down the great gullet. Pulling slowly, as carefully as a surgeon, taking no chance on breaking it, he drew it out, a limp, sticky twist that glittered in the glare of headlights. He waited, put his hand on the quivering flank, and when it lifted, and a gagging, sad moan told of a breath entering the lungs, he patted the head, and climbed out.

As Mr. Biedermann reached for his hand and the keeper banged the door shut, Rita gathered him in her arms. But the two little girls screamed at what he looked like.

It so happened, when his hospital term was finished, that he came out a national celebrity, with TV hungry to present him, along with the tiger, whose name, it turned out, was Rajah. So the two of them appeared. The emcee did most of the talking, with Greg saying: “Yeah, that’s how it happened, sure did.” But then Rajah put in his two cents’ worth. At first, recognizing Greg, and doing obeisance to his conqueror, he slunk back in his cage and cowered. Then Greg, leaning to the bars, stuck his nose out. Rajah, after staring, jumped out and stuck his nose out. When the two noses touched, it was a tremendous kick for the ten million kids who were watching, and also a kick for Greg. “It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it,” he reflects, “to save the life of a friend? But then when he thanks you for it, that’s really something. I’ve heard of that pal’s handshake, but that kiss through the bars, that big wet nose touching my nose, meant just as much to me — maybe more.”

(Esquire, September 1961)