The Collected Dashiell Hammett

The Barber and His Wife

Brief Stories, December 1922, as Peter Collinson

Each morning at seven-thirty the alarm clock on the table beside their bed awakened the Stemlers to perform their daily comedy; a comedy that varied from week to week in degree only. This morning was about the mean.

Louis Stemler, disregarding the still ringing clock, leaped out of bed and went to the open window, where he stood inhaling and exhaling with a great show of enjoyment — throwing out his chest and stretching his arms voluptuously. He enjoyed this most in the winter, and would prolong his stay before the open window until his body was icy under his pajamas. In the coast city where the Stemlers lived the morning breezes were chill enough, whatever the season, to make his display of ruggedness sufficiently irritating to Pearl.

Meanwhile, Pearl had turned off the alarm and closed her eyes again in semblance of sleep. Louis was reasonably confident that his wife was still awake; but he could not be certain. So when he ran into the bath-room to turn on the water in the tub, he was none too quiet.

He then re-entered the bed-room to go through an elaborate and complicated set of exercises, after which he returned to the bath-room, got into the tub and splashed merrily — long enough to assure any listener that to him a cold bath was a thing of pleasure. Rubbing himself with a coarse towel, he began whistling; and always it was a tune reminiscent of the war. just now “Keep the Home Fires Burning” was his choice. This was his favorite, rivaled only by “Till We Meet Again,” though occasionally he rendered “Katy,” “What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?” or “How’re You Going to Keep Them Down on the Farm?” He whistled low and flatly, keeping time with the brisk movements of the towel. At this point Pearl would usually give way to her irritation to the extent of turning over in bed, and the rustling of the sheets would come pleasantly from the bed-room to her husband’s ears. This morning as she turned she sighed faintly, and Louis, his eager ears catching the sound, felt a glow of satisfaction.

Dry and ruddy, he came back to the bed-room and began dressing, whistling under his breath and paying as little apparent attention to Pearl as she to him, though each was on the alert for any chance opening through which the other might be vexed. Long practice in this sort of warfare had schooled them to such a degree, however, that an opening seldom presented itself. Pearl was at a decided disadvantage in these morning encounters, inasmuch as she was on the defensive, and her only weapon was a pretense of sleep in the face of her husband’s posturing. Louis, even aside from his wife’s vexation, enjoyed every bit of his part in the silent wrangle; the possibility that perhaps after all she was really asleep and not witnessing his display of manliness was the only damper on his enjoyment.

When Louis had one foot in his trousers, Pearl got out of bed and into her kimono and slippers, dabbed a little warm water on her face, and went into the kitchen to prepare breakfast. In the ensuing race she forgot her slight headache. It was a point of honor with her never to rise until her husband had his trousers in his hand, and then to have his breakfast on the table in the kitchen — where they ate it — by the time he was dressed. Thanks to the care with which he knotted his necktie, she usually succeeded. Louis’s aim, of course, was to arrive in the kitchen fully dressed and with the morning paper in his hand before the meal was ready, and to be extremely affable over the delay. This morning. as a concession to a new shirt — a white silk one with broad cerise stripes — he went in to breakfast without his coat and vest, surprising Pearl in the act of pouring the coffee.

“Breakfast ready, pet?” he asked.

“It will be by the time you’re dressed,” his wife called attention to his departure from the accepted code.

And so this morning honors were about even.

Louis read the sports pages while he ate. with occasional glances at his cerise-striped sleeves. He was stimulated by the clash between the stripe and his crimson sleeve-garters. He had a passion for red, and it testified to the strength of the taboos of his ilk that he did not wear red neckties.

“How do you feel this morning, pet?” he asked after he had read what a reporter had to say about the champion’s next fight, and before he started on the account of the previous day’s ball games.

“All right.”

Pearl knew that to mention the headache would be to invite a display of superiority masked as sympathy, and perhaps an admonition to eat more beef, and certainly one to take more exercise; for Louis, never having experienced any of the ills to which the flesh is heir. was, naturally enough, of the opinion that even where such disorders were really as painful as their possessors’ manners would indicate, they could have been avoided by proper care.

Breakfast consumed, Louis lighted a cigar and addressed himself to another cup of coffee. With the lighting of the cigar Pearl brightened a little. Louis, out of consideration for his lungs, smoked without inhaling; and to Pearl this taking of smoke into the mouth and blowing it forth seemed silly and childish. Without putting it into words she had made this opinion known to her husband, and whenever he smoked at home she watched him with a quiet interest which, of all her contrivances, was the most annoying to him. But that it would have been so signal an admission of defeat, he would have given up smoking at home.

The sports sheets read — with the exceptions of the columns devoted to golf and tennis — Louis left the table, put on his vest, coat, and hat, kissed his wife, and. with his consciously buoyant step, set out for his shop. He always walked downtown in the morning, covering the twenty blocks in twenty minutes — a feat to which he would allude whenever the opportunity arose.

Louis entered his shop with a feeling of pride in no wise lessened by six years of familiarity, To him the shop was as wonderful, as beautiful, as it had been when first opened. The row of green and white automatic chairs, with white-coated barbers bending over the shrouded occupants; the curtained alcoves in the rear with white-gowned manicurists in attendance; the table laden with magazines and newspapers; the clothes-trees; the row of white enameled chairs, at this hour holding no waiting customers; the two Negro boot-blacks in their white jackets; the clusters of colored bottles; the smell of tonics and soaps and steam; and around all, the sheen of spotless tiling, porcelain and paint and polished mirrors. Louis stood just within the door and basked in all this while he acknowledged his employees’ greetings. All had been with him for more than a year now. and they called him “Lou” in just the correct tone of respectful familiarity — a tribute both to his position in their world and his geniality.

He walked the length of the shop, trading jests with his barbers — pausing for a moment to speak to George Fielding, real estate, who was having his pink face steamed preparatory to his bi-weekly massage — and then gave his coat and hat to Percy, one of the bootblacks, and dropped into Fred’s chair for his shave. Around him the odor of lotions and the hum of mechanical devices rose soothingly. Health and this... where did those pessimists get their stuff?

The telephone in the front of the shop rang, and Emil, the head-barber, called out, “Your brother wants to talk to you, Lou.”

“Tell him I’m shaving. What does he want?”

Emil spoke into the instrument; then, “He wants to know if you can come over to his office some time this morning.”

“Tell him all right!”

“Another shipment of bootleg?” Fielding asked.

“You’d be surprised,” Louis replied, in accordance with the traditional wit of barbers.

Fred gave a final pat to Louis’s face with a talcumed towel. Percy a final pat to his glowing shoes, and the proprietor stepped from the chair to hide the cerise stripes within his coat again.

“I’m going over to see Ben,” he told Emil. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

Ben Stemler, the eldest of four brothers, of which Louis was the third, was a round, pallid man, always out of breath — as if he had just climbed a long flight of steps. He was district sales-manager for a New York manufacturer, and attributed his moderate success, after years of struggling, to his doggedness in refusing to accept defeat. Chronic nephritis, with which he had been afflicted of late years, was more truly responsible for his increased prosperity, however. It had puffed out his face around his protuberant, fishy eyes, subduing their prominence, throwing kindly shadows over their fishiness, and so giving to him a more trustworthy appearance.

Ben was dictating pantingly to his stenographer when Louis entered the office. “Your favor of the... would say... regret our inability to comply... your earliest convenience.” He nodded to his brother and went on gasping. “Letter to Schneider... are at a loss to understand... our Mr. Rose... thirteenth instant... if consistent with your policy... would say... in view of the shortage of materials.”

The dictation brought to a wheezing end, he sent the stenographer on an errand, and turned to Louis.

“Hows everything?” Louis asked.

“Could be worse, Lou, but I don’t feel so good.”

“Trouble is you don’t get enough exercise. Get out and walk; let me take you down to the gym; take cold baths.”

“I know, I know,” Ben said wearily. “Maybe you’re right. But I got something to tell you — something you ought to know — but I don’t know how to go about telling you. I... that is—”

“Spit it out!” Louis was smiling. Ben probably had got into trouble of some sort.

“It’s about Pearl!” Ben was gasping now, as if he had come from an unusually steep flight of steps.

“Well?” Louis had stiffened in his chair, but the smile was still on his face. He wasn’t a man to be knocked over In the first blow he met. He had never thought of Pearl’s being unfaithful before, but as soon as Ben mentioned her name he knew that that was it. He knew it without another word from Ben; it seemed so much the inevitable thing that he wondered at his never having suspected it.

“Well?” he asked again.

Unable to hit upon a way of breaking the news gently. Ben panted it out hurriedly, anxious to have the job off his hands. “I saw her night before last! At the movies! With a man! Norman Becker! Sells for Litz & Aulitz! They left together! In his ear! Bertha was with me! She saw ’em too!”

He closed with a gasp of relief and relapsed into wheezes.

“Night before last,” Louis mused. “I was down to the fights — Kid Breen knocked out O’Toole in the second round — and I didn’t get home until after one.”

From Ben’s office to Louis’s home was a distance of twenty-four blocks. Mechanically timing himself, he found it had taken him thirty-one minutes — much of the way lay uphill — pretty good time at that. Louis had elected to walk home, he told himself, because he had plenty of time, not because he needed time to think the situation over, or anything of that sort. There was nothing to think over. This was a crystal-clear, tangible condition. He had a wife. Another man had encroached, or perhaps only attempted to, on his proprietorship. To a red-blooded he-man the solution was obvious. For these situations men had fists and muscles and courage. For these emergencies men ate beef, breathed at open windows, held memberships in athletic clubs, and kept tobacco smoke out of their lungs. The extent of the encroachment determined, the rest would be simple.

Pearl looked up in surprise from the laundering of some silk things at Louis’ entrance.

“Where were you night before last?” Mis voice was calm and steady.

“At the movies.” Pearl’s voice was too casual. The casual was not the note she should have selected — but she knew what was coming anyway.

“Who with?”

Recognizing the futility of any attempt at deception. Pearl fell back upon the desire to score upon the other at any cost — the motive underlying all their relations since the early glamour of mating had worn off.

“With a man! I went there to meet him. I’ve met him places before. He wants me to go away with him. lie reads things besides the sporting-page. He doesn’t go to prizefights. He likes the movies. He doesn’t like burlesque shows. He inhales cigarette smoke. He doesn’t think muscle’s everything a man ought to have.” Her voice rose high and shrill, with a hysterical note.

Louis cut into her tirade with a question. He was surprised by her outburst, but he was not a man to be unduly excited by his wife’s display of nerves.

“No, not yet. but if I want to I will,” Pearl answered the question with scarcely a break in her high-pitched chant. “And if I want to. I’ll go away with him. He doesn’t want beef for every meal. Me doesn’t take cold baths. He can appreciate tilings that aren’t just brutal. Me doesn’t worship his body. He—”

As Louis closed the door behind him he heard his wife’s shrill voice still singing her wooer’s qualities.

“Is Mr. Becker in?” Louis asked the undersized boy behind a railing in the sales-office of Litz. & Aulitz.

“That’s him at the desk back in the corner.”

Louis opened the gate and walked down the long office between two rows of mathematically arranged desks — two flat desks, a typist, two flat desks, a typist. A rattle of typewriters, a rustling of papers, a drone of voices dictating: “Your favor of... our Mr. Hassis... would say...” Walking with his consciously buoyant step, Louis studied the man in the corner. Built well enough, but probably flabby and unable to stand up against body blows.

He stopped before Beckers desk and the younger man looked up at Louis through pale, harassed eyes.

“Is this Mr. Becker?”

“Yes, sir. Won’t you have a seat?”

“No,” Louis said evenly, “what I’m going to say ought to be said standing up” He appreciated the bewilderment in the salesman’s eyes. “I’m Louis Slender!”

“Oh! yes,” said Becker. Obviously he could think of nothing else to say. He reached for an order blank, but with it in his hand he was still at sea.

“I’m going to teach you,” Louis said, “not to fool around with other men’s wives.”

Beckers look of habitual harassment deepened. Something foolish was going to happen. One could see he had a great dread of being made ridiculous, and yet knew that was what this would amount to.

“Oh! I say!” he ventured.

“Will you get up?” Louis was unbuttoning his coat.

In the absence of an excuse for remaining seated, Becker got vaguely to his feet. Louis stepped around the corner of the desk and faced the salesman.

“I’m giving you an even break,” Louis said, shoulders stiffened. left foot advanced, eyes steady on the embarrassed ones before him.

Becker nodded politely.

The barber shifted his weight from right to left leg and struck the younger man on the mouth, knocking him back against the wall. The confusion in Becker’s face changed to anger. So this was what it was to be! He rushed at Louis, to be met by blows that shook him, forced him back, battered him down. Blindly he tried to hold the barbers arms, but the arms writhed free and the fists crashed into his face and body again and again. Becker hadn’t walked twenty blocks in twenty minutes, hadn’t breathed deeply at open windows, hadn’t twisted and lowered and raised and bent his body morning after morning, hadn’t spent hours in gymnasiums building up sinew. Such an emergency found him wanting.

Men crowded around the combatants, separating them, holding them apart, supporting Becker, whose legs were sagging.

Louis was breathing easily. He regarded the salesman’s bloody face with calm eyes, and said: “After this I guess you won’t bother my wife any. If I ever hear of you even saying ‘how do’ to her again I’ll come back and finish the job. Get me?”

Becker nodded dumbly.

Louis adjusted his necktie and left the office.

The matter was cleanly and effectually disposed of. No losing his wife, no running into divorce courts, no shooting or similar cheap melodrama, and above all, no getting into the newspapers as a deceived husband — but a sensible, manly solution of the problem.

He would cat downtown tonight and go to a burlesque show afterward, and Pearl’s attack of nerves would have subsided by the time he got home. He would never mention the events of this day, unless some extraordinary emergency made it advisable, but his wife would know that it was always in his mind, and that he had demonstrated his ability to protect what was his.

He telephoned Pearl. Her voice came quietly over the wire. The hysteria had run its course, then. She asked no questions and made no comment upon his intention of remaining downtown for the evening meal.

It was long after midnight when he arrived home. After the show he had met “Dutch” Spreel, the manager of “Oakland Kid McCoy, the most promising lightweight since the days of Young Terry Sullivan,” and had spent several hours in a lunchroom listening to Spreel’s condemnation of the guile whereby the Kid had been robbed of victory in his last battle — a victory to which the honest world unanimously conceded his right.

Louis let himself into the apartment quietly and switched on the light in the vestibule. Through the open bed-room door he saw that the bed was unoccupied and its surface unruffled. Where was Pearl, then? he thought; surely she wasn’t sitting up in the dark. He went through the rooms, switching on the lights.

On the dining-room table he found a note.

Louis leaned against the table while his calm certitude ran out of him. So this was the world! He had given Becker his chance; hadn’t taken the advantage of him to which he had been entitled; had beaten him severely — and this was the way it turned out. Why, a man might just as well be a weakling!