“Is he a solid man—will you tell me that?”
“Solid is his middle name,” said Elsa. “Catch me tying myself to some shyster or drunk. Next January I move into the big money myself.”
Emmet stood up—he could time the moment when it would arrive at the lining of his coat.
“Excuse me,” he said, getting up.
In the pantry he steadied himself at the sink. Then he tapped on the secretary’s door.
“Get rid of Miss Halliday!” he said, catching a glimpse of his face—white, hard and haggard in a mirror. “Tell her I’m sick—anything—get her out of the house.”
Hating compassion from anyone, he hated the face of the Trainor girl as she rose from her desk.
“Do it quickly! It’s part of your job!”
“I understand, Mr. Monsen.”
“I don’t ask so much,” he continued unnecessarily. “But I want it well done.”
He went on out, feeling for the pantry sink, then for the swinging door, the back of a kitchen chair. A contemptuous line ran through his head in savage rhythm: “I never think much of a man who reaches for a glass of whiskey everytime anything goes wrong.”
He turned to the closet where there stood the brandy bottle.
IV
A rash youth taking down his first few gulps of spirits is moved not to homicide or wife beating, but to a blatant commotion, expressed in every fibre of heart and soul. An Englishman climbs, an Irishman fights, a Frenchman dances, an American “commotes” (the word is not in the dictionary).
So it happened to the abstemious Emmet—he commoted. It was in the bag from the instant that the cognac tumbled into contact with his burning fever—and it had gathered momentum while he sat on the side of the bed and let Miss Hapgood try to extricate him from his soaking clothes. He suddenly vanished—and almost as suddenly reappeared from the clothes-closet, clad in a sort of sarong surmounted by an opera hat.
“I am a Cannibal King,” he said. “I am going down into the kitchen and eat Margerilla.”
“Margerilla’s gone, Mr. Monsen.”
“Then I am going to eat Carlos Davis.”
In a moment he was on the telephone in the hall, talking to Mr. Davis’s butler. If Mr. Davis was home would he please come right over?
Hanging up the receiver Emmet leaped nimbly aside to avoid a jab of Miss Hapgood’s syringe.
“No, you don’t!” he advised her. “I’m going to act now, in full control of all faculties. Need all my strength.”
To test this last quality he suddenly bent down and plucked out a spoke of the bannister railing.
The ease of the operation fascinated him. He leaned over and plucked out another—and then another. It was like one of those unpleasant nightmares where one detaches one’s own teeth with uneasy awe.
The course of the operation led him downstairs. He kept in his hand one single spoke with which he intended to render Mr. Davis unconscious as he entered the door—in preparation to preparing and eating him.
However he made a single miscalculation. When in the vicinity of the kitchen he remembered the brandy bottle and had some short swift traffic with it—almost immediately he found, or lost, himself upon a sack of potatoes under the kitchen sink, his bludgeon beside him, his black silk crown awry.
Fortunately he was not conscious of the quick events of the next few minutes—of how Miss Trainor looked into the twilit garden and saw Carlos Davis making a short cut across it with the intention of entering his tenant’s house through the rear door—nor of how Miss Trainor stepped outside the kitchen screen to intercept him, closing the door behind her.
“Hello there! Cheerio! Good morning, and all that. Monsen wanted to see me, and I always say visit the sick and all that.”
“Mr. Davis, just after Mr.—Mom—” in her anxiety she parroted Miss Hapgood, “—called you, his brother phoned from New York. Mr. Mom wants to know if he can get in touch with you later—or tomorrow.”
As the Trainor girl prayed that there would not be a sound from beneath the kitchen sink she heard the slow bounce of a potato across the kitchen floor.
“Cripes yes!” said Davis heartily. “Script’s held up two more days. My writer’s on a bat! That rat!”
He whistled—and then looked admiringly at Miss Trainor—a reversal of the usual process.
“Like to see the swimming pool sometime? I mean you don’t work always. I mean—”
“I’d love it,” Miss Trainor said—then covered up a species of groan from inside with the remarkable statement: “There’s his buzzer now.”
A puzzled look crossed Davis’ face—faded. She sighed with relief.
“Well, cheerio and keep your chin up and all that sort of thing,” he advised her.
When he was ten feet off she stepped back into the kitchen. Emmet Monsen was no longer there but there was not any doubt as to where he was, for she heard the sound of spokes leaving the bannister, of window glass splintering—and then his voice:
“No! You going to drink it. I know what it is—it’s chloral hydrate—it’s a ‘Mickey Finn.’ Why, I can smell it!”
Miss Hapgood stood on the stairs and smiled ineffectually as she held out the glass.
“Drink it!” Emmet commanded, not even pausing in his wrecking task, which consisted in throwing the extracted spokes through a broken window into the garden. “When that Cardiff comes I want to have you all passed out in rows before he drinks his! My God! Can’t a man die in peace!”
Miss Trainor turned on the hall light against the darkening day—and Emmet Monsen looked ungratefully at her.
“And you with your smile, as if it was all so pretty. California!”
The name of the state was accompanied by a long-drawn splintering of the top stair rail.
“I’m from New England, Mr. Monsen.”
“Never mind! Write yourself a check anyhow. And write Miss Hapgood a check—on her chart.”
Miss Hapgood rose to the occasion. Perhaps a vision, like Joan of Arc’s, had come to her, a ghostly whisper from Florence Nightingale:
“Mr. Monsen—if I do drink this, will you go to bed?”
Hopefully she raised the glass of chloral.
“Yes!” agreed Emmet.
But as she lifted it to her mouth the Trainor girl darted up the stairs, tilted her arm and spilt the liquid.
“Somebody’s got to watch!” she protested.
The hall below seemed suddenly crowded with people. There was Dr. Cardiff, massive in himself; there was Mrs. Ewing coming on her shift; there was a gardener from the Davis estate with a letter in his hand.
“Get out of here,” Emmet shouted. “That includes Dr. Hippocrates.”
His arms were full of broken wood as he backed up a few steps and braced himself against what remained of the toothless bannister.
“I’m going to have him disbarred at the next port. Write him a check, Miss Hapgood. You’re off the case. I’m treating myself. Go on! Write checks! Get away!”
Dr. Cardiff made a step up the stairs and Emmet weighed a chunk, snarling happily. “Right at those spectacles. No curve—just a fast one. I hope you’ve got insurance on the sockets!”
While the doctor hesitated Emmet proved his aim by clipping off the light of the upper hall with a minor fragment.
Then the gardener, a man of seventy, started slowly up the stairs, holding out an envelope toward Emmet. Emmet’s hand tightened on the big chunk but the fearless old face reminded him of his own father.
“From Mr. Davis,” the gardener said, expressionless. He put the envelope through the gap in the balcony and started down.
“All of you get out!” Emmet cried, “while you’re still whole. Before I—” The world was spinning around him in cyclorama—
—and then suddenly he knew that the hall was empty. There was no sound in the house. For a few minutes he stood there, all his energies bent upon an attempt to focus. With a last resurgence of tension he crutched himself down the stairs—and listened. He heard a door shut far away—motors starting.
Leaning over so that he touched his hands to the steps he crept back up; at the head of the stairs his fingers touched an envelope. He lay on his back on the floor and ripped it open:
My Dear Mr. Monsen:
I had no idea of your condition. I saw the spokes come out the window—one of them hit me. I must ask you to vacate by nine o’clock tomorrow.
Sincerely, Carlos Davis
Emmet sat up, and accidentally flung his legs out over space through the gaps where the spokes had been. The house was absolutely quiet now. There was an echo as he experimentally dropped a last spoke down into the stair well. Presently, he told himself, he would get into bed. It was so nice and quiet. There were no people in the house. He had won.
V
When Emmet awoke there seemed to be no light save in the lower hall, but he had the half-waking memory of a sound far away in the dark house. He lay silent, seeing from the circlet moon in a window that it was late—somewhere between midnight and two.
The faint sound came again, with a suggestion of caution in its pitch, and Emmet sat up carefully. He tiptoed into his bedroom, put on his dressing gown and felt for his revolver in the drawer of his bureau. Snapping out the chamber he found to his annoyance that it was unloaded; and his hand came into contact with no bullets in the drawer. The chances were that anyone trying to break in was some discouraged tramp, but he put the empty gun in the pocket of his gown as he tiptoed down the stairs.
In the door of the dark living room he listened again—then he waited again outside the kitchen and the secretary’s office—hearing the sound once
