To Have and Have Not Read online

  TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

  'You're a goddamn liar,' he said to Freddy. 'Eighty-five cents,' Freddy said to him. 'Watch this,' said the red-headed Vet. Freddy spread his hands on the bar. He was watching the Vet. 'You're a goddamn liar,' said the Vet, and picked up a beer glass to throw it. As his hand closed on it, Freddy's right hand swung in a half circle over the bar and cracked a big salt-cellar covered with a bar towel alongside the Vet's head. 'Was it neat?' said the red-headed Vet. 'Was it pretty?' 'You ought to see him tap them with that sawed. off billiard cue,' the other said. Two Vets standing next to where the salt-cellar man h.d slipped down, looked at Freddy angrily. 'What's the idea of cooling him?' 'Take it easy,' said Freddy. 'This one is on the home. Hey, Wallace,' he said. 'Put that fellow over agaimt the wail.' 'Was it pretty?' the red-headed Vet asked Richard Gordon. 'Wasn't that sweet?' A heavy.set young fellow had dragged the salt. cellared man out through the crowd. He pulled him to his feet and the man looked at him vacantly. 'Run along,' he said to him. 'Get yourself some Over agaimt the wall the man who had been cooled sat with his head in his hands. The heavy- set young man went over to b;,,

  HARRY MORGAN--WINTER

  As Richard Gordon watched himhc felt a sick feeling in his chest. And he knew for the first time how a man feels when he looks at the man his wife is leaving him for. 'What's the matter, pal?' asked the red-headed Vet. 'Nothing.' 'You don't feel good, I can tell you feel bad.' 'No,' said Richard Gordon. 'You look like you seen a ghost.' 'You see that fellow down there with a moustache?' asked Richard Gordon. 'Him?' 'Yes.' 'What about him?' asked the second Vet. 'Nothing,' said Richard Gordon. 'Goddamn it. Nothing.' 'Is he a bother to you? We can cool him. The three of us can jump him and you can put the boots to him.' 'No,' said Richard Gordon. 'It wouldn't do any good.' 'We'll get him when he goes outside,' the red- headed Vet said. 'I don't like the look of him. The son-of-a-bitch looks like a scab to me.' 'I hate him,' said Gordon. 'He's ruined my fife.' 'We'll give him the works,' said the second Vet. 'The yellow rat. Listen, Red, get a hold of a couple of bottles. We'll beat him to death. Listen, when did he do it, pal? O.K., we have another one?' 'We've got a dollar .and seventy cents,' Richard Gordon said. 'Maybe we better get a pint then,' the red- o no9

  HARRY MORGAN--WINTER chunky Vet said. 'This fellow had the old tale and he was all broke out on the shoulders and back. Every time they'd go into a clinch he'd rub his shoulder under Red's nose or across his puss.' 'Oh, nuts. What did he put his face there for?' 'That was the way Red carried his head when he was in close. Down, like this. And this fellow was just roughing him.' 'Oh, nuts. That story is all bull. Nobody ever got the old tale from anybody in a fight.' 'That's what 'ou think. Listen, Red was as clean a living kid as you ever saw. I knew him. He was in my outfit. He was a good little fighter, too. I mean good. He was married, too, to a nice girl. I mean nice. And this Benny Sampson gave him that old tale just as sure as I'm standing here.' -'Then sit down,' said another Vet. 'How did Poochy get it?' 'He got it in Shanghai.' 'Where did you get yours?' 'I ain't got it.' 'Where did Suds get it?' ' 'Off a girl in Brest, coming home.' 'That's all you guys ever talk about. The old tale. What difference does the old tale make?' 'None, the way we are now,' one Vet said. 'You're just as happy with it.' 'Poochy's happier. He don't know where he is.' 'What's the old tale?' Professor MacWalsey asked the man next to him at the bar. The man told him.

  HARRY MOROAN--WINTER 'You can't get hm in without fighting him,' the taxi-driver said. 'Let him go. He's fine. Is he your brother?' 'In a way,' said Professor MacWalsey. I-Ie watched .Richard Gordon lurching down the street until he was out of sight in the shadow from the big trees whose branches dipped down to grow into the ground like roots. What he was thinking as he watched him, was not pleasant. It is a mortal sin, he thought, a grave and deadly sin and a great cruelty, and while technically one's religion may permit the ultimate result, I cannot pardon myself. On the other hand, a surgeon cannot desist while operating for fear of hurting the patient. But why must all the operations in life be performed without an anaesthetic? If I had been a better man I would have let him beat me up. It would have been better for him. The poor stupid man. The poor homeless man. I ought to stay with him, but I know that is too much for him to bear. I am ashamed and disgusted with myself and I hate what I l'mve done. It all may turn out badly too. But I must not think about that. i will now return to the anaesthetic i have used for seventeen years and will not need much longer. Although it is probably a vice now for which I only invent excuses. Though at least it is a vice for which I am suited. But I wish I could help that poor man whom I am wronging. ' 'Drive me back to Freddy's,' he said. =x7

  TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT 'Who did it, Harry?' the mate asked. Harry looked at him. 'Don't fool yourself,' he said. The captain and the mate both bent over him. Now it was coming. 'Like trying to pass cars on the top of hills. On that road in Cuba. On any road. Anywhere. Just like that. I mean how things are. The way that they been going. For a while yes sure all right. Maybe with luck. A man.' He stopped. The captain shook his head at the mate again. Harry Morgan looked at him flatly. The captain wet Harry's lips again. They made a bloody mark on the towel. 'A man,' Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. 'One man alone ain't got. No man alone now.' He stopped. 'No matter how a man alone ain't got n6 bloody chance.' He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all of his life to learn it. He lay there his eyes open again. 'Come on,' said the captain to the mate. 'You sure you don't want anything, Harry?' Harry Morgan looked at him but he did not answer. He had told them; but they had not heard., 'We'll be back,' said the captain. 'Take it easy, boy.'

  Harry Morgan watched them go out of the cabin. Forward in the wheelhouse, watching it get dark and the light of Sombrero starting to sweep out at o

  HARRY MORGAN--INTER

  sea, the mate said, 'He gives you the willies out of his head like that.' 'Poor fellow,' said the captain. 'Well, we'll be in pretty soon now. We'll get him in soon after mid- night. If we don't have to slow down for that tow.' 'Think he'll five?' 'No,' said the captain. 'But you can't ever tell.'

  TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

  'It is a nice clean little yacht basin,' said Wallace Johnston. 'Is it true Tommy Bradley's impotent?' 'I shouldn't think so. You hear that about every one. He's simply broad-minded.' 'Broad-minded is excellent. She's certainly a broad if there ever was one.' 'She's a remarkably nice woman,' said Henry Carpenter. 'You'd like her, Wally.' 'I would not,' said Wallace. 'She represents everything i hate in a woman, and Tommy Bradley epitomizes everything I hate in a man.' 'You feel awfully strongly to-night.' 'You never feel strongly because you have no comistency,' Wallace Johnston said. 'You can't make up your mind. You don't know what you are even.' 'Let's drop me,' said Henry Carpenter. He lit a cxgarette. 'Why should I?' 'Well, one reason you-might is because I go witl you on your bloody yacht, and at least half the time I do what you want to do, and that keeps you from paying blackmail and one thing and another, to the people that do know what they are, and what you are.' 'You're in a pretty mood,' said Wallace Johmton. 'You know I never pay blackmail.' 'No. You're too tight to. You have friends like me instead.' 'I haven't any other friends like you.' 'Don't be charming,' said Henry. 'i don't fed up to 224

  HARRY MORGAN--WINTER , height of 5500 feet without a parachute, he would land safely with his knees under some rich man's table. But he gave value in good company for his entertainment and while it was only lately, and rarely, that he felt, or expressed himself, as he had to-night, his friends had felt for some time that he was cracking up. If he had not been felt to be cracking up, with that instinct for feeling something wrong with a member of the pack and healthy desire to turn him out, if it is impossible to destroy him, which characterizes the rich; he would not have been reduced to accepting the hospitality of Wallace Johnston. As it was, Wallace Johnston, with his rather special pleasures, was Henry Carpenter's last stand, and he was defending his position better than he knew for his honest courting of a
n end to their relationship; his subsequent brutality of expression, and sincere insecurity of tenure intrigued, and seduced the other who might, given Henry Carpenter's age, have easily been bored by a steady compliance. Thus Henry Carpenter- postponed his inevitable suicide by a matter of weeks if not of months. The money on which it was not worth while for him to live was one hundred and seventy dollars more a month than the fisherman Albert Tracy had been supporting his family on at the time ofhis death three days before. Aboard the other yachts lying at the finger piers there were other people with other problerns. On 7 "

  HARRY MORGAN-WINTER

  clear coldness always that had, in the old days, been an after effect. And he lay now, with no kindly blurring, denied all that chemical courage that had soothed his mind and warmed his heart for so many years, and wondered what the department had, what they had found and what they would twist, what they would accept as normal and what they would insist was evasion; and he was not afraid of them, but only hated them and the power they would use so insolently that all his own, hard, small, tough and lasting insolence, the one permanent thing he had gained and that was truly valid, would, be drilled through, and, if he were ever made afraid, shattered. He did not think in any abstractions, but in deals, in sales, in transfers and in gifts. He thought in shares, in bales, in thousands of bushels, in options, holding companies, trusts, and subsidiary corpora- tions, and as he went over it he knew they had plenty, enough so he would have no peace for years. If they would not compromise it would be very bad. In the old days he would not have worried, but the fighting part of him was tired now, along with the other part, and he was alone in all of this now and he lay on the big, wide, old bed and could neither read nor sleep. His wife had divorced him ten years before after twenty years of keeping up appearances, and he had never missed her nor had he ever loved her. He had started with her money and she had borne him two male children, both of whom, like their mother, were fools. He had treated her well until the money

  HARRY MORGAN--WINTER

  the coast-guard cutter told her. 'We'll get them all right.' The coast-guard men had climbed up on the stern and were standing dripping. 'Comeon. Let's go,' one of them said. 'I'm getting cold.' 'Are you all right, Mrs. Tracy?' the sheriff said, putting the blanket around her. 'All tie?' said Mrs. Tracy. 'All rie?' then clenched both her hands and put her head back to really scream. Mrs. Tracy's grief was greater than she could bear. The crowd listened to her and was silent and respectful. Mrs. Tracy provided just the sound effect that was needed to go with the sight of the dead bandits that were now being covered with coast-guard blankets by the sheriff and one of the deputies, thus veiling the greatest sight the town had seen since the Islefio had been lynched, years before, out on the County Koad and then hung up to swing from a telephone pole in the lights of all the cars that had come out to see it. The crowd was disappointed when the bodies were covered but they alone of all the town had seen them. They had seen Mrs. Tracy fall into the water and they had, before they came in, seen Harry Morgan carried on a stretcher into the Marine Hospital. When the sheriff ordered them out of the yacht basin they went quietly and happily. They knew how privileged they had been.

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  TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

  of the house across the street a peacock squawked. Through the window you could see the sea looking hard and new and blue in the winter light. A large white yacht was coming into the harbour and seven miles out on the horizon you could see a tanker, small and neat in profile against the blue sea, hugging the reef as she made to the westward to keep from wasting fuel against the stream.