The dwarf brought the dog to a halt in the middle of the room, and took in, at a single glance, the prostrate figure of Jeanne Marie. St. Eustache, too, seemed to take silent note of it. The stiff hair on his back rose up, he showed his long white fangs hungrily, and his eyes glowed like two live coals.
“So I find you thus, madame!” M. Jacques Courbé said at last. “It is fortunate that I have a charger here who can scent out my enemies as well as hunt them down in the open. Without him, I might have had some difficulty in discovering you. Well, the little game is up. I find you with your lover!”
“Simon Lafleur is not my lover!” she sobbed. “I have not seen him once since I married you until tonight! I swear it!”
“Once is enough,” the dwarf said grimly. “The imprudent stable boy must be chastised!”
“Oh, spare him!” Jeanne Marie implored. “Do not harm him, I beg of you! It is not his fault that I came! I —”
But at this point Simon Lafleur drowned her out in a roar of laughter.
“Ha, ha!” he roared, putting his hands on his hips. “You would chastise me, eh? Nom d’un chien! Don’t try your circus tricks on me! Why, hop-o’-my-thumb, you who ride on a dog’s back like a flea, out of this room before I squash you. Begone, melt, fade away!” He paused, expanded his barrel-like chest, puffed out his cheeks, and blew a great breath at the dwarf. “Blow away, insect,” he bellowed, “lest I put my heel on you!”
M. Jacques Courbé was unmoved by this torrent of abuse. He sat very upright on St. Eustache’s back, his tiny sword resting on his tiny shoulder.
“Are you done?” he said at last, when the bareback rider had run dry of invectives. “Very well, monsieur! Prepare to receive cavalry!” He paused for an instant, then added in a high, clear voice: “Get him, St. Eustache!”
The dog crouched, and at almost the same moment, sprang at Simon Lafleur. The bareback rider had no time to avoid him and his tiny rider. Almost instantaneously the three of them had come to death grips. It was a gory business.
Simon Lafleur, strong man as he was, was bowled over by the dog’s unexpected leap. St. Eustache’s clashing jaws closed on his right arm and crushed it to the bone. A moment later the dwarf, still clinging to his dog’s back, thrust the point of his tiny sword into the body of the prostrate bareback rider.
Simon Lafleur struggled valiantly, but to no purpose. Now he felt the fetid breath of the dog fanning his neck, and the wasp-like sting of the dwarf’s blade, which this time found a mortal spot. A convulsive tremor shook him and he rolled over on his back. The circus Romeo was dead.
M. Jacques Courbé cleansed his sword on a kerchief of lace, dismounted, and approached Jeanne Marie. She was still crouching on the floor, her eyes closed, her head held tightly between both hands. The dwarf touched her imperiously on the broad shoulder which had so often carried him.
“Madame,” he said, “we now can return home. You must be more careful hereafter. Ma foi, it is an ungentlemanly business cutting the throats of stable boys!”
She rose to her feet, like a large trained animal at the word of command.
“Do you wish to be carried?” she said between livid lips.
“Ah, that is true, madame,” he murmured. “I was forgetting our little wager. Ah, yes! Well, you are to be congratulated, madame — you have covered nearly half the distance.”
“Nearly half the distance,” she repeated in a lifeless voice.
“Yes, madame,” M. Jacques Courbé continued. “I fancy that you will be quite a docile wife by the time you have done.” He paused, and then added reflectively: “It is truly remarkable how speedily one can ride the devil out of a woman — with spurs!”
Papa Copo had been spending a convivial evening at the Sign of the Wild Boar. As he stepped out into the street, he saw three familiar figures preceding him — a tall woman, a tiny man, and a large dog with upstanding ears. The woman carried the man on her shoulder; the dog trotted at her heels.
The circus owner came to a halt and stared after them. His round eyes were full of childish astonishment.
“Can it be?” he murmured. “Yes, it is! Three old friends! And so Jeanne carries him! Ah, but she should not poke fun at M. Jacques Courbé! He is so sensitive; but, alas, they are the kind that are always henpecked!”
1928
JAMES M. CAIN
PASTORALE
James M(allahan) Cain (1892-1977) was born in Annapolis, and grew up in Maryland, returning to the state permanently (after seventeen years as a screenwriter in California) in 1947. He received his BA from Washington College at the age of eighteen, then taught mathematics and English for four years before receiving his MA. He became a journalist, also submitting articles and stories to magazines while still in his twenties. His first full-length novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), became a huge bestseller and was filmed by MGM (with a script by Raymond Chandler) in 1946, starring Lana Turner and John Garfield, and again in 1981, with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson. Cain did not write detective stories, but is lumped with other hard-boiled writers for his tough, gritty crime novels of sex and violence, most of which follow a familiar plot of a man falling for a woman and engaging in a criminal plot for her, only to have her betray him. In addition to Postman, the formula also worked in Double Indemnity (1943), filmed by Billy Wilder in 1944 with Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson. The other classic film noir made from his work, Mildred Pierce (1941), was as bleak as his other books and films, but this time it is the titular character who is betrayed by a woman — her daughter.
“Pastorale” is Cain’s first published story and established the template for what was to become his more serious work. The familiar story of a man and woman in an illicit affair planning to murder her husband is told in the humorous style of Ring Lardner’s “Haircut,” but nonetheless leads to inevitable darkness. It was first published in the March 1928 issue of American Mercury and first collected in book form in Cain’s The Baby in the Icebox (1981).
1
Well, it looks like Burbie is going to get hung. And if he does; what he can lay it on is, he always figured he was so damn smart. You see, Burbie, he left town when he was about sixteen year old. He run away with one of them traveling shows, “East Lynne” I think it was, and he stayed away about ten years. And when he come back he thought he knowed a lot. Burbie, he’s got them watery blue eyes what kind of stick out from his face, and how he killed the time was to sit around and listen to the boys talk down at the poolroom or over at the barber shop or a couple other places where he hung out, and then wink at you like they was all making a fool of theirself or something and nobody didn’t know it but him.
But when you come right down to what Burbie had in his head, why, it wasn’t much. ‘Course, he generally always had a job, painting around or maybe helping out on a new house, like of that, but what he used to do was to play baseball with the high school team. And they had a big fight over it, ‘cause Burbie was so old nobody wouldn’t believe he went to the school, and them other teams was all the time putting up a squawk. So then he couldn’t play no more. And another thing he liked to do was sing at the entertainments. I reckon he liked that most of all, ‘cause he claimed that a whole lot of the time he was away he was on the stage, and I reckon maybe he was at that, ‘cause he was pretty good, specially when he dressed hisself up like a old-time Rube and come out and spoke a piece what he knowed.