_By_ FLETA CAMPBELL SPRINGER
From _Harper’s Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._
_Copyright, 1919, by Fleta Campbell Springer._
We were sitting—three Frenchmen, a young American named Homan, and I—in
the café of one of those small Paris hotels much frequented, even then,
by officers on leave. It was the winter of 1912, when the Balkans were
playing out their colorful little curtain-raiser to the great drama
which followed—playing it, as they say in the theater, “in one,” using
only the very smallest part of the stage, and failing even in their most
climactic moments to completely conceal the ominous sounds from behind
the curtain where the stage was being set for the real business of the
play.
At the tables a sprinkling of English and Americans of the usual
transient type mingled with French from the provinces, and here and
there a swarthy Balkan in uniform accented the room.
It was the presence of those other Americans—two or three, I should say,
besides Homan and myself, though I hadn’t noticed particularly—that gave
the special significance to Homan’s exclamation when he discovered
Corey.
I saw him pause with his glass half raised—he was gazing straight past
me over my shoulder—and a smile, meant for me, came into his eyes.
“Look!” he said, “at the American!”
I turned, because his manner indicated clearly enough that I might,
squarely round in my chair, and immediately it was clear to me why he
had said just that. Any one would have said it—any other American, I
mean—which makes it more striking—and said it involuntarily, too. You
couldn’t have helped it. And yet you would encounter a dozen perfectly
unmistakable Americans every day in Paris without feeling the necessity
for any remark. It was simply that Corey was so typically the kind of
American you _wouldn’t_ encounter in Paris, or any other place, you
felt, outside his own country. The curious thing about him was that
instantly on seeing him, almost before you thought of America, you
thought of a particular and localized section of America. You thought of
the Middle West. There was something wholesome and provincial and
colloquial about him. He was like a boy you’d gone to grammar school
with—the kind of fellow to succeed to his father’s business and marry
and settle down in his home town, with New York City his farthest dream
of venture and romance.
Yet there he sat across the table from a dark-visaged Balkan officer who
was carrying on the conversation in careful English—it would have been
unimaginable that he should speak in anything _but_ English to him—and
it may have been the brilliance of this man’s uniform which kept one,
just at first, from seeing that he, too, our American, was wearing some
sort of uniform, khaki color, very workman-like and shipshape, which
might, if there had been the least chance of throwing us off, have
thrown us. But his round, good-natured, uncomplicated face, his light
brown hair and the way it was brushed—the very way it grew, like a
school-boy’s—the comfortable set of his broad shoulders, his kind of
energetic inclination to stoutness, and even the way he sat at the
table, were pure American Middle West and nothing else, no matter what
his uniform proclaimed. He was as American as the flag, as the opening
bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as American as Kansas, Missouri, and
Iowa.
And when, at young Homan’s exclamation, I had turned and found him
looking straight toward me, the twinkle of his eyes had the effect of a
friendly wave of his hand. He had, of course, as he said afterward,
“spotted us,” too. Then he had seen—and it amused him—the little play of
our discovery.
I was just turning back to applaud to Homan the obviousness of his
designation, and to wonder, with him, what the uniform meant, when my
eye was caught by a thin, brilliantly colored line drawn, it seemed,
just above the left breast pocket of his coat, and about the same
length.
My first impression of the man, of the familiarity of his type, had, I
suppose, been so strong as to dull for a moment my reaction to this
discovery. I had seen that vari-colored line often enough before, on the
uniforms of British officers or French; I had perhaps seen it on an
American, but certainly I had never seen it on an American like this. No
wonder the connection was slow to establish itself. It was a decoration
bar, and there must have been six ribbons at least, if not more.
For sheer incongruous association, I doubt if you’d find a more pat
example in a lifetime than the man I had, on sight, conceived this one
to be—the man I may as well say now he actually _was_—and that bar of
ribbons pinned on his khaki-colored coat.
Young Homan had caught it, too, and was sending past me his deliberate
stare of amazement.
It was not exactly as if we thought he hadn’t come by them honestly, but
more as if we suggested to each other that he couldn’t surely have got
them in the way decorations were usually got; it seemed somehow
impossible that he understood their importance. And there was still
something of that in our attitude when, later on, after dinner, we had
drifted into the _salon_ with the rest for our coffee, and by a kind of
natural gravitation had found ourselves in conversation with our
compatriot, whose jocose friendliness led young Homan to ask, half in
fun to be sure, where he had got all the decorations. He showed
certainly no very proper appreciation of their importance by his answer:
“Bought ’em, at the Galleries Lafayette. Get any kind you want there, y’
know.”
We laughed, all of us, for everybody had seen the cases of medals and
decorations at the Galleries. I believe for an instant the youngster was
half inclined to think he _had_ bought them. I know _I_ was. As some
kind of outlandish practical joke, of course. It seemed, absurd as the
idea was, so much likelier than that he could have been through the kind
of experiences which result in being decorated by foreign governments.
And such an imposing array! The scarlet ribbon of the Legion of Honor,
the green of the Japanese “Rising Sun,” the brilliant stripes of Russian
and English decorations, and strange ones I had never seen before!
You see, he had turned out much more Middle West than we had imagined.
In the first ten minutes of our conversation he had spoken of “home,”
and mentioned the name of the town—Dubuque, Iowa! And a few minutes
later he gave us, by the merest chance phrase or two, involving the fact
that his married sister lived “a block and a half down the street” from
his mother’s house, a perfectly complete picture of that street—broad
and shady and quiet, of his mother’s yellow frame house, and the other,
white with a green lawn round it, where his sister lived. And the point
was that he was making no effort toward such an effect. He was only
being himself.
His dinner companion, the Balkan officer, came in presently and
addressed Corey as “Doctor” (I adjusted myself to _that_, still with the
Dubuque setting, however), and it was in the conversation following upon
the new introduction that the object of his being in Paris came out. He
told us, quite by the way, though not in the least depreciating the
importance of his mission—that he was in Paris for a few days looking up
anesthetics for the Serbian army. He had been working, he said, down in
the Balkans since shortly after the outbreak of the war, in charge of a
sanitary section. They’d been out of anesthetics for some time
now—impossible to get them in—and they’d been operating, amputating the
poor devils’ legs and arms, _without_ anesthetics; and now at last he’d
left things long enough to come up to Paris himself and see what could
be done. He was starting back the next day or the day after that.
Corey, from Dubuque! In a makeshift Serbian field hospital, in that
terrible cold, performing delicate and difficult operations—wholesale,
as they must have been performed—on wounded Balkan soldiers; probing for
bullets in raw wounds—_that_ was a picture to set up beside the one we
had of him in Dubuque!
And yet—it wasn’t at all a question of doubt (we’d read it all in the
papers day after day); it wasn’t that we didn’t believe Corey was
telling the truth; his evidence was too obvious for that—the picture
didn’t somehow succeed in painting itself—I can’t to this day say why.
Surely the Balkans just then—operations without anesthetics, the
pageantry and blood-red color of war—surely there was pigment of more
brilliant hue than any contained in the mere statement that his married
sister lived a block and a half down the street from his mother’s. But
the picture wasn’t painted. Corey wasn’t the artist to do it. Not, mind
you, that he tried; he was as far from trying to impress one, from
affectation, as a boy of fourteen.
I do remember my imagination taking me far enough to think that if I
were a soldier, and wounded, and had to have a leg or an arm off, I
couldn’t think of a man I’d rather have do it than Corey. Oh yes, I
believed him; I knew he’d been down there in the Balkans, as he said,
and was going back again to-morrow—but I went right on seeing him in
Dubuque, practising his quiet, prosperous profession in the same suite
of offices his father had used before him.
He himself lent, by the things he said, force and reality to the
illusion. He’d like nothing better, he declared, than settling down in
Dubuque for the rest of his life, and enjoying a home of his own. He
intended, in fact, to do just that when he had finished the Balkan
business. “I’m that type,” he said. “I never was meant to knock around
the world like this.”
And he _was_ that type, so much the type that it seemed hardly credible
he shouldn’t turn out the exception to prove the rule. He had already,
one would think, made a sufficient divergence.
And that, I suppose—the feeling that no personality _could_ follow so
undeviating a line, so obviously its own path—was responsible for my
impression, when I came later to hear how completely he _had_ followed
it, of his being because of it much more unique than he could ever have
made himself by turning aside. True enough, there are people who, if
they heard the tale, might maintain that he could hardly have
accomplished a more striking divergence from type. I’ll have to confess
I thought so myself—at the first; certainly I thought so all the while I
listened, long afterward, to the quiet, though somewhat nasal, and
thoroughly puzzled voice of the gentle old man from Dubuque, who seemed,
as he recounted the story, to be seeking in me some solution of Corey’s
phenomenon.
I thought it even afterward, until, sitting there where he had left me,
I began slowly to orient the facts in relation to Corey’s character. And
then, all at once, it came to me that it was exactly because Corey
_hadn’t_ diverged that he did what he did. He went straight through
everything to his predestined end. Any other man would have had stages,
subtleties, degrees of divergence. But Corey knew none of those things.
It was from old Mr. Ewing of Dubuque that I had my first news of Corey
after that night in the Paris hotel.
He must have gone back to his army in the Balkans the next day, for we
were to have seen him that night again in case he had to stay over, and
when I asked I was told that Monsieur had gone.
Things kept reminding me of him. The names of streets and places in
Paris recalled his flat American mispronunciation of
them—mispronunciations which sounded half as if he were in fun and half
as if he didn’t know any better, or hadn’t paid enough attention to
learn them correctly. I believe he saw, or was subconsciously aware of,
his own incongruity. Still, one would think he’d have become, so to
speak, accustomed to himself in the strange rôle by then.
I think I must have spoken of him rather often to people, so long as I
remained in Paris; and it was, if not exactly curious, at least a little
less than one would expect, that I never came in contact with any one
else who knew him, until that day, a little while ago, when I met, in
the smoking-car of a west-bound train out of Chicago, the man who told
me all there was, or ever will be, for any man to tell about Corey.
He may have been sitting there near me all the time; I don’t know. But
then he was not the kind of man one notices in a smoking-car, or any
other place, for that matter. Certainly you would never suspect that so
gray and uninteresting an envelope could inclose the manuscript of a
story like Corey’s. You had seen hundreds like him before, and you knew
what they contained—stereotyped circular letters full of dull,
indisputable facts, nothing you wanted or cared to know. And it was
precisely because I wished later on one of those very dull facts that I
came to speak to my man.
The train coming to a sudden stop brought me out of my oblivion, and,
looking idly out of the window to see what place it might be, I was
seized by one of those fits of petty annoyance incident to such
interruptions, for the train had run so far past the platform that I
found it impossible to see the name of the station. I got myself out of
my comfortable position, and tried, by turning completely about, to see
back to the station. But we had gone too far. And then—I haven’t an idea
why, for it was of absolutely no importance to me—I looked about for
some one to ask. And nearest me, sitting rather uncomfortably upright in
his big leather chair, the little rack at his elbow guiltless of any
glass, and holding listlessly in his hand the latest popular magazine,
sat a gray-haired, gray-suited old gentleman, looking lonesomely out of
his window.
“I beg pardon,” I said. “Can you tell me what place this is?”
He turned gratefully at the sound of my voice. “It’s ——,” he told me.
I’ve never been able to recall what name he said, because, I suppose, of
what came after.
It was certainly not surprising that he should think, from my manner,
that I had some interest in the place, and he went on, after a moment’s
hesitating silence, to say, in his unobtrusive but unmistakable
Middle-West voice, that the town was a milling center—flour and meal,
and that kind of thing.
I saw that I had committed myself to something more in the way of
conversation than my laconic word of thanks for his information and a
lapse into silence. I wondered what I could say. He was such a nice,
kindly old gentleman, and he would never in the world have addressed any
one first. I hit upon the most obvious sequence, and asked if, then, he
was familiar with that part of the country. He said, oh yes, he was “a
native of Iowa.”
“Indeed?” I said, for lack of anything else to say, and his statement
not having been a particularly provocative one.
“Yes,” he said. “My home is Dubuque.”
Dubuque! Dubuque! What was it I knew about Dubuque? The name struck me
instantly with a sense of importance, as if it had rung the bell of a
target concealed out of sight. I sought about in my mind for a full
minute before I recalled, with a kind of start—Corey.
So many things had come in between—bigger things than any one man—and
overlaid all the pictures that had gone before. Overlaid them with
pigment so crude, so roughly applied, that one neither saw nor
remembered anything else. All the nations of Europe loosed in the Great
War, and America straining hard at her worn leash of neutrality. Small
wonder that Corey, of Dubuque, along with countless other memories of
that pale time, had faded into a dim, far perspective.
And yet, the sound of that name had brought him—as clearly as I had seen
him that night in Paris—before me. I heard his voice, felt the vigor of
his personality, saw him throw back his head and laugh. And here, in the
chair next my own, and ready to talk, sat a man who, by every rule of
probability and chance, would be able to tell me about him.
“I know a townsman of yours,” I said, and he evinced at once a kind of
mild and flattered surprise.
“From Dubuque?” he said. “Well, well! What’s his name?”
“Corey,” I said. “Doctor Corey.”
It had upon him a most unexpected effect; very much, it seemed, the same
effect his announcement had had upon me the moment before. He leaned
forward no more than an inch, but his mild gray eyes kindled with a kind
of excited intensity.
“You knew Jim Corey! Not here—not in Dubuque?”
“I met him in Paris,” I said, “quite a long while ago.”
“In _Paris_! Well, well—think of that!”
He shook his head, and regarded me suddenly with a stronger and new kind
of interest. I was, apparently, the first person he had ever encountered
who had really known Corey abroad, and I could see that the fact had
established me immediately in his mind as an intimate friend of Corey’s.
I suppose I should have told him that I had only seen Corey once; that I
couldn’t, as a matter of fact, claim more than a passing acquaintance.
But if I had, I should never have heard what I heard. And, anyway, it
wouldn’t have been, in the sense in which such things count, exactly
true—for it had never been, for me at least, a one night’s acquaintance.
I had seemed to know Corey better in that one night than one knows most
men in a month of companionship. Yes, it was something more than the
curiosity of a passing acquaintance that caused me to let the old fellow
keep his impression.
“It’s queer,” he said, suddenly, throwing up his head, and pressing open
the pages of his popular magazine as if he were about to begin to read,
“he was a kind of relative of mine. His father and I—third cousins on
our mothers’ side.” He broke off and regarded me again silently, and I
believe now that he was trying to persuade himself not to go on, not to
say anything more. But the temptation, the maximum, I might say, of
temptation, combined with the minimum of danger that he should ever see
me again, overcame his natural shyness and discretion. He seemed to
decide, upon my ejaculation, to go on.
“His house is just ’round the corner from mine. His wife lives there
now.”
“His wife!” The surprise was plain enough in my voice. And this seemed,
just for a second, to surprise him, too.
“You knew,” he said, “that he had married?”
I explained that I hadn’t seen Corey for several years, and added that I
had, however, understood that he was thinking of settling down. It put,
I could see, a different face upon what he had to tell, for he seemed to
adjust himself, as if he must now go back to something he had thought
already understood between us.
“You didn’t know, then,” he said, “that he was dead?”
Dead! Corey dead! So that was what he had to tell. There sprang up in my
mind a vague, indefinite vision of something heroic in connection with
the Great War. When, I asked, and where did he die?
“A little over three months ago, in Europe. I was his executor.”
There was something in the way he made his last statement which lent it
a kind of special importance. And it proved, indeed, in the end, the
fact of supreme importance. And here, as if it were due me, he told me
his name—Ewing; and I told him mine.
“Yes,” he said. “I made a trip to New York to see a man who’d been with
him before he died. He brought a message from Corey. Queer,” he said,
“that message. He must have been—a little off, you know, at the last.”
It was clear that something had occurred on his trip to New York which
had puzzled him then, and continued, in spite of his explanation, to
puzzle him still. It was evident in the way he went back, presently, to
the beginning, as if he were stating a problem or building up a case.
He began by saying that he supposed nobody in Dubuque ever had
understood Corey—“and yet”—he faced me—“you wouldn’t say he was hard to
understand?”
I said that he had seemed to me to have an extremely straightforward and
simple personality; that that, to me, had been one of his charms.
“Exactly!” he said, “exactly! That’s what we always thought in
Dubuque—and I’ve known Jim Corey since the day he was born. Why, he’d go
away on one of his trips, and stay a year, sometimes two, and the day
after he’d get back you’d think he’d never been out of Dubuque, except
he was so glad to be home.”
And, talking with a growing and homely fluency, the nasal quality of his
rather pleasant voice increasing according to the sharpness of his
interest, he proceeded to sketch in, with the fine brush of his
provincialism, all the details of that picture I had had so clearly of
Corey that night in Paris, more than four years before.
It was astonishing how right my picture had been; how they, who had
known him always, had been no better able than I to visualize Corey
outside Dubuque.
And it seemed to have been the merest chance which had led him, the year
of his graduation from medical school, to take his first trip away from
his native State. He had “put himself” through college, and had come out
with all the school had to give, wanting more. It was doubtful if Corey
had ever read a novel through in his life, but the college library
yielded up treasures in scientific and medical books whose plots he
remembered as easily as boarding-school girls remember the plots of
Laura Jean Libbey.
In the end he had happened to be engrossed in some experiments or other
with herbs, and it was that which led him to decide upon going to China.
He was going to study Chinese herbs. And he had gone, straight, without
any stops _en route_, as he did everything. But when he had been in
Pekin two weeks the Boxer Rebellion broke out, and there he was in the
thick of it; and a god-send he was, too, in the foreign legations,
fighting and caring for wounded by turns, day and night, youth and
strength and his fresh fine skill counting for ten in that beleaguered
handful of desperate men.
It was for that he had got his first decoration—Japan’s Order of the
Rising Sun, and a little later had come from France, for the same
service, and quite to the surprise of Corey, the scarlet ribbon of the
Legion of Honor.
There had been, of course, the appropriate furore—pictures and full-page
interviews in the San Francisco papers on his way home, and Dubuque
expecting to see him come back transformed, a hero, conscious of honors
won. But he had arrived, to their amazement, merely himself, and they
had accepted him, after a day or two, at his own valuation.
That was the first, and it seemed after that, although he was always off
to one of the far corners of the earth, they were never able to look
upon him when he came home as a distinguished traveler returned. He was
simply, as he seemed to wish to be, “Jim,” or sometimes “Doc” Corey come
home again. And yet they knew about the things he had done. They knew
where he had been. And they knew, too, about his decorations. They had
seen them on one or two occasions, when he had been the guest of the
evening at the “Business Men’s Banquet,” and he had “dressed up,” the
old gentleman said, in a full-dress suit and all his decorations. “Two
rows, all kinds, by then.” One could imagine him doing that, in a spirit
of comic masquerade. And one could imagine him also doing it merely to
please them.
His wife, after he was married, used to get out his decorations and show
them to her women friends, and at this Corey only laughed
good-humoredly. But she never showed them to men; she seemed to sense
how that would embarrass him.