CHANCE
The wonder is not that Chance should seem to be the exception to the
orderly rule of life, but that except by Chance lives should ever
move in an orderly way. If it were possible to make, upon a piece of
white paper, a diagram of the goings and comings, the crossing and
criss-crossing of all those who move about New York in a single day,
the result would prove it to be little short of marvelous that the
paths do not cut across each other a thousand times an hour.
In a corner of the city removed in space many blocks from Delmonico’s,
and separated in other ways by what might be considered an impassable
gulf from the lives of either Joan Fairburne or Dicky Burnett, Mark
Devons paced the floor of his attic room, stopping now and then to
frown at the whirling snowflakes, and then at the letter which he had
received in the noon mail. The letter was typewritten and read as
follows:
_Offices of Carlow, Reed & Co.
New York, N.Y. Wall Street_
DEAR MR. DEVONS:
We have delayed giving you a final answer on the proposition you
submitted to us to finance your patent No. 4782937 covering a new
process for the manufacture of an improved patent-leather dressing
at a reduced cost over the present type upon the market, because, to
speak frankly, the report of our chemists was so enthusiastic that
we felt you had something that really deserved success. We went over
the matter several times, but have, however reluctantly, come to the
conclusion that other considerations enter to such an extent into
the problem of establishing such an enterprise that, with our many
other interests, we do not feel justified at present in continuing
negotiations. The Burnett product is so firmly intrenched with the
trade, and is backed by such a perfect organization, that any attempt
to break through, even with a superior article, would involve more
capital and time than we are just now prepared to risk. There is a
possibility that at some later date, if you care to re-submit the
proposition, we might be willing to undertake it.
Thanking you for your favor and wishing you all success, we beg to
remain,
Sincerely yours,
CARLOW, REED & CO.
MR. MARK DEVONS,
_Mullen Court, New York, N.Y._
In another envelope from the same office came a note from Ben Sawyer:
DEAR MARK:
I’ve just had a talk with Mr. Reed, and he tells me he has turned you
down. It’s a darned shame, because you have a good thing there. The
trouble seems to be that several years ago he had one set-to with the
Burnett crowd and got the worst of it. They say Burnett is a bear and
would fight to his last cent, and from all I hear there’re a good
many cents in between. I wish I had the money myself to back you!
Why the deuce don’t you drop round and see a fellow? I’m at
Wellington Chambers still.
Yours,
BEN.
Confidential; Reed says that offer Forsythe of Burnett’s made of two
thousand cash is robbery. Keep away.
B.
It was difficult, on the whole, to find very much humor in either
letter; and yet there was one line that brought a smile to Devons’s
lips every time he read it. “There is a possibility that at some later
date—”
At some later date! To appreciate the humor of that jaunty phrase one
had to realize that he had already been waiting several months on a
capital of seventy-five dollars. This had been reduced on Monday to
ten cents. To-day was Wednesday and he was hungry—hungry as the devil.
Under the circumstances the airiness of that suggestion of waiting six
months or a year longer might, if one were temperamentally so inclined,
be considered in the nature of a jest.
For two months he had subsisted chiefly on a diet of bread, black
coffee, and tobacco. That was well enough as long as he had his dreams
also. As long as he was able to go to bed at night with visions of a
fortune awaiting him on the morrow, bread, black coffee, and a smoke
were plenty for dinner. He had enough books with him so that he was
enabled to pass not only a pleasant but profitable evening with his
studies. If the after-breakfast mail did not bring him his letter,
there was another at eleven to look forward to, and more studying with
a little dreaming thrown in. So until lunch-time and the three o’clock
mail. So until dinner-time, and so through another evening.
Dreams! Dreams! Dreams! A man does not put on weight with them. A man
may even lose color through them. And of course plug tobacco in a
corn-cob is not altogether wholesome, although it helps the dreaming.
But it is surprising how happy a man may keep as long as his plug
tobacco lasts.
Devons had stumbled upon his discovery while doing research work on
leathers in preparation for the original paper which he offered for his
degree. He had hugged his secret close and worked on it all summer in
the Technology laboratories. When he came to New York he went direct
to Forsythe with it as soon as he had secured his patent papers; and
Forsythe, after looking him up, had made his offer to buy it outright.
When Devons indignantly refused, Forsythe only smiled.
“You’ll be back,” he said.
“Why?” Devons demanded.
“Because, my boy,” Forsythe assured him, “there is nowhere else to go.”
It had looked that way until, quite by chance, Devons ran across his
classmate Sawyer, who was connected with a house making a specialty of
financing new enterprises. That was when the dreaming began.
It had been glorious while it lasted, because dreams are largely a
matter of contrast, and Devons had, in the way of a somber background
to put them against, all that was necessary. One of ten children, who
had kept his mother lean and his father scrawny from the sheer effort
of getting together enough to clothe and feed them up to the age
when they were able to earn a pittance for themselves, he had fought
his way, as Mildred his cousin had hers, through school. And what he
remembered of it was not the hardship itself, but what it took away
from him. To do nothing but exist and study he had surrendered most of
those things that are the heritage of youth. It was work, nothing but
work, with laughter and bright eyes all about him, but beyond him—like
mocking fairy voices in the distance. It was work in winter and work
in summer for the dollars that came to him so grudgingly and came to
others so easily. He made Technology at eighteen as time is computed by
mathematics, but he was nearer twenty-five in body.
It had been pleasanter there, because he felt himself to be just so
much nearer his goal; but though the authorities advised against work
outside of studies, he was at work half the time he should have been
sleeping. And he did not have as much to eat as he should have had.
Life for those four years had been a treadmill affair for him, and
twice he had been upon the point of dropping, but had held himself
together by his nerve.
So when he made his discovery it was a good deal as though he had been
handed Aladdin’s lamp. For a week he wandered around in a sort of dazed
ecstasy. Then he buckled down again and pushed it through.
He had borrowed enough from home to secure his patent papers and lived
upon what he had left. The folks had mortgaged the farm to raise it for
him. And one of the very finest of his dreams ran something like this:
Mr. Reed, of Carlow, Reed & Co., came to him at the end of the first
fiscal year of the Devons Manufacturing Company and said: “Devons, this
thing is going better than we expected. You’ve worked hard, and now
you’d better take a vacation. Here’s ten thousand dollars on account.
Take it, and go off for a month.”
Ten thousand dollars! It is necessary to know how big a single dollar
is before any one can realize how big ten thousand dollars is. A
single dollar can be, in size, as big as the moon, and that’s as big
as you care to make it; as big as a pie plate, a carriage wheel, a
circus ring, or the circumference of the globe. A single dollar can be
in value as much as an ordinary fortune, or as much as a Rockefeller
fortune, or anything in between. If you’re starving it may be just as
valuable as all the money in the world.
To Devons a dollar meant the difference between being hungry and being
well fed. It meant the difference between walking with weak legs or
riding in a comfortable subway train. It meant the difference, almost,
between something and nothing—which is a big difference. Ten thousand
dollars, then, meant ten thousand times that.
He had ten thousand dollars—not in a check, but, say, in dollar
bills—something he could see, and touch and count in separate units. He
had them in two dress-suit cases. The cases were packed tight so that
it was difficult to strap them. Green bits of them stuck out. Even
then he had enough left over to buy a new suit of clothes and hat and
overcoat and shoes and silk stockings and shirts and cravats, and a
pair of gold studs he saw in a window once. After this he had enough to
buy a new pipe and eat a square meal at Delmonico’s and take a taxi for
his parlor-car reservation.
In the next picture he was stepping off at a little one-horse railroad
station in the West and shaking hands with his father who had driven up
with the big horses in a buckboard.
“Strap those suit-cases on tight,” he said to his father; “I don’t want
to lose them.”
So they jogged along for some ten miles, and he inquired after every
one and learned that they were all sick or dying or on their way to
the poorhouse. At the farmhouse door his mother came out to meet him,
looking, as always, thin and hollow-eyed. He took the suit-cases into
the sitting-room and handed one to his mother and one to his father,
remarking casually:
“A little present.”
Good Lord!—ten thousand dollars! If it meant what it did to him, what
did it mean to them? A real ranch with hired men to work it and ease
and comfort, and a Ford and—
Now it was all over. The dream had vanished. “If, at some later date—”
Devons scraped round in the bottom of his pocket and found enough
tobacco for one more pipeful. He filled his corn-cob and lighted it,
but the smoke tasted bitter. That was because he was hungry.
And yet, there was one chance remaining which, if accepted, would at
least pay off the debt at home and leave enough to stake him to some
sort of job at which he could earn a living. He had only to go back to
Forsythe and sign his name to a paper and he would receive two thousand
dollars. That was only a fifth of ten and—it was the end. It would,
however, pull him out of his present hole and leave him free for a new
beginning.
Once again Devons paced his room. If only he alone were involved he
would hold on, but he was not alone now. He knew what that mortgage
signified to his father. For twenty years the man had denied himself
everything except the bed-rock necessities of life to escape this
curse of the little farmer. Devons knew that to his father it was like
submitting to having a sword suspended above his head. If it fell—if
the interest money was not met promptly—it meant disaster. It meant,
with the foreclosed mortgage, not a single clean blow which a man might
endure, but a long-drawn-out type of torture. The only alternative open
to his father would be to give up his rights as a freeman and hire out.
When Devons reached this point he stopped short and clenched his
fists. He could not allow such a thing as that to be. No matter what
the sacrifice, he must forestall that contingency. It was getting to
be late in the afternoon, but if he hurried he might possibly reach
Forsythe.
Devons put on his coat, jammed his old soft hat down to his ears, and
started downstairs. On the second landing he caught the smell of coffee
from the room of Arkwright, the architect, and paused a moment to enjoy
it. The latter swung open the door and saw him.
“Hello, Devons,” he called. “Thought I heard some one there. Come in a
minute, can’t you?”
“I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Oh, come on and have a cup of coffee before you go out, anyhow,” he
pleaded. “It’s a tough old day.”
He was a big, insistent fellow, this Arkwright, and he stepped to
Devons’s side and took his arm.
“Want to show you something.”
Devons followed into the warm room, where over an alcohol lamp a
coffee-pot was sending out clouds of fragrant steam. A dark wooden
table in the center of the room was covered with drawings. Arkwright
poured a cup of black Java and shoved it toward Devons, with a box
of cigarettes. The latter hesitated. It seemed almost like accepting
charity to take it when he wanted it so much. His hand trembled as he
reached for the cup.
Arkwright studied him a second—his brows contracting over sharp gray
eyes.
“Look here, Devons, you’re sick!” he exclaimed.
But by then Devons had swallowed his coffee, and it warmed him all the
way through—warmed and stimulated him.
“No,” he answered steadily, as he lighted a cigarette. “It’s only a
case of nerves. What have you there?” He nodded toward the drawings.
Arkwright’s attention was immediately diverted.
“Come over and see,” he invited. “Here’s something good. When you make
your pile you may want it. It’s a gentleman’s country place—to cost,
say, around a hundred and fifty thousand; and it’s one peach.”
Passing his pencil lightly over the angles and circles and semicircles
that stood for masonry,—it required only dollars to convert them
into masonry,—Arkwright elaborated on his plans. He showed the house
modeled after the fashion of an English gentleman’s estate, with its
big vaulted reception-room and dining-room, and the master’s rooms and
the servants’ rooms and the modern kitchen, and the grounds outside
with pond and tennis-court and rose-garden, and garage, and Lord knows
what. He made it all so vivid that Devons visualized it as though he
were actually looking at the finished mansion. As Arkwright rambled
on he used the possessive. It was always, “Here’s your dining-room
and here’s your library,” until Devons was back again in his old
day-dreaming.
“It’s a corker,” nodded Devons as Arkwright finished. “If I had a
fortune I’d order it this afternoon.”
Arkwright laughed.
“That’s the trouble,” he answered. “The fellows that ought to have such
places can’t get ’em, and those that can get ’em don’t want ’em.”
“Some of us will get ’em yet,” Devons declared grimly.
He put on his coat; but when he went out again it was in a different
mood. Forsythe could go hang. Sawyer had spoken once of the possibility
of finding him a job—a small salaried job—with Carlow, Reed & Co. He
would walk up there and see him and take anything that was offered.
The wind blew the snow into his face and whipped his coat about his
ankles as he stepped out. It came like a challenge, and he accepted it.
He made his way across Washington Square to the Avenue and pushed ahead
uptown. For the first half-dozen blocks it was easy, but as he went
on it became harder and harder to walk. He was weaker, on the whole,
than he realized. But he gripped his jaws and went on and on and on.
With his head low and his eyes on the ground, he centered every effort
on just making his feet go. He saw nothing and felt nothing. He was
moving now like an automaton. So he went on and on and on—farther, as a
matter of fact, than he should have gone.
He paused once to stare through the snow at the number of a
cross-street. He was in the sixties and west of his destination. He
turned back dully. Then he staggered off the sidewalk and across the
Avenue. Like one in a dream, he heard the distant toot of a horn—then a
shout. He felt something strike him, and that was all he felt or knew.