THE FIGHTING THINGS
When Joan came into Devons’s room, she found him propped up on the
pillows, staring at the brass clock on the mantel.
“You’re five minutes late,” he informed her.
It was so trivial a matter to mention that Nurse Ware, who sat in the
farther corner of the room knitting and trying to look both deaf and
dumb, involuntarily raised her eyes.
“I was delayed by a caller,” Joan explained.
Nurse Ware turned to face the window, and from that point on assumed
that she was somewhere else. As far as either Joan or Devons cared, she
might have been in Jericho.
“It’s curious,” said Devons, “how the more time you have on your hands
the closer you watch the clock. This last five minutes has seemed like
an hour.”
“You should have been reading,” she laughed.
“I was waiting for you to read.”
The color came to her cheeks.
“I am ready,” she answered.
But it seemed that, after all, neither had anything especial he wished
to hear; and so, when she had looked through the table of contents
of a magazine or two, Joan found herself, in spite of the original
urgency of her mission, sitting back and idly talking. Doubtless a
fair explanation of this was that she had discovered that he, as a
cross-section of real life, was more interesting to her than any
fiction, which at best is merely a reflection of reality. As for
him, his experience with at least a dozen heroines during the past
week proved positively that the most brilliant of the authors were
stupid and clumsy when the work of their pens was put in such close
juxtaposition with actuality as in the present case. Even a poet cannot
describe black hair like hers as well as a man can see it—or eyes or
nose or mouth. Then there were a thousand other details, and these
other details were changing from second to second—changing so subtly
that words were powerless to trace the shadings. Sometimes they were
scarcely visible, but were rather variations of moods as intangible as
his own moods. Superficially, for example, her eyes remained always
the same in color and size, and yet they were never the same a minute
at a time. Even she as a whole did not remain fixed, because, as with
each visit he came to know her better and came to realize how much more
there was to know, she developed like a portrait on canvas under the
hands of an artist.
His attitude toward her at first had been one of challenge. He had
expected a certain class feeling to make itself manifest in her. He was
ready to resent any superiority she might express, even unconsciously,
as a result of her social position and wealth. He was for a little
while the elder Devons with all the latter’s pride in his few acres and
liberty. But as he found nothing to pit his aggressiveness against he
began to realize that after all it was he if any one who was playing
the cad. She was more natural and genuine than he. In not accepting her
for just what she was, he was unfair.
He was especially conscious of that to-day. And so he allowed himself
to unfold to her something of his past. It was at her prompting.
“I envy you and Mildred the chance you’ve had to travel and see
things,” she observed.
“Haven’t you traveled?” he asked.
“Only a little, abroad,” she answered.
To him that was the only kind of real traveling there was. The few back
home who had been to London or Paris were looked upon with something
like reverence.
“Then you’ve seen more than I,” he declared.
“Of buildings and pictures, perhaps. But always I took my own little
world with me.”
“You were lucky to have it.”
“You think so?”
He smiled.
“All this,” he went on, with a wave of his hand about the room,
“means—I wonder if you realize how much it means?”
“I wonder if you realize how little it means?” she ventured back.
He glanced up in surprise. Then he smiled again.
“I suppose facts, from a distance, get toned down,” he went on. “But
when you have to live them they stay pretty much as they are. You’ve
never been out West?”
“No,” she answered.
“It’s a wonderful country—to some,” he said. “To others—my father was
born out there. He grew up and married out there. He has worked like a
galley slave out there—all within ten miles of where he was born.”
“Tell me about him,” she begged.
“That’s about all there is to tell of him,” said Devons grimly. “I
suppose he had some ambition at first, but he stayed where he was. He
married early, and had ten children before he was forty. Then he _had_
to stay. He just plugged along day after day without energy enough
left to look ahead to the next day. Most of his life it’s just been a
question of getting enough to eat for himself and the others.”
Her eyes were sympathetic.
“He was honest and decent and worked hard. It doesn’t seem fair, does
it?”
“No.”
“I don’t know how I happened to wake up. I guess it was the teacher I
had when I went to the district school. She urged me on to the high
school, though that meant leaving home. And there I did so well in
chemistry that a teacher from the East suggested Technology. I didn’t
think I could make it at first—but I did. I got my degree. Then—well,
here I am.”
He stopped abruptly.
“What about between Technology and—here?” she asked.
“That’s the story of a dream that didn’t come true,” he answered.
“You’ll tell me about it some day?”
“I think you’d find the stories in the magazine pleasanter,” he
returned. “In those the dreams all come true.”
“Perhaps that’s because they go through to the end.”
He was thoughtful a moment, and then he nodded, his lips firm.
“Yes,” he said. “There’s that difference.”
“Why, you—you’ve just begun!”
He met her eyes. He had a curious sense of looking deeply into them.
Then she turned away, half afraid of her impulsiveness.
“Just begun,” he repeated.
It was the echo of a new impulse that had been stirring him for the
last few days. With the long, restful nights and the nourishing food,
his physical strength had fast returned. With that had come a new
outlook—an outlook that carried him to such dizzy heights that he had
drawn back, suspicious of it. It made all his former dreams seem feeble
in comparison.
After all, he had never looked very far ahead into the future
because—he faced the truth—because he had been so self-centered. Reed
and his ten thousand represented the climax. Even the return home was
to be in the nature of a personal triumph. Always he saw himself in
that picture as occupying the center of the stage. Then a slow curtain
with music.
These new pictures, as yet but faintly sketched in,—the idle pencil
movements, of an artist feeling his way,—were different. As nearly
as he could make out, he did not, in these, preëmpt the foreground.
Another figure was there. He scarcely dared identify it, except in a
very general way.
In a very general way it was evidently the figure of a woman—a very
beautiful woman with a hint of luxuriant hair. In the forehead and nose
and mouth he caught a general resemblance to some one he knew, though
he did not venture to call her by name. Besides, it was not this which
so greatly mattered. The fact which counted most was that she—whoever
she was—remained always in the foreground.
Yet he himself was not entirely eliminated. Far from it. He was
present, but at some little distance, and struggling toward her like
a figure in an allegory. Just what the meaning of this was he was not
certain. It might be some very broad subject—Youth struggling with
Success—like those in Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” except that he was
a great deal too intimately identified with it for that. Whoever the
woman might be, there was no doubt at all but that he was the man. And
with all his might and main he was trying to fight his way closer to
her. He did not even know what for, but there seemed to be some acute
necessity. It was as though everything in life worth while depended
upon his reaching her side. To do that he must accomplish certain
things, and this took him back again to those first weeks in New York
and to the old hopes reborn. Like all new-born things,—like the day
at dawn, like the earth in spring, like a man in love,—these hopes
came to him fresher and keener than ever. But here again there was a
difference. They did not so much concern him—except as a medium—as Her.
They were a feature of the struggle toward Her.
“You’ve just begun,” she said.
It was more than that. He had just been born. The past leading to this
present had been merely a period of conception. He thought he had been
working hard through all those long years, but it was child’s play to
what he felt himself capable of now. If he had felt then as he felt
now, he never would have gone out desperately to find Sawyer as though
that were the end. He would have known it as another beginning. Every
day, every hour, no matter what it brought forth, would be a beginning.
It is not possible to kill a reborn man. He is immortal. You can’t
starve him or freeze him. You can’t even run him down. Perhaps that is
why he was here; because the rebirth was foreordained.
Her words had brought these scattered thoughts which had for several
nights illumined his mind, like isolated rays of light, to a focus.
Instantaneously. Yet when he spoke again there was nothing in his words
to hint of the momentous truth they covered.
“Perhaps you’re right,” he said.
“Men like you—men out in the world—can always do that,” she ran on.
“Yes,” he answered.
“And women like Mildred,” she continued. “If she had lived, she would
have gone right on, beginning fresh every day.”
“And you?”
She hesitated a moment. To answer that involved the confession of
rather intimate details of her life. But if one talks of lives at all
it involves personalities. And that was what she was interested in.
It was just this side of him, that he was a live human being living a
quick life, that appealed to her. He was not merely some one like Dicky
Burnett, tagged and catalogued, circumscribed by his surroundings, and
acting his allotted part in a play. He was Devons. He was a man with
his story as yet unwritten.
“And you?” he repeated.
“Every day is so much like every other day,” she answered wearily. “It
must be so when most of the things worth doing have already been done
for you—years ago.”
“What things?”
“Oh—the fighting things!” she broke out.
He smiled at that. He liked her spirit, but it was the spirit of
an imaginative child who wants to go out and hunt Indians. But it
whetted the desire in him. He, too, would have liked a few Indians to
fight—for her. Those men of the early days who had such opportunities
were to be envied. There is something tangible about an Indian, and
when confronted by them a man had something definite to do. His task
consisted simply of aiming his old blunderbuss and shooting, or, at
close quarters, swinging his good cutlass.
“Grandfather Fairburne was a forty-niner,” she explained proudly.
“And discovered much gold?”
“I don’t know about that. He became a banker.”
“Your father is a banker, then?”
“No,” she replied. “Dad—he—he is only what is called retired.”
She looked as though ashamed of the admission.
“That is the trouble,” she went on.
“The trouble with what?”
“The trouble with the days,” she answered. “It’s why one day is just
like another.”
The clock on the mantel struck five. It struck five times very firmly
and loudly. Nurse Ware rose and thereby announced her presence. Dr.
Nichols had given orders that all visitors should be limited to one
half-hour. Considering the fact that Devons had only the one visitor,
could not possibly have any other visitor, the regulation appeared to
be more personal than is generally the case.
Devons scowled at the nurse.
“Oh, you’re there, are you?” he growled.
“Yes, Mr. Devons. It’s five o’clock.”
“I can count,” answered Devons.
Joan rose hurriedly. She knew what an autocrat Nichols was.
“I’ll try to find something more interesting to read to-morrow,” she
promised.
“Don’t,” he warned. “Besides, I’m going to get out of this bed before
long.”
“You mustn’t.”
“I must. I want to get to work.”
“But Dr. Nichols says—”
“Hang Dr. Nichols!” cut in Devons. “He doesn’t know what I have to do.”
Nurse Ware rustled forward, her starched skirts sounding like a distant
Gatling gun.
“Good-night,” said Joan.