Book: The Fighting Chance

R >> Robert W. Chambers >> The Fighting Chance




He did listen; he did patiently add two and two in the long solitudes of
his Louis XV chamber; and if the results were not always four, at least
they came within a fraction of the proper answer. And this did not alter
his policy or weaken his faith in his mentors; nor did it impair his
real gratitude to them, and his real and simple friendship for them
both. He was faithful in friendship once formed, obstinately so, for
better or for worse; but he was shrewd enough to ignore opportunities
for friendships which he foresaw could do him no good on his plodding
pilgrimage toward the temple of his inexorable desire.

Lifting, now, his Delft-coloured eyes furtively, he studied the silk-
and-lace swathed figure of the young matron opposite, flung back into
the depths of her great chair, profile turned from him, her chin
imprisoned in her ringed fingers. The brooding abandon of the attitude
contrasted sharply with the grooming of the woman, making both the more
effective.

“Turn in, if you want to,” she said, her voice indistinct, smothered by
her pink palm. “You’re to dress in Leroy’s quarters.”

“I don’t want to turn in just yet.”

“You said you needed sleep.”

“I do. But it’s not eleven yet.”

She slipped into another posture, reaching for a cigarette, and, setting
it afire from the match he offered, exhaled a cloud of smoke and looked
dreamily through it at him.

“Who is she?” she asked in a colourless voice. “Tell me, for I don’t
know. Agatha? Marion Page? Mrs. Vendenning? or the Tassel girl?”

“Nobody--yet,” he admitted cheerfully.

“Nobody--yet,” she repeated, musing over her cigarette. “That’s good
politics, if it’s true.”

“Am I untruthful?” he asked simply.

“I don’t know. Are you? You’re a man.”

“Don’t talk that way, Leila.”

“No, I won’t. What is it that you and Sylvia Landis have to talk about
so continuously every time you meet?”

“She’s merely civil to me,” he explained.

“That’s more than she is to a lot of people. What do you talk about?”

“I don’t know--nothing in particular; mostly about Shotover, and the
people there last summer.”

“Doesn’t she ever mention Stephen Siward?”

“Usually. She knows I like him.”

“She likes him, too,” said Leila, looking at him steadily.

“I know it. Everybody likes him--or did. I do, yet.”

“I do, too,” observed Mrs. Mortimer coolly. “I was in love with him. He
was only a boy then.”

Plank nodded in silence.

“Where is he now--do, you know?” she asked. “Everybody says he’s gone to
the devil.”

“He’s in the country somewhere,” replied Plank cautiously. “I stopped in
to see him the other day, but nobody seemed to know when he would
return.”

Mrs. Mortimer tossed her cigarette onto the hearth. For a long interval
of silence she lay there in her chair, changing her position restlessly
from moment to moment; and at length she lay quite still, so long that
Plank began to think she had fallen asleep in her chair.

He rose. She did not stir, and, passing her, he instinctively glanced
down. Her cheeks, half buried against the back of the chair, were
overflushed; under the closed lids the lashes glistened wet in the
lamplight.

Surprised, embarrassed, he halted, as though afraid to move; and she sat
up with a nervous shake of her shoulders.

“What a life!” she said, under her breath; “what a life for a woman to
lead!”

“Wh-whose?” he blurted out.

“Mine!”

He stared at her uneasily, finding nothing to say. He had never before
heard anything like this from her.

“Can’t anybody help me out of it?” she said quietly.

“Who? How? … Do you mean--”

“Yes, I mean it! I mean it! I--”

And suddenly she broke down, in a strange, stammering, tearless way,
opening the dry flood-gates over which rattled an avalanche of
words--bitter, breathless phrases rushing brokenly from lips that shrank
as they formed them.

Plank sat inert, the corroding echo of the words clattering in his ears.
And after a while he heard his own altered voice sounding persistently
in repetition:


“Don’t say those things, Leila; don’t tell me such things.”

“Why? Don’t you care?”

“Yes, yes, I care; but I can’t do anything! I have no business to
hear--to see you this way.”

“To whom can I speak, then, if I can not speak to you? To whom can I
turn? Where am I to turn, in all the world?”

“I don’t know,” he said fearfully; “the only way is to go on.”

“What else have I done? What else am I doing?” she cried. “Go on? Am I
not trudging on and on through life, dragging the horror of it behind me
through the mud, except when the horror drags me? To whom am I to
turn--to other beasts like him?--sitting patiently around, grinning and
slavering, awaiting their turn when the horror of it crushes me to the
mud?”

She stretched out a rounded, quivering arm, and laid the small fingers
of the left hand on its flawless contour. “Look!” she said, exasperated,
“I am young yet; the horror has not yet corrupted the youth in me. I am
fashioned for some reason, am I not?--for some purpose, some happiness. I
am not bad; I am human. What poison has soaked into me can be
eliminated. I tell you, no woman is capable of being so thoroughly
poisoned that the antidote proves useless.

“But I tell you men, also, that unless she find that antidote she will
surely reinfect herself. A man can not do what that man has done to me
and expect me to recover unaided. People talk of me, and I have given
them subjects enough! But--look at me! Straight between the eyes! Every
law have I broken except that! Do you understand? That one, which you
men consider yourselves exempt from, I have not broken--yet! Shall I
speak plainer? It is the fashion to be crude. But--I can’t be; I am
unfashionable, you see.”

She laughed, her haunted eyes fixed on his.

“Is there no chance for me? Because I drag his bedraggled name about
with me is there no decent chance, no decent hope? Is there only
indecency in prospect, if a man comes to care for a married woman? Can’t
a decent man love her at all? I--I think--”

Her hands, outstretched, trembled, then flew to her face; and she stood
there swaying, until Plank perforce stepped to her side and steadied her
against him.

So they remained for a while, until she looked up dazed, weary, ashamed,
expecting nothing of him; and when it came, leaving her still
incredulous, his arms around her, his tense, flushed face recoiling from
their first kiss, she did not seem to comprehend.

“I can’t turn on him,” he stammered, “I--we are friends, you see. How can
I love you, if that is so?”

“Could you love me?” she asked calmly.

“I--I don’t know. I did love--I do care for--another woman. I can’t marry
her, though I am given to understand there is a chance. Perhaps it is
partly ambition,” he said honestly, “for I am quite sure she has never
cared for me, never thought of me in that way. I think a man can’t stand
that long.”

“No; only women can. Who is she?”

“You won’t ask me, will you?”

“No. Are you sorry that I am in love with you?”

His arms unclasped her body, and he stepped back, facing her.

“Are you?” she asked violently.

“No.”

“You speak like a man,” she said tremulously. “Am I to be permitted to
adore you in peace, then--decently, and in peace?”

“Don’t speak that way, Leila. I--there is no woman, no friend, I care for
as much as I do you. It is easy, I think, for a woman, like you, to make
a man care for her. You will not do it, will you?”

“I will,” she said softly.

“It’s no use; I can’t turn on him. I can’t! He is my friend, you see.”

“Let him remain so. I shall do what I can. Let him remain a monument to
his fellow-beasts. What do I care? Do you think I desire to turn you
into his image? Do you think I hope for your degradation and mine? Are
you afraid I should not recognise love unaccompanied by the attendant
beast? I--I don’t know; you had better teach me, if I prove blind. If you
can love me, do so in charity before I go blind forever.”

She laid one hand on his arm, looked at him, then turned and passed
slowly through the doorway.

“If you are going to sleep before we start you had better be about it!”
she said, looking back at him from the stairs.

But he had no further need of sleep; and for a long while he stood at
the windows watching the lamps of cabs and carriages sparkling through
the leafless thickets of the park like winter fire-flies.

At one o’clock, hearing Agatha Caithness speak to Leila’s maid, he left
the window, and sitting down at the desk, telephoned to Desmond’s; and
he was informed that Mortimer, hard hit, had signified his intention of
recouping at Burbank’s. Then he managed to get Burbank’s on the wire,
and finally Mortimer himself, but was only cursed for his pains and cut
off in the middle of his pleading.

So he wandered up-stairs into Mortimer’s apartments, where he tubbed and
dressed, and finally descended, to find Agatha Caithness alone in the
library, spinning a roulette wheel and whistling an air from “La
Bacchante.”

“That’s pretty,” he said; “sing it.”

“No; it’s better off without the words; and so are you,” added Agatha
candidly, relinquishing the wheel and strolling with languid grace about
the room, hands on her hips, timing her vagrant steps to the indolent,
wicked air. And,

“‘Je rougirais de men ivresse Si tu conservais ta raison!’”

she hummed deliberately, pivoting on her heels and advancing again
toward Plank, her pretty, pale face delicate as an enamelled cameo under
the flood of light from the crystal chandeliers.

“I understand that Mr. Mortimer is not coming with us,” she said
carelessly. “Are you going to dance with me, if I find nobody better?”

He expressed himself flattered, cautiously. He was one of many who never
understood this tall, white, low-voiced girl, with eyes too pale for
beauty, yet strangely alluring, too. Few men denied the indefinable
enchantment of her; few men could meet her deep-lidded, transparent gaze
unmoved. In the sensitive curve of her mouth there was a kind of
sensuousness; in her low voice, in her pallor, in the slim grace of her
a vague provocation that made men restless and women silently curious
for something more definite on which to base their curiosity.

She was wearing, over the smooth, dead-white skin of her neck, a collar
of superb diamonds and aquamarines--almost an effrontery, as the latter
were even darker than her eyes; yet the strange and effective harmony
was evident, and Plank spoke of the splendour of the gems.

She nodded indifferently, saying they were new, and that she had picked
them up at Tiffany’s; and he mentally sketched out the value of the
diamonds, a trifle surprised, because Leila Mortimer had carefully
informed him about the condition of the Caithness exchequer.

That youthful matron herself appeared in a few moments, very lustrous,
very lovely in her fragrant, exotic brightness, and Plank for the first
time thought that she was handsome--the vigorous, youthful incarnation of
Life itself, in contrast to Agatha’s almost deathly beauty. She greeted
him not only without a trace of embarrassment, but with such a friendly,
fresh, gay confidence that he scarcely recognised in her the dry-eyed,
feverish woman of an hour ago, whose very lips shrank back, scorched by
the torrent of her own invective.

And so they drove the three short blocks to the Page’s in their hired
livery; the street was inadequate for the crush of vehicles; and the
glittering pressure within the house was outrageous; all of which
confused Plank, who became easily confused by such things.

How they got in--how they managed to present themselves--who took Leila
and Agatha from him--where they went--where he himself might be--he did
not understand very clearly. The house was large, strange, full of
strangers. He attempted to obtain his bearings by wandering about
looking for a small rococo reception-room where he remembered he had
once talked kennel talk with Marion Page, and had on another occasion
perspired freely under the arrogant and strabismic glare of her mother.
That good lady had really rather liked him; he never suspected it.

But he couldn’t find the rococo room--or perhaps he didn’t recognise it.
So many people--so many, many people whom he did not know, whom he had
never before laid eyes on--high-bred faces hard as diamonds; young, gay,
laughing faces; brilliant eyes encountering his without a softening of
recognition; clean-cut, attractive men in swarms, all animated, all
amused, all at home among themselves and among the silken visions of
loveliness passing and repassing, with here an extended gloved arm and
the cordial greeting of camaraderie, there a quick smile, a swift turn
in passing, a capricious bending forward for a whisper, a compliment, a
jest--all this swept by him, around him, enveloping him with its
brightness, its gaiety, its fragrance, and left him more absolutely
alone than he had ever been in all his life.

He tried to find Leila, and gave it up. He saw Quarrier talking to
Agatha, but the former saluted him so coldly that he turned away.

After a while he found Marion, but she hadn’t a dance left for him;
neither had Rena Bonnesdel, whom he encountered while she was adroitly
avoiding one of the ever-faithful twins. The twin caught up with her in
consequence, and she snubbed Plank for his share in the disaster, which
depressed him, and he started for the smoking-room, wherever that haven
might be found. He got into the ball-room, however, by mistake, and
adorned the wall, during the cotillon, as closely as his girth
permitted, until an old lady sent for him; and he went and talked about
bishops for nearly an hour to her, until his condition bordered on
frenzy, the old lady being deaf and peevish.

Later, Alderdene used him to get rid of an angular, old harridan who
seemed to be one solid diamond-mine, and who drove him into a corner and
talked indelicacies until Plank’s broad face flamed like the setting
sun. Then Captain Voucher unloaded a frightened débutante on him who
tried to talk about horses and couldn’t; and they hated each other for a
while, until, looking around her in desperation, she found he had
vanished--which was quick work for a man of his size.

Kathryn Tassel employed him for supper, and kept him busy while she
herself was immersed in a dawning affair with Fleetwood. She did
everything to him except to tip him; and her insolence was the last
straw.

Then, unexpectedly in the throng, two wonderful sea-blue eyes
encountered his, deepening to violet with pleasure, and the trailing
sweetness of a voice he knew was repeating his name, and a slim, white-
gloved hand lay in his own.

Her escort, Ferrall, nodded to him pleasantly. She leaned forward from
Ferrall’s arm, saying, under her breath, “I have saved a dance for you.
Please ask me at once. Quick! do you want me?”

“I--I do,” stammered Plank.

Ferrall, suspicious, stepped forward to exchange civilities, then
turning to the girl beside him: “See here, Sylvia, you’ve dragged me all
over this house on one pretext or another. Do you want any supper, or
don’t you? If you don’t, it’s our dance.”

“No, I don’t. No, it isn’t. Kemp, you annoy me!”

“That’s a nice thing to say! Is it your delicately inimitable way of
giving me my congé?”

“Yes, thank you,” nodded Miss Landis coolly; “you may go now.”

“You’re spoiled, that’s what’s the matter,” retorted Ferrall wrathfully.
“I thought I was to have this dance. You said--”

“I said ‘perhaps,’ because I didn’t see Mr. Plank coming to claim it.
Thank you, Kemp, for finding him.”

Her nod and smile took the edge from her malice. Ferrall, who really
adored dancing, glared about for anybody, and presently cornered the
frightened and neglected debutante who had hated Plank.

Sylvia, standing beside Plank, looked up at him with her confident and
friendly smile.

“You don’t care to dance, do you? Would you mind if we sat out this
dance?”

“If you’d rather,” he said, so wistfully that she hesitated; then with a
little shrug laid one hand on his arm, and they swung out across the
floor together, into the scented whirl.

Plank, like many heavy men, danced beautifully; and Sylvia, who still
loved dancing with all the ardour of a schoolgirl, permitted a moment or
two of keen delight to sweep her dreamily from her purpose. But that
purpose must have been a strong one, for she returned to it in a few
minutes, and, looking up at Plank, said very gently that she cared to
dance no more.

Her hand resting lightly on his arm, it did not seem possible that any
pressure of hers was directing them to the conservatory; yet he did not
know where he was going, and she was familiar with the house, and they
soon entered the conservatory, where, in the shadow of various palms
various youths looked up impatiently as they passed, and various maidens
sat up very straight in their chairs.

Threading their dim way into the farther recesses they found seats among
thickets of forced lilacs over-hung by early wistaria. A spring-like
odour hung in the air; somewhere a tiny fountain grew musical in the
semi-darkness.

“Marion told me you had been asked,” she said. “We have been so
friendly; you’ve always asked me to dance whenever we have met; so I
thought I’d save you one. Are you flattered, Mr. Plank?”

He said he was, very pleasantly, perfectly undeceived, and convinced of
her purpose--a purpose never even tacitly admitted between them; and the
old loneliness came over him again--not resentment, for he was willing
that she should use him. Why not? Others used him; everybody used him;
and if they found no use for him they let him alone. Mortimer,
Fleetwood, Belwether--all, all had something to exact from him. It was
for that he was tolerated--he knew it; he had slowly and unwillingly
learned it. His intrusion among these people, of whom he was not one,
would be endured only while he might be turned to some account. The
hospital used him, the clergy found plenty for him to do for them, the
museum had room for other pictures of his. Who among them all had ever
sought him without a motive? Who among them all had ever found unselfish
pleasure in him? Not one.

Something in the dull sadness of his face, as he sat there, checked the
first elaborately careless question her lips were already framing.
Leaning a little nearer in the dim light she looked at him inquiringly
and he returned her gaze in silence.

“What is it, Mr. Plank,” she said; “is anything wrong?”

He knew that she did not mean to ask if anything was amiss with him. She
did not care. Nobody cared. So, recognising his cue, he answered: “No,
nothing is wrong that I have heard of.”

“You wear a very solemn countenance.”

“Gaiety affects me solemnly, sometimes. It is a reaction from frivolity.
I suppose that I am over-enjoying life; that is all.”

She laughed, using her fan, although the place was cool enough and they
had not danced long. To and fro flitted the silken vanes of her fan, now
closing impatiently, now opening again like the wings of a nervous moth
in the moonlight.

He wished she would come to her point, but he dared not lead her to it
too brusquely, because her purpose and her point were supposed to be
absolutely hidden from his thick and credulous understanding. It had
taken him some time to make this clear to himself; passing from
suspicion, through chagrin and overwounded feeling, to dull certainty
that she, too, was using him, harmlessly enough from her standpoint, but
how bitterly from his, he alone could know.

The quickened flutter of her fan meant impatience to learn from him what
she had come to him to learn, and then, satisfied, to leave him alone
again amid the peopled solitude of clustered lights.

He wished she would speak; he was tired of the sadness of it all.
Whenever in his isolation, in his utter destitution of friendship, he
turned guilelessly to meet a new advance, always, sooner or later, the
friendly mask was lifted enough for him to divine the cool, fixed gaze
of self-interest inspecting him through the damask slits.

Sylvia was speaking now, and the plumy fan was under savant control,
waving graceful accompaniment to her soft voice, punctuating her
sentences at times, at times making an emphasis or outlining a gesture.

It was the familiar sequence; topics that led to themes which adroitly
skirted the salient point; returned capriciously, just avoiding it--a
subtly charming pattern of words which required so little in reply that
his smile and nod were almost enough to keep her aria and his
accompaniment afloat.

It began to fascinate him to watch the delicacy of her strategy, the
coquetting with her purpose; her naive advance to the very edges of it,
the airy retreat, the innocent detour, the elaborate and circuitous
return. And at last she drifted into it so naturally that it seemed
impossible that fatuous man could have the most primitive suspicion of
her premeditation.

And Plank, now recognising his cue, answered her: “No, I have not heard
that he is in town. I stopped to see him the other day, but nobody there
knew how soon he intended to return from the country.”

“I didn’t know he had gone to the country,” she said without apparent
interest.

And Plank was either too kind to terminate the subject, or too anxious
to serve his turn and release her; for he went on: “I thought I told you
at Mrs. Ferrall’s that Mr. Siward had gone to the country.”

“Perhaps you did. No doubt I’ve forgotten.”

“I’m quite sure I did, because I remember saying that he looked very
ill, and you said, rather sharply, that he had no business to be ill. Do
you remember?”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “Is he better?”

“I hope so.”

“You hope so?”--with the controlled emphasis of impatience.

“Yes. Don’t you, Miss Landis? When I saw him at his home, he was lame--on
crutches--and he looked rather ghastly; and all he said was that he
expected to leave for the country. I asked him to shoot next year at
Black Fells, and he seemed bothered about business, and said it might
keep him from taking any vacation.”

“He spoke about his business?”

“Yes, he--”

“What is the trouble with his business? Is it anything about Amalgamated
and Inter-County?”

“I think so.”

“Is he worried?”

Plank said deliberately: “I should be, if my interests were locked up in
Amalgamated Electric.”

“Could you tell me why that would worry you?” she asked, smiling
persuasively across at him.

“No,” he said, “I can’t tell you.”

“Because I wouldn’t understand?”

“Because I myself don’t understand.”

She thought awhile, brushing the rose velvet of her mouth with the fan’s
edge, then, looking up confidently:

“Mr. Siward is such a boy. I’m so glad he has you to advise him in such
matters.”

“What matters?” asked Plank bluntly.

“Why, in--in financial matters.”

“But I don’t advise him.”

“Why not?”

“Because he hasn’t asked me to, Miss Landis.”

“He ought to ask you. … He must ask you. … Don’t wait for him, Mr.
Plank. He is only a boy in such things.”

And, as Plank was silent:

“You will, won’t you?”

“Do what--make his business my business, without an invitation?” asked
Plank, so quietly that she flushed with annoyance.

“If you pretend to be his friend is it not your duty to advise him?” she
asked impatiently.

“No; that is for his business associates to do. Friendship comes to
grief when it crosses the frontiers of business.”

“That is a narrow view to take, Mr. Plank.”

“Yes, straight and narrow. The boundaries of friendship are straight and
narrow. It is best to keep to the trodden path; best not to walk on the
grass or trample the flowers.”

“I think you are sacrificing friendship for an epigram,” she said,
careless of the undertone of contempt in her voice.

“I have never sacrificed friendship.” He turned, and looked at her
pleasantly. “I never made an epigram consciously, and I have never
required of a friend more than I had to offer in return. Have you?”

The flush of hot displeasure stained her cheeks.

“Are you really questioning me, Mr. Plank?”

“Yes. You have been questioning me rather seriously--have you not?”

“I did not comprehend your definition of friendship. I did not agree
with it. I questioned it, not you! That is all.”

Plank rested his head on one big hand and stared at the clusters of dim
blossoms behind her; and after a while he said, as though thinking
aloud:

“Many have taken my friendship for granted, and have never offered their
own in return. I do not know about Mr. Siward. There is nothing I can do
for him, nothing be can do for me. If there is to be friendship between
us it will be disinterested; and I would rather have that than anything
in the world, I think.”

There was a pause; but when Sylvia would have broken it his gesture
committed her to silence with the dignity one might use in checking a
persistent child.

“You question my definition of friendship, Miss Landis. I should have
let your question pass, however keenly it touched me, had it not also
touched him. Now I am going to say some things which lie within the
straight and narrow bounds I spoke of. I never knew a man I cared for as
much as I care for Mr. Siward. I know why, too. He is disinterested. I
do not believe he wastes very many thoughts on me. Perhaps he will. I
want him to like me, if it’s possible. But one thing you and I may be
sure of: if he does not care to return the friendship I offer him he
will never accept anything else from me, though he might give at my
request; and that is the sort of a man he is; and that is why he is
every inch a man; and so I like him, Miss Landis. Do you wonder?”

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