The Fighting Chance

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

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Siward, still lame, and using unskilfully two shiny new crutches, came
down the stairs and stumped into the drawing-room, which, in spite of
the sombre, clustering curtains, was brightly illuminated by the winter
sunshine reflected from the snow in the street. Plank was shocked at the
change in him--at the ghost of a voice, listlessly formal; at the thin,
nerveless hand offered; startled, so that he forgot his shyness, and
retained the bony hand tightly in his, and instinctively laid his other
great cushion-like paw over it, holding it imprisoned, unable to speak,
unconscious, in the impulse of the moment, of the liberty he permitted
himself, and which he had never dreamed of taking with such a man as
Siward.

The effect on Siward was composite; his tired voice ceased; surprise,
inability to understand tinged with instinctive displeasure, were
succeeded by humourous curiosity; and, very slowly it became plain to
him that this beefy young man liked him, was naively concerned about
him, felt friendly toward him, and was showing it as spontaneously as a
child. Because he now understood something of how it is with a man who
is in the process of being forgotten, his perceptions were perhaps the
finer in these days, and the direct unconsciousness of Plank touched him
more heavily than the pair of heavy hands enclosing his.

"I thought I'd come," began Plank, growing redder and redder as he began
to realise the enormity of familiarity committed only on the warrant of
impulse. "You don't look well."

"It was good of you to think of me," said Siward. "Come up to the
library, if you've a few minutes to spare an invalid. Please go first;
I'm a trifle lame yet."

"I--I am sorry," muttered Plank, "very, very sorry."

At first, in the library, Plank was awkward and silent, finding nothing
to say, and nowhere to dispose of his hands, until Siward gave him a
cigar to occupy his fingers. Even then he continued to sit
uncomfortably, his bulk balanced on a rickety, spindle-legged chair,
which he stubbornly refused to exchange for another, at Siward's
suggestion, out of sheer embarrassment, and with a confused idea that
his refusal would somehow ultimately put him at his ease with his
surroundings.

Siward, secretly amused, rang for tea, although the hour was early.
After a little while, either the toast or the tea appeared to act on
Plank as a lingual laxative, for he began suddenly to talk, which is
characteristic of bashful men; and Siward gravely helped him on when he
floundered and turned shy. After a little, matters went very well with
them, and Plank, much more at ease than he had ever dared to hope he
could be with Siward, talked and talked; and Siward, his crutches across
his knees, lay back in his arm-chair, chatting with that winning
informality so becoming to men who are unconscious of their charm.

Watching Plank, it occurred to him gradually that this great, cumbersome
creature was not a shrewd, thrifty, self-made and self-finished adult at
all; only a big, wistful, lonely boy, without comrades and with nowhere
to play. On Plank's round face there remained no trace of shrewdness, of
stubbornness, nothing even of the heavy, saturnine placidity of a dogged
man who waits his turn.

Plank spoke of himself after a while, sounding the personal note with
tentative timidity. Siward gravely encouraged him, and in a little while
the outlines of his crude autobiography appeared, embodying his
eventless boyhood in a Pennsylvania town; his career at the high school;
the dawning desire for college equipment, satisfied by his father, who
owned shares in the promising Deepvale Steel Plank Company; the unhappy
years at Harvard--hard years, for he learned with difficulty; solitary
years, for he was not sought by those whom he desired to know. Then he
ventured to speak of his father's growing interest in steel; the merging
and absorbing of independent plants; his own entry upon the scene on the
death of his father; and--the rest--material fortune and prosperity,
which, perhaps, might stand substitute as a social sponsor for him;
stand, perhaps, for something of what he lacked in himself, which only
long residence amid the best, long-formed habits for the best, or a long
inheritance of the best could give. Did Siward think so? Was the best
beyond his reach? Was it hopeless for such a man as he to try? And why?

The innocent snobbery, the abashed but absolute simplicity of this
ponderous pilgrim from the smelting pits clambering upward through the
high school of the smoky town, groping laboriously through the chilly
halls of Harvard toward the outer breastworks of Manhattan, interested
Siward; and he said so in his pleasant way, without offence, and with a
smiling question at the end.

"Worth while?" repeated Plank, flushing heavily, "it is worth while to
me. I have always desired to be a part of the best that there is in my
own country; and the best is here, isn't it? "

"Not necessarily," said Siward, still smiling. "The noisiest is here,
and some of the best."

"Which is the best?" inquired Plank naively.

"Why, all plain people, whose education, breeding, and fortune permit
them the luxury of thinking, and whose tastes, intelligence, and sanity
enable them to express their thoughts. There are such people here, and
some of them form a portion of the gaudier and noisier galaxy we call
society."

"That is what I wish to be part of," said Plank. "Could you tell me what
are the requirements?"

"I don't believe I could, exactly," said Siward, amused. "With us, the
social system, as an established and finished system, has too recently
been evolved from outer chaos to be characteristic of anything except
the crudity and energy of the chaos from which it emerged. The balance
between wealth, intelligence, and breeding has not yet been
established--not from lack of wealth or intelligence. The formula has not
been announced, that is all."

"What is the formula?" insisted Plank.

"The formula is the receipt for a real society," replied Siward,
laughing. "At present we have its uncombined ingredients in the
raw--noisy wealth and flippant fashion, arrogant intelligence and dowdy
breeding--all excellent materials, when filtered and fused in the
retort; and many of our test tubes have already precipitated pure metal
besides, and our national laboratory is turning out fine alloys. Some
day we'll understand the formula, and we'll weld the entire mass; and
that will be society, Mr. Plank."

"In the meanwhile," repeated Plank, unsmiling, "I want to be part of the
best we have. I want to be part of the brightness of things. I mean,
that I cannot be contented with an imitation."

"An imitation?"

"Of the best--of what you say is not yet society. I ask no more than your
footing among the people of this city. I wish to be able to go where
such men as you go; be permitted, asked, desired to be part of what you
always have been part of. Is it a great deal I ask? Tell me, Mr.
Siward--for I don't know--is it too much to expect?"

"I don't think it is a very high ambition," said Siward, smiling. "What
you ask is not very much to ask of life, Mr. Plank."

"But is there any reason why I may not hope to go where I wish to go?"

"I think it depends upon yourself," said Siward, "upon your capacity for
being, or for making people believe you to be exactly what they require.
You ask me whether you may be able to go where you desire; and I answer
you that there is no limit to any journey except the sprinting ability
of the pilgrim."

Plank laughed a little, and his squared jaws relaxed; then, after a few
moments' thought:

"It is curious that what you cast away from you so easily, I am waiting
for with all the patience I have in me. And yet it is always yours to
pick up again whenever you wish; and I may never live to possess it."

He was so perfectly right that Siward said nothing; in fact, he could
have no particular interest or sympathy for a man's quest of what he
himself did not understand the lack of. Those born without a tag
unmistakably ticketing them and their positions in the world were
perforce ticketed. Siward took it for granted that a man belonged where
he was to be met; and all he cared about was to find him civil, whether
he happened to be a policeman or a master of fox-hounds.

He was, now that he knew Plank, contented to accept him anywhere he met
him; but Plank's upward evolutions upon the social ladder were of no
interest to him, and his naive snobbery was becoming something of a
bore.

So Siward directed the conversation into other channels, and Plank,
accepting another cup of tea, became very communicative about his
stables and his dogs, and the preservation of game; and after a while,
looking up confidently at Siward, he said:

"Do you think it beastly to drive pheasants the way I did at Black
Fells? I have heard that you were disgusted."

"It isn't my idea of a square deal," said Siward frankly.

"That settles it, then."

"But you should not let me interfere with--"

"I'll take your opinion, and thank you for it. It didn't seem to me to
be the thing; only it's done over here, you know. The De Coursay's and
the--"

"Yes, I know. . Glad you feel that way about it, Plank. It's pretty
rotten sportsmanship. Don't you think so?"

"I do. I--would you--I should like to ask you to try some square shooting
at the Fells," stammered Plank, "next season, if you would care to."

"You're very good. I should like to, if I were going to shoot at all;
but I fancy my shooting days are over, for a while."

"Over!"

"Business," nodded Siward, absently grave again. "I see no prospect of
my idling for the next year or two."

"You are in--in Amalgamated Electric, I think," ventured Plank.

"Very much in," replied the other frankly. "You've read the papers and
heard rumours, I suppose?"

"Some. I don't suppose anybody quite understands the attacks on
Amalgamated."

"I don't--not yet. Do you?"

Plank sat silent, then his shrewd under lip began to protrude.

"I'm wondering," he began cautiously, "how much the Algonquin crowd
understands about the matter?"

Siward's troubled eyes were on him as he spoke, watching closely,
narrowly.

"I've heard that rumour before," he said.

"So have I," said Plank, "and it seems incredible." He looked warily at
Siward. "Suppose it is true that the Algonquin Trust Company is
godfather to Inter-County. That doesn't explain why a man should kick
his own door down when there's a bell to ring and servants to let him
in--and out again, too."

"I have wondered," said Siward, "whether the door he might be inclined
to kick down is really his own door any longer."

"I, too," said Plank simply. "It may belong to a personal enemy--if he
has any. He could afford to have an enemy, I suppose."

Siward nodded.

"Then, hadn't you better--I beg your pardon! You have not asked me to
advise you."

"No. I may ask your advice some day. Will you give it when I do?"

"With pleasure," said Plank, so warmly disinterested, so plainly proud
and eager to do a service that Siward, surprised and touched, found no
word to utter.

Plank rose. Siward attempted to stand up, but had trouble with his
crutches.

"Please don't try," said Plank, coming over and offering his hand. "May
I stop in again soon? Oh, you are off to the country for a month or two?
I see. . You don't look very well. I hope it will benefit you. Awfully
glad to have seen you. I--I hope you won't forget me--entirely."

"I am the man people are forgetting," returned Siward, "not you. It was
very nice of you to come. You are one of very few who remember me at
all."

"I have very few people to remember," said Plank; "and if I had as many
as I could desire I should remember you first."

Here he became very much embarrassed. Siward offered his hand again.
Plank shook it awkwardly, and went away on tiptoe down the stairs which
creaked decorously under his weight.

And that ended the first interview between Plank and Siward in the first
days of the latter's decline.

The months that passed during Siward's absence from the city began to
prove rather eventful for Plank. He was finally elected a member of the
Patroons Club, without serious opposition; he had dined twice with the
Kemp Ferralls; he and Major Belwether were seen together at the
Caithness dance, and in the Caithness box at the opera. Once a
respectable newspaper reported him at Tuxedo for the week's end; his
name, linked with the clergy, frequently occupied such space under the
column headed "Ecclesiastical News" as was devoted to the progress of
the new chapel, and many old ladies began to become familiar with his
name.

At the right moment the Mortimers featured him between two fashionable
bishops at a dinner. Mrs. Vendenning, who adored bishops, immediately
remembered him among those asked to her famous annual bal poudre; a
celebrated yacht club admitted him to membership; a whole shoal of
excellent minor clubs which really needed new members followed suit, and
even the rock-ribbed Lenox, wearied of its own time-honoured immobility,
displayed the preliminary fidgets which boded well for the stolid
candidate. The Mountain was preparing to take the first stiff step
toward Mohammed. It was the prophet's cue to sit tight and yawn
occasionally.

Meanwhile he didn't want to; he was becoming anxious to do things for
himself, which Leila Mortimer, of course, would not permit. It was
difficult for him to understand that any effort of his own would
probably be disastrous; that progress could come only through his own
receptive passivity; that nothing was demanded, nothing required,
nothing permitted from him as yet, save a capacity for assimilating such
opportunities as sections of the social system condescended to offer.

For instance, he wanted to open his art gallery to the public; he said
it was good strategy; and Mrs. Mortimer sat upon the suggestion with a
shrug of her pretty shoulders. Well, then, couldn't he possibly do
something with his great, gilded ball-room? No, he couldn't; and the
less in evidence his galleries and his ball-rooms were at present the
better his chances with people who, perfectly aware that he possessed
them, were very slowly learning to overlook the insolence of the
accident that permitted him to possess what they had never known the
want of. First of all people must tire of repeating to each other that
he was nobody, and that would happen when they wearied of explaining to
one another why he was ever asked anywhere. There was time enough for
him to offer amusement to people after they had ceased to find amusement
in snubbing him; plenty of time in the future for them to lash him to a
gallop for their pleasure. In the meanwhile he was doing very well,
because he began to appear regularly in the Caithness-Bonnesdel box, and
old Peter Caithness was already boring him at the Patroons; which meant
that the thrifty old gentleman considered Plank's millions as a possible
underpinning for the sagging house of Caithness, of which his pallid
daughter Agatha was the sole sustaining caryatid in perspective.

Yes, he was doing well; for that despotic beauty, Sylvia Landis, whose
capricious perversity had recently astonished those who remembered her
in her first season as a sweet, reasonable, and unspoiled girl, was
always friendly with him. That must be looked upon as important,
considering Sylvia's unassailable position, and her kinship to the
autocratic old lady whose kindly ukase had for generations remained the
undisputed law in the social system of Manhattan.

"There is another matter," said Leila Mortimer innocently, as Plank,
lingering after a disastrous rubber of bridge with her, her husband, and
Agatha Caithness, had followed her into her own apartments to write his
cheque for what he owed. "You've driven with me so much and you come
here so often and we are seen together so frequently that the clans are
sharpening up their dirks for us. And that helps some."

"What!" exclaimed Plank, reddening, and twisting around in his chair.

"Certainly. You didn't suppose I could escape, did you?"

"Escape! What?" demanded Plank, getting redder.

"Escape being talked about, savagely, mercilessly. Can't you see how it
helps? Oh dear, are you stupid, Beverly?

"I don't know," replied Plank, staring, "just how stupid I am. If you
mean that I'm compromising you--"

"Oh, please! Why do you use back-stairs words? Nobody talks about
compromising now; all that went out with New Year's calls and brown-
stone stoops."

"What do they call it, then?" asked Plank seriously.

"Call what? you great boy!"

"What you say I'm doing?"

"I don't say it."

"Who does?"

Leila laughed, leaned back in her big, padded chair, dropping one knee
over the other. Her dark eyes with the Japanese slant to them rested
mockingly on Plank, who had now turned completely around in his chair,
leaving his half-written cheque on her escritoire behind him.

"You're simply credited with an affair with a pretty woman," she said,
watching the dull colour mounting to his temples, "and that is certain
to be useful to you, and it doesn't affect me. What on earth are you
blushing about?" And as he said nothing, she added, with a daring little
laugh: "You are credited with being very agreeable, you see."

"If--if that's the way you take it--" he began.

"Of course! What do you expect me to do--call for help before I'm hurt?"

"You mean that this talk--gossip--doesn't hurt?"

"How silly!" She looked at him, smiling. "You know how likely I am to
require protection from your importunities." She dropped her pretty
head, and began plaiting with her fingers the silken gown over her knee.
"Or how likely I would be to shriek for it even if"--she looked up with
childlike directness--"even if I needed it."

"Of course you can take care of yourself," said Plank, wincing.

"I could, if I wanted to."

"Everybody knows that. I know it, Leroy knows it; only I don't care to
figure as that kind of man."

Already he had lost sight of her position in the matter; and she drew a
long, quiet breath, almost like a sigh.

"Time enough after you marry," she said deliberately, and lighted a
cigarette from a candle, recreating her knees the other way.

He considered her, started to speak, checked himself, and swung around
to the desk again. His pen hovered over the space to be filled in. He
tried to recollect the amount, hesitated, dated the cheque and affixed
his signature, still trying to remember; then be looked at her over his
shoulder.

"I forget the exact amount."

She surveyed him through the haze of her cigarette, but made no answer.

"I forget the amount," he repeated.

"So do I," she nodded indolently.

"But I--"

"Let it go. Besides, I shall not accept it."

He flushed up, astonished. "You can't refuse to take a gambling debt."

"I do," she retorted coolly. "I'm tired of taking your money."

"But you won it."

"I'm tired of winning it. It is all I ever do win . from you."

Her pretty head was wreathed in smoke. She tipped the ashes from the
cigarette's end, watching them fall to powder on the rug.

"I don't know what you mean," he persisted doggedly.

"Don't you? I don't believe I do, either. There are intervals in my
career which might prove eloquent if I opened my lips. But I don't,
except to make floating rings and cabalistic signs out of cigarette
smoke. Can you read their meaning? Look! There goes one, and there's
another, and another--all twisting and uncurling into hieroglyphics. They
are very significant; they might tell you a lot of things, if you would
only translate them. But you haven't the key--have you?"

There was a heavy, jarring step in the main living-room, and Mortimer's
bulk darkened the doorway.

"Entrez, mon ami," nodded Leila, glancing up. "Where is Agatha?"

"I'm going to Desmond's," he grunted, ignoring his wife's question; "do
you want to try it again, Beverly?"

"I can't make Leila take her own winnings," said Plank, holding out the
signed but unfilled cheque to Mortimer, who took it and scrutinised it
for a moment, rubbing his heavy, inflamed eyes; then, gesticulating, the
cheque fluttering in his puffy fingers:

"Come on," he insisted. "I've a notion that I can give Desmond a whirl
that he won't forget in a hurry. Agatha's asleep; she's going to that
ball--where is it?" he demanded, turning on his wife. "Yes, yes; the Page
blow-out. You're going, I suppose?"

Leila nodded, and lighted another cigarette.

"All right," continued Mortimer impatiently; "you and Agatha won't start
before one. And if you think Plank had better go, why, we'll be back
here in time."

"That means you won't be back at all," observed his wife coolly; "and
it's good policy for Beverly to go where he's asked. Can't you turn in
and sleep, now, and amuse your friend Desmond to-morrow night?"

"No, I can't. What a fool I'd be to let a chance slip when I feel like a
winner!"

"You never feel otherwise when you gamble," said Leila.

"Yes, I do," he retorted peevishly. "I can tell almost every time what
the cards are going to do to me. Leila, go to sleep. We'll be back here
for you by one, or half past."

"Look here, Leroy," began Plank, "there's one thing I can't stand for,
and that's this continual loss of sleep. If I go with you I'll not be
fit to go to the Pages."

"What a farmer you are!" sneered Mortimer. "I believe you roost on the
foot-board of your bed, like a confounded turkey. Come on! You'd better
begin training, you know. People in this town are not going to stand for
the merry ploughboy game, you see!"

But Plank was shrewdly covering his principal reason for declining; he
had too often "temporarily" assisted Mortimer at Desmond's and
Burbank's, when Mortimer, cleaned out and unable to draw against a
balance non-existent, had plucked him by the sleeve from the faro table
with the breathless request for a loan.

"I tell you I can wring Desmond dry to-night," repeated Mortimer
sullenly. "It isn't a case of 'want to,' either; it's a case of 'got
to.' That old pink-and-white rabbit, Belwether, got me into a game this
afternoon, and between him and Voucher and Alderdine I'm stripped clean
as a kennel bone."

But Plank shook his head, pretending to yawn; and Mortimer, glowering
and lingering, presently went off, his swollen hands thrust into his
trousers' pockets, his gross features dark with disgust; and presently
they heard the front door slam, and a rattling tattoo of horses' feet on
the asphalt; and Leila sprang up impatiently, and, passing Plank,
traversed the passage to the windows of the front room.

"He's taken the horses--the beast!" she said calmly, as Plank joined her
at the great windows and looked out into the night, where the round,
drooping, flower-like globes of the electric lamps spread a lake of
silver before the house.

It was rather rough on Leila. The Mortimers maintained one pair of
horses only; and the use given them at all hours resulted in endless
scenes, and an utter impossibility for Leila to retain the same coachman
and footman for more than a few weeks at a time.

"He won't come back; he'll keep Martin and the horses standing in front
of Delmonico's all night. You'd better call up the stables, Beverly."

So Plank called up a livery and arranged for transportation at one; and
Leila seated herself at a card-table and began to deal herself cold
decks, thoughtfully.

"That bit in 'Carmen,'" she said, "it always brings the shudder; it
never palls on me, never grows stale." She whipped the ominous spade
from the pack and held it out. "La Mort!" she exclaimed in mock tragedy,
yet there was another undertone ringing through it, sounding, too, in
her following laugh. "Draw!" she commanded, holding out the pack; and
Plank drew a diamond.

"Naturally," she nodded, shuffling the pack with her smooth, savant
fingers and laying them out as she repeated the formula: "Qui frappe?
Qui entre? Qui prend chaise? Qui parle? Oh, the deuce! it's always the
same! Tiens! je m'ennui!" There was a flash of her bare arm, a flutter,
and the cards fell in a shower over them both.

Plank flipped a card from his knee, laughing uncertainly, aware of
symptoms in his pretty vis-a-vis which always made him uncomfortable.
For months, now, at certain intervals, these recurrent symptoms had made
him wary; but what they might portend he did not know, only that, alone
with her, moments occurred when he was heavily aware of a tension which,
after a while, affected even his few thick nerves. One of those
intervals was threatening now: her flushed cheeks, her feverish activity
with her hands, the unconscious reflex movement of her silken knees and
restless slippers, all foreboded it. Next would come the nervous
laughter, the swift epigram which bored and puzzled him, the veiled
badinage he was unequal to; and then the hint of weariness, the curious
pathos of long silences, the burnt-out beauty of her eyes from which the
fire had gone as though quenched by invisible tears within.

He ascribed it--desired to ascribe it--to her relations with her husband.
He had naturally learned and divined how matters stood with them; he had
learned considerable in the last month or two--something of Mortimer's
record as a burly brother to the rich; something of his position among
those who made no question of his presence anywhere. Something of Leila,
too, he had heard, or rather deduced from hinted word or shrug or
smiling silence, not meant for him, but indifferent to what he might
hear and what he might think of what he heard.

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