The Fighting Chance. Chambers Robert William

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СКАЧАТЬ Siward, this is too fine to miss,” she said. “I will walk as far as the headland with you.... Please smoke if you care to.”

      He did care to; several matches were extinguished by the wind until she spread her skids as a barrier; and kneeling in their shelter he got his light.

      “Tobacco smoke diluted with sea breeze is delicious,” she said, as the wind whirled the aromatic smoke of his cigarette up into her face. “Don’t move, Mr. Siward; I like it; there is to me always a faint odour of sweet-brier in the mélange. Did you ever notice it?”

      The breeze-blown conversation became fragmentary, veering as capriciously as the purple wind-flaws that spread across the shoals. But always to her question or comment she found in his response the charm of freshness, of quick intelligence, or of a humourous and idle perversity which stimulates without demanding.

      Once, glancing back at the house where the T-cart and horses stood, she said that she had better return; or perhaps she only thought she said it, for he made no response that time. And a few moments later they reached the headland, and the Atlantic lay below, flowing azure from horizon to horizon—under a universe of depthless blue. And for a long while neither spoke.

      With her the spell endured until conscience began to stir. Then she awoke, uneasy as always, under the shadow of restraint or pressure, until her eyes fell on him and lingered.

      A subtle change had come into his face; its leanness struck her for the first time; that, and an utter detachment from his surroundings, a sombre oblivion to everything—and to her.

      How curiously had his face altered, how shadowy it had grown, effacing the charm of youth, in it.

      The slight amusement with which she had become conscious of her own personal exclusion grew to an interest tinged with curiosity.

      The interest continued, but when his silence became irksome to her she said so very frankly. His absent eyes, still clouded, met hers, unsmiling.

      “I hate the sea,” he said.

      “You—hate it!” she repeated, too incredulous to be disappointed.

      “There’s no rest in it; it tires. A man who plays with it must be on his guard every second. To spend a lifetime on it is ridiculous—a whole life of intelligent effort, against perpetual, brutal, inanimate resistance—one endless uninterrupted fight—a ceaseless human manoeuvre against senseless menace; and then the counter attack of the lifeless monster, the bellowing advance, the shock—and no battle won—nothing final, nothing settled, no! only the same eternal nightmare of surveillance, the same sleepless watch for stupid treachery.”

      “But—you don’t have to fight it!” she said, astonished.

      “No; but it is no secret—what it does to those who do.... Some escape; but only by dying ashore before it gets them. That is the way some of us reach Heaven; we die too quick for the Enemy to catch us.”

      He was laughing when she said: “It is not a fight with the sea; it is the battle of Life itself you mean.”

      “Yes, in a way, the battle of Life.”

      “Oh, you are morbid then. Is there anybody ever born who has not a fight on his hands?”

      “No; only I have known men tired out, unfairly, before life had declared war on them.”

      “Just what do you mean?”

      “Oh, something about fair play—what our popular idol summarises as a ‘square deal’.” He laughed again, easily, his face clearing.

      “Nobody worth a square deal ever laments because he hasn’t had it,” she said.

      “I dare say that’s true, too,” he admitted listlessly.

      “Mr. Siward, exactly what did you mean?”

      “I was thinking of men I knew; for example a man who through generations has inherited every impulse and desire that he should not harbour—a man with intellect enough to be aware of it, with decency enough to desire decency.... What chance has he with the storms which have been brewing for him even before he opened his eyes on earth? Is that a square deal?”

      The troubled concentration of her face was reflected now in his own; the wind came whipping and flicking at them from league-wide tossing wastes; the steady thunder of the sea accented the silence.

      She said: “I suppose everybody has infinite capacity for decency or mischief. I know that I have. And I fancy that this capacity always remains, no matter how moral one’s life may be. ‘Watch and pray’ was not addressed to the guilty alone, Mr. Siward.”

      “Oh, yes, of course. As for the balanced capacity for good and evil, how about the inherited desire for the latter?”

      “Who is free from that, too? Do you suppose anybody really desires to be good?”

      “You mean most people are so afraid not to be, that virtue becomes a habit?”

      “Perhaps. It’s a plain business proposition anyway. It pays.”

      “Celestial insurance?” he asked, laughing.

      “I don’t know, Mr. Siward; do you?”

      But he, turning to the sea, had become engrossed in his own thoughts again; and again she was first curious, then impatient at the ease with which he excluded her. She remembered, too, that the cart was waiting; that she had scarcely time now to make the train.

      She stood irresolute, inert, disinclined to bestir herself. An inborn aptitude for drifting, which threatened to become a talent for indecision, had always alternated in her with sudden impulsive conclusions; and when her pride was involved, in decisions which sometimes scarcely withstood the analysis of reason.

      Physically healthy, mentally unawakened, sentimentally incredulous, totally ignorant of any master passion, and conventionally drilled, her beauty and sweet temper had carried her easily on the frothy crest of her first season, over the eligible and ineligible alike, leaving her at Lenox, a rather tired and breathless girl, in love with pleasure and the world which treated her so well.

      The death of her mother abroad had made little impression upon her—her uncle, Major Belwether, having cared for her since her father’s death when she was ten years old. So, although the scandal of her mother’s self-exile had been in a measure condoned by a tardy marriage to the man for whom she had left everything, her daughter had grown up ignorant of any particular feeling for a mother she could scarcely remember.

      However, she wore black and went nowhere for the second winter, during which time she learned a great deal concerning the unconventional proclivities of the women of her race and family, enough to impress her so seriously that on an exaggerated impulse she had come to one of her characteristic decisions.

      That decision was to break the unsavoury record at the first justifiable opportunity. And the opportunity came in the shape of Quarrier. As though wedlock were actually the sanctuary which an alarmed nation pretends it to be!

      Now, approaching the threshold of a third and last season, and having put away her almost meaningless mourning, there had stolen into her sense of security something irksome in the promise she had made to give Quarrier a definite answer before winter.

      Perhaps it had been the lack of interest in the people at СКАЧАТЬ