The Fighting Chance

“I don’t know how much courage it requires to do what you’re going to do,” he said sulkily.

“Don’t you? Sometimes, when you wear a scowl like that, I think that it may require no more courage than I am capable of.... And sometimes—I don’t know.”

She crossed her knees, one slender ankle imprisoned in her hand, leaning forward thoughtfully above the water.

“Our last day,” she mused; “for we shall never be just you and I again—never again, my friend, after we leave this rocky coast of Eden. …I shall have hints of you in the sea-wind and the sound of the sea; in the perfume of autumn woods, in the whisper of stirring leaves when the white birches put on their gold crowns next year.” She smiled, turning to him, a little gravely: “When the Lesser Children return with April, I shall not forget you, Mr. Siward, nor forget your mercy of a day on them; nor your comradeship, nor your sweetness to me.... Nor your charity for me, nor all that you overlook so far in me,—under the glamour of a spell that seems to hold you still, and that still holds me.... I can answer for my constancy so far, until one more spring and summer have come and gone—until one more autumn comes, and while it lasts—as long as any semblance of the setting remains which had once framed you; I can answer for my constancy as long as that.... Afterwards, the snow!—symbol of our separation. I am to be married a year from November first.”

He looked up at her in dark surprise, for he had heard that their wedding date had been set for the coming winter.

“A year’s engagement?” he repeated, unconvinced.

“It was my wish. I think that is sufficient for everybody concerned.” Then, averting her face, which had suddenly lost a little of its colour: “A year is little enough,” she said impatiently. “I—what has happened to us requires an interval—a decent interval for its burial.... Death is respectable in any form. What dies between you and me can have no resurrection under the snow.... So I bring to the burial my tribute—a year of life, a year of constancy, my friend; symbol of an eternity I could have given you had I been worth it.” She looked up, flushed, the forced smile stamped on lips still trembling. “Sentiment in such a woman as I! ‘A spectacle for Gods and men,’ you are saying—are you not? And perhaps sentiment with me is only an ancient instinct, a latent ancestral quality for which I, ages later, have no use.” She was laughing easily. “No use for sentiment, as our bodies have no use for that fashionable little cul-de-sac, you know, though wise men say it once served its purpose, too.... Stephen Siward, what do you think of me now?”

“I am learning,” he replied simply.

“What, if you please?”

“Learning a little about what I am losing.”

“You mean—me?”

“Yes.”

She bent forward impulsively, balancing her body on the pool’s rim with both arms, dropping her knee until her ankles swung interlocked above the water. “Listen,” she said in a low, distinct voice: “What you lose is no other man’s gain! If I warm and expand in your presence—if I say clever things sometimes—if I am intelligent, sympathetic, and amusing—it is because of you. You inspire it in me. Normally I am the sort of girl you first met at the station. I tell you that I don’t know myself now—that I have not known myself since I knew you. Qualities of understanding, ability to appreciate, to express myself without employing the commonplaces, subtleties of intercourse—all, maybe, were latent in me, but sterile, until you came into my life.... And when you go, then, lacking impulse and incentive, the new facility, the new sensitive alertness, the unconscious self-confidence, all will smoulder and die out in me.... I know it; I realise that it was due to you—part of me that I should never have known, of which I should have remained totally ignorant, had it not blossomed suddenly, stimulated by you alone.”

Slowly the clouded seriousness of her blue eyes cleared, and the smile began to glimmer again. “That is your revenge; you recommit me to my commonplace self; you restore me to my tinsel career, practically a dolt. Shame on you, Stephen Siward, to treat a poor girl so!… But it’s just as well. Blunted perceptions, according to our needs, you know; and so life is tempered for us all, else we might not endure it long.... A pleasantly morbid suggestion for a day like this, is it not?… Shall we take a farewell plunge, and dress? You know we say good-bye to-morrow.”

“Where do you go from here?”

“To Lenox; the Claymores have asked us for a week; after that, Hot Springs for another two weeks or so; after that, to Oyster Bay.... Mr. Quarrier opens his house on Sedge Point,” she added demurely, “but I don’t think he expects to invite you to ‘The Sedges.’”

“How long do you stay there?” asked Siward irritably.

“Until we go to town in December.”

“What will you find to do all that time in Oyster Bay?” he asked more irritably.

“What a premature question! The yacht is there. Besides, there’s the usual neighbourhood hunting, with the usual packs and inevitable set; the usual steeple-chasing; the usual exchange of social amenities; the usual driving and riding; the usual, my poor friend, the usual, in all its uncompromising certainty.... And what are you to do?”

“When?”

“After you leave here?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know where you are going?”

“I’m going to town.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, but haven’t you been asked somewhere? You have, of course.”

“Yes, and I have declined.”

“Matters of business,” she inferred. “Too bad!”

“Oh, no.”

“Then,” she concluded, laughing, “you don’t care to tell me where you are going.”

“No,” he said thoughtfully, “I don’t care to tell you.”

She laughed again carelessly, and, placing one hand on the tiled pavement, sprang lightly to her feet.

“A last plunge?” she asked, as he rose at her side.

“Yes, one last plunge together. Deep! Are you ready?”

She raised her white arms above her head, finger-tips joined, poised an instant on the brink, swaying forward; then, at his brief word, they flashed downward together, cutting the crystalline sea-water, shooting like great fish over the glass-tiled bed, shoulder to shoulder under the water; and opening their eyes, they turned toward one another with a swift outstretch of hands, an uncontrollable touch of lips, the very shadow of contact; then cleaving upward, rising to the surface to lie breathlessly floating, arms extended, and the sun filtering down through the ground-glass roof above.

“We are perfectly crazy,” she breathed. “I’m quite mad; I see that. On land it’s bad enough for us to misbehave; but submarine sentiment! We’ll be growing scales and tails presently.... Did you ever hear of a Southern bird—a sort of hawk, I think—that almost never alights; that lives and eats and sleeps its whole life away on the wing? and even its courtship, and its honeymoon? Grace Ferrall pointed one out to me last winter, near Palm Beach—a slender bird, part black, part snowy white, with long, pointed, delicate wings like an enormous swallow; and all day, all night, it floats and soars and drifts in the upper air, never resting, never alighting except during its brief nesting season.... Think of the exquisite bliss of drifting one’s life through in mid-air—to sleep, balanced on light wings, upborne by invisible currents flowing under the stars—to sail dreamily through the long sunshine, to float under the moon!… And at last, I suppose, when its time has come, down it whirls out of the sky, stone dead!… There is something thrilling in such a death—something magnificent.... And in the exquisitely spiritual honeymoon, vague as the shadow of a rainbow, is the very essence and aroma of that impalpable Paradise we women prophesy in dreams!… More sentiment! Heigho! My brother is the weeping crocodile, and the five winds are my wits.... Shall we dress? Even with a maid and the electric air-blast it will take time to dry my hair and dress it.”

When he came out of his dressing-room she was apparently still in the hands of the maid. So he sauntered through the house as far as the library, and drawing a cheque-book from one pocket, fished out a memorandum-book from another, and began to cast up totals with a view to learning something about the various debts contracted at Shotover.

He seemed to owe everybody. Fortune had smitten him hip and thigh; and, a trifle concerned, he began covering a pad with figures until he knew where he stood. Then he drew a considerable cheque to Major Belwether’s order, another to Alderdene. Others followed to other people for various amounts; and he was very busily at work when, aware of another presence near, he turned around in his chair. Sylvia Landis was writing at a desk in the corner, and she looked up, nodding the little greeting that she always reserved for him even after five minutes’ separation.

“I’m writing cheques,” she said. “I suppose you’re writing to your mother.”

“Why do you think so?” he asked curiously.

“You write to her every day, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, “but how do you know?”

She looked at him with unblushing deliberation. “You wrote every day.... If it was to a woman, I wanted to know.... And I told Grace Ferrall that it worried me. And then Grace told me. Is there any other confession of my own pettiness that I can make to you.”

“Did you really care to whom I was writing?” he asked slowly.

“Care? I—it worried me. Was it not a pitifully common impulse? ‘Sisters under our skin,’ you know—I and the maid who dresses me. She would have snooped; I didn’t; that’s the only generic difference. I wanted to know just the same.... But—that was before—”

“Before what?”

“Before I—please don’t ask me to say it.... I did, once, when you asked me.”

“Before you cared for me. Is that what you mean?”