Once to Every Man

The old man pulled away from her clasp, gently but very insistently. And he nodded–nodded as though he had understood. She paused and looked back at him from the doorway, just as she had always hesitated. He was following her with his eyes. Again he shook his head, just as positively as he might have, had he been the man he might have been.

“Some day,” he reiterated, serenely, “some day! And she’ll know then–some day I’ll tell her–that I was with her tonight.”

She had forgotten the rain. It was coming down heavily, and it was dark, too–very, very dark. She stopped a while, as long as she dared, and waited with the rain beating cold upon her uncovered head and bare throat until her eyes saw the path a little more clearly. It took her a long time to feel her way forward that night. And even when she came within sight of Denny’s lantern, even when she was near enough to see him through the thicket ahead of her, in the little patch of light, she had not decided what she meant to do.

But with that first glimpse of him squatting there in the small cleared space it came to her what her course should be. She realized that if it was an impossibility for her to go to him, she could at least let him know she had been there–let him know that he had not been entirely alone while he waited. She even smiled to herself–smiled with wistful, half-sad, elfen tenderness as she, too, huddled down without a sound, there in the wet bushes opposite him, and decided how she would tell him.

Denny Bolton never quite knew how long he waited in the rain before he was certain that there was no use waiting longer. More than half the night had dragged by when he reached finally into the pockets of his coat and searched for a scrap of paper. Watching from her place in the thicket near him, she recognized the small white card which he discovered–she even reached out one hand instinctively for her invitation from the Judge, which she had told him had never arrived and for which she had hunted in vain throughout the following days.

With an unaccountable gladness because he knew straining at her throat, she watched him draw the lantern nearer and read again the words it bore before he turned it over and wrote, laboriously, with the thick pencil that he used to check logs back in the hills, some message across its back.

It was a message to her, she knew; and she knew, too, that he was going now. Deliberately she reached out then and found a rotten branch beside her. Young Denny’s head shot up as it cracked between her hands–shot swiftly erect while he stared hard at that wall of darkness which hid her. And swiftly as she fled, like some noiseless night creature of the woods, his sudden, plunging rush almost discovered her.

Back in the safety of the blackness she stood and saw him bend over the place where she had been crouching; she saw him put his hand upon the patch of dead ferns which her body had crushed flat, and knew that he found it still warm. She even held up her face, as though she were giving him her lips–she reached out her arms to him–when she saw him rise from an examination of her foot-prints in the mold, smiling his slow, infinitely grave smile as he nodded his head over what he had seen.

Back over the path she had come she followed the dancing point of his lantern, sometimes almost upon him, sometimes lagging far behind when he stopped and strained his ears for her. All recollection of the night before was gone from her mind, wiped out as utterly as though it had never existed. Nothing but a great gladness possessed her, a joy that amounted almost to mischievous glee whenever he stood still a moment and listened.

Not until she had waited many minutes after he stooped and slipped the card beneath the door did she come out from the cover of the woods. But she raced forward madly then, and flung the door open, and stooped for it where it lay white against the floor.

All the mischievous glee went from her face in that next moment. Bit by bit it faded before the advance of that same strained whiteness that had marred it, hours before. All the wistfulness that made her face so childlike, all the hunger that made the hurt in her breast came back while she read, over and over, the words which Denny had written for her across the back of her card, until she could repeat them without looking at it. And even then she only half-understood what they meant. Once she opened the door and peered out into the blackness, searching for the lantern that had disappeared.

“Why–why he’s gone! He came to tell me that he was going away,” she murmured, dully. And then, still more dully:

“And I didn’t tell him I was sorry. I’ve let him go without even telling him how sorry I was–for the hurt upon his chin!”

Perhaps it was the silence that made her turn; perhaps she simply turned with no thought or reason at all, but she faced slowly about at that moment, just in time to see John Anderson nod and smile happily at something he alone could see–just in time to hear him sigh softly once, before his arms went slack upon his work-bench and his head drooped forward above them.

The bit of a card fluttered to the floor as both her tight-clenched fists lifted toward her throat. The softest of pitying little moans came quavering from her lips. She needed no explanation of what that suddenly limp body meant! And she understood better now, too, that untouched lump of clay upon the boards beside his bowed head. John Anderson’s long task was finished. He had known it was finished, and had been merely resting tonight–resting content before he started upon that long journey, before he followed that face, tumbled of hair and uplifted of lip, which seemed always to be calling to him.

The slim-bodied girl whose face was so like what that other woman’s face had been went slowly across to him where he sat. After a while she slipped her arm about his wasted shoulders, just as she had done so often on other nights. A racking sob shook her when she first tried to speak–and she tried again.

“You kept faith, didn’t you, dear?” she whispered to him. “Oh, but you kept faith with her–right–right up to the end. Please God–please God, I may get my chance back again–to try to keep it, too. You’ve gone to her–and–and I’m glad! You waited a long time, dear, and you were very patient. But, oh, you’ve left me–you’ve left me all alone!”

The tears came then. Great, searing drops that had been hopelessly dammed back the night before rolled down her thin cheeks. She stooped and touched the silvered head with her lips before she groped her way into the other room and found her chair at the table.

“He knew I was there with him,” she tried to whisper. “He knew I was, I know! But I wish I could tell him I’m sorry. Oh, I wish I could!”

And Old Jerry found her so, head pillowed upon her outstretched arms, her hair in a marvelous shimmering mass across her little shoulders when he came the next morning, almost before the day was fairly begun, to tell her all the things there were for him to tell.

CHAPTER XII

Monday morning was always a busy morning in Jesse Hogarty’s Fourteenth Street gymnasium; busy, that is to say, along about that hour when morning was almost ready to slip into early afternoon. The reason for this late activity was very easy to understand, too, once one realized that Hogarty’s clientele–especially that of his Monday mornings–was composed quite entirely of that type of leisurely young man who rarely pointed the nose of his tub-seated raceabout below Forty-second Street, except for the benefits of a few rather desultory rounds under Hogarty’s tutelage, a shocking plunge beneath an icy shower, and the all pervading sense of physical well-being resultant upon a half hour’s kneading of none too firm muscles on the marble slabs.

It was like Jesse Hogarty–or Flash Hogarty, as he had been styled by the sporting reporters of the saffron dailies ten years back, when it was said that he could hit faster and harder out of a clinch than any lightweight who ever stood in canvas shoes–to refuse to transfer his place to some locality a bit nearer Fifty-seventh Street, even when it chanced, as it did with every passing year, that he drew his patrons–at an alarmingly high rate per patron–almost entirely from far uptown.

“This isn’t a turkish bath,” Flash Hogarty was accustomed to answer such importunities. “If you are just looking for a place to boil out the poison, hunt around a little–take a wide-eyed look or two! There are lots and lots of them. This isn’t a turkish bath; it’s a gymnasium–a man’s gymnasium!”

That was his invariable formula, alike to the objections of the youthful, unlimited-of-allowance, more or less hard-living sons that it “spoils the best part of the week, you know, Flash, just running ’way down here,” and the equally earnest and far more peevish complaints of the ticker tired, just-a-minute-to-spare fathers that it cost them about five thousand, just to take an hour to work off a few pounds.

But they kept on coming, in spite of their lack of time and Hogarty’s calm refusal to consider their arguments–some of the younger men because they really did appreciate the sensation of flexible muscles sliding beneath a smooth skin, some of them merely because they liked to hear Hogarty’s fluently picturesque profanity, always couched in the most delightfully modulated of English, when the activity of a particularly giddy week-end brought them back a little too shaky of hand, a little too brilliant of eye and a trifle jumpy as to pulse. Hogarty had a way of telling them just how little they actually amounted to, which, no matter how wickedly it cut, never failed to amuse them.

The older generation dared do nothing else, even in the face of the ex-lightweight’s scathingly sarcastic admiration of their constantly increasing waist-line–or lack of one. For their lines were largely a series of curves exactly opposite to those on which Nature had originally designed them.

They continued to come; they ran down-town in closed town cars, padded heavily across the sidewalk like sad bovines going to the slaughter, to reappear an hour or two later stepping like three-year-olds, serenely, virtuously joyous at the tale of the scales which indicated a five-pound loss. And the Saturday and Sunday week-end out of town which presently followed, with the astoundingly heavy dinners that accompanied it, brought them back in a week, sadder even than before.

Monday morning was always a very busy morning in Hogarty’s–but never until along about noon. And because he knew how infallible were the habits of his patrons, Hogarty did not so much as lift his eyes to the practically empty gymnasium floor when a clock at the far side of the room tinkled the hour of eleven. The two boys who were busily scrubbing with waxing-mops the floor that already glistened like the unruffled surface of some crystal pool were quite as unconcerned at the lack of activity as was their employer. They merely paused long enough to draw one shirt sleeve across the sweat-beaded foreheads–it was a very early spring in Manhattan and the first heat was hard to bear–and went at their task harder than ever.

Hogarty had one other reason that morning which accounted for his absolute serenity. From Third Avenue to the waterfront any one who was well-informed at all–and there was no one who had not at least heard whispers of his fame–knew that the thin-faced, hard-eyed, steel-sinewed ex-lightweight who dressed in almost funeral black and white and talked in the hushed, measured syllables of a professor of English, loved one thing even more than he loved to see his own man put over the winning punch in–say the tenth. It was common gossip that a set of ivory dominoes came first before all else.

No man had ever ventured to interrupt twice the breathless interest with which Hogarty was accustomed to play his game. It did not promise to be safe–a second interruption. And Hogarty was playing dominoes this particular Monday morning, at a little round, green-topped table against the wall opposite the door, peering stealthily at the upturning face of each piece of a newly dealt hand, when the clock struck off that hour. But if Hogarty was oblivious to everything but the game, his opponent was far from being in that much to be envied state. Bobby Ogden yawned–yawned from sheer ennui–although he tried to hide that indication of his boredom behind a perfectly manicured hand, while he scowled at the dial.

Ogden was one of the Monday morning regulars–one of the crowd which usually arrived in a visibly taut-nerved condition at an entirely irregular and undependable hour. An attack of malignant malaria, contracted on a prolonged ’gator hunt in the Glades, coupled with the equally malignant orders of his physician, alone accounted for his presence there at that unheard of o’clock.

There were purplish semi-circles still painfully too vivid beneath his eyes; his pallor was still tinged with an ivory-like shade of yellow. And he fidgeted constantly in the face of Hogarty’s happy deliberation, stretching his heliotrope silk-clad arms and tapping flat, heel-less rubber-soled shoes on the floor beneath the table in a fashion that would have irritated any but the blandly unconscious man across the table from him to a state of violence.

Ogden’s quite perfectly lined features were smooth with the smoothness of twenty years or so. His lack of stability and poise belonged also to that age and to a physique that managed to tilt the scale beam at one hundred and eighteen–that is, unless he had been forgetting rather more rashly than usual that liquids were less sustaining than solids, when one hundred and ten was about the figure.

He was playing poorly that morning–playing inattentively–with his eyes always waiting for the hands to indicate that hour which was most likely to herald the arrival of the advance guard of the crowd of regulars. Hogarty himself, after a time, began to feel, vaguely, his uneasiness and lack of application to the matter in hand, and made evident his irritation by even longer pauses before each play. He liked a semblance of opposition at least, and he lifted his head, scowling a little at Ogden’s last, most flagrant blunder, to find that his antagonist had moved without so much as looking at the piece he had slipped into position.

The boy wasn’t looking at the table at all. He sat twisted about in his chair, staring wide-eyed at the figure that had pushed open the street door and was now surveying the whole room with an astonishingly calm attention to detail. Ogden was staring, oblivious to everything else, and with real cause, for the figure that had hesitated on the threshold was like no other that had ever drifted into Hogarty’s place before. His shoulders seemed fairly to fill the door-frame, for all that bigger men than he was had stood on that same spot and gone unnoticed because of size alone. And his waist appeared almost slender, and his hips very flat, merely from contrast with all that weight which he carried high in his chest.

But it was not the possibilities of the newcomer’s body that held Ogden’s fascinated attention. In point of fact, he did not notice that at all, until some time later. Denny Bolton’s long, tanned face was entirely grave–even graver than usual. Just a hint of wistfulness that would never quite leave them showed in his eyes and lurked in the line of his lips–an intangible, fleeting suggestion of expectation that had waited patiently for something that had been very long in the coming. And the black felt hat and smooth black suit which he wore finished the picture and made the illusion complete. His face and figure, even there in the doorway of Hogarty’s Fourteenth Street place, could have suggested but one thing to an observant man. He might have been a composite of all the New England Pilgrim Fathers who had ever braved a rock-bound coast.

And Bobby Ogden was observing. Utterly unconscious of Hogarty’s threatening storm of protest, he sat and gazed and gazed, scarcely crediting his own eyes. Domino poised in hand, Hogarty had turned in preoccupied resignation back to a perplexed contemplation of whether it would be better to play a blank-six and block the game or a double-blank and risk being caught with a handful of high counters, when Ogden reached out and clutched him by the wrist.

“Shades of Miles Standish!” that silk-shirted person gasped. “In the name of the Mayflower and John Alden, and hallowed Plymouth Rock, look, Flash, look! For the love o’ Mike look, before he moves and spoils the tableau!”

Hogarty lifted his head and looked.

Denny Bolton’s eyes had returned from their deliberate excursion about the gymnasium just in time to meet halfway that utterly impersonal scrutiny. For a long moment or two that mutual inspection endured; then the boy’s lips moved–open with a smile that was far graver than his gravity had been–and he started slowly across the floor toward the table. Hogarty half rose, one hand outstretched as if to halt him, but for some reason which the ex-lightweight scarcely understood himself, he failed to utter the protest that was at his tongue’s end. And Young Denny continued to advance–continued, and left in the rear a neatly defined trail where the heavy nails of his shoes marred the sacred sheen of that floor.

Within arm’s reach of the table he stopped, his eyes flitting questioningly from Hogarty’s totally inscrutable face to the tense interest and enjoyment in Bobby Ogden’s features, and back again. Hogarty’s hard eyes could be very hard–hard and chilling as chipped steel–and they were that now. He was only just beginning to awake to a realization of that profaned floor, but the smile upon Denny’s mouth neither disappeared nor stiffened in embarrassment before that forbidding countenance. Instead he held out his hand–a big, long-fingered, hard-palmed hand–toward the ex-lightweight proprietor. And when he began to speak there was nothing but simple interrogation in the almost ponderous voice.

“I–I reckon,” he said slowly, “that you must be Jesse Hogarty–Mr. Jesse Hogarty?”

Flash Hogarty looked at him, looked at that outstretched hand–looked back at his steady eyes and the smile that parted his lips. And Hogarty did a thing that made even Bobby Ogden gasp. He bowed gracefully and reached out and silently shook hands. When he spoke, instead of the perfectly enunciated, picturesquely profane rebuke which the silk-shirted boy was waiting to hear, his voice was even smoother and softer, and choicer of intonation than usual.

“Quite so,” he stated. “Quite free from error or embarrassing mistake, sir. I am Mr. Jesse Hogarty. You, however, if I may be permitted that assertion, have me rather at a disadvantage, sir.”

He bowed again, once more elaborately graceful. Bobby Ogden hugged his knees beneath the table, for he knew from the very suavity of that reply all that was brewing. Hogarty’s silken voice went on.

“Regrettable, sir, and most awkward. You, no doubt, have no objection, however, to making the introduction complete?”

The smile still hovered upon Denny’s lips. Ogden noted, though, that it had changed. And he realized, too, that it had not been a particularly mirthful smile, even in the first place. Again Young Denny’s eyes met those of the other boy for one moment.

“I’m Denny Bolton,” he replied just as deliberately. “Denny Bolton, from Boltonwood–or–or I reckon you’ve never heard of that place. I’m down from the hill country, back in the north,” he supplemented.

Hogarty turned away–turned back to the green-topped table and played the double-blank with delicate precision.