The Fighting Chance

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 he 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-à-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.

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.