The Fighting Chance

About four o’clock on the following afternoon Mrs. Mortimer’s maid, who had almost finished drying and dressing her mistress’ hair, was called to the door by a persistent knocking, which at first she had been bidden to disregard.

It was Mortimer’s man, desiring to know whether Mrs. Mortimer could receive Mr. Mortimer at once on matters of importance.

“No,” said Leila petulantly. “Tell Mullins to say that I can not see anybody,” and catching a glimpse of the shadowy Mullins dodging about the dusky corridor: “What is the matter? Is Mr. Mortimer ill?”

But Mullins could not say what the matter might be, and he went away, only to return in a few moments bearing a scratchy note from his master, badly blotted and still wet; and Leila, with a shrug of resignation, took the blotched scrawl daintily between thumb and forefinger and unfolded it. Behind her, the maid, twisting up the masses of dark, fragrant hair, read the note very easily over her mistress’ shoulder. It ran, without preliminaries:

“I’m going to talk to you, whether you like it or not. Do you understand that? If you want to know what’s the matter with me you’ll find out fast enough. Fire that French girl out before I arrive.”

She closed the note thoughtfully, folding and double-folding it into a thick wad. The ink had come off, discolouring her finger-tips; she dropped the soiled paper on the floor, and held out her hands, plump fingers spread. And when the maid had finished removing the stains and had repolished the pretty hands, her mistress sipped her chocolate thoughtfully, nibbled a bit of dry toast, then motioned the maid to take the tray and her departure, leaving her the cup.

A few minutes later Mortimer came in, stood a moment blinking around the room, then dropped into a seat, sullen, inert, the folds of his chin crowded out on his collar, his heavy abdomen cradled on his short, thick legs. He had been freshly shaved; linen and clothing were spotless, yet the man looked unclean.

Save for the network of purple veins in his face, there was no colour there, none in his lips; even his flabby hands were the hue of clay.

“Are you ill?” asked his wife coolly.

“No, not very. I’ve got the jumps. What’s that? Tea? Ugh! it’s chocolate. Push it out of sight, will you? I can smell it.”

Leila set the delicate cup on a table behind her.

“What time did you return this morning?” she asked, stifling a yawn.

“I don’t know; about five or six. How the devil should I know what time I came in?”

Sitting there before the mirror of her dresser she stole a second glance at his marred features in the glass. The loose mouth, the smeared eyes, the palsy-like tremors that twitched the hands where they tightened on the arms of his chair, became repulsive to the verge of fascination. She tried to look away, but could not.

“You had better see Dr. Grisby,” she managed to say.

“I’d better see you; that’s what I’d better do,” he retorted thickly. “You’ll do all the doctoring I want. And I want it, all right.”

“Very well. What is it?”

He passed his swollen hand across his forehead.

“What is it?” he repeated. “It’s the limit, this time, if you want to know. I’m all in.”

“Roulette?” raising her eyebrows without interest

“Yes, roulette, too. Everything! They got me upstairs at Burbank’s. The game’s crooked! Every box, every case, every wheel, every pack is crooked! crooked! crooked, by God!” he burst out in a fever, struggling to sit upright, his hands always tightening on the arms of the chair. “It’s nothing but a creeping joint, run by a bunch of hand-shakers! I—I’ll—”

Stuttering, choking, stammering imprecations, his hoarse clamour died away after a while. She sat there, head bent, silent, impassive, acquiescent under the physical and mental strain to which she had never become thoroughly hardened. How many such scenes had she witnessed! She could not count them. They differed very little in detail, and not at all in their ultimate object, which was to get what money she had. This was his method of reimbursing himself for his losses.

He made an end to his outburst after a while. Only his dreadful fat breathing now filled the silence; and supposing he had finished, she found her voice with an effort:

“I am sorry. It comes at a bad time, as you know—”

“A bad time!” he broke out violently. “How can it come at any other sort of time? With us, all times are bad. If this is worse than the average it can’t be helped. We are in it for keeps this time!”

“We?”

“Yes, we!” he repeated; but his face had grown ghastly, and his uncertain eyes were fastened on her’s in the mirror.

“What do you mean—exactly?” she asked, turning from the dresser to confront him.

He made no effort to answer; an expression of dull fright was growing on his visage, as though for the first time he had begun to realise what had happened.

She saw it, and her heart quickened, but she spoke disdainfully: “Well, I am ready to listen—as usual. How much do you want?”

He made no sign; his lower lip hung loose; his eyes blinked at her.

“What is it?” she repeated. “What have you been doing? How much have you lost? You can’t have lost very much; we hadn’t much to lose. If you have given your note to any of those gamblers, it is a shame—a shame! Leroy, look at me! You promised me, on your honour, never to do that again. Have you lied, after all the times I have helped you out, stripped myself, denied myself, put off tradesmen, faced down creditors? After all I have done, do you dare come here and ask for more—ask for what I have not got—with not one bill settled, not one servant paid since December—”

“Leila, I—I’ve got—to tell you—”

“What?” she demanded, appalled by the change in his face. If he was overdoing it, he was overdoing it realistically enough.

“I—I’ve used Plank’s cheque!” he mumbled, and moistened his lips with his tongue.

She stared back at him, striving to comprehend. “Plank’s!” she repeated slowly, “Plank’s cheque? What cheque? What do you mean?”

“The one he gave you last night. I’ve used that. Now you know!”

“The one he—But you couldn’t! How could you? It was not filled in.”

“I filled it.”

Her dawning horror was reacting on him, as it always did, like a fierce tonic; and his own courage came back in a sort of sullen desperation.

“You… You are trying to frighten me, Leroy,” she stammered. “You are trying to make me do something—give you what you want—force me to give you what you want! You can’t frighten me. The cheque was made out to me—to my order. How could you have used it, if I had not indorsed it?”

“I indorsed it. Do you understand that!” he said savagely.

“No, I don’t; because, if you did, it’s forgery.”

“I don’t give a damn what you think it is!” he broke in fiercely. “All I’m worried over is what Plank will think. I didn’t mean to do it; I didn’t dream of doing it; but when Burbank cleaned me up I fished about, and that cursed cheque came tumbling out!”

In the rising excitement of self-defence the colour was coming back into his battered face; he sat up straighter in his chair, and, grasping the upholstered arms, leaned forward, speaking more distinctly and with increasing vigour and anger:

“When I saw that cheque in my hands I thought I’d use it temporarily—merely as moral collateral to flash at Burbank—something to back my I. O. U.‘s. So I filled it in.”

“For how much?” she asked, not daring to believe him; but he ignored the question and went on: “I filled it and indorsed it, and—”

“How could you indorse it?” she interrupted coolly, now unconvinced again and suspicious.

“I’ll tell you if you’ll stop that fool tongue a moment. The cheque was made to ‘L. Mortimer,’ wasn’t it? So I wrote ‘L. Mortimer’ on the back. Now do you know? If you are L. Mortimer, so am I. Leila begins with L; so does Leroy, doesn’t it? I didn’t imitate your two-words-to-a-page autograph. I put my own fist to a cheque made out to one L. Mortimer; and I don’t care what you think about it as long as Plank can stand it. Now put up your nose and howl, if you like.”

But under her sudden pallor he was taking fright again, and he began to bolster up his courage with bluster and noise, as usual:

“Howl all you like!” he jeered. “It won’t alter matters or square accounts with Plank. What are you staring at? Do you suppose I’m not sorry? Do you fancy I don’t know what a fool I’ve been? What are you turning white for? What in hell—”

“How much have you—” She choked, then, resolutely: “How much have you—taken?”

“Taken!” he broke out, with an oath. “What do you mean? I’ve borrowed about twenty thousand dollars. Now yelp! Eh? What?—no yelps? Probably some weeps, then. Turn ‘em on and run dry; I’ll wait.” And he managed to cross one bulky leg over the other and lean back, affecting resignation, while Leila, bolt upright in her low chair, every curved outline rigid under the flowing, silken wrap, stared at him as though stunned.

“Well, we’re good for it, aren’t we?” he said threateningly. “If he’s going to turn ugly about it, here’s the house.”

“My—house?”

“Yes, your house! I suppose you’d rather raise something on the house than have the thing come out in the papers.”

“Do you think so?” she asked, staring into his bloodshot eyes.

“Yes, I do. I’m damn sure of it!”

“You are wrong.”

“You mean that you are not inclined to stand by me?” he demanded.

“Yes, I mean that.”

“You don’t intend to help me out?”

“I do not intend to—not this time.”

He began to show his big teeth, and that nervous snickering “tick” twitched his upper lip.

“How about the courts?” he sneered. “Do you want to figure in them with Plank?”

“I don’t want to,” she said steadily, “but you can not frighten me any more by that threat.”

“Oh! Can’t frighten you! Perhaps you think you’ll marry Plank when I get a decree? Do you? Well, you won’t for several reasons; first, because I’ll name other corespondents and that will make Plank sick; second, because Plank wants to marry somebody else and I’m able to assist him. So where do you come out in the shuffle?”

“I don’t know,” she said, under her breath, and rested her head against the back of the chair, as though suddenly tired.

“Well, I know. You’ll come out smirched, and you know it,” said Mortimer, gazing intently at her. “Look here, Leila: I didn’t come here to threaten you. I’m no black-mailer; I’m no criminal. I’m simply a decent sort of a man, who is pretty badly scared over what he’s done in a moment of temptation. You know I had no thought of anything except to borrow enough on my I. O. U.‘s to make a killing at Burbank’s. I had to show them something big, so I filled in that cheque, not meaning to use it; and before I knew it I’d indorsed it, and was plunging against it. Then they stacked everything on me—by God, they did! and if I had not been in the condition I was in I’d have stopped payment. But it was too late when I realised what I was against. Leila, you know I’m not a bad man at heart. Can’t you help a fellow?”

His manner, completely changed, had become the resentful and fretful appeal of the victim of plot and circumstance. All the savage brutality had been eliminated; the sneer, the truculent attempts to browbeat, the pitiful swagger, the cynical justification, all were gone. It was really the man himself now, normally scared and repentant; the frightened, overfed pensioner on his wife’s bounty; not the human beast maddened by fear and dissipation, half stunned, half panic-stricken, driven by sheer terror into a rôle which even he shrank from—had shrunk from all these years. For, leech and parasite that he was, Mortimer, however much the dirty acquisition of money might tempt him in theory, had not yet brought himself to the point of attempting the practice, even when in sorest straits and bitterest need. He didn’t want to do it; he wished to get along without it, partly because of native inertia and an aversion to the mental nimbleness that he would be required to show as a law-breaker, partly because the word “black-mail” stood for what he did not dare suggest that he had come to, even to himself. His distaste was genuine; there were certain things which he didn’t want to commit, and extortion was one of them. He could, at a pinch, lie to his wife, or try to scare her into giving him money; he could, when necessary, “borrow” from such men as Plank; but he had never cheated at cards, and he had never attempted to black-mail anybody except his wife—which, of course, was purely a family matter, and concerned nobody else.

Now he was attempting it again, with more sincerity, energy, and determination than he ever before had been forced to display. Even in his most profane violence the rage and panic were only partly real. He was, it is true, genuinely scared, and horribly shaken physically, but he had counted on violence, and he stimulated his own emotions and made them serve him, knowing all the while that in the reaction his ends would be accomplished, as usual. This policy of alternately frightening, dragooning, and supplicating Leila had carried him so far; and though it was true that this was a more serious situation than he had ever yet faced, he was convinced that his wife would pull him out somehow; and how that was to be accomplished he did not very much care, as long as he was pulled out safely.

“What this household requires,” he said, “is economy.” He spread his legs, denting the Aubusson carpet with his boot-heels, and glanced askance at his wife. “Economy,” he repeated, furtively wetting his lips with a heavily coated tongue; “that’s the true solution; economical administration in domestic matters. Retrenchment, Leila! retrenchment! Fewer folderols. I’ve a notion to give up that farm, and stop trying to breed those damfool sheep. They cost a thousand apiece, and do you know what I got for those six I sent to Westbury? Just twelve hundred dollars from Fleetwood—the bargaining shopkeeper! Twelve hundred! Think of that! And along comes Granby and sells a single ram for six thousand plunks!”

Leila’s head was lowered. He could not see her expression, but he had always been confident of his ability to talk himself out of trouble, so he rambled on in pretence of camaraderie, currying favour, as he believed, ingratiating himself with the coarse bluntness that served him among some men, even among some women.

“We’ll fix it somehow,” he said reassuringly; “don’t you worry, Leila. I’ve confidence in you, little girl! You’ve got me out of sticky messes before, eh? Well, we’ve weathered a few, haven’t we?”

Even the horrible parody on wedded loyalty left her silent, unmoved, dark eyes brooding; and he began to grow a little restless and anxious as his jocularity increased without a movement in either response or aversion from his wife.

“You needn’t be scared, if I’m not,” he said reproachfully. “The house is worth two hundred and fifty thousand, and there’s only fifty on it now. If that fat, Dutch skinflint, Plank, shows his tusks, we can clap on another fifty.” And as she made no sound or movement in reply: “As far as Plank goes, haven’t I done enough for him to square it? What have we ever got out of him, except a thousand or two now and then when the cards went against me? If I took it, it was practically what he owes me. And if he thinks it’s too much—look here, Leila! I’ve a trick up my sleeve. I can make good any time I wish to. I’m in a position to marry that man to the girl he’s mad about—stark, raving mad.”

Mrs. Mortimer slowly raised her head and looked at her husband.

“Leroy, are you mad?”

“I! Not much!” he exclaimed gleefully. “I can make him the husband of the most-run-after girl in New York—if I want to. And at the same time I can puncture the most arrogant, the most cold-blooded, selfish, purse-proud, inflated nincompoop that ever sat at the head of a director’s table. O-ho! Now you’re staring, Leila. I can do it; I can make good. What are you worrying about? Why, I’ve got a hundred ways to square that cheque, and each separate way is a winner.”

He rose, shook out the creases in his trousers, and adjusted the squat, gold fob which ornamented his protruding waistcoat.

“So you’ll fix it, won’t you, Leila?” he said, apparently oblivious that he had expressed himself as able to adjust the matter in one hundred equally edifying and satisfactory manners.

She did not answer. He lingered a moment at the door, looking back with an ingratiating leer; but she paid him no attention, and he took himself off, confident that her sulkiness could not result in anything unpleasant to anybody except herself.

Nor did it, as far as he could see. The days brought no noticeable change in his wife’s demeanour toward him. Plank, when he met him, was civil enough, though it did occur to Mortimer that he saw very little of Plank in these days.

“Ungrateful beggar!” he thought bitterly; “he’s toadying to Belwether now. I can’t do anything more for him, so I don’t interest him.”

And for a while he wore either a truculent, aggrieved air in Plank’s presence, or the meeker demeanour of a martyr, sentimentally misunderstood, but patient under the affliction.

Then there came a time when he needed money. During the few days he spent circling tentatively and apprehensively around his wife he learned enough to know that there was nothing to be had from her at present. No doubt the money she raised to placate Plank—if she had placated him in that fashion—was a strain on her resources, whatever those resources were.

One thing was certain: Plank had not remained very long in ignorance of the cheque drawn against his balance, if indeed, as Mortimer feared, the bank itself had not communicated with Plank as soon as the cheque was presented for payment. Therefore Plank must have been placated by Leila; how, Mortimer was satisfied not to know.

“Some of these days,” he said to himself, “I’ll catch her tripping, and then there’ll be a decent division of property, or—there’ll be a divorce.” But, as usual, Mortimer found such practices more attractive in theory than in execution, and he was really quite contented to go on as things were going, if somebody would see that he had some money occasionally.

One of these occasions when he needed it was approaching. He had made a “killing” at Desmond’s, and had used the money to stop up the more threatening gaps in the tottering financial fabric known as his “personal accounts.” The fabric would hold for a while, but meantime he needed money to go on with. And Leila evidently had none. He tried everybody except Plank. He had scarcely the impudence to go to Plank just yet; but when, completing the vicious circle, he found his borrowing capacity exhausted, and himself once more face to face with the only hope, Plank, he sat down to consider seriously the possibility of the matter.

Of course Plank owed him more than he could ever pay—the ungrateful parvenu!—but what Plank had thought of that cheque transaction he had never been able to discover.

Somehow or other he must put Plank under fresh obligations; and that might have been possible had not Leila invaded the ground, leaving nothing, now that Plank was secure in club life.

Of course the first thing that presented itself to Mortimer’s consideration was the engineering of Plank’s matrimonial ambitions. Clearly the man had not changed. He was always at Sylvia’s heels; he was seen with her in public; he went to the Belwether house a great deal. No possible doubt but that he was as infatuated as ever. And Quarrier was going to marry her next November—that is, if he, Mortimer, chose to keep silent about a certain midnight episode at Shotover.

It was his inclination, except in theory, to keep silent, partly because of his native inertia and unwillingness to go to the physical and intellectual exertion of being a rascal, partly because he didn’t really want to be a rascal of that sort.

Like a man with premonitions of toothache, who walks down to the dentist’s just to see what the number of the house looks like, and then walks around the block to think it over, so Mortimer, suffering from lack of money, walked round and round the central idea, unable to bring himself to the point.

Several times he called up Quarrier on the ‘phone and made appointments to lunch with him; but these meetings never resulted in anything except luncheons which Mortimer paid for, and matters were becoming desperate.

So one day, after having lunched too freely, he sat down and wrote Plank the following note:

My Dear Beverly: You will remember that I once promised you my aid in securing what, to you, is the dearest object of your existence. I have thought, I have pondered, I have given the matter deep and, I may add without irreverence, prayerful consideration, knowing that the life’s happiness of my closest friend depended on my judgment and wisdom and intelligence to secure for him the opportunity to crown his life’s work by the acquisition of the brightest jewel in the diadem of old Manhattan.

“By George! that’s wickedly good, though!” chuckled Mortimer, refreshing himself with his old stand-by, an apple, quartered, and soaked in very old port. So he sopped his apple and swallowed it, and picked up his pen again, chary of overdoing it.

All I say to you is, be ready! The time is close at hand when you may boldly make your avowal. But be ready! All depends upon the psychological moment. An instant too soon, an instant too late, and you are lost. And she is lost forever. Remember! Be faithful; trust in me, and wait. And the instant I say, “Speak!” pour out your soul, my dear friend, and be certain you are not pouring it out in vain. L. M.

Writing about “pouring out” made him thirsty, so he fortified himself several times, and then, sealing the letter, went out to a letter-box and stood looking at it.

“If I mail it I’m in for it,” he muttered. After a while he put the letter in his pocket and walked on.

“It really doesn’t commit me to anything,” he reflected at last, halting before another letter-box. And as he stood there, hesitating, he glanced up and saw Quarrier entering the Lenox Club. The next moment he flung up the metal box lid, dropped in his letter, and followed Quarrier into the club.

Then events tumbled forward almost without a push from him. Quarrier was alone in a window corner, drinking vichy and milk and glancing over the afternoon papers. He saw Mortimer, and invited him to join him; and Mortimer, being thirsty, took champagne.

“I’ve been trying a new coach,” said Quarrier, in his colourless and rather agreeable voice; and he went on leisurely explaining the points of the new mail-coach which had been built in Paris after plans of his own, while Mortimer gulped glass after glass of chilled wine, which seemed only to make him thirstier. Meantime he listened, really interested, except that his fleshy head was too full of alcohol and his own project to contain additional statistics concerning coaching. Besides, Quarrier, who had never been over-cordial to him, was more so now—enough for Mortimer to venture on a few tentative suggestions of a financial nature; and though, as usual, Quarrier was not responsive, he did not, as usual, get up and go away.

A vague hope stirred Mortimer that it might not be beyond his persuasive tongue to make this chilly, reticent young man into a friend some day—a helpful friend. For Mortimer all his life had trusted to his tongue; and though poorly enough repaid, the few lingual victories remained in his memory, along with an inexhaustible vanity and hope; while his countless defeats and the many occasions on which his tongue had played him false were all forgotten. Besides, he had been drinking more heavily all day than was his custom.

So Quarrier talked, sparingly, about his new coach, about Billy Fleetwood’s renowned string of hunters, about Ashley Spencer’s new stable and his chances at Saratoga with Roy-a-neh, for which he had paid a fabulous sum—the sum and the story probably equally fabulous.

Mortimer’s head was swimming with ideas; he was also talking a great deal, much more than he had intended; he was saying things he had not exactly intended to say, either, in just that way. He realised it, but he went on, unable to stop his own tongue, the noise of which intoxicated him.

Once or twice he thought Quarrier looked at him rather strangely; but he would show Quarrier that he was nobody’s fool; he’d show Quarrier that he was a friend, a good, staunch friend; and that Quarrier had long, long undervalued him. Waves of sentiment spread through and through him; his affection for Quarrier dampened his eyes; and still he blabbed on and on, gazing with brimming eyes upon Quarrier, who sat back silent and attentive as Mortimer circled and blundered nearer and nearer to the crucial point of his destination.