The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 44

And then, as if every atom of his great, strong body had suddenly succ.u.mbed to some long-growing exhaustion, Corey dropped down into a chair and threw out his arm across the table as if he would put away from him as far as possible that offending decoration.

"But when?"-Mr. Ewing found himself reiterating-"when-when-you haven't been away-"

"Oh, yes," said Corey. "You remember, in August."

And here Mr. Ewing confessed that he thought for a moment that Corey must be hopelessly mad. There was the question of time, and a dozen other questions besides. It seemed out of the realm of possibility, out of the realm of reason.

"How did you keep her from knowing?"

Mr. Ewing had not wanted to ask-had hoped the point would explain itself-and Corey looked for a moment as if he might be planning an evasion-then braced himself and looked Mr. Ewing straight in the eyes. A faint expression of scorn came round his mouth, as if he spoke of another-a scoundrel who hardly deserved his scorn.

"I left letters-dated ahead-with the scrubwoman at the laboratory to mail." He said it, took his eyes from Mr. Ewing's, and then he appeared to wait.

Mr. Ewing sat there filled with a kind of amazement, touched with fear for what should come next, and suddenly he became conscious that Corey was watching him with what seemed a tremendous anxiety, waiting for him to speak. And a moment later, apparently no longer able to bear that silence, Corey leaned nervously toward Mr. Ewing, and asked in the tone of one seeking an answer of utmost importance: "You don't see it? You don't see what she saw?"

"See what?" said Mr. Ewing-"what _who_ saw?" Yet he knew that Corey had meant his wife. It was she who had found the _Croix_ ... but what did he mean she had seen?

"Don't keep it back-just to be decent! She said it was plain, plain enough for anybody to see. What I want to _know_ is if everybody knew it but me!"

"Knew what?" cried poor Mr. Ewing, lost more completely now than before.

"Knew why I've done all the things I've done-run all the risks. Why I went over there this time, in August, without letting her know-G.o.d knows _I_ didn't know why!-why I've _always_ gone!"

"Why have you?" The question asked itself.

"Because I wanted the decorations! The d.a.m.ned orders and medals and things! Because I couldn't resist getting a new one-wherever I saw a chance. Do you believe a man could be as-as _rotten_ as that, all his life, and not know it himself?"

Slowly, then, Mr. Ewing began to see. And remotely it began to dawn upon him-the thing "she" in her anger had done. For there was no doubt that the thing was done. The man's faith and belief in himself, in the cleanness and simplicity of his own motives, were gone-and gone in a single devastating blow from which he had not, and could never, recover.

And, searching for the right thing to say, Mr. Ewing stumbled, as one always will, upon the one thing he should never have said:

"But you know better than that. You know it's not so."

Corey's answer was not argumentative; it only stated, wearily, the fact which from the first had seemed to possess his mind:

"No, I don't know it's not so. I've never been able to give any reasons for doing the things myself. _You've_ asked me why.... I couldn't tell."

"Why, it was youth," said Mr. Ewing, and one can imagine him saying it, gently, as an old-fas.h.i.+oned physician might offer his homely remedy to a patient whose knowledge exceeded his own. "Men do those things when they're young."

And Corey, rejecting the simple, old-fas.h.i.+oned cure, made an attempt at a smile for the kindness in which it was offered. "All men are young, some time," he said; "all men don't do them."

"But you happened to be the kind who would." And at this Corey made no attempt to smile.

"That's it!" he said. "I _wasn't_ the kind. I was the kind to stay at home.... _I_ know that. I was always happier here in Dubuque. And now-this last- You'd hardly say that was on account of my youth!"

"No-but it had got into your blood."

Corey at this gave a start and looked up suddenly at Mr. Ewing. "Into my blood- It's the very word she used! When she admitted I might not have known it myself, she said she supposed it was just 'in my blood'!"

He made a gesture which began violently and ended in futility, and sat silent, looking off steadily into s.p.a.ce, as if hearing again all those dreadful revelations of hers. And once or twice Mr. Ewing, who sat helplessly by, waiting, perhaps praying, for some inspiration, made a valiant but utterly vain effort to put out his hand, to show by some mere physical act, if no other, his unshaken belief in his friend.

And so, when the need for speech had become imperative, Mr. Ewing found himself saying something to the effect that these things pa.s.s; that she had only been angry, and had said the first thing that had come into her mind. And Corey, realizing the extremity into which he had led his friend, rose and, either ignoring or not hearing, from the depth of the chasm into which he had fallen, Mr. Ewing's last remark, made some hurried attempt at apology, and awkwardly moved toward the door.

Mr. Ewing had only been able to follow after, and say, lamely, and in spite of himself, that he mustn't say or do anything he might be sorry for, and that they would see each other again. And then he stood in the open door and watched Corey go down the path to the gate, and along the walk, until he had turned the corner, and so out of sight.

And then he had gone back into the house and spent the remainder of that afternoon trying to realize what had pa.s.sed, trying to decide upon what he should say the next time they met.

But he had reached no conclusion, and in the end had decided to leave it to chance. And Chance had solved his problem with her usual original simplicity. She took away the need for his saying anything at all; for the following day the station cab drove up to Corey's front gate and stopped. The driver got down from his seat and went up the walk and into the house. A moment later he came out again, bearing on his shoulder the small-size officer's trunk, the lid forced down now and locked, and in one hand, dragging slightly, a full dunnage-bag. And after him followed Corey. And no one followed him. No one came out on the porch to say good-by. No one stood at the window. The driver put the trunk on the seat beside him, and the dunnage-bag into the seat beside Corey. And then, without a word or a sign, they drove away toward the station.

It was understood in Dubuque after the next few days that Corey had gone to help in the war; he had received an urgent message from France.

And Mr. Ewing received, the day after Corey's departure, a little note of farewell, written in pencil, while he was waiting for his train, and mailed at the station. It said merely good-by, and that he hoped he would understand.

The next week Mrs. Corey closed up the house and went to Des Moines, to stay with her people, she said, until her husband's return.

And that was all Mr. Ewing had ever known of what pa.s.sed between those two, of the details that led to the sudden and final decision to go. And it was all that he had heard of Corey until that day, three months ago, when there came to him the unexpected letter from the man in New York, telling of Corey's death, and of a message and papers he had to deliver.

Mr. Ewing had replied at once that he would go, and had followed his letter almost immediately. He had seemed to feel, ever since that Sunday afternoon, when he had failed to be of use, an increasing sense of responsibility.

He had met the man at his club; and I had, as he told of the meeting, as he described the man, a curious impression of actually seeing them there, in the big Fifth Avenue club, sitting in deeply luxurious chairs and no table between-the gentle, gray-haired, gray-eyed, gray-garbed Mr.

Ewing, who had never been in New York City before; and the other, tall, very tall, with black hair, black eyes, and brown burned skin, who looked, Mr. Ewing said, as if he'd done all the things Corey had done.

It had been quite by chance that this man, whose name was Burke, and Corey had been attached to the same section and were thrown in that way a good deal together. And his very first statement had shown, with all the force of the casual phrase, how tremendously Corey had changed.

"A queer fellow," he said, "no one could understand." And he was a man, one would say, well accustomed to the queerest of men.

Mr. Ewing said yes, he supposed one would call him that, and asked just in what way Burke had thought Corey queer.

And Burke, it seemed, had had more than enough to base the idea upon. He cast about in his mind to select one out of the many queer things. And he had hit upon the most revealing one of them all.

Corey, he said, had gone about covered with medals, two rows, overlapping, on duty and off, all the time. That in itself was queer, especially for an American. Most men wore bars, but Corey had worn the whole thing. And yet, Burke said, he was the least egotistical man he had ever known. And he had seen him wince when other men, pa.s.sing, had smiled at sight of his decorations. He could never make it out.

There was no wonder in that. Mr. Ewing, who knew Corey well, and had, one might say, something to go on, couldn't make it out. And no more, for that matter, could I. There was something in it a little bizarre, and certainly alien. Surely no normal Anglo-Saxon American had ever indulged in such extremes of self-flagellation as that!

And then, abruptly and unbidden, there came into my mind a story of the old West, the story of how in the pioneer days a gambler, sitting down to play solitaire, laid his gun on the table beside him and, if he caught himself cheating, administered justice first hand by shooting himself. To be sure, in those days a man was pretty certain of playing a straight game. Well, so had Corey been, too, sure of the straightness of _his_ game. And I have heard it vouched for that, even in those robust times, the thing had been seen to happen, and to come, with just that appalling simplicity of psychology, from cause to effect, straight, and without hesitation.

The a.n.a.logy grew, for Burke averred that the queerest thing of all about Corey was that he had been the only man he had ever seen lacking entirely the emotion of fear. He volunteered on every sort of hazardous enterprise, and came through safe when men beside him were killed, time after time, protected, they had got to believe, by the inscrutable quality of his fearlessness. It was, Burke said, as if against some other secret consideration death to Corey counted nothing at all.

Then there was something a little peculiar in so silent a man having so many friends. Corey silent! Remembering him, one could hardly credit that change. Burke qualified that by saying that when he used the word silent, he didn't in any sense mean morose. Corey had never been that.

He merely hadn't, as people somehow seemed to expect him to do, talked.

And what he had meant by "friends" he wished to qualify, too. He hadn't meant pals. There had been nothing so active as that. But there were ways to tell when a man was well liked. For example, no one who knew him had ever seen anything funny about Corey's decorations, and they never talked about it among themselves.

Somebody had once asked Corey how long he had been over the first time.

It was evident that he _had_ been there before, because of the _Croix de Guerre_ he wore when he came. And Corey had answered, about six weeks, or a little less.

"And you got the _Croix_ in that time?" An exclamation forced out of the fellow's astonishment, and bringing from Corey an answer without a hint of rebuff, yet certainly nothing that a man could call brag.

"You forget," he said, with an almost imperceptible glance down at his two rows of medals-"I knew the ropes."

The man had afterward said to Burke that he was sorry he'd asked. But he didn't see anything to be ashamed of in the _Croix_-and Corey wore it where a fellow couldn't help seeing. There was, Burke said, a queer kind of apology in it. No, there had been nothing like brag in Corey's answer. There had been none of that in anything he had done. And he had been, according to Burke, the best surgeon of them all, the best man at his work. But of course he had come to disaster in the end. A man can't go on ignoring danger like that.