The Cinder Buggy (19 page)

“Thanks,” said Thane.

Still they lingered in a group.

“Have a bit of supper with us,” said Thane, suddenly.

“Not tonight,” said John. “We shall be too sleepy.”

Agnes was silent.

After a long pause, “Well,” said Thane, “this is Pittsburgh.”

John pensively nodded his head, and added, “Well.”

Agnes might have yawned. That would have produced the necessary centrifugal impulse. Or she might have said something to have that effect. But she was apparently sunk in thought.

After another long pause the two men shook hands in a hasty manner and John walked rapidly down the hall. From the head of the staircase he looked back. They were still there,—Agnes, her hands behind her, leaning against the wall with her head thrown back, gazing from afar at Thane, who stood in an awkward twist, with one superfluous leg, looking away. His face was towards John, and John waved his hand, but there was no response. The puddler was staring at an invisible thing.

That last accidental glimpse of them left a vivid after-image in John’s eyes. It stood there for hours like a transparent illusion. He walked the sun down on a country road and still it was there. Returning, he paced the streets until ten o’clock and it tortured him still. Coming presently to a fine brick house, not very large, with a marble fountain and small flower garden in front, he turned in. His feet knew their way up the narrow walk and he pulled the bell knob with the air of one to whom nothing unexpected is likely to happen. No light was anywhere visible. The windows were hermetically shuttered. Nor did his pull at the bell knob produce any audible sound. Yet almost at once the door opened, revealing a brilliantly lighted interior, and a servant in livery bowed him in. There was an air of vulgar elegance about the hall. The servant did not speak. Having offered to take the visitor’s hat, to which the visitor shook his head, he opened a heavy door to the right and there came from beyond it intermittent sounds of small clatter. The room John entered was what had been the front drawing room. Back of it were two more rooms, in a train to the depth of the house, all thrown together by means of unfolded doors, so that the effect was of one very long apartment, about thirty feet wide, laid with rich, deep carpet on which the feet made not the slightest sound. The walls were full of pictures, some of them good. There were several art objects on pedestals, a great many nice chairs and some small tables, like tea tables, evidently used for serving refreshments. On one of these tables was a large humidor and on another a tray with a cut glass service of decanters, goblets and ice bowl. That was all, except down both sides of the first two rooms roulette wheels and in the last room at the end three faro layouts.

Twenty or thirty men were betting at roulette, in groups of three or four each. John passed them with a negligent, preoccupied air, walking straight back.

No faro play was just then going on. At one layout sat a dealer in that state of chilled ophidian tension characteristic of professional gamblers in the face of their prey, and by none so remarkably achieved as by the faro bank dealer, who drinks ice water without warming it, who sees without looking, who speaks only under great provocation and then softly, and whose slightest movement is pontifical until he reaches for the six-shooter. That movement is as a rattlesnake strikes.

On the players’ side of a faro table are representations of the thirteen cards,—ace, deuce, trey, etc., to the king, in two rows of six each with the seven at one end. On the dealer’s side, besides the rack containing the chips, the cash drawer and the invisible six-shooter, is a little metal box in which a pack of cards will snugly lie, face up. The dealer moves the cards off one at a time. They fall alternately into two piles. One pile wins; the other loses. The players bet which pile a card will fall in, indicating it by the way they place their money on the table. No vocal sound is necessary. It is a silent game. The expert might play for ever and never speak a word.

John dragged up a large chair, hung his coat on the back of it, settled himself to face the dealer and passed five hundred dollars across the table. The dealer put the money in the cash drawer and pushed out five stacks of yellow chips. John began to play. He did not make his bets at random. He played a slow, rhythmic, two-handed game, never hesitating, always thoughtful, precisely with the air of a man playing solitaire.

For an hour or more he lost steadily. Several times his hands made a bothered gesture, as of clearing the space in front of his face. The dealer, the cards, the yellow chips, all objects of common reality, were dim and uncertain, by reason of the image persisting in his eyes,—that etched impression of Agnes and Thane in the hallway, so twain, so improbable, yet so imminent, so—... so—....

He groaned aloud and held his head between clenched hands. The dealer stopped and waited. Players sometimes behave that way.

Recalling himself with a start, John looked up, cleared his play, gave the dealer a nod to proceed and doubled the scale of his bets. That made his game steep enough to attract attention. A little gallery gathered. No one else cut in. He kept the table to himself. Gradually the haunted mist broke up. The tormenting picture went away. If it threatened to return he raised his bets again. His health revived. He had some supper brought in and ate it as he played. He played all night.

At seven he rose, yawned, stretched, rubbed his eyes like a man coming out of a deep sleep, pushed his chips across the table to be cashed, and drew on his coat while the dealer counted them.

He had won over three thousand dollars. But it was neither the fact of his winning nor the amount of his gain that floated his spirits. It was getting that picture out of his eyes and the feeling that went with it out of his heart. Losing would have served him quite as well, psychically, though of course winning was only that much more to boot.

Always for him the excitement of chance was a perfect refuge from thought and reality, better than sleep, which may be troubled with dreams, and restful in the same way that dreamless sleep is.

Now as he walked toward the hotel, though the morning was wet and heavy, he felt fresh in his body and optimistic in his mind. He could think of seeing Agnes and Thane at breakfast without that ugly lurching of his heart.

They were in the dining room when he arrived there an hour later. His impulse was to let them alone, but Thane, seeing him, stood up and beckoned.

“We kept a place for you,” he said.

It was so. The table was laid for three. John wondered whose wish that was.

“I’ve had word from New Damascus,” he said to Agnes. “Your father is all right.”

“Was there any reason to think he might not be all right?” she asked in surprise.

“No, no,” he said. “It was merely mentioned, like the state of the weather.”

She detected his confusion.

“You saw him last,” she said. “Did anything unusual occur?” She was regarding him keenly.

“I thought he looked ill, or about to be,” John said,

“And I asked the servants to call the doctor. Apparently it was nothing. Anyhow... I’ve had word that he’s all right.”

She did not pursue the subject, but became suddenly silent, and thereafter avoided John’s eyes, for in the midst of his explanation his expression had changed. He had looked at her in a most extraordinary way and she suffered a deep psychic disturbance. It was as if he had blunderingly discovered a nameless secret. And that was precisely what had happened. As he was talking to her,—positively as he would swear with no wanton curiosity in his mind,—as he looked at her and as her eyes met his in open frankness there came an instant in which he saw how matters stood.

How can one tell? One cannot tell. It tells itself in the way the eyes look back, in what is missing from them, in something there that was not there before, in a certain hardness of the chin.

In no such way had Agnes changed.

That was what John saw. The discovery shook him. All his senses leaped exultingly. She was not Thane’s,—not yet. Wild thoughts got loose. The dining room began to sway. Then he looked at Thane and enormously repented. His feeling for Thane was one of intense affection. He could no more help it than he could help his feeling for Agnes. They were separate chemistries, antagonistic. So he was torn between them, and when he could bear it no longer he began clumsily to excuse himself.

“We are delayed by legal formalities,” he said to

Thane. “May be three or four days yet. Take it easy. The company can stand it.”

So he left them abruptly.

All that day he fled from himself. All night he played. The next morning he looked at his haggard self in the mirror,—looked deeply into his own eyes, and said aloud:

“But she is his, not mine, and I will let her be, by God.”

On that he slept for twenty-four hours and rose on the third day with a strong appetite, a clear mind and a great vow to the divinity with whom he kept now a time of feud, now a time of grace, whimsically alternating.

T
HE divinity that made the pattern of John’s life is infinitely mysterious. Some call it luck. Others call it chance. Both are begging names. Mathematicians call it probability—the theory of, and devote a branch of their science to it. Definition is impossible. It is whatever it is that causes, permits or brings one thing to happen in place of all the other things that might just as well have happened. Its commonest manifestations are profoundly obscure. On the first toss of a coin the chances are even between head and tail. On the second toss they change. Why they change nobody can tell; but everyone knows that the odds against the heads coming twice in succession are two to one. If you think of it, how preposterous I Rationally, how can the result of one throw create any probability as to the result of the next? Yet it does. Here evidently is some principle or rhythmic variation that we do not understand.

We speak of the law of chance. There is no such thing, for if chance could be reduced to law it would cease to be chance. It is outside any law we know. The mathematical odds are two to one against double heads, yet the head may happen to come ten times in succession, so that the actual predestined odds against the tail showing once in ten throws were ten to one. If the head may come ten times in succession, could it come a thousand times? No one will say it could not. But since it has never happened as a matter of record you can’t imagine it, and the odds against it are what you will.

The fact of oneself is an amazing unlikelihood. The biological chances against one’s getting born as one is, plus the chances against any particular organism getting born at all, must have been billions to one. Yet here one is, thinking it had been precisely inevitable since all eternity. Perhaps it was. There may be no such thing as chance. It may be only that we never know all the factors. It may be. Yet does not everyone believe from experience that survival is a continuous chance?

There are innumerable chances for and against one’s living another day, another hour. These chances are estimated statistically and great companies are formed to bet on them. That is life insurance. The insurance company bets not on the life of an individual, for that would be gambling; it bets that the aggregate life of ten thousand people will correspond to the average duration of human life, and that works out, because those who fall short of the average are balanced by those who exceed it, and there is an average. But any single life is the sport of pure chance. And we know nothing about this fickle arbiter. Therefore we become superstitious. Belief in luck is the only universal religion. Luck is the happy chance. The right thing happens when it is needed. It strains a point to happen. Why it happens, in streaks, why it happens more to some than to others, why to a darling few it happens importunately,—these are questions one asks in a rhetorical sense. There is no answer. Luck and genius may be two aspects of the same thing. Luck happens and genius happens, and there is no accounting for it.

It came to be a notorious saying about John Breakspeare that he was lucky. But people at the same time said he was dangerous, which would mean that he sometimes failed. That was true. He often failed. When that happened he did not curse his luck. It only occurred to him that he had played the wrong chance, and he went on from there. Probably in a case like his there is a highly developed intuition of the winning chance corresponding to a musical composer’s intuition of harmony. The principles of harmony have been partially discovered. But the rhythms of chance are still a mystery.

Certainly it was chance, not luck, that brought John this day to the edge of a small crowd in front of the county court house just as the auctioneer was saying:

“Three thousand—three thousand—three thousand—t-h-r-E-E thous-A-N-D! Three thousand dollars for a first class nail mill. Why, gentlemen, it would fetch more than that by the pound for junk. Three thousand do I hear one? Three thousand do I hear one? GOING, at three—One! Thank you, sir.”

He bowed ironically to John.

“Thirty-one—thirty-one—thirty-one hund-r-e-d! Do-I-hear-two? Do-I-hear-two? Do-I-hear-two? Two over there! Now do I hear three? Do-I-hear-three? Two-do-I-hear-three?”

He was looking at John.

“Going at thirty-two. Are you all DONE? T-h-i-r-t-y-two, ONCE. T-h-i-r-t-y-two, TWICE. T-h-i-r-t-y-two for the third and—”

John nodded his head.

“Three! Three-I-have, three-I-have, three-I-have. Thirty-three-hundred dollars for an up-to-date iron mill in the great city of Pittsburgh. Thirty-three-hundred. Do I hear four? Four do I hear? Thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three. Going at thirty-three hundred. Going, ONCE. Going, TWICE. Going for the third and last time—SOLD! to that young man over there. Now, gentlemen, the next property to be sold by the decree of the court is a nail mill as is a mill. It has a capacity of—”

John, thrusting his way through the crowd, interrupted.

“Where shall I go to settle for this?”

The auctioneer eyed him suspiciously and relighted his cigar before speaking.