The Fighting Edge (Smith's Magazine 1907)/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.
DEVVIE” BLAKE caught sight of Miss Marriott, and brought across to her his gay smile.
“What luck?” he sang out.
She referred to the card in her hand. “The nomination of the gentleman appears to be Jefferson B. Stoneman.”
His smile held its own. “You are in luck.”
She discovered an infinitesimal split in her driver, and was examining it as she lightly laughed her answer. “There are people, I suppose, who would wrap it up in a tissue-paper verbiage.”
“But, you see, I’m honest—and I know the great Jefferson B. He does not condescend to an interest in the interesting sex. I didn’t mention his luck, because it is more than conceivable that even the charming Miss Marriott may bore him.”
She nodded gay, dubious thanks. “And why am I in luck—since I am? Because he is famous, or because he can play golf?”
“Because he is the guaranteed and only Stoneman.”
“How many Marriotts are there?” she wanted to know, with a burlesque of demure innocence.
“I doubt if he ever heard of your existence,” came back Devvie, with genial impudence.
“Oh, if he is as lost as that! But I don’t believe it. His own newspapers have had pages and pages about me. I'll ask him if he doesn’t know and admire me from across the footlights.” Her face dimpled at the thought.
“Do,” he chuckled. “And he’ll tell you—if he tells the truth—that he has no room to admire anybody except Jefferson B. Stoneman.”
Her eyebrows went up with a whimsical question. “Is this a challenge, sir?”
“If you like.”
“Then on behalf of my sex I accept,” she said, with a droll little assumption of responsibility.
“And so your dearest sin becomes a duty,” he murmured.
“Mr. Blake!”
He met her eye, smiled, and continued to smile. Presently the corners of her lips went up to join his amusement.
“Just the same, it isn’t so,” in perfunctory protest.
“No?”
“And, anyhow, I don’t see any harm in letting people like me. I can’t be a frump, can I?”
His eyes took in the slim, warm verve of her, so competently italicized by the jaunty golf-jacket and natty cap, took in and appreciated the vivid charm that seemed to bubble from an internal spring fed by a sweet ardor of the soul.
“No, you couldn’t,” he admitted.
“Well, then”—she pursued her advantage with gay scorn—“don’t blame me because men are geese—some of them.”
“Oh, I’m not blaming you. Wouldn’t think of it. We don’t blame a kitten for spilling the milk. That’s merely kitten nature.”
“You know very well you are making it worse,” she informed him severely. “I don’t see why you impute such things to me.”
“We'll put it that I’m jealous of the other poor beggars.”
“We'll invent no such fiction, sir.” Then suddenly she relaxed swiftly. “But you do like me, don’t you, Devvie?”
“Not at all; I dislike you extremely. You’re merely a fluffy young animal with insinuating ways. I don’t approve of you at all.”
“It isn’t important that you should, but it’s quite important you should like the fluffy ways. Don’t you like them a little, Devvie?” Her lips had an irresistible pout that seemed to be asking to be kissed.
“Of course not.”
“You might reform me if you liked me. Can’t a kitten be taught to leave the cream alone?”
“You’re beyond hope, I’m afraid.”
“Then why do you devote so much time to me?” she said,
“Because I’m beyond hope, too, one may suppose.”
A light laugh rippled from her soft throat. “Really, you seem quite in love with your fiction.”
“With the heroine of it, let us say.”
“But you don’t think Mr. Stoneman cares for fiction?”
“He is a very Gradgrind, for fact.”
“But he might be educated, don’t you think?”
Blake, after another swift survey of her sylphlike effect of rapturous life, thought that he might. “We'll see,” he said briefly.
“And pending developments I should like to know more about him. Does he golf well?”
“Yes, after an unbrilliant fashion. He makes himself do everything well.”
“Makes himself?”
“He personifies the copy-book mottos. He is an Industry-is-the-road-to-success sort of fellow. ‘You can’t lose him in the rough-and-tumble of the game. Jefferson B. is certainly on the spot.”
“I’m trying to find out why you congratulated me on drawing him for the tournament. The picture you paint does not exactly fascinate.”
“If you take him aright he’ll amuse you no end.”
“And how must I take him?”
“As a contribution to the diversion of Miss Marriott.”
“I’m glad that is possible. Some men entirely refuse to be taken so, no matter how hard they and I try.”
He smiled. “Stoneman won’t try. You'll find him diverting, in spite of himself—unless you find him a sermon.”
“A sermon?”
“Some young women do. But I think you'll escape. Your saving sense of humor, you know.”
“But a sermon! That sounds appalling.”
“Say, then, an illuminated text writ large; an autobiography on The Peerless Leader.”
“Oh, is he like that?” she groaned. “I’d heaps rather he would be interested in the biography of the nearest rising young actress.”
“He is very much like that.”
“Tell me about him,” she ordered, in her gay, peremptory way.
“I can’t do justice to him. Nobody can, except Jefferson B. himself.”
“I’m sure I sha’n’t like him,” she announced.
“I didn’t promise you would like him. One doesn’t like Julius Cæsar or the statue of the Goddess of Liberty.”
“Reverential awe is the correct attitude, I take it,” she laughed.
“So the great Stoneman conceives the right point of view toward him. He is to be the political Moses to rescue us from the Egyptian darkness, and to restore democracy to a people robbed of their heritage. Incidentally, he is a multimillionaire exploiting the same people to his individual profit, though, to be quite fair, he does get along well with his employees, and pays them a higher wage than some of his kind.”
“Do you know him well?”
The corners of his eyes crinkled in reminiscent mirth. “I ought to; we were at the same fresh-water college for a year. Stoneman has helped to keep me young.” He interrupted himself to ask if he might smoke. “I’ll tell you a story that illustrates him. He was a freshman at the time. I couldn't decide then, and I can’t now, whether he was a great man or a mountebank. I suppose he is a blend of both.”
She leaned back against the veranda railing, and gave him his time.
“The country was just then making an event over the unveiling of a statue to one of our martyred Presidents. It happened that we were close to the large city where the affair was to be pulled off, and so most of us ran up to see it. ‘The President of these United States’ was to make the address of the occasion, and his cabinet was present in full force, as well as the supreme court, and a good sprinkling of senators and other bigwigs. Seats were reserved for a few of the principal celebrities on the speakers’ stand at the foot of the monument in the center of the big square. About a million people seemed to be there when I edged into the crowd.
“But when I looked up at the speakers’ stand, I got the surprise of my life. Just behind the President, snugly flanked by the chief justice of the supreme court and Senator Sherman, sat Jefferson B. Stoneman. He was talking affably to the Ohio senator—about his famous silver-purchasing bill, we discovered later—but he courteously included the chief justice occasionally. And I'll swear that just before the President rose to make his speech, Stoneman leaned forward and whispered something to him.” Blake laughed quietly to himself, and the girl knew that he was seeing the scene again. “You see, Stoneman had noticed the vacant chair, and marched himself up to it. To him it was not important that the governor of Pennsylvania sat on the top step because his seat had been preempted. Now, mind you, this wasn’t impudence at all—not as J. B. understands it. It simply seemed to him that his place was up there among the celebrities, and he went up so naturally that none of the marshals of the day stopped him. He’s still going up to the seats of the mighty, but we don’t laugh at him any more. He has taken himself seriously so long that we accept him now at his own valuation.”
“You don’t like him,” she charged.
“Am I as obvious as that?” he answered ruefully. “I don’t really dislike him, but I think him a dangerous man—all the more dangerous because he has no conception of the harm he does. As for liking him—he doesn’t ask any man’s liking. He is entirely self-sufficient. Since he approves himself and believes in himself, that is all that is needed; and he is as certain of himself as a compass is of the magnetic pole.”
“You seem to have made rather an obsession of him, Devvie.”
She smiled her frank amusement into his well-bred, indolent face, for Devereux Blake, despite his acknowledged talents, did not have the reputation of taking life very seriously. He was a dilettante, unless current report did him injustice, playing the game for his own amusement rather than for any more serious reason. He had written a novel of some quality, and had followed it with a comic opera, just a bit too artistic for popular success. Latterly he had drifted into politics, and had been elected a few months before to the State senate. He had friends without number, and the more serious-minded of them were wont to deplore his easy-going aplomb. “If his father hadn’t left him just enough to live on comfortably he would have been a distinguished man; as it is” A shrug of the shoulders usually completed the prophecy.
The young man laughed. “I do seem to have him on my mind to-day. I don’t want to seem to make too much of him, but the truth is he’s such a puzzle that the interest attaching to him abides.”
“Perhaps I’ll read the riddle of the sphinx,” she cried. “Perhaps I’ll make clear the man of mystery.”
“Why not, since your business is to interpret human character? Without presuming to advise, I'll offer the suggestion that the clue to him may be found along the line of his ambition. That young man is going to travel a long way, and every step of it in the interest of the career he has mapped out for himself. One may be amused at his pretensions, but he makes good—and that is the final test in this country.”
“And what are his ambitions?”
There was a little humorous gleam in Blake’s eyes. “Oh, he’s modest just yet. He will be content with a seat in the United States Senate this year. Of course, he aims higher ultimately.”
“And will he get his seat in the millionaire’s club?”
“On my word, I believe he will. He gets whatever he sets his will on getting. If he should take a fancy to Miss Maisie Marriott” His warm, impudent smile finished the sentence for him.
“Take care,” she caught him up, but with a gleam of laughter in her eyes.
“It’s on the knees of the gods,” he continued, weighing her with a regard of humorous meditation. “If it happens to be his blind day, if he doesn’t happen to take a notion that he would go farther and faster in the rôle of the head of a household But, as I mentioned, one can’t make accurate forecasts about Jefferson B. He is the kind of a stormy petrel that one can never know where he will alight.”
“Perhaps he will forget to alight at all. I’m not going to wait for him much longer,” announced Miss Marriott.
“Very likely,” assented Blake cheerfully. “I saw him here ten minutes ago, but he may have tooled back to town to order his managing editor to indite a red-hot editorial on the decadent sports of the unproductive rich. No, by Jove, here he comes!”
The young man approaching along the club-house veranda certainly looked the part he had sketched for himself, assuming Blake’s analysis as fairly accurate. He was a large man, but did not show his height owing to his sturdy, square-built bulk. Of his force there could be no question. It stood forth saliently—in the cold, gray, masterful eye; in the resolute, square jaw; in the swing of his big shoulders and the spring of his sharp, heavy tread; and not less apparent than his power was his confident assertion of it. He claimed leadership by the grace of natural fitness, and every fighting inch of his thick-set six feet promised to back his contention. Room enough in plenty there was for criticism. One might judge those opaque, impassive eyes as cruel; might feel the strength relentless as a Juggernaut. But whether he were appraised demagogue, plutocrat, or patriot, the sense of an indomitable will, a boundless patience, remained. He might go down to defeat fighting, and silently regather his forces for a renewal of the battle, but overthrow irretrievable was not on the cards of his destiny. His assurance flaunted him a born winner, not too nice or too scrupulous to forget the rules of the game when it suited to overstep them.
Blake hastened to make the proper introductions, during which formality Stoneman’s impassive gaze rested on the young actress with an impersonal lack of interest that amused the introducer.
“If you’re quite ready, Mr. Stoneman, we might go down to the links. I’m afraid we may be keeping our opponents waiting,” suggested Miss Marriott sweetly.
Her sarcasm missed its object completely. “Yes, I’m in rather a hurry. I have an appointment down-town at five. Suppose we begin at once,” he agreed.
“I shouldn’t like to put you to any inconvenience, Mr. Stoneman. It’s a pity the rules of the club forbid us running a car over the course. We might save several minutes,” she ventured suavely.
“We'll make it if we hurry,” was his good-humored answer.
“Yes, but you see I’m not going to hurry.”
He looked at her in a sharp surprise. “I beg your pardon?”
The clear, fluty voice that came back to Blake was airily serene. “I make it a point never to hurry unless the matter is important.”
“But it is important.”
“I meant to me,” she added, in further elucidation.
Blake smiled. His eyes lingered with pleasure on her slight, daring figure, so gallantly boyish in its lithe elasticity, so compact of delicate strength and joy in life.
“My impression is,” he told himself whimsically, “that no woman out of heaven is so rich in charm as you, my dear, and that unless the great Jefferson B. is a born ass, he is due to receive the most delightful shake-up of his career.”