CHAPTER I
Many patterns of carpet lay rolled out before them on the floor – two of Brussels showed the beginning of their quest, and its ending in that direction; while a score of ingrains lured their eyes and prolonged the debate between desire pocket-book. The head of the department did them the honor of waiting upon them himself – or did Joe the honor, as she well knew, for she had noted the open-mouthed awe of the elevator boy who brought them up. Nor had she been blind to the marked respect shown Joe by the urchins and groups of young fellows on corners, when she walked with him in their own neighborhood down at the west end of the town.
But the head of the department was called away to the telephone, and in her mind the splendid promise of the carpets and the irk of the pocket-book were thrust aside by a greater doubt and anxiety.
“But I don’t see what you find to like in it, Joe,” she said softly, the note of insistence in her words betraying recent and unsatisfactory discussion.
For a fleeting moment a shadow darkened his boyish face, to be replaced by the glow of tenderness. He was only a boy, as she was only a girl – two young things on the threshold of life, house-renting and buying carpets together.
“What’s the good of worrying?” he questioned. “It’s the last go, the very last.”
He smiled at her, but she saw on his lips the unconscious and all but breathed sigh of renunciation, and with the instinctive monopoly of woman for her mate, she feared this thing she did not understand and which gripped his life so strongly.
“You know the go with O’Neil cleared the last payment on mother’s house,” he went on. “And that’s off my mind. Now this last with Ponta will give me a hundred dollars in bank – an even hundred, that’s the purse – for you and me to start on, a nest-egg.”
She disregarded the money appeal. “But you like it, this – this ‘game’ you call it. Why?”
He lacked speech-expression. He expressed himself with his hands, at his work, and with his body and the play of his muscles in the squared ring; but to tell with his own lips the charm of the squared ring was beyond him. Yet he essayed, and haltingly at first, to express what he felt and analyzed when playing the Game at the supreme summit of existence.
“All I know, Genevieve, is that you feel good in the ring when you’ve got the man where you want him, when he’s had a punch up both sleeves waiting for you and you’ve never given him an opening to land ’em, when you’ve landed your own little punch an’ he’s goin’ groggy, an’ holdin’ on, an’ the referee’s dragging him off so’s you can go in an’ finish ’m, an’ all the house is shouting an’ tearin’ itself loose, an’ you know you’re the best man, an’ that you played m’ fair an’ won out because you’re the best man. I tell you – ”
He ceased brokenly, alarmed by his own volubility and by Genevieve’s look of alarm. As he talked she had watched his face while fear dawned in her own. As he described the moment of moments to her, on his inward vision were lined the tottering man, the lights, the shouting house, and he swept out and away from her on this tide of life that was beyond her comprehension, menacing, irresistible, making her love pitiful and weak. The Joe she knew receded, faded, became lost. The fresh boyish face was gone, the tenderness of the eyes, the sweetness of the mouth with its curves and pictured corners. It was a man’s face she saw, a face of steel, tense and immobile; a mouth of steel, the lips like the jaws of a trap; eyes of steel, dilated, intent, and the light in them and the glitter were the light and glitter of steel. The face of a man, and she had known only his boy face. This face she did not know at all.
And yet, while it frightened her, she was vaguely stirred with pride in him. His masculinity, the masculinity of the fighting male, made its inevitable appeal to her, a female, moulded by all her heredity to seek out the strong man for mate, and to lean against the wall of his strength. She did not understand this force of his being that rose mightier than her love and laid its compulsion upon him; and yet, in her woman’s heart she was aware of the sweet pang which told her that for her sake, for Love’s own sake, he had surrendered to her, abandoned all that portion of his life, and with this one last fight would never fight again.
“Mrs. Silverstein doesn’t like prize-fighting,” she said. “She’s down on it, and she knows something, too.”
He smiled indulgently, concealing a hurt, not altogether new, at her persistent inappreciation of this side of his nature and life in which he took the greatest pride. It was to him power and achievement, earned by his own effort and hard work; and in the moment when he had offered himself and all that he was to Genevieve, it was this, and this alone, that he was proudly conscious of laying at her feet. It was the merit of work performed, a guerdon of manhood finer and greater than any other man could offer, and it had been to him his justification and right to possess her. And she had not understood it then, as she did not understand it now, and he might well have wondered what else she found in him to make him worthy.
“Mrs. Silverstein is a dub, and a softy, and a knocker,” he said good-humoredly. “What’s she know about such things, anyway? I tell you it is good, and healthy, too,” – this last as an afterthought. “Look at me. I tell you I have to live clean to be in condition like this. I live cleaner than she does, or her old man, or anybody you know – baths, rub-downs, exercise, regular hours, good food and no makin’ a pig of myself, no drinking, no smoking, nothing that’ll hurt me. Why, I live cleaner than you, Genevieve – ”
“Honest, I do,” he hastened to add at sight of her shocked face. “I don’t mean water an’ soap, but look there.” His hand closed reverently but firmly on her arm. “Soft, you’re all soft, all over. Not like mine. Here, feel this.”
He pressed the ends of her fingers into his hard arm-muscles until she winced from the hurt.
“Hard all over just like that,” he went on. “Now that’s what I call clean. Every bit of flesh an’ blood an’ muscle is clean right down to the bones – and they’re clean, too. No soap and water only on the skin, but clean all the way in. I tell you it feels clean. It knows it’s clean itself. When I wake up in the morning an’ go to work, every drop of blood and bit of meat is shouting right out that it is clean. Oh, I tell you – ”
He paused with swift awkwardness, again confounded by his unwonted flow of speech. Never in his life had he been stirred to such utterance, and never in his life had there been cause to be so stirred. For it was the Game that had been questioned, its verity and worth, the Game itself, the biggest thing in the world – or what had been the biggest thing in the world until that chance afternoon and that chance purchase in Silverstein’s candy store, when Genevieve loomed suddenly colossal in his life, overshadowing all other things. He was beginning to see, though vaguely, the sharp conflict between woman and career, between a man’s work in the world and woman’s need of the man. But he was not capable of generalization. He saw only the antagonism between the concrete, flesh-and-blood Genevieve and the great, abstract, living Game. Each resented the other, each claimed him; he was torn with the strife, and yet drifted helpless on the currents of their contention.
His words had drawn Genevieve’s gaze to his face, and she had pleasured in the clear skin, the clear eyes, the cheek soft and smooth as a girl’s. She saw the force of his argument and disliked it accordingly. She revolted instinctively against this Game which drew him away from her, robbed her of part of him. It was a rival she did not understand. Nor could she understand its seductions. Had it been a woman rival, another girl, knowledge and light and sight would have been hers. As it was, she grappled in the dark with an intangible adversary about which she knew nothing. What truth she felt in his speech made the Game but the more formidable.
A sudden conception of her weakness came to her. She felt pity for herself, and sorrow. She wanted him, all of him, her woman’s need would not be satisfied with less; and he eluded her, slipped away here and there from the embrace with which she tried to clasp him. Tears swam into her eyes, and her lips trembled, turning defeat into victory, routing the all-potent Game with the strength of her weakness.
“Don’t, Genevieve, don’t,” the boy pleaded, all contrition, though he was confused and dazed. To his masculine mind there was nothing relevant about her break-down; yet all else was forgotten at sight of her tears.
She smiled forgiveness through her wet eyes, and though he knew of nothing for which to be forgiven, he melted utterly. His hand went out impulsively to hers, but she avoided the clasp by a sort of bodily stiffening and chill, the while the eyes smiled still more gloriously.
“Here comes Mr. Clausen,” she said, at the same time, by some transforming alchemy of woman, presenting to the newcomer eyes that showed no hint of moistness.
“Think I was never coming back, Joe?” queried the head of the department, a pink-and-white-faced man, whose austere side-whiskers were belied by genial little eyes.
“Now let me see – hum, yes, we was discussing ingrains,” he continued briskly. “That tasty little pattern there catches your eye, don’t it now, eh? Yes, yes, I know all about it. I set up housekeeping when I was getting fourteen a week. But nothing’s too good for the little nest, eh? Of course I know, and it’s only seven cents more, and the dearest is the cheapest, I say. Tell you what I’ll do, Joe,” – this with a burst of philanthropic impulsiveness and a confidential lowering of voice, – “seein’s it’s you, and I wouldn’t do it for anybody else, I’ll reduce it to five cents. Only,” – here his voice became impressively solemn, – “only you mustn’t ever tell how much you really did pay.”
“Sewed, lined, and laid – of course that’s included,” he said, after Joe and Genevieve had conferred together and announced their decision.
“And the little nest, eh?” he queried. “When do you spread your wings and fly away? To-morrow! So soon? Beautiful! Beautiful!”
He rolled his eyes ecstatically for a moment, then beamed upon them with a fatherly air.
Joe had replied sturdily enough, and Genevieve had blushed prettily; but both felt that it was not exactly proper. Not alone because of the privacy and holiness of the subject, but because of what might have been prudery in the middle class, but which in them was the modesty and reticence found in individuals of the working class when they strive after clean living and morality.
Mr. Clausen accompanied them to the elevator, all smiles, patronage, and beneficence, while the clerks turned their heads to follow Joe’s retreating figure.
“And to-night, Joe?” Mr. Clausen asked anxiously, as they waited at the shaft. “How do you feel? Think you’ll do him?”
“Sure,” Joe answered. “Never felt better in my life.”
“You feel all right, eh? Good! Good! You see, I was just a-wonderin’ – you know, ha! ha! – goin’ to get married and the rest – thought you might be unstrung, eh, a trifle? – nerves just a bit off, you know. Know how gettin’ married is myself. But you’re all right, eh? Of course you are. No use asking you that. Ha! ha! Well, good luck, my boy! I know you’ll win. Never had the least doubt, of course, of course.”
“And good-by, Miss Pritchard,” he said to Genevieve, gallantly handing her into the elevator. “Hope you call often. Will be charmed – charmed – I assure you.”
“Everybody calls you ‘Joe’,” she said reproachfully, as the car dropped downward. “Why don’t they call you ‘Mr. Fleming’? That’s no more than proper.”
But he was staring moodily at the elevator boy and did not seem to hear.
“What’s the matter, Joe?” she asked, with a tenderness the power of which to thrill him she knew full well.
“Oh, nothing,” he said. “I was only thinking – and wishing.”
“Wishing? – what?” Her voice was seduction itself, and her eyes would have melted stronger than he, though they failed in calling his up to them.
Then, deliberately, his eyes lifted to hers. “I was wishing you could see me fight just once.”
She made a gesture of disgust, and his face fell. It came to her sharply that the rival had thrust between and was bearing him away.
“I – I’d like to,” she said hastily with an effort, striving after that sympathy which weakens the strongest men and draws their heads to women’s breasts.
“Will you?”
Again his eyes lifted and looked into hers. He meant it – she knew that. It seemed a challenge to the greatness of her love.
“It would be the proudest moment of my life,” he said simply.
It may have been the apprehensiveness of love, the wish to meet his need for her sympathy, and the desire to see the Game face to face for wisdom’s sake, – and it may have been the clarion call of adventure ringing through the narrow confines of uneventful existence; for a great daring thrilled through her, and she said, just as simply, “I will.”
“I didn’t think you would, or I wouldn’t have asked,” he confessed, as they walked out to the sidewalk.
“But can’t it be done?” she asked anxiously, before her resolution could cool.
“Oh, I can fix that; but I didn’t think you would.”
“I didn’t think you would,” he repeated, still amazed, as he helped her upon the electric car and felt in his pocket for the fare.
