Fate Knocks at the Door | Page 7

poured forth in the fine way youths have, before the control and concealment is put on. Grown men imprison each other.... Their low tones trembled with emotion while the night whitened with stars. Cairns wished that something of terror or intensity might happen. He hated a knife to the very pith of his life, but now he would have welcomed a passage of steel in the dark--for a chance to defend the other.
And the cook had that absolute, laughing sort of courage. Cairns divined this--a courage so sure of itself that no boastful explanations were needed. They talked about men, books, their yearnings, the recent fights. Cairns was enthralled and mystified. Bedient did not seem to hope for great things in a worldly way, while the correspondent was driven daily by ambition and its self-dreams. Life apparently had shown this cook day by day what was wisest and easiest to do--the ways of little resistance. He appeared content to go on so; and this challenged Cairns to explain what he meant to do with the next few years. Bedient heard this with fine interest, but no quickening. Cairns was insatiable for details of a life that had been spent in Asia and upon ships of the Eastern seas. Everything that Bedient said had a shining exterior of mystery to the American. His vague memories of New York; the water-fronts that had since called his steps; different ships and captains; the men about him, Healy and the packers; his entire detachment from relatives, and his easy familiarity with the great unhasting years--all these formed into a luminous envelope, containing the new friend.
"I was always fed somehow," Bedient whispered, as he told about the dim little lad that was himself. "There was always some one good to me. I 'member one old sailor with rings in his ears----"
The David Cairns of twenty likewise gave all gladly. Queerly enough, he found the other especially fascinated in anything he told of his mother and sisters, and the life at home in New York, made easy by the infinite little cushions of wealth and culture. A youth eight months away on his first campaign can talk with power on these matters. Here Cairns was wonderful and authoritative and elect to Bedient--particularly in the possession of a living, breathing Mother. This filled the cup of dreams in a way that the dominant exterior matters of the young correspondent's mind--newspaper beats, New York honors, great war stories, and a writer's name--could never have done. Bedient was clearly an inveterate idealist. His dreams were strangely lustrous, but distant, not to be touched nor handled--an impersonal kind of dreaming. Cairns was not so astonished that the other had been of uncommon quality in the beginning, but that his life had not made him common was a miracle, no less.
Elements of glory were in this life he had lived, but those who belonged to it, whom Cairns had observed heretofore, were thick-skinned; men of unlit consciousness and hardened hearts, gruelling companions to whom there was no deadly sin but physical cowardice, and only muscular virtues. Bedient was not of these, neither in body, mind nor memory, aspiration, language nor manner. And yet they believed in him, accepted him in a queer, tentative, subdued fashion; and he spoke to them warmly, and of them with affection. All this needed a deeper and more mellowed mind than Cairns' to comprehend; though it challenged him from the first moment in that swiftly-darkening night. "It's too good to be true," was his oft-recurring sentence.... Though apart, Bedient was not scoffed. Could it be that he was so finished as a cook, as a friend, as an indefatigable--so rhythmically superior, that the packers took no offense at his aloofness? Certainly, Bedient felt no necessity of impressing his values upon his companions, as do those who have come but a little way in culture.
Somehow, Alphonso smelled of roses that night, as the two lay together in that little plaza, where the mules were picketed and the satisfied infantry slept. In the jungle (which seemed very close in the moonlight), bamboo stalks creaked soothingly and stroked each other in the soft night winds, and the zenith sky boiled with millions of white-hot worlds.... Are not the best dreams of this earth to be heard from two rare boys whispering in the night? They have not been frightened by their first real failure, and the latest, most delicate bloom of the race has not yet been brushed from their thoughts. Curled within their minds, like an endless scroll, are the marvellous scriptures of millenniums, and yet their brain-surfaces are fresh for earth's newest concept.... What are they whispering? Their voices falter with emotion over vague bits of dreaming. They ask no greater stimulus to fly to the uttermost