Fate Knocks at the Door | Page 7

not known how
lonely their hearts were, until they encountered this fine mutual
attraction. Together they cleaned up the supper things, and spread their
blankets side by side.... Later, when only the infantry sentries were

awake, and the packers' running guard (and a little apart, the
interminable glow from Healy's cigarettes), the two were still
whispering, though the day had been terrific in physical expenditure.
So aroused and gladdened by each other were they, that intimate
matters 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