The Game | Page 3

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This etext was prepared from the 1913 William Heinemann edition by
David Price, email [email protected]

THE GAME
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.