Running Sands Part 8

"Then there's Death," he said, with an abrupt change. "Did you ever see anybody die, Holt?"

Holt shook his bald head. He did not like this sort of thing.

"No," he admitted.

"Not your parents?"

"No; my father died when I was away at school, and my mother during my first trip abroad."

"Well," continued Stainton, "it is not pretty. We hear a lot of talk about the dignity and serenity and n.o.bility of death. Nothing to that.

Absolutely nothing. Every doctor and nurse I've ever questioned agrees: it is always a horrible wrench accompanied by details that are disgusting. There are subsidiary manifestations.--There is no dignity in terror; there is no serenity in pain. My father----I was looking towards him through the garden window. The window was open. He had found a razor. A dull razor. He may have had some idea that he was shaving. He cut his throat from ear to ear. Jugular; carotid; pneumogastric nerve. I remember the queer gurgle and the----

"Do you wonder that I came to be as much afraid of death as I was of old age? I lay awake nights, I tell you--nights and nights--interminable nights, thinking, shaking.

"It all ended only after years of fighting and one horrid failure. There was a girl--it was a good many years ago, and I had just graduated from Harvard. I fell in love with her. Her people wanted her to marry a cousin, but I think she really wanted to marry me. At any rate, one day, when we were skating together, the ice broke beneath her feet, and into the cold black water we both went.

"It seemed to me that I was hours going down--down, and that I was still longer coming up. The old fears got me. I went through all the agonies of realisation. When my head rose above water I grabbed at the ice, and it cracked to little bits between my fingers. I felt myself sinking again, and just then she--the girl I was in love with--flung an arm toward me. I shoved her away.

"We were both rescued. There were lots of people about, the water wasn't very deep, and there had been only a small percentage of risk. It would have been, had I not known what death really meant, the chance of a lifetime for a rogue to play the hero. But, you see, I was too much afraid of death. I had flung her off to save my own skin, and she neither forgot nor forgave.

"She wouldn't, of course, have anything more to do with me. She threw me over, as she had every good reason to. I cleared out and went West. She married the cousin and eighteen years ago--so I heard long after her marriage--she died as my mother had died--in childbirth."

Stainton slowly refilled his gla.s.s.

Holt shook from him the gloom of the earlier portion of Stainton's narrative. He became once more interested in the manner in which he was accustomed to be interested.

"You certainly cured yourself out West," he said.

"Of my twin horrors?" enquired Stainton. "I tried to. That is why people thought me brave, when they didn't think me rash. I took myself by the shoulders. I said to myself: 'There are two things that you must do.

First, you must get over showing your fear of death. Next, you must live in such a way as to postpone old age to the farthest possible limit. In order to accomplish this postponement, in order to approach old age gently and in sound condition, you must make enough money to guarantee you a quiet, unworried life from the age of forty-five or fifty.'"

"Well," said Holt, "you've done it."

"You know what psychologists tell you about apparitions?" said Stainton.

"Not me. I don't go in for spooks."

"They say, George, that if you think you see a ghost and at once run away from it, you will be seeing ghosts forever after; but that if, at the first glimpse of your first ghost, you will only grip your nerves, walk up to him and touch him, you will find that he is only your yesterday's suit flung on a chair and forgotten, or a sheet flapping from a clothesline, or something else commonplace seen only in a different light, and that thereafter you will never again see a ghost."

"Oh!" said Holt, "do they?"

"That principle," said Stainton, "I tried in regard to my fear of death.

I couldn't do it with old age, but I could do it with death, and I did.

I began by taking small risks. Then I took greater ones, and at last I would deliberately court destruction--or appear to. The outcome was that, by the time you came to know me, I could do the sort of things you admired me for."

"Without turning a hair," Holt added. "You'd got your nerve back. You'd become a brave man."

"No," defined Stainton, "I had become only a man that could conceal his cowardice. I am still, in my heart, as much afraid of death as I ever was."

"I don't believe you," said Holt, more warmly; "and I'll bet you did even better with the other scarecrow."

"Old age?" Stainton's clear eyes snapped. "I had to go at that in another way, but there at least I have succeeded. George, I have trained like a Spartan. I have lived like a monk----"

"Don't I know it, Jim? Remember that night I tried to lure you into the dance-hall at Durango?"

"I have kept hard and keen and clean," said Stainton. "I have got myself--you can guess by what denials and sacrifice and fights--into the shape where the fear of senility, of loss or depreciation of my powers, is reduced to the irreducible minimum." He spoke a little boastfully, but so earnestly that there was, in tone or words, no hint of the prig.

"Tap that," he said.

He expanded his wide chest. He offered his biceps to Holt's congratulatory fingers. He filled his gla.s.s to the brim and balanced it, at arm's length, on the palm of his hand without spilling a drop of the wine.

"I went this morning," he said joyously, "to the best doctor in this New York of yours. That fellow went over me with all the latest disease-detecting and age-detecting machinery known to science."

"Well?" asked Holt.

"He said that I was to all intents and purposes not a day over twenty-five."

Holt nodded approval.

"And you've kept your heart and mind as young as you've kept your body; that's a cinch," said he.

"Younger," declared Stainton. "I have had to fight there harder than anywhere else, but I have won. In spite of that first love disappointment, in spite of friends that have gone back on me now and then, in spite of rough work in rough places and among rough men, in spite of money lost and money won, I have kept on believing. I was saying to someone else this evening that there was comfort in the philosophy of the sour-grapes, but I didn't really mean it. At any rate, I never followed the sour-grape school. I have just believed. That is the whole secret of it, George; all that you have to do is to say to yourself; 'I don't care; I won't doubt. I _believe_ in the world; I believe in Man.'"

Holt smiled.

"Wait till you know New York," said he.

"I am doubt-proof," answered Stainton. "I am immune."

"And so----" urged Holt, dropping this phase of the subject and reverting to Preston Newberry's niece.

"And so," Stainton took him up, "I decided to marry, sell my mine as soon as a good offer comes and be easy. I came to New York. I went to-night to the opera." His voice grew unaffectedly softer. "And at the opera," he said, "I saw the girl that I had loved all those years ago; that dead girl come to life again; not a curve altered, not a tint faded; not a day older. I knew, in a flash, that it must be my old sweetheart's daughter. And it was."

"What? Muriel Stannard?"

"Whose mother was Muriel Benson. Precisely."

Holt whistled softly.

"Well?" asked he.

"Well," said Stainton, "I intend to marry her."

For a moment Holt made no comment. Then he coughed and finally, as his dry cough produced no visible effect, he broke forth:

"But, Jim----"

There he stopped.

Stainton looked at him enquiringly.