The Readjustment Part 18

"Thank you! Though I wasn't fishing, I am grateful just the same."

"Then you do find something now and then that you can stand for in me?"

"I find a great deal--when you are Bert Chester." He seemed to puzzle over this, to ponder it; so that she added:

"Let's not talk conundrums in this air and this crowd! We're not blue-nosed, self-searching New Englanders. Let's keep away from Market Street and walk through the Quarter. They haven't yet taken the Easter things from the shop windows, and there's a darling atrocious group of statuary next door to The Fior d'Italia which you must see!"

And then, as they turned the corner--

"What's the crowd? I'm for disremembering that I'm refined. I want to be curious!"

"Looks like a sc.r.a.p--do you--"

"Nonsense! Come on. I divide women into those who would like to see a prize fight and admit it, and those who would like to see a prize fight and deny it!"

"Gee whiz!" said Bertram. They had reached the edge of the crowd, which circled about some knot of violent struggle and gesture. "Excuse me!" He had sprung from her side and was breaking his way through. By instinct, she followed into the hole back of him, so that she found herself in the second row of spectators to a curious struggle, the details of which flashed in upon her all at once.

Two laborers, gross, tanned, dirty, were fighting. They had swung side-on as the hole opened, and her glance focused itself upon the smaller of the two. He was an old man, quite gray; and down his scalp ran a stream of bright blood which trickled upon his ear. The thing which puzzled her was the action of the older man. He seemed to be hanging to the arms of his younger and st.u.r.dier opponent; also he was talking rapidly, excitedly; and she caught only one phrase.

"Hit me with a nail, will you?"

And just then the younger man got his arm free, and dove for the pavement--dove at precisely the same instant with Bertram Chester.

Apparently, the younger fighter arrived first; he backed off from the scuffle brandishing a piece of packing box. Then she saw what the old man meant. Pointing the weapon was a nail, stained red.

As this rough fury poised himself for the stroke, she took in the whole picture--a young, tall, brute man, one eye puffing from a new blow, the other blood-shot, the mouth open and dripping, the right arm raised for the murderer's blow.

Bertram Chester came between as though he had risen out of the earth.

His left hand, with a trained apt.i.tude which made the motion seem the easiest thing in the world, caught the upraised wrist. The laborer ripped out an unconsidered oath and struck with his free fist at Bertram's face. Bertram evaded the blow, slipped in close. And then--in a lightning flash of speed, Bertram's right hand, which had been resting loosely by his side, shot upward. His whole body seemed to spring up behind it. The blow struck under the point of the chin.

The head of the young bruiser dropped, then his shoulders, then his arms; his body sagged down upon Bertram. The champion of age shook him off; he dropped to the sidewalk. All this in a flash, in a wink.

The crowd, curiously inert, as all city crowds are until the leader appears, now followed this leader. A clamor of many tongues arose--"Get a cop!" "He's killed him!" "Do him up!" A short rush of half a dozen boys toward the fallen bully met the resistance of Bertram, who had turned as though antic.i.p.ating such a movement. He shoved them back and raised his hand. His eyes were bright, his face flushed, and that smile which won and commanded men had broken out on his lips.

"Say," he said, "you all saw me do this man fair and square. He isn't dead. He's only put out. He'll be all right in five minutes. You know it was coming to him. Now, I've got a lady with me, and I don't want her dragged into the police station. The cops will be here in a minute. I'd like to show this thing up in court, but we don't want to trouble the lady, do we? If I beat it, how many of you will witness to the cops just what happened?"

"I!" and "I!" and "I!" from the crowd and "Me! G.o.d bless ye!" from the elder warrior, who stood wiping the blood from his ear. Bertram gave them no chance for reconsideration. "All right!" he said, "here I go!"

He pushed his way out as he pushed it in, swept Eleanor along with him. The spectators lifted a cheer; but only a mob of small boys followed.

"Beat it, kids, or the bulls will pipe me!" called Bertram over his shoulder. At this magic formula, the boys fell out. A half a block away, Eleanor dared look back. A policeman had just arrived; he was clubbing his way stupidly through the crowd. Bertram looked back too.

"All right," he announced, "now don't appear to hurry." At Kearney Street, he swung her aboard an electric car.

"Victory!" she cried as the conductor rang his two bells and the car gathered headway. "It was perfect!"

He stared down at her.

"Well, I just had to put it through once I got started, but say--I thought you'd sure be sore on me." His voice took on an apologetic tone. "It seems to me when I see a sc.r.a.p, I const.i.tutionally can't keep out of it."

"No more should you--such fights as that."

"Then you make distinctions?" he asked.

"If you mean that I distinguish between fighting just for the l.u.s.t of it and fighting to protect the helpless, I may say that I do. You did well."

"Thank you!" he said, half-earnestly. "I'd have thought you wouldn't like to see me muss things up, that way." He was letting his voice slip away from him, both in volume and in manner, and the car was crowded. A panic necessity for concealment took possession of her.

"Surely we've evaded the police--let's get out and have our walk through the Quarter."

"I'm with you." Kearney Street, that thoroughfare which gathered into its two miles every element in American life, here struck its hill rise. Sheer above them hung Telegraph Hill, attained by latticed sidewalks, half stairs. The Latin quarter thronged and played all about them in the dusk and the fresh lamplight. And again, mood and spirits rose in her. The event whose swift, kaleidoscopic action still danced on her retina, the very stimulus of brutal youth in action, had conspired with the perfect night to raise her above herself.

"Oh, talk to me about it!" she said. "How did you do it--what do you call it--I want to hear _you_ tell about it."

"I guess you saw it all--just a plain uppercut. Those blame city crowds would see a man killed before they'd think of anything but the show. I've always said that, and now I know it. I caught sight of the old man side-on and I saw he was hurt by something more than a punch.

Far be it from me to spoil a good sc.r.a.p, but that wasn't a fair shake.

So I dropped you and started in. And then I saw that nail. I made a slip there," he let his voice fall in self-depreciation--"I should have kicked that chunk of board away, instead of diving for it. He beat me to it. The rest was so easy it was a shame to take the money.

Up comes his head and up comes my guard"--he stopped in the street to ill.u.s.trate--"and he couldn't use his club any more than a kitten. I'd have let him go, if he hadn't hit at me--and clipped me. For a second, I could have bit nails in two. When I pulled myself in close, there was his chin just above me--a be-auty target. And an uppercut was his medicine." Bertram jerked his right hand up from his hip to ill.u.s.trate the uppercut. Then he screwed up his face and felt of his right shoulder. "He marked me some," he said in explanation.

"Did he hurt you?" she asked with real concern. It ran into her mind that the conventional hero of romance makes his wound a scratch before his lady. If she expected that from Bertram Chester, he disillusionized her.

"Well, you don't take a punch like that, even glancing on your shoulder, without something getting loose," he replied. "I shouldn't be surprised if I'd slipped a cog or a tendon or something."

"Why--let's go home and see about it."

"Oh, it isn't bad enough for that!" Then he fell into reminiscences.

In their toilsome pa.s.sage up the hen-coop sidewalks of Broadway, he gesticulated--with constrained motions of his right arm--loosed the sparkle of his energetic, magnetic talk upon her. She drew close to him. Gradually, as the steps became steep, her hand slipped under his arm. She was only half-conscious of this motion; her consciousness was full of a softening toward him, a leaning upon that strength which she had seen in action. On his side, he did not fail to notice it--this first movement in her which had seemed like an advance. He stopped his buzz of talk at one moment and all the lines of his face relaxed as though he were about to say something softer and deeper. But he only caught his breath and changed to another story. He had remembered--and just in time, he thought--the advice of Kate Waddington.

But in spite of that remembrance, he permitted himself the luxury of being natural; and he talked continually until they were within the Tiffany doors.

Mrs. Tiffany must hear all about it from both of them. When they came to the hero's injury, she dismissed Eleanor, made him strip his ma.s.sy shoulder, and got out her pet liniment. The Judge, coming home in the midst of these surgical cares, heard the story retold with heroic additions by his wife. Dinner that night was a merry, a happy, an intimate party.

When Bertram left, Mrs. Tiffany did not follow him to the door, as was her old-fashioned custom. He waited a moment, as though expecting something. His eyes were on Eleanor. She did not move. She only bade him a simple and easy good night over her shoulder.

The old couple sat for a long time before the fire. Eleanor was gone--not to bed, could they but have known it, but to sit by her window and breathe bay-fragrance and drink the foggy night air off the Gate.

The Judge smiled down on that faded daintiness at his feet.

"Are we now to consider him in the light of a nephew-in-law?" he asked.

"It has bothered me a good deal," said Mattie Tiffany. "What do you think I ought to do?"

"If that frightful social responsibility of yours drives you to anything," responded the Judge, "I should say you'd best leave it alone."

"But Edward, dear, I'm just like a mother to her--and goodness knows I haven't always been the best of mothers. There was her father--you know how long I shirked that--"

"The sin of omission that you will carry to your grave--"

"And somehow this is so like Billy Gray! It was just this way in her mother's case. When Billy came around--you remember how bonny a boy he was then, Edward--I, her own sister, could never tell how she felt toward him. I've always told you that Eleanor has slipped a generation. She's her grandmother, not her mother, in mind. But she's just like her mother in one thing. You can't ever tell what she's thinking about, and the deeper her thoughts go the harder it is to tell! That's why I'm considering all this so carefully--she doesn't commit herself in one way or the other. It's a sign."

"Knowing you, Mattie, I presume that you've conducted researches into his desirability as a nephew-in-law?"